minute,” she yelled. Papers shuffling, drawers opening and closing. The man on the stool yawned. I looked at the headlines between us. “I’m sorry,” she said, coming back, “I don’t know where he keeps them. But you know what?” She took a breath. “The best thing to do would be to talk to him in person. He’ll be in later. That way you can find out exactly from him.”
So when did she expect him back?
“Ibrahim’s time is all messed up,” the man behind the paper said. “Best time to catch Ibrahim is first thing, before it starts.”
“Read your paper,” she said but she nodded. “Do you want to do that?” She smiled. “Come back first thing in person? Before it hits the fan?”
She said I should leave my name and number, in case Ibrahim wanted to contact me. I told her all I had for now was a name, and she took that.
I bought a madras shirt at the Salvation Army. I also bought a pan, plate, spatula, cup, and a fork, knife and spoon. The shirt cost fifty cents.
There was a room called Collectibles where you could buy a Madonna or a hand-cranked film projector or a velvet painting of a matador or a fur stole with eyes and teeth. The musty smell of abandonment came in waves of loss. I didn’t touch anything, but took something with me.
One o’clock went by, but there was always seven. The store at the bottom of the Avenue had a cooler full of malt liquor, and one dozen eggs that sat on a shelf like the last of their kind and were so priced. I asked the proprietor if there was a grocery store around. He said he didn’t know but one of his customers did. Just a few blocks and the store was packed. I filled a basket. Bread, milk, margarine, eggs, instant coffee, peanut butter. Store brands, things that were five for a dollar. I could drink coffee without sugar. I could drink water.
I had something to eat for the rest of the week, and a little change. I skipped lunch and ate supper. Whoever lived above me started vacuuming. I heard it sucking at the other side of the ceiling, the lights dimmed and went brown. Seven o’clock went by; there was always tomorrow.
The second night wasn’t any better than the first, only different. Now the girl from the shop was in it. I lay in bed in my undershorts and thought about her, and when I was done thinking about her for a while I closed my eyes. My ear hurt. I had to lie on the other side but I’d roll over in my sleep and wake myself up. When I touched it, it felt numb, like somebody else’s. The stone in my stomach wouldn’t go away. I shivered. I got up and turned off the cold again, went past the closet door that wouldn’t close. Back in bed I thought about the girl again, a dirty movie flickering in my brain.
I half-slept and half-dreamt. Whoever lay next to me was much bigger than me but I couldn’t turn my head. My thoughts were made of static. Thunder woke me but outside it wasn’t raining. I went to the bathroom to try and piss through a hard-on. A roach crawled out of my shorts and onto the tip of me. You could barely feel it. I made a sound and brushed it to the floor, brought my bare foot down. When I lifted my foot the roach waited for half a second, then propelled itself into the darkness with some of the second to spare. They can live on just paper.
I switched on the light in the bedroom. Saw how they ran. I wanted to break the cycle of the air conditioner, so I left it off and opened the window. The air that came in was warm but smelled better. I could see a parking garage, streetlights, part of the freeway, another building on the other side of the garage. It was about the size of the Avenue and could have been an office building, but from the colors of the lights in the windows you could tell people lived there. I couldn’t see any of them. The city had its back to me, or mine was to it.
Then: someone, a voice, man or woman, far away, shouting or screaming. It was far away and at first you didn’t hear it, then you only thought you did, then you couldn’t help it. I couldn’t make out what it was saying, what it was screaming, if there were words, but it pronounced the passing of each second without breathing. They kept piling up.
Call it the covered wagon.
I sat on the bed with the light on. There was nowhere left to look but the closet door, the protruding bolt like a tongue stuck out at me. Nothing to do but stand up and walk over and press my thumb against it. Cool and tarnished and it wouldn’t give. I put my thumb to my mouth and it was bitter.
I kept looking. The bolt and the latch poked through a narrow metal plate in the edge of the door. I got my imitation Swiss Army knife and pulled the screwdriver. One at the top and one at the bottom. They cracked when I started them. I got the screws out but the plate stayed where it was. Pried at it with the driver, then the knife blade. The blade broke and I figured I must have got my two dollars’ worth. I went at it with the butter knife then and it still wouldn’t come out. Still connected to something inside you couldn’t see.
The truth is I’d never been very good with my hands.
But I didn’t want to stop. Another screw in the neck of the doorknob and I took it out because there was nothing else to do. I pulled on the knob, turned it, and it kept turning and I saw something bright. Kept turning and now you could see a square threaded shaft, clean and silvery, getting longer.
The knob came off. It was glass. I held it, tossed it, held it in different ways till it was something else, like repeating a word till it is pure sound. I put it on the dresser. Gripped the shiny spindle it had been threaded onto when the Avenue had another name. Tugged. Soft crunch of metal churning in wood. The faceplate in the edge of the door moved, the latch and the bolt moved. All one thing.
I grabbed the knob on the other side and pulled the spindle out of the lock.
I still heard the screaming but in a different way now, not under my skin. I heard wood and metal coming apart. I took the lock out of the door.
I sat at the round table in my underwear. The window was behind me and so was the voice, the traffic, the after-hours sound a city always makes. The soft roar of its engine. I’d taken the lamp off the nightstand and put it on the table. It was all the light I wanted.
It sat on the table in front of me, a flat black metal box. Rectangular, heavy, cast iron maybe. A single screw held the cover in place. I took it out and opened the lock.
Something in the bottom corner. White and puffy, a wad of cotton, or mold, but then no, some kind of cocoon. An egg sac. I poked it with the tip of the driver, tore it apart. A cluster of tiny objects inside, bodies or eggs, now ruptured and lifeless—just husks now. I scraped them out along with the white skin that had held them.
From somewhere a train was coming. I was sweating.
Most of the bolt was inside the case and a tiny post rose from the side of it. I poked at it and nothing moved. A flat lever covering the bolt, a notch that the post fit into. A narrow strip of metal. I touched it. It shot up out of the lock case with a spring sound and hit me in the eye.
Bunk beds three tiers high. Pushed together to form a square. Draped with linen so no one can see what’s going on inside. What they don’t see, they don’t know, but they know enough to call it the covered wagon.
I put down the screwdriver and let it hurt. I tried not to move. My eye was streaming and wouldn’t open. I kept wiping at it and looking at my fingers to see if there was anything but water. The pain was like something big squeezed into a tiny point. Even as it dulled it seemed to move deeper, behind, burying itself in my head.
I hadn’t expected anything alive, but you couldn’t take it personally.
The
