The Night Country

6

Being drunk on the stuff Robin gave us made Brooklyn into a floating place, a green-resined dreamscape. We walked past sleeping brownstones, under the rustling canopies of old trees. My fingertips sparked as I ran them over the peeling skin of a plane tree, and I remembered living in a world where the trees had faces, where they dreamed their sap-slow dreams.

A group of men drinking from brown paper bags was walking toward us. They were hard-eyed and thick and they swelled when they saw us, their step turning to swagger. Until they came close enough to really see us, and shrank under our sight. And I felt, for once, like I might actually look on the outside how I felt on the inside. My blood ran keen and high, too close to the surface of my skin; I felt so alive I knew I must be a magnet for death.

Then the moon’s cold eye caught mine, and I remembered Hansa was cold, too. Thinking of her, of Abigail, of the prince, brought me to the surface of my drunken dream. Where, I wondered, did dead Hinterlanders go now? Were they lost completely? Or were they taken back, to wander, maimed, around some living underworld?

The man from my tale lived in a shitty little house that grew out of trash-strewn weeds, stuck to the end of an industrial block. We’d walked by the open doors of factory-sized buildings to get here, past men in Carhartts working too late, or too early. By the time we reached it I was a kettle set to boiling. A held-in breath, a cresting wave. I wanted to exhale, to crash, to do something reckless. Sophia was in full-on manic mode, her eyes shining like dollar coins.

“Let’s ring the doorbell,” she said, giddy. “Let’s put a rock through the fuckin’ glass!”

As a wingman, she was a mixed bag.

“Shh,” I hissed, watching his windows. He lived in the garden apartment, where blue TV light played over closed blinds. The house was detached, and it was easy enough to walk around toward the back, climb over the splintery mess of his fence, and drop into the backyard’s itchy overgrowth.

We didn’t talk about a plan. If we had, I’d have had to admit I was really here, breathless in the metal-scented dark, on the edge of doing something I didn’t want to put words to. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do.

Better just to let yourself into the unlocked screened porch. Find the cracked-open window. Fit your fingers under its lip, wince as it screeches, and pull till it’s open just wide enough to admit two girls.

I climbed in first. Adrenaline made it hard to see, my vision popping with anxious flashbulb flowers. The room was dark, tinged with the secretive stink of an animal’s warren. It knocked some of the glitter from my head.

First I saw the bed, mounded with blankets. Then I saw the sliding stack of magazines against the wall, a hoard of breasts and lips and heat, like he was a time traveler who didn’t know there was porn on the internet. Everything was low to the ground: bed, magazines, drifts of soiled clothes. And just there, lit by an errant fall of porch light: the red coil of a hair tie, the kind of thing Ella left scattered around the house, a fistful of them in every purse she owned.

A hand on my arm sent lightning up my spine, but it was just Sophia, nodding toward the door. It hung slightly open. Over the submarine chug of my heart, I could hear the rhythms of a game show. Delicately we picked our way across the room. The hall was short, running past the open door of a filthy bathroom and what must have been a linen closet, and opening to the right into an unlit kitchen.

We had clean sightlines on the back of his head. It was bobbing faintly, like he was listening to music we couldn’t hear. The sight stalled me out. Winnowed my mind from my body. I floated over myself, watching the girl with the steady step and the messy hair walk down that hallway. I almost wanted to stop her, but it was too late. I witnessed the sudden stillness of the man as he heard her, then swung around, face frozen with surprise. It curdled into something worse when he saw who’d come for him.

Then I snapped back into my body, standing alone in front of him for the first time since I’d left the Hinterland.

“Hey, asshole,” I said. “Remember me?”

“You.” He sounded unsurprised. Pleased, even. “My little bride.”

“Never your bride.”

“But here you are. Come back to finish our story the right way?” He grinned, his gaze skirting around my face, not quite catching it. “I think we’ll skip the wedding.”

It was different, seeing him up close. This wasn’t heady or daring, it was something else. I ran his words at the meeting through my fingers, sicker in the remembering. I tasted his mouth on mine, felt his hands on me. And the words came out of me like water from a well I thought had run dry.

“Look at me,” I told him. “Look at your destruction.”

His eyes went incredulous, and he started to laugh. Behind him, Sophia stepped lightly out of the kitchen.

“Listen to you!” he said. “You still think you live in a story.”

I rose up on my toes, light as air, dense as lead. “You still think you live in a world where girls will lie down for you and show you their throats.”

He rocketed up from the couch, moving faster than a man that size should be able to move, grabbing the hair at my nape and yanking my head back.

He had a smashed-flat nose and skin that looked grated. One of his eyes hung a little different than the other, like he was hating you out of two different faces. His face was a history book about violence, and his breath smelled like cooked meat and bad hygiene.

“Now this feels familiar,” he said.

“Yes, it does.”

I darted forward, took his lip between my teeth, and pulled.

It split like fabric, like pulp, like a blood balloon. He cried out, but he didn’t let go of me.

“You bitch.” He spat red, laughing. “You don’t win in this one, honey. The Spinner can’t save you now. Oh, I’m so glad you found me.”

His blood was thick and corn-syrup sweet and it should’ve disgusted me. But its flavor got into my head, mixing with the liquor there, making me dizzy and hungry and very, very cold. My eyes ached with it and my blood leaped so high I couldn’t tell if it was with rage or joy.

“What’s this?” he said, looking over my head. “We’re making it a party now?”

Sophia held a butcher’s knife in her hand. I guessed she had found it in the kitchen. Her face was blank and she was twisting the knife’s point on her fingertip.

His grip on me tightened. “You brought a friend, did you? Do I get to call one, too?” He looked at me full on, still laughing.

Then his face went hard, the humor dropping away. He shoved me, sent me reeling back into the wall.

“What’s that?” His voice wavered, his hands rising. “You didn’t tell me you could still do that.”

I moved closer. I moved fast. It felt like chips of time were being chiseled away, and I was shaking off the bits I didn’t need.

When Sophia looked at me, her mouth went slack. “Alice,” she breathed. “Your eyes.”

The man looked back and forth between us, from Sophia with her knife to me with nothing but my two hands. That was all I’d needed in our tale.

“Look at me,” I said. My head was a howling sea cave and my voice wasn’t my own. “Don’t worry about her. Don’t worry about anything but me.

“Now lie down and show me your throat.”