FSF, January-February 2010 (34 page)

One night, after I'd been in Albany six months, in the wake of a fierce argument that ended with Kaitlyn telling me she was tired of doing penance for a mistake she'd made a year ago, then slamming her apartment door in my face, and me speeding home down Western Avenue's wide expanse, I stood outside Chris's room, ready for a confrontation twelve months overdue. I hadn't bothered to remove my coat, and it seemed to weigh heavier, hotter. My chest was heaving, my hands balled into fists so tight my arms shook. The green door was at the far end of a dark tunnel. I could hear the frat boys who lived above us happily shouting back and forth to one another about a professor who was a real dick. I willed Chris to turn the doorknob, to open his door so that he would find me there and I could ask him what it had been like, if she'd pulled her shirt over her head, pushed down her jeans, or if he'd unhooked her bra, slid her panties to her ankles? Had she lain back on the bed, drawing him onto her, and had she uttered that deep groan when he'd slid all the way up into her? Had she told him to fuck her harder, and when she'd ridden him to that opening of her mouth and closing of her eyes, had she slid her hand between them to cup and squeeze his balls, bringing him to a sudden, thunderous climax? A year's worth of scenes I'd kept from my mind's eye cavorted in front of it: Kaitlyn recumbent on her bed, her bare body painted crimson by the red light she'd installed in the bedside lamp; Kaitlyn, lying on top of a hotel room table, wearing only the rings on her fingers, her hands pulling her knees up and out; Kaitlyn with her head hanging down, her arms out in front of her, hands pressed against the shower wall, her legs straight and spread, soapy water sluicing off her back, her ass. In all of these visions and more, it was not I who was pushing in and out of her, it was Chris—he had spliced himself into my memories, turned them into so much cheap porn. Worse, the look I envisioned on Kaitlyn's face said, shouted that she was enjoying these attentions far more than any I'd ever paid her.

While I desperately wanted to cross the remaining distance to Chris's door and smash my fists against it, kick it in, some inner mechanism would not permit me to take that first step. My jaw ached, I was clenching my teeth so hard, but I could not convert that energy into forward motion. If Chris appeared, then what would happen, would happen. In the meantime, the best I could do was maintain my post.

Perhaps Kaitlyn had called to warn him, but Chris did not leave his room that night. I stood trembling at his door for the better part of an hour, after which I decided to wait for him on the living room couch. I had not yet removed my coat, and I was sweltering. The couch was soft. My lids began to droop. I yawned, then yawned again. The room was growing harder to keep in focus. There was a noise—I thought I heard something. The sound of feet, of many feet, seemed to be outside the front window—no, they were underneath me, in the basement. The next thing I knew, I was waking to early morning light. I could have resumed my position outside Chris's door; instead, I retreated to my room. That was the closest I came to facing him.

Had a friend of mine related even part of the same story to me—told me that his girlfriend had cheated on him, or that he couldn't stop thinking about her betrayal, or that he was sharing an apartment with the other guy—my advice would have been simple: leave. You're in a no-win situation; get out of it. I was in possession of sufficient self-knowledge to be aware of this, but was unable to attach that recognition to decisive action. In an obscure way I could perceive but not articulate, this failing was connected to my larger experience of Albany, which had been, to say the least, disappointing. Two weeks into it, I had started having doubts about my job at The Book Nook; after a month, those doubts had solidified. Within two months of starting there, I was actively, though discreetly, searching for another position. However, with the economy mired in recession, jobs were scarce on the ground. None of the local bookstores were hiring full-time. I sank three hundred dollars into the services of a job placement company whose representative interviewed me by phone for an hour and produced a one-page resume whose bland and scanty euphemisms failed to impress me, or any of the positions to which I sent it. I wasted an hour late one Tuesday sitting a test for an insurance position the man who interviewed me told me I was unlikely to get because I didn't know anyone in the area, and so didn't have a list of people I could start selling to. (He was right: they didn't call me.) I lost an entire Saturday shadowing a traveling salesman as he drove to every beauty salon in and around Albany, hawking an assortment of cheap and gaudy plastic wares to middle-aged women whose faces had shown their suspicion the moment he hauled open their doors. That position I could have had if I'd wanted it, but the prospect was so depressing I returned to The Book Nook the following day. When I heard that their pay was surprisingly good and their benefits better, I seriously considered taking the exam that would allow me to apply for a job as a toll collector on the Thruway, going so far as to find out the dates on which and the locations where the test was being offered. But, unable to imagine telling my parents that I had left the job that at least appeared to have something to do with my undergraduate degree in English for one that required no degree at all—unwilling to face what such a change would reveal about my new life away from home—I never went. I continued to work at The Book Nook, using my employee discount to accumulate novels and short story collections I didn't read, and for which I soon ran out of space, so that I had to stack them on my floor, until my room became a kind of improvised labyrinth.

Nor did the wider world appear to be in any better shape. In addition to its reports on the faltering local and national economies, WAMC, the local public radio station, brought news of the disintegration of Yugoslavia into ethnic enclaves whose sole purpose appeared to be the annihilation of one another through the most savage means possible. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, which had promised brighter days, an end to the nuclear shadow under which I'd grown up, instead had admitted a host of hatreds and grievances kept at bay but not forgotten, and eager to have their bloody day. On EQX, the alternative station out of Vermont, U2 sang about the end of the world, and the melodramatic overstatement of those words seemed to summarize my time in Albany.

By that Wednesday night in November, when I fumbled open the door to the apartment and stumbled in, the Scotches I'd consumed at the QE2 not done with me yet, I had been living in a state of ill-defined dread for longer than I could say, months, at least. I had attempted discussing it with Kaitlyn over dinner the week before we went to see Marius, but the best I could manage was to say that it felt as if I were waiting for the other shoe to drop. “What other shoe?” Kaitlyn had said around a mouthful of dumpling. “The other shoe to what?"

I'd considered answering, “To you and Chris,” but we'd been having a nice time, and I had been reluctant to spoil it. To be honest, though there was no doubt she and Chris were part of the equation, they weren't all of it: there were other integers involved whose values I could not identify. To reply, “To everything” had seemed too much, so I'd said, “I don't know,” and the conversation had moved on.

Yet when I saw that the apartment was dark, and a check of my room showed my bed empty, and a call to Kaitlyn's brought me her answering machine, I knew, with a certainty fueled by alcohol and that deep anxiety, that the other shoe had finally clunked on the floor.

For the next couple of days, I continued to dial Kaitlyn's number, leaving a series of messages that veered from blasé to reproachful to angry to conciliatory before cycling back to blasé. I swore that I was not going to her apartment, a vow I kept for almost three days, when I used my key to unlock her door Saturday night. I half-expected the chain to be fastened, Kaitlyn to be inside (and not alone), but the door swung open on an empty room. The lights were off. “Kaitlyn?” I called. “Love?"

There was no answer. The apartment was little more than a studio with ambition; it took all of a minute for me to duck my head into the bedroom, the bathroom, to determine that Kaitlyn wasn't there. The answering machine's tally read thirty-one messages; I pressed Play and listened to my voice ascend and descend the emotional register. Mixed in among my messages were brief how-are-you's from Kaitlyn's mother, her younger brother, and Chris. When I recognized his voice, I tensed, but he had called to say he had missed her at the show the other night, as well as for coffee the next day, and he hoped everything was okay. After the last message—me, half an hour prior, trying for casual as I said that I was planning to stop by on my way home from work—I ran through the recordings a second time, searching for something, some clue in her mother's, her younger brother's words to where she had spent the last seventy-two hours. That I could hear, there was none. An hour's wait brought neither Kaitlyn nor any additional phone calls, so I left, locking the door behind me.

Two days later, I asked Chris to call Kaitlyn's parents. He was just in from a late-night library session; I had waited for him on the couch. He didn't notice me until he was about to open the door to his room. At my request, he stopped pulling off his gloves and said, “What?"

"I need you to call Kaitlyn's parents for me."

"Why?"

"I want to find out if she's there."

"What do you mean?"

"I haven't seen her since the other night at QE2."

"Maybe she's at her place.” He stuffed his gloves in his jacket's pockets, unzipped it.

"I checked there."

"Maybe she didn't want to talk to you."

"No—I have a key. She isn't there. I don't think she has been since Wednesday."

"Of course you do,” Chris muttered. “So where is she—at her parents', which is why you want me to call them. Why can't you do it?"

"I don't want to worry them."

Chris stared at me; I could practically hear him thinking,
Or look like the overly possessive boyfriend.
“It's late,” he said, “I'm sure—"

"
Please
,” I said. “Please. Look, I know—we—would you just do this for me, please?"

"Fine,” he said, although the expression on his face said it was anything but. He hung his jacket on the doorknob and went to the phone.

Kaitlyn's father was still awake. Chris apologized for calling so late but said he was a friend of hers from high school who'd walked through his parents’ front door this very minute—his flight had been delayed at O'Hare. He was only in town through tomorrow, and he was hoping to catch up with Kaitlyn, even see her. A pause. Oh, that was right, the last time they had talked, she had told him she was planning to go to Albany. Wow, he guessed it had been a while since they'd spoken. Could her father give him her address, or maybe her phone number? That would be great. Another pause. Chris thanked him, apologized again for the lateness of his call, and wished Kaitlyn's father a good night. “She isn't there,” he said once he'd hung up.

"So I gathered."

"The number he gave me is the one for her apartment."

"Okay.” I stood from the couch.

"I'm sure everything's all right. Maybe she went to visit a friend."

"Yeah,” I said. “A friend."

"Hey—"

"Don't,” I said. I started toward my room. “All because I stopped to help a fucking dog...."

"What?"

I stopped. “On the way to the club. There was this stray in that lot over on Central—you know, where the thrift store used to be. It looked like it was in rough shape, so I went to have a look at it—"

"What kind of dog?"

"I don't know, a big one. Huge, skinny, like a wolfhound or something."

Chris's brow lowered. “What color was it?"

"White, I guess. It was missing a lot of fur—no tail, either."

"Its face—did you see its eyes?"

"From about six inches away. Turned out, the thing wasn't that hurt, after all. Pinned me to the ground, stuck its face right in mine. Could've ripped my throat out."

"Its eyes...."

"This sounds strange, but its eyes were reversed: the whites were black, and the pupils were, well, they weren't white, exactly, but they were pale—"

"What happened with the dog? Were there any more?"

I shook my head. “It ran off. I don't know where to."

"There wasn't a man with it, was there?"

"Just the dog. What do you mean, a man? Do you know who owns that thing?"

"Nobody owns—never mind. You'd know this guy if you saw him: tall, black hair. He's white, I mean, really, like-a-ghost white. His face is lined, creased."

"Who is he?"

"Don't worry about it. If he wasn't—"

"He was at the club, afterward. Right before you arrived."

"Are you sure?"

"I was about as far away from him as I am from you."

Now Chris's face was white. “What happened?"

"Nothing. One minute, he was standing there giving me the heebie-jeebies, the next—"

"Shit!” Chris grabbed his jacket from the doorknob. “Get your coat."

"Why?"

"Do you have a flashlight?"

"A flashlight?"

"Never mind, I have a spare.” His jacket and gloves on, Chris shouted, “Move!"

"What are you—"

He crossed the room to me in three quick strides. “I know where Kaitlyn is."

"You do?"

He nodded. “I know where she is. I also know that she's in a very great deal of danger. I need you to get your coat, and I need you to get your car keys."

"Kaitlyn's in danger?"

"Yes."

"What—how do you know this?"

"I'll tell you in the car."

For all that I had been resident in the city for over a year, my knowledge of Albany's geography was at best vague. Aside from a few landmarks such as the QE2 and the Empire State Plaza downtown, my mental map of the place showed a few blocks north and south of my apartment, and spots along the principle east-west avenues, Western, Washington, and Central. I had a better sense of the layout of Dobbs Ferry, Kaitlyn's hometown, to which I'd chauffeured her at least one weekend a month the past twelve. Chris told me to head downtown, to Henry Johnson. Once I'd scraped holes in the frost on the windshield and windows, and set the heater blowing high, I steered us onto Washington and followed it to the junction with Western, but that was as far as I could go before I had to say, “Now what?"