White Apples (12 page)

Ettrich kept rubbing his arms. "Fucked up." "What is?"

His voice rose into falsetto. "This whole thing. It's completely fucking insane. We're sitting here talking about these things in mea•sured tones but it's all cra-zy!"

Isabelle waited silently for his verbal storm to pass. Vincent huffed and puffed and prepared to rant more but didn't. "Should I continue?" She raised an eyebrow and the edge on her voice.

"Certainly! Please describe how baby ugly told you I was going to die." "Wait a minute—"

"He said 'Wait a minute'? I don't understand." "No, shut up, Vincent. Something's wrong."

He didn't need to hear it twice. Ettrich's whole being came to instant attention. He scanned the restaurant like a Secret Service agent protecting the president in a crowd. He was so intent on finding an enemy that he didn't see Isabelle gather her things and start to stand.

"We have to leave." "Why?"

"It's Anjo. He says we've got to get out of here right now."

Ettrich threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table and got up. Is•abelle was already out of her side of the booth and heading for the door. She put a hand behind her for his. He took it and they hurried out. At the last moment he caught a glimpse of their waitress. Her face was triumphant—they were leaving.

In the parking lot Isabelle started walking in the opposite di•rection of his car. He pulled on her hand, trying to stop her. "Where are you going? The car's over here." He pointed.

"We can't take your car. Come on." Now she pulled on his hand. "Why not? All your bags are in there."

"Forget them. Just come, Vincent!" She looked over her shoul•der at him and then past him at the restaurant. Her eyes were so clear and scared that without thinking, Ettrich looked back there too. Nothing was different.

They were in that urban no-man's-land between a large city and its airport where cars speed back and forth but rarely stop, especially at night. A fly-by zone, a bus stop where you never stop, somewhere between here and there that's part of your city but a part you know only through the window of a car. The only busi•nesses in these neighborhoods seem to be open but always empty— fast food joints, defeated-looking karate schools, and discount fur•niture stores with thick metal safety gates blocking their narrow doors. Occasionally you do see a person walking here but they look drunk, lost, or dangerous.

Isabelle kept tight hold on Ettrich's hand while she moved straight ahead without once turning her head. It appeared she knew where she was going, but after a long time she just
kept
going and they never got there. For a mile he didn't say a word about it, content to walk with her and look at this strange area he had only ever whizzed through on his way to the airport.

Sometimes a brightly lit bus rumbled by, its noise and noxious exhaust fumes filling all the air. After a while Ettrich realized the only sounds around them were the
wush
of cars and trucks passing, and their own footsteps clicking on the sidewalk when no vehicles were around. It was a city silence, the kind you hear at three o'clock in the morning when you're walking downtown after a party and can't find a cab.

"Isabelle, where are we going?" "I don't know. I'm waiting." "For what?"

"For Anjo to tell me where to go."

He pursed his lips. "Okay. But can you at least tell me why we had to leave that place so suddenly and walk?"

A silver Jeep Cherokee passed with drum and bass music thundering out of it. A very white elbow stuck out of the passenger's side window.

Isabelle said something the music drowned out. "What? I didn't hear you."

"We left because you were in danger, Vincent. Anjo felt it coming and told me. The same thing with your car. It wasn't safe."

She continued her brisk pace to nowhere.

"Stop." Ettrich grabbed her arm. She tried to keep moving but he would not let her, not for anything. "Vincent, we must—

"No. Right now, right here tell me why I'm in danger. How's it possible—I'm already dead. Or was. What more can they do, kill me again? You're the one who's alive and
pregnant."

She looked left and right as if she were about to cross the street and was checking for oncoming cars. When she turned to him her eyes were all love and dread. "It's so complicated, Vincent. I need so much time to explain it all to you."

He wasn't having it. "Then give me a short version right now. I need something, Fizz. Give me something."

"You shouldn't be here. You died, you're dead. But Anjo brought you back to life because he needs you. You must help him before he's born. He needs both of us to be alive until he's born."

"Why?"

"He won't tell me."

A huge blue truck blew past them followed closely by a black one whomp-whomp.

Ettrich had fifty important questions but knew he had only mo•ments now to ask a few. "Why don't I remember any of it? Getting sick, being in the hospital,
dying
—I don't remember it. Nothing."

"That was how Anjo was able to bring you back—by wiping but all of your memories of that time."

"But it's not just me, Isabelle. Everyone treats me like before: Kitty, the people at work, Margaret Hof. They don't

know
I died. How can that be?" "Anjo. He reshaped everything."

Ettrich wasn't having it. "If he's so powerful, if he can do things like that, why does he need me here now? Or you?"

She smiled for the first time in an hour. "He needs me because I'm his mother. Why does he need you, besides the fact you're his father? Maybe because he knows how much I need you. Let's walk to that bus stop. We're going to catch the next one." They moved toward a small metal and glass lean-to fifty feet away. "There's something else you need to know, Vincent: You're very powerful now that you know the truth. You can do amazing things. If you haven't experienced them yet you will." Gently touching his face with three fingers, she said, "You're a mighty guy now."

Ettrich remembered the other night when he sent the dying taxi driver's
numen
back into him, saving his life.

Something else came to mind. "There are two other people who know I died—Coco Hallis and Bruno Mann. Do you know them?"

"You mentioned her name before. No, I don't know them."

"This all started for me when I saw Bruno's name tattooed on the back of her neck."

"On her
neck?
Boy, that's love. I don't think I'd do that, not even for you. How long have the two of them been together?"

"They're not together. They didn't even know each other until I introduced them a few days ago." "And then she had his name tattooed on her neck?" Isabelle sounded both surprised and impressed.

He was about to explain when a green city bus pulled up and stopped in front of them. The doors hissed open.

They entered and climbed the two steps up. The driver gave them a quick glance to check if they were a threat. Seeing that they were okay, he pressed the button to close the doors. There were two other people sitting far in the back. The bus began moving again. Isabelle grabbed Ettrich's arm to steady herself. With his free hand he reached into his pocket for some coins to pay their fares.

She stopped him. "No, no, let me."

He remembered that she liked buying tickets, dropping coins in slots, counting out exact change, doing sums with a calculator. Reaching into her purse, she took out the handsome brown leather wallet from the Connolly store in London that he had given her on their last fateful visit there. Even now seeing it again made him wince slightly at the memory of that calamitous trip.

As they walked down the narrow aisle Ettrich asked, "Where did you go in London that morning you left me?" "What?" The bus grumbled up to speed, hitting successive pot•holes and bouncing on what felt like no shock

absorbers at all. Isabelle stopped and swung down into an empty window seat and gestured for him to join her.

He sat in the empty seat next to hers. "Where did you go that morning after you left me in London?"

Her voice changed, becoming more strident and staccato. "I took a taxi to the airport. Where I sat for three hours, waiting for a flight to Vienna. And cried. And hated you."

He knew not to say another word on the subject now. The pitch of her voice always rose markedly whenever Isabelle was angry or unsure about something. She also spoke much faster, as if the speed of her words would either convince you of what she was saying, or else keep you from protesting. However, if you still disagreed, she would speak even faster and often end up saying malicious uncalled-for things that caused needless hurt.

Seconds later none of this mattered. Because without warning, Vincent Ettrich was struck by pain so excruciating that it should have killed him. It was so intense that he could not close his eyes, breathe, or blink. Worse, his mind remained crystal clear. It im•mediately remembered that this had been the pain at the moment of his own death. It was what had finished him off weeks before. It was the first time since his return to life that he consciously re•membered anything about that event.

But Ettrich had already died once, so the pain this time did not end in the relief of oblivion. This pain did not end at all. Beyond measure, it consumed his bones, brain, and his blood. It was Om•nipotent. It was God.

"Fight it. You're stronger."

Somewhere inside the agony of those endless moments, Ettrich heard and, more importantly,
understood
those words. As soon as he did, the pain ceased. It stopped as quickly as it had started, leaving him empty, hollowed out. At once he felt light as air, little more than a small cloud passing high over the earth.

"Vincent?"

Someone was saying his name. "Vincent!"

Without realizing, he had turned his head and only now regis•tered that he was looking at someone. A woman: Isabelle Neukor.

He did not react. He closed his eyes slowly, like a lizard sunning on a hot rock. "Vincent, what's the matter? Are you all right?" She was touch•ing his hand.

Awareness, then focus, and finally the world slowly came back to Ettrich. First he heard Isabelle, saw her, eventually recognized who she was and was glad. Before long came the smells—the thick insult of car exhaust, a fresh rye bread inside a plastic market bag, oranges. But it didn't stop there. He was now able to smell the three tarnished copper pennies in the bus driver's right front pocket. Haddock being fried at a fish-and-chips restaurant the bus was pass•ing, six-hour-old peppermint lip balm on the mouth of the woman sitting a few seats behind them, more. Ettrich smelled it all. It was as if a filter holding back life's odors had been taken away so that everything now flooded down over him.

The bus slowed abruptly to avoid hitting a car that veered in front of it. Feeling her hand on his and smelling the small patch of her skin, warm beneath the large Breitling wristwatch she wore, Ettrich quietly told Isabelle what had just happened to him. The pain, the mysterious voice, the emptiness after the pain, the smells that filled the emptiness...

While he recounted these singular things, their bus rolled on, moving its few passengers across the city. Nothing could have been more mundane—a mostly empty public bus at night. Four passen•gers, two of them staring out the window with the blank round eyes of stuffed animals. It could have been an Edward Hopper paint•ing. Except that one of the riders, the fortyish man talking to the lovely woman, had died recently and been resurrected by the unborn child the woman was carrying.

"The voice you heard must have been Anjo's. The
fact
you heard it and understood saved you. Because that pain
was
your death, Vincent. It came to take you back. I made us leave the restaurant because Death was coming for you. It was already in your car and that's why we couldn't use it. I thought we could escape but I was wrong. What's great is that you were able to fight it off this time."

"Anjo told you all that?" She nodded.

"What else did he say?"

"That Death is stupid but very determined. It finished you once with that pain so it tried to do it again with the same thing. But you're stronger now because of what Anjo's done, so it failed. When he spoke to you in the pain he was only reminding you that you're not the same person who died from it the last time. Death wants you back, Vincent, because you belong to it. You shouldn't be here. It will try very hard to get you. The advantage you have is..." She glanced away. When she looked at him again, her eyes were glistening. "I was going to lie but I can't. Your chances of beating it are very small. Anjo told me that before he brought you back. Death is stupid but never gives up. It may be very soon."

"Yeah, well, what about people like me though? The ones who come back? Do the same rules apply?" She shook her head. "I don't know, Vincent. I don't know how it works."

They rode in silence after that, Ettrich slowly regaining his wits and strength after the siege. Isabelle leaned her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. She wanted nothing more than to go to bed with this man and make love with him until she blacked out.

One hour and three bus rides later they stood in front of his building. Isabelle didn't like the look of the place but would never tell him that. It was too new and soulless, exactly the kind of faux postmodern apartment complex with a good address you'd expect an affluent man to move into after leaving a marriage and while waiting to catch a flight to his new life.

They rose to the fifth floor in a sleek metal-and-glass elevator that smelled vaguely of coriander. Ettrich would not let go of her hand. The corridor on the fifth floor was the kind of beige and salmon color combo you see in upscale restaurants and New Age furniture stores. It made her cringe. Yuppies lived in buildings like this, suspender wearers, Mercedes owners, Microsoft millionaires. People who were considering buying a vacation house in either Costa Rica or on some minor Greek island. Why had Vincent chosen to live here?

The view. When he opened the door to his studio apartment, Isabelle walked straight to the large picture window and pressed her hands against the cold glass. It wasn't a great view but it was a very good one. The television tower across the city was a glowing silver-gray finger pointing straight up into the night sky. She spent a long time there looking at everything, feeling safer now in this small flat with Vincent above the city. He came over and handed her a glass of Chivas Regal with a bit of water added—her favorite drink. He knew exactly how she liked it. Vincent knew exactly how she liked many things.