Éva Jozsefa Illésházy
Wed 09:01PM EST
Just like that, he is gone. Just like that, the dark apartment is hers, once more. How long she stood there, studying the long reaching shadows (where did he go? She was not sure. From somewhere deep she began dredging up vague recollections about what they can do, how and when they do it, and why. Her information: sadly lacking.) And so she stalked through her own apartment as if it were a stranger’s, exposing the shadows, peeking into the closets, throwing back the curtains until every last hiding place had been destroyed. She flooded the rooms with light, until the whole flat was ablaze with it, awash in it, until shadow could not touch her, and only then did she feel content in her security.
That shadow of uncertainty, of ill-feeling, of subtle, half-edged uncertainty, displacement, followed her through the whole of the next week. She felt like a lithograph, imperfectly printed, blobs of color bleeding out from behind the stiff marching lines meant to contain them, and whenever she turned around, she caught herself, now and then, looking for some trailing edge, sailing behind her, open to the wind.
The days passed, as they always do. She cooked, she worked, she went for drinks with friends. In the end, the fabric of her life is ordinary, and so too the framework. Only the shadows over the weave, the sudden puncuation of fear or violence, the entrance of the other from the darkness beyond the pool of light betrayed and undermined the ordinary. At night, with a glass of wine and a plateful of filet mignon and wild rice or homemade lobster ravioli or cool pear soup or an omelet, stuffed with all the goodies of which one dreams, she curled on her mint-green couch and studied transcripts obtained in secret, studied on the sly, without regard for her colleagues and friends.
Sometimes she amused herself by imagining herself as la femme nikita, smiling pleasantly at neighbors and coworkers until the phone rang. Josephine.
It was not so far-fetched, really.
One week later and she is on edge again. She comes home early, while the sun is still shining, so that she will not be surprised. She floods the flat with light, and sends the gauzy curtains spilling back from the streaming rays of the evening sun and then throws herself into her evening routine, to banish whatever doubts might creep into her mind. Dishes from the morning, dinner for the evening, some blouse to be pressed for the following day. There are nylons to be washed in the sink and tossed over the shower curtain-rod to dry, and so on, and so on, and so on, and only one hitch in the routine: she is home before dark.
She is home before dark, and the day is a lovely thing, on just the cusp of spring. The sun shines bright and warm over the stark, bare outlines of the winter streets, and though the grass is green and a few shrugs are flowering, the rest of the world seems washed out, devoid of color. There's a curious sense of enervation that accompanies spring fever - one wishes, somehow, merely to rest, even as one burns with the conviction of new life and new energy. She is home before dark and she has flung the windows open to enjoy the cool, fresh air. The curtains flutter helplessly in the the evening breeze.
Santiago
Wed 09:21PM EST
She's home before dark, but he does not rise until the sun has vanished from the sky. Blue turns to orange turns to blood red. Colors bleed across the sky and set wisps of cloud aflame; she can see it all from the large dusty windows of her flat, and this, among other things, is why she lives here. He can see the sunset too if he looked, but he does not, sleeping in the bedroom of his cabin in the woods with the curtains drawn, sleeping dreamlessly, like the reptile hunters of the desert.
Light fades and his eyes open. A split instant of disorientation fades without memory and he rises without hesitation, naked skin dusky and gleaming in the dark room. Bare feet hit the creaking floorboards. He dresses without a mirror, and his clothes are old but clean, worn but without patches, without holes.
He buys new ones when holes appear, but never because he has gained or lost weight, gained or lost inches. He has stabilized at six feet two inches, one hundred ninety pounds of lean, hard muscle at eighteen and seven months, and there he has stayed for the whole of his adult life thus far: eight years. It seems longer.
Socks, jeans. Snakeskin belt, handmade, trophy and memoir of his days in the waterless place, trying grounds of man and beast. His long fingers brush over the shoulder holsters thrown over the chair in the bedroom, the only other furniture next to the bed. The glock and the sig-sauer are buttoned down, and his fingers trail over the butts but do not close. He had not seen an issue worth addressing in this morning's papers, before he slept. He lifts a shirt instead and buttons it over his skin.
All this in the cool darkness. There is no lamp in the bedroom.
In the corner stands a rifle, oiled and old and polished by years of handling. Next to it, a sawed-off. Both are left where they are. The door cracks open and he steps out to a breakfast of black coffee, two eggs easy over, toast dipped into the liquid yolks. He watches the nightly news with a silence and a concentration reserved for religious devotions. Before he leaves the cabin he makes a note of the date.
A little under an hour later, perhaps while Eva is loading her dishwasher, there is a peculiar pop! in the air, a sense felt rather than heard that the air pressure has changed minutely, that molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide have suddenly been pushed out from their locales in the shape of a body.
The lights are on. His eyes are still black, the reflections of each point of light in the room caught in the infinite darkness like stars in the sky, fireflies in an abyss.
"It has been one week, kinwoman."
Éva Jozsefa Illésházy
Wed 09:35PM EST
Éva turns suddenly, sharply around, marooned in the warm washing light of her spacious kitchen, coccooned in light. The walls are pale yellow, and the recessed lighting shines off the copper bottoms of a set of professional chef's pans dangling from a cast iron rack suspended from the ceiling over the island. She straightens, her hand tightening around the handle of a fork she had been about to toss into the silverware caddy.
It is not much of a weapon.
It is not much of a weapon, but she holds it as if it were as she turns, and for several thin, serial lengths of a second later as her eyes narrow in focus over the edge of her heavy-framed glasses, pupils contracting abruptly against the glare.
"I have a report," she says after a moment, her voice surprisingly steady (can he hear the racing beat of her heart?) as she gestures with the fork, toward the living room. "On the coffee table."
She watches him, the hard, impassive planes of his face, then looks away. To her hands, of course, and the utensil still clenched between her fingers. A moment later, she bends and allows the fork to fall into the silverware caddy. It clatters against the rest of the silverware, louder than she would have thought.
Santiago
Wed 09:51PM EST
The planes of his face are far from the angles and deep hollows of a scandinavian skull. The lean, drawn strength in his face comes not from heritage - for his is the large-eyed, open-browed, aquiline heritage of ancient Spanish conquistadors and Latinate peoples that preceded them - but from a life eked out in the desert, windraked, sandhardened.
And his response is to swing silently, smoothly about and approach the aforementioned coffee table. Standing over it, he looks at the items scattered over it for a moment before bending to lift the report in a precise, but not fastidious gesture. For a few minutes he thumbs through it, reading. The missing gun; the conflicting testimonies of the condemned man, of the officer who collared him. Then he drops it with a soft slap back onto the coffee table.
"I have read your records," those black eyes pin her again. "You lose quite often. But you fight more than you plea, and you win more than your fellow lawyers. You must be rather good." Somehow, spoken like that, so flatly, it does not sound like a compliment. "If there is a retrial, could you be assigned to him?"
Éva Jozsefa Illésházy
Wed 10:23PM EST
"My supervisor defended the accused." The dishwasher door rises with a metallic sproing of protest, then swings suddenly, abruptly shut as the joint passes some critical angle, slamming home. It's a familiar sound, domestic and ordinary and comforting in the face of strangers who appear and disappear on a whim. The slender attorney remains in the kitchen, her professional upsweep falling to pieces around her shoulders, the white shell of her blouse just paler than her sun-starved skin. "So, in a word, no."
Her fingers run lightly along the lip of the dishwasher, where it disappears into the cabinets, tracing the metallic line in expenditure of nervous energy. She looks away then, out the windows framed by gauzy curtains (the scene, worthy of Martha Stewart, or at least a Better Homes and Gardens special on shabby chic that frame the high, wide windows looking out over the front yard, surrounded by its high fence, and the street - the once genteel neighborhood falling to ruin - beyond.
"I could - " reluctant, this, voiced without looking at him, but dutiful, of course, as she should be. " - ask to be second chair."
Santiago
Sat 05:45AM EST
"Do so," comes the crisp, curt response, and then Santiago turns and lets himself out.
No comments:
Post a Comment