Chapter 62: The Missing Piece (3)
The wardrobe door finally opened, and something scalding unfolded in my chest as the hallway light came in to find me among the hanging clothes.
YES! YES, FINALLY! GO! GO NOW AND DON’T YOU DARE STOP UNTIL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT OF HIM!
My body stepped out into the bedroom without a sound and set the shoebox down on the bed, then moved toward the hallway with a slowness that had nothing left of the trembling from before, every floorboard coming up through my feet while I felt something rising in me so vast and so hot that I would have screamed with pleasure if I’d had a voice.
The hallway was longer than I remembered, and I watched the frames on the wall slide past in my field of vision, one of them hanging crooked since he’d torn at it, the bathroom door left ajar, and at the very end the front door she would be coming back through any minute now with a pack of cigarettes she’d have paid for out of her own pocket.
In the living room, the guy was finishing his conversation among the wreckage, his back turned to us.
"Yeah, yeah, I’ll call you back." He hung up, slipped the phone into his back pocket and stood there a moment catching his breath, both hands on his hips, in the middle of everything he’d just smashed while promising to kill her. "Damn it."
He isn’t even turning around, the bastard, he doesn’t suspect a thing, PERFECT, I WANT HIM TO UNDERSTAND NOTHING AT ALL!
My body crossed the hallway without hurrying, passed the kitchen and went around the overturned armchair, and it looked at neither the wall nor the broken glass nor anything else but the cabinet against which the vase was still standing, the only object in the room his outburst hadn’t reached yet, its white flowers perfectly upright in the water.
My hand closed around the porcelain.
TAKE IT! TAKE IT AND CRACK HIS SKULL OPEN WITH IT!
The vase was far heavier than I’d have thought and the water still in it began to slosh as my arm lifted it, a few drops falling onto the carpet while the guy ran a hand through his hair, muttering something to himself.
My body was already behind him.
I watched my two hands raise the vase above my head, very high, far higher than necessary, and everything in me strained toward that moment with a hunger that was eating me from the inside.
There was a moment when nothing moved at all, when I saw our two silhouettes cut out against the black glass of the window, his from behind with his shoulders slumped and mine right there behind him with its arms raised, and when I understood that in the instant to follow there would be no going back for anyone.
GO GO GO NOW HIT HIM HIT HIM HIT HIM—
Then it came down.
The impact was dull and brief, something gave beneath the porcelain with a crack I felt travel up into my shoulders, and the vase shattered all at once, throwing water and white flowers across the whole room while the guy collapsed forward without a cry, his forehead striking the floor with a sound that went through me like a jolt of pure joy.
YESSSS! THERE! THAT’S WHAT YOU DESERVE YOU PIECE OF FILTH, AND IT’S STILL FAR TOO GENTLE FOR YOU!
He wasn’t moving anymore but he was still breathing, a thick uneven breath that stirred the dust in front of his mouth, and his right hand closed slowly on nothing while he tried to catch hold of something that wasn’t there.
HE’S STILL BREATHING! HE’S STILL BREATHING, THAT SON OF A BITCH, IT’S NOT OVER, IT’S NOT OVER WHILE HE’S STILL BREATHING!
My body looked at the piece of porcelain left in my fist, that half-circle of white vase neck with a clean edge where it had broken and that still sat perfectly well in the hand.
USE IT! DRIVE IT INTO HIM! DRIVE IT IN UNTIL THERE’S NOT ONE BREATH LEFT COMING OUT OF THAT FILTHY MOUTH!
My arm came down.
The first blow went in between his shoulder blades and I felt the porcelain catch on something before it came back out while the guy made a sound that had nothing human left in it, and that sound filled me with a joy so violent I could have wept.
AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAIN! DON’T STOP, DO YOU HEAR ME, DON’T YOU DARE STOP!
The second blow landed higher, in the back of the neck, and his leg started beating against the floor in no rhythm at all while I demanded more with an appetite nothing could have satisfied.
HE LAUGHED ABOUT IT ON THE PHONE! HE CALLED HER A BITCH! HE WAS GOING TO KILL HER WITH HIS HANDS AND LAUGH ABOUT IT AFTERWARD, SO MAKE HIM PAY FOR EVERY DAMN WORD HE SAID IN THIS ROOM!
My body had gone down on its knees beside him and the right hand rose and fell with nothing interrupting it, and there was blood on the floorboards now and on the carpet and on my fingers and on my forearm and down the front of my shirt.
The sound changed at some point and became something soft and wet that resembled nothing I’d ever heard before, and my body carried on a while after that, without hurrying, without breathing any faster, while I watched it happen with an exhilaration that wouldn’t come down.
Then it stopped on its own.
My body straightened up slowly, wiping its hands on its trousers with measured, methodical gestures, in no hurry whatsoever, with the calm of someone who has just dealt with the urgent part and has nothing left to do but tidy up.
The room was unrecognizable, with white flowers scattered as far as under the couch, the water from the vase spreading in a pool around the pieces of porcelain, the overturned armchair and the crooked frame and the shards of glass catching the ceiling light, and in the middle of all of it there was that shape on the floor that I couldn’t take my eyes off.
Silence settled back over the apartment with only the whistling of the living room window to occupy it, and somewhere in his back pocket his phone started vibrating against the wood, once, then again, then nothing.
AGAIN! COME ON! ONE MORE TIME! WHY ARE YOU STOPPING NOW WHEN WE COULD KEEP GOING ALL NIGHT—
And it was in thinking that that I heard myself thinking it.
... What’s wrong with me?
The front door opened.
"It was locked downstairs so I had to go around and—"
Alice stopped dead in the entryway, and I saw her in my field of vision without my head having turned toward her, standing in the hallway with a pack of cigarettes in one hand and her wallet in the other, her shoes still on.
She didn’t understand right away.
I watched her eyes pass over the overturned armchair and the wreckage with the irritation of someone discovering the outburst had gone further than usual, then travel down toward the floorboards and stop, then come back up to me, then go down again toward what was lying there, and only then did all the color leave her face.
The pack fell out of her hand.
"Kuro."
She took a step forward and her wallet fell too.
"Kuro, what—" Her voice broke in the middle of the sentence and came back much higher. "What happened, what happened, what happened?!"
She ran across the room and dropped to her knees in the blood a meter from me, without so much as looking at what was under her legs, and she started screaming questions and my name and things that made no sense, her throat straining and her face completely undone, exactly as I’d seen her a few hours earlier without understanding a thing about what I was looking at.
And she wasn’t afraid of me.
That was the detail that turned me over the most, because I was standing in the middle of that carnage with a piece of vase in my hand and blood up to my elbows, and she had come and knelt a meter away from me without a second’s hesitation, her hands reaching out toward me.
She should be backing away, she should be leaving this apartment and calling someone, and instead she’s coming toward me as though I were the one who needed comforting.
Around her, the water from the vase had mixed in with the rest and was slowly gaining ground across the carpet, and the white flowers scattered by the first blow were caught in it, their broken stems soaking in the red.
And I watched them drink.
It climbed the stems and spread through the blooms, turning the white to red flower after flower until there wasn’t a single one left the color it should have been, and I stayed there watching that happen while Alice screamed a meter away from me.
This is the scene, this is exactly the scene the tower showed me earlier, except now I’m inside it and I know precisely what just took place in it.
Then my body moved.
It dropped the piece of porcelain, which fell with a clear ringing sound, and it went over to Alice and leaned down toward her, and I felt my two hands come to rest on her shoulders, one on each side, firm and perfectly steady.
She lifted her face toward me.
And my mouth opened.
"Don’t worry, Alice."
That isn’t me.
It came out of my throat right enough and it had my voice, but it was calm in a way I had never been capable of, level and gentle and without the slightest tremor in it, the voice of someone who has just finished a job and is reassuring a friend about something of no importance.
That is definitely not me, so who is it?
"I’ll take care of everything."
And I woke up.