Chapter 60: The Missing Piece (1)
The bar was packed and the music far too loud, and Nicolas was telling the whole table a story about his internship that seemed like it would never end, wearing that grin he always had when he knew perfectly well he was overdoing it.
My hand carried a glass to my mouth.
I hadn’t wanted to drink, I hadn’t decided to lift my arm or close my fingers around the glass or swallow, and yet the liquid went down my throat while my wrist set the glass back on the table with a small sharp sound, as though all of that went entirely without saying.
What the—
My head turned toward Nicolas without any input from me, and I watched the bar slide across my field of vision, framed by eyelids that blinked on their own at regular intervals, without my being able to open or close them myself.
Move, move one finger, any of them, at least try.
Absolutely nothing happened, and I understood soon enough that it wasn’t my body refusing to obey me, since refusing would have implied there was still some relationship between us, whereas there was none at all and my arms and my chest and my legs crossed under the table concerned me no more than those of the guy sitting at the next table over.
What unsettled me most was that I felt all of it anyway, the cold of the glass against my palm and the stifling heat of the room and even an itch on the back of my neck that my hand went and scratched by itself while I screamed somewhere inside without a sound coming out anywhere.
My phone buzzed against my thigh and my hand pulled it out of my pocket.
Alice — i’m all alone at home
And my face smiled on its own, the screen lighting it from below.
Alice — why are you always out seriously
Alice — what’s so great out there honestly
Alice — there’s bad music and people you don’t even like
Alice — here there’s me
Alice — you can come hang out with me right?
Alice — say yes
Alice — say yesss
Alice — or am i bothering mister has-a-social-life-now
It’s her, it’s really her.
My thumbs were already typing.
Me — i’m not bothering anyone i’m listening to Nico talk about his internship
Alice — LMAOOOO
Alice — again?
Me — again
Alice — ok hurry up and come over
Alice — i have something to show you
Alice — you’re gonna love it
My mouth let out an amused breath.
"Nico," said my voice, coming out of my own throat without my having had any say in it, "I’m gonna head out."
Nico. Nico Wint, we’d met in high school, he was a decent guy and we played a lot of League together back then, and over time we’d stayed in touch without ever really questioning it. What’s become of you, Nico? Did you grieve for me, when I disappeared?
The thought was fairly unpleasant, so I pushed it away and came back to what was happening in front of me.
"You’re leaving already?" Nicolas rolled his eyes before setting down his glass. "Wait, let me guess, you’ve got a thing."
"I’ve got a thing."
"The same thing as last week, and the week before, and the week before that?" He gave me that little smile I’d always hated. "One of these days you’re going to have to introduce us to that stepsister of yours."
"Good luck with your internship."
My body stood up and grabbed its jacket.
That much, at least, is true, since I did spend my evenings at her place and Nico never missed a chance to point it out, except that I have no idea which evening this is.
Outside the air was cold and the streets were wet, and my body made the whole trip on foot with its hands shoved into its pockets, while I watched shop windows slide past without being able to turn my head toward the ones that interested me.
Maybe this isn’t a memory at all, but something the tower invented, or else a hallucination brought on by the shock of Alice’s lightning, which would at least explain why I can’t place this evening anywhere.
Except that if it were an invention or a hallucination, there’d be no reason for everything to be this precise, because I can feel the cold pinching my ears and the damp of the sidewalk through my soles and the weight of my jacket on my shoulders, and none of that resembles anything you experience in a dream.
Then there’s the other thing, from earlier, the apartment and the shattered vase and the blood all over the carpet and Alice on her knees screaming without a single sound reaching me, with that same unpleasant sense of looking at something that belongs to me without managing to recognize it.
Her building was the same as always, with its stairwell that smelled of cleaning product and its timer light that always went out between the second and third floors, and the door at the end of the landing with paint flaking off the frame.
I know this building by heart, I could tell you with my eyes closed which step the light goes out on, and yet I can’t place this evening among all the times I’ve climbed up here.
She opened before my hand had knocked.
"Took you long enough."
And something tightened in my chest, or in this body’s chest, the border between the two having long since stopped existing.
There she was, in pajamas, her black hair tied up any old way with what looked a great deal like a pencil, one hand on the handle and the other resting on her hip, her face a little rounder than the one I knew.
Her Earth hair, which suited her every bit as well as the white did, because Alice was one of those genuinely pretty girls that absolutely everything suits.
"I walked," said my voice.
"You could have run."
"It was raining."
"Weak excuse."
She stepped aside to let me in and shut the door behind me, throwing the bolt with an absent gesture.
Her gaze is missing the obsession, that’s what’s different, it isn’t as possessive yet as it would become even though you can already feel the attraction in it, which means she hadn’t quite turned into what she is now.
The apartment was exactly as I’d seen it earlier, with its worn carpet and its low ceiling and that bare bulb on the end of its wire that nobody had ever replaced, and the living room window that never shut properly and that you could hear whistling the moment there was any wind.
So here we really are...
My body went on calmly taking off its jacket while I searched every centimeter of the room my eyes were willing to show me.
It’s against that wall that the vase shattered, and it’s on that patch of carpet to the left of the coffee table that she was on her knees, and it’s between the couch and the window that there were those streaks of blood far too long to have come from a cut hand.
Except that scene isn’t anywhere in my head, and that’s exactly the problem, because it isn’t as though I’d forgotten the place or the people or the period.
There was a vase on the shelf, white porcelain, with white flowers in it that hadn’t started to wilt yet.
It’s there. It’s already there, with its flowers, exactly like earlier except they’re still white.
"Did you eat?" she asked from the kitchen.
"More or less."
"That means no." A drawer slammed somewhere. "You’re impossible, you know you’re impossible?"
She came back with a packet of cookies and two glasses that she set on the coffee table before dropping onto the couch and folding her legs under her, and my body settled in beside her without my needing to ask it anything.
We stayed like that a long while, talking about nothing at all.
She told me about her afternoon with big gestures of her hands, some idiotic thing that had happened on the metro, a neighbor who’d rung to complain about a noise she’d never made, and a film she’d abandoned after twenty minutes because the hero was too stupid to be believable.
"Like genuinely stupid, nobody is that stupid."
"Some people are that stupid."
"Then I never want to meet them."
My body told her about the bar and Nicolas and his internship, and she laughed at exactly the place where you were supposed to laugh.
She laughs normally, simply because she finds it funny, without monitoring the effect it produces on me.
She grabbed a cookie, broke it in half and held one piece out to me without asking whether I wanted it.
There had been something stirring under my ribs for a while now that I couldn’t put a name to, something much heavier than nostalgia and considerably more unpleasant, a mass swelling in my chest as the evening went peacefully on around me.
Was what I saw actually real, is it something I’d have forgotten in order to protect myself, am I amnesiac, and why am I seeing all of this again now?
"Kuro."
"Mm."
She’d set down her glass and was looking at me with that gleam I knew well for having watched it announce a certain number of problems.
"You want to see something insane?"
"That depends a great deal on what you call insane, because last time your insane thing was—"
"—you genuinely loved it at the time, don’t lie."
"I never lie, Alice, you know me well."
"Sure, sure, and I’m perfectly sane, but wait, don’t move."
She disappeared down the hallway and I heard her open something, knock something else over, swear under her breath, and then she came back with a shoebox clutched against her with both arms, which she set on the coffee table with a great deal of care.
"There."
"That’s a shoebox?"
"It’s my memory box, idiot."
She lifted the lid and I understood why she’d brought it out wearing that expression, because it was filled to the brim with photos and tickets and scraps of paper folded in four and nameless things that had piled up in there over years.
"You kept all this?"
"Obviously I kept all this." She shot me a sincerely offended look. "You didn’t?"
"... I did."
She plunged her hand in and pulled out a yellowed cinema ticket.
"Look, the first film we went to see together, and you fell asleep in the middle of it."
"It was a bad film."
"It was an excellent film and you snored on my shoulder through the entire second half, like a baby."
"That never happened."
"I have witnesses."
I remember that cinema perfectly well and the price of the tickets, and I remember perfectly having fallen asleep, but I don’t remember this evening, or this box, or the fact that she ever kept the ticket.
She put it down and pulled out a strip of black-and-white photo booth pictures taken in one of those station cabins, in which the two of us were crammed into frame doing whatever came to mind in the first three images, and in the last one she’d rested her head against my shoulder while we both smiled for no particular reason.
"We missed the train afterward."
"We missed the train because you absolutely had to do another strip."
"Detail."
My body answers instantly with all the details and the right tone, and the worst part is that those details come back to me at the same time they come to him, except none of it was filed under this evening before she brought out this box.
She went on with a broken keyring won at a fairground, half of which she’d given me before taking it back the very next day, a birthday card I’d written her, and a perfectly ordinary pebble whose presence she categorically refused to explain.
"It’s an important pebble."
"It’s a pebble."
"It’s important."
"Can you at least tell me why?"
"No."
She then pulled out a braided string bracelet that had lost all its color, a school badge, a fast food receipt with something scribbled on the back, a lock of black hair tied in a ribbon that my body asked no questions about, which struck me suddenly as very significant, and a whole series of little folded notes we’d passed each other in class and that she had kept, absolutely every one of them.
My body eventually stopped commenting and watched her for a long moment.
She had a particular face when she talked about these things, open and with nothing lingering behind it, the only version of herself that seemed to expect nothing from anyone, and she laughed at her own old foolishness while holding the objects up to the light, to the point of forgetting the cookie still in her other hand.
She’s happy, simply happy, right here, right now, and it doesn’t seem to cost her the slightest effort, which leaves me wondering at what exact moment that stopped, and above all what stopped it.
Then she stopped.
Her hand had stayed at the bottom of the box longer than it had for the other objects, and when she pulled it out she was holding a photo that she didn’t comment on at all.
My body leaned in to look.
It was us, at the beach, the summer we turned eighteen, with the sun going down behind the water and cutting everything into orange, and someone whose identity I didn’t know had taken us from behind while we sat on the sand shoulder to shoulder, our feet buried in it, watching the sun set without saying anything.
You couldn’t see our faces, only two black silhouettes cut out of all that light.
"Do you remember that night?" she said.
Her voice had changed, lower and slower than before, and she didn’t take her eyes off the photo.
"Afterward, when everyone had gone home and the two of us stayed until—"
She stopped herself.
I remember that night perfectly well, everyone heading home one by one and the two of us left on the sand until it got out of hand, until we kissed without either of us having decided anything, and I even remember exactly what we said to each other afterward to pretend nothing had happened.
She raised her head toward me, and I noticed we were considerably closer to each other than at the start of the evening without my being able to say when that had happened, her knee touching my thigh and the photo still caught between her fingers though she wasn’t looking at it at all anymore.
My body didn’t move.
Say something, anything.
It said nothing at all, and neither did she, and the silence in that apartment turned thick all at once with only the window whistling in the living room and the sound of traffic rising from the street.
Her eyes went down, then came back up.
She leaned in, barely.
My body leaned in too.
Wait—
There was almost nothing left between us, little enough that I could feel her breath on my lips, and my heart was pounding hard enough that I could hear it in my ears, except it wasn’t my heart, or maybe it was, since I no longer had any idea where that guy ended and where I began—
BAM. BAM. BAM.
Someone was pounding on the door.
Not the kind of knocking you do to announce yourself, but heavy blows close together that made the door shake in its frame and echoed through the whole apartment, and that didn’t stop, and that started up again immediately even harder.
BAM BAM BAM BAM.
Alice sprang up, and the word is too weak, because she went from motionless to standing with no transition at all, dropping the photo on the table and sweeping up the box in a single movement to shove it into my arms before anyone had time to understand what was happening.
Her whole face had changed. All the color had gone out of it at once.
"Damn it." A barely audible breath, her hand already closed around my wrist. "Hide, quick, hide."
She pulled me off the couch.
What’s going on, who knocks like that, why do I have to hide?
The blows kept falling on the door while she dragged me toward her bedroom at the end of the hall, her fingers tight enough around my wrist to hurt, and the wardrobe door opened in front of me with a squeak.
She pushed me inside and I found myself standing among her hanging clothes, the shoebox crushed against my chest, my face in the smell of laundry and of her.
She took hold of the panel.
Our eyes met one last time and there was something in hers I couldn’t read, fear certainly, but something else behind it too, something far calmer and far more decided.
"Don’t make a sound."
And she closed the wardrobe.
Through the wood, I heard her cross the hallway at a quick pace, stop for a moment in front of the entrance while the pounding redoubled, and then draw back the bolt.