There’s a scratching sound, above my head, something small up there, tiny claws scrabbling over the rusted interiors of the pipes. I stand for a long moment, as if at attention, listening to the mouse or mole or whatever it is, feeling each of my heartbeats like a whoosh of air in a bellows, feeling a flush of fever in my face. Maybe it’s a function of having lost so much weight—of being so tired—but I can, I can feel it, each individual heartbeat, every second passing.
All in all I’m counting only three doors, clustered together at the end of the hall. Two up ahead on my left, one just to my right. I shake my head, press my fingers into my eyelids. Three doors, three rooms. Doors and rooms. All I have to do down here is what I did up there, go down the line, search each room, clear each one, check them off, one at a time.
They’re even labeled. The door directly next to me on the right says GENERAL STORE in big spray-painted letters, bright red. On the other side of the hall, the closer of the two doors says LADIES, same paint, same color. The one next to it should say GENTLEMEN, but instead it has no words, just a graffiti depiction of male genitalia in bright blue paint. Sophomoric; charmless; bizarre in the context. This little masterpiece I presume to be what Cortez was laughing at, but it doesn’t look like it’s that room he chose to enter—it’s the door marked GENERAL STORE that’s slightly ajar. I peer through it and say, “Marco,” and he doesn’t answer and for a second I can see it vividly in my mind, Cortez in there, taken by surprise, his throat sliced open, red blood spilling out, writhing on the floor, blood spurting from the terrible wound.
“Polo,” he says, indistinct and distant. I exhale.
I shake my head. Where are the people? Maybe one of these doors leads to another hallway, another exit; another staircase, leading farther down. Maybe they came down here and disappeared, dissolved into patches of dust or shadows.
The door marked LADIES is locked. I rattle the handle. Bedrooms? Women’s bunks? I press the door with two flat hands, find it to be flimsy, just pine or pressboard. Eminently breakable, calling to be kicked down. I take a deep breath and prepare to kick in the door, and while I’m suspended there, between intention and action, another memory crowds in: my mother, a couple of years before she was murdered, she said this beautiful thing to me about how your life was a house that God had built for you, and He knew what was in each room but you didn’t—and behind every door there was a discovery to be made, and some rooms were full of treasure and some with trash but all the rooms were of God’s design—and at this point, these many years later, I have to wonder if it isn’t more accurate to say that life is a series of trap doors, and you fall through them, one by one, tumbling down and down and down, one hole to the next.
I raise my gun up to chest height, like a real old-fashioned policeman, and kick open the door marked LADIES. It flies open and cracks against the wall, ricochets back against my shoulder and cracks into the wall a second time, and my light looks in on a room full of corpses.
*
It takes time. To get the whole picture, it takes some time. Investigating a pitch-black room with a headlamp, what you get is a mosaic picture, like shaking puzzle pieces one by one out of the box. You turn your head and suddenly the light fills with a man’s face, scruffy beard, features slack, eyes staring straight ahead. Turn your head again, the light moves, and there’s an arm in a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, fingers curled, inches from the plastic Flintstones cup that’s rolled away from the hand.
My light moves through the room, seeing one thing at a time.
In the center of the room there is a small square card table with cups and saucers on it. There are dead bodies seated around it as if for tea. A man with a long ugly face and a buzz cut, head back and to the side, like he’s fallen asleep on the crosstown bus. One of his hands dangling down to his right, the other hand on the table, fingers interlaced with the fingers of the girl next to him. This is Tick, then, and the girl whose hand he is holding is Valentine—African American, very dark skinned, long arms. She has fallen forward and her cheek is flat on the tabletop, a line of fluid running from the corner of her mouth like a spiderweb.
Two more people are at the table. Everyone has a cup. Four for tea.
Across from Tick is Delighted, handsome young fella, clean-cut, slumped backward, head lolling. In the cape that Jean mentioned. I crouch under the table and find his trademark bright blue sneakers. Next to Delighted is a girl with a wide face, round cheeks, curly hair—maybe that’s Sailor, formerly Alice—her body turned slightly away from Delighted, as if upset with him or embarrassed by something he just said.
I shine my light into Sailor’s cup: it looks like tea, it really does. I sniff at it but don’t catch a scent. I don’t touch anything. It’s a crime scene.
I make my way from the center of the room out to the perimeter and find more corpses—many more. I am keeping it together, though, I’m doing fine. I’m shining my headlamp into each pair of eyes like an optometrist, examining each pair of dilated pupils.