She went back upstairs. Harold had told her they would probably meet in the living room. It was a huge room, carpeted with a thick wine-colored shag rug, dominated by a freestanding fireplace that went up through the roof in a column of rock. The entire west wall was glass, giving on a magnificent view of the Flatirons. It made her feel as exposed as a bug on a wall. She knew that the outer surface of the thermoplex was iodized so that anyone outside would only see a mirrorlike reflection, but the psychological feeling was still one of utter exposure. She wanted to finish quickly.
On the southern side of the room she found what she was looking for, a deep closet that Ralph hadn't cleaned out. Coats hung far back inside, and in the rear corner there was a tangle of boots and mittens and winter woolens about three feet deep.
Working quickly, she took the groceries out of her shopping bag. They were camouflage, and there was only a single layer of them. Beneath the cans of tomato paste and sardines was the Hush Puppies shoebox with the dy***ite and the walkie-talkie inside.
"If I put it in a closet, will it still work?" she had asked. "Won't the extra wall muffle the blast?"
"Nadine," Harold had responded, "if that device works, and I have no reason whatever to believe it won't, it will take the house and most of the surrounding hillside. Put it anywhere you think it will be unobserved until their meeting. A closet will be fine. The extra wall will blow out and become shrapnel. I trust your judgment, dear. It's going to be just like the old fairy tale about the tailor and the flies. Seven at a blow. Only in this case, we're dealing with a bunch of political cockroaches."
Nadine pushed aside boots and scarves, made a hole, and slipped the shoebox into it. She covered it over again and then worked her way out of the closet. There. Done. For better or worse.
She left the house quickly, not looking back, trying to ignore the voice that wouldn't stay dead, the voice that was now telling her to go back in there and pull the wires that ran between the blasting caps and the walkie-talkie, telling her to give this up before it drove her mad. Because wasn't that what was really lying somewhere up ahead, now maybe less than two weeks ahead? Wasn't madness the final logical conclusion?
She slipped the bag of groceries into the Vespa's carrier and kicked the machine into life. And all the time she was driving away, that voice went on: You're not going to leave that there, are you? You're not going to leave that bomb in there, are you?
In a world where so many have died -
She leaned into a turn, barely able to see where she was going. Tears had begun to blur her eyes.
-the one great sin is to take a human life.
Seven lives here. No, more than that, because the committee was going to hear reports from the heads of several subcommittees.
She stopped at the corner of Baseline and Broadway, thinking she would turn around and go back. She was shuddering all over.
And later she would never be able to explain to Harold precisely what had happened - in truth, she never even tried. It was a foretaste of the horrors to come.
She felt a blackness creeping over her vision.
It came like a dark curtain slowly drawn, flipping and flapping in a mild breeze. Every now and then the breeze would gust, the curtain would flap more vigorously, and she would see a bit of daylight under its hem, a little bit of this deserted intersection.
But the curtain came over her vision in steady blackout drifts and soon she was lost in it. She was blind, she was deaf, she was without the sense of touch. The thinking creature, the Nadine-ego, drifted in a warm black cocoon like seawater, like amniotic fluid.
And she felt him creep into her.
A shriek built up within her, but she had no mouth with which to scream.
Penetration: entropy.
She didn't know what those words meant, put together like that; she only knew that they were right.
It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Later, metaphors occurred to her to describe it, and she rejected them, one by one:
You're swimming and suddenly, in the midst of the warm water, you're treading water in a pocket of deep, numbing cold.
You've been given Novocain and the dentist pulls a tooth. It comes out with a painless tug. You spit blood into the white enamel basin. There's a hole in you; you've been gouged. You can slip your tongue into the hole where part of you was living a second ago.
You stare at your face in the mirror. You stare at it for a long time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. No fair blinking. You watch with an intellectual sort of horror as your face changes, like the face of Lon Chaney, Jr., in a werewolf epic. You become a stranger to yourself, an olive-skinned Doppelg?nger, a psychotic Vampira with pale skin and fishslit eyes.
It was really none of those things, but there was a taste-trace of all of them.
The dark man entered her, and he was cold.
When Nadine opened her eyes, her first thought was that she was in hell.
Hell was whiteness, the thesis to the dark man's antithesis. She saw white, ivory, bleached-out nothingness. White-white-white. It was white hell, and it was everywhere.