As Adeleine crossed the stairs’ halfway point, she tried to ignore her nausea, what felt like the revolution of every organ, and ran her fingers across the familiar wallpaper. With the wrench of the heavy front door came the soaring sound of her own blood, and with the descent of the stone steps the refusal of every bone and ligament to cooperate any further. She knew she should develop a plan right then, and tried to remember the order of subway stations on a Manhattan-bound train, just the words themselves and none of the people that would spill from the cars, hurried and hostile. The unmetered air, the confluence of smells, felt like a rough examination of her whole body. DeKalb was first and then was—
Huddled on the last step with her angry temples between her knees and her hands full of her hair, she heard Owen cooing from her apartment’s window. Soon he was next to her, cradling her, collecting her stiff limbs in his arms. “Come inside, now.” A gray-haired woman passing on the street stopped, mulling over the possibility of alarm, and Adeleine heard him say to her, “Bad day. Happens to the best of us.”
The woman clucked her tongue and continued on her way home, satisfied with his answer.
JUST AFTER DAWN, on the walk from the pea-colored emergency room lobby to the parking lot, through the two sets of automatic doors and across the quickly warming concrete, Claudia kept her arm hooked around Paulie’s waist and refused to look back at Edward. Still dressed in the thin motel robe, the regrettably undersized cutoffs, and the orange drugstore flip-flops, Edward gave a range of sighs aimed specifically at the back of Claudia’s head.
She opened the passenger door for Paulie and kissed his forehead as he settled in.
“Hey,” Edward said, before she’d had the chance to slip around to her side. “You really think this is such a good idea, to keep going? You don’t think he’s maybe had too much excitement and change for three days?” He was careful not to gesture in Paulie’s direction, to keep his image through the windshield calm.
“He had a panic attack, Edward, not a total breakdown. His condition comes with the occasional anxiety issue. He used to cry every time the trash went out because he didn’t want us to lose anything.”
“Claude. Have you forgotten the last five hours? I had to pry his hands from the bathtub. He said his heart felt like a drum march. The doctors had to sedate him.”
“I’ve been his sister for about three decades longer than you’ve been his weird misanthropic neighbor,” she said. “Travel freaks him out, but he’s been talking about these fucking bugs longer than you or I have talked about anything.” She indicated the conversation’s conclusion by sliding into the driver’s seat and slamming the door.
Edward leaned on the hood and looked out at the lot. Three silver-red hounds left behind in the cab of a peeling green truck barked up a chorus, trying to crowd their mouths through the just-cracked window. He closed his eyes and felt the car start, all the parts beneath stirring towards purpose.
—
THE STRETCH OF THE DRIVE that followed, free of sound save the occasional zoom of a speeding car, seemed to reject any passing of time, presenting the same fast-food billboards and roadside crosses in triplicate again and again. Paulie kept his hands in his lap and sometimes pressed his mouth against the window, forming bubbles of spit that broke almost as quickly as they formed. Claudia, her posture improved but fossilized, as though her shoulder blades were sewn to the seat, sent hard looks to Edward via the rearview mirror. Made restless by the silence, Edward dug into the backpack at his feet and removed his camera, trained it on Paulie, and called to him gently.
“Oh hi Eddy,” said Paulie, with a deflated inflection.
Claudia sensed the presence of the device immediately and asked Edward to place it far within a body cavity of his choosing.
“Ass could be good, but why not try—”
“It’s okay, sweet pea,” said her brother, looking straight ahead. “Let Eddy do what he wants.”
“Hey, pal,” Edward said. “How you doing? Last night must have been rough on you.”
“To be Mr. Frank, I feel like an octopus in a . . . math class.”
“Yeah? Feeling weird? Like, foreign? Alien?”
“I guess so, Ed. I guess you could say alien. I guess I would say I was worried I was accidentally living on the wrong planet.”
“You know what, though. An octopus in math class could work on a number of equations at once with all those arms.”
Paulie’s face, as represented through the viewfinder to Edward, began to twitch upward in small ways. “Wow, Eddy. Wow. I bet you’re right.”
“Just a different way of working.”
Edward repositioned himself. Up on his haunches, twisted behind the driver’s seat, he filmed from a slight height. Paulie retrieved a pen and paper from the glove box and began to sketch the tentacled creature in question. “Oc-to-pi,” he said, exhaling air from his open mouth rapidly. “Oc-to-pi.”
Claudia slipped on her neon-green gas-station sunglasses and began looking for a radio station, turning the knob at the first hint of static.