“Do you read palms?” she inquires.
“Palms? Can’t say that I do.”
“I have a very short lifeline, you know.”
“Seems like that should be the least of your worries, if you’re so set on offing yourself.” He looks at her, snuggled in her fur, sonsy and ringlet-maned, that pillowy mouth in its eternal pout. So soft. She only shot him once. “Why’d you try a thing like that anyway? After everything I’ve done for you. You’re a real selfish girl.”
She reaches into her handbag and takes out her compact. “It was the only way I could escape you.”
“Escape me? I didn’t lock you up. I didn’t chain you to a radiator. I didn’t hang you upside down by your ankles. You could’ve escaped just fine.”
“No. No, I couldn’t have.” Powdering her eye.
“All those books you read, you’re too dumb to find the door?”
Her mirror clicks shut. “The only way to escape you is death.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I can’t live without you.” She says it sweetly.
Sharkey looks out the window. He’s boiling over inside. But not with rage, with nothing he’s used to. It’s like the way she says Howie. A name nobody ever called him before, but once she said it, it was his. I can’t live without you. The words are his now, she can’t take them back. He wants to hear them again, up close, hot in his ear. He wants to press her to him and stroke her and squeeze her until she can’t help but say ’em, over and over. I can’t live without you. Nobody ever loved him before. The feeling’s too big for his chest, for his limo, bigger than the Outer Walls of Torchtown. Big as all outdoors. He won’t look at her until it passes. Maybe it’ll pass.
“Why not live with me, then?” he asks huskily. “I can be nice.”
She shakes her head. She still isn’t afraid to contradict him. “No, you can’t.”
* * *
Nick’s is a former theater, its slide-lettered marquee out front still strung with stranded characters like an unfinished crossword puzzle: TH T REEP NY OPER L ST 3 PER RMANCES. They’re in a part of Torchtown Swanny scarcely recognizes, within sight of the northmost Outer Wall. Automated sniper turrets and a filigree of barbed wire assert themselves against the moon. Duluth parks at the curb and they disembark.
“Where are you taking me?” Swanny asks, as if there’s any doubt. Except for Nick’s, the rest of the block is burned to the ground, a sootscape of dumpster huts and cinder-block forts, a graveyard of architecture haunted by the poorest of the poor, the lowest of the low. She draws the chinchilla coat tighter around herself, watching for the dragons, but all is still. For now. Though the snow seems to have passed, she still feels its icy pinpricks on her skin.
“You oughta see this place while it’s still here. It’s a relic. Like me.”
Nick’s box office is illuminated; a dog-collared hostess waits in a cage of gold and glass. When she notices Sharkey, she immediately presses a button that releases the door for admittance, with a buzzing that sounds exactly like a dentist’s drill. Another building with electricity: Swanny thought the Chaw Shop was the only one. Sharkey holds the door open and gestures her inside.
The theater has been converted into a supper club of sorts; most of the seats have been unbolted and removed, to make space for dark-cloaked tables, each lit by a single candle, and mismatched chairs that wobble on the sloping floor. Down in the front, just before a stage shrouded in crimson velvet, is a mostly empty parquet dancing area, manned by a bucket drummer who’s keeping his rhythms to a steady pulse. This minimalist tableau is at jarring odds with the room that contains it, a cathedral to amusement, worked over with aureate embellishments and festoons rendered in plaster and domed, up top, with a ceiling mural of constellations, their dots connected with silvery spiderweb precision against the midnight blue.
“You like it?” Sharkey asks her. “I always used to come here when I was real chewed out.”
“It’s so…strange.” Swanny has never been out to a restaurant before, and it’s most curious to experience for the first time in her present condition. Colors have taken on a hazy, impressionistic quality. Waiters, clad in white coats like surgeons, rove among the tables, carrying off the bones of the eaten.
“I used to know the guy who owned this place. One of my best customers. Nicodemus Satan Cannibal Jr. He took his name off the old inmate who ran the joint before him. Then he left it to some kid he trained. Nicodemus Satan Cannibal III. Pieces of work, all of ’em.”
“Like a succession of kings,” Swanny murmurs. Or like the Ripples, she thinks.
Sharkey signals the ma?tre d’. “Hey, Rollo. Seat us in the box.”
When Swanny was just a girl, Corona used to speak of thin places, locales where the membrane separating this world from the next was stretched to its outer limit, an unguarded border between the countries of Before and After. Swanny has never before visited such a place in waking life, but tonight, reality feels permeable. She’s uncertain how long she’s been floating, viewing the dining room from the perspective of a lost soul above an operating table. She wonders how long she’s been clutching Sharkey’s hand.
“Don’t try to fight it,” he advises her. His touch is her only tether to the physical world. His dusky red aura enhalos her body, holding her inside. “It’s only chemicals.”
“Yes, but Howie, what does that even truly mean?” Her own voice sounds so very muffled and distant; she wonders if it’s audible to human ears. “Love, hate, fear, joy—desire—religious ecstasy—imagination—perception itself—our entire interface with reality and the universe as we know it—can’t every last one be attributed to a series of enzymatic reactions in the petri dish of the mind? Aren’t they all ‘only chemicals’ too?”
“If you could see your pupils right now, you’d know what I’m talking about.”
With a pop, the chair asserts itself beneath Swanny at last; her spirit reattaches to her physical form. They’re at a table in a balcony, just the two of them, a brass guardrail holding at bay the hubbub below.
“Atta girl,” Sharkey says. “Stay with me.”
The waiter arrives, a singularly unappetizing individual. Three of the fingers are missing from his right hand, and even before he speaks, his jittery energy upsets whatever weak equilibrium Swanny has achieved. “Mr. Sharkey, good to see you again, sir. Would the two of you like to start with something to drink?”
“She needs to get some food in her stomach,” Sharkey pronounces. “What are the specials?”
“Tonight we have the chef’s singular rat balls, at least seventy percent freshly harvested rat meat and less than eight percent sawdust, served on a bed of something we found—reminds me of polenta. It’s good.”