Concrete Underground (2010) (24 page)

At that moment, I felt a strange longing come over me that I couldn't quite explain. For some reason, I found myself wishing that I had actually been the person she thought I was earlier that night, her friend from high school. I didn't really know what to do, what to say, or even how to feel about what she had just told me. I just felt restless, like I had to do
something
, anything. So of course I did the most stupid thing possible.

I leaned my head forward and pressed my lips the side of her neck, kissing her skin softly.

Immediately I felt her body tense, so I pulled back. We stayed still for another uncomfortable silence.

"Please leave," she said.

I stood up and saw Max standing across the room, leaning casually against the far wall. I walked over to meet him.

"Cuddle parties. They're becoming more and more popular with young professionals," he explained. "People who are so alienated, so wrapped up in their jobs, in technology, in creature comforts, that even the simplest acts of human affection become salacious. We have to schedule in any human contact, pencil it in on your calendar and treat it as anonymous as a date with a prostitute, just another transaction or business dealing, just another meeting to take or appointment to keep. Ours is a generation so neutered we can't even manage a proper orgy."

"It's doing my head in, honestly," I told him. "I guess I'm just old-fashioned some ways; I need something more visceral."

"Luckily, I think I can arrange for that, too."

---

We were sitting on a red velvet couch.

A beautiful woman in a black corset and stockings was walking towards us slowly, seductively. She had long, jet black hair and light mocha skin. Her face was obscured by a gunmetal mask like the servers downstairs, except hers was a half-mask, exposing her full, ruby red lips.

Max turned to look at me with a knowing grin.

"Shit, everything's running together, like side two of
Abbey Road
."

"Just shut up and enjoy this," Max said, shaking his head. "Would it help you if I made her wear a purple wig?"

The woman knelt between my legs and started working the zipper on my pants open. She leaned forward and buried her face into my lap.

I rolled my eyes back and savored the feeling. Then I opened them again when I felt Max's hand on my chin. He slipped his fingers around to the left side of my jaw and turned my head right, towards him. I let him control my movements and parted my lips as he leaned in to press his against mine.

---

I woke up in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. The sun shone brightly through an open window. I was wrapped in black silk sheets and spooning Max, who was still asleep. We were both naked.

I reached out and touched him, as if I needed to prove to myself it was real. He snorted and rolled over, hovering halfway between waking and sleep, then mumbled something that sounded like, "Didn't this already happen?"

25. Whatever You Want Most

"Are you still having the dreams?" Max asked me as he took a sip of his tea.

We were sitting in his bed, naked and loosely wrapped in sheets.

"No, they stopped about the time I met you," I replied, enjoying the warmth of my own cup in my hands. It was a Japanese-style stone mug, rough to the touch, with small lotus flowers painted on the sides.

Max cast a sideways glance at me. "I am," he said and drained the rest of his tea.

He stood up and moved over to his closet, keeping his back to me as he put on a red and black Japanese silk kimono. "Have you figured out why you were having them, yet?"

"No," I replied, getting out of bed myself and hunting around for my clothes - unsuccessfully.

He nodded. His demeanor was more restrained, more serious than I had ever seen him before. He wasn't wrapping everything in his usual forced irony. Honestly, it was a little unsettling.

"You know, when you first told me that you were having that dream, I thought that there was one painfully obvious explanation," he said.

"What's that?"

"Well, you knew where her body was hidden. Logically, there are only two ways that was possible - either you found her there, or you were the one who put her there." He let out a dry, bitter chuckle. "That first time you brought her up, I thought you were confessing."

"Wait, you thought I killed her?"

He chuckled again. "Yes. It actually made perfect sense to me at the time. I thought that since you were a reporter investigating my activities, you had uncovered certain damaging information about me in the process. It wouldn't have been the first time - your friend Cobb stumbled upon the same information back in his own time. Anyways, it seemed to follow that you were a likely suspect for my blackmailer. So when you first mentioned Jacinda's body being in my plane, my natural assumption was that you were trying to let me know that you were my adversary, and that you weren't afraid of me knowing your identity."

I laughed. I didn't know how else to react, so I just laughed.

Max joined in.

---

We descended together down the spiral staircase into his living room. It was a vast open decorated in the same minimalist style as his office. The walls were completely bare, devoid of photos, pieces of art, or personal touches. There were a few white couches, all pristinely clean, interspersed with black side tables and coffee tables. Everything was laid out in a precise, geometric pattern, and though it was obviously intended to entertain guests, the entire room had a cold, antiseptic feel to it.

I couldn't decide if he preferred such stark surroundings to avoid betraying anything of himself psychologically, or if he was legitimately this soulless.

As I stepped off the staircase, we found Columbine laying on one of the couches, looking rumpled and bleary-eyed, as if she had just woken up herself. I immediately regretted the fact that I hadn't been able to find my clothes to dress before leaving Max's bedroom.

She was wearing a men's shirt that fit her like a loose nightgown, and it took me a second to recognize it as mine. "Sorry," she said, noticing that I was looking at the shirt. "I found it on the ground when I came in last night, and I put it on so I wouldn't have to sleep in my costume."

Her eyes, however, betrayed that she knew the shirt was mine when she picked it up and that she had worn it as more than just something to cover herself.

Max had doubtlessly picked up on this as well. "Well I don't know about the two of you," he said jovially as he slapped me on the back, "but I could sure go for some more tea."

He headed into the kitchen to fix some. Meanwhile, I hunted around and found my pants.

"My cell phone's missing," I said as I slipped them on and felt around the pockets - mostly to fill the awkward silence.

"I haven't seen it," Columbine replied. "Your stuff was kinda scattered all around when I came in last night, though."

I nodded and continued to cast about for some way of making small talk. "So how did you end up here, anyways? Why didn't you go back to Violet's?"

She shrugged. "I did, but as soon as I pulled up I could tell they were in the living room, and I didn't want to interrupt, you know."

"Wait, what do you mean?"

"She means, they were in the living room,
fucking
," Max chimed in as he re-entered carrying a tray with a tea pot and three cups.

I felt a knot in my stomach as I imagined Violet and Anthony together. Columbine seemed to relish watching my reaction.

Max set the tray on a coffee table and continued talking in a light, conversational tone while serving us. "You missed a good game last night, Col. I took everyone underground. D even played. Of course, he got beat by a girl, but at least he played."

Still trying to shake the mental image of Anthony fucking Violet from my head, I said, "That reminds me, I was meaning to ask you for a favor. Whoever the big loser was last night, when you go to ruin his life like you did to Peterman, can you at least give me the scoop?"

Max laughed. "Do you honestly expect me to sit around for a week waiting for your paper to go to print? I hate to be the one to break this to you, but that's not how news works anymore. Get yourself a blog, and we'll talk."

Columbine grinned, trying to keep her face down so I wouldn't see.

Max added, "You don't really remember much from last night, do you?"

I shook my head. "No, and honestly I'm probably the better for it. I just wish I could remember what I did with my phone."

"Oh, you lost it last night," Max replied.

"Fuck," I muttered. "Jenny's flying back in today and she's supposed to call me later. I'll have to go back and find it."

"I'll drive you," Max offered. "I have some quick business to take care of there, anyways."

---

We went back to the Highwater Building after breakfast. As we walked inside, Max explained that it was most likely I lost my phone upstairs toward the end of the night. "Go ahead while I take care of what I need to do downstairs. Your keycard should be able to get me anywhere you need to go."

So I proceeded alone up to the mezzanine and its three colored doors. I decided to try the middle one first, which was painted white. It was locked, but I noticed an electronic card reader beside it. I held my card up to the reader and heard a loud click. I tried the knob again, and it opened.

The door led into the large room with the sun roof and mirrored walls where the "cuddle party" had been. It was now empty but for a small cleaning crew, who said they hadn't found any stray phones.

I doubled back out to the mezzanine and tried the black door next, but my keycard didn't unlock it. I thought it was a little strange, considering what Max had said, but just shrugged it off and tried the red door instead. It clicked like the first one had, and I turned the knob.

This one opened into a narrow hallway with three more doors - two along the left wall, the third at the far end. The right wall was made of one-way glass that looked into the room with the sun roof.

The other walls were covered in golden wallpaper embossed with faint floral patterns, while the dark red carpet had a pattern of intricate gold lines intertwining like a celtic cross.

I heard sobbing coming from the far door and treaded quietly down the hallway to see what it was. Slowly opening the door, taking care to be as silent as possible, I peeked inside.

I recognized the room with the velvet couch where Max had taken me last night. There were three people inside. One man stood in the corner facing away from me. He was bent forward over a second person, a woman, whom I also couldn't see clearly except to tell that she was sitting in a chair and wearing only underwear. The third man reclined on the velvet couch across the room. I could see him clearly and had no trouble recognizing him.

"Saint Anthony," I said as I opened the door fully.

He sat up and smiled broadly. "Come back to admire your handiwork?"

"What do you mean?"

I walked further into the room and got a clearer view of the other two people. The standing man was the old doctor who fixed me up at Asterion, and his patient was the masked woman from last night. She had been badly beaten; large bruises covered her face and neck, her nose had been broken, and a large crescent shaped laceration had split around her left eye. The doctor was busy stitching her up.

The woman glanced up to see me and immediately began trembling in terror, her eyes welling up with tears. I took a step closer, and she leaped up from her seat and screamed incoherently in Spanish.

Behind me, Saint Anthony laughed.

"What the fuck happened to her?" I demanded.

"You did," Anthony replied.

"Bullshit," I spat angrily, feeling nauseous.

The woman kept screaming, despite the doctor's best efforts to calm her down. "I think you better leave," he finally said to me over his shoulder.

I turned to go, but the door was closed behind me. Painted on the back side, where I now could see it, was another crowned globe sigil like the one I saw last night, shimmering hypnotically in strange metallic paint. Suddenly, fragmented memories started rushing back to me.

---

I was on top of this woman, thrusting violently and grunting like an animal. Max laid beside us, watching, barking at me to do it harder and faster. I looked down at her face, saw her biting her lower lip in pain, and noticed the mask had slipped and was covering her eyes.

I grabbed the mask and pulled it out of the way, revealing her face.

"Holy shit," Max said. "It's your sister."

"She's not my sister," I said.

"D, you're fucking your sister," Max insisted.

I looked down at the woman, and she did bear an unsettling resemblance.

"It's not her," I repeated.

"D, it is me," the woman said, her Spanish accent thick and sweet.

Max started laughing - a deep, resonant laughter that filled the room.

"Shut up!" I screamed.

The woman said, "D, it's me, Jenny."

Everything flashed red with rage.

---

I was back out in the hallway, fallen to my knees and doubled over to vomit all over that plush red carpet. I could still hear the sound of Max's laughter. Then I looked up and realized he was there, standing over me

"Do you remember now who lost the game?" he asked. "You did. You were the last one out before I sealed the hatch."

"You drugged me," I said feebly. "I didn't know what I was doing."

"Nobody made you do anything you didn't want to do," Max replied. "Let's not kid ourselves, we both know you've got some serious issues with women."

Anthony and the doctor walked out of the room to join us. "I've done as much as I can," he said to Max. "But she'll be scarred, and the nose could not be reset properly."

All three of us looked back to see the woman standing in the doorway. I thought to myself,
Goddamn you, Max, she does look almost exactly like Jenny.