Third Time
The shop closed its doors for them for an hour. For most of that hour the girl who worked there was very good at her job. She brought dresses in the right size and carried away the wrong ones without being asked. When Naru came out in something green, the girl said "no" quietly, and she was right.
Then she went into the back. When she came out again she was holding her phone flat against her stomach with both hands.
"I'm so sorry. This is really unprofessional." She was pink to the tips of her ears. "Could I get a picture? Just a quick one. It's for my boyfriend, he's a big fan." The smallest pause. "Of your older stuff."
Naru felt all of her at once, the way she felt everyone now.
The girl wanted the picture. That part was simple and almost sweet: she wanted to hand him something and watch his face when she did. Under it ran something with an edge. She knew what he watched on his phone at night with the sound turned down, and she didn't like it. A picture of herself next to the real thing would be something she could hold up and laugh at him with, and keep laughing. Under that, before Naru had said anything at all, the shame was already starting. She had heard herself ask.
"No," Naru said. "But tell him hello from me."
The shame arrived in full. The girl said sorry twice more and was careful for the rest of the hour, so careful it was like being served by someone made of glass. Naru bought a black dress with a high neck, and Theo carried the bag.
It was nothing, and she knew it was nothing. The girl was twenty and in love with someone who disappointed her, and the films had been made in a life Naru had only inherited. But walking out into the heat she found she was still holding it. It wasn't heavy. It was like a stone dropped into deep water: it went down and down, and somewhere at the bottom, something felt the water move.
Theo saw him first. She felt it happen in him, a small door closing.
"Pruitt," he said. "By the bus shelter."
A man was leaning on the shelter's frame with a long lens resting along his forearm.
"Freelance. Sells to anyone."
"Leave it."
"I'll ask him nicely."
He crossed at the light with the shopping bag still in his hand. She watched him stop at a polite distance and say something short. The man smiled, held up a palm, took three steps back and raised the camera again over Theo's shoulder.
Theo came back. "He'll get bored."
They walked. She didn't look back, and she didn't need to. Pruitt's want followed them down the street. It was a plain want, not a large one: a picture somebody would pay for. Under it lay a long grey patience, the patience of a man who had spent half his life in doorways, waiting for other people to have the worst moment of theirs.
The second time he was at the window of the café where they stopped for something cold. Naru put her cup down before Theo could get up, went outside and gave him Morgana's face, the warm amused one from a hundred red carpets.
"You've got your pictures. Let me have my afternoon."
"Sure thing, Morgana." He lowered the camera an inch and grinned, using her first name as though she'd given it to him. "You look really healthy, by the way."
She smiled at him until she was back inside. The water moved again, a little more.
Level three of the parking garage was half empty and a few degrees cooler than the street. The ceiling was low enough that Theo could have touched it. The car chirped when he unlocked it, and the sound came back off the concrete twice.
Pruitt stepped out from behind a pillar four spaces down.
The long lens was gone. He had the small camera at his chest and his hand already on it. Theo moved without being told and put himself in the way.
"We're done," he said. "You've had your afternoon."
Pruitt looked past him, at her.
"One question. Then I'm gone, I swear." His voice was friendly, almost gentle. "Six minutes and forty-eight seconds. That's what the report said." He tilted his head. "Where'd you go?"
She felt what he wanted, and it wasn't the answer. He didn't care where she'd gone. He wanted her face when she heard the question: the comeback girl asked about her own death in a parking garage, the second before she put her mask back on. That was the picture. His thumb was already moving on the dial.
The stone touched bottom.
What lay at the bottom had never been asleep. She understood that now, the way you understand cold water only once you're in it. It had been lying there all summer under everything she'd poured over it, under the coffee and the music and the morning light through the blinds. It had been patient the way only something very old can be. Now it rose. It came up through her without hurry, and it brought its reason with it, the way it always had.
They took. They had always taken. From the first garden on, they had taken whatever was held out to them and then reached for the hand that held it. This one wanted to know where she had been.
Then he could know.
She touched Theo's arm, and he stepped aside before he'd decided to. She walked to Pruitt and stopped close enough to feel his breath, and let him see her eyes.
They were what he had come for. Everybody wrote about the eyes, the pale aquamarine nobody could explain, the comeback eyes. She let something move at the bottom of them. She felt it rise, slow, out of the deep, the way something rises toward a light on the surface. She felt Pruitt see it.
His want flared like a match. It was the shot. Twenty years of reflex lifted the camera to his face before he had thought anything at all, and he looked at her through the glass. He had always been on the safe side of the glass. That was the whole of him, the shape he'd built his life around: he looked, and nobody looked back.
She looked back.
She gave him the pressure first. She gave him the place with no up in it and no down, where long wears away to nothing because nothing ever ends. She gave him the weight of it on every side at once, the weight of the deep on a thing that sinks forever without striking a floor. She gave him the age of it. She gave him what it had done to her name, crushed down to a single sound. Last she gave him the hate, because the hate was the only thing down there that had kept its shape. She had carried it up out of the Pit polished smooth and perfectly round, and she had never once been allowed to put it anywhere. She put it in him.
It was wonderful. She hadn't known it would be wonderful.
She felt his wants go out one by one, like windows in a tower going dark floor by floor. The picture went first, then the money and the month it would have paid for. Then the doorways, the twenty years of them, all the patience, all the small grey hours. Then wants she hadn't known a man carried, the ones from before words: to be warm, to be hidden, to not be the thing in the clearing that the dark has noticed. Those went too. What was left in him didn't want anything. It only knew.
The camera stayed at his eye a long time. His finger lay on the shutter and never pressed it.
His breath stopped. When it came back it came in high and thin, wrong, the breath of something much smaller than a man. Dark spread down the front of his jeans. She watched it the way she had once watched the tides of the first sea, with interest and no hurry. His knees went soft. Slowly, as if the weight of it were more than his arms could manage, the camera came down from his face, and she saw what was left behind his eyes. She was satisfied.
"You wanted to know," she said.
He ran.
He went backward first, straight into the car behind him, and its alarm went up in a scream that filled the whole low concrete space. Then he turned and ran, all arms, a man who hadn't run since school. The strap caught on his elbow and the camera tore loose and hit the floor, and the lens cracked with a sound like ice. He fell at the top of the ramp. He went down hard on both palms and kept going on his hands and feet before he found his legs again. Then he was gone, down and around, and for a long time she could still hear his steps under the alarm, slapping, uneven, getting smaller.
She stood in the cold and breathed. It was like the breath on the floor of the Marlowe, the first breath. It was enormous. For a moment she was nearly as large as she had ever been.
She turned around.
Theo was where she had left him, beside the open car door, the bag hanging from one hand. The alarm went on and on.
She felt him the way she felt everyone, and what was in him was fear.
It was clean and cold and sat right at his centre, and none of it was hers. She had never been able to put anything into Theo. Whatever was in him, he had made himself, and he had made this from what he had just watched her do.
He walked past her to where the camera lay. He picked it up, turned it over once, and put it carefully into the shopping bag on top of the black dress. Then he looked at her.
"Get in the car, Morgana."
She knew the voice. It was the one he used for disasters, level and kind and leaving no room in it anywhere. She had heard him use it on a guitarist with a bleeding hand and a hotel mirror in pieces around him. She had heard him use it on a label intern who had sent the wrong file to the wrong people. She had never heard it pointed at her.
She got in the car.
He didn't take the long way. He didn't turn on the radio. His hands stayed on the wheel at ten and two the whole way home, and she sat beside him and felt the hugeness go out of her, a little with every block, like water draining from a pool. It left her the size of a woman again, sitting in the passenger seat of a car with the air conditioning on. The thing at the bottom had gone quiet, the way something goes quiet after it has eaten.
At home he set the bag on the kitchen island and didn't take the camera out.
"He wet himself," he said.
She didn't answer.
"I've known Dale Pruitt for four years." He was looking at the bag, not at her. "He's a vulture. He's stood outside hospitals. There've been maybe twenty times I wanted to hit him." He took a breath. "I'd never have done that to him."
He waited, but she had nothing to say to that. After a moment he nodded, the way he nodded at things that couldn't be fixed today, and went to put the kettle on.
She sat at the island and listened to the water come to the boil. Something in her had started to hurt, slowly, in the place the hugeness had left. She didn't have a name for it, and she didn't look for one. She went down into herself instead, the long way, into the cold. The thing at the bottom was lying there, satisfied and awake, and it watched her come.
She settled the water back over it, layer by layer, until it was dark and still and the light didn't reach. Then she came up again and drank the tea Theo put in front of her. It was too hot, and she didn't say so.
He came back on Friday with the bag going see-through at the bottom and the coffees in their cardboard tray. They ate at the island. The sandwich had tomato in it.
"Small things first," he said, and opened the laptop.
The Aldine wanted the contract back by the fifteenth. Marcus had moved the call. Okafor's office needed her to fill out a form.
"Pruitt's been off since Tuesday," Theo said, in the same voice. "He told the agency it was heatstroke." He scrolled. "I had his camera couriered back to them. Told them he dropped it."
She looked at him.
"It was a hot week," he said, and moved on to the next thing.
Later, when he'd gone, she went into the bedroom to change. The black dress hung on the back of the door, still in its plastic. It had been there all week. She looked at it for a while and then put on something else.