Living Witness(107)

“Can I get you anything?” she asked again.

“Some scrambled eggs and toast,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Alice made a show of taking out her pad and writing it down. In those fancy restaurants out at the mall, nobody wrote anything down. It was just another way of telling people how much smarter you were than they were. Not writing anything down, as if you had a perfect memory. She bet they made plenty of mistakes, and then pretended they hadn’t, so they could all go on pretending together. That was what it was all about with those people. Pretending. They pretended to understand things you didn’t, and they pretended that the silly things they said meant something real, and then they pretended that they were nothing like you at all.

She put her book into her pocket and brushed her fingers against the note again. Then she blushed.

“Are you all right?” Gregor Demarkian said.

Alice started. Gregor Demarkian looked like he was peering at her. The television man looked like he was doing the same thing. She tried to straighten her back and succeeded only in creating a little spasm.

“I don’t have to talk to you,” she said, the words coming out when she had only meant to think them. “I don’t care what Gary Albright says. You’re not the police, and you’re not on our side. I don’t have to talk to you, and nobody else does, either. Your eggs will be out in a minute. Good-bye.”

She turned her back to both the men and walked away, to the little window that led to the kitchen, to hand in her slip. The note was still in there, in her pocket. It made her cold, just to think about it.

I saw what you did up at Annie Vic’s.

Well, Alice thought. What of it? What had she done up at Annie Vic’s that should be anybody’s business but her own?





3




It was cold in the room now. Sometimes it got that way. Annie-Vic thought about the window, and about how easy it ought to be to close it, but she couldn’t close it, and she knew she couldn’t. It was odd to be here like this—to float, to be able to hear everything anybody said without their knowing you could hear it. It was a revelation, really. If she came out of this—and she thought she would, if only because she wasn’t panicking—she would recommend a stint of it to everybody. It was amazing, the kind of things people said when they thought you couldn’t hear them.

This man, this person called Gregor Demarkian, didn’t say much of anything. Annie-Vic had been interested as soon as she’d heard Dr. Willard use his name. She’d heard of him, of course. She could barely help it. When she was home and on her own, she was practically addicted to Court TV, or Tru TV, as it had started calling itself. It was a silly change, and the mangled spelling of “true” offended her. She hated to sound like an old person, but she thought the standards of everything had declined badly since World War II. Even in the early days of television, when there was practically nothing on the box but the criminally stupid, nobody would have put up with a spelling like “tru.” Ed Sullivan had classical musicians on his variety show: pianists and violinists playing Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms. People were ashamed to admit that they were ignorant of the important monuments of the Great Tradition, never mind grammar, punctuation, and spelling. And tattoos—nobody had tattoos except the members of motorcycle gangs, and women never had them at all. The whole world seemed to have devolved into ugliness and squalor. It was as if one day she had gotten out of bed, and the hillbillies had won.

At the moment, she wasn’t getting out of bed, or even turning over. Annie-Vic wanted to turn over, because her back hurt. She couldn’t lift her arms. She couldn’t open her eyes, not on purpose. They sometimes opened on their own, she didn’t know why. They were open now, so that she could see something of what was happening in the room. Being flat on her back, she couldn’t see much. The Demarkian person was very tall, and broad, like somebody who played professional football. He was probably too old. Annie-Vic had no idea how old you had to be to play professional football. That nice black man, that Michael Jordan, had gone in and out of being retired for years, and she didn’t think he was much more than forty. But that was professional basketball, so maybe that was different.

There were things that Annie-Vic believed to be necessary. One of those things was a commitment to curing your own ignorance. There was something intrinsically wrong about being proud of what you didn’t know. So many of these people these days were proud of just that. They took it as a badge of honor that they never listened to Bach and couldn’t tell a Renoir from a Picasso. Franklin Hale, for instance, seemed to be making a career out of boasting about his own ignorance, and Alice McGuffie—