He went through the doorway behind the counter, took in the odd proportions of a commercial kitchen, the outsize pots and pans. Steel counters more like something from a hospital.
He moved on to the sitting room. In his exhaustion he noticed bizarre things: fringes on the bottom of upholstery, fringes at the ends of a rug.
Then he saw Suki. She was sitting on the sofa where they'd first held each other, at the soft edge of an arc of lamplight. Seeing her did not dispel the warping film but she moved somehow to Aaron's side of it.
"You okay?" she asked. She looked closely at him. His shoes were coated with dirt and his clothing was specked with sap and spider webs.
His lips moved but he couldn't speak. He stared at her. It was too dim to discern the color of her eyes, but their blue was absolutely present to him. Her shoulders were covered but he saw them.
She got up from the settee, didn't hug him with her arms, just stood against him, warm. She took him by the hand and led him to the room that had become their room. "He'll be okay," she said.
Aaron nodded, stared at her. Fear had jumbled time for them. As in some gaudy fantasy of traveling through bent and viscous space, the clock had sometimes raced like an exerted heart, and other times had stalled. The long wait to be lovers shrank down to a pendant and excruciating moment long ago. Their instant as a couple could be called forever, since the future might be snuffed out any second.
She led him to the bed that had become their bed. She began undoing the buttons on his shirt. "I really think he'll be okay," she said again.
Aaron nodded, and he started to cry. Time was all mixed up; Suki was already burned deep into him, suddenly abiding as the world around them grew jittery and abrupt and blurred. Lovers for one day, he cried in her arms as easily as if they'd been together, helpmates, many years.
Chapter 47
Next morning, very early, too early for most people to be having conversations, Piney said, "Fred, ya know what I sometimes wonder about?"
The first yellow sun was starting to dry the nighttime dampness of the mangrove leaves. In the clearing by the hot dog, the flat cracked stones were beginning to get warm; lethargic lizards crawled up on them to bask. Fred, his eyes half-closed, was drinking coffee from a dented tin cup. He didn't answer.
Piney looked down at his rubbed-up hands, said, "Time."
"Oh Christ," said Fred. He lit a cigarette, squinted against the phosphorous that smarted in his eyes, and wondered if he'd go to work that day, if he'd bother with the seven-thirty shape-up. He glanced over at his shovel. It was leaning against the service window of the hot dog, next to Piney's PARKING sign. Tools of the trade.
"Think about it," Pineapple went on.
"Why?" said Fred, and picked tobacco off his tongue.
"Say there was no such thing as time," Piney said, undaunted in the sunshine that grew whiter every moment "Does that mean nothing would happen or everything would happen all at once?"
Fred sucked his cigarette. "Who gives a rat's ass?"
"You in a bad mood, Fred?"
"'Bout like usual."
"I'm goin' downtown then," Piney said. "Take my sign, make a little money."
"'Bout time," Fred opined.
"Ya see?" said Piney.
"See what?"
"Time. Ya can't help but think about it."
Fred shook his head, looked off at an osprey circling over Cow Key Channel.
"At work, where I sit, there on the curb," said Piney, "I can lean back and look around the banyan tree, see Suki's balcony... Last couple days I haven't seen her though."
Fred gave a crude guffaw. "Course you haven't, Piney. Betcha anything she's shacked up with the rich guy, the owner, by now."
As blandly as he could, Piney said, "Think so?"
"Waya the world, friend," said Fred, and sucked deeply on his cigarette. "Rich guy gets the broad."
"Don't call her that," said Piney, and he looked away.
Fred chased his eyes to needle him. "You got a crush on her," he said. "Ain't this what I been sayin' all along?" He took a last drag on his smoke then doused it in a shrinking puddle, savoring the sizzle as the small fire was extinguished.
Donald Egan—his staff on indefinite leave, his publication schedule suspended due to vandalism—had worked through the night to write and lay out and print and fold a four-page special edition.
Not long after dawn, he bundled the papers with heavy plastic strapping, and horsed them into the trunk and the backseat of his car. The ink was still fresh; it smelled of acetone, you could almost see it seeping deeper into the newsprint.
Egan sucked a stogie as he drove the quiet morning streets of a town that stayed up late and slept late too. His pulse pounded with unaccustomed exertion as he carried the papers into empty grocery stores, guest houses that smelled achingly of coffee, laundromats with one lone dryer spinning.