“Then we can’t stay here. That Rabbit said we couldn’t.”
“He didn’t.”
“Then there’s nothing,” she said, with a satisfied finality and sat down on her favorite chair in the living room. C sat down too, and they stayed there for two or three days, wandering about the house, while Cell became increasingly aware that every time the furnace clicked on and the warm air swooned into their room, they had no money to pay for it. She turned the thermostat down, and made C read in the same light that niggardly lit her own book. He won’t stay here long, she thought. He’ll go out and find work. He’ll get tired of sitting around. It isn’t healthy. He’ll start hating; everyone does. Everyone hates.
“Don’t you hate things?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“What most?”
“Bologna sandwiches.”
“They’re almost gone.”
“Good.”
“No. Most,” she insisted.
“Iowa City water.”
“None of that here.”
“I can remember it.”
“I mean not things, but conditions.”
“I don’t know. How about you?”
“Worrying.”
“IS THAT YOUR REAL NAME, CELL?”
“Sure, if yours is real.”
“It is. But it was originally Cecil.”
“Oh.”
“What was yours?”
“A long one.”
“What?”
“Cassandra, I think.”
“Better that both of those names are gone.”
“Yes.”
“We got no more sandwiches.”
“Good.”
“C . . .” Then she turned away and went upstairs.
She is like a dark, ancient animal, he thought.
Upstairs, she was looking out at the car, trying to remember everything she had ever noticed about what it took to drive one. I am being tricked, she thought. These days’ll bring something from the worry. Something’s not good here. I have been tricked.
“I HATE PEOPLE WHO BUY ANTIQUES BECAUSE THEY COME INTO PLACES where other people live,” he blurted out, “real people who use things the way they were meant to be used . . . they come in and give them money for the things that they use, and take them back home and put varnish on them, and refurbish their houses with them.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Cell.
“Not if you think of things that you can use as dead. If you think that they’re alive—when they’re being used—then people who buy antiques are killers—killers who pay money to kill.”
“I never thought of them that way,” said Cell, and added, with her eyes cocked to the side, “and I never wanted to.”
That night they made love until they both hurt. Cell was glad when it finally ended and C rolled over, facing the wall. The house seemed frighteningly strange to her, moreso in the dark when she could only sense it, and though she knew C wasn’t asleep, she couldn’t speak to him. There was a barrier as surely as something she could touch. From where it arose, him or her, was no concern—only its realness. In the basement she heard rats chewing on wood, making noises like tiny hammers. She put her hand on her right breast and quickly took it away, it seemed so small and close to the bone when she was on her back. Any curiosity she ever had of her body always ended in the same kind of rejection. He’ll never penetrate into me, she thought. He’ll never really know me . . . or want to. The wind outside rattled the eave pipes. There was a fence around the orphanage, she remembered, that sounded a little like that, but not nearly so close. C’s leg jerked of its own accord. He seems so old, she thought. We both do. Tomorrow, if something doesn’t happen, I’ll leave: I knew this wouldn’t be any good. And once again she felt as though she wanted to cry—forever wanting to join the simple ways of normal living, forever being shut outside.
“Cell.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just wondered if you were asleep.”
. . . But C doesn’t want that, she thought. Any common sense that he’d had before had been rooted out and so entirely jumbled by the University that although he appeared to be normal—physically normal—he was virtually nothing more than a mad vegetable.
Cell had once been told by her mother, though she could not remember when and often wondered if maybe she hadn’t dreamed it (even down to what her mother looked and sounded like because it was one of the few vivid memories she was able to retain through the years with the juvenile home in between), that if she lay still in bed before going to sleep, and did not think about her troubles, they would rise to the surface and float away and be gone by morning. This memory comforted her and she fell off to sleep, confident that in the morning she would know what to do. Periodically the furnace turned on with a vooroom sound and ran an almost imperceptible tremulation up through the spine of the house.
But C woke up first. He slipped quietly out of bed and went up to the third floor and looked out across the yard. The moonlight was being filtered first through a layer of clouds and then through a low-hanging fog bank, leaving an eerie, almost blue light to trickle into the town. Through this C saw the upstairs light in Rabbit Wood’s house turn on. He’s getting up now in the dark to get ready for work, thought C . . . now when it’s still night he’s getting ready to go to work, and, God save him, he enjoys it. It was cold on the third floor and C rubbed his tired hands together and felt once, automatically, in his empty pajama pocket for cigarettes. And then as though some magic was working through Cell’s sleep into his mind, into his thinking, and into inspiration, he understood that it was these Rabbit Woods that not only ruled the world, but should, and that same evil that had been in his father—that distaste for life and the normal activities in it—was in him. He shuddered from the cold and leaned with one hand against the window frame.
I’ve come here, he thought, to be on the third floor looking out into the yard as though without moving. . . . I have been a part of the whole way things are, like a child complaining of beets or his mother’s milk. From now on what I have will be mine and what I do will be me. My father is dead. No one cares what I do any more, except her. I’m free. I’ll have to watch myself and not make any mistakes. If I fall, it will be because I have stumbled, not because of loose stones on the ledge.
I KNEW IT, THOUGHT CELL, LYING IN THE EMPTY BED . . . HE’D LEAVE me here and take the car and go away. I knew it . . . all along I knew he’d do it and I came anyhow. She stared at the floor over the edge of the bed, making ringlets in the dust with her finger. I knew . . . and I knew he’d do it at night—crawl away in the middle of the night after the food was gone, with the car, without me, like a rat . . . leaving me for the police to come and find and . . .
Then she heard him coming downstairs, and did not wonder if it was someone else because of his way of walking down sideways, making always a loud thud followed by a smaller clump in rapid succession.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good,” she said and stretched into a seated position and then out of the bed, holding her open arms out to him, who walked into them and carried her back. Like magic they were fitted together and Cell screamed softly, “Love me, C. Love me.” And C thought, I will surprise you.
“I’M GOING TO START A JUNK YARD,” HE SAID. “I’VE DECIDED THAT WE’VE got to have a junk yard that in years will