Stay by Nicola Griffith Page B

by one. I wondered when Bob got off shift, whether or not he had friends to go for a drink with, or whether he crept home to a microwaved dinner and reruns and infomercials on TV. I stood, began the slow swelling inhalation of an aikido warm-up. Maybe he had a cat who would curl up on his stomach and knead his chest, digging its claws through the cheap cotton and into his skin, reminding him that love hurts. I moved in the blending exercise, soften, step, exhale, turn, slide. There wasn’t room for a kata, or a tai chi form.
    There was a mirror above the dresser. I touched my reflection with a fingertip. My reflection felt nothing. That’s what I wanted from the world, to feel nothing. To feel nothing and not be involved, for everything to stay comfortably outside myself and not get in. How did people survive all this knowledge of suffering in the world? How did they carry it around, day after day, and not go mad? And what would I wear tomorrow?
    The food came. I didn’t let the man push the table into the room, refused to look at him; I didn’t want to know what he looked like or how he felt or anything about him. I didn’t care, I didn’t want to care. It wasn’t until I shut the door again that I realized I’d answered it in my underwear.
    I dreamt of the woman I had found on patrol nine years ago drowned in her tub, eyes turning to glue, the water so still I knew her heart hadn’t beaten in days. Once again I felt the slow, inevitable realization that the air in my lungs was still and stale, that I was dead, too. I woke at three in the morning and thought of how Julia had shaken me fiercely from the same dream six months ago and put her hand on my beating heart and my hand on hers, and told me I was alive, alive.
    I had breakfast in my room, then called information. They had no Tammy Foster listed, no Geordie Karp. No Tammy Karp or Geordie Foster. Not in Greenwich Village or anywhere else in Manhattan. It would have been convenient to call ahead and make sure she was there.
    At nine in the morning, the concession shops were deserted but none of them sold underwear. Guests might forget toothbrushes, they might forget a pen, their vitamins, a comb, but they didn’t usually forget underwear. I had remembered the perfect change of clothes, down to jewelry, brought credit card and money and socks and shoes, but had not thought of a coat or underpants. We only recognize we have an autopilot when it goes horribly wrong.
    Even in dirty clothes it was a pleasant walk to Saks in the kind of sunlight New York specializes in at the beginning of autumn: too warm in the sun, too cold in the shade without a coat. There was never quite enough space on the sidewalk to stride, and after I bought underwear and toiletries I walked back along Fifth all the way to East Fifty-seventh, just so that I could swing my arms. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Thomas’s Church, the Fifth Avenue Church: a similar concentration of churches per square mile as the poor Baptist South, though probably not as well attended. Central Park beckoned briefly, but I resolutely turned left and kept walking. Move, don’t think.
    After I’d changed I didn’t pause to talk to the concierge or to get a map but walked back out again, to the subway at Fifth and Fifty-third, and down into the stink of diesel fume and stale urine to catch the F train. If I could get to Washington Square Park, all I had to do was walk west to find Seventh Avenue. On the platform I tried to shut down my senses, close out the noise, the carbon-slippery air, the three middle-aged businessmen in expensive coats talking in tight voices about some deal that had gone south. A redheaded boy on crutches who couldn’t have been more than fifteen stood next to the men, whose discussion had now escalated to the kind of argument people have when they’re looking for someone else to blame. The boy stood too close. Any of those men could lash out in frustration and the boy would tumble off the