The Insides by Jeremy P. Bushnell Page A

too, so she knows this answer will satisfy and intrigue him.
    Which it does. His eyes light up immediately.
    “It may not be magic,” Ollie confesses. “I don’t know. But I kinda think maybe.”
    “Show me,” he says.
    “Not
my
knife,” Ollie says. “It belongs to some guy at work.” And she tells him about Guychardson, about the racing.
    “You say you’ve worked with him for a year?” Victor asks, when she’s through.
    “A year, yeah.”
    “You’ve been in the room with this knife for a
year
and you only mention it to me now?”
    “It’s only twice a week,” Ollie protests. “Fridays and Saturdays.”
    “That’s
one hundred times
you and this knife have been together. One hundred opportunities to hold it.”
    “To
caress
it,” she says, mimicking him.
    “To
learn something
about it!” he says. “You missed all one hundred?”
    “Not everyone has the same hard-on for magic stuff that you have, you know.”
    “Ut!” Victor says, holding up a hand to halt her. She makes a face, slaps her fist into his palm.
    The hookup appears in the hall again, a towel wrapped around his waist. Ollie notices, somewhat grimly, that it’s her towel.
    Victor eyes the hookup, kisses the air near her ear noisily, and springs out of her bed.
    “This conversation,” he says from the doorway, pointing at her with two fingers, as though they were the barrel of a gun. “It isn’t over.”
    “Go away,” she says. “Both of you.”

4
INDULGENCES
    Maja sips water from a paper cup and watches Unger use his hammy fingers to punch a number into an obsolete-looking phone.
    “Hello,” he booms into the chunky black thing. He holds it away from his head and eyes it balefully, as though it is in the process of bewitching him. “Hello. Hello, Martin?”
    The tinny squawk of a voice on the other end of the line.
    “Martin,” Unger says. “Maja Freinander is here. Yes, the Finder. She’s expecting to
begin
soon. Are you meeting us?”
    Maja eyes the disintegrating file folders on the desk, lets some of their histories drift into her. Visions of libraries begin to unfold.
    “No, Martin, no, we’re at the
office
,” Unger says. “We were—you were supposed to be meeting us here, at the
office
.”
    A pause. Maja suspects that this piece of information is in no way news to Martin. She lets another library accumulate in her mind.
    “Yes, Martin, I under
stand
, it’s just”—Unger sighs here—“no matter, nothing to be done. Where are you
now
?”
    Unger pins the phone between his ear and his shoulder and rummages in a desk drawer with both hands until he emerges with a chewed-up ballpoint pen and a memo pad.
    “And,” he says, “is there a place around
there
that we could meet?”
    Unger takes his car, and Maja takes hers. She’s partially following Unger and partially following her emerging sense of the way. The drive takes half an hour and it leads them through pretty tree-lined roads which occasionally give way to road crossings marked by the presence of commerce. Generic stuff, mostly—drug stores, gas stations—but there are also appearances of a more occasional type of shop that Maja interprets as local oddities. A place called the Doll Barn, for instance. It’s actually in a barn.
    They end up at a place called Zingers Dairy, an eatery with exterior signage that’s done up in a loud scheme of black-and-yellow zigzags.
    She follows Unger in. Everyone inside is eating ice cream. Gabbling teens and fattening families. And, among them, one adult-aged male sitting alone. His head is shaved, his chin is dark with two days’ worth of growth, his olive T-shirt is grubby, his eyes are hidden by cheap-looking sunglasses. He is bent over a huge banana split sundae, which he’s working his way through with clear method and intention, as though eating it is a joyless task but one that he intends to complete efficiently.
    “Martin,” Unger exclaims. Martin removes his sunglasses and looks up at his father.