"Yes, Niki, you do," he says, and she wonders how he can hear anything at all over the racket the car"s making. "You do, and you will. We"re not going to argue about this."
She sighs and holds her aching hand up, rests it against the cool, streaky gla.s.s of the pa.s.senger"s side window. And wonders again if maybe this whole thing isn"t just a trick to get her to the hospital, a trick to keep her in San Francisco. Maybe Marvin didn"t really call the airport at all. Maybe he called Dr. Dalby, instead.
Maybe they"re already waiting for her at the hospital.
You just get her here, and we"ll take it from there.
Thorazine and restraining straps, needles and pills and perhaps it wasn"t even Marvin. Maybe Daria set the whole thing in motion before she left the house.
"We"re going to do this," Marvin says resolutely. "But we"re going to do it right. I"m not sure you understand how serious that cut could be if it gets infected. h.e.l.l, for all I know it"s already infected."
"It doesn"t feel infected. It just hurts some, that"s all."
"Trust me," Marvin says, squinting at the street through the Volkswagen"s dirty windshield. "We"ll be in and out and on our way in no time."
He"s lying, Danny Boudreaux whispers from the backseat, his ghost"s voice like venom and sugar. You know he"s lying, Niki. I can see it in your eyes.
She glances reluctantly at the side-view mirror, and there"s nothing in the backseat but their luggage, half hidden in the darkness behind her.
"I never said that I didn"t trust you, Marvin," and so he smiles a nervous smile for her, then wrestles the stick into third.
"It was just a figure of speech, you know that. Don"t start getting paranoid on me, Niki."
"I"ve always trusted you. You and Daria both. The two
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of you, you"re the only people I have left in the world now, aren"t you?"
There"s a red light up ahead, and Marvin shifts down again, grimacing at the noises coming from the transmis-sion. "Easy, girl," he says, and Niki isn"t sure if he"s talking to the car or to her.
Listen to me, Danny whispers urgently from the backseat. Listen to me while there"s still time. You know d.a.m.n well what"s going to happen when he gets you to the hospital. You know they"ll lock you up again.
"You don"t have to whisper," she says, glancing back to the mirror and the pile of luggage. "He can"t hear you."
You don"t know what he can hear, Niki.
"Who are you talking to?" Marvin asks, flipping a lever for the right turn signal, and the car comes to a stop at the intersection of Fell and Divisadero. A teenage girl on inline skates and a homeless man in a baggy pink sweatshirt and cowboy hat cross the street in front of them.
"Myself," Niki tells Marvin. "I"m talking to myself," but she can see he doesn"t believe her, the look in his eyes, his hesitant frown.
"If you"re hearing voices again, you need to say so. You know keeping them a secret only makes things worse."
Lying n.i.g.g.e.r f.a.g, Danny Boudreaux sneers, but she"s pretty sure it"s not Danny"s voice anymore; some other voice back there, words ground against words like metal grinding metal, like the Volkswagen"s worn-out transmis-sion. You know better, Niki. I f.u.c.king know you know better than to trust this f.a.ggot son of a b.i.t.c.h.
"I don"t hear anything, " she insists, biting at her lower lip and turning away from the mirror, staring up at the traffic light, instead. "I don"t hear anything at all."
"You know you can tell me the truth," Marvin says, and he steals a nervous peek at the rearview mirror, so maybe he can hear the voices.
This time they won"t stop with the drugs, Niki. This time you"ll get electroshock. This time-this time they"ll plug you in and fill your head so full of lightning you"ll never think 80 of anything else ever again. Just white fire and crackling sparks trapped inside your skull with no way out until it burns you to a cinder.
"Is that really what you think?" she replies, replying to the crankshaft, gear-rust voice in the backseat, not Marvin, but he nods his head, anyway.
I can smell the smoke already.
"Yeah, Niki. That"s really what I think. I think you know that you can trust me."
The stoplight like a crimson eye blazing in the chilly November night, a single dragon"s eye peering into this world from someplace else, peering in and finding her trapped inside the ugly little car with Marvin and the ghosts in the backseat. She"s cornered, rat in a cage, rabbit with no place left to run, and in another second or two, it"ll tear its way through, shredding the s.p.a.ce between worlds in its steel and ivory claws.
He has more eyes than you could ever count. If you had three eternities, you"d never count them all.
"We"re going to the airport," Niki says quietly, shutting her eyes so she doesn"t have to see the dragon seeing her.
"You"re taking me to the doctor, and then we"re going to the airport."
"Yes. That"s exactly what we"re doing."
"You wouldn"t lie to me, Marvin? Not ever? Not even if you thought it was for my own good?"
"No, I wouldn"t lie to you, Niki."
They"ve prepared a special place for you, the voice from the backseat purls. You should know that. Here and there. A place where no one will ever find you, not even Spyder.
"I need to believe that, Marvin. I f.u.c.king want to believe that," but she"s reaching for the door, her hand around the handle before her eyes are even open, and he sees her and grabs her shoulder.
"What are you doing, Niki. I told you-"
"I can"t take any chances. You don"t know what"s at stake. You don"t know-"
"I can"t know what you won"t tell me." And now he
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sounds frightened, more frightened than angry. The light changes, crimson eye blinking itself to emerald green, and he looks at it and then quickly back to Niki.
"Please, Niki. I need you to let go of the door handle.
The light"s changed."
"Yeah, but it"s not looking for you, Marvin, is it? It"s not f.u.c.king looking for you," and it scares her how small and far away her voice sounds now, like she"s watching a movie or television and the volume"s been turned almost all the way down; her heart so much louder than her voice, her heart grown as wide and endless as the black California night spread out overhead.
Claws to tear through time and s.p.a.ce and anything in between, anything in its way. Claws to tear the sky, to tear your heart apart- "You can"t even hear it."
"I"m going to pull over now, okay? And I need you to be still, just long enough for me to pull over, and then we"ll get out of the car if that"s what you need to do."
Liar, the voice growls softly, unbelieving, and now it only sounds like Danny Boudreaux again. Only sounds like the strangled voice of a dead boy, not the vulcanized rubber tongues of d.a.m.ned and scorched machineries. He"s just trying to save himself. He"s made deals, and if you get away, if he lets you get away- Behind the Volkswagen, someone begins honking their horn, and Niki looks up at the green light again.
"I f.u.c.king swear to G.o.d, Niki, I am not lying to you,"
and Marvin cuts the wheel, nowhere to park but the cross-walk, and for a moment, the still point between breathing in and breathing out, she can"t look away from the light, from the eye. Red means stop, green means go, go Niki, go now, while there"s still somewhere left to run.
"I"m sorry, Marvin," she says and opens the door, jerking free of his grip and almost tumbling out onto the pavement, catching herself at the last and stepping quickly away from the car.
"Niki, don"t do this! Please, listen to me," but she"s al-82 ready turned her back on him and his musty car and all the other cars trapped there behind the sputtering Volkswagen. She"s not running yet, because none of this feels real enough to let herself start running, not just yet, but she is walking very fast, the soles of her boots loud against the sidewalk.
You better run, babe, Danny says, and she realizes that he"s following her. You better run fast, because you can bet he"s going to be coming after you any minute now.
Niki looks back over her shoulder; Marvin"s pulling over to the curb, and she starts walking faster. Her head"s grown so full that she can"t think-the drivers still blowing their horns because Marvin can"t get out of their way quickly enough, Danny and all the other voices, the ruby fire and green ice of the dragon"s eye. Everything getting in through her ears and her eyes, flooding her, and there"s no way she can shut it all out, no inch of silence left anywhere in her deafened soul.
Where you going, Niki? Danny asks her. Where you headed in such a G.o.dd.a.m.ned hurry?
"You leave me alone," she spits back, wishing there were flesh and blood left of him, something solid for her to dig her nails and teeth into, something that could bleed.
"You"re dead. You"re f.u.c.king dead because you were too afraid to live anymore. You"re dead, so leave me the h.e.l.l alone and be f.u.c.king dead!"
That morning you left me, that was the end of the world for me, Nicolan. That morning I trusted you, and you left me alone. I knew you"d never ever be coming back for me.
"Where am I going? Where the h.e.l.l am I supposed to go now?" she asks, not asking him, not asking anyone, just repeating questions over and over and over because she needs the answers more than she"s ever needed anything in her life.
That"s not true, Niki. Not more than you needed me, not more than you needed Spyder- "I said leave me the f.u.c.k alone! Get out of my head!"
and she spins around, swinging at empty air, at the insubstantial, unresisting night draped so thick about her.
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You"ll find the way. She believes in you, so I know that you"ll find the way.
Her own scalding tears to blind her, to blur the softening edges of brick walls and blacktop rivers, Divisadero Street become a smeared tableau, oil on canvas, and she thinks if she can only stand still long enough Marvin will find her and take her back home again.
You"ll follow the road that Orc took, and Esau. You"ll follow the road beneath the lake, the Serpent"s Road, because He"s watching all the other ways.
And this voice she"ll know when she"s forgotten every other sound in the universe, when even the stars have burned themselves away to nothing and the earth has finally ceased to spin. This voice seared into her mind so deeply, so raw, its touch can never heal, can never even scar; Niki screams and falls, and there"s nothing but the sidewalk concrete there to catch her.
They have set themselves against us, Niki, and they will stop at nothing, not until we"re all dead. Not until we are all held forever within the borders of fire and slag and- "Spyder?" Niki sobs, one hand held up high, held out, and someone"s pulling her off the ground, pulling her back up into the world, into the light, into herself. "Oh G.o.d, Spyder, please help me make them understand."
There are still two of you to stand against them. Bring him to me, Niki, by the Serpent"s Road, the road beneath the lake that burns.
Bring him down to me.
"Spyder! Wait-" but the voice has gone, and the night snaps suddenly back upon itself like a broken rubber band, something wound once too often. She"s standing on the sidewalk, and Marvin"s holding her so tightly she can hardly breathe. He"s crying, too, and she hangs on to him, hanging on for whatever life she has left that might be worth saving.
"Don"t you dare do that to me again," he says and hugs her tighter. "Don"t you dare."
And she doesn"t tell him that she won"t, and she doesn"t 84 tell him that she will, and in a few minutes he leads her back down Divisadero to the Volkswagen waiting at the corner.
Niki was born two years after the fall of Saigon, twenty-three years after Eisenhower had agreed to fund and train South Vietnamese soldiers to fight the communists. Her parents were among the lucky few, the handful of South Vietnamese evacuated along with American citizens. John and Nancy Ky had become Americans and immigrated to New Orleans, traded in tradition and their Vietnamese names, the horrors of their lives in Tay Ninh and Saigon for citizenship and a small tobacco shop on Magazine Street.
They had named their only child Nicolan Jeane, and would have named the son her father had wished for Nicolas. But Niki"s birth left her mother bedridden for more than a month, and the doctors warned that another pregnancy would very likely kill her.
Neither of Niki"s parents ever made a habit of talking about their lives before New Orleans, and they kept themselves apart from the city"s tight-knit Vietnamese community. They seemed always to struggle to answer any questions Niki asked about their lives before America in as few words as possible, as if bad memories and bad days had ears and could be summoned like demons. Occasionally, there were letters, exotic stamps and picture postcards from halfway around the world, messages from faceless relatives written in the mysterious alphabet that she never learned to read. Her mother kept these in some secret place, or maybe she simply threw them away. Niki treasured her rare glimpses of this correspondence, would sometimes hold an envelope to her nose and lips, hoping for some whiff or faint taste of a world that must have been so much more marvelous than their boxy white and avocado green house in the Metairie suburbs.
And when she was ten years old, just a few days past her tenth birthday, there was a terrible Gulf storm. The ghost of a hurricane that had died at sea, slinging its spirit land-
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ward, and she awoke in the night or in the morning before dawn, and her mother was sitting at the foot of her bed.
Niki lay very still, listening to the rain battering the roof, the wind dragging itself across and through everything. The room smelled like the menthol cigarettes her mother had smoked for as long as Niki could remember, and she watched the glowing orange tip of the Salem, a silent marker for her mother"s dim silhouette.
"Do you hear that, Niki?" her mother asked. "The sky is falling."
Niki listened, hearing nothing but the storm and a garbage can rattling about noisily somewhere behind the house.
"No, mother. It"s just a storm. It"s only rain and wind."
"Yes," her mother replied. "Yes. Of course, Niki."
The cigarette glowed more intensely in the darkness, but she didn"t hear her mother exhale over the roar and wail of the storm.
"When I was a girl," her mother said, "when I was only a little older than you, Niki, I saw, with my own eyes, the sky fall down to earth. I saw the stars fall down and burn the world. I saw children-"
And then lightning flashed so bright and violent, and her mother seemed to wither in the electric-white glare, hardly alive in her flannel housecoat and the lines on her face drawn deep as wounds. Off towards the river, the thunder rumbled contentedly to itself, and Niki realized how tightly her mother was squeezing her leg through the covers.
"It"s okay, Mother," Niki whispered, trying to sound like she believed what she was saying, but for the first time she could remember, she was frightened of the night and one of its wild delta storms.