EATING AT THE END-OF-THE-WORLD CAFÉ

by Dale Bailey

Dale Bailey contributed “Silence” to our May/June issue this year. His story “The Crevasse,” written with Nathan Ballingrud, has garnered several reprints and award nominations since it appeared in Lovecraft Unbound last year. Now he kicks off our anniversary issue with a science fiction noir story.

* * * *

She’d seen them once, the dead and damned, hooded blind, their hands bound at their backs. She’d seen blue lightning leap sizzling from electric prods as gray men in blue uniforms harried them stumbling down from enormous canvas-covered army trucks. She’d heard their cries, their moans, the shouts and the mocking laughter of the men in blue. She’d smelled the stench of their roasting flesh.

That had been her first night at the café. Afterward, in the ashen rain, Eleanor had gotten turned around somehow, missed the train station. When the fence loomed up before her—fourteen feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, and bound at the distant corner by the skeletal shadow of a sniper tower, the smoking red haze of the pit beyond—a fist closed around her heart. Recoiling in horror, she’d turned away and fled for miles through night-plunged streets, tears streaking her face. When a taxi hove up out of the dark, she’d flagged it down, blind to the expense; she just wanted to get away from that place, it didn’t matter how much it cost. But the heat inside the car couldn’t warm her and the aimless chatter of the cabbie provided no comfort. She resolved to give up the job, even if it meant that she and Anna both starved, but even then she knew that she would not. She could not. There were no other jobs, not for the likes of her, anyway, and so she resolved instead to forget what she had seen, to put it out of her mind forever.

Yet she dreamed of it still.

She dreamed of it now—the stench and the mocking laughter, the blue flicker of the prods in the dark. Then she was awake. A train thundered by down below, rattling the apartment. Eleanor stood and shrugged on a robe. She glanced at the alarm clock—four twenty-seven in the morning—as she stepped into the tiny bathroom, the light glary and over-bright as she lowered herself to the icy rim of the toilet seat. She showered and dressed, shivering in the cold, and then she let herself into the living room.

Anna dozed amid damp twisted sheets, bone thin, fever sweat beading her forehead. Eleven, she looked infinitely older—sixty, seventy even, a wizened old woman curled fetal around a hoard of pain. As Eleanor caressed the child’s head, she thought of the curls that had grown there not a year ago, thick and lustrous and dark. Anna: sick unto death, unable to die. Degrees of punishment, Eleanor thought, degrees of pain. And she wondered whose punishment this was, hers or Anna’s, and whose pain?

The kitchen—spotless—stank of rancid grease and an older, deeper corruption that no amount of scrubbing could eliminate, the ghosts of a thousand meals cooked into the cracked plaster, the peeling yellow-gray linoleum, and the rot-sodden wooden floor underneath. A round schoolroom clock hung above the stove: five oh-one now, Mrs. Koh due any minute. Eleanor cleared a spot among the avalanche of bills on the rickety table, set down her cup and poured boiling water over a basket of two-day-old coffee grounds. Setting it aside to steep, she brushed back the curtains to peer out.

Acheron dozed, dreaming its unquiet dreams. On and on it went, street and tenement, tenement and street, shot through with commercial avenues, decaying storefronts, and dusty offices where men in suits labored at inconceivable tasks. Craving the warmth of sunlight against her skin, Eleanor had tried once to beat the city—everyone did, sooner or later—jumping from line to line, yellow line, blue line, red line and more, until the primary colors failed and still the network of trains went on, each fresh stop spilling her up into the same squalid warren.

Eleanor lifted the coffee basket, dumped the grounds, and screwed the cap down atop her cup. She stole another glance at the clock, five-seventeen now—where was Mrs. Koh?—tilted the weak, bitter coffee to her lips, and twitched back the curtains. Beyond the age-rippled glass, Acheron stirred. To the east the sun glowed, a polluted cinder, wreathed in fog; to the west, the dawn burned. Night and day, it burned: the pit, sleepless and terrible, casting its sickly red pall over the successive rings of the city that surrounded it. And night and day now, Eleanor felt its pull. As it did with each successive generation, the city had drawn her slowly in, ever closer to its bleak and desperate heart. Even now she could feel it, its dark allure, as irresistible as the drag of a dying star.

In the living room, Anna cried out. Eleanor tensed, knuckles white around her coffee cup. And then Anna was sobbing. Eleanor let the curtain fall, turned from the window, and slipped through the beaded curtain between the rooms. Anna half-sat against the headboard, rocking, her interlaced hands clenched over her belly in agony.

Eleanor put her coffee down. She sat on the edge of the bed and rested her hand against the child’s forehead: hot, so hot, a fire burning deep inside her; just feeling it, Eleanor had to choke back the tears. “It’s okay. It’s okay, baby. Let me get your pills”—she stretched for the orange bottle on the nightstand—”Here. They’ll help.”

“They don’t help,” Anna gasped between sobs, but Eleanor had already loosened the cap. She was spilling the silvery caplets into her palm—one, two, and two more for luck; the prescribed dosage had ceased to help a long time ago—and reaching for the cup of tepid water Mrs. Koh had left the night before, when Anna screamed—

— “They don’t help” —

—and lashed out with one hand. Pills and water went flying like glistening rain. The prescription bottle and the water cup fetched up spinning against the rump-sprung sofa.

“Dammit, Anna!”

“I don’t want the pills!” Anna hissed. “I want Mrs. Koh!”

Confused emotion erupted at the base of Eleanor’s ribcage: fury and dull resentment and something else—

—face it, why don’t you?—

—something darker and more loathsome, something she didn’t want to name. It was all she could do not to slap the child.

Then the buzzer. Mrs. Koh. Eleanor rang her up. The diminutive Asian woman, her face as shrunken and wrinkled as a dry apple, bustled into the apartment, spilling umbrella and purse, a canvas sack stuffed with her knitting and her romance novel, and a spate of apologies even as Eleanor snapped, “You’re late.”

“I said I’m sorry,” Mrs. Koh told her, shrugging off her coat. “Sorry, sorry sorry.” She flapped her hand. “The trains, you know. What can I do about the trains? Hire somebody else, you don’t like it.”

“The trains!” Eleanor said, snatching up her cup of bitter coffee. “I’m late, and it’s you she wants anyway.”

* * * *

Outside, Eleanor ran for the subway, clutching her coffee at arm’s length so it wouldn’t slosh on her uniform. The doors snatched at her skirt, and the train lurched into motion as she was edging through the crush of grudging rush-hour flesh inside. She snagged a spot on the overhead rail and steadied herself, already framing the morning’s excuse—

—Anna it was always Anna—

—in her mind.

An in-bound train hurtled past the windows, light and shadow, scattering her thoughts. The car leaned into a curve. Eleanor shut her eyes, breathing air thick with the funk of coffee, cologne, stale sweat. It was okay.

Everything was going to be okay.

“Avernus Street Station,” the PA system said, and the train braked, gravity swinging through her like a pendulum.

The doors hissed back. In the rush on the platform someone jostled her, splashing coffee across her breast. “Hey—” she said, swiping at her blouse. “Why don’t you watch where y—”

A low menacing growl drove her back a step.

A man lean and sharp as a straight razor gashed the air before her, uniformed in a short double-breasted black tunic buttoned to the neck, with a pair of tiny red eyes affixed to the tips of his stiffened collars. His own eyes were glittering chips of mica, set deep over cheekbones like upturned blades. His mouth was a slit, unsmiling. She could see the coffee stain, darker on the dark breast of his uniform. And a dog, vicious and lean as its master, straining against its leash, teeth bared and slavering.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Clutching the coffee against her breast, Eleanor fished in her purse with one hand for a wad of napkins to blot the stain. “Here, let me—”

“Don’t touch me,” the man said. And then: “Sit, Cuth.”

The dog dropped to its haunches, gazing up at her out of mean, narrow eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said. “I’m—”

“Move along,” he said.

And she did, swallowing the word like a stone. She let the crowd carry her along, feeling those eyes take her measure as momentum swept her past. She glanced back from the turnstiles, but he was gone, lost amid the welter of blank morning faces. Vendors clashed back their storefront cages, and someone screamed into a cell phone—

—”it was at six, doesn’t anyone listen”—

—and the train shrieked as it pulled away, dragging up a rooster tail of candy wrappers and newsprint.

Just gone, like he’d never been there at all.

And she was late.

Yet he wasn’t gone, not really. His twin gazed down at her from enormous banners over the escalators, right arm crossed over his breast, hand curled into a fist over his heart, the words Ever Watchful inscribed in red above his close-cut hair. And then she veered away, into one of the labyrinthine corridors to the street. Her shoes unleashed a chorus of crêpe-soled accusations on the tile, late again, Eleanor, you’ll be late for your own funeral—

Charlie’s voice. Screw Charlie, she thought, and stepped out into the rain.

The sky clamped down like the lid of a pressure cooker. Even now, even in the rain, the air reeked of the pit, a sulfurous miasma of cinder and ash, charred flesh rendered down to bone, air so tainted not all the rain in the world could ever wash it clean. Clear days you could see it, an oily black haze that masked the sun, filming everything—sidewalks and windows, skin too—in clinging grime; worse, you could hear it, a sub-aural throb in your bones.

A tangle of secondary enterprises had sprung up to feed it, tributary veins wound tight into the fibrous heart of the tumor, newsstands and snack shops mostly, cigarettes and lunch, for people who worked in the pit would just as soon wash their hands of the place afterward, she supposed. Shed their uniforms and the knowledge of the things they did in them and do their real shopping elsewhere.

And there was the diner, too, of course.

The End-of-the-World Café, Tank’s idea of a joke.

It glimmered across from the station in the murk, crimson neon bloodying the rain-slick pavement. Eleanor dumped her coffee—rancid with the memory of her collision on the train—in an overflowing trash bin, and dashed across the street. Pausing, she glanced back at the dark mouth of the subway.

For a moment—a heartbeat—she thought she saw a figure standing there. Thin and black, that hateful cur at his side, straining at its leash. Both of them watching her. She brushed the water from her eyes, blinking: gone now, if they had ever been there at all.

Eleanor ducked inside, the dining room jumping with the first-shift crowd, damp heat and the rattle of crockery, the tang of frying bacon in the air. Philippe, bussing table six, winked as she rolled through. Noreen smiled from behind the counter.

“Today’s the day,” she said.

“What are you talking about, Noreen?”

“Loverboy, that’s what. Ten bucks says he makes his move during the lunch rush.”

“Right.”

Shedding her coat, Eleanor swung into the kitchen, already awhirl with the sizzle of grease and the tinny thump of the radio propped over the prep table, a wire clothes hanger jammed into the hole where the antenna used to be. Tank grinned at her from the grill, his clean-shaven skull shining, the roll of dark flesh at his collar stippled with sweat. “Darla laid down on me this morning,” he told her as she punched in, half an hour late, half an hour without tips, the clock grinding down her hours. “Said she was puke sick, if you believe that. You wanna pull a double?”

“I’ll have to make a call, see if Mrs. Koh can stay with Anna.”

“You know you gonna do it. You late, and both us know you need the hours.” He shook his head as she buzzed by in the other direction, tying on her apron. “You be late for your own funeral someday,” he said, and then the kitchen door swung closed at her back and the roar of the dining room engulfed her.

* * * *

Loverboy rolled in just after one—

“Ten bucks,” Noreen hissed, sweeping past with a tray of iced tea. “Betcha.”

—and took the last booth in Eleanor’s section, same as he always did; the dining room teemed by then, blue uniforms most of them—pitmen, the ones who did the really dirty work—their oily, sulfurous smell strong in the place, them and a handful of their supervisors, gray men clad in gray, their uniform collars emblazoned with a stylized flame, and a handful of locals, shop girls and countermen, hunched in nervous silence over their meals. Nobody talked much when the pitmen were around. They sucked the air out of a room, leaving other folks gasping for breath, stricken with the certainty that it wouldn’t do to cross them.

Loverboy, though—Loverboy was an exception.

Eleanor had noticed that much even before Noreen had saddled him with that ridiculous name. Yet she couldn’t quite figure out what it was: the way he carried himself maybe, confident but empty of swagger or maybe just that he always ate alone or maybe—though Eleanor didn’t like to admit it—that he reminded her of Charlie, rangy and raw-boned, with a beak of a nose that looked like it had wound up once or twice on the business end of someone’s fist. He had the same dark hair, unkempt and shot through with strands of gray; the same hands, thick knuckled, knowing. Occasionally—and she didn’t much care to acknowledge this either—Eleanor found herself alone in bed after Anna had drifted off to sleep, her mind fixing on those hands and how it might feel to have them touch her. Aside from the simple exchanges he needed to order, though, he’d never spoken to her—so when Noreen’s bet came in it took Eleanor by surprise.

She was making a coffee run through her section—just warm it up a little for me and how bout another one of those rolls and you got a straw, miss, the usual—when she swung by his table—

“Coffee?” she said. He pushed away his sandwich—tuna on rye—half eaten. He looked up and met her gaze, his dark eyes spoked with gray.

“Sure,” he said. And then, just as she was about to pour: “I’ve been watching you.”

She stood there frozen for a moment, carafe in hand, wondering if Noreen was right, and this was some kind of creepy come-on. And then she thought of Charlie, the way he used to step in when some guy forgot that he was paying just to look and got too friendly with his hands, the way he’d get right down in the guy’s face.

“Well you enjoy the show, hon,” she said. “I’ve been watched before.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Thing is, mister, I don’t care what you mean. I got seven tables here, I don’t have time to play whatever game it is you’re—”

“Listen. The last guy you rang up,” he said, and something shifted inside her. She was still suddenly, utterly still. She could feel a vein pulsing at the corner of her eye.

“I saw what you did.”

“I didn’t do nothing.”

“Sure you did, I’ve been watching you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the habit you got of collecting full price, but ringing up something less. You did it to me the other day, didn’t you?”

She had, too; it had seemed too easy to pass up. He was so insular, so private and apart from the rest of them, like he wasn’t but halfway in the world. She stood there another moment, and then—just to fill the silence—she leaned over and refilled his cup. Her hand shook, coffee lipping the rim to puddle on the table. She straightened, ignoring it.

“You need something else?”

“I’m not trying to scare you. I’m—look. My name’s Carl. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging you”—He glanced at her badge—”Eleanor. Really. I’m just...warning you. You wanna be careful, that’s all I’m saying.” He leaned toward her, lowering his voice. “All I’m saying is you’re ripe now. They’re going to come for you. I’d like to talk to you. I’d like to hel—”

“Thanks,” she said. “You let me know if you need anything else.”

Heart hammering, Eleanor turned back toward the counter, intending to slip the carafe back atop its burner and duck into the restroom. She needed a minute to pull herself together. Her mind had slipped into some kind of vicious feedback loop: she was ripe now, they were going to come for her? What did that mean? And if he’d seen her, then who else—

A hand shot out from a booth as she passed, closing around her elbow.

“Coffee, miss?”

She poured without looking—four cups, one two three four—emptying the carafe. Still the hand clutched her elbow. “Why don’t you look at me?” its owner said.

So she did, stumbling back a step as his features—those deep-set eyes, that lean hard face, the black tunic—impressed themselves upon her. She glanced wildly at the soot-grimed windows and there was the dog, too, Cuth, chained to a post on the sidewalk, unmoving, impervious to weather. And still the black tunic did not release her. He just reeled her in, utterly without effort, not so much as lifting his other hand from its place flat atop the table. She looked at his companions, four of them, black tunics all, watchful red eyes pinned to their collars, searching their faces each in its turn, not knowing what it was she hoped to find there but not finding it all the same, not finding anything at all, their faces flat and without affect, like stone, their eyes as empty as orbs of painted glass, until her gaze rounded the circuit and settled once again upon her captor.

He smiled.

“I saw you on the subway this morning, didn’t I? You caught my eye.”

“I’m sorry, it was an acc—”

Still clasping her elbow, he tilted his head and lifted his other hand to silence her. An inch or two, that’s all. And smiling. Still smiling.

“No need for that. Accidents happen. You caught my eye, that’s all. And just now—just now I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with my”—He pursed his lips, considering—”my...colleague—though the phrase is a little grandiose for the likes of a man in a blue uniform, don’t you think? Such a lowly...servant...of our regime, don’t you think? I could have him in the pit in a minute, if you know what I mean. On the other side of the equation: experiencing the pain rather than dispensing it.”

“That’s—” Eleanor swallowed. “I don’t know what he was talking—”

Again he silenced her with a wave. “Be that as it may. One thing you want to know—a very good thing to know—is that our organization is always looking for someone anxious to put their shoulder to the wheel. Someone willing to get their hands dirty. There are opportunities for advancement. We all end up in the pit sooner or later. It’s just a question of which side of that equation you want to be on.” And now, at last, he did release her, but still she stood there, unmoving, waiting to be dismissed, like a kid called in to see the principal.

He lifted his coffee, still steaming, and drained it in a single long swallow. He set the empty cup on the table—gently, oh so gently—and then, surveying his companions, he said: “Gentlemen.”

They stood as one.

Eleanor drew back to let them pass, but the man from the subway—she could see the coffee stain on his tunic now—wheeled back to face her, lifting his hand. She recoiled, thinking that he was going to strike her—something broken inside her almost welcomed it—and then she saw that he had magicked a sheaf of papers out of some hidden pocket. He folded them with one hand, his fingers dexterous and swift, once, twice, and then again, a neat packet the size of a business card. Leaning toward her, he tucked it down inside her breast pocket. His fingers lingered there, skating the rim of her nipple. Her cheeks flamed with impotent rage.

“We can take you away from this...place,” he said, the disgust audible in his voice; without another word he turned away. Outside a gray rain poured down—Eleanor could smell it, the gusty wet and the damp smolder of the pit beyond it, when the door swung jingling closed behind them.

The airless bubble that had formed around her burst; the clatter of the diner—the clink of silver and the muted babble of conversation and Tank bellowing Order up! from the kitchen—rushed in to fill it. Eleanor looked around, mystified that no one—

—not even Carl not even your precious loverboy—

—had noticed anything amiss: the world was as it had been always, spilling over with things to do and never time enough to do them, the clock by the serving window propelling her willy-nilly onward, onward, into a blind, imperious future where someone somewhere faraway was always wheedling her, “Excuse me, ma’am, excuse me, but is there any chance we could get some refills?”

She looked around at the grimy windows, the cracked vinyl benches, the stained and scarred formica tabletops, and there was nothing at all for her there, nothing but a phrase rolling through her thoughts like a stone: We can take you away from this place.

* * * *

Then it was late.

Philippe headed home, the street wound up its business for the night and still the rain came down, the dining room empty but for a couple of blue uniforms at a table, male and female, lovers maybe, whispering over pie and coffee. Eleanor was restocking the soda coolers when Tank stuck his head in the service window.

“Can I see you when you get a minute, Eleanor?” he said.

“You go ahead,” Noreen told her, “I got this,” so Eleanor slipped back through the kitchen to the office, a cramped cell jammed with furniture: a pair of battered filing cabinets, an oversized desk, and two chairs, Tank’s capacious leather throne and a rickety monster of molded yellow plastic that looked like he might have fished it out of a dumpster. Eleanor stood, shivering—Tank kept the window unit running full blast year round, as if to compensate for the constant blistering assault of the kitchen—and when she saw what he had on his desk, the temperature seemed to plummet another ten degrees.

He’d pulled the till and arranged the cash in neat stacks on the blotter in front of him. “How you doin, Eleanor,” he said, flipping methodically through a sheaf of yellow receipts, a pair of wire rim reading glasses perched at the tip of his nose. The fingers of his other hand danced over the keys of the adding machine. Eleanor stared at it as she tried to work up the spit to speak, watching in doomed fascination as the extruding tongue of white paper stroked out line after damning line of faded purple figures.

“Fine—” she said. She said, “I’m fine.”

“That’s good. I’m glad to hear that. And what about that little girl a yours, what’s her name, Hannah—”

“Anna.” Eleanor swallowed. “Her name’s Anna. She’s okay.”

“Is she? I know she’s been sick, Noreen says—”

“She’s as well as can be expected.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble. Seems like all we get is trouble sometimes.” Tank thumbed the last receipt face down on the desk, picked up a pencil, made a note. He rocked back in his chair.

“You want to sit down, Eleanor.”

“I’m fine.”

Tank shrugged—have it the way you want it—laid his glasses on the desk, and rubbed his eyes, thumb and forefinger, sighing like he didn’t want to do what it was he had to do. Then he looked up at her. Looked her square in the face.

“You stealing from me, Eleanor?”

“Someone say I was? Darla maybe? You know she can’t stand me, Tank.”

“Wasn’t Darla and you know it. I mean, don’t I got eyes?”

She said nothing.

“Thing is, I do most of the cookin myself, specially on days when Frank doesn’t come in. I know what goes through that serving window, I know what it costs, and I got a head for figures. I’m not stupid. How you think I got to where I am today.” Eleanor, looking around the ugly windowless cell of an office, had to suppress a bark of hysterical laughter. To think of such a place as a destination, rather than—rather than what? The last station on a long doomed journey to...where exactly?

Once again, those words pinballed around inside her head:

We can take you away from this place.

Tank said, “You tipped out yet?”

She swallowed. “Yeah.”

He leaned forward and drew the money toward him with his forearm, clearing a place on the desk. “Why don’t you empty your apron for me, Eleanor.”

“Tank—”

“Tank nothing. You ain’t stealing, you got nothin to worry about.”

Eleanor stared at him, hating him suddenly with a white hot resentment—

—I want Mrs. Koh—

—that burned inside her like the sun. She stepped to the edge of the desk, and upended her apron. Coins scattered across the desk—Eleanor watched a dime roll spinning to rest on the battered oak veneer—a handful of pens and paper-wrapped straws, her order booklet, a much-creased photo of Anna, and a damning clump of folded bills. The stack of bills collapsed in an untidy heap. In the silence that followed, Tank whistled.

“You done all right for yourself today, didn’t you?”

He reached out, pushed most of the mess back at Eleanor—he didn’t even glance at the photo—and picked up the cash, tapping it sidewise against the desk, like a poker dealer edging up a deck of cards. He leaned back, licked the ball of his thumb, and began to count. Once, twice, a third time. Then set the stack of money down on the desk, where it lay between them like a bomb.

“Getch your stuff off my desk, Eleanor,” he said, not ungently. But when she reached out for the money, he laid his big hand over it.

“How long’s this been goin on? How much you stuck me for? Three or four grand? More?”

“I didn’t—I don’t—”

“You tellin me you tipped out at two hundred fourteen dollars, when Noreen—yeah, I asked Noreen—tells me she’s lucky she clears a hundred dollars a night. You tellin me that for real? Don’t you bullshit a bullshitter, girl. What I asked you was, how much you stuck me for?”

Eleanor opened her mouth to speak, but—nothing. No words came.

“Let’s call it five grand, what do you say?”

“You gonna call the cops, Tank?” she asked, thinking of the pit, those smoldering depths spiraling down into the bowels of the earth.

“I don’t want to call anybody, Eleanor. I know about that girl a yours, I don’t want nothing bad to happen to her. But I can’t just let you steal from me, can I?”

Eleanor didn’t respond. She just stood there, feeling like the earth had slipped out from underneath her feet, like any moment now she might slide right off the daylit surface of the planet and into some black abyss where everything was weightless and still.

It was Charlie all over again, kicking back at his favorite table with the new spotlight dancer, Lena, his brand-new best-girlfriend-ever, the love of his life, lithe and high breasted and barely twenty if she was even that, guzzling his lies and his liquor both and cutting out his share of her stage money every night, blind to Eleanor, blind to the future incarnate standing right there in front of her, the clock already glutting itself on the beauty that wasn’t hers to keep: Charlie saying, you’re a sweet girl, Elle (and had anyone else ever called her that?), but this ain’t no job for a woman of your age, you know what I’m saying. Since the baby you know. Don’t get me wrong now, you still look damn good, but—

“Eleanor.”

She looked up. “What do you want, Tank?”

He ran his tongue across his lips.

“A man has his needs,” he said.

“What are you tryin to say?”

“I’m not tryin to say anything. What I’m sayin is you’re a fine-looking woman. We could work this thing out between us, the two of us. I don’t have to begrudge you the money, that’s what I’m saying.”

It was like he’d been sitting there this whole time, listening in somehow on the run of her thoughts. It was like something had been caged up inside her, some small fierce animal, furious and impotent, gnashing at the bars of her heart. Her voice broke when she spoke. She hated the sound of it, the words hanging helpless and weak in that icy air.

“You’ve been good to me, Tank. Don’t do this to me now.”

“Me? I haven’t done anything, Eleanor. You done this yourself.”

Then: “Look, we’re all of us damned in this place, Eleanor. We every one of us gonna wind up in the pit, one way or the other. Why not have a little fun along the way?”

“It wouldn’t be fun for me, Tank. Not this way. Can’t you see that?”

Tank said nothing.

Eleanor bit her lip, swiped in fury at her eyes, hating the tears that trembled there unspilled.

“Please.”

Tank heaved his bulk up behind the desk. He leaned over splayed hands, thick fingers mashing aside the neat stacks of bills.

“Don’t do me like this. What I’m saying, it ain’t nothing new to you, Eleanor. I know what you used to be. A leopard don’t change its spots.”

He straightened, picking up the stack of cash. Then he leaned over to tuck it down inside the pocket of her apron.

“You worked hard to steal this today, so you take it home with you, you hear. You take it home and you think things through. Think about that little girl a yours. You think about her real hard. We’ll talk this over again in a day or two.”

He lowered himself into his seat, put his glasses on, turned back to his paperwork. Eleanor just stood there, silent before him, fists dangling at her sides, that animal inside her heart hammering so hard at its cage that for a moment she thought she might just keel over. Without looking up at her—it was like she wasn’t there at all—Tank reached back to adjust the air conditioner, kicking the window unit into higher gear. Chill bumps erupted on her forearms, tiny hairs shivering themselves erect.

Then Tank did look up, peering over the tops of his spectacles at her like he was surprised to see her still standing there, he thought she must have left hours ago.

“You can go now,” he said.

The tears came the instant the bathroom door swung closed behind her, an onslaught that drove her into the last stall. Eleanor thumbed the lock and put her back to the wall, drinking in the soothing chill of the cinderblock, like water drawn up from some untapped well in cool depths of earth, to slake a thirst she hadn’t even known she had. She couldn’t say how long she stood like that—five minutes, she supposed, maybe ten, but it felt like forever, it felt like some central line had burst inside her and the tears wouldn’t ever stop. Except they did finally, wearing down in stages: sobs, then sniffles, then nothing but the hollow aftermath, her breathing labored and her makeup shot, her nose plugged with snot.

She leaned over to tear off a length of toilet tissue. The sheaf of paper—forgotten—crinkled in her breast pocket. Eleanor blew her nose, folded the tissue, blew it again. Dumping the soggy mass in the toilet, she took a breath. Settled herself. Dug out that neat rectangle in her pocket, memory stinging her, the humiliation of it, the way he’d touched her. As she unfolded it, a little flume of paper, it must have been folded up inside, sprayed out like it had been spring-loaded and fluttered to the floor at her feet: the familiar yellow rectangle of the ticket and something else. Three bills.

Eleanor knelt to retrieve them. Counted them out, one two three, and then again. Three one-hundred dollar bills. Enough to cover the tab ten times over. She dropped to the filthy tile, her legs abruptly boneless, folded the cash, slipped it into the pocket of her apron. She leaned her head against the tile and closed her eyes, trying to think things through.

When she opened them, she turned her attention to the other paper, the one he’d wrapped everything up in: a heavy stock, textured and creamy, folded over three times like a letter and gummed closed, Application for Employment printed neatly on the outside.

Eleanor laughed.

She shook her head in disbelief. She didn’t bother unsealing it, just shoved it down into the apron’s pocket with everything else. Her finger brushed the scalloped edge of the photograph, her personal talisman, a snapshot of Anna two years gone, the last one she’d ever taken before their life had turned itself inside out, not so much a life at all anymore but an endless campaign, a battle waged against photographs and mirrors and panes of night-drowned glass, a war to protect her little girl from understanding what it was that was happening to her, and maybe to protect herself as well.

She pulled the snapshot out, the lacquered surface creased with a thousand touches. Held it there before her with trembling fingers, Tank’s words—

—think about that little girl a yours—

—unleashing a torrent of memory. Anna hunched over the toilet, her narrow shoulders heaving. Anna in agony, her face limned red by the digital clock on her night stand, whittling down the hours until she could have another dose of morphine, twisting with skeletal fingers her threadbare sheets, her drug-dulled eyes unseeing. She thought about the hair, clumped anew in the teeth of the comb with every fresh pass, the wastebasket in the bathroom already brimming over with the stuff, all that beautiful beautiful hair. She thought about Anna’s labored breathing in the deepest slough of night, about the ammonia stench of the treatment center and the avalanche of unpaid bills claiming inch by inch the kitchen table and how long it had been since she’d had even a little bit of anything for herself, a drink or an hour to herself or the touch of a man’s hands and when would it end, God God, when would it ever end?

And something else: Anna’s face twisted ugly with fury, smashing the pills out of her hand, the glittering shower of tepid water.

I don’t want the pills! I want Mrs. Koh!

Eleanor’s fingers, unbidden, crumpled the snapshot. Then she was crying again—or trying to, anyway—as she struggled to smooth out the fresh creases in the photo, but it was too late. Too late. Somewhere along the way the tears had dried up, some microscopic internal plumber had gotten around to patching up that burst line at last. She felt nothing. She felt nothing at all. And so, still holding the snapshot in her hand, Eleanor climbed wearily to her feet and unlocked the stall and headed back out to work.

As Eleanor turned the corner into the corridor, still staring at the photo, a voice broke her reverie—

“Careful, miss—”

Startled, she looked up too late. She had a confused impression of a shadow looming before her, backlit in the fluorescent glare of the dining room. A heartbeat later, they collided. She stumbled back, overbalanced, and for a single panicky moment she thought she was going down. Then hands reached out to steady her. Strong hands, work roughened, with corkscrews of dark hair at the knuckles.

“You okay?”

She looked up.

Gray eyes, knotted nose: her friend the voyeur. Loverboy.

Carl.

He released her, smoothing down her sleeves where his grip had rumpled them and she pushed herself back, away from him, shoulders to the wall. He knelt before her, and when he stood, she saw that he was holding the photo of Anna. He studied it for a moment, trying to smooth out the creases himself, and then he extended it to her.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

Fingers trembling, she took the picture and tucked it away in her apron.

“I’m off. Noreen’ll take care of you.”

“Actually, I came back here hoping I’d run into you. In a manner of speaking.”

She let the joke pass unremarked. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve got to be worn out. Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

He coaxed her into the dining room, empty now, and as she slid into a booth, split red vinyl rasping against the backs of her thighs, Eleanor realized that she was tired, and not just tired either: weary, a bone-deep weariness bigger than the exhaustion of fourteen hours on her feet, so big it stretched all the way back past Anna and beyond, to Charlie and the club, almost seven years now. Sighing, Loverboy—Carl, she tried to think of him as Carl—slid into the seat across from her. She turned away. Beyond the transparent mask of her face in the window, steady gray rain slanted down.

Noreen flounced up to the table, winking at Eleanor. “Tell you what,” she said to Eleanor after he ordered—coffee, nothing more, “I’ll go ahead and clock you out. We’re about done anyway.”

Then she was gone, leaving them to the rain and the hum of the soda coolers back of the counter, the steady beat of the clock by the serving window, chewing down the hours. Funny how you never noticed that when the place was hopping; now each bite the second hand took sounded like the detonation of a tiny bomb. Then Noreen reappeared with the coffee and time vanished once again, swallowed up in the ritual bustle of sugar and cream, the clatter of spoons. He picked up his coffee and blew across the top of it.

“You afraid of me?” he said. And when she didn’t answer: “People are, you know. This...uniform”—he pinched the blue fabric at one wrist—”all you have to do is walk in the door when you’re wearing it and you see it. You see it in every face.”

She stared at her coffee.

“This afternoon at lunch. I saw what happened. You were afraid then.”

“I’m not afraid anymore.”

“Sometimes it’s better to be afraid.”

“I have other things to be afraid of.”

He nodded. Sipped his coffee.

“That picture. That your little girl?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s cute.”

“She’s sick.”

“That one of the things you’re afraid of?”

She didn’t answer.

He held her gaze for a moment; then he looked down, his thick hands restless, turning his cup, turning it and turning it.

Eleanor pushed her coffee away.

“Look—Carl—I don’t have time to play games. I’m tired. I’ve got a little girl I need to get home to. Whatever it is you think you saw me do, it doesn’t matter. That’s over now. So thanks for the coffee. And have a great life, okay. You probably won’t see me around here anymore.”

Putting her hands flat on the table, Eleanor shoved herself to her feet. She’d almost reached the pass-through in the counter when he spoke again, so soft she wasn’t sure what he’d said. But something in his tone—something grievous, something lost—stopped her cold. She drew a breath. Turned. Stared back at him staring down into the muddy depths of his coffee, like he could see something down in there that no one else could see.

“What did you say?”

“This is how they do it to you.” He laughed. “It’s so easy. That’s the thing about it: it’s so goddamn easy. They wait until you don’t have anywhere else to turn, and then they take the best thing you have inside you and turn it into a razor and they cut your throat with it.”

She took a step back toward the table. “What do you mean?”

He looked up. “Don’t fill out that application.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help herself.

She folded herself into the seat across from him.

She said, “You think I can steal enough? You think enough money comes through this place in a week to pay for the help she’s gonna need? I could steal every dime of it and it wouldn’t be enough.”

She leaned forward, lowering her voice, laughter—strangled, humorless laughter—bubbling like madness in her guts. “Fuck you,” she said. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, sitting there in that suit, holier than thou, like you know something about me I don’t know myself. Well fuck you.”

She pushed herself back from the table once again, but before she could stand, his hand shot out, shackling her wrist. His coffee—what was left it—went over, the cup rolling on the stained formica like a spun coin. He tightened his grip, bones grinding in her arm. His hands were cold, she thought as he dragged her close to him. In Acheron, everyone’s hands were cold.

“You don’t know what I have to do in this suit. You have no idea.”

But she did. She did know, she could feel it in the way he held her wrist, she could see it in the crusted black crescents under his fingernails, in the tension of his jaw and the cold light shining in his gray-spoked eyes. She knew something else, too, something she’d been pining to know in the secret recesses of her heart: what it would be like for him to touch her; she’d been touched like that before, not a man on Earth who didn’t have that down inside him.

“Let me go,” she whispered.

But he drew her closer, so close she could smell the taint of coffee on his breath. And worse: the reek of the pit. It had started to seep into his pores, a stench of blood and iron and soot that no soap on earth could ever lave away.

“It’s not enough,” he said. “No amount of money could ever be enough. And that’s not the worst of it. The worst thing is, you do it long enough—and you can’t ever stop, you can’t just walk away—you do it long enough and little by little you start to enjoy it, little by little it starts to eat you up, it just...devours whatever it was you thought you were, whatever it was you thought you wanted to be.”

And then he did release her.

She sat back, panting.

Cradling her wrist against her breast.

“Look, I’ve got money,” he said. He shook his head, fixed her with his gaze. “You’ll have plenty of money, they said, and they were right about that. I’ve got all the money I could ever want. So let me help you.”

Eleanor stood.

She stared down at him. “Why? What do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” he said.

He reached out to her, and though she flinched, she didn’t pull away. She just stood there, her breath suspended in her lungs as he traced the livid ghosts of his fingers on her wrist, his touch so light she could barely feel it, yet it seemed to fill up the silence that ached between each contraction of her heart, it seemed to chime inside her like a bell.

He had that in him, too.

“I just want to do one right thing before I disappear,” he said. “I just want to help.”

“I don’t need any help. I’m doing all right by myself.”

Eleanor turned away.

She didn’t look back as she slammed past the counter and into the kitchen, Tank behind closed doors in the office, the radio tuned to something jazzy and light.

“You and loverboy make out okay?” Noreen said from the prep table.

“Shut up, Noreen.”

“Had his eyes on you for weeks now, that one. I told you so.”

Eleanor draped her apron over the rim of the laundry bin and started emptying the pockets, angling her back to Noreen as she shoved the cash into her coat. “It’s not like that.”

“What’s it like then, honey? He’s just a man, isn’t he? I don’t care what color suit he wears. Or what he does in it. Long as he brings home enough money I can put my feet up and catch up on daytime television.”

“Well I do.” Eleanor glanced over her shoulder at the other woman. “I care, okay.”

Noreen shrugged. “All I’m sayin is what a man does ain’t necessarily what that man is.”

“That’s all any of us ever are,” Eleanor said, “the things we do. We don’t have to agree about that.”

“No, I guess we don’t.”

Noreen turned her back—so there—and started wiping down the grill.

Eleanor finished cleaning out the apron—a handful of straws, the application, the photo. She dumped the straws in a bin and crushed the application into a ball. The hell with it. She started to chuck it in the trash, all of it, the application and the ruined photo, too; instead, she found herself staring down at the snapshot—at Anna’s gap-toothed smile, her tongue probing the hole, a perfect paradox, frozen that way forever, as if the world wasn’t full of clocks, every last one of them mocking the endless era of her misery. She’d tried to stay awake that night—she’d wanted to see the tooth fairy, she’d been so excited—but when Eleanor looked in at eight, she’d already drifted off. And then the words came back to Eleanor, the twisted look upon her small face—

I don’t want the pills! I want Mrs. Koh!

Eleanor shrugged on her coat, shoving the wad of paper deep into one pocket. “Thanks, Noreen. Night.”

“You think about what I’m saying, Eleanor.”

“I will,” she said, and maybe she already was, for when she stepped back through the kitchen door and saw what was waiting for her on the other side—just emptiness, the sterile glare of fluorescent lights hung low over battered countertops, just nothing at all—she felt something give way inside her, some final parapet she hadn’t even known was there.

He’d cleaned up after himself, or tried to anyway, sopping up the spilled coffee with napkins from the tabletop dispenser and shoving them inside his righted cup. And something else: a fifty dollar bill.

Eleanor picked it up, crumpled it, flung it to the table.

Noreen could have it.

Headlights dazzled her, igniting in their thousands the rain droplets that jeweled the window, counterfeit every one of them, and a million million more falling by the minute. Looking up, Eleanor caught a flash of blonde hair behind the wheel, a woman’s smile; then she saw him circle around the car to climb in beside her, a blue uniform like all the other ones, another loverboy.

The car pulled away from the curb, and Eleanor stepped out into the rain.

* * * *

It slammed down around her by the bucket, soaking her through in the space of a breath, pummeling her scalp and shoulders and drumming down on the pavement and the parked cars like stones, unleashing all the thunders of heaven in wave after pealing wave until the sky split open in a smoky crimson gash and the earth itself trembled underfoot.

Eleanor paused, uncertain how she had come to be here: the chain link fence that loomed stark and black above her, slashing the turbid sky to bloody rags; the coiled thickets of razor wire and the towers and the dogs and the cold-eyed men with guns; the broken streets she walked upon; the husks of buildings; the pustulant wound inside the fence, a blight upon the land, or a tumor metastasizing to consume at last the strength of the city that had so long sustained it.

Not thunder.

Oh no, not thunder.

It was worse: the boom and din of vast, infernal engines in the midnight hollows of the planet, and in the intervals between, other sounds more terrible still: the creak of the whip and the rattle of the chain and everywhere around her bleeding up into the sodden air the pleas of the damned, the fruitless and eternal cries for succor of human souls hoisted on the cradle, rack stretched and flayed and broken on the wheel, time and time again, forever.

The word rang inside her mind—

—forever—

—forever without cease.

Eleanor reeled away—away from the blasted soil and the terrible coppery stench that hung like a pall in the humid air. Away from the futile moans that coiled up to shackle her and drag her down. Away from the searing conflagration that smoldered in the spiraled hollows of the pit, in the ruined chambers and recesses where sweat-slick men in blue coveralls, human beings not so much unlike herself, bent to the tasks assigned them and plied the tools of their terrible trade.

What kind of God could permit such an obscenity? What kind of God?

Eleanor reeled away.

Back to the street and the mouth of the subway somewhere awaiting, back to her dank apartment, to a wicker basket that had once overflowed with the hair of a child, to a bottle of pills that had long since ceased to have any effect at all, to the flat unfeeling face of Mrs. Koh.

What kind of God?

They spun her on her heels, those images; they marched her down to the spiked gates and the adjacent guardhouse, a squat bunker of yellow block that might have been mined out of the pit itself in some dim, forgotten era, and the whole time she could feel it, the tense circuit of that fierce little creature that had been caged up inside her, turning and turning as it paced off the measure of its prison.

She touched the door.

It swung open to admit her.

Eleanor stepped inside.

The door clapped into its frame at her back, and that quickly the noise faded. That quickly it was silent, utter and pristine.

And cool. Eleanor hadn’t realized how hot it had been out there, but she felt it now, a trickle of sweat down the channel of her spine.

She looked around.

An empty room, a fluorescent light flickering overhead. A reception window. A round schoolroom clock paring down the hours.

Eleanor rapped on the glass.

An old man, bloated and enormous, his thinning hair greased back over the dome of his liver-spotted skull, hove into view. He slid back the glass and peered myopically out at her.

“Help you?”

“I’m here about the job.”

“I see.” He sucked at his teeth, considering. “You got your application.”

“Yeah, it’s”—She dug in her pockets, looked up—”Here it is.”

Eleanor placed it on the counter, ironing it flat with the palm of her hand before she unsealed it, and by that time the old man had conjured a pen from somewhere. He slid it over to her. She picked it up and looked down at the form, smoothing it out again with her other hand. And then she looked up, puzzled.

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“It ain’t the most complicated form in the world,” the old man said.

“No it isn’t, is it?”

“That’s it, though. That’s all you need.”

She looked down at the page again: Application for Employment at the top, and below that, maybe a third of the way down the sheet, a single black line, and under that a word:

Name

“Okay, then,” she said.

She took a breath and then—no regrets, just do it—Eleanor wrote her name.

She handed the sheet across to the man. He eyed it in silence for a moment—like he’d expected more from her—and then he looked up at her.

He crumpled the application into a ball—

Eleanor gasped.

—and tossed it under the counter. Straightening up, he pushed a fresh copy of the form across to her.

“Maybe you misunderstood, ma’am. We don’t need your name. We’ve had your name for a long time now. What we need from you is somebody else’s name.”

“I don’t—” she started to say, but the final word—

—understand—

—died on her lips, for she did, she did understand, she understood all too well, and the day swept back over her in a tide of gray misery, Tank and Carl and the awful man on the subway—the way he’d seemed to look right down inside of her, knowing things about her she didn’t know herself—and Anna most of all.

Anna in her sickbed, waiting with Mrs. Koh, her sponge bath yet to come and then the sheets because you had to be careful of the bedsores and the avalanche of bills upon the table, which one to pay first, and why even bother?

Because there would never be enough.

No matter what she did, there would never be enough.

She licked her lips.

The old man held her gaze, phlegm rattling in his chest.

Eleanor picked up the pen and the clock overhead notched another second. She could hear it now, the steady electric whirr it made as it shaved down the hours.

Eleanor wrote down a name.