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He’s walking, he’s still walking, one step then the next then the next. Everything happens to the sluggish drumbeat of blood beneath his skin, as if the pulse itself is the only thing driving his limbs onward: one step then the next then the next then the next then the—
He stops.
The floor drifts forward without him. Two points of pressure weigh down his shoulders, as heavy as the bags of cash had been—heavier, even. It feels like he has two hands locked on either side of his neck.
He can feel the man who owns the hands standing behind him, and he can hear the echo of the word wife.
He swallows. His mouth is tacky with a sugary layer of Gatorade. Saliva burns his throat going down. His left toe throbs and his knees ache.
And, as he rolls his shoulders, he can feel those phantom hands tense with the new movement, fingers flexing around his neck, thumbs locking into the stiff muscles there. Not letting go.
At least the duffel bags are so light now he can only tell he’s holding them by the coarse rub of the canvas against his fingers. He knows his keys are somewhere inside the outer bag and he thinks about finding them and he brushes his way through the last remaining hundred dollar bills until his fingertips hit on the chill of metal—but when he blinks he finds he still hasn’t moved. He’s just standing there outside the apartment and his arms are so heavy and his shoulders are so heavy and his head is so heavy he feels as if he’s going to fall right through the ground, as if he’s going to plummet into the earth before she can even open the door.
He closes his eyes again.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, he sees a bright sun kicking off dirt and sand and a white-blue sky, sees sunlight bouncing from the windshield of an oncoming jeep or the ripple of a space blanket. He sees the burn of fluorescent bulbs in the Metropolitan Detention Center, driving into his skull as he sits in a hard plastic chair with his eyelids half closed and the sound of the money-counting machines flickering and flickering along with the dull green lights.
There’s a bang and his eyes snap open.
The door is widening to a square of light and his hands are in front of his chest, curling into balls.
A square of light—sand and sky and space blankets—and then she’s there, silhouetted against the white, and he takes—
—one step, then the next, then the next—
—through the bright doorway.
Jimmy stops. His legs, having delivered him here, to this final glowing space, give up. He folds to his knees in the entryway. He croaks, “Hey.”
Before him, Kim makes a strangled noise.
She’s blurry, glowing golden at the edges. He tries to say her name but it gets stuck. He manages only the first sharp consonant, the letter ‘K’. It catches in his throat like the click of a dry swallow—flesh separating from flesh with a snap. “K—”
She inhales like a fuse running down. “Jimmy,” she says, “Jimmy—Jimmy.” Her voice sounds like it’s coming down a long phone line, traveling through thousands and thousands of copper-lined miles. Crackling and cracking.
He laughs, strange and raspy, and squeezes his eyes shut. His eyeballs burn in the darkness. His knees are killing him. He laughs again, his throat catching again on the sound. Yeah, he thinks. Yeah, his knees are what’s killing him. He laughs and it bubbles wetly from his chest, the sound kicking and kicking like an ignition waiting to catch.
There’s a rustle before him as Kim kneels there in the entryway, too. Soft hands draw him forwards.
As soon as his chest touches hers, he’s clawing with tight fists at her back, holding her faster and faster, like he’s scrabbling for purchase over screaming dirt, his breath skipping like a stone on water, on and on until he can break the surface—
—and breathe.
He presses himself to her. Kim’s fingers are razors in his hair, crushing his head close against her shoulder. He laughs again, throatily, into the dark triangle of warmth. Her fingers tighten as he trembles, and she’s trembling, too, right there against him, finally right there against him.
From down the long crackling line, she says his name again. Jimmy.
He almost can’t hear it. Jimmy.
He presses his face deeper into the darkness. His forehead burns against the rough cotton of her shirt. His scalp burns under her tight hand. He never wants to move again. He just wants to stay here, here in this final warm place.
He inhales it all, fists dragging against her back.
The world is still doing enough moving for him, anyway. It’s swaying and drifting, slipping like sand beneath his feet, shimmering like the mirrored lakes of a distant horizon. He squeezes his eyes shut and presses himself harder into her shaking shoulder.
Kim’s hold on him tightens, too. It’s good to be close. It’s good to be close because he knows there’s something horrible trapped between their chests. Something he can feel running warmly down his white and unblemished t-shirt. He knows now that when they pull apart he’ll see red there again, see the shape of his own heart spattered on clean cotton.
It’s good to be close and keep it trapped there in the darkness.
So Jimmy breathes. In and out. Each breath shatters something, some brittle surface, fracturing like fired clay. He breathes.
After a long time, he becomes aware of the sound of running water. It shivers through him.
He pulls back. His eyelids cling desperately to his eyeballs. The apartment lights leave long tails, glowing wakes, but at least Kim is firmer before him now. She’s crisper at the edges. The shoulder of her shirt is damp.
He doesn’t know where inside him that water could have come from.
“Hey,” Kim says, her voice quiet, her eyes locked on his.
The dry skin on his lips stretches with his smile. “Hey.”
A smile flickers on her face to match his own. She tilts her head. “You’ve looked better.”
He chuckles weakly. “Yeah, I’ve—” He stops. He was going to say he’s felt better, but the truth is maybe he’s never felt better than this moment here on the floor, so he just shakes his head, and he looks at the patterned rug beneath his aching knees. Looks at his white novelty t-shirt, which is somehow still clean above his heart, just the running red of the stylized American flag. Looks at his right hand, at his fingers still locked around the handle of the canvas duffel bag. Not letting go.
Kim reaches again for his upper arms, fleeting touches that vanish as soon as they appear. Like he’s something that might burn her, or something that might break. Or both—like he’s fragile and electrified. Her fingertips dance over his shoulders and then up to his cheeks. He wonders if she dreamed of this last night, too, a dream that vanished in the morning.
Her fingertips tremble. They shiver over his face, outlining him.
He croaks, “Hey there, Helen Keller.”
“Sorry.” Kim flinches like it’s her own skin covered in sunburn. She starts to move her hands back.
“No,” he murmurs. He holds her wrists, keeping her hands there, and he closes his eyes.
Kim doesn’t move her fingers again; she just keeps them there, featherlight on his skin. He wants her to cradle his cheeks the same way she always does, or stroke her thumbs over his mouth, or curl her fingers around his ears, but she doesn’t. She just holds him in her fingertips.
Like water in her hands, he thinks.
He inhales shakily. The apartment smells of smoke. Another thing he’s dragged with him over the threshold from the desert: one hundred thousand dollars in cash and the word wife and the smell of dust burning beneath a high sun.
Somewhere, still: the steady splash of a tap.
Kim draws her hands away from him slowly, and this time he lets her. She murmurs, “I’ll be right back, okay?” She stands, her hand brushing his left shoulder as she rises.
He nods. He kneels there as she moves through to the bathroom, vanishing. He curls his fists tighter above his knees. In his right fist, he’s still holding the duffel bag. The hundred thousand.
He doesn’t think he’ll be able to move again, but he surprises himself. He rises to his feet. It’s uneven and his muscles are tearing but he draws the movement out from somewhere inside him, gathering it piece by piece and then letting it push his limbs upward until he’s standing.
It’s warm in the entryway. He holds himself there, the world slipping past him. He thinks he can’t walk a single step further; he thinks he’s discovered how to keep walking forever. On and on and on, to always bring him here, inside this door.
So he gathers a few more steps. He spends them, preciously, moving through to the living room and setting the fucking bag down on the armchair. His fingers uncurl from the handle. He imagines the sound of cash inside: the rustle of the hundred dollar bills like leaves. One hundred thousand.
Or maybe that’s just water running in the bathroom, maybe that’s just water splashing like wind through a lone tree. The sound of it flutters behind him as he spends a couple more steps heading down to the kitchen. The light here is cold and blue and his toe throbs. He turns on the faucet, and from nowhere more water runs down the drain.
It rushes like sand, hissing.
He holds a hand beneath the flow. The water twists in ribbons over his skin. It’s cold and blue, too. His skin is dark from the sun, and Marco will finally be happy—they pay me a golden treasure, yet I—
He exhales sharply. He turns his hand over, palm up, then palm down. There’s a deep cut on the second knuckle of his forefinger. Out there, the cut had torn open over and over again, and now it’s surrounded by angry pink skin. Inflamed. Other dark scabs line the edge of his hand, too, from scrabbling as fast as he can, scrabbling over loud and screaming dirt—
“Jimmy?”
Kim’s voice is soft. He thinks maybe it’s not the first time she’s said it. She’s standing in the bathroom doorway. Behind her, orange light spreads slowly, warm and liquid.
He finds a few more steps.
Their bed smells of oatmeal and lavender, and of smoke. Kim lies behind him, her face pressed between his shoulder blades. Her right arm curls over his waist, and her left stretches beneath his neck, matching the line of his pillow. Her skin is hot and he rests his cheek on her arm. Her legs are bent up behind him, warm down the back of his thighs.
She’s asleep. He heard her drift off some time ago. Her breathing had leveled out, steadying. He’d tried to follow her into that sleep, tried to match each inhale and exhale to hers, but he feels as if he can’t breathe slowly enough to do that anymore. He feels as if to breathe that calmly means choking.
In her sleep, she presses closer to him. Her right arm tenses around his chest. He pushes his legs back against hers, softly, in answer.
Awake, it had seemed as if she was afraid to touch him for too long. A hand hovering near his spine. A damp cloth held just above his skin. Boxers picked up and then put down in almost the same spot on the bathroom floor. His bangs brushed briefly aside.
Now, through his shirt, her breath tickles his skin. Loose hairs brush against the nape of his neck, like sparking ends of electrical wires as they hit sunburn. He keeps his cheek searingly on the fire of her upper arm.
She smells of oatmeal and smoke, too.
His right hand lies before him, curled loosely on the freshly-changed bed sheets, a piece of himself made unfamiliar with scabs and scratches. He lifts the hand, raising it higher and higher until it blocks the light from the window. His forearm aches to hold it there, silhouetted against the artificial light that’s glowing through the blinds. Silhouetted against the burning streetlamps in the parking lot below.
He can almost hear the lamps from here, humming.
In his hand now, the ache of a yellow glowstick. The edges of his fingers are made red with it, and his skin and bones and all the gaps between the different parts of himself are marked out with the light. He’s awake, and the yellow stick is fragile in his grasp. Glowing through the cold and the dark. Burning a ghost on his retinas. His suit jacket is thin above him, a loose sheet. The desert is loud with lizards and wind and tires wheeling over dirt roads. The glowstick is golden.
He twists his empty hand before the lighted window. His fingers are red at the edges, the yellow streetlamps trapped in the gaps. Kim’s face is warm against his spine. Her heartbeat seems to pulse through his skin.
Behind him, long fingers tighten around his neck, thumbs pressing into the muscle, locked there.
When he closes his eyes, he’s walking, he’s still walking.