The crowd roared “Happy New Year!” and the band began playing “Auld Lang Syne.” I closed my eyes and thought of the L-Pills from our survival kits back in Kandy—white and oval, in a thin glass vial encased in brown rubber. If need be, we were to bite down, crushing the glass and releasing the poison. When the poison is released, the heartbeat stops within minutes; death is fast and supposedly painless. It never crossed my mind that I might be captured so far from the battlefield.
* * *
—
He left me in the closet. I didn’t think about getting up. I didn’t think about crawling out. I didn’t think about getting help. I didn’t want to think at all. I wanted to sleep.
He returned with my coat and helped me to my feet. Anderson and his wife were leaving as we exited the coatroom—Henry first, me staggering a few steps behind him. But Anderson didn’t approach, didn’t call out “Happy New Year,” didn’t say anything. He looked at my smeared makeup, my torn dress, and he didn’t say a word.
Henry was right. I was nothing to them. Even Anderson couldn’t look at me. I wasn’t their colleague, their peer. I certainly wasn’t their friend. They’d all used me. The whole time, they’d been using me. Frank, Anderson, Henry, all of them. And I was certain they’d continue to use me until the honey dried up.
Henry put me in a car, kissed my cheek like a gentleman, and told the driver to drive carefully.
The driver escorted me to my door, and I walked up the steps to my apartment clinging to the railing. I could still feel him. I could still smell him.
The apartment was still cold. The half bottle of Dom Pérignon still sat on my glass coffee table next to the empty foil swan. The pair of heels I’d tried on with my gown but hadn’t worn still sat at the foot of my floor-length mirror. The Christmas card Irina had mailed me still sat alone on my mantel.
I removed my shoes. I removed my makeup. I removed my gown. I stood in my tub and let the scalding water run over my body. Then I got into bed and slept—into the day, and into the next night.
When I awoke, I went into the bathroom and knelt on the cold floor. Counting six tiles from the wall, I pried my fingernail under the one loose tile. My red nail broke. I bit the rest off and spat it onto the floor. Removing the tile, I picked up the business card: SARA’S DRY CLEANERS, 2010 P ST. NW, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Turning the card over, I thought of Irina. I wanted to remember everything. I wanted to catalog, then file away my memories of her so I could pull from them in the future, protect them from the influence of others, protect them from the cruel distortion of time, protect them from the person I knew I’d have to become.
Once I made the call, there would be no turning back. A double is a bit of a misnomer: one person doesn’t become two. Rather, one loses a part of herself in order to exist in two worlds, never fully existing in either.
I remembered seeing Irina at Ralph’s: how she sat on the edge of the booth, her legs half in the aisle, when she turned her head in my direction for the first time. I remembered the pink bubble gum she bought at the gas station in Leesburg on our way out to a vineyard that turned out to be closed. How we went sledding the night of the first snow at Fort Reno, the District’s highest point. How I balked when I met her in Tenleytown and she held up two pea-soup-colored trays she’d taken from the Agency’s cafeteria. I pointed at my heels and told her I couldn’t possibly. How I relented when she asked if I’d try just once. How the wind felt in my face as we rushed down the icy hill.
The time we ran into a Safeway ten minutes before it closed, in search of a birthday cake. It wasn’t my birthday, or hers, but Irina insisted we get it, even asking the baker, who’d already undone his apron for the night, if he could please write my name on it, with an exclamation point, in blue icing.
When we watched airplanes land at National from Gravelly Point. How we huddled together under a blanket when a flash of light appeared in the distance. How the sound of the planes’ engines grew louder and louder until they appeared overhead. How they looked so close we felt we could reach up and touch their bellies.
I even wanted to remember that morning in my apartment after we’d made love—when everything unraveled like a loose string on a sweater. After she left, I went to my closet, where I’d hidden a gift I’d bought her: an antique print of the Eiffel Tower. After seeing Funny Face, she’d said that we must go to Paris together someday. The tiny tower was the size of my palm, its intricate lines drawn by dipping the tip of a needle in ink. I’d had it framed and wrapped it in butcher paper, tied with red string. I had planned on giving it to her for Christmas, but it remained in the back of my closet.
I held the business card in my hand. I memorized the address, lit a match, and watched it go up in flames.
CHAPTER 16
The Applicant
THE CARRIER
The Bishop’s Garden was empty, the side gate unlocked. The bare trees formed black shadows against the illuminated National Cathedral. The cherub-covered fountain was turned off for winter, except for a steady drip to keep the pipes from freezing, the garden’s famed rosebushes just thorny shrubs.
Three footlights along the path hugging the stone wall were burned out—as they said they’d be—but with the full moon and the lit up cathedral looming over the garden, I had no trouble navigating along the path and through the stone arch to the wooden bench under the tallest pine.
I brushed off the thin layer of snow and dead pine needles and took a seat. A sudden movement behind me caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand at attention. I looked around: nothing. Had I been followed? I looked up: Two yellow lanterns hung high in the towering pine. An owl steadied herself on a branch that seemed much too small to hold her. She swiveled her head, surveying the garden for an unlucky mouse or chipmunk. She was a regal bird, there on her throne, poised to pass judgment and carry out the sentence herself. She paid me, a commoner, no mind as she patiently waited for her dinner to appear. To operate fully under instinct was a gift given to the animals; how much simpler life would be if humans did the same. The branch creaked as the owl shifted her weight. With a flap of her wings, she coasted up and over the garden’s wall. It wasn’t until she was gone that I noticed I’d been holding my breath.
I pushed my red glove back and looked at my watch: seven fifty-six. Chaucer was due in four minutes. If he was late, I was to leave immediately and take the number ten bus to Dupont Circle. If he was on time, I was to take a small package from him, two rolls of microfilm containing Doctor Zhivago in its native Russian, then board the number twenty bus and deliver the film to a safe house on Albemarle Street.
It started snowing, and I watched the flakes dance in the spotlights pointing at the cathedral. My thighs began to itch, as they did whenever I was cold, and I tightened the belt of the long camel-hair coat Sally had insisted on buying me when she noticed the cigarette burn on my old winter jacket—a small gift from a man who’d bumped into me on the bus. I took off my red leather gloves and blew hot air into my balled-up fists. When I released my fingers, my engagement ring slipped off and clinked to the cobblestones. It was two sizes too big, and I hadn’t gotten around to having it properly fitted. But my, it was beautiful. Teddy’s grandmother had given it to him when he was a boy, telling him that someday the woman he’d love for the rest of his life would wear it. He remembered telling her he’d never marry—he’d be far too busy fighting Nazis, like Captain America. His grandmother patted him on his head. “Just you wait,” she’d told him.