Читать книгу Panopticon - David Bajo - Страница 13

They wanted to stay in the room for what was left of the night. The grip light was off, and the room was dark save for the glow of the motel’s sign filtering through the edges of the curtain. They lay beneath the covers, their hands pressed to where the impression of the woman had been.

“You’re worried she’ll come back and find us?” Rita asked.

He fingered the sheet, pulled it up in little ridges between them.

“If she returned, what would she find?” Rita spoke softly, nosing the edge of the sheet, her legs moving beneath the covers, making a pleasant, sleepy sound. Her knee brushed his hip. “She would step into a motel room and find two people in a bed, sleeping, maybe screwing. So? And then of course we’d find her. And she could tell us what’s up with the lightbulbs and the black tape.”

“And the mirrors and the TV,” Klinsman added.

“So we’re good.” She squeezed his hand. “Like this.”

Rita slept deeply. A damp, soft breathing whispered from her lips, with only her chin and mouth discernible beneath the dark spools of her hair. Her shoulder rose and fell in a rhythmic shrug. Klinsman held his palm just above the rise of her shoulder, measuring the exactness of her breathing, the depth and thickness of it.

Klinsman never slept well, and his insomnia would rule this situation, armed with enough thoughts and images to deny sleep for the mere fragment of night remaining before dawn. Rita’s heat bathed his face and neck, the iron-steam smell of her. He imagined her warmth and scent passing through a tear they had just rent in their friendship. He imagined the imprint of the vanished woman writhing gently beneath them, like involuntary movements in tired muscles, fingering his legs and shoulders.

He caught bits of half sleep, momentary dips into the same dream. The dream was a pale worry, an outline of the woman against a deep white, undulating in the color and contour of kelp. Each time he surfaced from this dream, the translucent amber of the kelp became the whiskey-colored clasp in Rita’s hair. He would reach to his lips, imagining the clasp still there in the corner of his mouth.

They had known each other, worked together, grown to like each other over the course of seven years. So this would be easy for them, waking together, finishing off these seven days together. Seven days is right for us. They would have nothing to decide, could ride feelings like bubbles rising to the surface, heading breath-held toward open sky.

Del Zamora appeared in the last version of the dream, only his voice, really. But Klinsman could sense in the dream that Zamora had removed his mask, freed his lips. Remember when you could get it in Baja for fifty cents? It looked green in the sunlight. You know this woman beneath you.

This version startled Klinsman into permanent wakefulness, the heart-deep kind of quickening that fires all nerve endings. He slid up against the headboard as though pulling himself from a cold ocean dive. He heard the lonely clacks of the day’s first trolley.

He wakened Rita, warmed his hand with his breath before gently tugging her shoulder, smoothing her hair from her face. Her body set itself beneath the sheets. She made a small questioning sound. Her hand moved downward over his stomach, found him.

“Good,” she said.

They made love sleepily beneath the sheets, reaching to feel what they might find, cupping and grasping to tell what part of them it might be. He lay fully on her, she whispering an order for him to do that, to not brace his arms, to relax onto her. Her muscles, all along her, carried him. He barely came, a tug of a drawstring, the last of him. But she cried out, threw him upward with her body.

They dressed in the darkness of the room. They heard the shudders and blats of the first trucks on 1-5, heading north, the only direction here at the very bottom of this longest of freeways. Klinsman and Rita gathered their stuff, their captures of room 9, and walked into the dawn light of the parking lot. She swung her camera and bag over her shoulder, gathered her hair with both hands, the clasp held in her lips, ready. She took furtive strides next to Klinsman, some a little sideways, keeping him alert.

They found their bearings in the middle of the empty lot, a photographer and her journalist striding toward the day. They didn’t look back toward room 9, never thought to wait for the figure of Marta Ruiz to appear.