I shook my head.
“Someone die?” he guessed.
“Dead, yes.”
“Here we are. Western Avenue. I go north?”
“South.” Toward Roy’s apartment way out at Fifty-fourth. What then? Once inside, mightn’t I smell the good doctor’s cologne hanging in the hall like an unseen curtain? And his workmen, down a dark corridor, carrying things, waiting to lug me away like a piece of wrecked furniture?
I shivered and rode, wondering if and when I would ever grow up. I listened to my insides and heard:
The sound of breaking glass.
My parents had died a long time back and their deaths seemed easy.
But Roy? I could never have imagined a downpour of fright like this, so much grief you could drown in it.
Now I feared to go back to the studio. Th
e crazed architecture of all those countries nailed together, now falling to crush me. I imagined every southern plantation, each Illinois attic crammed with maniac relatives and smashed mirrors, every closet hung with tenterhooked friends.
The midnight gift, the toy box with the papier-mâché flesh and death-maddened face, lay on the taxicab floor.
Rustle-tap-whisper.
A thunderclap shook my chest.
“No, driver!” I said. “Turn here. To the ocean. To the sea.”
When Crumley opened his front door, he examined my face and wandered off to the telephone.
“Make that five days’ sick leave,” he said.
He came back with a full tumbler of vodka and found me sitting in the garden taking deep breaths of good salt air, trying to see the stars, but there was too much fog moving in over the land. He looked at the box on my lap, took my hand, placed the vodka in it and guided it to my mouth.
“Drink that,” he said, quietly, “then we’ll put you to bed. Talk in the morning. What’s that?”
“Hide it,” I said. “If someone knew it was here, we might both disappear.”
“But what is it?”
“Death, I guess.”
Crumley took the cardboard box. It stirred and rustled and whispered.
Crumley lifted the lid off the carton and peered down in. Some strange papier-mâché thing stared back up at him.
Crumley said, “So that’s the former head of Maximus Studios, is it?”
“Yes,” I said.
Crumley studied the face for another moment and nodded quietly. “That’s death, all right.”
He shut the lid. The weight inside the box shifted and whispered something like “sleep” in its rustling.
No! I thought, don’t make me!
27