“I need to take a leak,” she says and sets her cigarette down on the rim of an overflowing Disneyland souvenir ashtray balanced precariously on the edge of the small table, next to the clock radio.
“Well, I’m not stopping you,” says the Signalman, but he stands up and scoots the chair aside, like that’s exactly what he was doing. Then he offers her a hand, and she takes it. The Signalman pulls Ellison Nicodemo up off the dirty mattress, and she has to steady herself against the wall for a moment, waiting for the spins to pass, before she can stand on her own, much less make the long trek all the way to the bathroom.
“When’s the last time you got around to eating anything?” the Signalman asks, glancing about at the discarded, grease-stained wrappers from taco trucks and Korean barbeque joints. “And I mean something that actually counts as food, mind you, something that wasn’t measured out in milligrams and pressed into a pill?”
She ignores the question, because he doesn’t want to hear the answer.
“That’s what I thought,” the Signalman mutters, only half to himself.
She makes it the rest of the way to the toilet all on her own, so there’s that to be proud of, and then she closes the door behind her, turns the latch, pulls down her underwear and sits, and she pisses for what seems like a very long time. Like piss gremlins came while she was sleeping and filled her bladder with the contents of MacArthur Park Lake, like she hasn’t pissed in weeks. Her nose drips and she wipes it on the back of her hand, then wipes her crotch with the last few squares of toilet paper from the last roll in the apartment. Sweat falls from her forehead to spatter the pink-and-white mosaic of hexagonal ceramic tiles at her feet. She gets up, flushes, and tries to make it out past the cracked mirror above the sink without catching a glimpse of her own wasted reflection, but she fails.
“You fall in?” the Signalman calls impatiently from the other side of the bathroom door. “You might be interested to know I ain’t got all morning.”
“How about you just give me a goddamn minute,” she mutters, not quite loudly enough that he can hear, and she stands there staring back at herself, at the strung out, diminished ghost of the woman she was that last long-ago time she and the Signalman talked. She turns thirty-one in April, but could easily pass for the roughest sort of forty-five. Her skin looks more like wax than flesh. She’s lost so much weight it’s not hard to count her ribs or see the outline of her sternum between her small breasts, and there are sunken hollows beneath her cheekbones. Her eyes look bruised, as if someone’s been beating her on a regular basis, and her teeth feel loose in her mouth. Her shoulder-length, dishwater-blonde hair is a snarled mess that would make a fine home for a family of homeless mice. There are track marks on both forearms and between her toes and fingers.
And then there are the other scars, the ones that have not followed from bad habits, neglect, and self-inflected wounds. Ragged lines of proud flesh, still vivid pink even after more than half a decade, emerging from beneath her hairline and running down either side of her neck, continuing along her shoulders and arms, her ribcage, her waist and hips and thighs, the outsides of her legs, all the way south to her ankles. They look sort of like someone tried to carve a tiny railroad into her skin. There’s another set on her hands, beginning at the tips of her little fingers and ending at her wrists. Seven years ago, the agency offered her the best cosmetic surgeons that money could buy. Seven years ago, she said no and walked away. Now she’d make a fine addition to any passing sideshow, a freak to point at and pity and be grateful that’s not you up there. But the scars are hers, and she owns them, same as she owns the pain and her addiction. Masking them with surgery would only add another lie to the fold.
Ellison Nicodemo turns on the tap and splashes her face with a few handfuls of lukewarm water that stink of rust and chlorine. She imagines the Signalman scowling and telling her, “You look just about near enough to dead, it’s a holy wonder they haven’t already come and carried you away to the boneyard.”
Maybe I am, and they have, and this is Hell.
She screws the top off an almost empty plastic bottle of Listerine Cool Mint and swishes and spits into the stained porcelain bowl, then gets her hands wet again and runs her fingers through her hair in a half-hearted attempt to persuade it to behave.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she whispers to that other her in the mirror. “What do you care what he thinks?” When her reflection doesn’t see fit to answer either question, she spits again, and this time there’s a little blood in her saliva. She washes it down the drain, unlocks the door, and goes back out to face the Signalman. He’s returned to his chair and is staring at the dead TV again.
“This thing with you and the television,” she says, “what’s that all about? Have I missed the end of the world again or what?” She goes to the kitchenette and opens the lid of the blue-and-white forty-eight-quart Coleman chest sitting on the floor by the useless refrigerator. Most of yesterday’s ice has melted, but the beer inside is still cold enough. She takes out a can of National Bohemian and holds it against her forehead and cheeks for a moment.
“You want a beer?” she asks.
“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear, how you need to shake a leg.”
“You made yourself clear,” says Ellison.
“You know, I can remember when you stayed sober as a judge until noon.”
“Do you want a beer or not?”
And then the Signalman relents, says what the hell, and she takes out a second can and closes the lid of the cooler and goes back to her nest of sheets on the mattress. He takes his can and cracks it open, and she opens hers, and for a few moments they sit quietly drinking the cold Natty Boh, not talking. She finds the Public Enemy T-shirt she wore the night before and pulls it on, hiding her pale breasts and her ribsy abdomen and the strange train-track scars. The shirt is ragged black cotton, much loved, worn so many years now that it’s worn thin and worn entirely through in some spots. Printed on the front is the silhouette of what might or might not be a cop in the crosshairs of a gun.
Finally, it’s Ellison Nicodemo who breaks the silence.
“For a minute there,” she says, “I thought maybe you were going to meetings again,” and the Signalman shakes his head.
“Well, I ain’t, so you can stop worrying your pretty head over that. And I’m not going to lecture you, either, so you can stop fretting about that, as well.”
“What are you doing here?” she asks for the third time.
“Right up front,” he says, “I want you to know that it wasn’t my decision. Truth is, I advised against it. When they brought me your file, when I found out about”—and he motions at her and at the squalor with his beer can—“I told them you were clearly in no shape for active duty. Hell, I told them I doubted you were up to walking and chewing gum at the same time.”
She looks up at him, then looks down at her feet. There’s a dirty Band-Aid wrapped around her left big toe, but she can’t remember how long it’s been there or what it’s covering up. “I quit,” she says. “I was permanently discharged. I have the paperwork in a drawer over there.”
“And we both know that no one’s ever really, truly quit. You know permanent means, on a good day, provisional. And you also know that what Albany wants, Albany gets, and they get it one way or another, by hook or by crook or courtesy a few enhanced interrogation techniques.”