Part 4 (1/2)

”Ma'am, are you high or somethin'?” he asked. ”I know it ain't exactly none of my concern, and it don't make me much difference if you are. I ain't gonna put you out. I just want to know, in case somethin' happens.”

Niki nodded her head, thinking that she should feel more offended at his question than she did, and then she remembered the three prescription bottles in her pocket and took one of them out to show the driver. She held the Xanax bottle up so he could see it.

”I'm on prescription medication,” she said, wis.h.i.+ng that he'd just drive and stop glaring at her in the mirror. ”Sometimes it makes me a little groggy in the morning.”

”You don't say?”

”I don't think it's any of your business.”

”Yeah, you're probably right,” the driver said. ”Sorry,”

and he pushed the lever that started the cab's meter running and pulled away from the curb. ”Say, exactly what kind of animal you gotta skin to get a fur coat that color, anyhow?”

”It's not real fur,” Niki replied absentmindedly and glanced at the house as they pa.s.sed it, all the tall windows dark, the curtains drawn. So Marvin must still be asleep, and I got away, she thought.

”That's sorta rea.s.surin',” the driver said and turned west onto Fulton Street.

”I think you must talk more than any cab driver I've ever met,” Niki said to him and put her boots up on the back of the seat, the brown suede boots with bright, canary-yellow laces that made her feet look huge and blocky, Frankenstein feet, and she slid far enough down that she didn't have to look at the square anymore.

”Well, I don't intend to drive this ol' hack all my life. I plan on writin' a novel one day, a best seller, after I retire,

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and so I gotta pay close attention and talk to folks. I figure my book's gonna have real people, not a bunch'a made-up phonies.”

”Someone will just sue you,” Niki said. She realized that she hadn't put the pill bottle back in her pocket, and she shook it a couple of times. The pills made a dry, pleasant sound against the plastic, a comforting noise like a baby's rattle or a very small maraca.

”Oh, I ain't gonna use n.o.body's real name. I'll come up with brand-new ones that fit people better than their real names.”

”Doesn't matter,” Niki said. ”They'll figure out what you did and sue you, anyway.”

”d.a.m.n, you sure got a cynical streak, girl,” the driver mumbled and then honked his horn at a UPS truck that had pulled out in front of him. ”Someone go and p.i.s.s in your cornflakes this mornin' or what?”

”I hope you don't have your heart set on a tip,” she said and opened the bottle, shook one of the Xanax out into her hand. The swelling on her palm was worse, but the welt had almost stopped hurting, had begun to feel a little numb, in fact. The b.u.mp had turned the color of a raisin.

”Now, see? That is exactly what I mean. I'll probably be naming you somethin' awful, like . . .” and then he paused to honk at a rusty red Toyota and call the driver a blind hippie son of a b.i.t.c.h. He tugged once at the frayed brim of his Giants cap, and ”Well, somethin' disagreeable,” he said. ”Eu-dora Bittlesnipe, maybe, or maybe Miss Suzy Sourmilk.”

”No one's going to read a book full of names like that,”

Niki said and popped the pill into her mouth. ”It'll be a big flop, and you'll wind up living on the street.”

”Well, though it's been an inspirin' pleasure making your acquaintance, Miss Bittlesnipe, and I hate to see you go, I think this is your stop,” and he pulled over at the corner of Fulton and Divisadero.

Niki sat up, quickly swapped the pill bottle for her billfold, plain black leather with her initials in silver thread, 38 and she took out five dollars and told the driver to keep the thirty cents she had coming in change.

”h.e.l.l's bells. Guess I'll be able to retire a lot sooner than I thought,” he said, pulled a pencil stub from behind his left ear, licked the tip and jotted something down on a clipboard. His two-way radio crackled to life, momentarily drowning the jazz station in a sudden burst of static and angry, unintelligible voices speaking in Spanish.

”Thanks for the ride,” Niki said, climbing out of the backseat, and ”Hey, wait a sec,” the driver called out to her over the sputtering racket from the radio. But the door of the cab was already swinging shut and, besides, she wasn't in the mood for any more witty conversation. She crossed the street to Cafe Alhazred and went inside.

The interior of the coffee shop was a fanciful, mismatched fusion of Middle Eastern kitsch, someone trying hard to invoke the markets of Cairo or Baghdad and getting I Dream of Jeannie instead; sand brown plaster walls decorated with an incongruous a.s.sortment of Egyptian hi-eroglyphs and Arabic graffiti, lancet archways and beaded curtains, a few dusty hookahs scattered about here and there like a lazy afterthought, framed and faded photographs of desert places. A pretend Casablanca for the punks and hippies, the goths and less cla.s.sifiable misfits that had long ago claimed Cafe Alhazred as their own.

Niki ordered a tall double latte, paid at the register, and took an empty table near the front of the cafe, sipped at the scalding mix of steamed milk and espresso and inspected the people filing hurriedly past the windows. Men and women on their way to work or somewhere else, two pur-poseful and intertwining trails like strange insects caught in a forced march, northeast or southwest, and she closed her eyes for a moment. Nothing but the warm coffee smells, the commingled conversations of other customers, and an old Brian Eno song playing softly in the back-ground.

I really got away, she thought again, oddly satisfied by

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the simple fact of it, but not quite believing it was true, either, and not quite sure why. Marvin had never actually stopped her from going out without him, but since he'd come to live with them, to watch over her, she'd never tried to venture farther than Alamo Square park alone.

But I did it, didn't I? I got away from him and that house.

Now I can go anywhere. Anywhere at all.

Niki opened her eyes, half expecting to be back in her bedroom, but nothing had changed, and she was still sitting there in the wobbly wooden chair at the little table, the Friday morning stream of pedestrians marching past.

Only now there was someone standing out there looking in, an ashen-skinned child no more than five or six, seven at the most, gazing straight at her. The girl's long hair was black, and she stood with her face pressed against the window, her breath fogging up a small patch of the plate gla.s.s.

Her blue eyes so pale they made Niki think of ice, and the child wasn't wearing a coat, not even long sleeves, just a Ts.h.i.+rt and grimy-looking jeans.

Niki smiled at her, and the girl blinked her cold blue eyes and smiled back, a hesitant, uneasy smile as though she wasn't precisely sure what smiles meant or how to make one, and then she pointed one finger towards the sky.

Niki looked up and saw nothing over her head but the ceiling of Cafe Alhazred, and when she looked back down again the child was gone, just a snotty smear on the gla.s.s to prove that she'd ever been there.

We dream of a s.h.i.+p that sails away, Brian Eno sang above and between the murmuring voices crowding the cafe. . . .

a thousand miles away.

Niki raised the big mug of coffee, both hands and the cup already halfway between the Formica tabletop and her lips when she noticed the mark the child had traced on the windowpane, the simple cruciform design, and she stopped, caught in the disorienting blur of recognition and unwanted memories, the deja vu freeze-frame collision of then and now and the singer's insinuating, dulcet-gentle voice.

40.

We dream of a s.h.i.+p that sails away . . .

It isn't real, Nicolan. It isn't anything that can ever hurt you.