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Eustace wasn’t angry. Anger had left him, years ago. What he felt was relief. He hurled the man across the cell and got to work: his fists, the butt of the revolver, the points of his boots. Fry’s pleas for him to stop barely registered in his consciousness. Something had come uncorked inside him, and it was elating, like riding a horse at full gallop. Rudy was lying on the floor, his face protectively buried in his arms. You pathetic excuse for a human being. You worthless waste of skin. You are everything that’s wrong with this place, and I am going to make you know it.
He was in the process of lifting Rudy by his collar to slam his head against the edge of the bunk—what a satisfying crack that was going to make—when a key turned in the lock and Fry grabbed him from behind. Eustace connected with an elbow to Fry’s midriff, knocking him away, and wrapped Rudy’s neck in the crook of his arm. The man was like a big rag doll, a fleshy sack of loosely organized parts. He tightened his biceps against Rudy’s windpipe and shoved his knee into his back for leverage. One hard yank and that would be the end of him.
Then: snowflakes. Fry was standing over him, heaving for breath, holding the fire poker he’d just used on Eustace’s head.
“Jesus, Gordo. What the hell was that?”
Eustace blinked his eyes; the snowflakes winked out one by one. His head felt like a split log; he was a little sick to his stomach, too.
“Got a little carried away, I guess.”
“It wasn’t like the guy didn’t deserve it, but what the fuck.”
Eustace turned his head to get a look at the situation. Rudy was curled into a fetal ball with his hands jammed between his legs. His face looked like raw meat.
“I really did a number on him, didn’t I?”
“The man never traded on his looks anyway.” Fry directed his voice at Rudy. “You hear me? You breathe one word of this, they’re going to find you in a ditch, you asshole.” Fry looked at Eustace. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to hit you so hard.”
“That’s okay.”
“Don’t mean to rush you, but it’s probably best if you vacate the premises for the time being. Think you can stand?”
“What about Abel?”
“I’ll handle it. Let’s get you on your feet.”
Fry helped him up. Eustace had to hold on to the bars for a second to make the floor feel solid. The knuckles of his right hand were bloody and swollen, skin split along the bone. He tried to close it into a fist, but the joints wouldn’t go that far.
“Okay?” Fry was looking at him.
“I think so, yeah.”
“Just go clear your head. You might want to take care of that hand, too.”
At the door of the cell, Eustace stopped. Fry was easing Rudy into a seated position. His shirt was a bib of blood.
“You know, you were right,” Eustace said.
Fry glanced up. “How’s that?”
Eustace didn’t feel sorry about what he’d done, though he supposed he might later on. A lot of things were like that; the reaction you were supposed to have took its time getting there.
“Maybe I should have taken the day off after all.”
* * *
31
Alicia began to spend her nights in the stable.
Fanning took little notice of her absence. That horse of yours, he might comment, barely lifting his eyes from one of the books that now completely occupied his waking hours. I don’t see why you feel the need, but it’s really none of my business. His mind seemed distant, his thoughts veiled. Yes, he was different; something had shifted. The change felt tectonic, a rumbling from deep in the earth. He wasn’t sleeping, there was that—if indeed their kind could be said to sleep. In the past, the daylight hours had brought forth in him a kind of melancholy exhaustion. He would fade into a trancelike state—eyes closed, hands folded in his lap with his fingers tidily meshed. Alicia knew his dreams. The clocks’ hands remorseless turning. The anonymous crowds streaming past. His was a nightmare of infinite waiting in a universe barren of pity—without hope, without love, without the purpose that only hope and love could bear upon it.
She had a dream like that of her own. Her baby. Her Rose.
She sometimes thought about the past. “New York,” Fanning liked to say, “has always been a place of memory.” She missed her friends as the dead might miss the living, citizens of a realm she had permanently departed. What did Alicia remember? The Colonel. Being a little girl in the dark. Her years on the Watch, how true they felt. There was a night that came back to her often; it seemed to define something. She had taken Peter up to the roof of the power station to show him the stars. Side by side they had lain on the concrete, still warm with the day’s crushing heat, the two of them just talking, beneath a night sky made more remarkable by the fact that Peter had never seen it before. It brought them out of themselves. Have you ever thought about it? Alicia had asked him. Thought about what? he’d asked; and she’d said, nervously—she couldn’t seem to stop herself—You’re going to make me say it? Pairing, Peter. Having Littles. She understood, much later, what she was really asking of him: to save her, to lead her into life. But it was too late; it had always been too late. Since the night the Colonel had abandoned her, Alicia hadn’t really been a person anymore; she had given it up.
