A change of gravity

All the other weeks except for flu and his vacations, Merrion had gone to see Larry. Every time he'd gone there, he'd said the same thing.

"Just dropped by, see how you're do in'."

"Checkin' up on me," you mean," Larry had replied every time, wheezing it out and then coughing deeply, moaning as he dredged another shallow air-passage through the viscous tide collecting in his lungs. "See what progress I'm makin'." Igniting another Lucky Strike; gradually devouring and dissolving himself from the inside out, the brown whiskey yellowing his skin; even using two reagents, the process still took its luxurious time.

"You got to be patient," Larry had said. "After all, it stands to reason, am I right? Takes seven years to make the stuff, age it -isn't that what they claim it takes? Bound to take it a while to work. But I don't mind. I'm in no real hurry here to clear out. But I got no desire to hang around, either. Either way, perfectly all right with me."

Over the course of the twenty-one months the building had become etched in clear detail in Merrion's mind, the three-story, eighteen-unit rectangle squatting cramped on a mingy acre-and-an-eighth shelf of land ('being approximately 49,005 square feet, more or less," the deed to the trust recited) filled and levelled with the wreckage of buildings demolished in Urban Renewal projects in Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee, putting a questionably buildable site in place of the nine-percent grade of the natural ravine cut by Ransom's Brook. The fill pulverized brick, thick greyish clay, mulched fibreboard, chunks of cement glittered with shards of window-glass and china; bent steel spikes and rough zinced rods stuck up between dead blades of grass browned and

flattened by the early frosts. Larry Lane and the other four men in the Fourmen's Realty Trust had gotten the fill free for their investment. "Must've been damned near two hundred loads," Larry said, confirming what Merrion's eyes told him. The place had been built on debris.

"Crap built on crap," Larry said, laughing. "Just like the people who live in it now more stuff that nobody wanted. We got it for the cartage, for taking it away. Fiddle Barrow gave his drivers all the hours they could stand. When they finished his contract work for the day, had them go and get it, bring it over here. Eight, ten tons at a time, dumped it right down the slope of that ravine there, right to the edge of the cement trench. Lot of it didn't stop at the edge, went right along into the brook. But what the hell did we care, huh? Wasn't costing us anything. No one saw it go in. There was always plenty more."

Number 14, Janet's unit, was at the front, on the third floor of the six-unit stack to the left of the entrance on the westerly end of the building. The other twelve, Numbers 2 through 19, skipping 13, were stacked on the easterly side of the door, four units on each of the floors. Janet knew the habits of others in the building, people whose names she didn't know; she'd deduced their business by watching them.

"From my fucking picture window," she'd said once, matter-of-factly, mildly startling Merrion. "Some fucking dumb pictures I get from it.

Better stuff on stupid TV. OJ: I was watching that. More innaresting stuff n people in my building've got going, onna TV there." She attended the lives of the other tenants as though they had been staged for her, like the athletic events and movies she watched avidly. She preferred professional hockey, she told Merrion, "specially when they have the fights," seldom missing any game broadcast, no matter which teams were playing. Like the other people in her building they were features of the video in her life, silent players passing through it, their purposes unstated, their function as far as she was concerned being to entertain her. She thought that few of them tried hard enough, no matter what resentments she expressed by grumbling at them.

She did that a lot. She had plenty of time. Far too much of it, in Merrion's estimation; it allowed her the leisure to overheat her imagination, already running on more mood elevators than Merrion believed could possibly be good for her. Xanax, he thought it was, that Sammy Paradise'd said, assuming his own source was telling the truth. But that was not a safe assumption; Lowell Chappelle was the source, the probationer snooping around in his girlfriend's apartment for damaging information about her, who had heedlessly taken him in.

Chappelle was assuming Janet hadn't substituted something else for what'd come in the Xanax-labelled bottle that he'd seen when he browsed her bathroom medicine cabinet. She'd mentioned Elavil at least once to Merrion. Janet knew her drugs.

Louella Daggett was no help. She wouldn't tell Merrion what elixirs Janet was on, beyond confirming she'd been given something that would make the world spin nice and slow and even, no bumps. Louella cited rules of confidentiality Merrion did not believe existed, or should not if they did.