Dagger Key and Other Stories

“Everything. You’ll have to place your trust in me completely. Do you think you can do that? No matter how things look? I think you can. I think we have that kind of potential.”

“It sounds like you’re talking about something dangerous.”

“Love’s dangerous,” she says. “And these are dangerous times to be in love. Do you believe that?”

How can you disbelieve such a melodramatic challenge, with her eyes boring into you and her breath heating your skin?

“Promise you’ll always remember this conversation,” she goes on. “If you do, if you can remember us, the way we are this minute, everything will be all right.”

The pump gurgles loudly, the hum cycles down, and the damp smell of the firs is carried inward on a breeze “Do you trust me?” you ask.

“I’m trying to.”

“Then why not tell me what’s up? And this stuff about you knowing things I don’t…what do you know? What’s the situation going to be when I have to trust you completely?”

“I think for us,” she says, “trust has to be like when we make love. It has to come together, you giving your trust and me giving mine, at the moment when we want it the most.”

You’re uncertain of the metaphor, but you think you understand what she means.

“Promise me,” she demands, pressing her body against you.

Though you’re no longer clear as to what you’re promising, you promise. She clasps your head in both her hands and looks at you for a long time, searching below the surface glints and gleams for whatever hides in you from ordinary light. At last, apparently satisfied, she pulls you close and tells you all the things she wants you to do to her, whispering them sweetly, almost demurely, as if concerned that God and his angels might overhear.

Over the summer, you give up hamburgers. You’ve become so accustomed to Abi’s food that even the smell of a burger makes you nauseous. It’s a small thing to have given up—you’ve never been so happy. The way things are going, if you and Abi were traditional types, you’d be renting out a church and looking into rings. You run into Reiner occasionally and whenever he tries to accost you, you sprint away, leaving him to yell some madness about Abi in your wake. One day in the fall, you’re coming back from a meeting with your thesis committee, a distinctly unpleasant meeting, your work’s been slipping badly, and Reiner limps from the doorway of a used CD store directly into your path. Your temper flares and you push him back into the doorway and tell him to keep the fuck away from you or you’ll bring in the cops.

His laughter has an unsound ring. “You can’t threaten a dead man.”

You become aware again of your surroundings, of passers-by slowing their pace and staring, of two long-haired guys inside the CD store who appear ready to intervene, to rescue the cripple, and you take a step back.

“Those addresses I gave you…you never checked them out, did you?” Reiner asks. “You haven’t done anything.”

You start to turn away, but he grabs a handful of your jacket and hangs on. “What’ll it cost you to check ’em out? Just check out one of ’em!”

“They’re her clients, man!”

“She made them her clients! She crippled them.”

You twist free of his grasp.

“You still have the addresses?” Reiner asks.

You tell him you do, you’ll check them out, and hurry off.

“Didn’t she even leave you one ball?” he shouts.

The scrap of paper bearing the addresses is long gone, but you still remember the one, the building you used to live in, and a month later, walking past that building, you have a what-the-hell moment and stop to inspect the directory. Phil Minz, 1F. Once inside, you walk down a corridor past apartments A through E, and catch sight of a harried-looking gray-haired man wearing a coverall coming out of F, preparing to lock the door. You inquire of him and he tells you that Minz moved out last week. They took him, he thinks, to a clinic somewhere. Maybe in California. He’s only now getting around to inspecting the place.

“The apartment’s available?” you ask.

“Yeah, but I won’t be showing it until after it’s cleaned.”

“Can I take a look?”

He hesitates.

“You know how hard it is to find an apartment this close to the campus,” you tell him. “Let me take a quick look?”

A beat-up sofa in the living room, some paper trash on the floor. The back room is empty but for a queen-sized bed stripped of covers and, on a counter recessed in the wall, an aquarium filled with greenish water, pump gurgling, empty of fish.

“Guy left his fish tank behind,” the super says unnecessarily.

“What kind of fish did he have?” You peer into the tank, searching for signs of habitation, for algae, fish grunge, food debris. Thoughtful of them to clean a tank that was going to be abandoned.

“Hell, I don’t know.” The super joins you at the tank and for a second you’re both peering into it, like curious giants into a tiny lifeless sea. “I never had to come into the apartment when he was here.”