An Absence of Light

She looked at his glass and smiled. He reached out for the envelope, and he thought she kind of held on to it when he took it.

“What have you drinking there?” she asked.

“Oh, uh, scotch. Whiskey.”

She nodded, still smiling like she had caught him doing something… naughty.

“Uh”-he gestured vaguely-”you… want”-he gestured more vaguely, maybe toward her with the glass-”something?”

She raised her eyebrows. “To drink… with you?”

And it was at that moment that Panos Kalatis slid out of Gilbert’s mind for good. The spice of the present instant was overwhelming. He reached for the door which he suddenly realized she had been holding open with her… hip.

“I don’t have to hurry to go back,” she said, brushing past him. “It is so busy there, and anyway, they will everyone be gone away when I am back there.”

“You came by yourself?” he asked with appropriate concern in his voice as they made their way through his office and into his apartment.

“Oh yes,” she said, looking around, locking on the view of the city from the sitting room windows.

“What would you like to drink?” he asked, tossing the envelope into a chair and going straight to the bar.

“Cuba Libre,” she said, standing at the windows.

Cuba Libre. She goddamned looked like Cuba Libre. He managed to make it, as well as another scotch for himself, though he was in a bit of a fog, and he wasn’t sure he made it as good as he could have. He spilled some of each on his hands as he made his way over to her, and then was momentarily disconcerted to find her sitting primly on the sofa in front of the television, back straight, hands in her lap, breasts dripping burgundy, watching a man humping a woman on what appeared to be a motorcycle in a rainstorm.

“What is that?” he said stupidly, standing flat-footed with the wet glasses in his hands.

“They having some love,” she said equanimously. She pronounced it “lowve.”

She might have said it was going to be clear to partly cloudy, but then she smiled at him in such a way that entirely obliterated this alternate possibility.

Not once during the next half hour did Gilbert Hormann ask another question. Not of her. Not of himself. Not of Fate or of Good Fortune. Not of God. He never asked why it was that he should be naked on the sofa with this incomparable hetaera, Jael. He never asked why he should have her breast in his mouth or feel what he was feeling between her legs. He never asked himself why it should be his good, dumb luck to be in the Jacuzzi with her, swilling scotch and sliding all over her while the city lights went round and round in the vast, black firmament He never asked any questions at all until he was aware of holding his mouth open because she had asked him to, and looking past her glistening breasts above him to see her holding an eyedropper… an eyedropper… over his opened mouth.

But then it was too late.

His heart stopped. While he was exhaling, something invisible squeezed out what little air was left and held his chest and lungs in an excruciatingly painful vacuum. He was agog with pain, specific pain. He could feel his face turning scarlet, empurpling, and could sense the arteries in his heart growing thin, attenuated, dissolving, flooding the muscle in a hemorrhage of uncontained blood. He watched helplessly as Jael pulled her hand away, the dropper still poised, hesitant, with a clear drop on the very end of it He could see it, right on the very end of the glass ampule, and her breasts inviting even now at this very terrifying moment when he was thinking, God he had screwed up, her breasts inviting him to have one more mouthful.

She got out of the Jacuzzi very carefully and stepped onto a towel she had laid out ahead of time. He hadn’t noticed. She knelt beside the Jacuzzi, turned off the circulating pump, and released the water. As the basin emptied, she patted herself dry, watching the water disappear, leaving the pinkish Gilbert Hormann lying in the bottom like a great hairless bear.

Carefully folding the damp towel in a very precise square, she put it on the step to the Jacuzzi and knelt on it as she took the sprayer hose from its seat on the side of the basin and began washing down the body and the inside of the tub. She got back in the tub with him and turned him over, washing him thoroughly, washing the sides of the tub to make sure none of her head hair or pubic hair remained. She opened his mouth and sprayed it out and then took shampoo from the shelf of the tub and washed his hair, and hosed him down again very thoroughly, having to turn him over once more.

When she was satisfied, she refilled the Jacuzzi and restarted the circulating pump. The body floated awkwardly in the swirling water, moving oddly as the currents pushed it about. She wiped down the steps to the Jacuzzi with the towel on which she had been kneeling, and then put it in a plastic trash bag she found in the kitchen.