Free Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll Page A

I appreciate your helping me."
    "Would you have done the same thing?"
    "You know I would."
    "Right. So I just did what you would have done."
    "Don't be so gallant. You did me a really big favor and I appreciate it a lot."
    "That's good. Let's start unpacking your things."
    "Don't you want breakfast first? Let me treat. We can go to _Aida_ and have hot _Töpfen golatschen_."
    "If I fill my stomach now and get warm and cozy, I'll go into coma.
    Let's take the first couple of loads up to your place and then have coffee there."
    "_Gut Sowieso_."
    Although she spoke fluent, unaccented German, having lived there so long, it almost always surprised me when she slipped unconsciously into
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    Deutsch. Once, when I asked her what language she thought in, she said both.
    "Okay, Ms. Sowieso, let's go."
    After studying the real estate section of the newspaper every day for two weeks, Maris had found a small, recently renovated studio apartment in a
    Biedermeier house on the edge of the Wienerwald. The owners were a rich, unpleasant couple named Schuschitz who immediately announced that the big untidy lawn behind the house was not for her to use. I told her no one with that name and that much pettiness deserved her rent money, but Maris said she was sure they'd all get along fine after awhile. And she was right.
    I took the computer out of the car and gingerly made my way across the icy street to the front gate. She unlocked it, and then went back to get a load from the car.
    It was seven o'clock in the morning and the sun was just up, but the hard cold stillness and heavy gray sky were not the best welcome home to our first day back in Vienna. As I struggled up the outside stairs to her apartment, Diplom Ingenieur Schuschitz (as the big brass plaque on their numerous doors announced) came toward me.
    "So, Frau York finally decided to bring her things and stay awhile, eh?"
    He had the face of a man who was sure he had all the answers and would be happy to tell them, if only you were smart enough to ask. But I knew his wife had all the money from her side of the family, and treated him with the sweet dismissal due the fool she'd married a long time ago when they were both young, she was naive, and he only was good-looking.
    I was about to say something unpleasant when Maris came up close behind me.
    "Frau York, that's not your computer is it? What do you do with something like that?" he asked.
    "I'm working on schematic physiology right now, and need the machine to do the representative zero zone equations. It's much faster that way."
    He looked puzzled, then hunted: If he stood there a moment longer, we'd discover he didn't know a thing about "schematic physiology."
    Smiling like a nervous rat, he welcomed her home and hurried past.
    I waited till I heard the gate close behind him, then said over my shoulder, "I didn't know you were good at zero zone equations."
    She laughed a little. "Sure, he's an ass, but remember, I have to live in their house. Anyway, that's how you treat people like that: Make 'em know how dumb they are, and they go away feeling a little less pleased with themselves."
    For the next hour we toted Maris's old environment into her new one. It was another way of getting to know her. She liked rough-edged singers like Tom Waits and Screaming Jay Hawkins ("You like cool music, but I want to hear the kind that tears your heart out"), heavy, laced shoes and boots, obscure novels in both English and German. I'd helped pack these boxes in Munich, but we did everything in a hurry so as to be out of there as quickly as possible. To tell the truth, she'd been calmer than I then, but I wasn't ashamed of that nervousness. From the moment we rode west out of Vienna two days before, I'd had a deep-seated feeling I would do something both extreme and regrettable if Luc showed up.
    In the month we'd been together, Maris slowly told the tale of her relationship with him. Too much of it reminded me of the ingredients in the