Free Where She Has Gone by Nino Ricci Page B

with each sound, each hiss and whoosh of cloth, as she slipped on skirt, stockings, blouse. There were a few minutes of silence then, the moments when I should have gone to her; and then finally the sound of motion again, of furtive footsteps across creaking hardwood, of a closing door.

XI
    When she’d gone I fell into fitful sleep, fighting consciousness like a swimmer refusing to surface. My dreams were the shattered remnants of dreams, without centre: images flashed, took on portent, but resisted coalescing into meaning. There was no question now of solutions, only this frenzied rushing-by like the brain short-circuiting, sending out random impulses that the unconscious still tried to arrange into a whole.
    When I awoke, finally, to a haze of spring light through the window, it was only eleven. I felt a despair at how little time had passed while I’d slept. For a long time I lay in bed in a kind of paralysis – there seemed no possible next action in my life, no gesture that could move me forward. It was as if I’d come to the point in a story where it retreated back to the unwritten void: this was the end, everything had already happened, there was nothing left to be done.
    Through the window I could hear the traffic on College, the dull roar of engines, the clack, clack of streetcars as they crossed over the switches at Spadina. Every few minutes theclacks repeated themselves as another car passed, giving a rhythm to the traffic like the relentless thump of a heart beneath a roar of blood. I had an image of my body laid out like the roads, the tracks, of the endless network of things stretching away from me and which I formed the meaningless centre of, the streets leading to highways, the highways to other cities, on and on to take in the whole wearying edifice of the world.
    There was a single stain of blood on the bedcovers, and then a smaller one on the sheets. They were tiny, really, not much bigger than coins. Somewhere, in my dreams, I had imagined awaking in gore as if after a murder; but instead there were only these pinpricks of purple-red.
    From the bedroom doorway came a beckoning of late-morning light. It was the light that I moved toward, finally: it seemed to bathe everything in a quality of remembrance, to say, these were the rooms I once lived in, this was the life that I led. It was possible to reconstruct things in that way, to quell the panic, to touch my hands to coffee cups, kitchen faucets, cupboard doors, as if they were real, to reassert an order over things. I poured coffee into a cup as I once had; I tasted the bitterness of it on my tongue. Everything could unfold in the usual way; there was just this gap to account for, this doubling over, the sense that every feeling, every act, was itself and only the memory of itself.
    I sat at the kitchen window, staring out. Eddy the superintendent was patrolling the sidewalk along Huron, prowling outside again, in his furtive, casual way, now that the weather had changed. As I watched, he ambled to the corner of College, hands in the back pockets of his denim overalls, and gazed for a long moment in each direction; and thenapparently satisfied that nothing threatened there, he turned into the sun and raised his arms in a lazy, feline stretch. He seemed to take the sun in like some liquid on him, some tangible balm, for an instant alive only to that sensation, to the sun shining warm on his skin while his muscles stretched.
    Coming back toward the building, he looked up at my window. For an instant he seemed to stare right at me, right through me. There was no greeting, just that hard, assessing stare. Perhaps in the glare of the sun he hadn’t seen me, had seen only the mirrored dark that daytime windows gave back. But there had seemed to be knowledge in his look, some kind of message that had passed. I had a sudden sense of being monitored, under surveillance, not anonymous here as I’d imagined but the focus of a careful, calculated