keeper?” only more gender friendly. Gotta watch out for the sisters too.
“You live here,” Leandros confirmed. I walked across the letters to the door that had been placed off center into the corrugated metal that fronted the building. Battleship gray, the door opened without a key. You didn’t need a key when someone had taken a crowbar to the lock sometime in the past.
“Okay, that’s not right. I don’t need a memory to know that,” I said. “Great. I get amnesia, attacked by a spider in the john, and robbed. It just keeps getting better and better.”
“Hmm. It happens. It is New York.” Niko went in first and I followed, seeing that I had no neighbors. The entire building was one big space with the metal ceiling two stories high. There were windows up there to see the daylight beginning to dim. To the right was an area devoted to living. I noted a coffee table that looked cheap but brand-new, a couch that was about fifteen years past its prime with only prayer and duct tape holding it together, and beside it a small kitchen area with a bar separating the two spaces. You could eat there too and still swivel to see the TV hanging on the wall … and it was a great TV—big and flat with what I knew had to be one frigging amazing picture. I was in love with that TV.
So I hadn’t been robbed. No one would’ve left that TV. More and more weird.
The other half of the room was devoted to living in another way—keeping yourself alive. There were weights, a punching bag, mats on the floor, and untouched targets on the walls. Fresh paper, black silhouettes of human bodies intact. I liked that too. If you plan on surviving giant spiders, it’s nice to have a home gym to train in. Only one thing was off.
It was pristine, despite the couch carcass. Immaculate with a place for everything and everything in its place. The new targets were the worst, like hotels that fold your toilet paper into a neat point. Who wants their toilet paper practically folded into an airplane? I didn’t know me, not all of me, only five going on six days of me if you wanted to count, but I compared the condition of my motel room on my last day in the Landing with this. “This isn’t right,” I said, walking to the coffee table and nudging the remote control out of its perfectly parallel alignment with the table’s edge. Leandros reached past me and nudged it right back, then started to give me a similar nudge toward a six-foot-long hall. Whoever had converted this place had put up a wall that stopped about nine feet up. You had the open space above you, but you had privacy as well. The hall was dead center of that wall. This time Niko moved past me to lead the way and open the door on the right. I followed him and peered into the room.
There was no floor; only piles of clothes. Chances were that Einstein in his day could’ve theorized there was a floor under all that dirty laundry, but I wouldn’t bet a Nobel Prize on it. The bed was unmade with dark blue sheets and a cover so tangled they were almost one giant complex knot, the kind kids who go to Boy Scout camp learn to make. One pillow was at the head of the bed and one at the foot with a petrified piece of pizza resting on it. The wall you would face while you were in that bed was scarred with hundreds of slashes. The knife that had made them was still embedded in the plasterboard. A black marker had been used to connect all the marks to spell out Screw you . Under the bed I could see the gleam of metal and lots of it. If the bogeyman showed up under there, good luck finding a place to wedge itself amidst that arsenal. It was a disaster area. You could get federal funds to airlift people out of this biohazard nightmare.
I grinned. I didn’t mean to, but this was right. This was the room of a guy who didn’t know what the word pristine meant. “Now this I get.”
Leandros snorted, and the guy had plenty of nose to snort with. “There are some places men aren’t meant
“You live here,” Leandros confirmed. I walked across the letters to the door that had been placed off center into the corrugated metal that fronted the building. Battleship gray, the door opened without a key. You didn’t need a key when someone had taken a crowbar to the lock sometime in the past.
“Okay, that’s not right. I don’t need a memory to know that,” I said. “Great. I get amnesia, attacked by a spider in the john, and robbed. It just keeps getting better and better.”
“Hmm. It happens. It is New York.” Niko went in first and I followed, seeing that I had no neighbors. The entire building was one big space with the metal ceiling two stories high. There were windows up there to see the daylight beginning to dim. To the right was an area devoted to living. I noted a coffee table that looked cheap but brand-new, a couch that was about fifteen years past its prime with only prayer and duct tape holding it together, and beside it a small kitchen area with a bar separating the two spaces. You could eat there too and still swivel to see the TV hanging on the wall … and it was a great TV—big and flat with what I knew had to be one frigging amazing picture. I was in love with that TV.
So I hadn’t been robbed. No one would’ve left that TV. More and more weird.
The other half of the room was devoted to living in another way—keeping yourself alive. There were weights, a punching bag, mats on the floor, and untouched targets on the walls. Fresh paper, black silhouettes of human bodies intact. I liked that too. If you plan on surviving giant spiders, it’s nice to have a home gym to train in. Only one thing was off.
It was pristine, despite the couch carcass. Immaculate with a place for everything and everything in its place. The new targets were the worst, like hotels that fold your toilet paper into a neat point. Who wants their toilet paper practically folded into an airplane? I didn’t know me, not all of me, only five going on six days of me if you wanted to count, but I compared the condition of my motel room on my last day in the Landing with this. “This isn’t right,” I said, walking to the coffee table and nudging the remote control out of its perfectly parallel alignment with the table’s edge. Leandros reached past me and nudged it right back, then started to give me a similar nudge toward a six-foot-long hall. Whoever had converted this place had put up a wall that stopped about nine feet up. You had the open space above you, but you had privacy as well. The hall was dead center of that wall. This time Niko moved past me to lead the way and open the door on the right. I followed him and peered into the room.
There was no floor; only piles of clothes. Chances were that Einstein in his day could’ve theorized there was a floor under all that dirty laundry, but I wouldn’t bet a Nobel Prize on it. The bed was unmade with dark blue sheets and a cover so tangled they were almost one giant complex knot, the kind kids who go to Boy Scout camp learn to make. One pillow was at the head of the bed and one at the foot with a petrified piece of pizza resting on it. The wall you would face while you were in that bed was scarred with hundreds of slashes. The knife that had made them was still embedded in the plasterboard. A black marker had been used to connect all the marks to spell out Screw you . Under the bed I could see the gleam of metal and lots of it. If the bogeyman showed up under there, good luck finding a place to wedge itself amidst that arsenal. It was a disaster area. You could get federal funds to airlift people out of this biohazard nightmare.
I grinned. I didn’t mean to, but this was right. This was the room of a guy who didn’t know what the word pristine meant. “Now this I get.”
Leandros snorted, and the guy had plenty of nose to snort with. “There are some places men aren’t meant
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