head, always giving him orders, warning him, frightening him.
He leaves Epi’s room and turns toward his. All he has to do is to cross the hall, but the bad news keeps coming. Near the door, he thinks he catches a glimpse of a long robe, disappearing as its wearer takes cover. It’s too late; he’s already seen it. He shuts his eyes, enters his bedroom, gropes unseeing for the box of pills, rips off the packaging, and takes one, swallowing it with difficulty. At his first opportunity, he’ll wash the pill all the way down with a nice glass of water. In the darkness of his own room, he can control his movements almost without opening his eyes, but the minute he steps out into the hall, he’ll wind up breaking something. So he’ll have to open them. And he must keep his panic in check. He knows that. He’ll see absurd images, the door of the bedroom stained with blood, Lazarus returned from the dead and sauntering down the hall like John Travolta. He’ll see such things and more. “It’s nothing but illusions inside my head,” he tells himself, and he remembers that he’s right, that he has to concentrate on reality, as his doctor has counseled him to do. But if he sees what he sees and hears what he hears, what more is required for something to be real? All sheer madness. His mother always called him by his little brother’s name, never by his own. And things like theone stationed out there, wearing a robe, are nothing but the shit his mother crammed into his head. So many saints and martyrs, so much dust, so many wounds, such a desert. He can feel the pill stuck in his throat. He swallows saliva repeatedly. He could go to the bathroom or the kitchen, but he can’t move, he doesn’t dare. He ought to run. Do it quickly and trick all the shapes that’ll come out at him along the way. He runs into the kitchen and locks the door behind him. Taking a glass from the sink, he turns on the faucet. He empties the glass in one gulp. The water’s tepid. It’s disgusting. Of course—the water heater’s on. Maybe he’s the one who forgot to turn it off. Maybe it was the others. But the kitchen’s always a place of refuge. Sacred ground. The bright fluorescent lights chase away the undead. He disconnects the heater and lets the water run. A good swig of cool water will soothe him. After he drinks, he opens the kitchen door and starts running.
There’s no one who can see him, no one who can reprove him, as his mother used to do, for running in the hall with his eyes closed. At the same time, he pats his pockets to make sure he’s got his keys, his wallet, and his cell phone, and then he accelerates toward the door. He thinks there’s someone behind him, someone who wants to touch him. It’s Christ, beseeching him. Maybe He wants him to believe in Him, wants his help with the loaves or the fishes, or maybe He wants him to stop downloading music for free, because he and everyone else who does that are killing the artists. No matter. Go back to Nazareth, nutball, Alex thinks. But he’s immediatelyfrightened by his blasphemy. “God can read your heart,” his mother used to tell him. When he closes the door behind him and heads down the stairs, he hears the screams of the ghosts, which stay inside, growing like trees behind our backs, crossing off, one by one, the minutes left until we return and they can go back to scaring us.
4
EPI HALTS AT THE CURB AND LOOKS AT THE STOPLIGHT . It’s green. He can cross, but he’s already ignored so many red signals that he’s on the point of forgetting the rules for drivers and pedestrians. For a few seconds, he hasn’t the slightest notion where he is. Inside his gym shoes, his feet are burning. He crosses over to the opposite corner, attempting to catch his breath, walking with one hand clutching his side, as he did when he was a boy and he was trying to quiet his heartbeat. Several cars pass. A bus. He walks to the next corner. Maybe he can get a better idea of where he