NaNoWriMo Day 20: Breaking and Entering

NaNoWriMo goal: 50,000 words by November 30 Average daily goal: 1,667 Today's count: 4,072 Total so far: 35,609

The dancers (for of course, that’s what they were) streamed in through the house, from the back, from the front, the avant garde pushing forward with heads ducked and ready with their bottles of ether and rags, to take the girl when they found her, and dancers positioned themselves outside, one for each side of the house, to see if the girl made an escape. Victoria stood in the center of the living room, giving orders to open boxes, handing out long cruel-looking serrated knives to slash the cardboard, and the house was soon full of ripping, crashing sounds, the sound of pottery raining in shards against walls and floor, the occasional shout and curse of a dancer thumped by a fellow dancer, and at one point, the sound of a great rip and a rain of down feathers floating through the hall. Dancers sneezed, laughed, cursed, performed impromptu turns with the hilarious props of someone else’s life — wearing panties on their faces, stuffing mixing bowls into their shirts, taking other people’s medications.

Through the madness, with long spider-like strides, Victoria stalked, stomping her feet, with the long rapier she’d hidden in a broom handle now strapped in its odd scabbard to her hip. No sign of the girl, but she was here recently — empty chip bags and dirty water glasses in the sink attested to it. Victoria sniffed the air and beckoned the Indian girl over.

“Rashmi,” hissed Victoria, “take three, get the girl. We need her. And she probably knows where it is.”

Rashmi grinned and stuck her tongue stud out through her teeth thoughtfully. Thumb and finger in her mouth: a piercing whistle.

“Ta, thei, thei, ta, ah, thei, thei, ta,” she chanted, and three girls left the mayhem and stomped to her side with a military, strange robotic shuffling. She looked them over.

“Hunt the girl,” she explained. “We go into the bedrooms.” And she began her kathak counting again: ta, thei, thei, ta...

Across a floor of shards, springs from dashed clocks, around a scatter of pearls sprung from their strand, and touched with a few remaining floating fluffs of feather hovering in the air like smoke, they went stomping in formation, down the hallway, into the bedroom, prepared for this strangest of performance pieces — the piece done for no audience, in a shifting, temporary theater of the moment, seen only by their choreographer and any gods who might be looking for a spot of fun in this otherwise dull stretch of lifeless suburbia. They headed to the bedroom at the end of the hall, with its door agape, and one of them produced a rope, and one of them produced a roll of gunmetal gray, greasy duct tape, and the third held the ether and the rag, and together they became one body with many limbs, a centipede from hell, scuttling forward with the notion that ahead of them lay a defenseless squirming larva curled in its cocoon.

***

Wrong, everything was wrong. There was a new door leading from the yard to the garage, not the peeling paint one she was used to, with its faded curtain flap of cotton printed with red apples eaten by green worms. The clothesline was gone; there were no more trees, only a swimming pool. As they circled the house, she saw no jungle gym, no swing. There was a covered patio that had never been there before. The dark brown fence was replaced with planks of redwood with a strawberry blond hue. Even though Mr. Jonin moved right behind her, she felt entirely alone in her sorrow, running her hand over the wrong texture of the refinished wall. Her path seemed familiar enough: run into the house through the backyard sliding door. But the house was strange now, threatening. Someone else’s house. She pulled off her pack and went rummaging for her tools, her latex gloves. Within a few moments, they were inside, pushing through the curtain into the blindness of the dark interior.

Everything was in the wrong place, and it smelled wrong — like strangers, strange food, strange laundry detergent, strange components of some strange sweat. As her eyes adjusted, she recoiled at the sight of a brush with long blonde hairs entangled in it, which lay on a table as if it were the most ordinary and not the most repulsive thing in the world. Photographs of some cheerful family beamed proudly back from the mantelpiece, everything normal, incredibly normal, wrong. She clutched out at Mr. Jonin’s sleeve in a moment of vertigo, and then was happy to have him, if only for that second, in case she should lose her nerve.

Her nerve. She steadied. She focused on her breath, in and out. Her legs rooted, her feet flattened and felt the floor. Her spine expanded and felt alive, like the spine of some crouching animal ready for a chase, a stalk, a spring. Her muscles responded the way they were trained to do, and her focus diminished, like the picture in those old cathode ray TVs as you switched them off, to a single glowing point.

She crept through the open plan, the open rooms, up a step, onto kitchen linoleum where her soft leather shoes left no print, around a dining table too large for the room, decorated ambitiously with a candelabra sporting a false antique patina, around the obnoxious heavy chairs, past the china cabinet full of Hummel figurines and precious white, gilded plates and bowls and soup tureens. Behind her, soundlessly, Mr. Jonin followed closely, occasionally brushing her, some part of her, with a hand, a forearm, the front of his calf, as if to reassure her that she was not alone.

The hallway was a straight shot down, a tunnel hung with yet more photographs of extended family, faded picnics, black and white enlargements of prewar ancestors in flattering soft focus. There was a bathroom to the left, and three bedrooms forking off at the end — left, right, forward.

“The one at the end,” she whispered, as though she were trying not to wake the residents, as though they weren’t at work and school or day care, but instead were snoozing in their beds. “That was mine.”

“Is that where you hid it?” he whispered back, barely a breath to pass his lips.

“I’m going to get it. Stay here and keep an eye out, in case they come home.”

He bobbed his head and told her in the same near silence, “Quickly, now. No telling when that will be.”

She left him and swept forward, dizzy with knowing how close she was, hoping her memory served her right. The roar of the wind outside creaked the joints of the house, whistled through the cracks it found, shuddered the tiles on the roof.

***
“TA!” shouted Rashmi, her braid nearly whipping one dancer in the eye, as they stormed the room, rushing in past the half-unpacked boxes of stuffed bears, posters, CDs, puffy-covered journals, hats, necklaces, and scarves, like some kind of sorted evidence, or archeological artifacts of a representative variety of girlish adolescence. The bed was empty. They looked under the bed, around the bed, thundered at the closet and threw it open, but it was empty, empty, empty, a voided, broken cocoon, and they roared with rage.

“Next!” They stomped to her count into the next room, throwing things to floor for good measure, to express their disappointment and their fury.

It was a larger room, completely packed, the boxes stacked high, the mattress bare, the air chilled and fresh, coming in through the open window, illuminated by the flat gray light that angled in through the uncurtained glass, draining the scene of color. Small twigs, leaves, bits of outdoor detritus showed the window had been open while the wind blew, who knows how long? The dancers swarmed. She wasn’t under the bed, wasn’t in the closet, wasn’t in the adjoining bathroom. They stuck their heads out the window and called to their companion monitoring the wall from a perch on the fence, smoking a cig; she had seen no one come in or out, had seen no footprints on the bald concrete below. The kitten mewled again, and Rashmi clucked in sad sympathy. “Poor little orphan cat! Your mommy get run over by a car?”

The three dancers under her command milled, stomped without rhythm, pouted, stretched, fidgeted with their vicious props.

“Enough! Ta, thei, thei, ta!” She clapped in time, shouted them out of the room, gesturing them ahead of her with a jerk of her chin, swiveling her head this way and that as they left, hoping to find a clue. “Next room!”

***

The hallway narrowed and lengthened in Isa’s tunnel focus, like a tunnel filmed by Kubrick, the vanishing lines of the flat planes of wall and ceiling and floor seeming to angle too sharply in toward the center of the frame, as she lightly stepped, floating as if sucked by some unseen force to the door. She passed the open doors of parents’ bedroom, sister’s bedroom — no, she could see, it was now an exercise room — and pushed the slightly ajar door of the back room, which was — had been — hers.

The sound of footsteps approaching and a key in the front door snapped up Isa’s and Mr. Jonin’s heads. To run to the backyard or the garage would mean running down the hall, turning left, and heading past the entryway, straight in the view of where the second lock of the front door was already sliding open. As the doorknob turned, Mr. Jonin hustled toward Isa, and they both rounded the bedroom door at the end of the hall and found themselves pressed together on the other side behind it, Isa’s back curled against Mr. Jonin’s chest, too cornered and frightened to worry about thorny, complicated issues such as trust, memory, resentment, or even fear, reduced to pure silence and the wordless calculations and possibilities that fill the minds of predator or prey, as the mother and her young son entered the house in the middle of negotiating one of the child’s frequent tantrums.

***

Rashmi’s dancers snaked and marched into the third and final bedroom, which had not even a bed, was piled entirely with boxes, filled so thoroughly that there was hardly room for all four of the troupe, so after a cursory glance around, careful not to topple any boxes onto themselves, and after a check of the shallow, empty closet, which sat open and naked, waiting for a hanger, a coat, anything at all to give it purpose, they stomped out again, furious.

The kathak chant over, they fell apart into individual wills again, for their pure obedience was triggered solely by the chant, which they had heard so often, so long, under such strenuous conditions in their training, that their muscles knew it, their skin knew it, the small hairs on their necks knew it, and without it they were almost nothing at all. They lingered in the hallway, pouting, slapping their rope against the wall, sticking and unsticking the end of the tape, sloshing the ether around in its bottle. Rashmi ran to Victoria with the news.

“She isn’t here,” explained the darker girl to the light. Victoria’s face reddened. She put her hand to her sword.

“This is ridiculous! No key, no girl? Are you all useless?”

Rashmi growled and took out a cigarette. The mayhem of breakage had slowed. Every box was eviscerated, its innards spilled across the floor. Piles of useless ordinary stuff were heaped in every corner, shoved aside once proven to lack what they were interested in. Everything that could conceal another thing had been smashed or pried open. The landscape was pathetically surreal, mountains of other people’s lives turned to stomped upon garbage. The tiny Russian girl quivered with anguish.

“She will kill us, do you know? She will kill me if I don’t bring her either the key or the girl!”

She took the sword in its stick scabbard and batted away dancers, who ooched and ouched, leaping away from her slaps, straight to the back rooms.

On seeing the master bedroom, she shrieked, “Did you not see that she must have gone out the window?”

“Elena didn’t see it,” growled Rashmi, sucking her cigarette furiously.

Victoria howled and ran to the window. Elena sat in her canvas jumpsuit, her swanlike neck arched back as she stared, bored, at the rippled cloudscape above.

“You filthy, stupid whore!” cried Victoria, reaching for the nearest object — a picture frame, from which a young family of three peered out without smiles — and hurling it at her minion, who winced, cried out, then toppled forward off of her perch.

“What? What?” shouted Elena, rubbing the spot.

“The girl! The girl! She’s got the key! She’s got the key and run off! She knew! She knew! How did the bitch know?”

Victoria crumpled to the floor, defeated. Rashmi kneeled beside her, rubbing her back soothingly, clucking there-there-there, while stubbing out her smoke on the wall with the other hand.

***

Isa was unrolling, from around her waist, where it had served as a belt, a long black sash of fabric, which she handed to Mr. Jonin, who wrapped it around his face. She pulled from inside her jacket a black handkerchief, which she folded in half into a triangle and tied behind her head, leaving it hanging over her nose, hiding the lower half of her face. The boy was screaming, I wa-a-a-a-anted wuh-wuh-wuh one, and the mother was juggling paper and plastic bags full of groceries, snapping back, You can’t have everything you want all the time, young man, as he howled, Puh-puh-puh-puh-Pokémon is the oh-oh-oh-only thing I wuh-wuh-WANT!

The mother was slamming cabinet doors, slamming down things on the counter, thump, thump, thump, slam, thump, slam, her heels thudding on the linoleum, back and forth, weaving a tight stitch from counter to cabinet and back again.

Ronny, you can’t have it and that’s final!

Wuh-wuh-wuh-WHY?

The room, she realized, was arranged roughly the way it had been when she slept in it. The bed was in the same place, the dresser in the same place, although they were a different bed and dresser, it was soothing to see the sameness. Mr. Jonin’s body against hers was large, male, comforting. She felt at ease, suddenly. She knew what she was there for. She reached back and gave his cheek a pat, then skipped from behind the door (she could hear the boy and his mother still fighting in the kitchen) and to the closet, picking her way along the pile carpet carefully, avoiding the wooden train tracks, the Matchbox cars, the painted plastic cowboys with their hands on their holsters. Mr. Jonin stood behind the door, the sash in his hands, ready.

She was inside the boy’s closet now, on her knees, underneath the hanging world of small shirts and trousers, negotiating around some big plastic mechanical doodad with levers and buttons, to do who knows what. She was pulling up the edge of the carpet with her hands. It resisted at first, but began to ease up.

The boy was stomping his way toward his room. The television went on in another part of the house.

Isa, crouching in his closet, melted back. From her dark corner she could see into the shadowed room. The boy snapped on the light and threw his backpack onto his bed, pushing his door open wider. Now Mr. Jonin was completely hidden behind the door, silent. Isa watched the little boy pick up two sections of train track and begin fitting them together.

She was ready to sit there all afternoon until the boy left the room, but he sat up, alert. She froze.

His eyes turned toward the door. Then his head whipped around and he looked directly at Isa.

He was still gasping for air and reaching for a serviceable sound when Mr. Jonin slid out from behind the door and covered the child’s mouth with his hand. When he lifted his hand to strike the child at that spot on the side of the neck, Isa closed her eyes and felt the same blow, as she had in this room, eons ago. When she opened her eyes, the room seemed far away. The child lay in the man’s arms, as though asleep. He was asleep. Mr. Jonin motioned Isa to hurry, as he bound the child with the sash. The sound of canned laughter poured in from elsewhere in the house.

Beneath her ninja self, her child self was clawing out, kicking, screaming. She pushed it down. She reached for the carpet. She pulled up enough. She reached down to the floorboard, felt for the knot. It was there. She almost laughed from relief. After a few pulls, it had slid up an inch. She reached underneath and when her fingers brushed the soft pile of the small purple velvet whisky pouch she knew would be there, she felt nothing but relief. She pulled it out and shook it. It clinked. She felt it and it had the shapes she was after. She crept out and looked at the boy, who lay on his bed, his limbs wound tight to his small body, his jaw slightly agape. Mr. Jonin was pulling up the shades, opening the window. She leaned over and heard the boy’s breath, felt it against her ear. She relented. She untied the sash and pulled it away. She began to slap his cheek lightly, to revive him. He began to stir and moan. She reached into the pouch, lifted out a little plastic toy she knew was inside: a pirate. She put it in the boy’s hand, then slithered out of the window where Mr. Jonin reached out to catch her below. In an impulse, she pressed her lips to his cheek through two layers of fabric, and he squeezed her tight. Then they clambered over the back fence and into a neighbor’s yard, careful to land on paving stones and leave no indentation in the dirt. The car was parked several doors down, and they counted their way over the right number of fences, leaving no trace, happening upon not another soul, except maybe a lonely latchkey child daydreaming out her window, who had no one to tell, no one to believe her if she did.

***

The cleaning service filed out of the house as boldly as they filed in, carrying their implements, brushing the odd feather off their clothes. The last ones out were Victoria and Rashmi, the sophisticate ballerina, the kathak punk. Below them, sharp and unmistakable, the kitten cried again.

“What is that?” howled Victoria, drawing her sword.

Rashmi fell to a crouch and listened. “Oh, it’s the little kitten, underneath the floor!”

Victoria glowered, staring down, pinpointing the sound. Then with a yell, she drove the heavy sword straight down, through carpet, cheap insulation, board, down to the space below the house, down, down, down.

Rashmi screamed and clutched Victoria, but the kitten had stopped mewling. The sword was impaled to the hilt into the floor.

“Oh God you killed it you killed it the little kitten you killed it,” sobbed Rashmi, shaking her partner like a rag doll.

Victoria slapped out at her, wriggled out, then pulled the other girl’s braid with a hard yank. “If you had found the girl, I might not have done it,” she hissed. “Then again, I might have anyway.”

They sulked out, furious with each other.

Below the house, in the cement-floored crawl space below, accessible only through a loose board in the raised patio, which Daniella had found after some exploration that morning, the crouching girl shook all over beside the bowl of water she had brought out, the towels she had wanted to warm the kitten with, staring at the point of the sword, inches from her face, and the poor dead creature at the end of it, quiet at last. She had heard it all from start to finish; the van had pulled up half an hour after she had crawled beneath to find the kitten. She now heard the Russian voices, dejected, angry. She heard the engine start up across the street, heard it drive away. She lay there a long time as the gray light dimmed and the wind died and roared and died again, as she stroked the small still furry body with one finger, gently, afraid to move, afraid to not move, weak and wanting to lie down on the hard cold floor and sleep, invisible, alone, and never wake up.

***

In the car, Isa pulled down the handkerchief, opened her pouch and stared in. Her treasures, stolen by her tiny former self: an eraser, no longer smelling of bubblegum; a metallic blue fountain pen, without ink; a ring of false pearls and gold-plated silver; an empty miniature perfume bottle of a nameless scent; several coins in various currencies; and finally, a key of strange make. She ran her hands over them, talismans of a lost society. She remembered finding each, the thrill of each object. But no one cared about any of them now, but one.

She smiled up at Mr. Jonin. “I trust you now. Thank you.”

He looked away, put the car in drive, and pulled out. He was taking them to the freeway, back through the streets she’d walked down. At the traffic light, he checked the messages on his cell phone.

When he clapped his phone shut, a heavy sigh rolled out of him. His chin dropped to his chest, and his eyes closed.

“What is it?” she asked, rolling the eraser between her fingers, feeling its soothing gummy resistance and recalling the pleasure of it that made her steal it in the first place.

The light turned green, and he pulled out, turning past the bus stop where she’d been let off. He pulled over.

From behind her, two hands yanked her arms back to the seat, pinning her. Another pair of hands clambered over, reached for her pouch, snatched it away. She screamed and cried and kicked her legs and looked to Mr. Jonin, but he was looking in his rearview mirror, observing the stopped traffic behind them, past the stoplight.

The ninja who had snatched the pouch jumped out, looking like an ordinary teenage boy. He jerked out his thumb, as if to say, Get out of there. She was still held back by the other. Then the boy outside the car grabbed her, threw her to the curb. She scrambled to her feet, pulling out her dagger, and barely managed to slice once through the pantleg of the boy returning to the car. He cursed and kicked at her, catching her on the side of the head. She reeled back and rolled away, down the grass slope as he slammed the door shut.

Just before the car squealed away, heading for the freeway on ramp just a block ahead, the power window on the passenger side rolled down as the locks engaged. “I’m sorry, Isa-chan,” came the voice, and seemed to hover there, vibrating the air, long after the car had gone.

The tears came freely now, and she returned her bloodied knife to its sheath, leaving her hand inside her jacket, a fist clutched over her heart, as the light changed and the cars began to roar past. She lay upon the strange lawn and stared up at the blank page of the sky, her face aching dully from the kick, her arms bruised where she’d been gripped. She clutched her chest as if it were the only thing keeping her heart from falling apart into a hundred jagged fragments, her ribs collapsing, her body crushing inward toward the black hole of the betrayal. She no longer knew who she was or what she was doing. She no longer knew where or what home was. He had even taken her pack. She had nothing, save two daggers, twenty dollars in her back pocket, a headache, and a wrecked plan.

She thought of Willy Orwonti. She thought of the thieves.

She thought, for the first time, of what might have become of her little sister, Daniella, the baby.

She drew herself up and stood. She looked back at the freeway ramp.

She stuck out her thumb.