She was with a group of about six men and four women, though she did not
seem to be attached to any one of them. Vassago was trying to decide on
an approach to her when, not entirely to his surprise, she approached
him. He supposed their encounter was inevitable. They were, after all,
the two most dangerous people at the dance.
Just as the band took a break and the decibel level fell to a point at
which the interior of the club would no longer have been lethal to cats,
the blonde came to the bar. She pushed between Vassago and another man,
ordered and paid for a beer. She took the bottle from the bartender,
turned sideways to face Vassago, and looked at him across the top of the
open bottle, from which wisps of cold vapor rose like smoke.
She said, “You blind?”
“To some things, Miss.”
She looked incredulous. “Miss?”
He shrugged.
“Why the sunglasses?” she asked.
“I’ve been to Hell.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hell is cold, dark.”
“That so? I still don’t get the sunglasses.”
“Over there, you learn to see in total darkness.”
“This is an interesting line of bullshit.”
“So now I’m sensitive to light.”
“A real different line of bullshit.”
He said nothing.
She drank some beer, but her eyes never left him.
He liked the way her throat muscles worked when she swallowed.
After a moment she said, “This your usual line of crap, or do you just
make it up as you go?”
He shrugged again.
“You were watching me,” she said.
“”So?”
“You’re right. Every asshole in here is watching me most of the time.”
He was studying her intensely blue eyes. What he thought he might do
was cut them out, then reinsert them backward, so she was looking into
her own skull. A comment on her self-absorbtion.
In the dream Hatch was talking to a beautiful but incredibly
cold-looking blonde. Her flawless skin was as white as porcelain, and
her eyes were like polished ice reflecting a clear winter sky. They
were standing at a bar in a strange establishment he had never seen
before. She was looking at him across the top of a beer bottle that she
held and brought to her mouth as she might have held a phallus.
But the taunting way she drank from it and licked the glass rim seemed
to be as much a threat as it was an erotic invitation. He could not
hear a thing she said, and he could hear only a few words that he spoke
himself: …. . been to Hell… cold, dark..
sensitive to light.. .” The blonde was looking at him, and it was
surely he who was speaking to her, yet the words were not in his own
voice.
Suddenly he found himself focusing more intently on her arctic eyes, and
before he knew what he was doing, he produced a switchblade knife and
flicked it open. As if she felt no pain, as if in fact she was dead
already, the blonde did not react when, with a swift whip of the knife,
he took her left eye from its socket. He rolled it over on his
fingertips, and replaced it with the blind end outward and the blue lens
gazing inward. Hatch sat up. Unable to breathe. Heart hammering.
He swung his legs out of bed and stood, feeling as if he had to run away
from something. But he just gasped for breath, not sure where to run to
find shelter, safety.
They had fallen asleep with a bedside lamp on, a towel draped over the
shade to soften the light while they made love. The room was well
enough lit for him to see Lindsey lying on her side of the bed in a
tangle of covers.
She was so still, he thought she was dead. He had the crazy feeling
that he’d killed her. With a switchblade.
Then she stirred and mumbled in her sleep.
He shuddered. He looked at his hands. They were shaking.
Vassago was so enamored of his artistic vision that he had the impulsive
desire to reverse her eyes right there, in the bar, with everyone