Chapter 1
Your phone starts buzzing at ten-twenty at night on a Wednesday. You don’t recognize the number. Despite your better judgment, you pick up anyway. You don’t know why. You suppose that you were always going to.
“Hey,” he says. He has a thin sort of voice, tight with anxiety. It grates at the moment. “It’s Steven–Steven Grant?” This comes out like a question, as though he’s not certain himself. “I just wanted to check–we did say seven, didn’t we?”
For a moment, you’re paralyzed by the urge to hang up without saying anything. But he sounds genuinely confused–if he’s an actor, he’s got to be a damn good one. Maybe he’s just high.
“Seven?” you repeat, just to be clear.
“Yeah, Saturday at seven. For dinner?”
You were settling down with an ice cream sandwich and a book. You set the book down and give the ice cream sandwich, still in its wrapper, a second look. Even if his manners apparently don’t preclude standing you up, yours preclude eating on the phone.
“Steven, do you know what day it is?” you ask.
He’s quiet for a moment, and then he says, “Saturday. Isn’t it? I think it’s Saturday.”
You say nothing for a long moment, trying to decide whether you’re being punked.
“It’s Wednesday,” you say. “And it’s–” You check the clock. “--ten-twenty-four at night.”
“Oh,” he says, and then is quiet for a moment. Then, almost like a sob, “Oh my god.”
And there’s that note of panic that gets to you. When you were in college, a drunk girl once banged on your door for a good fifteen minutes, thinking that your room was hers. When you opened it and she realized that you weren’t her roommate, she said, This isn’t my room, and you said, No, it’s not, which room is yours? And you got in the elevator with her and walked her back home.
You like to think that you’re good in a crisis. Your mother says that you’re just a bleeding heart.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize,” he says. “I’m so sorry. I’ll–”
You shush him, unable to help it. “It’s okay,” you say, even though it’s not. Clearly he has something bigger going on. If this boils down to a time management issue on your end–well, there are worse things. “Where are you right now?”
“I’m–I’m at the restaurant. I thought I would–oh god.”
“Hey,” you say, trying to soothe him. “Hey, it’s all right. Have you had anything to drink tonight?”
“I don’t drink,” he says. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be bothering–”
“Steven,” you say. You get up. You put the ice cream sandwich back in its box in the freezer. “Stay right there, okay? I’m going to meet you there.”
You hate driving in London; you are not the best at it. The only car you have is a manual, and driving on the wrong side of the road still boggles the mind. Worse, there are all these traffic circles–roundabouts, the Brits call them. Having a car in London is expensive, but where you grew up, if you didn’t drive, there was no public transportation to take in its lieu. You just don’t feel safe unless you have your own automobile to make your escape in.
You pull up outside of Minerva’s Indian Kitchen, half-expecting to have to pay for parking, but the lights are off. There, sitting on the stoop with his coat collar folded up to his neck, is Steven. He smiles at you sheepishly.
You park on the street and get out of the car, your keys in your pocket. Steven doesn’t strike you as a dangerous person–a little too naive and needy for that, so if he’s faking, he’s a very good faker.
“Hi,” he says.
You look at the restaurant windows behind him. “They closed the restaurant, huh?”
“Yeah.” He’s still smiling, not in a way that says it’s funny but in a way that says he’s uncomfortable. “You didn’t have to come all the way out here, I could have gotten a cab. I’m really sorry–”
“It’s all right,” you say. If he has head trauma or something going on, then missing a date is the least of his problems. “Can you do me a favor?”
His eyebrows go up. “Yeah. Yeah, of course, I can.”
“Great.” You shake your phone twice and the flashlight goes on. You hold it so that you can see his face without shining it directly in his eyes; with your other hand you hold up one index finger. “Can you follow this with your eyes, without moving your head?”
He flinches a little from the bright light, and the corners of his mouth pull down as though disappointed. But his pupils don’t seem unusually dilated, and there’s no hesitation as he tracks your fingertip back and forth across his field of vision.
“Does your head hurt at all?” you ask.
He shakes his head. “Just–just my pride, I guess.” He offers you that nervous little smile again.
“You don’t remember getting hurt or anything?”
“No, nothing like that.”
You wait a moment, feeling awkward about having to ask, but: “You didn’t take anything, did you?”
“Take… like, from the rest–oh!” His eyes go wide as he realizes what you mean. “No, no, I don’t–I’m not into anything like that, I promise. I just… haven’t been sleeping very well, is all.”
That looks like the understatement of the year. Steven doesn’t just have bags under his eyes, he has full-on Samsonites. His hair is wild. You fully believe that he doesn’t sleep well.
“Yeah,” you say, thinking vaguely of things that you might have seen on Reddit. “Hey, let me drive you home.”
He’s very drawn in on himself, you decide, watching him sit in your passenger seat. He sits with his knees close together and his hands on his lap, his fingers touching. His elbows are tight to his side. Like he doesn’t want to make a fuss. You enter his address into your GPS and set your phone in the cupholder.
“If you need to rest, you can go ahead,” you say. “I won’t mind if you nod off. You might hear me swearing at traffic, though.”
“No, that’s okay,” he says. “You drove all this way out, I can–can keep you company.”
But he doesn’t seem to know where to go from there with the conversation.
You can’t help yourself. “Have you heard about Agatha Christie?” you ask.
“The novelist?” he asks. “Death on the Nile and all that?”
“Yeah,” you say. “I’ve read a lot of her stuff–she’s one of my favorites. She was so obsessed with the locked-room mysteries, she made these little dioramas in her spare time, little dioramas of the perfect murder. Some of them are still used in forensic classes. And she wasn’t a specialist. She was just a woman with a big imagination and a lot of things to think about.”
He smiles. “I’ve read, ah, And Then There Were None, I think. I never got as much into her Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, but…” He shrugs.
“Oh, And Then There Were None is my favorite,” you say again. “Not, like, my favorite book of all time, but I read it when I was twelve and it was, like, formative for me. I don’t like a mystery unless I have the chance to solve it, you know, all the clues.”
“Do you read a lot of mysteries?”
You frown, thinking about it. “I guess I do,” you say. “My parents like thrillers, but I’ve always liked mysteries. Even the books I read when I was a kid, they were set up like mysteries–you know, something nobody understands, and then the reveal, and then the kid detectives have to figure out what’s going on, and at the end some authority figure explains what happens. But–like, I liked Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I just forget that a lot of these crime thrillers are modern-day classic mysteries.”
“Modern day classics,” he repeats. He’s sitting upright, but his head is tilting back to touch the headrest; his eyes are half-shuttering.
“What do you like to read?” you ask, unable to help yourself.
“Oh… Oh, I read a lot of nonfiction,” he says. “History, and the like.”
“Yeah? Guess that’s appropriate, since you work at the museum and all.” You smile encouragingly, but the corners of his mouth twitch down again. Then he plasters his smile back on his face. You turn your eyes back to the road. “Any particular period of history?”
“Ah, ancient Egypt, usually,” he says.
“Big period of history,” you say. You don’t know much, but think you read somewhere that Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than the construction of the pyramids.
He laughs. “Yeah.”
You consider prodding him for more detail, but instead you just say, “I had an Egypt phase when I was a kid. Had that Egyptology book, and I read The Egypt Game when I was little. For a while I kept drawing women with green eyeshadow and red lipstick.”
“Malachite,” he says, nodding. “I read The Egypt Game. Never had Egyptology.”
He’s a little older than you, so this doesn’t surprise you. You explain to him the Ology book franchise–he’s faintly affronted to learn that Egypt was slotted in alongside such fantastical constructions as wizards and dragons, but you vaguely remember that they came out with pirates and ocean books in the series too, so that’s somewhat less offensive. By the time you’re done explaining this series of kids’ books, you’re parking outside his building.
You put on the parking brake and go to your phone to turn off the GPS. When you have silenced it, you look up to find that Steven is watching you.
You smile at him and remind yourself that there are greater things at stake than just end-of-date awkwardness here. This isn’t even end of date. This is… post-mortem of date. The date was dead on arrival.
You turn off the car and ask, “Do you mind if I use your bathroom before I go?”
If you had any doubt about whether this was some kind of trick to get you to go with him to his serial-killing lair, you no longer do. All the color goes out of his face when you suggest entering his home. But you know men like Steven, and he strikes you as apologetic and yielding. If you frame it as an issue of I’m uncomfortable and you can do something to relieve that discomfort, you’re pretty sure he’ll let you into his apartment.
“Of–of course not,” he stammers. “You’re… more than welcome to, I just.” His eyes flick everywhere but at you now, the panicky gaze of a man taking stock of how he left his apartment. “Haven’t tidied up in a little bit.”
“I promise not to judge,” you say.
This doesn’t seem to reassure him; he is still humming with anxiety as you take the elevator in his building up to his floor. He’s on the fifth floor; it’s more than a little bit of a hike. The building is average, you guess–an old one with plenty of other people living in it. He has to lead you almost all the way down the hallway to get to apartment 512.
“It’s, uh, right through the door, on the right,” he says.
You don’t actually have to use the bathroom. You take note of a fish tank with a single goldfish swimming in it as you walk straight by, trying to keep to your promise by not looking too hard at anything to either side of you. You get an impression of books and clutter, but nothing more as you walk directly into the bathroom.
You close the door behind you and, for lack of anything better to do, lock it. Then you stand looking at the mirror over the sink for a moment.
Better be fast. Better pretend that there’s nothing unusual about this at all.
You use the toilet quickly and wash your hands, and while the tap is running and the toilet is refilling, you use the noise to cover the sound as you open up his medicine cabinet. There’s no guarantee that he keeps anything in here, you just want to know. But there are no prescription bottles in there–everything is over the counter paracetamol, allergy pills, antacids, cough sweets. Nothing here speaks of an ongoing psychiatric problem that he’s taking medication for. Of course, it could be somewhere else in the apartment–your own medicines live in your kitchen where you can take them with meals–but this invasion of privacy feels like a spot you have to check.
You close the cabinet and dry your hands and head out, your keys jingling in your coat pocket.
Steven is standing, awkward as a coat rack in his own apartment, his hands up in front of his chest like he might have to shield himself.
“Thank you,” you say. “Before I go, could you do one more thing?”
“S-sure,” he says, looking perplexed.
“Can you show me your carbon monoxide detector?”
“I–” His face falls. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m…”
“I know,” you say. “I’m sorry, I know it’s none of my business, but–you just lost four days, and I saw this thing on Reddit, and I just…” You swallow, reminding yourself that if you make it a request for your peace of mind, your comfort, he’ll probably agree. “...I’d feel a lot better about leaving you here, if I knew that you don’t have carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Like Edgar Allan Poe,” he says.
“Yes, exactly,” you say with relief.
He goes into his kitchen and retrieves a stepladder. You, with nothing better to do at the moment, admire the fish. It’s a friendly fish–swims right up to you when you appear in front of it. When you were a kid you asked for a goldfish for your birthday, and you killed three of them one after another before your mother gave up and got you a betta fish, which lasted years. At the time, you had no idea that fish aren’t meant to be kept in bowls. But this looks like a proper tank, even for just the one fish. It gives you the impression that Steven knows what he’s doing.
That doesn’t totally rule out the possibility that he’s a man with dangerous fixations or something–Jeffrey Dahmer was a taxidermist–but you choose to be comforted by the fact that the man chooses to care for another living thing.
Just behind the aquarium is a corkboard, upon which are fixed postcard after postcard. Thailand. Lithuania. Saudi Arabia. Cabo San Lucas. You raise your eyebrows and take a step closer to look.
“Did you go to all these places?” you ask.
“What?” Steven is positioning the stepladder under a white bulb on the ceiling. Reassuringly, there is a green light glowing on it. You have to assume that English carbon monoxide detectors function the same way that American ones do. “Oh, no,” he says, seeing what you’re looking at. “Those are from my mum. She travels a lot.”
“I’ll say.” You tilt your head, looking at the one from the Vatican. You drift over at about the same speed as the fish swims to spot Steven as he climbs up to take down the carbon monoxide detector.
“So, that’s the smoke alarm,” he says, pointing toward the kitchen ceiling. “And this one is the–there we go.” He detaches it from the ceiling and comes down two steps on the ladder to stand beside you so that you can peer down at the guts of the little device.
There’s no acid leaking from the batteries that you can see. Steven holds down the TEST button and it beeps twice, shockingly loud. Despite expecting the noise, you jump.
Steven releases the button. “Sorry,” he says.
You shake your head. “No, just remembered how late it is.” It has to be midnight, or almost midnight, you think. You hope he either has some thick walls or that his books provide some sound insulation for his apartment. Otherwise his neighbors probably won’t thank him for his conscientious home safety.
He holds down the button again. It beeps four times, and then he releases it. “If it makes you feel better, I can put in new batteries,” he suggests.
You brush your hair out of your face. You know you’ve overstepped. “Sorry, I just...”
The man lost four days. This is not the time to be delicate about propriety.
“No, I’m sorry,” Steven says. He climbs back up on the stepladder and reconnects the carbon monoxide detector, turning it until it engages. His face scrunches up with effort, and then as soon as it clicks he releases it and steps down again. He looks exhausted.
“Listen,” you say, glancing to the side, which is when you see the sand.
At first you think it’s some sort of strangely textured rug, one shaped like a ring that just goes around the bed. That’s sort of cool, you think–not the kind of modern art you might expect in Steven’s apartment. He gives very strong Nutty Professor vibes, with his classic bookcases and his towers of books everywhere. But something about the way the stuff lies on the wood…
“Is that sand?” you ask.
Steven says nothing. You look up at him on the stepladder and see that his face is scrunched up like he’s bracing for a blow. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m a… I’ve been sleepwalking. I try to. Uh.”
Slowly you look around the apartment. It’s hard to imagine that he’s short of tripping hazards, with the towers of books everywhere. Then you see the strips of blue painter’s tape on the door, and the deadbolts, and the lock and chain.
“Oh,” you say faintly.
“It’s nothing weird,” he says. “I just–want to know if I’ve been anywhere.”
You think through the logic of it. Maybe the texture of the sand is supposed to wake him up when he gets up out of bed? Or does he just wake up back in his bed, uncertain as to whether he got up and wandered during the night?
“Don’t you get sand in your sheets?” you ask.
He gives a short laugh that sounds more uncomfortable than actually humorous. “A bit, yeah.”
You look back up at him, at the look on his face that suggests he’d rather die than have you standing here in his studio apartment, witnessing the way that he lives. You promised not to judge.
“Listen,” you say again. “The reason that I brought up Agatha Christie is…” This is something of a wind-up, so you give him a short smile, asking him to bear with you. “Agatha Christie’s first husband was a piece of shit.”
It occurs to you that he hasn’t really sworn in front of you, and you wince, wanting to follow his lead in his home about what he’s comfortable with.
“Sorry,” you say. “I mean, he broke it to her that he was cheating on her, and he wanted a divorce. So Agatha Christie left home, and she disappeared for, like, days. Nobody knows where she went or what she did, and everyone was looking for her. Like, they found her car abandoned, it was in the news. They thought she might have killed herself. Then they found her at this hotel under a different name, and she said that she didn’t remember leaving or anything. So people just kind of assumed, ‘oh, she was so shocked, she went into a fugue state.’”
Steven looks at you. Even with the dark circles, he has big liquid dark eyes, and a sorrowful expression.
“I just–I think you should see a doctor,” you say. “Because you lost four days. And–and you have the National Health here, right? You can go see a doctor?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I can.”
“Right,” you say, feeling uncomfortable. You creep toward the door. “Thanks for humoring me, I just–”
He says your name and you look back up at him. His shoulders are slumped, standing at the top of that stepladder; after a few moments he steps down onto the floor.
“Thank you, for caring,” he says. “I really am sorry I missed our date.”
You smile at him, but this was a weird enough interaction that you don’t feel the obligation to offer up a second date immediately. He’s sweet, and he’s clearly intelligent, and he’s not doing well.
“It looks like you have more stuff going on,” you say.
He grimaces. “I did just find out that I missed the last three days of work.”
You wince. “Yeah. I’ll–get out of your hair and let you handle that.” You add, imploring, “Please go see a doctor.”
“Yeah,” he says, which isn’t the same as I will. “Good night.”
“Good night,” you say, and let yourself out.