Parts Per Million

The basement stairway is a black hole pulling at Nelson, dragging him down. His hand is on the banister, measured, silent, like defusing a bomb. Not that he's ever defused a bomb, but it probably feels like this, with the sweating and the churning. Bare toes slide forward to find the edge. One step down, and the dark fills up with the heavy beat of his heart.

His hands are cold and wet from the railing and slip on the door knob but it pulls open of its own accord and there she is in the dark foyer. His wet hands catch in her hair. Drag over her skin. Slippery mouths. She breathes like a diver. "Forgive me?" she says, he thinks she says but it's more like an echo off his flesh.

The cheer mushrooms up, echoes off the buildings. Signs dance like wavecaps stretched as far as he can see. Nelson's knees are titanium. His head is crystal, clear and solid. His heart is a ruby, dense with love. He lowers his arms and walks away from the microphone. Hands pat his back, squeeze his arms, rest on his shoulders as he makes his way down the stairs. Fetzer's eyes, Jen's eyes, bright, alive, loving. Isobel yelling in his ear, "Good job!"

And Deirdre. He holds her tight. "Let's get married," he says into her neck, and he's not sure if she heard over the noise of the crowd, but she pulls back, grips his shoulders.

"Yes!"

Nelson lets a sliver of light into his eyes. It must be after midnight. The sound of the others' breathing surrounds him. Faint traffic noise bleeds in from outside, and a muffled TV is on next door. Even through the wall he can tell it's the blow-by-blow bombing of Baghdad. Shock and Awe.

Nelson's chest is heavy and uneven like it's stuffed with dirty damp towels. His head seems only partially connected. Moving so slowly it takes him nearly a minute, he turns his feet and lowers them to the floor. He holds his bandaged hand away from the cushions and uses his other hand to push himself up to sitting. Somehow his head follows. His sleep has been dreamless.

This is so unbelievable. We get home from a big firebombing only to play host-with-the-most with some random stranger. What the fuck was Franky thinking? He’s a goddamn house sitter, not a hotel manager. Of course Nelson, being ambassador from planet dork, is into it right away. And Fetzer caved in like five minutes! Bunch of rescuers.

The woman Frank so generously invited into our headquarters stands in the doorway, looking around like she’s hungry and there might be a stash of food conveniently laid out somewhere among the filing cabinets and desks.

“Stay there,” I tell her. Last thing I need is her snooping through our stuff.

"For fuck's sake, Deirdre. We just wanted some help getting inside this stupid campus. Don't tell me this is going to turn into some long-term art project."

But she's smiling in a conspiratorial way that makes me pause. "Ah. But Dr. Reynolds would be a collector of fine-art photography, wouldn't he. And he attends the openings."

Fetzer strokes his chin. Nelson smiles, and I have to admit, the idea of that prick seeing our mugs all over his swanky gallery walls is pretty funny.

The door to the building opens and my heart goes ka-bang again. A woman in a long brown coat steps out. Fetzer comes out behind her. Who's the woman? But she walks in another direction and Fetz comes towards the car.

He's a weird color.

Please, God, or whatever you are, I have never asked you for much.

Fetz opens the door, sinks into the seat. Drapes his pudgy hands over the bottom of the steering wheel.

"It's her," he says. A sound like a flock of bats rises up, screeching pins into my shoulders, my brain, beating me down.

Then when they were diddling around processing the crap in my pockets, stupid female cop said, "What is this, anyway?" and she waved the cable in my face. That I'd picked up off the basement floor.

"That's an Ultra ATA IDE ribbon cable to connect your hard drive to your controller card, and it was ripped out of my computer when my house was trashed by two violent criminals. But you arrested me for peacefully protesting. Can you tell me how that makes sense?"

Bitch was already pissed off I didn't have ID. She squished her mouth. "You and your friends are costing the city a lot of money."

"George Bush cost the city a shitload of money in August. Arrest him."

I got the needle to 70, and sagebrush and rocks and the occasional salt pan passed us by as we barreled along towards the Oregon border. We were sleepless, and that dammed oily burnt smell hung around even though we all had on clean clothes and the ones from the op were in two layers of black plastic bags in the trunk. If we were smart, we would have dumped the bags, but we were too poor to throw clothes away, and anyway, we'd have to be super smart to deal with dumping. Fingerprints on the bag, buttons, zippers. Too much to deal with. Could've burned them, but fires tend to attract attention. Like the one we videotaped. It was hitting the news right then on the car radio.

Nelson kept staring out the kitchen window. Jen pulled off her headphones. "Nelse?"

"Hmm?" Nelson turned to Jen, his eyes polite and there-for-you. I almost said, There's something you need to know about our guest, the one lying self-inflicted under the only fine sweet thing left of your grandma's. But I didn't. Because by then Deirdre had me disarmed. She'd looked up at me from that sweaty bed and whispered, "Promise you won't tell them?" Her hand was tight around mine. "I've got to get away from that shite. Fresh start. No one even thinking it about me." She squeezed even harder. "Please, Fetzer?"

Before midnight Dee and Nelson slipped out to the bathroom and came back with a big-ass chocolate cake. For me. Fifty candles poking out of its dark shiny frosting. And the singing, everyone singing. Dee and Nelson's hands under the heavy cake, their eyes locked on it, their feet shuffling forward into the dark room, their candlelit smiles. Shoulder to shoulder, holding the cake steady like a sacred thing of joy they were bringing to an altar. It was one of those moments you don't forget. The sweetness of it.

In seconds we were summoned out of Franky's car and led away from each other. Dee gripped Nelson's hand. "I need you to step over here, ma'am," said the cop. Dee just wound her hand tighter round Nelson's arm. The cop went and got a female cop. I don't know what she said because by then I'd been escorted to the other side of the road, but she pried Dee from Nelson and led her away.

Jen was sitting on the ground near the house with a big tall dude standing by her. Nelson was in a cop car. Franky was in another cop car. Dee was taken somewhere behind the fire truck. Cops went in and out of our house.

Pretty much the loneliest I'd felt in a long time.

(via Nelson)

She leans towards him and her face goes wide and bright. "Hey, you know that part in Peter Pan where Peter is marooned on a rock in the ocean, and the tide is rising and he knows he's going to drown?"

The table's pink Formica swims with overlapping swirls. Why does she make him feel like he's never read a thing? "No."

"It was probably left out of the Disney version. So he's standing there and his heart is pounding and the water is lapping at his toes. And it suddenly occurs to him, 'To die would be an awfully big adventure.'"

The points of her smile are like blades. The sore place swells in his chest.

(Via Jen)

And her fingers on my arm when we climbed over the fence. Digging in, letting go, leaving white marks under the freckles for a second. Then she was stepping onto the tracks, looking down them one way, then the other, like a little kid hoping to see a train. And on the way back, she goes and slips her hand under my hair like she owns it and asks what kind of shampoo I use and says it's beautiful.

"Not you, too," I said. It's bad enough having modelboy Franky nag me about 'hair care'.

But she told me that when she was a kid she prayed every night for curly red hair. And that they'd called her japhead in school, and said her mom bonked a chinaman.

"Bloody racist where I come from," she said. "It was good to get away."

(Via Fetzer)

Dee's place was decorated all over with strings of colored lights. There was a little bit of dancing but mostly we drank wine and talked and nobody was in a hurry to leave. My mind drifted in and out of the conversations, and the colored lights winked on and off all around us. A strand came loose and dangled close to Deirdre's head. She was laughing at Isobel's jokes and the reflections off her hair turned red, then green, then gold, then blue. She looked pretty in the soft light. More feminine, less angles.