There is blood in the room, but they can't find it. They know it's there. Blood always comes through. It can wait.

For hours, days, since, there's been washing and rubbings, sprayings and windows opened, but a small colony of maggots has still managed to thrive on a chunk of forgotten lung tissue caught under a chair leg. The flies will not disgust them when discovered in a few days. They will never find the bronchiole, and one day it will be swept up by a landlord or a rug cleaner.

The murdered one is not as important as the murderer, though, in this situation. Broken, affectless, the murdered woman does not concern us, as she did not much concern anyone in life; their theory to why she is dead.

Ah, we hold the key to something awful, something truly, deliciously awful, that we want.

We will start looking after hours, in a small, quiet part of the world. Things can hide in silence. But blood always comes through. It waits.

It twists in his gut, the memory of every no, every dismissive glance, each turned ankle, each beat of a high-heeled retreat. He's grown to accept the odds, the disadvantages of himself. Even lucky nights are rarely truly lucky. But he persists, like a good soldier, like his daddy had always told him to do with all things, and in that persistence he had grown mean.

He doesn't realize this quite yet; he doesn't hear the casual disdain in his voice when he compliments women on their bodies, their clothes; doesn't realize that he sounds rude, even dangerous, when he invites them home for drinks, and more recently, blatantly, sex; isn't consciously aware of the change between the pitying, uncomfortable glances and offended , nervous ones he now receives. No, he merely chalks up women in general to "having changed", to being even more frigid than they had been before, to a new trend in sexual politics. He is not aware that he has, more and more often, begun to refer to women as "cunts" in his internal monologues.

He only feels the twisting of gut and heart and down-there parts, and accepts his lot in his life.

Tonight, he sits in the coffee shop and watches the waitress serve him and the rest of her tables. He watches her bring trays of hot breakfast to the rowdy, drunken after-bar crowd and scans her flock for targets.

That blonde in the corner is trashed... Three of em. What, are they dykes? Too risky. Cunts in packs…fuckin' wolves.

Then the dirty girl comes in. He has of course picked the table which allows him to watch the door. He is one of the customers that waitresses hate, the kind that seats himself regardless of any lineup, and always picks the dirty table in the section full of clean ones. He watches her come in and his radar goes haywire.

She must be loaded, bitch is loaded...look how dirty she is, she can barely walk...she looks terrified...

A terrible, but scarily inviting, thought surfaces in his mind.

Maybe she's retarded.

Without any conscious effort on his part, his dick starts to get hard. Six months, a year ago, this thought would probably have caused him to look hastily away, remonstrating himself for using non-politically correct language, but now his evolving sexuality entertains the thought like a courtesan.

Retards don't get laid much, I bet, he thinks, and laughs, taking the immature pleasure in using such elementary-school terminology.

He giggles a bit more, covering his mouth with its awful two broken teeth behind his hand. Old habits die slow, but they do eventually die, and he looks down with some surprise to find that his Young Callahan is now obviously awake.

The girl looks awful; stringy hair, smudge of what may be puke on her arm. She is standing by the hostess podium, eyes as wide as Christmas, waiting.

Your wait is over, honey. He gets up from his long-finished coffee, shambles toward her. He left two dollars on the table, a four cent tip for the harried waitress, who always threatens to kick him out when he tries to talk to her privately. Just talk, just ask her how she is, how the boyfriend she always tells him she has is doing these days (he doesn't believe that she has a boyfriend; he thinks she must be a lesbian, which would explain why she's so rude to him when all he does is try to be nice to her), but fuck her, she can bitch about her tip to someone who cares, some loser with nothing to do after the bar on a Saturday night. Not him!

He has something to do. There it is now, trying to swipe napkins from the counter while none of the staff is looking.

The hostess swoops in, a vulture on his prey, and he stops in his tracks, steps back and drops into his recently-vacated seat, needing a moment to rethink his plan. He slides the edge of his saucer over the two dollars to keep the waitress at bay and watches, sliding his discount cigarettes out of his pocket, mourning briefly that he can't smoke in these places anymore. But there's no law against holding one, and so he slips one out of the pack, puts the rest away and strokes it thoughtfully under the table as he watches, the pad of his calloused thumb rasping over the paper seam between the filter and the tube, the tip of his deeply ridged nail digging slightly into the seam of the tube. A strange choreography overtakes the movement, as it always does when he's concentrating: over the seam, into the seam and back; over the seam, into the seam and back. Sensation begets sensation, and numbs his body, focusing him inwards, a single eye looking out upon the world.

The girl flicks a lank strand of hair away from her face as the hostess speaks to her. He can't hear what they're saying, but their bodies sound like disdain and fear, condescension and shame. Over the seam, into the seam and back.

His breathing grows more rapid, his heart pounding at her shame. Dirty girl, dirty girl, hello little dirty girl, he breathes softly to himself, imagining what it would be like fucking her from behind up against an alley wall, slick with grime and graffiti, breathing on her thin, unwashed neck, his hand in her hair, holding her head firmly against the bricks, the sheen of horrified saliva glinting on her teeth under the streetlights.Oh yes, little dirty girl.

Over the seam, into the seam and back. The moment stretches out as he pictures the rictus of her face as he ejaculates in her ass, feeling her heartbeat flutter through her body, an undulation of a pulse, one after the other, crescendoing and decrescendoing rapidly, her torn flesh like clutching fingers that have forgotten how to let go.

The girl, only half-paying attention, seems to feel someone watching her, and slowly glances around the room, meeting his eyes. Her face is slack, her eyes bovine, but she's aware of him. Shit. The cigarette under the table snaps at the filter under the sudden pressure of his thumb, and he curses himself for being so obvious. His erection wilts.

Bitch, he thinks. That stupid fucking cow.

The hostess gestures the girl towards the door. She is not welcome here. He sneers, one lip sliding upward, a snake through pock-marked mud, slow and nasty. How do you like that, you dirty little cow?

The girl daubs at her nose with one of the stolen napkins, which comes away delicately bloodied, intriguing him further, his dick on the move again. He senses the waitress hovering near, coveting her four cents and his table, and holds his ground for a moment, watching the scene at the door.

Without looking at the hostess, she nods only once, a movement so slight that it might have been that her head just drooped, and turns to walk out the door, napkin still in hand. The hostess has written them off; it's worth it to have her gone.

As the door begins to swing closed behind her, he stands, sliding the saucer away from the money, humming an old pop tune under his breath, even though his preference is country, timing the beat of the song to the step of his feet, thinking of wolves' teeth and saliva as he follows her out the door.


Before the summer came, and the Lost Time, Ruby Daniels was somewhere else. She remembers the Time Before and the Time After but there are five weeks missing and she has given up hope of their safe return. The bus trip to San Antonio is long, and she has time to apply more mortar to the doors that keep it Lost. Doodling idly in her coiled blue notebook, she passes the time between paragraphs with childlike drawings of dogs. One has sabretooth-type fangs, and beneath it is scrawled Fiat Lux. She plans to look it up in the library when the bus gets to San Antonio.

The notebook is smeared, falling apart. But she must keep it whole. She has copied the contents of the book into three new ones now – word for word, drawing for drawing, by hand. It is her living concordance, and without it the Lost Time seems much more appealing than the highways of Texas.

Ruby sleeps. She knows it by heart, and has to be awake to meet the detectives at the station. The detective's name is Goren, and his business card has a Latin phrase. She knows the Lost Time is coming back. For now, sleep.

When the bus does not arrive in New York, Bobby Goren calls the Plano police station.

"We put her on a bus."
"Yes. But the bus is not here. In fact, the bus appears to not be in this county at all." Goren is light, but his tone belies knowledge. He is waiting for the news. Something is wrong.

"Well…I don't rightly know what to say. We put her on the bus, watched her get on m'self. I don't think she's a flight risk – to be honest, looked like she could use a change of scenery after that thing at the diner. Are you sure it's the one-thir-oh, hold on." Rustling papers. Goren's neck gets warm.

His cell phone vibrates the second that the Plano sheriff comes back. They have the same information.

"Seems the bus made a stop in Memphis, at the Tennessee state line. Your girl got off and disappeared. No one saw anything. I'm right sorry, Detective. Found her backpack and her wallet though, so I don't know as she's gone too far."

Goren is already walking towards his car. "Have the bag sent to me this afternoon. Don't touch it without gloves. Bag it. Get that bus driver in for questioning, too." The driver wasn't notified of Ruby's trip. He should have been, and Goren made sure the Plano sheriff knew it. "Ruby Daniels is a suspect in a major homicide investigation, and I was under the impression she'd be monitored."

"Well…" The sheriff had had enough of Goren. "She wasn't under arrest, and volunteered to go help you, sir. If she wandered off, it's not a felony. Can't pick her up for leaving her things on a bus, now. At least, that's how the law works here in Plano. Detective."

Goren is pulling out of the lot. "Have the bag here by 5 EST or we have a much bigger problem than a skipped witness, Sheriff. Goodbye." The clipped New York accent is twice as dismissive. Goren is often rude, though he is not aware of it.

At the station, he maps out the area Ruby could have run to by now, and calls the State Police to arrange an APB. The bag arrives at 5:15. Forensics has it by 5:30, minus one piece.

The blue notebook sits in Goren's briefcase, waiting. He brings an extra pair of latex gloves home. When he is finished, he calls the FBI and arranges to send copies to Agent Clarice Starling.

Starling is not a popular person, and she loves it. It gives her time to read.

Starling has, with effort, become the best forensic language analyst in the blue states. Her time is occupied with codes, patterns, research, and puzzles. She is not capable of anything else since her graduation; having been burned, she loves the fire.

Starling is looking at the notebook Goren has brought over. He tried to give her photocopies at first, wanting to keep the notebook for himself, but she insisted that if he wanted a decent profile of the author, she needed to see the pressure-depths imprinted in the pages to account for stresses in the handwriting. This is partly true, but there's also the reality that she does what she does because she loves it, and there's an immediacy that gets lost in a copy, a connection: from my hands to yours. It's intimate, this reading and knowing of a stranger, and Goren's not going to take that away from her.

Starling has had just three conversations with Goren, so short they prompted her to poke around for information with his peers, which was whispered and unflattering. She is ready to meet with him tomorrow: not much freaks her out anymore.

Tonight she wants to get to know the writer of this book, and she has a stack of reference materials at the ready, and a notepad and a pen, in case anything really striking pops out at her. At first glance, the handwriting is neat, but the pages have disintegrated with wear, some dog-eared and dappled with coffee like holy water over a congregation, some edged with smeary fluorescent cheese powder thumbprints.

For now, she is enjoying it. Having turned down the lights, a soft glow fills her office of metal and glass, and she stretches out her legs for a good long read, pausing only to sneak a small handful of jellybeans from her desk drawer. The black ones are her favourite, but mostly because nobody else in the office likes them, and so if she had to share, she'd still have her favourites all to herself.

Snapping on some latex gloves as she chews, only dimly aware that she's actually enjoying the red jellybeans more than the black ones, she flips open the book, idly noting that it seems to fall open to a page near the middle. Her eye glides down the page, noting the advanced yellowing from finger oils, more so than the other pages.

The room may as well be empty. It's the backdrop to anonymity. The pictures on the walls are something everybody's seen, but leaves you feeling nothing. It's like every other hotel room I've ever seen. The only difference is the bedding. Nice places have better blankets. This place has scratchy blankets, polyester with polyester thread, clear and plasticky, poking up through the tufting where the threads have broken after being washed hundreds of times. I can't help but wonder about what this room's seen, and how it still manages to be so blank. Blank eyes on a dead world.

I guess it's paranoid, since I already look pretty different with it short, but I can't take any chances, so I'm dyeing my hair. The dye burns my scalp—it still hasn't healed, and the fact that my hands were shaking so bad that I jabbed myself a few times when I cut it doesn't help. I think of my hair in the fountain, and how bitter I felt, how lost, as the clumps sunk to the bottom.

I wait without a clock, pretending I know how to measure time by the movement of the sun, and probably waiting too long, staring out the window from my spot on the sagging bed. There's a spring jammed into the back of my leg, and I could move, but it wouldn't matter. The bed's all springs. I won't sleep very well tonight, but I rarely do anyway.

Outside, I can see the traffic sliding by, becoming nothing but strings of diamonds and rubies as the sun sets. There's a flower box on the windowledge that nobody's been tending to. I think the flowers are crysanthemums, but it's hard to tell. They're nothing but brown stalks now, their petals dry like fall leaves. Like miniature trees, I think, watching the light change on the dead plants, casting long shadows that turn the flowers into a forest on my floor.

It must be time by now.

I go into the bathroom, not looking into the mirror as I take the towel off my head, and rinse the dye out of my hair. I put the conditioner in, and knowing I have to wait, I take my chances with the mirror.

I used to have long black hair. I was probably a little vain about it back then, but I really liked my hair, the way it looked in the sun. It was a strange thing to see myself with short hair. I don't think I'd had short hair since I was really little and my mother would pin my hair back with plastic lamb-shaped barettes. I'd always had it long. Cutting it felt like cutting off a limb, and I hated that I was doing it because of him.

The dye is because of him, too, but it feels different. Like an empty motel room, with a freshly made bed and clean towels. No identity, no past. No sense of who was here, and who is here now doesn't matter much either. I am this moment and this moment will disappear, too, nothing left but the future, one empty motel room after another, stretching out before me like possibility.

I don't know if I like the colour or not, but it doesn't matter. I am a blank room now. That's what matters.

Starling stops herself, chastizing herself to start at the beginning. Turning to the front page of the notebook, she can't help but smile at the odd doodles: in the margin, dogs like Russian nesting dolls, infintesmal to massive, crawl out of one another's mouths, the tail of the last dog curling absurdly around the bottom of the page like inky blue smoke.

The page begins, and Starling follows it.

Sometimes when I wake up, I forget where I am, and how I got here. It's my senses that bring me back, though. The bus engine rumbling through my seat, the industrial feel of the upholstery, leaving funny pebbly marks on my cheek. The smell of the toilet at the back of the bus. The stale breeze from the vent at the window. The scattering of small lights on above seats, whether it's day or night. I can sleep any time, though. I prefer to sleep during the day. It keeps people from talking to me, from asking questions I've got no intention of answering. At night, the only ones awake are trying to lose themselves, like me: playing solitare, reading a book, or staring out the window. There are so many stars out here. I never saw this many back home. It's like they were hiding, and out here, where nobody's looking, they dance namelessly. Out here on the road, at night, there's nothing but stars. Especially on the back roads. I'm always glad when we take those. It means we don't get to stop for coffee as often, but what the hell. Road coffee usually tastes like shit anyway.

There's something different about the world at night, when all I can hear is the snap of a playing card and the occasional turning of a page. Mostly I like it, but when the playing cards stop and the book closes, and it's just me and the driver and the stars, I feel very small and unsure. I look out the window, and it's like falling into a black hole—just a sea of nothing out there. And sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing when I'm surrounded by all that nothing. All that space, all I can think about is the times when it was okay. When it was even kind of good. How happy I was sometimes. Mostly at the beginning.

What if I was wrong? And I have to play back all those old scenes to remind myself of why I left. I hate that I need that. It makes me feel weak, that I can't trust myself, that I almost need to let him hurt me again, if only through memory, so I can believe in myself and my decisions.

I hate him. Well, I want to. I think. I don't know. Hating takes so much energy, and all I really want, what I really want, is to forget. To become someone else. And it isn't enough for everyone else to see me as someone else. I need to be someone else to me. I want to undo myself and start again, really forget everything.

But mostly I want to forget the sadness, the hurt of being let down so bad. I never want to feel that again. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and not hate the beginning of another day in my own skin.

Starling looks up from the notebook for a moment, staring out the window without registering anything beyond the speckles of light on the skyline. A tower in the distance blinks over and over again. Pursing her lips in thought, she considers the differences between the first entry she read, and the one at the beginning of the book. The one at the middle is different. The crossings of the t's are at the same height as the first entry, with the same slightly downwards-and-to-the-right tilt, the d's with the same deliberate stem that dips only barely under the lines, but the angle of the letters changes partway through the entry, as though she was rushing to make sure her pen kept up with her thoughts. The ink skims across the page in that later entry, the pen barely denting the paper. The first entry seems to have the same pace throughout, an almost flat affect, an even and ponderous pressure to the letters. Strange.

She takes a deep breath, trying to prevent her mind from jumping to the conclusions it's already going towards. The girl will unfold herself to me in good time, she thinks. All I have to do is read. She glances at her mostly-empty coffee cup, and decides she'll fill it after she reads a few more pages, but falls asleep before finishing the thought.

Goren is writing in the margins of his legal pad. He is mapping out the route Ruby took from New York to Plano, getting as many names and times as he can infer from the short list that Starling gave him after she scanned through the notebook the first time. Every town is on the crisply-printed list his officers have prepared. He closes his eyes and watches the connections be made, glowing like LED tubes, colours mixing, creating a perimeter. He is asleep in seconds, and a dream takes the reins, showing endless loops of entwined, cartoonish dashes, pushpins, and unmarked graves Ruby Daniels may have left all over them.

When the call comes through from Plano that they have found Ruby's jacket, Starling leaves the phone off the hook, runs by Goren's desk and tells him to pick up. He listens to the Texas cop and follows her to the bus station in his own car, cherries flashing bright.

Ad Astra

Having collected Ruby's jacket from the lost and found, latex gloves in place, Starling walks back to her car and Goren. Pulling out napkins one by one, shredded carefully into strips of four, she sees each one is covered in a specific colour of ink, handwritten words that either do not make sense, or are familiar – every high school class readsHamlet. Idling outside of the passenger door, she makes no sign of noticing Goren, who waits impatiently to touch them.

A businessman staggered out into the parking lot, tripping on the torn tarmac. Goren couldn't tell if he was screaming drunk, or agitated at a phone call. He hated the earpiece phones with all of his soul, and the skips on the surface they cause. Goren likes things he can count on. Everything in its right place.

Starling leans up against her car, parked parallel to his, considers propping up her feet on his door to sit and stretch, and decided against it. His car is cherry in every way – clean inside and out, washed, waxed. He would not be happy, and she doesn't want to disturb her train of thought with an apology. Putting the napkins together was her only focus, clumsily as she was accomplishing it. She could tape it together later. For now the girl's words were the only thing she cared about.

The salaryman walks towards the two cars, still sputtering. Goren flattened himself against his car door to let him pass, not making eye contact as he stumbled through the small space between the cars. Angry with some response from the sky, or the caller, he shoved Starling as he passed.

She collides with Goren and he grabbed her shoulders.

Their hips twitch together in shock, relax, then apart in greater shock. He will tell himself later she needed a moment to regain her balance. His breath is heavy: the air is thin. Her head swells with blackness. Her body blushes.

Trying to look away, they look at each other.

Pause.

"I. Ahem." Goren is flustered, but not willing to play pretend. "Words. Words go here. Uhm."

"Words?"

"Words."

Her hips trembled again, the signal coming from a deep, night place.

He could not move until she did, and realizing this she stepped back too quickly and coughed.

"I…"

"So…"

Words. The thought nagged again.

A broken machine makes only echoes.

Words. Words. Words.

"Echoes."

"Of?" Composed. It's forgotten.

"Things that've already been said. Or sounded. Or made."

"Viruses? Loops?"

"Quotes."

Pause.

"Writer's block?"

"No…but…"

"Plagiarism." His affect is sour.

"Words, words, words."

The sky darkened. She had lost time.

"Hamlet."

His face twitches. That same small tic. He is unaware of smiling. She had pleased him more than she could know.

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

Her skin reddens again. Her face is full of blood. Breathing in deeply, she sloughs it off. There will be time.

"I need…we need to look at that notebook again. And a quiet place. The basement evidence room should do it." Nothing else matters again. The quarry is the carrot and her body is the stick. She will not eat for another two days, nor will she know it.

"Take your car," he waves dismissively. "I'll meet you there. I have to go get some things I need."

Nod. Her gaze drops to the car door. He walks away from it awkwardly, leading with his chin. She waits for him to be two arms-lengths away, then turns her head on her left shoulder.

"You're twitching." He slows, does not stop or turn. "Are you cold?"

She knows it is quite the opposite, and wonders if he does.

Driving back to the office, Starling hears his heavy breath around her head, and permits herself the first smile in three days.

There were no things to gather. He had his briefcase, and his laptop. After Starling's car disappeared, Goren pulled into the parking garage and masturbated furiously, eager to start the research. His head had to be clear. When he finished, he did not think of Starling.

"So…is she Ophelia, or Gertrude?" His eyes are tired but his mind is electric.

"Depends on who's Hamlet and who's Polonius."

"And what does that make us?"

"You. Horatio."

Her attention hurts. A small welt raises on his stoicism.

"What? How so?" Trying to keep his tone even, he betrays himself with a tic.

"Horatio…understood. And to the end, tried to make everyone else understand too."

Humming, he turns to the wall. She regrets her tone, but not the truth. He is going to explode.

"I don't-"

"I KNOW."

The room fills up with static. She can feel her energy brush against his, oscillating crazily. He stalks the rows of cheap folding tables, like a golem in a maze. His eyes are magnificent, shining like magpie treasure.

"I've done what I can, here…to help. Helping the victims, their families, his family – someone out there is caring for all those people, though. Someone wants them to be saved."

He turns to her, into the static field, his hand on the table; a pivot, a force of physics. A lion would roar.

"Yes. I want to save him. I want to stop him. But I want to know him. That's true. Yes. Bad men aren't born bad. They're made. And the more we know about how they're made, the better-"

"The better we can know ourselves."

No magpie could resist. He turns to hot stone. The energy does not drain from him. It settles in his shoulders, in his trunk; it hums like current. It pricks her neck.

She was not afraid of Goren. He would not hurt her, cross her, unless she trespassed on his rules. The rules were very specific for pain; his was not for her consumption. But it had to come out, and better now than later.

"I'm sorry…no. No, I'm not. If you're going to do this with me, I need to know you won't fuck up, and you won't bleed all over your badge. Whatever he is, he's murdered someone. Slaughtered them. Someone who had every right to wake up in the morning and eat breakfast and go to work, who has as much right to live her life as the rest of us." Worked up now, she pushes things to the surface that must be put down every day. His chest is rhythmic, the hum everywhere. He wants her; he wants this more. Nothing will be gained by lying, things might be missed should she hold back.

"It's always a woman, isn't it? Always a male killer and a female victim. It's the woman whose entrails are scattered into crazy bullshit patterns they make up, the woman who is eaten, raped, humiliated, depersonalized. When you watch a fucking movie, it's always a beautiful woman dumped in the lake, or the buried in the lime pit. And you don't feel sorry for them. You feel sorry for him. You want to help him. You want to talk to him, right? Have a big man-to-man chat. Find out where he keeps it? Find out how he does it? Don't you, Goren? And you know why, too. Because there but for the grace of God-"

The table is in the air, then on the floor by the wall. Instinctively she closes her eyes and lowers her chin, and hates herself for it. He is heaving now, hands in talons, eyes so bright he could see in the dark. In her mind is the rustling of birds, carrying pretty salvage, clicking tiny treasures in powerful claws.

Backing away, he slides silently to the door, but does not leave. Beats pass. She opens her eyes and her thin eyes are full of interest. He knows she wants to study him, to know him. His arms are heavy with rage, and he cannot trust himself to stay and talk. He was just waiting to see her look, and it is not full of pity, or avarice – just a mirror shard of her own self, reflecting in his possibility, and pushing down what she recognizes. Her spine curves down like a brandy glass. She has swallowed too much guilt, and it ruins her posture.

His hands ache and he cracks them. The briefcase remains on the floor when he leaves.

Starling toys with her pen, wanting to write the couplets again, to try to break the code. Goren has made fantastic progress, and she is satisfied with him. Of the hundred lines they salvaged from the apartment, he has identified exactly half, all stolen from songs, Shakespeare, and popular novels. One is a caption from a photo album; they found the album, but nothing in it save magazine clippings of different colours, arranged into wheels and tagged with adjectives: happy, fearful, horny. Goren is beginning to think she may have been trying to invent another way to speak.

"Synesthesiacs have been known to use colour as a metaphor for emotion, flavour, sound – you might feel blue, but the person with synesthesia knows what it tastes like. If her failure as a writer was because she couldn't describe feelings, locations – everything, accurately…it could be a Rosetta stone, a different form of concordance."

"Concordance? A guide?"

"Yes. Like a daytimer, almost. When a character is happy, she relates it to how, say, yellow feels, or to what sound it has. It's brilliant, actually. It would make a wonderful science fair project." Goren was tired, and hungry. Ruled by his stomach in all ways, he fought the tendency to run to fat between cases. During difficult thinking, he did not eat at all, enjoying the lightheadedness of a fast and the speed it lent his thoughts.