Francis Dolarhyde looks up from the small bank of screens, where indistinct forms dance and waver. The school, determined to effect its renaissance (as the city-wide ad campaigns proclaimed), had invested heavily in infrastructure. This appears to exclude the network of closed-circuit cameras over which Francis presides. Like an impassive god, he sometimes thinks. Half of the cameras or the other are always on the fritz.
A female freshman last year claimed to have been assaulted in one of the parking garages after a late-night study session. That had actually occurred on Francis's single evening off during the week. The guard on duty was given a week's suspension without pay in pure spite of the old equipment.
Sometimes he pictures the woman (young, young...), her beautiful dark skin and her halo of hair, alone and frightened and in pain...and his heart aches for her. Other times he pictures the same scene and it makes him hard. He hates himself for it. Sometimes.
The people-they're kids, really-walking through the breezeway between the University of Baltimore's Buildings Five and Seven have no faces. It could be the fault of the camera, or it could be the fault of Francis's mind. They don't need faces; they're all the same. If they don't see him, why should he be forced to look at them? And yet he has trouble looking away. So many hopeful little dreams soon to be moot, insignificant, once the full force of cold reality slams down. So many clicking, clacking minds. So much teeming meat.
Occasionally, one of them waves and greets him. They do not stop to chat, because they assume he doesn't like to talk. In that they are correct. Just Hey, Mr. D. Then they are gone.
He has had girls stare. They are trying to reconcile. Francis is an exceedingly good-looking man. He is tall with dark ash blond hair, muscular, broad-shouldered. He has excellent teeth (though half of the front from the left incisor to just behind the canine is a prosthetic, a bridge). The girls won't see these because he doesn't smile. He offers just a white edge of the upper teeth. These positive, attractive attributes he tries to project, but he knows it's in vain. The girls, the women—their gaze slips down from his long-lashed blue eyes to the dark purple of the scar that curves from his upper lip to just beneath his left nostril. It hitches his lip up like an old-fashioned stage curtain, and it is just as gaudy.
The women blink. They give a smile just seconds too late.
On one of the screens in the upper right, a faceless man has stopped and is, Francis assumes, looking up at the lens of the camera. The man who is only his face stares back at him, and thinks it's ironic.
"Hey, D."
The voice startles Francis from his daze. It's Andy, the guard who mans the little booth beside the west parking garage.
Andy claps his hands and rubs them together. The heating is out in his tiny cabin, and the old ceramic fire hazard of a space heater he's brought is woefully inadequate.
Francis does not envy him.
Andy goes to the small table that stands by the door and pours some of the ashy-tasting coffee into a styrofoam cup, then empties almost the entire canister of powdered creamer into the cup after it. "Last week it was warm, too," he says. "What the heck?"
Francis hates when people talk about the weather. It's inane, grating. He shrugs.
"Any plans for Thanksgiving?"
Francis shakes his head. He tries to go back to watching his screens. The young man looking into the camera has gone.
"Got the wife's family coming over." Andy makes a show of rolling his eyes. The liquid in his cup is right at the rim, trembling there as he moves.
"Not yours?" Francis asks, negotiating around the "s" as his old speech therapist had taught him.
"Hell," Andy says, "don't mind telling you mine's all dead."
This makes Francis's head snap up.
"Drank themselves into the grave," Andy continues, oblivious. Cheerful.
"Mine, too," Francis says. "Dead, I mean."
"Damn. I'm sorry, man." Andy turns to go and a good deal of the coffee sloshes out of his cup and onto the floor below. "Oh, heck."
"I'll clean it up," Francis says. He is anxious to be on his own again, watching his faceless charges.
"Let me just get some napkins," Andy tells him, setting the dripping coffee cup on the desk above the bank of screens.
"You go ahead." Francis tries for insistence; it sound wheedling to his ears. He sneers, making sure Andy has his back turned. "I'll take care of it."
"Thanks, pal."
Francis is not Andy's pal.
Andy takes his cup and turns once again toward the door, then hesitates for a moment and turns back around. He props his elbows on the desk in front of Francis, who is trying very hard not to cover his mouth with his broad hand.
"Listen," says Andy. "If you want to have Thanksgiving dinner at my house, I'm sure my wife would be more than happy to have you. Think about it?"
Francis hears the pity in his tone and battles back a red wave of rage. "No, thank you."
"You sure, man? It's not a problem. Linda makes enough food to feed an army. You look like you could pack it away." Andy laughs, and in it is an edge of nervousness.
"No."
"Come on. Nobody should be alone on Thanksgiving."
The red tide overwhelms Francis, clouds his vision. He shoots up out of his chair, which goes skittering behind him. Andy flinches away but not far enough. "I said no!" He slams the heels of his hands into Andy's shoulders and the man goes careening away from the desk.
Francis's head is now clear enough that he sees the heel of Andy's shoe go into the small puddle of coffee. Andy falls, mouth open in a silent "o," his arms pinwheeling. The crack of his head against the corner of the table is loud in the silence of the room. The coffeemaker rattles with aftershocks. Francis has never before seen a person's eyes roll completely back in his head, showing only the whites like a panicked horse. No, that isn't entirely true. When Grandmother passed in the narrow, creaking bed she had slept in for longer than Francis had been alive, her eyes rolled upward, but there had been a thin moon-sliver of milky blue below the lid. Francis had not been able to close those eyes. He'd covered her with her musty quilt instead.
Andy is on the ground. When Francis walks from behind the desk, the pool of dark blood on the linoleum is already shockingly large.
He knows he shouldn't, but he tries to cradle Andy's head, to get him to wake up. He feels the triangular indentation just underneath the base of the skull. Warm blood shoots out over his fingers. Like he has seen in movies, he slaps Andy's cheeks lightly. None of it makes any difference.
He lets Andy's head down again and it lolls obscenely, as if something has been loosened inside his neck. Francis stands. There is a sea of red lapping against the soles of his work boots. He steps back from it, away, outside the door. Then he pulls out his cell phone, dialing 9-1-1 with one hand so as not to sully the screen.
We don't make our possessions dirty, Francis. When will you learn?
An operator picks up, asks him whether he would like to be connected to police, fire, or ambulance.
"Ambulance," says Francis, wincing at his pronunciation.
In the weak sodium light mounted on the roof of the guard station, Andy's blood on his hand looks greenish-black.
It is nearly dawn and far past the end of Francis's shift when he returns home. His commute is a long and rambling thing, through the city and underneath the Beltway, up County Route 147 Northeast almost halfway to Fallston. Typically, he doesn't mind it but this morning he is tired.
Tired but too on-edge to sleep. Wasn't it entirely believable that Andy slipped of his own accord in the puddle of coffee, causing him to strike his head? He didn't regain consciousness throughout the time that the EMTs were trying to stanch the bleeding from the back of his skull and strapping him into a bright orange foam head brace. He was not conscious when they finally loaded him into the ambulance, taking what seemed to be their sweet time with it.
Francis had more than half-hoped he would bleed out on the way to the hospital. There was so very much blood on the floor, after all.
When Andy wakes—if, Francis reminds himself—he will be quick to point the finger, though. They will arrest Francis.
People at the school, his co-workers, will describe him to the police as mild-mannered and quiet. Perhaps that could work in his favor. Plus, people with head injuries misremember things.
But Francis is so tall and so strong. Imposing. Because of his flaw (and his mind, he thinks, his sometimes sick and bad mind) would they take Andy's word over his? Francis has a headache. He thinks he has a brain injury, too, though it isn't the kind that is spilling out red all over the linoleum.
They hadn't reached out and touched anyone before tonight, those writhings and chatterings in his mind. Hadn't infected anyone. They're very worked up this morning. Showing him things: exciting things, sickening things. He wants to pry the top of his skull off and let the horrors free. Yet he isn't so much afraid of what they will do when they're loose in the world as the void that might be left inside his head when they are gone.
He needs to wipe the night clean, which is why he eschews the usual ritual of taking his bridge out and soaking it in the effervescent cleaning solution after he mounts the old, creaking stairs to his apartments on the huge house's second floor. The dental appliance feels filmed over, but Francis doesn't care. He needs to purify. One hundred push-ups in his attic studio, fifty pull-ups, working until his arms are screaming with pain. Two hundred weighted crunches, curling and twisting on every other repetition. His abdomen is a sheet of white agony when he begins the weighted squats and calf raises, one hundred of each.
He is clenching his teeth tight together when he has finished, runnels of sweat tracing paths over the swollen muscles. But it has helped. The pantomime in his brain has ceased for the moment. There is only that gilded afterglow of pleasure-pain, a pleasant blankness neither wicked nor good.
Leaving his clothes in a heap on the floor of the studio, Francis showers, then wraps himself in his tattered bathrobe. He needs to get another; he can order the same brand and size off the internet and no one has to see him in a store. Yet this is the one he has had since before Grandmother died. At last, he removes the bridge from his mouth and drops it with two tablets into a cup of cool water. On the other side of the vanity, a similar cup holds Grandmother's dentures, crusted with white residue and the tarry evidence of her lifelong smoking, the water long since dried. He can still catch a hint of that ashtray scent if he holds the lip of the cup just underneath his nose.
The thought of doing so crosses his mind, but Francis ignores it. Instead, he absently traces the line of small, circular scars on his left flank, the healed burns knotted under his fingers.
Without the fogged lens of the night over the events, he can now more effectively evaluate the situation. Is it dire? It may be. He could lose his job. He could be arrested, hurting his chances of finding another one. The possibility, Francis finds, frightens him less than he had thought it might.
No, it was the abrupt translation of thought into motion that scared him. Or, rather, the transliteration of impulse. He had felt no more control over his hands as they shot out and pushed Andy to the floor than he does the urges of his bladder or bowels (not for any lack of trying on Grandmother's part).
Incontinence of action.
Had he "snapped?" Is that what they called it? The cumulative effect of proverbial straws on the backs of camels? Francis doesn't see it as a snap, a breaking point. Perhaps that is part of his sickness. Maybe he should treat it as such.
But, even still...the power of not his mind but his body over poisonous pity. It had felt like a step forward. Dear God, it felt like vindication.
Don't you dare take Our Lord's name in vain, Francis. Blasphemy is a mortal sin. You'll burn forever in a lake of fire. Naughty boys go to Hell. You remember that.
He knocks the heel of his hand against his temple, hard, to stop Grandmother's voice. Francis doesn't believe in Hell. But he believes Grandmother.
By that evening, when he arrives at work, the lake of blood has been scrubbed away. The security station has always been dingy, but the linoleum shines and the place smells of bleach. Francis fields a curious, empty sort of disappointment. It is as if he expected Andy's blood had become the floor and had dried to a lacquered shine upon which Francis would step from then on.
Levon, the afternoon-shift guard, is still sitting behind the desk when Francis approaches. He gives what appears to be a wary look, but shifts to concern. Genuine concern, not undue pity.
Francis is taken aback.
"You don't have to be here, man," says Levon.
He stops, stands still, fingers fidgeting at his pockets. "I do."
"Hammond said you could take the night off after, you know…" he trails off.
"What?" Francis's heart was pounding.
Levon lowers his voice. "Andy."
"Did he wake up?"
"No, man. They say he's in a coma. It's fifty-fifty that he wakes up at all, they said."
"Oh, no," says Francis, relief gushing into his chest like a warm whirlpool.
"Nothing you could have done. Just one of those freak accidents, you know?"
"I tried to help him," Francis says, clasping his hands in front of him to keep them from shaking.
"I know you did," says Levon, coming around the desk to clap Francis on the shoulder. "I know you did."
"You can go now," Francis tells him. "If you want."
"Hammond wants to see you real quick, then I'll clock out."
All the relief he had felt drains from his body. "Okay," is all he can say. He doesn't budge.
"He's right in the office," Levon prompts.
Francis nods and turns, shoulders stiff. He hesitates a moment before opening the door. Though he is a full head-and-a-half taller than his supervisor, he still feels cowed. "You wanted to s... talk to me?"
Hammond, who is balding in a little round tonsure, turns to him and says, "I wanted to thank you. If it wasn't for you calling the ambulance, Andy might have been a lot worse off."
"I did what anyone would do."
"I think some people would have frozen up. But you didn't," says Hammond.
"It wasn't enough," Francis says carefully.
"Coffee?"
"No, thank you." He tries to block out the memory of Andy's warm blood pulsing out over his fingers.
"You seem like a real sensitive guy, D," Hammond tells him.
Francis is immediately on edge. "What does that mean?"
Hammond looks at him, the same damnable pity on his face. "It's a compliment. I just...some guys can get really messed up after seeing something like that."
"I'm fine," Francis says.
"Listen," says Hammond, digging in the breast pocket of his dark blue uniform shirt, "give this guy a call if you feel like it." He hands over a business card, printed on heavy, cream-colored stock. "He helped my brother with some of his shit—pardon my French—his issues after he came back from Desert Storm. 'Exposure therapy.' Bill was telling me about it. Seems kind of creepy to me, but it worked."
"Thank you," Francis says, trying not to let the blush threatening to suffuse his pale cheeks rise.
Hammond claps him on the shoulder, as everyone apparently does. "You did good, buddy."
He nods and then turns, shoulders rigid. Levon is gone, so he takes his place behind the guard's desk. Two of the screens in the bank are fizzing with static interference. He sighs.
An hour later, he realizes he is still holding the card, the paper going soft in his sweaty hand. He looks at it. In simple copperplate print it reads:
Hannibal Lecter
Psychiatrist
There is a phone number at the bottom. Francis turns the card over, but the reverse side is blank, warped where he had clutched it between his fingers. He goes to throw the card into the wastebasket underneath the desk but stops. Instead he puts it in his breast pocket, below which his pulse is now slow and steady.
Francis has trouble sleeping when he finally arrives at his house, the hulking old Victorian that used to belong to Grandmother. It still does, in its way. At six o'clock, still restless, he gets out of bed and goes downstairs to make strong coffee in an old-fashioned percolator. His hand is large around the small cup that used to be part of a complete tea service set. It is the only one left. Francis had accidentally broken the others when he was cleaning out the cupboards after Grandmother's death. It was soon enough afterward that he lay awake all the following night expecting to hear her shuffling footsteps, her sharp voice.
An hour later, for no reason he can name, he digs his uniform shirt out of the laundry basket. There is a great sense of relief that washes over him when he finds the card still in place inside the pocket.
His heart begins to thump as the phone rings in his ear. Once. Twice. Three times. Francis is about to hang up when a soft, cultured voice answers.
"Hannibal Lecter's office," the man says.
Francis cannot place the accent, but he knows it must be European. The fact that others may find this man's speech difficult to comprehend puts Francis at ease somewhat. "I—" he begins, "I'd like to talk to the doctor."
"You are speaking with him."
"Oh, I was...expec—" the word 'expecting' is still hard for Francis to pronounce without an acute sense of self-consciousness, so he changes tack. "I thought you would have an..." Answering service. Dammit. Too many 's' sounds.
It seems Lecter takes his meaning. "I prefer to take calls myself. A sort of preliminary screening, you might say."
Do I pass? Francis wanted to know, heart in his throat. Instead of that, he said. "I'd like to make an appointment."
"Very well," says Lecter. "When are you next free?"
"I work evening shift."
"Earlier, then. My calendar is open from one to four o'clock today."
"Today?" Francis echoes.
"We can move it later in the week, if you prefer."
We. The word hints at a sort of initial kinship, even though Francis knows it is probably an illusion. "No, today is fine. One o'clock."
"May I have a name?"
Francis takes a deep breath, willing himself to get the pronunciation right. "Francis," then adds, "Dolarhyde."
"Please write this down, if you will, Mr. Dolarhyde. My office is at seven twenty-one Acheron Street. Baltimore, of course. I trust it's not too far a drive."
"No," says Francis. "Thank you." He commits the address Lecter has given him to memory. Francis was always good at remembering things, whether he wanted the thing in his head or not.
"I'll see you shortly," Lecter says.
Absent anything else to say, Francis hangs up. He puts the phone down and drains the last of the coffee. It doesn't occur to him that the doctor did not ask him for a reason for the visit. Perhaps Lecter was able to discern a certain need simply by the tone of Francis's voice, which worries him.
He takes up the phone again, his thumb hovering above the keypad, fully intending to call and cancel the appointment. It may seem cowardly. It probably happens all the time. If he were to do it, would Lecter refer him on to someone else? The odd, curt phone call had the air of a single chance, after which there would be no others.
A preliminary screening process. Certainly, Francis can have one of his own. Like this doctor, he makes his living observing people, guessing at their motives. He wonders whether this seer has ever himself been seen. It is a satisfying thought, one that allays fear and doubt.
Francis looks over at the clock on the oven. Its green digital display clicks over to the next hour as he watches. It is a rare occurrence. Portentous, perhaps.
If he hurries, he can complete his calisthenics and have enough time to shower before he sets out on the long drive back into the city. Still, he cleans the coffee pot and the cup with care, setting each back in their respective cabinets with the quiet tentativeness of a child trying not to wake his parents in the pre-dawn hours.
Admonished by Grandmother against lateness as an adjunct to his many other sins, voluntary or involuntary, Francis pulls his van up to the curb at 721 Acheron Street at ten minutes until one. The day is cloudy and cool, so he stays inside with the windows rolled up. The heating is off, though. He is already nervous and sweating.
It's not too late. You can turn around and go.
It is too late.
If Andy wakes up, this will look good. Francis is getting "help." What would a normal person do? A normal person wouldn't have pushed Andy in the first place. Would not have held a palmful of hot blood and let it run through his fingers, turning the dirtied hand over and back, over and back in the low light. Would not still have the soiled shirt still in the attic studio to mop his sweat-soaked brow, leaving behind what perhaps could be only an imagined trace of pink on slick skin.
You're the filthiest child who ever lived.
Francis grits his teeth so hard it seems for a moment his bridge might pop free, and pounds the heel of his hand at the top of the steering wheel so hard the whole van shudders.
He looks at his watch. He has one minute to reach the door in order to avoid disappointing Dr. Lecter. After a deep breath, Francis leaps out of the van, only just remembering to lock it behind him. The main door of the understated two-story brownstone is painted a dark burgundy. There is no small, round privacy window set into the wood, which strikes Francis as unwise, even in the money-padded seclusion of the Bolton Hill neighborhood.
Anyone peering through the door would see his throat working, struggling to swallow down the lump that is knotting there as he raps on the hardwood.
A sleek intercom crackles to life beside Francis's elbow, making him jump.
"Just a moment, please," says the same accented voice that had answered the phone.
Francis nods, though no one inside will see him.
The intercom makes a rhythmic ticking sound, then Lecter's voice comes again. "Mr. Dolarhyde. Please come in. The door is unlocked."
When he presses his thumb down on the latch it clicks. He feels it rather than hears it. Francis steps into warm darkness that smells of leather...and something else he can't identify. There is no one in the small room in which he stands, but he sees the winking lens of a camera mounted in the corner before the door shuts entirely.
It's a very advanced, very expensive model. He stares into the camera's eye until he hears another door unlatch. Part of the wainscoted wall before him has pulled away and the crack lets in gray, filtered daylight. In the slice of light stands a man—tall, but not as tall as Francis. He is clean shaven, with medium brown hair gone somewhat long but nonetheless carefully groomed and combed away from his patrician forehead. His face seems to be all angles and shifting planes. His eyes are many colors, but near-inscrutable in the half-dark.
Hannibal Lecter smiles without showing his teeth.
Francis unwittingly does the same.
"Please," Lecter says, opening the door wider.
The room that Francis enters is a cathedral of folded shadows, made just that much starker by the weak glow that filters in through heavy, vertically-striped damask curtains. They fall in burgundy and taupe down the double-story windowpanes and pool in artful pleats on the carpeted floor. At the center of the room is a large, heavy wooden desk, behind which is a leather chair. Francis expects that this is the chair behind which Lecter will seat himself, but he is wrong.
With fingertip pressure at his elbow—an oddly intimate first impression—he guides Francis to a set of chairs by one of the windows, each chair facing the other. Without waiting, Lecter seats himself.
Uncertain, Francis sits across from him, his chin tucked down toward his chest.
"I suspected it was palatal, not just labial. Can you confirm, please?" Lecter says.
Francis's head snaps up, his eyes wide. The wordless sound that comes out of his mouth is vaguely interrogative.
"Was the full palate cleft at birth?"
Brows knitting, Francis blinks once. Twice. He is not reluctant to answer, but is put off guard by the fact that the first thing Lecter chooses to address is his disfigurement. "Partial," he finally says.
"Then you'll have a dental appliance of some sort."
Francis nods.
"You'll forgive me what might seem like impudence, Mr. Dolarhyde. I assure you it is only curiosity, much the same as what you might have regarding me."
Determined not to seem cowed, Francis says, "Where are you from?"
"Lithuania," Lecter answers. "Would you like a cup of tea?"
"No. Thank you."
"Very polite. Someone's taught you manners as compensation. How much of your day consists of compensation, Mr. Dolarhyde?"
Francis understands. He is not resentful, only parrying familiar shame.
"No need to answer," Lecter says. "That's not why you came to see me, anyway. Is it?"
"There was an accident. At work."
"Not you. Someone else?"
Francis nods. "A man. Andy. My co-worker. He's in a coma." The s comes out more easily than he had thought his stiff tongue might allow.
"What happened to him?"
Here Francis freezes, though there seems not to be any menace behind the question. Only the same bald, almost cheerful, curiosity. "He fell. Hit his head. There was...a lot of blood."
"Ah," says Lecter. "You were referred to me by your employer."
A nod.
"He is afraid you may be...traumatized."
Another nod.
"But you aren't traumatized, are you?"
"No."
"And yet you still made the appointment. You were the one who called and spoke to me. We will have to look at what that suggests."
"We" again. The subtle intimation of a bond, either formed or to be formed. Francis relaxes a little into his seat.
"This Andy, this co-worker of yours. Did you like him?"
"I liked him enough."
"Did he like you?" Lecter asks.
"I don't know."
"Did he know your name?"
"Everyone calls me 'D.' Or 'Mr. D.'" Francis says.
"What do you call yourself?"
The question makes Francis flinch. "My name," he says.
"'Francis?'" Lecter prompts.
Francis nods, hesitant.
"But you don't like to say it. Even in your head. It took great willpower to tell me your full name on the phone, as you did."
It had. "Mm-hm," says Francis.
"Good," Lecter tells him. "I suppose you know the utility in naming something? We name things so that we can refer to them. Yes?"
Francis takes the question as rhetorical.
"But when we name things, they also become more real. More concrete. They have more consequence to us. Is there anyone who knows you by your first name?"
"Grandmother." It is out of Francis's mouth before he can stop it. "But," he says, "she's dead."
"We cannot remain unnamed, Mr. Dolarhyde. Not to ourselves. I don't mean that it's inadvisable. I mean that it is impossible. Your co-workers, they think of you as 'D.' Your grandmother knew you as 'Francis.' You don't call yourself anything, do you?"
Feeling as though a great hand is squeezing his lungs together, Francis shakes his head.
"I see."
Francis wants to shout at him, What do you see? What do you see that I don't? But he is pinned, motionless, riveted to his chair.
"I do hope that is something we'll be able to discover during our journey together," Lecter says. "Now, if you would, tell me about your grandmother."
Francis is in a daze when he leaves Lecter's office. However humiliating, it had been somewhat of a comfort, really, to talk about Grandmother rather than having to say anything more about Andy's "accident" or his role in it. Grandmother is ornamental, bombastic. A distraction from the blackness Francis fears lays behind her. It is the same green-black as blood in yellow sodium light and it roils, restless.
He is pleased with himself, in that he does not believe any of that dark seeped through as he spoke to the doctor, despite his unnerving, probing questions. Francis thinks he may have a few questions of his own for Lecter. He can't be certain, but there is something of the trauma victim behind the doctor's precise, economical action and diction. Has he been hurt? Harmed someone? Both? Perhaps hurt is a force that does not evaporate but merely passes through people one to the next, an inevitability. Those who have been hurt must themselves hurt in order to prevent an imbalance in nature. Perhaps Francis is merely a victim of that imbalance. Will Andy return from the other side of sleep and pass it back? Or maybe it is being dissipated in the sufferings of Andy's family members as they take turns by his sterile bedside. The idea makes Francis feel both guilty and relieved.
He does not have time to return home for lunch before his shift, meaning he must stop and eat somewhere, which he detests doing. All too often the food is greasy and of poor quality. He must also endure the stares and whispers of the staff, some of whom do not even try to conceal their wonder and disgust. Or, less often—thank God—their pity.
Driving out of Bolton Hill, he figures he can go to Lexington Market, get caught in the tail end of the lunch crowd as it seethes through the corridors that smell of baked goods and frying meats. He can take something to go and eat in the van, avoiding parking police who range from hypervigilant to actively sadistic in their ticketing. He has a tattered paperback copy of Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth that he has kept in the center console for just such an occasion.
Inside the Market, Francis can easily see over the heads of the milling crowd where he wants to go. It is a small sandwich shop at the far end of one of the rows. There are so few people in the area that he almost considers sitting at one of the tables, his back to the rest of the shoppers and diners.
There is what seems to be a young girl behind the counter, facing away from Francis. She has long blonde hair and wears jeans with too many holes in them and a shirt covered in swirls of silkscreened paint and rhinestones.
Francis clears his throat.
When the woman turns, he sees she is much older than he first thought. Her eyes widen. She doesn't say anything for a few long seconds. Then, at last, she says, "What can I get for you, big guy?"
His stomach may complain later, but Francis orders a full-size Italian cold cut sandwich and two bottles of water, one of which he'll have behind the security desk with him tonight. He turns away as the woman begins making his sandwich, but she is not so far from his sight line that he misses the fact that she reaches for but then decides against wearing a pair of latex gloves, holding the baguette instead with her dirty-nailed hands.
When she begins plucking slices of cold meat out of their trays with her bare white fingers, he looks away.
She wraps the food up and hands it over the counter along with the water. A young couple has sat at one of the tables near the sandwich shop and the taller boy is getting up, presumably to order.
Francis turns quickly, digging out his wallet.
"You get in a knife fight?" the woman behind the counter asks.
He shakes his head.
"My cousin Rodney got in a knife fight. Screwed up his face bad like that." It is a matter-of-fact sentiment. She takes the money in her grubby hands, counts out Francis's change and pours it into his palm. "Have a good day, hon."
Francis shoulders past the boy who is approaching the counter and heads back out to his van.
Our journey together.
Sitting at the guard desk, Francis remembers what Lecter had said at the start of their appointment. It comes to him after reading the small portion of The Power of Myth that he had been able to manage while taking his lunch in the van. Francis is a slow but thorough reader.
As the volume of students and staff shuffling by his camera-eyes diminishes, he ponders the hero's journey. In its earliest iterations, the hero who slays the thing in the shadows. Later, he who becomes the thing in the shadows, unrecognized by those he has sacrificed to save. Whatever journey is his, Francis knows it will be one of intent, of conscious motion. He is of exceedingly humble birth and does not consider his flaw as one that requires heroic overcoming. The woman at the sandwich shop; she sees, but she doesn't see. None of them do. Only Francis—or whomever he is inside his head—sees. Perhaps Lecter will have some vantage along the journey. Perhaps he'll only be a guide, blind by choice or by nature. Then, when permitted to see at the end of it, blinded by radiance.
Francis has a dim sense that Andy was the beginning, the rupture. All is dim now, dim as the shapes that slip by onscreen. Unquantifiable as the fuzzed feedback from the malfunctioning cameras. Dim as in Lecter's office. But they will brighten like sun on snow.
Francis hopes.
Later, in his bed, Francis falls asleep almost at once. This is something that has not happened to him for a very long time.
In his head, he is walking along a wooded path at twilight. The air should be filled with sounds—the insects and night peepers whistling and creaking—but all is silent. He feels a presence ahead, something toward which he is walking, but he can't see it. All that is before his eyes is the darkening path.
The cameras are bad, he thinks.
At the lip of a dry creekbed in front of him, Andy rises from the crumbling clay. He sports a lion's mane and paws—swishing scythes in the air before Francis's nose. Francis stumbles back. Andy spreads his hands out, palms up like a martyr. His eyes roll back into his skull, showing brown petechiae.
"You look like you could pack it away," he says in a voice that sounds dry and disused.
Francis steps forward and pushes him again—hard. This time, Andy slumps into the fall, a tiny smile on his lips. When his head strikes the opposite bank, green-black blood fountains over his shoulders. It flows into the creekbed, filling it. As Andy's head disappears below the flood, other round shapes rise. They are human heads whose mouths fill with thick blood when they open them to lament. After only a moment's deliberation, Francis steps across the swollen creek, each solid, high-arched foot set down on a different head.
He hears the creek's continued slick flow in the distance as he walks on. The path grows darker until a stalactite of white moonlight splits the treetops. From its spotlight glow on the ground emerges a beautiful woman dressed in vivid sunset orange, her gown slashed through with stripes of black. He cannot tell whether they are adornments on the dress or holes in her very person through which he can see the darkness beyond. Francis covers his mouth with one hand.
Her skin is luminous brown, and for a moment she looks like the campus rape victim who sometimes invades his daydreaming hours. But then he blinks and she is someone else entirely, holding her arms out to him. He knows he must put his hand down if he is to hold her. Here, Francis hesitates for even a longer time than he did when facing Andy. When he lets his hand fall to his side, the woman does not flinch away. Instead, she smiles, and he goes to her embrace. But as soon as he feels her warmth she dissipates in a bloom of steam and Francis is left with arms wrapped around his own torso, bereft.
Now he can barely see the path. He's begun to trip over roots on the ground, the fingers of trees reaching to bridge the divide of the beaten-down track, to overtake it. He doesn't see her at first, waiting. Then, as his eyes adjust, Grandmother's face resolves out of the darkness. Her grin is too wide, full of too many teeth. She sits almost as a Buddha, on gray haunches, great teats hanging from her belly.
Come here, you disgusting child. Come here and take your punishment.
Francis shakes his head, slow as if weighted down.
Grandmother raises her sharp-nailed hand and Francis gulps in agony as the seam along his lip splits. Blood pours over his chin. Still he shakes his head.
His nose ruptures, the rent making its way up toward the corner of his eye.
"Please," he tries, but he can't say it.
Grandmother laughs.
At last, he gets down on his knees, goes to her breast, knowing it is filled with poison. But he is unable to suckle with his ruined face, only to slobber blood all over her skin.
She opens her mouth to berate him when a rumble shakes the ground.
Grandmother sways on her wolf's paws and gnaws at thin air. Francis takes the opportunity to run past her into a clearing that seems darker than the woods. Yet still he can see the peak of a shadowed mountain. He is thrown to the earth when the second earthquake comes.
A huge, leathery wing unfolds from the mountainside, revealing a great blunt head with yellow eyes, slitted like a snake's. It is not a mountain but a dragon, and its waking shakes the ground.
Francis turns to run and can see behind him that Andy, the woman, and Grandmother have come into the clearing. They cringe and cower, and it gives Francis a dark glee to see it.
Before me you rightly tremble, the dragon says, its serpent's mouth forming the words perfectly and without fumble.
Francis wakes up sticky and cool. He shivers and feels the sheet around him. Wet.
Oh, God.
He vaults from the bed, fearing he has lost control of his bladder as he used to when he was a child.
Grandmother, he thinks, whirling to face the door to his room, expectant, terrified.
Only then does he realize that part of the sheet has adhered to his chest. He peels it away, wincing at the plucking of hairs. As he tosses it back to the bed he sees below it that he is still erect. He's come all over his belly.
Filthy, filthy child. Grown to a filthy man.
Sunrise is just barely touching the window ledge, but he grabs for the phone next to his bed, dialing a number he expects to ring into an empty room forever.
"Hannibal Lecter's office," the smooth voice says.
Does he sleep?
"I need to see you again," says Francis.
When he hangs up the call, he replaces the phone on the bedside table. And he weeps.