Borderlands Read online

  "I have to."

  "I want you to stay, Randy."

  "I can't, I have to go home. It's too late already."

  Alan laughed softly. "You can say that again." He stretched and stood up, lit softly by the hazy light from the window and the glass-paned door onto the tiny balcony, toward which he walked. He swung the doors wide and stepped between them, then perched like a pale hawk on the wrought iron balcony rail.

  That was when Randy decided to kill him.

  There was really no process through which he chose to become a murderer, no period of brooding in which he moved inexorably from love to hate. There were only facts, three undeniable facts—Alan would not let him go; he must go; and Alan was sitting on the balcony rail eight floors up from the hard cement at the airshaft's base.

  And with these facts registered and cataloged, along with the knowledge that Alan was going to die anyway, the gray, organic computer inside Randy Fralich's skull punched out what seemed to be the solution.

  He walked to the balcony door, unzipped his jacket, and said, "All right, Alan. I'll stay." Then he pushed Alan backward as hard as he could.

  Alan gasped as he fell, his arms flailing. His right hand caught a piece of the iron work and clung to it desperately, his nude body facing out from the building, his fingers and wrist bent backward at an agonizing angle. Randy knelt and rapped at the knuckles, trying to be careful (the computer again) not to break the bones or split the skin. It was working. The grip was looser now, no noise from Alan (good!) except rapid, ragged breathing.

  Just as Alan's hand released its hold, he brought his head back and up, and for a second his eyes looked full at Randy, the gaze piercing Randy's brain like crystal needles. Then the eyes and the face and the body fell silently away, a white moth soaring into darkness.

  Randy thought he heard the impact of the landing, like the dull krump of a mortar in a war movie, but far away and muffled by the city's nocturnal purr. He looked over the edge and down, seeing nothing at first. Then a lighter patch of darkness began to swim out of the black, and he thought he could see Alan on the concrete below, arms and legs jutting out like gray branches from a stunted tree.

  Randy listened. There were no suspicious noises, no screams of women, no shrieking of casements as long unused windows painfully opened. Lights remained where lights had been, weakened by drawn shades. And the darkness remained as well, behind the closed eyes of other, sleeping windows.

  He was safe. He was safe and it was time to go home. But first he would have to be very careful and make sure that there was nothing in the apartment that could be traced to him. It was likely that the police would accept suicide as the cause of death, especially when they learned of Alan's illness, but Randy couldn't take any chances.

  The thought of his lover alive came to him, but he drove it from his mind. He had to be clinical now, a machine. There would be time to weep later, to rationalize what he had done. It was all for the best, wasn't it? For both Alan and himself. He had spared them both suffering.

  There were no personal belongings of his in the apartment, not even a toothbrush, as he had never spent the entire night. No letters either—he had never put anything in writing. And no message on an answering machine. Alan was the only person Randy knew in the city who did not have one. There were no photographs, for their affair had been extremely private, with no parties, gay bars, or vacations where friends with cameras lurked, and he had never given Alan a picture.

  That left only address books. Randy drew the blinds and turned on a dim table lamp. He found only three addresses in Alan's book—Alan's parents, ex-wife, and an electrical repair shop in the nineties. There were several masculine first names with phone numbers, but Randy was not among them. He blessed Alan's tremendous memory, and closed the book.

  Then he filled the sink and put the two glasses he and Alan had used into the hot water and rubbed the sides to smear any fingerprints. He rubbed the faucet handles and the doorknobs when he left, figuring that wiping them clean would have made the police suspicious.

  No one was in the hall, or the elevator, or the lobby. He walked home, afraid to take a cab, entered his building unobserved, and walked the four flights to his apartment. Cathy was sleeping. His lies would have to wait until tomorrow.

  The next morning the lies worked. She bought them completely over the breakfast he barely touched. Dear, simple Cathy, Randy thought, I still do love you a little, if only for your never-ending faith in me. He wanted to be alone for a while to sort things out, so he told Cathy he had forgotten some work he had wanted to do over the weekend, and would walk the fifteen blocks to his office to get it.

  Once on the street, he found himself almost surprised by the callous attitude with which he considered his actions of the previous night. He had loved Alan, yes, but Alan was going to die and seemed ready to drag Randy along, in spirit if not in body, and Randy could not let him do that. In truth, he had spared Alan, spared him months of mental and physical anguish as traitor cells gnawed away at that nearly perfect body until it was nothing but a gaunt shell of yellow skin stretched over mealy bones. At least this way it had been quick. And relatively painless, though Randy shuddered under the warm sun as he thought of that last look on Alan's face.

  What had it meant? There was fear, yes, terror of that final dark plunge into the cement embrace of Mother Death, but there was more. Relief? Thanks? Maybe. Love even, mixed with hate at the true knowledge of Randy's motive?

  Jesus, no, don't think that, don't admit it even to yourself. You loved Alan, that's why you killed him. To spare him. To save him.

  What was it he had said? Something about remembering his face after he was dead. Don't worry, Alan, Randy mused. You can count on that. He thought he would never be able to forget that white face falling away, like an oval moon leaving its orbit, sailing into the black gulf of space, the craters of the eyes getting smaller and smaller until lost to sight.

  Randy shook his head as if to clear it of the image, and looked up beyond the edge of the concrete and steel gorge made by the Sixth Avenue buildings, up to the overcast gray sky that hung over New York City that morning like an ashen canopy.

  He saw Alan.

  It was Alan's face, slightly out of focus, up in the sky. Randy stopped dead on the sidewalk, held firmly by the sight, oblivious of the jostles and curses he received from his fellow pedestrians.

  Yes, it was Alan, and he hesitated to look away, expecting the vision to be gone when he looked back. At that instant he preferred the totally irrational idea of its reality to the more sensible one of its being an illusion projected on the sky by his own guilty mind.

  He tried to focus on the face, but the image blurred, the outlines dulled. Randy shifted his focus closer, until it seemed that he was watching the liquid film on the surface of his own eyes through a microscope, and suddenly it was there. The face swam before him as a crisp, clear image, but seemed to shift when he tried to look directly at it. It would remain for only a second, then drift up or down or to either side, so that he saw it only peripherally.

  The face was exactly as it had been the second before Alan had fallen, eyes and mouth wide, the skin of the face taut over the sculptured cheekbones. But there was no dimension, no definition, like a preliminary sketch before the shading is done. Color was absent also. The face was a duller gray against the gray sky. Even the outlines were not smooth strokes, but seemed to be rather a series of small dots or blobs that held together, a flotilla of tiny boats on the sea of Randy's eyeball.

  It was only after he had determined all this that he began to get scared. The utter novelty of the illusion was enough to keep him from thinking about its significance, but it wore off quickly, leaving the fact alone to hit him like a mallet on the forehead. Here was a man he had killed, whose face he was seeing quite clearly in his mind or his eye or his mind's eye, without conscious volition. Alan's face had just walked into his consciousness like an uninvited guest, and it was time for the gues
t to go home.

  Randy blinked his eyes rapidly, then brought them down to street level. At first it seemed to work. The image faded, became lost in the visual jigsaw of Sixth Avenue shops, cars, signs, and pedestrians. He took several deep breaths and realized that he was sweating, even though the day was pleasantly cool. He tasted the sting of salt as he licked his upper lip to clear it of the moist sheen that had formed, wiped his dewy forehead with his sleeve, and walked on.

  Soon he discovered that the face was not gone. First it drifted across the gray side of a passing bus as Randy waited on the corner for the light to change. Startled, he stepped back, bumping into a tall, rangy black man who called him a name and clipped him on the shoulder with the heel of his broad hand. Confused and angry, Randy turned down the cross street, rubbing his eyes viciously. The man shouted after him, but he didn't understand the words.

  Randy walked halfway down the block like a blind man, eyes jammed shut, hands over them, peeking every few steps to get his bearing, although he could not have said where he was going. Once he tried to look down at the sidewalk, but Alan's face formed immediately on the gray smoothness of the cement, like the afterimages of a flashbulb.

  He hailed a cab and gave the driver his address, only a few blocks away. After he saw Alan's face crawl slowly along the back of the driver's seat, he shut his eyes, and didn't open them until he heard the driver ask, "This okay?"

  Randy thrust the bills into the man's hand, then, blinking rapidly, rushed into his building. The blinking seemed to work. If he could not focus long enough on a suitable background, the image did not have sufficient time to form.

  Blink, blink, again and again.. . don't give it a chance, he thought as he hurried between the closing doors of the elevator. An old woman was inside, packed fearfully into the corner, the metal handrail pressing against her hip.

  Randy blinked frantically. "Something, something in my eye," he said in a tone of desperate apology that sounded high and hysterical in the confined space. "Gotta wash it out."

  She nodded, eyes still wide, but calmed somewhat by the pedestrian explanation. "Dust," she said softly, and a trace of a sympathetic smile touched the corners of her broadly lipsticked mouth. "Dust," she repeated, as if expecting an answer.

  The doors slid open at Randy's floor and he stepped out, still blinking savagely, leaving the perplexed woman standing in her corner, her mouth forming the word, "dust," with no sound.

  Cathy was sitting in the bentwood rocker reading when he staggered in, his eyes flicking away like signal lights. "God, hon," she said, shooting to her feet, "what's wrong?"

  "My . . . eyes," he said, and instantly realized how utterly obvious that was. "There's something in my eyes. I keep seeing . . . spots or something."

  "Do they hurt?"

  "No, no. . ."

  "Here, let me look."

  She pressed him gently down onto the sofa, and he tilted his head back, stopped blinking, and stared up at the off-white ceiling where the image of Alan's face immediately formed, drifting lazily across his field of vision.

  Cathy's voice came from far away. "Now just hold still. . . ." And he thought, what if she can see it? What if it's there, set in my eyes like two magic lantern slides?

  "No!" he shouted, clamping his eyes shut and lurching to his feet.

  "No!" he yelled, stumbling blindly toward the one room that contained the privacy he needed.

  "No . . ." he sobbed, as he slammed the bathroom door on Cathy's curious, anguished face, and turned the lock.

  Dark. Silent, peaceful, blessed dark. No lights, no windows to the dull grayness of the outside world that made such a perfect palette for the image his eyes had created. He fumbled about in the closet until he found some towels, and jammed them down against the bottom of the bathroom door where a hairline crack let the hated light seep in.

  Then, covered with a damp, clinging film of perspiration, he sat on the cold tile of the floor, his stomach twisting and churning in a paroxysm of nervous fear that quickly became a diarrheic attack. He pulled himself onto the toilet seat just in time, and, afterward, sat there sick and sweating, praying for either the nausea to go away and let him rest or to overtake him completely and let him puke his guts out, anything to stop feeling so sick.

  The feeling remained, a steaming, bilious lump the size of an apricot hanging deep in his throat, not going up, not going down. Finally he threw himself exhausted to the floor where he lay on his side, arm pillowing his throbbing head, pants tangled around his ankles like the aftermath of an inept escape act.

  He lay there for only a few seconds before another attack came, knotting his bowels with pain. He clawed his way back onto the seat, and hyperventilated in agony as the sickness roared out of him. Then he fell once again onto the floor.

  After a while the nausea faded, the lancing pain receded mercifully into memory, and he fell asleep. A few minutes later he was awakened by Cathy's voice, muffled and deadened through the sealed door.

  "Randy? Hon? Are you all right? Are you sick?"

  He pushed himself to his hands and knees. "No," he called, but his voice sounded weak and flinty. He cleared his throat and tasted bile. "No," he called louder. "No, m'okay."

  "Honey, I called Dr. Levy. He can take you in a half hour if you hurry."

  Damn her! Nosy bitch, mind her own goddamn business, should've killed her and not...

  The thoughts clattered like toppling dominoes, and Randy realized he was dangerously near hysteria. Stop it, he told himself. Stop it now!

  "Hon?" she called again. "Are you too sick? Should I cancel?" She sounded very worried.

  No, he thought, I have to do something. Maybe it's just some crap on my eye that's just a circle or something, and I'm making up the rest. Maybe Levy can just wipe it away. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  "No! I'll go. Gimme a minute." He slowly stood up, took a deep breath, switched on the light. The bathroom flickered, then flooded with white fluorescence. He thought he could see the face begin to encroach on his vision, so he started blinking madly, thinking of silent movies and strobe lights. The bathroom was a mess.

  First he cleaned the white tile floor, then washed himself, stripping and throwing the stained and sweat-dampened clothes into the hamper. He wanted to take a shower, but there was no time. Naked, he padded across the bare boards of the hall to the bedroom, where he quickly dressed and grabbed the necessities for the trip to the ophthalmologist.

  "Ready?" Cathy said as he entered the living room. Randy nodded, blinking faster than ever, in fear of seeing the ghostly face again.

  "Well, let's go." She picked up her purse and was almost at the door before he stopped her.

  "You don't have to go," he said. "I'll be okay alone."

  She turned back, hurt and surprise in her eyes. "But I'm worried about you. It's all right, I want to go with you."

  "But I don't want you to," he said testily. For a moment he almost regretted the outburst, not because he felt guilty at hurting her, but because she could have been a good seeing-eye dog. Now he would have to blink and stumble his way down to a cab and into Levy's office. But so be it. He just didn't want her around him. As guilty as it made him feel, he just couldn't bear her presence.

  "Cathy, I'm sorry, but I want to go alone. I'll be fine. Levy'll fix me up in. . ." He had been about to say, in the blink of an eye. "In no time. Don't worry." He kissed her cheek and went out the door.

  On the ride to Levy's office, he kept his eyes closed, opening them once to glance at his watch. Alan looked back from the crystal.

  Randy walked through the office door ten minutes late, and was quickly shown into the long examination room. He sat in the proffered chair and pressed his eyes shut, feeling a growing nausea at the sight of the cutaway chart of the human eye.

  Levy walked in five minutes later, bluff and hearty as usual. Randy offered him some simple symptoms—spots in his eyes, things floating on the surface.

  "Any pain?"

  "No."<
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  "Then why the blinking?"

  "I, uh, I can't focus on them that way. They . . . they bother me."

  "Headaches?"

  "No."

  "Nausea?"

  He didn't answer for a few seconds. "A little. I think I'm just upset by it." Classic understatement.

  "What do these spots look like?"

  "Spots, that's all." Like the face of the lover I murdered.

  "Round spots? Long spots? Square spots? Liver spots?"

  "Some are round, some longer, like rods."

  "Can you focus directly on them, or do they drift away?"

  "Drift away."

  Levy pushed a button on a console and a small fluorescent screen lit up at the other end of the room. "Look at that light."

  He did, blinking rapidly.

  "Stop blinking and look at it. Do you see the spots?"

  "Yes," he said, his voice breaking, as Alan looked across the room at him.

  Levy clicked off the fluorescent and pushed another button. An intense, bright yellow ray shone full in Randy's eyes. "How about now?"

  It was painfully bright. As his eyes struggled to adjust to it, his pupils closing down, he realized with a sense of joyous loss that the image was gone. "No . . ." he said slowly. "No, it's not there."

  "It?"

  "Them, I mean. The spots."

  Levy smiled in the darkness. "Figured as much. Look here." He shone a pocket flash full in Randy's eyes as he examined them with a magnifier. "Yep. Just flying flies."

  "Huh?"

  "Muscae volitantes. Latin to you. Means flying flies. Floaters. Most everybody has 'em. They're in the vitreous humor."

  "But what are they?"

  "Well, we used to think they were red blood corpuscles that managed to escape from the tiny capillaries in the retina. But now we think they're the remains of some embryonic fluid." He laughed. "Who knows what they'll be next year?"

  Randy started to relax. At least they had a name—that was a start. "What can I do about them?"

  Levy shrugged. "Live with 'em."

  "Live with. . . what do you mean, live with them?" The tension returned as if it had never left.