Page 24 of Hunger

The smell hits me. It's the smell I'd forgotten I knew. Varnish and rosin and old wood and the particular dust that collects in an instrument case. I'd forgotten this smell. I'd forgotten I knew it as well as I know the smell of my own hair.

I don't pick up the violin.

I look at it. I lift the soft cloth that's been folded over it, and the white wood of the chinrest is the same and the fingerboard is the same and the gut strings under the pegs are the same. The instrument has waited for me. Instruments will do that. They'll wait.

I reach out and touch the A string. It's dull and quiet under my finger. It doesn't make a sound, only a soft thud against the wood.

I lower the cloth back over the violin. I close the case.

I don't latch it.

I leave it lying open on the floor of my room.

I go to work.

* * *

The shift is normal. I work the grill and take orders. Tammy and I talk about Christmas and the snow and a movie she saw with Marcus on Saturday. I don't tell her about the rosin, or the boxes on the ledge — I don't know how to explain it, how to say someone climbed to my second-floor window in the middle of the night and left me three boxes of expensive rosin. The sentence wouldn't survive contact with the air.

I work, close, drive home.

The apartment is empty when I let myself in. Lisa has a lab tonight. Dee has Kevin. I eat, shower, and go to my room.

The violin case is on the floor where I left it. The boxes of rosin are on the desk. The cup of drooping jasmine. The black stone.

I get into bed.

I don't turn off the lamp at first. I lie there looking at the room. The case. The boxes. The shape of the violin under the soft cloth.

After a while I turn off the lamp.

The room goes dark.

I lie on my back and I listen.

I don't know what I'm waiting for, or what I want to come.

I lie there for a long time. The wind has started up again somewhere outside. I hear a car pass on the street below.

Nothing in the room moves.

Eventually I fall asleep.

In the half-second before sleep takes me, I think I feel a coolness in the air that doesn't belong to me. The kind of coolness I felt yesterday morning and the morning before. I can'ttell if it's real or if I'm imagining it. I can't tell which I want it to be.

* * *

Farkas

I rise at five. The dark has just come and the wind is pushing snow against the eastern side of the farmhouse.

I don't eat. The feeding from Dr. Reeves last night still holds, and the hunger is dull. I dress. The keys to the van are on the kitchen table. I take them leave.

I'm at the apartment complex in twenty minutes.

I don't wait. I cross the parking lot in the dark and stand at the base of the southeast corner of the building and look up. The light in her room is off. The curtain is drawn.

I climb.