Page 26 of Hunger

I do know. I'm afraid to name it.

I walk away from the building. I cross the parking lot. I cross the street. I walk past the elm and I keep walking. The cold airis in my face and the wind is finding the gaps in my coat but the cold doesn't reach me.

I shouldn't come back tomorrow.

I know already that I will.

I walk to the van and I get in and I sit in the driver's seat with my hands on the wheel and I don't start the engine for a long time. The shaking has slowed but not stopped. I look at my hands. The hands of something that was a man once. The hands that almost touched her hair.

I close my eyes.

I've lived for a thousand years and more. I have outlived empires. I've watched the long slow rise and fall of cities. I've stood in the dark of every century since I rose from the field of corpses and I've felt nothing, and the not-feeling has been a kind of safety I didn't know I valued until it was taken away.

It's gone. It's been gone for two weeks.

I'm afraid of myself. I'm afraid of what I almost did tonight. I'm afraid of what I'll do tomorrow when I come back and the wanting is in my hands again and she's there in the dark, sleeping, peacefully.

I start the engine. I drive home.

I sit in the room with no windows. I don't move for the rest of the night. I think about that soft sigh and the violin case open on the floor.

I think about all of these things and the dawn comes and the day weighs me down and I sit there with my back against the wall and my eyes closed and I don't know what I'm becoming.

I know I'm not going back.

I know I'm going back tomorrow.

Both things are true. They sit in me side by side like two stones.

Chapter Seven

Jenny

I wake on Wednesday and the apartment feels different again.

It's the same cool edge I've felt twice now. The same sense of a room that's been entered recently and then left. I've stopped pretending I'm imagining it. I lie in bed for a while with the blanket pulled up to my chin and I let myself believe it. Someone was in this room last night. Someone has been in this room more than once.

I should be afraid. I'm not. I should call someone. I don't.

I get up.

The violin case is on the floor where I left it yesterday. The rosin boxes are stacked on the desk. The cup with the dropping jasmine. The black stone. The room is exactly the way I left it, except for the cool edge in the air, and the cool edge is already fading as the heat works on it.

I get ready while it lightens outside. By the time I scrape the windshield clear and drive to the mall, the gray morning has gone almost blue with the cold.

The shift is busy. Tammy is in a good mood. Marcus drew her a picture of a fire truck at school and she has taped it to the back of the register where only she can see it. Every time she rings up a customer she glances at it and her face does the slight involuntary thing it does when she thinks of her son.

Around three, Diane the new security guard comes to the counter. It's the first time she's spoken to me directly. She's a short broad woman in her forties with a brown bob and an expression that looks permanently impatient.

"Small coffee."

I pour her one. She slides a dollar across the counter.

"Thanks."

"Sure."

She doesn't leave. She takes a sip and makes a face, then looks at me over the rim.