Cate booked herself on the last flight tonight to Chicago. She wants to take a couple of hours to be a tourist. On these recent trips, she’s inside the play more than she’s in Manhattan. She heads up to MOMA, which is open until eight.

Down in the subway, a train must have just come and gone. The platform on her side is empty. The air is sweet and sour with urine. She’s cold, but it’s also nerves that make her shuffle a little from foot to foot, flicking glances toward the passage she’s just come through. She needs to know who will come out next, into this echoing tunnel with no visible police presence, only videocams to record whatever happens down here, the footage valuable only afterward. She hates that she thinks like this now. It’s not fear. Neale bought all the fear available from what happened. Cate’s fallout is a constant readiness. She hates that she’s so ready. Being always ready is quite fatiguing.

December has pushed into January, the light staying longer, the sharpness of winter growing dull. The air—because it’s New York and not Chicago, also because of the changing climate—has a balminess to it. She gets out a couple of stops early, stops in a shop called Black Hole that sells jeans so heavily dyed you have to wash them by themselves not just the first time, but forever. She buys a pair, decides to wear them to MOMA, stuffs the old pair she’s wearing into her backpack. Might as well be modern herself.

Inside the museum, instead of being absorbed by the art, she stands alone and outside everything around her. This is a new bad feeling. Not a panic attack exactly. More a heightened awareness, hearing sounds from a higher register, picking up something drifting in on a chilled wind.

She catches a cab to the airport. Inside, she presses Dana’s number on her contacts list, which she has obscured as T. Oaster. She’s in luck. Dana answers. It’s too early for her to be at work, so she’s probably at home.

“Just tell me I must have the wrong number. I’ll call you later at work. I’m just having a bad moment. I want to hear your voice is all.”

“Sorry. I think you have the wrong number.”

tiles

Cate is in such a tumble of departing and arriving these days that she worries Sailor is confused about her. So this morning, before she has to go downtown to teach the first class of the spring semester, she takes him to the beach, where he wears himself out with a pack of younger dogs.