Irresistible

ONE "I know everything about you, but you don't even know I exist. I know what terrifies you, what makes you stay up nights, craving. I know when you break laws, or hurt people, to get what you want. Your nightmares are my reading fare. Your secrets my lunchtime companions." The woman, naked, paces in her apartment. "You think I'm making this up? I know about the three million dollars you've hidden from your wife, in your Chilean bank account. I know the secret deal you've concluded with the Japanese, to sell your optics company, and fire your employees. I know all of you, the liars, phonies, the tricksters, the fools." The woman grows more agitated. "If you're a scientist, I've learned each detail of the drug you just invented, against baldness, which is not even on the market yet. If you're sick, and trying to hide it, I know which disease infects you; and whether your surgeon thinks you will live or die, screaming, in pain, as tubes carry fresh blood into your body and poison out." The woman towels herself off, wet from the shower. She is alone. "And after all that, we've never met." She addresses a voice-activated tape recorder, on a maple table under a window shielded by iron bars. "My knowledge comes from science, not magic." She reaches for a glass filled with gin and ice. "The system that delivers you into my hands begins every weekday at nine a.m., outside my apartment, on 108th Street and Riverside Drive, where I am right now. A brown van double-parks on the far curb. A man in a uniform gets out, holding an eight-by-eleven cardboard envelope. My palms start sweating when I see it. I am an addict waiting for my drug, information about you." She glances at a loud, wind-up clock on the secondhand dresser. She is in a rush this evening. She must hurry to get downtown. "The man's name is Louis Vale. After ten years of deliveries, we've never really conversed. But I know him anyway. He lives in Queens, at 1297 Kennedy Turnpike, with an angry wife and two children. He loses half his pay on horses at Aqueduct, which is why his wife filed for divorce, why he started taking cocaine, why a labor dispute erupted at work. Louis is about to be fired. "Well, fuck you, Louis. You brought it on yourself, like all men." The room is small, but lovingly put together; with a single bed, oddly childlike for an adult of thirty years, and cheap but polished maple dresser, mirror, rocking chair. There are ferns everywhere, on the cracked sill, by the roach traps, half obscuring a sticker on the refrigerator that says one day at a time. There's a light-colored remnant carpet, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along two walls, packed with hard-back novels, non- fiction books, and manila folders, so many files that they, not the woman, seem to be the primary occupant of this studio apartment. The only decorations on the walls are magazine photosa baby in a carriage, a different baby on a swing, a third baby in a field of grass and daisiesand there is a black laptop computer on the maple dining table, against a far wall. The woman eyes a handwritten listfour names and addressesbeside the laptop. The first name is anderson, paul; the last, conrad voort. "I know you all." She upturns the last of the bottle and sucks the remains of the gin from the plastic glass. Nora Clay begins to dress. First comes the garter belt and real stockings, not panty hose. Then the tight, black, short skirt of fine cotton that molds itself to her petite hips. A pullover sleeveless blouse in white defines her flat belly. BBlack, Ethan is the author of 'Irresistible' with ISBN 9780345433480 and ISBN 0345433483.