Christopher heads for the light switch but Zeno says, “No, no, it’s better in the dark. Tomorrow you’ll be working backstage in low light. Come, let’s sit backstage, behind the shelves Sharif set up, away from the audience, just the way it will be tomorrow night, and we can talk about it, Olivia.”
He herds them behind the three bookcases, and Rachel gathers the pages of her script and sits in a folding chair and Olivia stows the crumpled green tissue paper in a bag and Alex crawls beneath the rack of costumes and sighs. Zeno stands at the center of them in his necktie and Velcro boots. At his feet the microwave-box-turned-sarcophagus transforms momentarily into an isolation box behind the headquarters at Camp Five—he half expects Rex to rise from it, emaciated and filthy, and adjust his broken glasses—and then it becomes a cardboard box once more.
“Do any of you,” he whispers, “have a cell phone?”
Natalie and Rachel shake their heads. Alex says, “Grandma says not till sixth grade.”
Christopher says, “Olivia has one.”
Olivia says, “My mom took it away.”
Natalie raises a hand. Onstage, on the other side of the bookshelves, the submarine gurgle still bubbles out of her speaker, disorienting him.
“Mr. Ninis, what’s a jiff?”
“A what?”
“Miss Marian said she’d be back with the pizzas in a jiff.”
“A jiff’s like a fight,” says Alex.
“That’s a tiff,” says Olivia.
“Jif is peanut butter,” says Christopher.
“A jiff is a short time,” says Zeno. “A little while.” Somewhere out in Lakeport, sirens rise and dip.
“But hasn’t it been more than a jiff, Mr. Ninis?”
“Are you hungry, Natalie?”
She nods.
“I’m thirsty,” says Christopher.
“The pizzas were probably delayed because of the snow,” Zeno says. “Marian will be back soon.”
Alex sits up. “We could drink some of the Cloud Cuckoo Land root beer?”
“Those’re for tomorrow night,” says Olivia.
“I suppose it won’t hurt,” says Zeno, “if you each have a root beer. Can you get them quietly?”
Alex hops to his feet and Zeno rises to his tiptoes to watch over the tops of the shelves as the boy walks around the stage and ducks into the space between the painted backdrop and the wall.
“Why,” asks Christopher, “does he have to do it quietly?” and Rachel reads her script with one index finger tracing the lines and Olivia says, “So about the swearing, Mr. Ninis?”
Is Sharif bleeding to death? Should Zeno be acting faster than this? Alex crawls out from the far end of the backdrop in his bathrobe and shorts carrying a case of twenty-four Mug root beers.
“Careful, Alex.”
“Christopher,” whispers Alex, as he rounds the apron of the plywood stage, all of his attention on fishing a can from the top of the case, “here’s one for—” and he catches a toe on the riser and trips and a dozen cans of root beer take flight over the stage.
Seymour
He stares at the phone, thinks: Ring. Ring now. But it remains inert.
5:38 p.m.
Bunny will be done with her housekeeping shift by now. Footsore, back aching, she’ll be waiting for him to pick her up and drive her to the Pig N’ Pancake. Are police cruisers streaking past the window? Are her coworkers talking about something happening at the library?
He tries to imagine Bishop’s warriors assembling somewhere nearby, using code words on radios, coordinating efforts to rescue him. Or—a new doubt slithers into place—maybe the police are somehow disrupting his ability to call out. Maybe Bishop’s people didn’t receive his calls. He thinks of the red lights moving out in the snow, the drone hovering over the hedges. Would the Lakeport Police Department have capabilities like that?
The wounded man is lying across the stairs with his right hand clamped against his bleeding shoulder. His eyes have closed, and the blood on the carpet beside him is drying, traveling past maroon toward black. Better not to look. Seymour diverts his attention instead into the long shadow of the middle aisle between Fiction and Nonfiction. What a shambles he’s made of the whole thing.
Is he willing to die for this? To give voice to the innumerable creatures that humans have wiped off the earth? To stand up for the voiceless? Isn’t that what a hero does? A hero fights for those who cannot fight for themselves.
Scared and confounded, body itching, armpits sweating, feet cold, bladder brimming, Beretta in one pocket and cell phone in the other, Seymour removes the cups of his ear defenders and wipes his face with the sleeve of his windbreaker and looks down the aisle toward the restroom at the back of the library when he hears, coming from upstairs, a succession of booming thuds.