Rex was dwarfed by his desk, his elbows resting uncomfortably on the mahogany top.
“Now I want the truth,” he said as Tyler was ushered into the room and offered a seat.
“What do you want here?” continued Rex.
“I want to find Laurel and take her back home.”
Rex grinned, his teeth still perfectly aligned. “Then you admit you don’t belong here?”
“I don’t live here, no,” answered Tyler.
“You know the law against flatworlders?” asked Rex.
“I told you he was a flatworlder,” noted the second goon from behind Tyler.
Rex raised himself in his chair, trying to look more menacing but looking smaller than ever.
“All flatworlders are expressly forbidden from entering Two Cities,” added Rex.
“That’s why I want to find Laurel and get back. I followed her here.”
“Intent is irrelevant. You’re here and you shouldn’t be. Not that I give a fig what you do, but there’s the business of a reward which I happy to claim as my own.”
“A reward for me?” asked Tyler.
“Not you. Anyone who doesn’t belong here. And if you really want to find this girl of yours, you might ask at Twin Towers.”
The second goon chuckled.
Tyler began to suspect it might be true, that he’d lost Laurel for good.
“What’s the reward?” asked Tyler.
“Does it matter? I’m takin’ it.”
“Look,” pleaded Tyler, alarmed by the unexpected shift in events. “I came here for help. Perhaps there’s something I can do to make it worth your while.”
“I got no use for you,” answered Rex, flashing his teeth. “If anything, you being here puts me on shaky ground and I’ve gotta renew my permit with City Hall. So if the Commissioner’s got some purpose for you, I’ll leave you to him and pocket some Greenbacks. No hard feelings. You done me no wrong. But business is business.”
“How much money? Maybe I can get that for you?”
“You can get me 5 Gs?” asked Rex in disbelief.
It was a lot of money, but it was better than prison.
“Sure. If that’s what it takes,” answered Tyler.
“So this is when I let you go and you get me money and we make like we’re the best of friends?”
“Sure,” replied Tyler.
Rex burst into raucous laughter. Then he stopped and leaned toward Tyler, still looking diminutive. “Well, I say a bird in the hand …” He trailed off.
“How’s that go?” asked Rex to himself.
“Want me to go ask?” offered the second goon.
“… is worth two in the bush,” finished Tyler, considering an attempt to outrun Rex and his men. They were armed, but would they use firearms in a crowded club?
Rex nodded. “Sounds right.”
Tyler bolted to his feet, turned and ran to the door. It opened and he raced outside. Navigating a hallway, he sidestepped a palm frond and took a leisurely pace to the entrance.
To his consternation, men in suits and hats collected near the maître d’s desk. Spotting Tyler, they pointed.
Tyler turned.
“I coulda told you that was a waste of time,” said goon two as he grabbed Tyler by the shoulders. Patrons turned, gazing upon him narrow-eyed as if management had just apprehended a dangerous criminal.
Tyler accepted fate in as unheroic a fashion as possible, head hung low as he was escorted to the back rooms. It always seemed so easy in the movies to defy those who had it in for you. In reality, compliance came too instinctively. Perhaps it was his faith in fairness, though it wasn’t clear what use theoretical fairness did him now.
Cuffed and placed in a storage closet, Tyler contemplated what he should have done. For one, he realized, he should have lied about being a flatworlder. If that didn’t work, he should have been willing to stop the bandleader and offer a plea to the patrons. Why couldn’t he hit upon the perfect solution in the rush of the moment?
Alone with his thoughts, Tyler considered the possibility that he was dreaming. He had only to wake up. But how?
The lock to the closet clicked and the door opened. To Tyler’s surprise, it was Carmen peering into the room, stepping inside, her hand on the doorknob. She smiled, a broad reassuring smile that promised anything and everything. She was still wearing her sparkling gown, although she’d dispensed with the hat of fruit and the heels, opting to go barefoot.
Leaning close, she produced a small wire, her bosom inches from his face as she reached behind his back to unlock his cuffs. Within seconds, his hands were free.
“Mi papito taught me that,” she explained, offering him her hand to help him to his feet. “He could break any lock. And, no, he was no criminal, just an honest locksmith who wished I’d been a boy so he could teach me everything but I learned anyway.”
Carmen’s movements were decisive yet graceful, her hand to the open door and her gaze downcast as if striking a tragic pose. But there was no artifice about her, her sadness as honest as her joy.
She peered outside. “We must be quick.”
Tyler nodded. He could hear the band still playing in the dining room.
“Thank you,” he told her, but she took no notice of his gratitude, grabbing his wrist as she opened the door wide, gesturing him toward a distant stairwell.
Tyler would have run if his shoes didn’t make so much noise, so he walked quickly, Carmen racing ahead to pull open a door. They disappeared inside.
It was only one flight of stairs to a door that opened to the impeccably landscaped front lawn.
“Don’t run. Look normal. I’ll meet you in the front.”
“Why?” asked Tyler.
“Why what?” she asked, her face blank.
“Why help me?”
“You needed my help,” she answered, surprised by his question.
Tyler nodded his understanding before stepping outside.
The sunlight was almost blinding. Without a hand over his eyes, he could have seen nothing. The shade of the palm trees offered only temporary relief as he walked out into the open, the path guiding him to the sidewalk.
The traffic on Wilshire was a riot of blurred movement and blaring horns. It was dizzying.
Tyler was light-headed. He remembered he hadn’t eaten, although he’d felt no hunger since arriving in Two Cities.
He might have fallen had Carmen not been there to prop him up. Her shimmering hip-hugging dress seemed out of place on the busy sidewalk, pedestrians eyeing the curious couple as they passed by in their hats and dresses. They seemed most surprised that Carmen was barefoot.
Carmen waved for a cab. Tyler did likewise.
“Where are we going?” he asked her.
“Home,” she answered.
“Mine or yours,” he asked.
“That’s up to you,” she answered, her hand to his and her face pressed against his shoulder. “Probably the same thing.”
“Don’t they need you in there?” he asked.
“You need me too. I always wanted you to need me.”
Tyler remembered her confusion over his resemblance to his father. Had she rescued him because she believed him to be West? And if it were his father Carmen thought she was protecting, how had his father found this place and was his father still here?
“I’m not West,” he murmured.
“Stop,” she answered with a smile as a cab idled nearby. Carmen took him by the hand, opening the door and sliding inside the back seat after Tyler.
“Where to?” asked the cabbie, the fumes from his cigarette filling the car.
“Bunker Hill,” answered Carmen without hesitation.
Tyler coughed. The cabbie nodded before putting out his cigarette and putting the vintage car in drive.
Carmen leaned her head against Tyler’s shoulder, a hand over his. He felt that he’d only earned her affection by failing to clarify his true identity.
“Really. I’m not West.”
“That’s right,” said Carmen, closing her eyes. “You want me to call you Tyler.”
How could this woman who loved his father also love him? Wasn’t it some breach of an ancient law? Consider Oedipus, he thought; although, to be fair, Carmen was definitely not his mother. Too many curves and altogether too warm to the touch.
Tyler relished Carmen’s affection. He just wished he felt deserving of it.
“And if I was someone you didn’t know,” he began. “Would you have saved me?”
Carmen released his arm.
“I told you why I helped you,” she replied, offended.
“I’m sorry. I’m not accustomed to someone looking out for me like that.”
“Here,” she confided. “There are friends and there are enemies. Friends come and go. But enemies are always enemies. Sometimes friends return and when they do, I never turn my back.”
“I’m not ..” he began before she silenced him with a finger to his mouth.
“By friend, I mean those of us who know the enemies by sight. We fight for something better, but the more we fight, the more they take away. Once we could speak our minds, now we do it in secret because they find us and take us away like they took my papa.”
“I’m sorry,” he answered, wishing he had something more constructive to say.
‘That was ten years ago,” she explained. “And when I ask about him, they say he doesn’t exist.”
Carmen squeezed his arm. “But you exist.”
“You know I’m a flatworlder,” he replied.
“That’s their word, not yours.”
“I just came to find someone,” he explained.
“I know,” she answered, releasing her hand. “And I can’t be like the women in your world because this is all I know. I wear a basket of fruit and I sing and they give me applause. That’s what I do. But in your world, you can do anything you want.”
“No,” corrected Tyler.
“Maybe I could come with you,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “They say it isn’t possible, but there are stories of those who inhabit both worlds. People who come and go whenever they please. People like you.”
“I don’t even know what I’m doing,” he murmured to himself.
“Tell me,” said Carmen, her eyes almost tearful as she turned to face him. “Why did you leave?”
“That was my father and I never met him.”
“You tell me you’re someone else but you don’t have to pretend with me. I understand.”
Tyler turned his thoughts to his father. Was it possible his father had come here long ago, never aging and forever a man of 30 or 40? And yet, Carmen spoke of his father as if it had only been a year or two since she’d seen him.
“What was he like?” asked Tyler before correcting himself. “I mean what was I like before?”
Carmen smiled as if recalling a fond memory.
“You noticed me,” she answered. “Everything was the same until then, and that’s the first time I realized it was all the same. You looked at me like you knew me but I didn’t know you at all. And now you tell me I still don’t know you.”
“I’d like you to know me,” he answered. It had always been his fervent wish to reveal all to someone worthy, to cease pretending to suit the expectations of others. Why could he only be himself in secret?
Carmen pressed her body close. She felt warm, her hand reaching for Tyler’s.
“I know you’re here for someone else,” she said, her eyes downcast. “But I don’t care.” She hesitated. “I do, of course. But it’s not my place to tell you what to love. At least I try to remember that.”
Carmen took Tyler’s face by the chin, turning it to gaze in her eyes. There was sadness in her eyes, but no sign of tears.
“Just look at me like you do, like you can see me, like no one else can.”
Carmen’s brown eyes were agleam with possibility, but encased in glass. And in that glass, Tyler could see his reflection, or was it his father he saw?
“What do you see?” she asked.
“I see love and I see hope,” he answered, not seeing her at all but wishing he could see past her eyes and into her head.
“Am I foolish to hope?” she asked.
“No,” answered Tyler. But it was Tyler who felt a fool for believing what he was seeing. Surely he was imagining everything. He could try to bring Carmen home but there was no taking an idea and making it real.
“Then why do I feel trapped here?” she asked.
“You want to leave?”
“They say that when we try to leave, we disappear like we never existed.”
Perhaps she was trapped, thought Tyler. Perhaps he was trapped too.
“It wouldn’t matter if there weren’t something wrong here, something that can’t be fixed.”
“Hey, buddy,” said the cabbie, his pugnose face in the rear view. “You said Bunker Hill but you didn’t gimme no address.”
Tyler turned to Carmen.
“We can get off here,” she answered.
“You sure?” asked the cabbie. “Bit of a dicey neighborhood.”
“It’s home,” she answered. “One of them anyway.”
Carmen handed the cabbie some cash from just inside her cleavage before stepping outside. Tyler followed.
The houses were stately yet dilapidated, phantom figures sitting on doorsteps and peering from open windows. All Tyler had ever known of Bunker Hill was a vast interconnecting network of office buildings, workers filling the streets at lunch before dashing home the moment it got dark. But there had been homes there once, until the developers noticed the rot setting in.
“Where do you live?” asked Tyler. He imagined Carmen removing her gown. Would she let him watch?
“It’s been a second home since you were here last,” she said as she ascended a hill.
Was this where his father lived, thought Tyler? Might he actually see him, or even speak to him?
“I lived here?” he asked.
“You don’t remember?” asked Carmen, pointing to a Victorian-style home near the crest of the hill. A woman stood on the porch, neither young nor old, hair shaped in a familiar bob and clothes similar to what he’d seen in old photographs from home. Could it be her?
