My cell-phone rang from the kitchen. I excused myself, squeezing Alan’s shoulder as I walked past him.

“I won’t be long. Do you want anything?”

“No,” he said, and tapped out another cigarette from the pack.

It was the Director of the Public Safety Commission. She asked how Alan was holding up, inquired about his breathing, his behavior, and his contacts, and then informed me that the bureau was interested in meeting with both of us in two days, at 5 in the afternoon.

“We’ve already notified your superintendent,” she added.

“I’ll be there. Is that all?”

“That’s all. Hang tight, Deputy,” she said. “We’re very proud of what you’ve done, all of us.”

Before I could speak, and thank her, the connection broke off on the other end. My cell-phone screen blinked a few times, and my background reappeared. It was a five-year-old photo of me and my former husband.

“Who was it?” Alan asked, hearing  the phone click on the countertop. I poured myself a cup of coffee, and walked back to the other room.

“The Director of Public Safety,” I said. He looked up from the table, curious.

“What did she want?”

“I’m not sure.” I took a sip. “She wants us to come in on Sunday,” I said. “Said she wants to talk with you.”

Setting down my coffee mug on one of the side-tables, I sat down and began to unlace my sneakers. The silence in the room suddenly became very tense and pregnant, and I looked up at Alan. He was staring at my shoes with a pallid face, and blank, wide-open eyes. My hands froze.

“Alan, what is it?” I asked. He blinked – the mist in his eyes gradually cleared.

“Nothing,” he said, looking up. Our eyes connected, and he gave me a weak, forced smile.

“Alan,” I said, kicking off my right shoe, and then pulling off my left heel-first with my toes, “I know this has been hard on you. And I totally understand if you don’t want to do this tonight.”

“No.” The blood rose to his cheeks, and he shook his head slowly. After the second time I caught him glancing down at my socks, I pulled my feet up behind me, on the chair, and knocked out another cigarette from the box with the flat of my hand. As I lit it up, and blew out a long, sweet-smelling tobacco cloud, I smiled at him, and nodded my head. He exhaled, regained his composure, rubbed his hands up and down on his thighs, breathed in deeply, and pressed the red button.

What did that girl do to him?

~~~

He heard two people whispering in the distance, and then the sounds of a window opening, and a light switching on. A sharp pain stabbed his forehead, and shot between his temples. The first time he opened his eyes, he saw nothing but red, a beating, panting, throbbing, bloody red that spread, took over all the colors of the world. He panicked, thinking maybe he’d been blinded.

Then he blinked again, and the redness began to bleed away. Bit by bit, his surroundings came into focus. Off to his left, he sensed movement. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, and turned his head. What he saw gave him another headrush.

Five immense and dirty toes, painted with black toenail polish, and gripping the edge of an enormous bed, beat regular time to a song he couldn’t hear. The other foot joined them shortly, heel-first on the headboard. It was a girl’s foot. And then came the humming, and singing along. It was Sadie’s voice.

A frigid breeze entered through the window-screen behind him, and caused him to shudder violently. He hugged himself, and felt his clothes – a suit and a tie, though made out of some silky, doll-like organza fabric, coarse and unknit, instead of cashmere or cotton. It reminded him of doll clothes. He shivered against the cold again.

Sadie, the giantess, must have felt it too, because the two feet disappeared, and a colossal shadow approached him from across the room.

“Alan!” she sang his name like the lyrics to a song, probably the song she was just listening to. “How long have you been awaaake! Alan…” She grinned, walking over to the window and shutting it.

“Brrrr! Right?”

“Sadie?”

“Yes?” Sadie leapt over to the desk, which creaked at the impact, and pushed her rear up right beside him, mere inches away. He squeaked and jumped back. She didn’t notice, and settled in, moving a few items around.

“They said you’d have a headache for a few hours, Alan. Your body’s got to toughen up.” She paused, and smiled that familiar smile, the one that seemed to begin at the eyes and spread like a bolt of lightning across her whole body. It was a gift.  

Terrified as he was, and shivering with cold in the new doll’s outfit he was wearing— he now saw it was a miniature businessman’s suit, complete with suitcase and tie – Alan smiled back. “I can hardly think,” he said. “How tall am I?”

“Two and a half inches,” Sadie announced, proudly –  as though she’d done the work herself.

“Two and a half inches,” Alan repeated after her, as though hypnotized, with a blank look on his face.

“Oh,” Sadie said, breaking the silence. “I’ve got your little books over here. Political Science and French tomorrow.” She zipped open a little black coin purse, and dumped a tiny set of volumes over the desk. He caught Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Hobbes’ Leviathan, alongside an elementary French textbook.

“And these are mine,” she announced. With a fatal thud, she let fall a heavy pile of her own books just beside him. He read the same titles along their thick spines.

“I have to go with you tomorrow?” Alan stood up, shading his eyes against the light.

She paused again, and he caught a little black flicker behind her eyes, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. “Yeah!” she said, playfully. Too playfully, maybe. “Anyway, rules say you have to attend classes and take notes too, otherwise you’re fired.” She pouted. “And I’d miss you if you stayed here, Alan.”

“What do we do now? Till then, I mean.” He changed the subject.

“Well, we’ve been out all afternoon. Hungry?”

We have? he thought. Where have we been? His insides growled and grumbled, before his brain even processed the word ‘hungry.’ A smile played almost constantly over her face. She stood up, aglow, and looked down on him. From below, the shadows playing across her face gave it a sinister contrast. Alan got to his feet and returned her look, and let out a nervous chuckle.

“Very.”

“I’m going to the deli. Wanna come with?”

“No,” he said. “If it’s okay with you, I mean, I’d rather stay here. Get my bearings. Do you have any aspirin?”

She frowned darkly, it seemed to him (it could have been the light), and studied his tiny face. Then her face cleared again, and she said, “Yeah. Let me get that for you.” It was somewhere in her closet, in a little zip-locked plastic bag, along with vitamins, loose bandages, and cough syrup. She brought the kit over to the desk, and poured everything out in front of him.

“How’s that?” She broke off a few particles from one of the tablets, ground them between her fingers, and sprinkled them down in front of him.

“Perfect,” Alan said. “Thanks.” His heart was still beating very quickly, and he tried to control himself. Any moment, he thought, her hand could come down. Sadie…she could do it.

“No problem.” Sadie crossed the room to her bed, picked up two worn socks at random from the floor, pulled them on, and slipped into her old black and white saddle shoes.

“Sadie,” he said, watching her pull on her blue coat, which she’d tossed over the desk chair. She stopped, and turned to him with an attentive face. “Where am I sleeping tonight?”

She seemed not to have heard him the first time. Her look was elsewhere, absent, preoccupied. He repeated the question, and this time she answered, stretching her arms through the coat-holes. “With me, Alan.”

“I’m sleeping with you?”

“Well, no!” He didn’t see the joke until she started laughing – he was so nervous. “If,” and she grinned, faintly, while rummaging through a desk drawer for her wallet, “and only if you’re good.”

“Well, what if I’m not?” He asked this automatically.

But she’d already turned her back on him with a quick about-face, and ran across the room to the door. Once she was outside, she peeked in for a moment, smiling, and then left it ajar.

“See ya.”

“Bye,” he said. But she’d left without waiting for an answer.

He hadn’t been leafing through her French textbook for more than five minutes when he heard a timid, two-fingered whistle far below, on the carpet. He froze and waited, one, two, three seconds. Hearing it again, he crept to the edge of the desk, and peered down into the darkness, interrupted in places by the yellow and orange shadows cast by Sadie’s desk-lamp.

“Hey!” It was a full-lunged cry. “Hey up there!” Alan traced the voice to a dark patch underneath the chair. He fixed his eyes on that dark patch until it began to move and change, and gradually take shape under the light. It was a man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, dark-haired and with a weeklong growth of stubble around his chin.

Alan watched him in silence, as five seconds ticked by.

“Hide!” the other man yelled up.

“What?”

“She can’t find you here!” He disappeared, running into the shadows under the desk. “Hide!”

Alan heard a key rattling in a keyhole, from outside in the hallway. A door’s hinges creaked, and something scraped against a hard surface. Shoes squeaked over the polished floor, stopped, and then came forward again, closer. The door to the neighboring room opened, and then closed. Through the wall, he listened to the movement, bags flung against the bed and books unpacked, shoes chucked to the side, and music turned on. Then there was a pause, a silence.

He backed up against the lamp, and flipped the switch off by jumping on it with his full weight. In the darkness, he hid behind one of Sadie’s books and waited. He didn’t wait long.

He heard stirring behind the wall again, and the door opened with a loud bang. Bare feet padded in the hallway, and someone’s hands pushed back the door to Sadie’s room, which she’d left ajar. The overhead light flared on, and Alan peeked his head behind the books. He recognized the girl from next door, Marina. She was kneeling down with her face against the carpet, scanning the ground for movement, for something or someone. In her right hand she held a pair of yellow canvas shoes.

Back behind the tall pile of textbooks, Alan’s heart banged against his ribs. He breathed in deeply, and let it out slowly. The shuffling noises on the carpet were nearing him more closely now, and then they stopped. There was a girlish laugh, as the wooden chair was dragged aside.

“There you are!” Underneath the desk, in one of the corners near the window, a man shrieked, terrified. Alan, trembling himself, decided to come out and demand to know what was happening. When the girl, holding her chestnut colored hair behind her head with one hand, reemerged from underneath the desk, he called out, loudly.

“What’s going on?” Everything in the room, and everyone, came to a standstill.

Marina got to her knees slowly, and locked eyes with Alan, her huge, black, sparkling eyes against his very tiny bluish ones. He didn’t see the man. But he noticed the old, yellow pair of flats in her left hand, their worn-out soles facing him. A tiny hole was beginning to appear in the heel of the right shoe. She sniffed, and tapped the desk with her finger.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there. Have we been introduced?” She had a faint Russian accent, and a flintiness to her voice. She smoked, Alan thought.

“I’m Alan,” he said. “Sadie’s new tutor.”

“Marina, Alan.” She sat down in Sadie’s chair, straightened her skirt out, placed her shoes in her lap, delicately, and her elbows on the desk. She cradled her chin in her hands, as she talked.

“There was a man here. He hid under the table.”

“Charlie. He’s my tutor. So that's what.”

Alan gulped. “Why was he hiding, if he’s your tutor?”

“Well, Alan, what did he tell you?” Marina answered with a question. There was a singsong, mocking quality to her voice now.

“He told me to hide.”

“He did?”

“Why would he say that?” Alan asked. “Where is he?”

Marina grimaced and then smiled to herself. She stood up. “I don’t know, Alan. But it was nice to meet you. We’ll have to talk again some other time.” She walked over to the door, and waved goodbye with her yellow shoes.

“Sorry! Wrong hand!” she laughed, and slipped on her flats while standing. As he watched Marina put those yellow shoes on her bare feet, and close the door after her, Alan remembered the day before when he and Sadie had passed her room. He had heard stories and rumors of men, and women too, enslaved since adolescence, and bought by some girl or woman while still young, living out their lives in her service, and forced to subsist, day in day out, in her footwear, socks, or nylons. Some starved, and were replaced. He remembered that some were sold as toys, dehumanized [Alan: or re-humanized, as they call it], worked to the bone, and then re-sold as an ornament, or as a choice delicacy in grande cuisine.

All he knew, for the time being, was that he wanted to stay as far as possible from Marina and her shoes.

When Sadie came back from the deli, with food, he told her everything. She frowned at him, while stripping her clothes and getting ready for bed.

“How did he get in here?” she asked.

“The door – it was ajar,” Alan said. She threw her shirt and pants into a corner of the room, and shook her head.

“I’ll have to talk with Marina about this tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know what to think.”

Alan waited. His stomach rumbled twice. “Did you get me anything?”

“I saved you a piece of my sandwich. Want it now?”

“Please.” She dug around in the deli bag for a second, and came up with a few sheets of crumpled wax paper. Unrolling it, she found a few stray pieces of lettuce and the corner of a roast beef sandwich.

“Bon appétit,” she said. “How are you doing with the French?”

“Didn’t get a chance.”

Sadie jumped on the bed and rolled over onto her belly. She winked at him, and made a wry face. “That’s one strike,” she said. “A half for not studying, and a half for trying to escape.”

Alan froze for a second, munching on the crumbs of her sandwich, and then laughed. “What?”

“I said if you’re good you can sleep with me. That’s one strike!”

“Really!”

“Yeah!” She smiled, and Alan returned it. But something, he couldn’t say exactly what, made him feel queasy. Half-uncertain.

As he finished eating, he watched Sadie brush her teeth, get into her pajamas, and set her alarm clock. From her dresser, she pulled out a clean, bright blue sock, and laid it out on the bed, beside her pillow.

“You could get lost in there,” she said. “Alan, if this doesn’t work out, you’re going on the floor.”

“What?” He waited for her to pick him up, and bring him over to the bed. Things were moving quickly, too quickly – almost as if she’d done this before.

“If I roll on you, I mean. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Oh, right. Maybe I should sleep on the floor, then.” I’m going to sleep in a blue sock, Alan thought. What could be worse?

“No, we’ll try it,” she said. “For one night.”

“Okay,” Alan said, noncommittally. “Whatever’s best.”

~~~

He broke off here, and asked me to bring him another drink. “Is it getting late?”

I looked at the clock quickly. It was just after midnight. “Do you want to stop?”

“Soon. I want you to hear what happened the next day. It rained, all day long. And then everything started to unravel."