Turn and Face the Strange, Chapter Nine
Gosh I hated writing this chapter. Kissyface is frustrating and boring and takes a more careful hand than what I could spare for NaNo. It's one of the shortest chapters I've written--there was more I wanted to say with this chapter, but I pretty much gave up and moved on.
Chapter Nine
I've nothing much to offer;
There's nothing much to take.
I'm an absolute beginner,
But I'm absolutely sane.
As long as we're together
The rest can go to Hell-
I absolutely love you,
But we're absolute beginners,
With eyes completely open
But nervous all the same.
- “Absolute Beginners,” David Bowie
As soon as they get back home from the old drive in theater and Joe falls asleep, Wonder grabs a few coins from the pile on the table and leaves for the Web. She has the feeling that she should probably wait a night or two to avoid garnering Joe’s suspicion, but she can’t help herself and he is asleep anyway.
She has a hard time finding the club again on purpose, and has to stop some passersby and ask for directions a couple of times, but eventually, into the wee hours of the morning, she gets there. Johnny is up on the stage again, his eyes closed and his fingers rippling over the strings of the instrument in his lap. A moment after she comes in and sits down at the table she’d chosen before, his eyes open and he slips her a smile, as though he was able to sense her proximity. She flushes and smiles back at him.
The flush, however, doesn’t go away. Johnny stays up on the stage with the other members of the Zeroes and plays, and Wonder sits at her low table near the front of the stage, and her face only keeps getting feeling more and more warm. It is not until she has to start concentrating on keeping her breathing even that she remembers that she did not stop to search for some twists of white paper before leaving.
She is devoting almost all of her attention to maintaining the calm and even breathing when Johnny and the rest come down from the stage, but she manages to focus her eyes and smile a bit when he sits down next to her.
“Hello, Wonder,” he says. “Are you feeling all right?”
She tries to answer but that means thinking about breathing and speaking at the same time and she isn’t quite up to that. Her chest feels a little bit tight, like someone has pulled the buckle down a few notches of the straps on her breastplate. Johnny seems to understand anyway. He gets up from the table and fetches his clay bottle and cup off of the stage. He sits back down next to her and pours some water into the cup. He hands it to her and she takes it from his hands with the same reverence as before. She tries to sip it slowly but it just tastes so good that she gulps the contents of the cup down in two mouthfuls.
“Sorry,” she gasps. He says nothing, only smiles kindly. He takes the cup from her and fills it full of water again, then puts it back in her hands. She drinks again. When the bottle is finally empty, he places a hand on her back and rubs it in small circles until her breathing calms. When Arthur pulls the band up on the stage again-he does not let them spend much time on the club floor these days-Johnny waves a hand at him and stays at the table with Wonder. Arthur’s face holds irritation, if not a sort of smothered fury; although he does not appreciate Johnny’s talent stealing the stage from the rest of the band, he dislikes possibly even more how palpably more unimpressive they sound now without him. Nevertheless he climbs up onto the stage with no comment. Wonder smiles palely but appreciatively at Johnny.
“I… I haven’t had any ice all day,” she gasps quietly. She takes a deep shuddering breath. His hand on her back reaches up and squeezes her shoulder.
“Would some more water help, do you think?” he asks. Another deep breath that rattles in her chest. She opens her mouth to speak, but abandons the effort in favor of simply squeezing her eyes shut and nodding her head. Without another word Johnny rises from the table. He goes to the barman in the corner and hands him his glazed clay bottle and several precious stamped coins, and the barman fills it. Johnny comes back and pours her another cup of water, and Wonder takes it, and drinks, and loves him.
v
When Wonder begins to sense the light starting to stain the edges of the smoggy sky, she raises her head out of the cradle of her folded arms on the table and places a cold and trembling hand on Johnny’s arm.
“I have to get back home,” she mumbles. “I have to get back, or Joe will worry. He’ll come looking for me if he worries, and he won’t… he won’t… he won’t…” she wants to say “he won’t understand,” but what is there for him to understand, really? What exactly is it that this looks like and isn’t? But Johnny knows what it is she means, or wants to mean, and only nods. He stands and reaches out for her hand. She places hers in his, but cannot stand even with his help. Instead, he has to bend and wrap his arm around her underneath her arms and lift her that way. She can only take a couple of steps before her knees buckle underneath her again. Without saying anything more, he bends and scoops her up in his arms, one arm behind her shoulders and one behind the crook of her knees. She lays her head against his chest, and he carries her silently out of the Web.
Arthur stops to watch them go, his bullhorn sinking slowly in front of his face. He finds himself, quietly and out of nowhere, not looking forward to the moment when the Diamond Dogs find Johnny of Freecloud.
v
She is back again the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. She picks up the twists of white paper every time, but she has started bringing them to the Web and trading them for glasses of water. The first couple of nights, it takes her a very long time to make the trip from The Diamond Tower to the Web on Twelfth Street, and Johnny has to first carry her back when dawn comes, and then let her lean heavily on his shoulder. But by the third night she is arriving a little earlier and a little less short of breath, and when it comes time for her to go back, he only needs to offer her his arm. She drinks cup after cup of clean, lukewarm water and it is the most delicious thing she’s ever tasted in her life.
“Wonder,” he asks her on the third night as they sit alone at a table in the corner, “Why do you wear this necklace? It cuts your skin and makes you bleed. Why would you put on a thing like that?”
She grasps one of the slivers of green glass between two fingers and lifts it up to her face to inspect, as though she had never noticed the necklace before. The sharp edge of the glass piece cuts her thumb, and a drop of blood draws a line down the side of her hand. She makes no indication that she has noticed; she merely continues to turn the sliver back and forth in the light.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Everyone wears one. I suppose I thought that everyone was supposed to.”
The next night she comes before it has hardly become dark, and when she sees Johnny she smiles. It is only after she smiles that she realizes how long it has been since she smiled with her eyes.
“Johnny,” she asks on this third night, back at their table in the corner, because it is finally time to ask, “why did you come down here from the mountain? From Freecloud?” He wraps an arm around her narrow shoulders. The glass necklace scratches his upper arm and draws blood, but he doesn’t flinch or pull away.
“I came down,” he says, “Because it is not yet time for the world to give up on itself. Humanity has laid down in the gutter to sleep and if someone does not rouse it now, it may never wake up again.” He fixes his eyes solemnly on hers. “Wonder,” he instructs her gravely, “never trust a savior who tries to convince you that you are not worth saving. Remember that, whatever happens. All right?” She nods.
On the fourth night, he tells her to turn around.
“What?” she replies, startled.
“Turn around,” he repeats. She does so, and feels the fine tickling tug of someone pulling at the splintery tips of her hair.
“What are you doing?” she demands, trying to turn back to see.
“Hush,” he counters with a laugh. “Stay turned around. Here, sing me a song.” At this, she is bewildered.
“A song?”
“Yes. Sing to me. You’re in rock and roll clubs all the time-surely you know a few good songs.”
Wonder considers this for some minutes. But none of the songs she’s heard in years of club going have stayed with her. They are merely a discordant buzz in the background of her sparse and broken memories. And then, to her considerable surprise, she remembers one. It is not a rock and roll song; it is not song she has ever heard in a club. Lullaby, says her mind. The word does not mean anything to her, but something makes her think it must have been her mother that sang it to her. Wonder had forgotten that she had a mother. The melody and lyrics are crooked and holey and scattered in her mind, but when she opens her mouth they come out as though she has never forgotten them.
Hushabye, don’t you cry;
Go to sleep, ye little baby.
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses.
Dapples and grays, pintos and bays,
All the pretty little horses.
Way down yonder, in the meadow,
Poor little baby crying mama.
Birds and butterflies flutter ‘round her eyes,
Poor little baby crying mama.
Hushabye, don’t you cry;
Go to sleep, ye little baby.
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses.
Dapples and grays, pintos and bays,
All the pretty little horses.
When she is finished singing it he asks her where she learned it.
“I don’t know,” she answers truthfully.
“Well, sing another,” he says. “I’m not nearly done.”
“What are you-?”
“Sing,” he interrupts. So she does. She opens her mouth and out comes one about not being able to cross a wide river. Give me a boat that can carry two, she sings in a soft, raspy voice, and both shall row, my love and I. She does not understand it, so when it is over she sings it again. When that is over, Johnny hums it back to her. And both shall row, my love and I. Through it all she feels his fingers in her hair, tickling and tugging, although never too very hard. At last his fingers reach her scalp, and then she feels them running through the length of her meager hair, in one smooth motion. She reaches up to touch it herself. The tangles and rats are gone, combed out in Johnny’s long, callused fingers.
“Never let anyone tell you that you are not worth saving,” he says to her again. “Never let anyone tell you that you are not beautiful.”
She cannot stop reaching up to touch her smooth hair for the rest of the night. Johnny walks her home again, and after he leaves her, a block from The Diamond Tower under the apricot sky of dawn, she lifts the long broken glass necklace up and off her neck. She leaves it in a glittering pile in an alleyway.
v
“You’ve combed out your hair, my little Wonder,” Joe comments when he wakes. She has pulled the only chair in the flat over to the small, glassless window and is staring out at the rising light. At his words she reaches up and runs her hand through her hair again.
“Yes,” she says vaguely. He sits up and swings his feet off of the pallet in the corner, then stands and comes over to press a kiss to her smoothed out hair.
“What happened to your necklace, my girl?” he asks. “Did you lose it?” Wonder turns and raises her head to make eye contact with her longtime protector.
“I don’t know,” she lies in a soft, clear voice. “I must have. Perhaps the cord broke.” Something about the directness of her gaze and the clearness of her voice makes him frown and take hold of her chin, as if she were not already meeting his gaze. He studies her face as though studying a troublesome piece he had not realized was missing from a puzzle he had thought to be already completed. Wonder’s breath threatens to grow ragged in her throat… and then he releases her chin, and kisses her, but it is less indulgent and more challenging than it has been lately.
She lets him kiss her, and when he finally lets her go, there is a moment of uncertainty as she touches her hair again and shuffles in place. When she speaks again, some of the clear confidence is missing from her voice, but not all of it.
“I’ve only just got home, Joe-I, I’m sorry, but I think I need to sleep some.”
A rough hand caresses her shoulder in what might have been apology if it wasn’t for a new suspicious sharpness to his eyes.
“Of course, little girl,” he assures. “Of course. You sleep as long as you need to.” Neither of them mention how little sleep she usually takes, or how the sleep she does is almost always taken on the floor of a club, not in his bed.
“I’m very tired,” she explains, falteringly.
“Of course,” he says again. He takes his hand away from her shoulder and turns and walks quickly away. He grabs his breastplate from the floor near the wall, putting it on as he walks out the door. She is left standing alone in the middle of the room, rubbing the shoulder he touched and staring at the doorway through which he had disappeared. She stands there, and she stares and stares, and then at last she walks over to the pallet, crawls into the center, curls up with her arms wrapped around her knees, and sleeps.
v
She skips a day going to see Johnny at the Web, in case Joe has become suspicious, and heads in the other direction to find a more northern club, where she pays for and drinks a glass of water, and then goes into the opium room to lay down on a dirty cushion and sleep some more. In the evening she goes back again to see him come home and go to sleep. Whereas before she would often miss either a morning or an evening-usually a morning-she dared not do so now. And somehow she had known from the beginning to only go to see Johnny at night. While many of the Dogs, especially the hunters, spent nights awake and days sleeping, Joe does the reverse, and works so hard during the day that she knows he is unlikely to stray from his bed at night. Joe does not go to the clubs; he works, and then he comes home and sleeps, and in between the two is Wonder.
When he returns to the flat that evening to find her waiting, he seems almost more suspicious than he would have been otherwise. His eyes are narrowed just the slightest bit as he advances toward her, but when he tries to put his arms around her she takes one step back before she can help herself. She shakes her head back and forth and buries her fingers in her smoothly combed hair, keeping her eyes down on the ground.
“It’s so hot in this room,” she pants. “It’s so hot. I’m so hot, don’t touch me, Joe.” It has worked before, but she hopes that the goose bumps on her arms don’t give the lie to her words. Joe the Lion nods only once, and pulls a few doses out of his pocket, casting them onto the table instead of putting them in her hands.
Wonder realizes that he must have had a lot of work today, and that she is lucky that he has. On most days, he would have pursued it farther, would have all but held her down to the bed as he whispered the story in her ear. Because, she can see, he does not quite believe her. But tonight, he is tired, and he strips off his breastplate and throws it down in the corner, and then falls onto the bed. He rolls away from her, toward the wall, but before she can give him a chance to fall asleep instantly, she is already gone, running from the flat, running from the tower, running to the Web.
She leaves the doses behind on the table.
Chapter Nine
I've nothing much to offer;
There's nothing much to take.
I'm an absolute beginner,
But I'm absolutely sane.
As long as we're together
The rest can go to Hell-
I absolutely love you,
But we're absolute beginners,
With eyes completely open
But nervous all the same.
- “Absolute Beginners,” David Bowie
As soon as they get back home from the old drive in theater and Joe falls asleep, Wonder grabs a few coins from the pile on the table and leaves for the Web. She has the feeling that she should probably wait a night or two to avoid garnering Joe’s suspicion, but she can’t help herself and he is asleep anyway.
She has a hard time finding the club again on purpose, and has to stop some passersby and ask for directions a couple of times, but eventually, into the wee hours of the morning, she gets there. Johnny is up on the stage again, his eyes closed and his fingers rippling over the strings of the instrument in his lap. A moment after she comes in and sits down at the table she’d chosen before, his eyes open and he slips her a smile, as though he was able to sense her proximity. She flushes and smiles back at him.
The flush, however, doesn’t go away. Johnny stays up on the stage with the other members of the Zeroes and plays, and Wonder sits at her low table near the front of the stage, and her face only keeps getting feeling more and more warm. It is not until she has to start concentrating on keeping her breathing even that she remembers that she did not stop to search for some twists of white paper before leaving.
She is devoting almost all of her attention to maintaining the calm and even breathing when Johnny and the rest come down from the stage, but she manages to focus her eyes and smile a bit when he sits down next to her.
“Hello, Wonder,” he says. “Are you feeling all right?”
She tries to answer but that means thinking about breathing and speaking at the same time and she isn’t quite up to that. Her chest feels a little bit tight, like someone has pulled the buckle down a few notches of the straps on her breastplate. Johnny seems to understand anyway. He gets up from the table and fetches his clay bottle and cup off of the stage. He sits back down next to her and pours some water into the cup. He hands it to her and she takes it from his hands with the same reverence as before. She tries to sip it slowly but it just tastes so good that she gulps the contents of the cup down in two mouthfuls.
“Sorry,” she gasps. He says nothing, only smiles kindly. He takes the cup from her and fills it full of water again, then puts it back in her hands. She drinks again. When the bottle is finally empty, he places a hand on her back and rubs it in small circles until her breathing calms. When Arthur pulls the band up on the stage again-he does not let them spend much time on the club floor these days-Johnny waves a hand at him and stays at the table with Wonder. Arthur’s face holds irritation, if not a sort of smothered fury; although he does not appreciate Johnny’s talent stealing the stage from the rest of the band, he dislikes possibly even more how palpably more unimpressive they sound now without him. Nevertheless he climbs up onto the stage with no comment. Wonder smiles palely but appreciatively at Johnny.
“I… I haven’t had any ice all day,” she gasps quietly. She takes a deep shuddering breath. His hand on her back reaches up and squeezes her shoulder.
“Would some more water help, do you think?” he asks. Another deep breath that rattles in her chest. She opens her mouth to speak, but abandons the effort in favor of simply squeezing her eyes shut and nodding her head. Without another word Johnny rises from the table. He goes to the barman in the corner and hands him his glazed clay bottle and several precious stamped coins, and the barman fills it. Johnny comes back and pours her another cup of water, and Wonder takes it, and drinks, and loves him.
v
When Wonder begins to sense the light starting to stain the edges of the smoggy sky, she raises her head out of the cradle of her folded arms on the table and places a cold and trembling hand on Johnny’s arm.
“I have to get back home,” she mumbles. “I have to get back, or Joe will worry. He’ll come looking for me if he worries, and he won’t… he won’t… he won’t…” she wants to say “he won’t understand,” but what is there for him to understand, really? What exactly is it that this looks like and isn’t? But Johnny knows what it is she means, or wants to mean, and only nods. He stands and reaches out for her hand. She places hers in his, but cannot stand even with his help. Instead, he has to bend and wrap his arm around her underneath her arms and lift her that way. She can only take a couple of steps before her knees buckle underneath her again. Without saying anything more, he bends and scoops her up in his arms, one arm behind her shoulders and one behind the crook of her knees. She lays her head against his chest, and he carries her silently out of the Web.
Arthur stops to watch them go, his bullhorn sinking slowly in front of his face. He finds himself, quietly and out of nowhere, not looking forward to the moment when the Diamond Dogs find Johnny of Freecloud.
v
She is back again the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. She picks up the twists of white paper every time, but she has started bringing them to the Web and trading them for glasses of water. The first couple of nights, it takes her a very long time to make the trip from The Diamond Tower to the Web on Twelfth Street, and Johnny has to first carry her back when dawn comes, and then let her lean heavily on his shoulder. But by the third night she is arriving a little earlier and a little less short of breath, and when it comes time for her to go back, he only needs to offer her his arm. She drinks cup after cup of clean, lukewarm water and it is the most delicious thing she’s ever tasted in her life.
“Wonder,” he asks her on the third night as they sit alone at a table in the corner, “Why do you wear this necklace? It cuts your skin and makes you bleed. Why would you put on a thing like that?”
She grasps one of the slivers of green glass between two fingers and lifts it up to her face to inspect, as though she had never noticed the necklace before. The sharp edge of the glass piece cuts her thumb, and a drop of blood draws a line down the side of her hand. She makes no indication that she has noticed; she merely continues to turn the sliver back and forth in the light.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Everyone wears one. I suppose I thought that everyone was supposed to.”
The next night she comes before it has hardly become dark, and when she sees Johnny she smiles. It is only after she smiles that she realizes how long it has been since she smiled with her eyes.
“Johnny,” she asks on this third night, back at their table in the corner, because it is finally time to ask, “why did you come down here from the mountain? From Freecloud?” He wraps an arm around her narrow shoulders. The glass necklace scratches his upper arm and draws blood, but he doesn’t flinch or pull away.
“I came down,” he says, “Because it is not yet time for the world to give up on itself. Humanity has laid down in the gutter to sleep and if someone does not rouse it now, it may never wake up again.” He fixes his eyes solemnly on hers. “Wonder,” he instructs her gravely, “never trust a savior who tries to convince you that you are not worth saving. Remember that, whatever happens. All right?” She nods.
On the fourth night, he tells her to turn around.
“What?” she replies, startled.
“Turn around,” he repeats. She does so, and feels the fine tickling tug of someone pulling at the splintery tips of her hair.
“What are you doing?” she demands, trying to turn back to see.
“Hush,” he counters with a laugh. “Stay turned around. Here, sing me a song.” At this, she is bewildered.
“A song?”
“Yes. Sing to me. You’re in rock and roll clubs all the time-surely you know a few good songs.”
Wonder considers this for some minutes. But none of the songs she’s heard in years of club going have stayed with her. They are merely a discordant buzz in the background of her sparse and broken memories. And then, to her considerable surprise, she remembers one. It is not a rock and roll song; it is not song she has ever heard in a club. Lullaby, says her mind. The word does not mean anything to her, but something makes her think it must have been her mother that sang it to her. Wonder had forgotten that she had a mother. The melody and lyrics are crooked and holey and scattered in her mind, but when she opens her mouth they come out as though she has never forgotten them.
Hushabye, don’t you cry;
Go to sleep, ye little baby.
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses.
Dapples and grays, pintos and bays,
All the pretty little horses.
Way down yonder, in the meadow,
Poor little baby crying mama.
Birds and butterflies flutter ‘round her eyes,
Poor little baby crying mama.
Hushabye, don’t you cry;
Go to sleep, ye little baby.
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses.
Dapples and grays, pintos and bays,
All the pretty little horses.
When she is finished singing it he asks her where she learned it.
“I don’t know,” she answers truthfully.
“Well, sing another,” he says. “I’m not nearly done.”
“What are you-?”
“Sing,” he interrupts. So she does. She opens her mouth and out comes one about not being able to cross a wide river. Give me a boat that can carry two, she sings in a soft, raspy voice, and both shall row, my love and I. She does not understand it, so when it is over she sings it again. When that is over, Johnny hums it back to her. And both shall row, my love and I. Through it all she feels his fingers in her hair, tickling and tugging, although never too very hard. At last his fingers reach her scalp, and then she feels them running through the length of her meager hair, in one smooth motion. She reaches up to touch it herself. The tangles and rats are gone, combed out in Johnny’s long, callused fingers.
“Never let anyone tell you that you are not worth saving,” he says to her again. “Never let anyone tell you that you are not beautiful.”
She cannot stop reaching up to touch her smooth hair for the rest of the night. Johnny walks her home again, and after he leaves her, a block from The Diamond Tower under the apricot sky of dawn, she lifts the long broken glass necklace up and off her neck. She leaves it in a glittering pile in an alleyway.
v
“You’ve combed out your hair, my little Wonder,” Joe comments when he wakes. She has pulled the only chair in the flat over to the small, glassless window and is staring out at the rising light. At his words she reaches up and runs her hand through her hair again.
“Yes,” she says vaguely. He sits up and swings his feet off of the pallet in the corner, then stands and comes over to press a kiss to her smoothed out hair.
“What happened to your necklace, my girl?” he asks. “Did you lose it?” Wonder turns and raises her head to make eye contact with her longtime protector.
“I don’t know,” she lies in a soft, clear voice. “I must have. Perhaps the cord broke.” Something about the directness of her gaze and the clearness of her voice makes him frown and take hold of her chin, as if she were not already meeting his gaze. He studies her face as though studying a troublesome piece he had not realized was missing from a puzzle he had thought to be already completed. Wonder’s breath threatens to grow ragged in her throat… and then he releases her chin, and kisses her, but it is less indulgent and more challenging than it has been lately.
She lets him kiss her, and when he finally lets her go, there is a moment of uncertainty as she touches her hair again and shuffles in place. When she speaks again, some of the clear confidence is missing from her voice, but not all of it.
“I’ve only just got home, Joe-I, I’m sorry, but I think I need to sleep some.”
A rough hand caresses her shoulder in what might have been apology if it wasn’t for a new suspicious sharpness to his eyes.
“Of course, little girl,” he assures. “Of course. You sleep as long as you need to.” Neither of them mention how little sleep she usually takes, or how the sleep she does is almost always taken on the floor of a club, not in his bed.
“I’m very tired,” she explains, falteringly.
“Of course,” he says again. He takes his hand away from her shoulder and turns and walks quickly away. He grabs his breastplate from the floor near the wall, putting it on as he walks out the door. She is left standing alone in the middle of the room, rubbing the shoulder he touched and staring at the doorway through which he had disappeared. She stands there, and she stares and stares, and then at last she walks over to the pallet, crawls into the center, curls up with her arms wrapped around her knees, and sleeps.
v
She skips a day going to see Johnny at the Web, in case Joe has become suspicious, and heads in the other direction to find a more northern club, where she pays for and drinks a glass of water, and then goes into the opium room to lay down on a dirty cushion and sleep some more. In the evening she goes back again to see him come home and go to sleep. Whereas before she would often miss either a morning or an evening-usually a morning-she dared not do so now. And somehow she had known from the beginning to only go to see Johnny at night. While many of the Dogs, especially the hunters, spent nights awake and days sleeping, Joe does the reverse, and works so hard during the day that she knows he is unlikely to stray from his bed at night. Joe does not go to the clubs; he works, and then he comes home and sleeps, and in between the two is Wonder.
When he returns to the flat that evening to find her waiting, he seems almost more suspicious than he would have been otherwise. His eyes are narrowed just the slightest bit as he advances toward her, but when he tries to put his arms around her she takes one step back before she can help herself. She shakes her head back and forth and buries her fingers in her smoothly combed hair, keeping her eyes down on the ground.
“It’s so hot in this room,” she pants. “It’s so hot. I’m so hot, don’t touch me, Joe.” It has worked before, but she hopes that the goose bumps on her arms don’t give the lie to her words. Joe the Lion nods only once, and pulls a few doses out of his pocket, casting them onto the table instead of putting them in her hands.
Wonder realizes that he must have had a lot of work today, and that she is lucky that he has. On most days, he would have pursued it farther, would have all but held her down to the bed as he whispered the story in her ear. Because, she can see, he does not quite believe her. But tonight, he is tired, and he strips off his breastplate and throws it down in the corner, and then falls onto the bed. He rolls away from her, toward the wall, but before she can give him a chance to fall asleep instantly, she is already gone, running from the flat, running from the tower, running to the Web.
She leaves the doses behind on the table.