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May. 12th, 2006 02:22 amIf you're careful, you can ask questions and nobody thinks twice. I was bored, sleepy, and inoffensive while the eyes of idle customers were on me. As soon as their fickle attention had wandered some, I was crouching near the counter. A little overhang and a trash bin hid me. The cashier didn't suspect a thing. I pitched my voice low, and subconscious.
"Who's that guy standing below the sign there, it says 'Cooking.' Probably the Cooking section," I said rapidly in a monotone. "The part of the store that has all the cooking books in it. Wonder who he is, why he wants to cook."
Usually when I do this, they try to look around for the guy who's talking before they start following orders. When they can't find me, they get a little disturbed about it. Did someone just say something? But who was it? I guess it wasn't anyone else?
I sidled behind the counter and into the window display as he came out. The clock ticked all the time, louder as I got underneath. There was a cardboard cutout. I made two quick holes for eyes. That's right. This same pocketknife.
The cashier was halfway there, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed. He shuffled a book that was lying to him back into Modern Fiction, and looked around, and then up at the incandescents. A display needed adjusting. He pulled it back, forth, not sure where it should be sitting. Frowns were creasing his forehead.
Then he took three almost unintentional steps backward, and knocked the mark's elbow. The Frenchman's Map of Michigan skidded across the floor, spine open. "How dare you," began the mark, and halted. The cashier spun around, astonished for life. My mark yanked his hoodie back over his sunglasses, but not very much. Not, we will say, enough to keep the colour of his eyes from showing.
When I say "the colour of his eyes," you think, oh. Urban fantasy. Yeah, have your day. That's not what I mean by "colour". I mean the shade, the tension, the terror, the ice. The tenor of the music. The tone of his instrument, the timbre of movement. Without a look at his eyes, he came off as behavioural disorder, plus megalomaniacal tendency. With some cheap black-rimmed sunglasses, he could just barely pass for human. But the ice is thinner than it looks.
I laughed and laughed, later. He was suspicious now. He - discarded, let's say - the cashier, and leaned down to stick a finger in his boot. "Hey, I hear someone," he muttered. "Hey you. Stick out your hand. Stick out your left hand. Stick out your little left finger. Stick out your left ring finger. Stick out your left middle finger. Stick out your..."
I tried to stop listening, but he was too quick and too insistent. There was a rock in my pocket, I thought, broken up between beats. I silently pinched it in a fold of my palm, and flicked. The door-chime alarm beeped merrily.
In half a second he was through, holding the hood with a couple fingers to keep it from falling open, and he was whipping his head wild like furious. Back inside; his eyes ran over everything; back out. They aren't very perceptive, but it always seems inevitable they catch you. I knelt, perfectly still, behind the cutout, eyes still against it or it would be obvious. And after he had exhausted himself, he was gone.
The cashier was walking slowly and thoughtfully back to the register. He on the other hand was more perceptive than he looked at first. The cutout was turned a little bit? It wasn't like that before, right? He knelt down to look at it, and maybe look somewhere behind it.
And there would have been irrational explanation. Now, I think fast, they tell me. I got out of there with my dignity preserved. But I can't take much credit.
You would have winked at him too.
