The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  “Sorry, just a minute.” I click the buttons closed down the front of the onesie. Glance over my shoulder at the dim room, the mess, the demon circle and the blood on the floor. Fuck. Not exactly a paragon of good housekeeping.

  I pull the sleeves over my hands to cover up my gory hands, open the door, slip out and shut it behind me as quickly as I can. Mr Russo is wearing green tracksuit pants, a white vest and a look of irritated concern.

  “Hi Mr Russo.” I go for sprightly. Nothing to see here.

  “Kara ragazza, it is nearly four in the morning.” His eyes flick over my onesie, my knotted hair.

  “Oh, the music.”

  “Always this same song. Over and over.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Mr Russo. I’ll turn it down.”

  I see his nostrils flare, picking up the smell. He considers me, with a flicker of sympathy at my obvious patheticness. “She left you?”

  “What?”

  “The girl, the nice one. She left, no?”

  Left me. Left me alone. Left me to fall apart.

  “I’ll turn the music down Mr Russo, sorry,” I close the door against the horrible pity in his face with a firm, “Good night.”

  He knocks again, but I don’t answer. After a moment, I hear him sigh through the door, and shuffle back towards the stairs. About time. I can’t afford another interruption. My phone has buzzed its way to the edge of the circle. I lean over to turn off the alarm, and don’t bother resetting it. What’s the point of any of this? She’s gone. She’s gone and no demon spell is ever going to bring her back.

  (We’ve been nested on the couch all weekend. I’m marking essays, feeling cooped up and hot and irritated. It’s summer and I want to be doing something. Driving somewhere. Fucking someone. She’s been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for ten hours straight, because bloodsuckers are her thing. Insert lawyer joke here. She gets so emotionally invested in everything. She cries in every episode. She cries when she watches fucking movie trailers, or when we drive past beggars, or when the southeaster blows, or every time we have the smallest fight. It drives me nuts.

  Did she always cry this much, or just since she met me?

  “I hate season six,” she tells me, stroking Squirtle, who’s purring unnecessarily loudly on her lap.

  “Don’t watch it then,” I barely look up.

  “It’s the ‘Bury Your Gays’ episode.”

  “I know. I was a queer teen in the 2000s, Shan.” I’m absorbed in writing an angry comment to some third year who somehow still hasn’t grasped how legal intention works.

  Dolus eventualis exists where the accused doesn’t intend the unlawful consequence which follows her conduct, but foresees the possibility that it might and nonetheless proceeds to do it. It is to be reckless as to the possibility of the consequence. Idiot, I don’t write. Because that’s unprofessional. Like fucking your student is unprofessional, falling in love with her, asking her and her wretched cat to move in with you.

  Shanaaz’s phone buzzes with a message. She reads it and blushes. Tilts her hand away from me so that I can’t see her screen.

  “Who’s texting you?” I ask, as casually as possible, putting the paper down, glancing at her face. She’s deadpan.

  “My sister.”

  “Bullshit.” I think about how much Shan loves people. She’ll think the best of anyone, never wants anyone to feel uncomfortable. If someone hit on her, she’d be too kind to turn them down. She’d cheat on me out of politeness.

  She frowns at me. “Who else ever texts me, since you hate all my friends?”

  She’s lying. She’s lashing out to distract me. But she is mine and I have a right to know.

  My mind races as I catalogue everywhere she’s been. Everyone she might have met. Someone in her class? A professor? Some friendly stranger at the library? Someone more appropriate.

  I lunge at her to grab her phone out of her hand. She pulls, away, startled, dislodging the cat, who swipes out with his claws, catching my arm. Without thinking, I whack him back. I can’t help it, it’s instinctual. He thuds off the couch and tears out the room, his tail puffy as a toilet brush. “Kara!” yells Shanaaz, as I shove past her and chase after him, into the kitchen. Little shit. Little shit must learn a lesson. This is how you train cats. My dad always said.

  He’s trying to get out the window, but I corner him. He hisses at me.

  “Kara!” I hear Shan sobbing.

  I aim a kick at the cat, but it’s only a glancing blow and he escapes and takes off through the window. “Stay gone, you piece of shit!” I yell after him and latch the window.

  Shanaaz is on the floor, weeping silently. There’s a big red mark on her arm where I may have pushed her. There will be a bruise tomorrow.

  I deflate like a balloon. What have I done? I sink down onto the floor with her, and hold the side of her face.

  “Baby, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” She won’t look at me. “You just make me so mad. I hate losing my temper, but you make me so mad, hiding things from me.”

  She grabs her phone and hands it to me, still not meeting my eyes. There’s a message from her sister. It says, U okay? Worried abt u.)

  Actus reus: the guilty act. Mens rea: the guilty mind.

  Shanaaz, her name rattles through me. Shanaaz. Shanaaz. The one good thing I had and I broke it.

  Barely in control of my own movements, I flip over the page to Step Five.

  Step 5: Pay the price

  Your beloved is the most important person in your world. You would do anything for them. There’s no line you wouldn’t cross.

  True love requires sacrifice.

  You must have known this was coming. This is the first and last rule of magick: a life for a life.

  Determinism. It’s one of those classic first-year questions. It’s inevitable: at some point during the first semester, some kid who’s also doing Philosophy 101 will put their hand up and talk about free will. If lecturers made bingo cards, this question would get you an instant win.

  If everything in the universe is determined by something else, if the whole universe is God’s overly complex Rube Goldberg machine, then why do we draw the line of causation back to the perpetrator and no further? Do we blame the bullet, do we blame the gunmaker, do we blame the woman who shot the gun? And if we blame her, do we blame the parents who raised her? Do we blame whoever hurt her first, who made her like this? Do we blame society, the patriarchy, the universe? Do we blame God?

  Conditio sine qua non—but for this, that would not have happened. But that’s true of every butterfly flapping its wings to cause a hurricane. So you find the proximate cause. The closest cause.

  The intimate partner is always the most likely murderer.

  But it wasn’t on purpose, she…

  (is in our bedroom, folding jeans into her backpack. Her face is blank and she’s not crying anymore.

  “My sister will come get my other things tomorrow.”

  She can try. Fuck you if you think I’m going to let that interfering bitch dismantle our home.

  But I say nothing, just keep sitting on the bed, watching her pack.

  She glances at me, like she’s about to ask me to give her a hand, then she shakes her head, crams her last hoodie into the bag and zips it up. She gets up and starts sweeping hairbands and knickknacks off her bedside table into the front compartment. She leaves the framed selfie that we took on the Sea Point promenade, ice cream all over our faces, grinning into the sun. I framed it and gave it to her as a gift when she passed her second year exams.

  An object she has no use for now. This is the thing that undoes me.

  “Baby, I said I’m sorry,” my voice breaks. She picks up the bag and carries it into the bathroom, starts zipping away her creams and makeup. I follow, begging now. Begging like a hungry dog.

  “Shan I didn’t mean it. Shan please. Shan. Baby, I’ll be better. Shan…” and she doesn’t even look at me, just keeps folding herself up, zipping herself up in
pouches and compartments, cramming herself away in a backpack. And my blood starts pumping so hard in me that I can feel my pulse, I can feel it in my own neck.

  “Shanaaz!” I grab her wrist and it’s clear now. If she won’t listen to me then I’ll make her listen. I’ll just make her stay here for long enough that she’ll listen. Everything is too clear. The shock in her eyes as she tries to pull herself away from me. The fear in her eyes. The disgust in her eyes.)

  I taught my students that character evidence is seldom admissible in a criminal trial. It doesn’t matter what someone might have done in the past. Focus on the evidence, because everyone thinks they couldn’t be the kind of person who could commit a murder, until they do.

  Are any of us really who we think we are?

  I get up, staring at the shambles in front of me like I’m seeing it all for the first time. This Sisyphean task. The red chalk circle, redrawn over and over and over again on the wood. My phone in the middle, a digital candle flame still flickering away, casting a glow on the blobs of candle wax, on the repeated word in red and brown, her name. I breathe deep and smell the air: shit, and sweat, and worse underneath it all: rot.

  What a mess you’ve made, Kara. What a mess.

  True love requires sacrifice.

  I look up to see Squirtle nosing at the gap in the kitchen window. He freezes when he notices me looking at him. Time for you and I to say goodbye, cat.

  I walk over to the cardboard box in the corner of the room, and tip it over. Six little mice rush out, fleeing to the corners of the room. My little “sacri-mice”. They were blind and pink when I bought them, but already covered in thin pelts of white fur. Squirtle darts into the room and corners one under the TV stand.

  There you go, Squirtle. Consider this a peace offering. Restorative justice, Shan would say.

  (There’s a thud as her head hits the corner of the bathtub. Her face is plastered to the floor. Her eyes roll up in panic. Her mouth is filled with blood. She can’t speak, opens and shuts her jaw like a fish gasping for oxygen. Ohbabyohnonono…)

  I bend down and pick up the knife. Lex talionis. The most ancient principle of justice: an eye for an eye. This is the first and last rule of magick. A life for a life.

  But Squirtle won’t do it. The mice won’t do it, and the cat won’t do it. Not this time.

  I slowly approach the door to the bathroom. Impossibly huge in the dark, like a portal to the underworld. Did Orpheus feel it, the dark pull of death? My hands are shaking. I don’t want to go in there. I know what is in there and I don’t want to see.

  I flick on the light switch and swing open the door.

  And there is Shanaaz.

  And Shanaaz.

  And Shanaaz.

  And Shanaaz.

  And Shanaaz.

  Shanaaz, still propped up against the bathtub with her bulbous cheek, dried blood a black half-mask on her face.

  Shanaaz, on the floor under the window, from the first time. I couldn’t believe it worked…

  (The knock on the door. Open it and she’s there, shaking and naked and confused, and I bring her inside and I’m sobbing, touching her face, telling her it will all be different now, but as she sits there her memories come back and she remembers, she remembers it all, and she backs away from me, she tries to run from me, her eyes are filled with fear and she falls back, hitting her head again. I am Prometheus, doomed to relive the same agony again and again.)

  Shanaaz from the second time, leaning against the bath next to the original, the stab wounds, big and ugly, all down her chest, because by then I knew how duplicitous the demons could be…

  (“Baby please, okay I’ll stay, just put it down…”)

  And Shanaaz III, draped face-down over the toilet seat.

  (She sees her own body, and she stumbles away from me, “Kara, Kara what did you do, what did you do Kara…”)

  …the back of her head a mess of blood and bone. Shanaaz IV, crammed into a corner…

  (this time I’m ready for her, I grab her the moment she walks in the door, gag her, explain to her that she can’t leave me, I’ve brought her back so she can’t just keep trying to leave me, and I keep her there for hours tied to the chair, but the clever girl manages to twist herself loose, she nearly escapes this time but I catch her before she reaches the door. I push the knife against her throat as I explain it to her calmly, “You think you can just come in here wearing her face, but I know what you are, demon, because the real Shanaaz wouldn’t leave me, she always forgives me, but I’ll do it again, I’ll get it right.”)

  I think I even managed to convince myself that they weren’t her, those first few times. But of course they were her. Kara, the demon slayer. Ha! What a fucking joke. The only demon in this room is me.

  The departmental receptionist used to have this poster above her desk featuring a kitten sitting on top of a comically huge pile of paper. It said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I have a PhD and I haven’t been as smart as motivational cat poster.

  But I see it now. I can bring her back as many times as I want, and it won’t matter. Because I’m the monster who can’t let her live if she tries to leave me. And who wants to stay with a murderer? Not someone like Shan. Someone like Shan deserves better.

  Step 6: Wait for the knock

  Was your love pure enough? They’ll be at your door. But maybe you lied to yourself, and you brought back something else…

  I squeeze myself in between the two Shanaazes on the side of the bath, and I pull back the arm of the Pikachu onesie. My forearm is a mess of scabs and barely healed wounds. All the times I’d bled myself to write her name. I know how to cut. This time I just need to cut a little deeper.

  There’s no line you wouldn’t cross.

  “White Lies” singing, could it pull a tear from my eyes?

  I lean against both of her as I pull the knife in. I think of all those infomercials I watched during depressed summer holidays back at my parents’ farm. It cuts through cans like a hot knife through butter! But flesh isn’t butter. The knife catches on sinews and tendons and scar tissue. I have to hack through. But it feels good, like cutting the truth out of me.

  It takes longer than I think before my consciousness starts to ebb. But the room starts to swim away from me, at last. The knife clatters to the floor. Is that the sound of someone knocking on the door, or is it my own heart hammering its last urgent beat?

  (Shanaaz, tangled in the blankets on her dorm room bed, her face flushed, that smile that says, I see you, I know you, I want you, I forgive you, her fingers brushing my bottom lip…)

  Baby, I’m doing my best.

  It Was a Different Time

  Will Hill

  People fucking love the rooftop pool.

  It doesn’t matter what time of the year, or what the weather is like. It does sometimes get cold in LA, despite what the movies and the tourist adverts want you to think: cold enough that you need to put on a sweater, or even a sweater and a coat. One day last January I saw a guy walking down La Brea with a wool scarf looped round his neck, although he looked like the kind of guy who would loop a wool scarf around his neck because he read somewhere that it was cool. To me, it mostly looked like he was sweating.

  In the summer, when it gets hot enough that old people start dropping dead and the local news warns everyone not to leave their dogs and children in their cars, people are in the pool or lying on the beds that surround it by nine-thirty in the morning. They sip Bloody Mary’s and mimosas and they talk loudly about how hard they partied the night before, about how they really need to start taking it easy, even though the guys all look like someone carved them out of wood and none of the girls look like they’ve eaten a carb in the last decade. Not without puking it back up five minutes later, anyway.

  In the winter, when the sun drops into the Pacific in the late afternoon and the nights are that little bit colder, the pool is less busy. People wr
ap themselves in towels and order coffees instead of beers, and sometimes they shiver and hope that nobody noticed. But there’s never nobody there, even on those rare occasions when it hammers down with rain or it gets so cold you can see your breath in front of you.

  It’s only actually empty after I turn on the big patio lights and tell everyone to get the fuck out. I mean, that’s obviously not what I actually say, because I like this job and telling everyone to get the fuck out would be a definite violation of the Associate Pledge that everyone who works here has to sign on their first day, but I like to think that the message I’m transmitting is pretty clear.

  The pool itself is just a rectangle with a sloping floor, six feet at the deepest end. There are strip lights along the walls and criss-crossing the bottom that glow red and purple and pink and orange and the water is kept really warm, so warm that it steams when the air is cold, but in the end, it’s just a pool. The beds are just beds, the orange cabanas are just orange curtains and orange cushions and orange mattresses. The furniture is carved wood that looks old but isn’t. I know because Stef told me she got them at a place in the Valley that mostly makes things for Pottery Barn. Sometimes people ask me where they can buy a side table or a twisted lounge chair, because OH MY GOD THEY ARE JUST SO CUTE, and I try not to smile when I say they’re bespoke pieces that were specially made for the hotel, and I’m really sorry but there’s nowhere they can be bought. So yeah. It’s fair to say I don’t really get the pool.

  The view, though? That’s different.

  That I get.

  I’ve been up here at least once a day since I started work eleven months ago and I don’t think I ever haven’t stopped to take a look, even if only for a few seconds. The hotel itself looks a lot like a filing cabinet; a tall, narrow rectangle of white walls and grey carpets and floor-to-ceiling windows with a digital screen that takes up the whole eastern side and is usually showing a motion poster for a comic book movie or the new Star Wars.