Bewilderness

by Karen Tucker

  He knocked on the door at eight thirty, right as scheduled. Classic Nogales. Luce had finished our makeup a few minutes earlier and Wilky was taking a bunch of photos. I went to let him in.

  “Whoa,” Nogales said. “You look incredible.”

  I stared at him. “Scrubs. You’re kidding.”

  “What’s up, doc,” said Wilky. He came over and gave Nogales a friendly clap on the shoulder. “The stethoscope really sells it.”

  “Blue’s your color,” Luce said. “Come get in a picture. Wilky’s making an album.”

  “What about our plan?” I said. “Luce was going to do your makeup. That wig I borrowed for you?”

  “I’m sorry.” Nogales took off his surgical cap, embarrassed. “Watkins wants everyone on call. Thinks we might see some trouble. Figured I better wear something on the tame side in case I’m needed.” He leaned over to kiss me, but I held my hand up to block him.

  “You’ll smear my zipper,” I said.

  Nogales and I rode to the party in his mom-style minivan, which he’d bought for cheap at one of those police auctions. Luce and Wilky went in the Subaru. Before we left, she and I swallowed down the last of our Soma/Norco cocktail, so even though I started out pretty mad at Nogales, it wasn’t long before I was drifting way up above everything, all nice and floaty. Maybe this was what the afterlife was like. The idea made me laugh, considering my murder-victim costume, and I got my phone out.

  “What’s so funny?” said Nogales. “Who are you calling?”

  “Hold on, I’m texting Luce.” I told her my afterlife thought and added a bunch of skull and heart emojis, but she didn’t answer. Probably she was drifting up above everything too.

  Nogales looked relaxed as well, but for his own reasons. For once, he hadn’t been stuck on traffic watch and instead he’d visited Anklewood Elementary and gone from classroom to classroom, passing out Halloween candy and giving scare-’em-straight lectures about drug use. “You should have seen them. Wide-open faces, asking all sorts of questions. And wow, so smart. Actually gave me hope for the future.” He glanced over. “You ever think about having children?”

  “Check please,” I said, waving my hand at an imaginary waitress.

  “Come on, it’s just a question.”

  I pulled my hair off my neck. “You see the stab wounds Luce gave me? I’ll be lucky to make it through tonight without croaking.”

  “Guess I was right to come as a doctor.”

  “You look more like a dentist,” I said. “Got any nitrous?”

  “Not tonight, but I did bring some candy. Trying to drum up business, you know. It’s under your seat if you want to get started.”

  I reached down to find a giant bag of Sour Patch Kids—watermelon flavor. Sometimes even Nogales could play along.

  Of course soon as you start thinking Manny Nogales is one of the few decent male humans out there is when things go swooshing right down the crapper. First he refused to go more than five miles past the speed limit, even though with his badge it wouldn’t have mattered, and we lost sight of Luce and Wilky. Then he got all mad when his phone led us onto some twisty back road, like it was the satellites’ fault they couldn’t guide us through the remote wasteland of Ribbins. We drove around so many loops and switchbacks trying to find the right address I came this close to upchucking watermelon gummies all over his dash. By the time we reached the complex it was crammed full of cars and we had to park by the manager’s office in a spot marked EMPLOYEES ONLY—ALL OTHERS TOWED 24/7. I told him we better not risk it and we should leave his car at the gas station up the road and walk back over. Nogales said we’d be fine since it was after hours.

  “Guess we’ll find out,” I said.

  We picked our way through a hopeless maze of apartments. The fog in Ribbins was that dense upslope variety you get in certain mountain passes, making it difficult to see anything until you got right on top of it. Even though we could hear bass thumping from several buildings over, it was impossible to tell where it was coming from.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Nogales said. “Why don’t we go back to my place. I’ll make dinner, light a fire.”

  “You serious? Me and Luce worked doubles all week so we could get tonight off. We haven’t been to a decent party in ages.”

  “Hey, it was just a suggestion.”

  “You don’t want to be here, fine. I’ll get a ride home from Wilky.”

  “Whoa now.” Nogales shifted his six-pack of Canada Dry from one arm to the other. “You okay? Something going on I ought to know about?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” I said, zipping up my coat.

  But the truth was I had a bad feeling. Not just because Wilky was taking a pill break, though that was part of it. No, it was something else, something far bigger. I remember gazing up at the sky and thinking how it looked carved out and empty, and how that emptiness kept going on and on forever until it fizzled out into nothing. No matter how hard you tried, you’d never be able to see where it ended. Surely there was an end somewhere. After that, what?

  At last we turned a random corner and found the party. Considering Luce’s hype, it didn’t look that great. Just a plain two-story building with a lone strand of orange lights over the main entrance. A few candle stumps flickering in windows. A pumpkin head on top of the community grill, grinning like a child. In the parking lot, someone had set up a portable firepit in one of the spaces reserved for disabled drivers. A crowd huddled around the flames, talking in low, confidential voices. No one I recognized.

  Finally I spotted Wilky on the far edge of the group and soon after that Luce resolved into focus. She was chatting up this super-pale guy in a black TAMA tee, black jeans, and a cheesy black headband. He kept hitting his abs over and over with a pair of wooden drumsticks. You could tell by the tightness in Wilky’s jaw that he wasn’t impressed with Luce’s new companion and when the guy tossed his sticks in the air and caught them again with a stagy flourish, I felt Nogales bristle beside me. He didn’t like being around people on stims.

  Luce saw us and waved us over. “My dudes! Guess who this is!”

  Nogales and I made our way toward her. He ran his eyes over the drummer. “Anemic Don Henley? Depressed Phil Collins.”

  “Haha,” Luce said. She nodded at the guy. “Go on, show them.”

  With a sly look, he put his sticks in his back pocket and lifted his T-shirt, revealing the name LARS ULRICH tattooed across his chest in the classic Metallica font you see on all their albums. The L and H stretched down into the yellow fur of his armpits. The ink must have been fresh because the edges looked pretty raw and swollen, maybe even a little infected.

  “Is that commitment or what,” Luce said.

  For some time we stayed outside talking. Or actually Luce and Lars Ulrich drifted away and began a private conversation just out of earshot, their heads bent so close they were almost touching. Nogales and I chatted for an awkward minute or two until he couldn’t take the drumming any longer and announced he was going inside to put his Canada Dry in the fridge. After that it was just me and Wilky, who kept rocking back and forth on his heels and staring into the fire. You could tell he regretted his decision not to use. I decided I’d wait, let him get a bit more agitated, and then give him a couple Norcos to smooth things over. No time for a CWE, but he could deal with a few stomach issues if he had to. Otherwise he and Luce might leave early and I didn’t want that.

  So when Wilky asked how work was going, I figured he was just making small talk before easing himself into the subject of my pillbox contents. I told him it was my dream job and I’d never been happier.

  “Hey, good for you,” he said. “Luce hates it there, but I guess that’s no secret.”

  I looked at him. “I was kidding. I hate it as much as she does. More, maybe.”

  “Right.” Wilky gave a funny little laugh. “Sorry, you’re kind of hard to read sometimes.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I didn’t like it regardles
s. I stole another glance at Luce. Despite the bloody claw marks across her cheekbone and the gangrene that stretched from her forehead down into her collar, the glow from the fire lit her up with a rare beauty. Lars Ulrich must have seen it too, because he leaned over and whispered something into her hair. She turned toward him, smiling. As for Wilky, he kept talking and talking like he hadn’t noticed anything at all.

  “Yeah, I’ll be glad when we can finally get her out of there,” he was saying. “Next spring she’s going to put in her notice.”

  I blinked up at him. “What notice.”

  He went on to confide that although they hadn’t got the details worked out exactly, he and Luce had been talking about opening their own restaurant. “A little mom-and-pop café. The kind of place with paper on the tables and crayons for kids to color with. An outdoor patio where people can bring their dogs.”

  “She likes dogs,” I said cautiously.

  “Between us, I was thinking we’d call it Lucille’s. What do you think?”

  “Lucille’s,” I said, testing the name out. It sounded strange. She’d been Luce as long as I’d known her. “I mean sure, I guess. But what about the army? No way you can do that and also run a restaurant.”

  Wilky said he figured he’d taught enough people how to jump out of planes for one lifetime. In a few short months his commitment would be over and with an honorable discharge he’d qualify for a home loan through the VA with zero down. “Soon Luce and I can live pretty much anywhere we want. We were thinking someplace warm, near the water. Florida maybe.”

  “Florida. Wow.” I looked over at Luce in time to see Lars Ulrich withdraw a baggie of pills from his jeans pocket and press it into her fingers. With the grace of a seasoned cold-copper, she slid it into her coat. “Well, as long as you two are going to be there, I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Any place has got to be better than here, right?” I had no doubt they’d hire me on at their restaurant—probably make me manager or something.

  “Actually.” Wilky hesitated. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we were thinking the two of us had better make a clean break from this scene. Start fresh. No temptations.”

  A tide of panic splashed through me, hot and frothy. “What do you mean, no temptations?”

  “It’s not that we don’t want you around,” he said quickly. “But it’s probably not a good idea. Not if she’s going to get clean. No offense, but you two aren’t exactly healthy for each other. You want the best for her, right?”

  I managed to nod yes, but it wasn’t easy.

  “Me too,” he said.

  Wilky went back to watching the fire, all relaxed and peaceful like he hadn’t just exploded a bomb in my face without warning. My blood thundered all through me and my chest closed up so tight I had a hard time getting air. I groped around for the tin in my pocket, thinking I’d better go slow things down a little, and snuck a final glance at Luce. She must have felt me looking at her because she flashed a three-fingered W down by her side—our signal to meet in the bathroom—and then she swung around and headed into the party. Right away I got that beautiful calm that comes when you finally get well after a long sickness. Good old Luce. Meanwhile Wilky was so wrapped up in his dumb Lucille fantasy he didn’t even notice his actual dream girl had gone trotting off without him. People like that you almost feel bad for. When I told him I was going to go find Nogales, he gave me a distracted nod and said he’d catch up with me later.

  It wasn’t until I got inside that I understood it wasn’t just one apartment throwing the party—it was the whole lower level. At least a dozen units had their doors flung open with bodies spilling out into the hallway. I texted Luce asking which apartment she was in but she didn’t answer. Twelve bathrooms and hundreds of people and nobody I knew, except Nogales of course. I ran into him in one of the many kitchens, leaning against the refrigerator and chatting up some woman decked out in a slutty-nurse costume that included a plunging neckline and white patent stilettos. She was examining Nogales’s stethoscope with a look of wonder, as if he’d invented the stupid contraption himself. I went up behind him and jammed a finger gun in one of his kidneys.

  “Whoa,” he said, turning to face me. “There you are. I was looking all over.”

  “You see Luce anywhere? I can’t find her.”

  He gave me that smug Nogales look, like he knew something I didn’t. “Ah yes. Luce. Listen, I have an idea. Why don’t you forget about her for half a second? Enjoy the party, meet some new people. This here is Natalia. She lives a couple buildings over.”

  “You can practically see my bedroom from the roof,” Natalia said. “Did you know me and Manny both brought ginger ale to this thing? Isn’t that funny?”

  I turned back to Nogales. “If you see her, tell her to check her phone. I’ve been texting.”

  “Wait, hold up,” he said. “Where you going?”

  But I was already halfway out of the room, following a spiky-haired blond I thought was Luce, but who turned out to be a run-of-the-mill goblin happily grinding her teeth into chalk. When she caught me watching her, she let out a yelp of delight and came hurrying over, arms outstretched as if to hug me. MDMA-ers are so annoying. I had to move fast to get away.

  For the next half hour I searched for Luce and her baggie. The party must have spread from the first floor to the second because soon there was a whole new set of apartments and bathrooms. Endless costumes, laughing faces, blurry washes of color. Music from Southern hip-hop to acid techno to, god help us, bro-country. The sickly-sweet odor of rose cologne in a bedroom turned into the funk of armpits in a crowded kitchen turned into a balloon of dank smoke by the fire escape. And yet I began to settle into the strangeness. Maybe it was the extra Soma I broke down and ate (you have to be careful combining muscle relaxers with Norcos), but soon I began to think of myself as traveling in a sleepy little boat on a river and around each bend there was something new to discover. In one apartment, a woman dressed as a fairy godmother was cutting a pan of brownies into squares and passing them out in orange paper napkins. Another unit had ballroom music on the turntable with a bunch of witches and wizards waltzing in sock feet on the hardwood, their shoes piled in an intimate jumble by the door. The next apartment was full of nothing but seniors arranged in a semicircle in the main room: shrunken white-haired folks in fleece bathrobes and slippers, watching a black-and-white movie on a giant flatscreen. No one was in costume, and I didn’t see so much as a jack-o’-lantern or a string of paper bats taped over the doorway, but when I entered they all waved me in with the kind of excitement that suggested they’d been eagerly awaiting my arrival. A man in a wheelchair rolled himself toward me and held up a bowl full of individually wrapped packages of gummy worms and spiders. I took one of each for both me and Luce.

  The upstairs corner unit had a litter of puppies shut up in the bathroom. I discovered this by accident, believing that the Do Not Enter note taped to the door meant this was where I’d finally find her, peeing out all the blue Gatorade she’d guzzled in place of supper. Instead, five tiny dogs were snoozing together on a plaid quilt laid out on the tile. I shut the door behind me with the gentlest click I could manage but they woke up anyway and came scrabbling over, yipping with excitement, their little legs all shaky and uncertain. My dopamine levels went flying skyward. No wonder Luce wanted a dog. I freshened their bowl from the sink tap, sat cross-legged on the floor, watched them lap up water. They had the pinkest little tongues I’d ever seen. I’m not sure how long I stayed with them, rubbing their ears and petting those soft round bellies, but at some point this Wednesday Addams–looking chick came in and tried to scoot me out, saying I wasn’t supposed to be in there. “Can’t you read?” she said, tossing an indignant black braid over her shoulder.

  I pulled myself to my feet, apologizing and saying her pups were the cutest things ever, and that I’d just poked my head in for a quick second hoping to find my missing friend. “Her name’s Luce. Makeup like mine, spiky blond hair, a funny
tooth that sticks out a little?”

  Wednesday gave me a puzzled look. “You hear that? Like someone screaming?” Without waiting for an answer, she pushed past me to the window and heaved it open. It was just the usual party chatter, the same chaos of music. Some people get so paranoid when they use.

  “Well if you see her, tell her to check her phone,” I said, backing out slowly. I was almost at the door when I had the idea. “You know, me and her were talking about getting a dog just this morning. We could take one of these puppies off your hands if you want.”

  Maybe if Luce and me got a dog together, she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to run off to Florida.

  “Sure, for three hundred bucks,” Wednesday said, still looking out the window.

  There went that idea. I’d worked doubles all week and I wasn’t close to having that kind of money. A dollar a milligram adds up quick. “Any way you could go lower?”

  Wednesday must have heard something in my voice because she turned and looked me over. “We could probably work out some kind of trade. You wouldn’t have anything interesting, would you?”

  I thought of Luce and her Lars Ulrich baggie. “Always. Let me find my friend and we’ll get back with you.” I had my hand on the doorknob when someone yanked it open.