Craving

by Kristina Meister

  On a piece of legal paper, I found her beautiful handwriting in a purple sharpie below a scribble she had swirled into being.

  “The soul is chipped, the days are hammers. They find my weak spaces and pry. They look at me with nails and sharp tools. They chisel me raw. What am I now? They say, ‘You are beautiful. You are perfect, faceted and sparkling.’ But my beauty was my filth, my roughened splendor, my mystery. They stole it from me to make themselves richer and now, thousands strong, they smile as I reflect them. But my soul is a black stone, an obsidian mirror, and when they tire of deceiving themselves, they will see the darkness of their crude refinement. They will scry and find no future. I am a gateway to nothingness.”

  The book slipped from my hands. I closed my eyes and tried to block it out, but it was no use. The memory was going to fight its way out whether I liked it or not.

  “Do you remember what Dad used to say about heaven?”

  “No,” I had said, knowing what she meant, but wanting her to just shut up about it. I was tired of her constant search for moral support and rescue. Who rescued me? No one, that’s who.

  “He used to say that heaven was the greatest place you could imagine. Don’t you remember?” She sounded hurt, but at the time, I didn’t care how badly I stung her. I didn’t want to talk of suffering eventually ending in bliss, because to me, at that time, it felt endless. Perhaps it was wrong of me, but I was tired.

  I’d been sitting at my kitchen table, phone squished uncomfortably between ear and shoulder, trying to soap the wedding ring off my finger permanently, and somehow everything else had shrunk in comparison with that final, frantic task.

  “You know, Ev, I don’t. I don’t remember a thing about it, and to be honest, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, because no matter how good your heaven is, I’m pretty fucking sure I can imagine better.”

  “I know,” she had said softly. “It’s different for every person and it changes. That’s the point. When we were kids, it was a room full of candy and no adults, but now I wonder what it is.”

  “A place where Brad Pitt tells me how beautiful I am and insists on killing Howard for me,” I had joked, just to stifle her.

  Her throat scratched in the hollows of my ear. “I don’t think perfection or happiness are enough anymore.”

  “You’ve never been happy. How would you know?” I lashed back. I didn’t want to talk about meaning. Meaning was having your husband dump you after years because he’d impregnated a stripper. Had she asked me about my pain? No. She had just called to free-speak indie poetry at me, and I didn’t want to hear it. I had real problems she’d never understand.

  “You don’t believe it,” she whispered.

  “No, I don’t. Why do you always feel it necessary to remind me that the memories I have of them are marred by ridiculous childhood stories? Why do you always have to make me feel like I’m not living up to their standards? Any faith I may have had in omniscient deities died the moment I realized that people see what they want, until they go blind.”

  “Lily, I . . .” she began.

  “Can it.”

  She sighed and halted what she’d been about to say. It was a moment I would never get back. Whatever she wanted to tell me, I would never know.

  “It doesn’t exist, Lily, I know,” she had said with surprising clarity, “but that’s just it. It’s a direction. It’s meant to keep us alive. You can find hope all the time without stuff like that, but I needed it, and you always knew it. I have to say this to you, because you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

  I had snorted.

  I thought back on it and was ashamed that I hadn’t asked what she meant, had not accepted her compliment and found something to say back. I had just been too upset.

  “I’m not going to cheer you up. I’m not going to convince you to put down the knife. I just can’t handle it anymore, Ev. Do it yourself and leave me alone.”

  She hadn’t responded for a long time while I twisted and pulled at that damn golden band, my fingers cramped and my skin raw. I don’t know what she was thinking, and I wasn’t even listening to the silence.

  “Everything means something, you know,” she whispered. “Even if you don’t want to accept what it means, it means something. There is no such thing as nothing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you hate me. I’ve always known.”

  “I don’t hate you,” I had growled defensively, knowing she was right and dismayed that I’d been transparent.

  “You do, and it doesn’t matter, because it all means something. I’m not supposed to live. I’ll die and when I do, you’re fated to wonder why, because you don’t have faith in anything. You’re fated to always rescue me, because you’re just that tough.”

  “What?”

  She had laughed strangely, like it was all not quite a joke, and for a moment, in my kitchen, I had known she was crazy.

  “Ev, you’re not doing something stupid, are you?”

  “Demons, angels, villains . . . vampires.” Then she laughed again and I realized something had changed. “They don’t stand a chance.”

  Then she hung up.

  Had she been cutting herself when she called me, sitting in her kitchenette, carving a band around her arm while I was contemplating hacking off my left ring finger? Why had I chosen those words, “put down the knife?” Where had my strength been then? Why hadn’t she put more faith in it, if she was such a believer?

  I took a shaky breath and picked the book back up. On the inside of a large sheet of drawing paper that had been bound folded in half, I found a sketch of a man. It was only lines, hatch marks that formed a shape seated in a cross-legged position, hands joined in his lap as if in meditation. It reminded me of the ghost story books she had collected as a child, eerie in its smeared, yet accurate, grotesquery. Below the drawing was a smudged charcoal paragraph.

  “It’s a wall that stretches upward, constantly tipping over me like a wave. I see far from beneath it, but it rolls over and I’m blind again. I breathe in dust and drown. I am buried in a fat, breathing, sweating animal that churns as it eats me whole. I sink into its flesh and am incorporated. When I open my eyes again, I see the horizon through the gaze of a universe.”

  A piece of me wondered what had inspired her ramblings. Did she have a brain like a waterwheel constantly churning out thoughts she found lovely enough to scrawl on any handy bit of paper? For a few minutes, I flipped through the pages, watching them crack and slide against each other, wondering why she had never been diagnosed with hypergraphia.

  The phone rang. The sound was so sudden I dropped the book and mistook my heartbeat for someone pounding at the door. I had to look around to find the handset, half-buried by the pile of clothing. It warned me of a low battery as I hit the button.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Detective Matthew Unger. I’m calling for Ms. Pierce.”

  “It’s me.”

  “How are you?” he asked and it sounded more perfunctory than heart-felt, which probably had something to do with how much sleep he’d gotten.

  “I’d be great if my sister wasn’t dead.”

  His beleaguered mind did a systems-check and I could feel him kicking himself. “Of course, that sounded bad. I’m sorry. I was just checking in to make sure you made it okay. Are you busy?” Which was cop-speak for, “Are you too fucked up to talk to me?” The answer was yes, but as Eva had said, I was curious to a fault.

  “Have you learned something new? That was fast.”

  The phone beeped again. Unger’s voice was withdrawn and a bit fatigued. “Your sister made a complaint a few months ago.”

  “Complaint? Like a police report?”

  I heard a car alarm from his side of the connection and realized he was on a cell phone. “Yes. She claimed that she had a stalker, someone who would follow her to and from work. She didn’t go into detail, and it could not be substantiated. They wrote it off a
s a . . . false complaint.”

  Great, I thought, just fucking great. She had a stalker and I’m staying at her house.

  “Do you know anything about who it might’ve been?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Given her state of mind, it may have just been . . .”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and grew even more frustrated by his roughened chivalry. Fate had a sense of irony, to hand me a gentleman, now of all times, when it could have made my life a lot easier and been consistent. “Paranoia?”

  There was a more insistent beep, as if the phone had a personality and was whining for food. “Yes. Please make sure to lock your doors and windows, just in case. I’ll let you know if anything pans out.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Call me if you need anything.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  I set the phone in its recharging cradle on the TV tray. The clothes were there beside me, and it looked as if they were the contents of her entire closet waiting to be laundered. I picked up a blouse and brought it to my face. Chanel, like always, ever since my mother had bought her a bottle for Christmas and she’d fancied herself an adult. Tomorrow, I’d have to start going through it all, washing the clothes, picking out things I would keep and give away.

  I would not sell a single piece of it.

  The phone rang again and I nearly ripped the cord out of the wall and threw it out the window in recoil, but just stared at it instead. After a few rings, I heard her voice, but it was not the shy voice it had been. It sounded strained.

  “This is Eva Pierce. I screen my calls. Leave a number.”

  Then there was the beep.

  I listened. First, a scraping sound, like a hand over the mouthpiece. Then there was the hiss of a sensitive mic picking up ambient noise.

  I reached for the loudspeaker button, prepared to tell whomever it was to piss off, but another sound stopped me: footsteps and the lonely wail of a car alarm.

  I jabbed the button.

  “Detective Unger?” I called, thinking he had perhaps pocket-dialed me by accident.

  There was the rhythmic chafe of breathing and then, “Lilith.”

  No one called me Lilith. I had forbidden it after the jokes my teenaged friends had made about Cheers. The voice was one I didn’t recognize. It sounded like the forced whisper of an emphysema sufferer. For some reason, a tingle shot from my sacrum to my skull.

  I picked the phone off the cradle and pressed it to my ear. “Who is this?”

  I heard more footsteps, what sounded like a conversation taking place somewhere in the background.

  If eardrums could expand like pupils, mine were fully dilated. Scratching and jiggling became loud as firing canons. When the phone beeped again, explaining to me in not-so-many words that it was about to shut itself off, I nearly went deaf.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, hell,” I heard and recognized the voice as Unger’s, though it was muffled.

  “Hello,” I repeated, hoping he’d hear the sounds of my tiny shout and get the hint, but he just kept on talking to himself.

  Suddenly, the raspy voice returned at full volume. “Everything means something,” it said.

  The phone trilled angrily and went dead in my hand.

  I stared at it and put it back on the charger. When it came back to life, I hit the loudspeaker button and dialed the number from Detective Unger’s business card, but before it got to the third ring, a new, harassed beep told me that there was someone else ringing in. Huffing, I tapped the flash button, thinking that if Unger answered while I dealt with the other caller, it would be fitting payback.

  What came from the other line was the sound of a cell phone ringing in chorus with a car alarm. It went on for some time, until silence intruded.

  “The detective is unreachable,” said the raspy voice.

  Chapter 3

  The next day, I went to the police station. I had spent most of the night trying to call Unger back, only to leave about a hundred useless and rambling messages in various states of discontinuity. I had even dialed 9-1-1, but hung up, thinking they would probably know before I would. I was sure I would find the station in a shambles with men in bad suits running back and forth, shouting incomprehensible codes or taking phone calls off a tip line. I thought I would find them huddled in tight-knit groups with sallow, glazed faces mourning the loss of one of their fellows.

  Everyone was exactly where they had been the day before, doing what they always did, including Detective Unger.

  I watched him for a while from the front desk. I’m not sure why, I just had to. What was going on? I was positive I had heard him being accosted by the same someone who had called to taunt me, to let me know that they had gotten to my sister and to the man investigating her supposed suicide. Why else say what they’d said?

  “Everything means something.”

  But there he was, drinking a cup of coffee from a black mug, reading something in a file, and frowning expertly. He was a cop through and through, had probably been one for most of his long life. He seemed the type of guy who smoked like a chimney, drank Jack straight, remembered the face of every victim, and could voiceover a film noir without batting an eyelash. I felt trapped inside a screenplay.

  It took me a while to build up the courage to speak to him; after all, I had nearly stalked the man. I stood there like a fool, even though the lady at the desk kept trying to welcome me with her gaze, and thought about the excuses I would make. When I had picked one that wasn’t too lame, I stepped out of the cover of the silk tree and smiled at her.

  “I’m here to see Detective Unger about my sister’s case.”

  She nodded. Guessing it was a welcome, I strode boldly up to his desk, still gross, unshowered, and wearing the shapeless sack of clothing.

  “Detective?”

  He glanced up, blinked, and then offered me the chair beside his desk.

  “I’m sorry to have called you so many times. I thought for sure I had heard something happen to you and right before then I got a weird phone call.”

  He frowned again.

  “I thought it might be related to the case,” I kept blabbing, though he looked more and more confused, “and I wanted to run it by you. He knew my name and everything. When I couldn’t reach you I was worried so . . .”

  “Um.”

  That was all, but it felt like a sledgehammer. I realized then, that what I saw in his face wasn’t confusion about my freakish interest in his safety; it was confusion about my identity.

  My heart sped up.

  “I’m . . . sorry if I know you, but I can’t place you,” he said in gruff perplexity.

  I swallowed hard. “I’m Lilith Pierce. We spoke yesterday about my sister.”

  “Your sister?”

  Something was wrong. This was not how it was supposed to happen. I was here all day. I had come directly from the airport and spent hours in his company.

  “Eva Pierce. She . . . she threw herself off a building. I was here . . . talking to you about it.” I know there was that whisper in my voice, that softened tone that tells others that the speaker should be considered worthy of medication.

  He stared at me and I clearly saw a reflection of myself altered in the funhouse mirror of his warped memory.

  In that catering, condescending way, he smiled and apologized yet again. “I’m afraid I’m not on any cases like that, ma’am.”

  “How can you not be on the case? How do you explain the fact that I know your name, that I called your phone, that you called me?”

  A spark of life flickered. “I have two phones, maybe someone . . .”

  I jumped up from my chair, though I’m not sure what I meant to do. “No! It was you! We talked here! Here! Yesterday!”

  He started up slowly, his hand out in front of him as if I might hit him or bolt for the door. Then I realized how I seemed, disheveled, distraught, clutching my purse like a delusional old woman. I forced myself to relax, t
o uncurl my hands and stand tall.

  “I was here all day yesterday. Ask her, she’s the one that signed me in!” I demanded and pointed to the lady at the desk.

  Everyone was looking at me, at Unger, at each other. This was a defining moment. After this I was either credible, or a nutcase, so I held onto the moment for dear life, seeing everything in slow motion.

  Unger looked at the woman over my shoulder. “Was she here yesterday, Cynthia?”

  Cynthia shook her head in amazement.

  “I didn’t see her,” one of the detectives volunteered.

  Unger frowned even deeper and crooked his fingers under his chin. He was staring at me as if he wanted to believe me and that gave me enough courage to plead with my gaze.

  “Anyone else see her?”

  Glances were exchanged. I took a deep breath and glowered at them defiantly.

  “We got a call,” said a second detective quietly. “We were gone.”

  I had lost my patience. “Look, I don’t get what you’re trying to pull, but I want to know where my sister is! I want her body back, right now!”

  The woman from the desk was closing in. I could hear her squeaky ergonomic shoes. She put what was supposed to be a comforting hand on my shoulder. “What’s your sister’s name, dear?”

  “Eva Pierce! I visited her in the morgue yesterday!”

  “And how did she pass, dear?”

  “She jumped off the Old River Motel!” I nearly shrieked. “I already said that!”

  Everyone stood still, giving me space. The hand recoiled from me, but ever so slowly came to rest on my shoulder again.

  “I’ll check the records for you, dear. I’m sure we have not misplaced her. I’ll call right now, see?” She reached for the phone, a look in her face and a tone in her voice that was the tried and true recourse of a baffled grief counselor. It was the tone my ex-husband used when he had already worked me into a frenzy, the one that said “By talking this way to you, I’m demonstrating superiority.”

  She dialed an extension and spoke in an almost-silent whisper. “Doctor, we have a situation here. Have you . . .”