The Unseen

by Bryan, JL

  “Thigh,” Whitley volunteered.

  “Ass,” Chet said.

  “Chet!” Allie chided him.

  “You don’t have to decide right now.” Cassidy continued drawing. She drew faster after they left, creating her best attempt at a tasteful topless nude mermaid based on The Birth of Venus.

  She felt inspired, and the dull red ache in her leg seemed to fade as she worked.

  Chapter Ten

  “You should end it with him. You can do better,” Cassidy’s mother said, which was apparently her idea of light conversation on the drive home from the hospital. Her rattling but usually reliable ancient Hyundai Accent nosed its way up the interstate, each exit densely packed with identical collections of signs every quarter-mile—the McDonald’s, the Cracker Barrel, the Waffle House, the Chevron, the Applebee’s. Billboards were everywhere, many of them advertising the questionable computer training schools that proliferated in the city’s strip malls, alongside nail salons and dry cleaners.

  “I know you don’t like him,” Cassidy said.

  “He could have killed you. Have you thought of that?”

  “We both lived.”

  “He broke your leg!”

  “It wasn’t on purpose.”

  “Does it matter? Oh, lovely, here’s some road construction for us.” Her mother touched the brakes. Traffic slowed down to a narrow crawl around several lanes closed for the city’s perpetual reconstruction. The evening had turned overcast, with a drizzling rain.

  “I couldn’t break up with him now if I wanted to. His ribs are broken. He’s in pain.”

  “It’s his own fault!” Her mother sounded exasperated.

  “And I don’t want to break up with him, anyway. You can’t blame this on Peyton. There was a crazy guy driving the wrong way on the road, and we had nowhere to go.”

  “No drinking involved, then?” She raised an eyebrow at Cassidy. “No drugs?”

  “A little drinking, maybe, but that’s not the point—”

  “It is the point, Cassidy. You’re irresponsible.”

  “You drink, I drink, Dad drank. We’re just Irish.”

  Her mother shook her head, sighing.

  “Thanks for the jammies, by the way.” Cassidy touched the loose flannel pajama pants her mother had brought her. They were hot, but they’d slid easily over her swollen leg.

  “You’re welcome.”

  They passed into the two lanes that were still open, orange and blue lights flashing around them in the rain, cars squeezing all around them. Cassidy felt her heart thumping, and her palms grew clammy as they passed an enormous steamroller moving the opposite way behind the orange cones. The road was freaking her out, she realized, the sense of being surrounded by heavy machinery operated by total strangers, any one of whom could make a fatal mistake.

  The feeling grew worse when they passed the construction, the road opened up, and her mother accelerated to seventy miles an hour. That was a slow speed for the interstate, but Cassidy tensed at every car that passed close in either lane, imagining all the crashes that could happen at any moment. The rain grew heavier. Cassidy gripped the armrest and finally shut her eyes against the sight of all the unpredictable automobiles swerving this way and that, all around their car as it sped along the slick road.

  “Are you getting sick?” her mother asked. “Do you need to throw up?”

  “No,” Cassidy whispered.

  “You look pale.”

  “Let’s just get home. I’ll feel better when we’re off the road. Car crash flashbacks, I think.”

  “Are you going to throw up?”

  “Only if you keep asking me if I’m going to throw up.” Cassidy clenched her eyes tighter, wishing she could get out of the car and never get back in a car again.

  She was able to open her eyes when they left the interstate, because the stoplights and traffic forced them to move slowly and stop frequently. Neon Asian ideograms lit both sides of the street, offering food and groceries from China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and a dozen other countries. The sight of them calmed her a little more, making her feel at home.

  Her mother drove through the front gate of her apartment complex, which was stuck open, as it typically was for several days out of any given month.

  When Cassidy was a child, the complex had been prettier, the flower beds planted with a mix of plants so that something was always in bloom between early spring and late autumn. A grassy, shaded lawn area between each building offered a place to play in the sun, with a barbecue grill and a park swing, and even playground equipment on the larger lawns.

  All of that was gone now, flowers and grass replaced by solid hedges of nasty, prickly plants. The buildings themselves had deteriorated and been spraypainted with gang tags.

  “Have you thought about moving somewhere else?” Cassidy asked.

  “Oh, yes,” her mother said. “I’ve been thinking a tropical island would be lovely. I could build myself a treehouse out of palm fronds.”

  “It’s not the worst idea. You could live on coconuts and mangoes.”

  “And seafood.”

  “Ugh.” Cassidy shuddered. Ocean life—squid, shrimp, crabs—only reminded her of the transparent creepy-crawly things she saw in the air when she’d been sober too long.

  “An Irish girl who hates fish.” Her mother shook her head as she parked the car.

  “It must be the American in me.”

  Her mother glanced from Cassidy’s leg to the concrete stairs leading up to her third-floor apartment, then called Kieran’s cell phone.

  “Come help your sister,” she said.

  “I can probably...” Cassidy trailed off as she looked up the flights of stairs.

  Kieran arrived with a sulking look on his face, still wearing the steel chain from his nose to his ear. He was accompanied by his best friend, Devin, who’d shaved stripes down the center of his blue hair, inadvertently making himself resemble a Smurf with male pattern baldness.

  “’Sup,” Devin nodded up at Cassidy.

  “Help your sister get upstairs,” Cassidy’s mom said, jogging away up the steps herself, carrying Cassie’s purse and the bag of gifts Barb had brought. “I have to be ready for work.”

  “I can totally help,” Devin offered.

  “Just don’t let me fall,” Cassidy said. She heaved her way up the cracked sidewalk to the stairs—left leg, then crutches, right leg dragging behind. She wasn’t sure how to use them on the steps, so she pushed them into her brother’s hands and started up, using her left leg and the right handrail.

  It was slow going, using only the handrail and her left leg, and Kieran’s friend hovered right behind her, his open hands inches from her back. When she glanced back, his eyes watched her expectantly while his mouth hung open...she got the sense he was hoping she would fall and give him a chance to catch her, maybe grope her up a little. She wished she’d given him the crutches to carry instead. Stupid choice.

  By the third flight of stairs, he’d grown bold enough to rest his fingertips on her lower back. By the fourth, those fingertips happened to drift down to the rear of her pajama pants.

  “Hey Kieran,” Cassidy said. “Tell your little friend to get his hand off my ass.”

  “Dude, sick! That’s my sister!” Kieran said.

  “Yo, I was just trying to help her, you know, keep her balance—” Devin began.

  “No. You weren’t.” Cassidy pulled herself along the railing of the narrow walkway to their door, which her mom had left open. Kieran arrived with her crutches. His gropey friend hung several paces behind with an embarrassed crimson face, staring down at the anarchist symbols painted on his shoes.

  The apartment was as she remembered—the same matching couch and loveseat facing the TV, both beige and printed with little flowers. For a moment, she wished she could escape back into being a child, her father lifting her high and kissing her nose.

  That was why her mother hadn’t moved, of course. Cassidy’s father had lived
in this apartment and warmed it with his life. He had pushed Cassidy on the swing set that was no longer there, sending her skyward above a sun-dappled lawn that had long since been replaced by the sharp-toothed security hedges.

  “Are you stuck?” Kieran asked behind her. Cassidy had been standing just inside the door, looking around.

  “Shut up. I’m tired.” Cassidy got moving again, across the living room, down the short hallway, and she pushed open her door, ready to sprawl on her bed and confront all the memories conjured up by her own room, and hopefully to fall asleep.

  Her room was not her room. The art she’d drawn from preschool through high school was mostly papered over with posters of crummy-looking emo bands and big-breasted women in lingerie or swimwear. The floor was shin-deep with empty Doritos bags, Coke cans, and crumpled candy and fast-food wrappers. A boxy old TV set dripping with game controllers perched on the dresser—Kieran’s black dresser, not hers. His bed with the built-in drawers had replaced her daybed. The room stank of rotten junk food and teenage boy.

  “What the hell?” Cassidy asked.

  “Hey, you weren’t using it,” Kieran said. “You had the big room with the balcony. I had the little room with the nothing.”

  “Where’s my stuff?”

  “My old room.” Kieran stepped back down the hall, past the bathroom, and opened the other bedroom door with a flourish. “It’s all in there, everything you left behind.”

  Cassidy sighed and pushed her way to Kieran’s room. The daybed was inside, and her other possessions were in cardboard boxes heaped around it. The walls were bare.

  Cassidy hopped-pulled herself to the bed, then sank down on it in relief. Her mother had clearly made it up with fresh pillows, sheets, and blankets in anticipation of bringing her home from the hospital. She lay back and let her crutches clatter to the floor.

  “You good?” Kieran asked.

  “Whatever,” Cassidy replied. Her brother and his pal returned to her old room, where they resumed a video game at deafening volume.

  Cassidy poked into the nearest box on the floor. It held the kind of literature she’d read as a “deep, dark” adolescent, like books of poetry by Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin. She opened the grocery bag, brought out her sketch pad, and resumed work on the mermaid design.

  “I’m off to work, unfortunately,” her mother said, interrupting Cassidy. She stood in the doorway, adjusting the cuff of her blouse under the blue blazer. “Kieran and Devin will be here all night if you need anything.”

  “I’m so relieved,” Cassidy said.

  “I wanted to take the night off, Cassidy, but there’s simply nobody to cover for me. I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll be fine, Mom.” Cassidy forced a smile. “I just want to sleep, anyway. Thanks for everything. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  After she left, Cassidy resumed sketching. A few minutes later, Kieran screamed “You’re dead! You’re dead, motherfucker!” accompanied by a spray of machine gun fire and the death howls of some monstrous beast. Soon after that, Kieran and his friend appeared in the doorway.

  “Yo, Cassidy,” Kieran said, “You’re good, right?”

  “I guess,” Cassidy said. “Hey, Kieran, I have some cash, do you want to get a pizza?”

  “Hey, yeah, you should get a pizza, yo,” Kieran said. “Listen, Dev and I have to scram over to this party.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, we’ll be back later. You won’t tell Mom we went, though, right?”

  “I can’t even walk, Kieran.”

  “But you told Mom you wanted to sleep. We have to go. We told these girls we’d be there.”

  “And they’ll be devastated without you,” Cassidy said.

  “Come on, I had to get up early and waste all day at the hospital already,” Kieran said.

  “He did,” Kieran’s friend added, pointing at Kieran and nodding vigorously.

  “Just go,” Cassidy said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know. See ya.” Kieran walked off. His friend Devin lingered behind, looking at Cassidy.

  “What?” Cassidy asked.

  “I can stick around if you want,” he said. “Kieran’s the one who wants to go to the party.”

  “Uh, no, thanks,” Cassidy said. “You should go.”

  “If that’s what you want...” The friend still lingered.

  “Yep. Go.”

  Cassidy listened as they left. She hoped her brother had locked the door, but she couldn’t be sure.

  She lay back on the bed again. Her arms, shoulders, and back ached from hauling her up the stairs, and more pain was creeping into her right leg, too.

  She hoped she could sleep, which she’d been unable to do since the surgery. She found the painkiller bottle in her purse—the doctor had prescribed a ridiculously low dosage, so she took a couple. She had no water handy, but she’d had plenty of practice dry-popping pills.

  Cassidy closed her eyes, her body hurting all over.

  Chapter Eleven

  The apartment was dark and silent, and for a moment after her eyes opened, she had no idea where she was. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light from a lamp out in the living room, which cast a pale glow into the hall, and she saw the boxes around her and remembered she was home.

  She’d had another nightmare, thanks in part to the doctor’s stinginess with her pain meds. She’d been lost in a thick, overgrown forest, searching for something among a web of thick, gnarled oak limbs. The thing behind her was huge, and she could smell its foul animal stench and feel its hot breath on her neck. She’d been too scared to turn her head and look at it—if she’d looked at it, she might have died of fright before it had a chance to kill her.

  She was sweaty now, and her leg felt as though someone had drilled deep into her bone marrow. The pain was intense, and she took two more pills. She would run out of them fast at this rate.

  Cassidy shoved herself into a sitting position. The apartment felt eerie with nobody home. It must have been very late at night, because she didn’t hear neighbors bumping around through the thin walls and floor.

  She tried to check the time, but of course her phone was dead.

  Sighing, she grabbed the crutches and heaved herself to her feet. She tried putting weight on her right leg, and it instantly filled with hot red knives digging into her muscle and bone. She cried out and shifted to her other leg.

  She slung her purse around her neck and pulled herself forward, still sweating from her bad dream. Her old friends were back, too, spiny worms and bizarre seven-legged insects floating across her field of vision. They were transparent, but visible enough that she knew she couldn’t blink them away. Her brain ached and itched, the painkillers doing nothing to wash away the relentless sobriety. She needed something a tad stronger, like a bottle of whiskey or a spoonful of raw morphine.

  Cassidy hiked out into the hall and leaned on her crutch, fumbling to open the door to Kieran’s room, the closest place she was likely to find a phone charger.

  His room smelled like cigarettes and cheap pot. She stood for a moment in the gloom, looking over the piles of clothes and trash. She knew where the outlets in the room were, and soon found the charger on the floor, between a spilled-and-abandoned pile of Ruffles and an ashtray with a few cigarette ends.

  Cassidy couldn’t bend her right knee, so she couldn’t simply kneel on the floor and plug in her phone. She tried leaning as far as she could, but she nearly topped over. Then she leaned her back against the wall and slowly slid down until she sat on the floor, feeling a little grossed out as Kieran’s stale potato chips crunched beneath her leg.

  Finally, she plugged in her dead phone. She let out a sigh of relief.

  Getting up would be hard work, so she decided to rest for a minute. Her head throbbed, her right leg felt like it was on fire, and her arms and back were stiff and sore.

  She wanted to take more painkillers, but she was going through them much too fast. She glanced at the ashtray. From
the smell of his room, Kieran might have some weed around.

  She scooted across his nastily cluttered floor to his bed and searched through the built-in drawers. In the bottom drawer, behind out-of-season sweatpants, she found what she was looking for: a cheap red metal bowl and a tiny plastic baggie, crumpled up with just a hint of green inside.

  “Sorry, Kieran,” she said. “It’s medicinal.”

  She unraveled the sandwich bag. It was empty except for a few stems and seeds wedged in one corner...just trash.

  “Ugh, why would you even keep this?” Cassidy flung the baggie back into the drawer, where it landed on a four-color pamphlet with the words ARE YOU THE MESSIAH? in bold, fire-red letters on the front.

  “Ha, these idiots are everywhere,” Cassidy said.

  She picked it up and leaned back against the wall, since she clearly wouldn’t be standing and walking anytime soon. She brought out one of the two bent cigarettes remaining in her crumpled pack. She didn’t have a lighter, but found one on Kieran’s floor featuring a glowing green skull with a viper’s tongue.

  She lit her cigarette and looked at the pamphlet.

  Below the giant ARE YOU THE MESSIAH? part was a clip-art desert palace. Below this, in smaller type: “For the chosen one will arrive in this generation, and has already been born.”

  “Wow,” Cassidy said. She flipped open the pamphlet, ready to read some entertaining schlock. The left side had images of nuclear weapons and starving Africans.

  She read:

  The End Times arrive with war, famine, disease, and DEATH...

  The world we know is illusion. The world we know shall pass away in fire and destruction.

  But the Messiah has arrived to save us all. We are searching for this young man or woman.

  Is it you? Are you the one born to lead the world?

  “Welcome to Crazytown,” Cassidy mumbled. “You get an ‘A’ for originality, though.”

  The next flap of the pamphlet showed a head shot of a fairly handsome, blond-ish man in his thirties, or maybe a very healthy early forties. His eyes were deep and kind, his smile warm and just a little impish. He had a look of easy confidence and a dark gray suit, which combined to make her think of some business tycoon who’d reached great success at a cocky young age.