Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  He wasn’t sure when he started babbling, though he listened to his own words with growing panic, because his mouth moved, his lungs worked, of their own accord. “You picked the perfect place to hide, Jeremy. You did. No one wants to admit this place even exists. It’s like the biggest open secret in the world. It’s where the disposable people go to be disposed. But you’re not disposable. You’re not dead. Why are you letting an innocent man rot in jail? He didn’t do anything to you. It doesn’t make sense.”

  He fumbled with the high-top, tumbling it back and forth in his hands. The words kept spilling as if reeled out of his throat on fishing line. “This shoe. My son would love it. I know he would. It’s too bad you don’t have the match anymore. It’s his size. Crazy, that you and he wear the same shoe size. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About what I’d do if you were him.

  “My ex won’t let me see Aaron anymore. Maybe she’s smart, because this whole city’s against me, and the alcohol, it’s not enough to help me anymore. But my boy. He’s like me. He’d want to know what’s going on here. He’s a good boy. He’s smart. Smart enough to look at my example and run the other way.”

  At last he could sort a face out from the dark. Without a doubt the allegedly murdered Jeremy Sellars stood before him, buzz-cut hair, chin scarred by a moped wreck. The bone ridges in his face jutted out sharp as axe blades. The boy hadn’t eaten in a long time.

  Jeremy’s chest heaved as he breathed. A smell wafted from him, like oil from a hot engine. His feet were bare and the weeks unshod had deformed them somehow. They reminded Kyle of socks pulled on with the heels misaligned.

  Despite his pounding skull, he found focus. “You let an innocent man go to prison. A man too mentally ill to defend himself. Why did you do that?” He stepped closer. He gripped the shoe by its toe, an awkward impromptu club. “You revealed yourself to me. Only to me. Tell me why.”

  No answer.

  “I ruined my life.” His voice rose as his rage gathered steam. “Because of you. Because of what you did to Audie Long. To an innocent!” He dropped the shoe, grabbed Jeremy by the shoulders and shook him with all the fury he could muster. “Why?!?”

  At first he thought the sleeves of the boy’s jacket had torn off in his hands. He didn’t understand what he was holding, why the boy’s head both tilted and stood straight, until Jeremy shrugged and shifted his arms and let the rest of his skin fall away. It lay in a puddle around the ankles of a wet and glistening mannequin. Veins pulsed in the membranes stretched between its ribs.

  Kyle again heard the cops’ crude laughter.

  He punched the thing in its blank face—and screamed at the chemical burn that seared his knuckles, like he’d punched roofing tar coated with battery acid.

  The courtyard erupted with bird cries and the sound of many claws scrabbling. A blast of skull-breaking pain threatened to buckle Kyle to the ground, but he fought it, stayed upright.

  More noise behind. He turned his yammering head, beheld others like the thing in the alley, squeezing up from the storm drain like cockroaches, three, four, a dozen.

  Even more were coming out of the courtyard, creeping into the alley behind the thing that had posed as Jeremy.

  Kyle stared wide-eyed at its faceless visage, and white hot agony split his brainpan. More scenes shoved into his head, one after the other, and he finally understood it was the creature that was putting them there, that rifled through his memories, made him move in ways he didn’t want to.

  Now, it showed him the future.

  At first light, crows and pigeons swarmed from the Boneyard, massed in the gutter, pecked at his name, flew off with the little white cards like so many breadcrumbs, removing every trace.

  The morning sun glinted off the chrome of his truck as its engine finally died. A public works employee dragged the abandoned vehicle onto a tow truck bed, bore it off to the city impound to rust unclaimed.

  Sunlight shone low through the city hall windows as the city manager and police chief shook hands and nodded in satisfaction. Uniformed officers, all faces Kyle knew, arrived in the newsroom. Towering Tom watched as they emptied Kyle’s desk, packed everything into evidence crates.

  Penny, looking the best he’d seen in years in a smart skirt and short business jacket, perched cross-legged on the desk in the prosecutor’s office. Her shoulders relaxed as the jarhead put a hand on the small of her back, let the other slide from hip to breast as they kissed.

  Aaron paused on the greenway during his walk home from school to tighten the buckles on brand new black high-tops. His father’s absence did nothing to dull the spring in his step.

  Two big men wrestled a third through a doorway into Boneyard shadow. Roache, his hands cuffed behind his back, his sin, trying to warn Kyle away. You don’t fuck with that. Ever. Especially if someone’s supposed to die. One of his fellow men in blue pinned him against a wall while the other pressed the barrel of a Taurus 9 mm right against the back of his head, and things formed of shadow and hunger shuffled forward.

  Audie Long shuddered on the metal cot in his fourth floor jail cell, the crescent moon blotted out as a face made from black void peered through the window slats.

  “Lies,” Kyle sobbed. “Oh, God.”

  He cursed his luck, his lot, his utter lack of foresight, that placed his voice so far from anyone who might hear it, that left his weapons in the truck, that left so much distance to cover. That left him so outnumbered.

  I tried to be your voice, he said, to Audie, to Jeremy, to the names in his crime reporter diary. The way his brain burned, he couldn’t tell whether he spoke the words aloud. The pain in his head fused in an unyielding wall, and yet he turned to the creature that had duped him, closed his hands around its throat.

  Not all the screams were his.

  CONDOLENCES

  Tarissa had seen enough newspapers on the rack in her father’s store that she knew who she didn’t want to be. The weeping girl behind the witness stand, contorted face wailing from the front page at every casually curious passerby.

  She watched the trial from the front bench, sandwiched between her grandmother and the grim-looking little woman who worked as victim witness coordinator for the prosecutor’s office. A TV cameraman and a newspaper photographer stood side by side across from her in their designated corner beside the judge’s chair. Most of the time they kept their lenses aimed at Ballinger, the man who killed her mother and father, as he glowered at each witness who took the stand. Sometimes, she’d catch him staring right at her, expression a harrowing blank. Sometimes she’d notice the cameras turned her way. She let nothing slip. Not a flinch, no tears, not even a frown.

  That poker face, that’s what the city saw as the trial coverage unfolded. Black curly hair kept in a neat ponytail, a cream button down, the best her parents could afford, dark eyes focused on the testifying policeman. Only she could see the white hot pillar of anger inside when she regarded those pictures.

  So much to be angry about. That this awful man with his bestial underbite drifted in straight from Interstate 484 and chose her parents’ store for the holdup. That he thought her mother and father’s lives a fair trade for the $20 and change he took. That he dared to take the stand on his own behalf and claim her father threatened him, got in his face yelling and forced him to respond in self-defense. Then when her mother tried to duck behind the counter he thought she was going for a gun, he said. Lie after lie after lie.

  Tarissa watched the jurors’ faces as Ballinger spoke, amazed none of them laughed at these vile tall tales. She feared to contemplate what might happen if even one of them believed the bastard.

  But her fury stretched in another direction. The customers who witnessed the slaying all gave similar accounts, that Ballinger pulled the gun, told her dad to empty the fucking register, and instead of complying, like he’d told her to do a thousand times, he smiled and waved like it was no big deal, said, “Hey, put that away. Just tell us what you want.” That he came out from behind
the counter, with her mother whispering “No, Zach, no,” and actually tried to take the gun away, like the whole situation was a joke. If he’d just done what he’d always told Tarissa to do if a stickup happened, he would be alive now. So would Mom.

  The prosecutor called her name. Wanted her to tell the jury what it felt like when they called her to the principal’s office, where the officers were gathered to deliver the news that she’d been made an orphan. It’s okay to cry, the prosecutor had told her. It might even help.

  But she wasn’t going to shed tears. Not for the camera. Not for Ballinger.

  She ignored the murderer’s unblinking stare as she answered the prosecutor’s questions. A camera shutter clicked as she talked. A woman on the jury sniffled, eyes moist, perhaps soaking in on some alternate channel the emotions that Tarissa bottled up.

  Then came the defense attorney’s turn. Bald, pot-bellied and sweaty, Ballinger’s counsel had no intention of picking on a grieving thirteen-year-old in front of a jury. “No questions, Your Honor.”

  But as he sat down, Ballinger cleared his throat. His lawyer waved, No, shut up, but the defendant talked anyway. “Young lady, I just wanted to say, I really am sorry for your loss. I didn’t want any of this to happen. I didn’t. But I did want to offer you my condolences.”

  His words were horrible enough, but as he spoke them something inexplicable happened. She heard a different sound underneath, underscoring each syllable.

  She had nothing in her experience to compare the sound to, no way to classify it. She could only frame it in terms of the pictures that formed as the noise tore her mind open. A dead body dried to paper in a pit of scorching sand. A crack in the floor of the ocean where no lava burned, no sea worms bred, colder than absolute zero. A space outside the universe where no light would ever reach.

  The camera captured the look on her face as Ballinger addressed her: wide-eyed, open-mouthed terror.

  Never in the city’s history had a jury taken less than an hour to sentence a man to death.

  Back in the conference room, the prosecutor, a beautiful but stern Asian woman, told Tarissa that the look on her face alone had won the case. As if she’d somehow planned it.

  Perhaps in response to Tarissa’s bewildered stare, the attorney put her hand over Tarissa’s on the table and said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all this. And I’m so, so sorry for your loss.”

  Tarissa screamed. Because she heard the sound again, grinding underneath the prosecutor’s words.

  Tarissa’s grandmother hugged her harder than she ever had in both their lives. “Oh Lord, child, what’s wrong, what’s wrong,” a comforting litany, not a question. As the prosecutor stammered, Grandma said, “Why don’t you just leave us alone for a little bit.”

  Once they were alone in the room, Tarissa finally let those tears flow. “I heard—” she tried to say. “I heard—”

  “Shh. You don’t need to explain. You don’t need to worry ’bout nothing.”

  * * *

  She moved in with her grandmother.

  Grandma Davis’s house was older than her parents’ had been, bigger and more decrepit. Tarissa’s grandmother dwelled in every corner of this rambling den, a sweet-tempered badger who marked her territory with odd groupings of porcelain saltshakers, from apple-cheeked Dutch children to Heckle and Jeckle.

  Photos from her parents’ wedding hung in the main hall. It took a long time for Tarissa to be able to walk past them without tearing up and trembling.

  She tried to explain to Grandma what she heard when Ballinger spoke, but her grandmother insisted on her own interpretation. “You heard that man’s evil. God let you hear it, and he got what he had coming to him.”

  Tarissa wasn’t so sure, because she’d heard it other times since. When people tried to talk her about her parents. Always the same things, they said.

  I’m so sorry for your loss. My heart goes out to you. I’ll keep you in my prayers. My condolences.

  Some said it with passion. Some by rote. Her teachers. Her school principal. The reporters who tried to talk to her after the trial. The ladies at church. Her classmates, the ones who cared enough to try to understand.

  Language wasn’t designed to address what she endured. How anyone suffered through grief. The anguish. The outrage. The fury. The abrupt sorrow. The emptiness. The sinking realization, when she saw a movie advertised and thought, Dad would love that, when she passed a math test with a B+ and thought, I’ve got to show this to Mom.

  Those repeated phrases, those stopgaps meant to give comfort or maybe just ward off the bereaved. When she heard them, she heard that background echo. A black hole bleeding through the syllables.

  She began to avoid the topic like her life depended on it. In desperation she asked her Grandma to let her stay home from church. She couldn’t take that good-natured chorus of condolences any longer.

  Her grandmother scowled at her across the kitchen table, motes of dust blazing between them like warnings in the Saturday morning sunlight. “Alright, child,” she said. “But don’t think you’re going to be sleeping in late.”

  Tarissa was more than happy to do Sunday morning chores. Even the ones that left her back sore and her clothes soaked with sweat, trimming hedges, weeding the vegetable garden, scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom floors. Anything was better.

  Afterward, exhausted, she thumbed through her grandmother’s Sunday paper—something she’d never have done otherwise, no one her age did—and she discovered she could summon the noise when she read. It wasn’t as intense, but it was unmistakably there.

  She developed an obsession with obituaries. She noticed, in stories about the dead and somehow significant, the people quoted tended to say the same things. She had a great sense of humor. He’d do anything for anybody. She always had a smile. He’d give you the shirt off his back. She never had a bad word to say. When the words sounded in her head, they could have been an incantation. Beneath them, she heard the noise, that sigh from the bottom of the world, though nothing disturbed the air, though silence wrapped the kitchen tight.

  So she questioned, more and more, where the sound came from—the newspapers provided incontrovertible evidence that it happened in her head and only in her head. But she refused to believe it.

  She didn’t imagine that sound. It didn’t originate in her mind. So she told herself, over and over.

  She didn’t talk about this to anyone else. Not even to Grandma.

  One day her grandmother walked in on her as she was using a black magic marker to obliterate the offending words in a story about a woman, president of the arts council, who’d died unexpectedly. (“She had such a great sense of humor,” her secretary told the paper.) Tarissa couldn’t explain what she was doing or why. She withered under Grandma Davis’s glare and never touched the paper after that.

  * * *

  Four years went by before she heard the noise again.

  She begged her grandmother to go to the clinic. The pain in Grandma’s stomach grew worse and worse, but still she wouldn’t see a doctor, refused with a little more snarl in her voice each time. Tarissa never let up. Nothing her Grandma could do to her could possibly be worse than what she had already been through.

  A tall hook-nosed man with a gentle Mr. Rogers demeanor, Dr. Keller ordered a barrage of additional tests, then told Tarissa, “I’m glad you nagged her to come in.” He said little about what might be wrong, but his eyes spoke volumes. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”

  The way Dr. Keller recoiled, her expression must have rivaled the one in that horrible newspaper photo.

  She learned at last not to wince when the sound rasped in her ears, because from that moment on, she heard it again and again and again, from so many sources. The nurses. The technicians. The insurance guy. The ladies from church, who insisted on helping out. The cousins who never used to visit before word got out Grandma had cancer of the pancreas.

  From the attorney and the notary. From th
e preacher. From the hospice workers. From the funeral director.

  In most, she sensed no malice. Yet those words—I’m so sorry. My condolences—always summoned the noise, an incantation that never ever failed. At times she thought of it as the voice of her grandmother’s cancer, broadcasting stronger and stronger signals as its tendrils spread into stomach, intestine and bone. The new avatar of a monster that first spoke to her through her parents’ murderer, that was determined to never leave her alone.

  Tarissa’s great aunt Olivia stayed with her in Grandma’s house during the final days. She kept offering words of comfort, and nearly came to hysterics herself when Tarissa hid in her bedroom and locked the door, shrieking, “Stop it! Stop it! Please, please stop!”

  “Honey, I’m sorry,” Aunt Olivia hollered. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through—”

  Tarissa screamed back, “GO AWAY! GO AWAY! GO AWAY!”