The Least of My Scars

by Stephen Graham Jones

  But then.

  Fluttering to the ground from each fold is a photograph. A snapshot. All different ones, looted from some old album.

  The kind that get set up at funerals sometimes, so everybody can remember this is a celebration, that they don’t have to be sad.

  Good pictures, I mean. Of the good times. Which is what you’re supposed to remember.

  It’s her husband, the one I never even met. Jack in cursive on the back of some—the name I lucked onto, that she thought she’d already given me. But I never even looked until now, swear.

  She’ll give me him at this barbecue, at that police function, in front of whatever Christmas tree, but she couldn’t bring herself to let me see his face. She’s keeping that for herself, in some salt shaker or pill bottle.

  All the faces are cut out. Neat little ovals of nothing.

  It’s supposed to tell me what I’ve done, I think.

  There’s even some of him holding baby Riley.

  I don’t touch any of them, can’t, but I do lower myself to study those ones anyway.

  If I had any pictures of myself, I could cut my face out, paste it there. Frame it for Riley to look at when I’m not there.

  Camera, I want to write on the board in the lefthand apartment.

  Except you don’t do that. You don’t leave pictures of yourself at the crime scene, at what will be a crime scene if you ever hear a SWAT team pounding up the hallway.

  Maybe I’ll just cut baby Riley out, then. Mat it against a black sheet of paper. Tell her I’ve been keeping it in my wallet for years. That, next door, I have the television on so they’ll think I’m just living, but really, I’ve been staring at this one snapshot. For years.

  Because I love you.

  This is another thing to thank Mary for.

  On the way into the closet, the little door that opens onto the righthand apartment, I touch five things, so that I can bring that strength with me to dress Riley.

  It’ll be my first time, putting clothes on one of them.

  Every day, it’s a new thing.

  I hum my way over to her bed, tell her that Daddy’s here, and then prop her up as gently as I can, start the process.

  Instead of eating a dinner of imaginary vegetables, I clean the little phone up. Make sure it still holds a charge. Check the voice mail.

  There is one, of course.

  She’s just there. Not saying anything.

  I don’t know.

  Before, with the cookies, with the ringtones, the nurse shit. It was all part of some mindfuck. Was supposed to get me asking so many questions in my head that I finally had to just take a knife, cut them out to get a proper grip on them.

  That’s over now.

  And the pictures on my kitchen floor, I was supposed to have already seen them. And, two days ago, who knows. They might have got to me in some way. Now, they’re nothing. Like throwing lit matches into a house fire.

  Is that what she wants me to think, though?

  Maybe the mindfuck’s over, but there’s something new. Maybe what I’m supposed to do is hold each one of these, study it. Maybe her whole plan depends on pretending to get lured here, then asking for one of the pictures, make some point about it, then storm out before I can do anything. Because, I don’t know. Because she’s holding something over me. Is going to tell Singer about the Girl Scout who skated, the Green Paper Suit guy. If he wasn’t hers in the first place.

  And then she’d have my fingerprints on that picture. Then she’d have everything.

  But I’m not stupid either. This is exactly where she wants me, cornered in my own head. Not sure if everything’s one way or another.

  Trick is, I don’t really need to know, I don’t guess.

  Sit on somebody’s chest, your knees in the hollow under their collarbone, your thumbs hard against their windpipe, and the whole rest of the world can be dinosaurs who bake birthday cakes. It won’t change what’s going on under my hands. What’s happening to her.

  But I’ve made promises to myself, too. Right-before-sleep kind of promises. So I can sleep.

  I’m not going to do it fast. Not all at once anyway.

  And as much as I can, I’m going to let her watch most of it.

  One thing I’ve always thought would work is to shoot one of them up with something that doesn’t let them feel anything. So they’re just a head. And lay them out on a table and hang a sheet from the ceiling right at their neckline. Then, maybe with a camera, maybe with mirrors—this’ll all take time, a long list on the board—let whoever it is (her) watch on a screen, or in the reflection.

  Trick is, and they won’t know this of course, is that what I’m really doing with the knives and probes and toys, I’m doing it to somebody else. Or to a dog, even. Anything with blood, so that when I pull the kidney out of its sac, they think it’s their kidney.

  Will they still be able to pee then, or will their brain click over into some other mode?

  I’ve got interests, see.

  And then I’ll do this a time or two, and show them their own uncut belly afterwards, but then on some special day, when I’m in the mood, am tired of all the things I fool them into thinking I’m doing, I’ll dust their stomach with powder, so that they think it’s the cadaver, but then really cut on them.

  After that, it’s as simple as pretending to pass out where they can see, or shoot myself—they’ll believe anything if it gets you on the floor—so that they can swing off the table, run for the door.

  Only—only they’re tripping on something, what?

  Yeah.

  And then I stand up behind them, wait for them to crane their neck around. Wait for them to know the truth, their last truth. The shape of it, leaning down to take them by the hair, drag them into the real world.

  It’s what’s going to make this dry month worth it.

  “You get that?” I say into the phone. Into the recording of Dashboard Mary, still just breathing, just there.

  Didn’t think so.

  Later that night, when I’m probably supposed to be asleep, I hear footsteps on my ceiling. It’s the first time ever.

  I stand in the living room, the wet-dry vac sleeves on again, and reach straight up, place my fingertips to the crackly paint.

  The apartment up there’s supposed to be empty. Supposed to be for later. Because if you explore your whole world all at once, what do you do with the rest of the years, right? There always needs to be something left to discover. Otherwise you turn your knife inwards, think there must be another cave just under your sternum, maybe. Or, if not there, in the hollow under your left arm.

  Thanks but no thanks.

  And anyway, I don’t have any hollow places left, I don’t think. They were all wallowed out by the time I was fifteen.

  Ever since then, I’ve just been trying to fill them back in, pretty much. Tamp down over them.

  But maybe this is the night. For discovery.

  It’s her up there, I know.

  Maybe the plan is to just move in, homestead the place. Make me listen to her clacky heels until I have to complain to management like I’m just another lackwit. One who can’t take care of things himself.

  Not likely.

  I drag a chair into the bedroom, prop it into the closet, then stand there, my gas mask already on. The chainsaw starts on the second pull, like always.

  I cut a ragged circle, pull myself up through it before the dust has even settled, and understand now why I’ve been wearing the wet-dry vac sleeves. They keep the splinters and nails from the fishbelly parts of my arms.

  Nobody’s waiting for me when I step out of the closet.

  Through the mask’s goggles, this could be my bedroom too. Maybe will be, years down the road. If I ever decide to be closer to the roof.

  No time for reminiscing about the future, though.

  I leave the chainsaw on, lead with it into the hall and, when it’s empty, the living room.

  Hanging by the neck, framed in the wi
ndow, some woman.

  I back away, knock the kitchen table half over, then am suddenly sure whoever did that to her’s in the kitchen, on the other side of the counter.

  I saw a wide V into it, kick the front part away so it falls half against the opposite counter, cocking the refrigerator door open enough to spill light down onto the linoleum, as far back as the shallow pantry.

  There’s nobody.

  And the hanging woman, she’s still just hanging. Though I’m ready, one hundred percent ready for her to turn around, climb down off that rope. Spider across the ceiling, try to pull me up there with her.

  I back out of the kitchen, try the front door. Locked. I nod to myself like I expected this too, then crab walk back the way I came, my ass to the wall the whole way.

  Has anybody on the fifth floor heard all this? Already called me in?

  If I could go to the window, I could check for red and blue lights coming in from every spoke of the city. And this is just how they’d want me, too: in a mask, armored sleeves, chainsaw grinding the air.

  After two more minutes of the hanging woman just hanging, I let the chainsaw spin down, go quiet.

  In the hall, as near as I can hear—it’s not my hall, though, so I’m not sure what’s normal—there’s no fast footsteps. No worried brows. No questions.

  But just because you can’t hear it, yeah.

  I’m not stupid.

  And the—

  No.

  The bottle hanging from the woman’s wrist. In it there aren’t any flashing red and blue lights. Just the marble, trying to find a place to settle.

  I shake my head no, fall to my knees a little but push back up with the chainsaw, suddenly an old man with a cane.

  But it could still be a trick.

  But there’s only way to know, too.

  Walking as slow as any kid ever has to his punishment, I cross the living room, take the woman by the hand.

  It doesn’t close back over my fingers, is cool, plastic.

  The mannequin rotates around so she’s staring down at me, and I hug her legs, slam my mask against her hard thighs, and, when my weight won’t pull her down, I start the chainsaw for a few rounds, reach up, careful not to get her hair, and she falls into my arms.

  Below us, out the window, the city’s asleep. All the cars moving out there driven by sleeping people, just going through the motions.

  I close my eyes too, so this can all be a dream.

  So I won’t have to know that the blouse she’s wearing now, it’s billowy, it’s thin, it’s not hers.

  But it’s all right, too.

  I’m still here.

  Because I’m a good person, I stretch the mask over her face, lower her down through the hole gently, and then slip down as well, my arms waving above me for a moment in exactly the way I don’t need them to, ever.

  Ten seconds later, I’ve got the little phone pressed hard into the side of my head.

  Mary pretends to be asleep, but I know better.

  What I should do is say I’ll trade her. I’ll magically get her daughter back to her if she can just wear that pretty blouse over, say.

  What I shouldn’t say is anything that lets her know that the mannequin suicide got to me. Anything that lets slip that I know what it means: she can get in downstairs without my knowing, and she can get in upstairs too. And Singer’s goons have already been in the lefthand apartment, surprise surprise.

  What’s left?

  She just wanted me to think the psychological campaign was over.

  “What?” she says, her voice creaky with fake sleep. It reminds me.

  “Hold on,” I say back, and hang up neatly, dig the crinkly plastic out of the trash, wrap it around the phone. Then, instead of clay, I stuff my mouth with two heaping fingerfuls of butter, take a deep lungful of that cool white air in the refrigerator.

  Okay.

  I scroll down to her other number, the home-one, I think.

  It rings and rings and rings.

  I call her cell back.

  “You’re not at your place,” I tell her.

  “That’s what it’s like on the outside,” she says, sitting up in bed, I think. Whatever bed. “You’d know that if, you know. Don’t want to say anything to incriminate you.”

  “This isn’t even me.”

  “Well then, yeah. One of the perks of not being in...let’s just call it jail, okay? One of the perks, it’s going wherever you want, at any time of day or night. You should try it sometime.”

  “Overrated. Been there, anyway.”

  “When?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I called. To answer your questions.”

  “Then why?”

  “You’re in your car,” I say, going to the window.

  There is one down there, parking lights on.

  It begins to creep forward.

  “Watch out for that bottle,” I tell her.

  The car doesn’t stop.

  Or, she knows that it’s not supposed to stop, if it’s going to keep not being her.

  You can’t put anything past her. This I know.

  I rip the curtain shut, lean over the kitchen counter. Change ears, rubbing my sweaty hand over the prickle of my scalp.

  “You’re up late,” she says then. “Guilty conscience?”

  “Maybe I don’t sleep.”

  “Eww, yeah. Scary. Good.”

  I don’t dignify this.

  I say, “You’re in better shape than I thought. Unless the elevator’s faster at night.”

  Now the quiet’s all on her end.

  “Been training,” she finally says. “Why are you really calling, though? It’s late.”

  I huff air out my nose at this.

  Like I’m not her night, her day.

  “Tell me more about him,” I say. “You know.”

  It was what got her ramped up last time.

  “Jack,” she says.

  “Yeah?” I say back, my voice too close to my real one for a moment. I cough it away, grind my throat down.

  “Not you,” she says, finally following. “Him. The real one.”

  What I almost slip and say back is Riley, pure ambush. But I bite my tongue. Hard.

  Later. Save it.

  “You would have liked him,” she says, her voice not cracking at all this time. “Really, he used to say that between cops and killers, there was just a switch that gets flipped.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not saying you’re either of those. You’re special, aren’t you?”

  I thin my lips. Wish she was right here with me.

  She knows it, laughs through her teeth.

  “I did it earlier,” she says then, her ambush. “Got you back for what you did.”

  “What I did to Dear Detective Jack.”

  “To my husband, yes. It’s not enough, but it’ll do, I think.” She pauses, liking the way husband felt in her mouth, I think. “What’s the worst thing you can imagine happening to you?” she asks then. “Pretend we’re playing a game here. Truth or dare. Bottle’s at you.”

  “Dare.”

  “Then I dare you to tell me what’s the worst you can imagine happening to you.”

  “And what if I don’t?”

  “It’ll happen anyway,” she says. “It’s already happening, really. Maybe we should cut this short. You might want to tidy up.”

  I breathe in, breathe out.

  A line of sea foam, whispering towards me.

  Something dark out there in the water, its back glistening for a moment in the moonlight.

  Shit.

  “It’s not dying,” she says for me then. “I know tough guys like you aren’t scared of that. It’s—”

  “Nothing,” I say. “The worst that can happen to me, I’d love it.”

  “What if you had to pay for something you didn’t do? Would there be any pride in that, you think?”

  I stare into the countertop, drool a thin line of butter out.
Finally get it.

  She’s setting me up.

  Not calling in the fuzz to come collect their next big news item, but—

  I can’t trace it out, though. There’s nothing to trace.

  “You were telling me about Jack, I think,” I say.

  “You don’t have to do that to your voice.”

  “Got a bone in my throat.”

  She almost laughs at this, I think.

  Whatever it was that got her to break down earlier, give up the nurse act, leave a voice mail of just breathing, she’s over it. Got her nerve back. And then some.

  What could she do to me that wouldn’t involve the law?

  “Jack,” she starts off then. “He had a sick humor too. Most cops do. Even saved pictures of crime scenes, you know they did that?”

  Yes. No.

  “And here’s something. I don’t care what kind of childhood you had to make you what you are. He had worse.”

  “I’m jealous,” I say.

  “But you don’t even know why, do you?”

  I squint, blink fast, flipping pages back to what she could be talking about. The crime scene photos. “Same reason I might save them,” I smile back. “Material for later.”

  “Why you.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course not. Might make him human, right? Lot easier just being the woodchipper out behind the house. Just chop up whatever gets pushed your way.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Don’t lie to yourself,” she hisses, losing it for a moment. “It’s exactly like that.”

  I cover my mouth with my hand. Swallow.

  “The reason he got pushed your way,” she says, “it was because your boss thought he was turning his girlfriend into an informant. He thought Jack was telling her all about him. Trying to turn her against him.”

  This is good.

  I wish I’d had it earlier, but it’s good.

  To Singer, if I’d known then: So you loved your little yoga princess so much that you’ve already got another lined up to take her place? What was that, sir?

  Ha.

  “It wasn’t Jack’s fault she killed herself like that, though,” Mary says. “If that’s even what happened, I mean.”

  I stop with the smiling. Run the dates.