“I can’t go with you.” She looked down at the worn wood floor, afraid to make eye contact with him.
He lifted her chin with a hooked index finger. She was conscious of the layer of makeup separating them. “Do you want to go with me?”
She bit her lower lip and stared at the farthest corner of the room. She didn’t know where he’d come from or where he was going. Also, she didn’t really know him. For all she knew, he could be going back to some dingy, cramped apartment even more depressing than this house. The molasses crawl of time made her anxious. The longer she went without saying anything the more it seemed possible she wouldn’t say anything ever again. Why didn’t she just ask him where he was going? Because it didn’t matter. She couldn’t go with him. No matter where he was going. No matter what he planned on doing.
He took a breath and she wondered if it had really only been since his last breath he’d asked that question. Already, she was having trouble remembering what that question was.
He retracted his finger from the underside of her chin, rubbing the silky grit of the spray tan between his thumb and index finger. “Maybe that wasn’t what I meant.” He smiled quickly and the look in his eyes made her think of lightning striking the top of a mountain and blowing it off in a granite fog. She didn’t know if it made him look crazy or powerful. “Do you want to go somewhere? Do you want to get out?” He placed an almost imperceptible emphasis on that word: want.
She put her hand on the flaking gold plated knob, turning it, and said, “More than anything, but you’ll see. She’s really bad off. I can’t just leave her.” Only, in that second, an ugly truth frothed to the surface. It wasn’t really about her grandmother. Not really. Not at all. She was just waiting for a better opportunity to present itself. That better opportunity might be here. But she would have to decide and that seemed like a lot of effort. It would be much easier if her decisions were made for her.
Erica pushed the door open and they were both in the room with Granny, Walt practically at the same time, and she had the sense she’d entered a cave, something locked up away from the sun, the floor thick with bat shit, the crushed bones of tiny animals, and amphibious things with slime-coated skin and no eyes. She took a deep breath, opened the curtains, and concentrated on Granny, lying serenely in her bed. She felt better.
“Morning, Granny, we’ve got a visitor. He wanted to meet you.”
Walt stood so close to the bed his knees practically touched it. He looked down at Granny but didn’t say anything.
“You can say hi,” Erica said. “She won’t bite.” She laughed softly and motioned to Granny’s nightstand. “Besides, her teeth are in that glass anyway.”
“Are you shitting me?”
Something shifted and broke inside Erica, plunging her back into that cave until she took another deep breath and focused on the squared rational features of Walt’s face. It was very symmetrical, asserting an inarguable geometry.
“What do you mean?” Erica asked.
“Your grandma’s dead. It looks like she’s been dead a long time.”
Erica didn’t say anything. Didn’t argue with him. Maybe she just needed to hear it spoken aloud. She watched Granny’s face. Her eyes were closed and her chest rose and fell. She’d brought Granny food every day since Granny had said she was too sick to get out of bed. She’d talked to Granny. She’d tried to make Granny comfortable.
“Why would you say that?”
“Trust me. She’s dead. There’s hardly anything left of her. Almost a skeleton.” He reached out and poked Granny’s cheek, the skin like old paper. His finger poked a small hole and he brought it back and wiped it on his jeans, his perfect teeth bared in something like a grimace.
Erica felt the cave trying to grow up from the floor. She didn’t know how to keep it away. She felt like the entire house rested on a thin and brittle layer of earth and everything was ready to crumble, plunging them underground where there wasn’t any life that wasn’t predatory or diseased. If she closed her eyes, something she wasn’t going to do, she thought she would be able to hear everything cracking around her.
Walt reached a hand behind him and lifted up the bottom of his white t-shirt. The gun made another entrance. Erica’s eyes locked on it and she suddenly felt herself in the bathroom, Walt’s hands grabbing her hipbones while he filled her and jerked her back against him.
Something was breaking inside Erica. Crumbling. And now the cave entered the room with the sunlight, fossilizing all the motes of dust suspended in the air. The scary place wasn’t in the ground below them. It was outside.
Walt aimed the gun at Granny and Erica felt like the only way she could escape from the cave was to move away from the window, toward Walt, to stop him from doing whatever he had planned.
The report deafened her before she could make it to him and she saw that look in his eye again and now the lightning wasn’t striking a mountain but a person and it didn’t fry them like in movies and cartoons. It exploded the person, sending blood and gore and the smell of something burning all over the room and Erica collapsed to the floor, her hands over her ears and sobs vomiting from her mouth.
Walt lowered the gun and for a second Erica was sure he was going to press it to the top of her head and detonate her the same way he had Granny. But he didn’t. He just slid it back into the waistband of his jeans and Erica thought about what the hot steel felt like against his skin.
“Now I guess there isn’t any question about it,” he said.
Lovesick
Erica shut the bathroom door and locked it before turning the faucet on full blast. She wasn’t sure if this was to keep Walt from hearing her or vice versa. She knelt in front of the toilet. The seat was already up. Walt had failed to put it down. And it was filled with shit. She was surprised she didn’t notice how foul it had smelled upon entering the bathroom. Brown and streaked with red, a gelatinous mess. Her first heave came as she depressed the handle to flush it. The water level rose, enveloping her chunks. One mess replaced with another. As she retched again, she couldn’t help thinking about the mess he’d left behind. “He’s sick,” she thought. It occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t shit he’d left in the toilet but vomit. He didn’t seem sick to her. Not temporary sick or permanent sick.
She retched a third time but nothing came up and, after a couple more dry heaves, she rose and stood in front of the sink. She stuck her hand under the running water, cupping some of it and slurping it down. She wiped off her mouth and chin, opened the mirror-fronted medicine cabinet and brushed her teeth. She left her toothbrush and the toothpaste on the vanity. If she decided to go with him, she might need them. She no longer had any reason to not go with him. She closed the mirror and studied her face. Brown eyes stabbed out through a mask of makeup and blood. She washed her face. The blood came off easier than she thought it would. Maybe it just hadn’t had time to dry yet. She grabbed her makeup bag from beneath the sink and set it on the vanity. She thought about reapplying the makeup she’d just wiped off but didn’t want to spend that much time on it. She was afraid Walt would get mad. Also, it wasn’t good for her skin to apply makeup and wash it too many times in one day. She fished around in her bag until she found a tube of lipstick the vibrant red of a Twizzler. She uncapped it, made a horizontal line across her forehead and a diagonal line over each cheek, starting close to her nose and drawing the lipstick downward. War paint, possibly. Or maybe a memorial mark, something like a black armband or a jersey number patch. This was, she told herself, an attempt at weirdstream. Most likely just something to have between her face and the world, provided she ever left the house.
Body emptied, teeth brushed, at least some type of makeup applied, she felt restored both inside and out. She opened the bathroom door and walked into the living room. Walt sat on the couch, his feet on the coffee table, holding his gun in both hands and staring at it.
“Are you going to shoot me, too?” Erica asked.
“No.” He didn’t lo
ok at her, didn’t look away from his gun. “Although I would if I wanted to.”
She sat down next to him. “Do you do whatever you want?”
“I do now.”
She put a hand on his thigh and moved into his warmth. “I loved my Granny a lot.”
“I’m sure you did. But she’s gone now. Like I said, it looked like she’d been gone a long time.”
“I just don’t see how that’s possible.”
“You didn’t want to let go.”
Erica was silent for a moment. “I guess that’s true.”
“And because you didn’t want to let go, she seemed alive to you, even though you wasted so much time pretending to take care of her.”
“I had to. Couldn’t just let her starve.”
“The only thing we have to do is eat and shit and piss. The body takes care of the rest on its own. You took care of that old lady because you wanted to. The more things you did for her the more you convinced yourself she was alive. Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you can do whatever the hell you want, too.”
Erica looked away and exhaled. “I don’t think so.” It didn’t seem like she’d done anything she wanted to do.
“I don’t think you’ve tried. There aren’t many people who try. And even less of them can get away with it. You have to have a certain something.”
This time she laughed. “I know I don’t have that.”
“Actually, it’s more like not having a certain something. You have to have a certain invisible quality. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that you have to have the desire and the will power to do whatever it is you want to do.”
“I just don’t think there’s anything special about me at all.” She didn’t, but she did often wonder why it seemed like so many people had so many things she didn’t.
“Well . . . you wouldn’t if that something special was the ability to not be noticed.”
“I guess . . .”
“When you go out in public, do you have to speak up to be heard?”
“Usually.” If she spoke at all.
“Do people get in front of you when you’re standing in line?”
“Yeah.”
“Do they practically merge into you on the highway?”
“More than a few times.”
“Do you not get waited on in restaurants? Do you not get calls from friends? Maybe you don’t even have any friends. Do people bump into you and say they didn’t see you or jump a million feet in the air if you clear your throat or when you come up from behind them do they say they didn’t hear you even though you make as much noise walking as anyone?”
“Yeah. To all of it. All the time. But I had a lot of boyfriends and friends in high school so something must have happened.”
“Or they were just noticing all that shit on your face.”
“I don’t leave the house without it.”
“What I mean is, they become friends with your clothes and makeup, how you do your hair. But it takes time to notice it. Same as it does with people. But then as soon as it’s not there in front of their faces anymore . . . If they haven’t identified or noticed the person beneath it all . . . They just forget about it.”
“Like a ghost.”
“Only you can do things a ghost could never do.”
“Yeah, you can’t fuck a ghost.”
He put the gun on the table and looked at her for the first time since she’d left the bathroom.
“What’s that shit all over your face?”
“It’s lipstick.”
“But why is it on your face, your cheeks?”
“Because I put it there.”
He leaned back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling in an effort of singular exhaustion. “Why did you put it there?”
“Because I wanted to.”
His lips drew away from his teeth. She thought about a snake striking its prey but, for some reason, she took away a sense of happiness and satisfaction from this.
“You can learn,” he said. “You will learn.”
She moved over him, straddling him, feeling him harden beneath her.
“Do you want me?” she whispered into his ear.
He didn’t say anything but, instead, showed her how much he wanted her.
Two Of A Kind
They finished in her bed and dozed off and when she woke up in the early evening, the sun still out but the shadows grown long, Walt wasn’t in the bed with her. Slowly, she got out of bed and gathered her clothes. Her legs were shaky and her neck felt like she’d been in a car accident. The muscles in her ass and stomach were sore.
After putting on her clothes, she walked out to the living room to find him standing in the doorway, smoking and looking outside.
“Should have a porch on the other side of the house. The sunset’s a far more interesting thing to watch. Besides, who gets up early enough to watch the sunrise?”
Erica lit a cigarette. “Most people sit on the porch at the end of the day. Who wants to sit there with the sun blinding you? It would get unbearable in the summer.”
“A matter of perspective, I guess. You ready to go?”
“What are we going to do about Granny?”
“I already took care of it.”
Erica ashed her cigarette on the floor and took another drag while walking barefoot to Granny’s room. The door was closed. She opened it, at least expecting to see the blood from earlier. It was like Granny had never even been in there. Stepping into the room did not make her think of descending into a dark cave. She thought about a clothesline in the summer, flapping with starched white sheets. Even Granny’s dentures and the cup she kept them in were gone from the nightstand.
She left the door open and turned back to Walt, went to him and put an arm around his waist.
“What –” she began.
He laughed and said, “I cut her up and ate her.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Do you really want to know?”
She felt like she needed to know. Felt like it was somehow her responsibility to know. Did she really want to know? Probably not. Much in the same way she didn’t really want to know if Granny had been alive or dead when Walt shot her. The only scenarios she could think of were depressing, gross, and probably illegal. Unless he’d called someone to collect her body, in which case Erica felt like she would probably have a lot of questions to answer.
“No,” she said finally.
He tossed his cigarette out in the yard and turned to face her, placing a hand on either side of her head, his big thumbs in front of each ear. “Tell yourself this,” he said. “You woke up this morning without a past. You were a girl who came from nothing and the world was open wide before you. There is something alive deep within you that you are trying to find. Some strange and beautiful power. Fear has been eliminated from your spectrum of feelings. The word ‘no’ has been eliminated from your vocabulary. Because every time you feel fear and every time you say no, you keep that power, that little spark inside you, from growing. People like us, we’ve been given this power of invisibility so we can let whatever it is that is inside of us grow unimpeded. So that we can realize our full potential. So that we can discover who it is we are truly destined to become. Without this power of invisibility, this unnoticeability, who knows how long it would take us to achieve this. I’ve only been aware of it for a few years and already I’ve accomplished so much. I even managed to find you and I think we might just be soul mates. We might just be able to spend the rest of our lives together. Now, can you think of too many people who have as much potential as us, who were also lucky enough to find each other?”
Erica heard his voice and looked into his eyes and thought about hallowed marble hallways in some place like ancient Greece. She shook her head.
“That’s because I asked myself what it was I really wanted to do and the answer was finding someone like you. And now that I’ve found you, I know there are things we both want to do and I know that, togeth
er, we are capable of doing so much more than either one of us could do on our own. So, Erica Monroe, what is it you want to do?”
“I want to follow you.” Her cigarette had burned down to the filter.
“Then let’s go. I put your stuff in the car.”
He was already walking toward the car. Her car. She didn’t see his car. Not that he’d mentioned having one. She just expected him to have one. And she followed behind him on bare feet, not combing the house for items she didn’t want to leave behind or even bothering to shut the door, like she was under some kind of spell.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“The end of the world,” he said. “But first we have to go see the boys.”
Spat
Walt drove. Neither one of them had said anything since they’d pulled away from the tiny house. Erica had to force herself not to speak because anything that would have come out would have been critical. When he’d said all of her stuff was already in the car, she’d assumed he’d meant packed not thrown. Along with trying not to talk, she fought the urge to look at all of her stuff littering the back seat and floorboard of the Honda Civic. She’d seen enough just getting in the car. Tampons, her toothbrush, toothpaste, makeup bags, a couple issues of Glamor Face, all the clothes from her closet (still on the hangers), a few pairs of shoes, half a carton of cigarettes – all looking like he’d opened the back door and tossed them in. At least he’d thought enough to bring them. That was the thought she used to calm herself.
The air conditioner didn’t work and neither one of them had rolled down their windows. The car was steamy and stifling. Erica lit a cigarette and rolled the window all the way down. Walt did the same. At least now the deafening roar of the wind as the car whined along back country roads made the silence seem less awkward. Made it seem almost necessary.
Even the cigarette didn’t help perk her up. She felt exhausted. She didn’t know if it was fear or if it was because she’d done more, physically, in the last few hours than she had in . . . a really long time. She tossed her cigarette out and rolled her window all the way up. Walt still had a bit of his cigarette left and kept his window down.
Sociopaths In Love Page 2