She imagined Walt’s insides as the cave, dark and inescapable.
Was that what she’d fallen into?
The girl pulled out of her parking spot. Walt pulled after her.
“Do you do it the same way every time?”
“No. This will be exciting though. I thought you’d like it.”
If she could think, for a second, that he was doing this for her, that he had ever done anything for her, she probably wouldn’t feel the way she had felt for the past several weeks. Yesterday had been good, definitely, but she now felt as though it hadn’t even existed. It took on the air of what it probably was – a dying couple performing one last ditch effort to try and prove to each other they still cared.
Walt stayed close to the girl’s car, making sure another car couldn’t come in between them. Erica felt like being followed was probably the furthest thing from the girl’s mind but, even if she was concerned, it probably didn’t matter anyway. There wasn’t really much of a reason for Walt to be discrete since the girl wasn’t going to live long enough to give anyone a description of him or his truck.
By him saying it was going to be exciting, she expected more. She was thinking Walt would follow this girl out to one of the wide open country roads, follow her until she knew she was being followed and started speeding up. Walt would move in close to her and then back off, to make her unsure, to give it more of a cat and mouse effect. Eventually, he would overtake her and, his truck being so large and her car being so small, the impending crash would be in their favor and they would have felt like they’d won something before Walt got out to claim his prize.
Instead he followed her into the downtown section of whatever shithole town this was. She stopped at a red light and he rear-ended her. Not incredibly hard but enough to send a jolt through Erica and, she was sure, a jolt through the girl in the tiny car. Walt waited in the truck until the girl stepped out of the car. The light turned green and a car behind them drove around the fender bender, uninterested and probably only slightly annoyed. Walt slid down out of the truck’s cab and walked toward the girl. He punched her in the stomach and she dropped to the pavement. Erica saw the look of surprise cross the girl’s face and wondered if this was one of the thrills Walt got from doing what he did. She imagined everyone’s expression was just different enough to make it interesting. Erica couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a look of genuine surprise on someone’s face.
Walt fell upon the girl on the asphalt, straddling her and wrapping his hands around her throat. Erica could no longer see the girl’s face, just her legs kicking and kicking, those stupid boots drumming against the asphalt. Cars continued to pass. The light turned red again and Erica bent the rearview mirror down to see if a car pulled up behind them. There was a car stopped on the other side of the intersection and Erica wondered what the people in the car saw. Did they see what was happening only feet in front of them? Did they not see it? Did they see it and refuse to acknowledge it for what it was? Did they see it, acknowledge it for what it was, and were just too lazy to do anything about it? How could any of these things be a possibility? Walt had claimed he had a gift, claimed she had a gift too, but she had a hard time seeing him as some sort of supernatural creature. She felt like their only gift was society’s complete and total apathy.
Other things to consider, she supposed, were that Walt had somehow brainwashed her into seeing something she wasn’t really seeing or that Walt was some projection of her self. She dismissed both of these things, knowing that if they were true, she would not even think of them as possibilities. One does not become brainwashed or insane and then magically realize she is no longer any of those things.
Walt picked up the limp girl and tossed her over his shoulder. He walked her back to the truck and dumped her in the bed. The girl was so slight the impact of her weight wasn’t even noticeable. Walt got into the girl’s car and parked it against the curb across the street. He came back and slammed the door of the truck.
“I’m glad you told me about you and that other guy. That was a really open thing to tell me about. Tonight I’d like you to watch me fuck that girl back there.”
Erica thought about arguing with him but felt like she already knew how it worked. “And if I don’t want to watch you then I can leave, huh?”
He clicked a finger pistol at her and said, “Bingo.”
Erica felt like she would be leaving some day, but not tonight. She would do what he asked her to do.
Halloween
Walt was apparently planning on fucking the girl in their bed. Erica told him he wouldn’t do that if he ever wanted her to sleep in there again. Surprisingly he didn’t do it. She almost thought he would just to spite her. She knew he didn’t have any really deep feelings for her and yet she knew she was going to stick around for a while. She felt like that meant something. Maybe she was just waiting around for something better to come along. More specifically, someone better to come along since, if she wanted to strike out on her own, there wasn’t really anything stopping her from doing that. So he ended up throwing a blanket down in the hallway (“So my knees don’t get all banged up.”) and fucking the girl there before dragging her into the master bathroom and letting her rot for a day or two in the bathtub. Erica slept on the couch anyway. She didn’t really know why. She actually hoped something didn’t compel her to sleep on the couch every night because it wasn’t really that comfortable.
The next day, sitting on the balcony in the cool October air, Erica realized she began to view their relationship as, well, just that. A relationship. There were things she wanted and things he wanted and both of them were willing to lash out at the other one to do those things. In other words, a comparatively normal relationship. She didn’t know if this made her more comfortable with it or just bored. She still thought she would like to convince him to leave. To get out of Dayton. Maybe even to get out of the United States. It wasn’t exactly paranoia and she mostly believed him when he said he’d been doing this for so long that if something were to happen it would have happened by now. But there was still the possibility they could be caught. She would have to be insane to think they could just go on forever with nothing happening to them. What continually entered into her mind was that there was some kind of super detective out there. Someone who was exactly like they were. She imagined this guy, world weary and haggard, going into some kind of FBI or CIA building every day and practically having to shout to make people listen to him. No one believing him. Maybe they don’t even believe he works there and ask to see his credentials every day. And this detective, he gets really tired of this and it all makes him really mad but, just as she and Walt were hellbent to fulfill their own personal desires, so was this guy. And his one overriding personal desire was justice. He was able to see them, able to see everyone like them, and he waited. He waited in the shadows for their crimes to accumulate or he waited for irrevocable proof. Like she and Walt, he lived in the caves, somewhere deep in the earth, unseen. Unlike she and Walt, he knew where to find the light any time he wanted to.
She thought about the man on the top of the parking garage. She hadn’t seen him since that one night.
October passed with Erica remaining in this numbed state. On Halloween, she put on her corpse paint, something she hadn’t done in a while, and went out walking around downtown. Walt wasn’t in the apartment when she left. If Halloween were really a day when the dead could walk the earth then it seemed only appropriate they were both out and about this night. While they weren’t technically dead – that would have been a far too simple answer to what she had come to think of as her dilemma – they might as well have been for all the impact they made. Maybe that was why Walt chose to kill people. If they could do anything they wanted and, after all, were only humans capable of performing single human-type tasks, then the only thing they could really do that had any sort of immediate and irreversible impact was to kill another person. She stole, that was her thing, and she doubted this rea
lly affected anyone. The stores she typically stole from were insured against this kind of loss and, because she never stole from the same place day after day after day, there probably weren’t any employees who got blamed for it. Not that she really cared. It would actually make her feel slightly better if what she did had even a negative impact.
The clubs across the street from the building were full. Everyone was dressed in some sort of costume, from really elaborate to really lazy. No one gave her a second glance. Just like always. The only difference was that tonight was a night where just about everyone was anonymous. Although she guessed she really wasn’t anonymous so much as invisible. Obviously, people didn’t dress up to become invisible. They dressed up to stand out but, in doing so, they lost a certain part of themselves. Some central identity. Like when Walt told her people recognized her for the makeup and the clothes, that that was who they were getting to know. That was the same with these people. They no longer had names and identities. They were the vampire or the super slutty vampire or the naughty nurse or the werewolf or the zombie or Kirk Cameron. It made her feel comfortable. She wished it were Halloween all the time.
She went to the Epoch and the bartender actually took her order although he did not try and stop her two hours later when she walked out on her tab.
People were still out and about, mostly in groups, going from their cars to the clubs and from the clubs to their cars and then after that where did they go? Probably to parties or to split into smaller groups and finally couples before doing whatever it was normal couples did.
Erica had planned to stay out longer but being around all those people made her feel really lonely and she decided to go back to the building.
She was unprepared for the carnage awaiting her as she opened the apartment door. She stepped into the apartment, her foot hit a puddle of blood, and she almost went down. Someone screamed repeatedly from the direction of the bathroom. A zombie head sat on the dining room table. Its body was slumped over in one of the chairs. What had probably been a witch was face down on the living room floor, a knife jutting from her back. A cowgirl’s legs had been removed and were on the hallway floor. Erica hadn’t seen the rest of her yet. She just assumed it was a cowgirl because the legs had boots on. She turned to go into the bathroom. The screaming came from the girl handcuffed to the shower rod. She had been stripped so Erica wasn’t sure what she had been. The cowgirl was on the vanity, dead and legless, Walt thrusting into her. Erica wasn’t sure he was fucking her vagina or one of the cavities created by the removal of her legs.
When the handcuffed girl spotted Erica she started shouting at Erica to help her.
It didn’t even enter Erica’s mind to try and do this. She looked into the girl’s eyes, the fear blazing in them making her feel a little better about her own shitty life, and turned to go back into the family room. There was another corpse on the couch so Erica turned back around, disappeared into the bedroom, and shut the door.
She fell asleep to the girl’s screams and dreamt about caves and monsters. She was in a pool of water in a cave. A horde of old people, all of them glowing, all of them looking exactly like Granny, surrounded her in the pool. Then Walt was there, yelling and splashing gasoline on them only the gasoline looked more like blood and when they were hit with it they stopped glowing and then he was throwing torches that just seemed to appear in his hands and all of the Grannies were bursting into flame and the cave grew very very bright and when it grew bright enough for her to look at the walls she saw they were all constructed from human bones and instinctively knew Walt had killed all the people who these bones had once belonged to.
She woke up before dawn to find Walt snoring next to her. He hadn’t bothered showering and was covered in blood. The apartment was a mess, blood and hunks of flesh everywhere. She went to the refrigerator to get some water from the pitcher and saw that Walt had left a note on the stainless steel door:
DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE MESS. I CALLED A MAID.
Winter Blues
In November Walt disappeared for a few days. Erica missed him. This didn’t really surprise her. It wasn’t like she had anything else to miss. The large wall between the living room and the bedroom, what Walt had taken to calling the ‘luxury wall’, was completely covered in human bones. He had some sort of high-powered epoxy in a caulk gun he used to keep them up there. Erica remembered her dream of the cave and a chill ran through her. She considered painting on them, decorating them somehow but it seemed too . . . collaborative, she guessed. The thing with the people, the bones, that was Walt’s thing. She didn’t want to encroach.
The second night he was gone she went down to the Epoch and drank herself into oblivion. She told herself if she had any type of urges, she wouldn’t hesitate in fulfilling them and, if anyone had approached her, she probably wouldn’t have turned them down but, as she suspected, that didn’t happen. She was on her period anyway and felt kind of gross. When they had been having regular sex, Walt never minded when she was on her period. He still went down on her and everything. He might have even enjoyed it more when she was bleeding. Who knew?
On the way back to the apartment she stopped by a newsstand and picked up the latest issue of Glamor Face. Dan Banal from the show Dan Banal was on the cover – red and black flannel shirt tucked into pleated khaki pants. It looked like it could have been an ad for a hardware store. It was the least glamorous issue of Glamor Face she’d ever seen. She wondered if this was considered weirdstream. She didn’t know. Could something be so normal it was weird? Was everything so weird that normal was now weird? And, of course, what was normal? She thought it was a valid question. Some would say there wasn’t really such a thing as normal but she thought there was. Normal was, she guessed, doing what the majority of other people did. Regardless, she had forgotten about Dan Banal and flipped through the television in the bedroom. It was in syndication and seemed to be on all the time. She found it. At first she thought it was the one where Dan Banal made coffee but this was the one where he went to work. He kissed his wife, who sat at the kitchen table, on the forehead and said, “I’ll be back around five-thirty.”
“Okay. See you then,” his wife said.
“Love you,” Dan Banal said.
“Love you too,” his wife said.
He left the house and got into his modest silver Honda Accord. There was a montage of him stopping at red lights and stop signs, a brief close-up of the digital radio dial.
Dan pulled into a small parking lot and walked into work.
He said good morning to a number of people and they said good morning to him. He sat down at a desk and stared intently at a monitor while typing methodically on the keyboard. Then he sat in the break room and pulled something out of a paper bag. A large man came into the break room.
“What did you bring me to eat?” the large man asked.
Dan’s face pinched up into something that may have been a laugh or a smile and he said, “Peanut butter sandwich.” Dan offered it to him.
“No thanks,” the large man said. “I just ate.”
Dan texts his wife: Just finished lunch. Headed back to work.
Later, after he is back at his desk, his phone vibrated and he checked it. It was a text from his wife. It said: Okay.
At the end of the day, Dan waited to clock out. The frazzled looking woman in front of him rolled her eyes and said, “Is it Friday yet?”
Dan made something like a smile and said, “It’s only Tuesday.”
Then he was back in the car where he texted his wife that he was on his way home and the montage was almost exactly like the one where he drove to work except maybe the light was different.
While Walt was gone, the weather turned colder and it rained nearly every day. Erica could feel the winter blues setting in and didn’t feel like doing anything to combat them. The night before he came home, she went to the Epoch again, drank until she felt drunk and warm and came back to the apartment to sit on the balcony and continue to dri
nk from the beer in the refrigerator and smoke while all of her extremities went numb. She looked over at the parking garage, not really expecting to see the figure there again. She didn’t. She didn’t even know why she bothered to look anymore. It was something, she guessed. Tonight all the lights in the parking garage were off and there wasn’t a single car in it. This was the first time she had seen it like this. She didn’t realize how much light the parking garage gave off. That whole block seemed somehow darker and this didn’t do anything to settle her depression. It felt apocalyptic. She liked electricity. She had never lived in a city before but one of the things she liked about it was that it always seemed alive. Even if there weren’t any people out and about, there was still the electricity, humming through lines, doing something. And she imagined all the lights as being warm, even if they were the cold fluorescent ones. She imagined all of them as the final result of some process and she thought if she could follow the lines of electricity back to where it all started she would find some sign of human life. A man in a building cranking something continuously or vigorously riding a bike or shoveling coal into some kind of raging furnace or maybe just flipping a switch. And she knew just by grabbing one of the laptops and researching this she could come up with some kind of answer but she thought the truth would be more boring. She preferred to think of things happening as she imagined them. It wasn’t like she had anyone to argue the truth with.
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