“You need to drink this.” The figure didn’t move his lips because he didn’t really have any. She hadn’t realized how appropriate it was to think of him as ‘the figure.’ That’s really what it was. A figure. More male than female but otherwise almost an abstraction. Like a loose outline of a human being filled in with some kind of glow-in-the-dark gray paint. The voice was in her head and it was probably some approximation of her own but it was one that seemed foreign to her.
She took a drink of the beer. If she was as drunk as she thought she had been, it should have been enough to make her throw up.
“All of it.” The voice was insistent but it rattled around in her head as something more like wisdom than a demand.
She chugged the rest of the beer. When she returned the glass to the bar, the heart was no longer in it. She should have felt it enter her mouth, should have felt it slide down her throat. She hadn’t said anything to the figure. She didn’t know what to say. She wondered if he was someone like she and Walt and Dawn and the Boys. One of the unnoticed. Maybe this was what happened to people like them. Maybe they just became gray, shapeless wrecks, out to play tricks on the living. Something gurgled in her stomach. She looked back at the glass and it was again full. This time it was filled with something the same color as the man and it finally occurred to her that that was also the same color as the fog or maybe the moon. She drank it all.
The bar fell away around her and she floated down through black space. When she could finally put her feet on the ground and gain some level of equilibrium, everything around her was pitch black. The only thing she could see was the figure and she had to gauge how far away it was from her by its size. She walked to catch up with it, not knowing what she might be stepping in. She did not walk quickly. There was something too intangible about her surroundings to allow her to walk quickly. She continued to gain ground on the figure and saw another light in the distance. It looked bright but it still had the same grayish quality as the man. She could hear her breath and feel her pulse pounding in her neck. She wondered if they were moving uphill.
Time seemed completely irrelevant. Even space seemed irrelevant. Erica barely felt like she even knew who she was. Aside from the seeming imperative that she follow this figure, the only real sensation she had was that of moving very far away from something. The immediacy of following the figure and the deprivation of her surroundings made it impossible to chase that thought. Moving very far away from something. She was sure it meant something. She was sure it was something she needed to think about but it seemed like it might be a black tunnel just like this one only maybe that tunnel didn’t have the figure, didn’t have any light at the end. As she closed the distance between them, she did have one thought. It flickered through her brain like sunlight. She was back at Granny’s house, sitting beside her bed and waiting for her to die, but the thought of it, however brief, seemed to lift all the blackness and the layers and layers of gray stone she was sure were going to crumble around her any second.
Now she was able to match the figure stride for stride and it felt like they moved very quickly. The light in the distance continued to grow brighter and brighter and soon it was almost too bright to look upon.
She was able to tell these were the people she had seen before. And, through their illumination, she could see the walls of the cave. Last time, even if it had only been a dream, Walt was in here with her and she had felt claustrophobic and terrified. Now she felt something like peace. There must have been thousands of nearly uniform people lying on their uniform cots. She followed the figure to the middle of them and it made something inside of her swell to turn in a circle and see all of these glowing people for as far as she could. The figure must have taken her to some kind of epicenter. It motioned to an empty cot. Did it want her to lie down on it? It occurred to her to ask but she didn’t know if she could make her mouth move. And, anyway, if this figure could speak from within her head then didn’t it stand to reason that it should be able to hear her thoughts without her having to vocalize them?
It motioned to the cot again.
Erica tried to say, “No,” but her voice fell out of her mouth and down into the heavy space surrounding her.
Why didn’t she just get on the bed?
Because getting on the bed was death.
The figure motioned toward it a third time, even more insistent.
Erica shook her head. The clear fluorescent light in the figure’s eyes dimmed noticeably.
It got on the bed and crouched down. Erica instinctively backed away as the figure shit a runny, bloody mess onto the previously clean cot. She continued backing away. All the other figures were now stirring. Whatever peaceful feeling she’d had was completely obliterated. The figures were sluggish at first but began moving more quickly as Erica moved farther through them.
They tore at themselves. They clawed at their chests. Fog ran down their stomachs and the fronts of their legs. Now that they all had their eyes open, it made the space even brighter and Erica had to squint. She couldn’t even train her vision at their eye level, forcing her to look lower, forcing her to watch them mutilate themselves. She saw one of them pull something like a heart out of its chest. The figure threw the organ at Erica. The others were doing the same thing. She now stood in a river of blood. Her clothes were soaked with it. She tried to walk faster and faster but the blood rose to her knees and then her thighs. By the time she thought she was almost out of their expansive circle, she allowed herself one last glance backward and saw nothing. All of their eyes had dimmed. Their glowing lights seemed to have been extinguished. The air was fetid and then it was closing around her, the river of blood washing over her head and making it impossible to breathe.
Numbered Days
She woke up in Dawn’s bed, the clean smell of the morning breeze and the fresh cotton from the curtains and bed linens mixing with a stale stench of sweat and old beer probably coming from her. She got out of bed on shaky legs and wandered around the small apartment. Dawn was nowhere to be found. Erica wondered how she had gotten here. She smoked a cigarette in the bathroom, the exhaust fan running. Dawn still hadn’t appeared so she left and headed back to the apartment.
As she reached the corner her building was on, she saw Walt emerge from the lobby. She expected him to get into his hulking truck and was surprised when he didn’t. So his routine had changed. She wasn’t normally awake when he left in the mornings but was under the impression he always took his truck to hunt like the time they’d driven over the girl in the Walmart parking lot. She had planned on following him anyway so the timing seemed especially serendipitous. That wasn’t really true, she knew. Today was a horrible day for this. What she would have liked more than anything was to be able to go up to the apartment and take a long shower and put on some clean, comfortable clothes and lie in bed all day. Maybe watch TV or maybe just watch the shadows sundial across the ceiling. She passed the building, remaining about a block behind him. It was difficult to lose yourself in a city as small as Dayton. If he turned around, he would have seen her easily. But he would have only turned around if it mattered that someone was following him. He didn’t care. He didn’t have to. Just like she didn’t have to care. Not really. She just hadn’t been aware of this fact for as long as Walt had so she had yet to grow entirely comfortable with it.
He went west two blocks, paused, and then crossed the street, not bothering with a crosswalk. She stayed close to the buildings on her side of the street. She liked the idea of hiding even if she didn’t really have to. She wondered what Walt would do if he happened to notice her. She thought she knew. She thought he would pretend not to notice her. He would make her draw attention to the fact she was following him. He might ask her why she was following him. When she told him she was doing it because she suspected he had found someone else then he would probably tell her the truth or lie, depending on whatever response amused him the most.
Once on the other side of the street he stopped in fro
nt of the glass window of a shop. It was a cafe. She stood in front of an abandoned office building with broken windows and watched him. He just stood there, staring into the cafe. He didn’t go in. Erica couldn’t see what he was looking at. She crossed the street and came to a stop about three feet behind him, tracking the movements of his head so she could see what he saw.
Then she saw her.
The replacement.
What made her think this was her replacement?
The first thing was the way Walt just stood there looking at her. The second thing was that she was so close. If she was someone Walt had noticed before and she was just another one of his victims then he would have dragged her back to the apartment screaming and had his way with her. The third thing was the way he looked at the girl. True, Erica couldn’t see his eyes but there was almost a . . . tenderness in the crook of his head and slope of his shoulders. Had that been there when he had been stalking her? She would never know. She didn’t even know if it would make her feel good to think that it had been.
And the replacement . . . Definitely Walt’s type and yet opposite enough from Erica to represent the slightly different path all relationships are to take. Young. Black hair. Erica couldn’t tell from here, but it looked like her eyes might be dark too, an effect that might have been created from the eyeliner. She was sure Walt could tell her what color the girl’s eyes were if she asked. The girl wasn’t fat but there was a lot more meat to her than there was to Erica.
Erica headed back to the apartment, knowing she wouldn’t be there much longer.
Space
She supposed she could have just gone back to Dawn’s but it seemed too easy. Entering the apartment, she found it awash in overt attempts to fill her with unease. Walt had taken to scrawling slogans over everything, probably in his shit or someone else’s blood.
I HATE ERICA
ERICA IS A CUNT
ERICA IS STUPID
ERICA IS A WHORE
ERICA SMELLS RETARDED
I WANT TO KILL AND EAT ERICA
Not that any of this was a great surprise. Nor were any of the messages particularly original. Erica wasn’t even sure Walt had ever used her name while speaking to her. She hadn’t even been sure he knew what it was. She heard the screams, now more ragged, coming from the bedroom. Part of her wanted to go throw the door open and let the girls out. But she knew she wouldn’t do that. She appeased herself by thinking it was because she didn’t have the key and there was no way she could get that door open without the key but she knew there were other reasons too. She always thought maybe she should just surrender this apartment to Walt and get one of her own. Hell, just go live with Dawn full time. Convince Dawn to get the fuck out of Dayton. If Dawn was here because of her then it seemed perfectly logical she would leave if Erica wanted her to. But that felt too much like giving up.
She found the keys to the Jaguar under a blonde’s scalp and, after going down and finding it parked on the street, she was not surprised to see the sheaf of parking tickets accumulated under the windshield. Why wouldn’t they just tow it? Wouldn’t they at least run the plates and find that the car was either stolen or belonged to a missing person? She had seen and experienced enough to know that people like she and Walt had a certain amount of invisibility but where did it end? Did it somehow prevent law enforcement from even looking into the mysteries undoubtedly surrounding this car?
It was too late to think about that. If she hadn’t been so enamored with Walt, so sucked in to his bizarre mystery, she would have asked herself these questions a long time ago.
She threw the stack of tickets onto the ground and drove fast to the suburbs. She went to Walmart and appropriated a tent, a space heater, a small battery powered lamp, and two five-gallon gas cans. Then she went to the gas station and filled the cans up. She stopped at a truck stop farther north of Dayton and let a trucker violate her in several savage ways in one of the coin operated shower stalls. When they had finished, Erica told him he was the last man who would ever fuck her, asked him how it felt, and then slit his throat.
She drove back to the building, fast, and left the cans of gas in the car. She took a tube of lipstick from her purse and wrote on the windshield: LEAVE THIS CAR THE FUCK ALONE.
Walt still had not come back by the time she got up to the apartment. She went to the refrigerator and pulled out several hunks of meat and shoved them through the slot at the top of the door to the bedroom. She heard the girls fall hungrily on the meat. Erica had resigned herself to the fact they were going to die but, at least this way, they weren’t forced to play Walt’s game. They were not going to fight and maul the other one for food if they were not hungry. And they were so hungry they weren’t going to turn down whatever Erica put through that door. Hopefully they would have it consumed before Walt looked in at them.
Erica dragged the tent out to the balcony and set it up. There was an electrical outlet for her to plug the space heater into. It was actually fairly pleasant outside right now but she knew it would get colder tonight. She went into the bathroom and ripped the mirrored door from the medicine cabinet. She looked in one of the closets and, amongst a lot of things that made her feel queasy, she found a couple of buckets she planned to piss and shit in for however long was necessary. She went down to the car and brought up the cans of gas.
For the most part, Erica stayed in her tent with the flap open, gaze trained toward the apartment. Around sunset, Walt came back and noticed her out on the balcony. Actually, he seemed to notice the tent first. He crossed the living room and locked the balcony door. Why a door on this level even had a lock on it was beyond Erica but, there she was, locked out. She didn’t suppose it really mattered. She was mainly out here to prove a point anyway, she guessed.
Later she saw Dawn out walking, probably on her way to the bar, and thought about calling down to her but didn’t because she wanted this to be between she and Walt.
That night she dreamed about eating the tent. She ate the tent and then she ate everything else on the balcony. Her stomach was huge and uncomfortable. She felt like vomiting and dropped onto her knees and vomited out the glowing gray figure. She tried to catch it, not entirely sure what she would do with him if she did get him, but he launched himself off the balcony, floated down to the first floor of the parking garage before scurrying up the side of the dark tower. Once atop the dark tower he was almost too small to be seen. Then he threw himself off the roof and plunged toward the street, getting larger and larger. She half-expected him to float back toward her but he dropped until he hit somewhere in the middle of the street and shattered like a light bulb. When she turned around, she noticed the tent was back, only this time it was made from the various scalps of humans and all of the hair looked like it had been permed.
Part Three
Purge
Cleaning House
The next morning Walt walked down to the cafe and stood there. She watched him watching the girl for about an hour before she realized how hungry she was and used one of the sturdy chairs on the balcony to break the glass in the door. She walked to an Irish bar at the perimeter of the Oregon District, ate a lot, drank a couple of beers and went back to the apartment. She guessed Walt would spend most of the day loitering in front of the cafe. She gathered everything that would burn, dragged it out to the balcony, doused it in gasoline, and set it ablaze, half hoping the fire would enter the apartment and rid the world of that as well. Then she could think of it as an accident. She couldn’t set the actual apartment on fire with the girls still in that room, although being burned alive was probably a better fate than what otherwise awaited them. She found a crowbar in the closet and chiseled off the bones from the wall. She put the bones in trash bags, dragged them to the elevator, and sent them down. She didn’t know why she wanted the apartment to be void of everything but it seemed of the utmost importance. Maybe she saw all of the filth and carnage as some kind of security blanket for Walt. Once she started cleaning, she realized she wa
s too lazy to do it herself and there really wasn’t much of a reason to. Also, if she did it herself, she knew it wouldn’t be remotely done before Walt came back.
She called an emergency cleaning service. That was what it was called. She didn’t know what constituted a cleaning emergency. Over the phone, she told them to clean everything except for the bedroom, the one with the door that looked like something you would see in a jail or an insane asylum. Then she called a drywall company and asked if they could paint the walls after they put the drywall up and could they do it, like, today? They said they could. Then she called a clown and told him that he would probably just be performing for a bunch of blue-collar guys who were working but that he should really give it his all. He said he could be there in a half hour. She left a note that read:
Walt,
Does she know about you?
XOXO,
Erica
P.S. Never fucking lock me out again. I swear I’m going to kill you one of these days!
She taped it to the refrigerator door. Before leaving the apartment, she wrote blank checks to each party using the woman who had lived here before’s checkbook, and went to Dawn’s.
Seeing Other People
Dawn seemed happy to see her. They went out to get dinner and had drinks at the Epoch. They went back to Dawn’s apartment. She lit some incense and they sat on the couch and felt one another up for about an hour, neither of them saying anything. Eventually they ended up in Dawn’s bed and Erica felt like she never wanted to be anywhere but right here. When they finished a couple of hours later, they lay in the bed, their heads touching, and smoked cigarettes. Neither one of them were very tired.
Sociopaths In Love Page 17