by John Everson
In a haze of time, he even vaguely remembered once getting his driver’s license, which allowed him to drive the car…speaking of which…
Jayce pulled to the side of the road and put the car in park. Then he pulled out his wallet. If he had a license, he at least would know where to go home to, since it included his address. So long as he hadn’t moved recently.
In moments he had discovered his address, and cross referenced it with a map from the glove box. The morning fog lifted as he navigated his way home, stopping once at a gas station to find out exactly where he was starting from, since Clandestine wasn’t on the map. He laughed at that.
The gray morning fog had lifted by the time he stepped onto the wooden porch of the small bungalow he apparently called home. He froze for a second as he slid a key into the lock. What if he was married and there was a woman inside whom he didn’t know? Or worse yet…what if he was divorced and he no longer actually lived here?
The lock clicked, and before he could think of any further debilitating scenarios, the door had creaked open. He stepped inside, shutting it quietly but firmly behind him. He knew in an instant that nobody was home. The air hung stagnant, stale, yet spiced with the hint of cumin.
He quickly saw why when he stepped past the empty dining room table and into the narrow run of the kitchen.
One long counter, meant for a cook’s workspace, was littered with empty Thai takeout boxes. As he stepped into the room something small and brown darted away from one of the boxes to slip in between the creamy counter backsplash and the kitchen wall. From the corner of his eye, Jayce thought he saw the dash for safety repeated elsewhere around him. He shivered and left the room to the bugs.
Upstairs in the bedroom, he found a rumpled mess of pale sheets wound inside an ocean-blue comforter. Elegant gold thread slipped and curled in subtle filigree patterns across the thick bedcover; they glimmered like firefly capillaries in the dull light as he threw the sheets up to cover the crushed mound of pillows. Apparently he hadn’t cooked or made the bed in a while. He ran a finger across the dark wood of a woman’s dresser and stared at the gray silt that had collected there. Or dusted or cleaned.
He reached around a ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary to pick up a picture frame from the dresser. The frame enclosed an action shot, rather than a portrait. He recognized a younger version of the face he had seen in the mirror this morning. Broad cheeks with a shadow of time turning to whiskers. Thick black eyebrows pulled back against an unmanageable tousle of hair. He was laughing in the photo, as was the woman whose shoulder he draped an arm around. One long lock of cinnamon hair obscured her right eye, but her left held the secret mirth of a cat’s eye. Emerald and squinting at whatever moment they shared. Captured in that second when all the two of them could do was gasp for air from laughter, while holding back the tears of life. He searched his memory for some clue, but his brain remained mute. His heart did not turn over. Jayce felt no connection at all to the picture or the woman.
Next to the frame was another, this one a posed portrait of a small child. A boy judging by the outfit. The toddler knelt in front of an obviously fake fall photo backdrop, chubby hands locked together atop a small stepladder with a collage of red and orange and browned leaves behind him. From the light of the photo, it appeared that the child’s eyes were green. Like his mother’s, Jayce guessed.
I knew these two well, if I kept their pictures on my dresser, he supposed. Girlfriend and her kid? His own wife and son? He realized suddenly that there was a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand.
God! Jayce slammed his fist down on the dresser and a bottle of woman’s perfume shivered on the edge of a small shelf next to the mirror. It fell and shattered on the wood below and the room filled with the dizzying scent of gardenias and vanilla.
Jayce breathed in the scent and gasped.
…black lace slipped high and stark on the cream of her thigh, and he moved his lips farther, up into the warmth of her, tongue teasing at her sweetness as he inhaled that warm elixir of her sex. Her fingers twined in his hair, pulling him closer as he tasted her heaven and breathed in her perfume, lust mixed with the lush of gardenias, woody vanilla spiced with love. His eyes flickered at the intensity of the moment, as she pressed harder against him and filled the perfumed air with the soft cry of her pleasure…
In a flash the moment was gone again, and Jayce staggered backwards, resting against the bed. He pressed a palm to his cheek, and closed his eyes again, trying to delve deeper into the memory, farther into the moment unlocked, and then stolen away again. But now he only smelled the overpowering thickness of spilled perfume, and presently he went to the bathroom to find a washrag to sponge up the spill before it ruined the wood. It was his dresser, he supposed, so he might as well take care of it.
He opened the bedroom and kitchen windows and cracked the front door to let in a breeze. The air chilled him to the bone and the furnace kicked on and ran and ran. It couldn’t keep up with the first breath of winter. But the cold braced him, woke him. He’d been in a fog since he’d woken this morning in the strange bed, and now he needed a plan. Something had happened to him, and he needed to find out what. Was he in danger? Where was his wife, and, he supposed, his son? Who could he call to find out?
He glanced across the room and saw the black-and-silver answering machine station sitting on an end table, one receiver poking its thin plastic antennae at the ceiling. A red light flashed incessantly, a heartbeat demanding notice.
Jayce reached out to touch the button to hear the message and then hesitated. His neck grew instantly cold. What if he didn’t want to know?
He needed to know.
“Hey, Jayce. It’s Bill from work. You remember work, don’t you? We remember you…but we haven’t seen you this week. Or heard from you. And well… Listen, I’m sorry about this, I really am, but…you brought this on yourself man. I mean—we were really understanding after Becky and…well, you know. But…it’s been months now, Jayce. And you’re not any better. We never know when you’re going to turn up…or if you’re going to turn up at all. I talked to you about this last week and you promised that was the last time. Well…I’m afraid this is the last time. We’ve gotta pull the plug and get someone in here who’s here, Jayce. I’m really sorry about this because you’re a nice guy and I know it’s been a lot to handle but…um…well listen, I’ll see you around, I’m sure…”
So…he’d apparently gotten himself fired from…wherever it was he worked. He would have called back and found that much out at least, but the phone said unlisted number on the call log.
Jayce closed the door and the kitchen windows. He was now cold inside and out. Stacking the partially empty takeout cartons one inside of the other, he cleared the kitchen counters of debris, wiping up the food and stains with a wet paper towel.
That was when he found the notepad by the kitchen phone. The edges of the top sheet were covered in scrawled notes, and doodles. Thai Bonsai—555-1223 read one note, which matched the name on the boxes he’d just thrown away. Saturday at 8 read another note, without further description. Who knew what he’d been planning for Saturday. Or even which Saturday.
Jean says quote is no read another. And Nothing lasts still another. As he searched for a memory to explain them, to find context, Jayce wondered if all the notes people scrawled by their phones were so oblique. At least to a stranger. And he was a stranger, at the moment. A stranger to his own life.
At the bottom of the sheet, hedged off in the corner by a triple crosshatched box, was another phone number, this one surrounded by a single explanatory note: She can help.
Jayce picked up the phone, and dialed the number. He didn’t know what “she” could help with. But at the moment, he’d take any help he could get.
A cool female voice answered on the fourth ring. “How can I help you,” she asked.
“I’m not really sure,” he
said. “I can’t really remember how this all started…”
He was surprised at her answer. “That’s a great start…”
The road seemed vaguely familiar as Jayce wound through the city following the directions the woman had given.
After a while, he realized it was more than familiar. He pulled through the narrow steel gates and drove into the parking lot of a building that teased the sky in a defiant thrust.
Jayce wondered if he’d taken the same parking space as he’d left earlier this morning. Shrugging and curious, he exited the car and walked towards the building where he’d awoken just hours before.
The parking lot was still empty, but for his car.
The door opened just a crack and Jayce could see the shadowed glint of a large brown eye through the narrow opening. “It is you,” she said, and a chain clattered metallic against the door as it opened farther. “Come in,” she said.
Jayce stepped inside, but didn’t immediately follow her after closing the door. The room was exactly as he remembered it from this morning, only now, there was a woman inside…and that made everything about the space different. She wore only two thin strips of black lace lingerie above and below a tightly cinched corset. Jayce followed the bob of the dangling corset laces as she crossed the room and sank to the bed. She patted the mattress beside her and beckoned him over.
“Come here,” she said in the lowest melody of near-silence. He obeyed her, taking her all in as he came to stand beside her and then joined her on the bed. Her eyes watched him, wide and brown as a doe’s, lashes unblinking. A haze of lushly black hair cascaded over her shoulder, broken in its midnight by a thick strand that glowed as red as neon. As red as her glossed lips. As red as the balm that traced and overwrote the thin seam of her eyebrows.
She was a black cherry, lush and waiting for him. But why? And waiting for what? She had not been terribly surprised when he’d called, and seemed to recognize him when he stepped into the doorway. Jayce instinctively knew as she slid a hand easily up his back and shoulder that he’d been with her the night before. Here. In this bed. He couldn’t remember a minute of it. Which was a shame. As he looked closer at her vanilla-scented skin, he knew that she must have been very good. Perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime partner.
“I don’t know who you are,” he said suddenly.
A tiny flicker across her lips.
“I don’t know why I was here last night with you.”
She blinked, but did not deny his supposition.
“I don’t really know anything anymore.”
She nodded, and this time grinned, exposing a smile that could have lit the room. “That’s good,” she said. Her voice was honey mixed with cloves—sweet but edged in dark peat. She pulled him against her and ran cool fingers up his temples.
“Let’s keep it that way.”
Jayce could feel his body relax, the frustration of the day fading out of him with every stroke of her fingers. She pressed him back to the mattress and he laid his head against the pillow. She coiled around him like a velvet robe, her thighs slinky and warm against his, the tight cinch of her waist hard against the place where he grew hard, and the swell of her chest a cushion that both called him forward and pressed him down. He breathed her in, and the scent of vanilla suddenly filled the room. Vanilla and gardenias, like this afternoon, when he had… When what?
He wondered, the press of her lips now whispering something to his ear, and then the light flick of her heat warmed his lips as her tongue teased him.
“What about this afternoon?” he asked aloud, and she shushed him, pressing against him with all her body. Her hands ran up and down his ribs and arms, and as she did he felt strange, disoriented. The room seemed to swim in the heady scent of…of…
“No!” Jayce pushed her back and off him, and the woman nearly fell to the floor at his violence.
He shook his head, struggling to clear the cobwebs that had grown across his vision like cotton. “What are you doing to me?” he said, and slapped his own face. In a heartbeat she was there, kissing his reddened cheek, but this time he did not succumb. He backed away and put out a hand to keep her at bay. She crouched on legs creamy as vanilla, her chest flushed cherry red, and heaving now. Her lips were wet, and she licked them nervously. “I need to kiss you,” she begged, and crawled forward again, pushing her way around his hand. He tried to fend her off but she was faster, darting through his fumbling hands to sink a wet, pink tongue quickly between his lips.
Jayce felt the world rush away, and everything tasted…hot. His thighs itched and his eyes refused to stay open. He tasted something warm and smoky, something sweet, something vanilla…
Jayce shoved her away again, disengaging violently from her kiss. She surged back instantly, and he yelled again, “No!”
She took his shoulders between her hands, trying to pin him between the wall and her chest, and he slipped one arm free.
He slapped her, hard, across the face. This time, she did fall back, and off the bed.
Jayce leapt after her, and before she could get up, he cuffed her wrists with his palms and held her to the floor. She twisted and thrashed against him, but he used his weight to hold her down.
“What did you do to me?” His voice grated as he struggled to remain on top. “Why was I here last night? Why can’t I remember anything?”
“Let me go,” she hissed back. “I did what you paid me to do.”
“Tell me,” he insisted.
“I’ll do better than that,” she said. “Let me go and I’ll show you.”
He released her, and pushed back to sit on the floor as she sat up herself, rubbing her wrists. Her face was still dark where he’d slapped her. She was so fair-skinned it would probably bruise. The thought disgusted him. He was no woman beater. Or was he? He couldn’t remember enough to know.
“What is this place? Who are you?” he said, calmer now.
“Call me Lethe,” she said, not easing the tension of her body as she faced him. Her voice betrayed a sadness that stretched deeper than any physical pain. “You came to me for help. Let me help you again.” She reached out a hand to him but he batted it away.
“Let me,” she said. “This time, I will help you remember, since that is what you wish.”
This time, he let her touch him, and as she ran fingers up his face, and around his neck to draw him close, he felt his pulse quicken. The fuzziness in his mind began to fade back, and his mind seemed to…tighten. Lethe’s eyes gazed into his own, and he could see his own reflected back at him, gray eyes wide with fear and a growing pain.
Her tongue slipped into his mouth again, and her fingers began to undress him as his own fumbled with the string of her corset. With every breath he shared with her, with every touch of his skin to hers, his world grew sharper.
He remembered his parents, Lois and Bill, and the cottage that they still kept in Michigan. For no reason, he found himself thinking of skinny-dipping with a blonde girl down at the quarry on one dark amazing night when he had come home for the weekend from college. He’d gone to the quarry alone for a late-night swim, and found himself an hour later exploring the cool skin of a beautiful girl who had come to the lake for the same reason. Escape from the problems of the day. Freedom from everything that had gone before. Instead they had become entangled in each other. A new problem, if a sweet one.
As he thought those words, Lethe suddenly became clearer to him. He had come to her for the same reason. He remembered unzipping the back of her thin black dress and watching in amazement as it fell to the floor.
“The only way out is in,” she had said, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pressing her bare chest to his shirt. “I hope you don’t mind coming in.”
He’d let her undress him and lead him to the bed, tears forming in his eyes as he thought about why he’d come and felt a rush of guilt for what he was doin
g. Becky was gone now, but still…he was paying a woman to…
To what…?
Lethe had led him again to the bed, and he kicked off his pants, as she shrugged out of her corset. She slid to the sheets next to him, wearing only black stockings, barely breaking their kiss the whole time they’d undressed each other.
The scent of her hair tickled his nose and he realized it smelled like the perfume of his wife. She wore vanilla. Had worn vanilla, the last time he’d kissed her. But that time Becky had smelled not only of vanilla, but of iron. And her lips tasted strange and cold as he pulled away. His hands had been smeared in her blood, but he couldn’t stop from pressing them to his face, to wipe the horrible tears from his cheeks. Across the room, Danny lay dead too. Like his mother, they had carved things in his flesh, something that only Jayce would understand.
The memory stabbed into the deepest pit of his heart like a coil of barbed wire, and he broke from Lethe’s kiss to cry out.
“This is why you came to me,” she whispered, pulling him back. “You don’t have to remember all of it now. I can take it away again.”
Jayce put a fist to his eyes and shook his head. “I have to know now.” Then he pressed Lethe to the bed, and forced his tongue back into her mouth.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Lethe gasped, pushing him back. “You didn’t kill them.”
He kissed her again, gripping the fullness of her breasts in desperation, not desire. But she let him use her, and in seconds, as his thrusts built to a point of unbearable need, the worst of it came upon him with the wave of his orgasm.
The laughter froze on his lips. He’d been chuckling at the radio DJ’s banter since he’d turned the key off in his ignition, and that laughter stayed with him right up until he saw the bloody handprint slapped against the buttercream wall of the living room. He called out for his wife, and before the echo faded from his voice, he had dropped his empty coffee thermos and a sheaf of papers from work to the carpet as he ran through the kitchen, following a trail of crimson smeared on the carpet, across the tile, and occasionally, with a long, scrabbling fingerprint, down a wall.