by Martin Rose
My old mattress had seen better days, but the second my spine met the springs, it roused the memory of the narrow prison bunk with Lincoln above me recalling when he used to hack into city grid systems and change the traffic light patterns so he could drive to the local game store without stopping at a red light. After six months, my sleep pattern had started to normalize and now I had to force both mind and body to relearn everything, to remind myself there was no one knocking a baton against the bars or hundreds of snores stitching the air around me. My mattress was so soft, my body refused to recognize it. Sleep would not come without a fight.
Beep beep.
I startled out of my daze. I jerked open the end table drawer and unearthed the source of the noise—my old digital watch. Another second more and I rattled out the prescription bottle I’d stolen from Lionel. A nice layer of pills at the bottom, sitting in a film of dust. I sat up in bed and disabled the watch alarm, but found internal alarms are harder to get at. I salivated in anticipation of my next dose of Atroxipine, wonder-drug and zombie panacea that once kept my mind limber and stopped me from subsiding into the numb hunger-rage so characteristic of the pre-deceased.
I set the orange pill bottle on the end table. A special space within me opened in the absence of addiction. My private romance with a drug was gone, and there was nothing to replace it with, save an endless stream of cigarettes planting slivers of cancer in my lungs as the seconds passed.
I didn’t need it anymore. But having taken it, I appreciated the new perspective. My ordinary swirl of thoughts became fluid. Logical. Inspired and without restraint. All the world and its smallest details highlighted and calling out for my attention. The pain of years past pushed into the background.
Blades of smoke disappeared into the air vent in the ceiling. I tried to imagine what my brother got up to while the government was looking the other way. I could build endless conspiracies on his bones, but did they really matter? What mattered was what the bastard brother of mine left behind—and what he left behind was a man named Blake Highsmith.
Blake Highsmith’s file was a patchwork of random statistics. A photo of a smiling business executive. Quiet youth and untroubled childhood with a speed bump of divorce. A latch-key kid. Cliché of disaffected middle-class youth. A million middle-class kids populate the country, becoming alienated adults just like him. Obedient mama’s boy did good and rose up through corporate ranks to be a stellar earner for the corporate titans. Shot up the ladder from intern to sales and then to the advertising department.
I imagined Lionel already knew what I was thinking: Blake Highsmith found success working for the same pharmaceutical company that supplied me with Atroxipine: Sisemen Pharma, Inc.
Coincidences have a way of backfiring on you, like a squib load caught in the barrel of a gun. Fools have been known to look inside and get themselves shot in the face. Would I come away with my head blown off when I looked down the barrel for the bullet stuck inside?
Blake Highsmith wasn’t a zombie, just a successful man. Freshly divorced, he had then married a beautiful wife who looked prepped for service as a soccer mom—glossy brunette hair and sensible clothing from a conservative catalog. PhD in chemistry. Darling Polly Moore, turned Polly Highsmith.
I shuffled their pictures in my mind. Through the veil of smoke, the sound of Elvedina’s footsteps, relentless as hoof beats, an eerie headless horseman riding up and down my haunted hall.
Blake and Polly Highsmith’s marriage was a happy one until the police showed up at their door and took Blake away. They didn’t drag him out and cuff him like they did me, but then, Highsmith didn’t have a gun in his hand at the time. The police department charged him with murder in the first degree, three counts.
While Blake Highsmith settled down into an approaching middle age with his trophy wife, his biggest hobby had been targeting unsuspecting people and killing them. Five people dead of cardiac arrest. They charged him for the three they could prove he’d interacted with the night before their deaths and dropped the other two. The department hadn’t been able to come up with a murder weapon, but they had circumstantial evidence and mounting pressure to convict. The flimsiest prosecution in the history of prosecutions, but then, this was the dirty machinery of law.
Someone had to be thrown to the machine, and Highsmith was the sacrifice. If he happened to be guilty, that was just a perk. His wife at home, crying in their empty bed and grieving their long-lost life. My job was not to figure out whether Highsmith was guilty, or to care if he was. My job was to figure out if Jamie had been the one pulling his puppet strings, and then cut them off, one by one.
I fell asleep to the thin comfort of Elvedina’s boot steps, thinking of Blake Highsmith. It saved me from thinking of Niko, of Jamie’s wife. It was too painful to be left alone inside myself; I realized this whole “living” arrangement would be much harder than I thought.
For lo, the consequence of being human is the birth of conscience.
*
I dreamed I was in Lafferty’s wheelchair.
Undead again, surrounded by the claustrophobic walls of my bedroom. The ceaseless beating of my heart, stopped, returning to me the lonesome silence I had not known I missed. Parts of me gone to decay. The smell of me, a rank carrion. The house silent and the door canted open to let the darkness seep into every corner.
When I tried to rise I could not; gravity pinned my every joint to Lafferty’s wheelchair while Lafferty slept on. I cried out. Wrenched back and forth so the chair wobbled and still, I could not free myself.
The chair changed. The arms lengthened, forming bony fingers at the end curling over my own, legs transforming from the slats of wood until it was not a chair at all, but Elvedina. Her arms cold as metal, her hands unfurling to lock my arms, my legs paralyzed and crucified on her ruthless and unforgiving body. My mouth evaporated concrete dust, licking the inside of my cheeks for a taste of Atroxipine. Just one dose. A single pill would have me walking again.
In the background, silhouettes. My father, in his black suit. Highsmith, made real from all those pictures I had pored over, his figure bent over and crying softly to himself, with his head down and his hands cuffed with a yellow ziptie.
“Help me, Vitus,” he whispered. “Don’t you owe me as much?”
I writhed to be free of Elvedina, of her barbed-wire arms. A third figure leaned into the light with his lambent yellow eyes and a neon name tag: INSPECTOR, ECHO. His shadow overwhelmed Highsmith, and Echo reached down to stroke Blake’s head. The gesture was meant to be paternalistic, but as he ruffled Highsmith’s hair, his forefinger grew in length, extending knuckle after knuckle, sinking into Highsmith’s ear until Highsmith’s cries became breathy screams. Blood flowed like a tap of maple syrup.
Elvedina turned my head away with a pair of pincer hands. Her mouth was made of knives. She brought me close to kiss me on the forehead, and then to my mouth. Her lips drew blood and I tasted motor oil where her tongue should be. I screamed, and all the spectators laughed and clapped while Lafferty, light years away on the couch, and Lionel locked away in the guest bedroom, slept on.
*
I faded out of blackness as easily as I gave myself to it; but the sense of dreams having elapsed without my comprehension hounded me into my waking hours. As I cracked my eyelids open, Elvedina’s rigid figure haunted the threshold of my door.
“Don’t you sleep?” I asked.
Her head turned in an angle, as though she could have kept turning it until she wore her skull backwards, looking over her shoulder at me from the corner of one slitted eye. But she dismissed me and faced the hallway once more.
A disorienting attempt to recollect my whereabouts passed—to understand I was no longer in the prison world of snoring, sweaty, rough-edged men. What occupies many a heterosexual man with no hope of conjugal visits is all the women he’ll consume when he gets outside. I’d spent hours replaying Niko’s body on the kitchen counter, trying to remember how this new body wor
ked. How to lift a hand or make a fist. My arms being a different length than they should be and my new height provided a dizziness that I could only let wash over me, helplessly, until it passed. Sometimes I reached for an object and overshot the mark, clumsily breaking the desired target.
I ran a hand across my chest, feeling skin to skin, hand beneath my shirt—this was not my chest. Not my rib cage. Not my heart—as though by touching it, I could make it real. Even food didn’t taste the same—not that prison food was anything worth tasting.
Spent all that time fantasizing about a woman out of my reach, and here I was, waking up to one.
I groaned and rolled with the intention of artfully setting my feet down on the floor. The schism between the body I remembered having and the body I actually owned split wide and I missed, falling to the floor with my breath knocked out of my chest and my spine rattling up to my teeth. I flailed and clutched at the bedspread. When I looked up, Elvedina blocked the light, her head silhouetting a corona of light that transfixed me, mesmerized by her alien presence.
I struggled to rise and missed the mattress for support. My arms and hands and fingers were all in the wrong places and then her hand was before me, fingers splayed.
I hesitated and took it; she lifted me up to my feet. A wave of unreality, of occupying two bodies at once, passed. The bitch made my skin crawl, but I did not let go and neither did she.
We were close as lovers, but sexual tension flatlined. Her nose, inches from mine. Her breath didn’t stir the air. Her pupils illimitable and black. I stood there without moving, waiting to see when she would reach the point of maximum awkwardness and walk away, but she did not.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Was she touched in the head? I’d seen shell-shock like this before, the endless stare and the empty expression, wondered what she’d seen in Sarajevo, if it had been anything like what I had seen—
She said nothing and yanked a drawer out of the dresser and onto the bed. She fished out a shirt and returned to me, smothering and claustrophobic, and shoved it into my chest. I got the distinct impression that if I did not dress, she would do it for me.
“No sleeping on your watch, is that it, Nurse Ratched?”
Immovable, expressionless.
“Think you could give me a few, y’know?”
She did not know.
Again, I suffered the surreal alienation of stripping in front of another woman, and this time I couldn’t even say it was because we were in prison—but then again, maybe it was. They held me under lock and key here like any inmate. I pulled off the old shirt from last time and balled it up in my hands, peeled off the shorts, and looked down at myself.
Everything rearranged and different. I’d already had a sexual test run with Niko, but that had been the heat of the moment, unruly and wild sex. Later came the forlorn examinations in the prison cell, staring at everything, the curve of my arms into my shoulder, touching my neck, trying to figure out what Amos had been doing with this body before I intersected it. Scars I would never understand or know the story behind. Like the nick on the side of his ribs, or the strawberry on his hip, a port wine stain on his left shoulder blade. These small things, like coming home to your house with the furniture moved an inch counterclockwise. Nights, I languished on my bunk, touching myself endlessly like I could find the zipper and leave the skin. Running my hands up and down, up and down, and keeping the bubbling frustration of this is not me, this is not me underneath where it belonged. Bottling up my helplessness. Relearning how to be me. In time, I imagined the leanness that characterized Amos in life would soon leach away into my trademark rawness hedged by unhealthy habits, too much drinking and smoking, forgotten meals instead of exercise.
I appreciated Amos’s Marty Stu, stripper body, but I missed everything that had made it mine. Even below the waist, things were the same. I’d tried jerking off in the prison twice and gave up. Everything felt wrong, nothing in sync, chasing the dragon of pleasure to experience it disintegrate inexplicably, increasing my frustration with no vent to direct it to. A malaise dogged this body, and Elvedina’s presence highlighted its weirdness.
I dressed in the quiet. Let myself be naked and raw in front of her and watched her eyes, her face, to meet mine, to react, to express anything at all. She did not see me; studied the light coming through the window until I was done and I felt secretly ashamed of myself, of being not me, of wearing this stolen skin.
Would it ever get better?
I sat heavily on the end of the bed, mattress springs squealing. Elvedina leaned over to push a piece of paper in my hands. I took it from her, staring at the name on the top.
Blake Highsmith’s prison record.
I read the name of the prison.
“Well fuck me,” I whispered.
*
Blake Highsmith.
He sat down across from me at the terminus of a long steel table from an old interrogation room. A steel chain rattled between his wrists as he sat up straight. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this a board meeting and Highsmith the ruling CEO whose off-hand gesture could cut a thousand jobs in an eye blink or order me to fetch him a coffee while he read quarterly financial reports. He moved and walked as though he wore a tie and three piece suit and not the tight, ill–fitting, and often unwashed prison orange.
I’d been sitting in this same spot last week.
He said nothing. I slumped in the chair and folded my hands on the table. Outside the building, Elvedina paced the parking lot. She hadn’t followed, and her response had been the usual icy silence.
“You’re not a police officer,” Blake Highsmith said.
“You’re right. I’m not,” I said. “I’m what you’d call the clean-up crew. A janitorial service for fuck-ups like you.”
Blake Highsmith blinked but his mask held firmly in place. A chin custom-made for superheroes, cleft included, free with every order. Squared face and hair modeled after a Ken doll’s. Plasticine and sophisticated. Hannibal Lecter on his day off. It took no great stretch of imagination to think of him poisoning his victims over a cup of tea and quoting obscure classics while listening to Schubert. Or whatever hyper-intelligent serial killers are supposed to spend their time doing.
“I don’t leave a mess when I kill.”
“You’re right, you don’t, and that’s my problem.”
I pulled out the file and pushed it across to him. He looked down at it once, unsure if he should touch an object stained by my peasant taint. His chains rattled as he flipped the first few pages of clipped articles and papers. Fast and intelligent. His blue eyes, positively dreamy. He would have looked great on the cover of Time magazine.
“One of the victims’ families hire you to question me?”
“I’m an independent contractor. Just trying to figure out what species of monster you are.”
He reached the end of the contents, closed it, and pushed the file back to the center of the table. I rose to take it and slide it back to me, but Highsmith held the file down. The wrist chains held taut, winking dull light as I met his persistent gaze.
His mask slipped. Another, different man peered out.
“You Jamie’s boy?” he whispered.
Highsmith’s eyes flicked to the camera in the corner without moving his head an inch and returned to me in one smooth, undercover motion.
In the deep recesses of memory, I remembered when being this close to a guy’s face made me salivate and think about what he’d taste like when I ate him. I grinned.
“Sometimes. Other times, I go by a different name.”
“Vitus.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Your brother told me. You have me to thank for your recovery.”
The Highsmith I’d traded whispers with two seconds before vanished.
He was acting. Acting for the cameras. Reading off an invisible script. Our pow-wow never happened. We were in the black, now; spilling government secrets had consequences and I
had to play the script for the surveillance cameras—but who was writing the lines? My brother, from beyond the grave?
I returned to my walk-on role as indignant interrogator.
“And what is it that you do, exactly?” I tapped the folder as though to bring to life the five victims he’d authored. “Poison? It must be poison, right?”
“No poison,” Highsmith said calmly. “All this is on the record. You could very easily ascertain it from my court transcripts.”
“I want to hear you tell it.”
“I had some obstacles. I eliminated them.”
“Oh, come on now; it required a little more effort than that. Why don’t you give me the whole shebang? Aren’t you itchin’ to tell the story? Gimme the Playboy interview version?”
He sighed like the ennui of this existence was too much to bear and his schedule was filled. “Nothing to tell. Case is closed, you’re the only smartass digging around for gory details. Is that your deal? Torture porn? Get off on this kind of thing?”
“Thought it was the other way around.”
“I killed them. Satisfied?”
“Just like that? They spill a latte on your prospectus? Piss on your lawn?”
I goaded him, hoping he might reveal something more that Jamie had buried, but Highsmith’s face shut down. The ease of his deception unnerved me. Had my brother employed a psychopath in secret?
He worked with you, didn’t he?
He shrugged. “They were mean-spirited and useless people who were in my way. Life was more efficient without them.”