by Martin Rose
She’d kill me after this was solved. It wasn’t personal; she wouldn’t waste her time with her hands. I bet she’d put a bullet through me while I slept and leave my remains for the vulture. Fluffy would tear me to shreds and think of all the good times we had together. A New Jersey bastard getting a sky burial without the fanfare.
I reached into my pocket, tripped a finger over smooth plastic, and then brought out the pill bottle. Elvedina started the car and the engine sputtered; the radio buzzed a tune into stale air. Her eyes were lost and burnt out asteroids hurtling through space. I should not be doing this—I told myself this refrain every time. And like every time, I opened the cap.
I tipped the bottle to my mouth, tumbled three pills onto my tongue, and snapped the bottle shut with my eyes closed, listening to the engine underneath the radio noise as Elvedina backed out of the driveway. Drugs did funny things in my blood stream, sent every synapse in my brain running on rocket fuel.
As we drove, Polly Highsmith’s house became small in a landscape of abandoned homes waiting to be filled with families that would never arrive, awaiting a return of stock investments and market prices.
Familiar landmarks of the place I spent most of my life: old restaurants, shopping malls. House after house, boarded up and foreclosed. All of New Jersey collapsing in on itself as though the state had become a black hole. Every now and then, a lone person walking along the shoulder flashed by, and homeless faces in abandoned homes peered out from broken windows.
Then, as though someone had simply hit the RESET button, the gated community rose up from the detritus, whitewashed and pearlescent in the coastal sun; houses rising from sugar sand like ancient citadels overseeing the flotsam and jetsam. Box stores and shopping centers.
She took us back through suburban sprawl, lurching to a stop in front of Pleasant Hills Pharmacy. She killed the engine. Up close, scar tissue webbed between her fingers, burn marks when she pulled out the car keys.
I wondered what—who—had given her those.
“What the fuck are we doing here,” I hissed. This was the same pharmacy where I used to pick up my refills.
You know, my Id pointed out with acid, she is a woman, she probably has needs.
Oh, I realized. Had I been so detached from female company so long that I forgot about the mundane realities that came with?
Or, you’re just an asshole.
Or, maybe I can just take another pill.
I fiddled with the bottle. Less in it than before. What would I do when I ran out?
The car door slammed. Elvedina’s figure receded as she went up the steps and disappeared from view. This is what dogs must feel like when their owners leave them in the car on a hot day, tongue lolling and sweating in the sun. There was a time when each and every pore stitched in my skin didn’t breathe or sweat. Was a time when I could almost hear and feel the bacteria eating at me and advancing the decay of my body. Now everything was thrown into reverse and I rippled with renewed cell growth. The thrum of my blood and the stretch of my ligaments. Fluid drumming up through my spinal cord in an unreal flux. The assumption of my living body had taken place nearly simultaneously with killing my brother, inextricably linking the two events within my mind and leaving me with scant time to appreciate the changes as they rained down upon me. Roughly six months later, now that I was out of prison and free, was not enough time; and I was coming to realize that a thousand years may not be enough time either.
I closed my eyes and forced a thousand and one raucous sensations to dim, to return me to my quiet, undead life from before. Listening to street traffic, kids laughing in the cul-de-sac. In between the pleasant heat and the sweat trickling down from the inside of my elbows, I drifted into a place that wasn’t quite sleep, but not wakefulness, either.
I went on like this, half-sleeping in the car with the scent of the leather interior in my nostrils. I came to by degrees—up and up through the waves and to the surface. Woke to a sound beneath my seat without sense of how much time had passed.
I opened my eyes. The sky was saturated into a blinding blue. The sound again, louder. A scratching beneath the seat, down deep beneath the metal of the car. Was there a cat underneath the chassis? Scritch scritch. The scratching again. Daylight blinded me, and I twisted in place. It moved beneath me, dear god, what was it? It pushed up the seat. A long and strangled groan I mistook for my own vibrated up through the metal in an inhuman growl. I jerked upright, fighting to unlock the seat belt. The metal squealed, the car rocked on all four tires with a force pushing up from under to get at me with tooth and claw. The seat churned. A ghostly form ripping through the fabric from within.
The seat belt jammed, my fingers slipping against the lock. The seat leather split beneath me and broke apart into a pair of lips, revealing a hand through foam stuffing, fingertips white with ragged flesh and bone. The grave odor of week-old pus in a hospital, a dead hand. I recognized the wedding ring on the left.
Jamie. Jamie was coming for me.
He grabbed my thigh, fingertips punctured straight into the meat. Next would be his face, pushing up through the seat as though being birthed through the car itself. I scrabbled over the dashboard, blistered in the sun, and yanked open the glove box. Papers flew. The face of the brother I murdered, rising through the leather like a drowning man with his lips pulled back over his teeth.
I blinked. My brother’s face shifted into Blake Highsmith’s, laughing, laughing, laughing as he reached up and looped the seat belt around my neck and began to strangle me.
*
I woke up screaming. In my thrashing, I must have kicked open the car door and slumped, half-in, half-out. Ass to the pavement. The seat belt snarled around my throat so I dangled out of the passenger seat with my upper half caught in the vehicle, drawing in struggling breaths through the thick, syrupy heat. Jamie was gone, but my vision reported burnt out silhouettes of his grisly form when I closed my eyes, like staring at the sun too long. Footsteps penetrated through the rushing blood thumping in my ears.
Elvedina’s boots filled my vision in front of me, her snapping arms and her grim face with the cut-throat grimace. She’d come to gut me and truss me while Jamie and Blake Highsmith looked on and laughed. Bleed me out and mount my head on the wall. Kill me right here in broad daylight and let my father know it had been a job well done. He’d celebrate with a glass of whiskey with chilled stones and do the kinda shit elite scumbags like him do when they’re not running a hegemony.
Elvedina’s figure blotted out the sun. I flailed for a weapon. Fingernails eroded against the concrete and came away empty. She leaned down. Get away from me! I wheezed, but all that came out was a strangled whistle. With one efficient motion, she unlooped the seat belt from my neck. My skin burned. I fell over, kicking, with my spine against the roadside and the hot surface broiling my new skin. I crowed breath in and out in throat-singeing scrapes. She bent over me and dragged me up, her fists in my shirt.
I collapsed into her long enough for me to feel the press of her against me, and the sensation of her sent every hair needling on end. With anyone else, I would have been asking for her number and her astrological signs, but touching Elvedina was like being skin-to-skin with a reptile. Cold skin. Hard and rubber, a waxy grease membrane between my fingers where I’d touched her. She piled me into the passenger seat.
She looked up and down the street, back at the line of corporate box stores, scanning the horizon. Then she returned to me.
“Fuck you, you’re probably just going to kill me anyway,” I wheezed.
She closed the door on me, leaving me with two seconds to jerk my hand out of the gap before they were jelly.
*
If I thought I felt sick after I woke up this morning, it was nothing compared to now. My bleached face in the sideview mirror while I hung onto the door of the car without strength, strapped in without motivation. My spineless head rolling from shoulder to shoulder as Elvedina veered down the street and back to the ho
use.
She slapped me. I hissed and threw up my hands and came fully awake. Her knuckles pressed white against the steering wheel, her face in profile as it cut through sunlight. I felt as though I should know her—the cast of her features, the suggestion of her Balkan background, summoned all the ferocious memories of Sarajevo, but I was not ready for Sarajevo and never would be, so I buried it.
Elvedina dragged me out. I listed and slid, collapsing out of the car. My neck burned with the memory of the seat belt. Every spoken word came attached with a fish hook. Up close, I could smell her. Gun oil and lead off a firing range. I wanted to vomit all over her shirt in a desperate bid to express my disgust and fear of her. Or was I thinking of Jessica, my long lost wife? My head swam and my eyes rolled to look at her, and still, it was only Elvedina. She hoisted me up by my shirt so I hung in the air like a marionette and then herded me into the house. Fever broiled in my mouth. Sweat rolled off my skin. My head on a balloon string far above the earth.
We burst through the door and I found the couch. Voices. Lionel’s query, a trembling question. The sound of Lafferty’s wheels rap-rap-rapping over the floorboards as he rolled to me. Someone pressed a cloth to my forehead. Elvedina, her hand on my head, her lips colorless and her eyes like surgical lasers.
“Get away from me,” I croaked. “Get her away from me.”
Lionel cut through the fray and his voice gave me focus. His face loomed above me and Elevedina subsided into the background.
“What happened?” Lionel asked.
I opened my mouth to tell him and instead the world came rushing out of my throat and spilling all over the floor.
*
After my embarrassing vomiting episode, Lionel scrubbed his shoes free of backsplash at the table where we all sat, while I sipped a glass of water and recovered.
Elvedina paced back and forth outside on the porch. My hands were clammy, my forehead cold and waxen where I pressed the glass to it to cool the fever inside. The vulture migrated out of my bedroom and invited himself to the countertop, flapping his wings and beating the air to get closer to the table. He settled beside the trash can to preen his feathers and peck at leftover Chinese takeout. Lafferty stared at it with one eyebrow raised. Lionel was absorbed in maintaining his shoes with his trembling hands. I could see the bulge in his pocket where his ancient grenade resided.
“Highsmith did this?” Lafferty said.
“It was just a dream,” I said and set the glass down. With a slip of my eyelids, I could drift off into sleep. My catnap in the car had counted for nothing. “A really vivid dream.”
Lionel nodded while he buffed one shoe and finally the old man set it down and stepped into it, pulling up his pant leg to set the heel.
“There was another casualty at the prison again, Vitus,” Lionel said.
“Another prisoner? Someone crossed him?”
“Not quite,” and Lionel’s pronunciation came out slow, labored as though he did not like to think on the news he intended to deliver. “No, I’m afraid the prison guard I bribed to report to me is dead. He apparently passed out from unknown causes, which this alone would not have proved fatal. He happened to be taking a bath, however, when he went under.”
“He drowned?”
“They’ll be doing an autopsy,” Lionel said.
“His heart. They’re gonna cut him open and, if they’re smart, they won’t stop at his lungs. They’ll see his heart stopped.”
“You know, Vitus,” Lionel began, “you seemed quite sick when you awoke this morning. What did you dream of last night?”
I waved a hand in the air to indicate vagueness. “Nothing, really.”
“Or nothing you’d like to share,” Lafferty pointed out. He gave me just what I needed—a helping of acid with the main course.
“They were strange. Disjointed. My father. Highsmith. Some other guy I dreamt of once before. Just meaningless psychobabble from the brain.”
“Highsmith again?” Lafferty said, but not at me. He spoke over my head to Lionel as though I were a child and they were my parents discussing sex. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“I’m right here,” I said.
“Vitus,” Lionel began slowly, his voice reminding me of the smell of old libraries and the sound of paper in a world before phones and cell phones and neon distractions. “Did you ever consider that Highsmith is killing people through dreams?”
“That’s your theory? That’s the best you got?” I stared, incredulous.
The vulture squawked and leapt into the air to land on the counter.
Talons tapped over the surface and he ambled over to drink out of the sink. His head like raw hamburger with a beak pressed in and his black eyes, staring at me. I would have to feed him if he was going to stay, but I couldn’t concentrate on the damn bird and untangle the newest knot of bullshit presented to me at the same time.
“Look, I know how it sounds—” Lafferty began.
“No, I don’t think you do,” I snapped. “Mind bullets and bad dreams? Where are you getting this crap?”
“Highsmith said he’d killed with the power of his mind, didn’t he? And we got nothing else for a weapon. No poison, nothing on toxicology.”
“Don’t feed me shit and say you baked brownies, Geoff,” I said. “You know they don’t test for everything.”
“There is quite a lot of literature on incubi and their ill effects,” Lionel added, leaning forward across the table to stare at me like those people who casually talk about sex demons between sports stats and weather reports. He reached out and set the back of his hand against my forehead. The touch of his hand, cool. He then leaned back and away. I didn’t even let my father touch me. “Your fever is down,” Lionel said, wiping his hand off with a napkin.
“Incubi? Oh good. We can read exorcisms next. You do know it’s the twenty-first century, right? That we left the Dark Ages behind five hundred years ago?”
“Have we?” Lionel said, mild. “With modern-day crusades in the Middle East alive and well?”
“Look, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have weird kinky sex dreams with Highsmith, so consider your bullshit theory debunked. My father was the one who used to argue politics, but I don’t have to put up with it now.”
“Not so fast,” Lionel said. “It doesn’t have to be sex that does you in. There are things undiscovered yet that could just drain you of your vitality. It doesn’t have to be an incubus, but the idea is similar, is it not? To feed off you, as a parasite.”
“Well it looks like you got the whole thing solved and you don’t need me anymore.”
“It doesn’t take a doctor to see that you’re sickening.”
Lionel lifted a trembling hand. He looked feeble at the table but the small shift in motion commanded our attention and rendered us silent. He tapped his forehead, wrinkled like the pages of a book when you hold it on one side—etched horizontal lines, timeless wisdom sandwiched between.
“What I am about to tell you, you never heard me tell you,” Lionel whispered. “What I am about to say has never existed.”
The vulture squawked and lifted into the air, landing clumsily on the back of my chair and beating his wings against my head. I cursed and pushed at him for space and he ignored me, brushing his talons over my shoulder and standing close to me so his feathers rested against one ear where he sat, contented. He smelled like yesterday’s garbage, but I’d spent years saturated in my own decay so I suffered it, riveted to Lionel. Lafferty and I understood without speaking that what he would say next was classified information. What happens in Vegas—or in government operations—stays there.
“We ran programs involving out-of-body experiences,” Lionel said gently.
And this, my friends, is how your tax dollars get spent, so people can pretend they’re ghosts and call it a full-time job.
The Dark Ages, indeed.
*
Out-of-Body Experience—or OBE, as it’s commonly known—belongs in the world of
government conspiracy theorists who like their paranoia thick and their tinfoil hats thicker. Fringe groups intersecting between hackers, hippies, and goths. Neo-witches playing around with colored bits of paper for love spells and lighting candles on the full moon, hoping maybe Stacy in Biology 101 will let him get to second base.
When Lionel spoke the words out-of-body experiences, I tumbled back in memory to find myself beside Jamie once more. Our years reduced to fractions and divided up into moments, all the way back to childhood. Our mother, winding the phone cord around one arm and talking in earnest whispers over the wires. Our father, away politicking in Washington. We were Roman Centurions. We were native braves, outwitting Custer. We were plotting elaborate fantasies and schemes to free the dinosaurs trapped in the center of the earth.
We hadn’t quite reached that inimitable place when you discover desire, frustration, sex. People tell themselves they stop daydreaming once they hit puberty, but that’s not true. We go right on daydreaming into adulthood—it just complicates things when they hoist you up by your puppy scruff and throw you out into a world filled with guns and knives, and worse yet, people wearing three-piece suits more dangerous than any street thug. Women whose lipstick is just a smattering of war paint. Broken hearts, broken promises, and the lies we tell ourselves. Welcome to adulthood, kid. You can dream, but it’s the cost that breaks you.
Before we hit those dubious rites of passage, our favorite pastime was breaking into our old man’s library because it was there, and we could. Because it smelled and felt like a place we shouldn’t be. Because we were forbidden and it was rich with the promise of opportunities, of ghosts that needed banishing and secrets in need of liberation.
Our father kept books and papers everywhere. The room had an exoskeleton of leather-bound volumes, tomes nicked straight from the library of Alexandria before it burned. Foreign language dictionaries open on the desk. A gun sitting on the ink blotter as though that was the instrument our father used to sign papers. Civil War–era colonels’ swords, one from each side of the conflict.