Black Out

by Lisa Unger

  “It’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” he says. “The building’s closed.”

  “It’s important,” I tell him.

  “Sorry.”

  A hundred-dollar bill from Gray changes his mind. From the looks of him, I think he would have done it for fifty. He gives us a disinterested nod and heaves his body out of the chair, which groans its relief. He slides an enormous ring of keys off the desktop, and we take the elevator up to the seventh floor.

  “Was this elevator broken earlier?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Not that I’m aware.”

  I am sweating, becoming more and more tense as the elevator climbs. Gray is armed, his hand tucked beneath his jacket, resting on the butt of his gun. He is at his best, cool and in control. When we arrive, the hallway is dark, lit only by fire-exit lights.

  I walk us toward the doctor’s door, which is shut and locked. Something’s off; I’m not certain yet what it is. The guard seems oblivious to our tension.

  “Are you sure this is it?” he asks as he unlocks the door and swings it open. That’s when I realize that the nameplate on the doctor’s door is gone. The waiting room is empty. No chairs, no silk plants, no magazine racks. We walk through to the office. It’s vacant. The desk, the bookshelves, the Murano glass vase on the table by the window, the cheap, uncomfortable furniture-all gone. Gray walks the perimeter of the room, runs his finger over the windowsill. His eyes scan the empty space. I see his brow wrinkle into a frown, then his eyes come to rest on me.

  I walk to the bathroom door and push it open. I’m confronted by my own reflection in the mirror on the far wall. I look haggard, afraid.

  “Are we on the seventh floor?” I ask. I look around-even the knobs and lighting fixtures are gone. There’s nothing to connect this place to the office I’ve been visiting for years. I check at the walls for shadows where I know photographs and degrees were hanging, but there are no telltale marks or stray picture hangers. There is no blood on the window.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the guard says, casting a suspicious glance. “I thought maybe you knew something I didn’t. It was my understanding that this floor has been vacant for months, waiting on renovations. Some real-estate agency moving in here.”

  I don’t know what to say. I blink back tears of frustration, put my hand to my forehead so neither of them can see my face. I am afraid and ashamed in equal measure.

  “You sure you got the right building?” the guard asks gently.

  I nod, not trusting my voice.

  “You have a building directory downstairs?” asks Gray.

  “Believe so,” the guard says. He looks uncomfortable now, shifting from foot to foot and avoiding eye contact. I’ve seen people act like this before. A kind of mystified embarrassment comes over people when they encounter someone who might be entirely off her rocker.

  He keeps his distance as we walk down the hallway and get into the elevator. My mind is racing through options: wrong floor, wrong office, wrong building. The doctor’s dead; someone hid his body and cleaned out his office. Or someone, as Drew so eloquently put it, is fucking with me. I can see from the look on Gray’s face that he’s running the same catalog of possibilities in his mind. He’s holding my hand tightly, as if he thinks I’m going to make a run for it.

  At the desk the guard gives Gray the building directory. I notice that the pages on the clipboard are crisp and new. On the list, Dr. Paul Brown, Ph.D., is nowhere to be found.

  “This looks like a brand-new directory. When was it printed?” asks Gray.

  The guard shrugs. “Does look new,” he admits, peering over Gray’s shoulder. “Maybe he moved his office. I don’t know.”

  “Do you know him?” I ask. “Dr. Brown?”

  He shakes his head. “But I’m just the night guy. Come on after most people have gone home for the day. I don’t really know anyone in the building.”

  The guard is looking at me with pity now. He takes a piece of scrap paper from the drawer, writes down a name and a number.

  “Nobody moved anything out of here in the last few hours?” I ask, trying not to sound as desperate and hysterical as I feel. I force my face into a mask of calm. I have learned in moments like this to keep the surface still even though the depths are raging. Animals hide fear and illness; they cannot afford weakness in the wild.

  “No, no. Nothing like that tonight,” he says, handing me the paper. “This is the daytime building manager. He’d know better about all of this.”

  Gray thanks him, and we leave. We walk in silence to the car, neither of us knowing what to say. We get inside and just sit for a minute. I examine the dashboard, since there’s nowhere else to rest my eyes. I can’t bring myself to look at Gray.

  “I didn’t imagine the doctor-or what happened tonight,” I say.

  “I know,” says Gray a little too quickly. I wonder if he’s humoring me. He puts a hand on my leg. When I find the strength to meet his eyes, I see his love for me, his compassion. This causes the tension in my shoulders to relax, my breathing to come easier.

  “I saw her,” I say, remembering the moment and feeling a shudder move through my body. “I saw Ophelia.”

  Worry is etched now in all the lines on his face. “You saw someone,” he says. “In the terror of the moment, your mind played a trick on you.”

  “I’ve seen her before, at a cocktail party and on the street. I just didn’t recognize her.”

  He moves his hand from my leg to my arm and squeezes firmly. “What are you saying, Annie? You are Ophelia. She’s not a separate person from you.”

  “I know that,” I snap. What am I saying?

  “Then what are you telling me?”

  I take in a deep breath. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

  “There was no dust on the windowsill,” he says, changing the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about Ophelia. He wants to deal with the facts, with the empirical evidence, not ghosts and hallucinations. “If it had been sitting empty for weeks, there would be dust.”

  “Really?” I say, feeling hope release some of the tightness in my chest. “What does that mean?”

  “It could mean that something happened there tonight, and between then and now someone cleaned and took the furniture out.” Gray releases a long breath. Does he believe this, or is he just saying it to make me feel better? I don’t know, and I don’t ask.

  Anyway, I do know what he’s thinking. He wishes I’d let him meet the doctor. But I never have. I’ve needed my present happy home life never to mingle with the nightmare of my past. But maybe that was part of my folly, to ever believe that I might separate the parts of myself like that, that I could keep the person I was from poisoning the person I am…especially when my present self is a fictional character I have created to escape my own heart, my own past, my own deeds.

  You belong to me. But it’s not Marlowe’s voice I hear this time. It’s Ophelia’s.

  25

  They waited on the road rain or shine, blistering heat or lightning storms, with posters featuring pictures of their daughters, sisters, mothers, chanting, “Murderer. Murderer. Murderer.” They were careful to stay on the public road. For the most part, they were orderly and nonviolent. Even so, the police could have caused the group, which called itself the Families of Frank Geary’s Victims, to disperse-but they didn’t. There wasn’t much sympathy for Frank among the citizens or law enforcement in our new hometown.

  I saw them when I left for school in the morning and usually when I came home. They seemed to work in shifts, the same ten or fifteen people taking turns on the road in front of our property. Twice I saw Janet Parker, appearing shrunken and even more haggard than she had when I first met her at our trailer. Her grief and pain were wasting her; she was slowly disappearing. Every time I saw her, I thought about her daughter floating in the water where Frank had left her.

  There was one man, the father of one of Frank’s victims, who was so sick with rage that he looked like he’d stuck his finger in a socket
every time he laid eyes on Frank. He’d go from this slack, tired-looking man to someone whose whole body was rigid and red with fury. He’d scream and hurl obscenities.

  The morning after I’d watched Frank place the unidentified bundle in the trunk of his car, the Angry Man (as I’d come to think of him) tried to throw a rock at us before the others in his group stopped him. He collapsed, wailing, into the arms of a woman.

  “These people need to move on,” my mother said that morning, annoyed by their grief and suffering. She was driving me to school, and Marlowe was along for the ride. “Frank’s not even in the car. Why would he be throwing rocks at us?”

  “He wants revenge,” said Marlowe from the backseat. We locked eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “He wants it from the wrong man,” said my mother. If she remembered her confession to me about Frank, about his strangeness, she showed no sign. I hadn’t even bothered to tell her what I saw the night before; she wouldn’t have believed me, and I didn’t want her to tell Frank. Fear was a stone I carried in my chest, so heavy I could barely stand upright. I thought of her in her used wedding dress, how she’d pranced about like Cinderella at the ball, thinking no one could see the frayed edges or the cigarette burn in the lace. The story of her life.

  At school that day, I just sort of drifted from class to class, not participating, not hearing anything that was said to me. I had the feeling that I’d stepped out of normal life, that my circumstances so separated me from everyone around me that I could no longer communicate in this world. I wonder if this is when I started “dissociating,” as they say. Nothing seemed real to me, everything took on a kind of foggy quality. The change in me must have been apparent. People who had harassed and taunted me because of Frank were suddenly giving me a wide berth. My social-studies teacher asked me to stay after class and inquired about my home life. Is everything okay? I don’t know you that well, Ophelia, I admit, but you don’t seem like yourself. He’d placed a call to my mother, he told me, to tell her my grades were in a precipitous drop from my prior school records, but she hadn’t called back. The honors English teacher from your former school wrote to say what a talented writer you were, how remarkably well read you were for someone your age. We’ve seen no evidence of any of that here, Ophelia. How can we help? He seemed so sincerely worried that I didn’t have the heart to tell him no one at all cared about me or my grades.

  That is another of those moments I reflect upon. This teacher was throwing me a lifeline, and if I had grabbed at it, maybe things wouldn’t have continued on their deadly trajectory. But I was too far gone by then, too alienated from the world around me to know a way out when I saw it.

  As I stepped off the school bus that afternoon, I crossed the street to avoid the protesters. To their credit, they generally left me alone. They must have recognized me as the victim I was, as helplessly cast in this miserable production as they were. They threw alternately pitying and suspicious looks in my direction as I came and went each school day. That day I saw Janet Parker watching me. She held a cup of coffee, raised it slowly to her lips. I glanced away from her, and as I did, I noticed Marlowe standing beside her. It looked like he was whispering something in her ear. I turned away quickly, cast my eyes to the ground, and walked through the gate to make the long trek to our house.

  Gray Powers is not a man who is often wrong. With a name like that, it seems almost impossible that he could ever be mistaken about anything. He should be jumping into telephone booths, slipping into superhero garb, and saving the day-which is actually not that far from what he does. But he was wrong about Detective Ray Harrison. Gray had sized him up as a small-town cop, corrupt and not that bright, looking for a big payday. He’s the one who always says that the worst mistake you can make in a fight is to underestimate your opponent. And it’s true.

  I go through the motions even though my head is reeling from the events of the night before. I put on a big show for Victory, who races toward me when she sees me waiting for her after school. I squeeze her hard and hold on until she squirms and giggles, and says, “Mommy, you’re squishing me!”

  In the car she regales me with stories of princesses and castles, giant cartoon characters, endless junk food, and the big bed in her room at Drew and Vivian’s suite. As I listen, I push back images of Simon Briggs, the dark shadow on the beach, my slain psychiatrist. I want to be present for my daughter’s joy. But I can’t. I’m sure she senses it, as her enthusiasm wanes and her tale peters out.

  Probably about the same time I was driving Victory back home, Detective Harrison was making connections Gray didn’t think he’d be able to make. There was something to link Annie Fowler and Ophelia March. It should have been obvious, since it was Gray. The articles I searched online to ease myself out of the black patches were among the same ones that Detective Harrison found when he researched Gray Powers. Of course there was the slew of articles about Gray’s military career as a decorated Navy SEAL, the articles about Powers and Powers and the rise of privatized military companies. After scrolling though page after page, Detective Harrison found an old item, an article from the Albuquerque Journal. The headline read: INVESTIGATOR HUNTS, KILLS CRIME-SPREE KILLER MARLOWE GEARY: Ophelia March, believed to be Geary’s captive or his accomplice, also killed. He might otherwise have glanced over the article except for the picture of Ophelia, which he quickly recognized. It was all there for him to see, my ugly past.

  Maybe it’s the disappearance (death? murder?) of my (imaginary?) shrink or the fact that I can feel Harrison’s breath on my neck. Or maybe it’s as my doctor believed, that I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, that I’m ready to face the things I have packed away. Whatever the reason, the flashes of memory I’ve had, the dreamlike images, begin to coalesce. The blanks start to fill in.

  It’s not as dramatic as I believed it would be, this return of my past. I envisioned being bowled over by it, taking to my bed, feeling helpless to do anything as the memories trampled me like runaway horses. But it is more like watching the rerun of a black-and-white horror film I saw as a child. The images are familiar, but too grainy and drained of power to be truly frightening.

  After I put Victory to bed her first night back home, I start to remember. I tuck her beneath her sky blue sheets and sit with her as she drifts off, watching the delicate rise and fall of her chest. As I get up quietly and slip from her room, she says sleepily, “I want my baby.” I find Claude on the floor and put him beside her, but she is already sound asleep again. As I leave the room, I hear Janet Parker’s voice and there’s a terrible ringing in my ears. Once I’m back in my bedroom, I’m swept away, traveling back to a place I haven’t visited in a lifetime.

  I watched Marlowe leave the house that night. He had his headphones on, and he walked out the front door and disappeared into the trees. As usual, Frank was gone and my mother was in a stupor in front of the television. Don’t you wonder where Frank goes at night? Marlowe had asked. He’s hunting. I easily slipped out after him. In the dark, I saw his form move quickly through the woods, and I followed. I could smell the acrid scent of his cigarette smoke hanging in the air.

  He walked for so long and he was so fast that I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up. By the time he came to a stop, I was breathless and sweating. My legs had been lashed by the overgrowth. The mosquitoes were in a feeding frenzy at my ankles and my neck.

  He came to a creek that ran through the property and waded across. Through the trees I could see a trailer, a rusted-out old thing up on concrete blocks, not much smaller than the one I’d lived in with my mother. He opened the door and went inside. I saw a light come on. I stood in the darkness, waiting, not sure whether to follow or to go back home. As I was about to walk over to the trailer, he emerged again. He came back to the creek and squatted there, looked into the water as though gazing at his own reflection. I approached him.

  At first I thought he was laughing, laughing at me for following him. It was only as I drew closer that I realized he w
as crying. His whole body was shivering with it. I didn’t know what to do. I stood and watched him for I don’t know how long, listening to the sound of his weeping, an owl calling up above us, tree frogs singing all around.

  “Marlowe,” I said finally, softly.

  He didn’t jump at the sound of my voice, and I assumed he couldn’t hear me, that he had the Cure or the Smiths blasting in his ears.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said, his voice a choked whisper. “It’s started again. You saw. I know you did.”

  I had the strong urge to turn and run from him, even though I’d followed him out there. Or was I just a fish on a line, he the fisherman reeling me in-too foolish, too naïve to feel the hook in my cheek?

  “You helped him,” I said. His back was still to me. “Who was it?”

  He stood and spun around then, came and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Does it fucking matter who it was?” he hissed. “Do you understand now?”

  I saw him then, saw what he was. This is why I can’t forgive Ophelia. She knew.

  “I’m ready,” I told him. And his face changed again. It was as white as the thin slice of moon.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” And I was.

  He brought me into the trailer. There was a kitchen and a small bedroom. A bathroom that didn’t work, of course. No electricity or running water. The lights were all battery-operated. I recognized the bedding, the pots and dishes from our old trailer. The table was piled high with Marlowe’s books and notebooks.

  “What is this place?”

  “I found it walking one night when we first came. Abandoned, gone to shit. I’ve been fixing it up, staying out here sometimes. You could live out here, you know. If you have provisions, you could live out here forever. He doesn’t know about it. No one does.”

  He took me by the hand and led me to the bed, turning out the little plastic lights as we went. In the darkness we lay close. I couldn’t see his face anymore. I was grateful that the darkness was so total. I could only hear the sound of his voice, feel the warmth of his body next to mine. We talked about what we would do. It didn’t seem real. It was all a dream.