Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  “Anyway,” he said. “That’s all I got.”

  “It’s a great start,” Fran told him. “Thanks. If we use some of these words as search terms, maybe we can dig up some more.” She toggled to her browser and typed Picota, shadows, delusions, psychotic into the search engine. Two million hits in under a second! But the first three items she clicked on were wiki articles about Picota that just regurgitated the same things Zac had already found out. And after that, everything the search engine gave her had Picota next to it in the margin.

  Skimming some of these non-Picota articles, she discovered that shadow people were in the top ten of reported hallucinations, even if the people who were doing the hallucinating didn’t have a mental illness. You could see shadows doing things they weren’t supposed to when you were very tired, or when you were going under the anesthetic before an operation.

  Zac was obviously looking at a very similar set of results. He voiced her thoughts. “This isn’t what we’re looking for, Fran.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “Bruno didn’t see you as a shadow. He saw something in your shadow, or something about it, that shouldn’t have been there.”

  “Could be the same psychosis, though,” she offered. “Showing itself in a different way.”

  “Could be, yeah. But the best way to understand Picota is to look at what he actually said. The whole shebang, not just the tease-y little bits that ended up in the media reports.”

  Fran toggled back to the Skype screen so she could see Zac again. “You mean his psych evaluations? We’re not gonna get that.”

  Zac looked a little bit smug, like he knew something she didn’t. “Sure we are.”

  “Zac, there’s a thing called doctor–patient confidentiality. My dad gets to talk to Dr. Southern about my sessions, but only because he’s my guardian. And I can stop that as soon as I hit eighteen. Nobody else can walk in and ask for them. And I’m just in a regular clinic. Bruno is up in Grove City in a secure hospital that looks like a concrete birthday cake with razor wire for icing.”

  “How do you know what it looks like?” Zac asked. His expression of surprise hung on the screen for a few seconds, comically detached from his voice as the video card glitched again.

  “I checked out some pictures online,” Fran said, which she had. After she called up the plans. And before she walked all around the perimeter on Google Earth. She had wanted to be sure he couldn’t get out. She knew she wasn’t rational when it came to Bruno Picota. He was a black hole sitting dead center in her mind. She kept being pulled toward him, but if she ever fell in all the way she didn’t think she’d come back out again.

  “So there’s no point in asking if we can see Picota’s records,” she went on, keeping up a careful deadpan. “They’ll just say no. They wouldn’t be allowed to show them to us even if they wanted to.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t gonna ride all the way out to Grove City anyway,” Zac said.

  “What, then?”

  “Grant Street.”

  “Grant Street? What’s at Grant Street?”

  “The Allegheny County central records office. Which includes court records, because I phoned and asked them.”

  Fran thought about it. “Oh. But …” She thought about it some more. “Really? You think?”

  “I don’t think, I know. Tapes of Picota talking to his doctors were played out at the trial. And the jury were given full transcripts, which were admitted into evidence. If you were just a member of the public, the records office might redact some of this stuff, because privacy et cetera, but you’re not. You’re a party to the original case. You could walk down there right now, so long as you’ve got ID, and they’d have to let you in.”

  “You’re wrong,” Fran said. “They wouldn’t.”

  Zac looked downcast. “Why? What did I miss? Did I miss something?”

  “We’re out of office hours, Sherlock Homeboy.” He flipped her the bird, but he was grinning, acknowledging both the joke and the compliment. Fran grinned back, but then straightened her face again because this was, after all, some extremely serious shit they were up to here. “Will you come with me?” she asked him.

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Tomorrow. Right after school.”

  “I’m there.”

  “Okay then. Hey, I’d better go. I’ve still got a Spanish assignment to finish. G’night, Zac.”

  “Night.”

  “And thank you.”

  She cut the connection. She felt a tingle of pleasure as she did it, because having a co-conspirator was nice. A friend, even.

  Distracted by these thoughts, she rolled over to put the laptop back on the bedside table and found Jinx’s eyes a scant inch from her own. She started back, aware of a flash of vivid white from just underneath that fixed stare.

  Jinx’s teeth were still bared. Or else they were bared again.

  I don’t like any of this, Jinx said.

  “I can handle it, Lady J. Honest. And if I can’t, I’ll stop.”

  You should stop right now.

  Fran reached out a hand, pretending to stroke Jinx. Normally Jinx played along with this because they both enjoyed it. This time Jinx deliberately sat up so her insubstantial head went through Fran’s hand, making it very clear that she wasn’t in the mood for games.

  Bruno Picota is our enemy.

  “Okay,” Fran agreed. “But isn’t there a proverb about knowing your enemy? How can that be a bad thing, Jinx?”

  Everything about Bruno Picota is bad. He tried to kill you.

  “But this—what we’re doing—it’s just words.” Fran gestured toward the articles open on the laptop’s screen. “Words can’t hurt you.”

  Jinx shivered all over, her fur bristling as though there was a cold wind blowing through the room.

  No?

  “No.”

  Jinx snarled and leaped. Her gaping jaws snapped shut on Fran’s outstretched hand, making her gasp in shock even though Jinx’s teeth couldn’t hurt her or even touch her.

  “Hey,” she protested. “Not cool.”

  Sometimes you don’t know what can hurt you until it’s too late, Jinx said.

  Marc got Liz by the throat and bore her down. Using both hands at first, but then just the one because he was reaching out for one of the sofa cushions with the other. He shoved it over her face, got his forearm onto it and bore down with all his weight. Changing horses in the middle of the murder, suffocating her instead of strangling her. And she had to wonder why. Was it easier to kill her if he didn’t have to look her in the face? The question didn’t trouble her for very long.

  And …

  She was standing at the sink when Marc moved in from behind and off to her left. She saw the movement out of the corner of her eye, alarmed—momentarily—at how fast he was coming. He punched her on the jaw with spectacular force, her head thrown sideways so it hit the corner of the kitchen cabinet. She was dead when she hit the ground, but whether it was the punch or the ricochet that killed her she never got to know.

  And …

  They were in bed together and an argument about her not putting out for him turned into an argument about love and trust and a dozen other loaded imponderables. The bedside lamp served as punctuation for his final, emphatic statement that she was a cunt! A cunt! A cunt! A cunt! A worthless, cold-hearted cunt!

  And …

  In the car. On the garden plot. In the bathroom. In the kitchen lots of times, when she was cooking or cleaning up after a meal or serving one up, loading the washing machine or scrubbing the countertops. Her death woven into the fabric of their domestic life, the one household chore that Marc took on himself.

  Over and over and over again.

  The first one of those was mine, Beth told Liz, with no trace of emotion. The others … well, they came afterward. I’m just hitting the highlights here. Believe me, there were a lot more.

  Stop it! Liz protested soundlessly. Please! I don’t want to see this. I don’t need
to see it. I already know what he’s capable of!

  But then she thought: afterward? What does afterward mean?

  Instantly, without any pause or transition, she and Beth were face-to-face again in the colorless void that Beth had said was the inside of Liz’s own mind. Beth’s mouth was set in a tight line and her eyes were hungry as though Liz’s reaction to this horrific memory montage was something savory that she was feeding on.

  What do you think it means? It’s a pretty basic English word. But let me spell this out for you, since you seem to be having a hard time grasping the completely fucking obvious.

  He killed me. I died. But I didn’t lie down under it, the way you would. No offense. I was fighting him right up to the moment when I ran out of air. Struggling. Trying to get free. Throwing my weight to one side and then the other to push him off balance so I could suck in some oxygen.

  And you know what? In some completely messed up way, it worked.

  I twisted out from under him. I was someplace else.

  But someplace else turned out to be not that far.

  I was still in my own house. My own bathtub, actually. And I was still dying, just in a different way. Marc’s hand was on my face and he was pushing me back down. Holding me under the water.

  Drowning is worse than suffocating. Trust me, I’m kind of a connoisseur now when it comes to this stuff. There’s nothing quite like that feeling you get when your lungs fill up with water and the last little bits of oxygen bubble up like vomit.

  Are you there yet?

  Liz didn’t answer, but that was irrelevant because Beth didn’t pause.

  To be fair, I didn’t get it myself. Not right away. It took a few more times, a few more deaths, to bring it home. Wham, my head hitting the garage floor. Wham, the kitchen knife being drawn across my throat. Wham, a smack across the back of the head with an electric iron that he bought for me as a goddamned birthday present, which should have been the only hint I needed to ditch him. Rinse. Repeat.

  I had a knack I hadn’t even suspected. Maybe I never would have known if my husband hadn’t decided to kill me. Maybe it took that life-or-death urgency to pull my trigger. Light my fuse. Whatever.

  I don’t have a word for what I was doing. I don’t think there even is one. It wasn’t time travel, obviously, because I was jumping sideways. And I started to notice the small details. You know, after the immediate thrill of being a human crash-test dummy started to wear off. The lives I was traveling into were the same as mine, but they were different too.

  Every time I had a chance to look around before I checked out, there was something I didn’t recognize. Sometimes big things, sometimes small. I died on that sofa a shit ton of times, but sometimes it was patterned, sometimes plain. The upholstery was clean, or else it was dirty. Sometimes it was the New York Times lying on the coffee table, sometimes it was … something else. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Philadelphia Inquirer. Or no paper at all, but those were rare because Marc does like to look like he’s a thinking man.

  So this was a different kind of impossible. A teleport jump from A to A. I was trying to escape but it was like I was on some kind of a bungee cord. All I could do was bounce back up and I’d be right there. Dying again. The same only different, like it was a TV movie and someone was getting sloppy with the continuity. Can you imagine what that was like?

  No, let me answer that one for you. You can’t. My great-grandma Scott had twelve children—

  My great-grandma, Liz thought, before she could stop herself. She was mine, not yours.

  If Beth heard the interruption, she ignored it. And I remember one time I did the math for that. She was pregnant for nine years of her life. Nine years of bloating and nausea and heaving that weight around like an overfilled suitcase. I guess if you’re looking for a comparison it was a little bit like that. Only I don’t know how long I spent dying, again and again and again and again and again. I only know it was a long time. Longer than I’d been alive, maybe.

  And at first it was just confusion, panic, pain, oops. Gone again, back again, before I could even think. But you can get used to anything. Anything at all. Are you listening to me, Liz Kendall? You can get used to it, and you can get through it.

  I started to watch Marc’s moves. His game.

  Because all of those different deaths kept coming back like old favorites, you know? There were recurring themes. And the house—some things changed, but some things didn’t. Or usually didn’t. I made mental notes.

  In the living room, there was almost always a glass ashtray I could break over his head. In the garden, there’s a pair of secateurs. In the bathroom, there’s usually a packet of razor blades at the back of the medicine cabinet from back when he used to wet-shave.

  And in the kitchen, the spilled groceries. You remember those, right?

  I got better at it.

  I got quicker.

  And that night, when you and I met … well, that was the breakthrough. I got there a few seconds early. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it was because in your world you actually got around to divorcing him. Threw off the cosmic clock by just a little.

  Anyway, that was the night when I finally won. I got there in time. I fought him off, I planted that broken bottle in his face, and I didn’t die. I won.

  Only—and I did not see this coming—I won for you, not for me.

  There’s no Beth Healey here, there’s only you. And right after I got my little moment, you threw me out again. I was in charge for exactly as long as it took to knock that bastard back on his heels, but I couldn’t stay in the saddle when things calmed down. I’m crisis management, not business as usual. It’s like I was playing musical chairs all this time, with just the one seat, and the seat was taken.

  So here we both are, Liz. Lizzie. Liz Kendall. Liz-not-Beth. Me with my mad skills at dying, and not dying.

  You with a life.

  Liz opened her eyes. It was harder than it should have been, and slower; the message from her brain traveling down through unwilling neurons like the thin, stubborn trickle at the center of a frozen stream.

  It was not quite morning. The birds were giving it everything they had out in the yard but the sky was still black at the zenith, whatever might be happening over on the horizon. The inside of Liz’s mouth tasted like licorice left too long in the back of a cupboard: an intense and bile-bitter flavor of nothing much at all.

  The inside of her head was worse. Her thoughts were bruised and stinging from friction with Beth’s thoughts. Remembering was an act that strained imaginary muscles, made her breathing quicken with the shock of unexpected, painful effort.

  Only it wasn’t just Beth anymore. Her imaginary other selves, her fragments, were now legion. She had told Dr. Southern she didn’t have a menagerie inside her. No, she didn’t. What she had was more like an anthill, seething with endless variations on a single theme.

  Which is worse, Liz thought numbly. Worse, sicker, crazier than she had ever imagined. Normal wasn’t anywhere in sight after this. Normal had sailed off into the sunset long ago. Her madness wasn’t just an island she was shipwrecked on, it was a brave new world.

  She lay still for a long time without moving, convinced that her body must be as tenderized by trauma as her brain. But flexing her fingers, and then her neck and ankles, brought no damage reports. When she finally sat up, the pain fell away from her as though it was just a trick of perspective. Someone else’s pain, cast over her in the way a ventriloquist casts their voice.

  She needed to get rid of that taste! She groped for the water glass on her bedside table but couldn’t find it. She must have forgotten to bring one in the night before, which maybe was understandable. In reaching for the glass, she discovered that she wasn’t alone in the bed. Molly had crawled in next to her at some point in the night and was now pressed up against her left side, snoring very lightly.

  Liz grabbed the clock and held it up close until the luminous numbers made sense. It was only 6:00 a.m.: too early to
wake the kids for school; too late to try to go back to sleep. Sleep didn’t feel like an option now, in any case. She couldn’t keep from remembering her own death, refracted and repeated like the endless patterns inside a kaleidoscope.

  She disentangled herself gently from her slumbering daughter, climbed out of bed on the wrong side so as not to disturb her and padded soundlessly out of the room. She went through to the kitchen, put some coffee on and sat for a few minutes listening absently to the plup-plup-plup sound of the Cona going through its paces. When it wound down, she went over and poured herself a cup. Normally she would have added creamer, but black fitted the mood of the moment.

  She drank the coffee down like a sleepwalker, vaguely aware that her tongue and throat were hurting because it was still a little too hot to drink. She was barely tasting it, only just aware of it going down. She could hear occasional footsteps and traffic sounds from the street outside, the faint chug of water in the pipes, the bark of a neighbor’s dog. The sounds seemed weirdly flattened and compressed, as though someone had sampled them and taken out half the wavelengths before playing them back.

  All those worlds. All those women. Ghosts of possible and impossible lives she hadn’t lived. But lives she could have lived, maybe, if things had gone differently. That was the point of this, wasn’t it? The whole thrust of the insane delusion she had conjured up and given a name to. That Marc was out to get her and that in every imaginable scenario he was going to succeed.

  Liz had watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos when the Science Channel re-ran the whole series on its twenty-fifth anniversary. She knew about the cat in the box that was alive and dead at the same time, and she had been broadly sympathetic to the cat’s predicament. But that vague, sci-fi-sexy idea of alternate realities must have sunk deeper into her mind than she suspected; must have festered there and turned into this full-blown … what?

  Psychosis.

  Call it like you see it. There was no point in doing anything else.

  She had dreamed herself into a crowd, a crew, a multitude—as though she was that guy in the Bible whose name was Legion. But they were a multitude of murder victims. And the enemy, the aggressor, was the man she had loved and married and raised a family with. The man who had defined the shape of her adult life, as though he were a mold and she had poured herself into him until she found her level.