One night, I saw one of the little boys nearly get snatched by members of an evil gang. I knew that that was what they were because their getup was pretty unmistakable: masked faces, capes, in black from head to toe. The girl and her father were fighting them off in their garden—him with a gun, and her with the kind of long sword I thought existed only in movies. (People around here pay no mind to moderate amounts of noise or gunfire, because there’s a massive ballpark around the corner; their hearing’s shot.) I was taken aback by the girl’s almost superhuman physical ability. Her father looked realistic enough, like a man holding a gun, but the skill with which she wielded her sword as she killed those henchmen was way out of the ordinary. I should have realized then that she was different from your average woman, but what can I say? The only person I could compare her to was my old man.
They managed to save the little kid from being taken that day, but a few days later the gang came back and killed the kid in a gruesome fashion. That was my first sight of her tears of blood. The gang members held her down and used a dropper to collect a few tears into a vial and disappeared into the woods behind the house with a purposeful swirl of their capes. The garden was littered with the bodies of the little boy and numerous dead henchmen. Then there was the girl, sitting on the ground, clutching grass. And her father, coming up to her and gently putting his hand on her shoulder.
I started to piece the situation together. The gang was after her (for whatever reason), and it was no use trying to run (because they’d catch up at some point), so the girl and her father were trying to force a showdown next door. That much I got. I did think maybe their plan was in a little bit of a rut, what with the way the gang seemed to insist on attacking the house repeatedly instead of just taking the girl hostage, or the way she and her father let the little boys roam around for the taking when they could have been kept out of harm’s way in a shelter somewhere. But I don’t like to sweat the details.
That being said, if it had occurred to me, surely it had occurred to her—that once all the little brothers were dead, her father would be next. Reduced to just the two of them, the girl and her father expanded their arsenal and kept their guard up around the clock. It’s possible they were staying put because they were using the father as bait, to lure out the evil gang and eradicate them once and for all instead of trying to find their HQ.
Their epic daily battles racked up mountains of dead henchmen, until one day it all came to an end. Her father was finally taken down.
The gang took just one drop of her blood tears and left, as usual. The girl sat on the lawn and wept. Her father, who’d always been there to hold her hand, had been blown to smithereens. Seeing how she was suffering, I was moved—despite not being in the habit of empathizing with people—to pop on a pair of sandals and make my way over to the stately and by-now-familiar garden next door. I entered the grounds through a segment of wall that had been damaged in the fighting. When I got closer to her, I saw the grass where she was sitting was entirely slicked with red. These were the tears whose mysterious powers the gang was after.
She didn’t even raise her head as I approached. What do you do to get a woman to stop crying in a situation like this? “Chin up, now,” I said, trying to keep the squeak out of my voice. I told her that I understood how she felt losing her last living relative. That I had no one besides my doddering old man.
I thought I might be in love. As she raised her face, I saw a red tear trail down her cheek and knew I’d do anything to take her father’s place as her right-hand man. I didn’t know how to shoot a gun, but perhaps I could learn to drive instead. I hardly recognized myself. I knew what this was called: unconditional love. The gang would probably be after me, but being beside her, even just briefly, would be worth it. My very first experience of love for a fellow human being. I’d bare my heart to her, tell her everything. How I’ve never been able to sympathize with anyone before, but would try to understand the loneliness that must come from having extraordinary abilities. That we’d no doubt face plenty of obstacles, but hey, there’s always my old man.
She’d been still for so long, but suddenly she got to her feet. “Love?” she said, moving toward me, head angled inquiringly. “Love? Love? Think you’ll still love me once you’ve heard what I’ve got to say for myself?”
I didn’t know why she was acting so aggressive toward a guy who was obviously trying to help, but I figured she was probably confused.
“Nothing you can say will shock me,” I said, affecting calm, nodding like a man of the world. I hadn’t brought up my spying on her, but it was possible she’d been aware of me for some time.
“All this is my own fault,” she said, “for falling in love with my father.”
I was dumbstruck.
She looked into my eyes to make sure I was listening, and began her tale.
“I was ten years old when Mother first suspected I had designs on Father. She kept warning him, but he always brushed her off, told her not to be absurd. Said she had a bee in her bonnet. That I was only a child.
“But Mother was right. I meant to take him away from her. I used every trick in the book to turn them against each other. They’d been so close, but Father defended me until the very end, saying it didn’t do to suspect a child. He wasn’t interested in knowing the truth. He wanted to think of his daughter as some kind of angel. He should have realized that was hopelessly naive, if he remembered anything about being ten himself.”
She stepped toward me, holding out her little hands. I should have been thrilled, but my body felt all tense, looking for a way to escape.
“Mother seethed, grew hysterical. Unable to prove that I was a wicked child, she finally cracked and shouted at me, and raised her hand in anger. That was the moment I’d been waiting for. I stumbled hard on purpose, and fell into the road. I was taken to the hospital and had to have a dozen stitches, but after that the court made sure she could never see me again. Father, who’d adored her gentle nature, divorced her, and we moved away together. Do you see? I got the law on my side.
“That’s why Mother joined the evil gang. She needed to find something that was more powerful than the law. I’m sure she made a study of every conceivable means of murder, purely to make me suffer—you know about the wonderfully imaginative, almost artistic ways each of my brothers was killed. You couldn’t do that without a genuine love of killing, or a serious obsession.”
She gave me no time to respond.
“One other thing—those weren’t my little brothers. They were our children. Mine and Father’s. I could hardly go to a clinic, so I gave birth to them all at home, in the kitchen. I admit I was pretty surprised when the triplets turned up. This isn’t a fight for justice,” she said, pausing at last. “It’s a deeply personal matter.”
I tried to rouse my stiff tongue. “But aren’t they collecting your tears?” I said. “Those tears of blood, I thought they had some kind of special power.”
“The tears?” She shrugged. “Who knows? They don’t do a thing. Mother just takes them as trophies of the misery she causes me, drop by drop.”
I’d obviously gotten everything wrong. What with the pink hair, and the fact she was just a girl, I’d simply assumed she was a plucky young thing fighting on the side of good. I wanted to get away, but as she kept trying to come closer, I’d inched my way back over the deck, and found myself inside the house.
“Do you really love me?”
She sounded sweet, but I no longer felt like saying yes. “I should really go check on my old man,” I said, gesturing vaguely toward my house. “He hasn’t got anyone but me to look after him.”
She seemed to sense the advantage was hers. Grabbing my arm, she said, “If you love me, then find out how it feels to be me.”
“How it feels?”
“To lose your family. You try it.”
I’d realized a while ago that I was in over my head. But it wasn’t going to be easy to get off the hook. I
couldn’t let my smile slip just yet.
“Lose my family? I couldn’t kill my old man,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean. To feel what I feel,” she said, immobilizing me with one hand, “you need to seduce him.”
“I need to—”
“If you want to get to know me.”
“But I’m—”
“That’s what you need to do.”
I hadn’t been lying when I’d said I wanted to understand her, but there was no way I was going to seduce my geriatric father. Just picturing it made acid rise in the back of my throat.
“Aside from Mother, no one realized that I’d seduced Father, not even Father himself. He was full of guilt for having ruined my life, and I planned to use that to make sure we went on living together like man and wife. With Mother legally out of the picture, there was nothing to stop me from lying to everyone else, and taking the secret of my wickedness to the grave. Or so I assumed.
“But I was wrong. Because then it all started. First my hair: I used to have beautiful black hair. But soon it started to turn pink from the roots out. I dyed it, but it wouldn’t take—when I woke up the next day the pink color would be deeper than ever. That wasn’t all. It grew out at an incredible rate. I always wore my hair in a bob, but now it comes down to my waist. Eventually I gave up cutting it, because it just keeps growing.
“Next was my eyes. Each time I looked in a mirror, my irises had lost some of their dark color, until they were finally emerald green, like a doll’s. And then my brothers. I told you they were mine and Father’s children, but the thing is, we only ever conceived the first one. The rest of them we don’t recall making. So all we were doing was living together, but my belly kept swelling, and I was trapped in a hell of perpetual morning sickness and contractions. Then, when I was giving birth, the babies’ little heads would get caught, putting me in agony. Some of them got stuck for too long, and they didn’t make it.
“I was gradually starting to understand what these changes meant. There was some force out there that wasn’t going to let me get away with what I’d done to Father, even if I’d managed to fool everyone else.
“Soon I couldn’t even leave the house, thanks to my outlandish appearance. In the early days, we kept moving from one place to the next, but every time we did, I got pregnant with another one, so we decided we’d go somewhere new, buy a house, and stay put. Once we got here, my perpetual pregnancies finally let up. We breathed a sigh of relief, thinking we might be forgiven at last.
“But there was another change yet to come. You know what I’m talking about?”
I said the first thing that came to mind. “The tears?”
“That’s right.” She nodded, still clutching my arm. “I started to cry tears of blood.”
Was this some kind of sick joke? I was too confused to work out where her lies started, or how exactly she was different from other women. I mean, they were all completely foreign to me to begin with. I tried to pry her hand off my arm. She wouldn’t let go, and kept on talking, as though she were trying to unburden herself by confessing everything. It was infuriating. I kicked her in the gut as hard as I could, and in a mad scramble half leapt, half tumbled down into the garden, clambering toward the shadowy darkness.
“Seduce your father!” I heard her cry. “Then you’ll know what I’m talking about!”
I’d meant to aim for home, but I found myself in the woods behind her house, through which the evil gang always made its exit. I ran and ran, but the trees went on forever. There was no way it could be so vast. “Father! Father!” I shouted, but maybe he didn’t hear—there was no sign of anyone coming to help. I saw that I was surrounded by countless mounds of soil, where the girl and her father had buried the gang members they’d killed daily. There were capes and masks scattered everywhere. Farther on, I came across five secluded graves.
After a while, I finally spotted the lights on in my house. I went to my room and slipped quietly into bed. The next day, my old man brought me some lunch. The moment I clapped eyes on him I remembered the night before, and promptly lost the will to eat his food. I couldn’t bring myself to even speak to him.
The Women
There was nothing to be done. no matter how many times I asked why, all she would tell me was that she was challenging me to a duel. I begged her to reconsider, but it was no good. She was the kind of girl who would call me every night when we first started going out just to check that we were really dating, a lover who was so slender she looked like she might break if you embraced her. I couldn’t believe it.
She stood up, as if to say there was nothing more to discuss, and asked if I’d like to do it by the river.
“How did we get here?” I cried. “Could we choose a more romantic location, at least?”
She paused to think, and then started listing places that were special to us: The amusement park. The movie theater. The park with the unusual swings. The petting zoo. Our parents’ homes. The courtyard at the college where we’d met . . .
“The river’s fine by me,” I said.
She nodded. “Anywhere much farther and we’ll have to drive, which will be fine for getting there, but could be tricky on the way back,” she said. Of the two of us, I was the only one who drove.
My suggestion that we wait until it got dark was rejected. Her excitement seemed to mount as we searched for the perfect spot along the river. I stole a glance at her profile and saw that her upper lip was curled back, exposing her teeth. I’d had no idea she felt so passionately about fighting me.
“I just want to know why,” I said again, in tears.
She was breathing heavily. Huh huh huh huh.
Another man came over the bank, led by his girlfriend. He also had tears rolling down his face. For a second, I thought an enormous mirror had appeared in front of us. The girl reminded me of my girlfriend: she was short and energetic-looking, with an attractive face. The man was like me. Nervous and pale, with a wan air.
As we passed each other, I noticed something that took me by surprise. The girl was holding what looked like a dog’s leash, the other end of which stretched up to the top button of the man’s shirt. I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed it, but I couldn’t help myself from looking at the collar around his neck.
“No good spots back there?” the girl said. She may or may not have noticed me staring.
“We’ve only just come out ourselves. We weren’t sure which way to go,” my girlfriend said. She was still panting. Huh huh huh.
“Same here,” the girl said. “We just decided to follow the river.” The two of them moved toward each other and started exchanging information, making it seem like the man and I should probably be talking to each other too.
“Hello,” I said, and nodded exploratively.
For a second I was worried he couldn’t understand me, but the man in the dog collar looked at my drying tears and, in a surprisingly normal voice, said, “So it’s happening to you too.” He wore glasses, and would have looked like a trustworthy office worker if not for the wrinkles in his suit. I didn’t know how to react. Because the girl was a few steps away, the leash was now pulled taut, making it even less possible to ignore the collar around his neck.
“What has?” I said.
“You’re the same as me,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Am I right in thinking you’ve been challenged to a duel?”
I looked over at our girlfriends in alarm. So that girl was also about to . . .
“Shh. Play dumb!” He admonished me without taking his eyes off my face. He sounded sharper than I expected. Maybe he had a position of authority at his company, in spite of the dog collar. “It’s our fault,” he said quickly, moving only his mouth as though the rest of his face had turned to stone.
Your fault? I almost asked, except I sensed he meant to implicate me when he said the fault was ours.
When I didn’t say an
ything, he continued, “Didn’t you wish for a more exciting lover? This is all because of the desires of men like us. The women—” There was a sharp pull on the leash, and I saw the light disappear from his eyes as he turned to plod after his girlfriend.
After that, we met many similar couples. All the men walked three steps behind the women, with sad expressions and heads bowed as if they were accepting heavy punishments. As we passed each other they signaled mutely to me with their eyes.
The women were starting to salivate. My girlfriend was walking in front of me, and I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear the occasional watery dribbling sound, so I presumed that it was happening to her too. I had the impression her body was expanding. Her dress—one of her favorites, which she’d worn on some of our dates—looked uncomfortably tight. Her breath was getting faster and more rhythmic. Huh huh huh huh huh. Her spine was slowly arching as though it were being pulled by an internal spring. And to think she’d once had perfect posture, and had always looked after her appearance, from her shoes to her meticulously trimmed bangs!
“You’re doing this . . . because of me? For me?” I asked, but she had her nose in the air and was busy sniffing something upwind. She seemed in no condition to talk. Decisively, I stepped in front of my lover and looked into her face. I couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d punched me. Her eyes, which tended to droop demurely, were angled sharply upward, and her eyelashes had grown preternaturally thick and voluminous. A dark line rimmed her eyes and made her seem to be glaring at everything. It made me shiver. What a provocative look! And her mouth too: at first I thought she’d bitten through her lip by accident, but no. The pink was gradually flushing to a striking red. I reached out and brushed my finger across her lip. The color came off on my finger. It was lipstick. Her lips were producing their own lipstick.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder Page 11