by Paul Neuhaus
Olkin sighed and threw back his head. “It was not on purpose! How long have we known each other, like fifteen years? In all that time have I ever been a stabber? Have any one of my friends ever said to you, ‘Watch out for David. He’s a serial penetrator.’”
Quinn raised an eyebrow. “I think that’s something different.”
“Yeah,” he conceded. “We’re getting into Beardslee territory here.”
Still nervous about being in the wrong restroom, the girl walked back out into the hall. Olkin followed.
David sighed again. “Look at it this way: you just had a massive adrenaline rush. You’ll probably sleep good tonight.”
“Swell.”
“Also, you have the rest of the day off. Did I mention that?”
Henaghan smirked. “Feel free to stab me more often.”
He nodded, pointing himself at the lobby. “Get yourself a new white sweater. I’ll pay you back in hard boiled eggs.”
Once Olkin was around the corner and out of sight, Quinn looked down at her band-aided palm.
On the sidewalk in front of ACT, Quinn stood at the crosswalk separating the building from the parking garage across the street. She still clutched her damaged hand, and the two wounds still stung beneath her bandage. As she waited, Henaghan heard an insistent cheep to her right. Looking over, she saw a bird in the short tree next to her. It was a tiny blue bird with a bright red head. Remembering Amber the Assistant, Quinn held out her finger, expecting the little guy to hop onto it. Instead, the bird gave her a “you’ve gotta be shitting me” look and leapt into the sky.
Amber must have special bird powers, Quinn thought.
Getting anywhere in Los Angeles is a soul-draining nightmare. Between the driving and the parking, a trip that should take thirty minutes door to door, often takes ninety. When Quinn reached her apartment, she was bent double. Maybe a nap. Followed by delivery from Fang’s and a deep dive into The Devil’s Garden. When she opened her door, the first thing she saw was a tall suitcase next to her couch. The second thing she saw was Noah Keller sitting on said couch. “Oh, hi,” he said. A year hadn’t changed him. Ten years wouldn’t change him. He looked like a refugee from the Grunge era, like a hybrid between the late, great singer Jeff Buckley and Ethan Hawke from the movie Reality Bites. He was a long-haired throwback.
“Fuck,” was all Quinn could manage.
Noah’s shoulders fell. “Nice to see you, too.”
“Why are you here? Why are you inside? How did you get in?”
“I have a key, remember?”
“No, I don’t remember. If I’d remembered, I damn sure would’ve done something about it. Thirteen months, Noah. Thirteen months you’ve been out of the picture. In the name of Sweet Baby Jesus, why now?”
“I need help, Quinn,” he said, working his soulful, long-lashed eyes.
Henaghan dropped her big canvas bag on the floor next to the door and trudged inside. “You always need help. You’re need-help incarnate. You must’ve fucked a hundred girls in the last thirteen months. Why aren’t you at any of their apartments? Doing the whole needing help thing?”
Keller stood up, smoothing out the thighs of his old jeans. “First of all, I haven’t fucked a hundred girls. I’m a serial monogamist. You know that. Second of all, there hasn’t been anyone else since you. No one with a connection, I mean. You know what I’m talking about. You felt it too.”
She glared at him. “I did feel it. For about twenty minutes. Then it passed. Like a hangover. You’re a hideous, soul-sucking man-boy with a passive-aggressive streak a mile wide. You’re a user, and you give nothing back. Not to women, not to society…”
He held up his hands in a placating gesture. He had rings on both thumbs. She hated that about him. “You know that thing you told me once? Where you think something and then you say it even though its way harsher than you meant it to be? You’re doing it.”
“No, I’m not doing it. You’re getting the direct line here. And it’s not just bitterness that’s festered over time. It’s what I thought of you when we were together. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming me. I was the one dumb enough to let it go on as long as it did. I wanna be very, very clear here: I hate you. I hate the way you are. I hate the way you act. I hate the way you look. And, again, that’s your trip. You gotta be who you gotta be, but you can’t be it here.”
“What’s that on your sweater? Is that blood?”
“Give me my key.”
“Hold on. Let’s talk about it.”
“No. No, we’re not gonna talk about it because it won’t be talking. I’ll be talking but you’ll be running a passive-aggressive subroutine like the self-interested android you are.”
“I got fired, Quinn.”
“So?”
“What do you mean ’so’? I said I got fired.”
“You always get fired. You wanna know why? I mean I coulda helped you with this a long time ago, so my bad, but here it is: You’re a fucking P.A. A thirty year old P.A. You’ve been a P.A. for nine years! That gig’s supposed to last, what, a year tops? You shoulda graduated out of it at twenty-two! Do you know what happens when you’re a thirty year old Production Assistant? People don’t respect you. You’re just that much more disposable to them—and they don’t even feel bad about letting you go. At first they might think they’re doing you a favor by hiring you. Later, after they’re exhausted by your histrionic bullshit, they think to themselves, Good riddance, man-boy! What I’m saying is, basically, that you had a chance to either shit or get off the pot years ago and you chose the pot.”
Noah, laughing, sat back down on the couch. He acted out a little scenario as if he were talking to an invisible friend. “‘What do you think of Quinn, Noah?’ ‘Oh, she’s great. So great. I just wish she wouldn’t play things so close to the vest.’”
“Ha ha. Good stuff. Although it’d be more entertaining with puppets. Why don’t you give me my key, and go get yourself some puppets?”
“I lost my job, I can’t find another one, and I got evicted. If you boot me, I’m on the street. My parents are sending me money so I can move back to Raleigh. As soon as they have it. I’m asking for a place to crash. Because it’s you or nothing.”
Henaghan turned away from him and screamed “fuck” at the ceiling. “What if I gave you money for a motel?” she said, her back still to him. “What if I gave you the money to go back to Raleigh?”
He sighed. “I wouldn’t take it. In either case. You think of me as a sad little peacock, and that’s fine, but I do have one rule: I don’t take money I can’t pay back.”
“I’m not asking you to pay it back.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Quinn turned back around, seething. Her little body practically gave off steam. “You get the couch. You come anywhere near my bedroom door and you get shivved. You understand me?” He nodded. “Also, give me my key. Now. No hedging. No ‘what about this?’ and ‘what about that?’” He nodded. “Also, you get one night. I don’t care what you do after that. Call Billy. Call David Olkin. As soon as the sun comes up, you’re no longer my problem. In fact, I’m gonna set my alarm for nine A.M. When I come out of the bedroom, I want you already gone, so make whatever arrangements you gotta make tonight. You hear me?”
He nodded.
“I don’t think you heard me because I don’t see a key moving through space from your hand to mine.”
Keller sighed and took a big keyring out of his jeans pockets. After some fumbling, he pulled Henaghan’s key off and handed it to her. “You’re no fun anymore,” he said.
“I was never fun.” With that she went into the bedroom and slammed the door.
After trying and failing to read Annabelle’s book (she was way too angry), she shut off the light and went to bed early. It was still twilight but that wouldn’t stop her. Keller’s sudden appearance reminded her how lonely she was, and she was bitter about it. Most of the time, she could keep that sad fact at arm�
�s length, but Noah had inadvertently poked at the wound.
As she finally drifted off, Quinn saw the phantasms orbiting the top of her room in streaky spirals.
At two-thirty-two (she knew because she picked up the iPhone from her nightstand and looked at it), there was a knock on the door. “What?” she said.
“I have to pee,” Noah said from the living room. If he wasn’t bullshitting her, it was a fair request. The single bathroom was accessible only via her bedroom.
Quinn dug her head into her pillows and shut her eyes tight.
“Did you hear me? I said I have to pee.”
She raised her head up so that her chin rested on her chest. “Okay. I’m getting up, but if this is some clumsy attempt at seduction, I’m going to literally murder you. Now, for your own safety, do you really have to pee?”
A long pause. Quinn could almost hear him breathing. “Look, okay. I don’t have to pee. I just thought we could—”
Henaghan’s scream cut him off. “Fuck, Noah. What about our earlier discussion made you think I’d want to fuck you? I would rather never fuck again than fuck you. My vagina is literally clenched. It’s puckered at the very thought of you and me doing it.”
“Okay, but—”
“Okay, but nothing. No sex. Ever. When you get back to Raleigh, you can reminisce about old times, but this, I assure you, is not going to be one of them. Go back to sleep. Be gone when I wake up.”
Another long pause. “Okay. ‘Night.”
She ignored him. She saw the phantasms again, right on the border between waking and sleep. This time they congealed into a single ectoplasmic mass and entered her through the wounds in her palm. There was no pain, only a feeling of fullness as an unseen force moved through her arm toward her torso and her vitals, filling her with strange warmth.
Then she was on street in downtown Los Angeles. Running. Running, and her legs hurt. She could feel the scrapes on her kneecaps. The pain in her bare feet as they slapped sidewalk. Tears in her stockings admitted cool air, making the torn flesh feel more raw. She came into the light again, a light illuminating a taxi stand manned by a man in a cheap uniform. He turned to her, drawn by the sound of her gulping breaths. “Whoa, easy there, honey. What’s wrong?”
“There was a man,” Quinn said through staccato breathing. The voice that came out of her was not her’s, yet she clung to its authenticity because, after all, wasn’t it coming out of her? “There was someone chasing me,” she managed.
The taxi man looked in the direction from which Quinn had come, obviously seeing nothing. “Well, he’s not there now, miss. You’ve had a hard time. Here sit.” He pulled a hard wooden chair away from the stand and planted it next to Quinn. Quinn sat, slumping forward and gathering her breath. “What’s your name, miss?”
Quinn wanted to say “Quinn”, but the voice that wasn’t hers said, “Bettie.” Sitting up straight again, she looked to her left, reacting to a noise. It was a car passing on the street. A coupe. 1940s vintage. She stared at the vehicle as it drove off into the foggy night. Then she heard footsteps, coming, she somehow knew, from custom-made Italian shoes. She looked up and to the right. The night was foggy and the street lamps made glowing white balls of the air beneath them. The light half a block away now contained Jeremy Daggett’s slim, well-tailored silhouette.
Quinn lurched forward then back, like she’d begun a ride on a defective rollercoaster. During the snap, her vision blurred then un-blurred. When focus returned, she was still looking into a light, but it was a different light. A fluorescent tube hanging from an indistinct ceiling. The illumination burning into her corneas forced her to snap her lids shut. She moaned.
An indistinct voice to her right said, “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.”
Henaghan tried to turn toward the voice but couldn’t. Her head was locked into a tight leather harness that fastened under her chin with a huge buckle. The buckle dug into the skin of her neck. Reacting instinctively, like an animal, she tried to stand and found that her wrists, ankles and waist were held in place by leather straps that cut and pinched at the slightest resistance. She was naked. Naked and cold and affixed to a stainless steel table.
The voice came again, a hoarse whisper. “It’s better if you don’t move. Trust me.”
She couldn’t see what the man was up to, but she could hear. He sat down in a rolling chair and moved it toward her table. Then he wheeled over a cart so that it would be next to him. On the cart were instruments and tools which he dinged together until he found the right one. Then he put his big left hand on her hip to hold her in place. With his right, he began to draw on her, just above the bone. But he wasn’t drawing with a pen, he was drawing with a scalpel. It took Quinn a moment to connect those dots in her head and that’s exactly how long it took her to feel the pain of the careful incisions. She screamed and the voice was both her own and not.
“That’s it, sing for me, dear,” said the man next to her.
When she woke up, Quinn listened. Nothing. Not even street noise. If there was no sound, that meant Noah had honored his agreement and left. A first. She reached down and felt her right hip. No blood. No pain. A dream?
Rolling out of her comforter, Henaghan stood, pulled her long nightshirt off and went for the bathroom. After she’d gotten the shower temperature right, she slid off her panties and backed up two steps to the sink. From the medicine chest, she withdrew her Lexapro and took one and a half tablets, as prescribed by her doctor. Morning meds out of the way, she closed the medicine cabinet and looked at herself in the mirror. As she always did, she lingered over her scars. Twenty-six little punctures between the bottom of her breasts and the top of her hips, random placement. She ran her index finger in a circle over two or three, marveling at the toughness of her hide at each old wound. She knew she had at least twice as many such scars on her back, but she couldn’t reach most of them.
The Ritual of the Scars complete, she realized she was cold and got into the shower. She was barely in there a minute before her stomach heaved. Dripping, she made it to the toilet before she vomited. Violently. Again and again. After she’d nearly turned herself inside out, she felt another barrage rising up inside her and she gripped the toilet seat hard. This time, however, it wasn’t puke that came out of her.
It was fire.
An angry ball of flame shot from her mouth and shattered the porcelain bowl beneath her. She spun her face away, but it was already too late. She’d already taken a few nicks to the face. When she was sure it was safe enough to turn again, she took stock of what she’d done. Where the toilet had been, there was now a black scorch mark, half on the tile and half on the wall. A puddle of water, sourced from a spitting pipe, formed around her.
As soon as Quinn was able, she stumbled into the living room, threw back her head and gave a deep but unsurprised sigh. Noah Keller was gone but his suitcase was still next to her couch. With all the strength she could muster, she opened her front door and pushed the luggage out onto the concrete porch. Then she slammed the door, locked it and fixed the chain in place. After that, it was all she could do to throw herself onto her couch and try not to vomit again.
Mia took her sweet time as always. Seven years younger and a different breed, Quinn’s sister moved according to her own rhythms. The needs of others rarely crossed her thoughts. All of that would’ve been bad enough if Mia’s rhythms weren’t also subject to sudden and alarming changes. Personality-wise the girl was, to put it mildly, fluid. But Mia was the only one Henaghan could call. Annabelle Grindle didn’t drive and Quinn knew she’d need to see a doctor. After she phoned her sister, she called her landlord and told him about the toilet. His concern was immediate but impersonal. No doubt, he feared the involvement of lawyers. “Were you on it at the time?” Henaghan assured him that she was not and avoided the fact that she’d blown up the toilet herself with vomit-fire. The landlord assured her he’d see to it while she was out.
Mia arrived at last with a deep sigh, dropping
her own overlarge bag on the floor next to Quinn’s and circling the couch to look at her sister. “Food poisoning?” she said. She was smaller than Quinn—elfin even—with large green eyes and short, strawberry blonde hair. The two resembled one another quite a bit.
The elder Henaghan, lying as stiffly as she could so as not to excite her stomach, shook her head.
“Well, I’ll give you this,” Mia said. “You do look like ass. Have you eaten?”
A head shake.
“Water?”
Another head shake.
“Do you want food or water?”
Still another head shake.
Mia plopped onto the floor near Quinn’s head with another operatic sigh. “Tell me why I’m here again…”
Quinn opened her mouth to speak but was cut off.
“You look like you need a caretaker, but you won’t let me take care of you. I could easily not take care of you from home.” Home for Mia was a dorm on the UCLA campus. She’d come out to California shortly after Quinn herself arrived. The sisters rarely spoke and almost never shared the same space. Truth be told, Quinn hated Mia—although she wasn’t sure the feeling was mutual.
Quinn’s iPhone rang. Mia grabbed it and answered it. Quinn could only hear Mia’s side of the conversation (and that consisted of “uh-huhs” followed by an “okay, I’ll tell her”).
“Who was that?” Quinn croaked.
“Wow. You sound like shit too. It was some dude named Darren. From Taft Books. He said he needs to speak with you. ‘ASAP,’ he said.”
“Okay,” Quinn said. Forgetting her own enforced rigidity, she rose at the waist. She had no idea why Taft would want to talk to her. She hadn’t ordered any books and their relationship was almost entirely professional. Still she thought the development was intriguing.
Mia pushed her sister down forcefully enough that Quinn’s bowels roiled anew. “What’re you, fucking nuts?” she said. “Reading Rainbow can wait. Why don’t you at least tell me what happened.” The younger girl resumed her position on the floor, spreading her skirt out around her.