by Cesare, Adam
It was not a much farther walk to the clearing. She lightly brushed the space under her eyes with her free hand. No tears. That was good.
The light from her keychain spread over the tall grass and settled on a black spot in the middle of it.
David waited for her there, sitting in the underbrush, his long legs folded under him.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. Even though he was yards away, he spoke in an indoor voice that carried through the clearing to meet her.
Victoria could hear his joints crack as he got to his feet, his knees popping like muffled firecrackers. She thought of her own swollen ankles and took small solace in the fact that David seemed to be aging more rapidly than her. That was what happened when you drank yourself to sleep every morning and spent most of your time with people half your age.
She waited for him to come to her, not comfortable stepping out to meet him. If she gave up the cover of the trees, she would feel exposed.
“Right there is close enough,” she said. He stood five feet from her, his hand out like she was going to shake it.
“Okay then, if that’s what you want, Ms. Brant,” David said. His beard was longer than she’d ever seen it, but his eyes were the same. They were the eyes of a child, even though the skin around them had grown bruised and slack with booze and time.
“Don’t call me that. Don’t use my name,” she said.
He held up his hands, showing her that he understood and half-apologizing for the perceived insult.
“Where is Roy?”
“That’s what you wanted to talk about? That’s new business. Whatever happened to old business? I thought we should catch up first. How’s the tourist murder industry? Booming?”
“Don’t play with me, David,” she said.
“You used to call me Davey. You’re the one that started that. I have everyone call me Davey. Am I going to have to switch back over now? People are going to be confused.”
“This meeting is over. You’re not going to tell me anything.”
Victoria turned her back to him and took a step, returning to the woods, towards her hotel. His juvenile attitude had disarmed her. She didn’t realize what a bad mistake turning her back to him was until she’d done it. He wasn’t a little boy anymore.
“He’s dead. Is that what you want to hear?”
She turned around to face him, slowly.
“Why? Tell me why you did it,” she said. Make me understand you, she wanted to plead, but she couldn’t say that. That was a question for the twelve-year-old David who’d marked up the walls with crayon, not the grown man who’d just admitted to killing one of her followers.
“Don’t pretend like you didn’t see the way things were going. Are going,” he said. “Pat Dwyer’s not allowed to sell us charcoal and frozen pizzas anymore? Are you kidding me? Do you think you’re going to starve us out? We have cars, you know.”
“Did I harm you? No. You and yours are fine.”
“Oh, and the priest that you’ve got stashed away up there, what’s he? The one that I guess you mail ordered from Vatican City or some shit, because I have no idea how one goes about acquiring something like that. He’s just for show? He’s voodoo bullshit,” David said, not taking a step forward but leaning closer. He was so tall that she could feel the heat of his words. “It’s a war of escalation.”
She didn’t want to talk about Father Hayden. This was his plan the whole time. He was not negotiating a surrender or peace—he was looking for information. She had to be careful not to give him any. She’d been sending him rumors for months, but they were the parts of the story she wanted to tell.
“When the town’s gone, you’re gone too. If you kill us, it will dry up and float away. You’re smart, Davey, you have to know that. There’s nothing out here for you. Come home.” This may have been how she felt, but there was no harm in sharing it. It didn’t tell him anything he wanted to know.
He wasn’t coming home. It was too late for that. Too late for her to let him.
“I’m not going to wait tables and change bed sheets. I’m not anyone’s servant,” he said and paused. These pregnant pauses probably worked on his flock, his children, but Victoria saw them as the window dressing that they were. She had tricks of her own. What she was getting from David was a rehearsed speech, not a spontaneous monologue.
“That’s where we’ve always disagreed. I mean, there are lots of differences in our ideologies, but that’s the main one. You preach service and I extol self-reliance. You tell your people that we’ve all got to serve somebody, and that’s what all the boring bits of your life are about. You use that to kill time between ceremonies. It’s amateur hour,” he said. “I tell my kids to live their lives. That’s what He really teaches us. You don’t bow to Him. You raise your fists and yell ‘Right on!’”
“I’ve heard all this before. It hasn’t changed much since you were sixteen,” Victoria said. “Are we done, then? If you’re not going to give me a reason why Roy is dead…”
He seemed hurt that his lecture had elicited no response, as if her counterargument would have given him pleasure, vindicated him somehow.
“He’s dead because I wanted him to be,” David said, his voice different now, more serious than she’d ever heard it. “Just like you’re alive right now because I want you to be. If I killed you, what would they do? Would your priest protect you from this distance? Or does the magic work like a cell phone tower?” He took a step towards her. “Can you hear me now?”
Victoria felt her stomach tense and shifted her stance. The laces of her boots were cutting into her shins. She would be icing her feet when she got home.
“You’re not going to kill me, David.”
“I didn’t say I was. I said I could.”
“I used to love you,” Victoria said. “It’s strange to think about that now, looking at what you’ve let yourself become, but it’s true.”
“Yeah, I love you too,” he said, pushing a strand of his long hair out of his eyes, his hand lingering on his beard. “We’re done now.”
He turned and began to walk back across the clearing. She could hear the crinkle of his beard as he scratched at his neck.
Victoria walked back to the hotel. It was close to two in the morning when she arrived. In the lobby, unconcerned with what her guests would think in the morning, she pried off her boots and left them on the corner of the front desk as she headed upstairs.
Chapter Twenty-One
Allison’s mouth no longer hurt, but her teeth were still a mess.
She lay in bed, whipping her tongue in and out through the hole in her front teeth, tasting the air like one of the snakes she’d seen in the forest. Before coming to live here she’d never seen a snake in the wild. The ones she had seen in zoos and pet shops had frightened and disgusted her.
Now she loved them. Now she would trade her breasts and hair in order to be one.
Davey entered the trailer quietly, turning the knob and opening the door as gingerly as the old rusted frame would allow. He was sweet like that, always considerate when she was trying to sleep.
“You’re up,” he said. It sounded like a question even though it was a statement.
He took off his large hooded jacket and balled it up into the shelf above the doorway. The trailer was cramped, but Davey made the best of it by making sure that everything had its place.
Allison tried to be clean for him, re-taught herself the preschool lesson of using one thing and putting it away before you took out another toy.
She tried to stick to it, but she still didn’t like to clean her own dishes. The ones she used and didn’t scrub this afternoon were beginning to smell.
She was getting better at cleaning though, for Davey.
He pulled his shirt up over his head and she could see the lines of his muscles. He wasn’t her type, spindly with prominent veins, but she’d learned to love it.
“How did it go?” she asked. Allison didn’t know what the meeting was,
but she knew it was important.
“Frustrating. Tiring. I’m beat,” he said and crawled into bed next to her, his arms folding up around her. He smelled good.
He groaned and his hands glided from her belly to her breasts.
“When I say ‘The Devil’,” he said, whispering in her ear, “what image do you think of?”
Allison had to think for a moment. This was what it was like living with a genius. They asked you questions that never seemed to have anything to do with what was actually going on.
“Just the first thing that pops into your mind,” he said. His hands moved behind her back and unhooked her bra. “Don’t let me distract you.”
That was a joke, had to be. He always distracted her. She’d learned to love the distractions.
“I think of a red guy with horns. Maybe kind of a cartoon, like on The Simpsons,” she said. This seemed like a good enough answer.
“Now try and think of the second thing that comes to your mind,” he said, “move down the list of images.” His hands crept up under the wire of her bra, touching the soft, pale flesh under her breasts. “When you think of the Devil, what do you see?”
“I see a man with horns and a goatee,” she said. He brushed one of her nipples with the tip of his fingernail, as if he were urging her to say more.
“He’s got red skin too. Maybe he’s dressed in a nice suit, a martini in one hand.”
His arms disentangled from around her, his hands retreated from her breasts and he sat up in bed. She could feel the skin of her chest dimple with gooseflesh as he retreated.
“Have you ever seen the image of Baphomet, the fellah with the goat head?”
Allison didn’t have to think about what he meant. She’d never heard the figure called Baphomet before, but she saw him in her mind’s eye all the same. He sat in the middle of a pentagram with two black candles burning at his sides, his cloven feet crossed under him.
Baphomet’s eyes were split like a goat’s and she could feel the heat of them surge through her imagination.
“Yeah, Satan on all the metal album covers.” Allison said. “You should talk to my roommate. She likes that stuff.”
She hadn’t thought of Claire in a few days. Had she been working at The Brant Hotel all that time? She wondered how she was doing, if she liked working there.
One day she’d asked Davey if she could go and visit the hotel. He’d talked her out of it.
“So you think of three different figures, minimum, when you think of the Devil?” Davey asked. He’d turned towards her in bed. In the low light she could see the muscles of his chest, the raised scar tissue crisscrossing his heart.
“Yes. Why does it matter?” She was beginning to get bored with this conversation, but she knew better than to anger Davey, especially when he seemed preoccupied.
“It matters because they’re all wrong. None of them come close to any of his forms.”
“Well, what does he look like then?” Allison felt herself becoming more interested despite the dual allure of sleep and her libido.
“What I mean to say is that there is no one image, and all the ones that you mentioned are best guesses. None of them meant to seriously represent him. They’re pop culture, even the oldest one. The image of Baphomet is millennia old, but even that one’s relatively recent when we consider the age of the world. They’re all equally right and wrong, because they’re putting a picture on the unpicturable. He’s an idea, not a person or a creature.”
“Nobody knows or can know what he looks like, so we make up pictures. Do I have it right?”
“Close enough,” he said. She could tell by his expression that he was moving on to his next subject. “What does the Devil represent? To you.”
“He’s evil incarnate, right? Like, the ultimate badass.” She lisped on badass, her tongue poking through the hole in her front teeth. The lisp reminded her of Daisy. She didn’t like Daisy but wondered what she was up to right now. Sleeping, most likely.
Allison’s mind wandered more these days. Probably because she thought less about shoes. She hadn’t worn hers in a week, even when she walked outside in the dirt.
“The ultimate badass? That one’s less open to interpretation,” Davey said and she felt like she’d gotten a quiz question wrong. She pointed her eyes down at the bedspread, but he took her chin in two fingers and raised her face back up gently.
“He’s unpredictability,” Davey said. They lay back down, his beard tickling the back of her neck, his voice hot in her ear. “He’s the other golden rule: no matter how good life is, you can have it fucked up for you in an instant.”
Davey snapped his fingers for effect before continuing. “Chaos isn’t the same as evil because Chaos has got consistency. If there’s order on one side and the Devil on the other, he’s the element of life that introduces unpredictability.”
“So he’s a good guy?” Allison asked. She was into the conversation now, but Davey’s strong hands held her down, trying to go back to the places they were before.
“No, I’m just saying there is no good and bad. Those labels come after. They’re manmade. The universe hasn’t got morality. We made that up in the Bible. Just like we make up cartoon faces so that sweet little girls like you can recognize the Devil.”
He slid two fingers down the front of her panties.
Allison let out a tiny sound at his touch. She meant it to be a moan, but it had come out a soft half-squeak. It was an authentic sex sound, because it meant that she was losing control of the artifice that she used to project when getting with all the boys before Davey.
She bit back the sound and asked another question. “You don’t study the Bible? Not even the Old Testament?”
“I’m not saying it’s not a good story, that it doesn’t have some universal truths peeking through the bullshit,” Davey said.
There were two hands on her but they felt like five. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, flashes of light shooting through the blackness of her vision.
“We just shouldn’t rely on it. We should recognize that it’s manmade, that it’s totally biased.”
“Biased towards who?” She was cresting now. It was almost impossible to concentrate, but she wanted answers almost as bad as she wanted his hands to keep going.
She felt a bead of sweat drip down into her bellybutton.
“Biased towards order. To God,” he said. “If you make the mistake of personifying order and chaos, suddenly order starts looking like the hero. Once you give both of the ideas human features.”
Allison couldn’t speak now, wasn’t going to be able to get out her next question. She bit her lower lip. The seal was uneven because of her broken tooth and she could feel spittle dribble down her chin, but she didn’t care.
Davey knew that she had come without being prompted. He removed his hands and patted down her blonde hair.
In the silence of the trailer Allison could only hear her own breath, feel the last dredges of euphoria as they dissipated out her fingers and toes.
“It’s time for people to realize the other side of that story and stop using images of red guys with horns and white guys with beards. It’s time that chaos got its fans.”
Allison lay in silent awe, the genius beside her in bed brushing her hair back over her ear and kissing her good night.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Shoeless, Victoria Brant shuffled through the hallway of the hotel that she’d named after herself.
The individual hairs on her head seemed to pull against her scalp and every third door she would touch the metal knob and discharge a blue spark. The tiny static shocks helped to keep her awake after her exhausting trek through the woods.
Davey used to do this as a boy. She’d catch him sneaking into the hotel at all hours of the night, charging himself up with wattage and shooting out sparks.
“What are you doing, Davey?” she’d ask.
“Just taking a walk, Ms. Brant,” he’d say, holding his child-size sneakers cl
enched in one hand. She remembered him as he was. It was impossible to tell back then how tall he would one day be. “I’m sorry. I know that I’m not supposed to be here.”
The neighborhood kids often hung around Main Street, but Davey was the only one who’d sneak out of his bed to do it at night. Looking back, there had always been something different about the boy.
He didn’t dress like the rest of the children of the town, no neon dinosaurs on his shirts or Batman insignias on his socks. As a child Davey had dressed like he did now, an adult dressed for a night out in a country town: plain white undershirt, plaid button-down, slacks or corduroys, but never jeans.
That was back when the town was new and the population still on the climb. Davey’s parents had been devout, active members of the church. They were true believers, not salon enthusiasts who came to town to play dress-up and spend a night or two as glorified swingers.
They’d moved on, though, as much of the town had, but they’d left their son behind, a parting gift for old Ms. Brant. He was in his late teens then, prepared to live on his own with his friends. Even in those early days he’d had friends out in the woods.
His parents packing up for the West Coast and leaving him behind had become an urban legend around Mission, like the one about people flushing baby alligators into the sewers.
Davey had been small and harmless then, unable to grow a full beard, with spots of acne on his cheeks. But now he was full-grown and dangerous, gnashing his teeth every time he was given a chance.
Victoria walked without thinking where she was going. She passed her own room and kept going, the phantom sound of little David’s socks pulling her up one more flight of stairs. The air cracked as she received a big shock from the banister.
The handrails in the stairwells used to polish up so brightly that they were indistinguishable from gold, but now the metal was mottled and tarnished. They weren’t ugly, just aged, like her.
Victoria was in front of the door before her conscious mind realized what her destination was. Sometimes, on nights like this when she felt defeated, she would end up in the subbasement, caressing the tiles of the ceremony room.