Dead Souls

by J. Lincoln Fenn

  “Your texts?” I repeat stupidly. Impossible to hear the cell buzzing in the bar, of course, but I should’ve been checking it periodically, or at the very least read them before I came in through the door. As if to spite me, my cell buzzes in my hand. More about Gary I’m sure.

  “That you’ll probably read, since it’s not from me,” he says curtly. “You smell like a bar, by the way.”

  He’s right, so I say nothing, trying to think of a reasonable cover story, and for a moment I almost think he’s not going to let me in to my own apartment, but then there’s a polite cough from behind him. He steps aside, glowering, petulant.

  Opal, perfect Opal, gathers her purse from the couch, already mentally through and out the door. I do the thing that annoys him the most, which is to ignore him.

  “Everything go all right?” I ask Opal.

  “Fine,” she says with a false note of cheer.

  They exchange a look, hard to define.

  “Fine,” she adds more firmly.

  I step past Justin into the apartment. He’s completely redecorated it over the past year, and it’s now perfectly organized. It gives him something to do and I have the cash, so where my cheap IKEA shelves used to be is an Italian modular bookshelf made with translucent plastic, the couch is now vintage mid-century, the coffee table an iron checkerboard Florence Knoll. We don’t have furniture anymore; we have pieces.

  Were those really scorch marks on my doorknob?

  The video was a shock—I’m probably gestalting a worst-case scenario. Opal slips her purse strap over her shoulder. “He got a pancake down, no syrup. I put the extras in the freezer—nuke them for five seconds and they’ll be perfect.”

  No sign of Scratch, no shadow lurking in the corner, no faceless man sitting by the window, nursing a drink. Maybe it was oil on the doorknob. I’d complained to the super weeks ago that the lock was getting hard to turn. The apartment smells mildly like piss and all the other smells that are supposed to take that one out—bleach, Comet, Pine-Sol. Justin’s stomach is too big for adult diapers, and the pressure of the tumor causes accidents.

  “Thank you, Opal.”

  She nods, puts a light hand on Justin’s shoulder, and then brushes past me, leaving behind the rich trail of a perfume I wouldn’t think she’d choose for herself. Maybe she’s tired of smelling like Pine-Sol and bleach.

  I want to touch the doorknob, see if it is an oily residue just to be sure, but I don’t want to attract Justin’s attention. Later, after he’s asleep. Plus his face is darkening in the way a frustrated two-year-old’s might. It’s horrific how easy it is to infantilize the sick, but hard not to. There are bodily fluids that must be addressed, quick changes in temper, the occasional mental vacuity. The truth is sometimes I feel like Justin’s dead already, that I’m just clinging to the husk of the man I used to know.

  “Good night,” I call after her, shutting the door.

  Justin glares. His eyes are lighter, the cancer having spread to both irises. I didn’t expect that, looking into eyes that are both familiar, and strange.

  “It was just one drink with some coworkers.” I take off my jacket, place it over the back of the couch. Drop my bag onto the cushion. “No big deal.”

  “No big deal,” Justin spits. “Fine. No big deal.”

  Now it’s his turn to ignore me, which he does by settling on the couch, picking up the remote and flipping on the TV. Click.

  News, of course. An officer standing next to a squad car, more officers just behind him, a show of force, a projection. We’ve got this handled, ladies and gentlemen, move along, move along.

  But if the super came, Opal would’ve mentioned it. Her copy of the key has the hardest time, since it’s new.

  The officer in front, older, weary, and worn, says, “We believe this to be the act of a single, disturbed mind. There is no evidence to suggest that this is an act of terrorism—”

  “Right, because only Muslims are capable of terrorism!” says Justin. He does this now, talks to the people on TV.

  I reach into my pocket, where I keep Scratch’s card in a silver metal case. Take a peek. Nope, nothing after the word FAVOR.

  “It appears to be the lone act of a lone gunman, and the community is no longer in danger . . .”

  Lone gunman, my ass. No firm data on how many dead souls in Oakland; it’s not like there’s a census, but if Scratch is collecting, we could be in for months of horrible violence. I try not to think that maybe I’ll be responsible for the next gruesome scene. My photo posted on the Internet, interviews with neighbors. She was so quiet, they’ll say. Kept to herself. But my wonderful assistant, Tracy, will be only too happy to throw me under the bus. She tried to launch another smear campaign last month, something about my intermittent hours, lack of focus. Yeah, her life is tragic, but I’m the one who has to clean up her shit, she’d written to some of the other assistants. We’re a fucking business, not a charity. The League of Overly Ambitious Underlings. She couldn’t understand how she was thwarted so quickly—Guess who knows all the underlings e-mail passwords? Too bad one of them accidentally forwarded it to HR, oops!—but the thing is, she’s right. My performance and judgment are off. Like the call from the Washington Post reporter who wanted to do a feature on the Istanbul, but I lost the Post-it note I’d written her number down on, forgot all about it. Only I blamed Tracy and sent a note to HR—a nice addition to a growing list of infractions and complaints about her.

  “Anyone who knows anything should contact police or call the anonymous tip line . . .”

  I know something, all right. Was it a message? A warning?

  Or maybe just a promise of things to come.

  I GINGERLY SIT DOWN on the couch next to Justin, leaving him his own cushion. Sometimes being too close physically sets his frayed nerves even further on edge. Everything prickles, he says. He notes this small kindness, but pretends not to.

  I slip my phone out of my bag under the pretext of reading his messages when really I need to catch up on the chatter. Someone’s made us our own text group.

  Everyone checked their cards?—Mike

  Mine’s clean—Jasmine

  Clean—Renata

  Is he still alive?—Jeb

  Life support—Renata.

  VUEWORKS stock dropped ten points before closing bell—Dan

  Not a good sign. Supposedly there’s always a fluctuation in whatever you got from Scratch right before he collects, or so Alejandro said. Like a power surge that can either suck away your ability or increase it substantially. Call me immediately if you have a hard time becoming invisible, or turn invisible without planning to. A tremor before the quake.

  So do you think he knew? Is that why he didn’t come?—­Clarissa

  NASDAQ dropped five. Statistically not relevant.—Mike

  Justin turns up the volume. “We ask the community to remain vigilant and report any suspicious behavior . . .”

  A passive-aggressive move, I haven’t mentioned his texts yet. So I click over to Justin’s contact, find five from him, unread.

  Can you pick up some Pepto-Bismol on your way home? XOXOXO—7:20 p.m.

  Feeling awful. Christ, I hate this. Need that Bismol. XOXO—8:15 p.m.

  On your way home? Situation desperate.—9:36 PM

  Two missed calls. 9:47 and 10:12 p.m. No voice mail messages.

  Having that much fun, huh? Shitting up a storm over here.—10:28 PM

  You know what, don’t bother. See you when I see you. All shat out and buying new sheets on eBay. Thanks for your love and support.—10:42 PM

  A moment passes. Two.

  “You know I hate this,” he says suddenly.

  I run my hand through my hair, utterly exhausted. I hate this too. “Anybody would. And I’m not much use. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t . . .” He stops himself, st
ruggles to find the words, and looks me in the eyes. A glimmer of old Justin there. “Don’t just talk at me,” he continues. “Talk to me. What is going on with you? Really?”

  It would be so lovely to tell him, all of it, every dark and twisted detail. You never know, he might even believe me, or not hate me for missing the one chance to save him. But to voice it here, in front of him, in the place we call home feels dangerous, like it might bleed out into unexpected places.

  He reaches out, cups my chin in his hand, just like the old days. “Forgive me.”

  “Forgive you—”

  “It’s not easy for you either. Sometimes I forget that. Or I don’t forget, but I don’t care the way I should.”

  Oh Christ, I don’t want these feelings right now, they won’t help, nothing will help. Tears start. So I try to push him away instead.

  “Yeah, you’ve been a real possessive, neurotic, pain in the ass lately. Sure, it sucks that you have cancer, but that’s no excuse to take it out on me. You might not have noticed, but someone I love is suffering.”

  I slipped—it’s not often I use the four-letter l-word. It costs me dearly every time.

  He laughs, lets his hand drop to take mine—so thin, damn so thin. “There you are, the Fiona I used to know.”

  I entwine my fingers in his. “There you are, the Justin I used to know.”

  A commercial for fabric softener plays on the TV, “for clothes that smell as fresh as the great outdoors.” He rubs the back of my hand with his thumb. It’s the nicest moment we’ve had in months, and I realize my part in that. I’ve been so obsessed with finding a way to save us both that I haven’t been present for him in the here and now. But what good is a double deal to cure Justin’s cancer and save my soul if our relationship falls apart in the meantime?

  “I really fucked everything up royally, didn’t I?” he asks softly.

  “You fucked up everything. Getting cancer wasn’t your fault.”

  A thin, bitter smile. “Technically I know that, but it still feels like it though. And I hate needing people just for the basics. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

  “Justin, I’m the one who’s been distant.”

  “And I’m jealous, you know.”

  “Jealous.”

  He hesitates a moment too long. Tries for an awkward recovery. “That you can go out. I’d love to ditch this place and hit a bar, forget things for a while.”

  I lean my head against the back of the couch. He was going to say something else instead, something truer, but I don’t want to press. “We can go out. There’s no law stopping us.”

  “The looks though. That double take.”

  The double takes are horrible. The last time we went to the store together and he looked four instead of eight months pregnant, people would look, and then look again, hard, trying to figure out what it could possibly mean, this man with a protruding belly. Was he a man or a woman? Was he on some gender-changing testosterone regimen? And the small children, they would take a step back, obviously afraid, reaching for adult hands or hiding behind adult legs as we passed.

  Justin stares at the coffee table. Something indecipherably sad and resigned flits across his face. “I’m jealous that one day you’ll move on. Be with someone else. Even though that’s selfish of me.”

  Here’s what he didn’t want to say. “Justin, it’s a little early to be talking about—”

  “There,” he says quietly, firmly. “In the envelope.”

  I look to the coffee table and see it—a manila envelope, torn open. My heart stops momentarily. Justin releases my hand and I try, and fail, to keep that hand steady as I reach over, pick it up.

  It’s addressed to me, or the nickname Justin gave me, which I shared with only one other person on earth.

  Scratch.

  For the Invisible Girl. We will meet again.

  Soon.

  I CAN FEEL THEM, a series of psychic fractures that start in my heart and then cascade out through my limbs, a crackling fear that trips along the floor, rises up the walls, slips through cracks and corners into and out of the building, down the street, radiating like the aftershock of an atomic blast. Fear, the word fear doesn’t cover it. Fear is for things like walking down the street alone at night, for the moment you’re about to be pulled into the womb of an MRI, fear is looking under the bed as a child, ready to find a monster. Fear is just an aperitif to sheer terror.

  He was here. He was here, in my apartment complex, a door the only thing standing between him and Justin. My heart pounds wildly, like it’s about to fly up and out of my throat. I wonder if this is how the children felt after the first eruption of gunfire, as they saw their classmates crumple to the stage. But at least they could run away. A possibility of escape.

  I have to find Saul Baptiste.

  Justin watches me closely. “You’re not even going to look?”

  The envelope—right. Whatever’s inside, Scratch has touched, and now Justin has touched, witnessed. Soon. I reach my hand in, expecting the worst, a missive that will connect and consume us all. My fingers touch smooth photographic paper. I pull out a series of eight-by-ten photos, black-and-white, all pictures of me, Alejandro’s work. He’s been intent on trying to capture the unique shade of dead souls, invisible to the eyes of regular people but visible to the camera if the aperture is set right. Something about ray bundles and whether the soul can be quantified.

  They’re not bad—I’ve never seen them before, and for a moment, narcissism trumps fear and I’m absorbed by my own images. The first is the picture taken at the cemetery a little more than a year ago. I look startled, eyes wide, caught midturn, creating a blur that makes me look like a ghost. Another photo, this one of me standing by a tall window at Alejandro’s Victorian, looking pensively out at the street, wearing one of his shirts, my hair askew. It looks more intimate than it is. A few too many drinks at the New Parish and I’d inadvertently ghosted myself, vanishing and then reappearing in his living room because he’d been describing a new mixed media piece he picked up. Of course, that meant I’d left my clothes behind, so I’d done the practical thing and crashed in his guest bedroom, curling up under a cashmere blanket. Didn’t wake up until later in the morning, the smell of strong black coffee percolating. He asked if he could shoot me, and I was flattered—who wouldn’t want to be part of a master artist’s body of work?

  I can see why Justin would think . . .

  And then I get to the next photo. Must have been taken earlier when I was still asleep, the blanket either fallen or pulled slightly to reveal everything from the waist up. It’s artful of course—I look like a classic reclining nude, porcelain skin, light nipples—but it’s creepy too, slightly pervy. I’d always assumed Alejandro was gay. We all did. He caught it though in this one, the slight shading that extends around my body, a dark aura.

  But how did Scratch get a hold of them, and why would he . . . ?

  Justin sits next to me with a fixed intensity.

  I know it then.

  Something about my favor will involve Justin.

  No. No, no, no, no.

  “That night you didn’t come back,” he says.

  I want to confess, I want to tell him everything, but it would all sound like a lie now, a confabulated story so outrageous that it would have to be covering a more mundane, disgusting truth. I should have told him before, and now it’s too late. So I say nothing. Guilt by silence. Devil takes all.

  Magnanimous, Justin takes my hand again. Something achingly wise, near Buddhist, in the gesture. “I’m glad you have someone. I am. And I don’t think I have much longer left. I just . . . if you could just hold off for now . . .”

  On the TV there are helicopter shots hovering over the managed chaos surrounding the theater. White triage tents, ambulances still pulling up, people already starting to gather around the periphery o
f yellow police tape.

  The thrust of all I want to say is hard to swallow, so instead, I lean into his shoulder, feel the push of his tumorous belly against my rib cage. My mind races down all the paths it has raced down before. I could stay invisible forever . . . If Scratch can’t see me, he can’t find me, right? And the card, it doesn’t come with me when I’m invisible, so maybe if I don’t have it he can’t call in his favor . . . Or I could vanish somewhere if I do see him, let him try to catch me.

  Alejandro has warned us that our talents won’t work with Scratch, the way they won’t work with other dead souls. Those who have tried to get out of their favor, thinking they’re clever, end up setting off a series of circumstances that lead directly to Scratch anyway. Selling your soul is spiritual slavery. And the first casualty of that isn’t the promise of hell but free will, he’d said.

  But then how do we know he’s telling us the truth? That nude photo was an unnerving violation, doesn’t fit the person I thought he was.

  Saul Baptiste might have the answer. If I can find him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT TAKES THE WHOLE NEXT MORNING and part of the afternoon before Opal shows up—an accident on the bridge—but I ­managed to do a little Internet research while Justin napped. Alejandro was right. No mention of Saul in any of the news archives, although I found a PDF on the site of a student lawyer–­led defense club, which noted the strangely long duration of one “Saul Baptiste’s confinement in solitary”—called “the Adjustment Center” at San Quentin. The initial charge was something that didn’t necessarily warrant solitary—bank robbery gone bad, he had passed a note to a bank teller telling her to give him ten thousand dollars, and when a pastor tried to stop him, he shot and killed the man—but later infractions in prison itself, like knifing an inmate in the foot, throwing feces at a guard’s face, led to his being moved there. Is that the whole story? asks the student article. Or is he a political prisoner? There was an old photo of Saul taken shortly before his arrest too, leading a march in a pro-Communist takeover of the Golden Gate Bridge. Square-jawed with a beard and thinning hair, he looks like a doppelgänger for Philip K. Dick. I try to see his dark shadow, but it’s not picked up by the lens.