“I have to goooooo,” says the girl.
I give a smile that never works on children, grab my purse, and make a hasty exit. Feel the lingering gaze of the curator on my back.
I’m behind. How many souls could be traded anyway in the Bay Area? How would Alejandro go about collecting their acquiescence? The technical aspects present themselves—limits of time and access to people, moving them. The hardest thing in marketing is to actually get people to do something they weren’t thinking of doing. Imprint them with an idea, stick an unforgettable jingle in their head, sure, a half-million-dollar ad buy can get you that, but to actually change behavior? Get a stranger to make a call, click a URL, switch auto insurance? That takes creativity and the will of a pirate.
But Alejandro has thrown down a glove, and as of now, as of today, I accept.
If rage were flammable, mine would light up the city.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE TRAFFIC ACROSS the Golden Gate Bridge hadn’t been bad for a Sunday, and the streets are relatively clear—too cold for the natives, so mostly tourists out and about, determined to have their vacation, weather be damned. I’m making good time. Will Alejandro be home? Probably not, with the emergency meeting. No, Alejandro will want to calm everyone’s nerves, settle them back into resignation. More souls for him. I wish I could get Tracy on a SWOT analysis—she’s brilliant at evaluating threats and weaknesses, exploiting opportunities.
It doesn’t help that at every corner, in every car, at every intersection, I imagine I see Scratch. Tick, tick, tick. There he is, hunkered down in an alleyway—there he is, standing in the shadow side of the streetlight—there he is, crossing the road with the collar of his jacket up, head down against the wind. Close but not close. There’s something sublime about the anticipation, a darker version of foreplay.
My card is stashed in the organizer under the stereo, and at each stoplight I open the case to check it.
FAVOR
Still blank.
Reassuring but also oddly disappointing. I’m not first on his list, which feels like a slight of some kind. I’m that competitive. But no, I need time, as much as I can get, because I have a strong, black foreboding that whatever Scratch is planning will involve Justin. There is that thread through all the collected favors of dead souls. I wonder if I can still make a double deal even after my favor’s been called in. Damn, something else I should have asked Saul. Not that I would have gotten a straight answer, just the two had been bloody hell. My neck still aches from where he gripped it, won’t be surprised if it’s already bruising.
I pass by Alejandro’s Victorian—dark as sin, not a single light on—and pull into a parking space under a lonely Japanese maple. The sun set an hour ago, and there’s no foot traffic. Dogs have been walked, dinners are being prepared, children are doing homework. The thrum of what used to be middle-class and is now enjoyed only by the dot-com emperors—no one to notice the woman in the parked car under the maple tree who simply vanishes. Strange things like that don’t happen in this kind of neighborhood, this tranquil oasis. They have no idea they live so close to a monster.
Is he though?
It’s hard to reconcile this new version of Alejandro with the man I’ve implicitly trusted from that first photo shoot in the cemetery. Always immediately available to any of us, he’s taken more than a few of my late-night calls, when Justin is asleep and I feel the weight of it, my damnation, a crushing depression that makes me feel like an invisible demon sits on my chest. Just his soft laugh would ease it somewhat. Or he’d say something strange, something that wouldn’t seem comforting but was. Everything you think is unbearable is actually bearable, because if it wasn’t, you’d be dead. Sometimes he’d stay with me on the phone until the first rays of dawn hit the sky, when the pulse of life would kick in, shadows banished.
Maybe Alejandro isn’t planning a double deal. It strikes me right then that I am, after all, naturally paranoid—this whole mess started because I thought Justin was cheating on me—and that I’m taking the word of a deranged murderer with a penchant for earlobes. Which one is laying the snare trap?
But Alejandro was the one who took the photo, a crack now in my relationship with Justin. No doubt about that. It helps, somewhat, with the lingering guilt surrounding my planned trespass.
Non, je ne regrette rien.
I set my mind on the Édith Piaf canvas, mounted on the nine-foot-high wall in Alejandro’s living room. Édith has a nice view of the marble fireplace—imported from Italy—and Edwardian bay window. I visualize the Victorian couch, reupholstered with a modern, teal-orange geometric design, the Karl Springer parchment coffee table, brass Koch and Lowy floor lamp, vintage orange crates repurposed as end tables. Alejandro may be a lying bastard, but I have to give props to him for style.
I listen to the soft rustle of leaves. A few drop, land on the windshield before they’re blown off into the sidewalk, the gutter. I close my eyes—
—and feel cold hardwood under my bare ass.
Open my eyes.
To an empty house.
INCROYABLE. And it truly is, because there had been so much stuff before, the clutter of an artist constantly at work. Where are the rumpled magazines thumbed through to the point of disintegration? Where are the books—stacks and stacks of books lining the walls in delicately balanced columns, tottering from smallest to largest—the lenses, and lens caps, the strategically placed coasters to discourage placement of glasses directly on the antiques? Where are the stacks of unopened mail, odd bits of machinery from cameras in the midst of rehabilitation? And the dust. Where’s the dust? Because while Alejandro had excellent taste, he hated the idea of a regular soul entering his apartment, floating around and disturbing his organized disorganization, or worse still, throwing out a favorite cheese that could be mistaken as rancid.
The spot where Édith used to hang is slightly darker, a testament to Alejandro’s westward facing windows and slope of a lot that always caught the end of a sunset.
I stand, the darkness enveloping me. Just for kicks I pad over to a light switch, try it. But no, the electricity has been turned off too.
That bastard. No mention, not a single one of a move, not in all the recent dead-soul meetings, not in any of the calls he did take, although now I see why he hadn’t been picking up the landline.
Who is Alejandro? I decide to see if there’s anything left that can tell me.
Kitchen—bare, not a single crumb, cabinets cleaned—if a regular soul has been allowed in, he’s definitely been moved out for some time, a week at least. I note that the candy-apple vintage GE fridge is still there, with matching 1960s stove—a small mint, he paid, to have them delivered from Minnesota and refurbished to working condition.
They’re so perfect here, he’d said, the first time I’d come. Ghosts from the past, materialized in the present. Resurrected.
The foyer is barren of anything except a crumpled bit of packing newspaper, remnants of foam peanuts, a pencil. The dining room is empty too, although here he’s removed the twenty-six-thousand-dollar crystal chandelier, lonesome wires hanging from the ceiling above. During the tour he pointed out each feature, with the price tag, the only one of us unabashed by his wealth, where it came from. I didn’t wonder why at the time. I do now. Up the curling stairs, the banister so newly polished it still smells like Murphy Oil Soap, through the five bedrooms, each with its own marble fireplace and tall window views. Empty.
Tellingly, no rolls of toilet paper in the bathrooms.
I drift back down the stairs, a ghost in a ghost house. It feels bigger but smaller too, without all of Alejandro’s stuff. Everything I own could fit in his living room alone. So many possibilities. I cross back to the arched entry, decorated with crown molding and painted a soft white. Lean against one of the Grecian columns. Picture me and Justin living here. We would need more furniture, but casual, California
n, like a Sloane leather sofa, some kind of Swedish coffee table in an earth tone, a thick shag area rug. Maybe paint one red wall, for pop. Of course, even with my steadily advancing career and advancing paychecks, the mortgage would be out of reach. I could easily rob a bank, but toting the loot would be problematic.
Pop, pop, pop. I can almost hear Justin popping corn in the kitchen, which means we would need a flat-screen TV, right over the fireplace. One of those new ones, that’s curved. Five bedrooms though, what the hell would we do with five bedrooms? Even if we each had one as an office, that would leave two.
The c-word makes a surprising appearance. Sticky hands, tiny feet. The c-word usually follows the m-word, but neither has ever been in my lexicon. I was happy enough just to have the same person to sleep with from one Saturday to the next; I never really thought that the things that happen to other people could actually happen, and happen to me. Hypothetically, I could ask Scratch for anything with a double deal. Why not ask for everything?
Good God, am I seriously considering the American dream?
It makes me momentarily breathless.
I wonder if you can have “ands” with the double deal if you offer enough souls in exchange. Or maybe it’s just the syntax—I need a pithy, concise but unmistakably pointed ask that encompasses a range of wants. Something that has the precision of a slogan, a tagline. Something that won’t leave me like Ellen, with too much of a good thing, or like Renata, who got so little. Sumpter, Inc., An American Original. Legend says it took a five-person marketing team six hundred hours to come up with that one.
But the bigger challenge is getting enough people to agree to sell their soul. How to slip it in?
Forms. If there’s one thing people don’t bother with, it’s reading forms—take subprime mortgages, or credit card agreements, or student loans, which are hardly ever repaid and are costing the nation trillions.
Holy shit, I think I got this.
It’s that moment I always think will never come, when after hours and hours of meetings and bleary-eyed research, looking at colors until you can’t tell them apart anymore and the words from your product descriptions start to blur, after focus groups and surveys and ad hoc polls among staff, split-tests for messaging and long calls with creative, the moment when you’re standing in a shower, or picking up an avocado in the store, or putting the key to your car in the ignition and it hits you. The perfect campaign message. Less than a sentence usually. Sometimes just a dangling participle. I don’t have what I would call a complete plan yet, but if there’s a contest of double deals among dead souls, I could be—no, I am—the front-runner.
I just need to convince an inordinate number of people to buy into a bad deal that ends well for me and horribly for them. It’s not like there isn’t a precedent. Tobacco companies have been doing that for decades.
A small sense of guilt tugs. But no, not just anyone, not innocent people. I’ll hone in on a perfect niche group of people who would probably end up in hell anyway. I’ll be doing humanity a favor, ensuring they don’t miss that final destination.
It feels right to be naked in this moment, newly born.
I’m just starting to think about heading back to my car when I hear a creak, followed by the soft shush of a screen door closing. There’s only one in the house, from the kitchen to the small back deck that leads out to the teeny rectangular lot Alejandro had turned Southern Gothic, complete with crumbling columns and a turret folly. He shot his One Foot in the Grave series there. It wouldn’t be like Alejandro though to leave a door unlocked; he was meticulous that way.
The lights flick on, then off.
And the faintest draft wraps around my ankles, rises, bringing with it the telltale whiff of sulfur.
THERE HE IS, standing in the darkest part of the dark entry, and goddamn, as hard as I try to I can’t see his bloody face, even though I’m looking right at him, less than a yard away. It’s like there’s a weird synaptic interruption—sometimes his face looks fuzzy, other times staticky, and I get the feeling that I do see him, but the memory, thought, image, is erased instantaneously. It’s infuriating, and petrifying. A shadow that can never be illuminated.
“You look stressed,” he says. “Like you could use a little rest.”
I feel the hard throb of my heart against my rib cage. I’m standing on the edge of a diving board, about to jump into unknown water. How many people will he tell me to kill? What will he make me do to Justin? I desperately want to cover my breasts with my arms, but suspect this might seem weak, so I don’t.
“Is this small talk?”
“All talk is small talk,” he says. “It’s the saddest form of communication ever invented. Completely inadequate.”
He walks past me into the empty living room, creak, creak, creak of the parquet floors. Stands in front of the Edwardian window, takes in the view of the Victorian on the opposite side of the street, exterior clapboard painted yellow with white trim, windows glowing warmly, obnoxiously, like a Thomas Kinkade painting. Beyond that, there’s a grand descent of rooftops sloping down to the dark singularity of a major road, and in the distance the beacon of the Golden Gate lights rise through a thin layer of fog, then the black ocean that merges into the black night sky.
I press my question into the back of my throat, try to quell the urge to run, disappear. He would just find me. Like the card, he will always find me. I watch him watching the house across the street. It casts enough light so I can see what he’s wearing—dark denim jeans, an old thermal long-sleeved shirt, ragged denim vest with the sleeves cut off, boots of some kind. So innocuous on the one hand—from the back I could practically cast him in the Istanbul commercial as a bike messenger—so dangerous on the other. I remember Gary holding out his arms on either side like Jesus on the cross before letting himself fall from the balcony railing.
“Guess you don’t have the card on you,” Scratch says wryly. Casually sticks his hands in his pockets.
Throb, throb, throb goes my heart. “Why?”
He shrugs. “I’ve been trying to catch up on my writing, but there’s so much of it these days. I lose track.”
“You lose track?”
“You don’t have to get all huffy about it, love. Not like I can program an app. Wish I could. Be a lot easier.”
The lights flick on, flick off. “Have you written me?”
“That’s just the thing,” he says. “Damn if I can remember. Oh no, right, I did. Been out drinking too much, I suspect. Speaking of which, anything left in the fridge?”
I’m stunned, and while I try to find words, while my mind tries to compute them, he walks past me again—closer this time—almost brushing my waist with the cuff of his sleeve. Heads for the kitchen. Lights flicker, but falter again.
I suppress the strange feeling that we are repeating something begun eons ago, that my smartest move would be to ghost out, or at the very least, run.
But instead, I follow.
“AH, THERE IT IS,” says Scratch, holding the door of the red fridge open. Only when he says there it sounds like ter, that strange, foreign lilt again. He reaches into the belly of the fridge and pulls out a six-pack of Guinness, the cans beaded with condensation, and cradles them like a newborn.
I remember something I can’t believe I’d forgotten over the course of the year. I never drank Guinness until that first time, with Scratch.
“Not as good as tap, but ’tis what it is.” He plops the six-pack on the kitchen island with the Koa countertop—illegally imported from one of the last groves in Kauai, endangered, Alejandro had said proudly—ignores the small stack of coasters purposely left behind, and pulls a can off the plastic ring. Pushes it in my direction.
Did Scratch bring the beer here, or plant them earlier? If the electric is off, the fridge wouldn’t be working. It strikes me how little I know about the devil, what the limits of his power might, o
r might not be. How vulnerable I truly am.
I don’t touch the beer, although my mouth does water at the sight of it.
The lights flicker again.
“Damn electricity,” says Scratch, popping another can open. “Doesn’t seem to like me very much.” He holds his up. “Cheers.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.” I remember what happened the last time I went drinking with Scratch. It’s not much ground to hold, but I hold it.
At this, he clutches at his heart theatrically. “Oh, now that really hurts my feelings. Making me drink alone. Holding a grudge.” He shrugs again and raises his can to where his lips should be, takes a long, slow sip. And I realize this is theater, a performance of a human being, not an actual one I’m standing across from. It’s a thing with the limbic, emotional range of a shark.
“You don’t have to . . . you know,” he twirls his finger. “Stay invisible. Takes more effort these days, I’d imagine, and I can see you perfectly well anyway.”
“I’m fine,” I say tersely.
“Ah,” he says. “I see. Like the house?” I recognize the attempt to change the subject, draw me out, reveal something. I would do the very same thing with an ornery focus group participant.
I run a hand along the edge of the wainscoting to give it something to do. “It’s a house.”
“It’s a good house for a family. Don’t have to try to wedge a pram in an elevator.”
My hand stops. Can he read my mind too? Would I kill to live in this house; would I sell the souls of the entire world, times two, to have a life, a real life with Justin? Maybe. But demonstrating interest is death in any trade. And what I need to buy right now is time.
I wrinkle my nose. “Smell that?”
“What?”
“Mildew. Probably some kind of black mold in the walls.”
“Ha!” He takes another sip, and I sense he’s eyeing me in a different way. Like there’s more to me than he thought. “You’re a right funny one. What does black mold do again?”
Dead Souls Page 15