We’re only a few yards from my car. What does it matter anyway? “He’s a right sick bastard.”
“But you were able to . . .” Lets the words trail away.
I appreciate her tact. “I don’t think sex would qualify for a double deal though. No offense.”
“None taken.”
We’re at my car. I pull out my key, and she stuffs her hands in her jacket pockets, one of those puffy ones designed for skiing, but it never snows in Oakland, or anywhere close.
I open my car door, but she doesn’t follow the visual cue.
“I’m not even thinking . . .” she says. “Well . . . let’s just say there’s just some people I’d like to close up with.” I can see her breath hang like smoke, illuminated by the pale streetlight. “If I had the time. Like my ex.”
She says it in a heavy, loaded way that implies she’s expecting me to ask. Reluctantly, I do. “Your ex?”
“She cheated on me with Renata, back when Renata was gay. I didn’t even know it until I met Renata for the first time. She sure knew who I was, because boy did I get some graphic imagery. Then I went home and said stuff I wish I hadn’t.”
Too much information, and I don’t have the time. Tick, tick, tick.
She must hear, because her smile turns rueful. “I’ll let you go.”
It’s one of those awkward moments I’m no good at, when something wise and supportive should be said and all I have is the keen desire to pass into the next moment, and the one after that, alone if possible.
She nods, hearing that trail too, and starts to turn around but stops. “You’re going for it, aren’t you? The double deal?”
Am I?
I am.
“Maybe we all should,” she says, and then suddenly I think of the Guinness sweating on Alejandro’s Koa countertop right before I picked it up, opened the tab, took a sip.
What exactly are you up to, Fiona Dunn?
Jasmine gives a slight smile, a slighter wave, and then walks away.
I’m left with that feeling I get when Tracy picks up one of my cast-off ideas and then runs with it as her own, and I wonder if instead of gauging my competition, I just created it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I AM NOT DOING what I should be doing. If I were smart, I would go to the store, pick up the Tylenol, endure Justin’s wrath, and try to squeeze in a power nap afterward. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to try to find Jeb and Dan; I’m in that exhausted state where reality feels distant, where bad decisions get made. There are microlapses in my consciousness. I reach Birch Street and I don’t remember any of the four miles leading up to it.
And Justin is royally pissed. I texted On my way and he didn’t respond, I called three times, no answer. In the olden days, the pre-cancer days, if I was working too late or I missed another one of his “bring your date/partner” work functions, I would make amends with a package of white frosted mini-doughnuts and a box of Jujyfruits.
But then I’ve done something far, far worse than just miss a function. Many worse things actually.
At the next stoplight my eyes drift closed, the rumble of the engine like a lullaby, so it’s a shock when the car behind me honks in protest—for a good few seconds I have no idea where, or when, I am. I see the light is green. The car passes around my left, an angry swerve with another fierce honk, and when I put my foot on the gas, I press too hard and almost hit it. The driver flips me off.
Easy. Take it easy. I’m more careful with the gas this time. I really put my mind to it, the pressure, but it feels strange. It’s like being suddenly aware of your heart, that you must clench it, release it, that your lungs need to expand, contract, expand—one of the reasons I always hated meditation, the knowledge of all the gears that must turn for you to live another moment.
I should go home. I’m going home.
The car seems to make a different decision though, and it skips the left turn toward home, like we’ve switched places—it’s the driver, I’m the vehicle—and heads for the highway ramp instead.
I wonder if maybe I’m losing my mind.
There was a famous PR stunt in the late sixties where a radio DJ went two hundred hours without sleep to raise money for a cause, crippled children or children with cancer, something like that. All the scientists got excited at this opportunity for a risky, live human experiment, and after a hundred and twenty hours awake, he started to have hallucinations—opened a drawer and saw flames shoot out, forgot the alphabet, and thought one of the scientists was an undertaker come to bury him. I wish that everything I’ve seen and done in the last day could be attributed to a hallucination. Make that the last year. Saul chose madness, and at the moment madness seems very attractive, a respite, a place to shelter, either temporarily or forever. But how do you go about losing your mind on purpose?
I bet there’s a wikiHow on that.
The car continues its journey toward Holy Names University, and I just hold the wheel, let it take me.
Not much traffic on a Sunday night, so when it weaves across the line occasionally, we don’t hit anything—I note the pronoun we: I’ve personified the car. I’m regressing. We pass the blur of the neon sign from Justin’s old workplace, Fealtee, a “word that doesn’t mean anything” word that sounds close enough to a real one, and hell, the domain was available. Ostensibly the company’s purpose is to safeguard people’s personal info—a “gold lock” account will send you a text if someone applies for a credit card in your name—but Justin shared that the other, bigger side of the pie is selling the metadata to the NSA. After you sign up, a bit of spyware is installed, tracking every click, Google search or Pandora play, even the content of e-mails. No one ever reads the privacy statement, Justin once said.
Damn though, Fealtee’s benefits have been amazing.
I check my cell. I think there’s a law against this now, driving and checking your phone, but I’m not sure. No text messages from Justin. A small part of me is relieved. I hope he’s asleep by the time I get home. It will all work out in the end though. It’ll all come out in the wash. He’ll see.
Next is a billboard for the college—HOLY NAMES UNIVERSITY, BUILDING THE PEOPLE WHO BUILD THE WORLD—and the car takes the exit. I look in the rearview mirror. No one behind me for a mile. Then I catch my own reflection. It stops my breath.
Part of me is missing. A good chunk from my chin to my neck is completely opaque—I can see the backseat headrest through my throat. This has never happened before, partial invisibility. I reach my hand to my neck, feel the warmth of my skin, the pulse of my jugular vein, but in the mirror it looks like I’m holding air.
Halfway down the off-ramp, I quickly flip on the car’s interior light—again something you shouldn’t do while driving, especially in Oakland—and I get the faintest sense of something vanishing, or more like escaping, but with the light on I’m returned to normal, fully visible.
Did I just imagine that? Or is it a sign that Scratch has already called in the other three favors, and I’m next? The only person I could ask is Alejandro, and he’s dead to me. I flick the car light back off. The world, already unbearably harsh, seems like an even harsher, colder place without him. A gust of wind picks up a lonely plastic grocery bag, lands it in the gutter. A homeless man pushes a rusted grocery cart down the sidewalk, a ratty umbrella propped over his sleeping bag, tins of food. No, there is no one to lean in to, to trust, not now.
But then there’s something else to think about because as we approach the campus, I wonder what’s going on. Students gather on the sidewalk, huddled around their cell phones, chatting. The traffic that passes the campus slows from the rubberneckers trying to get a good look. I put my blinker on for a left-hand turn, and as I pass through the entrance, I catch a millennial couple in the gleam of my headlights, which blanches them, renders them into pale ghosts. Throngs of other students mill about on the pavement,
on the lawns, their faces lit with some kind of heightened thrill.
Then I see strobing lights ahead, bright flashes caught in a hovering mist, blue and white. Then I hear sirens. Like every ambulance in the whole city is hurtling toward us, announcing their imminent arrival like the horsemen of the apocalypse.
UP AHEAD, police blockade the road that loops through the oak-studded campus. An officer with an orange glow stick waves me to turn around—Go back, he mouths. Go back—but an ambulance has just come up behind me so I slowly pull my car over to the soft shoulder where another couple of cars have been ditched too.
I can feel my heart flutter in my throat. This isn’t good. There’s no way this can be good.
I pull out my cell, scanning for news, but this is so new I don’t see a thing under Holy Names, or Holy Names + Jeb or + Dan. Which means there’s only one thing for it—talk to an actual person. I kill the engine, turn off the lights, and slide over to the passenger side to ease out of the car as two more ambulances drive by. Goddamn. Really, goddamn.
The grass is packed with a spectrum of people, older professorial types and a mix of students from an assortment of races, some weeping, some murmuring, all straining to see over one another’s heads to whatever it is. A couple of more boisterous lads have climbed onto the branches of the oak trees for a better look.
I sidle toward an unassuming group standing under the eave of an ugly, three-story squat building. Goth girls huddled together, wearing dark vintage clothing, thick eyeglasses, and obviously new combat boots. One twists her blond hair nervously, another bites the end of her black fingernails. I fold my arms over my chest, wrap my jacket a little tighter and catch Hair Twister’s eye. I know that as a person older than twenty-two, I am ancient, suspect.
“What happened?” I ask her.
Conflicting emotions—the politeness her middle-class parents raised her with competes against not wanting to seem like a pushover to her friends. So I get a middle-of-the-road, ambiguous shrug.
It’s Nail Biter who answers. “Total massacre.” Her voice is scratchy in an assumed kind of way, like she’s practiced it in the mirror. “Sorority sister party. I don’t think any of them survived.” I note that her vintage clothes look like actual thrift-store finds, a size too big. Poor girl on a full-ride. A kindred spirit.
“No one knows anything,” says the tallest girl, with jet-black hair and a tongue piercing, obviously the alpha.
“I heard Darren talking to police.” Nail Biter has some spunk. “He saw it.”
“But he can’t know if they’re all dead. No one can know that.” The other girls shift their stance slightly, leaning in Tall Girl’s direction, getting into pack formation. It’s the hardest age to conduct focus groups with because they tend to coalesce around the biggest personality and then just repeat the same things.
“Do they know who did it?” I ask.
It’s the tall girl who answers, obviously unable to contain herself. “Santa Claus.”
I’m expecting the others to laugh at this lame joke, but none do.
“Santa Claus?”
Tall Girl cuts her eyes at the others. “I guess we know which bitches have been naughty this year, right?” Now the smirks appear. Nail Biter looks like she wants to add something but doesn’t.
More sirens, more police cars. The officer who flagged me to turn around joins two others, and they immediately close off the exit.
“Shit,” whispers Tall Girl. “Are we on lockdown? Should we lock ourselves in a classroom or something?”
We all pull out our cell phones, each of us thumbing searches to find more info.
“I got a text,” says Nail Biter. “We’re supposed to proceed to the gym in an orderly manner. Keep the road clear for emergency responders, stay with a group. Report anyone in a Santa suit.”
“Fuck,” says Tall Girl. Not as funny now that it’s confirmed.
Santa Claus. Given recent events, definitely sounds like a dead-soul favor being called in, but was it just one of them or were Jeb and Dan working together? If it’s both, then I am truly, and royally screwed—that would put my name next on Scratch’s list. I wonder if we’re all going to be given a macabre Christmas theme, what the purpose of that could possibly be. So many brutal murder sprees in such a short time will set off national debates—liberals blaming socioeconomic policies, conservatives the plummeting values of the left, and religious nuts Oakland’s close proximity to San Francisco.
I almost want to ask the girls if any of them know Jeb or Dan, but then that would link me, and unlike Saul, I’m not interested in a sustained prison term at the moment.
Should I go and see?
Dicey. Lots of eyes around, plenty of opportunities for a misstep, and after what happened in the car, invisibility feels like a risk. But it could be hours before the real news leaks or photos make it online.
No, I need to confirm, know where I am on the list.
There’s a rustle of activity on a grassy knoll to the left, some kind of school administrator standing on a folding chair with a megaphone, while a professorial type helpfully holds up a flashlight to illuminate his torso, which makes it look like the administrator’s body has been cut in half.
“Everyone, we’re experiencing technical difficulties with the loudspeaker system. Please proceed to the gym in an orderly manner, and keep to the left of the road to allow emergency vehicles to pass. Police will take down your contact information and ask you a few questions, then once the campus is cleared, you can return to your dorms. The police chief will give an update on the situation in fifteen minutes.”
I drift away from the girls—everyone is so focused on the administrator that no one notices me step into the shadow behind a looming shrub. I’m grateful I chose a black jacket and dark denim jeans, because even without my talent it doesn’t take long for me to almost completely disappear from view.
I find a lonesome spot near a Dumpster where the foliage is particularly thick. But really, even if someone saw what happens next, who would believe them?
NO PROBLEM WITH THE INVISIBILITY, a relief, and the next hardest part is moving through the crowd—people are packed so tightly together on the left side of the road that I have to slip through the in-between spaces, trying not to bump or brush against anyone in the process. But once I’m through, I have the right side all to myself. It’s cold, I always forget about cold—the air, the grass, even the paved road beneath my bare feet is freezing—but it always feels primal, this walking among people, naked and invisible. Empowering in a strange way, to see but not be seen.
Soon the road diverges, and while the crowd moves left toward the gym, I turn right, where I see strobing police car lights up ahead. A soft wind blows through the barren trees. Eventually the rooftop of a white colonial house comes into view, and then a Southern Gothic porch, with a sign perched on a small, rounded second-floor balcony, the Greek letters ΦΚΨ painted in gold.
This is where the ambulances are thick.
I duck under the yellow police tape. The tension is fraught, palpable, a barely ordered chaos of first responders and technicians. I step past paramedics working on the body of a young blond woman, stabbed or shot is hard to say but there’s so much blood it looks like she took a bath in it. She’s wearing footed pajamas. They push at her heart, but her glow is gone, I sense nothing there anymore.
Not the way she probably expected her life would end, although at that age the very idea of an end would seem unfathomable.
Where will she go? I wonder. Is there another side of the equation, a heaven? If so, I can’t imagine why it’s so underrepresented here on earth, why the devils and the damned have the run of the place.
It’s not until I get closer that I see what happened to her face, or what’s left of it. A blurry, runny red mess, like someone used the smudge tool in Photoshop. I’ve seen this before, in a documentary I
dragged Justin to about the untouchables in India and how throwing acid in women’s faces was considered justifiable in certain circumstances. Turning down sexual propositions, for example. The top of her pajamas have melted into her skin.
The complete and utter brutality is definitely Scratch’s signature. If there was any doubt that this was a dead-soul event, it’s gone now.
Good God, what will he make me do to Justin?
Better not to think about that. It would be like climbing a ladder and looking down, paralyzing me, and my window of opportunity will close, and then Justin will die, and then I will be damned and alone.
I take a quiet, steadying breath. Head for the porch. A police officer almost steps into me, but I manage to dodge at the last second. Too close. I feel painted wood beneath my feet, make my way up the creaking steps, get the sense that I’m walking in slow motion—shouts inside, “We found another one!”—and turn my shoulders to avoid another paramedic carrying a girl. Her arms flop listlessly, her face burned beyond comprehension, and a viscous liquid fills her eye cavities.
Don’t think about it.
I put my hand on the rail to steady myself.
Maybe Scratch knows we talked about the double deal at the New Parish—he seems to know almost everything else. But then he is the devil—he would know everything, right? Be able to do anything? That wouldn’t leave any room for free will though, in which case, how could anyone be saved or damned if they never had a choice in the first place?
It’s another Möbius strip of an existential puzzle. Don’t think about it.
I reach the top of the porch. The front door is open, an inviting Christmas pine wreath nailed to it. Music, music from inside, high and tinny, like it’s playing through a bad speaker.
Bing Crosby, it sounds like, crooning “Jingle Bells,” the song the little girls in the pageant were performing just before they were cut down. A cosmic joke or a spooky coincidence?
I step through the doorway. Pass by a detective. He looks grim, and I soon discover why.
Dead Souls Page 18