Epiphany Jones

by Michael Grothaus

  ‘I caught her red-handed,’ he continues. ‘She was running down the street, away from the fire and I grabbed her by the arm. We were eye to eye, and even though it had been over fifteen years, I recognised her right away. I never forget a girl, Jerry. Never. Lucky for her that fire truck came barrelling down the street when it did. It was either let go of her or be hit. And one whore isn’t worth a man’s life, is it?’

  My mind spins as memories connect. I remember that night. When Epiphany came home she looked a mess. She had a long, bleeding scratch going down her arm. I thought she had been covered in dirt, but it was really smoke and soot.

  ‘When I got to my orphanage the girls told me that a woman had made sure they all got out. They said she even went in to rescue a few of the youngest ones who were trapped upstairs.’ Nico notices the astonishment on my face. ‘I too wondered why. Why risk all those girls’ lives? Just to get back at me? No. Hanna always was clever. She knew the news of an orphanage fire would spread quickly. She knew that the newspapers would follow up on what happened to the girls. She knew I would have no choice but to let them be split up and taken to real orphanages. She was saving the girls, Jerry.’

  And if I weren’t so scared right now, I’d be a little impressed.

  Nico crouches by me. His face is flushed. ‘You know what those girls would have been worth over the next ten years?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Over four million US.’ He takes a moment before he speaks again. ‘So the next day I tracked Hanna to that street market. But then you ran into me and I lost her. You told me you were late for work, but it was obvious you were following her. Then, as fate would have it, a day later you shouted my name in a bar.

  My head sinks. ‘You were there?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, but saying my name is like calling the boogeyman, Jerry. I have eyes everywhere. You were with LaRouche.’

  And I wince as her jagged, broken teeth snap into my mind.

  Nico laughs. ‘You saw her when I was done?’

  I begin to breath heavily.

  ‘You know, I didn’t want to do that to her. I had to though. It took so much beating to get her to admit that Hanna was even back in this country, but then LaRouche just reached a point where she wouldn’t tell me any other specifics. It was as if she thought we had reached maximum pain.

  ‘Then I tried another approach: I asked her to tell me where the man was who she was at the bar with – but she lied and said that you weren’t associated with Hanna. Of course I knew that was a fib. So I told her again to tell me where you were and she refused. So I changed the look of her mouth.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ I say under my breath.

  ‘I did that because of you, Jerry.’

  ‘Please,’ I say, not knowing why.

  ‘It takes multiple tries to knock all the teeth out you know,’ Nico goes on. ‘And with each try she gave up just a little more about you: that you weren’t a buyer of Hanna; that Hanna has some kind of videotape you want; and that you were heading to the bus station to journey to meet Hanna here.’

  ‘Here, I have other orphanages,’ he says grimly and pulls a thin little blade from his boot, and I begin to cry.

  ‘I’m sure you can guess what happened next. LaRouche, being the dishonourable person that she was, was lying when she said you had already left for the bus station. I got on the road but then it occurred to me that maybe all that money in her kitchen was for you. Maybe you were coming back for it. Maybe you were taking the later bus. I’ve been in this silly country long enough to know there are three buses a day making the journey from Ensenada to Veracruz. So I waited on the shoulder of the road until the last bus to Veracruz passed and what did I see? You looking out the window at my car. Am I right, Jerry?’

  I can’t find the words to answer him.

  He sighs and rolls his eyes, growing frustrated. ‘Do you know how I got her mouth to fill with blood? After you shatter the teeth, you take a knife – like this one –’ he holds it to my mouth. ‘You slice the tongue from the bottom, making sure you leave a little bit of flesh connected so it flops back but doesn’t fall off. Here, let me show you.’

  ‘No!’ I scream, but already he’s grabbed my head in his arm and with his fingers on his other hand he’s spread my mouth wide and buries the blade underneath my tongue.

  ‘Shh. Shh,’ he says. ‘You feel this?’ The blade pokes the thin strip of flesh that holds my tongue to the floor of my mouth. ‘This is where you cut. Then up through the bottom of the tongue. Then you push it down their throat.’ The blade, it prods against the bottom of my tongue and I cry out as its tip pierces the flesh of my tongue’s belly.

  ‘Pleath!’ I scream as sweat breaks on my brow.

  ‘Jerry, don’t distract me. I’d hate for my hand to slip.’

  I try to freeze my face.

  Then Nico says, ‘After you’re done with their mouth, you put your heel on their forehead so they can’t turn over. They die from suffocating on their own tongue. The pool of blood is just for show.’ He smiles.

  My breath is rapid and shallow as he slides the blade from my lips and I taste the battery-acid tang of blood under my tongue. Spasms beat my insides. I keep seeing LaRouche’s mouth in my mind.

  Nico shows mock concern. ‘Oh, don’t cry,’ he says. But I am. I’m leaking tears.

  ‘Tell me where she is,’ he says, ‘so I don’t have to give you a new mouth.’

  And I spring from the bench. ‘Police!’ I shout. ‘Police! Guard! Police!’

  But Nico just laughs and starts shouting ‘Police!’ with me. The lanky and fat officers come back into the room. They see me crying and look at Nico. But Nico walks over to them, takes out his roll of money and hands them more bills. Then, without warning, he grabs me by the back of the neck and pushes my face between the bars of the cell.

  ‘That looks like a bad laceration,’ he says and then I feel two thick fingers burrowing into the wound in my back.

  I scream and scream as he thrusts harder and deeper. And the two police officers, they just leave the room as Nico finger-fucks the hole between my ribs.

  The pain is unbelievable. White and hot, like a poker burrowing into my core. There are moments when time has no presence, when I hear nothing, not even my screams, and see only pale swirls of white. The pain is so great even death couldn’t stifle it. I don’t even know where it’s coming from anymore. Am I on fire? Am I freezing in the cold depths of space? Has someone sent me to the bottom of the ocean, where the pressure is crushing my body from all sides?

  ‘You see, perro,’ someone breathes into my ear; my face is still stuck between the cell bars. ‘Do you know what “perro” means? It’s Spanish for “dog”. You are my new dog. So you see, perro, money buys anything here.’

  I drop to the floor. I’m wet all over. My head spins. Black-and-white spots muddy my vision, which is only slowly returning. Nico … I think, yes … it is Nico, he’s wiping his bloody fingers on my pants. ‘Every time you scream it will cost me money,’ he says, his voice slightly delayed behind the movement of his lips. ‘I have a lot of it, but I don’t like spending more than I have to. It’s bad business.’

  I feel myself moving involuntarily. I’m sobbing uncontrollably, on the floor.

  Nico squats next to me and I scream again.

  ‘Shh. Shh,’ he says. ‘You want to keep your teeth, yes?’

  All I can do is cry.

  ‘Answer me, perro.’

  Through my tears and blurred vision, I shake my head up and down, grunting a ‘yes’.

  ‘You want your videotape?’

  Grunt.

  ‘Do you know where Hanna is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good perro,’ he says. ‘We both win. I need to make sure Hanna can never hurt my business again. You need your videotape. You will take me to her, I will make her give you your tape, and then you will leave. You can go back to your life, you can be Jerry again,’ he says as I sob. ‘If you refus
e, perro, I will splinter your teeth.’

  I begin to bellow so loudly.

  ‘Relax, relax,’ Nico eases, mocking sympathy for me. ‘I won’t cut your tongue. I won’t kill you. I’ll just leave this newspaper with our friends here and you can go back to your country and go to prison with a nice, gaping mouth.’ He pauses to let a sufficient image of life with a hole in my face form in my mind. ‘Or, you can bring me to Hanna.’ Nico rises and puts on his leather jacket. ‘Now, which would you like to do?’

  Good perro.

  22

  Judas

  I walk along the pier, like a zombie slowly shuffling towards its prey. And there is a hunger I’m feeling.

  My flesh is blotchy and grey like the dirty dishcloth used to clean ashtrays in hotel lobbies. Plugging up my wound, a blood-soaked rag makes the back of my shirt stick to my skin. A rotting-meat smell radiates from it.

  Still, I move without feeling, without pain even.

  I shuffle past the mesh cages and wooden crates meant for holding crustaceans, past the nets and hooks the size of your fist meant for hooking marlins. Epiphany stands in the moonlight, just at the pier’s end. Her little blue sundress looks almost black in the night. She’s crammed her cream hat into the yellow bag that sits on a pile of lobster traps made of wrought-iron rebars and green plastic mesh.

  After Nico picked me up off the cell floor; after the police returned and gave me my clothes; after Nico handed me a cup of water and my red backpack, saying, ‘They’re keeping your gun’, I didn’t want to come here – even if it meant not getting the tape.

  What he had done to me, the pain I had felt was absolute proof – absolute truth – that nothing good comes in this life. It’s a pain I will always remember. Not because it’s memory will always linger in my body, but because it’s a pain that wasn’t contained only to me. It will grow and leap to another person, and soon Epiphany too will awaken to the fact that no, nothing good comes from this life. And, as Nico and me and the lanky officer left the jail, I wept for her.

  I wept for her because I’m the virus that shows the pain where she is. And I wept for me too because you never want to believe you could be the Jew who gave up the location of other Jews to keep yourself out of the oven.

  I saw what he did to LaRouche. Felt what he did to me. He did those things to both of us and we weren’t even the ones who burnt his orphanage to the ground. What he’ll do to Epiphany is going to make my wound-fucking look like a spanking.

  Epiphany’s pale skin glows in the moonlight. And I think, who is this girl who I’ve just condemned to unimaginable suffering? Epiphany Jones or Hanna? How can one person have such extremes? To me a devil but, to the girls she saved, an angel. Those thirty girls will have a small chance at a better life because of the risk she took. But then I think, it was a risk to the girls as well. This woman I’m about to betray is the greatest conundrum of my life. How could she have known the fire wouldn’t kill any of them? And as I watch Epiphany breathe in a swath of night air in silent thought, I know what her answer would be. My voices.

  In the cell, Nico pumped me full of the painkillers Epiphany got for me so I’d stop collapsing. The amount I took, all the little co-codamols and ibuprofens, I should be dead. Maybe I am.

  In the cell, I showed him the tourist map with the docks circled. I begged him to let me go. I told him I’d just be a liability. I could barely walk after the finger-fucking he gave me. But he wouldn’t go alone.

  ‘She’s not some dumb animal, perro. You don’t survive for twelve years on the streets without being clever and aware. You already missed your earlier appointment with her. She’ll be on guard. You don’t show tonight, she’ll know something’s up,’ he said. ‘Besides, if you’re lying to me, I’m going to take your nose.’ He handed me a dirty rag. ‘Now plug your hole up. I don’t need you bleeding to death before we get there.’

  In another time, in another life, who I see before me would be just an ordinary woman looking out on to a beautiful sea on a moonlit night. But in this life, on this night, I don’t know who I’m looking at. A murderer and a saviour? How can one person be both? Why was Roland’s life expendable, but the girls’ lives at the orphanage valuable? Is one life worth more than another? Is mine worth more than hers? Who is she to decide? Who am I?

  I’m so close I can hear her mumbling to herself. Something’s different about her. She’s not on guard like she usually is. After I didn’t show this afternoon, I’d expect her to be clawing at her skin – or mine. Any time before this she would know if I were within twenty feet of her. Now though, I’m close enough to reach out and touch her shoulder but she hasn’t even noticed me.

  And though my past pain and her future pain cause my empathy for her to grow, I know that I’m still going to go through with this. That hunger I feel? It’s called necessity. It’s called self-preservation. You’d do the same thing if you were in my position, so don’t you dare judge me for this.

  I clear my throat and Epiphany breaks from her mumbling and turns to me. Her mutilated earlobe glows like coral in the moonlight. I’m quiet for a moment. How do you begin a conversation with a dead person?

  ‘What were you, um, talking about just now?’ I say, hoping the night hides the grey of my skin, the emptiness of my eyes.

  ‘A kiss,’ she answers, letting the word float between us for a moment before it’s carried off on the breeze. ‘Where were you?’ she asks, almost softly. ‘I waited.’

  And her eyes. There’s something different with her eyes.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘My – my wound. I laid down in a park. Fell asleep. Only woke up an hour ago.’

  I can hardly bear to look at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I knew you’d come.’

  Over her shoulder, a quarter of a mile out on the moonlit Gulf, I see a three-storey freighter. Its hull is painted a dark red and ‘THE CAPRICE’ is written in white letters on the side.

  ‘Is that it?’

  Epiphany nods. ‘The captain has arranged transport,’ she says. ‘It should be here shortly.’

  In the distance the red light of a small tugboat moored next to the freighter blinks. I glance at Epiphany. What the hell is wrong with her eyes tonight? It’s as if they don’t belong to her. Like if you’d put your grandmother’s eyes into Charles Manson’s head, that’s what they look like.

  ‘You – you know, when you said we were taking a boat, I imagined it was one of those small fishing boats – like the one from Jaws or something.’

  Epiphany looks puzzled.

  ‘The movie?’ I say.

  She shrugs her shoulders.

  Jaws. I see LaRouche, bloody mouth gaping open, jagged teeth pointing in every direction.

  What’s Nico waiting for? Is this part of his cruelty? To prolong the time I spend with the person I’ve betrayed?

  Epiphany’s new eyes look into my dead ones. ‘I know this hasn’t been easy,’ she says, ‘but we’re almost done. It’s almost over.’ She turns towards the sea and I stand by her side. In the distance, the tugboat has just pulled away from the freighter.

  On the pier, the moonlight casts soft, blue shadows over Epiphany’s face. And it’s then that I realise why her eyes look so alien. It’s because that freighter is the last part of the journey that takes us to her daughter. Her eyes, it’s not that there’s something wrong with them – it’s that they possess something they never had before. They’re full of hope.

  And out of nowhere there’s an abrupt flash of movement in the moonlight. Nico, he steps from the shadows between two sets of crates. I must have made some sort of yell because Epiphany snaps around in an instant. Her figure is dwarfed by Nico’s six-foot-six frame.

  It begins quickly. He raises something in his fist and swings it at Epiphany. She tries to duck, but she’s not fast enough. She’s knocked to the ground before I can blink. She tries to rise, but Nico lifts his arm again. This time I can see the thing he sw
ings is a sock with something heavy in it. I press my eyes shut before he hits her again.

  My stomach churns and rolls around, like it’s been cut loose from the rest of my viscera. In my mind, Nico’s face warns, ‘Don’t interrupt, perro. I’ll take your nose. I’ll shatter your teeth. I’ll dump you in your country and your wound won’t be the only thing getting stretched in prison.’

  When I open my eyes blood from Epiphany’s skull falls in large drops onto the pier. She wobbles to all fours. Her eyes go wide as she sees I’m still here.

  ‘Run!’ she screams. That’s when I feel the lanky police officer brush past me. Epiphany barely has time to register that I haven’t moved before the officer boots her in the stomach. I snap my eyes closed again before I can see her fall for the third time.

  And their viciousness, it’s nothing like you see on TV. Seeing someone beaten in real life … it’s the sounds. They aren’t as pronounced. When Nico bludgeons her face, there’s no THWACK or CRACK to go with it. You think, his strike can’t be doing that much damage. There’re no jarring jump cuts showing a close-up of the attacker sneering as his victim writhes in pain. There’s no camera in the face of the beaten woman highlighting her tears and blood. And when you see her lying still, you think, You don’t look like it hurt that much.

  But you’re wrong. It hurts more than is believable. You don’t know how it is.

  Even though it’s just barely, Epiphany, she still moves. She manages to lift her head.

  ‘Stay down, goddamn it,’ I want to yell.

  As the lanky police officer forces Epiphany’s hands behind her back, Nico picks up the yellow bag. He digs through it until he finds a small, blue clamshell case. He flips it over in his hands, then tosses it to me. ‘You’re done here.’

  The surface of my entire body is numb. I need to look to see if I’ve caught it. And though I don’t feel it, there it is, this little thing, in my hands. Inside is the videotape with Roland’s handwriting scrawled on it. I expect – I hope – to feel relief.