12 Bliss Street

by Martha Conway

  Chorizo panned back for another shot of the two of them. The moment was coming. He had given her two pills but they were working fast. He was a little afraid the moment would get here too soon.

  * * *

  Carmen was sitting on Nicola’s couch sobbing in gulps while Nicola watched her, trying to think of what she could possibly say. Only a few minutes before she had been sitting in the same spot with her legs entwined in Lou’s. Now here was Carmen with her head down, her hair over her face. Lou had turned off the music. Right now he was half-sitting on the couch arm with a glass of water in one hand and his other hand on his knee. After a minute, when she seemed to have quieted down a little, he touched Carmen’s shoulder and she looked up and took the glass then she gave it back without drinking. She gulped some air and put her head down and everything started all over again.

  “Oh dear,” Lou said.

  Nicola gently pulled Carmen’s hair back behind her shoulders. She almost said, It’s all right, but she stopped herself because of course it wasn’t.

  The sister, she was thinking. She must really be the sister.

  What could she say to her? After a while Carmen’s breath came back and her sobs began to slow down. Nicola stroked her hair and Carmen said, hiccuping, “You must really be wondering.” She took the water Lou gave her and wiped her eyes with her fingers and Nicola went into the bathroom for a wet washcloth wondering, Should I offer her something stronger to drink? She put her fingers beneath the tap waiting for the spray to get colder. She had a few bottles of beer, but that didn’t seem right.

  When she walked back to the room she tried to think what she would want to hear if their positions were reversed. The clock ticked loudly over the mantelpiece and Carmen took the washcloth without looking at Nicola and held it over her eyes. What would I want someone to say, Nicola wondered?

  She said, “Carmen, we’re going to help you.”

  At that Lou looked over at her.

  “What,” she said, meeting his stare.

  “We should find out what’s going on first,” he told her.

  “Of course. We find out what happened. Then we fix it,” Nicola said.

  “I agree we need to help, but…”

  “But?”

  “We really need to find out what’s going on.”

  “Look at this woman,” she said.

  Carmen was still holding the washcloth over her eyes. She took it off and dried her face on her sleeve.

  “I’ll get you a towel,” Lou said.

  “No, wait.” Carmen took a breath and drank some water. “I know you’re wondering and I want to explain,” she began. “Robert always said…” She hiccuped and started to cry again then tried to stop herself.

  “It’s all right,” Lou said. “You don’t need to talk.”

  “No,” Carmen said. “I want … you must really be wondering. I want to tell you.”

  “Well, take your time,” Lou told her.

  Carmen took a breath and almost smiled. “What a nice guy. He’s a nice guy,” she said to Nicola. “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “We were just sort of getting to that,” Nicola said.

  “Oh, Christ. Did I…? I mean here you were having a nice evening, a date—was it a date?”

  “Yes,” Lou said.

  “And I show up,” Carmen said.

  “Stop apologizing,” Nicola said. “We can pick all that up again whenever.”

  “And I barge in, a total stranger.”

  “Stop,” Nicola said again. “Look, I’m going to take the washcloth away if you don’t stop.”

  “Because Robert always told me if anything happened, if anything strange or frightening or just anything, I don’t know, anything happened I should come to this house. This cottage. I’d be safe here, he said.”

  “Safe here?” Nicola asked.

  “So I barge right in because I didn’t know what else to do after I found … I found him … he was sitting in his TV chair with his eyes open…” Carmen began losing her voice. “But I don’t believe he killed himself,” she said, losing control.

  Lou and Nicola looked at each other. Killed himself?

  “I don’t … I don’t want to cry,” Carmen said.

  “But you should be crying,” Nicola said. “Robert is your brother. You should be crying.” She took Carmen’s hand. The clock ticked loudly; it was just after eight.

  “Listen, why don’t you lie down,” she said. “Whenever you want, you talk to us, you tell us what happened. But first I’m going to make you some tea. And then after that we’re going to feed you. And after that we’re going to help you.” She looked at Lou. “Aren’t we?” she said.

  “Oh my God,” Lou said, getting up suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The soup,” he said.

  * * *

  But Chorizo needn’t have worried; as it turned out the timing was perfect. It was dark now and slowly the sounds from the street increased as more and more people left restaurants and headed for the clubs. Chorizo looked through the camera lens.

  “Awakening is to know what reality is not,” he said aloud. That was good; he liked that. A pity he would have to delete the soundtrack. Later he would add music, then convert it all to quicktime. Last time he did Brian Eno. This time, who knows, some retro seventies band? A big-hair band? She had a seventies look with her puffy hair, her wide-cut blue jeans. Not that she was wearing blue jeans now.

  He could definitely picture a seventies soundtrack. Something light and frivolous. A good juxtaposition, he was thinking, as she died. Not that he thought of himself as an artist. He thought of himself as a businessman.

  A businessman with a wife in trouble.

  “It’s time,” he told Ricky.

  He looked at the girl. Beneath the overhead light a thin stream of dust moved down from the ceiling and he focused the camera for a moment on the girl’s pale face, what he could see of it. They had eaten garlicky Chinese food for dinner and afterwards they stopped for a mojito—rum mixed with mint and lime juice. His mouth felt slightly sour and he ran his tongue over his bottom teeth. “Awakening is to know,” he said again. But what did that mean exactly? She will not awaken, he thought. She will not know.

  Ricky moved over and, without disengaging himself from her, picked up the scissors from the metal bedside table.

  * * *

  A half an hour later Carmen combed her hair, then sat down with a cup of chamomile tea at Nicola’s small kitchen table, a forties-style metal table wedged into the corner of the room. The soup smelled delicious. Lou was cutting potato rosemary bread with a long serrated knife.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Carmen said. She was still wearing her coat.

  Nicola pulled out bowls from a cupboard. All her dishes suddenly seemed too bright and festive. What was this, dinner in Disneyland? She poured bubbly mineral water into tall Mexican glasses with stems.

  “Drink this,” she said.

  “Do you have anything stronger?” Carmen asked. So Nicola brought her a bottle of beer. Her mind kept circling around two things: curiosity about Robert, and trying to comfort Carmen. About Robert she wanted to know the particulars, but, about Carmen, she felt she could not ask.

  Carmen said she wasn’t hungry, but Lou put soup and bread in front of her anyway and soon she was eating in small, rushed bites. Lou washed his hands and grated parmesan cheese over her soup, then took out a bottle of wine.

  Nicola found three glasses; one she had to wash first. She thought of a story she had read in the news that day about how women don’t have the same fight or flight tendencies that men have; instead, this particular report claimed, they tend and befriend. Tend and befriend. Nicola hated that phrase the minute she read it and she hated it now, remembering.

  Because she would fight. Even for Carmen, and who was Carmen? Pretty much a stranger, someone who might take my home away, okay, but also someone in trouble. It wasn’t Carmen’s fault that her brother tried to screw her, Nicola,
over, and then went and killed himself or whatever it was that happened—in any case something that Carmen will now have to deal with for the rest of her life.

  Nicola sat down beside her. Lou ladled out more soup from the pot and like a mother kept getting up from the table to fetch something else—the parmesan cheese, napkins, a pepper grinder.

  After her second bowl Carmen slowed down and began talking.

  She told them that her brother worked for a man he didn’t trust, someone she worked for too, and that last week Robert told her about this cottage and said that if anything ever happened she should come here. She would be safe here.

  To be honest, Carmen said, she never trusted the man. Adam Lightwell was his name—but she didn’t think that was his real name.

  “He looks like a sausage,” she said.

  “What did you do for this man?” Lou asked.

  Carmen tore the crust from her bread and added it to the pile on her plate. “Originally accounting. That’s what my degree is in.”

  She said Lightwell and Robert had done a few deals together, some real estate stuff, but something strange happened over the last one—Carmen thought maybe Robert somehow lost his portion and became indebted to Lightwell as well. But Lightwell wasn’t only involved in real estate. He had ideas about making money on the Internet. Carmen found herself helping him set up a Web site, nothing very interesting except that he had her upload files through an anonymous remailer that went through Finland. That was when she realized he didn’t want to be traced.

  Lou was standing at the table, stacking the empty soup bowls. “What’s a remailer?” he asked.

  “A remailer,” Nicola explained, “is kind of like an e-mail go-between. You send your files, or your e-mail, to a server in a protected country—in this case Finland. The server in Finland consults its secret database and forwards your files to another server, one which you’ve set up beforehand, say one in California. Your Web site is on the server in California, and the files are published there. But if someone wants to know who uploaded the files onto the California Web site, all they get is the address of the anonymous server in Finland.”

  “You leave no trail,” Lou said.

  “You leave no trail,” Nicola agreed.

  “It sounds fishy.” He turned to Carmen. “Weren’t you suspicious?”

  “Well, but this is the Internet; so many people are a little crazy,” Carmen said. “You know—paranoid about privacy. That’s all I thought it was at first.”

  “And then?” Lou asked. “After a while you changed your mind?”

  “And then—oh, I don’t know. I began to wonder, I guess. That soup was delicious.”

  Lou took the stack of bowls to the sink and closed the kitchen blinds, then set the skillet to soak. The night had lost all of its original romance. A woman sitting at the kitchen table, crying over her brother who was—murdered? As she listened to Carmen, Nicola could feel her heart start to race. She didn’t know if she was being very, very stupid or not.

  “At a certain point we should consider the police,” she said.

  Carmen tore more crust. “What can they do? They’ll say it was suicide.”

  “You said that before. Why do you think that?” Lou asked.

  “There was a note in the printer tray. Not even signed. Also, I found an empty bottle of pills—methadone. But when does Robert take methadone? He’s not a junkie; maybe he drinks a little too much, but that’s it. I just don’t buy it.”

  Nicola tried to be gentle. “You say he was seriously in debt to this man? This Lightwell?”

  “He owed him a lot of money.”

  Nicola took a breath, then paused. She and Lou looked across the room at each other. But Carmen caught their look.

  “It was not suicide,” she said again fiercely. She pulled out her laptop and put it on the kitchen chair beside her and turned it on. “Look at this,” she said.

  * * *

  The scissors caught the light from the bare bulb and he was glad he just had them sharpened. He threw away the bedspread each time and he bought new pillowcases and new posters for the wall but the scissors were always the same—German hairstyling scissors with long blades and small finger holes. The boy had thin fingers, which is why Chorizo hired him. Not that there was much competition.

  The boy put his fingers in the finger holes, then, blades closed, he lay the metal over the girl’s throat. No movement. Her chest went up and down only slightly as she breathed and the end of the scissors pointed straight out at the camera. Chorizo stepped quickly to the other side of the bed for a better angle and the boy opened the scissors and cut once into the air.

  * * *

  “This is what he does,” Carmen said.

  She opened an image file on her computer.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I think the girl is dead.”

  Nicola and Lou stared at the image.

  * * *

  “Now,” Chorizo said.

  The boy moved down over the girl’s body—thank God she was still hanging on—and began cutting. First the white straps, exposing her shoulders. Then the bodice. He made a long incision lengthwise, smoothly rending the white silk into two pieces. Her chemise opened, became a vest, but the boy did not pull it aside; instead he cut a strip of material out and then another. He was cutting her clothes off. She was absolutely still.

  “Good, good,” Chorizo said. “Be careful of her skin.”

  Ricky cut some more, making smaller and smaller cuts, drawing the process out. Sometimes he made shapes: long flat ovals, trapezoids. A not-very-good squiggle of lightning. Flaps of white material fell away from her or hung like feathers near her skin.

  Chorizo watched through the viewfinder. “I want only the suggestion of blood.”

  The idea was a kind of transference—you didn’t see the skin cut but you felt the skin was cut. In a few minutes the chemise lay in pieces. When there was no more to slice, the boy looked down for a moment then moved to her panties.

  “Careful, careful,” Chorizo told him.

  The panties were white silk too. Ricky started at one leg hole then cut a line to the opposite one.

  “Careful.”

  The material fell away. It took only a few seconds. The boy was visible from behind. The girl’s arms were at her sides, limp, palms up. Her head was turned and her eyes were not fully closed. Her lips had turned a deeper blue.

  “That’s it,” Chorizo said.

  The boy fell forward for a moment, losing his balance, and nicked her with the scissors. “Ooh,” said the boy.

  “Christ,” Chorizo said. He stopped filming. A small dot of blood appeared on her thigh.

  “Christ,” Chorizo said again. The inside of his mouth felt slick, as if lined with sesame oil from that night’s Kung Pao chicken. He wanted to take the audience to the edge, make them see the blood without seeing it. Feel the death without doing it. The spiritual warrior is at one with the physical plane, but in a sense he moves beyond it. He finds the spirit within the object. There would be no blood and yet the audience would swear there was blood, because the sense—the spirit—of blood is there.

  Chorizo felt the back of his hair with his fingers while Ricky looked up at him, waiting to hear what to do. He thought about the audience, middle-aged men with credit cards sitting at a desk chair holding the crotch of their blue jeans or chinos or suit pants, what have you, watching the scissors snip snip at what might have been her throat, watching the clothes fall away, both their hands moving together, sitting in the den or in the family room with the television off, late at night, the family in bed, or maybe they lived alone, maybe they lived with their mother, maybe they were getting a business degree at night or they were in some frat house in a college on the eastern seaboard and they were saying to a frat brother man you gotta see this. Look at this, man, come here a minute, oh shit, oh my God! Their voices getting higher. He thought about all the men with their credit cards and their secret desire to duck under soc
iety, to get out of its tedious grip, and why shouldn’t he give them that pleasure for a fee? He would give them that pleasure and he would see his wife out of jail with their money, why not? Because they were not warriors. They were not priests. They were not shamans. They were not healers. They ate, they watched, they took anything offered without thought. The underlying meaning would be lost to them, absolutely—this he always knew. Still, one wants to do one’s best.

  Chorizo adjusted the chain of his bracelet and felt his hair with his hand again then looked back through the lens. Ricky was still waiting.

  “Oh well, fuck it,” he said to Ricky, “go ahead.”

  * * *

  It was difficult to tell if the girl in the image was alive or not. Nicola moved the laptop from the chair to the table.

  “When did you find the picture?” she asked.

  “I didn’t find it, I copied it. I took it home. Now I realize how incredibly stupid that was. I never looked at any of the files before.”

  “Were they all images?”

  “What if Robert was killed because I…”

  “Wait,” Nicola said. “First I want to know, were all the files images like this one?”

  “I don’t really know,” Carmen said. “They were compressed in various ways.”

  “How did you decide to take this one?”

  “It was one of the ones he threw away, that’s all. I found it in the computer’s trash can.”

  There was a knock on the door and Carmen gasped. “Do you know who it is? Don’t open it!” she said quickly. As she took hold of the kitchen table, Nicola noticed she wore a small silver ring on her thumb in the shape of a snake.

  “It’s all right,” Nicola said. “I know who it is. I made a phone call a few minutes ago. Don’t worry.”

  She came back with Davette.

  “See,” Lou said. “It’s all right.”

  “This is Davette,” Nicola said. “She’s our resident hacker.”

  Davette looked around the kitchen. She had dyed her hair an orangy-yellow color and was wearing a short black skirt underneath her puffy coat.