12 Bliss Street

by Martha Conway

  “Where’s Dave?” she asked.

  “I didn’t call Dave,” Nicola told her.

  Carmen was still clutching the edge of the table. Davette took off her coat and set her airline laptop case down on the floor. After Nicola offered her food and gave her a glass of mineral water, she told her what had happened to Robert. She watched Davette’s face closely. Her expression didn’t change although her color deepened.

  “This is the landlord?” she asked.

  “And we think there’s more going on,” Nicola said. She pulled Carmen’s computer onto the table and showed Davette the image of the girl on a bed. “Carmen feels that … well maybe you should say what you think, Carmen.”

  “The man who did that is going to kill me,” she said.

  Davette glanced at Nicola. Nicola suddenly remembered she was only sixteen or seventeen, a girl. But Davette only said, “Well, we won’t let him.”

  Lou said, “Do you think you can find out more about Robert’s Web site? There might be a connection between that and this … this girl here.”

  “I think so,” Davette said. “But first.” She reached inside her airline bag and searched around until she finally found something. It looked like a matchbox.

  “Pocket spell for luck,” Lou read aloud, looking over Davette’s shoulder. “What’s that?”

  “A pocket spell,” Davette explained. “For luck.”

  She did the spell with tiny white candles on a white saucer and a small gray pebble glued to a leaf. “Lucky rock,” Davette chanted, “lucky circle, lucky day, lucky hour, lucky me.”

  Afterwards she looked up at Nicola, who was still standing next to her. Nicola blew out the candles.

  “There,” Davette said. She gave the plate with the spell circle to Lou, then looked at Carmen.

  “You’ll be all right,” she told her, and pulled the laptop closer.

  * * *

  The girl’s silk camisole lay—if not in threads, then in long white strips that led away from her body like snakes leaving a log. But she was not dead. Not yet. Ricky sat next to her and began making himself hard. He had to get himself ready on his own because nothing worked too well in that area these days. Chorizo, bored, watched him do it.

  Meanwhile the girl breathed slowly and unevenly. Her skin was that extraordinary color. He wished he could pick it up better on video.

  “All right, then,” he said.

  Ricky climbed on top of her and began to move. The girl groaned; she was still hanging on. She didn’t know what was happening, it was probably like a wonderfully vague dream. Or so Chorizo hoped. For her sake, he hoped so.

  His wife accused him of being tender-hearted, but surely she couldn’t accuse him of that now. She was the one who wrote letters and sabotaged—or tried to—various Turkish or Greek offices of government. She, with her Turkish father and her Greek mother, hated both sides. What did she want? Anarchy, she would say. The end of nationalism. But she didn’t really know what she wanted. She was angry; she was well read. At various times she said various things. For the press she had all sorts of ridiculous statements.

  And the most ridiculous thing of all was the way she’d been caught—a prematurely exploding bomb. Her own bomb. She was lucky she wasn’t dead herself. But her hands … her hands! thought Chorizo. At the trial she had hoped she could make some statements, but they wouldn’t admit political discourse. So it was all for nothing! Chorizo’s face contorted. Her beautiful hands.

  He made himself focus on the bed. Ricky was right there, moving on top of the girl, her filmy skin, a coldness that seemed to start from her heart. These Americans, Chorizo thought. For a moment he felt the bitterness his wife felt—although in her case it was all about who governed Cyprus—the sense of being with the wrong people and hating the people for being wrong. Americans. Everything on the surface, everything easy, everything in control. A narrowness of mind that was almost staggering.

  And the remarkable thing was that they liked this, this what Ricky was doing. The Americans liked this. It was for them a turn-on. A man on top of a comatose women, naked, her clothes cut away. Fucking her to her death.

  He had to sit a minute. Take a breath, center himself. It was his fault for letting thoughts of his wife creep in.

  The spiritual warrior is at one with the world.

  When he looked back up the scene seemed different. Was the girl still breathing? He listened for the death rattle—each time it sounded slightly different. The first time he thought it was a cough, a cough without movement, a cough without opening her mouth. Then he realized. Now he watched closely as the girl’s eyes opened slightly, two slits looking at something halfway across the room. Her skin, he knew, was growing colder. The sound was forming in her throat.

  “What the fuck,” Ricky said suddenly. He started to get off of the girl.

  “Don’t stop!” Chorizo ordered. But he was surprised, too.

  It was remarkable. Her eyes had opened fully, looking Ricky right in the face. Like she knew exactly what they were doing.

  “She’s freakin me out. Man, stop it.”

  He started to cover the girl’s face with his hand.

  “No, don’t do that.”

  Then all at once she relaxed and closed her eyes again.

  “Man,” Ricky said. And settled back down.

  Chorizo panned back. River? Was that the girl’s name?

  * * *

  Davette found the Web site they had gotten to before and began running a program in the background to get more information about it.

  “It has a different IP address than Robert’s,” she said. “I’m going to hack into the server. Find out when it was last updated.”

  A line of files and dates appeared in a separate window.

  “Any of these names look familiar?” she asked Carmen.

  “Those are the files I copied for him. Look, there’s one that’s still compressed.”

  “Hmm,” Davette said, frowning.

  “What?” asked Nicola.

  “Not all of these filenames match what’s on the site. It could just be that he didn’t end up using all the files. Let’s just see. Let’s just look around a little.”

  Davette launched several programs at once and after the third one got going Nicola watched the screen, amazed. Davette was really a pro for someone so young. Nicola found herself thinking about her own days in high school. She was such a good student, so active, so competent, and yet always the vice president—the one who ran around organizing what everyone else wanted. Now she was the one making decisions while someone else did the work.

  Carmen washed her face at the kitchen sink, then went into the living room to lie down, and Nicola brought her a Mexican blanket. After that she had nothing to do.

  “Do you mind if I load your dishwasher?” Lou asked her. He was standing at the sink.

  “What?”

  “Some people are particular.”

  He had wet hands and Nicola pictured him wearing rubber gloves as he sprayed the bottom of the skillet. Why did this turn her on?

  “Do you want some help?” she asked.

  “Under control,” he told her.

  “What’s this?” Davette said suddenly from the table.

  She was looking at another Web site on screen.

  “A semi-invisible link,” she said.

  “Semi-invisible?”

  “From your landlord’s site. The porn site. There’s a semi-invisible link. Which means you have to know where it is. Let’s see where it goes.”

  She pressed the link. Nicola moved closer. A new screen appeared: the face of a rubber doll looking up. It was heavily made-up and dressed like a cabaret dancer in, say, Berlin around 1930.

  Lou came over to see. “Dolls for sale,” he read.

  “A site selling rubber dolls,” Nicola said.

  “A site behind a site.”

  “Strange.”

  “But still nothing illegal.”

  “I bet there’s more,
” Davette told them.

  Nicola stared at another doll, which was dressed in a turquoise negligee that looked familiar. “More?” she asked.

  “Just a sec,” Davette said.

  Lou pulled a chair up behind Davette and after a few minutes Davette found what she was looking for: another transparent link on the rubber doll site. There was only the slightest change in the cursor arrow as Davette passed over it, like a faint ripple on the surface of the moon.

  “Here we go,” she said.

  “Should I wake up Carmen?” Lou asked.

  “Let’s just take a peek,” Davette told them, and clicked on the link.

  Nicola was watching over Davette’s shoulder as a window popped up on the screen.

  “It’s asking for a credit card number,” Nicola said. Lou reached for his wallet. “No, wait,” she said. She went into the living room past the sleeping Carmen and knelt beside Scooter’s duffel. Carmen was breathing lightly. Inside the duffel, at the toe of one of the shoes, was a credit card.

  “Okay, here,” she said coming back into the kitchen.

  Davette typed in the number and confirmed.

  “How much does this cost?” Lou asked.

  “I didn’t look.”

  The screen had faded and was now a flat dull uniform gray. Then a small window popped up indicating that a video file was loading. After a moment music began.

  “Hawaiian,” Lou said. “The Guy Pardos band. I think I have this album.”

  “You have Hawaiian music?”

  But the video was starting—hula dancers on a stage, filmed from the waist up, their dark hair held back by large pink flowers. It was some sort of old documentary clip. When the drums began, they started to dance.

  “Weird,” Lou said.

  Nicola looked over at him. “Do you think this is it?”

  The drums got louder and louder and the women shook their hips though you couldn’t see their hips, you could only see their naked navels and their tanned stomachs and their shoulders and their shiny black hair with the flowers. They moved faster and faster with concentration and precision but with smiles on their faces. The drums beat harder. The women moved their hands. Mahalo, they mouthed. Their palms were up, giving. Mahalo.

  “WTF,” Davette said.

  “Here comes the finale,” Lou said.

  But just as the drums got very loud and the camera began to pull back to show the whole shot—tanned women with grass skirts and bare feet on a wooden stage—the video sort of just crinkled—crinkle was the only word Nicola could think of to describe it—crinkled into a new video, though still accompanied by Hawaiian music. She stared as the image of the dancing women faded and the new image crinkled in.

  It was a woman lying on a bed.

  Next to her, a man. He had scissors in his left hand and he snipped at the air above her throat. As he snipped, new music began—Brian Eno.

  “What’s he doing to her?” Davette asked.

  * * *

  Her clothes were in shreds and the boy was raping her and she was going to die right there on camera.

  Call a spade a spade.

  Her eyes didn’t open again. Chorizo listened to the rattle in her throat as her breaths unevenly came and went. Was that her last breath? He waited, listening hard. No, there was another. That one, then? He waited again. Ricky moved up and down, up and down, but the girl was absolutely still. Nothing. No more breath. That was it, then, there would be nothing more. The body was so still, so still, as though something had evaporated and moved away, just moved away. So that was the end. A spirit dispersing. Chorizo kept the videotape rolling.

  He thought about how in the final version the music would build to a climax, and just as the viewers adjusted to the snipped clothes the camera would cut suddenly to Ricky climbing on top of her and then they would get to see a long shot of the girl dying while Ricky worked himself over her, raping her, killing her, and then if they were lucky a long last take of her strangely still and strangely colored body. If they were very lucky there would be a little blood, just a trickle, slithering down from her nose. Her clothes cut away from her. Her clothes in shreds. He always appreciated that added effect. A woman whose most intimate clothing, a symbol of her deeper side, her sensuality—her secret thoughts of sex—all of this stripped away, destroyed.

  God is in the details, his wife used to say as she made her inferior bombs.

  Ricky rolled off the girl and rubbed his eyes with his thumbs. For a moment the noise outside abated and Chorizo could hear Ricky breathe heavily, then cough once into his hands. No doubt about it then, the girl was dead. She’d passed over. Or, as Chorizo considered it, she’d passed through. Ricky moved his legs over the edge of the bed and began to pull on his pants. Dead bodies—it seemed they meant nothing to him. He would get paid and he would get the junk that Chorizo had purchased that morning and he would eat something and find a hotel room and shoot up in peace while Marlina finished with her john in the room just below them. He would save some food for her.

  And meanwhile Chorizo would do all the rest—get rid of the bedspread, the posters, the girl. Anything that appeared on the video. The main thing was not to allow himself caught on camera, and how could he be, if he were the cameraman? There would be no trace of him on the Internet. There would only be poor Ricky: one indistinguishable junkie in a country of a thousand indistinguishable junkies.

  Chorizo stopped the video and examined the lens of the camera. Everything appeared normal. He was always very careful with the disk files even though technically he was not very proficient; but he was learning, he was watching Carmen and asking her questions and soon he would be able to handle the nuts and bolts of the Web site himself. Carmen knew so little of what really went on. Still, she would have to die.

  She was so pretty; almost certainly she would be photogenic. He wished he could do it on video. But there must be no links back to himself; that was important.

  Chorizo covered the girl’s body with the bedsheet, tucking the edges in around her shoulders and head. Be true to yourself: this is the first rule of Shambhala. No backward links: this is the first rule of crime.

  Seventeen

  Nicola woke early the next morning, scared out of sleep by a dream—what was it? But no, it wasn’t a dream, it was a video. It was that video. Jesus, that girl, she thought. Her bare bluish shoulders and feet. The strange color of her lips. Nicola turned and looked at the clock. What had she gotten herself into? Fear: this is what it felt like. She wanted to stay in bed.

  But the screech of a garbage truck coming down the street got her up—as usual she had forgotten to put out the cans. “Oh shit,” Nicola said and she threw herself out of bed and onto Carmen, who was sleeping on a foam pad on the floor. “What?” said Carmen, still mostly asleep.

  “Oh shit, oh shit,” Nicola said, pulling a sweatshirt over her nightgown.

  In the kitchen, a faint pearl-gray light was filtering through the blinds. She opened a paper grocery bag and began throwing cans and bottles inside. The recycling truck always came first. From the street she could hear it start up, then brake again, and also the sound of a second truck starting and braking not far behind. Nicola quickly began throwing old newspapers and junk mail into another empty paper bag, then she picked up all the bags and ran.

  The recycling guy—Ulyssey—was grinning at her as she opened the front gate.

  “I’m waiting for you,” he called.

  “One of these days I’m going to surprise you,” she told him.

  He swung the bags up into the truck and jumped into the cab, driving with one foot and one hand. Nicola looked up. It was cold out, but surprisingly clear. The sky was a soft baby blue. She shivered. She would never get back to sleep.

  When Lou called later Nicola was on her computer looking again at the snuff video, which she had illegally copied onto her computer using software she got off a hacker who occasionally freelanced for her. She was running the video over and over, pausing to loo
k at something more closely, then running it and pausing it and running it and pausing it, trying to find something … she didn’t know what. She was thinking about Carmen, who was still asleep on her bedroom floor. Was this what was in store for her? The video scared her every time.

  “I wasn’t sure if I would wake you,” Lou said.

  “I was just about to do my power-walk. This girl is a size eight, like me.”

  “The girl?”

  “The dead video girl. There’s something about her that seems familiar.”

  “Can you see her face?”

  “Not clearly, no. I’ve tried to zoom in, but then everything gets so blurry.” She pointed her mouse to a frame in the video then stopped and picked up her coffee instead. It was ice cold. She was sitting at her kitchen table, her back to the door.

  “Scooter never came back last night,” she told Lou.

  “Does this worry you?”

  “Not really. Not normally. But right now I guess everything worries me. I’ve decided to call in sick for work.”

  “I’m with you on that,” Lou said.

  “You call in?”

  “From time to time.”

  Nicola stood up and went to the sink to pour out her coffee. She cradled the phone against her shoulder and told Lou she wanted to ask him a favor. Had he by any chance cashed her check yet?

  “Oh that’s long gone,” he said.

  “Because I was thinking I might need money … I’m not sure now what might come up.”

  “I’m sorry, princess,” Lou said.

  Nicola looked out her kitchen window. The fog was beginning to come in. Long stalks of grass swayed in the wind like a row of musicians. She closed the blind. It was a good day to stay inside and hide. But was she thinking about Carmen or herself?

  She asked Lou if he wanted to come over.

  “I mean as long as you’re sick,” she said.

  * * *

  Nicola and Lou watched the video maybe fifteen times together, taking time off to ask Carmen, when she emerged, if she wanted breakfast. Lou poured her a cup of strong black coffee and Nicola started the video, explaining what had happened last night after Carmen fell asleep.