Beyond the Pale Motel

by Francesca Lia Block

  Stu.

  “Hey,” I said. “What the hell?”

  He jumped, startled. He had been talking on his cell. When he saw it was me, he sneered. “Look who’s here,” he said, lowering the window and his gaze, down the length of my body, at the same smooth pace.

  “Why the fuck are you here?” The adrenaline was forcing the whiskey through my blood faster than normal but not enough to sober me up.

  “Why the fuck are you here? I might ask.”

  “Are you watching Bree? You sick fuck.”

  Are you watching Bree, you sick fuck? I think he said it, but I’m still not sure.

  “I’m going to call the cops,” I said. I took out my cell phone.

  “You really want to do that with all that booze in your system,” Stu calmly replied. His head looked huge. “How many years sobriety do you have again?”

  The night of my birthday came back as if I’d fallen down a hole back into the scene. I was looking for Bree in the fun-house maze of my bungalow, wanting her help. She was doing the dishes—too fast, slamming them around, splashing water onto her dress—she wouldn’t even look at me. My mouth felt stuffed with dry, sweet cake mix and I couldn’t talk.

  Back in real time I watched Stu drive away.

  I’m still not sure if he was actually there at all.

  * * *

  One night during my “watch,” I saw Bree leave her house wearing a short, black cotton dress and motorcycle boots and carrying her camera and Louis Vuitton overnight bag. Skylar was with her but he only had his school backpack. The sun was setting, the sky an odd shade of lilac. I followed them to Baby Daddy’s historic seven-story, art deco apartment building in Hollywood, where he and Bree had lived when they first got together, and watched her park and walk Skylar past the cypress trees and in through the glass doors. She didn’t stay long.

  It is important for me to say, here, that I did not drink that night. I hadn’t had a drink since after seeing Stu in front of Bree’s apartment building. Not that I considered myself on the way back to recovery; unlike some white-knucklers I was clear that I couldn’t do that on my own, long term. But I knew there was something wicked coming, like a storm when you smell metal in the air, and that I would have to face it without the scrim of drink to protect me.

  I drove behind her out of the city, along I-10, listening to Savages—music as wailing, dark, and discordant as my state of mind. Night was falling across the brushfire-begging chaparral, and the air smelled of noxious fumes. If aliens had landed, they would think humans were attached to these toxic metal boxes with wheels, that they ate greasy food, gambled, drank beer, worshipped and despised young, beautiful women, and desperately needed hospitals. The aliens would not be wrong. A few scraggly palm trees gave way to dusty shrubbery, and in the distance mountains blackened against a sunset sky. I drove stealthily behind Bree, reciting my Fourth Step inventory in my head to keep from thinking about what I was doing and what she would say if she caught me. I would still list Dash, Darcy London, Jarell, Carlton, Dean, Stu, Big Bob, the psycho on FU Cupid, Cyan, my mother, my father and Bree, and I would still list the same things that I should have done differently. Shana had moved higher up the list; I’d added Jimmy, peripherally, and Scott was on there for dying, for not getting treatment, for not telling me he was sick. But I was also responsible for everything that had happened.

  You know those red stains on the highways? Are those from blood? How do they get rid of those things?

  A dead animal lay in the middle of the road, too mangled to identify. I swerved to avoid it and felt my stomach lurch. Once on a trip to the mountains with Dash, I’d seen a deer lying like that, fragilely broken in its darkening blood. It had disturbed me more than it should have, Dash said when I wouldn’t stop crying.

  “You need to try some meds.”

  “You know I can’t. Of all people you should know.”

  “SSRIs aren’t drugs in the same way, Catt. They just make your body do what it should do naturally. If you’d taken them as a kid, you probably wouldn’t have had to start self-medicating.”

  He was probably right. If I had listened, things might never have gotten to the point they had.

  But he would have left you anyway. And so would Bree.

  If Bree were an animal, she would be a doe for sure, I thought.

  The air hung still and hot; night hadn’t cooled it much. We were approaching the real desert, with its vast expanses of empty. The highway wound and I followed Bree at a dangerous distance. She turned onto a dirt road and I had to kill the lights.

  Bree, a deer, a female deer, parked and got out of her SUV, adjusted her dress. There was a small building there, middle of nowhere; it looked abandoned except for one lit bulb. The neon sign reading MOTEL was out. Someone had graffitied Beyond the Pale across the front wall.

  A van was outside. It looked like Cyan’s van, but that didn’t quite make sense.

  I parked behind a small outcropping of rock. Bree didn’t seem to notice me; it was as if I had already become a ghost.

  For a while I just waited. I saw her enter the building and I listened to the hum of a swamp cooler and the Santa Anas shivering the palm fronds into a whispered frenzy. Time passed; I’m not sure how much. I didn’t know what to do. What if she caught me? How would I explain myself?

  Finally I got out of my car, the back of my legs suctioning against the vinyl, and snuck around the side of the motel. Weeds brushed my shins and sand gritted my eyes. The air had a faint smell of hot metal.

  Through a cracked glass door I saw Bree lying naked, except for her boots, on a bed, her ice-blond hair yanked into a wispy ponytail, her legs spread and her fingers tucked almost shyly between them. Her breasts loomed large, pearled and perfect as the moon that night. Her head was back, her throat exposed. Her eyes looked unfocused. Drugged? There were silver chain bracelets on her neck and wrists. Over her, fully dressed, stood Cyan, taking photos.

  What I felt was a strange mix of jealousy, betrayal, desire, anger, confusion, and fear. Why wasn’t I there on that bed? Why wasn’t someone looking at me that way? Why didn’t Bree love me anymore? Was she high? How had I ever believed Cyan desired me? When did Cyan and Bree become close enough to make this happen? And then: Why was Cyan out here in the desert, in this place? Who was he? Besides Dash’s brother, the photographer, who was Cyan?

  What follows may make no sense. I’m not sure it happened this way, but somehow it all resulted in my current state. And that is what I want to tell, so I will try to recount the events that led up to it as best I can. I was sober, that I know. But I was also, after everything, less than sane.

  Cyan pulled something out of his back pocket, and before I really realized what it was (I had only recognized it by the expression in Bree’s eyes), I howled Bree’s name and threw my cell phone as hard as I could against the glass door. A panel shattered. Cyan whipped around. Bree got up and stumbled screaming through the doorframe and into the desert. Cyan moved toward me holding the thing I’d seen in his hand. A knife. He was evenly tanned; his head was freshly shaven, but not his face—a shadow of stubble defined rather than blurred the angles of his cheeks and chin—and he wore black jeans and a T-shirt and his boots, dusty with desert. The glistering look in his eyes reminded me of a man who has been interrupted just before he is about to come.

  “Catt?” he said.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed.

  In one motion Cyan grabbed me by the wrists, pinned my arms behind my back, and held me against him with the flat of the knife at my throat. I tried to turn to face him but I couldn’t move. For a moment I flashed on how he had stood over me, taking off my clothes. In the desert motel his voice had the same soft tone I had heard in it that night. But how different the words. “She’s not going to get far. The drugs will take effect and she’ll pass out. Then I’ll go get her. Right now, I have things to show you.”

  “Fucking let go of me. What the fuck are you doing?”
<
br />   “I’m going to show you something,” Cyan said. Beyond the pale motel.

  * * *

  There were many things Cyan made me see that night in the desert. As I screamed and kicked and spat, he tied my arms, stabbed a needle into my leg, and sat me in an old wheelchair. He wheeled me along through empty rooms with broken windows and sand on the floor. Dark rooms. There were tiny squee-ing bats on the ceiling of one dark, dark room. A desert rabbit in a cage. Bones of a coyote and the bones of cats and the bones of birds. The bones of a large dog.

  We went into another room. There were chains on the wall. I was already feeling weaker, less able to struggle. Cyan positioned me in front of a black-and-white picture of a woman wearing only a pair of garters and high heels. She was very tall and thin with angular, shadow-casting bones and rapacious eyes. I recognized Cyan’s photography. And his facial structure.

  “She used to make me take her picture.” Cyan sounded like a schoolteacher giving a lesson. “She said I’d be a great artist someday.”

  I knew who she was, although I had never seen her photograph; Dash didn’t want to think about his mother anymore. I survived one fucked-up woman …

  “She left him alone,” Cyan went on, as if he knew what I was thinking. “I made sure of that. But kids know what’s happening. Look at her.” He shook his head. I couldn’t read his expression in the dark. “She taught me how to do these,” he said.

  And then he showed me a series of black-and-white photographs of women.

  Strangely—or maybe not—they all looked as if they had already left their bodies. At least the souls had escaped, knowing there was no hope for the bodies. The bodies that were naked, except for their shoes, and bound. Their disembodied beauty was a blank and terrible thing.

  I recognized Mandy Merrill and Adrienne Banks from their smiling pictures in the paper and on TV. Except, in the images I’d seen, they looked fresh and alive. In these made-up, dead-eyed photographs Mandy wore black stiletto boots and a silver choker necklace; she had her hair dyed black and cropped close to her head so her eyes looked even larger in their blankness. Adrienne wore satin pumps and pearls and had her hair in curls. The third woman, with a gardenia behind her ear and high-wedge, ankle-strap sandals, was Michelle Babcock. The fourth young woman was Leila.

  Leila’s picture made her look like a tan, 1970s pinup with feathered hair. She was wearing one other item besides her metallic platforms. It was the necklace that said California. Just like the one I’d found. For a moment I thought, Did I kill her? Did I kill Leila? And I wanted to weep but I could not.

  All these young women had felt, or would have felt, like threats to me; I would not have invited them over for dinner if, like Michelle Babcock, they were my neighbors, running by in neon shorts. I might not even have learned their names. I would have avoided them, afraid Dash, or, later, if I’m honest, maybe even Cyan, might have chosen them over me.

  Cyan had chosen them over me.

  The last thing Cyan showed me was the industrial-size refrigerator in the motel basement. By then the drugs he had injected into my leg had fully kicked in and I couldn’t scream anymore in spite of what I saw. No one was there to hear me anyway. But what I saw should, by all rights, have dragged screams from the realm of the dead.

  The refrigerator hummed like Cyan’s pulse and the terrible light in his eyes. In the cold, cold box were what appeared to be a pair of arms wrapped in plastic, a pair of legs similarly wrapped, a pair of hips severed cleanly below the waist and at the upper thigh, and a torso with a pair of once-perfect breasts. I remembered seeing, as a teenager, a picture of a human head stored like meat.

  By the refrigerator’s greenish-white fluorescence, I saw Mandy reach out to me, though she had no arms. I saw Adrienne balanced on the stumps of her legs, holding Michelle like a baby. What was left of Leila tried to smile at me. I remembered the first time I had seen her smile, the guilelessness, the freckles. She had been a little girl not that long ago. They all had.

  My frozen heart cracked into shards. I turned and vomited on the floor, but I did not try to escape. It was the drugs and the knife and the fact that I was tied. But there was something else: maybe somehow I believed that if I gave myself to Cyan, my body and my soul, he would let Bree go.

  “I just want her to be safe,” I whispered. It took every effort to speak. My face was wet. I was crying but I hadn’t noticed it happening. “She has a son.”

  “She was going to be the face,” Cyan said. His voice was a sheet of clear plastic, wrapping my body, suffocating me. He didn’t seem to notice that I had thrown up. “She was beautiful. But you have a beautiful heart, Catt. I need your heart more than I need your friend’s pretty head.”

  “Please don’t hurt Bree, Cyan,” I managed.

  “This proves it.”

  Proves? What did he mean?

  “You have a perfect heart.”

  No, I didn’t. Not at all.

  “You are what I needed to make her,” said Cyan.

  I knew what he meant before he said it.

  “Her,” Cyan said.

  Perfection.

  Cyan told me many things that night. And I listened because I wanted to know, I wanted to try to understand what had happened. He told me how his alcoholic, heroin-addict mother had made him photograph her naked and how he did it in order to get her to leave Dash alone. Although Cyan didn’t say what he meant by this, I could guess. He said he began to enjoy taking pictures because it was the only time he felt in control around his mother. He told me how, when his beloved dog died, he began killing strays and collecting and photographing their body parts. How he became a successful photographer and grew to despise the “narcissists” he worked with. He took home runaways and prostitutes, promising them modeling careers. No one ever found out what he did; he became more bold. On a trip to LA (he hadn’t contacted Dash that time; we didn’t know Cyan was there) he had met an aspiring model named Mandy Merrill, suggested she cut off her hair, which she did, and photographed her at the abandoned motel he had purchased for shoots. And killed her. Then he met Adrienne Banks and killed her, too. And my neighbor, the one I hadn’t let myself get to know—Michelle Babcock. He’d seen her jogging in my neighborhood; she’d smiled and said hello. The night I’d heard the sound outside, he’d watched her from her bedroom window and then slipped back in before I came downstairs and found him. Later he had followed her, given her his business card, photographed her. Killed her.

  But Cyan wasn’t done.

  He’d photographed Leila the day before he stayed overnight at my place. She’d left her necklace behind and he’d put it in his pocket. It had fallen out. Later, he’d bought another one and asked her to meet him again to retrieve it and take a few more shots.

  When Cyan saw Leila’s necklace on my blog, Love Monster, which, he said, he’d followed obsessively since I’d first told him about it, he realized that he’d left the jewelry at my house and worried that I might know something, that it might incriminate him. So he’d come back on the night of my birthday to see if he could get the necklace back. Which he did. He’d brought the cookies in case he needed them, in case he needed to get me high. He’d taken the rest of the cookies with him when he left so no one would find any evidence of what he had done.

  The last victim Cyan had chosen was Bree. The woman he was making was almost complete. She would be his revenge upon his mother and the women who reminded him of her. The creature Cyan was making would be his masterpiece, his work of perfect art. She would be his ultimate possession.

  “Why Bree?” I asked. My voice felt too thick to fit through my mouth. Why any of them, but especially why Bree?

  “She’s just as vain, but smarter than the others. Older. Somewhat of an artist. And you love her. But she mistreated you.”

  I asked with my eyes, How did you know?

  “She contacted me on my Web site and said she wanted to do a photo session. But really I think it was also her way to get back at you someho
w. To come here and see me after she abandoned you like that. She told me what happened after the party.”

  My mind was trying to put the pieces together but they kept shattering into smaller fragments.

  “I never wanted to hurt you, Catt,” he went on. His voice had been calm, almost meditative, the whole time he spoke; now it vibrated in his throat. “You are different from them.”

  I found myself, sickly, wondering if he meant that I wasn’t as desirable. Still, even in these last hours when nothing but the sacredness of life, in any kind of body at all, should have mattered, I thought of this. If Cyan had known, he might have killed me long ago. I was just as shallow and vain as any of them, maybe much worse. I told him this. He shook his head. No.

  “What about Bree?” I said. “You won’t hurt her. She’s a mother. She needs to be with Skylar.”

  I could see him in my mind. As a newborn lying on Bree’s white sheepskin coat under the trees, gazing up with eyes like leaves. As a crawling baby with rings of fat around his legs, his chubby-cheeked, gummy grin revealing the delight of motion. Later, missing two front teeth, my charming rogue. At ten, asking me why I couldn’t stop smiling at him; it was because his ears, which he hadn’t quite grown into, were being folded forward by his baseball cap.

  Catt?

  Yes, Sky?

  The next person you go out with?

  Yes?

  Has to treat you really, really well.

  He had meant Scott, of course.

  “Please, Cyan.”

  “I’ll have to go out there and get her soon.” He sighed, squinting out through the broken glass door into the vast black. “She’ll have fallen.”

  “She didn’t see anything. She doesn’t know you did all this.”

  “She was never really your friend.”

  I tried to shake my head no, but it felt too heavy. She was scared, that’s all. You’re wrong.

  Later, there would be sirens, but I could not yet hear them. If I had, would I have fought harder against Cyan, spurred on by hope? Or would I have given in anyway, sacrificed myself? A part of me believed that if I gave of myself, gave all I had, Bree and Skylar would be safe.