The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “Cole,” I said.

  “Gimm.”

  Already smoking a Parliament, she pulled over one of the plastic ashtrays and blew a smoke ring my way before tapping out her ash. I puckered and kissed the center of the smoke as it melted across my face. Menthol and wet fabric and a whiff of body odor, maybe from the elderly bodies she’d handled and washed and wiped through the day at the assisted-living center. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she seemed drowsy tonight, lighting a second cigarette before finishing her first, the two smoldering together in the ashtray. Vicodin, I guessed—easy to know when she was using.

  “I need a manhattan,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Long day,” she said, her voice graced with that musical accent. I’d learned that she’d moved from Mombasa when she was a teenager.

  “I’ve got your drinks tonight,” I said.

  “Ah, your SSI check must have cleared,” she said. “Largesse.”

  I raised my glass. “To life in the welfare state,” I said, but after a pause, “I remember what today is—”

  “April sixteenth.”

  “April sixteenth,” I said.

  Her husband had passed away from thyroid cancer, I knew, ten years ago today, too early for the cure. I didn’t know much about him, a guy named Jared. They’d married young, and I had the impression her marriage to Jared had been troubled from the start. He had abused her—she told me once she’d suffered a broken jaw, that he had hit her. I knew they’d been estranged for a number of years before he died. Nicole and I had grown close these past few months, and I felt like she poured her life into me, like I was her vessel. She talked freely about her painful past, a hard life, chasing drugs after her husband died, waking up in strange rooms with men, trading favors for stamp bags. Her life wasn’t as wild now, age had mellowed her, but she still used, still drank, still tried to erase the ache that coiled within her.

  “I almost forgot,” she said, digging through her purse, drawing five scratch-off lottery cards from a side pocket. She fanned them out, slid them to me. “I didn’t win shit with mine,” she said. Pills mixed with liquor—she was woozy, moved like her bones were liquefying. Tonight might end like some of our other nights together when she was using—pushing her to drink, pushing her to more pills if she had them. Sometimes she’d pass out and I’d get her to my apartment next door, stay up with her to make sure her breathing didn’t stop—but other nights the pills and liquor just made her lose herself, stripped the shell from her, and I’d turn off the apartment lights and listen to her stream of chatter. Those nights I’d lead our conversations, tell her I wanted to hear about old loves, just two girls talking, and she’d talk about her dead husband and affairs she’d had and her regrets over a lover who had died. Mursult, I’d think, and ask for more, but she would mix her stories of dead lovers with violent nightmares, carry on conversations without me as if she could hear the dead speaking to her from a great distance until she slipped under.

  She finished her manhattan, called for a second. I flipped through the lottery cards, the Gold Mine. I scraped silver crud from icons of miners’ tools but came up a bust.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t scratch them all at once,” said Nicole.

  May’rz had always been a bar for regulars but had been adopted by frackers. Southerners, mostly, coming through southwestern Pennsylvania to tap the shale. Truckers and roughnecks, a scourge that would pass once this area was depleted. They filled May’rz almost every night now, turning the dive rowdy. A group of men played pool, talking loopholes in the dumping laws. They were boisterous and drank too much, their southern twang somehow a more foreign sound than even Nicole’s Kenyan lilt. Nicole was known here, had been coming to May’rz since the early nineties at least—the bar about a half-hour walk from her apartment over at Castle Tower and within walking distance of her job at the Donnell House. Two decades, the same routine, and I was part of her routine now, too. The bartenders called us “Cole and Court,” like we were a set, or “The Odd Couple,” and eventually we spent some time together outside of May’rz, on weekends, visiting each other’s apartment and taking quick road trips in Nicole’s Honda, usually up to Pittsburgh to pick through the record stores, Nicole an eclectic collector of chansons and medieval polyphony and dissonant classical music, strange things she said reminded her of childhood.

  She swirled the ice in her drink. Prone to tunnel vision tonight, I noticed—usually Nicole was erratic when she was using, but tonight she was turned inward.

  “They’re having a memorial service for Jared,” she said. “Out on their property. They want me to come out, but I haven’t seen those people in ages.”

  “What people?”

  “My in-laws,” said Nicole. “Jared’s mother, Miss Ashleigh. She has a large property, wants to have the family over—”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  Nicole shrugged, took a drag from one of her cigarettes. She had told me about her husband’s suffering, the cancer, how he’d begged her back following his diagnosis, how she’d nursed him until he died. His family was close-knit, his cousins or close friends of his, and they were an unhealthy influence on Nicole. She used heavily after the last time she saw them, she said, a spiral that had flattened out only after some time had passed, but the damage was done, and she could never quite kick the heroin.

  “For a few days, what could come of it?” I asked.

  “I could tell you,” said Nicole, gazing at the television. KDKA teased their eleven-o’clock news—a family killed, a lethal crash on 65, a pit bull burned alive. “I could tell you some things . . .”

  The pills were affecting her—she seemed like she was dissolving. Her gestures were loose, and she drank her manhattan in gulps. “So tell me,” I said, trying to make myself seem hollow for her, like anything she’d want to unburden would fit inside. She thought I was simple, I knew that—I helped her feel that way, that I was good for a laugh and to talk shit about the men at the bar but wasn’t someone with greater designs, that talking to me was almost like talking with an empty room. “Cole,” I said.

  “I fucked a friend of his, I didn’t care,” she said. “I wanted to hurt him.”

  I tried to focus through my own wash of alcohol, the glare of the television, a rise of voices around the pool table, Tim McGraw on the jukebox. I waved at Bex for another round. “Who was the guy?”

  “Patty,” said Nicole. “Patrick,” taking another drink. “He was married, so we met in hotels—in a cabin he used to rent. He would fuck me, then take pictures so I could mail them to my husband, so he would know I was with someone else. Jared would drift in and out of my life, bring all his shit with him. I wanted to hurt him.”

  Patrick Mursult, I thought, a rise of heat through my neck. Imagining Mursult and Nicole’s adultery, Nicole posing for him in the cabin at Blackwater and mailing photographs to her husband like she was sending packets of poison.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Nicole gestured at the TV. “It was on the news,” she said, her eyes welling. She wiped away tears, seemed nauseous—some memory passed over her, and she shook her head.

  “Did your husband kill him?” I asked.

  “Jared was a coward,” said Nicole, vacant, delayed, the liquor pushing her deeper. “I fell in love with him because he had this tattoo, and I was just seventeen when I met him, and that tattoo was all it took to impress me, this eagle on his chest. He said he liked my jacket. He was my worst mistake.”

  “Jesus, Cole. What are you telling me? Did your husband kill someone?”

  “His friends did, our friends—Cobb did, and Karl,” said Nicole. “And after, he would call every night and threaten me, said he would kill me for what I did to him, or if I said anything. He ruined everything about me, he took everything good and ruined it—I wish I would have died when I was seventeen instead of living this hell.”

  “Who are these guys?” I
asked her. “Karl and Cobb? You never mentioned them before. They were friends of yours.”

  “That was a long time ago,” said Nicole, finishing her manhattan. She chewed the ice.

  “I’ll go with you to the memorial service,” I said, wondering who would gather at a service for her husband. A man named Cobb and a man named Karl had killed Patrick Mursult, and Nicole’s husband, Jared, was involved somehow, too. In this IFT Jared had died of thyroid cancer in 2006, but he would still be alive in 1997. I can find him. “Take me with you.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Nicole. “These people—”

  “You shouldn’t go alone,” I said. “After what you just told me? I can’t let you go alone. Christ, Nicole. I’ll come with you. It will be all right. You need a friend with you.”

  “I guess so, maybe,” she said. “Let me think about it. I guess I don’t want to be alone.”

  Nicole excused herself to the bathroom, and I ordered us another round. I wasn’t a friend, I was a manipulation, I was a lie, but every truth here was a lie. I was buzzing, three suspects for the Mursult deaths. I texted Nestor, let him know about the weekend, that I wouldn’t be around. COME OVER TONIGHT, he wrote back, but I texted, IT’S LATE, and he replied, TOMORROW.

  “Ah, hell,” said Bex.

  Nicole returning from the bathroom, stumbling. She bumped into someone and almost sprawled.

  “Hold on a sec,” I said. “Bex, go ahead and swipe my card. I’ve got to get her out of here.”

  A twenty on the bar, a tip. I looped Nicole’s purse over my shoulder. “Come on, Cole,” I said. “We’re going up to my place.”

  Her arm draped over my shoulders. Nicole just a slip, like she was made of air. “You’ll be all right,” I said, “you’re just drunk, that’s all. We’re getting you home.”

  “You need help?” asked Bex.

  “We’ll manage,” I said. “She can still walk,” knowing how ridiculous we looked. May’rz hadn’t been rollicking, but outside, the night was silent. Rain fell, an icy haze. I tested the sidewalk to see if it was frozen before trusting my fake foot. We made our way up the flight of stairs to my room, spotting her as we climbed. 3-B, I unlocked the dead bolt. “Just lie on the couch.”

  She sagged to the futon, coughing, her legs hanging over one of the armrests. A gurgling belch—I smelled the tang of boozy vomit and checked her over. She had messed her shirt, her cardigan. I took off her shoes, her soiled clothes. Her breasts were small, her body emaciated, her arms pocked with track marks. She wore her serpent bracelet and a necklace I first thought was a vivid sapphire because of its brilliance, but when I looked closely, I saw the iridescent blue was actually the petal of some exquisite flower embedded in resin. The necklace was stunning, the shade of blue unreal. I dressed her in one of my sweaters, covered her with a blanket, the blue of the flower petal such a strange blue, I thought, turning out the apartment lights, such a breathtaking blue, unlike any shade I’d ever seen. I sat near her, on the floor. Nicole’s fingers touched my head, and I realized she was petting me, almost, running her fingers absently through my hair.

  “You want anything?” I asked, but Nicole had closed her eyes. Her mouth hung open, and soon she snored lightly, like a purring cat.

  I left the bedroom door open a crack to hear if she stirred and slid my briefcase from the closet floor, hoisting it to the bed. Printouts I’d made from the library the previous weeks, articles about the CJIS attack, about Marian Mursult. I glanced at a poster that had been distributed in the years before Marian was found, a HAVE YOU SEEN ME? poster created by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. There were other folders, information about Patrick Mursult. I pulled my copies of the Polaroids we’d found at Elric Fleece’s house, in the duffel—close-up photographs of a black woman’s thighs, breasts, stomach, feet. Nicole was healthier then, nineteen years ago, her body less worn.

  Nicole believed that Patrick Mursult had been killed out of jealousy, but Patrick Mursult hadn’t been the only victim—his entire family had been killed. Nicole’s story had omissions; time had made her too innocent. Her version of the past was the only version here, but there must be something more. I could imagine a man shooting another man over an affair, ambushing the adulterer at his love nest at the Blackwater Lodge, but I couldn’t make the leap into believing that Nicole’s husband or his friends had butchered Mursult’s entire family over an affair, that they had taken Marian Mursult to the woods. A failure of imagination maybe, an inability to assume the utter worst of people, but someone had killed a woman and two children with an ax and then killed a seventeen-year-old girl. I couldn’t imagine.

  I looked out the bedroom windows. A snow squall had swept through, dusting the streets a glistening white like crystallized sugar. I took off my sleet-damp sweatshirt, draped it over the shower-curtain rod to drip dry, then removed my prosthesis and plugged the knee-joint battery into an outlet to charge. Patty, Nicole had said. Patrick. I wondered if his killers were still alive in this IFT. It would have been twenty years ago that they had found Mursult in the Blackwater Lodge and executed him. I remembered the pitch-darkness of those cabins at night, stars and moonlight choked out by pines. I imagined the knock at the door, the interrupted silence, and it occurred to me that Patrick Mursult might have known his killers. Nicole had confessed that she had wanted to hurt her husband when she slept with Patrick, that Patrick was a friend of his. Maybe Mursult knew his killers when they arrived in the night, and maybe they had told him that they’d killed his family, that they’d killed his oldest daughter and left her in the gorge not far from the cabin where they would leave his body, that only a few miles would separate him from his daughter.

  I went back to the briefcase and pulled Libra’s crew list. I found his name: Jared Bietak—Machinist’s Mate, Engineering Laboratory Technician. Nicole’s husband had been a sailor on Libra, had known Mursult because they’d served together. As the ELT he would have worked with the B-L drive, would have been the engine-room supervisor. Fleece would have reported to him. Heart pounding, I found Cobb, Charles—Special Warfare Operator, another SEAL. And there was a Karl Hyldekrugger—the CEL-NAV, the ship’s celestial navigator. They were all sailors on Libra. Mursult wasn’t the only MIA surfacing. Libra had returned, or it had never launched. Where was the rest of the crew? These men knew one another, they all knew of Mursult’s affair with Nicole. If I could track them down in terra firma, I might find Marian.

  Nicole’s breath occasionally hitched—she’d wheeze and roll over. I brought down a comforter to sleep on the floor next to her and sat up through the night when her sleep was disturbed. Staring at the ceiling much of the night, imagining my sight could pierce every impediment, through the ceiling and the apartment above, through the cover of rain clouds, straight into the night sky, the stars. I tried to imagine that love triangle, Nicole and Jared, Patrick Mursult, but grew distracted by the shadows of the rain, my mind wandering to Fleece, to the tree of bones in the mirrored room, to the ship built of nails that will carry the dead. Missing fingernails. Whoever had killed Mursult’s family had taken their fingernails. Nicole gasped, sounded like she’d swallowed a spurt of vomit before rolling over and breathing again. What would happen if Nicole actually were to die? No one would find her body until the landlord came through. If Nicole were to die during the night, I would pack everything and walk out the front door without turning back, return to terra firma, let this possibility blink.

  FOUR

  Buick ran from the mudroom to meet me when I pulled down Nestor’s drive, to get his ears rubbed and sniff my tires before scampering through the lawn. Nestor came out onto the front porch, said, “There you are,” and kissed me as I came up the front steps. He offered me a record in a brown paper sleeve.

  “What’s this?” I asked him. The last time I saw him, he’d wanted to know how I filled my time when we weren’t together, and I’d said my favorite thing in the world was to lie in bed and listen to
music.

  “Just take a look,” said Nestor. “Let yourself be surprised.”

  A cross of skulls, Nirvana’s Leadbelly.

  “I thought you might like this one,” he said. “You don’t have it, do you?”

  “Not on vinyl,” I told him. “Good choice, I love it.”

  “I wanted to give you something from ’97, when we met,” said Nestor. “The first time we met. This had just come out.”

  “I used to have a Nirvana T-shirt, back in college. The one with the transparent angel, all the anatomy. I tore off the sleeves, made a tank top out of it.”

  “I used to do the same thing with my shirts,” he said, lighting a cigarette. Nestor had cleaned up for me, shaved off the beard—he looked years younger without the scruff. “See, if we were friends back then, we could have borrowed each other’s clothes.”

  “I don’t think mine would have fit you.”

  A breath of summer had pushed through, melting the glaze of snow from the other night, turning the ground muddy. We passed the afternoon in wooden rockers, pulling chilled Yuengling bottles from a cooler, watching Buick chase butterflies. We played “In the Pines” loud enough to hear his living-room speakers out in the yard.

  Steaks and zucchini from the grill for dinner, and after we washed dishes, we took a walk around his property, an expanse of field that stretched for close to seven acres before a strip of woods marked the start of the neighbor’s farm. Buick trotted along without a leash, running out through the longer grass before loping back. Nestor and I held hands intermittently, and when I clutched him for balance on the uneven ground, he didn’t let go. We reached our usual turning point, out near a ruined Ryder truck, something the previous owners had abandoned in the field. The neighbor’s barns were newer, bright red corrugated metal lit with floodlights. Buick barked at the air, probably catching scent of the neighbor’s shepherds.