Dead Lines

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  She swore it would be the last.

  Five dollars later, the cab slid up to the curb. Here we go again, Katie sighed. Guess it’s where the heart is, after all.

  Home.

  The ordeal proved to be quick and relatively painless. Meryl didn’t ask many questions, and for this Katie was very glad. She’d answered the door sporting freshly spotted bib overalls, a paint roller, and little else. “I’m busy,” she said; then, “C’mon in.”

  Katie smiled and lugged her stuff through the door. Meryl turned around and went back to work. Katie breathed a sigh of relief. It was hard enough to deal with the very personal decision of jettisoning her rightful claim to what few material possessions had found their way into Colin’s lair during their three rounds together—her stereo, her TV, her plants—without having to explain why she’d showed up with next to nothing. No one who hadn’t actually been around to witness their diseased relationship could really sense the taint that its terminal last gasps left on the things they’d shared. And certainly very few knew what a colossal prick Colin could be when he didn’t want to give something up.

  To hell with him. They were things, they could be replaced. She wasn’t about to go back and fight for stuff that would only serve to remind her of him. It was as if his scent was forever upon anything he touched. To hell with it.

  Besides, Meryl seemed to have the necessities covered. Looked like a lot of the boxes she’d seen turned out to be stuff coming in. In fact, it looked like Meryl had been pretty damned busy. The place was transformed from the last time Katie had seen it. There were plants now, hanging in the windows and sitting on the sills. They weren’t hers, but it helped. In the middle of the living room was a big floppy couch and some chairs, plus a color TV and a black steel shelf that housed a stereo system that put hers to shame. The Talking Heads were playing at mondo volume; David Byrne’s tremulous voice rode over the band:

  “Home—is where I wanna be,

  pick me up and turn me round

  I feel numb—burn with a weak heart

  (So I) guess I must be having fun…”

  “Whatcha up to?” Katie asked, gesturing to the back wall, which was half-coated in an explosion of bright pastel colors. A half-dozen cans of acrylic paint lay open on a canvas drop cloth.

  “My father wanted to hire painters,” Meryl replied. She dipped her roller in a tray. “But I said fuck em. I want to do this my way.”

  She rolled a neat stroke of violet onto the wall, pushing the color right up to the corner, where it abutted a swath of mandarin orange. Other colors—greens, yellows, purples, blues—graced other parts of the shelves, the pantry, the whole back wall. It was as though no surface could match any adjoining surface, an unwritten rule in the World According to Meryl.

  And strangely enough, it worked. Meryl had great color sense; though there was no logic to speak of beyond that one golden rule, it appeared unified, complete. It made the whole end of the room come to life, a jumbled kaleidoscope of vibrant kinetic planes.

  Meryl reached up on tiptoe with her roller, the stretch exposing a paint-speckled glimpse of her right breast. She worked with an almost obsessive intensity, covering the walls in quick, deft strokes. Katie watched for a moment, admiring her control. Meryl didn’t talk much.

  “Can I do anything?” Katie asked. She was antsy from wanting to form some social bonding with this complete stranger. The music boomed its bouncy, naive melody:

  “the less we say about it the better

  make it up as we go along

  feet on the ground

  head in the sky

  it’s OK I know nothing’s wrong…”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry,” Meryl said. “I space out sometimes. There’s a ladder around here somewhere that I sure could use.”

  “Coming right up,” Katie burbled. On turning away she felt foolish, like she was trying too hard. She should just chill out, not try to buddy-buddy it up so badly. Meryl wasn’t aloof so much as neutral. Some people don’t warm instantly. She reminded herself not to push it.

  The ladder was in the back of her room, where a lot of the excess boxes had also been shoved. She tried not to view this as anything but an accident of convenience. She pushed her way through the cardboard obstacle course, thinking it’s okay, it don’t mean a thing, don’t be so damned paranoid.

  The ladder was leaning against the wall, inert. By the time she reached it she had rallied, conjuring up scenarios of handy helpfulness that would make them feel more like a team, make this place feel like a home and not some well-appointed way station.

  She grabbed the ladder and felt a sharp stab, an almost static shock of pain.

  “Ow! Shit…” she hissed, and pulled her hand back.

  Blood flecked back and spotted her shirt. “What the hell?” She held her hand up.

  She was bleeding from a small but nasty slice across the center of her left palm. “Oh, great,” she bitched. “What next? Tetanus? Rabies?” It didn’t look like a nail wound. A mean splinter, maybe. A rabid termite. She examined the wood for the offending protrusion.

  A curved, thin shard of glass was embedded in the wood, one edge cleaving through the grain like the fin of a shark. What the hell is that doing there?

  She left the ladder where it lay and went out to the bathroom.

  “Jesus, what happened?” Meryl asked when she saw the blood, which was etching thin, trickling grooves across the pale skin of Katie’s wrist. “Are you okay?”

  Katie held it out for inspection. “I think so. Goddamned sliver of glass on the ladder.”

  “Yeah, I found a bunch more sweeping under the radiator in the living room.” There was no hint of apology in her voice; the lack of it irked Katie just a little. “Was it real thin?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Looks like somebody blew up a video monitor or something.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Who knows? I heard this used to be a studio. Maybe it was a performance piece.” Meryl looked at the floor. “You’d better get cleaned up. You’re dripping.”

  Katie looked down; droplets of blood were plopping down to spatter the floor, the drop cloth, the tray of violet pastel. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Katie moaned.

  “There’s some iodine and peroxide in the medicine chest,” Meryl said, as she turned and made for Katie’s room. “I’ll get the ladder.”

  Katie watched her go, wondering if she could ever feel close to such a person. Then she walked up the stairs to the bathroom, closed the door, ministered to her wound, and then sat on the toilet and cried, very quietly, for the next five minutes.

  The music drifted through the door, its obscenely cheerful beat bopping along:

  “I’m just an animal looking for a home share the same space for a minute or two and you love me till my heart stops love me till I’m dead…”

  When she came back out, the song was over. The tape flipped automatically; another tune took its place. Meryl was up on the ladder, painting to beat the band. Katie went back into her room. Blood and pastels covered the wall.

  And Katie unpacked her bags.

  6

  CARDBOARD CATHEDRAL

  At ten o’clock that evening, Meryl discovered the cardboard cathedral.

  She had been working tirelessly since the early morning hours, but that energy was all but petered-out now. By the time she actually wandered into her bedroom, she was running on fumes and sheer stubbornness; and when she saw the pile of boxes and crates and garment bags, she threw up her arms and moaned to the heavens, “Uh-uh. No way, Jose. Hasta mahana.”

  Still, she couldn’t get past the fact that, though her body was fatigued to the point of collapse, her mind was wide awake and a-rarin’ to go. Surely there had to be something to do that didn’t involve loading, unloading, lifting, setting down, painting, cleaning, or rearranging clutter.

  “Okay,” she said to the bedroom, but mostly to herself. “What options does that leave me with?” Because she was
not a delusional schizophrenic—at least not yet—she answered the question within the solitude of her own mind.

  Food? Nah. She’d nibbled a bit through the course of the day, but she was really too amped for a sit-down meal. Drink? Well, she was already doing that: a pint of Seagram’s had spent most of the day making its leisurely way into her system, buffered by the tonic of the same name. Drinking, at this point, wasn’t an event; it was an ongoing process.

  TV? No way. Even with the cable turned on, her mind was too restless to sit still for that dreck. Read a book? Ha! That was a good one. Unless it was telling the story of her life, she doubted very seriously that it could capture her attention. Maybe write? That was a double har-har. Until she got this place straightened out, no way could she concentrate on tiny matters like the soul.

  That left taking a walk, which she was too tired to even consider, or talking to Katie, which was doubly likewise. Whatever had happened to her surprise instant roommate, Meryl didn’t especially want to know right now. It gave every appearance of being depressing as hell. Not exactly what the doctor ordered.

  “How about just standing here, talking to yourself?” she inquired. “Might be fun. But I doubt it. Nah.” With all of her options gone, it seemed the only thing left was to disperse into gas.

  And that was when she took a good look at the wooden contraption that was holding the loft bed aloft.

  “Hmmm,” she said, appraising the structure, weighing the value of keeping it up against the pain of tearing it down. On the downside, it ate most of the room: a sprawling confluence of drywall and two-by-fours, held together by bolts as thick as a big man’s thumb and apparently anchored right through the wall and into the steel skeleton of the building itself. Whoever put this thing up wasn’t fucking around, and that was a fact.

  That figured heavily on the upside, as did the fact that it was well designed. The sleeping area was high and wide, with a sturdy railing guarding the two open sides and enough headroom that she could move freely without stooping, and could thus afford the ultimate luxury of privacy in her room without having to shut the door.

  Meryl hopped down off the ladder and peeked inside the structure, which she’d only given cursory examination prior to her father’s departure. Yeah, this was okay. Plenty of storage underneath. This was great. She wandered around the side. There was a door there, a rubber-lipped, hollow-core job held shut by a brass-plated doorknob. She twisted the knob and gave it a yank. The rubber lip hissed across the floor.

  The door opened.

  Inside was a room no bigger than a walk-in closet. A wide shelf ran waist-high around the interior. It was cluttered with shallow, crusty plastic pans and cast-off detritus. A faintly pungent chemical taint hung in the air. A tiny utility sink sat tucked into one corner, its single rusty faucet going drip… drip… drip. A light fixture hung on one wall, a dull red sixty-watt bulb poking darkly from the socket. Its purpose was unmistakably, wonderfully apparent.

  It was a darkroom.

  “Oh, this is perfect,” she whispered to herself. “This is too much.” Dreams of shooting the city danced in her head. This place was, she realized, a score and a half. Maybe Dad wasn’t so out to lunch after all; at least sometimes. She was struck by a fleeting impulse toward gratitude. It passed.

  But she was still in a terrific mood, thrilled by the discovery that vaporization wasn’t her only option after all. What she had, instead, was the chance to do some Big City spelunking. What mysteries might she uncover, here in the Tomb of Forgotten Images? Discarded shots for toothpaste ads, perhaps? Nudie pictures of would-be models or aspiring stars of stage and screen?

  Only one way to find out.

  It took a moment to find the light switch. Once found, it did not help matters one whole hell of a lot. The red light brought some things into focus, but only served to deepen the bulk of the remaining shadow. She shrugged, wished idly for a flashlight, and then started to snoop around by hand.

  Her excitement turned fairly rapidly into yawning disappointment. Whoever the previous tenant had been, he or she had taken all of the good stuff. The most promising item was the plastic trash can, which was back in the corner behind the sink. Still, it appeared to be about half-full; the eternal optimist in her, waxing prophetic-like.

  “Welly-well,” she murmured, “what do we have here?”

  It was yet another in the long list of personality traits that her father found utterly incomprehensible. She could hear the mental admonishment echoing—what!?!! A Daly picking through garbage!!?!!—down the corridors of her mind.

  Fuck it. Meryl refused to feel shame. She was by no means a pack rat; hell, she eschewed most of the opulent abundance her family had heaped on her by the shovelful, living a Spartan existence by comparison. It was just that there was something mysterious and wonderful lurking in the cast-off and forgotten relics of other people’s lives. She found secrets there. Sometimes, she found magic.

  Kinda like the artist she met on Broadway one day, who had collected little bits of junk, little textures and patterns and shapes, and made the most amazing jewelry out of it: earrings and necklaces and bracelets and pendants. All unique. All from seeing something beautiful in things everyone else had simply ignored. It was a gift.

  She peered into the can. Looked clean enough, mostly throwaways of prints and stuff. Her rule was, if it didn’t ooze, it was worth a cruise. She pulled a few out. The first two were deservedly forgettable: wrong paper, bad exposures, poorly cropped. Garbage.

  The third one, though, was kinda cool. It was a big print, very obviously shot in the apartment, in front of those big arched windows. It was a portrait of someone, and judging from the light and the long shadows it was taken either very early or very late in the day. He was in three-quarter profile, one leg up on the ledge, half-sitting on the windowsill. She couldn’t see his features clearly— partly the shadows, partly the fact that whoever had taken it had set the shutter speed too long, or maybe the film wasn’t fast enough, or maybe they were just going for an artsy effect. She had no way of knowing for sure. They’d obviously used a tripod, because the apartment itself was super clear. But the light looked like it was crawling across the floor, and the guy in the portrait…

  He was a blur: one arm waving like a hummingbird, dark hair swept back to reveal the shadow-pits where his eyes belonged. The rest of his face was indistinct; a bit of mouth in motion, the hint of a nose line. But those eyes… there was something about the way those two smudges of silver nitrate stared out at the world beyond the curling borders of the photo paper that intrigued her. Something intimate, something compelling and tragic and boundlessly mysterious.

  Meryl liked it. There was no way in hell she’d ever know who this guy was. It was like having a portrait of a ghost.

  “Yep,” she decided. “It’s a keeper.” She’d bop down to Basics in the morning and pick up a box frame; she could hang it on the same wall it had been shot against. There was a nice bit of poetry in that. Yep, she was really starting to like this place.

  Finding the keeper had derailed her junk hunt somewhat; she suddenly became fixed with the idea of finding something heavy to flatten it out with.

  And that was when she spotted the cardboard cathedral.

  It was, in feet, merely a cardboard box, pretty scrupulously sealed up with silver duct tape and jammed into a niche that the trash had concealed. Indeed, if it weren’t for the red glint off the silver, she wouldn’t have spotted it at all. It appeared as though someone had shoved it there and forgotten all about it. On closer inspection, she could see why. It was pretty forgettable-looking.

  But it also looked like it would do the trick, flattening-wise, and it sure wasn’t going anywhere. Alright, she thought. Now we’re cookin’. She grabbed a paper towel, moistened it in the sink, and swabbed the back of the print. She laid it face-down on the counter on another paper towel. Then she reached under the counter, hooked her fingers through the side flap of the box, and gave it a yank. It
was a heavy sucker, roughly the size of a file cabinet drawer. So much the better. Something was written in big black letters on one side, but she couldn’t read it in the absence of legitimate light. Probably THIS SIDE UP or HANDLE WITH CARE, or some other message of earth-shaking import.

  It wasn’t until she’d actually maneuvered the damn thing onto the picture—carefully, carefully, not wanting to crack or bend or tear her prize—that she saw how close her flippancy had actually come.

  The side of the box said DO NOT OPEN ‘TIL DOOMSDAY.

  “Huh,” she said. Now there was something you didn’t see every day. It definitely got her curiosity going. Perhaps the rest of the goodies in the garbage can could wait.

  She thought about the heft of the thing, the way its weight had shifted. Not books, or any single large object: no solid clunk or thud within. Her guess was paper. A lot of paper. More photographs? Maybe. Or maybe magazines.

  But why had the thing been left behind? And why the cryptic witticism, if witticism it was?

  Right, she thought. This is deadly serious. I’ve just stumbled onto Pandora’s Cardboard Box.

  And she knew what that meant.

  The first thing she had to do was get her X-Acto knife. It was out in the main room somewhere. One simply did not open the Doomsday Box without the Ceremonial X-Acto Dagger. To do otherwise was heresy.

  Meryl darted out of the darkroom, trusting that the box wouldn’t crawl back into the corner while she was gone. Her own belongings, which held no mysteries, warranted nary a second glance. She had a big ol’ smile on her face as she raced into the main room and began her holy quest.