The Visible Filth

by Nathan Ballingrud

  He put out his hand. “Give it to me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Please. Please, Carrie. Give it to me. I’m going to give it to the police, like I should have done last night.”

  “No you won’t.” She set it on the end table, and left him to fetch it himself. “People look so normal on the outside,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Inside it’s all just worms.”

  He strode toward the end table and snatched up the phone before she could change her mind. “I don’t understand you,” he said.

  She arose from the couch and disappeared into the bedroom, emerging a while later dressed for the day.

  “Have a good night at work,” she said.

  “Just like that?”

  “Give up the phone tonight. Then we’ll talk.” With that, she was gone.

  He fell onto the couch, wanting to be angry. She had no right to give him an ultimatum. He’s the one who found the damn thing, he’s the one who saw the pictures and tried to protect her from them, he’s the one who’d had to listen to that awful voice after she insisted he make the call. The more he thought about it all, the more righteous he felt.

  But he still couldn’t get angry.

  He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to feel. The spikes of fear he’d experienced earlier always seemed to retreat to a low-grade anxiety during the day. He couldn’t bring himself to believe in what he was seeing. This had to be some kind of elaborate joke, or maybe one of those bizarre role-playing games, and he’d been caught up in it. If anything, he was less inclined to turn the phone over to the police for fear of being laughed at.

  He took the opportunity to check her computer in the office room, personal space be damned. He booted it up and toggled her history. Some .edu sites, links to papers on T.S. Eliot, a few celebrity gossip sites, a lengthy spell of window shopping at Amazon. Somewhere in that time the weight of what she’d seen shifted her focus; what started as a perusal of furniture and clothing ending with a browse through the true crime section, followed by books on the occult. There were links to a few sites after that, but not many – ancient, horribly designed sites about Satanism and witchcraft, hosted on long-defunct platforms with rudimentary interfaces. It was as though she’d been engaging in a geological dig through the strata of the internet’s past. From there she seemed to have spent considerable time looking into something called The Second Translation of Wounds. The last recorded site visit was time-stamped 11:17. Several hours before he arrived home.

  After that, there was no record of her activity. It was as though she’d shut the computer off. Or – he thought, despite his efforts at rationalization – cracked through the lowest stratum to something else.

  What had she been looking at?

  What did she find?

  He shut the computer down. The whole thing made him feel sick. He went into the kitchen and made himself a screwdriver. Two or three more of those and he’d be able to push the whole thing out of his mind.

  THE NIGHT WAS surprisingly busy, and at first he was able to lose himself in the tide of work. Most of what he termed the Rosie’s Regulars made an appearance: Old Willard, the raisin-faced ex-POW from the Korean War, smiling through his sublimated rage and throwing nasty remarks at tough guys fifty years his junior; Naked Mary, the two hundred and thirty pound exhibitionist who was good for two or three appearances a month and always concluded her stay with a pool game played in the nude; Scotty, the oyster-shucker from down in the Quarter who sang Frank Sinatra tunes at the top of his lungs, even though he’d been living under the aegis of the Jim Crow laws when most of those songs had been popular; along with the ordinary flotsam of an ordinary night, a number of which Will counted among his friends – at least as far as a word like that stretched when they only came to see you for the booze.

  Even the roaches were at a low ebb, as the bar had been visited by an exterminator earlier in the day. He found nearly a dozen of them on their backs, their legs moving lethargically, as though they’d been caught sweetly dreaming.

  But for the absence of Alicia, it was shaping up to be a banner night at Rosie’s.

  Derek and his partner showed up too, drifting to their usual haunt at the pool table. Will felt the weight of the yellow phone in his pocket. He tried to make eye contact with Derek, but his attention was focused elsewhere. Later, then. The phone wasn’t going anywhere.

  Around ten-thirty, a sourness began to set in. Alicia’s continued absence started to feel like an indictment. The bar was full, the jukebox was rattling on its feet, the vibe was good, but the joy he’d been taking in the work seeped away, and his mind disengaged. She was blowing him off. He remembered their kiss with a beautiful, unkind clarity. He needed her to be here so he could apologize to her, so he could be reassured by her, and so he could impress upon her with nothing more than the force of his absolute conviction that the love he bore her was the purest thing he had ever felt.

  Perhaps it was because of this distraction that he did not immediately recognize the clean-cut kid leaning across the bar at him, his arms folded beneath him and an ugly half-grin climbing up one side of his perfect face. He looked at the kid, waiting for him to place his order, some pugilistic impulse refusing to utter the first syllable in the exchange. If the kid was too cool to speak, he could fucking go without.

  And then he recognized him. His face must have betrayed him, because the kid gave him the full-wattage smile, the one that charmed the girls right out of their clothes, like snakes from their baskets. “Took you a minute,” he said.

  Will looked behind him for the other kids, the ones too young to come up and order for themselves. The bar was crowded, but he didn’t see them. The table in the corner, where they’d roosted last time, was empty.

  “What can I do for you,” Will said, trying to play down his momentary shock. Act like he was any normal customer.

  “Well, I’m not going to stay long – I forgot my ID.” He patted his pockets with a sad smile. “I just wanted to let you know we left you a little present.”

  The world blurred for a moment. He thought of Carrie, alone at home, staring into her computer screen. “Leave her alone,” he said. He sounded weak; like a scared little kid.

  The other guy smiled and shook his head. “Your girlfriend? Nice tits, butch haircut? No, dude, I’m not talking about her. Hey, you got a thing for dykes or something?”

  Will couldn’t believe he was saying this to him. In his bar, of all places. Surrounded by his friends. The absolute arrogance of the move was enough to render him breathless. He had a vague sense of people waiting for his attention down the bar. They could keep waiting. “You need to get the fuck out of here right now,” he said, “before something bad happens to you.”

  He realized that this was the best chance he’d have to turn the phone over to Derek. Everybody was right here. He could settle it all right now. But the thought of surrendering the phone made him feel ill. A distant alarm sounded from some deep chamber in his brain as he realized this, but he buried it and focused on the moment.

  The kid held up his hands in mock surrender. “No problem, man, no problem.”

  “Who are you people, anyway?”

  He seemed to consider this a moment, and then leaned in over the bar, gesturing Will closer. Against his better judgment, he leaned in too.

  “The truth?” he said. “We’re nothing but a nice suit of clothes, waiting for somebody to put us on.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Open your present,” he said, and turned to push his way through the crowd. In moments, he was gone.

  Will sent Carrie a quick text, and she replied that she was fine. So he continued to work, agitated and jumpy. Fortunately, most of the customers were too buzzed by this point to notice.

  When Alicia finally strolled in with Jeffrey, well past eleven, Will felt a thrill of relief. It seemed she was borne in by a tide of inevitable movement, that the slow engine of fa
te was finally beginning to turn. They took their positions at the end of the bar and turned in to each other, deep in conversation. He poured their drinks and set them down; no exchange of words was necessary. They were functions of an algorithm.

  He wouldn’t try to wedge himself into their conversation. Usually he was welcomed into it, but tonight they barely gave him notice. That was all right. What he had to say to Alicia would take time and her full attention. He could wait.

  Derek tapped the bar for his attention. Will grabbed a cold bottle of Miller Lite from the cooler and went to meet him.

  “I heard what happened to Eric,” he said, taking the beer and turning it up to his mouth, never breaking eye contact. “Why didn’t you call us, man?”

  “I did. You guys didn’t show up for like an hour.”

  “I don’t mean Sixth Precinct, I mean us.” He pointed to himself and his partner.

  It hadn’t even occurred to Will to call them specifically. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t know that was something I could do.”

  “This is our turf, man. We protect it.”

  “I know.”

  “Dude. Look at me. When was the last time this place was hit by an underage sting? Hm? When’s the last time anybody ever followed up on a noise complaint? We protect this place. You have my number, right?”

  Will looked at dozens of business cards and personal notes tacked to the wall behind the bar phone, interlaced and overlaid like continental plates. “I know it’s up here somewhere.”

  Derek slid him a card with his name and number on it. “Put this in your wallet. Next time, you call me.”

  “Okay.” Will felt both empowered and chastened.

  “So is he all right? Who did it?”

  He thought about Eric dwelling in darkness above them, solitary as a monk, cherishing his wound like some acolyte in a cult of pain. He considered what his reaction might be if a couple of police officers – even ones he drank with and played pool with sometimes – came into his apartment at Will’s direction. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about for long.

  “He’s okay. I checked on him yesterday. He’s cut, but I think it’s his pride that’s hurt, more than anything.”

  “What about the guy that did it?”

  “I’ve never seen him in here before. I figure that’s between them.”

  Derek raised his eyebrows. “Dude swings a broken bottle and you figure that’s just between them?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I really don’t. You see him, use that card. I want to talk to him. See how tough this bitch really is.”

  “Okay, Derek.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know. I will.”

  Mollified, Derek returned to the pool table, placed some quarters on the edge, and watched his partner finish his game. Will gathered a few dirty mugs from the bar and brought them to the sink. He caught a glimpse of Alicia and Jeffrey from the corner of his eye, and stopped what he was doing.

  Jeffrey was staring at him with an expression Will found difficult to interpret. Alicia slouched beside him in an attitude of defeat, her head lowered, her hand cupped over her eyes.

  Well, here we go, he thought, and he walked over to them.

  “Need another beer, Jeffrey?”

  Jeffrey looked at his bottle, which was still half full, and tipped it over with one finger. The contents splashed over the bar top, and the bottle rolled and fell over Will’s side, where it landed with a glassy crunch. “Yeah,” he said. “That one’s empty.”

  Alicia lifted her head. “Please don’t.”

  Will leaned over until he caught Jeffrey’s gaze, and held it. “Are you okay, Jeffrey?” His tone of voice made it more of a challenge than a question.

  Jeffrey was not okay. In fact he was grandly drunk, his eyes bloodshot and the skin hanging loosely from his face, like wet laundry. He gave Will a big grin, about as genuine as an alligator’s, and clasped his hand. “Hey Will, I’m good, I’m really good. How the fuck are you, Will?” His words stumbled against each other.

  Will extracted his hand. “You’re wasted, man. You should go on home.” He looked at Alicia. “You guys started before you got here, didn’t you?”

  She didn’t answer, just watched him with a darkness in her gaze. It unsettled him; he didn’t know how to read it. She was probably wasted too.

  “Bring me another beer, Will,” said Jeffrey.

  “I think you’re about done for the night, man.”

  “Bring me another beer, Will.”

  “Don’t take this approach with me, Jeffrey.” He looked at Alicia. “Maybe you should get him out of here.”

  She nodded vaguely. She looked devastated. Obviously, she’d told him. That’s what he’d wanted, of course, but somehow he’d imagined it would be different. That she would not be so upset herself. Of course, Alicia was kind, and she would be distraught over the pain she was causing Jeffrey. It would run its course. He tried to catch her eye, to communicate through a glance his own understanding, but she was too involved in getting Jeffrey to his feet to notice.

  Jeffrey did not resist too much. He let himself be guided off the stool, but some residual instinct of self-respect wouldn’t allow a clean retreat: as she walked him away from where they were sitting, he flicked her half-empty bottle off the bar too. It shattered on the floor.

  People were starting to look.

  Alicia pulled him harder. “Jeffrey!”

  “Bring me another beer, Will,” he said.

  “You’re not a tough guy, Jeffrey,” said Will. “Stop acting like one.”

  They were almost at the door by this time, drawing the curious gaze of the rest of the bar behind them like a net caught in their wake. It was too easy. Will was struck by a perverse impulse.

  “Alicia,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”

  Jeffrey turned, wrenching his arm free of Alicia’s grasp, and walked back toward the bar. Rage clouded his face. Will was fascinated; what was he going to do, vault over the bar? The presence of violence was in the room again, filling it like a gas. He felt ghostlike: a witness to his own life. Something fundamental was about to tip, and he waited for it with a hunger which was curiously distinct from any sense of self-preservation. What he wanted was an irrevocable action, the crossing of a bloody border.

  Derek intervened. He stepped in front of Jeffrey, stopping him in his tracks. “We got a problem here?”

  The frustration on Jeffrey’s face was almost heartbreaking. You could see his heroic plans evaporating right before his eyes. “I thought we were friends,” he said to Will, speaking over Derek’s shoulder.

  “We are friends,” Will said. “Come on, man.”

  “What’s the matter with you, you fucking prick?”

  Derek poked him hard in the shoulder. “Don’t talk to him. Talk to me.”

  Derek wanted it too; you could see it radiate from him like a stuttering light.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Jeffrey said. He didn’t sound confrontational; he just sounded sad. All the bravado he’d felt after breaking up the fight the other night, the masculine dream he’d allowed himself to indulge in, was gone. He just stood there, ashamed and ineffectual, tears gathering in his eyes. Alicia took his arm again, shooting a dark look at Will, and led him away. This time, he didn’t resist. They pushed through the door, into the world outside.

  “Was he crying?” somebody said, and there was a snicker. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, people returned to their own little endeavors. The noise rose, the pool balls clicked, and people approached the bar with money in hand. The night’s slow engine began to turn once again.

  Derek and his partner finished their pool game and left, waving amiably on their way out the door.

  Will felt cheated, somehow. That old hollowness reasserted itself, and he felt a vertiginous pull, as though he stood on its crumbling edge. The image Carrie had been looking at the night before came back to him: the wet
, black tunnel, and the silent, gliding passage through it to an unfathomable end.

  Something waited down there.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket, ready to dial her.

  There was already a message waiting for him. A text from Carrie. Two of them. He quickly slid it open.

  I think something is in here with me.

  The next was a picture: their own apartment. Their own bedroom. The lights off. A man sitting on the edge of their bed, facing the camera. His arms rested loosely between his legs, and he was buried in shadow. His face seemed somehow misshapen. Will felt his gut clench, felt adrenaline spike in his body. He was breathing hard. His hands shook. He tapped the picture to bring it to the fore, and enlarged it. Squinted at it.

  We left you a little present.

  A wave of nausea passed over him, and he felt something hot crowd the back of his throat. He stepped out from behind the bar without really thinking about what he was doing. He pushed his way through the crowd. His chest was too tight, he could barely breathe. Somebody called out to him.

  “Watch the bar!” he said back. He didn’t care who.

  In seconds, he was in his car and speeding through the narrow streets, slamming through potholes and across cracked pavement bucked up over the roots of oaks, gunning through intersections. Aware of his recklessness even in the heat of his own panic, he had the stray thought that some kindly angel must be watching over him, shepherding him safely home.

  THE APARTMENT WAS quiet, the windows dark. Carrie’s car was still parked out front. He didn’t know how long she’d been home. Wishing for a gun for the first time in his life, Will sprinted across the street and crept quietly to his own front door. He pressed his ear against it, trying to siphon out the sound of the occasional passing car, the sound of the leaves rustling in a light wind. He was pretty sure it was quiet inside. He tested the knob to see if the door was locked. It was.

  So much for sneaking up on the intruder.

  Twisting his key in the lock, he grit his teeth at the hard thunk of the bolt sliding back. He pushed the door open while remaining outside.