Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  FIFTEEN

  Jerome Anthony Franklin was on break working the graveyard shift and he was bored and frustrated, hanging out in the back room with the dry stock and trying to figure out how to use the electric pallet jack. There was some dumb rule that you couldn’t bring the heavy machine onto the sales floor because of customer liability, but there was an issue here for worker’s rights as well, having to lug fifty-pound boxes one by one to the racks, and he made a mental note to look it up in the library tomorrow. Maybe he’d contact regional and start a petition. Maybe . . .

  “Jerome! Mr. Franklin!”

  It was Balbir, and every time the man barked out orders in that accent laced with polite desperation Jerome was perturbed at those who would see the man as no more than cliché, a Hindu originally from Bombay who was running an inner-city 7-Eleven. There was nothing cliché about making a living and nothing stereotypical about a man from a foreign country trying to better himself, a man who liked watching soccer and brewing homemade green tea, a man who had a daughter married to a guy who owned a breakfast truck in Center City and a son who was studying to be a pharmacist, a man fighting the good fight and who’d always treated Jerome more than fairly. He opened the door and stuck his brown head in.

  “Jerome, my friend!”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “I have a customer to attend to and someone just left without taking his receipt.”

  “No problem,” Jerome said, grabbing his coat, which he’d tossed on top of the 2 for $2.00 snack cartons. He took the slip from his manager and smiled in passing. Balbir hated it when business wasn’t properly completed, and while it was anal to chase someone down to offer a record of transaction for a pack of gum or box of Tic Tacs, it was his thing. And the pallet jack wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  Jerome jogged down the front aisle and, while sidestepping to avoid a pallet of bottled water, he almost ran into the Slurpee machine. Outside he was a few seconds too late, for there was just one car at the edge of the front lot, waiting at the exit ramp for the cross-traffic to clear. It was a Toyota with fumes of exhaust threading up into the rain, making mystic reflections under the street lamp.

  “Your back tires are low,”Jerome thought. Then he shrugged and got his cell out of his jacket pocket to check the time.

  There was a text from Marissa. His heart kicked up a notch, and he moved back under the overhang. This was from a couple of hours ago, and he hadn’t checked for her reply because he hadn’t expected one. Marissa Madison wasn’t going to give up her gift. And even though it hurt to admit that to himself, he’d committed to moving forward the moment he’d suggested the ultimatum.

  Strange.

  Her message didn’t make sense.

  It said:

  “Follow Cinderella with the two busted slippers so the ghosts won’t cry anymore.”

  He frowned and turned back to the store, slipping the phone in his pocket and wondering why he’d considered getting back with her at all. She was crazy. Always had been. He had the door half open and stopped right there in his tracks as something connected. It was a statement that one of his favorite all-time race car drivers, Emerson Fittipaldi, had made back in the mid-nineties when he lost an Indy race. He’d referred to his car as a “she” and called the faulty tires “her shoes.”

  He looked back with a start, and the Toyota with the low back tires tried to cut into traffic, having to screech to a stop. The driver laid on his horn and pulled back up into the lot a few feet because his nose was sticking out. The rain was coming down hard.

  Jerome stuck his head back into the store.

  “Boss! I gotta go! It’s an emergency!” He turned and took off, splashing over to the side lot where the Malibu was parked, as he and Grandma shared it when they both worked the night shift—picking each other up and dropping each other off as a way to keep in touch. He had no idea what Marissa’s message really meant and less of a clue what he would do if he managed to confront whoever was in that vehicle. But all the connections were more than coincidence, and he’d never doubted Marissa Madison’s relative powers. He only questioned her ability to follow through with her visions.

  But he was suddenly compelled to do this, all in, right now.

  For Marissa.

  For crying ghosts.

  He couldn’t quite catch up. At Manoa it looked as if the guy had gone left and Jerome followed him, just catching the glow of his tail lights cutting down Reed Road. He was nearly positive that he saw a receding flicker of red heading left on Springfield at the top of the hill, and at the first stop sign he thought for sure the guy had done a quickie right/left to head for Route 1. But at the fork in front of the Marple Crossing Shopping Center he had to make a decision. Was the mystery man with the Cinderella tires continuing on the same throughway or making for 476?

  Jerome could have sworn he saw something flash for a second way up past the overpass where there was a sign for Chester left lane, so he kicked it in and swung onto the merge for the bigger of the two highways as fast as he dared without hydroplaning. The rain was coming down in buckets and his wipers weren’t that great. He was lucky to have this ride, but really, Grandma, hit the auto parts store, will ya? He chewed at a hangnail. He’d risked his job to go on this wild goose chase, and he had to admit to himself that it was insane.

  But there was something about that message. Something desperate and sad and important. And he loved Marissa Madison. As bad as she was for him.

  He thought he saw the lights of another vehicle way up ahead a few times, but in this kind of downpour everything seemed like a mirage. At the Swarthmore exit an eighteen-wheeler going way too fast shot by in the passing lane, but besides that it seemed no one was out here. Jerome slowed down despite himself. He wanted to help, to figure out the puzzle, to come up big for his ex, but it wasn’t going to do anyone any kind of good if he wound up driving off a cliff or down an embankment. Enough was enough.

  He was about to double back when he came around a long yawning bend and saw something. Up ahead there were lights, but they weren’t hanging low on a shitty Toyota. It was a state trooper parked in the breakdown lane with his flashers going. Jerome approached, slowed, and stopped next to it.

  There was no one in the car. And just past it there were scrapes in the road, as if someone had peeled out dragging his back end.

  Jerome pulled over just past where the scrapes were and put on his emergency blinkers so he could think. What was this? Why had he been summoned or whatever Marissa would call it? She scared him and saddened and thrilled him. Still. But this had everything to do with trouble and bad endings. Though there wasn’t anything he could fathom worse than the Citrus Bowl, a vacated cop car, skid marks, and an isolated highway in the rain had nothing to do with magic slippers and fairytales. Besides, he was pretty sure that he’d lost the guy back on Springfield Road. He’d been going on faith.

  I’ll give it a mile more. Maybe two.

  He put the Malibu in drive and slipped back to the highway. He passed under a bridge that was pitted and water-stained on its underside, and it imposed upon him a feeling of dread he couldn’t substantiate. Exit 6 was coming up on the right. He took a look farther up the road and thought he saw traffic.

  He hit the gas and continued up Route 476, driving straight into the teeth of the storm.

  THE

  UNVEILING

  Ha!” I spout right into Marissa Madison’s dirty tangle of hair. “I said ha! Your nigger-boy drove right past the exit! Just like the Citrus Bowl, he failed you! Just like in the Mustang trying to give you a poke, he fell short! Just like with his grandma and his teachers and his buddies in the lunchroom, he dropped flat on his face! Oh, you sure can pick ’em. Thanks for the show!”

  She laughs back at me and it sounds harsh, as if it’s coated with the dirt of the hole I’m still planning to bury her in. Her breath still reeks of pork rinds and she’s holding my neck tight with her fingers interlocked behind it, in turn forcing me to kee
p my bucket hold beneath her dead naked ass.

  “Before we finish this business,” she says, “I want to run some numbers by you. Like a parts breakdown you’d see in the shop, or one of those bids from the Navy Yard where you look at the graphs and figure out the ratios.”

  I shut my mouth and she says, “I want to discuss the mathematics of visions, Jonathan. You have certainly not been standing here in the archway of the Motel 6 watching movies, but the scenes you’ve experienced took up literal segments of time, not much, but enough to become real ‘substance.’ While a lot of the presentations actually skipped time, or rushed through it like a montage sequence, like paraphrase, even those events occupied certain precious seconds. There were a number of scene clips where you briefly lived in the younger versions of yourself, while there were flashbacks inside of flashbacks which by default took up absolutely no time at all, like my meeting Jerome in the stairwell and then his rap battle in the lunchroom, both displayed during the larger scene where I was walking into the mall. And even though the outer scenes were never played out in full linear minutes, like the string of highlights illustrating Jerome’s following you down Reed Road to Springfield Road to the fork in front of the Marple Crossing Shopping Center, my exhibition as a whole took time, measurable time, just not real time, ya dig, Johnnyboy? Ya gettin’ my drift?”

  I never let no one call me “Johnny” except Mama, so I squeeze her hard enough to flop her head against my collarbone, and she grunts all pissed off.

  “Careful, jerk! Someone broke my neck, it’s sensitive!”

  “Sorry,” I say. “So what’s your fucking point?”

  She puts her forearms against my chest and pushes off so I’m facing that awful tangle of hair again.

  “The point is that altogether,” she says, “considering all the scene partials, I managed to hold you here on this jobsite for sixty-six minutes. Sixty-six. Time for Jerome to go back to his grandmother’s house in Broomall and sit in the living room while she continued on her night shift. Time for him to put two and two together and get back on the road. You see, her place is right near an exit to Route 476, and Jerome just needed time to think and a place to do it. He always just needed time.”

  She places her hands on both sides of my head, and her voice comes through in a whisper now.

  “And he’s no loser,” she says. “You are. Asshole.”

  She changes, she breaks and crumbles, and I’m standing in the archway of the Motel 6 with an armload of body parts. The rain is sweeping in from the east and the moon is making reflections all along the puddles of the walkway that dance and jump with the pellets of the rain. All seventeen pieces of Marissa Madison tumble out of my arms, splashing in the puddles gathered at my feet, her head making a meaty thump on the pavers and rolling. It bumps off the base of one of those disassembled luggage rollers and settles facing upward, the eyes glassy and the nose area nothing more than a dark, stringy void.

  Shadows move above her and then they’re pushed off by a creeping sort of light fingering along the ground, snaking in and out of the crevices and edges cut into the darkness by the jobsite machinery.

  Headlights.

  Jerome Anthony Franklin here to find Cinderella and quiet the ghosts.

  I think about running off right toward the new construction and the storage units. I think about moving back to the inner darkness of the motel, but I don’t. Instead, I watch him sweep his brights across the front end of the jobsite down there in the public lower parking area, checking the semicircle of office trailers up on blocks and when he sees that everything’s dark and vacant, sure as shit he’s gonna advance those headlights to bumpier ground. Up here.

  I think about the possibilities, and I wonder how everything could have actually fallen into place so perfectly. I consider Marissa Madison and the creepy way her powers have stretched out past the span of her lifetime, like echoes, like vapor, and I remind myself that echoes fade and stench dissipates. In the end she was just a girl. A girly-girl who thought coaxing her boyfriend to a showdown was gonna solve things. Like the schoolyard. Like the movies.

  I feel the corners of my mouth tent-pitch upward.

  Then I run out into the rain, sneakers slapping along the brick pavers of the entrance walkway. I can hear Jerome Anthony Franklin working through the various ruts and divots down left, revving the engine and spinning his tires in the mud here and there along the incline, and out the corner of my eye I can sense the jagged points of light reflecting high off the exposed steel in the broad skeleton of the motel’s residence quarters stretching along to the west. I am pretty sure there aren’t any shadows jumping off me as I splash through the puddles over here, and as I shove between the luggage racks and Rubbermaid push-dollies filled with reusable scrap, I know my cover of darkness ain’t gonna last all that long. Twenty seconds until Franklin makes it up the washed-out access road, takes the dogleg, and floods the area with light. Twenty-five, maybe.

  I dodge through the checkerboard of jobsite equipment, slip on a pile of wet rebar that shouldn’t have been lying across the makeshift walking path to begin with, and bark my shin on the edge of a Big Tex trailer hitch. I slide a bit, sidestepping, arms windmilling, still smiling and grimacing, telling myself, “Don’t rub it!” and next I’m sloshing through the mud as fast as I am able without doing a face plant and belly-slide right here in this open stretch leading straight to my car.

  Wish I had time to look for a wrench. It would come in handy when I make to remove the license plate.

  See, I have to get it off the back before Jerome Anthony Franklin enters the fold, lights up the world back here, checks things out, and makes his “discoveries.” So he’ll think there’s a blank spot.

  So he’ll believe I got a reason not to kill him.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Deseronto used the dead cop as a buffer and went in sliding on his knees in the mud. Air burst out of the corpse sandwiched up against the low fender, and it smelled like chicken. That one almost made Deseronto crack the fuck up, but he wasn’t usually a laughing sort of fellow and his protruding knucklebone was killing him. He set to work on the license plate, wet hair dangling in his eyes, and at first it seemed it was going to be lickety-split. The left set-bolt spun off in a heartbeat, but the right was stubborn, rusted and frozen. Jerome Anthony Franklin was getting close to the turn, brights pointed up at the storm clouds like those Hollywood victory spotlights because he was at the base of the last part that had looked steep, almost a drop-off. With any luck he’d get stuck there for a second, back off, and reroute, moving around through the weeds.

  Deseronto switched it up and went ass-first into the mud. He planted the soles of his sneakers above the dead cop, fingered behind the plate on both sides of the fastener, and leaned back, yanking with all his strength and his weight. For a second he got nothing, and then he heard the gritty “pop” of a bolt-thread being forced past the base material wedged around it. Then another “pop” and another, and when it finally came free the momentum threw him backward, almost smacking the back of his head flat into the mud.

  By the time he pushed up to his feet the lights were coming around the corner.

  Deseronto scrambled back for the cover of the scattered machinery, ducking behind a large yellow compressor angled up on one side off its tow-wheels just as Jerome Anthony Franklin drove up bumping and bobbing. The kid moved cautiously by the Toyota, slowing and parking just past it, pulling in rear to rear leaving a car’s space between.

  Perfect.

  Deseronto had a good view from around the back of the compressor and down a path made by two dozers and a stack of concrete block. Jerome turned off his lights and shut the car off. When he got out and made his way around the front side of it there in his pathetic 7-Eleven uniform he looked hesitant and vulnerable, not alarmed and razor-sharp, so Deseronto concluded that he hadn’t yet seen the dead cop wedged in partially beneath the lowered back fender of the Toyota. He hadn’t had the an
gle.

  More perfect.

  Jerome passed his front passenger door, moving carefully through the mud, staring at Deseronto’s opened trunk. When he got to the rear corner of his Malibu he saw the cop lying at the base of the sunken Toyota. He stopped there in his tracks.

  And Deseronto called out to him softly.

  FOREPLAY

  When he hears me call his name it chills him straight to the marrow. I can see it plain as day, asshole, and I know how easy this is gonna be. And fun too. He’s wire-tight, looking all around trying to pretend he ain’t looking, but the sound is tricky with all the weird echoes and the rain. He can’t pin me down, and that’s the point.

  “Jerome . . .” I singsong again. “There’s a dead man laying there in the mud, for real—for real, ain’t no drill, and if you don’t wanna join him you’re gonna do everything I tell you. Now hold on. Don’t even think it. No wild horses or crazy roadrunners. You ain’t gonna come back in here like a cowboy looking for me in the clutter. I know everything ’bout you but you got nothing on me, and while I could be some skinny runt like you, I think you’re smart enough to know not to chance it. I got no reason to lie to ya, ’cause tell the truth I could kill ya even if I was some skinny little runt, or running little cunt, or whatever you think you might be able to handle. But the fact is I’m over six feet tall, and I could snap you like a twig.”

  He’s frozen right there, left hand splayed out, right hand in a fist still holding his car keys. Then I use what folks might call my Injun talents passed down by generations of warriors hunting in the brush, and I move silently to another spot, this time behind some big plastic barrels filled with steel rakes and pick axes.

  “And I know what’s running through your head,” I say. Then I almost laugh aloud, because he jerks there in his spot, freaked by the way I seem to be throwing my voice all over the jobsite. “So don’t you go listening to your street sense or whatever the fuck you’d call it back in the hood, ’cause there ain’t gonna be no making a break for your ride, hitting the gas, and kicking mud back into my face. You don’t know how fast I can come on, so you’d best recalculate whether or not you could get back around to the other side of your car, get in it, and drive out of here before I could stop you and break your little chicken neck. Go on, work the numbers. First you gotta account for slippage. In the mud. I’ve been here for over an hour getting used to the way you gotta make your way around here, and I guarantee you’d lose a second on your starting burst no matter how subtle you tried it, like Bugs fucking Bunny bicycle-pedaling his feet with that fuck-tard tin drum soundtrack, you see what I’m saying? Then you might skid going around the corners, and even if you jump across the hood you have to account for how close you parked to that big concrete pipe. I saw your door hit it when you got out, and it’s gonna be a chore getting back in. To be honest with you, I could throw down some strides out here without even half trying and you wouldn’t even make it to the door, let alone have time to push up the proper key from the bunch you’ve got there in your fist. So first things first: why don’t you take them keys, walk ’em over to your trunk, open it, and then put those bad boys on the roof of my vehicle, right in the middle where they’d be a real pain in the ass to get to if you suddenly got itchy through the process and thought you could make a run for it.”