by Ed Kurtz
“You don’t believe me.”
“Not really something you take on faith.”
“But I just showed you!”
“You showed me something, but complete control isn’t what I’d call it. Besides, was that the most imaginative command you could come up with? Jump up and down?”
“I…I don’t want to…hurt anyone,” Leon stammered, suddenly flustered.
Lisa crawled out from beneath the bedspread and stepped into her pleated skirt, keeping an eye on both Leon and Jaclyn.
“You sound like maybe you already have,” she said.
She located her blouse and shrugged into it. The bra she left on the floor.
“Okay,” Leon said. “All right. What do you suggest?”
“You can make her do anything?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“Anything at all?”
“Well, I can’t make her fly. At least I don’t think so. Anything physically possible, though.”
“Then if you told her to punch herself in the face, for instance…”
“I said I don’t want to hurt her,” Leon sulked.
Lisa buttoned up her blouse and sat down on the felt chair.
“You have, though, haven’t you? Hurt someone, I mean. With your supposed magic powers.”
Leon made a tight, white line of his mouth and furrowed his brow. Lisa pointed at Jaclyn and asked, “Is she just going to stand there, or what?”
“Until I tell her what to do, yes.”
Lisa slid her feet into her pumps, one at a time, and crossed her legs.
“Then tell her,” she said.
“Tell her what?”
“How should I know? You’re the wizard.”
Leon sighed.
“Right.”
He turned to face the prostitute, who was beginning to sway a little in her stupor.
“Jaclyn,” he said, “punch yourself in the face.”
And to his considerable surprise, the young woman hit herself so hard that she shattered the right half of her lower jaw. This he discovered upon checking on her after she dropped to the floor. He could feel the jagged shards protruding behind the skin. Dark, red-black blood bubbled out from between her lips and her eyes rolled back until only the whites were visible. Yet the girl did not cry out, nor did she attempt to comfort herself or seek help. Leon had not told her to.
On the radio a Neil Diamond song was wrapping up, though Leon could barely hear it over the sound of Lisa’s uproarious cackling. She laughed and snorted and clapped her hands. She was in the throes of mirthful ecstasy at the act of self-violence Leon had compelled the prostitute to perform. As for himself, Leon was not a hundredth as amused.
This chortling woman across the room from him was the polar opposite of Ami. Where Ami was gentle and empathic, Lisa seemed cruel and impulsive. To Leon she had always been the obnoxiously chatty girl at the office, the one who never knew when her welcome had worn out but was otherwise generally harmless. The sociopath in the green felt chair hardly seemed like the same person. Leon sneered. He felt like he was in over his head.
“I think…,” he began, too quietly to be heard. Lisa’s laughter overwhelmed his words, as did the Bacharach tune now seeping out of the radio, so he began again, more loudly: “I think maybe we should get you back to work.”
“Work?” Lisa choked out past her heaving hoots. “For fuck’s sake, why would we do that?”
“I shouldn’t have brought you here. I was…angry, not thinking too clearly. It’s this thing, you see—the pain…” Leon cupped his hands over his ears and shouted, “Goddamnit would you turn that radio off?”
Instantly Jaclyn rose from the floor and staggered around the bed to the nightstand, where she reached over and twisted the knob on the radio to off. Afterwards she merely stood there, her unhinged, half-broken jaw hanging grotesquely from the bottom of her bruised face.
Lisa’s face was pink and shiny with sweat. Her laughter had mostly petered out, but her expression still betrayed a macabre enjoyment of the proceedings.
“Do it again, Leon,” she hissed through a broad, rapacious grin. “Make her hit herself like that again.”
“No, Lisa…”
“Do it, Leon. Show me what you can do. Show me your power.”
“I can do anything,” he protested. “Why that?”
“Because it turns me on to see you take control—now fucking do it.”
Leon swallowed to moisten his dry, scratchy throat and focused his gaze on Jaclyn. She didn’t look a day over twenty-five, despite the crows’ feet that splintered out from her eyes and the occasional stark white hair he spied sticking out of her head. That was life, not age. She was practically still a kid—or else had never been one. He wondered if anyone really loved her, or if she was just put on the earth to be used, like prey for the many, many predators who sought her out. That had always been his argument about cows, that they were meant to be cultivated and slaughtered for human consumption, that their irrevocable fate was to be eaten. Perhaps, Leon thought now, some people were cattle, too. Perhaps some people were meant to be corralled and cultivated and used for whatever they could give to benefit the greater predator class. Divinity versus bovinity. Gods and meat.
From the hooker’s broken, melancholy face Leon’s eyes trailed back over to Lisa, who had lifted her skirt and propped one foot up on the bureau in order to expose her sex to him. She gently touched herself with her index and middle fingers, keeping her wolfish eyes on Leon all the time.
Annoying, chatty Lisa, he thought. But she means well…
“Go on,” she said.
He stared deeply into Jaclyn’s empty eyes and felt the throb in his forehead growing steadily worse. It’s the pain, he felt like telling her. The pain and the girl.
“Punch yourself again,” he said forcefully. Then, cruelly: “Break the rest of your jaw.”
Jaclyn curled her hand into a tight fist and sent it crashing into her own jaw without delay. Leon heard the sickening crunch of her knuckles on the first impact, and the cracking of bone and teeth with every punch that followed. Broken bits of crumbled teeth spilled out of her mouth on rivulets of bloody saliva, which sprayed Leon’s face and neck with each successive blow. By the time Jaclyn was done her face was mashed to a ragged, bloody pulp and all of the fingers on her right hand were broken and twisted hideously out of shape. Leon did not give an explicit order for her to cease, but her hand was a limp, tattered mess no good for hitting and she’d accomplished the goal as far as her jaw was concerned. He figured that she’d be eating and breathing through a tube for a long while, and probably horribly scarred for the rest of her life. So much for her career.
Lisa squealed with delight. Leon sat the mangled girl down on the edge of the bed and said, “We’d better call an ambulance.”
“Later,” Lisa said, standing.
“She’s in a bad way, Lisa.”
“Later,” she reiterated. “I want you first.”
Leon slouched and sniffed. He felt numb, exhausted. But his head felt much, much better.
“I’ll get the door,” he said.
“Leave it,” Lisa demanded. She pointed to Jaclyn on the edge of the bloodstained bedspread and said, “Leave her, too.”
Leon nodded once, sharply, and crawled onto the middle of the bed. Lisa hiked up her skirt and climbed atop of him, eliciting an involuntary moan from the fatigued little man beneath her.
As Leon entered her, Lisa gritted her teeth and said, “We’re going to have a hell of a lot of fun, you and me.”
PART THREE
The ants do not move much at night, but even so they are not safe to attack in such great numbers—even a moderately small army could dismantle the spider and crawl underneath his exoskeleton to eat away at his tissues before he was dead. A single soldier, however, separated from its column, is an irresistible morsel ripe for the needle points of the spider’s lethal fangs. Such is the quarry found, hanging perilously from the t
opside of shame plant leaf. The spider lunges, the fangs pierce, the venom pumps into the ant’s tiny body, liquefying its tissues until they are fit for the predator’s sucking mouthparts to drink it up. And once this is done, the spider scampers off in search of new prey to obliterate in this same manner.
The humid night stretches out long ahead of him.
21
When, exactly, did the world turn upside-down? That’s what Ami wanted to know. Make a friend, lose a friend. People came and went in life. But not usually due to an otherworldly ability to control people’s minds, coupled with—what?—a kind of madness? In a matter of minutes he’d turned the office into a lunatic asylum. Inside an hour everything was relatively normal and nobody seemed too bothered by what had happened, at least those who could remember it. Lisa was gone. And there was absolutely no telling what Leon had in store for her, what he was capable of. For a short while, Ami had thought she had a grasp on him, on the sort of person he was. Terribly shy, a little backward socially, but all in all a nice enough guy. Had she been wrong all along? Or was it responsible for a drastic, personality altering change?
Who was controlling who?
Ami deflated her lungs, slowly and noisily, and tried to give the menu another look. On her way home from work she’d decided she was hungry, but too frazzled to cook, so she stopped at a random Chinese place on University Avenue, the sort of place with laminated pictures of food in the window and a colossal, gold-painted Buddha overlooking the hostess’s station. She was already nearing the bottom of her second refill of iced tea and the waiter was visibly anxious for her to make up her mind. Every time she glanced up, she noticed him lingering in the passageway between the dining area and the kitchen, giving her the eye. Probably he was wondering if she was just wasting his time, that she’d never order anything apart from the tea and leave a lousy tip. The place was gradually filling up as most people’s customary supper time drew near. They’d want her table for those ordering actual food, she realized. With pursed lips and a knitted brow, she picked something completely at random and signaled the waiter.
“General Tso’s chicken, please,” she said.
The waiter snapped up her menu and marched back into the kitchen without a word. With that much off her mind, Ami returned her thoughts to the various developing crises bearing down on her. Apart from Leon and Lisa, she worried about Bess, the dog. In his bizarre state, Leon was not likely to be taking particularly good care for her, if he hadn’t abandoned her entirely. The temptation to check up on her was strong, though thoroughly intimidating. His father was a cipher, an invisible phantom who made her uncomfortable by way of his mystery. Even the neighborhood was a bit creepy, however much it stung that she should feel that way. She guessed it had been upwardly mobile half a century ago, but now most of the houses were old and falling apart, the preponderance of the yards either overgrown or gone to seed. Nearly every street had at least one lot that stood vacant or had on it a house completely destroyed by fire, or rot, or neglect. The Weissmann place might have been the worst one of them all judging by the knee high weeds in the yard, all the junk piled up out front and the shingles barely hanging on for dear life on the crumbling roof. Recalling it now, Ami decided that the place looked like what she imagined a crackhouse was supposed to be, though she permitted some wiggle-room for the inventiveness of memory. But however much her subconscious tweaked the reality of it, Ami remained unconvinced that a solo visit to Leon’s house was a good idea, especially if Leon was home and up for a bit of fun with his strange talent. Though he explicitly said he never wanted to use it on her, there was no telling when he might feel he had no other choice. Ami figured he was losing his grip on sanity, and the insane were not to be trusted.
Presently the waiter came back around with a steaming plate piled high with a mound of white rice and brown meat. He placed it on the paper placemat in front of Ami, obscuring all those helpful facts about the Chinese horoscope, and then absconded with her empty glass. Ami snapped apart a pair of wooden chopsticks and studied the food on her plate, which most assuredly was not General Tso’s chicken, nor any kind of chicken. It was beef with cashews and snowpeas in it, which surprised her, but since she ordered at random in the first place she decided that it was good enough and dug in. The coarse, chapped wood of the chopsticks scraped uncomfortably against the dry skin of her hands. She frowned as she stabbed a morsel of rice-speckled beef into her mouth. It occurred to her that the grains of rice stuck to the meat chunks looked like maggots feeding on rotten flesh. She swallowed with no little effort and set the chopsticks to one side as the waiter returned with a full glass.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she lied.
He walked away and Ami redirected her stormy thoughts to her sister, Naila. Sweet, religious Naila. Ami’s polar opposite in almost every conceivable way. They’d never had much of a relationship as sisters go, but Ami felt like she needed someone to talk to, someone close, except there wasn’t anybody that close. No boyfriend, no girlfriends to speak of. All she had were the dogs, and though they could be decent listeners, Ami required a little more presence of mind than they could offer. That pretty much left Naila. But Naila never answered her damn phone.
She chugged cold, unsweetened tea until the ice cubes collided with her teeth. She tried another bite of her meal after that, but her appetite had completely evaporated. Leaving all but the two bites she took on the plate on the table, Ami collected her purse and paid for her uneaten dinner at the front. From the kitchen her waiter stared with puzzlement. Ami did not notice. She slipped her pocketbook back into her purse and went out to her car in the parking lot.
A mile and a half up University, where she would typically have turned right on MLK, Ami abruptly jerked the wheel and made a left just in time to beat the red light. Up ahead, three traffic lights down MLK, was the intersection with Red Grove Road, and just a few miles down Red Grove was a small, two bedroom house with alexander on the mailbox. Ami hit the gas and headed directly that way.
* * *
When, exactly, did goofy, annoying Lisa from accounting transform into the malicious, sociopathic sex freak who got turned on by senseless violence? That was what Leon wanted to know.
He guessed that she hadn’t really transformed at all, but had only removed a mask. Everyone wore them, especially in a work environment—Leon learned this firsthand from Cheryl Minchillo. Lisa’s mask turned out to be damned intricate, too; a three-dimensional character she’d devised from the ground up. Leon had to give it to her—it was a top-notch performance that snowed everyone, himself included. Unless, of course, she’d shown herself in private to others. Others like him.
Except there weren’t any others like him. That was what riled her up so badly. Leon was her new toy, and he knew it. He just wasn’t sure how to feel about that yet.
After they left the motel—and the poor, battered girl in it—Leon handed his keys over to Lisa at her request and slid into the passenger seat of the pilfered car. She started the engine and peeled out of the lot, kicking up dust and pebbles at all the other cars that were parked there.
“All right,” she said as she downshifted and blasted down the road, “where do you live?”
“I…uh, well…”
“It can’t be that hard a question, Ace. Where did you wake up this morning?”
“In this car, as a matter of fact.”
“You’re not helping much.”
“Sorry.”
“So, what—you’re out on the street? Is that it?”
“More or less. I left my dad’s house. I don’t want to go back.”
“Don’t get along too well with the old man, huh?”
“I hate him,” Leon said. It came easier now than it had when he told Ami at the cafeteria.
“That’s okay,” Lisa assured him. “Mine’s not so great, either. Besides, you can live wherever you want.”
“That’s right,” Leon said as though suddenly en
lightened.
Lisa laughed.
“I don’t think you’ve done much with this, have you? I mean, you haven’t really lived it up or anything.”
“I’ve done some things,” Leon said meekly.
“Like what? You thought you had me, but that was a bust.”
“Not really. Turned out pretty well for me, actually.”
Lisa smirked and gave him a sideways glance.
“Okay, but what about other things? Like, I dunno, money?”
“I haven’t really thought about money. I guess if I wanted something, I could just have it. I wouldn’t need to pay for it.”
“Fair enough. How about a decent pad? We could head out to Riverside, you know…”
“Where all those gaudy new money mansions are?”
“Sure, up in the hills. Just knock on the door, and when someone answers, kindly inform them of the new ownership.”
“Jesus, I don’t know…”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re not worried about them, are you?”
“I guess not…”
“What’s the issue, then? We’ll just pick one out, squat for a while, and when we get sick of it we can go wherever we want. It’s freedom, Leon. Fucking freedom!”
The notion did not sound particularly free to Leon; it sounded like sitting around in someone else’s house, eating their food and drinking their liquor until the larder ran dry and they had to move on to another house. He did not have a better plan in mind, but he certainly wasn’t too keen on the one under discussion. In addition, he missed Ami. He regretted making an ass of himself for the second time in as many days. He even missed Bess a little. And the incident with Jaclyn at that seedy motel had done little to alleviate the pain in his forehead—the ache was coming back, minute by minute.
“Well, what do you say?” Lisa asked. “We’ll screw like rabbits on some rich bitch’s satin sheets. It’ll be a gas.”
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“I don’t think there are too many empty refrigerators in Riverside…”