He powered his phone up. Hadn’t missed a lot. A text from his manager about blowing off an afternoon ‘session’ that usually just included overpriced drinks at a bar and a brief rundown of upcoming dates. Edward supposed there would be many more texts from his ‘people’ when he wasn’t on or even near the stage that night. He supposed he could curtail many of those by sending his manager a warning, but he didn’t feel like it.
He waited for the plane to clear out and stood and grabbed his bag from overhead and made his way off the plane and into the airport, just one of a hundred other zombies surrounding him.
Before exiting the airport, he paused and watched one of the big screen TVs from a Chili’s or something. Donald Trump was on the screen. It was turned low and closed-captioned and Edward was thankful he didn’t have to hear his voice. It didn’t save him from the idiocy pouring from the man’s mouth, though. Trump was talking about using coal to build some type of shadow Disneyworld in Kentucky.
“Think of all the jobs it’ll create. It’ll create a really, a lot of jobs. A killer amount of jobs. It’ll be dark and ominous. Which is, you know, kind of great. Think about it. Coal castles. Coal houses. Maybe rides through coal mines. All these people will have these really killer jobs. I said I was gonna do this thing and I’m doing this thing. You know, the pampered coastal elites want clean energy. Oh, they say, reduce our fossil fuel emissions so our kids can breathe and our planet doesn’t smother. Well, let me tell you, they’re not living on my planet. Like, all that’s just fake news. Science is fake news. I didn’t even like science in school so we’re getting rid of it. Did you like science? Nobody does. And I tell these elitist snobs, if we can’t burn our coal, we’ll make amusement parks with it. And when Appalachia is once again rolling in all that money, they’ll see. Because Appalachia is a very loyal state. You’re all great people. Really fine people. And maybe when they want coal for their own fun places, maybe they won’t be allowed to have it. We’ll see. We’ll see.”
Edward blinked and wanted another drink. Trump didn’t even bother wearing a suit to these things anymore. Today he was wearing an NRA-branded tracksuit. Sometimes he just wore pajamas.
Edward left the airport and scanned the curb.
Grant had told him he would send a car. At least, Edward thought that’s what he meant. The email was mostly incoherent but after the third one of Edward explicitly asking if he could send a car, he finally received a succinct “Yebs” and thought that would have to be close enough.
There was, in fact, a woman off to his right holding a sign, but she was too far away for him to read it. Still, since it looked like the most hopeful option, he went toward her. As he drew closer, he saw that the sign did indeed say ‘Koenig,’ spelled correctly and everything.
A timid woman in some kind of service uniform, probably in her early twenties, held the sign.
“Did Grant send you?” Edward asked.
“Yes.” She flinched.
He pointed to the sign and said, “I’m Edward Koenig.”
“Okay,” she said. “We can go now.”
She dropped the sign on the curb. Edward bent to pick it up.
He threw his bag and the placard into the back and sat in the front seat.
Even before getting out of the airport, it was apparent to Edward the woman didn’t drive very well. All the starting and stopping was making his nausea come back. Or maybe this was a fresh nausea. He’d already forgotten about all the drinks before takeoff.
“Well,” he said, not wanting to distract her any more but also wanting to get her to relax, “you know my name but you haven’t introduced yourself.”
She glanced over at him and flinched again.
Maybe she didn’t understand what he was asking.
“What’s your name?”
“Natalie!” she practically shouted. “My name is Natalie and nothing else.”
“Okay,” he laughed. “Relax, Natalie And Nothing Else.”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
She stopped suddenly at least fifty feet before a red light, the car behind them squealing its tires and honking the horn. Edward didn’t know if things would be better or even more terrifying when they finally made it to the highway.
Edward noticed there was no GPS or phone mapping app. “So I guess you know where you’re going, huh?”
She gripped the wheel and said through a tight jaw, “I always know where to find him.”
The light turned green and she slammed the accelerator so hard the tires peeled out and she swerved the car to the right shoulder of the road before gaining some semblance of control and bringing it back to roughly the middle of their lane.
“Would you rather I drive?” Edward asked.
She closed her eyes and took both hands off the wheel to rub them along her thighs.
“Please stop asking me questions,” she said.
“Sure thing,” he said. “Sorry.” He was secretly relieved. He had a license and knew how to drive, but it was something he avoided at all costs.
They finally made it to the highway and the sun disappeared from the sky shortly after. Edward contented himself with looking out the window. It wasn’t long before she pulled off the highway and he found himself in the more familiar territory of the rural farm country surrounding Twin Springs. Eventually they entered the town and Edward didn’t experience the rush of nostalgia he’d expected. His parents had moved to New Mexico to retire as soon as he graduated high school and he hadn’t been back here since. It was like the place, nearly everything about being here, had just faded from his memory.
Natalie stopped the car at a stop sign. There was a Methodist church on the right and a bar down the street on the left. Edward waited for the lay of the land to come back to him but it didn’t. He’d always sucked at directions.
Natalie, breathing rapidly, said, “I can’t. I just can’t.”
Then she opened her door and went running into the night.
What the fuck?
Edward got out of the passenger side, at a complete loss for what he was supposed to do.
“Natalie!” he called.
Should he go running after her? He didn’t see how that would do anything other than draw unwanted attention.
Should he drive around and look for her? Again, he didn’t see how that would help. She was probably a lot more familiar with the town than he was and could get more lost than he could find. Plus he was kind of tired. Or, rather, he just wanted to find Grant’s place and stop moving for at least a few minutes.
He crossed over to the driver’s side and sat behind the wheel, sliding the seat back.
He didn’t know who Natalie was. She didn’t seem entirely stable but she was an adult who was capable of making her own choices. Over the years, Edward had heard of plenty of friends who’d simply walked out of jobs they hated and he didn’t see how this was any different. Hell, wasn’t that what he was doing?
He opened ‘maps’ on his phone and punched in the address Grant had given him.
The familiar voice began “Starting route to . . .” and Edward pulled through the stop sign.
Grant would know more about the situation than Edward could even speculate on. Besides, it was really Grant’s problem. It wasn’t like he was stranded or anything. Even if he wasn’t comfortable about driving away in the car Natalie had picked him up in, he could have called somebody.
But, no, this was easier. And he wasn’t going to worry about why Natalie had run off. Maybe she didn’t have that far to go. Maybe she had a quiet, sad apartment in town. Maybe she only had to run a couple of blocks.
At the next stop sign, he accessed one of his playlists and the opening car sounds of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” puffed through the speakers.
Perfect, he thought.
The maps app had closed and he couldn’t get it to open again.
He kept driving.
He’d find the place.
FOUR
Lena en
tered the house unaccompanied to find Shawn in the kitchen slumped over the island. He’d been staring at the note in his hand for the past half hour or so.
It read:
Dear Shawn,
I don’t love you anymore.
Regards,
Lexi
It didn’t make any sense. It was definitely in her handwriting, but why now? Why here? Why wouldn’t she have just told him to go alone and they could have talked about it when he came back? Why wouldn’t she have brought it up before they left? Or waited to talk about it on the car ride home? Lexi could have staged one of her infamous trapped-in-a-car sneak attacks.
After he’d come out of the bathroom and found her gone, he’d had a moment of panic until he noticed all her clothes were gone too. He’d wandered through the empty house calling for her until going outside and noticing the car was also missing. Until discovering the note, he’d comforted himself by thinking she’d forgotten something and had taken the car into town to pick it up. Maybe she’d started her period and forgotten to bring anything. That would be highly unlike Lexi, but they had left in a hurry so something was bound to be left out of the packing.
Then he’d found the note and everything had shifted.
He first went into complete and total denial.
True, the note was in her handwriting, but that didn’t mean she wanted to write it. Grant and the weird maid weren’t in the house either. The answer seemed pretty apparent. Grant was obviously a lunatic. Something had gone wrong in his brain. He and the maid had dragged Lexi from the room, forced her to write the note, and driven her somewhere. What were they doing to her? What had they already done to her? They’d probably get rid of the body in the acres of woods surrounding this place, ditch the car, and come back feigning complete ignorance of Lexi’s disappearance. He had a brief and horrifying image of her body scattered throughout the woods, surrounded by spatters of already drying blood.
Then he had to stop and ask himself who the lunatic was.
What reason did Grant have to do something like that?
He continued staring at the note, looking for what, he didn’t know. Some kind of clue, maybe. Some cant or jitter to the handwriting to suggest it had been written in a state of panic or, at the very least, under duress.
But it looked perfectly normal. He could see Lexi on her way out, bag slung over her shoulder, tearing a piece of paper from the little notepad on the island that was probably kept there for reminders and grocery lists and calmly writing her little note, possibly thinking how to sign off on it before opting for the cold and generic ‘regards,’ like it was a response from a customer service department or something.
It hurt but it was much easier for him to see her doing that than it was for him to see Grant and the maid sweeping her away to a body dumping ground in the woods surrounding Twin Springs, Ohio.
“Shawn?”
The voice was a familiar echo. He looked up to see Lena, the weight of the last twenty years colliding with his current situation almost too much to bear.
“The door was open so I just came in. Is anyone else here? I saw Grant outside but then he ran off and . . . is this all some kind of joke?”
The note quivered in his shaking hand and he fought to process what she was saying, still trying to take in this fast-forwarded afterimage of the Lena he’d known at seventeen.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you okay?”
Shawn was still searching for words. Lena had been back in his life for less than a minute and it felt like they’d already shot past all the formal re-introductions he’d been expecting.
How much did he want to tell her? He didn’t invite a lot of people into his personal life. He wasn’t the type of guy to talk about his feelings. Never had been. He felt like it would have to come out sooner or later. Maybe. Possibly not. Like, he couldn’t really imagine Grant, in his current state, turning to ask him where Lexi was at some point in the evening. He hadn’t even acknowledged her when they got there.
“I, uh . . .” he stammered. “I guess it depends on what you mean by okay.”
She moved closer and dropped her bag on the floor.
He stood from the chair, almost expecting her to hug him. Instead he got a hard slap to the cheek. He fought the instinct to return the favor by slamming his fist into her face.
“That’s for not reaching out to me in twenty-five fucking years,” she said.
He slumped back down on the stool and rubbed the hot handprint on his cheek.
“I . . . I guess I deserved that.”
“So Grant’s gone off his fucking rocker, huh? That’s why we’re here?”
Shawn turned toward the island and laid the note facedown, placing his palms on either side of it, reaching for some bit of calm in the island’s cool granite surface.
“Can we just . . . maybe go a little slower?”
“Okay. Well, what do you want to talk about? Want to talk about what you’ve been eating? You’ve gotten chubby.”
This almost brought a laugh to the surface. Lena, he could tell, hadn’t changed much. This was why she’d run with the boys in high school. She had no problems holding her own.
“You look good,” he said. “Still on the booze and depression diet?”
“Making a living from it, asshole.”
“I tried looking you up but I couldn’t find anything.”
“Nice try, but you’re lying. Anyway, I got married. My last name’s Burberry now.”
“You’re right. I don’t know why I didn’t bother. I didn’t keep in touch with any of you.” He slid the note to her. “So this is how well my life’s going.”
She glanced over it. “Dear God. Did this just happen?”
“Yeah. I went into the bathroom to jerk off and when I came back out, she was gone.”
“That’s not right.”
“It was pretty unexpected.”
“No. I mean you’ve already been to your room. You’ve already jerked off. I’ve been wet ever since getting off the fucking plane. I need to find my room and take care of some business of my own.”
“Ms. Burberry?” a timid voice called from the entrance to the kitchen.
Lena turned and gave the twitchy maid a withering glance.
“Are you here to take my bag and show me to my room?”
“Yes. I’m Natalie.”
“I don’t really care.”
Natalie cast her eyes downward as though Lena were getting ready to smack her which, Shawn guessed, was not completely unfounded.
“Have you seen my wife?” Shawn asked her.
“Who?”
“My wife. Lexi. The woman who came here with me?”
“I have not.”
“Now that we’ve got that settled, there’s my bag.” Lena motioned to her bag on the floor.
The maid picked up the bag and Shawn watched the two women exit the kitchen. He crumpled the note and tossed it into the trashcan, certain he wouldn’t find any clues contained therein. He slid his phone out of his pocket but there still wasn’t any signal. He glanced at the refrigerator. He and Lexi had their wi-fi password affixed to theirs with a magnet for visitors. There wasn’t anything on this refrigerator.
The empty kitchen felt lonely in the long sunlight of the late afternoon.
The patio beckoned him. He walked out through the sliding doors and sat in one of the rocking chairs. The sun had already sunk below the trees and the evening insects were just beginning their chorus. There was an almost grim familiarity to it.
Past the pool, at the edge of the yard just before the start of the woods, he watched Grant go streaking across the lawn.
Shawn stood and walked to the edge of the tiled patio.
“Grant!” he called. “Hey, Grant!”
But the man appeared determined, hitting the corner of the yard before making a hard left and disappearing around the house.
Shawn sat back down in the chair and wondered when things had stopped making sense.
“Where would you like your bag, Ms. Burberry?” Natalie asked.
“The desk is fine,” Lena said.
She kicked off her shoes and was already unbuttoning her shirt.
Natalie set the heavy bag on the desk at the far side of the room.
“You’re kind of cute,” Lena said. “Do you eat pussy?”
Natalie, now on her way back across the room, stopped, refusing to make eye contact with Lena.
Looking at some random spot on the floor, Natalie said, “I do what is asked of me.”
“You don’t sound very committed. I don’t want you to do it if it’s just going to be, like, a chore.”
“I always do my best.”
Lena briefly considered it. A tongue would feel better than her hand and Natalie seemed willing. But that would only be half of it. Lena felt like she needed more. She should have invited Shawn up to her room. He was probably full of heartbroken rage after getting that note from his wife. At least, she assumed it was his wife. Had he said that? She didn’t know. Couldn’t remember. Did she even care? More and more, she found she only really half-listened to people. He didn’t really seem as broken up about it as she thought he might be. No. It had to be his wife. She thought about Shawn’s doughy physique and lazy sense of fashion, even for someone who thought he was on vacation or who was trying to make a vacation out of something else, and figured he’d probably been married for the past ten years. Might even be a dad. So, no, Shawn wouldn’t do. He probably hadn’t truly fucked someone since the first couple months of being with his future wife, so he’d be unimaginative and out of practice.
Back to the maid or servant or whatever she was, standing there staring at the floor like a powered down robot.
“Go on,” Lena said to her. “Maybe some other time.”
“Very well, Ms. Burberry.”
Lena watched as the girl left the room and shut the door behind her. She contemplated locking it before deciding she didn’t give a fuck. The threat of getting caught made everything sweeter. She let the shirt fall from her shoulders and unsnapped her bra in the front. She unbuttoned her pants and shucked out of them. She let her hand rest between her legs, over her underwear, and cursed her need. She didn’t even understand it, wrapped, as it was, in futility. Over the years, she’d come to realize it was about the act, not the final result. It had to be. So maybe it was more a necessity than a realization. She’d once had a drunken conversation with one of her guy friends who confessed that his girlfriend didn’t do blowjobs. Lena pretended to be appalled and the guy had said it didn’t really matter because the end result was the same. At this point, be it with herself or someone else, sex was more like exercise. She could get the exhaustion, the feeling of being filled up, and a few minutes of pleasure, but she never got the payoff. So it was kind of like exercising but never losing weight, never achieving the six-pack abs. Exercising for the love of the act. Not since the summer of her seventeenth year had she gotten what she longed for now. She could be filled up but what she wanted was to be emptied out.
Irrationalia Page 3