Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  That night the episode came and went while I was wrapping up my shift at Laurel’s, and when I went to bed, it had been shared on Twitter only a few times. I woke up unprepared for the deluge of agent and manager e-mails that had hit my inbox overnight. Overwhelmed, I spent the morning on the phone fielding offers of representation, allowing a handful of agents to believe I was on the point of moving to Los Angeles. The feeling of being wanted was too intoxicating for me to bother with details. My contest winnings wouldn’t get me far, but maybe they would at least give me time to start looking for a day job out there.

  Which reminded me: I was late for my shift. As I wound through the midday traffic on the east-side streets, I thought about day jobs, the ultimate costume for comics, our way of pretending to be normal people just like everyone else. We seldom allowed ourselves to dream of life without one, but we’d stick with each minimum-wage or tip-sharing job for a year or two at most. Then we’d get restless, decide our day jobs were holding us back, and quit, announcing on social media we were making more time for art, for ambition, in our lives. Then, suddenly, one day, we’d reappear in an apron on the other side of town, and you’d know, once more, we hadn’t made it.

  Having spent the past twenty-four hours in the oasis of daydreams, the luxury career of comedy stretching out before me, I spent more time looking around Laurel’s store than I had in a while. Something occurred to me.

  “How come I never see men in here?” I said to Ruby, who was straightening the linen tags on a display of necklaces. “We’re a gift shop. Don’t men have to buy gifts for, like, their wives or girlfriends or something?”

  “Men don’t know how to buy women gifts,” Ruby explained. “That’s what flowers are for.”

  I was jotting it down—I didn’t bother hiding my notebook anymore—when, as if on cue, a new text lit up my phone. When I saw the sender, my heart leaped into my throat.

  Heard you on Omari!! Let’s catch up sometime

  That was all. Two sentences from the person I used to care about most in the world, the best friend who had never once checked in with me as I faded out of his existence and retreated back to home base. The breezy double exclamation points, the lack of an I in the first sentence, as if he’d grabbed a minute to text between commitments, and the missing final punctuation all left it so that I would have to interpret and respond without further information. If there had been a period, an exclamation point, or even an ellipsis at the end—if he had so much as written soon instead of sometime—I would undoubtedly have gone on break early and called him right then.

  But he hadn’t. Which meant I would have to content myself with a soft lob back over the net. Something casual and preferably funny. I’d have to come up with words that were not Jason, I have missed you. I am only half myself without you.

  I stared at my phone and texted nothing.

  That night I skipped the open-mics and went to bed early, drained by hours of pretending to care about tiny baby cacti in glazed ceramic pots and other Henry-curated crap. Rather than bringing Los Angeles closer, Jason’s text had caused it to recede again, ever so slightly. In its place, the Carl M. strike loomed. I needed my rest.

  10

  Carl M.’s two-story apartment complex consisted of twin rows of doors and windows facing each other, motel-style, across a pitted parking lot, the windows glowing yellow or blue to signify the private worlds enclosed behind diseased-looking venetian blinds.

  I parked on the street around the corner. As I walked toward the parking lot, I went over the plan, fumbling nervously in the pocket of my red Runnr hoodie for the key elements: gloves, thumb drive full of malware, and, of course, the stun gun. Although I was relieved to have talked Amanda out of a firearm, the conversation had shown me how easy it was to purchase one. Now, in the dark, I couldn’t help wondering what good the stun gun would do me if my client was packing heat. I tried to come up with a joke—Did you know food trucks are now more heavily regulated in Austin than assault rifles? But at least murder by vegan taco is way down this year—but it didn’t help. Walking between the rows of apartments with the bag of Thai food swinging by my thigh, I looked at every window and tried to picture the guns that might be hiding in each apartment like malevolent Easter eggs. Was this the way Amanda saw the world—evil possibilities lurking just beneath the surface, glinting out of the darkness? Feeling suddenly conspicuous in the parking lot, I ducked between the cars to the awning on the left-hand row of apartments and hurried up the concrete stairs to the second floor.

  Carl’s apartment was all the way at the end, his window completely dark behind the grin of sagging blinds. Was he even home? I was ashamed at the flash of hope I felt at the thought that he might be out. Maybe he’d dashed to the corner store for a six-pack. Or, better yet, decided to attend some viewing party where half a dozen tubby Jon Snows and a single Daenerys Targaryen would be clustered on a sofa arguing their fan theories. Of course, he had placed his usual order—I readjusted my sweaty grip on the plastic-coated Runnr bag full of Thai food—but maybe he’d forgotten about it. As I was resolving to leave it on the doormat and run, a light came on along with a burst of music so loud that, even muffled, it made the concrete walkway shudder under my feet. I hesitated for a moment in the twitchy glow emanating from the blinds. Then I raised my fist.

  Knock-knock.

  The door opened faster than I’d expected, and I almost took a step back. Carl, in defiance of my internet-troll stereotype, appeared relatively normal. Just a guy of stooped but medium height, on the skinny side, with auburn hair and a weak chin. His maroon T-shirt had a grease stain just over the left nipple. Could this possibly be the same person who had sent Amanda mocked-up GIFs of her being decapitated, among other things? Close-up, he looked startlingly human. The only thing that made him seem slightly shifty was the way his eyes kept darting to the right, toward the television, which was blaring out a montage of ads for HBO shows. It was almost eight o’clock, and he could barely peel his eyes away from the screen.

  “Carl? I’m your runner, Betty.” I held the red thermal Runnr bag just over the threshold. “Thai Kitchen?”

  “Right,” he said, reaching for the bag automatically. His thumb brushed the tip of my third fingernail, and I felt something like an electric shock run through me. “Thanks,” he said, already closing the door.

  “Um, hey,” I said. Then: “Never mind, have a great night.”

  But the door halted with a tiny squeak. Carl squinted at me through the crack, giving me his full attention for the first time. “I’m sorry, did I—I already paid with the app, right?”

  “Oh yeah, you’re all paid up. I was just—” Here it came. My big moment. It was for this I had driven all the way out to Buda yesterday and dropped part of my winnings in the mega–hardware store; for this I had fed the tail of the Betty wig through the snap-back opening of the Runnr cap and fussed with it until I looked as much as possible like a short little girl with a tan and a blond ponytail, the kind who could easily wheedle favors out of strangers. I took a deep breath. “Is there any way I could just use your bathroom real quick? I’m, like, dying.” As Carl’s expression ran through hesitation and doubt, I added, “My next run is a twenty-minute drive out to the suburbs. Please?”

  In the room behind him, a grim-voiced announcer intoned the words, “Previously, on Game of Thrones.” Carl winced visibly and looked toward the screen.

  “I promise I’ll be superfast,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other expressively, trying to project an urgency on par with the impending arrival of an army of undead in Westeros.

  The sound of a dragon screeching on the television seemed to make the decision for him. Anything to get rid of me and back to the previouslys. “Yeah, that’s fine,” he said, taking a step away from the door and jerking his head over his shoulder to indicate my path without once taking his eyes off the TV in the living room.

  “Oh my God, thank you so much!” As I scooted past him, stepping off the s
quare of linoleum in the entryway and onto the seedy hall carpet, I could see Carl standing in front of the sofa, transfixed by something on the screen that made a bone-crushing sound, followed by a shriek of pain.

  I slipped on my gloves as I walked into the hallway. Just in case he was listening, I pushed the bathroom door open as far into the tiny bathroom as it would go—just far enough to see the mold on the shower curtain and shudder before retreating back into the hallway—then I pulled it firmly shut and kept walking. In the bedroom, I could see two large screens set up on a desk. I reached into my pocket and grabbed for the flash drive so hurriedly that it almost bounced out of my hand, but I caught it just as, on the television in the other room, a woman screamed, “No!”

  Amanda had given me some idea of where to look for the USB port, but the bedroom was dark, and I didn’t have much time. I glanced over my shoulder toward the living room and saw the bump of Carl’s head over the sofa back—unable to resist sitting down, a good sign he was getting sucked in. I went back to searching the side of the monitor, but the gloves made it hard to distinguish between the different holes. Then I bumped the desk a little too hard, and, to my horror, the monitor came to life.

  The screen grew bright, and a flicker of movement started up in the browser window. My hand flew to the keyboard to turn the display button off, but then it hovered there instead. Perhaps it was only the sudden thought that with the monitor light on I had a better chance of finding the USB port that made me look at the screen a moment too long, but once I recognized what I was seeing, I couldn’t look away.

  It was a five-second video clip on loop—a GIF, RadioMacktive666’s specialty. The man’s face wasn’t visible; the video had been shot over his shoulder to give the viewer the sense of participation. All you could see of him was his back and his forearm across the woman’s shoulder and collarbone, holding her down. After a moment, I recognized the woman, her face contorted in pain and horror, as a famous young actress who had recently delivered a speech on women’s rights at a global summit. Fighting to stay calm, I saw that her screaming face must have been lifted from one of her films—a horror film, by the looks of it—and transposed onto another, grainier video clip.

  As the video looped, I stared. What was happening to the woman in the GIF had happened to me. It had happened a long time ago, in the dark, on a couch in the TV room, Mattie’s old room, at Jason’s house. In a way, it had been looping in my memory, just like the GIF, for ten years.

  I noticed a string of letters in the address bar: nsfw_gifsound.

  Not safe for work was an understatement. But what really got me was the word sound. A pair of noise-canceling headphones lay on the desk, connected to a jack in the monitor, and I slipped them over my ears as if in a trance. They were heavy but comfortable, still warm from their last wearer. The sound immersion was unlike anything I could have afforded. The cries of protest synced to the opening of the woman’s mouth sounded real.

  Feeling oddly detached, I let my gaze drift down to the comments section, which was full of compliments on Carl’s technique. Wish I could do this, one guy wrote. I mean the animation AND her!

  Under the numbness, I felt a quiver of nausea, but I tried to push it down. I told myself that the clip that had been pasted over was probably lifted from amateur porn, not footage of a real assault. But if something could look this real and feel this real—if it could thrust me suddenly back onto the couch in the dark TV room at Jason’s house my senior year of high school, render me powerless, terrified, and numb—Mattie silhouetted in black against the television snow, his drunken pressure forcing me down—even if it was a reconstruction, a fantasy, a fake, I knew it was at least as real as I was.

  I’d never told Jason what his brother did. I told myself it was to protect Jason; I made up all kinds of stories in my head about how he would try to defend my honor and wind up getting his face bashed in. But the truth was, I couldn’t have told Jason even if I’d wanted to, because even while it was happening, I had made sure it wasn’t me that it was happening to. I had peeled myself away from my body and watched from a safe distance, just like I was watching the GIF now. And afterward, I had gone on living in the me that it didn’t happen to, which meant choosing to live in a world where it had not happened at all. That, I thought, was strength. That was moving on. Neely and Fash and even Amanda had failed to drag me back into my body, back into what had happened to it that night. Where they had failed, the video in front of me, with its repetitive twitch of violence, had succeeded.

  The day unfolded again in slow motion. Jason and I went to his house after school as usual and headed straight for the TV room. Mattie had come home while we were watching something on DVD—Strangers with Candy. He leaned against the door frame, staring at us silently, an open bottle of tequila dangling from his fingertips, until Jason got up the guts to tell him to get lost.

  “Whatever, Gay-son,” Mattie had said. Then he pointed drunkenly at me. “You—Diaz—I’ll see you later.”

  “Sure, Mattie,” I’d said, pretending to be absorbed in the show.

  That night we finished binge-watching one show and started another, letting each episode blur into the next so we wouldn’t have to talk about the third presence in the room, invisible but stifling. It got later and later, darker outside, darker in the room. I’d come home late from Jason’s house many times when my mom was already in bed, but I’d never before spent the night. This time the inertia was overpowering. During the closing credits of a Fry and Laurie episode, my eyelids got heavy, and I was already half asleep when Jason tucked a blanket around my feet and tiptoed out of the room.

  I awoke in the dark, a strong hand clapped over my mouth, barely able to breathe under the pressure, a cloud of sickly sweet alcohol fumes making my head spin. The fuzzy light of the television, still on in the background, just enough to trace Mattie’s outline but not his features, so that I couldn’t even tell whether he was smiling or snarling. I squeezed my eyes shut, and the rest happened in blackness.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder.

  If I’d been frozen that other time, this time every nerve in my body leaped into action at once, responding to the past scene that hung superimposed over the present moment. Feeling Mattie’s hands on me again, I grabbed what was in front of me—the keyboard—whirled around, and, wham, smacked it across Carl’s face. I felt his nose buckle under the plastic side of the keyboard, but it wasn’t enough. He was already coming back up, yelling something I couldn’t hear with the noise-canceling headphones on. It looked like his mouth was moving around the shrieks of protest in the GIF. The effect was grotesque.

  I yanked off the headphones, and the full flood of noises came rushing at me. “What the hell,” the man who had grabbed me was saying between coughs, but much louder came the throb of the theme music to Game of Thrones—duh duh duh-duh duh duh—and I brought the keyboard crashing down on the top of his head with the next duh and then tossed it aside because it was too light to do any real damage. My hand fumbled around the desk until it reached something tall and spiky with a heavy base, a trophy, maybe, and I smashed it across his face. He crumpled to the side, and I reversed the statuette and swung the heavy base into his groin. He dropped to the ground.

  “Ungh.” He was struggling to form words, emitting a kind of gurgle, but time had slowed down, and there was blood on his face, and I could hardly understand who he was, much less what he was trying to say.

  I squatted by his crumpled form, and the voice that came out of me was Betty’s.

  “What?” she said. “I can’t hear you. Too much noise.” The credit music launched into a soaring bridge; out of the corner of my eye, I saw flames on the TV screen. “You should really turn the TV down. Your neighbors hate you.”

  “What do you want?”

  I thought about what I wanted for a moment, but his hands were cupped over his corduroy-clad groin, so Betty swung the base of the trophy into his lower back instead. He jerked and gasped on the floor
like a fish, and I remembered waking up unable to breathe from Mattie’s weight and tightened my grip. “Shhh, it’s okay,” Betty told him, like Mattie had told me that night. The smell of tequila had turned my stomach ever since.

  Even distracted by this memory, I noticed immediately when the rhythm of his writhing shifted slightly and his right hand started inching toward his left hip pocket. It reminded me what I had in mine. Betty pulled out the stun gun and leaned over and poked him with it. He went rigid with a choking noise.

  “Nope. You don’t get to call 911. Sorry.” I brushed his hand, now stiff and shaking, away from his pocket. No shock of contact, now that I’d shocked him first. I hooked my gloved fingers into his pocket, past the corduroy bib and down into the cotton lining, and wiggled them down past the crease with businesslike efficiency, past the hipbone that had ground so sharply into mine it had left a bruise. I’d ignored the stiffness in my hips the next day as I drove the hour and a half to Lubbock in search of a pharmacist who would sell an underage girl a morning-after pill. My fingers closed on Carl’s phone and I slid it out of his pocket and dropped it into my own. “See, I didn’t get to call 911. So you don’t get to either.”

  “Who are you?” Carl gasped from the floor.

  “I’m Batman,” Betty said in a low, growly voice and then exploded with laughter. Carl flipped onto his stomach and started scrambling down the hall, trying to pull himself along the carpet.

  Still howling, Betty turned toward the video that was playing on the screen and swung the base of the statue until there was almost nothing left on top of the desk. Hiding behind the monitors like an animal crouching in fear was an external hard drive.

  “What do we have here?” Betty yanked the cords out of the hard drive and stuffed the whole thing in her hoodie pocket. There was room now that the stun gun was out and about.