The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

  “But what if I do? Where will I go? What will happen to me? What will happen to Soph?” Across the room, Dana’s sister was sound asleep on her back. One of her arms was flung above her head. Even in the dark, I could see her small hands twitching in her dreams.

  “Baby.” I tried to keep my voice light. “You’re not going to disappear.”

  “But Auntie Dee did.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek and waited and waited for the metallic taste of my own blood to flood my mouth. “She didn’t disappear.”

  “Daddy says Auntie Dee disappeared and she never came home.”

  “He told you that?”

  She shook her head. A string of hair near her neck was plastered with sleep sweat against her skin. “I heard him say it.”

  “She didn’t disappear,” I repeated.

  “What happened to her? Where is she?”

  I paused. “I don’t know,” I told her. “We don’t know.”

  Dana cried, “That’s disappearing. I know it is.” She wrung her hands. “I want Mama.” She began to cry louder, and I worried it would wake Sophie.

  I climbed back into the bed and got under the covers with her. I hugged her tight against my chest, where she was working herself up to cry louder. I tried to muffle her against me. “I know, baby,” I tried to say. “I know. You’re not going anywhere. I promise.”

  Dana pulled away from me. She put her hands on my shoulders to keep a distance between us. Her eyes were massive and still pooling hot tears. “You don’t know that,” she said.

  And that was the truth.

  May 1991

  The exhibition was sparsely attended. I felt relieved I’d made it and ashamed that, when Dee had asked me to come a few hours earlier, I’d considered skipping. The Milwaukee Art Museum had selected student work from five different colleges in southeastern Wisconsin. Dee was ecstatic that they’d chosen two of her onion paintings to represent Mount Mary’s student artists. I didn’t particularly want to go because we were in the midst of a demoralizingly late-spring storm—heavy, slushy sleet blew from the lake and turned the streets and the sidewalks into slick death traps. It was cold, wet, and dark; winter was making one last desperate fight for its life. I was just as content to stay in my apartment, drinking day-old red wine and reading until I had to pick Leif up. But Dee worked her magic on me, as usual. She called me an hour before doors opened. I need this. I need you, Pegasus, please. Please without the question. That was one of her signatures.

  All the student artists wandered around awkwardly holding sparkling water and complimenting one another’s pieces; it was painfully obvious to me who they were. A few parents and friends milled around; most of them affected interested, engaged expressions.

  The gallery itself had the feel of a great open mouth. Sleet thrashed the windows, creating a loud, frantic atmosphere despite the relative silence of the attendees. I felt my pulse with my thumb, but the beats were too quick to count. I scanned the place for Dee. Even from a distance, I could tell there was an energy suck in the room, that there was a leader or two toward whom everyone had trained their attention. I knew one of these people would be Dee.

  As I got closer, I saw the other one was Erik. They had their arms around each other’s waists so tightly they looked like conjoined twins. I was surprised by their closeness, embarrassed by it. They were aware of how closely the rest of the group was watching them. Throwing their beautiful heads back and laughing with their throats shining up to the ceiling, dramatic flourishes of their wrists, hands cupped to each other’s ears. A performance. I almost didn’t want to say hi, because I sensed that my presence would alter this dynamic, change it, and something would be lost. But Dee caught me watching from a distance. She broke away from Erik and rushed to me. He followed. She hugged me and her body was warm against mine, cozy from the heat of Erik’s body pressed against hers.

  “I didn’t know you invited Erik,” I said when she pulled away.

  Dee blushed. “You said you weren’t sure you could make it.”

  “I said I’d be here.” She frowned. It wasn’t what I meant to say. I added, “Hey—congratulations, babe.” I tried to shake the edge in my voice, but I could tell it had already affected Dee. “I’m so proud of you.” She nodded at me and let herself get led away by some fellow students who wanted to talk technique. Erik patted my arm. I shirked his touch, but he stayed close nonetheless.

  “How’s Leif?” he asked me. I glanced at him. His expression seemed genuine. I scanned the gallery for Dee’s paintings and began to make my way toward them. Erik followed. He had a skittery energy—he moved like Leif but more concentrated and frantic, like he felt he had no time at all.

  “He’s okay,” I told him. “He’s fine.”

  “He’s crazy about you,” he said. I didn’t take my eyes off Dee’s paintings. They hung side by side, two purple onions, which in the stores they call red onions, though ever since Dee started painting them, I’ve thought of them as purple. In one piece, the onion was fully intact and floating against a dark green background; in the other, the onion was splayed in half on a green countertop.

  I noticed Erik watching me. He was waiting for a reply. I nodded.

  He went on, “Like, really crazy. I’ve never seen him like this before.”

  “What do you mean? Like what?” I said.

  “Like . . . in love.”

  “Oh, stop. I’m sure he’s been in love before.”

  “No,” he said. He leaned in to me. I didn’t want to turn to him, so I kept staring at Dee’s paintings. “This time is the real deal. Don’t you think I can tell? I know him. It’s like you with Dee. I’m sure you’d be able to tell if she was in love.”

  I thought on that. Would I? My mother always said when you’re on the outside, you can never know what goes on between two people in a relationship. I very much agreed with that sentiment, and I also wondered if we could ever truly know what goes on in our own relationships. Given that the bonds with even our most beloved contain such unknowns, such gaps, such vast spaces of inaccessibility, what can we ever truly know about those smallest of spaces where we overlap and come together?

  “Do you think Dee’s in love?” I asked him.

  His face took on a pained expression. I felt awkward for asking.

  “With . . . with this Frank guy?” He said the name like it tasted bad. “As I’m sure you’ve guessed, he’s a phase. I think she’s trying to impress you. And between you and me . . .” He hesitated, and I made a gesture like, go on. “Don’t tell her I said so, but he’s an absolute fucking nightmare.” This was the most pointed Erik had ever been to me. I wanted to know what he knew, but just then two guys brushed by us. One of them checked Erik with his shoulder and muttered something I couldn’t hear.

  Erik’s body took on a charged energy. He made himself bigger, which was a considerable feat given that he was already a tall man. Though he was quite thin, he had the ability, under certain circumstances, to grow and to loom. I felt myself shrink in comparison.

  “What did you just say?” Erik shouted into the back of the kid’s head.

  The kid had a baseball cap on backward and a stiff polo with large Tommy Hilfiger logos on the sleeves. He turned around to look at Erik. He drove his eyes up and down Erik like a steamroller flattening a massive mound of dirt. He smirked. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I heard you.” Erik’s voice echoed through the gallery. People began to turn their attention to us. My cheeks were hot. I checked my pulse again. “I heard you say something about my friend’s painting.” He was shouting. Some people began to leave through the wide-open doors—out into the disgusting Milwaukee night. I wished I could go too.

  “Come on, man,” the kid said. His smirk was fading. “I didn’t say anything. You heard wrong.”

  “You better apologize to my friend,” Erik said. “Dee! Dee!” he shouted across the gallery. More people started leaving. The kid’s friend took a step away from him.
“You better fucking apologize,” Erik said again.

  “Or what?” The kid laughed in dry spurts. “Are you going to fight me, you fucking fairy?” The kid’s friend took a second step back. A big betrayal that he’d hear about later. Dee rushed forward, and I watched the kid become a different person once she was in his purview. I felt sick. His eyes took on a dumb glaze.

  “What’s this?” Dee said. She looked at me desperately, trying to take stock of the situation. I looked away. Erik took a step toward the kid, but Dee moved in front of him.

  “Apologize,” Erik said again.

  The kid was ignoring Erik now and staring at Dee, who’d planted herself firmly between the two men. He shrugged heavily, like they’d only been arguing about what the Brewers’ chances were that year. “Sorry,” the kid said. He walked away.

  “What the hell. Come on,” Dee said. Her face was flushed and shining. She shoved Erik playfully. “Let’s get a drink.”

  She tugged on Erik, who had turned back to her paintings and who didn’t seem ready to stop looking.

  I don’t remember anything else from that night. What bar did we go to? How late did we stay up? Did we talk about Frank? Did we talk about the city whose seams had been, or were always, unraveling rapidly? What songs did Erik and Dee sing together while we walked back to my apartment in Riverwest? Did our fingers get numb from the cold? Were Erik and Dee there with me, laughing and laughing, when Leif came home from work?

  Are you ever afraid of how much you’ve forgotten? Entire days slip by—the contents of which could just as easily have been a dumb drama or a sitcom or an inane advertisement—with not a single discernible moment to hold on to. You don’t even know what you’ve lost unless you’re like me, and then every day you think about how much might be gone, how much you wish you still had, how difficult it is to mourn memories that don’t even exist.

  September 1984

  I think my parents blamed me for what they perceived as Dee’s excessive promiscuity, because I was the older sister, and I was supposed to be a good model for her. I was supposed to set standards. But the truth was that I was as shocked as they were by some of her behavior. I was especially baffled by her early preoccupation with sex, or maybe, more aptly, her preoccupation with her own sexuality, though in front of her, I did my best to hide this. In fact, I often made an effort to seem much more knowledgeable than I really was.

  Once, when I was a freshman in high school and Dee was in seventh grade, I came home from school to find her sitting on our porch stoop with her face flushed pink. Her bike, a pale blue Schwinn our father had bought her for her twelfth birthday, was lying on its side by her feet. Later, when she moved into her dorm at Mount Mary, that bike was stolen. Dee mourned it for weeks. She never had the chance to buy another one.

  I sat down next to her. Her thigh was warm against mine. I pressed in to it. She smiled at me conspiratorially. She was drinking a glass of Ovaltine and shoveling popcorn into her mouth. I reached into the plastic bowl for a handful. I tossed a few kernels in her hair, and she pretended to be annoyed.

  Then she turned to me seriously. “Do you know what orgasms are?” she asked. I didn’t have time to hide my surprise.

  “Sure,” I said confidently, though I’d only read about them in books, or heard about them on TV and in movies, and I wasn’t convinced at the time that they existed for women. Once while reading a graphic sex scene, I’d reached into my underwear and been surprised to find a filmy wetness there. I’d since made a few half-hearted attempts at masturbating, but I had yet to experience anything miraculous beyond agitation.

  I hadn’t told Dee any of this. She nodded at me like she knew, though.

  “Well, Nicole told me that she had one when she was riding her bike on a gravel road,” Dee said.

  I eyed the bike at her feet. “Uh-huh,” I said. “And?”

  “She said it was the best thing she’s ever felt. Ever.” Dee whispered the last word, which I found a little creepy. She tossed her head at the bike and then kicked the wheel so the spokes spun thin shadows on the concrete. “So I gave it a try too.”

  I felt the need to laugh, because I was suddenly uncomfortable in my skin. Or maybe I was just more aware of it than I’d ever been. Everything on me felt electrically charged, like I could shock anything I touched. I thought about how our comforters would spark with static charge, bright bolts of light in the dark, when we shook them out at night. I moved my leg away from Dee’s. She didn’t register it. She just kept kicking the wheel of her bike.

  “Did it work?” I asked her.

  Dee shook her head. “I couldn’t find any gravel roads.”

  I nodded. “Did Nicole also tell you that you can lose your virginity if you ride your bike too much?”

  Dee’s eyes widened. I’d read this in a book, though I didn’t believe it.

  “Really?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe,” I told her. “Why? Do you want to lose your virginity to a bike?”

  We laughed. She threw the rest of her popcorn at me.

  When I finally did lose my own virginity, and I was shocked at the sheer force required to break inside me, I remembered this moment. It became unfathomable to me that some women could lose their virginity to something as gentle as a bumpy bike ride, when it took so much effort on the part of the boy, and involved so much pain, for me to lose mine. At the height of this pain, when the boy was finally inside me, all I could think about was the pretty pale blue of Dee’s new bike, and those spokes spinning as she kicked the wheel absentmindedly with her bare feet.

  April 2019

  The protestors in front of the now vacant lot at 924 North Twenty-fifth Street began to thin when most of the cameras left. The news crews went to stake out spots at General Mitchell International Airport, where famed psychic Thomas Alexander would be arriving shortly. The media had never been interested in the protestors anyway; they had been interested in the protestors’ tangential relationship to the psychic. NPR was barely interested. The protestors were asking community leaders to come out and support their efforts.

  But a lot of people had forgotten about the serial killer altogether, and even more had forgotten about the young men he’d killed. It had been easy for people to forget, because most people didn’t know who those men had been. After the arrest, one man’s sister said, “They could put these boys on the front of Newsweek, Time, and everything to show that these boys were real. If it wasn’t for these boys, he wouldn’t even be existing.”

  But the serial killer did exist. He persisted in his existence, and in death, he became truly famous: the Milwaukee Cannibal, they called him on episodes of shows like Truly Terrifying People.

  “Now, isn’t it odd that the majority of his victims were Black or Brown boys?” one of the protesters asked an NPR reporter. “You reporters have all kinds of reasons for this. None of those reasons have anything to do with the relationship between the police and the communities where these men lived in. Nobody wants to hear that story. And that story certainly won’t be told on these tours, especially not right now.”

  The group put out a statement requesting that the mayor stop the show. The mayor’s office declined to comment.

  When I typed Thomas Alexander’s name into Google, his baby face shone in a strip of headshots at the top of my browser. He had wispy blond hair, pearly teeth, and the upper body of a yogi. He probably could have been a model or an actor. I stared into his eyes—they were a different color in almost every picture: ultraviolet purple, bright blue, hazel. Maybe he had a rainbow of differently colored contacts in his medicine cabinet. Beneath his photos were hundreds of links to news articles about celebrities who’d used his services to contact dead loved ones. I noticed a link to his website, which was a flashy page full of glowing testimonials from celebrities. He said he was a medium, a clairvoyant, and a medical intuitive. According to his bio he was twenty.

  Thomas Alexander had garnered attention most recently for predicting the death of s
ome B-list actor. The actor’s wife begged her husband to do a reading with Thomas Alexander. During the session, Thomas Alexander contacted the actor’s dead grandmother, who said she wished she’d been at her grandson’s wedding. The actor rubbed his scruff. He got a little misty. The psychic also mentioned that some of the actor’s ancestors wanted their progeny to take better care of their hearts. The ancestors told Thomas Alexander that high blood pressure or something was an issue. The actor threw back his head and laughed. He said something like Thanks, Doc, and Thomas Alexander laughed too, so all of his immaculate teeth shone. He looked like he still had all his baby teeth.

  Two weeks later, the man died of a dissected aorta. He was playing basketball with his son when his heart literally exploded. A few months after that, the widow asked Thomas Alexander to come back and do another taped reading at their home. Thomas Alexander walked around the woman’s sprawling property and told her that her husband wanted her to date again. He wanted her to move on. He told her she was still a beautiful young woman. After this episode aired and earned a record number of viewers, the television series, despite terrible critical reviews, was renewed for a second season.

  I hungrily read the skeptics’ takes on him—he taped all of his readings; he used a combination of hot-reading and cold-reading techniques to convince his clients as well as his fans that he could speak to the dead; he employed flattery. This worked, apparently, because of a psychological phenomenon known as the Barnum effect, which occurs when people believe that what they are told applies specifically to them, despite the fact that it could apply to almost anyone. This phenomenon is the reason people hungrily consume horoscopes and the reason why Thomas Alexander’s readings worked so well, especially on people who were grieving.

  Meanwhile, the kid refused to do live shows. He refused the skeptics’ calls. He refused requests for interviews. He smiled his Mickey Mouse Club smile and tweeted Haters gonna hate memes on repeat. He was a twenty-year-old millionaire.