The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

  “You busy?” I asked him.

  “What do you need?” I heard some voices on his end, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  “I wanted to say sorry about the necklace. I didn’t remember you giving it to me. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Is that all?”

  “I need some help.”

  “When?”

  “Whenever you can.”

  “I’m a little tied up here.” The voices got louder. The tenor of it sounded like an argument, but it was hard to tell. Wolski got louder too. “Text me. I can be where you need me in an hour or two.”

  He hung up without saying goodbye. I texted him the address of the storage locker where we kept Dee’s stuff. He never responded to the text, but I knew he’d be there. I closed my eyes and lay back down for another half hour. All I could see were Thomas Alexander’s baby teeth shining in that tiny, immaculate forever smile of his. Then I brushed my teeth and fixed my hair. I avoided the mirror. When I pulled up to the gate of the storage locker, Wolski was already there, smoking and leaning against his car. I thought for a moment I felt something unnameable for him, and then the thought was gone, and as was the case more often than not, I felt nothing.

  “Rough night, eh?” he shouted while I was still getting out of the car. I wondered if I should have been braver and looked in the mirror. “You look like shit.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He squeezed my shoulder. “We’re gonna get through this,” he said in a low voice. He tried to make his voice like an anchor. Usually, this tone worked on me, but I wasn’t attached that day. A heavy gust of wind could have carried me away.

  “I know,” I said. I stood straighter and shrugged his hand off my shoulder. “I just didn’t want to go alone. It’s been a while.”

  It had been two decades since we’d boxed Dee’s stuff up and locked it away. I didn’t think Peter had been in here since, and I certainly hadn’t.

  Wolski nodded. “Well. Let’s make it quick,” he said. “I need to get back.” I was tempted to ask him what was going on back at the office, but I needed to focus. I hung back while Wolski took the key from me and opened the sliding door. I imagined a large steel mouth with Thomas Alexander’s tiny teeth lining the top and the bottom. Dust flew from the door and into Wolski’s face. He coughed daintily, pretending he hadn’t inhaled it. I stepped over the imaginary row of teeth on the floor and into the locker, which was hot inside even though it was brisk outside. I looked up into the cement cell.

  Dee’s paintings were stacked like pallets on top of one another along the walls of the unit. I took one down from a stack near the door. It was a painting of an onion cut in half: deep purples and reds on a dark forest-green background. The paint was smudged and faded now. It was one that had hung briefly on the wall in the Milwaukee Art Museum that spring. I put it back on the stack. I opened a box near the door and found a set of art supplies. I picked up a dirty paintbrush. She used to let me watch her at work, though often she would make me promise not to talk, because I was a distraction; she, however, was allowed to talk. Once she turned to me, her whole body lit up by a long shaft of light spilling through the high studio windows, and she said, You can never really mix the same color twice, but that’s okay. And I remember repeating in my mind, But that’s okay, but that’s okay, but that’s okay, like it was some brilliant bit of Buddhist wisdom. It occurs to me now that Dee was the type of person who seemed to float, without effort, but also without judgment, above all the rest of us sad, rooted people.

  I grabbed the paintbrush and was about to leave when I noticed her old Walkman in a box of tapes. It was one of the bright yellow ones that had SPORT written in large block letters across the side. Flimsy headphones, the foam now crumbled, were still plugged in. I remembered Frank had given the Walkman to her. At the last moment, I chose the Walkman instead of the paintbrush. I rushed out of the unit and motioned for Wolski to help me slam the heavy door shut again. The lock was sticky, and I fumbled with it. Wolski took it from my hands, his large fingers brushing the backs of my own, and I stepped away. He snapped the lock into place with a terrifying click, and I jumped back. Wolski moved to keep me from falling backwards. I let him. He nodded into the top of my head. I put a hand on his chest.

  “Hey,” I said. “Did you tell the psychic about the photo?”

  Wolski looked hurt, or like he was pretending to look hurt. I was suddenly saddened, and very exhausted, by the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference.

  “You know I wouldn’t . . . I couldn’t do that.”

  I wasn’t sure about this. “Okay,” I said.

  “He knows?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think so, not really.”

  Wolski left in a hurry, and it wasn’t until later that I realized he, along with his MPD brethren, was dealing with another crisis.

  News of Thomas Alexander’s request for police protection had only stirred up fresh outrage over the city’s clear support of the psychic’s tours and the mayoral office’s historic apathy regarding police brutality. More people were now joining the victims’ families in protesting the tours and the police presence in that area of the city. Besides the victims’ families, most people hadn’t been particularly interested in protesting the tours, but people were eager to protest the MPD. They had been doing so for years. Because every year there were more police killings of Black Milwaukeeans. Many of these cases failed to make national news, and I’m sure there were many that never made the local news either. The coverage of Terry Williams’s murder stayed with me. Maybe because he was the same age as Dee when she disappeared, or maybe because it happened near Bradford Beach, a place that is, for me, inextricably linked to that summer. Or maybe it was the way they assassinated his character after he died. All of it disarmed me. Made me feel like we were living on overlapping loops of loss that circumnavigated one another. I couldn’t see how we would get out. But I could see the years stretching out in either direction and understand that all of this had happened before and it’s still happening now.

  On a summer night in 2017, a Milwaukee County deputy fired several rounds into a car whose driver was fleeing from a traffic stop. That driver, nineteen-year-old Terry Williams, was murdered across the street from Bradford Beach. The young woman in the passenger seat was gravely injured. The deputy said he had feared for his life, even though the car was not headed in his direction. In the days that followed, the news pored over this young man’s history, reporting on his rap sheet. The reporters seemed eager to explain the teenager’s death, and in order to do so, they needed to make him irredeemable and deserving of his fate. I saw this happen again and again. They’d done the same thing to Sylville Smith a year before Terry Williams.

  After these murders, protests spread and flourished on the North Side, in Riverwest, Harambee, and Tosa. People marched up and down MLK Drive. UWM students joined the protests and helped organize community events. In those days, the news almost never used the word protest or protestors. They preferred the word riot: They sought out small-business owners to interview in front of damaged storefronts—people who gave impassioned descriptions of looting and destruction. During the last set of protests, the police department sent cops in riot gear into the streets and enforced curfews. The governor sent in the National Guard. They arrested dozens of protestors. People marched downtown and stood in front of the Milwaukee Police Department headquarters with their hands in the air for hours on end.

  Whenever protests erupted, I had memory flares from the summer Dee disappeared. Activists had held multiple rallies in front of the serial killer’s apartment after learning that officers had automatically trusted a white man more than the Black women who had tried to flag the killer’s suspicious activities. Just like in 1991, protestors made demands and the city made promises. Olive-branch stuff. For example, the previous police chief resigned, and they brought in a new one. The protests would die down when it started to get cold again, kids went back to
school, and the national news outlets that had covered Milwaukee finally left, but only after almost everyone ran some version of the following headline: “Milwaukee Remains One of the Most Segregated Cities in the Nation.” Many white people in Milwaukee were shocked to hear people say this about their city, though they had only to look at their neighborhoods and their children’s schools to know it.

  As far as I could see, the police reaction to real or perceived problems was to add more police. That was what they’d done in Walker’s Point when the psychic arrived. They’d tried to quietly squash the protestors by restricting access to Specter’s and other establishments on Second Street. They added horse cops, and bike cops, and motorcycle cops, and cops walking around with their fingers looped through their belts. Two helicopters noisily patrolled the neighborhood from the sky. But the more police the department threw at the situation, the angrier people got, and the more the protests’ popularity grew.

  I sensed Thomas Alexander was nervous but hopeful about the situation. Though the optics weren’t ideal, they still put him and his show in the spotlight. Who cared what was in the spotlight with him if he was the shiniest thing in it?

  Wolski grumbled about the whole situation. “Only way this will die down without somebody getting killed is if it snows. Nobody likes protesting in the snow,” he said to me and Pete once.

  “It’s April,” Pete told him.

  Wolski shrugged. “Crazier things have happened.”

  July 1991

  On the same night he’d been admitted, Erik checked himself out of the hospital while Dee was out getting something to eat. When she got back, she dropped the bag of takeout she’d bought for the two of them, and the tomato soup spilled across the hospital floor. The nurses did not have a forwarding address, and they admitted that they’d recommended he stay another night, but he’d requested the wheelchair, and they’d brought it and rolled him outside. He’d limped away. Dee left a voicemail about it all on my work phone, and I listened to it while sorting books. My boss eyed me warily from the door of his office. I hadn’t picked up because I’d known it would be about Erik, and I’d missed so much work that summer, and done such a terrible job when I had been there, that I sensed I was dangerously close to losing the job. I assumed I’d been hired in part because my boss thought I was cute, in part because I played the poet-needing-work card well, but I’d missed several days in a row during the past week and I knew I wasn’t that cute. I wasn’t Dee-level cute, anyway. It was a good job, an easy job, and I needed it. I listened to the voicemail and acted bored, like it was a message from my mother or the landlord. I could still feel my boss’s eyes on me while I deleted the message and quietly put the phone back on the receiver. I picked up my sorting pace and kept my head down.

  When the clock struck four-thirty, I rushed to Dee’s dorm. I had to walk and then take the bus, so it was almost an hour before I was knocking on her door. I was sweating from the walk, and I felt empty and hungry, like I could drink all of Lake Michigan or eat six meals at once. Dee didn’t answer, so I gently opened the door and found her painting. She looked so beautiful, I had the urge to run to her and wrap her up. Dee had this effect on me sometimes; I needed to be near her body. She was sweating too, but just lightly, and it gave her whole body a glistening pulse. She ignored me, and I allowed her that. I sat down on the floor and watched her paint, and I could feel time passing by the way light pooled and evaporated and pooled again in the corners of the tiny room and on her bed and in her hair. She was painting more onions. It was getting dark when she finally turned to me and said, “What?”

  I felt like I was waking from meditation. “You called me,” I said.

  “You didn’t answer.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand unselfconsciously and smeared a streak of purple paint on her nose.

  “Babe,” I started. “I was at work.”

  She rolled her eyes, and then they got large and dark and began to well. I stayed on the floor. I lost the urge to touch her when the tears started to flow.

  “He’s gone,” she said. Her voice broke. I wanted to turn a light on in the room because the space seemed suddenly, dangerously dark, even though summer light still lingered in the sky. Leif’s words echoed in my head: You can only make it worse. I was making it worse.

  “He’s a smart kid. He’ll be okay,” I tried.

  Dee threw down the paintbrush she’d been holding. Paint splattered on the carpet. “You’re dumber than I thought,” she said. I cringed. “Okay?” she repeated.

  I didn’t really think he was going to be okay, but I needed to say something. I was bad at saying the right thing, even when it came to Dee, whom I knew so well. Whom I thought I knew so well.

  “We need to find him,” she said. She pointed at me. “You need to find him.” I nodded and nodded, but I had no real hope we would. The nodding seemed to calm Dee, though, so I put some heart into it. She sat down next to me on the carpet. I wished she would turn the light on. Her bare shoulder touched mine, and I felt our skin stick together for a second while she leaned in to me. “You saw those pictures at the bar. What if Erik . . . What if he goes missing too.” I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of this possibility. Or that Leif hadn’t.

  “Right,” I conceded, because I was tired of fighting. This was the way I lost all arguments—appeasement. “You hungry?” I pinched her arm, and she shoved me.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “Let’s go to Walker’s Point,” I said. “We can ask around.”

  Dee eyed me. Her face was hard to see in the dark room. I put my forehead against hers, but she still wasn’t having it. She pushed me back. “Fine,” she said.

  I scrubbed Dee’s nose harshly with a washcloth to get the paint off, and then we took the bus down to Walker’s Point. I was starving and wanted to kill two birds with one stone, so I decided we’d check out the bar right next door to the one where the devil blew smoke out onto the dance floor. This bar was famous for serving cheeseburgers that would change your life. I’d heard this from Erik, and he hadn’t cared to elaborate. I told Dee on the bus, and she rolled her eyes.

  “I’m a vegetarian now,” she said smartly. Milwaukee washed by behind her done-up eyes, and I had a hard time focusing on either view: her purpled eye shadow and the sidewalks, her rose-petal cheekbones and the bus shelters, her oily mascara and the cream-brick buildings.

  “Jesus, really?” I murmured. “You can get plain cheese. Just like we used to make at home, then.” She huffed and put her headphones on. I thought Frank had given her the Walkman, though she’d never confirmed that. I didn’t think she could have afforded it on her wage at the salon. Frank was big into gifts like that. I was suspicious of them, and I wondered if they were meant as distractions, though from what I didn’t know. But I also couldn’t remember the last time Leif had bought me something besides drugs or takeout, so maybe I was just jealous.

  The bus started to empty out near the downtown, and it didn’t pick up any new passengers. By the time we got to Walker’s Point, Dee and I were the only people on the bus. It was late, and Dee had slipped into a half sleep, resting her head slightly on my shoulder. At our stop, I nudged her, and she sprang up and grabbed my hand so tightly it hurt.

  “Relax,” I said. “We’re here.” She got embarrassed and busied herself with tucking away the Walkman. I wished she hadn’t brought it. It was a thief magnet.

  The bar was much shabbier than the one we’d been to with Erik. Its most redeeming qualities were the permanent multicolored Christmas lights strung up behind the bar and the overwhelming smells of hot butter and meat. Dee wrinkled her nose up, but I knew she thought it smelled good. We sat at the bar, which was fairly empty, and I ordered us two beers and two cheeseburgers, one without meat. The bartender, a young woman in a crop top and a choker, stared at me. “No meat?” she yelled over the music.

  “No meat,” I yelled back. She laughed, and I nodded, and I saw her run to tell the other bartender, who w
as running the grill (a generous noun for the contraption he was cooking on), and he threw his hands up, and she gestured toward us, and they laughed conspiratorially.

  “Happy?” I asked Dee.

  She licked foam from the head of her beer. “Hell no,” she said. “Great plan. Brilliant.”

  “Just drink your damn beer.”

  The burgers arrived in waxed paper and dripping in grease, which spread in large wet spots on the paper and covered our hands when we opened them. The most satisfying part was the waxed paper. The burger did not change my life, unless clogged arteries counts. Dee hated hers; it was clearly an unevenly sliced piece of Velveeta cut from those processed cheese-like blocks they sell in aluminum foil.

  “Gross, Dee,” I said. “Stop eating that.”

  “Well, give me a bite of yours, then,” she said. She reached over to grab my burger and I slapped her hand away.

  “I thought you were a vegetarian,” I said. “Now.” I stuck my tongue out at her.

  Dee shrugged. “I changed my mind again.”

  I nodded and slid my half-eaten burger toward her. She kissed my cheek. I leaned in to the kiss.

  When the bartender came to refresh our drinks, I leaned across the bar; I motioned for her to lean in too, and she was annoyed. Sweat collected on her choker and I watched it run down her neck. “Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “That depends,” she said.

  “Do you know Erik Gunnarson?”

  “Honey, lots of men come into this bar. I don’t develop a relationship with every single one of them.”

  “Young, skinny, tall, reddish-blond hair, huge green eyes . . .”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen him.”

  “You see him recently?”

  “You a cop or something?”

  “No, just his . . . friend.” I choked on that word.