The Dead Girl in 2A

by Carter Wilson

  “Christ, how much do you know about my family?” I ask.

  “Enough to know you moved out recently.”

  “Whatever you’re doing,” I say, “it needs to stop. Leave me and my family alone.”

  “Take it easy, Jake. I will leave, if that’s what you want. I’m no longer monitoring your family anyway. I’m here to help you. I’m not even sure I can, but I do know I’m the only one trying to right now.”

  I realize I’m sliding my ring up and down over my finger again, back and forth.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “You can call me Elle.”

  “As in Eleanor?”

  “As in L-M-N-O-P.” She takes another sip of wine, which just about finishes it off.

  So I’m calling this woman an alphabet letter.

  “And why do you think I need help?”

  Elle leans in, forcing me to do to the same. “Because of Kate and Raymond.”

  “Who?”

  “They’re like you. Or, I should say, they were like you.”

  “And they are?”

  “Dead.” She leans back and takes another sip of her wine. “They’re both dead.”

  I raise my hands in an attempt to actually grasp this situation. They’re shaking. “Can you just tell me…in plain language…what the hell you’re talking about?”

  She gives me a furrowed brow, as if impatient I don’t know all the things she apparently does. “I could have been helping all along, and I didn’t. What Landis did with you, he did with Kate and Raymond, and they’re both dead. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “The clinical trial.”

  “There is no clinical trial, Jake. Aren’t you listening to me?”

  Am I dreaming here? I actually take a moment to look around, take in my surroundings. Deep breath, inhale, smell. Listen to the clink of glasses at the bar. If this is a dream, it’s the most goddamn realistic one I’ve ever had.

  Elle leans toward me. “Look, if you’ve been taking the pills, then you’ve been changing. You’ve been feeling it, haven’t you? Ever since you went to see Landis.”

  This woman even knows how I’m feeling?

  “I have felt…changes,” I admit.

  “Good changes or bad changes?”

  If I were to choose to answer, I’d say both. The bad change is the onset of more memory loss. The good changes? Well, how about the idea of seeing the entirety of my decade-long unfinished novel suddenly unfolding in minute detail in my mind? Or how I can connect emotionally with nearly everyone I meet, feel their essence, their undercurrent, with just a simple look in the eyes?

  But I don’t answer.

  She leans in just a touch, locks in on my eyes. “I think, over time, everything Landis gave you becomes more and more suggestive. Starts giving you ideas. Are you having radical thoughts you hadn’t had before?”

  “Radical thoughts? Like divorce?”

  “Divorce is a bit soft. I’m talking about something more significant. Like…thoughts of violence. Either to yourself or others. Have you had those kinds of thoughts?”

  “No.” But my answer comes only after a pause. I think about my growing obsession with death, my scouring of the obituaries.

  “You say you want to help me,” I say. “That’s also what Landis said.”

  She pulls back and looks around the room, scanning. Then she leans into my ear. “He’s not helping you. He’s experimenting on you.”

  “What do you—”

  “We need to find Clara.”

  Clara. The name sends a jolt through me.

  “How do you know about her?”

  “Do you remember her, Jake?”

  Events are happening too fast for my brain to keep up.

  “I met her yesterday. She was on the plane.”

  “No, Jake. Do you remember her? Not from yesterday, but from another time in your life?”

  Coffee-brown eyes, flecks of cinnamon. The smell of citronella. Of nostalgia.

  “Yes. I mean, I think I do. But I don’t know how. Who is she?”

  “She’s like you,” Elle says. “Another one of Landis’s lab rats.”

  “You put us together on the plane.”

  “You were put together.”

  Not I put you together. But you were put together.

  “I don’t think anyone knows the complete story behind who you all are,” she says. “Not even Landis, but he’s trying. He hired me to track you all down so he could give you the books and pills. It’s all part of something…”

  “So Clara has a book as well?” I ask.

  “She does. And the pills. Just like you.”

  Elle is tying my brain into tight little knots.

  “I’m lost,” I say.

  “I don’t think you have much time left. We need to find Clara.”

  “Why?”

  She takes a sip of wine—more of a gulp—then sets the glass down and stands.

  “Because you’re the only two left, Jake. The last two names on the list. I know you don’t trust me—I suppose there’s no reason you should. But I’m trying to keep what happened to Raymond and Kate from happening to you.”

  I pound my fist on the table, which immediately seems ineffective. “Save us from what?”

  Instead of answering, Elle looks around, as if assessing for the safest exit. “I have to go.”

  “Wait, you can’t just leave.”

  “You’d be surprised how wrong you are.” She turns and starts walking away.

  “Wait. Just…just one more question.”

  She turns.

  “What?”

  So many questions swirl through my brain, but I only get to ask one. I straighten in the chair, lean forward. “How did Kate and Raymond die?”

  She pivots so she’s facing me fully, then pulls out a pen and writes a number on my cocktail napkin.

  “If you want me to help, you can reach me at that number. As for your question?” She tucks the pen back into her purse and zips it. “Violently.”

  Twenty

  Friday, October 12

  “Hey, sweetie.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  My daughter’s voice is the only thing I want to hear, yet it also breaks my heart. One of life’s little jabs.

  “Getting ready for school?”

  “Yup.”

  “How are you feeling?” It was the new morning question. It used to be How did you sleep?

  “Okay.” Always the same answer.

  “You have some OT today, right?”

  “I dunno. I think so.”

  She does. Every Friday at 3:00 p.m., the occupational therapist works with Em for an hour. It’s a form of play therapy, targeting anxiety and memory issues stemming from the accident.

  I open the blinds of my hotel room, greeted by darkness. Five in the morning. Last night I made it until 3:00 a.m. before sleep decided it had had enough of me. I finally felt it pulling at me but forced myself up to call Em before she left for school.

  “So, I’ll be here a few more days.”

  “How’s your trip?”

  There are a lot of answers to that question.

  “The guy I’m writing the memoirs for… He’s a unique individual.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I think he has an interesting story to tell. I’ll tell you about him more when I get back.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Mom says I need to go now.”

  “Oh…”

  “Do you want to talk to her?”

  God, yes. I miss her. I miss them both.

  “Sure, if she’s around.”

  Silence for a moment.

  “She says she’s getting ready and can’t talk right now.”

  Can’
t or doesn’t want to?

  “Oh, okay, sweetie,” I say. “In that case, I think I’m going back to bed. I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  We hang up, and I fall back on my mattress.

  My copy of The Responsibility of Death lies on the right side of the king-size bed. I reach over and pick it up, its well-worn cover smooth and comforting in my hands.

  There are several copies of the book, Jake, but each is different. No two stories are the same.

  Did that really happen last night? Was that woman real?

  If she was, that means the book in my hands is the only one telling the story of a king. He has no name and barely a face, but he and his kingdom are drawn from thousands of tiny pen marks. His face is shaded, almost blurred, as if he could be anyone, and his singular detailed feature is his crown. Here the illustrator abandons his whisker-style of art and strives for detail and realism. Though in black and white like the rest of the book, the crown is ornate in its detail, dozens of various-sized jewels layered on soft velvet, the gleam of gold wrapped around the base.

  But most striking are the five points of the crown, each of which depicts a head of a snake, all with their eyes only the narrowest of slits, their jaws unhinged, mouths open to the sky, fangs bared and ready to pierce.

  The same picture as in the flyer seeking volunteers for a memory-based clinical trial.

  The story itself is simple and disturbing. I always wondered who thought it an appropriate children’s book, but now I know the answer. It was never a book for children. It’s only a book for me.

  The man in the story wasn’t born a king. He begins as an ordinary child, a poor one, the son of a cobbler. Yet he is happy and has many friends. On the second page are the first words of the book, in which one of the boy’s friends says to him, “Let’s play a game of war.”

  It took me several reads to understand the rhythm. The following pages—a total of forty-two—consist of the boy growing older alongside his friends, and on every page, a different friend makes a singular statement to the boy. Strange things, utterances that make no sense. Things like Tickled alligators bare no teeth and Make me a sharpened stick from bone.

  The boy has no name. The boy never speaks.

  He grows older.

  The words in the book consist largely of these bizarre statements from the friends, and no one friend ever speaks twice. There is a lulling cadence to the language, which is almost poetic in nature but without any defined rhythm. No iambic pentameter, or any other metered types of verse I vaguely remember from school. But there’s something congealing the collection of gibberish together in a satisfying way. On one of my many reads, it finally hit me.

  Every statement from a friend contains exactly one of the same words as the previous one. It might be an almost invisible word, like me or the, or something more apparent, such as castle. I’ve checked every sentence, and no more or no less than one word is carried over from one to the next, and the same word is never carried over more than once.

  Finally, in the last few pages, the boy has grown into a man, as have his friends. Suddenly, he is king, with no explanation or logic given. On the second-to-last page, the king sits on his throne in an impossibly large chamber, looking vastly bored and tired. His image is tiny—most of the page is blank space—making the detail of his crown all the more amazing. I’ve actually studied it through a magnifying glass, and I can’t think of a pen with a fine-enough tip or a human with a steady-enough hand to create the detail of the snake heads as they are drawn on that page. Yet there they are.

  A similarly tiny friend leans into the king’s ear and says, “The life game commences, sire, and you decide who wins.”

  Turn the page.

  In the very last scene, the king sits on this same throne, yet now he fills up nearly the entire page. And rather than bored, his eyes are wide with excitement. Another new friend leans in. His is the first face with a shadow of whiskers. He repeats the very first sentence from the book.

  Let’s play a game of war.

  There is one remaining page after that, but it is blank. I used to give this extra page no thought; don’t most books have blank pages at the beginning and end? Yet now I’ve come to consider this final, glossy piece of blank white paper as the king’s oblivion. He played a game of war, and everything was wiped out.

  Perhaps that’s the key to the title. The Responsibility of Death. And whatever this book is, it’s supposedly dangerous. The woman—Elle—said I need to stop reading it, though the damage might already be done.

  She referred to the illustrations as algorithms.

  I let the book slide from my fingers, and my head becomes impossibly heavy. I sink into the pillow and close my eyes, thinking, lost in the deepest of fogs. Five more minutes of sleep. Maybe ten. That’s all I need.

  Hours later, I awaken. Phone ringing. I recognize the number and try to sound as alert as possible.

  “This is Jake.”

  “Did I wake you? Jake, it’s nearly nine.”

  “No…no, Eaton. Well, actually, yes. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

  “I thought we were meeting at eight.”

  “We were. I’m so sorry. This isn’t like me. I can be right over.”

  A long pause. “Please come.”

  I apologize again, and we hang up.

  In the bathroom, I splash water on my face. No time for a shower. I get ready in ten minutes, grabbing a cup of coffee in the lobby on the way out.

  Outside, an intense sun lights my face. Thick, gunmetal clouds lumber in from the mountains. As I look west, I let myself think of Clara for just a moment, long enough to wonder yet again if the girl from 2A is alive or dead.

  Then I push her away in my mind. Not totally gone, but out of reach for the time being. I’ve got responsibilities here.

  But later, I need to chase these ghosts.

  Twenty-One

  I knock. Eaton doesn’t answer the door, just barks at me to enter. I do. Again, the inside of the vast apartment is dark. Shades drawn, only a few lights on.

  He’s sitting on the couch, as if he hasn’t moved since yesterday. I think his outfit is different, but it’s hard to tell. His right hand grips his forehead, telling me the darkness hasn’t quashed his headache.

  “Come. Sit.”

  This is a different Eaton than yesterday. That Eaton seemed eager to leap into the work, despite his weakened state. This Eaton seems to want to pull his blankets over his head and turn the world away.

  I sit. He doesn’t look over at me.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I say. “Are you okay?”

  He mumbles something. I don’t ask him to repeat it.

  The air is stale, stagnant, as if having been recycled by the same set of lungs, over and over. I try to picture Eaton outside of this apartment, in the world, conducting meetings, networking. Out to dinner. I don’t know him, but I can’t see it. The image of him here, on the couch, in a dark apartment on a sunny day, seems the only setting appropriate for this man. What does he do for a living? Where does his money come from?

  When he finally speaks again, his voice is on edge, his words clipped. “I was there, you know.”

  “Where?”

  “At the massacre.”

  The word massacre is about the last one I expected as a response. I gently reach into my messenger bag and retrieve my laptop and digital recorder. I power up my system and launch into the Word document I’d started for my notes on Eaton. I turn on the recorder, not asking him permission.

  “What massacre?”

  “The Water Tower Place mall shooting.”

  I try to process this. I was half expecting him to talk about some metaphorical massacre, but what he’s referencing was very real.

  “The shooting from last month?”

  One of the worst mas
s shootings in U.S. history. Ray Higgins, dentist, walked first into a mall and then a hotel in Chicago with an assault rifle and just opened up. No apparent motive other than maximum body count.

  “That’s right,” Eaton says.

  “You were there?”

  “In the hotel. Where it all ended.”

  Holy shit. This is hard to fathom.

  “Were you hurt?”

  “No. Not physically.”

  He goes quiet. Scratches his neck, then lightly squeezes his temples, as if coaxing his headache away. Part of writing memoirs is to act as a psychologist, knowing when to tease information from your subject, and when to remain silent and let the subject decide when to talk. This is a moment I remain silent. This lasts perhaps a full minute. Feels longer.

  Finally, Eaton speaks.

  “Raymond Higgins. A thirty-five-year-old dentist. Raymond Higgins started in the mall.”

  Raymond. All the news stories referred to him as Ray. You don’t hear the name Raymond all that often, and I just heard this name off the lips of a woman who whooshed in and out of my life.

  I know a coincidence when I see it, and this feels nothing like that.

  “He walked in through Macy’s carrying a large duffel bag,” Eaton continues. “Headed straight for the changing rooms. Was in there for some time. When he came out, he was in full camouflage, Kevlar vest, and was carrying an AK-103. He also had pistols on each ankle.”

  I remember the grainy security footage. Images of Higgins walking out of the dressing room before the killing started.

  “I was in the lobby of the Ritz,” he continues. “I was there for the night on business and was just checking in. The hotel is connected to the mall, of course. I heard the shots, but it didn’t sound like gunfire. It was just staccato popping in the distance, something unrecognizable. But the screams. The screams were unmistakable.”

  Eaton isn’t looking at me as he speaks. His hand continues to massage his forehead, squeezing pressure on, then off. On, off.

  “The first person he killed was a store clerk in Macy’s. Three rapid gunfire bursts ripped open his chest. The victim was twenty-five, I believe. He killed indiscriminately. Seven more people died in that Macy’s, and by the time Raymond reached the interior of the mall, everyone was running. Did you see any of the video footage?”