After the People Lights Have Gone Off (30 page)

The doorbell rang again and I slammed the door open.

It was my pizza.

I took it, ate it with water from the tap. Remembered splitting pizzas with Teresa.

Our first date had been pizza, then the arcade in back.

When we were going to make it forever.

I don’t know if I missed her, but I missed that, I guess.

I nodded thanks to her, stood with a mouthful of the past, went to her door and pushed it open, the bungee cord humming with tension by my leg.

The heat billowed out like a rancid breath.

I came back with the air freshener she’d thought to send, sprayed two cans’ worth, until I was coughing and laughing, my hand leaving tomato-sauce stains on the wall by her door.

Somewhere in there, I cried. I tried to tell myself it was for her, for us, for what we’d had, what we’d meant, but I don’t know. It just hit me, that I was here, now. Alone. That this was it. That everything was just going to keep getting worse, now, from here on out.

I cried and cried, just sitting there on my knees in the hall, holding Teresa’s door open the whole time. Like telling her I was sorry and meaning it, now.

Like isn’t this enough?

No.

The doorbell rang its broken ring.

I shook my head no.

I stood in the hall. The doorbell rang again. Then again.

“Wait here,” I said to Teresa’s open door, and let it close gently, made my way to the front door, to whatever this next punishment was going to be. From the Philippines, from China, from Kentucky.

It was from six doors down, on the other side of the street.

The new kid’s little brother. He was holding a bat, shuffling his feet.

Behind him the street was empty. Just the soccer net.

He’d come out alone to practice. To get good enough to play with the big kids.

Until now.

“Let me guess,” I told him, and he nodded, couldn’t make eye contact, and I saw him through the camera again, from a distance, with nightshot.

The way Teresa would have.

I stepped aside, shrugged, and he leaned his bat against the porch wall, came in.

In the living room now, some of the lights were on, some off. In the whole house. Perfectly normal.

“I think it went—” he started.

“I heard it,” I told him, leaving the front door open, and ushered him down the hall, pushed against Teresa’s door with my fingertips.

“What’s that smell?” the boy said.

Teresa’s room was as scattered as it had been, just me and the boy’s dim outlines in the mirror, but, in the direct center of the bed, like the bed was a nest, was a baseball, the curtains in the now-open window rustling like it could have come through there, sure.

“If anything’s broke, my dad will…I’m sorry,” the boy said, about to cry.

“No worries,” I told him, “it happens,” my hand to his shoulder, and guided him in like Teresa had to be wanting, held the door open just long enough for him to get to the edge of the bed, look back to me once. And then I let the bungee cord snick the door shut, collected the bat from the front porch and settled back into my chair. There wasn’t even a muted scream from down the hall. Just the sound of forever.

In it, I aimed the gun into my mouth, pulled the trigger.

The readout said I was still alive, still human.

As far as it knew, anyway.

and the universe. She’s learned her lesson. It doesn’t need to go any farther. It doesn’t.

But it already is.

He watches her from the edges of the room. From just past the light, where it doesn’t reach all the way to the wall. His Catwalk of Shadow. His Dark Hallway. His Night Path. His whatever-he-calls-it.

She pictures him designing this room in his mind for years.

No windows, one door. Cement floor. A hole in that cement for the toilet—a ritual she’s learned to close her eyes for. There’s even studs to attach the legs of her wooden chair to the floor. She wonders if the chair’s wooden because he’s going to wheel a car battery in. She wonders if dogs are next. Or rats. Birds.

She wonders a lot of things.

She can feel her bra, still on. Some bra, anyway. No panties, but something that’s got to be a catheter.

Her clothes have been replaced by scrubs. Because scrubs are easier. They still have the creases in them.

Is he saving her clothes to dress her in again, after?

Does he work at a hospital? At a laundry?

Her hair, it was down the toilet hole the first day. She assumes. She woke and it wasn’t on her head anymore.

Because her mouth was taped, because it’s always taped, she couldn’t ask him why. She couldn’t ask him anything.

And he doesn’t turn the light off.

The game she plays is to close her eyes for forty seconds or a minute, then open them fast, in the direction of the place in the room he last was, or the next place he should be. The idea is that her light-starved pupils will somehow drill through the shadows, and her mind can take a snapshot of him.

The game he plays is more hands-on.

•

On the fifth day he steps into the light, his eyes already watching her.

Her body shudders and she kind of barks a sob out. She hates herself for it, but if she wasn’t tied to the chair she’d be reaching for him, she knows.

In her arm is the IV that must be feeding her.

The clear tube snaking out from it trails off into the darkness.

It could be a sedative, though. Or worse.

He could be doping her into some sort of mental twilight, then spooning clam chowder into her mouth twice a day, touching the corners of her mouth with the corner of a napkin.

It doesn’t stop the other parts, though. The parts she’s awake for.

It involves the duct tape from the meat drawer of the refrigerator.

She assumes it’s the meat drawer.

What he does after stepping into the light is drag another wooden chair across the floor and sit down directly across from her.

It’s not a torture chamber, she tells herself.

It’s an interrogation room.

He just has some questions, that’s all.

If she answers right, she can go home.

Except he isn’t speaking. He’s just watching her. Licking his top lip once, but not in a particularly hungry way. More like he’s waiting for some mental cuckoo clock to announce the right time.

You don’t say that out loud to someone in his position, though. Even through tape.

He hears anyway, unpockets a utility knife, balances it on his right thigh. It takes a few seconds to get it right, but then he remembers, snicks the first quarter inch of blade out, has to balance the knife all over again.

She pees heat into her catheter, screams her throat full.

He waits for her to calm.

His face isn’t masked or bagged or painted or disguised, and she doesn’t want to see it anymore. She doesn’t care. She wants him to know she doesn’t care. If he would just look into her eyes, listen to what she’s trying to mean.

He’s checked out, though. He’s waiting.

She’s breathing as hard as her nose will allow, now. For a moment that feels like luck, like providence, like the universe answering her, one of her tears slips behind the adhesive of the tape over her mouth and under her chin, and she tastes that saltiness, and realizes that if she cries enough, the tape might let go, and then she can scream until the right person hears.

Except she isn’t at all sure there are any right people within hearing.

And then it’s time.

•

The game, his game, he teaches it to her slowly. Patiently.

It involves the tape. And the utility knife. That first quarter inch of it, anyway.

At first he just leaves the knife and the tape there on the top of his leg. For her to get used to them. The same way she’d once seen someone on television get a horse used to a saddle. He’s easing them into this. Together.

What he does next, minutes later, after she’s ridden the swell of her fear back to a place where she can breathe halfway normal, is tear off three or four inches of the dull grey tape, then press the part still on the roll back down, lining it up edge-to-edge.

With the same deliberation, then, the same attention, he presses that torn-off piece of tape onto her forearm, and rubs it down with the undersides of the fingers of his right hand so that, for the first time, the tape brings heat, doesn’t draw it out from her.

She throws up, her head rocking with it, and he cuts a slit in the tape over her mouth to keep her from drowning.

It doesn’t stop this from happening, though.

Nothing will.

He tapes new tape onto her mouth when it’s dry enough, when she’s calm enough, and sits back down on the very front part of his chair. Moving slow and holding the knife out like a demonstration, keeping it flat in his open hand at first like that’s supposed to help, he brings it towards her left arm. Toward that strip of tape he’s pressed there.

At right about the center of it, both lengthwise and width, and holding the knife with both hands for precision, he pushes the bright leading corner of the razor blade through the grey, into her arm. A quarter inch into her arm.

And then he traces a small triangle only as long as it is deep, her blood welling up through the new lines. The blade dipping out and in at the corners, to make proper points, to connect the lines all the way. Like that’s a rule. Like there can even be rules anymore.

When he’s done he looks up to her, right into her eyes. He’s not breathing.

She bucks and strains and cries and screams more in her throat.

He holds his index finger up.

She thinks it’s shhh, but then he rabbit-ears a second finger up.

He’s counting.

On three, and without breaking eye contact, as if looking down to what he’s doing would be cheating, he rips the length of tape up from her forearm.

When she can see again, there’s a small, dull grey triangle of tape left on her forearm, blood welling up around it.

She looks up to him about it and he sits back in his chair.

Moving slow, with obvious reluctance, he stands to lower his black, military-surplus pants to his ankles.

She’s shaking her head no, now. Please, please no, not this.

But it’s not what she thinks.

He’s lowering his slacks to give himself access to the fishbelly flesh of the top of his thigh, his right thigh, the wiry black hairs sparse there, like a forest that burned a quarter century ago. The top of his other thigh matted with ropy scars of untended cuts, all at about the same angle.

He purses his lips, looks up to her, and draws a neat red line into the skin of his right. It makes him lower his head. In pain. In prayer. In something.

The blood is going both ways around his leg, to the seat of his pants. It doesn’t look like spider legs or like a ribbon or like melted candy. Just blood.

When he looks back up to her, his eyes have resettled themselves. His face is remote.

“Fair’s fair,” he says, and pulls his pants up, snaps them shut, drags his chair back into the darkness.

He lost.