Dead Souls (21 page)

“I can run to the store.”

“That's okay, I'm sure we'll survive. Really, thanks for all you've done.” I wrap my hair in my towel, daring her to say one more word.

Opal definitely radiates something other than her typical helpfulness. Jealousy? Possessiveness? Contempt? A female passive-aggressive vibe, but she doesn't have a choice really—she
is
the hired help, so she retrieves
The Firm
from the floor and places a bookmark in the last quarter of it with a marmish, proprietary gesture. Picks up her purse, then her jacket.

I have been weighed, and judged, and found sorely lacking. I wonder though at the intensity of her fervor. Something to probe Justin about later.

She stands, gives me a curt smile, glances down at Justin, her brow furrowing, then she casts a final, suspicious glance in my direction before walking to the door.

She pauses there. “You sure you don't want me to go to the store?”

“Quite.”

She stands for another moment. Hoping Justin will wake up perhaps? What
is
going on between them?

“Again,” I say. “Thanks so much for staying late.”

She doesn't reply, just opens the door and closes it behind her with an accusatory click.

Maybe it's time to call in a new hospice worker, change things up a bit. The last thing I need is someone looking closely at anything in my life, and me in particular.

And then I see them. The photos in the manila envelope, only they're not where I left them, tucked under a coffee table book,
Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team
. The envelope is out, facedown, the tab open. She's seen the photos.
Christ, why did I leave them out?

But what's really disturbing is that a part of me doesn't care at all, or I care but only from a purely logistical point of view—what kind of disruption this will cause for Justin, how that disruption might affect my next steps. I feel no shame, no regret. No triste.
Maybe it's just the Xanax evening out my ragged edges. Maybe I shouldn't have taken three
.

Too late now
. At least Justin's asleep and I can have some time on his laptop. I'm about to head back to the bedroom when I notice that sweat beads his forehead, and his cheeks are flushed. I gently place my hand on his forehead—warm, not hot, a good sign—but my touch wakes him because he opens his eyes, fixes them on me. They're strange, distant.

“How did he take the bad news?”

At first I don't know what he's talking about, and it's that instant, that lapse, that confirms it for him.

He pushes my hand off his forehead, turns his face away, staring up at the ceiling. “So it's like that, huh.”

I'm too tired, too utterly exhausted, to respond.

“Well,” he says. “Maybe we should just stop pretending. Maybe we should break up.”

THE MOST DEVASTATING WORDS
of my life, they truly and righteously sting, but at least I'm feeling something. I am grateful for that.

“No,” I say. “Don't be stupid.” I settle into kneeling, pressing my hands under my knees, an old schoolgirl nervous tic.

“Well, let's rewind. The car was stolen.” Flat, not believing.

“You were listening to me talk to Opal?”

“I woke up when you came into the room.”

“You didn't seem awake.”

“Nothing is what it seems anymore.”

Oh Jesus Christ fuck, we're going to get into a domestic fight,
now
? The day has been like a Quentin Tarantino movie shot in a single take. Have I even had a single moment to myself? Taken a single breath?

“
You
didn't seem too upset.” He continues to stare at the ceiling. “You love that car.”

“It's just a car.” My shoulders stiffen. Everything I've been trying to hide is somehow tangible, present, like there's a third person in the room neither one of us want to acknowledge.

“It's the first car you bought with your own money.”

I ache for something stronger than a few Xanax, the caliber of drug that my parents kept on hand. There was that relaxed ecstasy that always washed over my parents' faces just after they'd shot up, abandoning me, yes, but escaping too. At the moment I can see how the only way out sometimes might be through a needle.

“You want something to drink?” I ask.

“Sure, honey, I'd love something to drink.”

A bad sign, him calling me
honey
, a retro-misogynistic hausfrau dig. But it gives me something to do, so I stand, head
for the kitchen to get him a glass, open the fridge for the ginger ale. Grab a can. Unfortunately we're fresh out of Guinness—a Guinness would be wonderful right now, and I thought we had a six-pack unless I drank it all and don't remember.

This strikes an off note somewhere deep in my subconscious.

I pop open the ginger ale, feel the carbonation tickle my fingers.
His hand, brushing my thigh
.

Stop, Fiona. Just stop and get off that bus right now.

“So the car,” he says, picking the line back up on our fight. “Not important?'

“Maybe,” I say, my voice hollow, “some things don't seem as important anymore.”

“That word again,
seem
.”

“Maybe I've just lost my appetite for materialism, Justin. Maybe I don't care about anything but you.”

It's the first true thing I've said all night, and it makes him quiet for a moment. I open the cabinet door, toss the can in the recycling bin, reach for his glass, and notice my bottle of Ambien in the spice rack. I always take half before going to bed, half when I wake up in the middle of the night to pee. Light sleeper or no, an Ambien would knock Justin out for the night, definitely, and I need some alone time with his laptop. See if what I'm even thinking about for a double deal is remotely possible.

I glance over my shoulder. Justin's turned his face to the TV. A child's tinny voice, “
You're in big trouble bucko,
”
followed by a rush of applause and canned laughter.

“What
is
this crap? And why are they all wearing acid-washed jeans?”

“It's nostalgia TV,” I say, reaching for the bottle, keeping an eye on him. “People long for the eighties, for simpler times.”

“AIDS, the Cold War, and Reagan?”

“They don't remember those parts. Or they choose not to remember.”

It's a little bit of legerdemain on my part, popping open the bottle and slipping a large, white pill in Justin's glass. Am I really about to drug my cancer-stricken boyfriend?

I am.

“Can people choose what they remember?”

Bubble, bubble, bubble
. The pill disintegrates in the ginger ale, creates a long white spiral. “Absolutely.” I pick up the glass, give it a swish. “Memory is shaped by desire. Rose-colored glasses, all that.”

“Maybe one day you won't remember me,” he says.

“That's not true. You know that's not true.”

I carry his drink back to the couch, where he struggles to sit up. The doctor had warned that the tumor would eventually start pushing on his lungs, his heart, that it'd be better to have another palliative surgery, but Justin's recovery from the last one was long, and painful.
No more
, he'd said one night when I was rubbing his back while he vomited.
Never again
.

I hand him his drink, which he takes without looking at me, and I sit in the spot recently vacated by Opal. We're an infinity away from anything resembling the people we used to be—he's thickly padded behind the wall of cancer, an experience I can't even begin to fathom, and me, well I'm trapped behind a maze of lies and damnation. The only difference is I chose my snare trap, while he got a bad roll of the genetic dice, or there was DDT in the water, or carcinogens in the air.
Would that be better, to suffer and not be able to trace the cause to any one thing in particular? I'm not sure.

“I know it might not feel like it at the moment,” I say. “But I'm loving you the best way that I can.”

Not much of an offering, granted, but still I'm surprised at his laugh, quick and bitter. One thing Justin has never been is bitter.

“Well, I won't be a burden for much longer,” he says. “Dad is coming out to visit. And Sarah.”

At first I don't understand, but then I do, and it's worse. They're coming out because they've gotten the call. The
you probably don't have much more than a few weeks to live
call.

He keeps his eyes fixed on the TV. “Dr. Edwards thought the news might be easier coming from Dad.”

“Oh Jesus,” I say, my heart in my throat. “I should have been . . .”

Here. I should have been here.

Justin stares hard at his drink, and for a panicky moment I think he knows, can see the remains of the pill fizzing away. But he just takes a long sip.

Christ though, is it safe? Giving him an Ambien?

He looks up at me with raw, naked emotion in his eyes, and I get a glimpse of him, the Justin who used to be inside the Justin who is now, a Russian doll nesting inside another. It causes a singular ache.

“I wrote my obituary today.” He tries an ironic grin, but can't pull it off. “I just couldn't picture you, or Dad, or Sarah doing it. But there wasn't enough. I think I got one paragraph, three hundred and twenty words, total.” He looks down into the glass again, as if the answer lies there. “I mean, what have I
done really, with my life? Got a degree from Stanford, worked in a cube.”

I reach out, grab his hand. It's pale, and cold, and half-dead already. “I know you think it's over, but it's not. I'm not giving up hope.”

“I'm not
giving
up either,” he says. The dark circles under his eyes are deeper than I remember, like skin is sinking into bone. “It's all being
taken
from me. Minute by minute. Second by second. And I see you already, without me. Sometimes I watch you in the kitchen, putting the water on for coffee, and I think how you'll be doing that a year from now, that the light will hit your face just . . . there . . .”

He lets go of my hand, reaches out and traces his index finger along my jaw.

“But I won't be here to see it. Something will be on the news, a war, or a new movie, a scandal, and I won't be here to know. Although that's strangely comforting too. That it will all rage on anyway.”

“I don't want to
be
there, in that moment you've imagined.”

He smiles now, a genuine one. “What, you're going to throw yourself on my funeral pyre? I thought they only did that in India.”

“I was going to, but they banned suttee.”

“And how would they prosecute for that anyways?”

“Karma police?”

There,
there
it is, the soft twinkle in his eye, the way he looked the first time he approached me—I was reading something pretentious,
War and Peace
I think, to keep anyone from asking me for spare change. My car was in the shop and I was waiting for the bus, trying to shut out the cold, and the
rain, and the fact that I'd just been laid off from a struggling dot-com.

I didn't even notice him, just registered someone tall and reedy step under the protection of the bus stop roof. He asked me a question that I found intrusive until I looked up and saw him, and
once
I saw him, the high cheekbones, the dark, wet hair and voluminous eyes, I wondered
Why is he talking to me?
In my experience people like him didn't talk to people like me. He seemed too . . . normal. Together. A whole human being. I'd worked with many of them, and had even on a few occasions made a friend, but in time they'd pull away, sensing my dark side, the broken, never-to-be-fixed parts.

Only Justin seemed to find them interesting. Only Justin didn't turn away.

He reaches out for my hand, which I give him, and he pulls me to him. He is it, my last tether to the person I want to be, to the life I want to live. I scoot forward and lie next to him, curling myself around his body, and rest my head against his still-beating heart. He strokes my hair, wraps his other arm around my waist. This is the only place I am ever real, where I don't feel the negative tug of all my angst-filled ramblings. I cannot—will not—let him go. If I have to sell all the souls in the world to keep him with me, so be it. Because aside from Justin, what has the rest of the world ever given Fiona Dunn, daughter of addicts?

Nothing. Absolute, and utter, fucking nothing.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

T
AP, TAP, TAP.
The sound tugs at me, pulls me away from something else, something important, the edge of a dream that has something to do with Alejandro's massive camera, the flash that looks like lightning but feels radioactive, contaminating my entire body until I glow with it, his disease.

Tap, tap, tap
.

No, that's an actual sound, like something's knocking on glass. My heart gets a jolt of adrenaline—
intruder?
—
Scratch? What time is it?

12:45 a.m. Shit, I must have fallen asleep on the couch. One too many Xanax. I raise my head and find Justin asleep too, head resting on my right arm, which is now completely numb.

A firmer, harder
TAP!

I turn and there's Jeb staring at me through the window like a ghost, with the dark form of Dan slumped against the rail of the fire escape. He waves for me to come over. Holds up my purse.

He brought it. He was true to his word. It's a miracle of sorts, an honorable dead soul. And while getting my stuff back
throws a bit of a wrench in my narrative, although I don't much like the idea of letting the boys in because it's a further intrusion of all
that
into my personal space, a hacker or two could be very useful for my double deal.

Worlds, they cannot cross
, Saul said.
It bleeds that way
.

Fuck Saul.

I hold my finger to my lips. Jeb gives a curt, impatient nod. They must be freezing.

I begin the delicate process of arm extraction, but moving it slightly causes Justin's eyelids to twitch. He
is
a light sleeper—he's often said that just the act of me turning over in the bed wakes him several times a night, and I don't know how much I can rely on the Ambien. But I was able to walk through the door. Surely I should be able to just pull my arm through and out?

I look at my arm, willing it to slowly,
slowly
disappear, dissipate, and to my relief, it does. First the fingers, then the wrist, then the forearm, dissolving like ice in the sun—so gradual that Justin's head just naturally sinks down to the baseball pillow. A soft sigh escapes his lips, and I wait a moment, to be sure. He's out.

Instinctively I reach my hand to push myself up—but there's no hand, just a stump of what used to be my arm with a gradient blur where visible flesh disappears. I get the strange feeling that there
is
an arm but it isn't mine, like I'm staring at a thing through the glass of a museum case, a casual observer.

It's unsettling.

So I do the next reasonable thing and imagine my hand and wrist returning, starting with the forearm . . . but no, it stays invisible.

You're just exhausted
, I tell myself.

Worlds of possibility open up, bad ones. What if my arm is lost in the gray space? What if it never comes back?

With a mounting panic, I start with the fingers this time, imagine the tips of them with my inexpertly polished nails, and for a moment they flicker into visibility—
success!
—before they flicker out again, like a TV with bad reception. Worse still, the invisibility that ended with my forearm now starts to creep along my upper arm, reaching out and up to my shoulder and then collarbone. Now my heart starts to thud in earnest, but even though I will it to stop, the fractal spread continues until I start to look like someone has taken an ice-cream scoop and just carved away a good chunk of my body. More of me disappears, evaporating down the side of my body to my left leg and up my neck until I feel the glimmer of it, an icy shiver, along the ridge of my jawbone.

I can't control it.
Holy shit
, for the first time, I can't control it.

I shut my eyes and try ghosting to the window, an all-or-nothing gambit, and for a moment I'm in that numb, in-­between gray space, not feeling the press of my body on the couch or the floor beneath my feet, no sound, no
thing
, just a strange, opaque emptiness.

But then I hear a sound, a tentative
tap
, and when I open my eyes I'm by the windowsill, Jeb staring at me intently through the glass.
It worked
. I feel like I narrowly missed getting hit by a car.

I turn to see if any of this has disturbed Justin and almost gasp out loud. Because while I am standing by the window I am also looking at my body, or the half of it remaining, still
curled up next to Justin on the couch, still wearing my robe. It—my body—is practically split down the middle. I see half my brain, half my lungs, half my heart, half my face. The curved half ridge of my spine.

What the fuck?

For a few, horrific moments I think this is how Justin will finally discover my secret, waking to half a girlfriend, but then who is
in
that half? As if it's reading my mind, it turns to me, that half head, stares at me with a discerning right eye.

Blinks.

My knees give out and I slide to the floor.

Tap
,
tap
,
tap
. I look up at Jeb, still trapped on the other side of the window. He meets my eyes, raises a tentative hand.

He sees me
. I hold up my arms, and they're both there. I dare to look back at the couch and now there's only Justin, the terry-cloth robe draped over the couch and onto the floor.

“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?”
Jeb whispers after I slide open the window. “What
was
that?”

I'm so shaken all I can manage is, “I don't know.” It reminds me of a recurring nightmare I used to have as a girl, where I went to a funeral only to find out, when I approached the casket, that it was
my
body being mourned.

That eye
. That eye staring at me from half my head, that moment, that
moment
of me, looking at me.

But which one
was
me?

A gust of cold air blows through.

Don't think about it
.

I reach out for Jeb's hand, but he pulls it back. His hand is
horribly swollen now, the burned edges of skin starting to pucker. God, it must hurt like hell. Instead, he quietly steps through the window into the living room, striving for balance without touching a single thing. I can see he's on the last of his last nerves, and honestly I'm not far from crumpling into a heap myself.

Next, I draw a nearly comatose Dan through the window. He's wearing a black garbage bag that reeks from trash, and my jacket over it.

“Best I could do,” mumbles Jeb. “Had to walk halfway here—flying is just out now.”

Blood's still caked across Dan's mouth, chin, hands, and he moves like someone's performed a lobotomy, as floppy and listless as the straw man, eyes wide, open, dilated. Shock has taken hold. I wonder what's on the other side of it.

I slide the window shut. A soft
thwump
.

Still Justin doesn't stir.
Good
.

I beckon for Jeb to follow me, and he loops one of Dan's arms around his own neck, half-leading, half-carrying him to the bedroom. Once we're inside, I give a final glance at the couch—Justin, still asleep,
praise the pharmaceutical industry
—and then gently close the door. Flip on the overhead light.

Wish I hadn't.

In a desperate move for shelter between evictions, my parents once brought me with them to a real crack house, someone's home long abandoned, exterior the color of faded mildew. The whole structure listed slightly to the side, as if it had given up decades before. It took a half hour of threats and a close-fisted punch to get me inside. As soon I stepped through the door, I knew I'd made a mistake. Walls hacked away, pipes sto
len for salvage, mattresses on the floor and people on the mattresses, or what used to be people. Ghosts where people used to be. Later when I saw photos of refugees, victims of war hunkered down along the side of some desert or jungle road, I recognized that same thousand-yard stare, which I now see reflected in Jeb's and Dan's eyes.

Boys no longer.

Suddenly self-conscious, I grab a pair of yoga pants and a small T-shirt Opal's laid out on the bed. Thoughtful, thoughtful Opal. Hope they're not doused in mercury.

“You were like . . . split in half on the couch,” whispers Jeb.

“I know.”

“How'd that . . . how'd that happen?”

“I don't know.” I look at his injured arm—shit, what to do about his arm? He can't die until his favor's called in, but it could get infected. He could lose it.

First, fix the things you can
. I go to the closet, pull out one of Justin's old shirts and a pair of his pants that are going to be too tall for Dan, but will have to do.

“Let's get him dressed.”

Jeb makes a move to try, but his fingers are too raw, so I approach Dan. He's as obedient and passive as a young child while I take off the jacket, tear off the bag, leaving him naked except for his underwear, which he's pissed in. I find a clean pair of Justin's underwear in the bureau, ones he hasn't worn in a while, pre-tumor.

Don't think about it.

Then I head for the bathroom, grab the wet facecloth. Dan will clean up, but Jeb, what to do about Jeb? I open the medicine cabinet, grab Justin's bottle of oxycodone. A morphine
substitute should help the pain some. When I come back, I find Jeb is sitting on my bed, slumped and vacant.

I ignore him, start to clean off Dan as best I can, hope the warm water will have some wakening effect.

It doesn't.

Right
. I pull Dan's underwear down, lift his feet, one after the other to get him to step out of the underwear, pull the clean pair up and over his groin, his waist. I pick up Justin's shirt from the floor—

“Oh . . . oh Christ,” Jeb says. It's the broken, lost way he says this that instantly chills me. I turn and find he looks utterly terrified.

And then I smell it, that faint waft of burning sulfur.

A TENDRIL OF SMOKE
rises up from behind Jeb. It loops into a curly
S
before dissipating.

“Shit!”
Jeb jumps to his feet and I see he's left bloodstains on my duvet—
great, something else to hide from Eyes-Everywhere Opal
—but there's a scorch mark on the cover too, still smoldering. It doesn't make sense, until it does.

His favor's been called in
.

Jeb frantically turns around. There's a hole burned right through his back jeans pocket.

“Your card,” I whisper.

He tries to get it with his swollen hand but his fingers are too thick, too clumsy. “Shit, shit,
shit
!” He reaches into his pocket with his good hand, pulls out a cell phone and his card.

Black ash falls to the floor.

Jeb gives me a pleading look. He wants a way out—
want
isn't the right word; he's
desperate
for a way out. I might be able to use that. Everything around me comes into a sharp, laser-like focus—the acrid smell of piss from Dan's underwear lying in a heap on the floor, the lingering scent of smoke, the cell phone, Justin's laptop closed on the pouf chair in front of the window, its white power light on, winking. Justin hasn't used it much because it's hard now for his fingers to type, some nerves pressed by the tumor, the doctor explained. So it's quite possible his login and password to the Fealtee site are still cached, if not saved.

This is my palette. These are my instruments.
Yes. Possibly yes
.

Jeb reads his card, pale as a stunned rabbit.

“It doesn't matter,” I say.

“It says Transamerica building, seven a.m.” His lower lip starts to tremble. “Does that mean all I have to do is go there?”

“Let me see.” I reach my hand out, and reluctantly, he hands it over. I trace my finger along the writing, still warm. But is Scratch anticipating what I'm going to do next? Is he giving me these pieces, knowing I'm just pulling my own snare trap tighter? Because something about this feels like a piece has been moved on a board.
Your turn, love
.