Dead Souls (8 page)

“Inside the leather one, you'll find a yellow Kodak box.”

“Kodak still makes film?”

“For us large-format purists, yes. And I'll take the film plate back.”

I hand him the box of film and then, with remarkable dexterity, he zips the bag shut, changes the film inside it.

“It took me a good month to get the hang of this,” he says. “I was so disappointed the first time I saw my results in the darkroom. All overexposed, parts of the image completely blackened. I would have thrown the negatives in the trash, but then I wanted to see what would happen. If
he
would honor his part of the deal. You know? Make even my failures grand successes.”

I remember then, a bit of the
Chronicle
article. Alejandro's first show, which astonished the art world.
Overexposed
.

“You got what you wanted then.”

“No, I would not go that far.” He pauses for a moment. I can almost hear the woman down the hill rubbing charcoal on
her paper. It's a soothing, white-noise sound.

“I got what I asked for,” Alejandro continues. “Exactly that, and nothing more. What I wanted, in my heart, was revenge. Revenge takes you on a twisted journey, until the end has no meaning anymore, until everything tastes like ash. The truth is . . . I hate photography. Absolutely hate it. I mean, everything about it—the people who are drawn to it, like flies to shit, the stink of chemicals, the flattening of the world into a sheet of paper. But the materialism . . . well, I have to admit I enjoy those benefits. Once you're poor, and then you're rich, you'd rather die than be poor again.”

There had been a photo in the
Chronicle
too, of his lovely restored five-bedroom Victorian in Noe Valley. I remember because we clipped the picture and added it to our vision board for the Istanbul's demographic.

“But why ask to be good at something you hate?”

“Because that was part of the retribution. I have never felt so righteous as when I was planning my revenge. I miss being that naive.”

He unzips the bag, pulls out the film plate, inserts it back into the camera. “When I was sleeping on the streets, a man came, a Western man.”

“Scratch?” I ask tentatively.

He chuckles softly. “He hasn't used that name in a long time.”

“Why, you don't call him that?”

“Oh he has many names. Lucifer, Iblis, the Son of the Morning, Satan, Melek Taus, Mara, Kölski, Angra Mainyu, der Leibhaftige, Diabolus,” he says, adjusting the tripod. “And he takes many forms. Whatever he thinks will work best—
woman, man, child. Stranger, friend, lover.”

An unnerving thought strikes me. “So he can look like anyone. Even you.”

Alejandro smiles. “Do you see my face?”

Of course I can, even the fine lines edging his gray-blue eyes. But Scratch? No.

As if he can see the realization hit, Alejandro adds, “No one sees the face of the devil. We would go mad, apparently. But a good way to know if the person you are speaking to is him.”

He looks off into the horizon line, something weary in his expression, and I sense there is more, much more to this story. But he continues with the other.

“It was another kind of devil that came to me as a child,” he says. “A man with a camera. For a few days, he took photos of all of us—how we lived, how we stole, how we sold cocaine in the favelas. He was an artist, he said. It was for a famous American magazine, he said. He gave us ice cream, Belém cakes,
sonhos
. And then he showed me an American hundred-dollar bill. I followed him back to the hotel room where he was staying . . . and there he took different kinds of pictures.”

There is no reason to ask what kind. It's in his face, a small death there.

“Before she died, my grandmother, who was full Mayan, warned me of photographs. How they could steal your soul, trap them in celluloid. Mine was long gone before I ever met our mutual friend.”

Oddly there is not even the slightest trace of bitterness as he says this, or a twinge of pain. It's like he's telling me a story about someone else, about something that has nothing to do
with him directly. There was once a woman at work like this; she'd been diagnosed with lung cancer, given three to six months to live. She was ashen-faced at first, hostile, a broken glass you were afraid to speak to. But then, toward the end, she came back for one last visit, and she was preternaturally calm, kind almost. Like we were the ones suffering, not her.

“I met the devil in Monterey. There was a library in town with a computer, and after months of searching I'd found the American man with the American hundred-dollar bill. Toby Whitfield. A photojournalist in the seventies. He tried and failed to become a fine-art photographer and moved into real estate photography instead. So when I made my trade, I knew what I wanted. The poor orphan would achieve the heights Whitfield aspired to, and then I would reveal myself to him, degrade him, taunt him with my success.
Ruin
him, if there was anything left to ruin. I thought there would be some satisfaction in that. I had damning evidence that I was planning to confront him with before calling the authorities. Then I hired him to come shoot my impeccable house, so he could see the life that would never be his, make his failure visceral. But when the moment came, when he arrived in his beat-up van, with his battered camera, I found no satisfaction. I saw he was a small man, an old man, a broken man. His demons had already claimed him long ago. I didn't even tell him who I was.”

There is no bitterness when he says this either.

“So it was all for nothing,” I say.

“Not for nothing, no.” Alejandro aims his camera at the valley below us, the city. “I have an amazing life, and who knows . . . perhaps I would have committed some sin, an atroc
ity that would have damned me anyway. As you can imagine, I parted ways with the church long ago. When the favor finally gets called in, yes, I will have a hard moment, and I am not looking forward to death or where I'm going after . . . but why think of that now when there are so many other more pleasant things to occupy me?”

“Compartmentalize,” I say quietly. Justin has accused me of doing this too well on more than one occasion, but right now it's all that's keeping me from running from the cemetery, screaming.

“Exactly. I have found that this is what the rich do—enjoy themselves without thinking about what, or whom, it costs.”

The cemetery smells of sweet, wet earth, the vaporous release of something intangible. Alejandro looks through the viewfinder, then makes another adjustment to the camera. “Just so you know, there is a small group of us, dead souls. We meet once a month at the New Parish. It helps to not feel so alone.”

“That's the bar converted from the old church?”

“Yes. It is written in the book that Scratch abhors churches, even if they've been desanctified. Too painful, like visiting the house of an ex.”

“What book?”

“The book of dead souls. Really more of a collection of notes, gathered from those who have gone before us. I will let you borrow my copy until you make your own. It may help.”

I notice that small word,
may
. Woefully inadequate. And then, that turn of phrase,
those who have gone before us
.

How many?
I wonder.

“Did he give you a card?”

Alejandro nods. “He gives us all one.” He thinks a mo
ment, as if he's wondering how much more I can take, the state of me. Then he makes his decision, pulls his wallet out from his back pocket. It's slim, black, leather. And hands me the card.

That same rich, strange texture. The same pyrography.

DATE:
Sunday, November 13

SOUL:
Alejandro Xavier

TIME:
12:15 p.m.

FAVOR:

My hands feel deadened, numb. “Favor is blank, too.”

“Oh yes. It's better if it is. It is said that when he calls in the favor, the words there will appear. And then . . . you really have no choice.”

The deadened feeling rises from my hands, through my arms, to my throat. So. This is it then. What I've really indentured myself to. “What kinds of favors?”

Alejandro quietly pockets the card back in his wallet. “Why, the worst kinds, of course.”

“But I flushed my card down the toilet.”

A kindly smile, a shade on the side of patronizing. “It is not that easy to rid yourself of it. It will find you again,” he says. “It has been nearly two decades since I got my card and I have never been able to lose or destroy it. Do you want to take another?”

At first I don't know what he means, but then he holds out the camera cable to me, like an adult offering candy to a child after some particularly bad news. Still, I take him up on it, look through the viewfinder. Taking pictures is as good a diversion as any.

I gather the woman with her tombstone rubbings into the
frame. It's strange how, through the viewfinder of a camera, you can look at someone as long as you want, and they'll never know it, or suspect. It makes me feel oddly powerful, to be able to invade someone else's private space this way, like peeping through a window. And in the background, the city. Beautiful. The fog has lifted, and the Transamerica Pyramid rises dead center.

A gust of wind curls around my feet.

“Think, Fiona,” Alejandro whispers. “Think of all the souls we are stealing.”

CHAPTER
FIVE

I
HOLD ALEJANDRO'S BOOK OF DEAD SOULS
open in one hand as I ride the small elevator back up to my apartment, in a nervy kind of mood. Shaky, giddy with fear, but also struck with the odd excitement that I used to get in my broke days, when I'd shoplift a can of tuna for dinner, a box of crackers, slide them under my thick coat.

I'm already obsessed with what's here. The whole Justin thing seems smaller, far away. Alejandro was right—it's not a book so much as a thick collection of notes, photocopied and then bound with a plastic spiral. Some of the typeset is inkjet printer, some dot matrix; there are five pages that look to be the same typewriter (the
j
always hits half a line above the other letters); there're even copies of medieval pages and scraps of what looks like cloth or papyrus. Different people have made notes in the margins, a wide variety of hands. Loopy script, compressed, tight handwriting, slanted cursive, and brief, almost stenographic bursts. Here and there sentences are underlined or highlighted, words circled.
Cannot commit suicide until after the favor has been completed—4/18/88. —A.W.
Dates, tons of dates,
11/1/53
,
6/18/74
,
2/6/1902
,
12/19/45
.
Drinking blessed water is no protection—7/3/88. What about free will?—12/6/76 —S.B.
S.B. had a lot to say; those initials are scattered everywhere.

It's a catalog of insight that should not be viewed as fact, Alejandro had said. It's simply a collection of unverified thoughts, opinions, opinions on top of thoughts.
Nothing,
he'd told me
, is ever thrown away or reordered.

Which makes it read like an elevator full of people with Tou­rette's syndrome, no thread or cohesion. Debates scattered across time, parts crossed out, especially the first few that lists crimes believed to have been favors called in. A conspiracy theorist's dream come true.

Holocaust/Hitler

Khmer Rouge

Charles Manson

228 Incident

Jeffrey Dahmer
(classic psychopath), S.B.

Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada??? S.B.

Hiroshima

Columbine

The Holodomor

Then there's the list of contributors at the end.
The ones who have gone before
, as Alejandro said. The known debtors, the favors called in, of which there is no doubt.

You should give yourself some time before you look at this
.

But I can't resist.

Adele Cameron, sold 7/18/67. Buried her three children alive, then poured concrete and made a patio over their bodies.
Died of natural causes, 2007. Bodies discovered when new owners installed a pool.

James and Frank Aindrea, identical twins, sold 8/14/85. Made a killing in the stock market. Dropped bowling balls from the balcony of their Chicago Gold Coast penthouse in 1994 onto the people and traffic passing by, then got into a fistfight that ended with James throwing Frank over the railing. Five people, including a four-year-old child, died. James spent the rest of his life in prison, and what was left of Frank was mostly washed away with a fire hose.

The elevator clicks past the second floor, the third. There's always that questionable jolt when it reaches the fourth, like something's wrong with the gears, worn past comfort.

Volodya Uros, sold 6/3/72. Defected from Russia, lived an unobtrusive, modest life in Missouri until one Halloween, in 2001, when he locked the exit doors of the Fuze Box nightclub and detonated a bomb, having earlier soaked the basement in gasoline. One hundred and twelve people died. Uros was caught trying to escape over the Mexican border and was eventually executed in his home state. And he had a son, noted as Alexi Uros, who sold his own soul in 2002. I wonder if there's some kind of genetic disposition for selling one's soul, or if Scratch locks in on our loved ones to further torment us.

I skim through the rest of the book, looking to see if Volodya Uros added pages and find one in badly written English, initialed V.U.
I have sold my soul to devil, but give my heart to God. I go to St. Ignacio two times each day, I make rosary three times, I give one third my salary to Sisters of Charity. There will be forgiveness, this I know. John 5:29
—
And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of
life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation
.
10/25/01

Apparently there is no salvation from the usual places, not for the likes of us.

But then, I've never been a fan of the usual places. For a brief period in middle school I became enamored with faith, incentivized by a new addition to class, a girl with neat, brown-bag lunches and pressed cotton shirts. A Catholic from somewhere in the Midwest with a forgettable name, she was never without a gold cross on a chain—it popped up and out of her shirt when we jumped rope. I lifted a near identical one from Sacred Heart Collectibles, the contradiction lost on me, but I was thinking maybe the whole problem with my life was my atheistic parents. Her life was so much simpler. Better.

For weeks I wore the cross, not even taking it off in the shower, but like the trainable sea monkeys that came in a box for $1.25, it offered nothing for me but disappointment. My clothes still smelled like lighter fluid, as my parents never remembered to empty their pockets before dumping clothes into the washing machine. Also mildew, as they never remembered to put wet clothes in the dryer. No magical paper-bag lunches appeared. I was still stuck with whatever I could scavenge from the kitchen—the heel of a loaf of Wonder Bread smeared with ketchup, the crumbled dust of Cheerios from the bottom of the box mixed with peanut butter. Even the gold in the cross wasn't real, just a burnished bronze that left a green circle on my neck. Disgusted, I finally threw it in the trash. That alone was blasphemy, sure.

But one good thing came out of it—an interest in marketing. Because it struck me that there were two distinct kinds of
people—those who were Oz the Great and Powerful behind the curtain, creating a better illusion of life, a world where you could conjure sea people with tap water, where a purported savior was actually loving and watching over you every day. And then there were the dupes who believed Oz really was a wizard and forked their money over for brine shrimp eggs and religious trinkets.

What does that make
me
though? Getting drunk and selling my soul.
Am
I
the dupe, then?

For the first time, the horror of the entire situation is tinged with something else, a certain pissy edge that Justin calls my Yankee intuition, a sixth sense that itches when I think I paid two dollars more for a coffee grinder than it would have cost at another store, or the tip is already slyly calculated in the restaurant tab. The itch is telling me that while the first rule of marketing is desire, the second is misdirection, and nothing deceives people so easily as presenting an absolute.
Offer ends Thursday!
just means you'll be paying retail until the next sale comes up in a month.

What if this book of dead souls is just a log of what happened to people who didn't know any better? Maybe it's not a question of getting out of the contract, but renegotiation. Scratch said he was in sales, a trader, and I
know
those people, the oily film of them. The only thing they love better than a score is a bigger one, and the possibility of five birds in the bush versus the one in the hand is a no-brainer.

What if I just offer Scratch a sweeter deal than my soul?
Contracts are adjusted every day—I do it myself.

There's another jolt when the elevator reaches the fifth floor, accompanied by a waning
ding
that also sounds like it's on its
last legs. I have to unlatch the inner accordion gate before I can undo the bolt of the wooden door, which opens out into the hall. Taped on the wall in front of me is a paper sign.
DON'T FORGET TO SHUT THE GATE
. The elevator seemed charming when I was looking at the place, but if someone forgets to shut the gate, the thing doesn't work at all, which means taking five flights of stairs until the super finds which floor it's open on.

I tuck the book under my arm, walk down the hallway, searching for keys in my purse. I want to call Alejandro—so many questions burn. But Alejandro specifically said,
Taking in too much at once is never a good thing
. Although just because Alejandro knows more than I do doesn't mean I should trust him in all things.

No, at the moment there is no one, and nothing, I can trust. Not an unfamiliar place, at least for me.

I put the antique key in the antique lock—as usual it takes a good minute to catch. My plan is to pop a quarter Ambien, catch a good nap before I have to face Justin and our “talk.” Maybe add a half Xanax too and a glass of wine . . . or make that half a glass. Don't want to inadvertently pull a Monroe, although if the book of dead souls is right, I couldn't kill myself anyway.

But when I step into my apartment, there he is, gaunt, weary, and hauntingly lovely, sitting on my couch. Justin.

And next to him, Pink Coat. They're locked in a tight, and very emotional, embrace.

THE APARTMENT
should be on fire—there's no way I should feel this thunderous, murderous rage and it
not
be on fire, bolts
of lightning sparking from my eyes before I plunge daggers into their faithless, corrupt hearts, but instead a blend of shock and that other Yankee trait, terminal politeness, takes over. They break apart. Justin awkwardly stands.

You goddamn cheating son of a bitch
rises in the back of my throat, but I choke it back down, where it rustles menacingly in my stomach. I quietly shut the door behind me, taking my time to put my keys back in my purse, hands trembling, almost dropping them.

They exchange an intimate look. Two against one.

“I let us in,” Justin says. When he's really nervous, he always states the obvious, a habitual tic that makes me ache.

Gone
. It's always the strange things you miss when you lose someone you love—the way they used a knife left-handed; their favorite brand of toothpaste, which you eventually got used to; the freckles on their back that they're not aware of, shaped like a constellation. Justin is standing in the middle of my living room, but the Justin I knew, or thought I knew, is gone, and already I miss him.

Pink Coat rudely interrupts and stands too. The hairs at the back of my neck bristle. And then, and
then
she actually has the gall to take a few steps toward me and extend a hand, like I'm holding some kind of work soirée and they inadvertently dropped in early.

“Hi. I'm Sarah,” she says.

“Sarah,” I repeat, like there are dead things in my mouth. Pink Coat now has a name, and I immediately hate it. I take her hand though, reluctantly, and she gives it a clammy squeeze.

Justin swallows hard. Apparently things aren't going well here.

“God, I've heard
so
much about you,” continues Sarah blithely, dropping my hand, looking dangerously like a hug might be next.

How could he dump me for someone so pedestrian? Professionally whitened, even teeth, a slight roll of muffin top over her low-rise jeans, pink turtleneck sweater, and a strand of white pearls that match the teeth. Thick mascara. Pink lip gloss.

“I hope you don't mind me ‘tagging' along with Justin,” she continues, “but he could really use the extra support right now.”

Goddamn, the woman just actually made quote marks with her fingers
. And then she gives Justin a prompting,
Let's move this along,
look. History, and lots of it, between them. I see she's left an umbrella by the door, a foreign invader leaving watermarks on the floor. I get a quick visual of stabbing her through the eye with it.

“I know I should have told you earlier,” says Justin. “But . . . I didn't know how you'd take it. The news.” His arms dangle uselessly by his sides, and he looks so lost, so forlorn that a part of me—

“That's my brother for you. He's
never
been good at asking for help,” adds Sarah softly.

The words drop like marbles on the floor. My stomach flips.

My.

Brother.

“So we made a deal when he was eight . . .”

My brother my brother my brother my brother my brother . . .

“. . . if he ever ran into trouble, real trouble, I'd drop everything and come running.”

Oh dear sweet Jesus, Pink Coat is his
sister. I want to cry, I want to scream, I want to claw my eyes out.

“So I'm just going to come right to the point and say it for him,” continues Sarah. “Justin has pancreatic cancer. It's spread to his liver. Fiona, it's . . . it's not good.”