Entropy (26 page)

The rain's punishment increased and crashed down around me, undressing me of the persona of William McCoy, but leaving me surrounded by the truth of my failure.

***

Noemi closed the bathroom door behind her. I drained the water from the bathtub and switched off the light. When I opened the door and went back into our room, I watched her settle into the bed. I then climbed in and spooned her, tracing my fingertips across her abdomen. I wished that I could vanish without a trace and take all of the people that I had become with me; be they righteous or criminal.

“Tell me that you love me,” she said.

“I love you.” However nothing I said to her mattered, and in the end, it was obvious to me that she understood that. She bedded and loved a man who had killed someone. And no amount of love could change that, and I felt sorry for her. Forgiveness and absolution were faces I never recognized, lost languages I never understood. In that regard, she was my translator, an unparalleled woman, engaging, tender and intensely erotic. I was scared that I would lose her. She turned her body and looked up at me. After I kissed her cheek, she smiled slightly. It was as if she thought that it would be the last time I would tell her that I loved her.

“It wasn't your fault,” she said, her eyes piercing deep inside mine, trying to help me escape, to run from my self-imposed imprisonment and rediscover her and us.

“What you did … that wasn't the man I fell in love with,” she added. “And it never could be.”

During the early dawn hours, I leaned over and brushed my lips across hers in the pale morning light. I caressed her breast and leaned in further to touch her. Despite her closing her eyes and sighing, and her tongue opening the space between her lips, she pulled away from me. It was the first time she had ever made me feel so detached. It was bruising, being the one a lover pulls away from.

After taking a long shower later that morning, I came back into the room already feeling exhausted and conflicted knowing that I would soon have to become Jonathan Levin again. Until a suspect was apprehended it would continue: the dialogues, the sick photographs, the films and the hopelessness I felt in my everyday life.

When Noemi stepped out from behind the bathroom door, her naked body glistening under the fluorescent lighting, her face was alluring but inexpressive. It was hard for her to hide how she felt. She tried to mask it by turning her back to me, but I could see her disappointment in the way she carried her shoulders; those ink-like shoulders that I wanted to kiss, that I wanted to map out with my nervous lips, like a cartographer trapped in a charcoal snowstorm, abandoned in an endless plain of blackness.

“Don't look at me like that,” she said.

“I don't know what you mean,” I responded.

“No, I don't suppose you would,” she said. She bent over and dropped her head and ran her hands through her hair. When she raised her body, and her hair settled back down over her shoulders, I thought she would never believe in me again. It was something I had watched her do hundreds of times, but that simple action seemed unconventional and unsettling, instead of being reaffirming and engaging. Instead of battling with her, I submitted.

“Do you want me to resign from the case?” I asked.

“No. What you are doing is noble, and I love you all the more for it. I do. It makes me proud, but opposing that I guess, is a feeling of isolation – if that makes sense. I just want you to talk to me instead of you feeling that you have to protect me all the time” she admitted, lowering her eyes and pretending to be distracted.

“Talk to you about what? Cases? You know that I'm not supposed to.”

“What you're feeling. I understand that this stuff is confidential, but I'm not a reporter asking questions to get a scoop.
I'm your wife
,” she said with a passion I didn't expect.

“What I investigate most of the time is brutal, violent and disgusting. I live among criminals who are on the edges of depravity. The only thing that grounds me, reminds me of the man I want to be, is you, our marriage, the small moments that we spend together. I live for a moment's peace, something as simple as watching you fall asleep on the couch. As soon as I let you into my sad world, and make you a part of all that, I'll never survive,” I said. Noemi turned to face me.

“I'm stronger than you give me credit for,” she said.

“But it's a chance that I am not willing to take,” I said. I raised her chin and tenderly stroked the underside of her neck. It would be the last time that she would look at me with an obvious sense of honor and dependence. Instead of being a loving husband, I felt I had suddenly become a burden. At the time, she looked so beautiful standing there, her blue dress settling comfortably against the dark complexion of her skin, and gently accenting the smooth curves of her hips. I wanted to tell her that she looked more beautiful here in front of me than she ever had. However she pulled away from me before I could say anything after glancing down at my wrist.

She touched my hand and stared at my watch. It was almost noon and we had less than two hours until we were supposed to be at her sister's wedding. On reflection, I should have given her a chance and accepted her offer to provide me with the emotional strength I needed, as she pulled my hand to her lips and kissed it gently, before turning back to the dresser to get ready.

***

The girl in front of me at the wedding had her dress - Penelope's dress! Not that exact one, but it was so similar that, for a moment, I thought that it was. Maybe it was the light from the midday sun that made it look the same in color and pattern; the pale yellow offset by the auburn tone of her hair. The girl came down the aisle, holding a small bouquet of flowers in her hands. A light wind ruffled the petals, and I was reminded of the perfume Noemi had splashed lightly across her neck before we left the hotel. At first, the girl moved deliberately, her lips parting slightly as if she were trying to remember her steps. Her hair was tied back with strands of silk ribbon. She couldn't have been more than ten years old.

I looked back towards Noemi who was beaming at the flower girl. Noemi caught my eye and gave me a knowing look. She had discussed wanting children on numerable occasions before. I gave her a quick smile before turning back to watch the bridal procession.

Eventually, the girl gained confidence and began to walk without trepidation at the front of the procession, raising her shoulders higher and holding her head up, giving her added poise and grace. Petals from some of the bouquet dropped behind her.

Each one merely needed cultivating …

As she neared Noemi and me, the girl appeared to become imbalanced. Instead of standing up straight, her body began to contort. The prevailing wind changed her skin and it began to dry and crack as if she were a molded piece of pottery. Sand and ash dropped from her limbs and torso, leaving behind an emaciated structure of bones and necrotic tissue. The vibrant shades of the bouquet became oppressive and dull. The hair I had admired and found to be beautiful became nothing more than pieces of dried vine, which the tied silk clung to desperately. Her shoulders resembled a metal closet hanger, trying to tear through a dry-cleaning bag.

While the dulcet tones of the piano continued to play, I watched her struggle to remain upright. Pieces of her skin continued to flake off, like shreds of burnt paper, until there was nothing left. I wanted to go to her, but I couldn't. The stench emanating from her body was indescribable. I quickly covered my mouth. The flower girl then toppled backwards into the bridal procession.

I moved on my hands and knees to her body as it stopped decaying, as she lay immobile at the base of Noemi's sister's wedding gown. The sequins on the pearl white dress sparkled in the air, but were dimmed quickly by the black concavities from where her eyes had been. Nothing could exist in a place so dark. Pasted onto the dead flower girl's skull was a look of incredible agony, as if she knew what was happening to her, and had felt the intensity and brutality with each contortion of her body.

I held her in my hands, like someone holding a piece of porcelain or a rare art object; with compassion and grace, but also with fear and uncertainty. There were ligature marks embedded into the brittle bones of her wrists and ankles. Over the wedding hymns I could hear her screaming, her desperation reaching into the atmosphere, and rippling across the tender wings of migrating birds, causing them to be buffeted in the turbulence of her pain. Tears fought their way across my flushed cheeks as I was distracted momentarily from the flower girl's wailing by a cool, startling touch to the back of my neck. I turned around and standing over me was Noemi, moving her hands in an effort to find mine and gather me aside. But it was with humiliation, not concern.

If I had waited, it would have been clear that it was a ten-year-old girl on the ground in front of me, not the fifteen year old who had been found murdered and left to rot inside a barn silo. I reached out to her. It wasn't the dead girl's hair that tore from the scalp and ended up entwined between my fingers. The hair was a different color. The girl was sobbing into her palms, confused and upset by what had happened. I wasn't sure what I had done.

Noemi's sister took the flower girl's hand and led her away and I thankfully realized that at least the flower girl wasn't hurt physically. Murmurs corrupted the painful silence as I struggled to stand, weighed down by the oncoming consequences, and the emotional damage I had undoubtedly caused. No one helped me, not even Noemi. As she dropped my hand, I watched the flower girl as she turned back to look at me with a look of confusion and fear.

It wasn't Penelope.

***

I closed what was left of the file on Jonathan Levin, and grabbed my ticket from an end table, and stood in the doorway of our living room. It was in here where I told my wife about Penelope when we returned from Morrow Bay. It was the place where I had probably been deeply honest with her for the first time, when I told her who Penelope was, and what had happened to her. And more importantly, who I was. It would be hard for me to come back here again, to what was once our home, bruised by a lack of direction and compassion. Noemi wouldn't have wanted to see me again anyway, not after everything that I had done to her. There was a sense of finality when she cast off her wedding ring as she stepped into the cab not more than a couple of hours ago. I closed the door behind me, unsure of who I was going to be without her.

***

Stepping through the door of the bus, I took a seat towards the rear, against a window. I retrieved a few small notes and went over the details of the new identity that I had assumed the moment I walked out my front door. Part of me wanted to be that man and to never look back. However, despite my efforts at trying to put my past behind me, my mind kept wandering back to the events that led the case finally being solved.

After re-examining the trace elements found underneath several of the victims' fingernails, it was determined that not all of the substances found were just in earthen soil, but plant fertilizers as well. When a flower petal was found to have been inserted into the latest victim's vagina, I focused on one man in particular. The man whose comments about Penelope resonated in the subconscious ideas I had developed while living in the dark and disturbed world of Jonathan Levin.

There were so many ways that I could have told Noemi that I was wrong; that I was unintentionally introverted and unavailable. We were instructed during my training never to tell anyone, including our loved ones, what we precisely did. Part of her understood that, and she'd said as much when I eventually explained the investigation to her in detail. What hope I felt we had was lost when she held that photograph of Penelope in her palms; that poor girl's hands held at the wrist against her lower back. I wasn't sure if she realized at that moment that I had, in turn, disrespected her as much that night at Morrow Bay. I no longer deluded myself into thinking that it was an act of violent passion between two people who loved each other, but recognized it for the offensive and unjustifiable act that it was.

I will never forget the emotion that encompassed her face when I told her that I could never have children with her after all that I had witnessed. It was the beginning of the end, even if Noemi still wanted me after what happened at that wedding.

Until the suspect was apprehended, the investigation and the grief it caused would be a parasite, spreading infection to everything. Investigators resigned or quit because of cases such as this; people rapidly aged and withered after seeing the things that one human being was capable of doing to another. There was nothing from this case that I could ever forget.

However, regardless of the personal impacts, because of my work in infiltrating and gaining the acceptance of one of the most depraved networks in society, an arrest warrant was due to be issued for a man in his forties who was a florist. At least the murders would now stop.

Each one merely needed cultivating …

I never explained it to Noemi, but if I were to have a child, it would break me. It would mean that there was a possibility that something evil like what had happened to Penelope, could also happen to my daughter. A parent couldn't always protect their child. Depending on which criminal I was, no one understood these risks better than I did. I slept with urban decay.

I sat back and reflected on those last thoughts. At the end, when Noemi was asking me what she could have done differently, I was unable to answer her. Perhaps that was because there was nothing she could do to erase the things that I had seen and done.

I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes. All I wanted to do was become who she wanted me to be, to walk back into our house and to wait for her, and to relearn all the intrinsic things about her that I had forgotten, that I had allowed to be stolen. I would wait as long as I had to … but I knew I couldn't do it.