Sociopaths In Love (23 page)

Erica headed back to the apartment, knowing
she wouldn't be there much longer.

Space

She supposed she could have just gone back
to Dawn's but it seemed too easy. Entering the apartment, she found
it awash in overt attempts to fill her with unease. Walt had taken
to scrawling slogans over everything, probably in his shit or
someone else's blood.

I HATE ERICA

ERICA IS A CUNT

ERICA IS STUPID

ERICA IS A WHORE

ERICA SMELLS RETARDED

I WANT TO KILL AND EAT ERICA

Not that any of this was a great surprise.
Nor were any of the messages particularly original. Erica wasn't
even sure Walt had ever used her name while speaking to her. She
hadn't even been sure he knew what it was. She heard the screams,
now more ragged, coming from the bedroom. Part of her wanted to go
throw the door open and let the girls out. But she knew she
wouldn't do that. She appeased herself by thinking it was because
she didn't have the key and there was no way she could get that
door open without the key but she knew there were other reasons
too. She always thought maybe she should just surrender this
apartment to Walt and get one of her own. Hell, just go live with
Dawn full time. Convince Dawn to get the fuck out of Dayton. If
Dawn was here because of her then it seemed perfectly logical she
would leave if Erica wanted her to. But that felt too much like
giving up.

She found the keys to the Jaguar under a
blonde's scalp and, after going down and finding it parked on the
street, she was not surprised to see the sheaf of parking tickets
accumulated under the windshield. Why wouldn't they just tow it?
Wouldn't they at least run the plates and find that the car was
either stolen or belonged to a missing person? She had seen and
experienced enough to know that people like she and Walt had a
certain amount of invisibility but where did it end? Did it somehow
prevent law enforcement from even looking into the mysteries
undoubtedly surrounding this car?

It was too late to think
about that. If she hadn't been so enamored with Walt, so sucked in
to
his
bizarre
mystery, she would have asked herself these questions a long time
ago.

She threw the stack of tickets onto the
ground and drove fast to the suburbs. She went to Walmart and
appropriated a tent, a space heater, a small battery powered lamp,
and two five-gallon gas cans. Then she went to the gas station and
filled the cans up. She stopped at a truck stop farther north of
Dayton and let a trucker violate her in several savage ways in one
of the coin operated shower stalls. When they had finished, Erica
told him he was the last man who would ever fuck her, asked him how
it felt, and then slit his throat.

She drove back to the building, fast, and
left the cans of gas in the car. She took a tube of lipstick from
her purse and wrote on the windshield: LEAVE THIS CAR THE FUCK
ALONE.

Walt still had not come back by the time she
got up to the apartment. She went to the refrigerator and pulled
out several hunks of meat and shoved them through the slot at the
top of the door to the bedroom. She heard the girls fall hungrily
on the meat. Erica had resigned herself to the fact they were going
to die but, at least this way, they weren't forced to play Walt's
game. They were not going to fight and maul the other one for food
if they were not hungry. And they were so hungry they weren't going
to turn down whatever Erica put through that door. Hopefully they
would have it consumed before Walt looked in at them.

Erica dragged the tent out to the balcony
and set it up. There was an electrical outlet for her to plug the
space heater into. It was actually fairly pleasant outside right
now but she knew it would get colder tonight. She went into the
bathroom and ripped the mirrored door from the medicine cabinet.
She looked in one of the closets and, amongst a lot of things that
made her feel queasy, she found a couple of buckets she planned to
piss and shit in for however long was necessary. She went down to
the car and brought up the cans of gas.

For the most part, Erica stayed in her tent
with the flap open, gaze trained toward the apartment. Around
sunset, Walt came back and noticed her out on the balcony.
Actually, he seemed to notice the tent first. He crossed the living
room and locked the balcony door. Why a door on this level even had
a lock on it was beyond Erica but, there she was, locked out. She
didn't suppose it really mattered. She was mainly out here to prove
a point anyway, she guessed.

Later she saw Dawn out walking, probably on
her way to the bar, and thought about calling down to her but
didn't because she wanted this to be between she and Walt.

That night she dreamed about eating the
tent. She ate the tent and then she ate everything else on the
balcony. Her stomach was huge and uncomfortable. She felt like
vomiting and dropped onto her knees and vomited out the glowing
gray figure. She tried to catch it, not entirely sure what she
would do with him if she did get him, but he launched himself off
the balcony, floated down to the first floor of the parking garage
before scurrying up the side of the dark tower. Once atop the dark
tower he was almost too small to be seen. Then he threw himself off
the roof and plunged toward the street, getting larger and larger.
She half-expected him to float back toward her but he dropped until
he hit somewhere in the middle of the street and shattered like a
light bulb. When she turned around, she noticed the tent was back,
only this time it was made from the various scalps of humans and
all of the hair looked like it had been permed.

Part Three

Purge

Cleaning House

The next morning Walt walked down to the
cafe and stood there. She watched him watching the girl for about
an hour before she realized how hungry she was and used one of the
sturdy chairs on the balcony to break the glass in the door. She
walked to an Irish bar at the perimeter of the Oregon District, ate
a lot, drank a couple of beers and went back to the apartment. She
guessed Walt would spend most of the day loitering in front of the
cafe. She gathered everything that would burn, dragged it out to
the balcony, doused it in gasoline, and set it ablaze, half hoping
the fire would enter the apartment and rid the world of that as
well. Then she could think of it as an accident. She couldn't set
the actual apartment on fire with the girls still in that room,
although being burned alive was probably a better fate than what
otherwise awaited them. She found a crowbar in the closet and
chiseled off the bones from the wall. She put the bones in trash
bags, dragged them to the elevator, and sent them down. She didn't
know why she wanted the apartment to be void of everything but it
seemed of the utmost importance. Maybe she saw all of the filth and
carnage as some kind of security blanket for Walt. Once she started
cleaning, she realized she was too lazy to do it herself and there
really wasn't much of a reason to. Also, if she did it herself, she
knew it wouldn't be remotely done before Walt came back.

She called an emergency cleaning service.
That was what it was called. She didn't know what constituted a
cleaning emergency. Over the phone, she told them to clean
everything except for the bedroom, the one with the door that
looked like something you would see in a jail or an insane asylum.
Then she called a drywall company and asked if they could paint the
walls after they put the drywall up and could they do it, like,
today? They said they could. Then she called a clown and told him
that he would probably just be performing for a bunch of
blue-collar guys who were working but that he should really give it
his all. He said he could be there in a half hour. She left a note
that read:

Walt,

Does she know about you?

XOXO,

Erica

P.S. Never fucking lock me out again. I
swear I'm going to kill you one of these days!

She taped it to the refrigerator door.
Before leaving the apartment, she wrote blank checks to each party
using the woman who had lived here before's checkbook, and went to
Dawn's.

Seeing Other People

Dawn seemed happy to see her. They went out
to get dinner and had drinks at the Epoch. They went back to Dawn's
apartment. She lit some incense and they sat on the couch and felt
one another up for about an hour, neither of them saying anything.
Eventually they ended up in Dawn's bed and Erica felt like she
never wanted to be anywhere but right here. When they finished a
couple of hours later, they lay in the bed, their heads touching,
and smoked cigarettes. Neither one of them were very tired.

"I want to be with you all the time." Dawn
stared at the ceiling. A tear rolled from the corner of her eye.
Erica turned to her and licked the tear away.

"We'll leave. As soon as it's over, we'll
leave."

"Good. Where are we going to go?"

"We can go anywhere you want."

"Anywhere
we
want."

"Sounds good."

They fell into a comfortable silence, the
creaking apartment and buzzing city the only sounds.

"Are we dead?" Erica asked.

"No," Dawn said, not even thinking about it.
"Not dead. Something else."

"Is it some kind of punishment?"

"I don't think so. I don't want to believe
that."

"If not dead then what?"

"Insubstantial."

"But you would think even if an
insubstantial person inflicts enough damage they'd be noticed."

"You would think a lot of things. I've tried
to grasp it for a while too. I'm not sure it makes any more sense
now than it did the first time I found out about it."

"The Boys showed you?"

"I used to think that but, the more I
thought about it, I think it was probably my mom. I think she was
insubstantial. I think she could have done anything she wanted to
do and chose not to. She chose to be my dad's servant or live-in
maid or something. And then, I don't know, maybe it gains in
intensity over time. Thinking about it too much will drive you
crazy. If you want to know why there aren't more people like us,
it's because the suicide rate is high. Even before the Boys I'd
done some . . . pretty terrible things. Things I don't
want to repeat."

"And things you don't want to die for. I
think, possibly, I'd done some things before meeting Walt. I don't
want to think about them."

"You don't have to."

"I keep seeing a cave. And these gray
figures . . . They're like ghosts but I think they want
to say something to me. They might even want to see me suffer."

Dawn reached down and took her hand. "You
don't have to think about any of that anymore."

An hour later Erica sighed and said she
guessed she'd better get back to the apartment. Dawn told her to be
careful, watched her put on her clothes, and gave her a long, slow
kiss at the front door.

The apartment looked much like it had when
they'd first come there, minus the furniture. Walt lay naked and
face down in the middle of the living room floor. Erica smirked and
went to go sleep in the bathtub.

She decided if he was still sleeping when
she woke up then she would grab a knife from the kitchen and stab
him in the back repeatedly.

Domestic Violence

At first she thought her alarm was going off
and then realized it was Walt standing above her with a chainsaw.
Thinking she was in bed, she slid to the other side but was met
with the resistance of the tiled bathroom wall. He brought the
chainsaw close to her face. She could smell the gas and the oil on
the chain. She brought her knees into her chest and closed her
eyes, completely passive. It occurred to her that, other than
during intercourse when she had maybe kind of sometimes asked for
it, Walt had never hit or even threatened to hit her. She waited
for the bite of the chainsaw. Waited for it to ruin her face. Maybe
she would stop being invisible then. He pulled the chainsaw away.
She opened her eyes to see it sitting on the toilet next to the
tub. Walt sat on the edge of the tub like a parent giving a child a
bath. He had his face in his hands and appeared to be crying. She
doubted he was actually crying. She wasn't going to comfort
him.

"What went wrong?" he blubbered.

"Are you . . . serious?"

The chainsaw vibrated frenetically. It was
only a matter of time before it slid off the toilet. Possibly into
Walt but possibly into the tub where it would gnaw her legs that,
since she'd stopped fucking Walt, were remarkably bruise free.

"I've done everything for
you. I took you away from that place. I brought you here. Let you
do anything you want. I
showed
you things. Showed you parts of myself I haven't
let anyone see."

You brought me here to be
closer to her
, Erica wanted to
say.

Now he seemed to be bawling hysterically.
Like a kid who acts apologetic or wounded to get out of trouble. He
brought his head from his hands and bellowed toward the ceiling.
"Why are doing this to me!"

Erica almost laughed.

The chainsaw vibrated and touched him and
she waited for him to jump up and squeal. She was going to try and
dart around the other side of him. There must have been some kind
of trigger you pressed to set the blade in motion because it didn't
cut him. He calmly swiveled around and turned it off. He reached
into the tub, between her legs, and massaged her vagina.

"I don't want to hurt you," he said.

He didn't make eye contact with her and she
didn't know what to say. Didn't know if she should play his game in
the time she had left or resist him completely.