The Voices in Our Heads (14 page)

I have mastered pointillism, an art that can only be properly registered from a distance, and the cuts and gouges on Melissa’s face are anything but random.

Today, I am going to use this small abandoned jobsite here on 95 a mile before Exit 6 and three miles after the last rest stop. It is a common jobsite, one that has a dozer, a pile of Ponderosa pine, a walk behind saw, and a slew of fifty-gallon drums ringed with reflective tape. I am going to park my rig as if I belong here, walk around the truck wearing my hard hat and safety vest like a veteran, haul out my masterpiece, and mount the end of the smooth stake I impaled her with into the flagpole base I stole from the ROTC storage garage back at school. Another
Wizard of Oz
moment, but it’s a haunted one, because Melissa isn’t a scarecrow with hay sticking out of her neck and a goofy smile cut through the burlap, but rather a blurry, bloody form under plastic.

I untie the bottom. I look both ways the way my mother taught me to, and I see that the highway is momentarily clear. I reach up and unveil her.

I don’t hesitate even for that last hungry, parting glance reserved for maestros and masterpieces. I put my head down, get back in my truck, and haul ass out of there. The sun is about to break over the horizon.

According to the traffic patterns I studied, most vehicles frequent this stretch of road between 5:28 and 7:40
a.m.
Early risers. Go-getters. My work will have left its mark long before this. I drive off at 4:55
a.m.
, and just as I round the curve that changes the sightline three hundred yards up, I look in my rearview and see headlights.

I smile.

My first customer!

According to what I have heard on the news, there will be an average of two hundred witnesses before rush hour, and around a hundred and fifty more before the police can make it out to the crime scene and take her down. The latter observers will just see a horribly scarred victim hanging limp on a pole, yet they are not my concern. It is the former, the virgins, the ones who speed by before traffic comes to a standstill, the early birds listening to their favorite radio stations, caught in the soundtracks of their lives, not thinking, not living, not really looking at the road before them because it has been memorized and placed into some fuzzy, collective background, zoning into the comfortable fabric of their respective transitions.

At a pass of fifty-five miles per hour, Melissa will offer a coy smile and mouth the words “Love you,” her image in the rearview a scarlet seductress fluttering off a series of winks, puckers, and kisses. At sixty-three miles per hour, she will crease her forehead, and then air-whisper the phrase “To arms!,” the receding image in the side-mirror, a crimson Indian princess, striped with war paint, shouting after you in a wide-mouthed cry of betrayal. And at anything over seventy-two, she becomes the red mask of terror, face rippling with G-forces, head slowly turning with you as you fly by, black eyes going from half-lidded semi-slumber to widened awareness, lips forming the words “mine forever,” the image dwindling in the glass, a petrified witch-queen laughing, lips raised up and curdling.

Rest assured that each time I have left a doll, I have hit the next exit, circled back, and tried to film her on my cell phone in passing. No go. Thankfully, there is something about the craft that makes it camera shy. Even the steadiest hand yields nothing but muddy blurs of gore. Know that my art is pure, and that on some level religion is probably involved.

My girls were fashioned for bald observation, to form ghosts in the mind, phantoms guaranteed to wander through your dreams and appear sporadically in the fabric of your everyday routine as empirical memory. The real stuff. No instant replay, no secondary sources. Transitions become important again, and there is something to talk about. The scrapbooking, at least for a moment, takes second fiddle to a reality played out in real time.

Fear.

Live.

It is really a simple equation.

A cluster of pigeons flaps into the air and then settles back down around the green monument modeled after some Age of Enlightenment guy with a powdered wig, stern eyes, flaring nostrils, and a long furling coat.

There is a brook and a walking bridge. There is a war memorial surrounded by decorator spruces and a garden with a fountain. Across the park due north, a larger cobblestone avenue stretches uphill to the law library, the amphitheater, and the bell tower. To the right, the park is bordered by 5th Avenue, which features a number of red brick buildings making up the University Health Center and a line of light poles, each bearing the school flag. Beyond this, the freshman dorms rise up to the gray autumn sky, and to the left through thicker foliage stands the huge stone chapel covered in ivy. Behind this there is a gymnasium and parking complex, and beyond that stands the cluster of towers that makes up the business school. This is a huge urban university, population more than thirty thousand, and their football team actually played a bowl game on ESPN last year.

It is my day off, and I am sitting on a park bench at the edge of the walkway. A male jogger goes by, and three janitors cross from the other direction, one of them pushing a gray cart with a bunch of spray bottles and an eighteen-inch floor broom sticking up out of the deep corner well. I see a security guard drive by on a ten-speed, and I note that like all the officers on foot I have observed, he wears a gray button-down jersey made by the same company that manufactures the three hanging in my closet at home. Of course, the circular shoulder patch is different, but I can buy a duplicate in their university bookstore’s sports and decal section, then simply sew “SECURITY” in silver stitching along the bottom curve below the icon. The bike rider is the thirty-first security guard that I’ve noticed on campus, and I walked it for a mere twenty minutes before sitting on this bench and watching the pigeons. Clearly the philosophy here is to flood the territory, create a uniformed presence, and it is likely that most don’t know one another, especially the ones working the different eight-hour shifts. Finding the seam in those shifts and walking the shadows as “one of them” will be child’s play, striding cap-brim down with casual fatigue beside my ten-speed, unmounted, as if my shift just recently ended. No questions, no worries.

And beneath the brim of my cap I’ll be watching.

This is a perfect hunting ground: lots of trees and alleys and side streets and lots, construction areas with dark walkways bordered with tarps and scaffolding, and subway tunnels connected by poorly lit entrance stairways. This is a teeming labyrinth of lecture halls, and cafeterias, and auditoriums, and apartments, all with easy access if you’re smart enough to know where to find the service entrances. It is as easy as walking your ten-speed, identifying the blind spots between cameras, choosing your mark, and learning her come-and-go.

It is the top of the hour, and the park fills up with students. There is an Asian girl walking next to a tall nerdy guy with wild curly hair, a long neck, uneven horn-rimmed glasses, and spooned-out monkey ears. He is a disaster and she appears not to notice, nodding in quiet support of his exaggerated exclamations and yielding shy smiles when he clearly jokes poorly. She has straight black hair tied back with a thin green ribbon that matches her eye shadow, and she wears a black skirt. Slim hips. No backpack; she hugs her books in front of her chest. She has on black tights, and her legs are thin, toned, and strong. She walks like a dancer. They are five feet from me now, and he hits a home run, blurts something relatively clever, and she leans in toward him, she turns up her face, she surrenders a genuine smile that reaches her eyes, then the sun, the moon.

I die a little inside and fall head over heels in love with the girl. I want to know her and comfort her, and find out her dreams and how she feels about her father. I want to caress her cheek with the back of my knuckle and hold her in front of a hearth fire.

I want to make her immortal.

Often when I am in Target looking for cheap sweaters, or on the third floor of Macy’s checking out coffeemakers, or at Staples trying to find the right printer cartridge, people stop me and ask if I work there. I smile and gently admit I do not. Then they forget me. I am someone and I am everyone. I am the clerk at the service desk, the guy in the blue jumpsuit checking under the hood, the one who cuts your spare key at the hardware store, the dude stocking shelves at Home Depot. You give me access to the pipes down the basement and always let me in to read the water meter. I run your credit card at the rental place, check your coat in the lobby, and bring up room service.

And you never bother to notice me.

November

I’m telling you, Professor, I’m gonna catch the bastard red-handed and you ain’t about to go talking me out of it.

No one’s talking you out of anything.

Well, you don’t have to say it. I can feel it the way you’re sitting there staring out the windshield as if some ghost is floating there between the headstones.

Jonathan, I’ll humor you with this nonsense because I feel that tonight we’ve become something like friends, but the ridicule isn’t necessary. It is no secret that this makes me uncomfortable.

Why?

Why do
you
think?

Hmm. I think that up there in your classroom, in front of them first-year students gawking at you, especially the coed-types twirling their hair and popping their gum, it’s easy to talk about graveyards in
stories
and such, like that fella who always made the children into beggars and the streets into trash chutes full of soot and fog.

You mean Charles Dickens.

Yeah, Dickens. You think I didn’t know that? I went to school. I know Dickens and Shakespeare and Hemingway and all them English
gentlemen.
What I’m saying is that when you read about stuff it’s one thing.

And when you do them you could go to prison.

We ain’t breaking no law.

But we could be easily blamed for the actions of the phantom you want to catch simply because we are on the premises.

It’s my job to be on the premises, Professor.

At two in the morning?

Well, sure. What if Percy books four burials tomorrow instead of three? Sometimes you got to dig at night, break out the braces and struts and the gas-powered Ditch Witch, get dirty.

Isn’t that kind of loud?

Who’ll hear all the way out here?

Don’t you get tired?

I work best at night, I told you. Shit, you asked me all these questions when I first made to bring you out here. Is this some kind of teaching trick, like you want to test how set I am on catching this guy by making me repeat my reasons or something?

No, Jonathan. I assure you that repetition is not something I favor. I’m just nervous, that’s all.

For what?

I don’t know.

Sure you do. You just don’t want to admit that some wacko digging up graves and filling them back in scares the mess out of you.

Would I be sitting here if I was really that frightened?

I don’t know. Would you?

Stop it.

What? Being rhetorical?

Yes.

You didn’t think I knew that word, did ya?

No, I didn’t.

Learned it in church.

Well, God bless.

No need to be sarcastic, Professor.

I wasn’t being sarcastic. I was being ironic.

Shit! There he is!

Where?

There, by the flush memorials!

I don’t see him.

Don’t you have eyes? There now, crossing in front of those decorator boxwoods, the garden gate, now . . . shit, I lost him ’round the corner of the columbarium.

I want to go back.

C’mon, I was just kidding, Professor. Ain’t no ghosts out here, just a lot of grinning skeletons.

What if he does show up tonight? What if he sees us?

He won’t.

How do you know?

The lamp from the shed tosses a glow on the windows here. We see out, but he can’t see in. We’re safe. No one will know what we’re doing.

What are we doing?

Now who’s being sarcastic? We’re waiting to find out why this sick son of a bitch keeps digging up my handiwork. Why I have to have this shit job excavating trenches in the elements in the first place, rocks in my work boots, always checking for fretting along the top edge and tension cracks and support timbers showing signs of stress, and getting no credit for it while professors like you sit in your ivory towers making all the rules.

Well, I do grade a lot of papers.

That ain’t the point. And now you’re making me mad, sitting there hands folded in your lap all delicate, grinning that little grin like you know something I don’t. And then to top it all off, some lunatic comes through in the dead of night digging up what I packed in so nice and neat the day before. He’s mocking me. Making me look at what I done with my life and laughing at it.

No one’s laughing, Jonathan.

Well, it feels like they are.

You mean it feels like
he
is.

Yeah. Don’t go playing word games with me now, Professor, I ain’t in the mood.

No problem. [Pause.] Jonathan?

Hmm.

How do you know someone is really doing this?

Shovel marks on the backfill. I ain’t no pedestrian.

Nice use of vocabulary.

Thanks. But you know what time it is, don’t you?

No.

Professor . . .

I don’t want to go back. I want to sit with you and play detective, where’s its safe out here in the truck.

Game’s over. And if I don’t put you back in now, I’ll still be sitting in the backhoe when the sun breaks and we can’t have that, now can we?

It’s dark down there and cramped and gritty.

Now, now, just hold still. I’ll use the power tamper and pat you in snug as a bug.

I’m afraid your pun doesn’t quite work, Jonathan. The bugs made their way through me a long time ago. It was quite offensive.

Yeah, you smell offensive. Let’s go.