Dead Souls (3 page)

I had too much to drink. Way too much to drink. I make a solemn promise—no, a vow—to never get that drunk again. I can't afford to end up like my parents. I couldn't live with myself if I did.

So next I try to tear up the card, rip it to pieces, the evidence. It bends, it twists, but it won't tear.

SOUL
:
Fiona Dunn

SOUL
:
Fiona Dunn

SOUL
:
Fiona Dunn

Why do I feel like this card is mocking me? I jump to my feet, head for the kitchen, with its cracked 1920s porcelain sink, cabinets that have been painted so many times the doors
stick shut.
The lighter, where's the lighter?
I pull out the junk drawer, dig through the detritus of three years—coffee loyalty cards, rusty screwdriver, unidentifiable keys, coupons long expired, emergency votive candles, paper menu for the Chinese restaurant down the street that changed owners and is now a patisserie—
there it is
, brass cigarette lighter, the one I'd stolen from my father in one of my middle school attempts at hiding my parents' drug paraphernalia. It's silver, with a red stripe advertising Filter Tipped Winston Cigarettes.

It takes a couple of clicks to ignite the flame, then I hold it to the tip of the card over the sink.

The card doesn't catch fire.

I've heard of indestructible business cards, made from synthetic recycled materials—
it's probably a mix of used baby diapers and plastic shopping bags
. This isn't a sign that I'm losing it.
Get a grip, Fiona
. The world can get fucked up, really fucked up, but it's always fucked up in some identifiable way, a quantifiable series of interdependent causalities. If you have the time, and the patience, you can track down the reason for anything. At least that's what my therapist used to say.

An idea strikes. An aging carrot has been sitting in a small bowl on my countertop for days, so I use it to shove the card down the garbage disposal, turn on the faucet, flip the switch. The disposal whines a complaint, but eventually the carrot spins and disappears. I let it run for another minute for good measure, then turn off the disposal. Then the faucet.

I got drunk in a bar called Make Westing.

I look at the drain.

I met a guy, a creepy guy. Creepy guys in bars are a constant.
Like
e
in
e=mc
2
.

Take a moment.

Of course he locked onto the alone girl, the sad girl, the barefoot girl. Not surprising.

Reach my hand in. My wrist cringes at the slimy rubber part that I never think about cleaning. I feel the dull disposal teeth with my fingers, and then I find the card, still there. Intact.

He plied her with drinks, got under her skin. A cliché if ever there was one.

I pull out the card. It's in one piece. Not a scratch, not a tear, not even a wrinkle.

SOU
L
:
Fiona Dunn

“And then what?” My voice out loud surprises me.
And then what happened?

A dull, throbbing ache starts at the base of my spine, a familiar sensation, long forgotten. When my parents shot up, it was like the walls of our apartment melted away and I could feel all the people around us, trapped in their own boxes of low-income housing, stacked one upon the other, a storeroom of the poor, an ever-expanding radius of faceless strangers, none of whom gave a shit about the girl with the ponytail in the purple room pressing her headphones against her ears. The quietly desperate sense of being surrounded by people, utterly alone.

Think.
One thing at a time.
Breathe
.

I was sitting on a barstool in Make Westing.

I focus on the stool. It was a hard stool, with a low wooden back, modern, dark green. A green that almost perfectly matched my skirt.
My clothes
. The woman found the card in my
clothes.

I quickly walk back to the living room, grab the grocery bag, still damp, from the floor, and pull out each piece carefully, checking to see what secrets they have to tell me. My shirt—plain white, right front pocket—empty. My green pencil skirt—soggy receipt in the left pocket for lunch that day, the hot bar at Whole Foods
plus an Italian soda. Next out comes my bra, and, disturbingly, my underwear, black, a little bit lacy and equally itchy, a concession to Justin because he'd been so . . . distant. The fact that the neighbor touched them—
what was her name again? Gloria? Lydia?
—causes an unpleasant shiver. But there's nothing else from that night: no bar bill, no phone number scratched onto the back of a matchbook, no folded paper napkin.

I lay the clothes out on my second-hand sofa, head to toe. It looks like a snake's shed skin, like I was lying there and simply evaporated. The sleeve of my white shirt droops over the side, touching the floor, acquiescing to the inevitable. I sit down on the coffee table, tapping my jittery knee with the card.

Think
.

The band was packing up. I remember a man in a black T-shirt rolling up cable around his elbow, and there was glass on the floor, and I was barefoot.
Barefoot
. Immediately I hold up one foot, then the other, examining for cuts, or slivers.

They're perfectly fine. Unscathed.

So someone
did
lift me off the stool . . . and then what? Carried me home, or worse yet, drove me home? And then maybe stopped off somewhere in between, removing my
clothes? I shudder.

What if Scratch put something in my drink?

A much more logical, but equally frightening explanation presents itself. It would explain the gaps in my memory, the state I was left in, hallucinations.

I glance at my underwear.

My stomach heaves again and I race to the bathroom, barely making it in time.

I KNEEL IN FRONT
of the toilet bowl, vomit everything that's left, and then five heaves that yield nothing. Afterward I feel empty, eviscerated, cold.

Should I call the police?

This is the point where people call their family or friends for moral support and advice, but I have no one except for Justin. Acquaintances, plenty of those, work people good for a chat in the break room or a quick lunch. They get the edited-­for-television version of my life, minor dramas that end well—parking tickets, hijacked Wi-Fi, near-miss accidents on the freeway. But no one to really call in an emergency, not a real friend; it'd be pushing it to even ask one of them for a ride, let alone get involved in what could be a trip to the hospital for a vaginal examination. Parents? A joke. Assuming the phone hasn't been turned off, assuming they aren't doing time, the call would only end in some guilt-trip attempt to get me to wire a couple hundred dollars.

Plus I was drunk. Everyone would say I was drunk and there'd be plenty of witnesses . . . not that drunk equals con
sent, but it sure doesn't help a case where memory is spotty already. But if Scratch did slip me a roofie, there'd still be traces, right? I pull off some toilet paper, wipe my mouth, and decide to ask Dr. Google.

It's still raining outside, and my small bedroom looks somber, pensive, claustrophobic. More of a junior bedroom, barely enough space for a full-size bed and a small end table that also serves as a desk, although the ceiling is tall, which helps somewhat. I flip open my laptop, type in my search. “Roofie side effects” include: hallucination, decreased blood pressure, memory impairment, drowsiness, visual disturbances, dizziness, confusion, and gastrointestinal disturbances. Check.
Traces remain in the bloodstream for twenty-four hours, can be detected in urine for seventy-two hours
.

Christ
. I'm horrified but also relieved in a strange way, because at least this is the fucked-up world I'm familiar with. There is a logical, although vile, explanation. What will Justin think?
Hey, honey, I was in a bar drinking with a strange guy last night
. I glance at my purse on the floor, the one I left behind. Pull out my cell phone.

No missed calls. I don't think I've ever longed so much for a person in my entire life.

I'm about to swallow my pride, call his number, when I get a flash—the pink coat folded over the back of some anonymous hotel chair, or no, it's on the floor, they pulled each other's clothes off as soon as they got through the door, hungry. I remember those kinds of days with Justin. The early ones. I see the back of her head, blond hair disheveled and floating above her now-naked shoulders. She orders room service, probably something rich and decadent, like eggs Benedict or cinnamon
bread French toast, with coffee and a fruit plate to share and then wheat toast, no butter, for Justin. He's taken to an austere diet over the past couple of months—nothing nonorganic, lots of raw vegetables, a drastic reduction in anything with milk. Lost about ten pounds, making his features even more chiseled, dramatic. I should have guessed there was a woman's hand behind it.
I should have known
.

Rain
tap
,
tap
,
taps
on the fire escape outside. No, I'm in this alone.

The fire escape. I look at it through the window. The rain has turned it from gunmetal gray to a slick black.

Maybe that's how Scratch got me back in?
A sick feeling gathers. I've always had a hard time with that window, nearly impossible to get it open or shut, so it doesn't even cross my mind to lock it anymore, but that Scratch had an athletic build, and the way he held me upright, kept me from tipping over—yes, he was strong. I can almost picture it, him pulling me up the rungs, forcing the window open. And then.
And then
. And afterward—what? Went down the elevator? Why would he leave my clothes out by the entry?

To screw with the evidence, obviously. Blur the trail. But leaving the card as a parting favor, to instill a sense of dread, make that dread personal, intimate.

Christ, why did I ever go to that damn bar? Get drunk with a stranger?

You think you're better than me, but you're not
, my father would say, often.
You think you're a good person, but you're not. Apple never falls far from the tree. Never does.

I jump to my feet, take the two or three steps needed to reach the windowsill, find the latch unlocked. A possibility.
But when I try to push it open, it doesn't budge, like it hasn't been opened in months, which it hasn't, not since the super shoved it closed over the summer and told me to leave it alone.

I touch my forehead to the cool glass. God, I wish I could just disappear, melt away into some other version of a life, one where things would make some kind of sense.

My cell rings.
Justin?

Pulse racing, I scramble to get it before voice mail kicks in. Click
Accept
without even looking at the number.

“Justin!” I'm just about to blurt out my woes, pink-coat woman be damned, but it's another voice that answers.

“No, it's me, Tracy.”

Tracy, my assistant Tracy. My heart plummets. Still, I manage to pull myself into the mannequin I usually present as myself. Competent, terse, juggling too many things.

“Hey, it's a Saturday, and I don't remember signing off on your overtime.”

“Focus group?”

Right,
shit
, right. Weeks spent organizing a group of extreme urban nomads to evaluate the Istanbul prototype, people who live out of a pack for years at a time and never stay in a country longer than three months. Early enthusiasts who set a trend and then abandon a product once it takes off and becomes commercial. It took almost six months to get five in a room at the same time.

I look at the clock. I'm already a half hour late. I can feel the gears of my life making the decision for me, and I'm grateful to be back in the mundane. I can always call the police later.
Maybe I'll remember more by then too
.

I don't know if I quite believe myself.

“I'm really sorry. I had some issues here. Tell them I'm running late,” I say. “Get them all whatever they want from Whole Foods, and let them know that after the focus group, we'll let them choose three packs from our stash in addition to the seventy-­five-dollar stipend.”

I search the floor for jeans and shoes.

Tracy is pointedly silent for a good second or two. “Those are for the editors coming Wednesday. I don't know if the warehouse could even get me another set by Wednesday.”

The one thing I can always count on Tracy for is a passive-­aggressive critique of my lack of organization.

“Could be worse,” I say, and hang up.

How it could be though, I have no idea.

CHAPTER
THREE

T
HE OFFICES FOR SUMPTER, INC.
are located on the fifth floor of an art deco building that used to be a department store, its copper-plated siding burnished into a graceful green patina. The building is the lone holdout from the 1930s on a block of otherwise squat, concrete offices designed by a sixties East Berlin defector. No problem finding street parking on a rainy Saturday—the area is inhabited only by worker bees Monday through Friday, with the population trickling down to the homeless on weekends.

I get out of my car, a Honda too old to be interesting enough to steal, make a mad dash for the portico since of course I left my umbrella at home, and then dig around in my purse for the magnetic card that will unlock the front door of the building. Try not to think, for the millionth time, that Justin hasn't called me yet, even to check in.

Sumpter
has always been a problematic name, recalling deep Southern forts and lost Civil War ambitions, but the company started in Georgia in the late nineteenth century, making packs, sleeping bags, and gear for hunters, so now we call attention to its founding date to evoke durability and to massage perception
away from its antebellum origins.
Sumpter—Est. 1855. An American Original
. There was a professor of African-American studies in Oklahoma who wrote a pretty accurate and detailed journal article, “We Don't Need No More American Originals,” about our company's founder, Mr. James A. Sumpter, petty-thief-turned-slave-catcher, who single-handedly tracked, kidnapped, and returned 145 poor souls to their owners. He then used the profits to buy a cotton plantation and a couple of mills in New England. It was not unusual for Sumpter to check those New England hires, if black, to see if there was a bounty out for them, in which case he would either return them and collect the reward or, if it was a case of mistaken identity, simply install them on his own plantation. We outsourced a PR firm to handle any negative publicity just in case, but the same week that the article was published coincided with the arrival of a major hurricane, and other than a few comments from fellow academics, it died a natural death.

Before I reach the door, I take a folded five-dollar bill out of my purse and let it drop to the sidewalk. I have no doubt that even in this weather it'll be gone by the time I head out. There're always two or three homeless people tucked out of sight, watching. It's a habit I picked up after I first started making money of my own, part good-luck charm, an offering to the deities—if they exist—because I remember the days when a found dollar bill was the difference between eating or not, part proof to myself that I am a good person, that my father was wrong about me.

I open the door, step into the entry of the building, quiet as church. Dark gray marble floors that match the marble walls, a ceiling of brass plates imprinted with bold, Frank Lloyd
Wright–style patterns and not a column in sight, the entire three-story space held up by magical engineering and the backs of goddesses or angels that bear more than a passing resemblance to Ayn Rand.

The middle-aged guy behind the security desk looks up from his computer screen and raises an eyebrow—short gray hair, thick glasses, a name I should remember but don't.

“Hey, you made it,” he says, that annoying touch of both familiarity and reproof. “Tracy's been frantic.”

I put on a smile, search for the least interesting explanation possible. “Power went out and my clock reset.” Not that I have to report to him, but security guards, receptionists, and interns are career-deadly fonts of gossip.

“You need to get a clock that takes batteries too,” he says, sticking to his point. “I've been using the same alarm clock since ninety-eight. Haven't been late to work in years.”

I feel my smile stiffen. “Good advice. I better head up now.”

He nods and returns to his computer while I head for the elevator, press the brass elevator button, burning.
If I had a penis and my voice was two octaves lower, he would've never said that to me
.

The elevator chimes, then the doors open. I step inside. For some unknown reason, the building's owners saw fit to nail cheap mirrors over the otherwise beautiful mahogany paneling, a nod to modernity, or vanity, or the seventies.

I don't look right.
Something about my reflection is slightly off, or not so much off as
with
, like one of those hidden pictures puzzles where you're supposed to find the image in the negative, not positive, space.

I turn around, press the button for the fifth floor, try to shake the feeling off. The doors close, slowly, and there's the familiar rattle as the gears shift before the car starts to rise.

I take a sideways glance at myself in the mirror. Long dark hair scooped into a ponytail and pulled back from my high forehead—bangs, always an issue—a minimal amount of Saturday makeup, my nose leaning slightly to the left from where my father broke it when I was fourteen. I'd tried to wake him from a drug-induced stupor for lunch money; he thought I was trying to steal his coke, so he “accidentally” pushed me down the stairs. Too stoned to drive, one of his nameless friends took me to the emergency room, dropped me off at the curb with a twenty and a piece of advice:
It'll all work out in the end. It'll all come out in the wash. You'll see.
I didn't bother going inside the hospital, just washed the blood off in a bathroom at the 7-Eleven across the street and spent the money on a weekend matinee and popcorn.

Did I take my Xanax today? I don't think I did.

Still, I turn my head, step in for a closer look. No, it's the cast of my skin and the color in my eyes—they're wrong, dialed down, as if one of my graphic designers has taken the bar for brightness and moved it twenty points negative. Is it the lighting? It has to be the lighting. Unless it's another hallucinatory side effect from whatever that asshole Scratch slipped me. I shouldn't have come; I should have told Tracy I was sick.
Christ
, if only I had some time, time to think . . .

I close my eyes and ferociously wish I were back home, in bed. For a moment, I can almost hear the clink of the floorboard heater, and something softens inside me, a gentle lull like a wave receding—

The elevator chimes, and as the doors open, I register a whoosh of cold, air-conditioned air.
Time to get my game face on
. I open my eyes, about to step into the hallway, when I feel something strange beneath my feet.

The cool marble of the elevator floor.

I look down. I'm barefoot.

Not possible. So not possible
. But when I turn around to see where my shoes could possibly have gone to, I find my Keds and white ankle-high socks just a step behind me, askew. Like they dropped from the ceiling, fell from the sky. Like I wasn't wearing them just moments ago.

TRACY HAS THAT LOOK,
the one that starts when I tell her a package has to be overnighted to an editor and yes, I know it's only a half hour before FedEx closes. She sticks out an arm—impeccable shirt, crisp, robin's-egg blue—and holds the glass office door open for me, helpful and condescending in equal measure.

How the hell did I take off my shoes and not even know it? Am I having blackouts too?

“Good morning,” says Tracy, in a tone that means just the opposite. She's short, with a blunt cut that would look stupid on someone else without the right bone structure. She also has the organizational skills of a general with the polish of a news anchor, and very much wants my job.

I pretend that I don't notice the look, the tone, and try to settle my mind in the reality that presents itself. “How's the group?”

“Pissy, obviously,” she says. “Not a great introduction for early adopters, and . . .”

What if Scratch didn't slip me a roofie but something else instead? LSD? PCP?
PCP comes with amnesia, I know that much. Tripping on PCP, my father killed my pet kitten—a stray I stubbornly tried to keep hidden in my bedroom—and afterward, when I presented her small, limp, furry body, he became furious that I would even accuse him of such a thing. Even though I saw him throw her from my bedroom window, pitching her like a baseball.

“. . . would have started. Did you get my text?”

Tracy's been talking this whole time, but I have no idea what she's said. I ignore the fact that my laces are still mostly untied and flop with every step. “Did you get them food?”

“Yes. I just said that.” She holds a manila file to her chest possessively, a brief on all the participants that she directly gave to my boss to review—trying to impress, didn't show me first—but I handpicked them and know their names, e-mail addresses, and short bios by heart.

Douglas Close and his partner, Ed Rigby—travel-slash-food writers who live nowhere in particular in Asia; Melissa Wright—a photographer specializing in documenting the displaced tribes living in South American slums; Liza Willoughby and her boyfriend, Sam Reed—planned to summer in England three years ago and haven't spent more than a month in one city since; Alex Fujita—another photographer and a professional urban nomad, his free-living blog on making it in metropolises like Chicago for under twenty dollars a day getting a hundred thousand weekly visitors; and finally an aging hippie, Raven Light, writer for various adventure and outdoor magazines and advocate of turning abandoned city lots into community gardens.

Vegetarians, every goddamned one of them.

I bet if I asked my parents, explained my symptoms, they'd be able to tell me exactly what drug he used.
For once, they could prove useful.

“Surveys ready?” I ask, and Tracy nods, because of course they are. We head toward the conference room. She walks just slightly ahead of me.

Of late, at work I've noticed a slightly poisonous vibe pointed at me. Assistants are a tricky thing. You need their help making the sausage, but you have to keep the spice recipe a secret, you have to perpetuate the illusion that the distance created by your title and pay discrepancy is an insurmountable moat, that you always know more, see more. But I have a strong feeling she's waking up, planting seeds in the break room about how she'd improve everything that I've built for this company. And, quite frankly, she's hungrier for it than I am. Middle management isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Not anymore. You're the working poor until you get to CEO golden-parachute status, and I really don't know how many people you have to kill to get there.

“Got pencils this time?” I say.

I watch Tracy's shoulders stiffen. When she was still new, the first time she helped with a focus group, she forgot the pencils. She had to go hunting through desks to find them—not a big deal, but a good dig I save for special occasions.

“Of course.”

The truth is, I'm shaky and can't afford to be, not for a moment around this girl.

Even though it's still raining, a good amount of light streams in through the tall, narrow windows. I try to center
myself on this, where I am. The office is a wide-open space, not much different really from its department store days when it sold wallpaper, bedroom linens, and children's clothing. Desks have been placed here and there, with Aeron chairs of course, all the electric and cables tucked under a subfloor tiled with cork, the ceiling left exposed to showcase ductwork and rough, wooden beams. The absence of walls and privacy is supposed to facilitate communication and workflow, but instead even the smallest sound echoes loudly, which makes people feel paranoid about who's listening to phone calls and directs them to gossip in the bathrooms.

I hear a muffled snort of laughter.

Our subjects are in “the fishbowl”—the sole conference room, set up in the center of the space, glass walls on all sides. Wrappers and recycled food containers are littered across a conference table repurposed from barn doors, and Tracy's right—from their hostile sideways glances, it's easy to tell they've coalesced into a peevish group. Nothing unites people so quickly as something to complain about. On the plus side, the ice has effectively been broken and they'll be more likely to identify problems, which is a better win at the end of the day for product development.

I feel the pinpricks of their eyes on me.

I'm actually in a similar line of work.

The way Scratch leaned on the bar, relaxed in an almost feline way, like he was the apex predator in the savanna.

I push away the memory—compartmentalizing inconvenient truths is something I'm adept at—and open the glass door, smile.

“Oh my God,” I start. “Hey, guys, I'm so sorry you've been
waiting for so long.” All of them are leaning back in their chairs, quietly resentful. “But I got a last-minute call from Oprah's people—her magazine is considering the Istanbul for their must-have travel gear list. But I got here as soon as I could.”