Dead Souls (4 page)

Dropping a celebrity name in general always gets the attention of a focus group, and Oprah in particular is a panacea for almost all problems, even here, among hard-core travel enthusiasts. They now relax a little in their chairs, suddenly interested in seeing these packs dusted with
O, The Oprah Magazine
interest.

“You've all met Tracy, and I'm Fiona Dunn, director of marketing for Sumpter, Inc.”

I nod to Tracy, and she pulls out a box of Istanbul packs from under the conference table. The box is fresh from the factory, still sealed. Crap, one of us should have opened it to check—if the warehouse got the order wrong, we're screwed. No, sorry,
she
should have opened it to check. Now I'm almost hoping it's wrong, just so I have a new dig to keep her in line.

“We are so grateful you came today, and we wanted to keep it to a few, select industry experts,” I say, opening my gambit with flattery. “This is a pack for the real urban nomad. What we're looking for here is your one hundred percent honest opinion on everything. Today,
you're
the CEO of Sumpter, Inc. Whatever you say, goes.”

I can tell by the way I'm holding their attention that they're now slightly mollified. Everyone loves the concept of holding unconditional power, even if it's only for a few hours.

As Tracy slices through the tape, Liza Willoughby gets up, unasked, to collect the trash on the table. She's the youngest in
the group, the daughter of an Exxon executive, daddy issues—in college she chained herself to a fracking rig along with her Planet for the People student organization. After the fallout, she quit school to live in sin with Sam, the son of a plumber, whose main skill set is drumming on buckets for spare change. Her feedback is probably the most important since we're thinking of launching the Istanbul as our introduction into a low-key luxury line, i.e. luxury that only someone who's in the know will be able to identify—a way the 1 percent can show off without suffering the accompanying evil looks from the other 99. But no matter how much Liza wants to be bohemian, she'll never be able to quite scrub the taste for one-thousand-count linens and two-hundred-dollar earbuds. The vintage Tiffany bracelet on her wrist tells the story. Twenty-five grand, easy.

I help Tracy lay the packs out on the table—thankfully, they're the right ones—which are accompanied by the waft of fresh plastic and Styrofoam, and now the energy in the room finally starts to shift from interest into something approaching excitement. The design is based on Parisian bicycle messenger packs, Euro-mod, not terribly practical but good if you're carrying everything you own and need to squeeze into public transportation. The small pack can be zipped onto a larger pack, the Ankara, that still legally fits in an airplane's overhead compartment bin. Colors range from the bright like framboise, vermillion, and tropical cover to neutrals like samovar, tatami, and chinchilla.

“Remember, there are no right or wrong answers.” I say. “But we're very excited about some of the innovative technology we're launching for the first time. Like the back panel with
sleeves for a tablet or a fifteen-inch laptop that unzips to lie flat for security screening.”

Tracy demonstrates this with a thin laptop.

“And the shoulder straps and side handle that transform the pack into a horizontal briefcase-style bag.”

With the efficiency of a game show hostess, Tracy unclips the shoulder straps and refastens them to turn it into a briefcase.

Maybe I want to be the invisible girl . . . sometimes.

I suddenly feel disassociated from the room, from the people in it, like I'm standing outside of myself, a ghost-twin observing the slight tremor in my hand, dimly registering the pause as Tracy waits for the next line in my spiel. Like I'm an actor in a play, but watching from the audience too.

“The large fleece-lined front pocket . . . it . . . it . . .”

Would you give up your soul? How about it?

Would I?

Did
I?

Everyone feels the off note, and Tracy gives me another look now, but this time it's one of real concern. Four seconds. Four seconds of an awkward pause is all it takes to start breaking group dynamics, to begin the buildup of negative emotions, and let's face it, this room wasn't too positive in the first place. There's no way in hell we're going to get an accurate read from them. Goddamn, I've blown it.

“Oh shoot . . .” I say, stumbling for words, another excuse. I feel my back pocket for my cell phone, pull it out, pretend to look at something important on the screen. “Sorry, guys. Gotta take this. Oprah's people again. Tracy, you can manage from here, right?”

My stomach gives an alarming heave as I race from the room, and I can feel the burn of my lie falling flat. I quicken my pace.

I don't want this, I don't want this, I don't want this
.

Whatever
it
happens to be.

THE FIFTH-FLOOR BATHROOM
is really beautiful as far as bathrooms go, with white, scalloped pedestal sinks and light pink marble floors, hailing from a different era for women. There's a long vanity counter just after you enter, with worn, dark pink velvet stools from the days when ladies sat to apply powder to their already porcelain skin, but now are used by nursing mothers. An opaque window lets in some natural light, giving the wan, overhead antique fixtures a needed boost. My pulse is racing—I can actually hear the blood in my veins throbbing near my temple.

Breathe
.
Breathe, Fiona, breathe
.

I approach one of the pedestal sinks, turn the right faucet for cold water. Splash a little into my hands, then onto my face. It feels good, so I do it again.

Then I stand, looking at my reflection in the mirror.

That odd, dark cast to my skin again. Not the light in the elevator then.

I lean in closer. Another side effect? For the first time, a real fear lands, that I'm in true, immediate, physical danger. I seem to remember a grayish cast to my father's skin, but God only knows which drug caused it, or if it was all of them together. What's strange is that if I look very carefully, the slight shadow extends about an inch from me, as if the surrounding air is
contaminated too. I raise a hand in front of the mirror, wave it fast, and there's the faintest dark shimmer, like heat rising off asphalt. And my eyes—normally a warmish brown, the irises have gone a shade darker, pupils wide and dilated. Even the whites seem to have a slight gray tinge.

Cheap-shit mirrors. The only possible explanation. We think all mirrors are the same, but they're not. Clothing store mirrors are warped enough to make their clientele appear thinner, driving sales. I bet these made for brisk business in the makeup department.

There's a part of me that knows I've seen my reflection in these mirrors a thousand times and never noticed this kind of effect. But already that notion is being bricked into a new compartment in my mind, until the lack of attention causes it to atrophy and die slowly. I have a whole mausoleum of things I prefer to never think about again. A cemetery of dead memories.

I splash more cold water onto my face.

Are you in sales?

No, I'm the devil.

My stomach suddenly heaves again, riotous, and I stumble for one of the stalls, the only nod to modernity with thick, floor-to-ceiling walnut panels featuring a horizontal grain. I kneel in front of the toilet, my forehead starting to feel clammy again. Nothing happens for a minute, then another. False alarm.

It's quiet here in the bathroom, just the soft hush of traffic filtering in through the window. A hum from the overhead light fixture. I don't have to go back to the focus group—Tracy's more than capable of damage control. I should have just told her to
handle it when she called me at home, but I was . . .
in
so many pieces.

I take another look at my cell phone—no missed calls from Justin—but even that doesn't seem to bother me very much, because the marble is cool, and there's nothing to do, at least not right now.

I lean back against the wall. Take a moment. The air is shadowy, in a soothing kind of way.
Finally
, a chance to think, even if it is in a stall and I'll have to soak my hands in Purell later.

Growing up, the world often didn't make sense, not the kind it should have according to the glimpses I saw in other kids' homes. So I'd make probability lists, narrow things down to what was most likely my reality. Take the fridge. At a friend's house, a tray of Jell-O would be an after-school treat, something to snack on while watching a sitcom, but in mine, a tray of Jell-O wrapped in cellophane presented a broader array of possibilities. I'd have to consider who was in the house, whether some of it was already gone, and if my parents and their friends—frighteningly anemic, thin creatures with bags under their eyes and nervy twitches—were giggling in the living room, the volume of the TV turned full blast. Probability the Jell-O was safe to eat—low. Probability it was laced with ecstasy—high. Ninety percent of my adult life has been trying to exorcise that past, fly within the boundaries of normal, where things are safer, life is safer . . . or so I've been told.

So why the hell did I go to a bar last night?

Because swimming just underneath my veneer of normalcy is the other me, the twisted me. The me that dabbles in
self-destructive behaviors to cope with trauma
, my therapist had said. Better than running the scissors over my thigh again I guess.

But now's not the time for introspection—I can think about all that later. Or not. Instead, I pull the indestructible business card from my jeans, the only constant.

Time to think this through logically.

Possibility number one. I have actually sold my soul to the devil. For real. And that has to be a load of bullshit. I mean, for starters, there's no such thing. With all the bad stuff I've seen happen to innocent people, I can't even entertain the idea of a just and loving God . . . a paranormal Big Brother monitoring system watching all, doing nothing, with accounts paid only after death. Finding a dead toddler in a car on a hot summer day with the windows rolled up because the junkie parents were shooting up with mine will do that to a girl.

But even if God and his evil nemesis
did
exist, with seven billion people around, I can't see why the devil would bother trolling bars in Oakland, California—surely there'd be easier, and bigger fish to catch, like drug-running despots and military generals with their fingers on the trigger of nuclear weapons. Or if he was collecting low-hanging fruit—like oh, say, desperate women shafted by their cheating boyfriends—the probability of running into him would be extremely low. I'd have a better chance of getting struck by lightning, winning the lottery, or contracting Ebola.

Unless he was targeting me specifically.

But again, if there's anything I know for sure, it's that there's nothing so remarkable about the soul of Fiona Dunn. I firmly represent Generation X's postfeminist, post-seventies
lack of optimism; we're generally pessimistic about our financial futures, we've seen, up close and personal, the popped balloon of the American dream, and suffer from an overall sense of malaise shaded by cynicism. I share shopping habits and music preferences with about forty-one million others of my ilk who came of age between 1988 and 1994, which is why they play the Cure in Banana Republic and the Smiths in Whole Foods. There would be no reasonable answer to the question:
Why me?

It's just a card
.

Whoever this Scratch really was, he went through a lot of trouble inscribing my name with a wood-burning pen. But the probability that I've sold my nonexistent soul to the devil? Low. Again, bullshit.

So. I'm left with two other more likely possibilities, neither of them good.

Possibility number two. Scratch slipped me a roofie. The easiest course of action is to do nothing, pretend that it never happened. I'm very good at that. Stoically enduring catastrophes is a strong suit. I don't have to go to a hospital—I hate them.
Hate
them. I could build a new mausoleum in my mind for last night, seal off the door, and eventually forget about it. Or if maybe not forget entirely, just make sure I never take a path that comes near it. I would need to get checked out, blood tests, that kind of thing. And it would have to be a secret between me and Justin, but he's the one who started keeping secrets,
so there
.

Possibility number three. I'm just hungover. I was blackout drunk. The kind of slip that I'm supposed to alert my therapist about. But then I'd have to start seeing him again, and I have him under the lovely illusion that I've made good progress,
mainly by telling him things like
I've been finding alternative things to do with my anxiety
, or
if I feel angry, I sit down and meditate to get in touch with my feelings,
and
I'm going to a support group and I'm really enjoying the people
. He loves that one. Again, what's done is done, and even if something happened without my consent, I have no name, no face even to describe. In fact, other than some purely circumstantial conjectures, I have no proof that anything untoward happened. I mean, nothing's sore. No bruises, no clothes torn, no skin under my fingernails. Of course, I woke up naked under the sheet. But for all I know, I was so blitzed that I took off my clothes myself.