Dead Souls (6 page)

“Doesn't seem very comfortable,” says Raven quietly.

“No compression straps either,” adds Alex. “Hey, wasn't there a piece about you recently in the
New York Times
?”

Raven nods, looking like she couldn't care less when I can see that she does, very much. “Mm-hmm.”
No, no, no
, they're getting completely off track, we didn't spend all this time and money, to give them the opportunity to professionally network.

But Tracy is
still
absorbed with Liza. “Do you remember how much your waist belt cost?”

The impulse to take over is strong, but given no one can see me, not exactly possible. I've always known I was fiercely competitive but never realized how entrenched it was—even in a hallucination, it clings to me like a second skin. If I were leading the group, I'd be touching base with each of them, digging deeper but also heading off the formation of mini-groups, off-topic conversations.

Although.

Although
.

There
is
something enjoyable about being the proverbial fly on the wall—I can see all the twitches and behaviors people usually mask when they think you're looking, let alone Sam's sticky fingers. Meanwhile, he's now completely checked out of the conversation and is busy tapping his thighs with two pencils, drumming, bored. Melissa pulls her chair a little closer to Alex and plays with the top button of her V-neck shirt, subconsciously unbuttoning it. She doesn't know that Alex is at the forefront of an asexual movement, having been famously burned after a well-known affair with a married celebrity. Alex quietly leans back, vacating the personal space Melissa has invaded, and pulls out his cell phone to check something, the international call sign for
not interested
.

Maybe, hypothetically, there's something to that conversation Scratch and I had about the invisibility thing. Access to closed-door meetings with the exec team, listening in on bathroom gossip, looking over people's shoulders as they type in passwords and then accessing their files later. I could potentially know everything about everyone. That
would
be interesting. Interesting enough to sell one's soul for, though? Even if I believed in souls, I'd need more convincing.

Sam yawns, stretches, hands almost bumping right into me.

“Where's the bathroom?”

He pushes his chair back and just like that I'm—

—BACK IN THE BATHROOM STALL.
Only now I'm naked, sitting on a pile of my clothes and shivering with cold, like I've just stepped out of a walk-in freezer, or the temperature has dropped twenty degrees. All is quiet; the same church-like hush.

I don't remember taking off my clothes. That's not good.
God, I'm losing it
. Unless this is a hallucination within a hallucination? How deep does this rabbit hole go?

And then a more disturbing thought tickles my brain.

What if this
is
real?

Through the walls, I hear the gurgle of water rushing through pipes—Sam. In my hallucination, Sam was going to the bathroom—he must have just flushed the toilet in the men's room next door. So there were a few minutes there before I came to.

He put the waist belt in his pocket.

In my hallucination. Anyone could be in the bathroom. Anyone.

A significant part of me doesn't want to know the truth, is afraid. Not knowing can sometimes be preferable to knowing—you can sketch in whatever version of the truth suits you.

But I'm naked, cold and shivering.
Fuck it
. Quickly I throw my clothes back on—shirt's backward, screw it, panties inside out, screw it—grab my cell, my coat, the damn card, shove my socks into my purse and then my feet into my Keds, squashing the backs of the sneakers, no time to lace. I unlock the stall door, race past the sinks, ignoring my reflection in five mirrors, and open the heavy oak women's room door, then step into the darkened hallway, which seems to stretch, lengthen, pull away from me in both directions like someone is pulling taffy.

I feel sweat bead my upper lip—why is it so hot all of a sudden? Another gurgle from inside the men's room: the faucet.

He's washing his hands. I should've washed my own, I'll probably get hep A on top of everything else the way my luck's going.
Christ, it's taking so long.
Tick, tick, tick, tick. I feel like a small, nuclear weapon has been detonated in my chest:
What
i
f
? What i
f
? What i
f
?
Finally I can't stand another minute, another second, and open the men's room door. Charge inside.

The security guard is the one washing his hands, while Sam stands in front of a urinal, holding the turtlehead of his penis, mid shake-off. His head snaps in my direction, startled. “What the hell?”

The security guard—
his name, why don't I know his name?
—smirks, takes in my disheveled appearance, head to toe, making mental notes. Something to chat up Tracy about, I'm sure.

I swallow but hold my ground, even though the men's room is inherently intimidating, ten urinals total with those, whatever the hell they are, bars of something at the drain. Pedestal sinks and cracked mirrors that look like they haven't been cleaned since Kennedy was president, puce tiles the color of split peas that line the floor and creep up the walls until they're defeated by a band of black tiles.

“Do you
min
d
?” says Sam.

The stink of old piss is overwhelming. It would make for a good American Apparel shoot.

The security guard is enjoying himself, takes his time grabbing a paper towel, drying off.

I gather my courage, say nothing, and just stride past the guard toward Sam instead, grabbing the pocket by his ass for the suspicious bulge there.

“Fucking A,” he says. “What do you think you're—”

While he's occupied with his shake-off, tuck, and zip, I yank the waist belt out from his pocket, give it an accusatory snap. He turns, and for a moment we both stare hard at each other, equally stunned but for entirely different reasons.

It takes a second for him to register the contraband. Sam
puts up his hands,
no más
, and takes a step backward. “I have no
idea
how that got there.”

This is real
. I feel a vein throbbing somewhere near my temple, a gathering aneurysm probably. I saw him put the waist belt in his pocket; I heard him say he was going to the bathroom. This is real. All of it is real.

The guard's hand drifts to the walkie-talkie in his belt.

“I'm telling you,” says Sam, trying out a smile, dipping into a boyish charm that must have worked once, with Liza. “I don't have any idea—”

“Just . . .” I say, the words coming out as a whisper, which surprises me. My tongue feels thick, foreign, metallic. “Just get out of here.”

Relief drops over Sam's face, confusion over the guard's.

“Whew,” says Sam. “For a moment there I—”

“I said
get out
!” They both seem shocked; neither moves fast enough, so I scream, “
Get the fuck out of here! Now
!
”

And they do, quickly.

This is real.

This is not a hallucination, this is not a lucid dream, I am really standing in the men's bathroom on the fifth floor of Sumpter, Inc., with my feet half in and out of my Keds, and the room smells like piss, and I'm holding the waist belt, which I really saw Sam put in his jeans pocket because I was really there, in the fishbowl, standing just behind Tracy.

It can't be real
.

Because if the invisibility is real . . .

Then it means Scratch is real . . .

Which means the word
FAVOR
and the blank space after is real too.

Right . . . ?

Can't be though.

Right?!

My reflection. Cracked in a cracked mirror, which would be a cliché in a movie. My skin doesn't look right in it, either. Nothing does. I don't know if anything will look or be right again, because I just might have a soul that I just might have sold to the devil himself. In which case, I also owe him a favor.

Which part is worse, I don't know.

Yet.

I hold up my phone, frantically click the screen, enter my passcode and find—no missed calls.

I'm completely, and utterly alone in this too
.

I have never felt the entire world to be so massive, cold, and unforgiving as it does in this moment, not at age nine when I covered for my comatose parents in the bedroom as the social worker came to visit—
they're at work, no, everything is fine
—not when they kicked me out of the house at seventeen, pushing two hundred dollars into my hand before shutting the door so they could rent out my room to their drug buddy—
we're doing this for
you;
you're too sensitive
;
you need to grow up, get a thick skin
—not when I looked up at the Lowell Greyhound timetable at 1:00 a.m., bleary-eyed, trying to see how far away I could get.

But the sense of being damned? Now that's familiar.

I pull the card out of my pocket, head for one of the stalls at the back, pick one, open the door, drop the card in the toilet, and flush. Water fills the bowl, swirls, and then sucks it down, into the bowels of the sewer where all the dark, stained things go.

CHAPTER
FOUR

W
HEN I LEAVE THE BUILDING
I see the five-dollar bill is gone. It feels like I dropped it years ago, in a different lifetime, another era. Rain now falls in earnest, so I pause under the portico, try to gather myself.

Get a grip, Fiona.
There has to be another explanation
.

Astral projection, remote viewing, things I'd always been mercilessly snide about whenever I crossed paths with some holistic New Ager, maybe it's time to reconsider. Or Scratch could be some kind of bar-trolling illusionist/hypnotist, with lock-picking skills and a misogynist streak. I could also be suffering a psychotic break—it's possible I saw Sam palm the waist belt in the fishbowl before I crashed and burned during my presentation, and my mind just tucked it into a hallucination.

Not great hypotheses, but still in the realm of the reality I know. I pull out my cell phone, hoping to see at least a text from Justin, but no, nothing. A small part of my heart shrivels and dies.

The sensible thing would be to go to the hospital and tell them everything, let them sort out what's wrong with me. There's something appealing about the idea of handing it all
over to someone else to figure out, letting go. Of course, I just flushed away my only piece of evidence.

“Great move, Fiona. Brilliant.”
I'm talking to myself.
That
doesn't seem crazy.

Then, as if to confirm I
am
crazy, when I look up from my phone, I find Scratch leaning against the hood of my car in the rain, although I could've sworn he wasn't there just a second ago. He wears the same clothes from the night before—black leather jacket, dark jeans, knockoff watch—and his hands are tucked into his front pockets; so casual, easy, and relaxed, like it's a sunny, warm day, not a cold downpour. I struggle to make out his face, but again, it's a mystery.

My stomach twists.
Why can't I see his face?

“Do you know,” he says lightly, like we're picking up our conversation from the night before and nothing has happened since, “that Native Hawaiians consider rain a blessing?”

I call mutiny and say nothing.

“You should feel very blessed today Fiona. Do you?”

A sedan passes by, the driver splashing water on a homeless man slumped by a trash can across the street. He doesn't move. Doesn't stir. Not much of a witness if something else bad happens.

I grip my purse a little tighter. “I'd feel a little more blessed if I wasn't naked when I woke up this morning.”

“Oh, that,” he says, and I can feel a smile even if I can't see it. “What do you take me for? You were hammered. I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't tempted; you were pathetic yet attractive in a drowned Ophelia kind of way.”

A compliment or an insult? I'm not sure. “So we didn't . . .”

“Have sex? No.”

A small relief—we were at a bar, he made a pass, nothing happened. I'm still a few steps above Justin on the moral high ground.

“So how did I get back into my apartment?”

Scratch holds out an arm, beckons me closer. I reluctantly take a few steps but stop right at the edge of the portico's eave.

He takes a moment, looking me over. “It suits you.”

“What?”

“There's no word in your language. It's a way we identify each other, not through our eyes, but with our souls. Our tribe's unique mark. And I'll answer your other question with one of my own—how did it feel being in the fishbowl just now? Did people see you?”

My throat swells, choking any possible reply.

No, it can't be
.

“Was it like you were invisible?” he adds softly. “A ghost-twin?”

How does he know?!

“Was it like the very thing you wished for has come true?” He stands then, takes a step toward me but doesn't cross the boundary of the portico's eave. The rain hits his shoulders, cascades down his sleeves, and this close I see his skin too, with the same dark tinge I saw in my own reflection. Something magnetic about it, a strong gravitational pull.

He lifts his arms slightly, lets the rain hit his palms for a moment. I notice there are no lines on them. “But at what cost?”

He snaps his fingers.

The rain stops. Instantaneous. I can hear other sounds now
that had been drowned out by the rain, the thrum of traffic on the freeway, the rumble of a nearby garbage truck.

“No.” I take a step back. “What you're saying . . . it's not real . . . it can't be real.”

“Perhaps there are more things in heaven and earth, Fiona, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

It's impossible to breathe. Impossible to speak.

“Like devils,” he says softly. “And souls. And hell. What some call damnation, but I call liberation.”

Maybe it's the impossible that's possible
.

He snaps his fingers again, and the deluge resumes.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I take two more shaky steps back. “Get the . . . I don't know what the hell your
game
is, but—”

Suddenly I hear the door open behind me and turn just as the security guard steps out.

“Hey, you okay?” he says. “You've been standing out here for a while.”

The glass door seems to swing shut in slow motion behind him—in the reflection I see the back of his head where he's starting to go bald, the tag from his shirt poking up behind the collar—and when I turn back to the car, no one's there.

Scratch is gone. Vanished. Not a sound as he left.

I DRIVE, AND DRIVE, AND DRIVE.
Eighth to Broadway, Broadway to Nineteenth, Nineteenth to Telegraph. I don't have a destination in mind, but then I don't feel like I have much of a mind at the moment. Instead, I concentrate on the present. The here and now. Dark sheets of rain fall that the windshield
wipers can't keep up with; they just blur the taillights in front of me, turning everything into a Monet wash. I click on the radio. Anything for a distraction.

“. . . residents of Monterrey, Mexico, were shocked to discover the bodies of four children, ten women, and five men in the main lodge of the eight-million-dollar ranch, founded by cult leader and proclaimed incarnation of Jesus, Alexi Maximus. Maximus, a Russian defector and former janitor, began teaching his brand of ‘enlightened' apocalyptic scripture in San Francisco, where he developed a following of wealthy patrons . . .”

Wonderful
. I feel numb, anesthetized. I feel like I'm wearing a Halloween mask over a new, truer face. I drive slowly, huddled over the steering wheel, my foot pressing the brake for each sudden stop prompted by the nervous SUV in front of me—a soccer mom probably, lugging kids and worried about hydroplaning.

I could have hallucinated Scratch just now too
. It's a halfhearted thought though, no real muscle behind it.

“. . . all suicides, except for the children, who were given brownies poisoned with a fatal dose of barbiturates . . .”

I click to another station.
“The armed robber shot six people in the bank before turning the gun on himself after a ten-hour standoff with police . . .”

Click
. I need to find some jazz. That's always good for a rainy day, but it's spot-on the half hour so it's all news or ads.
“Bad credit? No credit? No problem! Our financial experts
 . . .”

Movement catches my eye, and I see a driver in the opposite lane slow down to avoid a clump in the road—clothes, trash, hard to say—but there's something strange about the driver, I note a faint, shadowy aura around him, feel a magnetic
pull. He must notice me looking, because he meets my eye, gives a grim nod before continuing past me.

What the . . .

After that, I'm grateful for the sudden starts and stops of the SUV in front of me, because it gives me a chance to closely examine the passengers and drivers in cars, people darting through the rain for this or that business, either bothering with umbrellas or not, diners in well-lit cafés enjoying lattes with their afternoon lunch.

Not often at all, but every once in a while, I'm drawn to someone and find they have that shadow, a dark pallor. A woman standing under the wide eave of a Laundromat, smoking—she sees me but pretends she doesn't, shifts her weight into her other hip, scrunches her eyes into a squint, and stares hard into the gutter. A car double-parks and a man gets out of the passenger side, clutching a folded newspaper over his head. He makes a dash for the 7-Eleven, turns, and watches me pass, strangely intent. A bus passes, glowing with fluorescent light, and an elderly woman at the back sees me and presses her palm against the glass, like a greeting or a warning, I don't know.

It's a way we identify each other, not through our eyes, but with our souls.

Of course, I could just be responding to this thought he's planted in my head, interpreting reality through his lens. In which case, he's a better marketer than I gave him credit for.

I'm so fucking exhausted all of a sudden. But somehow home doesn't seem like the place to go—home is where I found the card, or where the card found me, and what if
he
is lurking nearby, watching, waiting to fuck with me again?

So I drive by the Grand Lake Theatre, past the street I usu
ally turn right on. Maybe I shouldn't ever go home. Drive as far as my tank of gas will take me and live off of my savings—all $15,675 of it—until I can pick up a job somewhere, maybe waiting tables, something low-key, inconspicuous. Disappear.

Leaving is something I do well; it's almost become second nature. Never held a job more than three years, never a boyfriend more than two. I've lived in Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Portland, Denver, Miami. Nothing ever feels quite as good as shaking off a whole life, turning the page on everything, leaving all mistakes, judgments, failures behind. Nobody gets in, not for long. I always tell them it's a career move. What happens to those I leave behind is only an occasional thought, easily drowned out in a cacophony of new experiences. I am now protected by the thickest of thick skins—my parents would be proud. My therapist warned that I've never really unpacked. But unpacking is hard, staying is hard, trusting people is hard.

I trusted Justin, and now look what's happened.

A small part of me blames him for everything.

I almost rear-end the SUV in front of me when it stops hard at a light. But the rain is starting to lift, or at least it's not raining as hard in Piedmont. To my right, I see the cement pillars of the Mountain View Cemetery, its gates open.

The one place where everyone has to finally unpack, stay.

I think of all the lives the people under the ground must have lived, how important it must have seemed to them at the time. And then after, not so much.

Christ, I don't even believe in souls, or hell, or heaven
. How can something you don't believe in try to ruin you so completely?

There's a sudden flash of light, bright like a bursting star, coming from a knoll near a pyramid-shaped tomb. I see a tall, thin man standing next to a tripod, a sharp silhouette against the retreating, ominous clouds. Either he's impervious to the rain or just doesn't give a shit—even from three or four hundred yards away, there is something relaxed and confident about him, like a rancher surveying his land. I feel that magnetic pull again, so strong that my car drifts into the right-hand lane, almost of its own accord.

And even though he's so far away, I can tell he sees me. Locks on to my car like it's a lost sheep, newly found.

And waves me over.

This is how I meet Alejandro.

I DRIVE UP THE SERPENTINE ROAD,
wheels crunching on gravel, past small rounded tombstones, taller ones adorned with Celtic crosses, rectangular granite monoliths. A weary angel rests his head on his hand. I pass mausoleums that look like small Parthenons or domed miniature churches. A small medieval city planted on a hill with stunning views the dead will never enjoy, and of course I think about the grass, how green it is, and why.