Alison’s skin crawls. And yet she seems unable to get off the couch—she can barely even twitch a finger. Sweat rises warm on her brow, then cools in the breeze of the ceiling fan spinning above.
“I don’t know who you mean,” Alison says. Voice quavering.
“I smell him on your lawn. His grief. His blood.”
“Please—”
“But you have holes in your mind, Alison. Human-shaped holes.”
“
Please
. Please, please. Leave.” Hot tears press at the corners of her eyes.
“Someone removed something from you.” Suddenly, Psyche nods—and a little lunatic laugh rises up and out of her like a flurry of bubbles. “Of course. Of course. I see, now. Not all of it, but I see. I see my love’s fingerprints.” Another laugh. “My true love has been there. Inside you.” Alison blanches and the stranger shakes her head. “Oh. Not like that. He would never—not
you
. You’re too plain.”
A spike of fear and anger rises inside Alison—
And instantly it’s tamped back down again by a mental hand.
“I’m going to show you something now. Are you ready?”
“No, no. I’m not ready.”
Psyche shrugs. “That’s too bad. Because you need to see.”
Though Alison’s eyes are already open it’s like her eyelids are being ripped off, her eyes—her inner eye, her third eye—exposed to the bright noon-day sun.
It’s a face she recognizes, a face of—
Cason
.
And then all turns to red curtains drawn dark over the light and yellowjacket wings and the shooshing thundering river of blood in her ears and—
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bomberman
C
OUPLE DAYS LATER,
Cason stands in front of a falafel place on South Street. Smells of hot grease and steamed pita reach up his nose and hit that primal part of his brain—his stomach tightens, and hunger growls like a bear in a cave.
Behind him, Tundu honks the horn—“Hey, you good?”
Cason nods, gives a thumbs-up. Tundu pulls the cab away. Back to work.
Now, no time for food. Instead he looks down at the address on a curling piece of paper, an address given to him last night when Conny called right around midnight. His brother didn’t say much. Just this address followed by, “You fuckin’ owe me, remember.”
The address took him here. To a falafel joint. Yehuda’s. He’s never felt compelled to have one before, but right now, his stomach is making a strong case to try one.
He quick steps out of the way as a black kid pedals by on a BMX bike. Cason almost falls into a gum tree—literally, a tree spackled with hundreds if not
thousands
of smooshed pieces of gum. Couple tourists—white girls with too big sunglasses, sunglasses that make them look like old women or praying mantises or something—hurry past. Again, he’s reminded:
You need to get your reflexes back, old man. That kid almost cut you off at the knees and those skinny girls’ elbows are sharp enough to make you bleed.
It’s then Cason sees that to the left of the food counter is a plain door. No address or number listed. Maybe the guy lives upstairs. Two more stories above the restaurants. Probably full of apartments. Hell, Cason’s first apartment of his own town was above a bar. A bar that played loud shitty pop music till two o’clock in the morning.
Fine. To the door, then.
He tries opening it, but isn’t surprised to find it locked.
Sure enough, a list of apartments—the labels all faded.
He runs his finger down all the buzzer buttons, mumbles something into the speaker. The door
clicks
. Bingo.
T
HESE ARE NOT
nice apartments.
In the stairwell, Cason finds a grungy Schnauzer eating fast food out of a Burger King bag, chasing flies away with his tail. At a door on the second floor, he hears someone wailing and someone weeping—they call to mind the sounds you might hear at an old asylum, with madmen and women screaming at invisible intruders.
By the numbers, the apartment Cason’s looking for is on the third floor.
Up to it, then.
First door on the right has an Asian girl in a leopard-print top and a zebra-print skirt pounding on it. She’s not using her hand to pound on it, though—she’s using the bottom of a bottle of Asti Spumante. She’s yelling, “Hey! You Jew! Open up! I want to celebrate with you! I got the job!”
Thump thump thump
. “Jew!”
As Cason ekes past, she shoots him a look, her eyes daggers. “What are you looking at, asshole?”
He just shakes his head and keeps walking.
Door he’s looking for is right around a bend. Last door in the hallway.
Apartment 313.
Down the hall, the echoing thumps of the bottle on the door. (“Jew! Open up!”)
Cason’s not really sure what his next move should be. What the hell was he thinking? Guy’s got a maimed face and a penchant for blowing things up with his own special brand of shrapnel panache, and Cason’s going to just—what? Knock on the door?
Fuck it. He knocks on the door.
Nothing.
(
Thump thump thump, “Jew! Job! I want sex!”
)
And that ends Cason’s one and only plan.
Well—he’s got one more item on the menu, a back-up plan that has no chance of working, because in this town, who leaves their doors unlocked?
He tries the doorknob. The door squeaks open.
No shit.
L
IGHT FILTERS THROUGH
gauzy, tobacco-stained curtains. In the beams whirl an endless dance of dust motes and cat hairs. Cason doesn’t actually
see
a cat, but he smells it—the ammonia stink of spent kitty litter.
The apartment isn’t much to look at, size-wise. One room with a kitchen and a bathroom glommed onto it. The guy’s bed is a rumpled pull-out couch, covered with the remnants of various snack foods: broken tortilla chips, Cheeto dust, M&Ms laying strewn about like the cracked, chipped teeth of a colorful clown.
Makes Tundu’s place look like the Taj Mahal.
What matters, though, are the walls. Or rather, what’s on them.
Cason thinks:
So he’s a tinfoil-hat type
.
All across the walls are photos, newspaper clippings, print-outs, documents, and more, all stuck to the wall with little thin carpenter nails. He begins scanning the walls—there, a blurry photo of a woman in blue walking in a wheat field. Here, an article about a man struck by lightning in his own house. Articles about bank failures and 9/11 and the Spanish Flu of 1918. Wikipedia articles covering a weird array of topics: triremes, Viking axes, volcanoes, Homeric epics, Nazi occultism, hallucinogenic drug use, jaguars.
Many of them strung together with red thread wound around one nail, then to the next, then to the next. Forming connections that make no sense to Cason. Nor anybody else but maybe this man, this bomber—the ‘Cicatrix.’
It’s like the guy’s walls are a one-man-band crazy-ass version of the Internet.
As Cason winds his way through the apartment, his index finger tracing his own invisible (and ill-conceived) connections between things, he sees something on the floor that gives his heart a reason to gallop with swift and heavy hoof.
It’s a shoebox. With his name on it in thick permanent marker.
CASON COLE.
Beneath it, a question mark: ?
It’s not dusty like everything else. It’s been opened recently.
Cason opens it. And immediately wishes he didn’t.
The underside of the lid is affixed to another piece of red thread, like that which connects the images and articles on the walls—and when Cason opens the box, the thread tugs on something, and then that something
gives
.
He hears a
snick
.
He catches sight of a small canister inside the box.
A bomb
, he thinks.
And there’s a slow-motion moment where anger strikes him—anger that he was so stupid, anger that he hasn’t found a way to bring his family back together, anger that he hasn’t punished those who put him in this situation.
There’s a hiss—and a cone of white fog blasts up and hits him square in the face. His hand slams the cardboard lid back down, crushing the box and killing the spray, but it’s already too late. His face burns like he just pressed it into a plate of hot peppers. His nose runs. His throat starts to close. The corners of his eyes tear up and those tears burn like blown-out match-tips.
He can’t see. Can barely breathe. Cason shoots to his feet, almost falls—
Behind him, he hears the door.
The room shakes. Footsteps. Closing in. Fast.
This is a trap.
He pivots on his heel, throws a clumsy kick wide—it goes nowhere,
swish
. But there’s a scuff to his left and then something hard jabs under his armpit and his whole world turns from
swarm of fire ants
to
thrown into the witch’s oven
as his darkness brightens with pain and light and his body goes rigid—
—he thinks about the man struck by lightning inside his own home—
—about Barney and how he looks so much like a
little boy
now—
—about that time he fought Choo-Choo Ortega in Vegas, and how that crazy sonofabitch almost choked him out but how after one good reversal he was able to get Ortega in a hold and rain a hail of ground-and-pound blows on him till Choo-Choo tapped out—
—about how he doesn’t want to go out like this—
He lets himself go. Releases himself from the misery like in the old days, in the octagon days. Doesn’t ignore the pain so much as disappear beneath it. He opens his eyes: a new misery, but fuck it. Past the watery curtain his vision looks like a melting masterpiece of running paint, but he can see movement, and there’s an exaggerated rictus swimming across his vision like some mad cackling Jack-o-Lantern.
Cason stabs out with a straight punch. Connects. His enemy gurgles, yelps—
Opportunity. He throws another punch low and up—connects with his enemy’s gut, hits hard enough he imagines it sinking deep, grabbing his opponent’s heart, and squeezing it like it’s an overripe grapefruit.
A new thought strikes him:
To win is to escape
.
He shoves his foe out of the way and makes a bolt for the door. Or at least the door-shaped smear of brown at the far side of the room.
But his opponent has other ideas.
He hears the sound of a gun’s hammer drawn back.
Only two options. Flee or stay. His life now in that regrettable role of being left only to hope—a trembling kitten beneath the dangling Sword of Damocles, the blade held up by only a little red thread.
Cason doesn’t know which option affords him the best chance. But he’s blind. And his face feels like napalm still burning.
He stops. Panting. Out of breath and out of shape.
“Don’t move.” The voice, rough and rusty like a can full of nails and screws. The words imperfect, too—hissed over lips that aren’t lips but caterpillars of scar tissue, irregular and inflexible. “You want answers, yeah?”
“Go to hell.”
“Been there and back again. You want to know the score? You want to know what they did to you and your family? You want to know
who they are?
I can pull back the curtain. I can set the stage. You want to see? Then let me show you.”
CHAPTER NINE
Ex Nihilo
“D
O YOU THINK
I’m pretty?”
Psyche asks the question idly, as she tugs back the curtains on the bedroom window and stares out and up into the sky. Looking for anything with wings. The Driver is coming one way or another, soon as it catches her scent. She’s done a great deal to distort and disturb the psychic imprint she leaves in her wake—but eventually the Driver will figure that out.
So, in the meantime then, idle conversation.
It’s a lie, this idleness. The question neither empty nor casual. But the way she asks it: flip, one-off, like it’s a half-formed thought.
“I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Alison says. Her words take on a dreamy, listless quality.
“Thank you,” Psyche says. But the woman’s words do little to soothe the kinks out of her tangled nerves—after all, Alison is only saying that because Psyche is
making
her. Which makes it all the more surprising when the woman adds:
“You’re the most beautiful and... the most... horrible.”
That last part, a struggle to get out. Those final three words lose the dreamy vibe as a coldness creeps in, a stinging saline slush. Psyche didn’t make her say those words. And couldn’t stop her, either.
Psyche’s just... rusty, is all. That’s what she tells herself. Honestly, she’s been rusty ever since Zeus abandoned them and Aphrodite made her a captive.