Authors: Michael Marshall
I
t was one of those dreams you get where you wake to find you’re in the same kind of place in reality as where you’d just been in your sleep. Warner had always hated that kind of dream. They seemed to carry a message that there was no respite, no way out.
He had tried to escape his coding, many times. Drink, drugs—which work for a while but come back to bite you; business had been a form of escape, too, and that at least had made him rich. Playing the executive, playing the boss, playing the computer-games visionary, every role easier than real life—personas he strapped on every morning before he left the house. Women, too (the endless variety of their shapes, textures, and smells) . . . you could escape into them sometimes.
There were the ones who went okay and ones . . . who went the other way. There were different kinds of women, after all. He’d been able to keep them in separate pens in his mind. Usually. He’d long ago accepted that in reality there isn’t any escape, however . . . in which case what else is there to do except play your hand out?
In his dream he’d been lying on sand, his head shaded, legs out in the morning sun. The sky he could see beyond his feet was a featureless blue, and from close by came the rustle of waves running up ashore, then trickling back across broken shells. A mangy black dog walked up, turned its head to look incuriously at Warner, and then carried on past.
At first that was all, and it was a restful kind of dream, but then he realized that this was not a dream at all but a memory. He knew this beach. It was on the Baja coast near Ensenada, and he’d been there at the end of a two-week road trip across Louisiana and the vast bulk of Texas and then into dark Mexico. Many, many years ago. A trip with a female friend, a look-how-grown-up-we-are-now expedition that spiraled away into the dark.
Yeah, that trip.
He realized also that he did not feel good in the memory. His fists hurt. There was guilt, and a vertiginous feeling of “what happens next?” Most of all there was the relentless, gnawing knowledge that he’d done something he ought not to have done: but an accompanying certainty that it had been an event that had been building within him, unavoidable.
In some people, anger dissipates. It rises from the spring and then flows gently away via gullies and streams to the ocean. In others it sinks back into the earth, finding its way back into the source, bubbling and biding its time underground before reemerging even more concentrated than before.
It never, ever goes away, and sooner or later it’s going to be spent upon someone. That’s just how it goes.
Was there a feeling of relief, too, then, that the event had finally come to pass? More than that—an excitement, dark and lurid, a
breathless
excitement, a sense of a door having been opened that could never be shut again—now that you’d finally glimpsed what lay on the other side, you knew normal life was never again going to be enough?
The bulge in the front of his jeans said yes.
He let his head fall back onto the soft sand of a beach that lay thirty years back in time. But it was the beach, too, that he’d laid his head on every night ever since. It didn’t matter where the pillow was, or whose, or how expensive the cotton . . . really, it was that beach on which he laid his head.
W
hen he woke—for real this time—he realized he wasn’t wearing jeans at all but blood-stained sweatpants, and remembered also, in the small hours of the night, wading out into the sea to try to get some of the mess out of them. He’d crouched there for some time until it simply got too cold. Then he had come lurching back up the beach and gone to sleep.
As he sat up he was confronted by a small child. Five, six years old, in a pair of yellow swimming trunks, a long-handled spade in one hand, a red bucket in the other. The colors seemed very bright.
The child said nothing, just stared at the adult beached here on the sand. In his gaze was a look of frank appraisal and lack of morality that Warner had spent a lot of time learning to hide in his own eyes.
Yes, you look cute enough now,
Warner thought,
but I bet your parents know different.
I’ll bet there are times indoors when you set their hands shaking with held-back violence. A six-year-old on the warpath—with its lack of care or understanding for either punishment or incentive—shows you why our prisons are full and bodies are found buried in the woods. In our hearts is a love of breakage and chaos for which society is only ever a failing brake.
“When I was your age,” Warner said to him, “I trapped a bird. I broke its wings in my hands and watched to see what happened.”
The child started to cry, and ran away.
Warner tried to massage life back into his face. The skin there moved, but it felt slack, dehydrated. The swirling sensation was still there at the base of his skull. It seemed miraculous now that he’d been able to make his way out of the half-built condo and to the sea. His leg felt so dead it seemed unlikely he would ever be able to move it again. Though the trip into the ocean had removed some of the smell of sweat, it had done nothing to the odor that had begun to come from the wound. There was bad shit happening in there. Someone needed to come for him, soon.
In addition to his wander out into the ocean, he had made several calls from a battered public pay phone he’d discovered around the back of the next condo along the drive. He’d been shambling slowly around the resort for what seemed like hours, a one-man zombie movie, when suddenly he’d turned a corner and found a phone attached to a wall, glowing in a pool of light.
He’d made two calls, collect.
The first had gone unanswered. As he didn’t have a watch or a phone, he wasn’t sure what time it was. Late, certainly, possibly very late—but the intended recipient was a cop, someone who didn’t live by normal hours. So now what? He was trapped here. His leg was too badly injured for him to go anywhere under his own steam. But he couldn’t stay here, either.
There was the other number he could call, but he didn’t want to do that. He really didn’t want to.
The panic in his guts started to grow. He had even, for a moment, thought about calling Lynn instead. He knew this was born of nothing more than desperation, however. She was just a chew toy, part of a long and complex program of self-distraction, a way of proving to himself that he could live as others did. He knew that. She could be of no help to him now, and it puzzled him that he’d considered it.
He wondered for a moment then, as he held himself upright with one hand, the handset gripped in the other (the two broken fingers in the left making it hard to hold it properly), whether he’d somehow got it all wrong. Whether he could, in fact, have led a normal life.
Too late now.
Too late by years.
Too late to be anything else.
And so, finally, he’d called the second number.
After five rings, it had picked up. Perhaps this was because the guy was on the West Coast, and three hours back in time. It seemed equally possible, however, that he just never slept. Warner had met this person three times over the last few years, and though he understood himself to be a bad man, he had immediately realized that this person was on a whole other plane. The man had been polite, even friendly at times. He had nonetheless scared Warner badly, as you might be by an alien who looked exactly like a human, and yet was something else.
“Who’s this?” the voice said.
“David Warner.”
“And?”
“I’ve got some serious . . . problems.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“You . . . how? How do you know?”
“Why are you calling, David?”
Warner had tilted forward until his forehead rested on the rough, pebbled wall above the phone. He used a sentence he had never previously uttered in his life.
“I . . . need help.”
He explained his situation. He explained his injuries. He explained why he could not go home. Though he knew it was probably a mistake, he mentioned the heavy financial dues he’d paid every year.
The man on the other end told him what to do. He gave him a phone number, told him to leave a message as to his whereabouts, and then to keep out of sight.
Warner started to thank him, but realized the phone had already been put down. He called the toll-free number he’d been given, left the message, saying he would be on the beach in front of the unfinished Silver Palms development. It seemed as safe a place as any. No tourist was going to recognize him.
He put the phone back on the hook and shambled out toward the beach.
H
e didn’t know what time it was now, but if children were up and about and looking for shells, it had to be coming up for nine. Maybe later. He hoped they’d come for him soon. He really didn’t feel very well.
“I saw her face,” said a voice.
It came from behind, a point about six or eight feet up the gentle sandy slope. He recognized the speaker. He didn’t turn. No point turning to face the dead.
“I saw it every night when I lay in bed. I saw how it looked when she realized how drunk you were.”
Warner let his head drop, and answered to the sand between his knees. “She was a bar slut. A whore. She’d seen drunk gringos before.”
“But not like you. Not a man who’d get her into the back of a car, with me there in the passenger seat so it looked safe. Not someone who’d drive her way out of town and then pull off the road and stop the car.”
“Shut up,” Warner said.
“And I was just too high to do anything. Too drunk, too many joints. And fuck, David,
I was only seventeen
. So were you. How should I have known something like that was going to happen?”
“I didn’t know, either.”
“Yeah, you did. I’d always thought there was ice in you, but . . .
fuck,
Dave. Do you
remember
the way her face looked afterward? What you did to it with the rock?”
He remembered. He remembered waking the next morning, on the beach, miles from the mess he’d hidden in an abandoned house—he’d tried to get Katy to help, but she was too screwed up and drunk and crying too hard. Remembered feeling sick, remembered the sense of horrified awe at what he’d done.
Remembered the erection, too.
He heard Katy crying behind him, here on Lido. He’d heard her on that beach in Mexico, too, the morning after his life changed. Poor dead Katy, who’d looked a little like Lynn did. Katy, who he’d known since they were five years old. Katy, who if things had turned out differently could have been by his side in a totally different kind of life.
“I loved you,” the voice behind him said.
“I know that now.”
Warner knew whose fault his life was. But who do you blame, when you’re the one? Who do you take it out on? You can’t punish yourself—at least any more than you already do by turning your life into an endless dark carnival. So you hurt others. Not always intentionally, either. Sometimes you just lash out. Things get out of control. You watch your hands act. Verbal warnings turn into violence, beatings turn into a bloodied mess.
And your dick gets hard.
Gradually, the sound of crying faded out. Not as if she’d stopped—Katy would never stop crying now—but as if something had slowly dragged her away.
H
alf an hour after that there was a tap on his shoulder. At first he thought it was Katy come back again, but then he realized the tap had hurt. Physically, in the real world.
He looked up and saw someone standing over him, a silhouette blown into soft-edged white by the sun.
“I’ve come to help,” it said.
F
orty minutes later we were back on the mainland. When I started taking my surroundings in properly again, I saw we were heading south on the Tamiami Trail, a chunk of anonymous urban sprawl twenty minutes from downtown. Office supplies, perfunctory restaurants, copy shops, places to get your exhaust fixed, and the single-story DeSoto Square Mall. The woman was driving with negligent skill, as if this were a video game she’d played every day of her life. She appeared to be looking out for something.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Here.”
She swerved off the highway into the parking lot of a Burger King—and drove straight toward a space on the far side, decelerating only at the last minute. She snapped off the engine and rubbed her face in her hands. She rubbed hard, as if her face had done her wrong. I stared out through the windshield at a brick wall.
When she was finished rubbing, she yanked open the glove compartment and pulled out some cigarettes. She took one and tossed the pack into my lap.
“I don’t.”
“You didn’t. If you haven’t started again yet, then you’re a stronger man than I thought.”
I looked at her, nonplussed.
“You haven’t noticed?” She lit up, blew out the first lungful of smoke. “God, you’re slow. Not even the table of women at Krank’s last night? I forgot to cancel them. Of course that was when you were supposed to be there with your wife. The big reconciliation drink, destined to go badly wrong. And yet you wind up taking yourself there anyway. Funny, huh.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Jane Doe, to you.”
“What’s happening?
What is going on?
”
“Well, that’s the question right there. Everything was laid out. Lines were drawn, walls put in place to stop it spilling too wide. The walls have not held, and this has got
way
the fuck out of hand.”
There was a word fighting for attention in my head, but to get at it I had to fight past a double image of Cassandra’s upturned face. My mind hadn’t caught up with the implications of what I’d seen in her apartment, and insisted on presenting her to me as she’d been in the night—cute, happy to be drinking wine and hanging out and talking about computers or whatever it was we’d been discussing when my brain had taken that snapshot. Then—
bam
—the other image dropped down like a lead curtain.
A door. Dark. A bed full of blood.
I got the word out in the end. “Modified.”
“Yep,” the woman said, rolling down her window to let out the smoke. “You have been.”
“By who?”
“Me. Among others.”
“The e-mail? The photo book?”
“Both, with a little help. I was also Melania Gilkyson for a couple of phone calls.”
“That was you?”
She cocked her head, and altered her voice slightly. “ ‘I don’t work for him twenty-four-seven, you know.’ ”
“But
why
?”
She didn’t answer, just stared with a flat kind of unhappiness across the lot.
“Why
have you done this to me
?”
“Because it’s my job.”
“Where’s Stephanie? Have you done anything to her? If you have . . .”
“No.” The woman shook her head, a concise back-and-forth movement, as if economy of motion ran deep in her bones. “That’s not on me. I have no clue where your wife is. That is one of many things that have gone badly off-script in the last forty-eight hours.”
“Were you at my house?”
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“No. Why?”
“I called, trying to track down Stephanie. A woman picked up the phone. She said the word ‘Modified.’ ”
The woman rubbed her forehead with her fingertips and looked pained. “Not me. Christ.”
“But you have
been
to my house. Right?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because when I asked, you didn’t deny it. You just asked when I was talking about.”
“Shit. I must be tired,” she said. “Yes. I was there Wednesday morning, to put the pictures on your laptop.”
“
You
took those?”
“Not me. Someone I know.”
“How did you get in?”
“I have keys.”
“
Why?
”
“Why what? There’s a lot of whys here. You need to be specific.”
“Why plant the pictures?”
“Why do you think?”
“To make my wife believe I’d been spying on Karren.”
“Duh.”
“Did someone pay you to do this?”
“Maybe you’re not as dumb as everyone thinks, hey.”
“Who? Why would anyone do that to me?”
“I’m not at liberty to—”
Suddenly, and without warning, I lost it. I’ve never raised my hand to a woman in my life, but I wanted to pull this one’s throat out, break her nose, do anything and everything that would hurt forever. I needed to be sure, absolutely sure, that this woman didn’t know where Stephanie was and hadn’t hurt her in any way. I snapped around in my seat and lunged toward the woman’s neck.
I didn’t even see her hand move from the steering wheel, but then suddenly there it was, clamped around my wrist, arresting the forward movement in my arm so fast that I felt my shoulder joint twist.
“If you want,” she said, looking at me with cool blue eyes, “I can drag you out of this truck and do you in the lot. Right now. And I’m talking flamboyant, crowd-pleaser, playing to the gallery. Broken bones, rib kicks, with my hair down and chest stuck out so everyone sees it’s a girl busting you apart. What do you say? Want to press start on that?”
I tried to pull back, but she was too strong. Her eyes held mine, unwavering. The muscles in her face and jaw were hard planes of intent, and I could feel the long bones in my forearm being pushed together. I had no doubt that she could—and would—do what she’d threatened.
I’ve also been in many meetings in my time, however, sat face-to-face with a lot of people who aren’t revealing everything they know. I’ve seen what humans look like when they’re trying to hide something, to present only one side of a deal, when they’re playing poker with a guy they think is just a dumb-ass extra in their lives.
“You’re scared,” I said.
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You heard.”
“You know what, I
am
going to do it. I’m going to kick your fucking ass.”
“Not scared of
me
. I get that you’re tougher than I am, okay? Big deal. But you’re scared about
something,
and blowing up at me isn’t going to help you solve that.”
The grip on my wrist got even tighter, then she abruptly dropped my arm. She looked away, at the brick wall in front of us. The middle fingers of both her hands moved to press against the opposing thumb. She held them there, pushing hard for a few seconds, and then let go with an audible exhale.
“I need something to eat,” she said, as if the last conversation had not happened, as if she was a friend of a friend who just happened to be in the same car this sunny Friday morning. “Probably, so do you.”
The idea made me feel ill.
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged. “But you need rehydrating at least, or today is going to get worse and worse for you. And trust me, your baseline of expectation should already be set very low.”
She opened her door. “Are you coming, or what?”
S
he directed me to a table in the corner of the restaurant, sweeping the detritus of the previous eater’s meal onto a tray with an oddly prissy movement before marching over to the counter. As she waited in line, she got out a cell phone and pressed a speed dial number.
The place reeked of fries and ketchup and sounded like an experimental station called “Radio Human”: people chewing, bawling out kids, talking on phones, belching, breathing, existing. I don’t come to burger joints very often, for the same reason that I
do
head to the gym and read positivity blogs. Because we’re supposed to. Supposed to eat right, think right, act right by the planet: the endless series of secular rituals intended to keep others thinking well of us, or keep us thinking well of ourselves. People rag on about God, how lucky we are to be getting shot of him, but He at least would throw the occasional bone, handing down a good harvest or ticket to heaven once in a while. The internal taskmaster we’re working for now doesn’t believe in fripperies like motivation. He/she just wants you as his bitch.
Steph and I have a ritual, though. Once in a blue moon we’ll come out to an UltraBurger or Kingdom of Fries—though usually it’s a McDonald’s—and slum it, showing the world that we’re bigger than the zeitgeist, that we can make our own choices. I suddenly realized we hadn’t done this in months, however. I had been getting deep into the program. We both had. Time had been patiently breaking Steph and me, turning us into everyone else.
But now the program was breaking down, too, and the only thing I cared about was finding my wife and putting things right.
As I sat watching the woman getting closer to the front of the line—she’d finished on the phone now—I recalled how convincing she’d been in Jonny Bo’s, both on the night of my anniversary dinner and the time I’d had the coffee with Hazel (who I suddenly remembered I owed a call, though I couldn’t imagine when that might happen). In Bo’s this nutcase woman had been slick, professional, the consummate waitress.
She could act, in other words. This got front and center in my mind and stayed, enough to make me raise my head and watch her properly, and start asking questions.
What did I actually know? I knew this woman had been involved in getting pictures of Karren onto my computer. Maybe she’d even e-mailed Janice to ask her to get a booking at Bo’s, the restaurant where she’d been working, presumably as a cover. A cover for what, I didn’t yet understand. So . . . I knew
some
stuff.
But I didn’t know what had happened to Cass, who’d killed her, or—for the love of god—why. I didn’t know where Steph was—though I hoped it had nothing to do with all of this. I didn’t know why this other woman had happened to turn up—how she’d known I’d be in Cassandra’s apartment. I didn’t know why, after starting to drive one way, she’d turned around. Had there really been someone up the road—or was that another piece of acting, to convince me a pursuit was under way at exactly the point where I was starting to get my breath back and question why I was allowing myself to be dragged out of a building by someone I’d never properly met before?
How could I tell what was the truth?
She’d admitted she’d been involved in screwing up my life. Why should I believe that she now had another goal? Wasn’t it more likely that this was another roll of whatever dice were being used in this . . . What? Game? Did she
really
not know where Stephanie was, or was she faking ignorance to bond me to her? When she came back to the table was she going to tell me truth, or more lies? Would I have any hope of being able to tell the difference?
I realized that I would not, and there were only two things that I needed to do right now:
Find my wife.
Talk to the police
.
Neither involved this woman.
She reached the head of the line. The server stared at her with bovine insolence. The woman’s eyes flicked up to the menu boards, as they always do, even if you know what you want. She was occupied, for a few moments at least.
I stood up. I walked at a steady, even pace to the doors. I opened them, went outside, and when my feet made it to the sidewalk I started to run.