Sociopaths In Love (10 page)

Walt pulled into a parking space.

"I have to find out why this thing smells so
bad." He popped the trunk and got out of the car.

Erica got out the other side, feeling like a
clown. "It's probably just embedded in the seats or something." She
had to raise her voice over the cacophonous rustling of the warm-up
suit.

Walt looked excitedly into the trunk.

Erica glanced in and gagged but found it
hard to look away.

The trunk was full of porn mags, DVDs and,
mostly, crunchy looking yellowed paper towels and napkins. The
smell wafting out was exponentially worse than it was in the actual
car.

"I'm going to leave you here to figure that
out," she said.

Walt began savagely rifling through
everything. Erica didn't understand how he could let those crunchy,
highly compromised napkins come into contact with his skin.

As she walked toward the bright and bustling
mall, she told herself that every person they took something from,
everyone who happened to die because of them, deserved it. She knew
a trunkful of pornography did not make one a depraved sicko
criminal, but it helped to think of that man she'd last seen lying
face down in a gas station parking lot that way. The waitress had
probably been a ruthless bully or queen manipulator, undoubtedly
just a couple years away from bringing a child into the world to
mercilessly fuck up.

Faulty
logic
, Erica thought.

Sometimes it's all we have.

She felt good for now and wondered if she
could manage to think like that all the time. It made things a lot
easier.

Nostalgia

Entering the mall was like wrapping a
security blanket around herself. Many people milled about, some of
them with a specific purpose but most of them hollow-eyed and
directionless. They had time and money to spare and this was where
they chose to spend it because the mall made it easy to get rid of
both those things. Bright and scrubbed to a gleaming polish it was
like a dry erase board of commerce. What was here one week could be
gone the next and yet it felt like nothing really changed.

She would have felt self-conscious about the
way she was dressed if she thought anyone was paying the slightest
bit of attention. But she knew they weren't. Between the power
walking elderly who sat together in groups around the cookie and
coffee shop, the determined middle-age women with their severe
hairstyles and expensive but ill-fitting clothes, and the teenagers
who lounged around in droves, looking cool, speaking in lines
they'd heard from movies and television, and texting or messaging
how they looked, what their casual, brief, and vapid thoughts were,
or what they were going to buy, she felt like a ghost. A ghost
because she was, in a sense, all of those things – determined,
distant, vapid – but, above all, she was alone. That was what
separated her from them.

She entered a clothing store catering to
young women, the smell of new clothing and perfume the same as
every store sharing the same demographic. It was a heavenly
balm.

This scent, it was the smell of her past.
And though she usually fought the urge to reach back into her
memory, she seized upon the nostalgia of browsing through many
clothing stores just like this, always alone, lost, letting herself
get lost, giving into it. When she had them, she'd never brought
friends with her because she thought they could only detract from
this solitary pleasure.

Was that what Walt meant when he referred to
what they had as a gift?

Even if he didn't know, she
thought it might be. Perhaps they could do anything they wanted to
precisely because they were and always would be alone. If the mall
was the dry erase board of commerce, they were the dry erase boards
of humanity. People could sense their aloneness. What was the point
in infiltrating that aloneness through some kind of interaction if
all traces of that interaction would be gone moments later? People
want to believe what they say matters. People want to believe what
they
do
matters.
If it doesn't then it's a waste of energy, a waste of
time.

Maybe that's what people
like her and Walt radiated:
It doesn't
matter
.

She took some clothes into the dressing room
and changed into them, feeling immediately better. She knew someone
could try and stop her on the way out, but she wouldn't stop. And
then, what? For the person who tried to do the stopping it would
have just been a potentially embarrassing waste of time. She
thought they could probably call someone else to look for her but
would come up blank when inevitably asked for a description.

She'd opted for simple black skinny jeans
and a white v-neck t-shirt. She squinted at the mirror, pretty sure
she could make out the darker skin of her nipples and thought she
probably should have worn her old bra regardless of how dirty it
was. But it didn't matter. She would probably go to a lingerie
store and pick one up. If she chose not to, it wasn't a big deal.
Even if people were looking, they weren't observing.

She folded the old woman running suit and
left it on one of the benches.

She left the store and went to the food
court to get a soda and some soft pretzel sticks.

There was a line at Pretzel Face and she
could either choose to wait or go behind the counter and get it
herself. She thought she could figure it out. A guy with aggressive
acne manned the register and a girl who moved so slowly she had to
be super stoned went about filling the paper containers with
various pretzel concoctions. Erica grabbed one of the containers
and filled it with random things from beneath the warming
lights.

"Hey, you can't be back here," the girl
said. She didn't really look at Erica, just noticed there was some
foreign object taking up space.

"I'll be out of your hair in a sec."

The girl huffed something but seemed to
forget about it once Erica moved out of the way.

Success
, Erica thought.

She grabbed a really big plastic cup, dumped
a bunch of ice in it, and hit the button for Cherry Coke. She
couldn't figure out how to turn the flow of soda off so she just
took her cup away once it was mostly full and walked out from
behind the counter. She waited for either the employees or
customers to mention her presence but no one did. She sat in the
food court to eat and drink. She stood up when she was full, not
bothering to throw anything away, and went to a large department
store. She grabbed some huge shopping bags from the counter and
went around the store to fill them up. An announcement said the
mall would be closing in a half hour and she was pretty tired of
shopping anyway. She wanted to be on the road, headed to their
destination, curious about what would happen once they got
there.

About ready to leave the mall, she realized
she'd forgotten makeup. A Halloween store was to her immediate
right, despite the holiday being months away, and she thought that
would work.

She walked out of the mall, greeted by an
angry orchestra of blaring car alarms, and Walt pulled up in a
bright yellow VW Bug, the classic kind.

House Hunting

They tore out of the parking lot even though
they didn't really have to.

"Fruitful?" Walt asked once they were on the
highway.

"Very."

"This car smells less like ass."

"I noticed. Good work."

"Thanks."

"Where in Dayton are we going?"

"Not sure. I was going to head downtown.
I'll know the place when we come to it."

"Somewhere specific?"

"I don't traffic in specifics."

Erica pulled the sun visor down, happy to
see it had a mirror clipped to it. It wasn't original to the car
and Erica enjoyed knowing there was a whole market out there for
people who could not go a few minutes without looking at themselves
in a mirror. Or the thought of someone being so self-conscious she
couldn't step out of a car without first inspecting herself. Until
her latest grim realization, she'd been one of those people. And,
even now, here she was using it. She grabbed the bag from the
Halloween supply store and pulled out the various packages and
tubes.

Walt glanced over at her.

"Don't look. I'll let you know when I'm
finished."

He returned his focus to the road.

She began covering her face. There was
something nostalgic about the smell of the cheap Halloween makeup
but she didn't really attach any specific memories to the feeling.
Surely she must have gone trick-or-treating at least once, but she
couldn't think of a single costume she'd ever worn, a single
character she'd ever been.

On the highway there was enough street light
to see what she was doing. They must have been close to the city.
On their trip, she had noticed that cities meant brightness.
Otherwise, the highway had been dark dark dark.

Walt took an exit off the highway and said,
"Are you about done? We're almost there."

"A couple more minutes." She kept her lips
mashed together so she didn't fuck anything up.

She capped everything, put it back in the
bag, and said, "Okay. What do you think?"

Walt glanced over at her. A look crossed his
face. She couldn't tell if it was confusion or excitement.
"Ghoulish," he said.

"Thanks."

"You know you don't really need a disguise,
right? People are less likely to remember you without any of that
shit."

"I know. It's what I wanted to do."

"Good then. But I have to tell you
. . . I'm not a fan."

"Of what?"

"All that artificial shit."

"It reflects me more than the skin I was
born with. Look at it that way."

"Just . . . you know
. . . if I ever ask you to wash it off
. . ."

"I'll think about it when and if that
happens."

She saw the muscles clench in his jaw and
expected him to say something else but he remained silent.

Downtown Dayton turned out to be not nearly
as large as Erica thought it would be. Walt pulled onto 2nd Street.
The car moved slowly. To their left was a parking lot for what
looked like bars or dance clubs or something. A huge LCD screen
flickered a rainbow-colored smiley face and the phrase: HAVE A GAY
DAY. To the right was a rundown apartment building with square
glass pods attached to it. Balconies, Erica guessed. Two people
dressed in black sat on one of them. It looked like they were
drinking and smoking. A fat naked man stood in another one, clearly
masturbating. Drunk people in club clothes milled about the street
and sidewalks, many of them shouting, "Whooo!" Erica didn't think
she'd ever had the urge to shout an expression of joy out loud.

Walt crossed the intersection, slowing down
even more and eventually pulling the car to a stop at the curb. To
the left was a very tall building that looked like some kind of
ominous dark tower. To the right was a maybe ten-story apartment
building. Erica thought it looked a lot more upscale than the other
one. This was probably not filled with chain smoking alcoholics and
chronic masturbators. She wasn't sure how she felt about that.

"This is the place," Walt said.

"Have you ever been in there?"

"Nope. You can either grab your shit or we
can come back out for it."

Erica thought about grabbing it, but it
seemed like work. Walt pulled his gun from his pants, ejected the
clip to see how many rounds were left in it and, apparently judging
it a satisfactory amount, reinserted the clip and said, "Let's
rock."

A double glass door waited, full of clean,
pure light, off the sidewalk. It had to be locked. No way a
building like this wasn't secure. A black man in a suit approached
from the other side. He swiped a key fob and opened the door. Erica
and Walt walked in after him.

"Thanks, buddy," Walt said.

The man didn't acknowledge them. They
followed him into the elevator. He pressed '3'.

"Ten please," Walt said.

The man mechanically pressed '10,' the top
floor.

Walt focused on the man and said, "Thanks,
buddy," repeatedly until he got off on floor 3. "Thanks buddy
thanks buddy thanks buddy thanks buddy thanks buddy thanks
buddy."

At 10 the elevator opened and Walt walked
down the hall, the gun raised.

"Don't freak out," he said to Erica. "Or do.
I guess it doesn't really matter."

She took a deep breath.

Moving In

Erica didn't think Walt used confusion as
any kind of tool. It wasn't like he went at this with any sort of
coherent plan. The confusion just seemed like a natural
outgrowth.

He knocked on the door and a man opened it
without inquiry. There was a spyhole toward the top of the door.
Maybe Walt looked like the type of person you would open a door for
but there was the matter of the gun he made absolutely no effort to
conceal. And Erica's face was painted like a skull. It was unlikely
the man in the apartment mistook them for someone he knew. Before
the man could open his mouth, Walt shot him in the face. It wasn't
until this point that Erica believed him about Granny already being
dead. She thought she'd seen blood when Walt shot Granny but, after
seeing the sheer spray and volume of the blood erupting from this
guy's head, Erica began to think she had imagined the blood that
came from Granny.

Just as Erica wondered how many people were
in the apartment, a woman came out from either the bedroom or the
bathroom.

She didn't say anything. She screamed.
Whatever veneer of normalcy this woman wore was quickly stripped
away and she stood in the hallway, holding a cell phone in her
right hand but not using it, looking down at the corpse of what was
probably her husband. Before she did anything with the phone, she
turned and charged back through the hallway.