Sociopaths In Love (22 page)

Growing Apart

A black, heavy hum settled into her bones.
She stood up with difficulty. The fog was still very thick. She
couldn't see more than a few feet in front of her. She took a deep
breath, expecting the fog to feel clean and moist in her mouth,
nasal passages, and lungs. But it was acrid. Like breathing a cloud
of toxic waste. As if hypnotized, she got on the elevator. The
lighting in the car was the color of infected pus. When the
elevator stopped she got off and had the feeling the elevator
hadn't just taken her to ground level but somewhere much deeper.
Not Hell. She wasn't foolish enough to believe in that sort of
thing. Maybe the cave that had been plaguing her. And even when she
stepped out from the parking garage and onto the sidewalk she felt
the gray weight of the fog on her.

And it was
dark
. Like all of the
lights had gone out downtown. The fog should have given everything
more of the milky quality it had earlier. Instead it was just
black.

She stopped and looked down, still feeling
dazed, nothing quite registering. On the sidewalk two feet to her
left lay a bloody hunk of meat. She was pretty sure it was a
kidney. A year ago she never would have known what that looked
like.

All the sounds had gone away too. Not just
muted by the fog. Gone.

If she turned to her left she could go back
to the apartment. She didn't want to go back to the apartment.
Didn't want to see Walt. And she was slightly afraid. If what Dawn
said was true, if Walt had found a replacement, Erica's days were
numbered.

If she turned to her left and then to her
right, she could go to Dawn's, but she was pretty sure she'd
already been over that. She had things to straighten out. She
wanted to get them straightened out before sinking any time into
Dawn.

She turned to her left, deciding to go to
the Epoch. She had no idea what time it was and didn't know if they
would be open or not. It was only a short block but, with nothing
to gauge time or distance with, it seemed to take forever. She
crossed the street without checking to see if any cars were coming.
The thought of cars and buses didn't even really occur to her. This
felt like a foreign landscape, something prehistoric or even lunar.
She was glad the Epoch had the name of the bar stenciled on the
door. Otherwise, she didn't know if she would be able to even
recognize it. From street level, all the buildings looked the same,
and she couldn't see to the tops of anything. It didn't look like
any lights were on beyond the door but she grabbed the handle and
pulled anyway. It opened.

The only light coming from inside the bar
was the clean, gray light she recognized from the people sleeping
in the cave, never mind that that was a dream. She had thought of
the figure that way too, even though she was pretty sure that was a
dream, as well.

The figure was the sole person in the bar.
This close, she stopped thinking of the figure as an it and began
thinking of it as a male. He sat on a stool and turned to look at
her when she entered farther. She looked at the floor. An inky
blackness ran from the door to beneath the figure. It seemed to be
dripping off him, over top of that weird gray luminescence like
black water running down a windowpane. It was like he had dragged
the shadow here with him. She wondered if she had been following
him the whole way without realizing it. A full glass of beer sat on
the bar. He motioned toward it. She sat on the stool next to him.
She lifted it to her mouth, stopping at the halfway point. A heart
was shoved into the glass and she didn't know why she hadn't
noticed it before lifting it up. She gagged slightly but before she
could set the glass back down, the figure nudged it toward her
mouth.

"You need to drink this." The figure didn't
move his lips because he didn't really have any. She hadn't
realized how appropriate it was to think of him as 'the figure.'
That's really what it was. A figure. More male than female but
otherwise almost an abstraction. Like a loose outline of a human
being filled in with some kind of glow-in-the-dark gray paint. The
voice was in her head and it was probably some approximation of her
own but it was one that seemed foreign to her.

She took a drink of the beer. If she was as
drunk as she thought she had been, it should have been enough to
make her throw up.

"All of it." The voice was insistent but it
rattled around in her head as something more like wisdom than a
demand.

She chugged the rest of the beer. When she
returned the glass to the bar, the heart was no longer in it. She
should have felt it enter her mouth, should have felt it slide down
her throat. She hadn't said anything to the figure. She didn't know
what to say. She wondered if he was someone like she and Walt and
Dawn and the Boys. One of the unnoticed. Maybe this was what
happened to people like them. Maybe they just became gray,
shapeless wrecks, out to play tricks on the living. Something
gurgled in her stomach. She looked back at the glass and it was
again full. This time it was filled with something the same color
as the man and it finally occurred to her that that was also the
same color as the fog or maybe the moon. She drank it all.

The bar fell away around her and she floated
down through black space. When she could finally put her feet on
the ground and gain some level of equilibrium, everything around
her was pitch black. The only thing she could see was the figure
and she had to gauge how far away it was from her by its size. She
walked to catch up with it, not knowing what she might be stepping
in. She did not walk quickly. There was something too intangible
about her surroundings to allow her to walk quickly. She continued
to gain ground on the figure and saw another light in the distance.
It looked bright but it still had the same grayish quality as the
man. She could hear her breath and feel her pulse pounding in her
neck. She wondered if they were moving uphill.

Time seemed completely
irrelevant. Even space seemed irrelevant. Erica barely felt like
she even knew who she was. Aside from the seeming imperative that
she follow this figure, the only real sensation she had was that of
moving very far away from something. The immediacy of following the
figure and the deprivation of her surroundings made it impossible
to chase that thought.
Moving very far
away from something
. She was sure it meant
something. She was sure it was something she needed to think about
but it seemed like it might be a black tunnel just like this one
only maybe that tunnel didn't have the figure, didn't have any
light at the end. As she closed the distance between them, she did
have one thought. It flickered through her brain like sunlight. She
was back at Granny's house, sitting beside her bed and waiting for
her to die, but the thought of it, however brief, seemed to lift
all the blackness and the layers and layers of gray stone she was
sure were going to crumble around her any second.

Now she was able to match the figure stride
for stride and it felt like they moved very quickly. The light in
the distance continued to grow brighter and brighter and soon it
was almost too bright to look upon.

She was able to tell these were the people
she had seen before. And, through their illumination, she could see
the walls of the cave. Last time, even if it had only been a dream,
Walt was in here with her and she had felt claustrophobic and
terrified. Now she felt something like peace. There must have been
thousands of nearly uniform people lying on their uniform cots. She
followed the figure to the middle of them and it made something
inside of her swell to turn in a circle and see all of these
glowing people for as far as she could. The figure must have taken
her to some kind of epicenter. It motioned to an empty cot. Did it
want her to lie down on it? It occurred to her to ask but she
didn't know if she could make her mouth move. And, anyway, if this
figure could speak from within her head then didn't it stand to
reason that it should be able to hear her thoughts without her
having to vocalize them?

It motioned to the cot again.

Erica tried to say, "No," but her voice fell
out of her mouth and down into the heavy space surrounding her.

Why didn't she just get on the bed?

Because getting on the bed was death.

The figure motioned toward it a third time,
even more insistent.

Erica shook her head. The clear fluorescent
light in the figure's eyes dimmed noticeably.

It got on the bed and crouched down. Erica
instinctively backed away as the figure shit a runny, bloody mess
onto the previously clean cot. She continued backing away. All the
other figures were now stirring. Whatever peaceful feeling she'd
had was completely obliterated. The figures were sluggish at first
but began moving more quickly as Erica moved farther through
them.

They tore at themselves. They clawed at
their chests. Fog ran down their stomachs and the fronts of their
legs. Now that they all had their eyes open, it made the space even
brighter and Erica had to squint. She couldn't even train her
vision at their eye level, forcing her to look lower, forcing her
to watch them mutilate themselves. She saw one of them pull
something like a heart out of its chest. The figure threw the organ
at Erica. The others were doing the same thing. She now stood in a
river of blood. Her clothes were soaked with it. She tried to walk
faster and faster but the blood rose to her knees and then her
thighs. By the time she thought she was almost out of their
expansive circle, she allowed herself one last glance backward and
saw nothing. All of their eyes had dimmed. Their glowing lights
seemed to have been extinguished. The air was fetid and then it was
closing around her, the river of blood washing over her head and
making it impossible to breathe.

Numbered Days

She woke up in Dawn's bed, the clean smell
of the morning breeze and the fresh cotton from the curtains and
bed linens mixing with a stale stench of sweat and old beer
probably coming from her. She got out of bed on shaky legs and
wandered around the small apartment. Dawn was nowhere to be found.
Erica wondered how she had gotten here. She smoked a cigarette in
the bathroom, the exhaust fan running. Dawn still hadn't appeared
so she left and headed back to the apartment.

As she reached the corner her building was
on, she saw Walt emerge from the lobby. She expected him to get
into his hulking truck and was surprised when he didn't. So his
routine had changed. She wasn't normally awake when he left in the
mornings but was under the impression he always took his truck to
hunt like the time they'd driven over the girl in the Walmart
parking lot. She had planned on following him anyway so the timing
seemed especially serendipitous. That wasn't really true, she knew.
Today was a horrible day for this. What she would have liked more
than anything was to be able to go up to the apartment and take a
long shower and put on some clean, comfortable clothes and lie in
bed all day. Maybe watch TV or maybe just watch the shadows sundial
across the ceiling. She passed the building, remaining about a
block behind him. It was difficult to lose yourself in a city as
small as Dayton. If he turned around, he would have seen her
easily. But he would have only turned around if it mattered that
someone was following him. He didn't care. He didn't have to. Just
like she didn't have to care. Not really. She just hadn't been
aware of this fact for as long as Walt had so she had yet to grow
entirely comfortable with it.

He went west two blocks, paused, and then
crossed the street, not bothering with a crosswalk. She stayed
close to the buildings on her side of the street. She liked the
idea of hiding even if she didn't really have to. She wondered what
Walt would do if he happened to notice her. She thought she knew.
She thought he would pretend not to notice her. He would make her
draw attention to the fact she was following him. He might ask her
why she was following him. When she told him she was doing it
because she suspected he had found someone else then he would
probably tell her the truth or lie, depending on whatever response
amused him the most.

Once on the other side of the street he
stopped in front of the glass window of a shop. It was a cafe. She
stood in front of an abandoned office building with broken windows
and watched him. He just stood there, staring into the cafe. He
didn't go in. Erica couldn't see what he was looking at. She
crossed the street and came to a stop about three feet behind him,
tracking the movements of his head so she could see what he
saw.

Then she saw her.

The replacement.

What made her think this was her
replacement?

The first thing was the way
Walt just stood there looking at her. The second thing was that she
was so close. If she was someone Walt had noticed before and she
was just another one of his victims then he would have dragged her
back to the apartment screaming and had his way with her. The third
thing was the way he looked at the girl. True, Erica couldn't see
his eyes but there was almost a . . . tenderness in the
crook of his head and slope of his shoulders. Had that been there
when he had been stalking
her
? She would never know. She didn't
even know if it would make her feel good to think that it had
been.

And the replacement . . .
Definitely Walt's type and yet opposite enough from Erica to
represent the slightly different path all relationships are to
take. Young. Black hair. Erica couldn't tell from here, but it
looked like her eyes might be dark too, an effect that might have
been created from the eyeliner. She was sure Walt could tell her
what color the girl's eyes were if she asked. The girl wasn't fat
but there was a lot more meat to her than there was to Erica.