The Herd

by Andrea Bartz

  I went to town on the buzzer, pushing it to the beat of Jingle Bells, imagining I could hear it in the cold, still night. Finally Mikki’s voice crackled through: “Hello?”

  “It’s Katie! Thank God you’re up.”

  “Your phone, right? I can bring it down.”

  I hopped from one foot to the other. “Actually, can I come up and use the bathroom?” And wait for my car from the warmth of your living room?

  Another beat, then the shriek as she buzzed me in. I hurried up the cracked marble steps, past red and green garland, paper candy canes, and snowman cutouts. Mikki looked harried as she answered the door, still clad in sweats, her hair pulled back in a scrunchie.

  “My precious,” I murmured as I scooped up my phone. There was a small glass pipe next to it, the weed inside still smoking.

  “You want?” she said.

  I shook my head. Pot made me paranoid—she knew that. “No, thanks. When did Hana leave?”

  “Just a few minutes ago.” She rubbed her eyes. “I was just gonna finish the movie and crash.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right back.” I headed toward the bathroom. The hallway was covered with framed paintings she’d brought back from a three-week stint in Vietnam: nudes on uneven sheets of bamboo paper, a few black strokes intimating the female form. I mistook her bedroom door for the bathroom before continuing down the hall.

  On the walk back, I peered back into her room. I was drawn to the massive workspace hulking in the corner, covered in haphazard piles and a bulky ceramic lamp. An orange trapezoid of light from the fire escape fell on it squarely, like a spotlight. Without turning on the light, I tiptoed through the space between her closet and bed and leaned down to look.

  The collages. I’ve been doing these large-scale works and then taking photos of them and working those into my collages, she’d said in the bathroom of the Herd, topless and powerful, all those weeks ago. There were no final products here, but I spotted a few usable chunks of photos: a mouse spray-painted on the sidewalk, the photo of it cut into the shape of a cat, and a female reproductive system, ovaries and Fallopian tubes and everything, stenciled on what looked like aluminum siding, carved into the shape of California. The word HERE written in fat white bubble letters, so familiar I could swear I’d seen them before, with the final E crossed out in a careful red X, the photo then cut into a bird’s silhouette.

  Fringing the gray-white desktop were little scraps of photos in odd, puzzle-piece shapes, the literal cutting-room floor. The leftovers, the negative space from whatever she carved out. I picked up a chunk, smooth along one side and carefully sliced along the others, curvy and sawtooth in spots. I tilted it into the light, wriggled it to lose the glare. Mauve with delicate white pinstripes. The Gleam Room.

  Large-scale works. I remembered the first time I’d entered that room, almost too entranced by the array of pretty Gleam products to notice it. UGLY CUNTS. But there was no way Mikki…why would she…

  The overhead light switched on like a migraine, like a seizure, and I whirled around. Mikki stood in the doorframe.

  “Baby girl,” she said, her lips curled into something between a smirk and a grimace. “Are you creeping on my desk?” She took a few steps forward and paused by her open closet door. She leaned against it, and the hanging organizer stuffed with cocktail jewelry and feathers and beads slid along the wood.

  My brain was doing something frantic—the graffiti, the tagging, what does it mean that she did that—while my torso took over with something much more primal: fear. “I just wanted to see the collages you’ve been talking about!” I stretched my mouth into a smile, groped around for a joke: “Figured I’d give it the ol’ collage try!”

  She smiled. “Why were you in the dark?”

  “I—I didn’t want you to think I was snooping. Which I totally am.” I realized I was still clutching the pinstripe photo and casually dropped it on the desk behind me.

  “Well, what do you think?” She crossed her arms. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the collection for a while.”

  “I’d love to see a finished one. Where are those?”

  “What were you looking at?” She crossed the few feet between us and I flinched; she reached past my hip and picked up the picture scrap of the Herd’s Gleam Room wall. Without looking up: “You recognize this, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure. Hey, I should get going.” I shifted my weight and she looked at me, her thin frame somehow formidable.

  “You recognize this, I can tell.” She dropped the scrap on the bed and its soft landing made me think of a snowflake.

  I shrugged, channeling all my energy into seeming casual. “I know I know it, but I can’t place it. Is it the Herd?”

  “Ding-ding-ding!” She aimed a finger-gun my way. “That’s exactly where it’s from.”

  “I love that you worked it into your art!” I gave my shoulders a cheery shake. “Your beautiful aesthetic is all over the Herd, on every square inch—and your package design, obviously, on the products in the Gleam Room.” Why was my heart pounding, jittering my entire torso? Mikki still hadn’t said or done anything nefarious. But there was something I was so close to seeing, a revelation hovering on the tip of my tongue. “And now you’ve worked it into your own art. It’s like a hall of mirrors!” I thought crazily of the foyer in Eleanor and Daniel’s townhouse, the big mirror-fronted closet doors. A million Mikkis, Hanas, and me’s fading out into the distance.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Were you just getting the striped wall here?” I asked, my fingers sweeping toward the image. “Or were you actually capturing the graffiti? That would be very…avant-garde.” Because there’s no way you could’ve done it, I tried to beam from my brain to hers. You would never antagonize Eleanor like that.

  “Don’t tell anyone, but I was actually pretty proud of how I pulled it all off.” She leaned against the wall. “I knew Eleanor wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t think it would really throw her off her game. She hates the word so much. Cunt. Why give it all that power? It’s just a word. Don’t be cunty.”

  I grinned conspiratorially, as if all of this were logical—nay, brilliant. “I love that. Reclaiming the word. Did you spray-paint it yourself?”

  “In the West Village, yeah. It was easy; there were security cameras in the elevator, but not the stairs. Obviously I wasn’t in San Francisco or Fort Greene—I had friends do it there. I was hoping to have a whole collection of collages done by the end of the year. And I figured out the name for it: It’ll be WOMEN, but with the W in white and ‘OMEN’ in red.” She flourished her palm, as if seeing it on a wall.

  “Great title. Very ominous.”

  She nodded. “It was gonna be a representation of just how fucked women are in society. It’s like, women unfairly can’t own up to their shit because they’re punished so harshly for not being perfect. Men can fuck up and move on, but not women. If you’re a woman, you’re always one mistake away from being worthless again. You go through life waiting for everything to be taken away, bending over backward trying to prove your worth, driving yourself crazy trying to get everyone to like and respect you. We do it in jobs, we even do it in our extracurricular lives—fuck, look at the Herd, women begging for the opportunity to spend three hundred dollars a month on a membership to a female-only space where you’re still expected to dress up and put on makeup and smile and mingle, and you have to slit your wrists if you smear your lipstick or say the wrong thing or fart in the bathroom.” Her voice was rising, growing, hurtling out like a mushroom cloud. “And the one way to win, the one fucking way to be a woman and do well in this world is to stomp on other women’s backs. Like Eleanor did to me.”

  My voice was a small and shaky Chihuahua: “What did Eleanor do?”

  She ignored me, stared thoughtfully at the photo scrap on the bed. “I thought she’d even
tually see WOMEN, but she never got the chance. And now I’m not sure I can ever show it. It was just art, but I don’t want to be accused of murder. I mean, the whole thing was fucked once some rando stole her phone and tried to spread photos of our work—that was never my intention.”

  “The police thought it was all linked,” I said. “The graffiti, the stolen phone, and then the murder.” On journalist autopilot, I was keeping the conversation flowing, but my brain kept replaying Mikki’s mysterious rant: How had Eleanor stomped on Mikki’s back?

  “I had nothing to do with that. Her phone probably fell out of her bag in a cab, and then some asshole accessed the photos and tried to make a buck.” She shrugged. “I was glad that didn’t happen. I wanted my collages to be the first time people saw it.”

  “So the police were wrong. None of it was connected.”

  “Guess not. The graffiti was me. The phone was a petty thief. And the murder…” She looked away, blinking back tears. “Just Cameron confronting Eleanor about what she did to Jinny.” She shook her head. “He must have known she was about ready to leave. It’s all so…wrong. She almost got away with running off to Mexico. He almost got away with killing her. What the fuck was his plan with the body? Just leave it on the roof forever and hope no one ever noticed him driving in and out of Manhattan? It’s all so…messy. So deluded.”

  A tear slid down her cheek and I took a step toward her. “Mikki, I haven’t told you how sorry I am. About everything, but especially about Cameron. I barely knew him, obviously, and I had no idea you two were so close. It’s…a lot.” I reached my arms out for a hug and her shoulders jumped reflexively, one hand jerking toward the big orange lamp on her desk. I looked at it and her fingers retreated; stiffly, she let me hug her.

  “I’m gonna go call a car, okay?” I said, and she stared blankly for a moment before nodding. She didn’t move, so I turned toward the door. A few steps later my eyes fell on the craft organizer hanging from her closet door. I saw them all clustered in one pocket, like a deadly bouquet—shiny and sharp, the same tool I’d often seen in her overstuffed backpack on account of all the careful photo cutting she was doing. My chest turned to cold steel, and before I knew what I was doing, I reached out and touched the cap of one, the X-Acto knife’s blade glistening below it.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “It was never a scalpel.”

  Behind me, a heavy scraping sound. “You don’t understand. If you’d been there you’d understand.”

  Scorching heat on the back of my head, then a plummeting sensation. My legs gave out and the floor rammed my kneecaps.

  I twisted around and Mikki was murky, swirling, something huge in her hands, round and orange as a pumpkin. I was moving in slow motion, my head drifting backward like I was doing a trust fall.

  “I didn’t know it was in my hand,” she was saying. “We were the last ones there, and—and she’d told me about the acquisition and I couldn’t stand it any longer, I said, ‘You know you stole the idea from me.’ And she said, ‘But Mikki, it doesn’t matter. Because I’m the founder, and you’re not.’ ”

  Falling, falling, downward, downward, down. My tongue and lips and teeth collaborated, just for a moment: “Fuck you.”

  “It was an instinct, it was like in krav maga. Like I was trying to block a blow. I shot my hand forward and it wasn’t until—I didn’t realize until…”

  Another sunburst as I crashed to the floor, wooden slats bouncing against my skull. A momentary humming noise, and then, finally, blackness.

  CHAPTER 25

  Hana

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 10:10 P.M.

  Mannheim Steamroller blasted through the taxi’s speakers, each synthesized note like a personal jackhammer to my brain. It’d been four or five years since Cameron came out of rehab, a posh treatment center in Arizona, and as far as we knew, he hadn’t touched an opioid since. The news wobbled through my torso, prickling with pressure.

  Had Daniel heard the news? I reread his email to me, the one with Mikki’s pathetic cease-and-desist letter. How hugely, devastatingly sad. Overlooked by her group of friends, betrayed by her best friend, and now abandoned by her secret lover, who crossed a border to try to kill himself in peace.

  I spotted a new email from a publicist friend, one I’d worked with years before: “So sorry to hear the news about your friend Eleanor. Let us know when the memorial service will be. You’ve probably already seen this, but I just saw it on Twitter—thought you’d want a heads-up.”

  She’d linked to a trashy gossip site that made The Gaze look like the Times. I followed the link, then felt a blast of heady nausea: EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: SEE THE EXACT MOMENT ELEANOR WALSH’S BODY WAS FOUND.

  It started automatically—a cell-phone video, shaky and pulsing in and out of focus. Three figures in a bright window. Us. That Friday night, as a drum corps chopped the air on the street below, someone in a nearby building had lifted his lens and focused on the three women—Katie, Mikki, me—silhouetted across the way. The video zoomed in and I watched, rapt, as this small outline of me lifted her phone and pressed it against the glass, then said something, then tapped at the phone. Katie responded, and then the miniature me whirled around and disappeared into the light.

  I’m gonna see if I can get it from the roof, I’d said, clomping toward the staircase. And that was where my perspective, my eyes on the two women in the window, faded out.

  But now, on my phone’s greasy screen, I could see it all. I could see how Mikki’s hand shot to her mouth, how her shoulders tensed before she turned around and took a few furtive steps after me. How Katie had kept her forehead near the window’s coolness, delighted, enchanted, distracted, while Mikki shifted on the balls of her feet, staring toward the staircase, both hands clenched near her mouth.

  And then the camera canted upward, dizzily, too zoomed-in for a huge maneuver, and found me picking my way across the roof.

  Fingers shaking, I closed the video and called Mikki. Straight to voicemail. To the right, a sign rolled past the window: LAST EXIT BEFORE TOLL.

  “Take the exit!” I yelled, so loud it spooked even me. “We’re going back to Greenpoint.”

  * * *

  —

  I thrust a fistful of bills at the driver and hurtled up Mikki’s stoop. I leaned on the buzzer the way a bored cabbie leans on the horn: absurdly, forlornly, relentlessly.

  “Jesus! Who is it?”

  “It’s Hana. Let me up.”

  “I was sleeping. Did you forget something too?”

  “Let me up.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Mikki, I know you knew Eleanor was on the roof.” I leaned into the speaker, listened to her Darth Vader breath. “Why are you covering for Cameron?”

  Sobs, splintered and crackly through the intercom. “Just let me go to sleep, Hana. Just let me be.”

  “Let me up or I’m calling Ratliff.”

  More crying, and then next to me, so loudly I jumped, the screeeeeeh of the door unlocking.

  Mikki peeled the door open gingerly. A dim lamp cast shadows into the corners, and everything else—the hallway, the TV, the air around us—was waiting and dark. She had a hoodie on over her pajamas, and her eyes were swollen and squinty, two pale pieces of puffed rice.

  “Mikki, it’s okay.”

  She stuffed her hands into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and flopped onto the couch. On the coffee table, a lighter, pipe, and small mess of weed sat in a jumbled pile.

  I perched on the sofa. “Just talk to me! I don’t want to get you in trouble. I wanna help you.”

  She took a long, unsteady breath. “How did you know?”

  I held out my phone. “This video. I saw how you didn’t want me up on the roof.”

  Wind yanked at the windows as she watched it. Finally she pressed the screen against her knee and closed her eyes.
“I didn’t do it.”

  “But you knew she was there.”

  “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

  “Mikki.”

  She swiped at a tear. “I don’t know why I helped him.”

  I waited. Her heater clanged, as if it, too, were growing impatient.

  “He called and told me what he’d done.” She dragged her sleeve against her nose. “He said he was going to turn off the lights and lock all the doors. And that he’d go into the janitor’s closet and get out all the cleaning supplies, not let the blood get onto anything it could stain. I said I’d be right there.”

  Say no to Cameron, Mikki, I pleaded silently, like she could change how the story ended. Tell Cameron to fuck off. “Why?”

  She turned. “Why, what?”

  “Why did you go to him?”

  Mikki frowned. “I don’t know. He knew about the Jinny situation, obviously. And we were—we talked every single day. When we saw each other, it was…electric. We never talked about trying to turn it into a real relationship or anything, but…” She shrugged. “Love makes you do crazy things.”

  She wiped both eyes at once, then looked at the tears glistening on her index fingers. “When I got there, Cameron was calm. He’d been thinking. He said we couldn’t take her out of the building, because someone would see us carrying her. It was the beginning of that cold snap, so he had the idea of hiding her on the roof until we could come back in the middle of the night and get rid of her.”

  Something surged up my throat, acidic and foul, but I kept listening.

  “He carried her upstairs and left her behind the stack of lawn chairs. I helped him clean. He kept saying we just needed to buy enough time that no one would look there until a bunch of other people had passed the spot. But of course, there was still the issue of everyone looking for her. She had that presentation the next day.”