by Gemma Files
My new site is up in Scarborough, somewhere—a mere apparent bus stop away from the ass-end of beyond. Mushroom cloud country, with way too much skyline and not enough pedestrians for my liking. Another night shift, roaming from dusk till dawn around a square of Ontario Lottery Corporation offices, checking to see the computers don’t overheat, counting the fire extinguishers as I card-key each successive door. Looking out the windows as I pass.
Scanning the parking lot for shadows.
Last week, on the street, Colin came up behind me, seemingly not realizing I had my walkman on. He got within an inch of the back of my head, shouted, “Hello, Lee!” and stalked off. As though I’d insulted him with my lack of notice. As though either of us really gave a good God damn anymore.
But this is the truth: I tried. When he came begging back to me—when he told me he hadn’t known what he was saying, that night in the restaurant, when he told me it was no use going through with the wedding, and could I please pay back that $150 I owed him from our vacation in Ireland—I made excuses, made allowances. Because hey, it was probably my fault, anyway. As so many things are.
So I went out with him again. I sat with him, talked with him. I kissed him. I let him kiss me. And I felt—nothing. Except that I wanted less and less to sleep with him, to touch him, to be in the same room with him. And the real joke of it was, I didn’t even know what was wrong. It didn’t even occur to me.
’Cause when you get right down to it, I guess I’m just stupid. When people tell me they don’t love me anymore, I tend to believe them. (And what was it you did mean to say, then, Colin? Exactly?)
I should have known a long time ago that I will never marry anyone, except maybe myself.
I hear noises at night, now. One the bus, riding up, my two-hour trip is dogged with the steady pad of bare feet on asphalt, with the scratch of clawed toes. On my rounds, I carry a plastic bag full of unpopped soda cans, swinging it like a weighted sling. I memorize the exits, and check the walls for fire extinguishers. I listen carefully to each new person I meet, trying to decide what they’re hiding, what they really are.
Because the pain is draining away now: Taking my well-worn detachment with it, leaving nothing but the fear I never felt—glinting sharp.
The knife in my unhealed wound.
And whenever I stop long enough to consider it, it occurs to me that breaking a bottle of my own urine across the face of something with an animal’s sense of smell may not have been the best idea I ever had.
I think of my dream, of the woman with hooks for hands, Our Lady of Self-Protection, who can only wound, never touch.
Never touch. Not even herself.
Skin City
THE STREET LAMP’S glare leaks in over her windowsill, unchecked by blinds, to touch what little furniture remains with a bleak light. Before her, a table—actually, three upturned boxes topped with a plank stolen from the construction site just north of the railway tracks. On the table, a tape recorder. Next to it, an empty cassette case.
Her suit waits, thrown over the end of the bed, for her to make up her mind.
Adage swallows.
The bright eye of her cigarette blinks, as ash dots the rug beneath her feet.
Useless even to try and tell you what she looks like: She’s naked now, though not as we know the term. Naked and red and wet. And it’s so comfortable to be hidden away here in the dark, she almost wishes her cigarette would last forever.
But that’s impossible.
Soon the clock will strike, and she’ll get up. She’ll dress herself, as carefully as she can. And then, when she’s presentable, she’ll go out.
To meet somebody.
Anybody.
Adage takes a last drag. She drops the butt on the rug and lets it lie, smoldering.
She leans forward into the dark, feeling for the “record” button.
* * *
A month later.
Mike Grell sits by the window nearest the front door, looking out. In one hand he holds a postcard, in the other his walkman.
Outside the bus, Chinatown blurs by, trailing pennants of red lacquer and neon.
The postcard is custom made. One side’s a holiday snapshot: 13-year-old Adage tilts her head back, laughing, as the sun bleaches away her face.
Mike touches his wallet, where the original lies folded between bank card and expired driver’s license.
The other side is a scribble. Deciphered, it reads:
It’s happening again. In Toronto. At the Meat Market, there’s a girl named Sherri. Ask her where I am. Find me.
Please.
Adage.
Below that:
P.S.: If you got the tape, listen to it.
Ahead, a couple with matching Mohawks argues with the driver over what currently constitutes exact change. An elderly woman squeezes past, cradling an overweight pug on one hip and a bag of groceries on the other. Somebody drops a dime. Dust motes tremble, caught in mid-flight, as the doors slam shut.
Mike sighs.
He flips the cassette case open, and lets the tape fall into place.
* * *
A low hiss.
“Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Hello?”
Click.
Rewind, and press play.
“Testing, one, two—”
Click.
Softly: “All right, then.”
* * *
“July twenty-third, nineteen-ninety. About . . . quarter to twelve.”
Silence. In the background, a distant sitcom’s laugh track seeps up through the floor like a forming blister.
“Okay. I’m gonna tell you a story.
“It’s a red one, through and through. The words I’ll use are stained so deep nothing could wash them clean. They reek and shine. Red the same way the moon would be red tonight, if you could see it. Red the same way the river is red. A red moon, a red rising tide, a red river breaking its banks, and a deep red tale somebody beside me has to hear before the world ends or I do, whichever comes first. And Larry’s dead, so it might as well be you.
“Here’s how it goes.”
* * *
Mike hops the curb and stumbles, nearly sprawling waist deep in a puddle.
Uck.
He scans for the Meat Market sign—a steak on a phallic neon stick—as his mind races backwards.
Larry.
Last name—Gurley? Garvey? A skinny kid, bigger even than Adage, who’d spurted to full height that year, the way girls tend to. They spent their summers at the cottage—Mike with his parents. Adage her grandparents—and played in the woods, down by the lake. Always together, but always alone. And not minding.
Right up until Larry’s Winnebago pulled into the vacant lot across the road.
Mike shuts his eyes. Beneath his coat, against his side, he feels the cold iron weight of his father’s gun.
* * *
“Late July, nineteen eighty. You, and me, and Larry. Out in your Dad’s truck, in the woods, before it got light. You wanted to go spot birds, and I wanted to go home. But Larry said no, let’s do something different. And he took out the cards. So okay, you said, you want to play gin rummy? And Larry laughed. It’s not like that, he said. Now draw.
“So we all took one card. And then Larry made us stop the truck, right near the shore. Just before the sun comes up, when all the stars are dead. And the lake was still. Now look at your card, Larry said, and I looked down. And my card was a picture of four sticks, lashed together and hung with some kind of fur, standing in front of a river. Like a door.
“And underneath it was written the word: SKIN.”
* * *
Inside the Meat Market, girls jiggle and sway like parade balloons—white, swollen, shiny as plastic wrap. Strobe lights pulse. Squinting, Mike spots the bartender: A tall skinhead,
deep in conversation with an even taller transvestite wearing a lime-green mini dress.
Up and down the bar, tattoos bloom, bright as mold.
Mike elbows his way in. “’Scuse me—”
Next stool over, a yuppie with his shirt open to his waist howls with laughter. Bottles click together.
“I said, ‘scuse me?”
The bartender turns, slipping his customary scowl back into place. “Can I help you, buddy?”
Oh, Christ.
“Well, yes,” Mike replies brightly. “Actually, you can. I’m looking for a girl—”
Deadpan: “What a shock.”
“—named Sherri.”
No immediate reaction. The light turns orange. Cheers greet the next number.
“Sherri?” Mike repeats.
The transvestite blows a smoke ring. The bartender jerks his scalp toward the front. “Back there. In pink.”
Mike turns. One door’s propped open, spilling noise. Beyond, shadows move and posture. A faint gleam of rose-colored plastic shimmers, becomes an arm clutching a battered leather bag whose long white fringes seem chewed. Now a profile, once pretty, but equally worn. Between them, couples thrash.
“Thanks,” Mike says, pushing off.
* * *
“There’s nothing on my card, you said. And Larry smiled, like he expected it or something.
“Nothing on mine either, he said.
“Then he looked at me.
“Later, you told me Larry said I should stare at the card and try to make the door open. To want it to. So I did. And you started feeling like there was somebody watching us. Let’s go, you said. And Larry said no, something’s gonna happen. Like he knew it would. And when he said that, I started to make this noise deep in my throat.
“So then you got mad, and you said you were going to start the truck, and Larry could go to hell if he wanted but we were going back. But as you reached past me, I grabbed your arm. Hard. And it was like my nails were longer or something, because I was hurting you. And you said hey, Adage, let go, hey, what’s wrong with you?
“And then I looked up, I grinned. And you screamed.
“You told me my mouth was full of blood.”
* * *
“Sherri?”
The girl—15? 30?—jumps, catching Mike’s sleeve with her cigarette. A tiny circle of pain stamps itself inside his wrist.
“Oh, man. Man, I’m sorry. I—you okay?”
“Fine,” he lies. She beats ineffectually at the damage, making it worse. Through gritted teeth: “Please. No problem.”
A shrug. “If you say so.” Sherri drops the cigarette, face falling into more familiar lines. “Looking for me, huh?” she says. “What for?”
Instinctively Mike reaches inside his coat—whether for his gun or his wallet, he couldn’t say. “I—I’m a friend of a friend.”
Sherri smirks. “Got a lot of friends, baby. Refresh my memory.”
Mike swallows, hard. Something seems to be caught in his throat. It knocks against his tongue when he tries to speak, deforming the words. “A—dagebeck.”
“Come again?”
Much slower, this time: “Adage Beck.”
Sherri recoils, slipping on some stray garbage. When he tries to help her, she avoids his touch. “Get off me,” she snarls.
“You knew her, right?”
“Damn straight I knew her. That chick was stone crazy. Nuts. And you’re her friend?”
“Look, it’s important. You know where she is?”
Sherri wrenches away, flattening herself against the inside of the door.
“One time,” she says, suddenly clear and calm. “Only one time, and then I don’t ever wanna see your face again. Me and Susan, we had a room down in Chinatown. And one night she brings back another chick she found on the street. Your friend.”
Adage, Mike breathes.
“So we’re doing pretty well here, right? Except our johns start disappearing. And they turn up dead, all over the Strip. It’s in the papers. Cops’re finding them in pieces. And none of them got any skin, right? Like somebody tore it off.”
And Mike sees early morning. 1980, peering through the windshield of his Dad’s truck at something. Something small, and nude, and black with flies. Something without a face.
As the smell rises and settles, rises and settles, like a tide.
“So I start noticing stuff. Like how she smells weird, like meat that’s gone off. And she sleeps all day, and she’s always wearing the same clothes. Whatever. And then Susan’s gone. And they find another body, out back of Ryerson. And that night I come home early, and your girlfriend’s standing there—”
Sherri chokes.
And: I don’t want to hear this, Mike thinks. I really don’t.
“She was wearing Susan’s—Susan’s—”
A nearby street lamp goes out.
“Sherri?”
Sherri looks up, mascara dripping.
“I’m going now,” she says, and does.
* * *
“I was three months in the hospital, but I don’t remember any of it. Just a long, red blank.
“And the silence.
“When I resurfaced, they told me Larry was dead. They said it was suicide.
“ . . . likely.
“So I got better, and moved away. You wrote for awhile, and I appreciated it. Then, eventually, you stopped.
“I wasn’t too surprised.
“I went to Toronto, and I was fine for a long, long time. I lived in the waking world, and brushed my teeth twice a day. I thought bright little thoughts which flashed once and were gone, just like everybody else. I went to school. I even had friends.
“Years slipped by.
“Until—it happened.
“Again.”
* * *
Across the street from the Meat Market, Adage leans against a lamppost, waiting for her evening’s prey to reveal itself. It’s finally stopped raining. The gutters overflow with light.
At 12:22, a girl in a tight pink plastic slicker breaks rank—struggling, briefly, with some unseen partner—and jumps the last two steps, falling into her customary strut as she clicks away.
Sherri, Adage thinks with a little stab.
She didn’t expect it to be her tonight.
Other—worthier—candidates still linger outside the Market’s doors: That older woman, whose smile seems penciled on over a lipless slash of a mouth. The boy in the leather jacket, whose ears are fringed with tiny silver rings. The girl with a freshly-bloodied nose, whose pendant proclaims her to be a HOT CHICK.
But take what you can get, babe, and count yourself lucky.
Adage lets Sherri’s footsteps die away before rising to follow.
The moon sees her coming, and narrows appraisingly.
* * *
“Graduation night, I let a boy I barely knew drive me up the hill to that spot we’d all heard so much about. And we sat there, side by side in the car, staring at the city below. He shuffled his feet, and coughed, and finally put his arms around me. And there in the dark, between the bars of a Depeche Mode song, I felt something change. A key in a lock. A red river rising, a hot red tide finally coming in, high enough to drown us both.
“And when he turned to kiss me, he sniffed the air and gagged.
“And I just smiled.”
Then, in a whisper:
“And it was so sweet, Mike. Like sex. Only so much better.
“Like Larry.
“And I remember it all.”
* * *
Pushing her way past the Totally Concerned With Sex Shop, Sherri hangs a right in front of Girls! Live! Girls! Nude! and disappears. Her scent remains, though fading fast.
Adage swallows, tasting dust.
It’ll be ove
r soon enough, she thinks.
And walks even faster.
* * *
Mike rounds the corner and sees her up ahead: A slight woman in a long, cloth coat, fashionably cut. A toque pulled down over her ears. Shabby. Anonymous. Totally unseasonal.
Adage?
She pauses at the crosswalk. Her face is very pale against the dark. White and flat, and oddly limp. Motionless, except for a pair of searching eyes.
As she bends to press the signal change button, a lock of hair spills from her hat—
Ad—
Blonde.
Mike feels his heart deflate.
You stupid sucker, he thinks. She’s dead in a ditch somewhere. You blew your education to get here, and she’s dead. Probably died while you were still on the bus.
The woman reaches up to scratch behind her ear. Maybe to tuck back the lock.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Instead, she—
what?
— digs her nails into the side of her neck, and rips.
The skin flaps slightly as she shifts weight.
Oh, God.
Delicately, Adage reaches further in, to scratch the raw flesh underneath.
* * *
The signal changes. Adage spots Sherri on the opposite side—twenty feet ahead, and gaining speed.
Behind her, a movement.
Sherri pauses, nose wrinkling.
The wind has changed.
And the smell boils up from Adage now—an invisible glove of uncured hide, reaching in every direction at once. Prodded by the stench, Sherri turns—
— to meet Adage’s eyes.
“Uh,” she says, then, “Susan?”
Hardly.
And Mike freezes, as Sherri starts to run.
* * *
“So why am I telling you all this?”
“Larry was dumb. He wanted power, but he was too lazy to take his own risks. So he tricked me into opening the door, because he thought he could control me. Afterward. When what was always inside me finally came ripping up to meet the waking world, all raw and naked and hungry.
“And he was so wrong it’s kind of funny.
“I live my life the way I was meant to now. I get up, and I get dressed, and I go out and meet someone new. And then we dance. And then I take what’s left of them home and sew it back together, and the whole thing starts over again.
