Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Brian isn’t being as gentle now. Tessa is baiting him brutally, with a fingernail down the ridges of his back, a lick to his mouth and an evasion of hers, a laugh, as if patting a dragon’s nose. Brian stops. Suddenly. He looks at her quite seriously. He looks very young and very sad. Tessa starts to match him, younger and sadder. When they match perfectly, Brian fits them together. It’s all visible, as the covers are down. It embarrasses.

  The Killer makes no sound. Justin’s eyelids snap open, seeing what his ancient, primitive instinct sensed and woke him to see. He scrambles out of the bed on his side. “What the—? Who the fuck’re—?” He grabs a lamp by the base and tries to brandish it, but the plug holds inside the outlet and he almost falls backward. The Killer has stopped at the foot of the bed, intrigued or amused or both, as Justin bends and yanks the lamp’s cord with the noise one makes during a tough tennis serve.

  The sound wakes Jules. “Whuh?” she says, falling out of bed like a klutzy sleepwalker, “Babe-uh?” She blinks at the Killer and shakes her head, chemically incapable of anxiety when it might for once be beneficial.

  “Come on!” Justin shouts. “Come on, freak—let’s go!” Justin rushes forward with the lamp in both hands, feigning insanity or truly finding a temporary form of it. It might work on a burglar or a hophead.

  The Killer waits. Justin swings the lamp around. The Killer catches it with one hand, waits. He waits until Justin sees the knife in his other hand. At the same time, as if on cue, the Killer nods and Justin shakes his head. The knife pistons up-in so fast, Justin seems to understand he’s been stabbed only when he hears his own offended grunt. He looks down at the handle in his heart like it’s a harmless new addition to his body—a freckle, a callus. At worst a sliver.

  Jules stands straight. Sober in a heartbeat.

  Justin coughs a mouthful of blood. Lifts a fist and punches the Killer’s mask with a force no greater than a slap.

  Jules shrieks and tries to run, but the Killer moves, taking Justin with him. He uses Justin’s struggling body like a portable wall to railroad Jules back on the bed, where she whirls, tumbles, and yanks an end table drawer open. She throws the Bible. The handset of the cordless phone. A book, a cup of cold tea, a clock radio, the sound system’s remote control, more. They all miss the Killer, but the clock radio hits Justin in the back. He’s holding on to the Killer’s coveralls, aspirating blood as the Killer watches him die.

  The room is a shambles. Both lamps are broken, water glasses spilled, a bodice-ripper romance paperback stomped under the Killer’s boot. Jules sinks into a corner, screaming. The Killer slides Justin’s body off the knife. Justin flumps to the white carpet, making a high hissing noise that indicates his lungs can’t get any air. The Killer is walking past him, toward Jules. Justin grabs the Killer’s foot. The Killer turns back to Justin. Jules screams.

  The penthouses, both of them, are soundproof.

  It’s abnormal. Neither of them gets on top. They stay face-to-face on their sides, and the movement is scarcely happening. Overlying this is screaming that Tessa and Brian can’t hear. Tessa and Brian aren’t here anymore. It’s bizarre. It’s as if they see El Dorado in the banality of the other. Humiliating, shameful, a body is a shame. An inert body is a shame. It can do nothing but think. It can only wonder at a healthy penis violet with blood and a blooming rose of softest-soft flesh fitting together like a childish idiom—a lock into a key, puzzle pieces, a tunnel taking the train chugga chugga woo woo—delighting in the childish, in the simplification, because the mind within the inert body understands, now, when the epiphany no longer matters, that this process, which I have always mistaken for simple, is not. This process is everything else, except for simple. That is shame, a shame, the shame: whom can an inert body tell? Whom could they tell, these two who are anything but inert? Tessa can’t keep looking at him; it’s too much. Her head drags backward, and she mews at the fourth post on the bed. But Brian follows—shame! humiliation!—and he’s showing her he understands: It’s too much, but keep looking at me. Keep looking, Tess.

  This is why sex isn’t meant to be watched. It’s meant to be participated in, not watched, unless it’s staged to be watched, as in pornography, which is banality resigned to itself, and therefore not embarrassing beyond one’s being privy to the size and shape and color of a stranger’s sex organs. Tess, keep looking—this is what Brian is telling her, without telling her aloud—and he is not saying it to anyone watching. He is unaware that anyone is watching, which is why he’s able to do it this way, meld with her this way, and—scarcely moving—make her squeak high in her throat. Brian is smiling, but not lasciviously, not in pride. He is glad. He’s merely glad, but there’s nothing mere in that, nothing banal. He’s holding her hips still, where they want to rut at him. He is exacting. Tessa is squeaking, fighting to move, and then no longer fighting. Tessa has entered some trance. She sings in an inhuman language. Brian is nodding, reassuring: I’ve got you. I’ve got you. You’re safe.

  The Killer wanted Jules to fight, but she wouldn’t. Justin stares, unseeing, out the sliding glass door. The penthouses both have decks with sun chairs. The regular penthouse has a hot tub on the deck. The deluxe penthouse has a hot tub in the bedroom, where Tessa’s squeaking has formed the rough equivalent of Brian’s name, and sweat stands out on his body, all of it, and Tessa has grabbed the fourth post of the bed, and Brian comes with a cry of surprise, and it lasts so long, it surpasses embarrassing into funny, and the minute vibrations of suppressed laughter might make the chair with wheels roll, but I don’t care; this is just ridiculous.

  The Thinker looks up from his game of solitaire. I hold very still. I hold my breath. The Thinker gets up, and then walks to me. Right behind me. I try to remember where my eyes were looking the last time he looked at me.

  It’s embarrassing to care, still, after pissing and shitting in this chair. Why live? Why wish to keep living?

  Why ask these questions, when the Thinker is bending forward to check this broken body for signs of life? Hold your breath. Stare at the monitor you saw when you first fell—the one that shows the fountain in the center of the maze—while chaos took over behind you and your men bellowed from the searing, white flash. The monitor beside it (bottom row, third column) shows the employee break room. The Tupperware for Vivica’s huevos rancheros is soaking in the sink. The Killer put it there and added soap. The soap is curdling. The Thinker is reaching toward my neck to check for a pulse, when his phone buzzes. He stops. His mask tilts as he considers. He’s considering how unlikely it is that this broken body could be alive. Practically impossible. It’s embarrassing to him that he thought such a thing, when obviously the chair must have moved, minutely, due to explainable phenomena involving weight displacement and time. He’s turning away, sitting down on the floor again, and tapping his phone to read a text. Then he’s looking at the monitors.

  At Jules, who groans and bleeds and cries in her corner. The Killer stabbed her in areas of the torso that would not result in death. It looks like he hit her in the head with the butt of the knife—half her face is glazed in blood—but not hard enough to incapacitate her. He receives a text and reads it.

  Tessa is weeping. Clinging fast to Brian and weeping. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I was so mad at you for such a long time. I wasted so much time.”

  Brian pulls the covers over them. “Tess, don’t cry.” Then Brian begins confessing. Specifics about Mitch, how many conversations, how many arguments he and Mitch had about Tessa. How he, Brian, never really argued that he himself should be the one for her, though he knew Tessa loved him more. Because he, Brian, felt that was an unfair advantage, somehow. He confesses, now, how stupid that was. He laughs at how stupid, but Tessa’s drying his eyes—really, this is nauseating—and he says, “It was this whole other layer of guilt. After Mitch died. Because it kind of, I can barely say it, but it cleared the way for me. With you. He even talked once about how we could share you, make up a schedule—he was
high at the time, but I still busted his lip.”

  “Sounds like him,” Tessa says, smiling.

  “It was more than Mitch, though. I can’t pawn it all off on him. It was me. It was—it was our parents ditching us when we were two. I’ve looked into it. I hired a PI and everything. Tracked ’em down. They’re still alive. They’ve got a whole mess of kids, live in Pacoima, in this dump with a dirt lawn. They’re drunks, both of them.”

  Tessa puts Brian’s head between her breasts and plays with his hair.

  The Killer is walking down the stairs of the regular penthouse, flicking blood off his knife in quick whipping motions. Spatters dot the wallpaper, the carpet. He arrives in the eighteenth-floor hallway. Crosses it. Puts his card key into the lock of Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse.

  The lock flashes red.

  I smile. The Thinker is boxing up his cards. There are only two keys that access Room 1802. One is on the nightstand beside Tessa. The other is in my pocket.

  The Killer pushes on the door. The doors are constructed so as not to give in the slightest without card key access. They have no exterior handles, only locks. The Killer’s push therefore makes no noise inside Room 1802. The Killer tries his card key again. The lock again flashes red.

  I smile.

  Brian says, “I saw them. I watched them. I went to talk to them, but I ended up watching, for hours and hours. Parked my bike and camped out on a bus bench across from their house. This was about a month ago. I was going to ask them—man, a trillion things. I’d planned to tell them about Mitch. The PI said they were drunks, but I still wasn’t—the woman came out to get the mail, and she wasn’t wearing any fucking pants. Just her underwear and this blouse it looked like she hadn’t washed in forever. She watched TV all day, same chair, and about six or seven different brats—at least one set of twins—around the house, all around her. Maybe if I’d gone on a weekday. I went on a Saturday, so the kids weren’t in school. I went on a Saturday so I could meet the dad, too. But the dad paints houses, and he didn’t get home till almost dark, and he went inside, and in the window, the woman gets up and goes and jumps on him, right in front of the kids. He takes her up against the wall—hand to God, Tess—right in front of the kids, and the kids don’t even care.” Brian pushes his face into Tessa’s right breast. It seems to comfort him.

  Tessa also comforts him, saying, “They’re missing out, not knowing you,” and kissing the top of his head.

  “I thought of you,” Brian says. “I thought, looking at them, ‘At least I can hire a PI and get a look. Tess can’t do that.’ And after that, I was itching for an excuse, any excuse, to come see you. So when I’m buying the paper one day and I see you on the travel magazine, I was like, ‘Well, there we go.’ ”

  Tessa says, “There we go,” and then she begins confessing. About how she hired a PI, too, and he turned up five women who might have thrown a baby in a Spokane Dumpster, but one of the women was black, one Latina, so that made three, since Tessa is whitest white. How the trail led into the mountains of northern Washington State, another trail to Canada, another to Florida, and Tessa decided it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to know. She was fine by herself, she was okay alone. But she wasn’t, she says; she isn’t. She’s been imagining Brian beside her in bed since he left for the motocross circuit when she was fourteen, and she’s been imagining him sexually since before that, from about thirteen. She had a dream about him kissing her and touching her naked body when she was thirteen years old and he was asleep two feet away from her. Which was why she started sleeping in her own bed, down the hall.

  Brian’s mouth falls open. “Are you serious?”

  The Killer is winding up to kick the door of Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse. He doesn’t do it, because his phone lights up, in his hand, where he just finished sending a message to the Thinker about this unexpected turn of events: a scant few hours until the morning security shift arrives, two people left alive in the hotel, and he can’t get to them.

  Well, four people alive: there’s also he, the Killer, and there’s also Jules, whose cries emanate through the door to Room 1801, the regular penthouse, which the Killer left open.

  Six people left alive, counting the twentieth floor.

  Jules sounds—disturbingly childlike. She’s still in her corner. She looks at Justin, and she cries and she cries. It never takes the form of a word, like “Help.” It sounds like a siren whose batteries are dying.

  The Killer reads his text and looks where Jules’s cries are coming from.

  “Don’t,” says Tessa. She hides behind a pillow. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Why?” Brian says, tugging the pillow down. He’s laughing. “Tess, Jesus, that’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever heard!” He’s hugging her.

  “Are you sure? You’re sure you’re not perv’d out?”

  “Baby, if you knew . . .”

  “Knew what?”

  Brian continues confessing. One gets the feeling he has never said the following out loud: he was twelve, for the first one. He woke up on the floor, his body cold and hot at the same time. He must not have made a noise, because Tessa was still snoring, there, in his bed. Mitch, of course, stayed asleep. Brian got clean underwear and pajama pants and changed in the bathroom, not knowing what to do. Very confused. Very, very upset. Lots of head scratching. Luckily, Troy was home that weekend, and on Sunday, when Mitch left the shed to get sodas, Brian asked Troy whether he should be worried that his peener was spitting stuff all over his jockey shorts at night.

  Tessa laughs, sedately, full of endorphins and petting him. “Troy was cool about it, wasn’t he?”

  Brian affirms that Troy put down the five-eighths (they were rebuilding a Harley engine from scratch) and explained to Brian that no, he should not be worried. He should know, in fact, that it was a hundred percent normal. Was it a girl from his class? Yes, Brian said adamantly, yes, it was a girl from his class. Brian tells Tessa, no, it was not a girl from his class. It was Tessa. It has almost exclusively been Tessa all his life, which is weird and he knows it. He’s been with other women, a pretty solid number of them, especially after Mitch died, but he has, only on maybe a half-dozen occasions, dreamed of other women, and he has very rarely masturbated to other women, and Tessa is now laughing and hugging Brian, and I want to vomit. “Troy said to use tissues, hide the magazines, sponge the sheets if it happened at night. They didn’t know you slept with us. I never did it with you next to me. Not once. That would’ve been—no.”

  Tessa’s pensive. She feathers his hair between her fingers. Her teeth worry her lower lip, until Brian puts his thumb where her teeth are biting. She licks it. Not mischievous. Docile, like a cat.

  “Tell me,” says Brian.

  “What?”

  “What you’re thinking.”

  She runs a finger over his eyebrow, which rises at this pause, this reluctance.

  “Please?” he says.

  “I stopped sleeping with him a week ago,” Tessa says, and swallows. “I shouldn’t have told you about him, at least that he worked here. It was only ever physical, but—”

  The Killer is reentering the nondeluxe penthouse, but wild dogs couldn’t pry my attention from Tessa saying,

  “I tried to keep it strictly physical.”

  Brian looks at the bracelet on Tessa’s wrist. He undoes the clasp and sets it on the bedside table; then he puts her fingertips to his mouth and kisses them. To show he is quiet. To show she should go on.

  Go on, go on.

  Tessa says, “He loves me way more than I deserve.”

  “Impossible,” Brian says, and I hate him for saying it, and I hate him for getting to say it.

  Tessa huffs, turns over, away from him—and Jules begins an impressive, lengthy keening scream at the sight of the Killer climbing the last few stairs; he stops at the top step, to enjoy the sound—but Brian makes a frustrated face for all of a second before he’s furled around Tessa from behind.
“Tell me,” he says again. “Because I need to know. This could be a problem. I’m a thousand percent sure I love you more than he does. So if you’ve got issues with that—”

  “Have you ever felt like—like, going through what we went through, it’s too much to ever explain to somebody? And the idea of even trying—you’re tired before you start.” She’s crying again. She wipes her tears on the sheet. “What it takes to survive that when you’re so small. How it never goes away, not all the way away, not ever.” She shakes on a sob. Brian turns her, very carefully, so she’s cradled to him. Tessa fights for a full breath and says, “If I could’ve told him, if I thought in a million years I could have made him understand how hard it is, even now, especially now, to feel . . .”

  Alone.

  I wonder if the anger is visible in my eyes. It wouldn’t matter. The Thinker is composing a text message, which the Killer—listening to Jules’s continuing screams like a man taking in the symphony—reads, replies to, and grudgingly obeys by walking toward her.

  Whereas I, behind my death mask, roil in Tessa’s self-assured, self-centered, self-fulfilling prophesy that I couldn’t possibly understand her loneliness. While Brian pats and pets and shushes and squeezes, I ask Tessa, Would I be permitted to understand now? Now that I sit alone among the dead, death behind me, death beneath me, watching it watch you and stalk you and I’m powerless to stop it?