The statement lingered in the air. Vera knew that she should say something to counter it, but she was disturbed somehow. Something in Stacy’s words unlocked a door to darkness within her, and she spent the intervening moments trying to shut that door before it was too late. After another minute or so of uneasy silence, Stacy turned to her again:
“What do you remember about the forget-me-not woman?”
Vera stared at her for a while, as if she had to reconfigure her mind before she could bring herself to think about those things. She sighed. “A mentally disturbed woman got killed outside my book signing,” she said reluctantly. “What else is there to remember?”
“Do you remember anything about her?”
Vera shook her head: “Nothing, really…she had this weird, broken heart birthmark. It’s strange what you remember about people,” she mused. “She had this way of looking at me…it gives me the shivers to this day. It was as if I had let her down—as if she had nowhere else to turn, and I had abandoned her.” Vera hated thinking about it, but now that the subject had been broached, she continued, “I went to her funeral, you know. It was in a little town in North Carolina.”
“Oh? You met her family?”
“She didn’t really have a family. She was living with a family friend—some old grandmotherly woman who used to be friends with her mother. Everyone else in her family died when she was about fifteen. There were rumors. …I don’t know how much of it was bullshit, but some people said she killed them.”
“You didn’t believe the rumors?”
“Her parents’ house burned down. She was the only one who made it out alive. As she was always a little ‘off’ mentally, there were rumors afterwards. You know the way things are in small towns: everyone has a story on everyone else, and they’re eager to tell you all about it if you let them.”
Stacy smiled: “You don’t like small towns?”
“Nah. I’ve never liked them. They’ve always given me the creeps. Every time I even pass through one, a feeling of panic comes over me. They always make me feel trapped—unsafe…”
Stacy had a playful smile on her face: “Maybe you should get some therapy for that, Dr. Vera?”
Vera laughed. “It’s possible, but…I don’t know. I’ve never liked small towns. …And the other thing is that maybe I was a little off when I went down there for the woman’s funeral. …She died right outside my book signing. The entire thing had me a little crazy. I was talking to her moments before she walked out into the street and got flattened. I couldn’t get those images out of my head. Something like that stays with you. …She said all those things about what we had done together, and how I had forgotten—how she had helped me to forget…”
“You thought there was some truth to that?”
“I don’t know what I thought. Maybe I went down there to see for myself—to make sure that I really hadn’t forgotten.”
Stacy eyed her. “Do you believe in things like that? Repressed memories and all that TV movie stuff?”
Vera laughed at Stacy’s characterization. “As a psychologist, I know that repressed memories do exist. …Do I think that I forgot the woman? No.”
“Fair enough.” Stacy was staring out of the windscreen, at the street.
Vera followed Stacy’s gaze out of the windscreen, and noticed that they were nearing the club again.
Young people were still milling about outside. Stacy parked in the same cordoned off area in front of the club. This time, instead of going up to the bouncer and walking through the club, they entered the building the same way they had left it the last time: through a side door down the block. They began to walk up the stairs. Somehow, it was good to be inside again. Vera felt safer, as if something ominous were out in the night. She wanted to sleep and forget everything. She still did not feel as though she could sleep—her mind was too frantic and frayed—but the thought of sleep was soothing to her.
At the top of the staircase, there was actually only one door, which led to Stacy’s apartment. It was not locked, because Stacy merely turned the knob to open the door. However, when Stacy pushed open the door, the mother and the boyfriend were on the other side. The door opened into the kitchen area. The boyfriend was at the sink, preparing something; the mother was sitting down at the kitchen table, rubbing her bunions and corns. Stacy and Vera froze; the boyfriend and mother looked up at them. The mother scowled when she saw Stacy; the boyfriend smiled in a peacemaking kind of way and explained:
“I didn’t see why she should spend the night in a hotel when we have an extra room.”
Stacy stared at him as if he were speaking Greek. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and menacing. “I prepared that room for Vera.”
“It’s okay,” Vera spoke up quickly, not wanting to be in the middle of a lovers’ spat. “I should be going home anyway.”
“Nonsense,” Stacy objected. “We have more than enough space—you’ll just have to share a room with me.”
Vera was not exactly keen on the idea, but she knew that she did not have the energy to argue. She shrugged her shoulders.
When the boyfriend saw that the argument had been deflated, he smiled in relief. “I’m making Ma some cocoa,” he explained as he filled a pot. “Would you guys like some?”
“I’m fine,” Vera said quickly. She wanted to get away from that scene as quickly as possible. She and Stacy were still standing in the open doorway. Stacy had stepped in; Vera was about to enter and close the door behind her, when she heard someone running up the stairs. It sounded like a herd of buffalo stampeding, so curiosity and a kind of terrified anticipation caused her to stop and look. When she did so, she saw a towering hulk of a woman appear. The woman was probably about two hundred eighty pounds, and stood 6’5” in her high heels. The shoes, Vera saw, looking down with sudden fascination, were stilettos about two sizes too small for her size twelve feet. The woman’s toes reminded her somehow of Fred Flintstone’s: each one was like a crudely chiseled rock. Vera looked at the rest of the woman the way one would a carnival freak. The woman did not so much walk as fling herself forward with a kind of reckless waddle. The flimsy stilettos only made the entire enterprise seem more precarious. The woman was wearing a see-through blouse that revealed things one did not even want left to one’s imagination. Through the sweat-drenched blouse, the woman’s two humongous breasts swayed disconcertingly as she waddled up. She was wearing a bikini top, but she may as well have been wearing dental floss, as the bikini top barely even covered her nipples and areolas. In fact, the breasts were so huge that Vera had to believe they were fake—some mad scientist’s doing, perhaps. The left breast seemed two sizes bigger than the other, as if Dr. Frankenstein had had an extra sack of silicone lying around, and had decided to get rid of it. And then, when Vera’s eyes finally settled on the woman’s face, she blinked twice, as if convinced that her vision were failing her. To say that the woman was ugly would be an insult to ugly women everywhere. The woman was something else entirely—some new paradigm of ugliness. Her eyes were so far apart that they practically seemed to be on the side of her face, like a frog’s. Topping it all off, her hair was like a butchered hedge withering in the summer heat. Instead of a haircut and styling, the woman looked like she needed to be pruned and watered. She was baring her teeth, like an enraged baboon trying to show dominance. Vera realized some of that teeth-baring was because the woman was panting from having run up the stairs. Still, the woman’s teeth were so brown that Vera found herself thinking that that must be what wooden teeth looked like; she had a momentary image of George Washington smiling with a pair of such teeth. She grimaced. At last, as the towering hulk of a woman waddled the last couple of feet toward the doorway, Vera ducked into the apartment, terrified; Stacy, who had been watching over her shoulder, took her place, and smiled as the woman stopped before her:
“How are things, Coco?” Stacy greeted her.
“I need an advance!” the woman demanded. Her voice was like a rust
y foghorn. The woman was clearly high on something, because her eyes had a far-off, crazed expression as she stared down at Stacy. Stacy seemed unconcerned, and Vera had never before admired someone’s courage as she did Stacy’s then. Stacy shook her head.
“You know I can’t give you an advance, Coco—that’s not how it works.”
“What do you mean, you can’t give me an advance! Aren’t my movies your bestsellers? You know all the men are coo-coo for my Coco puffs,” she said, grabbing her humongous breasts. “I’m the best bitch you got!”
As the woman said this last part, Vera suddenly realized that this had to be one of those “Stank ‘n’ Ugly” women Stacy had mentioned—
“True, indeed,” Stacy averred, “—you’re the best actress I’ve got, but I can’t pay you for dick you ain’t sucked yet. You get paid on a dick-by-dick basis.”
“What the hell you mean!” the towering hulk screamed then.
Stacy’s boyfriend came over and began to plead with the hulk to remain calm—
“Don’t tell me to remain calm! I want my money—”
“See what I told you!” the mother lectured her son from the kitchen table, where she had taken a break from her corns and bunions, “—look at what that woman brings into your life. …All these low-life people.”
“Who you calling low-life, you old bitch?” the hulk growled from the doorway. She looked like a rhino about to charge; Vera took two steps back.
“There is no reason for any of this,” the boyfriend tried to placate her. However, the hulk was one of those people who grew crazier as you tried to be reasonable with her. The next thing they all knew, the woman had fished a gun from beneath her gargantuan left tit.
“I’m gonna fuck all o’ y’all up!” she declared in her rusty foghorn way.
Everyone gasped and ducked out of the way, except for Stacy, who still stood there with her usual indifference.
“Coco,” she said in a calm, even voice, “you know I don’t give advances.”
Hearing this, the hulk’s head seemed as though it would spin around; Stacy expected green vomit to fly out of her mouth, like that Exorcist demon. The woman’s eyes bulged; her upper lip was trembling over her wooden teeth, and an evil-looking frown appeared on her forehead—
“Please,” the boyfriend pleaded, stepping between the simmering hulk and Stacy, but by then the woman had been pushed over the limits of reason. The next thing they heard was the sound of the gun going off. For a moment after the echoing blast, there was silence, and then there was a thud as the boyfriend fell to the ground. He lay there, writhing in pain with a bloody chest. They all stood staring down at him, as if unable to make sense of it. The mother was the first one to figure it out. In a millisecond, the old woman was out of her chair. Vera just managed to get out of the way as the mother sprang at the hulk. The mother was about a foot and a half smaller than she was, but the old woman was on her like a Tasmanian devil. Soon, the hulk was screaming out as the mother buried her teeth in her neck. With all that, the towering woman finally lost her tenuous balance, and both of them tumbled down the staircase. There was a racket like one of those overbearing jazz drum solos, and then a loud crash, as the two landed on the lower level. At the sound, Vera finally screamed out, as if the scream had been trapped inside of her, but Stacy ran to the kitchen sink, grabbed a knife and returned to the doorway, where the boyfriend was still twitching from the shock and pain of the gunshot. In one clean, powerful thrust, Stacy jammed the knife into his chest, and the convulsions stopped. Vera’s scream got caught in her throat again, and she just stared, and there was a horrible silence.
Stacy was still crouched over her boyfriend’s body. When Vera could breathe again, she whispered, “Why’d you do that?”
“No point in having him suffer.”
Vera did not know if that was a reasonable response or not, but she remembered the mother and the hulk then. She ran into the hallway and looked down the staircase. The mother and the hulk were a crumpled pile of flesh at the foot of the staircase. Vera ran down the stairs. The onetime porn star’s neck was broken. The woman’s eyes were open, staring blankly into space. She was dead. The mother was still breathing, but she was unconscious. Her leg seemed broken. Stacy appeared at the top of the staircase then. Vera looked up at her and screamed: “Call an ambulance!”
Instead, Stacy walked down the stairs and joined her. She came down nonchalantly, as if nothing were amiss. She stared at the two crumpled bodies, and then smiled mordantly when she saw the mother: “This might be a good time to check your theory on inherited immortality,” she joked. “If the old lady dies and comes back—”
“Is everything a joke to you!” Vera screamed, cutting her off. “Goddamn,” she said in bewilderment, “—do you live like this all the time? Does this kind of crazy shit always happen around you!”
“What are you so upset about?”
“Your boyfriend’s been shot; the woman that shot him is dead; his mother is messed up! Doesn’t any of that mean anything to you?”
“Stop being such a drama queen,” Stacy said in the same nonchalant way; and then, turning to walk back up the stairs, “I’ll call the ambulance.”
Vera stayed with the mother and the hulk’s corpse. A few surreal minutes passed. Eventually, Vera realized she was crying. She had no idea when she had started: she just knew she had been crying for a while. Stacy appeared at the top of the staircase again:
“What are you crying about?”
Vera was too wracked with sobs to answer. Stacy walked back down to her and hugged her. “It’ll all be okay, Vera—no reason to come undone on me. We both know my boyfriend will be better in an hour, and his mother will be fine when she gets to the hospital. C’mon, Vera,” she pressed her, holding her more tightly, “we’ve both seen the nature of life and death—we know there’s no need for tears.”
Vera still did not know if any of that was true, but she knew the boyfriend would be alive again soon, and the old lady’s injuries did not seem to be life-threatening. The hulking porn star was dead, however. When it occurred to Vera that the woman’s death meant nothing to her, she was disturbed and ashamed—as if it all marked her descent into something horrible. She had seen too much death tonight: maybe she was becoming desensitized to it—some kind of heartless monster. She began to cry again.
Stacy shushed her, and held her closely. “Come with me now,” Stacy said eventually. “I need your help. Come upstairs with me.”
Vera looked down at the unconscious mother, and then she began to walk back up the stairs. She did not feel like a real person anymore. The boyfriend was still lying in the doorway. Stacy had wrapped his chest with towels to stop the blood from flowing onto the floor.
“Help me move him to the back room,” Stacy said then. “The police will be here in a few minutes, and it would be best if they don’t see him.”
Vera looked down at him uneasily: “Are you sure he’ll be okay? Maybe we should bring him to the hospital, too—he’s been dead three times today.”
Stacy shook her head: “He’s already dead. What good would it be to bring him to the hospital? Besides, you’re wasting your time counting his deaths. Counting his deaths is like counting grains of sand on a beach.”
“How do you know?” Vera said, finally regaining some of her spirit. “Maybe there’s some limit to the amount of times he can die. Even on the beach there are only so many grains of sand.”
“We can discuss this later,” Stacy said dismissively. She took up her boyfriend’s legs, and gestured with her head for Vera to pick up his arms. When they were dragging the boyfriend down the hallway, to the back room, Stacy said, “You know what your problem is, Vera? You have no faith.” Stacy pushed open the bedroom door with her hip. They left the boyfriend lying on the floor, in the darkness, then they returned to the hallway.
“What does faith have to do with it?” Vera said at last. Stacy’s comment had been playing in her head.
“You
refuse to accept things that are obvious,” Stacy said in the same calm, matter-of-fact way. “You question things that don’t need to be questioned.”
Vera stopped and stared at her; Stacy stopped and looked back at her. “When we started out,” Vera began, “you said we were going to be explorers—investigators. If you’re going to investigate something, you have to ask questions.”
“Even investigators have to take leaps of faith to get around the unexplainable,” Stacy replied. She continued walking down the hallway; Vera pursued her. She did not want to back down anymore. She did not want to make more compromises with her soul. She remembered the hulking woman’s corpse lying at the bottom of the staircase, and her sudden indifference to the woman’s death.
“Look,” she said now, her voice more contentious, “if you’re looking for some kind of mindless disciple you’d better look elsewhere.”
Stacy stopped and looked at her. Vera was breathing deeply—like someone preparing for a fight. Stacy smiled at her. “Fair enough,” she said simply, before she continued walking.
Once they were in the kitchen, Stacy got a rag from the sink and cleaned the boyfriend’s blood from the floor. Vera stood staring at her, telling herself that she had to stand strong. She figured that Stacy would say something else to make her compromise herself—something else to lure her into the darkness. However, when Stacy was finished swabbing the floor, she merely walked back to the sink and washed out the rag. After that, she walked past Vera and into the stairway. After two steps, she called over her shoulder, explaining, “I’m going downstairs and let the bouncer know to expect the ambulance.”
When Stacy was gone, Vera felt lonely. She walked down and stood above the mother and the dead porn star again. She looked at her watch: it was a few minutes to three. Within minutes, some paramedics rushed up the stairs, followed by Stacy and two police officers. The paramedics checked both of the women on the ground, saw that the porn queen was dead and then began to put the boyfriend’s mother on a gurney.
How to Kill Your Boyfriend (in 10 Easy Steps) Page 8
