Vera shuddered. “That’s a harsh view.”
“Why? Because I refuse to believe in lies and fairy tales? …You don’t believe in love either.”
“What?” she said with an incredulous laugh.
“Your kind of love is a ridiculous commodity that you sell to your equally ridiculous readers and listeners. You have the same relationship to love that a fast food joint owner has to his food: you both know you’re selling shit, but you don’t care because you know that people love buying shit.”
To Vera’s amazement, she laughed—not a defensive or sarcastic laugh, but a laugh of simple acceptance.
Stacy smiled: “You know I’m right.”
Vera looked at her with a sly smile. “There are more important things in the world than being right, Stacy.”
Stacy shrugged, and they both smiled.
However, that was when Vera remembered the boyfriend: how they had run out of the house in search of him. It was suddenly amazing to her how easily they got sidetracked: how easily their bizarre conversations distracted them. She looked at Stacy soberly, remembering what Stacy had said as they ran out of the house.
“You said your boyfriend was following the Pussyman story?”
“Yes.”
Vera looked at her doubtfully: “You came to that conclusion after watching a fifteen-second news report? It could have been another lunatic with a pair of panties on his head.”
Stacy shook her head. “I know it’s him,” she said simply. In fact, her expression was chilling. Vera instinctively retreated from it.
“…My God,” Vera whispered as the scope of the situation occurred to her. “If what you say is true, then your boyfriend has had a total psychotic break. …Has this ever happened before?”
“No.”
“It must have something to do with his remembering all the times you killed him.”
“Do you still think you can treat him?”
“I’ll try.”
“Have you ever treated anyone like that—who has lost all connection with reality?”
“How many immortal, brain-scrambled boyfriends do you think there are in the world, Stacy?”
Stacy laughed at her sarcasm. “Are you admitting defeat already?”
“I don’t know—I’m simply telling you how it is. It’s not as though this is your typical case.”
“If you can’t treat him your way, then that leaves only one option.”
Vera looked at her anxiously; she leaned in and whispered, “You mean, killing him again?”
“Yes.”
Vera nodded, bowing her head introspectively.
“But I won’t kill him,” Stacy said abruptly.
“What?”
“I won’t kill him this time. No matter what happens, I won’t do it.”
Vera was confused. “I thought you believed that killing him was the best way to restore balance?”
“Yes—I still do, but you don’t. Now it’s time for us to show and prove: to test what we believe. I’ve already taken my test. Now it’s time for you to take yours.”
All Vera could do was stare. Stacy returned to looking blankly out of the window. They were now on the Williamsburg Bridge, crossing the East River. Outside the window, cars zoomed past on the bridge’s roadway. Beyond the cars, the East River seemed dull and dour below them.
Vera’s mind rebelled against everything Stacy had said: “Why are you making me responsible for everything?”
“I’ll be there with you, but it’s time for you to take the lead for a while.” As Stacy said these words, she fished something out of her back pocket. She handed it to Vera. It was a switchblade knife. “Hold onto this,” Stacy said.
Vera shook her head, looking at Stacy with rising panic.
“If you can’t treat him as a doctor,” Stacy went on matter-of-factly, “then there’s only one option left.”
“Why do I have to do it?”
“We’re partners in this, Vera. You can’t be a passive observer: you have to take part. You have to know what it feels like to take and give life. Now is the time to become a full partner in this, instead of some kind of Peeping Tom on the sidelines.”
“But I can’t,” she pleaded. “I can’t even step on cockroaches.”
Stacy shook her head in disappointment: “You’re still not embracing the full implications of this situation, Vera. You won’t be killing him: you’ll be giving him life. If you can’t help him your way, using all the knowledge and techniques of science, then it’s time to embrace new possibilities. Stop thinking so one-dimensionally.”
As she said these last words, the subway doors opened. They were across the river, in Manhattan, at Essex Street. They were underground again—Vera had not noticed the growing darkness during their conversation. Stacy grabbed Vera by the arm then: “This is our stop.”
They ran out of the car and toward the transfer with the F Train. Vera felt lost and wretched. The things Stacy had said to her were rooting about in her head like some kind of vicious beast. She allowed Stacy to lead her; Stacy’s grip was firm on her upper arm. She felt frail and desperate.
The F Train was coming. Stacy pulled her arm more gruffly, so that she would speed up. This time, they just managed to leap onto the train before the doors closed. The train was not full; Stacy steered Vera toward two seats in the corner, and they sat down. Vera was panting again. They did not say anything to one another for about a minute. Finally, when Vera began to catch her breath, she looked over at Stacy’s calm face. Stacy was staring ahead distractedly, at the colorful advertisements across from where they were sitting. For whatever reason, Vera tried to think about Stacy objectively. What did she really know about the woman? Stacy was obviously highly intelligent, but there was something unhinged about her. Stacy had done things that perhaps human beings were not meant to do. Stacy had gotten it into her mind that it was possible to kill without consequences, and Vera knew that horrible things were bound to come from such reasoning…even if the boyfriend could not die. At the same time, Vera found herself thinking that maybe Stacy was right about her. Maybe she was still refusing to grasp the monumental possibilities of this situation. The boyfriend could not die, and that meant that everything was open for discussion and exploration. Everything. …She remembered the switchblade that Stacy had handed her. She shook her head unconsciously, knowing that she was not yet ready to take the proverbial leap of faith that Stacy’s request required. …Maybe Stacy was right about her. Maybe she was holding onto old, useless things. Even before Stacy abducted her last night, she had merely been going about the motions of life. She had not really been living—she had been existing: waiting passively for something to happen. She remembered how she had felt when she woke up that morning: she had felt alive and free for the first time in years. She wanted to feel that way again. Her body craved it, in fact.
Vera looked over at Stacy then. She needed to be reassured. Somehow, she felt that if Stacy told her that everything would be fine, then everything would work out. She spoke up abruptly, saying, “Do you really think I can do it? Do you think I could kill him?”
Stacy looked over at her absentmindedly, as if she had forgotten that Vera was there. It seemed to take a few moments before Vera’s question made sense to her. At last, she nodded; Vera, despite everything, found herself thinking of how beautiful Stacy was. That fact, irrelevant as it was, gave Vera a strange sense of hope. The beautiful people were always good deep down—at least, that was the case in fairy tales. It was easy to believe in beauty and simplicity. Vera took a deep breath, suddenly desperate to be optimistic about things—to see hope where there was probably only horror. She smiled. Looking at Stacy again, she ventured:
“So, where did your boyfriend run off to?”
Stacy gestured to the poster directly across from where they were sitting. Vera looked up at the poster. She frowned and suppressed the impulse to shudder when she recognized Pastranzo’s grinning face.
“The concert in
Central Park?” Vera said in bewilderment.
“Yes.”
Vera thought back to the story; her mouth gaped when she understood what was before them: “…Your boyfriend is hunting the screeching demon: Pastranzo.”
“Exactly,” Stacy said. “We have to get to him before he tries to kill Pastranzo.”
Some seconds passed; the train stopped at the next station, and dozens of passengers entered. Vera’s mind was still dazed and wretched. At last, when the train began to move again, she turned to Stacy again, saying, “If your boyfriend is still on foot, then we should get there before him.”
“Unless he jumps off a building, thinking he can fly.’
Vera nodded uneasily. After some thought, she reasoned: “The key to all this may be getting him to take off the panties.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Stacy said with a shrug and a smile.
Something occurred to Vera, and she smiled. “I assume those were your panties he was wearing?”
“Knowing him, it was probably his mother’s.”
They both laughed.
Ten minutes later, they came to the 57th Street stop. Actually, by now, the train was packed with Pastranzo’s fans. Some of them carried posters and wore T-shirts with his grinning image. When the train stopped, practically everyone got out. Stacy walked briskly; once they were outside the subway station, Stacy began to jog again. Vera followed, her legs already rubbery. Pastranzo’s fans were everywhere. Many of them seemed high or otherwise dazed. Even before Stacy and Vera entered the park they could hear Pastranzo’s music. It was an eclectic, sometimes incompatible mix of rock, Middle Eastern and Asian music. From Vera’s perspective, his shrill voice was an exclamation point to the entire cacophony; however, his fans seemed somehow addicted to it—or at least, immune.
Most of the fans were young and idealistic—from Vera’s perspective, people who wanted to be seen saving the world, but who really did not give a shit. A half a million people were expected to attend the concert. (Unfortunately, that was a factoid that Vera had retained from a week of being around the media frenzy.) Vera looked around the crowd uneasily. Pastranzo’s fans were a freak show of pierced and tattooed flesh. Even the “normal-looking” ones seemed to have a demented gleam in their eyes, which Vera attributed to prolonged exposure to Pastranzo’s music. The only good thing about the crowd was that it kept Stacy from running. Vera’s clothes were all soaked through with sweat by now. Her panties had run up her behind; she had to resist the urge to reach under her skirt and correct the problem. She remembered the old school player; a queasy expression came over her face for an instant. Stacy looked back at her as they navigated their way through the crowd. When they made eye contact, Vera ventured:
“What if your boyfriend already got picked up by the police? He caused a traffic jam, remember?” Now that she had Stacy’s attention, she began walking by her side. She continued: “Even if he didn’t get picked up, he’s probably still hours away from the park, if he’s still on foot.”
Stacy’s voice was low but firm as she went back to scanning the crowd: “I know he’s here.”
“How?”
“I just know—the same way I knew you were going to be at that deli last night.”
“That’s different—you were stalking me,” Vera joked.
Stacy smiled, but continued to scan the crowd. They walked side-by-side for about five minutes. Vera still did not believe that the boyfriend was anywhere near the park. There were thousands of police officers patrolling the crowd as well—which made it less likely that the boyfriend would go unnoticed by the police if he showed up. Even in such a motley crowd, a man with a pair of panties on his head would stick out.
The crowd got thicker as Stacy and Vera moved toward the Great Lawn. Presently, they were coming upon a giant screen TV, on which Pastranzo was shown singing one of his creepy ballads. For whatever reason, Stacy stopped to watch, and Vera did the same. Vera had to listen closely before she was willing to accept that Pastranzo was singing in English. His singing reminded Vera of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz—it was high-pitched and eerie, without the good humor that cute midgets could instill in a song. Vera shuddered and leaned over to Stacy, whispering:
“You sure that guy ain’t really a demon?”
They both smiled and walked on.
They walked for another five minutes or so. Vera’s feet were getting tired. She looked over at Stacy again: “Even if he’s here, this is like finding a needle in a haystack.”
No sooner had Vera made this statement than Stacy gestured with her head: about a hundred feet from their position, the boyfriend was skulking around, ducking behind trees and exhibiting other types of paranoid behavior—as if he could maintain a low profile with a pair of red panties on his head. On top of that, he had accessorized his superhero costume with a cape—a floral-pattered curtain that Vera remembered vaguely from Stacy’s bathroom window—
“Let’s go!” Stacy said suddenly; she and Vera moved toward the boyfriend as quickly as they could, but he was already moving away, darting through the crowd in his quest to find the screeching demon. In his reckless haste, he banged into two police officers, practically knocking them over. However, he did not stop or acknowledge them.
“Hey, you!” the cops screamed. They began chasing him.
The boyfriend hurdled a park bench; the first police officer attempted to do the same, but he was an overweight slob, to put it succinctly. His foot caught on the back of the bench and he toppled over, onto the ground. Luckily, it was dirt, but he was so huge that his collision with the ground was a brutal one.
The second cop, learning from his partner’s stupidity, decided to run around the park bench. “You okay?” he called to his partner as he ran; the first cop made a noncommittal grunting noise, so he ran on. The boyfriend was running like a startled jackrabbit—darting in one direction, and then the other. Now, somehow, he was running back toward Stacy and Vera. Stacy looked at Vera and nodded: a gesture that told her to stay where she was. Stacy then ran ahead. Vera thought she would grab the boyfriend, but she ran past him and pretended to accidentally collide with the pursuing police officer. They both crumbled to the ground. The police officer seemed to take the worst of it, as he lay sprawled on the ground like a bloated corpse. As Vera looked on in her usual stunned way, Stacy looked back at her and winked.
The wink seemed to bring Vera to her senses, because she grabbed the boyfriend’s arm as he ran past, and they ran on together. In his madness, he did not even acknowledge her; when he ran from the police officers, he probably had not even realized that they were pursuing him. Vera looked at his eye through the leg opening of the panties. His eye seemed glassy, like a cheap doll’s. Vera glanced over her shoulder: no police officers were following, but this incident would be reported to headquarters soon.
“Hey!” she called to him. He ignored her. “Hey!”
He looked over at her with an enraged expression on his face. For a moment, he seemed on the verge of knocking her out. Her mind worked quickly: “Pussyman,” she began, “I’ve brought news for you.”
“You know of Pussyman?” he said, slowing, his interest and ego piqued.
“Everyone knows Pussyman,” Vera lied easily.
The boyfriend nodded his head and puffed out his chest, pleased. In the meanwhile, people passed them, frowning or laughing and point at his ridiculous costume. Vera spotted two police officers approaching. She took the boyfriend by the arm now, and guided him away:
“We have to hide: the screeching demon has his spies out—”
“What do you know of the demon!” he said, suddenly enraged again.
“Come with me and I’ll tell you.”
They moved quickly behind a tree, where two exhibitionist twelve-year-olds were groping and groaning against the tree trunk. The Pussyman outfit startled the girl, and she gasped—
“Get lost,” Vera told the two stunned kids. They slunk off.
“What do you k
now about the demon?” the boyfriend asked her again.
Falling into character, Vera shushed him. She decided to follow though with her original plan. Hopefully, treating him was as simple as having him take off the panties; with any luck, the panties were the catalyst of his psychotic break. She went into action, whispering, “We have to hide from the demon’s spies. They know you as Pussyman, but they don’t know who you are behind the mask. Maybe it’s time for you to assume your alter ego.”
He rubbed his chin, giving her proposal thought. Vera rushed him ahead: “Give me your cape, Pussyman,” she said, snatching off the curtain—the end of which was not really fastened, just shoved down the back of his T-shirt. She shoved it into her huge handbag. “Now, take off your mask, Pussyman, so we can thwart evil.” She almost laughed at her own stupid phrasing; but on another level, she felt proud of herself, as “thwart evil” was a good comic book phrase. She nodded her head encouragingly then, and the boyfriend looked around furtively, before wrenching off the panties. Vera looked at him closely, to see if he came back to his senses, but he still had the same insane gleam in his eyes. Actually, he kept the panties balled up in his hand; as they stood there, he sniffed them anxiously, as if getting a fix of a drug. Vera watched this with fascination, and with the sudden realization that her plan was not exactly working. She hoped that his removing his “costume” would end the psychotic break, but it had no effect. Worse, she had done something fatally wrong as a therapist: she had just verified her patient’s delusion. While she was standing there indecisively, he began to wander off, as if he had forgotten about her. The Great Lawn—and the main body of the Pastranzo concert—could be seen through the trees. As if drawn by a scent, the boyfriend began to walk in that direction. Vera panicked a little, wondering what she was going to do. At least now that he had taken off the panties he would be somewhat safe from the police, but he was still mentally unstable: a danger to himself and others. The only thing she knew for certain now was that she had to get him out of there. He still had the panties balled up in his hand and was sniffing them every few seconds (supposedly to keep up his super strength). It occurred to Vera that for all intents and purposes he still had the panties on. Acting on instinct once more, she grabbed the panties from his hand and began to run in the opposite direction from the podium, hoping that he would follow.
How to Kill Your Boyfriend (in 10 Easy Steps) Page 12
