“I want to speak to somebody at that rehab center, too, and find out what they knew about her.”
“Well, if it was drugs that got her in trouble in Philly, then I reckon it was drugs got her in trouble here.”
“That’s a fair bet. Got in with the wrong crowd.”
Sloane snickered. “Yeah . . . apparently a gang of drug dealers who snort Play-Doh.”
Afternoon was winding down and Sloane was on the phone with yet another person in Philadelphia, so it was Dill who took the call about Phyllis Otis—the elderly woman they had interviewed that morning.
“What’s going on, Terry?” Dill asked.
“Thought you guys might want to know: that possible witness you interviewed today is dead.”
“Dead?” Dill hissed. “Who found her?” He had been under the impression she lived in her apartment alone.
“Some kids walking down the street. She was lying there in that same lot where your former Jane Doe got dumped.”
Dill didn’t want to interrupt his partner . . . nor be discouraged by him . . . so the moment he got off the phone he grabbed his jacket and strode for the door.
Dill learned the woman’s body had already been removed, but when he heard a few details about the scene he stayed on course for the lot to see for himself. While driving, he asked into his radio, “Is it looking like foul play, Terry?”
“Nope,” was the reply. “What they’re saying is heat stroke.”
“Her body wasn’t . . . she wasn’t wet, was she? Like she’d been submerged in water?”
“What? No, I didn’t hear anything like that.”
“Okay . . . okay . . . I’m coming up on the scene now. Thanks.” And Dill set his radio down on the passenger seat as he pulled his car up to one of the two curbs that bordered the front of the empty lot.
In spite of the recent activity in the lot, Dill was alone. Even the yellow crime scene tape had already been torn down. He stamped across the dusty grass, kicking up scraps of litter, until he neared the high concrete wall that formed the lot’s rear boundary. Even before he reached it, however, he could smell the fresh paint . . . and see the damage Phyllis Otis had done to the colorful mural.
The old woman hadn’t been tall in life, so she hadn’t been able to reach the tops of several of the painted images, but she had still covered up much of what had been there. A bucket of white latex paint and a paint roller pan rested in the scrubby grass, while a paint roller lay where it had apparently been dropped in mid-stroke. Even with evening approaching, the air was still baking hot. The paint was already nearly dry, even though she had applied multiple layers in irregular areas. Some of the images beneath were entirely hidden behind this snowy expanse, while elsewhere ghostly glimpses still peered through. She had worked from left to right, and must have become overwhelmed by the heat and dropped while painting over the diminutive, cherubic devil in his diaper. He was partly effaced but his eyes still gleamed through a white fog, and she hadn’t yet touched the word balloon that said: “Art is dead!”
Staring at the word balloon, Dill said aloud, “Art. Art is dead.”
He turned to stare across the street, settling on the third floor window where he himself had stood gazing out that morning. Might an echo of himself, a lingering shadow, be standing just behind that curtain even now, his past self watching for his future self down in this lot . . . waiting for the two of them to converge in revelation?
“Angela . . . Renee . . . Turner,” he muttered to himself. “Is dead.”
She had left her apartment unlocked before going downstairs and across the street to paint the concrete wall.
Dill had washed out the coffee maker’s glass pot, plus one mug for himself, and while fresh coffee brewed he spoke with Sloane on his radio, peering through the parlor window at his car parked and locked at the curb.
“So where are you now, man?” Sloane asked him.
“After I took a look at where they found Mrs. Otis I headed home,” Dill said. He wasn’t lying . . . it just wasn’t his home. “Pretty bad headache.”
“I can relate. Anyway, I told you that poor old lady was a loony. Painting over that graffiti . . . not that I blame her. It’s not connected, buddy—let it go. Let me tell you what I found out after you left.”
“Shoot.” Dill wandered back to the kitchen and poured himself some black coffee. He wanted to be sure to stay awake through the night.
“Didn’t talk with them myself, but I’m told Mom and Dad are both pretty shaken up; they were under the impression she was dead these past four years. They never heard a peep from her after she vanished from the rehab center.”
“Huh,” Dill said. “Well, at least now they have some closure.” He hated using that inadequate cliché, but he was at a loss as to what else to say.
“As for the rehab center, as far as the staff knows our girl never told anybody she planned to escape, let alone run off to California. But they remember something funny.”
“Which is?”
“They had this therapy program, encouraging the kids to vent all their inner demons through art. Well, sometime during the night, right before Turner ran off from the place, she painted a mural on the wall of her room. She shared the room with another girl, and that kid left the place legitimately a long time ago so I didn’t talk to her, but the staff swears the roommate slept through the whole thing—never saw the mural or discovered Turner was missing until she woke up the next morning.”
“What was it Angela painted?” Dill asked in a quiet voice. Why did he want to ask if what she had painted was a door? What would make the image of a doorway paint itself in his mind?
“A fish bowl . . . one goldfish inside. Blue eyes, long eyelashes, lipstick on its lips.”
“A skeleton? Like the mural at the lot?”
“Nope. Scaly. This one was supposed to look alive,” Sloane replied. “Before and after, I guess.”
“I guess.”
“The fish had a word balloon, too. It was saying: ‘Art is Free!’ You see that? She’s obviously the one who painted that stuff in the lot.”
“Mm,” Dill grunted noncommittally.
“One more funny thing. Apparently what set the girl off so she wanted to run away that night was she got in a big fistfight with another kid in the cafeteria. The staff says she ended up with a real shiner.”
“Left eye?” Dill asked.
“They didn’t specify which eye. But that has to be a coincidence, my friend. It’s not like our girl would have a black eye for four years, is it?”
Dill had turned off all the lights in the parlor, except for the ghostly blue cathode glow cast by the television set, which he sat in front of in Mrs. Otis’s old armchair, a coffee cup in one hand.
He had no wife to go home to, and so he sat for hours, getting up only to pour more coffee or use the bathroom. Mrs. Otis hadn’t specified which channel she had been viewing when her program had been interrupted, so he pointed the remote and changed channels every so often between the few that offered halfway decent reception. The others were nothing but solid, hissing static.
Despite his efforts, despite the coffee, he woke with a startled jolt in the early hours of the morning with the realization that he had dozed off at some point.
He wasn’t sure what had awakened him. Maybe it was the silence of the TV, replacing its incessant chatter. Maybe an intuition in his very nerves.
Whatever it was, when he straightened up in the chair and focused on the TV screen, he saw three indistinct figures behind a layer of grainy snow . . . like a trio of portraits that had been obscured under a thin layer of paint.
The figures were garbed in black uniforms or jumpsuits, but more striking was their hairless, lumpen white heads. These heads looked formed from some raw matter, like virgin protoplasm. The eyes were mere punch-holes, and yet Dill felt their stare penetrate him. For all three figures had been studying him while he slept, and continued to study him now that he was awake. Gazing at him not a
s if they were enclosed in the TV on the other side of its glass, but as if he were the one enclosed . . . imprisoned like a fish in an aquarium.
Dill’s fingers dug into the chair’s armrests like claws. But then he thought of the remote on the little table beside him, on which also rested his coffee cup. He shot his hand out for it, knocking over his cup and spilling its dregs of coffee in the process. Jumping up from the chair and backing away from the TV a few steps, he pointed the remote at the screen like a gun and thumbed the OFF button.
The image of the three obscure figures flashed to darkness. Now in the screen he saw only his own reflection, but even that shadow being’s face with its crazed expression unnerved him.
In a lower kitchen cabinet he found a toolbox with a hammer in it, and another can of white interior house paint.
He used the hammer to smash in the television’s screen.
That morning, people driving or walking past the street corner on their way to work or school glanced over into the vacant lot where that young woman had been found murdered, and where their neighbor Mrs. Otis had dropped dead from the heat . . . a little perplexed to see a man standing in front of the high concrete wall at the back, his arm pumping fiercely as he finished what the old woman had started: covering over the colorful mural completely.
BEAST WITH TWO BACKS
GARRETT COOK
Mia and him, they’d been doing nothing but arguing. Maybe not literally, but close enough. He’d wanted to go to the opera. He loved the opera and when they were first dating, she had said that she too loved the opera. He should have known when she didn’t name any specific operas that she was trying to impress him. She actually hated the opera and wouldn’t be caught dead there. What she loved were carnivals. She loved watching him compete at games that were skewed against him, she loved eating funnel cake. She loved the muddy musky dirty smell of ponies. She loved smiling at tattooed creeps suggestively as she got on rides that took her to the brink. She loved sleaze and grime and the magic of lies. Things that always made him uncomfortable.
And she loved the sideshow. They were usually nothing like her conceits and dreams of sideshows. When you thought of sideshows, you thought of human oddities that bent and broke the laws of nature, displaying superpowers or shamelessly parading ugliness. The days of the true sideshow were mostly gone. These were, after all, the days of tolerance and political correctness. Calling mentally-challenged children pinheads or gawking in wide-eyed shock and terror at the morbidly obese were products of a simpler, sicker time. At a modern-day sideshow, you’d get to see a fake Fiji Mermaid (the only kind of Fiji Mermaid) in a glass case, a monitor lizard billed a living dinosaur, a lady with her body in a box with a spider painted on it, and some framed photos. A scam posing as a museum.
It was at the third carnival they’d been to that month, this one an hour and a half outside of town. He objected to throwing away six dollars to get into the sideshow, just as he’d objected to the smell of piss over red velvet seat cushions, woodchip fries over a sitdown meal and a tilt-o-whirl over beautiful, masterful music painstakingly perfected by people that wanted nothing more than to do what they do perfectly, inspiringly. He had longed for inspiration and had never gotten it from this world of overinked ex-cons and oil-slick cuisine that had marred their time together. He was starting to feel like he wanted to get out.
He had developed low expectations, and was perfectly justified in them. He had reached a point at which he wanted just a night at the opera and a glimpse of mastery, the sort of thing that would make him want to sit back down at the piano and start playing something that wasn’t Billy Joel or a Sinatra song to belt out adequately as a de facto wingman for some bluesuited hack who’d never met half the people whose names he dropped. A trip to the opera would have done that, at least in his mind. She knew better and he knew she knew better and he resented the hell out of it.
He had developed low expectations and was certain the sideshow as always would fail to meet them. Even if he tried to meet the bullshit with an ironic smirk, he’d still be out three dollars. Three dollars spent for the dubious privilege of walking around a shrine to chicanery and petty theft. But this sideshow was slightly different. In the middle of this tent was a corral, and the corral housed something unlike anything he’d seen at any other sideshow. So they passed the Fiji Mermaid and the woman in the spidery box. A mutated pig fetus in a jar. Went through the motions, halfheartedly wondering what was in the corral. Couldn’t be anything that great.
Except that it was. A naked man twisted like a backwards bridge. Toned chest. Cast-iron arms holding him up. Overdeveloped legs bent, spread-eagle. Head crooked right. A woman, firm-breasted, toned arms, powerful legs pressed against his, was bent into the same position, head facing the opposite way. They were making love. Or else . . . no. They were joined at the crotch by a bridge of skin. Two beautiful people, stuck together in mock intimacy. Brother, sister. He pulled Mia close. Kissed her. Clamped down on her tongue until he could taste blood. Reached under her skirt and squeezed her ass. Even though they must have been in plain view of the naked conjoined twins and even though they could hear another couple walking into the tent, the making out only got more intense. Soon they were fervently dry-humping.
The other couple, lightly pierced but preppily dressed college kids, whispered to each other. Quietly debated whether the freaks were real. Cleared their throats to make their presence known. Forced them to find some modicum of common decency. Forced them to break their embrace, cut off their kiss, leaving them to taste their bloody mouths and public shame. They took another long look at the brother and sister bridge before shuffling out, barely glancing at the third monitor lizard of the month. Was it just him or did this one look small and sickly?
They didn’t ride any rides. He didn’t try and win her another tiny plush pig by popping balloons with darts. They didn’t eat any greasy food. They went to the car. They made out like teenagers. He began to notice the grey in her eyes again and the way the pixie cut about which he’d felt apathetic before framed her sweet freckled face perfectly. On the drive home, they pulled over and she gave him a blowjob. He enjoyed locking eyes with her and watching her as much as he enjoyed the act itself, which was plenty. It took a tremendous force of will to last as long as he did.
They waited, not knowing what they’d do next. Were they daring each other to go further? Were they trying to stop something that they knew was coming? He chickened out. He started the car.
“I think we should get some dinner. Like, a real dinner.”
It took a second for Mia to crack a smile.
“Yeah. That would be nice.”
They were underdressed for the restaurant, which was tiny, dark and intimate. Little Italian place. The food probably not worth the price. Under the table, they moved their legs forward, bodies stretching, unconsciously reaching for each other, his foot rubbing her leg, her foot rubbing his. They talked. Really talked. Ate ten-dollar bruschetta as they waited for their meal. Kissed vigorously in spite of onion garlic blood mouth. Incurred judgmental Connecticut glances of curdled patrician spite. They savored their meals, the restaurant, the moments, each other.
They pulled over again on the way home. Frenetic scratching of two teenage werewolves. Bitter disdain of t-shirts and seats that would not pull back far enough. They fucked. Clumsy, dirty awkward car sex. We’ve got shit to prove sex. By the end of it, they were sweaty, stinking, content, tired and just the slightest bit afraid. The previous day they had been pulling apart. It was only begrudgingly that he had accepted her suggestion that they should go to the carnival. She had been speaking less often, curtly, muttering things under her breath. And here they were, entwined, bitterly, achingly in love. Neither of them needed to speculate for long. They knew where their passion had come from. When they got back to the apartment, they fell asleep slower than they let on. Eyes half-closed, ears perked-up to wait until the other one had drifted off.
The next day, she went
to work and he was stuck at home. Not amused by daytime television. Didn’t feel like reading. Or watching a movie. Or going for a walk somewhere. He sat down at the piano and played. It yowled like a cat. It screeched protest. It growled hatred and spat lopsided notes that would not string together. The piano was usually unresponsive, but he had made some headway. It had moved from utter noncompliance to babbled curses. That was something at least. Not enough. He soon found that he did not know what to do with himself.
He called a friend. Asked to borrow his car. Yes, of course he’d fill up the tank. He left a note on the coffee table. Said he was catching up with some old friends. He had no intention of catching up with old friends. There was only one thing he was thinking of doing. Only one person he wanted to see. Two people. He went to the carnival.
For once he could ignore the grease urine crimestench. For once he could ignore the sleaze. There was something beautiful to see there in the freak show tent. Ignoring the grimeworld and the gaffed freaks and everything else, he approached the corral and the bent bridge twins. Inseparable. Stuck. Together. He cried. He didn’t know why he would cry in the presence of such a perfect, loving monster. But he did. He wondered if the freaks could hear him, if they felt for him, if they could feel anything but their oneness and if they could care for the feelings of a being that was not part of the fleshbridge.
For reasons that also escaped him, suddenly, he no longer felt like crying. He felt content and safe and like life made sense again. He left, drove back home. Found Mia in the livingroom reading. Locked eyes with her. Used her at length on the couch. Sweating aching, uncertain of what brought them so close, exactly what was unifying their bodies when their minds and hearts had been growing so far apart. Scared by feelings of what was simultaneously consent and rape. When they finished, they sat up on the couch, trying to scoot away from each other, but ending up cuddled together, quiet and unsure. Each thought of making a move for the remote to turn on the TV. Neither dared.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 8
