“I clean twice a day,” Ciara says, slightly offended, to which he laughs, holding up his hands in mock surrender: hey, baby, I’m just sayin’. And after a moment she smiles too, because there’s nothing else to do—humour, charm, etcetera. Not worth wrecking a working relationship over.
“How long have you known those people, exactly?” she finds herself asking, instead. “In that house, I mean. The delivery.”
“Ciara, shorty, you need to be more specific.”
“Last night, Garth. Down near the water?”
“What? Oh, dockside, yeah . . . them fools. How well I know ‘em? Well as I know anybody, girl, you feel me? Well as I know you, for damn sure.”
Ciara can’t think that’s true, exactly, though she knows enough not to say so. “They seem . . . odd,” she says instead, carefully, somewhat afraid he’ll find that funny, too. But Garth simply shrugs.
“Odd’s okay, long’s they pay. I mean, we dealin’ narcotics, not givin’ out Meals on Wheels or nothin’. Odd’s kinda our stock in trade.”
“Well yes, I suppose, but—they say they sell children.” Explaining, as he looks at her: “In their basement, that’s where they keep them. Kids people don’t want anymore, for sale to new parents.”
“Um, huh: that don’t sound right. Sure you ain’t trippin’?” He nods at her pill-bottles, but she shakes her head; the meds aren’t that sort of drug, as he knows.
Still: “I’m never sure,” Ciara admits, after a moment. “Of anything.”
“Good to keep that in mind, then, huh? You see them kids, or what?”
“. . . no. But I heard them, and that woman, she told me—”
“Bitch, please; that woman’d tell you the sun come up backwards an’ inside-out, you give her the right kinda fix. ‘Sides, not like you don’t see shit ain’t there on the regular, right?” Which makes Ciara pause another moment, frowning, even as Garth’s voice softens. “Listen, sleep some more on it, see if you still feel the same tomorrow. I mean, ain’t like they call every week, so might be you never have to go back there, anyhow. That’d be good, huh?” As she nods: “That’s my girl. And if they keep on creepin’ you out, then boom! They cut off. No extra charge. You my boo, Ciara; need you more’n I need them, and that’s the truth. Junkie under every rock, you just know where to look.”
Which is him trying to be reassuring, she guesses.
Later, meanwhile—her meandering path taking her along much the same delivery circuit, bike slipping dock-wards by slow degrees—Ciara finds herself stopping almost at random, pausing to snap photos of whatever she suspects might not be quite as there as it seems. Some of it’s easy to spot, like that bright shoal of sharp-toothed little fish infesting the air between the trees, or a MISSING poster with her own face on it, but other things are slipperier: a shadow-trick circling that greasy spoon’s chimney with darkness, only noticed just as it’s withdrawn all of a sudden, slick as some retreating tentacle. A dog with no tail and six legs glimpsed at a far remove, barking what almost sounds like human curses in Arabic, or maybe Japanese.
And then there’s the house, curtains drawn tight. The painted-over basement windows like cataracts, a corpse’s coin-set eyes.
She snaps a series of views from almost every angle, for further study.
“Are you taking your meds?” her social worker asks, looking down at her pen as she takes notes.
Ciara nods, frowning a bit when she receives no response, before realizing the woman probably can’t see what she’s doing. So: “Yes,” she confirms, out loud.
“Every day?”
“They say ‘take every day’ on the package, so yes.”
This finally gets her a glance, more narrow than she’s comfortable with. “You need to be compliant, Ciara, you know that,” the social worker tells her. “I don’t want to have to send you back.”
“I understand.”
“Keep up with the meds, in other words.”
That’s the clear implication, Ciara thinks. But only repeats, instead: “Yes.” Getting up, turning away.
The woman’s already gone back to her notes, no doubt thinking about her next appointment. It would be easy to simply walk away, let it slide, go where her feet yearn to take her. Instead, however, Ciara hears herself asking: “If you knew something bad was happening, would you try to do something about it?”
The worker looks up again, eyes sharpening. “Is something bad happening?”
“Well . . .” Ciara back-pedals. “. . . um, I said ‘if.’ More of a ‘for instance,’ really.”
“Hmmm, all right. Then if that’s the way it is, I’d probably try to make sure I had all my facts straight, that I actually understood what I was dealing with, before I made any hasty decisions. You know? Before I did something I might regret.”
“Uh huh.”
“You are taking the pills, though. Right, Ciara?” She nods. “Say yes again, please, one more time. Out loud.”
“Yes,” Ciara replies yet once more, annoyance sparking. “Of course.”
“Then you’ll be okay to figure things out for yourself, probably. Like an adult. Which you are, right?”
“. . . right.”
“Just making sure,” the woman says, with a last, not completely unconvincing smile: you’re dismissed, the subtext reads, clear enough even Ciara can’t fail to pick up on it as her cue to go.
Outside, her continuing freedom duly rubber-stamped and signed off on, Ciara passes the usual complement of fellow crazy people. Granted, their cocktails probably aren’t the same as hers (exactly), or their diagnoses, but she feels a certain sympathy for them nonetheless—she can read their body language, spot them from a distance, the same way they can read/spot her. In any given crowd, no matter where, they’ll always know each other.
The man nearest the door—she thinks his name is Fubar, unlikely thought that seems—looks up as she approaches, sidelong; he has a tattooed scalp and a fresh streetburn, just starting to shade from peel to tan in patches. “‘Lo,” he says. “Cee-arra, yeah?”
“Chee-ahra,” Ciara corrects. “Can I, um, show you some-thing?”
“. . . okay.”
“It’s just pictures. On my phone.”
He looks down, then up again, eyelids clicking dry as he blinks. “Yeah, all right, sure.”
Ciara sits down to watch as Fubar flips through the photos, considering them owlishly, one by one. “Don’t know what you’re expecting,” he says, eventually, and Ciara has to take a moment to think, before answering—how much can she tell him, after all, and how much should she?
“I just need you to say what you see,” she replies, and watches his eyebrow twitch upwards.
“This a trick question, girlie?”
“No, not at all. No.”
“Uh huh. Wouldn’t tell me if it was, though, right?”
Probably not, Ciara thinks, as Fubar gives a creaky laugh, thumbs back to the beginning, studies them again with equal disinterest. Until—
“Trees,” he begins, at last. “Streets, a restaurant, some crapped-out little shack. Front view, back view, side view. You shoppin’ for a new home? Could put a down-payment on that one pretty easy, I’d think, ‘less you’re allergic to dirt.”
“Yes. And that’s all you see?”
“Walls, doors, windows, the works; bricks below, shingles up top, concrete on the damn walkway. Sky, light. Freakin’ shadows.” A snort. “Seriously, want something else? Then you maybe better give me a ghost of a clue on what.”
Ciara looks at him for a moment, debating. Then asks, finally: “Do you see any children in them?”
. . . and feels the tiny hairs on her arms go up with a dull yet completely distinct shiver, shoulder to wrist, as he nods, points—drags a dirty nail across the screen, finger casually connecting dots from this one to that, here to there, everywhere.
In the basement’s windows.
In the windows above, too—upper, lower. Those on the first floor. Those on the second.
>
On the roof, under the eavestroughs. Behind the chimney. Clinging to the slope.
Under the front porch. Behind the doors, front and back.
Looking out at him—at her—through the letter-slot, the keyhole.
“Can’t see ‘em?”
Ciara shakes her head.
“But they’re yours, right?”
“No. They’re not.”
“Huh. That’s surprising.”
“Why?”
But he just shrugs, falling silent. The subsequent pause in their conversation drags out a good long while after that, Ciara clamping down on a growing urge to grab the phone back and run, before she hears herself blurt out, at last: “Okay, but . . . can . . . can they . . . see me?”
“No idea, girlie.”
“Oh. Then why—”
Fubar squints down one more time before handing the phone to her again, sun-damaged fingers surprisingly cool on hers, movement dry and quick as a lizard’s.
“Do look a whole damn lot like you, those kids in there,” he concludes, finally. “That’s all I really meant to say.”
And turns away.
That night, the world bears in on her extra-hard, no filter between its truth and her naked brain. Everything pressing down, an inverted pyramid, crushing her into one small, still point of concentrated misery; sheer weight of a wasted lifetime, all crashing in on her at once. She sits in the kitchen, crying, room around her reduced to a haze of uncertain light, lensed through tears as though drowned: an existence measured out in cost-benefit analysis coffee-spoons, forever eking away like some endless plus-minus chain.
It’s moments like these, thankfully few and far between, when she feels the void open up beneath her heart—a second mouth set to yearning, hot, bright and hungry—empty, always wanting, never filled. When she realizes her so-called life is less peace than purgatory, a sere and dreadful place where nothing will ever touch her as long as she never touches anything in return, forever.
As night falls, her cheeks air-drying, Ciara watches the lights go on all over town—what little of it she can access, that is, through her apartment’s window. Feels the wires hum, electricity spreading out like a web, both seen and unseen; that net of cables, connecting everything. That buzz in the air, never stopping, no matter how late the hour.
A voice speaking up from the back of her brain, now, clear as the day she first heard it: some prof from first year, at the very start of her truncated university “career.” Our entire civilization’s unnatural, sociologically speaking, he says, and she doesn’t even have to close her eyes to see him—face gaunt but body pale and puffy, a dough-lump set with sunken bones, snappy cardigan and sandals ensemble pointing to almost certain tenure. Building cities started it, but ever since the implementation of electric light, mankind has completely lost its natural circadian rhythms; we’re all chronically sleep-deprived, every single one of us. Used to be, the sun went down, there was nothing to do but sleep—too dark for detail work, not if you wanted to keep your eyesight. Now people can work at night, work all night . . . hell, we live by night, in a way our species just never evolved to do. Studies show that people awake and operating between three and six a.m. take on brainwave patterns like those of somnambulists, causing the line between waking and dreaming consciousness to literally disappear.
Which is why doctors can perform entire operations yet recall none of the details afterwards, why workers can go whole shifts without making new memories, simply surfing on already-recorded impressions of how it feels to perform a meaningless task over and over and over. Because when your brain knows you’re essentially waking up on the same day you went to sleep, you lose all referents for transition, the ability to separate today from yesterday and tomorrow. Time itself stops meaning anything.
Vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight; neurochemical imbalance from overexposure to UV; the psychological effects of long-term social isolation—it’s all the same process, kids, and sleep deprivation just makes it happen faster. Ruin the body’s rhythm, you ruin the body . . . and the mind.
Ciara considers the ceiling of her apartment, trying to remember if she’d found the lecture funny or not, at the time, or if that was the rest of the class. Looking back, there certainly seems to be some vague echo of laughter running counterpoint beneath the words—but then again, classrooms are bad for that; she’s been listening to people snicker almost her whole educational life, even when she hasn’t borne the brunt of it. Though she can only suppose it’s better to laugh than cry, in general, just like the old phrase says—sometimes, anyhow. Depending on the subject matter.
Professor Guy got it backwards, though, far as she can reckon: given her mind came pre-wrecked, her schedule can only be the effect of that ruin, not its cause. Can’t possibly sleep your way back to health when your basic problem is being hazy on telling sleep from waking, in the first place.
She rolls off the bed, hand finding a sketchbook on her end-table in the dark, without needing to look. Time to take the Zen approach—stop trying to go to sleep, let it come to you. Flick on the light, grab the coloured pencils; turn to a blank page, and let the patterns flow out of your moving hands onto the paper. Veer between symmetry and asymmetry. Lay out shapes in spirals and matrices, abstract mosaics. Don’t try to draw anything, just watch the paper slowly fill in, patterns accreting across the white space like stained glass frost.
It was an art therapist who first recommended this particular insomnia cure, during Ciara’s last hospital stay, waxing poetic about the benefits: repetition, concentration without thinking, the colours. Like concrete meditation. Normally, she’d be yawning before she covered half the page, but maybe it’s time to re-adjust her meds again; she sits back, scrubbing at her face, looking at the weave of triangles, polygons and lines. Then frowns, and studies it again.
Is there—something in the pattern, now? That she didn’t put there, obviously: a hidden shape, similar to one of those eye-wrenching 3-D pictures you can only see by unfocusing your eyes and looking behind the surface? Looking up at her, flat yet rough-edged, its corners lifting slightly from the paper, as though about to detach and—
(flip up, twist out)
(flap away)
Her bedside light goes out, but after the first second’s jolt—shock to the chest, tiny heart attack—she realizes the streetlights are still on, so this can’t be a power failure; bulb’s burnt out, that’s all. So she tosses the pad onto the bed, rises, then stops, turning slowly back.
The pattern, lying in a square of metallic yellow seeping in from outside, has changed; some colours bleached to invisibility, but others inverted, gone toxic-negative. The spectrum shift renders its hidden shape painfully clear: the house, that house. But . . .
More, too. Much more.
Because: she can finally see them now, in this light, from this—angle. Doesn’t even have to squint. Eyes in all the windows, wetly bright, insectile; bodiless faces like wind-caught balloons, slack-grinning. Twisted figures smearing themselves, disproportionately, everyplace Fubar’s moving finger once touched; not threatening but shivering, self-protective. Forever coiled in on themselves against a world full of monsters no one else acknowledges.
The children. The ones who supposedly look exactly like her.
They plead their case wordlessly, appealing to her: Help us, Ciara. Find us, free us. Be there for us, in our hour of need . . . the way no one ever was, for you.
(This much she understands, after all, both well and intimately—how when you’re diagnosed as different, when everyone around you “knows” you see things, the first thing certain predatory parties start thinking is how they can probably get away with anything, because no one will ever believe you if you tell. And mostly, they’re absolutely right.)
Something happened to you too, right? A girl asked her once, in Shepherd’s Flock, long before she met Garth. And that’s why you’re here. Right? Then nodded even though Ciara hadn’t answered, continuing: Yeah, see, I k
new it. Knew it had to’ve. ‘Cause something always does.
She’s a good girl, my Ciara, that’s what her mother used to tell people. Got her challenges, sure, but that doesn’t matter; with the Lord’s help, she’s good. Does what she ought, no back-talk. Does whatever you tell her to.
And yes, that had been true, for the longest time—up to a point. The point she went off to university, to be accurate; left her family’s house, their firm embrace, their watchful, shepherding gaze. When she had that first episode, then that second one . . . ended up in jail overnight, in custody, committed. When she ended up in a halfway house where another “exceptional” young adult started in on her and she went into a sort of fugue-state, unable to admit what was happening until it was too late, the changes in her body were too obvious to deny. Which was when, in turn, her parents took her to one doctor then almost immediately to another, where something they never bothered to fully explained was done to her.
It took six months back at home, doped to the gills, for her to finally figure out exactly what’d happened, and the confrontation which followed threw the gates of Shepherd’s Flock wide open: if she bites down hard enough, she can still feel the ache where Momma slapped her for even suggesting such a thing, hear the noise as her jawbone cracked under the pressure of that beautiful two-karat engagement ring Daddy bought her when the money started coming in. After which Ciara hit her back, hard enough to break a tooth.
Ciara draws her breath, throat burning, stuttering. Allows herself to recognize the all too familiar way that her room’s own darkness has already begun to writhe softly just beyond that square of sick light’s parameters, surfaces set similarly a-tremble: coiling, uncoiling. A thousand carrion lips set smiling by her discomfort, mocking and menacing all at once.
You’re going back to that house right now, to those kids, to help them, these no-mouths whisper from every direction, each word a barely-suppressed smirk. I mean, not that you can, probably, but . . . you’ll do it, even so. Because you are what you are, see what you see, so it really does behoove you to do something about it, goddamnit, at the very, very least. Anything else is cowardice, plain and simple.
Strangers Among Us Page 30
