After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I cried and cried, just sitting there on my knees in the hall, holding Teresa’s door open the whole time. Like telling her I was sorry and meaning it, now.

  Like isn’t this enough?

  No.

  The doorbell rang its broken ring.

  I shook my head no.

  I stood in the hall. The doorbell rang again. Then again.

  “Wait here,” I said to Teresa’s open door, and let it close gently, made my way to the front door, to whatever this next punishment was going to be. From the Philippines, from China, from Kentucky.

  It was from six doors down, on the other side of the street.

  The new kid’s little brother. He was holding a bat, shuffling his feet.

  Behind him the street was empty. Just the soccer net.

  He’d come out alone to practice. To get good enough to play with the big kids.

  Until now.

  “Let me guess,” I told him, and he nodded, couldn’t make eye contact, and I saw him through the camera again, from a distance, with nightshot.

  The way Teresa would have.

  I stepped aside, shrugged, and he leaned his bat against the porch wall, came in.

  In the living room now, some of the lights were on, some off. In the whole house. Perfectly normal.

  “I think it went—” he started.

  “I heard it,” I told him, leaving the front door open, and ushered him down the hall, pushed against Teresa’s door with my fingertips.

  “What’s that smell?” the boy said.

  Teresa’s room was as scattered as it had been, just me and the boy’s dim outlines in the mirror, but, in the direct center of the bed, like the bed was a nest, was a baseball, the curtains in the now-open window rustling like it could have come through there, sure.

  “If anything’s broke, my dad will…I’m sorry,” the boy said, about to cry.

  “No worries,” I told him, “it happens,” my hand to his shoulder, and guided him in like Teresa had to be wanting, held the door open just long enough for him to get to the edge of the bed, look back to me once. And then I let the bungee cord snick the door shut, collected the bat from the front porch and settled back into my chair. There wasn’t even a muted scream from down the hall. Just the sound of forever.

  In it, I aimed the gun into my mouth, pulled the trigger.

  The readout said I was still alive, still human.

  As far as it knew, anyway.

  and the universe. She’s learned her lesson. It doesn’t need to go any farther. It doesn’t.

  But it already is.

  He watches her from the edges of the room. From just past the light, where it doesn’t reach all the way to the wall. His Catwalk of Shadow. His Dark Hallway. His Night Path. His whatever-he-calls-it.

  She pictures him designing this room in his mind for years.

  No windows, one door. Cement floor. A hole in that cement for the toilet—a ritual she’s learned to close her eyes for. There’s even studs to attach the legs of her wooden chair to the floor. She wonders if the chair’s wooden because he’s going to wheel a car battery in. She wonders if dogs are next. Or rats. Birds.

  She wonders a lot of things.

  She can feel her bra, still on. Some bra, anyway. No panties, but something that’s got to be a catheter.

  Her clothes have been replaced by scrubs. Because scrubs are easier. They still have the creases in them.

  Is he saving her clothes to dress her in again, after?

  Does he work at a hospital? At a laundry?

  Her hair, it was down the toilet hole the first day. She assumes. She woke and it wasn’t on her head anymore.

  Because her mouth was taped, because it’s always taped, she couldn’t ask him why. She couldn’t ask him anything.

  And he doesn’t turn the light off.

  The game she plays is to close her eyes for forty seconds or a minute, then open them fast, in the direction of the place in the room he last was, or the next place he should be. The idea is that her light-starved pupils will somehow drill through the shadows, and her mind can take a snapshot of him.

  The game he plays is more hands-on.

  •

  On the fifth day he steps into the light, his eyes already watching her.

  Her body shudders and she kind of barks a sob out. She hates herself for it, but if she wasn’t tied to the chair she’d be reaching for him, she knows.

  In her arm is the IV that must be feeding her.

  The clear tube snaking out from it trails off into the darkness.

  It could be a sedative, though. Or worse.

  He could be doping her into some sort of mental twilight, then spooning clam chowder into her mouth twice a day, touching the corners of her mouth with the corner of a napkin.

  It doesn’t stop the other parts, though. The parts she’s awake for.

  It involves the duct tape from the meat drawer of the refrigerator.

  She assumes it’s the meat drawer.

  What he does after stepping into the light is drag another wooden chair across the floor and sit down directly across from her.

  It’s not a torture chamber, she tells herself.

  It’s an interrogation room.

  He just has some questions, that’s all.

  If she answers right, she can go home.

  Except he isn’t speaking. He’s just watching her. Licking his top lip once, but not in a particularly hungry way. More like he’s waiting for some mental cuckoo clock to announce the right time.

  You don’t say that out loud to someone in his position, though. Even through tape.

  He hears anyway, unpockets a utility knife, balances it on his right thigh. It takes a few seconds to get it right, but then he remembers, snicks the first quarter inch of blade out, has to balance the knife all over again.

  She pees heat into her catheter, screams her throat full.

  He waits for her to calm.

  His face isn’t masked or bagged or painted or disguised, and she doesn’t want to see it anymore. She doesn’t care. She wants him to know she doesn’t care. If he would just look into her eyes, listen to what she’s trying to mean.

  He’s checked out, though. He’s waiting.

  She’s breathing as hard as her nose will allow, now. For a moment that feels like luck, like providence, like the universe answering her, one of her tears slips behind the adhesive of the tape over her mouth and under her chin, and she tastes that saltiness, and realizes that if she cries enough, the tape might let go, and then she can scream until the right person hears.

  Except she isn’t at all sure there are any right people within hearing.

  And then it’s time.

  •

  The game, his game, he teaches it to her slowly. Patiently.

  It involves the tape. And the utility knife. That first quarter inch of it, anyway.

  At first he just leaves the knife and the tape there on the top of his leg. For her to get used to them. The same way she’d once seen someone on television get a horse used to a saddle. He’s easing them into this. Together.

  What he does next, minutes later, after she’s ridden the swell of her fear back to a place where she can breathe halfway normal, is tear off three or four inches of the dull grey tape, then press the part still on the roll back down, lining it up edge-to-edge.

  With the same deliberation, then, the same attention, he presses that torn-off piece of tape onto her forearm, and rubs it down with the undersides of the fingers of his right hand so that, for the first time, the tape brings heat, doesn’t draw it out from her.

  She throws up, her head rocking with it, and he cuts a slit in the tape over her mouth to keep her from drowning.

  It doesn’t stop this from happening, though.

  Nothing will.

  He tapes new tape onto her mouth when it’s dry enough, when she’s calm enough, and sits back down on the very front part of his chair. Moving slow and holding the knife out like a demonstratio
n, keeping it flat in his open hand at first like that’s supposed to help, he brings it towards her left arm. Toward that strip of tape he’s pressed there.

  At right about the center of it, both lengthwise and width, and holding the knife with both hands for precision, he pushes the bright leading corner of the razor blade through the grey, into her arm. A quarter inch into her arm.

  And then he traces a small triangle only as long as it is deep, her blood welling up through the new lines. The blade dipping out and in at the corners, to make proper points, to connect the lines all the way. Like that’s a rule. Like there can even be rules anymore.

  When he’s done he looks up to her, right into her eyes. He’s not breathing.

  She bucks and strains and cries and screams more in her throat.

  He holds his index finger up.

  She thinks it’s shhh, but then he rabbit-ears a second finger up.

  He’s counting.

  On three, and without breaking eye contact, as if looking down to what he’s doing would be cheating, he rips the length of tape up from her forearm.

  When she can see again, there’s a small, dull grey triangle of tape left on her forearm, blood welling up around it.

  She looks up to him about it and he sits back in his chair.

  Moving slow, with obvious reluctance, he stands to lower his black, military-surplus pants to his ankles.

  She’s shaking her head no, now. Please, please no, not this.

  But it’s not what she thinks.

  He’s lowering his slacks to give himself access to the fishbelly flesh of the top of his thigh, his right thigh, the wiry black hairs sparse there, like a forest that burned a quarter century ago. The top of his other thigh matted with ropy scars of untended cuts, all at about the same angle.

  He purses his lips, looks up to her, and draws a neat red line into the skin of his right. It makes him lower his head. In pain. In prayer. In something.

  The blood is going both ways around his leg, to the seat of his pants. It doesn’t look like spider legs or like a ribbon or like melted candy. Just blood.

  When he looks back up to her, his eyes have resettled themselves. His face is remote.

  “Fair’s fair,” he says, and pulls his pants up, snaps them shut, drags his chair back into the darkness.

  He lost.

  She keeps saying that to herself.

  •

  The next time he pulls a strip of tape up from her arm, the triangle of skin comes up with it, dangling by a gummy thread.

  This time he doesn’t cut himself.

  It’s a simple game, really.

  Three times in a row, by willpower alone, she holds onto her triangle of tape, the top of his right thigh opening up like the back of a butterflied shrimp, over and over, his meat dull and striated before the blood rushes in to cover it.

  Like with her arm, he isn’t applying bandages or ointment or care to himself.

  Fair’s fair.

  The triangle either stays in place, a tiny island in a sea of blood, or it hang-gliders up into its sky.

  But then she loses six times in a row, and he has to switch to the other arm.

  At what’s either the second week or the third week, her family’s kitchen probably stacked with uneaten casseroles, their porch mounded with flower baskets, he brings a flashcard in with him.

  On it is a hieroglyph, or an ideogram, or a cuneiform in ink.

  She looks from it to his face, then back to the card.

  He holds it up even with her eyes, and, moving slow again—this is his knife hand—he peels the tape from her mouth, from under her chin.

  She licks her lips ravenously, never had any sense that was something she could long for so deeply.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  She’s been practicing. She’s made promises to herself. She knows her lines. This is the first step. This is her chance.

  It doesn’t matter.

  He holds the card closer. Waiting.

  She narrows her eyes. She looks past the card to him.

  “What do you want?” she says, off-script.

  Nothing. No response.

  “I’ve—I’ve got a daughter,” she says, remembering her plan. Her strategy.

  “To trade?” he asks, a grin ghosting the corners of his mouth up.

  She closes her eyes, looks away.

  You can’t die from holding your breath, she tells herself. And you can’t die from just wanting to. Not with your arms taped down. Your legs. Not in this room.

  Moving with what she wants to read as fatigue, he tears off a three-inch strip of tape and applies it, snicks the razor from the knife.

  It’s just sounds to her, now.

  It’s not really her body anymore.

  He cuts deeper, until she has to agree that it is still her body.

  It’s worth it. It makes her triangle of tape stay behind.

  He cuts himself just as deep and has to tilt his face up, to keep his eyes from spilling.

  She loves him a little, in thanks. And hates herself for that.

  •

  Next is her lower lip.

  It’s the day the roll of tape runs out.

  He studies the leftover cardboard tube, the spinout her daughter used to call it—right?—then nods, leans over, deposits it in the hole of her toilet.

  Like everything that goes down there, it falls and it falls.

  She shrugs like oh well. Nothing to do.

  He doesn’t agree.

  Instead of going back to his refrigerator for more tape, he uses what they have, what’s already there, on her mouth. But only after holding the flashcard up again. Giving her one more chance.

  It’s still nothing to her. Less than nothing.

  He stands to hold her forehead when he pushes the knife into the tape. And it’s good that he does. Otherwise the tip of the blade would be all over her face.

  The triangle of her lower lip goes with the tape this time, and when it does she slings her head back, sees the afterburn of that ideogram on the ceiling. That hieroglyph. That cuneiform, that inkdoll, that Rorschach blot.

  It hangs in the air before her for a moment then slips back to wherever it came from. Wherever it goes. Wherever it lives.

  It’s been a month, at least. It has to have been.

  She’s been replaced at work. Her family’s in mourning.

  He stands there with her strip of tape in his hand, by his right thigh, a deep piece of her lower lip stuck to the tape, as rubbery as octopus meat, and he lets her scream.

  This time when her tears slide down, they seep into the open wound her lip has become.

  She screams through it. That she should have watched closer, she should have been better, she knows. She screams that she’s sorry. She screams that she hates him. She screams that she’s the wrong girl, can’t he see? It’s not her. He wants somebody else for this, whatever this is.

  He just watches her. Studies her.

  “What do you want?” she asks when she can, out of breath, blood and saliva stringing off the bottom of her chin. Onto her wrists. Under the tape.

  Up here, she tells him with her eyes. Keep your eyes right here.

  He looks down the backside of the tape he’s holding and pinches her bloodless triangle of skin up from it. He inspects it like it’s a bug. Like it’s piece of a bug, and he’s trying to guess at its true form, its lifecycle. What it eats and what it doesn’t. What it looks like sleeping.

  And then he folds the tape shut over it, presses it tight, giving it the burial it deserves, and when it makes its wet fibrous sound she feels another jolt of pain.

  Her bottom lip’s discharge goes clear hours after he leaves. Clear like the fluid in her IV tube. It’s what she’s made of, anymore, she knows.

  She tilts her head back to try to keep it in, and stays that way for most of the night. Or what she thinks is the night.

  •

  The next two weeks it’s that same idiot of a flashcard. That
same hateful symbol, sign, letter.

  He brings new tape, just as chilled.

  She’s taken to laughing when he has to cut himself. To making herself laugh.

  She tells him his lap is what the mall Santa for cats must look like. She tells him to go slower, so she can watch, so she can hear. She stabs her tongue into the hole in her lip to stay awake.

  The tops of her arms are ruined by now, a patchwork of bloody triangles, all pointing at her bicep. The IV is spiked into the top of her foot. She doesn’t remember it happening. Or her daughter’s name, either.

  She tells herself that’s the real pain, that that hurts the worst. But then she’ll see the knife again, from across the room.

  He holds the card in front of her and she tries spitting on it, just to get a new one. Just to switch the station, please. Her spit doesn’t make it past her chin, even. Just her right wrist.

  He saws the front of her scrub-shirt open, lays a strip of tape on the pale top of her left breast.

  She lays her head back, stares at her favorite spot on the ceiling.

  Moments later both cups of her bra warm with blood, not just the left, like she was expecting.

  It’s something. And maybe not her bra, even, so there.

  She doesn’t even look down to see if she won or lost.

  On the ceiling, she moves her eyes in the brushstrokes of the hieroglyph, and she isn’t sure whether she’s telling herself to do it or if she’s watching herself do it.

  In school, she’d studied business, not ancient cultures. Not languages. Not art. Not even international business. She only knows of cuneiform from a project in sixth grade. But they were writing in English, for it. Their boyfriend’s names. With hearts they had to smuggle onto their tablets, hide until the clay dried.

  “You’ve got the wrong girl,” she tells him again, just speaking straight up, her throat stretched tight, her words easy in spite of that, because her flesh is less every day. “You can keep doing this, but I’ll never guess.”

  “You don’t have to guess,” he says, his voice smooth like he’s been talking all day. “You already know. You just don’t know it yet.”

  By the time she looks up, he’s already limped away.

  His cuts are just as infected as hers. Just as festering. Just as boiling with pus.