Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  33

  I am pain. I am nothing but the agony of my body and mind. I don’t know how long I’ve been alternating between total darkness and blinding white light, silence and the booming voice asking questions I can’t answer. I might have been here for hours or days. It’s dark now, and I take comfort in it, though my body is numb from the inch of freezing water in which I lie. I am shivering uncontrollably, my jaw clenched.

  A rectangle of light opens in the wall and a man, small and lean, walks through a doorway I didn’t know was there. His footfalls echo off the metal surfaces, and he comes to a stop about an inch from my body. I can’t see his face. The lights come up then, less harsh than before, but still I have to close my eyes, open them to slits, then close them again. I do this several times before I am acclimated to the light.

  His face is distantly familiar, angular and deeply lined. His eyes are small and watery, his lips dry and pulled tight. But he’s not Marlowe.

  “This can end. It can be over for you,” he says to the wall. He doesn’t want to look at me, out of either pity or disgust. I struggle to stand, and I feel a wave of light-headedness so severe I almost black out.

  “Just tell me where he is, Ophelia,” he says, his voice reasonable and tired.

  I am confused, disoriented. I don’t know why he thinks I know where Marlowe Geary is. But I can’t say any of this. I just can’t make the words come out. He stands there for I don’t know how long, looking at the wall. I think he’ll move to hurt me, to kick me where I lie. But he doesn’t. He just stands there.

  “I don’t know,” I finally manage. “I swear to you. I don’t know where he is.” My voice is little more than a desperate croak.

  He rubs his temples in a gesture of fatigue. I am straining to remember his face.

  “Annie Fowler may not know. But Ophelia March does,” he says softly, almost kindly. His eyes are flint. “She knows.”

  “No,” I say. “No. I don’t remember.” I try to keep myself from sobbing in front of him, but I can’t. I am desperately searching my newly recovered memories. Is it possible that somewhere inside the maze of my shattered psyche I know where Marlowe has been all these years? I chase it, but it turns corners fast, slips away from me. If I could catch it, I would. I would.

  “I don’t want to hurt you any more, Ophelia,” he says.

  “Don’t,” I answer, more out of desperation than anything else.

  His whole body goes rigid. He drops to his knees into the cold water and puts his face, red and pulled like taffy with his rage, next to mine. I can smell his breath as he whispers ferociously in my ear, “Then tell me what I want to know, Ophelia.”

  I recognize him then. He’s the Angry Man, one of the protesters that waited on the road outside the horse farm, the one that threw a rock at our car that day. My brain doesn’t know what to do with this. I struggle to get up, to get away from him, even as my mind is struggling to put this piece of information into one of the blank spaces of my life. But it’s too much. I black out.

  When I come to again, the Angry Man is gone. The lights are still on. I sit up with effort and look around the room. There’s nothing to see but metal walls and a photograph left by my feet. I pick it up. It’s a picture of Victory, my baby, my little girl. Her eyes are closed, her face a ghostly white. Her blond curls fan around her face like the light cast from a halo. There’s a piece of black tape over her mouth, and her hands are bound behind her. She looks impossibly small and fragile.

  Every rational thought I have left in my head deserts me, and I start to scream. It’s a guttural wail that seems to come from someplace primal within me; it’s involuntary, rips through me. I’ve heard this sound before so many times in my worst nightmares, my memories of Janet Parker. I pull myself from the floor and go over to pound on the door.

  The voice booms through the speakers I can see now on the ceiling.

  “Let’s start again. Where’s Marlowe Geary?”

  34

  Ray Harrison lived another life after his wife and daughter went to bed. When they were awake, he was centered, rooted in his life by his love for them. But when they both slept, a strange restlessness awoke within him, an almost physical tingling in his hands and legs. It was something he wouldn’t have been able to explain, even if he wanted to. And he didn’t.

  The silence of the nighttime house, as Sarah called it—the dimmed lights in the kitchen, the hum of the baby monitor, the television volume so low he could barely hear it—caused him to connect with a hole inside himself, a place that needed to be filled. These were the hours when he had first found himself on the phone to his bookie, betting ridiculous sums on games he was assured were a lock. These were the hours when he sat riveted to the screen—always with the same feeling of stunned incredulity—as the quarterback with the bad knee made the impossible touchdown, as the horse who couldn’t lose stumbled and fell, as the pitcher with the bad arm threw a perfect game. It felt personal sometimes, it really did. As if something were conspiring on a cosmic level to fuck him until he bled.

  So many nights he almost woke Sarah to tell her what he’d done to their life. But then he’d go to her and see that she was asleep so soundly, so peacefully, that he’d lose his nerve and just get into bed beside her. Her trust in him was total. She wasn’t one of those wives who called the station to see if he really was working overtime, who went over his pay stubs to check his hours against the tally she was keeping on the sly. She let him handle all their money, all the business of their life together. She never even looked at the accounts online. She wasn’t a woman who needed control. She was a woman who’d needed a baby and a home and a husband she trusted. He’d been able to give her all those things, easily, willingly.

  Then he’d almost destroyed her, without her ever even suspecting. Every time he thought about it, a shudder moved through him and his face would flush with shame. His escape from the total decimation of his life was narrow. He came so close he could feel it like the rush of a freight train.

  He found himself oddly grateful for me, the woman he knew as Annie Powers. If it hadn’t been for me, he strongly suspected that he’d be dead or that he would have lost the only two people who meant anything to him. And now he found himself using those hours, that terrible restlessness, to work his case, to find out what happened to the mysterious woman who, without meaning to, had saved him.

  He kept a cramped office off the kitchen where the large walk-in pantry used to be. There was a small desk, a creaky chair, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that he turned off and on with a string. He had an old computer that was slow and loud and badly needed replacing, but he could still use it to access the Internet through his dialup connection.

  On the night after he’d talked to Gray, while Sarah and Emily slept, he sifted through the contents of the envelope he’d found in my car. He had known immediately that it had belonged to Simon Briggs; his handwriting was a distinctive loopy cursive that looked like it belonged to a child—a deranged and very stupid child. He’d seen it on other items recovered from Briggs’s car. With its big, faltering O’s and wobbly L’s, his handwriting was oddly precise, as though he had copied each letter from a chalkboard in front of him. The envelope also carried an odor of cigar smoke, a scent that had permeated Briggs’s other belongings.

  It contained mainly printouts from articles Harrison himself had already read on the Internet. They were arranged neatly in chronological order, beginning with the article about the fire and murder at the horse ranch. Then there were articles detailing our flight across the country, the crimes Marlowe was suspected of committing, and our eventual death.

  There were photographs, stills taken by security cameras at convenience stores and gas stations across the country. Some of them were grisly, some of them grainy and with blurry images impossible to discern. And so many of them were of Ophelia, a haunted, broken-looking young woman. Harrison could barely connect her to me. One shot in particular moved him, disturbed him mor
e than any other. Marlowe and I were captured in conversation, a woman’s body on the floor beside us, violated and damaged in ways too unspeakable to describe. Harrison looked at my face and saw an expression he recognized; he’d seen the expression on Sarah’s face when she looked at him. It was a look of the purest and most profound love, a love that stood witness to every sin and endured just the same.

  I’m still lying in a pool of water, but I’ve stopped feeling the cold.

  “The notion of romantic love is wrongheaded,” the doctor tells me. He sits cross-legged in the corner of my metal room. His voice echoes, wet and tinny, off the walls and ceiling.

  “Human beings love the thing that tells them what they want to believe about themselves. If at your core you believe that you are worthless, you will love the person who treats you that way. That’s why you were able to love Marlowe the way you did.”

  “Because I thought I was worthless?”

  “Didn’t you? Isn’t that what your parents taught you by word or by deed? If not worthless, then at least negligible?”

  “But he didn’t treat me as though I was worthless.”

  “Not at first. They never do at first. Few people hate themselves so much, or so close to the surface, that they accept abuse right off the bat. If he’d treated you badly at first, you’d have walked away from him. He wouldn’t have been able to control you the way he did. That’s the trick of the abuser. He builds you up so that he can tear you down, piece by piece.”

  I conceded, even though this didn’t feel like the truth. But I have come to understand that in some cases the truth doesn’t seem like the truth at all. I had judged my mother harshly for loving a killer; I had hated her for her weakness, for the fact that she’d do anything to keep even the cheapest brand of love. But Ophelia was just like her.

  “When you’ve completely lost touch with your own self-worth, your very identity, he convinces you that he’s the only one who could ever love someone so wretched. The love he first gave you is a high you remember, and like a junkie you keep doing the drug, waiting for that first rush again. But it never comes. Unfortunately, though, it’s too late. You’re hooked.”

  “He loved me,” I say pathetically.

  My doctor gives a sad, slow shake of his head. “Ophelia, he was a psychopath. They don’t love.”

  “No wonder they took your license away.” My words come back at me sharp and hateful. “You’re a goddamn quack.” The truth can make us turn ugly like that.

  He smiles patiently, gives a gentle cluck of his tongue. “Temper, temper.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  He lifts a hand. “That’s all right. You’re under a little stress. I understand.”

  “I can’t tell him what he wants to know.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” I say, my voice climbing an octave.

  “You do know. Somewhere inside, you know.”

  I am startled awake. The doctor, my dead doctor, is not here in the room with me. I am alone, clutching the now torn and wrinkled picture of my daughter. It looks as though I have clenched and clawed at the image, trying to climb through to save her. I smooth it out now.

  “Victory,” I say out loud, just to taste her name. I have done this to her. The things we fear the most are always visited upon us; it’s the way of the universe. I rock with her picture, hating Marlowe Geary, hating the Angry Man, and hating myself most of all.

  Of course my dream doctor is right. Marlowe was a sociopath and a killer like his father. And no, of course he never loved me. But that didn’t stop me from loving him, from giving myself over the way only an abused and neglected teenage girl can give herself over, like a virgin on an altar, gratefully willing to be sacrificed. He manipulated and used me, but I laid myself down for him. Every time he killed and I did nothing, something vital within me died, until I was little more than a walking corpse.

  Now, strangely, I am resurrected in this place. I am neither the girl I was nor the woman I became. I am both of them.

  I think of all those flights from my life, my fugue states. I wonder where Ophelia was going, what she knew that Annie didn’t. I suspect now that she was going to find him. I remembered what Vivian said during our last conversation: You were haunted by him…. Part of you, maybe the part that couldn’t remember so much, was still connected to him.

  The question is, why? Was she trying to go back to him, wanting to be with him again? Was she that desperate, that stupid, that miserably in love? I don’t know the answer. But I am sure of one thing: Ophelia knows where Marlowe is. I just have to get her to tell me.

  “Can you hear me?” I yell into the air.

  The silence seems to hum, but it’s just the fluorescent light burning above my head, flickering almost imperceptibly. They’ve shut off the spotlight they’ve been shining on me—I see it mounted in the far corner of the room. I’m glad they’ve given up on that technique. In the other corner, there’s a security camera, a red light blinking beneath its lens.

  “Where is my daughter?” I yell, louder this time, looking at the camera. More silence, and then I hear the buzz of a speaker.

  “I don’t want to hurt her, Ophelia,” says the Angry Man, his voice, broken by static, sounding far away, as though he’s calling on an old overseas line. “I know what it is to lose a child. I don’t wish that on anyone. Not even on you.”

  “Don’t hurt her,” I say quickly, feeling my chest tighten. “I’ll find him.”

  The static from the speaker seems to fill the room. I should have demanded to hear her voice first before I agreed to help him. But I’m too desperate for those kinds of tricks.

  “You remember?” he says finally. “You’ll lead me to him?”

  “I’ll do anything you want,” I say, sounding as beaten as I am. “Just don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my baby.”

  I realize then that I’m weeping again. I’m so beyond shame that I don’t even bother to wipe the tears from my eyes.

  35

  When Marlowe and I finally got to New York City, to my father’s shop near the Village, I was a fly in a web, stuck and drugged, not even trying to escape. I didn’t even ask for help. It was still relatively early in our flight, only about three weeks after the fire at the horse ranch, and the authorities hadn’t put two and two together. At that point we were just runaways. I didn’t realize this, of course. I believed that we were fugitives, wanted as Janet Parker’s accomplices for murder and for the fire. I was still deeply in denial about what had happened at the gas station; in fact, it was gone from my consciousness completely. In my dreams I saw a bloody halo of hair spread out across a linoleum floor.

  My father asked no questions. He let us stay in the small spare room I used to sleep in when I’d stayed with him in the past, in the back of his apartment over the tattoo shop. There was a pink bedspread and a patchwork chair. The radiator cover was the same purple I’d painted it when I was twelve. There was an old doll made out of denim, with red yarn for hair and wearing a black Hells Angels T-shirt. One of my father’s old girlfriends had made her for me long ago. Predictably, I’d named her Harley.

  “I ran away when I was your age,” my dad told me when he took us upstairs to the bedroom. We’d just wandered into the shop; he hadn’t seemed surprised to see me. I didn’t know when he got back from his trip or if he’d ever been gone at all. I didn’t ask. “Been on my own ever since.”

  He said it with a kind of uncertain pride that filled me with disappointment. I wanted him to be angry, to scold me and help me find my way back from the downward spiral I knew I was in. But right away I saw he wasn’t going to do that.

  Marlowe and my father seemed to bounce off each other. They didn’t look at each other after the first greeting, a stiff handshake that seemed more like a confrontation ending in stalemate. Marlowe towered over my father by a head; Dad seemed almost frail and shriveled beside him. Another disappointment: In my mind’s eye, my father was a
lways a big man, powerful and strong. But I saw quickly that he was no match for Marlowe, physically or in any other way.

  If I recall correctly, we were there three nights. All those days seem to run together in my mind. Marlowe and I did little but eat and sleep in that quiet, dim back room, we were so exhausted and worn down. I remember having trouble differentiating between being awake and being asleep. I have vague recall of conversations with my father that seemed like parts of a dream: He asked about the weather in Florida…. He said he knew I was trying to reach him…. He was sorry that he’d been away. We talked about the tattoo he’d agreed to do for Marlowe. He seemed uncomfortable and tentative around me, as though he wasn’t sure how to handle this recent wrinkle in my life. Something inside me was screaming for help, but he was deaf to it.

  On the fourth morning, I heard a light rapping on the bedroom door before it pushed open a crack. I could see my father standing there, motioning for me. It was just after dawn, the sun leaking in through the slats of the drawn blinds.

  “O,” he whispered. “Opie.”

  I slipped out from beneath Marlowe’s arm and followed my father down the narrow hallway into his living room. The space was dominated by a large pool table surrounded by a couple of old metal folding chairs. It smelled so strongly of cigarette smoke that it made my sinuses ache. There was a small, dirty galley kitchen over by the door, with dishes in the tiny sink and rows of empty beer bottles lined up on the counter.