Hollow Man

by Mark Pryor

  It took sixteen days and she called Gus, not me, which pissed me off. She called at 9:30 on a Saturday night, while Gus was in the shower. His wife answered the phone, which made me laugh.

  When Gus got on the line, she claimed to have a gun in her hand, pointed at a bad guy, which is why Gus ignored his angry wife and called me immediately, and why I decided to give her another chance.

  Gus barely contained the panic in his voice, his words falling fast and jumbled.

  “She's terrified, she doesn't know what to do.” He was almost panting down the phone he was so breathless. “Dom, shit, you have to help.”

  Fear can be contagious, I know that and have seen it, but I am immune. My fear response is almost nonexistent. If someone close to me is in danger, or even if I am, it's as stressful as a game of chess. My chief response to Gus gabbling down the phone like a rooster with his arse feather plucked was impatience.

  “Just call the police,” I said. “What else does she expect you to do?”

  “She said something about having drugs, being there to rescue her brother and so no cops. I think I'm going out there.”

  “Good plan. But first, check with your wife that it's okay for you to go out and rescue a super-sexy woman who you have a massive crush on, and who's covered in bags of heroin while holding a gun on someone. If she says you can go, I'll join you.”

  Gus's voice hardened. “This is serious, Dom. She needs help.”

  “Maybe she does. But not ours. You're being ridiculous.” He was, of course. And the tickle of interest I felt was equally idiotic. But I couldn't help feeling that way—it was a part of me just like the other bricks that built the wall between me and everyone else. It was the part of me that I fought and repressed the most, actually. And I knew that, like magma beneath the earth's crust, it bubbled ferociously hot, looking for a crack that would allow it to burst free and scorch everything in its way. “Impulsivity”: number fourteen on the checklist, and two more points for me.

  Gus wouldn't give up. “You're in law enforcement, aren't you obliged to help?”

  “I'm a lawyer, Gus. I file motions and show up to court with polished shoes. Boots, to be precise. I don't have tactical training and I don't wear a cape under my suit. In fact, as I see it, my only obligation is to call the police.”

  “And a nice girl gets arrested for trying to save her brother.”

  “How do you know she's a nice girl? She's pointing a gun at someone.” A moment of silence echoed through the phone, and, given Gus's panic, I knew he wasn't telling me something. “Gus, what the fuck is going on?”

  “She is a nice girl.” He'd lowered his voice, almost to a whisper. “We've talked on the phone a couple of times. She told me about her family. Her dad is in prison and has been since she was a baby. Her mother is a drug user, and she's raising her brother by herself. So yeah, Dom, she's a nice person who's living in a shitty situation, one where the involvement of the police won't help.”

  I gritted my teeth and felt a growl in my throat, low and primal. Gus was an idiot, a goat tied to a stake in the ground, waiting to be devoured. Worse, he'd tied himself to the stake. She wasn't a nice girl, she was toying with him to get to me. She was letting Gus think that he'd won her over, and she wanted me to know it. The problem was, if I didn't play along right now, then I'd lose for sure. Not that Gus would ever have her, no, either she'd cut him loose or his moral compass would flicker straight and true. But I'd lose and I didn't like to lose, especially not to a demure, unexciting, married man.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “Give me the address.”

  The east side of Austin used to be where all the rookie cops wanted to work, the sector known as Charlie where the gung-ho boys in blue were guaranteed nightly encounters with drug dealers and gangbangers. In the rundown shopping centers and broken parking lots, there was the promise of nabbing a local politician getting his knob polished by a crack whore. I'd done ride-alongs in Charlie and had seen for myself the change that came with nightfall. The potholed alleys that were deserted in the day's heat became busy with shifty buyers and sellers who would lounge with practiced innocence every time a black-and-white rolled past. The car washes, too, filled in the daytime with pimps scrubbing their Cadillacs, were even busier at night as their girls steered a procession of Johns into the car stalls for, well, knob polishing. The place used to make SoCo look like Mayfair.

  Lately, though, economics had succeeded where the cops had failed to crack down on crime. The worst parts of East Austin were too close to downtown for the developers to ignore, and the slum landlords developed dollar signs in their eyes, unable to resist the hefty sacks of cash being dangled in front of their greedy, sniffing noses. This meant a slow death to the excitement of Charlie Sector as eco-friendly homes popped up alongside crack houses, and solar-powered town houses nudged aside crumbling, cinder-block duplexes. The yuppies moving in needed organic-food stores and coffee shops, not crack and hookers, and they didn't hesitate to call the cops about the hoodlums lurking on the street corners.

  As I drove, I spotted several clubs I'd heard about but not played in, new and hip and cool places to see, be seen, and pick up chicks. I felt acid in my stomach, that flash of anger as I realized that I may not get to play in those clubs, ever, and reminded myself that my extracurricular time needed to be spent tracking down the snake who'd lied about me stealing his music, rather than risking life and limb for Gus and his crush.

  The violence and discord moved farther east, away from downtown and into the ramshackle apartment complexes and trailer parks already inhabited by the poorest people who moved to the outskirts of Austin, the Mexicans and Hondurans who felt unwelcome and didn't much want to be seen unless it came to their lawn-care business. Or the gaggles of day laborers who gathered early in the morning hoping to feed their family that day and maybe pay some rent.

  The address Gus gave me was in this new war zone, a patch of unused land that lay between East Austin's jugular, Ed Bluestein Boulevard, beside a sprawling mobile-home park. About the size of a football field, it was all rock, dust, and broken beer bottles. If I'd looked closely, or perhaps remembered to bring a flashlight, I knew I'd have seen a sprinkling of used condoms and needles, too. Sometimes it's better to stay in the dark.

  It was 11 p.m. when I pulled up behind Gus's car. I doused my headlights and sat looking into the darkness for signs of the mayhem I'd been expecting. All was quiet. I opened my car door, and the ding-ding from the dashboard startled me until I whipped the key from the ignition.

  I got out and walked slowly toward Gus's car, reassured by the weight of my gun in the small of my back. The day's heat seemed to have settled on this place, pressing down on me and provoking the millions of cicadas, setting them to a cacophony of noise that blanketed the field. The moon fed down its light intermittently, wisps of cloud fanning across it like fingers playing Guess Who?

  I followed a dirt track that curved to my right, and stopped when I saw another car, a van. Two people stood watching me, and I knew who they were. I looked past them, and then down at their feet to see if they stood over a body, and when I didn't see anything I wondered if there was already one in the van. All seemed calm, normal. Safe for me to leave.

  That moment, I think, was my last chance to walk away, to turn and set my boots on the path back to my car before the dust settled behind me. I didn't do that. I couldn't because in a life so repressed, so controlled and so unnatural to me, I found myself presented with an adventure. Not just a theoretical one, either, but one that lay not more than twenty yards away in a dark field, an adventure that pitted me both with and against the closest thing I'd had to a best friend in years, and over a girl who intrigued me beyond any other. It felt like a black hole was drawing me in, and I crossed that dusty gap as the fragile safety of my life crumbled under my feet, disappearing with every step of those twenty yards. Tunnel vision blocked out the tedium that waited behind me, kept me from seeing the safety of my carefully contrived world
, and the glimpses of my life that I did get were of a job demotion and a decision from Marley, a forever ban from playing music at the Norman Pub. So right there, at the edge of a moonlit field in the wrong part of town, with a gun for comfort and a mystery unfolding before me, my involvement had ceased to be a choice.

  When I got close, she moved forward, the pale skin of her face glowing like platinum in the moonlight, but her eyes were narrow, as though she wasn't happy to see me.

  “Gus said you'd come,” she said. “I wasn't sure.”

  I didn't know what to say. The spell was almost broken by her flat tone, her unwelcoming face, as if I'd misread her, misread this evening. But this was a mystery in itself, part of her game perhaps. While I figured it out, as tricksters and liars will do, I refrained from committing myself to an emotional position and instead turned the focus outward, away from her and away from me.

  “What's going on?” I asked Gus. “Whose car is that?”

  Gus looked over his shoulder as if he didn't know it was there, then back at me. “I don't know.”

  I looked at her standing beside him. Her face softened and she smiled suddenly, a coy and teasing look. “You don't recognize it?”

  “A Ford van near a trailer park, I'd guess it belongs to Gus's client. But I can't imagine either of you would be stupid enough to actually steal it.”

  “Wrong on both counts,” she said. “The first count. For now.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It's a 1995 Ford Transit van,” she said. “Same make and model, different color. I wanted to show Gus that it was easy to steal.”

  “Borrow,” Gus said hurriedly.

  “Why would Gus care that it's easy to steal? Or borrow?”

  “Ask him.” She shrugged. “It was his story, after all. And the point of his story, unless I'm mistaken, was that some guy rides around with sacks of cash in a car that's easy to…” She shrugged again.

  It was true, of course, it was the point of his story. But she'd taken a story that you shake your head at and made it into a game that could land someone in jail. Also, I wasn't sure who was supposed to be in this game, or what the rules were. All I could think was that she'd recognized three people who needed money, including herself, and that was reason enough to roll the dice. But she was mistaken if she thought I needed money badly enough to steal.

  I started as the rear doors of the van opened behind her. A boy stuck his head out and looked at me, the same boy I'd seen at the JJC. Her brother.

  “Can we go?” he said. “My iPod battery is dying.”

  “Wait, he stole the van?” I asked.

  “I told you,” she said. “He has experience in matters criminal.”

  “And how nice of you to encourage him.”

  “I'm his sister, not his mother.” Her voice was soft. “Maybe we'll do a shift at the soup kitchen tomorrow. You ever help out at the soup kitchen?”

  “No,” I said. “What exactly do you want from us?”

  “Oh, Dom, don't be so suspicious,” she said. “So judgmental. Gus told a story, and we all wondered how easy it would be to steal that man's car.”

  “I didn't wonder that.”

  “Yes, you did.” It was the first hard note I'd heard in her voice, and again, she was right.

  “Fine,” I said. “I also wonder what it'd be like to drive at a hundred and twenty on I-35, but I'm not going to do it.” I also wonder what it'd be like to fuck you, but I'm not going to rape you.

  “Really? If you had a fast-enough car and were sure no one would catch you?”

  Gus gave a gentle laugh. “Even if you got caught, this is liberal Travis County. You'd get a slap on the wrist, if that.”

  They were actually being logical, persuasive, but it was still a road I didn't need to go down. “Then it's done. We know how easy it is to steal a 1995 Ford Transit van, so we can all go home.”

  No one moved. That vein of curiosity still pulsed in me, and I moved past them both to the car where the boy sat slumped in the front seat, plugged into his tunes. I looked to the ignition and saw the yellow handle of a screwdriver jammed into the key slot. He glanced up at me, then looked away as if he didn't want to be seen, didn't want to be there.

  I knew how he felt. I was at a crime scene that I wasn't going to report, standing next to a juvenile delinquent who'd stolen a car and broken curfew to do it. I was, legally speaking, at the sharp end of a conspiracy to commit a felony, which I also was not planning to report. I looked over my shoulder and found myself the hub of this little prank, two pairs of eyes on me as if the next move were mine, and mine alone. Normally I would want to take the lead so I could manipulate the situation to make sure my own ends were met. As it was, I just stood there staring back at them. And wondering.

  Could it really be that easy?

  My job had taught me many things, but that night the two that came to mind were the facts that criminals got away scot-free a lot more than they got caught, and that as a general rule, even the ones who got away were pretty stupid. I'd also been wayward enough as a youth to know that it wasn't necessarily the criminal act itself that determined whether or not you got caught, it was the planning. That was my bypass mechanism, the route I took to avoid my own nature. Because if I planned carefully enough, I could follow the rails of my own logic like a train and not be sidetracked by impulse.

  I watched as she climbed into the minivan with her brother, and it struck me that I didn't even know her name. I couldn't imagine what it would be, either, because ever since we'd met I'd thought about her as one would a dream. Or maybe a ghost in a nightmare—real enough to make me react, to entice and intrigue me, but in the end not a real person, and not with a real name.

  She drove without turning on the headlights, the van's tires spitting out dust and pebbles as it rocked and bounced along the dark track away from us.

  “So who lied about the gun to the head, you or her?” I asked.

  “Her,” he said, still staring down the track. “I wouldn't make that up.”

  “Figures.” We were silent for a moment, then I looked at him. “So what's her name?”

  “I have no idea,” he whispered.

  Sixteen days after my gig was canceled, that was also how long it took Marley to call. He phoned midmorning, as I was scribbling some lyrics on a notepad, and I wanted to ignore him. The words were flowing, soft and manipulative verses that girls would swoon over. Words that my sweet little sadist would fucking hate. And yet I wanted to sing them in a crowded bar with her right there in front of me, so I could watch the irritation on her face, watch her roll her eyes at the sap I was singing, and have her see all the other girls lap it up.

  I answered, though, as the name on my phone's screen told me who it was, and I listened as he hedged and stammered, the quiver in his voice giving me advance notice of what he was going to say. He apologized for taking so long and got halfway through firing me permanently before his spine kicked in and he switched to mild outrage that I'd try to deceive him and my audience.

  “I'd like to think this was accidental, Dom, but that's not possible. Parts of it are a carbon copy—chords, rhythm, even some of the damn lyrics are the same.”

  “Who says I stole their music?”

  “You did steal it, man, but if you don't know who complained then maybe you did it more than once. Maybe several people have complained to me about it, and I ain't telling. Come on, get real, Dom, you can't do that shit.” He started up again, talking about ethics and trust, as if he didn't screw every musician who came into his shitty little bar, making them play for tips and be grateful for the chance. As he rambled on, I tuned him out and thought about what to say in reply. I could go with the apologetic, So sorry, it won't happen again, please forgive me, or maybe try, I must have absorbed it without knowing, I'm just so embarrassed, both attempts to save my musical career in Austin. Manipulation is my strong point, especially making myself the victim, but in the end I chose door number three. I waited until he was mi
dflow to interrupt. “Hey, Marley. Fuck you.” I hung up.

  At moments like that, when events conspired and turned against me, I could always set them straight by tweaking someone else. Usually, I'd find a girl to sleep with, make some impressionable, dumpy chick do something she didn't want to do in bed by feeding her hope for the future. I'd lie about a pending record deal and ask if she'd want to go on the road with me, did she like hotels and breakfast in bed? Then I'd not call her, or call her and ask for another girl and act like I couldn't really remember her. It sounds cruel and maybe it is. Cruelty is pretty abstract to me, a concept I get on an intellectual level but don't experience. After all, cruelty requires empathy, and that bucket is empty.

  And remember what I'm saying, the reason I toyed with these girls. It wasn't to be cruel—it wasn't about them at all. It was to build myself up, and their hurt feelings were a mere by-product. Something more, too, these excursions acted as scientific endeavors because incisions into a person's soul gave me a chance to see emotions I didn't have, to experience things vicariously that most other people experienced all the time. And I benefited from that vicarious experience by studying it in a detached way, learning a little more about my fellow man. Or woman. If I saw an emotion, heard it, then I could mimic it.

  The drunk girls in Austin were safe, though, that night at least. I just wanted my music. My lovely guitar, the gentle hum of words in my throat, perfect accompaniments to an idea floating like a song in my mind. It was a song about the unthinkable, and yet I couldn't stop thinking about it.

  I took two more weeks to decide, but in the way a starving man sits before a meal and decides to eat it. Some things become inevitable. I'd surrounded myself with a force field of reasons to keep on the straight and narrow, to stay invisible behind my one-way mirror: personal safety, financial security, avoiding the stigma of my condition. Those reasons were still there, but the force field had weakened thanks to a pay cut, an unwanted transfer, and accusations of musical fraud. And on the other side of the mirror, out in the real world, a beautiful woman beckoned like a proverbial siren. I wasn't planning on shipwrecking my life, of course, but given the circumstances, a careful tack in her direction seemed, at the time, reasonable enough. And, of course, there was the money.