Mondo Crimson

by Andrew Post

  Of course it’d end up being the middle child. Of course.

  Brenda eased the door shut on her two youngest and went into the bathroom, closed the door, and squinted in preparation for flipping on the light. She wasn’t surprised by what she saw in the mirror. Steve, bless his heart, hadn’t buttoned her pajama top the right way and her left boob was about to fall out. As she fixed it, she saw her neck was red from her shoulders to under her ears and her eyes were glassy and bloodshot like she’d been out drinking all night, and her cheekbones bore a dusting of red freckles of broken blood vessels. He’d apologize tomorrow when he saw her on the other side of the breakfast table and, like always, she’d kiss him and thank him. The girls, naturally, wouldn’t notice, but Brenda still planned to wear a turtleneck – besides, you never knew when fucking Linda Cassel might make an unannounced visit. The nosy bitch was observant in the least helpful way and she never let a chance to comment on something pass her by. Fucking Linda.

  Brenda peed and washed her hands and, mind elsewhere, did the thorough job she normally reserved for cleaning blood away. Realizing what she was doing when her hands were both pink and raw, she turned off the light before opening the bathroom door because Rebecca’s room was directly across the hall. Moving by memory alone, she padded downstairs on bare feet. She went into the laundry room to move the load of her clothes that’d stunk like plane cargo hold into the dryer. The blouse she’d worn to the restaurant, she noticed, had one perfectly round hole burned into its front, down by the hem. Clean-edged as if done by a hole punch. She was lucky the acid hadn’t eaten through any farther than that. She balled up the soggy shirt and tossed it in the trash.

  In the kitchen, by the pale light of the refrigerator, she poured herself a glass of water and sat at the kitchen island, elbows on the cold marble, in front of her laptop. She couldn’t be positive why she’d chosen now to do this to herself, but decided to gaze into the certain disaster their bank account would be anyway because, she supposed, ignoring it wouldn’t improve anything.

  They still had $781,021 left to go on the mortgage, this after six years chipping away at it having never missed a payment. She saw that while she’d been away Steve had spent two hundred on groceries, another fifteen bucks to have them delivered to the house, and god only knows how much he tipped the driver – they’re trying to make it through the day like everybody else, she could hear him say. She also saw the day she’d left he’d bought something on Amazon that cost eighty-five dollars, then something for sixty-two the next – neither purchases he mentioned when she got home, so it must not have been anything for the house or the girls but something for him, more sports memorabilia or some gadget he’d be trying to pawn off on his brother the next time Eric visited. The auto-pay for the rental of the French horn Rebecca played in the school band had come out (three hundred, quarterly), the people in charge of Maureen’s soccer association had chipped off their monthly seventy-five, and the out-of-pocket following Judy’s optometrist appointment last Friday had come to one hundred seventy-nine and one cent. Don’t forget that one fucking cent, right?

  She didn’t like seeing their lives quantified in such cold terms as numbers, but there it was – checking and savings, their whole existence and hope for a comfortable one put into six digits divided by a comma, all they had. Of course, the people Felix sent her to visit had had their lives squared into numbers, some of those numbers now accounting for the total of the bank account presently displayed on her monitor.

  She refreshed the page, hoping to catch some magic influx unfold, and saw that Amber, Felix’s payroll person, had forwarded the money through the company Felix used as a laundering front, Snappy Transcription & Caption Services, and the first chunk’s deposit would be available by noon today. And even with that first amount coming in, five thousand dollars, which was a pretty decent payday by its own merits, it was already spoken for. Brenda imagined a pig being thrown into a tank of piranhas, reduced to a swirling pink cloud in seconds. And thinking about fish tanks made her think about what she’d done in Florida, the three lives that were, because of her, no longer being lived but reduced to numbers, facts, and figures. She couldn’t say why but she pictured trying to pay for a big load of groceries with a bloody piece of Stacy Dauber’s detonated head, asking the cashier, “Will that cover it?”

  And the cashier turned into Valerie, the girl in the Donald Duck uniform, and said, “No, ma’am, I’m afraid it won’t. Please put everything back in your cart and return the items where you found them. You’re holding up the line.”

  Valerie Talbot, age twenty-one, according to the news Brenda caught at the airport, was originally from Palm Springs and had apparently gotten hired at Dock 17 to fund the postage for submitting her poetry to magazines. They cut to Valerie’s mother reading one of her daughter’s insipid poems outside the restaurant, the fluttering of the yellow police tape occasionally interrupting, but Brenda didn’t feel she missed anything vital seeing how Valerie’s word-art was all descriptions of flowers and beaches and the color of the ocean. When Valerie’s mother was done, the frumpy old broad raised her watery eyes to the blue Florida sky and said, “Take care of her, Jesus. You got my sweet baby girl up there with y’all now.”

  Brenda’s past deeds did not get at her very often, and when they did they didn’t reach very deeply. There were blockades in place, some she’d had all her life, moored at birth, natural, and others she’d worked to construct, building them tallest around her carefully compartmentalized soft places. But the fear of being caught never failed to set the wrecking ball swinging. That was no match for her blockades, no matter how reinforced she’d built them. She had vivid nightmares about being walked out her front door in handcuffs and having her girls, and Steve, see her being addressed as what she really was, who she was when Mama went on one of her trips – what she did when away from them, who Mama became those absent days.

  That wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  Away from them for their safety, far from what they’d see and hear and know.

  If Steve ever knew, he’d never let her see the girls again and away from them would be a set arrangement. He’d change their names, take them out of state. She’d never find them again, never see the women they’d grow up to be, and she’d never make good on that promise to Steve that they’d grow old together, do old-people things.

  She was afraid of what she might be like without this one foot always planted on solid ground, her ankle being held in place by her girls and her husband. If there was no reason to ever stop working, to take a break, to be this other woman and occupy her skin with these four amazing people she shared a house with, who would that be? She imagined a lot of silence, mostly. The word bereft kept storming to mind. A life of nothing but filling work order after work order, no contrast or balancing-out. A darker machine than that which swallows most but she’d still be a cog within it, no different, uniform. There were many reasons to work as hard as she did – it was for herself, sure, because without it she wouldn’t be able to be the woman to her girls they needed to know her to be. Clearing out from herself what needed clearing out, she felt, gave her a deeper well of patience, something a parent can never have too much of. She let Steve in a little – like tonight, and other zebra nights – but he did not know who she was inside that dreamless sleep he acquiesced to launch her into with two hands around her neck and the push and pull of his manhood, much less what she was escaping by asking him to send her there. She was filling work orders for him as well. He was her guideline back to earth, the rope in the snowstorm, and the person she’d find tied to the other end she’d climb inside – safety, warmth, understanding. For him, a wife, a best friend, a confidante, a shoulder, a fellow parent, a cheerleader, a partner in all this. After the accident, when he was still in the hospital, he told her that if it wasn’t for her and the girls, he wouldn’t have bothered. That’s how he put it. Bothered. The pain was that great apparently. But
he’d fought through it, because he had to. For her, for their girls. For them. Team Stockton.

  She looked across the kitchen, out into the living room, to the front windows. Right now, they were lit a dull orange by the streetlight outside, but she could easily picture the curtains catching the color of red and blue, painting everything inside this house like the fireworks had that hostess she’d killed in the street, Valerie. Some government agent, or entire conspiring roomful of them, was trying to find Brenda. She had no doubt about this. Somewhere out there, they were trying to put the pieces together, to scrape a name into shape – then an address. For one of them or all her imagined pursuers, she was the malignant labor that was undoubtedly leeching everything out of their life. Without ever touching them or seeing them, she was killing them just by going places and doing things that we, as a species, having achieved ‘civilization’, mostly agreed to stop doing because, in theory, it does not benefit the whole of the world tribe to be killing one another all the time. Of course, tell that to the smart cookie who’d thought it’d be a good idea drawing dotted lines all over the globe, and the other one who’d come up with the concept of money – combined efforts that wound up stapling a big, fat let’s not get too hasty to the whole ‘killing is bad’ thing.

  It crossed her mind to go out to the garage, ignore how cold the cement floor was on her bare feet, retrieve the gun she kept buried in a bin of old photo albums, and remove the girls, then Steve, then herself, from any possible future where they could not all be together. A preemptive act of mercy.

  She remained seated at the kitchen island.

  This can work. There may be people who’d very much like to find you, yes, but nobody has your name. If they did, rest assured you’d be having this debate with yourself in a stuffy room with no windows, when any deliberation would be pointless. So, again, since it seems tonight this bears repeating, this can work.

  Nonetheless, the Brenda that lived outside this house and the Brenda that lived inside this house could see each other too clearly. The curtains weren’t thick enough, the glass not as thick as it needed to be. Already, she knew she needed to take on a job – if only to get some distance, to not have to live so cut down the middle. Spend a week doing the extended stay, as per the special request the Minneapolis job was going to apparently come with, and after Christmas, take some time off. A full week or more, and spend the whole time at home, tell Steve she had the vacation days to burn, and just be here, with her family, with the curtains closed, as this Brenda, this Mama.

  She opened her phone and sent a text to Felix.

  Tell the client I can start the Minneapolis job early if they want. I’m available.

  Chapter Five

  Merritt Plains didn’t like the term Peeping Tom. He considered his nightly outings as observation sessions and he a mere observer. Peeping Tom, to him, implied there was some unpleasant thrill trying to be achieved. Probably because of the Tom part. Any act that has a man’s name associated with it always gets a bad rap. Jacking off, an example.

  Tonight, he’d brought the foam pad his mother knelt on when weeding the yard and he was glad for it. Last fall, the Carmichaels had put down a fresh layer of cedar chips around the bushes in their side yard, and it probably would’ve given Merritt bleeding knees by now if he hadn’t brought the foam pad. He’d just have to remember to put it back where he found it when he got home so Mom didn’t berate him about borrowing her things without asking. And, of course, she’d want to know what he was using it for and off to the races we’d go, with Merritt having to expend the energy to think of something the suspicious old witch would swallow.

  Anyway.

  Even though he’d never spoken to his neighbors, he’d been observing the Carmichaels ever since they moved in across the street five years prior. He still didn’t know the man’s and woman’s names but because it was written in block lettering on their son’s bedroom door, Merritt knew the boy’s name was Skyler. He’d watched the boy go from a gawky nine-year-old to a stoic fourteen-year-old, complete with peach fuzz. The Carmichaels’ house, like the one Merritt shared with his mother and everyone else who lived on this street, was a raised ranch-style home. Because the bottom floor of the house was set half underground, Skyler’s bedroom window was level with the lawn outside. This gave Merritt, whenever he came to observe him, the perspective of what, he thought, was a lot like a terrarium on a shelf. Sometimes he even imagined himself as a pet, a gerbil or guinea pig of Skyler’s. This feeling was compounded by the bed of cedar chips Merritt lay upon, a rich woodsy scent filling his every slowly stolen, quiet breath.

  And after a long week replete with shifts that only offered him frustration and boredom in equal measure working at the grocery store, Merritt, only now, could breathe. By spending time with Skyler – though only one of them was aware it was happening – Merritt felt how most men feel when they go play pool with their friends down at the corner bar, a break from the pattern, a respite, a reprieve, a chance to reconnect with whom he felt he truly was behind the apron he had to wear at work.

  There were a lot of reasons to be an observer, and from those who shared his interest he’d met online, a lot of people got a number of gifts out of keeping up the practice, but for him it was just relaxing. Through the Carmichaels, he could have a family, albeit without any of the responsibility that came with it, like being expected to contribute in any way – financial, emotional, whatever. A remote involvement, a hands-off love at a distance that could make up for what his own mom seemed incapable of giving him even after he’d begged her to at least try being nicer to him. Not to mention all the women he’d shown an interest in who’d either fed him a line how they ‘didn’t think of him like that’ or, as the less tactful ones did, openly laugh in his face. Since he’d decided that those avenues for acceptance were dead paths for him, the Carmichaels would be the earth and he their moon and that arrangement would suit his needs just fine.

  Tonight, like most nights after he and his folks had had dinner and Skyler helped his mother with the dishes, the boy was in his bedroom with the door shut playing a video game. Skyler had friends – Merritt had seen him riding around town with them in their beater car, listening to what passed for music nowadays – but in Merritt’s observation, the boy only chummed around with those guys out of some obligation, checking the I have friends box because he would soon be in high school and it’d be too much hassle bucking the perfunctory social design when, really, Merritt could tell the boy valued his time alone, something to which he, himself, could relate quite well.

  Skyler was sitting on the floor. The room was dark save for the TV screen currently filled with the first-person shooter. Every time Skyler opened fire on an enemy, the digital muzzle flashes threw back the shadows of the boy’s room like controlled lightning. This game was clearly his favorite. He was damn good at it. His reaction speed was a sight to behold. Skyler might have a future as a fixer, if he decided to go that route.

  Though video games had been around when Merritt was a teenager, they were nothing at all like they’d got now. He never really got into them, aside from the occasional bike ride to the local arcade (where the Burger King was now) to dodge the summer heat and sacrifice his allowance to Joust. But watching Skyler play was almost as much fun. He felt he was alongside the boy for every victory when he landed a headshot on a bad guy, as well as the agony of defeat when the aim of an AI sniper he hadn’t taken into account struck true – like now.

  As the screen reddened over, Merritt watched Skyler start to rip off his headphones to spike them to the floor like Merritt had seen him do before, but Skyler’s mother must’ve said she wouldn’t buy him new ones if he just kept breaking them, and he put them back on. As the game reloaded, all the soldiers Skyler had killed were resurrected and reset about the snow-swept military installation, unaware of their demises only seconds before. Merritt watched Skyler take a sip of his soda, deeply pick his nose,
assess what he’d dredged free, and wipe it on the wall.

  The things people don’t even think twice about doing when they’re alone and think no one can see them. The things animals will do at the zoo, even when they know they’re being watched. The line.

  Merritt had observed Skyler masturbating countless times. It was what the boy did in his room with the door closed almost as often as playing video games. Unlike when Merritt was that age, Skyler had his phone to look to for inspiration. Honestly, Merritt was somewhat jealous. He and his brother had had to rely on magazines they shoplifted from the drug store, whereas Skyler, for free, had an entire universe of videos and images available to him.

  Skyler’s face was lit by the glow of whatever serviceable material he’d decided on for inspiration, eyes sharp with concentration. Merritt always got a heavy dose of nostalgia observing that. Full of that burgeoning, rampaging drive to the point of bursting but because of mores, and possibly making your father jealous, needing to sequester yourself just to crank out some relief and act, afterward, like you hadn’t been doing in there what everyone in the house was already assuming you were doing in there. The secrecy. The very American shame that followed, going about the cleanup like tidying after a tender little murder.

  Merritt lived with his mother, so he was still experiencing some of that, but it was old hat by now. It wasn’t a fun, new secret. Merritt was fifty-three, so it felt like work, addressing an issue on a schedule no different than changing the oil in his car or going to get a haircut. And now with a wealth of material available to him online, it wasn’t the pedestrian lounging nudes in soft focus like the stuff he and his brother used to ogle out behind the shed. Merritt’s tastes had shifted before the advent of the internet, and perhaps because of its availability to him, he had been allowed to pinpoint what he liked and it was far from pedestrian. Specific to the point of being sub-sub-niche, you might say. Accessing such content required certain hoops to be jumped through, measures to ensure your online anonymity, an external drive that could be burned clean at the push of a button, but more importantly, a willingness to look further and deeper, where most have their constitutions give out, miles back. Merritt had established his predilections by defining their contrasts, sharpening himself as he thought of it, taking what he did like and rubbing it against what he did not like and honing his tastes to such a precise point they could impale a single cell.