by Nick Lake
This is sick, I said, inside my head now.
At the same time I was thinking: This could work. He doesn’t know what Dwight looks like. He thinks the cop I spoke to was a friend of Dad’s.
“It’s necessary,” said the voice. “Or do you want to tell him you’ve been lying to him? Your dad’s right. You have to think of his protection. People close to you die. Think of your mom. Think of Paris.”
A dry click from my heart; sound of a revolver clicking to an empty chamber.
Me: don’t say that.
Voice: “It’s true and you know it.”
Me: (nothing. Just the roar of the ocean, when you put your head underwater, filling my eardrums, inside me.)
So I did it. Because I was too … too selfish and horrible to risk telling you the truth, because I preferred to create a lie rather than to see the look in your eye when I told you I was a voice hearer, because I didn’t want you to be afraid of me, because I thought I might die if I saw fear in you; but if I saw pain, that would only be what I expected, because I expected to hurt people, it was in my nature, and because I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON.
You were halfway across the street. I know this all sounds slow, but it was fast; as fast as thought, as fast as film, tick tick tick, twenty-four frames a second.
The voice went silent. Maybe you were too close now, muting it, your force field doming over me, where I stood with Dwight, embracing me.
Not for long.
I grabbed Dwight’s hand. He turned to me, surprised.
I didn’t need the voice to tell me what to do next. I didn’t need the voice to say: kiss him.
I just kissed him.
I leaned up, grabbed the hair at the back of his head, kicked one heel up, like an old starlet. Kissed Dwight hard on the mouth. He was too shocked to pull away; he didn’t exactly kiss me back either, but I didn’t need him to; you were still twenty feet away, maybe more.
I pressed myself against him.
Finally pulled away.
“What was that, Cass?” Dwight asked.
“A thank-you,” I said. “For helping. With Paris.” I saw his face flicker; two images superimposed—guilt, I thought, for a flash, and then a strange smile. Probably it was him who called my dad. But that wasn’t what I was concentrating on.
What I was concentrating on was turning, turning to see you.
You had stopped in the middle of the street.
Cars were passing you, horns blaring, lights flashing. But you were motionless, a still point in a world of noise and brightness.
I let my mouth fall open. I let Dwight’s hand fall from mine.
You were in a trance, almost. You looked at me, like, “Why?”
I shrugged.
And it was like that broke the spell. You turned, and held up your hand, and an SUV stopped, a Cadillac, gleaming in the artificial light, and you walked back to your truck.
Which was what I wanted, of course.
Which was what the voice wanted.
Which was part of me.
So why was I crying?
I dialed Dad’s cell number. After a few rings he answered—I could hear the bubbling of voices in the background, the scrape of knives, the chinking of glasses. “Yeah?” he said.
“Hi,” I said coldly.
“You okay, Cass?”
“No I’m not okay. What do you think?”
Silence.
“So what did you call me for?”
A pause.
“Listen, Dad.”
“Yes?”
“You don’t have to worry about ‘that boy’ anymore. And I kind of hate you right now. Just so you know.”
The line went dead. He had hung up.
I’m so sorry.
I walked all the way home.
It took hours.
It took hours, but I felt like I deserved the punishment. I didn’t even care if Dad got back before me; he might want me to take buses because of the killer, but I could give a **** what he wanted.
You were sitting on the grass of the yard. Of course you were.
Not on a deck chair, but right on the ground; it must have been damp—there was a storm supposed to be coming and the air was thick with moisture—but still you were sitting there. Like you had just run out of kinetic energy, as you crossed from the sidewalk, like your mind had been so blank that you had just dropped, like a puppet let go by its master.
****, I thought.
You looked up. Your eyes were red.
The moon rotated a thousand times around the earth, in its cold black vacuum. The stars wheeled around us for aeons; the universe was born and died, and was born again, and fast-forwarded from the big bang to a night in Jersey, in the twenty-first century, the crickets buzzing in the undergrowth.
“Who was that guy, Cass?” you said.
I wanted to be able to fly. I wanted to be a bird. I wanted to step forward into wings, unfolding from my back, the softness of feathers, and step again up into the air this time, pinioned on those wings, strong, pressing down on the suddenly viscous air, and spiral up, away from you, through the window of my room.
Or away. Away into the sky, like I had dreamed about, drifting into the piled black clouds of the horizon, the dull light of the moon. Float, forever.
But my feet were concrete, bolted to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” I said, the words glass in my throat.
“I said who is he.”
I shook my head. “No one.”
You kept your eyes on mine. Your expression was horribly, horribly calm. “Seriously, Cass?” you said.
“What do you want from me?” I said, trying to keep the shaking out of my vocal cords, the tears, the ocean of tears that would come spilling out if I let it, break over the sea defenses, wash everything away, the sidewalk the grass the bushes the crickets.
“How about the truth?” you said.
“I can’t do that,” I said.
You nodded very slowly. “In that case, I’d like you to get out of my sight.” You didn’t say it like in a movie. Not dramatically. You said it smooth and frictionless as marble. No intonation at all, no rise and fall. Stone.
“Okay,” I said.
And I did.
When I got to my room I lay facedown on the bed, pressing the duvet into my face, wrapping myself in it.
What do I do now? I thought. What am I supposed to do now? I felt like a clockwork toy with a broken spring, like a puppet with wood where a heart should be. No Paris. No you.
No way to get you back either. Not without telling you the truth, telling you everything, and the dead would talk through the tongues of birds, I mean really talk, before I was going to do that.
“Find Paris, then,” said the voice.
Yes, I thought. Yes. It was something to cling onto. A piece of driftwood, floating on the open ocean, after a wreck.
But no. I’d had a warning, hadn’t I? Dad had told me, the police were onto me. They didn’t want me interfering. They didn’t want me getting myself killed.
“So be careful,” said the voice. “Don’t let him know you’re still after him.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“I’m trying to help.”
“So help by shutting up. I don’t want to hear from you right now.”
I wanted to be sharp, so I was glad Dr. Rezwari had lowered my dose a little. It wasn’t great, as far as alertness went, but it would have to do. I wasn’t about to get myself locked up again.
I rolled over on the bed and realized I had no idea how to find Paris. How to find the killer.
“Call Agent Horowitz,” said the voice. “Ask about Paris’s dad. The alibi. Find out what he’s doing.”
“He’ll tell my dad. He’ll … I don’t know. Give me an official warning or something. And anyway, what if Horowitz is the killer? We still think it might be a cop. Say he decides I’m poking my nose in, and that I would be better off … dead?”
“Fine,” said the voice. “So don’t
take any risks. Let the killer go. Just like the guy who smashed your mom’s head in.”
“**** you. Don’t use Mom.”
“Also, you know how the killer is out there somewhere, out there in this town, maybe even torturing Paris right now?”
Me: (through gritted teeth) “We don’t know there’s a killer. Paris might have just left town. Split.”
“You believe that?”
Me: silence.
“Just saying,” said the voice. “He’s not going to just go away, is he?”
“So?”
“So the only way to really make yourself safe … to make any girl in this town safe … is to get the killer. To put him behind bars. Or in the ground.”
I pursed my lips.
There was a logic in that.
SEE? NOT THINKING CLEARLY.
“Anyway,” said the voice. “Horowitz hasn’t been in town long enough to be the killer.”
Huh.
Well, that was true.
“So,” said the voice. “Now that lover boy is gone, what do you have to lose?”
Nothing.
Nothing, I realized.
I had nothing to lose.
“I’m not doing anything till the boys are gone. They’re still in the apartment. We only just … broke up. It’s too soon. When they’ve gone … Then I start again.”
“Okay, but Paris could still be alive. She could be in a basement right now, fighting for her—”
“Shut up.”
And, miracle of miracles, the voice did.
But just then Dad shouted up from downstairs. “Cass! The boys are moving out tonight. Ahead of schedule. I don’t know what **** you pulled, but it worked. Your one? Skinny kid? He looked an awful lot like he’d been crying.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well … You wanna talk to me about it, you can.” A cough. Embarrassed. A pause. “So anyway, I want you with me on cleaning duty tomorrow. Got new guys coming in on Saturday.”
“Whatever,” I shouted down.
“You want me to come up there?” he shouted back menacingly.
I seethed. “No,” I called. “No.”
“Then be ready to clean tomorrow. Eight sharp. And don’t go anywhere till then. I’m going back to the restaurant—we have an inspection tomorrow. I want you in that room and nowhere else.”
Again, I didn’t say anything. After a while I heard him walk back from the stairwell to his study.
**** you, Dad, I thought.
“So,” said the voice. “No calling Horowitz tomorrow, if we’re cleaning with your dad.”
“No,” I said. “****.”
“We’ll have that apartment sparkling in no time,” said the voice. “Might finish up early. After all, I made you do all that practice.”
“Ha-ha,” I said.
It sounded hollow.
As hollow as my life had become.
As hollow as your eyes, when I didn’t tell you the truth.
I wrote you a note.
It was a short one. It said:
The truth is that I hear a voice that isn’t there and I go to a group to talk about it and that guy you saw me with was Dwight, the cop I talked about, who goes to group too. I’m not interested in him. I just kissed him so you wouldn’t know I was crazy.
I want you.
Only you.
I folded it up.
I had no intention of giving it to you.
But better late than never, right?
It was when I was cleaning your room that I found it.
It was on the floor just under your nightstand—you must have knocked it off in the night or something and not realized in the morning. You had other things on your mind of course. The necklace, with its little blue pendant. Your mom’s necklace, the one you usually wore. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been on my knees, with the handheld vacuum cleaner.
I picked it up and held it in my hand for a moment. The metal of the thin chain was cold and silky against my skin, like water. I closed my hand around it, then I put it on. It made me feel closer to you, though I didn’t deserve to. Then I kept cleaning. I got the dust balls from under the bed, picked up a couple of books you had left behind. Your Ovid, your Middlemarch. I loved that you had a copy of Middlemarch.
Then, dusting the top of the wardrobe, I found a small instrument—a banjo, I think. Or a ukulele. I remembered you playing me a Beach Boys song by that pool on the roof. It felt like the last time I was happy. Maybe the last time I would ever be happy. I figured you had brought it with you and forgotten about it, up there on the wardrobe.
Before I left your bedroom—well, not your bedroom anymore—I took off the necklace. I showed Dad the necklace and the banjo in the den. “He left these,” I said.
He nodded. “I’ll call him. Tell him to come pick them up.”
But it wasn’t you who came for them.
You know that already of course.
I woke up early. Sun was streaming through the window, sharp, rhomboid.
“Is it over?” said the voice.
“One more thing,” I said.
I put the note I had written you in my pocket and left the house—Dad was at work—and walked down the street to the beach. Then I went right up to the water. The sun was hard and flat on the waves, the ocean made of beaten metal.
I took the note out of my pocket; it felt toxic against my skin. I didn’t want it anymore. It’s stupid, but I didn’t want it in the house at all. I didn’t really understand why I had written it even. I felt like … like the truth was a poison that might hurt me, like it was bad luck, an evil talisman. Like you might find it and hate me more than you already did, or fear me, which would be worse. (I wanted you to hate me. I wanted not to see you recoil from me. Can you understand that? I guess I will find out soon. It’s nearly time to send this.)
Anyway, the note. It felt like:
An exposure.
A curse.
Superstitiously, I thought if I could just get rid of the note, then I would free myself, I would be safe.
STUPIDEST THOUGHT EVER.
Anyway, I slowly and deliberately tore the paper into strips and ribbons, then I threw them one by one into the ocean. The breeze caught them and one or two fluttered back onto the sand but most landed in the water. A gull thought it was food and swooped down, pecking at the red paper, but then realized its mistake and wheeled into the sky again, crying.
Torn clouds drifted overhead.
“Okay,” I said, when the last shred of paper was gone. “It’s over.”
I felt disassociated from the world, like my body was one of those robot limb things that scientists move by remote control. Everything was removed from me. The cell phone felt like an alien weight in my hand. I suppose I was in shock, again.
You killed your mother and you just broke his heart. Everything you touch turns to ****.
That wasn’t the voice speaking. It was my conscience. Which was worse.
Then the stuff with your dad happened. Another time I covered myself with glory.
That was sarcasm, of course.
It was him who came for your stuff.
He drove over the next day from your little town twenty miles inland. I guess you had sent him instead—you hated me so much you didn’t want to risk seeing me. I didn’t blame you.
Your dad turned up in a beat-up Honda when my dad was out. When I saw that car, I realized right away that I had gotten it wrong about you and your iPhone; I mean, I had gotten the wrong idea about the background to your life. Other people’s lives are like stage sets, aren’t they? Which is to say, there are a couple of things in the foreground—items that set the scene, appearance, accent, and stuff—but most of it we fill in with our imaginations, assuming the backdrop, the rest of the picture.
Your going to Brown, your swimming … I guess it had all read middle class to me. But then that car rolled out, and your dad levered himself out of it, sweating, his back stooped and his arms covere
d in what looked like prison tattoos, and I saw I had gotten it all wrong. His radio was blaring—country music faded out, and then an announcer came on, talking about a storm system that was on its way.
“Come for the stuff,” he drawled. “The stuff my son left behind.”
I nodded. “I’ll get it.”
I went into the house and picked up the necklace and banjo. Or ukulele, or whatever. You must know—just fill in whatever is right.
Outside, I handed the necklace over first. Your dad’s eyes gleamed briefly when he saw it, as if someone had passed the beam of a torch over a dark pond. His chest expanded, like he was drawing in air to soothe a pain inside him. Then he put it in his pocket.
I held out the banjo/ukulele. (Delete as appropriate.)
“Nope,” he said.
“Um … sorry?”
“Ain’t his. He don’t play.”
He turned around and spat as he did so, opened the door of the car. I wondered if you’d said anything about me to him, if he was pissed off with me. His whole attitude pissed me off anyway, even though I wasn’t in a position to be judging anyone else, and I guess that’s why I didn’t keep my mouth shut.
“He does,” I said.
Your dad turned. “Wassat?”
“He does play,” I said. “He plays beautifully.”
Your dad shook his head. “Stopped when his mom died.”
I glared at him. His whole stance and the set of his eyes—everything about him was signaling belligerence, and usually I would have backed down, done anything to remove myself from the situation. But I didn’t. Maybe it was the influence of the voice.
“You mean you wanted him to stop?” I said.
“What?”
“Maybe it reminds you of your wife when he plays. But what about what he wants?”
Your dad’s expression had changed to incredulity. “What the **** are you talking about? Who the **** are you?”
