by Poppy Brite
He checked Trevor again, found him still sleeping. Zach began to get bored. He picked his way across the living room, went out to his car, and got the bag that held his laptop computer and cellular phone. He thought he might be staying here for a few days, and he wanted to give Eddy a more specific message than the one he had left last night. If he dialed in now, he thought he could just make the deadline.
Zach accessed the Times-Picayune’s computer, typed rapidly for several minutes, then pressed the keys to send his article. After he had done that, he was still restless. He found a square of yellow Post-it notes in his bag, scribbled down a few phone codes, and stuck them on the edge of the table. They were numbers he might need in a hurry, and he didn’t think Trevor would mind.
Then, just for the hell of it, he dialed into Mutanet. He didn’t log in with his own password, of course, since They might be monitoring the board. But Zach had long since acquired full systems-operator privileges on Mutanet, though he had discreetly neglected to mention this fact to the sysop. The sysop fancied himself a Discordian, or worshiper of the chaotic goddess Eris, and his password was POEE5.
First Zach read the messages on the main board, scanning them for his handle.
MESSAGE: 65
FROM: KØDEz KID
TO: ALL MUTANTS
“Lucio” got busted today!!
Hahahahahahaa!!!!!
MESSAGE: 73
FROM: ZOMBI
TO: KØDEz KID
If you had a googolth of Lucio’s hacking skill you would not take such sick joy in his misfortune. You’re wrong Kidd0-somebody warned him Sat. nite and he’s long gone.
MESSAGE: 76
FROM: AKKER
TO: MUTOIDS
Zombi’s right! I, Akker the H-akker, founder of the Data Acquisition and Retrieval Team (DART), cracked the Secret Service’s system and found the warrant to search Lucio’s house. It was I who warned him in time! ! Power to DART! ! ! :-)
MESSAGE: 80
FROM: ST. GULIK, YR. HUMBLE SYSOP
TO: ANYONE READING THIS
Lucio can’t get on this board anymore. I disabled his account. If he tries to contact you, don’t talk to him. For all we know he could have gotten busted and turned informant. Anyone known to still have contact with him will be kicked off Mutanet! A paranoid hacker is a free hacker!
That caught Zach’s interest, so he checked the sysop’s personal mail. There was only one message.
FROM: ZOMBI
TO: ST. BOGUS
FUCK YOUR FASCIST BOARD, DØØD! YOU’D BE THE FIRST TO TURN RAT IF A KKKOMPUTER KKKOP NAILED YOUR WHITE ASS!!! YOUR ADDRESS IS 622 FRAZIER ST. IN METAIRIE AND IF YOU KEEP TELLING kidZ WHO NOT TO TALK TO, I WILL FIRST POST IT ON BOARDS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY, THEN COME OVER THERE AND PERSONALLY INTRODUCE YOUR TEETH TO SOME OF THAT CHAOS YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO WORSHIP (BUT DON’T SEEM TO) ! AND BY THE WAY, AKKER DIDN’T WARN LUCIO … I DID! ! !
Zach nearly fell off his chair laughing. He’d known he could count on Zombi. He left two messages, the first on the main board where everyone could read it, the second personal.
FROM: LUCIO
TO: ST. PARANOID
Pleez don’t kick me off the board, Br’er Sysop! Pleez! Pleez! ! Pleeeeeez! ! !
FROM: LUCIO
TO: ZOMBI
A googol times, thanks.
Then Zach logged off Mutanet, maybe for the last time.
After turning the computer off, he felt disoriented. He was used to spending hours each day in front of the screen. Those few minutes had only whetted his appetite, had made his fingers tingle but hadn’t given them the supersensitized buzz he got from a marathon session of pounding the keys. But he didn’t need money yet, and he wanted to lie low for a few days.
He noticed Trevor’s backpack sitting on the kitchen counter. The zipper was half open, and Zach could see the corner of a comic book poking out. He glanced toward the door, then went over to the bag, cautiously tugged the zipper all the way down, and began to nose through the contents.
To Zach this was no different from examining Trevor’s credit rating or police record, either of which he would have done guiltlessly and without hesitation if he had reason to. But he didn’t care about those things. He wanted to know what Trevor carried around with him, what he kept close to him.
Here were all three issues of Birdland, battered copies in plastic bags. No surprises there. A Walkman and some tapes … Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker, and, just for good measure, Charlie Parker … a black T-shirt, a pair of underwear, a toothbrush and other assorted toiletries. Pretty boring. Zach dug deeper, and his fingers touched worn paper. An envelope.
He pulled it out, unfolded the contents carefully. The three sheets of paper were taped and retaped at every crease, wrinkled to the texture of fine silk. Much of the text was indecipherable, but from what Zach could make out, he suspected Trevor had it memorized.
Multiple defensive wounds … A blow to the chest penetrated the breastbone and ruptured the heart, and could in and of itself have been fatal …
Due to gross trauma, victim’s brain could not be removed in one piece …
Robert F. McGee … Occupation: Artist …
Each report was signed by the county coroner and dated June 16, 1972. Yesterday had been the twentieth anniversary of the McGees’ deaths; tomorrow would be the twentieth anniversary of their autopsies.
Zach imagined the three naked bodies lined up on steel tables whose blood gutters were black with clotted gore. He could picture them much more clearly than he wanted to, their skin shockingly livid, their wounds black and purple, their torsos crisscrossed with Y-shaped autopsy scars that bisected each pectoral muscle and went all the way down to the pubic bone. The woman’s breasts hanging slack and darkly veined like fruit gone rotten on the tree, her long hair stiff with blood. The little boy’s head tilted at an awkward angle because the back of his skull was gone, his soft pink lips sealed with a crust of dried blood, his fingers permanently curled like a doll’s. The man with his eyes squeezed halfway out of their sockets by the pressure of the rope, giving him a goggle-eyed stare that would last until the eyeballs fell into the cranial cavity.
Zach folded the autopsy reports and jammed them back into the envelope. It was as if Trevor had imagined the scene so many times that it was imprinted on these sheets of paper like some sort of psychic snapshot. Zach glanced over his shoulder again, but the doorway was still empty. He wasn’t sure if he had been afraid of seeing Trevor, or something worse.
Enough snooping for now. It was making him jumpy. He put the envelope back and found a fat paperback book in the very bottom of the bag. Thou Shalt Not Kill was the true tale of a man named John List who had calmly and systematically murdered five members of his family—wife, mother, two sons, and a daughter—and then disappeared for eighteen years. The back cover said they had caught him through the TV show America’s Most Wanted.
The book fell open in Zach’s hands to page 281 where the spine was cracked. List was killing his older son, fifteen-year-old Johnny. He’d struggled with the boy in the kitchen, shot him in the back as he ran down the hall, caught up with him and shot him nine more times as he tried to crawl away from his father toward some imagined safety.
Zach checked out Johnny’s school picture in the section of photographs at the center of the book. A skinny, grinning kid with badly cut dark hair and birth-control glasses and ears that stuck out goofily. Looked like a hundred computer geeks Zach had known, not so different from how he had looked at fifteen. This shit could happen to anybody.
He sat down at the table and began to read about the Lists. He didn’t usually read this kind of thing, but it was a pretty interesting story. They didn’t find List’s family until a month later, lined up on sleeping bags in the giant ballroom, their bodies black and swollen.
When it grew too dark to see the page, Zach got up and switched the overhead light on without thinking about it. He read for two hours, until he heard stirring and yawning fro
m the bedroom.
Trevor appeared in the kitchen doorway, his hair rumpled and tangled, knuckling sleep from his eyes. He had put on a pair of baggy black sweatpants but remained shirtless. “Was I out long?”
“Couple hours. I thought you could use it.”
“Why are you reading that?”
Zach put the book down. “Why are you? I mean, it’s none of my business, but it seems a little depressing for someone in your situation.”
Trevor pulled out the other chair and sat down at the table. “I always read books like that. I keep hoping one of them will make me understand why the guy did it.”
“Any luck?”
“No.” Suddenly Trevor looked up, speared him with those eyes. “Anyway, I meant why are you reading that book that was in my bag? I didn’t say you could go in my bag.”
Zach held up his hands. “Sorry. I just wanted something to read, and you were asleep. I didn’t touch anything else.”
Great. They’d make a perfect pair: a professional snoop and a privacy freak. Zach guessed now was probably not the best time to tell Trevor how much he had liked the drawings in his sketchbook, and he didn’t think he’d better mention the autopsy reports at all.
Trevor still didn’t look happy about the matter, but let it drop. He noticed Zach’s Post-it notes, peeled one off the table and read it. “What’s this?”
“A phone card number.”
“What’s it for?”
“Making phone calls.”
Trevor gave Zach a look, but decided to let this pass too. “Are you hungry?”
“Starved.”
They retrieved Kinsey’s can of ravioli from under the couch and ate it cold with forks scrounged out of a kitchen drawer. It was awful, but Zach felt better after he had choked it down. He watched Trevor drink two Cokes the way some guys drank beer, putting the stuff away with more regard for quick chemical effect than thirst or taste. He was starting to think he could watch Trevor all night.
“Do you want something else?” he asked, thinking they might go out to the diner.
Trevor looked at him rather sheepishly. “Could I …”
Anything, Zach wanted to say, but settled for “What?”
“Could I have some more of that pot?”
Zach laughed and fished the half-burnt joint out of his pocket. It was a bit damp, but fired up fine. “I thought you weren’t used to it,” he said.
“I’m not. I never really liked it before. But my dad used to smoke a lot back when he was drawing, and I just thought …”
“What?” Zach asked gently. “That you could figure out why he stopped?”
Trevor shrugged. “If I really wanted to figure that out, I’d start drinking whiskey. Bobby used to say pot made him more creative, and after he went dry, he wouldn’t smoke even when Momma tried to make him. It was like he didn’t even want to try anymore.”
“Maybe he just knew it was gone no matter what he did.”
“Maybe.”
They sat at the table talking and smoking. As Trevor passed him the joint, Zach noticed the tracery of slightly raised white scars on his left forearm. He had to put some on the outside, Zach thought, to match the ones on the inside. But he didn’t yet know Trevor well enough to say that. Instead he talked of New Orleans, the daytime bustle of the French Market, the way the cobblestone streets looked at night under the gas lamps all black and gold, the neon smear of Bourbon Street, the river like a dirty brown vein pulsing through the city.
At last they both began to yawn. Trevor stood up, stretched hugely. Zach watched the loose sweatpants ride low on the ridges of his hipbones, then wondered why he was staring; he’d already seen it all this afternoon. “Do you want to crash here?”
Finally. “That’d be great.”
“You can have the big bedroom. There’s a mattress and, uh …” Trevor stared at the floor. “Nobody died in there or anything.”
Zach hadn’t expected an invitation to bed down with Trevor, was still trying to convince himself he didn’t want one. But he couldn’t help feeling disappointed as he said good night and left the kitchen.
He untied his sneakers, took off his glasses, and was about to lie down on the sagging double mattress when he realized that his head and back were throbbing in tandem. He’d been running on pure adrenaline for more than twenty-four hours; now the pot and the long drive had finally kicked in to give him the great-granddaddy of all body aches, and he hadn’t brought any kind of medicine.
He padded down the hall to Trevor’s room, saw that the light was still on, and tapped at the door. “Do you have any aspirin?”
Trevor was sprawled in bed reading the John List book. “Yeah, I think so.” He sat up and rummaged in his bag, came up with a single white pill. “Here you go. I think this is my last one.”
“Thanks. G’night again.” Zach went to the kitchen and drank from the faucet, put the pill in his mouth, and washed it down. A chill ran along his spine as he passed the hall doorway and returned to his room. It was dank and dim, empty except for the mattress and some moldering cardboard boxes in the shadowed recesses of the closet, the window an inky rectangle beaded with rain.
For the first time in hours Zach found himself unnerved by the house. Sitting in the bright kitchen talking with Trevor was one thing. Sleeping by himself in the bedroom of a suicide and a murder victim whose blood still stained the place … that was another.
But he wasn’t afraid of ghosts, he reminded himself. He lay down on the dusty mattress, pulled one of Kinsey’s blankets over him, and closed his eyes.
A few minutes later his heart gave a nauseating lurch and began to race so hard he thought it might just punch right through his breastbone like an angry fist made of muscle and blood. Then his whole chest seized up and he was sure the tortured organ had simply ceased to beat, that in seconds he would realize he was dead.
He felt the house gather itself around him, its rotting boards alive and watchful, its darkness ready to enfold him in velvety arms and claim him for its own.
Trevor turned out the light and lay back on his mattress, listening to the slow creak and drip of the house. He thought that somewhere deep within the hundreds of tiny noises there might be a murmuring voice. He wondered what having Zach here would do to the house’s subtle chemistry. He wondered why he had let Zach stay.
It was only for one night, he told himself. Zach was an outsider too, and he would surely want to move on tomorrow.
But that didn’t explain the weird sensation they’d had of almost recognizing each other this afternoon. And it didn’t explain the tightness Trevor felt behind his eyes when he looked at Zach, or the uneasy warmth deep in his stomach when he thought about Zach now. He was so smart … and so strange … and he had the smoothest skin, like matte paper …
Probably it was just the pot. Trevor had smoked too much. Stupid to think it could teach him anything of his father; it was only a drug, its effects as subjective as those of sleep or sorrow. Even alcohol was nothing but a drug. In his heart he knew it hadn’t made Bobby kill his family any more than the hammer had.
The idea of being drunk still made Trevor feel sick, though. All he could remember was the stinging scent of whiskey that had surrounded Bobby like a cloud as he watched his five-year-old son drink Seconal, then hugged him goodnight for the last time.
Trevor heard a floorboard creak in the hall, then a closer sound. The door of his room, which he had pushed to, slowly swinging open. His body stiffened and his ears strained; he felt his pupils dilating hugely, painfully against the blackness.
“Trevor? You still awake?”
It was Zach.
He thought of not answering, of pretending to be asleep. He couldn’t imagine what Zach wanted now. But Zach had listened to him this afternoon.
“I’m awake,” he said, and sat up.
“What was that medicine you gave me?”
“Aspirin, like you asked for.”
“Are you sure it was aspirin?”
<
br /> “Well, Excedrin. That’s what I always take.”
“Oh, god.” Zach laughed weakly. “That shit has sixty-five milligrams of caffeine in every tablet. I can’t deal with caffeine.”
“What happens?”
“It hits me like speed. Bad speed.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing.” He felt Zach’s weight settle onto the edge of the mattress. “I’m not gonna be able to sleep for a while, though. I thought maybe we could talk some more.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to talk to me?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t understand why you like me. The first time I ever laid eyes on you, I tried to knock your brains out. Now I’ve poisoned you. How come you’re still here?”
He heard Zach try to laugh. It came out more like a moan. “Just persistent, I guess.”
“No. Really.”
“Well …” A shudder ran through Zach’s body, into the mattress. “Do you mind if I stretch out here?”
“I guess not.”
Trevor moved to one side of the bed. He felt Zach arranging himself on the other side, thought he could feel electricity crackling off Zach’s skin. When Zach’s elbow brushed his, it gave Trevor a sensation like the shock one gets from walking across a carpet and then touching metal.
“First of all,” said Zach, “you didn’t try to knock my brains out. You stopped. Second, you didn’t know caffeine would hurt me.”
“Even so—”
“Even so, seems like I would have figured out by now that you aren’t exactly good for my health?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Maybe I’m not in this for my health.”
“In what?”
“Life.”
