I bang through a fire exit, and instead of a dark stairwell I’m back on the first floor, pounding around the corner where the counter block is to my right and the drywall studs I fell into are bent and bowed to the left, and of course the logistics don’t make sense in here, of course A plus B doesn’t lead directly to C, because the horror, the real horror, is that nothing’s a straight line for us, not ever, not really. We make that shit up so we don’t get seasick, fearing ghost pirates, spiders, visions in the slats. But in the end, there’s nothing but wasteland, warped and retooled, like memory, that fucked up mirror-shattered point of view we keep sweeping together and rebuilding.
There’s a figure waiting in the doorway.
It’s Marissa Madison, hunched over and bone pale with the fishing line stitching holding her together in seventeen places. There’s a pale light from the moon outside and the rain’s blowing in around her, ponding in the entranceway. Her hair is dripping, hanging in her face, bursting outward before her mouth area every second or so.
“My turn,” she rasps. “So would you like to step outside?”
I put my hands forward, palms up.
“Why wait?”
“Thanks for the invite.”
When she springs, I am amazed at the explosive speed.
And the teeth.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Deseronto took it like a man. She was light as a feather, so he didn’t even have to spread his feet on impact, he just stood there and absorbed the force of this barbed, spotted thing pouncing chest high and wrapping herself around him. His huge arms enveloped her in a sort of auto-response and she bent in, head slightly tilted.
It seemed she was to kiss him.
But their mouths were not parallel. Her damp veil of hair masked the sticking point, and just after a hot burst of her oily breath he got wet strands in his eyes, face first in the spongy jungle brush.
From beneath came the snake, as Marissa Madison jerked her head forward and clamped down her teeth.
It was awkward through the buffer, but what she lacked from direct contact she made up for with blunt force. Clumps of hair were pushed up Deseronto’s nasal cavities followed by the gouging. His septum and bunching nostrils came up like old stubborn roots, and at the top end her front two incisors raked down between his eyes, curling back flesh until they found purchase just above that little Indian ridge that he had.
Hot blood burst down over Deseronto’s lips and a thin stream jetted into his left eye. Everything felt greasy and while the pain was enormous in a way, it wasn’t the type to cry and moan about, more the sensation that made you grit your teeth, firm up your backbone, and brag that you lived through it. You hoped.
The girl-thing went into a frenzy then, probably because she was swallowing a bunch of her own hair, so she started snapping her head like some mad dog, twisting and pulling at the last of the bone and cartilage that was stubborn and set in deep where the sinuses drained.
His nose came off, and it was not a relief. What had felt like lustful toss of hot spice suddenly became a galvanizing agony, air hitting the opened areas, blood pumping out in two massive cross streams that thumped along to the beat of his heart.
There were Indian war drums thumping in his head and mad dogs ripping at the soft spots.
Hard rain drumming on the picture window. It’s Mischief Night and I am Marissa Madison sitting on the floor playing with Rusty, my little King Charles Cavalier spaniel puppy, my delicate little “British boy” who’s trying to act tough, back haunches up, snapping his head back and forth trying to pull away the canvas toy shaped like a farm turkey that grew its legs too long for its own good.
I am Marissa Madison, and I am a freshman at Widener University. I’m a pretty girl, with high cheekbones and long jet black hair I like to toss over my shoulder because it’s cute that way. I came home early this semester for some home cooking, but I’m here every Halloween because it is my favorite time of the year and I like giving candy to the kids, out of the plastic jack-o-lantern Mother bought for me when I was seven. I am boiling cinnamon sticks in the kitchen because it makes the house smell like heaven, and I’m disappointed in myself because I left the trigger-killer upstairs.
Without it, I might play here all night. Dr. Ruberstein was very specific about this very thing, and even though Professor Dixon keeps using that awful red pen to circle my overly expressive pop-up words like “very” and “so” and “really” and “uncontrollably,” I am really so very uncontrollably enjoying being the perfect playmate for Rusty that I might lose my edge, miss a sign, deaden a superior piece of the patchwork by focusing too long on its subordinate. Of course, I could probably write a book on the subject of “premonition-overlay” and make millions of dollars, buy a mansion, become the most searched individual on Google, but I was never meant for fame and Mother dedicated a large portion of her life to teaching me this.
I was meant to assist, and I am darned good at it too, ridiculous, insane. Call it a gift, a calling, a curse.
I call it obsession. And I really should have had my device on my belt loop that night, because now that I am dead I am left to wonder if I missed a premonition of what seemed the first premonition I had of you the next day.
The dark virgin in the passing vehicle.
The one who must be forced now to see the shadow he has spread across the face of the sun.
MARISSA
Yeah, she’s gifted asshole, I know it all too well now, and there ain’t no I.E.P. or specialized resource program that could define or measure or channel her talents. Not unless you wanted her to rewrite the state mandate for you. I mean, I’m talking prodigy, asshole. Michael Jackson. Mozart. Sitting Bull.
Only better.
She is the one who assists. Like you wouldn’t fucking believe.
And don’t let the girly dog and the cinnamon sticks fool you. She’s tough as nails, and sharing her consciousness is one rude fucked up ride, let me tell you. This girl is about cracking codes. Your codes.
Do you see what I’m saying, you numb piece of shit? Maybe not, so I’ll spell it for you slow. I’m trapped inside a female first of all, so it’s like sucking down a hard shot of vertigo. Guys are bad enough, trying to scratch their names into the world with all these hard rites of passage proving they’re all worthy of each other or some such lame garbage, but this chick lets her “feelings” paint the pathways and guardrails. Everything is bright and happy chaos and if I could be sick in here I wouldn’t wait for some quaint motherfucker to hold back my hair. Second of all, there’s this unbelievable talent she has that makes others realize their dreams and potential.
It’s psychic.
Not like she can read minds or nothing. It’s patchwork. Pieces. Puzzle parts she’s good at bringing to the surface so she can stick stuff into the blank spots.
She makes you a better you. She’s good at it and now that I’m with her in the rewind, she’s blanked me, left parts out, fucked me royal, her ghost still carrying on the tradition she maintained in the world of the living, making people understand their own genius. First hand.
See, I know I am going to waste her tonight just before midnight, that I am going to cut her up at the shop and avoid my usual path to the public woods behind Jimmy Whalen’s old abandoned place because a cop is going to be parked at the border of the dark cul-de-sac and the golf course. I am going to improvise, going up on 476, looking for some area thick with foliage to bury the body parts and I’m going to end up with two flat tires for my trouble.
But I don’t remember the stalking phase before all that, and I suddenly can’t recall tonight’s date in reference to the initial sighting I had of her back on Halloween day. See? I can’t recollect the kill itself, the chase, the particulars leading up to tonight, nothing.
It’s a blank spot.
Marissa Madison is going to let me experience what it is like to be hunted. By the dark virgin. The gargantuan shadow that she’d been fixated on since she fel
t him spot her making the multi-lane turn into the King of Prussia Mall.
I get to feel the pure and beautiful terror I create.
And understand why I am the one Marissa Madison calls “Prodigy.”
CHAPTER
SIX
After the drizzle and mist of the previous night, Halloween morning had crafted the world into some glorious illustration, with colors exploding into everything and the mischievous breeze making the leaves gossip. It was the brazen conceit of autumn pulling the sun on a kite string all along Montgomery Avenue where Marissa Madison drove her cherry-red Mustang with the Sirius Radio blasting through the door speakers.
She looked good in this car, and even though admitting that was sort of shallow, it was the type of exhibition out here that demanded participation. Marissa wasn’t really hooked into the au-naturale, Whole Foods attitude anyway, and it didn’t bother her to think of the world as a stage filled with pomp and circumstance. Girl, she was all about the accessories, Russianred lipstick, baby-pink blush, and smoky purple eye-shadow framed off by her shiny black hair done long, straight, and sleek with full bangs and those gorgeous silver hooped earrings she found last week at Chico’s. She was a shopaholic and she wasn’t about to keep the bounty locked up in the closet, like her sizzling Louboutins with the devil-red soles and the heels so high she had to keep them on the seat while she was driving, or like her new Super Skinny low jeans and the black fitted Versace shrunken field jacket that made her waist and hips look like the curves on a wine glass. She always wanted to stand out on a spree, and it wasn’t a vicious cycle, but rather a delicious one, and she had to make sure to write that down because there had to be someone with a business head who could use such a cute and sassy name like that for a shop or boutique or whatever.
She glanced in the rearview and smiled, simply because so many girls always forgot to. She liked her smile, at least now that she had maneuvered it into her package in a way that made it work for her. She had big teeth and a little mouth, so her grin curled up at the edges almost woefully. As a kid it made her all weird and “sad clown,” but she had long retooled it into a sexy little “hello.” By the time she was a sophomore in high school they were calling her “Half-Stick” because she was short dynamite, and two years later underneath her senior picture in the yearbook it said “Pretty Little Runway” because she walked as if she had a clue, and believe it honey, she would never tell a guy to “keep his eyes up here,” even on a day when she was playing book-smart and subtle.
She came up over a rise and had to pull herself up by the top of the steering wheel to see over the hood. This car was gorgeous, but it rode “big,” seeming to sprawl over the lane lines and fill up the parking spaces stripe to stripe. Often she had to back out and pull in a second time to get it just right—and parallel parking, forget it. She was always too far away from the curb or angled up on it, and the way the doors were built so heavy she had to use a shoulder to get out and two hands to push it back shut, getting behind it like a slave wheel and taking mini-steps that always made her giggle hysterically.
Marissa eased back in the seat and turned the dial to channel 66, Watercolors Jazz, perfect accent to the reddish-orangey burst of woodland rising up on the right and the stately entrance to Rosemont College on the left with its stone barriers and manicured border foliage. Outside Lawrence Hall there was a rickety scaffolding and a guy in coveralls and a back-turned painter’s cap doing trim work on the windows. He bent to dip the brush, and the way he repositioned his feet and held his shoulders above his carriage instead of favoring the weaker side kicked up “the patchwork,” mapped now across Marissa Madison’s mind in vivid images, pieces and partials so explicit that the details were staggering, almost painful to behold. The music from the car radio faded to the distant background, and the landscape washed out to a listless black and white.
And suddenly Marissa Madison knew that the painter’s name was Louis Gorsky, that he was twenty-six years old, that his mother died in 1994, and that he was a boxer, a good one, a club fighter who had been headed for his big break before the big fuck-up, story of his life, and even though everyone in the business knew he was no one’s tomato can, he couldn’t currently work his way out of the “back-yarders,” so popular lately especially up in North Philly where the cops turned a blind eye and the purse could shoot up to five grand if you were willing to go gloveless. His manager had dumped him five years ago when he lost an exhibition match at the Blue Horizon to this ringer who was a stand-in for some Russian bum who had backed out on account of the flu, and that fight was Louis Gorsky’s turning point for the worse, his dark defining moment, and it came to Marissa with a ferociousness that almost made her drive off the road.
The place was packed and the air was thick with the smell of cigars, the smoke like silk veils floating above some secret royal sanctuary. He was the first on a card of five, but when the fat guy with the headset gave him the nod to start up the aisle he felt like a frontrunner. The spotlight blazed him up, marking and documenting his casual strut to the ring like some crazy exclamation point, cheers echoing in his head and volleying behind the thump and wail of his entrance music, “New Divide” by Linkin Park, and when his cut man pulled up the ropes for him to duck through and his bucket man helped him off with his robe, he was a god.
He didn’t even notice his opponent. The dude’s music was hip-hop, some old-school Nelly crap that didn’t sound all that manly. And when the guy stepped into the ring to a chorus of visitors’ boos, all Gorsky registered was someone incredibly short and incredibly black, nondescript, a boy fireplug in a man’s arena. Gorsky had this one and he knew it. He had heavy reach advantage, and his reputation as the clever taunter-counterpuncher, pride of Kensington, was about to be known all up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
But when the bell sounded he went apeshit, free swinging and brawling, toe-to-toe, looking for a knockout. What he didn’t know was that the little black guy, built like a brick shithouse in the leopard-spotted trunks with the black trim, was a captain in the Marines, boxing ten years for the service, two hundred fights under his belt and only three losses. When you were first on a card you were usually an amateur getting a shot, not some experienced ring jockey with a reputation for pounding people into chop meat. The catch was that since this beast had been working under the umbrella of his rank for seven years this was technically his first professional fight, and that loophole was Gorsky’s tragedy.
He got TKO’d in fifty-three seconds, knocked down twice, the referee stopping the bout after Gorsky climbed the ropes a second time and wobbled. He couldn’t recall the ring doctor holding his face in both hands and asking through the catcalls who the president of the United States was, and he didn’t remember not remembering. Back in the hallway by the dressing rooms a few minutes later, Gorsky was sitting on a clothes dryer with a towel around his neck. Rod (the bod) Rogers had ambled by with his trainer, wondering if Gorsky was OK, and he had asked Rogers in return when his fight was going to take place.
He kept working out in the gym after that, but no one ever backed him again.
And Marissa knew how to fix it. He had to break down his whole scheme and start over, learn to fight southpaw, adjust his plant foot and work on power-jabbing rather than dancing, the hard and crafty butterfly rather than the tricky little hummingbird. And he needed a haymaker. It would take a year and a half of rebuilding and two more years of promotion, but she could have him headlining Atlantic City and Vegas within a three-year window even though bantamweights didn’t draw like the heavies and the UFC had made the sport almost obsolete . . .
She reached for her belt and pressed the button on her “trigger-killer,” the small silver mechanism she had on her hip, clipped to a belt loop. It was the size of an iPod and looked like just another accessory. Daddy had constructed it for her years ago at Mortimer-Smith where he was an electrical engineer, and she hated using it the way diabetics despised pricking their fingers. Still, it was a necessar
y evil when she had to obliterate the patchwork and move on with her life.
The sound was inaudible, set on a designer frequency that only she and a rare breed of European feline were sensitive to, but it was about as delicate in her own head as an air-raid siren. The sound struck her like an electric shock and she was back in the bosom of autumn colors and roadway, the connections with Louis Gorsky fading, becoming slowly unimportant, the after-effect lingering but manageable as it blew off in whispers and threads.
Sports were bad. Dangerous. Definite no-fly zones, teeming with people who meant well but would inadvertently lead her to people who didn’t. Marissa Madison had little interest in becoming some sleezeball’s soothsayer even if the payday was grand, and organized crime was a bummer in general. She was put here to assist the individuals who were in search of their gifts, not those who would use her talents to circumvent the superstructure. That was just pathetic and lazy.
And art wasn’t lazy. It was active and vibrant.
She rested her right wrist on the Mustang’s cute little gearshift and dialed the radio down to the metal stations, not “Octane” or “Liquid” because the after-effect of the boxer had stunted her hunger for the hard stuff, but into the #39 and #38 zone, where Hair Nation and Ozzy’s Boneyard would provide some nice syncopated throwback to the black asphalt winding its way through the thickening wood.
A tune piped through that she hadn’t heard before, but she knew of the singer. It was Tommy Keifer of Cinderella, trying a solo thing after all these years. Poor, poor Tommy. So talented and damaged, stretching and straining those wounded vocal cords his whole career, working a little comeback. Bluesy, but nondescript. Good beat, but rather generic.
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