Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  “It’s the Suitcase Murderer!” she thought crazily. “He just hauled in an oversized luggage bag with one of those airplane carriers you pull behind you on wheels, and he yanked it so hard he banged the reinforced plastic handle rods against the sinks! Oh God, all the girls must have been small like me so they could fit and he could get the zipper around the lumpy parts!”

  She saw a pair of dirty black sneakers appear on the other side of the stall door, one foot then the other, slowly, deliberately.

  If Marissa’s eyes could have gone wider they might have fallen out of her head. She could hear his breathing and it was all through the nose, heavy as if he had a cold or more as if he were really amped for the roast that had just come out of the broiler and those hardened fatty parts by the bone he was going to carve off and eat right there at the cutting board.

  There was a hard knock. Marissa squirmed and tried not to give out a squeal or an “eek” or some other lame giveaway. Next, the guy pounded on the door, this time shaking it on its hinges.

  “Yo! Someone in there?”

  Wait.

  “Yo!” he said.

  “Yes, God!” she exploded back, change of emotion, new flavor, are you kidding me? It was the guy’s voice, too stupid and rude for the “Suitcase Killer” for sure. Of course, he was the janitor. Of course, the clatter came from the hardened rubber wheels of a mop bucket running across the grout lines of the floor tiles, and the metallic “boink” sound was the mop handle coming in contact with the sinks as he drew the affair across in an arc. Embarrassing!

  “How come I can’t see yer feet?” he said.

  “Why are you looking?” Asshole.

  “Didn’t you see the sign?” he said.

  “What sign?”

  “The floor wet sign. I put it right on the matting outside.”

  “Missed it. Do you mind?”

  “Naw . . .” he said, but now it was his tone that was doing a change in flavor. It sounded wistful or mystified or . . . gross! His feet had backed off and he was most certainly squatting, looking under the door. Marissa was pretty sure he still couldn’t see her, but it was obvious what had caught his attention. It was her cotton panties, lying in a dainty rumple just inside the stall shadow.

  She hopped off the toilet and snatched them up, and while she was putting her pants back on, riding bareback and absolutely furious that some snotty-faced high school dropout or whatever he was had the opportunity to picture her so, she formed a scenario in her mind where she sought out his manager and filed a formal complaint.

  But then she would have to detail her actions in the stall, and even if she came up with a logical and acceptable excuse for having her underwear on the floor of a public bathroom, in an establishment where she was not even a paying customer mind you, there were worries here. How many assistant managers, bartenders, waitresses, and busboys would get a load of this one? Would it end up online? Would she have to give her name?

  Marissa pushed out of the stall and saw that the bathroom was vacant again. Of course the punk was hiding, probably in the kitchen, or better in the back room with the food stock, somewhere he wouldn’t have to confront her face to face. She threw her undies in the steel, waist-high receptacle bolted to the wall and passed her hand in front of the towel machine a few more times. She was going to put the paper product on top in there more as a perfunctory action than a practical one, because if the creep wanted her panties bad enough he’d just dig them out anyway, and this made her so mad she felt she was going to spit nails.

  She exited the bathroom, and right there across the thin, dark hall area was a yellow wet floor cone. But it was nestled against the far wall as if stowed there for convenience instead of standing directly in front of the door for a purpose, and that piped Marissa to the moon. It was easy to miss and it was intentional, as if the guy were trying to set up these kinds of “walk-ins” as opposed to stumbling into a lone instance by chance, and she was actually reconsidering that complaint when suddenly the blood ran out of her face.

  All thoughts of righteous wrath withered and died right there, her stomach turning to lead, one hand coming up to her cheek in hard shock. The problem wasn’t the janitor here. He was irrelevant.

  The problem was her, and it had nothing to do with some shifty kid who would say it was just “in her head” if he was finally called onto the red carpet this time for setting traps and peeking at the ankles under the stall doors. It was what had not been in her head, what still wasn’t. Something was different, something off-kilter, and she would have recognized it immediately back in the bathroom if she hadn’t been so filled with fear and adrenaline.

  She’d had no read on that janitor whatsoever, no flood of pictures, no catalogue of his past. The “Suitcase Killer” idea had not only been wrong, but it lacked body, dimension, authenticity. It had been her imagination alone.

  No patchwork.

  Marissa was almost paralyzed where she stood. The entire restaurant before her seemed to have gone dull, at least in terms of what she could hear. There were forks and knives contacting plates, glasses clinking, and a low murmur of voices, all of it coming from the seating area just past the nearly vacant oyster bar, but she was apart from it all as if from another planet, standing on the edge of scraps upon scraps of meaningless, random surface conversations.

  This was what it was like to be “normal.”

  And it was the epitome of being alone.

  She stumbled forward toward the waiting area and the open frame exit behind it that would lead her into the mall. She passed a server with a blond ponytail and nerdy reading glasses, tables filled with customers, a guy in a dress coat carrying a briefcase with whom she got caught up for a second in that awkward dance where you both guessed wrong and almost bumped three times, a scattered few sitting at the bar watching ESPN, and the air was flat, no read of anything, no pictures, nothing. By the time she passed the hostess, who noticed her this time with thin eyes and a wide plastic smile, Marissa had gone from a state of near shutdown to an absolute terror, and when she stepped out to the wide hall she was hyperventilating, trying not to go prostrate, falling, going fetal on the floor, drawing the attention of the mall medics who drove golf carts around looking for the elderly who’d collapsed, had strokes, broken a hip, drank too many Bloody Marys.

  This was unreal. Her patchwork had shorted out or something, and there by the information board Marissa reached to her belt loop and unhooked the trigger-killer, fingers shaking. Down at the bottom edge the tiny battery light, which had always been green, was a dull crimson. All the mall noises seemed to amplify around her now as if her ears had gained sudden recognition of what they had considered second fiddle for so long, and it was hard to concentrate. Had her battery ever gone dead? She couldn’t remember. Daddy constructed this device for her back in middle school, and she didn’t recall any time that it had been on the fritz. It was like the battery in your desk clock, or more like the one in those old-fashioned watches that seemed never to run out even as decades passed by.

  Marissa looked up blankly at the mall map. There was no Radio Shack or Circuit City that could help her here. The device was custom-made, as was its power source, and she had to get her father into the lab and quick. She kneeled down and unzipped her bag, for a moment unable to find her phone in all the clutter. By the time she quick-dialed Daddy at the office and worked through Ms. Fehlinger asking her about school and all that, she was almost in tears.

  “Hey, Rissa,” he said. “What can I do you out of?” The sweet familiarity of his voice calmed her. Slightly.

  “I need your help kind of quick, Daddy.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “It’s my trigger-killer. I think the battery died.”

  “Hmm. Is the light on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Color?”

  “Dull red.”

  “Hmm.”

  She crossed an arm across her stomach and looked up at the high ceiling. Daddy could be s
low-moving at times, typical techie, caught in his world of gadgets and more interested in trying to let you see the brilliance of the equations behind the scenes than the final product in your hands. She heard him mute the telephone and ask an assistant or someone about a blueprint, and when he came back in full voice, his tone was in sing-song mode as if the conversation were ready for its signatures and sign-offs.

  “OK, then, Rissa-bissa. Let me know if you need money or . . .”

  “Daddy!”

  “Hmm . . . no, the schematic of the south grid . . . yes? Oh, sorry. A little busy here with stuff, honey. Now what’s wrong with your device?”

  “Nixed battery! Daddy, is it possible that the thing went dead right after I cut off a particular flood of patchwork, and that it somehow kept me blank, like in a permanent state where it left me, sort of trigger-killed in the dark?”

  “Neat-o!”

  “What?” She rolled her eyes and couldn’t help but forfeit a small grin. That was just so . . . him. She could picture her father sitting there at his drafting board, sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up, long thin face, silver sideburns and that friendly, trusting sort of elevated worldview as he was born the nerd, raised the nerd, and now paid so handsomely to be the nerd. He lived in his perfect world of formulas and contraptions, and he loved it with the pure joy of a child. It was cute in a way, and incredibly annoying in most others.

  “It short-circuited you!” he said. “I’ll have to jot down some notes on this, Riss, it’s fascinating.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Stop mumbling, please! This is an emergency!”

  “Oh, right. Well, in terms of your power source there’s nothing to fix. The problem is that the battery itself is custom and minuscule and there’s no charger, or recharger, at least not one I’ve invented quite yet.”

  “Can you make me one?”

  “I’m kind of swamped here.”

  “Daddy!”

  “Uh, yes, OK, sure.” Whoever he had been mouthing stuff over his shoulder to there in the office must have left, because Marissa could hear in his voice that she had his full attention now. “I can do it,” he continued, “but what happened here might not just be a dead battery, and there very well might be an issue with a repair, or at least what you might call minor surgery.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why is it so noisy in the background there?” he said. “I can hardly hear you.”

  “I’m at the mall. So why not just a fried battery—short version please?”

  “Right. If your patchwork is frozen or blacked out so to speak, it seems you have been the unfortunate victim of two issues, a worn battery and possibly a circumstance where the contacts have fused in the switch, in effect welding themselves shut, locking you in the dark. So in short, I need your device so I can file down the spotwell and smooth it. As for the battery, I have to start from scratch, cut down a unit and marinate the cloth in a complex brine solution. Then I can initiate the chemical process that will reconstitute the prototype.”

  “What’s the timeframe, Daddy?”

  “Two days, maybe three.”

  That wasn’t good, considering that today was Thursday.

  “Can you get into the office on the weekend?”

  “No one here but the dust mites after 5:30 on Fridays, Riss. But I’ll have you good to go by Tuesday, for sure.” Marissa did her best to keep her voice sweet and ignore the fact that she was digging her nails into her left palm.

  “Can’t you bring some of the materials home, Daddy?”

  “Aww,” he said, sounding like the disappointed child now. “I was going to work on my calendar this weekend.” It was his pet project, the process of creating a new way of sectioning off a “year” with thirteen months, all of them bearing new names combining the Catholic and Judaic hallmarks and somehow eliminating the need for daylight-saving time. Marissa had read this one in him many times, forcing herself not to tell him that some of the equations were numerical paradoxes that were no more than roundabouts. But he liked working the numbers, an illusion of forward movement and a harmless one.

  “Please, Daddy?” she said, trying to keep her voice steady so she could play it this way believably. “Pack up a kit and bring it all back to the house. We’ll set it up in the den, play oldies on the record player the way you like with all the crackles and pops. I’ll be your helper.”

  “Hmm. Really?”

  “I’ll make chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts.”

  “Now you’re talking! Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Shouldn’t you be in school? Don’t you have reports? I thought you were going to be buried in the library this weekend.”

  She swallowed dryly. All of a sudden words like “buried” sounded prophetic. She smiled brightly.

  “I’m home for a little while, Daddy. At least the weekend. It’s Halloween, and the apartment is so . . . empty.”

  That gave him pause. He cleared his throat and said cautiously,

  “Don’t you have classes tomorrow?”

  “It’s the day after all of today’s staff in-services, and considering it’s sort of a holiday anyway they sent around a message on Campus Cruiser that we had off through Friday,” she lied. Tomorrow was actually a bear of a day, with three of her professors collecting major assignments. She had a lab in Chem 105, three journal responses for Psych 105, and the rough draft of the analysis paper for Comp 101 that she’d never gotten around to bringing to the Writing Center for polish. But there was no way in hell that she was going to go back to Chester right now, to a college campus filled with unfamiliar streets and walkways, construction detours, empty classrooms, hallways. Too many people, too many places for a serial killer to blend in as a maintenance worker, a teacher, a student, or security. And her apartment? Forget it, there were just too many places for a killer to hide. There were parking areas with poor lighting at night, basement laundry and storage, a creepy spread of forest out back behind the Goodwill bins, no thank you!

  “It’s a deal,” her father said. “I’ll bring home a package, some tools for the close work, and a pair of goggles or two. We’ll get silly with it.”

  Marissa let her breath out, and it was only then that she realized she had been holding it. Her father was just so out of touch with things that it was almost charming, and she nearly burst into tears thinking that if she turned up missing she might never again hear him doing his best to totally botch the concept of “cool,” not only by messing up a phrase like “Let’s get jiggy with it,” but remaining absolutely unaware that it was long out of style.

  “Deal,” she said. She closed the connection, tossed the phone in her carry bag, and then took a real look around, trying for a level of intelligent, critical study and gaining little more than a series of glances that darted all over the place from behind her sunglasses. It was nice to have decided to stay at home for a short while where she was familiar with all the dark corners, but she still had to get there.

  Everyone around her suddenly looked like a criminal.

  Two guys in dirty blue jeans and reflective vests on break from some road crew, criminals. A guy with wavy hair and a goatee wearing a gray pea coat and carrying a guitar case, maniac. A thin bow-legged guy in black spandex pushing one of those baby strollers that you jogged behind, monster! Did that overweight dude with the grizzly sideburns just stare at her rack? Did the suit with the newspaper under his arm just glance back at her bum as he passed? Was the greasy-haired guy in the Eagles jersey giving her the north to south, the dirty old man with the jowls and brown derby hat looking at her sideways?

  It was as if the lack of the ability to get a clear psychic read on a given male’s libido magnified the possibilities, and her imagination was running wild especially since she had long decided that this was a killer with a sexual agenda. Marissa was also alarmed that in the sweep she’d just made, she had only noticed the men. It wasn’t just that her patch
work was down, but her selective perception had heightened to the point that she was blocking and blanking the puzzle pieces that might distract her. She didn’t like this. She had to be aware of everyone and everything, and who said the killer wasn’t a woman? She had gotten a read that the black cloud was virginal, and she remembered sensing all male-all-the-way, especially considering her orgasm, but when she thought about it her bodily reaction had been a result of the absolute purity of the passing evil, not its gender.

  Wouldn’t that be a kick? A female killer, playing on the camaraderie shared by most chicks almost like second nature, draping fabric across their chests in the clothing store, swaying and saying, “Isn’t this cute?” to relative strangers, going to the bathroom together, exchanging bottles of lotion, talking about men. The “fiendette” would already be “in the club” so to speak, and the luring wouldn’t seem so unnatural if a bait and trap was the play to begin with.

  And that was the trouble. Marissa had become a token in a game filled with shadows and fog, where you didn’t know the rules and you couldn’t get a good read on the borders. Oh, and don’t forget that there was also a clock. Ticking. She was next.

  She walked over to the Victoria’s Secret store, thinking that all this was eerily similar to that old classic movie she’d caught on TCN a month or so ago when she’d been channel-surfing late at night, bored, unable to sleep. There was a blind woman who didn’t know that there were drugs hidden in a doll in her apartment, and criminals who came looking for the goods. Then she pulled the switch so all the lights would be off and they’d be even-Steven. Wait Until Dark, that was it. Only in that story it was the bad guys who got the lights shut off on them, just the way Marissa’s patchwork had blacked out. And they were the unfortunate losers in the end.

  That word made her think of poor Jerome, and she scolded herself for associating him with such a label. He was beautiful and she had somehow dressed him in the wrong robes, near miss, one wrong turn somewhere, that was all. She raised her chin and switched her bag to the other shoulder. What irony. She needed Jerome, needed him badly, and she couldn’t call him especially to discuss the idea that the very patchwork that had failed him was now failing her. It was a guaranteed disaster, putting him in a corner and asking him to connect with the very thing he was not equipped to deal with. She tried to envision any possible conversation they could make of this, but came up with a big blank. Might as well send him a T-shirt with a big “L” on it.