Mister Tender's Girl

by Carter Wilson

  A wave of dizziness sweeps over me as I make my way to the table. My left foot hits a tower of precariously stacked books, and they crumble to the floor.

  “Damn it.” I don’t have time to put them back.

  I reach the table and sit on the stool, and the sudden support beneath me makes me realize how unsteady I actually am. I lay my palms on the smooth, white surface of the table, which is angled up toward me. There are no pens, pencils, or paper in sight, though there are a few stray, colored marks on the table, evidence of its use. I should be searching elsewhere, through the various half-open boxes or piles of books for something that will give me insights. But I’m pulled to this table. There is something here. I can feel it.

  I run my hands along the top and the sides of the table as my head feels lighter by the second, as if slowly being filled with helium.

  What the hell is happening to me?

  I flick my gaze to the open door and confirm Brenda’s not there. Just a few more seconds.

  My hands go beneath the table, and at that moment, my fingertips find a drawer handle. I look down, seeing the drawer isn’t necessarily hidden, but it’s tucked flush under the base of the table, and it’s only a couple of inches deep, so not obvious to the eye. The drawer is nearly as wide as the table, and as I slide it open, a clutter of colored markers and pens rolls toward me.

  The colored tips begin to blur, and in this moment, I know something is very wrong.

  I’m aware of paper: thick, heavy white sheets. Blank. I reach inside the drawer and grab the one on the top.

  My stomach roils. A sudden, stabbing pain in my side, like a very large bee stinger. Or a very small knife.

  I’m sick, I think. Food poisoning. Bad Chinese. And if I don’t make it back into the bathroom, I’ll be sick in this office. On this table.

  Go back, logic insists. Get out of this room.

  I pull the sheet out and hold it up. It’s a dull white, the color I imagine my face must be right now.

  It’s blank.

  Leave this room.

  My disappointment is quashed by my sudden, commanding need for a toilet. I’m not even sure I’m going to make it.

  My body starts shaking, and the heat that mere moments ago filled my body is replaced by jagged, stabbing ice, which saws at me from the inside out.

  This is beyond food poisoning.

  This is poisoning.

  My legs turn numb, and I have to brace myself on the top of the table to keep from collapsing. As I do, the paper falls from my hand and twists in the air.

  When it lands, it’s turned over, and this side isn’t blank. Not at all.

  Artwork. Heavy black lines outline a shape I know very well, even though he’s only half drawn, and only partially filled with rich, brilliant, piercing colors. Mister Tender is leaning over the top of his bar and whispering into the ear of someone who looks very much like me.

  And suddenly I see the similarity. The bold strokes, the confident outer lines of a first sketch. This artist is undeniably the same as the one who chalked up daily specials and images of coffee cups on the chalkboard at the Rose. The same person I always thought should be in art school, rather than working in a simple coffee shop.

  My legs give up entirely, and I fall to the ground, crumpling the page beneath.

  I look up.

  Brenda stands in the doorway, smiling at me. It’s a genuine smile, top-shelf, and I know beyond question there’s nothing more important in her world right now than me.

  She says something, but I don’t understand. My mind tells me I’m reaching for the wine opener in my pocket, but my limbs don’t respond. My only thought is that I’m now the one thing I promised I’d never be again: helpless.

  Then, as much as I try to fight it, darkness comes.

  Forty-Eight

  I wake. No, that’s not the right word. What I do is emerge from one state into another. The last state was, I think, unconsciousness. This is lucid unconsciousness. Awareness through some senses, others deadened.

  Sight.

  I have none. The limited, weak atmosphere circling my head is hot and thin, trapped in by something with mass. A bag, I think. There’s a bag on my head. Fabric, perhaps. A sack.

  Smell.

  Horrific. Vomit. There’s no other aroma like that. I don’t know if the puke is inside or outside this bag on my head. The vomit is certainly mine.

  Touch.

  I’m sitting in a chair, feet on the floor. I move to take the bag off, but my wrists are bound to the arms of the chair. Each ankle bound to a chair leg. There’s a dampness on the top of my thighs.

  Taste.

  Bile. Puke and Chinese food. Acid.

  Brenda poisoned me.

  Pounding headache. Any coherent thought lasts only moments before vaporizing.

  Sound.

  There wasn’t any until now, but I hear it. Another room. My mind comes back into focus for a moment, and I hear Brenda talking. On the phone, perhaps. Short words. Clipped sentences. I hear something like

  Everything’s ready

  and

  Do you want to watch?

  I’m able to focus my mind a little more, and now I feel the first true pangs of panic. There will be a moment when she’ll lift this bag off my head, and then I’ll understand what her plan is. But I can’t be the victim. I might be bound and helpless, but I won’t be the victim.

  I make a promise.

  If I die tonight, I will face it with deep, long breaths. A clear mind. And I won’t beg for anything.

  Nothing.

  The wine opener is still in my front pocket, pressing against my thigh. But that’s worse than bringing a knife to a gun fight. It’s like bringing a letter opener to a battlefield.

  Richard.

  Did he get my text? How much time has passed? The nausea from earlier is gone, replaced with a headache. That should have taken hours.

  Then:

  Footsteps on hardwood floors.

  A door opening, hinges squeaking. A brief rush of air on my face.

  Light floods my eyes, but I only see an inch in front of me. Everything is a hazy tan, and I have no sense of depth. It’s like looking onto an endless expanse of sand, stretching forever.

  Then the sand disappears.

  The hood is yanked from my head, and my eyes recoil against the light. But it takes only seconds to adjust, and then I see I’m in the same room as before. In front of me is the drafting table. The light in the corner. I look down. I’m in a chair from the dining room. Vomit cakes the tops of my jeans. The stench is stronger, and though I gag, everything stays down. Maybe there isn’t even anything left to come up.

  The hood falls to the floor next to my feet, and I see it’s just a pillowcase. A light tan pillowcase with brown spots on it. Puke stains. Maybe blood.

  My focus is watery. Feels like I’m viewing everything through a swimming pool.

  Brenda materializes into view. She peers down at me, like a little boy inspecting an insect he’s just about to squash. No more smile.

  “He wants to talk to you,” she says.

  I open my mouth to talk and then realize it’s completely devoid of all moisture.

  “Water,” I manage.

  Brenda furrows her brow at the request, leaves the room, then returns with a glass. She holds it to my lips and pours faster than I can drink, and most of the water ends up all over me. But I get a few swallows, which douses the fire in my throat.

  After a few gasping coughs, I ask, “Who wants to talk to me?”

  “You know who.”

  I sit up as straight as I can, and my spine protests with a sharp pain. I’ve been slouched for too long.

  “You took the pictures,” I say. “All those pictures.”

  “For two years,” she says.


  “Why?”

  “Because you’re all I have, Alice.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She leans down and places her hand on my cheek, pats it once.

  “I started reading Mister Tender when I was very young. All sorts of graphic novels, really. But Mister Tender was the one I couldn’t get enough of. And then…then you were stabbed. I was twelve when that happened, and I suppose I got a little obsessed over the story.”

  Then Brenda steps back, unzips her jeans, and slides them down her legs. She is wearing just a tiny strip of red underwear that tightly hugs her hips. Her legs are strong, toned, and milky white, and as she steps out of her jeans, I realize this isn’t some kind of bizarre sexual advance. She wants to show me something.

  Her legs are covered in scars.

  Hundreds of them. It’s like looking at the surface of the moon, in an area covered in the eternal, dusty tracks of rovers. Straight lines, zigzag lines, some not longer than inch, others the length of her thigh. Crossing, parallel, diagonal. Up the calf, across the knee, some as far up as her panty line. Most of them are whiter than her skin, old scars. A few are a dull red, more recent. One, a two-inch incision across the shin, is bright red and puffy. It could have been made yesterday.

  I say nothing. There is nothing to say. Brenda is insane.

  Forty-Nine

  “I’m running out of room,” she says. Brenda slowly turns around, letting me view the extent of her carvings. “I don’t want to cut above my waist, but it’s getting harder to keep myself from it.” Then she reaches out and thrusts her left arm toward me. I don’t understand what it is she wants me to see, and then I spot the small scar on her forearm. A single ski track on virgin snow. I remember the Band-Aid on her arm from last week. When I had asked her about it, she told me she was cut by a nail sticking out of the wall in her apartment.

  “I’ve been cutting since I was a teenager, but my scars are nothing compared to yours. You are the queen of scars, Alice.” She steps into her jeans, pulls them up, and buttons the waist. “And then I found…found the community.”

  “The website.”

  “Yes. The website. I realized I wasn’t the only one interested in you.”

  Yes. Interested is the right word.

  “Brenda, this is crazy. You drugged me. You’ll be arrested. You need to stop this now before you make things worse for yourself.”

  “You’re the queen of scars, Alice,” she repeats. “But I’m the queen of you. I get to be next to you all the time. Do you know how exciting that is?”

  I won’t be able to reason with her; that is quite clear now. But maybe I can keep her talking until I figure something out.

  A fresh wave of vomit stench attacks my nostrils, and I suppress a gag.

  “You moved to Manchester just to work with me?”

  She smiles. God, she’s excited. “From upstate New York.”

  “So, what, you just want to be close to me? Take pictures of me so you can tell your fellow online psychopaths what I’m doing?”

  The smile disappears. I don’t care for her serious face.

  “You don’t understand, Alice. I’m the number two fan. I’m very important.”

  “So you’re the one who draws all the pictures?” I feebly nod toward the drafting table.

  “Some. But Mr. Interested does most. I do the inking. He’s in charge of everything, though.”

  He’s in charge of everything.

  “Like Jimmy? He told you to kill him? Showed you how to do that?”

  She lets out a frustrated sigh, almost angry that I don’t immediately understand her delusions.

  “I didn’t do that. I mean, I had to help. I followed my instructions, found Jimmy, got him high, and put the strap on his chest. Gave him the wireless. But I didn’t kill him. That was Mr. Interested. It wasn’t my privilege. Mr. Interested is the number one fan, after all.”

  “Why? Why do you let him be in charge?”

  She looks as if I just asked her the most basic question in the world. “Because he was there from the beginning. And he’s always been there.”

  Does she actually know who Jack is?

  “So that makes him the number one fan?”

  “Of course.” She takes a deep breath of satisfaction. “But tonight, he’s letting me be in charge.”

  Her voice—so pleasant, almost singsongy—makes this pronouncement all the more horrifying.

  “Is he here? In Manchester.”

  “He was. He’s back in London now,” she adds. “He relies very heavily on me for things.”

  “Like placing a gun in my planter box,” I say.

  “That. And other things.”

  “So…so you take pictures of me, send them to him to draw, then he sends you the artwork to ink?”

  “We are very busy.”

  Keep her talking, Alice.

  “Why? What’s the point of any of this?”

  Brenda takes a step toward me, and for a moment, I smell her perfume rise above my own stench. Then she leans down and kisses me on the lips, the lips with remnants of my own puke still on them. It’s little more than the slightest brush on the lips, but it’s sensual and disturbing.

  “The point,” she says, “is tonight.”

  Brenda leaves the room.

  Fifty

  I have no idea how long she’ll be gone, so I use the time to whip my head around and try to find anything that can help me. It’s still dark outside, which means morning has not yet come. How long was I out? Did Richard even get my text? And what the hell do I expect him to do, come kick the door down and wrestle this lunatic to the ground?

  Everything in the room is what I remember from before. Nothing I can obviously use as a weapon, even if I could free myself. Moving my feet is impossible. I yank against the tape binding my wrists, and it twists a little. There’s a little room there. Maybe, with time, I could make some progress. But there is no time.

  Brenda reappears, grabbing the stool next to the drafting table and setting it in front of me. Then she sets a laptop down, and with the flair of a magician revealing the surprise under a handkerchief, she yanks open the screen. Skype.

  A man stares directly at me.

  Then Brenda says, “Alice, meet your number one fan.”

  Fifty-One

  What if some of the people you meet in the world already know you? Know everything about you, have been studying you, stalking you? And you have no idea. Like you’re a bug trapped under their glass lid, and all you do is wonder stupidly why you keep running into invisible walls.

  I had this thought two weeks ago in the Stone Rose and attributed it to my long history of paranoia. I had this thought, in fact, when a stranger ordered a drink. Older man, salt-and-pepper beard, deep-green eyes, the color of jade. Charcoal suit, no tie. All he did was order a cappuccino, but when he handed me the cash, he just stared at me. It lasted no more than a few seconds, but there was endless longing to it. I remember the name I wrote on the cup, the name that he paused before giving me, as if I had asked him a deeply personal question. John. But I also know there’s a common nickname for John. Something less formal, the name of a barman.

  “Jack,” I say.

  “You remember me,” he says.

  “You came into my shop. Twice.”

  “It was all I could do to only order a drink from you and not talk more than that. I couldn’t even manage to give you the name everyone knows me by, only my birth name.”

  His British accent betrays just the slightest hint of Cockney, as if he’s worked years to put traces of hardscrabble roots behind him. I immediately feel his pull, a gentle gravity, and realize I’m actually leaning toward the laptop screen. I’m trying to see any of me in him. And as much as I want to see nothing, our eyes could be interchangeable. Exact same shade of green.

&nb
sp; This is my father.

  Jack leans back in his seat. The room he’s in is dark, with just a small lamp providing the only light. He wears a loose oxford shirt, a cerulean blue.

  “You have no idea what it means for me to finally talk to you,” he says. “You have grown into such a beautiful woman. Strong, flawed, wondrous.”

  There’s too much happening, and the smell of my vomit hits me again, threatening to overload my senses. I close my eyes, shutting my view of this man, and take in a deep breath, hold it to four, then let the air trickle from me.

  Keep calm. Figure out what they want, and use it to your advantage. Focus on nothing but escape.

  “Tell her to let me go,” I say. The words sound so impotent, but I have no idea what else to say.

  “She won’t do that,” Jack says. “This is a very important night for her. For all of us, really.”

  I won’t ask why. I can’t ask why.

  Now when I move my wrists, I sense the slightest bit more wiggle room. If I could even get one hand free, maybe I could reach into my pocket and get the wine opener without Brenda seeing. There’s the sharp little end used for cutting the foil. Perhaps I could saw through the rest of the tape. But Brenda would have to be out of the room. There’s no way I could do it without her seeing me. Still, there’s a chance. Keep them talking. Just keep them talking.

  “How many fans are there?” I ask. “You are the number one and two fans. How many more? How many have the username and password to the website?”

  “Dozens.” The voice is Jack’s. I look at the screen, and he’s smiling. “And the only thing they all have in common is an obsession with you, Alice. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s not uncommon, actually. I call it victim fetishism. We read about crimes all day, don’t we? Every leading news article is one horrific event after another. Most of the stories wash over us, leaving us feeling very little about them. But once in a while, a particular crime affects us deeply, and not necessarily because we’re saddened by it. Sometimes a crime is so cruel and horrifying that it forces us to sit up and take notice. To honor it, in a way.”