Follow Me into the Dark

by Sullivan, Felicia C. ;

  Massaging the inside of his leg I say, “Kate, Gillian, who do you want? Who do you want me to be?”

  Another time: I tell James I watched The Shining when I was five. He rents us a room on the far part of town and we feast on raw fish while a madman wields an axe. On the news we learn that the inhabitants of a small California town have vanished. Reporters scour the remains. Bowls filled with soggy, half-eaten cereal. Televisions tuned to soap operas, game shows, and the local news. Cigarettes burned down to the filter. It was as if five hundred people woke one morning, started their day and then . . . disappeared. There are forensic experts, state troopers, and investigators on the scene—all dressed up in astonishment. Everyone is mystified. Evangelists dial in to local radio shows and talk about the rapture, that this is the first step of our punishment for not being what He had intended. This disappearance was phase one of The Plan.

  “Of course Jesus has a project manager,” I say. I smoke a cigarette with the eerie feeling of being watched. I once drove through a town near the Sierras where everything remained in a state of arrested decay. Soup tins lined supermarket shelves, bullet holes sprayed Shell signs, and abandoned tractors and pickups were strewn across wheat fields. Structures were maintained, but only enough so they remained standing. I remember that town was the last place I could hear the sound of my own breath. I took a man then, and the only things we had in common were our inability to love and our proficiency at fucking. We wondered aloud, how does one attach oneself to someone else? We’d lived our childhoods as if we were phantom limbs crying out for the familial love we were deprived of. When you’re in the desert, you’re thankful for even a thimble of water—so this sex, these two bodies forming a temporary attachment, was our thimble.

  “Pets, people—all gone. Even the plants, all signs of life, vanished. Where did they all go?” James says, massaging his forehead with his fingertips. He seems to be in pain. We sit in silence for several minutes. I continue to eat the fish. My mother hated fish, couldn’t stand the taste of it.

  “I wonder if I can go to where they went,” says James.

  Did Kate appear the way this town disappeared?

  “I feel like we’re being watched,” I say. I pace the room and look out the windows. I open and close the door. There is a piece of paper on the floor. In bold, slanting script the note reads: This has been your warning.

  “WHAT DID YOU do today?” Jonah said.

  My brother hated small talk. Exchanges involving weather reports sent him into a blind rage. Celebrity gossip made him lethal. Jonah preferred to start in the middle of things. On a checkout line, he’d once threatened a cashier by saying, If you ask how I am today, I will end you. When he told me the story, I asked him why he went to Costco; I didn’t figure him for being into multiples. Subtraction was his game. He said he needed duct tape. Lots of it. No one thought to ask a man why he needed twenty rolls of tape. Perhaps people assumed that he had much to fix.

  “The same thing I did yesterday. Maybe more of it?” I was watching a comedy show without laughing.

  “Sixty percent chance of thundersnow tomorrow. Winds are coming in from the north. Buffalo is already covered in eight feet of powder.”

  “You called me with a weather report? Are you dying or is someone dead?”

  “What’s the forecast? Be descriptive. Spare nothing.”

  “It’s seventy-five and sunny. It’s always seventy-five and sunny.”

  “And the barometric pressure? The humidity? I need you to talk to me about pressure.” Jonah was in a panic. He spoke like a skipping record.

  “Jonah, are you taking your pills?”

  “I think I might love someone.”

  “Far worse than I imagined.”

  “This is serious business. I love Lucia and I think she’s going to leave me.”

  “So how’s she different than the rest?” My eyelashes hurt. I was jealous in a way that was less about sex and more about possession. Jonah belonged to me. Jonah was my property. I thought about an interview with Ted Bundy I once saw: The ultimate possession was, in fact, the taking of the life. And then . . . the physical possession of the remains.

  “She’s worse off than both of us and trying to climb out of it. Why does she get a free pass?”

  “You want me on a plane? I can be there in the morning.”

  Jonah sighed. “I want you to listen to weather reports.”

  “THERE ARE NO pictures of her before she was ten,” I say. I hold Kate’s photo album in my hands.

  “You know why.”

  “I wasn’t asking a question.”

  “I spoke with Jonah yesterday.”

  “Why the fuck would you speak to my brother? How did you get his number? What could you possibly have to say?”

  “I called him because it’s starting again. I called him because I’m worried about you and he’s the only one who’s able to get through to you.”

  In a voice I don’t recognize I say, “You’ll be sorry you did that.”

  WHEN THE WIFE dies, I remove the pony from under my bed and wrap it neatly in two white trash bags before I return it to my closet. I weep because I accidentally purchased scented bags, the kind that remove stubborn odors. Everything that has come before has been removed. The past twenty-five years—gone. When no one can see, I clench the stick between my legs and run. My legs chafe and burn. The horse’s hair matted with tears.

  A few days later I enter the house when no one’s home. I am a hurricane. Kate’s room is tidy, neat, and I take all the clothes out of her drawers and throw them on the floor. I spit on them. I remove dresses—why is everything blue?—from the racks and rub them all over my body, even the dirty parts. I walk into the kitchen and make a sandwich and get crumbs all over the carpet because why not? I pull socks over my hands and play pretend like my brother and I used to do when we were small, before my mother called me trash taken out on Wednesdays, when we all knew it was collected on Fridays. I was what you left to rot.

  I have the picture of Kate and Ellie in my hand. At least you had a mother.

  “SOMETIMES YOU GO too far,” Jonah says. We are in the same place, seventy-five and sunny.

  EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT

  2003–2005

  JONAH KEPT THE best girls in boxes, crates, and cabinets—anything with four walls and a lid. He wrapped them in linen, and, with a litany of chemicals, he preserved them as best he could. Everyone thought he was a taxidermist, with all the skull bleaching, skin tanning, and preservatives he routinely carted into the house—a man should have a hobby—but he was an artist who kept the murdered girls in chain-wrapped boxes, and locks in the shape of hearts. Jonah loved his miniature dolls, and sometimes he’d open the crates and smooth their hair, tend to their cotton and silk dresses, finger their lashes, and imagine a life where all his creatures played house. Their collective murmur drowning out Lionel’s angry voice in his head, for Lionel was a shouter.

  “You’re too weak for this kind of work,” Lionel said after the last girl, baring rows of gleaming white teeth. If you looked closer, you could see his incisors, chiseled bone. Lionel was the kind who liked to linger; he wanted to spend time with the girls long after they were gone. This was important because each of them had to know they were among the chosen. They were special. After a while he got ravenous—one doll would be fresh in a bag while he whispered to Jonah about the next hunt. When it came to their projects Lionel sometimes regarded Jonah, and his care of the prey, with disgust. “I’ll leave you with the lady parts. You dress them up and put on that glitter nail polish while I do the real work.”

  Lionel was good at cleaning the scene.

  Jonah was a coward; this was true. He couldn’t even bring himself to say the word “murder” out loud; it was far too coarse and cold for conversation, so instead he called their kills “excavations” or “projects.” Responsible for scouting, Jonah would find girls standing alongside empty roads and highways, thumbs outstretched
, or in the parking lots of bars after they locked their keys in the car, or alone at the bus stop, shivering, knowing the local would never come. All of them wanted to go home, and as soon as they slid in the passenger seat Jonah promised them this. It wasn’t a complete lie; he’d just neglect to clarify whose home he’d take them to, or whether they’d make it to the front door intact. That’s when Lionel stepped in and took over. He never appeared like an apparition, rather he was a constant mutter, a sonata rising from the side of Jonah’s mouth.

  In the car, the girls always pleaded for their lives. Always with the tears and wet, matted hair. The guttural feline cries for mercy rising up from their stomachs, gurgling. Jonah loved their flushed faces and wide eyes; they were alive. Invariably, they’d cry out for their families: the children who expected them home and the boyfriends who missed tracing the shapes of their faces.

  Many of the dolls smelled of wild flowers and cotton, and Jonah often imagined the boxes coming to bloom, bleeding arms reaching out of the dead land and mouths catching their first breaths.

  They’ll come looking for me was their constant refrain, and this was true, too. Men always hunted for women killed by other men. Pressing a knife or a gun to their cheeks, Jonah would nod and make promises that their lives would be spared if they didn’t scream, if they drove a few more miles. He knew it was cruel to dole out hope like foil-wrapped sweets, but he was a coward. How do you tell someone that you’re about to kill them? Snuff out their life like some cold, cruel thief in the night?

  “You always leave me with the dirty work,” Lionel said. “How do you think that makes me feel? Always the bad guy left to snap their pretty necks. Washing the blood off my hands. Blood stains, you know. Bullets leave holes in windows and car seats.”

  “I clean up. I do my share,” Jonah said.

  “You gotta take some responsibility. Own some of the work. We’ve been at this for years and you’re acting like they’re all Lucia.” No more knives or guns, Lionel decided. Stick to belts or our hands. It’s neat that way. Close.

  “Can we not talk about Lucia, please?” Looking down at Lionel’s hands and then at the marks on the doll’s neck, he continued, “Leave that one’s face alone. I want her eyes intact.” This creature was special. When he picked her up in Roanoke, hitchhiking, she called herself Victoria, but he’d change that soon enough. Give her a new name like the rest of them. Her skin was bruised and blue, and for a second he could remember the way her teeth cracked. He could hear his voice telling her that this was the moment her life would begin. Tonguing the word extinguished, Jonah played around with the syllables, allowed them to linger. Words had more power than hands around a woman’s neck.

  After the first time, Jonah got sick for three days. He hadn’t anticipated all the blood, the mess of it under his nails and on his face. This was before he learned how to manage the details and be clean about it. This was before he’d feel the thrill of bones cracking.

  Jonah wanted to stop, he did, but the urge to kill was always greater than the urge to stop. Then Lionel: “You’re in this. Deep. There’s no going back. Mop up those tears; I don’t give a shit about those people and you shouldn’t either.” After the first time, Lionel had quoted someone he’d heard on television: “You learn what you need to kill and take care of the details. It’s like changing a tire. The first time you’re careful. By the thirtieth time, you can’t remember where you left the lug wrench.”

  Jonah pressed his eyes shut. No, no, no, that wasn’t him. Those weren’t his hands laboring that last breath out. That wasn’t his voice humming a lullaby as her chest fell quiet. That was all Lionel’s doing. Jonah’s work was afterward, dressing up the remains.

  This one he’d bury in his wall, standing upright, one hand waving. First, he’d have Lionel skin her lips.

  “No one gets out of this,” Lionel said, stepping over the body with a paring knife. “You get it one way or another.”

  HE’D MET LUCIA on a plane two years ago. She was on her second flask when she leaned over and offered a swig, by way of introduction. “I hate flying. They say you’re more likely to get killed in a car accident than on a plane, but I don’t buy it. Every single time I get on a plane I feel like I’ll soon be barbeque.”

  “They have pills for that,” Jonah said. Shaking a packet of sugar, he poured it into tepid coffee.

  “Drinking’s cheaper, and I don’t have to spend an hour of my life that I won’t get back lying to some doctor just to get a scrip.”

  Midway through a flight from Los Angeles, and this woman threw up four times. Every time she returned to her seat, she proceeded to drink some more. Even flagged down a nervous flight attendant for backup miniature bottles of Merlot. “We could hit turbulence,” was her excuse. She was something out of a film noir, with her black hair bordering on blue, lips painted red, and a crooked nose, as if she were built to break the surface of things. Dressed in sheer black crepe with only a cashmere shawl to lend modesty, she was beautiful in a way that made you think she’d cut open your face with her mouth, and pry her fingers in.

  She also smelled of vomit.

  Jonah made a dramatic showing of opening his manila folder and examining the photographs. Fixated on the construct of home, he was an artist who spent his life deconstructing its meaning. His photos were of his latest canvas installation, The Kingdom of Limbs, where he superimposed daguerreotypes onto blueprints of California mansions. Vermont barns and New England Tudors collided with cool Spanish tiles, billowing palm fronds, and floor-to-ceiling glass windows. On top of the photos, he drew Victorian figures swimming in indoor infinity pools and cooking frankfurters over hot pots. The women wore corsets while the men stood stalwart in their wool coats and expensive hats. The children were styled as Kurt Cobains in miniature, with their sweeping blond hair, dour mouths, and track marks. Jonah loved this carefully composed mess of image, time, and texture, and apparently the woman did too. He felt her sour breath on his cheek.

  “It’s straight out of a Buñuel movie. I’m waiting for a mother to start waving raw meat in a kid’s face. I’m Lucia, and I’m drunk.”

  “Telly,” Jonah said.

  “Like the virgin hunter in Kids. You must get that a lot.”

  “No, mostly I get Telly Savalas.”

  “The bald guy with the lollipop? Which generation are you rolling with? Just how old are you?” Lucia laughed.

  Something in Jonah curdled. This woman set his teeth on edge. He had this sudden urge to choke her. “The kind of generation that has a name for the amount of drinking you do.”

  Lucia snorted. “Alcoholics go to meetings. I’m a catalog girl. Well, former girl. I’m twenty-eight and I’ve already been put out to pasture. Replaced by some teenager with implants and a hollow throat. I imagine they’ll make glue out of me. You know what’s hard about getting old? People look at you and find fewer ways to use you.”

  “Do you always speak this way to strangers?” He noticed that her teeth, like her nose, were crooked.

  “Do you always flaunt art that makes you look like a mental patient?” After what seemed like an extraordinary amount of time had elapsed between her last word and her next, Lucia said, “You have sturdy hair.”

  Jonah looked at her and felt the whole of his world invert. Cars tumbled out of the ocean, the sky birthed trees, and everyone tiptoed on their heads. Lucia was a blind nymph, some sort of black star that, having collapsed into an airplane, found her way to the seat next to his.

  “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” she said, tapping his folder with a blue fingernail.

  When they arrived at JFK, Jonah had to carry Lucia to his car. Later, she’d joke and say that he liked his women narcoleptic and his bed cold, like the inside of a grave.

  Lucia made a habit of breaking into empty apartments. Maybe because it was the only place where she could really hear the records she still played with the volume turned up, or perhaps she was comforted by what had been abandoned; she l
iked to imagine the lives of people left behind. Sometimes she’d find small dresses in large closets, tags stapled to the sleeve. Other times, she’d thumb through secondhand books filled with pictures of couples who were once blinded by their love. And now, these pictures—a catalog of them through the seasons—were shoved into the books you read as a teenager: Salinger, Cheever, and Faulkner. Lucia imagined the division of a home and the business of leaving, and she’d text Jonah, “Come.” Come. And he did, and he kissed her ten times on her nose and told her, “You can’t eliminate what you don’t own.” They would never have to suffer through the mess of math; “There will never be an end,” Jonah promised. There would never be a leaving.

  Always she came before the paint, before the crew of men lumbered in and whitewashed the previous owners, and their lives, away. She came before the women who swept and scrubbed floors, the women who woke before dawn and took two buses and a train to neighborhoods where men spent hours watering sidewalks, carrying their sons and daughters on their backs. Lucia came when the place was dirty, when the scent of the departed—wet leather and something rotting and sweet—still lingered.

  Jonah always followed, even when she didn’t know he was behind her. He watched other men stare at her parts. He understood her loneliness, which was a mirror of his own, and when she called, and she always called, he made a show of running up the stairs, climbing through the windows, and holding her close when she sat on the floor with an old record player and a stack of 45s.

  “We’re going to get caught,” he said, once. They were on the first floor of a Park Slope brownstone. Lucia told him she picked this one because of the bay windows, and how she felt when the light came through the wooden blinds. Look at the children play. She played Sade’s “Smooth Operator”: Jewel box life, diamond nights and ruby lights, high in the sky / Heaven help him, when he falls. / His heart is cold.