Follow Me into the Dark

by Sullivan, Felicia C. ;

  “No, we’re not. I’ve cased this place for a week. Do you know the people here pass one another in the lobby without even saying a word? Collect their mail without so much as a hello? For all they know, I could be the new neighbor.”

  “But you’re not.”

  Lucia shook her head, as if she were speaking a language Jonah didn’t understand. “We’re always someone’s neighbor. You think a number on a door decides that?”

  “You brought me here to pick apart the etiquette of stroller moms and banker husbands?”

  “I have two Italian sandwiches and a sad song playing, and I thought you might want to share them with me.”

  “You know, we have an apartment where we can do that. Eat sandwiches.” Jonah kissed her ear, bit it. He loved her because she was the kind of woman who would eat a pork sandwich without faking it. She’d see the whole thing through.

  “I know.” Lucia nodded, taking a bite of her sandwich. She tore the bread with her teeth in a way that was savage. “I like it better here. I like us in the in-betweens. There’s never a beginning or an end.”

  Jonah handed her a letter. “This came for you today.”

  She eased open the envelope and laughed at the check, a final payment from her former agent for work in her former life. “No, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t like endings.”

  He took her hand in his and felt the coolness of her. She had pastry hands, and for a moment this reminded him of his sister. “You don’t have to worry about money.”

  “Do you think that’s why I’m with you? For the money?”

  “If only you were that simple,” Jonah said.

  Lucia handed him a sandwich and purred into his neck. “Eat before it gets dark.”

  The record skipped. They permitted the stutter.

  Lucia gave him her pickle because she knew he liked it. “So, where were you last night?”

  “We’re here again?” Jonah sighed in the dark. He picked up Death in the Afternoon and flipped through the photographs. “There’s only so much of this I can take.”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “Out. I was out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I was out not fucking another woman.”

  How do you keep a wave away from the sand? How do you hold it back from grabbing at the one thing it desires? Lucia slid her underwear down her legs and let it rest at her ankles. “I’d like you to fuck me now,” she said.

  Afterward, in the dark, Jonah traced three words on her back. Three blind mice.

  In the city, the former catalog girl traded her bejeweled corsets and Chantilly lace for crepe suits and tweed jackets. Four days a week Lucia was the telephone girl at McCann Harrison, responsible for managing the carousel of phone lights, the sprucing of conference rooms (sprucing was included in the fourteen-bullet job description), the watering of plants, the rearrangement of lobby magazines, and the doe-like fawning over the male executives who strode past her on their way to close deals. Lucia didn’t know what actually transpired at McCann Harrison beyond the cackling of We’re on a deadline! We’re not selling a bar of soap, people—we’re promising a lifestyle! We ran out of coffee filters! Someone stole my yogurt! WHERE IS MY DAIRY-FREE, LOW-FAT, GLUTEN-FREE BLUEBERRY YOGURT?

  Sometimes it was Lucia’s job to procure yogurt, even though she was the one who stole it. During one of her three allotted bathroom breaks, she’d sneak the tubs in and devour the insides. Flaxseed and whipped lemon meringue and cherry crème, she’d wrap the evidence in tissue. No one ever noticed the evidence on her upper lip or cheek because Lucia was the front-desk girl, the girl who transferred calls—she was universally invisible and routinely ignored.

  Pilfering the supply closet was the work of low-rent clock-watchers, but food theft was primal. Only a former catalog girl, whose fame had been eclipsed by a knock-kneed teenager with tits the size of Kentucky, would opt for the more dubious art of snack theft. No one would dare suspect the girl whose sinewy hips once tumbled out of their mailboxes of hoarding string cheese, frozen grapes, and Lean Cuisine meals. Models, even former ones, didn’t eat the food relegated to the plebian, peanut-crunching lot. They hired Lucia to set a mood, project an image, although they never thought that the mood would be one of rampant distrust and the image of paranoia. Coworkers started labeling their food with notes that read, I may not know which one of you animals stole my salad dressing, but God does. Jesus is watching.

  Tensions were high; interns went ballistic over the theft of their carefully budgeted and packed lunches. They booked a conference room and spent two hours deliberating a desk-to-desk search, but knew HR would never comply for fear of lawsuits and vigilante recriminations. “This is bullshit,” Ryan, the experience guru intern, lamented. “My sandwiches cost my parents a lot of money. Multigrain isn’t cheap, people.”

  Lucia made it her mission to eat all of his sandwiches.

  “I SAW THE devil last night,” Lucia said. This time, they were in their home with all the lights turned off except for a tangle of Christmas lights she’d strung up. She liked how they winked at her.

  “Come again?” Jonah said. He picked out all of the pork from his pork fried rice because he knew how much she liked it, and how much the Chinese joint on the corner overcooked it. Lucia liked her meat either raw or well-done. In life she needed the middle, but when it came to meat, she couldn’t tolerate the suggestion of something undone. It either had to be bruised or burned. “You saw the devil. Like Damien in The Omen devil?”

  “Damien was the Antichrist,” she corrected. “And no, I didn’t actually see the devil; I saw a movie. About a man so consumed by his grief, you end up wondering who’s the predator or the prey. I thought of you and me. I’m wondering if I’m the predator in all of this. Am I what will undo you?”

  “Why are you talking nonsense?”

  “I just wonder if I’m keeping you from . . .”

  “From what?”

  “From living your life?” Lucia said. Under the pink and blue lights, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes appeared dark and gray.

  “What life? No life of mine,” Jonah said, quoting a line from a Grace Paley story his sister had once sent him. He couldn’t remember the story, but it began with, Hello, my life. “There was no life before you.” And this was true. What Jonah had, has to a certain extent, is a like life. A suggestion of something real, something just in the periphery, and it was only when he was around Lucia and all her sadness—he loved his walking wound, he did—that Jonah felt as if he understood the quality of his breath: the involuntary inhalations and exhalations, the taking in of new life and the letting go of waste. He only understood love through the act of sacrifice, and in Lucia he saw mouth-to-mouth personified in the way she would involuntarily give up her breath for his.

  “There was life. You just weren’t there for it.”

  “Maybe you’re right. But all I remember from this life is you on a plane trying to play hotel instead of house,” Jonah said, and kissed her collarbone and allowed his mouth to settle in the delicate space between bone and skin. They were quiet for a time, until Jonah asked, “Tell me, what’s with the lights? It’s July.”

  “I had in my contract that all of my sets and hotel rooms had to be filled with Christmas lights. Even when the men with their cameras told me that I was as cute as kittens, I wouldn’t come out until I saw the blinking lights. Only then did I give them a hundred watts and a thumb inching a bikini down low. God, my ass used to be epic. Feel free to forward your bereavement cards to this address; you’re looking at a widow mourning her former life.”

  Jonah went into the other room and got his camera. “I’ll take your picture,” he said. She was beautiful in parts, and Jonah photographed her that way, limb by limb, with the flash on. Lucia was a face full of high beams: jumping up and down on the couch, she posed, preened, and gave him a light that blared a little too bright, and he saw something in her that resembled happiness. In the pictures,
she looked bone white and the Christmas lights resembled tears, but in life, oh in life, she looked terribly, terribly happy.

  “Don’t stop,” she gasped. “Don’t ever stop taking my picture.”

  “IF YOU WERE going to die and you knew you were going to die, and you could choose how . . . what would you choose?” The road ahead of them unfurled a blanket of varying shades of gray: paved to gravel to dirt to gravel and paved again. They barreled down the back roads of Virginia; Jonah pressed a steak knife into Victoria’s neck as she drove. He watched the symphony of her body—the quick rise and fall of her chest, the uneven breath and quivering lips—and he found comfort in her terror. He liked this disquiet.

  “Please let me go. I’ll be good. I won’t tell anyone, I promise,” Victoria said.

  “This isn’t about being good, Victoria. This is about choice,” Jonah said, suddenly impatient. “Not many women in your situation have options. Someday we’re going to die, because everybody dies. I haven’t seen anybody yet that didn’t die. And I’d like to choose my own kind of death for a change. I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of. Tired of people’s lives in my hands, and I certainly don’t want your life in my hands, and I’m going to tell you, Victoria, without me, life has no meaning. But if it were me, I’d choose a midair plane collision. There’s poetry in that—a burning body falling to the ground like some sort of star.”

  “I have money. We can go to an ATM, and you can have it. I’ll give you my pin, account number—anything you want. Just let me go.”

  “You think this is about money?”

  “They’ll come looking for me.”

  “I don’t doubt that. Tell me, are you the slit-wrists-in-the-bathtub kind of girl, or the hail-of-bullets kind of woman?” Jonah tossed her a napkin. “Fix your face.”

  Victoria wiped her mouth, crumbled the napkin in her lap. “Pills,” she said. “A bottle of sleeping pills.”

  “It’s like you’re a fifties housewife, chewing tranquilizers and burning steaks. Folding before the first hand is even played. Maybe we should talk about all those bags in the trunk and where you’re going.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she cried, gripping the steering wheel. Veering the car outside the lines. “Please take me home. Take me home.”

  It took everything in him not to jam the knife all the way in, Lionel or no Lionel. Always with the shelter they’re privileged to have, but inevitably abandon. Always with the family they complain about, and secretly hate. Always with the men with whom they lie frozen between undisturbed sheets. They all begged for the life they didn’t have, but thought they could if they had the chance. Jonah’s job wasn’t to help them live up to their fiction; his work was excavation and preservation.

  Why didn’t they understand that?

  Why is it that we miss what we’ve always taken for granted at the very moment we’re on the verge of losing it? Nearing death, we cry out for our rotting floorboards, the oven that burns all the cakes, and the lovers who crawl into our beds stinking of someone else’s happiness. But what we really mourn is our own loss; we lament the time that exists just beyond our last breath, when a shovel presses cold earth on top of a wooden box. How do you mourn this loss when you’re on the precipice of it? We’re unable to say its name or define its shape, it’s so elusive; instead we call out the things that compose this minor life, in hopes that the sum will take form from its ramshackle parts. We are nothing if not children who regard a manual with terror when we see the words some assembly required.

  Jonah’s sister went to the crazies; his mother became a light in a house that had blown out, and his father, well, he’d never loved his father to begin with. And for all of it, Jonah felt nothing. So why should these women make a case for a miserable life they’re so desperate to save? Be honorable. Lay a blanket down over your sadness because the only way around pain is through it. These women were fucking lucky to receive the gifts that Jonah gave; Lionel wouldn’t stand for release; he would never allow Jonah to go quietly.

  Lionel’s here, and it’s about time.

  Lionel reached for Victoria’s hair, petted it. It was no use, though; she couldn’t hear or feel him. She was only a repository in which their pain could be placed. Lately, he’d been getting these nightmares of a girl in a white lamb’s mask, wearing a Crazy Eddie’s T-shirt and ripped dungarees. The girl, who couldn’t have been older than ten, stood in the middle of the street with a snake in her hand, and in the snake’s mouth you could see a mouse trying to claw its way out, only to be swallowed whole. Lionel remembered the claws that took on the appearance of tweezers. The girl held the snake to the sky like some kind of victory, and then Lionel woke up.

  Lionel woke to another car speeding down a back road, another woman pleading for her life who would invariably become another doll stuffed in a box or buried under the floorboards.

  “Took you long enough,” Jonah said. “We need to have a discussion about punctuality. Quit it with the snakes; you know how I hate them.”

  “You’re not the one dreaming about them,” Lionel said.

  “What snakes?” Victoria cried.

  “Seems to me that you’re on the run,” Jonah said. “All those clothes folded up neat and tidy. Pictures of your kids shoved into books. Tell me about the home you so desperately want to go back to, but when you picked me up it was the one thing you seemed intent on leaving.” A thin line of blood trickled down her neck from where Jonah pressed the knife a touch too deep.

  “Easy, soldier,” Lionel said. “Look at you, cutting up her neck. Making a mess. Are you looking for a one-way ticket to a needle in the arm? What did I tell you about the belts? They’re clean, honest. But no, you got to be the kid throwing sand outside the sandbox.”

  Jonah peered over his shoulder. “Put on the gloves.” To Victoria, “Pull over. Park.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “We’re going for a walk. See those trees over there? I’m going to leave you there and take the car. All your talking’s giving me a headache.”

  “I told you to gag them. I told you to take the wheel, but you never listen. Sometimes I think you’re suited for back office, because you’re starting to fuck up the basics,” Lionel said.

  “You’re going to let me go,” Victoria said. This was the part Jonah secretly loved most—the walk from the car to the tree, and the hope occupying the small space between the two.

  She cut the engine and Jonah tied her hands with rope. Behind him, Lionel shook his head and said, “The gloves, you moron.” But Jonah didn’t listen. Skin on skin excited him.

  They walked into the forest and stood under a canopy of trees and purple sky. He told Victoria to get down on her knees, that he had to blindfold her before he drove off. Security measures, he called it. Then he told her that he wanted to give her a hug before he left. He was sentimental like that. She nodded, thinking this was the end, and it was.

  Her jaw, in particular, was probably broken. Jaws tended to break around him.

  He pressed her face into his chest and stood still as she writhed and screamed. Choked on her cracking teeth. “Everything’s okay,” he assured her. Be assured that the choice is not ours now. Children, it will not hurt if you’ll be quiet. When she collapsed into him, he started to hum a lullaby about buttons and lambs—the kind of song his mother used to sing. Slack and beautiful, Victoria was a blond version of his Lucia. Two dolls, two hearts ceasing to beat.

  ON MONDAY, LUCIA got caught. She’d gotten sloppy with the merchandise, stuffing granola bars and rotting bananas and half-eaten apples in all of her drawers, until the flies came with their multiplication. She hardly noticed when they formed a halo around her desk because she was drunk. Yvonne and the interns huddled in the kitchen, whispering about the tragedy that was Lucia.

  Banding together, the militant clock-watchers dissected the events of the past month: the botched call transfers, dead plants, and conference rooms littered wit
h trays of picked-over muffins, and melon and cantaloupe, second-class fruit. Lucia used to send email alerts detailing the bounty up for grabs. Now, she just let the trays pile up. Deal makers clicked through their PowerPoint presentations with one eye on a lone pineapple congealing in its own juice and the other at the glare from their computer screens.

  Everyone at McCann Harrison was apoplectic; Lucia colonized. Last week, she stole a pile of printouts and set them on fire in the bathroom. Watching them burn in the basin gave her a certain kind of calm. Lucia hungered for the days of Sancerre lunches and lace thong shoots. In Biarritz, her body was a ticker tape of ivory along the shoreline. Surfers strode past with their wetsuits and boards, murmuring to her in clumsy Basque. Come nightfall, she’d eat steak with her hands and let the meat slip through her fingers. Back then they called her carnivorous—the girl with the twenty-inch waist who could devour you down to gristle and bone. The threat of Lucia sold millions of bikinis and mesh tanks. When the famous catalog fired her, they promised her a lifetime supply of terry shorts, to which she replied, “Fuck the shorts. I want the million-dollar bra.”

  Lately, she’d taken to measuring her waist, thighs, and hips, and couldn’t stop them from expanding. The gap between her thighs closed up, and she felt that her thirties were one long, steady march to the grave. At home, she’d press the tape measure into Jonah’s palm and beg him to strangle her with it while they fucked, because her neck was the one area of her body that did not multiply. String me up like tinsel, she’d plead, and after a time she saw something ferocious in Jonah, as if this were the one thing he desired all along.

  “Black me out,” she’d scream.

  When Lucia returned from her lunch, which consisted of her coworkers’ half-eaten snacks, Debbie from HR and Yvonne hovered from behind Lucia’s desk. Debbie said, “We need to talk about the granola bars, Lucia.”

  “And my fucking yogurt,” Yvonne said.

  Lucia could’ve fought it, could’ve said that the items were planted, that she had been framed, but all she wanted to do was inch home, crawl under her bed, and stare at photographs of herself in silk and vinyl. “So, let’s talk about it.”