Alice & Dorothy (38 page)

“So I built up layers of earth and dirt and fertile green hills and ran a gold brick road through the middle of it. It was a magic land where I went when I wanted to feel important. And when bad things happened, I went there. A land called Oz. After a while it became easy to slip it on and off, like a mask. If something started to leak through, some bad part of my life, I’d just imagine it harder. I was important in Oz. I was needed. Best of all, everyone loved me there. I became a princess, with a sceptre and a beautiful crown and everything. It was really nice.

“And the best part was all my bad feelings or hurts and scrapes just fell into the gutter beside that gold brick road. Then they got washed away down deep in the ground where they were added to the dragon. But it was okay because the dragon was asleep and far away, far deep under me.”

“That’s pretty crazy,” Alice said.

“Yeah well, I lived like that for most of my life. It was fine. I wasn’t crazy or anything. Just a dreamer. Then one day the dragon got out and I beat a girl at school with my shoe. Hurt her really bad. I smashed all her teeth in and was trying to pull her head off by her hair when the teacher finally caught up to us. Her name was Shelly. She pushed me on the slide because I was afraid to go down, and I just kind of blacked out. They told me about it later. After that, I was in and out of hospitals for a long time.”

“
What?
” Alice said. “What did you just say?”

“I said I was in and out of hospitals...”

“No,” Alice said. “That’s wrong. How the fuck did you know about that? Did I tell you?”

“I was there
.
” Dorothy smiled.

“How did you know about Shelley?” Alice said. She needed to stay focused right now. It felt…important, somehow. Like what Dorothy had just said held some deep inner meaning, brought on by the drugs and their love for each other.

Dorothy looked into Alice’s eyes. Her face was cold and perfect, with no sign of the bruises or scrapes from her fight with Rabbit. She looked perfect, just as she had the day Alice first met her in the hospital. Her face was tipped in a slight frown.

“I think you know,” Dorothy said.”I think maybe you forgot for a little while, but maybe you know again.”

“
No,
” Alice hissed.
NO!
”

“I tried to tell you,” The Hater said, sitting in the back seat. We
both
did. You’re not here at all, Alice. You never woke up from your drug coma. You’ve been lying in a hospital dreaming this entire time.”

“
What?
” Alice said. She felt like she’d been hit in the head with a sack of doorknobs. “That’s...That can’t be true.” But was it? She was suddenly looking from The Hater to Dorothy, perfect Dorothy, between a voice in her head and the girl she’d carry to the end of the world, and suddenly she was having a hard time telling which one of them was a figment of her imagination. “That’s not true,” she said again.

“No, it isn’t true,” The Hater said, laughing. “Wouldn’t that be a trip though? Bet I had yah going for a minute, right?”

“FUCK YOU!” Alice screamed. She jammed the gun between the Hater’s eyes and pulled the trigger. He had time for a smile and then the car was slammed with thunder and the back of his head exploded outward in a rush of tea and digestive cookies and bits of china. The car smelled like vanilla and tea leaves and Alice clamped her eyes shut. The air was thick with brimstone and smoke.

“Alice, look at me,” Dorothy said.

“No.” Alice clenched her eyes shut. Everything was moving in slow motion, but whether it was from the drugs or her own fucked up mind she couldn’t tell.

“
Alice
.”

But then she really looked, and it wasn’t custard at all. It was blood. A lot of blood, and Dorothy’s pale skin shone under it. There was a small black hole on her tit that she’d gotten from that cop when he’d fired into the car. The blood pooled in Dorothy’s lap and congealed there, a giant mess that she’d been sitting in since before the gas station. She was cold now. Her brilliant green eyes were static and staring off into space. Her head was pressed up against the window, like she was resting.

And then something in Alice broke, and she saw Dorothy crying and digging at her belly as the blood pumped out of it, and uttering a shaking, final gasp with Alice’s head in her lap. A single bloody tear had run down Dorothy’s face to match the torrents from Alice. She hadn’t made love to Dorothy just now. she’d been fondling a corpse. Dorothy’s blood was everywhere. Alice could taste it, cold and metallic in the back of her throat.

Why didn’t I pull the trigger when I had the gun in my mouth?
she thought.

But She knew why. It was because her mind was broken; she saw and heard and smelled things nobody else did. She hallucinated atrocities to cover the horrors of her real life, and this was no different. Seeing Dorothy there with a hole in her tit and blood pumping out of her like a spilled beer can, her mind had done what it did best. It covered the pain with another reality, something to keep on going for a little while. And Alice was such a mess that she had gone right along with it.

There was no Hater. And now there was no Dorothy. Outside, the wind screamed around the car and hail smashed into the pavement mixed with stinging rain and the roar of the storm was calling to her. Alice could feel tears coming, and she balled her hands into angry fists to stop them, but it didn’t help. They came anyway, and they burned her cheeks with salt.

After a while, Alice adjusted herself in her seat and did up her pants. She felt used up. She was exhausted and fading from the blood loss. She stared over at Dorothy’s body. The space between them seemed like an eternity now. The irony, of course, was that Dorothy was now
inside
her, and closer than ever. Like The Hater had been. All of it had been in her mind. Her crazy, fucked up, heroin saturated brain had gone and scrambled everything. She’d had a delusion and fallen into a fantasy world, and now it seemed no matter how much she tried she couldn’t claw out of it.

But she had saved the biggest fuckup for last, hadn’t she? Just like any good story. Because now Alice was slowly dying in a car on the highway, and she was all by herself. Dorothy was gone now. And she didn’t know if Dorothy would ever be back.

Worse, Alice had never told her how she felt about her. She looked over at Dorothy, and then reached over and cupped the girl’s cold, hands in her own warm ones. “I want you to know that I never gave a fuck about anything really before I met you.” The melodrama brought a fresh round of tears to her eyes, and she whimpered through her words. “I had drugs and I had a life, but neither of them really mattered to me at all. And I know I’ve been a real bitch the last few days, but I will never forget you. You were the world that mattered. And I just want you back her for just a minute, so I can tell you that.”

“You too,” Dorothy said. “I love you. So much. It hurts me to think about you.” She squeezed Alice’s hands and then leaned down and kissed them.

Alice beamed. “Let’s drive a bit, okay?”

Dorothy rolled the window down and looked in her rear-view mirror. There was no traffic at all. Behind them, the storm reached across the sky like a green and black oil spill. Dorothy’s face lit up at the sight of it. “Yeah,” she said, rolling up the window. “Let’s go on ahead.”

Alice wasn’t afraid of the storm. She looked at Dorothy and laughed. “I’m so glad you came back,” she said.

Dorothy leaned over and kissed her sweetly on the side of the mouth. “I never left,” she said simply.

Alice considered her words. Then she laughed. “No, I guess you never did. The Hater is gone though. For good. It really is just you and me this time.”

“Forever,” Dorothy said. She scooped up Alice’s hand and laced their fingers together. Dorothy was cool to the touch, but she was still wet from being out in the storm. Anyone would be a little cold after getting soaked to the bone from the rain.

Alice sighed. Now that the adrenaline of the drama and sex was subsiding, she was crashing badly. She was fighting to keep the car on the road. She didn’t know how much blood she’d lost, but she was sure there wasn’t much more to go before she started passing out. Maybe black out for good. Then what? She remembered hearing about people losing blood experiencing a white out when they came close to death, and Alice supposed she would see that.

“It’s called an NDE,” Dorothy said, reading her thoughts. “A Near Death Experience. As the blood leaves your brain, you’re left with noisy, distorted snow. Like you click your brain over to an unused TV channel and slowly turn the volume down until there’s silence. The long black sleep of death follows.”

Alice’s vision was a little gray around the edges, and there was a steady pounding of water in her ears, but that also might have been the storm. The hail was steadily growing in size, and it roared off the sheet metal of the car’s body. She was hunched over the wheel squinting at the black mess in front of them. “This is really bad.”

“It’s fine,” Dorothy said. She’d rolled the window on her side partway down, in spite of the invasive rain water, explaining that the noise and fresh air grounded you when you were driving in miserable conditions. “It also helps if the windows start to steam a bit, because of the moisture,” she said.

“But you are letting the moisture in,” Alice said. “You have the window down. Besides, this car is trashed and half the windows are missing anyway.”

“Trust me,” Dorothy said, and that was new, because Dorothy was a meek and shy creature, and she never said things like
trust me
because that required a certain level of confidence.
Confidence
was something Dorothy had in short supply. What she had in very large supply, in barrels stacked on barrels and stored in large warehouses with buzzing yellow lights for protection, was indecision and shyness. Two things Alice was attracted to, but that The Hater had despised in them both.

“Do you know where I’m going?” Alice croaked.

“Absolutely,” Dorothy said. Her face hinted at a smile, but Alice saw her bite down on her lip and kill it.

Alice cranked up the windshield wipers to full, but it resulted in only short lucid glimpses of the road ahead. It showed a wall of black dotted with flecks of gray and yellow. Alice was a city girl, and used to bad weather, but there was something to be said about a full on prairie thunderstorm. The power and size of the disturbance could be enough to stop a person in their tracks. It was raw, natural energy; something people tended to take for granted when all they saw was a dark spot of cloud between buildings. Rain pounded the windshield and bounced in through the holes in the windshield. The wipers scraped across them and pushed more water into the car. It dripped down the glass and onto their legs, each drop a tiny shock of electric energy.

Ahead on the road there was a large train overpass, and underneath Alice could see what looked like rows of grinning silver mouths with red eyes.

“Dammit,” Dorothy said.

“What the fuck is that?” Alice said. The grinning mouths seemed to stutter in the air, and melt down into one large mouth completely covering the underpass. The smile broadened, and the little red lights turned into bulbous cat’s eyes. They were bloody moons, with craters for pupils.

Jack Sprat, he ate a cat. His wife, she ate a spleen
! The Hater’s words, but The Hater was gone. Alice had thought them herself. “I don’t want to go in there,” she said. She tried to push herself up onto the seat but didn’t have the strength; the effort alone was enough to cause her vision to dim. She didn’t know what it was they were driving in to, but she knew it was something terrible. Something with glittering metal teeth ready to rip and feast.

“It’s okay,” Dorothy said. “It’s just an overpass for the train.”

“It has
teeth
.”

“It’s fine.”