Disconnection (15 page)

A hand covered Lisa’s lips, stopping the scream she had almost released.

A voice whispered in the darkness,
“Surely thou shalt slay the wicked, O God: depart me from therefore, ye bloody men.”

Lisa could not see him, though his sleeves were long and brown, and he smelled like incense and dried blood. His hand gripped her face so hard that she felt her teeth cut into her lips. Blood gushed from her forehead as a long, iron crucifix slammed into her skull.

S
o, who’s the guy?” Mandy looked poignantly at Sela over her tall Hurricane glass.

Sela smiled as she took a sip of her drink.

“Come on, don’t be coy. If you’re blowing off your best friend, there has to be a good reason for it.”

“Oh, I see.”

“‘Oh, I see,’ she says. Well, spill it. What’s his name?”

Sela took another long sip. “Well, his name is Dean, he’s getting his degree in biology at Tulane, he’s from New York, and he’s very, very funny.” Sela saw Dean in her mind, the way he had looked this morning in her bed, holding her tightly, creating the illusion of safety around her body.

Mandy cleared her throat. “Is he good to you?”

“So far.”

“Well, just as long as you’re happy. You know something? I didn’t see your car outside. You cabbing it tonight?”

“Well, that’s another long story.”

“Listen, do you mind if I make a phone call real quick? I was supposed to meet Steve at approximately…” She looked at her watch. “Right now. I just need to tell him that I’m running late because I’m hanging out with my buddy.” Mandy poked Sela affectionately in the side.

“Who’s Steve?” Was it possible that Mandy had added yet
another
man to her already long list?

“Do you remember that banker I danced with at the Black Kitchen?”

Sela thought about all the men she had seen dancing with Mandy and decided that it was fruitless to pick out only one. “Just pretend I do,” she said.

“Well, it’s his brother. I met him when I went over to his house that night with Hal, the banker. I better call him. He has loads of cash, Sela. His friends have their own crystal meth lab in Shreveport. Hold on a second, okay?”

“Don’t leave me again, Mandy.”

“When have I left you before?”

Sela stared Mandy down. “Okay,” Mandy conceded. “Not this time though. I’ll be right back.”

Sela watched her leave the bar and step outside, taking her phone out of her purse on the way out.

Her damn phone. If it hadn’t been for that contraption, Sela’s life would have continued its safe distance from murdered girls and serial killers and strip clubs.

What one little mistake could do.

“You look pensive.” The bartender stood over her. “Need another Hurricane?”

Sela stifled a yawn. “The last thing I need is a Hurricane. I could stand to go to the little girls’ room, though.”

“In the back. Last door at the end of the hallway.”

“Thanks.”

Sela was opening the bathroom door when a nearby pay phone began ringing with a burst of chimes cracking through the solemn quiet of the dark hallway.

Sela was not sure why she picked up. Maybe, she thought, she was just used to picking up phones now. A habit that had formed in little over a week.

“Hello?”

“Sela.”

Sela shivered when she realized the voice on the other line belonged to Chloe. “How did you get this number?” she asked.

“What number?”

“This pay phone’s number. How did you get it?”

“I don’t know. I just called your name and you answered.”

During their short stint as boyfriend and girlfriend, Rufus had developed a fondness for the Finnish philosopher Mikko Jarvi, which, for Sela, seemed fitting considering that Rufus was always getting into some New Age hocus pocus crap that Sela found too eccentric to take seriously.

Sela now remembered his speech about Mikko Jarvi’s theories, which had come after a curiously weak performance in the bedroom. The couple was relaxing between the sheets, Sela’s head nestled on Rufus’s shoulders. He had pushed her hair from out of her eyes and said: “Do you know what Jarvi says time and space are, Sela? They are interchangeable. They are coils that spread back to back against each other, interconnected by harmonious particles. When harmonious particles find one another, they can lock at any given place and make anything—time travel, voice-time recognition, memory transference, whatever—possible.”

At the time, Sela believed Rufus’s bullshit was his only means to make her forget that he was a lousy lover. She dismissed his sermon as the ponderings of a juvenile pseudo-intellectual. But thinking about it now, it seemed like a strong explanation for what made it possible for Sela to talk to Chloe, even from beyond the grave.

Maybe Chloe was Sela’s harmonious particle. Maybe they could find each other anywhere, even between life and death.

“What do you want?” Sela asked. “Where are you?”

“At a bar. Near Canal Street.”

“Why didn’t you take me with you tonight?”

“Because I like to go places every once in a while without having to carry a phone connected to a dead girl, if that’s all right with you.”

“You shouldn’t have left me. I’m scared.”

“What do you have to be scared about? You’re already dead.”

“There’s someone in your house.”

“What?”

“I hear them. Can you hear them too, Sela?”

A slow, pulsating sense of dread crawled within her, slicing the last threads of her security. Silence flowed through her ear, but Sela knew, she understood now, that there was silence, and then there was
silence
. She heard the same silence that lived beneath the lava of a dormant volcano, that kind that lingered on a field before battle, or the silence that slept in a mother’s womb as a cancer of magnificent proportions ate away at her healthy cells.

And it was within this terrible silence that Sela knew someone was inside her apartment, waiting to kill her.

S
ela, Mandy, Woodrow, and Stuart stood at Sela’s front door.

“Damn. We leave that girl alone for thirty minutes and she goes crazy.” Stuart tossed a condemning look Sela’s way. A series of thick bandages surrounded the hick’s wounded elbow—the injury a token from the bouncers at Johnnie’s Cabaret, who had earlier thrown Stuart ten feet across the street, and promised to throw him harder next time if he ever came back. Stuart seemed oblivious to the injury.

“Why you scared, girly?” he asked Sela. “No one’s gonna rob your house when Woodrow lives just beneath you and he’s got a plasma TV and shit.”

“Shut up, Stu.” Woodrow turned to Sela. “Let me go in ahead of you, okay?”

Mandy whispered in Sela’s ear as Woodrow began opening the door, “I don’t get it. What happened after I left you?”

Keeping a steady eye on Woodrow, Sela answered, “I got spooked.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“The living room looks fine,” Woodrow called.

Stuart entered the room. “This ain’t nothing but horse shit.” Sela could hear him from inside, “You on the pipe, Sela? ’Cause that crank can get to you. I got me a cousin over there in Warren County who was on the crank for twenty years and now he runs around my aunt’s farm claiming that the Japs implanted spying devices in his attic. The shithead ain’t even got an attic.”

“Holy shit!” Sela heard Woodrow exclaim from further inside the house.

Sela ran inside her apartment. “What is it?”

She entered her bedroom and screamed. Woodrow’s hand pointed to a wall that had once displayed Sela’s pictures and cheap art prints. Now drawn on its surface was the Fishhook sign, its crude shape leaking in red ooze to the carpet.

The fish is hooked. The fish is hooked. The fish is…

“The same thing I saw the night Dee died,” Stuart said from behind Sela.

She turned around and looked at him. “What do you mean?” Sela asked, fighting to regain control of her fear.

Stuart walked closer. “That sign,” he said. “That exact sign. I saw it. The night Dee disappeared in the hotel, and I went lookin’ for her. I went into the missus bathroom, and there that thing was,” he pointed at the sign, “starin’ right at me.”

Woodrow folded his arms over his chest. “Why didn’t you say anything to the cops?”

Stuart cocked his head. “What? And look guiltier?”

Mandy touched Sela’s arm. “We got to go to the police.” Her face was white. It was the first time Sela had ever heard Mandy struggle for words.

“Nice idea, genius,” Stuart said. “But what are they gonna do, set out a squad to find some crazy loony psychopath who likes to break into girls’ apartments and scribble coloring jobs on the walls?”

“That’s not a red crayon he used,” Woodrow said, moving closer to the wall.

“This is not the first time this has happened to me,” whispered Sela.

“Can you speak up, honey?” asked Stuart. “I can’t hear real well after flying ten feet in the air.”

Sela spoke louder. “This is not the first time this has happened.”

The three other people in the room stared at her. Mandy said, “I don’t understand.”

Woodrow asked, “He’s been in your apartment before?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. He wasn’t in my
apartment.”
She went on to explain the fiery inferno of her car the night before, and the Fishhook sign that was laid out beside it.

Woodrow, looking solemn, nodded. “We have to go to the police, Sela.”

Stuart, red-faced, shook his head. “No way!” he exclaimed.

“Stop thinking of yourself!” Woodrow screamed at his cousin.

Stuart argued, “I’m livin’ in an apartment complex next to a girl who just happens to be an object of this crazy man’s fascination, after already being a suspect thanks to the intimate few minutes I had with that fat California chick, and you want me to go to the police?”

“Stay behind then,” Woodrow ordered. “I’ll take Sela.”

“I’ll come too,” Mandy said.

“Fine,” said Stuart. “I’ll stay here. I got some Fox News I gotta catch up on anyway.”

Detective Kline woke from a Valium-induced sleep in which he was chasing a dragon through his neighborhood streets. The dragon was as black as night and had hot, fiery breath. In its teeth were Lewis’ children. They screamed and cried for their father, but Lewis could not catch up. The dragon was fast, faster than light, and he left blazing trails of fire in his wake.

“Lew, you have a phone call.”

His wife placed the phone’s receiver on his firm belly. Lewis rubbed his eyes while the dragon’s terrible laughter still rang in his ears. Waking, he could hear a voice on the phone, “Hello? Lewis?” It was Sawicki.

Lewis grabbed the receiver and put it up to his ear. “This is Detective Kline.”

“Lew, this is Sawicki.”

“I realize that.”

“You know that girl that came in yesterday about her car being on fire?”

“Sela Warren.” The girl that looked the spitting image of Chloe Applegate. Lewis remembered her well.

“Well, she’s back. Says some clown came into her apartment and put another one of those Fishhook signs on her wall. In blood, she says.”

“Sawicki?”

“Yeah?”

“Is anyone dead?”

“Huh?”

“Is anyone dead?”

“Uh, no. Not that I know about.”

“Well, if no one’s dead, then why I am awake right now?”

“I thought you might want to …”

“What I want is to sleep. If there isn’t a corpse, then I want some other guy that’s already at the station—that would be you, Sawicki—to take the girl’s statement, get some pictures of her apartment, including a sample of whatever the fuck is on her wall, and tell me all about it in the morning. You got me?”

There was a long pause. Finally Sawicki said, “She looks an awful lot like that Chloe Applegate girl, Lew.”

“A coincidence. Now, may I get back to sleep?”

“Okay.”

“Thank you, Sawicki. Thank you so much. Now fuck off.”

S
ela sat in Mandy’s bathroom and drew a tub of water as hot as she could endure. She added a drizzle of Mandy’s Body Shop White Musk oil into the running water and undressed. As soon as she settled into the tub, her body began to adapt to the temperature. At last, she relaxed.

Last night she had little sleep. The circumstances surrounding her stay at Mandy’s apartment—the bloody Fishhook sign found on her bedroom wall, which was still there because Detective Sawicki had decided that it was in the investigation’s best interest to leave it up for a while—had left Sela a miserable insomniac. She had tossed and turned on Mandy’s couch most of the night, unsure of what to make of everything that had happened.

The other night Dean had suggested to Detective Kline, Sela’s burning car must have been a random act of violence. But, Sela asked herself, how random were two acts of violence against the same person? What were the odds? A billion to one?

“Sela,” Mandy called through the door. “How about some caffeine, babe?”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Sela answered, the bath’s steam rising around her.

“I’ll have it ready for you by the time you get out.” Sela heard Mandy’s footsteps walk away.

Despite the promise of coffee, Sela closed her eyes and finally fell asleep.

She found herself inside her old nightmare, where she was again a seven-year-old child crowded in a tiny corner, waiting for what seemed like the inevitable inferno of death to come and take her away.

Sela, we’re coming
.

In the distance her parents screamed. Sela watched the fire and wondered if fire had the power to change its mind, if it ever stopped and gave up, knowing the destruction it was causing. She wondered if it ever felt naughty for what it could do. She wondered if she could wave a magic wand and make the flames evaporate into flowers, or cry enough so that her tears would turn to giant buckets of water that doused the flames with such might that the house would eventually become a giant river of miracles.