Epiphany Jones (12 page)

The clone gets off the bed and walks towards me like she’s about to take my order at McDonald’s. She’s lost that come-hither look that she displayed in front of her pimp, too. Now she’s more like a robot. She moves, but there’s no life. She rolls her hands. She wants my order.

‘Uhh, I don’t know. I’m new to this. What do you recommend?’

‘The Big Mac is popular,’ I expect her to say.

‘English no,’ the clone says and rolls her hands again. She takes her top off and presses her small tits together. And at this moment,
something bugs me. She crawls back onto the bed and kneels. She brings her fist up to her mouth and mimics giving a blowjob. ‘Like?’ she says.

I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m thirteen.

As she moves around on the bed, going from spooning to missionary to cowgirl, I glance a burn on her calf, a heavily bruised inner thigh, a deep scratch on her back. I shake my head at all the positions, not because I don’t want to do them, but because I wouldn’t know what to do.

And, OK, look, busted. I’ve never actually had sex before. Not with a real person, anyway. I’m a virgin. I’ve never even dated anyone. My relationship with ‘Rachel’ and my hand are as far as I’ve gone. Judge me, laugh at me. Everyone else would. But, you know what? I’ve fucked hundreds of stars. Virtually anyway. I’m a master at what I do. I’ve taken masturbation to a level most could only dream of. The way I do it, it’s practically a religion. And truthfully, I pity you a little. I do. I fucked Judy Garland a few weeks ago. She looked just as off-to-see-the-wizard as ever and she’s been dead for forty years. How’s the wife holding up?

In the room the clone keeps mimicking positions: piledriver, T-square, rimming, and I keep shaking my head. She interprets my headshakes as disappointment – as ever-increasing perversity. She gets off the bed and walks towards me, her little tits wobbling with each step. And something bothers me again. I don’t know why, but it’s her tits.

She glances into my eyes before turning her back towards me. Then, bending over the bed, she flips her pink skirt up and takes her left hand and spreads her ass apart. With her index finger, she points to her anus. And that’s when I find myself nodding ‘yes’. And that’s when she doesn’t look like a robot anymore. She shows emotion again. Not the come-hither seduction she displayed earlier, though. This time it’s something – something that’s not quite sadness. It’s not even despair. It’s the realisation that this is your life and you can’t change it.

Kneeling over the bed the clone presses her face into the stained
mattress and spreads her ass apart with both hands. And just for the record: I don’t have an anal fixation. I don’t. It’s just your first time has to be way less embarrassing when your partner is looking the other way. You don’t have to worry about any goofy virgin looks on your face.

Her body stiffens slightly as I unzip my pants. And even though I can’t see them, in the back of my mind, there’s still something that bothers me about her tits. Her small tits. I pull down my boxers and awkwardly kneel on the floor behind her. I’m harder than I’ve been in my life. Much harder than I am when I’m jerking off – even when it was to Epiphany.

The heat of her crotch flows over my balls as my dick pulsates an inch from her asshole. The Portman clone breathes shallowly. Will this hurt her? Do I care? And in my head I picture Natalie Portman in
Star Wars
. In
Where the Heart Is
. But this clone really reminds me of the way Natalie looked in
Beautiful Girls
. It was only her second film. Even back then, she showed such great range and she was … only thirteen.

All her eyeliner. The blush on her face. Can makeup really make a girl look that much older?

No. No way. All the nights I lay awake fantasizing about fucking Natalie. This is as close as I’ll ever get. How do I know she’s really underage anyway? What is ‘underage’ in Mexico?

Fuck it. I grab her hips and the tip of my cock gently brushes against her anus. The side of her face not pressed into the mattress refuses to look at me. The heat from her is so inviting.

I can’t believe I’m about to fuck Natalie Portman.

Her face tightens as my tip prods her opening. The mascara constricts around her eye.

That damn makeup.

‘How old are you?’ I say, still gripping her hips.

But she only replies with a broken ‘please’ and spreads her ass farther apart.

I shake my head. I asked. I did my due diligence. And the clone, she braces as I push against her anus. And a voice in my head says,
Don’t let your demons snowball
.

I pause just for a moment before a loud crack suddenly breaks the seclusion of the room. I jerk backwards as the doorframe splinters. The Jamaican’s muscles flex as he hurls me into the hall. ‘You try to steal from me?’ he shouts. A knife is snug in the waistband of his jeans. Behind him, in the room, the girl has scampered to the corner of the bed. She wears a look like she’s the one being attacked. ‘You steal from me?!’ the Jamaican shouts again. The veins in his neck look like worms.

‘What are you talking about?’ I yell, scrambling to pull my boxers up.

‘No one steals from me,’ he rages and grabs the knife from his waist. The clone shrieks.

And this is when I discover just how fast I can run. I’m at the other end of the hallway before I know it. I turn the handle, but the front door doesn’t move. I push and bang against it as the Jamaican barrels towards me, but it refuses to budge. And as I’m wondering how much it will hurt to be the Hulk’s voodoo doll, I
pull
on the door and it opens, but my body jolts and my eyes go wide when I find Epiphany standing on the other side. She looks at me like she’s not at all surprised to see me. Like we had split up to shop for groceries and now we’re meeting in the cereal aisle.

I open my mouth but for the briefest moment nothing comes out.

Then I swallow and my voice is able to scream a single word. ‘
Run!
’

But instead of running, Epiphany, she puts her hand against my chest to stop me from leaving. And before I can push her away, before I can say anything, I feel the big hand of the Jamaican on my shoulder and the searing pain from his blade as it sinks between my ribs.

I’
m lying in an MRI machine. There’s an identical one next to mine. The other MRI clicks and hums as its big magnets gyrate around its insides. As its sequence completes, the flat table in the centre of the machine slowly slides out.

The patient has a pointy snout. His head is flat and grey. A bullet hole oozing watery blood sinks between his big black eyes. Jagged teeth jut from his mouth; they’re large, even for a shark. The MRI bed stops expelling the patient just beyond its dorsal fin.

‘What is this?’ I say. ‘Where are the doctors?’

‘Relax,’ the shark answers. ‘You were stabbed.’

‘I know this place.’

‘It’s where the doctors first discovered her cancer,’ the shark says, wiggling his head a little in my direction. The bullet hole goes deep. Salt water and blood mix inside it and flow like wine. ‘I’d kill for a piece of cotton to plug this up. Maybe a cork.’

‘You’re the shark that attacked that Timmy kid.’

‘I didn’t attack anyone. It was simply dinner time.’ His lifeless eyes make it hard to tell if he’s looking at me.

‘Is this a dream?’

‘Of course it is,’ answers the talking shark.

The room is so clean, so sterile. It gives the impression that nothing hostile can live in it; that what the doctors in the white coats find here, they can kill here.

‘I miss her.’

‘Let her go, Jerry. Live your life.’ The magnets in his MRI kick on
again. Slowly, the shark is drawn back in. ‘I gotta go,’ he says. ‘More tests to be run.’

‘Wait–’

‘Can’t,’ says the shark. ‘I don’t have insurance and they charge by the minute.’

‘But what does all this mean?’

‘Sometimes a dream is just a dream, Jerry. It doesn’t have to mean anything.’ Then, as the MRI machine grows louder, the shark mouths something to me.

‘What did you say?’ I yell. ‘I can’t hear you.’ And over all the noise, I think the shark says, ‘
Go find her
.’

My eyes open as I hear ‘
Go find her
’ repeated. It’s dark. I’m in bed at our place in Ensenada. Through the doorway a large, dark-skinned woman with faded red hair speaks to Epiphany. Epiphany, she glances at me and slips on a black backpack. Then I hear something I never thought I would come from her mouth. She says ‘thank you’ to the woman with red hair before glancing at me once more. And then she walks out the front door.

The redhead comes over and sits besides me on the bed. She feels my forehead. Her hand is knobby like the root of a sequoia. ‘Take these,’ she says and hands me two small pills.

‘What are they?’

‘You were stabbed,’ she says. ‘It’s nothing serious. It’s not too deep. But you have a fever. The wound is infected.’

I put the pills in my mouth and reach for the glass of water on the nightstand. A pain sears through my back. I reach around and feel bandages. The redhead brings the water to my mouth.

‘It feels worse than it is. The wound has been cleaned. The pain will be less tomorrow, and less the day after that. Take your medicine.’

I swallow. ‘Who are you?’

She doesn’t answer until she’s set the glass back on the table. ‘Your friend calls me Momma. To most people I’m just LaRouche.’

‘You’re her mother?’ A slight smile reveals a silver tooth. ‘Where’s she gone?’

‘She had to take care of a few things,’ the woman says, putting her hand on my shoulder, making me lie back.

‘How’d I get back here?’

‘We brought you. The both of us.’

‘She trapped me,’ I say as the memory of what happened returns. ‘She fucking set me up.’ Another shot of pain races through my back.

‘Easy,’ the redhead says. ‘She didn’t set you up. You were silly to try to follow her. She’s been on this quest of hers for far too long. Someone like you couldn’t track her without her knowing. Besides,’ she eyes me, ‘she didn’t make you go to that pimp.’

I’m about to say, ‘
But I didn’t intend to
,’ then realise how stupid that sounds.

‘She knew you were following her, so she doubled back and started following you. When she saw you enter the sex house, she waited until the pimp came back out. She led him to believe she was a prostitute and told him that you always skip out before paying for the extras.’

‘What the hell is wrong with her?’ I say. ‘I could have been killed!’

‘She only wanted to scare you. She didn’t know the man had a knife,’ the redhead says. She hands me the glass again and tells me to drink. ‘Things went further than she would have liked.’

‘Further than she liked? I got fucking
stabbed
,’ I grit, ‘because
she
blocked my way out.’

‘Like I said, she thought you would only be beat. She wanted to teach you a lesson.’

Only be beat?
Is this lady for real? A jolt of pain jumps through to my ribcage. I shift in the bed to take weight off my wound. ‘Well, I know Epiphany pretty well,’ I say. ‘And I don’t think someone like her should be teaching anyone anything.’

‘Please,’ the woman recoils, ‘please don’t call her that. It is a horrible name given to her by a horrible person.’

‘What am I supposed to call her?’

‘Hanna,’ she says, ‘Her name is Hanna.’

‘H
anna was brought to Ensenada when she was just eleven. It was my job to prepare and educate her. Her preparation was daily beatings. Her education: sexual brutalisation.’

That’s how the origin of Epiphany Jones begins. LaRouche and I are walking along the port where cruise ships dock from places like LA and San Francisco. Once you get away from the shithole of a neighbourhood we’re staying in, Ensenada isn’t a bad-looking place. It’s got palm trees, the Pacific Ocean – the whole nine yards. We watch the fat, white American tourists disembark, cameras around their necks, smiling. Not a care in the world.

My wound was inflamed when I woke this morning. LaRouche insisted I stay in bed, but I needed to get out. Epiphany hadn’t returned and LaRouche, whether to keep an eye on me or to distract herself from worry over Epiphany’s whereabouts, insisted on joining me.

‘I was the mother at a local house not far from here,’ LaRouche says, gazing over the Pacific. The sun is bright and the day is a far cry from the cold spring of Chicago. Every time she’s in direct sunlight, her silver tooth twinkles just like the silver cross around her neck does when the sun hits it. ‘If you want to break young girls, you first need them to trust you. The night they arrived I treated them to a homemade dinner and a movie on the television. I even tucked them into bed.’ Her face grows sombre. ‘But the next day you start with the verbal abuse – then the physical. By the time you brought the first man and locked them in the room together, they’re already a fraction of their former selves. By the time you’ve brought them their ninth or tenth, they no longer exist as you or I do. They’re just a shell.’

The wrinkles on LaRouche’s face are set deep; too deep for her age. She can’t be more than fifty. In the bright sun her red hair is a translucent orange around the edges.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘Epiphany’s a hooker?’

‘Prostitutes have a choice,’ LaRouche says, ‘slaves do not.’

‘You’re telling me someone abducted an eleven-year-old girl, brought her to Mexico, and forced her to have sex with people?’ I say. ‘No way. Wouldn’t happen. It’d be all over the news.’

‘Don’t be so naive. Girls are abducted every day all over the world, Jerry. They’re abducted for the sole purpose of being turned into a product – a marketable commodity like sugar or gold. Just because no one’s reporting it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The girl you went to last night: was she chained to her bed? You think she did that herself?’

‘She wasn’t chained,’ I almost say. Then I remember the bars on the window. They were on the inside, as if they were meant to keep people in, not out. ‘If Epiphany was brought here, where’s she from?’ I can tell LaRouche still doesn’t like me using that name, but after all the bad shit Epiphany’s done to me, calling her by a normal name would be like Batman calling the Joker ‘Marty’.

‘Russia, like most of the girls that were under my care.’

Care
is a rather generous use of the term here.

‘You’re Russian too?’

LaRouche nods and knows I must be about to ask, because she says, ‘My nickname was given to me by one of the girls. A girl from St Petersburg who spoke French.’

‘But what’s a Russian doing in Mexico?’

‘I was trafficked, just like Hanna, when I was a young girl. My cousin sold me to a man in Omsk for fifty roubles. I was resold in Italy and again in Portugal. By the time I reached Mexico, I was worth a thousand times what my cousin sold me for.’ LaRouche rubs her large knuckles before continuing. ‘The work took its toll on my body. When I no longer made the traffickers money, I had only two choices: be left for dead on the streets, or become a madam.’

‘But why didn’t you just go to the cops?’

A glint of light reflects off her tooth when she laughs, like it’s the most ridiculous question she’s ever heard. ‘This entire town is run by traffickers. Their connections cover Mexico, Europe, Russia, the States. And they aren’t even the largest ring out there. You didn’t go to the police because they were your clients, too. They received money and free use of the girls. They weren’t going to stop anything. None of this would be possible if the right people didn’t look the other way.’

LaRouche explains how the girls who aren’t outright abducted are tricked into boarding a plane. They’re promised jobs as nannies or waitresses in the States. The beautiful ones are led to believe a model or actress scout has ‘discovered’ them. They’re promised a better life. An American life with a TV in every room and two cars in every garage.

She tells me how the exceptionally pretty ones aren’t raped during their ‘education’. They’re saved and their virginity is sold for a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars to rich US businessmen. She explains how the houses here, where the girls are kept, are just midway points before they’re brought into the US where they’ll fetch the most money.

The walk is making me tired and my wound is beginning to flare. I need to sit. The bar we stop at is this dingy underground thing. It’s packed despite being the middle of the day, and when we enter everyone inside looks at each other like they’re protecting a secret of something shocking that happened fifteen years ago. We order a few beers and some nachos from the bartender then find a seat near the door.

‘Once we caught a girl who had fled from the man who purchased her. As punishment one of the runners at the time, a particularly cruel Italian named Nico, burnt her face with an iron. That night as I covered the wound with makeup, she told me about the man she escaped from. He was an American oil executive living in Mexico City. To everyone else she was his live-in maid, but every morning, after his wife went to work and his children left for school, he would enter her bedroom and bind her arms with padded rope so she wouldn’t bruise. Then he would read her passages from the Bible before he raped her. He said she should be proud. She was saving his young daughters from his ungodly
desires. As time went on, he invited his friends to join in. One day, a friend brought a large dog with him. They forced her to do the most humiliating things, Jerry. She was only fifteen.’

LaRouche’s face is stoic. She fiddles with the silver cross on her neck.

‘The next day Nico put the girl on the street again. But because of her burned face she only had one customer. Nico was furious. That night he assembled all the girls in the basement. He made the scarred girl bite the edge of a concrete stair. Then he kicked the back of her head. Her teeth went everywhere. I’d never heard someone scream like that before.’

I feel my teeth with my tongue and my stomach is suddenly sick. I look away from LaRouche, as if doing so will wipe the girl’s image from my mind.

‘Nico wasn’t finished,’ she says, meaning neither is she. ‘He dragged the girl to the middle of the room and held her up by the hair. She was wailing so loudly. Her teeth were jagged and pointed in every directing. Blood poured from her mouth. Nico told all the girls to listen and watch. He said if any of them looked away, the same would happen to them. Then he slit the girl’s throat. That’s when I knew I had to get out.’

My stomach knots. ‘This guy, this Nico, whatever happened to him?’ I say. ‘Did he get caught? Is that how you got out?’

LaRouche laughs. ‘No one gets caught, Jerry. He runs the ring now.’

‘So, what? They just let you go? Just like that?’

She shakes her head, like I’m just not getting it. ‘All this – the girls, the smuggling, the payoffs – it’s a business, Jerry. It may be all about sex on the client side, but on the distribution side it’s all about profit. These men
owned
me, like a person owns a dog. In order to leave I had to pay back what they decided I was worth to them, and when you have no say in the price, they can set it as high as they like.’

‘Then how’d you pay them back?’

‘By helping arrange a sale,’ LaRouche says. ‘A powerful and wealthy man wanted a beautiful little virgin – a clean, untouched, child. He wanted her no older than twelve so she would last many years. He wanted dark hair and fair skin.’ LaRouche’s eyes appear to sink farther
into her skull when she recalls this, and for a moment she’s silent. ‘I put the order out. Our people in Russia sent me photographs they took of girls on the street; girls at playgrounds; girls leaving school. When I saw Hanna’s photo I knew she was the one. In the picture she was chasing a ball in a park. She was a fiery little girl with deep-black hair and the face of an angel. I placed the order for her that night.’

LaRouche finishes her beer and orders another.

‘When Hanna was brought to me I didn’t see a girl – I saw my freedom. The men who came by, they all wanted to sleep with her, but I couldn’t allow it. I would make her watch, or make her love another girl, even force her into oral sex, but her virginity was top priority.’

When the barman returns with her drink, LaRouche goes quiet and doesn’t speak again until he leaves.

‘In spite of this,’ LaRouche continues, ‘I began to worry. It had been months and she still resisted whenever we educated her. Even the strongest girls could only hold out a few weeks before they accepted their fate. But Hanna, she was different. I started to believe she would never break. I began to fear for my life. If I messed up a sale, Nico would kill me without thinking twice – and he would make sure I felt pain before I died.’

LaRouche takes a sip of her beer, not so much because she’s thirsty but as if she needs to collect her thoughts.

‘One day, I called Hanna by name,’ she says. ‘She didn’t reply. I called her again, but again she didn’t reply. I grew angry and slapped her with a leather belt on the back of the head where her hair would hide any marks. She cried and asked what she had done wrong. I told her, “You must always answer me when I call you, Hanna”, and I raised the belt again. It was then that she looked up at me, tears streaming down her face, and asked, “Who’s Hanna?” That’s when I knew she was broken. She had become the product the client ordered, ready to be delivered.’

An odd felling springs in my stomach. It’s just a scrap, but even being so small I still recognise it as a hint of sympathy for Epiphany.

LaRouche takes a drink. ‘So, I arranged the sale of Hanna to the man. He paid twice as much as any other girl had ever made us. Nico 
was pleased, and he thought I was used up anyway. Hanna bought me my freedom.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I say.

LaRouche takes a long drink, sets the beer down and only answers when she is ready. ‘Hanna is requesting something of you, so I thought you should know something of her. Sometimes people are misunderstood. Sometimes they’re too aggressive. Hanna, in particular. She is so focused that she doesn’t understand that the people she needs to help her might be more willing if they knew the maths – if they knew the reason for what she does.’

‘Maths?’ I laugh. ‘There’s nothing logical in what Epiphany does;’ an ironic smile forms on my face. ‘She’s insane.’ My wound flares and I realise how hot I am with fever. ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s a touching story. Really. Little Hanna is abducted, loses her mind, becomes Epiphany, and, twelve years later, believes that I can help her on some fucking quest. All of it’s unfortunate, but none of that changes the fact that she’s framed me for murder.’

LaRouche stiffens at how loud I’ve said ‘murder’, and I know that that tension in her eyes signals my best opportunity to get what I came for. ‘There’s a package she mailed you,’ I say.

She doesn’t reply.

‘Listen to me,’ I demand. My words come out with such force, LaRouche looks genuinely startled. I bite my lip before continuing. ‘I get that you were a person who was stuck between a rock and a hard place. You had to do what you could to save yourself.’

LaRouche looks down at her root-like hands.

‘But Epiphany killed a man I worked with because she was trying to get to me,’ I say. ‘She’s framing me for his death. She’s blackmailed me into coming here because she thinks she needs me for some insane mission from God.’

The harder I breathe the more my ribs hurt.

‘Did you know that?’ I say. ‘You beat her so silly, she thinks she talks to
God
.’

And I would think that would underscore just how crazy this whole
situation is, but LaRouche remains silent. So I say, ‘I mean, why are you even helping her? Is she blackmailing you, too?’

LaRouche doesn’t answer. Instead she rubs the cross hanging around her neck.

Then she says, ‘We all need our chance at redemption for the sins we’ve committed.’

My jaw drops.

‘You have to be kidding me. You actually
believe
God is talking to her? That this is your chance at redemption for all the bad shit you did?’

‘Yes.’

My frustration causes my wound to burn that much more. ‘Listen: God’s not talking to her,’ I say. ‘She’s fucked up in the head. You want to redeem yourself? Help me. Please.’

‘Please,’ I say again. Then I swallow and shallow my breath before I show all my cards. ‘There was a videotape in that package, wasn’t there?’ And before she can deny it, I say, ‘The one she mailed you.’

LaRouche begins to speak, but stops herself.

‘I need that tape,’ I plead. ‘I
need
my life back.’

She still doesn’t speak.

I say, ‘
Please
.’

Nothing. She just sits there.

I can’t even breathe without hurting now. I feel tears coming. I grab LaRouche’s hand. ‘I just need the proof that
I
didn’t do it. I won’t turn her in. I won’t tell anybody where she is. Please, LaRouche,’ my voice trembles, ‘
please
let me have the tape. Please don’t ruin another life to fix a mistake you made a long time ago. I never did anything to her. I don’t deserve this.’

It takes me a minute before I realise how hard I’m squeezing her knotty hand. I release it and LaRouche takes a breath. ‘I don’t have it,’ she says. And she can tell I’m about to lose it because she raises her palm, signalling me to hold on. ‘She asked for the videotape back last night when you were passed out.’

I shake my head. ‘Bullshit.’