Kitabı oku: «Alice Isn’t Dead», sayfa 2

4

Keisha backed away, holding the heavy flashlight in front of her as a club. The man smelled like a compost pile that is almost soil.

“Where do you think you’re going? I mean, where would you even go that I couldn’t follow? Don’t you know who I work for?” He indicated the Thistle on his pit-stained shirt. He was sweating thick mildew.

“There are people all over this parking lot,” she said. This was self-evidently not true. It was a Target parking lot, but it was also late, and in the middle of nowhere. There were a few cars, yes, some people, but she didn’t expect help from the world, and generally the world met her expectations.

He coughed up laughter, continuing to hobble toward her. “People?” he said. “People!” He shook his head and grabbed her arm. She didn’t know how he got that close, but he was there, and he took her arm like a dance partner, gentle but insistent, and then with a tremendous strength, well beyond what even his large frame would seem capable of, he twirled her up against the truck. His skin writhed, like there were insects crawling back and forth under it. The smell was overpowering. His tongue was swollen and covered in a white film.

It was over. His arm was on her throat and he was pushing enough to let her know he could do it, but not enough to cut off air. She drew shallow, frightened breaths against the weight of him. She kicked for the crotch, of course, but it was like he felt nothing. And then she flailed at him with the flashlight. His body dented with the blows, whatever was under his loose skin sinking with the force, but he didn’t stop smiling. Didn’t even grunt. Pushed a little harder on her throat. The flashlight dropped and rolled away.

“I could take a bite of you right now and it would be over. I could devour you. And then what would become of Alice?”

Alice’s name in the monster’s mouth made Keisha slump, made her give up. If he knew about Alice, then he knew about everything, and then what was left? She had been searching for her wife for a long and terrible year. All those miles upon her, and now a monster. She adjusted to accepting her own death. As she did, a feeling sparked. It wasn’t a feeling she recognized, but it spread like her anxiety, tingling at her skin, zipping up her spine, and exploding in her brain.

Fuck the Thistle Man, the feeling said.

She kicked and screamed with all the energy she had left. Perhaps she would go down, but it would not be quietly. Other people in the parking lot were finally turning, finally seeing. Even if she couldn’t beat him, she could get them to look. A family, a father and two kids, and the kids were pointing, and the father was on his phone. He was talking urgently and gesturing toward her. She fought until the Thistle Man’s arm on her throat lowered her into a quiet darkness she had apparently always carried somewhere in her mind, and then there was a siren, and the arm was off her throat, and the world returned to her, and a police car pulled up.

The police officer got out. A white man. No partner. Big. Not big as in muscular or big as in fat, just big.

She stumbled a few paces away from the Thistle Man, out of his reach. The policeman sauntered over. He was a man used to the world waiting for him. He must have seen the Thistle Man attacking her, but he didn’t seem worried about that. He examined Keisha with heavy-lidded eyes.

“What seems to be the problem here?” he said.

She did her best to tell him. The noises, the stopping, the Thistle Man, the air, the lack of air, the struggle. He frowned. Made no notes. He turned to the Thistle Man, who hadn’t moved, hadn’t interrupted, had leaned with crossed arms on her truck.

“That true?” the policeman asked him.

The Thistle Man giggled, a high, childish sound.

“Doesn’t sound like it’s true,” said the policeman.

She didn’t know what to do. On one side, the police. On the other side, a literal monster. The policeman nodded to the Thistle Man. “If he has to come talk to you,” he said, “then you’ve been asking the wrong questions.” He lumbered back to his squad car, opened the door. “My advice,” he said to Keisha, “is to stop asking the wrong questions.” He tipped his hat at the Thistle Man. “You have a nice night now.”

The Thistle Man did a lazy wave in return, as the policeman folded his towering frame into the car.

“I will, Officer,” the Thistle Man said. “You know I will.”

The police car drove away, but the Thistle Man made no move toward her.

“You see now. You see how it stands. Go home.” He made a face of concern, worry even. “You can still go home.”

He turned and stalked away into the night. To the lit edges of the parking lot, and into the sparse landscaping, and the vacant grassland beyond. Keisha stood frozen until she found it in herself to get back in her truck and drive away. No one in the lot talked to her or checked to see if she was alright. They looked at her and then looked away.

Police cars followed her for a few days after. No siren, no lights, but staying close on her tail. She had well and truly gotten their attention now.

But the Thistle Man was wrong. She couldn’t go home. Because home wasn’t a place. Home was a person. And she hadn’t found that person yet. After five days the police stopped following her. They had let her off with a warning. It was a warning she was going to ignore.

5

It’s a long and desolate way from Florida to Atlanta. The landscape is constructed of billboards. There are no natural features, only a constant chatter along the side of the road. A one-sided conversation. Lots of anti-evolution stuff. Advertisements for truck stops with names like the Jade Palace or the Chinese Fan, written in racist faux-Chinese fonts, and wink-wink language about the massages available. Keisha winced. Lord, get her to Atlanta. At least there was cruise control, and a road so straight all she had to do was make sure she didn’t go crashing off into a billboard telling her the Confederacy still could win, which was an actual billboard she had passed. The subtext of America wasn’t just text here, it was in letters five feet tall.

Business wasn’t booming. Many of the ads on the billboards were ancient. Announcements of local fairs from 2005. Fire sales for stores long since buried under pitch and concrete. A lot of vacancies, phone numbers to call for renting the space. She wondered how much an ad on a stretch like this would cost. Even on her wage she might be able to buy herself one, maybe this bare one between an ad for dog grooming whose tagline was DECADENT DOGS and yet another thinly veiled ad for sex work. She could reach out to Alice that way, even if Alice could never respond. Shout at the passing cars long enough and maybe someone somewhere would hear it. Or, hell, she could pick up her radio again and tell her entire story to every bored trucker in range. But instead she would keep driving, keep moving, and hope eventually she would arrive somewhere. A conclusion, a great transformation, or, failing that, Atlanta by the afternoon.

She was weighing the merits of stopping for a coffee when she spotted a billboard that didn’t fit. For one, it was spotless, installed maybe in the last week. It was a black billboard that said in tall white letters, HUNGRY? Was it advertising the concept of food? The idea of eating? If so, it wasn’t effective, because when she looked at it her gut twisted. The billboard pointed her somewhere bleak and horrible, even as her conscious mind hadn’t picked out why.

Another billboard, a few miles later. Same design; black background, white text, plain capitalized letters. BERNARD HAMILTON, it said. Then another that said SYLVIA PARKER. With each one she felt sicker and sicker. Someone was sending a message to someone, and the message felt to her monstrous and wild.

After Alice’s funeral, Keisha had mourned privately for weeks, refusing to see friends, missing work. She had sat at home and allowed the grief to weigh on her, a physical pressing on her chest that strained the muscles if she tried to get up or even turn her head. If she had had someone else to look after, a child, an elderly relative, even a pet, then maybe she would have forced herself into something resembling the person she had been before. But even then, inside she would be a vessel of fluids and mourning. She wasn’t the person she had been before and she never would be again. Sure, she had always been anxious and shy, but it had never been what defined her. She was able to relax when with friends and family. She had her hobbies and dreams. For some time she had been thinking about quitting her job to start a bakery, because the idea of arriving to work at four in the morning to make bread sounded like the best possible job in the world, but it had never been quite the right time for her to do that. All those parts of her were gone. It wasn’t only Alice who had died. Each death leads to smaller, invisible deaths inside the hearts of those left behind.

Alice never called Keisha by her name. This is true for many couples. Chipmunk, Alice would call Keisha. Chanterelle. Often Chanterelle. Walnut Jones. Alice found that last one especially funny. Now everyone called Keisha by her name. “Keisha,” they would say, in soft and worried voices, and Keisha just wanted someone with a laugh in her voice to call her Chanterelle, to call her Walnut Jones.

It wasn’t an intervention from her friends that broke her out of her stasis, although to their credit they tried. Showing up with food and with concerned frowns and busy hands tidying a house she couldn’t care less about. But none of them were able to reach her. Because they were trying to reach the Keisha they had known, and that Keisha was gone. No, it was not her friends who changed her, but that after two months she grew bored with her absolute grief, and so she pulled herself up against the weight of it and started going to grief counseling groups.

She sat in circles and described the shape of the monster that was devouring her. Because that’s what, as a civilization, we do. We try to talk our way through the ineffable in the hope that, like a talisman, our description will provide some shelter against it. But the monster continued to devour her, no matter how specific her description of it, no matter how honest the shell-shocked sympathy of her fellow mourners.

And when she wasn’t describing Alice, over and over talking about Alice, as though her wife could be resurrected with stories, Keisha watched the news. The news was good, full of tragedy and loss that had nothing to do with her. So many people in pain, she couldn’t possibly be alone, even though she felt as alone as could be. And then, six months after the funeral, somewhere in the third hour of Keisha’s daily news binge: a murder, brutal, somewhere in the Midwest. Bystanders gawking, standing in a circle and trying to describe with only their faces the shape of the monster they had seen. Behind the witnesses being interviewed, unmistakable, staring at the camera as person after person babbled their way through the horrible story—Alice. Keisha laughed, and then sobbed, and then threw up, and then looked again and there was Alice still, looking back at her, not dead at all.

The names on the billboards kept coming. One every three miles. TRACY DRUMMOND. LEO SULLIVAN. CYNTHIA O’BRIEN. They felt more like a memorial than an advertisement.

At the next stop she pulled off the road and searched the names, one after the other. It didn’t take long, because one name was connected to the next, and most of the articles were the same articles. Anxiety bubbled in her blood.

Found near major highways all over the country. Lives torn short under overpasses, on frontage roads, in broad wooded shoulders. Lost even in the age of GPS and Siri. Gashes on thetorsos. Defensive wounds on the hands. Victims of an unsolved serial killings from a murderer who reporters had nicknamed the Hungry Man. The nickname came from the single common thread between all the murders. A human bite on the neck or shoulder or armpit. Not elegant pinpricks, the romance of a vampire, but ragged and clumsy. Every name was a human being who had died alone on the sides of highways. Or, worse, not alone.

6

Bernard Hamilton left for San Francisco immediately after graduating from college. He had no job set up there, no friends or acquaintances waiting for him. He had never even been to San Francisco. But youth is the time for great leaps of faith, and so he packed everything he owned into his Corolla and started the drive from Connecticut because he believed that to experience America is to experience its distance.

He called his mother every night, because she was worried he would be murdered, and he was willing to humor her silly fears. He was driving on major highways, staying in budget chain hotels with free coffee in the lobby. This was transit, not hedonism, and lots of people do it every year. He was no different from lots of people. Of course, lots of people get murdered every year, but he thought he was different from those people, for reasons he could not have articulated because the idea that nothing horrible could ever happen to us personally exists not in our thoughts but in the base of our necks.

Bernard told his mother about the Great Lakes, how Lake Michigan looked like the ocean, how he couldn’t see the far shore even from the high floor of an office building in Chicago that he snuck into because he couldn’t afford any of the viewing platforms or skyscraper restaurants. He told her about the flats of the Midwest, how there were no physical landmarks to divide anything from anything else. And then he got to Utah and he stopped calling. His mother contacted the police the first night she didn’t hear from him, but the police told her that they weren’t going to look for an adult man because he hadn’t called his mother. But she was right, because he was dead and shoved into a bush in the parking lot of a budget chain hotel with free coffee in the lobby and his body wouldn’t be found for four days. There is some version of the world where he made it to San Francisco, grew lifelong friendships there, found a career, found a partner, grew old. But that never happened in our world, which is a sadder, emptier place.

Each name on each billboard was a story with a promising start and an unhappy ending. Tracy Drummond was a church volunteer leading a trip to Mexico to build houses when she vanished during a dinner break in Waco, a day short of the border. Leo Sullivan was a trucker, who had last been seen eating dinner with a man in a yellow hat and was found a day later by a group of prison laborers clearing garbage from the side of a highway.

Keisha read the stories, scrolling down and down, and feeling sick with what she knew, and scared with what she didn’t know.

The Hungry Man, who she thought of as that nightmare creature, the Thistle Man, had been active for almost two decades. He only struck occasionally, only sometimes left behind a life torn open and bleeding out. And now he was following Keisha. How long had he followed the others before he killed them? How long before those brutally strong fingers reached out of parking lot darkness?

Perhaps soon, because she knew that this was him taunting her. He had discovered her upcoming routes and had arranged for these billboards to be erected as a message to her. This is who I am, the message said. This is what is coming for you.

She pulled out of the truck stop, back onto the highway. Because what else was there? She had no hope that surrender would save her. No, if she were to be murdered, then it would be while moving. Alice wasn’t dead, and neither, yet, was Keisha.

Another billboard. NED FLYNN. A body somewhere with a big bite out of him. All of these names were dots on a map. Last known whereabouts. Keisha was a dot on a map, too, but she hadn’t settled into a final location yet. Her last known whereabouts were somewhere behind her and her body kept driving.

A few miles later she saw the final billboard. In design it was similar to the others, but there were more words on it, and the text was smaller to fit the space. She squinted as she tried to read it with eyes that she hadn’t admitted to herself were approaching middle age. The words came into focus. She gasped and almost swerved off the road, almost did the Thistle Man’s job for him. Her eyes were stinging and blinking with tears, but she managed to put on her emergency blinkers and pull slowly to the side of the road under the sign. She got out on the door not against the highway and leaned on the truck to support herself. Once she felt somewhat steady, she looked up again at the billboard.

CHANTERELLE, MISS YOU. GO HOME.

A nickname that no one knew except her and one other person. This was the final piece of the message. She had misunderstood. The billboards weren’t a threat, but a warning.

Alice had had the same idea as Keisha when she had seen all these vacant billboards. Shout at passing cars long enough, and maybe the person the message was for would hear. She had put them up to show Keisha what was after her. Keisha dropped into a squat because she couldn’t find it in herself to stay standing. She shook with new grief and with rage.

Go home, why? Because she wasn’t safe? Because Alice thought she could keep Keisha safe? Because Alice thought safety was an option that had ever been available to Keisha? She hadn’t been safe since she was born into this country, this angry, seething, stupid, could-be-so-much-more-than-it-is country. And Alice wanted her to turn and run?

Through the tears, she saw movement a hundred feet down the shoulder. A pile of clothes under the billboard stirred and rose into a human shape. Keisha sprang up, not sure if she was happy or furious. Alice had waited for her by the sign. Finally Keisha would meet her wife in person, would touch her. But the shape didn’t move like Alice. If it wasn’t Alice, then it was the Thistle Man, come to take her after weeks of promises and threats.

She reached for the handle of the door. Would she have time to get the truck back on the road before he reached her? Like hell she would. She tried to comfort herself that even the Thistle Man wouldn’t be so brazen as to take her from the side of a busy highway, but she had trouble believing her own reassurance.

The figure moved toward her. She needed to go. She needed to run. But she didn’t. Because what if she was wrong, and it was Alice after all? She couldn’t let that possibility pass her by. The figure was close now. It was slight, and short, more like a child than a grown man. Keisha saw the scared, thin face of a teenage girl. What was a girl doing by the side of a highway like this? There were far worse things than men circling these roads.

The figure reached out her hand.

“I know what you’ve seen,” the girl said, “and I need your help.”

7

Keisha’s first impression was frailty, and so she mistook the girl for maybe fourteen. But there was a hard and adult aspect about the girl’s face, and on reconsideration Keisha decided she was probably sixteen or even seventeen.

The girl considered back, giving Keisha a hard up and down, and then, apparently satisfied with what she saw, brushed by her and hopped up into the passenger seat.

“Excuse me?” said Keisha, unsure of what was happening. The girl was already tossing a backpack behind the seat and feeling around for controls to move it into a more comfortable position.

“What do you know?” the girl asked.

Keisha put her hands on her hips. “I know you’re a kid and you shouldn’t be on the side of the road like that, so I guess if we’re making a list we could start there.”

“You stopped and looked at one of those billboards. The new ones. You were looking at one of them and crying. Do you know who put them up?”

Keisha felt the weak and tired part of herself falter, but she wasn’t about to let the kid see it, so instead she hopped up into the truck, too, and pushed past the kid’s legs.

“Am I driving you somewhere?” Keisha said. The girl shut the truck door, which Keisha took as a yes and so she pulled back into traffic. Neither of them spoke. A few miles of silence. The girl smelled overpowering. Not like she needed a shower. Instead as though she had taken too many showers, over and over, until any natural human smell was replaced by perfumed soap. She smelled like a walk through a park condensed into a single, overpowering whiff. In small doses maybe the smell would have been pleasant, but Keisha found her stomach turning again and rolled open the window.

“Ok, maybe you don’t know anything,” the girl said. “Fine, I don’t know anything either.”

She kicked Keisha’s book pile out of the way to make room for her feet. Brat.

“What’s your name?”

“Sylvia. Sylvia Parker.”

Keisha glanced at her. “I’ve heard that name somewhere.”

“Common name, I guess.”

“Where are you going?” said Keisha.

“Swansea, South Carolina.”

“Bad luck. I’m on the way to Atlanta to exchange shipments and then I’m heading west. Where can I drop you off?”

Sylvia didn’t look at her, instead watched the blur of billboards. “Swansea,” she said again.

Keisha sighed. Fine. She was almost to Atlanta anyway. She’d get the girl to leave there, and until then maybe it was nice to have friendly, or at least nonhostile, company for the first time in months, even if the smell was a lot to handle. Sylvia’s face softened and she turned her body back to face Keisha.

“No offense, I have to know if I can trust you,” Sylvia said.

“I have no idea if you can,” Keisha said. Sylvia nodded as though that were the right answer.

“You’ve seen it too,” the girl said. “Visions out on the highway. The road takes weird turns for you, same as it does for me.”

“What have you seen?”

“What have you seen?” Sylvia said, and smiled.

That was a good question. A lot that was impossible and terrifying. Keisha couldn’t find the shape of the tongue needed to name them. She shrugged.

“Exactly,” said Sylvia. Another half hour of silence, and then, as they entered the traffic that marked Atlanta long before the skyline was visible, she spoke again.

“Don’t you wish sometimes that you could forget? That you could have your memory wiped, and then you wouldn’t be a person wandering but a person who was almost somewhere, a person about to arrive, and when you arrived you could just stay?”

“Yes,” said Keisha.

“Yeah. God, yeah, me too.”

When they got to the distribution center, Sylvia clicked off her belt and hid in the back. Keisha didn’t know if that was necessary, but also didn’t know how to explain to her supervisors why she had a runaway child in her truck and so decided that it was probably for the best. Pallets of cereal were unloaded from the truck and replaced with pallets of travel-sized deodorant. When packaged, the two looked much the same. Brown boxes covered in plastic wrap. Only the logos were different. As Keisha waited for them to finish loading, a hand came out of the curtained back with a book. Sylvia was holding up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second volume from that comic series, which Keisha had just finished reading.

“Is this any good?” she asked.

“Hell yeah, it is.”

“Ok,” she said, considering the cover for a moment before tossing it back by her feet.

Once the new cargo was in place and all the paperwork had been signed off, they were back on the highway and heading west. Sylvia had made no move to leave, and Keisha hadn’t found a way to ask her to. Sylvia hopped back up to the front.

“My mom and I, we used to travel a lot for work,” she said, as though it were part of a conversation they had been having for a while. “And on breaks from school I would come with her. Lot of time spent in cars. We started to see what other people were missing. Between the rest stops and the Taco Bells. There’s danger out there. There’s a crack somewhere, and a terrible force is seeping through.”

Keisha nodded slowly, not sure how to respond.

“Do you know what that terrible force is?” she asked.

“Mm,” Sylvia said. “I need to get to Swansea, South Carolina, and I can’t tell you why. Can you take me there?”

“South Carolina’s the complete opposite direction from where I’m going. I have to get to a supermarket in—”

“You’re the first person I’ve talked to, like really talked to, in, I don’t know, weeks? Months? I need you to take me to Swansea. It has to do with, you know.” Her hand spiraled out to indicate all the things neither of them was willing or able to specify.

Keisha snorted.

“Sylvia, I’m an adult. I’m an adult woman with a job. And that job says I have to deliver deodorant to a supermarket, not drive a teenager hundreds of miles to a town I’ve never heard of for reasons that kid won’t tell me. I’m a responsible goddamn adult.”