Sociopaths In Love (12 page)

"I'm sorry I snapped at you earlier."

"It's okay. Every relationship will have its
bumps. So what're you doing?"

"I was going to try and clean up the blood
but I think I'm going to wait till the morning. I'm kind of tired.
Come to bed with me."

He held up his bloody arms and hands. "I'm
kind of messy."

"I don't mind."

Chores

Erica woke up with a stiff neck and sore
vagina. Naked, she shuffled out of bed. The formerly white sheets
were now streaked with brown she knew had probably been red only a
few hours before. Walt was running a chainsaw in the master
bathroom so she continued shuffling to the one off the hall. She
peed and washed her hands and face. The remnants of the cheap
Halloween makeup washed off much more easily than the real stuff.
She had liked the way it looked. She would probably make herself up
like that again. She thought about putting on clothes but didn't
want to and didn't think she really had to.

Her stomach grumbled.

She went into the master bathroom to check
on Walt and see if he needed anything. It looked like he had made
good progress. A number of body parts, cut down to a relatively
uniform size, were stacked on the vanity, draining into the sink.
The bathroom was glistening with blood. It spattered the walls,
pooled to coagulate in the corners. It would probably require some
serious cleaning later or else the whole apartment would smell like
a slaughterhouse.

"How's it going?" she asked.

Walt, wearing goggles and yellow rubber
gloves, looked up from his crouch in front of the bathtub and said,
"Huh?" He grabbed some toilet paper from the roll and wiped his
goggles with it.

"How's it going?"

"Oh, pretty good. You were still sleeping so
I went to Home Depot alone this morning and got the chainsaw. They
already had a really good set of kitchen knives so I didn't need
those. I'm just trying to get this down to manageable portions and
then I'll do some deboning before freezing the meat."

"And this is what you want to be doing?" She
tried not to sound judgmental.

"Well, yeah . . . Why else would I
be doing it?"

"I don't know. Are you hungry or
anything?"

He nodded his head toward a hairy forearm at
the top of the pile on the vanity.

"I'm not cooking that."

"I'm not hungry then."

"I'll make some coffee."

"Can you put on some clothes?"

"Excuse me?"

"Yeah . . . I don't know. If I see
you naked all the time it loses something. I'm pretty sure clothes
were invented to make nakedness more alluring."

"So, what? You think that, like, naked
pygmies or whatever don't have sex because it feels good?"

He pushed the goggles up to his forehead,
his blue eyes staring out from the narrow expanse of clean skin. "I
don't think we're fucking pygmies. I think we're at the height of
evolution and evolved people wear clothes. You look about this
bitch's size. I'm sure she's got a closet full of real nice
stuff."

"But she's like thirty. I don't want to look
thirty."

"Then maybe you should get the shit you got
yesterday out of the car."

Erica slumped her shoulders and walked out
of the bathroom. Not bothering to put on any clothes, she walked to
the elevator and down to the lobby. The attendant wasn't behind the
desk so she rummaged around until she found something that looked
like a key fob. Probably should have asked Walt how he managed to
get back in this morning. The car was parked on the curb, a ticket
fluttering beneath the windshield wiper. She plucked the ticket
out, wadded it up, and dropped it on the ground. A number of people
walked up and down on the sidewalk. Cars drove by. No one seemed to
gawk at her. She remembered what Walt had said about people only
really noticing her clothes and her makeup and becoming more
familiar with them than her. So here she was, completely naked on a
busy street in the middle of the day, and no one even turned his
head. She climbed up to the top of the Bug, threw her arms open to
the day, and shouted, "I am here and I am alive and I can do
whatever the fuck I want!"

From above the street level city sounds she
heard clapping and looked up to see Walt leaning over the balcony
railing, slowly smacking his hands together. She beamed at him. She
didn't know if he could see it or not, but she smiled as large as
she possibly could at him. He reached down, came up with the
woman's head, and dropped it off the balcony. It cracked on the
sidewalk, the brains oozing out. It wasn't the dramatic explosion
she would have thought. She grabbed her bags of clothes from the
backseat of the car and went back into the building.

In the apartment, she put on one of the
woman's robes she found, ground some fantastic smelling coffee, and
brewed it in a coffee maker that looked like a science experiment.
Then she took a cup of coffee out to the balcony, smoked
cigarettes, and listened to Walt finish taking the humans apart
from somewhere deeper in the apartment.

She felt good.

Dinner

Since Walt was using the bathtub in the
master bedroom to clean and bleach the bones from the man and
woman, successfully flayed, Erica took a shower in the smaller
bathroom off the hallway. She had noticed her vagina needed shaving
while she was roaming around nude earlier and took care of that as
well. Already, she had begun to think of this bathroom as hers. She
hadn't really picked out many comfortable clothes from the store
but was able to find a suitable t-shirt and black yoga pants from
the woman's wardrobe. When she came out of the bathroom, the
apartment smelled like food. She walked past the stomach-high bar
separating the dining room from the living room. Walt sat at one of
the four modern chairs surrounding the sleek glass table. A plate
piled with meat sat in front of him. A matching plate with maybe a
slightly smaller pile of meat sat in front of the chair to his
right.

"I made this for you," he said.

"I told you I'm not eating that."

"You're not even going to try it?"

"No."

He took a bite. "It's delicious. Really
fucking delicious."

"It doesn't matter how delicious it is. It's
people. I'm not eating people and I know you want to save your one
favor for something really hideous."

"It would make me so happy if you would at
least try it. I worked really hard on those bodies. Worked to cook
this for you."

"I'm sorry, baby, I don't want to."

She went into the kitchen to throw some
bread in the oven to warm it up. For people who obviously had a lot
of money, Mr. and Mrs. Whoever had a downright scarce amount of
food in their refrigerator. They probably ate out a lot. Erica
supposed there was nothing really stopping her from getting
something delivered but guessed she wasn't that hungry yet. She
brought her bread back to the table. Walt ate his meat slowly. It
almost looked like he was ready to cry, but he kept eating and this
made it somehow sadder.

Erica took a bite of her bread. "What's
wrong?"

"I feel like you've stopped caring
. . . About us."

"Are you fucking kidding
me? While you took care of those bodies I scrubbed all the blood
off the floor, off the walls. I worked for
hours
on that and you never even said
thanks."

"That's why I went to Home Depot this
morning. Why I went through all the trouble to prepare this meal.
Besides, I didn't mind the blood."

"It would have started to stink eventually.
Attracted flies. It would have been gross."

"Then thanks, I guess. But, still, I wanted
to bring you here so you could live like a queen."

"It's a nice place. Thanks for murdering the
owners of a really nice place so I can live like a queen."

He threw his hunk of meat on the plate in
disgust. "That's exactly what I mean. You're just being sarcastic
now. You said you wanted to come with me. I told you I saw us being
together for a really long time, told you I love you, and now
. . . I don't know."

"Fine. Will it make you happy if I eat the
meat you cooked?" She reached toward her plate of meat. There must
have been at least three pounds, mostly rare, sitting in a pool of
blood on the bone white plate. She grabbed an indiscriminate
handful and held it up to her mouth, fought her gorge, and started
eating it like she would an apple. "Mmmm, this is really good."
Blood and juices trickled down her chin, dripped onto her clean
white shirt. "Best fucking thing I've had in a really long time."
She finished what was in her fist, gagged a little, and licked her
palm and fingers clean.

Now Walt was mad. She saw it in is eyes.
"Exactly what I mean," he said. He grabbed her plate, stacked it on
his unfinished plate, walked them both across the living room,
through the open balcony doors, and tossed them off. He came back
in. "There, thanks for ruining dinner." He rested his forehead on
the back of his right hand, a drop of blood hanging from the
fingertip.

Maybe she liked him better this way. There
was something vulnerable about him when it looked like he was about
ready to cry, when it looked like something had been taken from
him. Actually, it made her feel better but made her like him even
less. She wouldn't say she hated vulnerable men but she didn't
think it suited Walt. There was something about him that was
missing and his tough exterior let him get away with it. It was
like a cover. Once that cover was lifted it was like, she didn't
know exactly, it made her think of some amorphous lump of clay.

"Fuck you." She pushed her chair back from
the table and stood up, faced him.

The electricity was back in his eyes. The
clay hardened back into the stone exterior and he stood up.

He turned her around, bent
her over the table. He grabbed her arms and pulled them behind her
back. "You want to eat fucking bread?" he said. "Is that what
you
want
? There's
nothing better in the world then what I just tried to feed you and
you want this shitty stale bread?" With his free hand, he picked up
what was left of the baguette. He put it on the table, just beneath
her face. "So why don't you go ahead and eat the bread? Eat every
last crumb."

She heard him unbutton and
unzip his pants. She should have tried to fight him or get away,
but there was something about this that excited her. He
probably
wanted
her to fight him.

"No," she said.

"I told you not to say no. It seems like
that's all you say now. Eat the fucking bread." He shucked his
pants and underwear down and mashed her head toward the bread. She
took a bite.

He pulled her stretchy pants down to her
knees. She hadn't bothered putting on any underwear.

It was hard to take bites of the bread
without any hands. Walt noticed this. He grabbed the bread. "Here,"
he said. "Open up."

He tapped the bread against her face and she
opened her mouth. He slowly worked all the bread into her mouth.
She gagged and vomited on the table. He let go of her wrists and
placed both of her hands to either side of her head in the warm,
expanding pool of vomit.

"Don't move them off this table."

She heaved again. This had suddenly become
not the slightest bit fun but he seemed worked up and she was
actually afraid of what he might do if she told him no again.

He dropped to his knees behind her and
spread her ass cheeks, plunging his tongue into her anus, working
it in and out, spitting on it. He stood up and pressed himself
against her asshole. He tried for what felt like a very long time
to get the head of his penis inside her. Once started, he slowly
slid the rest of his length in. This wasn't the first time they'd
done it this way but the pain, even though expected, was still
there. He forced her head down into her vomit and she began
retching and heaving again.

Quickly, he came inside of her and then said
he was going out.

She didn't move until he had slammed the
door behind him.

She flicked the vomit from her fingertips
and used one of the expensive linen napkins to wipe the rest of it
from her hands before pulling up her pants and walking out onto the
balcony. She watched Walt as he got into the bright yellow car and
went speeding down 2nd Street, the only car on the road.

Did she care if he wrecked? Did she want him
to come back? These were probably important questions. Maybe it was
important that she was even asking herself these questions. She
didn't know.

She went back into the
apartment and cleaned the vomit off the table. After that, she felt
disgusting and decided to take another shower. Almost jokingly, she
thought of it as a rape shower and then realized it kind of felt
like rape every time she had sex with Walt. The only thing that
made it different was that she wanted it. Even what just happened,
as humiliating as it was, she'd wanted. But she wondered how long
she would want it that way. Perhaps even more frightening, she
wondered where she would want him to take it. Would it get even
rougher? Even weirder? She'd already let three of his friends and
one of their girlfriends fuck her. Was that even weird? She felt
like it probably was. Or would it get more comfortable? Would she
even
want
that?

She felt like she shouldn't be focusing so
much on the sex when there were clearly so many other looming
issues. The enormity of the situation felt like it could rise up
and swallow her. However, if they existed in some kind of vacuum
allowing them to do whatever it was they wanted without being
called out or caught, then the enormity of the situation was
diminished, almost completely. Or it made it even more enormous.
Or, anyway, it gave it the potential for enormity. Most people were
forced to make decisions based on economics or what those around
them would think. The only person around her, in a sense, was Walt.
He leaned toward depravity. It wasn't exactly hard to know what he
would like. But in the greater scheme of things, in the world
outside Walt, her choices were limitless. She never saw herself
having this problem. That, again, was another problem. She still
had trouble seeing herself before Walt at all. There must have been
things she wanted to do. There must have been a time when she
carried a future vision of herself, the culmination of an infinite
amount of life choices. But it was all a blank.