Sociopaths In Love (2 page)

This is why she tried not to think too
much.

The more she thought, the shittier things
became.

She wanted to be entertained. She wanted
what everyone else had. She wanted to be entertained by what
everyone else had. This life she'd been given wasn't enough for
her. She felt like she was being punished. She wanted a new
life.

The bathroom door opened behind her and
scented steam rolled out. She closed her magazine and lit a
cigarette, pictured all that steam curling around Walt, slicking
and warming his skin. She had a brief image of him washing the shit
and come and blood off his cock. She imagined it soft and reddened
by the hot water. Imagined him standing in the bathroom, making a
human impression in the steam, carving out his space in the vapor.
She wondered where he put his gun, if he even had it on him. She
hadn't found out he was carrying one until he'd put it on the
vanity before taking down his pants.

She took a deep drag off her cigarette.

Walt stood in front of her wearing the same
clothes he'd worn before. Still, she thought he seemed clean and
pressed. His hair was wet and she liked the darker color and added
density of it. She imagined touching it, feeling its damp warmth on
her fingertips.

"Get what you need so we can take off. I'll
have one of those." He pointed at the white and gold pack of
cigarettes. She tossed the whole thing and a half-empty book of
matches at him. He sat down in the chair across from her, lighting
the cigarette and hoisting his feet up on the shiny coffee table in
what seemed like one single motion.

"I can't leave." She crossed her legs and
stared into his eyes, surprised he was asking her to go someplace
with him. "You're welcome to stay here though. It's free rent." It
suddenly seemed like there could be no alternative. She couldn't go
anywhere, but she didn't see how they could possibly be apart. He'd
brought more excitement into her life in the last half hour than
she had experienced since before Granny got sick. And he was here
in front of her without her having to do anything at all.

He exhaled a gray plume of smoke and almost
laughed. "I can't stay here. Feels like I've been here too long
already."

"It wouldn't be a problem."

"No. It's not your inconvenience I'm worried
about. I just don't want to be here." He looked around the small
room. "This house, it's . . . gross."

"I keep it clean."

"I don't mean like that. It's just small and
in the middle of nowhere and it seems kind of boring.
Depressing."

"It's a lot boring. A lot depressing."

"Doesn't matter now, anyway. You're coming
with me."

"I can't do that."

"It's not like I'm giving you a choice."

"You're going to kidnap me?"

"Don't have to."

"I have to stay here with my granny. She's
sick."

"Let's have a look at her."

Erica crushed out her cigarette in the amber
ashtray. "She doesn't like visitors. She said the only person
besides me she ever wants to see again is my dad. And only then so
she can spit in his face."

"I want to see her. I'm sure she won't mind.
Which room is it?" He pointed his two fingers holding the cigarette
toward the doors in the wall to his left. "That one or that one?"
And she didn't know if he was making fun of her or not but it made
her feel small and boxed in, sitting in an old worn velvet chair
surrounded by four doors, a small opening to the kitchen, and
hundreds of acres of nothing but trees and dirt and dumb animals.
And that was all one of those four doors led to.

Erica stood and walked toward the door on
the left. It faced east and let in all the good morning light and
Granny liked that. Before grabbing the knob, Erica turned to face
Walt, standing spookily close behind her.

"I can't go with you." She looked down at
the worn wood floor, afraid to make eye contact with him.

He lifted her chin with a
hooked index finger. She was conscious of the layer of makeup
separating them. "Do you
want
to go with me?"

She bit her lower lip and
stared at the farthest corner of the room. She didn't know where
he'd come from or where he was going. Also, she didn't really
know
him
. For all
she knew, he could be going back to some dingy, cramped apartment
even more depressing than this house. The molasses crawl of time
made her anxious. The longer she went without saying anything the
more it seemed possible she wouldn't say anything ever again. Why
didn't she just ask him where he was going? Because it didn't
matter. She couldn't go with him. No matter where he was going. No
matter what he planned on doing.

He took a breath and she wondered if it had
really only been since his last breath he'd asked that question.
Already, she was having trouble remembering what that question
was.

He retracted his finger
from the underside of her chin, rubbing the silky grit of the spray
tan between his thumb and index finger. "Maybe that wasn't what I
meant." He smiled quickly and the look in his eyes made her think
of lightning striking the top of a mountain and blowing it off in a
granite fog. She didn't know if it made him look crazy or powerful.
"Do you
want
to go
somewhere? Do you
want
to get out?" He placed an almost imperceptible emphasis on
that word:
want
.

She put her hand on the flaking gold plated
knob, turning it, and said, "More than anything, but you'll see.
She's really bad off. I can't just leave her." Only, in that
second, an ugly truth frothed to the surface. It wasn't really
about her grandmother. Not really. Not at all. She was just waiting
for a better opportunity to present itself. That better opportunity
might be here. But she would have to decide and that seemed like a
lot of effort. It would be much easier if her decisions were made
for her.

Erica pushed the door open and they were
both in the room with Granny, Walt practically at the same time,
and she had the sense she'd entered a cave, something locked up
away from the sun, the floor thick with bat shit, the crushed bones
of tiny animals, and amphibious things with slime-coated skin and
no eyes. She took a deep breath, opened the curtains, and
concentrated on Granny, lying serenely in her bed. She felt
better.

"Morning, Granny, we've got a visitor. He
wanted to meet you."

Walt stood so close to the bed his knees
practically touched it. He looked down at Granny but didn't say
anything.

"You can say hi," Erica said. "She won't
bite." She laughed softly and motioned to Granny's nightstand.
"Besides, her teeth are in that glass anyway."

"Are you shitting me?"

Something shifted and broke inside Erica,
plunging her back into that cave until she took another deep breath
and focused on the squared rational features of Walt's face. It was
very symmetrical, asserting an inarguable geometry.

"What do you mean?" Erica asked.

"Your grandma's dead. It looks like she's
been dead a long time."

Erica didn't say anything. Didn't argue with
him. Maybe she just needed to hear it spoken aloud. She watched
Granny's face. Her eyes were closed and her chest rose and fell.
She'd brought Granny food every day since Granny had said she was
too sick to get out of bed. She'd talked to Granny. She'd tried to
make Granny comfortable.

"Why would you say that?"

"Trust me. She's dead. There's hardly
anything left of her. Almost a skeleton." He reached out and poked
Granny's cheek, the skin like old paper. His finger poked a small
hole and he brought it back and wiped it on his jeans, his perfect
teeth bared in something like a grimace.

Erica felt the cave trying to grow up from
the floor. She didn't know how to keep it away. She felt like the
entire house rested on a thin and brittle layer of earth and
everything was ready to crumble, plunging them underground where
there wasn't any life that wasn't predatory or diseased. If she
closed her eyes, something she wasn't going to do, she thought she
would be able to hear everything cracking around her.

Walt reached a hand behind him and lifted up
the bottom of his white t-shirt. The gun made another entrance.
Erica's eyes locked on it and she suddenly felt herself in the
bathroom, Walt's hands grabbing her hipbones while he filled her
and jerked her back against him.

Something was breaking inside Erica.
Crumbling. And now the cave entered the room with the sunlight,
fossilizing all the motes of dust suspended in the air. The scary
place wasn't in the ground below them. It was outside.

Walt aimed the gun at Granny and Erica felt
like the only way she could escape from the cave was to move away
from the window, toward Walt, to stop him from doing whatever he
had planned.

The report deafened her before she could
make it to him and she saw that look in his eye again and now the
lightning wasn't striking a mountain but a person and it didn't fry
them like in movies and cartoons. It exploded the person, sending
blood and gore and the smell of something burning all over the room
and Erica collapsed to the floor, her hands over her ears and sobs
vomiting from her mouth.

Walt lowered the gun and for a second Erica
was sure he was going to press it to the top of her head and
detonate her the same way he had Granny. But he didn't. He just
slid it back into the waistband of his jeans and Erica thought
about what the hot steel felt like against his skin.

"Now I guess there isn't any question about
it," he said.

Lovesick

Erica shut the bathroom door and locked it
before turning the faucet on full blast. She wasn't sure if this
was to keep Walt from hearing her or vice versa. She knelt in front
of the toilet. The seat was already up. Walt had failed to put it
down. And it was filled with shit. She was surprised she didn't
notice how foul it had smelled upon entering the bathroom. Brown
and streaked with red, a gelatinous mess. Her first heave came as
she depressed the handle to flush it. The water level rose,
enveloping her chunks. One mess replaced with another. As she
retched again, she couldn't help thinking about the mess he'd left
behind. "He's sick," she thought. It occurred to her that maybe it
wasn't shit he'd left in the toilet but vomit. He didn't seem sick
to her. Not temporary sick or permanent sick.

She retched a third time but nothing came up
and, after a couple more dry heaves, she rose and stood in front of
the sink. She stuck her hand under the running water, cupping some
of it and slurping it down. She wiped off her mouth and chin,
opened the mirror-fronted medicine cabinet and brushed her teeth.
She left her toothbrush and the toothpaste on the vanity. If she
decided to go with him, she might need them. She no longer had any
reason to not go with him. She closed the mirror and studied her
face. Brown eyes stabbed out through a mask of makeup and blood.
She washed her face. The blood came off easier than she thought it
would. Maybe it just hadn't had time to dry yet. She grabbed her
makeup bag from beneath the sink and set it on the vanity. She
thought about reapplying the makeup she'd just wiped off but didn't
want to spend that much time on it. She was afraid Walt would get
mad. Also, it wasn't good for her skin to apply makeup and wash it
too many times in one day. She fished around in her bag until she
found a tube of lipstick the vibrant red of a Twizzler. She
uncapped it, made a horizontal line across her forehead and a
diagonal line over each cheek, starting close to her nose and
drawing the lipstick downward. War paint, possibly. Or maybe a
memorial mark, something like a black armband or a jersey number
patch. This was, she told herself, an attempt at weirdstream. Most
likely just something to have between her face and the world,
provided she ever left the house.

Body emptied, teeth brushed, at least some
type of makeup applied, she felt restored both inside and out. She
opened the bathroom door and walked into the living room. Walt sat
on the couch, his feet on the coffee table, holding his gun in both
hands and staring at it.

"Are you going to shoot me, too?" Erica
asked.

"No." He didn't look at her, didn't look
away from his gun. "Although I would if I wanted to."

She sat down next to him. "Do you do
whatever you want?"

"I do now."

She put a hand on his thigh and moved into
his warmth. "I loved my Granny a lot."

"I'm sure you did. But she's gone now. Like
I said, it looked like she'd been gone a long time."

"I just don't see how that's possible."

"You didn't want to let go."

Erica was silent for a moment. "I guess
that's true."

"And because you didn't want to let go, she
seemed alive to you, even though you wasted so much time pretending
to take care of her."

"I
had
to. Couldn't just let her
starve."

"The only thing we have to do is eat and
shit and piss. The body takes care of the rest on its own. You took
care of that old lady because you wanted to. The more things you
did for her the more you convinced yourself she was alive. Maybe
you're like me. Maybe you can do whatever the hell you want,
too."

Erica looked away and
exhaled. "I don't think so." It didn't seem like she'd done
anything
she wanted to
do.

"I don't think you've tried. There aren't
many people who try. And even less of them can get away with it.
You have to have a certain something."

This time she laughed. "I
know I don't have
that
."