The Visible Filth (6 page)

“Oh man. Really? I lost track of time.” She rubbed her eyes.

“What’s that? Are you researching something?”

She switched off the screen. “No. That’s something else.” She arose from her chair and draped her arms around his shoulder. “Are you just getting home?”

“Yeah. I stayed after the shift. Played a few games of pool. Just hung out.”

“Good. I like you to have fun.” She kissed him sleepily. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Did you send me a picture a few minutes ago? Did you try to call me?”

She frowned, put her forehead on his shoulder. “No. Maybe? I don’t think so. I can’t really remember. I feel foggy.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I’m just really tired, Will. Come on. Let’s go to bed.” She headed in that direction, attempting to drag him along behind her.

“I’ll be right there, okay?”

She continued on by herself, walking like someone drugged, sagging from her own bones.

He checked the apartment thoroughly. In closets, under the bed, in the pantry. The place was empty. After double-checking the lock on the front door, he followed her to bed. He stared at the ceiling until the rising sun painted it with light, Carrie still snoring beside him. Only then did he manage to close his eyes and lose himself from the world.

T
HEY BOTH SLEPT
into the early afternoon. They awoke groggy and irritable. A heavy weight swung in Will’s skull, moving at a slight lag to the rest of him. He moved ponderously into the bathroom, where he took a scorching shower. He felt unaccountably filthy, as though he’d been steeped in sewage. The soap and hot water did nothing to change it. He considered, briefly, that he was feeling guilt about his encounter with Alicia, but in fact the only thing he felt about that was a horror at her rejection.

In the living room, Carrie was sitting on the couch, staring at the window, her hands folded together on her lap. The blinds were still drawn, and the day was a pale white blur beyond them. She noticed him come in, and gave him a wan smile. He had a hard time returning it, but he did.

“What do you think it is?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She opened her hands, and the yellow phone was there. “The pictures. The video.” Her face looked wrong. Maybe she was sick.

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you were going to give this to Derek.”

He shrugged. He resented the question; it felt invasive. “I didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Just – don’t worry about it. I will tonight.”

She didn’t respond. Instead she activated the phone and opened the picture album.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m looking at them,” she said simply.

He joined her on the couch and leaned into her, looking as well. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said. She scrolled to the pictures of the severed head, pausing on the first one.

“I Googled that guy’s name last night. Garrett? Checked if there were any references on nola.com to someone with that name who went missing or was hurt. I didn’t find anything.”

“We don’t know that anything happened to him,” Will said.

She ignored this bit of absurdity. “Then I Googled other words.”

He felt queasy. “Like what?”

“I don’t remember. A bunch of stuff. Voices on the phone, trading images of violence, death cults, that sort of thing.”

He shook his head, unable to process what he was hearing. “Death cults?”

“Well I don’t know, Will! What the fuck are these people doing? Texting each other these things?”

“Carrie, did you go
looking
for it?”

“I was trying to figure this out!”

He stood and started pacing, his body sparking with an energy as much excitement as fear. “Well? Did you find anything?”

“I can’t remember,” she said quietly. He thought of the dark, wet tunnel on the screen last night.

“Don’t go looking again,” he said.

Carrie sighed, putting her forehead in her hand. The phone lay limply in her other one. “Don’t tell me what to do, Will.”

He put out his hand. “Give it to me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Please. Please, Carrie. Give it to me. I’m going to give it to the police, like I should have done last night.”

“No you won’t.” She set it on the end table, and left him to fetch it himself. “People look so normal on the outside,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Inside it’s all just worms.”

He strode toward the end table and snatched up the phone before she could change her mind. “I don’t understand you,” he said.

She arose from the couch and disappeared into the bedroom, emerging a while later dressed for the day.

“Have a good night at work,” she said.

“Just like that?”

“Give up the phone tonight. Then we’ll talk.” With that, she was gone.

He fell onto the couch, wanting to be angry. She had no right to give him an ultimatum. He’s the one who found the damn thing, he’s the one who saw the pictures and tried to protect her from them, he’s the one who’d had to listen to that awful voice after she insisted he make the call. The more he thought about it all, the more righteous he felt.

But he still couldn’t get angry.

He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to feel. The spikes of fear he’d experienced earlier always seemed to retreat to a low-grade anxiety during the day. He couldn’t bring himself to believe in what he was seeing. This had to be some kind of elaborate joke, or maybe one of those bizarre role-playing games, and he’d been caught up in it. If anything, he was less inclined to turn the phone over to the police for fear of being laughed at.

He took the opportunity to check her computer in the office room, personal space be damned. He booted it up and toggled her history. Some .edu sites, links to papers on T.S. Eliot, a few celebrity gossip sites, a lengthy spell of window shopping at Amazon. Somewhere in that time the weight of what she’d seen shifted her focus; what started as a perusal of furniture and clothing ending with a browse through the true crime section, followed by books on the occult. There were links to a few sites after that, but not many – ancient, horribly designed sites about Satanism and witchcraft, hosted on long-defunct platforms with rudimentary interfaces. It was as though she’d been engaging in a geological dig through the strata of the internet’s past. From there she seemed to have spent considerable time looking into something called
The Second Translation of Wounds
. The last recorded site visit was time-stamped 11:17. Several hours before he arrived home.

After that, there was no record of her activity. It was as though she’d shut the computer off. Or – he thought, despite his efforts at rationalization – cracked through the lowest stratum to something else.

What had she been looking at?

What did she find?

He shut the computer down. The whole thing made him feel sick. He went into the kitchen and made himself a screwdriver. Two or three more of those and he’d be able to push the whole thing out of his mind.

T
HE NIGHT WAS
surprisingly busy, and at first he was able to lose himself in the tide of work. Most of what he termed the Rosie’s Regulars made an appearance: Old Willard, the raisin-faced ex-POW from the Korean War, smiling through his sublimated rage and throwing nasty remarks at tough guys fifty years his junior; Naked Mary, the two hundred and thirty pound exhibitionist who was good for two or three appearances a month and always concluded her stay with a pool game played in the nude; Scotty, the oyster-shucker from down in the Quarter who sang Frank Sinatra tunes at the top of his lungs, even though he’d been living under the aegis of the Jim Crow laws when most of those songs had been popular; along with the ordinary flotsam of an ordinary night, a number of which Will counted among his friends – at least as far as a word like that stretched when they only came to see you for the booze.

Even the roaches were at a low ebb, as the bar had been visited by an exterminator earlier in the day. He found nearly a dozen of them on their backs, their legs moving lethargically, as though they’d been caught sweetly dreaming.

But for the absence of Alicia, it was shaping up to be a banner night at Rosie’s.

Derek and his partner showed up too, drifting to their usual haunt at the pool table. Will felt the weight of the yellow phone in his pocket. He tried to make eye contact with Derek, but his attention was focused elsewhere. Later, then. The phone wasn’t going anywhere.

Around ten-thirty, a sourness began to set in. Alicia’s continued absence started to feel like an indictment. The bar was full, the jukebox was rattling on its feet, the vibe was good, but the joy he’d been taking in the work seeped away, and his mind disengaged. She was blowing him off. He remembered their kiss with a beautiful, unkind clarity. He needed her to be here so he could apologize to her, so he could be reassured by her, and so he could impress upon her with nothing more than the force of his absolute conviction that the love he bore her was the purest thing he had ever felt.

Perhaps it was because of this distraction that he did not immediately recognize the clean-cut kid leaning across the bar at him, his arms folded beneath him and an ugly half-grin climbing up one side of his perfect face. He looked at the kid, waiting for him to place his order, some pugilistic impulse refusing to utter the first syllable in the exchange. If the kid was too cool to speak, he could fucking go without.

And then he recognized him. His face must have betrayed him, because the kid gave him the full-wattage smile, the one that charmed the girls right out of their clothes, like snakes from their baskets. “Took you a minute,” he said.

Will looked behind him for the other kids, the ones too young to come up and order for themselves. The bar was crowded, but he didn’t see them. The table in the corner, where they’d roosted last time, was empty.

“What can I do for you,” Will said, trying to play down his momentary shock. Act like he was any normal customer.

“Well, I’m not going to stay long – I forgot my ID.” He patted his pockets with a sad smile. “I just wanted to let you know we left you a little present.”

The world blurred for a moment. He thought of Carrie, alone at home, staring into her computer screen. “Leave her alone,” he said. He sounded weak; like a scared little kid.

The other guy smiled and shook his head. “Your girlfriend? Nice tits, butch haircut? No, dude, I’m not talking about her. Hey, you got a thing for dykes or something?”

Will couldn’t believe he was saying this to him. In his bar, of all places. Surrounded by his friends. The absolute arrogance of the move was enough to render him breathless. He had a vague sense of people waiting for his attention down the bar. They could keep waiting. “You need to get the fuck out of here right now,” he said, “before something bad happens to you.”

He realized that this was the best chance he’d have to turn the phone over to Derek. Everybody was right here. He could settle it all right now. But the thought of surrendering the phone made him feel ill. A distant alarm sounded from some deep chamber in his brain as he realized this, but he buried it and focused on the moment.

The kid held up his hands in mock surrender. “No problem, man, no problem.”

“Who are you people, anyway?”

He seemed to consider this a moment, and then leaned in over the bar, gesturing Will closer. Against his better judgment, he leaned in too.

“The truth?” he said. “We’re nothing but a nice suit of clothes, waiting for somebody to put us on.”

“What the fuck?”

“Open your present,” he said, and turned to push his way through the crowd. In moments, he was gone.

Will sent Carrie a quick text, and she replied that she was fine. So he continued to work, agitated and jumpy. Fortunately, most of the customers were too buzzed by this point to notice.

When Alicia finally strolled in with Jeffrey, well past eleven, Will felt a thrill of relief. It seemed she was borne in by a tide of inevitable movement, that the slow engine of fate was finally beginning to turn. They took their positions at the end of the bar and turned in to each other, deep in conversation. He poured their drinks and set them down; no exchange of words was necessary. They were functions of an algorithm.

He wouldn’t try to wedge himself into their conversation. Usually he was welcomed into it, but tonight they barely gave him notice. That was all right. What he had to say to Alicia would take time and her full attention. He could wait.

Derek tapped the bar for his attention. Will grabbed a cold bottle of Miller Lite from the cooler and went to meet him.

“I heard what happened to Eric,” he said, taking the beer and turning it up to his mouth, never breaking eye contact. “Why didn’t you call us, man?”

“I did. You guys didn’t show up for like an hour.”

“I don’t mean Sixth Precinct, I mean
us.
” He pointed to himself and his partner.

It hadn’t even occurred to Will to call them specifically. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t know that was something I could do.”

“This is our turf, man. We protect it.”

“I know.”

“Dude. Look at me. When was the last time this place was hit by an underage sting? Hm? When’s the last time anybody ever followed up on a noise complaint?
We protect this place.
You have my number, right?”

Will looked at dozens of business cards and personal notes tacked to the wall behind the bar phone, interlaced and overlaid like continental plates. “I know it’s up here somewhere.”

Derek slid him a card with his name and number on it. “Put this in your wallet. Next time, you call me.”

“Okay.” Will felt both empowered and chastened.

“So is he all right? Who did it?”

He thought about Eric dwelling in darkness above them, solitary as a monk, cherishing his wound like some acolyte in a cult of pain. He considered what his reaction might be if a couple of police officers – even ones he drank with and played pool with sometimes – came into his apartment at Will’s direction. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about for long.