Palindrome (39 page)

Before I have time to respond she forces me into her, sits back and gasps.

She wants to . . . conceive?

In the shadows I can barely see her face. I can only hear her raspy, heightened breathing; feel her back arching; her hips quivering; smell her growing more fragrant by the second, to the point that her scent seems to be something thick and dense swirling around us.

There are no words, only sounds. The snapping of the mattress with every rise and fall; her breathing, my own breathing. I close my eyes and listen to the pleasure crescendoing in the back of her throat.

Greta's hips grind desperately. Darkness seeps over my eyes, and I feel myself sinking deeper, like she's an endless abyss that's sucking me into her world. And I'm getting closer to letting go.

Greta's shadowy form is writhing, nearing a point of finality. I catch glimpses of the colorful faces painted on her body as they slip in and out of the scant light of the reading lamp. They, too, seem to be screaming for release, begging their host to speed up, which she does. I'm feeling the first tingling tremors in my own loins. Greta emits an ear-­shattering groan that sends shivers down my spine. She grabs her hair with one hand and screams again, an inhuman wail that sounds more like anguish than pleasure.

“I need . . .” she gasps and leans over me, her breasts dropping on my face. She's stopped grinding, but I'm still pulsing inside of her. She's fidgeting with something in the darkness that I can't see.

And when she pulls up again, I see that her gloved hand is still holding the Walkman.

She resumes her grinding, but somehow with an even more fervent intensity as she does something with her hands. I'm losing control, nearly impossible to focus, but I think that between the flails and screams, she is fiddling with the device. Putting her earbuds in.

She plunges me into her as deeply as I can go, without abandon, and through a shimmer of light from the window, I catch the terrified ecstasy on her face, the dreadful anticipation. My body is shivering, I feel almost feverish.

A click as Greta hits play. My fingers dig into the sheet beneath me. Unbearable pressure welling up inside of me.

Greta lets loose a howl that reverberates inside the room, a sound so tremulous and jarring that I have a quick moment of clarity in my mind's eye. Sadie sitting somewhere alone, waiting for me, while I do this with her kidnapper. A killer.

Oh god. Did she tattoo Sadie?

“Ergh!” I scream and sit up with all my power, swiping the tape player out of her hands. Her earbuds rip out, and I hear a small crack as the Walkman slams into the window.

In the sudden silence that follows, she stares at me, stunned. We listen for a moment to the distant honking of traffic, sirens. She's still breathing hard; it's clear by the tension on her face that she hasn't quite reached where she wanted to go. For a second, I'm positive she's going to kill me with her bare hands.

Instead she shoots off me and lunges for the Walkman. I watch her fumble with the earbuds and growl in displeasure. The earbuds are broken, cord ripped.

Now is my moment. I roll off the bed, naked, and half stumble to the dresser. Grab the pistol and point it at Greta, who's still crouched on the floor with the Walkman. I see the glimmer of flying tape. She's rewinding.
Rewinding
?

“Where's my daughter,” I say. She hardly even seems to hear me. The Walkman clicks and stops. Done rewinding. She hits a button, and the tape starts to play again. She unplugs the earbuds from the headphone jack. It's some kind of professional model; there are built-­in speakers.

It starts from the beginning.

“Stop,” I say, voice and pistol shaking. “Turn it off.”

She doesn't. Just looks up at me. I'm frozen. Listening.

From the Walkman I hear Greta's muffled but unmistakable voice saying:

“
You tell me.
”

Then comes the sound of crinkling plastic. Plastic bag. A struggle. Horrible gasping. A high-­pitched half cry stifled by the bag. Flailing. Last strained twitch against the bag. Then nothing. A pregnant silence from the tape player for a few seconds during which Greta's—­Hannah's—­and my eyes meet again. I could end this. Could shoot her in the head and pause the tape. Instead my sneakers remain rooted to the slick wood floor. The cassette player continues to whirr.

And then my chest goes cold as a sound suddenly bursts into the air of the hotel room, emanating from the Walkman, a still, thin cry. Not a cry . . . a note. Singing.

I see Savannah sitting in the dirty cellar, face wrapped tightly by a plastic bag, singing a single, glorious note. Beautiful. Like a choir of pink-­cheeked cherubs, except it's all coming from one mouth. My eyes water. The note is bliss. It's light, warmth. The note is exactly the way I felt when Sadie was born. The same awe, the same inexplicable gratitude to something,
someone,
bigger than me. Though the sound from her throat is loud, there is no echo—­as if the sound is being absorbed by the walls.

But in a moment that feeling—­and the sound—­disappear, leaving Greta sitting beside Savannah's limp form in a damp basement. I hear the pitter-­patter of rain outside. Savannah's bagged head hangs loose as a rag doll's. The cellar, which was just filled with this beautiful song, now feels horribly barren. Greta—­stunned—­is about to stop recording when Savannah's head suddenly jerks up again, and from somewhere under the tight plastic comes a new sound: a low, droning bass note, loud and terrible, like an airplane engine.

The frequency shatters the lone lightbulb in the basement, and we're immersed in thick ink with her rumbling groan. And then from the cloudy darkness—­perhaps from Savannah's bagged throat—­sneaks a form: a black snake, his yellow eyes illuminating the two women as he slithers in the air between them, forked tongue flickering at me. He almost smiles at me, then turns away, displaying to me his hovering, lengthwise form. Spiraled around his body is a strip of tiny glittering scales, a million mirrors. I take a step toward his body to examine them more closely and realize each of the tiny mirrors contains my face. But not my reflection; rather still images from my life. One of me in a lecture in law school, nodding off. There's a picture of me on one of my early cases, tearing my hair out with stress. In another I see myself drunk, laughing uproariously at something filthy . . . my stomach churns as I recognize this night. The night I cheated on Helen.

I tear myself away and shift down the snake's length. The images turn brighter as I move toward his mouth. A day at the swimming pool in the summer before ninth grade, in the lifeguard shed. I'm offered a flask and take a sip. My first drink. I don't want to watch this either. I move closer to the mouth, finally hitting some pleasant images. Me as a smiling, deliriously happy toddler, an infant, a newborn . . .

The pictures start to ripple and fade. The snake is moving. He turns to look at me with a toothy grin, and then his head floats past my chest, dragging his thick form in the direction of his tail. He's spiraling in on himself, curving inwardly in an almost sensual motion, searching for his own tail. And I want him to devour it, to devour himself fully. And once he does, the tape will end and I'll simply flip back to the start of the tape and listen to the sweet beginning again, and again, and again . . .

Behind the snake Savannah looks at me, her face clear again of tattoos, the bag evaporated, and whispers, “
Stop, Frank.
”

My first shot opens a hole directly beneath Greta's bare collarbone. The rest are aimed at the Walkman, and the fifth connects, jarring the machine's primitive mechanism enough to stop the gears midspin, plunging the hotel room into blissful silence.

Greta—­Hannah—­looks first at her wound and then at me. She's on her knees, glistening blood streaming down her tattooed torso.

“Which room is my daughter in?” I ask. Unclear if the question registered. She's losing blood very fast. “
Which room is Sadie in
?” I scream, still keeping the pistol trained on her even though the chamber is empty.

“723,” she gurgles.

“Where's the key card?”

“Under the . . . money.”

“Did you hurt her?” I demand. She doesn't respond. Her eyelids flicker. “Did you
hurt her
?”

Greta bares bloodstained teeth. I see her gloved hand fumbling weakly with the dented Walkman. “The end. The snake,” she says.

Then her eyes roll back and she topples over onto the cherrywood floor face-­first, blood fountaining from the exit wound on her back, sprinkling the tapestry of faces. I heave the money bag onto my shoulder, sift through the bills frantically until I find the key card. Pull on my shirt and jeans, leaving my shredded boxer shorts, and rush out the door, not turning around for another look at her draining body.

I think,
Doesn't get much less professional than that.

I throw the pistol into the duffel bag as I sprint toward the elevators, imagining, praying that Sadie is sitting calmly in front of a TV on the seventh floor. Frantically slam my fist against the down button and pull out my phone to call Helen.

 

Epilogue

I
SINK DEEPER
into my plastic lounge chair, chug the rest of my piña colada, then woozily wave my empty glass in the air until a bronzed Sicilian twenty-­something in a spanking white uniform materializes to take it from me.

“Keep 'em coming,” I say, but before I can hand her a twenty-­euro bill, she takes an already prepared refill off her tray and hands it to me.

“
Grazie,
” I say.

“
Prego
.” She smiles, and only then does she pluck the bill from my outstretched fingers. Been staying at this place for about two months now; guess it's about time they got the idea.

Through my green-­tinted aviators, I watch the waitress hurry back to the poolside bar. Take a long slurp of frozen slush and set the glass down on the scorching cement.

Around the pool is a perimeter of vacationers—­mostly European—­being pampered by over-­the-­top-­polite resort staff, the kind you can spit on and they'll still serve you with a smile. White stone steps lead off the side of the pool area down to the private beach: white sand, no dogs, girls in bikinis, cool blue salt water that licks your ankles as you stare off to the horizon, struggling to remember what it's like to be broke.

Behind me the glorious coral hotel stretches toward the cloudless sky.

“Dad!” Sadie is clinging to the side of the pool, about ten feet away. She's wearing a goofy pair of goggles. “Come swim!”

“Gimme a few minutes,” I say.

“If you just sit in the sun all day, you're going to get fat and burned.”

“Too late on both counts, sweetie.”

Sadie rolls her eyes and drops off the wall. Doggy-­paddles away to the other side of the pool. Splashes around in the shallow end with a chunky Spanish boy she's made friends with this week.

A shirtless bear of a man a few seats down from me roars in laughter and shouts something in what I think is Russian. I light up an Italian brand cigarette and close my eyes for a second. Feel the Mediterranean sun tickle my belly, luxury tobacco snake out through my nostrils. Try tuning out the ambient noise. Haven't been sleeping well again. But maybe if I just—­

The cigarette is suddenly plucked from my mouth. I open my eyes and jerk up in my lounge chair to behold what I initially assume is a mirage: Courtney standing over me, clad only in a wide-­brimmed sombrero and a saggy black swimsuit, grinding out my cigarette in the ashtray beside me.

“It's one thing to smoke when you're on the job,” Courtney mutters, pulling up another chair and easing his cricketlike body into it.

I rub my eyes. “Took your sweet time. Wasn't sure you got my email.”

Courtney blinks. “It's not carrier pigeon, Frank. Emails have a remarkable delivery success rate.”

“You know what I mean. Thought maybe you wouldn't remember the name Ben Donovan.”

“How could I forget. I was up all night making those fake FBI badges.” Courtney laughs lightly. “I just had to wait until some of the heat dropped off.” His lanky stick-­frame is as pale as ever, almost looks like a translucent jellyfish under the bright sunlight. He has white splotches on his cheeks where he failed to rub in his sunscreen all the way. Not that he really needs it—­no light is piercing that thick sombrero.

“So . . . Are they still looking for me?”

“Yes, but they're winding down,” he says, looking around the pool area. “I mean, they've known you killed Greta from the start. But the more they uncover about her, the more they figure it was some kind of drug-­deal-­gone-­bad-­type situation. Not the senseless hotel room slaughter the
Post
reported.”

I chew on my lower lip.

“This could all have been avoided. I could have cleaned up the room, wiped my prints . . . was just in such a hurry to make sure Sadie was downstairs. Been cursing myself every day since.”

“Understandable. A drop of fear can poison a gallon of patience, thoughtfulness and subtlety,” Courtney says.

I stare up at the electric-­blue sky, resist the urge to smack him.

“And what about Helen?”

Courtney grimaces. “She didn't clear your name, but she's also not giving them any really pertinent info. Her story is that you were an ex-­lover gone mad who showed up and threatened her. You can't blame her—­you were gonna get tied back to her. She had to protect herself.”

“Naturally.” I pick my melting piña colada off the ground and chug it down. I wave my empty glass in the air, and when nobody immediately appears, I say, “Well, let's go on inside and I'll get you your money. And then you can be on your way.”

I start to stand up, but Courtney stays seated. He looks hurt.

“You think I came just for the money?”

I raise an eyebrow and sit back down. I keep my eyes on him even as the Sicilian waitress finally shows up to swap my empty glass out for a full one.

“I mean . . . I just . . .”

“I came, first and foremost, to apologize.”

I look at him. “For what?”

“I should have never put you in that situation. Forced you to threaten us like that.”

I stare into his long, pale face, eyes grey in the shade afforded by his hat. Then I grin.

“Bullshit.”

Courtney feigns being taken aback. “What?”

“You came here to apologize for
me
pulling a gun on
you
?” I laugh. “It's alright, Court. I know what you want. Besides the money.”

Courtney wrings his hands.

“Frank, I—­”

“Just ask.”

Courtney frowns dourly. Claws at the inside of his ear for a second, then taps his lips and says, “Well, I mean, did you . . . you know. Did you hear it?”

I light up another cigarette.

“Just the first few seconds. But I think I've got it figured out. Want a drink?”

Courtney shakes his head adamantly. Every second I keep him waiting is pure torture.

“Her name was Hannah,” I say. “And after making a few phone calls, I'm all but sure that her last name was Graham.”

Courtney's eyes go wide. “Silas's . . .”

“Older sister. I don't have much to do with myself these days. So I started making calls, just hoping to learn a little more about Silas. Finally got ahold of his elementary school in Alabama—­you know, where he grew up before he killed his parents. Was talking to one of his teachers, who mentioned that Silas was always a little weird, but what really creeped her out was his
sister,
who would pick him up after school. Looked like a full-­grown woman at fourteen, inordinately fascinated with death and self-­mutilation, spent a
lot
of time hanging around the local church . . . until it burned down. Gorgeous. Teacher didn't remember her name off the top of her head. I asked, ‘Hannah?' and she said that sounded right.”

Perhaps in a subconscious reaction to the story, Courtney forms a steeple with his hands.

“So, I have no way of verifying this, Court, because any mention of a big sister is totally absent from Silas's police report. But here's what I figure:
Hannah
killed her and Silas's parents with a ball-­peen hammer and buried them in the garbage dump. Or maybe she made Silas help her. After all—­it was always a little suspect that an eleven-­year-­old kid would be able to do that alone, right? Silas is shipped off to a foster home, Greta—­Hannah—­is sent somewhere else. Maybe the same spot. Who knows. Anyways, once she gets this idea to tape ­people as they die she recruits her old assistant: her little brother. Remember how that doctor told us Silas kept saying he was ‘told' to do all this stuff? What if he meant it literally?”

Courtney is very still. His face is embroiled in some type of inner conflict.

“Hmmm,” he says. “And then, like you thought before, after killing Savannah, Silas got scared—­”

“She tattooed his face. Hundred percent. She's the artist—­only the front of her body, the parts she could reach herself, are tattooed. She did it after making the tape, that I now know,” I say and shudder, picturing the black snake curling in on itself.

“How can you be sure?” Courtney asks.

“I just . . . Leave that for now. But anyways, it makes sense that Silas freaked out and tried to escape from her. Steals the tape, as that's the source of his fear. In his mind, it's the reason she tattooed him. Marked him. Maybe he was going to be next. To replicate her success with Savannah. So he turns himself in so that she can't get to him. And there's no reason for them to look into his sister—­he confesses to killing both Savannah and his parents himself.”

Courtney strokes one of his eyebrows, glaring at me. Can tell I'm holding out on him but doesn't want to push me too hard.

“Okay. But then so . . . what about—­”

“Okay, so then, as we'd already figured, once his big sister finally gets in to see him at Sachar, he freaks out and mails the tape to his snail-­mail paramour in Beulah, and—­”

“Frank,” Courtney interrupts, “this is all secondary. You said you heard the first few seconds . . . What happened in that hotel room?”

I sigh, grind out the end of my cigarette and watch Sadie splashing around in the pool. She hasn't spotted Courtney yet. Or maybe she just doesn't recognize him without his winter clothes.

The last two months here at the resort—­and the weeks before that, moving to a different city every other night, initially scared to stop moving—­have been tainted by memories of that night in the hotel room. Even now, sitting here thousands of miles away, I can't seem to get her scent off of me. Can't stop feeling her clawlike hands on the sides of my face, keep picturing the look on her face immediately before I shot her.

But mostly I keep thinking about the tape. The snake. What Greta said:

“
We've made mistakes that will be echoed back and forth for eternity.
”

I didn't hear the whole tape, but as I've stared at the ceiling at three, four in the morning these past months, replaying the images the snake showed me, I've come to suspect (or fear) that it's not the cassette itself that's a palindrome, it's
everything.
Like, once you die, the system just hits stop, then rewind, and you go backwards—­your mistakes being echoed back, replayed—­until starting at the beginning again. A train slowly chugging to a halt, and then the engineer cranking it into reverse for another ride backwards, down the same tracks. That life and death are the snake consuming his own tail. Was that what Savannah was when she visited me? An echo coming back the other direction?

I only saw the start of this process. I'm still guessing about this stuff. But if I'm right, that this is what the end of the tape makes explicit, I figure the Beulah Twelve saw that they were stuck in an infinite loop and lost their marbles. Because who's lived a life so well that they want to live it again and again forever? First they killed a kid, thinking it was an act of mercy, to spare
him
. Better to have never been born, or to never grow up, than to get stuck in that loop, right? And then, perhaps exacerbated by the realization that the murder itself would be part of their endless film reel, they attempted what appeared to be the only escape. They couldn't just kill themselves, knowing what they knew. The only way out was to keep themselves suspended, somewhere in between life and death. Frozen. That was the only way to get some peace. Some rest. What they must not have realized is that cryogenically freezing oneself is somewhat complicated.

I polish off the colada in my hand, savoring the cold rum on the back of my throat.

“Frank?” Courtney is leaning in close, looking desperate. “So?”

But because I didn't hear the whole cassette, nothing was
proven
to me, as it was to Greta and the Beulah Twelve and ostensibly Candy. There's still a skeptical—­or hopeful—­part of me that's sure the snake hallucination was some kind of self-­induced placebo effect, like speaking in tongues. All the images I saw of myself are obviously things my subconscious could have summoned on its own. And so I'm fortunate, in a way, to be struggling in the nether zone that nun on the plane described. A place of belief, just short of knowing.

Still, it's kept me from a good night's sleep ever since I put a bullet in Hannah Graham (admittedly, fleeing the country hasn't helped either): I can't shake the thought that one day, I'll echo back this way, then back again. Every moment repeated and analyzed forever. It's too much pressure to live with. I wish with every cell in my body that Greta hadn't let me hear that thing. I keep thinking about those divine first few seconds, and then the low bass note. The snake. Some things can never be unheard.

“Frank?”

Before I can think about how to answer, we're interrupted by Sadie emerging from the pool. She patters over to us, dripping on the polished stone.

“Courtney!” she says.

“Hello.” He gives her a weird smile as I wrap a green towel around her shoulders.

“Are you staying here with us?” she asks.

Courtney looks around, as if considering whether this resort is up to his lofty standards.

“I certainly wouldn't be opposed to checking in here for a week or so if your father doesn't mind the company.”

“Wanna go swimming?” she asks Courtney.

“I . . .” Courtney looks longingly at me. “Maybe a bit later, Sadie.”

“Then why are you wearing a swimsuit? Come on.”

“Go on, Court.” I grin. “We can talk later. Live a little.”

“Yes, live, like you're doing.” Courtney rises to his feet. Gives me a look of disapproval. “Live with skin cancer and liver failure.”

“Courtney. Come on!” Sadie tugs at his hand.

Courtney sighs, takes Sadie by the hand and leads her back to the pool. Removes her green towel and sets it carefully on the edge of the cement. She jumps in, trying to tuck in her knees for a cannonball, but fails miserably. Courtney tentatively sits down on the edge and dips in his feet.