The Brink (14 page)

“Why did she push me?” The kid repaves his bald cap.

“Because you were poking her.”

“I'm supposed to poke,” he says. “Eddie told me to poke.”

He tells me Eddie is on the roof, and we zip through the rest of the building: more kids leaping out from behind chairs, mattresses. The longhair manager from Video King, way too old for the room, proudly wears a diarrhea-ass costume from Spencer Gifts, leaking all over the place. In a shower, a chick dressed in a white sheet plays a harp. Solvang fixes on her and the girl waves back. Callie pulls him on.

“Who was that?” she demands.

“I don't know,” Solvang says.

Callie knocks him on the head with her wand. “You know her.”

“Jesus,” he says. “Your fucking wand fucking hurts.”

Out the back, past the exit, I catch the murmuring up on the roof. A training staircase runs up the back of the
building, to the promising noise. Jess has to be up there. When I ask Solvang and Callie if they want to crash the party, they do that couple-deciding thing, where she's looking to see what he wants and he's looking to see what she wants and it takes five minutes for them to decide that they're too tired to go out. But for once, Callie is game. “What's at home?” she says. “Let the babysitter deal.”

The roof is the size of the community pool. A cloud of dope hangs over the proceedings. At the other end, groupies circle Eddie while he boasts that he “made over a thousand dollars in the first hour.” His jaw chomps and chomps, with some chemistry of his own.

I see Jess, propped up on the edge of the roof, imprinting the lip of a Styrofoam cup with her fangs. Her pupils are big as volume knobs—Eddie must have fit her with black contacts.

“Mr. Randy DiSilva!” Eddie calls out to me. “Buddy, been way too long.” He waves me over and claps me on the back. Then he tilts his head and examines my face as if I'm auditioning.

“What'd you use?” he says. “Latex glue?”

“For what?”

“For this,” he says, running his finger down the left side of his face, eye to his chin. He has no idea.

I shake my head. “No, latex.”

“Gelatin?” He asks.

“Glass,” I go. “Some fire.”

I let that sink, but Eddie's too juiced to follow. “Huh?”

Solvang shows up, changing the subject. “So, Randy, is Amanda Jane here?”

“The girl from the stupid movie?” Eddie says. “Oh, yeah, right, she's doing Ouija by the keg.”

Solvang scans for her and Callie watches him look for this girl, the girl who's not her, and it pains me. She's loyal to him the way people get when they start feeding a feral animal, leaving a plate out, expecting the animal to care. Solvang was raised in the woods. He'll go back there eventually. I know they're having trouble—Solvang told me that he can't get it up since he saw her making way for the baby. “I just keep expecting other stuff to keep coming out,” he told me. “It's your playing cards,” I told him. “They're rotting you.”

I peel off from Eddie and head to the drinks. I pump two beers into red plastic cups and mash one of my pills on the edge of the table. It doesn't quite powder and it gets in the foam, but I stir it in with a finger. She doesn't need much. Jess looks up, blank and unfocused, when I approach. The itch starts up, with the sweat.

“Jess,” I go. “It's me, the guy who took your portrait the other day.”

“Randy, right?” she says. Maybe the friendliness takes a little too long to shape into her face, but we'll get there. Her lips don't know what to do with the fangs, so they rest on the outside, like a rabbit. “I'm sorry. I can't see anything. These contacts are driving me crazy.”

“I brought you a beer,” I say. She takes it, but it goes nowhere near her lips. “So what's your costume?”

“I came as normal,” I say. “The boy next door.”

She nods. “Oh that's a hard one, that one takes time,” she says. The fingers have been snipped off her gloves, and with bluing fingers, she accordions the pleats in her skirt. Her knees are right there, offered through the rips in her leggings. The itch says,
Start there
.

She holds out her hand. “You want this?” she says. A mint-colored pill rests in her palm, a fish-tank pebble. “Eddie gave it to me and told me it was aspirin.”

I have competition. I sit next to her on the edge. “That's not aspirin.”

“It figures,” she says. “He's a creepster.”

“Have you seen his movies?”

“I watched like ten minutes of the one about the imp and the spell and the whatever.”

“So why'd you sign up to join the vampire squad?”

“He said I could die in his next one,” she says. “Gotta start somewhere.”

“Maybe one day you'll get to be the final girl,” I say.

Jess squeezes up her face. “She's the one who never has sex, right? Because when you have sex in those movies you die.”

“The final girl is the last one alive, that's all that matters,” I say. “The beautiful one nobody notices, except we do, the audience. She's the one with the inner resources and the keys and the journey and the one weird implement that brings death. Chopsticks. Or the poker. Or hair spray on fire. And then at the end, when she looks over the railing, or into the
pit, that's the abyss looking into her. And she's alive. And her being alive means we're alive.”

You don't need to be all that smart. You just have to make the girl feel like she gives off light.

“You watch a lot of movies, Randy,” she says, and it's so much specialness that it distracts me from asking how she knows my name.

I'd just ruined the Bronco twins. Two cowlicky bullies from East Rutland whose princely poses I saw and went,
Here are two people who deserve some damage.
All it took was a little more cherry and less nude in the paintbrush. When I was done, Kenny Bronco looked like a flaming leper.

So I didn't notice her at first. I almost passed her prints straight into the shipment. Almost. But then I took her in: the blue sweater, the brown hair, that crucifix nestled at the base of her neck. Her skin was trophy golden. She seemed familiar, like a sequel.

And then it wasn't her face I was seeing, but a face I've seen so many times in my head that he's my Forest Glade. Her brother's face, in the obituaries. My mother had kept the page for me until after I was out of the hospital and could focus. Eric Denning, seventeen. He'd started his own lawn-mowing company and was planning, like half of everybody, on getting the hell out of Rutland. I was too, before I became a monster.

I went to Kramer's catalog to confirm what I already knew: the photo in my hand was Jessica Denning. I never knew your brother, Jessica. But five years ago, drunk and bored, he bent
time around me. He crossed the yellow line and splintered my life in two.

I took the digital files and dragged them into the trash. My pulse jumped when Kramer came into the room. He dove into the office fridge.

“Hey, boss, we're missing this one girl's prints,” I said. “Can't find her in the bin. Some kind of error in the camera?”

Kramer popped open his soda. “Just schedule her for next week, then,” he said. “She's all yours.”

Suddenly, sirens. Down below, in the firehouse parking lot, two police cars pull up. The blue and right lights make everybody on the roof wave the air to waft away the dope smell which, for about five seconds, seems like an idea. Then everybody runs. Eddie hitches his pants, heads to the stairs. “Remember the legend of Edward Cosimano!” he shouts.

“Cops are here,” I tell her.

“Are you serious?” she says. She tugs her cape in close. “I can't see.”

Solvang crashes into us, throwing one arm around me. “Hey, you—you should love this guy,” he says to her. “Randy is ready for love.” I'd like to kill him right now. I see Solvang dead on a punji stick, like one of his cards.

Callie comes and catches him. He got in a drinking contest with one of the zombies, she says. Jess snaps off her fangs and says, “Let's go.”

Sometimes you walk up to a wall and you walk through.

I lope with Solvang's arm around my shoulder, and we work our way down the stairs until we're ground level. Out front, I can hear Eddie arguing with the cops. Cars tear out of the lot, nipping past us. I dump Solvang in the backseat of my car. When I turn around, Callie is wiping her mouth with a bit of her gown. There's a grim puddle at her feet.

“I think I just vomited,” Callie says, without surprise.

Jess steps around. “Shotgun.”

We drive in quiet. As we pull into Callie and Solvang's driveway, their babysitter fumes on the wooden stairs. “I have been waiting for hours,” she goes. “I was supposed to be at a rave at ten.”

Solvang twists out the door and just spills. The babysitter, disgusted, hops on her ten-speed. “The kid's asleep—if you care,” she says, and goes.

For a moment, we just sit there. “I'm pregnant,” Callie goes, into her hands. “I know nobody cares. I just thought somebody should know.”

Nobody says a word. I walk Solvang back to the house with Callie trailing behind in the silence she made. Their place is a mess, like the baby is doing the arranging. Life-size cutouts of WWF wrestling guys—Solvang is a fan—circle their living room, peopling it with goons. I roll Solvang off onto the bed in the master bedroom. It's a waterbed, and the wave action sounds like a stomach digesting.

Solvang is a little gray in the lips. He wakes up some and pulls my head toward his, mumbling. Somebody gave him a pill on the roof, he says. One of Eddie's aspirins. Then he takes
my hand and rests it on his hard-on. He's proud, like it's a science project that managed to work after all.

“That's the proof,” he says, bleary.

“Proof of what?”

“Proof I'm not dead.”

In the kitchen, Callie sits at their tiny table, a young crone. She plays with her wand, remolds the star points that have blunted.

“Callie, I'm sorry, but I've got to go,” I say.

She taps her wand once against her belly. “Bing,” she says. “All gone.” Back at the car, Jess's working on her eyes, trying to fish out the contacts. The rip at her knee, I swear, is bigger.

“I can't get these things out,” she says. “And now it's kind of scaring me.”

“Where am I taking you?” I ask.

She stops for a minute. “Not home,” she says. “Not yet.”

Just three folding chairs in twenty feet square. I was four months into my treatment, pacing the clinic courtyard. The walls of the courtyard were glass and with noonday sun, we got our reflections back. The heat made the itch so I couldn't stay in the sun for long. I pressed my fingers on the left side of my face to feel out the tender parts. My face looked like somebody fried an egg there and forgot about it. I looked like something you'd never want to look at.

“So what happened to the other guy?” I heard behind me.

He was in jeans and sunglasses, sitting in one of the folding chairs kicked back on its rear two legs. He was a tree cowboy,
one of the loggers from upstate, compact and hardy. But from the collar of his shirt rose a bright red welt, up his neck, onto his jaw.

“Sorry?” I said.

“The other guy,” the cowboy asked. “The guy that hit you in his car. The nurses talk.”

“He died,” I said.

The man nodded. “My ex-wife set my house on fire,” he said. “Since then, I've been coming back here. They take pieces of me and move them around so I can look like everybody else.”

He held up a hand that had the fingers fused together. “I ain't never going to look like everybody else,” he said. “Neither will you.”

He banged his chair back to the ground so he could dig around in his pocket with his good hand. He found a blister pack of pills. No label or markings.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two,” I said.

He tossed the packet at me. “Take some of those.”

“What are they?”

“They're not for you. They're for her.”

“For who?”

“For the girl,” he said. “For the partner of your choosing.”

I shake my head and hand the pills back. “No thank you.”

He scratched at his cheek and considered what came next. “Listen to me. I'm doing you a favor. You're broken now. Just like every person who comes through here. No woman is
going to look at you. You'll see. You've got lots of time, lots of time to see what I'm saying. The only kind of sex you'll have, from here on out, is up in your head.”

He must have seen something shift in me. Because he tossed those pills right back.

The Star Mart, it figures, doesn't have a bathroom. So I huddle by the magazine rack, crushing two pills against the shelf, Jess waiting in the car. I won't miss this time. I pour the powder from my hand into the neck of a soda bottle and shake it. When I pay, the Indian at the counter gives me a look. Behind him, a bank of security camera feeds. There's one over the magazine rack. He saw everything, says nothing.

Back in the car, I set the bottle between us. “Thirsty?” I say. “I got us a soda.”

“Let's go somewhere,” she says, taking the bottle.

So I drive to the deserted Rutland Mid-City Mall. It's been waiting for demolition for years. You can look in the windows and see rolls of carpet and dummies and florescent bulbs. In the acres of asphalt and lamplight, you feel like you're parked on the moon. I used to come here and join up with a crowd of smokers on the backside, where we'd turned a patch of curb into our spot.

“This place is special for me,” I say. It was here that I met this beautiful girl, Melissa Carmichael, in a skirt and with a scarf on her wrist. Melissa was up from the Berkshires, the only one of us not getting stoned. I lay my head in her lap and told her about my favorite soundtracks. She combed my
hair with her fingers and loved me in minutes. But then she had to go, she said, she was staying with a friend. “When can I see you? I have to see you,” I said, and she told me she would come back tomorrow tonight except Eric Denning found me that night and then I never saw her again.