Benighted (24 page)

Ally’s hands tug at each other, and he looks down at them. “They dug the bullet out of his head,” he says. “It was silver.”

“What are you talking about?” All my skittishness has frozen.

Ally stares down at the floor. Even through the rags of hair hanging around it, I can see his face contort. He takes a deep breath, and doesn’t look at me. “You remember after Johnny was killed? There were rumors going around that there was something odd about the bullet he was killed with. I just found out what was odd about it, Lo. It was silver.”

“Johnny?” I hear myself speak, like a child asking for someone in the dark.

“Yeah, Johnny. Johnny and Nate. That’s what I heard, that they were both killed with silver bullets. This guy from Forensics, he wanted to do a comparison of the bullets.”

My face is cold, disconnected from the rest of me, disembodied. “He thinks someone from DORLA killed them?”

“No.” Ally looks up at me. “No, that’s not it. He was asking about how well we guard our stores. And whether someone could make bullets on their own, homemade ones. I don’t know, I’m not Forensics and I didn’t see them. I’m just…He…” Ally rubs his face. His shoulders are hunched as he looks up. “I just thought you might want to know about it.”

TWENTY

S
ilver bullets.

When I was nine, I saw bullets being made. We were taken to a factory where machines whirred and flashed past and bullets piled up in great containers, not burnished as we’d expected silver to be, but dull. They could have been steel or lead. We tried putting our hands into them like lucky dips, but the metal was heavy and resistant, we couldn’t push through it. It was a standard trip to be taken on, every non school takes its pupils on tours of the factories where lycos spend their time manufacturing for us. Usually, the children are bored; the irony of lycos working to supply us only occurs to the grown-ups. An unpopular job. “I work in metal processing” is a phrase I’ve heard more than once. Still, the money’s good because it has to be, they’re better paid than steeplejacks or slaughtermen, and the factories are always humming. The graffiti on the walls and the rocks thrown at the chicken-wire-covered windows don’t stop the machines.

Mostly I was disappointed. I wanted the bullets to be shiny.

When you melt metal down, it holds together, heavy and lithe. I’ve seen them pour it. I think of the pain of boiling water on my skin, and when I imagine molten metal I can only imagine how it would feel to the touch. Thinking of pain of that caliber is impossible, like trying to invent a new color. Like trying to imagine things in Paul’s description of lune monochromatic vision. Or perhaps it would burn out all your nerves before you could feel it. Perhaps. It’s hard to believe that. No one gets used to the heat of hellfire. I don’t understand how anyone could melt down silver to make a bullet without fear of the heat overcoming them.

The human skull isn’t very thick. I used to think of human flesh as tough, because of an experiment I did when I was a child. I tried to bite my tongue. There was discomfort that rose smoothly to pain as my teeth pressed down, and the flesh thickened under them, became dense, fibrous, hard to get through. I wasn’t going to put it to the test, of course, not all the way, but I seemed to have discovered something. Under pressure, my tongue was tough meat; biting through it wouldn’t be easy.

It was only years later I understood that it wasn’t the resilience of my tongue stopping me. It was the pain.

I thought the skull was a fortress. Curved like the sky, smooth and beautiful, a stone-walled bastion for the butter-soft brain that carries so much inside it. But really, it isn’t so strong. A hammer will break through, without even needing much strength of arm. A chisel, a rolling pin, a lead pipe. A little fall will put a crack in it. Just the distance between eye level and the ground. It doesn’t need a bullet. Five or six feet will do the trick.

Johnny is rotting in the ground. The charge has gone from his body. With nothing to hold it upright, his flesh went slack, and now the microbes have him. Somehow they knew. His life left him and with it went all protection, and somehow the worms knew that it was their time, that they could open their mouths and bite.

Johnny will be pulp and curds now. Tiny creatures will have breached his surface. No violence in the grave, only hunger. Even that hunger will not be violent. Just insensate, relentless. Little spores will send thread-thin tendrils down through Johnny’s arms and face, and nothing will stop them taking root. Soon, he’ll be honeycombed all through. Perhaps some of the skin is still left, but it wouldn’t be smooth to the touch. It will break under the impact of a fingertip, yield and sink into the teeming marsh beneath.

And Nate. They won’t let us go to the funeral. Just the family, we were all told. Only his own flesh and blood. But I know they mean to cremate him, and I’ve seen cremations before. A fine coffin of polished wood and gleaming bronze handles, a crest of flowers on top. Dignity, arrangement. Hair coiling in on itself, half-settled blood boiling within the flesh. The body won’t long withstand the flames.

You wouldn’t know it from the coffin. But then I look again inside my mind, and I see something else. A fallen tree, hewn and scraped and slashed into place. How much damage the wood took to become that handsome casket. And the lilies and orchids on the top are dying already, their spines broken when some diligent florist clipped them from the ground. More than one dead thing goes into the fire. Only the handles are truly free, the nerveless tranquil metal. It comes out of the mines to be fixed onto a wooden box, and scalds no living flesh when it melts.

There’s no reason, not a technical one anyway, why you’d make a bullet out of silver if you were hunting in the daylight. It’s too soft. There’s the question of the alloy, as well. We use a special combination, enough silver to trigger the allergy, enough hard metal mixed in to give them some stopping power. Silver isn’t a practical weapon.

It can only be a symbol. I can think of no other reason in the world why someone would put together an expensive, inefficient set of bullets and shoot two of my people.

It’s beyond insult. It’s beyond attack, beyond curses sprayed on our office buildings every night and fucking skins and bareback and night after night with teeth at your throat. It’s beyond being beaten up in bars and getting followed home and wearing gloves in summer.

Another part of me can’t take it in. I have a chilled, fragile urge to laugh, because there’s an awful comedy to this. It’s so perfect. Of course. They lay down rules that set us to guarding them from each other every month. We bleed and die and have to treat them with tender caution because if we hurt them the least little bit when they try to kill us, the next morning they’ll rise from their beds and sue. For this, they call us names and pay us nothing and let it be known that they despise us. Liberals hate our methods, reactionaries hate our kind, children laugh and the old shake their heads at the state of the world that has us in it. And finally someone takes silver, the one defense we have, the only thing in this life that hurts them more than it hurts us. They didn’t need to. A lead bullet would have done just as well. There was no need to use our only weapon, to flaunt and mock with the killing, to shoot at us as if we were…what was Seligmann’s word?

Soulless. Ghouls that walk among the living, shut out of the bright world and foraging on the edges. Be good, or the barebacks will get you. And perhaps it’s true, perhaps Seligmann thought himself in hell, perhaps he was afraid of us. I stood back and watched Nate beat him until he couldn’t sit up. And now I’m not even sorry. I should have let Nate kill him when we had the chance. Even as I think that, I know I wouldn’t have done it, not faced with a real flesh-and-blood man whose life was so far beyond me that I wouldn’t have dared snuff it out, but I’m not sorry for hurting him. There’s no pity left in me. Maybe that makes me what he called us, soulless, the spooks, the bogeymen. It’s not what I’d have chosen to be.

Someone thought they would make a grand gesture, find the best, most beautiful insult, so perfect you could mistake it for justice if you half closed your eyes. They found silver and melted it down and followed people I knew down the road to hit them in the back of the head with this final, artistic affront. Someone put thought and effort into this. They cared enough.

It’s an impossible desecration, beyond belief. But now that it’s happened, I can’t push it away from me, I can’t fault it. A silver bullet. Of course. What else? It’s the final wrong anyone could do us, the last twist, the perfect consummation.

TWENTY-ONE

P
aul is already home when I get back. He rests on the sofa, his feet bare, a book held above his face—something about ancient Roman portraits with pictures in it. His soles are dusty, flat, the skin on them dark as hooves.

“Good day?” he says, sitting up and laying his book open-faced across the arm of the sofa.

“No.” I speak staccato, close off the word before it starts to shake.

“Bad day?”

“Yeah.”

Paul sets up a cushion for me, arranges it and waits for me to join him. I walk to the sofa and sit, upright, straight-limbed, without expression. “What happened?” he says, touching my hair.

I pull my head away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Are you worrying about Marty?” His face is sympathetic, and I feel an ugly thump in my chest. I haven’t thought about Marty once since Seligmann escaped.

“No. I said I didn’t want to…” It’s too much trouble to finish the sentence.

“Oh.” Paul puts his hands blamelessly in his lap. “Well, would you like to talk about something else?”

“I don’t know.” The words make no sense. I stare at the painting that hangs on his wall, a homemade thing, the canvas tacked roughly to the frame, the work of some friend of his. Bright fresh colors smeared into patterns, the paints not fully mixed so that different colors swirl together. The beauty of the materials. Adult finger-painting.

“Oh. See, that’s a problem. I’m going to have to not be curious about your bad day, which means we’ve got to talk about something else, or we’ll just spend the evening carefully not talking about your bad day. Very awkward.” He nods at me, not really serious.

“Stop,” I say. I raise my hands, parallel, touch my temples. The painting will never hang in a gallery, but there’s some eye for proportion in it, the colors are nice. I don’t want color. I want the world white and soundless, cool, air around me. If I get sick, perhaps I can lie on a wheeled bed in a tiled operating theater with a clean echo and people around me in thin safe masks, and I won’t have to move or speak.

“Hey. Hey, are you okay?” Paul shifts on the cushion, looks into my face.

“No,” I say, trying hard to make my voice normal. “No, not really. I—People were talking a lot at work about the boy who died, and it was—I’m upset, I guess.” I try to lighten up, but my laugh sounds bitter. “Not that I ever liked him.”

Paul puts an arm around me. I flinch, stop myself from pulling back. He rests his arm a moment on my tense shoulders, then takes it away.

“I’ve been thinking all day,” I say. “I’ve had enough thinking.”

“Do you want to go out?” Paul sits up, crosses his legs. “We could go to a movie. You wouldn’t have to think or talk about anything at all for two hours straight.” I twitch, stiffen my hands. That would be my reason for going to the cinema. It unsettles me that Paul can put his finger on it, drag it out into the light so casually.

“Or we could go to a meeting or something. I’ve got an old school friend whose boyfriend writes the most god-awful conceptual poetry and gives readings every other week; we could go to that. Last time I went he read out a sonnet that included a five-minute silence in between each quatrain and making faces every other rhyme. It was oddly compelling after a while. How about it? Maybe some schadenfreude would pick you up.”

“I don’t want to go out.” He can’t just pick me over, toss my faults from hand to hand like jokes. “I get enough looking over my shoulder during the day without adding the cover of night to any stalkers, thanks.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He strokes my hand. The tolerance burns my skin. “Well, okay, we’ll stay in then.” He rises, goes over to the window and pulls the curtains closed. Crossing to the cupboard where he keeps his drinks, a battered pine construction with old postcards of landscape paintings and a few cocktail recipes tacked to it, he crouches down and pours me a glass of whisky. I didn’t ask for it, and it hasn’t been my habit to drink when I got home. Not while I’ve been living with him. He hands it to me, and I look at it without speaking for a moment. Then I raise the glass, knock back the whisky and set it down on the table with a hard clatter.

“Another?” He stands beside me. Something about him is poised, alert, as if he were standing on the balls of his feet.

“No thank you.” I stare at the empty glass. A little film of whisky runs down its inside and settles on the bottom.

Paul sighs, rubs his head. His hands open and close. Then he shakes them and comes around the back of the sofa, touches my shoulders, starts to massage them. His thumbs easily find the knots. By now he knows where my tense places are, on my back.

I wriggle in his grip. Once I’ve started, the pressure of his hands feels more and more and more irritating against my twisting shoulders, and I wrench myself away to find my hands have become fists. “Stop it!” I say.

“What?” He stands away, his hands raised as if innocent.

“Just—stop it. Stop treating me like an invalid.”

“I’m not.” He backs away.

“I—I don’t want it. I’ve seen you give me drinks, I’ve seen you rub my shoulders, propose trips. I know the repertoire. Stop trying to fix me.”

“I was trying to cheer you up.” He walks around the sofa to face me.

“Don’t try to do things with me.” I don’t know what I’m saying. Only that my hands are clenched and my shoulder blades are folded tight, there are straps around me, binding me.

“I’m trying to be nice, Lola.” He sounds almost as if he’s giving me warning.

“Nice doesn’t cut it. Nice isn’t helping. This isn’t a nice time.”

Paul shakes himself. When he speaks, I’m startled at the pitch of his voice. “Well, God damn it, Lola, what do you want? I live here. I’m doing my best and you’re knocking back everything I try. And you’re not trying at all. You’re just sitting there, it’s no good. I can’t just ignore you sitting there like a death’s head. I
live here.
”

I freeze. “I know this is your place, Paul. I can’t go back to mine.”

“I know.” Paul puts his head between his hands and presses. “I know that. Just—please try to be nice while you’re here, eh?”

“You sound like my mother,” I say. “While you’re under my roof, you do as you’re told.” Though it was Becca she said this to, not me. My stay under her roof was always considered more transitory.

“Lola, for God’s sake!
Please
don’t take things out on me.”

“Why not?” The words are out of my mouth before I know I’m going to speak. What I felt when I talked to Bride rises in me again, the passion to live, to rend whatever stands in my way. My fingers claw in my lap. I look at Paul. I want to touch him, caress, drive some passion into the air around us, but also to hurt him. I remember how his hair feels, the fine, tough strands, and my hands tug at the cloth of my jacket. I’ve seen how pleasure changes his face, traces itself around his eyes and mouth, but how would he look, how would he sound, if I hurt him?

“Because—” He’s pacing now, raising and dropping and raising his hands, caged. “Because it’s fucked up, that’s why. I’ve been nothing but nice to you, Lola. It doesn’t mean you can turn on me because you’ve had a bad day. You got a problem, deal with it. Don’t fire on the nearest safe target like a coward.”

“You think I’m a coward?” I laugh; the sound echoes, hard-edged and acrid like a dropped coin. “There speaks the respectable man. You go out one night with a trank gun and the moon up and see how liberal you feel.”

“That’s nothing to do with me!”

“No,” I say quietly. “You’re right. It isn’t. Try it sometime, and then call me a coward.”

“I
can’t.
” His voice is as quiet as mine, and just as harsh. “But that’s not to do with me either. Don’t try to justify attacking me by flashing the DORLA card.”

Flashing the DORLA card. He’s seen me do that, he’s seen me get past people by flashing the card. He remembers.

“Then don’t call me names,” I say.

“What has the one got to do with the other?” The phrase is scholarly, educated, and I slam my fist against a cushion. “And leave the fucking cushion alone.”

“Why, do you feel sorry for it? Go on, take the cushion’s side against me.”

He looks at me, and his face collapses in laughter. “For God’s sake. This is getting ridiculous.”

I knock away the hand he reaches out to me.

“Lola, stop it. Why are you being such a bitch?” The word is sharp-pointed and savage, but his tone is more questioning than anything else.

“I told you not to call me names.”

“Oh for God’s
sake
!” He flings away from me again. “Lola, I’m prepared to be nice about anything if you’ll work with me, but this is just fucking ridiculous. I’ve had enough, you can just sit there and simmer.”

Simmer. I’m a pot that will burn his hand if he touches it. “Of course. You only sympathize with those doe-eyed enough to beg for it. I forgot you were sentimental.”

“Here.” He takes a knife off the sideboard, a small one for cutting fruit, and tosses it over to me. “You want to sit there playing knife-thrower, use a proper weapon.”

“Oh, wonderful, now you’re giving me props. Get me to act out your little scenario rather than deal with me. You’re such a fucking child.”

Paul slams his hand into the wall. I flinch at the sound, shrink back into myself. Then he turns around, and I’m angry with him for making me shiver. “If you’re going to hit the wall, I think I’m entitled to hit the cushion,” I say. “And wake the neighbors up while you’re at it, I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.”

“Lola.” His voice is slow, precise, fierce. “Leaving aside the fact that it’s seven o’clock, I have to tell you that I’ve had absolutely all I’m going to take of this. I don’t want you picking fights with me, I don’t want you throwing out barbs about everything I do or say. You’re not the only one who’s had a bad day.”

“Oh, you’ve had a bad day.” My voice is hard.

“Yes, I’ve had a bad day.” He flexes his fingers, looks at the door. “Whatever you say about your job, I’m sure it’s true, but, but no one likes dealing with social workers either, and I’m trying to do my best, too. You’re not the only one outnumbered, you’re not the only one fighting uphill. I do a hard job, Lola. And I haven’t laid it on you. I know you’re going through something really bad. But I’m—for God’s sake, I’m taking a risk even having you here.” The blood stops in my veins at the words. “And you’re not the only one who’s, who’s got a life to deal with.”

He’s put our lives in separate categories. “You can’t blame me for not reading your mind.”

“I don’t want you reading my mind. All I’m asking is that you think about the possibility that you might not be the only person who can get upset.”

“You didn’t have to risk yourself,” I say. I’m beyond emotion; I feel what he’s said as a physical pain in my chest. “I told you when I asked you, you didn’t have to take me in.”

“I wanted to, God damn it. Christ, Lola, you think I don’t know what it’s like for you, you spend all your life thinking ‘no one understands me,’ and it’s just not true. I know what you’re up against. I wanted you to stop fighting the world for a bit. I thought if you stayed here you’d know not everything was against you. But if you’re going to carry the fight in here, then—then you’re still staying here,” he starts to look confused, frustrated with his words, “but you’re not going to fight with me. It’s just—it’s just damn well ungrateful, that’s all.”

I sit. I stare. Everything he’s said has been in the past tense. “If you invited me here to prove a point,” I say, my voice unsteady, “you might have tried telling me. If you wanted to turn me into an object lesson, you should have let me know. You think I should be grateful? If you can dare stand there and tell me that you wanted me so you could prove something, if you wanted a woman you could fix, then I’m sorry I trusted you.”

“Jesus,” Paul says. He’s gazing at me as if I was a news bulletin of an atrocity, a self-inflicted wound. “You really don’t like men very much, do you?”

“I don’t have a problem with men,” I say. “I have a problem with lycos.”

We look at each other. What we’ve said hangs tattered on the walls around us, closing us in, it’s everywhere we look.

Paul speaks quietly. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

I swallow, say nothing.

“You actually think it’s all right to say things like that.”

I can’t speak. My teeth ache and I have to press them together to keep the pain out.

“Lola, if I said something like that to you, you’d kill me.”

Could he say that to me? All I can see is that he knows he might. If Paul calls me a bareback, I’ll die. I make myself meet his eyes. “People say—something like that—to me all the time. It won’t kill you to hear it the other way around.”

He opens his mouth as if to shout, then shuts it fast. In the second that takes, I’ve heard so many answers—that I’ve no right to pass on abuse, that he’s never done anything to deserve it, that insults are my lot in life and no fault of his. Instead, he gestures as if pushing aside a heavy branch, and speaks in a tense, quiet voice. “If you feel that way, Lola, then why are you seeing me?”

I can’t tell him I love him.

“Come on, Lola, you always have an answer for everything. If you feel so badly about lycos, then why are you sleeping with one? Why not stick to people like yourself?”

People like me.

If he thinks this is self-hatred, that I wouldn’t want someone like myself, he’s wrong. I know he’s wrong. I wouldn’t want someone like myself, but that’s not because I’m a bareback, it’s because I’m me. But why would he say that, if he doesn’t believe, deep down, that I should know myself for a freak?

“I just met you, that’s all,” I say. “You were interested. Bareback girls are sluts, didn’t you know?”

He covers his forehead. “You’re not a stupid woman, Lola. Why do you come out with such stupid things?”

I open my mouth to say, Well, I guess I didn’t have the advantages of a lyco education, but I stop. Paul has always somehow made me ashamed of cheap remarks, and even now, sitting shaking on his sofa, his warm untidy sitting room as empty and cold around me as an Arctic wasteland, I can’t say it.