"I'm sorry," he offers. "I don't mean to get pissy. It's just…" He waves it off. "Been a long couple weeks. Just coming down off a backslide from Cincinnati, and have to head down to Charlotte to pick up another load."
He takes a deep breath through his nose, like he's trying to ratchet up his courage.
"Thing is, I've got a few days down there before I grab the next haul. I don't get too many days off, I usually go straight through, but… I was thinking. Maybe you'll be down in that area. It's only an hour south of here. And maybe, if you are in that area, and you have a spare night, well. We could do dinner. A movie."
She puts out her hand. "It's a deal."
He doesn't grab it, and Miriam wonders how bold she'll have to be. Reach up and tweak his ear?
She only needs skin to skin to see…
But then he smiles and takes her hand in his own, and –
The lantern room is encased in glass. One window pane is broken out, and the wind howls madly through the gap. Thunder rumbles in the distance. Gray light filters in through the dirty windows and illuminates Louis's face, a face encrusted in dried blood.
Somewhere, the sound of the ocean.
Louis is bound to a wooden chair next to the lighthouse lantern. A dizzying array of optics sits above his head. Brown extension cords affix his wrists to the chair arms, and another pair holds his feet to the chair legs. His head is held fast by black electrical tape wrapped around his forehead, fastening his skull to base of the lighthouse's pedestal clockworks.
A tall, thin man approaches. He is entirely hairless. No eyebrows. No eyelashes, even.
In one of his smooth, spidery hands he holds a long fillet knife.
The man admires the blade for a moment, though it is pocked with rust and smells not-too-faintly of fish guts.
"Get away from me," Louis stammers. "Who are you? Who are you people? I don't have what you want!"
"That no longer matters," the man says. He has an accent. Nebulous. European.
The man moves preternaturally fast. He stabs Louis in the left eye with the knife. It does not go to the brain, and only ruins the eye: a choice the hairless man has made. Louis screams. The attacker withdraws the knife. It makes a sucking sound as he extracts it.
His thin lips form a mirthless smile.
He pauses. He admires.
Louis's good eye darts to somewhere over the man's shoulder.
"Miriam?" Louis asks, but it's too late. The man stabs him again, this time through the right eye, and this time, all the way to the hilt. All the way to the brain.
FOUR
The Million-Dollar Question
She can still hear the sound as the knife pulls out of the one eye and the sound as it plunges into the other. And him speaking her name…
Miriam
? It bounces around her skull like a ricocheting bullet.
Her hand feels like it's touching a hot stove. She gasps and jerks, pulling it away.
Her head slams into the passenger side window. Not enough to crack it, but enough where she sees stars. The unlit cigarette drops from her lips and tumbles into her lap.
"Do you know me?" she asks, blinking away the white spots. Louis, of course, looks confused.
"I don't know if anybody knows anybody," he says.
"No!" she barks, sharp,
too
sharp, and shakes her head. "I
mean
, have we met? We don't know each other?"
Louis still has his hand hanging out there from where she grabbed it, but now he slowly pulls back, like any fast movement might cause him to lose it.
"No. We don't know each other."
She rubs her eyes. "Do you know
anyone
named Miriam?"
"I don't think so. No."
He's watching her now like she's a rattlesnake. He's got one hand on the wheel and the other hanging free – just in case the rattlesnake decides to bite, she thinks. He probably thinks she's on drugs. If only.
Shit. She knows how this adds up. This is a bad equation. Her guts roil.
"Stop the truck," she says.
"What? The truck? No. Let me get to a–"
"Stop the goddamn truck!" This time it's a hoarse scream. She doesn't mean it to be, but that's how it comes out. And the reminder of how little control she really has only furthers the feeling that she is weightless, dizzy, spiraling into a yawning black hole.
Louis is kind enough not to punch the brake. He eases it in, slow. The hydraulics whine. He brings the truck over to the shoulder and lets it idle.
"Okay. Calm down," he says, putting his hands out.
Miriam grits her teeth. "That's the worst thing you can ever say to somebody who's not calm. It's just gas on a fire, Louis."
"I'm sorry. I'm not… trained in this."
This?
He means dealing with crazy people. Which she is, probably.
"I'm not trained in being this way, either."
Though,
she thinks
, I'm getting better with it. Week by week, month by month, year by bloody year.
One day, it'll be water off a duck's back.
"What's wrong?" he asks.
"That's the million-dollar question."
"You can tell me."
"I can't, I really can't. You wouldn't–" She takes a deep breath. "I have to go."
"We're in the middle of nowhere."
"It's America. Nowhere is nowhere. Everywhere is somewhere."
"I can't let you do that."
She fishes the cigarette from her lap and, with trembling hands, tucks it behind her ear. "You're a very nice man, Louis. But you
will
let me get out of this truck, because you know now that I am off my bloody rocker. I see the look on your face. Already you're thinking, she's not worth the trouble. And I'm not. I'm a curse. I'm an infected boil on your neck. Best thing I can do for you is get away from you. Best thing you can do is lance the boil."
Grabbing her messenger bag, she pops the door.
"Wait!" he says.
She ignores him and hops out onto the cracked and crumbling highway shoulder. Her feet plant into a murky puddle, soaking through.
Louis slides over onto the passenger side and pops the glove box.
"Wait, here," he says, going through the compartment. He pulls out a white envelope, and as he cracks it, she sees what waits within:
Money. A thick wad of it, all Andrew Jacksons.
With a callused thumb and forefinger he peels out five bills, then thrusts them at her.
"Take it."
"Go fuck yourself."
He looks hurt. Good. She needs to hurt him. She hates doing it. But it's like medicine. Everybody needs their medicine. Tastes bad. Does wonders.
"I have plenty."
It's the last thing she wants to know. It makes him a mark. She can't help but picture him as roadkill now, and her picking at his exposed guts with a vulture's beak.
"I'm not a charity case," she says, even though she knows she is.
His hurt has already scabbed over and become something else. He's angry now. He grabs her hand, hard enough to force her but not so it hurts, and presses the money into her palm. "It's a hundred dollars."
"Louis–"
"Listen.
Listen
. Walk the way we were driving. It'll be a halfhour or so. You'll find a motel down that way, a motor lodge, it's like a… a series of bungalows. There's a gas station and a bar. You keep walking, you'll find it. But get off the road. You don't know what kind of weirdoes are out here at one o'clock in the morning."
"I know what kind of weirdoes are out here," she says, because she's one of them. Miriam takes the money. She looks into Louis's eyes: He's trying to be firm, but even now the anger is melting, the scab drying up and flaking away.
"You going to be okay?" he asks.
"I'm always okay," she says. "You best forget you ever met me."
Miriam pulls away from him and walks off. Head down.
Don't look back, dummy.
She needs a drink.
INTERLUDE
The Interview
"The first rule," Miriam says, "is that I only see what I see when skin touches skin. If I touch your elbow and you're wearing a shirt, then nothing. If I wear gloves – and I used to, because I didn't want to bear witness to all this craziness – then it prevents the vision from happening."
"That must be horrible," Paul says. "I mean – sorry. I just mean, over and over again, you can never get close to somebody, I mean–"
"Relax, Paul. I can take it. I'm a big girl. But this speaks to rule number two. Or maybe number three. I should really write them down. The rule is, it's one and done. I get the vision once. It doesn't keep happening over and over again – though, I'll tell you, some of the really bad ones will keep a girl up at night." She pauses and tries not to think of any. In her mind's eye, so much blood, so much suffering, so many last moments play out. Theater of the macabre, the curtain forever open. Dancing skeletons. Chattering skulls.
"So, what is it that you see?" Paul asks. "You're like, what, an angel floating above the scene? Or are you the person who's dying?"
"An angel. That's funny. Me with my wings." She rubs some sleep boogers from the corner of her eye. "This speaks to the next rule. I'm the impartial observer. My viewpoint hovers above the whole thing, or maybe off to the side. I'm privy to certain details but not others. I know how the person tap-step-shuffles off this mortal coil, for one. Intimately. Death isn't always obvious, you know – a guy clutches his head and falls over, could be a lot of things. But I know what it is. I know if it's a brain tumor or a blood clot or a bumblebee that's burrowed its way into his cerebral cortex.
"I also know when. Year, day, hour, minute, second. It's a red pushpin stuck in the great timeline of the universe, and I can see it. The pushpin I
can't
see, oddly, is where. The location remains a mystery. Outside visual cues, of course. I see a chick's head explode in the parking lot of a McDonald's with street signs at the corner of
Asshole Boulevard
and
Shitbird Lane
and she's wearing a 'Don't Mess with Texas' T-shirt, then I can use my Sherlock Holmesian deductive reasoning to figure out that pesky riddle. Or I just use Google. I fucking love Google."
"So, how long?"
"How long what?"
"How long – er, how much do you see? One minute? Five minutes?"
"Oh. That. Well. I used to think it was a minute, right? Sixty seconds on the clock, go. Turns out, not so much. I seem to get whatever time I'm supposed to get, if that makes any sense. A car accident might happen over the course of thirty seconds. A heart attack or whatever could unfold over a five-minute period. I see what it lets me see. The weird part is, even if I see five minutes in my mind's eye, it doesn't take more than a second or two in real life. I'll space out, and then I'm back. It's certainly jarring."
Paul frowns, and Miriam can tell that, despite the thing with his uncle, he doesn't quite believe her. Not that she blames him. She finds times, even still, that she herself doesn't buy it. The easier answer is that she's just bugfuck nuts. A real moonbat. A shithouse spider.
"You're witness to the last minutes of human lives," he says.
"Well-put," Miriam says. "Lots of human lives. You know how many people you bump into on the subway during summer? Everybody in short-sleeves? It's all elbows, Paul. Death and elbows."
"So, why don't you stop it?"
"Stop what? Death?"
"Yeah."
Miriam chuckles, the sound of
I Know Something You Don't
. The sound of irony, that mirthless cad, expressed. She tips the bottle to her lips but does not yet drink.
"Why don't I stop it from happening," she ruminates over the lip of the bottle. "Well, Paul, that right there is the last – and cruelest – rule."
She sucks back a cheek-bulging mouthful of Johnny Walker and explains.
FIVE
Bug Light
Miriam's been walking for a half-hour, and the thoughts that run through her mind have serious legs. Terrible thoughts jog swift laps.
The man, the trucker, the Frankenstein. Louis. He is going to die in thirty days, at 7.25pm.
And it is going to be a horrible scene. Miriam sees a lot of death play out on the stage inside her skull. Blood and broken glass and dead eyes form the backdrop to her mind. But it's rare that she sees murder. Suicide, yes. Health problems, all the time. Car accidents and other personal disasters, over and over again.
But murder. That is a rare bird.
In a month's time, Louis is going to say her name right before he dies. Worse, he
looks
at someone before the knife punches through his eye and into his brain, and
then
says her name. He sees her there. He's speaking to her.
Miriam goes over it and over it in her head, and not once does it make sense.
She cries out some hybrid of "fuck" and "shit"– she's not really sure – and punctuates it by picking up a hunk of broken asphalt from the shoulder and chucking it against the dead center of an exit sign. It
clangs
. Wobbles.
And just past it, she sees the place:
Swifty's Tavern
.
Neon beer signs glow bright against the storm-tossed, late-night sky. The bar is a bug light, and she is the fly (fat from feeding off death). She makes a bee-line for the place.
Her mouth can taste it already.
Inside, the bar is like the unholy child of a lumberjack and a biker wriggling free from some wretched womb. Dark wood. Animal heads. Chrome rims. Concrete floor.