Sociopaths In Love (19 page)

She was unprepared for the carnage awaiting
her as she opened the apartment door. She stepped into the
apartment, her foot hit a puddle of blood, and she almost went
down. Someone screamed repeatedly from the direction of the
bathroom. A zombie head sat on the dining room table. Its body was
slumped over in one of the chairs. What had probably been a witch
was face down on the living room floor, a knife jutting from her
back. A cowgirl's legs had been removed and were on the hallway
floor. Erica hadn't seen the rest of her yet. She just assumed it
was a cowgirl because the legs had boots on. She turned to go into
the bathroom. The screaming came from the girl handcuffed to the
shower rod. She had been stripped so Erica wasn't sure what she had
been. The cowgirl was on the vanity, dead and legless, Walt
thrusting into her. Erica wasn't sure he was fucking her vagina or
one of the cavities created by the removal of her legs.

When the handcuffed girl spotted Erica she
started shouting at Erica to help her.

It didn't even enter Erica's mind to try and
do this. She looked into the girl's eyes, the fear blazing in them
making her feel a little better about her own shitty life, and
turned to go back into the family room. There was another corpse on
the couch so Erica turned back around, disappeared into the
bedroom, and shut the door.

She fell asleep to the girl's screams and
dreamt about caves and monsters. She was in a pool of water in a
cave. A horde of old people, all of them glowing, all of them
looking exactly like Granny, surrounded her in the pool. Then Walt
was there, yelling and splashing gasoline on them only the gasoline
looked more like blood and when they were hit with it they stopped
glowing and then he was throwing torches that just seemed to appear
in his hands and all of the Grannies were bursting into flame and
the cave grew very very bright and when it grew bright enough for
her to look at the walls she saw they were all constructed from
human bones and instinctively knew Walt had killed all the people
who these bones had once belonged to.

She woke up before dawn to find Walt snoring
next to her. He hadn't bothered showering and was covered in blood.
The apartment was a mess, blood and hunks of flesh everywhere. She
went to the refrigerator to get some water from the pitcher and saw
that Walt had left a note on the stainless steel door:

DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE MESS. I CALLED A
MAID.

Winter Blues

In November Walt disappeared for a few days.
Erica missed him. This didn't really surprise her. It wasn't like
she had anything else to miss. The large wall between the living
room and the bedroom, what Walt had taken to calling the 'luxury
wall', was completely covered in human bones. He had some sort of
high-powered epoxy in a caulk gun he used to keep them up there.
Erica remembered her dream of the cave and a chill ran through her.
She considered painting on them, decorating them somehow but it
seemed too . . . collaborative, she guessed. The thing
with the people, the bones, that was Walt's thing. She didn't want
to encroach.

The second night he was gone she went down
to the Epoch and drank herself into oblivion. She told herself if
she had any type of urges, she wouldn't hesitate in fulfilling them
and, if anyone had approached her, she probably wouldn't have
turned them down but, as she suspected, that didn't happen. She was
on her period anyway and felt kind of gross. When they had been
having regular sex, Walt never minded when she was on her period.
He still went down on her and everything. He might have even
enjoyed it more when she was bleeding. Who knew?

On the way back to the
apartment she stopped by a newsstand and picked up the latest issue
of
Glamor Face
.
Dan Banal from the show
Dan Banal
was on the cover – red and black flannel shirt
tucked into pleated khaki pants. It looked like it could have been
an ad for a hardware store. It was the least glamorous issue
of
Glamor Face
she'd ever seen. She wondered if this was considered
weirdstream. She didn't know. Could something be so normal it was
weird? Was everything so weird that normal was now weird? And, of
course, what was normal? She thought it was a valid question. Some
would say there wasn't really such a thing as normal but she
thought there was. Normal was, she guessed, doing what the majority
of other people did. Regardless, she had forgotten about
Dan Banal
and flipped
through the television in the bedroom. It was in syndication and
seemed to be on all the time. She found it. At first she thought it
was the one where Dan Banal made coffee but this was the one where
he went to work. He kissed his wife, who sat at the kitchen table,
on the forehead and said, "I'll be back around
five-thirty."

"Okay. See you then," his wife said.

"Love you," Dan Banal said.

"Love you too," his wife said.

He left the house and got into his modest
silver Honda Accord. There was a montage of him stopping at red
lights and stop signs, a brief close-up of the digital radio
dial.

Dan pulled into a small parking lot and
walked into work.

He said good morning to a number of people
and they said good morning to him. He sat down at a desk and stared
intently at a monitor while typing methodically on the keyboard.
Then he sat in the break room and pulled something out of a paper
bag. A large man came into the break room.

"What did you bring me to eat?" the large
man asked.

Dan's face pinched up into something that
may have been a laugh or a smile and he said, "Peanut butter
sandwich." Dan offered it to him.

"No thanks," the large man said. "I just
ate."

Dan texts his wife:
Just finished lunch. Headed back to
work.

Later, after he is back at
his desk, his phone vibrated and he checked it. It was a text from
his wife. It said:
Okay
.

At the end of the day, Dan waited to clock
out. The frazzled looking woman in front of him rolled her eyes and
said, "Is it Friday yet?"

Dan made something like a smile and said,
"It's only Tuesday."

Then he was back in the car where he texted
his wife that he was on his way home and the montage was almost
exactly like the one where he drove to work except maybe the light
was different.

While Walt was gone, the
weather turned colder and it rained nearly every day. Erica could
feel the winter blues setting in and didn't feel like doing
anything to combat them. The night before he came home, she went to
the Epoch again, drank until she felt drunk and warm and came back
to the apartment to sit on the balcony and continue to drink from
the beer in the refrigerator and smoke while all of her extremities
went numb. She looked over at the parking garage, not really
expecting to see the figure there again. She didn't. She didn't
even know why she bothered to look anymore. It was something, she
guessed. Tonight all the lights in the parking garage were off and
there wasn't a single car in it. This was the first time she had
seen it like this. She didn't realize how much light the parking
garage gave off. That whole block seemed somehow darker and this
didn't do anything to settle her depression. It felt apocalyptic.
She liked electricity. She had never lived in a city before but one
of the things she liked about it was that it always seemed alive.
Even if there weren't any people out and about, there was still the
electricity, humming through lines, doing
something
. And she imagined all the
lights as being warm, even if they were the cold fluorescent ones.
She imagined all of them as the final result of some process and
she thought if she could follow the lines of electricity back to
where it all started she would find some sign of human life. A man
in a building cranking something continuously or vigorously riding
a bike or shoveling coal into some kind of raging furnace or maybe
just flipping a switch. And she knew just by grabbing one of the
laptops and researching this she could come up with some kind of
answer but she thought the truth would be more boring. She
preferred to think of things happening as she imagined them. It
wasn't like she had anyone to argue the truth with.

When Walt came back, it was like he brought
the winter with him. It grew even colder and sometime near the end
of November there was a massive snowfall. This prevented Walt from
going out to hunt. There were now four large deep freezers in the
nursery, all of them full, and he ate from them constantly.
Sometimes he would be hunkered over the dining room table – he no
longer even bothered with plates – eating a mountain of meat and
saying, "Nom nom nom," under his breath. Some days he would go out
and vomit off the balcony into the freshly fallen snow and go back
to eating it again. He no longer seemed to bother cooking it fully.
He would put it in the sink and let it thaw and then maybe throw it
in the microwave to bring it up to room temperature. The smell of
it seemed to stay in Erica's nose yet she never got used to it. It
started to make her kind of nauseous. Once the snow lifted, the
winter continued to grind on. Walt would go out during the day to
hunt and then go to the Shop 'n' Save to buy a case of Pabst Blue
Ribbon and come back to the apartment and eat human meat and drink
the case of beer. Erica would have one or two to help her sleep and
smoked from the time she got up until she went to bed, coming in
from the balcony to get warm. Walt had forbidden her to smoke in
the apartment and she didn't argue. They never argued. They talked
but they didn't really talk to each other. They took turns talking.
Sometimes. Sometimes they just talked over each other. Every day
was so similar it didn't really matter. It wasn't like an exchange
of information or anything. And whatever internal landscape they
shared was mostly pure fiction. Erica didn't really feel anything,
just a cavernous numbness, and she didn't think Walt even felt
that.

They didn't bother celebrating any of the
holidays. On New Year's Eve, she sat on the balcony and watched the
parking lot of the clubs fill up and then empty out and she
wondered what it was all for. She felt a certain amount of cynicism
toward these people, like they were just living their lives one
night at a time but she inevitably turned that cynicism inward. It
wasn't that she wanted to be just like them. She just wanted to do
something. Walt had again stopped having sex with her and, with his
voracious appetite and beer consumption, had put on a lot more
weight. She no longer even felt physically attracted to him. And
while she had previously seen his seeming lack of emotion and
self-awareness as some kind of puzzle to be figured out, she
gradually just assumed there was nothing there, would never be
anything there, and that any direction her life was going to go
from this point forward would have to be governed by her.

In February, Walt finally did something that
interested her. He stopped eating people. Well, he stopped hunting
people. He no longer brought them home. There were still the
freezers and he continued to eat from them but he didn't eat such a
large quantity and she even thought he might be losing a little
weight. He had said he did things until he got tired of doing them
and then he did something else. She couldn't help but think he was
transitioning, moving on to something else. She thought about
asking him about it but it made her nervous at the same time. They
had their routine. She didn't even know if he was aware of it.
Also, she didn't really know how to approach him and, possibly most
of all, she was afraid of whatever answer he would give her. If it
were unspoken, maybe, the change didn't exist. To put it into words
made it too real.

By March she realized she had mostly just
been lying around the apartment and smoking for about three months.
She listened to a lot of music and that comprised a sort of
soundtrack to her depression. She found one of those online music
sites where you pick a song you like and then it just plays
forever, building off that one song. She just let it go. Most of
the songs seemed gray. She thought a little but realized how
creepy, obsessive, and circular her thought patterns were. She
would think about what she was going to say to Walt all day and
then by the evening, after she'd had a few beers and smoked a lot
of cigarettes, it all seemed ridiculous and she would start
thinking about other things, like what she was going to do when she
left here, and then she would go to bed and think about caves and
figures jumping off parking garages, and then it would start all
over again the next morning until she realized she had been doing
exactly the same thing for the past few months and it made her
think of exactly the way she had felt while watching Granny die and
she wondered how long it would last and knew the answer to that
question was that she didn't really know because, had it been up to
her, she would have stayed in that sad tiny house and watched
Granny die day after day for who knew how long. Walt had been there
to break that cycle. She wondered what would have to happen to
break this cycle.

On what she thought of as the first night of
spring, she decided she had to get out of the apartment. It was
warm and breezy and for the first time in a long time she actually
felt good. When she left, Walt was wandering around the apartment,
naked and dazed, a beer in hand. She went to the Epoch and was
surprised to see Dawn sitting at the bar.

Dawn

Besides Dawn and the bartender, there were
only about five other people in the bar. Erica went behind the bar,
grabbed a glass, and poured a beer for herself from the tap. She
glanced at Dawn but the other girl was fumbling with a pack of
cigarettes. Another reason to like the Epoch, Erica thought. Unless
it was really busy, no one really cared if you smoked inside. Erica
took her beer and sat next to Dawn at the bar. The door was propped
open and she could smell the damp spring air mingling with the
cigarette smoke and other bar smells. It was a pleasing mélange.
Dawn got her cigarette lit and stared blankly at one of the
televisions suspended in the corner. Erica thought about saying
something to her but, if Dawn didn't recognize her, she thought it
would be really embarrassing. It occurred to her that Dawn was
quite possibly thinking the same exact thing. Erica lit a cigarette
of her own.