And then I saw the damage to her skull. I saw blood and hair and exposed brain. She raised one limp hand in my direction and parted her lips as if to speak. I looked away.
You never know who you are until you are tested. I’d always thought of myself as the guy who does the right thing, but it turned out I wasn’t that guy at all. In that moment I understood that I was drunk, I’d been driving without headlights, and this girl was going to die. I could see her brain, and I could hear her death rattle. Nothing I was going to do could save her, and that was a good thing too, because if I’d thought I could save her, I can’t say for sure I would have. Even so, I ought to have called 911—I had my cell phone on me—but if I had, my life would have been over. I would have been looking at jail and disgrace. Everything I was and wanted to be would have been done.
All around me it was dark. No lights were on. No dogs barked.
No one knew I was there. In an instant both clear and decisive, I got back into the car, turned around, drove past the girl I had broken, and managed to navigate my way into the garage. Amazingly, I could find no sign of damage on the car. I was drunk as hell, and I knew it, which meant I could not trust my judgment, but to my foggy eyes, everything looked good. So with nothing else to think about, I went upstairs, got undressed, made a vague gesture toward brushing my teeth, and went to bed.
In the morning, hungover and panicked, I went out and looked at my car. Nothing. No blood, no scratches, no dents. To be certain, I took my car to an automated car wash. Then I began to relax.
The murder, as they called it, of Maisie Harper was a big story for about a day, but then there was that category-4 hurricane that started heading our way, and no one much cared about Maisie Harper anymore. The hurricane missed us, but it hit about two hundred miles north of here, and that generated enough media attention to keep Maisie’s name, if not her body, pretty well buried.
Of course, the cops kept working it, and the story made the paper, though only small stories in the back. At first they had no clue who would kill the twenty-one-year-old college student, home for the summer, out for a late-night stroll because she could not sleep. Then the police began to suspect it was her boyfriend. They arrested him, and it looked like I’d caught a break and this guy would take the fall. I cheered the cops on. I didn’t bother to think that he hadn’t done it, that he was mourning for this girl he possibly loved and very probably liked. All I could think about was that if they nailed him, I could exhale. But they didn’t nail him. They let him go, and they made some noise about pursuing more leads. Every day I would look out the window expecting to see cop cars pulling up, waiting to cart me off in shame. The cars never came. They never suspected me, never came to talk to me. There were no witnesses. No one had seen or heard a thing, and eventually the story blew over. In the process, I learned a very important thing about myself. I could do something terrible and live with it, and when the going got tough, I could keep my cool.
When I was done with my hour, I went to see Yiorgio in his office behind the stages.
“You had good time, my friend?”
“I’d like to buy her,” I said.
He laughed. “You did have good time. Ryan, he tells me you have never before been with reanimate girl, yes? Maybe you should try some others before you are so sure.”
“I don’t want to try others. I like that one. How much?”
“You’ve been good customer, so I don’t want trick you. Maisie is difficult girl. She does not always listen. She becomes maybe a problem for you, and I do not want that you come back and tell me you no longer like so difficult a girl. You maybe tell me you want your money back.”
“It won’t happen,” I said. “No returns. I understand the rules going in.”
He shrugged. “So long as you understand. Let me tell you something, though. The reanimates, we give them whatever name we want. This one come, she tell us her name. Would not listen to any other name. Very willful.”
I nodded. All of this was making me even more convinced I had to get her out of circulation. She knew who she was. She knew who I was. I didn’t know if a reanimate’s testimony had any legal standing, but I didn’t want to find out.
“I want to buy her,” I said.
“Okay, my friend. You are very determined, yes? You may buy her for eight thousand dollars. I hope you know this is cash, and all up front. But it includes lifetime servicing.”
Eight thousand dollars was a good price. An economy reanimate from one of the Big Three would cost at least fifteen thousand dollars. Even so, I did not know how I was going to get that kind of money. We had no real savings, no more than a fifteen-hundred dollar cushion at any given time. But I had some ideas.
“I’ll get you the money,” I said. “Soon. Don’t sell her to anyone else until I do.”
“Who am I to break up true love?” Yiorgio asked.
I blundered my way back to my chair. I hardly noticed Ryan was still sitting there until he started to punch my arm and ask me how I’d liked it.
He was joined by another guy now, a regular named Charlie—older and almost entirely bald but for a strip of white hair and a very white goatee. He was well dressed and spoke very deliberately. He spoke like a rich man.
“This is Walter,” Ryan told Charlie. “He and Maisie have that thing.”
I was not about to ask what he meant. Better to just be cool, be one of the guys.
We sat around and talked and drank, and then finally, Charlie turned to me. “I’m having a party at my house tomorrow night. Ryan knows about it, but I think it’s time you joined our circle. It’s the sort of thing a hobbyist like you shouldn’t miss.”
I was going to have a hard time explaining to Tori where I was going without her. She was about five months pregnant now, starting to show in earnest—not as big as she was going to get, but still new enough to being big to be sensitive about it. You try telling your pregnant wife not to get all worked up about it. You try telling her that she desperately wanted to be pregnant, and now she
was
pregnant, so maybe she should stop complaining about it. Dealing with a touchy pregnant woman who is self-conscious about her appearance makes negotiating with North Korea seem like a pretty sweet deal. There was something about the way Ryan and Charlie spoke that told me that if I skipped the party, they wouldn’t quite trust me, wouldn’t quite consider me one of them. I didn’t know what Ryan might already suspect about me and Maisie, and I didn’t want to give him any reason to worry about me.
Tori was furious with me, of course. I was always going out, she said. I was being secretive, she said. I was one of those asshole husbands who cheats on his pregnant wife because she is now fat and ugly. Of course I told her I had never touched another woman, but she didn’t believe me, which bothered me. I ended up leaving for Charlie’s party with her shouts ringing in my ears and the thin satisfaction of slamming the door.
Charlie lived in a verdant old neighborhood, and his house was massive to the point of being intimidating, probably five thousand square feet and gloriously appointed. Ryan was there, and I recognized quite a few people from the Pine Box, but even so, it was hard at first to shake off the feeling that everyone was judging me for my creepy interests. I drank too much beer too fast, but that made me sociable, and that made things easy. The beer was served by unmasked reanimates in tuxedos. All of them, I soon learned, were black market. And that began to put me at ease. Charlie had illegal reanimates. Why shouldn’t I have one?
The party had gone on for a couple of hours, and it seemed like just a regular party to me—people talking and eating, taking hors d’oeuvres from trays. Ryan had promised something wild, but I began to think I was missing something. Then, at about ten at night, we all went outside to the fenced-in, private yard. The mood changed at once. It was tense and charged, full of an almost sexual expectation.
Everyone spoke in low whispers. A couple of men even giggled nervously. I asked them what was going to happen, but they wouldn’t tell me. “Better to be surprised,” one said, and then his friend gave him a high five.
There was a big sheet of heavy plastic set out in the middle of the backyard, and Charlie ordered one of his reanimate servants to go stand on it. The thing lumbered onto the plastic and stopped. Charlie told him to turn to face the crowd, and it did so. It looked like it had died when it was in its forties or so. It was a slightly heavyset white man with thinning reddish hair and sad gray eyes.
Charlie turned to his guests.
“Hey, guys,” he said, “this is Johnny Boy.”
“Hi, Johnny Boy!” the crowd shouted.
“Johnny Boy has been a little slow to obey orders lately,” Charlie said. “He’s not disobedient, but he’s getting a little old.”
“Awww!” cried Charlie’s guests.
“What do you think? Should we retire him?”
Charlie’s guests cheered.
Charlie turned to the animate. “Johnny Boy, would you be so good as to remove your clothes for us?”
With the fumbling and mechanical efficiency of its kind, Johnny Boy began to remove its clothes. Perhaps out of habit or training, it folded each piece of clothing, and it left them piled on the plastic sheet. When it was done, it turned back to us, entirely naked. Johnny Boy looked like it’d been killed in some sort of accident: Its torso was all messed up, not exactly scarred, but exposed and purpled in places. Its belly was distended, its flesh swollen, its penis and testicles so shriveled as to be almost invisible. Charlie’s guests raised their drinks and toasted it.
“Johnny Boy,” Charlie cried, “be so good as to hold out your arms.”
Johnny Boy held out its arms.
Now another reanimate arrived with what looked like an old stained butcher’s apron, which he handed to Charlie. After putting it on, Charlie lifted an ax he’d clearly had nearby, though I had not seen it until this moment.
Charlie turned to the crowd, brandishing the ax. “You boys ready to send Johnny Boy off in style?”
The guests made it known that they were ready. I took a step back.
I understood now what was happening, the weird grotesqueness of it all. What did it mean? Was it a crime? Was it even cruel? I didn’t know, but I didn’t
want
to know, I didn’t want to see. Yet I knew it would be a mistake to leave or even to show my feelings, to make these guys feel like I thought I was better than they were—which I did, by the way. I stood there and made myself watch.
Charlie, after taking a moment to flash a wolfish grin at his guests, brought the ax up and then swung it down on one of Johnny Boy’s outstretched arms. The limb tumbled down to the plastic sheet, continuing to move, and the stump remained outstretched, oozing a slow and steady flow of black, watery liquid. Johnny Boy began to scream.
It did not move its legs. It barely moved its head, but it screamed and shrieked and wailed. The guests cheered. People hooted and clapped and drank to its suffering.
“My brakes!” Johnny Boy cried out. “Oh, my god, the truck, the fucking truck!”
The crowd cheered again.
Charlie handed the ax to Ryan, and he cut off the other arm in a quick, clean stroke. Johnny Boy still screamed, sometimes just noise, sometimes about the impending head-on collision with the truck. Its stumps continued to produce their black blood, like a kitchen faucet left running just a little. Then the ax was handed to another friend, and he cut off one leg. The body tumbled over, but this didn’t slow the screaming. It seemed not to know or care what was happening now, but the past, its death, was vivid and real and immediate. The crowd loved it.
I stood there feeling nauseated and horrified while the last leg was cut off and the crowd gathered around to laugh and point and cheer on the dismembered torso. I could not have held my breath all that time, but if anyone had asked, I would have sworn I didn’t breathe between the time they started hacking up the reanimate until the time they finally put the pieces on the fire and burned them into stillness and silence.
The party began to clear out after that, but it was still too early and I was too shaken to go home. I wanted to make sure Tori was asleep when I got there, so I wouldn’t have to deal with her. I went to a bar and drank too much, but I’d learned my lesson. Even though I now drove a car with headlights that went on automatically, I still checked them before driving home at almost 1:00 a.m.
The lights were out, so I thought I was safe, but when I walked through the door, she was waiting for me, sitting in the dark.
“What is going on, Walter?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “I wanted to hang out with some friends. Christ, you are the only wife in America that doesn’t want to let her husband out of the house once in a while.”
“You got a call while you were out,” she said.
“A call! Oh, my God, a fucking call! No wonder you are so upset.” I stumbled past her.
“I don’t know who it was. It was a woman. She sounded, I don’t know, retarded or something. I think she was saying your name, but I couldn’t understand the rest.”
“Jesus Christ, Tori,” I shouted. “A wrong number? You are giving me shit about a wrong number? Have you lost your mind?” I stormed upstairs, and she didn’t follow. After fifteen or twenty minutes, I figured she was going to sleep on the couch. Just as well. It gave me time to figure out what the hell I was doing to do with Maisie, who was now calling my house. She must have done it during sex or right after sex or while stabbing herself or something. The point was that someone might have seen her do it. This someone might not have understood this time, but what about the next time or the one after?
Two days later I went to the Pine Box and paid for Maisie. I brought her over to the apartment, and I left her there. Everything was fine for about two months. Then it fell apart.
After the incident with the flowers, I decided I needed to visit more regularly. The next time I went over, she had newer flowers, and on the mantel she’d placed a goldfish bowl with two fish. There was a little tube of fish food next to it. Maisie herself was still and lifeless, as she usually was when I walked in.