This was part of the deal I had made. Two days of total control. He told me it would start out simple,easy. Then we would work our way up to other experiments, other kinds of pain.No more burns, I told him.Well, I’m paying to be the one who makes all the rules. Deal or no deal, he said. I pictured the Ten of Swords in my mind. One more difficult thing, and then I would be free.
First I practiced mouthing the words.May I please use the restroom?No,Sir, may I please use the restroom?He looked up at the sound of my lips moving, closed his book, stood from the chair.
“Didn’t I tell you,” he said. “Now is the time for repenting what you’ve done wrong.” As he pulled his arm back, in the moment before he brought it forward, his sleeve slipped again. I saw the burn scars snaking up his wrist, and then the force of his hand knocked me backward. I staggered, fell, but stood again as quickly as I could.
He went back to his chair. He flicked his cigarette lighter, and as soon as I saw the flame I jumped. He smiled and closed the lighter, slid it back into his pocket. This was a game to him, all of the ways he could scare me, make me hurt. He didn’t look up when he heard the stream of urine hit the carpet. He only looked up after, when my clothes were wet and relief had flashed through me and the only sensation left was shame. I thought that must mean it’d be over soon, that it would be like before—themetallic clunk of his belt buckle and the groan as he took himself in his hand. I stood, my eyes on the carpet, and waited. But there was only silence. I had been so used to seeing into people, to thinking I understood more than most. My gift couldn’t help me now.Gift, if I even dared to call it that anymore. I couldn’t see clearly what had happened already or what would happen next—maybe I never could. I’d been so convinced that these women needed me, that they were asking for my help. But maybe none of it was real. Maybe my brain was wired badly, and now it shot off only the wrong kinds of sparks.
I was still standing, feeling woozy, waiting for whatever was going to happen to end, when I had another vision. Or, I didn’t know what to call it now. The tingle surged through my body, and I saw a hand, reaching for a door handle inside of a car.
I blinked, rubbed my temples. I figured it must have been something in my brain, churned up by feeling stuck in that hotel room. Perhaps the visions were just my own wishes, my own bad dreams. My knees felt like they could buckle. My legs shook. I didn’t understand the appeal of this—it hardly seemed like he was paying any attention, even—but I didn’t see the appeal in a lot of things men were supposed to like. I guessed that I should have been grateful for avoiding more cigarette burns, though part of me wondered if this meant that the worst was yet to come.
Another tingle seized me, like shocks in my fingers and toes. Something silver, a necklace, with a charm in the shape of a cross against a dark background. When I came back into the room, I felt as though an hour had passed. Darkness seeped in around the edges of the blinds. I tried to track how many pages he had made it through in the book, but I was thirsty, dizzy. I couldn’t trust my eyes to see things for what they were.
I was jolted into a third vision. A hand, a woman’s hand again, but it was somewhere new, somewhere inside. The roomhad a reddish-yellow glow. I could hear thatswish, swish, swishsound that was so familiar from other visions. Flies buzzed in my ears.
My thoughts started to race—Luis, the marsh, the glow of the room, like the neon glow of the signs. The sunset that lit up, one ray at a time. The first vision had also held something familiar. I stood as still as I could and tried to recall everything about it. The shape of the door handle. The look of the person’s hands. And then: The bracelet. Lily’s bracelet. The one I had stolen all those weeks ago, those little pearls, like dredging up a detail from a dream. Lily? Lily was in trouble?
No, I told myself. There would be a reason for those images. Those thoughts. That was the way I was going to live my life now. Logically. According to what I knew. Facts. That way I could hedge against whatever had made my mother’s brain go wrong, poisoned by her talent. I was thinking of escape, because that’s what I wanted most. A way out of my own life. There were still scraps of whatever I had seen from Luis lingering in my brain. I would learn to control those kinds of thoughts, learn to push them away.
But those women. The four—or was it five now? or more?—of them lined up together, arranged. The hungry, relentless buzz of the flies. Their blue-tinged skin.
“I have to go,” I said. “You don’t have to pay me, but I need to leave.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what the arrangement was. Remember? Total control.”
“My friend needs my help.”
A smile. For a second I saw it through his eyes, how ridiculous I was. A teenage girl with trembling legs, claiming she needed to run off and save someone. I stepped toward the door and heard thethunkof his book hitting the floor, the heaviness of his boots on the carpet. He grabbed my shoulder, pushed me into the wall,shouting insults at me—Stupid slut. Worthless whore.I curled into a ball, sweating, shaking. I didn’t know what would be worse: ignoring the visions and the possibility of something terrible happening, or invoking this man’s rage.
When I swallowed, it felt like a blade was lodged in my throat. I stood in the center of the room again and waited for my chance. Lily needed my help. He was just one man, after all. Someone who stole library books, someone who was so afraid he needed to prey on other people’s fear. I would find a way to get out of there.
LUIS
HE RETURNS TO THE MOTELone more time, unable to walk past the border where the parking lot meets the grass. He knows he needs to do something, to warn everyone, to make sure the women are found, but he thinks of all that he will lose if he is misunderstood. How dangerous it is for him to be the one who knows the truth. He sits at the edge of the lot, wondering what else he can do. A woman approaches him with a photograph of a teenage girl with bright purple hair.
For a moment the hair throws him, but then the realization lands like a punch. She’s one of them. The one with the tattoo on her chest.
He waves his arms, points to the marsh over and over. He refuses to go back, but she could help him. She has a kind face, though she is startled by his gestures, and her eyes get wide. He points again, each time feeling how impossible it is to ask someone to imagine the horror, to make them understand. She reaches in her bag, pulls out a pen, and he starts to wonder if that is a good idea—something she could use as proof. Something that would show he knew about the women before anyone else—she might misunderstand. He turns his back on her, senses her behind him as he walks away and panics. At the shoulder of the road he breaks into a run.
AT HOMEhe puts his treasured things in a pile, should he need to leave quickly. Whether because of the fires or because someone has seen him going into the marsh or just because it’s finally time. A set of clothes, the photograph of his grandmother, the sheaf of pictures his grandfather took from his hospital days. The two-dollar bill, the German bullet the doctors pulled from his grandfather’s leg. The paintings along the wall eye him, the room filled with lonely stares. As though they hadn’t come from him, hadn’t been made with his own hands.
He looks over the canvas that he started when he realized the camera wasn’t going to work, that he wouldn’t be able to make himself go back and see the women again. Those frenzied nights when he’d painted until his hands were too stiff to hold a brush. If he destroyed it, who would ever know? If he didn’t, someone might think he had something to do with those women. He took it off of the easel, imagined himself breaking it over his knee, making it small enough to throw away, but he couldn’t bring himself to ruin it. It was another way to say:I SEE.
It had been so long since he painted—two years? three?—but he soon relived the pleasure of blending paint, the instant satisfaction of a slash of color against the blankness of a canvas. His grandmother teaching him, so long ago, to copy from photographs. The joy on her face when he showed her a finished picture—he always thought it was the happiest he ever saw her, when he brought her something he had made. To think, he once assumed that was how he would spend his life: Showing people what they overlooked. Making sure they didn’t forget. He did paintings of the wreckage from the last hurricane, when thetown got pulled apart. Paintings of the days when the casinos closed down, bits of them sold off. Men walking down the street hugging disco balls, slot machines being loaded into the beds of trucks. The portrait of the man who gave him the two-dollar bill—the only kindness Luis could offer after he died. One of a man who bought from him, a man who also sold old chairs, stacks of mismatched plates, tins of buttons. Every month Luis would bring him another picture, until one day he went back and the seller’s tent was gone. He never saw him again. Another person the city simply swallowed up.
He wishes he had realized how much painting would soothe him, thinks that the fires might have been a mistake, but now it’s too late. The last part of himself that the city has taken—he has become someone who thinks to ruin before he thinks to create.
HE PACESthe long hallways that snake through the casino, his hand on his matches in his pocket. He feels the cameras watching him, all of those little eyes embedded in the ceiling. He starts to feel like everyone is looking at him with suspicion. The guards, the dealers, the grounds crew, the girls who carry drinks. The other day he stood behind the blonde woman while she watched a screen: eight views of the hallways and rooms. She pressed a button, and then the windows went black, disappeared.
Twice he’s seen her in the spa when neither of them are meant to be there. He hates the long lines for the showers at the boardinghouse, so sometimes he sneaks in after work to enjoy the pressure, the hot stream. She emerged from the women’s room in a blue dress, her mouth slicked with pink. It’s one of the reasons he’s so angry about her pushing him away when he wanted to show her his drawing. He thought they had an understanding—the first time she caught him, or they caught each other, shestarted, but then gave him a single slow nod, as if to wish him good night. But it doesn’t matter now. He’ll make everything burn, everyone pay.
As he slips in the back way, through the gym, and then along the dim, narrow halls, he still grapples with the strangeness of the place, its whiteness. The hallway of empty rooms. The clean smells that remind him of the medicine his grandmother rubbed on his chest when he was very small, but without comfort.
He knows it is late, that everyone is gone for the night, so he takes off his shoes, pads through the hallway to the big double door. The room has two beds in it, blankets, square vases filled with small rocks. He cracks open the cabinets, squeezes tubes of cream, unscrews the caps on all the small jars. Then he finds the candle, and it feels like a gift. Recently he can’t stop thinking of his grandmother—those candles with the saints’ faces she would light on the windowsill while she prayed. He had spent that evening of the fire trying to paint the glow of the saints, but the combination of dimness and light had been too difficult. He had meant to move the bottle of turpentine before he went to sleep, but frustrated by his failures to get the colors right, he’d stormed upstairs to his room. He woke to that same smell of smoke, and the flames were already raging in the hall, dividing his room from his grandparents’ with an insurmountable wall of flame. He was able to escape through his bedroom window, ran to the neighbors’ and pounded his fists on their doors. He remembers looking up at the cold, indifferent sky, the smoke swirling into it. By the time the fire trucks came, it was too late. His grandparents, their whole beautiful, careful life, were gone.
He finds the box of matches nearby, lights them on the countertop with shaking hands, appreciating the fire’s awesome and terrible power. Wisps of smoke twist toward the ceiling. He runs a finger through the flame.
He thinks again of the women. The sight of that fifth body, her eyes on him, in the marsh.The woman from the parking lot, holding out the photograph, how he couldn’t trust her to understand. The feeling that he needs to do something crests in him like a wave. He pulls a towel from the rack and dips a corner of it in the flame, his anger glinting, goading him on. He tells himself, as it catches, that there is still plenty of time to make it stop if he wants to—this could be the night he finally gets caught. He runs a finger through it again and the heat, the pain, feels good. His mind fills with one thought:More.
