The Cormorant Read online

  “Be that as it may, Andrew, that doesn’t change what’s coming.”

  He says it again – “You’re crazy” – because he can’t find any other words, because his brain is suddenly a snarl of sparking, rat-chewed wires, and he knows he’s being played. Conned, somehow. He takes a step back, turns – starts hurrying across the basketball court.

  She’s after him. Like stink on a skunk.

  “You’re processing this poorly,” she yells. “Totally normal, by the way. This was all kind of an experiment for me. I’ve run it again and again, and it always runs smack into the same dead end every time.” She clears her throat. “No pun intended until now. Hey. Slow down. Wait up.”

  But he keeps hurrying.

  “Get away,” he says.

  “You’ve got an appointment to keep, huh? Running right toward the reaper’s bony hug. Fate, man. Fucking fate! See? I told you how it was going to shake out. I gave you all the details – the date, the ring, the ATM machine–” You no need to say extra machine “–and yet here you are, not walking but sprinting toward the cliff’s edge. It’s like people want to die.”

  “I’ll call the police.” He fumbles for his phone. He palms it, turns around while still walking backward and waves the phone at her like it’s a weapon. “I’ll do it. I’ll call 911!”

  “Go ahead,” she says, stopping. She sucks on the cigarette. “Call them. I’ll wait. You call them, you might just save your own life, Andy.”

  “Andrew. It’s Andrew.”

  “Whatever. Ringy-ringy. 911.”

  He holds the phone. Hand trembling.

  He doesn’t call.

  He doesn’t call because he doesn’t have the time. If he calls the police, they might actually show up. Then they’ll want to talk to him. Take a statement. But the pawn shop closes at midnight.

  And midnight is fast approaching.

  Instead, he takes out his house keys. He shoves keys through his fingers and forms a soft, clumsy fist.

  He shakes the fist at her.

  She laugh-snorts. “What is that?”

  “I’ll hit you. It’ll… the keys, the keys’ll cut you.”

  “Did you learn that in a movie?”

  “In a defense class.”

  “In a defense class for who? I didn’t know you were a middle-aged housewife, Andy. You cover it up well.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “There it is. The anger. The resentment. Nobody likes being told they’re going to die. They struggle like a sparrow caught in a man’s hand. Flapping and scratching and pecking. You can fix this, Andy. Turn around. Go home. Whatever you’re doing out here in pissing distance of midnight, do it some other time.”

  He kicks stones and slush at her. Like a child. He feels stupid for doing it but there it is; it’s already done.

  “You’re a fucking lunatic!” he shouts at her.

  The woman just shakes her head.

  “Fine,” she says. “That’s the experiment, then. I’m calling it. Time of death: fifteen minutes. Go forth, spunky housewife, and meet your maker.”

  She turns then. Pulls her hoodie back over her head. Flicks her cigarette off into the snow.

  The woman recedes. A slow walk away.

  She doesn’t look back. She’s done with him. Good.

  He stands there for a little while. Shaking. He tells himself it’s just the cold. Sarah. The ring. The ATM. Midnight. Man up, Andy. Andrew! Andrew. Damnit. It’s like the woman’s insanity is contagious. Like she’s in his head, a spider spinning a web, catching flies. He lets out a plume of frozen breath.

  Then he turns, hastens his step across the last two basketball courts.

  Through an alley. Through puddles of dirty ice-mush.

  There. Across the street, next to a small alley. Glowing bright, Superman red-and-blue: the ATM. Almost there, he thinks, as he darts across the empty street. Above, the sky glows Philadelphia Orange, a blasted burnt umber hue as if a chemical fire burns in the heavens.

  Andrew digs out his card with cold-bitten hands, shoves it in the machine. He jumps through all the hoops. Presses all the buttons. Enters his PIN number – and suddenly he realizes it’s not a PIN number, it’s just a PIN, a Personal Identification Number, and the absurdity of yet another redundancy makes him laugh–

  Whew.

  Tension flees.

  This is OK.

  It’s all going to be fine.

  Except:

  The machine won’t let him take out more than $200. He needs four times that amount. Damnit!

  He stabs the button. Fine. It spits out two hundred.

  Then he crams his card into the slot again.

  It beeps. Tells him he’s taken out his “allotted transaction amount.”

  “No no no,” he says, hand balling into a fist and pounding on the machine like he’s knocking on a door to be let in. “I need more than that! Please, c’mon.” But the machine keeps beeping its refusal. The two hundred will have to do. He’ll take it. He’ll… offer it as a deposit to hold the diamond until tomorrow. He’ll come back in the morning with more money and then it’ll all be fine–

  Click.

  “Yo, dude, step away from that box.”

  His blood turns to snowmelt. His bowels to chilled vinegar.

  “Come on, come on, turn around, turn around.”

  Andrew – ten twenty-dollar bills clutched in his left hand – pivots slowly. He can barely breathe. He’s going to hyperventilate.

  A lanky black kid stands there. Fifteen, sixteen years old. A gun almost too big for his hand hangs leveled at Andrew’s chest. The big poofy Eagles jacket makes him look like a parade balloon. His face is half-hidden behind a purple paisley handkerchief.

  “I’m gonna take that money now, son,” the kid says, starting to reach.

  Andrew instinctively pulls the money away–

  Wham. The kid clips him across the chin with the side of the gun.

  Teeth bite into tongue. He tastes blood. His neck is wet – first warm and wet, then cold.

  The kid snatches the money out of Andrew’s hand.

  The mugger laughs loud, like he’s not afraid of anyone hearing him out here. “You do not belong in this neighborhood, motherfucker. Shit, shit, look at you. Even in this fuck-ass snow your shoes still all shiny. Rich white people shoes are special shoes, I guess.”

  “My… socks are wet.”

  “Your socks are wet. Listen to this dude with his wet-ass socks.” Suddenly the kid yells in his face, eyes wide and white, “I don’t give a shit about your wet fuckin’ socks, I care about what’s in your fat fuckin’ pockets! You got more shit in there, I know you do, rich boy. So open them up and share the wealth. Let’s close the income disparity in America starting here, tonight, with you and me, motherfucker.”

  “I… OK, OK,” Andrew says, pulling his wallet and handing it over. He can lose that. He can even lose the two hundred. He can’t lose the ring. His hand instinctively presses against the flat of his pocket, as if to protect the gold, the diamond, Sarah’s love, the whole future.

  “Whoa-whoa-whoa, what else you got there, rich boy? Hiding something in that pretty pocket? A present? For me?”

  “Hey-hey-hey, no, it’s nothing, really–”

  Wham. The kid lashes out again. This time Andrew holds his arms up, so the gun cracks him in the side of his hand. He pulls it away, crying out, and when he does, the kid nails him in the temple–

  Next thing he knows, the sidewalk is rushing up to meet him–

  Red freckles on white snow–

  The world is lost in a screaming whine–

  The gun in his face, the kid screaming.

  He can’t even hear what the mugger is saying. He thinks suddenly, I can reason with this kid, I can make him understand, and he starts babbling about how he’s got a ring in his pocket, an engagement ring, and he needs it or Sarah won’t marry him, and his eyes are closed and he’s pleading, praying, spit and blood making his words sound sticky–<
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  The gun barrel presses against his head.

  The mugger yells, “Gimme that fuckin’ ring!”

  Andrew thinks, It’s over. That crazy woman was right.

  I’m a dead man.

  He tilts his head.

  Sees the blur of the gun. The length of the kid’s arm. The madness in the mugger’s eyes.

  Then: movement in a whorl of snow.

  An avenging angel. A knife-slash of black hair. Ends dyed in blood.

  The girl from before, she steps out from the alley.

  Her own gun up–

  The kid never had a chance–

  Bang.

  Blood mists from the side of the kid’s head.

  He drops into the empty street. Blood pumping.

  TWO

  SCALPER

  Little details go off like Pop Rocks. The kid hits the snow, his scalp peeled back like the skin of an unfinished orange, and all Miriam can do is see those tiny details–

  Cigarette burns on the back of the kid’s hand.

  One shoelace on a green-and-white sneaker untied.

  One pant leg cuffed. The other unrolled.

  The jacket and shirt pull up – she sees two freckles and a mole.

  The gun in her hands is small. A little nickel-shiny .38 with a stumpy pig-nose of a barrel. It felt light before. Light like a feather. Now with one bullet gone, it’s heavy like a length of chain. Her arm falls to her side.

  Andrew looks up at her from between splayed-out fingers.

  “I saved you,” she says. Her voice sounds a hundred miles away.

  “Wh– what?”

  “Stand up. I saved your life.”

  Andrew braces himself against the wall. He tries to stand. His chin is wet with blood. His lips, too. His whole mouth is a slick crimson hole.

  He stares at the body. She does, too. Dark blood pumps gently – glug, squirt, glug, like someone’s making a cherry sno-cone at a carnival.

  “He was just a kid,” she says. “Jesus.”

  “He was going to kill me.” Those words spoken past bubbles of blood.

  “I think I had that part figured out, Andy.”

  “Andrew, my name is…” But he finishes the sentence with some kind of goat bleat, then drops to his knees and begins fishing out the wad of money from the kid’s fist. The cold dead hand is tight on the cash. Andrew has to peel back the fingers like he’s peeling an onion.

  “Here,” she says, holding out a hand.

  He gives her his hand, and she thinks, No, that’s not what I meant, but she helps him stand up anyway. “I mean, give me some of that.”

  “Some of…” But then he looks down at the cash in his hand. Speckled with glistening red. “It’s mine.”

  “Your life is yours, thanks to me,” she growls. She points at the body. “I did that. For you. People give money for finding a lost cat. You can damn sure pony up for me saving your punk-ass life.”

  He scowls. “I need it.”

  “You cheap sonofabitch. Twenty bucks! Give me twenty bucks.”

  He takes a step back. “This is… this is some kind of shakedown. You planned this all along. You even told me. This is some kind of con. Is that guy even dead? Did you know him? You knew him. You crazy–”

  The gun is up before she even realizes she’s lifting it.

  “I did not shake you down,” she says through bared, feral teeth. I just saved the life of a total asshole. “I knew your death was coming. Fate was a train bearing down on you, Penelope Pitstop. I pulled you off the tracks. Your whole life should be unfolding for you right now – some rich country club wedding, some jam-handed yuppie asshole kids, a big ol’ precious privacy fence around a house in the burbs. I chose to save you. That life is mine.” Her mother’s voice springs up like a weed in the loamy dirt of her mind: Don’t do something nice for somebody expecting something nice in return. Whatever. Fuck her. “Least you can do is spot me cab fare home.”

  But all he can do is stare at that gun.

  Then he calls her “bitch.”

  She pulls the trigger.

  He jumps like a spooked squirrel. The bullet digs a furrow in the brick of the building next to his head.

  “Now I don’t want the cab fare,” she says. “I want a saving-your-life fare. I want all the money. All two hundred of it. You give it, you live. You don’t, I kill you and I still take it, and then I take whatever that ring is in your pocket and I pawn it for good cigarettes and bad whiskey. Money! Now.”

  His hand opens. The money flutters to the ground.

  Andrew runs. Slipping, skidding, escaping.

  Somewhere, sirens.

  “Fuck!” she yells.

  She hurries to scoop up the twenties.

  She looks into the dead kid’s blank-slate eyes one last time. Dead black pupils like a bird’s eyes.

  Then she bolts.

  THREE

  INTO THE BLACK

  Miriam’s back at the apartment. The water-stain apartment. The cockroach apartment. The squealing radiator apartment.

  She comes through the door like a black storm, like a funnel cloud sucking up everything it touches. Jace is there. He’s still in his coffeehouse barista-bitch apron and he springs up as soon as he sees her, a mop-top hipster gopher at the hole. He chucks aside his video game controller and says, “Dude, I got news. We need to celebrate tonight.”

  All she can do is shove him back onto the couch.

  She tells him to go fuck his mother.

  Then she shoulders her way into her bedroom.

  She stays there for three days.

  FOUR

  HER HAUNTED HEAD

  He shows up as the first light of the morning sun pools under the cusp of the window like hot magma, and she thinks, It’s him. She’s going to pull her head from under the cave of three pillows and there will be the boy in the Eagles jacket, the top of his head flapping lose –his scalp will be the mouth, slapping and yapping, the words gurgling up out of his convertible skull.

  He doesn’t say anything. But she feels him there. A heavy presence in the room. A frequency. Like a TV on mute. Like a whisper-crackle of white noise coming from the corner.

  She refuses to look. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.

  Eventually, he speaks.

  “You did a number on that kid, huh?” Louis’ voice asks. Miriam lurches upright. Pillows flumping to the floor. She knows why she looks. Because it’s Louis. Not the real Louis. She hasn’t seen him for over a year. But she’s desperate for a friendly face. Even if it’s a mask worn by a Trespasser who treads on the forbidden burial ground that is her mind.

  This Louis has both his eyes gone. The sockets aren’t covered with black electrical tape, though – they’re half hidden behind a rolled-up purple handkerchief tied tight around his big Frankenstein Monster head.

  “Shut up,” she says. “That shitbag was a killer.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “Shitbag or a killer?”

  Not-Louis shrugs, mouth the barest smirk. “Why choose?”

  She kicks a pillow toward him. It falls through him, hits the wall.

  “You see those cigarette burns?” Not-Louis asks.

  “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “He either did those himself – an act of self-abuse – or someone was abusing him.” Not-Louis whistles, a mournful choo-choo. “Probably had a hard life. Just a kid. Just a stupid kid who didn’t have the presence of mind to know one of his shoelaces was undone. One pant leg unfurled: a fashion statement? A gang thing? Or just a goofy dumb teenager?”

  “That goofy dumb teenager had a pistol the size of Colorado.”

  “And he was going to use it, too.”

  “He was. That’s right.”

  Not-Louis leans forward. He smiles. His teeth are bright – stinkbugs crawl across the flat white expanse. His tongue, now the flattened head of a rattlesnake with its own forked tongue, lashes the air.

  She wants to look away. But
she can’t. It’s all she has.

  Call Louis, she thinks. The real Louis.

  She thinks that every day. Once, twice, many times.

  Not-Louis says, “So why this guy? People eat bullets all the time. They get stabbed, burned, strangled, drowned. And yet here you felt the need to step in. Close one door to open another.”

  “It was an experiment. Just to see.” She stiffens. Folds her arms over her chest: the move of a petulant child. For some reason she doesn’t want to seem like a petulant child, though, so she lets her arms drop and suddenly they feel awkward. Like dead fish staple-gunned to her shoulder-meat, just flopping there. She doesn’t know what to do with them. “Just one time I want to be able to tell someone how not to die and have them listen.”

  Not-Louis chuckles. The snake in his mouth hisses.

  “That wasn’t an experiment,” he says. “You knew the drill. You went out there armed.”

  “Whatever.”

  “It wasn’t an experiment. It was an execution.”

  “You taught me that. The scales must be balanced, ain’t that right? One life saved means one death owed. The killer must be killed.”

  “You’re messing with powerful forces, naughty girl.”

  She suddenly stands up and yells, “You taught me that, too! You… you fucking invisible, unreal, trespassing dickhead! You’re always there, walking in through the Employees Only door like you own the place. You show up, you whisper these little cryptic ciphers, you let your little thought-bugs crawl into my ears. You push me to do these things, and now you’re saying, what? That I shouldn’t? That I’m messing stuff up?” She gives him two middle fingers thrust up, up, up. She yells, “You told me to mess things up! That’s my fucking job!”

  Suddenly, a pounding on the door.

  Jace, through the door: “Are you OK?”

  “Piss off, Jace.”

  “Who are you yelling at?”

  “I’m yelling at God! Or your mom! Leave me alone!”

  A new voice at the door: Taevon. Their other roommate.

  “Girl, it’s early. You freakin’ out.”

  “I’ll freak out if I want!” she shrieks. Then she stomps over to the door and does a Russian kick dance against it. “Go away! Fuck.”