The Cormorant Read online

She buries her face in her hands. Trying not to weep. Trying not to tear the door off its hinges. Trying not to fling herself into whatever bleak black expanse she can find.

  She hears them mumbling on the other side of the door. Footsteps retreat. Good. Go.

  When she turns back around, Louis is no longer sitting there.

  It’s Eleanor Caldecott.

  Her stretched, corpse-white face lies marked with striations the color of muddy river water. When she speaks, brackish water slides over her withered lips, splashes against her lap.

  “Not everyone deserves to live, girl.”

  “I made a choice.”

  “A choice of which we do not approve.”

  “I’m not your dog. Is that how you see me? Snap and point and let me go to work? I thought free will was your thing. Or are you just another version of fate?”

  “You have free will. You may choose, even when you choose badly.”

  Miriam sits on the edge of the bed. “Go away.”

  “I’m not done speaking,” Eleanor hisses.

  Miriam screams, “But I’m done with you!”

  And, like that, the Trespasser is gone.

  FIVE

  THREE DAYS WITH THE DEAD

  Time runs like blood in snow. Everything is red and melting.

  The sun is up. Then it’s not. Then it’s back. Then ice is hissing against the windowpanes. A mouse chews somewhere in the deep of the wall. A TV comes on. Video games. Maury Povich. Someone yelling. Someone laughing. A knock at the door. A candy bar shoved under it. She eats it greedily, a feral child starving. She sees the mouse in the corner. Eyes glinting, whiskers twitching.

  Shoo.

  Fuck off.

  You’re free to go.

  The mouse stays until it can get the candy wrapper. It sits on it. Licking chocolate. Then its paws. Then it’s gone.

  The Trespasser comes. Dead Ben with his head blown apart. Dead gang-banger with his skull popped open. Louis with one eye, no eyes, three eyes. Eleanor Caldecott with a crow’s head peeking out of her mouth, squawking, picking tongue-meat. Andrew the yuppie prick with a twenty-dollar bill clutched in the clench of broken teeth. Red Wren, the girl with wings. Harriet, gunsmoke from both nostrils. Ingersoll tumbling down an endless spiral of lighthouse stairs. One-foot Ashley chasing her in a wheelchair.

  The Trespasser never speaks.

  He-she-it doesn’t have to.

  Her castigation comes in her own voice:

  You shouldn’t have killed that kid.

  She’s killed before. (Uncle Jack’s voice intrudes: Nicely done, killer. But don’t tell your mother about this! Then he laughs, that asshole.) But this time was different. The other times felt earned and owned. Like she’d been drawn into something. Drawn into a grim purpose, into a tug-of-war that wasn’t her fight but was hers to lose or win just the same. Hers is the thumb on the scale. Balance by way of imbalance.

  But then this. Andrew on the bus. A year’s worth of waiting. It was just an experiment. Just to see. Is this who she is? Is this what she does? She chose him randomly. She didn’t even like him. She liked Louis. Loved him, even. She liked Wren. They deserved life. Andrew deserved–

  It didn’t matter what he deserved. That’s the thing. She wasn’t invested in what was owed to him. That kid, the dead kid in the Eagles jacket, who was he? Poor kid. Fucked-up life. Cigarette burns and undone shoelaces. Maybe that two hundred bucks would have changed everything for him. Maybe Andrew would have been his first and only kill. Maybe Andrew was the monster. Maybe he’d become a serial killer. Or run a bank that would one day foreclose on an orphanage. Or maybe he’d just never make anything of himself, maybe the girlfriend would shove that ring right up his ass, maybe he’d skulk off and suck on a tailpipe–

  An endless string of possibilities like little crow skulls threaded with barbed wire. There in the sky of her mind, swallows dancing, mockingbirds mocking, the featherless heads of hungry vultures plunging deep into meat but finding no sustenance, the scream of a thunderbird, the shriek of a shrike–

  Infinite variables, a ladder made of maybes.

  You fucked up.

  You chose badly.

  Then one day it’s over.

  SIX

  EVICTION NOTICE

  She wakes up. Soaked with sweat. Hair plastered to her forehead.

  Jace is sitting there.

  “You’re trespassing,” she says.

  “What? Oh. Sorry.”

  Her mouth tastes of nicotine. And lint. And regret.

  “How’d you get in here?” she mumbles. She feels around the futon, finds her cigarettes, lights one, closes her eyes. “I locked the door.”

  “Taevon has a key.”

  “Ah.”

  “Taevon also wants to talk to you.”

  “Mm.” She picks sleep from the corner of her eye with a thumbnail. “Lemme guess. He wants to give me fashion tips.”

  “I think he wants–”

  “To kick me out. Yeah, I get it.”

  “But I have good news–”

  “No such thing,” she says, lurching upright and into a standing position. “Let’s go get this over with.”

  Out of the bedroom. Into the living room, which is also the foyer and the kitchen and the family room and occasionally someone’s bedroom. Taevon sits on the futon couch – when you’re half-broke everything comes in “futon,” as if “futon” is a lifestyle choice – and next to him sits Cherie, that little Korean fag-hag who clings to him like he’s the tree and she’s the koala. Miriam rolls her eyes so hard she’s afraid they might get lost in the back of her head.

  “Miri,” Taevon says, calling her that nickname she hates with the garish light and stinking fury of a garbage fire. “This ain’t working out, girl.”

  Cherie purses her lips. “You gotta go, ho.”

  “I know how you die,” Miriam says. “I haven’t told you because it’s very embarrassing. But I’d be so happy to tell you now.”

  The girl sticks her tongue between the V of her two fingers and waggles it. “Eat me, bitch. You pretend like you’re some kind of witch or some shit, but you just want attention.”

  “Incurable gonorrhea,” Miriam chirps. “It’s a thing going around. Some high-octane STD that refuses any efforts to treat it. It’s going to be awful. It’ll feel like you’re pissing acid. Your fallopian tubes will swell up like microwaved hot dogs. You know what the worst is, though? Two words: rectal infection. Blech. Yucky. Your butthole–”

  “Shut up, hooker!”

  “–will look like a blown bike tire. Really, really sad. What a shame.”

  It’s a lie. Cherie dies from lung cancer when she’s in her early seventies. But Miriam read about that super-gonorrhea, and gonorrhea sooner sounded better than lung cancer later.

  And it makes the little brat mad. Because suddenly she’s up off the couch and reaching for Miriam with nails painted like video game characters – Pac-Man takes a particularly vicious swipe; must be his predilection toward ghosts – but Taevon is planting his hand against her chest and shoving her back onto the futon.

  “Cherie, shut the fuck up for a minute. You ain’t in this conversation.”

  Miriam focuses on Taevon. “I saved your life, man.”

  “Yeah. I know.” But the way he says it, she can tell he doesn’t believe her. Or is unsure enough for it to matter.

  “He was going to poison you.”

  “That was a year ago. We let you live here ’cause of it. But you haven’t paid rent in what, the last three months?”

  “Four.”

  “You are not helping yourself.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And then you be coming all up in here making all kinds of racket and clamor and yelling like you got the devil all up in your coochie.”

  “The devil is not, for the record, all up in my coochie.”

  His eyebrows – dyed daffodil gold like his hair against his dark skin – arch like the McDonald’s logo. “W
ell, that’s real good to know.”

  “I’m not good at saying I’m sorry,” she says. “It physically pains me. I get a tightness right–” Her hand floats over her midsection. “Right here, like someone is pinching my ovaries with clothespins. But even though it hurts, I’ll still say: I’m sorry, Taevon. I’m really sorry. The psychic thing isn’t paying as well since winter came, and the last couple days, weeks, months–” I killed a guy the other night and it turns out I don’t feel good about it. “–have been a little weird.”

  “I’m moving in,” Cherie blurts out. Like she’s trying to hold in a burp but she can’t. It just comes out of her. And she giggles afterward.

  Taevon’s face freezes into a mortified didn’t-I-tell-you-to-shut-the-fuck-up-for-a-minute glare and he pins Cherie to the couch with it.

  He turns, starts to say something–

  Miriam waves him off.

  “It’s fine. I’ll get my things together. Be out in a few hours.”

  More like twenty minutes.

  She doesn’t have a lot of stuff.

  Taevon stands, opens his arms. “Can we hug?”

  Miriam blinks. “No. No, we cannot.”

  “Girl, don’t be bitter.”

  “Might as well tell the sun not to shine, Taevon.”

  INTERLUDE

  ONE YEAR AGO

  She’s been out all night and now it’s morning and all she can do is let the angels of steam rising from her diner coffee wreathe her face, performing their divine task of scaring away this demonic hangover.

  So far, they’re failing. Fucking angels.

  At least Miriam has enough money for breakfast. And maybe lunch. November is witch-tits cold but warmer than it should be, and so last night on South Street she was able to stand there and peddle her wares like a good little working girl. Not that kind of working girl.

  Shaking her psychic moneymaker.

  This is how it works:

  Sun starts to dip around five in the afternoon. The tourist crowd thins as the bar crowd and folks going to see a show at the TLA start pouring in. Miriam, she stands there on a street corner – the smells of cheesesteaks, cigarettes, and anger washing over her.

  While standing, she holds up a sign: WILL PSYCHIC FOR FOOD.

  Ten bucks gets someone a vision.

  She tells them how they’re going to die.

  And she lies about it, most of the time. Oh, you’re going to die in a fiery jet-ski accident. Helicopter crash skiing K-12, dude. Eaten by a bear in your living room – I know, right? So crazy! Ebola. Monkey flu. Squirrel pox. You die while base-jumping at the same time you’re fucking a Ukrainian super-model, good for you, high five, up top.

  Very rarely does she tell them the truth.

  You die alone in bed in thirty years. You burn in a car crash on your way to a job you hate. You choke on a greasy wad of cold cheesesteak.

  You die poorly because we all die poorly.

  The lie is part of the job.

  She gives good story.

  They give her ten bucks.

  Most people don’t want to know how they’re going to die.

  Most people want to know how they’re going to live.

  They don’t realize how intimately those things are connected.

  She tries to sexy herself up – torn T-shirt, knife-slashed jeans, a push-up bra (which for her is like trying to pinch and lift a couple of mosquito bites, but you work with what you have, damnit).

  It’s hard to be sexy in the wintertime.

  Well. Fuck ’em. Today, she gets breakfast from it. And lunch. And maybe tomorrow night she’ll be able to afford another motel room instead of crashing under bridges, on park benches, in Hobo King’s car. (Hobo King knows all the tricks. “Don’t fog up the windows,” he says, “because that’s how cops know someone’s sleeping in there.” Hobo King’s name is actually Dave and he used to be a cab driver.)

  The waitress comes, drops down a plate called the Working Man’s Special: sausage, bacon, pancakes, eggs, hash browns, toast. All for seven bucks. Breakfast: the cheapest and easiest way to eat a gut-load of food.

  And goddamn if Miriam doesn’t love breakfast. She would marry it if she could. Stick a ring on one of the sausage links – a terrible idea, really, because before she knew it, she’d eat the sausage link and the ring with it and that probably wouldn’t feel great coming out the other end.

  Rings. Engagement rings.

  She makes a mental note: Don’t forget about that guy from the bus.

  Andrew, that was his name. Still almost a year away. He was kind of a prick. But it’s an experiment, she tells herself. Another experiment. She warned him. And in a year she’ll see if he heeds her warning.

  For now she sits and doesn’t eat her food so much as maul it. Fingers greasy from sausage. Bacon in her teeth. Syrup on her chin. The waitress comes and gawks for a moment, and Miriam thinks: I remember you, Susie Q. You’re the one who gets breast cancer in ten years, dies in twenty.

  Cancer, cancer, cancer, so often cancer.

  Miriam dives back into her food with all the gusto of a starving wolverine. Suddenly, here’s the waitress again–

  She looks up. Not the waitress.

  Three dudes. Boys, practically.

  One of them, a shaggy-haired scarecrow in dark hipster glasses. Next to him, a super-skinny black guy with hair so blond it looks like pollen gathering on a bee’s butt. The third is a pooch-bellied pot-smoker type, hair so ratty with resin you could probably break off a hank and stick it in a bong.

  “You really a psychic?” the black one asks.

  “We want to know how we die,” the hipster scarecrow says.

  “Because holy shit,” the stoner says. “How awesome.”

  “I’m off-duty,” she says.

  “We got money,” Black Daffodil says. He elbows Hipster Scarecrow, who in turn elbows Bongwater. They each pull out a ten-dollar bill.

  Miriam looks at the money suspiciously. Eyes flitting. “You do know that ‘psychic’ is not code for ‘blowjobs in a diner bathroom.’”

  Black Daffodil’s eyebrows lift so high, she wonders if they’ll levitate off his head and fly back to their homeworld. “You ain’t my type.”

  “Skinny heroin-chic type?” she asks.

  “Vagina type,” he says.

  “Ah. You like dong.”

  “I like it better when you don’t call it ‘dong.’”

  “Fine,” she says, snatching up each ten-dollar bill with a thumb-and-forefinger pincer like she’s plucking butterflies out of the air. “Let’s start with you, Daffodil; chop-chop, put your hand in mine.”

  She puts her hand out. Tilts the palm up.

  The guys all look to each other and she can feel their excitement.

  Black Daffodil reaches out–

  He sits on a curb outside an Exxon in the middle of the city, traffic on Broad Street, flecks of flurry-speck snow landing in his hair and melting; he’s humming a little tune as he plunges his hands in and out of a Funyuns bag. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Head bobbing along. Doo-doo-doo.

  The other two yahoos come out, Scarecrow and Bongwater. Scarecrow’s got a granola bar and Bongwater has five granola bars, some blue-colored Mountain Dew variant, and a gas station hot dog (which is half shoved in his mouth) and he’s trying to talk and Scarecrow’s laughing and he might be high, too.

  They cross the parking lot.

  Someone else makes a perpendicular toward them.

  Santa Claus. Not the real Santa, if there is such a thing. This is a drunk, dirty Santa. Droopy, stubbly cheeks. A Karl Malden nose bursting with broken blood vessels. Pear-shaped body waddling along in a red Santa coat that’s surprisingly clean despite his grimy face. Santa hat askew on his lumpy head.

  He’s got a six-pack of beer. Bottle in his hand. Open. He takes a pull.

  “Yo,” he yells, waving, wiping his mouth, looking over his shoulder to see if anybody’s looking. One car sits at a far pump, but that’s it. “Hey, I got
five left in this sixer. Sell yous each one for fie-dollas a pop.”

  Daffodil yoinks his head up. Purses his lips. “We can buy our own beer, elf. Go on back to your igloo now.”

  “Horseshit,” the guy bellows, sloppy smile on his face. “If yous kids are twenty-one, then I’m the goddamn Easter Bunny.”

  “I’m in,” Bongwater says, veering toward the drunken Santa. Despite the epic snackload in his hands, he’s somehow already got a five-spot waving like a little flag. Scarecrow nods, hurries over with a ten, buys one for Daffodil too.

  “Natty Ice,” Santa says, taking a pull. “S’good.”

  “It’s shit but we’ll drink it,” Bongwater says.

  “I gotta go baffroom,” Santa says, and it seems for a second like maybe he’s just standing there pissing in his pants but then he jerks like someone just tugged on his ear and he makes a beeline for the Exxon.

  Scarecrow tosses a bottle to Daffodil. They pull out Bongwater’s snacks, use the bags to hide the beers, and then they’re all eating and drinking and talking shit. Something-something Christmas break. Something-something Professor So-and-So is a real ballbuster. Blah blah Tumblr, Twitter, Batman, Kanye West.

  It’s Daffodil who gets it first. A line of blood crawls out of his nose. He doesn’t notice. Bongwater has to point it out. He wipes it on the bag. A red streak. The other nostril starts bleeding.

  He stands.

  Something is wrong inside.

  Things twist up like a braided rope. Tightening. Fraying.

  He burps.

  He tastes blood.

  The bottle drops from his hand because he can’t hold it anymore. It shatters. Ksshhh. His body shakes. Drops. Flops. Eyes wrenched open, can’t close, jaw clenched like high voltage is coursing through him. Heart going so fast it might as well be a drumroll preceding what comes next – cardiac arrest rips through him like a fist through tissue paper.

  –and Miriam yanks her hand away.

  “What?” Daffodil asks. She smells the sausage stink on her own fingers. Nausea blooms sick and yellow. She grabs Hipster Scarecrow’s hands, then Bongwater’s, and it’s just as she feared.

  Bongwater dies there, too. In the parking lot. Blood. Pain. Seizure. Coma. Heart attack. Boom, boom, boom. Scarecrow bites it later. A week after. Pale, comatose. Tubes and monitors, beep, beep, beep – faster then, like a robot orgasm, beepbeepbeepbeep, then cyborg peaks, cyborgasm, beeeeeeeeep, one long killer cumshot as Scarecrow’s body arches up like someone stuck a stun gun between his ass-cheeks and–