The Least of My Scars Read online

  Locked in the decompression chamber of the wet-dry vac, the user’s manual of course can’t do anything to me.

  That lasts about four hours.

  By this time I’ve cut the body from my sweat jacket, nestled the hood and shoulder down over the educational skull and tacked the cape part down to the countertop, even run the ear buds up and clayed them in place.

  I don’t have to see the face anymore anyway.

  But the ear buds, it’s stupid: there’s no music piping through them. If I’m beeping around on his phone, he’s going to hear. Going to know that I want to know something in there. And that’s when the power can shift.

  And, would she have even known that his phone was still here? Just to check—you can’t be too careful—I’ve scoured every last inch of my apartment. Not in advance of some forensic team, but to see how she could have known that I couldn’t work that phone. Cameras disguised as buttons, buttons as listening devices, little sponges soaking everything up, tied to a fishing line so she can pull it back whenever she wants. But there was nothing.

  It had to be a guess.

  Better than that, even, an accident. She could have been carrying the manual for him, for Kid Hoodie, then, digging for her own phone in her purse, dislodged it, and not heard it fall. Not stepped on it when she turned to leave, that third set of perfect fives still closed in her hand.

  I try to think of other things, of a dog made of butterflies, of a band named Spore, of what magazines I should consider subscribing to but never will, of how LED displays work and whether there’s some greater plan there to trap me counting lines, balancing them against other lines, waiting for a perfect symmetry of display and time before I can ever do anything, but soon enough I’m shoulder-deep in the wet-dry vac’s belly, prizing up the manual.

  I set it on an ancient place mat I’ve never used, walk around the table biting my thumbnail.

  Kid Hoodie watches from his place on the counter but doesn’t say anything.

  I would pry the nails up from his neck straps and move him, throw him away even, use a whole barrel to get rid of him, but he watches the hall for me when I sleep now. We’ve made a deal of sorts about it: if I eat what kind of cereal he likes, with too much milk like his mom used to slop in, then he’ll let me know if there’s ever any wavy robot arms in the hall.

  You do what you have to.

  But the manual, the little phone’s bible.

  I lower the crossbar over the front door, drop the pin through just once and squat there in the corner, open the book. Only allow myself to breathe when my head starts to cave in a little.

  Two hours later I’m still staring at it.

  This is what discipline is: reading the instructions enough times that you can leave the phone itself up on the table. If you have to get it down to run through the controls, understand that way what the words are already telling you, then you’ve failed, you’re losing.

  If, however, you can just picture the phone in your head, and get properly intimate with it that way, then when you come to it, you’re master already. It has no choice but to do exactly what you tell it.

  When it’s done, when I know how to work the phone in its entirety, when every nook and cranny of its functions have been laid bare for me, I nod a single thank you across town, to Dashboard Mary, then set the manual down against the baseboard, pat it into place, thanking it as well. Gratitude is such an essential part of living, I mean. I don’t deserve any of this, I know. And, if I ever start thinking I do deserve it, that something I’ve done has earned me this station, then that’ll be the day I lose it all. With nobody to blame but myself.

  Calm again, not needing to tap anything on the way, I cross to the table, lift the phone like it’s just another thing. Because it is.

  “Your girlfriend,” I explain to Kid Hoodie, the wires from the player still trailing into the blackness of his hood.

  Kid Hoodie just stares, doesn’t nod thanks.

  I chuckle at how stupid he is, then, like I know to do now, hold the off-button down for a steady five-count, to either turn the thing off or wake it up.

  On cue, like it has no choice but to do, the phone alerts me that it knows what I want, some bullshit animation doing its tired cycle across the screen, but then, just the juice necessary to be pushing that light around like that, it pulls the battery the rest of the way down, so that the phone makes a sound like it’s digging for traction, straining forward, trying to be good.

  Except then the little indicator light blinks out, comes back red.

  On the display, already fizzling, the power meter alert I know from page xiv.4b of the English section.

  “Recharge,” I recite.

  It’s the first fix on each entry of the troubleshooting list.

  Breathe in, hold, hold, relax.

  I do, even manage a bit of a tolerant smile.

  Now Kid Hoodie’s the one chuckling, back there in his shadow.

  “Fuck you,” I tell him, but don’t rip the ear buds out either.

  Instead I try every power cord in the place, then finally accept what I’m going to have to do here: cut the cover off the manual, tape it to the list in the lefthand apartment, then write CHARGER under it.

  So demeaning.

  I’m already ducking back through to my closet when I remember, go back, add LOTION to the list. They know what kind.

  What I get instead, the next afternoon, is a girl. A young one.

  It’s not the first time this has happened—a kid, a young girl even.

  I think Singer was testing me with the other one, though.

  Testing himself, maybe.

  Here’s how it went: I was two months in, still waiting for that crack of daylight when nobody was looking. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy, it was that this was too good, it had to be a set-up of some kind. I’d done permanent things to his Belinda, I mean. What I was expecting was that he was going to use me to dispose of a few undesirables, then arrange for my slow disposal. You shoot the housekeeper when the room’s good and clean, after all. The front desk’ll send another by soon enough.

  So yeah, my bags, they were still packed. Except that I didn’t have any bags. When I’d moved in, I’d been wrapped in a blanket that wasn’t even mine, that somebody in the hall pinched onto when I stepped over the threshold, so that it stayed out there.

  The plan initially was for me to use the halls to go to the lefthand apartment for supplies, the other apartment for whatever—“Think of it as your summer place,” Singer said, his hand all fatherly on my shoulder—then use the special elevator key to get to the two below if I needed, and the one above.

  I’m not stupid, though. Neither are prairie dogs or ground squirrels. They grow up with sharp eyes always watching for them too.

  I burrowed into the apartments on either side, tunneled straight down to the other two but just walked around them once, blinking over and over again, like taking snapshots. But it felt wrong, like watered down versions of my apartment. Pale copies. If I stayed there too long, I’d go pale too. To prove it, I had the Vegetable Ghost leave me six boxes of mannequin kits. I carried them down through the trapdoor one limb at a time, and then assembled five in the bottom apartment, the base of the cross. The one I made a kid’s looking out the window, always. I’ve seen a guy in the building across the street watching the kid. In the kitchen the kid’s big sister is on her knees, has her head in the stove. The dad’s hanging by his necktie in the front closet, like he’s just another jacket somebody shrugged out of ten minutes ago. The other two are just sitting at the table, waiting to eat something.

  They’re the ones I think about the most.

  I can’t go check on them, though.

  The sixth mannequin has the plastic soles of her feet glued to the underside of the trapdoor in my dining room. Hanging by kite string all over her body are bottles filled with marbles. Mom. She never closes her eyes, will tell me the instant anybody gets too close.

  If I pull it op
en hard enough, though, she’ll shatter at the ribs, and I’ll slip down through the hole, monkey across the handles bolted into the ceiling, be halfway through the other trapdoor in the bedroom, the one with the rug nailed to it for cover.

  Now you see me, now I’m gone.

  The best plan’s just to not ever need to run, sure.

  But you don’t want to get caught needing to run and not having a plan. And I’ve done it in my head a hundred times: running through that bottom apartment, touching each of the five mannequins on the lips with my index and middle fingers, in farewell.

  And the look on their faces after all these years, shit.

  It almost makes me want to rabbit.

  But that was the Egyptian me. The one in the old days, who built everything. The one who had no idea what the volume was going to be, what kind of traffic to expect, or hope for. There just wasn’t enough to go on, then. I mean, aside from Belinda’s dad that first month, there’d been exactly four others: a guy who obviously owed money, and tried to pay it to me (I let him); one of Singer’s goons, who tried to convince me to call Singer to make sure this wasn’t some accident (either way, right?); a girl who claimed to be pregnant, like that was supposed to keep me off her (she wasn’t; we both saw); and a pizza delivery kid. And I’m not even sure if the pizza was from Singer or not. Wrong addresses happen, after all.

  I didn’t eat the pizza. It had sausage on it.

  I put it in the barrel with the kid, tamped the lid down with the rubber mallet.

  It was a living, I told myself. All I needed was a time card, really.

  Until that first little girl.

  Her knock was all wrong—uneven, already scared.

  I opened the door, had the long barreled .22 in my back pocket the way I used to do it, to be sure nothing ever got out of hand.

  She was just standing there.

  Maybe twelve years old.

  My stomach turned over a bit. Not because I’d never done a kid, but because, weighted down from her neck was a badge, a shield. It hit her at about the waistband of her jeans.

  Special delivery.

  The dad, I had to assume, was already history. Leave the dirty work to me.

  “They said he was in here,” she said, leaning over to try to look past me.

  I reached back for the solidness of the .22, the assurance, and stepped aside. “Yeah, right in—”

  It’s best to not finish your sentences, sometimes. It leaves room for people to walk in, try to finish it themselves, by looking into the kitchen, down the hall, their eyes shaped like they’re just about say something.

  Behind her, I let the door swing shut.

  She stopped when she heard it.

  “Dad?” she said, into my apartment. Her voice just hung there, filling every empty space at once.

  This is Riley.

  What I’ve done for her is a kindness.

  And the girl at my door now, a lot more Y than I mean when I put YG on the list—not that I’m complaining, mind you—she’s the same all over again. Except for the outfit.

  She’s a Girl Scout, right down to the clipboard.

  My mouth twitches into a smile. Wholly on accident, which is rare. You’d think I’d know better by now. I mean, the wolf, he didn’t lay there in grandma’s bed with saliva running down the base of his jaw, did he? Never let them see your hunger. They can use it.

  “How’d you get in here?” I say down to her, my hand still to the door like I’m maybe going to close it here. Like I’m one of those people.

  “I just—” she says, leaning back to point down the hall, and the way she leaves her sentence open at the end, my trick, I lean out, look down to the dull door of the elevator. Lean out far enough that anybody hiding to my left could have sapped me if he’d wanted. Scooped my brainpan clean, licked the backside of my brow ridge.

  Stupid, stupid.

  I grip the door harder, try to funnel all my mistakes into the muscles of my fingers, the clamp of my hand.

  “I’m with Girl Scouts,” the girl starts, reading from a laminated card in her mind, “and my troop—”

  “How much?” I interrupt, playing for time.

  Did she just catch a lucky door down at the street, start working the Chessire Arms from the ground floor up?

  “For. . .” she leads off, parentheses around her eyes like a character in a cartoon panel.

  “Three boxes, say.”

  She does the math, moving her mouth around the numbers, then comes back to me: “Twelve-seventy-five. No tax.”

  I nod like this is a cheap enough way to get her to leave, sure, then turn. But the door starts to swing shut between us.

  “Hold this,” I tell her. “It locks automatically.”

  Hesitantly—I’ll give her that—she steps into the door’s little arc, leans against it with her shoulder.

  Oldest fucking trick in the book.

  I go to the kitchen, touching three things on the way then the counter twice, and dig in the drawer, all the time humming a song to myself. Because I’m just this innocent, lonely guy. A little gruff around the edges, but probably diabetic too, unable to say no to thin mints.

  I come back with the cigar box. Lots of people keep house money in something like that.

  And I’m maybe wearing wire-rim sunglasses now too, and a black cap pulled way down.

  Probably, yeah.

  They were beside the box, from last time.

  The Girl Scout’s eyes widen in the most perfect way, and she forgets all about her lips, her sale.

  In her head, I know, she’s telling herself that she’s in the hall, practically. That I’m old and she’s young, so she’s faster.

  That she never should have come here.

  She’s right.

  “Oh, this,” I say at last, touching the brim of the cap. “The light—it’s nothing. How much again?”

  My fingers are in the cigar box now, our transaction almost over.

  What the Girl Scout can’t see is that what I’ve got in there’s a hypodermic needle filled with drain cleaner, two broken pens and one functional one, a piano wire tied to two porcelain cabinet handles from the bathroom, and three of the big cat-eye marbles I used to covet as a kid. They can work as eyes, if you push them in but not too deep, and especially if there’s a candle anywhere in the room.

  All of which is to say that I’m not going to let her get to the table. It would be a betrayal. Riley would know, would hear it in the way I breathe. Or worse, hear the girl’s voice through the wall. It’s why I’m wearing the cap and the glasses, really. Because I have to think that Riley’s somehow flopped over to the wall, is watching through an electric socket or something. Thinking she’s not the only one anymore.

  It hurts my soul to even allow that possibility.

  I shake my head no, for Riley not to worry. That I’ll make this fast.

  Piano wire’s what I’m thinking, what I’m already untangling, what the Girl Scout would know isn’t money if she were more than ten years old and not about to sell three boxes, and I’ve just got it out enough to loop over her wrist if I’m fast enough, the one she’s holding the clipboard with, when suddenly, and with no warning, she’s not alone.

  Behind her a shape, a woman, a voice. It shatters through my head. I don’t look up, keep my head down like a servant. Just watching the Girl Scout. The woman suddenly and undeniably framing her.

  “There you are,” Dashboard Mary is saying from a hundred directions at once, her red-nailed fingers protective on the girl’s shoulder, her voice half a scold. “But, what floor is this?”

  The girl jerks her head up for my door number, caught.

  “That’s right,” Dashboard Mary says—I can smell her, taste her on the air—“I’m sure I told you he lives on the third floor.”

  “But you, you said—” the girl starts, and Dashboard Mary reaches out with a porcelain hand, to guide my hand down. As if pushing money away, no, no. Like she doesn’t even see the piano wire loo
ped up past my fingers. Or maybe she thinks it’s the wire you hang pictures and mirrors with. That this cigar box is my version of the junk drawer.

  Or maybe she really and truly doesn’t see it.

  I don’t know. She’s still just a waist, a pair of legs. The same clacky boots.

  “An honest mistake,” she says to the top my cap, my eyes so wide behind the dark plastic lenses, like a rabbit’s. “She’s only supposed to go to people she knows . . . ”

  I nod with her, my head going even lower. “Safer that way,” I intone.

  “Can’t be too careful,” Dashboard Mary adds, opening the palm she has on the Girl Scout’s shoulder in a way that means she’s talking about all the slobbering freaks the city must hold in its thousands and thousands of rooms.

  Not me, it means, standing there without a face.

  Me she accepts.

  I haven’t breathed in a while now.

  “Now, Megan, if you’ll just,” she says, turning the girl around, directing her back down the hall. “We’re so sorry to have bothered you,” she tells me as goodbye, hushing her voice down a notch or two, her steps small to match the girl’s, and I know all at once that the whole time she was standing there she was trying to decide what I was staring at. I follow my own eyes down to what she must have seen, the ankle rig, and nod like I deserve this, yes. But it’s our secret, me and her. She didn’t say anything, at least.

  Only when she’s gone does the name stitched onto that Girl Scout uniform resolve some, like a Polaroid developing, coming into focus.

  I can’t get all the letters, but it started with an A, not an M. And when the Girl Scout looked at the numbers on my door, she looked at them with her eyebrows up, like they were the right numbers, right?

  I don’t know.

  Once their footsteps are gone, I push the door shut, have no doubt that Singer bought ten boxes from that Girl Scout. Twenty maybe. Because he knows her dad, works with him, or against him. Or used to. Before he leaned down and whispered to her about this one guy who would probably buy all the rest of her cookies. This one guy over at . . . something ‘Arms.’ Chessire? Like the cat in the story, right?

  I loop the piano wire around the index and middle fingers of my right hand, apply enough pressure for the nails to splotch purple, for the skin to split into a line of blood.