VII

THE WOMAN WHO LAUGHS

To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within.
— Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

I float at the bottom of the bathtub under a flotilla of ice cubes. My eyes are closed and my lips, too. I am motionless. Frozen. Unfeeling. Seconds tick away.

Then the human in me takes over. My lungs are starting to seize. My brain is screaming for them to exhale the old, stale air from their cavities and take a big, deep breath. Bubbles start to eek out of my nostrils. It’s the drive to survive that we’re all preprogrammed with, to one degree or another. How typical of me. I’m very disappointed in myself.

Water sloshes onto the floor when I sit up. All at once, sound comes rushing into my ears. My phone, over on the vanity, is screaming at me to get out. Further away—a floor down and five rooms over, to be exact—my brother’s voice is loud and aggressive but I can’t make out anything specific. Yes, it’s been so wonderful since he regained his ability to speak. A miracle of modern medicine. Unfortunately it happened just prior to me settling on the proper safe haven of legal euthanasia. I knew I should have gone with Spain. Maybe I could have taken Marisol. A little bestie bonding over the legal killing of a half sibling.

My body muscles start to spasm when the air touches my cold skin, immediately turning to the business of raising my internal temperature. There’s still sand in the water from that match, if you can call it that. Fuck, it really does get everwhere. My hands grip the sides of the cast iron tub and push me out of the water. Bare feet patter on the tile floor, leaving a trail of water across the master bathroom.

The call goes to voicemail before I reach for my phone. The screen shows twenty one missed calls. Well, that can’t be a good sign. I wonder if it has anything to do with Nathan having a full blown fit downstairs…and here comes number twenty two. The caller ID flashes PIZDĂ. Inside joke. I swipe up.

“Yes?”

“Where have you been,” she squawks at me with her very annoying and yet very fuckable Yat accent. In the background my brother’s hooting and hollering is much more defined.

She yells, “I been callin’ for ten minutes!”

I hang up the phone and set it back down. She calls back of course. I don’t answer, at least not right away. My hand reaches into the top drawer for the jar of La Mer Creme de La Mer. With a shaking hand I apply a thin layer of the face cream.

That’s her voice booming beneath my foot, I assume yelling at me to pick up the phone. On the next ring I answer and place it on speaker. The combination of her shrill voice and my brother’s handicap wailing funnels into the bathroom and echoes off the walls like the inside of a steel drum. This must be what abattoirs sound like.

“Okay. Marie, I’m here. What’s wrong?”

Jamarie Monáe is the live-in nurse for my brother, Nathan. She hates me, which is fine because I can’t fucking stand her even though I fuck her (sometimes). More importantly, despite her strong disagreements with the treatment plan prescribed by the quack doctor I hired to oversee Nathan’s care, in the end she does what she’s told and she keeps her mouth shut.

“He’s having another one of those fits,” she starts in. “I know the doctor says we can’t put him on antipsychotics because of the increased risk of another stroke, but there’s other things they could give him…”

At some point I stop listening. My attention focuses solely on the way my hand feels around my neck and then my fingers as they trace the veins down, over my collarbone and across the subtle prominence of my ribs. I take my right breast in hand and roll my nipple between the pads of my finger and thumb.

“Are you listening to me, Yelena?!”

“Of course,” I say with a sigh as my hand falls. “But let’s skip the part where you tell me what you want, and don’t say me, because I am positively off limits tonight and nothing you can do will make any difference.”

“Jesus,” she says with a huff. “I want you to come down here and talk to him. Maybe it will settle him down while I get his night meds ready. Okay? Can you do that? It’s been too long since you spent time with him.”

Hanging out with my demented brother? Sounds like a blast.

“I’ll be down in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

After toweling off, drying my hair, wiping up any remaining water on the floor (I don’t want to get final destination’ed after all), brushing my teeth, checking the social media platform formerly known as twitter, and getting dressed in some Alo Yoga leggings and a plain white tee. The chills are gone by the time I sashay away down the hall toward the foyer. I decide to take the elevator. Sure, it’s only one floor, but it’ll be funnier this way. Trust me.

My finger presses the button for Penthouse 4. The door slides shut and the car begins its descent. After ten seconds it slows to a stop. A second later my stomach arrives and the doors open. Of course Marie is waiting for me. All attitude, hip cocked to the side, with a mean look on her face. I want to strangle her narrow little neck. She’d let me, if not for Nathan’s constant yelling being a total cock block right now.

With a click of her teeth she says, “Really? The fucking elevator, Yel?”

See, I told you.

“What took you so damn long?”

One of the things I find so attractive about her isn’t that she’s beautiful. I mean, don’t get me wrong. She’s beautiful, with that narrow waist and the right amount of curves hiding under those scrubs. She’s wearing the blue ones tonight. They fit just a little snugger than her other pairs and she knows it. Her dark brown skin is flawless, with nary a wrinkle to betray her forty-something years on this planet.

What I find attractive about her is that she isn’t damaged goods. Somehow this woman escaped four decades of life in this city without any trauma. No one close to her has ever died. Her parents are alive and happily married. She lives relatively stress free. No pets. No kids. No crazy exes. She goes to therapy once a month to make small talk for a hundred bucks an hour, not to avoid therapy, but because she, ahem, ‘enjoys the conversation.’

Innocence is a sweet scent if you have the nose for it, and my sense of smell is quite refined for this particular aroma. I’m looking forward to stripping that innocence away and then afterward I’ll discard her. The world doesn’t deserve someone like her. Better to snuff it out before any other predators follow the scent—and do worse.

“I’m here now,” I say while exiting the elevator. She walks side by side with me. “What’s he going on about this time?” I may not want to be around my brother but my fingerprints are all over his medical file. It was me who strong armed the doctor into not treating Nathan’s schizophrenia. Aren’t I a stinker?

“It’s the police woman again,” she’s telling me. He’s comically loud now, in there yelling at a hallucination. “You know, that one who went missing. They’re in an argument, apparently. I tried telling him she isn’t there but that upset him even more so that’s when I tried calling you. I called and I called and you didn’t answer.”

Is that the beginning of a cry coming on? An arm-length from the door I push her gently against the wall. Our bodies meet. The heat between us is molton. With the side of my finger I lift her chin. A tear runs down her left cheek. I wipe it away and cup the side of her face.

“I’m sorry,” I lie to her. “Is the syringe ready with his medications?”

She says, all breathy, “Yes. On the table by his bed.”

“Go downstairs to the kitchen and fetch us a bottle of wine from the cellar. I’ll talk to him and make sure he gets his nightly cocktail.”

Her brown eyes ache to leave mine but she does as told, slinking out from between me and the wall before hurrying away like a good little girl while wiping away another tear or two. I watch her while trying very hard to ignore Nathan.

It’s like that last deep breath you take before plunging into the water. It’s not sadness for his state that gives me pause. It’s the comedy. It’s that hee-hee feeling that wants to burst out of my chest every time I’m around him and that just isn’t acceptable behavior in modern society. Marie would certainly notice a machine-gun guffaw rat-a-tat-tatting down the hallway while she’s trying to decide between one fancy bottle of wine she knows nothing about or the other fancy bottle of wine she knows nothing about.

I take my breath and reach for his door.

The room is cool and reeks of disinfectant and some other slight odor that I can only describe as depression. A lamp on a table near the bed dimly lights the room but there are shadows lurking in every corner, like the dense darkness which welcomes me through the door.

Nathan doesn’t hear me enter. From his bed, this frail, pathetic man is yelling mindless nonsense at the empty sofa over by the curtain-drawn windows. He’s frail and weak. Most of his muscles have withered away. Once a big, barrel chested brute, he’s been reduced down to a hundred twenty pounds of bones and skin. Monitors constantly track his vitals in real time. An IV delivers saline to his central line to keep him from getting dehydrated and provide easy access to deliver meds. Another tube feeds him baby food straight into his stomach through an incision under the ribs and when his body is done with it it’ll come out in a pouch taped to his belly. His urine collects in a bag hanging on the side of the bed.

“I tried to warn you,” he’s yelling. “But you wouldn’t listen to me! Now look at you. DEAD!”

The invisible woman he is currently berating from his hospital bed is none other than Alexadra Dumas, former New Orleans homicide investigator turned true crime author who made it her life’s work to smear my father’s sterling reputation with accusations of betrayal and murder.

She is dead, of course. He’s right about that. I killed her and he knows because it was a bit of gossip too juicy to keep to myself. Had I known he would regain his ability to communicate, I might have reconsidered, but we’re not here to retry the past, your honor. Objection: hearsay! Habeas corpus! Emancipation proclamation!

“Who’s there,” he suddenly says while trying to angle his head towards the door, towards me, but his poor eyesight can’t find me in the gloom. That old feeling in me stirs. The other me, the real me, is clawing its way out of its special place rooted deep in my downstairs brain. That’s right. You’ve not met her yet. Lucky you. There’s nothing like your first time.

In the blink of an eye, the world goes technicolor. Everything is painted with vivid, bright pastels, but not like a cheap camera filter on a phone. I’m Dorothy walking out of her sepia tone life in Kansas into the bright and beautiful land of Oz. From somewhere I hear Lesley Gore singing You Don’t Own Me as my other self seeps out of my pores and spreads over the human skin like the black blood of the earth, until there’s no longer a me, but rather, an us.

Nathan says, “Marie? Is that you?” He twists his torso around but his legs? They don’t move as well. His veiny neck stretches when his head cranes around to stare past the subtle glow from the lamp and into the crepuscule of his nightmares. We wonder what terrible fears are singing off-key show tunes in his mind’s eye theater.

One foot in front of the other leads us to the precipice of the tenebrae, where enough of the faint light catches the mirrors of our eyes and the white of our grinning teeth.

“Hello Nathan,” I say as Yelena, and then we continue, “You’ve been a very bad boy.”

It’s a voice he cannot recognize. The razors in our throat have grown sharp and the barbs on our tongue pointy. The words were ground and chewed before escaping our strained, smiling lips, accompanied by a bit of sing-sony whimsy.

He recoils from us. If his legs worked, he’d already have sprung from that bed and made it halfway down the hall by now. His eyes search around his bed and now his hands, too. He’s trying to find the panic button, the one we see dangling off his bed railing. So close and yet so far away.

“Who are you,” he mutters.

“Awh, bucko. Don’t you recognize your little sister?”

He watches in horror as we leave the shadow for the light, revealing our true self to him for the first time. The mask is gone. All the vestiges of a normal human with trivial flaws and mundane desires have been torn from us like a tattered skin suit. Our eyes, twisting like augurs, drill into the back of his skull.

“Aren’t we just the cat’s meow?”

He suddenly coughs. It isn’t the mucous-clearing whoop of a healthy man, but a pathetic hack of a person too feeble to expel the slime collecting in his bronchi. Oh my, did we break him already?

“Is this real,” he says, coughing the words up along with a thick sludge that ends up in his hand. He wipes it on his blanket.

“Are we real? An interesting question coming from someone who spends his free time yelling at a dead woman.” Our crooked hand takes a nearby chair and drags it to his bedside, letting its legs screech across the hardwood, causing an ear-ripping whine to serenade us like an out of tune violin.

He’s coughing again, only this time it’s more pronounced and fraught. By gum, we do believe he’s choking on his own saliva. We could walk away now and be done with it, couldn’t we? Ah, but where’s the fun in that!

The veins of his forehead are fattened and turning dark purple. His vital signs are in distress. The beep of the heart monitor quickens. We don’t want that, do we, love? No, no, we don’t. We wouldn’t want Miss Monáe’s to come running back here to discover us rather than Yelena. We reach over with one spidery finger and press the proper button to silence that trilling pulse.

On a tray hovering over his legs is a pitcher of water. Like a loving sister, we refill his cup and deliver it to him. We even turn the straw to aim at his chapped lips. He resists, like a wild animal leery of being hand fed, but not for long. He leans his head off the pillow, finds the straw with his lips, and takes several long, labored drinks before relinquishing.

We place the cup back on the table as he murmurs, “You should let me die.”

“Should we? And why’s that? Sell us on the idea.”

“I’ve lost my body. I’ve lost my mind. I can’t tell whether this is really happening or not. You don’t look right. Are you my sister? Or are you a demon?”

“Maybe a little bit of both,” we say with a snicker-snack.

We plop down in the chair and scoot it closer to him. A quick hand brushes our still damp hair out of our eyes.

“Hiya.”

He collapses into the pillow from exhaustion. So much excitement. He can hardly take the thrills of a Lifetime Movie of the Week. We can only imagine the burden our revelation has placed on his ticker.

“You’re right,” he says with a whimper. “I was weak when I took the pills but now I’m weaker. I can’t handle the things I see or the voices I hear. It’s too much for me to bear. Please tell the doctor to write the prescription. I’ve never asked you for anything. I’m begging you.”

“See,” we say with a wag of our finger. “There’s your problem, Nate. You spent ten years shoveling those pills down your throat and where’d it get you, huh? Wasn’t it the combination of alcohol and Seroquel that made you so drunk you walked in front of a city bus? Tsk, tsk. Now you can’t stand to be off them because you’re an exposed nerve.

“You never learned to live with our father’s boon and now, sitting here, you still don’t get it. The money he left you was never what mattered. Seeing the world for what it is is the gift that keeps on giving. You look behind the curtain and weep. We hoped you would adjust after enough time passed without those pills dulling your senses but it appears you may be a lost cause. Maybe we should toss you in a cage and throw you in the river like the sad little kitten you are.”

Oh, look at the way he relaxes at the thought of death. Has he really fallen so far down that black hole of despair? Empathy isn’t our strong suit. Maybe he has gas. Isn’t that what they say about babies? We aren’t experts, and in this case we really hope it’s depression.

“Please,” he trembles. “She won’t leave me alone.

His limp hand lifts from the bed and with great effort his index finger straightens to direct our attention toward that empty sofa, which of course is no longer empty. Miss Dumas stares at us with eyes peeled like rancid soft-boiled eggs and mouth hanging agape in a silent howl. Her body is rotten inside and out. Flies buzz around her and maggots are spilling out of the exposed skull fracture that we gave her before locking her away where no one will ever find her.

To our brother we say with a wave of our hand, “It makes sense why this causes you so much grief. After all, she’s a terrible conversationalist. Maybe if she was actually contributing something to this scene it wouldn’t seem so fucking pointless. Amirite? Instead she just sits there with her cloudy bug eyes. Such a drag.”

We shoo Ms. Dumas away like an annoying pet. “Leave my brother alone. It’s not like he’s the one who did you in, after all. Honestly I don’t know what he sees in you. Maybe he has a thing for older ladies. It must run in the family.”

We look back at our brother. Is he crying? He’s crying. He’s totally crying.

“It’s okay,” we say in an almost caring sort of way. “She’s gone. We told you. You just need to be firm with these things. Otherwise the hallucinations will walk all over you and you don’t want to be a doormat for the rest of your life!”

His voice shakes as he pleads. “All I want is for you to do what you already want to do. I can see it in your eyes when you look at me. The disgust. The envy because our father left everything to me. You hate me for something that I never asked for.”

Ha ha ha… hee… BAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!

The laughs bend me over like a violent lover, each chuckle bursting out of my throat like the moans of an orgasm. We nearly fall out of the chair. Our fist beats on the armrest. Oh, god, the tears sting as they well up in our eyes. We needed this. So much.

“eNvY?!” My teeth slice the word off like a guillotine’s blade. “The idea that we would be envious of you over money is fucking hysterical. Really, you should take that one-man show to the Apollo. Nathan Grey: No Legs to Stand On, coming soon to Netflix.”

We get up from the chair and for a moment loom over him with ominous effect. It works. He can hardly look at us. “The hard truth, brother-of-ours, is we’ve been a terrible sister.”

We go to the bedside table where his nightly cocktail is waiting in a prefilled syringe on a tray. From the box of sterile gloves we take one and pull it down over our right hand, stretching our fingers to the tips of the nylon, then grab another and slip it over our left. We take the syringe and an alcohol swab with us around the foot of his bed. He watches like a wounded animal caught in a snare, trying to work out whether we’re here to cut him loose or break his neck.

“When was the last time you and us spent time together? It was December, wasn’t it? All this time, living in the same building, we never wanted to be around you because let’s face it, bro, you’re a buzzkill.”

The IV pole has a half-full bag of saline hanging from the hook. The drip follows the line down to his left shoulder and then under his t-shirt, feeding directly into his central port. Hanging over his collar is the injection clave. That’s where the magic happens. The syringe lays on his pillow right next to his shriveled little head while we tear the swab open and begin cleaning the clave.

“But when the doctor told us you had regained your ability to speak, we should have paid you a visit, if only to clear the air about a thing or two, but the hard truth is that we didn’t want to risk seeing you with even a glimmer of happiness in your life.”

The alcohol pad and its wrapper go into the small trash can by the bed. With the syringe in hand, we remove the cap from the nozzle and hold it vertically. Carefully we pull down on the plunger, drawing in a slight amount of air. He’s watching intently, perhaps wondering if I’m about to push an air bubble into his venous catheter. Perhaps hoping.

Truth is that usually doesn’t work. The lungs are quite adept at clearing a troublesome bubble. To get the job done, we’d need a much bigger syringe of nothing but air. No, that wouldn’t be suspicious at all.

We push the plunger until all the air is forced out, along with a single drop of his dose. From there it gets screwed onto the clave. Our thumb rests on the plunger as we look down at him.

“How many years did you spend convinced there was something wrong with you? We can’t imagine such a thing, believing you’re broken when in reality it’s everyone else walking around like poorly glued-together vases that are shattered over and over again, every day of their pathetic lives. But they keep picking up the pieces, don’t they? They don’t know a better way. They don’t know our way.”

We start to administer the cocktail. Slowly. Deliberately. We don’t want him to fall asleep quite yet, do we? His face relaxes as the first taste quickly rushes from his heart to his brain.

“We wish we had met you before you turned into Jack Moreau. You know, when you painted your face and bought broken down amusement parks for the lulz. Watching you from afar, you seemed actually happy, but then you decided to change yourself and not for the better. You chose your white trash mother over our father’s legacy and started being what the world wanted you to be rather than what you were born to become. What a drag.”

More of the drugs slip down the line into his port. His eyes are getting heavy and he lets out a long, drawn out ohhh like the dirty little drug addict he is. You can’t hold it against him. A steady dose of morphine and ativan every night for almost a year will turn anyone into a junkie.

“The truth, big bro, is we like you just the way you are. Father wouldn’t want his kids killing one another, at least not without him in attendance, and unfortunately that is no longer possible. So we’re gonna keep you nice and comfortable. Who knows? You learned how to talk again with pudding for a brain, maybe you’ll figure out how to walk next.”

He says something so quiet I almost didn’t notice. With about a third of the cocktail still in the barrel we lean down closer to listen.

“I’ll tell.”

Desperation is all that is. A pointless threat from whatever dream realm he’s riding off into on a magic carpet or some shit.

“And say what? They thought you were behind that bitch’s disappearance, remember? You’re the one who broke into her house and ran around naked smearing PB&J all over yourself, or whatever it was you got up to. I don’t pretend to understand your perversions. As for me, no one even knew who I was back then, and I made sure I had an airtight alibi.”

Our head tilts to the right in thought. “Besides, the only people who will ever find her body are archaeologists centuries from now, and that’s assuming climate change doesn’t submerge this whole city under water in the next few decades. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me the science is very clear on this matter. We need to end our dependence on fossil fuels. Let’s go green, Nate. Let’s get some solar panels and mount them to the top of our high rise. Do you think the condo board would approve?”

We push the last cc. He slips far, far away into an immediately deep sleep. We unscrew the syringe and drop it into the bin and then cap the clave. The gloves snap off our hands, one and then the other, before following after the syringe. We reach out to touch his face and cradle his cheek before bending down to find his ear.

We whisper, “Dream about your mother putting a bullet into her brain and then remember that there are things far worse than death. Don’t fuck with me, pal-o-mine. After all, we’re all you got, Nate. So stop acting like such a little pussy.”

We kiss his forehead and then leave him to slumber. There’s a hot old lady downstairs waiting for my fingers to be inside her. We reach for the doorknob but stop. Not like this. She shouldn’t see us like this, right? At least not yet.

It’s an unpleasant feeling, sending the other me back into her little room. She’s spent too much time cooped up in there as it is but I had to be careful after killing Tibor Petrov (‘memba him?) and Miss Dumas. I couldn’t give people a reason to suspect or risk having prying eyes looking too closely at my activities.

Something changed though in the sand and muck of my match at Solstice. People watched. A lot of people watched. Maybe the world could use a little bit of the other me in their lives. They’ll tell themselves it’s a character but I remember something my father once said to me. People clamor for a glimpse behind the curtain at what lies on the other side. So give them what they want, a little peek at the time, and then when the time comes, rip the curtain off the rod and shove them face first into the abyss.

Marie is waiting for me in the kitchen with three bottles of wine on the kitchen island. “How was he,” she asks as I come around to her.

“Sleeping like a baby.” I turn one of the bottles by the neck and look at the label. “Bonnes-Mares. 1969. You sure know how to pick em.”

“I couldn’t decide on one,” she says while trying to hide her embarrassment. “These all sounded like they would be good.”

“This one is worth more than your car.”

“Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I can put it back if you like—”

I force her against the fridge and we begin making out. My tongue down her throat. My hands are all over her. She writhes against me, trying to get a leg around mine to press even closer to me. She hisses when I bend her over the island and rip her pants and underwear down to her ankles. Her hands smack on the marble. I grab one and then the other and pin them behind her back while my other hand explores her ass.

“Oh, god,” she moans.

As I stand there, three digits in and counting, I remember what I thought earlier about letting people see the other me. A little here and there couldn’t hurt anyone, right? In fact I think some extended us time is exactly what I need. What we need.

“Fuck…right there…oh fuck, please, please…don’t…don’t stop…”

“Don’t worry, love.”

I close my eyes and when they open, we’re smiling.

“We’ll never stop.”