PART 4

CONTRAINDICATIONS

Astorm came and lashed the coast with jagged spikes of lightning and sent thunder rolling over the pines. I watched it from the police department complex with my back against the concrete. The rain pattered a line beside my boots, leaving the rest of me dry.

Before I arrived at the station, I’d locked myself in the bathroom. I had broken a pill of Atroxipine apart and ground it down to a powder. Lionel called my name outside, Boy, are you hurt, boy. He cajoled in his gentle, old man’s voice. I had flexed my hand, grinding, grinding as though I were grinding Lionel’s bones.

“Talk to me, boy. Tell me what you saw.”

I had inhaled enough Atroxipine that even a zombie would have been concerned. I leaned back, a wet line of crimson painted down my face, to my chin. I laughed while it dripped on the tiles and bled into the grout.

“The drug can warp your perception. Things don’t appear as they seem. Will you not be reasonable? Let me in, Vitus.”

I looked at the pill bottle in my hand. Lionel’s voice reduced to a dim babbling in the background while Atroxipine entered my bloodstream, coating my brain stem in its delicious powder. It wasn’t pleasure, but a pleasant uptick in consciousness. Every thought coming faster now. I wasn’t sitting on a toilet seat, but levitating several inches above it. I was Christ. I was Buddha. Enlightenment from the drug store.

Even when I reached the station, I hung onto the euphoria of that initial hit as though I could ride the wave indefinitely. I was treading unknown territory, chasing an addiction to a drug whose contraindications were untested, untried, and unknown.

What would I do when the refill ran out?

Like a junkie, I chose not to think about that too hard.

Instead, I thought about Elvedina. I pictured her monolithic and immovable in the rain, letting the storm lash her. Lightning kissing and ferning her before she rebooted and came to life again. Her concrete and mercury eyes. I replayed the memory of last night like footage from a home movie, the way some people remember birthdays and anniversaries and weddings. Over and over. Saw her arm with the weapon in one hand, the flat matte of the silencer extending the gun into black space.

I drew the bead in my mind’s eye. Who had she been aiming for?

Lionel? Or me?

I should have realized from the beginning—none of this was about Jamie’s black projects. All that was ancillary. That’s what made it the perfect cover, because it was true, and they needed to tie up their loose ends.

And I was a loose end.

But Elvedina hadn’t been sent to kill me. Investigate me, perhaps. Kill me? No.

I dug back farther. Atroxipine charged every sense, resurrected memories in haunting detail. Every recollection awaiting my perusal like a massive library contained within the space of my mind. My Id stood in the doorway and opened the door. In my mind’s eye, he wore a crumbling and dusty smoking jacket and brandished a highball filled with gasoline, beckoning me in with a greasy, decayed smile. Lips furry with mold.

Good to see you’re finally back on top again, he said. What’d you want to know?

I want to look at the footage from the night I got stabbed. We got any of that?

Hmmm, my Id said, sipping at his glass. He offered it to me. Maggots writhed in the muscle of his forearm. Want one?

I politely declined.

Suit yourself, and then he was trudging past racks over to big movie reels, old spools, and microfiche and, with a rousing clatter, set one unfurling on the floor. The room went dark. A projector powered up into a low hum. In the wall of my mind, I saw the memory back-lit with the power of a thousand suns. All of it sponsored by Atroxipine.

The projector cast an image of the prescription bottle, as fast as I’d thought it. Then the camera lens retreated, showing me the table, my kitchen table. Elvedina, Lafferty, Lionel and I, all of us gathered around it. I recognized the memory from the beginning. I had complained of a headache. Lionel had opened his briefcase and shuffled through a handful of medications and pills…

The projector hummed and showed me Lionel’s shaking hands. Showed me Lionel, artfully pushing the prescription bottle of Atroxipine over the edge of his suitcase, with enough force to send it rolling to the edge, where I caught it. So proud of my new, human reflexes. How I quietly pocketed it.

My Id used a long wooden pointer like a college professor, smacking it against the screen so I jumped.

Right there, you see it?

His pointer terminated at the center of Lionel’s eye, where the frame froze, and made a line directly to me, where I held the bottle in my lap the moment before I stuffed it into my pockets, thinking no one had seen me and no would know.

But someone did know, my Id whispered. Someone did see.

I stalled, unable to accept the truth.

Do you think a drunk is still a drunk when someone else is holding his mouth open and pouring the bottle down his throat? my Id said and laughed.

It’s not the same thing; it’s my own fault, I whispered. I chose to take it.

And he put it in front of you. Where he knew you would see it. And where he knew you would take it. Like the clever little thief you are.

He set me up, I said.

The screen flashed and went into motion again. My Id receded. A single image of the grinning Inspector filled the wall. A silhouette and a bare suggestion of that figure whom I’d dreamed of in passing and then never again. And beneath his picture, in block letters:

EVIDENCE

A sign beside it flashed a brilliant red: APPLAUSE. Like a family sitcom from the fifties, I heard Highsmith, my Id, the Inspector, and my father, laughing in one chorus.

*

Which led me here, to the evidence room at the police station.

Lafferty never came back to the house last night. His absence begged the obvious question, and I didn’t need to replay that footage to see where it led. If any of what I had dreamed was real, if any of the delirious and fevered out-of-body experience was genuine and not conjured and ushered along by the drug itself, then Lafferty had spent his night with Niko.

It would have been easy to hate him for having the privilege to share in Niko’s world. To shelter in her feminine vulnerability and steal her youthful passion for his own. It burned and ate in spaces within me. I’d thought myself one bad motherfucker, but the path of feeling opens to riven every wound and scar until your heart is a bigger target than you thought. All your hard shell, a facade that blew away at the first sign of a storm.

Atroxipine lingered under my tongue. I was a strung out junkie with blood on the belly of his shirt and his face hollowed out with too little sleep and too many drugs.

But I couldn’t bring myself to hate Lafferty. The gray morning hours passed when I saw the van arrive. A fellow officer who’d once been Lafferty’s partner in better days opened up Lafferty’s wheelchair like a collapsible skeleton and wheeled it to the passenger door. Lafferty’s sun-starved and muscular arm opened the door and he held out his hand. The partner steadied him. Lafferty hefted himself with a grunt, legs dangling without feeling or sensation as he collapsed into the metal beast. Too much rain for the motorcycle.

A dark shape circled the building and descended from the sky. Talons pulled at my shirt. I let him settle on my shoulder, shaking free of rain, the buzz and hum of his wings like an engine.

I often thought of Lafferty and his chair. Not in the way observers might pity or feel sorry for him, which was possibly the worst and most condescending of sympathies, but fascinated and curious by the mechanics of his universe. How the world must be realigned and reconsidered from his new height and all the details it contained.

I wallowed in the shadow beneath the overhang of the building until I was one with the concrete. Lafferty wheeled to the door and disappeared inside. I corralled my racing thoughts but Atroxipine drove them now, drove them into superhero limits and gave my brain horsepower beyond reason.

What you waiting for? my Id breathed.

I entered through the back door, made the trip down the familiar steps to the basement where the police department evidence room for the whole of the municipality resides.

*

I’d been a soldier, a private detective, and I now boasted the dubious accomplishment of being an ex-convict. For that last reason, the evidence room made my ex-convict’s skin crawl. It’s in the construction and the architecture of the place, a malaise—the same gray institutional concrete composes prison walls and public schools everywhere. The room terminated in a black cage enclosing the front, drawing a strict partition from any casual passerby and the oddments hidden behind the wall. Replace the bare industrial bulbs with candles and torches and one might imagine a large and angry dragon sitting atop a pile of gold in an underground lair.

But there was only Lafferty; wizened and older than I was now that I had cheated time and bought myself a body ten years younger. Lafferty would beat me to the grave, no small miracle he had evaded the Reaper thus far. I leaned over the counter.

“Wondered when you’d trouble your ugly mug,” Lafferty said.

He did not look up from his paperwork. His writing was neat and orderly as though he were making up for the reckless youth in another past. A muscle in my forearm flexed and then relaxed. Stirrings of jealousy, want and possession, all wrapped within the name of Niko.

“You got something to say to me?” Lafferty asked when I did not speak.

This was my opportunity to crack a joke. Fill out familiar roles of quasi-friends the way we always had in the past. Hide our wounded egos behind machismo and posturing and continue to not talk about things that mattered to us.

Every time I opened my mouth to do so, nothing emerged but my hurt and pulsing silence.

Lafferty slammed down the pen. The paperwork flew to the floor. I withdrew from the counter. Wheels squealed as he jerked it through a tight turn and I listened to the subtle tracking of his chair as he came around the corner.

His face looked mean beneath the harsh lighting. Boxing ring bulbs. They spared us nothing. He let go of his wheels, set both fists on the arms of the chair, and leaned forward to look up at me.

“You wanna take a shot at me?” he whispered.

“What?”

“Go ahead,” Lafferty said, moving his wheelchair closer. I moved back, step after step, keeping an equal distance between us until I hit the wall and I could go no farther. Lafferty put on the brakes at five feet from me.

“You think that because I’m in a fucking chair, I can’t take a hit?”

“What the fuck do you want from me, man? You want me to punch you, is that what you’re saying?”

“I can take a lot of shit in this life. Waking up in a wheelchair is one of them. But what I ain’t gonna tolerate is another person condescending to me and pulling his punches just because he thinks I can’t take it. ’Cause I’m down here, and you’re up there, right? You’ve got that look on your face like I went and slashed your tires and poured sugar in your gas tank. You should just come out and fucking say what you’re gonna say to me. Since you got back, you’ve been full of nothing but vitriol and bad attitude, and I got news: nobody gives a flying fuck.”

Tired. Exhausted. Stitches stretched thin and my guts used up, shredded and trampled like confetti after New Year’s Eve in Times Square. I wanted to lie down and sleep my way into oblivion. But Lafferty and I had business. Our nights spent reconnecting and defining the terms of our new lives, thrown together in unexpected and unforeseen circumstances, did not put paid to our underlying problems, our very human problems—how familiarity breeds resentment, how misunderstandings develop and grow, how even those we are most loyal to possess desires and wants that do not necessarily align with our own, and they all must be contended with in the end. Overtures of friendship must be followed through and demonstrated with something more than promises, and now Lafferty was forcing me to ask myself the question: all told, was I walking the walk? Was I being a flesh-and-blood human, with all the responsibilities of one, including recognizing and respecting others? Or was I a shitty example of a human, too self-absorbed to know when I was crossing the line?

A few parts shitty, I decided.

“Is she happy?” I asked.

Lafferty’s face was a piece of hammered steel. His eyes glinted with flame, defiant. Daring me to say more, go further. Give him a reason to explode and lash out.

“What makes her happy ain’t no business of yours,” he said.

My Id cackled in the background of me. I reached into my pocket. My hand trembled and, at the last second, Lafferty’s eyes tracked it and I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t in my control. Atroxipine had me now and I pulled out the cigarette, eager to give myself a distraction, to lace the Atroxipine with a nicotine high.

“I’ll keep that in mind after she’s done using you up,” I said. I breathed in smoke with a sigh.

“Like hell you will,” Lafferty said and wheeled forth.

I high-stepped but he clipped my shins. His wheelchair squealed and I careened into the counter with a groan, struggled to find my footing, and then lost it again. The cigarette skittered across the counter in a spark that sputtered onto the floor and hissed out. Lafferty’s hands found the edge of my shirt and dragged me down so I fell to my knees on the hard concrete. I kicked my feet and turned in a circle. A thousand teeth bit into my burning belly. By the time he had his wheelchair turned back around, I was at his height.

“This what you want?” I asked. I gestured at my face and turned my cheek toward him, into the light.

Lafferty said nothing.

“I’m not gonna fight you, Lafferty.”

“You better get it out of your system now,” Lafferty said. “Or get the fuck out of my evidence room. I’ve done enough for you.”

“I came here to ask about Elvedina,” I said.

“What about her? You gonna throw her away like you did Niko? That a thing with you?”

I blinked. “Is that what Niko said?”

“You think she didn’t have a heart? That you didn’t hurt her?” Lafferty snorted in disgust. “You’re the sort of asshole born with so much good luck, you don’t even know what’s in front of your own nose.”

“You’re right,” I said. “That’s why I need you to tell me what happened right under my fucking nose, the night I was stabbed. You came out into the hall with the rifle. What did you see?”

Lafferty’s eyes changed in the hard yellow light. His jaw set as though there was still a discussion we’d be having later, like we were a fucking married couple instead of two guys having trouble figuring out that Niko was no one’s possession and she would be with whoever she wanted. If that turned out to be someone else later on down the line, we’d still be fighting this same stupid fight.

He leaned down to pick up my cigarette butt with agility borrowed from a lynx and rolled up to me. I slumped back to the floor, back against the wall, and held out my hand. He gave me the cigarette. I relit it while he leaned over me and I looked up at him, our perspectives reversed.

“Strange night,” he said. “I was sleeping out front on the pull-out, you remember. It’s got this suck-ass metal bar that likes to dig up into your back.”

“I know. It’s a piece of shit. Jessica used to make me sleep on it when I snored.”

I held out the cigarette to him. He took it and dragged before releasing a puff. Smoke crisscrossed over his well-used face, pocked and marked like the surface of the moon.

“Too bad it’s not a joint,” he said. Smoke uncoiled from his nostrils and passed it back to me.

“It’s a fucking evidence room,” I said. “I know you got shit back there.”

“I ain’t sharing. That’s what they call ‘fringe benefits.’”

“When did you wake up that night? When I started screaming?”

“No. I kept drifting in and out. That goddamned metal bar in my back. A man can’t sleep well like that.”

“Uh huh,” I said, thinking he probably slept better last night. But I didn’t want to drag in our troubles. I needed to stay on track, unravel this mess. “You must have seen something. Heard something.”

“Yeah, well,” and he scratched the back of his neck as he cast his glance inward, pacing himself back through the hours and the days. A mountain climber wearing cleats walked across my stomach, back and forth, back and forth over my stitches while I waited for his response and took another drag. “Sometimes I’d hear things. Like Lionel getting up in the middle of the night. And that Elvedina was always walking from one end to the other. Sometimes she’d spend an hour in one place, out front on the porch or out in the backyard.”

“I woke up with her hands in my guts,” I said.

“Yeah, but were you awake when you were screaming?”

I opened my mouth to answer yes when instead I heard the voice of my grinning Id: Ah, ah, ah. Not so fast. Were you?

And I didn’t know.

“Maybe not,” I said. Maybe I was screaming before I woke up.

Lafferty leaned forward. I could hear his chair creak, the tilt of his wheels and our eyes met, strung out along a line of gravity so strong I could not open my mouth against its force.

“I know after a car accident, ’twas a couple nights I was screaming and sleeping at the same time. And you gonna tell me, military man, you ain’t never done the same?”

I said nothing. Some things, you just don’t talk about.

“Okay,” I said. “So I’m dreaming about being stabbed. And I start screaming—while I’m under, still. Then what?”

“What I know for sure is that I heard footsteps a little while before. But Elvedina was the first one running when the screaming started. You telling me you were stabbed before you started screaming? Because that’d be a key point before you start pointing fingers at Elvedina.”

“You were the one who said she was the hired killer.”

He shrugged. “Bitch is cold as stone. But that doesn’t make me right, now does it?”

I cursed when I realized I’d let the cigarette burn down into the filter and dropped it, crushed it with my heel.

Lionel’s name hung between us, but neither of us spoke it. I looked up at Lafferty with my hands dangling over my knees.

“So what about Highsmith and his mind bullets?”

“You know how a pickpocket gets away with all your cash, right? Or how the magician pulls the rabbit out of the hat?”

“Distracts you with something else. That’s what the whole Highsmith thing is about? A fucking sham? A distraction? Jesus Christ,” Lafferty said, running his hands through his hair and pressing them to the sides of his head. “Do you know how much that freaked me out? Thinking a guy could walk out of his body and play the invisible man and kill me?”

I said nothing about the out-of-body experience or Atroxipine. We were floating in a whole new conspiracy world of half-truths, things Lafferty didn’t need to know.

“What was the fucking point of all that? What’s the rabbit in all this?”

“I think it’s to kill me,” I said.

“You’re so fucking important, eh?”

“My father’s scared. It’s a testament to his fear that he wasn’t satisfied to let me languish in prison.”

“So they’re letting Highsmith languish in prison instead.”

“Do you know what happens to them? To people like Highsmith, who were brought into black missions like out-of-body stuff? Did you ever talk to Lionel about that? What happened to the rogues?”

“Who cares? They’re criminals. Highsmith said himself he killed those people. They can rot in hell.”

“What if it’s not Highsmith, though? Look, Highsmith got a court case, was judged by his peers. It was all on the level. Even if the case was flimsy, don’t you think every suspect deserves the same? Don’t you think they should have his fair treatment like every other citizen, instead of being locked in a cell and having the key thrown away after his own government uses him up? Isn’t that really what they did to Highsmith?”

“Edmond Dantès,” Lafferty blurted.

I hadn’t thought about that book in years. Long ago and far away when we’d been in the same classes, that had been our summer reading project and we had taken turns slogging through Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo between bouts of sneaking off to swim in the next door neighbor’s pool after dark. I recalled Jamie, sourpussed and sullen while he bent over his medical texts and dissected frogs. As far as he’d been concerned, Lafferty was too low class to hang in our end of the neighborhood. The few good moments in a cesspool of childhood memories.

“You think that’s what they’re doing?” he asked. “You think they’re taking people they used up, hired as tools, and are locking them in and throwing away the key?”

“Lionel seemed to evade the question when I asked,” I said.

“Lying by omission. Sweeping up anyone who can implicate the government in wrongdoing and vanishing them.”

“How very Soviet of them,” I said.

“You know who killed them, if not Highsmith?”

“Not sure. Just a hunch.”

Lafferty nodded.

“You gonna turn him in, when you find him? Just turn him over to Lionel and hope for the best while they figure out new ways to kill you better?”

I said nothing. I had no answer. The trust and loyalty I had assigned to Lionel had broken beyond repair. Yet, the terms of my freedom were reliant on carrying out this job to the end, and all the other monsters awaiting investigation once I finished with the current monster at large. Handing the killer over was out of the question, but I had no clearer idea of what I would do when the time came to make the decision.

To be, or not to be, I thought, reflecting on the interminable hours when my father drummed political science into my head via Shakespeare. Faced with the choice between duty and conscience, Hamlet was no help to me now. Even my Id was quiet and contemplative until I spoke once more.

“You still have my evidence from my brother’s case?” I asked.

Lafferty grinned.

“So. You want the gun back?”

Lafferty leaned down to pop open a box and withdrew a plastic bag. Through the transparent material, the matte black of the semiautomatic carved a silhouette I knew of old. My fingers quivered to touch it, and Lafferty made an amusing ceremony of pulling it out of the plastic and holding it out for me as though his next move would be to knight me with it. Done with the frivolity, our expressions set as it passed into my possession. The metal seemed to jump into my grasp, fitting into the flesh as though it, too, had missed me, longed for me, yearned for me during our long absence. Having her was like returning home at last.

“Look,” Lafferty said as I pulled the slide off the Glock and took out the barrel, staring through it and frowning at the buildup. “I ain’t gonna tell you what to do with your weaponry, but now that you’re not a hell-bent for leather zombie, maybe you wanna try a little harder not to rack up the body count?”

“I killed my brother, Lafferty. What does it matter now?”

“Don’t talk that shit. You know it matters. Try this.”

He slapped a taser on the countertop.

I lifted an eyebrow and set the frame of the gun down to pick up the taser.

“Fewer dead people. Maybe you can avoid a second murder charge in your life. You’re not dead anymore. No gray area loopholes for you now.”

He had a point. I pressed a button on the side of the object and, between two metal fangs, a brilliant line of blue electricity appeared and then zipped out of existence.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

He grinned and said nothing.

Meanwhile, somewhere on an evidence shelf, a taser goes missing from a lapsed case.

“Let me rephrase that—what did the previous owner do with it?”

“Some kid was going around and shocking vending machines with it. Can you believe it?”

I smiled, remembered Lincoln Tanner, my one-time bunk mate in the prison. “You don’t say.”

“Shorts out the circuit. Machine spits out food, or quarters.”

“Really,” I said, and thought of Elvedina.

What would she spit out?

“I’ll take it.”

*

I came back into the rain from the evidence room basement. The vulture circled above the roof, and I surrendered my shoulder to him. He took up the space beside my head while I stoppered my mouth with another cigarette of tightly packed death, stared at the oil stains casting rainbows in parking lot puddles. My Thunderbird was worse for the years, nicks and dents where I’d driven it through the garage door after Elvedina. I wondered where she was now. If she was out there in the rain like the Tin Man, frozen in place with her oil can discarded at her feet. Trade her ax out for a gun, frozen in space.

The idea chilled me. The vulture squawked and protested, flew away into a screeching black mark on the wind as I jerked open the car door and inhaled the stale exterior, then filled it with smoke. But thinking of Elvedina, I kept rerunning the image of her kissing Megan’s forehead. How could a cold, hard machine summon up all the trappings of human feeling to kiss another?

I started the engine and turned out onto the main drag. I smelled the ocean in the air. Heard the cry of the vulture tracking me from above as the vehicle shot like a silver bullet through the town, through the boarded up and foreclosed homes lost to bad investments and personal tragedies; past the tent shelters of the homeless, the strangers hitchhiking up the route; past the old secret burial grounds where the mob buries bodies in the pines; until the landscape changed and the houses turned along more upscale tastes. The road leveling out into new paving afforded by the rich and the well-connected. No more heroin addicts drowning in the gutter here. Now, I drove in the perfumed avenues of the affluent.

The northeast storm winds brought more stinging rain. The vulture sulked and followed me as I drove and put my hand over the firearm. I made sure it was real and, satisfied with the comforting weight of it, I wound my way back out of the gated community and over to the next one, navigating through a warren of cul-de-sacs and well-groomed lawns.

I parked the car in the double driveway of Polly Highsmith’s house. The events revolving around that ill-fated night when I left my body occupied my mind, and with it, Polly’s conversation with her husband, and most of all, Blake’s terror of the Inspector. This did not seem to me the cold-hearted killer I’d been led to believe I was hunting. I kept returning to her, this unremarkable women who appeared all but invisible, who grew smaller with the weight of her tragedies, until I perceived her in a different light, a different understanding. It put me in mind of Megan, it put me in mind of my mother, even Elvedina, who in her illimitable silence embodied some unspoken melancholy—this trio of women tied to disasters like latent Furies from a Greek Tragedy, giving shape and form to crimes others had wrought. It left the last possible conclusion, the most logical direction left to me: Polly.

The driving rain lashed thick and the first whip crack of angry thunder rent the air. The vulture soaked and shivered at the porch and stared at me as though I authored the foul weather.

I passed a row of shrunken and withered pansies, all the color sucked from them, except brown. As though the degradation I had cohabited with for so long as a zombie had evolved like a virus, insidious and invisible, to visit Polly. I carried the stain with me, destroying lives in my ominous wake. All my convictions and newfound conscience for naught.

I ducked into the shadow of the house and rang the bell. Rivulets chilled a line down the back of my neck, soaking my shirt. I imagined an alternate world in which I had not survived Virus X. I imagined Lafferty, tending his evidence room with no knowledge of Niko only three blocks away in the funeral home; Lionel would be tending grapes on some faraway South American spook foxhole. My father overlooking the Capitol with disgust and disdain, pinning a medal on my smiling brother’s jacket. Beside Jamie, his intact and perfect family. Amos.

One virus turned it all upside down and led me here, to this very moment. It seemed to me that all that effort and monstrous fissuring in the universe should have singular meaning. A lightning strike, pivotal moment. A climax to punctuate the senselessness of life. Perhaps a choir of angels trumpeting a delightful chorus in answer. A deus ex machina to lift me from this inferno.

Instead, all I have is the shitty version of a poor man’s parrot, a beat to shit body like a crumpled candy wrapper that’d seen the inside of a toilet bowl. One of these days, I promised myself, I need to get my ass to the beach, buy a houseboat. Take it out to the distant canyons. I would forget all the bullshit and bake in the sun, try not to think about Niko and—

Shattering glass.

The vulture curled his tongue into an S with his beak open and hissing. I tried the door knob. It turned, slick with rain water.

I withdrew the gun and threw the door open wide.

*

All the lights blacked out. Yellow-gray storm light churned through the diaphanous curtains. Polly Highsmith’s home smelled like fresh lemon polish and whiskey. I surged forward with my arm out and steadied into an isosceles lock. Each wet step from the rain was muffled by the expensive carpeting. In a distant room, a bang-crash! as an object met its fate, shattering into pieces beyond my sight.

Through the living room. The couch littered with the remains of a newspaper. A cell phone turned face down on the end table. An empty glass rimmed in whiskey. Bland neutral walls tinted eerie and gray in the rain light, turning everything into a mist.

Around the corner and into the hall, I caught my breath and held it.

Elvedina and Polly stood in the center. Around them, the detritus and debris gave suggestion to the battle ranging through the kitchen. Polly’s headlong flight, the place where Elvedina caught up with her. In seconds, I play-acted their recent past: I pictured Elvedina, a storming bull, reaching one hand out to catch Polly’s streaming hair and yank her back with heartless machinery. Send her to the ground where Elvedina towered over her, straddling her with her face erased of emotion.

Like she was now, with her weapon drawn and the silencer making a long, black exclamation point to Polly’s chest. Polly, a kitchen knife in her hand. The kind of knife you buy with a maxed out credit card at 1 a.m. because it can cut through uninvited cyborgs when the occasion calls for it. A big one-piece, steel pig-sticker. She rammed it up and thrust it into Elvedina.

They were too far in to care; too locked into each other. Faces drawn in the grimmest and bloodiest expressions that left no expression at all. Women hell-bent on killing one another. It drove the breath out of me. Turned me cold to my toes.

Elvedina stumbled back with the knife sticking out of her chest. The silencer wobbled in her grasp. Elvedina grunted and reached up like a wind-up toy, all fluidity gone as she negotiated this new turn of events to grip the blade handle and snap it from her. The hallway lengthened into a marathon mile. Too long to traverse in time. See-saw nausea rollicked in my belly as I dug in and ran anyway, dropping the gun to pull out the taser as I gained momentum. The knife crunched like metal cans in a compactor as she slicked it out of her. A line of dribbling, black blood. Motor oil permeated the air. She dropped the blade to the floor and readied herself to take aim at Polly, who huddled on her expensive carpeting with her hands above her head, her knees curled to her chest, screaming.

I skidded and slid into home base. The taser gleamed and crackled like handheld fire. I thrust it up into Elvedina’s arm, to the meat of her ribs and her eyes, flying open wide to meet mine as we made impact. She felt light as aluminum as I reached out with my other hand to hold her, take her shirt by the fistful and rivet her there while her eyes dissected me, deconstructed me, viciously took me apart bone by bone with all her hate.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

Her eyes rolled back in her head and Elvedina collapsed.

Adrenaline pushed through my veins, made my mouth taste like I’d eaten a plateful of wet cigarettes for breakfast. I kicked her weapon away. It cartwheeled down the hall and disappeared into the space of a shadow as I came down to my haunches to reach for Polly.

She rose up and took my arm, leveraged it so we both came to our feet together. Her hair become a witch’s mire of filaments, her eyes dazed and mouth turned into a permanent stain of bloodless shock.

“I can’t,” she whispered and then burst into tears.

“Polly,” I said, and held her while she cried into my arms and whispered, I’m sorry, over and over again. I’m sorry, I never wanted this. I never wanted to hurt anyone.

*

I poured her a drink and gave her a box of tissues. Polly stared at the collapsed shape in the hallway.

“Is she dead?”

“I don’t know,” I answered while I turned the taser over in my hands. “I think it’s a short circuit.”

Polly didn’t ask what that meant and I wouldn’t have explained it to her if I could. I was exhausted. My stitches itched, fire ants lapping honey off my abdomen. I helped myself to her bottle of Laphroaig and sat on the opposite side.

“Do you know why I’m here, Polly?”

She looked down into the bottom of her glass where her reflection wavered. She looked about to cry again. This time around, she was wearing more than sweatpants—cargo pants and a dark shirt. Dim and neutral colors matched with luggage by the door. Her hair combed back into a ponytail and her eyes hollowed and rimmed with sleepless circles.

“Yes,” she managed to choke out.

I gave her a minute longer to swallow her drink. I followed suit until I emptied my glass. I set it down on the coffee table and folded my hands.

“How did you do it, Polly?”

She didn’t look at me.

“It’s complicated,” she whispered into her glass. She looked frail and breakable in the half-light. The rain tapped and drummed above us with ferocious purpose.

“Nothing came up on the tox screen,” I said.

“It wouldn’t,” she said, putting her glass down. Then she laughed, jagged, running a hand through her hair. “What will my husband say? It will break his heart.”

I blinked. All of this, all those dead people, and all she could think about… was her husband. And in the end, it seemed a human concern to have.

“Why don’t you tell me how, and maybe we won’t have to break his heart after all.”

“It started,” she began, “with the drug trials for Atroxipine.”

Halting, stumbling over her words, she began to tell me.