Ironies, Emilia thought, shuddering into the moth-eaten sheet he draped over her whenever he left her down here in the dark. So many ironies.
The only place she was absolutely certain no one would ever look for her was in the library from which she’d vanished. That was a good one, for starters. To be fair, she wasn’t technically in the library anymore, but underneath it, in the bomb shelter she’d never heard mentioned and suspected no one who still worked for the county even remembered was there.
But the Invisible Man remembered, or knew. He’d even known where to pull up the ratty green carpet in the back of the Records and Reference Room to reveal the trapdoor, which probably hadn’t been opened in decades.
The back of the same room, in other words, where the records of bomb shelter trapdoors were kept, and the history of the county catalogued and almost never read.
“Ironic. See?” she felt herself mouth into the scrupulously sanitized and deodorized blankets her abductor had provided, in the corner of the cement floor he swept clear of spiders and dust bunnies every single time he came back. She was too weak actually to vibrate her vocal cords. But her lips moved, and she was fairly certain word-shaped air still spilled from them.
Soon, he’d be back. Probably. Already, he’d been away a little longer than usual. She’d gotten surprisingly good at tracking passing hours down here, even without clock or light. Like a cat, she was. A feral, Piney Woods swamp cat, waiting for her captor to open the door.
Right from the start, from the moment he’d grabbed her, Emilia had decided to survive. Somehow. So she tracked hours. Counted ironies.
Here was another:
The person the District had installed upstairs as her replacement apparently possessed a sense of thoroughness and efficiency Emilia had never encountered in another Butterfly Weed county employee. He or she had pasted copies of the police department’s HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN? flyer, complete with a faded, years-old, two-tone photo of Emilia, all over the library: not just on the doors to both bathrooms but inside toilet stalls; on cardboard bookstands, set up every few feet, all the way across the top of the circulation desk; in the empty end caps of each empty shelving unit.
Now if only the District could generate one plausible reason for anyone not employed by the county to come to this library anymore, someone might actually see those flyers. As it was, the only people Emilia was certain had seen them were Emilia and her abductor. They noted them together upon resurfacing in the Records Room every night, after the lights shut down and the air switched off.
Where had they even gotten that photo? she wondered, fingering the holes in the crooks of her arms, imagining playing herself like a recorder. Forming notes by opening and closing the holes, generating sound that way. She could still remember the fingering from elementary-school music class. D, E, A, C. She hummed inside her head, imagined playing a little Emilia’s-arm steel guitar solo over the top of that goofy new Kacey Musgraves song, the sweet and funny one about family being family. The last new Kacey Musgraves Emilia was likely to hear. Unless she got out.
Until she got out, she made herself mouth even if she couldn’t quite say it, pressing her back into the wall, playing the holes in her arms.
The police had gotten that picture from her parents. Obviously. If she thought hard enough—if she still had enough blood in her body to sustain memory—she could probably have called up the exact song her father was spinning on his record player at the moment he’d taken the shot, which had to be at least six years old. She knew this because Ursula, her turtle, was still alive, perched like a parrot on her shoulder. Was it the turtle, the music, her parents, or just habit that had once made her smile like that, sidelong and sly, whenever anyone snapped her picture? Apparently, the police had decided her Butterfly Weed ID photo wasn’t distinctive enough. That no stranger just happening to glimpse her in some passing car or down some alley somewhere would be able to identify her from it.
Ironies.
Her parents were almost certainly in Butterfly Weed by now, Emilia realized. She wondered how long they’d stay, what they’d think up to do that wasn’t already being done. A long time, and a lot, she suspected. They were those sorts of parents, always had been. The thought of them here … making nice to the asshole trust-fund Ole Miss dropouts downstairs who managed her building so they could get keys to her pathetic apartment … asking around the library and the Save-a-Lot and Hansom’s Diner to find friends who might know where she’d gone, and slowly realizing that there weren’t any …
The sound of her own sigh startled her, and she twitched, made herself somehow wriggle into a sitting position with her shoulders against the wall. Her voice was still in there, somewhere.
Thinking about her parents hurt. Even thinking about Ursula hurt. Not as much as the holes in her arms where the Invisible Man slurped at her every night, leaning across her lap and making little gulping noises like a five-year-old guzzling from a water fountain.
But it still hurt.
To distract herself, she curated and collated more ironies. In the weeks she’d been down here, she’d collected dozens more.
Ever since she’d taken this job, for example, she’d fretted over the emptiness creeping kudzu-like through the Butterfly Weed branch, the town itself, and by extension her own life, only to find herself somewhere even emptier.
Then there was the fact that she’d spent the better part of the last year—months and months, ever since he’d first appeared—trying to trick the Invisible Man into turning in her direction, looking her in the eye, and saying something. And now, she couldn’t shut him up. All it had taken, in the end, was a single, exhausted, “What on earth happened to you,” which had come out of her mouth sounding so much more gentle than she’d intended, simply because she didn’t have enough air or fluid left after his feeding to expel anything but words.
Ever since, once he’d taken his nightly nibble, he just opened his mouth and rambled on and on and on. As though he were a vein she’d opened.
And the stories he told …
There was another irony, come to think of it. Perhaps the driving force behind her decision to become a librarian in the first place had been her love of Storybooktimes. How dearly had she loved her own, which had come complete with opening and closing theme music courtesy of her father and his magical, constantly detuning guitar? How often, in the midst of reading to the kids here, had she wished she could still have Storybooktime, too, find a lover or friend or surrogate dad to read or recite to her once a week, or every night, to help her sleep?
Well, now she’d found someone. And he had so many stories, all of them connecting to each other without beginnings or endings, that they seemed to stretch across her life like a freight train that would never finish its traverse.
That thought brought her to perhaps the worst irony she’d noted so far: if she ever did find a way out—when she did—she would miss the Invisible Man’s stories. Because those stories … snow falling in sugarcane fields, children playing hide-and-seek there, and what they found in those fields on the night after the boat parade … and that other night, on the riverboat this time, amid screaming and shooting stars, when the Invisible Man first met his Sally, or Aunt Sally, or whoever she was … and what happened to them after … and dancing with his mother (or someone named Mother?) on the porch of the Pine Palace in Grace Holler, which apparently had been a real place … Emilia had always assumed it was made up, just a line in a song … and the lemon cake served on the sheets of men who’d come into the forest on horseback for a lynching, and found Aunt Sally’s camp … and the months-long walks down the Mississippi toward its mouth with just a few companions, and sometimes none at all, only the Invisible Man and his Sally amid owls and bats and seabirds, with the offshore oil rigs rumbling and clanking in the roiling Gulf in the aftermath of a hurricane …
Mississippi had always seemed such a brutal, wild, wondrous place to Emilia. It turned out to be much wilder and more brutal than she had dreamed. Than anyone she knew had dreamed. As wild as the Colombia of her parents’ childhood.
She’d been sagging down the wall, but now, using mostly her feet, Emilia pushed herself back upright. Even that slow-motion lurch made her nauseous, set her starved veins twitching like cello strings loosened on their pegs. Once she was sure she wasn’t going to vomit, she took a deep breath, held it, went still, and listened. She wanted to be sure she’d heard correctly. Always, it seemed better to know he was here. That he was coming.
He was.
It had taken her a long time to learn how to hear him. The stairs out there, that led up through the trapdoor and back to the world, were concrete, free of creaks, and sheathed in dust, and the Invisible Man stepped so lightly. More lightly than a cat. It was almost as if he had no mass. As if he weren’t really there.
“Close your eyes,” he called softly, as he always did, so he wouldn’t blind her when he pushed the door open.
Emilia slitted her eyes instead, so she could watch him come. He had his flashlight tucked under his arm, aimed upward, so that his bandaged head glowed like flame atop a candle. Outside-smells wafted off him, redolent and marvelous in this odorless room: burning-leaves smoke, wet earth, cigarettes (not his; he didn’t smoke). With his free hand, he offered Emilia a white paper bag, and when she smelled that, her eyes welled, and she almost fainted.
“Catfish tacos,” he purred, and smiled. “From that place you like.”
From the Strawberry Side? She’d told him about the Strawberry Side?
And he’d listened?
How funny, she thought, as her trembling hands shivered awake, rose off her lap to flit to the mouth of the bag. She could remember so many of the stories the Invisible Man told her, but she barely recalled doing any speaking of her own.
Somehow, despite her nausea and sweating, there was tortilla in her mouth, sweet and fleshy fish falling apart in her teeth, on her tongue, as tears spilled from her eyes and vinegar-cabbage tumbled down her sweater into her lap like confetti.
“Thank you,” she heard herself saying, in her scratchy new not-Emilia voice. She hadn’t meant to say that, hated that she had. But the fish taco had triggered gratitude, the same way it had conjured saliva out of the dry walls of her cheeks and throat. So, she had to admit, did the Invisible Man’s manner, which somehow suggested courtship, the antebellum kind she’d only read about in books from half a century ago. Books that had lured her father to the American South.
“Shh,” he said, and edged a straw between her lips. A bendy one, no less. Sprite shot up into her before she’d even closed her mouth around the plastic, like fluid from an upside-down IV, something over which she had no control whatsoever.
He waited until she was done eating, until the greasy paper wrapping fell from her fingers like a husk and the straw bounced along the bottom of the Sprite cup. Gently, he eased the cup from her hands, touched her face, let the flashlight catch in his eyes so she could see them. Sighing, crying without any tears—there wasn’t enough Sprite in the world, she thought, to get her producing those again—Emilia slumped back against the wall, and her elbow fell open in her lap.
Like a bird at a fountain, he seemed to twitch, glancing around the empty room as though checking for predators. Then his head dove down, and his mouth was on her. In her. She felt herself gushing out of herself. Thought, hazily, that she had it wrong. She was in him. Her blood disappearing into his veins. She wondered if he ever considered using a bendy straw, sometime, just to change things up. With her eyes closed, she leaned into the wall and listened to him suck.
It didn’t take long, never did. As usual, he came up chattering.
“You should have seen it,” he said, wiping his lips with her fish taco napkin, spreading more of her across his mouth. He smiled through the bandages, again reminding her more of a suitor than a monster. “The woods where I found her. That’s the kind of place one would find someone like her, don’t you think? Of course, at the time, I didn’t think anything like that. None of us did, because we didn’t know she was someone like her, or even that there were someones like her. Sally still doesn’t know, how could she? None of us would even have dreamed, not even the girl herself. That’s why Sally did what she did at the last party, at our camp. Do you see? The circus, and the fire? It all makes sense. She thought she understood. But as usual”—and here he looked up, and his smile came slow, shy, and prideful—“only I do. Now. And oh, when I tell her…”
He was on his feet by this point, the flashlight on the floor, his hands steepled beneath his chin as he paced. He really did seem to glide on his own shadow, his posture perfect but his head bent. At one and the same time, he looked like a figure skater and a recently grounded teenager working through an excuse or apology. “When she understands, too … when I explain, and when she sees what I actually brought her, what I’ve done for her … and what we have, now … what our responsibility is, to the child, above all…”
Emilia was as surprised as the Invisible Man when she burst out laughing.
He whirled, and she flinched, cowering deeper into her corner, shivering beneath his gaze like a cotton stalk in a late-summer wind, watching pieces of herself detaching, floating away. All he said was, “I know. Right?”
That made her laugh harder. The phrase sounded ridiculous in his bandaged, cultured, Faulknerian gentleman’s mouth. He’d have sounded more natural wailing a cumbia.
She laughed so hard that actual wetness spilled down her cheeks. Sprite-flavored, no doubt, since she couldn’t imagine she had enough of her own fluids left to spill.
What stopped her laughter, finally, was the tilt to the Invisible Man’s head, the sudden lifting of his eyes. She could feel his gaze penetrate her pupils, twisting and setting like a hook in the softest place in her brain. She stopped shivering, except for occasional, volition-less twitches, like a fish yanked from a river and hoisted in the air.
“I’ve never actually tried this, you know,” he murmured. His cadence was his own, now, buttery as Gulf Coast moonlight, old as the Delta. “Nightly little tastes, instead of occasional feasting. It feels so much more … civilized. Humane, too, don’t you think? For me, of course, I’m not so insensitive as to imply … I mean, I don’t know how it feels to you. Or what it’s doing to you. Can you tell?” He cocked his head, now, studied her face.
“Tell?” she managed. She wasn’t sure what either one of them was asking, or whether this even qualified as sentient conversation.
“Are you different, do you think?” he asked.
As in, less liquid? Entirely drained of hope? Closer to dead?
That was the moment she grasped the richest, most appalling irony of all. The curse of her name, bestowed at birth by her father, had come true after all, but in reverse. Apparently, in the Restrepo version of the story, the corpse turned out to be the one walking around chattering. Emily was the motionless thing on the bed. Or, in her case, mattress pad.
“I don’t know,” she finally said, because the new laugh building in her throat wasn’t one she dared—or could bear—to unleash.
The Invisible Man nodded thoughtfully, touched her cheek, and smiled again. “I understand. If it helps, I don’t know, either. We’re going to find out together. Isn’t it exciting?”
Then, abruptly, he was pulling her to her feet and dragging her out of the shelter, up the cement stairs. Emilia kept tripping, not quite getting her feet over the lip of the next step, but he yanked her along anyway. At the mouth of the trapdoor, she had to control an urge to lunge through the opening, though not to escape; even the thought seemed ridiculous. She knew he’d taken something essential from her, or drooled something into her, because she didn’t even want to escape, anymore. She just wanted to clutch carpet in her fingers, cling to the top of the ground. What her captor had really done to her, she realized, was bury her alive. Render her invisible.
The Invisible Man dropped her on the floor in a heap. Moving to the table next to the microfiche viewer, he started gathering folders and papers. He showed no concern whatsoever about whether she might scramble to her feet or crawl to a computer terminal and alert someone, somehow. He didn’t even glance her way.
Madre de Dios, was she jealous? Because he was paying more attention to his papers?
Eventually, he sagged into a chair. When he finally did return his attention to her, he was no longer smiling. His bandaged hands quivered atop the pile of folders, but not with excitement. In their paleness, in the slivers of light from the computers, they reminded Emilia of the wings of a smacked moth. Tiny, desperate things. His gaze slid into hers again, but instead of hooking or smothering her, it just settled in her skull this time, seemed to curl into that soft place like a cat.
“Five years,” he whispered, and his beautiful voice rippled in the air, swirled the dust motes. “I have so much to tell her. But I’ll never find her again. In the end, all of this…” He tapped the stack of folders, gestured at the machines and reference volumes. “This was easy. Because it had all already happened, do you see? The pieces were all there. I just had to find them, recognize them, figure out whether they fit. And now I have, and they do. And I can’t tell her, because I don’t know where she is. She doesn’t even know I’m…”
Actual sound drained from his voice, though he went on speaking, his lips still glistening with whatever he’d sucked from her tonight. Eventually, his eyes slid away, too, toward the floor, and his bandaged head sagged into his hands. Her Invisible Man. She was on her knees, then her feet, before she realized what she meant to do.
Weaving on weakened legs, she settled before the nearest computer and poked it awake.
Why was she doing this? Not because she wanted to.
Not quite.
He wasn’t even watching, was too busy muttering into his lap, tapping his stack of file folders as though they were telegraph keys. It would have been so easy for Emilia to call up her Gmail, snap off a tweet. Check in on Facebook or Google locator. Surely, that alone would have alerted someone. Eventually.
Yet she didn’t.
Because she couldn’t.
Because her hands were his. The impulses directing them were hers, but directed now by other impulses atop them. She could feel them in her head and under her skin, now that she knew they were there, warm like the Invisible Man’s mouth never was, gentler even than his voice. Like her father’s hands curling her finger around the trigger of the pistol he’d taught her to shoot when she was ten, or the handle of the ax he’d taught her to chop firewood with, more because that’s what characters in American novels did than because their cabin was cold. Decades ago, in another life. When she was another person, a dusky-skinned Mississippi girl who’d been christened Emilia after a malevolent story by Colombian parents who loved her.
Maybe this is me, she thought dully, watching her fingers trigger keys, her browser accessing databases the Invisible Man wouldn’t even know about, so how could he be directing her to them? Despite his clearly formidable research and organizational skills, the Invisible Man would have never have thought to check where she was checking. He had never asked her to connect the bits she was connecting, which she’d scavenged from all the stories he’d serenaded her with over these past weeks as he slowly, slowly killed her. The “parties” by the river with his Sally, the massacres at Grace Holler, the whistling young fool in the hat who’d fled for the North with his Mother, or someone named Mother. He’d never seen or even looked for the trail there would have to be, wherever these creatures went, once anyone stepped back far enough and realized what they were looking at.
And now, just like that … there it was.
There she is, Emilia thought. It could have been any of them, she supposed. Assuming there were more of them, although somehow, she hadn’t gotten the impression there were.
But this was the one. Her trail. She was sure of it.
She stared at the screen a little longer, skimming once more through the headlines she’d collected, the snippets of story no one else apparently realized was unfolding. The most recent one, from just a couple days ago, recounted the discovery of a half-decapitated, exsanguinated corpse in a pasture, way out on the Wyoming plains, being nibbled by sheep. The incident was being investigated as a hate crime.
It wasn’t, she knew. It was worse.
Or was that better, because at least there was no hate in it? As far as she’d gleaned, there was no feeling involved whatsoever.
With a smile that didn’t feel like hers, and communicated absolutely nothing she actually felt, Emilia turned the screen to her captor. The motion surprised him, and he jerked up his head. He stared at her, then the computer, her again, before bolting to his feet. He loomed over her with his bandaged hands in the air in the greenish, gloomy Records and Reference light, which made him look like a giant rabbit. His mouth remained satisfyingly agape.
Emilia felt herself smile. “This her?” she said.
Fifteen minutes later, as he hustled her out of the library and into the open air for the first time in weeks, the Invisible Man was still atremble, practically bursting from his bandages like a butterfly from its pupa as he muttered and planned and scurried ahead. He did retain enough focus to order Emilia to turn off her monitor as they left.
But not enough to check whether she’d turned off the computer itself. Which she hadn’t. Just in case the next user—if there was one—actually turned on this machine before the library closed down for good, actually looked at what was on the screen before x-ing out of it, and somehow recognized her little breadcrumb trail—or, single breadcrumb—for what it was.