Lost Girls

chapter 18

I can't work. Time I should have spent organizing the mass of Crown evidence has instead been invested in taking longer and longer night walks around town with fallen leaves scuttling behind me on the cracked streets. Staring out the tall window of the honeymoon suite at the locals lurching about or killing time in the cool drizzle that threatens to extinguish their cigarettes. Or, more often than anything else, gazing up at the pictures of Krystal and Ashley, their eyes staring back at me in what I've come to take as some kind of impossible effort toward communication. Trying to say something to the one guy in town who is the least interested in having them say anything at all unless under circumstances of their being alive and well, returning on the Greyhound from touring with whatever band it's important for kids to tour with these days or a failed attempt at finding waitressing jobs on the West Coast.

And there are other concerns. While I know the last thing mild paranoia and bad work habits need is the continued use of a drug known for its side effects of mild paranoia and bad work habits, I can't stop myself from setting new personal records for daily coke intake. I've already gone through more than half the thermos that was supposed to last until Christmas and it's not even Halloween yet. Even though I live on my own in the city and rarely seek the company of others, somehow up here the isolation is more concentrated, as though something imposed from the outside. The alternative relief of rye-and-gingers and barstool companionship in one of the local taverns has been ruled out. The Lord Byron has given me the creeps since my first and only visit, and the couple other places I've walked by at night just seem too sad to be entered.

But it's all worse the longer I go without a line. Step over to the bedside table and cut a couple fat ones. There. No excuses now.

Pull the chair in close, straighten the nearest police report before me and stare down hard at the words. First one, then the other, string them together. Remember reading, Barth? Maybe it would be easier if there weren't such a distracting contrast between the black print and white page. I push the lamp to the far edge of the desk. Darker now, but no clearer, the paragraphs blotching together in the middle, glistening blobs spreading out to steal whole chunks from sentences. Touch one and my finger comes back slick with red grease.

Fucking nosebleed. Dripping out fast over the pages and now on my shirt. All at once I'm pushing the chair back, wiping hands across my lips and smearing them over the back of my pants. It comes with the territory: the exploding vessels, the burned-out septum. But this is an especially bad one. A geyser of thin stickiness spilling liquid copper down the back of my throat.

In the bathroom slapping at the toilet roll, whole yards spinning off onto the floor, scrambling it into a loose ball and pushing it against my face. Wad after wad thrown into the sink and the whole time I'm ignoring the voice in my head--apply pressure--because I'm not exactly sure what it means. But after a time just mopping seems to do the trick, or slows it down, anyway, and I roll up a couple tight cigarillos of paper and cork them in each nostril where they're soon glued in place.

Back to work, Barth, old boy.

But it's still no good. After five minutes I stand again and walk to the window to look out over the empty intersection below. It's late, though not that late, last call at the bars only half an hour ago (an occasion marked by a collection of howls and slurred threats echoing down the street). There's nothing to look at now but the absurd changing of the traffic light, directing movement that doesn't exist. Press my forehead against the cool glass. Exhale. Leave stains.

Then I see something.

A glimpse of movement across the street, two figures stepping into the circle of streetlight. Girls in drab cotton dresses, once white with fancy lace at the seams but now stained ivory, the lace in need of restitching. Around each of their waists a tattered blue ribbon tied in a partly loosened knot. Standing in front of the old Bank of Commerce, a cold-faced limestone vault with Corinthian pillars out front half-dissolved from acid rain. Eyes raised to where I stand at the window. One light haired and the other dark, the light one snug in her dress and the dark one shrunken inside hers.

''Hey!''

I knock on the window harder than I need to, rattling the loose glass in its frame, but they don't move.

''HEY! HEY!''

They give no sign that they hear me aside from both of their arms rotating at the shoulders in a steady, almost mechanical movement. Except these girls are real. White skin shining out from beneath and through their hair, the caps of their knees distinctly visible just under the hems of their dresses. They've got to be freezing their asses off, no jackets on a night like this, as dry an evening as Murdoch's seen in the past two weeks but probably the coldest yet, the air having taken a final turn toward winter. Serves them goddamn right if their hands fall off.

''Who are you?'' I shout through the glass, breath curling back into my face.

Then the answer arrives on its own: a couple of the doughnut-shop girls trying to mess with me. Went out and blew twenty bucks on a couple thrift-shop dresses, waited in the dark until I came to the window so they could do this little Ash and Krys memorial freak show in my honor. Apparently the crank calls weren't entertainment enough.

So now I'm pulling open the bedroom door, pounding down the stairs without thinking to grab my coat. When I'm out the front door my first plan is to run straight at them but I don't, not right away, just squint across the street to where they stand. From here I can better see their too-white faces, thick with pasty foundation, eyes blotted out with mascara. It's the Goth look. Big with certain girls of that age, all Anne Rice novels and fishnet stockings. Punk witches cooking up spells for the bad guy's lawyer.

''I know who you are, you know!'' I call across at them. ''I can get your numbers. One call, and believe me, you're both in deep shit.''

They keep waving. Cast my eyes over them again and notice they wear no shoes. The tiny pink crescent moons of their toenails standing out like polished stones.

''You're doing a very stupid thing here, ladies.'' I step out into the street. ''There are charges for this.''

Something aside from makeup shrouds the details of their faces, an angle of light that effects a veil of shadow. I keep my eyes on them and step forward. Their mouths enlarging as I approach, borders marked by gummy lipstick.

''You think this is funny? I don't think it's fucking funny. I think you're some very sad hick bitches is what I think.''

Take a step across the yellow line at the street's midpoint and follow it with another. Close enough to see their mouths open. Strings of spit caught between their lips. Close enough to hear--

HHRRROOOONNKK!!!

A pickup truck barreling through the intersection directly to my left, weaving into the wrong lane without slowing, its huge front grille widening like the mouth of a deep-water fish. No headlights on, just a green glow from the dashboard illuminating a blank-faced, ball-capped driver with Abe Lincoln beard. There's time to catch all of this, to understand that in the next second it will meet the same place where I stand, but not time to move.

Eyes closed, but I can still see the peeling stick-on racing stripe and jagged rust holes around the truck's wheels as it blows past my face. Knocks me down with the suction of air it creates in its wake, the back of my head smacking neatly against the pavement on the way down. A white flash across my eyes followed by blue pinprick static. A million strings of pain spun out from rear molars, sinuses, top of the spine.

By the time I get back to my feet the truck is lurching around the courthouse corner at the far end of the street, giving me a double blast on its horn as it goes.

''Homicidal inbred!'' I shout into the empty street. Then I see that the street is empty.

The black-eyed girls in ragged dresses and bare feet are gone.