“I say these things to you,” he said. “just as I said them to the police. I asked them about this, and they all get the same weird smile on their faces. I ask, who are these guys, and they say, these guys? They’re dead, that’s who they are. I say no, who are they, and the cop’ll say, who cares? Old Kevin Swanson took care of that problem for us. They smile and they change the subject. It’s like…”
He trailed off, shaking his head. But I finished for him.
“Some kind of Jedi mind trick,” I said. “Like they’ve all been brainwashed. Questions they should be asking… they’re not.”
“Precisely.”
I closed the file folder and set it down atop the mess on my desk. I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes. What is going on, I asked the backs of my eyelids. They didn’t answer me, so I opened them again and looked at Craig.
“Why is nobody concerned about this?”
He shrugged and shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. But, you know, when you sit here and think about it… really, who does care? These guys got what they deserved. Who cares where they came from? Who cares who they were?”
I pursed my lips, staring down at the manila folder.
“I do,” I said.
18.
The rising body count didn’t bother Allie. We made love that night, but of course I couldn’t come. After twenty minutes, Allie asked me, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I gasped, sweat dribbling down my face.
“It’s staring to hurt.”
Crazily enough, it started hurting me, too. My hip muscles rumbled with sedition. On the verge of revolt, they threatened to cramp up on me at any second. But I wouldn’t give up. I’d never given up before, and I wouldn’t give up now. What did some of those posters say?
Determination. Perseverance.
I began flipping through the Rolodex of pornographic images in my brain. I found the one from our first night in this house, down in the kitchen amidst the boxes and newspapers and dishes that hadn’t found their home yet—gourmet kitchens, I discovered that night, were like Spanish Fly for upper-class white women. I envisioned Allie bent over the kitchen table, her hair falling in a golden brown waterfall over her shoulders, her pajama bottoms puddled around her ankles and…
She put her lips up to my ear and whispered, “Come on.”
…the Rolodex began to flip on its own. It buzzed like a playing card in the spokes of my bicycle when I was a little boy, and when it stopped flipping it came to rest on an entirely different image. Pinnix. Or Ramseur.
Or a bald man. I really couldn’t tell.
Rough hands on her hips, hairy legs slapping against the backs of her thighs. Her gasps of pain. The pool table, not the kitchen table, and a belt buckle rattled on the basement’s cement floor, metal scraping the concrete as the table itself groaned in rhythm with every violent thrust.
A face. Smiling, laughing, because this was funny to him.
Right then, I knew: this was one of my nightmares.
Say it, you bitch.
And she did, only her voice shook and broke.
Fuck me harder, she whimpered.
My legs seized up and my erection vanished. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Kevin? Are you okay? Kevin!”
I was most certainly not okay. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever being this not okay in my life. I rolled off abruptly and lay beside her, gasping for air. “I’m fine.”
“Are you having chest pains?”
Where in the hell had that image come from?
“No chest pains,” I said, laying my forearm across my eyes. “I just… I don’t know. I think all this shit’s been getting to me.”
The furnace kicked on and added its low hum to the whoosh of the ceiling fan. Somewhere down the hall, the pressure change forced a door closed and pulled another one open. I wiped sweat from my face and rolled over on my side to look at her. Large brown eyes blinked at me in the dark. A blue satin sheet followed the rise of her body as it crested at her hip and plunged into the trough of her waist.
“I thought you girls liked a guy who could go forever,” I said.
“Oh, that’s great in theory.” She sat up and hunted on the floor for her underwear. When she couldn’t find it, she rose and walked naked to the bureau, where she fished out a pair of bikini underpants and slipped them on. I stared at her from the bed, taking in every flex of smooth muscle. Only the Caesarean scar on her flat belly anchored her image in reality. “Not so great in execution. Like many things.”
She climbed back into bed and wrapped her arms around me, burying her face in my chest. I buried mine in turn in her hair. I took long ki breaths in which I inhaled deep lungfuls of her scent and tried to forget those claws digging into her hips.
The enemy overran my perimeter, I thought, and he’s still here.
No, he’s not, Bobby replied. That’s just your fucked-up mind playing sick tricks on you.
“What are you thinking about?”
I didn’t answer her for a long time.
“I think I remember one of the dreams,” I said finally. “One of the bad ones.”
“Want to talk about it?”
I pondered that. Then I said, “Not particularly. It involves you… and another man.”
I paused. She said nothing.
“You weren’t exactly a willing participant,” I added. “That’s what I’m carrying away from it, anyway. When you started talking dirty to me there, it was like a switch flipped and suddenly, there it is.”
I sat up, shaking my head and holding it in my hands.
Be a man, Bobby admonished, and handle your own shit.
Handle my own shit. Yeah. I’d been doing a great job of that.
“I talked to Craig today,” I said, changing the subject. “About the mugger. And Pinnix and Ramseur.”
She waited.
“Nobody knows who they are,” I said. “Three guys, no positive ID. After talking to Craig, I’m not even sure the first two were named Pinnix and Ramseur at all. According to him, nobody knows where those names came from.”
Ki breath.
“The guy on the phone,” I said, “the one I call the Bald Man, he threatened me. That guy I stabbed said his name, he said Bald Man right before he died. I’ve got this idea that… I don’t know… maybe the Bald Man made him.”
“Made him?” She asked. “Like a golem?”
“What’s a golem?”
“An old, old Jewish folk tale,” she answered, rolling away from me and propping herself up on one elbow. “A creature made from mud, or dust, or dirt, or whatever. It’s supposed to be a man, but it isn’t a man because God didn’t make it—someone trying to be like God made it, so of course it falls short. Men create golems to do their bidding. Sometimes they’re bad.”
That picture of the Bald Man in his dark room again. Conjuring. Creating. Making.
My mouth went dry. Golems; holy shit, that was it. Motherfucker was sending golems after me. The idea clicked so loudly that I almost jumped.
“Pinnix and Ramseur and this asshole who tried to mug me are… golems.”
“Probably not. Golems can’t talk.”
She paused, studying me.
“You know I’m kidding, right?”
I didn’t answer.
“The mugging was a coincidence,” she said. “The fact that nobody knows who these guys are means nothing, because when you exist on the periphery of society not only does nobody know who you are, but nobody cares who you are. And as for this little vision of yours, these dreams, they’re nothing more than a product of the anxiety you’re feeling over your perceived inability to protect me from harm. It’s completely natural.”