Sinner

  I climbed the stairs to my apartment and locked the door behind me. My fingers were starting to get cold. Everything in me felt shaky.

  It took no effort at all to conjure my parents’ faces. They probably thought I hated them.

  I didn’t hate them. I just never wanted to see them again. It wasn’t the same thing.

  My phone buzzed a message. Standing in the tiny dark living room, I looked at it. Jeremy: ?

  I wanted there to be a text from Isabel, but there wasn’t.

  I had told her the truth. I had run from my past, and where had it gotten me?

  The same place I’d started.

  Trust you?

  I didn’t know how to do this with my parents and without Isabel.

  I didn’t know why to do this with my parents and without Isabel.

  I felt the room cameras on me, so I crossed the floor to the bathroom and closed the door behind me. I fisted my hands. Then I unfisted them and locked the door. Someone had taken the dismantled bedroom camera out of the sink. It was hard to remember caring about it.

  There was something wrong with me.

  The human body doesn’t want to get hurt. We’re programmed to feel squeamish at the sight of blood. Pain is a careful orchestration of chemical processes so that we keep our body alive. Studies have shown that people born with congenital analgesia — the inability to feel pain — bite off the tips of their tongues and scratch holes in their eyes and break bones. We are a wonder of checks and balances to keep on running.

  The human body doesn’t want to get hurt.

  There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I didn’t care. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I wanted it.

  We fear death; we fear the void; we scrabble to keep our pulses.

  I was the void.

  What are you afraid of? Nothing.

  You are not doing this you are not doing this you are not doing this

  But my eyes were already clawing over the bathroom for ways out.

  Trust you?

  I wasn’t meant to live, probably. This was why I was wired this way. Biology formed me and then took a look and wondered what the hell it was thinking and put in a mental fail-safe.

  In case of emergency pull cord.

  I was crouching by the wall, breathing into my hands. Victor had told me once that he’d never considered suicide, not even for a second, not even at his darkest moments. It’s the only life we have, he’d said.

  Even when I was happy, I felt like I was always looking for the edges on life. The seams.

  I was so perfectly born to die.

  I looked at the cord for the bathroom blinds.

  This is too much this is too big for what has happened you need to stop

  I thought about the joy of recording the track earlier that day. I tried to drag it back to myself, but it was an academic exercise. Every chemical switch inside me was thrown to get out get out get out, and happiness wasn’t even possible.

  I cupped my hands over my ears, like the gesture of the headphones on them, and I listened in my mind to the song that I’d made, something that hadn’t existed this morning.

  My parents’ faces.

  I stood up.

  I needed to … not feel. Just for a few minutes.

  That would be all I was going to get anyway.

  Wolf.

  Clean, unbreakable, perfect. I had been all that, and here we were.

  I went into the bedroom to get the things I’d need to trigger the shift. Not just a shift, but a wild shift, a howling shift, a shift that would break me. Not all of my wolf experiments had led me to easy places. I didn’t want to go to an easy place now. The small, logical part of me thought the meticulous process would help. Remind me of all the reasons to stay human. Give me a chance to calm down. Remind me of all of the other ways I had learned to take this feeling down inside me.

  But it only seemed to feed it. Even though I was moving quite slowly and methodically, time pushed and brushed past me, both the past and the future. With no effort at all, I summoned the memories of doing this, or something like it, countless times before.

  Wolf.

  My mind skirted to Sam back in Minnesota, who so hated the wolf. I could hear his voice telling me how I was scrubbing out everything about me, doing this. I was wasting everything good about me. How hateful I was to throw it all away. Victor had died as a wolf, longing to be a human, and I was giving it away for nothing.

  I told myself that, and I told myself that again.

  But this was a prerecorded session. I already knew how it ended.

  Even though I was alone in the bathroom, it felt like there was someone or something else in there with me. A dark presence hovering in the corner, floating up by the ceiling. Feeding the dark inside me, or feeding off the dark inside me. All of us users and used.

  I turned on the shower, and then I sat on the edge of the toilet, syringe in one hand, phone in the other. I dialed Isabel’s number. I didn’t know what I was going to say if she picked up.

  I knew she wasn’t picking up anyway.

  Trust you?

  It rang through to voicemail. For a few minutes, I watched the shower pour gallons of water down the drain. I thought about how outside it was a desert. Then I stabbed the needle into myself.

  Pain reminded me it was working.

  I leaned my forehead on the wall and waited for it to change me or kill me, and I didn’t really care which. I did care which. I hoped it did both.

  The thing I’d put in my veins scrabbled through my bloodstream to my brain. When it got there, it clawed and beat and gnawed at my hypothalamus, screaming the same message over and over:

  Wolf

  Wolf

  Wolf

  Pain snatched my thoughts away. My mind was a chemical fire, burning itself out. I crashed to the tile, shaking and sweating and retching. My thoughts immolated.

  And then

  It was light. Shining overhead, reflected in the ever-shifting, never-growing puddle. It was sound. Hissing water splattering the ground, soft and continuous. Scent: acid and fruit, sweet and rotten.

  Wolf.

  I drove.

  Part of me wanted to keep driving for the rest of my life. Part of me wanted to go to Cole.

  I didn’t know which was worse.

  In the end, I found myself way up the coast, past Malibu. The road here was dark and snaky, on one side the rocky coastline and the wild sea and on the other the steep, scrubby mountain cliffs. The palm trees were gone, the people, the houses. As I drove up a random canyon road, I felt like I was driving straight up into the black night sky, or into the black night ocean. I had no idea what time it was. It was the end of the world.

  I finally parked the SUV at one of the scenic pullovers. Down below, the crash of the surf made an uneven white line parallel to the shore. Everything else was dark.

  I got out. Outside, the air was freezing. My knees were shaking, and so were my hands. I stood there with my arms wrapped around myself for a long minute, feeling myself tremble and wondering if an emotional shock reaction was possible when you had no emotions.

  Probably it was time to admit to myself that I had emotions, and they’d betrayed me.

  Then I opened up the back of the SUV, got out the tire iron, and closed the hatch again. I thought of that sick feeling in my stomach when I’d first seen Cole at the party. It was exactly the same, in retrospect, as the feeling that had crept inside me when my father’s voice had gotten strange earlier. When I’d known he was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

  I looked at the moon-white surface of the SUV. I tightened my grip on the tire iron.

  And then I beat the hell out of the SUV.

  The first dent wasn’t the best. There wasn’t anything surprising about swinging a tire iron at a vehicle and leaving a dent. That’s what happens when you hit something metal with something else metal.

  But the second hit. That was the one that
sent a rush of feeling through me. It surprised me. I hadn’t known there was going to be a second swing until it happened, or a third, or a fourth. Then I realized I was never going to stop hitting this car. I smashed the doors and the hood, and I cracked the big plastic safety bumpers.

  There was nothing in my head except for the knowledge that I had to drive this thing tomorrow, so I didn’t smash out the windows or the headlights or anything that might keep it off the road. I didn’t want it broken.

  I wanted it ugly.

  The tire iron dug down through the white paint, straight to the bare metal. Its guts were dull and utilitarian under all the gloss.

  Finally, when my palm was hot from the effort of clutching the tire iron, I realized how tired I was.

  I felt empty. Like I didn’t give a damn.

  Which meant I was ready to go back home.

  “Mr. St. Clair?”

  I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew where I was. Well, I knew the kind of place I was. I recognized the feel of tile on my skin and the smell of bleach millimeters from my nose. The grit between my hipbone and the floor. I was on a bathroom floor. My ears hissed.

  “Cole? Do you mind if I come in?”

  It took me a moment longer to realize which bathroom in particular it was. I had to backtrack, narrowing my thoughts. Earth. North America. U.S. California. Los Angeles. Venice. Apartment. Hell.

  “Cole?” The voice seemed to consider. “I’m coming in.”

  Over the hiss of my ears, I heard a doorknob jiggle. I opened my eyes, barely. The action took a lot of thought and seemed unimportant. The door was still closed. I wondered if I’d imagined the voice. I wondered if I’d imagined my own body. As difficult as the concept of opening my eyes had been, the idea of moving any of the rest of me was impossible. My mouth was the driest part of me, like my face had climbed in and coated it.

  The door jumped. I was too dead to flinch.

  It jumped again.

  Then it burst open, its progress halted by my legs. A pair of men’s black shoes stepped in front of me, accompanied by the scent of coffee. They were not new, but they were very clean.

  The door shoved shut. The shoes were still in front of me.

  I closed my eyes. I heard a rustle, then felt someone push fingers into my wrist, felt my breath hitting something close. A hand, checking for respirations. I could smell aftershave.

  Leon let out a relieved sigh.

  A moment later, the hiss stopped. It had never been my ears. It had always been the shower. I heard Leon’s shoes squelching on the damp floor.

  “Can you sit up?” he asked me. Then, without waiting for my reply, he answered, “Let’s do that.”

  A towel wrapped around me and then my armpits jerked and then, just like that, I was painfully dragged and propped into the corner by the sink.

  I closed my eyes again.

  In the filmy background, I heard Leon moving and running water in the sink and stepping back and forth. He put a cup to my lips and carefully tipped. There was a kind pause as I sputtered and breathed the liquid instead of swallowing it, and then he gave me some more. I felt more alive at once.

  I said, “What is that? What are you giving me?”

  “It’s water,” Leon replied. “You were lying in it, but you weren’t drinking it.”

  “How did you get here?” I asked. My voice sounded like paper looked. “Are you real?”

  “You weren’t picking up your phone,” Leon replied. “And I thought you might be in trouble…. I saw the episode.”

  “It’s up already?”

  He gave me a funny look. “It’s been up two days.”

  I blew out my breath. It smelled pretty bad. “Oh.”

  Leon retrieved a disposable coffee cup from the other room. He handed it to me, watching me closely to make sure I wasn’t going to drop it. I sipped it as he dropped another towel onto the tile and began to push it around with his feet to mop up some of the water and blood.

  “This is sweet,” I said. It wasn’t even coffee. It was sugar marinated in coffee. “Just how I like it.”

  Leon shrugged. “Kids these days.”

  Suddenly, I saw him in sharp focus, either because the phrase reminded me of when he’d brought me the energy drink in the studio, or because my system was prodded to life by the water in my dry mouth or the sugar in the coffee. Leon was dressed for work in his neat suit and clean black shoes. Morning sun through the bathroom window lit his impeccable form as he used a foot to push a towel around this filthy floor.

  I was so grossly ashamed.

  “Don’t —” I said. “Don’t do that. I’ll get it. God.”

  Leon stopped. He put his hands in the pockets of his slacks.

  “This is disgusting,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I was talking about the floor or me or Leon seeing me like this. “This is not — not the side of me I wanted you to see, friend. This is not the grand future I had planned for our relationship.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, hands still in pockets. “Things don’t always go like planned.”

  “They do for me.”

  “So you must have planned this, then.” He said it gently.

  I gulped the last of the coffee. Both my stomach and my heart stung. “I’ve lost all my credibility. I’ll never be able to convince you to quit your job now.”

  Leon’s eyes smiled, even though his mouth didn’t. “Was that the idea?”

  “That was the idea. Joy and happiness for you, Leon, in this sunlit paradise.”

  He took his phone from his pocket and stepped over the towel on the floor. Crouching beside me, he held his hand out for the empty coffee cup. He traded me for his phone.

  “What am I doing?” I asked him.

  “Looking.”

  I looked. He’d opened it to his photo gallery. At the top was a photo of me, carefree and joyful, flipping arrogant devil horns at him. There was the photo we took at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the sky blazing behind crooked palm trees. The photo of us on the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, the night I’d gone out with him after Isabel had left my apartment.

  Those photos I’d expected. I didn’t expect the others. There were photos of surfers running out to the water. People knotted in front of clubs. A crazy, camel-shaped planter with palm trees jutting from it. A fiery sky behind the L.A. skyline. A neon sign that said FROLIC ROOM. A peacock peering from behind a wall. A man in blue underwear running down the sidewalk. David Bowie’s star on the Walk of Fame. A pagoda in Koreatown. Bubbly, amiable graffiti on the side of an old van. A self-portrait of himself reflected in the side of his car, smiling, even though you could see that he was alone.

  He’d done what I’d said. He’d become a tourist in his own city.

  “It wasn’t about the job,” he told me. “It was just about me.” After a pause, he asked, “Why did you run away from your parents?”

  I closed my eyes. I could so clearly remember the pair of them in front of the Mustang, and it still killed me. “Because I can’t look at them.” There was a long pause, and he didn’t fill it. “I thought I was going to end up like them, back when I lived in New York. I thought that was what a grown-up looked like. I can’t take that.”

  “Couldn’t.”

  I opened my eyes. “What?”

  “Couldn’t, not can’t. Because you’re not like them, right? You aren’t afraid of becoming that now.”

  But I sort of was. It wasn’t that I was afraid of becoming them — it was more that I was afraid of becoming the Cole that I had been when I’d lived with them. The Cole who was so tired of the world. The me who realized there was no point to being here, where here meant life.

  My stomach rumbled loud enough that we both heard it.

  “I’m starving,” I said.

  Leon said, “You should get breakfast with your parents.”

  “I don’t know how to talk to them.”

  He took his phone from me and straightened. “Like you’re talking to me. But m
aybe with some pants on.”

  I went to .blush. I did my job. I sold a lot of leggings. Sierra reminded me of her upcoming party.

  I went to class. I did my clinicals. I rolled over a lot of old people and cleaned up a lot of soiled beds.

  I went home. My mother made an appointment for my SUV to go to the body shop. My aunt gifted me a bouquet of therapist business cards. I had been in therapy for years, though. Talk was cheap. I wanted both of them to scream at me for my SUV — my father would have. But he wasn’t there.

  Wouldn’t ever be there.

  Cole texted me. Talk?

  I texted back. No.

  He texted back. Sex?

  I texted back. No.

  He texted. Anything?

  I didn’t reply. He didn’t text again.

  Rinse and repeat. Job. Class. Home. Job. Class. Home.

  I didn’t text Cole, but I kept updating Virtual Cole. I’d have to see him in order to give his phone back, and I didn’t think I could survive that. And I didn’t have it in me to screw him over by holding his Internet presence hostage. And anyway, updating Virtual Cole was the only thing that I had to remind me that life had ever changed at all.

  I called Grace right before I went into the diner. Actually, I called Sam, but Grace answered his phone.

  “It’s the end,” I said. “I’m going to breakfast with my parents.”

  “I had the worst dream about you last night,” Grace mused.

  “Did I go around L.A. biting people? Because that already happened.”

  “No,” she replied. “You came home.”

  I hadn’t noticed until just that moment that my friendly neighborhood camera crew was sitting on the curb right around the corner. That meant my parents were already here.

  I was not convinced I could do this, no matter what Leon said. The weather condition of my heart was murk.

  Grace had been talking. She was still talking. She finished, “That’s really all there is.”

  “Any advice?”

  “Cole, I was just giving you advice.”

  “Say it again. The summary version. The abstract.”

  “Sam just told me to tell you that the most important thing is to not do what you did to them on the episode.”