The Home Made Mask Page 2

  She offered sweat pants, a loose long-sleeved tshirt and a pair of flip flops. She folded them carefully and set them on the ground as though she was trying to entice a stray dog with a pile of hamburger. The black cords didn’t reappear; Carly must have imagined them. The woman—who introduced herself as Marie—held the blanket while Carly changed. Her husband John kept his distance. No other cars passed by.

  “Let us take you somewhere,” Marie said. “Or when we get out of these hills we can make a call. Do you want to speak to the police?”

  Well, Carly had just left a dead body back on that trail. Who was ever going to find it if she didn’t speak up? But the idea of talking to cops made her feel exhausted. It had all been a stupid prank anyway, right? Was she going to send the cops down that trail in the middle of the day to find a fake version of her? “I don’t need the police. It was… It was just a stupid prank.”

  “A prank?” Marie clenched her calloused hands. “Sweet Jesus be praised we found you, because a prank like this in the middle of the desert could get a body killed. It’s going to be over a hundred degrees today, if it isn’t already.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” Carly interrupted. “I think everything just went wrong. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

  Carly thought Marie was about to call her honey but she stopped herself. “If that’s what you want we won’t make a big deal. I hope you don’t mind that I’m fuming anyway. Will you let us take you home?”

  A battered Dodge Sprinter passed them on the road. The driver was a white guy—good-looking with an icy expression and a little knife scar on his cheek—and he glanced at her briefly. The way he seemed to size her up in one chilly glance gave her goosebumps. She did not want to be alone on the road if that guy passed again.

  “Yes, please,” Carly said, although she was ashamed that she couldn’t even pitch in for gas. All she had was her phone and an empty bank account. With her few shifts at the bakery, she could barely cover her rent.

  Once back in her little studio apartment, she stripped down, threw out the borrowed clothes, and gave herself a scalding hot shower. She had no idea what the greasy, ashy grit on her skin was, but she lathered and scrubbed and then did it again. In between, she let the hot water run into her mouth and down her throat. August in the desert makes people thirsty, obviously. Finally, she felt clean enough to turn off the water, and to talk herself out of shaving her head or any of her other parts. The Fernandez’s, the building’s owners, would have been scandalized to discover she’d used so much water, but it was still the middle of the day and they were not here.

  Her phone rang. For a moment, the old-fashioned ringtone she liked so much made her skin crawl just like the web around Marie and her family, but god, it was her phone. She had to answer it.

  It was Shelly, her best friend, and her first words were: “So? How was your date?”

  For the first time that day, Carly let herself break down and cry.

  * * *

  The next-door neighbors’ dog was better than a doorbell. Anytime one of her friends came up the walk, it would bark loud and long, straining at its canvas leash.

  So Carly had ample warning when her friends arrived: Shelly was first, with a big box of cheap red wine, followed by Karen and Ilse, who had good jobs at a casino and showed up with an armload of Indian food. Then Esperanza arrived, late as always, with another bottle of wine that was much too fancy to drink in the middle of the day.

  Carly told the story of the prank several times, leaving out only the switch in clothes, because she wasn’t sure how that part made sense, and if the others heard it they would be sure she’d been roofied or something and god, what if she had been?

  She glanced at the dish on the end table. A folded piece of paper with Marie and John’s phone number lay on it. English names for non-English Americans. If Carly changed her mind and wanted to call the cops, Marie would be happy—happy, she’d said—to support her story.

  Her friends could. Not. Believe. David had pulled that shit. They called him a dickhead, a dillweed, a creep, a coward, an asshole, a walking glory hole, a human fart, a waste of skin, a shitheel, a pissant, a punk bitch, a sad little limp dick shit streak, a blight on the universe, a germ, a slime mold, a dogfucker, an over-cooked noodle, a flesh-eating bacteria with legs, a turd-gobbling moron, a vat of toxic waste, and much, much more.

  It started as support for Carly, but their outrage took on a life of its own. Carly, for her part, stared into her bowl of Roghan Josh and let them do their thing.

  “Sweetie, are you okay?”

  It was Shel who asked. Shelly, who was practically a sister and who had a huge circle of friends and family that she looked after. Never alone, never silent, Shelly reached out to person after person to connect with them. As soon as she’d heard Carly start crying, she’d been on her way over like that, moving faster than even an ambulance would. But Carly couldn’t look at her.

  The web had returned, black cords springing out from each of her friends, some connecting each other right here in the apartment and some passing through the walls like ghosts. Shelly was the worst of all. She bristled with dark, thick, wet connections, like an overused pin cushion.

  Even worse, Carly had them, too. Not as many as her friends, but they were there, visible but untouchable. She and her friends were tied together by these repulsive… She shuddered to think of it.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, she suddenly realized that one of the black strands anchored in her stomach led though the wall, across the city to David. She knew it was true as if his name was written on it. God, bad enough that she was attached this way to her friends, but to that shitstain David, too?

  “Carly?” Shel asked, trying to break through her silence. Carly shut her eyes tightly, then rubbed the heels of her hands against the until she saw spots. When she opened them again, the cords were gone.

  This was no hallucination. Something had happened to her. She had been changed.

  Carly stood from her chair so suddenly the Roghan Josh spilled out of her lap onto the carpet. Her friends gasped, but she’d already turned her back and yanked open her cutlery drawer. There wasn’t room for much in a studio apartment, but she couldn’t do without a good sharp knife. She yanked it from the bottom of the drawer, a yard-sale special—cheap metal, cheaper plastic handle—but it was nine inches long and sharp as hell.

  Her friends gaped at her as though she might use it on them.

  “I have to see David.” With that, she left, marching out into the scorching day.

  As she descended the creaking wooden steps that connected her apartment to the outside world—the compulsion to jump up and down on one until it broke was tremendous—she could hear her friends calling her name and scrambling to come after her. Let them come for now, dragged along behind by those invisible cords.

  The yellow mutt next door barked at her, furious and terrified at once. The neighbor’s house had just barely been grandfathered in by city ordinance, so he had been allowed to keep his little front lawn. It was a massive waste of water, but he thought green grass was part of his American dream, so he chained his dog on it in all temperatures and slapped the poor little pup when his piss made a bare spot.

  For the first time in her life, Carly was not afraid of the dog. She stalked toward it, knife in hand, and as she came within a few feet, its ears went flat, its tail curled between its legs, and it cringed.

  Before she could think about what she wanted to do with the knife, she leaned down and sawed through the mutt’s thick canvas leash. She would have cut the collar but it was made of metal and was locked with a key. The canvas split in hardly any time at all—how sharp was this knife that it could cut so quickly?—but once the dog was free, it fled up the street as fast as its legs would take it.

  She threw the knife onto the bark mulch at the base of the Fernandez’s big willow. She’d pick it up again when she came back, maybe.

  Or maybe she would never come back. Maybe she would walk away from all of this and run off to a cabin in the Yukon. She could find someplace near a river so she could drink whenever she wanted. For the rest of the time, she could sleep like the dead.

  Her friends stood close together at the bottom of the stairs, staring at her like frightened prairie dogs. Shelly pushed through them and approached cautiously. “Sweetie? You don’t have a gun, do you?”

  Carly stared at them. The web was invisible now, and she was glad of it, but she needed to figure out how to cut those connections. How do you destroy a figment of your imagination? “No, there’s no gun.”

  Shelly spoke slowly. “You know, it sounds to me as if this prank was played on you and David both. He was all scared, right? And ran away? I mean, it was amazingly shitty of him to ditch you, but it was probably the guy who lived there that arranged it all.”

  Carly stared at her, trying to decide if it mattered who had set up the whole thing with the pretend corpse. Was that even important now? Carly’s main concern was that she was trapped inside a web and she didn’t know how to cut herself free.

  “I just want to talk to him. Thank you for coming over, but… Goodbye.”

  “Carly!” Esperanza stepped forward, standing close to Shelly’s shoulder. “I don’t think you should be alone right now.”

  It occurred to Carly that she was still feeling the effects of a hallucinogen, and that maybe it would be dangerous to get behind the wheel of her car. She looked from the face of one friend after another, remembering the history they shared: The parties in college, the books Karen loaned her, the hours spent at Shelly’s binging entire seasons of television shows, the time she’d made out with Ilse, the four months Esperanza had let her sleep on her couch because her stupid communications degre
e couldn’t get her any kind of job at all. There was a give-and-take between them, a friendship, and once she had valued those relationships above everything in her life.

  Once.

  “I understand,” Carly said. Then she got in her car and drove through the wide streets, through block after block of white houses with terra cotta roofs, to the Whole Foods where David worked.

  His car was right there in the parking lot, so she peeked into the back seat. There was her purse, just sitting on the floor. She tried the doors but they were locked. Fine. She marched out of the burning desert heat into the cool of the grocery store.

  This was where she’d met him two weeks before. Returning from a matinee across town, she’d stopped in for a salad and he’d flirted with her. It was so surprising and fun that she went out of her way to drop in again three times until he asked her for coffee.

  Now she had this connection to him for no reason at all, and she had no idea how to break it. Would she have to kill him? Because she would. If that’s what it took to be free of this horrifying wet vein, she would do that without hesitation.

  Carly stalked around the registers and saw him standing there right behind the deli counter. As she marched toward him, he glanced up and looked at her. His eyes went wide and he turned on his heels. He didn’t run through the double-swinging door into the back of the store, but it was close.

  The customer he’d been helping threw up her hands in exasperation. Carly suddenly had an awful feeling about what she planned to do: the store was packed even in the middle of the afternoon. What would people think of her if she made a scene next to the quinoa salad? If she were a guy, they might take her seriously, but…

  Fuck it.

  “DAVID!” she shouted, making everyone near her jump. “DAVID, YOU GET BACK OUT HERE! DAVID!”

  “Excuse me!” A commanding woman in a green apron rushed toward her, her expression making it clear she was going to take no nonsense. “You can’t just—”

  “David abandoned me in the desert,” Carly interrupted. If they thought she was going to be intimidated, they were wildly wrong. “He left me in the middle of nowhere. I was lucky to find a road and to get a ride home. I could have died out there and David drove off with my purse, stranding me. In case you didn’t know, it is very very August right now.”

  “Okay,” the woman said, still trying to be commanding, “but you can’t just—”

  “DAVID!” Carly shouted. She moved along the counter, looking for an opening or a gate she could go through. “David, you creep! Come out here now with my purse!” She couldn’t talk about the prank or the weird hallucinations he’d given her somehow, not in front of these strangers… Shit! The refrigerated counter was an unbroken barrier. There was no way to follow him into the back.

  “Okay!” the woman said. “Okay, you stop that or I’m going to call the police. Do you understand? I sympathize, honey, but you can’t keep on like this. Now, I will go back there and talk to him. I’m sure he’ll be willing to come out here and straighten things out in a quiet, civilized manner. Yes?”

  She stared at Carly, waiting for her to agree. “Yes. Fine.” The woman lumbered through the swinging door that David had fled through.

  Silence. Carly folded her arms across her chest—a habit she’d broken when she started college, she’d thought—so she forced herself to hold her hands at her sides. Almost everyone around the counter was carefully not looking at her. People who weren’t near the counter, especially the cashiers, craned their necks at her. Even the little red-haired homeless woman loitering near the cafe tables glared at her as though she was thinking of murder.

  The last employee behind the counter, a willowy older woman with black-dyed hair, turned to the customer she was helping and said: “Did you want a full sixteen ounces or…?”

  Just like that, the world started up again. Customers began chatting on their phones or milling around the glass case looking at the pastries, salads and sandwiches inside. Only occasionally did they glance warily in her direction.

  Carly felt a sudden rush of anger at all of them, not just because they were judging her but because they were involving themselves in her life. Did it make sense for them to be thinking about her when she’d done nothing more than raise her voice in the grocery store? Seriously. What if all that thinking created another revolting black strand?

  The little homeless woman was still staring at her as though she could read Carly’s thoughts. She was creepy, dirty, and sort of androgynous in an unfashionable way. Behind her were a half-dozen nobodies sitting at little round tables tapping at their laptops.

  Carly had a sudden vision of them on the internet, their machines all connected to a modem set high on a column as though by faint silver clouds. Just the thought of it was like a knife twisting in her guts. All that text and image, all moving from one person to another like greasy whispers. She could suddenly see machine connections all around her—bluetooth, phone signals, flowing electricity—pressing against her like a crowd on an elevator—

  “Carly? Miss, are you Carly?”

  The vision disappeared like a popped soap bubble. The woman had emerged from the back. Carly met her the end of the counter where they could talk in low voices without being heard. “I’m Carly, yes.”

  “Okay,” the woman said, her voice low. “David… he said some crazy things.”

  Of course he did. He was dumb enough to think people would believe him just because. “Like what?”

  “Crazy things. He also said he called the police on you. And he quit.”

  “What do you mean he quit?”

  “He told me he’d call with an address to send his last check and he walked out. Said he was leaving the southwest all together. Said he hates the desert. I’m sorry, honey, but—”

  “What about my purse? My credit cards were in there!”

  “I’d go home and cancel those suckers right away. I’m sorry, honey—”

  Carly pushed away from the counter and started toward the exit. She wanted her purse, absolutely, but it wasn’t the most important thing. What she really cared about was that her connection to David was broken. When that black web reappeared—and she knew it would—she wanted to have cut at least one cord between her and other people. Would driving him out of town do the job? Why was it so hard to know how all this worked? And why was she still so thirsty?

  Carly felt herself seized by an urgent compulsion. She turned sharply toward the cafe, then slid a chair against the column where the modem had been mounted. Hefting a second chair—they were not as heavy as they looked—she leaped onto the first chair and swung, shattering the modem into a hundred plastic shards.

  She leapt down to the plastic tile floor, letting the clatter of the dropped chair drown out the pained moans of the patrons who had just lost their connections. It felt so incredibly good—

  A hand clamped down on her forearm. Carly was so surprised she cried out. It was the homeless woman with the almost-shaved red hair, and god, she smelled like a goat. She also had a grip like a steel handcuff.

  The cafe manager was actually sprinting toward them both when the homeless woman said: “Hold still.” She slapped a block of wood on the fat part of Carly’s upper arm.

  Immediately, black steam and iron-colored sparks blasted out of the design. The charging cafe manager cursed in surprise as he dodged out of the way.

  The homeless woman actually smiled then. It was a bloodthirsty expression, and the secret subconscious part of Carly’s brain that she’d decided she ought to trust urged her to run like hell. She yanked her forearm downward, breaking the little woman’s incredible grip—surprising both of them—then sprinted toward the door, shouting and pointing behind her.

  David’s car was gone from the lot but Carly’s purse was just sitting on the asphalt like a turd he’d left behind. The bakery keys were inside and so was all her cash and credit cards. Fine. He was a creep but he wasn’t a thief.

  The homeless woman hadn’t followed her into the parking lot, and neither had the cafe manager. Probably, they were scared of the desert heat; that homeless woman was too pale to be homeless in Vegas.

  Carly got into her car and roared out of the lot. Someone had almost certainly called the cops and she did not want to have to explain why she’d freaked out in that cafe. She also didn’t want to empty her wallet paying for a new modem. With luck, they’d blame the crazy chick with the toy fireworks. Carly was glad she lived across town; she never had to go in that place again.