Dead Souls Read online

  I don’t look right. Something about my reflection is slightly off, or not so much off as with, like one of those hidden pictures puzzles where you’re supposed to find the image in the negative, not positive, space.

  I turn around, press the button for the fifth floor, try to shake the feeling off. The doors close, slowly, and there’s the familiar rattle as the gears shift before the car starts to rise.

  I take a sideways glance at myself in the mirror. Long dark hair scooped into a ponytail and pulled back from my high forehead—bangs, always an issue—a minimal amount of Saturday makeup, my nose leaning slightly to the left from where my father broke it when I was fourteen. I’d tried to wake him from a drug-induced stupor for lunch money; he thought I was trying to steal his coke, so he “accidentally” pushed me down the stairs. Too stoned to drive, one of his nameless friends took me to the emergency room, dropped me off at the curb with a twenty and a piece of advice: It’ll all work out in the end. It’ll all come out in the wash. You’ll see. I didn’t bother going inside the hospital, just washed the blood off in a bathroom at the 7-Eleven across the street and spent the money on a weekend matinee and popcorn.

  Did I take my Xanax today? I don’t think I did.

  Still, I turn my head, step in for a closer look. No, it’s the cast of my skin and the color in my eyes—they’re wrong, dialed down, as if one of my graphic designers has taken the bar for brightness and moved it twenty points negative. Is it the lighting? It has to be the lighting. Unless it’s another hallucinatory side effect from whatever that asshole Scratch slipped me. I shouldn’t have come; I should have told Tracy I was sick. Christ, if only I had some time, time to think . . .

  I close my eyes and ferociously wish I were back home, in bed. For a moment, I can almost hear the clink of the floorboard heater, and something softens inside me, a gentle lull like a wave receding—

  The elevator chimes, and as the doors open, I register a whoosh of cold, air-conditioned air. Time to get my game face on. I open my eyes, about to step into the hallway, when I feel something strange beneath my feet.

  The cool marble of the elevator floor.

  I look down. I’m barefoot.

  Not possible. So not possible. But when I turn around to see where my shoes could possibly have gone to, I find my Keds and white ankle-high socks just a step behind me, askew. Like they dropped from the ceiling, fell from the sky. Like I wasn’t wearing them just moments ago.

  TRACY HAS THAT LOOK, the one that starts when I tell her a package has to be overnighted to an editor and yes, I know it’s only a half hour before FedEx closes. She sticks out an arm—impeccable shirt, crisp, robin’s-egg blue—and holds the glass office door open for me, helpful and condescending in equal measure.

  How the hell did I take off my shoes and not even know it? Am I having blackouts too?

  “Good morning,” says Tracy, in a tone that means just the opposite. She’s short, with a blunt cut that would look stupid on someone else without the right bone structure. She also has the organizational skills of a general with the polish of a news anchor, and very much wants my job.

  I pretend that I don’t notice the look, the tone, and try to settle my mind in the reality that presents itself. “How’s the group?”

  “Pissy, obviously,” she says. “Not a great introduction for early adopters, and . . .”

  What if Scratch didn’t slip me a roofie but something else instead? LSD? PCP? PCP comes with amnesia, I know that much. Tripping on PCP, my father killed my pet kitten—a stray I stubbornly tried to keep hidden in my bedroom—and afterward, when I presented her small, limp, furry body, he became furious that I would even accuse him of such a thing. Even though I saw him throw her from my bedroom window, pitching her like a baseball.

  “. . . would have started. Did you get my text?”

  Tracy’s been talking this whole time, but I have no idea what she’s said. I ignore the fact that my laces are still mostly untied and flop with every step. “Did you get them food?”

  “Yes. I just said that.” She holds a manila file to her chest possessively, a brief on all the participants that she directly gave to my boss to review—trying to impress, didn’t show me first—but I handpicked them and know their names, e-mail addresses, and short bios by heart.

  Douglas Close and his partner, Ed Rigby—travel-slash-food writers who live nowhere in particular in Asia; Melissa Wright—a photographer specializing in documenting the displaced tribes living in South American slums; Liza Willoughby and her boyfriend, Sam Reed—planned to summer in England three years ago and haven’t spent more than a month in one city since; Alex Fujita—another photographer and a professional urban nomad, his free-living blog on making it in metropolises like Chicago for under twenty dollars a day getting a hundred thousand weekly visitors; and finally an aging hippie, Raven Light, writer for various adventure and outdoor magazines and advocate of turning abandoned city lots into community gardens.

  Vegetarians, every goddamned one of them.

  I bet if I asked my parents, explained my symptoms, they’d be able to tell me exactly what drug he used. For once, they could prove useful.

  “Surveys ready?” I ask, and Tracy nods, because of course they are. We head toward the conference room. She walks just slightly ahead of me.

  Of late, at work I’ve noticed a slightly poisonous vibe pointed at me. Assistants are a tricky thing. You need their help making the sausage, but you have to keep the spice recipe a secret, you have to perpetuate the illusion that the distance created by your title and pay discrepancy is an insurmountable moat, that you always know more, see more. But I have a strong feeling she’s waking up, planting seeds in the break room about how she’d improve everything that I’ve built for this company. And, quite frankly, she’s hungrier for it than I am. Middle management isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Not anymore. You’re the working poor until you get to CEO golden-parachute status, and I really don’t know how many people you have to kill to get there.

  “Got pencils this time?” I say.

  I watch Tracy’s shoulders stiffen. When she was still new, the first time she helped with a focus group, she forgot the pencils. She had to go hunting through desks to find them—not a big deal, but a good dig I save for special occasions.

  “Of course.”

  The truth is, I’m shaky and can’t afford to be, not for a moment around this girl.

  Even though it’s still raining, a good amount of light streams in through the tall, narrow windows. I try to center myself on this, where I am. The office is a wide-open space, not much different really from its department store days when it sold wallpaper, bedroom linens, and children’s clothing. Desks have been placed here and there, with Aeron chairs of course, all the electric and cables tucked under a subfloor tiled with cork, the ceiling left exposed to showcase ductwork and rough, wooden beams. The absence of walls and privacy is supposed to facilitate communication and workflow, but instead even the smallest sound echoes loudly, which makes people feel paranoid about who’s listening to phone calls and directs them to gossip in the bathrooms.

  I hear a muffled snort of laughter.

  Our subjects are in “the fishbowl”—the sole conference room, set up in the center of the space, glass walls on all sides. Wrappers and recycled food containers are littered across a conference table repurposed from barn doors, and Tracy’s right—from their hostile sideways glances, it’s easy to tell they’ve coalesced into a peevish group. Nothing unites people so quickly as something to complain about. On the plus side, the ice has effectively been broken and they’ll be more likely to identify problems, which is a better win at the end of the day for product development.

  I feel the pinpricks of their eyes on me.

  I’m actually in a similar line of work.

  The way Scratch leaned on the bar, relaxed in an almost feline way, like h
e was the apex predator in the savanna.

  I push away the memory—compartmentalizing inconvenient truths is something I’m adept at—and open the glass door, smile.

  “Oh my God,” I start. “Hey, guys, I’m so sorry you’ve been waiting for so long.” All of them are leaning back in their chairs, quietly resentful. “But I got a last-minute call from Oprah’s people—her magazine is considering the Istanbul for their must-have travel gear list. But I got here as soon as I could.”

  Dropping a celebrity name in general always gets the attention of a focus group, and Oprah in particular is a panacea for almost all problems, even here, among hard-core travel enthusiasts. They now relax a little in their chairs, suddenly interested in seeing these packs dusted with O, The Oprah Magazine interest.

  “You’ve all met Tracy, and I’m Fiona Dunn, director of marketing for Sumpter, Inc.”

  I nod to Tracy, and she pulls out a box of Istanbul packs from under the conference table. The box is fresh from the factory, still sealed. Crap, one of us should have opened it to check—if the warehouse got the order wrong, we’re screwed. No, sorry, she should have opened it to check. Now I’m almost hoping it’s wrong, just so I have a new dig to keep her in line.

  “We are so grateful you came today, and we wanted to keep it to a few, select industry experts,” I say, opening my gambit with flattery. “This is a pack for the real urban nomad. What we’re looking for here is your one hundred percent honest opinion on everything. Today, you’re the CEO of Sumpter, Inc. Whatever you say, goes.”

  I can tell by the way I’m holding their attention that they’re now slightly mollified. Everyone loves the concept of holding unconditional power, even if it’s only for a few hours.

  As Tracy slices through the tape, Liza Willoughby gets up, unasked, to collect the trash on the table. She’s the youngest in the group, the daughter of an Exxon executive, daddy issues—in college she chained herself to a fracking rig along with her Planet for the People student organization. After the fallout, she quit school to live in sin with Sam, the son of a plumber, whose main skill set is drumming on buckets for spare change. Her feedback is probably the most important since we’re thinking of launching the Istanbul as our introduction into a low-key luxury line, i.e. luxury that only someone who’s in the know will be able to identify—a way the 1 percent can show off without suffering the accompanying evil looks from the other 99. But no matter how much Liza wants to be bohemian, she’ll never be able to quite scrub the taste for one-thousand-count linens and two-hundred-dollar earbuds. The vintage Tiffany bracelet on her wrist tells the story. Twenty-five grand, easy.

  I help Tracy lay the packs out on the table—thankfully, they’re the right ones—which are accompanied by the waft of fresh plastic and Styrofoam, and now the energy in the room finally starts to shift from interest into something approaching excitement. The design is based on Parisian bicycle messenger packs, Euro-mod, not terribly practical but good if you’re carrying everything you own and need to squeeze into public transportation. The small pack can be zipped onto a larger pack, the Ankara, that still legally fits in an airplane’s overhead compartment bin. Colors range from the bright like framboise, vermillion, and tropical cover to neutrals like samovar, tatami, and chinchilla.

  “Remember, there are no right or wrong answers.” I say. “But we’re very excited about some of the innovative technology we’re launching for the first time. Like the back panel with sleeves for a tablet or a fifteen-inch laptop that unzips to lie flat for security screening.”

  Tracy demonstrates this with a thin laptop.

  “And the shoulder straps and side handle that transform the pack into a horizontal briefcase-style bag.”

  With the efficiency of a game show hostess, Tracy unclips the shoulder straps and refastens them to turn it into a briefcase.

  Maybe I want to be the invisible girl . . . sometimes.

  I suddenly feel disassociated from the room, from the people in it, like I’m standing outside of myself, a ghost-twin observing the slight tremor in my hand, dimly registering the pause as Tracy waits for the next line in my spiel. Like I’m an actor in a play, but watching from the audience too.

  “The large fleece-lined front pocket . . . it . . . it . . .”

  Would you give up your soul? How about it?

  Would I?

  Did I?

  Everyone feels the off note, and Tracy gives me another look now, but this time it’s one of real concern. Four seconds. Four seconds of an awkward pause is all it takes to start breaking group dynamics, to begin the buildup of negative emotions, and let’s face it, this room wasn’t too positive in the first place. There’s no way in hell we’re going to get an accurate read from them. Goddamn, I’ve blown it.

  “Oh shoot . . .” I say, stumbling for words, another excuse. I feel my back pocket for my cell phone, pull it out, pretend to look at something important on the screen. “Sorry, guys. Gotta take this. Oprah’s people again. Tracy, you can manage from here, right?”

  My stomach gives an alarming heave as I race from the room, and I can feel the burn of my lie falling flat. I quicken my pace.

  I don’t want this, I don’t want this, I don’t want this.

  Whatever it happens to be.

  THE FIFTH-FLOOR BATHROOM is really beautiful as far as bathrooms go, with white, scalloped pedestal sinks and light pink marble floors, hailing from a different era for women. There’s a long vanity counter just after you enter, with worn, dark pink velvet stools from the days when ladies sat to apply powder to their already porcelain skin, but now are used by nursing mothers. An opaque window lets in some natural light, giving the wan, overhead antique fixtures a needed boost. My pulse is racing—I can actually hear the blood in my veins throbbing near my temple.

  Breathe. Breathe, Fiona, breathe.

  I approach one of the pedestal sinks, turn the right faucet for cold water. Splash a little into my hands, then onto my face. It feels good, so I do it again.

  Then I stand, looking at my reflection in the mirror.

  That odd, dark cast to my skin again. Not the light in the elevator then.

  I lean in closer. Another side effect? For the first time, a real fear lands, that I’m in true, immediate, physical danger. I seem to remember a grayish cast to my father’s skin, but God only knows which drug caused it, or if it was all of them together. What’s strange is that if I look very carefully, the slight shadow extends about an inch from me, as if the surrounding air is contaminated too. I raise a hand in front of the mirror, wave it fast, and there’s the faintest dark shimmer, like heat rising off asphalt. And my eyes—normally a warmish brown, the irises have gone a shade darker, pupils wide and dilated. Even the whites seem to have a slight gray tinge.

  Cheap-shit mirrors. The only possible explanation. We think all mirrors are the same, but they’re not. Clothing store mirrors are warped enough to make their clientele appear thinner, driving sales. I bet these made for brisk business in the makeup department.

  There’s a part of me that knows I’ve seen my reflection in these mirrors a thousand times and never noticed this kind of effect. But already that notion is being bricked into a new compartment in my mind, until the lack of attention causes it to atrophy and die slowly. I have a whole mausoleum of things I prefer to never think about again. A cemetery of dead memories.

  I splash more cold water onto my face.

  Are you in sales?

  No, I’m the devil.

  My stomach suddenly heaves again, riotous, and I stumble for one of the stalls, the only nod to modernity with thick, floor-to-ceiling walnut panels featuring a horizontal grain. I kneel in front of the toilet, my forehead starting to feel clammy again. Nothing happens for a minute, then another. False alarm.

  It’s quiet here in the bathroom, just the soft hush of traffic filtering in through the window. A hum from the
overhead light fixture. I don’t have to go back to the focus group—Tracy’s more than capable of damage control. I should have just told her to handle it when she called me at home, but I was . . . in so many pieces.

  I take another look at my cell phone—no missed calls from Justin—but even that doesn’t seem to bother me very much, because the marble is cool, and there’s nothing to do, at least not right now.

  I lean back against the wall. Take a moment. The air is shadowy, in a soothing kind of way. Finally, a chance to think, even if it is in a stall and I’ll have to soak my hands in Purell later.

  Growing up, the world often didn’t make sense, not the kind it should have according to the glimpses I saw in other kids’ homes. So I’d make probability lists, narrow things down to what was most likely my reality. Take the fridge. At a friend’s house, a tray of Jell-O would be an after-school treat, something to snack on while watching a sitcom, but in mine, a tray of Jell-O wrapped in cellophane presented a broader array of possibilities. I’d have to consider who was in the house, whether some of it was already gone, and if my parents and their friends—frighteningly anemic, thin creatures with bags under their eyes and nervy twitches—were giggling in the living room, the volume of the TV turned full blast. Probability the Jell-O was safe to eat—low. Probability it was laced with ecstasy—high. Ninety percent of my adult life has been trying to exorcise that past, fly within the boundaries of normal, where things are safer, life is safer . . . or so I’ve been told.

  So why the hell did I go to a bar last night?

  Because swimming just underneath my veneer of normalcy is the other me, the twisted me. The me that dabbles in self-destructive behaviors to cope with trauma, my therapist had said. Better than running the scissors over my thigh again I guess.

  But now’s not the time for introspection—I can think about all that later. Or not. Instead, I pull the indestructible business card from my jeans, the only constant.