The Quiet Parts Pt. 11
He’d never looked so . . . appropriate. So him.
Andre, dead, his corpse an island in a red lake adjacent to the stove, begins to take on macabre attractiveness in her eyes. Her hunger for his dark, smooth flesh pulses stronger now that it rests so still. Rising pleasure awakens her third eye. She thinks: this must be the libidinous attraction to annihilation that seizes the heart of every human, awoken by the black, the people who as a race hive to violent death like gluttons to a feast.
She hears the front door open. Sequoia’s heavy footsteps waken her from charnel ecstasy like an electric shock down the length of her spine.
A moment later, Sequoia stands at the kitchen door in overalls and galoshes, hands over their mouth frozen O-shaped in their rapidly paling face. From that mouth pours the dark, leafy remains of their lunch. Jumping clear over the vomit, Leigh throws herself into their arms with manufactured tears. She cries, “He tried to rape me!”
Sequoia squeezes her. “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?” they scream.
“I need you to focus,” Leigh implores. “Let’s think this through.”
“We’re going to jail!” Sequoia shrieks.
Leigh pauses before responding, tempted to echo their hysteria. Early in life she was taught, should she find herself in a hard spot, cry. Cry loud and long until a man rescues you. But the thought of playing victim now leadens her blood with weary disempowerment. For that reason Leigh shrugs free of her housemate’s arms to level them with a stoic, decisive gaze.
“No,” she says. “We’re not. He attacked me. That means, even if we went to jail, we’ll be acquitted.”
“How are you so sure?” Sequoia screams.
“Because,” she explains, “as much as I hate to say it, we have white girl privilege. The justice system will be kind to us. It’s a fucked up thing, except in a time like this where we’re obviously in the right. We could set up a GoFundMe and make millions for our legal defense. They would pay us to make appearances. It’s settled,” she concludes meditatively, fingers laced over her bloodstained lap. “I’m going to call the police and turn us in.”
Sequoia looks horrified. “Us?”
“Us,” Leigh chirps on her way into the living room, her phone on the coffee table. “We’re going to be heroes.”
No sooner does she type the first 9 than Sequoia tackles her to the rug.
A tearful conversation follows in which Sequoia makes it clear how a connection to something like this will ruin the harmony they desire in life. Trials, even acquittals—these things do not happen to good people. They propose disposing of the body, something Leigh wholeheartedly agrees to.
“But we shouldn’t do it without knowing what we’re doing,” she argues. “Have you ever disposed of a body before? We need to research. But we can’t google it,” she hurries to say. “What if they look at our search history?”
Slumped on the couch, Sequoia concurs with a gloomy hang ten. “Aren’t there, like, a million shows about killing people? I could load up Netflix.”
“If we watch a hundred CSI episodes that leaves a history. It’s these horrible tech companies spying on us.”
“What if we use the hallways?” Sequoia proposes tiredly, already gassed on ideas.
“You’re a genius!” Leigh shouts, and pulls them to their feet.
There will come time for scrubbing the kitchen floor, airing out the stench, sweeping up bits of brain. But the body comes first.
Leigh retrieves a blue tarp and rope from the basement. Looking at Andre proves more difficult than killing him because his handsome face has been replaced by pulverized meat around a promontory of splintered teeth. Handling him, rags over their noses to stymie the fecal smell, Leigh keeps looking to the window. Fourteen loud, sociable men with jobs yet she hasn’t seen a single one all day. Any moment she expects a knock.
“What’s wrong?” she asks Sequoia, because her partner has paused in the middle of wrapping his ankles.
“It’s just . . .” Mourning clouds their eyes. “You . . . massacred him.”
“He had it coming,” Leigh states.
This seems to convince Sequoia, but over the long, sickening hour Leigh thinks she might have to kill her housemate, too. After wrapping Andre she showers, stuffs her bloody dress in a plastic bag and changes into sweats. By the time she returns, Sequoia has painstakingly washed the blood off the linoleum. The walls, unfortunately, will require a new paint job.
From the basement they bring a bag of fertilizer, pickaxes, shovels, and Jason’s circular saw. Leigh supplies a gallon of Bombay Sapphire. They open the magic window and struggle to heave the body inside. Two hundred pounds of meat and shit, Andre proves so heavy they must roll him across the floor. “Over-the-Rhine,” Leigh decides.
In the entrance, she stares down a hall walled in boards like an ancient, poorly constructed mineshaft. Beams of sunlight pierce chinks in the wood to crosshatch one another. A normal enough space on first glance, but she remembers crawling on hands and knees beneath a low ceiling, a floor that rose and fell like a combination funhouse slide and cellar. She shivers. Seemingly from nowhere she remembers a Sopranos episode relevant to their problem. “We gotta cut off his head and hands,” she proposes.
Sequoia wipes sweat from their pallid face. “I can’t do it. Dismembering a body . . .”
Leigh taps the bottle of Bombay. Something that will impair their inhibitions but not their functions.
Between the two of them, they drink the whole thing. They weep. They scream. They vomit. On top of the endless blood, the coppery smell invades her nose all the way to the back, until she tastes it in her tonsils. She hacksaws his neck to find his spinal column tough to cut. Meanwhile, Sequoia tearfully apologies to Andre, because, in order to saw off his hand, they must hold it as if saying farewell to a loved one in palliative care. Impatient and furious, Leigh brings down the hacksaw on his wrists, over and over, like a hatchet. Though she ruins the blade, his hands come off.
His extremities they throw in a duffel bag. Next on her list of things she’d never expected to do, they tear up the floorboards with pickaxes. She expects a void, perhaps, another dimension parallel to the parallel dimension they occupy, something that will at once expand her horizons and obliterate her mind with existential dread. Instead, somewhat disappointingly, she glimpses a dirt floor seven feet below.
She kicks his carcass into the hole. Grabs her crotch and shouts, “Hoo!” Once they have covered the body in fertilizer, she proposes the Marina.
A skull-white moon hangs low over Berkeley when Sequoia parks at the edge of the trail. Together they venture into the dark. The air is humid and chill at the same time. Frogs yell out for sex. Guided by Sequoia’s headlamp, Leigh descends to the bulrushes where mud sucks her sneakered feet and the tall grass itches her hands.
Knee-deep in marsh water, they pause. Sequoia asks, “Should we say a few words?”
“Rapist piece of shit,” says Leigh, and tosses the bag in the tide.
Watching it sink feels enough like a parting ritual. She will miss his flute and his cock. Crabs will eat his soft, pleasing hands.
They sit against an oak and stare on the satin waves. At a distance, the lights on the Bay Bridge flicker silver and gold, omnipresent. Close to blacking out, Leigh closes her eyes and welcomes the trip through time and space.
“Do you remember the night of the Ghost Ship fire?” she slurs. “We were such cute little innocent baby queers. I was in black booty shorts, a cheetah print top, a thrift store belt with brass studs, and a long white coat. And you were fucking femme that night. That black jumpsuit with the bows down the front! And Revlon lipstick we boosted from Macy’s,” she laughs. “We were halfway to the party when I had a panic attack. You stayed with me and took me back to Top/Bottom. Your goodness saved both our lives,” Leigh reminds them through tears, turning to Sequoia’s blushing face. “I love you, Koi Pond.”
Sequoia makes a shy, feminine sound. “I love you, too.”
“What’s crazy now is I’m not freaking out. You’d think I’d be having an attack but I’m chill.” She muses, “At the end of the day, we’re all just works in progress.”
Her words earn a nervous chuckle from Sequoia. “Everybody’s a work in progress until Leigh bashes their brains out with a fire poker.”
Leigh laughs into the night.
Two days later, someone won’t stop buzzing the doorbell.
“Coming!” Leigh yells, padding barefoot downstairs in her nightgown, her hangover a red dwarf behind her eyes. She throws the door open. “It’s eight in the fucking morning—”
“Where’s my brother?” asks Drew, on the porch with Sam.