The Visible Filth Read online

  “Leave him alone,” she’d said.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t be an asshole. I know you’re talking about Jeffrey. Lay off the kid. He’s okay.”

  “Just okay? Maybe you do need batteries.”

  “Fuck off, Will.”

  He’d like to say that was the last time he’d taken a cheap shot at Jeffrey, but it wasn’t. Sometimes he just couldn’t resist. Alicia started to ignore it, until it wasn’t much fun anymore. He contented himself with knowing that Jeffrey couldn’t last much longer, that Alicia’s appetite and her impatience with ridiculous men would spell his doom at any moment. But he’d been waiting for a while now, and he suspected Jeffrey’s unlikely heroics last night had given him an extended lease.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed Alicia.

  “Get a beer with me,” he said when she answered.

  “Fuck, dude, what time is it?”

  “Are you still asleep? It’s like ten o’clock.”

  “I didn’t get to sleep until sunrise.”

  Well, that was the last thing he wanted to hear. “So are you going to come get a beer with me?”

  “No, asshole, I am not. I’m going back to sleep.”

  “When did you turn into a pussy?”

  “That is so wrong. And so are you. Maybe I’ll see you tonight. Have one for me, okay?”

  She hung up.

  He pocketed the phone again and kept walking, a cold gulf opening in his chest. Nothing he felt made any sense, and he knew that. He knew he was skirting dangerously close to infidelity, was practically inviting it, but he didn’t feel the pang of guilt he knew he should. There was just a need, and he had to answer it.

  The thought of going in and having a beer without Alicia with him was too depressing to countenance, so he maintained his heading, resigned to checking in on Eric instead.

  His apartment was located above the bar, with a metal staircase affixed to the side of the building, terminating in a small balcony and a front door. You could access the place without being noticed from inside the bar, for which he was grateful. Rosie herself worked the morning shift, and if she saw him, she’d call him in and fill his head with her outrageous opinions. Will crept up the stairs and knocked on Eric’s door.

  Will found himself hoping that he wouldn’t answer. He was having a hard time remembering the impulse that drove him here. They’d never been close – hell, they barely qualified as friends – and standing here in the heat of a bright Wednesday morning, Will felt mother-hennish and ridiculous.

  But the thunk of a deadbolt retracting into the doorframe scuttled any hope he had of leaving unnoticed. The door swung open into a cool darkness, and Eric was standing there in his underwear, his hair matted with sweat despite the air conditioner Will could hear clattering away somewhere in the depths of the apartment. The right side of Eric’s face was a Technicolor nightmare of scabbed and torn flesh. Dried blood speckled his face and shoulders.

  “Holy shit, Eric.”

  Eric spoke without moving his jaw. He was clearly in vast pain. “What is it?”

  “I came to check on you. You need to go to the hospital, man. I’m calling an ambulance.”

  “No.”

  “Fuck that. Yes.” He reached for his pocket.

  Eric took his elbow and brought him inside, shutting the door against the heat. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “Dude, you can barely talk.”

  He made a vague gesture toward his face. “Swollen. That’s all. Come inside.”

  Will followed him into the kitchen, which was cluttered in the typical way of a single guy who partied too much. Take out boxes on the counter, trash overdue for removal, a few plates in the sink. In the living room he could see some clothing piled in a corner. Eric shook some pills out of a bottle on the counter and swallowed them dry. “Buddy of mine can stitch this up.”

  “A buddy of yours? What is this, Afghanistan?”

  “Can’t afford a hospital.”

  He moved slowly into the living room, one hand in front of him as though he were looking for balance, as though he were still drunk. When he made it to the couch, he collapsed onto it and unfurled like a caterpillar. The blinds were drawn on the room’s only window, and the apartment had the cool, dank atmosphere of a cave. “Thank your friend for me,” he said.

  “What friend?”

  “Guy who saved my ass last night. The one banging your girl.”

  Will felt both irritated and irrationally thrilled. “Alicia isn’t my girl.”

  “Okay, man.” His voice was starting to drift.

  “Who was that guy you were fighting with?”

  Eric didn’t answer. His breathing calmed, water finding its level.

  “Okay. Anyway. I was just checking in. I’ll let you sleep.”

  Eric, eyes still closed, put out a hand. For an awkward moment, Will thought he meant for him to hold it. “Don’t leave me,” he said, his voice bleary with painkillers and the proximity of sleep. “Nightmares.”

  Will felt a sudden shame at having witnessed this nakedly weak gesture, this plea in the dark; it was a gross and bewildering intimacy, and he wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard it. Reluctantly, though, he found a place to sit down by moving a laundry basket from a chair to the floor. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll hang out for a little bit.”

  He waited for Eric to drift off to sleep, watching his face twitch, his eyes spin beneath his eyelids. He was growing cold in the frigid blast of the AC, but Eric was still covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Below them, at Rosie’s Bar, someone fed some money into the jukebox and a dull bass throbbed its way up through the floor, ringing the bones in his body. It would drive him mad, that constant, subdermal growl. He watched Eric fade away, and wondered what black dreams slid through his brain.

  FEELING AIMLESS AND obscurely unsatisfied, Will walked back home, where he planned to crash on the couch and play video games until Carrie came back from class. He didn’t like spending time by himself, for the most part; silence unnerved him, left him feeling unanchored and threatened. The froth of the video games was partially successful in keeping that silence at bay, but after a while it started to chew through his little pixelated boundaries, and he would be forced to find some other manner of distraction.

  So it was with relief that he sensed someone else at home, as though a passage through the air had sent ripples brushing his skin as he entered.

  “Carrie?” She should still be in class, but she might have come home early. No one answered. He passed through the kitchen, through the living room, and stopped in their bedroom. The place was empty. Feeling mildly foolish, he planted himself in front of the TV and booted up his video game console.

  He was an American solider half an hour into a jungle heavily seasoned with hostiles and a good five minutes away from a hotly defended save point when the phone chimed. He paused the game and fished his phone from his pocket.

  Blank. No messages.

  His blood cooled several degrees when he realized which phone it had been. He set his own down and removed the other one from his pocket, the bright yellow one with the hearts. Its face was lit, the little green text box signifying a message received. He tapped it with his finger. It was from someone named Jason.

  Hey bartender.

  He looked at it for several seconds before deciding not to answer. He leaned back and unpaused the game. A sniper took a shot at him from the dense foliage. He keyed himself into a crouch.

  It buzzed again, and he glanced over.

  U want it?

  Fuck you, he thought.

  Buzz: Keep it.

  He dropped the controller and typed a response. Don’t want ur goddam phone. Pick it up at the bar tonight.

  A moment passed. Did u look at all the pretty pictures?

  He typed. Maybe I should take it to the police.

  Take a look. Might like what u see.

  He waited, but nothing else came from the phone. The video game was froze
n on the death screen. A blurry image of his avatar’s bullet-riddled corpse lay behind the reset prompt.

  He switched it off and gave his full attention to the yellow phone. It felt like a conduit of some dark energy, and he felt uncomfortable holding onto it. He placed it on an end-table beside the couch and called up the menu. The camera icon pulled his eye toward it, as though it exerted its own peculiar gravity. He touched the icon and scrolled over to the picture gallery.

  There were four saved images and a video file. He stared at them a moment, trying to come to terms with what he was seeing, trying to arrange the world in such a way that would accommodate his own mundane life, the daily maintenance of his ordinary existence, along with what he saw arrayed before him in neat little squares, like snapshots of Hell.

  He tapped his finger on the first one so it ballooned to fill the screen.

  It looked like a close-up shot of a sleeping man’s face. He was middle-aged, balding, with a large, flat nose; his face was soft and rounded, like the features of a stone carving which had been worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. There was nothing sinister about this picture; it might be an intimate portrait taken by a lover, or a dear friend.

  The second was the same man from the same angle, but taken from a few feet further away. In this picture the man was clearly dead, felled by a violent strike to the head. The rounded dome of the man’s skull, cropped out of the first picture, was here depicted in its shattered complexity: bone and brain and blood extruding from the crown like a psychedelic volcano caught in mid-expulsion. The man was lying on the sidewalk. The blood around his head reflected a disc of overhead light, a streetlamp or a flashlight. The picture had been taken at night. He noticed what appeared to be a wedding band on the man’s left hand, which lay palm up, white and plump.

  The third picture revealed a new setting. This one had been taken indoors, under a harsh light, probably a fluorescent. Seventies-style wood paneling covered the wall in the background. A utilitarian white drafting table occupied the foreground, and resting atop it was the same man’s head, severed from its body. It sat planted straight on the table; someone must have taken the time to balance it, to arrange it just so. The wound in his head was not visible from this angle. No blood marred the scene, save the inevitable blackened ring around the neck. It seemed that some care had been taken to clean the blood from his head, primping him like a schoolboy for his yearbook photo. A slender red book lay on the table behind it, partially obscured, its spine facing the camera.

  Will tried to slide on to the next one, but his fingers had gone numb and the phone clattered to the floor. He experienced a wild and irrational fear that someone had heard him and would see what he was looking at, and he felt an overwhelming shame – as though he’d been caught looking at the most outrageous pornography, or as though these ghastly photographs depicted his own work.

  Putting the phone back on the table, he closed his eyes and forced himself to calm down. His breath was shaky, his nerves jumping. It occurred to him, abruptly, like some divine communication, that he did not have to look any further. He knew something awful had happened, that a murder of grotesque proportions had been committed and documented, and that any further examination was unnecessary. He should go to the police right now and wash his hands of it.

  But stopping was unthinkable. He scrolled to the fourth photograph.

  In this one, someone had gone to work on the head with an almost medical precision, and an artisan’s hand. Using the killing wound as a starting point, the man’s scalp had been sliced into a star pattern, and the skin pulled down from the head in bloody banana peels. The soft, generous features of his face, which had suggested to Will only moments ago the close proximity of someone beloved, which suggested both kindness and the passage of time, were obscured now by the bloody undersides of themselves. The skull had been scraped clean, or nearly so. The eye sockets had been scooped hollow. The table beneath the head was festooned with the gory splashes of the artisan’s hard labor.

  Only the video clip remained. Pressing the button was not like scrolling through the pictures; he could not pretend he was carried by momentum. This was a separate choice. It was his second chance to turn away.

  He pressed play.

  The video player took a moment to load, and then filled the screen with the shaky image of the head on the table. A blare of static shrieked from the phone as someone said something unintelligible. Will tapped the button to lower the volume, conscious of the sound intruding into the atmosphere of his apartment, like a species of ghost. He checked over his shoulder, the sense of proximity to another person prickling his nerves once more, and then held the phone close to his face to be sure he wouldn’t miss anything. Shame, fear, and a weird thrill filled his body.

  “Hold it steady. Jesus.” A young man’s voice.

  The view stabilized, holding firm on the severed head, which was canting slightly to one side. The fourth picture had already been taken: careful ribbons of flesh suspended like wilted petals over the dead man’s face. The top of the skull had been shaved down, leaving a red, raw hole just above the temple. A girl stepped into frame, her back to the camera. She had straight blond hair, an athletic body. She straightened the head again, held it a moment to make sure it stayed in place.

  “Oh my god I can feel it,” she said, and jerked her hands away.

  “Get the fuck out of the picture!” Another girl’s voice.

  She retreated, and a calm settled over the image. A slight movement of the camera as a heart pounded hard in the chest. A stifled, nervous giggle. The head shifted slightly, as if it had heard something and had to turn a fraction to listen more closely. Then it moved again, and something seemed to shift in the darkness of its open skull.

  “Oh shit.” High pitched, genderless.

  Four thick, pale fingers extended from inside the hole and hooked over the forehead. Someone screamed off camera and the image skewed wildly. The video ended.

  “Will?”

  “Fuck!” He flipped the phone over, turning to see Carrie standing beside him. He felt slow and disjointed, as though he’d dropped a tab of acid. “When did you get home?”

  “Just now.” She wasn’t looking at him, though. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought you were going to turn that in to the police.”

  “Yeah. Tonight. I said I’d do it tonight. Jesus, what time is it?”

  “I came home early. Skipped math. What are you looking at, Will?”

  “I said nothing. Just…” He stood up and put his arms around her in a belated welcome. There was nothing genuine about the gesture, and she pushed him away, plainly irritated.

  “Give it to me.”

  He just shook his head, looking at the ground between them. He could not let her see what he’d just seen. “No. Carrie, just trust me. You don’t want to.”

  He felt her staring at him. “Is that Alicia’s phone?”

  “What? No! What does that even mean?”

  “You know what the fuck it means.”

  “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you’re still hung up on this. My friends can only be guys? Really? What about Steve?”

  This didn’t get the rise out of her he was hoping for. She looked at him calmly and said, “What about Steve?”

  “He’s into you. He wants to fuck you.”

  “So what? I’m not fucking him.”

  “But you want to.”

  “No. I don’t. You want to check my phone? See if I have any pictures of him on it? You want to see if I’ve sent him pictures of my tits? Go check it. It’s in my purse in the kitchen. Go.”

  He shook his head, but the temptation was real. Was she bluffing? Did she know that he wouldn’t do it? What if he surprised her and really looked? What would he find? “No,” he said. “I trust you. I wish you trusted me too.”

  “I want to trust you. But you’re fucking looking at something on some cunt’s phone and you
’re acting guilty as shit!”

  Of course, she was right. Nothing about his behavior signaled anything good. He knew that. He retrieved the phone from the table and placed it into her hand. “You don’t want to see,” he said. “You really don’t. It’s awful.”

  “What is it?”

  He thought about the fingers. “I don’t know.”

  She sat down, and she opened the files.

  He watched it all a second time with her. When she was done, she returned it to him, her hand shaking. He stared at her face the way he would a television screen, waiting for something to happen on it, waiting for it to give him something to react to.

  “Is that Garrett? The one who was texting last night?”

  That thought hadn’t even occurred to him. “I don’t think so. These were taken earlier. They were already on the phone.”

  “Call him.”

  “What? No.”

  “Then give it to me. I’ll do it.”

  He clutched the phone more tightly. He felt as though they were debating opening the cage of a starving tiger. “Why, Carrie? It’s a bad idea.”

  “I want to know if he’s still alive. I don’t want to think about someone dying like that while you ignored him.”

  “Ignored him?”

  “He was asking for help! He was begging you!”

  “Oh, fuck that,” he said, a surge of guilt turning quickly to anger. “No one’s dead, for God’s sake.” He activated the screen and went back to Garrett’s last written text.

  PLEASE

  He summoned Garrett’s number and called it.

  Carrie stared at him as he waited for an answer, the phone trilling lightly into his ear. After a moment it stopped ringing. He brought the phone away from his ear a fraction of an inch, thinking at first that it had been disconnected, but something about the quality of the silence told him otherwise.