James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

Then she shrugged at me. One bare shoulder lifted, one lifted corner of her mouth, a wise guy smile. She was wearing a pale spring dress, the thin strings tied round her neck in a bow. It showed a lot of her dark flesh. I noticed a crescent of discolor on her thigh beneath the hem.

“I’m not too sure about the etiquette here,” I said.

“Yeah. Maybe you could look under ‘Entertaining the Girl Who Killed Your Best Friend.’”

I gave her back her wise guy smile. “Don’t say too much, Susan, okay? I gotta go in to see the cops on Monday.”

She stopped smiling, nodded, turned away. “So-what? Like, Jim told you everything? About us?” She toyed with the pad on my phone table.

I watched her. My reactions were subtle but intense. It was the way she turned, it was that thing she said. It made me think about what Jim had told me. It made me look, long and slow, down the line of her back. It made my skin feel hot, my stom­ach cold. An interesting combination.

I moistened my lips and tried to think about my dead friend. “Yeah, that’s right,” I said gruffly. “He told me pretty much everything.”

Susan laughed over her shoulder at me. “Well, that’s em­barrassing, anyway.”

“Hey, don’t flirt with me, okay? Don’t kill my friend and come over here and flirt with me.”

She turned round again, hands primly folded in front of her. I looked so steadily at her face she must’ve known I was thinking about her breasts. “I’m not flirting with you,” she said. “I just want to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“What he did, that he beat me, that he humiliated me. He was twice my size. Think how you’d like it, think what you would’ve done if someone was doing that to you.”

“Susan!” I spread my hands at her. “You asked him to!”

“Oh, yeah, like, ‘She was asking for it,’ right? Like you auto­matically believe that. Your buddy says it so it must be true.”

I snorted. I thought about it. I looked at her. I thought about Jim. “Yeah,” I said finally. “I do believe it. It was true.”

She didn’t argue the point. She went right on. “Yeah, well, even if it is true, it doesn’t make it any better. You know? I mean, you should’ve seen the way it turned him on. I mean, he could’ve stopped it. I’d’ve stopped. He could’ve changed every­thing any time, if he wanted to. But he liked it so much… And then there he is, hurting me like that, and all turned on by it. How do you think that makes a person feel?”

I am not too proud to admit that I actually scratched my head, dumb as a monkey.

Susan ran one long nail over the phone table pad. She looked down at it. So did I. “Are you really going to the cops?”

“Yeah. Hell, yeah,” I said. Then, as if I needed an excuse, “It’s not like they won’t find someone else. Some other guy you did this stuff with. He’ll tell them the same thing.”

She shook her head once. “No. There’s only you. You’re the only one who knows.” Which left nothing to say. We stood there silent. She thinking, me just watching her, just watching the lines and colors of her.

Then, finally, she raised her eyes to me, tilted her head. She didn’t slink toward me, or tiptoe her fingers up my chest. She didn’t nestle under me so I could feel the heat of her breath or smell her perfume. She left that for the movies, for the femme fatales. All she did was stand there like that and give me that Susan look, chin out, dukes up, her soul in the offing, almost trembling in your hand.

“It gives you a lot of power over me, doesn’t it?” she said.

“So what?” I said back.

She shrugged again. “You know what I like.”

“Get out,” I said. I didn’t give myself time to start sweating. “Christ. Get the fuck out of here, Susan.”

She walked to the door. I watched her go. Yeah, right, I thought. I have power over her. As if. I have power over her until they decide not to charge her, until the headlines disap­pear. Then where am I? Then I’m her Lord and Master. Just like Jim was.

She passed close to me. Close enough to hear my thoughts. She glanced up, surprised. She laughed at me. “What. You think I’d kill you too?”

“I’d always have to wonder, wouldn’t I?” I said.

Still smiling, she jogged her eyebrows comically. “Whatever turns you on,” she said.

It was the comedy that did it. I couldn’t resist the impulse to wipe that smile off her murdering face. I reached out and grabbed her hair in my fist. Her black, black hair.

It was even softer than I thought it would be.

Chris Adrian (1970-) received a BA in English from the University of Florida (1993), and an MD from Eastern Virginia Medical School (2001), then completed a pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco. He also graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and attended Harvard Divinity School. He is currently a fellow in a pediatric hematology/oncology program in San Francisco.

Although he regards himself primarily as a doctor, Adrian has published two long novels and a short story collection. Gob’s Grief (2001) is a somewhat surrealistic story set during the Civil War in which a group of people, including Walt Whitman, attempt to build a machine that will abolish death. In The Children’s Hospital (2006), God brings a second apocalyptic flood to earth, annihilating everyone except the occupants of a single pediatric hospital. His short story collection A Better Angel (2008), originally titled Why Antichrist?, contains nine stories, including “Stab.”

“Stab” was written in 1996, shortly after the death of his older brother, but not published until 2006. While working on his master’s thesis, about conjoined twins, Adrian learned that when one twin dies during separation surgery, the survivor always feels a sense of loss, even when the operation occurs in infancy. At about the same time, he had a nightmare in which he was the actress Karen Black being chased by the frightening fetish doll in the 1975 film Trilogy of Terror, except that his terrorizer had blond hair. The nightmare, combined with interviews he conducted with survivors of twin-separation surgery, was the inspiration for this strange story.

“Stab” was first published in the summer 2006 issue of Zoetrope: All-Story.

Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and round, not flat, and that their bodies were marred by clean-edged rectangular stab wounds. Sometimes they lay in drying pools of blood, and you knew the murder had occurred right there. Other times it was obvious they had been moved from the scene of the crime and arranged in postures, like the two squirrels posed in a hug on Mrs. Chenoweth’s doorstep.

Squirrels, then rabbits, then the cats, and dogs in late summer. By that time I had known for months who was doing all the stabbing. I got that information on the first day of June 1979, two years and one month and fourteen days after my brother’s death from cancer. I woke up early that morning, a sunny one that broke a chain of rainy days, because my father was taking me to see Spider-Man, who was scheduled to make an appearance at the fourth annual Leukemia Society of America Summer Fair in Washington, D.C. I was eight years old and I thought Spider-Man was very important.

In the kitchen I ate a bowl of cereal while my father spread the paper out before me. “Look at that,” he said. On the front page was an article detailing the separation of Siamese twin girls, Lisa and Elisa Johansen from Salt Lake City. They were joined at the thorax, like my brother and I had been, but they shared vital organs, whereas Colm and I never did. There was a word for the way we and they had been joined: thoracopagus. It was still the biggest word I knew.