Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

I could feel the emotion contorting the face on the wall, and I could understand it, and even be tempted by it a little. Just a little. The release and the freedom of it. I wasn’t looking at a twisted mockery of myself, I was looking at a secret temptation, drawn by someone who knew me better than I want to know myself. I may not be a good man, but I’ll die before I give in, and that’s close enough for me.

The other wall was a portrait on the same scale, drawn with a black marker. The face was turned upward, lips parted slightly and eyes closed, eyebrows arched skyward. It was the face of a supplicant and a martyr. It was the beatific calm of the willing victim.

That expression on that particular face was disorienting. Piotr was a butcher. He was violent, aggressive, and crafty. He bled out hundreds of living people for his charnel pit, suspended shrieking from chains in rows with no regard for age or sex or race. The expression bothered me more when both portraits were taken together. They faced each other across the room on opposite walls. I was ravening madness, lunging at Piotr, who was waiting, ecstatic, to be devoured. It made the hair stand up all over my body.

The wall between them, the one opposite the door, was made up of dozens of smaller portraits, each one a mixture of features from the larger ones. Here, my lunatic eyes over Piotr’s slack mouth. There my gaping maw snaring out of his beatific face. In one my face shared an eye from each of us in the center, with smaller mouths covering the rest of the head. This wall made me the most uncomfortable, implying some kind of interchangeable intimacy between us that was obscene.

Anne stared up at my portrait, meeting its eyes with her own. “Is this a picture of your past, or your future?”

“Neither, I hope.”

“Me, too.” She turned and gestured at the other giant face. “Who’s your victim, here?”

“That’s Piotr, the guy that we were chasing in Warsaw. I’ve only spent maybe ten minutes with the man, but I’ll never forget his face. It was his pit full of blood that Henry pulled me out of.”

“Georgia seems to think he’s the good guy here.”

“She also thought I’d look better with my insides on her kitchen floor. Fuck Georgia.” I stood next to Anne, looking up at Piotr’s face. “You know, I’m the only person in our squad to have ever actually laid eyes on Piotr. We were alone when I spoke to him up in that control room. Everyone else was down on the ground. Even Henry doesn’t know what he looks like, and Frank sure as hell didn’t.”

“Maybe he visited her?”

“And left her alive with the altar piece? I doubt it.”

I stepped back out into the hallway, finding the moldering garbage almost comforting in its forthright existence. Anne followed me to the next room.

It also featured walls covered with drawings, but this time they were crowded so close together that frequently the edges overlapped, creating an impenetrable crosshatch on two of the four walls. The other two walls were more sparsely filled, as if the artist has simply picked a blank spot at random to start drawing every time.

Each picture was fairly small, maybe a foot across, and without borders. The subjects seemed random, and more often than not, innocuous, drawn as though looking through the eyes of the observer. There was a coffee cup on a counter with a hand extending into the picture about to grasp the handle. Next to it was an empty parking lot in front of a boarded-up storefront. A sign in the window proclaimed “OPEN.”

My eyes wandered from wall to wall, skipping from image to image. Most of them were bland and pointless. A hand pulling open a door. A bird. A view out of a car window, looking at field. Some of them were weren’t. There was a body, facedown in a bedroom with a dark stain spreading around the head, a dismembered dog on a kitchen table, and horribly, a knife pointed directly back into the center of the picture, two hands wrapped around the handle.

“Abe.” I turned away from the jumble of mesmerizing images and went to Anne, who was kneeling down and staring hard at a picture near the floor. “Look at this.”

It was a picture of a bathroom, looking into a mirror. A woman was leaning forward and putting on makeup. Her face was indistinct, being a small part of a small picture, but the shape of the features were there, if not the details.

“That’s from my dream. I dreamed I was that girl, putting on my makeup, in that bathroom. This is it exactly.” She stood up and turned her back on the sketch. “Is this what I have to look forward to? Being driven more and more insane by my dreams until I’m wallowing in garbage and trying to chop people up in my kitchen?”

“Well, at least you’ll bake a good candle.”

“That’s not helping.”

I hunkered down next to her and took her hand. “I think you and Georgia probably shared a certain sensitivity, but that’s all. Just because you can hear the music doesn’t mean you have to dance.”

“I hope you’re right.”

I helped her to her feet. “Me, too. Nobody likes a stabby roommate.”

The door at the end of the hallway turned out to be a bathroom. At some point the toilet had gotten plugged up, but that hadn’t stopped Georgia from using it. Looking at the sink, it appeared that she had resorted to mashing stuff down the drain towards the end. We pulled the door closed and prayed that we didn’t have to return to search.

Moving around the left bend brought us to the final door in the house, also closed. I put one hand on the knob. “Has to be her bedroom. Ready?” Anne nodded, and I pushed it open. The door swung open without resistance, indicating a lack of garbage on the floor, or at least along the door’s path. Beyond the entrance was only blackness. The odor coming from the room was that of stale, sour sweat.

Anne peered around me. “Turn on the light.”

“I’d have to feel around on the wall for the switch.”

“You are a huge baby. Move.” She pushed past me. I could hear the swish of her hand sliding around on the wall, and then the lights came on.

The floor of the room was stripped down to bare concrete. Strips of carpet tacks still adorned the edges of the floor next to the walls, and there was old blood staining most of them, coating the short nails and the pale wooden strips they were embedded in. Bloody footprints adorned the concrete around these spots, as if Georgia had trod on the carpet tacks and then kept walking around unconcerned.

Candles were stuck into the remains of other candles on the floor in a ragged circle around the dirty mattress in the center of the room. A plastic disposable lighter lay next to the mattress, a shockingly cheerful pink artifact from the outside world. The mattress was sagging, lacked sheets, and was covered in overlapping urine stains in the middle. At the head of it was the pewter gray arc of the altar piece. The twin spikes were shoved downward through the mattress where a person’s head would be, leaving the hard crescent as a pillow.

Anne made a face. “She slept on it? Jesus.”

“Well, that explains all the pee.”

“I’m not touching it.” She pushed me. “You get it.”

I bent over the bed and grasped it in one hand. As usual, it felt oily and squirmy under my fingers, only this time the sensation was more intense. I pulled and it slid easily out of the mattress. Holding it made me feel queasy.

“It’s more, I don’t know, active or something than the one we’re carrying. Put it in your purse, I don’t want to carry it.”

“It’s not going to fit in my purse, it’s like two feet long! Just hold it.” She was looking around the room at the walls. “What do you think all of this is?” The walls and ceiling were completely covered in long wavy lines, all the way to the floor. I shrugged.