Lisa Unger - Black Out

He rubs his temples in a gesture of fatigue. I am straining to remember his face.

“Annie Fowler may not know. But Ophelia March does,” he says softly, almost kindly. His eyes are flint. “She knows.”

“No,” I say. “No. I don’t remember.” I try to keep myself from sobbing in front of him, but I can’t. I am desperately searching my newly recovered memories. Is it possible that somewhere inside the maze of my shattered psyche I know where Marlowe has been all these years? I chase it, but it turns corners fast, slips away from me. If I could catch it, I would. I would.

“I don’t want to hurt you any more, Ophelia,” he says.

“Don’t,” I answer, more out of desperation than anything else.

His whole body goes rigid. He drops to his knees into the cold water and puts his face, red and pulled like taffy with his rage, next to mine. I can smell his breath as he whispers ferociously in my ear, “Then tell me what I want to know, Ophelia.”

I recognize him then. He’s the Angry Man, one of the protesters that waited on the road outside the horse farm, the one that threw a rock at our car that day. My brain doesn’t know what to do with this. I struggle to get up, to get away from him, even as my mind is struggling to put this piece of information into one of the blank spaces of my life. But it’s too much. I black out.

When I come to again, the Angry Man is gone. The lights are still on. I sit up with effort and look around the room. There’s nothing to see but metal walls and a photograph left by my feet. I pick it up. It’s a picture of Victory, my baby, my little girl. Her eyes are closed, her face a ghostly white. Her blond curls fan around her face like the light cast from a halo. There’s a piece of black tape over her mouth, and her hands are bound behind her. She looks impossibly small and fragile.

Every rational thought I have left in my head deserts me, and I start to scream. It’s a guttural wail that seems to come from someplace primal within me; it’s involuntary, rips through me. I’ve heard this sound before so many times in my worst nightmares, my memories of Janet Parker. I pull myself from the floor and go over to pound on the door.

The voice booms through the speakers I can see now on the ceiling.

“Let’s start again. Where’s Marlowe Geary?”

Ray Harrison lived another life after his wife and daughter went to bed. When they were awake, he was centered, rooted in his life by his love for them. But when they both slept, a strange restlessness awoke within him, an almost physical tingling in his hands and legs. It was something he wouldn’t have been able to explain, even if he wanted to. And he didn’t.

The silence of the nighttime house, as Sarah called it-the dimmed lights in the kitchen, the hum of the baby monitor, the television volume so low he could barely hear it-caused him to connect with a hole inside himself, a place that needed to be filled. These were the hours when he had first found himself on the phone to his bookie, betting ridiculous sums on games he was assured were a lock. These were the hours when he sat riveted to the screen-always with the same feeling of stunned incredulity-as the quarterback with the bad knee made the impossible touchdown, as the horse who couldn’t lose stumbled and fell, as the pitcher with the bad arm threw a perfect game. It felt personal sometimes, it really did. As if something were conspiring on a cosmic level to fuck him until he bled.

So many nights he almost woke Sarah to tell her what he’d done to their life. But then he’d go to her and see that she was asleep so soundly, so peacefully, that he’d lose his nerve and just get into bed beside her. Her trust in him was total. She wasn’t one of those wives who called the station to see if he really was working overtime, who went over his pay stubs to check his hours against the tally she was keeping on the sly. She let him handle all their money, all the business of their life together. She never even looked at the accounts online. She wasn’t a woman who needed control. She was a woman who’d needed a baby and a home and a husband she trusted. He’d been able to give her all those things, easily, willingly.

Then he’d almost destroyed her, without her ever even suspecting. Every time he thought about it, a shudder moved through him and his face would flush with shame. His escape from the total decimation of his life was narrow. He came so close he could feel it like the rush of a freight train.

He found himself oddly grateful for me, the woman he knew as Annie Powers. If it hadn’t been for me, he strongly suspected that he’d be dead or that he would have lost the only two people who meant anything to him. And now he found himself using those hours, that terrible restlessness, to work his case, to find out what happened to the mysterious woman who, without meaning to, had saved him.

He kept a cramped office off the kitchen where the large walk-in pantry used to be. There was a small desk, a creaky chair, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that he turned off and on with a string. He had an old computer that was slow and loud and badly needed replacing, but he could still use it to access the Internet through his dialup connection.

On the night after he’d talked to Gray, while Sarah and Emily slept, he sifted through the contents of the envelope he’d found in my car. He had known immediately that it had belonged to Simon Briggs; his handwriting was a distinctive loopy cursive that looked like it belonged to a child-a deranged and very stupid child. He’d seen it on other items recovered from Briggs’s car. With its big, faltering O ’s and wobbly L ’s, his handwriting was oddly precise, as though he had copied each letter from a chalkboard in front of him. The envelope also carried an odor of cigar smoke, a scent that had permeated Briggs’s other belongings.

It contained mainly printouts from articles Harrison himself had already read on the Internet. They were arranged neatly in chronological order, beginning with the article about the fire and murder at the horse ranch. Then there were articles detailing our flight across the country, the crimes Marlowe was suspected of committing, and our eventual death.

There were photographs, stills taken by security cameras at convenience stores and gas stations across the country. Some of them were grisly, some of them grainy and with blurry images impossible to discern. And so many of them were of Ophelia, a haunted, broken-looking young woman. Harrison could barely connect her to me. One shot in particular moved him, disturbed him more than any other. Marlowe and I were captured in conversation, a woman’s body on the floor beside us, violated and damaged in ways too unspeakable to describe. Harrison looked at my face and saw an expression he recognized; he’d seen the expression on Sarah’s face when she looked at him. It was a look of the purest and most profound love, a love that stood witness to every sin and endured just the same.

I’m still lying in a pool of water, but I’ve stopped feeling the cold.

“The notion of romantic love is wrongheaded,” the doctor tells me. He sits cross-legged in the corner of my metal room. His voice echoes, wet and tinny, off the walls and ceiling.

“Human beings love the thing that tells them what they want to believe about themselves. If at your core you believe that you are worthless, you will love the person who treats you that way. That’s why you were able to love Marlowe the way you did.”

“Because I thought I was worthless?”

“Didn’t you? Isn’t that what your parents taught you by word or by deed? If not worthless, then at least negligible?”

“But he didn’t treat me as though I was worthless.”