Lisa Unger - Black Out

“Not at first. They never do at first. Few people hate themselves so much, or so close to the surface, that they accept abuse right off the bat. If he’d treated you badly at first, you’d have walked away from him. He wouldn’t have been able to control you the way he did. That’s the trick of the abuser. He builds you up so that he can tear you down, piece by piece.”

I conceded, even though this didn’t feel like the truth. But I have come to understand that in some cases the truth doesn’t seem like the truth at all. I had judged my mother harshly for loving a killer; I had hated her for her weakness, for the fact that she’d do anything to keep even the cheapest brand of love. But Ophelia was just like her.

“When you’ve completely lost touch with your own self-worth, your very identity, he convinces you that he’s the only one who could ever love someone so wretched. The love he first gave you is a high you remember, and like a junkie you keep doing the drug, waiting for that first rush again. But it never comes. Unfortunately, though, it’s too late. You’re hooked.”

“He loved me,” I say pathetically.

My doctor gives a sad, slow shake of his head. “Ophelia, he was a psychopath. They don’t love.”

“No wonder they took your license away.” My words come back at me sharp and hateful. “You’re a goddamn quack.” The truth can make us turn ugly like that.

He smiles patiently, gives a gentle cluck of his tongue. “Temper, temper.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He lifts a hand. “That’s all right. You’re under a little stress. I understand.”

“I can’t tell him what he wants to know.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“I don’t know where he is,” I say, my voice climbing an octave.

“You do know. Somewhere inside, you know.”

I am startled awake. The doctor, my dead doctor, is not here in the room with me. I am alone, clutching the now torn and wrinkled picture of my daughter. It looks as though I have clenched and clawed at the image, trying to climb through to save her. I smooth it out now.

“Victory,” I say out loud, just to taste her name. I have done this to her. The things we fear the most are always visited upon us; it’s the way of the universe. I rock with her picture, hating Marlowe Geary, hating the Angry Man, and hating myself most of all.

Of course my dream doctor is right. Marlowe was a sociopath and a killer like his father. And no, of course he never loved me. But that didn’t stop me from loving him, from giving myself over the way only an abused and neglected teenage girl can give herself over, like a virgin on an altar, gratefully willing to be sacrificed. He manipulated and used me, but I laid myself down for him. Every time he killed and I did nothing, something vital within me died, until I was little more than a walking corpse.

Now, strangely, I am resurrected in this place. I am neither the girl I was nor the woman I became. I am both of them.

I think of all those flights from my life, my fugue states. I wonder where Ophelia was going, what she knew that Annie didn’t. I suspect now that she was going to find him. I remembered what Vivian said during our last conversation: You were haunted by him… Part of you, maybe the part that couldn’t remember so much, was still connected to him.

The question is, why? Was she trying to go back to him, wanting to be with him again? Was she that desperate, that stupid, that miserably in love? I don’t know the answer. But I am sure of one thing: Ophelia knows where Marlowe is. I just have to get her to tell me.

“Can you hear me?” I yell into the air.

The silence seems to hum, but it’s just the fluorescent light burning above my head, flickering almost imperceptibly. They’ve shut off the spotlight they’ve been shining on me-I see it mounted in the far corner of the room. I’m glad they’ve given up on that technique. In the other corner, there’s a security camera, a red light blinking beneath its lens.

“Where is my daughter?” I yell, louder this time, looking at the camera. More silence, and then I hear the buzz of a speaker.

“I don’t want to hurt her, Ophelia,” says the Angry Man, his voice, broken by static, sounding far away, as though he’s calling on an old overseas line. “I know what it is to lose a child. I don’t wish that on anyone. Not even on you.”

“Don’t hurt her,” I say quickly, feeling my chest tighten. “I’ll find him.”

The static from the speaker seems to fill the room. I should have demanded to hear her voice first before I agreed to help him. But I’m too desperate for those kinds of tricks.

“You remember?” he says finally. “You’ll lead me to him?”

“I’ll do anything you want,” I say, sounding as beaten as I am. “Just don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my baby.”

I realize then that I’m weeping again. I’m so beyond shame that I don’t even bother to wipe the tears from my eyes.

When Marlowe and I finally got to New York City, to my father’s shop near the Village, I was a fly in a web, stuck and drugged, not even trying to escape. I didn’t even ask for help. It was still relatively early in our flight, only about three weeks after the fire at the horse ranch, and the authorities hadn’t put two and two together. At that point we were just runaways. I didn’t realize this, of course. I believed that we were fugitives, wanted as Janet Parker’s accomplices for murder and for the fire. I was still deeply in denial about what had happened at the gas station; in fact, it was gone from my consciousness completely. In my dreams I saw a bloody halo of hair spread out across a linoleum floor.

My father asked no questions. He let us stay in the small spare room I used to sleep in when I’d stayed with him in the past, in the back of his apartment over the tattoo shop. There was a pink bedspread and a patchwork chair. The radiator cover was the same purple I’d painted it when I was twelve. There was an old doll made out of denim, with red yarn for hair and wearing a black Hells Angels T-shirt. One of my father’s old girlfriends had made her for me long ago. Predictably, I’d named her Harley.

“I ran away when I was your age,” my dad told me when he took us upstairs to the bedroom. We’d just wandered into the shop; he hadn’t seemed surprised to see me. I didn’t know when he got back from his trip or if he’d ever been gone at all. I didn’t ask. “Been on my own ever since.”

He said it with a kind of uncertain pride that filled me with disappointment. I wanted him to be angry, to scold me and help me find my way back from the downward spiral I knew I was in. But right away I saw he wasn’t going to do that.

Marlowe and my father seemed to bounce off each other. They didn’t look at each other after the first greeting, a stiff handshake that seemed more like a confrontation ending in stalemate. Marlowe towered over my father by a head; Dad seemed almost frail and shriveled beside him. Another disappointment: In my mind’s eye, my father was always a big man, powerful and strong. But I saw quickly that he was no match for Marlowe, physically or in any other way.

If I recall correctly, we were there three nights. All those days seem to run together in my mind. Marlowe and I did little but eat and sleep in that quiet, dim back room, we were so exhausted and worn down. I remember having trouble differentiating between being awake and being asleep. I have vague recall of conversations with my father that seemed like parts of a dream: He asked about the weather in Florida… He said he knew I was trying to reach him… He was sorry that he’d been away. We talked about the tattoo he’d agreed to do for Marlowe. He seemed uncomfortable and tentative around me, as though he wasn’t sure how to handle this recent wrinkle in my life. Something inside me was screaming for help, but he was deaf to it.