David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

Then there was her mother, who always claimed to have favored Aphrodite. Even before she was out of elementary school, Desiree had begun to wonder if it was true, if it was just something hurtful to say, but wondering that, even believing that, didn’t diminish the sting. Her mother loved to cry, to hold her head in her hands and say, “Oh, why wasn’t Aphrodite spared?”

And there was Aphrodite herself. Desiree started hearing her voice around her twelfth birthday. Her mother was out of town that week, gone to Key West with a new boyfriend, though the relationship- big surprise- never went anywhere but the emergency room. Even calling it a voice was suggesting too much, she supposed. Aphrodite was there, a presence, a sensation, a compulsion, even a stream of intuitive information. When she met someone and she took an instant like or dislike, she could feel her twin’s push or pull.

At first it had been welcome, a balm in the loneliness of her life, but by the time she was fifteen, things had begun to change. She met people who didn’t care about her scar, who wanted to hang out, listen to tunes, smoke cheeb. Aphrodite didn’t like these people, but they liked Desiree plenty. Then Desiree discovered that crank made Aphrodite’s voice quiet. It stung at first, made her nose burn with such incendiary pain that she snorted up water and blew it out like a whale. The next time it didn’t burn so much. The time after that, if it burned, she didn’t notice.

That was how it went until B.B. had found her. Or she had found him. He was driving on the Ft. Lauderdale strip, stopped in his Mercedes at a light with the top and windows down and Randy Newman blasting as if it were Led Zeppelin.

This guy had what she needed: cash. She needed cash because she needed to shoot up so fucking bad that it killed her. Once it had jolted her from the normal world to a place of power where she could do anything, say anything. She felt whole and finished, no longer subject to the whims of her mother or teachers or dead twin.

Now it was something else. The crank still lifted her up, no doubt about it, but not to such heights. And the lows- the lows were more than she could ever have imagined. Under the earth lows, buried under your grave so you were scratching the bottom of your own casket lows. She was dry and evacuated, a squeezed-out and tattered sponge, and she would do anything to get back up, if only she could begin the cycle again. Even go over to a stranger on the Ft. Lauderdale strip. Whatever restraints had once governed her routines had been eroded by endless fatigue and sleeplessness, as far back as she could remember, which wasn’t very far since her memory didn’t work so well in those days. A low level of panic hummed perpetually just under her consciousness. Her mouth felt dry no matter how much she drank, and she never felt hungry no matter how little she ate.

For all that, she’d never done anything quite like this before. She fucked and sucked for crank, but always guys she knew; but the more she thought about it, the more she saw that it didn’t matter. It was just a few minutes. Of what? Sex? Big deal. They tried to make a big deal of sex, but it was nothing. A few minutes, and she’d have some money and she could score.

Even then, with the pound of need and terror in her ears, she could hear her sister’s muffled voice. She couldn’t make it out, but she knew it was there, a distant pleading. But the guy, he seemed like he would go for it. He was nicely dressed, hair neatly combed, neatly dyed. He had a few pieces of tasteful but expensive jewelry- her time in the pawnshops had taught her to tell the difference. He didn’t look like just another rich Florida doctor or lawyer or real estate developer in a convertible. He was that other kind. He had the mark, the sign, the vibrating tone audible to crankheads and dogs. He lied on his tax return, cheated on his wife, fucked over his partners. Something. The guy in the Mercedes was crooked, and he had money.

She walked over, smiled at him. She used her best smile, which was radiant. At least it had been once. If she’d known how she looked- cancer thin, sunken eyes, thin lips, red welts on her face and hands- she never would have offered, never would have thought anyone would want her. But she didn’t know, so she smiled, and he turned to her.

“I’ll blow you for ten dollars, sweetie,” she said.

He started to roll up his window- a defense of minimum value with the convertible’s top down- and she pulled away from the rising glass, about to swear. Then he stopped. The window came back down.

“What are you using?”

“Fuck you,” she said, starting to turn away- but slowly. She knew they weren’t done.

He took out a twenty and showed it to her. “What are you using?”

She paused. She could hear Aphrodite, the voice that had been muffled and muted for years. She could hear it now, hollow and echoing, the trickle of distant water in a cave. A feeling so strong that she could almost sense the words: Don’t tell him. And that was why she told him. “Crank,” she said.

He studied her for a minute longer and then unlocked the doors with a flick of his finger. “Get in,” he said.

She got in. Why not? He was okay looking for an older guy. Probably clean, certainly rich. That other thing- the vibrating something that told her she might die, might end up dumped in a vacant lot, tossed off an airboat into the Everglades- that didn’t matter right now. The need called to her, the need. The need. Ripping her in half, pulling her, crushing her, knocking her off her feet and dragging her through the dirt. So she got in.

But the man in the Mercedes didn’t want a blow job. He wanted to clean her up.

B.B. never came for sex. After a couple of months, by which time Desiree had become a kind of live-in maid, it was clear that he wasn’t going to. He didn’t like women. He didn’t look at them when they passed on the street or in the mall, not the charming or the cute or the beautiful. The slutty and the sexy he looked at, but not with desire. It was more like a vague hostility, or maybe amusement.

At first she assumed he was gay, which was okay by her. She’d known plenty of queens on the street, and even if she hadn’t, she’d spent too much time as the object of derision to judge anyone for being in any way different or out of step with the idea of normal you got on TV. Still, it never rang true. B.B. didn’t much look at men, either. Not even those who were both beautiful and obviously gay.

It was entirely possible that he was asexual, but Desiree’s gut and Aphrodite’s voice doubted it. He was maybe asexual and maybe not, but he was something else, too. Something the twins could not put their respectively fleshly and ephemeral fingers on. There was a blankness to him. He seemed in a daze half the time. He’d rescued her, but he never acted like the sort of person who would rescue a drug addict. Only when he was doing charity work with one of his kids did he come fully alive. Or sometimes when he was watching a boy. They’d be in a restaurant or walking on the beach or shopping, and his pupils would dilate and his posture would grow straighter without getting stiff, and he would flush a healthy pink, as if he were in love. Each time he seemed to fall in love.

Once she brought it up. Only once. Because the thing of it was, there was something almost admirable about B.B.’s desire for boys. He wanted to be with them- she could see that. On the street, she’d seen men who went for boys, for girls, for children so young that they didn’t know what sex was. They were predators, monsters, and she regretted not having killed them all. B.B. was like them, but also not. He turned his desire into charity; he hid from the world, maybe even from himself. Instead, he helped them. If there was a way to be admirable in such a desire, surely this was it.