Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

The boy in the locker room who says “water” over and over again now starts yelling. What he’s saying is indecipherable. He kicks his legs in his wheelchair, making a loud banging sound. He flails his arms, and when his helper tries to stop him, he hits her in the face. “Shhh, it’s all right,” she says to him, but it just makes him yell louder.

This is Mandy driving home in her pickup, turning the radio low, then lower, then finally off, trying to hear if the engine is acting up the way it has in the past, when it has sounded as if some miniature mechanic were already at work on the pipes beneath the hood and clanking them with tools, making a plink, plink, plink sound. This is the loon on the lake where Mandy likes to go with her husband, calling to her mate over the mist covering the water in the morning.

T his is you being picked up by Chris later that night. This is you thinking the boy who says “water” all the time was trying to warn you. The road is slick with a fine coat of rain, and when Chris pushes the car above seventy, she says it feels as if it’s hydroplaning.

When you told Thomas that Chris was coming to pick you up to go to a movie he said, “Be careful driving, the roads are slick,” before you left. “A movie! I want to go,” your girls said, but you told them it was not a movie for young girls.

The movie ends late. The two of you talk about it on the ride home, and you do not talk about Paul or the killer. Then Chris stops at a rest stop. It’s the same one Bobby Chantal and Kim were killed at.

“Maybe we shouldn’t stop here,” you say.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Chris says, and walks into the bathroom.

She parks far down the lot, away from the lights that are probably always turned on for safety reasons, and she leaves the keys on in the car so you can still have the heat on. You wonder why she’s parked so far away. Why does she want to walk so far? But you don’t have time to ask her because she is already opening the door and walking into the restroom. While she’s gone you peer out through the side window. You look to see if you can find the place in the woods where, if you were a killer, you would come from to surprise a woman. The woods are dark, though. There is nothing to see close to the restroom but some newly planted trees whose trunks are no thicker than your bare arms and whose leaves in the fluorescent light look pale, and closer to yellow than green. You can feel a strong wind buffeting Chris’s car from side to side as if someone were shaking it. You can hear the leaves rustling in the tops of the trees and deep inside the woods, probably skittering along and blowing up from the forest floor. Chris is gone so long you wonder if she really had to go to the bathroom. You wonder if there’s a way for the killer to enter the bathroom from behind the rest stop. You wonder if he was already in the rest stop bathroom, waiting for her to come. You look at the wall and door of the rest stop. You try to tell yourself that if something terrible were taking place right now inside of the bathrooms, then the walls and the door and the grass just outside the rest stop would let you know. You would sense it from them, even though they are inanimate. The horror taking place would allow them some kind of a voice.

You jump, of course, when the driver’s door swings open. For a second, you can’t believe the door was left open and the wind so strong it blew it open wider. But then you see a man get into the car, and you realize that the car door was not left open and it was not the wind at all. The man, with his deeply creased forehead, looks just like the man Chris has painted so many portraits of. He looks so much like his paintings, like he has lifted himself off the canvas, that you expect to smell the smell of the oil paint. You think to scream when the killer slams his door and pushes the button that locks all the doors, but just as you open your mouth he turns around with a knife in his hand. The blade shines, a knife with a blade so big it catches light from all the way across the parking lot where a single lamp is turned on. “Don’t,” he says, and you stop, a creaking sound coming out of your mouth now because you can’t stop wanting to scream that quickly. He starts the car and you look toward the restrooms. Chris must still be inside them. You call to her, of course. It’s raining harder now and the wind must be roaring because the tops of even the sturdy pine trees are bent over, and some maples look as though they could snap.

“Where are we going?” you ask, your voice not sounding like your voice to yourself, but tighter, wound up, as if let loose it would spiral out of control and turn into something almost visible as it shot out of your mouth. This man will not kill me, you think. I will end up killing myself from the inside out. I will die from my fear. You don’t receive a reply from the killer. And why would you? Thomas has read to you from his science magazines of studies showing how animals are so different from humans that even if a lion, for example, could speak your language, you would not know what it was saying. You picture the killer as a lion. You think how you shouldn’t ask him anything else again. It would be pointless. Maybe this is easier, not talking or begging for your life, because he would not understand anyway. You see you are driving on a back road made of dirt. The killer drives in the center to avoid the sides of the road that are washed out and riddled with holes and bedded with fallen dry pine needles. You think maybe he should drive toward the right side of the road instead, because what if there is an oncoming car? But of course, there will not be an oncoming car. The killer has chosen a road so untraveled he does not worry about which side of the road he is traveling on. The road is all his. There will be no headlights from the other direction. You wonder if there is someone else in the car with you and the killer. You keep hearing panting. You wish the person would stop. After a while, you realize it is you doing the panting. You are so thirsty. Would the killer understand? Surely, even a lion, if a lion could talk, would understand water. Wouldn’t it? Thomas, you are sure, would disagree. Thomas would tell you about mind-mapping, how an animal wouldn’t have a name for water but might have a visual map in its head of how to get to a watering hole, or it might have a name for how it feels after it drinks water, when it could be ready to chase and bring down an animal in a kill.

You remember how the killer is not one of those killers who does away with the bodies. He does not bother to cut them or bag them or burn them or bury them or sink them or hide them deep in the woods. He leaves them where he kills them, not afraid of leaving fingerprints on them because he is so careful not to leave fingerprints on them. You notice his gloves. They are leather and have stitches on their backs. They are like driving gloves and you are on a drive in the country. You try to see what there is near you in Chris’s car. Maybe there is a hammer you can use to protect yourself. Maybe there is an ice scraper, even though it has not been cold enough yet for windshields to completely freeze over in the mornings. You feel with your hands between the seats. You feel what feels like a file folder. You feel papers inside and pick them up. You reach up and turn the light on in Chris’s car. “Turn it off,” the killer says, without looking at you. You see how the collar on the back of his polo shirt looks new and stiff. This killer is wearing all new clothes, you think.

“Listen to this,” you say. You have no idea what’s written on the papers. You start reading anyway. You read the first line: “I can tell you what she wasn’t.” The killer does not ask you again to turn the overhead light off. You keep reading now. It is Paul’s story of Bobby Chantal. You wonder if it was between the seats all along, or if it just materialized, or maybe you even conjured it to appear. Whatever the case, you keep reading, and the killer keeps driving.