Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
It’s strange, hearing Leila’s voice again, after what I’ve decided she’s capable of.
Her voice sounds ragged, like she’s been crying, and the things she’s saying are perfectly appropriate and not at all sinister: I left my phone in the car this morning, I can’t believe this is happening, I told him to go to the doctor.
“I-I’m just so grateful to you both,” Leila says. “Winny told me what happened. That you were the one who called for help. I don’t know what would’ve happened if you hadn’t been there.”
Her familiarity with my best friend grates.
Stop calling her that, I almost snap. Instead, I say, “I’m so sorry this is happening,” even as my heart beats out of my chest. I remember the fear in Brandon’s eyes just before he collapsed, and this little woman’s tinny voice is causing it to surge in me.
I hate that a part of me wants to ask her about Julian. “Does Sophie know yet?”
“I’ll tell her tonight,” Winona says. I can hear the weariness in her voice. “Maybe I’ll keep her out of school next week? I don’t know.”
I feel silly all of a sudden, calling Winona to spout accusations that will most certainly sound like conspiracy theories while she is contending with telling her child that her daddy is terribly, horribly sick.
For the last twenty years, I have told my best friend my every unfiltered thought.
But this, I decide, is mine to bear. At least until I know for sure.
Winona texts me when she and Leila get to the hospital. She lost both of her parents on a hospital floor, she explains. Didn’t want to go alone.
The excuse doesn’t quite make sense to me.
Leila works in hospitals. True, the cath lab is far removed from the inpatient floors, but she’s surrounded by potential triggers all day, every day.
But Winny’s kindness is abundant, and so even though she could’ve told her ex-husband’s new wife to catch an Uber and suck it up, she took her hand and walked into the hospital with her.
Onix places a heavy paw on my chest. His sigh is soul deep, like he too is toiling over impossible questions.
“What do you think is going on, baby?” I ask him.
He blinks at me mournfully, and for a moment I’m struck by how old he looks.
The snout on his fur is turning white. When I adopted him he’d already been fully grown, seventy pounds of scary dog privilege for a woman who was still afraid of her own shadow and needed a big friend with even bigger teeth.
“Do you think it’s drugs? Are Julian and Leila drugging us?
Are they slipping things into our drinks?
Or…” I pause, thinking of how Julian’s touches always seem to leave me punch-drunk. “Is it skin to skin contact?”
My search history will probably land me on an FBI watchlist. It’s an endless hunt for hallucinogens, sedatives, and synthetics that can affect memory, cause strange dreams, and maybe accelerate aging.
I run into the usual suspects, of course—a few people have written about the effects of amphetamines on the brain and skin, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t been force-fed meth—but nothing that quite encapsulates what Brandon and I are experiencing, which is not surprising because whatever is happening to us is so out of the ordinary that it can’t be a well-known substance.
Maybe they have a chemist, someone to synthesize it for them directly. Julian certainly has the funds for one.
I begin the deep dive on Julian that perhaps I should have done from the start.
It’s only been a few weeks since he left me, but I’m already starting to forget what he looks like, and the internet does not give me a reminder.
For his social standing, as I remember, Julian has an oddly scant online presence.
There are no interviews featuring the young mogul, no LinkedIn account or features on Forbes.
The paucity of information almost spurs me forward; I am not a woman who easily accepts a no.
I search for Leila instead but only find her profile on the Palette website.
A search for Margaret West unveils forty years of an illustrious art career, and I pause, finding myself clicking through photographs of her from the eighties, sporting a crown of Jheri curls and leaning over an enormous half-finished canvas.
There’s no mention of her friendship with my ex, no photos together, just the link to the PERPETUITY show that should have been shut down after the event.
I click it without enthusiasm; I’ve been here before and know it’s a bare-bones events page.
I try not to react as I click through the site and my heart pangs to find that a few of the West and South Side artists I recommended have upcoming exhibitions.
When I click back to the PERPETUITY page and scroll, I notice that it has been updated with a new link: Photo gallery.
I follow it.
There’s not much there, just a three-by-two grid of photographs of a small selection of pieces from Margaret’s show.
I recognize the lobster shell macro painting, one of the sculptures.
The weird skull and rotted fruit painting is there too, as is the one with the man crouching on the woman’s flank.
There’s a note under it: Acquired for the Harrison Margaret has been careful to render the silken black hair that hangs down his back and before one eye, has paid close attention to his plush pink lips and straight nose.
Even through the screen, I feel the impact of his stare.
Its directness reminds me of the subject of Jared’s painting, though in this one, I don’t feel like I’m looking at a cornered animal gearing to fight. This one looks like a predator.
Julian once told me that The Recurring Nightmare is a recreation. I don’t remember the name of the original, but a quick search and there it is: Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare.
“What the hell,” I mutter, opening the image for a closer look.
The paintings are nearly identical in theme and composition, except Margaret has excluded the stunned horse head, and the apelike creature squatting on the woman’s flank in the original is everything but beautiful.
He’s horrible, barely human, and his stare, while just as confrontational, is less alluring than hostile.
Still, there is the woman, arms flailing in rapture.
It’s grotesque, and strange, and according to the article that I skim on it, audiences at the time thought the same and reveled in it.
I read further, my brows knitting with concentration until I snag on one word, the name of the creature: incubus.
I don’t know what that is, but luckily the article links to an explanation, and I leap further down the rabbit hole.
incubus:
1 : an evil spirit that lies on persons in their sleep;
especially: one that has sexual intercourse with women while they are sleeping
→compare succubus
2 : nightmare 2
3 : one that oppresses or burdens like a nightmare
My heart leaps in my throat, but I ignore it, clicking link after link to read further information.
In some descriptions, the incubus is hideous, an imp or goblin who holds their victims down and assaults them.
In others, they are beautiful demons, targeting women at night to impregnate them with their supernatural spawn.
I read a literature review on erotomania, a psychological delusion in which a person believes they have been assaulted by an imaginary figure, which leads me to incubus syndrome, in which they believe they have been touched by a ghostly lover.
There are countless descriptions of them across cultures: the Chilean Trauco, a hideous footless monster with irresistible sexual allure responsible for fathering the children of single women.
The Brazilian boto encantado, a music-loving dolphin who emerges from rivers as a handsome man and bewitches unsuspecting women with its charm and joviality before escaping back into the watery depths of its home.
There are the lilu, one of whom begat Gilgamesh, a Sumerian demigod, and the wizard Merlin, born of the union between his human mother and incubus father.
I remember the first time I met Julian. Sitting with him on the piano bench. I’d told him I wouldn’t sleep with him and he’d smirked and said, “Not yet.” Not even forty-eight hours later I’d dreamt about tearing his clothes off.
My left hand, balled into a fist, seizes, and I shake out the cramp.
It’s one thing to think that Julian might have been drugging me, but to think he is a supernatural creature?
Outlandish. Ridiculous. I might be desperate to find answers, but I’m not so far gone that I would accept that my ex is a demon.
“Fuck!” I say, and as if on cue, my phone begins to buzz its way across my coffee table.
The screen flashes with a picture of my favorite toothy-grinned preteen, and I am slapped back into cruel reality, where both my best friend and her daughter are grappling with tragedy. I scramble to answer before it goes to voicemail.
“Hey, nugget,” I say.
The voice on the other end is muffled and throaty.
“Auntie Sean,” Sophie manages, “can I come over?”
“Of course,” I say automatically, then look at the time. It’s after nine p.m.; I will not put my baby girl in an Uber, nor will I allow her mom to drive in and out of the city for a third time to bring her here. “Have you asked your mom?”
“She’ll say yes,” Sophie says. “So you should too.”
I suck in my bottom lip, pulling my phone away from my ear for long enough to open a text thread with Winona.
My question is half typed before I pause; as horrible as this might be for Sophie, I also don’t want my best friend to be home alone tonight.
Most times, being the fun aunt is a delightful job, and one that Winona is glad I take on.
But there are moments like this one, where Sophie puts me between a rock and a hard place, between being something of her friend and all of her mother’s.
“Can you ask her?” I ask. “Please.”
Sophie is silent for a moment, and I know that she wants to resist. She’s twelve now, no longer the scared little girl calling me in the middle of the night to tell me that she’d just seen her dad kissing a strange woman in the kitchen and worrying that I’ll be more upset that she’d been downstairs sneaking cookies past her bedtime.
She understands betrayal, understands heartbreak, understands the permanence of death enough to know that the father she knew may never come back.
“Fine,” she eventually huffs.
She doesn’t mute me. I hear stomping feet and the creak of a door opening, Winona’s weary voice. They talk for a minute, and when I next hear a clear sentence, it’s from Winona.
“It’s fine,” she says. “She can go to yours.”
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Winona laughs. It’s the only appropriate answer to my completely asinine question, and the moment I ask, I wish I could snatch it back.
With her kid in the room, she can’t afford to break down, which, it occurs to me, might be precisely what she needs to do.
She’s not giving me permission; she’s calling in a favor.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” I say. “Ask her if she wants me to bring Onix.”
“Yes please,” I hear Sophie answer in the background.
I’m on my feet and hunting for Onix’s harness as soon as I get their assent. As if he heard it too, Onix hobbles to his feet.
“Come on boy,” I say. “Let’s go get your baby.”