Dwellers

4

There are two girls on a bed. There are two girls on a bed. One wears a white shirt – a man's shirt – and the other is naked, save for a pair of pink panties. They face a barred window. They are both kneeling on the bed. I am sitting in one corner of the room. I should be able to see their faces in profile but I can't. It is as though I am looking through a camera eye with the frame cut off. I can see them clearly from the chin down. The girl in the shirt touches the naked girl's breast, slides her palm down her bare stomach, and slides her fingers under the garter of her pink panties. Her free arm is around the naked girl's neck. The naked girl is trying to pull the other girl's arm down. The naked girl is crying.

I wake up and all of the lights are off. The clock reads 2 AM.

A dream. It is just a dream. I sit up. Normally I dream of the big house and Celeste. The twins. But this dream is different. It doesn't feel connected to me.

Louis steps into the room with a flashlight. "Blackout," he says, rubbing his eyes. He yawns. "The entire street is dark." He places the flashlight on the study table.

"I had a dream," I say.

Louis doesn't say anything except, "Hm", probably thinking he already knows what the dream is about.

"It's not about Celeste," I say.

"You shouldn't say her name," Louis says. He pulls out the chair from the study table and sits on it.

"There were two girls. I think one of them is sexually abusing the other."

"Jesus, Jonah."

Louis and I have talked about this exhaustively. We are what we remember. Or what we choose to remember. If we lose our memories, we lose ourselves. But where do memories reside? Are they tangible objects you find in the organic brain? Do you take them with you when you leave your body, or are they left with the corpus? Do they simply disappear, like steam? Or are they more like the boxes in the attic or the ruined dresser cabinet in the basement? Things that can be abandoned and later inherited.

"Do you think it's Jonah's memory?" I ask.

He yawned again. "Maybe."

"I hope Jonah is not a monster."

Louis laughs, to my surprise. "Maybe he just saw it in a movie. Online. Someplace. You find the most depraved things online."

That is possible. "I hope so," I say. "You're tired, Louis. Go back to sleep. Thanks for the flashlight."

"I hope the blackout ends soon," Louis says before he closes the door. "We have meat that might go bad."

There is still no electricity the next morning. I have coffee and bread and NSAIDs for breakfast. I wheel myself to the window to catch a breeze. No such luck. The humidity is unforgiving. I watch Louis stand near the bars of the gate and listen to a couple of women fanning themselves, neighbors commiserating, speculating on the cause of the power outage.

"Transformer blast," Louis reports back to me. It's too hot to do anything. Louis sits, languorous, on a chair in my room and stares at the ceiling. I hunch over a book. The skin covered by my knee immobilizer starts to sweat and itch. We don't talk. What is there to talk about when you can't talk about your past? Remember that time when we had a power outage for two days, and we had dinner in the garden with all the grown-ups? We wore our best suits and felt like grown-ups ourselves.

We can't talk about that.

We notice the smell around lunchtime. Louis has wheeled me out of the room into the dining area despite my protestations. Beef stew.

"I'm not hungry," I say.

"You need to eat something."

I haven't eaten much of anything ever since the hospital. Louis gives me a look. I sigh, pick up a spoonful of beef, eat it, and chew. It should be enough to placate him, I think. He frowns. I try to eat more but cannot find pleasure in it. I have no appetite. My hands hang limp at the end of the wheelchair armrests. I watch Louis finish his meal.

That's when I notice it. A faint stench in the air, like rotten meat.

"Do you smell that?" I say.

Louis looks up. "I've used up all of our meat in the stew," Louis says, but enters the kitchen anyway to check.

"Well, it's not coming from the refrigerator," he says.

"But you do smell that, right?"

"Yes." He sits at the table again but stands up after a moment, agitated. "Shit. Where is that coming from?"

Louis places the dishes in the sink and leaves the dining room. I wait, listening to him walking around the house. He stops walking after a few minutes, but doesn't return to the room. I wheel myself out.

I find him in the laundry room, where the stench is stronger. It smells like leftover rice left out in the sun. The door leading to the basement is straight ahead. The plain white door has, in addition to the doorknob, a slide bolt latch that looks newer than the rest of the house. Louis unlatches the door and the smell hits us like a wave.

"Damn," I say, covering my nose with the collar of my shirt.

"What is that," Louis says. "Did something die down there?"

I can see the dresser cabinet seven steps down, right at that point before the winding staircase turns.

"You can't go in there," I say. "You might get hurt."

Louis goes down the seven steps with a flashlight. "I still can't see anything," he says. He goes back up, sees me there and gives me a look as though seeing me for the first time. "Do you want to go back to your room?"

"I can wheel myself back you know," I say, slightly miffed. "And you're not going down there."

"I'll be careful," he says. He goes out and disappears for a long time, and comes back with a hammer, safety goggles, and a pair of rubber boots.

"You have got to be kidding me," I say.

"I wish I had an axe," Louis says, putting on the goggles and the boots. He goes down the basement stairs.

"Why do you need to go investigate?"

"If there's a dead animal down there it's going to stink up the street."

I hear splintering wood, a boot crushing through a board. Louis curses. "You might cut yourself," I shout through the doorway. The hammer goes down. The glow of the flashlight disappears further down the staircase.

"Well?" I say. I hear squeaks against a cement floor.

"Old furniture," Louis says. He grunts. "It smells really bad down here."

"Dead cat?" I say.

"It smells like shit and bleach."

"Did you say 'bleach'?" I say, but Louis doesn't reply.

For a minute I couldn't hear anything. Then heavy footsteps, boots crashing through wood. Louis emerges from the dark basement, ashen-faced.

"What?" I ask, wheeling myself back. He puts down the flashlight and the hammer on the floor and slams the basement door shut. He pulls off the goggles and sits on the floor with his back to the door. He covers his face with both of his hands and tries to breathe.

I'm frightened. This is no dead cat.

"Louis?" I say, softly.

"Oh my God," Louis says, dropping his hands from his face. He looks at me. "There's a chest freezer down there."

My heart stops.

"There's a dead girl in it," Louis says.