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1.
Maisie’s on the verge of something spectacular. This, we know—and not because the nanosecond upticks of her gait, pulse, blinks, aerobic functions, shuddering fast-twitch muscles are all textbook, or whatever. Not because North’s screens and heat sensors and remote-control body cameras are blaring their siren songs, moaning something is about to happen, what could it be? Well: We know what’ll happen. Because Emily had scouted hundreds of potentials before settling on the Tour Guide splayed on the bed in front of Maisie, and Pierce scented the room with a four-hundred-dollar oud and put every bit of his M.Arch to use in the sleek knotting around the girl’s wrists, and I am whispering in Maisie’s ear with the keening lilt of eighteenth-century poets that this is it, her shot at everything she wants, taketh thy spoils.
You could say this is its own literary art.
Signs and symbols.
Puppets and masters.
I mean—look at us!
Young modern gods—
But Alice frowns when she hears talk like this.
Her mouth goes full-on clown grimace.
Alice, who keeps saying to every new hire that her real name is Alice and admittedly gets more convincing with each iteration, like a machine better calibrated with each new commercial release, reminds us it doesn’t count as playing god when we’re just doing what we’re paid to do.
The whole point is that someone else gets to be god, Alice says.
Less talking, more executing, Alice says.
Overconfidence leads to failure, Alice shrieks, slamming a fist down.
No one wants to look Alice in the eye when she gets all Harvard Business Review like this. Which has been quite often, lately, ever since that political candidate’s sordid details found their way into Page Six. Clients spooked. Lawyers snarling. Auditors prowling. Hairs on edge.
You’re all getting lax, Alice hisses. Keep the grandeur in check, please. Research shows that this dangerous, self-important language—
All the correlated delusions, murmurs North.
An increasingly insatiable lust for power, suggests Emily.
Life-ending lawsuits, says Pierce.
A grave you dig yourself, says Josef, twisting his neck back, grinning.
Alice snaps at him to just drive the van.
North chances a smirk in my direction, and I have to turn away to hide my blush.
On screen, Maisie sinks down onto what’s-her-name on the bed. She, the well-paid blonde, the Tour Guide, arches her back into it, big green eyes and fire-engine lips like gift-wrapped Christmas. Camera six, tucked into Maisie’s earring, gives us her gentle hand stroking at the Tour Guide’s hair before it snakes around the girl’s neck, manicured fingernails pirouetting around the jugular. We watch in silence. Of course there is a towering document stipulating we’ll never see daylight again if we breathe a word of this out loud to anyone, but sometimes there isn’t a need to talk about a scene even among ourselves. Maisie paws at the girl’s throat, a bit shy. The Tour Guide flutters a hiccuping breath into Maisie’s grip, not too theatrical—Emily, annoying as she is, has a gift for casting—and Maisie’s free hand scrapes a porcelain lamp into shards on the carpet when she reaches to steady herself on the nightstand, and I murmur over the headset that it’s all right, all right, and Ric dutifully marks it down on the spreadsheet under collateral damage.
2.
It will disappoint you, North had said.
They all will disappoint you, he warned, or maybe promised, or maybe dangled.
North had been working for Alice for two months. We had been broken up for nine. You could call it bad or brilliant luck that he was at the bank that day, witnessing me flat-out bawl to the teller, the Plexiglass in front of the woman’s indifferent face bouncing all the emotional irradiation right back to me.
Waste of tears, he whispered, sidling up. You know this, D. They’re just pawns. They can’t fix anything. They don’t have the authority.
North was wearing tasseled loafers, though I’d never seen his feet in anything but tumbling ruins of Tevas the whole time we were together. He seemed taller. In the parking lot he told me about his new gig, hooked up through someone who’d dropped out of their philosophy of mathematics program. The classmate traded in a futile decade of tinkering on Benacerraf’s epistemologies to help run some kind of private-sector black ops.
North said, I mean, yeah, it pays pretty well, and had the grace to pretend to look embarrassed.
North said: Finn, who set me up? He actually just quit. And they love people from the university. So, I mean, I could probably, if you wanted.
He had come to the bank to deposit a comically thick wad of cash.
For a week after North gave Alice my number, she called me every day in the middle of the night with sudden hypotheticals, like: how would I approach a psychopath holding a maternity ward hostage, how would I recapture a steroidal racing horse on a rampage, how would I go about entrapping the lover of my dreams if I were horribly facially disfigured?
Tell me everything, she said. I told her I have a Ph.D in out-of-print literature and a stack of red-rimmed envelopes all making highly personalized threats about my financial past, present, and future, and the scope of my desperation alone meant that nothing would ever intimidate me.
Alice sniffed. She found me disappointing. But she was in a staffing crisis.
Rumor is, Alice used to be some hotshot psychologist at the Sorbonne, Josef said once, sometime between then and now, when we were all chain-smoking in the desert between Voyages—thinking, wrongly, that this would cheer me up.
Josef said: Or maybe it was forensic science. Or organic chemistry. Anyway, she got fired for selling narcotics or something. But she’s a total badass. She’s been doing the Voyages for like a decade, and she’s got this sick house up in Calabasas and a team of butlers. Right, like, who hires butlers anymore?
Oh, such bullshit, Emily said.
Emily said: She’s a middle manager. Her boss runs these things, they’ve got a hundred Alices across the country. We make pennies compared to whatever they’re getting.
I’ve seen her house, Josef argued.
Your hopes and dreams are so small-minded, Emily said, rolling her eyes.
Today, I’ve been here long enough to know that what Maisie’s asked for is fairly mid-tier, as far as these things go. Chump change to her—a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Maisie is a quiet, soft-around-the-waist housewife type, Mormon upbringing, and all she wants to do is mess around a bit with a woman without the money-source husband or any of her church friends ever finding out. A lot of the other Tourists want much more lavish things: To fuck somebody who is unconscious, or who looks like their brother or mother or daughter, or who is legally a child. To punch a homeless person in the face or ribs. To burn down a house. To deploy a live bomb. To be watched by a bright-lit stadium of strangers while they orgasm or burn down a house or deploy a live bomb. To be dropped off in a sand dune without water and made to crawl their own way back home, barely alive. (Hefty add-on fee: we monitor you the whole time, always ready to pull you back from the brink.) Alice can usually upsell people on the pricing once she starts to chat specifics about what is allowed to be broken, maimed, or mutilated beyond repair at each cost level. I could do that too?, all the clients say. Ric handles the mountains of paperwork—first with the Tourists and the barnacled suits from what they call their family offices who pore over the bespoke documents on Cessna overnights. Then, whenever the Voyage needs to be staffed with other human beings—which is most of them—Emily vets and hires the Tour Guides, the poor kids who eagerly sign away their time, speech, identity, ego, internal organs, very rarely reading a single page.
The more complex the Voyage, of course, the bigger the payday for the Tour Guides, and for us.
I wasn’t here yet for the politician’s—but his Voyage was a Tier X, and the most expensive one Alice’s team had ever staged. A .22 and a dozen teenage Guides. The under-the-table rental of a high school campus. The bulk buy of bulletproof vests, because the guy refused to do it with fake blood. The emergency-room bills alone. Non-threatening injuries, all, but amputations of at least seven limbs out of forty-eight. It’d taken a quarter of a year to plan. North told me Pierce left the van as soon as it was over and did not come back for six days.
Blessedly, Page Six only got scraps—just a few hints about a secretive seven-figure payout to a shell company. The prevailing theory on social media is that the guy was paying for sex with the B-list singer his son is dating.
In the room on the screen, our lovely voluptuous blonde Tour Guide tied to the bedposts is asking Maisie, demurely, if Maisie would like to get down there and eat her out?
We can’t see Maisie—no cameras pointing at her, she told Alice—but I imagine her jowly face is crimson when she politely stutters no, no, she just wants to touch, with hands.
For now, the Tour Guide purrs, with a wink.
North nudges Emily with his foot.
Your girl’s a little porny, he says.
Emily shoves him away, punching his shoulder, but smiling.
The fucking Tourist likes that, Emily says. I found her XVideos history, it’s all these trashy girls in frilly bows. Guess where she’s from? One of those LDS towns right outside Vegas.
She have kids? North wants to know.
Two.
Affairs?
None. Though there are a lot of Facebook searches for women she went to school with. Repeat searches. Bookmarked photos.
What else you get?
She writes short stories sometimes, like fanfiction but with real people—about those women, I mean—they’re all in a folder on her laptop. Kinda fantasy sex scenes. They’re pretty shitty stories.
And the husband? We know who he is?
Alice says, North, in a warning voice.
It’s research, he says.
It’s a contract, Alice says.
Classified, I’m afraid, Emily says, smiling.
We all sign the same NDAs, North protests.
I think I might recognize Maisie from a business magazine, standing next to the CEO of some software company. The article was announcing the couple’s ten-million-dollar foundation for paralyzed children who want to learn how to code through blinks of their eyes or something like that. If I’m right, this is the same man whose websites were investigated for harboring a large cross-section of child-groomers and obesity feeders on the hunt for anorexic women—allegedly. But I am barred from joining the conversation in the van when I am wearing the headset.
All I want to know is, is the dude kinky, North is saying.
North’s fast-flickering gaze to me, as he says this, could be wholly my imagination.
If he were kinky, the wife wouldn’t have requested kinky stuff, Pierce says.
That doesn’t mean anything either way, North counters.
Says, It’s not like the Tourists come to us looking for only fantasies they can’t get elsewhere. You know, I think it’s not even about voyeurism, but about consumer culture. Buying other people is more satisfying than buying a Birkin bag.
North is wearing a leather jacket emblazoned with D-I-O-R in foot-tall letters. He was midway through a dissertation on the illogicalities of human risk systems when I met him, and he didn’t have a clue that handbags could even had names. Hovering in the doorway of our apartment, with his one lone and battered backpack of possessions slung on his shoulder, he’d given no grand last words; he didn’t want to saddle me with some generic apology, he murmured.
I guess I don’t know what your definition of kinky is, Emily says.
I glance over, and see that Emily is looking at North out from under her eyelashes.
The van cruises its endless circles through the desert, untraceable, unbound to any particular state jurisdiction for long enough, crushing dust and ash.
3.
The next day brings a different housewife Tourist—Latina, former-model candlestick build, a lady who walks with a halting gait like a foal. She doesn’t care about us knowing her full name. She wants us to know. On the internet, there’s a ghost-trail of editorials from the Nineties, from before she wedded the fund manager with the fuck-you money and retreated into an idle cocoon of coke and ostrich feathers. But it’s animal nature that you must wake up, someday, and want to hunt. The Tourist stalks her way around her no-longer-best-friend’s McMansion, knocking chips into garish stone gargoyles with a set of golf clubs she’d found on the property, yelling puta this! Puta that! She rubs spit onto the immense painting of the hostess sitting naked atop a prancing horse. She drips calorie-rich grapeseed oil into the nonfat milk in the kitchen. Runs three dryer loads to shrink all the woman’s jeans, carefully hanging them all back up where they were in the walk-in. Gives all the vibrators and toothbrushes to a drooling Bichon Frise to lick. There is obviously a revenge motive: for a snide comment in the press, an upstaged dress at a gala, or whatever these people get mad at each other about.
I’m bored, Emily mouths to me. Aren’t you bored?
I shrug.
We didn’t budget for destruction of property, Pierce points out. The gargoyles.
Penalty charge, Alice barks happily. Put it down at four times the usual. Plus the fee for going outside the scope of what we had agreed.
Ric jots +Masonry repair down in the spreadsheet along with other reminders like +Prune hedges back into shape, +Neutralize alc. scent, +THOROUGH fingerprint/footprint/sanitation sweep.
Some Tourists do want to leave damage for other people to find, but the majority pay through the nose for us to come in and fix it all back up, after—there’s more satisfaction, maybe, in knowing there’s zero consequence beneath you.
Emily swivels to North, on her other side, and asks him what is his favorite Voyage so far. I do love having newbies on board, she says, breaking into sing-song: North and Diane, sitting in a tree, V-o-y-a-g-i-n-g anew. Adrenaline bonds people together, you know, it’s why you should do horror movies and roller coasters on first dates—I wonder if it’s the same effect if you do it all vicariously?
North doesn’t answer her.
Was it a carjacking? Emily presses. An assault?
Save the pontificating for later, Alice mutters.
Thing is, the novelty wears off, Emily says, ignoring this. Like, this chick? She’s the tenth or eleventh Tourist I’ve done who wanted to piss on someone’s lawn. I’m tired of it! At least be a bit more original!
It’s better they’re not original, I think but don’t say. It’s better to understand how people react, what they are going to be like, when they want to cause harm.
North says, finally, that his favorite Voyage was the heiress a few months ago who requested a lookalike for her father who’d just died, so she could sit down and have an angry, berating conversation with him for hours.
Adorable—the tin man and his heart of gold, says Pierce.
I can’t help a smile, and notice that Pierce is watching me with obvious curiosity.
North tells him to fuck off with more force than necessary.
Emily is watching, too.
We spend the night at Best Western of the Week. It doesn’t take long for the knock on my door I’ve been expecting to come, North’s voice ringing through the cheap drywall—
You awake, D?
Sure.
How’s your mom doing? he asks.
I tell North I’m too tired to talk, when I pull him in and down. It isn’t necessarily true.
In the morning when we climb back into the van, Alice tells us Maisie has asked to see the girl again. The same one as before. Just this time in a more nondescript setting, no lobby attendants and hotel doormen—more anonymous, low-key.
This is vehemently against the rules: No repeat Voyages involving the same Tour Guides, and especially not within the same week. For both parties’ protection. You run into obvious dangers.
We’re making an exception just this once, Alice announces.
North raises both eyebrows high.
He mouths behind Alice’s back, Cash flow’s fucked.
We know a new reporter has been going around making calls. The private investigators tell us the guy is putting together a bigger story about furtive pursuits of the ruling class, a What Enough Money Really Buys kind of thing. It’ll likely be another set of tenuous claims wrapped in conspiracy, a hit piece diluted by its own lack of substantiated information, because Alice is nothing but careful. But the PIs say this guy does have a source on the record. I know which part of the writer’s questioning has gotten Alice tied up in knots: his knowledge of a Voyage from last year involving a Texan oil baron’s son and the hospitalization of three black guys. That specific number—three. Neither North nor I had been aboard, but Emily murmured offhandedly that it was hard to stomach. The Tour Guides were sent to different hospitals with false names, caved-in cheekbones, swollen spleens, one of them missing his tongue.
It couldn’t have been anyone currently in the van who’d blabbed. We are all highly motivated to avoid attention. To the IRS, I am employed as an ergonomic consultant; North, an orthodontist’s assistant.
Maisie seems at once more confident and more agitated when she gets to the sparse Airbnb we’ve rented. She spends a long minute staring at herself in the HomeGoods mirror by the door, and I see her face for the first time—not as dumpy or sagging as I’d thought, but rosy with a proud brow, hair in a careful braid.
The Tour Guide has tied herself down this time, at Maisie’s request.
You’ve gained weight, is the first thing Maisie says to her, shrugging off her cardigan.
Her tone is sharp. Looking for something.
I—no, I don’t think so, the girl says, trying at a coquettish smile.
You’re fatter here, and there, Maisie says, jabbing.
Um, the girl says, caught off guard.
Wait, Pierce says, does the Guide have an earpiece?
I thought the Guides didn’t get— I say.
We have a script for her, Alice hisses. Diane, why didn’t you call her and talk her through it before she went in—
I didn’t know—no one told me—
It doesn’t matter, Maisie says, straddling the girl’s waist, more roughly than before.
Emily shoots me a grateful look, the I fucked up written clear across the pale of her cheeks.
Maisie announces: I’ve decided I do want more than just to touch you with my hands.
And when she proceeds to spend the next two hours making good on that, I feel a flush of something nice, warm, down my sternum, that I realize later is not only relief, but also pride.
4.
In our earliest, most lovesick days, North and I would play this stupid tongue-in-cheek game over microwave dinners called What Would You. If ability to execute half the population, which half? If a billion dollars? If no money at all? If sudden fame and accolades? If The Day After Tomorrow in real life? If my mother could walk again instead of degenerating on a daily basis, bone by bone, melting into the ground like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz? The point was to give instinctive, animalistic answers—whatever first came to mind.
Nowadays, what we mostly do is he fucks me on my stomach in silence, leaves, and we go to work.
At Same Old Best Western Number Hundred and Two, I find out from scrolling a classmate’s feed that a guy from the philosophy of math department has smeared the vertebrae of his spine all over a waterfall in Yosemite. Finnegan was his name. It’s not known if he jumped or was pushed.
I knock on the door of Alice’s motel room and tell her I want a raise.
Are you freaking kidding?
Alice is in a bathrobe and clay face mask. She seems livid.
No, I say, slowly.
You must be.
I deserve a raise.
You deserve to know you’re completely underperforming.
No, I say, I’m—
You lack ambition, Alice says, over me.
I put in zeal, I say, raising my voice. I talk the Tourists through it all with grace under pressure—
Zeal, Alice says, mimicking. You don’t get brownie points for doing exactly what you’re hired to do, Diane, have you ever worked a job in your life, or did academia stultify you completely?
I—
I can’t stand your type, all of you self-satisfied, privileged millennials—
I’m not—
You don’t go above and beyond. You don’t even take extra time to research and dream up bigger and better scripts, like the others do.
With Maisie—
Alice says, With what?
Then her eyes widen and she says, You call her “Maisie”?
A small crack has appeared in her hardened green-putty face mask.
(Unsaid: You sentimental idiot. You sad, lonely bitch.)
I can’t see any other choice but to leave, if only to prevent Alice from slamming the door onto my face.
On the phone, my father tells me that instead of going to graduate school, I should have launched a guerrilla-marketing agency like my nephew, of whom the whole family is so proud. I point out he was the one who’d told me to play it straight. My father says: When did I fucking say that? I played it straight, I’ve sat my ass for thirty-five years at this shitty little cubicle, and look where it got me.
Later, the van parked at a standstill, Josef finds me lying on my back, out by a tumbleweed behind the gas station.
A tumbleweed, really? he says, pointing, coming to sit cross-legged next to me.
It’s a bit melodramatic, he says.
I remind him that I have an advanced credential in early Romantic literature.
He offers me a Parliament Silver. I blow smoke toward the clouds.
Yeah, I know you do, he says, frowning. That’s literally all you overeducated people ever talk about. Your degree programs. You get a master’s in something and then it’s your whole damn personality.
A Ph.D, I correct him, instinctively.
Josef seems to have sensed some deep despair in me and taken pity. He is normally unbothered by his exclusion from the social life of the van.
Doesn’t it ever get to you? I ask him. I mean, the are-we-puppeteers-or-are-we-slaves. The lack of credit for any of it. The way you can’t talk to anyone about what you do.
What gets to me is a down payment for a garage full of vintage Aston Martins, Josef replies.
You’re into cars?
I couldn’t care less about cars, Josef says. I’m saving up to start a high-end safari service.
A what?
You know like, what they take you on through Asian jungles. But I want to do it in rural America. I’ll drive all these billionaires through farms without power, families who can’t afford fridges and still have to bury their food in the ground to keep it cold, that kind of thing.
Where are you going to get the clients?
Josef looks at me like he is wondering for the first time how dumb I truly am.
So, I think, he’s a lot closer to Alice’s operation than I had thought. Josef’s job is to drive us on sinewy paths of iffy jurisdiction, and to run clean-up—anything he can’t fix with a tool kit, he knows how to outsource to the right street kids who will respect the silent sanctity of duffels of cash—but there are days I see him and Alice murmuring together, in a corner of a lobby under Muzak or out in the desert when the rest of us are stretching sore kneecaps or trying to jog out a sad wobbly mile or meditate or otherwise pretend we didn’t just watch somebody live out their most lurid, grotesque desires on willing human subjects.
What do you want to buy? Josef wants to know. You like really ancient shit, right? Old rare books, whatever. Put them in a castle. You could buy some old cathedral somewhere and fix it up. You could probably buy two cathedrals at this point. You could—
I tell him I don’t want to be here anymore.
Josef considers this.
You know Pierce’s sister was shot and killed in Virginia Tech, he says, finally.
I’m silent.
I did not know this.
And Emily? How do you think it felt for her, getting paid to mutilate her cousins like that?
What are you talking about?
The redneck oil kid, Josef says.
I don’t understand.
The three Tour Guides he wanted to fuck up, he says, impatient.
They were Emily’s—why would she pick her cousins—?
The guy paid a fat stack extra for it to be her cousins, Josef says. The kind of person who gets off on the personal connection, I guess. Demanded blood work beforehand to confirm they were related and everything. Em worked it out with Alice and the guy and she got an extra quarter mil in the payout.
And the cousins? The Guides?
What about them?
What happened to them, what bonus payments did they get?
Nothing. Why do you care?
I am quiet for a long time.
Everybody needs to blow off steam, Josef says, finally.
Josef pushes to his feet and drops the oranged cigarette into rocks.
None of us want to be here, Diane, Josef says.
5.
Once, my elementary school did The Music Man. The singers were so off-key that the professional adult pianist quit in a hissing fit, and a boy I had a crush on raised his hand and said, Diane plays piano! Sight-reading a complex array of minor keys proved inevitably too advanced for my Für Elise level of musicianship, but the kids singing above on stage were also bad enough that the thing sounded almost experimental, intentional, bold. In the end, though, the fed-up conductor sent our whole orchestra pit home and ran the show with CD recordings. I never spoke to the boy again. I told my parents I’d played piano and it was a hit and Juilliard talent scouts had come up to beg for my email.
Lately, I have been thinking about how all I remember from my life is school, is grades, is smiling at teachers and saying yes to assignments. You’d call this embarrassing. Not masterful or artsy or literary. Not even worthy of inspiration for the novel I’ll probably never write. So it’s with fresh glee—the freedom of this realization of my absolute failure at every life stage—that I put on my first-ever set of lingerie, purchased full-price at the Victoria’s Secret of some suburban shopping complex nearby, so that I can click into North’s generic room at Best Western Hundred and Eleven and tumble assertively into the tight-tucked, severe-cornered bed with a new attitude, only to stop at the doorframe and realize Emily is already in it.
Oh, she says, pulling up the sheet to cover her tits, but without hurry.
North motions to chase after me.
In the hallway of this motel there are three massive framed Rothko prints that I run past.
Who puts Rothkos in a chain hotel?
(Who hires butlers anymore?)
I lock my door and take a modafinil to keep from falling asleep into a nightmare, listening to North rap at the wall for less than ten minutes before he gives up and leaves. Then it’s just: a whole night of this, sleepless, repeating exercises to breathe and not think, staring at the ceiling’s unmoving divots.
In the van, in the morning, Alice reports Maisie has requested a third meeting with the same girl in a week.
She wants to meet at the Tour Guide’s house this time.
Alice says this is strictly, expressly, verboten. Obviously. No can do.
I’ll pay triple what we said, Maisie says on speakerphone.
Quadruple, she says.
Tenfold, she says into the pregnant silence finally, and, yes, okay, yes, tenfold works.
North is trying to catch my eye. I keep my head down.
We drive to the Tour Guide’s house and spend the day making preparations—hurriedly trying to anonymize as much as we can, hide all bills, letters with names on them, all personal details.
This is so depressing, Pierce mutters, running a Hoover over a crayoned carpet, shutting and locking the door of a nursery. We’ve sent the kid, a one-year-old, to a babysitter for the whole night, but the whole place still smells like stale shit.
He catches my eye and says, Sorry.
Sorry what? I say.
I didn’t mean to offend you.
Why would I be offended?
Pierce blinks.
Because you used to be, uh—her, he says.
Pierce, I say. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
A Tour Guide. Weren’t you?
I notice that my hands are shaking the picture frame I’m holding.
Why would you think that? I say.
I—North said you were, Pierce says, flustered. He told Alice you were super familiar with the Voyages, because we’d already used you a bunch of times on Tourists as a Gu—oh, god, sorry, I probably totally misheard, I have a really bad memory—
No worries, I say automatically.
Pierce’s memory is immaculate.
When Maisie walks in the house in the evening, she spends twenty minutes just flitting around. Picking up things here and there. Curiously poking her head into closets. Inhaling foreign memories. It makes all of us restless, and Alice, leaning over the screens, starts to look more and more like she regrets this.
What you wanna do to me, the Tour Guide says, her lipstick radiant as usual but her eyes tight.
She’s trussed up in an elaborate net, in her own bedroom. She keeps glancing at the camera tucked above the door. At us.
I don’t know yet, Maisie murmurs.
You could choke me again while you make me come, the Tour Guide suggests.
Maybe, Maisie says.
Then Maisie says: Diane? What do you think I should do?
I dig my thumb into the headset.
Slap her, hard, I suggest. Across the face.
Alice looks briefly over at me, and I see the surprise in her eyes.
Maisie does.
The girl whimpers and then smiles up angelically at her.
Stop that, Maisie whispers.
Stop what?
That, Maisie says, audibly irritated. Trying to please me.
The girl is at a loss for what to say.
Alice looks at me.
I whisper to Maisie: Punish her for that. Like you mean it.
Another strike, harder this time. Leaves a shape.
Maisie gets up suddenly and ducks into the girl’s bathroom, heaving breaths at the mirror. I refrain from crooning my usual, zealous encouragement. She’s curling fingers around the girl’s crusted tubes of Maybelline mascara, her tweezers, her box dye, her gummy false eyelash sets.
The girl has clamped her legs tightly together, apparently having read Maisie’s mood as needing a bit more reluctance, needing a bit of resistance, needing to fight a way to a prize. She’s edged herself tighter to the bed frame, the netted wires unyielding.
Whatever I want, Maisie whispers.
Yes, I say, in lieu of the Guide saying it.
Maisie holds the girl down and tears off her underwear, puts her mouth there, stuffs the underwear up into the girl’s mouth. She licks all the way back up the girl’s chest, tongues the cuffs around her wrists and ankles.
Tell me something, she says. Tell me—
You’re gorgeous, the girl stammers out through muffled lace and wiring,
No, no, not that, Maisie says,
Maisie wipes at her forehead. I’m sorry. It’s just. It’s all so fake isn’t it.
The girl gulps, breathing anxiously, and tries to say, I’ll do anything—
Maisie says, No. NO.
You’re just so frustrating, she says.
Punish her, I say to Maisie.
Maisie puts an elbow to the girl’s ribs, and the girl gasps, winded.
She deserves it, I say, more loudly. Show her what you mean. Make her fucking suffer.
We don’t see the tweezers in Maisie’s clenched hand until the metal tongs are sunk deep into the girl’s neck. Red spurting suddenly everything, everywhere, every part from every vein all over.
Two of the camera lenses are completely coated in it.
An artery, then.
The girl on her own bed is trying to speak, to scream, she can’t, she is thrashing and the fishnet is pressing into the cut and pushing it glug glug glug deeper.
Maisie babbles, No oh my god, I didn’t, I didn’t mean—
She wants it, I whisper in Maisie’s ear.
The camera angles going haywire as Maisie tries to get her hands around the girl’s neck to stem the bleeding, making it worse, making it moot, tidal-wave bedsheets, the stillness of the body, the eyes already having gone glue-vacant.
No, Maisie cries, no, no, she—
Maisie, I say, raising my voice. She wanted it—
I don’t think she—no, she’s—
Alice has sprung for me. I’ve pulled myself out of my chair against one side of the van, and Josef happens to be rattling around a pothole at that moment, unsettling Alice’s footing.
I close my eyes and tell Maisie, yes, it’s okay, you’re not going to really hurt her, so you can.
Maisie says: I want to hurt her
Do it then
I’m afraid
Do it right now, slit her whole—!
A big sparking pain, blunt and high-pitched, registers in my head and I have the urge suddenly to look around for a pen and paper so I can jot an idea for a fresh poem down for the first time in years. It’s because Alice has stabbed a stapler into the crook of my shoulder.
You—fucking— Alice shouts.
The metal of the staple bursts and half-skids across my collarbone, scraping a foot of skin with it, quite sculptural, modernist.
Maisie is stock-still.
When I next look at the screen, I can barely see the tweezers, they’ve been pressed all the way into the windpipe.
Maisie says, Was that—I don’t know, fuck—FUCK—
Alice, fingers quaking, snatches the headset from me.
Pressed against the opposite corner of the van Emily is taking quick breaths, bright tears trailing down her pretty face. Josef barrels straight ahead, his back rigid, and Ric’s eyes are wide and locked on the papers on his lap. North is staring open-mouthed at me and the way Alice is pressing the bloodied stapler into my neck with one hand and wrenching at my hair with the other I have no choice but to look at him, his small gray eyes that I’ve never noticed before are a little offset, a little rat-like.
I didn’t mean to, Maisie sobs.
She’s—Is it going to be okay, Maisie whispers.
Please— Maisie says, PLEASE, DIANE, are you there, please, please—
Alice clears her throat and draws in a breath.
Yes, she says, adopting a lower vocal register, both hands squeezing firm pain onto me. Lowering the soprano of her voice, adding a rasp to it, she says, Yes, yes, I’m here.
Diane, Maisie sobs.
Maisie, Alice says, soft.
You made me, Maisie whispers. It’s your fault—you told me—I didn’t want to—
I know, I know, everything’ll be okay, Alice whispers back, eyes closed, hand tightening so much on my scalp that I cry out, but Alice mutes the headset just in time. She kicks me hard, aiming for ribs, but I’m wriggling and her boot connects with front teeth and then there is warmth and tiny chunks of something skiing across my collarbone. Alice unmutes and says, Yes, it’s my fault. She says, Don’t even worry about it, says, I promise, it’ll be okay, forcing her mouth into a grin, coughing out a plausible little laugh.