She pauses at her desk to leaf through some sketches she has piled there. The ones on top are of her father. All of them show him from afar. His hair a helmet with a tail. His face vague with jittery lines. His shoulders broad and hard. In the topmost sketch, he is standing in a conference room talking to several seated men, his back a thick shadow. In another he is only partially glimpsed through a series of windows. In yet another only half his face is visible. Leigh pauses on a sketch of her father stepping out of a car, waving. He has sunglasses on and is waving to someone across the street. It looks like an illustration you’d find in an airplane safety guide, the figures of her father and the man across the street mirror images of each other. Bland everymen. Leigh sometimes has dreams where the sketches are animated, these robotic figures of her dad in featureless seventies polyester suits slipping around corners and into elevators and under desks and behind books. These dreams are dialogue free. Leigh doesn’t shout for her dad. His addresses in the boardroom are charades. And yet overlaying it all is really irritating lounge music. Early sixties schmaltz. The stuff Kip Tiller adores. She hasn’t told anyone about the dreams, and doubts she ever will.
The other sketches are of Marchesa. Unlike those of her father these are precise and clear. No vagaries in the lines. Marchesa is ugly here. Flat and falling over. Her features stretched out in sharp lines that cut clear across the page. The eyes huge and pupils spirals. In these drawings Marchesa is a supernova of knife strokes. Leigh looks at them and shakes her head. After long nights out, this is how she sees all of her friends. These diamond people cutting through her life. All of them surface, all of them compact lines of fashion and eyes big with longing.
Leigh flips the drawings over, then heads to the bathroom and washes her face, paying special attention to the thick mascara Marie coated her with. She runs the hot water and relaxes in the steam for a few minutes and then brushes her teeth. Loves the crisp, clean feeling of freshly brushed teeth and the dreamy feeling of running her tongue over the smooth surface of her incisors. She opens the medicine cabinet and digs out some homeopathic sleep aid Marchesa got her in Montreal and shakes two of the lima-bean-colored horse pills into her hand. When she closes the mirrored medicine cabinet door she notices the bear in a top hat standing just behind her.
The person in the tatty bear costume says, “Boo.”
Leigh gasps and holds her chest while this cheap bear with his wrinkled and dusty top hat, his missing eye and missing ear, sways back and forth like a boxer. Her being drunk helps take the edge off her fright.
“You scared the shit out of me. What the fuck are you doing here?” Leigh backs up against the sink. “This is my apartment. You need to leave.”
She realizes how ridiculous she sounds and part of her wants to laugh. Part of her wants to scream. The bear says nothing, just rocks like an imbecile. Leigh jabs a finger into its rough and patchy fur. “You need to leave right now or I’m going to alert security.”
The bear sways faster, giggles.
“Did Hank set this up? He send you over here?”
Snicker.
“Look, you need to get the fuck out of here right now. It’s not fucking funny.”
Leigh pushes the bear back against the wall and the bear’s oversized plush head just wobbles and the snickering inside continues.
“Get the fuck out!”
The chuckling stops and the bear pulls a knife. It’s a small knife, maybe it’s a switchblade, but it flickers and fades in the sterile light of the bathroom and Leigh’s eyes go wide. Her buzz gone, she leans back against the sink and kicks the bear into the tub. He topples over just the way funny bears do in cartoons or in children’s shows. Then Leigh runs for the front door.
But the monkey from the film shoot blocks her way.
This dilapidated monkey, it’s the same one on the stairs at the shoot, the same one that had been lounging with the cat. The monkey costume jumps up and down and the person inside makes monkey noises and Leigh’s first thought is that maybe she’s imagining this. That maybe she’s going nuts.
The monkey isn’t armed so Leigh bowls it over, smashing its threadbare head with her fists. The monkey goes down easy, with a curse and a sigh. Leigh makes it to the front door and is struggling with the lock when the door suddenly opens and two more animals arrive. A penguin and a cat.
“What is this!?” Leigh’s screaming now.
The penguin speaks, a woman’s voice. “This is the mouth of capitalism.”
Leigh is able to knock the cat down before the penguin jumps on her. The feeling, like being smothered under mildewed grandma blankets, is suffocating. The penguin doesn’t move, just lies on her face. The person inside the costume whispers, “We’ll inoculate you, don’t worry. Don’t fight it.” Leigh isn’t sure if it’s her imagination but she smells anchovies. It’s enough to make her heave and she panics, gets her legs up under the penguin and kicks. Penguin huffs like she’s got the wind knocked out of her and goes limp. Leigh rolls out. Jumps up.
She is surrounded.
The bear with the top hat is there, giggling again, knife in hand. The cat lifts the penguin up off the carpet and pats her on the back. The penguin, breathing heavy, says, “You’ll regret that, electro bitch.” Leigh can’t see how, but the penguin pulls a cattle prod out from somewhere in her costume. Flicked on, the black tube hisses with current.
Leigh backs up from the penguin toward the bear.
“Commence Artichoke two, baby,” the penguin says.
“If you want money…” Leigh motions toward her bedroom. “All my jewelry. Even a safe that I can open for you. Car keys, I have three cars.”
The bear laughs. “Exactly.”
The penguin jabs the cattle prod out and an arc of electricity grazes Leigh’s forearm. She thinks getting shocked by someone who’s just scooted their rubber soles across a carpet, only ten times worse. Only really painful. “Please,” Leigh begs, lump already in her throat. “Please, just go.”
“Sorry,” the monkey says. “But this is where it all begins.”
The tattered animals move in. They paw at Leigh. Get closer and closer, almost on top of her. Leigh punches the monkey in the face. Her fist bounces off. All it does is produce little clouds of dust.
Leigh screams. Screams as loud as she possibly can.
Until the monkey pulls a metal spray can from somewhere under the costume. He says nothing. Doesn’t even make a fake monkey noise when he presses the button on the top of the can and mists Leigh’s face.
She fights it. The stuff burns her eyes and her throat.
Before Leigh knows it she’s on the floor. Eyes flooded with tears and six shabby paws and two faded wings on her. The animals are hooting and hollering. The ruckus they’re making is like something you hear at a zoo when all the tourists have gone home. Whatever was in the can starts to work. Leigh is suddenly so tired she can’t open her eyes. And her limbs are deadweight. She’s sinking into the carpet as the frayed beasts are getting farther and farther and farther away like in a tunnel.
They’re laughing. Not animal noises but human voices. Laughing.
Then it all just fades out.
CHAPTER ONE
Five days out
1.
Midday and a man in a cheap navy business suit sips soda and takes small bites of a bologna sandwich in the bland cafeteria of Omni ConsumerTronics in Passaic, New Jersey.
The man