I heard a female voice, crying, shriller screams, pleadings, but the words were indecipherable when they reached my ears. The larger figure kicked at the ground. Then it knelt down, thrusting.
More screams, the loudest, most piercing yet. Silence.
Now only the large figure stood, staring at the ground. In a measured pace, it walked back in the direction from which it had come, pulling by long black hair what it had chased through the desert. I heard the footsteps and what it dragged sliding through the dirt, the woman’s legs still twitching.
Suddenly, it turned and looked in my direction. Moonlight, bluish and surreal, streamed across the stranger’s face.
I froze. My brother, Orson, stood smiling on the desert.
5
A stiff purple dawn unfolded on the desert, ending a terrible, sleepless night. I realized from here on out, whenever I closed my eyes, I would always see a man on a moonlit desert, dragging a woman through the dirt by her hair.
At the approach of footsteps, I sat up in bed. A dead bolt turned and the door swung open, revealing a man of my proportions: same thin, muscular build, same stark blue eyes. Similar but not identical, his face looked like the ideal of mine, more handsome in its superior proportionality. He stood grinning in the doorway, and in contrast to my unkempt graying hair, his crew cut shone a perfect brown. In addition to black snakeskin boots and faded blue jeans, he wore a bloody white T-shirt with sweat marks extending down from the armpits. I wondered fleetingly why he perspired so profusely before the sun had even risen. His arms were stronger than mine, and as he leaned against the door frame, he took an aggressive bite out of a large burgundy apple.
I couldn’t speak. It was like seeing not the ghost of a loved one, but the demon. Tears burned in my eyes. This is not real. This cannot be my brother, this terrible man.
"I have missed you so much," Orson said, still hovering in the doorway. I could only stare back into his blue eyes.
Orson had disappeared from Appalachian State University our junior year, my last image that of him standing in the doorway of our dorm room.
"You won’t see me for a while," he had said. And I hadn’t, from that day to this. The police had given up. He’d just vanished. My mother and I had hired detectives: nothing. We feared he was dead.
Now he apologized. "I wouldn’t have had you see that last night. The consequence of using old rope, I guess." I noticed fresh scratch marks on his neck and face. Specks of glitter glinted on his cheeks, and I wondered if they’d come off the woman’s fingernails when she struggled. "You want breakfast?" he asked. "Coffee’s brewing."
I shuddered, repulsed. "Are you kidding me?"
"I wanted to keep you in here for several days before bringing you out and revealing myself, but after last night…well, there’s really no use is there?"
Sweat slid down my sides.
As he bit again into the apple, Orson began to walk up a short hallway. "Come on," he said.
I climbed down off the bed and followed him out of my room, heading toward the front of the cabin. My legs felt unstable, like they might sink right down into a puddle on the floor.
"Have a seat," he said, pointing to a black leather sofa pushed against the left-hand wall. As I walked into the living room, I glanced behind me. At the terminus of a narrow hallway, two rooms, side by side, constructed the backbone of the cabin, mine on the left, a door without a dead bolt or a centered metal panel on the right. A small Monet of a skiff gliding under a stone bridge hung from a log between the two doors.
The walls of the living room were covered, floor to ceiling, with books. They stood on rustic shelves that protruded from the logs, and I was amazed at the diversity of the titles. I recognized, on the end of one shelf, the colorful jackets of the five books I’d written.
My brother walked to the other side of the room, which became a tiny kitchen. A record player sat on a stool by the front door, a three-foot stack of records beside it. Orson looked at me and, smiling, set the needle on a record. "Freddie Freeloader" sprang out from two large speakers, and I eased down on the sofa.
As the song progressed, Orson took a seat on the other end of the couch. The way he stared unnerved me. I wanted my glasses.
"Do you think I could have my things now?"
"Oh, you mean this?" Nonchalantly, he pulled my .357 out of his jeans pocket. "I did tell you to bring the Smith and Wesson, didn’t I?" His voice filled with angry sarcasm as his cold eyes dilated and burned through me.
"I’m sorry," I said, shifting uncomfortably on the couch, mouth running dry. "Wouldn’t you have done the same? I mean, I didn’t know —"
"Trying to put me in your shoes won’t work." He walked to the record player and lifted the needle. The cabin now in absolute silence, he moved to the center of the living room.
"You fucked up, Andy. I told you just bring clothes and toiletries, and you brought a gun and a box of bullets." He spoke casually, as though we lounged on a back porch, smoking cigars.
"When you don’t follow my instructions, that hurts both of us, and the only thing I can think of to do is show you that not following them isn’t in your best interest." He opened the cylinder of the .357 and showed me five empty chambers. "You fucked up once, so we’ll load one bullet." He took a round from his pocket and slipped it into a chamber.
I grew sick with fear. "Orson, you can’t."
"Andy-Andy-Andy. You never tell a man with a loaded weapon what to do." He spun the cylinder, flipped it back into the gun, and cocked the hammer. "Let me explain how this punishes me also, because I don’t want you to think I’m doing this just for kicks.
"I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to bring you out here, and if your luck suddenly runs out and the twenty percent chance of this bullet being in the hot chamber bites your ass, I’ve done a lot of work for nothing. But I’m willing to take that chance to teach you a lesson about following my instructions."
When he pointed the gun at my chest, I uselessly held out my hands. He squeezed the trigger — click — and took a bite of his apple. I could hardly breathe, and as I buried my face in my hands, Orson put the record back on. The music started again, and he snapped his fingers to the offbeat, smiling warmly at me as he returned to the couch. When he’d removed the round from the chamber, he set the gun on the floor and plopped back down beside me. A wave of nausea watered my mouth, and I thought I might be sick.
Holy fucking shit, he’s out of his goddamned mind. I’m going to die. I’m alone in a desert with a psychopath who is my brother. My fucking brother.
"Andy, you’re free to roam the house now, and the desert. The shed outside is off-limits, and I’m gonna lock your door every night when you go to bed. You can quit pissing in the bowl. Shower at the well by the outhouse. It’s cold, but you’ll get used to it. The electricity comes from a new generator out back, but I’ve been too busy to put in plumbing."
"May I use the outhouse now?" I asked, scarcely able to muster my voice.
"Sure. Always let me know when you leave. I don’t ever want to have to come find you."
Still shaking, I crossed the room and opened the door to sunlight ripening upon the russet wilderness. I shivered, girding the white bathrobe I’d worn for the last two days more snugly around my waist. When I reached back to shut the door, Orson stood in the threshold.
"I have missed you," he said.
I looked at him, and for a second he was vulnerable, like the brother I’d loved when we were young. His eyes pleaded for something, but I was in no condition to consider what they wanted.
"Who was she?" I asked.