Disclaimer: Meyer owns all.

Chapter 4

It just seems like any other day when I wake up.

Nevertheless I somehow sense that it would be wrong to just lay there daydreaming. I'm too fuzzy with sleep to remember exactly why it's wrong—more wrong than the usual why-are-you-wasting-your-life-daydreaming?—I just somehow know it is.

But I feel like crap and I don't know how I can face the day. So instead of using the snooze button on my alarm to catch some more sleep, I use it to daydream.

It started out as just a scent. Something lingering that he couldn't quite get a hold of.

Like a memory, just on the brink of retreating into oblivion.

Like a dream, disappearing on the point of waking.

A rat-tat-tat on his skull. Tapping tapping tapping.

It grew louder over time. A smell with sound. It grew technicolor, too. Tapping tapping tapping tapping tapping until his head was pounding with lights blazing a piercing pain right in the center of his skull.

And it happened every time she came around.

Young ingénue, Bella Swan, sky's the limit, she's in it to win it, all around good girl next door, here in Hollywood to become a star. Every time he sees her, it's like an ice pick between the eyes.

But she's got talent a mile long. He can tell from her work, from the film shorts he picked out personally, because no way was he doing this show with the producers' pick of no-talent fresh-faced media whores. Man of the hour, big man on campus, first-time director Edward Cullen's not going to saddle himself with some dancehall floozy who doesn't know her way around a camera.

This is his time to shine, no one note show-tune fiddler.

And what a gimmick. The public'll eat it up. Edward Cullen making his directorial debut, accompanied by a hometown girl making it big, Trilby to his Svengali, working as his personal assistant in return for his mentorship—never mind that he's new to this himself!—their antics broadcast into everyone's home once a week, a sure fire hit. And when the actual movie comes out? Blockbuster for sure.

It's lookin' good, too. Sitting in the dark at the end of every day, watching the dailies, it's lookin' promising. Cullen's as much of a genius behind the camera as he is in front of it. By the time the film wraps, there's enough buzz to guarantee nominations. And the party to celebrate the wrap is wild.

But that was last night. The cleaners're coming in an hour, and there's empty bottles and broken cups all over the place, lost earrings and stray cufflinks, bowties and broken heels, the aftermath of debauchery.

He's standing in a window looking out at the sun coming up over the desert and he can smell her coming, just like he can always smell her coming, a dagger to the brain, and when he turns around he can see it in her eyes. She knows he's dying.

Things he never wanted anyone to know, he knows she knows, just looking at him right now.

It doesn't matter. Scum-bag lawyers and dirt-bag producers have seen to it that she can't run her mouth. He owns her.

He's been thinking about putting a bullet in his head. Save the doctors some trouble. If the surgery doesn't kill him, it'll probably leave him a vegetable, so what's it matter if she knows? The rest of the world'll find out soon enough.

But then he smiles. A death mask.

Because that would be fitting, wouldn't it? She was his first symptom. The headaches he'd get whenever she'd come around and he'd smell that smell that was so inherently her. It was only fitting that she be the first to know the truth. And she can't say a fucking word about it.

"I have a tumor," he says. And shrugs. "A brain tumor."

It's not fair. It isn't her fault. But he can't help thinking, every time he looks at her, of his skull just splitting in half.

He laughs. "Do you know how many times I've fantasized of trepanning myself? You know what that is, right? Cutting off a piece of my skull and slicing off a chunk of my brain." Anything to make the pain stop.

Ring a bell and a dog salivates, after all. We're just animals. And every time he would see her, his brain would seize up. So he can't help blaming her. Illogical as it is, he can't help wanting to hold her responsible.

He tells her how hard he's been working to keep it all a secret, at least until the film wrapped. And now that it has, he has no reason not to get the surgery. Except that it'll probably leave him a drooling, simpering mess. He doesn't want the world seeing him like that, does he? What he needs, is a dog on a leash and an iron-clad confidentiality agreement. Someone to oversee his recovery and keep the news from leaking.

How convenient, then, that her contract says that he's got her at his beck and call for another six months.

When my snooze alarm goes off again, I remember what happened the night before and I realize just why it seems so fucked up that I'm laying here in bed, fantasizing.

I found a dead body last night.

There's a cacophony of sound in my head—

I don't want to think about that. I don't want to think about anything. I just want to lay in bed and daydream.

I do think about calling in sick. But I've just had a vacation and will have to leave work early to go to the police station. Besides, the new semester at school is starting soon and I can't afford to get behind at work with Comps coming up.

So I get ready and leave my apartment only a few minutes late.

Walking to the subway, I stay well away from the alley where I found the dead body. There's still police tape up and I spy a gawker who's paused in wonderment at the loss of his shortcut, muttering to himself about crime rates in the city.

My subway card doesn't work and I go to the kiosk for help and the woman on duty glares at me for disturbing her, even though the first words out of my mouth to her were an apology, and I don't know how I'm going to make it through the day when the world is already so angry at me. I think that my skin hurts.

I have to buy a new subway card and she says that I can mail my old card to the main office and maybe—maybe—I'll get my money back. But the cost to my soul of writing and sending that letter and handling the reply, not to mention what it took to speak to the angry attendant, already seems like much more than the twenty-five dollars I've lost.

The subway is more crowded than usual and I feel nauseated, trying to hold onto the bar without actually touching it and wondering if it really is necessary for the man next to me to be standing so closely, his body "inadvertently" swaying against mine whenever the train makes the slightest turn and the warmth of his body positively burning through his suit so that I wonder how he hasn't caught fire.

At first he doesn't move when I turn to get off and I have to say "Excuse me" three times, like an asshole, before he'll budge and I think that maybe this is why people throw themselves in front of trains, to fuck up the lives of men like this. It's so obnoxious, throwing yourself in front of a train, making sure that people will remember you in death. If I ever kill myself, I'll go somewhere where no one will ever find me. I'll take care of everything before I go, sell or give away everything, return the keys for my apartment to the landlord, quit my job and pay all my bills and give my family some bullshit story so that no one will be looking for me. I'll make sure that no one will ever find my body, because I know how people make fun of suicides, which is probably just a coping mechanism, but I think that I shouldn't have to put up with it, not in death. And anyhow, as my last gift to the world, I want to be sure that I don't leave a mess. I want to be forgettable. Disappear.

I trip on the stairs coming up out of the subway and no one says anything or even makes a move to help me. So who knows? Maybe I've disappeared already. A see-through person.

I suppose it's because I'm not pretty. I have to try just to look passable. Pretty women aren't see-through. They get doors held open for them and job offers and receive general interest from the population at large, proof that being pretty is evolutionarily advantageous. Translation: I shouldn't even be here.

If a crime's been committed, ugly people are suspected first. There're studies to prove it: Given photos of kids along with narratives of little crimes that the kids have committed, like throwing rocks at dogs, people always let the pretty kids off. "Here is a basically good child," the subjects invariably write, "sometimes driven to less than sterling behavior, but inherently good." The ugly kids aren't so lucky.

I pick myself up off of the stairs and blink fast so that the lone tear in the corner of my eye doesn't fall—I won't cry, I won't—and race up the rest of the steps even though my knee is throbbing.

I think about taking a bus the last three blocks to my office building but I can't, I can't stand in that line or face the bus driver or jockey for position on the bus or bear the agonizing wait to pull the bell—not too early, not too late—with the other commuters thinking what they will about me (She took the bus just to go three blocks?). So I limp to work, feeling dirty already with the stink of the subway ride and the lingering heat of the man who kept pressing up against me on the subway and the filthy stairs I fell on and the sneer of the attendant at the kiosk.

Once I'm in the office, I wash my hands and tell myself it's okay, that I'm okay, because I don't think I'll make it otherwise. I don't dawdle getting my coffee though, because there's a crowd in the break room and I can't face any of my co-workers. Instead I log on to my computer and go right to work and don't get up until my supervisor comes in.

I don't want to tell her exactly why I have to leave early, but what else can I do?

She's all sympathy. Faked or not, I will take it, but now she's looking at me like I'm Humpty Dumpty and she wants to try to put me back together again. Fortunately, the jagged edges of my broken shell must be showing because she's looking at me like I'm bleeding so badly that she's afraid to touch me for fear of making it worse. And it would, it would make it worse if she tried to touch me, but she doesn't so I'm okay.

Back at my desk, I wonder if she's already looking online for details of the murder. I open up a browser and run a search for information about the incident, but I don't learn much. The articles don't mention me at all and there're no details about the victim's life or why he might have been killed.

After the police arrived, I was escorted out of the alley. But before I was led away, I saw enough to know that he—whoever the victim was—must have been either shot or stabbed. There was too much blood for it to have been anything else.

I know it wasn't robbery though. I watched the police pull out the victim's wallet.

I can imagine hating someone enough to want to kill him. I remember how I felt when everything was going on with V and J.

I wanted them out of my life. And more. I wanted them to pay for what they'd done to me.

But to act on the desire for vengeance? How does a person do that?

I remember going online for advice about how to deal with the two of them. But for some reason, there aren't many sites devoted to recovering from a doomed friendship. Like it's not supposed to hurt bad enough to require that kind of effort.

In the end, I had no choice but to turn to the sites devoted to overcoming failed romances, which just pissed me off even more, because it was like confirmation of V's bullshit about my feelings for J.

Forget J.

None of the advice worked either.

I was supposed to make lists of V and J's bad traits. A list of their failings apparently reminding me why I was better off without them.

So I was on an endless loop, all day long, listing the things that I hated about them, going over and over conversations we'd had, things that they'd done—a steady background chatter as I worked or as I walked through the grocery store, as I tried to study—and that was before I'd "broke up" with them. I knew what was wrong with them and I still wanted them.

Listing their bad traits wasn't going to help.

If meditation (like prayer) works because it centers your thoughts and concentrates your focus, then why not a candle and a crystal? There was advice on the color of candle I should use if I wanted to rid myself of negative energy and the most effective kind of crystal for overcoming heartache. I drove all of the way out to F— to find a shop that sold the stuff.

The shop girl smiled too widely and said "Blessed be" when she gave me the change. And I said, "Umm yeah," and ran, like an asshole, all for nothing, because the candle and the crystal didn't work, obviously, because I still missed them, goddammit.

If I was really and truly desperate, of course, I knew that there was another option.

I could get a different color candle and a different crystal. There're spells in the Papyri graecae magicae for making one of the dolls, and archaeologists have found little wax figurines of women stuck with pins. A guy who'd been cursed with a voodoo doll went to a Christian shrine near Alexandria for help. Maybe his problems had nothing to do with that doll, perhaps the doll only made a difference insofar as it was tied to the a wholesale assault on the psychological defenses that, according to real scientists, bolster the immune system. But if the world really exists and everything's really connected—chaos theory—then why shouldn't it have been the voodoo doll that actually did him in?

I would have been well within my rights. I mean after we got back from that island, V actively went about trying to hurt me—her fucking humming and her fucking music and her strategic socializing like a fucking knife in my chest—while I sat there doing nothing, quiet as a fucking mouse.

I would have been entitled to some defensive measures. Some offensive measures.

But was that really who I was? Could I have actively tried to hurt her?

Could I afford to continue doing nothing?

During my mother's brief stint with Neo-Paganism, she told me that the only real rule with magic was to harm no one.

The fact that it was my mother handing out a dictum like this was strange enough. My mother was the very incarnation of harm. She didn't need to lay a finger on you. She just had to open her mouth.

Besides, it didn't make sense to me that Neo-Pagans could claim that they never harmed anyone with their magic. If magic worked, then the people who used it were at the very least changing things, weren't they? And change has effects.

It's like praying. Even if you're just praying to get over a hurt and not praying that the person who hurt you is somehow punished. Chaos theory again—there's ripple effects to change, both good and bad. There's no such thing as a surgical strike, whether the entity driving the drone is the Great Mother Goddess, El, YHWH, Allah, Krishna, or Buddha.

So assuming that I believed in God and/or magic—which was a big leap considering that I questioned the existence of the world—then religion was a little too much like drone warfare. It was all too likely to miss its target. And I didn't want to be one of the assholes behind the bad intelligence. So I wouldn't pray and I wouldn't try to cast a spell.

This is why monks withdraw from society, I thought. Knowing people means getting hurt and getting hurt makes you violent.

I wouldn't give into temptation though. I kept my mouth shut and my head down.

And look where that got me. V and J have been gone for months and I'm still hurting. Still angry.

V was always telling me that I was volatile.

And I have a temper. I know that because I do in fact often have angry thoughts—I considered actually cursing that bitch after all—it was crazy for her to complain about this though, considering that I always ended up doing whatever she wanted. If my temper was really all that bad, then how come I never got my way? Until the day I stopped talking to them altogether of course. But I didn't really get what I wanted then either, did I? Because I lost V and J.

So I never did get what I wanted, did I?

And which of us used physical violence in the end? Not me.

I was just so fucking docile.

I remember again how V once said that I must make a great mess, throwing things whenever I had one of my little temper tantrums.

Her remark confused me at first. I couldn't remember having thrown a single thing out of rage in my entire life (except for a math book in the seventh grade but that didn't count because it was math, which is predicated on the existence of a world that might not exist).

But when V said that, I let a beat pass while I thought over her comment. And then I nodded and said that it did. It did make a great mess when I threw things during one of my little tantrums.

I fucking nodded.

Because I always did just whatever she said. I became just whatever she thought that I should be.

How is it possible that she knew me so poorly?

I wonder if she somehow saw a secret part of me that I don't even know myself. An angrier, more violent part.

Or maybe it was that she wanted me to be that person—the one who was out control—so that she could justify telling me what to do. Make me into some sort of beast that she was could enjoy trying to tame.

Because in her head she was one of those awesome, monster-defying monks, totally at peace with herself and the world, Buddha in her back pocket.

I admit that, on that island, I took a swing at V, but it was in self-defense. She'd already laid hands on me by then and my so-called swing hardly connected, my arm flailing weakly.

I've never learned how to fight. My parents were both Corpmen, long before I was born, and yet they claimed to be pacifists, as nonsensical as that sounds, and they said that I should never put up a fight. My mother said if I was ever attacked by a rapist, that I should just let my attacker do whatever he wanted because my mother would rather have me raped and alive then raped and dead. My father was drafted into the military—it was Vietnam—so maybe he didn't have a choice, but he could have run away to Canada, and in fact my mother said that he went AWOL twice during his service. I think that he went into the military only because he was too scared to run, which is the same reason why I think he stays with my mother. My mother wasn't drafted, of course, but she was trying to get away from her family. And she stayed in the military until her time was up because she's never been afraid of anything in her life, except maybe her family whom she's never let us meet, and she doesn't leave my father because she enjoys claiming to be his victim.

As bad as my parents get, they've never laid hands on me or my brother. They are pacifists after all. Yet there's a screaming black abyss whenever I let myself think of them and that trailer in G— where they're still living.

And if I'm evidence of what can be done without even touching a person in violence, I can't imagine the kind of anger it must take to actually lay your hands on someone and murder him.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

I've never been inside a police station before. It's less hectic than I imagined it would be, but I still have to dig my fingernails into the flesh of my palms to keep the panic from overwhelming me as I traverse the maze of desks and personnel, trying not to meet anyone's eyes.

I calm down slightly when I sit down with the sketch artist, a pang of disappointment setting in when I realize that she's going to use a computer program instead of a sketchpad. For some reason, I think it would be so much more romantic to have a drawing.

My heartbeat starts to pick up again when we hit our first roadblock. The sketch artist is nice to begin with, but I realize that that's just a front.

I can tell that she's particularly annoyed that I'm not sure about the gender of the person I saw in the parking lot. Of the person whose reflection I think that I saw.

The image she comes up with at last is so indistinct that it could be anyone, the blur of circles and squares that make up the face easily transposable from person to person. But I've never been any good with things like that. I remember words, not faces. Ideas, not names. I think it's because I'm a megalomaniac. I only care about myself.

Except for my family. I also hate them though.

I'm so grateful when she gives up and tells me that I can go, but getting away turns out to be a little harder than that. It was stupid of me to think that it might be easy.

The detective from the previous night has loomed up in front of me, like he was waiting for me to be finished this whole time. I wonder what this means, that he would wait for me like this.

I don't like the way that he's looking at me either. Like he thinks I'm a criminal. Or maybe that's just the way that all cops look at everyone, yet it makes me feel guilty, and I'm not even sure what I've done.

But we're in a police station already—a gauntlet of officers and criminals between me and the exit—so it's not like I can just run away.

Head down, I follow the detective back to an interrogation room. The scene from Laura where Dana Andrews questions Gene Tierney in the police station flashes before my eyes. I don't think this is going to be anything like that.

After all, my detective's nothing like Dana Andrews, who was kind of ugly actually, but had the most sensitive eyes. You can see when Dana's face hardens, too, like he's putting on an act. My detective's better looking, maybe, but he hasn't got nice eyes and his face is always hard, always angry. And I'm definitely not Gene Tierney. I don't look like a model and no Clifton Webb will ever say of me that I make him want to be a better person.

The interrogation room has a dirty yellow table and the walls are lime green. One of those funny mirrors is hanging on the wall and I wonder if someone is watching. The detective offers me coffee but I've seen Law & Order so I know better than to accept. At least, there's no spotlight in my eye like there was in Gene Tierney's. No third-degree.

Nevertheless, I consider asking for a lawyer. Thanks to reforms after 9/11, I'm not even sure if I still have the right to a lawyer. Can't they just lock me up? They don't even have to charge me. In antiquity, prison was rarely used as a punishment for condemned criminals. Prison was usually reserved for people awaiting trial and for witnesses who might otherwise run. The pagan orator Libanius once complained to an emperor about Christian magistrates who were just letting accused criminals languish in prison—where prisoners suffered from want of food, water, space and air, to say nothing of the fact that these prisoners were usually chained up. It seems that Christian magistrates preferred to leave people in prison rather than conduct the trial, because trials inevitably involved torture, at least for non-elites. I have visions of Black Ops sites and waterboarding, which is ridiculous. I didn't do anything wrong.

Even if I did, they can't possibly suspect me of something heinous enough to warrant seizure and torture.

But that's the point of state violence, isn't it? The injudicious use of strength.

And I've been on the verge of a panic attack since I walked into this police station. I haven't got any money or any friends and my family is crazy. The police can do whatever they want to me and no one would notice or care.

The detective's got me alone, too. I wonder where his partner is. After all, don't they always run in pairs? I'm not going to ask, though. I don't want to point out that I've figured out that he doesn't want witnesses when it comes to me, which must mean that he's going to try something especially shady, even though everyone knows that cops always cover for each other.

"So, why were you in that alley last night?" the detective asks me once he's taken a seat, eyeing the way that I'm fidgeting.

I clasp my fingers together, willing myself to sit still. "To get home," I say, again, having told this story so many times (to two or three police officers last night in addition to the detective) that I'm starting to feel like it's not even about me. Like it's a story about a story that might have been about someone who knew someone I knew.

"But why the alley? It's pretty dirty. And the streetlight's broken. Why would a young woman like you want to walk down an alley like that?"

"It's a shortcut."

"A dangerous shortcut."

"The long way around is just as dangerous. Just danger spread out. The alley crams it all into one space so you get it over with." I'm trying to make this sound logical even though I know that it doesn't.

"Danger? It's just a sidewalk."

"There might be people."

"Normally, a young woman like you feels safer when there are more people around."

"But they might want to bother you." And I feel so small and inadequate saying that. I wish that I could just disappear.

"Why were you out so late?" he switches topics.

"I went out with coworkers."

"No one came home with you?"

I'm confused. "Came home with me?"

"You know, did one of your coworkers accompany you?"

I know that my cheeks are burning. "No. No one came home with me. I wouldn't do that."

He's trying to seem conciliatory now, but it's not working. "I can be discreet, you know. It doesn't have to get back to your boss."

"No one came home with me," I repeat a bit too vehemently. Then I worry that this just makes it sound like I'm lying.

He watches me for a few beats before he sighs. "It's just as well. But you know, it would help if we could get someone to corroborate your story about the guy in the garage."

"I didn't say there was a guy in the garage."

He looks at me reproachfully. "You just sat down with a sketch artist."

"I didn't say it was a guy." I'm not letting him confuse me into contradicting myself. The sketch resembles a man, but it could also be a woman.

"What time did you leave the bar?"

"Can't my Metro card tell you when I entered and left the subway?" I won't try to guess. I'm going to make him work for it.

But he doesn't even bother to respond to that one, changing topic again. "One of your coworkers left at the same time as you."

I realize that the police must have already tried to confirm my story. I don't remember anyone leaving the bar with me though. "If you say so."

"How much did you drink?"

"Less than a glass."

"You didn't take a sip out of anyone else's drink?"

I remember K making us all try her margarita. "Just a sip."

"You seemed a little confused last night. Like maybe you'd had more than one drink."

"I'm not a heavy drinker."

"Why not? You don't like your coworkers?"

"I just—I just don't. That's all. No reason."

"You don't go to many of these happy hours, do you?"

"No."

"Trying to avoid someone?"

"Avoid someone?"

"A coworker maybe. You had an affair and it ended badly and now it's hard to see him around. Especially outside of work. So you usually skip happy hours."

"I'm not seeing anyone."

"But you were seeing someone."

"No." He can't possibly know about V and J. And I wasn't seeing them, not the way he means. Besides, V and J can't possibly have anything to do with this.

"Then why don't you like to go out drinking with your coworkers?"

"It's—I'm awkward." I wish this was already over.

"Awkward?"

"I don't get along with my coworkers. I don't like drinking and it's awkward." Isn't it obvious?

"Why do you go if you don't like them and you don't like drinking?" he asks as if he's genuinely stumped, but I know that he's just trying to catch me in a lie.

"Because you're supposed to. You're supposed to go to happy hours and have a beer even if you don't want to. To seem social." Everyone knows this.

"So you didn't stay long?"

"I left as soon as I could."

"But one of your coworkers left at the same time."

"I didn't know that."

"Why would he leave at the same time as you? Doesn't he like going to happy hours?

"I don't know." I don't even know just who it is he's talking about.

"Could he have followed you home on the subway?"

"I was alone." I try to picture the scene again, even though I'm not good at things like that. There's no point in being observant about a world that holds zero interest for me. "No one else was walking out of the station."

"Except for the guy in the parking lot. The one you saw."

It only takes me a few seconds to recover."He must have already been there."

"You just said that you weren't sure that it was a guy."

"Him. Her. Whoever."

"And didn't you say that you weren't sure if it was a trick of the light?"

"It might have been a trick of the light."

"What'd you call it? Pareidolia? I looked it up. You were right, that's what it's called. Why d'you use big words like that when you can just say 'trick of the light'?"

I don't know. Why do I do that?

And now he's looking at me like I'm a problem he's trying to solve. The suspicion's gone, but this isn't much better. "You know," he says in a softer tone, almost like he's confiding in me. "We sometimes get witnesses who try to inject themselves into cases. They do their civic duty in reporting what they know, which is great, they've done the right thing. And that gives them a sense of importance. So they try to help a little more. They even make stuff up sometimes. Things that aren't true. Because they're trying to help."

I don't have anything to say to that.

He asks again. "Did you see anyone in the garage?"

"I don't know."

"You went home alone?"

"I was alone." Why can't he just believe me?

"How long did you wait to call 911 after you found the body?"

"I didn't wait. I called right away."

"The time stamp on your Metro card says you exited the station eighteen minutes before you called 911. Are you telling me it took you eighteen minutes to walk 400 yards?"

AN:

Thanks for reading.

For the story about the guy going to a Christian shrine for help after being cursed with a voodoo doll, see Gager's Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World 262-63. For instructions on making one of these dolls see IV 296-321 inThe Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, translated by Hans Dieter Betz.

Libanius Oration 45 in Loeb Classical Library.

Rec: Operation: Merry Christmas by nicnicd - When Bella, alone for Christmas, bumps into a shy and quiet coed outside of her dorm will her negative outlook on the Holidays change? My submission to the Twilight Gift Exchange on LJ. Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance/Humor - Chapters: 9 - Words: 19,796 - Reviews: 291 - Favs: 384 - Follows: 188 - Updated: Mar 2, 2010 - Published: Mar 1, 2010 - Bella, Edward – Complete