SlashAs I was leaving for work I received a text ordering me to report to the Chair, ASAP. Crap! Just great! Commings was someone I tried to avoid.
I entered Commings’s office and saw my arch-enemy, James Fredricks. Commings fiddled with some papers and said, “I’m glad you stopped by, Dave.” As if I had a choice. He smirked and added, “I was just congratulating James on getting his latest paper published and informing him his promotion to full professor was approved. Unfortunately, your promotion wasn’t. I wanted you to hear it from me before it became common knowledge.” Fredricks came over, put his arm around me, and said, “Better luck next year, old boy. I guess the board didn’t want two promotions in the same department.” I resisted the temptation to knee Fredricks in the nuts. He would’ve kicked my ass. For once I couldn’t think of a smartass comeback. I stomped out not saying a word, fantasizing about grabbing Commings’s letter opener and plunging it into Fredricks’s heart. As I closed the door I could hear them laughing. It was tempting to charge back and try for the letter opener, but I knew it wouldn’t work. The letter opener was metal. To slay Fredricks I’d need a wooden stake. That was the start of a seriously shitty day. An email informed me a paper I’d submitted was rejected. Ten minutes into an exam my best student came to me and said, “Professor, I can’t get started on problem one. Can you give me a hint?” The problem was supposed to be easy. I looked at it and saw I’d made a careless mistake, changing it from trivial to impossible. The low point occurred as I was leaving for home. My girlfriend, Rachel, told me she’d been denied tenure. I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. Rachel would be fine. As a female computer scientist she’d be heavily in demand. However, she’d have to move. I’d been planning to ask her to marry me. Finally something good happened. My sixteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, was waiting in my apartment. “After the day I’ve had, I’m really glad to see you,” I said as we hugged. “Weren’t you going to spend the night with your mother?” “Shithead is coming over.” “Shithead” was Hannah’s name for Fredricks. Not only was he making my life miserable at work, he was the current beau of Grace, my ex. “Yeah, he’s a jerk,” I said. “Avoid him. He just wants to sleep with Grace.” “If that was it, I wouldn’t have a problem.” She shuddered. “He never misses a chance to touch me or walk into my room when I’m not dressed. It started when we went to Rio over Christmas break. He insisted we go to a topless beach. It’s too creepy having my mother’s boyfriend staring at my boobs. You’d think he’d be happy with Mom. Even if she is forty-one, she’s really hot.” In Hannah’s mind anyone over forty should start looking at walkers if not wheelchairs. *** The next morning, as I walked by Fredricks’ office, I heard his voice and saw red. I barged in, leaned over his desk, and shouted, “Listen Fredricks, you pervert, what you and Grace do is your business, but you keep your hands off my daughter! I don’t care how big you are! If I hear you’ve been copping feels from my kid, I’ll make you regret it!” Fredricks bolted out of his chair, pushed me away, and yelled, “Keep your greasy hands off my desk! Your slut of a daughter comes on to me! Every time I go there she parades around in next to nothing and misses no opportunity to rub against me.” I pushed him back and said, “I’m warning you, Fredricks! Touch Hannah again and I’ll take you down!” “Like you could,” Fredricks said with a sneer. He punched me high on my cheek. My glasses went flying, I stumbled back, hit the wall, and slid down on my ass. Fredericks started towards me looking as if he were going to finish me off for good. Josh Kalinski stepped between us. Meredith Motin and Dustin Stevens came out of their offices across the hall to investigate. Stevens saw me sitting on the floor, my glasses in the corner, and a red mark on my face. He leered with an obnoxious grin. Motin helped me to my feet and said, “C’mon, Dave. Let’s go to your office.” Motin has been an unofficial mentor for me even though she has troubles of her own. Her husband has ALS. *** Late the following afternoon I got a call from Grace. Fredricks hadn’t showed for a date and wasn’t answering his phone. She asked if I’d check to see if he was in his office. I grudgingly agreed. I knocked on his door and called, “Fredricks? You there?” No answer, but the door swung open. It was dark. I flicked on the lights. I saw a foot sticking out from behind the desk. Fredricks lay on his back in a pool of blood with two bullet holes in his chest. I raced to the men’s room, bent over the toilet, and barfed. Finally, after I’d been reduced to dry heaves, I was able to collect myself. I got shakily to my feet and called 9-1-1. The cops, headed by Sergeant Gregory Williams, grilled me for about two hours, before letting me go. I wondered how buffoon like Williams got to be a Sergeant. *** A few days later I found Williams in my office. “The secretary let me in,” he said. “That’s good,” I said as I removed my coat. “For a moment I thought I had an intruder. I was about to call the police.” I should learn not to make wiseass cracks to Williams, but he’s such a schmuck he brings out the worst in me. Williams turned red. “I’ve had enough of your smart remarks,” he yelled. “You listen to me, and you listen good. I’ve…” I started to laugh. “Did you really say ‘You listen and you listen good?’ You’ve been watching too much television.” “You think you’re so clever,” Williams spat out. “You won’t be laughing when you’re charged with murder. You’re our number one suspect, and you’re way ahead of anybody else. I’ll tell you what we’ve got on you. Maybe you’ll make things easy on yourself, and confess.” “Once again with TV lines,” I said. I hung up my coat and sat. “In police shows a cop says, ‘Make things easy on yourself and tell us how you did it.’ Does anybody in real life say that? In my case, since I didn’t commit the murder, of course I won’t confess. If I had done it, I’d be an idiot to admit it. That’d make things easy for you, not me. But certainly, go ahead, tell me what you have on me.” “First,” Williams said, holding up a finger. “You resented Fredricks. He was hired after you, and surpassed you professionally.” “Other people have started after I did and outpaced me. Am I preparing to murder them all or am I being selective?” “By itself it’s not enough,” admitted Williams, “With everything else it’s just one more nail in your coffin.” Another finger. “Second. He kept rubbing your face in the fact he outdid you.” “That makes him an asshole, not a candidate for murder.” Williams added finger three. “Third. He took your wife away.” “He didn’t take her away. We’d split long before she started dating him. He’s just one of a long list of men she’s screwed.” With a contemptuous smile, he said, “Not how she tells it. They were doing the deed while you were still married.” He barked out a laugh and taunted, “Fredricks was having sex with her for years. That’d make you really want to kill him. For all we know he could be your daughter’s father.” “Hannah was conceived while we were living in Rhode Island. Fredricks was just starting graduate school in Michigan. He didn’t meet Grace until he took the job here.” “Fourth,” Williams said, raising the next finger. “He kept saying how he was sexually better than you. An insult to your manhood.” “He claimed he was more proficient in the sack than I am. That doesn’t make it true. The only woman who’s had sex with both of us is Grace. Did you get an affidavit from her?” “Fifth,” Williams said, ignoring my response. “He was making moves on your kid and you resented it. I have this from several sources, including her. I have to admit, it does make him a pedophile, but that’s no reason to murder him.” I was surprised Williams knew what “pedophile” meant. He had me, though, with reason five. If I’d witnessed Fredricks making inappropriate advances on Hannah, I would’ve gladly murdered him. However, I couldn’t let Williams know he’d gotten to me. “You just said you thought he was Hannah’s father,” I reminded him. “Would he put moves on his own daughter? If he’s that much of a sleaze, he deserves to be dead.” “He might not have known she was his kid,” Williams responded. “But I agree. Given the time element, it’s unlikely she is. Sixth. You stormed into his office, challenged him to a fight, and threatened him with bodily harm. You said him being bigger than you wouldn’t help. He beat the crap out of you. That’s when you decided to shoot him.” His facts were a little garbled, but I had threatened Fredricks. I felt I needed to reply to each of his points, so I said, “True, I barged into his office. I didn’t challenge him to a fight. I told him to keep his perverted hands off my daughter. He only punched me once before colleagues intervened.” “Seventh. Fredricks made up the teaching schedules and gave you a terrible schedule.” “A flimsy reason for murder, if I ever heard one.” “I’ve seen people commit murder for two dollars.” I doubted the two dollar claim. I didn’t doubt it occurred, just that Williams, a small-town cop, had seen it happen. It sounded like another TV line. “Eighth,” Williams went on. “From what I found out from members of your department, Fredricks was the primary reason your promotion was denied. You had to know he was behind it.” “I don’t care that much about rank,” I lied. “My job would be pretty much the same anyway.” “That brings us to ninth,” Williams said, holding his hands up with all fingers and thumbs raised but one. “Fredricks got your sweetie fired. This might mean she was in on it, so we’re looking at her too.” “She’s already had feelers from other schools, all of which offered her more money than she’s getting here. Fredricks did her a favor.” I exaggerated by saying she already had offers, but I wanted to deflect him from Rachel. As he headed toward the door, he said “Well then this reason might not apply to her, which means you acted on your own. Even if she’ll be better off, she’ll be leaving you. You wouldn’t like that. Except for the ones about him molesting your daughter and beating you up, no one of the other reasons would be enough, but when you take all of them together, the evidence is overwhelming. You watch your back. We’ll be on you like white on rice. It won’t be long before we nail your butt to the wall.” Evidently he was a member of the “no cliché left behind” school. *** I needed a lawyer. I hired Marissa Shea and met with her and her investigator, Elise Conway. Conway and I called on Grace. As she opened the door, I stormed in and shouted, “How could you bring Hannah to Rio with Fredricks and go to a topless beach?” She snickered and said, “I didn’t bring him. He brought us.” That stopped me cold. Grace’s father is richer than Croesus. Anytime Grace wanted anything, she charged it and Daddy paid. It was a contentious point while we were married, though the main cause of the divorce was her philandering. “First class?” I asked. “Of course,” she said as if there were any other way. “Who paid for the room?” “He rented the penthouse suite.” “Did you wonder how he could afford it?” Conway asked. “I didn’t think about it,” Grace replied. Affording something was never an issue with her. “You saw nothing wrong with bringing Hannah to a topless beach?” I asked through clenched teeth, my hands balled into fists. “Grow up!” she exclaimed, but flushed. “She’s not a little kid anymore. She’s let Billy see her topless. There were lots of girls there her age… Besides, I was probably stoned.” Billy was Hannah’s boyfriend. I was too pissed to realize Fredricks casually paid for a vacation I never could’ve afforded, but Conway wasn’t. “Did Fredricks routinely supply drugs?” Conway asked. “Yeah,” Grace replied and shrugged. “So what? A little coke or weed never hurt anyone.” “Did he supply it to your friends?” “He sold it to them,” Grace clarified. “He wouldn’t just give the stuff away. Except to me.” “Do you know who his supplier was?” “Of course not! How would… oh, wait.” “What?” Conway asked. She move forward, intruding on Grace’s space. “Well,” Grace said as she backed up until she bumped into a wall. “One time we were out with Megan and Brett. James didn’t have something Megan wanted. We were passing the math department, and he stopped. He said, ‘Let me see if my fearless leader has it.’ He ran in, and two minutes later came out with the stuff.” As we were leaving, I asked, “Was anything accomplished?” “You bet,” Conway said. “Explain!” “Fredricks was spending too much for someone on a math professor’s salary. The money came from dealing drugs. He was working for someone in your department. You tell me. Who?” “Holy shit!” I thought briefly before saying, “It’d be a full professor. Fredricks wouldn’t take orders from an inferior. Could this be enough to get me off the hook? Reasonable doubt?” “We can’t prove it. In court Grace wouldn’t admit she’s using. We need to find this X factor.” *** We went to my apartment and met with Shea and Rachel. Hannah was also there. Shea asked me to describe the full professors in the department. “There’s four,” I said. “Brad Commings, the Chair, Meredith Motin, Josh Kalinski, and Dustin Stevens.” “What can you tell me about them?” “Stevens dislikes me intensely. He’s an Evangelical Christian type who wants to ‘save my soul’ by getting me to convert. He resented it when I told him if he didn’t stop proselytizing I’d file a formal complaint. I’ve also made remarks he might’ve interpreted as defamatory.” “Is he the most likely X?” “I think so. The sanctimonious son-of-a-bitch is just the type to play the God angle and pull something like this. Besides, the prick drives a new Mercedes SUV. It had to cost mucho bucks.” “Who’s next?” “Commings,” Rachel said. “His office has a large, walk-in closet. X needs a location for storing drugs. Commings has one.” “Has Commings shown any indication of spending too much?” Conway asked. “He doesn’t flaunt it the way Fredricks did,” I said. “He doesn’t live like a pauper either. Of course his pay as a full professor with more than thirty years experience is probably over $100,000, plus, as department chair, his summer stipend would be another two-ninths of his regular year salary.” “What about the others?” Shea asked. “Josh Kalinski has a summer home and a boat on Lake Ontario. It’s a cabin cruiser so it wasn’t cheap. Grace and I were invited there a couple of times while we were married. He told me he’s planning to buy a home in Florida after he retires, and possibly another boat.” “Any indication where the money is coming from?” Shea asked. “He’s clearly spending more than his salary. Why isn’t he your leading suspect?” “Partly because I like Josh,” I admitted. “Also his wife has family money.” “He might want funds of his own,” Conway said. “We can’t discount him. Next?” “Meredith Motin,” I said. “She doesn’t spend much money. Her husband has ALS and needs constant care. Even with health insurance, she’ll have out of pocket expenses.” “Meredith has a ruthless streak,” Rachel remarked. “It comes out occasionally. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Remember how she tore apart what’s-his-face from the sociology department, when he made that ridiculous proposal at the general faculty meeting?” I grinned at the memory. “I forgot about that. Meredith is soft spoken, but she has a spine of steel.” “I have an idea,” Rachel said. “There’s big money here. Nobody can keep track of everything in their heads. X is probably using computer files. The office computers are connected in a wireless network. I can hack into them.” “Really?” Conway asked, eyebrows raised. “Yeah,” Rachel replied with a fiendish grin. “I have a Ph.D. in computer science. I worked in industry, specializing in network security. Unless there’s really tight encryption or a strong firewall I can get in. At the least I can narrow down the list.” “As an officer of the court, I can’t condone committing a criminal act,” Shea said. She grinned. “Assuming we’re speaking hypothetically, when would you do this?” Rachel chuckled. “Some people don’t lock their offices during the day. Tomorrow I’ll sneak into various offices and install software on their computers. They’ll never know. I wouldn’t want to do the main hacking job when anyone else is in the building, so tomorrow evening, late, would be a good time. It probably won’t make much difference, but I want to do this from Dave’s office. It’s right next to the closet containing the router.” “I should be there in case somebody comes in the building,” I said. “Hannah has a hockey game. I’ll drop her off…” “The hell you’ll drop Hannah off!” Hannah exclaimed as she jumped to her feet. “I’m coming with you!” “Honey, it’ll be late. There’s nothing to do except watch Rachel.” “Tomorrow is Friday. Being late isn’t an issue.” She had that mutinous look teenagers get, so I gave in. What harm could it do? *** It was after 10:00 PM when Hannah, Conway, Rachel, and I arrived at my office. Rachel said she’d been able to plant software only on Kalinski’s computer. A cursory inspection showed nothing suspicious. Using her laptop, Rachel set up a download to an external hard drive. “Try Stevens next,” I suggested. “I still think the prick is X.” Rachel used my computer to hack into Stevens’s computer. It was more difficult, since she hadn’t been able to plant software on it. I wondered if Hannah regretted insisting on coming along. Then Rachel announced, “I’m in!” Files related to Stevens’s coursework were neither encrypted nor password protected, but there was a folder that was protected. After Rachel got around the password, we saw several of the files in the folder were spreadsheets with financial data. When I saw that, I said, “I knew he was the one!” “Don’t be too sure,” Rachel said as she opened one of the files. “This looks like it’s connected to his church. He’s a deacon or something, and church members are sending him money.” “Some of which he may have used to get himself a Mercedes,” Conway said, and laughed. “It’s possible he is a low life, bilking his church members, but he may not be our low life.” “There’s a lot there we haven’t identified yet,” I said, stubbornly. “He could be like one of those televangelist cretins and still be a drug dealer.” Rachel set up a download for the files in that folder. While the download from Stevens’s computer was going on, the download of Kalinski’s files ended. Rachel used her laptop to hack into Motin’s computer. After about ten minutes, Rachel said she was in. A short time later Rachel said, “That’s strange. Look at this.” We all crowded around my desk, even Hannah, who’d been putting tape on the handle of her hockey stick. “What’s up?” I asked. “Most of her files are unprotected,” Rachel said, “But there’s a folder containing some strange files, some of which are associated with health care and finances. The latter are password protected. I was able to get around one of the passwords.” “Her husband has ALS,” I reminded Rachel. “She has expenses related to his care. That’s probably what those are for.” “I know,” Rachel said, “But why password protect only them? And wouldn’t most of the financial end be covered by health insurance?” “Not when it runs out,” Motin said. She walked into my office brandishing a gun. “I was in my office when I saw someone was hacking into my computer. I figured I’d find the hacker in this room, and it appears I’m right.” “Meredith,” I said in disbelief. “You’re the one who’s behind the drug deals and the murder? Why?” “The ‘why’ should be obvious. Harry needs a lot of care. Our health insurance company, the bastards, won’t pay. Even if I could’ve taken the insurance company to court and won, it would’ve taken years, and what would’ve happened to Harry in the meantime? Through a former student I stumbled on this drug deal at about the same time I found I needed the money. The drug money covered the cost of Harry’s care, even the experimental stuff, plus a little more for a rainy day. Everything was going great until Fredricks became insatiable. I had to remove him. I knew you’d be a suspect because of the animosity between you and James. Especially after he cleaned your clock. I told the cops about those threats you made. I was planning to let the police either arrest you or not, but once you started digging, I was afraid you’d find out too much. DON’T ANY OF YOU MOVE!” The last statement came as we tried to edge apart. Motin was planning to kill us, and we’d done her a favor by bunching. She’d been holding it in for a long time, however, and welcomed the opportunity to tell about it. I wanted to keep her talking in the faint hope she’d momentarily get distracted and Conway could make a move. If it appeared she was about to shoot, I planned to jump at her. She didn’t know Conway’s capabilities, so she probably regarded me, the only male, as her biggest threat. She’d aim at me first. If I distracted her, maybe Conway could shoot her before she could shoot Hannah or Rachel. Maybe if I got shot, it wouldn’t be fatal. “How did Fredricks get involved?” I asked. “I was looking for a partner. I wanted to stay behind the scenes. I needed someone in our department so the meetings wouldn’t be noticeable. I couldn’t take one of the junior faculty. They might not stay. I considered you, David, but you were married to Grace. Money would have little appeal for you, and in any case you were too straight-laced. Josh’s wife is richer even than Grace. I knew Dustin liked money, but he’s a religious fruitcake. I’d never know if at some point Jesus would tell him to go to the police. Fredricks was perfect. He was greedy, on tenure, and had no scruples. Then he became piggish.” “What do you mean?” “He was worse than avaricious, he was stupid. He was spending too much money. The IRS might notice. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen. If he got arrested he’d certainly give me up in a plea deal. I’d been thinking about removing him for a while, but if I did, it could lead to another problem.” “What?” I asked, puzzled. She snickered and said, “I wanted Commings to continue as Chair. The position would make me too visible. I had to appear willing to take it, but not get it. So I voted against Rachel for tenure.” “You voted against me?” Rachel said. She was livid. “After all the support I gave you!” “I see you’re surprised,” Motin said with a wicked grin. “It was a secret ballot. No one knew. I hated to do it, but if Fredricks was removed and Rachel got tenure, I’d have too many votes for Chair. I knew Stevens, Commings, and Fredricks would vote against you, Rachel, because of your connection to David. It would only take one more vote to kill tenure for you. Anyway, back to Fredricks. Not only was he spending too much money, it wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to take over. I’d stupidly given him Eduardo’s contact information. He called Eduardo and tried to make a deal for himself. Eduardo knew Fredricks wasn’t stable enough to run the operation. He called me and told me to take care of it. I did.” The distraction, when it happened, came from an unexpected source. Sergeant Williams burst into my office with his gun out, shouting, “I’ve got you now, you low-life, murdering, drug-dealing, scumbag!” Williams was referring to me. He probably thought he’d caught me with my entire cabal. Motin, however, saw a policeman with a gun yelling about a murdering drug dealer. She undoubtedly thought he meant her. She swiveled and shot Williams. As soon as Motin turned her gun away from us, Conway made her move, but she wasn’t fast enough. Before Conway could do anything, Hannah brought her hockey stick down on Motin’s gun wrist in a vicious, overhand chop that shattered her wrist bones. In the NHL Hannah would’ve been assessed a match penalty. Motin screamed and dropped the gun. Hannah used her stick to knock it away, but Motin was in too much pain to go for it anyway. Rachel picked up my phone and dialed 9-1-1. Conway went to see if she could do anything for Williams, but it was too late. Motin’s shot was dead center in the chest. No vest. I grasped Motin by the shoulders and pulled her down into a chair. I needn’t have been concerned. She was doing nothing but wailing in pain. “Two minutes for slashing, Babe,” I said to Hannah. “It’s only ninety seconds in my league, Pops,” she responded.
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The UntetheringTHE FIRST TIME
Someone asked her if she needed the extra chair scooted under her table; she didn’t. She rearranged herself in the stiff-backed seat, smoothed her right hand across the lacquered wood of the table, felt the itching crumbs of her half-eaten scone brush against her skin like sand. Samantha turned off her phone, removed her fingers from the keyboard. No more noise escaped her corner of the café. She willed her ears to create silence, to make everything invisible, and then allowed the world back in, one sound at a time. The vague music from above, lyrics only occasionally decipherable, the beat steady and comforting like a mother’s heart. The rapping, grinding, whirring, and release of the espresso machine. The shouts of the baristas, now calling out a vanilla soy latte, now announcing that Sarah’s drink is ready. The kitchen crew dinging their bell, slinging pots and pans, crashing metal against metal. Samantha’s heart beat fast, her eyes filled with tears, her chest clenched into a tightness that she couldn’t will away, didn’t want to will away. She reached for her coffee cup and found that her arm was a cloud, her fingers a mist with no grasping power. Her vision fogged and she tried to blink; no more could she blink than fly. Relief flooded over her, a welcome torrent. She wasn’t Samantha, she was bigger than Samantha; she was the world. She had exploded into the noise, become a part of something; she and the sounds of the café had fully integrated. Although she couldn’t hear them anymore, the cranking, the beating, the shouting, she couldn’t hear them because she was them, she was noise and sound and volume and cadence and rhythm. As quickly and strangely as it had happened, she suddenly came to, and she blinked: a real blink, with eyelashes meeting eyelashes, and the papery skin of her eyelids stretching and folding. Time started again. Her hand wavered over the coffee mug, no longer a cloud but flesh and throbbing blood. She knocked the mug over, shaking. She tried to thank the young man with the mop who appeared at her side to attend to the lukewarm puddle on the floor, but her tongue sat heavy and dead inside her mouth. RUNNING Samantha’s reflection bounces up and down in the mirrored wall. At 2:15 p.m. people are neither on their way to nor from work, so her reflection has the mirror to itself. Right now, Samantha doesn’t have a job to go to or from; the first Tuesday of November has passed and her candidate has won. She is doing some consulting here and there for a few exploratory committees, helping potential candidates analyze voter data and demographics and economic predictors to determine if it’s a good idea for them to run in the next cycle or a terrible one; but this work is straightforward and simple, requires no commute, and allows her to enjoy the winter vacation to which she has become accustomed. She always spends these few months eating green salads, drinking kale smoothies, and running daily – to lose the weight she has inevitably gained when surrounded by pizza and late-night burger runs on the campaign trail. This time will be no different; she will continue these habits, even though no one will notice. No one notices now, she corrects herself. No one notices anymore. As she runs, she thinks about her feet as they hit the rubber mat, her arms as they swish against her hip bones, her legs as they roll in waves. She sees her reflection; she exists with every thump of her feet. Running is the opposite of faith; running is fact. Her feet on the rubber, her socks on her feet, her feet in her shoes, her muscles clinging to bone, her bones jointed together, her cartilage contracting and protecting, her spine curving, her head swaying on her neck. Samantha knows that she runs, knows that she survives, knows that her mother is dead. Believing in those things requires no faith. Faith requires ignorance, and only the ignorant really think that prayers make feelings go away, change lives, or bring back what you have lost. Even I know that. CHANGE “Mom,” she said. “I’m just saying you need to be more involved, that’s it. Look – I found this meting for you, the Little Rock Township Democrats, and they meet right down the road. And it’s even on your day off, so you don’t have to rush after work or anything.” “Samantha, I want a day off. I want to rest. I work had, and I need a day off. It’s not that I don’t care –” “But that’s what you’re saying, right? you just don’t care enough?” “Samantha…” “Seriously, Mom – the country’s a mess, these terrible people are making decisions that are going to affect us for generations, and the least you can do is go to a meeting and see how you can help.” “Darling, how many times do I have to explain myself? I help people every day – every day, Samantha.” Her mother had worked as a nurse for thirty-seven years. She believed the best way to heal the world was through healing the bodies of the sick. She believed that by giving life and saving life the balance would be restored. It’s true, that balance is in life and death, mostly – but it’s in the in-between that I’m the most interested. “I donate every month to the food bank,” her mom continued. “And I foster kittens in the summer, and I always give my spare change to the panhandlers outside of the hospital. Just trying to give people a little extra boost, whatever it is they need to overcome that day.” “But you do realize that does nothing to address the roots of all of these problems – you realize that, don’t you? How many times have you told me how unjust the healthcare system is? About all of the roadblocks you come up against when you’re trying to help a patient? The bureaucracy and the legal barriers?” Samantha’s mother took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh that said oh, how my daughter will suffer, “Sweetheart, there is more than one way to skin a cat.” “Yeah, sure, Mom, I know what you’re trying to say, but look – sure, there are different approaches to change, I get that. But there’s one that actually makes a difference quickly and materially in people’s lives, and there’s a long-term solution that goes along with that and supports it. Giving change to homeless people isn’t helping them to not be homeless – electing someone who will vote for laws protecting homeless people is. And what we need right now is more of those people,” and her voice raised here, in pitch and in volume, like the sound of an approaching siren, “—which means we need phone-bankers and door-knockers and organizers to hit the streets and turn people out for progressive Democratic candidates.” Samantha breathed, almost panted, shook her head at her mother. “That’s literally the only way I see it.” “Well, that’s fine for you, sweetheart. And you know what? You keep doing your job and I’ll keep doing mine, and if everyone does their part I just know the world’s going to get better, someday.” “But what part are you going to play, Mom? What part am I going to play? We have to be doing what’s right – work smarter, not harder. Who knows how much time we have left, really.” “Samantha,” her mother said, and she wanted to say, you’re much too hard on yourself, you’re carrying too much weight, you’re under too much pressure, but she said, “Samantha,” again, touched her on the wrist, “It’s going to be okay.” SIGHT During American History, junior year, when Samantha had already been dreaming about New Orleans from the halls of Little Rock? High School, they learned about Manifest Destiny and the city became hers. Highway 40 and the plastic booths of the Dairy Queen and the backseats of volleyball players’ hand-me-down sedans could not compare to the city that called to her, music notes drifting across state lines, rhythms thumping up the river like tugboats. In Little Rock she had a boyfriend, she hung out with his friends and their girlfriends, she went to football games and house parties, visited Hot Springs, went camping in Ouachita. She went on long runs, looping through her subdivision, dragging along her mother’s dog, waving at neighbors and the little kids she babysat. She was bored. Samantha wanted the romance of having a voodoo priestess as a neighbor. She wanted the grit and squalor of the Ninth Ward. She wanted to be a part of somewhere that threw every obstacle at its people and then helped them to stand again. She read Truman Capote and William Faulkner, fell asleep reading Anne Rice and dreamed of loving vampires. She memorized lyrics to every expletive-ridden Lil’ Wayne song, decided his words and experiences would make more sense once she had settled in New Orleans, a kind of cultural osmosis. She performed an Alice Dunbar-Nelson poem at the annual oratory contest, didn’t win, didn’t even place, insisted to the principal that the student judges were racist because the poem was entitled, “To the Negro Farmers of the United States.” The principal took in her sandcastle-colored hair, her peachy skin, her cornflower blue eyes. He told her there was nothing he could do. Once her boyfriend bet his best friend that he could find and name more black people in the yearbook than he could. Samantha felt a pinch in her stomach, but the feeling never manifested into words. She laughed a little, sipped at her soda; she didn’t participate. You all get a little muddy, at times. Depending on how you feel about it, you clean off your shoes to hide the evidence, you wear the mud proudly, or you are tortured with the decision that lies somewhere in between. Samantha understood that the world was uneven; she had evidence. Her father in prison, her grandmother, addicted to meth, wasting away in a nursing home. The elementary school serving the black neighborhood with its bad reputation, the lack of black students in her honors classes or in the varsity orchestra. “Caleb is so weird,” she wrote in her diary that night, of the incident. “I guess I should be proud, but what a stupid bet to make. I’ve decided I’m not going to pay attention to things like that anymore – to the color of people’s skin. There are more important problems in the world we need to solve, instead of judging each other.” Samantha tottered along in Little Rock, stepping carefully, but willing to track through the mud if the path veered into a direction she didn’t much care for. She got muddy. HOME Samantha’s mother lived in a house with extra blankets in the linen closet, a pantry stuffed with cans of clam chowder and snack-size bags of Lays and boxes of name-brand mac n’ cheese, a fully furnished living room perfectly laid out for reading at the window and writing job applications at the secretary desk by the front door. It was a place of rest, where Samantha went to spend her winter vacations, to recover and recharge. The first week continued much like her life on the campaign trail. Samantha dipped chips into salsa, made late-night Steak ‘n’ Shake runs, devoured mint chocolate chip ice cream by the pint while watching late-night tv. “Samantha, you get more beautiful every day,” her mother declared, one morning as she watched her daughter pour coffee at the kitchen table. Whether truly a compliment or a veiled comment on her size, it was routine, as is what followed: Samantha’s big show of waking up early to walk, then to run; her mother’s big show of buying salad mix, fresh fruit, salmon. “You’re working so hard!” her mother said. “I’m so proud of you! You’re getting healthy and that’s so important!” She patted her own generous stomach, square and soft, like a pillow had been tucked beneath her shirt. “So you don’t end up like me!” Time slowed down and expanded. She and her mother spend days in bed with coffee, watching the morning news shows as they turn into daytime soap operas, go to a yoga class together, select ready-made salads from the grocery store or opt for the Smoothie King drive-thru. This was how they always passed their time, or perhaps how time passed for them. The vacation ended when the field director for a new candidate offered Samantha a job. Samantha felt her mother understood, took pride in her; they both wanted their lives back. She bunched up her dirty sheets in the laundry basket, grabbed a few extra rolls of toilet paper, a tube of toothpaste, a pair of her mother’s earrings she’d been meaning to borrow. Her mother cried and clung to her, suddenly desperate and emotional and almost pathetic. They both knew she wouldn’t be back until next winter, at the soonest, that she probably wouldn’t even call for a few months as she got set up in her next job. “I love you baby,” she said. “Don’t be a stranger – you know I’ve got your room ready for you whenever you want to come visit.” CAMERON New Orleans did not make space for her. Samantha had been determined to curate a group of diverse and political friends. The city sheltered so many democratic clubs and groups that she had assumed this would come easily. Each group had a focus: Black democrats, Hispanic democrats, LGBTQ democrats. She went to those meetings, but after each meeting she tried she left feeling unwelcomed, discouraged, and offended. She didn’t want to say she had given up, that she had exhausted every possibility and found success and acceptance nowhere. She didn’t want to say that she had begun to resent the city of her dreams, this city she had imagined as easy and open. She needed to be re-energized, needed a shot, an inoculation, the kind that makes you feel just a little sick after, a warning, a reminder of the blessing of its protection. Samantha ran the marathon one spring, after preparing for months, running up and down the Mississippi River, around the French Quarter, sweating, sending pigeons up like a spray as she crashed through the stress, through puddles. Someone with a baseball cap handed her a plastic cup of Gatorade at the end. She had brown hair, tucked into a bun at the nape of her neck. Samantha didn’t say thank you. She breathed, huffed, sweated. She wasn’t paying attention. She wasn’t looking for anything. But she was thankful for the cool liquid, for the respite, so, “Thank you,” she said. “Sure,” the someone said, and she introduced herself as Cameron, and her eyebrows arched above her honey-brown eyes and her eyes held home and comfort and care, and Samantha smiled a different smile, a vulnerable smile, a smile that was easy and open. They went one exactly three dates, before Cameron disappeared. Date Number One: a café in the Marigny. Cameron ate pancakes topped with blueberries and whipped cream. She drank a vanilla latte. Samantha had a cappuccino and a spinach frittata. They held hands beneath the table. Cameron kissed Samantha on the cheek when they left. Date Number Two: Samantha met Cameron at the address she had texted her. “No pressure, really. It’s just a backyard barbecue with some friends. Everyone’s super laid back and friendly and they’re going to love you, I promise. Just be you and you’ll be fine,” Cameron had told her, the night before when she had tried to back out, naming all kinds of excuses before she realized Cameron saw right through her, Cameron who had no problem with her sight. After they made introductions, poured drinks, filled plates, everyone gathered in the odd assortment of chairs in the friend’s backyard, plastic lawn chairs, camp chairs, rocking chairs. It looked trashy to Samantha, not the kind of romance that she had imagined a gay backyard would hold. Potted plants squatted tightly together in the muddy yard. The guests wore t-shirts that proclaimed, “Black Lives Matter” and “Eat the Rich.” Samantha sipped her drink, a sweet sangria with uneven hunks of fruit suspended above the ice. She didn’t think she would have much to contribute to the conversation, to any conversation that happened in this backyard. She looked at Cameron, so cool, so relaxed, sitting next to her but not close enough to touch. “Oh my god, did y’all see this?” A brown-skinned woman with a nose ring and close-cropped hair turned her cell phone outward. “Another Black man shot by police – this literally just happened in Baton Rouge.” A few other people pulled out their phones, googling and scrolling through their social media feeds. Samantha didn’t. She looked around. She sipped. She didn’t want to get muddy. “I guess we have to call another protest,” someone said. Cameron had introduced the person as ze, and Samantha didn’t catch his name, or her name, and she was already so anxious and overwhelmed that she had never followed up with Cameron to ask. “Samantha,” someone else said, “You haven’t been to one of our protests yet in New Orleans, have you? How long have you been in town?” Samantha desperately swallowed the last of her drink, tried to find a place to set it down, worried that leaving it on the ground made it vulnerable to spilling over her open toes, clutched it between both hands and tucked it near her waist instead. “About a year,” she answered. “A year and half, maybe.” “Well, you were telling me the other day you really wanted to get involved locally, didn’t you?” Cameron nudged her, encouraging. “Oh, awesome,” the girl with the nose ring said. “What’s like, the biggest issue you’re interested in? Environmental racism? Reproductive justice?” “I mean, all of those things, really,” Samantha replied. “I just think we need the right people in public office who can actually make change happen, you know? There’s only so much we can do with the congress we’ve got these days.” “But it’s all about people power, right? – direct action – we don’t need those idiots in the house or senate to tell us what they think, to tell us we have to wait and take our time, make reforms, don’t freak people out or be ‘revolutionaries.’ I’m sick of waiting for them to get their shit together. Even the democrats haven’t made statements on Black Lives Matter – and if they have, they’ve been lukewarm, at best. They’re not really on our side.” Samantha ran her finger along the outside of her glass, the condensation dripping down between her fingers. She wiped her hands on her shorts, left a dull wet spot on the denim. Did she tell Cameron what she did for a living? She couldn’t remember. And she couldn’t help but feel that everyone here was laughing at her, that Cameron was laughing at her. “At some point though, like, that anger gets a little unproductive. How much is a hashtag really worth without power behind it? How much can you threaten people to change policy if those people don’t really care about you to begin with? I mean, I just think y’all would have an easier time out there if we had more friendly faces representing us, more diverse faces too.” “Cameron, get your girl,” someone said, and Samantha’s face flushed. Was she Cameron’s girl? Why did she need to be gotten? Samantha knew she had unpopular opinions. Usually, she didn’t need to tell anyone; usually, she was more involved in conversations about turnout and ad buys than rallies and activism. Plus, she saw how the All Lives Matter crowd had been ridiculed on social media; she couldn’t afford that kind of bad publicity for herself or her campaign. Samantha sucked her teeth, shook her head slightly, unconsciously. She only saw anger, she only saw purposefully inflammatory conversations, meant to catch people in usable sound bytes to keep fueling anger instead of action. The sangria had unsettled her stomach, her insides churning. “I just think those things have been happening on the ground but no one is listening because they’re not going to listen no matter what. Banners and posters and linked arms and shut-down highways – like, who are you trying to convince? Have you even talked to the elected officials responsible for those racist policies? Have you ever gone to a lobby day?” She still believed in this world; she still believed in this country; she still believed in democracy. She wasn’t ready to try anything else. She won’t ever be. The incredulous faces surrounding her told her that she had said something wrong. Cameron was looking down at the dirt between her sandaled feet. Samantha looked past the crowd, let her eyes focus on a magnolia tree at the edge of the yard. Date Number Three: They made up, in Cameron’s bed, curled beneath a cheap set of sheets, smelling of women and wine and night cream. They didn’t have sex. “It’s okay, Cameron said. “You’re entitled to your opinion, and me and my friends are too. It’s just a matter of finding the common ground, okay?” The next time Samantha ran, a half-marathon this time, she hoped to see Cameron at the end of the line, a Gatorade in her hand, her honey eyes warm and melting. She didn’t. Instead, a red-faced teenager with a huge, scabbing cyst below his right eye handed her a cup of water, which she tilted over her head, letting the water drip down her sternum between her breasts. BUSY The call came after dinner, when Samantha was still running call-time, planning an evening meeting, deciding whether or not she’d sleep in the office under her desk again. “Hi, Samantha? It’s Carol, your mom’s friend? I know you’ve got a busy schedule, hon, but give me a call back as soon as you can. It’s about your mom and it’s really important.” Samantha called her back at lunch the next day, from the Burger King drive-thru, where she was picking up lunch for the candidate and the rest of the staff. Carol told her that her mom was going to have surgery, emergency surgery, in two days, to remove some kind of tumor from her lymph node. Samantha knew her calendar by heart: in two days the final debate between her candidate and his opponent would be broadcast around the state, and in three days the voter registration deadline would hit, both key dates for rallying supporters and volunteers. “Is it serious?” She asked. “Of course,” Carol said. She didn’t really want to believe that her mom was sick enough to warrant a day off. The candidate supported a woman’s right to choose, although he occasionally voted for age restrictions; he said all of the right things, and whether or not he would be able to follow through with them was up to the voters’ opinions and the make-up of the rest of Congress this term. Winning would be Samantha’s in for a senatorial or even a national campaign, opportunities she had been waiting for her whole professional life. What can I do if I’m there? she thought. I’m not a doctor, I faint at the sight of blood. She wouldn’t rest if I came – she’d try to take care of me. I’d be more trouble than anything. “I don’t think I can make it, Carol.” Samantha could hear her take in a deep breath and let it out slowly, like she were blowing through a straw. “Can you put my mom on?” So, she didn’t go. And her mother died on the operating table. SUNDAY SCHOOL Sometime around the second grade, Samantha made friends with a girl in her class named Roxie. Her mother, upon meeting the new friend, said, “Roxie! What a fun name!” and asked the girls if they would like a special after-school snack of Frosted Flakes with strawberries and extra sugar. Roxie’s family was Lutheran, which to Samantha meant nothing beyond their attendance at church on Sunday. Any family that spent their Sundays at worship fascinated Samantha. Her own mother always seemed to plan for it, talk about it, a little wistful, a little resentful, but then when Sunday rolled around they stayed in bed watching television and reading magazines until just before services at the Catholic church down the street began, and then it would be too late to get ready and they might as well just stay in bed all day anyway, right? One Sunday, Samantha had spent the night the Saturday before, and so was present for the weekly sojourn. In anticipation, she hadn’t slept much, instead sprawling on her borrowed pillow, staring at the ceiling and whispering into the darkness, “I believe in God.” She knew this was what you were supposed to say, anyway. She had this picture of God that was somewhere in between Mr. Rogers and Tim Allen as Santa Claus. She wondered where the wind came from, why people prayed if they knew God already had a plan, where babies came from and why – but knew – but had faith – that when she walked into that church and the man-in-charge started explaining, it would all make sense. To her surprise and disappointment, the children who attended church were ushered away from the big room and into a smaller room, a classroom really, nothing special or churchy about that, with a woman-in-charge, a smile too saccharine to be completely trustworthy. If eight-year-old Samantha knew the word skeptical, that’s how she would have described her feeling in that little room. Roxie was with her, and a group of children with similarly Southern names – Cal, Jimmy, Rayna, Holly. They all introduced themselves, and Samantha introduced herself; the woman-in-charge called her Sammy. She read from a thick book with thin pages, words that felt grown-up and important that Samantha couldn’t follow. It felt like music, like poetry; the teacher read in a voice full of drama, then said a man’s name and listed a series of numbers afterwards. Samantha wondered if that was the year it was written, or how much it cost, or even someone’s birthday. Her birthday was coming up and she hoped she would be able to invite all of these new friends – she would call them her “church” friends. The teacher started asking questions about feelings, particularly anger. Something about whas she had read had been about anger, Samantha supposed, although the word was never said. Maybe one of those grown-up words was another way of saying anger, or maybe grown-ups just felt a different emotion from children when anger was concerned. “And what do we do when we’re feeling angry?” The teacher asked. Samantha knew she had a great answer and her hand popped straight out from her shoulder almost immediately. The teacher smiled, beamed even. Samantha knew this was her in; she was about to be accepted completely by God and by Jesus and feel that feeling that people felt when they prayed. “When I’m angry, I talk to my stuffed animals, or I punch my pillow. It helps me feel better.” The teacher’s smile remained in place, but stiffened, tightened, like dry skin pulling taught at the creases of her lips, like she was posing for a photograph that was taking irritatingly long to snap. “That is a fine answer,” she said. “But what does God want us to do?” Samantha felt panic. God wants us to do things? Cal – or was it Jimmy? – raised his hand. “God wants us to pray to Him to take our angry feelings away.” “That’s right!” the teacher’s smile relaxed, spread, back into that beaming grin she had had before Samantha let her down with her un-Godlike answer. She had wanted to believe, to have this faith rooted in her that could sprout forward any time the sun turned its way. That kind of believing kept you safe, kept you from detaching your legs and arms and neck, kept you whole. She didn’t go to Sunday School again, that failed experiment. Instead, she sunk deep into the pillows on her mother’s bed, come Sunday, a different kind of grounding, a kind of getting stuck, a different kind of mud. GRIEF It’s not even as if she is consumed by guilt or fear or even pain, as some people describe their grief. Grief as this all-consuming feeling, grief pushing out everything that used to make you who you are until there’s nothing left of that person. Grief that squeezes and twists at you like a dishrag, taking every last drop, then leaving you dirty and damp to dry at the edge of the sink. Grief that shakes you so hard and so fast that you forget what it’s like to be still. Samantha didn’t feel any of that. It wasn’t as though her grief had made it impossible to feel, but as though anything else she could have felt just vanished – the slate was wiped clean – the lawn was mowed – the house was demolished. It was not an emptiness, but a space. And in that space, there is no lack of activity, no loss of things to do. Life doesn’t really continue, in the space. It just moves, flows, the normal bodily functions taking over and your body becoming a vessel for them, your body surging through the days. Some days she sits on the couch, drinking nothing but coffee, watching nothing but re-runs of dating reality tv shows, until she feels jittery in her heart and her mind and her hands, until she can’t sit still but sort of forces herself to hold all of her muscles together until they become rigid, until they are moving so fast they are suspended in that movement like hummingbird wings, like hummingbird hearts. Some days she cries, riding the waves of tears like she is heaving over a toilet at the end of a too-long and too-much night, tears like poison her body needs to expel, so many tears she can’t hold on to them anymore, can’t keep anything down. Some days she drinks too much, and the tears are actual vomit, sour and salty and sticking to the back of her throat, her knees peeling up the pattern of the cheap bathroom tile, skin grinding on the lines of grout, wetting herself from the effort. And she has no one, no Cameron, no high school boyfriend, no mother, no God. Only the blue blue blue drumbeat of her heart, only her hope for the future shining ahead, only the mantra of leave this world better than you found it and the daydreaming of what it would be like to leave of her own accord, to choose for herself when she walks away. She doesn’t do this. She doesn’t leave. She wallows until the grief mellows, fades, becomes beige and taupe and neutral. Not very pretty. Easier to look at. UNTETHERED The treadmill slows, beeping. Samantha starts to walk. She reaches to wipe sweat from her face, but doesn’t touch any wetness with her fingers. She doesn’t touch anything at all. She doesn’t touch because she has no face, she has no fingers. She turns to look in the mirror, but nothing turns. She looks down at her feet, but no chin tilts, no feet in slim sneakers peep up from beneath her. She moves her not-body to the other side of the gym. A tune runs through her thoughts, but silence hangs about her, a kind of heavy silence that should be pushing on Samantha from all sides, but she feels nothing. She looks at her not-reflection in the mirror. She tilts her not-head from side to side, stretching her not-neck. She reaches for the five pound weights from their resting spot on the metal rack, but her arms are vacant and weak. She looks down, expecting to see her feet in their purple sneakers – no feet, no sneakers. Only the streaky grey rubber of the gym floor. The air-conditioning kicks on, and shivers the ads for personal trainers and used gym equipment that paper the walls. No goosebumps prickle on Samantha’s arms, no whirring motor whistles between her ears, no manufactured air twitches her nose. No arms, no ears, no nose. She wonders if this was how her mother had felt when she died, suddenly not there but extremely aware of it. She could have cried, thinking about it, if she had eyes with which to create tears. Samantha is sure this will wear off. It always has. The fanaticism, the obsession, the tunnel vision, the post-campaign mania. She just needs to get out of here, away from the streaked mirrors, the worn rubber grips, the squeaky machines, the threadbare floors. She makes it beyond the door; I don’t know how. Past the door, into the hallway. The vent above her head shoots cold air to its left, and she follows its command, tells herself she feels the breeze, not admitting that it feels like a wave, the current of a river, pushing her along while her feet can’t touch the ground. Of course my feet are touching the ground; of course I have feet that can touch the ground. The door to the outside opens and closes. Samantha is not the one who opens and closes it. The rain is stopping, a faucet slowly clinching to a close. The wind has died down. Samantha worries about her running shoes squelching, socks soaking. She wants to close her eyes, bask, lick raindrops from her lips. There is nothing, everywhere, nothing, emptiness, like Samantha on the inside, like everyone on the inside. Everyone is the same on the inside. She holds her mother and Cameron in her mind, like different sounds in a coffee shop, like different muscles driving feet forward on a treadmill, one sometimes louder, stronger than the other, sometimes working against each other, sometimes working together. JUICE Last winter, Samantha’s mother bought a juicer. The two of them spent hours in the kitchen, cutting themselves on gears and mechanical choppers and grates, reading directions upside-down and backwards until, sweaty and red-faced, they threw up their hands and opened a bottle of wine instead. They both knew how to operate a corkscrew without fail – that perfect, satisfying pop every time. All of the fruits and vegetables left behind, piled in wooden salad bowls and metal mixing bowls and plastic bowls for chips and popcorn and pretzels and trail mix, glowed against the background of the white kitchen. They even smelled colorful, smelled juicy and sweet and pungent. They rotted, then, turning to mush, fruit flies diving in for the party, celebrating their luck at finding such a cacophony of options available to their puncturing mouths. Samantha threw the fruit away, double-bagged it, the plastic ironically, hilariously, filling with the juice they had once hoped to extract. Her mother never finished assembling the juicer; it sat on the counter for months, gathering dust, the tape to the box attracting grease and particles of food and the remaining fruit flies. It was the hardest thing for Samantha to part with, when she came home the last time, to clean, to dissect, to disassemble, to pack, to sell. She left the juicer on the curb with a pair of armchairs: Free to a good home. FROM ABOVE She can see New Orleans, all the lights on, all the music playing. All the gutter punks cowering from the storm, passing damp joints. After all she had done, New Orleans welcomed her less and less, turned her more and more invisible. Now, everyone could see straight through her whiteness, to her veins and her heart, through to the other side, the dirty streets, the neon lights. She did her best, she reminds herself. The sky is the kind of blue that fades from white to grey to blue in front of your eyes, as if you had no eyes, no clean lines, no clear cuts. She wants to be a part of it, to melt into it, to lift her body up to the alchemy of rain and air and flesh, wanted to fade like grief, become watered down, just another part of the scenery. She wondered if this is what God feels like: like nothing and something at the same time. God can’t be nothing and be all powerful; god can’t be nothing and take anger away; god can’t take anything away. The rain comes down steadily now, but soft. It’s humid, the air fragrant, in hibernation, anticipation. Puddles gather at the ancient curbs, collecting plastic lids, broken strands of beads, lost flip-flops. The rain beckons the green from the trees. Steam twirls from the asphalt, almost into a fog. A butterfly lands on a dripping bush, wings rhythmic. A stuttering sedan rolls by, splashing, and the noise sends a flurry of pigeons from their perches on the rod-iron balconies lining the street with Boston ferns and fairy lights. Several groups pass by. The first, at least twelve white women carrying pink sparkling umbrellas and wearing matching t-shirts: She said YES – we said NOLA! Then, a cluster of men in taupe boots, hard hats, neon vests – black and brown men, dripping from the rain, carrying lunch boxes and plastic bottles of water, scowling, jostling, coughing. Then, three men in business attire, suits and clacking shoes, black umbrellas, their skin ghostly white without the sun. Then, a black woman with dreadlocks tiered around her head zooms past on an orange bicycle. The city continues. The butterfly takes off into the air, into an alley, out of sight. A Good Man“Landon, what are you waiting for? Is something wrong?”
Her voice reverberates. It seems extrasolar, like I’m intercepting a sound from beyond Orion. I don’t know how long she’s been sitting there. Maybe lightyears. Her bra lies askew at the end of the bedspread, but I don’t remember her taking it off. The fresh no-scent of absurdly excessive disinfectant and deodorizer over the hard surfaces and linens returns to me. The latticework on the small window throws slants of light over her upturned face and onto the Rembrandt painting behind her. A bottle of Pinot Noir rests atop the table stand, the one where they always keep the Bibles. I feel as if I might faint. A verse comes to mind. Ephesians 6:12: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities. I quickly dismiss it. I am not a spiritual man. Two wine glasses lie beside the bottle, one empty and one a blood-red which matches the color of her lipstick. I’m not drunk, not yet, because I’ve only had the one glass that may have been five or five million minutes ago. It’s not that, nor is it the allure of her naked beauty. It’s her eyes that are doing this to me, those dark hazel oceans that have burned and risen from the ashes. They will soon make this night one worthy of Greek tragedy. She smiles. “This is why I like you, Landon. You listen. I tell you to stop staring at my tits so much, so now you don’t look even when I take my shirt off for you.” *** I met her after my most important lecture of the semester: Consequentialist Vs. Categorical Moral Reasoning. The night was freezing, so I decided to stop by the faculty lounge to see if Jeanette wouldn’t let me brew up some Volcanica before I headed home. It’s really a toss-up as to what takes the crown for the greatest perk of my teaching career: making a positive impact on the minds of young people, or the fact that I haven’t paid for coffee in twenty-seven years. The door was locked, which meant Jeanette had gone home early again. No biggie. I would just let myself in and make sure to leave a note, lest she raise holy Hell about it tomorrow. Henry David Thoreau entered my mind for no reason at all, and I got to humming a little tune I called “Life is But the Stream I Go A-Brewin’ In.” Thinking I was alone with the coffee-maker, my own idiotic thoughts and awful singing, I heard a voice behind me. “Kant was an asshole.” Half from fright and half from embarrassment, I jumped a little before turning around and nearly losing my balance. “I… I beg your pardon?” “Immanuel Kant. He was a sexist, pro-war, demoralizing asshole, professor Richter.” She looked to be a woman in her forties, or closer in age to myself than anyone who was in the habit of addressing me as “professor Richter.” I hadn’t noticed her in the lecture hall, and she wasn’t present for the brief Q&A I offer for my more ardent thinkers afterwards. This was no student of mine. She was wearing a pair of Levi’s with a white Cardigan sweater, a sky-blue scarf with the school mascot draped neatly over it. And she was stunningly beautiful. I might have responded by informing her that Kant was the most brilliant and influential thinker in all modern philosophy. I might have asked her how she got in, how I didn’t hear the door open. I might have told her that she scared the living, breathing shit out of me just a moment ago, and if she could please take her foul attitude elsewhere, thank you very much. But she carried herself with an austere, assertive sort of confidence that fascinated me enough to humor her. I grinned and folded my arms. “You forgot racist.” Her dead-eyed glare slowly became a bright smile. She approached me and offered her hand. “I’m Dr. Melinda Fillmore. But you can call me Mindy.” I had heard something about an interim professor of sociology stepping in while Yolanda was on maternity leave. I shook her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mindy. Or should I call you Hypatia of Alexandria?” She giggled, and her complexion grew brighter. “Too controversial. Elizabeth Anscombe is more up my alley.” For the first time I noticed her eyes. As ridiculous as it sounds, I saw something there that made me feel like a man no longer lost in a silent sea. There was music behind those eyes. And besides, she actually understood my humor. She put her hands to her hips. “You know, it seems in entirely bad taste to not offer a woman shitty coffee in the midst of a heated philosophical discussion.” Stupid. Stupid, Landon. What the fuck is wrong with you? Just sitting here drinking it in front of her. “Where are my manners? Let me brew up another cup.” “No, no. I was just kidding, professor Richter.” She looked at the ground and began tracing circles with her right foot. This timidity was new. Perhaps it was something I said. I smiled curiously. “Call me Landon.” She looked up, and her eyes met mine again. “Okay, Landon.” She turned to go. “I’ll be seeing you around. Nice lecture, by the way. Kant the asshole would be proud.” She reached the door. I suddenly realized my heart was pounding, my stomach was turning over on itself, and my brows were sweating. The music was fading. I couldn’t let this song get away from me. “Uh..m, miss Fill-, Mindy?” She turned around, her beauty a thing to behold even half-hidden in the darkness. “Yes?” It took everything I had in me to say what I said next. I didn’t know how it would come across, but I knew I had to say it anyway. “Do you believe in fate?” She pondered over this for a moment, then smiled radiantly. “What an odd question, Landon. I guess that depends. If my fate involves a certain professor of philosophy buying me some real coffee in the near future, then I suppose I do.” I tried to hide my glee and relief, but I don’t think I was successful. “I think that would be in entirely good taste.” She pushed the door open. “Tomorrow morning at 7. Little place by my house. I’ll text you the address.” The door shut behind her. She wrote her phone number with her index finger on the condensation of the glass. I felt like I was in high school again. I finished the last of my coffee and jotted down a few words for Jeanette. But I didn’t feel any warmer. *** Again, I can make out the words, but they sound like they are being delivered to me through some channel, some other world that I am not currently inhabiting. She has made a joke. She always makes jokes. She says them at just the right times. Though I have yet to even kiss this woman, her shirt is off, her bra hanging over the side of the bed. That in and of itself is somewhat of a joke. But not a joke in any derogatory sense. A perfect joke between two minds meshing perfectly together. If I was a spiritual man, which I most certainly am not, I would say Mindy Fillmore and I are kindred spirits. Soul Mates. Two peas in a pod. I look into her eyes and look away, then back again. It was just drinks. Jesus, help me, it was just coffee, it was just drinks, and long talks and long walks on the beach. Talks of Nietzche, Sartre, Epictetus. Talks of love and laughter and life. And then it was the drinks and now it is the hotel room. I look at the table stand. Proverbs 6:32: Whoever does so destroys himself. Whoever does so destroys himself. Whoever does so destroys h- “Mindy, there’s something I need to tell you.” *** I met my wife in the Fall of ’87, during my third semester as an undergrad. I was living at home so I could take care of my mother while the government took care of my tuition. I was doing a work-study position in the school bookstore which mocked me with every passing second. In those days, the naïve idealism of youth had me convinced I could write my way out of debt and into intellectual glory among the literary elite. I wanted to spend my time writing my own books that nobody would ever read, not filing and organizing other peoples’. A shame the school didn’t see it that way. I was combing through a copy of The Scarlet Letter (I made a habit of reading some of the stuff I was supposed to be taking inventory on, to maintain my sanity) when I heard a voice behind me. “Excuse me? I’m lookin’ for a book by Victor Frankie.” I turned around to see a young woman who was taller than me by at least half a foot. She was wearing a pair of black shorts that accentuated her long, sinewy bare legs. A gorgeous amber braid fell snuggly over her right shoulder and onto her crimson hoody, veiling the C and K in JACKALS VOLLEYBALL. She was smiling at me with blissful curiosity, the way a small child might smile at a new species of bug in a jar. Her eyes were a hue of hot dark hazel I couldn’t ever remember seeing before. “What was the name?” “Victor Frankie,” she repeated, now twirling her braid around with her index finger. “It’s for Psychology. Would y’all happen to have that here?” I couldn’t help but chuckle. I knew exactly what book she had in mind, as I was responsible for the required text distribution for many of the entry level classes. She stopped smiling and put both hands to her hips. “What’s funny?” “You’re looking for Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. It’s an ull sound, not an ee. It’s a brilliant book. A lot of Frankl’s readers value his perspective on life much more than anything ever proposed by Freud.” “Well sorree, Mr. fancy-pants bookstore man. Tell ya what.” She unslung her backpack and rummaged through it for a second before pulling out a King James Bible. “Show me where to find my book, and you can have this one, since it seems you could learn something about how to treat a lady from the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” I couldn’t tell if she was being serious. I accepted it willingly, regardless, and responded before I could restrain myself. “Thanks. You know, there are about 40 books of bad men in here before I get to Jesus. You sure you want me learning from Lot? From Jephthah?” Her face became flushed with a heated red. I was almost certain I saw the hint of a grin coming back, but she quickly fumed in anger and stomped her foot down. “Ummmph. You! Just show me where to find my book!” I walked her over to the F section in Psychology. There was one copy left, which she snatched up eagerly. I was smiling as she walked away and toward the register without a word. But she stopped and stood there for a few moments before turning around. “For your information,” she began, straightening her posture and folding her arms. “There are plenty of good men in the Old Testament. Not that you would know the difference.” “Maybe I need a good woman to point them out for me.” That one got her. I had never seen a woman blush with such colorful intensity. “Maybe you do.” I walked up to her and offered my hand. “I’m Landon.” It took her a second. She looked at my hand, then back up at me before offering her own. “Ruby.” “You have a beautiful name, Ruby.” We stood looking at each other for a while. I don’t know if it was the accent, the sporty look, or the blind ignorance in believing in a thousand-year-old myth. But I liked this girl in a way that went beyond opposite attraction. This girl was…. fixable. “Do you believe in fate, Landon?” The question took me aback, but I quickly answered anyway. “I don’t know, Ruby. Do good men believe in fate?” She smiled and shook her head. “No. They believe in Christ.” Another silent few moments. “You know, uh, y’all have a big campus. I just transferred on a volleyball scholarship. Maybe you could show me around?” I nodded. “I’m off in fifteen. I’d be happy to.” “Great! I, uh, I’m gonna go change. I’m in 312C. Come up when you’re off, yeah?” I winked at her like an idiot. But I didn’t care. It seemed appropriate in the moment. When she was gone, I opened a page at random from the Bible she gave me. Ecclesiastes 10:12: The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious, but the lips of a fool shall swallow him up. *** “Daddy, why did God take Austin away? Didn’t He love him?” It was a new kind of question. First, I looked to my wife in the passenger seat to see if she may have caught it too, but she only gazed absentmindedly at the passing fields. “God loved Austin very much, Savannah,” I said. “God loved him so much, in fact, that He brought him home early.” This response seemed to offer some temporary relief, both in my daughter’s distraught mind and for my own respite from her incessant questions I had no business answering. And Ruby hadn’t spoken to me in weeks, save for the cordial necessities. It was June of ’99. A month had passed since my boy, Austin, was hit and killed by a drunk driver while riding his tricycle on the corner of our street. My wife and I both had nervous breakdowns, but for my daughter’s sake, I had to force myself to remain strong on the outside even though I was dead within. And questions like these felt like progress. What had been uncontrollable crying for hours on end, with words like “dead” and “die” and phrases like “I hate God” were now subsiding into the tolerable realm of curiosities and more pleasant expressions. Later that day, I got to work on the picket fence I had started in my yard. Ruby came out and gave me a glass of water with lemon in it. She had been crying, that much was obvious. I accepted the glass and nodded to her in thanks, returning to my shoveling after a healthy swig. “You’ve got some nerve,” she said dryly, after some time, “talkin’ to my daughter like that. Some mighty high promises, comin’ from a man who don’t even believe in God.” I had an idea she was looking to get at me for something. We had agreed to raise our children in the church, despite my personal views on the matter. She knew it as well as I did. “Who says I don’t believe in God?” “Oh, please. You don’t read the Word anymore. You don’t do much of anything these days, aside from buryin’ your nose in those fancy books and buildin’ this fence.” “Ruby, if you’re looking for a fight, you’re not going to find it here,” I replied, slinging dirt into my wheelbarrow. “I’m not lookin’ for a fight. I’m lookin’ for my husband.” That stopped me. I glanced up at her. “What sort of man builds a fence at all hours of the day when he loses his boy?” She was looking at me the way she did when I first met her, only this time all the jovial curiosity was gone. But it was the same somehow. Like we had just met. “The sort who loves his family,” I said. “That so? The way I see it, a man who loves his family ought to be lovin’ his family when they’re hurtin’.” This was another reasonless jab. I had held her in my arms all night for nights on end. I had rocked my daughter to sleep when the tears wouldn’t stop. I had been with them night and day, stalwart as a soldier. “A man’s got to deal with his grief in his own way.” “Grief!” she chortled. “You don’t grieve for nothin’! You have no emotion! It’s like Austin never existed to you!” The tears had started again. “Here I am wishin’ the good Lord would take me now, put me outa my misery, and you’re out here buildin’ a fence!” She buried her face in her hands and began to sob uncontrollably. I approached her and put my hand behind her back. “Come on, honey. Let’s go inside. We’re going to disturb the neighbors.” “FUCK the neighbors!” she wailed, pushing me away so hard I nearly fell into the dirt. In the ten years I had known her, I had never heard her swear. Not once. And she unleashed it with a rage so profoundly foreign that I questioned whether I ever knew her at all. “Who are you buildin’ this fence for, Landon? For your family? Does this make you feel like a man? Like you’re protectin’ us? Think you can keep folks out? You couldn’t even keep Austin in!” I wanted to slap her. I really did. But my mother raised me better than that. Instead I threw down my shovel angrily and positioned my face within inches of hers. “How dare you. How fucking dare you.” She backed away cautiously, as if realizing she had inadvertently awoken something dangerous. “Daddy was right about you.” “Daddy’s in Atlanta, sweet cheeks.” She shook her head with incredulity. “You ain’t no good man, Landon Richter,” she said, wiping her face and regaining her composure. The fear, anger, and sorrow had all left her. She walked inside and turned around before closing the door. “You ain’t no good man at all.” When I was a kid, I had heard it tossed around quite a bit that men marry women like their mothers. Though my mother was a devout Catholic, she was further from Ruby in personality than light is from dark. But I came to realize something that day alone out in the heat with my shovel and my crumbling world. I had spent my life educating myself away from the church my mother had prayed desperately to draw me back into. I wanted a real life, one led walking in real answers, in truth I would discover for myself. My mother was too far gone to see that, but Ruby wasn’t. At times she listened, and she knew. Deep down, she wanted the same things I did. But I couldn’t save her either. My mother died in my arms, her expression at my unceasing rebellion a shattered visage, the same shattered visage on Ruby that day. And I knew that Austin’s death and Ruby’s grief weren’t what divided us. It was my rebellion. I put walls up with my mother, and I put walls up with Ruby. Always one foot in and one foot out. Faith and rationality. I was a man divided amongst himself. There were vineyards that spread out for miles past the old Victorian home I had bought for my family. Ruby said it felt like Paradise the day we moved in. We had beauty that stretched all the way to the horizon. But I looked out and could only think one thought: The lone and level sands stretch far away. *** The night after my daughter went off to start her Master’s program, I came home to find Ruby flipping through an old photo album with pictures of the family just after Austin was born. It had been a long time since either of us had taken it out. Some of our friends in the Bible study group we were attending strongly advised against it. But she was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen in as long as I could remember, so I was reluctant to intervene. “Landon, babe, come here,” she said, in the kind of whisper a child might speak in when she was getting into something she knew she wasn’t supposed to. I sat down and put my arm around her. “Ruby…” “Look how happy we are,” she said. She flipped to a photo of me with Austin raised over my head, Savannah clinging to my leg. His wide smile brought back memories of his heartwarming laughter, his arms spread to the world in innocent, magnificent splendor. Tonight the tears came spontaneously. An outburst rather than a gradual meltdown. She quickly shut the photo album and gave out a piercing wail, like a banshee. She threw the album across the room and climbed up onto the bed, burying her face in the pillow. After three glasses of wine, an Ambien, and two hours of holding her tightly to me while she bawled and pounded my chest, Ruby drifted off to sleep. I got through a good fifty pages of Anna Karenina when I decided to call it an evening. I finished the last of my stolen decaf from the teacher’s lounge and got up to use the bathroom. “Landon.” I turned around. My wife was wide awake, her eyes glossy with inebriation. “It should have been you.” I stood there for a moment, looking into those cold, dead eyes. Those eyes that once burned with such inundating fervor. “It should have been you,” she repeated. She turned over and went back to sleep. I went into the bathroom and turned the light on. After a long piss, I looked at my own reflection in the mirror for some time. Ruby. My Ruby. My Georgia peach. My girl who proclaimed “Yes!” to the world when I got on my knees and asked her to marry me on the balcony of the Globe Theater. My Ruby who was by my side as we beheld Saint Peter’s Basilica. My Ruby who taught me everything I know about hushpuppies and sweet tea on a hot summer day. My Ruby who never laughed at me when I told her I would run with the bulls someday in Pamplona. The mother of my children. My Ruby Richter. You ain’t no good man. I removed my wedding ring and flushed it down the toilet. I tried not to think too much of it. Besides, I had the most important lecture of the semester to give the next day. *** Mindy laughs. “It’s your first time!?” She laughs again. “I’m..I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself. What, Landon? What could you possibly need to tell a naked, now self-conscious woman before you make love to her?” I walk over to the table stand and open the drawer. I laugh hysterically. “What, Landon? Jesus, what?” “No, not Jesus,” I reply, shutting the empty drawer. “Not Jesus at all.” Ron Kostar lives in Central New Jersey where he writes stories and plays music. He is the vocalist and clarinet player in the jazz swing bands Delta Noir and Wooden Swing. In the distant past he earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and taught in the Intellectual Heritage Department of Temple University. He is currently compiling a book of short stories. Mrs. Wu |
Yasmin Hemmat holds an M.A in dramatic and English literature. She is also a part-time teacher with a passion for reading and writing poetry and story. Her poems have been published in literary journals such as: Spillwords, Literary Hatchet, Literary Yard, Piker Press, Raven Cage Zine, and Duane’s Poetree. |
A Veiled Woman
When I reached his castle I realized that his castle was somehow near my house, and I was surprised. Why didn’t he call on me on those years? I asked myself. When I saw him I didn't recognize him since he was very pale and thin. He became someone else. Even his voice had changed. His house was like a Museum. There were lots of antique objects but the most eye-catching things were those mythological paintings. The pictures of the naked goddess and nymphs could be seen everywhere on those old red wallpapers. Among those paintings, there was a picture of a woman with raven black hair and big dark eyes but her face covered by a red veil. My friend told me at night he could hear the murmuring of those women and even their laughter. I was very sorry for him since I thought he lost his mind. I asked him where he was on those years and why he wanted to see me. But he didn't say anything. He just laid down on his bed and gazed at somewhere far away. After a minute of silence, he told me:
“I saw her last night. She danced for me…the ethereal music could be heard from the woods, and she danced with it.”
“Who? Who danced for you” I asked with amazement.
He pointed to the veiled woman.
“You know her? Who is she?”
“A sweet devil.”
I didn't know what to say but I knew one thing that he went into delirium, then he fell asleep. His servant came into the room and brought some pills.
“Has any woman come here lately?” I asked.
“My master is not a crazy man. She never let go of him.” said the servant with insipid voice.
I was really confused. I didn't know what they were talking about. After one hour he woke up and I asked him to tell me everything or I would leave the house. So he started to tell me some of those bizarre events.
“I was a poor painter. I painted everywhere from rich's houses to whorehouses. One day I went to a brothel to paint those poor beautiful women and I saw a seductive veiled woman. I asked her to unveil herself, but she told me she wouldn't do that because she promised herself she just showed her face to a man who loved her truly and after that, she would leave her job. I told her how could a man love you without seeing your face. She just told me you would find it soon. At that time, I didn't understand what she meant. But gradually, the mystery of her profound eyes captivated me. Every day I went to visit her but because I didn't have enough money I couldn't sleep with her. I just painted her picture. The one that you could see on that wall. One day I confessed that I loved her, but she just laughed and told me If I loved her I had to prove it but I didn't have anything to prove, I didn’t even have money. Therefore, I decided to quit painting and found a lucrative job to catch her heart. At the brothel, I became familiar with a rich merchant and asked him to help me find a job. And I became his page. All day and all night I worked hard in order to see my beloved’s face. I gave her some money but the money was not enough, so she just danced for me and made me crazier. I fell for her completely. She became my only reason to live. Even in my dreams, I could never see her face and the time I wanted to unveil her, I was jolted awake. One day due to the business trip I was forced to leave the city. I told her to make a promise not to show her face to anyone until I came back. My trip took one year and I made a great deal of money. I even slept with lots of women in every city we anchored. But those profound eyes never vanished from my mind. In those years the war had broken out. I wanted to run away but someone who was jealous of my accomplishments ratted me out. So I dispatched to the war and you knew every detail of it.”
He became silent after telling this strange story. But I wanted to know more. What happened to that veiled woman? Did she reveal her secret? When I looked at my friend again, I came to realize that he became older than the time I came to his house. He took his pills and went to sleep again. I went closer to that mysterious painting and looked into her eyes carefully. Her eyes were familiar to me as if I saw them before. My friend’s murmuring distracted me. I noticed that he was calling her name but I couldn't hear it clearly. I decided to wake him up because I still didn't understand what this story had to do with me. He woke up and gazed at me. I told him, “you are calling a name in your dream. What is the name of that mysterious woman?”. But he didn't say anything. After a long pause, he started again:
“The war was over. You and I went back to Spain and I never saw you again. When I came back I wanted to see her soon but on my way, I had an accident with a carriage and I broke my legs. So I couldn’t manage to see her. It took a month to recover. Those weeks spent like many years. Finally, I went to that brothel with a heart overwhelmed with joy. I became a different man. Nobody knew me at first because I was an opulent man and everybody treated me with respect. I asked them about the veiled woman, but they didn't answer me. I became angry and started to shout. One of them told me after 2 years that you had disappeared, she left here and nobody knew where she was. She ran away at night without saying a word. The whole world fell over my head. I wanted to die. I didn't know where to go or what to do. I howled like a wounded animal. I left that doomed place and with lots of money in my pocket, I lived like a beggar. My delirious dreams had emerged. Most of the time I was drunk. My illness had been started on those days. I looked for those eyes everywhere. I went to every brothel in the city but no one knew her. One day I went back to the brothel and after sleeping with one of the girls who was a close friend of her, I begged her to tell me about that mysterious woman. She swore to God that she didn't know anything but after I gave her a piece of gold she told me everything. She said the veiled woman had been seeing a man but the man didn't know that she was a prostitute. That man was a rich handsome gentleman. One day she had an accident with a carriage and that man help her and due to the accident she became unveiled so the man saw her face, and he fell in love with her beauty, and she told her she was an actress in a theater.”
He became silent again. I was shocked and speechless. I was shaking with rage. After a minute I shouted:
“And how have you known that man was me? Why didn't you say something all these years?”
“That girl saw your picture and tell me about your appearance and I found out that man was you. I searched everywhere to find you and when I came near your house I realized that she was married. So I didn't want to ruin her happiness but sometimes I came there in order to see her but I had never seen her. I bought this ruined castle to be far from the world and at the same time to be near her. If that bloody accident hadn’t happened to me, I would have seen her again. You were so lucky… You got her without any effort. And to my surprise, I came to realize that you had never noticed her eyes... Just before I died I wanted to ask you something. Just tell me how she looked like.”
I paused for one minute. I knew she was beautiful but I didn't know how to describe her face. After her death, her face even became blurry in my mind. I loved her but why I had never looked at her carefully?!
He continued with a weak voice:
“You unveiled her secret without knowing that it was her secret. You saw her as an ordinary woman. A woman without a mystery.”
His breathing became harder. His eyelids became heavier and finally, he fell into an everlasting sleep. Cold sweats covered my body. With shaking hands, I went towards the painting... It was the first time I fathomed the beauty of those mysterious eyes.
Amirah Al Wassif is a freelance writer, poet, and novelist. Five of my books were written in Arabic and many of my English works have been published various cultural magazines in many international literary and cultural magazines around the globe such as cultural magazines such as praxis Magazine , the gathering of tribes, credo Spoir, reach poetry, Otherwise Engaged literature and arts journal, cannon's mouth, Mediterranean poetry, The BeZine ,spill words,Merak Magazine, poetry magazine, writers Resist, the Bosphorus Review Of Books, the Writer NewSletter, Call and Response Journal, Echoes Literary Magazine, Better Than Starbucks,Envision Arts, women of strength strong courage magazine, chorion review , the conclusion magazine, street light press. She has 2 published books in English, collection poetry " for those who don't know chocolate" and a children book " the cocoa boy and other stories". Her English literary creative works have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and Kurdish |
NANA
A year ago Nana was playing happily in the clay. she was stealing some clay and throw her friends with it and they return her favor back without hesitation as a daily habit of childhood age.
She was still a child until Ismael came. at that damn moment when he looked at her as if he would eat her innocent face with his red eyes.
Nana shuddered, uncomfortable feeling knocked her heart's door and unfortunately, her poor heart opened.
his father stopped close to her and whispered in Nana's ears " show some respect to your husband"
Nana smiled, she is a child and doesn't know what is the exact meaning of "your husband?"
All she did is smiling because she used to smile to everyone, to every stranger.
Ismael took the child and ran away. Nana parents waved with indifference.
Nana tried her best as a child to leave Ismael hand, but how she would flee away from her man/from her destiny?
She asked in a crying tone " where we are going?"
He didn't answer her question. he never ever did.
As every tragedy story, she screamed until her voice disappeared. nothing prevents Ismael from his plan or (the plan of God) the only answer that he told Nana in the creepy tone of a man " you are mine, and I am your God."
Bernie Silver was an editor and writer for several corporate and business publications before retiring to write fiction. He has published one novel, Nathan in Spite of Himself, and short stories in Aphelion, JAB and Literary Yard. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, he attended Wayne State University and now resides in Rimrock, Arizona, with his wife, two dogs and a cat, all of whom have also retired. |
HAPLESS ANNIVERSARY
Ward hadn't changed much, at least not from Elaine Trilby's vantage point, and she had the best seat—front row center—in the hotel's cavernous ballroom. His hair was graying, and cut shorter than she recalled; also, combed more conservatively, the better, she surmised, to match the suit and tie that had replaced the T-shirt and jeans. But the eyes were still penetrating, the walk an insolent swagger, and the words delivered with resolute certainty.
Also as in days of old, the three hundred souls comprising Ward's audience were enraptured despite the verbal assault, which he privately called "tearing 'em down to build 'em up."
Happy anniversary, you bastard.
In one respect it seemed like only yesterday, rather than a decade ago, that Elaine last saw him, so vivid were her memories of their time together. And yet in a way it felt like a lifetime had passed since Ward introduced her to more pleasure—and pain—than she'd ever known.
"In case you hadn't guessed it," he went on, "you'll get no sympathy from me, you assholes." The vein in his forehead—the same one Elaine found so charming once upon a time—appeared about to pop. "Your friends, family and frickin' shrinks will offer you a shoulder to cry on. They'll all buy your bullshit. But not me. I'm not in the market."
Of course you aren't. You're full of enough BS yourself to fertilize the planet.
Don't be glib, girl. Focus on what he did to you. Or helped you do to yourself. That way you won't change your mind.
For reassurance, Elaine hefted the red leather purse off her lap, felt the extra weight of it and set the accessory back down. Thus comforted, she refocused on her target-to-be.
"You see, all you victims, I know your dirty little secret. You love your victimhood. You love it more than any of the lovers you ever had. And why not? It doesn't go running off in the middle of the night or first thing next morning. It stays with you all day, in fact, kissing your booboos when your boss or your mommy or your kid or society picks on you. And most important, it assures you that if it weren't for all those nasty people out there, you'd be somebody."
And for a while back then, Elaine had been somebody.
"Well, I'm here to tell you you're right. You are a frickin' nobody! You hear me? No-bod-y. And you wanna know why you're a nobody? Because it's much easier to be a nobody than a somebody. If you're a somebody, you need to take responsibility for your life, and you all'd rather slit your wrists than do such a thing."
Elaine never did get the logic of that last bit of wisdom, but what did she care about logic in those days?
Ward Bolton snapped his fingers and a slope-shouldered Assistant appeared bearing a baby bonnet. He handed it to his boss, then vanished. Ward donned the headgear and tied it under his chin.
"Oh poor me, oh woe-is-me, oh-me-oh-my-oh-me." The audience tittered at his impeccable imitation of a precocious infant. Next came a comically contorted face. "I'm a baby. I'm helpless. Won't you please take pity on me?" Now the audience laughed full out. Meanwhile Ward removed the bonnet and tossed it aside
Elaine had laughed too back then, because her life had finally changed for the better, seemingly overnight.
The upgrade began when Aunt Lil—in whose custody Elaine's drug-addled mother had left her—enrolled her niece in Renewit Seminars' ten weekly "Get Over It!" sessions. The sixteen-year-old sat transfixed as this marvel among men persuaded her she could get over anything, including a father who'd abandoned her mother, a mother who'd abandoned her daughter, and a self who'd abandoned all hope of happiness.
"Don't laugh, damnit," Ward scolded his audience. "It's not funny. It's you. Poor, miserable, self-pitying you. You think that's funny? Tell me what's funny about it? What's funny about giving up your strength and power to victimhood? What's funny about cowering before everyone you meet? What's funny about starting out full of smarts and vigor and ambition and ending up a doormat, a pushover, a pussy willow, a nobody? Hell, by the time you reach puberty your life is over. Done with. You're a corpse. Or, more accurately, a fucking zombie, because you can still walk around and mumble gibberish."
Elaine hadn't minded the profanity, since everyone around her—especially at school, but even at church—used language much worse than Ward's. And she didn't mind the epithets flung at her during his harangues because, after all, she deserved them. In fact, they weren't as harsh as the ones she'd hurled at herself. Elaine took Ward's strident tirades for what they were worth to her at the time: a warning that if she didn't shape up and stop being afraid of everything and everyone, she'd spend the rest of her life wretched and unhappy.
"Pathetic, that's what you are. I don't know what you expect out of life, sitting there on your pity pot. Even if you get what you think you want, when you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror you'll still see that same scared, scary-looking character. Aaaarrgh." Ward threw his hands across his eyes to block the scary view.
Elaine knew the feeling, until the physical transformation that came with "Begin Anew!"
Aunt Lil had gone on to study Buddhism after finishing "Get Over It!" but generously staked Elaine not only to that series, but to the more advanced (and expensive) "Begin Anew!" that would, the brochure promised, "transform participants into the beautiful creatures they were meant to be." The seminar would accomplish this miracle by instructing enrollees on how to dress, style their hair and achieve a confident bearing. For an extra stipend, which Lil was more than willing to pay on behalf of her niece, an eleventh session would offer, for women only, a complete makeover by Renewit staff members.
"Well, now that you know how revolting you are," Ward continued, "what're you gonna do about it? And I don't wanna hear how you're paying me the big bucks to tell you what to do about it. Bullcrap. Figure it out for yourself."
And with that Ward Bolton strode off stage.
His departure was followed by whispers, murmurs and frowns throughout the audience. Some headed for the exit, only to find it blocked by a stoic Assistant. Most sat motionless, waiting to see what, if anything, would happen next.
Several minutes later, Ward Bolton casually strolled back on stage and smiled benignly.
"Hey, you're the deserters. You're the ones who surrender so easily. I never give up, not even on losers like you." The audience issued a collective sigh of relief. "Now I suppose you think I'm gonna tell you how to improve your pitiful lives. Forget it. You've been fed enough pablum by all those human-potential con artists. But I'll damn well tell you what not to do. Never—and I mean never—whine or complain or bellyache again. Do you hear me? Ne-ver!" The vein reappeared briefly, then receded. "In other words, whatever else you do, don't ever squeal like a stuck pig again." Strategic pause. "If you wanna roar like a lion, well, I guess that's okay." Followed by nervous laughter from the audience.
In all these years, Ward hadn't changed a single line, not one, but then why would he if his marks kept buying them as is.
"Whining is boring," he informed the wide-eyed innocents "Complaining is boring. Bellyaching is boring. No one wants to hear it. Oh, some people will listen to your pissing and moaning, because that'll make 'em feel better about their own crappy lives. Otherwise, they won't give a fig about all your troubles." Another dramatic pause. "You don't believe me? You think people really care about your fucking problems? Are you really that naive? C'mon, no one on this planet is that gullible."
Wrong. Some people on this planet are beyond gullible. Certainly Elaine was. To this day, she shuddered just thinking how credulous she'd been, practically begging Ward Bolton to take advantage of her.
Damn her. And damn that predator.
"You think about it," he suggested. "We'll talk about this next time."
And with that Ward Bolton turned abruptly and strutted off stage.
The session over, an Assistant stepped up and cordially invited attendees to partake of refreshments in the third-floor hospitality suite.
#
Riding up in the elevator, Elaine felt her purse again for comfort. Upon exiting at the third floor, she strolled down the hallway to the hospitality suite, briefly enjoying the feel of plush carpeting beneath her four-inch heels. Once inside the room, she negotiated her way to a door at the back that offered access to Ward's private suite, where, Elaine knew from her Assistant-in-Training days, he'd be winding down.
Assistant-in-Training. She remembered the first time she'd heard that term. After the tenth "Begin Anew!" session an Assistant hopped up on stage and reminded attendees that next week Renewit staff members would conduct a makeover session for those enrolled in it and after that, for a mere six hundred dollars more, enrollees could participate in the Assistant-in-Training Program leading to the inestimable privilege of supporting Ward Bolton's life-changing seminars.
Just the prospect of assuming such a role excited Elaine, because not only would she be helping the Exalted One help others, she'd surely be accelerating her own progress toward self-assured womanhood.
Already her timidity was dissipating, thanks to the "Get Over It!" seminar's reconstruction process, during which she'd begun initiating conversations with those sitting next to her, which might not seem like much of an accomplishment to others but for Elaine it was equal to cresting Mount Everest.
Her transmutation continued with the "Begin Anew!" series, and the makeover that capped it led to a physical transformation to go along with the psychological one. Elaine had started with ratty, lackluster hair, shapeless ankle-length dresses and a wan, sickly complexion, and emerged with long, lustrous tresses, snug thigh-high dresses and a face considerably enhanced by Revlon blush and Maybelline mascara.
The new Elaine received the grudging admiration of girls at school and the fawning attention of boys previously unaware of her existence.
Then came the Assistant-in-Training Program, and the end of life as she'd known it.
#
It happened midway into her training. She was busy in one of Renewit's suite of offices in the Bolton Building, sharpening pencils and preparing sign-in sheets for that night's "Begin Anew!" session, when a veteran Assistant, whose funereal demeanor Elaine found almost amusing, appeared in the doorway.
"Ward would like to see you," he informed her.
Ward? Ward Bolton? Wanted to see her? Must be some mistake. But on the offhand chance it wasn't, she asked, "What about?"
"That's for him to say. He's in the Peaceful Room." The messenger about-faced and left.
Elaine resembled a somnambulant as she made her way to the room in which Ward enjoyed periods of quiet time during non-seminar days. She knocked on the door and, upon being invited in, traversed the threshold of the dimly lit space as if entering a holy place. She found Ward in bulging T-shirt and tight jeans, reclining on a red velvet sofa, which, if it belonged to anyone else, might be considered garish, as might the rest of the room, whose two velvet armchairs, frieze carpeting and sparsely adorned wallpaper were all various shades of crimson. The sanguine decor notwithstanding, the room seemed bloodless.
Elaine gingerly approached the sofa.
"C'mon, c'mon, I won't bite." Ward sat up and motioned her to one of the two chairs opposite him. "Make yourself at home."
Elaine sat and tugged at her short blue dress while realizing this attempt at modesty was futile.
Though she'd had no direct contact with the man before that night, even from a distance he seemed imposing, fairly reeking of power and machismo. Up close, he was so massive, even in a sitting position, she felt Lilliputian in his presence. His build was that of a weightlifter and his face that of a boxer, complete with slightly bent nose and scar tissue above both eyes, both of which, Elaine was certain, could penetrate her soul.
"You gotta be curious why I sent for you," Ward said. His voice was the same as on stage: gruff, more befitting a dockworker than a lifesaver.
"I . . . yes, I am," Elaine said.
"Well, here's the thing. As you know, you won't qualify as an Assistant for another year, when you're eighteen. Right?"
"Um . . . right."
"Well, that's too bad, because I've had my eye on you. You catch on quickly, you work hard and you get along with others. Most important, you don't gripe about the workload all the time." He chuckled as if he'd said something funny. Elaine laughed, though she didn't quite get the humor.
"So what do we do?" Ward said. "Sit on our hands for a year? Hell no. We make you my personal assistant. That job you can do immediately."
He openly gazed at Elaine's legs, a substantial portion of which showed below an ascending hemline.
"I'm . . . I mean . . . I'm grateful," she stuttered, temporarily misplacing whatever poise she'd gained.
"You should be. As you know, I'm very discriminating. I don't choose just anybody to assist me."
Ward winked, rose from the sofa, and took his time covering the distance between sofa and armchair. He towered over her, forcing her to crick her neck upward to see his face. As if to make it easier, he bent over and leaned in close while placing two outsized hands on the arms of the chair. Then he transferred them to her knees, from which point they crept upward, pushing her dress even higher on her thighs. His eyes briefly locked on hers, then he pulled the dress back down as far as it would go.
Throughout this scene, Elaine felt her cheeks flushing and her heart pounding in her chest.
"Never cover up, " Ward said in that gravelly voice of his. "Be proud of who you are, and reveal yourself to the world. You've got a lot to share with it."
He returned to the sofa and reseated himself, then grabbed a pack of Marlboros and a Ronson lying on the coffee table. "I only smoke in this room—it helps me meditate," he explained, then removed a cigarette, lit up and inhaled deeply. "You'll do well here, I can tell," he said, exhaling. "You're not a frickin' idiot like my last assistant, whose ass I just fired, though not nearly soon enough." Ward took in another lungful and let it out gradually. "You should split now and get plenty of sleep. Report to me here at 6 p.m. tomorrow."
Elaine left, barely aware of having done so. She wasn't sure why he chose the Peaceful Room rather than his office for their next meeting. Perhaps he also used the room to wind down from the day's pressures, whatever they might be between seminar sessions.
Ward Bolton intended to wind down all right, and Elaine discovered exactly how the next night.
#
Ensconced on the sofa when she entered the Peaceful Room, Ward wore a silk robe and a welcoming smile. He invited her to sit next to him by patting the cushion. She sat, this time forgoing any attempt at modesty.
"All right then," Ward said. "I'll bet you've been wondering how you're gonna assist me."
"As a matter of fact—"
"Well, mainly by helping me relax. Doing these seminars is tougher than screwing a porcupine. Everyone has these expectations of me. Even I sometimes wonder if I can deliver. I always do, but the tension is a ballbuster."
"I can see where it would be," Elaine said, her voice a bit shaky.
"Not that I want pity or sympathy. What I want is to handle the problem."
"I see, but how--
"I'll tell you how you can help. No, better yet, I'll show you."
And he did. All night long.
#
Elaine knew on one level there was something amiss with what they were doing, but on another she felt, for lack of a better word, honored. Ward Bolton was the greatest man she'd ever known, one who'd helped thousands of people "find themselves" and cope with their lives more effectively. And he'd selected her to, in a sense, help him do that.
Ward was Elaine's introduction to the fleshly pleasures, and she found that first time both painful and awkward, as she suspected it would be based on her friends' accounts of their own initiation into carnal activity. But the discomfort was well worth it, she told herself.
For the sake of the cause.
#
Aunt Lil was not happy when Elaine arrived home after midnight. More accurately, she was livid. Livid and, at the same time, relieved, as indicated by her greeting: "Thank God you're alive."
Then, "Were you in a car accident?"
"N-No."
"Did you pass out from drugs or alcohol or something."
"You know I don't use or drink, Aunt Lil."
"And for that I'm very happy. Then did someone kidnap you and hold you prisoner?"
"No . . . I . . . I—"
"I don't want to hear it. Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, you could have at least called."
Yes, she could have, but Elaine had no wish to lie, nor to tell the truth. So she did neither and hoped for the best.
"I . . . um . . ." she began, not knowing where she was headed.
"Never mind," Aunt Lil said. "I'm exhausted from worrying myself sick. We'll talk in the morning."
#
They each ate their ham-and-eggs breakfast in silence, at Lil's request. Then over coffee she said, "Well, where were you till after twelve o'clock, and what were you doing?"
Elaine felt cornered. She still would rather not tell the truth, as Aunt Lil couldn't possibly understand why she'd done what she did. But lying to this kind, supportive surrogate mother was not an option either. So in the end Elaine fessed up.
"That . . . that . . . lecherous creep!" was her aunt's first reaction, followed by, "And to think I once admired that man. Practically worshiped him, in fact. How old is he? Do you even know?"
"Thirty-four."
"So he says."
"Yes, of course, how else would I know?"
Sarcasm? Elaine even caught herself by surprise.
Lil ignored the question. "Well, for the sake of this conversation, let's say he's indeed thirty-four. That still makes him twice your age. I get that he's supposedly a great man. As I said, even I thought so. But what he did with you was inexcusable. I should call the cops."
"The police? Really? Aren't you overreacting a bit?"
"Overreacting? If anything I'm under-reacting. You're only seventeen. He committed statutory rape. I should go after him myself with that stupid gun your uncle left behind, which was about the only thing he left me when he ran off with that slut."
"Go after him with a gun? And what? Kill him?"
"I was thinking more along the lines of a threat, but now that you mention it, yes, I should shoot him between the eyes, knowing what he's done with you. I hate him now."
"I thought Buddhists were supposed to love everybody. You're always saying they do."
"We do love everybody. All sentient beings. But that doesn't mean we can't blow a man's head off for raping a woman, statutorily or otherwise. In fact, I should plug him in the balls. That would be a fate worse than death to a man like him, a perverted cradle robber."
Lil stood abruptly and began clearing the dishes.
Elaine got up to help. "Cradle robber? Really? I'm a big girl now, Aunt Lil."
"Right. I almost forgot. And yet you're foolishly involved with someone twice your age."
"So? What's age got to do with it? I'm old enough to make my own decisions, and I assure you Ward didn't force me to do anything I didn't want to do."
Elaine sat at the glass-topped kitchen table while her aunt piled dishes in the sink. As Lil began washing them Elaine changed subjects.
"Why don't you use the dishwasher?"
"Because I'm too upset," Lil said. "I need something to occupy my hands or I will go for that gun." She gazed out the window above the sink; a group of teens was milling about on the corner. "Isn't your school bus due any minute?"
"I've decided not to go today. I'm too tired."
Lil turned, looking none too pleased. "Young lady, you will damned well . . ." She paused and closed her eyes for a fleeting moment, then opened them. "Okay, okay. But just this once. And no more doing anything with that . . . man . . . or I'll yank you out of the training."
"But you can't . . ."
Elaine's voice trailed off as she thought better of extending the argument. Instead she went to her room and crashed.
#
She knew she should stop "relaxing" with Ward but couldn't, mainly because she enjoyed—no, she loved--helping him relax. After the initial pain and discomfort, their thrice-weekly sessions afforded her enormous pleasure. Elaine's girlfriends had said their satisfaction increased after the first time, but they'd understated the case. Which was understandable, since they hadn't been with an older man who knew every inch of a woman's body, and how to caress and stimulate it for both her satisfaction and his own.
Then one night Elaine knew pain again, but of a different sort entirely.
#
They'd just finished relaxing on the sofa's rollout bed when Ward took her hand and softly stroked it.
"Kiddo, it pains me to say this, but I gotta let you go."
Elaine knew what that signified in business, a subject she'd been studying in her spare time and that she intended to pursue in college. But she wasn't sure what Ward meant by it—though she had an inkling.
She decided not to guess. "What's that mean, you're letting me go?"
"It means I'm letting you go."
"Are you firing me?"
He stopped stroking. "No, no, nothing like that, You'll still be an Assistant, just not my personal assistant."
"But—"
"See, our time together is over."
Elaine felt disoriented, as if her life had been turned inside-out. Things had been so good between them; Ward seemed to care for her as much as she did for him. She must have done something to upset him.
"What did I do wrong? Whatever it is, I'll stop doing it. I'll—"
He placed a thick forefinger against her lips.
"Shhhh. Please don't make this difficult. It's not anything you've done. It's just that this thing has run its course. Happens all the time, and when it does it's best to break it off right away rather than delay the inevitable. All the others have been grateful I didn't drag things out."
"All the others?"
"Of course. I'm not a priest, you know. I've got nothing against lovemaking. In fact, making love is one of my favorite things to do. Now I'll make love to someone else. Please, my sweet, don't create a scene. Just go."
"You've made love to other trainees?"
"Naturally. Nice young women, and very appreciative of me."
As if to emphasize the point, Ward got up without bothering to wrap a sheet around himself, apparently aware that his regular workouts continued to pay off handsomely.
A wave of nausea washed over Elaine. Soon someone else would be lying beneath that body, experiencing the kind of bliss she could no longer live without.
Ward strolled into the bathroom, leaving the door open. She heard him emptying his bladder at length, then flushing the toilet
Upon reappearing he said, "You still here? When I said go, I meant it."
Ward began to dress.
"But—"
"No buts. No wailing. No crybabies here. You'll survive and appreciate the experience. Like all the rest did."
Elaine got up, still in a daze, the bed sheet wrapped around her. Then without thinking she dropped it. Sitting on the sofa in his standard T-shirt and jeans, Ward seemed to watch appreciatively as she slipped into her bra and panties, then the abbreviated dress.
"You've got a lovely body," he observed. "It'll make some man very happy. And then you'll marry him and have kids and a home and all that, and before you know it you'll be very happy yourself. Trust me on that."
Trust him? Was he trying to be funny again? She'd have laughed if she weren't on the verge of tears.
Her voice quivering, Elaine asked, "So you're dismissing me, just like that?"
"Of course. How else would I dismiss you? Now get the frickin' hell outta here."
Elaine couldn't believe he'd said that, or that this was happening in reality and not in some nightmare. She felt lost, alone, humiliated. And glued to the floor.
Ward Bolton sighed. "Okay, I didn't wanna hafta do this but you're forcing my hand. Too bad. I kinda liked you."
He grabbed the mobile phone forever present on the coffee table, punched a button and spoke into the device. "I need you in here. Now!"
No sooner said than done. Two men, newly assigned to stand guard at the door, burst into the room. They looked like fellow weightlifters and may have been twins in their matching buzz cuts, tweed sports coats and yellow turtlenecks.
They stood like statues in front of Ward as he came right to the point.
"Get this bitch outta here."
#
Not much made Elaine happy, let alone very happy, after that night. Certainly the midyear abortion didn't make her happy, nor did her quitting Renewit afterward, nor the cancer that took Aunt Lil five years later, nor the feeling of unworthiness that haunted her even after she received her MBA from Stanford six years AW, after Ward.
She found it impossible to trust men, so she slept with anyone and cared for no one.
Then came the headline two weeks ago in the Living section of the Arizona Republic. "'He's Baa-aaack: 'Pity-Pot' Guru to Conduct Seminars for First Time in Five Years."
Elaine was dimly aware that Ward had turned the seminars over to select staff members he'd trained to conduct them, and that he'd also written several best-selling books and appeared countless times on TV talk shows. Still, she'd managed to push him to the edge of her consciousness. Now here he was, back from the edge, gazing at her from a three-column photograph above the fold. He appeared older, of course, but still ruggedly handsome and as smug and self-satisfied as ever.
In addition, he seemed to be mocking her.
And that's what did it. For the first time since Ward had kicked her to the curb, Elaine thirsted for revenge.
She laid down the paper and rummaged through the house that Aunt Lil had bequeathed to her.
Along with the gun.
#
Elaine wore the dress Ward had called his favorite, the bright, but not too bright, red one, let out only slightly to accommodate the few pounds she'd gained over the years.
The first thing she noticed as she approached his private suite was the two guards, looking more like cave dwellers than weightlifters, flanking the door, arms folded across their chests. Tall and wide, they wore suits and ties but seemed more suited to loincloths.
"I'm here to see Mr. Bolton," Elaine said, effecting an air of calmness.
"Who the hell're you, lady?" one of the Cro-Magnons asked.
"An old friend."
He looked Elaine up and down, his tongue all but hanging out. "Mr. Bolton usually don't receive people after doin' his thing."
"He'll want to receive me. Tell him Elaine Trilby is here and wishes to speak with him."
"Wait a minute."
He knocked on his master's door.
"Who is it, for chrissake?" Neither the voice nor the disposition seemed to have changed.
"It's Herman, Mr. Bolton. Woman out here says she wants to see you. Says her name's Elaine Trilby."
"Elaine who?"
"Trilby. Elaine Trilby. Seems to think you know her."
"Well I don't. Never heard of an Elaine Selby. Tell her to go away."
Herman turned to Elaine.
"Says he don't know—"
"I heard what he said. The shithead knows me, all right. He must be getting senile."
"Now just hold on a minute . . ." Herman sounded indignant on his employer's behalf.
Elaine rushed past him, then quickly opened the door, entered the room, slammed the door shut and slid the dead bolt home. Judging by the frenzied pounding and cursing, Herman and his partner feared the consequences of their laxity.
Ward Bolton sat in an easy chair sipping a glass of wine. He'd changed into cream-colored slacks and an open-necked sport shirt.
"Now see here, whoever you are, you can't just—"
"Of course I can. I just did it." Elaine paused to smile as best she could. "I'm Elaine Trilby. Since you've forgotten me, I'll remind you. Ten years ago, when I was seventeen, you screwed over me, in a manner of speaking. Not that I feel the least bit sorry for myself."
"I don't know any Elaine Trilby," Ward said, "let alone who I did or didn't screw ten years ago."
"Have there really been that many virgins parading through your life, you pile of excrement?"
"Hey, now wait a frickin' minute. I will not sit here and listen to—"
"Yes you will. You will sit here and listen to whatever I have to say, which may be the last thing you listen to." Elaine opened her purse, removed the gun and pointed it at his head.
The color drained from Ward Bolton's face. "What the frickin' hell. You can't—"
"And stop telling me what I can and can't do. Those days are over." She flicked the safety. "I can blow your head clean off if I want to. And believe me, I want to."
Ward's right hand shook slightly as he put his half-full glass down on the end table. "Why, what'd I ever do to you? Were you an Assistant or something?"
"Trainee. And what didn't you do to me, plus God knows how many others?"
"I—"
"But I want you to know this: while I think you're a pile of shit, I've got even more contempt for myself for letting it happen. What kind of a girl sleeps with a phony, muscle-bound cretin like you?"
"You and I . . . we . . ."
"Yes, we screwed, or as you so fondly put it at the time, relaxed."
"Oh." Ward seemed to unclench, despite the unwavering gun. "So? What's the big deal? Did you enjoy it?"
Elaine cocked the gun, after which Ward returned to panic mode.
"God-damn-it!" he screamed, the familiar vein in his forehead prominent once more. "Cut this crap out!"
More pounding on the door. "Mr. Bolton? Are you all right, sir?"
"No, I'm not frickin' all right. This insane woman is pointing a gun at my head and—"
"Insane? Now I'm insane? All right, here's how insane I am."
Elaine sighted in and shattered a framed photograph of Ward Bolton and John McCain, the now-deceased U.S. senator, hanging on the wall behind the easy chair.
"Son of a bitch! You're going to kill me."
"So? What's the big deal? Maybe you'll enjoy it."
Elaine fired at the ceiling above him, sending plaster down on his head and shoulders.
"Please, I beg you. Take pit . . . I mean . . . I don't know what I did to deserve this."
"I was afraid of that." Elaine took her time approaching him in the easy chair. "And because you don't know what you did to deserve this, and probably never will, which means you'll probably continue to do the same thing to other unsuspecting victims . . . sorry, I know how you hate that word . . . I'm going to ensure you can never again do what you've been doing. Not ever."
Elaine stood within inches of her intended target, who in desperation lunged at the weapon. The sound of the gunshot filled the room as Ward grabbed his groin. He screamed like a banshee and at first Elaine thought this might be another of his loony imitations, but then she saw blood spread across his crotch and knew it wasn't.
Through the suite's large picture window she heard sirens approaching, the police probably having been summoned by Herman, so she wasn't surprised a few minutes later when two burly cops rammed their way into the room. Both held guns and one demanded she drop hers, which she did quite willingly. The same cop picked it up while the other snapped a pair of handcuffs on her and rattled off her rights. Neither was she shocked when shortly she found herself sitting in the backseat of a squad car.
What did surprise Elaine was the smile on her face—broad, bright, and like the one she wore during sex, satisfied.
Penny Faircloth draws and paints in addition to writing stories and poems, and says that drawing, as much as anything, has been formative. His high school yearbook named him most likely to become an ornithologist, and for many years thereafter, he says, he lived a life that was “strictly for the birds.” For nearly a decade, he worked as a cook/baker for a Transcendental Meditation community in North Carolina, New York and Iowa. Penny lives in paradisal, rural Western North Carolina where he cooks spaghetti every Wednesday night for twenty-four residents and visitors at a halfway house |
Hardly a City, or, The Bum and the MP
This was hardly a city, more like a village, except that there was plenty of money; and so it had hired a mayor and become a city. The football team’s winning championships several seasons running had brought publicity, support, patronage, tourists, tailgaters, bikers, celebrants and drunk revelers, better athletes and everything they needed—and much besides. A new field, sky boxes, towering stands all round the field, expensive rubber-filled turf, new locker rooms: all for them. A star quarterback came and they won more games.
The roads were widened, sidewalks added, grocery stores and car dealerships proliferated and a large health-food store moved in. The sidewalk benches were ripped up and in their stead nothing replaced them, but sculptures were installed and parking meters added.
The city directors and members of the chamber of commerce did not want people just sitting around in their city. The town became a touristy, walking-only city—nowhere for natives to sit. Locals, except for the wealthiest and the homeless, began to trickle away. Bumper to bumper traffic filled the streets. But the bus was free for everybody, subsidized by the university. And bicycle lanes had been painted in, used by the cycling clubs and the less wealthy students, who could not afford cars, and the most eco-conscious.
The cafes and restaurants, of which there was a plethora, now catered to a target clientele—call it the New Wealth, which extended like a golden thread through every clique, subculture, meme, claque and cabal, through every mind of whatever self- or mass-imagining. Even the cafe bookshop—which had been a haven because everybody had been welcome: the outcast and the artist, anyone who regarded himself or herself, or was regarded by others, as different, or difficult—had come to welcome only the monied. The cafe’s owner had set about systematically replacing the “wrong kind” of customer with the “right kind” and had taken out the books and added a wine bar in the loft.
The city wanted people who would stimulate commercial growth and ensure the continuing expansion of the university—that it should qualify by increasing its academic rankings, its programs and enrollment to move the college into a higher football bracket.
Nevertheless, in spite of or as a consequence, a new homeless shelter had been built. It was situated on the outskirts of town by a granite quarry in the bend of a river, back of a cul-de-sac, elevated in the midst of a floodplain: a drug infested trailer park to the south of it, across the road, very much in its hankering periphery. After the right turn off of Quarry Road onto River Road—which road, in turn, spilled into the vulnerable hollow where the shelter rose on its eminence—a methadone clinic, in easy hailing distance of the shelter, operated daily. For eleven dollars a pop, every morning the addict got his or her dose.
This River Road was prowled continually by police during the day and during the night. Many of the homeless folks’ cuts (outdoor niches carved out of woods or town wilderness for the purposes of recreation, and survival), were discovered by law-enforcement and systematically “slashed” and effectively destroyed. Large shrubs, voluminous trees and bushes, hiding places behind or within which the people slept or drank and caroused were eradicated, to drive the Lumpenproletariat and the déclassé out of the city’s commercial centers. These activities equaled an ultimatum, but it didn’t take. The undesirables had continued to crowd the buses and bus stops and to wander the highways and byways and the Greenway and, of course, Walmart and to sleep, or pass out, wheresoe'er they list.
The overflow “sleeping shelter” was scrapped and student lofts, above, with businesses on the street level, were erected in its place and filled with students. The rents were exorbitant. The bars were hopping, the night spots were too, what few there were, and in the summer the whole town was a big party for those who could afford it. New, higher priced restaurants moved in, and the restaurants that were there already upscaled their menus and began to charge higher prices. Some restaurants kept the same menus and charged much higher prices, which the new more wealthy students happily paid with little complaint. For the prices in the small mountain city were yet less than New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts and Maryland and Vermont prices. But prices would rise to compete, eventually, with those other states’ prices, then top them. For the small city’s locale was a coveted one; everybody wanted to be there. But space was limited.
So, there was nothing for it but for Steve to drink and wash his feet in the tributary—a brook about as wide as a man tall with arms outstretched.
The creek runs through the city, behind the Cafe Primavera, around the university, before dipping into a sluice recently gouged out parallel to the highway. There the highway is renamed H. Street to complement the college street into which it anastomoses. The creek disappears at the end of the city under the hotel behind Walgreen's, past Walmart, before resurfacing several hundred yards on, under a stand of trees—a large bend in the highway after the last intersection by the hospital and the new nursing college—to empty into the bigger river that flows under the highway where it turns west, rising in elevation to the as yet unincorporated town of Cone Orchard.
Steve—now far from the Walmart side of town, in fact right in the middle, between Queen and Commerce—did not know whether or not the water was safe here to drink, but he must drink. He had always trusted the trout river. Here in town drinking branch water seemed a dubious prospect, but he was parched. His feet needed washing, and a little TLC. They had begun to blister. He had nowhere to go, so he walked. He couldn't sit still, and he wanted a beer every couple of hours, so he must walk. He couldn’t sit still. He might have gone anywhere and sat, but he couldn’t….
He had a camp, a different, newer camp than the one on the trout stream southwest of the city, this newer one in the floodplain, opposite side of the river from the homeless shelter—but the same floodplain—at the end of River Road. He had moved there after being denied access to the shelter.
First, he had been kicked out for pissing dirty. He was eating pills, anything he could get his hands on—even picking one up from the bathroom floor and swallowing it indiscriminately —in addition to the methadone dose when he had the eleven dollars. The methadone was approved by the shelter but not the extras and not alcohol.
Then later, when he had tried to return after the requisite thirty-day ban, he had been denied. The sheriff administrator had informed the shelter that registered sex offenders were no longer allowed there if they had a conviction resulting from a crime against a minor. The shelter had a playground which prohibited his being within three-hundred feet of the building—so neither could he legally eat or shower there.
Steve was a registered sex offender because twenty years earlier he had cupped a fifteen-year-old girl’s breast at a company party while dancing with her: indecent liberties. He had been twenty at the time. He had been drunk and reckless. These many years later and across the country—his “crime” had occurred in California—he was still required to register as a sex offender. He had gone to prison twice in that time for failing to register a new address when he had gotten drunk and could not maintain a dwelling. His last time in he had been raped at knife point by the dorm janitor, an old head in for life. Steven had cut the man one afternoon soon thereafter while the man was taking a nap. Then Steve went to protective custody.
His camp had been accessible by way of a trail that led across the community garden to the farthest corner of the free-clinic lot. Passing through a small copse one arrived at a low water bridge. His camp had been a few hundred yards east above the north bank.
While he was last in jail (trespassing), a big rain had come and washed away all of his things, strewing them through broken detritus and waste litter and gobbed weeds along the riverbanks for, who knows, hundreds of yards down the tree-flattened undercut shelves of embankment either side the river. He had had a full wardrobe in his tent, dozens of cherished books, sleeping bag, cookstove, fuel, hygiene products, a few salvaged heirlooms from his father’s house, a small mahogany table, a jade plant and a geranium—gone. He never bothered to look for any of it.
God knows why he had camped there. Those at the shelter had wondered what he had been thinking. Little Steve did made sense to most of them. Some, though, understood him, more or less. When they had been told about his moving out there, these had said, “He would do, wouldn’t he… That’s Steve all over.” He might have camped there in the danger zone just exactly because he had wanted the flood to wreck him. He would want to be ruined again and again continually without end till doomsday, then build his stores again and re-engineer another coup against himself.
Steve was somewhere between disasters now. He was tooling around town with nothing obligatory. Doing nothing much. He had spent a couple nights drinking and watching TV in a hotel room paid for by a man he knew from the shelter and jail, a man named Doyle. Doyle said that he and his wife were arguing. He said rather than have her see him drink, and complain about it, when he got his veteran’s pension he liked to rent a room for a few days so she did not have to see him doing his thing—and he didn’t have to hear her lip. Then, either Doyle’s money ran out or his patience with Steve did; or he had marshaled his inner resources and determined to return to his wife, who, he had told Steve, was about to receive a big check of her own. That had been a few days ago. So after helping Doyle up the steps to the hotel office to pay his bill and down again, Steve had departed to find a place to crash under a thick hedge he’d used before to rest under. But, again, mostly, he had just walked around, day and night; so this morning his feet were tired and sore.
On his way through an alley between Queen and Commerce, en route to a small bridge under which to wash his feet, Steve decided to play a game. He would inspect the margins of the alley, backing upon which were several restaurants and apartment houses, to see what might be left there, with the idea that some college kid—or even someone like himself, easily distracted and hating to be burdened with carrying anything—might have laid something by in a bottle. There were bars on either side of the alley, and it was crawling with college kids at night. It was nothing for one of them to abandon a bottle;—they’d just buy more next night. That was one reason he liked living in this college town. He never had to buy shit to stay fucked up. Almost at the same moment that the plan was hatched in his brain, Steven espied a brown paper bag crushed into the rectangular shape of its contents, stuffed behind a drain spout that came down against the wall from the eave two stories up, through the deck of the apartment above him, to the ground, to spill onto a concrete pad into the alley. The bag had been there a while. It was covered with dust and grass clippings and webs. He had to wrench it out with a side to side waggle. But it came out right enough. He looked inside. The contents were five clean bottles of Pabst in their sleeve. What a way to start the day. He had earlier imagined that after cleaning his feet he would either walk to the other end of town or take a bus to steal a ‘40’ from Walmart. Now he could relax a while. Sit under the pedestrian bridge with his feet in the water and have himself a few drinks. The day was beginning aright.
He had downed one Pabst immediately he stood under the ped xing bridge, before sitting down. He had replaced the bottle in the carton with the lid on and taken another and screwed off the lid and swigged half down. The cap he had put in his pocket.
His blisters stuck to his socks. They were weeping a little, clear liquid. When he stepped into the creek bed he bored his feet into the sand. He wiggled his toes; he dredged through the clean sand, the water left clean below him, with his thin wolfin feet. He sat again and inspected his blisters—not too bad, yet. He swirled his feet in the ripples that the water should clean the sand out of his broken skin. He repeated the process a couple times. He sat back on the riprap and swigged the rest of the second beer, replaced the cap and put the bottle in the carton and took out the third. He opened the third and drank it, holding the cap in his hand the while and replacing it and the bottle and getting the fourth. Four was about where he wanted to be. Pabst was weak.
Someone stomped over the bridge, hitting it thrice. Runner. Then a herd of clops. Train of runners.
Steve thought of the “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” a favorite fairy tale. He had become the troll. The world is made of trolls and billy goats. He was not a goddamned troll! How could he have arrived at this place? Impossible. How many times he asked himself this question in a day—How, When?—he could not count. The question was his unceasing prayer. Its foreground fruits were expletives, poison plums building to black tumescence and continually dropping from his lips daylong. The more he drank, the more they grew—the curses. Seeping poison from some pit of poison out of sight below the root bulb of his rancor—a bilious bluegreen ball, a world all its own—dripped from its nadir into the teeming plexus below his umbilicus, rose to his heart and was carried to every cell, suffocating him. Alcohol melted the heavy poisonous exudation that choked him, to let the atomized remnant out into the air as rancorous natter, nacreous rancor.
Steve might have said it was all in fun that he poked thus, ironically, at the world, that invisible interlocutor which he loathed along with himself; though, he had no control of his clanging rancor or his drive to drink. He rationalized, rewriting as personal myth what he must do, what he could not not do, powerless to remain silent or sober either one.
He twisted the cap off of bottle number four and tossed it into the stream. When he finished the beer he dropped the bottle in the riprap and took out five and put it into his back pocket, leaving the package, and climbed from beneath the bridge into midmorning sunlight, as yet wan under a lingeringly late fog that washed over the sun making of it an innocuous flat white candy disk, so close that one could reach out and pluck it from its meringue.
The first stop Steve made was where he should not stop, a cafe whose owner had banned him forever; and when Steve had asked why, the owner had said to him, “Your past, man—I’ve got kids….” his thin eyes growing wide in frustration and perhaps something else besides, pity perhaps. He went into the bathroom and washed his face. He got down on the floor and did fifteen pushups. He urinated, then washed his hands. Without looking around he left the restroom and walked to the screen door and through.
Coming as Steve was going, a middle aged man with a short gray beard and wire rimmed glasses, a lawyer he had known for years, shook Steve’s hand and said, “Good to see you.” Then another, a therapist from across the way, whose office fronted onto the street—red awning, black dragons, yawning concrete lions—also shook his hand and said hello.
Steve left the lot and walked toward the university.
If he didn’t find an address to report to the sheriff soon, he’d be back in prison for his third bid. Else go back and rebuild his shattered camp by the shelter. That was the address the sheriff had now. He had not been there since his inspection of the wreckage after the flood. That had been a while back, at least a week. He needed to make an appearance over there, so if the police came snooping the people could tell them yes we’ve seen him, he’s around here somewhere. Steve had a feeling they had not been by. This slope was getting slipperier though; he’d have to show himself soon to be counted clear. He was not going back a third time.
Whatever he did while in his cups Steve ended up throwing it away. Invariably he made a mess. Nevertheless, he broke from his trajectory, now, to return to the cut for his knapsack containing his few art supplies. This was the beginning of the day: of some misadventure, an abortive nothing like all his drunk days, which, if he had been able to soberly reflect upon it might stop him what he was doing. But he was not capable.
He sat in the copse where he kept his few possessions and drew dicks and cunts in his drawing pad. It was a subject that never failed to stir his imagination. He never showed them to anyone. But he thought them masterpieces. He did not restrict himself to genitalia. Neither was it obvious what they were. They were disguised dicks and cunts. They might resemble anything: a turtle taking a bit of leaf from a small plant with its beak while a shimmering volcano seethed like Krakatoa in the background; a bird beating its tail feathers against the rim of a baptismal font; a lone klansman standing under a bent burning T while blackbirds peppered a tree in the background under which crouched a black feline—or something else proportionately cat sized and black. Maybe a hail of dicks and cunts, falling like fire from heaven, with Erasmus-featured faces zenfully arrayed in a seeming random field without deliberation. Maybe a fierce falcon, pinions held in tight chevrons, driving for the dispassionate kill, eight talons hieratically exhibited, to usher the dead through the Field of Reeds to edify the living.
Alice had liked them, though what she hung on the walls of her salon were his magnified paintings of ladybugs, whistling birds and butterflies painted on seasoned planks of lumber or mat board or pastel paper or rarely a proper canvas. A few private collectors had bought his photo-collages of roadkill and his “Howling Wolves” series of oil pastel drawings of wolves under the influence of lycanthropy baying the moon. After his death, examples of all of these had been collected into permanent storage by the Cone Orchard Conservancy, which did not publicly display the works. If he did not show them to any, it was not because he did not deem them worthy, but because he believed there was no worthy audience to receive them. Yes, despite their value as unique expressions—and irreproducible—he tore each with a hoarse zipping sound from its metal coil, ripped it into strips, collated these and ripped them again into square bits and threw the bits into his pack with the several pair of women’s shoes that he had stolen from the Goodwill with the intent of opening an internet boutique, growing rich thereby.
Next, he drank the final Pabst and cast the empty into the bramble.
Steven wandered into the public library from which he had not yet been banned, although he had been arrested once and another time been found floundering among the stacks with a plastic grocery sac containing nothing but a bottle of vanilla extract. Awakened at the hour of closing he had been allowed to leave unushered.
But today he was hardly buzzing. He knew soon he would want more. So he’d steal some. The more he drank the cheaper it got. With less one or two drinks it cost him dizzying precipitous anxiety with galvanic glandular reactions. With two to four drinks, it was all in a day’s work. With six under him he floated it out. More than eight, he and alcohol became one, and he could not tell whether he was stealing the stuff or it was stealing him. Over twelve he performed disembodied miracles—thinking himself invisible to all eyes.
As he made his way between the last row of Fiction and the periodical case, he noted a man head on in the chair the end of the aisle. Their eyes met. A robust gentleman to say the least, a veritable giant even sitting. He wore a bold jacket, a dashing cashmere velvet blazer of a purplish-greenish iridescence, very dark, tending more toward blue than magenta without making muddy, with a royal insignia of some sort over the left breast—perhaps Marines perhaps Rangers—goldstraw linen slacks, heavy cordovan shoes of immortal make. Socks of equal quality. Not a townie. Not a stitch of Patagonia or North Face, not even a Lowe Alpine slouch hat or waist pack.
The dignitary looked into Steven, seemed to recognize something similar, if not of spirit perhaps of another share in a world touched by a spirit of affinities: maybe, a mutual friend whom neither of them had met yet, or a common ancestor in Igboland, some primal mother whose diaspora had scattered them hither by routes surprisingly straight and narrow, belying the notion of contingency; and since nothing can be proven against destiny, or for any variant thereof, time might have wed chance in some order crystalline in its development, so that these two must meet there and then. Though both be dead now.
“Man, do you look out of place!” Steven commenced the chat, taking up the convo as it had already begun and left off somewhere time out of mind (obviously the MP had had a few belts too). “You’re not the White Duke are you? No, couldn’t be; he died, didn’t he … Wish I coulda bought into him—those bonds…. You are British, right?” Steve had, for all his many deficits, no inhibitions about speaking to a stranger, even one as magisterial as this: he had the gift of gab.
They introduced themselves. Both were bored and wanted a walk in the rain. (It had begun lightly to sprinkle.) They agreed a drink would be fine.
“Shall we dine?” the MP asked and Steve asked, “Lunch okay?” tucking the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—he liked ferreting out the secret meanings of stock index charts—into his pack while the MP excused himself to use the restroom.
They met in the breezeway outside the first set of sliding doors, the sounds of whales emerging under a door to the right as they left, Steven remarking that “it must be bring-your-pet-to-the-lib’ry day,” (feigning britischer), and the MP quite misunderstanding remarking that, No, his mother in law had been dead these many years. “Some people have all the luck,” replied Steven, which the gentleman interpreted perfectly and agreed that his life had been one fortuitous accident after another.
“Therefore, sir,” he assured Steven, “I must assume the same in regard to my meeting you here now.”
“Where’d you learn to talk like that?” Steven kidded, “But no seriously, I think your privilege has gone to your head, Lord Wyke-Wicket (for so the gentleman had introduced himself, ‘Though you can call me Des,’ he had added. ‘All my friends do, a name given me at Eton, though my name is actually Welsh and impossible to say even by the current Welsh.’), there’s no luck and there’s no meaning. I mean it: There’s nothing new under the sun, because there’s nothing: Haven’t you noticed, the sun is made of marzipan today. Yesterday it was something else entirely. And our Earth is equally esculent.—So, where to now?”
“I should say a restaurawn,” returned the MP.
“Okay then: burritos, burgers, Papas Majadas, Bengali Buffet, Viet Now, Sushi Go to Go, kava bar, dim sum, pho, Pan Trout and Taters, Possum Sop-Up, ‘Materlicious—what? We’ve got eateries, now.”
Steven was playing travel-docent to the English Honor.
“Oh … but I quite know my way round. You see, my wife is the chancellor’s sister. This is not my first rodeo, as you Yanks like to say.”
“I’ve probably never said that myself,” Steven interposed, “but I’ve known some cowboys who never should.”
“Oh yes, yes, quite, quite. Very droll, Master Steven, very, yes….”
So they went to hob nob at a cafe near the post office whose eggless Hollandaise over the Eggless Benedict on a buttermilk biscuit instead of an English muffin the MP liked especially well and wrongly assumed, though he swore allegiance to Southern Cookin, to be de rigueur Appalachian cuisinerie.
“Chancellor’s sister, huh?”
“Oh, yes. Flossie, the chancellor, you will know her as Florence, of course——”
“I don’t know her at all,” interjected Steven.
“——Well, Flossie is struggling with her own private challenges, which I am sure that you will appreciate, as can I. My Jo is here to try to talk sense to her, but thus far she has not been able to muster the courage; she is rather playing the part of Flossie’s personal swizzle stick. I say Flo should learn to drink it neat, the only solution. And if she can’t take it dry well there it is. She must quit drinking hard beverages altogether.”
“Tell her try switching to vanilla extract, see how she likes it.”
“Oh, master Steven, you are a riot…. But I can see your point. She might try something a little cheaper, a little sweeter: It might ruin her taste for the stuff. Though, that never worked for me.”
“I was just thinking about all the money she’d save drinking vanilla; it’s saved me a bundle. In this day and age, bundling is frowned upon, but I think it’s the only way to go.”
“Sir, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Jo paid five-hundred extra for her baggage. Fares are atrocious these days, and do you know that Heathrow had not even a record of our having booked a flight—we had to fly business! I sat next to a very nice gentleman. He told me the entire history of his business career while swilling one goblet after another of Chardonnay, while I had my bourbon, then had the indiscretion to ask me if I thought that he might be an alcoholic….”
“Boy you said a mouthful, Des. I have some justification for saying that was a flatulent diatribe but you can make up for it by treating us to a couple stiff ones.”
“Oh, I quite like your style and choice of words. Don’t get me wrong, that talk about being an alcoholic, that is for no one’s benefit and to no one’s credit, and I certainly would not think to hoist my petard at you. I can see that you quite like your grog; I saw it from the first. I knew that we were kindred when I saw you among the folios: Tell me my boy, do you like jazz music?”
“I like good music—no matter the kind.”
“What of poker?”
“I don’t play cards. But I’ll forgive you for it.”
“Sir, the only things that America has produced that justify its existence are jazz and poker.”
“Oh, I see. That’s like a philosophy of yours—sort of aphorism. That’s good. What about rock and roll, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Credence, Jimi and Janis? What about the Dead man? You’re old school, I like that. I’d rather you didn’t know about those cats. Hey man, stick to your Miles and Monk.”
“I’m more a Satchmo man, myself, the early ensembles rather than the vocalizations….”
“Ok, sold. But we’re sitting here talking while we should be drinking. I don’t mind saying I have not had a drink now in something like an hour; so if you don’t mind, could you call the garçon over, maybe we could have a drip of something.”
“Oh, my boy, but I placed an order for a bottle the minute we walked in the door. Bushmills. I don’t know what is taking so long … Oh, but we’re having a tremendous time. Long-lost and all that. Besides, my blood is up! Your president and our Ms. May may be burning down the house, but we’ll fiddle my friend, we’ll fiddle an Appalachian chune and dance an outlawr jig until the cows come home to roost. Life is for gamblers—you may not like cards Stevie my boy, but you Sir are a gambler, a real gambler. You gamble for your life every day. I believe you could use some luck; I shall give you a leg up. I’ll buy you all the paint you need and everything to go with. This is a day of wish fulfillment. Let Freud have his revenge on the anti-philistines. We have our strong opinions too.”
At that moment a dreadlocked server in Patagonia pullover and flared flower skirt and Chacos put the bottle of Bushmills down on the corner of the table and said, “We had to borrow one from the bar up the street, guys; but don’t worry, it won’t cost any extra. Our owner’s brother-in-law owns the bar. He said give it to you at cost. Know what you want?”
But they had what they had been waiting for. Nevertheless, Des ordered a grass-fed beef sushi tartare appetizer, not the Eggless Benedict, and Steven a half-dozen jerk wings with extra celery and blue cheese.
“You shall have them, and thank you Master Steven——”
“Hey, Des, stop calling me master, I’m nobody’s master, man.”
“Oh but I believe that you are deserving. Do me a favor and wear the title. It suits you. Just as I call Lady my mistress back in London, but that’s a sad long story in itself. You see, she won’t speak to me. I embarrassed her.”
“Yeah? You toss her salad with the wrong fork or something?”
“Sir, you are delightful. No, my boy. She demanded I give up this.” He held the small tumbler of whiskey, tilted his head, and with a rictus engraved—a bent paperclip—between wincing parentheses and a substantial margin of jaw either side, he poured the honey-hued toxin over the back of his tongue.
“Des, I’ll tell you … We are absolutely, batshit-fucking crazy. We are sitting here, a man of the highest London society and a derelict—equals in our own eyes—two of a kind without a doubt, and we’re having our little fucking bacchanal, reveling, totally fucking reveling in killing ourselves with this poison.—We’re fucking crazy.”
“Well put, Master Steven. Your summing up is absolutely spot on, sir. In fact, here you go,” he poured Steven, who’d had two already, another, “We shall take it as our this-hour’s toast, and here’s to our eventual annihilation, my friend.”
The wings arrived and Steven made a bit of a mess with the blue cheese, but Des said, “Nevermind, you shall have a new costume. We shall walk to the general store and put you all in Patagonyer too, or whatever you prefer. And new shoes to boot, or whatever you’d prefer, hat, coat. Or if you’d prefer something more or less formal you shall have it—here’s another,” and he poured another couple of fingers into Steven’s glass and into his own.
The dreadlocks returned with the check and true to word the Bushmills was at cost.
Fresh dressed like a million bucks—not out of the general store at all but out of the consignment shop—in a second hand Armani suit (a new one was not to be found on the mountain) and Nike running shoes, black socks and black knit tie, Steven’s old clothes cast into a garbage can on the corner of Straight and Queen, though he’d kept his old boxers on and had a new pair in his pocket, the disreputable artist and the MP sat in Saloon, the half-full bottle of Bushmills in Steven’s pack, which he had worn over his silk jacket and hung over the straight rail of the chair in which he sat.
“Bartender, two Dead Guys right here.”
When they first walked in, Steven had fed a twenty given him by Des into the tip jar while whistling the barkeep’s attention, and now they were getting theirs first, or when not first, at least as-soon-as.
This time Des said to the barback, who brought the drinks round to their table, a youngish, modish girl looking to be between sixteen and thirty-two and fresh off the set of a Tim Burton movie, “We’ll be having at least six each more of these Dead Ones, so keep them handy. Warm’s fine for me, though Steven probably prefers his icy, as most Yanks do. Nevertheless, let us continue—and have a wonderful day. Here's another twenty, just for you my dear.”
“She could be your daughter, Des,” said Steven, the girl at bay before him, marveling at the MP, a girl who might have been Swedish, or Danish, or even Ukrainian, a very hipsterish chick: bangs, bent and broken-eyeleted calf-boots, torn early-Madonna stockings, tweed skirt, black T shirt, onyx makeup, pale polymer skin.
“She could be my daughter's friend—And she could be mine too if it suits her,” the barrister smiled a tombstone smile, and though she did not answer, Cara, the barback, seemed not indisposed enough, as she should be, to the overtures of the wicked old man. But with a girl like her, how could one tell?
“Des! Why seek ye the living among the dead?”
“Tis true, at my age I seek not far from the grave. I am like one of those prognathous and blind deepwater bugfish who call forth victims through the jellied blackness with phosphorescent tentacle, or something subtler which I learned in India as a youth.
“What the hell are you babbling about?”
My father was stationed there and I could not get away. At first, I hated the Indian people because they stank of curry, sandalwood and sweat; although, as for their personalities, I found them much more congenial than the English. My first real friend was a Gujarati boy named Ashish—he had a voice like a paradise bird and was as svelte as a leopard. But he stank like all of them. I will make an exception for Ashish’s mother—she did not stink, but smelled like fresh lemons and cardamom. I know this from her own lips: she never used a chemical deodorant or soap in her life. She shredded lemon rind into ghee—clarified butter—and rubbed it into her skin every morning after bathing in a river close to their house. She was a school administrator, very wise, very shrewd, very pious: a veritable tigress! A spiritual tigress, always reading the Gita. When I first laid eyes on her I thought her the ugliest woman I had ever seen, but she was the most beautiful. The holiest. She is my sacred mother.”
The MP put his hands in front of him in a prayer and nodded a secret assent to this divine mother he had known in his childhood.
“I carry her with me in my heart to this day. She revealed to me the secrets of the universe, at least what I, a spoiled child of entitled English father and Swiss mother, could understand.
Oh, she was so lovely. She knew just how to talk to a boy. Her eyes were treasure houses. To look into her eyes was to travel infinitely far. To traverse the universe.
She is the reason I could never accept the Christian faith as my own. Good and evil are not warring principles but are at one with each other. Ashish’s mother taught me about Vishnu, who is creator, preserver and destroyer all three. Ultimately, all is silence. But I won’t go into it too deeply…. I should befoul the Hindu conception by pretending to ally myself to it. It is I who stink! You know Kali, too, I shall assume: I won’t wait for reply. She is as much as the creator responsible for the beauty of the world, for destruction is not unbeautiful.”
“I can dig it Des.”
“I know you can, old boy, that’s why I allowed myself such freedom of expression—”
“You let loose because you’re drunk, but okay. Not too familiar with the whole Hindu thing, but I can dig the silence. You ever done any acid, Des?”
“I must assume that you are referring to lysergic acid diethylamide 25, am I wrong Master Steven?”
“Right again, Des. It’s like jazz. It’s a trip, to use a cliché. But you’d never know it if you hadn’t done it. I couldn't have guessed in a million years what silence is from being told. That doesn’t begin to tell it. I’ve known people who just couldn't handle it, but you know people: You can’t predict who’ll be strong when all’s said and done. When you’re slam up against it, like you get on cid, sometimes there really isn’t any telling how people are going to act. The hard ones crack and the softies shine like sunrise, to borrow another cliché. Anyhow, why am I talking about this? I haven’t touched acid in over twenty years, and I don’t know anybody who messes with the stuff anyway. But …”
“Yes, my boy, ‘But …’ say it. ‘But’ what?”
“But… if we could get some. How old are you, my man?—Not that age matters. Nevermind——”
“I’m sixty-seven.”
“For all I know, you’re higher than acid already. I’ve heard of certain dudes being higher than acid. I wasn’t always like now. I was something of a scholar. I read into this stuff we’re talking about. It’s only a memory now. I’ve taken acid, but I mean years ago, before all the reading about these things, and it took me high. It took me nowhere at all and I was high above; I was everywhere all at once and nowhere, just like you were saying about the Hindu lady’s eyes.
Then it splashed me down hard. Right back into this mean old world—with telephone poles and guardrails and concrete walls and manicured lawns. It made me sick to see how ugly the world is we’ve made, this… shitty fucking world we’ve made of paradise, so I stopped tripping. That’s what you reminded me of…. Let’s skip it if you don’t mind. Fuck it. I can’t stand even to think about it—makes me sick.”
“Here she comes with more death for us, Brother. Watch your wing there so she may put them down.” Des had become consolatory for a moment, but he did not want to stay in that frame of mind. Neither did Steven, Des knew. Steven soon shook his dolor, stretched his frontlegs to the ceiling, stood for a moment, rattled his hindlegs and went to the bathroom. When he returned, he and Des finished their beers and left.
Out in the street Steven felt great again, better than ever. Though in the back of his head he knew it all must come crashing, that it could not last longer than the sauce kept flowing. But before he could get lost in these lucubrations, Des had invited Steven to ride with him to the chancellor’s house, to introduce him to Jo, his wife, promising that they would not be long, assuring him that Jo would not detain them; that he, Des, was perfectly free to come and go without matrimonial constraints; that, in fact, he and Jo were entirely detached as far as all that: he could do as he damn well pleased. Would Steven please go with him now—Des had called an Uber driver already, to return as he had come. And, oh yes, we could both stand a belt of Bushmills from the bottle en route, and we had better stop at the ABC for another on the way, or the time might get away from us and we be forced to drink in bars all evening. Oh, I say—nevermind….
The Uber Camry Hybrid rolled to a silent stop at the gate and Des keyed in the code and the gate opened. Through firlined corridors a narrow strip of drive passed under them, they upon it floating. The driver let them out at a loop in front of a modest, modish house with glass all around and a flat roof and slate pad that began at the front pavement and, wrapping around the back, resolved itself somewhere out of their sightline, parapetless and without any protective railing overhanging a void. Below, the tops of pines and middle-age poplars and maples and oaks reached upward, trying to climb aboard the chancellor’s weird, incongruous Lissitzky of a house.
When they walked in, a tweeny girl with nixyish ears and eyes and sprightly plucked brows, though rounded out withal, in a lime green mini skirt and black, patent-leather belt and go-go boots stepped up to greet them. Apparently, she had been sitting in the parlor to the left with a group of ladies who were playing whist.
Steven, who had gotten hot and removed his coat in the car on the way, tossed the coat over the girl’s outstretched arm, held forth in a plea position as she were addressing an invisible dirk, mistaken for a request to take it from him, as she drew forward with what must have been an intention to hug or accost her father.
As the coat leapt onto her arm, she let it droop and the surprised silk slid a floundering wreck onto the parquetry.
“This is my daughter, Fil. Fil, that is Steven’s new suit coat on the floor groveling at your cold, booted feet, and this is my mate Steven, himself. Please say hello Fil.”
“Hello Fil,” Fil hailed.
Now an hispanic menial—thirtyish, stout, handsome, olively marmoreal—was among them for a moment, now rehanging the declassed coat on a rack around the corner on a hall tree; now clackingly retreating into the shadowed hall, an oblique rectangle of fluctuating light—an opening, projection or mirrored reflection—upon the wall some few strides back away in the gloom.
Fil looked Steven over, ministerially thorough in her classification of him—merciless too and malicious—which was uncannily correct.
This was the chancellor’s niece, and so she had come from time to time to stay with her aunt. She remembered having seen Steven in the Mountain Picayune and had thought him a valueless slouch in the picture printed therein; although, the current impression was slightly modified by the difference of the suit and a haircut, but otherwise there was no improvement. Coupled with other intriguing qualities Fil found predation very alluring, but Steven had nothing to back it up; his was all in vain, a stalker rather than a hunter—his kind never confident to possess and subdue what he skulked after. The coitus of his insecurity and pride spelled penury. She would not have put him in her tea.
Fil turned and went back to her game and ignored the men for the duration of their intrusion on her aunt’s card party. Her mother floated forth next and fidgeted about the outlines of her husband’s being, inspecting his hems, whistling and tsking and muttering, the whistling not tuneful but a hoarse shrill of indrawn breath over large incisors. She nervously and equinishly side glanced Steven a bit while she fidgeted, once confronting him face on while he took up the skin of her fingers for a brief moment with a “How do you do,” but soon wandered distraitly, as she had come, back to the gaming table.
“That’s Jo, my wife, of course, and there is Flo, her sister the chancellor,” Des said, raising his voice to a siren alarm volume: “My wife’s lovely sister, and these other ladies are Flo’s colleagues and compatriots. Who’s winning ladies?” Des stepped for a moment into the darkened hall and withdrew the handkerchief from his breast pocket and blew his nose before stuffing the square of silk up his sleeve, leaving Steven standing to catch the signals as Flo and another lady were left with each an arm in the air but not looking at them. If the chancellor recognized him she did not show it. She had troubles of her own Des had said. Still, Steven’s paranoia about his notoriety was with him constantly; he needed a drink. Then he realized he had left his pack in the goddamn Uber car.
“Des, I left it!” he exclaimed, horrified. “Des it’s gone!—Shit, it’s gone…”
“What? Oh, yes. We’ll just call and have them return…. Fil, you’re handy with those things,” (meaning her smartphone). “Would you just ring up Uber and have them return to the house. Steven has left behind his bag. Thank you, Dear.” And it was done with a flick of the wrist.
They had repaired to a parlor opposite the darkened hallway, in which, against a rare solidly opaque wall, was a small bar set-up featuring cut-crystal decanters of gin and whiskey, scotch and vodka, and several bottles of French liqueurs and vintage glass and stainless steel spritzer bottles. Steven asked for a drink.
Des moued. Des hemmed and hawed and said they’d better not—for the moment.
“You saw how my wife was worrying me (Steven had not recognized it as such, he had thought she was just silly). She was trying to sniff out how much I might have had to drink…. You see, my boy, things are not exactly as I described them to you in a moment of slum bravado back there at Saloon. She is, after all, my wife, and though sometimes my thirst temporarily abrogates my uxoriousness, really I am very fond of her, you see. And if it’s all the same to you, let us try to behave ourselves around the ladies. We shan’t be long, Steven, I promise. Then we’ll be on our way, and we’ll be men again without women, and we may speak and do as we please. Sir, women, excuse the expression, are not to be fucked with. They have great powers of intuition—and superkeen noses! She can alway guess within a drink or two how much I have had. Oh, God, but I don’t know what to do. I cannot choose between them, Master Steven.”
Des had such a hangdog look about him that Steven could only smile indulgently and feign interest in the outlook from the great glass window which wrapped the southwest corner of the room. God, what a drag this was getting to be. He might just get into the Uber car and go back to town and get some pills and … Hell yes, that’s exactly what he would do. Fuck this shit. He had a fifth and a half of Bushmills in his bag. The whiskey would last at least a day and a half.
Okay—now—how to break the news. He had no money. He’d have to borrow some for the ride. Shit. No. He did not want any goddamn scenes, not likely anyway from this crowd—but Fuck! He had to get the fuck away from here. These weren’t his people; he didn’t have people. No people were his people. Ok. He’d fucking walk. Ok. He’d decided—it was just down the hill. That’s right it was all downhill from here.
He was in the Horseshoe Gap gated community. He had not paid attention to how they got there, but Steven knew that all he must do is keep walking downhill and eventually he’d reach the foot; from there he would know where he was. He’d never been exactly here, but he’d been every which way below here. Once at the bottom it’d be a cinch getting a bus and back to town. Then to Walmart for some triple-cees. It all sounded unremarkably familiar now.
When Steve started hurrying, run-walking, out of the drive as the Uber driver was pulling away, the driver lowered his window and said, “Hey you wanna ride man? You don’ have to walk man.”
“I’m broke dude,” Steven said.
“Hey man that shit’s paid for already, homeboy; these people have a account man. Come on get in.”
The Uber driver lit a joint and passed it back and said, “Here man,” but Steven refused. He had never liked smoking pot, though he had done it enough in his apprenticeship days at the resort. “Naw, brah, that’s all you. Hey, I appreciate it though; it’ll make me tired, and I have some things to do today. How do you get the smell out before your next fare?”
“Around here everybody smokes man. I do it all the time—nobody ever complained. I got the best kush in town homeboy. This shit is the killer.”
“Smells good. Makes me paranoid…. And tired, like I said.”
“Not my weed bro, this is the cleaness high you ever smoke man, you sure you won try? You makin me nervous man—you don’ smoke weed.”
“Listen man, I ain't police. In fact, I’m going to score some pills right now, so don’t get nervous about me—I’m your pal. Just drop me anywhere near Walmart; I’m suppose to meet my friend there.” Buying pills, real pills, was one thing, but stealing Coricidin from Walmart was ghetto-sketchy in anybody’s book. Smoking weed, shooting Opanas and Roxies: that was all kosher, but swallowing handfuls of cough medicine was definitely treyf--non distingué.
Steven took his suit coat from his bag then left the bag under a bush behind an electrical transformer. Once in the store, he went directly to hardware and took a flathead screwdriver and dropped it into his pocket, looking for cameras. He went to a pharmacy aisle and took from a floor level shelf a lexan anti-theft box containing a box of generic cold and cough medicine and took it into the bathroom. It fitted perfectly his jacket pocket (Thank God I did not leave it on the hall tree!). He had once stomped a box to open it at a pharmacy across the road, and it never opened. Defeated, Steven had stuffed the box into the trash under all the used paper towels, the product still inside. As he had emerged from the bathroom a man in shirt and tie had appeared from a door off the bathroom corridor and asked dubiously if everything was alright. He had done the same at Walmart and the echoing had made such a racket in the tiled, hard plastic and steel room, that, though he had gotten what he wanted he would never do it again.
After a bit of levering the box was open, stuffed out of sight in the trash, and the pills pressed out of their aluminum backing resting in a pocket, the first five swallowed with a mouthful of tap water. This was a typical day. In thirty or forty minutes, after having taken the remainder of the total sixteen pills, he would begin to feel the DMX kicking in—and in an hour or so he would be tripping.
He slid by the magazine rack and took a Vogue Italia and put it, folded, into the interior pocket of his blazer. He’d do some drawing later. He’d catch a bus, go to the university library, trespass despite his ban. He’d cut corners; make like a rattie-o. Go up to the PNs and PQs, NBs, NCs and NDs. He waltzed by the deli and pocketed a sub and a plastic sleeve of prosciutto-wrapped mozzarella, went out the way he’d come, found his bag, took out the bourbon and drank a slug, recapped it, careful not to drop it onto the full bottle. On second thought, he removed his jacket and rolled the full bottle in the silk and dropped in the magazine—remarking the stolen Journal and Times, something for later—and the sandwich and prosciutto and went over to the bus stop to wait the half hour for the Green Route. It was right on time.
At first there were just sounds, and he did hear them, but they meant nothing to him. He opened his eyes. He had drooled substantially on his wrist which was heavy under him, and when he unfolded himself and lifted his head he was stiff. First thing he thought was that he’d wasted his trip falling asleep—because he’d only taken five of the pills before he had. Had he taken them all, he would not have been able to sleep. He had a five dollar bill in his hand. A voice had waked him.—That meant it was near 2:00 AM. Closing.—He saw the back of the person the voice belonged to, who had jiggled him conscious, down the way. Had she recognized him? If so, he might have the library policeman waiting for him when he tried to exit. Shit. But if he wasn’t there—he did not believe he would be…. He still had the Bushmills and eleven triple-cees and Walmart was open all night. He’d drink and walk his way there: gank more pills.
When he’d arrived in the library he’d come up to the third floor unmolested. He’d made it up to the Art and Lit stacks and gone straight to Southern Lit to get a book he had thought he might like to read. He flipped over a few pages reading snippets, another book rattling bars for attention in his brain, and put it back. He went to Russian Literature; he did not need a call number. He found his title easily among the author Ns—anyway, its call number PG3476.N3 L3 1972 had it out of place. Somebody needs to organize these shelves, Steven caviled: he took a minute to do so; several other titles were out of place. He had taken his selection to a carrel by a big window, the opposite building’s frontispiece facing him, closed between sessions, darkening with dark eyes all over—sun behind the clouds, or was it so late?—and opened to the frontispiece. Abraham Lincoln all in green stared out at him with sensual, bovine stare. Lickity-split Steven pocketed the bill and looked around for a witness to the miracle. None. He was expecting maybe the devil. Already, the five earmarked for a pint. No way was he spending good money on pills. He dared not attempt lifting a bottle from the ABC—there was only the one ABC in town. God forbid he should be banned from it too. He was already forbidden at two groceries and this library. He could not smile, but inside a wide grin opened and a chuckle fell out—he needed a drink. He had taken his pack to the bathroom and had drunk down, from half- to quarterful, from the open bottle of Bushmills, then gone back to the carrel to read the generous novel and had, at some point, apparently while inspecting the enchanted Lincoln, passed out cold.
He pulled his pack on and went downstairs, exiting from the side. No problems at the circulation desk. Nobody looked at him. Nobody in the corridor leading out—nobody in the police booth. Nobody anywhere. I must have slept something like, what, six seven hours? Steven was thinking as he emerged into the warm and sultry, starless night. The parking deck was lit and would be lit all night long. The bus rondel was deserted. He decided to walk through campus rather than around. Nothing but Walmart open this time of night;—although … the bars were just now letting out, so a few summer people would still be hanging around, drunk, for an hour or so before going away. May be good for some crazy talk. He changed his mind about Walmart and headed back toward the bars—reversing course. Walmart was not going anywhere. He stopped behind a bush between two brick buildings—he could smell magnolia. He took the quarterful bottle from his bag, the other fifth as yet unopened. He took the eleven pills from his pocket and threw back five and swigged the whiskey, then threw back the remainder and took two swigs. His face contracting into a rictus, he hissed involuntarily. He replaced the bottle in the pack—now almost empty. His stomach rebelled. Quickly he undid his belt and dropping his trousers leaned against the wall and evacuated a noxious spongy dark feces. He reached his bag with his left hand and took the clean underwear from his coat. He gingerly fingered off his underwear and wiped himself clean and dropped them onto the feces. He hunched over and tipped from the wall, stepped clear of the pile and removed shoes and pants and put on the fresh underwear and slid on the pants and shoes and tucked himself in. He shouldered the bag and set off again toward the meager lights of club and tavern between Howard and Depot.
Around 3:00 AM a sober witness watched Steven fall face first on the sidewalk after taking four 1mg Xanax he’d purchased for five dollars from a man he’d met in jail. The witness—a young gay professional who’d picked Steven up once and from whom Steven had stolen money, liquor, pills, and pot and never put out—called the police, who responded to the call within minutes, and Steven was taken to jail for a twenty-four-hour hold. Steven was relieved—a hold is not an arrest. However, next day he was held rather than released after he blew .00 on the breathalyzer. A detective had come and asked him questions about his recent whereabouts. Steven refused to talk; nevertheless, he was taken to the magistrate and charged with failing to report an address change as a sex offender. His third strike. In addition, his probation officer came to the jail and served him several violations and explained that his probation was being revoked. That afternoon, Steven was moved from seg into general population and, once arrived there, dove head first from the mezzanine onto the tile below and died in hospital with a fractured skull and a broken neck several hours later.
Des stopped drinking a couple of years later—though his Lady never returned—and died, beloved husband and father and brother (his sister in law also sober and happy) in the bosom of his family, sober many years.
Murage is near there in art and life and is figuring out how to master the whole family of creativity. He was born an artist, he taught himself architecture and literature and right now is a comfortable single father. he was born in central Kenya and grew up there where only a few could converse in any other language apart from Kikuyu. to exacerbate, he has primary dyslexia (alien term to most in Kenya) which gave him a devastating language barrier where he was poor in reading and in spelling and gave him nervousness whenever he was to talk in public because only him knew his condition. He has a passion for reading though, this resulting from his introversion. He has read many writers from Homer through Tolstoy to V. S. Naipaul. Reading is a cult to him. For his condition, it took him three months to finish Oliver Twist, and he couldn't skip a day without opening pages. He researched on his problem with reading, spelling and found out it is called dyslexia. It is hereditary and his niece has an acute one. Gidson, having gone only up to high school, taught himself architecture and is a professional practising architectural designer. He says he is neither religious nor an atheist but a spiritual man who knows the spirit should be left to its own devices. |
A DROP TOO MUCH
Of all things that men adore to abhor,
It is a thing that even in merry-making is assumptive,
Yet when everyone acknowledges it's a nuisance and emetic,
It loiters and seduces and untold neurons get a blip.
It has broken many a family.
It has cast Mũrang'a into poverty,
In Nyeri, it is a thing chockablock with pervert,
It has killed many in the world.
And yet since creation, it has remained,
And many it has maimed,
Yet with all, hic' the strength with men,
To its false promises they shout amen.
I have yet to understand why,
With vanity, we so love to comply.
No one can tell when time shall come.
And put this alcohol thing to calm.
I want in future to remember what it would be like the week I turn 40. I do not want to request as I do about my 26th birthday with all the events that were but I have scattered recollections of only the regrets: the laughter of girls who no longer like my posts on FB, the smoke of trivial weed but which was like a newly discovered life-and-death, the stupid kids whom we did not know and liked the tipplers because the kids were better than the tipplers in many things, in sense, facts, memory and combination of the inner voice (maybe they too, but may it be forbidden, shall become dysfunctional in future) and then my tears of mourning the waste, the carelessness and the immaturity and gabble and those kids who wished for my token. I gave them the scraps they asked for which included my cheese, whiskey, boots, the bike and a packet of sportsman cigarette and also had asked if I had a girlfriend, a genuine one. I pointed at her; I couldn't gamble on that. They nodded and thus lost my trust; I threw them out. Who were those children for Chris sake?
I want to transport with Kwach who has reached fourth floor this year 2019. He tells me from the fifth floor the laws made by the building regulations board demands that there must be an elevator. He said it is for the obvious reason, at that age one starts getting a horror of stairs.
When Kwach started reading this story, the story started reading him; he added details in an attempt to make it sound true, to make it a fabled story because he is a pattern-seeking animal. He said the likes of John Henry Bonham, Jimi Hendrix, Truman Capote lived a life like his. But his is far from a madcap one, he is shy. He also fears own vomit a lot.
It was something predictive about Kwach's depression when it matured to bipolar. It was his entire fault. He had lost four prime jobs in somewhat less than four years, all for alcohol-related causes. He was two decades in a successive ordination of drunken stupor like there was a coveted gold prize.
Three years past he had done a swan dive by establishing a wine and spirit shop whilst he already was fighting a near-fatal dependence on substance.
He had a year-old son though what worried him most was the son's mother; she was light years apart with her husband in, leave alone ideologies that Kwach is at loggerheads with everyone, but her uxorial disposition, her methodology, imagination, and propositions too. Oh! The young lady made Kwach's alcoholism find an alibi.
When he visited his mother on one festive holiday, she appealed in desperation to her God to stop Kwach from drinking as his dad did; poor old bloke, his death made headlines. His mum, his only god begged him to eat, he was thin. He would make efforts of a few nibbles, and lean back on the chair, close his eyes and give a great breath. He could not stomach food, it always wanted to come out.
He had failed as a son, like Phaeton the son of a water nymph, Clymene. He was failing as a husband and to be a father. He was mostly forlorn, irritable, and only alcohol was his anecdote to everything, to stress, even to fear. When tipsy he is a genius but once drunk he is a brute, the greatest nuisance and a cause of serious disquietude to whoever is near. The following day he can’t recall anything, even on being reminded. He suffers from MPD.
His wine and spirit shop, everyone knew, was to be guzzled by his hankering. One evening he managed not to drink and while seated in his couch feeling his arms and thighs because they were having slight seizures, his wife asked him what was wrong. He could tell from the corner of his eye that she was looking at him with those beseeching eyes he could not look straight back into. He told her he was dying. She was very bitter and said she would beat his corpse if he died that way. Wretched Kwach could only think, ‘if only you were a listening wife, only if you remembered not to repeat what I reproached you for just the other day I wouldn't be drinking this much, I would drink only a little, while watching Gooners play, and in your company like the good old days.'
He told me his wife had metamorphosed from the young girl he met helping her aunt in a clothes shop (Obviously, him too from a boy budding architect) to an ignorant lady whose food burn every day because she is watching a movie. She was loving, innocent, listening (She still is, I know her) girl. Now, this food she prepares after 9 pm because that is when her gossip friend closes the shop. Then the preparation is always haphazard, she would light the stove (They had forfeited the gas cooker) put a pot with water on it and when boiling she would remember there was no flour. She puts off the fire and goes for flour and then comes and boils water again and realises the cooking oar is dirty and considers using it that way. Then the bland result. She would boil water to bathe on the gas cooker when they had it, then let it cool to her desired temperature because it got to that point whilst she was watching GOT. Such wastage of energy and so many other small wastages like a salon he established for her; she refused to open because her friend did not come to keep her company. He closed it. He took her to his wine and spirit shop where she liked to buy a pig in the poke from any vendor who happened. Then when the government said there shall be no more selling during the day, Kwach used to find it open every time until one day he was upcountry the police are the ones who were lucky to find the bar open. She fled. This drove them slowly to wriggling in squalor. He had to close shop and sell the remaining merchandise in hiding and as you already know his drinking habit, and that now is what he resulted to, tant pis.
But look, she was just a girl, and he was a drunkard and sots are used to blaming people.
Anyway, that was during when one evening he told her he was dying. Then his seizures got to delirium tremors. She moved in a frenzy then ran to the shop and brought him a drink. She found him on the floor in convulsion and she helped him swallow his thing. She was innocent and concerned.
And even in the pale vegetable state he was, she still trawled through his WhatsApp. She couldn't let him get screwed.
He finished the stock and started to depend on his wife's hairdressing exploits.
He would get so worried in the evening to a point of going to his local and sit waiting to see who would buy anything before he got to convulsion.
He had severe fevers and sweats till his beddings got soaked, and he went for a week without sleep. Heart palpitations, he had optical hallucinations of his son crawling around and his wife seated watching a movie while they were not even near the house. The hallucinations would not scare him they only disturbed and he would like in exorcism move the clothes on the couch to destroy the illusion of them making the shape of a person seated. Sometimes he would do it without moving his eyes from the screen. Then it would be his son making his usual trifling grimaces and sounds while in bed. He would exorcise that also by briefly going out then back and it worked.
He continued in the house alone, nowhere to go and nothing to do but words on a calendar on the wall kept occupying his brain ‘Battha Medical package provides comprehensive …' so he also resulted in watching a series of movies and pray that the kilowatts may stagnate. There is nothing worse than clinging to nothing. Better have a pen and wait for ink than have no pen at all.
His wife went upcountry to look after his mother who was not feeling well, and to at least have some solace in her mother-in-law's inhabitance.
She called to wake him up every morning at 6 and remind him he should go looking for a job ‘like other men' not knowing he would not pass an interview; he had a puffed-up face especially the tawny cheeks and had a lesion that spoke of his jaunts. His eyes were shot red and with pulsing veins and staring. He had lost a tooth while she was away after skating backwards in the bathroom now full of fungus which she fastidiously used to scour.
He even had sold things. They had only left him with the mattress, a duvet, clothing, and curtains to hide him and also left the kitchen business, which was of no profit because it had no stock. The computer had survived also, waiting for a job.
Because of poor diet, hypoglycaemia and stress, he feared going to bed. He would kick violently in the air or hit the wall. He threw jabs and one had got the wall real good and the wall tore his skin exposing the carpals. One night he ran up to the door and when he found it closed, he screamed. The following day he could tell all that to details, you would have thought he was playing hoax.
He woke and sat in a Sukhasana pose like he was fond of and pondered on where to begin. He was so dirty and everything was so - wash his shoes? How long would that take? The bathroom floor and walls needed scrubbing, all of that? Wipe the main floor? It was too wide now that there was an absence of furnishing. He needed his wife back, let her come and start asking for her sofa and other questions, no problem let her come and attack. But this would be a pet peeve to her. The lace curtains suspended from strings, the door one and even the walls had it, would get pulled down and thrown on top of the duvet, on top of his clothes which were having patches of dark marks with mildew. Shoes and socks would be thrown out lest there be a rat inside choked by the pungent smell. Dhobi would start and Kwach would take a stroll looking for Mrevi and would come to a house which had gone through a purge of woes.
He cried a little, how dreadful it was to think of her presence and then there was nobody. He cried quietly, not shrieking or gracelessly. He cried at nobody, into a void and fought but pleased no one.
He cursed tears and sat there dallying like a dirtbag and resolved to face it like a man because she would not come back to that shit hole.
His neighbour outside was wringing her floor mat after mopping her floor and she asked, "Is it you Kate who drinks Keg? This area smells of urine of Keg, it must be somebody."
And Kate agreed it must be someone.
Kwach knew he should never piss that place again. He thanked gods that she thought it was Keg and not chan'gaa that was.
Kate said that she never partakes such things.
Keg? It is far better if they knew the culprit!
Kate shouted, "Watu wa maziwa mikono juu" (those who like milk I want to see your hands up)
Kwach stayed a little before moving out.
He rested flat on the mattress, his head in his two palms and looked through an opening in the ceiling caused by rainwater, and further up at the corrugated iron sheets that were the roof. There was a hole that let the sunray shine through. He could not figure out the colour of the light; white? Light blue? And it made a nice shape of a star and it excelled in magnificence. He gazed at it and then he questioned his sanity. Do normal people do this?
He wished he had learnt tapestry or how to join beads into a necklace or sewing even if it were the braids and weaves. He admired the strength in the state of mind of the stay-home women. They listen to radio Maisha or Ghetto radio or Kwangwaru all day, how! He strictly listened to X-Fm, but it had recently got closed, he liked playing Tetris battle 2P on Facebook when he had a modem but even if he had another the game got shut down, the helluva world this is.
He looked at the calendar on the wall that belonged to an insurance company for an umpteenth time. He read ‘Battha Medical package provides comprehensive inpatient and out…' over and over. He recites the thing every day every time, and it tormented him. While in the kitchen he heard the words ring in his head repetitively. When they did not appear in his mind, he had nothing there and so there was a ring-like tiiiiii and diiiiii that slowly transformed to a continuous sound that seemed to rhyme with the sound of ‘Battha Medical package provides…' In the toilet, he would go ‘Battha Medical package provides comprehen…' and then stop and curse. In bed, the same and he blamed it for his insomnia because it produced a psychedelic effect. While alone, seated on a bench somewhere outside a shop, ‘Battha Medical package provides…'
While at it, his friend Kĩnoti Mrevi knocked like a messiah.
Kĩnoti dared to suggest that Kwach should bask the mattress in the sun, it smelt of urine. Sure he had peed it, but if you knew Kĩnoti's bed? Where he spent the night with his wife and kid? He says it's the kid, so let me spare you the sordid details.
It must be Kĩnoti had money that is only when he would be that audacious and so Kwach immediately knew where to begin; follow him.
He took him to his place of desire, they went past a speakeasy which they knew did not have what they wanted and entered a hole in the wall that sharply smelt of faecal because the main drinks were chan'gaa, nguzo and buzaa (dirty ales distilled from sorghum or anything cereal) and keg. And the smell came from the mouths of the revellers themselves. Most of them had nothing on their tables but were drunk, they had been, since the previous day and they slept there. Useless vagabonds. Some were women but you never could have pointed out the difference, in fact not even by their chests. One was crying at a corner and her same old age mate was sitting a yard away slouching down and struggling to drop a long thick spit without a result. A youth man was quarrelling with her woman friend who was not convincible because the drink had gotten the better of her. A niece was nursingly holding a glass of ale to her uncle who was concealing iv tubing with his jacket hoodie and was shaking in a way he could not hold a cigarette. A guy who owned both a car and a huge potbelly was at a dark corner hoodwinking a teenage girl who had strayed from her abusive family. A woman who was the only one taking proper beer was smoking a proper cigarette at her own zone. Another was in slow motion in speech asking for something to eat and Pauline at the counter, a huge woman made more ferocious in appearance by a hugely prognathous chin and deep voice kept shouting, "ũyũ ti mũkawa umia itina nja ngui ĩno" in English it is euphemistic (This is not a hotel, move your ass out you dog!) She was arms akimbo, shifting from one foot in clogs to the other, frowning and casting a gimlet eye; anyone could vamoose. Here there was always one or two prostrate on the floor, either limply drunk or beaten by Pauline, especially Jonty who was perpetually on the floor. There was also a kind of striptease who was dancing to Nigerian Starboy's Soco to amuse herself flapping her bodice and exposing a brown stained pantie. It is a place that a man had died and other five and a woman had gone blind the previous year after taking an illicit brew and suffered from an accumulation of formic acid and in the hullabaloo, misattributes and the shop owner’s conspiracy, a fifth columnist got lynched. And it was back to business as usual.
He asked Kĩnoti Mrevi to buy him something to munch first, not something heavy because it would make it hard for him to get blotto, but something just to oil his oesophagus and prevent his stomach lining from being torn. He walked him out with pride telling him, "I always tell you to never allow yourself to get hungry while I am here, be telling me what you want" he always said so when he knew his friend had nothing and he mostly paused till he was asked. He never had much himself and when he was penniless, he would quit alcohol and pretend to enjoy staying at home with his son then borrows some money from his wife and say, "let me see whether Kwach has finished the job, we need to get paid" putting his faux leather jacket on his T-shirt with a Tuborg brand on the chest then a PVC cap and asking the kid what he wanted from the shop. "Bano" the boy said asking for marbles, he knew his dad's limit. And even with that when he got back, he would tell him he found his friend sick and took him to the hospital with the money his mum gave him. His friend Kwach would certainly be in comportment tantamount to sickness and unable to move his limbs.
He bought Kwach a half of bread to take with a boiled egg split to accommodate pieces of tomato and pepper.
He said he could not stand the smell in the bar so they should take home what they needed. But it was because Pauline didn't like his pretended attitude of being a cool-minded guy and her eye could tell she was waiting for him to try greeting her so she could start on him. And loudly. Also, it could have been because he was alone at home and Kwach did not know what had transpired but nodded as though the issue was one he had given much thought and said, "women are like that" with a concerned sigh, more because he had found someone they could relate.
Then suddenly he remembered his uncle Mato, a guy only half a decade older than him. They used to school together but was his uncle nonetheless and his frenemy. He had struck gold from unknown quarters in Nairobi and had given a surprise visit to shagz (the village). Mato did not like his parents’ rondavels and so was staying with Kwach's mother. He is a guy so predictable to Kwach but not to anyone else. Kwach could smell his schemes from far, especially when Mato is gay, he is very nice. His gayness is always triggered by some prospects of gaining whether materially or emotionally. He would buy a girl something, not to please the girl but to have it reciprocated. Kwach's wife was upcountry staying with his mother. Now what?
In the mucky room that was Kĩnoti's they opened the bottle and ecstasy emptied Kwach's perturbation.
The room had a gourd on the wall hanging on a leather braided girdle baked with soot and dust, with Rastafarian colours. On the wall, there was also a thick paper cut into the shape of Africa mass land and drawn a lion on it like those smiley lions that Nairobi governor Sonko had made for us. There was a huge pot on the floor with a radio speaker unit in its mouth. There was a curtain hiding the bed but could not silence the smell. The curtain had a laced edge that went zig-zag and looked like the Nairobi mayor's chain. At a dark corner, there sat a grandpa's clock, or was it? This place looked like a ghetto version of a Hogwarts something. The couch Kwach sat in had a missing part of the bench and torn upholsters that were pink with flowers of red and yellow when they were new, now they were a universal colour chart. The remaining bench Kwach sat on had a homemade Spiderman with a timber leg and a sisal fibre one. It had one eye that looked at him the other at Kĩnoti, quite Spiderman's frolics. There was also a lorry half full of sand, it had deposited some on the upholstery and the bench and the stove and inside a mug with water.
Kwach thought of Kĩnoti's mistress out there; what did she like, the filthy room? She had never been here; she knows Kĩnoti out there and he is the bad boy who is the best in playing pool game and darts and did Accounting in College. I remember in darts he used to look at the board and say, "I am from Mũrang'a" then pause between adjustment aims and say, "I ask one, she comes with her friend." Then beam and say, "Without panties." jerking his head towards me, bent with a cynical smile. Throw the dart straight into the eye and ask me, "Do I call them for a press conference." I would plausibly agree because he looked like it. Girls of demi-monde get attracted to bad boys, outlaw conformers; wrong reputation.
Kwach for most of his life has been vexed of himself being steep, having no obstructive ability to depravities. It is quizzical how gullible he is. He could not tell why the types with nomenclatures like ‘Kaa sober squad' (stay sober squad) ‘Wale wa' (those of) ‘Corridor team' ‘Watu wa Marie' especially this last one, (People who belong to Marie's pub) - the cadre, the ilk he is propitious to - are always the woebegone ones. They are apprehensive when they first meet him then, later on, they feel home and dry to even casually invite him to their dark klutzy dwellings. He still carried his status in his mind, but it dwelt in his wobbling knees, he had nothing, an addict and these are the hounds he related with, they liked him. They could tell even before he spoke that he once was someone. Then, Voila! "He is one of us."
They could not wish him to be back on firm ground; they needed a companion in this sin drenched world.
Kwach made it home anyhow.
His friend Carlo called him to her house. She had a 750ml bottle full of hard something, just his material.
When she called, he was lying on his mattress, wondering where he would get supper.
She had a screen which took Ozil and Abemeyang at true scale. She had white rice too, chicken curry, drum sticks and some greens, hot sauce and the drink, and the accoutrement of being with her for the evening; the only things that a man needs. She also had a brand new Peugeot GT, and he needed to add nothing else.
From the fridge he went for tonic water and a tot of gin; he had to be suave.
She served the food and again he had to be unadventurous and go with her pace which he found tantalising and sometimes forgot and voraciously took a spoonful of each ingredient and filled his mouth and worked on it like the waifs and strays, stopping mid-way to attend to her, ‘Is everything all right?'
They started on the drink and he was in no hurry here also so as not to invite a puke. But he started reacting to her soporific story on how her new pet the Peugeot rides well on the new Southern bypass; penniless drunks like him would have wanted to hear about how at a certain occasion one was spoilt for choice on what he wanted to eat and how the ladies liked him which could be true because he was funny and oblivious of his pettiness and did not care how foolish he appeared trying to speak in tongue.
As Carlo knew, she wrapped some drumsticks for him. He would be hungry and so much wished for her benevolence. But trust him, he could sell the drumsticks or exchange for a can of ale. And he couldn't leave the remaining drink; it would do to show his buddies that some people would say "You know this dude? Was my deskie in college" whatever happened later they don't ask; ‘Just open the thing ninja' magic thing to his common company.
They rode from Karen where she had rented to Dagoretti where he stayed, all the way talking about the malls: the secret beauty ‘Galleria', the imperial that ‘The Hub' is, the upcoming obsolete ‘Waterfront', meeting places like ‘The Junction'. It was interesting, though, because he is an architectural designer.
At their gate, he said cheers and whispered quoting Goethe, "Architecture is frozen music."
He got into his room feeling nice and the icing on the cake, he decided to take a shower; it's been a while. He felt the tap but had even forgotten that the caretaker lets the water flow only early in the morning, it's been quite a while for sure, he did not even remember such things.
He sat down without worries; he was full, had spent the evening with a beautiful classy lass, here was the drink and an Architectural Digest. Bingo! Life was good.
Then the surprises of them all, miracles like misfortunes don't come in a piecemeal, Carlo called again in excitement to inform him of an opening if he was interested. There were HobbitLab Architects where her cousin was working and they needed someone like him.
HobbitLab is a firm where everybody drives and clad well not his rugs. To cut the madness short and talk with sobriety, he was to report to their new offices on James Gichuru road the following day. Carlo finished by telling him to go fetch a smart suit from her place and she MPESAd (mobile money transfer) him the bus fare. Architects don't wear ties, Kwach was to pause the rule.
That morning and like the Kikuyu say, ‘God coming in person, not sending someone' Carlo handed him the GT keys.
Along Ngong road he drove windows down, nodding to the classical music, feeling like to light a fug but his fresh breath was an additional advantage so he threw it back into his pocket. He intercepted a Jaguar at Lenana and the owner threw some unorthodox words towards him. He also did not have any of his fingers amputated; he used the tallest. At ‘The Junction' there was no traffic and so his transition to the steep King'ara road was in a way that Vin Diesel could not have held a candle to. Now into the ever trustful James Gichuru road and he wished HobbitLab was far ahead at Muthangari police station, those guys apprehend him even when he had not gotten rowdy, just tipsy. It could have felt good to bully them with rally howling.
Here he was in HobbitLab's intimidating reception. No matter how much he assumed some demeanour, he still had that awkward uneasy, guilty look and could attitudinise nothing for confidence effect. There was an aura of odoriferous flowers in the space. Behind the reception was a 72 inches TV screen and at a corner on his right was a functioning fountain down a stack stone feature wall. Guys were checking in, so freely and casually wearing that it made him embarrassed of his glad rugs. There was also a butch woman in a grey Italian suit who entered, she noticed him but not any near acknowledging it and she went in the office shouting orders and lastly said, "Mr Buick and the client will be here in five minutes" Kwach wondered whether that guy with a car model name was the boss. He was and in those five minutes in and area with the client and in tow was the most beautiful lady in the solar system. Mr Buick said to the Maa beauty behind the reception desk' "Christine, this is Mr Sunil, the developer of The Blue Towers" they greeted and the bosses got lost in the hubbub of whatever was going on behind the walls. Blue Towers? It had a phallus Architecture. Was designed by HobbitLab?
The twinkle in the solar system made a beeline towards him. "Are you Kwach?" she asked, and for a moment he could not remember his name, could have confused it with his purpose. "I am Carlo's cousin my name is Julia. Come. "
He followed then bumped to a stop behind her as she exchanged a quick gossip with the Maa girl with some giggles, two extremely beautiful ladies and happy and expensively clad and with an unexplainable air and to imagine they should be his workmates, it dumbfounded him. Form plus aura equals function and lifestyle.
They zipped into the offices and fortunately for him, they were cubicles, not open for everyone to talk to him. She said, "I saw you drove the new GT. How do you guys know each other?" He did not see that one coming, and she came to his rescue with a "Never mind." He could only get amused.
They entered the HR office. She introduced him to Mrs King'ori the butch lady and Julia left him to get oriented.
Three months under probation with a salary of Ksh 85,000 the job had to be his. He signed some papers with such enthusiasm and a self-promise to work expeditiously that he could tell it was now possible to stop alcohol.
They took a sortie into the cubicles.
He started wetting his palms such that when Monica, the lady who served them beverages asked him what he would take he rubbed them first then said tea. "Black? Green?" He said green. Tea leaves are green. "Sugar?" He declined at first but when a lady nearby shifted her face from the screen to scrutinise his, holding her shin in her left hand, elbow on the table, wanting to know whether he was from Afghanistan, he stuttered "one spoon, please. Eeh milk separately." All the ladies laughed. One stood and said, "C'mon Monica let me show you." She went and as one other asked him some silly questions she came with a cup of cappuccino and placed it into his butterfingers. "I am Faith, accountant," she said. "That crazy one is Koi an Interior designer, Joyce there silly one also a designer. They should move to the studio." She stretched her hand to him. "Any time Kwach and welcome to the job."
Phew! He walked out in gawkiness.
They took him to his station. The guys in the studio were not sure what to do with him and no one offered him anything. In a minute they were back to their discussion like it was business as usual. You could have thought they are not professionals in their T-shirts and jeans and canvas shoes and one with dishevelled locks like those of Lidudumalingani, another clean-cut at the lower back of his head and a flower pattern drawn above both ears until you saw what they did with CAD. Do you know how to use 3Ds Max? No. Autodesk Revit? Yes. ArchiCAD? A little. Photoshop? A little. Good. They saw his cappuccino and remembered they too needed it and immediately called Monica who was already at the door getting each a cup and a toast.
Monica complained of the previous day's cups on the tables, some half full and toasts half bitten and said that if one does not need something he should say, and that some people don't know that money had been spent on the products and also it is quite a task to clean up.
"No one is someone's maid here, do you hear Andrew?"
"Yes Monica, and please bring me a glass of water. I need to take Eno. Last night I ate meat without knowing, those ready-made sustenances from Carrefour." Andrew said walking with a 1980s frayed vellum blueprint in hand to the scanner.
"I told you," Monica said. "Why don't you let me bring you greens from Kawangware?" Monica was pointing him with her index finger, accusingly and proprietorially. "There is terere, kanyũria, mũhika, kahũrũra, mabakĩ and hatha from lĩmuru. (amaranthus, Cucumis, black nightshade, pumpkin leaves, Urtica massaica) "I can also bring you a rabbit or pork from Uthĩrũ and it is only 50 bob? You use no fat, just place it on a pan and eat it" Monica was a resourceful woman and herbs from prohibited hawkers with sharp eyes for the city council askalis and grains from Nyamakĩma were what she knew. Were it not for the modern-day oils in gallons of 20 litres that are normally spread outside the shop to melt yet they are oils and fat products that are scooped with a big spoon and weighed to grams, they lived healthier on tapioca, arrow roots, yams and sweet potatoes of the 80s not like the middle class who earn forty to a hundred and own a fridge equipped with a half-empty can of an energy drink, spoilt onions, last weeks boiled beans that he couldn't finish because he has a laptop with the latest movies and cans of beer and slept on the couch because he has a car which meant convenience. Gym and jogging can wait. The freezer has red meat which though it’s a week-long it stays like it is new and it is not because of the freezer but sodium benzoate. Quasi modern tech guys.
An offender gulped his previous day's cappuccino immediately, and another said he had a stomach upset and he needed Eno as well. You may have rumoured that they fear Monica but no, it was guilt and recognition of the impairment of consumerism.
He waited for the IT guy. The designers did not talk to him for a long time, but he liked their carefree attitude and intelligence. They were talking about Picasso, whether he is supposed to get lionised that copiously. After an hour of facts finding and YouTube documentaries that to him were alien, Pablo Picasso, they agreed he was lesser of Georges Braque. YouTube said of how he treated his wife like an odalisque and made paintings of her in the positions she let him the night he spent with her. He neglected her and had mistresses in her view. They, the mistresses too were treated as commodities and Picasso was Mephistophelean on them too and gave them babies he did not care for. His surviving progenies are callous of him.
They also talked of the hype being associated with Superhighways and disconnected them with modern. Addis, Alexandria, and even Pretoria had better roads and were there before this millennium.
They talked about Afro-feminism vis-à-vis Chimamanda. About atheism. About Syria's political settlement, which is not likely, and other things like: their country has got a name that is not a description like Englishland or a direction like South Africa. It is unique like Colombia, a name that has got no meaning. It does not have a language name like Germany or Italy it is itself.
In between, there were the annoying calls from project managers and clients. You heard, "Agh! This is that parsimonious woman of Muthaiga villa," then a compatriot, "tell her you are working for the magnanimous client of Zanzibar hotel" the other, "I know it is the QS who has failed her; make an intentional mistake and send her the Blue Towers BQ. Man, the comparison."
That would be his life now and it was thrilling.
The IT guy came. It was a surprise because IT guys take weeks to arrive. The supermen who only take your keyboard and spend half the time on SportPesa and Dr King'ori Live and have the mettle of requesting for your attention on those. Then they leave your machine calculating percentages and with a warning that you should wait for it to finish. They then ask whether you make tea in the office, they are always hungry and carry with them a pancake or a kdf and a yellow translucent plastic hipflask with coloured water inside.
It guys also enjoy taking motorbikes from stage to stage because clients also are spivvy people and they imagine the guy is always located somewhere where there is a motorbike doing nothing else but to wait for his call while an emergency occurs: PowerPoint is not working. The IT guys and their purported magic fingers! Kwach doesn't like them and if HobbitLAB knew, he never checks them, he googles for solutions, which is why he liked Monica at first encounter.
During lunch, he sat next to Julia. She too was an architect and also a director and it demoralised him; he fears over ambitious ladies. But it relaxed him when she invited him to see around the compound. A manicured lawn, a koi pond, a pool table, a servant quarter where HR preferred to live, a hot shower if you jogged to the office in the morning and which was a thing they encouraged. He agreed to be jogging with her every morning since she lived at Santack Estate, which was near Dagoretti Corner and jogged leaving her car at home.
In the afternoon, the Boss gathered everyone to the boardroom. It was his welcome meeting, and they threw confetti and they gave him a bag with his welcome present. He traced the bag, and it had things and one was a bottle, something he would dearly need he guessed. Julia hugged him and said they would ride together up to Santack gate as he took back the car to her cousin. They would visit Carlo together on the weekend and he swore to spurge that weekend, kwani? (So what!)
He parked at Santack estate, the Sauti sol song, ‘Bwana ni mwokozi wangu…ananipenda leo kuliko jana' (The lord is my saviour… he loves me more today than yesterday) was humming and when he was about to kiss her goodnight, he woke with a start.
He had a bottle in his hand and was lying in a pool of running water. Last evening, he had forgotten to close the tap and his bathing vessel blocked the floor trap after it got full.
He had gotten home from his schadenfreude friend Kĩnoti Mrevi with a half-full bottle of bitter illicit liquor. He had wanted to fill it with water from the bathroom.
There was no new job, no Julia, Carlo is his Landlord's daughter, an 18-year-old debutante and with his rent arrears, that he could have designs on her was suicidal. She drives a Peugeot, and she has never seen him, and Kwach doesn't know how to drive even.
He woke with paroxysms because of hunger and thirst; the last thing he had eaten was half of bread with a boiled egg and pepper the previous morning. There were no drum sticks, he had not a penny and to aggravate, the bathroom water had mixed with his fake brandy, gin, vodka, you couldn't tell what it was, and it is banned. He quaffed the contents without hesitating.
His empty stomach groaned, Welcome to reality dude.
****
He got a job about four kilometres away but could not make it. First was because he had no money and second because of his condition. He had gotten to a state where without alcohol he was not stable and even crossing the road was knotty because he couldn't find his bearing when in withdrawal symptoms and when drunk he slept.
His mother was sick in a way that when he went to see her in hospital, his brain reeled.
Spontaneously it was women's day the critical night.
Now he had a situation and an impossible atmosphere, the worst ever in his life. A situation which since childhood had plagued him so much and wished it would never happen when he was alive. His perception of life changed and his state of mind that followed was eerily volatile.
Oh! The lesson about the succinctness of life. He shall miss that one regal and devoted woman, his only God, she left something in his measures that shall last forever; she had an ethos that he warmly approved and to sum it all she wrapped his life with a love which she renewed in candour.
They buried his only God; they had a ceremony at her local church where they repeatedly preached against things he could not comprehend. He did not know why they emphasised it so much because nobody likes those things, even the ecclesiastics who are wont to achieve them; for example inferiority to the schemes of Eros, incest and things that topple the likes of Kwach like alcohol. Not even a guy outside who was eating all the time and asking for more, would want them, he neither liked to be dirty though he sure had a stench. So they were addressing Kwach; he was to blame.
When a friend who had attended got home, she called and suggested he start a program on stopping alcohol. His hands were shaking when he held a cup or a spoon she said. She said she was disappointed.
Another long-time friend called later that week, and she also used the same expression and he could not help acknowledging that the term ‘disappointment' is a quick last subject applied to the species that had/has failed. The sharp cool boy that was you, what has he morphed into? She told him to see her.
He told her he was incontrovertibly not going back to the city.
Introverts especially melancholic ones like him blame other people a lot or maybe his meticulousness is to blame or his astuteness if he would be allowed to blow his trumpet and if that, then he should also be allowed not to explain because mostly he claims things and paradoxes that require very unusual evidence.
He went to pick his things from the city; he was done. To his chagrin, they could fit in a bag after ten years in the city. Everything else had gone with the landlord, Shylock, and others. His wife also gave him a surprise. She prepared herself and gathered up the kid and they left. And he did not feel bereft; he couldn't anymore. It would take time but eventually she would fade out of his dreams. Alcohol is for the dying and he was one.
He could not sleep in that house alone. He went to his friends and fortunately that night they were not cooking using animal fat. They also had some alcohol. They sat and got so touched by Kwach's predicament; he had been someone who helped them when they had no means. They revered him and held him to a level that in their standard was to be talked about. Now he was the one who was asking for help from them.
At night they received a call instructing them on their duty at their new site the following day and in their drunkenness, they sang that ‘Nairobi is the place to be, upcountry is the burial place'. He wondered aloud whether he would die because upcountry is where he was headed to and his wife had left him. His friends were apologetic anyway.
After his forty winks in the bus on his way home he woke and for a minute he could not tell where he was. He thought it was his hearse.
He settled down in his room at his mother's home upcountry. He called the sweetheart of his youth; she said she had been waiting for that call for so long. They talked a lot, and she defined for him the term ‘paranoia'. She was so concerned and she wanted him to visit them and stay for a while. She was the fifth person to want a serious talk with him within a week.
Then incidentally that week his long-time friend posted something on FB, a meme that depicted a man lying in a hospital bed and being forced by his family to sign below something written ‘I shall never drink alcohol again' and his friend had commented saying that he could see the last nail being hammered into the coffin cover.
Worry overwhelmed him.
This young uncle of Kwach, Mato also had his own opinion.
They sat in their mother's lounge for that ad hoc meeting that happens after burial, at least to have a concerted conversation. They were waiting for their other older uncles.
They were Kwach, his two cousins, Maggie and Joan en plein beaute. Kwach particularly like Joan a lot. She is a good lady and much respected. Long easily manageable hair sometimes done in fluffy kinky Mambo curls and still looks great. A smile to boot, big bold eyes. A doting girl since her childhood. A child with such precociousness that she frowned on mischief and mistrust. She was a girl of the church, she still is. Then she was with her friend whom Kwach in his poor memory of names could not remember her's but he eyed from canthus and knew could never reach to talk to her informally, she looked good. Still, there was that countenance of the funeral so his mind should have been termed atrocious.
In their presence, this Mato had the impertinence to say that Kwach had troubled his mother. "You are also an atheist and you do not like girls alone" he said.
And there was that guarded hostility in Mato's squinted eyes.
Kwach was taken aback and discombobulated. For how long shall he be a misjoinder of parties?
Anger and outrage should have welled within him for such a crass assumption, just trust his EQ. But no matter how you glower at him he is known in that he never acquiesce to decisiveness that lacks imagination. But fundamentally Mato added to his things to ponder, better he knew that much. Why? He could for always maintain his autonomy.
Mato is that boy who goes kicking the can down the road. A guy of a life that has a dearth of reliability; he identifies nothing with suspicion, not the future, not the rivers, not a personal place to live or even care about the coming short rains or that there is a shortage of maize in Kenya. He would only love it if you wanted to take him to coast for whatever your reason. Then what a recalcitrant fellow he is, something he won't abnegate, you cannot tell what weakness he tries to hide there. He exercises it at the slightest opportunity, especially to authority. He sometimes even seeks for it when his admirers are around. He is a knowledgeable fellow that's why. In politics, football, only quantum mechanics beat him. His lingo is well-honed and unfortunately in stealing other people's thunder and in ad hominem fallacies also he is refined and he sometimes used Kwach's dyslexic condition as the butt for his jokes when they were young. For example there was a time when they were young he told his pals to ask Kwach what the question tag for "He is drunk" was and Kwach said the answer was "Is he?" because he thought like his uncle was wont to he was then talking about one of his pals and he knew it was not proper to accuse someone wrongly of being something not in favour of the popular public opinion.
But like Turner, it is true Kwach trained by ear and could not sight-read. Ike Turner I hear would learn the pieces by listening to a version on record at home and pretend to be reading the music during rehearsals. Kwach is no different, and it has given him the edge over the less observant; he has never been learnt fully. Despite a strong desire for intimacy, Mato is a compensatory narcissist. Mato is sincere in his bigotry. He hated a certain woman because she had a bulbous nose. He had snide remarks for the underprivileged and the physically challenged and the less educated and women and he calls children rats. But he is oleaginous to girls and other people who admire him and are on his side, and he is quite a thing in it and gives him a personal character force because, you know, the human's street epistemology is universally unproductive.
Kwach's mother trusted his acumen. He damn caused his mum's death now?
He opted to be invisible, to escape from the guilt, to repudiate what now he associated with normal people. He was a persona non grata in their reckoning. He chose everything afresh: family, friends, clothing, music…. He also had his private bureaucracy and also wanted to be a solo tribe because Kikuyu that year betrayed him big time in the elections. He no longer trusts popular public opinion because everybody laughs when negative sarcasm is applied.
He was overwrought by life upcountry and it worried him a lot of dying, the air, the sounds, it was all inauspicious and unmistakable that some people looked at him with a sibylline eye predicting the eminent woes to fell him.
At night he heard the sounds; they were not stray cats to him but real human babies crying. He clung. A bush baby jumped on the corrugated iron sheet roof and crept up like a man. He listened to the footsteps and avoided breathing until tears came out and as if it had sensed him it jumped down puh! and then there was silence. He swore it was a man. The crickets outside this time had a pattern, not the staccato they were used to. He tried to fix that by closing one ear with his palm then releasing but the pattern remained. The dog's wail was unusual in this period of his mum's death. They came running up to the door and mysteriously went away and he heard them in the neighbour's compound. He thought they were witches. He thought he heard someone shush them and he wondered who it was. When he was all ears wanting to hear some more and decipher where the voices were coming from, an avocado dropped from the tree and fell on the iron roof with a thud. His heart stopped.
The following fitful night the same happened. There was an addition, there was a patterned knock on the rear wall like with a knobkerrie or a stone. There was no wind and thus it must have been a ghost. He skipped breathing and could not find sleep. Then the chicken in their coop had a frightful cry and then one remained crying in its proximity to death. The following day he found two dead chickens in their house, one with a decapitated head.
Another night he dreamt that someone had told him to call his sister to see their mother in the living room. They found her there positioned in her usual pose, smiling at them then she disappeared.
They sucked another chicken its blood. Someone told him it was a mongoose. An avocado fell followed by two Metuya fruits on their neighbour's roof. They scared him. The dogs howled like wolves; cats cried like babies in anguish. His clairaudience also captured voices of people outside talking in deep inaudible voices. Especially a night that the rain fell so heavily and he heard two groups of two men each in a tête-à-tête but in an inaudible grooowwwlgroooolllrrrr. He could not tell what they were discussing, but he knew it was a bad plan. There was a heavy torrent of rainfall outside with a peal of thunder which sounded like some phantoms breaking the heavy hardwood door using a huge stone after having a tête-à-tête on how to go about it. A ghostly night, credence to Kwach's death, he thought.
He remembered how he enjoyed jogging through Ngong forest from Lenana High school to Saigon village in the night and quavered. He had that weird thing; jogging at night in the forest and could not gather the concept that that was a passion he shared with no one and would be found unconventional and perhaps satanic by the bigots that the religious regulars of Africa are. It went to further fun when it rained. Parting pools of clean stagnant water under those old Croton megalocarpus trees yet you are in the City made him forget things that one is not able to fully explore. His wife had one day warned that the forest guards shall clobber him. He said they did not roam at night and the only fearful things in that thick forest were the baboons with their sharp fangs.
Then he fantasised jogging, and the forest was full of creatures shrieking like seagulls which also gave an impression of flying reptiles of the Jurassic period. Ornithocheirus existed 110 million years ago yet it made his hair stand on end now.
Kwach jogged through the forest because there were no people there. He did this whenever he survived withdrawal symptoms and felt like to detox. He liked the sweat; he gave himself extreme marks, and he made them like a ritual. He felt healthy whenever he completed a 4km to and 4km from Ndũnyũ market through Saigon village. He for years has wanted to quit habits and whenever he has a chance to recuperate, he does so with gusto; eat greens, a lot of fruits, whole grains, bath daily, read Edger Alan Poe's poems, jog and do yoga. And it had been so for more than half a decade. This happened every time he had no money but enough food, paid rent and his wife came home with a nice movie series like Banshee or Shameless. When money came by it spoilt the routine and he drank and only pensively thought of Ngong forest.
His passion in jogging, and being irreligious, made him think he had discovered his ritual, a way to communicate with nature, like a cult he was creating because of the risk involved and the resulting sensation, something profound which was so stimulating to him. He ran not to keep fit but to feel the erotic composition. He was lean and his body needed more meat but he ran like he was training for Boston marathon. He said that jogging in Ngong forest around seven in the evening had a feeling better than sex, and he meant it. When back at around nine, ten he wanted to find people closing shop, perhaps take a stop at his favourite, a cybercafé that had a guy who asked the same question every day, "You jog? I wish I was able because you see, my tummy is getting to a pot belly."
But now he felt an all-consuming fear and dreamt a lot in that fear. He also feared that he shall never jog again; he was dying. To extricate that fear in his current state, free from intoxication he used the TV morning exercises shows which were so boring. They bore to a point of making him cry. He likes crying.
At the village only providence got him going, no one ever saw him sit down and savour something huge and sweet, but what he took was substantial at any rate and helped this way; they liked fried food, and he had no money and so he boiled his. They bought many processed commodities from the supermarket and he could only meet the expense of wild greens like ming'ei, terere (amaranthus), kahurura (Cucumis), managu (black nightshade), mabaki (pumpkin leaves), thabai (Urtica massaica) and local bananas and avocados. His mum had left maize, beans, potatoes all prime for harvesting and when he thought about it he got into fear again and now genuinely cried. Could she have done it for him? He took maize to a miller, added finger millet and sorghum and went back with whole-grain brown flour for ugali, nobody liked it and it was all left to his disposal. Then he tilled the farm and planted again, enough, keep your Jazzercise to yourself.
Second, he could not afford alcohol and his boon company who could have bought him intoxication was not there.
Third, he kept the state of his mind back to the norm when they took him back his son. He could stop smoking everything now because he couldn't do that in his presence. He also was a jovial boy. One day he found him with his friends at the road and told him, "you left the door open son and I found a stray cat eating your food" his son asked, "Did it leave some for me?" "Yes" and the boy ran to finish the rest.
Kwach had quit bhang years back, the day they smoked a joint with a cousin and in his stoned state, he had requested a lurid offbeat fantasy that exposed his most hidden skin. In primary school, there was someone he used to give small gifts, who wrote nice English compositions and was also a beautiful person. In high school, he wrote something to a friend; it was a response in which he had misconstrued the original post out of excitement and thought things were not a secret anymore. He had tempted his friend on reading his mawkishness, to sip a cold soda. Kwach had suppressed his stroppy feelings since then. He couldn’t tell why he had all of a sudden thought of etymologising himself. His cousin's disbelief and repulsion thereupon embarrassed him. Without ever being worthy or moralistic he had to bindingly tend to a gentlemanly hushed but tough and malicious "Say it!" and he had to do it with some show of principle and say that he had similar tastes to his cousin’s and blamed bhang on the situation he found himself striving to extricate from. Rejection. The damage was already done and his sexual inclination embedded in his cousin’s recall. He couldn’t and won’t ever be forgiven by his straight cousin. In resignation and also knowing his inborn aberration he told him, “You will never understand”
As if he was not replete with his now perfect BMI, they called him to a new job, a new firm being put together by a former employee of ‘BAZ Architects' and he had gained virtually all the BAZ Architects clients, in a new office, in a new mall; Jazz Mall second floor. They were five of them: the Kamba senior architect (one of the best young architects in Kenya; he had won several competitions while with BAZ Architects and many more awards since his salad years as an undergraduate) his two juniors: Kwach and a Kalenjin guy, a Luhya QS and a Luo civil engineer. An intercommunal thing.
It was crazy and this time it was not a dream because he recorded the call and he called the following day to confirm his appointment.
On a Monday he sat in the swivel chair again, he had missed it.
There was a copious job to be done because they were to continue with what the senior architect was working on with BAZ Architects. Their director had taken most of the client's from there and established his own office. They had promised him jobs and whilst he was up to the task because he in effect wanted to start on his own that same year; they were also steadfast.
Within a week he felt like they had been in Jazz Mall for a decade. Kwach had an obsession with Malls. Jazz mall is somehow misplaced and people shy away from such a setting and so refuse to occupy it and thus it is a perfect place for someone who likes solitude and fewer shuffles and less prattle like of CBD and Westland. Most architects like it when they hide and it is all the more enjoyable to him. You will find them in gated communities or the forests of Karen, never on Moi or Luthuli Avenue, if worse perhaps Westlands. 'Scenic Architects' are an exception, they are at Kipande road near Globe round-about and ‘Abhta Architects' are another, at Gikomba. You do not lack eccentrics.
They were in Jazz Mall, not architecturally any near his taste, but the columns were friendly to his ground-floor phobia. The notion of several floors above him and the frivolity of our structural engineers give him a mutant judgment.
On Friday their director, a guy who caresses his bottle like it was a calypso dancer, invited them on fifth floor Club Stings for ‘Office warming.' Kwach uttered profanities on the drink, he was ready to defer all his pleasure in his life until he attained his own rented house. Right now he had to stand the animal fat and skirmishes over whom is to perform cooking with his two bachelor friends in their cubicle.
But he had never tasted Johnnie Walker Green Label before and he could not kick against the goad. He had not tasted anything unadulterated for a decade. He said cheers without a tincture of guilt. One night wouldn't pull through to take him back into the drain. After all, they were with the boss.
They had merry, they toasted, they told bad jokes like when the Kalenjin asked him what tribe he was from and he said Kikuyu, he asked, "Why are you guys thieves" and in the laughter, he said, "Is Samoei Ruto a Kikuyu?" Haaaahahah…. they agreed everybody steals at one time and their boss pointed out that he stole clients.
Their boss gave them two thousand shillings each, and he went home head over heels in jauntiness.
The drift of things, regarding opportunities, good health, luck and dreams in comparison, were fraudulent. This was not the niche he had gotten used to; there was an invisible line he had intersected. Misfortune seemed more the conventional fate than having a new job and now getting handed some money without a course. Up till now, there was a lack of the outcome of a life wasted in hedonism. Kwach had a feeling that he was supposed to be begging, dirty, with an unhinged brain, perhaps at a loony bin. Grief, sadness and stress too have got an addiction, they lacked in him and he felt the ambiguity in the program because history was failing to shape him. There was an alteration of the procedure and he could not come to an understanding about his role in his life. The alteration was in his inference because rather than see his sovereignty away from fear and from the state of cringing every time a bold step forward was needed, he saw a split in what he expected and rightfully deserved as a result of self-damaged spirit, aspect and reputation.
The following day was a Saturday and since his bachelor friends were the least exciting and had incongruous interests, he could not have made the mood right in any other way than to go for a drink. Ksh. 300 was enough to send them home singing of their wealth and of flocks of sheep they owned. He spent the rest of the day in the hole in the wall, the nook, away from them, telling his remarkable stories to the ever keen audience, his fellow disciples of bootlegged methanol. He is pleasurable and quite off his introversion when tipsy and without stress.
Problem is, like old days, he forgot to eat.
The following day he could not lift his head. His friend brought him a Panadol, and it revivified him. He thought of going upcountry but first; he had to kutoa lock (additional dose of alcohol to offset a hangover).
A drop became two and preoccupied him the whole day. After too much of drops he went home at twilight asking, "did I not say I shall never be back to Nairobi?" stagger a little, stop and take a step back with his head further back then heave it forward. He had a wobbly vision of the road, he dilated his eyes and looked at the people in their evening endeavour following their noses to get liberated of their stimuli to mutura (roasted viscera stuffed with the meat mostly from the knacker's yard) samosas with meat from the knacker's yard also, roast maize, boiled eggs, fried chicken legs with their tarots others buying omena (silver cyprinid), beans, githeri mũrũgarũgio (maize and legumes boiled together), sukuma (collard greens), to take home to prepare supper. Girls regarded him with disdain, women with pity, kids with comedy, boys mocked him and high fived. Men called his bluff to dare give them his hand to greet them. He looked at them like he was holding an SOS placard.
After a weekend drinking spree, on Monday he totally could not get out of bed. He awoke in the afternoon and found twelve messages of missed calls from the office. He called back and his boss' wife was indignant; he was the one who had the key to the office. They were trying to get his location when his phone went off, battery low. He went to the nook; he could only be normal again if he drank a little. He drank all the money he had.
He got into another nonstop rapid eye movement.
The following day he was hammered, it was even worse than the previous day because of hunger, even breathing was punctuated with inflamed woe. And then he had not even a penny for, leave alone bus fare to go to work, but Panadol.
They came for the key and did not discuss him apart from saying they had already informed the police because he was new and they did not know his intention. They do not call bosses' wives ‘spooks' for nothing. He has had this moment before, in one of his many premonitory dreams and he had seen how dicey the whole business could end up and so he was not fretted. He doesn't mourn anymore. He only did a dirge on the death of an affirmatively waged dream.
A gentleman never steps into the same river twice because he is not the same man and it is never the same river. He did the opposite, same him.
Alex Page writes fantasy, sci-fi, and other things at Bookish Leftish Gibberish. His work has been featured in Beyond Worlds Magazine, Elephants Never, and The Drabble. He lives in the UK and also enjoys memes, doggos, and recklessly exchanging goods for magic beans. |
The Ninth Step
He was almost used to the looks. Fear, mostly. Curiosity. The ones who tried to meet his blazing eye-sockets and smile as though he was normal, but fumbled the change and audibly exhaled when he left.
When he had been Icoran, Reaper of the Shadowlands, Envoy of Twilight, he hadn’t cared how anyone saw him. In early sobriety, Icoran the new guy sitting in the meetings shaking like a martini, he’d hidden himself in baggy clothes with hoods, even tried wearing big sunglasses. Until his eyes had burnt holes through them, which Tanda had encouraged him to see as a sign.
Now, five months clean, Icoran sat reading the paper in the airport terminal, trying to ignore the fellow passengers either staring or conspicuously looking away. His feet itched where a layer of flesh was regrowing on the bones. The airport coffee was gritty, cheap, but his partially restored digestive system didn’t yet have a tongue to go with it anyway. It was enough for now to feel the warmth of a hot drink, the hit of caffeine. Sensations taken by the addiction, slowly coming back as nerves and viscera reasserted themselves, the skeletal lich regaining humanity cell by cell. One Day At A Time, as they said in the program.
First and business class passengers began filing out the gate. A few minutes later the economy passengers followed. The dragon was a young specimen with red and black scales, lapping at a trough with its wings folded out of the way as it waited for them to climb the stairs up into the fuselage strapped to its belly. Icoran showed his boarding pass to a stewardess and took his window seat, strapping the seatbelt tight around his partially formed waist. The scales above his head moved in time with the dragon’s breathing.
He dug the tips of his finger bones into the armrests as the beast took lumbering steps forwards then surged into the air with a beating of wings, each thrust rocking them up with a lurch. Once the dragon reached its cruising altitude, settling into more smooth flaps, he let go and looked outside. The roads below were reduced to ant trails, a train to a caterpillar, the clouds above close enough to make out some angelic structures. The air was colder up here, but the heat of the dragon’s fire in its belly warmed the fuselage from above in compensation.
“Not a fan of flying, young man?” the woman next to him asked, her wrinkles suggesting a long life (by conventional standards) of good cheer. Not bothered at all that his head was a skull with pits of fire for eyes.
“I prefer to keep my feet on the ground,” he said.
“Nothing to worry about. They’re very well trained.”
“I know. Just tell that to my stomach.”
She chuckled, patting him on the arm, then buried herself in the in-flight magazine. They were over an expanse of ocean, Icoran leaning over to pay for a tomato juice from the trolley, when she turned to him again. “So, what brings you to Miranelle? I have a niece over there.”
Icoran paused. Miranelle, formerly the Shadowlands, a place I scourged with dark magics before you were born. My name is Icoran, and I am a magicholic. I’m going there to try to address the Ninth Step of my Twelve Step program. The fire dimmed for a moment. “I have some errands to run,” he said, reaching out for the can and his change.
#
He could only remember the first MA meeting in sweeping impressions. Walking into the community centre, wearing a stained hoody several sizes too big, hiding his skeletal arms in the sleeves. The lime-green carpet, rows of people on chairs facing the podium. Milling around a giant urn of coffee.
Being offered a polystyrene cup, shaking his head and edging to the back of the room. It’d fall right through. Joining some of the newcomers in the back row, all jittering like a shoe in a washing machine. Someone trying to light her cigarette by flicking some device, instead of snapping her fingers like anyone on the street.
The speakers, coming up one by one, telling their tales of woe. Fading in and out of his focus as Icoran shook. The guy next to him spewing in a bucket. What he took in was trite shit. One Day At A Time. My Best Thinking Got Me Here. The regulars clapping, calling back jargon about how they totally Identified with the speaker, to Stay In, Be Active In The Group.
Leaving as soon as it ended, while the regulars stacked chairs, not seeing how any of this could scratch the surface – especially the Higher-Power-as-you-understand-it guff, which seemed vaguely cultish. But going to the next one anyway.
#
At Miranelle International Airport, Icoran retrieved his luggage from the conveyor belt and wheeled it to the car rental place, taking in the view of surrounding mountains, the warmth on his patches of skin. Olive trees lining the parking lot’s fence, rustling in the breeze.
When he sat in the booth to wait for his rental he took an old sheet of newspaper from his pocket and scanned it. The story was about a fallen angel saving a child from a derailing train near the sleepy village of Pike, Miranelle. The story included an image of the being’s androgynous face, looking displeased to have their photo taken. Just the same as all those years ago, neither old nor young, but perhaps tired. Amoxiel.
“Icoran?” the rental agent asked.
“Yes.” He signed the papers and pocketed the keys. “Could you tell me the best way to get to Pike?”
“You’ve got quite the drive ahead of you. Let’s see… follow the signs to Rymond, then go east along the coast. You’ll probably want to stay over in Rymond.”
“Thanks.”
Icoran sat in the car, adjusted the seat, and set off. The voices on the radio spoke a language similar enough to that of the Shadowlands as he remembered it that he could just about follow, driving along the motorway with mopeds erratically veering across lanes, cars honking at each other, his elbow out of the open window.
The traffic here was chaotic, forcing him to pay too much attention to slip into the past. Even so, he marvelled at how different the environment was. The necromancers had kept this land a place of mist, the sun pale and tinged with red, gnarled thorny trees with branches whipping out in phantom winds to grasp the unwary. If it weren’t for the mountains, he wouldn’t think it could be the same place.
As the sun set and the ghostlights floating over the road ignited, shining pale lavender, a bit of the old aesthetic returned. But the stars above were clear, the night dark without being oppressive as it had been, the looming black of a mine with struts threatening collapse. Icoran turned up the radio, checking signs for the distance to Rymond. The travel was taking its toll, and night was the most difficult time for him. The time when thoughts of surging magic, raising him above his troubles and crackling through his spirit, were most intrusive.
How easy it would be, even now, to conjure up wings of shadow and be at Pike within the hour. But then, that would defeat the purpose in coming here. He tightened his grip on the wheel, letting the thought go.
He reached the town, cruising around its outskirts and quickly finding a motel. He paid for the night, handing the receptionist paper towel to dab up the iced coffee spilled jolting at the sight of him, then went to his room. He kneeled by the bed, thanking nobody in particular for a day’s sobriety, then lay back to drift off, asking it to not send dreams.
#
The MA Groups in North Dartwood had a penchant for primary-schoolish names. His was called The Real Magic Is Sobriety. By his fourth meeting he could have held a cup steady, though his torso was still only ribs and spine with a few strands of cartilage starting to sprout.
He cleared his throat, standing at the podium, focused on the ground. Nobody coughed passive-aggressively or said anything to nudge him forwards. He could hear the clock ticking in the background.
“Um. I’m Icoran. And I, uh, I guess I’m a magicholic.”
“Hi Icoran,’ the group said. Leaning forwards, subtly encouraging. He looked up, glancing over the newcomers at the back, the regulars, the keen and long-term sober up front, the woman with the cigarette lighting device puffing at the edge of the front row.
Once he’d started, it unspooled like a thrown toilet roll. ‘I grew up in a village just outside the then Shadowlands, during the War of Hemlock,’ he said, not even hearing the muttering, wait, he’s, what, 200 years old?, ‘and I suppose that’s where it started. The soldiers came through and, well. I won’t go into what they did. I wanted to be strong to track them down and avenge my village. So I went into the Shadowlands, committed myself to Twilight.
“As I practised necromancy my body slowly started to… well, as you see. By the time I’d raised the village’s ghosts to tear apart the soldiers, I’d lost about half my flesh. But I’d completed the mission. But I couldn’t let magic go.”
Nods.
“I couldn’t stop using it. I gave up taste and touch and normal human relations for the spark of magic, the crackle inside. Nothing mattered but that, being alive with that even as it turned me into a being of death, the freedom and the power even as it… as it enslaved me to doing spell after spell, ritual after ritual, anything to hold onto the buzz, and as time went by things that made me buzz ended up merely making me feel stable, so I had to go further and further.”
The smoking woman was watching more intently, a wan smile. Tanda, an ex-shaman with crazy sober time, gnarled and dark as a ragged tree.
“My existence got shorn down to a series of acts of dark magic, running away from my own fear and anger and weakness up the ranks of Twilight. The more powerful I became, the more I was just covering up the reality. A few hours without magic and I’d start falling back to earth, shaking. I degraded to a full skeleton and as I carried on I started to become brittle. I’d black out, come to and find that one of my bones was starting to crack and I’d destroyed a village. My mentors told me I’d have to complete the process, give up my humanity and become a lich, or I’d die.
“The other option didn’t occur to me. The idea that I could stop, stop getting high on the magic of death and restore who I’d been. I’d been what I was for longer than I’d been a man. So I did it, I took out my very soul and put it in a vessel, my phylactery, so I could stand on the edge between life and death and carry on.
“And finally, the Paladins came. They scourged the Shadowlands with angelic light, they bound me, they were going to kill me for what I’d done but they couldn’t find the phylactery. So they put me in a cell. I was in there for long enough that in that time the dragons were tamed, the world became industrial, the great monsters were vanquished, the monarchies fell to parliaments, and my crimes were forgotten. In that place I could just about tap magic enough to cycle between withdrawal and the barest shadow of a high, always out of reach.
“On the day I got out I knew I was free, I could do it all again. But now I had enough humanity to care about my actions. So on one side was withdrawal and on the other was becoming a monster again, I used magic to stave off withdrawal but now I was caught on two sides. I couldn’t get high and I couldn’t get sober, I couldn’t live and I couldn’t die. I was just as trapped as in the cell. I began to see that the cage was inside me, and I couldn’t get out because I was also my jailer. I remembered some of what I’d done and I remembered withdrawal and I couldn’t go back to either, and that, I think that was when I, like you say here, Hit Bottom.”
He coughed. “I went to where my phylactery was hidden, meaning to smash it. To die. But I didn’t. Instead I came here.” He shrugged. “And, uh, that’s the story, I guess.”
The group clapped, some of the grizzled elders came up and insisted on giving him their numbers, people said they totally Identified with what he’d said.
Tanda lit a cigarette on his eye socket, took a drag, then said, “Good one. Stay In, won’t you?”
#
Icoran woke up, kneeled beside the motel bed, and asked nobody in particular to help him be sober for the day. Eating was a bit of a chore without having a tongue yet, like filling a car, but since he had a digestive system now he got something cheap before continuing the journey to Pike.
He took the road east along the coast, passing through dusty red hills dotted with olive groves and dark green palms, the sea indigo and glittering to his right. Goats scampered through the hills. Despite the surroundings his stomach tightened as he got nearer to Pike. If Amoxiel was there, he’d be facing probably the only surviving victim of his magic. He remembered the landscape around here, as it had been in those days. The sea ink black, infested with kraken.
As he took the road down to Pike, directly beside the beach, a lighthouse loomed into view, shining white stone matching the buildings of the village. He pulled over at the bar and went in.
“What’ll it be?” the barman asked, in the modern language of Miranelle, with a regional accent and dialect to boot.
Icoran ordered a drink, over-enunciating to make up for being so out of date. The bar was cooled by a simple sigil drawn on the wooden floor. He avoided looking at it, or the fisherman in the corner, who was using a location charm to point out on a map which of his traps had caught something.
“Do you know anything about the fallen angel?” Icoran tried asking.
The barman’s brow furrowed. “Isteli?”
Icoran took out the sheet of newspaper, pointing to the picture. “This one.”
“Ah. Yes. You want the lighthouse.”
“Lighthouse?” Miming a tower, to confirm the word.
“Yes, yes. In there. Open.”
“Thank you.” Icoran nursed his drink. Amoxiel was a short walk away. But he couldn’t quite get up the courage to walk out the door and go over there. What would they say to him, the person who’d done so much damage, appearing out of nowhere so many years later? He asked for strength and didn’t find it.
He ordered another drink.
#
When he was newly able to drink again he’d had an excessive amount of coffee with Tanda, in the shop opposite the community centre before a meeting.
“You aren’t the first lich I’ve seen Come In,’ she said, leaning forward to light up on his eye socket.
“I’m assuming they relapsed,” he said.
“Yep, shot back Out There. In the throes of the addiction, until they went too far and the Paladins swooped in. First time you wandered in, sat in the Denial Aisle, I didn’t have high hopes, I’m afraid.”
“Denial Aisle?”
“The back row. The maybe I don’t belong here, maybe this isn’t for me zone.”
“I see.”
“You wanna be at the front, do your damnedest to Identify with what they’re saying, not compare their story to yours and say you weren’t that bad--”
“I don’t think I could ever claim that.”
She shrugged, tapping the ashtray.
“You’ve really got to commit to not counting the days, I guess. What with the immortality.”
“I’m not immortal.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Well, I was never into necromancy.”
“If my body was smashed it’d restore, sure. But my soul’ll burn through the phylactery in about 70 years. If I don’t use magic at some point to replace it--”
“Right. And I’m guessing that’s a serious ritual. The kind of magic to chuck you right back Out There, strip what flesh you’ve got back off your bones and have Paladins on you lickety-split.”
“Better 70 years sober than eternity high.”
“Good,” she said, bug-eyed with caffeine. “Still, don’t count the days.”
“One Day At A Time,” he muttered. “Damn mottos.”
“The mottos mean more than you can imagine. You’ll see soon enough. You’ll start to get dreams, memories coming back. Stuff the magic pushed away. Take in the mottos, do the Steps. Remember--”
“My Best Thinking Got Me Here.”
“That’s right! Speaking of the steps, you got any thoughts on the ninth? Eight: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Nine: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”
“Hard to make amends when they’ve all died by now. Can’t even conjure their ghosts to apologise, even if I hired someone else. It’s been too long.”
“Sure there’s nobody who might be around? Obviously no regular humans, but anybody else?”
He’d searched his memory, then shook his head. “No.”
#
Icoran sat in the passenger seat and got out his palantir, pressing the glyphs for Tanda’s number. The crystal tablet throbbed with green light, then resolved into an image when she answered the call. Tanda in bed, squinting in the dark, holding her palantir above her.
“Fuck me sideways with a rusty rake, boy,” she said. “Do you know what time it is? Daylight on your end?”
“Forgot about time zones, sorry.”
“I am your sponsor, available as required. Don’t worry.” She put her palantir down and turned the light on, then sat on the bed holding it in front of her. “So what’s the story, where are you?”
“I’m doing the Ninth Step.”
“Really? Good.”
“I’m in a little village in Miranelle, about to go see a fallen angel.”
“I take it you’re there on account of the ‘fallen’ part being your fault somehow.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t mention this before.”
“I only remembered recently. I’d buried it under everything else. Then it was too shameful to bring up.”
“No it wasn’t. I’ve heard stories in MA to make your hair curl.”
“If only I had hair.”
Hacking laughter.
“Any advice?”
She sighed. “They’re bound to be pissed. You’ve just got to face the music. They’ve no obligation to forgive you. This is about you, committing yourself to sanity. Just go there, be honest and open. Face the consequences. Sorry I can’t be more twee about it.”
“No, that’s just what I needed to hear. Thanks.”
“No worries. Night,” she said, closing the call.
He got out, took his case from the car, and began walking to the lighthouse. She’d been right about memories, and once he started needing sleep again she’d turned out right about dreams too. Dreams twisted, foul, and true, HD memories and technicolour nightmares. Dreams of Amoxiel chasing him across the Shadowlands. And of what he’d done to get away, buying time before a full Paladin squad finally caught him.
The door at the bottom of the lighthouse was open. Icoran ascended the tight spiral staircase. If he’d had a heart again yet, it would’ve pounded with each step. Gulls calling outside, between the echo of his steps.
Amoxiel stood at the top, facing the ocean. Their shadow, cast back on the top of the lighthouse, had the tattered remains of wings. They were barefoot, in a flowing robe with a colour never normally seen, softly glowing. Icoran presumed they stood here at night, shining to warn the ships.
Icoran coughed. Amoxiel turned around.
“Ah,” the fallen angel said. “You’re still alive.”
“Yes.”
“It’s been a long time, by your reckoning. Why now?”
“I came to try to make amends.”
“You can’t make amends. You used dark magic to rip out my grace, leaving me powerless and stranded on the earth. You used it up, merely to try to cover your trail from my comrades. You can’t give it back, or make it regenerate any faster than it is. For the first decades I had to eat, sleep, drink. Imagine such a thing! I created lightning!” Amoxiel’s androgynous face briefly writhed with disgust. “Even now I can’t fly, can’t stand on the clouds. My fellows visit me, bring me the comforts of home,” they said, “But how long to return? How much longer, to be able to serve as a Paladin again? So, how did you find me?”
“The derailed train.”
“Ah. You realise that had I more grace, I could have stopped the accident. One child saved. All the other victims are yours.”
He stood still, holding the case.
“You want forgiveness? You will not get it. I am not a prop for your self-esteem.”
“No. I want to prove that I’m not what I was.” Icoran opened the case, moving clothes aside to get at a box. He handed it to Amoxiel. They opened it, and took the gem from inside. An egg-sized sapphire with fire burning in its centre.
“Your phylactery. Why are you giving me this?”
Icoran said nothing.
“Even as I am, I could smash this.”
“I expect you could.”
“I don’t understand.”
“In time it will break anyway. I will die eventually, unless I replace it. Which I will not do. I’m in MA. I came here to try to make amends, the Ninth Step. So long as you have my phylactery, I won’t be able to replace it. The biggest risk of me going back to old habits is gone.”
“You’re willing to die for this,” Amoxiel said, staring into the sapphire.
“Eventually, yes. Until then I’ll live properly. Sober.”
They put it back in the box and closed the clasp. “I’ll have my next visitor put this in a vault in the clouds for safekeeping. I can’t say this makes being a fallen angel any better. But I appreciate what you’re trying to do.”
Icoran nodded.
Amoxiel turned back to face the sea. Icoran picked up his case and went back to the rented car.
#
Icoran released his grip on the armrests, as the dragon flying back towards Dartwood reached cruising altitude.
He peered up at the clouds for angelic structures, knowing one of the clouds held his phylactery in a place well away from temptation. An itch in his cheek was bothering him; the passenger beside him already snoring. When a steward came with the trolley he got a tomato juice, avoiding touching the sleeping man, and drank it while browsing the in-flight magazine.
The sun began to set while they were over the ocean, and biological needs drove Icoran to the toilets. Tanda encouraged him to view all physical experiences as a gift of sobriety.
He saw when he looked in the mirror that his cheek itched because a small strand of muscle was coming in. As he looked, it twitched. He realised that muscle strand, once One Day At A Time his whole face came back, would be one of the ones giving him a smile.
He returned to his seat and, before going to sleep for the rest of the flight, thanked nobody in particular for the day’s sobriety.
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