Deprivation

by Roy Freirich

  She opens her eyes.

  Sunlight makes a shadow of a leaning girl across the floor.

  A faint sound like creaking begins and stops. Begins again.

  A thin smell like ammonia floats in the air.

  12

  Under the desk in his tiny back office, Sam has reached and pressed the sides of the phone jack to unplug it and slip it back in, but the cordless in his hand is still as dead as his cell.

  He has no earthly reason to doubt it, but like everyone, he can’t resist pulling the traitorous, disconnected little rectangle from his pocket to blink dumbly down at it yet again.

  He steps into the hall to check; the Boy’s still in his plastic chair, gripping his little game in both hands, hunched as if to make himself small, perhaps enough to crawl into that square of light and another, kinder world.

  In this one, people have crossed the threshold, finally, of reality into delusion, of sanity into myriad variations of degenerative, dissociative states. Denied the outlet of dreams, the contents of the unconscious always find another way to surface. Driven by some old psychodrama of fear or vengeance, or fantasy of rescue, some deluded insomniac has cut them all off.

  What’s left, meanwhile, but to backtrack, retrace the origins of the unconscious idea, the involuntary symptomatic behavior spreading? But to what end, since each Sleepless now causes another, sure as the first awakened a second? The Boy or not, no matter. Fleisher is not getting anywhere near him.

  Slow down, breathe, focus.

  A clutter of noise bursts from the waiting area, curses and half-shouts as the newly injured crowd in. One moans, gripping one arm with the other, scorched sleeve flapping in shreds. Another smiles as if at some epiphany or mildly-amusing bon mot, an eyebrow and half of his hair gone. A woman picks at singed threads with a blistered hand, almost idly, in a fugue state.

  Paula and Sam are already moving, gathering gauze and salve for burns and blankets to treat shock, as a man with a bleeding ear addresses the room, almost smugly, first to know, “The pharmacy. On fire. Some kind of argument, the cop’s gun went off, something blew up. Boom.”

  Sam slows. “Anyone shot? Where’s the cop? The chief?”

  The man shrugs. Another chimes in, “Shot? Dunno. Cop took off, to maybe get help, who knows. Or just took off.” He giggles.

  When the next half dozen or so injuries arrive from the pharmacy explosion—more burn cases, a broken ankle, a wrist sprain, a concussion—Sam gives them each a quick look and judges them stable enough. But how many were left behind, or are wandering in shock, unaccounted for? He grabs an EMT kit from the storeroom to head over, evaluate and triage on site, but next in the door is Pete, an auxiliary fire guy with his own kit and scene assessment: a heart attack and skull fracture are down for good, and the rest of the injured have found their way here, either ambulatory or fireman-carried the two and half blocks.

  Those already gathered make way grudgingly for the new arrivals, unhappy to think they may lose their place in line.

  “Hey, I’ve been waiting—”

  “You and everybody, right—”

  Paula silences these with a stern look as she and Sam hand out a few last blankets and the usual Dixie cups of water, and set about cleaning, salving, and dressing the worst burns. Two turn out to be third degree and should go to the mainland for follow-up by a dermatologist.

  Sam notices wary glances from a few, even as he treats them. A few looks accuse outright, and a woman in a huge sweatshirt and smeared makeup finally confirms his suspicions: “Fake pills? That’s what you were giving us? Why?”

  Eyes turn to Sam, the disbelieving look of the betrayed.

  Sam nearly backs up a step, but finds his footing, true as any placebo: “What are you talking about? Why would you believe that?”

  “A doctor showed up at the pharmacy, said so.”

  “And you believed he was a doctor? And that he somehow identified the pills just by looking?”

  The woman looks around for support, the effort already failing as others murmur and shrug, barely able to track the substance. “Yeah, no. But—some do.”

  A weathered dockhand turns to the others, “What the fuck are you lookin’ at, Doris? You, Chuck? You’re back for more of what they gave you because it worked, whatever it was. Wouldn’t be here otherwise. So shut the fuck up, all of you. Doc, you got ointment for this one? Looks like a bad burn.”

  −−−

  Bleary, lost in the back hall, Sam turns now to find more gauze or topical antibiotic, or both. He’s already unsure, but now he slows; at the end of the hall the storeroom doorway is partly ajar, the light there flickery, somehow, odd.

  He moves closer, entranced. An image flashes: a smaller, darker door, a narrower hall. A fragment of a memory of a place to shut back away. A cloying rotten odor is unrecognizable, but then it all disappears into what’s there anyway—the thin flat smell of floor cleaner and disinfectant, and the bright hallway to his clinic supply room.

  −−−

  Suitcase and duffel beside her, Kathy sits on a cracked leather stool at the Pier View Bar, sipping a Hurricane, rubbing her thumb along the bar’s smooth worn edge of polished mahogany, the grain a rich reddish gold, curving around a darker, solid knot she knows by heart. This has been her seat so many summers, fielding the smirky innuendo of Manhattan junior bond traders, or the lame come-ons of Jersey tourists and the desperately single overflow from the Hamptons. Sam had been her storybook rescuer from all that—right up until he turned out not to be.

  Bartender Seth has known Kathy her entire adult life, and knows the vague, broad facts of her serial monogamy: the surfer housepainter, the oceanography grad student, the charter fleet owner, and Doctor Sam Carlson. He eyes the duffel and suitcase and shoots her a sympathetic glance. “Hard day, Kath?”

  She tries to laugh. “You have no idea.”

  “Sleep on it, my dad always said. As if.”

  They share a faint, knowing smirk, and Seth muses, “You know what’s funny? We were full up at first, no one could get enough booze, a bunch even broke in and stole half my inventory, but now? It barely works. You have to down enough to kill yourself, they’re saying.”

  Weariness feels different now, like a kind of pressure on the sides of her head, like regret, like tears behind her eyes, aching to spill. She laughs instead, but on a day when she threw back the big one, walked away from a helpless child, and all the phones went dead, like every last connection to anyone, what’s funny? She’s wanted to call Sam just to be sure the Boy and he are okay, and so she continues to check her little cell’s bright screen every minute or so, as if the next time she’ll see full signal bars and hear Sam’s drowsy, wry voice on the other end, as always.

  “You talk to anyone mainland? Before it all went out?”

  Seth shrugs. “My sister, last night. Sounded fine. Baby crying, husband pissed off, the usual.”

  Suddenly, a bunch of gawking college kids crowds the entrance to the patio, shouting to anybody, “—the clinic, demanding meds! We’re going in!”

  At a far table, a few tourists fall silent, and then trade looks and leap up to follow. One giggles on the way out, another pumps a fist. “About fucking time!”

  There have been low points over the years: repulsiveness in long supply, alcohol-fueled desperation to forget or to wallow; friends and couples, strangers and families shouting incoherently, stumbling with faces streaked by tears of bewilderment at real or imagined betrayals, fueled by alcohol and the addictive reality-show ethos of indulgence, all freak-outs and meltdowns. After a while, the view from behind the Coffee Spot counter or a Pier View barstool seemed the same, the faces and voices of the aggrieved interchangeable.

  But this is a new, jubilant ugliness: young, determined, and energetic, just getting started. Kathy watches them rush out and turns back to Seth, who’s seen it all twice, to
gauge his reaction.

  But he has stepped slowly from around the bar, staring out the side wall’s bank of windows. “What the fuck—?”

  Through the glass she sees the white of the fog that’s hovered offshore all day—and an ugly, menacing stain spreading across it, inky smoke billowing up from just across town.

  She imagines enough for the moment—buildings burning, a mob of these uncontrollable, irrational idiots surrounding the clinic and threatening Sam, the Boy, Paula and whoever else—and she bends to her suitcase, unzipping it, digging through, one hand finally emerging with what Sam had left behind, and that neither had been willing to try—Ambesta, the two perfect oblong pills in their pastel sample pack.

  13

  The faces of the drowned seem to rise, pale and bloated, behind Chief’s shut lids every time he blinks, so he won’t. He keeps eyes front as he floors the Jeep through a rut, rear tires spitting sand, but now the names come back too, that could be anybody’s, but were theirs: Andy, Doug. Dan, expert whiner, no one lazier. Steve, all of eighteen, baby-fat and red-faced, from out by San Diego, with his Walkman headphones. Pete from Georgia, with his tyro’s porn stash.

  Chief gives his head a shake against the ringing shouts of these men, but the voices come back, of his guilt and his redemption in the single lucid moment of decision, one that sacrificed some and saved most, they said, and all because he knew. In the Cat 3 off Guam, when the shell rolled off the rack and blew, hull breached and ship taking water fast, he knew: the locked bulkhead door would drown a few but keep his ship afloat. Navy let him go, sure, just as glad as he was to part ways—a quick discharge, honorable, uncontested, full benefits. Which said it all, as much as anyone could, without saying too much.

  And he knows now, just as well, the same hard, incontrovertible truth as he hard-lefts the Jeep, fishtailing a little, roaring down an access lane behind low-end share houses halfway to the marina, where he may just have a chance to seal a breach again.

  These are the shabbier, weekender two and three bedroom saltboxes, and the unshaven middle-ager in boxer shorts seems at first like the usual renter, swaying as he goes, gut sagging and smeared with white sunblock, but as the chief steers the Jeep nearly past he glimpses dull dark metal: the barrel of a shotgun almost hidden behind a pink ham hock thigh.

  A prickly jolt climbs his scalp as Chief stomps the brakes, craning his neck to watch this man step to a doorway with his shotgun and the doorway open to reveal a skinny, sideburned kid in a rapper tracksuit. Some kind of thrash metal hits Chief’s ears, a screech of guitar feedback lost in a sudden, thick blast of louder sound as the kid’s torso bursts inward and apart into redness and he flies backward.

  Chief is trapped in air that will not part for him, that slows him like water as he spins from the Jeep pulling his spare service pistol from his holster, shouting, “Police! Hold it!”

  The shotgunner doesn’t turn, but he hesitates, as if actually debating it.

  Chief brings the pistol up two handed, but beyond the shotgunner, through the open doorway, there’s a flurry of dim movement, another shriek of feedback or a girl’s scream. Shotgunner steps in fast, sideways and out of view and fires again, muzzle flash lighting the room.

  Chief rushes to the right of the door, crouching close, and there’s another blast from inside, a sharp, snapped-off metal screech. The music is gone, and now Chief hears the weeping, worse than the scream. And the whispering, softly confiding, “Why wouldn’t you just turn it down? Didn’t I ask nice? Wouldn’t that have been easy? Now look, look what you made me do.”

  Chief pulls in a breath and leans to crouch into the doorway low and fast, minimum silhouette, but he’s already too late. Why does each shot sound so different? This one has a ragged, scattery sound, and when Chief has dropped and aimed through the doorway to fire, way wide, the man flips his shotgun, barrel to his own forehead.

  Chief sees the man smile, or thinks he does: the queasy, mad grin that maybe is just a grimace after all, before the top of his face disappears in a red and white blur and another sharp stinging explosion shudders the air. The man remains standing for another impossible moment, his mouth a gash leaking a last vowel as he half-turns, falling, landing with a leg breaking backward beneath him. Clots of flung, dull pulp and bloody hair litter the room, a hot coppery reek rising thickly.

  But for the slow ooze of pooling blood on the floor and a spark from a shattered bulb still swinging, nothing moves now, Chief as still as the rest as he stands there. How long before time begins again? How many minutes go by?

  Bark of a dog somewhere, far away gush of the surf. This limp twisted broken thing that was a girl. This man-child of a boy so torn.

  Chief feels a knot in his chest go loose. He pulls in a gulp of air with a gasp.

  He blinks at the dead shotgunner, steps inside, and without turning feels behind him for the door and shoves it softly closed.

  −−−

  On his way to the marina, Chief skids the Jeep to a stop outside Al’s Bait ’n Tackle and climbs out with the dead murderer’s shotgun—a pricey little Benelli recoilless, it turns out—and one that can blast the front door padlock hasp to a splintered twig with a single 12-gauge shell.

  Plenty more inside, in boxes on shelves stocked for the shark-boaters, maybe even enough.

  #

  Some are still down from the blast at Howard’s Odds ’n Ends, though others have helped out and carried a few injured away. The rest just kind of dust themselves off and even laugh as they watch the place go up. A gyp joint anyway, let’s face it, selling bogus sleeping meds, and that fat ass Howard another gatekeeper prick in a world of more of the same.

  But this gray-haired guy, Dale Kelso thinks, is speaking my language. He looks like some snob elite in his preppie Docker shorts and polo, the slicked-back salt and pepper hair and sleek-looking metal eyeglasses, but he’s talking some sense about jokers like Carlson, who breeze in from Boston or wherever and snag the hot home girl and good job while they slum and smirk at the locals. The surgical mask is weird, but turns out the guy’s a doctor, so he must know.

  “Listen to me!” Dr. L.L. Bean shouts. “None of you are getting better! How many nights can you go on? Are you going to believe nothing is wrong with you and let that con man at the clinic treat you with fake pills? It’s fraud, nothing less! We need to call him out, and we need to quarantine and question that boy! And find and dispense whatever real meds that so-called doctor is hoarding! You all deserve them as much as anyone!”

  The skin on Dale’s neck and arms gets a chill and tingle like electricity as he lifts a fist to pump, and he hoots. See, this is key, right there. Fucking-A, yes!

  A cheer goes up around him—frat guys who look all right, some share house partiers, the guy from the clinic, the aide, though not anymore is a safe guess.

  −−−

  Mouson Hasmini knows these young people in America can be frightening, this is true, and so many these last days have been without all politeness or consideration, vulgar and wild hooligans who disrespect their elders and their women most of all in the pictures and the tight clothing and less, God forbid.

  If there is a prayer to say between the morning and evening prayer times, this is the time to say it; to kneel and be washed in the sea and cleansed of those thoughts that once were only dreams and so disappeared on waking, in sweetest light of day.

  Uncle from Nariya, nephew from Sanii, these and brother Nasir would call for punishment rightly, these who first feared for the soul of their beloved kin who left to come here and start this beach taxi Jeep business which praise God has flourished. And cousin in Sirt.

  Oh, the struggle in a land of infidels to never become one but still everywhere on computers and televisions, on every screen the poison pictures you see them, as if not enough in this place in the bikini bathing suits, lying like whores writhing on their towels on the hot sand to be driven u
p and down and back and forth into numbness for money to send to Afifa.

  So it is time now to climb from this seat out the door and kneel in this same sand and let the white shallows rush up and push and pull, clothes heavy and tugging with it, water salty like tears from our eyes, which close as they must when any man truly begs forgiveness.

  But—how has his “Pine Glade Taxi Now!” beach taxi Jeep suddenly started behind his back? How have these men-children in their shirts that show their thickly muscled arms and with their hair that points up like wet bristles, and their cruel laughter and pumped fists, climbed inside his own beach taxicab?

  Why shout, what does it mean? Nothing. Why lift hands to plead—not to curse, for that is for God only to visit upon us—because what does pleading mean? Nothing. Running behind, feet slowed by the loose sand, until there is not enough air in the world to stop the chest pains like a knife to bend you double? It means only the same nothing.

  14

  With intent, determined expressions, breathlessly, people are running. Along the beach they come, across the dunes stumbling, thumbing and shouting into disconnected cell phones, appearing and disappearing in the pall of fog already dimming into shadowless gray as the light fades with the day.

  At the edge of a lane, in a last summer home, an old couple holds their drinks, staring out their bay window at a group rushing by.

  Yards away, a little girl sits in the sand, crying, her mother whispering curses to no one, rubbing at her shut eyes as if the world will be otherwise when she opens them.