Y Is for Fidelity

by Logan Ryan Smith

  It was beginning to get really late (must have been near eleven) when Katharine said she wanted to hear more. “You live somewhere near here, don’t you? Why don’t we go to your place? I’d love to see it,” she said, and my heart leapt. She remembered that I live in Lakeview near the lake and it was on her mind at that very moment! I wondered what other thoughts she might have about me.

  It didn’t take long before I knew the answer to that bit of pondering.

  Right now she’s in my bedroom, on my bed, bathed in moonlight, soaking the sheets with her sweat and other bodily secretions, and getting pounded very well, from the sound of it, by my roommate, Ben.

  When I brought her home, Ben was on the couch, reading The Bridge by Iain Banks, that book he pulled off the shelf upon his first time in the place. A poetry book by Robert Burns and Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh were set beside him, and a few other books were laid out on the coffee table. He sipped a glass of chardonnay and wore designer jeans, a v-neck t-shirt, and a pair of smart-looking reading glasses. I hardly recognized the man. Where was the tracksuit? The whiskey? That dead look in his eyes?

  Katharine, a few sheets to the wind, seemed excited at the unexpected company. She asked why I hadn’t told her I had a roommate. Before I could answer, Ben was pulling some vampiric glamour stuff, making her gush and blush at his lude jokes interspersed with talk of books and the underground music scene in Chicago. He also knew plenty about that gosh-darned Derrick Rose. I tried to interject my opinion on books, but when it came to music neither of them wanted to hear about my love of Phil Collins and Hall and Oates. Before I knew it, the three of us had drained three bottles of wine and Ben was asking if it was OK to use my room as he still didn’t have a bed, just an air mattress. He said he would consider it a huge favor and would owe me one. He told me that since he was released from the state’s care with incurable amnesia he had had a tough time meeting women and knew that he and my Katharine had really hit it off. Pulling me into the kitchen, out of Katharine’s view, he said, “I can tell you like her, Ian. But, you’re my friend and I think you understand what this means to me.”

  I told him to go ahead, though my guts twisted and I imagined pummeling his face with a brick until it was a pulpy red mass, his jawbone shattering, sending thousands of bone slivers down his throat, effectively choking him to death before he could die of a massive brain hemorrhage.

  I said I’d sleep on the couch.

  By the time he was walking Katharine down the short hall and welcoming her to “his” room it was like Katharine forgot all about me. It was like she made me up, or vice versa.

  That’s fine. My concession and the offer of my room makes Ben happy, so, that’s fine. Ben’s the first friend I’ve had in a long, long time. And like Will Smith says, bros before hoes.

  I play Halo for a while, but the sounds from down the hall distract me and I’m unable to advance in the game. I keep restarting from the previous save.

  From down the hall I hear Katharine plead to have something all over her face. She keeps saying she wants it on her face. Grunts and heavy breaths and more grunts followed by the cessation of contracting and expanding bed springs come next.

  I curl up on the couch and pull a blanket over my head.

  CHAPTER 16.

  WOOSH! BANG!

  POP-POP! POP-POP!

  CRACKLE

  HISS-FIZZZ

  Blue sparks, then red and gold sparks, expand against the night sky and drop toward the lake, disappearing before they can be dowsed.

  A fat, damp breeze tussles my hair, which I’m worried has begun to thin.

  It’s Fourth of July and we’re watching the fireworks from the roof of the giant jagged-V of our apartment building. We’re not allowed up here but Ben said he remembered a few things he’d learned in his previous life, and one of them was picking locks. I joked that he must have been a criminal mastermind before he lost his memory and he narrowed his black eyes at me, effectively zipping my lips shut.

  So, here we are, sipping on a fifth of Johnny Walker (my treat) and celebrating the birth of this country full of liars, cheats, frauds, and back-stabbers. It started out as a lie, and it’ll end as a lie. At least, that’s what Ben’s telling me now. I’ve never been too political, myself, but with this scotch coursing through my veins and lights sparkling in the sky, I can see where he’s coming from.

  We’re sitting in cheap lawn chairs. He grabs the bottle away from me and I watch the fireworks flicker in the gleam of his dark eyes and fizzle into blackness.

  “You sure your distrust of this country doesn’t have something to do with your French Canadian side?” I ask, as a joke.

  “I don’t even know if I have a French-Canadian side, Ian! Fuck’s sake!”

  He jerks out of his chair and walks to the edge of the roof and I fear he’s about to jump, but, he hacks up something and spits then takes a ten-second pull on the scotch bottle. Fireworks continue to blossom in the dark, and the lake bleeds a violet pool below them before they extinguish.

  Ben lights a cigarette, keeps his back to me. A sticky film of sweat coats my arms and the back of my neck.

  Behind us, down on Pine Grove, neighbors are setting off Roman Candles, Bottle Rockets, Bumbling Bees, Cuckoo Fountains, and Piccolo Peats. Children squeal and their drunken parents warn them to be careful. I imagine one toe-headed bastard holding an M-80 a tad too long and suddenly—BANG—his forearm stump is doing an impression of the Lava Fountain firework erupting down the street.

  It’s illegal for them to be setting off fireworks in the city limits (only city-sanctioned functions are allowed, like the one happening south at Navy Pier that we can see quite easily from here). Earlier, I nearly phoned the police on my no-good neighbors but Ben slapped the phone out of my hand and told me you never rat out your neighbors. Shocked, I looked at my iPhone on the wood floor and worried he’d broken it. Ben said if you have a problem with your neighbor, you tell your neighbor what your problem is. And if they continue to be a problem after that, you settle it yourself. You don’t call the police. No, he said, you put your goddamned boot in their face.

  I said, “But, you don’t wear boots, Ben. You wear Adidas.”

  He looked at me as though he was about to throw me through the street-facing window. I could see my head cracking on the asphalt, which would let all the tiny black snakes out in an ooze of liquid squiggles. They’d scurry under the cover of night into the storm drains and crawl into someone else’s unsuspecting orifices late at night, infecting them with a nervous stomach and regular nightmares.

  But he didn’t put me through the window. He chuckled and dragged me up here for the fireworks show.

  “Are you remembering something?” I ask him as he lights up a Camel and exhales into the magnesium night. “Like maybe where you’re really from?”

  Spherical roof ventilators spin and screech in between the booms of millions of sparks tasseling out into the summer night sky.

  “No.”

  “But something’s troubling you. Clearly.”

  “I… don’t know.” He retakes his lawn chair on the tarpapered roof and hands me the bottle.

  “How come you haven’t gotten help? How can you stand not knowing who you really are?”

  WHOOOSH CRACK HISSSS

  “I tried, man. I tried. At first.”

  “Why’d you give up?”

  “Because, man. Because nothing was working. And those motherfuckers…”

  “What?”

  “They didn’t care.”

  “They probably cared a little bit. That’s why they have the jobs they have, right?”

  “They have the jobs they have because they pay well. Tough cases… you know what they say when they have tough cases like mine? You know, someone who can’t remember a goddamned thing about his own life and his own fingerprints can’t even offer any clues? You know what they say when they finally concede there really isn’t a single person alive that cares who you are or
what has happened to you—you know, because no one comes looking? You know what they say?”

  “No.” I shake my head.

  BANG POP FIZZZZ

  “They say it’s your fault.”

  “Your fault?”

  “Yeah.” He drags on the cigarette, blows blue-white smoke, and flicks the burning butt over the lip of the roof where it’ll land with a fizzle in a puddle of stagnant alleyway piss.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They, in their mighty goddamned schoolbooked wisdom said, ‘Benoit, if you still can’t remember nothing, then you’re choosing to remember nothing.’”

  “Maybe there’s something to that.” I drink down the scotch burn and motion for Ben to give me a cigarette. I don’t smoke, and I haven’t accepted a cigarette from him yet, but he reaches automatically for the pack in his tracksuit pocket and pulls one out for me. I’ve watched how he’s held and lit and sucked on his cigarettes for a few months now, so I try to emulate those motions.

  I don’t want to look uncool.

  “Maybe there is,” Ben concedes, leaning over with his Bic and lighting my cigarette.

  I inhale and it tastes foul. Like choking down burning dog hair, but I keep sucking on that and the scotch bottle, and eventually I believe I can see the appeal.

  “Maybe there is,” he repeats. “I mean, I… sometimes there’s this feeling. But then it goes away before I know what it was. And, I don’t know if I want to know. Not even now.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you thought about, I don’t know, hypnotherapy?” I stifle a cough, my esophagus enflamed.

  “I tried that.”

  “What happened?”

  “I woke up from it strangling the hypnotist. Orderlies barely got me off of him in time. I could of killed that fucking hack.”

  “Geez.”

  “Yeah. Say, what about your shrink?”

  “Madelyn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about her?”

  “Maybe I could pay her a visit.”

  “Yeah… maybe,” I tell him, apprehensive. I’m not sure if I’m apprehensive because I fear harm coming to Madelyn, or I simply don’t want to share her.

  “What’s she look like, anyway?”

  “Um… Madelyn?”

  “Yeah, shit for brains. Who else?”

  “She’s, um… Madelyn. I don’t know.”

  “You mean you never yanked yourself to sleep thinking about this chick?”

  “No!”

  “She’s a real hound dog, then, huh? Or is she just some old blue-hair with tits sagging to her knees?”

  “Madelyn is, I’ll have you know… a very… intelligent person.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah. I’m sure she has a great personality, too. All ugly chicks do.”

  “Hey, Ben, seriously, why do you have to talk that way?”

  “Listen, man, if she’s not worth a good yank or two in the privacy of my own home, I’m not sure I want to see her, anyway.”

  “I… I don’t think she’d be much help for you, anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  SSSNAP BOOM HISSSS

  “She’s just… she’s not even a real psychiatrist. She doesn’t have a doctorate or anything.”

  “What color’s her hair?”

  “Huh?”

  “What color’s her hair, fucknuts?”

  “Blonde. Kind of.”

  “Figures.”

  “What happened with Katharine?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t seen her around the apartment since… that one night.”

  “You mean when I fucked her brains out in your bed? Yeah, actually, I’ve been meaning to apologize… I meant to wash your sheets for ya. I just got busy.”

  “Don’t, um, worry about that.”

  “OK.”

  “But…”

  “But what?” Ben asks, bored.

  “But why hasn’t Katharine been around the apartment since then?”

  He takes out another cigarette, lights it, and yanks the whiskey bottle away from me.

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her? You work with her, don’t you?”

  “Work has been… busy. I haven’t seen her around the last few weeks.”

  “Well…”

  “What? You didn’t like her?”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Not recently. I just said.”

  “No, I mean, have you seen her. Of course I liked her. That chick is into some kinky shit. And, let me tell you, she had a pussy sweet and juicy as strawberries. I bet I could get her into some shit where I work…” he trails off, realizing he’s said too much.

  “Where do you work, again?”

  “I told you… the gym.”

  “The gym?”

  “Yeah. The gym. What? Anyway, I was just thinking if I got that bitch to work out she’d be at least an eight out of ten.”

  “Don’t talk about her that way.”

  Ben leans over and slugs me in the shoulder. “Shut up, you pussy. I’m just fucking with you anyway. She didn’t like me. That’s all there is to it.”

  “But she slept with you.”

  “Yeah. Women do stupid shit all the time.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Would it make you feel better if I told you I have called her a handful of times and left messages, asking her out on proper dates—you know, dinner, movies, etc.—and that I just never heard back from her?”

  “It…”

  “Why not just let yourself think I did?”

  I remember the morning after he used my bed to bed the woman I’ve been dreaming about for at least a couple years. I woke up on the couch to her fiddling with the locks on the door, turning them the wrong way and yanking on the doorknob to no avail. Even in my sleep haze I recognized the panic fit she was about to have and found it endearing.

  “Turn the bottom one left,” I said from the couch, propping myself up on my elbow, “and top one right.”

  She did, heard the clicks, and pulled the door open an inch, and paused. Her shoulders relaxed and she sighed. She rested her forehead against the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Yeah. I, um… I just… wow… I drank way too much last night. I’m… embarrassed.”

  “It’s OK, Katharine,” I told her. I sat up in the couch, balled up my blanket, and held it on my lap. “You don’t…”

  She walked out and shut the door behind her without another word. I could hear Ben snoring in my bed. I thought of going after Katharine. Instead, I made pancakes, eggs, and coffee, and woke Ben up when it was ready. We had breakfast on the couch and watched All Creatures Great and Small, which he said was starting to grow on him.

  “You called her?” I ask Ben now. The pops and crackles and fizzles of fireworks multiply. The show’s coming to its crescendo.

  “No! No, goddammit, I didn’t call her.”

  “Why not? Why didn’t you call her? She’s a very nice girl. You should have called her.”

  “Listen, mom… listen…. She spent all night with you and what did she do?”

  “She… slept with you.”

  “Right. She spent all night with you and you brought her back to our place and what does she do? She fucks me, man. You had your chance. You spent all night with her and you must have been putting off all the wrong vibes because that bitch was just waiting—”

  “Don’t call her a… bitch.”

  “Fine. You spent all night with that woman and then what does she do? She comes home and fucks your roommate. And I mean seriously fucks your roommate, man. You think I want to date a broad like that? I mean, do you still want to date her?”

  “I… don’t…. I mean, I… don’t…”

  “No, you don’t. Trust me.”

  “Trust you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should just be
more respectful,” I tell him, blowing smoke that stings my eyes. I put my cigarette out beneath the heel of my shoe. Ben throws me a look of resignation.

  “Listen, I’m sorry. I don’t know where this shit comes from.” Ben leans forward, rubs his eyes, exhausted. “I mean, most of the time I hear myself say some pretty foul shit and I catch myself thinking: That’s not me. Like, I’m playing a part. Or I’m not even real. I’m just a character, you know, in a TV show or something.”

  “I know what that’s like!”

  “But, still, most of the time, I don’t feel like this… disrespectful part of me, as you point out—I just don’t know if it’s really me, man. I don’t know. I mean, maybe it is. Maybe it is. And maybe I have been calling Katharine and she’s been ignoring me because I’m such a disrespectful piece of shit,” he finishes, his faint accent thickening, his eyes bluing in the evening glow.

  “Maybe she has been.”

  Everything’s exploding around us, from the street behind us to the alleyway below to the sky hanging lanterns of disintegrating light over the lake.

  Red. Gold. Green. Purple. Pink. Blue.

  Black.

  Red. Gold. Green. Purple. Pink. Blue.

  Black.

  BANG BANG WHOOSH POP POP POP FIZZZ FIZZZ BANG WHOOSH FIZZZ POP CRACKLE POP BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG HISSS

  “Yeah. Maybe she has been. Anyway, forget about her. Now, tell me more about Madelyn.”

  CHAPTER 17.

  Four days later, Ben comes back from his first session with Madelyn (my treat) and says he’s never going back to her.

  “What happened? Is Madelyn OK?” I ask, picturing her hogtied and hanging from a chandelier while Ben treats her like a piñata. I’m smoking a Camel and re-reading The Bridge (the book Ben was reading when I brought Katharine home) and I’m wearing two-hundred-dollar jeans and a kind of shiny v-neck t-shirt that cost eighty-bucks. I’ve got Calvin Kline ankle-high leather boots on. I feel silly, but even though it’s a Wednesday Ben said we’d be hitting the clubs in Gold Coast tonight where all the money-grubbing types and desperate cougars prowl. He said I need to up my game, fashion-wise, if I ever expect to “plunge my lick-a-stick into the fun dip.” He also told me to get on Rogaine STAT before it becomes a real problem.