No Further Messages

by Brett Savory

  Swanny looked at him in the rearview mirror for a while, studying his face. “You broke your promise, detective.”

  Fintner said nothing, just started the car and drove.

  Swanny nodded, looked out the window.

  She thought about the photograph that had fallen off the wall earlier that day when she’d stormed into her bedroom. In it, Marcus Gronk had his arm around his wife, looking neither happy nor sad—a honeymoon picture taken years ago, before the divorce. Before Gronk’s life had fallen apart, piece by piece.

  When she got out, she would buy a new frame.

  APOLOGY

  They say Death comes swiftly, but today he’s taking his sweet fucking time.

  I’ve been lying here in a pool of my own blood for nearly three hours, with no end in sight. Shotgun to the gut. Hurts more than words can convey, yet here I sit beside a garbage dumpster in a dimly lit alleyway, watching rain dribble out of a nearby drainpipe.

  Not that it matters, but my name is Ajay Lackré, and I did nothing to deserve this.

  As much fun as bleeding to death is, I’d sure rather be elsewhere, doing something other than this. Many years ago, I came to terms with the fact that my life would essentially amount to nothing meaningful, and was pretty relaxed with the concept, all told. I mean, so what if I never invent anything that revolutionizes the way people do business. Big deal if I never write a New York Times best seller. Who gives a rat’s ass if I never get married and raise a Harvard graduate.

  A blip on the radar. Time swallows us all up anyway.

  I know, a defeatist attitude. Shameful. But then, I’m the one who’s gutshot, aren’t I.

  The sky cracks and gives birth to thunder. Boom. How anti-climactic. How fucking cliché. Dying in a dark alleyway. In the rain. Beside a dumpster. With the skies unleashing hell.

  Pah. Life is made up of such dreary moments.

  Fucker cornered me, ambushed me. Accused me of sleeping with his wife, of ruining his life. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I’m not accountable to him. Pretty bad attitude, I know, but then you aren’t me, and have no idea how I ended up this way. Bitter. Callous. Uncaring. Maybe I had a hellish childhood. Maybe Daddy was a belligerent alcoholic and Mommy a crack-addicted gutterslut. Destined to a life of ridicule and trauma.

  Who is woe? Woe is me.

  Again: pah. Like I buy any of that shit.

  The first trickles of blood connect with the puddle I’m sitting in. I’m completely drenched, shivering. But my life isn’t slipping away like it should be. How much longer? Jesus H. You always see those war movies where some poor bugger gets shot in the stomach and he lies there cold, just wanting to close his eyes and drift off, but the guy’s buddy keeps slapping his face, trying to keep him awake, ’cause he knows that if his friend goes to sleep, it’ll be forever.

  Well, there’s no one here slapping my face. No one here to give me reason to live, tell me that I gotta hold on for little Timmy, who’ll grow up fatherless, and for my lovely wife, who can’t raise the boy on her own, so I gotta hang on, I just gotta keep awake, ’cause help’s on the way, a medic will be here soon, and everything’ll be okay, everything’ll be sweet and rosy again, if I can just hold on, for Christ’s sake.

  Not here. Nothing here but falling water from a disinterested sky, a few scattered cardboard boxes, discarded soup cans, and, of course, some squeaking rats. Gotta have the rats. What’s a death scene in an alleyway without rats?

  So what did I have going for me? I had a job that paid well. The job itself was shit. Multinational corporation fucking the weak, sucking up to the strong. The way things get done. No pissing around with lofty morals, pointless ideals, or anything else that might make me stop to think what I’m actually doing. Just money, hand over fist. Big house, fast car, the respect of my peers.

  Glorious.

  But in the end, fucking street whores just doesn’t cut it. Loneliness is every rich man’s downfall. You want what’s not yours, and you’re so used to just taking it, there’s not even a moment of indecision. And there shouldn’t be.

  I have no regrets.

  Fuck the bitch I crammed up the ass, and fuck the guy I stole her from.

  There is no punishment meted out after death. No heaven, no hell. Not even a limbo or purgatory. All that crap just makes it easier to make it through the day, gives people a reason to get up in the morning and face their daily allotment of bullshit.

  Nothing but silence awaits. Silence and maybe the fading memories of what you did with your life.

  Same old story, I know. But I’m dying, and it’s the only story I’ve got.

  I take a deep breath, and finally things seem darker, the streetlights dimmer, the sounds more like they’re underwater. I’ve lost feeling in one of my arms, and the other feels like a big stick of ice. I lift it, bang it against the wall at my back, try to shatter it. But it just thuds wetly, falls beside me in a puddle.

  The rain falls harder, and the sky rips open again with close thunder. Lightning crisps everything in my vision. Snapshots of drabness, mediocrity. Failed potential.

  And even though I’m guarding against it, this, of course, is my weakest moment, so it intrudes, barrels through my crumbling wall of bitterness. Siphons off whatever small piece of humanity might be cowering somewhere deep inside me.

  This thought, this fucking non-truth:

  I’m sorry.

  For everything.

  My eyes close and I drift away, seething. Feeling betrayed by my own mind.

  The sky opens up once again, but this time there’s only silence . . .

  Or at least I hope that’s what Ajay thought when I shot him and left him to die in that alleyway.

  FRESHETS

  Okay, so I’m fucking this guy in the ass, over a chair, you know? Just fucking him hard and fast, like we’re—

  No, wait a sec. That’s not right.

  So I’m banging the piss out of this chick, right? Just railing on her, pulling on her tits from behind and really giving it to her, like—

  Hang on. That’s not right, either.

  Alright, so I’m licking this cunt, don’t care whose, just some cunt, and there’re two of them, these hot lesbos, just really on fire. One’s taking my whole cock while I’m lapping her up; the other’s got three fingers in my asshole, knuckle-deep, trying to wear me like a glove, and she’s pumping in hard, twisting her nipples between her fingers, trying to rip the poor fucking things off, and—

  Nah, that ain’t happening, either.

  Dirty dishes, though, that’s for sure. Right over there in the sink. Stacks of them. Filthy. Shit growing on them. Moldy green crap, you know? Nightmare mountain, looming over me, over everything in the kitchen. My tiny kitchen, with its doorless, empty cupboards, wide open, staring at the dishes, hungry, wishing I’d wash them so the cupboards could have some sort of purpose.

  Yeah, sure, but fuck them. I have more pressing shit to deal with.

  Like, hey, where’d these people come from? These fornicating freshets, splayed out all over my living room. My living room where nothing lives. Just a dusty television, which I leave tuned to the nature channel ’cause I like to learn things about other animals.

  No pizza boxes, though. You want pizza boxes, go read someone else’s choppy-sentenced, no-plot story. This one only has dirty dishes, empty cupboards, a dusty television, wildly bucking males and females in decidedly provocative positions, and me, the poor bastard in the middle of it all, wishing I knew what was happening and why it was happening to me.

  For the most part, I just sit on my ratty old cigaretteburn-holed couch and watch. No bag of chips in my lap, though, same as the pizza boxes, so don’t even think it. The shit the freshets get up to is not particularly relaxing, and my perpetual erection makes it hard to concentrate on lifting food to my mouth, anyway.

  Erection. There, I said it.

  But I’m not a man. Can’t be a man. I have fantasies about m
en. Like when I’m fucking that guy over the chair in the corner of the living room, really ripping into him, you know, and—

  But it’s not true. Fucking cocksucking homos.

  And there’s Dad talking, there’s my brother talking, there’s everyone in my life talking.

  Some days I pinch the lips of my pussy, slide a finger or two inside and grin, grin like mad, lift my other hand to my tits, heft their weight. Oh, yeah, I’m all about breasts, me. Even the dishes turn away when I’m doing this, shrink into the grimy crusts of their dried-on foodstuffs. Then I feel some other woman’s sex toy in me—a long, fat dildo—and it’s sliding in so slowly, just feeling around in there, spelunking, digging for treasure, scoping out the joint, and she’s gonna invite some friends over, too, ’cause—

  But that’s not true, either. Sick-ass lesbos. Just need a good fat sausage up the ass to turn them back to the straight and narrow.

  Hi again, Dad.

  Hey, best friend.

  Howdy, world.

  I just sort of float around every day with different genitalia attached to me—man, woman, both, neither, in between, upside down, inside out, on top, below, from behind, whichever way and in whatever body presents itself. I’m a sexual chameleon, baby. Pussy, dick, all the same to me. I have no shame. But then, that’s not even me talking. That’s the person I want to be. I have yet to discover what I actually am. What do you prefer? Does it matter? Is there even a difference?

  Let’s ask the dishes. Let’s ask the cupboards. Wideeyed, accusing motherfuckers, all of them. Staring, staring, watching, leaning, looming, dirty and dirtyminded. Not everything is about sex, I tell them. Not everything.

  There’s a picture on top of the dusty television of someone I don’t recognize. The freshets never look at it, never even turn their heads in its direction. Two guys. Smiling. Happy. As if.

  One of the guys seems like he’s gone. Seems like he hasn’t been in this apartment for a long, long time. So long, I can barely remember him. I think the other guy might be me. I look like a discarded beer can—sort of crumpled at the edges, pinched in at the waist and leaning to one side—and many years younger.

  I can barely remember him, either.

  So there’s dead-or-missing guy and empty, young maybe-me. We’re quite the couple. I have no idea who could have taken this picture, because no one else exists except me (or the thing that pretends to be me), dead-ormissing guy, and the ever-present host of fabulous freshets.

  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has this to say on the subject:

  fresh•et n.

  A sudden overflow of a stream resulting from a heavy rain or a thaw.

  A stream of fresh water that empties into a body of salt water.

  The picture on top of the dusty television has thawed, and I’m M./Mme. Saltwater. Pleased to meet you.

  On an end table next to one of my frayed and crappy chairs is a pile of bills. The bills do not even come close to competing with the dishes, but they’re trying. Yes, sir. Trying hard to loom and be menacing, but achieving only a sort of semi-threatening almost-leer that doesn’t do much to stir any sort of fear inside me. I’m far more terrified of the dishes. Dirty dishes were born to terrorize, created to instill a sense of doubt in humans, designed to challenge our control of the situation—whatever situation we’re deluded enough to feel that we’re in control of.

  Far off in one corner of the living room, leaning against a grimy gray wall, are the cupboard’s doors. Looking forlorn. So sad. Ripped from their homes, then crammed close to one another against their wills.

  Surely there’s symbolism in there somewhere, but I can’t be bothered to figure it out. I know I must have ripped the cupboard doors from their hinges for some symbolic reason. I’m such a pretentious twat when it comes to emoting. Fuck it, who am I kidding? I am the doors and the doors represent my disconnection from reality for whatever pathetic, self-centered reasons I feel like telling myself this week.

  Because cupboards without doors do not exist. Carpenters do not build such things. They are aberrant. Against nature.

  On the television, a fat man talks about zebras, motions to them in the background behind him. Black and white stripes. Something about mating. On television, everything is about sex. And yeah, fat man, black and white stripes. Sure. Like anything is so simple.

  I reach inside my disgusting couch, pull out the VCR remote, point it in the general direction of the television, having to lean around a few sets of freshets twisting nipples, reaming assholes, moaning about how good it feels, how it’s never been like this before—having to lean around these monsters to shoot my infrared at the screen.

  I press Record.

  After a few minutes, I rewind the tape and watch zebras run across my screen in Fast Forward. They’re gray. Not black and white at all.

  Gray. Just like the rest of life, fat man.

  Everything is about perspective.

  The way I see it, sitting on this beer-stained shitbrown couch, a distinct chunk of myself dead or missing, I’d say I’m about ready to kick these freshets out on their asses, out my door, out of my life. This isn’t a porn flick, you fucks. Get out.

  Now I’m standing, I’m livid, motioning with my arms, pointing at the door, get out, get out, you’ve been here too long. No one invited you, anyway. Nobody wants you.

  But they ignore me, the lot of them. White and black and brown limbs, flailing, groping. I sit back down on my couch, defeated. Deflated.

  There’s a video camera on the floor, in front of the television. I get up again, push naked bodies out of my way, collecting sheens of sweat as I go, like stamps or foreign coins.

  Picking up the camera, I check to see if there’s a tape inside. Of course there is. This isn’t the sort of story where the protagonist isn’t prepared, boring everyone by running around hunting for a fucking videotape. That story, and the one with the pizza boxes and chip bags, is somewhere else, in some other book, on some other guy’s bookshelf.

  I press Record on this machine, just like I did on the VCR. This extension of my memory, this chunk of my psyche that will never grow old or become damaged by time. Only accident or violence can smear this recollection of my existence.

  Film’s rolling. Tape’s moving. I’m the director. Let’s see if these freshets can stand the glare of the spotlight. Let’s see if they can prove their substantiality by not being ghosts, by not being just the boring, filthy furniture of my diseased living room and kitchen. Let’s see what these little bastards are really made of.

  Rolling, rolling, several minutes of film, from several different angles all around these two-rooms-in-one. I make sure the microphone is working, too, so I’ll be able to hear, upon playback, all the promises of love, fidelity, affection, loyalty, monogamy, and other things people should be smart enough not to believe in.

  I want to film the dishes and the cupboards and the bills, but I’m afraid of what they’ll look like on camera. They’re scary enough without adding ten pounds to their weight.

  I press Stop, fight my way through the fleshy freshies, eject the zebra tape, and pop this new one in.

  Press Play.

  Somehow the fat man has weaselled his way onto this tape (and, presumably, into my living room). He’s pointing behind him at the freshets, smiling, discussing their mating rituals. Now switching his attention to the picture on top of my dusty television.

  Dennis, he says. That’s the only word I can make out because the live porn in my living room-kitchen is getting out of hand with the moaning and cussing and smacking and biting. Settle down, I want to say. Settle down or get the fuck out.

  Dennis.

  The camera closes in tight on the picture, and I remember the name. But the tears in this story are with the pizza boxes and all that other crap. Not here, buddy. No tears for dead-or-missing lovers in this recreation of events that may or may not have happened.

  Dennis.
<
br />   Fuck.

  I rewind the tape, watch the fat man and the freshets in Fast Forward. Gray and gray and gray, like the zebras. All those limbs thrashing, meshing, melting, crumbling into one another, crushing the flesh hues into a colorless paste of humanity.

  How profound.

  I feel sick to my stomach. I’m going to vomit all over my shitty couch.

  I rewind the tape again, watch it at normal speed. I point at the screen and tell the fat man to piss off. Get off my screen, you fat fuck; just go back to your nature show and leave me out of it.

  But the fat man isn’t listening. I let the tape run longer than before, and soon the camera zooms in so close to Dennis, it’s now just his face. I remember touching that face. I remember kissing those lips. I remember wishing my eyes were like his eyes. Sharp. Crisp. Colorless. Gray.

  I press Pause now. Anew button. Mixing it up a little.

  Dennis stares at me, his face filling the screen.

  If dishes could laugh, they’d be busting a gut right now. Laughing at my confusion. Laughing at my loss.

  Dennis looks like he’s trying to say something, like maybe he’s going to apologize, or tell me when he’s coming back. Or maybe he’s trying to open his mouth to tell the freshets to piss off and leave me be.

  Dennis would have done that for me.

  My Dennis.

  The VCR chews up the tape. I hear it munching.

  Dennis’ face crinkles, warbles, flickers.

  Disappears.

  And that fat fuck from the nature show is suddenly back on the screen. Now he’s talking about giraffes.

  Somehow, between the last time I checked and now, tears have sprung from my eyes.

  More freshets. More overflow.

  Why am I crying, Dad?

  What about it, bro?

  How about you, ma? What’s up with me? Why can’t I keep hold of anything? My cup constantly runneth over with the shit that’s been poured into me.

  I stand up, wipe the tears from my cheeks, looking around my living room-kitchen, seeing nothing but gray, nothing but Dennis’ cold, crisp eyes in every one of the freshets’ heads. Nestled in there, buried deep, gripping the sides of their sockets, refusing to change color.