Waste

by Andrew F Sullivan

  “He knows the elevators, he’ll take the bigger one, and then he’s gone,” Elvira said. “Ted knows the elevators.”

  Jamie yanked Elvira into the tiny elevator before it struggled up the guts of the Pillar. Small feet scurried around the outside of the tube. Jamie hit another button. They were headed to the twentieth floor and the penthouse suite. He flexed his good leg and tried to stand on his toes. The right foot dangled limply above the floor. Jamie pulled the rifle out of his pant leg and let his hands get used to the weight. Elvira had stopped talking once they stepped into the elevator. Jamie tried not to think about the size of the Vines’ hands. He hadn’t even recognized the body the two bearded men had left behind in his bone can.

  The elevator doors opened on the twentieth floor. The walls were a much darker shade of mauve. There was one door at the end of a very short hallway. All the light fixtures were made of fake pewter and stuck out from the walls at odd angles. The ice machine’s hum cut through the artificial silence.

  A skinny man in a robe waved at Elvira as she and Jamie stepped out of the elevator. Long, winding scars traveled up from his belly button and into webs across his chest. The man’s skull looked shaved down to the skin. He grinned at them with a full mouth of discolored teeth and shook his ice bucket in the couple’s direction. The elevator doors closed behind them with a ping. Elvira pulled the spoiled quilt up over her head and stuck her gaze to the floor.

  “This isn’t Ted. Look at the hair.”

  “I wasn’t—ahem—really expecting anybody,” the man said. “I think you might have the wrong floor. This is the honeymoon suite, the penthouse. You must have the wrong floor.”

  Astor Crane gazed down the rifle barrel now tucked under his pale chin.

  “But I suppose I could ask you all in for a drink. Would that help?”

  The lone strand of hair on his head was red and stringy.

  28

  Elvira Moon ran down the hall into the honeymoon suite. The hotel staff still sometimes called it a penthouse despite the heart-shaped bed. This was where Ted Moon once walked away from her. Jamie could only watch her run. His leg was still screaming every time he moved.

  “You gotta relax, buddy.”

  Astor Crane laid a hand on the rifle barrel bobbing in front of his face.

  “You seem a little too high-strung. How about—now, just swing that away from me. Just like that. There we go.”

  “She said—fuck. She said they’d be here,” Jamie said. “Elvira! Hey, get back here!”

  “Who would be here? No one on this floor ’cept me,” Crane said. “Hasn’t been anyone else up here for months, really. I’ve got the place as long as I want. She probably isn’t going to come out of there if you yell at her, you know.”

  Jamie swung the rifle barrel down at the floor. He could barely hold it straight.

  “You have no fucking idea the night I’ve fucking had,” he said. “Just back off, all right.”

  “Well, after you graciously jammed that gun up in my face, how can I refuse?” Crane said. “Manners. You ever notice no one has them anymore?”

  “Oh fuck off. It was a mistake, all right?”

  The almost bald man turned to walk down the hall.

  “Wait up!”

  Jamie limped after him. The rifle returned to its original role as a cane.

  “What happened to your leg?”

  “I said I had a night,” Jamie said. “I just need her to help me find them. That’s the whole problem—she can’t tell one apart from the other.”

  “You look a bit shaky,” Crane said. “You wanna sit down for a second?”

  Elvira Moon lay naked on the heart bed.

  “You gotta—what did you do with the quilt?” Jamie said. “She doesn’t even realize she’s got everything hanging out there, you know? I shoulda just waited there for them.”

  Astor Crane carried his bowl of ice over to the bar. He plopped three cubes into three heart-shaped glasses and pulled out a bottle of Canadian Club. The suite’s floor was littered with VCR cases and small ashtrays overflowing with bottle caps and cigarette butts. Prescription bottles were lined up neatly on a windowsill with a schedule taped to the glass above them. On the massive television screen in front of the bed, The Wizard of Oz played on mute.

  “You bust in on me and start waving shit like that around, there is bound to be a misunderstanding,” Astor explained. “So I think before you run off with the princess and the pea here, you need to at least introduce yourself. Let’s try this out, like human beings enjoying the early hours of a Sunday morning. Or is it Monday? Must be Monday now.”

  Jamie set the rifle down on a pink loveseat.

  “All right, but I can’t really stay.”

  Astor offered Jamie a drink. He took the strange glass but didn’t sip from it.

  “No, let’s start brand new. My name is Astor. I live here. And you are my guest. So is your friend. Now, what did you say your name was?”

  “Jamie. Does that work?”

  “Jamie, yes, that works. You can take a sip of that, you know.”

  Jamie wanted to spit it out, but swallowed instead. “Look, we can just get our shit and get out of your hair and then…”

  “Very funny…”

  “What?” Jamie asked.

  Astor pointed to his fuzzy scalp.

  “Come on, man,” Jamie said. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “Nobody ever does. Can you let me know when it’s five thirty? I need to take another round of meds. Disgusting stuff, really. Horse pills.”

  Jamie sat down on the loveseat and placed the rifle on the floor. He took a bigger sip and tried to avoid looking at Elvira. “Look, uh Astor, we aren’t looking for you. Or anybody really. I’m looking for twins. Well, not real twins, like pseudo twins,” Jamie explained. “And I found you instead. And Elvira, well, she had it in her mind that they would be here.”

  Astor remained standing. He gazed at the television while Jamie spoke. Dorothy skipped through red flowers with her three friends. The lion was a little out of step with the other two.

  “Twins? You don’t look like you’re in any condition to be chasing some twins around. Look at your foot,” Astor said. “And you haven’t shaved either, I can see that. You really think two girls are going to go for that…and the gun?”

  Jamie swallowed his drink and crunched an ice cube in his mouth. “Not girls, they’re old guys. Like forty-something. And they were supposed to be at the fucking Dynasty, but they weren’t, and then I found her there, and she was out of her gourd.”

  Elvira stood and began remaking the bed. Her long hands smoothed the sheets and tucked them under the upper ridges of the heart-shaped bed. Astor ignored her.

  “My buddy says they call themselves the Brothers Vine or some stupid shit like that. Sounds like wrestling names to me. They could be wrestlers actually, I guess. Tatted up like crazy, too, but they don’t ride bikes. Any of this ringin’ bells?”

  Astor leaned back on the bar. His skin looked transparent in the blue flicker of the television. The scars up and down his chest could have been rotten veins floating to the surface, like bodies in the water. Jamie sucked on another ice cube.

  “Oh, I know they don’t ride bikes,” Astor said. “Brothers Vine. Tommy and Al. What did you do, exactly, to piss ’em off, eh?”

  “So everyone seems to know these assholes but me?”

  “They can be pricks, I’ll admit that. But they get things done.”

  Elvira was finished with the bed. She leaned against one of the windows and looked outside. The sun was starting to emerge on the horizon. Little figures limped from corner to corner on the roads below. Elvira left the window and headed toward the bathroom. No one stopped her. On TV, Dorothy had fallen asleep within sight of the Emerald City, her red shoes matching her lips as she drifted off into another dream within a dream.

  “Get shit done?” Jamie said. “It’s overkill if anything.”

  “You ever
watch a lot of these kids’ movies? I mean, like really watch ’em. They let me have a VCR in the hospital for a few months. Calmed me down at first, until I started paying attention.”

  Astor turned his gaze away from the television screen.

  “I know you looked at the scars. Don’t worry, it’s not like I fell into a meat grinder or nothing. This is just what happens with the cancer. Sometimes they gotta go inside and pull some pieces outta ya. I watched these movies after they cut me open. I watched them over and over. It helped with the chemo, too. All the stories work out in the end, but they don’t actually when you think about it. Even in Oz, those farmhands are looking in the window all creepy and leering. You know? If you were there, and you were there, and you were there, then who the fuck was the Lollipop Guild the whole damn time? The internal logistics alone can mangle your mind.”

  “Cancer?” Jamie said. “Really did a number on you.” He eyed the rifle on the floor, but didn’t move from his position in the loveseat.

  “Adrenal cancer, to be specific,” Astor said. “Adrenaline, right? The stuff that gets your heart pumping. Fight or flight, right? Actually something in your brain, I think—the fight-or-flight part. But the adrenaline contributes, and mine was all over the place. Adrenal glands going crazy. Up and down, side to side, fluctuating like a motherfucker. I was smashing coffee cups when there was too much milk. And your adrenal glands, they are inside you, inside the trunk, you know, like a tree. I had these tumors—”

  “Like on the glands?” Jamie asked.

  “Exactly. Benign. What a fucking word. I must have had them for years.

  “Some of the other guys were jealous I had the VCR in there, but I had to watch them all leave while I stayed and they cut more and more out of me, because the hormone levels weren’t balancing out. The tumors were telling my body, go, go, go! Firing on all the wrong cylinders. They’d gone malignant on me. Each time they cut me open, I’d wonder what was going to be left over after. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t exactly be pleasant,” Jamie said.

  “They still got me popping pills and going in for radiation. I swear my balls are going to fall off if they keep this shit up. All virility shot to hell. Now that’s a good word. Virile.”

  “You got it,” Jamie said. “Like I said, when you’re right, you’re right.”

  Astor swallowed, then poured another glass. The lines on his chest swayed in the blue glow.

  “Well, I did wonder what would be left, what would be left of Astor Crane once the knife went inside, and what would come out?” Astor said. “You see that scar traveling around my belly button? They called that a ‘necessary’ procedure. The kids’ movies, they were supposed to be an escape. You can escape in a movie, right?”

  “You wanna see something get blown up,” Jamie said. “Or something funny like Belushi.” Jamie was fumbling for words. He was out of ice cubes to distract his mouth.

  “I watched The Wizard of Oz over and over,” Astor said. “I watched Robin Hood, I watched The Land Before Time, I watched the fucking NeverEnding Story, which was just false advertising, you know? Ugh, how many times the nurses made that fucking joke. I started picking up on some weird shit in those movies. The radiation has got me puking out my eyes.”

  Astor gestured with his glass. Droplets splashed onto the screen. Elvira dropped something in the bathroom and slammed another cupboard shut. Astor ignored the noise, but Jamie shook himself and tried to stand.

  “Maybe I should go check on her. Don’t want her to mess up your pills.”

  “None of its mine—it’s the hotel’s stuff. Got my meds by the window, so who gives a shit?” Astor said. “What a piece of work she is though, eh?”

  “This shit just landed in my lap. I didn’t even see any of it coming. Let me grab her.”

  Astor Crane placed an idle hand over the Tin Man’s face. He was wearing heart-shaped slippers on his feet. His heels hung out the back of each fluffy organ.

  “That is how it works. Just like the cancer,” he said. “Out of nowhere. Just like you stepping out of an elevator and swinging a gun in my face. Nobody is supposed to be ready for it. You don’t wake up in the morning and decide to pump adrenaline into your bloodstream for five hours straight. You don’t just decide that today is the day you’ll get run over by a truck. The truck is there and your eyes lock on the headlights like a deer…and then you go down. Or a raccoon. Or a house cat. Doesn’t matter. Splat. You don’t see it. You weren’t meant to, either. Just another dead dog on the road.”

  “Or a fucking lion,” Jamie laughed. “You never know.”

  Astor Crane grinned and massaged the thick scar tissue scaling his stomach. Flying monkeys tore apart the scarecrow on the screen. Straw and bits of felt fluttered in the air as the scarecrow shrieked without making a noise. With one heart-shaped slipper, Astor slammed his foot down onto Jamie’s right ankle.

  “That happens too, doesn’t it, Jamie?”

  Jamie shrieked—a sound he hadn’t heard before—and scrabbled at the floor for his rifle. Astor kicked the gun away with another heart-shaped foot. Tears filled Jamie’s eyes. He saw four blurred versions of Astor Crane toss the gun from one hand to the other and check its sight.

  “My fucking foot—”

  Astor Crane leaned in toward Jamie. His eyebrows were barely visible in the gloom. Little red hairs poked through transparent skin. The veins underneath were blue and his eyes were wet and pink. All the blood vessels were broken. Something yellow was dripping from the corners.

  “I don’t know how you stumbled in, but that’s okay,” Astor said. “You can just walk out on that leg now. It’ll hurt, but you can do it. Grab your friend, too. I’m sure the cops will love to see you two walking down the street. That was the second break, wasn’t it?”

  “I fuckin’ told you we could just leave,” Jamie said. “Oh Jesus, it’s snapped.”

  “They’ll put a pin in it. Slap you back together. Good as new, like Robocop,” Astor said. “Who doesn’t want to be Robocop?”

  Jamie tried to take a swing at Astor, but the smaller man danced away. He ran a hand over his chest scars and walked to the window. The line of prescription bottles had times drawn on their caps. Five thirty was dumped down his throat and then he began to talk again.

  “Leave a man in a bed for that long and see what happens. The docs gave me a list, but how do you expect a man to keep track of that? And yes, you do have to listen to this. It’s just a fucking foot,” he said. “You’d think I castrated you.”

  “You fuck,” Jamie said. “I’m going to barf on all your shit.”

  “I did that too. All over the place. And I was spewin’ words all over the place too. Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! Delirious as shit and just singing along to keep myself from getting sick. Singing along to all that shit. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

  “And of course those dipshits take it literally. Wonder twins, wonder twins both of them. They only survive because they’re too stupid to take any initiative beyond stealing a lion. And then the beast gets run over, of all things. Steal the lion, give it a name, and watch it get railroaded by some drunk in the middle of the night. Or you, I guess. Were you drunk? We’re gonna get the head stuffed now because you kind of have to at this point. All this bullshit because of me fucking singing while high on whatever they had me on. It wasn’t like I made a special request.”

  Jamie coughed and tried not to think about the swelling in his boot. Astor kept bouncing the rifle up and down on the bar. His hands didn’t look out of place on the barrel. “You’re gonna get it stuffed,” Jamie said. “Why? Jesus, I can’t even feel my toes.”

  “Because you bond with an animal. Even if you didn’t want it and you think it’s a stupid idea and it smells like shit, you bond with it because it eats from your hand,” Astor said. “They had a bear, too. We didn’t name it though. She was too dumb.

  “All because of a stupid codeine high with me babbling abo
ut the fucking Wizard of Oz in the recovery ward, I get two pets like it’s a present. I never asked for a fucking lion.”

  Jamie groaned and tried to massage his busted ankle.

  “Gotta get him stuffed because some people don’t know how to drive,” Astor said. “A dead lion. Kept them just outside the city, too, where we grow the plants. And of course, the Lorax was trying to ruin all that shit. We had the hydro set up perfect. We tapped right into the main line and bypassed the meter. But the Lorax is always trying to run something on the side, never ever a team player. I didn’t really care as much as before though. Wild, you know? I wouldn’t have just broken your foot back in the day.

  “But I come out of the hospital and it’s gone. The wildness. They took it. They took something. Something that I needed, and they left all these lines on me. You see? Look at them.”

  Astor pulled back his robe and pointed at the thick, rigid tissue burrowed into his flesh.

  “I want you to look at them. Women want to touch them, but they don’t really want to know. They want to imagine what it was like, but not ask me. It was like swimming underwater while they played music. They play music while they cut you open, did you know that, Jamie? A scalpel is like another instrument for them. Only in the right hands does it ever play true. Nobody wants to say they got fucked up by a violin. I don’t, at least. Not by a symphony.”

  There was pink light streaming in through the thin curtains. It clashed with the blue of the television and made Astor look purple as he paced back and forth in front of Jamie. On the screen, Dorothy was yelling at the man behind the curtain, and he was bellowing into a machine that echoed through the Emerald City. Jamie’s ankle had puffed out of his sock.

  “I’m slower now. I’m kinda glad I don’t have a kid because like, how the fuck am I supposed to be surprised anymore? There is just nothing there, nothing. I can’t even blink.”