Black Leather Required

by David J. Schow

  A year until he had to repeat his evening with Kayce. Little salvation there, now.

  The man prayed to unhearing gods that he was not beginning to hate Lorelle. That his stonewalled frustration would not fester, that it would not grow worse.

  He stopped drinking, took up smoking. Once more he supervised the installation of the glass door. It took him less time than before; he knew all the glitches by heart.

  On a cursory inspection of the wine rack, he saw the bottle of cabernet he would share with Kayce a year from now. The thought lent him a curious feeling of stability.

  He was getting good at this way of life.

  Meeting a lunatic on a beach at sunset, thought Kayce. Well, that was certainly one way to think twice about doing yourself in.

  Half past dinnertime she stopped pondering her own image in the vanity mirror, donned her newest bathing suit–a curvy one-piece in eye-searing magenta–and with a towel around her neck went down to consider the ocean, in the way a person toying with a loaded gun considers how simple it would be to place muzzle to temple and snap an unschooled trigger finger, just once. No motive, no Sherlockian maze of reason or intent . . . merely something done one day, as opposed to not done.

  The lunatic was a classic, unshaven, white-eyed and disheveled, one baby step away from a shopping cart and a lifetime of panhandling on the Venice Beach boardwalk. She did not spot him immediately because he tacked on her like a skittish, abused dog, veering near, then detouring away at right angles. The light was poor. Her attention was on the water. The noise of the surf easily overrode the small sounds of his stealth. She had seen him several times, and yet was startled when he popped up in her face.

  The man radiated toxicity toward Kayce, his gesticulations blind and apprehensive, his entire manner deranged and tentative, as though he feared he would explode on the spot, or she would dissolve from view, a specter of the sea, an hallucination to which he would speak in spite of his conviction that she might not be real.

  He knew her name, and that scared her. He babbled, and repelled her before the import of his obscure message could be expressed. He advanced to the brink of her barrier of personal space, forcing her to back away, hands-up in warning, as he tried to unload a frightening rap about how they had met before, this night, this beach, several times over. When she finally turned to escape he yelled louder. She glanced back, her heart rioting, once there was a safe and increasing distance between them. Her last sight of him was a depressing picture of isolated loss and madness, of a stranger on his knees, futilely clutching handfuls of sand.

  She rushed home, anger slowly displacing her fright. The lunatic did not follow her. Yet somehow, he had known her name. Wonderful–now she did not even have the succor of the beach anymore.

  In a bizarre way, the man had saved her life. Her latent plan of suicide had been elbowed aside and replaced with real-life, real-time acts of personal survival. The moment in which romantic extremes were indulged had been punctured; to persist now would be a reaction, a self-victimization that would soil her purpose. She did not want anyone's sympathy or participation, not even a crazy person's.

  Kayce returned to her home, her mirror, and embittered sleep. Maybe tomorrow she'd do it.

  After blowing it in a major way with Kayce, the man returned to the drawing board, literally.

  His architect's world was a slanted, padded board. High-intensity work pinlights and Scum-X and chewed pencils. In work, he had always been a sleuth of the indefinite, knowing by instinct, dead reckoning perfect fits in impossible spaces, lending harmony to warring concepts, always led by the surety that he could make things fit and work, somehow. It had been that way with the sliding glass section of the door.

  Lorelle had teased him once about never being satisfied with his work. "You always try to go back and change it," she had said. "You're the King of Tweak." He had countered that one doesn't poke at what works, nor mess with success; his watchword was never to intellectualize the intuitive and it got us this house, didn't it?

  Now he worked to revise the sliding door out of his existence. And the strategy was not yielding peace; the ideas were not coming, period, thank you, try again later.

  He had never used a computer to help him design. Machines were not intuitive. Forty-six came. And went. Again. Then, forty-seven. Time marched.

  Phone messages dwindled and he reflected briefly on how isolated he had become. Everyone else out there in the world was waiting patiently, they all understood, and thought they were giving his genius time to evolve his next and newest brilliance. After all, it wasn't as if he'd been out of the loop for three years; merely one, plus small change. If you flip an hourglass often enough, the sand never runs out. He nodded at clerks in stores, silently gassed his car and paid his bills, and kept to himself once the plastic was off the house, and the counters leveled, and the furniture emplaced. He installed the glass door by rote, now thinking in terms of how it could be eliminated. One rib-tickling irony of this plan was that his design sense actively rebelled against putting something else in place of the door. It was supposed to be there; any substitute would just remind him that it was all wrong.

  He was smoking and drinking now, far too much, letting himself go. No wonder he had freaked Kayce out on the beach. Another error for his burgeoning tally of mistakes; another year of waiting squandered in a moment of madness.

  The door had remained, mostly because of its promise. When he at last gave up and returned to the house, Lorelle was already inside, waiting for him, fixing her tea herself, and voila, there he was, passing GO again.

  Losing Kayce had provided a few tangential insights. What it was all about, he decided, was power. The power of stimulus and response. Guilt trips and paybacks and all the petty agonies inflicted day-to-day by people who turned love into a weapon, and became assassins. Perhaps the lesson was that Lorelle would be spared the one horror worse than all her combined deaths–the decay of his own love.

  Or maybe the black topology of his own personal Mobius loop boiled down to his bullheaded refusal to accept the truth of loss. It was a diagram he revised constantly, yet never improved. Nothing else in his world was this close to an absolute, and he had behaved like some fanatical Chosen One, when in hard didactical fact he was simply a man suffering a deep loss. In the name of being right, he had become willing to sacrifice and destroy everything good he could still remember about Lorelle. Everyone who had a grail felt just as right in their own particular quest. Causes and effects could provide a veneer of statistical validity if your grail was ever challenged. The world was full of heretics. But logic was for calculators, and the only truth toward which he cared to bow tonight was that no matter how many times this backslip befell him, he would never know the why, any more than he knew why he'd hit a red light one day and a yellow light exactly one day later.

  By the time he got back to the house he understood that he wanted Lorelle to know one simple thing–that he loved her. His hands shook as he braced himself for the onrushing downside.

  "I think if you have a shave and sit in the whirlpool for awhile, you'll feel better," she told him.

  Investigators, police, Authorities with a capital A; they all converged eventually on Kayce's apartment. They had but to follow the smell.

  She had executed perfect razor incisions, if there was such a thing as a textbook for suicide. She had died in her bathtub, subsumed in crimson water gone cold days before. When one of the cops joked about the sands in this chick's hourglass finally running out, his buddy noted that the victim still had great tits; what a fucking shame.

  Picture a man sitting quiet sentinel in an intensive care unit.

  The man is not sure of his age. Bedside, he can see his reflection in the curved gray glass of vital signs monitors. The woman he loves has fallen into a coma, beyond practical recovery, a hair short of clinical brain death. Her pupils ignore light.

  Inside her head, she might be screaming.

  The man speaks to he
r as though she is another person, alive and cognizant, living a life. The floor physicians are accustomed to this sort of behavior. The man is routinely permitted access and time alone.

  The words spoken by the man would break your heart; anyone's heart. The nurses have ceased to eavesdrop on his pain because it is, without hyperbole, too excruciating to hear. My god, he really loved her, they say, already referring to the patient in the past tense.

  The man wonders if the fact they are both back in a hospital again, after so long a time, might help some cycle to close. Then he chastises himself for his own futility. Not important. All that matters is for him to keep giving back the things Lorelle told him that last night, after he had cleaned up and calmed clown.

  "You worry too much," she had told him. "You should know I love you without having me here to tell you all the time, but I'm telling you to your face so you won't have any lingering doubt, okay? No Gothic novel jazz. I'll love you as long as those stars are up in the sky."

  They had been out on the deck, outside the in-work sliding door. She had looked upward, with the expression of a woman who had mistaken the moment as significant, a turning point. The man averted his eyes; he had seen the same stars wink out too many times by now.

  "No applause for the lame poetics," she had joked.

  The sea was not eternal. Neither were the stars she had cited, nor the sky itself.

  Her words had made love to him. Her words were enough. They had to be.

  Sometime during the night, the comatose patient in 302 dies. The man is nowhere to be found. Someone phones his machine, at home. It was finally too much even for him, the nurses all agree, sympathetically.

  At home, the man ignores the hospital's message. He sits lotus, considering his ghost image in his brand-new sliding glass door.

  He has done what was necessary. There is even a time for love to die. It is possible someone will wish to punish the man for what he has done, but the Authorities will only ask questions and then leave him to his grief.

  He is no more and no less than human. In him, the species' infinite capacity for futility, error and loss had to be balanced by equal measures of transcendence, insight and gain. He wonders if it will be enough, for Lorelle, for Kayce, a year from now, for him to be merely human.

  He lights a cigarette, keeps the lighter flame burning until his thumb grows hot. He thinks of the beach outside, the glass door, of the fact glass is forged from sand, via heat. Trivia.

  His ghost image meets his level gaze, toys with its ghost lighter, feels no such pain. The doorway invites him to try again.

  Kayce savors the salt-spray and the wet give of the beach beneath her bare feet. Each outgoing wave exposes tiny, wriggling things in the sand. Simple pleasures.

  She always makes this particular house her turning point. Probably someone's summer home; the damned place seems empty and deserted most of the time, but for signs of vague activity, like the invisible passage of caretakers. She has gone so far as to inquire with the broker for the area. The place was being refurbished by a prizewinning architect. He's the guy who put in all the glass; maybe you've seen his stuff. The broker, a seedy ferret named Speaks, has all the subtlety of any lecher, and his obvious manner motivates Kayce to put the rest of their preordained conversation on permanent hold.

  Tonight, Kayce does not intend to return home. She has left everything behind her in order. No note: As she nears the architect's house, she feels an imminent delay in her plans as moments add themselves to her life, unbidden.

  The enormous glass door on the seaward side of the house has been broken, smashed to a billion smithereens. She is aware of a black, non-reflective gap there, as though a small plane was flown through the wall.

  Her heart accelerates at the thought of an intruder lurking inside. Another trap for her. She mourns the violation of this property in advance; soberly assesses that her testimony might be required later, in case someone needs details.

  There is movement inside, indistinct enough to make her doubt what she sees. A trick of the light. Nothing happens for long moments. In another life, Kayce might have let the opportunity slip. Tonight, going with the flow of the unexpected, she decides and moves with less hesitation, recalling her highfaluting speech to Cort about sudden fire, the fast heat and stealth of real passion.

  Already she is climbing the path, imagining meeting the mystery architect at last: He'll play lonely and tragic, like he's had his heart broken. . . he'll refuse a drink; there'll be a backstory, there. . . he'll have a fastidious name to match mine, and if he's any good, he'll laugh at the observation . . .

  She has her back to the ocean now, so it cannot be reflected in her eyes. She has no sane idea of why she should even bother trying, why she deludes herself with fantasy meetings and their promise of further entwinements. All she knows is her strong attraction for the house, and the stranger inside. Magnetism. Tidal pull, perhaps.

  Barefoot, she avoids the deck, where the chunks of broken glass glitter like crushed ice in the twilight. She finds the front door and raps three times, then again–a polite pause between each salvo before she gives up and returns to her original business.

  She has turned to leave when she hears the door unbolt and open behind her. "Hel-lo?" says a voice.

  Funny, that inflection. It's meant to tell her not to rush away so quickly. The stranger's face matches his voice. Behind him, there is a taper alight on a silver stand in the middle of the room. Beyond that is the smashed door. Kayce's glance prompts him to look rearward and consider the ludicrous first impression this all must conjure. Oh, creative people, so florid.

  But Kayce likes candlelight, and it is this which gets a tiny smile out of her. "Should I leave?" she says, her doubt designed to encourage him.

  The man shakes his head, as though he has the craziest story in the world to tell, and answers her.

  Author's Note:

  This story is dedicated with love to Richard Christian Matheson and Richard Matheson.

  Bad Guy Hats

  The four young men in bad guy hats sauntered into the Jump Mart on a summer day of record heat and Amazon humidity. They came packing, hammers down on chambered slugs, mad whoopee dancing in their eyes.

  Their bad guy hats' made them heartbreakers, life-takers. Hard partiers and dirty fighters.

  Dicky's savage grin organized itself around a wooden match, the kind you could strike anywhere. This one was burnt out. Sweat ran into his eyebrows from his black brush cut. He mopped, then drew his piece from the waistband of his jeans. Stonewashed and supertight, those jeans; snug in all the right places, yet soft and broken-in as a mother's nipple. Dicky was proud of the gun. It was an S&W L-frame Combat Magnum, a 586 cut for speedloaders. It took Dicky a moment to haul all eight-plus inches of barrel out of his pants. He dipped the weight of the revolver forward to help his thumb cock it. Smooth.

  He told the geezer working the counter to shut up three times. By the third time, he was screaming, and the rest of the store had fallen silent.

  Zippo and K-Bar and Toots had drawn and leveled. By the time Dicky demanded money, the tableau was just like that Twilight Zone episode about the stopwatch that froze everything timelessly still.

  Twilight Zone spoke to Dicky's condition.

  Down through desert, they had ridden hard. Past scrub and saguaro, first Phoenix, then Tucson, look out, Cochise County, here we come.

  Mexico was one potential tidbit for the future. If not, then they would ride east, to Lordsburg, New Mexico. There were convenience stores everywhere. That's why they were called convenience stores.

  They faced off four versus six. Besides the old counterman there was a cowboy, a mommy with a toddler, and a teenage muscle-car metalhead with his chick in tow. The baby was riding the seat of a small shopping cart. The cowboy was furthest from the counter. The dude and-babe combo both wore Metallica tees; they faced the coolers, trying to guess whether they'd get carded for beer.

  Zippo got a vantage and froz
e them with his mini-Uzi; hypnotized them like a snake charmer. He had used a home conversion kit to bump the weapon to full auto–fifty rounds in five seconds. Zippo was the biggest of them. He wore a yoked Western shirt, bright yellow, with no sleeves. His sunburn made his eyes seem to bulge–too white, mildly insane. His temper was as filed down as the pin on his Uzi.

  Dicky snapped his fingers and pointed. Toots snatched a basket and began to round up chips, brew, you know–supplies.

  The counterman fumbled. He was so shaky he could barely coax the register to pop.

  K-Bar drew down on the cowboy while Zippo covered the rest. The cowboy was packing; K-Bar had spotted tooled leather and ivory grips. He ordered the cowboy to unholster, butt-first, using his fingertips. K-Bar kept his own Automag IV steady in a two-handed grip and edged closer; he thought all revolvers to be ancient history and occasionally itched Dicky about sticking with a six-shooter. Good-natured teasing to mask genuine irrational contempt.

  The cowboy did as he was ordered. Nice and easy. Toots grabbed cold six-packs as the Metallica twins shrank out of his way.

  Then K-Bar saw something he had never seen before, and would never see again in his life. The cowboy snapped his wrist, simple as flicking a booger. His pistol spun in a clockwise blur and landed in his grasp with the hammer back. K-Bar's ears registered the click about the time the first shot smashed through his right collarbone. He actually heard the gunshot. . .afterward.