“Thank you,” the girl utters, barely audible. “Thank you.”
I can’t think of anything to say.
The ambulance pulls up, with a fire truck and two police cruisers in tow. One of the paramedics that gets out is the guy who’d been talking to me and the janitor a while back. I pray to something I don’t believe in that he won’t recognize me, but if anything is out there, it doesn’t listen.
As the other three delicately pull the girl out of the car, and I stand there holding my blood-sopping shirt, the paramedic says to me, “Awfully kind thing for you to do, considering you made it pretty clear that you don’t seem to care about who lives or dies.”
“Can I go,” I ask. The firemen are inspecting the car, I assume to make sure it’s not going to catch fire or blow up or something. I hope it does. It would save me from having to talk to this asshole again. Now he’s really going to remember me, and that’s greatly discomforting, enough to make my stomach churn and clench with nausea.
The paramedic frowns at my flippancy. “Did you see the accident occur?”
“No. I just found her like this.”
“Are you yourself hurt? Did you sustain any injuries when touching the vehicle?”
“No.”
He shrugs. “You can go. I’ll stop by the security office tonight and let you know how she is.”
I blink at him. “Please don’t,” I say.
He snorts and shakes his head. “Whatever, dude. Thanks for helping out, anyway.”
I pick up my other ruined shirt and walk away. I’m almost to my car when I turn around and say to the paramedic, who’s about to climb into the ambulance, “Wait.”
He looks over at me and raises his eyebrows. His face is hard and impatient.
“On second thought,” I say, “let me know. Let me know if she makes it.”
His face softens a little. “Yeah, man,” he answers. “Sure, no problem.”
We stand there for a moment, and then I get in my car and drive away. The girl’s blood is on my hand and I get it on my steering wheel.
When I get home, I don’t wipe it off.
***
She’s not in the morgue that night.
Toward the end of my shift, the paramedic knocks on my door, and I open it. I know what he’s there to tell me.
“Hey,” he says, looking uncomfortable. He doesn’t like talking to me; I think I creep him out, which is good. I don’t want to leave any sort of impression on people, whatsoever, but I’d at least rather it be a bad one than a good one. At least that way they’ll leave me alone.
“Did she make it,” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah,” the guy says, “we had to get her right into surgery, and the doctors said she’s got a long recovery ahead of her, but she’s going to be okay.”
“That’s really . . . tremendous,” I say, figuring that’s an appropriate human word for the scenario.
“She wouldn’t have lived if you hadn’t been there, you know. I can pretty much guarantee that.”
“Okay.”
“Um . . . well, yeah. Anyway, what’s your name? The docs want to tell her who her savior was when she wakes up.”
I cringe at that word. “No,” I say. “Please . . . I . . . I don’t want any recognition.”
The guy gives me a weird look I can’t decipher and says, “Right, okay. Whatever, dude . . . I’ll tell her it was her Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, or something.”
“Great. You do that. Just don’t give her my name.”
“I don’t even know your name, bro. Chill.”
“I really don’t want her to know who I am. I really don’t want . . . recognition.”
“Dude, I get it, it’s fine. Listen, I gotta go. Thanks again, on her behalf.”
“Okay.”
He makes another strange face, mutters goodnight, and walks away. I close the door and lock it, sitting back down to look at the monitors.
***
I can’t sleep.
It’s been four days, I think, since I slept. Actually slept, I mean; I have periods where my mind kind of lapses and shuts off, while my body keeps going. Last night, or maybe two nights ago, or tonight, I was having a bored and awkward conversation with the janitor around two AM, and then, all of a sudden, I’m in the morgue, balls-deep in a dead girl’s asshole, and it’s just past midnight.
I don’t even like anal.
Things like that keep happening. It’s like time travel, almost, except some of the things that happen in the future—or the present or the past or however you want to look at it—never end up happening after I travel backward. Or maybe they do, just during one of my brain-lapse zombie moments. Maybe I’m imagining all of it. Maybe I’ve been kidnapped by toilet-plunger-shaped aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.
Maybe I’m dead.
I’ve been chugging Red Bull and averaging three pots of coffee per night, just so I can remain somewhat alert and capable of motion. Coffee makes me nauseous, and I fucking hate Red Bull.
Everything is just a means to an inevitable end that never comes soon enough.
***
I’m not sure how long the insomnia thing lasts. Toward the end I start seeing shit that isn’t there, and not seeing shit that is there. I shouldn’t drive, but I do. I think I do, at least. I always make it home to sit in my studio apartment and stare at the TV, watching-but-not-watching infomercials and daytime soap operas, and then I always make it back here to the hospital, but I have no memory of how I get to and from either place.
I haven’t been going to class. My grades are high enough that they won’t suffer too much from my absence, and I wouldn’t be any use there, anyway. It’s still early in the semester, though, and I can’t afford to miss much more.
I’ve at least been conscious enough to avoid Helen. I haven’t seen her since she told me about the pregnancy. That was when I stopped sleeping, so I can’t say for sure how long it’s been. Since that night, I’ve been locking the door to the security office, and when she knocks, I just watch her on the monitors as she stands there waiting, until she walks dejectedly away and I can breathe again.
I don’t know how to face her. She’s pregnant with my fucking child. My child. A living thing, borne from my loins. For a few days I think seriously about quitting my job, but the dead girls in the morgue win out every time. I might be an expecting father, but I still have priorities.
One night, she leaves me a note on a Post-It, stuck to the office door. All it says is, “It doesn’t have to be like this.” The letters are careful and rigid. I crumple up the note and shove it in my pocket.
Once I get home (again, by unknown means) I lie on my mattress and start playing Solitaire in my head. People who have been dead for a long time come into my apartment and talk to me about things I can’t remember once they leave. Sometimes whole groups of them come in together, and they all talk at once, and it’s distracting, so I keep losing at Solitaire.
Night comes and I remember I’m off for the next three nights, and I decide that I need to sleep. I can’t keep doing this. My mind is eating away at itself (and the mind is a terrible thing to taste . . . track four . . . track four . . . track four). I have to sleep. I have to sleep. If I don’t sleep, I’ll go crazy.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t drink. I hate the taste of it, and the way it makes me feel. But I have to sleep, and I know alcohol makes people pass out, and I live above a fucking bar, for fuck’s sake, so I might as well change things up a little.
I go downstairs and into the Bad Seed and sit at the bar. The bartender, who’s also the owner, who’s also my landlord, is an old junkie named Nick, who has a habit of shooting up right in front of his patrons. They don’t mind because they’re usually doing something similar. “The divest dive bar in the Cleveland area”, they call this place. The smell of cigarette smoke isn’t enough to cover up the stench of sweat and sex and puke, and I’m reminded of why I don’t ever come down here.
Nick is leaning against the bar, smoking a joint, looking pale and sick and wasted, and writing something in a notebook. He told me once that he wrote a novel, even got it published. Something about a dead rabbit, I think. He’s a musician, too, and he swears he’s the best lyricist since John Lennon. Whatever, I don’t listen to the Beatles.
He looks up and smiles at me when I sit down. “Hey there, kid. This is a neat surprise,” he says, putting his notebook down and wiping some drool from his chin with the back of his white hand. “I didn’t figure you for a drinker.”
“I’m not,” I say. “But I am tonight.”
“That’s what I say every night,” he says with a wheezy chuckle. He coughs into the track-marked crook of his arm and asks, “What’ll you have, boy-o? First round is on me.”
“I don’t care,” I say, lighting a cigarette and moving a nearby ashtray closer to me. It’s shaped like a heart, which I find odd and out-of-place. “Whatever will get me drunk the fastest.”
He chuckles again. “Well, how’s about I fix you up my specialty drink? I call it ‘the Wild Rose’, after the Wild Rose, owner and namesake of the most glorious adult entertainment club in the US.”
The Wild Rose is a strip club down the street. I’ve never been to a strip club. They don’t have any dead girls there.
“That’s fine,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.”
Nick turns around and starts making the drink. “You know, Rose and I were a hot little item, back in the day,” he says. “Shit, I could tell you some stories about the pussy on that girl. Hey, did you pay your rent this month?”
“Yeah. I gave it to you last week.” He does this a lot.
He shrugs and puts the drink in front of me, on top of a little square napkin that appears to have been used for the expulsion of snot from his or someone else’s nose. “Okay, I trust you,” he says, leaning back and lighting another joint. “Sorry, I tend to be forgetful sometimes.”
“It’s fine.”
“I think it’s the drugs,” he says.
“It’s understandable.” I look down at the drink. It’s dark, and there’s no ice in it. I take a deep breath and down it in two laborious swallows. I put the glass down and cough breathlessly into my hand. My throat and nose and chest burn, and I’m thinking maybe I should have just taken a handful of Benadryl in the interest of passing out, as opposed to subjecting myself to this, but I don’t like taking pills.
Helen.
Helen and her dead eyes.
Helen with my baby inside her.
“Get me another one,” I say.
“You got it, champ. You want to buy some blow?”
“No. Just the drink is fine.”
He shrugs again and goes about mixing the drink. The bar door opens with an accompanying sound of a tinkling bell, and a man in a business suit staggers in, maybe forty-ish, his tie hanging loosely from his neck, and his sweaty hair disheveled. He sits on the stool beside me, even though the rest of the bar is open, and now I’m really wishing I’d just bought some fucking Benadryl.
“I think my wife is cheating on me,” he says, and then tells Nick to get him a strawberry cheesecake martini. Beneath the reek of alcohol and cigarettes, there’s a scent of expensive aftershave and cologne.
“What the fuck is a strawberry cheesecake martini?” Nick asks, sliding me my drink and regarding the guy in the suit with a disgusted look on his face. “This is the Bad Seed, man. If you want some pansy drink, there’s all kinds of places down the street that you can go to. I don’t even know how to make a regular fucking martini.”
“I’ve been barhopping along this street all night, and I keep getting kicked out,” the man says. “For fighting.” He looks over at me.
“I’m not going to fight you,” I say distractedly as I stare at the awful beverage before me, trying to gather the will to drink it.
“Just get me a stout, then,” the man tells Nick. “I should probably cool it on the hard liquor, anyway.”
When Nick walks over to the tap to fill the glass, the man turns to me and says again, “I think my wife is cheating on me.”
“That’s really tragic,” I say, reaching for my drink and then retracting my hand so I can clutch the edge of the bar to prevent myself from tumbling off the stool. The effects of the first drink are starting to set in and mix unpleasantly with my exhaustion. Instead of wanting to sleep, I just want to fall over and look up at the cracks in the ceiling and wish I was dead.
“Yeah, dude, it is fucking tragic,” he says. Nick brings him the beer, and he takes a big gulp. He wipes foam from his lip with the back of his hand and glares at me.
I’m not really looking at him; I’m still staring at my drink, and I tell him again, “I’m not going to fight you.”
“I travel a lot,” he continues. “Like, all the time. I’m usually only home for a day or two at a time before I have to leave again. Yeah, she’s probably lonely, or whatever, but that doesn’t give her an excuse to go and fuck someone else, you know? And, I mean, sure, sometimes I engage in a little, uh, extracurricular activity, but it’s usually when I’m in another country, so it doesn’t count, right?” He takes another big swig of his beer and belches.
“Sure,” I say. I blink rapidly, trying to stop the world from spinning. Maybe this is what they call “being a lightweight”. I don’t know how people do this all the time.
“And, for Christ’s sake, I’m an international businessman, goddammit. I’m stressed and under a lot of pressure. I have needs. It’s different for men, especially men like me. I have an excuse. She doesn’t.”
“Right,” I say. “Definitely.” I take a tentative sip of the cocktail and cough again. The man asks me for a cigarette, and I hand him one.
“Who smokes Lucky Strikes anymore?” he asks, putting it in his mouth and lighting it with a fancy Zippo that’s engraved with something I can’t make out.
“I do,” I say.
“You know,” he goes on, exhaling loudly through his mouth, “she hasn’t been wearing her wedding ring lately. Like, what the fuck is up with that, right? She says it’s ‘because of her job,’ or whatever, but I think that’s bullshit. And fuck, I can’t even remember the last time we had sex. When I come home, she barely even acknowledges me.”
“That’s awful,” I say, and then lift my glass to my lips but decide I’m not ready for another mouthful of napalm, so I set it back down.
“I think I’m losing her, man,” the guy says, suddenly turning sullen. His face turns down, and I think there are tears in his eyes. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
After a few moments, I realize he’s looking at me expectantly, anticipating a response. I say, “I don’t know. Buy her something.” That’s what Americans do, right? They buy shit. I have no way of knowing if it works, but that’s what they do, and it’s the best answer I have.
The man nods slowly, contemplating this. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s not a bad idea. She really needs a new car. I think she’s got a lemon or something. It’s a great car, but it’s a piece of shit.”
“Sorry to hear that.” Please, please, leave me the fuck alone.
“Then again,” he says, “I don’t know if I want to go through all the hassle of buying a car, you know what I’m saying? It’s such a pain in the fucking ass.”
I wouldn’t know. I’ve never bought a car; the Toyota was my mother’s, and one of the many things left to me upon her death. “Buy her flowers,” I say, thinking of the tiger lilies I’d bought for Helen. I wonder if they’re still in the vase on her table. I wonder why I care. I force myself to take another sip.
“Flowers, yeah, now there’s a fuckin’ good idea,” he replies, nodding more vigorously, smiling a little. He claps me on the back and says, “Thanks, dude, you’re a real fuckin’ pal. You don’t meet a whole lot of good guys anymore. Nice to know there’s still decent folks out there. Your next round is on me.”
“I’m not going to have another round,” I tell him,
feeling my forehead begin to perspire.
I think you’re a good guy, you know, Helen had told me.
A real fuckin’ pal, according to Mr. Sleazy Businessman.
I’m covered in sweat. I have to get out of here.
I stand unsteadily and toss a twenty on the bar and mutter something about checking the monitors. I stumble back to the stairs, dragging myself up them, and lurch into my apartment. Exhausted, so exhausted, but not sleepy.
I must sleep.
I shuffle over to the wall and place my palms against it, then proceed to bash my forehead into it with all the strength I can muster. Blood runs into my eyes, but I still keep bashing. My vision starts to blink in and out and turn gray, and finally narrows into a tunnel-like tube, and then it’s all gone and all black, and I’m falling backward and slipping away, and then I’m gone.
***
I don’t wake up until eight o’ clock the next evening. I feel wonderful, almost like I do after fucking a nice fresh corpse. I stand and stretch and look outside at the autumn night’s fading light. My head is clear. I can think again.
And there are things about which I must think.
***
Helen keeps trying to talk to me, and I keep avoiding her. One night I bump into her in the hallway, on one of my rounds, so I turn and run the other way. Another night she comes outside while I’m smoking, looks at me for a moment, and then asks for a cigarette. I stub out my own with my shoe and then go wordlessly inside. She tries to block my path, but I brush past her.
Things go on like this for a while, this pathetic game of cat and mouse, except the cat is pregnant with the mouse’s baby. A month goes by, and then a second and third, and finally a fourth. It’s winter, and it’s cold. I get better at avoiding Helen, but I watch her on the monitors, watching as she slowly grows visibly pregnant. Some of the nurses start giddily putting their hands on her stomach. I’ve never understood that shit.
One night, I doze off into a light half-sleep while reading Will Self’s Umbrella (it’s a difficult and cumbersome read, even for me), and when I wake up, Helen’s sitting there watching me. The slight swell of her stomach is even more disturbing up close. I can’t stop staring at it. Her breasts look bigger, too, but I don’t care about that. It’s her stomach. Her fucking stomach, and the fucking thing inside of it.
Dead Inside Page 11
