by Jeff Somers
“And you fucking made me drag his poor ass over here, asshole. And now we’ve got more problems.”
“We?” Tommy seemed to be fighting with physical force for control over his own amusement. “We? Bicky, I was down here scheming to go through her underwear drawer, listening to you two bitch and moan at each other like a proper married couple. Don’t fucking tell me I’m in trouble.”
Bick was back to me, hanging off of me. “Jesus, Hank, you can’t think I’d do it on purpose. Look at me, Hank! Look at me! I’ve known you forever. Forever, Hank! I’m just asking for some help. It just doesn’t look good, you know? And I need your help. That’s all.”
And for some number of seconds, I don’t know how long, we stood there, with Bick’s hands clutching my jacket, our eyes on each other, with Tommy standing in the background vibrating with suppressed Glee, with Mary staring at me, and me staring back, begging to know what she wanted me to do. I was pretty sure Tommy actually wanted me to refuse, wanted this to get worse and worse, to spiral down into blackness and horror. The Glee was fed on blackness and horror, and Tommy was willing me to tell Bick to go fuck himself. I could almost see him mouthing the words for me.
Finally, I focused on Bick again.
“Okay,” I nodded.
“Great,” Tommy said immediately. “Here’s what we want you to do.”
“Hank? You with me?”
Mary’s eyes looked dusty. I sat on the couch with a drink in my hand, which was wet from melting ice and sweat, and stared back at her. She kept her eyes on me, a filmy stare of accusation and resentment. It was, I realized, the same way she’d always looked at me. I could see Miriam in her. I used to think they didn’t resemble each other beyond minor things. But I could see they were sisters.
“Hank? You been listening? Are you okay with all this?”
“Now you ask him? Jesus!”
What bothered me about it, I realized, was that she’d been lying there, all twisted up and staring, and none of us had done anything for her, no sign of empathy or respect. No covering, no dignity, no attempt at comfort, whether she could feel it or not. I’d been sitting here listening to Tommy and Bick tell me how they wanted me to lie so no one got “the wrong idea” about what happened, and I was exhausted, and I think standing up was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
“Henry, what’s up? You understand? Where are you going?”
Tommy seemed disinclined to let me past him, but I just went around. I’d known Tommy long enough to know that he wasn’t one to take a swing, at least not without a clear exit and a lot of running room to work with. He smelled, up close, like sweat.
I could hear them both like pigeons behind me, a lot of bobbing and weaving and ruffling feathers, a lot of preening. I walked over to her and looked down. She appeared to be staring at my feet, intent on something. I’d never really liked her, I realized. Still, I swallowed back something resembling regret, something that tasted vaguely like sadness. I knelt down and pushed her hair away from her face a little.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard Bick say.
I shrugged off my jacket and held it before me, feeling static, momentarily at peace, but maybe it was just an illusion, just blankness, someplace where I was supposed to be feeling something and was misinterpreting nothing as calm. I snapped the jacket out like a sheet and let it settle gently on her, covering her face. I kept kneeling for a moment because I didn’t want to turn and face them. I wasn’t ready.
“Well,” Bick said quietly, “Thanks.”
I closed my eyes.
“Jesus,” I said, surprising myself with the levelness of my voice. “Hasn’t one of you called the cops yet?”
I wanted to move, I wanted to move badly. I was sick and tired of being still, and Tommy was saying horrible things. Vile Tommy, we hated him, we did, because whenever he was presented with a choice between saying something nice and saying something vile, he always chose vile. Always. Vile Tommy.
I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but I couldn’t do that and keep trying to move, to break my stillness. I gave up trying to follow Tommy’s annoying little nasally voice and pushed everything into my fingers, pushing, I just wanted to move one finger, and if I could move one finger, I knew I’d be able to stand up and tell the boys to go home, to get out and leave me alone. David, too. I wanted to be boy-free for the first time in my life.
The first had been Maury, Maury whatever his name was, in seventh grade. I’d made out with him at Kelly Dessent’s party, in the basement after half a lite beer and one puff of a menthol cigarette. He never spoke to me again. I always thought it was because I wouldn’t let him touch my breasts. I learned my lesson.
Six months later, I let Carl Sweeney touch them as much as he wanted, and squeezed him until he came in his pants. We dated for six months. We never removed a single piece of clothing. I got him off dozens of times. I don’t recall him ever touching me under my clothes.
Throughout high school there had been Jeremy Hannon, who said hello to me in homeroom on my first day and who had been my first real actual sex seven months later after a pint of blackberry brandy in the backseat of his rusted, broken-down Mustang that I thought was the coolest thing in the world. I remember he cursed every time he came. Nothing that made sense. Just random fucks and shits and then he would bury his face in my hair and sob.
I dated Jeremy for four years. I cheated on him a lot, though. It always just sort of happened. Plus, we were forever breaking up and then I would be at a party and trying to enjoy myself and put him behind me and then we would get back together again—was that my fault? Who knew we would end up back together? You can’t predict these things, and you can’t go through your life feeling blue and depressed all the time, either. Jeremy was okay, though, and he never acted all possessive or bugged me about some things I might have been rumored to have done. He was usually really sweet, but he got too weird near the end of high school, calling me all the time and asking me to move to New York with him. As if. As if I didn’t have my own life to worry about. It was hard breaking up with Jeremy. He came to my house and cried and begged me not to. It was one of the worst days of my life.
I had already met Billy by then, but hadn’t really done anything with him. Made out a little with him at a college party me and my best friend Eileen had gotten invited to. I dated him freshman year, or most of freshman year. Then there was Sam, who was a brother at Phi Theta; he was fun. After Sammy there was Ralph, and then another Jeremy, although Jeremy Two didn’t really ever go anywhere because his name freaked me out all the time and he kind of looked like Jeremy One too. So while I was seeing Jeremy Two I was also kind of messing around with Ralph, who I didn’t really fully break up with until after school. Even then we kept running into each other and sleeping together a lot until I started seeing David One.
David One was my boss at my first job. I was an assistant in the marketing department, making like twelve thousand dollars a year, but it was a start. David was forty-three and married, but he made me weak in the knees anyway. I guess David and I never really dated. We slept together; we had an affair. It was great fun, it was breathless and exciting, and it was the best sex I’d ever had. After two years he changed jobs, and I sort of lost touch with him. It just kind of happened. Since we’d never really been dating, I’d sort of been going out here and there, with the girls, to bars and stuff, meeting people. I think when you’re under twenty-five it’s just natural to be out meeting people. I have my whole old age to sit at home with my cats and a cup of tea. So I’d had a few dates with this guy Kenny, who was wild. Liked drugs, stayed out all night, showered and would come in to work. Knew everyone and was constantly getting into shows and clubs that made my friends jealous. He was wild and fun and a little scary, and I was still dating him and just starting to get tired of his act, of nursing his hangovers, when I met David Two, my David, my husband. By then I was twenty-five and willing to settle down.
David Two was great. He was fu
n and a little wild, but not like Kenny: He was smart. He was older but not married-and-getting-a-gut older, like the first David had been. He made me feel like he was in charge without making me pissed off about it. He had a magic about him. He dazzled me at first, and even after that dazzle faded, I still felt breathless around him.
His only downside, I thought, was Vile Tommy, who came along like a disease, and Droopy Henry, who slouched around like a fucking rainy day in human form—but they were okay, really, and I even came to like Henry a little.
But no more. No more boys for me. I was declaring my Independence Day. I was shedding the skin. Look where boys had gotten me. Look where David had gotten me. I was going to be rid of them all.
And it was dark, and I imagined that it smelled like Henry, who I remembered somehow smelled like cigarettes and cologne, some kind I’d never identified. It was a tired smell, an after-a-night-of-drinking smell, not bad at all. It was weird: I was almost touched by Henry covering me with a jacket, which was just a weird thing to do. But there had been such niceness in his eyes when he’d done it, I couldn’t think anything bad about him.
I could hear them talking, the kind of not-yelling volume that I used to hear from Mom and Dad when they “weren’t fighting,” back in the day. None of the words made any sense, and I became so sleepy, suddenly, so tired. I would have closed my eyes if I could have, but it seemed beyond me, too much strength required. Could you be too tired to close your eyes? I was, though. Too tired to close my eyes.
Henry was being melodramatic, though, talking about calling the cops. An ambulance, maybe. Someone to find out what was wrong with me, but the cops—that was nuts. I didn’t want David to get into trouble. I just wanted to be boy-free, and I didn’t need police to do that for me. I could handle David Bickerman all right.
“What’s wrong? Is something wrong?”
I kept unlacing my shoes and didn’t turn to look in the direction of her sleepy voice.
“Yes. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” I wanted nothing more than to sleep. To close my eyes, have a quiet heart attack, and never wake up. I pulled one shoe off and set it carefully on the floor.
“I’m mad at you,” she said, sweetly. She pushed her feet against me, though, and somehow, by some magical human communication, I knew that I’d been forgiven. “You were gone a long time. What’s up?”
I unlaced the other shoe. “Tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.”
Quiet. Lightening dark, because the sun was coming. I set my other shoe on the floor. I was beginning to be able to see.
The phone rang, and I shut my eyes. I started to cry, silent, just welling tears dripping down because I wasn’t even going to get this night. This one fucking night.
XII.
MONDAY
I knew Lindsay the Doctor from high school. I knew this, although I didn’t remember much from high school. My childhood at all, really. My past faded. A few years down the line, it was like stuff never happened. People would show me photos—Tommy in a cowboy costume, Tommy screaming at some concert, Tommy playing guitar with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth at some frat party—and there was nothing. No glimmer of recognition. Like it was a different me doing all that, all those years ago.
I was a perfect organism. Unencumbered by past failures or triumphs.
It was all still there, though. If I concentrated, if I had a reason, I could pull it all back out of the dark moldy folds of my brain, the complex chains of acids and chemicals that formed memories. I rarely tried very hard. There was nothing for me there.
Lindsay, I remembered. She was useful to remember. She was pretty but not beautiful. The kind of girl you chatted up energetically at a bar and then spent the morning wishing fervently would leave. Super smart. Fucking Bond Villain smart. In high school, she’d been insecure and desperate, got high a lot, always had drugs, put out like a French Quarter prostitute, and spent a lot of her time crying. Naturally, I stayed in touch.
In college, she’d done well. Professionally. Pre-med, good grades piled up. She was fucking brilliant. Could read a book in an hour, remember everything. Said she hated her brain, because she couldn’t forget. Anything. It all stayed there. Every insult, every backseat date rape, every humiliation and menstrual cramp, burned in. If we bred, our children would be Supermen.
She was already making money selling. Pills, mainly. Pills were plenty. She also sold gear. Syringes, ampoules, whatever. She got contacts to write scrips for a premium. Her dorm room was fucking party central, something out of a movie. People everywhere, getting stoned, Lindsay always stoned, but always somehow showing up for finals and getting fucking perfect grades. And when she went on to med school and I went on to a lowly perch in corporate America’s gut, I kept in touch. I remembered her. I forced myself to, because she was too good a resource.
And she appreciated being remembered. Most of her old friends had moved on. Most of her customers forgot her the second she shut the door behind them. I always reminded her how cool she’d been in high school. A rebel. A smart, pretty girl who liked to party. I told her high school story like a fucking teen comedy film, leaving out the crying jags except when I’d been there to manfully put an arm around her—a bonding moment for the main characters—and the occasional six-month depression. I shaped her adolescence into a fucking magical time of freedom and triumph, so she liked having me around.
She told me people wore her out on OxyContin. Wore her out. That’s all they wanted. She was fucked up to the gills all the time herself. Handfuls of pills, a bottle of vodka in her locker, in her glove box, in her backpack. She was thin and yellowed and her hair got brittle, she looked like fucking death but she pulled through her residency with flying colors. Told me she maybe killed two, three people by accident, but seemed kind of surprised by that stat. Like she knew it should have been more. Told me doctors killed more people than you would imagine but covered for each other. Invented symptoms, scotched up test results. She said most doctors were shit, they fucked up all the time but covered it all up so they could continue killing us.
She also told me doctors earned shit. Until they were out of residency, at least, and then only if they were specialists. And then only if they were fucking incredible. Most doctors made decent livings, but weren’t rich.
I didn’t do drugs often. I liked drugs fine, but the quality control issue bothered me. You buy something from some asshole, who the fuck knew what you were getting. Booze was safe. Regulated. Your chances of drinking a bellyful of antifreeze instead of bourbon were essentially zero. Your chances of blowing a rail made up 65 percent rat poison were essentially 100. But pharmaceuticals, from a fucking pharmacy, passed on a scrip? Fuck all. Why not.
Time had not been kind to Lindsay. At her messy, tight apartment downtown, she paced and chewed her nails. Her apartment had a layer of her dust on top of the dust that had been there when she’d moved in. A sublet. A sweet sublet, rent-controlled. She was paying practically nothing for a one-bedroom. And treating it like her dorm room. Shit everywhere. Hadn’t been cleaned, period. Like, since it had been built, first not cleaned by the Italian or Irish immigrants who packed into it, desperate and unwanted. Then not cleaned by generations of increasingly upscale slummers who could have afforded some shitbox studio in midtown but chose to beat the system and pay pennies on the dollar for a place with atmosphere. The place smelled, and felt tight and hot, like we were buried under ash.
Her apartment made my skin crawl. I sat there with a theatrical smile on my face.
Lindsay had a small path to pace in. Eight feet, spin, eight feet. A canyon formed by piles of boxes and books, clothes and plump, swelling garbage bags I suspected should have been taken to the curb months ago. She smoked and chewed and spat little pieces of herself on the floor, telling me about it. Pills to wake up in the morning, pills to stay sharp during the day, pills to go to sleep at night. Dark bags under her eyes. Lindsay fucking up almost too much for even her fellow doctors to cover u
p. Dozens of people, now, she said. Dozens dead.
She kept telling me this as she paced, smoking a cigarette, hands shaking. Dozens. She’d killed dozens now. Nodding off during procedures, getting all blurry reading tests, writing out preposterous prescriptions that were filled without question, making hearts explode and livers fail.
Sure, sure, I kept saying. Soothing. I felt like I was back in school, trying to fuck a Sad Girl. You had to coax the Sad Girls. You had to listen and listen and listen and rub their backs and tell them they were special and beautiful and of course you understood and then you had to listen and listen and listen again, and rub their fucking backs and murmur kind words of support. And again and again, endlessly, your appetite for it directly proportional to how hot she was, how big her boobs were, how long her legs were. If you did it long enough, if you put in the time, the Sad Girls would lay down and spread their legs and you got in. And then you made them more sad, but that was the next asshole’s problem.
Lindsay was like that. Pacing, making me dizzy. Smoking and talking. And talking. She was being watched. She was going to lose her license. She was being sued by so many people now, and she was going to lose her malpractice insurance. She was fucked. All I wanted to do was buy some pills from her, heavy-duty stuff that you could calm a gorilla with. But I had to sit there and rub her back and say sure, sure and tell her she was beautiful so she would lay back and put her ankles in the air and sell me some fucking pills.
She had a plan. She was selling everything. Everything Must Go. Caution to the wind, she was moving more fucking drugs out the door than she’d ever dared. She was going to sell everything she could, fucking bankrupt the hospital, screw all of her doctor friends, and put together a tidy amount of money. Move to Mexico. She knew an American doctor with a license in any state could buy a license in Mexico for a few grand. She’d set out her shingle in some shithole town and make burrito money stitching up cuts and diagnosing asthma, and live off her wad.
