Nigh

by Zachary Leeman

  I crank the volume on the stereo as Dwight sings about calling lonely streets home. I enjoy listening to the battling orchestras of his music and the screaming engine.

  “Focus, you dumb fuck,” I say out loud, though my words are nearly inaudible amidst the clashing sounds around me. “You are so close.”

  Hate. It is a durable thing, one which will always give and never leave you should you choose to feed it. Turn any corner in this world and you can find someone or something to hate. Try finding as many things to love.

  Love is disappointment, a fleeting thing. Like any high, it disappears and when it’s gone, you’re left with a thirst that you can never fully satisfy.

  Hate will put a fire in your belly only you can put out.

  The fire is the only thing keeping me alive now, keeping me breathing, keeping me moving. Everything else is death. I need to feed it, fan it, protect it, listen to it even as time wanes down to nothing.

  She sits in the deepest part of me and she has become my mother. I listen to her and follow obediently. She is why my blood is still warm and the air doesn’t taste so shallow and the voices are but a whisper these days. Focus on the fire, I tell myself again and again.

  My mind eventually turns to every one of them and their last looks, and I think about Caitlin and the dried blood and her dead eyes.

  I then think about him until I can taste how much I want to kill him on my breathe. I breathe slow and deep and savor the sweetness on my lips.

  Dwight is preaching about guitars and Cadillacs as my hand finds its way to the ring and my heart screams at the thought of killing Jody Hills.

  291 days left

  The News made me the happiest I’d been since Sarah Lyson was goodly enough to give me my first blowjob between second and third period my sophomore year. She’d told me she wanted to practice for her boyfriend, but no one could ever know. There were no arguments from me and I never told a soul. Not even after high school.

  Friends.

  Wife.

  Family.

  No one knew the name Sarah Lyson in my life. That happy and sloppy and wet blowjob had always been mine and mine alone.

  “Honey,” I’d yelled from the couch after The News had sunk into my skull, “I’m not going to work tomorrow!” I heard a delight in my voice I didn’t immediately recognize.

  I worked first shift at an office supply factory. It was hard labor and my back had been breaking there since I was nineteen, a full four years after Sarah and her big pink lips.

  After a decade working there, I became the cliché I’d always silently feared I was destined for — a potbellied, sad-to-watch man who couldn’t stand straight and whose days were hardly distinguishable from one another. My father had been that man. I’d always told myself as a boy that I would never fill his shoes. Then I blinked.

  When you have a job you hate, you pretty much have a life you hate. It’s all you think about. Even at home, my mind would be consumed with breaking down the hours of my life spent sweating for pennies. I’d spend typically forty-five to fifty hours at work a week. A work day was usually ten hours. That left another fourteen left in each day. Plus, another hour and a half of commuting. Another six or seven for sleep. The only hours left after all that are spent obsessing over those numbers and the sad breakdown of your life. No matter how you move or add or subtract the hours in your head, you always lose.

  Then there were the weekends. I’d often daydream at work about all the fishing and golfing I would do with a free day or two, but I never did any of it. I would sit around for forty-eight hours, tired and beaten from the job, unwilling to let my body do anything beyond recover and rest. When I did have a modicum of energy outside of work, it went into fixing the house, following the wife around, or just putting up with friends and family. Whether I was there or not, my work was a poison that infected every part of my living.

  My first thought when I heard The News was freedom. I would never step foot in that damn factory again. No more rat race. I closed my eyes and dreamt about the fishing, the golfing, the sleeping. My life was finally going to begin because the shackles were off.

  My boss called me for weeks. Sometimes it was five or six times a day. I could remember endless times answering the number before, pushing myself out of bed to head in for another hour or two to help things move along. Things like that didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t answer now. I never answered. I’d just stare at the number, feeling the vibrations move their way down my arm again and again, smiling at the power I’d never had before.

  Content. I was content. I’d never stood still long enough to even flirt with the concept. My mornings were filled with solitude and fishing. I never caught much, but I did catch up on a lifetime of sleeping and drinking.

  The afternoons were spent with a buddy from the same factory I’d worked at. He’d said he’d had the same immediate thought I did when he heard The News and that still makes me smile.

  We’d laugh and joke about our early retirement and drink beers and pretend we knew something about hitting golf balls.

  The sun. I’d missed it and never knew how much until I saw it again. You miss the sun when you work for a living. I did, at least. I’d go to work in the dark fog of the morning and I’d leave when the sun was saying its goodbyes to the world. The days were spent trapped inside windowless concrete walls. Inside that factory, you forgot about things like trees and plants and the wind and the sky.

  It’s hard to tell when it changed. Maybe it was a month, maybe two. Time became a fuzzy concept for me rather quickly. I woke up and felt a foreign sensation come over me. I was not tired. I was not sore. I was fully rested. I was ready.

  Getting out of bed in the morning had always been a forced activity. It was something that the powers that be — whether work, or parents, or wives — had been forcing me to do since I could walk.

  That day, I didn’t wake up because I needed to. I woke up because my body was ready to wake up. It was a strange feeling and it made me nauseous.

  My wall of sleep had always been cracked by an alarm or some reminder of the hectic day to come. Now, lying in bed with no resistance to consciousness, I didn’t know what to do.

  I laid there for a long time. I listened to the footsteps of my wife in the kitchen, the humming of the digital clock next to the bed. I even listened to the whizzing of the fan above me.

  I got up to piss when my bladder began to pinch and then made my way to the kitchen and sat at the dining room table. Sitting there in silence, my eyes made their way down to my underwear. First, I realized I hadn’t bothered to put pants on and then I realized there was a glaring wet spot.

  “You going fishing this morning?” my wife asked, her voice as sing-songy as ever.

  “No,” I heard myself say. My wife turned to me with a quizzical look.

  “Are you golfing with Frank today?”

  “No,” I heard myself say again. My eyes made their way back between my legs. I wondered if she saw the dampness.

  “What are you going to do then?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said, the dark spot making my stomach cramp and my head sore. I headed back to the bedroom.

  I didn’t want to fish. I didn’t want to see Frank. I didn’t want to hit another fucking golf ball. It all made my stomach churn just to think about. I laid back on the bed, the electric hum of the clock on the nightstand consuming my attention, the noise growing louder and louder and swinging in my head, around and around.

  My wife checked on me a couple times and asked if I was feeling well. I said I wasn’t sure in a stern voice that told her to go away each time. Even her presence was making me sick, her voice scratching at my head with an unrelenting force it had never carried before.

  I laid there, the smooth white ceiling consuming my attention until finally my eyes burned enough to force themselves closed. When I woke, the sun was gone and my wife lay asleep next to me. I got up and went down to the kitchen and ate something. I didn’
t turn the light on, instead feeling more relaxed sitting in the shadows of the house.

  I stayed up the rest of the night. Sitting in front of the television, my senses numbed. A daze of nothingness took hold of me to the point where the noises sounded like nothing more than mumbling and buzzing.

  The morning came and I shuffled myself back to bed. After what was maybe another week or so of losing my mind, I forced myself out of the house and grabbed my golf clubs on the way out. I didn’t make it past hole three.

  I told myself I would go fishing, but I got to the lake and didn’t even cast a line. I just sat there staring at the fish roaming around in the clear water for some time and then left. I drove around for a while after, the bigness of everything making my heart quicken and cramp. I felt frightened and worried outside my house.

  Time rolled by and my wife busied herself, always finding something to occupy her time while I laid around and watched television and slept. The days, the hours, the minutes — they all melded together.

  I can’t remember saying or doing much of anything after that. The only moment that stands out for me is on a morning when I sat at the dining room table, wearing my usual piss soaked drawers wondering if I should go back to bed while my wife busied herself outside in the garden. I sat there blankly until a memory came from out of nowhere and projected itself in my mind. Perhaps I’d forgotten it because as it played out in my head, it was like I was experiencing it for the first time.

  I’d shown up to work late one day, which was unusual for me. Steve, an older fellow who had nearly thirty years in at the factory, arrived just after me. As I entered the building, he jumped out of a taxi and followed me inside. Joe, our manager, was waiting for us as we clocked in. He asked me why I was late and I said sorry and that it wouldn’t happen again. I gritted my teeth and cursed my life and readied myself to begin the day.

  Then I heard him ask Steve the same question.

  “Why are you late, Steve?” Steve burped and struggled for a moment before opening his mouth.

  “Drunk,” he said. “I’m drunk. Lost track of time.”

  “You can’t come to work drunk,” Joe said, taking a step back and covering his nose from the stench of liquor emanating from Steve’s pores and lips. Steve shot Joe a look of genuine confusion. His brow furrowed like he was trying hard to solve a problem in front of him.

  “How the fuck else am I supposed to make it through work and deal with your sorry ass?” he said.

  I had to walk away because I was laughing so hard. I laughed about it all day long to myself, looking like someone losing his mind around the factory. I even saw Steve later that day working like nothing had happened. Joe stayed away from him and it was never mentioned again.

  The moments played through my head as I sat there at the dining room table and I laughed as hard as I knew I had when I’d first heard the slurred words leave Steve’s mouth.

  “That was pretty funny,” I said to no one and then went back to bed.

  266 days left

  “Once upon a time our job was to protect and serve.”

  “What is it now?”

  Officer Stone shrugged as if the answer didn’t matter all that much.

  “To clean up the messes, I guess,” he said, “and to make sure people don’t go too crazy.”

  She ran her fingers across the rim of the steaming cup of coffee in front of her, trying as hard as she could to soak in the words of Stone, to accept them as truth.

  He’s in charge of her.

  He has more experience than her.

  He has seen more of the world from behind a badge and gun.

  Still, try as she might, she found it hard to boil her thoughts in the same bleakness as her training officer.

  The cackling storm out of Stone’s radio interrupted his teachings. She listened intently to the voice on the other end and watched as Stone responded.

  “I hate when they interrupt breakfast.” Stone left the table, and she paid the bill and then followed him to the car.

  Blood was spurting faster and faster from her heart with each step she took. She caught herself smiling as she buckled herself in. She looked to Stone, whose eyes were disapproving. He shook his head, turned over the engine and began driving.

  He wasn’t in a rush. That was for sure. She wanted to reach over and push his foot down until she could no more, but she knew it wasn’t in her to turn such wants into reality.

  “When we get there,” he said, “give it a few minutes.”

  “A few minutes?” she asked.

  “I’ve taken these calls before. It’s pretty much all we get anymore. Give it a few minutes.” They sat together the rest of the drive in silence.

  The car slowed and Stone stopped when they were parked on the side of the street next to a two story, blue house in a litter of other two story, blue houses. She heard a loud thud and the muffled sounds of a man yelling.

  “He’s been like this for a while,” Stone said. “Like I said, give it a few minutes.”

  She forced her hand away from the car door, not understanding Stone’s words, not being able to absorb them the way she knew she was supposed to.

  Seconds passed as more muffled yelling and thuds rippled through the air. She looked to Stone who was now hiding behind sunglasses and half asleep.

  She kept listening until her leg began shaking and she could feel a heated scratching crawling its way across her skin. She watched as she opened the door and closed it behind her. She drew her service weapon, a reliable and simple Glock 9mm, the fleeting cold of the plastic grip against her skin giving her nerves a shot of adrenaline.

  She kept her finger outside of the trigger and switched the safety off.

  “The fuck are you doing?” said Stone, his voice a whispered yell as he tried not to spook the man inside. Seeing the fear leaking from his pores, she quickly swung her back to Stone and began moving toward the house, the yelling from inside growing louder and clearer with each step.

  The moment had played out in her mind countless times before. She’d dreamt about it, had nightmares about it. It was a moment in time that could not be expressed properly with words or be contained by single emotions. She’d known deep down it was coming and she’d dreaded it and yet longed for it at the same time.

  The wall exploded and her ears screamed and she found herself huddled to the ground, her mind, her body, her senses frenzied, mixing together in a storm that was difficult to control. She knew only one thing for sure in her desperation — the moment was here.

  She’d always expected a wave of grand emotion to come with it — perhaps fear, adrenaline, hopefully courage, or even a mix of it all to create some new sensation unknown to her before.

  When the second bang overtook the room, and decapitated the small table next to her, she realized she felt none of those things. Her heart pounded and her mind had trouble keeping up with it all, but in that pit in her stomach where one’s deepest and truest emotions lie, there was nothing profound or new.

  You are going to die. The words echoed again and again in her mind. You are going to die and it’s going to be for nothing, at the hands of just another redneck on an end of the world bender. She should have run. She should have never come in the house. She should have listened to Stone. She could have written a book in those brief moments of all the things she should have done.

  Another shot was released from the shotgun and it hit the same spot as before, tearing apart a portion of wall. She pushed herself away from the doorway to the living room, fragments of wood and wallpaper resting in her hair and mouth. Coughing, she saw the doorway to the outside world and Stone only a few feet away. She could go back. She could turn back time.

  Her eyes moved away and back to the doorway to the living room of the house. She pushed herself against the wall previously given a makeover by the man with the gun. She rolled around the idea of saying something, talking to the man, but even she knew things like that didn’t work anymore.

&nb
sp; She checked the safety on the 9mm, holding the weapon tighter now, her knuckles white, and slid the clip out to reassure herself that the magazine was full. She slipped it back in, hearing the smooth scraping of it taking its proper place and then the click letting her know the weapon was ready. She pulled back the hammer slow until she heard the brief snap of a round being chambered. She then let the hammer slam itself forward, the machine now ready to function as one with her.

  Crying. She could hear the man’s sobs moving their way through the house. She was disturbed that it was audible enough to hear through the ringing tearing at her ears.

  She weighed her options while listening to the man. He’d fired three shots since she’d been there, but he could still have plenty of rounds left to unload. More weapons, too. The only chance was to move fast and to move smooth. She lifted herself to her knees and closed her eyes and touched her weapon to her head, the cold of the unused gun surprisingly comforting.

  The count ticked away in her head.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  It couldn’t have been seconds

  Seconds were too long, too sure

  Turning the corner, she felt a reality take hold where time was different, slower

  He was big

  His gun was big

  She didn’t fully line her front sight post to her pupil

  She aimed square at his chest

  He was a bigger, easier target than the silhouettes she’d spent years shooting

  A moment

  No, not a moment

  Something different, something smaller, more abstract swallowed them both and their guns

  She could hear her heart stop in anticipation, could feel the lift of cold adrenaline

  She squeezed, didn’t pull

  The recoil was part of her, her body absorbing and moving with the impact

  Excitement

  Then

  Again

  Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze

  Then

  She catapulted backwards, feeling the hard ground swallow her