The Next

by Rafe Haze

  I could close the curtain again.

  The disposal was still growling from the throat of the sink. I switched it, and the grinding stopped. The contrasting hush in tandem with the sunset hues triggered a hairline crack in that mossy, wet wall that separated me from the brown-green muck of my memories. Nothing specific. Just a tingle of an awakening.

  I took a few steps to the open window.

  It’d been so long. Did I really want to look? It’s just a courtyard. The buildings across the way held no more significance than any other groupings of buildings of the seventy-two thousand blocks in New York City. What was my hesitation? What was I battling?

  I inched closer to the opening in the curtains. As my eyes adjusted to the novelty of focusing long distance, the outside came into view. The raw unadorned backside of the buildings once again appeared, some of their eyes glowing with lights, some of them closed, some winking as their occupants moved.

  And there they were— the neighbors.

  My eyes found their way to the apartment on the top floor on the left.

  The Couch Potatoes. Slumped with their rounded bellies side by side in the comfy brown couch, eyes pointed toward the television. The coffee table contained the remote control, two plates of comfort food, two large pint glasses of soda, a loaf of bread and a small plate with a butter stick. The two men didn’t talk to each other. Their routine hadn’t changed at all since I last saw them, and watching them troubled me.

  Lazy brains, lazy bodies, lazy imaginations, like sloths sunning their bellies on a rock six p.m. to midnight, every night of every week of every month of every year. Certainly I was hardly one to disdain the Couch Potatoes in terms of immobility, but at least I had the kinetic dynamic of anger, sadness, and self-loathing to feed me rather than the passive mind mush of corporate sponsorship, reality scum, contrived plots, and muted performances by hair models slash actresses.

  I saw a flash of a lighter in the Little Old Man’s apartment. He was, still living, lying in his bed completely exposed. He looked like a skeleton lightly wrapped in white gauze. He was lighting grass in a small red glass pipe, and struggling with flicking the lighter between his trembling fingers. He tried one more time and accidently tipped the pipe upside down. The weed drifted to the floor. I could almost hear him grumble some century old expletive and proceed to refill the pipe from the Ziploc bag. He was just about out of his supply. I guess the old black man with the white mustache would be at his door soon. I knew I ought to have felt it was nice to see the Little Old Man still breathing, but instead I was just irritated he hadn’t kicked it yet. I wedged the pillow back into the corner of the window to block the view of his apartment.

  The lights flicked on in the Broadway dancer’s apartment, and my eyes shifted over. The smooth white body of the dancer bounced lithely onto the couch, placing a sandwich on the coffee table. He was clothed only in tighty whities. Must not be dancing in a show again if he’s eating wheat at this hour. He covered his lap with his laptop. His eyes darted back and forth between the computer screen and the television. He reached for the sandwich and took a large bite, causing a dollop of what looked like jelly to drip down his chest.

  Pale white skin…blood dripping down Nathan’s abdomen…

  My brain had been so contained in the vault of my apartment, so confined to uninterrupted, grey self-reflection and shadowed, unpunctured bubbles of thought it seemed to jump at the opportunity to free associate when presented with even a mild stimulus.

  A Swiss Army knife blade grazing the shirtless boy’s cheek…

  There was a damn good reason why I kept the curtains closed. I moved my hand to the edge of the curtain and gripped its soft thickness.

  I could re-seal the vault.

  I looked back at the less evocative apartment of the Couch Potatoes, and all at once I found a surprising comfort in their inactivity. The longer my gaze lingered on the Couch Potatoes, the more I envied them. How comfortable they were with each other. The hypnotizing television was something they both agreed to be the tranquilizer of their life, and they had no contention about it. Plates of pasta, chicken, a loaf of bread, the remote control, gentle shadows in the quiet flickering TV light. They needed nothing else to define the fabric of their relationship.

  To be content with another. To require no more than what you have and to know you require no more. I had no idea what this state was like. Was it earned? Genetic? Just luck? Was it, perhaps, a template molded by your parents’ practices during your youth?

  A white porcelain dish shattering against the brushed steel handle of the wooden cupboard.

  Paul and I grew up in a violent household—parents throwing dishes at each other in coffee and/or alcohol-fueled arguments, then ripping us from our Legos and Hot Wheels, strapping us in the backseat of the Volkswagen, and speeding angrily away to someone else’s strange house. As angrily as one could speed away in a putt-putt-putt Volkswagen bus anyway. Then returning the following afternoon, only to have the drama repeat the following evening. Day after night after day after night, shattered dishes and skid marks on the pavement.

  Our father had obliterated the television screen with the mixer and never replaced either, so we had zero Dukes of Hazzard, zero Knight Rider, zero Dallas and Falcon Crest, and zero baked anything, but we had my grandmother’s old first edition Enid Blyton Adventure Books. Paul and I would escape to the State Park and live out adventure stories we’d read: Valley of Adventure, Castle of Adventure, Island of Adventure, River of Adventure, Sea of Adventure. Our adventures were epic, and we educated ourselves with every tree, cave, bush, volcanic remnant of rock, path, creek, valley, fallen log, and shadow of that park, integrating it all into our stories. We were the masters of the kingdom. Princes of the wooded valleys. At least until one of our parents shrieked for us to come home, his or her strained voice echoing over miles through the trees.

  City folks would visit our kingdom, completely unsuspecting that every step they clumsily took would be spied on by agile nine and twelve-year-olds just feet away in the bushes or above them in the crooks of the tree branches. A family’s picnic became a drug smuggler’s secret rendezvous. A jogger with her dog became a femme-fatale on a covert operation to be followed and uprooted.

  But the two teenagers that visited our park on the hot, dry afternoon in June changed our lives forever.

  One teenager called the other Jessie. I never got the other one’s name. Paul and I spotted them settling down in an isolated glen from the point we called King’s Rock. We went down to the creek, crossed the slippery tree that had fallen across it last winter, and snuck up to the glen. Jessie and the other boy were lying close to each other in the shade head-to-toe. There was nothing more delicious to my brother and me than the irony of people thinking they were alone when they were decidedly not. We relished our ability and dexterity to scale trees, burrow through bushes, blend into the shadows, and traverse the grass, leaves, and acorns on the ground in silence.

  The teenager named Jessie lit up a joint and passed it to the other. Both teenagers were athletic and tall, in jeans and sneakers. The boy with no name had a yellow t-shirt on, while Jessie’s shirt was stuffed in his back pocket. Jessie had smooth skin, colored naturally by a fearlessness of the sun. His chest was toned and just beginning to grow hair. Jessie was dark-haired with Italian features while the other boy was a rough-looking blond. Paul and I put our feet in the knots of the pine tree and climbed to a point where we could clearly see them, but we remained obscured by shadows and bushy branches.

  Marijuana was mysterious to us. We recognized the pungency of the smell from other visitors to our kingdom, but we’d never tried it ourselves. Never had a need to with imaginations as active as ours. We nestled in the branches for several minutes, listening to Jessie and the other boy mumbling. Jessie seemed more talkative then the other.

  The boy withdrew a magazine that they took turns flipping through. The magazine had photos of naked women with pendulous breasts. From one
page to another, Jessie and the boy would alternately laugh and then remain transfixed on an image for an extended couple of moments, wordlessly, moist lips slightly apart.

  Jessie reached for the other boy’s crotch.

  The other boy slapped his hand away.

  “Fuck you,” the boy said, standing up.

  Some tones of voices tease, and others pierce to the marrow of your bones like a cold steel syringe. Paul and I had heard enough arguments from our parents to know the type of voice that precedes appliances flying across the kitchen and cracking tiles.

  Jessie laughed at him and told him to relax.

  The boy remained standing, arms crossed, with an agitated stern look on his face. Jessie stopped laughing and looked him directly in the eyes. He righted himself, kneeling directly in front of the boy. They stared at each other in this duel-leveled stance for at least a minute. Then Jessie stretched out his arm, slowly and smoothly, toward the standing boy. The boy eyed him wearily and angrily but did not move away.

  At last Jessie’s hand made contact with his knee. The standing boy’s breath grew shorter, but he remained still, his limbs stiff. Jessie’s hand slowly inched its way up the boy’s jeans. As Jessie’s hand neared his upper thigh, the boy’s crotch began to bulge.

  Jessie boldly put his hand on the bulge.

  Suddenly the boy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small Swiss Army knife, red and shiny. Paul and I usually carried similar pocketknives of our own to shear off the thorns of blackberry vines for our bush forts. We kept them hidden from our parents under the loose tile behind the toilet in the basement bathroom. We’d neglected to bring them that day. The blond boy flipped open the large blade of his and held it in his right hand. Apart from that efficiently executed movement, his legs remained planted in the same spot. He whispered slowly and deliberately, “What the fuck d’ya think you’re doing?”

  Paul looked at me. The excitement of spying had turned to fear. He motioned with his head that we should back down the tree, but I immediately saw the impossibility of this. Climbing up a tree is one thing. Climbing down is more challenging because you cannot anticipate which tree branches your feet will land on, and we’d likely make enough noise descending to be discovered. Paul and I redirected our fascination to the scene below.

  Jessie hadn’t removed his hand from the boy’s crotch. Instead, he looked up directly into the boy’s eyes and unfastened his belt buckle. The knife remained suspended as Jessie put his fingers on the boy’s fly and pulled it down tooth by tooth. The boy gasped as his penis finally pushed through the jeans, its head protruding from the top of the waistband of his white underwear. His knuckles were turning white. His face was also turning white with an expression of ferocity that made my heart race, beads of sweat lining his forehead.

  “Stop,” the blond boy forced out as if he were being strangled.

  Jessie did not stop. He pulled the band of the underwear down the shaft like a flag lowered reverently down a pole at sunset. The boy’s dick jolted forward onto Jessie’s face, but Jessie remained with a stillness that betrayed either the terror of a crouched doe before the pounce of a lion or the predatory assuredness of the lion readying to pounce. With the thick red meat pressed against the side of his nose and the vibrating knob half an inch from his eye, Jessie was frozen, waiting for some cue from the standing boy to proceed or withdraw.

  The standing boy growled under his breath, brought the knife down with deliberate intent to Jessie’s cheek, and held it there. The only movement was the boy’s penis twitching as it engorged even more, the blood rushing through the shaft and slamming into the head in steady forceful surges.

  Jessie remained suspended at the point of the knife for a full thirty seconds. Then his tongue emerged from between his plump red lips and extended toward the shaft. When its tip finally touched the side of the boy’s erection, the standing boy drew in an enormous breath.

  Then with the suddenness of a rattler strike, the boy grabbed a handful of Jessie’s dark hair and pulled his head back, shoving his stiff rod into Jessie’s mouth until his lips and nose were smothered in the boy’s pubic hair. The boy’s primal grunts echoed off the bark of the tree, the cool of the rock, the green of the brush, the ripple of the water. Drool and precum leaked out of the side of Jessie’s mouth as he suctioned the boy’s dick. The undulation grew more savage. Jessie’s eyes were pressed shut, and he snaked his hands up the convulsing boy’s thick hamstrings, cupping his hard ass and squeezing. The red shaft appeared and then disappeared into Jessie’s mouth with mounting speed as the boy thrust faster and faster, grasping Jessie’s hair like a jockey holding a horse’s mane.

  The knife the boy gripped sliced Jessie’s cheek. Blood dripped down from the point and flew into the air with every motion of the boy’s hip. As the knife gouged into his cheek, Jessie’s motion changed. He moved his hands to the front of the boy’s hairy thighs, and tried to push himself away from the knife, but the boy’s hold was too firm. More blood dripped off the point of the knife, spattering Jessie’s neck, the white skin of his chest, and the hair leading down to the pink hole of his belly button.

  Jessie gasped unintelligibly, his protests, muffled by the triangle of blond pubic hair repeatedly slamming into his face. The standing boy moaned gutturally, fiercely, both audibly and stifled as if screaming into a pillow. His pistoning becoming violent. He arched his throat and thrust his mouth to the sky, his red face streaked white with tension, eyes strained shut.

  He released his load into Jessie’s mouth ferociously, jetting with rage into the back of Jessie’s throat. His entire body stiffened—his calves, thighs, hips, abdomen, chest, arms, shoulder, neck, and skull convulsing in spasms as if reacting to sharp electrical shocks.

  Hot white thick creamy cords of cum spurted out of the corners of Jessie’s mouth. The white globs mixed with spittle, pooling on his neck and shoulder with the smears of blood. The standing boy let out a final scream of anger and release. Tears formed in the corner of his closed eyes, and his mouth was opened wide as if calling to the skies. The boy opened his eyes. Breathing heavily, he focused on something in the close distance.

  That something was me…

  Yappity yap yap.

  Minnie snapped me out of my zoning.

  A bleeding nipple on a cold shivering skinny white twinkie boy…

  I turned my head sharply away from the Couch Potatoes, two sloths that had no idea what their innocuous routine conjured in me.

  Yap yap yap yap.

  Shut the fuck up, Minnie!

  Knock knock.

  The hell!

  I could see the dark lumps of two shiny shoes through the crack beneath my door. My vault was being breached yet again.

  Chapter Six

  Sergeant Marzoli stood at the doorway with a white paper bag, a cocky smile, and a devious glint in his eye.

  “Me again. You looked like you could use something organic.” He withdrew a sandwich from the bag. “Free range turkey, organic baby green shit, cranberry, multi-something-grain bread. Good for you. May I?”

  No.

  He opened the door all the way and entered.

  He crossed to the window and looked out. The last rays of the sun settled on his rugged face, highlighting the perfection of his nose, his cheeks, his eyebrows, his forehead, his stubborn chin. He was a complete stranger to me and utterly unwelcome, yet his apparent insistence on developing a rapport beyond checking the box on a list of tenants neighboring his missing person appealed to my fundamental rejection of propriety. My monotonous mental self-flagellation needed to be interrupted, and I had no idea how much until I heard myself offering this stranger a drink.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Fresca.”

  “Wine?”

  “Fresca.”

  “Water, please.”

  I poured the little fucker water and handed it to him.

  Wine? Was he off duty now?

  “How did you get through the
lobby door?”

  “Not happy to see me?” he chided with a wicked glint in his eye, commencing the completely ineffective man-flirting once again.

  “Happiness is not quite my thing at the moment.”

  “Lock’s broken.”

  “Oh, but that makes me fucking overjoyed.”

  Marzoli had already moved on to exploring something new, giving my sarcasm no purchase. He was scanning the apartments across the way. His body language was still. His eyes were as bright and focused as a laser. I could feel the massive kinetic energy of his brain taking in and relating and associating and calculating and concluding and storing and discarding. As smart as I gave myself credit for being, I was in the presence of a loftier IQ. Brilliance radiated from his deep brown eyes. Within seconds, I started imagining squashing him like beef through a meat grinder. Not only was he a lady-killer, he could make smart men feel inadequate without even speaking. Why the hell did this man have to return here? And what the hell was he looking for?

  After being ignored to the point I doubted he was aware he was in my apartment with me waiting, I asked, “Didn’t I answer all your questions?”

  “I made fun of your relationship earlier with what’s her name.” He paused, keeping his eyes steady on the outside, “and I feel I should apologize.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Did you kill Nathan Ridges?”

  God, I despised how much I liked his noodle.

  “No, sir. But you said he was missing, not dead.”

  “I lied.”

  “I see.”

  And I did. Had I been the killer, my defenses might have been a bit more lowered had Nathan been presented as only missing. Marzoli looked me squarely in the eye, his big brown eyes and feminine long lashes contrasted with the masculinity of his jaw, five o’clock shadow, and muscular neck.

  “He was found in the Hudson river. Throat slit.”

  “I haven’t left the apartment in months.”