Curse: The end has only just begun

by Rich Hayden

  “What the fuck are you looking at?” she snarled to no one in particular as she emerged out into the chill of winter.

  Ali shuffled into her car and fumbled for the ignition. She made her way out of the parking lot and onto the main road before she thought to turn on the headlights. Every light was piercing, and all the other cars whirled by as though moving at the speed of sound, but not Ali’s. To her, it felt as though it would require an eternity of driving to make the short trip back home. After a couple of swerves over the center line, she managed to find the cobblestone of her street. She left her car with a crooked placement and cracked the door off a signpost as she exited the vehicle. Over the slick sidewalk, she practically resorted to a crawl as she made her way to the front door.

  As Ali staggered up the stairs from the darkened space of the bookstore, she realized Amil was already home. The sight he was treated to was upsetting. Looking beaten, like a convicted criminal, Ali leaned up against the inside of the door and stared at Amil through bleary eyes. Her sexy look was wrinkled, her makeup was smeared, and her body stunk of a mix of smoke, gin and perfume. Her eyes were half open, and a neglected cigarette dangled from her mouth. She tossed her purse in the corner of the room and made her way back to where this forgettable evening had started.

  “You wanna tell me what this is all about?” he questioned.

  “Try being sensitive, Amil,” Ali sniveled, as she sat on the couch.

  “Should I be? I don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “I fucked up, that’s what I did. I’m a goddamn drug addict and I’m drunk,” she said.

  “Is that all you did?”

  “Is that how it is? Are you just gonna think of yourself? Do you wanna know if I fucked another guy? Huh? Maybe if you’d fuck me once in a while.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ali.”

  “I didn’t, okay! I got hammered, hit on some dude, blew a couple of pills up my nose and then I thought of you, so would you please sit next to me?” begged Ali. Although she deeply loved him, Ali wished that Amil would make an effort to be a bit more compassionate. Especially in moments such as this, when the temptation to hurl something in his direction was near irresistible.

  “Alright,” agreed Amil. He never quite knew the right things to say, but in this instance, he wasn’t exactly searching for the words. He felt as though Ali was hiding her behavior behind old excuses, as he struggled to understand the intangible affliction of depression that crept up on her from time to time.

  “I’m sorry. Sometimes I just get down on myself. Today was bad...I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you need to see a doctor,” said Amil.

  Ali laughed in frustration. “They’re gonna give me more drugs. I’m not taking drugs.”

  “It’s medicine. There’s a difference.”

  “Not to me. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “Okay, okay. Then we’ll figure this out. Look, if we have to scale things back, we will.”

  “What about money? We need that,” said Ali.

  “I’d rather have you happy. Hey, we’ll manage, we always have.”

  With snow still caked onto the bottoms of her boots, Ali curled up on the couch and rested her head on Amil’s lap. She closed her eyes, and, within seconds, she passed out. Amil flicked on the TV. There was a rerun of SportsCenter, and the topic being discussed was some possible rule changes that might take place during this year’s upcoming baseball season. This came as a cruel coincidence. His exile from baseball usually didn’t bother him much, but this certainly wasn’t the time. In a way, this felt like their first meeting in the diner all those years ago. Two damaged people set before each other with nothing to say. Amil turned the TV back off and joined Ali in forgetting about the day.

  As the invincible hammers of time beat the nails of the past into memory, the space between the couple became an abyss. Amil could feel as the gap widened with every day that crept by, but there was something that he dwelled upon that made healing a difficult process. He was shocked at how blind he had been to her escalating battle with depression. It became so clear to him. Ali hadn’t been happy for months, maybe more than a year’s time, and he had done nothing to help her.

  A swamp of guilt swelled in him, but a retrospective mind keep him from moving forward. Instead, he agonized over all the little things, and the silent cries for help that he had passed off as mood swings or nothing of consequence at all. They had been together a long time, and, as quiet nights found them with more frequency, Amil had ignored the obvious, as he cast the muted evenings into the realm of nothing left to say.

  They had done less, laughed less, made love less and, still, Amil had chalked up this lethargy as a symptom of age and routine. But there was more to it than that, something deeper, something darker, which had served to drive them apart. Amil came to see the frost as it settled over their relationship. He hated the apathy that they bounced off each other the way they once used to exchange energy and love.

  A dark winter was finally lifting, but it did not go alone. With its passing, the season robbed hope from the couple and replaced it with tribulation and anguish. A string of bad investments, an unexpected dip in business, and a rotten run of luck had left the pair desperate for money. The Back Shelf Bookstore cut its hours, and the coffee bar operated on weekends only. This loosening of responsibilities could have been a boon for Ali, but instead, she was forced back to a waitress’s work and the thin hope of a more steady pay. They saw less of each other, but when they shared company, the time was usually spent sleeping, bickering, or mired in a pained absence of speech.

  As spring rose from the earth, Amil drove as slowly as he could on his way home from work. His hours had been slashed, and he dreaded having to relay this news to Ali. It wasn’t the money, or the fact that they would be forced to again sacrifice barely necessary amenities, he just didn’t feel up to the challenge of combating another breakdown. She’d had three pretty wicked meltdowns recently. Amil was counting, and he was reaching his breaking point. The fact that he entertained the thought of leaving Ali in her greatest time of need made Amil hate himself. But the truth remained that, in over a decades’ time, he had never felt further away from her than he did right then.

  Amil walked through the kitchen and threw his keys upon the counter. He poured himself a glass of juice and stared into the cup in his hand. He gulped down the tart liquid, rubbed his face, and ascended the stairs up toward their bedroom. He found Ali there. She was still in front of the mirror, adding the final touches to her makeup.

  “They cut my hours,” he blurted out, not knowing how else to start this awful conversation.

  “Remember when, no matter how bad your day was, you would give me a kiss as soon as you came home?” asked Ali. “I miss that.”

  “I miss a lot of stuff.”

  “What the hell happened?” she wondered aloud as she plunked herself down next to him on the bed.

  “Life.”

  “This ain’t life, Amil. Everything happens too fast now. It seems like just yesterday that everything was great. Now everything sucks.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know, I really don’t know. We’re barely getting by as it is. I just wish things were simpler, like they used to be.”

  “What do you mean?” questioned Amil.

  “Like when we lived on Middle Street. Sure that place was a dump and we were poor, but I’ve never been happier in my whole life. It was like it was just me and you, and nothing else mattered.”

  “We can get there again, happy, I mean. This is just gonna be hard.”

  “Fuck, you always say shit like that,” she whispered.

  “Like what?”

  “You never actually offer a solution. You just say things are gonna get better, or we’ll be okay, but you can’t just wish away all this crap. It doesn’t go away just because you ignore it.”

  “I know. But I don’t know what to do. I’m doing all I can just to keep u
s afloat. You’re not making it any easier, ya know?” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s just hard to get motivated to change with you moping around all the time.”

  “I can’t believe you would say that to me. Do you think I enjoy feeling like this every day?” she snapped at him.

  “Maybe you do, Ali, maybe you do. Because if you didn’t, you might actually get help.”

  “You’ll never understand. I’m going to work.”

  “Come on, I’ll drive you,” Amil offered in a hushed tone, as he tried to make amends.

  “Don’t fucking touch me!” screamed Ali, as she shook his hand loose from her arm and continued down the stairs and further away from him.

  Suffering mutual disintegration, they navigated their way through another month of muck and misery with nary a word mixed in with all the waste. The guilt that Amil once felt for failing to recognize Ali’s somberness for a legitimate disease quickly faded, and was replaced with anger. He quietly blamed her for the decline of the bookstore. He harbored resentment for her, for this was the second time in his life that a passion he had nurtured was torn away. Ali, meanwhile, sunk into her depression with a lugubrious fervor and sniped at Amil for the way in which he chewed his food and a horde of other even more trivial transgressions. It was as though all love between them had vanished, and all that remained was a couple who had stayed together for years past the expiration date of their union.

  “Aren’t you even gonna say hi?” she taunted as Amil returned home from work.

  “Don’t fucking start with me, Ali.”

  “Just leave.”

  “This is my house, too. So why don’t you pack your shit and get out?” he asked with an impatient gesture of his hand.

  “I will, if that’s what it takes. I’m leaving you, Amil,” she stated.

  “I’m surprised you have the ambition to do anything with all the sitting around on your fat ass that you do. Isn’t leaving me gonna interrupt all the time you set aside to feel helpless and sorry for yourself?”

  His remark shot Ali from the couch like lightning through the fattened underbelly of a cloud and planted her mere inches from his face.

  “I can’t believe I used to love you,” she growled.

  “I can’t believe I still love you. I just can’t stand the sight of you anymore.”

  Ali shoved him. She indulged old habits of throwing items at the target of her ire, and raked her nails across Amil’s face. In the grip of rage, Amil did something that he could have never fathomed he would ever do. With all the vigor he once used to hurl a baseball, Amil smashed his fist across Ali’s face. She fell to the floor and started to cry as visions of Max descended over her. Her bottom lip was split, and the fissure leaked a stream of blood onto the carpet. She could feel with her tongue that his punishment had cracked the denture she had worn since recovering from Max’s assault. She brought a hand up to her face and twitched as a warm rush of blood ran over her fingers. As she gazed into her reddened hand, Ali experienced the mightiest sensation of betrayal and loss that she had ever felt.

  She raised her eyes to Amil. They were polished with a glaze of tears. The old scar upon her face was speckled in new blood. As he looked into her face, a face that he had rendered damaged and pained, Amil knew that he would never escape the condemning glare of her blue gems. What he did was more than a punch, more than a brutal affliction applied in a moment of rage. What he did, no, what he had become, was everything that Ali feared and despised. He was once her source of solace and safety. Now he had joined the ranks of her nightmares and mistakes.

  Amil had never before prayed to God, but in that terrible moment, he prayed for any god that might hear him to strike him down and commit his eternal soul to everlasting torture. Even such damnation didn’t sound harsh enough. He could never take back what he had done. He could never atone for this most heinous and regrettable of acts.

  Amid a crushing silence, Amil turned away from Ali. She lay on the floor, her mouth glistening with blood and her eyes wetted with tears as they stared into him, but he could not bear to stay. He left Ali alone on the floor, and walked out of the house like a corpse tugged on by strings. The door didn’t close behind him. As Amil stepped away, the image left behind was as clear as the landscape before his wide eyes. With a haunted clarity, he could see Ali crumpled on her side, legs draped over one another and her arms folded up against her chest. He could see the pain as it distorted her face and the beads of sweat as they matted her hair. Amil couldn’t shake the vision of the blood as it ran a twisted course around her chin before dropping to the rug in rivulets of betrayal.

  What happened next must have happened to someone else, because Amil’s mind retained no memory of his actions. He didn’t recall getting into his truck or putting it in gear. He had no recollection of which direction he chose, or whether or not the radio was left to play. He didn’t know how long of a drive he took. He had no knowledge of how fast he drove, or if he was mired in a traffic jam. His brain stored no image of the bus he cut off, and he remembered nothing of the accident that totaled his truck and sunk him into a coma for two weeks.

  When he awoke, Amil was informed that he had suffered a punctured lung, an assortment of cracked ribs, and a broken collarbone. His left arm had been flayed to bits by an onslaught of glass and steel, and the back of his skull was marked by a fresh fracture. The bones contained within the skin of his right leg were turned to dust, and his foot had been bent in a direction that would have made a blind man wince. He lost a significant measure of vision in one eye, and the left side of his face became a gulag for scars.

  As he lay dazed in a hospital room filled with the sounds of monitors, he looked to Ali as she sat by his side. In his weakened state, he couldn’t do much other than stare, but the condition of his skinny, grey, and hairless form conveyed his emotions perfectly. Apparently, she had been there the whole time, holding Amil’s hand and gently stroking his shaved head. Whatever damage he had done to her had faded from her face, but the solemn look in her eyes told of the ugliness that filled that fateful day. But for all the misery the two had worked so doggedly to craft, it had taken a series of devastating events to remind them of the true force of love.

  Amil tried to speak, but Ali delicately shushed his attempt and begged him to save his strength. She ran her fingers across his forehead and whispered something to him before placing her hand in his. He squeezed her thin fingers and watched as she turned away. Ali peered out the window as the invincible urge to cry twisted her face. She was illuminated by bars of light as the sun shone through the slats of the blinds, and, as Amil saw her striped in amber, he felt what it meant to hate.

  A feverish animosity for himself and all the ruin he had wrought was born within Amil. He knew Ali had been with him for most every second of his newfound shiftless state, and he was stung by her loyalty and devotion. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she so much had neglected to send flowers, but to stay with him and to endure this torture seemed cruelly unfair. It was he who had brought this down upon them, and, through his actions, Ali was again made to suffer. Though he still lacked the capacity to express himself, Amil wished for Ali to leave him. He desired for her to at last be free of their acidic relationship and emancipate herself from the burden that he had become.

  As he lay within the stale air of his dimly lit room, Amil recalled all the fractures of their union and his laziness as he had stepped over them. The vision of Ali on the floor with blood upon her lips never left his mind. In fact, it seemed to be all that he could remember. It was a movie with no buildup or climax. It coldly looped that one tragic scene, and its repetition forged Amil onto a guilt so heavy it could have dragged the whole world down to hell.

  Though he remembered none of the efforts that were applied in the salvaging of his life, Amil felt like a machine that had been rebuilt with inferior parts. His bald head supported a patchwork of scars, and his leg was rebuilt using a
cold collaboration of steel bars and screws. His shredded arm had healed into an unsightly mass of lumpy skin and differently hued scars, while his insides felt like they only operated on a primal and crude basis.

  During the months that followed, Ali found strength that she never knew existed as she accompanied Amil to all the physical therapy and doctors’ appointments that filled their calendar. She took on the responsibilities of a medical staff, and sleep became a shy and irregular friend, but Ali was as strong with devotion as Amil was physically weak. She became ever patient, and gave him a lifetime’s worth of encouragement and motherly affection. She helped him to shower when his legs felt frail, and she stayed up long past his retiring to the land of dreams in order to tend to the laundry and other housework that had gone neglected. She smiled anytime Amil properly pronounced a word, as his speech therapy was a slow go, and slowed her own pace in order to adjust to his struggles with simple conversation.

  The Back Shelf Bookstore closed its doors during this time, and the rest of the books were sold off at cut-rate prices. Ali reduced her hours, and the couple scraped by on her meager wages and Amil’s insurance and disability payouts. It was odd that after so much had been sacrificed and lost, Ali and her ailing mate were brought closer together. She committed herself fully to him, and, in turn, Amil developed a love for her that bordered on frenzy. He was overcome by her limitless compassion, and clung to her as though she were the only living force on planet earth. It was a shame that such a tragedy was required to make the couple recall the extent of their former love and to heal the wounds carved into their relationship. But in Amil, these feelings also came shackled with a constant reminder of his shame, and it entwined itself through his every cell like a cancerous agent.