by Chris Vola
*****
A clothes shop halfway down the street. The floor – covered in money, loose coins glittering under the soft lights. I step inside and Lauren – the shop assistant – approaches, offers me a Marlboro Red. No, I shake my head. She shrugs, lights one for herself. Tiny sparks flutter from the tip of her cigarette and onto her clothes… burning holes in the fabric. She continues to smoke with a strange enthusiasm. The sparks spread everywhere.
“Do you need a coat?” she asks.
*****
On the concrete, dabbing at mouth sores. Try to imagine faces, Billy’s, if he knew, why would they want to kill me, if I deserve it, always the EXIT light. Davis? Piles of shredded clothes soak up the warm puddles, the stink that’s wrapped itself around everything.
Curl up until a new tray arrives. Try to prepare. Whether or not to focus on a dark spot in the corner of ceiling, predict the best moment to fake a seizure. Any initial planning evaporates at the scrape of the door. There’s just the first touch, the first shot of warm, acid-sting piss, the first breakage of skin.
The undiscovered fear that builds, that washes over like Chernobyl run-off.
****
Lauren unhooks an enormous black coat from a rack. She pulls it over my arms, then steps inside it herself, closes up the buttons. Our bodies fusing together. The coat is a perfect fit, but we’re no longer ourselves. The floor is littered with ants.
A stranger walks into the shop and we offer him a Marlboro Red.
*****
The pain devours, leaches itself, chokes itself out. In the dull red hours of apparitions and concrete, this knife unravels.
A NOISE FROM the hall? I press my ear against the wall’s cold concrete, sickly heartbeats in rapid-fire. Nothing. I slump against the door, a housebroken dog starving for a hollowed-out bone. I wipe my hand on the ground, sniff it.
The door gives way a little. I sit up, press against it. Nothing. I grope for the handle. The hinges moan softly. I hold my breath, push the door open a few inches. Light slices through the shadows. The hallway is vacant, a dim hospital-glow, the same row of high school doors with the blurry writing.
Footsteps and flashlight beams, the echo of conversation. I shut the door fast but silently. I sink to the floor, hugging dirt, shivering. Footsteps, closer, closer. Familiar scratch of steel on steel. The slot opens, the tray slides in. Bottled water, pills, a steaming plate of bean sprouts, a bag of trail mix. The slot slams shut.
I inspect the meal, snicker.
THE MEN IN ski masks have stopped coming. Been maybe a week, maybe two. The slot opens and a bottle of water rolls in, nothing else. The itchy creep of loneliness. I count the kaleidoscope of stains on the wall, memorize their dull shapes, gnaw at raw thumbnail skin. Did they find out I opened the door?
I eat the saved pills in the refrigerator, crushing them with one remaining set of molars, sucking them down, savoring the bitter powder between caked lips. No effect besides a puke- and acid-flavored aftertaste. The stink from my filthy clothes, the plastic bucket and the reddish-brown tub must be unbelievable, but I can’t smell anything.
THE BOTTLES HAVE stopped coming through the slot. At least two days. My throat is crusted over, guts are shrink-wrap. I’m dying.
The door expands in the forefront of a diluted vision. An outline of pulsating Christmas lights frames the steel. The EXIT sign loses all of its significance. No sleep, no dreams, only a constant half-awake, a ballet of horrifying shadows that keeps snapping into focus, pulling me back under.
The door and its rectangular tractor beam.
Vague industrial pipe noises.
The idea, the only one that’s made sense. I’ve been an obedient pet. But a real dog has to dig his own food. He has to scavenge. No more time to think. I get up, stretch the scarecrow legs.
The door handle is loose, unbolted. I open it a crack. The hallway is empty. The smell of woodsmoke and thickly sprayed sanitizer. I crab-walk out, creep ghoul-like to the right-side wall. The cold concrete, a brighter gloom.
The first and second doors are identical – no windows, locked. Hastily painted an indeterminate earth tone with rough, uneven strokes. A noise behind me and I stiffen, but it’s my footsteps’ echo.
A light shines out of a small window on the third door, flickering as I approach. Behind the glass – a head of wispy cornstalk hair, acne scars, jagged black teeth, burnt lips. Staring at me. I stumble back. The glassy eyes remain fixed, the pupils unmoving. I wave my hands in front of the window. No response. Behind the face, the room is shadowy, one seizuring light bulb dangles from the ceiling. Other creatures recline on metal benches pressed against the filthy walls. The same chapped lips, dull red eyes. A shirtless man with twin nose rings who can’t weigh more than ninety pounds scratches at his head with tiny raptor fists. Coal-colored track marks distinguish the veins down both arms. Two naked girls, their arms and hips riddled with crude tattoos, trade a broken light bulb and a lighter between their lips, blowing gauzy blue smoke. Other cellmates laze against the walls, against each other’s spines. A blonde woman cradles a bundle of stick-figure arms and a thin ponytail, a skeleton-puppet girl, her head burrowed into the cavity where the woman’s breasts used to be. Transfixed – at the woman’s gray eyes that seem, for a moment, so familiar.
Sharp stomach hurdles. No time to stop, no time to think, processing denied. The next room’s not locked; I twist the brass handle, walk in. Piles of cardboard boxes and black plastic bags everywhere. Musty fabric and paper. Storage. I rip open the bag closest to me. An avalanche of water bottles tumbles out, ruptures on the floor. Grin a toothless lunatic’s grin, almost shriek. I twist the cap of a bottle, chug until it’s done. Brain-silencing relief for a few perfect seconds, then I start scavenging.
Most of the other bags are filled with food products. Stuff as many wrappers and tins into my sweatpants as can fit. In one of the smaller cardboard boxes, thousands of pills – OxyContin, Hydrocodone, a few other recognizable pain meds. I scoop out a handful of bottles, shove them below the waistband.
I turn to leave and notice a pile of random clothes spread out on top of a metal crate and shuffle toward it, pants bulging. A uniform, US ARMY on the left breast pocket, another that says USMC. Tucked in between the top two uniforms is an oversized pipe wrench. I pick it up, keep digging. Another name tape – WHITMIRE, W. Billy’s. Splotches of brown blood congealed above the shirttail. I turn to run, trip over one of the boxes. More clothes spill out. Billy’s tee shirt he was wearing in the restaurant. My shorts and tee shirt. Davis’s suit jacket. Our phones. I shove my BlackBerry into the sweatpants.
As I creep back along the other side of the hallway, I notice a new light shining in one of the last doors across from my room. Don’t look inside, don’t look, don’t… I can’t help it. A kamikaze fly on the charred wall. Powder courage from the three Vicodins freshly swallowed.
Inside, two men in Army uniforms are sweating under a bright floodlight. One is glassy-eyed, standing behind the other soldier – pantless, bent over an ironing board, wearing a leather mouth gag. On the edges of the light, men in ski masks hold rifles. One points a camcorder. A bear-like man in a red shirt and pressed khakis leans against a heap of unidentifiable electrical equipment.
The standing soldier unzips his fly, lowers his pants. He says something to the man holding the camcorder. One of the ski-masked men rushes at him, beats the side of his head with a rifle butt. The man in the red shirt walks to where the soldier is clutching his face, takes a handkerchief from his breast pocket, carefully wipes the man clean. He gently stuffs a pill into the soldier’s mouth, holds his neck down until he swallows. Two of the men in ski masks drag him back to where the gagged soldier is still bent over. The tall soldier starts jerking off, the droplets of blood on his neck exaggerated under the movie-quality lights, until he works up a semi. He penetrates his comrade. The bent-over soldier closes his eyes, twists his neck.
Hyperventilating. Some of the prescription bottles
in my pants rattle against what I assume is a bag of corn chips.
The man in the red shirt is staring at me through the window. His lips curl.
I WEDGE THE door shut with a bottled water, fling the pills and food into the VEGETABLES drawer, cram the BlackBerry between my ass cheeks, crouch behind the tub, and listen for the footsteps – closer, closer, stopping, farther, gone – keep listening, until…nothing. I open a bottle of OxyContins, swallow a few. Finger the wrench. Wait.
THE SONG – “ZERO” by The Smashing Pumpkins. A Davis favorite. Cybermetal guitar crunches at full volume from invisible speakers. My reflection, dirty mirror, there’s no connection to myself, I’m your lover, I’m your zero, I’m the face in your dreams of glass…
Shit, you fell asleep! I reach blindly for the wrench, the room’s vague colors shimmering into place. The music stops. Kane is sitting on the tub’s ledge, wearing a white tee shirt and military fatigues, twirling the wrench. Behind him, two men in identical suits, aviator sunglasses, familiar faces – the driver in New York with the weird accent…
“Morning!” Kane says, his hair shower-slick. “He sure can snore. Philippe?” The taller man nods. The smile disappears. Kane lifts the wrench, smashes a prescription bottle a few inches from my knees. Pills scatter.
“Now be honest,” he says, “Did you really think that we wouldn’t know?” One of the men in suits says something to the other one. They snicker.
Kane kicks my chest, forces me down. He laughs. “We know all about you, about decomposing Mommy and Daddy, about…what’s-it-called, East Fairport, you know, all that crap.” He twirls the wrench, bored. Philippe steps forward, tosses an envelope onto my lap. “Open it,” he says. Inside is my parents’ wedding portrait, smudged and wrinkled. Another picture – Lauren’s photo of us in Myrtle Beach.
“Don’t be scared,” Kane asks, in the voice of a deviant hospice worker fascinated by the collapse of his patient’s final moments. “I’m not trying to scare you,” he says. “Are you scared?”
“No.” I turn the pictures over, numb and deflated.
“Good,” he says. “Because I want to make it clear that none of us give a shit about your house, your dead family, your piece of ass. This isn’t some mob flick.” He stops, frowns. “Although they’re usually pretty good movies. You like Casino?”
Eyeballs of sweat pool across his upper lip.
“I don’t know.”
“You see? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Kane says, turning to Philippe and the other man, “nothing but a fucking brick wall, this one.” He turns back to me. “The point I’m trying to make with these,” he points the wrench at the photos, “is that we know more than enough about you to fully understand how much of a pathetic, miserable, frittered away, waste of a half-decent life you are.” He waits for a reaction, doesn’t get one. “Come on, when was the last time you had an original thought, felt a genuine emotion, made something remotely close to an interesting comment, something that made somebody think you were more than just a lame ex-frat boy pill-popping piece of –”
I lunge. The wrench meets me in mid-air across my spine. Crumple to the damp concrete.
Kane scoops up a prescription bottle, pours the pills over my face. I try to swallow them.
“When we first brought you in,” he says, smirking, “we’d hit you, burn you, break a couple toes, and you’d scream. Now when I hit you, re-break something, you still scream, but the scream’s different. Because no matter what you tell yourself, you’ve come to like the idea of whatever you think this is, deep down. Maybe not when it’s happening, but when it’s over, you’re so glad.”
“No.”
“Oh really?” He swings the wrench hard in an arc towards my face. I don’t flinch, wait for the contact. He pulls back and the metal just barely flicks my nose. I slump back, sweating now, but not in relief. “See, you twisted little shit? You wanted it so bad.”
I want to rip his face off but my back burns. Philippe and the other man move closer.
“We’re doing the fine residents of Connecticut a public service by keeping you,” Kane says before he opens the door and strolls into the bleared hospital light.
Philippe kicks my sternum, lays me out flat. The other man holds my mouth open. Philippe places two horse pills on my tongue. I try to spit them out but he clamps down. Charcoal-flavor. Anesthetic jelly spreads outward, stomach first. Philippe hoists me over his shoulder. The BlackBerry slides down my leg, catches above the elastic ankle band.
The hallway, my eyes tunneling into spirals of gray and blue pigment. Body exists only in that I can see arms hanging, a pair of flailing cartoon railroad tracks flapping in transit. Another hallway, identical doors, whitewashed cave. Two old men standing over a table. One in a blue jacket cradling a metal box and tubes. The other, gray-bearded, red shirt. Leans in, smiles.
“Est-ce qu’il est prêt?” he asks Philippe.
“Oui.”
The man in the blue jacket inserts a small tube into one of my nostrils.
I’m beneath the tunnel.
GRABBED FROM BEHIND, lifted off what feels like a soft downy mattress. Bare feet touch hardwood. Pain-free.
The hands release me. A door closes and the light changes.
“Your vision should be back to normal in less than thirty seconds,” a voice blasts from a speaker. “Take care of what you need to do in the toilet, then do us a big favor and take a shower, man.”
The light changes into vague shapes. These morph into a stainless steel sink, a mirror, a toilet, a stainless steel shower head, a bar of Dial soap. A folded white tee shirt, cargo pants, and flip-flops rest neatly on a metal bench.
I stare into the mirror, shocked at the clarity of sight without glasses, more shocked at what’s staring back. My head is shaved and my skin is Proactiv-smooth, stretched tight. The scars and burn marks on my neck and stomach are gone. I touch my back. The scoop marks and drill holes? Gone. I’d always had slightly crooked teeth, but now my tongue traces two identical rows of gleaming dental perfection.
The first instinct is to run, but where? Wince at the thought of the men in ski masks. Are they waiting?
Take off the sweatpants, piss. The BlackBerry cracks against the tiles. How did they not notice? I scoop it up, listen for any noises on the other side of the door. Nothing. I tuck the phone between the cargo pants and the tee shirt, turn on the shower.
For a few seconds the steamy water drains away…what? Remember where I am – where? – and wash off with the soap, get dressed. I tuck the phone into one of the cargo pockets. One last glance in the mirror. The gaunt, hardened cheekbones. I reach for the handle. No other options.
The high-ceilinged room is flooded with natural light from a large bay window. I squint, try to adjust. Except for a steel door, the other three walls are covered by bookshelves. Withering encyclopedias, pot-bellied tribal sculptures, stereo equipment. An ex-hippie Baby Boomer’s impression of who the fuck knows? Classical music wafts from black Bose speakers. An antique writing table faces the window – closed laptop, yellow legal pad. Somewhere near the center of the room a circular dining table is covered by a white tablecloth, a silver tea service, steaming platters of scrambled eggs, sausages, biscuits, orange juice in a carafe. The old man in the red shirt is sitting across from where I’m standing, reading a collection of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, chuckling, a few other books spread around the table near his plate. He looks up, smiles.
“Josh,” he says. “I’m Titus.” I wait for the ski masks to rush in. The only sounds are the music and the faintest twitter of birds outside the window. Titus keeps smiling. “You look much better,” he says. “Sit down, have some breakfast.”
The rising sun pours down against the cliff we’re protruding over, against the sloping ledges of rock, melting into a forest of dense vegetation, yellow and red shoestrings of wildflowers, distant cobalt peaks shining through thick patches of woodland. Nothing human.
Titus ladles a hefty
pile of eggs onto my plate. Hunger overpowers disorientation. I shove a forkful into my mouth and watch him as he pours me a glass of orange juice. He’s old, older than his voice suggests, maybe 60, even 70, with a scraggly gray beard and matching hippie-length hair that would be Unabomber-esque if it wasn’t so well-maintained. And he’s big, offensive lineman big, forearms bulging below his rolled-up sleeves. Onyx eyes, two pupils with nothing around them. Smooth doctor’s hands.
“You ever read Calvin and Hobbes?” he asks.
“When I was younger.”
“Some of the best stuff,” he says, “better than this –” he motions at the other books in front of him “– and that little bastard and his mouth get me every time.” He chuckles. “It’s his language that makes Calvin what he is, the words themselves. Their real power is in, like, their unending flexibility, don’t you think?”
“I don’t…know,” I mumble in between greedy mouthfuls of sausage.
“No,” he shakes his head, “you don’t.” His voice is strangely soft, high-pitched for his mass. My attention wanders from the bacon to the biscuits. He stares at me.
I stop chewing, drop my fork. This is where it starts again. Wait for it…don’t wait! I tense for a sprint and Titus, as if sensing it, stands up, blocks any sort of direct route to the door. He’s at least six-four, two-fifty, maybe bigger. “I want you to believe me when I tell you that I’m so sorry about the last few weeks.” Weeks? How many? “But Josh,” he lowers his voice, pulling a little on his beard like he’s got a secret, “I needed to make sure you weren’t a, well, a monkey.”
