Bad Things Happen

by Kris Bertin

  I love you Tony. I love you Chris.

  The Sobey’s bags were so full I could hardly lift them, and I lost a lot of quarters and candy going up the street. I realized on the bus that I’d forgotten my workbag, my wallet and uniform, but I wasn’t going back to get them.

  Diego and I ate big handfuls from the bags between sips of a Corona we’d split. He drank leftovers like I did, and ate them too, but only if they came from women. He was telling me about how his wife found the VIP PASS in his pants and tore it up in front of him. He wanted to know if I could get him another. I was in the middle of telling him I couldn’t get him another one when our little Iranian boss came downstairs. Told us to get back to work. Clapping his hands violently to signal that it had to be now, and clapping so hard that any excuses I tried to get out were squashed between his palms.

  I grabbed my bin and ran up the stairs, keeping time with him. As I opened the door to the restaurant, he grabbed my arm and explained that someone was there to see me, but I couldn’t meet them until I cleared all the dishes and was on my break, fifteen minutes away.

  Do you understand? He asked, still holding my arm like you’d hold a toddler’s.

  She sat at a table near the front, a kerchief around her head and big sunglasses like a movie star on the lam, white fur coat and those one-size-fit-all cotton gloves, bare legs shining under the dim lights. She looked fake and weird, but fit in perfectly with the place’s Tex-Mex decor. Her back was against the painted wall, the one with a cactus and a sunset and a sombreroed man on a donkey.

  I motioned for her to go around into the alley behind the restaurant, gathered as many dishes as I could in one go, went downstairs, and out the emergency exit. Diego asked what I was doing but I ignored him.

  All I could smell were the dumpsters and her perfume. When she said hello, she called me by my real name. I told her I still didn’t know what to call her. She put her hand on my cheek, but those gloves and those sunglasses made it so I couldn’t feel or see anything of her. I told her to take that shit off, so she removed her big fur coat and tossed it on the ground, dramatically. Then she came over and pressed her body to me and kissed my neck even though my arms were at my sides and not around her. Kissed me even though I smelled like sweat and brown water and had spinach-artichoke dip speckled across me.

  I like you, she said.

  I looked down and away from her but she took my face, started petting it.

  I just need a yes or no.

  Yes or no to what?

  She told me she was getting out of the city, and she wanted me to come with her.

  She lifted her glasses to say it, so I could see she was serious. But then she took out a gun from her waistband and held it up, her eyes darting around. I could see it was plastic, could see the orange tip on the end.

  Shit’s about to go down, she said. Her kerchief fluttered.

  Will you stop? I asked.

  I’m not joking you know.

  There’s something wrong with you, I said.

  She pointed the gun at the dish-pit window. Leaves blew by.

  And what about that? She asked. Nothing’s wrong with that?

  I couldn’t see him, but I knew Diego was inside, looking up at our feet. At her legs, unable to pull his gaze away. Imagining his face between her thighs, or maybe those legs wrapped around him. Maybe still working, maybe not, waiting for the day to be over but unable to leave.

  She didn’t say anything else. Just showed me her hands, palms up, her fingers still wrapped around the gun, her gloves against the plastic. I went back inside, and she went back down the alley against the wind.

  Maybe two days later I saw Leslie.

  Marc and I were cleaning a food court’s skylight, a job that kept us focused enough that we didn’t talk much. It was a big honeycomb that collected bird shit and fat, juicy spiders that we had to kill and scrape off before we could even start squeegeeing. Before we started, I said to Marc:

  Did nobody think of how hard this would be to clean?

  And he said Nope in a way that made me sound naïve for even thinking it.

  Leslie appeared behind the glass breezeway where the access door was. She looked halfway between what I’d seen on the wall at the party, and how she looked when I first met her, wearing sweatpants and sneakers, a wide-open windbreaker, and what looked like a piece of lingerie for a top. Her face was streaked in lines of makeup sludge and my first thought was that someone had died.

  Jesus fucking Christ, said Marc.

  He threw his rag down and went towards her, but lost any menace along the way. We knew the glass wasn’t loadbearing so he had to crab walk along the steel frame in order to get to her, which could only ever look silly.

  How did she find us? I called to him.

  But then he was up and inside the breezeway and with her.

  I kept working, but glanced up at them every now and then. There was a space and distance between the two of them, and I could see that they just weren’t on the same level anymore. She hugged herself, and he motioned a lot, pointed and waved his hands. Even without the reactions of the people going by, it was clear they were fighting. It occurred to me that Marc looked exhausted—had looked exhausted all day—like this had been going on for some time.

  When it was finally over, and he crawled back over to his spot, his face was red, the bags under his eyes swollen like he’d aged and turned into the person he’d be ten years from now. Still cleaning windows but with all joy and vitality wrung out of him. Leslie sat on the breezeway floor like she’d collapsed that way, stayed there for another half hour. I made a point not to look her way, because seeing her made me feel sad and guilty and sort of scooped-out on the inside. I was also careful not to press Marc, but on the elevator, when we were leaving the job three hours later, he was compelled to tell me.

  Sensualcams.com lost a lot of money and had to let go of every cam girl except the top twenty. Marc said Leslie was in the top thirty-five (which sounded to me like she was #35 on the nose) and had just missed the cut-off. Someone who handled the credit cards and Paypal accounts had taken and sold all that information, emptied the funds for advertising, PR, and found some way to drink the entirety of the company’s savings and their by-the-minute earnings on top of that.

  She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, Marc said, because she quit her real job to do this and they probably won’t take her back.

  He added:

  I didn’t want her doing this shit anyway.

  I asked—carefully—about the person who did it to them. Do they know who it is, and did they get caught?

  Marc said that the person was a girl named Gretchen. We were down in the street by then, making our way home.

  If anyone sees her again, he said, she’s a dead person.

  The next day I almost left Frankie’s five times waiting for her. My hands were shaking, and my teeth chattered. A homeless man in a coonskin cap kept whispering swears in my ear and asking me if I was a Freemason. We sat together and I bought us each a four-dollar breakfast with handfuls of quarters.

  When she showed up I almost didn’t recognize her. She was wearing jeans and sneakers, but they were frayed and stained. She wore an old poker visor, lime green, and those same huge sunglasses. She looked like a street person.

  I told Davey Crockett to give me a minute and he shook my hand, arranging our thumbs in what he explained was the grip of an entered apprentice.

  She took off her sunglasses and sat down.

  I didn’t think. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t think. I’d only speak. I can’t even remember what I said. I think I was trying to argue with her, or trying to make her feel bad. Trying to make her give me something of her, like I had done with myself. I wanted her to beg me to come with her, to give me her offer, but she didn’t. She sat, and listened, and waited.

  Then, w
hen I was done, she extended her arms, extended them to the people working and the people drinking and said this is it. Do it or don’t.

  I think if I hadn’t gone after her that day, I would’ve gotten up the next morning and masturbated. Tried to think of anyone but her. Then I would’ve had a big coffee from Second Cup and climbed a ten-storey building with Will or Desmond or maybe the new guy. I would’ve hung over the edge on a little seat, in my harness, water and soap dripping from my squeegee down to the streets below, and I would’ve watched for a big green hat or a blue wig or a woman emanating an aura of power like a phoenix. I would think about her lying down, bare-chested, and having that needle score her body. Think about the way her blood must’ve collected around the needle before getting wiped away. Think about what she must have thought or felt when she first took off her bandages and stood before the mirror and saw herself.

  I’d do this involuntarily, and when I realized it, I would try to stop. Try to move my thoughts to where I need them. Stay focused on the windows and the soap in the bucket. The perfect “S” motion to clean the whole thing in one go.

  IS ALIVE AND CAN MOVE

  I’d made it through a real rough patch, and so I had to do everything I could to try and get something going that would keep me together. My brother wouldn’t let me stay with him but he did put up the money so I could get an apartment. Said he’d help me more if I started going to meetings, but I said I didn’t need that shit. Said all I needed was a job, and believed it, too. Eventually I’m hired to do cleanup at one wing of a building at the far end of the university campus. Mostly dorm rooms, but there was a cafeteria and a kitchen, a daycare, and two floors of offices for the teachers. I had to clean from midnight until it was done, which was usually five in the morning. For the first time in years, I really tried to stay on top of it and do a good job because I really had nothing else.

  I held on, even though for the first week I had to smoke every five minutes, take a dump every two, and was sweating so much I looked like I’d been out in the rain. But the cleaning boss, Charles, seemed to understand. He had one of those big, bloated noses and you could see he’d been through some rough patches himself. You can never know how bad someone else has had it, but even the worst drinkers didn’t have it as bad as me. I was a special case—even the doctor said so—but it was still nice to know he had an idea or two about it.

  One time, he even asked how I was handling it, like he knew what it was all about, and I’d said good, because it was mostly true. The job gave me a place to be at the exact time most everyone would be going downtown to drive drinks into them. And it was a job that, for the most part, was quiet and didn’t involve other people. Sometimes I’d see a college kid or two, shuffling around in their pajamas, but that was it. And the only other people I’d see were the professors, a couple of young ones who would even talk to me sometimes. They seemed to always be working late, smoking pipes and cigars and laughing a lot. I never really let myself get in too close, because I felt how bad they wanted me to, which could only be dangerous. I had felt something like it before, in the past, when someone was stuck themselves and wanted to draw me in for no reason except not to be alone in their situation or habit. With them, I’d allow myself a quick hello but keep moving because it was the only way I knew not to get snared.

  It was impossible to start the shift at the dormitory end, because any day of the week the kids would be going right until three or four in the morning, and if you cleaned it too early, you’d have to pick up trash, mop up drinks or even puke, broken glass, shredded papers, then come back and do it all over again. Instead you’d start with the offices, go down each floor, sweep, mop, and buff. Change garbages. Vacuum the mats near the doors. Clean walls once a week. Wipe down doorknobs and railings and light switches with disinfectant. Do the toilets and sinks and stock everything up, too.

  Charles said I had it right. That it was best never to even see the kids, to never even lay eyes on them. A guy who had my job from before, a few years ago, he got fired for fucking one of the girls.

  “Whether or not he even did,” Charles said, “And I fucking tell you he did not so keep that in mind, too, young fella.”

  One night I did end up seeing a girl, at maybe quarter to four, hanging over the stairwell, watching me polish the floor. Her tits were dangling down at me in her silvery shirt and I had to do everything not to take a second look at her. Problem was it was summer, it was hot, and we were both stripped down to almost nothing. I had on shorts and a muscle shirt, and she had on that party top, which barely covered her. Even with the noise from the polisher and all the space between us, I swear I could almost feel her body against mine. Smell her. It had been so long since I’d been with a woman, I almost dropped that big hand-operated thing down the stairs a dozen times.

  The first thing she’d said was you’re hot and then you’re younger than the other guy, and I like your tattoos. Then she moved onto hey and what’s your name, which she shouted a half-dozen times. Shouted them right down on top of me so they bounced off every surface, jumped over the buffer and into my ears.

  And to be honest, I was scared, scared all around. For my job and my life and to even be seen with her. But I was most scared of what she might think if I actually went for it, if she got a good look at my face and my eyes and smelled the stink coming out of my pores. So I put my head down and pushed hard on the handles, as hard as I could, got out of there with the job half done, my shorts soaked with sweat and my chest filled up with panic.

  So I kept away from there until the very end of the night for both those reasons, and because the only way for things to get back to normal was for me not to lay eyes on any bottles, not to even smell the stuff or look at it. I knew I couldn’t even look at someone when they were screwed up and having a time. Doctor told me I had to do whatever I had to do in order to make it work, and the old guys who’d been able to quit altogether said shit like it never gets easier, and I had to believe it because what else could I believe? Even all the pamphlets said the same thing, and I’d imagined that the meetings would too.

  Being alone might not have been the solution I needed, though for the first part, it was. When my system was changing, trying to turn itself—like the doctor said—from a machine that ran on grain alcohol into one that ran on food and water, I needed to be alone. When I would have sudden bursts of energy and the air smelled fresh, when all I wanted to do was tell the world how beautiful it was, when I was so emotional the taste of Mike and Ikes nearly moved me to tears, I knew it was good no one was around. Same as when I’d have a real downward dip and I would be so angry at absolutely nothing—angry at dirt and streaks and myself and the walls—those were times it was good to be alone. Then when I’d have a blackout and I’d come out of it, scared and confused, and I would have a moment where I wasn’t sure if it was a new day or one that happened a long time ago. Those were times I was glad to be alone.

  And then other times it would’ve helped to have someone there. Part of drinking so much that your brain is permanently fucked means that you have trouble staying focused on tasks, or else you can get distracted from the ones you need to be doing by ones that don’t matter. For a while I got to counting all the bricks at eye level and got to thinking that if the number of bricks came out odd, it was an omen that things were going downhill again. I’d feel grim and grey and once even thought about opening one of those big, green windows in the bathroom and stepping out headfirst. When it was even, I’d get a burst of energy and I’d hear a whistling sound like my life was flying down the right path. Those were things that another person could have kept from coming.

  The brick count came out odd a few too many times and so I started to get the idea that the place itself was somehow against me. It wasn’t a thought that occurred to me, it was something I realized I had always believed.My first real scare came when I found a brick was missing from one of the walls, low and on a corner that I ha
dn’t noticed. I’d walk by it, or just clean the little red crumbs where the gap met the rest of the wall. It wasn’t until I realized that the dirt and bits around it on the ground were from someone’s foot—from climbing on it—that I paid it any attention. When I stuck my foot in it and took a step up, I saw there was another brick missing, a whole arm’s reach up, near the top. I felt something slimy up there and let go, and a few white things went plop onto the ground. At first I thought they were worms—maggots—and I froze, held my breath while my brain tried to work it out. With what I have, figuring things out can take longer than it should, and it was only when I smelled my hand that I finally realized what it was. A horrible smell. Latex and come. When the scent hit my nose I heard a squeal like a saxophone. A scream.

  At first I thought it had come from me, but then I saw a gang of men coming down the hallway, laughing and hollering. They burst into the atrium, carrying something over their heads, and chanting Edmund Burke, which was the name of the building. Said it over and over, like it had a hold on them. I saw that they were just boys, but they were giving off something I didn’t like. I went upstairs to the cafeteria and stood on the landing where they wouldn’t notice me, and that’s when I saw what they were holding. A person. A girl. And though the boys were laughing and chanting, the sound underneath it, the one getting drowned out—the scream—was hers. She was fighting and flopping around like a person on a vibrating mattress. It looked like a prank, and I could tell by how red and sweaty their faces were that they were drunk—a deep, dark kind of drunk—and the girl wasn’t. Or if she was, she wasn’t anymore. At first I thought they were going to throw her through one of the windows, but then they crashed through the double doors I was just trying to wipe down, and carried her up a hill.