Garden of Fiends

by Matthews, Mark

  “He was older, had less hair, and was considerably fatter than he appeared in his picture. I admit to being disappointed, but I’m also not superficial, so I can deal with disappointment in the looks arena if the personality compensates. Is that crass?”

  “Not at all,” I tell her. “Unless you’re classifying me the same way.”

  Another eye roll. “Nooo. Anyway, with this guy, not only had he lied about his looks, he wasn’t even interested in a date.”

  “Then why sign up for a dating site?”

  “I know, right? Sometimes people baffle me.”

  “So, what was his deal?”

  “Religious crusade.”

  “Christ.”

  “Exactly. He spent twenty minutes lecturing me on my vices, said only godless whores put themselves out there on a public site with the intention—his words—of forcing men to compromise their spiritual beliefs through sexual perversion.”

  I chuckle at this while noting my glass is somehow empty again. Without taking my eyes from Melinda, who is clearly enjoying recounting the story, I raise a hand to summon a waiter.

  “So, what did you say?”

  She shrugs. “Told him he was absolutely right, that had he not been good enough to call me out as a heathen, I’d have lured him home and let him do anything he wanted to me. Then I thanked him for saving me from myself and left him there with the check.”

  The waiter appears. It might as well be a mannequin for all the life that’s in his eyes. I order another round and tell him to cheer up. His tight smile appears to be all that’s holding back a torrent of abuse. I can’t blame him. It’s a shit job for shit pay made worse when customers like me offer casual and unsolicited advice.

  “The best part?” Melinda says, tears of mirth in her eyes. “There was absolutely no victory on his face when I told him he was right. He looked crestfallen, like he regretted not getting to see what I’d have let him do to me. Fucking hypocrites, hiding behind judgment of others to protect themselves from their own impulses.” She grabs a napkin and delicately dabs the moisture from her eyes without ruining her makeup. “Who the fuck goes out on dates just to preach?”

  “Amen, sister.”

  “Okay, your turn.”

  “Mine’s weird.”

  “Oh goody. Tell me.”

  “I’ll spare you the worst of it. The short version is I met a woman who looked like a supermodel. Thought I’d won the lottery because unlike your guy she showed up looking exactly like her profile picture.”

  “Did she have a dick?”

  “No, that I could have handled. Excuse the pun.”

  Melinda snorts laughter. That and the slight glassy look in her eyes tells me the alcohol is settling in, and that’s good. I work better when people are, if not on my level, then at least in the same building.

  “We have dinner, we connect. It all goes great. We end up back at her place.”

  “Just like that, huh? Floozy.”

  “I guess the chemistry was just there.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Fiery.”

  “Right.”

  “Sooo…we get there, beautiful house, nice cars parked out front and I’m thinking she comes from money. It’s starting to look like I’ve hit the jackpot…”

  “And…what?”

  “And we get inside and her parents are waiting for us.”

  “Oh, no.” She puts a hand over her mouth to restrain a laugh and raises her eyebrows.

  “I’m thinking: shit, she’s younger than she looked and now I’m in Dutch. But that wasn’t it. Her parents were just really nice, open, understanding people. They invited me in and we all sat down for drinks. The father, real congenial sort, tells me about his fiscal year at the law firm. The mother, a little drunk, throws flirty eyes at me and quizzes me on my background. And then, when the conversation ebbs, they apologize for getting in the way and leave us to, as the father put it: ‘Consummate our night.’”

  “Oh God, and…did you?”

  “Are you kidding me? The cab couldn’t get there fast enough.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, but the worst part is she stalked me for like a month. I had to delete my Facebook page.” I raise my hand to grab the waiter’s attention again. He looks at me somewhat witheringly. “Then her father started calling and leaving me voicemails, apologizing for scaring me off and asking if I’d give his daughter another chance.”

  Melinda loses it, her laugh so loud everyone at the bar looks in our direction.

  * * *

  Somehow, I manage to turn my head so half my face is out of the water, but only for a moment. I have time to see the shadowy shapes of darkened houses backlit by the sickly glow of streetlights before the pressure returns and slams my face back down into the muddy water.

  And those teeth, such a source of shame for so long, shatter against the asphalt.

  * * *

  “This the weird part,” Melinda says.

  “Like the rest of the night hasn’t been?”

  She stops on the pavement outside the restaurant and appraises me with as much seriousness as her condition will allow. She’s weaving slightly on her feet, one hand clamped on my shoulder for support, which, given my own state, is like leaning two ladders against each other on an ice rink. “Is that a criticism? Did it go bad? Badly? Whatever it is?”

  I feel a swell of affection for her, and it’s far from the first. She’s beautiful: curvy, smart, bubbly, funny, she’s everything a guy could want. And most importantly, she drinks. And while I can handle people who don’t, I prefer that they do. Sober people see straight through me much too quickly.

  “I think it went great. And I think you’re amazing.”

  Now that the alcohol has softened her filter, she blushes and draws close. I can smell the strawberry vodka on her breath, and it’s wonderful. Her eyes are like shot glasses full of crème de menthe. Her smile is uneven, uncertain, and tinged with mischief. “I don’t date alcoholics.”

  A shrug. “Me neither.”

  She snorts laughter again and appraises me as if for the first time. The people on the street around us become a blur. “I’m not an alcoholic.”

  I believe this to be true. “But you’re an addict.”

  She considers this, staggers a little and puts her free hand on my other shoulder for support. It looks like we’re about to dance. “I’ve been too fond of many things in my lifetime: booze, painkillers, pot, but the only thing I’ve ever really developed an incurable and destructive addiction to is men. Pricks like you who come along out of nowhere to make me feel good about myself for a while, even if it’s all just so much bullshit in the end, and even if the effect is only ever temporary and leaves me feeling even more empty and depressed afterward.”

  I don’t protest her classification of me, because I don’t know that she’s wrong. I’d love to purport to have noble motives in this instance, but really it would all be so much self-delusion and deception. I’m here with her because I’m lonely. I need someone to talk to, to drink with, and, all going well, to sleep with. If I could choose only one option, it would be the second one, because ultimately that’s the only constant, the only requirement my soul needs when the darkness is at its worst. The only real need. But even so, loneliness can, like everything else, be drowned. The date was just a feeble attempt to make it look to myself like I’m trying to rebuild a normal life, and yet I contacted Melinda because I knew from her profile that she wasn’t ready for that. Something about the forced confidence in her sales pitch. Even if she decided to take the chance, she certainly wasn’t ready for me and my unruly shadow.

  Maybe I was wrong and she’s not an addict, at least not in any traditional sense, but she’s here with me because she needs something she’s not getting, and it’s more than just sex or the casual company of another. Perhaps it’s nothing more complicated than validation, the very ordinary need to be appreciated, but isn’t that an addiction, too?

  “Come b
ack to me,” she says, and follows it with the same sound one makes when trying to summon a cat. “Did I blow it?”

  I offer her a sly smile. “No.”

  “Good.”

  “But you can if you want to.”

  “Jesus, is that a line that ever actually works?”

  “Not really,” I tell her and join her in laughing.

  But this time, it does.

  * * *

  I don’t know how I ended up here, shivering from the cold, wearing nothing but my boxers as someone tries to drown me in a brackish puddle. I can taste the rainwater, the blood, the grainy pieces of my broken teeth on my tongue. My thoughts spin in a mad vortex of self-preservation.

  Finally, the pressure relents. I roll over on my back, sobbing from the pain, the humiliation, the confusion, and see the dark figure looming over me. He is backlit by the streetlights, which makes his face a mystery, but I know who he is, and dread squeezes my heart so tightly I fear it may stop.

  “Please...don’t,” I beg him.

  “Get up,” he says.

  I start to sob and bring my hands to my face to cover my eyes.

  I pray I’m dreaming, and know I’m not.

  He found me again.

  * * *

  Time has a way of contracting when you’re drinking. I met Melinda at eight, and by midnight we’re back at her place, but it feels like an hour has passed between us. Her house is small but spotless aside from a few dishes in the sink and a scattering of dry cat food around a bowl on the kitchen floor. The cat itself is nowhere to be seen, and for this I’m grateful. I used to be a cat person until my daughter’s tabby was mauled by the neighbor’s dog and I had to put it out of its misery. Sitting beside the small mound of dirt in the back yard that night, I drank myself into a stupor and cried, not for the cat, not even for my daughter, but for memories of things that had happened to me as a child, things I had buried deeper than poor Chuckles the cat and were thus much harder to exhume. But I felt them, mourned the loss of who I might have been, and when my wife, eyes narrowed by sleep, came out to check on me, I attacked her for reasons unknown.

  That was the only time she had to call the cops on me, and because incarceration came to mean sobriety, and a terrifying, disorientating, nightmarish kind of hangover, just the threat of it kept me in line for the future. If you’ve ever gone out for a few beers and woken up startled to find yourself in a jail cell surrounded by mad, violent, and similarly confused people, you know what I mean. I had no desire to go back. That’s when I learned the trick to secret drinking and the benefits of false sobriety.

  “You’re a deep one,” Melinda says, pulling me back out of myself for the umpteenth time since we met. We’re sitting on her comfy sofa before a dark TV, close enough that our knees are touching. Before me, on the low glass and mahogany coffee table, is a glass of white wine. I’m not a big fan of wine. It tends to make me nauseous if I mix it with bourbon, but that won’t keep me from drinking it. Right now, wine is as good a poison as anything else.

  “I’m out of practice,” I explain with a sheepish look. “I’ve forgotten how much fun this can be and I think I’m being distant out of some silly fear that I’ll do or say the wrong thing, y’know?”

  God, if she only knew.

  Since returning from the bathroom, she has touched up her hair and makeup and taken drops to remove the redness from her eyes. She looks as good as she has all night. I wonder how I look and dismiss the question almost immediately. It will do me no favors to ponder it.

  “Just relax and be yourself. You’ve managed to lure me back to my place and thus far I haven’t screamed or called the police. You’ve scored. Chill.” Grinning, she raises her glass. I grab mine and we toast.

  Looking into her eyes, I feel a transient calm. I’m happy to be here, with her. There’s no future in it and I think we both know that. But for the moment I feel, dare I say it, human. Normal.

  Safe.

  * * *

  He grabs me by the hair and lifts me bodily off the street until I’m forced to stand. My legs are shaking from the cold and the terror. I silently will someone in that darkened row of houses behind us to wake and come out to see what the commotion is, to call the police, to run to my aid, something, anything. The houses have nothing to say.

  But I know, deep inside where the truth hides, that even if someone did come to my aid, it would do no good.

  “This is a dream,” I manage to gasp and my attacker responds by driving a fist into my stomach. It feels like he is wearing a glove made of concrete. My knees buckle and I blurt vomit onto my feet, but I can’t fall because now he has me by the throat.

  “I could kill you,” he says, and I know he’s telling the truth, because once upon a time he tried to save me and it killed him instead.

  * * *

  I am lying naked on her bed, stripes of shadow across my chest from the light through her bedroom blinds. I have one hand behind my head, the other in her hair as she attends to me. My eyes are closed and I am wincing, not from desire but embarrassment, because in my mind I am hard as a rock, a shockingly becocked paragon of virility, but in reality, she has been trying to evoke a reaction from that treacherously flaccid member for what seems like forever. If I possessed any residue of male pride, I would claim, if only to myself, that this was an aberration, but it isn’t. Sometimes I’m lucky and whatever blend of alcohol I have imbibed on a given night quite literally throws me a bone, but more often than not, I’m left dead from the waist down despite the will to perform. It is an eventuality I frequently forget. Eventually, she gives up and I await her judgment. But when her face resolves from the dark, she is smiling, my useless cock lying dead in the shadowed valley between her pendulous breasts.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I guess I had one too many.”

  She kisses her way up my chest to my neck and then rolls over on her back beside me. “It happens,” she says, and spreads her legs, knees drawn up. “Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  Relieved that my failure to rise to the occasion has not killed the moment or become something to be taken as a personal affront to her sex appeal, I shimmy down and kneel at the end of the bed. The smell of her sex is almost as intoxicating as the finest bourbon. Her fingers find my hair and force my lips to hers. I slide my tongue inside her. I drink deep of the salty sweet taste as she bucks against me, moaning low in her throat. My hands knead her buttocks, pulling her tighter against my mouth. I miss the intimacy, the closeness, the warmth, and the sheer giving involved in such acts. It is one of the few things I can offer anymore. When Melinda comes, she throws her head back against the pillow, mouth wide, hands flying up to grab the rails of the headboard. Her body shudders once, twice, and again, and she utters a single staggered “Ohhhh,” and grows still. I am aware that as aroused as she makes me in my head and my soul, my cock still refuses to obey.

  Thankfully, it doesn’t appear to be an issue.

  “Cuddle with me, loverboy.” With a contented smile on her face, Melinda reaches for me. I climb atop her, my face buried in those voluminous breasts with their incongruently tiny nipples, and within minutes, we are both asleep.

  But my mouth tastes like salt, and I am thirsty.

  So thirsty now.

  * * *

  I am struggling in vain to be free of him as he carries me back toward the house I now realize is Melinda’s. His hand around my throat is like a tourniquet keeping the scream from bleeding free. I try to kick him and it is like kicking a brick wall. Any moment now I might die. I am already seeing stars.

  But how did I get from the bed to the street outside?

  “Blackout, you fucking loser,” he tells me, his voice like someone rattling bottle caps in a wool pocket. “You woke, you walked, and you ended up in the middle of the street with your dick out, trying to take a piss.”

  I want to think he’s wrong, but I know he isn’t. In life, he never misled me. In death, there’s even less of a motive to lie. And
it’s not like this isn’t a regular event. Most nights I can’t remember how I ended up wherever I find myself, and the panic and confusion is debilitating.

  I can move only my eyes, and I see the small wrought iron gate leading to the driveway of Melinda’s house. Her car comes into view, then fills my vision entirely as my face is slammed into the side of it, a move which has the instantaneous effect of setting off the alarm. It screeches and squawks into the night as I am thrown against it, an alcoholic wretch in his underwear covered in rain and blood and gasping for air.

  A few moments later the front door flies open and through rapidly swelling eyes, I see Melinda standing there, hair tousled, tugging a robe closed to hide her nakedness, her face jaundiced by the flashes of amber light from her car.

  “What the fuck?” she asks, and disappears back inside the house. A second later, long enough for me to see that my attacker has vanished, she reappears, points her keys at the car and hits a button. The car shrieks once more and falls silent.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Abby. I was thirsty. I got lost. I’m sorry.”

  “Abby?” Melinda says, but she doesn’t look annoyed, merely concerned. I’ve seen that look too many times before to trust in it. It never lasts. Instead it mutates over time into frustration, hatred and resentment. Most people are not equipped to deal with my problems. People like me. People like my ex-wife Abby, or my poor kids. Or Melinda.

  Why am I here?

  What the fuck was I thinking?

  Certainly not about the cat, the cutest cat you ever did see, who I killed with the shovel to end his pain.

  Certainly not my friends, none of whom will answer the phone.

  Certainly not about my sponsor, who is dead, and won’t leave me alone.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, and then I am weeping openly, hopelessly into my hands. The cuts on my face and mouth sting, sobering me, bringing me, however temporarily, back to the wasteland I have made for myself. My gums ache as if someone has tied strings around them and is trying to pull them down my throat.