Me, Myself and Them

by Dan Mooney

  He smiled at her. There were times in his life when his mouth seemed to act independently of his brain, shooting out suggestions and declarations that led to anxiety and panic attacks. Before the previous night, his asking her to stay in bed with him all day may have provoked just such an attack, but today it caused a mere moment of trepidation. He felt the pang of regret when she said no, not the relief he expected to feel.

  “There’s that smile,” she told him, reaching one hand up to brush his cheek. He was powerless against her, he knew that now, but he didn’t mind.

  She showered and dressed, planted a lingering kiss on his lips and left for work. Denis sighed contentedly and basked in the moment. A moment of freedom that was barely tinged with his usual fears and worries. He soaked it in for as long as he could, but such moments are glorious, and if milked for too long, can end up turning quite sour. He decided not to let that happen and bounced from his bed to shower.

  He dripped on the tiles of the bathroom as he stepped out of the shower, the water making pools that ran together and collided into new shapes and islands in reverse. He looked at them for such a long time, waiting for the moment when they upset him to the point that he would have to mop them. The moment never came. He hummed a Barenaked Ladies song to himself as he brushed his teeth. He was careful not to let any spittle hit the mirror, or miss the sink, but he didn’t count the brushstrokes like he normally would. This seemed to liberate him further, and he whistled while he dressed. He briefly worried about whether or not his whistling would wake his housemates, but that concern passed too, and he went about his morning at a pace that would have frightened him at any other time in the last six years. A leisurely pace. He practically sauntered into his kitchen. Denis fantasized that if there had been anyone else present in his house to see him, they would have thought how relaxed and casual he looked. As though he hadn’t a care in the world. He made breakfast, carefully avoiding making any mess, but he didn’t measure the cereal before he poured it into the bowl. Instead, like a rebel who refused to bend to authority, he just emptied in the amount of cereal that he felt like eating. It tinkled merrily as it hit the bowl, a little melody of congratulations for him.

  He considered waking his housemates but decided against it. There would be time enough for that showdown later on. They were expecting him to kick her out today; what a surprise they were in for. Their war was over. He owned the house. They would be told, in no uncertain terms, that Rebecca Lynch wasn’t going anywhere. He imagined the look on Plasterer’s face when he told him. In his mind’s eye, he played out the conversation.

  “Plasterer,” he would tell the clown. “It’s time you learned to live with her or move on, because I’m the boss. I’m the captain of our ship. You’re my troops and, dammit, you will obey orders.”

  Plasterer would cower at his confidence and authority.

  He set about his work for the day. He played music as he worked—the band Fred. It was half-past ten when the phone rang. He looked at it, a sense of unease grabbing him by the belly and the throat all at once. Not enough to panic, just enough to make him tense. It rang and rang. He refused to answer it. Frank was calling him. Why would Frank be calling him?

  The call went unanswered.

  Then it started to ring again.

  “Answer it,” Plasterer told him from the door of the office.

  “What?” Denis asked, his confidence emptying from him like water from a bucket.

  “Answer the phone, Denis,” Plasterer ordered implacably.

  “I don’t feel like it,” he replied, trying to reassert his sense of authority.

  “Answer the phone now, Denis,” he was told.

  It was still ringing. The sound of it seemed to scream into his brain.

  “Hello...?” he finally said, punching the button to take the call.

  “Denis?” Frank asked. His voice sounded thick. Something was wrong.

  “What is it?” he asked, frightened.

  “I’m sorry, Denis, I’m so, so sorry.” A sob escaped his friend.

  “Frank... What? What is it? You have to tell me what it is? What did I do? Who did I hurt?”

  “You didn’t do this, buddy, this isn’t your fault. I’m sorry. They pulled the plug this morning. They’ve been preparing for so long. I’m sorry, Denny.”

  “Pulled what plug?” he demanded, but he already knew.

  “Denny, you have to listen, this isn’t your fault. I’m so sorry. Eddie died this morning.”

  Denis began shaking. His stomach convulsed. The phone dropped to the soft carpet and bounced. His knees were hopping up and down. He grabbed at them with his hands to stop them and found himself rocking back and forth on the seat.

  “Denis? Talk to me, Denis...” The voice coming from the phone on the floor seemed so very far away.

  Eddie had been laughing. He’d held Jules’s hand tenderly as she reached around the passenger seat to hug him. He used to bring purple flowers to their house. Denis mocked him every time. Kiss ass he used to call him. He brought those purple flowers to the hospital.

  “Denis, please,” the voice on the phone said. “It’s not your fault. You have to talk to me, Denny.”

  This is why Ned had stopped by the previous day. He had come to tell him. Denis had kicked him out of the house before he could.

  Plasterer sauntered across the room just like Denis had earlier that morning. If anyone else had been present, they would have thought that the clown didn’t have a care in the world. He reached down to the floor and picked up the phone.

  “Denis doesn’t feel like talking,” he said into the handset.

  “What? Denis, look you have to talk,” he could hear Frank reply.

  “Go away. Leave us alone,” was all the clown said, and he cut off the call.

  Denis’s whole body was still shaking. Something was building inside him, something huge and monstrous. Something unstoppable.

  “Did you think it was going to be so easy?” It was Penny O’Neill’s voice. “Did you think you could kill two people and it would just go away because you talked some woman into your bed? Is that what you thought?”

  “Eddie...” Denis tried to say.

  “You’re a breaker of families. A ruiner of lives. You think there’s comfort for you?” This time Penny and Plasterer were speaking in unison, their voices mixing into one, slamming into his head, each word a battering ram that tore at his ability to think.

  “What are you going to do now, Denny?” Plasterer asked him, his voice like acid.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” he replied. He was still shaking. The room was spinning.

  “Clean the kitchen,” Plasterer ordered him.

  “It’s not dirty,” he heard himself replying.

  “Dirty it then.”

  Denis found his feet; they seemed to reel underneath him. Eddie used to nudge the back of Denis’s pool cue when he walked by during games to give himself an edge. Denis used to poke him with the cue when he tried it. Both of them would laugh. He walked into the kitchen and took the cereal boxes. He opened them and emptied the contents on the floor; the sound they made this time was a rushing sound, like a waterfall. He got lost in it for just a moment. It seemed to roar in his ears.

  Eddie used to go to soccer matches with him. He had no idea about the game itself; he went purely as company. He’d shout, “Go team,” and “Yay sports,” to mock Denis’s love of the game. It was playful ribbing among friends. Ollie and Frank would go too. Afterward they would head to a bar and drink pints of Guinness and play pool. No girls allowed on these nights; it was just for the four boys. Jules and Rebecca would object to being excluded. Denis would hug them both and go anyway. Denis tore out the contents of one of the cupboards and then sat on the floor, opening sachets individually to empty them. Tearing at the lids of salt-and-pepper canisters with fin
gers like claws. The Professor sat with him. For just a minute his face was Eddie’s face, but then the moment was gone. The Professor was not his usual pompous self. There was a sinister quality to him in that moment, a brooding menace that seemed to make him seem larger than normal.

  “Where did you go, Denis? Why did you have to stop visiting him?” The Professor almost sobbed for him. His words cut into Denis’s brain.

  “I don’t know,” Denis replied, his eyes leaking bitterly. “I promise I’ll visit now. Every day. I’ll visit every day.”

  “Sure you will,” Penny O’Neill interjected sarcastically. “Just like you visit Jules every day. Your own sister, Denis. Your mother goes once a week. She brings purple flowers, doesn’t she? You sit here instead.”

  Denis climbed to his feet and began emptying out the cleaning products. He poured them into the sink, making a cocktail of sharp-smelling foulness. He took the dishcloths and dipped them into it. He flung the cloths against the walls of the kitchen. He had seen his housemates at their most destructive; he knew exactly how to make a mess, a mess that would take him hours to clean. He had learned from the best.

  The house he had shared with Eddie and Frank and Ollie had frequently been a mess, and so, more often than not, they would hang out in Rebecca and Jules’s house. When they did clean, it was to loud music and it would be a pretty slapdash job. Eddie would choose the music, and more than anyone else, he hated cleaning.

  He stopped and looked around to survey the damage.

  “Keep going,” Plasterer told him. In the doorway, Penny O’Neill and Deano watched. The Professor was still sitting in the mess on the floor.

  He pushed on. He took the bag from the vacuum cleaner and emptied it on the already ruined floor. He began to boil water in all the pots, allowing them to overflow and burn the top of the stove, bubbling and hissing at him as he walked tracks through the filth. His eyes stung all the way through his tasks. Plasterer watched from the door into the hallway, Penny O’Neill and Deano from the door into the living room. The Professor helped him with his work. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, each was destroyed. His cupboards emptied of everything. His feet still felt shaky. His shoes were beginning to crush him, so he took them off and stood barefoot, with water leaking from his eyes, down his cheeks and onto the floor while the others just watched him. Soon it would be time to clean up, but just like that, all the energy went from him, and he sat down in the mess and filth he had just created and buried his head in his hands.

  With his eyes closed, his imagination went into overdrive and a thousand memories burst from the depths of his mind like an avalanche that would sweep him under entirely. Eddie playing pool, holding hands with Jules, smoking a cigarette out the passenger window of the car. Eddie studying in the library, throwing a Frisbee, pulling out a seat to let Jules sit down. Eddie’s mangled and crumpled body with the oxygen mask being fitted to it. Blood all over his T-shirt. His cigarette had burned a scar into his hand. It was distinguishable, somehow, from the mess that was the rest of him. Eddie lying in his hospital bed with the machines beep, beep, beeping throughout the room. Eddie’s hand, being held by his mother, Ann, as he lay in the bed. For almost seven years.

  His thoughts snowballed and started a second avalanche on a nearby mountain of memories. Suddenly it was Jules in his head. Jules as a little girl when he had to walk her to school. Jules in her school graduation dress. Jules and Eddie curled up on the couch watching movies. Jules’s seat at the table for Sunday dinner, opposite his. Jules and Rebecca whispering and throwing looks at him and Eddie with half smiles. Jules’s determined face when she insisted on sibling bonding time even though Denis wanted to watch soccer.

  Now he imagined Eddie, with skin that looked like plastic. Like some life-size doll, lying in a coffin. No smile. No smirk. No clever retort or witty banter. Denis had killed his friend, just like he had killed his sister. It took him seven years to die, but time was irrelevant. The sense of utter helplessness overwhelmed Denis, and he screamed like an animal, his fists beating on the floor and splattering the walls with the mess that was all around him. He screamed until there were no screams left. He sat there in silence. His housemates had left. He was all alone.

  It could have been minutes or hours from the time he sat down alone to the time that they returned. Without a to-do list, without a frame of reference for the execution of daily duties, there was little that Denis could use to tell the passage of time. The Professor had a watch, but he had made it himself out of cardboard, so it was hard to know how accurate it was at any time of the day.

  “Would you have me assist you in the cleaning?” the Professor asked sympathetically as he surveyed the damage.

  “Do you know how?” Denis replied glumly.

  “I am an encyclopedia of knowledge, Denis. Let us dump it all in the bin.”

  “Sure,” Denis told him. “Dump everything. Dump everyone. It’s easier than sorting it all out.”

  “She’ll return as soon as she finds out. You are aware of this, aren’t you?” the Professor asked.

  “Finds out what?” he asked, confused.

  “When they tell her about Eddie. She knows this will have a tremendous impact on you, and she’ll come home posthaste to address your issues and fix you all over again. You know how much she enjoys such things.”

  “I need to be fixed,” he replied.

  “No, you don’t. You’re not broken. Everyone else is broken. The sooner you remember that, the better. Do you remember what it was like before she came back? We were happy, Denis, all of us together. No one made us feel like we were broken. I fear that her presence has upset this. I am loath to agree with our aggressive friend out there, but she has changed you, and you must repair the past.”

  “But I’m so lonely...” The words came out of his mouth, and he knew that he meant them, but he couldn’t recall ever thinking that before.

  “You have us for that. That’s why we’re all friends.”

  “Plasterer isn’t my friend anymore. I don’t think Penny is either.”

  “They’re just angry because you’re turning your back on everything you believe in. Look at what she’s made you do. Look at the mess you’re sitting in. This is her fault, you know. With her hot yoga and her book clubs. She believes this is all going her way, that somehow she’s in control of you, but she’s really stripping you down and cracking you open, I regret to tell you. She’s taking away a part of who you are. What will be left when she’s taken it all?”

  “She’s my friend. I don’t want her to leave.”

  A key turned in the door. The Professor’s head whipped around at the sound. He gave Denis one quick severe look before he dodged out the door into the utility room, suddenly nimble where he had shambled before. Denis didn’t move. He sat in the filth he had made and waited for her to see him. This is what he wanted her to see, not the covered-up version of his life that he’d been living with her, but the reality of who he was. The cleanliness, the order, the need for control. Now she’d truly understand. Now she’d see him for who he really was.

  She walked into the kitchen and took in the entire scene in a single glance. She barely paused before walking to him and sitting down at his side.

  “I’m so, so sorry, Denis. I’m so very terribly sorry.”

  Her eyes were puffy and red, her mascara a mess from the tears.

  “I killed them both,” was all Denis could manage to say.

  “You didn’t kill him Denis, you didn’t. Don’t you understand? Ned was here yesterday to tell you that you didn’t. To let you know that no one blames you for what happened. It’s nobody’s fault. Accidents happen.”

  “When you kill your sister and your best friend, that’s something different. That’s not an accident.”

  “What is it, then? What do you think it is?”

  “Murder.”

  “Denis you
can’t go on like this. Look around you. Look what you did...”

  Her words so closely mirrored the Professor’s that it forced a bitter laugh from him. Look what “you” did, she said. Look what “she” made you do, is what the Professor had said. Who’s to blame? In all things in life there must be responsibility. Was it hers or his?

  “What’s so funny?” she asked him angrily.

  “Nothing. Everything. This is me, Rebecca. This is the reality of life for me. A mess, then order. Why won’t you understand me?”

  A silent voice in his head disagreed. She’s the only one who understands you, it seemed to say. Denis was a mess because of all the voices, all the different opinions, all the perspectives that weren’t his own. He didn’t know what his own perspective was. Do this, do that, be this, not that, it was a cacophony he couldn’t escape.

  “It’s not you,” Rebecca disagreed, a hard edge to her voice. “This is something else. It’s the you that you’ve made up. You made it up to hide from the world, but you can’t hide forever. Eventually you’ll have to face it, Denis. Face your problems like a man. Stop hiding like a child.”

  Her words had the effect of a hammer, smashing his attempts to rationalize.

  “I slapped her hand, you see...” he started. Then stopped.

  “Tell me,” she said. Her tone brooked no argument.

  “I can’t,” he replied.

  “Tell me,” she said again. Harder this time.

  “You don’t understand. I can’t. I can’t tell anyone.”

  She didn’t say anything, but her hand gripped his arm, viselike. The message was clear.

  “Jules reached out from the passenger seat. She used to sit forward in the middle of the back seat so her head would be popping in between ours. She had one hand over his shoulder, and I slapped it. I didn’t do it hard. I just did it as a joke. And they laughed. And then they were screaming. I didn’t look, Rebecca. I was somewhere else when I should have been there.” The words came out in a rush. The police investigation into the crash had apportioned no blame, and Denis had been allowed to leave the station with only commiserations from the officers. He hadn’t been able to tell them what happened. He told them he didn’t remember, but he did. It was a terrible lie. The lie of his life, and the lie of their deaths.