Vincent and Alice and Alice

by Shane Jones

  “What’s going on?” she says. “What’s happening with me?”

  This time I do move forward. Breathing heavily, she rests her hands on her knees. I take another step forward. She places her chin on her chest and in a spring-loaded movement her head shoots backward, cracking the cabinet’s center and breaking it from the hinges.

  She doesn’t stop. Her rhythm is pure violence as she continues, faster, harder, her facial expression tranquil as her hair moves around her shoulders, faster, harder, the storm breeze coming in as she destroys everything behind her, the cabinet’s contents tipping out like an earthquake or wraith-like reckoning sweeping the air. Eyes open, fixated on me, she has no reaction with each hit, cups rattling off the shelves and cracking on the counter. I lunge forward and grab her by the shoulders and she convulses backward, her mouth expanding with poison-yellow froth.

  Her skull bounces off the counter’s edge as she slips toward the floor, as I fail to hold her.

  “To the living room, anywhere, let’s go, you’re real, okay?”

  Onto the floor calling me a liar, saying she deserves better, head crashing into anything that will break with her force. She dents a floor tile and blood splatters outward like a firework. Calling me a loser. Someone with only a past. Telling me to leave her. Telling me to divorce her.

  Do not control the gate.

  I pin her to the floor.

  Let the gate guide you.

  Her head rests to the side as if falling asleep.

  Do not confront the gate about its plausibility.

  I don’t want this anymore.

  Do not attempt to escape the gate.

  But I have nowhere else to go.

  Do not question humans inside the gate.

  But I have no one else to concentrate on.

  I run and grab a towel from the bathroom. Back in the kitchen, she isn’t here. Where she sat on the counter it looks like a grenade went off. The splintered cabinet door is on the floor leaning against the stove and most of the cups and dishes are broken or badly chipped. Smeared blood leads from the shelves, to the counter, and down and across the floor.

  I search the apartment.

  A buzzing sound is coming from the bedroom.

  The gate opening back up, the gate shifting, the gate so imperfect.

  I walk into the bedroom.

  Alice is asleep in bed with no sheets. She’s curled up in a fetal position and shaking. Quietly, I walk over and inspect her head and find not one cut. I run to the kitchen again and everything is fixed and in perfect place like nothing happened.

  Documenting the gate by video or photo is prohibited.

  Fuck the gate.

  JUNE 28

  Bell is calling while I’m at the grocery store buying prepackaged spaghetti and meatballs for Francesca. I figure it’s a way to apologize for everything I’ve done or not done in the office lately. This morning I left Alice sleeping in bed, still not one cut or sign of what happened last night. I’m not sure how many hours she should sleep, but she needs the rest, the recharge.

  I haven’t called Alice back. At first I had no desire to do so, but now I’m thinking about it. Last night was a nightmare. Alice is not sustainable. But maybe? No, I don’t think so. I’m happy in my life now. Maybe the gate will correct itself. It’s still early. But I need the real. No. I’m happy in my life now. Yes. I’m happy in my life now. I’m happy in my life now. Things are just a little… fucked up. Things are just a little… hole-heavy.

  “St. Peters,” states Bell. It sounds like he’s driving with the windows down. I bet he’s in short sleeves again. Running red lights because he has sirens. You would think with everything happening in A-ville he would have more crucial things to do, but I’m not surprised, I once saw a cop riding a bike down a hill past a burning bodega.

  I turn around an endcap with 2 for $4 bags of Doritos. An employee is stuffing the shelves with unbelievable speed, slicing boxes open with a box cutter, throwing the bags onto the shelves slightly faster than the people pulling them off. It’s a great deal. But what the employee is doing alone is amazing in its proficiency. He’s a machine, it’s art, but no one records him.

  “Peters,” repeats Bell, slightly louder, the phone cutting out. “The old man there. Spent…found at the park. He asked for you. There? Hello?”

  “Yeah,” I say, but my head is crammed with Alice, the thought of her as impermanent, something withdrawing, someone I have no control over, someone or some thing with the option of leaving.

  I get in line as Bell continues to talk, but I can’t hear him with all the wind blowing into his phone. It takes a second for me to realize he’s telling me where Elderly is.

  The man with the blood-red suspenders, Caesar Salad, is here again, holding, what else, a Caesar salad. What you have to realize is your circle is very tight, a radius of five miles or so, and the same people are inside this radius performing the same tasks as you. In my radius is Alice, coworkers, guitar playing neighbor, pizza eating squirrel, deaf person singing, Shawl Lady, Bell, Dorian, Fang Lu, Billy Krol, Elderly, Rudy above RIP, and Caesar Salad. Who am I missing? Someone or so many? Those in my radius including myself are on repeat, and when we’re gone new people will replace us, doing similar things.

  During my painting “career” my favorite film was The Exterminating Angel because one scene is dinner guests entering a castle twice. You think it’s a mistake, a glitch in the film, but it’s just the guests re-entering their reality again. This is what life feels like to me, hoping to crack through and into something else, another chance, another dimension, but you’re just doing the same moves.

  “Thank you,” I say to Bell.

  “For?”

  “Telling me where he is.”

  “Not much of a favor,” says Bell, and the sirens come on, which means either an emergency or he wants to zoom through a stop sign.

  I decide to do something strictly against the guidelines, that is, call in sick to work and go to the hospital. I lock in on Elderly. I shake everything else from my head.

  My routine will be compromised. I won’t complete the suggested daily data entry, my face into a computer so important in the maintenance, the headset, the water, the watch flashing with light and logo, but I need to see Elderly because it feels like one of those defining moments, and if I don’t show up I won’t be able to live with myself. My imagination of what could have happened to him will only be worse. Besides, I can get back on track with PER, Dorian isn’t even around. Also, the Alice problems are glaring, and if the real Alice is trying to reach me maybe full reality is possible again.

  I leave the line at the grocery store, place the prepackaged spaghetti and meatballs into where the rotisserie chickens stay warm, and the guy stocking the Doritos gives me a big thumbs-up.

  I walk across the street to the bus stop. I wait in the summer-heat under a metal awning in front of a smashed CVS sign. Taking the bus is faster than walking to my car, I think, or just running. It’s so hot outside it hurts. The bus is approaching in the near distance, sagging to the sidewalk with each stop. Quickly, I email Francesca while standing inside someone’s vape cloud.

  A shower curtain is pulled across and around where the bus driver sits. Light-blue with slits of white rain, the curtain is hung above with plastic laundry clips and twisted metal wires in a half circle. On the floor, big army boots and a ring of garbage. I pay my fare and find a seat.

  I love public transportation, but can’t remember the last time I rode the bus. Like a library, it should be free. Another one of Elderly’s ideas, so good. Taking the bus feels right to go and see him. He’ll appreciate it when I tell him.

  A huge man wearing a suit with the dress shirt cuffs covering his hands sits in a wheelchair behind the driver, the wheels locked by tiny chains to the floor. The man takes up so much space it’s hard not to stare. He appears naturally a part of the wheelchair. His face is perfectly shaven and shellacked in sweat, tortoiseshell glasses resting low on his
nose, mouth parted in a stunned expression. I’m sitting slightly behind him, but on the opposite side, facing him.

  “The Body,” says the person next to me. She leans over when she speaks, and means to whisper, but she doesn’t, she’s loud.

  “Hey, I know you,” I say, unable to believe how truly small my radius is. Out the window the sky darkens to a violent purple. The first raindrops smear across the glass.

  “I’m going to talk,” she says rolling her shoulders back, “but don’t you dare say you know me.”

  “We work in the same building. We ride the elevator together.”

  “I’ve ridden this line every day for three weeks and The Body is always on it,” she continues, adjusting her shawl. Her green flats are dirty now. On her lap is an open purse showing three prescription vials. “I’ll tell you one thing, if I was in as bad a shape as him, I wouldn’t go to work. But I guess it’s inspiring? I’ve taken hundreds of elevators. Big deal.”

  “Who are you?”

  She shrugs. “Wait a second,” she says, now excited, “he’s going to do it.”

  I shift over, but the seats are designed to cradle an ass like mine, so there’s only so far I can move, I’m kind of stuck in the mold.

  “Wait for it.”

  If you don’t have earphones or a book to read on the bus you look like a fucking creep in these sideways facing seats. You have to stare out the window or pick at the skin around your thumbs or read old texts on your phone. How do you get a job as a bus designer? With Shawl Lady, I look out the window, but we’re really looking at The Body, waiting for something, whatever she means, to happen.

  “I know,” she continues, “you don’t believe me that he’s going to do it. But just a few more minutes and he’ll do it. I’d bet you a hundred dollars if I had it.”

  I look out the window.

  His spine becomes rigid like he’s being electrocuted, head wrenched left, toes diving into the floor. One thick neck vein pulsates as he tries to control his body, the instrument of his torture. Whatever he does it doesn’t work, the wheelchair bounces like we’re racing over potholes, chains rattle, and something inside him squeals.

  The driver says, “You got this, Earl.”

  Shawl Lady’s elbow nudges my ribs. “Told you he was going to do it.”

  “Remember what we talked about yesterday,” says the driver. “That this too shall pass.”

  I hate life.

  I love life.

  I just want Alice back.

  The rain comes hard, and The Body stops, his head hung, he appears to be sleeping, his muscles zapped of energy, the cuffs of his shirt touching the floor.

  “Works for the State,” says Shawl Lady. “Never misses a day.”

  “Pretty depressing.”

  “No,” she says pressing her purse into her chest. “He’s completely out of his mind. He’s both on the ride and off the ride. Oh, you didn’t hear that from me. Sitting at a computer all day doesn’t necessarily feel like it? Not too shabby. Here’s my stop. And listen, you’re little secret is safe with me. I’m not telling him because I’m rooting for you guys.” She stands by gripping the metal pole, pulling herself to her feet in a smooth motion. “Also, you didn’t speak with me today, yes?”

  The bus travels across town, away from downtown fires and through the suburbs where the streets are named after renaissance painters. On one side of the hospital, the police training academy, and on the other side, a law school with a bad reputation. Each brick building has sprawling front lawns fenced-in by black iron gates. The sun illuminates everything into the unreal, which, given my life, feels right.

  Everyone – the sick, the visiting the sick, nurses and janitors, an entire community – exits the bus at the hospital. I rarely watch the Leaders when they’re on State TV, but one time I remember a Leader’s mouth saying there were two types of people: those who are sick and those who will be sick. They wanted to pass legislation making it illegal to have six hospital beds in a room designed to hold only two, but didn’t have the votes.

  I’m riding the elevator with four men in lab coats holding trays of blood. One is a surgeon, and wears one of those thin caps shoestring-tied in the back, but this one isn’t hospital-green, it’s the colors of the flag. I step off on floor ten and start looking at the room numbers, searching for 1008.

  The hospital – the lighting, nurses station, the cream colored walls and flower paintings – is identical to an office, if you swapped out the beds for cubicles, made slight adjustments to the layout. But it has the same feel. I hate this realization, and being here reminds me of Mom and Dad. I didn’t need to visit them, that’s true. I didn’t need to see Dad connected to that red machine pumping air into his lungs. I didn’t need to see Mom attached to a wall of wires.

  Elderly is sleeping under fuzzy blue sheets. They’ve cut his hair and shaved off his beard, a few red nicks from the razor on his jawline. His hospital gown is tied neatly around his neck and there’s yellow lotion on his skin, little dunes of it under his eyes. He looks waxed. If it wasn’t for the hospital setting you could dress him in a suit and give him an office job. I imagine, when he arrived, someone said to clean him up, look at this bum, or maybe a new hospital program to have the sick look their best possible and this is the result, which isn’t Elderly, but someone else. I feel sick. On his wrist a purple bracelet says FALL RISK and a yellow one DO NOT RESUSITATE. Under the sheets, one ratty blue arm sticking above and against its head, is his stuffed animal named Millionaire. Standing over Elderly, I carefully pull Millionaire up so their heads are touching as they sleep. I’m still capable of sentimental things.

  I plop down in a leather chair. I should call Alice. I work myself up into a phony confidence I once channeled during conference calls. What is Alice doing right now? Does she even exist when I’m not there? Maybe she only appears when I open the front door. Maybe my body near her is the trigger to her appearance.

  On television is an ad for a salad spinner. Then a local news story with a masked protestor throwing a garbage bin through a Bank of America window. Everyone thinks in twenty years we’ll be living in a dystopia, all storefronts blasted out, banker’s heads on spikes, but in twenty years I just think that no one will care. The protesters will give up when they learn how powerful and indifferent the State is. Good people become corrupt with titles. I’m being negative again, but I’ve seen cruel things done by friendly politicians. So much wasted money, and they love to breed.

  I’m not calling any Alice.

  The nurse sneezes as she slips the needle in. After she leaves with the vials of blood, Elderly opens his eyes. He leans forward and looks toward the door. “She gone? I like to pretend I’m asleep when they do it.”

  “E,” I say, and put my hand on his leg.

  He leans back. “You know what I could really go for?”

  “What?”

  “Big burrito.”

  In a hospital you order breakfast by pushing numbers on a phone. As he pokes each number with a way too long press, he says he had a heart attack in connection with poor blood circulation. “Well,” he says, casually, “Omar thinks my feet are kaput. I don’t know what they’re going to do about them, but they seem fine to me, they still work like feet, just don’t look like feet.”

  Sitting up, tugging the blankets at his thighs, his bandaged feet are stump shaped, and it’s enough for me to understand I have no power, nothing I have or could say will help this situation, could have helped Mom or Dad, I was just there, like I’m just here.

  When I was a kid you had to put your time in during family events even if you didn’t want to be there. Birthday parties lasted eight hours. A hospital visit was a day trip. It was more about obligation than love. I don’t know which one I’m acting on now. I don’t know when, in my existence, I’ve known why I’m doing what I’m doing. Some people can run off a list of personality traits describing themselves, and at a young age know what they want to do for a career. They know what th
ey want in a house and car. I’ve never known. Once on a home show I heard a guy tell a real estate agent, “If it’s not Craftsman style you can forget about it.”

  “I was running in the park,” continues Elderly.

  “From?”

  “What do you mean from?”

  “For exercise? Someone was chasing you? Was it someone from PER?”

  He folds his hands on his chest. “The body is a temple, V,” he says condescendingly, “and you have to condition it.”

  “Just thought –”

  “I have a gym membership.”

  “You do?”

  “I don’t.”

  A fat calico cat slinks past the room. Elderly says it’s Graves. That if she naps in your bed after midnight you don’t wake up in the morning. She comes in to either comfort you as you ascend to heaven, or take your soul to hell, according to Elderly.

  I could believe him. Everything makes sense if you let it. Someone once looked at the stars and saw an eagle, twin boys, a crab, a woman falling.

  “A cop told me you own four houses,” I say hesitantly, “and that you’re married.”

  Clean shaven, his hair styled like a little boys school picture, he doesn’t look anything like Elderly. “If you don’t have someone to love houses are traps,” he says.

  “But you are married?”

  “Martha drives a Lexus,” says Elderly. “A Lexus SUV.”

  “Is she here?”

  “Fuck, I’m tired. What is this junk?” He yanks weakly on a tube inserted into his forearm. Around the needle a piece of clear tape unsticks. “What’s going to happen to me? Never mind, don’t tell me.”

  “I could ask. Want me to ask?”

  “No, it’s better not knowing. If you see them tell them I don’t want to know.”

  He doses off again, his mouth open and drooling.

  I leave the room. Graves is walking the perimeter of the hall so I follow. In one room the lights are off and tied to an empty bed is a silver helium balloon with the number 95. Graves walks in, leaps onto the bed, and curls herself into a comfortable ball on the pillow. I keep walking. In another room I see a child in a reclining chair holding a Dinosaur coloring book. But most of the rooms are empty, beds curtained off, a biohazard bin in a corner, beeping machines, a crucifix cross on each wall. Even with the curtains open the rooms feel cold and terrifying.