Y Is for Fidelity

by Logan Ryan Smith

  “I was getting… drinks. Drinks with friends,” I say and take a sip from my Old Style, letting my Chicago Fire players fend for themselves as I take a hand off the controller.

  “Drinks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like, chardonnay?”

  “No! I met them at a café up the street. Just up on Broadway, five or six blocks south.”

  “Coffee?” he says.

  “I was having coffee. One of my friends was having a… sherry, if you must know.”

  “Ohhh…. A real party then. That café you went to serves sherry?”

  “Huh?”

  “You went to a café that serves sherry? I don’t know. That seems… unlikely.”

  “Well, no. The café doesn’t serve sherry. Of course it doesn’t.”

  “Uh… then how was your friend having a sherry?”

  “He wasn’t in the café, of course.”

  “Your friend?” Benoit asks, flatly.

  “Yeah.”

  “He wasn’t in the café… where you were—where you went… to have drinks with friends?”

  “No.”

  “Your friends are on the internet, aren’t they?” Benoit says, pausing the game and putting his controller down on the coffee table next to the tinfoil, which I’m just now noticing has more than a few stubbed-out cigarettes in it.

  I glare at him for a moment then pick his controller up and unpause the game and try to get a shot off before he gets hold of his controller. I knock the ball about eighty feet wide of goal.

  “Nice one,” Benoit says.

  “Benoit?”

  “Huh?”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “My last name?”

  “Yeah. You know, that thing that comes after your first name?”

  “My last name?”

  “Do you not know your last name, Benoit?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “What is it?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “It’s Tellman.”

  “Tellman.”

  “Yeah. And yours?”

  “It’s Jones.”

  “Jones?”

  “Yeah. Jones.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Benoit Jones?”

  “My mother was French Canadian. My father, you know, the policeman, he was American. Very American.”

  “I thought your father was a fireman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You just said he was a policeman.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Slip of the tongue, I guess.”

  “And that memory of yours…”

  “Yeah, like I said… my mind is a sieve.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A sieve? I don’t remember. It’s just a thing people say.”

  “No. That. On the coffee table.”

  Benoit stops playing FIFA and looks down at the coffee table where I’m pointing. Beneath four or five empty cans, some spilled ash, and the cupped tinfoil filled with six or seven butts, is a magazine I hadn’t noticed until just now.

  “Oh, that? That’s just work.”

  “Looks like a porno mag,” I tell him, abandoning my controller to lift the foil ashtray up and retrieve the magazine. I study it, feeling a mixture of queasiness and excitement. A white woman, which some might call plus-sized, and a black woman of equal body type are on the cover, smashing their swollen faces together as their droopy breasts hang out of undone corsets. The magazine title, splashed above them in a white font made to look like it’s dripping, reads, BUXSOME LOVIN’. The two women are playing with each other’s privates, which I notice are swollen to the size of catcher’s mitts. I feel a bit more queasiness than excitement the longer I look at it.

  “I found it out in the hallway. Thought you might want it,” Benoit says, humorless. He stares at me over his can of beer as he takes a healthy swallow.

  “You just said it was work,” I tell him, putting the magazine down, suddenly aware it might give me a VD or something.

  “I was kidding. Here.” He picks the magazine back off the table and jabs it at me.

  “What? No. I don’t want it.”

  “Take it,” he says, his vague accent becoming more pronounced. “Go on. Take it with you to the bathroom for a few minutes. Show yourself a good time.”

  He’s still bald-faced.

  “No, Benoit. Really. I don’t want it.”

  “Are you a fag?”

  “No. And I don’t like—”

  “Then take the goddamned magazine, Ian Tellman, and go fire off a load. You’re probably so backed up it’s blocking blood flow to your brain, man.”

  “What… no!” I say, standing now.

  “Take the goddamned magazine,” he tells me, eyes like a serpent’s, ready to strike.

  “No.”

  “I said take the fucking magazine, Ian. Consider it a gift.”

  “If I take the magazine, will you just drop it?”

  “I’ll drop it.”

  “OK. Here. Give me that filthy thing.”

  He hands me the porno and laughs, slouches back into the couch and picks up the controller, unpausing our game.

  “Wait, where are you going?” he asks when I walk behind the couch, headed for my room.

  “Bed. I think I’ve had too much to drink tonight. I’ve got to get up early, you know… for work?”

  “Not until we’re done with our game, man.” He doesn’t turn toward me when he speaks, just remains facing the TV.

  “No, really. It’s fine. I’m feeling light-headed and, besides, you’re obviously going to wipe the floor with me. Really, sportsball games are not my—”

  “Sit down.”

  “Benoit…”

  “Sit down. We’ve got a whole other half to play. It’ll take fifteen minutes.”

  “Benoit, I’m going to bed.”

  “Fifteen minutes! Sit!” he shouts, now turning around in the couch to face me. The scar behind his left ear pulses and has turned a darker red.

  Adrenaline speeds through my veins like mercury, and disappears just as quickly, leaving me feeling weak and shaky. I return to the couch and pick up the PlayStation controller. We play for another ten minutes, Benoit controlling the play the whole time, scoring at will. It’s five to nothing now, and there’s only a few minutes left in the game when I find my number-eleven player suddenly with the ball and nothing but green digital grass between me and his goalie. I remember to aim and not put too much power behind the kick, so I let it rip and the ball zips by his goalie and ripples the upper right corner of the net. I’m so shocked I almost do nothing but then I realize I’m laughing laughing laughing and then I’m yelling GOALLLLLL! into Benoit’s ear. He has slinked back into the couch, shoulders slumped, and he isn’t smiling or even looking at me. He sighs and his scars pulse again. His eyes go dark.

  Getting up off the couch, Benoit flings his controller onto the coffee table and it clips the foil ashtray, spilling silt and a few butts.

  “Hey!” I protest, but I’m smiling, expecting Benoit to show pride in my goal, waiting for the joke.

  “Clean it up. I’m going to bed,” he tells me without looking my way as he walks to the hallway. He jerks open his bedroom door and nearly slams it closed, but catches it at the last second and shuts it quietly.

  I feel something sink inside me. Like someone just offered me a giftwrapped box that I opened with excitement only to find it empty and the gift-giver convulsing with laughter.

  I turn off the PlayStation and wipe the ash off the coffee table onto the porno mag then I toss the porno into the kitchen trash bin. I also throw out the tinfoil ashtray and place the empty beer cans in a bag set aside for recyclables. I take my iPod to bed with me and watch three episodes of All Creatures Great and Small on that. When I’m convinced Benoit’s not going to rush into my room and murder me, I finally let myself fall asleep after three minute
s of rubbing my feet together. I dream of pregnant cats so bulbous they’re painful to look at. After much caterwauling, hissing, and screaming, the pregnant cats roll over and split open at the belly, their fur tearing like old carpet, and hundreds of red and black strings burst from them like confetti from those plastic party poppers shaped like champagne bottles. Only, the wet confetti flying from the ruptured kitties is hundreds and hundreds of baby black snakes. All those slimy black things fly through the air and land in a big black bowl that turns out to be my gaping mouth.

  CHAPTER 8.

  They found me. They found me in a dumpster, unconscious, half froze to death.

  That’s how the earliest dated entry in Benoit’s massive manuscript begins. It’s dated Thursday, February 18, 2010. A little more than six years ago.

  Benoit left around eleven this morning. It’s Saturday but I’ve managed to avoid him since our video-gaming session Wednesday evening.

  For the last few hours I’ve needed to use the bathroom fiercely but feared exiting would invite another confrontation with Benoit, who I of course envisioned waiting for me in the hallway with crossed arms and dark eyes, wearing a white tanktop and black tracksuit pants, and clutching a bloody meat tenderizer—why it would be bloody before he bludgeoned me is anyone’s guess.

  For now, that will have to remain a mystery as I dig into what appears to be some kind of diary (after I paid a visit to the WC, of course), albeit a tome of a diary. I’m in his room again, the old-fashioned suitcase opened so that I can rifle through his typed sheets. There’s at least eleven-hundred pages here, and some are dated this month during the days that he’s lived in my apartment. But not once since his arrival have I heard the chik-chik-cha of a typewriter.

  Rifling through the pages, I discover most of them are gibberish or at least nonsensical. There’s sixteen pages here that just read Sláinte! over and over while another thirteen pages count up to 4,254 by twos, all numerals spelled out, and no spacing between them (it took me some time to work out what was happening there). Others are disjointed and plastered with vividly disturbing and violent imagery. I start reading one that is particularly troubling, unable to take my eyes away.

  Saturday, May 9, 2015

  I woke up in a deep pool of sweat. I choked on it and pulled myself out of it. I dug hair out of my palms and got out of bed, walked down the long hall, and drank a glass of water in the kitchen downstairs.

  Moonlight slit my throat.

  Drowned my eyes.

  I missed my workout. I called my daughter a cunt.

  After my banana I like coffee and enemas. I put your face in my face and I waxed a mirror with my toothpaste. Then I went back out of the guest room where I had slept the last several days and down the hall of this large house. How many rooms? Seven? Large chandeliers hung in the common areas—the foyer, the dining room, the den.

  You were in the bedroom, where I’d never go again. Except for now because you were in there.

  I had you hogtied and gagged. My wife. My lover. My mistress. My temptress. My dream. My nightmare. The mother of my children: The cunt and the accident.

  Momma. Mum. Mommy.

  There you were, gagged and bleary eyed. Your mascara ran. Your red lipstick smudged the white gag. Your brown skin, wet. Your hands tied together behind your back, your ankles bound together and adjoined to the rope binding your wrists. I ran another rope through that binding and up to the ceiling where I’d screwed in a metal hook. I ran the rope through that to create a kind of pulley system.

  Yesterday I went to the porn store and bought a philosophy book. It was red. It said accidents do not happen. An apple doesn’t fall from the tree by mistake. A wild boar does not gorge a man to death on its tusks when it doesn’t mean to.

  People are slippery.

  Especially when they excrete.

  Or bleed.

  Or fuck.

  I walked down a long hall a hundred miles long full of doors backlit by moonlight and I wound up in our bedroom where you were tied up and I pulled on the rope that went through the hook. You screamed against the gag as your arms and legs lifted behind you, and then you were hovering over the bed, slowly rotating counterclockwise, human origami—beautiful.

  Of course you fucked him. Of course you did.

  I told you this and if you weren’t gagged you probably would have finally confessed. But you never did before so I wasn’t going to let you now.

  My brother.

  My brother has children.

  Unfortunately I thought they were my children.

  I ate a persimmon and watched you rotate and I let the juices spill over my lips.

  I was so sticky.

  The moonlight was sticky. It stuck to you in patches. Your eyes were glowing ripples of light. Your pussy was blue-white and haloed.

  You twirled in the air, naked, tied up.

  Your nipples were black until I twisted them, which I thought would turn them red, but it only turned them grey.

  There was a long pointer stick in the corner that you had used for work during meetings to point at the chalkboard or whiteboard or projector screen that showed pictures of Satan ripping the Virgin Mary in half with his enormous, spiked pecker. That was your job. You showed people what Satan can do.

  You worked for Walmart, Nestle, De Beers, or some other corporate monster. You were wealthy but you often bathed me in pennies. Melted pennies. I let you because I thought you were infallible. I drank molten copper because you told me to. I would do anything you asked me to.

  You loved my brother. He looked a lot like me. Black hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, serious smiles.

  You twirled in the air over the bed where you made my children his, nine and twelve years ago, respectively.

  As you spun, I reached out, tenderly, and cupped your knee in one hand, and stopped you spinning. Your hair was soaked in sweat and plastered to your face. I, sweetly, moved it behind your ear. You strained your eyes upward to look me in mine. Your eyes pleaded as you choked on your gag, sobbing.

  I couldn’t feel anything then, of course.

  I couldn’t feel a goddamned thing.

  I would stick needles in my skin, thinking I’d deflate like a balloon. Hollow. All air.

  But it wouldn’t sting. And I’d just bleed instead of disintegrate.

  When I wound up and cracked the pointer stick against your bound arms and legs, over and over again—when I thwacked that stick against your ribs or the side of your face, causing thin, red lacerations, I swear I thought you were a piñata and it was my birthday.

  I only wanted candy.

  Just a little piece of candy.

  To suck on.

  To break my teeth on.

  I wanted to choke on something that came from inside you.

  I was twelve, feeling nothing again.

  Momma. Mum. Mommy.

  Your blood stained the bed, though it dripped so slowly.

  I of course knew you were pregnant again.

  I didn’t care anymore whose this one was.

  Could have been mine. Could have been his. Could have been anyone’s.

  I didn’t care.

  I considered that a step forward. Progress in my emotional stability. There was a future for me after all.

  My stomach turns while reading and I have to make a quick trip to the WC once more upon finishing the entry. I rinse my mouth in the bathroom sink when I realize I’m overreacting. It’s just a story, right? Just some strange, offbeat fiction? Right?

  Just because the sections are dated doesn’t make them a diary or journal or anything remotely resembling something that really happened. After all, that terrible book Crash that I tried to start reading recently could easily be called ten times more disturbing than that May 9, 2015 entry.

  It’s just art, right? Literature? I mean, he’s no Stephen King, and may not even be a good writer, but it’s just some creative endeavor of some sort. It must be.

  I return to Benoit’s room, careful
to listen for any approach from outside the apartment, and get back to the typewritten sheets. Quickly I note that many of the sheets that are halfway coherent are equally disgusting, so I flick back toward the beginning, hoping to find something less abrasive.

  Tuesday, February 23, 2010

  They found DNA under my fingernails. That’s what they told me a week later. They said some of it belonged to a woman, some to a man, and that they couldn’t match it to anything on record. They said it probably belonged to my assailants, and that they’re just as much of a mystery as I am.

  They also told me I was covered in kerosene when they brought me in and that the two probably meant to set me on fire but were scared away by something before they could make sure I lit up like a Christmas tree. There were a few burnt out matches stuck to my skin. It had been snowing. A couple flakes of snow kept me alive somehow.

  A dreamlike vision of a woman’s throat in my hands, her spit and snot running over my knuckles just as her blurry face turns from red to purple.

  No, that was a cop show. CSI Los Angeles, I think. I remembered a TV show for some reason but nothing else.

  “Can you tell us anything about the woman and man that assaulted you?” the black detective asked me. I was still in the hospital bed. They wouldn’t release me until they knew who I was. That’s what they said. The nurses, on the other hand, told me I couldn’t go anywhere until I recovered from my wounds—three stab wounds to my left ribcage and one to my neck. I was also shot once in the shoulder, once in the back, and once beneath my left ear. Somehow the bullet didn’t get too far, just lodged in the back of my jawbone and stuck there. Has that affected the way I talk? I really don’t know.

  It didn’t matter. None of it. I was stuck there, in that hospital bed. Not that I had anywhere to go. Or, at least, I didn’t know if I had anywhere to go.

  “Do you remember if there were more than two?” the white detective with a shit-stained mustache asked.

  “No,” I told them, licking the spoon after polishing off my cup of green Jell-O.

  They sighed, annoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” I told them, setting my spoon down on the bedside table.

  “Call us if you remember anything,” the white detective said.