With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

by J. R. Hamantaschen

  “Actually, maybe you shouldn’t?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t pursue this shit anymore. You know, maybe just, let it go. Kaye isn’t making you. Kaye doesn’t even know and wouldn’t care. I don’t know man, this shit like — I’m not sure if I believe you that that guy was actually in the grocery store, but, still man. I don’t know.”

  Again, Kevin looked like he was trying to flex his brain. For a moment, Alex looked at him warmly and contemplatively. Kevin didn’t notice. He was flexing his brain, his expression becoming more dour, more concerned.

  “You should be careful about applying that salsa, right? Your throat and all that.”

  “Word, thanks.” Kevin applied just a bit of the salsa, and washed down his bites with his large Coke. Alex stuck to water. Caroline would be proud, and he didn’t need all that sugar. It made him feel sick, actually. Avoiding soda was one good trait he picked up before he even met her, but she certainly helped to reinforce it.

  “You know what would be depressing?”

  “Life?” Kevin responded.

  “Word, but, no. You know what would be depressing? Like, imagine there was a psychiatrist whose job it was to go over the medical records of dead people to, like, determine their mental problems they dealt with during their life. Like, figuring out what pivotal events occurred in their life that caused or influenced their emotional problems, and then coming up with a treatment plan for them. But the whole thing would be worthless and futile because they’d already be dead. It’s, like, what could have been.”

  Kevin nodded slightly as he gulped down the last of his Coke.

  “Yeah, pretty depressing. Pretty stupid, too, but yeah, depressing also.”

  >< >< ><

  The work day proceeded apace. While responding to emails, he dryly noted to himself that Keith Ortega had never called him.

  He checked his personal email later in the afternoon, while nursing a late afternoon Greek yogurt and a Starbucks “Refresher.” He’d gotten to a stage in his life where he was lax in checking his personal email. Most of his bills were paid automatically online, and if someone wanted to get in direct contact with him, they texted him or hit him up on Facebook or something. If he had waited a couple days, maybe he’d have missed this particular missive, especially since it had the tell-tale signs of junk. All CAPS, blaring, hyperbolic subject line, an unfamiliar sender.

  PLEASE READ IMMEDIATELY APARTMENT NEWS

  SORRY TO BOTHER YOU ALL. I USED THE APARTMENT EMAIL LIST TO SEND THIS OUT. PLEASE FORGIVE ANY SPELLING PROBLEMS AS I’M NOT GREAT WITH WRITTEN ENGLISH.

  MY DAUGHTER CAME HOME LAST NIGHT LATE IN THE MORNING AND SAID SHE SAW A MAN ON A LADDER OR HIGH UP SOMEHOW TRYING TO STARE INTO A WINDOW ON THE CORNER FACING THE STREET. AFTER CHECKING, THIS IS THE HALLWAY ON THE 3E SIDE.

  MY DAUGHTER SAID SHE YELLED AT THE MAN AND HE GALLOPED AWAY. I DON’T KNOW HOW HE GOT AWAY EXACTLY IF HE WAS ON A LADDER BUT SHE SAID THE MAN SOMEHOW RAN AWAY. I DONT KNOW IT WAS DARK SO NOT SURE WHAT HAPPENED BUT SHE SAID SHE YELLED UP AND THE MAN TURNED AND WAS GONE.

  IVE CALLED THE LANDLORD MR. CHEN AND THE POLICE WILL SEND OUT A CAR TO DRIVE AROUND AT NIGHT FOR THE NEXT WEEK. JUST WANT TO LET EVERYONE KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON.

  Caroline was also sent this email. A couple of minutes after that email had been sent was her response to Alex: OH MY GODS ALEX, SCARY!! I DONT LIKE THIS! WE TRAVEL IN TEAMS!

  They were apartment 3D.

  Another email from Caroline:

  I’ll be home later tonight. I have Zumba tonight! Shake it!

  Can you meet me by the LIRR tonight if ya not busy? I should be home around 10 p.m. or so but I’ll text you when I’m on the train. I don’t like this! I’ll go to Zumba to get buff to defend us!

  >< >< ><

  An aleatory pall was cast over the rest of the day, things and events drifting by on autopilot. Last night, while Caroline slept, he whispered “I love you” to her, mimicked lovingly her sing-songy way of saying it. He didn’t know why he thought of that now, unless to mentally ground his discursive, panicky thoughts toward something uplifting.

  He gave no outward indication of these portentous stirrings, not in the idle follow-ups with clients or in the pursuit of his other mundane occupational activities. Maybe if Kevin had had time to grab coffee, those feelings may have been cultivated and expressed. But when Alex stopped by his office, Kevin shooed him off in that odious Kevin way — batting the air to push him away like a cat batting a string — that grated so much on Alex’s nerves. Sometimes Alex would return the obnoxious favor and play dumb while Kevin was on the phone and shooing him out — “Are you trying to tell me something?” — at which point Kevin’s eyes would narrow and his features would become sharper and his air-batting became ever more dervish-like. Alex didn’t bother today, and just left with an “ok, whatever.”

  Alex left work around five and stood by the doors on the packed Long Island Rail Road train. In his mind, he was sitting, staring out the window contemplatively, at the gray New York sky and the rows of bric-a-brac houses visible from the tracks. But in reality, this was rush hour, and since he’d barely made it on the train to begin with, he’d have to reconcile that wistful feeling with the rushed, packed and unpleasant scene before him: inconsiderate kids taking up more than their allotted seats with shopping bags, a harried mother sipping an open coffee practically waiting to be spilled, an oblivious businessman insistent on spreading out his newspaper, neighbors be damned, and a whole mess of people content just to cram into the corners to get a moment of reprieve. It all took on a bloodless, weightless tone. Nothing tactile. He drifted through it, like a cartoon cat lifted up by the nose by the smell of a baking pie on a windowsill, until he’d drifted all the way home.

  At home, he checked the mail. Some bills, some Broadway flyers. He remembered the last time there was an apartment-wide panic, about a year ago when a burglar had been caught in the apartment building adjacent to this one. There’d been a cluster of emphatic residents meeting-and-greeting, promising to look after each other and keep in touch. He hadn’t seen any of those people since, or, at the very least, he hadn’t been aware of seeing them since.

  He made his way up the three floors without seeing anyone else. The complex was fairly new and well-lit, adding an anti-septic feel to the barren building. The soft pads of his shoes were his only accompaniment as he made his way up to 3D.

  He looked out the hallway window — the same window that had been peered into, had been violated, he thought dramatically — only a day before. He saw nothing but encroaching darkness and the perspective-diminishing glare of reflected lights and his own hazy, evocative reflection.

  His front door opened with an unusual creak. He flicked all the lights on, and here he was, in his nice (by New York standards) one-bedroom apartment. It was a nice building, an advantage of living out in the less popular, eastern nether regions of Queens. Off-white, clean walls, a small dishwasher (an amenity coveted in New York), a silver shiny fridge festooned with wedding invitations, Caroline’s recycling chart, and various magnets from their travels together: an orange and black silhouette of a witch from Salem, Massachusetts, a tomato pie magnet from Asbury Park, New Jersey, a “Welcome to Milwaukee” magnet from when Alex visited Caroline during her Midwest work training.

  Like always, Caroline’s shoes were clumped up by the front door, their measly shoe rack not equipped to handle the shoe outflow. He walked toward the computer in the living room, past the pots and pans underneath their shelves, past the dinner table with its lived-in scratches and covered with candles, cups and a blender they never used, past the sad coat-choked chairs which they always planned on dealing with whenever they were going to have company. Here again, the blue leather couch, Time Out New York, New Yorker, Glamour and Bust magazines on the arm rest; the book he was reading, Istanbul, with its own place on the foot rest, l
ooking crisp and regal by comparison.

  He walked judiciously around the junk on the floor, filled a mug with water — an orange Salem mug with black cutout images of black cats and witches — and watered their little eucalyptus plant that Caroline had gotten some time ago.

  He turned on all the lights, including the lights in the bathroom and bedroom. He found the humming whirl of the bathroom fan comforting.

  He sat on the blue leather couch and put his feet uncomfortably atop the ottoman, perched atop all those magazines, deathly concerned with not toppling any of them over. Still, calm. Sane. He kept still for reasons unknown. It was just him and the hum of the bathroom. His ghostly shadow was reflected back at him in the black television screen.

  There was a cardboard box by the garbage that needed to be recycled.

  Caroline would be at the train station around ten, he remembered, and he’d walk her home from there.

  Atop the lived-in table was a brightly colored plastic bag of cashews. How long had those been there? Did cashews go bad?

  Silence.

  Next to the cashews were loads of tea bags. Caroline loved tea; she particularly loved swiping them from hotels when she traveled. Jasmine, Earl Gray, Peppermint (good for stomachaches).

  Someone outside, down the hall, unlocking, opening and then closing their front door.

  He missed Caroline but for some reason was glad she wasn’t home yet.

  A black hanger was jammed in the top crevice of the living room closet.

  The whirr of the bathroom fan, the faint tinkling of distant traffic.

  He walked in silence to the bedroom. Same mess, same mound of clothes on her side of the bed. Same piles of perfume on the nightstand, same humidifier and fan in his corner, a single brown sock there on top of his sole pair of jeans, by the refuse of work shirts he intentionally crumpled as his impetus to get them washed.

  He clicked the bedroom light off, then on, then off, as if that’d change something.

  It didn’t.

  He kept it off and went back into the living room, closing the door shut behind him.

  He ferreted his phone out of his pocket, saw a text from Brian, a text from his mother, and that mysterious symbol that meant voicemail. He should go outside to call them back.

  He intuited something slinking behind him and, before he knew what to think of it, he looked over his shoulder.

  And looked up.

  Depths beyond eternity.

  He looked up at what looked back down on him.

  There was the flash-bang panic buzz of instinct and imprinted cell memory — a crystalline shadow image of Nosferatu’s silhouette sliding across the room — except when his cell memory reconciled that image with the image before him, it was modified to reflect the hooked shrimp-like curl standing upright before him on its butterfly tail, and just this detail alone left him with the realization that there was no point in trying to discern the details of what stood before him.

  They’d died of heart attacks, he remembered the newspapers had stated. An ersatz image of the dumpster behind the Washington Heights Clinic — of course the whole surrounding area had been well-kept and maintained — but now an image of a bloodied dumpster behind the clinic, mudskipper shapes inching toward it.

  He looked up at the bisected, colorless mouth, was unable to determine where the mouth ended and the face began, but it made no difference, as there was nothing there, no spark of intelligence or critical thinking skills or relatable emotional experience writ large anywhere across this face, or if there was, it rang at a tenor he could not detect. The bisected, soft fangs of shrimp-like flesh vibrated softly, in some synchronized way, and, somehow, this was happening in the same world where Caroline was taking her Zumba classes, where he could reach out and grab a brightly colored box of cashews off his messy dining room table.

  He almost, beyond logic, turned to the cashews, just to close his eyes and open them up and pop a couple in his mouth and pretend like nothing was wrong. Wanted to look up and watch saved episodes of their favorite shows. Wanted to apologize to Caroline for nothing in particular, maybe just hear her voice. In between these desires he closed his eyes and witnessed a silent movie of his own imagining, of Mr. Rampole and his assistant chucking little pieces of freshly-cut fetus meat down a pipe to the squealing delight of rubbery little creatures the color of a full moon, while their larger brethren flopped and squirmed and swam up to pledge their loyalty before those who provided them a feast of soft tiny little legs and limbs and offal.

  Curling around and over him, tight. He thought of a newspaper, maybe one that stated somewhere, “they’d died of heart attacks,” or reported on the unusual substance found ensconced between the arteries of the victims’ hearts.

  He would die, too, and he pictured his soul lifting out of him and inhabiting the pages of the newspaper.

  An “O” formed around him. Bristles like horsehair and wet shoelaces on his face, half-cooked pasta on his head and the back of his neck, vice-like snapping on his thighs and between his legs, and he didn’t need to see the two dried-raisin eyes on fleshy toothpicks and stalagmite crustacean face to understand why it ate only the softest and most delectable fresh protein, or to comprehend its full length to understand why it’d been mistaken for a ladder for whatever overseer it’d been carrying.

  They’d died of heart attacks.

  He didn’t feel any pain in his chest or anywhere, really, though he felt like he was rolling, as if in a tire, but he no longer trusted his senses. Now the feeling of a horsehair bristle the size of a chalkboard eraser pushed down his mouth, rolling, in a hamster wheel, pink lungs cross-cut with sharp quills, a wetness in his chest, then slack, rolling, no one to pick up Caroline at the station, text message and voicemail left unanswered, remembered the day he first noticed Caroline at school, rolling now, an object out for — goodbye, no, please — the trash.

  He turned without thinking and propelled himself out the nearest window. It gave way without shattering and he fell out of it, almost like a parcel through a slot, and fell the three short floors in an undignified sprawl, the brunt of the impact bearing mostly on his outstretched upper body.

  He thought there’d be concrete and a quick pullback and the snap of his neck and the flight of his teeth, but by the grace of Heaven Above he landed on a patch of rough grass around the apartment building. Thank God. Thank God. If they’d lived in a neighborhood closer to the City, this would all be concrete. Thank God.

  He was in aching pain and fearful of moving, for fear of finding out that he was immobilized.

  He turned his weary body on its back, so he was looking up to the stars. His left elbow was in rictus; he grimaced as he felt the sheared-off skin of his elbow, but he could still feel the pain in the joint, in the bone … so it wasn’t broken. He bent it oh-so-slightly and squeezed his eyes shut in pain. He didn’t think the jump had been far, but by God he hurt.

  He was looking up toward the stars.

  He was being looked at by the inhabitant in his apartment.

  There was a prolapsed moment of great calm, when Alex looked at it, and it looked at him. There were no words, other than some kind of understanding in Alex that what he was facing-off against was, in some undeniable way, rational and calculating.

  The elongated brownish stick of an upper body retracted back into the apartment.

  He rolled over onto his stomach and kept his face pressed down against the ground. He remained motionless. There was no one else outside in suburban Queens. He let destiny overtake him; he had no survival instinct left, no false hopes or grand ambitions other than to just sit here and ignore the pain radiating through his body. He didn’t want to look up, for he feared the moment he looked up he would be looking back into that abominable spasm of a face, and confirming the futility of trying would be more painful than anything to come. His only reaction was involun
tary. He coughed violently, ropy phlegm, first on the ground and then into his hands; only when he rubbed his fingers through it did he feel the grit of slender, impossibly-sculpted cilia-like fibers.

  He rolled over, thinking that maybe he’d inadvertently choke to death on his own backwash but not caring. Let death take him. Let him die without an inventory of everything in his body that was wrong, broken or contaminated.

  Caroline.

  No, Caroline. Caroline Caroline Caroline.

  Caroline Caroline Caroline Caroline Caroline,

  How could he be so fucking stupid?

  No.

  He took the phone from his pocket and turned it on, please be working, please be working. He didn’t remember it being off but no matter, thankfully it turned on.

  Now, a complete reversal of priorities. He had something to live for.

  He got up and ambled toward the street, calling Caroline. He hobbled in a painful shuffle – his running speed had always been lacking, and it certainly wouldn’t help to have it reduced so dramatically. Now he was thinking, strategizing: caring.

  Her phone was off, just the voicemail, she still must be in Zumba.

  “Caroline, it’s me. Don’t go home. Please. Just please, don’t go home. There’s a … a gas leak at home, a terrible gas leak, it’s not safe at all. Please, just promise me you will not go home. Call me immediately. Don’t go home, and you have to call me. Stay at a friend’s house tonight, I will be alright, I … don’t be scared, I need to take care of something. Call me.

  “I love you. I love you more than anything in the world. Don’t be scared, sorry I’m just… I’m just freaking out.” He absentmindedly signaled a passing borough taxi; being so far out in Eastern Queens, the taxi-cab driver was probably starting his shift and en route to more profitable destinations. The car slowed down and he got in, still on the phone.

  He tailored his voice to make it more benign and placid, the way he did when he realized he’d become too excitable or had spoken out-of-turn: “I love you. Don’t worry. I will see you soon.” He wanted to end on that but it wasn’t in his nature not to be careful. “Just please, don’t go home until you speak to me.”