“Why would you do that?”
“For Jenna,” he said softly. “I did it for Jenna.”
“She’s with Charceen now, is that it?”
“Yes, and he’s a dangerous and deeply disturbed man. I’m lucky to be alive.”
“Is Jenna in danger?”
“Of course.”
“Then if she loves me so much what the hell is she doing with him?” I paced about near the door. “Why would she do this?”
“We all have problems. Jenna has her demons just like the rest of us. But I’m afraid you need to ask her those questions yourself, not me.”
“Is she there now?”
“I would imagine so.”
“It’s awfully late, maybe she’s gone back home.”
“She’s there.” He took another sip from his drink. “And she’s hoping you’ll come, Charlie. She’s hoping sooner or later you’ll come and save her.”
“And Charceen?”
“I think you should go and see about that maniac for yourself.”
“You know more than you’re telling me.”
Gwynn nodded sullenly. “All I can say is that it’s happening at once—all of it—and while I know it’s terrifying, it’s all right, it—it really will be all right, Charlie. Regardless of what one does or does not believe, this universe of ours is more than chaos and chance. Reality cleanses itself when necessary. And every now and then we get to see it. Just a glimpse moving through our heads disguised as nightmares, daydreams or hallucinations, those strange and beautiful moments of déjà vu or epiphany, when for the briefest time, every mystery in life makes absolute, perfect sense, and then quietly slips from memory. Like a blink of the mind’s eye, yes? The rest is jumbled, as these things often are.”
“I want it to stop,” I said wearily. “I want to go home.”
“Then forget all this, Charlie, and go.” He looked at me with genuine kindness. “Go home. Maybe it’s time.”
Gwynn was right. I had to stop wandering the city like a blind nomad. Maybe when I got there Jenna would be waiting for me. Or maybe she was lost to me and I’d never see her again.
Either way, it was time to go home.
-7-
Cap was waiting, leaned against his cab, chomping his cigar and seemingly oblivious to what had become a brutally cold night. He smiled, his breath madly spiraling around him in the night air.
I reached the taxi and doubled over, vomiting into the gutter.
“So, that went well,” he chuckled in his gravelly voice.
“What the hell’s the matter with me?” I gasped.
“You’re sick, kid. You’re Jonesing.”
I yanked open the door and slid into the back. “Get me home, Cap.”
Within seconds we were rocketing through the streets of Cambridge and on our way back to Boston. I did my best to control my body, but my stomach kept lurching and the nausea was so severe I was sure I’d vomit again at any moment. “I want to go home. Take me home.”
“That’s where we’re going. Not to worry.”
“What time is?”
“Late.”
“I haven’t been home in a long time, have I?”
“Nope, not in a long time, kid.”
We traveled in silence for several minutes. Eventually we slowed to a crawl, and I assumed we’d arrived at the brownstone. But when I focused and looked out the window, we were in a neighborhood I didn’t know. The cab crept slowly along a dark street and finally stopped in front of a lot filled with debris and pieces of a demolished building that had once stood there. Next to it was a rundown apartment building that looked abandoned. I remembered it from my visions in the Théâtre du Présent.
“What are we doing here?” Despite the cold I was suddenly drenched in sweat. “I want you to take me home.”
Cap looked back at me through the rearview mirror. “This is home, kid. Twenty-Eight Ross Avenue. Second Floor. Apartment Seven.”
“No, I want to go to my home, our brownstone.”
“Somebody else lives there now, has for years.”
I looked at him helplessly. “I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t,” Cap said, his grizzled face softening with compassion. “But you will. Time to pay the ferryman, kid.”
I opened my wallet. It was empty.
“Remember what the book says.” He cocked his head toward the building. “Go on. There’s no turning back, not this time.”
I got out of the cab. The second I closed the door, Cap tore out of there, tires squealing as he disappeared around the corner, leaving me alone on the dark and desolate street.
The apartment building stood before me like a rotting temple to ancient and forgotten gods, gray and crumbling, covered in graffiti, cracked, battered, dark and menacing as the deep shadows surrounding it.
On the wall of a condemned building across the street, a series of posters advertising a visiting French troupe’s production of the classic ballet Swan Lake caught my attention. Though ripped and worn from the elements the painted eyes of the ballerina staring at me through the night were horrifyingly familiar.
Moving through the biting cold, I crossed a small section of lot leading to the front steps. Littered with garbage and debris, the terrain was uneven and difficult to negotiate. The entire street looked like it had been bombed and left for dead years ago. Even as I climbed the steps and pulled open the grimy, battered and graffiti-covered front door, it seemed hard to believe anyone still lived here.
I stepped into a foyer and saw a bank of mail slots, an old elevator and a long hallway that led to the stairs. Trash was strewn across the floor, and the walls were marked and cracked, long neglected. The hallway smelled like something had crawled beneath the peeling tile floor and died, its carcass still rotting and filling the air with a pungent stench. The elevator looked so old and decrepit I doubted it was still operational, but the hallway leading to the stairs was even less inviting.
Shadows moved along the far end of the hall, and I thought I heard footfalls somewhere down there. I pushed a hand into my coat pocket, gripped the revolver and listened more intently.
I was not alone here. Someone was coming down the stairs. Slowly.
I took a few steps back, watching the hallway intently.
A figure emerged, hobbling through the shadows on the staircase and into view as it stepped down into the far end of the hallway.
Frail, thin, slightly hunched and dressed in a heavy overcoat and orthopedic black shoes, a very old woman tottered toward me. Ninety if she was a day, she certainly had no business walking around alone in this neighborhood at such a late hour.
“Ma’am?” I asked.
She didn’t seem to hear me, and kept shuffling closer. Her pale skin was badly wrinkled and her hair, white as chalk, was combed straight back from her face in a severe style. But it was her makeup I found the most disturbing. She wore a tremendous amount of black eye makeup for a woman of her years, and her lips were painted with red lipstick so bright it was startling. A black leather purse was slung over one wrist and her other hand gently touched the wall to steady herself as she went. At about the midway point between us she stopped and bent her head forward as if something on the floor had caught her attention.
Very slowly, she raised her watery eyes and looked at me. Her lips curled into a demonic smile. Removing her hand from the wall, she held it out before her and opened it so I could see.
A black tattoo of a scythe covered her entire palm.
As I stared at it, unable to look away, it began to bleed.
Jenna is on her knees next to me. I wrap my arm around her shoulder, pull her in tight against my leg, press the revolver to her temple and pull the trigger. The blast is deafening, and the bullet pierces her skull effortlessly, spraying blood, bone and brain fragments across the wall like a Jackson Pollock painting. I feel the warmth of her blood as it pumps out the jagged exit wound in her temple, trickling down between my fingers and onto my a
rm. Her body goes limp, and her head falls back, glassy eyes staring up at me with a look of disbelief that I’ve actually done it. In the corner of the dark room Curtis Gwynn lays on the cement floor writhing in agony, bones shattered, face smashed, his body riddled with bullets and wounds that are slowly killing him, a bloody pile of piss and shit and tears.
I realize then that Jenna and I are nude. I let her go. She flops to the floor, lifeless and limp, the blood from her fatal head wound still pouring from her skull to form a crimson halo about her. I run my bloody hands all over my body, spreading her blood across my bare flesh, bathing in it, and as I realize my rage has not yet been sated, I grasp the revolver tight then push it up and into her cunt. Killing her isn’t enough. I need to destroy everything about her, the same as she erased me. Yet even as I do, I understand the ghoul is not me, but someone else, some Other I fear and loathe, a foreign agent that has infiltrated my body and mind, my soul…my dreams…
And still, I embrace the rage, hold it close and fuck it like a lover as it takes over, ripping me to pieces just as the pain of loss and separation and destruction of everything I held dear tore me to shreds in a feeding frenzy of evil and horror.
I hate you for what you’ve done. I hate me for what I’ve done. I hate you and I love you and I can’t stop either one.
The room goes dark.
The old woman peered at me from darkness, eyes glaring, mesmerizing me against my will as her arthritically gnarled hand reached through the night to show me her palm, that hideous tattoo, and the blood pooling there…
I pace back and forth in a narrow little box of a room. A cage. Alone. But around me is the constant din of the monster that holds me captive. I have heard it for years, and will continue to hear it for the rest of my life. Day and night, it seldom stops. When it does, it means pain is near. Quiet is something one never wants to hear in this awful place. Quiet means someone is about to die. I will die here, in this little box. I will rot within the carcass of this monster until I am no more. Demonized, hated, and finally, forgotten. I am old and damaged both physically and emotionally. My body is weak and sore from years of physical and sexual abuse, and my mind has been in tatters for ages. I am a sad and pathetic old man, tucked away in a trunk that will never be opened. And that is exactly where I should be. I have earned my station in life, though I’m already dead and have been for a very long time. In fact, I can no longer remember what living is like. It all seems more like something I saw in a movie, or perhaps read about in a book. It is anything but real. I don’t even feel regret anymore. I don’t feel anything at all. And I never will again…
I sit on the edge of a familiar bed. Jenna is next to me. We hold each other tight as tears stream across our faces. Her head wound has left her grotesque and frightening, her shattered skull and mangled brain exposed, her pretty face specked with blood and sorrow, her hair matted down and her petite body soaked with blood and bodily fluids. I look into what remains of her eyes and know all I need to know, all I need to see, and understand all that has been lost, thrown away and murdered. With a bloody hand, she rubs my bare chest, stroking it at first but then pushing harder, her slender fingers kneading and probing until it becomes painful.
Holding her sad, dead stare, I offer no resistance.
Her fingers push harder against me and finally break through, puncturing my flesh and bone with a popping and crackling sound until her hand is inside my chest up to the wrist. I gag and vomit blood into my lap as she goes deeper and I feel her hand wrap around my beating heart. I can feel her fingers pressing on it, and the bottom of my throat constricts as if I’m being strangled. She squeezes and I feel as if I’m going to come out of my own skin. More blood and bile clog my throat, explode and bubble up and out of my mouth, through my nostrils and the corners of my eyes as she squeezes harder still and yanks down, ripping it free with a sickening tearing sound.
I cry out as my bowels and bladder let go and another wave of blood explodes from my mouth, covering us both in thick, black crimson.
She leans her head on my shoulder lovingly, her hand still deep inside me. I probe her head wound with my fingers, searching, pushing and tearing, as if ripping at the skin of an orange, until I can touch her brain. I scratch at it; feel scrapings of brain collect beneath my fingernails like dirt.
I kiss my wife on the mouth. Blood passes between us, sprays and spatters about as a gory reminder of our agony, the horror of our love, our loss, our lies and our betrayals, lives once lived, lives never realized, days and years and jobs and friends and each other lost and gone forever.
I see Curtis Gwynn sitting in a chair, Jenna kneeling next to him, her hand and mouth working on him, trying to bring life to his soft dead cock.
I push my thumbs into my eyes until my eyes are no more.
Somewhere in that bloodbath—perhaps because of it—while there is not yet transcendence or grace, there is rebirth and forgiveness. Isn’t there?
Dark clouds roll in, save me, take it all away and remind me that there is still a chance, still hope even on this cold and dark and hellish night…
The old woman stood staring at me from the hallway, her eyes intense and unblinking, as if trying to hypnotize me.
Somewhere far off, a siren blared then faded away. I looked behind me.
The elevator.
I ran to it, stabbing frantically at the call-button as the old woman shuffled toward me, the same insidious grin on her painted face.
A bell rang and suddenly the elevator doors opened.
Once inside, I quickly hit 2 then flattened myself against the back of the car and prayed the doors would close in time.
They did.
The old elevator groaned and grumbled and roared, coming to life like an ancient beast that had slept for centuries.
With a loud bang, it rattled and screeched and began to rise, slowly carrying me to Apartment Seven.
-8-
I rolled over, coughed, and then struggled into a sitting position and swung my feet around to the cold floor. My stomach was upset and I was gripped with terrible nausea. Christ, I thought, it’s freezing in here. Shivering, I reached back for the blankets, pulled them from the old mattress and wrapped myself in them. Most had holes and tears in them and were so threadbare they’d become transparent in spots, but if I used enough of them and wrapped myself tight they still did the trick. I sat there on the edge of the mattress in the dark room awhile, dazed and groggy, shivering and sick to my stomach. I scratched my head. My hair was greasy and needed to be washed, just like the rest of me, and my mouth was coated with muck that tasted like sour milk.
I flicked the switch next to the old crate that served as a nightstand, forgetting we hadn’t had power in a long time. I fumbled around in the dark until I found my cigarettes and a book of matches. I struck one and held it to the candle on the crate, watching bleary-eyed as it caught and slowly illuminated a good portion of the bedroom. The place was a mess. Dirty clothes, bits of trash, empty bottles and old pizza boxes were strewn from one wall to the next.
I glanced at the crate. An old word jumble book sat there alongside a nub of a pencil. Jenna had always liked puzzle books. It was open to a page marked CELEBRITIES. The first two jumbles read: JANE DAMES and CHAN VIDDLY.
Earlier, she’d solved the puzzles.
J A N E D A M E S. JAMES DEAN.
C H A N V I D D L Y. DAVID LYNCH.
My foot brushed something, an old shoebox full of photographs on the floor next to the mattress. I peered down into the shadowy light and remembered going through them. Lately I’d been obsessed with the photos because in a sense our entire lives were in that shoebox. From older photos of Jenna and me before we got married, to a few wedding photos, to pictures of our first apartment, to our old friends Alan and Gary, photos of the brownstone we’d eventually purchased, of Jenna in her business attire and me in a suit and tie, two young professionals on the way up, so certain our lives would forever be the storybook we’d believe
d them to be. The photographs chronicled everything that was good about our lives, or at least had been. And why wouldn’t they? No one took pictures at funerals. No one wanted to remember bad times, only the good.
Partially concealed by the photographs, I also noticed a revolver in the box. Using my foot, I pushed the box away beyond the reach of the candle and into the darkness where it belonged.
I stabbed a cigarette into the corner of my mouth, sparked it up, and with another hearty cough, managed to get myself into a standing position. My body was sore and stiff, and my knuckles were scraped raw.
After a second or two, I remembered why.
Bare feet freezing on the cold floor, I shuffled out into the other room to find it illuminated by numerous candles. Jenna had covered the windows with old sheets so the place had the eerie, shadowy look of a candlelit church, maybe a tomb. It was just as messy here, just as awful, but I’d become skilled at dismissing such things and sometimes no longer even seeing them. Like some twisted joke, a worn and dirty tabletop Christmas tree sat on the floor in the middle of the room, a used paperback book beneath it as if left there by some poverty row Santa Claus. Several cartons of half-eaten Chinese food were scattered along the floor just inside the doorway. They made me think of Dino and the last time I’d seen him in Chinatown trying so hard to look like he knew how to handle a gun. Poor Dino, I thought. Always wants to do the right thing but almost never does.
Jenna was sitting on a pillow on the floor playing with her new toy. At first glance she looked like a child, in a ratty old coat she’d gotten from the Salvation Army store, one of those old nylon parkas she might’ve worn back in high school with the fake fur trim around the hood, which she had pulled up over her head. She adjusted positions as I realized she didn’t have anything on underneath it.
“How long have I been asleep?” I asked her.
She looked up with tired, glassy eyes. She’d been so beautiful once, and now, like me, was a mere shadow. Dirty, sickly thin, pale and in a perpetual state of grogginess. “Long time. When you finally came home you were out of it. You came in, did your thing and crashed. Been out cold ever since.”
Apartment Seven Page 7