“Who’s been here?”
“Nobody. You and me.”
“I heard the elevator,” I told her. “Goddamn thing woke me up.”
She nodded. “Yeah, it’s been running on and off all night, but there’s nobody there.”
“Nothing else in this dump works but that fucking elevator won’t die. The building doesn’t even have power anymore, how’s it possible?”
“I think maybe it’s possessed,” she said.
Why not? I thought.
“Errol, there’s something I need to tell you.” Jenna put her toy aside a moment. “While you were gone I went to the soup kitchen to get something to eat. Got some bad news. Mabel died.”
An old homeless woman we’d known for a while, Mabel was one of the few street people I liked and got along with. I’d been worried about her in these freezing temperatures. “Who told you that?”
“Cap Payens.”
“Cap Payens is a drunk old homeless fool that thinks he still drives a cab and tells everybody he’s in the Illuminati.”
“He’s the one who found her. She froze to death in an alley across town.”
I wandered over to one of the windows, pulled back the sheet enough so I could see the street below. “She always called me Maury, remember?”
“She always called me Beatrice.”
“I’m gonna miss that old girl.”
“Me too.”
“Where are my clothes?” I asked.
“I brought them out to a barrel in the lot next door and burned them.”
I looked back at her.
She pulled her hood off then combed a string of hair behind her ear with her fingers. She wouldn’t make eye contact. “They had blood all over them.”
I took a drag on my cigarette, exhaled through my nose.
“Did you kill him?” she asked.
“He got what he had coming.”
“He’s just a harmless old man.”
“Don’t defend him,” I said evenly. “This shit between you and me, it’s not over yet. I’m still working it through. Just because I came back doesn’t mean everything’s fucking roses, you hear me?”
“Did you kill him?” she asked again, still not looking at me. “Did you?”
“He’ll live.”
I could see the relief in her face, in the tears in her eyes.
“You gonna cry for him now, is that it?”
Finally, she met my stare. “I’m crying for us.”
After a moment she went back to fiddling with her toy, a fancy phone Curtis Gwynn had given her. He’d even paid for several months of service. “Why don’t you just text the fuck and ask him if he’s all right?”
“Because I told you it was over and it is.”
“But you’re gonna keep that thing? You know what we could get for that?”
A spasm-like smile of embarrassment crossed her face, and she rocked back and forth on the pillow as if she had to go to the bathroom. “Never had one like this before, not this nice. Once the service is gone we’ll sell it then, OK?”
“He gave it to you so you two could send your little love notes back and forth and play your little sex games.”
“It’s not like that,” she said. “I told you before we were just friends.”
I slammed the wall with the palm of my hand so hard the whole room shook. “And I told you I don’t want to fucking hear about it!”
She bowed her head. “You didn’t have to hurt him, Errol. He’s just a sad, old man.” The tears that had already filled her eyes spilled free. “It was just for fun. Not for the reasons you think. I made him laugh, made him feel good, and it reminded me of before, you know? When things were good and we had a better life. And he liked me. He liked me. He made me feel smart and funny and pretty and sexy and worth something again…even though I know I’m not.”
“Don’t say that,” I told her, my anger weakening.
“Look at you. Look at me.” She wiped the tears from her face. “I hadn’t felt that since I can’t remember when. You didn’t have to hurt him. He couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to.”
I finished my cigarette then put it out in one of the cartons of Chinese food. “I’ve lost everything too. You’re all I’ve got.”
“You think I don’t have anger too? Look at what our life has become. We had it all, and we blew it. And even now we still can’t stop.” She pulled up one of the parka sleeves to show me the track marks and bruises along her arm, as if I’d never seen them before or didn’t have the same scars and reminders of Hell all over my body too. “You rob and cheat and do whatever you can to keep us alive. And I get into cars with men who could kill me if they wanted to, just so we can eat. And none of it matters because I don’t feel a thing. It’s you I love, and me you love. But it’s all dirty and twisted and bad and dark. And then this sweet old man comes along and sees something besides the scum I am. He doesn’t see a junkie whore, he sees me. He sees Jenna Charceen. He doesn’t want to do anything but talk and buy me a cup of coffee, a hot meal. He listens to me because he’s lonely, and he wants to be my friend. He’s smart and he tells me things, teaches me stuff, and I started to remember that I wasn’t always like this. I used to be smart too. He never puts a hand on me. He reminds me who and what I used to be, all right? It makes me remember the times before all this got away from us. He says he can help me, says he can help you. He knows people, he says. He can get us into rehab. He’d even pay for it and set us up because he’s all by himself and what else can he do with his money? And besides, he likes me. He says I have potential. Maybe he’d even like you if he got to know you. We’ll all be friends, he says, and everything will be all right. I have too much to offer, he says, to live my life this way anymore. It’s been years of this Errol. The brownstone was a long fucking time ago. But he means it, and even though I know it’s too late for us I believe him anyway, and it feels so good, so goddamn good, because I can almost touch it, I can see it, right there in front of me. For the first time in years it’s real. And I want it, you understand? We beat this once before, we can again. I want it back, all of it. I want us back.”
I squatted down next to her on the floor, gently took her by the chin and slowly raised her head up so she was looking at me through her teary eyes. “So do I,” I whispered. “More than anything.”
“It’s dying,” she said. “We’re dying.”
I picked up her toy, glanced at it then handed it back. She put it aside.
Demons stirred in nearby shadows, reminding me they had toys over there in the dark with them too. Bent, burned spoons, spent books of matches, used needles and the smell of cooked heroin. And the feeling, it was there too. The feeling when I put that spike hard and deep into my ravaged veins and The Devil held me tight and whispered his lies in my ear.
Like the obedient slave it was, my body ached for its master. I looked down at the shattered old watch on my wrist. It hadn’t worked in years but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. “What time is it?” I asked.
“After midnight.” Jenna smiled a little. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “Do you even know what day it is?” I shrugged. “It’s Christmas.”
“I don’t have anything for you.”
For just a second I glimpsed in her pretty sad eyes traces of better times from long ago. “I don’t have anything for you either. We’re destitute, you idiot.”
We both laughed, and she came to me and held me so tight that just this once our laughter refused to turn to tears. I wanted to hurt her for what she’d done. I wanted to hurt myself for what I’d done. But I wanted to believe even more. I wanted to believe her, and Gwynn too. I wanted to believe all the things he’d told her whether they were true or not. I needed to believe. So I did.
When we finally let go of each other Jenna said, “When I was at the soup kitchen, Cap gave us a Christmas present.” She pointed to the book under the little tree.
I stood and walked over to it, aware that had I
wanted to I could’ve kept walking back into the bedroom and gotten the revolver from the box on the floor. Jenna knew it too.
I closed my eyes, saw the revolver in my mind and knew it could end all of this once and for all, for both of us.
I imagined a man whose face I couldn’t see spinning with horror and rage and helplessness, like a top gone out of control, stumbling from that haunted old elevator and flailing about outside our door, wailing in torment as blood and gore sprayed from his mouth and his life died right before his blind and bloodied eyes.
I reached for the dog-eared paperback. “A Christmas Carol?”
“I always liked that book when I was a kid,” she said as I rejoined her on the floor, cuddling up close and reminding me how good that felt.
“Me too. Haven’t read it in a long time, though.” I flipped to a random page, though I knew now it was anything but, and began to read aloud. “‘There are some upon this earth of yours, who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’”
“No,” Jenna said, snuggling closer. “From the beginning, OK?”
Everyone always looks for some major event or horrible trauma, some explanation that’s unmistakable and clearly the culprit for the ruination of the soul. But more often than not people lose their lives slowly…gradually…quietly. So quietly, in fact, that by the time they realize it, they’ve already fallen into the darkness and the grasp of those horrible things that dwell within it. What we fail to realize is that recapturing those things happens exactly the same way.
The gun was in the bedroom. The blood and demons, the rage and shame, the twisted dreams and nightmares and riddles, all of it was still there too. But for a few quiet moments on a very early, cold and dark Christmas morning, I held Jenna tight and read her a story that claimed redemption and hope and forgiveness was possible for even the worst of us. And for a very short and wonderful while, we believed and felt alive again.
Alive. Loved. Necessary. Whole.
All that’s left are the days to come. One or one thousand, they’re all we have…
Out in the hallway, the old elevator rattled and shook and moaned as it slowly began its growling descent back down into the bowels of the building.
I kept reading, safe in my dreams awhile, and pretended not to notice.
About The Author
Greg F. Gifune is widely considered one the finest writers of his generation. The author of two short story collections and numerous novels, for years his work has been consistently praised by readers and critics alike, and has been translated into several languages and published all over the world. Greg and his wife Carol live in Massachusetts with a bevy of cats and a dog named Dozer. Discover more about Greg’s work at his official website: www.gregfgifune.com or look for him on FaceBook.
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About The Author
Apartment Seven Page 8