Wetbones

by John Shirley

  But he went. She was a good cook, though afterwards her kitchen looked like hurricane wreckage. And she left the mess for two days. The stir fry was great, her raspberry mousse was exquisite, but before he'd quite finished it she pushed the little table aside, strode across to him, and straddled his lap facing him. Reached down for his zipper. He could taste mousse and brandy on her tongue. She wasn't wearing panties.

  The first time they made love, that particular night, was a prolonged spasm, starting on the chair and ending on the rug. But when it happened again, in bed, it began languorously, and veered into an ecstatic mutual searching. He quickly learned to maintain a steady, pistonlike rhythm, once he was inside her, to counterbalance her bucking and thrashings. It was exactly what she needed, his rigid organ the axle for her wild torquing, and it brought them to that rare confluence of desire, mutual orgasm. In the moment of orgasm, the timing was right: they both flung their emotional doors open; they opened their eyes and saw one another. Knew fleetingly that until that moment, their skilled and very modern sexuality had been only a way of using.

  Suddenly, all the pretenses were dropped, and isolation was gone, and they embraced for the first time: the first time it was real.

  "Jesus Christ," he breathed, amazed at the intensity of his feeling.

  After that, she didn't have to talk about herself, her outsized ambitions, the people who'd "validated" her. At least, not so much. They could sit quietly in the windowseat, holding hands, talking sometimes and sometimes not. Watching people on the street. Both of them perfectly happy. And he'd thought: Finally. I can stay with this one.

  For twelve years, since he began dating at eighteen, he'd never had less than two girlfriends at once. It was a constant juggling act. And he was constantly on the look-out for more pins to juggle. Knowing all the time the performance was commanded by some undefined insecurity. Completely unable to fight it; and maybe having too much fun to want to fight it.

  But, now and then, he felt the lack, too. No commitment meant no real closeness.

  Amy's sheer intensity had overwhelmed his insulation. Maybe something more: some quality of underlying familiarity about her, as if she were someone he'd always known. It made him feel close to her at the roots of his personality.

  And it felt good that she needed him deeply. He was a writer, a humourist, a freelancer, something of a rake, but compared to Amy he was as stable as the Rock of Gibralter.

  It took time, though. The morning after that third date, Amy was resoundingly depressed. "It's not you," she said, huddled in a corner of her bedroom with a cup of coffee. "It just happens. It just comes. I'm up and then I'm down. It takes me a long time to talk myself back up again…

  Prentice had talked Amy into seeing a psychiatrist. It wasn't easy; she wouldn't consider it at all when she was up – and when she was down she was sure that therapy would turn out to be a dead end, "Like all 'solutions"'.

  They gave her medication and it worked. She stabilized, without losing her vivacity. Prentice felt safer: he asked her to marry him. They moved in together; had a small, informal summer wedding on the roof of his apartment building. People in t-shirts, drinking wine on the roof of the adjacent building, applauded and yelled "Go for it!" when he kissed her. Amy had laughed and yelled at them to come over for champagne.

  She stayed on the medication until the last three months of their marriage. Until then, everything went swimmingly. She was getting some work in an independent film production shooting in New York. He was riding high on the good box office for Fourth Base. Everything was great. Amy was growing up. She could go hours without talking about herself sometimes, and she wasn't compulsively competitive with other women. And then at the bottom of the emotional ninth inning, Prentice dropped the ball. He had an affair with Nina Spaulding, a rather pretentiously arty and very full-figured young dancer, and Amy found out. Maybe on purpose, Nina left an indiscreet message on the answering machine. Amy's fragile self esteem couldn't take it. She went off her meds and back on the wrong kind of drugs. Three months later, three months of near constant argument with Prentice, and she left him: and left New York for L.A…

  The ballgame on Jeff's TV was winding up. The Dodgers were doomed. With the fickleness of the L.A. sports fan, Jeff swore at them, gave the screen the finger, threw Doritios at a shot of the Dodger's pensive manager. "The hell with you lamebrains! You had the playoffs and you let the Padres, my God, the Padres take it from you, do you know what kind of average those guys have got? It's fucking humiliating."

  Prentice got up to pee. All that beer. He called out from the bathroom, "You don't have to watch the game to the bitter end, you know. Maybe there's some basketball on. Or, I don't know, backwards speed-skating or something. Check ESPN."

  "No, I got to see how bad the humiliation is. Whether or not I should go so far as to wear a bag on my head for being a known Dodger fan."

  Prentice came back into the living room and did a couple of kneebends. He'd been sitting down too long. Outside, twilight was whispering into evening. The noise from the pool was almost gone. There were other television sets faintly audible through the walls, mumbling softly to themselves in news anchor cadences.

  Another beer commercial came on. Jeff stood up and went to the French doors, stared out at the frayed ends of the tangerine ribbon of sunset, visible above the opposite roof. It was a clay-tile roof, on the imitation-Spanish-style apartment building beyond the pool. Identical to his own building. "Goddamn that kid, too".

  Prentice sighed. Okay, maybe if he listened to the latest on Mitch, it'd distract him from thinking about

  Amy. "When was the last time you saw him, you say?"

  "Six or seven weeks. I mean, I could've called the cops, do a missing persons thing, but he's not really missing, exactly, because he said he wanted to go off on his own, make his fortune, like, and he had a chance to sing in some rock band that was going to get a record deal…" He shrugged.

  "He's too young to 'make his fortune, like', Jeff."

  Jeff was a silhouette against the windows now, his back to Prentice. But Prentice could see his shoulders stiffen. "You telling me I shirked my responsibility?"

  "I'm not really qualified to be selfrighteous about responsibility to people," Prentice said. Seeing a mummy in a file drawer.

  "No, you're not. But maybe I did blow it, I don't know. You know what? I think I liked the kid looking up to me. I was mad when he thought he could do without me. So he moves out and – I just wanted him to come home on his own."

  "With his tail between his legs."

  "Sort of. It was stupid. I did call around, yesterday, to find him. Asked some people I knew he used to see. They hadn't seen him in a while. He's got this black girlfriend, Eurydice, I'd like to date her myself. Foxy. She claims she hasn't seen him. Kid could be dead in a culvert somewhere."

  "He was doing drugs?" Prentice looked for a light switch. The room was getting darker and darker.

  "Sometimes. Mostly not, around here. I don't tolerate it. But without me around…"

  "He could be in jail, then. They've been doing a sweep for crack users".

  Prentice switched on the light. Jeff turned to face him. Moving in slow motion, he brushed corn-chip crumbs from his small, neatly trimmed black beard, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. His eyes were glassy with unshed tears. "I'm gonna call the cops, the hospitals. See what I can find out." He went to the touch-tone phone on the end table beside the futon, put his hand on it – and froze. "I just thought of something. You know who was maybe the last person I know who saw Mitch? Your ex. Amy."

  South Los Angeles

  It wasn't a prison clinic, Mitch decided, after he'd been awake for a few minutes. It was a general kind of hospital, and it had the rundown, used look of the public hospital that poor people had to go to, and maybe they got turned away and maybe they didn't.

  He felt okay till he tried to move. It felt like he was strapped down with barbed wire. Lay still and it didn't hurt
much; move and it tore you up. And it felt, too, that his bones had turned to lead. They were that heavy to lift.

  He just had a glimpse of his arm, all stitched with fine black thread, the stitched wound and the skin around it discoloured with orange-coloured disinfectant. He was sewn up like a badly made rag doll, with seams on his chest, his legs, his arm. Had he done his groin too? Had he done the thing he'd been thinking of when he'd lost consciousness: slashed up his own dick?

  The More Man had wanted him to do it.

  But he'd been drawn into unconsciousness, pulled down into it, and he'd lost the More Man and everything else. Until he woke up in this bed and in this hospital gown and in this pain.

  Don't move. Just don't try to move. Because if it hurts much more you'll vomit, and if you vomit you'll move your arms and legs with the convulsion of it, and the pain that would come, then – that was not something to even imagine.

  So he lay there, floating in a septic pool of nausea, cotton-mouthed with dehydration, until a nurse came and looked him over, shaking her head with amazement. She asked him how he felt, and he said, "Hurts."

  She looked like she was half-Indian, half-Hispanic. She had a Mexican accent. "Chure, I bet it hurts," she said, taking his pulse.

  "Painkiller?" he rasped.

  "We see what the doctor say."

  "Water?"

  "You not supposed to have any in the stomach yet but I give you some IV glucose water, you feel better." She set up an IV stand, put a needle in his right arm; she chewed her gum vigorously the whole time. She smelled like cigarette smoke. The glucose bottle fed by a rubber tube into a long needle that bit into the mainline vein of his right arm. She taped it down, and whisked out of the room without another word, probably to grab a quick cigarette in the nurse's lounge.

  The bottle ticked out bubbles from its tube every so often, and coolness fed into his arm.

  They'd put him in a loony ward, on medication. That's what'd happen, eventually.

  He wondered if they'd posted a guard outside, or if the orderlies were supposed to keep an eye on him, or what.

  He was sick, disfigured, and he was a prisoner too. They probably wouldn't even let him call his brother, without the juvenile hall authorities giving some kind of approval. His wounds were beginning to itch nastily, as well as burning and throbbing with pain. He couldn't scratch them.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, as hard as he could, thinking that he was going to lay here and suffer for a long time.

  Not if you don't want to.

  "I have to."

  You can come with us. We're sending someone to help you come back to us. They haven't got a guard on you right now. You're just a juvenile. You're not important enough. The orderlies are supposed to keep an eye on you, but they're not bothering to. We can get you away .

  "Look what you've made me do to myself." Said with more disbelief than resentment. He didn't have the guts to be mad at the More Man. And the more he heared the More Man's voice, the better he felt.

  That's right. If you hear me, if you really listen, you'll feel better.

  He felt a trickle of the Head Syrup ooze through him, easing the pain a little.

  That's all I can give you, until you come. The connection isn't quite there.

  "I can't. I can't move."

  We're coming to help you.

  Terror and giddy anticipation. First one, and then the other. Wanting to yell for someone, ask them to get Jeff, and wanting to go with the More Man.

  He knew he couldn't yell for help. He knew just where he was going. He had as much choice about it as a wad of phlegm going down a drain.

  "I don't -" Try. "I don't want to -" Say it. "I can't -"

  "Is he talking in his sleep?" A man's voice, asking it in a clinical way, almost as if thinking out loud.

  Mitch opened his eyes, and saw a doctor, a dark little Paki or Indian dude, eyes just a bit too sunken. Coming in with the nurse. ''I am Doctor Drandhu." Indian accent.

  "Painkiller."

  "I am not your doctor, so I can't prescribe it. Your doctor's up in the E.R., doing a little cutting and pasting on somebody else. He'll be here soon as he can. I came over from Culver City – I work at the Culver City Private Hospital – because Doctor Metzger – that's your doctor, Dr. Metzger, he said I might have a look at you…" He was talking distractedly as he looked at Mitch's wounds. "Very very nice sewing. Doctor Metzger does good work. It doesn't look like you lost a lot of muscle tissue, so if the nerves are well, you should recover, but you will have some scarring…"

  "You got one like this one?" the nurse asked, surprised.

  "Two, actually, correct. A young woman and a man about forty. We have just got the man in this morning. Were you taking a drug, Mitch? It's confidential."

  "No."

  "You are sure? We are not going to tell anyone about it, no."

  Mitch just closed his eyes. Sure, right, just try and explain.

  The doctor asked him another question. Mitch ignored him. He didn't even notice what the question was, at first. He was too busy trying not to throw up. He heard it when the doctor repeated it. "Mitch, who were you talking to when we came in? Are you hearing voices?" Mitch ignored that, too. After a few minutes he realized they had gone. But someone else was there. He could feel it.

  He opened his eyes and saw the Handy Man. The More Man had sent him.

  A little man with red cheeks and very big bright blue eyes and extra-big earlobes like that Senator with the bow tie who ran for president, and not much forehead, and a wide, yellow-toothed smile. He wore an old brown jacket, and a neatly pressed brown shirt, brown polyester pants. His hair was crewcut. He really didn't care much what he looked like, no, not the Handy Man. Just simple and clean, that was the Handy Man. Maybe that's why he didn't have any fingernails.

  Panic. "No! I'm not going."

  "There no one around," said the Handy Man, in his too-high voice, a midget's voice. He was only an inch or two taller than a midget. "And the ones out in the clinic, well, they're all busy, and I've brought something so you don't have to walk, and something so you don't have to feel any pain." He held up a syringe. "Morphine." He smiled apologetically. ''We would prefer to use the connection instead, but it is broken, so…" He shrugged, and widened his smile.

  "Morphine? Oh yes, please."

  Let the Handy Man give him the painkiller, Mitch thought, and then he'd refuse to go with him. He'd buzz for the nurse. Yell for help.

  But after the Handy Man shot the drug into the IV tube, a warm tide of indifference carried Mitch away and he let the Handy Man bundle him into some clothes and into the wheelchair.

  On the way out, as the badly oiled wheelchair squeaked down the hall, he found himself staring hazily at the stitches in his arm. The black wiry stitches stuck out at the ends, where they were tied off, looking like insect legs, insect antennae. Insects burrowing in his skin.

  He didn't care. He fell asleep, not caring.

  Culver City, Lot Angeles

  "You sure you weren't sleeping with Amy?"

  "I think I'd probably notice it if I was."

  "That's not funny, Jeff. You know what I mean."

  "I'm being honest. She came over and said she needed a place to stay for one night. Mitch was pretty dazzled by her. I think his respect for you quadrupled when I told him she was your wife."

  They were sitting in Jeff's little office, Jeff on an orange crate and Prentice on Jeff's swivel chair. The orange crate would have collapsed under Prentice. He sat next to the PC workstation, with Jeff's collection of Playboy Calenders from the 1950s and early 60s on one wall, his Japanese robot monster toys, bookshelves made of cinder blocks and raw boards taking up another. They were untidy shelves, with magazines and graphic novels crammed in horizontally over the Penguin paperbacks and Jeff's pulp detective novel collection, each old yellowing paperback encased in a clear plastic envelope. In a closet was Jeff's small but startling gun collection…

  They were waiting for the
phone to ring.

  "She stayed on the futon and Mitch slept on the floor in a sleeping bag. I knew you'd want to get all the sleeping arrangements clear. I tried to talk to her but she seemed really spooked. She said she was trying to make up her mind about something. Said she had a part, or anyway an offer, but she didn't know if she trusted the guy. I figured it was one of these casting couch situations."

  "Shit."

  "Yeah. Anyway, she didn't want to talk about it. She sat on the futon with her legs drawn up under her -"

  "She always sits that way if there's room."

  "- and stared at the TV. She watched like four sitcoms without hardly even blinking but she didn't laugh at any of the jokes. She was still on the futon, asleep, when I left for a meeting the next morning. I called home and Mitch said she'd left." He paused, staring reflectively into space as he remembered. "I think I… I was in a rotten mood so I argued with MItch, over the phone, about him finding a job or going back to school. And… when I came back he wasn't there. Left a note, didn't say much. I didn't connect his leaving with Amy. Maybe there's no connection. Probably not…"

  "How come you didn't tell me before about Amy being here?"

  "Because she asked me not to and because I know how you are. Irrationally jealous. I mean, I never laid a finger on her but I knew you'd grill me anyway if you knew she was here. You could be divorced or busted up with a girl for three years and still be possessive of her, Tom. Even if it was you that dumped her, which it usually was."

  Prentice winced. "It's mostly if it's one of my friends. I can't stand the idea of one of my friends sleeping with my ex-girlfriends. I don't know why it should bother me, an ex should be an ex, but…"

  The phone rang. Jeff dived for it. "Hello?"

  A pause as he leaned vulture – like over the phone, one hand flat on the desk. "Where? Juvenile Detention? Jesus. Which one?" He reached for a pen and a yellow pad. "Got it. Thanks. Thanks Officer, I-" He shrugged, and hung up. ''Cops don't waste time with amenities, just hang up when they're done. He's in JDH, possession of a controlled substance."