Numb

by Sean Ferrell

  “Yeah,” Redbach said. “Jesus Christ.” He kept repeating that as he began to cut through the line.

  We stood and waited for the police. The chopper swung around in the air, its engine laboring to keep the unflyable shape suspended in the air above us, the pilot clearly working against the high winds and afraid to approach tree-thick bridge cables. Bug-eyed searchlights danced toward us.

  “Do they know he’s down there?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” Redbach’s sweat dripped onto his hands as he got through the last part of the line. He’d cut himself in his efforts and, unfeeling, worked despite it. Blood dropped onto the bridge deck beside his knees. I looked back over the handrail and watched as once more the small orange dot at the end of the line dropped into the water. This time it wasn’t moving. He’d stopped his struggle.

  Pounding of feet and the lights from police cars. Six or seven uniforms, heavy in the middle, hanging over gun belts, made their way to us. They took turns asking us questions and peering over the edge. One of the cops squinted down at Mal and said, “This guy lit himself on fire and jumped off the bridge?”

  “Yeah,” Redbach said.

  “What a fucking moron,” the cop said as he turned away. He shouted into his radio and the chopper swung away from the bridge. Beneath us, lost in the new darkness that had rolled in after Mal’s second loss of fire, a police boat circled, small floodlights trained on the lettering on its side. One larger light swept the water ahead and another popped on behind as they looked for my friend.

  Redbach and I were arrested and booked for trespassing and disturbing the peace. In the processing station, one of the officers eyed us carefully.

  “Hey,” he said, “you that guy?” He pointed at the palm of his hand, finger cocked like a pistol, and made a nail gun sound. “You are, ain’t you? My kid has downloaded stuff about you off the Web.”

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  He stamped a form and wrote something above the smeared red ink. “I couldn’t believe that last thing my kid downloaded. That sex tape of yours is sick.”

  I stood there, not sure what to say. I could feel my back curving as my knees wobbled.

  He looked at Redbach. “And you, you’re his pal, aren’t you? Put the nails in him?”

  Redbach turned pale. “No,” he said. “Not me.”

  Another cop walked in as they took our mug shots. Mine is now famous. It ran in Time and Newsweek and was eventually named one of the fifty most recognizable images of the year. My eyes, swollen half shut from crying, are red, and sweat and tears run down my cheeks. The photo was taken just as the cop said to me and Redbach, “Sorry about your friend. He was DOA.”

  Redbach and I both became sick in the small plastic wastebasket in the corner behind the police cameraman, who kindly waited for us to finish before saying we could help ourselves to coffee or water before we headed to our cells.

  Released from jail the next day, I went to Hiko’s apartment and made our home happily devoid of any modern conveniences. God help me if Hiko heard about the film the cop had seen, heard about it on the radio or my television. I had no idea what it was and didn’t want to find out. I had also discovered that the videos shot the previous night were being shown on the news. I wanted none of my films to enter my home. I felt them rising outside, like a tide, and I kept expecting to hear thunder and catch flashes of lightning from the corner of my eye, as if the flood of information were a real storm raging outside my window. The cab ride home had been horrific, as the cabbie spent most of the trip, eyes on the mirror, smile on his face, trying to engage me in conversation about the reports rising from his radio. I’d only just escaped his questions about my “talents” and the “tragedy” of my friend. Did self-immolation equal tragedy? Since then the constant radio chatter and television reports from other buildings and cars on the street had pattered on my ears like rain. A storm, a flood.

  I circled the living room. The television and electronics equipment sat around me. Some might say, though not me, that I had “earned” them. Mal had deserved more than he’d gotten, had actually worked toward something, however ridiculous, and died. He’d killed himself to get what I had gotten without trying. The electronics, my prizes, buzzed even when turned off, hummed with the need to repeat reports and videos of Mal’s death. They dared me to listen. They dared me not to.

  I could have sold the equipment, the electronics. Instead, I threw them away. To be more accurate, I threw them out the window. It started with a couple of CDs that I decided would never be listened to again. They had both been Mal’s. Out the window.

  It felt good, holding them out there and letting gravity do its thing. I sat by the window and dropped one after another of the disks from our metal rack bought at an overpriced, trendy furniture store. After a while I ran out of CDs. What good is a CD player without any CDs? Out the window. DVDs and DVD player followed. The TV proved the bitch of the litter—it just didn’t want to fit—but with a tremendous cracking sound part of the window frame gave way and at last it went. I found that there is a beautiful, quiet moment when something falls. The television, like the other items before it, hung there for a second, not appearing to move but instead only getting smaller. It looked as if it might never hit bottom, as if it might just shrink silently to nothing. At last it, as the other appliances had, exploded into a reminder that everything is only a collection of parts, no matter how solid the shell. In this way the items of my life had been shrunk down to nothing, rendered incomplete in their collapse to parthood, parts only now adding up to more refuse instead of useful items. Beneath me, in the back courtyard, about ten feet from where the cooler had sat for weeks with Mal’s fire jelly, scattered my exploded life.

  As I leaned out the window, looking down, I felt blood on my face and a salty taste in my mouth. Drops fell from my chin and shrank until they splattered below on the television, CDs, and DVDs. I had no idea how I had hurt myself. Cut myself on the window, maybe, or bitten through my lip. It wouldn’t be the first time. On my way to the bathroom to get to the mirror, I wiped my palm across my face to find the cut and stop the flow. I pulled my hand away to see not blood but water. I tasted it and recognized it for tears. I hadn’t cut myself. I was crying.

  When Hiko got home, I waited in the living room, facing where the television used to be. She called and I answered, and she felt her way toward me.

  She said, “My God, how did this happen?”

  She’d heard about the jump from Karen. I wanted to call it “the accident” but couldn’t. Accidents are things that aren’t meant to happen. There was no avoiding this.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “By the way, we were robbed. They took my TV.”

  “Oh God.”

  I told her it was fine. That everything would be all right. I didn’t need a TV, I said. I never wanted another. Not while films of Mal were being shown. I said all this while she held me. Inside I thought, Not while sex tapes of me are being shown.

  MAL’S FUNERAL WAS small and quiet and Karen cried through the entire ceremony. Deep into fall, the sky hung low and the leaves were gone. The cemetery was surrounded by a gray haze of barren trees that refused to move despite the wind. Afterward, as everyone else began to leave, I stayed beside the grave, safer and calmer there than anywhere I’d been in weeks.

  Karen was comforted by her mother and Hiko. She pointed at me and then separated from them. I thought she would go to the car, to leave the cemetery, but she came directly to me. “We need to talk.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not here. Tomorrow, come to my place. Bring anything of Mal’s that you still have.”

  “I don’t know if I—”

  “Just look around. You might have something. It’s mine now and I want it. Even if you don’t have anything, come to my place tomorrow at two.” She walked away without looking back.

  This left me rattled. I’d always thought that Karen didn’t like me. Much the same way that I thought Hiko didn’
t like Mal. We formed an odd circle, Mal to Karen to me to Hiko. Neither woman trusting the other’s man, neither man quite trusting the other. What had kept us together, what kept us from pushing the others away, was an emotional gravity that keeps people in orbit despite so many reasons for them to tear free and float by themselves. Now, without Mal, Karen would probably break free, and there was nothing to keep her from ripping into me on her way out.

  There had been something in her voice, I thought. Something present in its lack, something that told me she’d decided enough was enough.

  Later that afternoon I made up another lame excuse to Hiko. I said I was going to do some research at the library or a bookstore, looking for information on my “condition.” I went to Emilia’s.

  At first she didn’t want me to come up to her place. I ignored the fact that she had ended our nonrelationship, I ignored the fact that I had convinced myself that the ending hadn’t happened. I stood outside her building and pushed on the buzzer over and over until she finally let me up.

  She met me at her door, no smile on her face and no clothes on her body. There were packed boxes throughout the apartment, small spaces barely left for a chair here or a pile of magazines there. She took my hand and with a sad resignation took me to her bedroom and lay down with me.

  Afterward, feeling the sweat roll off my sides and mix with the pale bloody spots on her sheets, I realized that my patterns and habits revolved more and more around Emilia, with fewer of my moments spent around Hiko. Hiko demanded more somehow, and I was ready to move away from that. I drifted between two islands, it seemed. One was more dangerous but was closer, and so I tried to reach land. Even though Emilia and I didn’t really talk, I thought there must be some sort of security there.

  Emilia got up and left the room.

  Still lying on her bed, I said, “So, I’ve been thinking about California.” I hadn’t been, but I grew more scared by the moment that an ending, a bad one, approached. Mal gone, Karen demanding something from me. I drifted.

  Emilia sat in the bathroom, gasping as she dripped hydrogen peroxide into the small cuts and bite marks I’d just left on her body. I’d once offered to clean them for her, but she’d laughed and said that I only needed to worry about what I did to her, not what I could do for her. I didn’t understand the difference.

  I said, “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I was thinking, I could go with you.”

  She didn’t respond, so I rolled off the bed and went to the bathroom door and repeated the offer.

  “I heard you,” she said. She didn’t look at me. She sat on the closed toilet lid, dabbing a cotton ball over a cut on her thigh. When had I done that? I couldn’t recall. The white panties she wore had a drop of blood on them. I wondered at how many articles of clothing might have been ruined during our time together.

  “So,” I said, “what do you think?”

  “Why are you asking?” She concentrated on her wounds. Mine could wait.

  “I guess I’m trying to figure out where I might be in the next few years.”

  She smirked and her eyes flashed at me. She stood and tossed some bloody cotton balls into the garbage. “Jesus. You actually, what, see us settling down somewhere? With some little house and a yard and a fence?”

  My stupidity rushed over me and I felt suddenly sweaty. I walked back to the bedroom. “Where are my clothes?”

  The medicine cabinet snapped open and shut as she pulled out a box of bandages. She followed me into the bedroom and threw them on the bed. “We don’t even live together, for God’s sake.”

  I pulled my jeans on. Before pulling on my shirt I realized that I hadn’t cleaned my newest wounds from the afternoon spent bloodying her bed. They still wept blood and should have been cleaned and bandaged. Instead I pulled the shirt on. The blood would show through it, probably ruin it, but I had to get out of her apartment.

  Emilia stood in the doorway, watching me. She was skinnier than I remembered, thinner by a hand’s width.

  She said, “I mean, what were you hoping for?”

  I grabbed my shoes and pulled one on. “I don’t know.” I really didn’t. “I don’t think I hope for anything.”

  “Well, you must. You asked the question, and you’re upset at my answer.” She disappeared into the bathroom again.

  I tried to imagine she was right, but I couldn’t decide what I hoped for, if anything. Somewhere beneath my annoyance at her answers, my fears about Hiko discovering my relationship, my distrust of Mal and Michael and others who cheered on my performances or claimed rights due to friendship, somewhere under all of that there must have been some sort of hope or expectation. There had to be. Mal would have known what he wanted. He would have demanded and gotten an answer from her.

  I tried to find a path back to her front door, but boxes blocked me in. I looked over the walls of stacked cartons, wondered what they were filled with and how I’d gotten past them. Emilia stood in the hallway and watched me try to go.

  “I know you’re upset about your friend dying, but that doesn’t mean that you and I have something more than whatever this was.”

  I shut the door behind me. I was left with little consolation other than the fact that she would take some small part of me with her to California. It would be the little black flecks of blood sprinkled over her sheets and clothes, unless she managed to do some laundry before leaving.

  The next day I went to the tiny apartment Karen and Mal had shared and which Karen now haunted alone. New pictures peppered the walls. Karen let me walk around for a moment, as if in a museum. I examined each picture and, sadly, found most of them were of Karen and Mal. He looked happier in the pictures than I remembered him to be in person. Many were taken at parties or bars, with dark crowds behind and lighting that caught the sweat and exhaustion on him and Karen. There was one black-and-white photo taken in a park. They were walking away from the camera and looking at each other, smiling, clearly happy in a way only they knew. The picture caught and held me. I fingered the scar on the back of my hand where I’d stapled my most recent cut shut.

  Karen circled through the room, unsure what to do with me there. “So you didn’t find anything?”

  “No, sorry. I had some stuff, but Mal took it.”

  “The jump equipment, right? I had a feeling he was going to do something incredibly stupid, so I made him throw it out. I believed him when he said he had. But you had it, right? You held it for him.”

  Karen stood in her kitchen and tried to avoid looking at me as she put dishes away.

  I said, “I looked around, but I didn’t have anything else.” She waved my comment away.

  “I really don’t care about that anymore. Until last night I wanted to get a hold of everything of his that I could. I didn’t know what I wanted it for, but I knew I wanted it. Then I suddenly had an idea. I literally thought, I’ll take all the bastard’s stuff and I’ll burn it. Can you believe that? For a second I didn’t remember how he died. I was just so mad I thought, Burn it.”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she put a chipped blue dish on the counter and walked away. I’d never been in the apartment during the day. Brilliant sunlight poured through the windows. Outside, kids filled a basketball court with pleasant screams. I longed to be out there. I wanted to be near laughter, anywhere I could find it, even on a basketball court filled with strangers.

  I said, “Why don’t we go outside for a quick walk?”

  “No. I just wanted to talk to you for a moment, then you can go.” She sat down on the threadbare sofa and searched around a second, then found a pile of papers and flipped through them. “I just wanted to let you know that there’s some stuff of you online.”

  I didn’t know how this related to Mal. “Some of the old videos? Me with a lion?”

  “No, new stuff. You having sex.”

  She pulled a page from the pile and held it out for me. At first I couldn’t figure out what angle to view the grainy image from. Finally, I realized it w
as a shot of a window and through the window were two people on a bed.

  Karen leaned back, the pile of papers on her lap. “I was doing research on you and found this. About two days ago.”

  “This doesn’t look like me.”

  “Not that shot, but that’s only the still that I printed out. The film is pretty clear, actually. Some guy sneaking around on fire escapes and he gets that. He recognized you and now it’s out there for the world. It’s you and some model. She’s wearing tiger gloves.”

  The paper got terribly heavy. Had there really been someone on the fire escape and wouldn’t I have noticed? As I remembered everything that Emilia had done, I realized that I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all.

  Karen stood up and took the paper back. “You two do some pretty twisted shit. You I understand, you can’t feel it. But her?”

  She walked to the kitchen. When she came back she had a glass of water. She sipped at it cautiously while I tried to get my brain to work.

  She put the glass down. “I wanted to tell you so that you can do the right thing and break up with Hiko.”

  I blinked hard a few times, to regain focus I probably never had. “How is any of this your business?” I crinkled the paper but knew I couldn’t really destroy the image it had left in my head or the dozens of other images tied to it from my many visits to Emilia.

  “She’s my friend. As her friend, I will keep her away from people who will do stupid things that might hurt her. You’re doing that.”

  I tried to call her bluff. “I’ll tell her.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  It was final. The way she cut the words off shut my mouth and held it closed, almost as if it had been stapled shut.

  She walked back to the kitchen sink and refilled her glass. As she dropped ice cubes into it she glanced over her shoulder and finally looked fully at me. “You’ve done nothing but stand by and watch as people self-destruct around you. Now I’m going to make sure that you don’t drag my friend down like Mal did me.”

  “This will hurt her.”