After the Fade

by Ronald Malfi

  “Stay in the car,” Lauren said to the driver in a small voice. “Stay in the car.”

  Some of the others took up her mantra: “Stay in the car…stay in the car…stay in the car…”

  One of the bugs lifted off the plate glass window and soared in a zigzag formation toward the open driver’s door.

  “No,” Tori practically whimpered.

  The bug went into the car. There was motionlessness for perhaps a second, maybe two. Then the woman began to flail frantically, her hands tearing at her wild nest of frizzy hair, her single foot thumping uselessly against the cobblestones.

  Another bug lifted off the window and fluttered over to the car; the darkness swallowed it before I had a chance to see where it landed.

  The woman burst from the car. She had both hands clutching at her head and her clothes looked disheveled. She staggered out into the middle of Main Street just as the rest of the bugs pulled away from the window and soared in her direction. I watched as two of them netted themselves in her big hair, disappearing in that frizzy mop. Only their wings were visible, beating furiously against the sides of her face.

  Tori screamed and turned away from the window.

  “No!” Kathy Bowman began shrieking. “No! No! Stop it! Stop it!”

  The woman finally collapsed in the middle of Main Street. She dropped like someone whose spine had been instantly turned into butter. Her head rebounded off the cobblestones and one of her legs went wild and off at an awkward and unnatural angle. As she flailed and struggled on the ground, more bugs came out of the darkness and infested her. They got in her hair, across her back, her legs, on her face. After a little while, the woman stopped moving.

  Tori was sobbing quietly toward the back of the bar. Kathy and Lauren went over to console her. Derrick slid away from the window, uttering, “I think I’m gonna be sick,” and then I didn’t see him again for five or ten minutes.

  I just stared. The blackness outside was tremendous, and that one fucking headlight spearing off into space mocked me. I wished it would blink out and erase the whole ordeal. It didn’t. Fuck.

  At the hearth, the bugs inside the wood-burning stove sounded rejuvenated: they strummed and buzzed like tiny chainsaws within the cast iron belly of the stove.

  “I’m going to lose my mind in here,” Jake said, his eyes happening to catch mine as he swung away from the window and back toward the bar.

  This time, I put a hand on Victor’s shoulder. It was frail and did not fill out his shirt. It felt like the hanger was still in there. “Come on. Come back to the bar.”

  “Sorry, Tommy. I can’t. I’m keeping watch now. Ain’t moving. Can’t.”

  I thought about convincing him otherwise but decided against it in the end. “Suit yourself,” I said eventually, and went back to the bar. My legs were like water; I could hardly move on them. When I sat down at the bar, my vision threatened to pixilate and disperse into the ether. I held onto it for all I was worth.

  It’s just like the music. It’s just like when the music fades, when it disappears, and all that’s left on that recording is the wash-hiss-wash of the soundlessness.

  My skin prickled with sweat. Something wasn’t right inside me. I feared I might throw up, but I was determined not to do it here at the bar. I shoved myself up off the stool again and staggered toward the back of the bar in the direction of the bathroom. The bathroom door was closed and there was a sliver of golden light beneath it. I rested my head against the door and thumped my knuckles on the frame.

  “Occupied.” It was a woman’s voice. Lauren or Tori or Kathy…who could tell?

  “Sorry.”

  I wended through the darkened bowels of the bar, banging my hip against tables and chairs. There was the exit door here, which I avoided. I continued along the wall until I could continue no more. I dropped to my knees and vomited nothing but air and spittle into one darkened corner. There was a part of me that considered standing the fuck up and marching right out the door and staring destiny in the face. In fact, I knew with certainty I was maybe just one more drink away from doing just that.

  After I finished vomiting, I propped myself back up on unsteady legs and went back to the bar. There were some wet dish rags behind the bar. I grabbed a handful of them and carried them back to the place where I’d thrown up. Lauren, Tori, and Kathy were back here now, talking quietly at one of the tables. They had lit the candle in the little glass bowl at the center of the table and the cast of the candlelight made their faces look like ghosts.

  “What happened?” Lauren asked me as I trod by with a dish rag soaked in vomit. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m swell,” I said, and went directly to the bathroom where I rinsed the rag out in the sink.

  My reflection peered out at me from the spotty mirror. It grinned a cadaverous grin.

  The thing is, I will wake up in the morning to find myself in my own bed. This will have all been a dream, a nightmare. None of this is real. None of this can be happening. Billy Beans will be there in his ridiculous glow-in-the-dark boxer shorts, reeking of pot, and I’ll be there to make a fresh pot of coffee. We’ll sit out on the balcony and drink coffee and smoke a single joint between the two of us while we watch the boats rock in their moorings, and maybe later Beans will have some girls over. Beans always has girls over. Sometimes, I can hear them having sex in his room—his fastidious grunts and their girlish pants and whimpers, the bed squealing beneath them like some large sea mammal made to perform tricks, and then the silence that follows. The aftermath. And then sometime later, I’ll hear one of them get up and go to the bathroom. I’ll hear their piss hit the water and the sink turn on and maybe someone will brush their teeth, too. It doesn’t matter. Just as long as that’s the real part and this—this madness right here—is the dream, is the nightmare.

  I went back out to the bar and sat down. Someone’s glass of water looked tempting enough for me to steal. I swallowed half of it before I set the glass back down on the bar.

  Jake appeared beside me. “You look green.”

  “Really? I feel like a million bucks.”

  “For the record, I never had nothing against you, Holland. Those times we slugged it out, I was just drunk and I happened to recognize your face. It wasn’t nothing more than that.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “There was more than one time?”

  He laughed. “Well, I’m just saying. You’re a good guy. I hear your band is doing good things. I wish you luck.”

  The thought struck me as purely ridiculous, and it was all I could do not to break out into hysterical laughter.

  He must have decoded the look on my face, because he said, “You’re thinking there’s no future, huh? There’s nothing that’s gonna happen after tonight.”

  “You could say that.”

  “And that might be true. Nonetheless, I’m saying I ain’t got nothin’ against you, Holland. For what it’s worth.”

  I turned to him. “I appreciate that, Jake. Now sit the fuck down and have a drink with me.”

  “You sure you need another drink?”

  “I’m doing it right tonight, bud.”

  “Hey, Scott,” Jake called. “You pouring?”

  Scott was lying down on the old bandstand, a towel wadded beneath his head. “Your arms ain’t broken and you know where the bottles are,” he called back, not looking up at us.

  “Works for me,” Jake said. He reached over the bar and grabbed two rocks glasses and a bottle of Jim Beam. He examined the Jim Beam then set it back down and selected a bottle of Macallan. “Might as well hit the good stuff.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  He poured the two drinks then set the bottle back down. Lifting his, he said, “To your band.”

  I lifted mine. “To your good nature, Jake.”

  Again, he laughed. I could see the silver fillings in his molars. “What’s that mean?”

  “Fuck if I know. Let’s drink.”

  We drank.

  It wa
s midnight, according to the display on my cell phone, when Jake and I finished the bottle of Macallan. Giggling like school girls, we sat slumped at the bar while Scott snored on the bandstand and the girls chatted quietly in the back and Derrick watched the acoustical tiles while he laid on his back, his coat propped beneath his head, and Charles sat by himself in a booth staring at the fire-blackened hearth, and old Victor Peebles kept watch on his stool before a plate glass window infested with giant, bloodsucking bugs.

  “I have to do something,” I told Jake after we’d finished the last drop of scotch in the bottle.

  “Take a piss?”

  “No,” I said. “Something else.”

  I got up and walked in a rough semicircle around the bar. The darkened corridor that led to the front vestibule beckoned me. I considered going in that direction…considered pushing out through the front door and staggering drunkenly out into the street. I was convinced the bugs wouldn’t be real if I was outside with them; they only seemed real from in here, trapped like feeder mice in a tank, just waiting for the snake’s feeding time. Ha! I wouldn’t wait.

  I stumbled down the dark hallway toward the front door. There was the coat check closet and the door bolted against the night. The upper portion of the door was all glass, and two of the large bugs clung to it like barnacles. I stood there staring at them for what seemed like an eternity. I even brought up one hand and drummed my fingers on the glass. On the other side, the bugs raised and lowered their hydraulic legs. Those feathery antennae that reminded me so much of peacock feathers twitched in the wind. One of the creatures lowered its stinger to the glass. The thing was as large as a shark’s tooth, and just as sharp. A drop of poison shimmered from its tip like a diamond.

  Across the street, I saw the light still on in the second-floor apartment. Only now the window was broken and the semitransparent curtain billowed out in the wind. Bugs scaled the building and I could see one halfway into the window. I could no longer see movement in the apartment. What had Jake said earlier, when we’d first noticed the light on in that second-floor apartment? Let’s hope there’s a lot of people alive everywhere.

  I turned away and walked back into the bar. But I didn’t sit back down at my stool: I went behind the bar and proceeded to set up wineglasses along one side of the bar, one wineglass after another. After I’d set up about a dozen, I grabbed the hose and squirted water into the glasses—varying amounts, increasing as I went down the length of the bar.

  Jake watched me and chuckled. “Fuck,” he said. “You’re drunk. What the hell are you doing?”

  “The only thing I know how to do,” I told him.

  I finished filling the glasses then replaced the hose beneath the bar. There was a tray of silverware down there; I picked two table spoons from it and held one in each hand like drumsticks. I saw the bar lights shimmer in the water and sparkle on the rims of the glass.

  I began to play.

  Eyes closed, working strictly off instinct, I drummed the spoons against the glasses, eliciting a series of chimes that swirled up into the atmosphere where they commingled to form sound, to form song. It was a rough jazz melody, one I used to play on the piano when I performed here—right on that darkened stage where Scott Smith now slept—and it came as if it was hungry to come. I let it. I let it bleed out. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell Jake’s smirk faded and was replaced by awe…and then a nondescript contentment as I effortlessly ushered him from one plane of existence to another. Similarly, I did not need to open my eyes to know Scott had awoken and he was now sitting up on the bandstand—the bandstand where I used to play when I was just some underage little punk kid—and I did not need to open my eyes to know that Derrick Ulmstead had sat up and was watching me, too. I did not need to open my eyes to know the girls had relocated to the bar and were watching me in mutual silence. I did not need to open my eyes to know that old Victor Peebles had swiveled around on his barstool by the window to watch me with eyes as narrow as coin slots.

  I played. And in my mind, I was in some smoky club somewhere along the east coast of the U.S., and the music was reverberating off the steel rafters of this nameless club, mingling with cigarette smoke and heightening perspiration, the velvet stage curtains soaked in it, the crowd nothing but faceless silhouettes beneath the blue stage lights, the drumming in my fingers an echo of the drumming in my soul, my soul, my soul…

  The final note rang out, sustained. I let it go for as long as it wanted, for as long as it was able.

  When I opened my eyes, they were all there staring at me. It seemed like their silence would go on and on, the way a black hole supposedly sucks up light straight into infinity, so I set the spoons down and, smiling, said, “I hope I didn’t bother you guys.”

  “That was beautiful,” Lauren said. Then she shook her head. “No. It was more than that. It was…it was supernatural. That a human being could do what you just did, Tom…that’s amazing.”

  I came out from behind the bar and gave Lauren a hug. She hugged me back. Then she pulled away from me and looked me squarely in the face. “You’re shaking,” she said. “Something’s wrong. Other than the obvious, I mean.”

  “I think I want to try calling my mom again.”

  “Okay.”

  I went to the darkened back of the bar and dialed my parents’ phone number again. This time, it rang and rang and no one ever answered the line. After a while, I hung up and tried dialing it again. It still rang. Still, no one answered.

  I heard breathing beside me in the darkness. I could smell Lauren’s perfume. Collecting my legs up underneath me, I sat down on the floor. It was dark back here; I could barely make out Lauren’s face.

  “You brought me here tonight to tell me something,” she said. It was like listening to someone speaking over an AM radio broadcast. “What was it, Tom?”

  “Forget it.”

  “No. I want you to tell me. It’s important to me.”

  Was it? None of it mattered now. We could be on the far side of the moon and none of this would matter.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  So lie, said a creepy little voice at the back of my head. Lie to her. None of it matters now. Say whatever makes her feel good. Say whatever makes you feel good, too.

  It made sense.

  I said, “I was going to break up with you.”

  The words simmered between us, somehow suspended in the air by the darkness for longer than they needed to be.

  “I know,” she said after a very long moment.

  “Did you? Then why did you ask me?”

  “Because I wanted to see what you’d say to me now,” she said. “After all this. I wanted to see if you’d still tell me the truth.”

  Suddenly, I was angry. “What is this, some kind of test?”

  “Don’t feel so important, Tom. It’s not all about you, you know.”

  “Who’s it about?”

  “Us. Or me. Or…I don’t know. Anyone. People in general.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “I guess I just needed to know there’s some good left in mankind.” Her silhouette shrugged. “Seeing how we’re on the verge of extinction and everything, I mean.”

  I laughed then. I couldn’t help myself. It burst out of me like a volcanic eruption. Lauren laughed too, and that made me laugh all the more.

  “I care about you, you know,” I told her after we’d stopped laughing. There were tears in my eyes, and I wasn’t sure how much were from the laughing and how much were from all the other stuff.

  “Shit,” she said, “I know that. You’re just a guy. You’re just someone finding your way. I don’t hate you for it, Tom.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “I guess we split up.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Yes. I won’t lie to you. Yes.”

  “It’s just—”

  “I love you, Tom.” She held up her hand. “Shhhh. Don’t try to fumble through something stupid. You don’
t need to say anything. I just wanted to say it to you because that’s how I feel. I love you.”

  “Thank you. And I—”

  “No,” she said again. “Stop. Don’t talk.”

  “Lauren…”

  “Don’t,” she insisted. “Please. Don’t talk. I’ll hate you if you do.”

  I said nothing. After a few minutes, Lauren crawled over to me and rested her head against my chest while I draped an arm over her shoulders. She felt small and helpless—the way I always imagined my own children to feel.

  After she fell asleep, I whispered in her ear, “I love you, too.”

  * * *

  I awoke to the first slivers of daylight casting white bars through the front window of the bar. Stiffly, I moved my head on my neck, wincing at the change in light. Lauren sighed and awoke soundlessly. She looked up at me with dark, doleful eyes. I wanted to kiss her but didn’t. I was still trying to grasp the fact that I had fallen asleep at all.

  “Is it a dream?” she whispered to me.

  We were still in The Fulcrum, so I knew it hadn’t been a dream. “No. Unfortunately.”

  We stood. My back ached and my neck was stiff. I went to the front of the bar. Scott was there, snoring on the old piano bandstand. Derrick and Jake were slumped against one wall, a half empty bottle of Glenlivet propped in Jake’s lap. Charles and Kathy Bowman were curled up on the floor, their coats draped over their slumbering bodies. The Fulcrum’s cook—a fellow whose name I’d never learned in the midst of all this madness—was asleep, planted straight on a barstool, drooling across the top of the bar. In one of the booths toward the back of the bar, Tori snored lightly, a tablecloth pulled up under her chin as a blanket.

  Only Victor was still awake. Just as he promised, he remained on his stool staring out the plate glass window as the sun broke up over the far end of Main Street. Golden light trickled up the cobblestones and cast yellow light along the side of Victor’s face.

  I came up behind Victor, noticing that the bugs still clung to The Fulcrum’s window. Outside, the car was still wedged beneath the bent lamppost, its single headlight glaring off into the distance, its driver’s side door standing wide open. The driver was in the middle of the street, the husk of a human being. Her frizzy hair was matted with blood and her bare feet looked impossibly pale. I couldn’t see her face—it was planted straight down in the street—and for that I was thankful.