Still, sleepwalking my way through the bottle is preferable to sleepwalking out into the backyard, kids in tow, in a poor attempt at self-immolation.
“A toast to crazy bitches,” I say and guzzle what remains in my glass.
I sigh and reach into the cabinet above the sink. The hinges whine and a cockroach skitters over my fingers. The crank is hidden inside a box of baking soda, just in case John decides to go poking around.
I snort a line. It’ll get me through the morning, until the booze is out of my system, and then maybe by this afternoon, sleep will be possible. (Forget that I’ll likely need to crack open a second whiskey bottle to get to sleep; I’ve long since accepted that basic concepts like sleeping and waking are dependent upon my ingestion of dueling chemicals.)
After returning to my bedroom, I open my window and light a cigarette.
I’d be mistaken to call my house a rowhome. It had been, once, back when my grandparents lived here and there were actually other houses on the block. Now it stands alone on an otherwise vacant block, one of many, almost a quarter-mile in any direction. There was a time when my friends—when I had friends—would crack lazy jokes about how I’m the only white girl in my neighborhood. Had there been anyone in my life to make that joke now, I’d correct them: I’m the only person in my neighborhood, period.
Mother Nature has reclaimed these vacant stretches, filling them with weed trees, shrubs, briar, and bramble. The flora, I don’t mind, but the fauna is another matter entirely. Possums, rats, and raccoons prowl the dark. It’s wild country out here, making me feel like a homesteader in a city of over a million people.
Now and then I’ll spot a passing transient, but even the addicts keep away. No drug peddlers ‘round these parts, pardner, with the lone exception being the aging tweaker who delivers my crank.
That’s what makes it so peculiar when I spot a lone figure at the end of the block, standing on the corner across the street. The person raises a cigarette to their lips, the tiny red cherry a bloody pinprick in the gloom, but otherwise just stands there.
A hooker, perhaps? I doubt it. They usually post up closer to the drug markets or the main prostitute drag a few miles south on Kensington Avenue. I lean on the window sill, lighting another cigarette, watching the figure in the distance. The figure is black, not in skin color, but utterly bathed in shadow. Even so, I can tell when the figure cocks its head very slightly and I get the impression that this person is watching me back.
I furrow my brow—just fucking feeling another new wrinkle on my forehead—and raise the cigarette to my lips. The figure on the corner mimics me, showing me that murderous pinprick the moment I inhale.
I know I should pull myself away from the window. Humoring the weirdo watching me won’t do me any good, and yet, something compels me to keep an eye on the figure. I’m not eager to make friends but I feel a sudden and urgent need to keep track of this person.
My cigarette has burned down to the butt. I flick it out the window and light another.
Down at the corner, the figure flicks its cigarette into the gutter and lights a new one.
One would have to work extraordinarily hard to break into my house. Wrought iron bars on all the windows. Double locks on the back door, triple on the front. Nanna and Gramps were aware that their neighborhood was going down the tubes and shielded themselves accordingly well before I moved in.
But it’s not the idea that this person could get inside my house that unsettles me, as much as it is the anonymous nature of the figure’s gaze.
Then the figure starts up the sidewalk. It passes underneath the few working streetlights lining my street but remains completely dark, like a living shadow.
I’m about to shout that I keep an aluminum Louisville Slugger by the front door and I was one fuck of a softball player back in the day, but I’m not entirely confident that would dissuade the figure from approaching.
Just as this thought shoots through my skull, the figure stops and turns right, climbing into a dense thicket of foliage that the dull orange glow of the streetlights can’t penetrate.
The dark bushes ripple as the figure disappears inside and I lose sight of it.
For all I know, that person is a fellow tweaker and just wants to continue on his or her way, cutting through the vacant wilderness because they’re tired of the strange woman staring from her lonely bedroom window.
But I know better.
The movement within the bushes ceases; that, or it’s just too dark for me to see any, and I’m confronted by an entirely new sense of dread. My eyes strain. I’m looking for that burning cigarette cherry. Surely, the figure will take another puff.
My flip phone vibrates on the nightstand and I nearly shit myself. I snatch the phone and quickly return to the window.
Keeping one eye on the bushes, I flip it open. I’ve got a voicemail from a private number, though the phone never rang. Though it’s possible that the call came when I was sleeping and the voicemail notification was just delayed. It happens with these older phone models.
The voicemail begins with crackling static, initially faint, and for a moment, I assume the message will cut off. A wrong number, or a pocket dial, or a malfunctioning robocall. The static ebbs and flows, yet I hear something else, just under the crackle.
It’s a low voice, dark and ethereal, but unmistakably feminine. “Broken…cunt…” says the voice, gusting over the static. “You’re…broken…” The voice becomes clearer, taking on a slightly higher pitch. “Cunt.”
So I’m a broken cunt, huh? That’s an arguable point, but I’ve been called far worse in threatening phone calls.
Her voice takes on a singsong intonation. Two children chime in, singing along. The song becomes clearer, higher pitched, almost gleeful. And I’m wrong. They’re not calling me a broken cunt.
“Your broken cunt,” they sing. “The dead flesh from your…broken…cunt…”
Ice fills my bowels. I can no longer pretend that it’s the crank that’s got me trembling. When I pull the phone from my ear, somehow I must click the speaker on, because those voices continue, louder, echoing in my room as the light flickers above.
I try to cut off the volume but the song continues. My hands shake so violently that I can just barely hit the power button, holding it in until the phone’s screen goes black, finally cutting off the chorus.
Out in the dark, perhaps thirty yards away in the dappled midnight sea across from my window, I see the figure’s cigarette, cherry bright red upon inhalation.
I slam shut the window and pull the curtains down. My bare legs break out in goosebumps but by the time it occurs to me to find some pants, I’m already in the kitchen again, whiskey sloshing over the rim of the glass, onto the counter, interrupting the roaches nibbling on the rotting detritus from the Chinese takeout I ordered three days ago.
I sit on the couch, the baseball bat’s aluminum surface chilly between my thighs, and I light another cigarette and struggle to pull the whiskey to my lips. I consider calling John, because I assume it was Allison who left that voicemail, but I can’t bring myself to turn the phone back on.
From the corner of my eye, I catch something outside my window, through the stained white linen sheet that’s been serving as a curtain. I try not to look, although I can’t help but glimpse the cigarette’s burning tip as the figure takes another puff.
That wasn’t the first regretful load John deposited into me, nor was it the first time I voiced not a word of protest when I felt him spasm inside me several long seconds before his release. I’ve always blamed the crank for that. Meth has a way of cutting through your ego, leaving bare your id and all your deviant impulses, like plump pale worms squirming from upturned earth. When one is sufficiently tweaked, satiation becomes a priority. Little matters beyond sensation and gratification.
Long story short, when tweakers fuck, we rarely use condoms.
Roughly two years ago, after many an irresponsible load, I began experiencing str
ange aches and pains my lower abdomen, cramps that felt almost accusatory. Oh, I realized that I hadn’t been getting my period, ditto for my growing pot belly, most noticeable back when I was still working, wearing that awful ill-fitting K-Mart smock.
I convinced myself that my rounded belly was just a sign that I’d been eating too much despite a succession of long meth binges, during which I’d routinely go days without eating.
Denial and ignorance can look awfully similar.
Back then, I still painted, half-convinced that the menial job and borderline homelessness would be worth it when the drooling masses realized my artistic genius. I’d been painting that night, down in the basement as always. At almost the exact moment I cut a red brushstroke across the canvas, I suffered a bad cramp, reflexively violent, a wholesale rejection of whatever was inside me.
This cramp was different from the others. I was scared so I did the only thing I could do: I bent over the small table next to my easel and snorted another line.
My thighs were slick, I noticed, and my sweatpants were soaked with something red and thick. Dead things were slipping out of me, that much was clear, so I clenched my jaw and grimly pushed the rest out. Somehow, I was able to focus on the task at hand. Not a sign of character or bravery; it was all from the meth.
As far as the cleanup went, I cannot get into specifics. When I finished, I wrenched free several floorboards with Gramps’ old prybar and took a spade shovel to the soil beneath.
I did this naked from the waist down, my gore-splattered sweatpants and panties in a pile along with the flesh, wrapped in a trash bag. Calling it flesh might sound needlessly callous but, at the time, I couldn’t refer to it as anything else. Can’t manage to do it today, either.
The basement grew stiflingly hot as I worked. My hair, soaked in sweat, clung to my face and salt stung my eyes, yet I dug, one shovelful at a time, and when I paused to think—which wasn’t often—I told myself I was doing it for John. Had I told him what happened, it could have ruined his life, his marriage, and I simply couldn’t do that to him.
Of all the lies I’ve told in my life, that one was the most brazen.
And though the timeline doesn’t add up, as I finished placing the soiled clothes and flesh into the hole, as I threw the soil upon it, I felt at that moment a pair of charred, blackened lips less than an inch from my ear curving into a smile.
“Broken…cunt…”
I awake lying on the basement floor, staring up at the single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling (wire and socket bringing to mind umbilical and placenta). It appears I’ve been sleepwalking again, as I haven’t come down to this awful room since the night I buried the flesh.
Despite my pulse hammering in my skull and the putrid aroma of last night’s whiskey wafting up my gullet, I’m nevertheless compelled to look at my work.
It’s been two years since I’ve seen my paintings, a dozen completed canvases along with the water-warped remains of the ones I gave up on, haphazardly rolled up and dumped along the back wall.
There’s an issue, though, one that keeps me lingering in the familiar musk of watercolors and oils mixed with the damp, mossy basement stink. My crank habit has made my memory spotty, but I’ve always kept track of my work, and I never finished a twelfth painting.
A bead of sweat trickles down my temple and I’m struck with a sudden nausea as I look upon it. It’s a swirl of black, though the darkness varies by degrees, framing a strange shape in the middle.
Of course, I don’t need long to recognize it. Those rippling, crinkled shades of black portray a close-up of your standard ten-gallon garbage bag, wrapped poorly (and perhaps hurriedly) over a small, half-formed face.
I look down at the floor. The floorboards are missing and I see the soil, still marked by divots from the spade shovel.
I’d scream, but at that very moment, I hear John rummaging through my kitchen cabinets, no doubt searching for crank.
“John!” I shout.
He’s still in the kitchen when I get up there, clutching my crank to his chest, as guilty as a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Clearly he’s been up all night. I can smell liquor on him and he looks to be on the back-nine of last night’s crank.
He moves his lips as if to speak, but his throat merely clicks. His right arm is wrapped in gauze from his hand up to his elbow. There’s a hospital bracelet on his left wrist.
“John?” I ask.
He offers a silent stutter, and I’m not sure how much meth this idiot snorted, but I’ll be motherfucked if I’m about to let him put a dent in my eight ball. I snatch the bag off him and shake a nugget onto the counter. I mash it into powder with the bottom of a coffee mug and chop a line.
“Allison and the kids are dead,” he says.
I’d just put the rolled-up dollar bill to my nostril, but I pause. John looks at me expectantly, perhaps waiting for consolation, but I still catch him stealing a glance at my meth. A sudden, visceral hatred overwhelms me.
I snort the line anyway, sensing John’s jealousy when I shake out another nugget, crush it up just like the first, and snort that too, expediting my blastoff. I light the remains of a cigarette, resting on the mouth of an empty beer can. “And you’re here, why?” I ask.
“I just need someone to talk to,” he says.
“But you didn’t come here to talk. You came here to steal my crank.”
“My wife and kids are dead,” he says, as if that absolves him.
And perhaps that should elicit some sympathy from me, but it doesn’t. Because now I realize that, should John be the person who eventually finds me dead, he’s going to rummage through my shit looking for crank before he dials 911, if he ever dials at all.
“The house was on fire when I got home,” he begins.
I plop the cigarette into the beer can, extinguishing it. “I don’t need to hear the details.”
“But my family—”
“Your family, not mine,” I tell him.
I smile at his palpable desperation, a feeling I know well. He obviously finished the last bag I procured for him. Crashing now, in his grief, he knows I hold respite in my hand, that I can alleviate his anguish—cauterize it, if you will—simply by handing the drug over to him.
“I’m not giving it to you,” I tell him, wondering if he’ll just take it from me. He could, if he wanted; he’s a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier. He could, but he doesn’t, the same way I could give him instant relief, but I don’t.
“Alright,” he says. “I’ll leave. I won’t come back.”
“You will,” I tell him. “When you realize that you can’t get a fix anywhere else. Or maybe you’ll read my obituary in a few weeks. Then you’ll come back, digging through my shit again, trying to pick the bones. Because that’s the only reason why you’re here. Let’s not lie to ourselves.”
Then he leaves. His desperation lingers after he’s gone and I smile perversely, taking far more pleasure in his suffering than I anticipated.
I make a call and my dealer drops off another eight ball. Forget blastoff; by noon I’m in low orbit, intent on hurtling toward heaven.
I can’t sit still. Normally, when I’m this tweaked, I’ll fire back a few drinks to even myself out, but today I have no such compulsion. My brain’s running just like an old laptop. My circuitry is overwhelmed and I can almost hear the cooling mechanism in my skull, fans whirling, CPU chugging as the screen fails to load.
It’s working, working, working, but spews forth no data.
That’s quite alright. I know my reasoning even if I can’t articulate it. If I sleep, I know where I’ll wake up. I’d rather end up there on my own volition. I snort another line, spark a Marlboro, breathe it into my ragged lungs, and sit at my bedroom window, flip phone in hand. It feels strangely warm.
I wonder what time, specifically, John found Allison and the kids, wonder if I should check the time I received that voicemail, though it hardly makes a difference now. Behind the sky’s
gray veil, the sun arcs and descends and by the time the sun begins to dip below the skyline, I’ve already lost track of just how much meth I’ve snorted.
I turn the phone on. It lags for a solid five minutes before it begins to beep with notifications, vibrating in my hand like an egg about to hatch. I start with the text messages, over a dozen from a private number, all multimedia messages that my elderly phone struggles to process.
They all look vaguely similar, photos of a dark room framed by fire, the only difference being the flames inching inward with each subsequent pic, growing closer to three black figures in the center. They just stand there, reminding me of shadows seared onto a wall after a nuclear blast.
I blink and an hour passes. When I look out my window again, the streetlights have winked on. There’s something rustling in the bushes across the street. I see the tip of the burning cigarette before I see the figure.
It steps out of the bushes, watching me watch it, and steps directly under the streetlight. It seems to draw the light in and trap it, its edges simmering as if distorting the gravity around it, a walking event horizon.
A walking nothing, an embodiment of emptiness.
I put my Marlboro to my lips and inhale. The figure does the same.
I click off the text messages and turn now to the voicemails. I’ve got plenty more, all from that private number, one after the other, the most recent one being from this afternoon.
Another line, I chop it right there on the window sill as the nothing watches. My heart shudders with trepidation but I snort it anyway. Outside, the nothing has crossed the street, standing now in front of my house. Movement up the street catches my eye. Something very tiny is crawling toward my house, slowly, on hands and knees.
I go to the living room and begin playing the voicemails. They sing about my broken cunt, cheerfully at times, amid that crackling static that I know isn’t static; it’s the fire eating its way through that room, chewing through drywall and plaster. Sometimes only Allison sings, barely audible over her screaming children. Or, as is the case in the more recent voicemails, Allison chants something incomprehensible while the kids laugh hysterically.
The Half That You See Page 14