One Hit Wonders

by Patrick Warner

  This was the day then, the very last normal day we had together, the last time we were happy in that complex way we had of being, which also always included our individual unhappiness. Shortly after this Saturday, we entered a period of drift—not our first by any means, and one I thought would take the same course as all the previous ones, with drift eventually changing to pull, with both of us reminded of how lucky we were to have each other, and feeling stronger in ourselves for having passed through yet another fallow period.

  But as it turned out, drift, this time, was hijacked by a modified bread van that was driven by none other than Al Calhoun. Al the flour man entered the scene. Soon, he and his white powder had ratcheted Lila’s desire to levels she had never known before. Endorphins and their release—which she pictured as porpoises skimming ocean swells—became her sole focus.

  Soon, even Al became secondary. He simply became a means to an end: her dealer, her dough boy, her sky man. She told herself the arrangement was just as practical for him. All he wanted was her naked and straddling his lap, her breasts softly cuffing his face. He wanted to lose himself in the illusion that her young body wanted his ripeness. So she pretended for him. And while it wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be, she had no idea how quickly their pact would degenerate into something more sinister.

  Lila was high when Al first asked her to contemplate a criminal act. She decided to play along. It was exciting. Fabricating a plan with her lover to rob her husband was a game, an academic exercise, like an episode from a TV show. Cocaine facilitated. It made her mind elastic and sharp at the same time. She could think around corners, think her way through complex scenarios while remaining unencumbered by morality. And when—the third or fourth time they discussed the plan—it no longer felt like a game—when it was clear that Al was serious—hippie logic kicked in: hey man, if the rules are all invented anyway, what does any of it matter. Dig? It’s all just bullshit.

  This is not to say Lila didn’t have moments of clarity, moments when she shuddered to think about what she and Al were planning to do. Such scruples, however, usually coincided with her being straight, a condition she was more than willing to change. I’m an addict, she would think, as the drugs seeped through her blood-brain barrier. It sounded so romantic. She was a damsel in thrall to a daemon. Al was a vampire lapping to bursting on her menstrual blood. Al was a tic.

  Lila knew it was only a matter of time before I found out. Her plan was to stop long before that day arrived. Having to deal with my response was not an eventuality she planned for because she knew the situation would never arise. She was just taking a little all-inclusive holiday from her life. If it went on for a little longer than she planned, no worries. Her junket was nearly up. It was always going to end the next day. But then Al would arrive with a new supply and her holiday would get renewed. In the brittle morning, she would promise again to lid her nostrils against snow storms. She would drown Al in a barrel of apples. All their talk of robbery was a pipe dream. It was never going to happen.

  But then came the night—starless and still, arctic air enveloping the city—when Al told her he had found a couple of hard guys to help them carry out the job. Lila, who was at that moment riding a rocket ship, and exercising a pincer movement between Venus and Uranus, filed the information away to be reviewed at some unspecified date.

  Later, she was too distracted and peeved by the news that Al would be gone for five days (what kind of a loser travelled all the way to Arizona to caddy at a senior’s tournament?) to pin him down about details. Who were these men—Snuffy and Gosse? Were they even real? And if they were, just what was he going to have them do?

  “I’ll be back Tuesday afternoon,” Al said, handing her two small envelopes. “Meet me at the airport?”

  “Stay,” she said.

  Lila insisted they empty one of the envelopes there and then. It was to be a proper send-off. She offered her lower back to him as a platter. “Arch it,” Al ordered, before he tipped the white powder into the dimples that formed when she thrust her buttocks towards him. Her dose—when it was her turn—she snorted from his collarbone. Al loved playing sultan and slave.

  The next day Lila was depressed. She wandered the apartment in her housecoat, obsessively checking her mobile phone for messages. There were none. And none came. She avoided me, did not bring me my mid-morning coffee, did not—as was her habit—create some pretext to stick her head into my office and attempt conversation, attempts that usually elicited grunts in reply. I didn’t care that the hot-water tank was leaking, that the recycling was not picked up, that there was a dead cat on the street.

  That afternoon, I went out as usual for my walk. When I didn’t come back by suppertime, she decided to sample the content of the second envelope. It was different from the first one, cut with speed or something more poisonous. She freaked out for a while, remembering talk around town about a recent bad batch, people hospitalized, one woman dying from “complications.”

  Lila barely slept that night. Her heart beat like two clocks ticking out of sync. Everything hurt, her hair ached—she kept seeing the long strands on either side of her face as weather stripping, like the foam strips they stuck around the inside frame of the back door.

  By the following afternoon, she was breaking out in sweats and had her first case of the shakes. “My god, you look terrible,” I remember saying when I stumbled out of my cave, another two pages completed and discarded.

  “It must be flu or something.”

  “I’ll cancel the thing with Ted and Shirley for later, OK?”

  “Oh shit. I completely forgot.”

  “It’s OK. I’ll cancel.”

  “No you go on, honey,” she said. “I know you and Ted have been trying to get together for ages.”

  “No really, it’s fine.”

  “No, really, I insist. Look I’m going to sleep in the spare room anyway. I don’t want you catching this, alright?”

  “OK. Don’t get upset. I’ll go. But call me if you need anything.”

  She knew I wouldn’t be back until late. She knew Ted had a way of getting me to the magic number of pints after which I would stay until I could drink no more.

  By evening, her symptoms worsened. She paced the floor trying to get rid of the cramps in her legs. She drank pints of water. She had violent diarrhea. Her nerves were like frayed fibre-optic cables. Blue spots played at the corners of her eyes. Her skin was tender. Sounds took on an echo. She chased a slow fat bluebottle through the apartment until she was exhausted. Finally, she crashed down on the bed in the spare room and fell into a sound sleep.

  She awoke later to find me leaning in close to kiss her on the forehead.

  “Are you feeling any better?”

  She had to think about it. “Not as bad as I felt earlier.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No. I’m fine. You go on to bed. How were Ted and Shirley?”

  “It was just Ted. Shirley decided to stay in. Good. He’s good. He’s applying for another gig at the prison. We had a long conversation about the social responsibility of the writer. He’s trying to get himself worked up for it.”

  “And how does he feel about being on the right side of the law this time?”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant—given that Ted had already done one teaching stint at the pen—but I didn’t want to get into it. She was sick. Her thoughts were muddled. To press her was not a good idea. Lila could be volatile. When angry, she liked to throw things, and sometimes she could even be accurate. I was drunk and wanting only my bed. I answered as though there was nothing odd about her question.

  “Hard to say. He’s hoping it will lay a few ghosts to rest.”

  Afterwards, Lila lay in the dark and listened as I navigated the bathroom before stumbling across the hall into our bedroom. Less than a minute later, she heard my first snores.

  She really was feeling better. Her frenzied thinking was now a wild party that had moved two doors down.
Al came to mind and she realized—with some surprise—that she hadn’t thought about him all day. She didn’t miss him at all. She comforted herself with the notion that everything she had done with him had been a dream. None of it had been real. It was a lie she was perfectly willing to believe.

  She began a dizzying fall into sleep only to be drawn back into consciousness by the low buzz of the bluebottle swerving above her in the darkness. She heard it ping off the window. Got you now, bastard, she thought.

  She slipped out of bed and closed the door. She picked up a magazine and rolled it tight. The bluebottle—perhaps sensing her intention—began to bounce frantically between the curtains and the slick black glass. Lila approach slowly, then lunged. Her first strike succeeded only in agitating the creature. Its buzzing intensified until, weirdly, she could feel its wing vibrations register in the hairs on her neck. She swiped again. The buzzing stopped. She inspected the rolled-up magazine for some evidence, a blot of yellow or a streak of blackberry juice. There was none. She flicked on the light. Turning back, she could see her reflection in the window. Her hair was stuck to her head with sweat. She looked bloated and seemed to billow out as she walked towards the streaming glass. About to subject herself to a torrent of self-criticism, she spotted the bluebottle, still alive. It was on its back, wiggling its legs in the air. Coming closer she saw that its insides had burst out of its body, only instead of the usual mustard blob of guts, what had emerged was a ball of mature maggots. It was being eaten alive. The thought gave Lila gooseflesh. She smashed the rolled-up magazine down on the squirming mass.

  Back in bed, her thoughts raced. Within minutes, they had become disconnected from any narrative or organizing principle. Her brain was like an algorithm randomly selecting snippets from memory. Lines streamed before her inner eye, one at a time, like banners: “Here they come, Tube-a-Caulking and Tube-a-Caulking Junior.” “They eat the honeydew the aphids expel from the terminations of their alimentary canals.” “Not that I want more recognition. But isn’t it plagiarism?” “Exactly. My point exactly, Mir.” “C’mere, I wants ya.”

  Some of the snippets were from conversations she remembered having. Others were lines she had transcribed from my notebooks, sketches and scenes from my new book: “That’s easy for you to say but I’m the one…It’s me who has everything to lose…Do you understand what I’m saying?” “What’s normalcy? Everything we say means something else.” “Lamé of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

  Lila could feel one pulse ticking in her neck, another in her groin. The faster her blood circulated, the faster the lines scrolled through her brain: “I keep washing my hands.” “It’s related to coal tar, isn’t it?” “I’m kidding you, Freddy. You don’t really expect me to give away trade secrets.” “I hate the whole Paraben family—Methyl, Ethyl, Propyl, sickly Benzyl and ambiguous Butyl. Every one of them is evangelically committed to killing pheromones.” “Lord Jesus, turn off the fucking C-bye-C, will ya? Put on VOCM or a tape or anything. Jesus.”

  Lila began to panic. The lines were resonating in her imagination as though they were being spoken by someone else. Some of the voices she recognized, but others were harder to place. Were they from movies she had forgotten? Were they characters from books she had read that she was now giving voice to? She went into the living room, sat on the cold couch, hugged her legs. The change of scene did nothing to slow her thinking. She looked at the empty radio cabinet in the corner of the room. She was in free-fall. The snippets began to blur.

  “Something about the way Mom said what she said made me right angry. I remember I grabbed a hold to the bars of the cot and began to shake the whole thing. I was almost four years old and still hadn’t spoken a word. I don’t feel like drawing with crayons. Mom and Pop thought there was something wrong with me, that I was a retard, which would also explain why they were acting the way they were acting in front of me. It was Mom’s way of helping me to grow up. And she was right, you know, she was right.”

  Lila looked closely at the radio cabinet’s cloth grille. The voices she was hearing seemed to come from inside it. “This is the purse from the photograph of you and Dad in the park. You’re saying it’s not mine? Wagner & Knowles care deeply about the people and the environment of our fair province. I once wrote a novel, you know. Am I going to die tonight? So what are you writing these days, Freddy?”

  Lila was suddenly taken by the idea that she was inside my head. Her thoughts were my thoughts. For a few moments, she was convinced my mind was the only place she existed. I’m going crazy, she decided. But didn’t that mean she hadn’t yet gone fully around the bend? How could she be in my mind? What could that mean? She tried to calm her thinking, but the effort only made things worse. She began to flood.

  “This brings me to the question of how much money we have in the bank. You surprised me; that’s all. I thought you were still upstairs. Do tell, how can the prosecutor know the mental state of the defendant? Speaking of the weather, how about a little bump? A million dollars, shit! Ah hell, don’t be like that. All you need is another little bump. You’ll see. Trust me. She needs to be surprised. She needs to come across as confused and scared when she is dragged out of bed by two guys carrying shotguns, looking like Jabba the Hutt. Lila thinks we will be taking only half of what’s in old Freddy’s safety deposit box, if you follow.”

  Oh my God, what have I done? Lila thought. Has everything with Al been a lie? Has he set me up?

  “Sounds easy, right. You said Part B. Is it Plan B or Part B? I see it in your eyes. Mi zapallo chico! The mystery of the woman. Her desires. She is a volcano ready to explode. Little Gosse, so sweet.”

  Lines began to fragment into a stream of words, then syllables, which in turn shed their vowels until there was nothing but a hissing stream of consonants, until there was nothing in Lila’s head but white noise.

  “I need help,” she whispered to no one. “I NEED HELP. Somebody help me, please. Somebody help me. I don’t know what to do.”

  Slowly, Lila became aware of a presence in the room. She looked up to see who had come in. She expected to see me standing at the entrance to the room, perhaps leaning against the door frame, my arms folded, the expression on my face part scold, part compassion, like I was dealing with an overly tired child. There was no one there.

  And yet there was an unmistakable feeling that someone else was close. She stared at the RCA Player Cabinet. The box seemed alive, lit from within. It was calling to her, drawing her. Stranger still, something in her welcomed this presence unequivocally. Darkness was pushed back into the corners of the room. She grew aware of her surroundings. She heard water trickling in the bathroom at the end of the hall. The shamrock plant on the coffee table was suddenly thick and luxurious. The parched orange tree in the corner had one tiny green orange on a low branch. She became conscious of the solid floor under her feet. She became alert to her body and all its distinct parts. She was herself again, her being was separate from mine, but not either. She knew now that we were both part of one mind. And that mind was calm and vast. Where there had been white noise, there was silence. Where there had been a formless void, there was now

  god

  The room became very still. She heard cat paws approaching, felt the sleek heft against her shins. A bird sang. She lifted the blind. She could see her reflection in the still dark glass. Her eyes were luminous. She was smiling. She was moved with compassion for what she saw in her own face. She walked back to the couch and sat down again. Where there had been conflict, she found an upwelling of joy. “Yes,” she gasped in the silent room. There was nothing else to say. A life sentence had been transformed into a gift. She had only to accept it. “Yes,” she whispered again. She felt no impulse to do anything other than to be. She no longer felt sick. She didn’t feel tired. At peace with herself, she sat in the room until light began to pick out chinks in the venetian blinds. It was the first day of her new life.

  She sat in the front room until the sun
was high in the sky, afraid to move for fear the beautiful feeling would desert her. Slowly, she came to trust that it would not go away. That the feeling was in her now, had claimed her, was part of her, was a source she could always find by looking inward. It would be there until the end of time.

  Later, when she heard me stirring, she went to the kitchen and made breakfast: bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee. While she cooked, she prepared her confession. Ten minutes later—dragging a nasty fart with me—I appeared in my plaid bathrobe and sat down at the table. She told me later that my hair was standing straight up on my head, like a bad wooden sculpture of a blazing fire. My morning face was a puffy blanc-mange.

  “Freddy,” she said, “I have something to tell you.”

  16

  SO LILA HAD what in old-fashioned parlance would be called a “nervous breakdown.” Later, she would describe it as a breakthrough, as the floor giving way underneath her. For a long time, she knew it was weakening—hairline cracks, spongy bits, effusions of woodworm—but she ignored it; she could always find another place with firmer footing. Eventually, she said, everything began to feel unstable and the only way she could feel secure was to keep moving, keep walking, as if the constant redistribution of her weight would be enough to stop the ground from crumbling. It wasn’t. In a terrifying few hours—while I slept soundly down the hall—her supports gave way and she went into freefall. But it wasn’t what she thought it would be; it wasn’t the end of the world. She didn’t die. Once she knew her position was hopeless, once she gave up control, everything changed. She found her way through to a world she always suspected was there. A place of healing. She was starting from scratch, from the nowhere where it was possible to build.

  If that moment was the turning point in Lila’s downward trajectory, it was the opposite for me. To build on her metaphor, I felt that a rug—a deep-pile shag—had been pulled out from under my feet, leaving me face down on pissysmelling concrete. Less breakthrough than smack-down. I was face-to-face with the facts of her affair, with the truth of her addiction, with the reality that a plan was in motion to relieve me of my money and much more. It was the strangest breakfast of my life. All I could do was munch my shredded wheat, drink my coffee, brew a second pot as she—in a calm and deliberate way—poured out the whole story in far too much detail.