by Aaron Gwyn
Late in the night when both men were in their rooms, Jansen would lie awake listening to crickets outside his window, the hum of the refrigerator, the house settling. He imagined he could hear Wisnat from across the hall, the rhythmic noises of inhalation, the serene breathing of the unconscious. Often, he would climb out of bed, move the door on its hinges, creep the expanse of hallway, and peer into the near blackness of Wisnat’s room—moonlight framing the blackout shades, the face of a glow-in-the-dark clock. He thought many times about making his way farther, to his friend’s bed, parting the covers and sheets, sliding in between. But what, he began to ask himself, would he encounter once he reached the warm body in its center? What would be left to embrace?
The more time that passed, the more Jansen did not want to answer such questions. It was no longer a fear of being met with outrage (What are you doing, Jansen? What the hell do you think you’re …); these were issues he’d assuaged in 1,001 nighttime fantasies: explanations and reasoning, a long silence wherein enlightenment might take sudden hold. What troubled Jansen was the fact that even if he were able to negotiate the minefield of Wisnat’s confusion, even if able to settle his friend’s nerves and allay his panic, he would be faced with nothing but a shell, a hollow parody of the man he had known. For almost a year, Wisnat had been an automaton, his emotions gone beneath the surface, his desire extinguished. How could he recognize love, much less return it?
So, standing at the door, Jansen bided his time, hoping for that thing inside Wisnat to regain its consciousness, for the sleeper to awake. He stared into the darkened room and waited for those eyes to lose their blank and mechanical hopelessness, to become, once again, merely sad.
IT WAS A Thursday night when Megan made her first appearance, ladies’ night at the Gusher. Jim Peters, an overweight veteran, foreman on a legion of the town’s construction jobs, had been playing the video trivia machine Jansen installed a week earlier, sliding quarters in the slot and mumbling, his broad face narrowed, scrunched to the screen.
“Vanna White?” he was whispering to himself. Turning to Wade Stevenson—a thin man, thoroughly defeated, Laurel to his companion’s Hardy—he rocked drunkenly on his stool. “Fuck’s Vanna White?”
Wade looked frailly over. “Game show,” the man explained. “Turns the letters.”
“Miss America?” Peters asked.
“Huh?”
“She the Miss America was in Hustler?”
“Naw,” Wade said, snapping his fingers, “that’s what’s her face—”
“Williams,” Jansen told them.
“That’s right,” said Wade, “Vanna Williams.”
“Vanessa,” Jansen corrected.
“Vanessa Williams.”
Peters looked back to the screen, pressed a neon button. A red X reflected off his glasses.
“Shit,” he said.
For most the evening, Jansen had been wiping the south end of the counter, glancing occasionally at Wisnat, who for the first night in weeks had decided to come to the bar for drinks. He was by himself at the dartboard, making impassive throws, dislodging them from the cork, making them again. Over the last several months he had grown completely bald or, perhaps, after giving up his quest, had merely begun shaving what hair remained—Jansen was uncertain which. The bartender was looking directly at him when the front door opened and the room’s acoustics shifted in pitch, jukebox country spilling into the foyer. It was for this reason that his first impression of the woman would not be the slight alteration in sound or even her actual image when he turned in a moment toward the entrance. Jansen’s initial reaction would be forever filtered through Wisnat—the blurred likeness of the door reflected off his polished head, that head turning and its eyes coming about, giving a look Jansen had never before seen on the barber’s face. It was neither sadness nor desperation, this look; certainly not the blank gaze that seemed, these days, to be permanently etched in his features. This, the bartender decided, was something else.
Jansen went to greet the woman making for the empty barstool beside Peters and Wade. Close to five nine, he calculated, five ten. She was wearing a midriff and jeans, and she looked tall in the heels she wore—she might have been six feet in the heels. Her stomach was flat and tan, and her navel was pierced with a bright silver ring, and this ring had another linked through it with a bell that jingled when she walked. She was blond, not a speck of makeup, with hair to her hips, and blue eyes—otherworldly, thought Jansen: small ears like an elf, small, soft, elfin features.
Peters, together with the rest of the men, watched her walk the floor, then hunkered between his shoulders, raised his glass, and muttered into his beer.
“They God Almighty,” he said.
The woman drew back a stool, set her purse in its seat, began digging inside. She pulled out cigarettes, a lighter, a small brown leather wallet. As the bar registered her movements, Jansen put down his towel, walked over, and asked what she’d like. The response was a White Russian. The bartender nodded, took the vodka, Kahlúa, and cream from beneath the counter, poured them in equal portions into a glass, scooped in several ice cubes, settled the drink on a coaster between the woman’s elbows.
“How much?” she asked.
“Three fifty,” he told her.
She slid four singles across the counter, released a tranquil smile.
Seeing this, Wade and Peters scooted back their stools. “We’ll see you,” Peters said.
The bartender looked up, asked if they were leaving. It was only, he reminded them, a quarter till nine.
“We got to be out there to pour that concrete at six,” Peters told him, wiping his mustache.
“We got to get,” said Wade.
“Bossman don’t pay us to be late, Jansen.”
“We got to go,” Wade said.
Jansen saw the All-Kraft Konstruction logo on Peters’s shirt disappear out the door, took the woman’s money to the register. As he fitted the bills into their cubbies, he located Wisnat between two bottles of scotch in the bar’s mirror. The man was sitting beneath the dartboard, feigning interest in a hockey game on the television hung above the counter—glancing, on occasion, toward the woman. The blank expression was indeed gone. It seemed that the old sadness had awoken to replace it, but this sadness was compromised by that other something Jansen had noticed before, an anxiety, maybe—perhaps what passed with Wisnat for desire.
Then, suddenly, Jansen was unaware of himself. Something struck him with the force of a blow, the apprehension a runner receives when he is in front, only a few feet from the finish line, his opponents yards behind. As if the entire race had been free of worry precisely because he never let himself believe that winning was an option, didn’t allow victory to distort his senses, cloud his mind. But now with the unbroken tape within grasp, what fantasies of failure will assail him: whether twist of ankle or sprain of knee or, possibly, disasters more far-fetched—environmental mishaps, nuclear war, the Rapture. For Jansen, turning, seeing the woman as if for the first time, no longer observes a person of beauty, a woman enjoying a drink, but sees rather a pit stacked nearly level, a place inside for one more body and, if properly positioned, if perfectly placed, the fulfillment of his dreams.
JANSEN RECLINES IN the barber’s chair; Wisnat stands above him. The barber gathers foam from the palm of his cupped hand and dabbing it, spreads it across his client’s face. He makes, almost, a mask of it, a cast of lathered white. Then it is out with his razor and its calm, smooth strokes—up the neck, over the cheeks, scrapes on the underside of Jansen’s pointed nose. Tightly caped, the man closes his eyes and allows the barber to work on him, barely comprehending the syllables, the urgency in his companion’s voice.
The topic is the woman from the previous night. He calls her simply “the girl,” for they do not yet know her name. Wisnat has plans for her should she come in the bar again, wants to know if the bartender will help with these plans, wants to know the odds of her coming in.
; The odds.
His opinion.
Jansen?
“Opinion of what?” says the bartender, having decided beforehand to play this coy.
“The girl,” Wisnat tells him.
“She seemed nice,” Jansen noncommits. “Very nice girl.”
The shaving stops. When he opens his eyes, he sees Wisnat has crossed his arms, the razor passive against his smock, his expression strained-looking, severe. The bartender has not seen this side of his friend. It frightens him.
“I don’t like my chances,” says Wisnat.
“Chances of what?”
No answer.
“A date?”
Wisnat nods.
“I’m sure they’re good. Why wouldn’t they be good?”
The barber merely looks at him. Jansen brushes a spot of foam from his cheek. He points to one side of his face—the unshaven side.
“Are you going to—”
“I need an edge,” Wisnat tells him.
“Edge?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of edge?”
“Any,” says the barber.
Jansen, about to rise and bolster his friend’s esteem, is pushed gently back, the razor at work again, the sounds of soft scraping. He closes his eyes, then relaxes, imagines, for an instant, the woman. He pictures tucking her arms and legs, folding her into a large square. Then hefting this brick, fitting it snugly into place.
Evening, for the bartender, cannot get here too quickly.
IT WOULD HAVE been difficult to determine who was more pleased. For that night, when the woman arrived at the bar, there was a look of ardor on the faces of Wisnat and Jansen both.
She arrived, crossed to the counter, settled her purse into the selfsame seat. Jansen prepared her White Russian, starting a conversation in which the woman revealed more than the bartender had hoped. Her name was Megan Thomas (having a strong Southern accent, she drew the syllables out, pronouncing them May-gun), and she’d recently moved from Missouri to take a job at Perser Memorial Hospital. She was, by her own account, much younger than she looked, had a history of bad relationships, issues with self-respect. Since the move, she’d been desperate for company: on the phone every evening with her mother or aunt, friends back in the Ozarks. Jansen—in an attempt to stall Megan until he could summon his friend—began asking a series of questions to which the woman responded with sincerity and candor.
No, she’d not thought of a dating service.
No, she didn’t read the personals.
No, regardless of how hard it was for him to believe it, she was rarely asked out. She had a way, she’d been told, of intimidating men.
As she spoke, Jansen nodded, trying to entice Wisnat over, to find a way of introducing the two. But Wisnat remained where he was, huddled beneath the dartboard drinking bourbon and Cokes, observing, from beneath his sloping brows, Jansen talking with the woman—this woman laughing, reaching to touch the bartender on the arm, spinning a straw in the corner of her mouth.
Indeed, Wisnat was all but silent on the matter until the next day when Jansen was back in the chair with the sheet draped across him, face smeared with shaving cream. But on this occasion, when Jansen opened his eyes he did not see Wisnat standing cross-armed and anxious but rather the barber’s palm extended in front of his face, in its center several small tablets—orange and flat, shaped, Jansen would later think, like stop signs.
“You’ve got to cut them in half,” began Wisnat, using an index finger to demonstrate the motion. “Cut them in half and crush them between a couple of spoons.”
Jansen looked at the medication, then the barber.
“What are they?” he asked.
“They’re pills.”
“What are they for?”
“The girl,” he was told. “You stir them in her drink. But first you have to crush them into powder.”
“Wisnat—”
“You have turn them into dust.”
“You’re not serious.”
The barber indicated he was.
“What do they do?”
Wisnat closed his fist around the tablets, sunk them into a pocket. He took up the razor and moved toward Jansen. The bartender pushed away his arm.
“Wisnat,” he said, “what do they do?”
The barber took a step away, looked toward the street. His answer, when it came, made very little sense. Jansen asked again, was again told.
Rising in his chair, Jansen took off the cape. He stared at Wisnat, stood staring at this man he’d known for most his life. He shook his head and exited the barber’s shop, went to the Gusher, the conversation still turning in his head. He very nearly laughed at it, at someone having asked him to do this. He could lose his license. His parents’ life savings. He carried cases of liquor from the storeroom, walked them toward the counter, looking at the bar, his bar, all of it jeopardized by the mere entertainment of this idea. He would not do it. He would refuse Wisnat something so ludicrous. Who, after all, did he think he was? There were limits, the bartender decided, even to love.
And so it was, that evening, when Megan arrived, when the pills (already crushed) slid into her drink, Jansen continued to ponder that afternoon’s conversation, as he stirred the powder and the vodka, the Kahlúa and the cream.
Wisnat, he would remember asking, what do they do?
His reply was simple enough, the type of answer one uses for delusion, a thorough washing of the hands.
They make women so you can talk to them.
THE CHOICES WE MAKE. The treacherous instant in which we see ourselves as characters in a story: the crucial decision, the moment of crisis. Everything, we begin to think, must follow from here. It cushions us, does it not? Makes us disbelieve the reality, the complexity with which we’ve engaged. Life, henceforth, will assume a tighter structure, move toward an inevitable denouement. There will be an ending we will stand apart from, observe with disinterest. All the clutter will be removed and we will be granted a brief vision into what we truly are. We will behold our very natures, unclouded and frozen, reflected all at once in God’s eternal mirror.
This is what Jansen thought. Evening after evening he drove to his bar, out Highway 9 with the air conditioner running and the windows rolled down, past the First Pentecostal: the small church he’d grown up in, left at the age of sixteen and never returned. He thought that the church had added to this viewing of himself as a dramatic figure. It was something for Jansen to measure himself against, a means of adopting a position from outside and surveying his soul.
The church was in revival that summer: all the cars in neat rows on the white gravel, the stray family running behind schedule, the sign facing the highway. He remembered revivals quite vividly, the weeklong (sometimes monthlong) meetings wherein the parishioners would rededicate their lives to holiness. Evangelists with handkerchiefs and polyester suits would preach of fire and death, the book of Revelation, the judgments reserved for those who abused their bodies with cigarettes and alcohol, promiscuity and drugs, television, liberal politics, homosexuality, makeup, rock and roll—all liars and whoremongers, thieves and murderers, sinners and backslidden Christians caught up at the last day and cast into a lake of fire.
As a boy, the fear of such a place was on him. He hit adolescence, felt a desire denounced from the very pulpit, and the fear swelled, ruled his existence as a palpable force. He became a teenager, left the church, professed atheism, and the fear was on him stronger than ever. In the dead of night, Jansen pictured scenes more vibrant than even the preachers could create: regions of pit and ash, time’s livid flames extending into days unmarked by torment. He rolled on his bed, confessed sins enacted and imagined, awakened in the morning to grainy dawn and a love he could seldom understand.
But it was also this love that in his first years of college anchored him, kept him from returning to his faith out of simple fear. As long as there was Wisnat, this physical entity walking about, he could push away thoughts of fantastic a
nd eternal torture. He could focus entirely on his roommate, justify his yearnings with the one Christlike emotion agreed on by all denominations, charismatic or otherwise.
Now, as an adult of almost thirty, Jansen no longer feared Hell, no longer lay awake constructing mentally its antechambers and dungeons. But whenever he was quiet, whenever there was neither light nor sound to distract him, the residue of past threats would present itself as a nagging anxiety—the sense that something was not right, something somewhere unfixably and permanently wrong. And while Wisnat contributed to such feelings, he also, by his mere presence, allayed them. Even the desire Jansen felt for his friend had become something on which the bartender could depend. He could not afford to lose him.
This, more than anything else, was how Jansen in the years to come would justify putting the pills in Megan’s drinks. He knew it was not right—every nerve in him screamed against it—but what choice did he have? What was he to do when the man with whom he was in love asked of him a favor—one that, after all, was probably harmless, probably, thought Jansen, would not even produce its intended effect. At worst, Wisnat would not get what he was seeking and things would return to the way they’d been. At best, this would be Wisnat’s final conquest, the beginning of what Jansen had imagined since he was a boy of ten.