Worlds of Hurt

by Brian Hodge

  Andrei glanced away, down at the floor, as if there were something wrong with letting Corey see him smile for the first time in days.

  “I made you up a big pot of millet and black beans, okay? I remembered that’s one of my dishes you liked best. Ain’t got no meat in it, no dairy, nothing to worry about going in spoiled. It’s on the stove downstairs. I started it at the restaurant and brought it over to finish, so it’s got a couple hours left to simmer. Just promise me you won’t forget…‘cause you let it cook down too far and scorch, I might take that as a personal insult.”

  “Promise,” Andrei said, and realized moments later how much he was looking forward to it, his stomach perking up after four days of feeling not very hungry at all.

  Corey knew his way around a kitchen, all right. He ran an Afro-Caribbean place, eighteen or twenty tables that were nearly always filled. Without the restaurant he never would have met Janika. Went into her shop last year looking for more authentic décor than what he had started with.

  “’Cause you need to get yourself out of this room, man. More than just next room over to take a piss. Even if it’s just downstairs, you gotta get yourself out of this room. It ain’t healthy.”

  “Why stop there?” Andrei said, and didn’t know why it was coming out now, now of all times, but here it was: “You want me out of this house, don’t you?”

  “Hell yes I do. No secret there. But I wouldn’t be saying so if it wasn’t for one thing: You want you out of this house.”

  Andrei gave his head a couple of little tilts that were as much of a nod as he could muster. True, he did want out of here. And it seemed that every time he thought he was ready to make the leap, something came along to shove him right back inside his room. Sometimes bringing nails and a hammer, too, to board the door shut.

  “But let me ease your mind on one thing, if it matters,” Corey said. “I know you think this arrangement you got here is what drove off your brother-in-law. You got to think that was on your head. And you know, it probably was, but even if that’s what did it, and I wouldn’t never say this to Janika, but if that was it, then he wasn’t much of a man to begin with. But I ain’t him. That won’t happen with me. Whatever life Janika will let me have with her, I want it, as much as I can hang on to, and it wouldn’t make no difference to me if there was ten of you that came with her. I’d take every one of yins and call you brother, okay? I was raised by my grandma, and she took care of me and her parents both at the same time, and I spent eleven years emptying out my great-grandpa’s slop jar. I’m used to shit in the family, so yours don’t scare me none.”

  Corey took a few more steps into the room, acclimating to the smell of old plates and b.o., maybe, and settled his bulk onto the edge of the bed.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea. I ain’t telling you this as any kind of threat, and not even as a promise. Just in case it eases some of the pressure, that’s all. For her sake, you don’t gotta worry about history repeating itself. So…we cool?”

  “Yeah. We’re cool,” Andrei said, and thought about shaking hands, then thought better of it. He felt like one giant grease slick. “Tell me the truth. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  Corey looked at him as though he were crazy for asking in the first place, then his expression approached sadness. All things considered, Andrei preferred judgment to sorrow. Judgment could change. Sorrow tended to be forever.

  “Naw, man. I just think somebody maybe put some weird ideas in your head, is all,” Corey said. “Maybe one of them doctors you saw a few years back. Some of them do that, I hear. Spend enough time with ‘em, they got you remembering shit that never happened, never come close. But no, I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  “Trust me, the ideas were in my head before the doctors got there. They didn’t change anything, for good or for bad. But let’s forget that for now, okay? Let’s stick with the facts. My friend Kimmy—how much do you know about what happened to her?”

  “Not a lot. ‘Cause you’re the one who knows and Janika says you ain’t had much to say since you found out.” Corey shrugged. “Somebody walked in on her with a knife and some serious bad intentions, that’s about all I know.”

  “The guy that flew in to question me, he wasn’t one of the locals from where she lived. He was state, something called the Division of Criminal Investigation. It didn’t mean anything to me, so I Googled it. Turns out they only go in when they’re asked. Do you know how bad a murder must be when the locals immediately forget their pride and call in outside help?”

  “Bad, I guess.”

  Andrei nodded. “The DCI guy didn’t tell me a lot. So I went looking for newspaper articles. One of the local deputies is a combat veteran from the first Gulf War. They quoted him saying he’d never seen anything this bad even there.”

  Corey was shaking his head. “I get the picture. You don’t gotta be telling me this, you know.”

  “Yeah I do. You’ll see why in a minute,” Andrei said. “Whoever did it drugged her. He nailed her to a wall. Gutted her. Gutted her, Corey. And was skilled enough at it that she stayed alive for a long time. He wanted that. Because he’d set up candles so the parts he’d pulled out of her would cook.”

  Corey was starting to squirm. “Papers told all of that?”

  “Not everything, no. After the papers, I found an online board local to her town. They were talking about it there, the area gossip. You know, a deputy tells a friend or two, things get out that are too harsh for the papers.”

  “Don’t mean it’s true,” Corey said, and anyone could see how badly he wanted it not to be so.

  “It feels true,” Andrei said, because he had thought the same thing, just rumor and overheated imaginations. Exactly the kind of thing you tell yourself in desperation, that nobody could be that cruel, even as the futility of the argument was obvious. “As if all that weren’t bad enough, she must’ve thought it was me doing it. She was never the one that told me to stay away and stop bothering her. She still thought I was coming. She was looking forward to it.”

  He could smell home cooking now, wafting up from downstairs, forcing itself through the funk and the fug of his room. The musk of cilantro, the savory jerk spices that Corey had stirred into the pot. A couple hours to simmer, yet he wanted to eat now. It seemed enormously important to eat, to relish every meal, every bite.

  “A couple days ago I dropped by the chat room where Kimmy and I met,” he said. “Neither of us had been there in a while, not since we’d paired off and focused on each other. I thought maybe the others there should know that she wouldn’t be coming back, and why.”

  He pointed toward his desk chair until Corey got the idea, went over and took a seat in front of the computer, looking at him as if to ask what next.

  “There’s a graphic file on the desktop. A screen shot I took of somebody’s reaction,” Andrei said. “I wanted to keep it to prove to myself it’s not just me.”

  Corey fumbled with the mouse, double-clicked. Read for a moment, a scowl creeping down from his brow, then he leaned back in the chair, a move that looked purely unconscious, as though he’d been physically repelled.

  “Go on, out loud,” Andrei said. “Read it out loud and then tell me that it’s all just my imagination.”

  Corey scrubbed a hand along his jaw and gritted his teeth; leaned toward the computer again. “’I’m very sorry to hear about this. It happens sometimes…we get reclaimed. Once something goes wrong in our heads (or maybe goes right is a better way to put it) and we awaken to what really happened to us when we died, from then on it can be as if we live on borrowed time, and eventually they manage to reclaim us. It’s nearly always messy. An object lesson, I think.’”

  Andrei nodded. “Yup, that’s what I thought it said.”

  Corey leaned back again, shaking his head. “This is fucked up, man. This is fucked up.” He pointed to the screen, and although Andrei couldn’t see it from his spot along the baseboard, he knew what was coming: “What’s this link he give
s you?”

  “A list of dead people. Dead for the second time. Somebody was keeping it, but I don’t know who. It’s not like they were signing their name. But it’s been five years since the page was updated. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything, but from where I’m sitting right now, it’s hard to believe they just got bored with it.”

  “How many names?”

  “Fifty-four.”

  Corey looked as though he were about to bite into something spoiled. “And you checked ‘em out? You’re not just taking some stranger’s word for it?”

  “I checked out five or six. They were real. The information’s out there, you just have to look. One in New Jersey, she took a shotgun blast to the face. In Mississippi, another one was found wound up in barbed wire and burned. One guy from Iowa, somebody cut him into pieces and wrapped them in butcher paper. Taped them up nice, then left the pieces in a church’s drop-off charity bin. None of them were solved, either. And for two of them, I found definite mentions that they’d died once already and had been revived. Yeah, it was just a handful out of fifty-four, but how many times would you want to read the same basic story?” Andrei got a look at Corey’s expression and had to laugh. “And you probably thought I’d just been spending the last few days up here looking for porn.”

  “Aww, don’t say that.” Corey’s head sagged and he scooted the chair away from the computer. “Andrei, man, what happened to you when you died?”

  He was pretty sure that Janika had never told Corey, not in any detail. She kept his secrets well, without having to be asked; let him be the one to decide who knew and who didn’t. He nearly always decided to keep it to himself. Family secret, family shame. He couldn’t remember why, exactly, he had blurted it out to Manon a couple of years ago—even without going into specifics—a year or so after she’d come to work at the shop. An intrinsic trust, he supposed. Manon was just different.

  “What do you think happens to you when you die?” Andrei said.

  Corey gave him an uncomfortable grin, as though he’d been put on the spot. “Umm…peace? This big old enveloping feeling of love. Mmmm…light of God, I guess. Getting reunited with the people you lost. That sounds good enough for me.”

  Andrei nodded. “Where’d you learn it?”

  “It’s what my grandma taught me.”

  “And where did she learn it?”

  “I don’t know, man. Her momma, her grandma, or church. Probably all three.”

  “So what’s the point of me telling you any different? You either won’t believe me, or you will, and it’ll ruin the rest of your day…and then you’ll decide you don’t believe me after all. Either way, we won’t have gotten anywhere.”

  Corey said nothing, only shaking his head, and Andrei figured that if he wasn’t reading the man’s mind, he knew it close enough: Why do I waste my time with this smelly nutbar? Corey pushed off the chair and up to his feet, looking toward the door with a flicker of longing.

  “I should be getting back to the restaurant. Time to start cranking up for the evening rush. Your food’s downstairs, don’t forget.” He took a couple of steps toward the hallway, then stopped. “All that heinous shit, you said you had to tell me, and I’d see why in a minute.” He shook his head, mouth curling down at the corners. “Did I miss something, or…?”

  “A favor. I haven’t asked yet.” Andrei decided that in this moment he liked Corey more than ever, because just look at the effort he was expending to keep his expression neutral instead of letting the trepidation show, even though he had to be feeling it. “Kimmy…what happened to her was real enough. And so are those fifty-four names, from everything I can tell. I was just going to ask if you’d try to convince Janika to move in with you for a while. And don’t take no for an answer. She shouldn’t be here if…uh…”

  After a couple of beats, Corey was right with him. Not like the bit with the mosquitoes at all. “Aw, no, man, you’re not thinking…don’t even be thinking that. Ain’t nobody coming for you.”

  “What makes me immune?”

  Never had a few moments been so empty. Just as he’d thought—no answer, nothing to back up Corey’s assertion other than blind faith, knee-jerk hope that it couldn’t happen here. It’s what you told people when you first found out they’d been diagnosed terminal: You’ll get better, I just know it.

  Yeah, you’re the exception. You’re the special one. You’re the one destined to beat the odds, the one the rules don’t apply to.

  All those corpses rotting in line ahead of you don’t mean a thing.

  “It’s funny. I’ve spent all these years being scared to move,” he told Corey, the man who, in spite of everything, wanted to be his brother-in-law. “Now I’m scared to sit still, too.”

  VI

  In the days since he had returned to Atlanta after the long, wet afternoon spent in Wyoming, it felt as though he were on R&R…a lull, breathing room before events or encounters that would prove to be even more revealing.

  He had been something rare enough already—had sensed almost from the time he’d entered gradeschool how different he was—but now he had been nudged toward a purpose and a destiny that must be rarer still, and if he couldn’t yet pinpoint what that was, he could feel it with the same faultless instinct that had served him well his entire life.

  Intuition, he had called it as a boy, a word picked up from his mother, but in time he’d realized how female the word was, ripe with repugnant connotations of softness, and so he had shunned it ever since.

  From outward appearances, no one could guess the degree of change occurring inside him. Evolution worked quietly, calling no attention to itself. His days were the same, his routines stable. He shaved twice a day, because he enjoyed the sleek cleanliness of it; could not imagine savage angels, however masculine their features, with even the whisper of a beard. Every weekday he arrived at the station by noon, was on the air an hour later, WNSK on the AM dial, four hours of rapid-fire patter about batting averages and steroids, playoff chances and the continued woeful state of the heavyweight division ever since Tyson’s deterioration into a freak show.

  Bruce Barbakoff…he announced his name to his listeners countless times during the week, spitting it into the city so often that it had lost all meaning to him. It belonged to the shell he wore, one more tool of camouflage, although he could foresee a day when he might leave his name behind like a split cocoon, something that had enveloped him as he had transformed in plain sight yet still hidden from view.

  Every afternoon he took their calls, laughing with them, commiserating with them, agreeing with them when they talked sense and ripping them new ones when they talked idiocy. His voice left his mouth for the microphone and returned to him through his headphones, and most days it seemed to be no more a part of him than his name.

  This is the voice of a man who sounds like he cares what he’s talking about.

  Didn’t anyone recognize that knowing and caring were two separate states of being? Apparently not. He talked and they listened, and they called to argue, if not with him then with one another, and not a word of it meant anything. They wasted half their lives’ breath on inconsequential games played by grown men who loved them in the abstract—the fans—and loathed them as individuals.

  There were no faces to his callers, just names relayed by his show’s producer, and merely first names at that. As he spoke to one or another or the next, it amused him to think that he might have taken the life of someone that person had known. Or maybe he was speaking to someone he was destined to meet one day while engaged in his true work.

  In the days since Wyoming, he went out with women a few times, as always—fix-ups engineered by co-workers who wanted to play matchmaker and find a mate for him, lucky catch that he was, the perennial bachelor who always came to work in a team jersey and a ball cap slapped backwards, eyes shielded from Atlanta’s midday sun behind his Oakley Thump shades, their built-in MP3 player piping a soundtrack that only he could hear. More than one co-worker
had watched him close his eyes in peculiar bliss as he listened on the elevator or at his desk, and would wonder what he listened to that brought him such obvious contentment, except he never got around to answering when asked, only that it wasn’t music…but then, a little mystery was good in a man. So they happily procured dates for him and he accepted to keep up appearances, and was good company, or so he was told, and always tireless in bed, even though these sessions left him feeling exactly the same as their opposite, when he administered not pleasure, but pain:

  Nothing. Zero. Absolute whistling emptiness.

  The rest of the time, alone, he read. Anatomy texts, as always—a craftsman could never know too much about his medium—and the thick sheaf of chat transcripts that he’d printed out at Kimmy’s. He lost track of the number of times he went through it, gleaning insights into these people’s mindset as…well, a problem that had to be eradicated, perhaps.

  The distinction was vital to recognize. They were nothing like the dozens he’d harvested before…interchangeable, really, opportunistic sacrifices to a greater good, the greatest god. No, people like this were special. Seized by death and accidentally let go, they carried its smell, and it marked them. They had thwarted the designs of a Heaven that had claimed them as its own.

  So he read, and they taught him well. Kimmy Matteo, Andrei Lepik…he wondered if either of them possessed the capacity to appreciate how they had, night after night, compiled a treatise that could only help further the extermination of their kind.

  Certainly, Kimmy had gone to her grave without a clue.

  Andrei might fare better before the end.

  Still not accustomed to their way of thinking, Bruce had no idea which would be worse.

  * * *