by Grefe, Jamie
“Sounds, yeah?” Alina says. She’s just standing there now, standing like Lek was standing before he moved to the window, moved to the side of the window, hovering in this in-between time of their talk.
He hunches forward to the table, slides his cup across, to the paper cutter, holds the cup by its semi-circular handle, light hitting the grey-blended paint.
“Another one of your Nyquilian nights, Lector?”
“I slept early that night, I think,” he says. “It’s Lek, just call me Lek.”
She nods. “Talk later. I’ll be up on the forty-third—the dreaded top-corner cubicle for the next two hours. Will you—you should drop in, dream weaver.”
Lek positions himself to the side, back now to the window, perfectly framed in that window. Eyes on the mug, the mug by the paper cutter. He touches his nose. It’s wet around the rim. Index and thumb rung-round in nostril-sized dollops of blood, dimes on his tips, blood on his swirls.
Take the cup.
Pick it up.
Alina’s gone.
Lek limp-sprints, looks out into the hall, but the hall is not the hall of this company, instead, it is a window looking into a motel room facing the bed.
He dares not take another step, can’t step.
Alina, white-toweled, sits on the bed.
Lek stumbles to the side, grips the wall, looks away from the scene. His legs jiggle, buckle, and his garbled grunt is a static blast, a wall of noise. Swallow, keep it here, he thinks. This shudder. And what would happen if the world cracked?What would happen? Lek’s nose plugs, sputters yet more blood. He stumbles back, bends over, one arm outstretched, fingertips on the copier to hold him up.
The door is a passage.
The door cannot be.
And from down the hall, Lek hears the sound of several telephones ringing, the rings crescendo to a shrill drone. Lek zombies away from the door. His head cracks up, though, to catch one more sight of the motel.
All of a sudden, blood rivers out his nose.
He drops to his knees, crumples a cowboy hat he’s been holding the whole time, slips, hits the floor. He looks up at the ceiling of stars, pulls the hat out from under him.
He snorts the welling blood up into his skull, stands and spits.
Darker now, more blood on the floor now.
But another voice is trying to break through, it’s the voice of the copy room. “Don’t do it,” he says to himself. “Don’t go there.How many times do I have to tell you not to go there?”
“Shut yourself up,” Lek says. “I don’t listen to you.”
“What if there are others like this? Like this, Lek? Like this?”
The stirring fizzle inside Lek rises. He tips the cowboy hat into place, just to darken the room, cool his burning eyes. He puts one finger on one nostril and forces out a gob of snot and blood. He clears his throat, tries not to listen to that other voice. The woman on the bed is too beautiful for voices, for his voice. For his entire life.
Lek limps back to the copy room window, down at the dark.
Behind him, the doorway is coated in static, but the woman on the bed is still there.
He turns to face the door, crouches. He’s a limp bull and charges, more monster now than man.
To become the man he—
***
Static hands turn real as meat in the frozen television light of the motel room. The man moves to the bed, touches the messy bedspread. Sheets steam warm with the lingering aura of a body. She was here and this man’s rough hands tear the blanket from the bed, cast it to the green shag carpet floor.
Damp stains on the spread.
On the television, a woman’s frozen mouth gapes, spread wide in white and black. A film the man has seen before, but can’t place.
The telephone rings and the man lunges, picks up the black receiver and listens: grunts, sputters, gurgles, a power line hums, limbs smack, flesh tears, flies bump glass and buzz, flesh rips, fabric torn, a multiplicity of tearing, of screaming, of men, of women, of creaking stairs collapsing, burning, of stabbing, of imploding glut.
The line dies, a thick buzz.
Something bubbles from the bathroom.
The man boot-shuffles to the bathroom door, kicks it open, and slips on the wet tile. The shower is still running. Water coats the floor.
Behind him, though he has not yet seen her, Alina sits on the bed, cross-legged and pale-faced.
That telephone call as if torn to somewhere I’ve tangled before.
But a sudden pain clenches teeth. The man’s chest cracks out static bone splinters. He’s trembling. Can’t help it.
“Love me, dear, don’t think,” Alina says. “Won’t make it better, make it better.”
The man blurts out a curse, spins, brow tense, mouth wide in horror.
It can’t be her. It must be her.
“Weren’t you just in the—”
“I’m always here,” she says. “Come, Lek, sit.”
The man hesitates, says, “I haven’t seen you in so long.”
“Don’t lie,” she says.
“The party at the desert house—”
“I’m not.” She flexes her toes, leg dangling crossed over the other. She stretches them toward the television.
“What film is that?” And his voice wavers, fades.
“You should know,” she says. She stands, too quick, and she’s at the small table by the motel window, thumbing through a purse. She pulls out a pack of smokes, shakes one out.
“I don’t know who I am.”
“Are you ready?”
“I don’t know,” he says. But the words escaping his mouth sound wrong. He’s ready. It sputters his imagination, this motel and this woman.
Alina inhales, exhales a stream of smoke. “Don’t baby me, baby. This has been a long time coming. Here.” She tosses him a keychain. It floats through the air and he opens his palm. It’s there. “You better get going. This is your long time world, lover. Thought you disappeared.”
“Me too,” he says, not looking up at her. The key. “Where am I going?”
Alina laughs, walks back to the bed and sits down in the exact same spot. “Now’s not the time to humor me with your baffled bullshit.”
“But I—”
“Make me proud to be in love,” she says.
***
Someone torched the bearskin. Patterns of puke like calligraphic smudges. A poetry of codes. More people fill the room to burst. The walls have turned semi-solid skin. Light flickers hard. Hot air whistles, moans like how Alina remembers Lek to smell, hotly stained with ink and hesitation. She flutters in the corner. She recalls windows. There are no windows now, no night air if it’s even still night. A turn has come upon this stinky room. And Alina thinks she sees a wall split mouth-like and lick lips, split mouth-like and scream. Someone throws a blood-spattered camisole at the fireplace. Alina dives to retrieve it, bumps a hunk. She pushes aside a leather-masked gimp. Fingers curl around fabric, but it’s not a camisole. It’s a cardigan. She tugs it on, ignores the rumble. The floor is shifting stickier and she can’t move right. There are no doors here. But to the left, screams as if space howls for the bodies to lie down, be swallowed. She keeps her eyes open, can’t focus on the people in the room. No more false exits. And through fog and static, Alina smells argyle, piss, something earthy and familiar. Alina hugs herself, hugs the cardigan to her chest, wedges herself into the corner. Alina tries to hold her breath, but her lungs are tight. She chokes, hacks up burnt maggots, little black specks of ooze.
And someone chops into the room. The sound. The stench. The sight of a limb disconnecting from a body, from the body of a patsy, a construction. All she sees through the mess of bodies, through the smoke and the blood, is a shiny object hacking its way up and down and up and down and one voice towering screams over the others.
And Alina’s vision is burst red.
The man’s arm as machinated system, a process by which death is made possible, in which life is und
one.
And even as she soundlessly utters the name of the man who sinks in this gala, she no longer possesses a clear image of his face, such that she fails to realize that the man who is chopping the room to gory bits in this room full of blue static is Lek Gardenio.
***
A pink MG sports car shoots across desert asphalt.
Headlights hold curve upon curve of lonely road in twin circles of light.
Mash the gas harder.
Lek spins the dial. Old jazz fills the car.
Lek rounds yet another bend, heading higher up the mountain. Suddenly, he slams on the brakes. To his right, an automobile rages green flames and crackles about thirty feet off the road.
“Good Lord,” Lek says.
He rushes to the flames.
“Anyone here?” he says. “Anyone alive?”
He bends, tries to see inside to the driver’s seat. A cool desert breeze ghosts around his ears, buzzes. And through the shattered glass, Lek spies what appears to be a body in the tangle. The face has been glass-smashed, broken and splattered flat. He reaches in the cab to touch the body’s fingers.
Lek stands, adjusts his suit coat, reaches into his slacks for something to smoke. He pauses. “If there’s anyone out here, please answer.”
He grips his temples, face scrunches, wrinkles in odd ways. He feels blood unloose in his nose, sucks it back up into his skull. And his vision is the vision of a woman in the wreckage. But he throws his arms into the air, exhales a swarm of flies that explode in tiny blood-drops in a moonlit The blood-drops form an arrow that point to a slope in the distance.
Lek is stumbling through the deep night toward the slope. Behind him, the car explodes, lights the sky orange.
And this is when he finds her.
But it’s not her.
It’s never her. He keeps following the blood. As if love were something one could stumble upon in the aftermath of a wreck.
But before Lek can make his way to the figure of a woman, a woman seemingly lying at the foot of a crooked tree, he is halted by a hand that slams down on his shoulder.
This is when the desert grows foggy, turns thick.
“Turn around, Lek,” the voice says. “She’s not real—not as real as you’ll be, son.”
“She’s real,” Lek says, still watching the woman. She appears to be sleeping, and he wants to run his fingers across her pale cheeks, to check for injuries, tears. “I’ve seen her before,” he says.
“Look at me,” the man says.
And Lek shuts his eyes, opens his mouth for the last of the flies to burp their way out. He sniffles the last of the blood up his head.
He opens his eyes.
Before him stands a priest.
“Father?” Lek says.
“Days getting shorter for you, eh?” the priest says. He pets Lek’s black hair, studies his face like a man looking out at a mountain. “You’ve grown.”
“I should—the blood—it’s all in the . . . in the dirt.”
“No dirt, son,” the priest says. “Not where you’re going.”
“Who—?”
“A couple. No fuss for us, friend, not for my always friend.”
“What did you say?”
“You got the jitters, the jitterbug shakes,” the priest says. His arm drifts down to Lek’s lower back, and he urges him to turn to face the fire of the exploded car. “We go this way. Places to be.”
“And the wreck?” Lek kicks a rock.
“God’s own pyromania.”
“Has nothing to do with this.”
“Has everything to do with this,” the priest says. He stops Lek with his palm outstretched toward the flaming auto. “We all burn. In our own ways.”
Lek’s lips tickle with the blood flowing from his nose.
The priest pulls out a white handkerchief, “Blood of the lamb—blood to pass.”
***
“And that’s it?” Dallas says.
“That’s that,” Alina says. “Far as the eye can see—this one’s a pawn.”
Outside, the street light hangs through the window of the nearly empty cafe.
Two coffee cups and a white ashtray on the table. Fingers drum slow on the checkered Formica, Sinatra in the background. A barista towels off tables around them, whistles to the music. Outside, couples walk hand in swinging hand. Others pass with shopping bags, handbags, and backpacks, their bodies gracing the air through unheard conversations.
“All it took was a prod, huh,” Dallas says. She pulls out another smoke, reaches across the table to Alina’s side, near her cup, slides the lighter into her grip and lights it.
“Can I—?” Alina say.
“You quit, silly,” Dallas says. “Not like it matters.”
“In retrospect, I suppose,” Alina says. “I quit every cycle. Probably ten minutes from now.” They laugh. Alina lights a Viceroy, taps off the first ash, sucks smoke right down to her toes. “Really, it wasn’t like that, not totally, but hard to put these things to words, right?”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen, must have been—or, wait, older.”
“Like a little deer.”
“Like a little deer,” Alina says. “But we all have these experiences, no? I can’t be the only—” Alina’s cell phone jingles from her purse.
“Work?” Dallas mouths.
Alina nods, answers “Hello” and says nothing. Her head bobs as if responding to someone important. She pushes out a “ung,” to agree. Another to confirm. “Bye,” she says. “Sure,” she says. “It’s okay,” she says, hangs up.
“Who was that?”
“Nine to five unending.”
“They work you.”
“To the bone, babe—what are they thinking?”
“No more dream talk.”
“Not tonight,” Alina says. “Special case, he said—oblivious to pillow talk, obviously.” She swallows the last of her coffee, hisses out a tiny burp. “They have more work, so I have more work, and no willows weep for me.” She points to the ceiling, somehow signifying Sinatra’s approval of her emotion through the synchronicity of that song.
“Not in this town,” Dallas says. “You gotta go.”
“I gotta go. Until tomorrow night. Eight?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for any world.”
“Our limo awaits,” Alina says, stands, and holds out her hand for a smoke.
“For the road?”
“One vice.”
“Tap, tap,” Dallas says.
***
The office hall is empty this time of night. Lek grabs hold of the copier, pulls himself to his feet. He reaches for the first thing in sight, his coffee cup.
It stabilizes him, roots him to this reality.
The coffee is cold. It doesn’t matter. He drinks it to the bottom, rubs at his nostrils. The bleeding has stopped. It’s somehow darker now, something not right now. And Alina?
The Dark Room.
Floor forty-three. Stairs at the end of the hall, the elevator, or—that’s it. Down below, he tries to recall what duties brought him up here in the first place other than to be able to snag a chat with Alina.
It’s been a long time coming.
And the hallway. Something happened. It’s been happening lately. To the point of concern. To the point of waking up standing, blade in hand, and shivering and shaking. First, it crept brainward in small doses like handling the butter knife out of the fork drawer, dipping the butter knife into the spread-tub, spreading the butter across toast, only to find the toast is not toast, but the throat of a blurred member sawn off. Or, take for instance, the simple gesture of crossing the room from the kitchen to the sofa. A subtle intent in the act. The feeling of letting one’s body sink, become cushion. To imagine the result of the gaze from the sofa: the television, the window, the humidifier, the table. But, in this case, the crossing of the room, from the kitchen to the sofa crackles and hums, spits fragments and Lek finds himself in the middle of a night dese
rt. The buzzing of flies.
“Calm yourself,” he says to himself, but his voice pitches to the faintest shadow in the room. He focuses, but no one else is there.
It’s in this dimming sensation in the copy room, here of all places, he first spots the photocopied flier for a celebration of grinding skin. So Lek jittered his hand over to the corkboard where the flier hung. And why hadn’t he seen it before? He often visited the copy room, almost daily or nightly, and it had never been there. And he tore down the flier, held it in his hands. An invitation to tango. Come one. Come all. And the date, the date, the date was this evening, the evening of his awakening there in the copy room. “This can’t be real,” Lek says. “It is real, not real,” Lek says.
He lifts his head. Somehow, in the spotting of the flier and the reading of the flier, he has drifted himself out into the hallway.
Lek folds the flier up, stuffs it in his pocket.
Lek shuffles down the hall, feels something brush up against his leg, something sharp in his pocket he must have forgotten about. Lek reaches into his slacks, pulls out a pair of scissors.
***
And the mutation of a motel room alters the soft spot of a dead man’s mind.
***
The MG races further up the mountain. The priest sits beside Lek. They are winding higher and higher.
The priest passes him a pair of scissors, angles the twin blades between his legs. “Feel ‘em crackle?” the priest says. “They burn when they hit your stomach. It’s meant to purify, and you, son, need purification.”
Lek hits a turn too fast, speeds up and guns toward another dip in the road. “When I was a child,” Lek says. “I thought why not, why not—”
“Live and let go,” the priest says, holding his arm out into the night, beating back night air.
“But that’s not true,” Lek says. “I thought that was true. It was Delfonte and me, out back of Grandpa’s barn. Where the secrets are.”
“With whom, my good man?”
“Often Cindy, sometimes Josephine.”
“Lovely.”
“Lovely girl,” Lek says. He swallows that mouthful of flies. “Until the day with the pitchfork—and Delafonte passed in a combine accident. Turned him into dog shit, it did. Can you believe that?”