by Mike Wehner
“Wonderful, I wish she could be here too, don’t you Erin?” Charlie raised up his eyebrows, daring her to act out of turn. She squirmed, feet clacking on the concrete. “Isn’t this fun?” he squealed, “then what Alex?”
“I was crushed, lost. I gave up my life, taught myself how to cook. I wanted to get to know Erin and make sure all the assumptions I had about what happened with John were true.”
Charlie cut in, “and if they were?”
“Then I was going to kill her. But that wasn’t the answer. This isn’t the answer.”
“Do you still want to kill her?”
“No, and I don’t want to kill you either.” He turned his head back towards Erin, giddy.
“Back to you little girl, did you know who he was when you hired him?” Charlie made deranged faces with his mouth after he spoke.
“No.” All emotion had left her voice.
“But you know now?”
“Yes, Alex told me while we were locked up.”
“Did John ever talk about Alex?”
“By first name, dumb college stuff, he wasn’t big on sharing,” Erin said and Charlie jumped in.
“Did he talk about me?”
“Not that I remember, it’s hard to remember stories about people you’ve never met.” Charlie deflated.
“Alex sure has been bad, do you want me to hurt him?”
“No, I want to hurt him,” she pointed her face at me. “You mother fucking...” buzzzzzz went Charlie’s mouth.
“Speaking to Alex out of turn is against the rules.” Charlie said with a meat tenderizer in his hand. He straddled the chair and her body disappeared. All I could see was his mauling back. Charlie pressed the soft palm of her left hand onto the chair’s arm and hammered each of her knuckles in succession. Erin sucked up the first two swings with grunts but howled when he shattered her ring and pinkie fingers. Each one popped straight and pointed at me when its knuckle was struck.
“Catch your breath sweetheart, Alex’s turn.”
Thirty-three
Truth or dare?” Charlie asked like I had a choice. He was on a barstool with a glass held to his temple.
“Truth,” I said, “I can ask either of you a question right?”
“Sure, what the hell.”
I focused on Erin’s gnarled fingers.
“Charlie, was John a stable guy, mentally?” I gave Erin the nod to continue what I started.
“Sure, he was medicated. I know he was depressed and shit, but that was just part of his family having money and sending their oddball kid to the doctor. Normal people call that sad, it happens.”
“My turn,” Erin said, “did you ever see him hurt someone else, or himself?”
Charlie mechanically turned towards Erin, “no, which is why your self-defense argument is bullshit. He is the only guy I know that’s never been in a fight.”
“He talked about killing himself all the time,“ I said, “what about the parking garage?”
Once we were old enough to go out to the bars John insisted on being designated driver because he said the rest of us lacked self-control. He’d wheel a car stacked with guys up to the top of the parking garage on 2nd street, even if there were empty spaces below, so he could get up on the concrete ledge and tightrope walk to the stairway. Every time he did it he had a new question or comment about self-destruction.
I’ll race you to the bottom.
What’s more important than finding out if we’re infinite?
Would you miss me?
“Those were fucking jokes Alex,” Charlie said, irritated.
“You know they weren’t,” bzzzzzt, “he’d been committed at least twice,” bzzzzzt, “he’d sleep for days at a time,” bzzzzzt, “all those pills, all those guns.”
Charlie flashed on top of me, buried my face in his chest and squeezed until I was silent. The force rang my ears and everything turned into a blur. He pounded my head with overhand chops. My nose split, one of my eyes swelled shut, teeth cracked and splintered. Exhausted, he picked up a paring knife from the floor and held the tip to my good eye.
“Why can’t you see,” he repeated until his throat got tired of saying it, “my turn.”
He sat down, sweat peeking through the front of his shirt.
“Do you love me, are you my brother?”
“This has to end,” I said.
“Do you love her?”
“I do. I know it’s fucking absurd and I love them all. I won’t tell you to hurt her. Not now, not ever. Take my head, carve my fucking heart from my chest and feed it to the wolves. Do your worst. Put it all on me Charlie, but leave her out of it. Never has a person so undeserving suffered so much.” I sunk my head.
“Truth or dare Alex?”
“I dare you to kill me.” Charlie paused, thought.
“Like a man, look me in the eye as you do it.”
“Fine,” he said.
Charlie scuffled to the kitchen pass and grabbed my knife satchel from the window. He pulled on the swooped knot and it unfurled to his stumpy feet. The boning knife fell out as Charlie eased them down lovingly to the ground. He stood over the long row and slid the handles in and out. He stopped at the meteorite blade, captivated by the golden lines reflected from the yellow Edison bulbs above.
“We’ve grieved together, now I’ll do it alone,” he said, eyes to the floor.
Charlie bound up, the knife turned over in his hand like a javelin and sprinted towards me. Tears welled. Erin screamed.
“Wait, let me do it, wait!”
Charlie veered off course and stopped himself by running into the bar. I was relieved.
“Let me do it,” she said, “please, I deserve it.” Charlie snarled and cut the tape from her hand. He handed Erin his pocket knife and kept the big knife to himself, just in case.
Erin concentrated on Charlie as they stalked towards me. I closed my good eye, I was ready.
“You’re next,” he said to her, “consider this a consolation prize.”
“Fast or slow?” she said to him. The echo of steps moved towards me. One, two.
I waited.
And waited.
When it didn’t hurt, I peeked.
Charlie was falling towards me.
One.
His mouth was as wide as the chasm between us.
Two.
The farther down he went the more of Erin was revealed in the background.
Three.
His face hit the ground and the knife she’d stuck into the side of his neck wavered left and right like a planted flag in the coastal wind.
“Is that self-defense enough for you?”
Erin clenched her teeth and tried not to cry. It’s hard to see someone for what they are when you love them.
“Cut me free,” I said, “or cut me, or, I don’t care anymore.”
She took a pull from a bottle of bourbon on the bar then stood with a foot on either side of Charlie’s twitching head.
Erin ducked around and cut into my wrist to get underneath the tight plastic band. Her nose was smeared with my blood when she called the police, leaving me to unbind my legs myself.
She offered her undamaged hand to pull me up and once I was on my feet she knocked me back on my ass with a heavy punch to my already broken nose.
“That’s for Emily,” she said and collapsed down the wall. Sirens rang in the distance, red and blue lights screamed towards us that looked like they were flashing but were really an illusion, a circular pee-a-boo. We stood hand in bloody hand outside the front door and waited for them to arrive.
There was fresh graffiti tag, end to end, scrawled across the front windows of the restaurant. It sang in neon green, popped in cerulean and had a black drop shadow to accentuate the message. Cunts cook here it said, with a glitter-golden arrow pointed at the front door and the two of us.
Thirty-four
Mike and Emily sat between us at the police station, on a plastic row of chairs in the quiet bowels next to the co
ffee machine. I was handcuffed to the arm and couldn’t see very well out of my swollen face. We’d been there a few hours.
Erin and I were questioned together at first and then separated after I casually dropped into the conversation that at a certain point in the timeline I intended to kill her, “briefly,” I qualified but it didn’t help. She rubbed my knee as I said it, then slapped my bandaged nose. From then on they questioned us separately.
Mike sat next to me to fend off Emily’s savage swipes, the fact that I put her sister in danger was enough to send her into a frenzy. Thankfully, I didn’t hear Erin mention the car. She kept telling me to go fuck myself wearing purple pajamas covered in kittens—it was adorable.
“Chill Em,” Mike said, “we can’t go anywhere. They’re going to handcuff you if you don’t settle down.” I pulled my arm towards Mike to give him a fist bump but the forgotten shackles snatched it back to the chair.
“Erin how are you not more upset?” she said to her big sister.
“I knew.”
“What!?” Emily gasped.
“I knew this was coming. Some part of you had to know too, you can’t kill someone and live happily ever after,” Erin said with diverted eyes, traumatized. Polished black shoes struck the tiles in double-clacks that kept me on edge. “If you really did care about me Alex, then I’m sure this was hell for you too. It says something about you that you weren’t capable of hurting anyone, not the way I am at least.”
The bill acceptor on the coffee machine didn’t read very well and each officer and clerk had a different trick for crisping the bill. Crease it long ways, iron it with your palm on the side of the machine, whatever. A tall brunette in a pantsuit threw her hands up in disgust when her dollar was spit back a third time. She looked down at me, covered in gauze and blood, and went back to her work with a smile and a new perspective on what a bad day really looked like.
Erin and I dribbled bits of the night back and forth to Emily and Mike. We sat there for hours, Mike went home to rest once the sun was up but Emily refused to leave her sister even though I was basically under arrest. She finally left in the afternoon after Erin told her I tried to sacrifice myself for her. She said I was still a piece of shit before she left, she was right.
Knees bent, Erin wisped around one empty office chair and then another until she was next to me. She fought a wavy knot of hair off her colorless cheeks.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said.
“Me too,” I tried to set my head on hers but my neck no longer worked.
“The thing about tragedy is that it either defines you or reveals you,” she sighed, “I saw what you are Alex, you did too, don’t lose that, carry it wherever you go from here.”
It was the nicest way to say we weren’t putting this puzzle back together, that our time was up. The hourglass didn’t run out of sand, the sand turned to storm.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?”
“For showing me a new way to live. Everything in this world isn’t quantifiable or even rational. You’ve gone through so much and yet you’re happy. You choose to be happy. You embrace the joy of right now, it’s inspiring.” I thought how stupid that sounded, like some live in the now, self-help crap. At least it’s crap until you understand how tentative existence is and how almost every moment of every day is either a reaction to something that happened back there or a step in a future direction.
Erin got up and stretched her arms straight overhead, the double joints in her elbows caved in and her forearms bent out. “Do you know what this is?” She held her tattooed forearm in front of me.
“No.”
“It’s a triskelion, an ancient symbol. People have given it all sorts of different meanings. Some relate it to sacred geometry or even cosmology but to me it’s a symbol of change. Past, present, future.
“The whole universe is in constant flux, even right now we’re decaying. Soon, all those little microbes that I’m a host to are going to consume me. I don’t have time for hate, or resentment, or bitterness. I hope whatever tomorrow brings you decide not to have time for it either.”
“I don’t think I’m that strong.”
“Past, present, future. These things will always be a part of you, but you choose if they define you. Choose wisely.”
An officer that looked like he did a lot of push-ups took Erin away for more questioning or medical treatment or who knows what and my California dream came to an end. It was time to go home. Home was an itch I couldn’t scratch.
I called over to her as she was escorted down the hall, “I won’t hate you if you write this down.”
She disappeared around the corner forever.
Thirty-five
DAY 1597
I didn’t see Erin after that. I tucked my tail and went back to Chicago where I did my best to water my dead roots and make a new life. I couldn’t get comfortable in my old ways, the ordinary jobs felt like itchy wool sweaters after losing a bunch of weight. It was easy to find work but I couldn’t keep it. My mind wasn’t the same, when I integrated and did digital stress tests on medical parts I didn’t see the teardrop outline of the inlet shoe, I saw a sweet potato. The tubing was soba noodles. The buttons sliced baguette.
Calculation was no longer satisfying. Iteration was the enemy of imagination.
I moved from job to job socking away each little signing bonus. They welcomed me to the team at Crane Pharmaceutical with a video series narrated by a former child star. The RGL group was contracted by the steel mill, their offices were converted mobile homes stuck between a sludge factory and an oil refinery. The hiring manager at the metal parts fabricator told me that my predecessor had died in his office, this office. I was already dead.
Before the stash of money was half of what I hoped, I quit my last real job and rented a chute in a strip mall on the northern shore. The best part about being back in Chicago was that I had a spiderweb connection to every type of guy. A drywall guy, a tire guy, a bushy blond lady who wore crystals around her neck and walked my dog during the day. I didn’t have any friends, but I had lots of guys.
I covered the paint-splattered floor with cheap brown tile, got some used kitchen equipment at an auction and paid a neighborhood kid with stained fingers who swore he didn’t tag my dumpster to paint a mural on the exposed brick walls.
The lettering waved and contorted, it looked like abstract art—Jackson Pollack before the drip phase, a bunch of liquid shapes. If I turned my head at the right angle and relaxed my eyes like looking at a stereoscopic drawing I could see it: cunts cook here.
The space was so narrow there wasn’t room for tables, stools ran along a butcher block counter the length of the open kitchen and stopped at the door to the only bathroom.
The days were long and hot but I lived my million dollar dream minus the million dollars. I served eggs on the flat top all day, any way you like. I invented strange sandwiches for every palette like kimchi buffalo chicken and veal schnitzel caprese. People liked some of my ideas and balked at others, but it didn’t discourage me. No reviewer was going to walk in, lick his pen and critique what was little more than a food truck with a roof.
The item that kept them coming back was the one I’d had the most trouble selling initially. Essen Ramen. I’d suggest it as a morning warmer, it’s got an egg on top! Or as a stand-alone lunch and they’d say that doesn’t sound like ramen to me.
I spent more than half of each day’s prep on an item that never sold. I didn’t give up because it was the thing I was most proud of. When the dashi went bad it looked like mop water swirling down the drain. I needed to make that soup every day. I needed to be reminded of the time I found out hell was a real place and my mind could take me there any time I’d let it. And I’d think about Erin and how heaven was real too as long as you cared for something more than you cared about yourself.
Over time I got more customers and a few people gave it a try. There was never a line out the door but the
seats had butts in them most of the time. Occasionally I’d get a walkout, a hip girl with white wireless ear buds might wave me off when she saw there were no seats. It felt good to make something. I didn’t make much money and nobody called my job frying eggs interesting but I was happy. Happiness is shaking water out of a basket of noodles and flipping it into a bowl of hot broth, then watching your customer look both ways before they tip the bowl up to their face.
On a cold day in March the sleet folded itself into ice on the sidewalk. A frozen puff pastry film only let half of my shoes grip the ground on the way to work. Each step was a tiny slide forwards and back. It was a weekday and I spent the morning trying to hide shrimp paste in Hollandaise, then I remembered how common shellfish allergies were.
Lunch was the usual roll and bounce from the griddle to the stools. I cooked so close to the diners that I could have a conversation over the background chatter of sizzling meat. The doorbell buzzed to let me know someone was coming and I felt the hard suck of heat rush out behind me, to escape to one of the much better restaurants that surrounded me.
I was too busy at the griddle toasting buns for sandwiches to turn and greet my new customer. I wore a stained apron and goofy white toque that one of my regulars gave me as a joke. When I turned around, the front door was falling closed and up on the shelf between the counter and the kitchen was my black satchel of knives—not tied with my shoelace swoop but with a nice knot, a thoughtful knot.
I wondered how long she’d sat outside and looked through the window. How long had she seen my shadow moving through the frosted glass? How many times had she tried to pull on the handle of the front door? But most of all I wondered if she was going to try the soup.
Thirty-six
HALF OF SEVENTY-TWO
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