by John Everson
And then the blood came, seeping out along the jagged edge of glass like the ocean through sand at high tide. It pooled in my hand, rising up slowly to drip over my palm and down the edge of a green knife. As I watched it drool down the broken bottle out of sight, a glint of something that wasn’t glass caught my eye from below. I pushed the bottle to the side and gingerly reached down to pry it up. It felt hard and rounded between my fingers, dry as a chalky stick. I pulled and bottles shifted to set it free. Part of it rose above the surface of the glass but it did not break free; some bit was still connected to something below the bottles.
Stretched out from the deadly green sea was a skeletal hand. A silver dragon ring hung loosely on its fourth finger, matching the jewelry on my own. We were mirror images of life and death shaking hands between two realms. Was this, then, where I was to end?
The pain came back full force, and I dropped the bones. Burning fire singed my hand and arm and leg and feet and I looked ahead of me, gauging the distance to the last of the broken bottles. Just a few more steps. I had to get up and move now, and I had to sacrifice my feet to get there or I would sacrifice myself.
I levered myself upright, ignoring the new shards that carved whatever flesh was left on my feet, and put one foot down on a broken bottle. It shifted beneath me, slipping away from my step as another rolled up from beneath it to stab me again. And so it went.
When I collapsed to the ground on the far side of the sea of bottles, my body was shaking in shock, and covered with gaping, ugly wounds. I gasped for breath that wouldn’t come and wiped my bloody hand across the hair of my chest to clean it enough to see the size of the puncture through my palm. The center of my hand manifested the stigmata. My lifeline had been gouged into two raw lips an inch long that gleamed with the acid spit of blood. Already it had swollen to twice its normal size, but I could still move my fingers, so nothing crucial had been severed. It might heal.
My feet were another story. There was no skin that I could see left on the bottoms; several stab wounds had pierced through the flesh and bone to come out the other side. They looked like raw meat. I could see the white of bone when the blood flowed right.
I could not stand. Leaning on my right side, I began to crawl up the hill towards the city street so far above. I tried to call for help, but no sound came. I was mute, and the world leered back, unspeaking.
The temptation to lie still grew overpowering but I kept moving. If I stopped, I’d never move again. I looked back, and saw the evidence of my passage. A bony arm, grasping for purchase from the depths of the white-flecked green sea. The bottles glittered red across the center of the glass river, and the dirt nearby was streaked with damp spots and crimson pools where I’d rested briefly. How much more blood could I lose? I wondered.
How long I climbed, I couldn’t say. Every inch was a struggle, every yard left a piece of me behind. But finally, beneath the unheeding cloudless blue of the sky, I reached the top of the hill. I took in a deep breath, willing the fire of my body to cool, and stared down a street I knew so well.
Hartford Street. Newfordville.
My home town.
The band had started out here, a bunch of cocky high school kids we were, with bad hair, acne and a thirst for coke and vodka. And an all-encompassing love of music. Jack and Chuck played bass and drums in the marching band, and I played keys and fancied myself a poet. We found Randy through Chuck’s older brother. He was a dropout, working the stock room at the supermarket every night and jamming away on his guitar to Led Zeppelin CDs during the day.
There, a few doors down, was the Guitar Shack we’d spent hours at, drooling over the latest amps and effects pedals. There was The Hole, a narrow bar with a stage about the size of a dining room table. We’d played there every month for a year before packing everything into Randy’s van and doing our first “regional tour” which basically meant playing a hundred dives just like The Hole for little more to show for it than gas money to get to the next place. We had slept in the van and lived on McDonald’s.
Nobody was out on the street, though it was the middle of the afternoon, and I began to inchworm my way down the cement sidewalk, heading towards The Hole. Nick ought to have the place opened by now, and he’d get me some help fast. And a drink.
I pulled myself up to kneel at his door, and turned the knob. It fell open.
The floor was clean from last night’s excesses, but the chairs were all still upside down on the bar’s tiny round tables.
“Nick,” I called out, but my voice was still gone.
“Fuck it,” I said to myself, and dragged my body inside, heading behind the bar. I needed water and I needed it now.
The sink was just below the top of the long wood bar, and I pulled myself up to it with my good hand, cranking the cold faucet to high. A stream sluiced out, and I plunged my face in, sucking the water into my throat with greedy gulps. When I couldn’t drink anymore, I put my wounded hand in the spray, leaving it there until the flow turned back from pink to clear. Steeling my nerves, I put both hands on the bar and pulled myself up until I could drag my feet into the sink. Leaning across the bar I let the water wash away the blood and dirt and flecks of glass. I could still feel the long shard lodged in my left foot like a fiery brand.
When cold water had sucked almost all the feeling from my feet, I let myself down to the floor, pulled a bottle of whiskey from the “well drinks” shelf, and took a heavy swig. Then I went to work on my left foot, searching in the ragged flesh with my fingers for the glass. I forced my breathing to remain shallow, found its edge, and pushed my fingers up into the raw meat of my sole to flank the glass. Grasping it tight, I pulled, and screamed silently as it came out, a blinding wave of pain and blood following in its wake. I poured the rest of the whiskey over my feet, crying in vain at the burning pain that threatened to stop my heart. Certainly it stopped my breath.
I don’t know how long I laid there. When I finally crawled back outside, the light was fading. Still, nobody was around. My stomach was cramping and my kidneys felt swollen. My entire body throbbed with pain. I crawled my way up the street, marking the pavement with dull streaks of red. I stopped at Karol’s Kitchen, praying that someone would be there, that someone would give me a french fry, a crust of bread, something. I was desperate.
There was nobody inside the restaurant. But I could smell food. My stomach lurched at the scent of scorched hamburger, and on a table near the door I saw its source. Steam rose from a plate of fries and a burger glistening with grease. I clawed my way into the chair and stuffed half the burger into my mouth. The taste was overpowering. I grew lightheaded with the ecstasy of food, and gorged myself without stopping for breath. Every fry, every bit of bun, every drop of grease I licked from the plate, until my belly felt like it would burst. For those few moments, the hideous pain in my body subsided, and I was in heaven.
But then it all came rushing back.
I pulled napkins off the table and bound the wreckage of my feet in white linen that quickly bloomed pink. Using the back of a chair as a crutch, I stood, and then moved the chair ahead of me like a walker. Slowly, painfully, I made my way down the street.
Inside the Guitar Shack, the real horror of my situation finally hit me.
I picked up a Stratocaster knock-off, clumsily held the neck and, ignoring the pain, pressed down three strings with my injured hand and strummed.
There was no familiar twang of an E chord, the beginning of almost any classic rocker.
I couldn’t hear a thing. I hadn’t heard a thing all day.
I’d been so preoccupied by the pain, that I’d ignored the silence of the world, even when I couldn’t hear my own screams. Part of me had thought I’d just lost my voice. I’d seen no one, so there was no reason I should have heard any sound.
Angrily I brought my hand across the strings again and again, banging out the riffs to “Can’t You See Her,” my biggest hit with Serenading Sonia, and then “Rock and Roll” from Zeppeli
n. Then the bass riff to “Smoke on the Water.”
Nothing.
I was trapped in a wall of silence with pain as my only friend.
I opened my mouth and screamed again and again, straining to hear the slightest squeak of sound until I could feel my throat closing raw and angry.
There was nothing for me to hear.
I left the store with the guitar anyway, abandoning the chair and using the guitar as a walking cane. I staggered down my old street, the last place in my life where everything had felt right. There was promise when I lived here. It had all started here, on this street. Fitting that it should end here, after all the wrong roads I’d travelled.
This was my hell, I realized. To be here, alone, stripped of my clothes, of my voice, of my music. To face all the places I’d betrayed. And to walk the path of my unrepented murder. That blackest night of my life had been my final chance at redemption, I realized. To face what I had become and turn back. Instead, I had only fallen farther, drowning the spark. Killing the only thing I had ever really loved.
As I slowly passed the old hair salon, and the VFW hall, I began to see a glow at the top of the hill. The light was fading behind me, but ahead the sky oozed a sickly green. I pulled myself up the last sidewalk square to the top of the hill and looked out. Behind me, the comfortable street I’d come from so many years ago slid into twilight. Ahead of me, a sea of green glass awaited. Just before the glass began, the last outpost before oblivion, stood a hotel.
The hotel. I would never forget the fake stucco pink walls and black wrought iron balconies.
I didn’t hesitate. Wrapping my fingers tighter in the tuning pins of my guitar, I lurched inside, and walked to the elevator. I knew without trying that there was only one button that would work. Still, I pressed floors 2 and 3. They did not light up. When I hit the button for the 4th floor, the door closed, and the elevator lurched upwards, lights flickering. Just the way they had when we’d lugged Amy’s body down in it, sweating over the idea that those creaks and flickering lights might mean the elevator would stall before we got to ground, and when we were finally rescued the police would check our bags, or see a spot of blood that had somehow leaked through the sheet to make its way through the keyboard case.
It didn’t stall then, and it didn’t stall now. When I stepped off the elevator into the empty corridor, the door to Room 414 was open.
I hesitated at the threshold, remembering the last time I’d stood here. Setting down the body concealed in the black canvas bag to take one last look inside before closing the door. Making sure there was no evidence of the night before.
There was plenty of evidence now.
Inside, the carpet was covered with blackened pools of blood.
In the bathroom, Angela, a groupie I’d drugged, boned and left behind in a nameless hotel room in Iowa was kneeling on the tile, head resting on the toilet seat. Her eyes were closed, and a spew of dried vomit caked the edges of the bowl.
Lying on the floor behind her, half in the tub, head on the floor, was Rochelle. I would never forget the hair, which was fanned across the tile, hiding her eyes. “Electric blue to match my panties,” she had laughed. I had gotten Rochelle high enough to blow all the guys in the crew before telling her that I didn’t want their leftovers. I was too drunk to fuck by then anyway. The dye of her blue hair had run and dried in swirling pools across the white tile of the floor with the flow of her tears. She looked stiff.
There would be no rest for me here tonight.
The bed had my choice of brunettes, blondes and redheads. Seven women in all, in varying degrees of decay. Ragged slices ripped across their abdomens; blood had spilled from each of their naked bellies to stain the bed and pool on the floor below. Flies rose in a cloud as I stepped closer, recognizing Melinda, purple-painted toenails hanging over the bed’s edge. She had painted those a new color almost every day.
Something jutted out from the black and green sludge oozing from the tear in her stomach and as I peered closer, I made out the tiny pale skeleton of a hand. It looked like a doll was reaching out to free itself from inside her. She’d been pregnant when she’d been slaughtered. The baby must have smothered in her blood trying to claw its way free. A dessicated veil of skin hung from its forearm, translucent as snakeskin. I grimaced and pulled away, but not before recognizing Cassie and Barb and Gin. They were all women I’d taken for rides on the Serenading Sonia tour bus. Some for a month, some for more.
I’d left them all about the time they said they were going to have my baby. I’d bought the abortions and left them strung out in some hotel room somewhere, without a word of goodbye. I wasn’t ready to be a father. When they woke up, the bus was gone.
“I didn’t do this to you,” I complained. “I was an asshole, but…”
On the other side of the bed on the floor, the girls were stacked five high, and four rows deep. All were naked. All were rotting, viscous sludge oozing down from one blue-white breast to another purpled thigh to stain the carpet in bright rainbow colors of death. I couldn’t recognize most of them. But I knew I had used and thrown them all away; none had ever been enough. None filled that place in my soul that only the scream of an electric guitar had ever touched. I could never bring myself to care enough.
There was a broken bottle of Rolling Rock on the desk.
I stepped to the small balcony, where the curtains waved in a silent breeze, and took a deep breath. Then I pulled the plastic drawstring pole.
Amy was waiting, just as I knew she would be.
A green icicle in her eye. Blood drenched her tight white shirt. She would win the goth version of a wet t-shirt contest for sure. Her nipples protruded through the bloody cotton, as she lounged against the outer rail.
“I didn’t kill them,” I complained silently again.
“No,” she said, pushing off from the rail to step towards me. She was alive! And I could hear her!
“You didn’t kill them. These are just the marks you left on their souls.”
She stood in front of me, boring deep into my heart with her one good eye.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“That’s the first step,” she said, “but not the most painful one.”
And then she vanished.
I sat down on the bloodied floor and looked at the girls surrounding me. The castoffs of a life spent running from myself. They had all led up to Amy. I’d tried to forget their faces, moving from one warm drunken kiss to the next, never looking behind their eyes, never seeing what they were after, or what dreams I crushed in my wake.
I curled up on the floor with my pain and dreamed of Amy, alive again. Of Amy saying yes. Of Amy as my wife.
In those last moments before fully waking, I held the image in my mind of her in my house, casual in jeans and a black t-shirt, wearing my dragon ring. It made me wonder. Had I really killed the woman who would have been my wife, my salvation? Had I killed my only chance for redemption?
When I opened my eyes, there was grass all around me. My feet were healed, my hand whole. Had it all been a dream? A prescient vision?
I walked naked, randomly choosing a direction, just as I had the day before. I walked for hours, until I stabbed my foot on a broken bottle of Rolling Rock.
Driven by hunger and thirst, again I bled in agony on the river of broken glass and found brief solace in a heavenly hamburger. I smiled in bitter understanding, as I gorged myself on the meat. Only through a respite in pleasure can one really appreciate the depth of pain.
Once again the dead girls awaited me in the hotel, faces purple with accusation. But this time Amy wasn’t there.
I didn’t stay in the room, but instead tried all of the other doors in the hotel. None would open. At last, I slept on a chair in the lobby.
And woke in a field of dead grass.
I’ve gotten used to the glass. And I’ve thought about the last words Amy spoke to me. The only thing I’ve heard in the days I’ve repeated this vicious, bloody cycle. I
could walk this same hellish road every day, forever. Being sorry is only the first step, not the most painful one, she said.
Pain is transitory, and while each day, the fresh slice of glass on my heels is beyond description, and the visceral guilt of what I did to all of those women a choking burden, I’ve discovered that there is an inner pain that is much worse.
Every night I stop at Guitar Shack and strum the silent strings of a Fender or an Ovation, hoping against hope that the music will be there. Music was the only thing I ever loved in life, though I betrayed it as I betrayed myself and countless others.
I strum and pound on the guitar until my hands bleed and my face is wet with yearning.
The music never comes.
Hell is the green, green glass of bone.
Hell sings silent of my sin.
— | — | —
THE DEVIL’S PLATOON
The devil was on our side.
I wish now that it had not been the case, or that what I just said was only a figurative expression.
But in the darkest shadows of winter, in the coldest desperation of the Black Forest, we called upon the forces of evil to save our cause. And in the calling, we forfeited our fatherland, as well as our immortal souls.
The year was 1945. It was a new year, but to us, it felt old as bare bones. We had been on the frontline for months, each day falling farther and farther back, it seemed. As the winter moved in and blanketed the deep, narrow valleys of the Black Forest in wraith mists and desperation, we ran shorter on fuel, and our spirits thirsted for hope that flowed ever thinner. Some men swore they heard the seductive call of the legendary Lorelei and ran off after the siren into the swirl of the cold earthbound clouds. Generally, a spat of machine gun fire moments later told us of the outcome of such delusions. The magic of the deepest reaches of this place were legendary, but they did not help us. The rest of us held on, as best we could.