Chum

by Jeff Somers

  She laughed. I flicked my cigarette to the ground, winked at myself internally, pushed her up against the wall, and kissed her, hard and fast, hands roaming.

  I’m perverse, and I know it, and that’s fine.

  • • •

  I spread my hands and smiled and walked toward him. I hadn’t been hit in the face since seventh grade, but figured I must be as close to it as I could be without already picking my teeth up off the floor. I thought better of the smile and wiped it off my face as I drew even with him. I paused, watching him from the corner of my eye, ready for sudden moves.

  “Henry, sorry man.”

  I didn’t know what else was expected of me. I waited a moment, to be hit, for him to say something, and then I just kept going and I let my smile creep back onto my face. I found Luis still sitting at the bar where I’d left him, only moments ago. I slapped him on the back and tossed a bill onto the bar.

  “Luis, let me buy you a drink because after a brief period of confusion, life is good again.”

  “Bick and Mary have left,” he said seriously, pronouncing their names as Beek and Maree. “There was some fighting.”

  “Isn’t there always?” I said brightly. “It wouldn’t be right in the world if there weren’t mean words bandied between those two. Don’t worry, grasshopper, someday one of them will kill the other and that will be that.”

  He looked at me very steadily, and for a moment I thought I’d offended him somehow. “What,” he said ponderously, “is this grasshopper you speak of?”

  I laughed and kept laughing. That’s fine.

  XV.

  TOMORROW

  I shifted Bickerman’s shoes to one side and sat down on the bed. The whole damn place smelled like shit. I wanted a cigarette and took out my pack, then thought better of it and retrieved Bick’s pack from his jacket pocket. Sitting back down, I sat there for a while with the cigarette in my mouth, but didn’t light it. For a while I just sat there and contemplated Casa Bickerman, which was decorated in a style known, apparently, as Abandon All Hope.

  It was a split-level condo, two bedrooms on the second floor, living room, kitchen, bonus room on the ground. Not bad bones, really, and before the ruinous involvement of the Bickermans it probably had potential as an unexceptional living space. Post-Bickermans, however, it was a structure fire in waiting, nothing but a pile of insurance money. It was hideous. I’d been in it many times, and was now winding down six hours straight in it, sweating and absorbing its carcinogenic atmosphere. I could identify the Bickerman place by smell at five hundred yards: Old Spice, bourbon, the rusty wire-scent of tension.

  I worried that the smell was going to stick with me, and that years from now someone I’d never met before would do that air-sniffing thing, bobbing his nose up and down, and say “Does anyone else smell failure and ennui?” and everyone will look at me. And there would be a lengthy uncomfortable silence.

  The thing about the Bickerman condo is that it was decorated and furnished and terraformed by two completely classless people. You hear about people like the Bickermans, idiots with a bit of scratch and the docile, empty certainty that the world was created just for them. It was a sticky, dusty jumble of patterns and styles, a mix of Bick’s old college furniture spruced up by desperate, amateurish refinishing and a host of abortions in furniture form, all of which arrived with a fucking Allen wrench in order to be assembled by the uncoordinated Bick. They all ended up looking like sculpture: The title of the works, invariably, would be Almost. They all had at least one unfinished screw, or unsanded edge, or a slightly unbalanced nature. None of the pieces were tied together in any kind of coherent way—it was a fucking garage sale.

  And the colors! The colors made me angry.

  How people who liked to pretend to be smart could choose such an ugly palette was beyond me. The whole house was chaos. I’d often daydreamed of burning it down, although that wouldn’t have helped much. The Bickermans would have just bought another concrete box and remade their abortion, except this time with more money to start off with.

  I stood up, and with an unlit cigarette between my lips I took my handkerchief from my pocket and looked around the bedroom. This was the master. Everything had a master bedroom these days, like we were all nobility heading out every day to whip the slaves and dock the renters, instead of mouth-breathers earning paychecks. Master bedroom my ass. It was fifteen by fifteen, with two grimy windows on one end and two closets, shallow and disorganized. Beige walls and a carpet an inexact shade of pink that might also believably be called any number of bizarre and meaningless names. Melon. Picot. Rouge. Salmon. Scallop. Whatever you called it, it resembled puke. This had somehow escaped the Bickermans’ attention, and when they’d taken possession of the house they’d failed to immediately rip the carpet out, with their bloodied fingers if necessary. Maybe they were colorblind. This was possible, as the last time I’d asked either one a personal question was about seventeen years in the past.

  The bed was nothing special. King-size, of course, because royalty such as the Bickermans could not be expected to sleep on anything less, and their unerring eyes had brought them the ugliest fucking bed ever created, a triumph of Bickermanism. I dragged my handkerchief along the square, brown pressed-wood headboard, taking off a thick pelt of dust. Small, basic nightstands on either side with matching digital clocks. I wiped down the one on Bick’s side, sending more plumes of dust everywhere, the fucking pigs. I imagined they’d made a blood oath to not clean the fucking house until they were rich enough to afford a maid.

  I scanned the crappy dresser opposite the bed with the big mirror over it, but kept my eyes moving. I walked over to the cave-like bathroom, an avocado dream. Avocado being a main color in hell’s palette, and probably matching most of Bickerman’s stools over the years, since he’d been staying one thin step ahead of scurvy due entirely to the lime wedges you got with certain beers. I stepped inside, breathing through my mouth. Fluorescent lighting, the absolute genius choice of green accent rugs—because only Bickermans would choose green to accent avo-fucking-cado—and sweet lord, there it is, the fuzzy, carpet-like toilet cozy. While the Bickermans had not descended the final step into insanity signaled by a carpeted bathroom, they had festooned their crapper with something that could only be called a crapper carpet. Filled, I was sure, with minute butt hairs woven into the loose pile, it glowed radioactively. I sometimes dreamed of Bickerman’s crapper carpet being stuffed into my mouth, suffocating me. I didn’t know why, and didn’t want to know.

  I wiped the faucet and handles carefully, and then gave the sink a quick run around the edges. I hadn’t touched the toilet. Whenever I had to piss when over at Bickerman’s I did it in the sink. There was no way I would ever touch that toilet. I winked at myself in the mirror and headed back into the bedroom.

  I hadn’t been in the spare bedroom, which was just a collection of random extra furniture, including Bick’s old semen- and puke-stained SRO mattress from his younger days. I didn’t think anyone had been in the spare since they’d bought the place. If you opened the door the ghosts of winters past would hiss out of it, howling and swirling, smelling vaguely of stale disco moves and flat beer.

  I walked down the stairs, rubbing my handkerchief down the banister as I went, and pictured Mary on her way down, hitting, every, damn, step on the way—from my vantage point at the top of the stairs I’d seen her perfectly, her amusingly amazed expression and the way her head whipped around waayyyy too far right there at the end, with her limp husband standing there, mouth open and dick in his hand. Mary: a more graceless woman had never been created. She’d been born to look good in short skirts and spend half her life rubbing out bruises after she tripped—definitely the sort of girl who needed to have someone take hold of her ankles and move her around, show her what to do. A fucking waste of ass, that was.

  The kitchen was a fucking mess. On the surface it was okay—a quick glance and you might make the potentially deadly decision to prepare a
meal there. A closer look, though, and you could tell that the people who’d lived here were subhuman. The white tile was not so much grouted as caked with grease and ancient dirt, and the countertops—cheap laminate that was never designed to withstand the onslaught of two people who were like two gorillas in a cage when it came to hygiene and housecleaning—had been faded from their natural beige to a sort-of yellow, which was probably just light refracted through a layer of grease. The appliances had been here when they bought the place. They worked, and that’s all the Bickermans cared about.

  Two empty beer bottles stood on the counter next to the sink. I couldn’t recall which was mine, so I took both and slid them into my pants pockets, damp and awkward. I rubbed my handkerchief on the fridge handle and the countertops, imagining the layer of Bickerman grease being rubbed off, knowing that I’d have to burn the handkerchief now. That was okay—I was pretty much going to burn everything: bridges, my apartment, my clothes, and myself. I was going to rise from those ashes, and be someone new and exciting. Exciting to me, at least. No one else mattered.

  The living room, I was pretty sure, hadn’t been cleaned or touched in any way since the night she had died. I was pretty sure he hadn’t done more than move through it quickly, probably with his eyes closed, in that time. He’d considered the room haunted.

  I moved through it quickly, entering the bonus room. The bonus room was in reality a den or an office—it didn’t have a closet, so they couldn’t call it a bedroom—but some douchebag of a realtor had sold Bickerman on the term bonus room, so a bonus room it was. When you were talking about a huge McMansion with four bedrooms and a media room, a bonus room might make sense as a fucking room they built but can’t think of a single fucking thing to do with. But when your condominium has exactly five goddamn rooms, that fifth room is not a bonus in any way.

  As a personal fuck-you to me, I’d always assumed, they’d even left the fucking room more or less unfurnished. Of course, this made some sense: The Bickermans didn’t read, so there was no use for a library. They didn’t do anything requiring an office. They didn’t have any appreciation for art or entertainment beyond consuming it with groups of other people, so a media room would have been wasted. They probably couldn’t think of anything to do with the room except use it as storage.

  Personally, if your whole life fit into four fucking rooms, you weren’t living.

  I stood amongst the cardboard boxes and random furniture—a card table piled high with coats, two old wooden chairs that may have grown, organically, inside the room itself, and a weird, nonfunctional floor lamp that had a strange little table affixed to its middle. The room was dark and dusty, and filled with shoes, endless rows of her shoes, gleaming like something alive, seeming to pulse with respiration. I hadn’t been in the room, but I liked to glance into it every time I was over at the Bickerman place. It made me feel happy to think of people living in such self-imposed squalor.

  In the living room, I wiped things down randomly. After a few minutes I put the handkerchief in my back pocket. I’d have to burn everything. I looked around the terrible earth tones of the living room, the scratchy cheap upholstery and the dark rug that looked like it held every known pathogen in a desiccated, preserved state, just waiting for some idiot to spill water on it, bring Pandora’s Box back to life, wipe out the planet. Millions of years later some alien scientists will trace the end of life on the planet back to this room, and reconstruct a spilled glass of tap water.

  I went back upstairs.

  It was nice and quiet. Finally quiet—I appreciated silence, and this place was usually always filled to bursting with noise. TVs on everywhere—they had five fucking rooms and four televisions, including ones in the bathroom and kitchen. All while the owners themselves were ranting and raging and puking and cursing each other. Coming over here had always been torture, but Tommy had brought The Silence and it had settled in on everything like baffles, making even this hellhole a tiny bit contemplative. Padding on the dry, corrupt carpet I went back into the bedroom and began going through the drawers: Her silky underthings, his permanently crusted underthings, an envelope containing five hundred dollars in small bills which I left in place, assuming it was crawling with small, microscopic parasites.

  I glanced up. All around the big mirror were photographs. I stared, fascinated. I’d never noticed before, and would never have assumed that either one of them had a sentimental streak, but there we were, all of us in happier times. Me, looking stiff and awkward, like I’d just wandered into the photo and paused when someone said cheese. The droopy one, casual and sincere, my fucking God painful to look at. His old girlfriend with the cans, looking especially tasty in a pair of tight jeans and a T-shirt, fuzzy pixels hinting at all of her curves, curves sadly lost to me forever now. She would age and sag and wither, all without ever knowing the joys of Tommy, which were considerable, no matter what my other flaws might be. The black kid, an epic waste of my time. Then him and wife, looking fresh and clean in what must have been an old, old photo. They looked like a fucking beer commercial, good, clean white folks having a good time with their good, clean white friends and token racial characters.

  I reached out and plucked the photo from the edge of the mirror, bringing it in close. For a second I wanted to ask him where in fuck this was taken, because I thought I ought to remember Droopy’s girlfriend dressed like that.

  I started taking the other pictures down and stuffing them into my pockets, folding and wrinkling them. That was okay. They’d burn too. Here was one of just Droopy, whatshisname, and me, looking young and fresh, just out of the oven. Maybe some yellowing on the edges—maybe—at least for me and whatshisname. Droopy still hadn’t ingested as many chemicals and screwed as many pooches as we had. Based on my last interaction with Droopy, I doubt he ever would. He’d remain perpetually youthful as I aged into my dotage, getting scaly and leathery. Here was one of the wife and the girlfriend pretending to be lifelong friends, and I experienced a stab of regret that those two hadn’t been college roommates who’d experimented with each other’s bodies one fateful evening—they were born for the role, awkward slippery sex they’d never speak of again. Or at least in my mind it was awkward and slippery, with a lot of inexplicable bubbles and smoke and heavy metal music. In reality maybe they’d be giggly and joyous, or angry and grunting.

  Here was a picture of the Spaniard, alone, eyes too wide and smile too broad, looking insane. I left that one where it was.

  Here was a photo from the wedding, a candid, taken with one of the disposable cameras left on the tables. We’re all in a group, looking happy and dapper, a little blur of motion as we’re talking and moving about. You can’t really tell who’s who—we’re just well-dressed people, one of whom has a wedding gown on. Might have been a photo that came with a frame, for all you could tell, but I stuck it in my pocket anyway.

  There were photos around the mirror that didn’t have anyone I recognized in them, which was disturbing. Where did whatshisname and wife ever meet anyone else? As far as I could remember I’d spent the last seven hundred years with him, every minute of it. Woke up and had him lying next to me, spooning. Showered with him leering at me from his perch on the toilet, like a vulture. Ate lunch with him stealing fries from my plate, had drinks, went to work, puking, fucking, living, breathing him. Where in the world did they meet other people? I stared at the pictures for a few minutes, silence buzzing in my ears, wondering about these strange other people. They looked like fun, wholesome types, his other family. Fucking polygamist.

  Turned and stared at his shoes. Scuffed. Something brown and crusty on the tip of one. A bit of brown sock, the slightest glimpse of hairy, pale ankle. He’d always been one of those secret slobs, who looked pretty shiny in the distance but turned out covered in cruft when he got close.

  Moving through the condo back toward the stairs and freedom, I kept my eyes on the floor, the faintly dirty rug scrolling under me as I moved. I felt good. Light, empty. Hungry—I
was fucking starving. I was heading for Frankie and Johnnies and ordering a porterhouse, a Scotch, and one of their chopped salads, and I was going to have a bowl of ice cream and a cup of coffee to wash it all down, all while I listened to the tinkling piano and the dull, brown chatter of morons around me, overweight people with too much money. Then I was going to waddle to the bar and drink until I passed out, preferably with my pants down around my ankles and excretions pouring out of me as my shivering, weakened body strove to survive. Then I’d be a blank slate, dehydrated, scraped clean, ready to start taking on someone else’s water, someplace else, far away.

  At the bottom of the stairs I paused and looked around. Then I headed for the door, moving quickly. I would never see the place again. It was just the home of someone I used to know. Outside, I stood on the steps, smoking cigarettes and enjoying the ozone smell of a storm coming.

  Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Somers.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

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  eISBN 10: 1-4405-7005-1

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7005-6

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

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