Imperfections

by Bradley Somer

  “Fuck,” I grimaced.

  “…for two minutes.” Paige finished with raised eyebrows. “You don’t have any psycho fans do you?”

  “None that I know of,” I replied.

  CHAPTER 16

  As With Life, You Knew How This Story Would End

  It had been morning when Leonard knocked on the door. Paige and I were still in bed. Our limbs casually intertwined, we drifted awake to plant a soft kiss on a sleepy eyelid or cheek, only to drift away again. It was bright in the room; the spring sun wove through the cracks between the blinds. The air coming in the open bedroom window was alive with the whisper of traffic and fresh with birdsong.

  I had answered the door wearing a towel.

  “You’re not supposed to see each other today,” Leonard said. He held a coffee in each hand. “It’s bad luck. We have to get you away from here or we’ll both face the wrath of Rachel because you’ve willingly cursed your marriage.” He handed me a paper cup and an elastic band-bound newspaper before brushing past into the hallway. “You got some gooby in the corner of your eye,” he said. “Get dressed.”

  “Morning, Leonard.” Paige came from the bedroom wearing a nightshirt that went to her knees. She pointed at the coffee. “That for me?”

  “Good morning, Paige.” Leonard pecked her on the cheek. He contemplated the coffee for a moment before handing it over.

  Paige took Leonard to the kitchen while I went to shower and get dressed. Wearing my dress pants and a pressed white shirt, I grabbed the remainder of my tuxedo from the closet and hung it on the front doorknob on my way back to the kitchen.

  Leonard and Paige were sitting in the breakfast nook and smirking about something when I joined them. I kissed Paige on the forehead before sitting down at the table. Sunlight streamed in the window and the room was filled with the warm smell of coffee.

  “What are you two up to?” I asked.

  “Leonard was showing me this picture of you, when you were kids.”

  Paige handed me a small square, a picture of Leonard and me in a photo booth. It was the one taken at my tenth birthday party, the one where no kids showed up except Leonard.

  I paused for a moment as I recalled the incident and then said, “That’s not funny. That’s a horrible memory.”

  Leonard and Paige laughed.

  “You both looked terrified. What kind of birthday was it?” Paige reached across the table and gave my forearm a reassuring rub.

  I smiled for Paige’s benefit, even though I was serious. It really wasn’t funny.

  “Hand me the paper,” I said and pointed.

  “Really?” Paige raised an eyebrow and then passed the paper across. “He’s been doing this for months,” she said to Leonard. “We actually got a subscription because he needs to read the obituaries every morning. I don’t get it.”

  “Hey,” Leonard said. “They’re works of art.”

  “Yeah, they’re works of art.” I sided with him as I slid the rubber band from the paper. I flipped though the sections. “Just give me a second and we’ll be out of here.”

  “Looking for someone in particular?” Paige asked.

  Leonard and I glanced at each other before I answered, “No. No one in particular.”

  “Oh, you guys suck.” Paige shook her head. “You’re such bad liars. What’s with the look, did you guys kill someone? Are you waiting to see if the body was found or something?” Paige laughed.

  I looked at Leonard and he looked at me.

  “Man…” Leonard said. “After today she’s your wife. You should tell her.”

  I sighed, unsure how to explain that I was going to die this year. Paige’s smile inched from her face, ticking the seconds by.

  “You idiots didn’t kill anyone, did you?” Paige asked.

  “No,” I told her. “Leonard can predict the future by people dying.”

  Leonard nodded solemnly.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “A few months back, the Pope and Prince Rainier died. Now, I’m watching for Tigger and Piglet to die, then it’s my turn,” I said. “I’m sorry. I should have told you earlier. It’s just that I love you and I wanted to protect you.”

  Paige contemplated this for a moment.

  “So you’re going to die later this year?”

  I nodded.

  “2005?”

  I nodded.

  “After some cartoon characters die?”

  “The voice actors that played them,” Leonard corrected.

  I was still nodding. “Our fates are tied,” I said. “It’s true.”

  “Say I believe this,” she said, though the tone of her voice turned serious and told the opposite. “Say Leonard can predict when you’re going to die…”

  “I can…”

  Paige silenced him with a finger in the air and a look that made my blood cool a few degrees.

  “Richard,” she said. “Do you believe this?”

  I dropped my gaze to the tabletop and fiddled with the rubber band.

  “Yes.”

  “Say you are going to die this year,” she said. “Why are we even getting married? I don’t want to be a widow in six months. Why would you do that?”

  The pause that followed was not because I didn’t know the answer—I was all too aware of why we were getting married. It just took me a moment to put the words together in the right way.

  “As with life, I know how my story will end. We all know how our stories will end, every time. We all wind up in the same spot yet we all try. We learn, we love. It’s when we live that makes the difference, not when we die.”

  The breakfast nook was silent. Our coffees steamed lazy opalescent spirals above the cup rims.

  “I’m no different because of what I know,” I continued. “I don’t know that much more than anyone else does, the ending is always the same. Whether it’s tomorrow or forty years from now, we all deserve that time. Paige, I’ll love you until tomorrow or I’ll love you until forty years from now, it doesn’t matter.”

  I raised my gaze. Both Paige and Leonard were staring at me. Leonard wore a smile and Paige’s eyes had melted from stern to mildly perturbed within a few seconds.

  Paige took my coffee, sniffed it, then said to Leonard, “Have him at the gardens by two for the ceremony. No excuses. I’m going to have a shower.” Paige put my coffee back on the table. “Rachel’s supposed to be here in an hour to help me get ready.”

  “She’ll be here,” Leonard said.

  Paige kissed me on the forehead and left the room. A few silent moments passed. Neither of us spoke until we heard the shower running.

  “You think she’s worried about me dying?” I asked.

  “I think she thinks we’re nuts and she’s probably questioning the wisdom of marrying you right now,” Leonard said. “Did I ever explain to you the power of testimonials?”

  My blank look must have sufficed for an answer because he kept talking.

  “Think about it. Next time you try to explain this, you may want to break her in with a few examples of my correct predictions. It’ll make it seem less crazy.”

  “But you’ve never been right,” I said.

  “I was right about the Prince and the Pope,” Leonard said.

  “That’s the first time though.”

  “I’ve been close on many occasions and a few examples might have helped convince her.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Now she thinks we’re nuts. This is why you aren’t supposed to see each other on your wedding day,” Leonard said. “Because any shit you say today actually gets heard and means something. That’s why you’re not supposed to talk to each other until after you’re married.”

  The shower stopped running.

  “Let’s get out of here before she comes back,” Leonard said. We grabbed our stuff and ducked out of the apartment.

  We spun around one descending flight of stairs and dashed down the next. Within moments, we broke onto the street. Leonard had fo
und a rare parking spot right in front of the building and all I could think was that it really was a perfect day. I hung my tuxedo jacket from the clothes hook in the back of his car and got into the passenger seat.

  I took a sip of coffee as Leonard nosed the car into downtown traffic. With a sharp horn-blast we merged into the line of cars coursing through the street.

  I thought of the picture Leonard had shown Paige.

  Auntie Maggie had said, “Come on, you will look back at this picture in twenty years and laugh.” If Leonard was right this time, I would die a year short.

  Those little boys trapped in the chemicals of that creased and faded photograph were now full-grown men. The little boys in that picture now bore the marks of nineteen years past and I marvelled that we sat here, in the same positions; Leonard on the left and me on the right. The windshield replaced the camera and this time, unlike in the picture, I smiled.

  I turned to Leonard, raised my coffee cup to him and said, “Thank you. You couldn’t have been a better friend.”

  “No need,” Leonard replied and looked my way. “I couldn’t imagine not being a part of your wedding.”

  I had meant “a better friend in life,” but let Leonard think I was talking about the wedding. It didn’t matter. I glanced forward, gasped and braced my arm against the dashboard.

  Leonard’s eyes shot to the road and his foot stomped on the brake. The tires locked and laid a solid, greasy black line on the asphalt. We slid to a halt a mere hairbreadth from the bumper of a garbage truck that had veered into our lane.

  The lid flew from my cup as I grasped it tightly and what was left of its contents splashed forward with the application of the brake and then backward as we rebounded from our inertia. My white dress shirt received the brunt of its tarnishings. We, of course, hadn’t registered the coffee spill yet. Our focus was on how close we had come to being in an accident.

  Leonard gripped the wheel and his leg was tensed, pinning the brake pedal to the floor. My heart pounded. A look of relief eased itself onto Leonard’s face as he let out a slow breath that sounded like he was hissing a drawn out version of the word “shit.”

  I glanced in the rear-view mirror at the rusty maroon ’82 Monte Carlo that sat mere inches from the rear bumper.

  As traffic began to move again, I felt the warm wetness of my shirt.

  “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “Got coffee on my shirt.”

  “I think we got off pretty easy then,” Leonard said, glancing my way.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” I said. I patted and rubbed the coffee spill, only succeeding in smearing it around a bit. “I can’t get married in this.”

  “We still have a few hours.” Leonard signalled his way around a corner. “There’s a department store on the way. Let’s go get another shirt.”

  As we drove, the tall buildings gave way to rows of houses and the occasional strip mall. Within fifteen minutes of leaving downtown, Leonard eased the car into a spot near the entrance of a department store. The parking lot was largely empty, a broad expanse of lonely asphalt dotted by the occasional weed that found a crack to poke through. A warm breeze blew, unhindered across the flat expanse. We made our way into the department store and took a rattling escalator up to the menswear department.

  “Over there.” Leonard touched my elbow and pointed. “The shirts. I’ve got to go take a leak. I’ll meet you there.”

  I nodded and made my way past the Diesel to the Deacon Grande display. I didn’t know when department stores started carrying his line but I relished the fact that he had a sale rack in a suburban shopping mall.

  I absent-mindedly rubbed the coffee smear as I fingered my way through the rack. My head bounced along to the tinny, muzak version of ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” I thought about how the past constantly reinvented itself, as if it has all happened before in one way or another. I found my size and pulled the shirt from the rack.

  Done, I nodded to myself, 20-percent-off Deacon Grande, white shirt, French cuffs. All I needed.

  I glanced over to catch a clerk fiddling with a mannequin. She pulled off one of the arms, adjusted the position of the peg that held the arm to the torso, and then reattached it. The newly positioned limb was now held out, as if in a sweeping motion over a kingdom, saying, One day, all this will be yours.

  I chuckled and shook my head. I had been the model for that mannequin twelve years ago. It had been early in my career, when everything was amazing, when I still had amazing abs. I was eighteen. It took only an afternoon for them to make the cast for the mannequin and here I stood in my old body looking at my young body. Only one of us was unchanged by time.

  “Hey.”

  Someone had been trying to get my attention. I didn’t know how many times it had been said or how long he had been trying to get me to notice, so I apologized.

  “Sorry, hi.” I looked at the man, trying to place his face. It was a face that would have been easy to remember, yellowed teeth worn to pegs in the front, pockmarked skin and a ruddy complexion that came with excessive drinking.

  “Ain’t I seen you somewhere before?” he asked, his voice a chunky growl of a long-time, heavy smoker.

  It was wonderful, being singled out, being recognized. It was a warm feeling I hadn’t felt in so long. I wanted to hear it again, it didn’t matter from where or whom. I wanted to bathe in it just once more, so I feigned distraction and said, “What’s that?” Like I had been thinking about something else. I wiggled the shirt I had chosen to make the point.

  “You look familiar.” He smiled his broken smile. I could see little chunks of food between his teeth.

  “I’ve done some modelling,” I said.

  “No kiddin’.” A searching look passed over the man’s face, his head cocked to one side in examination. “Yer the tank-top guy, right?” he asked. “The one on the boat.”

  Wow, good call, I thought with surprise. Jungo undergarment shoot. The boat on a trailer in the middle of a parking lot downtown. Man, I marvelled, that was back in 1994. Eleven years ago. I had been eighteen.

  “That’s me all right,” I said. “That was a while ago though.”

  “Yeah, I remember that.” The man’s voice rolled like gravel. “Musta been early nineties.” The man stood for a moment and then continued his rummage through a sale pile of singlet shirts.

  I couldn’t let the moment go, I wasn’t ready to be forgotten quite then. The warm rush of recognition cooled slightly. I glanced around to see if Leonard was coming back but didn’t see him. In fact, there was nobody in the store but me, the man, and the woman changing the mannequin.

  “You see that mannequin?” I asked. “That one over there?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s me.”

  The man’s eyes flashed from the woman stripping the mannequin to me, from plastic to flesh.

  “Really?” he said. “The face ain’t yours.”

  “It’s my face.”

  “I don’t know.” He scratched the bristle on his chin, making a sandpaper sound. “It don’t really look like you.”

  “It is my face,” I insisted. “It’s just…stylized. You know? They made the nose sharper.”

  The clerk stood in front of the naked mannequin, hands on hips contemplating something, before walking away.

  “Yer nipples that pointy?”

  “No. That’s stylized too. My nipples are normal.”

  “Oh.” The man nodded. “So, what you been doing lately?”

  That hurt. It prompted the words “nothing” and “looking for work.”

  Lately, I’ve had a feeling of panic.

  “Things are moving along nicely,” I said. “I’ve decided to do less modelling and take more of a management role. You can’t stay beautiful forever, right?” My laugh sounded more desperate than I thought it would.

  Lately, I’ve had this tightness in my chest that made it hard to breathe.

  “No…you can’t stay bea
utiful forever. It ain’t like there’s a fountain of youth or nothing to make you immortal, right?” The man chuckled and moved closer. He started fingering the Deacon Grande shirts but I could tell he wasn’t really looking. He had a distinct odour, a mix of earth and whiskey sweat.

  “True.” I smiled uncertainly and took an instinctive step backwards.

  He matched my retreat with a step’s advance and said, “The body of work you left behind’s admirable, though. In itself it kinda preserves an immortal youth, right? Kinda like a time capsule.”

  “Oh, you know my work,” I said.

  “I do, Richard.” The man glanced around. I did too. We were horribly alone. The clerk was nowhere to be seen. Leonard was still absent and the store was as expectedly deserted as a failing midday suburban department store should be. “I’m very familiar with your work.”

  I felt the overwhelming urge to run. The feeling sprouted from deep in my primordial mind and the flight instinct came through louder than any other thought. It may have been the hunger in the man’s eyes, it may have been that terrible predatory grin, it may have been the way his wiry, insectile arms shot out to grab me—and it was likely all of the above that compelled me to push off from one planted heel like a sprinter out of the blocks. The man’s arms closed on air.

  The best I can figure, it was one of the shorter escape attempts in history. I slammed facedown on the linoleum, hard and fast. The best that I can figure, I made it two steps before he knocked my feet from under me. My landing thumped the wind from my body so hard it hurt deep in my chest.

  My hands and elbows squeaked across the linoleum as the man crawled on top of me, both of us moving together but in opposite directions; I slid backwards along the floor as he scrambled his way onto my back.

  I couldn’t scream. I tried. I couldn’t breathe. His weight on my back. I felt his arm wrap a vice-like chokehold around my throat. My face was pushed into the floor as he wedged my neck into the crook of his arm and levered it like a nutcracker with his free arm. The man’s breath blasted a rhythm against the back of my head.