The Sleeping and the Dead

by Jeff Crook

  Finally a toilet cleared. As I sat, I listened to the asthmatic wheeze of the bathroom door as the last girl departed and I was finally, thankfully alone.

  My phone rang. I didn’t really want to talk to my mother while sitting on a public toilet, and I didn’t have to answer to know she wanted me to come home for Thanksgiving. No matter how many years I avoided her calls and made promises that I didn’t keep, she always called the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to tell me what she was cooking and how much she was looking forward to having me home, trying to pretend that I had already promised to be there. It never worked, but she always tried.

  I knew I’d have to call her eventually. At least this time I had a good excuse for going AWOL.

  I was just finishing up when I noticed a pair of men’s black high-top Reeboks beneath the stall door. I looked up to see a man’s eye pasted to the crack, the blackest eye I had ever seen. His skin was a dark reddish-brown. He looked Hispanic. I hadn’t heard the bathroom door open, hadn’t heard footsteps, but I was fairly certain he wasn’t one of my special friends. I could smell his breath—minty, like he had just brushed. My heart was thumping. I didn’t know what he was going to do, but I wasn’t about to wait for him to try. I pulled up my jeans and yanked the door open without even bothering to zip, but he was already gone. Again, not even the sound of the door opening.

  I headed back into the bar, scanning the crowd as I worked my way to Jenny’s table. This wasn’t the first time somebody had peeked at me in a public restroom, but it was the first time a man had followed me into the john to watch me pee. I was so wired on adrenaline, everybody in the room looked like a suspect. There were dozens of men with dark hair and skin, and they all seemed to be staring at me, smiling like wolves, fucking me with their eyes, but none as black and flat and cold as the eye I’d seen, an eye with nothing behind it, no life, no humanity—a mannequin’s eye.

  It must have shown on my face because when I sat down Jenny asked, “What happened? Are you OK?”

  “Some guy followed me into the bathroom.”

  Her friends heard that. Now they were all ears, my sympathy sisters, sliding down the benches toward us. “Oh my God!” one of the redheads said. “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. Just watched.”

  “Get the manager!” another said.

  “Fuck that! Call the cops,” the third shrieked.

  “I can’t give a full description. All I saw was about this much of his face.” I demonstrated the gap in the door by pinching it with my fingers. I used to be a cop, and like they say in all the cop shows we’re specially trained in the techniques of observation. Of course, that’s bullshit designed to give our testimony more weight in court. A cop is as vulnerable to mistakes as anybody else, and sometimes more so, as any cop who’s been on the job for very long carries a gorilla of prejudices. If the only tool in your shed is a sledgehammer, every problem looks like a watermelon.

  I tried to play the whole thing hopeless, but I knew if I saw him again I would recognize the bastard. After that, plans got fuzzy.

  “That’s just too creepy,” the brunette said. “Especially after what happened to Ashley. I wish we didn’t have to do this here.”

  “Well I’m not staying,” one of the girls complained. “Let’s go to Newby’s.”

  “Not until we’ve had our toast,” Jenny said. Our drinks had arrived while I was in the toilet. She lifted her glass and nodded at my beer. “Join us?”

  “Sure.” I picked up my glass. They raised theirs, and for the moment, I was one of them, though I didn’t know why.

  “To Ashley,” Jenny toasted.

  We drank in silence and left our glasses on the table. The ladies were strangely somber. As I stood up to let the others out, I asked Jenny, “Who is Ashley?”

  “An old friend…” but before she could finish, a passing waiter bumped her into me and I sat back in the booth to keep from falling. The waiter apologized, but I barely heard him. I had spotted a pair of black Reeboks moving through the crowd of feet near the bar. I shoved the waiter out of the way, but I couldn’t see my guy, just his shoes, and only then in flashes through people’s legs. He must have been the shortest guy in the room, and he was heading for the door in a big damn hurry.

  “What’s wrong?” Jenny asked, tagging along behind me. She grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t easy plunging through the crowd dragging her behind.

  “It’s him.” I jerked free.

  On the sidewalk outside, I saw a short, dark-haired man split off from a group of umbrellas and disappear around the corner of the building. I ran after him, acutely aware that I had no weapon, no backup, and no options if he was armed. However, he was smaller than me, and as long as I was able to get the drop on him, I was fairly confident I could take him, even if he had a gun. The trick was not letting him know he was being followed. I slowed up as I reached the corner, then walked casually by and glanced between the buildings. Bosco’s had a large deck on that side, but because of the weather it was closed up, the table umbrellas folded and the chairs stacked upside down. I didn’t see my stalker in the alley or on the deck, but I spotted a dark head moving between the cars in the parking lot behind.

  “Jackie!” Jenny called out behind me. She was just coming out the door with her friends. I waved at her to shut up and dove down the alley, running low, splashing through the puddles. My bathroom buddy wasn’t easy to follow. I wasn’t sure if he was aware of me, but he seemed nervous and kept looking over his shoulder, forcing me to duck and wait for him to move on.

  Finally he stopped by a silver Mercedes. I was running with a radar lock on the back of his head. The noise of cars leaving the parking lot helped cover the sound of my footsteps, but at the last second I splashed in a deep puddle. He turned, and even before I hit him I knew he wasn’t my guy at all. He was a chick with a short black crew cut, but I couldn’t stop myself. I nailed her just behind the right ear with my elbow. As our bodies smashed into the door of the Mercedes, I heard a satisfying crack of ribs that didn’t belong to me. I was on my feet again in a second, but she wasn’t. She lay on the pavement with her head in a puddle, little bubbles appearing around her submerged nose. She was wearing a white sweater, jeans, and black Adidas that looked similar to the black Reeboks I had seen.

  This had turned into one serious bag of dicks. Somebody was shouting to call the police. It was time to clear datum, but first I pulled her out of the puddle so she wouldn’t drown, then ran ducking between the cars until I made it to my Nissan. Despite the cold and the rain, I was calving buckets of sweat. I climbed in through the passenger door, started her up and eased her out of the space as casually and quickly as possible.

  As I turned out of the lot onto Madison Avenue, I passed Jenny and her friends standing on the corner under their umbrellas. Jenny looked straight at me with absolutely no expression on her face, as I though I was invisible, or a total stranger. That’s exactly what I was to her—a total stranger. Maybe she didn’t recognize me in my car. Maybe she couldn’t see my face behind the wet glass. I hardly recognized myself anymore. I only hoped she would forget my name.

  Thanksgiving

  14

  I WOKE UP ON THE floor in front of the couch with a syringe hanging out of my arm. The candle beside me had burned down to a waxy black hole in the rug, but that was nothing compared to the charred crater in my self-esteem. And after all that back-patting, too. Little Miss Got It All Together, one little mistake, one innocent victim of her rage and she’s running home to Mr. Brownstone. Apparently she can’t leave the guy, no matter how much he beats her.

  I felt like a bag of smashed asshole. I figured at least two days had passed, maybe three, I didn’t know. I crawled to the bathroom and into the shower, turned on the water with my clothes still on. I stunk and my clothes needed washing anyway. Water spurted out in a nearly frozen slush that roused me somewhat. I wondered if the customers downstairs could hear me scream.

  The weather
must have really turned cold while I was larking. After a few minutes I noticed vomit swirling down the drain and realized it was washing off of me from somewhere. I hoped it was my own vomit. I stripped down and picked the bigger chunks of ralph out of my hair, checked my pubes for evidence, found none, and thanked God for small favors. The water had gradually heated up to the temperature of warm spit by the time I turned it off.

  I opened the shower door and found myself face-to-face with her, not five feet away. Dank blond hair, dank and stringy, hanging over her face like a drowned woman, breasts sagging over skeletal ribs, face like a skull, sunken cheeks and eye holes hollow and dark, mouth hanging open. It took me a minute to recognize myself in the foggy mirror.

  I sat on the edge of the john and toweled my hair. The television was on in the den. I didn’t remember the television being on when I woke up, but then again, I barely remembered waking up. I walked naked and dripping to the kitchen, grabbed a beer, wondered where it came from and thanked God again that I hadn’t drunk it all. I sat on the couch to let my hair dry. The commercial for laundry detergent ended and I was confronted by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and a giant Bart Simpson balloon floating around the corner at West Thirty-fourth.

  So there I was on Thanksgiving morning, naked, cold and sick, drinking a beer on the couch at nine in the morning after a smack bender, no turkey in the fridge, no turkey in my future. They say you have to hit rock bottom, and I thought I’d hit it too many times already, but before this I didn’t know the meaning of rock, much less bottom. All the times before had been mere rest stops on the journey to the smoking cracks of today’s fresh new hell.

  I poured the rest of the beer into the toilet and forced myself into some clean underwear, then lay on the couch for half the day waiting to die. When that didn’t happen, I searched the apartment until I found the stash under the couch. I still had three decks. It wasn’t like me to leave any gato for tomorrow once I was going good. I dumped the whole thing into a paper bag, rolled up the bag and pushed it to the bottom of my garbage can. I hadn’t hocked my cameras or my laptop to pay for more, so that was a plus. I finished dressing, then checked the pockets of my wet jeans. Michi’s five hundred dollars—James’s five hundred if you wanted to get technical about it—was gone. I searched through dirty laundry and drawers, unpacked boxes, in the ashtrays and under the seats of my car until I scraped together four bucks. Flush with cash, I went to see if the mercado was open.

  Apparently it wasn’t Thanksgiving in Mexico. Mynor looked up as I entered and smiled his friendly disaster of rotten teeth. It was good to have a friend somewhere. I bought a pack of Marlboro Light 100s, the brand I smoked when I was in college. Might as well go back to the beginning and start over, I thought.

  “Everything OK?” he asked as I counted out pennies.

  “Yeah.” Something strange about the way he asked. Maybe he’d seen me last night. Maybe I’d come in here and forgot I knew him. Or worse. “Why?”

  “Just wondering.” He was trying not to look at me again. I wondered what I had done.

  “What happened?”

  “Well.” He glanced at the ceiling. “You were pretty loud.”

  “I was?”

  “I could hear,” he said, embarrassed. He pointed at the ceiling. “You were arguing with some woman. Shouting.”

  “I’m sorry. Did you see her?”

  He shook his head. “I knock on your door for a long time this morning, but you don’t answer. Was she your sister?”

  I said she was. I couldn’t imagine who had been with me in my apartment. Maybe another junkie. I couldn’t remember.

  “Me and my sisters used to fight like that sometimes,” he said.

  “Pretty bad, huh?” I took my smokes. “I hope we weren’t too loud.”

  “It was nothing. Wait until Mrs. Kim’s husband gets back from Korea. You’ll hear loud.”

  I thanked him and hurried out the door.

  I stopped at the top of the stairs to open the pack and light one. The smoke seemed to burn through all the cobwebs. In the silence of the hall I heard a woman softly crying. I touched my ear to my door and listened, but the crying came from nowhere in particular, or maybe from inside my own skull.

  The accordion elevator door at the end of the hall rattled open and Walter Pinch stepped out. He paused and for a moment he looked like he didn’t really want to see me. I tried to be jovial. “Morning, Mr. Pinch.”

  “Please! Call me Walter.” He resumed his usual golden treasure of a smile. A specter of gin fumes preceded him down the hall.

  “I just want to apologize about yesterday,” I said.

  He waved it away and reached for his back pocket, but checked himself midswing. I unlocked my door. The woman had stopped crying. I opened the door and the cold seemed to flow out in a wave. Walter stepped back and bumped his head against the wall.

  “Is your heat broke?” He looked past me as though he expected to see a ghost in my apartment.

  “Seems so.” I closed the door so the old man could dip into his pocket gin. He looked like he needed it.

  * * *

  I stood with my back to the door staring around my apartment. For the first time since I’d moved in, I felt like a stranger. I said “Hello?” to the empty room. I don’t know who I expected to answer. Nothing happened except the heat kicked on. The air suddenly smelled of burning dust bunnies.

  I tried to be rational about this. Mynor had heard two women arguing. Assuming I was one of them, I thumbed through my mental Rolodex for any female friends who might have shared a scream fest with me. I came up empty. I had no female friends. Those female acquaintances I once had I gave up when I left Reed. Maybe one of them stopped by late last night to try to talk me into going back with my husband. It would have been just like Reed to send one of our old church friends around to talk me out of signing the divorce papers I’d been sitting on since forever.

  I checked the messages on my cell phone. I had seven: four from Adam, one last night from my mother, and a couple from a personal-injury lawyer I sometimes worked for. While trying to decide who I should call back first, the phone rang in my hand.

  “Hey!” James shouted over the high-pitched whine of a propeller engine.

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Me,” he said. “Go outside.”

  “Why?”

  “Trick or treat. Just go outside and look up.” He hung up.

  I had nothing better to do on Thanksgiving Day except to call my mother and tell her I wouldn’t be home for dinner again this year. Or call Adam and explain to him why I didn’t show up to take pictures of whoever got killed while I was strung out in my own apartment arguing with a total stranger nobody had seen and I couldn’t remember.

  It had finally stopped raining and the puddles were rippling in the sharp north wind. I looked up, squinting into a painfully gray sky, shading my eyes with my hand. I almost preferred the drudgery of rain. The sun was up there somewhere running across a blue sky I barely remembered. And somewhere up there with it buzzed a small single-engine aircraft. I followed the sound as it came over the roof.

  Down out of the clouds dropped this tiny, very red airplane, red as a drop of blood, with upswept wingtips and the green and gold of the Brazilian flag painted on its tail fin. As it swung toward me, it wagged its wings side to side, so I knew it was James. It passed low over the building and my cell phone rang again.

  “That was pretty cool,” I said.

  “It’s a great little plane,” he shouted over the whine of the engine. “I can’t talk now. I’ve got to get this thing to the airport before I get dinged by the FAA. I just wanted to make sure we’re still on for dinner tonight.”

  Sure you did, I thought.

  “Are we still on for six?”

  “Sure.”

  “OK. Gotta go.” He hung up. I heard him coming back for another pass, so I stood there in the cold hugging my arms and waved as he flew over. He wagged his wings again;
then, as he climbed up into the clouds, he performed a quick barrel roll. He was showing off for me. It was so adolescent and stupidly dangerous, I couldn’t help but smile. At the same time, I thought, if life were a movie, this would be the moment where I watch in horror as he clips a power line and crashes in a ball of fire.

  I sat on the couch. There was a football game on television and the perky sideline announcer looked like she was feeling her age as well as the cold. It must be depressing to be an old cheerleader, I thought, and that made me feel a little better about myself. Or perhaps it was the cigarette I burned that cleared me out. Maybe it was the stupid silliness of my impending date with the pilot. I should probably have curled up on the couch hugging a pillow, but I still felt vaguely ill about the future and about myself, as though I were only putting off an eventual rug dance in the captain’s cabin. Sooner or later I was going to have to go to a meeting and come clean about what I had just done to myself, though I’d probably leave out the part about the felonious assault of an innocent stranger. And there was still my mother to call and explain why I wouldn’t be home for Thanksgiving. Again.

  At least this year I had an excuse she could understand. I didn’t know if she would believe it. “I have a date,” I said when I finally called her.

  “On Thanksgiving?” Mom asked. I could hear my father in the background wondering where she put the bourbon. Daddy was a drunk in the finest old Southern tradition. He liked his toddy about four in the afternoon, sooner on special occasions, eggnog on Christmas morning with his ham and eggs, which just shows that I came by it honest. He never seemed drunk, but I couldn’t remember an evening when he didn’t have a glass of something in his hand. Some fathers smelled like Old Spice; my old man smelled like whiskey and spearmint.