The Sleeping and the Dead

by Jeff Crook

  I faced my naked self in the mirror once more. At least with tits I looked more like me, or the me I expected. My vision remained about twenty-one years old, back in the day when married photography professors asked me to stay after class and model for them. But my ribs, God, my ribs. I looked like a medical specimen. The smack had eaten away at me all these years. It was going to take awhile before I stopped looking like a junkie. Thank God for darkness as well as light. I hope I wake up before he does. I opened the medicine cabinet, leaving the mirror tilted against the wall so I wouldn’t have to look at myself again.

  I loaded up my toothbrush and set about trying to scrub eight years of cigarette tar from my teeth. I heard James say, “Hey!”

  I stopped for a minute and listened, but all I heard over the running faucet was the approaching storm, an almost continuous grumble of thunder. I turned off the light and opened the door.

  James was lying on the bed with his shirt off, but still wearing his jeans. He lay almost against the wall, his face hidden in the shadow thrown by the headboard from the red streetlight outside the window. The light turned green. I suddenly felt ridiculously awkward, standing naked before him in that ghastly glow.

  My laptop was still on, its screen shining off the refrigerator door in the next room. My camera rested beside it on the kitchen table, still plugged into the computer. Each flicker of lightning made the camera lens wink like a dark and knowing eye, with a weird purplish dot of light glowing deep within the lens.

  Something moved in the corner by the fridge. I froze with my hand on the doorknob. Another flicker of lightning showed nothing there, but I noticed that the drawer next to the refrigerator was open. I hadn’t opened it. Nothing but silverware in there. Maybe James had.

  In the next flash I saw a butcher knife floating before me, about chest high with the handle toward me. There was nothing there, nothing holding it, just the knife with the blade ground down and sharp enough to split a hare. I let go of the door and tried to say something but nothing came out of my throat but air.

  A disembodied voice, like the voice of some thousand year old crone, spoke out of the darkness in a thin crackling falsetto. “Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” The knife floated between me and my laptop and I finally saw the hand and body, like a clot of darkness, featureless, almost shapeless, crouching with the knife held up like an offering.

  I finally found my voice. “Who are you?” Just a little hysterical.

  “Life’s but a walking shadow,” it answered.

  I turned, shouting for James, and something struck me a terrific blow across the small of my back. Before I could think, it struck me across the back of the legs. I stumbled and sprawled on the bed on top of James, grabbing his arm to keep from sliding off, because my legs no longer worked. He didn’t try to grab me or hold me up. He didn’t even look at me.

  I couldn’t move. The muscles of my back and legs were tight as car springs. I tried to lift my head but it felt as though my neck wasn’t made to bend that way. My face was almost on top of my cell phone. Adam was calling. I tried to push the talk button with my nose, but something grabbed my leg and rolled me over, lifted me stiffly by one elbow and dropped me next to James on the bed, so that we lay side by side. But by that time, I blacked out.

  42

  I WOKE IN A FLASH of intense light, blinked, waiting for the crack of thunder that never came. He was leaning over me, the glow of the Leica’s LCD screen lighting up his featureless black mask of a face. The green traffic light showed the rest of him well enough to see that he wore black gloves, a black shirt and pants that looked like pajamas or some kind of karate gi and a black hood that completely covered his face except for a slit across the eyes. There was something wrong about his eyes, the way they stood out. By the sound of the storm, I couldn’t have been unconscious more than a few minutes. Either that or I’d slept through the whole thing.

  When he saw I was awake, he dropped the camera to his side and pulled off his hood. I tried to move but he had tied my knees together with one of my bras. I guessed it was another bra binding my wrists. My brother’s baseball bat lay on the dresser against the mirror. One end was dark with blood that wasn’t mine. The dresser drawers were pulled out, my clothes spilled all over the floor, hanging from the knobs. At least I could move a little. Unconsciousness had loosened the rebellion of cramps paralyzing my back from the blow of the baseball bat. James’s elbow dug into a soft spot below my ribs. I turned my head to look at him. The mattress under his head was soaked through, the back of his skull a soft mass of wet hair. I watched his chest for a moment. It wasn’t moving. The light outside turned yellow, then red.

  I turned away. Endo squatted at the end of the bed now, peering at me over the wad of sheets and blankets. His face was completely black with stage makeup. In the red light, the black didn’t show up at all. His eyes seemed huge and disembodied, floating in space until a strobe of lightning showed the rest of his frizzy head. He rested the Leica on my knees. I wasn’t as afraid he would rape me as what he might do to James’ body.

  “Did you know that ninja techniques of stealth were first mastered by puppeteers in medieval Japanese Bunraku theater?” he asked in his cracking falsetto. It sounded like it hurt to talk that way. He cleared his throat. “Two years ago I was in a production of Waiting for Godot at the Germantown Community Theatre. I was the tree. It was my job to move around the stage without being noticed. The actors would get up and walk around, and when they went back to the tree, it would be in a different place on the stage.”

  “Is that how you got into my apartment?”

  “No, your landlord let me in. I told him I was an old friend. He was most accomodating.” He rose and walked to the window, peered up at the flickering brown sky. “This is gonna be some show,” he said. The light turned green again and he stepped back into the shadow by the dresser. I heard him opening drawers, but with his back turned, I couldn’t see him. He was a ghost, his falsetto floating out of the darkness, “Sorry to tie you up like that. I saw what you did to that dyke behind Bosco’s and I didn’t want you jumping to conclusions about me.” So it was Endo who followed me into the women’s bathroom that night. I wondered how long he had been stalking me.

  “Walter wouldn’t have let you in,” I said.

  “You’re right. The man was downright rude. Tried to wallop me up side the head with a bottle of gin, but his heart wasn’t in it. I think he was afraid of spilling the gin. He loved it more than his own life.”

  “What did you do to Walter?”

  “I didn’t touch him. If you must blame someone, blame Newton. Blame gravity. Blame God. It makes no difference.”

  “Where is he?” I asked, trying not to sound angry. I tried to pretend this was a normal conversation, but Endo made normal conversation impossible.

  “Look for him yourself,” he giggled and closed his eyes. “If you do not find him within the month, you shall nose him around the elevator.” He sat on the end of the bed in almost exactly the same place where the ghost of Ashley St. Michael perched, looking at me with almost exactly the same featureless black face, until he smiled and reached across to rub James’s leg.

  I worked myself around until I could pull my knees up and ease the strain on my back. My neck was resting on my cell phone. It was vibrating with an incoming call. I hoped this was Adam calling back. If he called and I didn’t answer, he would either send a patrol unit over or check on me himself. Now I wished I had listened to him. He’d been wrong about James, but not Endo. I thought Endo would be somewhere over the Caribbean by now, yet here he sat on the end of my bed with a smile on his blackened face so pleasant you’d think we were talking about baseball or the weather. He gave James’s leg one last shake and stood up.

  I aimed both feet at his nuts and connected so hard it shoved the whole bed against the wall with a loud bang. Other than a brief stagger to regain his balance, it didn’t seem to phase him. “You have strong legs
,” he said. “But you can’t hurt me. Do you know, I haven’t slept since I was four years old? They tell me I used to sleep, but not anymore. It’s like I’m not even human. Tee hee hee!” His operatic little giggle made me cold all over. I landed a solid two-footed kick, hard enough to knock his balls out through the top of his head. He shouldn’t even be breathing. It was like I had kicked a corpse.

  He knelt beside the bed and dragged out my suitcases, opened them, closed them and pushed them back under the bed. “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  He glanced around the room as though mentally checking off a list. “You know what.”

  “Honestly, I don’t.”

  He left the room. I heard him banging around in the kitchen, dragging pots and pans out of the cabinets, opening drawers. In the dim light of my laptop, I saw him toss the couch cushions aside, then tip over the entire couch. He used his butcher knife to rip up the upholstery. Without looking at James, I tried to roll over so I could get my legs off the bed and at least stand up. I wanted to break a window and shout for help, but I couldn’t roll over without falling off the bed.

  Endo returned, stopping in the doorway with hands on hips staring around the room. “I searched the whole house. It wasn’t there.”

  “What house? What wasn’t there?”

  He smiled at me. “Like you don’t know.”

  “I honestly don’t.”

  “Even if you did, you wouldn’t tell me. But ve haf vays ov making you talk.”

  He pulled a small black bag from his pocket and sat on the end of the bed. He opened the bag, removed a smack junkie’s rig—hypodermic needle, bent spoon, stub of a votary candle, and worn Zippo, which he flicked open, holding the blue flame up to his face.” My grandfather must have sent the box to you before he murdered Cole.”

  “Michi murdered Cole?”

  Endo held the votive candle to the wavering blue flame. “Do you remember the day you sold Michi the photos of those Simon boys?” he asked. He had been watching me that day, probably though one of his spy holes. I remembered him dashing past the kitchen door, just before I left. “Michi hadn’t bought me a birthday present yet, so I begged him to get me a copy of your full collection of Playhouse Killer photos.” His eyes shone as he spoke the name given to him by the media, and I recalled the scrapbook of theater reviews we’d found in his apartment. He was his own biggest fan.

  “Cole Ritter came in just as I asked Michi for those pictures and he started laughing. Why Wayne, he says, are you our little ole Playhouse Killah? Michi looked at me. I saw it come together like a puzzle in his fat little eyes. Cole thought it was hilarious. He couldn’t stop laughing because Michi never suspected a thing. Michi’s cane had a sword in it. He stuck it through Cole’s heart because he wouldn’t stop laughing. So I helped my grandfather cover it up, made the murder look like one of mine. We had to hurry or I would have staged it better.”

  Endo was lying, of course. I said, “Cole rode with Michi to the hospital.”

  He shrugged and changed his story without missing a line. It was just another narrative to him, one just as good, just as real to his fantasy world mind as the next. “Michi caught me tearing his bedroom apart searching for the pictures. Only at that moment did he realize who I was and what I had become, right under his nose. He drew that sword from his cane and told me to me to get out of his hay-ouse. So I did. I wasn’t ready to kill him, anyway. I didn’t think he would turn me in, but I had to have those pictures, see? After I left, he had his little heart attack, or acted like he did. I was still in the garage when the ambulance showed up. I thought he might tell Cole about me on the way to the hospital, so I called Cole and told him I wanted to give him the whole story. I figured he’d want to hear it from me before he called the cops, because the great Cole Ritter always has to know everything first. The man never wrote an original thing in his life—it was all gossip. Michi told me all about Cole Ritter. Gossip was the only thing the great Cole Ritter was ever any good at.

  “Cole agreed to meet me, but first I had to take him home so he could get his little tape recorder because he was going to write a play about me, he said. We sat in Michi’s dining room drinking his wine until about two in the morning. I told him everything and when I was finished, he said he wanted to me to blow him. So I did. And when he was done and sitting there smoking his smug little cigarette, I took a sword out of the drawer in the china cabinet and stabbed that dirty little arras rat through the spleen. It was his own fault. He should have seen me coming because that’s how he would have written our scene.”

  Endo closed the Zippo and picked up the camera. “It’s not important now,” he said. He took a photo of me. When the camera clicked, he frowned and turned it around to look at the lens. “What’s wrong with the flash?”

  “It doesn’t have a flash,” I said.

  “It was working a minute ago.” It was like he didn’t hear me, or couldn’t hear me. I was just another object to him, a subject, already a corpse in his mind, to be manipulated, posed, and photographed. He bashed the Leica against the bed post. “I don’t like the way this thing looks at me,” he snarled. He flung it through the door into the kitchen. I heard it smash against the wall and tried not to let the pain of losing it show on my face.

  Instead, I tried to engage him, to buy myself some time, time for Adam to ride in and save the day. “Do you like to take pictures, Wayne?” I used his name, the name he preferred to bring us together on a more personal level. I asked him about himself, about what he liked to do, to bring him out of his fantasy world and into the moment. This is what they taught us to do in hostage negotiation training.

  It worked. “Oh yes,” he said, warming immediately to the subject. “It’s one of the few pleasures I allow myself. But I find I prefer video. Still photos are too limiting, don’t you think? You can’t get the true feel for a scene unless you’re actually there. Video is better for that. I wish I had brought my camera, but I hadn’t really planned to kill you. I have nothing against you, Jackie. You’re a wonderful photographer. All I want is my package.”

  “All your pictures are on my laptop. Every picture I’ve ever taken. I photographed every scene you created, all your best work.”

  “Even Michi’s?” he asked, suddenly excited, like a child at his birthday. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” He paused, smiling at me, his teeth floating in the darkness like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. “That’s from Macbeth, you know.”

  “You can have them all. Take the laptop. Anything you want.”

  “I’ve never been with a woman before.” He edged up the bed until he was sitting beside me. He took off his gloves and laid his hand on my left breast. His hand was hot from the gloves, or maybe from the fever consuming him. He was sweating through the black paint on his face. It started to run down his cheeks. “Sometimes I’ve wondered what it would be like to be with a woman.”

  “You could try it,” I offered. I was fishing for anything to stall him. Even that.

  “You’re a beautiful woman. Anybody can see that. Truly, truly desirable. But this…” He tweaked my nipple. “It’s just meat to me.”

  “What could it hurt to try? You never know. You might like it.”

  “I’m not really atttracted to women. I tried to go straight once.” He circled my areola with his finger, teasing it hard despite my revulsion. “I gave up the gay life and accepted Jesus H. Christ as my Lord and Savior. I signed up for this Christian camp run by Pastor T. Roy Howard, where they promise to cast out the demon of homosexuality. My roommate was this good-looking little black boy from Memphis, about sixteen years old. They actually put us in the same dorm room together, if you can believe that, locked us in every night. His mama sent him to camp so his older brother wouldn’t kill him. They didn’t want no down-low brother in the family making them look bad in front of the black community, you see, so they sent him off to exorcise the demon of homoseckshality. You may have seen his people on television las
t week, pulling out their hair and flopping around on the sidewalk over their dead baby boy, that very same down-low brother they couldn’t bear to have in their house—Chris Hendricks, of Hendricks Brothers Funeral Home.”

  Trying to keep him talking, I asked. “The cure didn’t work for you?”

  “Good God, no,” he drawled, and in a flash of lightning I recognized his resemblance to Michi. He had the same tired eyes, worn out from seeing too much, and the same soft face and lips, or would have if he were about fifty years older and a hundred pounds fatter. I wondered if Michi looked like Endo when he was a young man, newly-married to his wealthy, white, lesbian wife. Endo even sounded like the old pervert. He had adopted Michi’s Mississippi twang.

  “That Christian camp was a Goddamn NAMBLA convention. It was a flop house for closeted preachers with a Socratic penchant for young boys. The counselors were supposed to be reformed faggots, but they had set themselves up with an unending stream of easy ass-boys, all in the name of the Lord. People were actually paying them thousands of dollars a week to bugger their sons. I remember this one session—Get the Low Down on Christ—honestly, they didn’t even try to hide what they were doing. They even called their ministry ‘Servicing the Lord.’ So after about three days of trying to resist, what with that Hendricks boy crawling into my bed every night begging me to fuck him, I finally gave in. I stayed there about a week until I got tired of him and them and the whole damn thing. A man can get tired of just about anything.”

  “Why don’t you untie my hands?” I asked. He ignored me again, lost in his monologue on a dark stage of his own creation.

  “Michi was a saint compared to those Christians. At least he had to keep up appearances for the neighbors. This camp was about twelve miles back in the woods near Greer’s Ferry Lake. The shit that went on out there would curl your hair. But I really did want to go straight, see, so I checked myself out. They didn’t want to let me go because Michi was paying a lot of money for me to stay there and they said I wasn’t cured yet. They were worried about the state of my immortal soul and the demons of homosexuality. So I showed them some videos I had secretly taken of Dr. Howard baptizing … you understand … baptizing in his seminary fluid three white boys under the age of sixteen. They said I was cured and could go home, even drove me to the bus station in Little Rock and left me there without my camera or any of my luggage.”