by Rafe Haze
Table of Contents
Title Page
THE NEXT
The Hunted
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Trademark Acknowledgement
Rafe Haze
WILDE CITY PRESS
http://www.wildecity.com
The Next © 2014 Rafe Haze
Published in the US and Australia by Wilde City Press 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, situations and incidents are the product of the author’s imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. This eBook cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this eBook can be shared or reproduced without the express permission of the publisher.
Published by Wilde City Press
ISBN: 978-1-925031-96-6
Cover Art © 2014 Wilde City Press
THE NEXT
Rafe Haze
The Hunted
It Eyed me
It Stalked me
It Absorbed my habits
Then decided
No
And went away to hunt another.
But am I freed?
For now I need
The Eying
The Stalking
The Absorption.
~ by Rafe Haze
Chapter One
When I first arrived in 1993, I was told I’d know I’d become a real New Yorker when a body pancakes on the cement at my feet at the base of a high rise. My agent disagreed. She said you become a New Yorker once you find the engorged blackened body of some glum neighbor rotting on his toilet after complaining to the super that his apartment smells foul and the pile of yellowing newspapers at his door has expanded into the hallway.
Either way, like most New Yorkers, I’d Yep with a grin. Yep with the understanding that some inevitable proximity to death would inaugurate me into a galvanized and oddly covetable world of cynicism. Yep with the assumption that on any one of the 7,300 days in the next two decades of cement-glass-steel-brick existence with the constant proliferation of people above, below, in front, and behind, it’d be fairly likely I’d encounter a flattened slash rotting body.
Not once in those shiny, nubile days twenty years ago did it occur to me that I might become one of those bodies.
At what point, as I rounded which pitch-pitted asphalt corner of one of the Empire’s seventy-two thousand city blocks, did this new grey notion begin to metastasize inside my gut? Stirring which cardboard cup of appallingly uninspiring burnt-brown Starbucks did I transform into one of the miserable sorry saps? The eyes-cast-down-on-the-subway have-nothings? One of the ones who gave up?
As one drowns, at some point the sack of bricks cuffed to your ankles starts doing you a favor. No songwriting gigs for the last six months. I had enough to pay the maintenance fee for perhaps one more month, after which I’d probably be allowed three months of non-payment before the landlord raised a true stink. The Con Edison bill had not yet arrived for this month, so I could remain burrowed in denial about grid energy. My Verizon cell and internet service would be cut off at any moment since those payments were delinquent too. I hankered to talk to nobody, but I needed the ability to accept and negotiate projects for the cash because even the cheap corner Thai food was starting to pop holes in the purse.
Was I cognizant I was slowly lowering myself with bent elbows and strained triceps into a self-cemented slough of green-brown shit, bill-by-bill, rejection-by-rejection, withdrawal-by-withdrawal? Was all that kept me from slumping into the slough entirely a telescoped ego-inflated conviction I had good songs at my fingertips, really good songs, straining as always to bleed out into tangibility? And how much longer could I continue to blame environmental influences for causing these musical lifelines to clot? My fear was that if something stays clotted long enough, one loses the ability to recognize its beauty. At what point would I just see the scars?
December eighth. Forty years old.
The sack of bricks decided my birthday was the perfect day to cuff itself to my ankle. For my first gift, I received an email from Mr. Palmer, my brother’s trailer park neighbor in a greaser town called Placerville, located in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains.
Paul is dead.
A year of shit-slurping in the muck trough had my emotional reactions well flat-lined, or at the very least well delayed, so these three words were redirected to an examination room in my brain for a clinical breakdown. Paul is dead. Literally three words. Intentional or not, the brevity had its own connotation. He died unnaturally. Not hit by a semi on Highway 5 or a stray bullet at McDonald’s. In those cases it would have read, Paul was killed. Not drugs, for Mr. Palmer would have informed me, as he had three times before, that Paul was using once again. But there was no phone call. Just one definitive short email which circumvented both conflicting emotion on the part of the messenger as well any on-the-spot further inquiry of details. Paul is dead. Passive in its tense…an insinuation of shame…
Oh. Oh…Fuck.
He succeeded this time.
He killed himself.
Paul would have been thirty-seven in March.
But on that morning in December I had no time, let alone faculty, to process the impact of my brother’s death. No time to be hit with the acute awareness I now had no family left alive. No time to realize I also had no tight group of friends to substitute for family.
Writers have their egos tightly entwined with the work they produce—largely because the moment they put their names to a song, they simultaneously imagine every individual actually reads the credits in the CD inside covers and proceeds to judge them to be a success or failure. With ever-sharpening fatalism, your work and its explicit and implicit deadlines become all-consuming to the point where even scheduling dinner plans becomes a chore. One by one, your friends begin to sense this, and it drives them to other New Yorkers more reliably, authentically, and overtly grateful to see them.
I recognized the pattern. I did not change the pattern. And on the morning I turned forty, the only person I had in my life on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis was the one person who would walk into my apartment that birthday morning and begin not doing the dishes.
Juicing the last of the Palmolive, Johanna was cleaning the dried green peppers of leftover Thai food crusting on a translucent plastic container from three days ago, a Styrofoam cup that once contained banana pudding, plastic silverware, and an empty Orangina glass bottle. Yes, she was cleaning the recyclin
g, which told me she was merely finding an activity that would allow her not to make eye contact with me.
9:17 a.m. She wanted to make this quick, so she chose a time where she would have an excuse to cut any belabored discussion short by the urgency of rushing off to work. She was wearing a dark blue suit more suitable to a law firm than the sales department of the luxury women’s clothing design company at which she spent sixty hours a week. She revealed no cleavage, messaging with absolute crispness that on this morning she was goal-driven, pointed, clean, and efficient. Nothing goes on the body of a fashion chick without a thorough subjugation of purpose—from the geographic source of the silk, the centimeter of heel height, the luster of gold on the bangle, the direction of the point of the collar, to the goddamn choice of stitch for the inseam.
Ten seconds after I’d learned my brother had committed suicide, and I was actually analyzing inseam stitching.
Fucking Christ.
“Johanna, just recycle the shit and get it over with.”
“It’s not another man.”
“You’re disgusted with me and me alone. I’m feeling better already.”
“I’m stopping this because...of so many reasons.”
She wanted me to let her off the hook rather than force her into the shithole of specifics, but I remained silent and forced her to struggle.
“We talked about them,” she said.
We did, but I shrugged my shoulders anyway and adopted my shell-shocked facial expression just to anger her, leaving her no choice but to retaliate.
“Your not remembering the reasons is one of them.”
“Johanna,” I paused until her averted eyes finally wandered back to mine. “Leave.”
She was too surprised at my own crispness and efficiency to acknowledge it. She instead circumvented the command by focusing on the closed dusty, thick, red curtains.
“How can you write in such a depressing environment?”
I repeated, “Johanna, leave.”
Her reaction was scripted and inorganic, precipitated by a year of lunchtime bitch fests with her well-coiffed colleagues, inordinately high-priced, coffee-clutching therapy sessions, martini fueled Sex-in-the-City girl-power nights out with her bedazzled gal pals, and isolated sweat-slicked thoughts during furious sprints on treadmills at Equinox:
“I give up trying to convince you not to give up.”
To me, the saddest part of her final words was not the appropriateness of the sentiment; it was its unoriginality. Even more pathetic was how unaware she was at how uninspired the notion was. My thoughts immediately circled back to how pathetic I was to focus on originality rather than the fact that Johanna was completely justified in giving me this particular middle finger, no matter how it was phrased.
She shrugged her petite shoulders as her final gesture to me, which, when punctuated with the curt clicking of her heels towards the door, communicated the ultimate disgust she’d felt since the day I stopped bringing in enough income to buy her six dollar soy caramel decaf latte every morning at Starbucks. Since the day I stopped paying a hundred and eighty-two dollars a month for the Equinox gym membership just to take the core boot camp classes with her and the room full of others desperately substituting tone and tightness for fulfillment and personality. Since the day I encouraged her to begin making a clear distinction between who she is at work and who she is away from work, and valuing the latter.
She closed the door behind her.
Thud. As conclusive and as brief as Mr. Palmer’s email. So much thudded away. Thud—those inane but energetic ongoing political and philosophical discussions concisely ended. Thud—the sexual ecstasy that once headlined the front page of our relationship suddenly castrated to a tiny bubble thought in the cartoon section. Thud—the delight of finding that kosher pizza joint and proclaiming it as our secret go-to place on Friday nights deteriorated into a piquantly annoying place to be avoided. Thud—the flirtation with marrying her and having kids curtailed with a dry, irreversible “No thank you. Not with you.” Thud—I no longer deserved her love, nor did I ever to begin with. I could feel that sour pill disintegrating my guts like a mug full of Drano.
Minnie, the toy dog, yappity yap yapped as she passed Mrs. Abraham’s door, mocking the tragedy. I listened to the remaining clicks of her heels down the tile stairs.
Fuck fuck fuck. Do I stop her? Do I even want to?
The street volume increased through the hall to my apartment and then cut out as she exited the building’s lobby three floors below. Thud.
One less person to fake being happy for.
My immediate thought was to call Paul and tell him it’s over. Paul hated her anyway.
Except…
I inhaled deeply and felt a strangulation of pain in the effort.
There was no Paul anymore.
Click—his death switched off all the goddamn painful memories.
I was not the kind that voluntarily sentimentalized the past with dusty rose-colored nostalgia. Particularly our past.
Happy Birthday.
Blow out the candles.
Blow out every fucking thing that burns.
Chapter Two
Eight blurry days later, my cell phone rang.
California area code.
I ought not to have answered.
With the sensitivity of a wire hanger the greaser official in Placerville asked me where he should send Paul’s belongings. What would I do with a collection of Mozart records? I had no record player. What would I do with a collection of Enid Blyton children’s books? I had no intention now of having kids to read them to. And what the fuck was my brother holding on to our childhood books for anyway? Why would I want any group photo of Paul and his flunky friends, half of them high on meth, and the other half trying to get there?
I replied to Sergeant Flunky, “No thank you.”
“What do you mean no thank you?”
“Do you read?”
“Yes.”
“What luck! The books are perfect for you. They’re children’s books.”
“Sir, I can’t…”
“Listening to Mozart increases brain activity. That may interest you.”
“Sir, I can’t keep any of it.”
“Then shred it all. Burn it.”
I hung up.
Sergeant Flunky tried calling back and received my voicemail, which was the equivalent of tossing a message in a bottle down a dry well.
Chapter Three
The waiting for the Next began.
The next fall of a shoe that would end something. The next fluttering that would begin something. The next anything that might trigger anything else. But until then, all I had was the thick gelatinous weight of waiting. Of darkness behind the thick, dark red dusty curtains, closing in my apartment’s murky stillness. Of the revolving, oozing thoughts so inconclusive it’d become too much effort to bother reproaching myself for failing to conclude anything. Of deliveries of paper bags filled with bland cheese, tortillas, and let’s call it chicken. Of phone calls ignored, mostly to spare the caller from the obligatory compassion layered on their impatient need for whatever information. Of pointing my sunken eyes at the television and imagining the sound and sight of the impact that evil glass and metal apparatus would make if I dropped it off a gargoyle at the top of the Chrysler Building. Of imagining dropping myself off that gargoyle. Of throwing away underwear made threadbare by twisting in my chair with the agitation and pointlessness of merely sitting upright at all. Of gradually abandoning routines like a trip to the Laundromat because it required hunting for quarters, gathering clothes, hauling a bag, and making myself just a hair more presentable to distinguish myself from the piss-and-shit-soiled homeless people Rosalinda kicks out of her establishment because they only enter to beg for money and take a crap in the tiny pink can in the back.
Like the mice rustling behind the thin painted walls, I started becoming aware of all the encroaching coulds. I could do some sit-ups. I could catch up on
missed episodes of Rachel Maddow. I could floss. I could write a song about a breakup. I could replace that light bulb. I could order a mushroom and black olive pizza. I could open the curtains and watch the neighbors. I could get a broom and bang the ceiling to tell the tweaking twinkie twat in the apartment above me once again to stop playing his fucking thump thump thump music at two a.m. I could masturbate. It’s all the same to me.
It’s all too much to tackle.
It’s all too little to tackle.
I could try and write a song about Paul.
Or could I?
Why can’t I remember crap about him? Me? Us? Nothing surfaces. Nothing. Not a single fucking bubble of detail.
I’d never had fantastic recall to begin with. I developed a dependency on some major memory jogs to recall even the street I lived on as a child. Jogs like writing music. Jogs like writing lyrics. Since songwriting in my curtained New York prison had become as plausible an activity as, let’s say, dressage, I assumed what little long-term memory I’d possessed fell victim to gangrene and was amputated months ago.
Perhaps dropping the turbulence of my past had simply been my brain’s natural evolution towards a more efficient present? Doesn’t a slump without the baggage of history speed your journey to recovery?
Assuming there was any recovery.
Or was this pretty much it?
Fuckity ho hum.
The door buzzer buzzed, startling me like a camera flash in a dark movie house.
“Yum Yum’s.”
“Come on up.”
I pressed the button to let the delivery boy from the Thai restaurant up. The door speaker buzzed again.
“Sir, could you possibly come downstairs to get it?“
“Why?”
“I’m double parked. Wanna keep an eye on my car.”
“No.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“You have to come upstairs.”
“But…”
I hung up and buzzed the door again. Part of me felt like an asshole. The dominant part didn’t give a shit. I had no injuries. I was not paraplegic. I was not too lost in any creative moment to be interrupted. I simply could not go into the hall, let alone go downstairs.