Revolver

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  I held the razor tightly at first, controlling my impulse to cut deeper. The razors were embedded in a safety cap, allowing for a surface-level, injury-free shave. Not like the single-edged razor blade that left the shallow pink lines on my left wrist, and then years of therapy and medications in its wake. “My cry for help,” according to the shrinks.

  Finished, I stood in the steam-filled bathroom, wrapped in a terry cloth towel that I could happily live forever in. I wondered how gauche it would be to die in it.

  A black clothes bag hung from the inside of the door. I cracked the door open to let the steam out, then dressed. The white blouse and blue capris were both ironed – all sharp creases and crisp fabric. They fit well enough, but felt a bit loose, either because I wasn’t used to dressing so lightly or because weight loss from too many missed meals had left me little more than a skeletal frame covered in taught skin. I left the socks in the bottom of the bag and stepped back into the main room. Or was it a dressing room? Green room? Guest suite? Did it matter?

  Walking barefoot against the plush throw rug, I balled my toes into fists. I’d picked up this trick from some old holovid that pre-dated even my dad. It was oddly relaxing, and I paced for a few minutes, telling myself again this wasn’t a serious mistake.

  I can do this.

  Along the back wall was a long counter of freshly polished oak. The tang of Lemon Pledge was barely discernible beneath the thick stink of bleach. Glass shelves filled with bottles of amber and clear liquids caught my eye. A square tumbler waited on a coaster, inviting me. Something to steel my nerves wouldn’t hurt.

  I reached for the top shelf and pulled down a bottle of bourbon. Knocked back two fingers, neat. It took a minute for the burn to blossom behind my breastbone and deep in my belly, but the warmth spread pleasantly. The booze was much better than the stuff I’d been drinking for most of my meals of late, and I poured off another two fingers. Fuck it; I made it three.

  The walls were all white, and if I caught the right angle I could make out the dark tinge of stains, barely visible. The bleach had done a good job, but the cumulative effect of so many Revolver crowdfundings had left its indelible mark.

  On the opposite side, at the front of the room, were three liquid holodisplays. Two were running stock photos – a polar bear standing on an ice float, hummingbirds, Earth from space, massive steel-bodied trucks with customized chimneys spewing columns of black smoke into blue sky.

  The middle screen was running what passed for the news these days. Talking heads argued back and forth, digging deep into the disused history books and reaching all the way back to the nation’s only black president to focus all their angst and hate on. With complete, straight-laced seriousness, they laid all of America’s ills solely on that long-dead once upon a time president, exclaiming that he had been personally responsible for bringing Middle Eastern fundamentalist terrorists into the country across the Mexican border. One speculated that the ex-president had bought the cell leader a first class ticket with his own creds, but so what? It was still all taxpayer money, anyway.

  A viral outbreak was sweeping through Plano, Texas, and had left more than a hundred people dead. Apparently, also the former president’s fault. They never blamed the current president for the tumultuous mudslide the country had been lost under, and had, for the better part of a decade now, been arguing which of his former liberal rivals, whether in office or not, had done the most grievous harm.

  When the newsfeed switched cameras, to show the men in full and sitting across from one another, I saw that they were both armed. Naturally.

  In a segment they called ‘Secular Murder Spree’, they ran the names of women who had received abortions that week, and vented their frustrations over the continued existence of underground women’s health clinics. This in spite of the personhood amendments that stripped women of most of their civil rights. It took the broadcasters a surprisingly long time – nearly a full minute – to get around to comparing the clinics to Nazi extermination camps. In a ticker at the bottom of the screen, the names and addresses of each woman scrolled in an endless loop. I couldn’t figure out a way to shut off the display, but the rant was a convenient reminder that I was doing the right thing.

  I’d known what a shit-fest this faux news network was going in. Last week had been sweeps week, and to bolster ratings while also celebrating the anniversary of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act all of the state-run media reveled in bigoted debauchery. Revolver brought in a revolving door of LGBTQIA contestants who had no other options. Each had been given a choice – life in prison, chemical castration, or a chance to win their family some money and, maybe, give their deaths a smidge of meaning.

  The zealots in office told us often enough, and loudly enough, that this was a Christian America. They just never bothered to clarify if we were New or Old Testament. And eventually their claim was repeated enough to win the perception of truth. Now, everything was a Holy War.

  I covered my ears to block out the noises of such earnest hatred, but whoever was monitoring me was a spiteful little fucker, and the volume on the display rose and rose.

  This world was way too fucked up to keep on living in. Especially with people like that – the so-called reporters, the so-called politicians, all of them just radical fundamentalists beneath it all – given so much power and influence.

  Without knocking, Stevens opened the main door and popped his head in from the hallway. “Eyes are up here, bub,” I said, after his leer failed to drift much further north than my chest. “And quit drooling.”

  He came into the room, but spoke back into the hallway. “Come on in.”

  “Sure, that’s fine,” I said, like I’d been given a choice about who I socialized with before the main event. Stevens kept on ignoring me, but the woman that followed at least said ‘hello’, and seemed to recognize me as a fellow human being, if not a compatriot.

  “I’m Tracy,” she said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

  “Here?” I said, pointing at the barstool.

  She nodded – way too perky for me. “That’s fine, yeah.”

  I straddled the leather seat, feeling the weight of Stevens’s gaze all the while. Starting with a manicure, Tracy decorated me and got me all dolled up for my first, and last, time on TV.

  “I don’t think I could do this if I were in your shoes,” she confided.

  She kept her voice low, throwing Stevens a sideways glance every now and then. I caught him staring at the both of us more than once, licking his chops. He kept his arms folded across his chest, one hand lingering near the grip of his holstered pistol.

  “That’s because you haven’t hit rock bottom yet,” I said, rotating the tumbler between my fingers.

  While Tracy worked, I tuned into the newscast. Always a mistake. A supermodel had been shot to death in LA after staging a ‘Get Out The Vote’ campaign. Two female anchors – both blonde, full figured, and virtually indistinguishable from one another, as if they’d been plucked fresh from a cloning tank – had joined the men and were taking turns mocking the model’s life and her murder.

  “She was a supermodel,” one woman said, “so, obviously, she didn’t have much in the brains department.”

  “She didn’t get it,” the other said. “We’re at war with the Middle East, and she’s speaking out against gun rights and demanding gun safety for people here in the States. She’s part of this campaign to turn the country into a communist state. She got what she deserved.”

  “Ladies,” the first woman said, speaking to all of us now, her voice deepening into condescension, “you shouldn’t vote if you can’t control your emotions. If you can’t vote properly, if you can’t vote conservatively, stay home. Play with your apps and your phone and stay home. Make some cookies, find a date.” She threw the collection of paper she’d been holding at the table, clearly disgusted. “Do literally anything else.”

  “That’s right,” the other woman sai
d, nodding vigorously and glaring at the camera. “Our soldiers aren’t over there dying so you can go out to the polls and be completely clueless. Get a clue. Stay at home.”

  “Let her life be a lesson. She should have kept her mouth shut and her clothes off. Learn something from that, ladies.”

  A dull throb was building behind my eyes, and I pinched the bridge of my nose trying to drive it away. “How can you stand working for these people?” I asked.

  Tracy shrugged. “It pays the bills,” she said. Stevens coughed to attract her attention, and she shut her mouth.

  Instead, she said, “Close your eyes.”

  I felt the soft press of a brush against my eyelids, and then a few sweeps across each cheek. She did my lipstick, then had me blot with a Kleenex. Finally, she did a light bit of curling with my hair. Something simple, but it finished off the appearance she was going for.

  “What do you think?”

  For the first time in a long while, I felt – maybe even looked – beautiful.

  “Gonna be a shame to splatter half my head against the wall and ruin all your good work.”

  My words took the shine off her perkiness, her beaming smile cracking then eroding in stages; first crestfallen and then downright plummeting off her face entirely until her lips turned into a thin, barely-there crease. I couldn’t muster up enough of a shit to care. The bravado was false, and my suicide was still enough hours away to not feel entirely real. I watched her smile wither and die with a small bit of satisfaction as she packed up her gear without another word.

  Stevens was on top of me, clipping a wireless lavaliere mic into place.

  “You need to undo a few more buttons.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He held both hands out, his empty palms cupping the air in front of my breasts. “Show more skin. C’mon, this is your last night on Earth. Let’s see those tits.”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” I said.

  “It’ll bring in more money. You want to raise enough creds for your family, right? So?” He shrugged. “Show your tits. You’ll make a killing.”

  My face burned and I told him again, “Get the fuck out of here,” my words edgy and clipped. I fought back the desire to throw my drink in his face, not wanting to waste it.

  He huffed, his cheeks ballooning as his face turned red. He twisted away from me and stomped back to the door, talking all the while: “Hey, it’s your life. At least what’s left of it. You don’t want my advice? Fine. Don’t take it. Fuck you too. I’ve only been doing this for five years, you hear me? I know what I’m talking about. And before this? I worked on This Evening, Tonight. You want to get all stuck up over me trying to help? Fuck you, lady. Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame. Fucking psycho bitch.”

  The door slammed behind him, shaking in its frame. The holodisplays shimmered in the wave of his frustrations.

  I shot back the bourbon and poured another. Free booze was a luxury I hadn’t enjoyed in ages.

  I nursed my way through round number three, letting the liquor cut through the fog inside my head. I felt downright swimmingly all of a sudden, and the world was clear enough to me that I wasn’t sure if I needed to laugh at it or cry because of it.

  My fingernails were too neat, too shiny. I’d given up weeks of accumulated filth for that French mani, trying to shut out a memory that came to me, unbidden – my fingers scoring the earth as I tried to kick myself away from the weight pressing down on me. My heart raced and my hand started shaking. I had to set the glass back on the bar. My tough-girl routine could only carry me so far, but I’d almost died this morning. And how fucking ironic would that have been? To check out before I could do it on my own with cash in hand?

  I thought of the stranger’s oppressive weight bearing down on me, my fingers scrabbling, nails carving shallow scars into the dirt, its blackness pressing into the nail beds and crowding the corners of my vision. His breath had been hot and putrid, heaving forcefully into my face, his stink invading my nose and mouth. He’d held a makeshift knife – a long shard of glass with one end wrapped in electrical tape – to my throat and had finished before he’d even unbuckled his pants. The thrill of it, the physical power he had over me, had been enough for him, and it had been more than enough to leave me shaken and violated.

  I’d been through worse, so I wasn’t sure why I suddenly felt so shaken-up by this particular attack. Maybe it was Stevens, and his oafish, ripe sense of entitlement; the way his eyes had lingered and the way he’d held his hands before my breasts, not touching me, but making his thoughts plain enough.

  The bourbon made me feel less like a piece of meat, and forced my hand to be still.

  As I glanced around the room again, the truth of it finally sank in. A truth I had known in a largely academic way, without examining it too deeply; like knowing that the sky was blue. The reasons why weren’t important. It was a fact of life. But suddenly it carried new weight and settled into my brainpan, taking root in my mind with a new clarity.

  I was alone.

  Not too many people get a glimpse of how their own funeral will be, but I knew. All I had to do was take a look around this room and I could see the end so clearly. It was only me. No friends, no family. Not even motherfucking Stevens.

  Me and a gun. Somehow, I always knew it would end this way.

  THERE WERE NO windows in the room, but I could hear the rioting outside through the walls. Angry shouts, hostile screams – the sounds of discontent, of pain and resistance. I didn’t need to see it to know what was happening. I’d seen enough on the way in, as the Revolver security team picked me up from the displacement camp and delivered me here. This evening’s riot had been birthing then, but was in full swing now.

  Three floors up and on the opposite end of the street, I could still hear the loud engine and clacking of treads against asphalt as police combat carriers, mobile assault units and tanks rolled into place. The gunfire was sporadic, but I knew it would grow as the evening progressed. It always did.

  A week ago, I’d been on the outer edges of a riot that had engulfed the entire city square. I’d been scavenging for food and wound up with a mouthful of tear gas. That was before the police began firing their automatic rifles into the crowds. I’d been lucky to escape.

  As the bourbon settled, my mind drifted. I couldn’t help but think of good old Ravencroft. When I was sixteen and Dad demanded to know what had happened to my wrist and why it was wrapped in gauze I had lied – told him I cut myself on a bush … best I could think of at the time. Stupid, I know. He demanded to see, and when I tried to weasel out of it, he grabbed my arm and tore the bandage away. Then he found the razor after digging through the garbage can in my bedroom. After that, we were off to the ER and a week-long stay in the psych wing where they pumped me full of drugs that made me want to kill myself even more, and then medication that numbed my brain and turned me into a zombie during the very few hours I was awake.

  It had felt as if my mind was disconnected from my body, and that I was living in a frail shell where everything was slow and sluggish. I had existed for a time on two planes, both myself and not myself, a familiar stranger in my own skin. Another batch of pills made my heart race and the world sped up into a nauseating, dizzy spin. Eventually, they sorted it out, but not before a lifetime of cardiac irregularities had set in.

  Like this guest suite at the news station, my room in Ravencroft had been windowless too. Except there I had a roommate who spent most of the time muttering to herself and drooling across her hospital gown. I’d sit in the rec room with drugged-up horrors who stared blankly into space. There was a window there, at least, providing a wonderful view of the lower adjacent wing’s roof.

  “The attempt was serious,” I had argued in my earliest group therapy session. I had been exquisitely pissed off to have my aborted suicide brushed aside as a ‘cry for help’. I didn’t need help. I needed to not be such a fucking coward. I needed to not have a fucking la
st minute epiphany about all the things I’d miss if I were gone.

  “Then why not do a better job?” the doc had asked. “Why try to hide the razor in plain sight? Why not have a better excuse for your injuries?”

  No planning, no follow-through. A cry for help. I sat there crying, hating myself for living and having to sit through this shit. Officious prick.

  When I started drinking and collecting DUIs, my probation officer asked me what alcohol was supposed to solve. She didn’t get it either. None of them did. None of them understood the one, single, basic fucking fact of it all. Alcohol wasn’t going to solve anything – it didn’t have to. It simply needed to help me feel like a goddamn human being. It needed to make the world bearable.

  But that was the one thing the world could never be again – bearable. Things only got worse. The bottom fell out of the whole place completely after the last market crash; a total downward spiral, and those of us with too little had even less. Displacement camps were set up for those who had their homes seized by the banks, or the police, who became increasingly aggressive in their stop-and-seize practices, even in the total absence of a crime, in an effort to prop up their local governments and demand additional funding.

  I poured off two more fingers of bourbon as the gunfire went from erratic to almost continuous. I’d have to find a new bottle soon, and I wasn’t even trying to get hammered. I needed to be clear-headed enough to pull the trigger.

  Rioting had become such a common practice, a backdrop of daily life, that it hardly even made the news anymore, unless there was a significant body count. The mention of rape hauled me back to the broadcast.

  “Reports coming out of a college in Madison, Wisconsin where a young woman is claiming to have been raped by the football team. We’ve obtained some photos from the party she was attending, and look at that,” the journalist said.

  He was young, his hair a black Brillo pad. The photo, blown up to focus on the girl in question, occupied the right side of the display.