Frayed

by Tom Piccirilli

  I wanted to see him go crazy with hate.

  I wanted to see him break down into a puddle of his basest emotions, and then I wanted to stomp him into the ground. I had written similar scenes to this many times before. So many times that the critics cal ed me repetitious. Interviewers asked me why I was stuck using the same images and narrative devices. I wished I could’ve invited them al to see this.

  You can’t move beyond whatever it is that needs to be exorcized.

  I threw him the knife. He gasped as it approached and he fumbled the blade in his hands. It flipped against his chest and plunged down to stick into the floor. He peered at a smal cut on his finger, a drop of blood wel ing. Good ole Mark Kutchman, who’d kicked the shit out of me in front of a restaurant ful of gawkers, and now he looked like he wanted to cry because he had a boo-boo.

  “Use it, you prick,” I growled at him.

  He glanced at Emily and said, “No.”

  She shrieked at me, her fists battering at my back.

  “Get out! Get out!”

  I told him, “Do it.”

  “No.” He sneered and the malice was alive and burning inside him. He threw the knife aside.

  I stared into his eyes and knew he would’ve given it a go if she hadn’t been here. I grinned.

  He wasn’t any saner than me.

  9

  ANOTHER ONE, RIGHT HERE,

  WHO ASKS THE QUESTION

  THEY ALL ASK (AND YOU ANSWER)

  The storm inside wanted out. It screamed to be put down onto the page. I wrote for four days straight, hardly eating or sleeping and without going outside even once. I worked on the new novel for a while but realized it could wait. I’d gotten through the wal and the ending seemed clear to me now. For the moment, I had other stories to tel .

  None of them were horror as I’d written in the field before. No supernatural creatures or occult matters, no cyborg assassins or alien possession. Instead I fil ed the pages with tales of lost men and women, the damned and the disturbed, the forgotten and the missing.

  People who crawled the back al eys and stumbled through their disheartening trials, who’d never done much wrong in the world but had never done much good either.

  The lackluster, the common, the average who had become weary of their own mindless mediocrity.

  I had no idea what to do with the stories. Where to sel them, who to show them to. I was about as far out on the rim of my humble talents as I’d ever gone, and I stil wasn’t sure why. It seemed a grand waste. Al this sudden energy and I stil wouldn’t be making any money, garnering any new fans, or fulfil ing any contractual terms. I kept cal ing up the book on my computer screen, but the moment it appeared I’d click it off again. There was so much more to accomplish before I could get back to that, but I didn’t know what else I should be trying to do.

  I sat sweating in my underwear stinking up the apartment, scratching my beard stubble and doing my best not to look in the mirror. It wasn’t difficult. It’s sometimes too great a chore to look at your own face.

  Late in the evening of the fourth day, with a strong breeze blowing through the apartment, the hint of rain again in the air, I was lying on the couch enjoying the deep weariness in my muscles. I thought I might sleep wel tonight, for the first time in weeks. I’d printed out my seven new tales and had them neatly paper-clipped and stacked on the coffee table. I stil had no idea what to do with them.

  A knock on the door roused me from the couch.

  “She who is the shining light laid over the eyes of children.”

  I threw some clothes on and answered.

  It was Doctor Ferrara. Or Trudy, if that actual y was her first name. She’d refused to tel me.

  “Hel o, Eddie.”

  “Doctor.”

  “May I come in?”

  “You’re a little far from your usual stomping grounds aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  She walked in carrying a smal handbag that swayed at her side and patted her hip. She took careful notice of my disheveled appearance and the chaotic state of my apartment, which was unusual for me but not so odd for most bachelors in New York City.

  If the Club Med of insane asylums had at least one token feces-smearing lunatic, maybe she wouldn’t be pul ing a face now. Her attitude seemed to be a mix of the two extremes I’d seen the first two times I’d seen her. Cold but with a makings of a smile. Control ed and determined, but also with a touch of familiarity, like we were old friends getting reacquainted.

  “Dr. Howards and I thought it would be in Mr. Gray’s best interest to talk further with you.”

  “I don’t suppose I have anything to say about it, eh?”

  “Certainly you do. I’l leave if you’re uncomfortable.”

  She was pretty damn smooth, giving the subtle implication that I had something to be scared about.

  That if I didn’t talk to her I was somehow weak. I was a lot easier to fuck with than I’d ever previously considered. My visit to the Clinic continued to have aftereffects I never would have imagined.

  I slid some old newspapers and pizza boxes off my lounge chair and said, “Not at al , Dr. Ferrara. Please sit. Tel me, how’s Gray doing?”

  “As wel as can be expected.”

  “That sounds faintly ominous. What’s wrong now?”

  “He’s had something of a setback.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s stopped working since your visit. Also, he’s convinced that a girl committed suicide on the Clinic grounds by swal owing cigarette butts.”

  I sat on the couch across from her. “Did she?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You say that as if it’s inconceivable. It’s not. Not even at a bin posing as a resort.”

  “Please, Eddie, it’s not a ‘bin.’” Her chin firmed up as if she might be preparing to argue, but then thought better of it. “However, what you say is true, it’s not inconceivable that there are occasional misfortunes.

  But we wouldn’t hide the fact if such a tragedy had occurred.”

  “Why not? You make a hel of an attempt to hide everything else from your special guests.”

  She hit me with that glare again, making the effort to search down through my bones. I found it vaguely naughty.

  “Why does he hate you so much?” she asked.

  “Because we’re best friends.”

  “Best friends don’t attack each other...” she said, but her voice petered out.

  “That right? And lovers never kil each other. And al children are respectful of their parents. And nobody cheats on their taxes.”

  I knew then that Howards had al owed her to take point on Gray’s case because she was bound to learn more from him, and more from me. How clearly we wear our needs on our sleeves, in our eyes, in the way we moisten our lips. Gray and I both wanted the girl next door despite our failed relationships with just such women. He was only a hair on that side of insane, and I was only a hair on this side, and maybe not even that.

  “Please answer me,” she said.

  “He hates me because I stole his first story.”

  The answer took her back. She seemed to have thought she was only asking a rhetorical question.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was about an angel named Jazrael.”

  “And you stole his story?” Incensed, excited now that I’d admitted it. Her pretty knees began to bounce, and I stared at their dimples. I wondered if she was going to kick me. “Plagiarized it?”

  Some things could never be explained. And why the hel should I have to discuss any of this with Gray’s doctors? If they’d been worth a damn, they could’ve gotten him to reveal his motivations, fractures, and hang-ups al on his own. The burden of my responsibility to him had to end eventual y, didn’t it?

  Despite my resistance I stil found myself talking.

  “We were out on the Isle of Dogs, camping. We talked about the idea al night long in our tent. We fashioned the tale together. In t
he morning we both went home and wrote our own stories on our fathers’ typewriters.

  But Gray’s mother was a housewife. My mother was a secretary. She taught me how to type. I could do seventy words a minute even back then on a manual.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I finished my story first and showed it to him. So he never finished his.”

  Her knees quit tapping, and I sighed. She skirted forward, forced me to look into her face. The icy mask melted around the edges. “Why do you say you stole it then? It was your story too.”

  “I’m just tel ing you why he hates me. It goes back to that. Maybe further. I don’t know. You’re the one who needed an answer, not me.”

  She stood and drifted to my bookcases. I’d published thirteen novels so far in my career, and Gray had published seven. In general, his were more literate, thoughtful, insightful, and far better reviewed.

  Dhavana was stil considered a cornerstone by genre fans. But my sales were better and my output was large enough to attract a little more attention from publishers. He’d had enough movie interest to pay his bil s whereas I’d written three screenplays and gotten zilch from Tinseltown. It only served to make our drive and our resentment that much more concentrated, which was probably for the best.

  It did my heart some good to see Trudy ignoring Gray’s novels and started pul ing my books down from the shelves, checking titles. Dead Hand of Purgatory.

  The Swift and the Stunned. Carotid. Jugular.

  Corroded by Love. Brother of Darkness.

  “May I have these?” she asked.

  I tried not to sigh. Everybody in the world had way too much fuckin’ gal when it came to getting free copies of a book off the author. I should ask for a free steak from a butcher or get an oil change for nothing.

  “Sure,” I told her.

  “Was he abused as a child?”

  “Yeah.”

  “By his father?”

  “No.”

  “His father was a drunk wasn’t he?”

  “No.”

  “He references wine whenever he speaks of his father.”

  “That’s because his father was a wine sel er.” She gave me a look like she thought I was being facetious.

  “A wine seller, doctor, not a wine cel ar. Get it?”

  “But he hates his father.”

  “He hates everyone he loves.”

  “And your father?”

  “What about him?”

  “How do you feel about your father? He speaks of your father nearly as often as his own, and seems to occasional y reverse them.”

  “My dad was the same type of man as his. Strong, personable, hardworking. Warm and solid.”

  I told her more. How the two men had been friends though not particularly close. They played on the same softbal team in Central Park —the Canal Street Cannolis— and had spent their entire lives within six blocks of one another in Little Italy and Soho.

  Gray’s grandfather had come from a long line of winemakers. He took the boat over from Sicily just before

  Mussolini

  conquered

  Ethiopia.

  He

  Americanized Grigio to Gray and became a wine merchant on Mulberry.

  My grandfather came from Palermo as soon as it was clear Il Duce was going to rev up the troops for WWI . He was sixteen and had Canetti changed to Cane even before he’d gotten off the boat. His family trained dogs for the shepherds. They’d given my grandfather a wool overcoat to wear on the voyage. It made him smel like a wet dog so his fel ow voyagers cal ed him cane—Italian for dog — as a joke.

  They spel ed it that way on his papers. He worked his way up from busboy to waiter to manager at La Tasca’s, which he bought in 1960 when al the big New York mafia crews were swinging their weight through town, thanks to Sinatra and Kennedy.

  Our fathers grew to manhood in those shadows, as we grew to manhood in their own. “His mother? Did she abuse him?”

  “No.”

  “Who then? Neighborhood children?”

  “No.”

  “You?”

  “No. Himself. The world. Al of us, none of us. You’re asking the wrong questions.”

  The crease between her brows deepened and she clutched the stack of books tighter to her. It was an oddly sexual gesture, or so I thought. “You’re not being very helpful.”

  “You can’t track true madness.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I know you don’t. It real y doesn’t matter. You’re never going to heal him, don’t you understand that?

  You can’t heal anyone. They either work their way through the fire themselves or they don’t.”

  “Tel me about yourself.”

  “No.”

  Now, acting stunned, as if I was somehow betraying a newly formed friendship or cheating on a girlfriend.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Doctor, I’m under no obligation to answer your questions, and I’m not interested in continuing this, ah, interview.”

  “Not even to help your friend?”

  “Help him do what?”

  She quickly started shoving books into her handbag. I could see the eagerness in her again, the desire to say something even though she was trying desperately to hold back. I decided psychiatrists were very screwy people with a lot of their own repressions.

  I al owed myself the compliment of thinking perhaps she wanted me. Her breasts jiggled slightly and I suddenly felt horny, but not for her. And not for Emily.

  Maybe for Nola. What would Trudy think about that?

  As a doctor and a woman?

  I had a feeling I knew what she was about to say, and I couldn’t keep from smiling.

  “What happened out on the Isle of Dogs, Eddie?”

  “To me or to him?”

  “Both of you.”

  “Ask Gray.”

  “I did. He told me to ask you.”

  Her cel phone rang and she had to dig past my novels to find it in her handbag. She answered it and spoke in a clipped, terse, mostly monosyl abic outburst. “Yes. Oh. No, it must be a mistake. I don’t accept that. No. I see. Yes, I understand.”

  She looked at me and her firm voice was fil ed with an aching. “It seems that Mr. Gray has left the Clinic without permission.”

  Any other mental institution and they would’ve cal ed that an escape. “He’l be coming here.”

  “Something else.” She began to tremble, and I final y saw more real emotion in her, that exterior cracking and al owing me a glimpse of something inside that began to make my bel y burn. “He supposedly did something.”

  “What? What did the bastard do now?”

  She couldn’t hold onto the handbag anymore. It spun and my books dropped and buffeted her feet. It was a powerful symbol that made me feel very confident of my place in the black universe.

  “He’s suspected of...having kil ed another guest.

  Strangling her. With his belt.” Her eyes widened and grew more and more distant. Soon tears dribbled down her face though her expression hadn’t changed.

  A pleasant flood of noise fil ed my head as Trudy stepped to me, wanting to be held, but I didn’t take her in my arms. “He was the last one seen with her.

  They only just found her body, but she’s been dead for hours. Cheyenne Califa. But why? My God, why?”

  The storm outside wanted in.

  10

  CLARITY OF DEFINITION,

  WIPERS ON HIGH

  BUT SMEARING

  I left her standing in my apartment and rushed down the two flights of stairs, careening and slamming into the wal at each turn. Gray already had at least three hours to hitchhike or steal a car and get back into the city. He was either already here or had decided to go straight out to Long Island, twining his way along the parkways to the Isle of Dogs. To wait for me.

  Sometimes your fate is directionless and without form, and sometimes you can see the threads of your life drawing together and poi
nting to one very specific time and place and goal. Gray and I had, for no reason I could see, been on a col ision course since we were born. The way before me was clear.

  I had to get back out to the state park, to the mud and surf where we used to camp as boys and where we wrote our very first story together, which I had stolen because my mother had been a secretary.

  How could he not hate me?

  I sprinted through the rain to my parking garage three blocks away. I kept swal owing water and didn’t know why until I realized I was sneering the entire time, with the rain washing against my teeth.

  So he’d done it.

  Gray had murdered a woman. Again.

  Again.

  “— who is set over mankind and over chaos and over spirits, queen of paradise, ruler over serpents and cherubim.”

  So now I was tel ing myself the story of the Isle of Dogs, where two boys with imaginations too powerful for the constraints of their friendship decided to create an angel from out of the burning summer sand.

  Where she stood before them, her wings of bril iant gold, and charged them to keep her secret. But the burden was too great—

  I ran inside and took the elevator to the fifth level, found my car and pul ed out with the engine screeching and the tires squealing. I don’t know why I felt such a need to get there as fast I could. Gray would wait for me however long it took.

  I had to slow down. I had to be calm. But it wasn’t possible, having prepared for this moment for too long. I stomped the gas pedal and stood on it al the way down the spiraling ramp, and barely managed to hit the brake in time as a figure moved in front of my path.

  “Who

  is responsible for overseeing the repentance of sinners and the growth of boys into men.”

  Trudy stood before my car, wet and breathless, her hair writhing into her eyes. “Wait!”

  “Get out of the way!” I screamed. If I tried to veer around her I might clip her hip, but I was this close to giving it a try.

  She placed her hands on the hood, as gently as if she was touching a frightened child. “Where are you going, Eddie?”

  “You know where. I told you where.”

  “You think he’s going out there? To the park?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Why? Why there?”