The Inside Out Man

by Fred Strydom

  Jolene pushed on: You don’t look like one of Leonard’s regular cronies. Nope. You haven’t had enough sun on you. And your shoulders are up, your neck’s too stiff, Lurch Addams. Loosen up! Here. She handed me a glass of wine. Take two before meals. Now, come. We’ve got guests to entertain, you and me.

  She took me by the hand and led me to the house. The physical contact set something off in me. We swooped inside. The décor reflected the outside look, a mix of handmade objects and shiny hi-tech toys. A big backlit fish tank formed the bottom of the bar counter. An assortment of liquors and liqueurs were lined up, their trendy bottles making the contents look like milkshakes or glow-in-the-dark radioactive waste.

  Heads turned to us, and Jolene extravagantly introduced me as the greatest bloody jazz musician she’d ever known—Seriously, you’ve just got to hear him play, a musical genius, people, you’ve never heard anything like it!—which resulted in a round of handshakes, murmured hulloes, pleased-to-meet-yous, how’d-you-dos, and a couple of kisses on my cheeks.

  Faces swam in and out of focus. There was a woman with a black bob and too much eyeshadow who raised her glass to me with a wink. A balding man eyed me with distrust from behind round lenses. Two others slunk into the circle: a lanky guy with a long face, narrow eyes, and greasy hair who felt the need to mention he was a literary critic, and another acne-scarred man who looked like a seventies porn star—complete with ponytail, gold chain, and a nest of black chest hair on display.

  Not a single one of their names stuck. It was nothing personal. Names just fall out of my head sometimes. The one thing I couldn’t help thinking, however, was how different we all were—and not just different, but mismatched, as if we were a cross-section of people off the street who’d been roped into some kind of social experiment. That, or the cast of a gritty Snow White remake, featuring all-new Disney dwarves: Smiley. Sleazy. Pervy. Boasty. Misanthropy.

  I was surprised to learn that nobody seemed to know their hostess very well. None of them had been to Jolene’s house before. I didn’t really get it, but I didn’t dwell on it either. For whatever reason, there we all were, Jolene’s collection of strange new curios, hanging out with her, like the teapots in her trees.

  We sat around the dinner table, and course after course was brought out by two smiling young women. Throughout, the guests talked about anything and everything that came to mind. For me, silence worked better than the bullshit. I opened a bottle of Blood River Shiraz and made friends with it. Two glasses in, Jolene leant over and grabbed the bottle, doing me the favour of topping up my drink.

  What can I say, I said as she poured, I’m a drinking composer with a music problem.

  She laughed. So, are you glad you came?

  Everyone else was in their own bubble of conversation.

  I am, I said.

  She grabbed an empty chair and sat down beside me, looked around the room, pushed her hair behind her ears, and then turned to me with a smile that seemed to flick on with a switch. She crossed her legs, and her knee caught my eye, rousing me. I remembered how I’d felt after my call in Leonard’s bedroom.

  You know what, I’m sorry, she said. It wasn’t fair of me.

  What, exactly?

  Inviting you. I’m not sure now it was the right thing to do. She stopped, put her hand to her mouth, tried again: No! God. I mean, you’re lovely. Really. It’s been great meeting you. It’s just, well, I think when the phone rang, and that number showed up, I needed to … I don’t know …

  Feel closer to him? I ventured.

  She gave a sigh, then smiled. I felt myself shrink before her eyes. Nothing nudges you out the playground quite like a woman who pities you.

  You know, Bent, he’s what you’d call … an enigma, she said. The problem is, “enigma” isn’t good. It isn’t bad. It isn’t anything. You can’t fall in love with an enigma. It’s more of a whirlpool. Or a black hole, sucking you in and then crushing the light. That’s what an enigma is, and that’s what Leonard is.

  Wow, I said. That’s pretty brutal.

  She jutted out her bottom lip. Ah, he’s already got to you.

  I immediately thought about Leonard, wondering what he might be doing right then. Sleeping? Writing his memoirs on the wall in blood and shit? Playing the world’s longest game of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall? My mind swerved to the image of the man outside the window, waving at me, watching me, then vanishing without a trace.

  I asked, Have you known each other long?

  Yes and no, she said. When it comes to Leonard, things don’t really work that way.

  What do you mean?

  She paused, looked up, tried again. It’s like the longer you’ve known him, the less you in fact know him. The closer you think you are to getting to the bottom of him, the further you actually are. Take you, for example.

  Me?

  Ja, you, bright eyes. You’re probably closer to him than I am. Yet here you are, trying to find out about him from me. And that’s the thing. Like I said, an enigma. But you know that already, don’t you?

  With a shrug, I said, I hate to disappoint, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. I folded my napkin tightly (six times, all together). As I did so, I noticed my blood-stained fingernails, and quickly unfolded it, sliding my hands under it. It took me a moment to pick up where we’d left off. I don’t know Leonard very well. We’re not friends, really.

  No? she said, cocking her head.

  I shook my head. We’re actually strangers. I water his plants.

  Water his plants. Hmm. Right. Important job.

  Someone has to do it.

  Sure, she said, with a gentle tug at my collar. Well, I guess he must be pretty grateful since he was kind enough to let you wear one of his favourite shirts, hmm? One last smile, and she stood up. I’ve always liked him in this colour, she said. Then she kissed a forefinger, and traced it along the length of my nose.

  Dessert arrived. A towering croquembouche drew oohs and aahs and predictable gags about guilt-trips and compromised dietary plans.

  I’d tried small talk, but the banality hurt my head, and in the end nobody bought that I cared anyway. But the booze went down and a familiar haze blurred everything. Like Vaseline smeared on an old camera lens, it created the mistiness of a low-budget movie dream sequence. I couldn’t shake it off, so I tucked in my tongue, and left it at that.

  The only other person who refrained from yakking was Jolene. She danced by herself to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” As she swayed, I tried to imagine her with Leonard. How did they see each other? What did they talk about? What kind of people did they pretend to be with each other? Or was the issue that they simply couldn’t help being themselves? And how much could Leonard possibly have cared for her if he’d chosen to lock himself away for a year without telling her?

  Heels off, hair down, and eyes closed, she danced tipsily, twirling in slow circles, a beautiful ghost conjured up in a séance. She was soon joined by Eyeshadow Girl, with her awkward yet innocent sexual moves. The two women were simply letting go, I reminded myself. That’s all. Remember letting loose, Lurch?

  Porn Star was next to join, followed by Baldy and the Critic. By now Jolene had emerged from her mesmerising, solitary trance. The new dance to some recent pop song was a cheaper performance, without nuance, without any kind of truth, I thought. She slid her back up against one of them playfully, then threw her head back with a laugh—

  Something in the corner of the room caught my eye.

  Partially veiled by the fold of a curtain, a patch of fog appeared at the dining-room window. I did nothing but stare at it for a long while, wondering if there was anyone out there. My mind jumped once more to the man in the garden. I considered getting up to take a closer look, but didn’t, afraid my guess might be correct. Then, as if there was indeed someone out there, the patch of fog shrank, expanded, shrank and expanded—

  Hey, Mr. Cool!

  My head flicked s
ideways, and I looked at Jolene.

  She was on the makeshift dance floor, and as she came over, I quickly told her I didn’t dance. But she just grabbed my hand and said, Of course you don’t, you’ve got another job. She pulled me to a piano in the corner of the room.

  I threw one more glance at the window.

  The white breath was gone.

  I shrugged it off, sat down, fingered a few of the yellowing keys. The piano was slightly out of tune, but the crowd was drunk and easy. So I played—a piece I hadn’t played in years, some rockabilly number from a long-gone phase of my life. It came easily. The crowd whooped and cheered, and soon they were hovering over me. They were impressed—gasping and cheering—which made me play faster and harder. I riffed on the song, fingers doing a quick crab-walk from one end of the keyboard to the other. The crowd cried out for me to let the piano have it, to play faster and faster, and then they were back on the floor, in full arm-swinging, head-swivelling glory. For a moment the whole thing was almost fun, more fun than I’d had at the piano in a helluva long while—

  But no.

  Something inside me refused to let me grab the moment. The feeling grew. I couldn’t say what it was, exactly. Not at first, though it began as a tingling, a low, arrhythmic something in my stomach. Around me, the room stretched and warped, and when I looked up—

  Bulge.

  That’s the word that came to mind. The world began to expand, swelling and ballooning. I turned to look over my shoulder, but Jolene and the guests were no more. There were no longer five people on the floor, but only one—one fleshy mass with flailing arms and legs, like the rough draft of a new Hindu god, moving in and out of itself, and holes were opening, and the holes had teeth and pink tongues, and laughter poured out of these holes.

  Panic. Panic. Panic.

  I shut my eyes, opened them, and for a fuzzy instant they were all individual people again, as they’d been all evening—people whose names I still couldn’t remember, but who were individuals nonetheless—until an arm slipped into another arm, and a pair of shoulders had two heads, and then this restless, sexless mass had one big head and many mouths, and one of them opened wide and yelled at me to keep playing, to Pound it! Pound the hell out’f it, piano man!

  I looked down at my feverish hands. They were no longer connected to my arms, but detached and independent, doing their own mad thing. The walls began to bend, the piano softened and slumped, and I felt the darkness soak into me, reminding me of the night I’d first met Leonard. The fingers kept playing and pounding and playing, and the fleshy, bulbous chimera behind me kept laughing and singing and dancing—a human croquembouche.

  And then everything dissolved and disappeared.

  38.

  Two paramedics wheel my mother out of her apartment block on a metal gurney—“One step, two step, easy does it.”

  Her dead body is covered by a baby-blue sheet. There’s a wet patch in the middle, but I don’t know what it is. A bit of piss? Sweat? Booze from the bottle that had slid to the floor when I’d found her? The rickety gurney bounces across the pavement and a hand flops out. Her fingers are fat and white, like raw pork sausages. As the paramedics pass by, the whole rig reminds me of a grisly buffet tray being rolled out for some big creature somewhere—something that just loves a cut of dead drunk mother. The paramedics, they don’t even look at me as they wheel her across the pavement, as if I’m the ghost, as if that’s actually me under that sheet.

  I’m sitting on the steps outside my block. I’m not saying a word and there isn’t even a sad lump in my throat. I don’t feel much beyond a vague sense of curiosity. All I do is dimly wonder how many people have died in that very same spot over the entire history of time. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands.

  I watch as the buffet tray is lined up with the back of the ambulance. The doors are already open—a low-rent version of the Pearly Gates. A man descends the steps behind me and stands at my side. He’s wearing neat brown trousers. They stretch all the way up to the bottom of his black leather jacket, like a tree trunk disappearing into a dark cloud. Above that, a big thick moustache twitches, looking like a scared dumb animal clinging to his face. A hand disappears into a pocket, and out comes a box of smokes. He lights up, looks down at me.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” the man says.

  “Thanks,” I say—as if I’ve just been praised for something.

  The man, he pauses, then he says, “It was probably a heart attack. But I don’t want to say just yet.”

  I think about how it doesn’t matter at all whether it was a heart attack, an embolism, or an extraterrestrial brain parasite. Dead is dead.

  “How old are you?” he asks.

  “Eighteen in three weeks.”

  “You have a father?”

  I jut out my bottom lip and shrug, indicating I couldn’t care less.

  “You earn money?”

  I nod at this because, yes, I do earn money. I’m the only one who’s been earning money for months now. But he doesn’t need to know my business. And he respects that I don’t tell him; I can see it on his face. Adults don’t share personal details. It’s the first step towards self-preservation in a world where no one gives a shit till you’ve got something they want.

  The man smiles and takes a drag. The smoke jets out of him.

  “Good,” he says. “That’s good. You gonna be all right here? You want—”

  “No,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You’re gonna have to come down … to the station, of course. There’s paperwork. Stuff to sign. Nothing serious. Think you can handle that?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m sorry you had to see your mother go like that.” He shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have had to be the one.”

  I consider what he’s just said, hold myself back from saying that if it wasn’t me, it wouldn’t have been anyone else. My mother and I were somewhat short on witnesses to our lives. At times I thought that, for her, I was the only proof that she existed at all.

  And maybe that went both ways. Maybe she was my proof, too.

  The man—I assume he’s some kind of cop—bends down and offers his pack of cigarettes to me. He gives it a shake and a single pops out. I’ve never smoked in my life, and I gingerly take it from him. He must know I’m not a smoker by the way I’m holding the cigarette, like I’m about to write something down, but he says nothing. He just flicks his lighter in front of my face. I stick the cigarette between my lips and lean forward. I take a deep pull, the smoke goes into my lungs, but I don’t cough. I’ve seen new smokers cough on their first—but not me. I inhale, embrace a slight wave of dizziness, and take another pull. Then I sit on the stairs, puffing away and watching as the ambulance doors are shut and the paramedics amble to the front of the van. They’re in no rush. They don’t even switch on the lights, or the siren.

  I really wish they’d put on the lights—just for a bit, if for no other reason than to alert the world to the fact that my mother’s just died, to have the event of her death turn at least one or two last heads. But the way they drive down the street—so casually—there’s no sign that they’re carrying anyone at all. Even now, as she’s being ferried out the world by her boatmen, no one gives a crap.

  “And that’s that,” the plainclothes cop remarks. I think he’s slipped up by saying this; he was only supposed to think it. He looks down at me to see how I react—his moustache does a nervous samba on his lip—but there’s no need to worry; I’m in complete agreement with him.

  “Yes. That’s that,” I say. And I finish my first cigarette.

  39.

  I woke up in Leonard’s bed, in the master bedroom. I was still in my turquoise shirt and pants, feeling rough, with no recollection of how the party had ended, or how I’d got home. I climbed out of bed and went downstairs to the fridge. I drank almost a litre of orange juice, straight from the carton, and took two aspirin. Then I mustered the pluck to call Jolene—I needed to know what ha
d happened the previous night. But no one picked up. I tried again a few hours later, without success, and then wrote it off, did my best to forget the whole thing. The warping walls. The flesh. The teeth and the tongues …

  What was it all about? Whatever was happening, it was getting worse. The blackout in the bar. The hyper-lucid dreams of blubbery creatures and undead dogs. People popping in and out of paintings. Hell, maybe even the man outside the window … and now this, this surreal Jarosław Kukowski painting, followed by a full-blown fugue. My mind jumped from the likelihood of stress to a brain tumour to lead in the wall paint, before squashing the thought altogether.

  I got stuck in to some chores.

  There are always jobs to be done in a big house. Things seem to come apart at twice the rate of a normal house, as if they’re protesting at being there. I found tools in the shed and refitted a hanging gutter. I replaced a broken window. I picked ripe vegetables and herbs in the garden, and rearranged foodstuffs in the pantry so that anything soon-to-expire could be used first.

  I’d just about put the previous night out of my mind, when the phone rang in the downstairs kitchen.

  It was Jolene.

  She asked if I’d be interested in meeting with her the following day. No small talk, just a curt little question. I’d have said she didn’t sound like herself, that there was something off—but of course I didn’t know her well enough. No explanation for the call, but I agreed to meet anyway.

  She’d suggested a public park where there was a broad, rolling stretch of lawn with big evergreen trees and a lake. An assortment of people were enjoying the sun, or sitting in the shade, in a fresh space, apparently with nowhere else to be. A little girl with a kite. A man reading a book under a tree. Two boys pushing paper boats at the water’s edge. I noticed then that I was dressed wrongly, my big thick coat ten degrees out of place. Everyone else, in their shorts and skirts, had apparently got the note that a single spring day would be coming by a few months early, as a rehearsal.