Unhinged

by Reed, Rick R. ;

  “I have Tuesdays off. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Makes for a nice weekend,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  Paula poured tea and coyly asked, “One lump or two?” even though the “sugar” was little blue packets of artificial sweetener in a bowl. We sipped for a while, quiet, at last two strangers with not much to talk about.

  How could I bring up Tommy and Karl without seeming nosy? What right did I have to know anything about them anyway? But there was this lingering hunch I had—that they had something to do with my weird dreams. They had to.

  I noticed, among the stacks and stacks of books scattered around the room, that several of them were on ghosts and psychic phenomena. Even the novels leaned heavily toward the occult with the holy trinity of horror well represented: Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz.

  I had my in. As casually as I could, I asked her, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  Paula grabbed my hand. “Oh yes, honey. I think those who have departed are all around us.” Her eyes lit up. “I have studied this stuff—been to several séances and I never miss Ghost Hunters. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, ever since we moved in, I’ve been having these weird dreams.”

  Paula got up and got herself a ceramic ashtray and a pack of Marlboro Reds. “Filthy habit, I know.” She sat back down and lit up. “You want one?” The cigarette bounced up and down in her mouth.

  I shook my head.

  She inhaled extravagantly, then blew the smoke over my head. “So tell me about these dreams.”

  I told her a little about them, their reality, of the sad little man who had appeared to me. “They were so real, it doesn’t really seem right to call them dreams.”

  Paula examined the glowing end of her cigarette. Outside, there was a bright flash of pure white light and then an almost deafening crash of thunder. In seconds, we could hear the drum of a steady and hard downpour. Paula looked to her rain-smeared window.

  She spoke quietly. “Tell me about the short guy.” There was something in the way she said the simple sentence that made me feel like she knew what was coming.

  I described him—the buzzed hair, the sores on his skin, the bad teeth, the dirty clothes, all somehow brought up to another level by large, sad brown eyes.

  Paula’s gaze flickered away from me, and it looked like her own eyes had become shinier. Were those tears? Angrily, she shouted, “Get out of there!” And JoAnne leaped from a laundry basket in the corner of the room and ran toward the bathroom, casting suspicious looks behind her at both of us. Paula snorted, took a puff, and a swallow of tea. When she looked back at me, she seemed more composed. But I had seen raw pain flicker across her features and I wondered why.

  “You saw Tommy.”

  “Tommy?”

  “Tommy Soldano. He lived in your apartment before you moved in, with his boyfriend, Karl. Like I told you.” She smiled broadly, her cheeks reddened with warmth. “Oh! I used to have so much fun with those guys. They were lunatics! We used to do everything together. I drank a lot of dirty martinis with them at Big Chicks and saw a lot of bad, bad movies at the underground film festival every year. We all used to volunteer.” She snuffed out her cigarette and her eyes took on a faraway cast; she was remembering. “We had some good times.”

  “What happened to them? Why did they move out?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “I thought I told you I didn’t like to talk about this.”

  “You did, but I thought maybe these dreams…” I let her complete my sentence.

  “Yeah. What you saw, that had to be Tommy and that has to mean something.” She shook her head. “Although I don’t like what it might mean.”

  I didn’t know if we were going to dance around the issue all morning, so I decided to simply be blunt. “What happened? I don’t mean to upset you, but did Tommy die?” Maybe I had seen a ghost.

  Paula shook her head. “Actually, I don’t know.”

  I cocked my head.

  Paula gnawed at her lower lip and moved the cigarette pack back and forth, as if she were debating whether she should have another one. Addiction—and nerves, I suspect—won out and she lit up. “Tommy disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “He was just gone one day. Karl claimed he had no idea what happened. That he simply woke up one morning to find Tommy gone, along with all his clothes and belongings.” Paula shrugged. “Of course, there was an investigation. Tommy’s family came around, asking questions. I remember his sister Amanda was particularly worried. She said it wouldn’t be like her brother to just walk away, no matter how bad his life had become. He talked to her almost every day.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I suppose people did walk off the jobs of their lives without looking back, but it seemed like a rare thing. I had never personally known anyone who had done it or anyone who even knew someone else who had.

  “What do you think happened?”

  Paula cocked her head. “I don’t know. Karl and Tommy changed during the last year they were here. They changed a lot. And not for the better. So I guess you could say I no longer knew what would be in character for either of them.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  Paula angrily exhaled twin plumes of smoke through her nostrils. “Ah! They got into that shit all you gay boys think is so much fun. Christ! I’m always pickin’ up those tiny Baggies off the sidewalk!”

  “Meth?”

  “Yeah. Crystal. Tina. Whatever the hell you call it.” She got up from the table and went to a chest of drawers along the opposite wall. She dug around in one of the drawers, then another. She mumbled, “Shit. Where is it?” Finally, she found what she was looking for, I guess, and returned to the table. She handed a snapshot to me.

  It was Paula and two guys. One of the men was tall, stocky, with streaked blond hair and a crooked smile that reminded me of Ernie’s. The other guy—well, he must have been Tommy because he was—no question—the guy I had seen in my waking dreams. But this Tommy was different. He was vital. Aglow. Really handsome. His skin was clear, his eyes bright. His hair glistened in the sunlight, long, dark, and wavy. He had a smile that I knew must have been infectious—it beamed and radiated joy. He wasn’t rail thin; if anything, he was a bit pudgy, but the weight looked good on him. His skin, which appeared tanned and spoke of a Mediterranean heritage, was unmarred by sores. And his teeth were perfect and white, a dazzling contrast to his olive complexion.

  He was a looker. It was hard to believe he had become the sad, unhealthy-looking wraith I had seen in my dreams.

  “That was taken a couple of years ago. Pre-Tina. Down at Hollywood Beach one Sunday. It was like the perfect day.” Paula’s eyes were bright with tears again. She looked at me. “Is that the guy you saw?”

  I nodded. “Except he didn’t look so good.”

  “I know. That shit ate him alive. Fast. Both of them. They were such good boys. Such a happy couple. And then they started in with that shit. At first, it was just on the weekends. Then, they stopped doin’ stuff with me. They started havin’ guys over at all hours of the day and night. Missing work. Men in and out of the apartment like it needed to be fitted with a revolving door.” She made a tsk sound. “That wasn’t them. It was the drug.”

  Paula and I were quiet. It made sense. The pantomimes I had seen were the movements of someone smoking crystal meth through a pipe. I had never done the stuff myself, but had been around guys who had. I should have figured it out sooner. And the phone call? In retrospect, what I had overheard now sounded like the desperate pleas of an addict to his dealer.

  “Such a shame. I know several guys that shit has done a real number on.” I tentatively put a hand over Paula’s, and she turned her palm up so it rested against my own. Her hand was damp with sweat, but I didn’t move away. I squeezed her hand. “Was anything ever resolved?”

  “No. Karl did the missing-persons thing and, with Tommy’s family, went through all the motions. I even helped him
put up flyers on streetlights and in neighborhood stores with Tommy’s picture on it. There was talk of a reward, but nobody had any money.” Paula frowned. “He never turned up.” Her breath quivered a little as she said, “Neither did his body.”

  She let out a big sigh. “So a little part of me still hopes. Maybe Tommy will show up again one day and I can give him hell for scarin’ the shit out of everyone.” Paula slowly shook her head and said, barely audible, “But I don’t like the fact that you saw him. That can’t be good.”

  I didn’t know that I had any comforting words. I tried, “Maybe there’s just some of his energy hanging around. You know, like some sort of psychic vibration and for some reason my dreams just tuned in on it.”

  Paula looked thoughtful, as if mulling it over. “It’s possible.” She looked faraway. The cat wandered over, and Paula scooped it up and hugged it. When she looked up at me again, her eyes were red. “I got a headache. I think I’m gonna lay down.”

  “Sure.” I hurried from the apartment, feeling bad that I had stirred up so much shit.

  What had happened to Tommy?

  Chapter 4

  “How can that be?” Ernie looked at me across the dinner table. We had just finished some grilled chicken, brown rice, and a celery, apple, and Parmesan salad I had thrown together. I had just told him about the morning I spent with Paula—and about our neighbors. Ernie’s mouth had dropped open a bit when I mentioned Tommy, and how Tommy was the person in my dreams.

  I shook my head and stood up to clear the table. As I rinsed the dishes in the sink, I said, “I don’t know. But there’s no doubt in my mind that the guy in the picture she showed me is the same guy from my dreams.” Just the thought of it made my hand jerk in a spasm, caused a chill to run up my spine, like an icy finger.

  Ernie brought over his own plate and set it in the sink. “Are you sure? I mean, do you think you could be projecting your memory onto this picture? Forcing the piece into the puzzle?”

  I picked up his plate and rinsed it, not looking at him because I didn’t want him to see how angry he was making me. “It’s not like that, Ernie.” I blew out a sigh and stared at the wall for a moment. “You know how sometimes you see someone in the street or at a club and you think it’s someone you know but you aren’t really sure?”

  “Yeah.” I could tell Ernie had no idea where I was going with this.

  “Well, think about other times, when you see someone and you know, without a doubt, that it’s someone you know.”

  “Okay.”

  “My point, and I wish there was a more eloquent way to put it, is that when you know, you know.” I shut the water off and wiped my hands on my jeans. “There’s no doubt.”

  We grabbed our wineglasses and took them over to the couch and sat down. Ernie picked up the remote control and turned on the TV. I picked up the remote control and turned it back off.

  Ernie looked at me.

  “I need to talk about this.”

  Ernie smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know what there is to say. So maybe through some weird thing, you saw this Tommy. I don’t know why or how that could be, but I suppose that could be said for a lot of things. I think that we don’t know half the shit that goes on around us all the time.” He pondered. “People show up in my dreams all the time, I guess, that I would say I’ve never seen. Who’s to say they’re not real?”

  “What if he’s dead?” I sucked in a breath. “What if he was murdered?” I had had all afternoon, by myself, to think about things. And it should come as no surprise that my thoughts tend toward the melodramatic.

  “Oh, come on! You don’t really think that?”

  “It makes sense, Ernie. You’ve heard stuff about ghosts hanging around. It’s because they can’t move on. They can’t rest because something’s unresolved. Maybe this Tommy is appearing to me because he’s trying to tell me something.”

  “You’ve watched way too many horror movies.”

  “You have to admit it’s plausible.”

  Ernie took a sip of his wine, shook his head, and grinned. “I don’t have to admit shit. You have no evidence to think anything so extreme.” He turned toward me. “Even from what you told me, this guy was a flake. He was a drug addict. From what you said he looked like, I’d say he was into the meth pretty heavy. And it does sound like your pal Paula corroborates that.”

  “So?”

  “So, I know guys who have gotten into that stuff in a big way, and it affects your brain, Rick. It makes you nuts.” Ernie was quiet for a long time, as if he were considering what to say next. “Look, this happened way before I met you, but I used to get together with this guy when I was single. He was a fuck buddy; you don’t know him. But he smoked that stuff. I didn’t want to touch it. At first he was a lot of fun, but then, for him, it became all about having other guys over.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” I cursed myself for feeling jealous. I believed Ernie when he said this was before my time, yet I couldn’t help but think of him in bed with this other guy and it made me sick to my stomach.

  “Your honor, this goes to state of mind.” Ernie raised his eyebrows. “Anyway, the last time we were together, he found this real hottie on Manhunt, you know? And he invited him over. Well, the guy was nothing like his picture. He looked more like your Tommy, so skinny his ribs were poking out. And all the time he was over, he kept talking about the voices he was hearing coming from his radiator. He thought his neighbors were piping in voices to drive him crazy. He was dead serious.”

  “Your point?”

  “My point is that this drug eats holes in your brain, man. It can make you crazy. Now just as likely, if not more so, is the scenario that this Tommy just faded away, went off with some other addict. It’s possible that he did die, but not here. And I doubt he was murdered. It’s far more likely he flaked out and just left. I’m sorry, but the truth is usually way more boring than fiction.”

  I nodded. What Ernie said made sense. But I wasn’t sure I believed it. I didn’t know if it was my own mind rationalizing, but now when I looked back at my dreams, I saw them as more than just apparitions or figments of my imagination, but as cries for help.

  Yeah, I know. Overly melodramatic.

  I picked up the remote and pointed it at the TV. Top Chef would be a welcome diversion, a relief.

  * * * *

  I’m no fool. I knew I was dreaming. Again, the dream had all the earmarks of reality.

  But this time, I was not in the apartment. I was outside of it. Right outside. On an el train, pulling into the Irving Road Station on the Brown Line. The train’s engine hummed as the train screeched to a stop. The doors slid open.

  I had a perfect view into our apartment. Only it wasn’t our apartment. Without knowing why, I knew it was Tommy and Karl’s. Everything was different. Lots more furniture. Lots of junk. Clothes strewn about the place and dirty dishes in the sink.

  It was night and the apartment was almost dark. The only illumination came from the light over the kitchen sink. But it was enough.

  And I could see him.

  Not Tommy.

  Karl. I recognized him from the picture Paula had shown me.

  He was crying. Not just crying, sobbing. His hands covered his face and even in the pale half-light, I could see his shoulders shaking and his chest heaving. He stood near the bright red screen, but now it was not where Ernie and I had positioned it by the front door, but on the upper level of the room, next to what appeared to be the bed. I could see the footboard of the four-poster sticking out of one edge of the divider.

  I could also see a very white foot, looking almost as if it had been crafted from alabaster.

  I felt like I was intruding on a very private moment.

  The train’s doors slid shut; there was a gong and the mechanical voice over the intercom announced that Addison would be the next stop. I turned in my seat to watch as the train lurched into my motion.

  I pressed my hand against the glas
s as I watched Karl fall to his knees at the foot of the bed.

  Then the apartment was no longer in view.

  Chapter 5

  “I want you to stop worrying about what happened in this apartment before we lived here, okay? Everything’s unpacked and you still have a few days more off. Today, I want you to do something fun—go see a movie, have an afternoon cocktail at Roscoe’s, take a walk along the lakefront. It looks like it’s going to be nice out today.” Ernie gestured toward our windowed wall, and he was right; unlike the day before, pure, undiluted early morning sunlight streamed in. Promising—falsely or not—warm breezes and boundless outdoor fun.

  “Okay. You’re right.” I smiled at Ernie and got up on tiptoe to kiss his full lips. He grabbed the back of my neck and thrust his tongue deep inside my mouth, kissing me hungrily and letting his hands wander down to my ass.

  He pulled away, a little breathless, and laughed. “That’s to hold you until I get home from work. No bad dreams tonight. Just bad Ernie—maybe more than once. Hell, maybe more than twice!”

  “Promises, promises. You better get a move on, or you’re gonna be late.”

  “Promise me you won’t spend the day brooding about this Tommy and Karl. They’ve been weighing too heavily on you, and I don’t like it. We just moved here, for Christ’s sake.”

  The night before, after the el train dream, I had awakened screaming.

  “I promise.” I handed him the brown sack lunch I had packed for him. “Now run along.”

  I felt bad. I didn’t like to lie to Ernie.

  I went to the window and watched his progress toward the el station. When he was out of view, I threw on some clothes and headed for Paula’s.

  * * * *

  When she opened the door, I could see she was dressed for work. She had pulled her red frizz away from her face, almost severely, and had put on makeup—a ton of it, eyeliner and mascara, shadow, blush. Her lips were a glossy orange/red. She wore big dangling silver earrings, and her ensemble of a bulky black sweater, tights, and heels actually made her look thinner.