My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart

by Martin Rose

  “Talk to me, boy. Tell me what you saw.”

  I had inhaled enough Atroxipine that even a zombie would have been concerned. I leaned back, a wet line of crimson painted down my face, to my chin. I laughed while it dripped on the tiles and bled into the grout.

  “The drug can warp your perception. Things don’t appear as they seem. Will you not be reasonable? Let me in, Vitus.”

  I looked at the pill bottle in my hand. Lionel’s voice reduced to a dim babbling in the background while Atroxipine entered my bloodstream, coating my brain stem in its delicious powder. It wasn’t pleasure, but a pleasant uptick in consciousness. Every thought coming faster now. I wasn’t sitting on a toilet seat, but levitating several inches above it. I was Christ. I was Buddha. Enlightenment from the drug store.

  Even when I reached the station, I hung onto the euphoria of that initial hit as though I could ride the wave indefinitely. I was treading unknown territory, chasing an addiction to a drug whose contraindications were untested, untried, and unknown.

  What would I do when the refill ran out?

  Like a junkie, I chose not to think about that too hard.

  Instead, I thought about Elvedina. I pictured her monolithic and immovable in the rain, letting the storm lash her. Lightning kissing and ferning her before she rebooted and came to life again. Her concrete and mercury eyes. I replayed the memory of last night like footage from a home movie, the way some people remember birthdays and anniversaries and weddings. Over and over. Saw her arm with the weapon in one hand, the flat matte of the silencer extending the gun into black space.

  I drew the bead in my mind’s eye. Who had she been aiming for?

  Lionel? Or me?

  I should have realized from the beginning—none of this was about Jamie’s black projects. All that was ancillary. That’s what made it the perfect cover, because it was true, and they needed to tie up their loose ends.

  And I was a loose end.

  But Elvedina hadn’t been sent to kill me. Investigate me, perhaps. Kill me? No.

  I dug back farther. Atroxipine charged every sense, resurrected memories in haunting detail. Every recollection awaiting my perusal like a massive library contained within the space of my mind. My Id stood in the doorway and opened the door. In my mind’s eye, he wore a crumbling and dusty smoking jacket and brandished a highball filled with gasoline, beckoning me in with a greasy, decayed smile. Lips furry with mold.

  Good to see you’re finally back on top again, he said. What’d you want to know?

  I want to look at the footage from the night I got stabbed. We got any of that?

  Hmmm, my Id said, sipping at his glass. He offered it to me. Maggots writhed in the muscle of his forearm. Want one?

  I politely declined.

  Suit yourself, and then he was trudging past racks over to big movie reels, old spools, and microfiche and, with a rousing clatter, set one unfurling on the floor. The room went dark. A projector powered up into a low hum. In the wall of my mind, I saw the memory back-lit with the power of a thousand suns. All of it sponsored by Atroxipine.

  The projector cast an image of the prescription bottle, as fast as I’d thought it. Then the camera lens retreated, showing me the table, my kitchen table. Elvedina, Lafferty, Lionel and I, all of us gathered around it. I recognized the memory from the beginning. I had complained of a headache. Lionel had opened his briefcase and shuffled through a handful of medications and pills…

  The projector hummed and showed me Lionel’s shaking hands. Showed me Lionel, artfully pushing the prescription bottle of Atroxipine over the edge of his suitcase, with enough force to send it rolling to the edge, where I caught it. So proud of my new, human reflexes. How I quietly pocketed it.

  My Id used a long wooden pointer like a college professor, smacking it against the screen so I jumped.

  Right there, you see it?

  His pointer terminated at the center of Lionel’s eye, where the frame froze, and made a line directly to me, where I held the bottle in my lap the moment before I stuffed it into my pockets, thinking no one had seen me and no would know.

  But someone did know, my Id whispered. Someone did see.

  I stalled, unable to accept the truth.

  Do you think a drunk is still a drunk when someone else is holding his mouth open and pouring the bottle down his throat? my Id said and laughed.

  It’s not the same thing; it’s my own fault, I whispered. I chose to take it.

  And he put it in front of you. Where he knew you would see it. And where he knew you would take it. Like the clever little thief you are.

  He set me up, I said.

  The screen flashed and went into motion again. My Id receded. A single image of the grinning Inspector filled the wall. A silhouette and a bare suggestion of that figure whom I’d dreamed of in passing and then never again. And beneath his picture, in block letters:

  EVIDENCE

  A sign beside it flashed a brilliant red: APPLAUSE. Like a family sitcom from the fifties, I heard Highsmith, my Id, the Inspector, and my father, laughing in one chorus.

  *

  Which led me here, to the evidence room at the police station.

  Lafferty never came back to the house last night. His absence begged the obvious question, and I didn’t need to replay that footage to see where it led. If any of what I had dreamed was real, if any of the delirious and fevered out-of-body experience was genuine and not conjured and ushered along by the drug itself, then Lafferty had spent his night with Niko.

  It would have been easy to hate him for having the privilege to share in Niko’s world. To shelter in her feminine vulnerability and steal her youthful passion for his own. It burned and ate in spaces within me. I’d thought myself one bad motherfucker, but the path of feeling opens to riven every wound and scar until your heart is a bigger target than you thought. All your hard shell, a facade that blew away at the first sign of a storm.

  Atroxipine lingered under my tongue. I was a strung out junkie with blood on the belly of his shirt and his face hollowed out with too little sleep and too many drugs.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to hate Lafferty. The gray morning hours passed when I saw the van arrive. A fellow officer who’d once been Lafferty’s partner in better days opened up Lafferty’s wheelchair like a collapsible skeleton and wheeled it to the passenger door. Lafferty’s sun-starved and muscular arm opened the door and he held out his hand. The partner steadied him. Lafferty hefted himself with a grunt, legs dangling without feeling or sensation as he collapsed into the metal beast. Too much rain for the motorcycle.

  A dark shape circled the building and descended from the sky. Talons pulled at my shirt. I let him settle on my shoulder, shaking free of rain, the buzz and hum of his wings like an engine.

  I often thought of Lafferty and his chair. Not in the way observers might pity or feel sorry for him, which was possibly the worst and most condescending of sympathies, but fascinated and curious by the mechanics of his universe. How the world must be realigned and reconsidered from his new height and all the details it contained.

  I wallowed in the shadow beneath the overhang of the building until I was one with the concrete. Lafferty wheeled to the door and disappeared inside. I corralled my racing thoughts but Atroxipine drove them now, drove them into superhero limits and gave my brain horsepower beyond reason.

  What you waiting for? my Id breathed.

  I entered through the back door, made the trip down the familiar steps to the basement where the police department evidence room for the whole of the municipality resides.

  *

  I’d been a soldier, a private detective, and I now boasted the dubious accomplishment of being an ex-convict. For that last reason, the evidence room made my ex-convict’s skin crawl. It’s in the construction and the architecture of the place, a malaise—the same gray institutional concrete composes prison walls and public schools everywhere. The room terminated in a black cage enclosing the front, drawing a s
trict partition from any casual passerby and the oddments hidden behind the wall. Replace the bare industrial bulbs with candles and torches and one might imagine a large and angry dragon sitting atop a pile of gold in an underground lair.

  But there was only Lafferty; wizened and older than I was now that I had cheated time and bought myself a body ten years younger. Lafferty would beat me to the grave, no small miracle he had evaded the Reaper thus far. I leaned over the counter.

  “Wondered when you’d trouble your ugly mug,” Lafferty said.

  He did not look up from his paperwork. His writing was neat and orderly as though he were making up for the reckless youth in another past. A muscle in my forearm flexed and then relaxed. Stirrings of jealousy, want and possession, all wrapped within the name of Niko.

  “You got something to say to me?” Lafferty asked when I did not speak.

  This was my opportunity to crack a joke. Fill out familiar roles of quasi-friends the way we always had in the past. Hide our wounded egos behind machismo and posturing and continue to not talk about things that mattered to us.

  Every time I opened my mouth to do so, nothing emerged but my hurt and pulsing silence.

  Lafferty slammed down the pen. The paperwork flew to the floor. I withdrew from the counter. Wheels squealed as he jerked it through a tight turn and I listened to the subtle tracking of his chair as he came around the corner.

  His face looked mean beneath the harsh lighting. Boxing ring bulbs. They spared us nothing. He let go of his wheels, set both fists on the arms of the chair, and leaned forward to look up at me.

  “You wanna take a shot at me?” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “Go ahead,” Lafferty said, moving his wheelchair closer. I moved back, step after step, keeping an equal distance between us until I hit the wall and I could go no farther. Lafferty put on the brakes at five feet from me.

  “You think that because I’m in a fucking chair, I can’t take a hit?”

  “What the fuck do you want from me, man? You want me to punch you, is that what you’re saying?”

  “I can take a lot of shit in this life. Waking up in a wheelchair is one of them. But what I ain’t gonna tolerate is another person condescending to me and pulling his punches just because he thinks I can’t take it. ’Cause I’m down here, and you’re up there, right? You’ve got that look on your face like I went and slashed your tires and poured sugar in your gas tank. You should just come out and fucking say what you’re gonna say to me. Since you got back, you’ve been full of nothing but vitriol and bad attitude, and I got news: nobody gives a flying fuck.”

  Tired. Exhausted. Stitches stretched thin and my guts used up, shredded and trampled like confetti after New Year’s Eve in Times Square. I wanted to lie down and sleep my way into oblivion. But Lafferty and I had business. Our nights spent reconnecting and defining the terms of our new lives, thrown together in unexpected and unforeseen circumstances, did not put paid to our underlying problems, our very human problems—how familiarity breeds resentment, how misunderstandings develop and grow, how even those we are most loyal to possess desires and wants that do not necessarily align with our own, and they all must be contended with in the end. Overtures of friendship must be followed through and demonstrated with something more than promises, and now Lafferty was forcing me to ask myself the question: all told, was I walking the walk? Was I being a flesh-and-blood human, with all the responsibilities of one, including recognizing and respecting others? Or was I a shitty example of a human, too self-absorbed to know when I was crossing the line?

  A few parts shitty, I decided.

  “Is she happy?” I asked.

  Lafferty’s face was a piece of hammered steel. His eyes glinted with flame, defiant. Daring me to say more, go further. Give him a reason to explode and lash out.

  “What makes her happy ain’t no business of yours,” he said.

  My Id cackled in the background of me. I reached into my pocket. My hand trembled and, at the last second, Lafferty’s eyes tracked it and I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t in my control. Atroxipine had me now and I pulled out the cigarette, eager to give myself a distraction, to lace the Atroxipine with a nicotine high.

  “I’ll keep that in mind after she’s done using you up,” I said. I breathed in smoke with a sigh.

  “Like hell you will,” Lafferty said and wheeled forth.

  I high-stepped but he clipped my shins. His wheelchair squealed and I careened into the counter with a groan, struggled to find my footing, and then lost it again. The cigarette skittered across the counter in a spark that sputtered onto the floor and hissed out. Lafferty’s hands found the edge of my shirt and dragged me down so I fell to my knees on the hard concrete. I kicked my feet and turned in a circle. A thousand teeth bit into my burning belly. By the time he had his wheelchair turned back around, I was at his height.

  “This what you want?” I asked. I gestured at my face and turned my cheek toward him, into the light.

  Lafferty said nothing.

  “I’m not gonna fight you, Lafferty.”

  “You better get it out of your system now,” Lafferty said. “Or get the fuck out of my evidence room. I’ve done enough for you.”

  “I came here to ask about Elvedina,” I said.

  “What about her? You gonna throw her away like you did Niko? That a thing with you?”

  I blinked. “Is that what Niko said?”

  “You think she didn’t have a heart? That you didn’t hurt her?” Lafferty snorted in disgust. “You’re the sort of asshole born with so much good luck, you don’t even know what’s in front of your own nose.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “That’s why I need you to tell me what happened right under my fucking nose, the night I was stabbed. You came out into the hall with the rifle. What did you see?”

  Lafferty’s eyes changed in the hard yellow light. His jaw set as though there was still a discussion we’d be having later, like we were a fucking married couple instead of two guys having trouble figuring out that Niko was no one’s possession and she would be with whoever she wanted. If that turned out to be someone else later on down the line, we’d still be fighting this same stupid fight.

  He leaned down to pick up my cigarette butt with agility borrowed from a lynx and rolled up to me. I slumped back to the floor, back against the wall, and held out my hand. He gave me the cigarette. I relit it while he leaned over me and I looked up at him, our perspectives reversed.

  “Strange night,” he said. “I was sleeping out front on the pull-out, you remember. It’s got this suck-ass metal bar that likes to dig up into your back.”

  “I know. It’s a piece of shit. Jessica used to make me sleep on it when I snored.”

  I held out the cigarette to him. He took it and dragged before releasing a puff. Smoke crisscrossed over his well-used face, pocked and marked like the surface of the moon.

  “Too bad it’s not a joint,” he said. Smoke uncoiled from his nostrils and passed it back to me.

  “It’s a fucking evidence room,” I said. “I know you got shit back there.”

  “I ain’t sharing. That’s what they call ‘fringe benefits.’”

  “When did you wake up that night? When I started screaming?”

  “No. I kept drifting in and out. That goddamned metal bar in my back. A man can’t sleep well like that.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, thinking he probably slept better last night. But I didn’t want to drag in our troubles. I needed to stay on track, unravel this mess. “You must have seen something. Heard something.”

  “Yeah, well,” and he scratched the back of his neck as he cast his glance inward, pacing himself back through the hours and the days. A mountain climber wearing cleats walked across my stomach, back and forth, back and forth over my stitches while I waited for his response and took another drag. “Sometimes I’d hear things. Like Lionel getting up in the middle of the night. And that Elvedina was always walking from one end to
the other. Sometimes she’d spend an hour in one place, out front on the porch or out in the backyard.”

  “I woke up with her hands in my guts,” I said.

  “Yeah, but were you awake when you were screaming?”

  I opened my mouth to answer yes when instead I heard the voice of my grinning Id: Ah, ah, ah. Not so fast. Were you?

  And I didn’t know.

  “Maybe not,” I said. Maybe I was screaming before I woke up.

  Lafferty leaned forward. I could hear his chair creak, the tilt of his wheels and our eyes met, strung out along a line of gravity so strong I could not open my mouth against its force.

  “I know after a car accident, ’twas a couple nights I was screaming and sleeping at the same time. And you gonna tell me, military man, you ain’t never done the same?”

  I said nothing. Some things, you just don’t talk about.

  “Okay,” I said. “So I’m dreaming about being stabbed. And I start screaming—while I’m under, still. Then what?”

  “What I know for sure is that I heard footsteps a little while before. But Elvedina was the first one running when the screaming started. You telling me you were stabbed before you started screaming? Because that’d be a key point before you start pointing fingers at Elvedina.”

  “You were the one who said she was the hired killer.”

  He shrugged. “Bitch is cold as stone. But that doesn’t make me right, now does it?”

  I cursed when I realized I’d let the cigarette burn down into the filter and dropped it, crushed it with my heel.

  Lionel’s name hung between us, but neither of us spoke it. I looked up at Lafferty with my hands dangling over my knees.

  “So what about Highsmith and his mind bullets?”

  “You know how a pickpocket gets away with all your cash, right? Or how the magician pulls the rabbit out of the hat?”

  “Distracts you with something else. That’s what the whole Highsmith thing is about? A fucking sham? A distraction? Jesus Christ,” Lafferty said, running his hands through his hair and pressing them to the sides of his head. “Do you know how much that freaked me out? Thinking a guy could walk out of his body and play the invisible man and kill me?”