Until the Last Dog Dies

by Robert Guffey

  My heart leaped into my throat. Though I had already been performing off and on at various open mike nights for a few years, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to pursue this as my lifelong career. I needed some form of independent confirmation to inspire me to persevere, and how much more independent can you get than a beautiful girl you’ve seen only from across a classroom? Now here comes the Lost Opportunity part. It’s a twisted, pitiful tale of misery and woe. Any other healthy American male with even a fraction of a brain would have recognized her compliment as an obvious opening, right? They would’ve engaged her in some witty repartee, kept the lines of communication flowing, maybe ask her to go catch a movie and grab a soda, whatever. I did none of that. Instead I blew her off, didn’t even thank her for the compliment, just waved my hand in the air and made some snide comment. I might as well have told her to fuck off, it would’ve been just as polite. I’m god damn mentally deficient in so many different ways it’s amazing I’m even able to cross the street in the morning. I mean, who the hell would do something as stupid as that? I wish I could blame it on some insane Imp of the Perverse that takes over my mouth at times, but I can’t. I know it’s entirely my fault.

  And I can’t blame it all on the fact that I was only in the eighth grade at the time. This is just one example of a Lost Opportunity; there are plenty more like it reflected a million times over like mirrors looking into mirrors. I never learn and I never will. Take tonight as yet another example. I tried to think of Esthra not as a Lost Opportunity, but as a Crisis Avoided. As the night wore on, however, this became rather difficult. I tossed and turned, turned and tossed, couldn’t get Esthra’s face out of my mind, and finally decided to masturbate into an old sock. Then I went right to sleep.

  Once again I dreamed of my father, who somehow ended up at my old elementary school standing beside Mrs. Love and Mr. Taylor, watching with them as the other kids broke my finger. I also had the most vivid, realistic dream I’d ever experienced: Esthra and I were strolling the streets of the neighborhood I grew up in, having a casual conversation about the usual sorts of things, nothing dramatic at all. It was the utter mundanity of the dream that made it so eerie. I experienced every step of that walk in real time, heard every word that was spoken between us.

  I awoke at around one in the afternoon. For some reason I got confused and thought it was Sunday. I bolted out of bed, wondering if Heather had gotten back from San Francisco yet. I considered calling her, then remembered that last night had been Friday. She probably wouldn’t be home until tomorrow morning. I felt disappointed. It would’ve been nice to have someone to talk to at that moment. Now that Danny had descended into that extra-special corner of Hell reserved for comedians-turned-junkies, Heather was the only person in the world I could really communicate with. Just think about that: The world minus Heather equals a whole hell of a lot of people. And I couldn’t communicate with even one of them.

  Since Marsha didn’t have any gigs lined up for me that evening, I knew I had a long wait ahead of me before I could talk to Heather. I decided to fill the hours with long overdue chores. I did my laundry, ironed some clothes, bought groceries, washed the dishes, etc. I performed all these tasks in a strange trance-like state, not thinking of Esthra or Heather or Danny or anything in particular, which was a welcome change of pace. Still, in the back of my mind I was aware of a distinct sense of foreboding floating about in the air. This much peace and quiet was far too rare in my life. I knew something weird was bound to happen before the night was through.

  It happened at twenty-two minutes after eight. I remember glancing at the clock, that’s how I know the exact time. I also remember the line I had just read in a book Danny had let me borrow months before, a peculiar book I hadn’t had time to finish. “Evil is even, truth is an odd number, and death is a full stop,” Flann O’Brien writes in his experimental novel At Swim-Two-Birds. The line struck a chord in me for some reason, and I was tracking backwards to read it again when this brief moment of bibliophilia was shattered by the ringing of the phone. Isn’t that always the way? Books, baths and blowjobs are often interrupted in this manner; that’s a universal law.

  I lifted the receiver to hear a woman sobbing on the other end. At first I thought it was a prank. “Hello?” I said. “Who is this?”

  “Elliot?” I had never heard Heather cry before. “Could you please come over … right now?” She could barely get out the words.

  My grip tightened on the receiver. “Of course. Are you at home? What’s wrong?”

  “I-I’ll tell you when I see you.” She hung up.

  I dropped the receiver into the cradle and shot up from the floor. What was Heather doing home a day early? Had she been attacked—raped? I flashed back to my little fantasy about the leather fetishist newspaper reporter strapping Heather down in his dungeon lair. Had I experienced a genuine moment of precognition? Had the act of fantasizing the attack actually brought it about? This seemed unlikely, of course, but when you’re panicking any number of improbable scenarios will bubble forth out of your brain.

  I grabbed my jacket off the back of a chair and rushed toward the door. As my fingers wrapped around the doorknob the phone rang again. Thinking it might be Heather, I ran back to the phone and lifted the receiver to my ear. “Hello?” I said.

  “Oh, I’m so glad I got ahold of you,” I heard Danny say.

  I sighed. I didn’t want to deal with his junkie woes right now. “Look, I’ll have to call you back later. I was just on my way out the door.”

  “No, no, wait, I need to—”

  “I’ll call you from Heather’s, okay? Later.” I hung up on Danny while he was still in mid-sentence and ran out the door. On the street below I hopped on a bus and headed over to Cahuenga. I was fortunate in that nobody attempted to grab my penis this time around, but come to think of it is that really fortunate? I mean, shouldn’t you just take that for granted? I believe the Constitution guarantees the right of all citizens not to be molested by mad Mexicans while riding public transport. The Founding Fathers died for that right.

  Twenty minutes after climbing aboard, I leaped off the bus on Cahuenga and sprinted toward Heather’s apartment building. It was well before ten p.m., so I didn’t have to bother with the damn intercom. I swung open the gate and took the stairs two at a time. On the third floor I skidded to a halt outside Heather’s apartment and pounded on the door. No one answered. After long, worry-filled moments I decided to open the door. It was unlocked. The apartment was dark and silent. “Heather?” I whispered. I received no response.

  I brushed my hand along the wall, found the light switch and flipped it on. Three pieces of luggage lay on the floor, two of them resting on their sides as if they’d been dropped there without care. Of course, every other piece of bric-a-brac in the room looked as if it had been dropped there without care so that was nothing unusual. I shut the door behind me, picked a path through the clutter on the floor, and made my way into the bedroom. All was dark in here as well. On the bed sat a woman with her legs drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her chin rested on her right knee. She was just staring out the window, perhaps at the starry night sky above, perhaps at nothing at all.

  “Heather?” I said.

  She lifted her head. In a dull monotone she said, “Oh. Hi.” Beat. “I didn’t see you.”

  “Well, no wonder, you’ve got all the lights out.”

  I reached out for the light switch, but before I could touch it Heather snapped, “No! I want it out.”

  Her voice was so insistent, my hand pulled away from the switch as if it were made of thorns. “Why?”

  “I like the dark … I think better in the dark.”

  I took a few steps toward the bed. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  “No, nothing happened. My whole life’s over with, that’s all.”

  “What are you talking about?” I sat down on the edge of the bed. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I studied Heather clos
ely. She was wearing a dark green silk blouse opened loosely at the throat, a slender silver necklace, black slacks, one black sock on her right foot, her left foot bare. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot; she’d been crying for a long time. She sighed and closed her eyes, pausing for awhile, as if wanting to choose her words carefully.

  At last she opened her eyes and began speaking: “I wasn’t entirely truthful with you on the phone.” As in Pavlovian conditioning, these words caused me to hold my breath. I’d been told that by women before, and those words were never followed by good news. “I couldn’t talk about it, not right then. I had to keep up a good front or I knew I’d just … break down.” The second she uttered those last two words her voice broke and she lowered her face into her hands, tears streaming into her palms. I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder, stroked her forearm, tried to comfort her as best I could. She held out her hand. I grabbed it. Her grip tightened, tightened. “The first night in San Francisco was a disaster,” she whispered. “The moment I walked out on stage I knew there was something wrong. From the second I opened my mouth to the last punchline I got exactly zero laughs. It was the longest twenty minutes of my life. Has that ever happened to you before?”

  “Of course. It happens to us all, you know that. It was just a bad night for you.”

  “No. It happened the next night, and the next night, and the next night. It happened the entire god damn time I was there, even at that fuckin’ dyke club.”

  “Well, dykes are a notoriously tough audience. I mean, how many good dyke jokes do you know?” Heather remained silent. “No, no. You’re supposed to say, ‘Well, Griffin for one.’” I smiled weakly, but she didn’t laugh. I guess it wasn’t all that funny. Moving right along… . “Were the other comedians getting any laughs?”

  “Some, the ones who weren’t funny. The rest of us were devastated, we couldn’t understand it. The whole city felt dead, filled with dead people, dead cars, dead buildings, dead girders, dead molecules, everything dead. Dead to the core.”

  “That’s definitely not the San Francisco I know.”

  “Tell me about it. Usually I leave there feeling vibrant and alive, wanting to leave L.A. forever. This trip left me cold, cold way down here.” She pressed her hand on her stomach. “It was the worst experience of my entire life.”

  “The humor virus… .”

  “After the second night a whole group of us comedians sat around at the bar and talked about that. Even the most skeptical of us were beginning to believe in it. Of course, it’s the only explanation that makes sense. Some of the comedians said they’d noticed the same feeling of deadness in some of the clubs in Seattle and New York and Berkeley and D.C. and New Orleans. Others hadn’t noticed it at all before San Francisco. Maybe some areas are more infected than others … I don’t know. It seems to be affecting everybody in San Francisco, but they don’t know it. The victims just go about their daily routines, not even realizing that a huge chunk of them has been sliced out and turned inside out. God, isn’t that horrible? To have your brain altered and not even be aware of it?”

  She slipped her hand out of mine and wrapped her arms around her chest as if she were shivering deep inside. “You can’t know what it was like, you can’t. I know you’ve bombed at times, so have I, but this was something different. This was totally alien to me, like being trapped in a nightmare. You know those dreams where you’re sitting in a classroom getting ready to take a test and you suddenly realize you’re naked? That’s what this was like, only a hell of a lot worse. One night … one night I remember having a dream where I walked out on stage and opened my mouth and tried to speak but I couldn’t, I couldn’t remember any of my jokes. I woke up in a cold sweat, one of those times when you look around the bedroom and think, Oh, thank God it was just a dream. When I was up there on that stage in San Francisco I kept wishing I would wake up. Hell, I’m still wishing that.”

  She took a deep breath that rattled throughout her chest as if she had a terrible cold; her arms tightened around her body, making her look like Houdini awaiting his straitjacket. “I felt like I was disappearing,” she said. “You have to understand, I’ve never done anything but make people laugh. I began working on the stage when I was seventeen. The only other job I’ve had was working behind a cash register at a Jack in the Box; it lasted three weeks, and that’s when I was sixteen. What the hell else can I do? Nothing. I’ve got no fucking skills. I’m a retard off stage. I’m nothing.”

  Upon uttering those last two words Heather broke down crying once again, this time erupting into heaving sobs that emerged from somewhere deep inside her gut. I’d never seen her in such a fragile state. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just did what seemed right. I slid my arms around her shoulders and drew her toward me. I felt her fingernails dig into my shoulder, her sobs muffled by my body.

  “You’re far from nothing,” I whispered. “Don’t ever say that. You’re one of the most talented people I know.”

  “Then why didn’t they laugh?”

  “It wasn’t your fault. It was the virus.”

  “But what happens … what happens if everyone comes down with it?”

  I remained silent for a long time before replying, “I don’t know.”

  “I do, I know exactly what’s going to happen. I’m going to disappear. My molecules are just going to peel away from each other, drift off into nothing. My body will fade out like a ghost and I’ll drift around the world telling jokes to no one at all.”

  I pulled away from Heather, just enough to place my hands on her cheeks. “You’re not going to disappear. You’re not disappearing now.” I stared into her eyes … so soft, the color of cream and coffee … and leaned toward her slowly, trying to gauge her reaction. She didn’t pull away. I kissed her cheek. She closed her eyes and released a little sigh. My heart began to beat fast at the sound of that brief exhalation of air. I kissed her gently on her forehead and temple, her other cheek, her neck, her chin. She began running her hands up and down my back as I pressed my lips against hers. She responded instantly; she dug her nails into my shoulder blades again, this time out of passion instead of grief. I felt the softness of her mouth with my tongue. I felt her body lowering back onto the bed; she pulled me down with her, our mouths still locked together. I was so excited I think I almost forgot to breathe. After many minutes we pulled away from each other. I found myself staring into her eyes again. At that second I was certain I’d never seen anyone more beautiful; I leaned down near her ear and told her so in a whisper. I pressed my lips against the saltiness of her tears and told her we should begin making up for lost time. At that moment I realized there was nothing sadder in the universe than lost time. Though Heather may have disappeared to the rest of the world that night, to me she seemed to be the only person who had ever existed, or ever would exist. Her eyes reflected my own words back at me: You’re not going to disappear. You’re not going to disappear.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jesus Saves

  (October 4-5, 2014)

  That night our love making was interwoven with whispered discussions about childhood fears and adult pleasures and past relationships gone sour and future hopes and dead dreams. We’d talk, make love, talk, make love, and talk some more. This continued until about three o’clock in the morning when Heather drifted off to sleep with her head snuggled between my neck and shoulder, her hands resting on my chest. I lay there and thought about everything that had happened in the past few days. I thought once again about all the lost opportunities in my life and realized that if I had brought Esthra home with me Friday night I might not have been there the next day to receive Heather’s call. Perhaps every lost opportunity was just a better opportunity gained, I mused. About a half hour later I fell asleep while listening to Heather’s gentle, rhythmic breathing.

  After what seemed like only minutes, I awoke to the sound of pounding on the front door. Beams of dust-speckled sunlight streamed in through the window. I glanced at the digital al
arm clock sitting on the night stand beside the bed. It was a little after eight a.m. Heather was still dead asleep, curled into a ball on the edge of the bed with all the blankets wrapped around her. How had that happened? For a moment I considered lying in bed until the pounding stopped, but I didn’t want the noise to wake Heather. I got out of the bed as quietly as possible, snatched my Levis up from the floor, and dashed out into the living room. I paused to shut the bedroom door behind me. As I walked toward the door I managed to wiggle into my Levis and button them up. Still the pounding continued.

  “All right, all right,” I mumbled, “hold your fuckin’ horses.” I swung open the door to find myself staring into a pair of raging infernos within the eyes of Mr. Michael Aster.

  At this point I experienced a strange moment of cognitive dissonance. It felt as if some creature from an alternate reality were intruding into the little pocket universe I had carved out here in Heather’s apartment. I would’ve been less surprised if a UFO had flown in from the hallway and burned a crop circle into the rug.

  The first words out of Mike’s mouth were, “You fucked her, didn’t you?”

  At first I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Was he referring to Heather? Had he been peering into the bedroom from an opposite rooftop with a telescope? Did he want to congratulate me on my good fortune? Out of all of these questions the only coherent one I could formulate was, “How’d you find me here?”

  He pushed me backwards into the apartment. “Shut up, you asshole. I heard about what you did to her in the bathroom!”

  I held my hands in the air. “Hey, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man.”

  “Don’t play stupid with me. Everybody knows it. Everybody who was at that party heard about what you did. The gossip spread around the house like wildfire in a couple of fuckin’ minutes. I was the last to know. I’m always the last to fuckin’ know!”