Orientation

by Rick R. Reed

  He rolled over and snagged the receiver just before it switched over to voice mail. Middle of the night calls were always worrisome and demanded attention. Robert still had family in Pennsylvania and suddenly thought of his mother. His heart beat a little harder, dreading the voice on the other line, maybe his sister, with terrible news…

  But the voice that came on the line was familiar, yet Robert didn’t immediately place it. But just the sound of the word, “Robert?” caused his heart rate to slow and a feeling of warmth and calm to begin spreading through him.

  “Robert?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Jess? From Christmas?”

  “Of course, Jess, is everything okay?” Robert glanced over at the clock on the nightstand. Its digital readout told him it was just past four A.M.

  “I’m sorry to be calling at such an ungodly hour. I probably woke you up.”

  “Not really.”

  “I just needed to talk to you. Don’t worry. I’m not going to be the kind of person that would make you think you need to change your number.” Jess gave out a short laugh. “But something’s been on my mind and I didn’t think it could wait until a more reasonable time. Do you think you might be able to listen for a bit?”

  Robert propped some pillows against the headboard and sat up. “I can listen for all the time in the world, Jess.” Whatever the woman wanted would be a welcome diversion to the prospect of ending things with Ethan. He assumed she just wanted to talk about her own breakup. He knew how lonely and endless middle-of-the-nights could be. And he didn’t want her trying anything like she had the night they met. “What’s on your mind? Feeling okay?”

  “Actually, I feel wonderful.”

  That was not a statement Robert expected. He glanced out the window at the night sky, almost black and starless. “Really?”

  “Yes. I think it’s just because I had a wonderful dream and the good feelings that were in the dream have stayed with me.”

  “Okay…What was the dream about?”

  “It was about us.”

  Robert chuckled. The girl had said her ex was a woman, hadn’t she? This conversation was not going at all where he expected, although he was intrigued. He had thought she would be saying things more along the lines of not being able to live without—what was her name—Ramona? Not a late-night confession of a dream about him.

  “But it wasn’t really about us.”

  “I don’t follow.” Yet he did, not on any conscious level, but with a simple certainty that he knew what was coming next. He flashed back to Jess looking at the picture of him and Keith and how Jess had fainted. He had a sudden urge to see Jess, to have her with him right at this very moment, so he could lay the back of his hand tenderly against her cheek. She needed him.

  “It’s kind of hard to explain. You were you, but not really you. At least not as you are today. And I certainly was not me.” She paused. “At least as I am today.”

  “Go on.” Robert felt like he was on a rollercoaster, just slowly making its way to the top of the first rise.

  “I don’t quite know how to put this, other than just saying it. The dream was about us, but it was a much younger you and I was Keith.”

  And the coaster took its first plunge. Robert wanted to scream, giddy and terrified all at once.

  “I don’t understand.” But he did, on a gut level, he most certainly did. And it scared him to death…and thrilled him beyond his wildest imaginings. He didn’t dare let himself hope, not for something so far-fetched, so ridiculous and absurd.

  “I dreamt I was in a leather bar? But it wasn’t present day. From the music, which was the dominant sound I can remember, it was the early 1980s, when disco was holding sway. Alternative, grunge, whatever you call it, hadn’t emerged yet. Never mind. It was this leather bar, and it had two stories…”

  Robert’s breath caught. “You mean floors?” It was a stupid thing to say; he knew exactly what she meant. In fact, his memory was already filling in the detail.

  “Yeah, yes—two floors. I was wandering around, and there were all these men dressed in leather. I remember a pool table upstairs.”

  “Oh God,” Robert closed his eyes.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just go on.”

  “I saw you. But it was the same you as in the photo in your living room, not the way you look today. Oh Robert, you were so beautiful.”

  Robert could hear the warmth in her voice, the love carried through the phone wires. Tears sprang up in his eyes. Logic be damned. It wasn’t Jess telling him he was beautiful. It was Keith. It was Keith.

  He contemplated replacing the phone in its cradle, not sure if he could bear to hear anymore. Not sure if he could bear reliving that gorgeous, life-changing memory.

  But the dream, he told himself, could be just that. And then Jess said something that made him gasp.

  She laughed. “You were dressed all wrong for the place.”

  Robert choked out, “What? What was I wearing?”

  “You looked kind of preppy. Let me think.”

  There was a pause during which Robert wanted to scream into the phone, “Tell me! Now!” But he waited, heart thudding. He wondered if Ethan, downstairs, could hear its mad thumping. Blood roared in his ears. He felt like laughing. He was already crying.

  “You had on Levi’s, I think, like everyone else in the place. But you also were wearing an Izod shirt. You know, with the little alligator?”

  Robert nodded.

  “And running shoes. Adidas, I’m pretty sure. I used to run a lot, myself.”

  Robert nodded again and then realized Jess couldn’t see him. No matter. He couldn’t speak right now if he had wanted to.

  “You were holding a ski jacket to your side. It was dark in the bar, and really smoky, but I think it was yellow and navy or maybe black.”

  Robert pressed his hands to his face. The memory flooded back, and he saw himself that night, just before New Year’s, in a bar called Touché. He remembered passing it by so many times and wanting to go inside, but never having the nerve. And finally, one night, he had just said the hell with it and pushed open the door.

  Up until now, he wouldn’t have been able to say what he was wearing that night. He only knew it was something inappropriate. But when Jess described his clothes, he could see himself in his apartment earlier that night so long ago, looking in the mirror on his closet door, thinking he looked pretty good in the brown Izod and skin tight Levi’s. He always wore running shoes back then, and was a slave to Adidas.

  He didn’t think it was the power of suggestion making him recall the outfit exactly as Jess described. No, he knew it wasn’t. The memory of that night was so important he had replayed it over and over in his mind over the years.

  “You were so young.” Jess’s voice roused him from memory. “About the same age as I am now, I would say. Fresh-faced. The fact that you were so out of place made you stand out.”

  “It worked to my advantage,” Robert said, without thinking. From his point of view, the discussion had moved from a dream to a memory.

  “Uh-huh. You smiled at me…” Jess sucked in some air, and Robert could almost feel her debating what to say next. “You smiled at me and patted the space next to you, for me to come sit beside you.”

  “I remember. You were the most handsome man in the place. And I wasn’t leaving without at least a taste.” Robert shook his head, feeling elated and sad all at once. He could see Keith so clearly in his mind. His eyes…their eyes…meeting for the first time…the charge of the connection. It was like it had happened yesterday, instead of more than twenty years ago.

  “I was wearing leather.” Jess stopped. “You know, don’t you, Robert, when I say ‘I’, I’m not referring to the young girl you just met.”

  “I know,” Robert whispered.

  “I was wearing a leather vest and chaps.”

  “You were so hot.” Robert closed his eyes again, remembering. That night played in his br
ain like a film, and the memory elicited all the same reactions: his pulse quickened, his face reddened, and he felt himself getting hard beneath the sheets.

  “The dream shifted then. We were…”

  Robert picked up. “We were standing, naked, in front of the bedroom window, looking out at the lake. The sunlight was brilliant. And the hair on your chest tickled my back.”

  “That’s right. I don’t think I need to go on.”

  “I don’t think you do, either. We were both there.”

  “Both of us?”

  “As you said, not as who we are, today, but who we were, then.”

  The line went silent for a long time. Minutes passed.

  Robert didn’t want to believe. He didn’t want to because it lit a small flicker of hope in his heart and he didn’t know if he wanted that flicker to burn brighter, to blaze up, and consume him. Yet how could the detail of the dream be so real?

  He didn’t know if he could stand it. He didn’t know if he could stand to be without her (or him).

  “I want you here now.”

  “Okay.” Jess’s voice was soft.

  “Get in a cab. I’ll pay for it.”

  “Okay.”

  Just before they hung up, Robert asked her, “You sure you’re all right?”

  “All right?” Jess asked. “I feel like a million bucks.”

  And then Robert did hang up, but he missed the cradle because his vision was blurred by a torrent of tears. Keith used the phrase “like a million bucks” oh, a million times.

  Chapter 10

  Ethan knew sleep was futile. What did it feel like to get into bed and sleep through the night, waking to morning’s light and scattered dream imagery? Gone was the pleasure of waking refreshed and hungry for breakfast. Indeed, he no longer was on a first-name basis with any of the simple pleasures of ordinary people, sleep being a primary one. Now, sleep came when he passed out after several days of partying, his body and mind giving out and sinking into a black hole. He seldom woke refreshed from such sleep, but groggy, still profoundly exhausted and his limbs feeling like they each weighed a ton.

  Robert was upstairs and asleep. Bless the old man. He had heard him take a phone call, earlier, and then nothing. He wondered who had called him in the middle of the night. He knew nothing, anymore, about this man with whom he had spent the last several years of his life. Tina had come along, turned his head, and made him forget all about Robert. At least, until he went to an ATM with the card Robert had given him, to withdraw funds to feed the hungry beast his addiction had become. Then he blessed Robert for his generosity.

  He pictured Robert above him, now, his face in slumber, his brow uncreased by worry or pain. Well, maybe a little pain. Ethan wasn’t so far gone as not to realize what he was doing to Robert, how his twin addictions of sex and crystal methamphetamine were affecting the man Ethan once thought of as a hot Daddy. Robert was still a hot Daddy, with his close-cropped blond hair, blue eyes that could cut through a person, and a well-toned body. In fact, if he and Robert were to go out to a bar tonight (an occurrence that was about as likely as Ethan getting up from the couch and eating a big breakfast), it would be Robert who would now turn more heads than Ethan, even if he were old enough to be his literal daddy.

  He got up and moved to the windows. Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten over the water; a thin band of gold separated pale grayish-purple from the deep blue of the water. Once upon a time, Ethan might have incorporated the image into a poem. That boy, the one who wrote poetry and could find himself weeping at the beauty of a Shakespearian sonnet, seemed like someone he knew in the distant past, someone who had never been a part of him.

  Not what he was now.

  Now, all the beauty of a sunrise made him do was wonder if he had the strength and wits to kill someone. He had danced around the issue since it had first entered his brain, and suddenly he had seen it as the only way out.

  “I can’t kill anyone. How could I? Have I sunk that low?” When he realized he was speaking out loud, he stopped himself.

  The alternative was to go on, to try and stop on his own. He knew that was impossible. For the past several months, he had not gone without Tina for more than a three-day stretch. He knew how painful the crash would be, how soul-depleting. Depression would wash over him like a physical ache. People who thought depression was just feeling sad were wrong. It was soul crippling, and as painful as placing a fiery brand on sensitive skin. It robbed Ethan of everything he’d ever felt or took any pleasure in; it made him nothing more than a shell, a life support system for an ungrateful being. He would feel sick, like he had the world’s worst case of the flu. He would want to kill himself, to throw himself spectacularly from the condo’s balcony, imagining himself crumpling the hood of a car parked below. The “crash” left in Tina’s wake was so horrible, he could no longer contemplate life without the drug.

  Ethan could throw himself at Robert’s mercy and hope for the best. But several times Robert had commented angrily on crystal meth use and its ties to the rise in HIV infection. (He thought the connection was, at best, a stupid one, and at worst, evil.) Robert would cast him out. There was no doubt in his mind.

  That left the image of the insurance policy document there before him, as if he were still gripping it in his hand…with its one million dollar benefit and his name typed into the space labeled beneficiary. A million dollars could buy him a whole new start on life. The money would allow him to get long-term, intense treatment—the only way he thought he might free himself from the web within which he had hopelessly tangled himself. The money would give him a chance, once he moved from rehab, to go somewhere else and do what normal people did: find a job, a home, maybe even one day a boyfriend…one with whom he would do things like make dinner, go to the movies, shop for a puppy. That kind of life seemed beyond his reach now, a fairyland so out of reach that it was fantasy, the province of a person he no longer knew how to be.

  A million dollars would free him. But could he be selfish enough to take someone’s life in order to buy that freedom? He could see no other way. He tried to rationalize: Robert was getting old (near fifty!), he was alone (no friends to speak of, family far away), and he had no work to involve him. What was he really living for, anyway? Ethan thought the man had once been happy, early in their relationship, but it seemed like he always went back to mooning about his first lover, Keith, whose silent presence hung over Ethan like an impossible competitor.

  Ethan spoke aloud again, “I could never be Keith. No one could. Robert will only be happy with Keith.”

  So killing him (and death would be painless and quick; whatever happened, Ethan would make sure of that) was actually doing Robert a favor. It would be putting him out of his misery, and if there really was an afterlife, he would be certain to be reunited with his one true love.

  Sure, the death would benefit not only Ethan, but Robert as well.

  But he couldn’t actually kill him. Not even with poison. He couldn’t be there when he died, no matter how peacefully he drifted off.

  He needed someone to help him.

  And he knew only one person amoral and money-hungry enough who could be persuaded to help. His dealer, Tony Parker.

  * * * *

  Tony got very little sleep. It wasn’t because, like his clients, his whole system was a jangling, teeth-gnashing mass of nerve endings, it was because those same clients were at him almost constantly, their need eclipsing any regard for his privacy or for the simple fact that he might just need to sleep or get things done, himself. They called at all hours, once they had become slaves to Ms. Tina’s charms. They called in the morning, in the afternoon, and at all hours of the night. With Tina, a party happened any time of day.

  He ignored many of the calls, but the barrage never ceased. The longer he let his voice mail messages pile up, the more there was to deal with later, no pun intended. And then he placed unreasonable demands on his “cooker” who manufactured the drug out of a farmhouse
eighty miles away, in rural Indiana.

  Tony had to keep up with demand. There were too many others like him out there, dealers with ready product, and if he couldn’t supply the aching need he had helped create, someone else would.

  And then where would he be?

  Tony never touched the stuff, himself. Tony didn’t even drink or smoke. He was what his unsuspecting family referred to as a health nut. He never let it show, but he hated the gay boys who were in and out of his apartment at all hours. Tony was straight and even dated a woman in Evanston, who thought his work had something to do with sales—pharmaceutical sales, he had once told her, struggling to keep a straight face.

  If he felt anything for his clients beyond hatred, it was pity. They were a pathetic lot. He had watched many of them get so caught up in the drug, they literally shrunk before his eyes. In months, their frames became skeletal and often covered with sores. Their teeth yellowed and rotted, gums bleeding. Their faces looked withered and desperate. They aged years. What was once beautiful, rapidly became grotesque. And many of them were so enmeshed in their love affair with Tina, they didn’t even see it happening to themselves.

  It wasn’t Tony’s fault if they couldn’t control themselves. He supplied in response to demand. Simple economics. He would pretend to be concerned, even as he snatched the last few dollars out of some guy’s hand in exchange for a baggie of the stuff. He could turn cold in a heartbeat when someone arrived at his door, in tears, to beg him for “just one bump” until he could scrape together some money. He could turn even colder when they offered him their bodies in exchange for the drug. Even if Tony was wired that way, most of these boys no longer had anything left with which to barter—not only did they look bad, they smelled bad.

  But he was good at pretending to be their best friend. Other than making a trip out to Indiana every few days, and a little weighing, measuring, and bagging the product, he had very little else he needed to do. In exchange, he was making a respectable profit. So, he could charm them, even flirt a little when they were high, allowing them to ogle his six foot, three inch frame, packed solid with lean muscle, his shaved head, and shockingly pale eyes that wavered between gray and blue.