Come Out Tonight

by Bonnie Rozanski

  “Find the perpetrator?” I asked, trying to sound legit.

  “Hello Henry,” the detective said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine but that’s not the point,” I said, going over to Sherry. “How are you?” I asked Sherry.

  “Pretty good,” she said, smiling at me. She looked good too, even if the smile was a little lop-sided.

  “Fantastic.” I said, giving her a kiss. “What were you two talking about?”

  Sherry shrugged. “Trying to remember,” she said.

  “Remember what?” I asked

  “What happened that...night,” Sherry said.

  “What do you remember?” I asked.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be going,” Sirken said from the door.

  “No! Don’t go,” I shouted, running after her. “Tell me about the investigation.”

  “No new leads,” she said, when I got to her. “By the way, I heard about the break-in.”

  “What break-in?” Sherry called from the chair.

  “It was nothing,” I called back to Sherry. To Sirken, “You heard about that?”

  “I know everything,” the detective said, smiling.

  I must have hesitated. What did that actually mean? “Did they find the Oxycontin?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said.. “Nor any of the other stuff. Whoever took it hasn’t tried to sell it yet.”

  “What break-on?” Sherry called.

  Sherry’s like a dog with a bone. She just won’t give it up, even when she can’t find the right word, and her short-term memory stinks.

  “Oh, didn’t I tellya?” I called to her. “There was this break-in at the pharmacy.”

  By now, Detective Sirken was walking out the door. “Nice talking with you, Sherry,” she said, disappearing.

  “What were we talking about?” Sherry asked when I returned.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just thanked her for coming.”

  “Something about a drug store,” she said, closing her eyes.

  “Better get back to bed,” I said, half-carrying her over. “I think you’re tuckered out.”

  “Yeah.”

  I got her settled in bed, and she closed her eyes. I asked her if she was comfortable, but she didn’t answer.

  “Sherry?” I said, but her eight hours were up.

  I went home, feeling everyone was against me. What did Sirken ask and what did Sherry answer? For that matter, what did Sirken know and what did Sherry remember? They were in a huddle as I came in. Was the detective asking her about me? Sirken said, “I know everything.” Was that a joke or a threat? Had she gotten a search warrant and checked my apartment?

  I let myself into the apartment, running straight away down the dark hallway, flipping the bathroom switch. Fifteen boxes were still in the medicine cabinet, looking the same but not the same. Were they all on their side like that? Was that someone else’s fingerprint on the mirror? You’re just being paranoid, I told myself. I tore open one of the fifteen boxes, withdrew one tablet, and threw it down my throat along with half a glass of toothpaste water. I was asleep before I hit the bed.

  * * *

  The rest of the week passed pretty uneventfully. Carl had long since stopped ribbing me about the Oxycontin. When no leads materialized, he called his insurance company and filed a claim for all the stolen stock. Everything seemed to be back to normal. Sure, I was running up to see Sherry every other night and on weekends, but I was sleeping great, and I wasn’t forgetting things or making mistakes on the job, so everything was copacetic. Carl said I had proved myself, and put me back on prescription duty.

  So, everything was cool, except for the fact that I couldn’t seem to kick Somnolux. I mean, every time I tried to stop the pills, I’d get non-stop nightmares. Dream rebound, the Internet said. I’d manage a night or two without it, go through Hell and start in again. I was limiting my alcohol consumption to weekends after I had seen Sherry, though, and all in all was keeping myself in line, but sometimes I’d wake up Mondays to a surprise. One Monday I found Heather Kuznitz in my bed. As I watched her, speechless, she stretched, the sheet cascading down a sleek and tempting body, giving me a sexy smile.

  “Hey big guy,” she said, reaching out to my privates.

  All I could remember was that time months and months ago when she threw me out of her apartment telling me to fuck off. It was obvious something had changed. But what? “I never thought I’d see you again,” I said.

  “Honey, you saw me last night. All of me.” She laughed, edging closer.

  I looked at the alarm clock. A quarter to nine. “I gotta get to work.”

  “This won’t take long,” Heather said, climbing on top of me, her body soft and perfumed with sweet sweat. She gave me that sexy smile again, half dreamy, half mischievous. “Let me thank you for last night,” she said, taking me in her mouth.

  * * *

  Stuff like that happened. Women’s underwear would show up in my drawers; homemade lasagna, in the refrigerator. At first it kind of fucked with my mind, but it wasn’t hard to get used to. Heather came and went. She didn’t seem to want anything from me but the sex, and most of that was already consummated and done with when I woke up. Still, I reaped the benefits of grateful women. I was beginning to like this life where I was the hero and the benefactor with no effort on my part. And I was slowly losing my enthusiasm for visiting Sherry every other day, having to act care giver and cheerleader, even though now she was awake, and that was what I said I’d always wanted. I felt something in me morphing, but I couldn’t say into what. Maybe it was natural. Maybe it was just that I wanted a life.

  Anyway, Thursday was my late shift at work. So, Thursday morning I took my usual trip to the Bronx. Old Brown Suit wasn’t on the platform. I figured maybe he had taken the weekend off, but no such luck. There he was, already sitting in the back of the 8:14 express car as I walked in. I nodded to him, but he was too engrossed in an ad for learning Cantonese. I sat down on the other side of the aisle. We traveled almost all the way up to the Bronx, separated only by the width of a subway car, staring out of opposite windows. He left the stop before I did, passing me in the aisle without a glance. I wondered why he had even bothered making the trip.

  I walked the rest of the way to the home along quiet, empty streets. The gang members usually huddled on street corners at night must have been home, sleeping it off. Used syringes were scattered in the gutter and busted liquor bottles littered the sidewalk, but all in all, in daylight this place was sadder than it was scary. The wind might have been blowing right through the bombed-out bus shelter, but for the first time I saw homey scenes painted on tenements’ boarded windows. Red flower pots sat on dining tables; a big TV set with rabbit ears on top showed Oscar the Grouch; little girls with ribbons in their hair leaned over of the sill. Boarded, falling-down buildings, but someone took the time to paint hope on those windows.

  Inside the home a few dozen old folks, probably up since dawn, milled around. I could see the old busybody traffic cop shuffling towards me, fixing to interrogate me again, so I scooted down the hall and ducked into Sherry’s room. There she was, lying in bed, pale and still, her eyes open but staring a million miles away. She hadn’t had her Somnolux yet. I walked back out and down the hall to the nurses’ station. Why they call it a nurses’ station, I’ll never know. You can’t ever find any nurses there.

  I sauntered down one hall and then another, finally finding the day nurse. “Sherry Pollack hasn’t had her meds yet,” I told her.

  “Honey, I’m way behind. The subway took forever, and here I am doing my best. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I calculated the distance from there to Sherry’s room and how long that would translate to in time. “Let me give it to her,” I said.

  We argued for a few minutes, she insisting only licensed practitioners can give out meds, and me insisting I was the very first to give Sherry Somnolux, so obviously I was qualified. This didn’t fly. So I followed her down the hall
as she did her rounds, not letting her out of my sight. Down one hallway, up another. Finally she sighed and reached into her cart for the Somnolux, put it into a little dixie cup and handed it over. It was an ordinary 10 mg tablet. If I hadn’t been so paranoid about depleting my supplies, I could have given her one of mine. Never mind. I ran down the hallway, almost bumping into an old man with a walker. “Sorry, sir,” I said, rounding the corner, sprinting the last lap toward Sherry’s room.

  When I walked in, she was still in the same position she had been before. I dissolved the pill in a little water on a teaspoon, grabbed the dead weight of her and hoisted it into a sitting position, opened her mouth and forced it into her mouth. Ten minutes later her color brightened and her face flushed. Her eyes seemed to twinkle, and her mouth curved into a smile.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi, yourself,” I answered, our usual repartee. I helped her to sit up, pushed the button to let down the side of her bed. “Can you dress yourself?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Open the top one?” she asked me, pointing unsteadily across the room. I followed her finger and opened the underwear drawer. She’d been disconnected from her tubes and catheter, so she was able to wear regular clothes.

  “This?” I said, pulling out a bra and underpants in varying styles and colors.

  “No,” she laughed. “Not those. Something that matches.”

  I fumbled about in the drawer, pulling out two pieces which might, in an imperfect world, be said to match. “These okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I brought them over. This was a first: dressing Sherry. I helped her to pull off the top of her pajamas, held out the bra so she could slip into it. Then she couldn’t fasten the hook between her breasts. I managed to get in back of her and loop my arms in front to hook the bra. We swung her legs over the end of the bed; with effort, we managed to pull off her pajama bottoms and to pull up her panties. By the time the aide came in, we were both exhausted, and all that we’d managed was her underwear. I thankfully gave over my role to the aide and went outside for a breath of air. This, I knew, was what it would be like if Sherry lived at my place.

  Outside, I moped. Nothing would ever be the way I used to imagine it. Nothing would ever be the same. This person just wasn’t the same. Was it really Sherry?

  Sherry used to say that there is no little man in our heads, telling us what to do. No self. Selves are constructs made by our brains. Human beings have language, and our words kind of take off on their own and create a story of who we are. All we are is works-in-progress, stories that keep updating and updating themselves throughout our lives, snowballing with new events and jobs, friends, moves, adventures, losses. Each new turn becomes part of the story that tells us and the rest of the world who we are.

  I told her once I didn’t believe it. I was sure I was more real than just a story.

  “Really? Sherry said. “You’re sure? How?”

  “I don’t know. I feel real. I...Isn’t that enough?”

  Sherry just laughed like I was an idiot, punishing me with another fifteen minutes on how self is represented by a single cluster of cells in our brain. How those cells don’t have to change because all they are is a name: Me. That the story itself is somewhere else, somewhere in the connections between other cells that hold our features: maleness or tallness or dumbness, where we grew up and the movies we’ve seen. But is there really a Henry in the world? No, Sherry would say. We might see ourselves as real, unchanging, even immortal, but it’s not true. It’s just a story.

  Well, I hated to think it, but it looked to me like the old Sherry had ended, and this new Sherry was some other story altogether.

  I plodded down the hall toward her room and whoever I would find there. I opened the door to find Sherry, dressed in pants and sweater, washed and brushed, and sitting in a chair eating her breakfast. She seemed to be coping slightly better with the oatmeal; I didn’t offer to help.

  “So what’s new?” Sherry asked.

  “Not much,” I said. “Iraq. Afghanistan. The Middle East. Same old. Same old.”

  “No,” she said, trying to navigate the spoon back to the tray. “Your life.”

  I didn’t know what to say. All the interesting parts were off limits. “Not much. Back and forth between the job and the apartment. And here.”

  “I miss working,” Sherry said, laying down the spoon.

  “You’ll go back.”

  “No I won’t,” she said. “They gave away my job.”

  “I think the law says that they have to give you a job when you’re ready to go back.”

  “Oh, sure. What can they give someone who can’t stay awake?”

  I thought of my talk with the doctor. Will she have to take Somnolux for the rest of her life? And the answer: We can only hope... This was not what she wanted to hear. “The doctor said he is optimistic,” I said instead, not lying, just taking something out of context.

  “Really?” she said. “Optimistic?”

  I had put my foot in it. Now how was I going to make shit smell better? I gave her my version of the conversation: We don’t know for sure, only God does, but you’re a miracle! No one ever came out of PVS this way before, so who’s to say you won’t be back to your old self soon, very soon. I left out the black brain scans, long-dormant pathways, and no gamma wave. Sherry seemed happy with what was left. She picked up her spoon in her fist and made another run at her oatmeal.

  “You hear from the Institute?” I asked.

  “Ryan calls sometimes,” she mumbled through the oatmeal.

  “You see him?”

  “No,” she said, her eyes on the spoon.

  “What about Detective Sirken?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “You know, the detective who was following your case.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “The woman who came and asked you questions.”

  “Yeah. I think I remember her. ”

  “Has she come again?”

  “Again?”

  I decided to drop it. Sherry didn’t even remember she was there. “Turn on the news?” I sighed.

  Sherry nodded.

  I grabbed the remote from the bed table and clicked it on, forwarding through a series of morning shows, commercials, Lydia’s Italian Kitchen, cartoons, until I lit on the local news broadcast. Morning or not, all it seemed to contain was bad news. Hold-up in a Brooklyn liquor store, owner shot to death when he wouldn’t open the register. Fight to the death of rival gangs in the Bronx, two killed, eight wounded. Local drought continuing; don’t flush your toilet. Then, shooting in Queens. More after this. A commercial followed for some medicine to prevent strokes. Do not use if you are pregnant, thinking of becoming pregnant, have heart disease, thinking of having heart disease. Might cause glaucoma, migraines, kidney failure. Hi, we’re back. There was a shooting last night in Queens. Diego Jimenez, the anchor said, the screen filling with a picture of a large beefy guy with curly dark hair...WAIT I THOUGHT... was found shot dead in his home...WASN’T THAT?... Here the picture morphed to a little white house with green shutters...OH MY...at 78-22 160th Street...GOD.

  * * *

  Then there’s a blank spot in my memory. The next thing I remember is being on the F train on its way to Queens. My watch showed two hours later. I pulled out my cell and called Sherry to find out what happened. It rang for six times before she picked up. I could picture her fumbling for the phone, trying to pick it up with misbehaving hands.

  “Hi, Sherry,” was all I said, before the line cut off.

  I pushed redial, figuring maybe she had pushed the wrong button. Five rings until she picked up this time. “Hi, Sherry,” I said again. I could hear angry bursts of crying on the other end.

  “I wouldn’t live with you...if you were...the last person on earth!” I heard between sobs.

  “What?” I said.

  “Don’t bother...selling my apartment or...bringing my clothes someplace! Don’t bother.
..doing anything for me!” she sobbed. “...Don’t have to tell me what a weight I am on your...back. I know I am. And I’m sorry, but...you think...I want this? You think...I want to be a...cripple?”

  I tried to say that she wasn’t a cripple, that she’d be okay, not to worry so much, she was just depressed, but she blew me off. “Don’t give me that bull...dog. After you just told me I am. But it’s your fault! You called the ambu...ambulance. I didn’t ask you to. You should have let me die!”

  “But what happened?” I asked. “I didn’t say those things.”

  There was a long pause before she said anything. Then, “I don’t want to see you again,” and click.

  Meanwhile the doors were opening at the Forest Hills station. I didn’t want to go to Queens. Why was I going to Queens? But I was in a daze: paralyzed, weak. I sat in my seat four more stops till I could summon up enough will to get off the train. Then I walked down one long flight of stairs and up another, and boarded the train going the other way.

  The train was packed: students in lumpy backpacks; a coffee klatch of gray-haired women chatting in a corner, their seats facing each other; a group of teenaged ballerinas, their hair in buns, carrying duffle bags; a herd of rowdy schoolchildren being corralled by their teachers. I made my way down the car. Grabbing an overhead strap, I saw the time on my watch: almost two. I was due back at work an hour and a half ago. Could it get any worse?

  The shadow of a person grabbed the strap to my left. “Late for work?” a familiar voice said. I turned around to see Detective Donna Sirken. Worse.

  “Have a nice trip to Queens?” she asked.

  “You been following me?”

  “All the way from the Bronx,” she answered.

  “Well, then, you’d have noticed that I never made it to Queens.”

  “True,” she said. “I just figured you caught sight of me and decided not to complete your trip.”

  “I never noticed you till you came up beside me.”

  “Right. Then why would you get all the way to Queens and then turn around?”