Judas Goat

by Greg F. Gifune

  I don’t think I can stop it.

  He shivered despite the heat. Dream visions of Sheena bleeding flickered past his mind’s eye, a pen buried deep in her arm, veins ravaged and gushing crimson…

  Fighting with everything he had to keep his mounting terror at bay, Lenny backed into a corner of the room and slowly sank to the floor. He wrapped his arms around himself and stared at the lamp. Its light provided some comfort, but the paranoia and fear were winning.

  Lenny watched the glow for what seemed hours, clinging desperately to whatever bits of control remained. He felt like a helpless child lost at sea and struggling to remain above water. No matter how hard he fought, eventually he’d slip beneath the surface and die. He knew this, yet he continued to struggle. Had it not been quite so hopeless, he might’ve claimed it valiant. But the doomed had no such luxuries. He told himself he would not sleep—could not sleep—but eventually did just that. As the waves overtook him, he swallowed night and spiraled down through liquid darkness to all that waited for him.

  There, in the horrifying depths of his own torment.

  7

  He remembers her physically in bits and pieces. Eyes…ears…lips…her hair…human shards free-floating and dismembered, scraps—fractions—but rarely the whole…breasts…her stomach…between her legs…her ass...her feet… She is a paper doll torn to shreds and hastily reconstructed; the missing parts filled in with darkness, sighs and whispers; a patchwork of night. Only none of it matters, her essence remains. He can still sense the feel of her, the taste and smell of her…sometimes even stronger than when he’d held her in his arms.

  Wrapped in blankets, they sit together on the fire escape. From the third-floor apartment, they can see the Boston Commons in the distance: the parks and trees and pond. It is chilly out on the fire escape, but wildly romantic. Snow falls gracefully in tiny pellets, silently blanketing the city as it sleeps on an early Sunday morning. The look and feel of the city takes on a dated and magical appearance, like those enchanting snowy scenes in old Hollywood films, Lenny thinks. Like Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle.

  He doesn’t know then that he will never feel anything quite like this again. These tender moments will forever remain in memory, but just beyond his grasp.

  For the first time, they discuss their home lives, their families. He tells her about being an only child, his parents—his mother a bank teller, his father an electrician—and his dreams of one day being a great actor. He sees how tired they are, he says, how miserable they are doing things they never really wanted to do and living lives they never dreamed of. They settled, and now they mark time, content in their own way, but not quite happy. He explains how he began acting in junior high school theater productions, and how all through high school he has studied and worked toward a career in the arts, toward first obtaining the college scholarship he now enjoys and then to continue on to New York and study with the greats at The Actor’s Studio. It’s all he’s ever wanted, all he knows. His parents tried for years to have a baby, and when he was born his mother nearly died giving birth, so they never had another. He’s their hope too, he tells her. He’ll make them proud and achieve things they could only imagine in their wildest dreams.

  In her usual soft and thoughtful voice, she tells him about being the baby in her family, how her sister is older and has more in common with their mother and how sometimes it seems like it’s them against her. She’s on the outside, an afterthought. Her mother and sister love her, she explains, and she loves them. But it’s not the same. She talks about her father, a man she’s never known, and how it hurts her to realize he abandoned her without ever laying eyes on her. She hopes to be a journalist, a writer of important and compelling works that inform and help and challenge people. And she speaks of her desire to have a family of her own, to one day be able to live the storybook life she’s envisioned since childhood. A husband, children, lots of pets, a nice home and a fulfilling job, to love and be loved, these are her dreams.

  “They’re good dreams,” he tells her, holding her close, his arms wrapped around her soft, delicate shoulders. But even then he can’t be certain if it’s really him on the fire escape or if he’s only performing, playing a role that fits the scene, as he so often does. Maybe there’s no difference. For Lenny there never is.

  “That’s all they are, dreams,” she says sadly, “at least for me anyway.”

  “You’ll get there.”

  “But not with you.”

  The snowflakes collect in her red hair like sugar. He gently runs his hand across her scalp. The warmth of his fingers melts the snow. “With someone else,” he says, “someone who can give you the life you want and deserve.”

  “It won’t matter. You’ll all leave me. Everyone does. My father left me, both boyfriends I had before you left me, even my friends in high school left me. It’s what people do.”

  “Even when this ends, we’ll always be friends, Sheena. If you ever need me, I’ll be there.”

  She smiles at him, but he can tell she doesn’t believe it any more than he does. “Maybe you’ll want to be there,” she says, her eyes turning moist, “but you won’t be.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  She rests her head on his chest. “I love you, Lenny.”

  It is the first time she’s told him this. What he feels in return is panic.

  “I love you,” she says again.

  He doesn’t answer, pretends not to hear.

  “Don’t be mad.”

  With a sigh he slips away from her, bringing enough blanket with him to remain covered as he leans against the railing and looks out at the commons. “I’m not mad.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I don’t want you to love me.”

  “Love doesn’t care what anyone wants.”

  “I told you going in what this was. I never lied or misled you.”

  “I know you don’t feel the same way. It’s OK, I—”

  “How do you know what I feel?”

  “I know you don’t love me back.”

  It will be years, and Sheena will be lost to him forever before he realizes he did love her.

  Without saying another word, she shrugs the blankets off and slowly stands, hands clutching the railing. Lenny, still sitting in the corner of the fire escape, looks up at her. She stands naked before him and the rest of the city, her pale skin so white in contrast to her red hair. The snow falls across her, and she trembles but makes no move to cover herself.

  “What are you doing?” Lenny asks, stunned.

  Sheena’s hands glide down across her breasts, over her belly and between her legs. Her eyes never leave his, even as her mouth drops open. She looks like an animal in heat, overcome and unable to fight the desire coursing through her. Her lips curl in a silent snarl, her eyes drip with lust.

  “Sheena,” he says, reaching for her. “Stop, you’ll...”

  Her fingers push deeper inside her and she moans, choking on her own spit as her chest heaves seductively. She looks out at the city, hopeful someone else has seen, tempting the world to watch.

  “Jesus.” Lenny scrambles to his feet and throws the blankets up and over them. As they fall across their nude forms, he wraps himself around her and buries his face in her neck. Together, they stagger back into the apartment.

  Night folds, glides and runs like dark rapids, alive and fierce and altering everything in its path, gradually breaking it down, dissolving layers of time and distance until those things buried within it from long ago begin to emerge, born anew amidst the carnage of supposed redemption. Forgotten voices skip through the years, stones bouncing across smooth water, thoughts tumbling through the madness of dreamscapes and nightmares. “Cleanse me of my sin.”

  They are together in the apartment. Sheena’s roommates have all gone home for the weekend, so the apartment is quiet and empty. Their lovemaking complete, she and Lenny lay in bed sharing a joint, no longer wrapped in blankets but each othe
r, bodies moist and warm.

  “I can’t figure you out,” he says, exhaling and passing her the joint.

  “I didn’t know you were trying to.”

  “The minute I think I know you, you do something I never expected.”

  “Everyone has two sides, Lenny.”

  “But not everyone shows them.”

  “I don’t show both to everyone.”

  “Only to me?”

  She returns the joint. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’re so quiet and shy and innocent, and all of a sudden you’re out of control, you’re…”

  “A slut?”

  He stares at her, tries to read her eyes. They give away nothing.

  Or is it everything he sees?

  “Do you like that side of me?” she asks. “It turns you on, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah it does sometimes.”

  “But?”

  “Is it really you or just something you think I want?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I don’t know then how can I know you?”

  “You don’t need to know me,” she reminds him. “Not really.”

  “Just because this isn’t going to be a long-term thing doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. I do, OK? I do.”

  She smiles dreamily. “I believe you.”

  “And that side of you worries me.”

  “Why?”

  “Doesn’t it scare you?”

  She slides her head lower to his chest, nuzzles his nipple. “All the time.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “You ask like I have a choice.”

  “Don’t you?” He offers her the joint again.

  She waves it away. “It’s as much the real me as the sweet innocent side.”

  “Maybe that’s it. You’re only nineteen. You don’t know who you are yet.”

  “And you do?”

  “No, not completely, but…” Now a roach, he takes another pull then drops the joint into an ashtray on the nightstand.

  “Maybe I’m sick. Maybe I’m a nymphomaniac or something.”

  He can’t tell if she’s joking. “You’re trying to find your way and define yourself at the same time. We both are.”

  “What if it’s just the opposite? What if it’s so simple and right there inside us all along, and all we have to do is listen and open ourselves up to it?”

  “And what if one day doing that puts you in a really bad situation?”

  “There are consequences, Lenny, to everything. But one thing I do know is that we’ll never be alive again like we are right now. It’ll all be yesterdays and memories before you know it. And we’ll both look back and give anything to be young and free again just for a day, an hour. No matter what happens, good or bad, we’ll never feel this indestructible again.”

  “But we’re not indestructible.”

  “No, it’s an illusion. But it’s a beautiful one, don’t you think? It doesn’t last but it’s so beautiful sometimes it makes me want to cry, because I know, like everybody else, we’ll get older and we’ll forget how to be like this.” She pushes herself up onto her elbows, and her hair falls across her face. She pushes it away and behind her ear and leans closer, her breasts crushing his chest. “Maybe we don’t need to spend our lives trying to find ourselves at all. Maybe we start out knowing and we’ve got it exactly right in the first place, and it’s time and age that makes us lost. Maybe that’s how we lose ourselves. Couldn’t that be it? Couldn’t it be that we don’t spend our lives trying to find ourselves, we spend them trying to get back everything we’ve lost?”

  He thinks about it a while. “How do you feel when you do those things?”

  “Powerful.”

  “But you’re so submissive when you get like that, it’s like, you almost make me be…”

  “Is this the actor studying the subject or is it just you and me?”

  Suddenly confronted with a feeling of darkness and detachment, Lenny closes his eyes, not wanting to look at her just then. “I don’t know.”

  “You really don’t, do you?”

  One hand moves down her back and onto her buttocks. She moves closer and they kiss, her tongue entangled with his.

  She pulls away, licks his ear and whispers, “Fuck me.”

  Lenny takes her face in his hands and pulls her to him. They kiss again, and this time as the passion grows he can feel her wiggling, her nude body mashing and slithering against his own as he closes his jaw enough so that her tongue must drag across his teeth before she can pull away. He bites down just enough to cause her pain but not enough to draw blood. She moans and rolls onto her stomach, lifting her ass into the air, offering it to him and looking back over her shoulder with the same fiery look she always has when she gets like this. “Do it. Please, just do it.”

  Darkness returns, but the sounds and sensations remain. Their moans and grunts…wet flesh sliding and slapping…her screams and pleas for him to hurt her…and his horrifying ability to grant that wish…it’s all there somewhere deep in the blackness…covering him now like a funereal shroud…

  And then that thing is there again, with its twisted horns and inhuman eyes watching him through the night…soulless, empty eyes…neither alive nor fully dead. And Sheena, she’s nearby too, he can hear her frightened, rapid breath. He can smell her sex along with the earthy smell of the animal wafting across the sand on the sea winds. Just beyond his bare toes, he can see Sheena’s blood trickling across sand, wetting it down, forming puddles…so much blood it cannot be hers alone...

  “I love you, Lenny. I love you.”

  8

  It took him a while to understand it wasn’t snow falling all around him, but glass. Showering down in tiny shards and sprays of mist, the broken pieces sliced and cut him as they fell. He screamed, looking up into the storm, forcing his eyes to remain open even when they’d been punctured and begun to bleed. He could feel the grit, coarse and jagged in his mouth, on his tongue and grinding against his gums. He could taste the blood filling the spaces between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks, rising from the back of his throat to mix with the glass in a soupy froth that spilled across his ravaged lips and dripped from his chin.

  Just before, Sheena had stood in front of a large mirror, staring into it with eyes turned black and smooth like polished onyx. Then she too had screamed. More rage than pain, her screech seemed unlikely in one so slight, but erupted like the blast of a siren, exploding the mirror and shattering it to pieces.

  An eerie silence followed. In the distance, Lenny heard something steady and slow, like a faraway wind, but soon realized it was his own shallow breath ringing in his ears. He knew he was curled up on his side, but in utter darkness had no sense of direction or context.

  His memories circled him, marauders bent on annihilation.

  Lenny awakened to pouring rain. He found himself on the floor in the living room, sitting in the same corner he’d retreated to the night before. Waiting until his vision and mind had synchronized and he could be certain he was fully awake, he struggled to his feet. His back, shoulders, neck and legs ached, and his hands were clenched into fists so tight they’d fallen asleep. As he made his way to the kitchen he shook his hands vigorously until the pins and needles retreated.

  Icy rain pummeled and blurred the windows with an ongoing tap-thud, and a steady wind slammed the house. The structure creaked and moaned in agony or defiance, he couldn’t be sure which.

  He lit a cigarette just as his cell phone began to ring. Lenny checked the ID. Walter. “Hey.” Lenny coughed, cleared his throat.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No, I’m up, I—just got up a minute ago. What’s up?”

  “Got your message, just haven’t had a chance to call you back until this morning. I nailed the interview. She’s representing me.”

  “That’s great, Walt. Congratulations.”


  “She’s already got me lined up for auditions. I’m flying out to the coast next week, can you believe it?” When Lenny didn’t answer he said, “You OK?”

  He rubbed his eyes and nodded into the phone. “Yeah, I’m selling this place, going to see a real estate agent today and I’m getting the hell out of here. Did you check in on Tabitha?”

  “I stopped by your place last night. She was drunk off her ass per usual. I straightened the place up and made her some soup. She kept telling me to go fuck myself, enchantress that she is. Then she started crying. I don’t know how you put up with it, man. I mean, you never really told me the full story about this other broad that left you the house, but I know there’s a lot of guilt and bad memories there. Things happen, Lenny, you can’t punish yourself forever. It’s like you feel bad about this Sheena chick from a million years ago so to make up for it you let Tabitha shit all over you. You’re paying penance, is that it? Life’s too short.”

  “Not always.”

  “I’m worried about you, bro. You haven’t been yourself lately and—look, you—hell, all of us in the arts are a little crazy, comes with the territory, right? But you can’t let those things inside you get the upper hand. Like the old Ronald Coleman flick A Double Life, remember? He gets so deep into playing the role of Othello he snaps and goes psycho because he can’t separate the part from real life. Living someone else’s reality is dangerous, Lenny, you follow?”

  Lenny gripped the phone so tight his hand began to ache. “I’m just tired.”

  “You’ve been exhausted and stressed out for months. Alone up there with all those old ghosts and shit, it’s not conducive to you getting it together.”

  “I can’t run anymore. Those old ghosts have been hunting me my whole life. Now they’ve got me cornered. Here.”

  “You put that property on the market and get your ass home ASAP.”

  Weary, Lenny leaned against the wall. “I’ll be back soon. We’ll talk then.”