A Perfect Blindness

by W. Lance Hunt

  Breaking free from their questions, I weave my way through the bodies, keeping my head down to avoid being seen by anyone else I might know. I hesitate at the edge of the glass-block wall separating the dance floor from the main bar. Some Cubs fan who’s standing next to me starts looking me over. He cocks his head as if he’s going to say “Don’t I know you?,” so I quickly step around the corner toward the dance floor. The music grows more intense, the bass thudding through my chest. I search the silhouettes of dancers thrashing, jackets winging, cigarette cherries carving arcs to the rhythm. No Chris. Not a surprise. I look down the drink rail fencing off the dance floor. Small spotlights shine straight down, splashing off the glossy black wood. Trails of smoke climb the light beams. I scan the people standing behind the drink rail as they nod to the rhythm and sip drinks. Again—no Chris.

  There is only one place left to look in the whole bar.

  Making it to the far end of the bar, I can see the back alcove in the far corner—a large, square darkness. Chris has to be there, but I don’t want anyone sitting in those shadows to see me.

  I just want Chris.

  So I steal a look into the alcove. At one of the tables, I see Chris shaking her head, looking distressed. She doesn’t see me, so I have to take a step forward. Everyone looks troubled. Nancy shakes her head, and AnnMarie sits cross-armed but then leans down to listen to Jonathan, who sweeps hair from his lips.

  I freeze.

  He hasn’t seen me yet, so I drop my shoulders, thinning myself, trying to disappear into the darkness so I can, quietly, escape.

  Then Chris sees me. She stands up, pointing. Following her finger, Jonathan’s eyes land on me.

  “Aw, hell,” I say.

  He stands, ushering me to sit, looking very grave.

  “He’s dead,” Chris says. She looks stricken.

  “What?” I urgently want to flee but feel paralyzed with everyone watching me.

  “Good you’re here now. Come on. Sit next to Chris,” Jonathan says, urging me to the table with a hand on my shoulder. I submit.

  Chris leans close. I can see she’s been crying. “He’s dead.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Kenny,” she says. “Kenny’s … dead.”

  “What do you mean? Dead?”

  “Shot,” she continues. “By Scott.”

  “Shot? Who? What’s going on?”

  “For starters,” Jonathan says, with a dramatic thrust of his hands, “Scott’s in jail.”

  I disbelieve him. Yet now everyone’s lost expressions make sense.

  “He shot Kenny this afternoon.”

  “My god,” I say. Then I realize what that means. “Oh Chris, I’m so sorry. I … I …”

  “Cops stopped by this afternoon,” Jonathan says. “Questioned me. Unreal. They suspect a lover’s spat. I think that’s nuts.”

  This is all too much.

  “Oh,” he says. “Mercurial Visions … broke up.”

  “Hold on … what?”

  “Jennifer … I …” he says. He drags his hands down his face, leaving a frown behind. “I’m sorry. For not seeing things. Everything could’ve been so different.” He squeezes my shoulder.

  In this darkness, everyone at the table looks like a specter, and the music keeps thumping through my body. Like shades, shapes of people mill around the alcove’s opening. I feel like I’m in a cave, looking out from the world of the damned.

  Chris is hunched over facing the wall. I wrap my arm around her, and can feel her sobbing. I lead her away from the alcove and what was Mercurial Visions. In the deep shadows and columns of light, I steer Chris through the faceless silhouettes as dark-dressed bodies jostle us, waving lit cigarettes around, the orange glows like tools of torture. The rhythm pounds over cackles, chortles, guffaws, and bits of conversation. The faces look menacing, leering, and angry. Smoke rises up the columns of light as if from pits of fire.

  We make it to the stairwell. I feel cold air on my face, and I climb up and pull Chris with me down the hall, through the gates, and into the cold air of the night. It bites into me. Walking down Clark Street, I shiver. I take the car keys from her.

  We’ve escaped, but Kenny’s dead, and I need to spend the night with her—for both of us.

  • • • • •

  It’s still dark—around three, four in the morning. I’ve lost track of time sitting here with Chris. She’s finally fallen asleep. I should be so tired I can’t keep my eyes open, but so many thoughts hound me: I’m back in Chicago. Chris’s boyfriend, Kenny, is dead. I knew him and partied with him. I liked him, I think. He was good for Chris. And he was shot dead. By Scott. Who’s in jail. Mercurial Visions is gone. AnnMarie’s little boy Malcolm is dead—hit by a car shopping for his fake mother’s birthday. Charlene’s dead—killed by Charlene, the jaded killing the hopeful. “Clap, clap, don’t let Tink die.” Nancy’s a well-off escort. She told me right before I moved to Seattle that she gets all cash and special favors. Now she backs shows with Les Femmes. Ron and Wendy traffic in illusion. My homophobe ex was queer.

  I’m so sick of tripping over who people really are.

  Chapter 60

  Sammy’s Face

  —Scott—

  I hate the way hospitals smell. That’s the first thing I notice when I wake up—the chemical stench.

  Then I start remembering. The flash. The boom. The gore. All that blood. It’s as if I’ve woken up in someone else’s life.

  ‘Cause this couldn’t be my life. I kept my promises.

  The next several days smear together into a series of scenes from a gritty crime show, except nothing’s like it is on TV. It’s slower, dirtier, and more confusing. Once the doctors say I’m fine, there are people taking pictures of me in handcuffs when I’m helped into the waiting cop car. They take mug shots and fingerprints, give me a jumpsuit, and leave me sitting alone in a room. Then come questions I can’t answer to anyone’s satisfaction. And there is waiting, more waiting, and more waiting.

  My size plus a few angry faces keep the other prisoners from messing with me much.

  Eventually Dave—my short, red-faced lawyer—posts bail for me. He’s vaguely reassuring, telling me how “we’ll say the powder on your hands is residual, blowback, from protecting yourself. The spurned lover was shot with his own gun.” He nods. “I doubt there will be charges for anything in the end.”

  After handing me a bag of clothes, he slips me a wad of twenties and tells me to find someplace cheap to stay for now. “Think SRO. Try the Hotel Hong Kong over on Ohio. It’s not far. You’ll need to work on getting something more permanent.”

  It seems I’m basically broke after posting bail. I still have three boxes of T-shirts from the Micherigan tour. Collector’s items for … some consignment shop. They’ll probably end up as expensive rags. If I can ever get them.

  I scoff, stepping out into the gray afternoon.

  The hiss of tires accompanies me as I trudge along Ohio Street in a misty rain. The streetlights give off damp light, making faint streaks on the wet asphalt. The Hotel Hong Kong stands tall over the street, towering over the one-story buildings and vacant lots surrounding it, making it seem impressive.

  Pushing open the door, I stride past the three wooden phone booths that crowd the doorway to the attached liquor store and move down the hallway, with its stained red-striped wallpaper and flattened, threadbare red carpet. I cross the lobby—which reeks like hell—step up to the office, and look through the plexiglass window. It’s a filthy little room full of old food wrappers, disheveled stacks of papers, and an ashtray overstuffed with butts.

  The man inside turns from a small black-and-white TV and looks me over from inside his chamber with deep-sunken, dull eyes. In his stained, yellowing shirt, he’s as grubby as the rest of this place.

  “No noise,” the man says, shaking his finger
at me. “This respectable place.”

  “Right.”

  “Pay first.”

  “How much?”

  “One forty a week,” he says. “Up-front.” The man glares at me, challenging me to disagree.

  You must enjoy that power: able to torture us from behind your Plexiglas window, untouchable. A small-time tyrant.

  Reaching into my pocket, I quickly count out seven twenties and push them into the plexiglass cylinder. The man inspects the money and counts it carefully, twice, and then shoves a card into the cylinder with a pen. “Fill it out.”

  Name: Scott Marshall

  Address: Here

  Phone: none

  In case of emergency: David O’Brian, ESQ.

  I exchange the card for the keys to room 917, a roll of wrapped-up toilet paper, and a greyed, fraying towel. The man turns back to his flickering little black-and-white TV.

  Picking up my bag, I turn to the two elevators and walk past the shabby couch and two mismatched chairs furnishing the lobby. I punch the call button.

  A skinny black man in a shabby suit watches me from the corner, smoking.

  Don’t tell me. The house dick.

  The elevator doors clatter open. A painfully skinny man looks surprised to see someone on the elevator. His shirt’s hanging open, showing skin wrapped tightly to ribs. He gives me a crooked single-toothed grin. The elevator’s small. I take up almost half of it when I step in. I press the button for the ninth—the last—floor. The door closes, and the elevator groans, shuddering as it lifts me into the belly of the building.

  It stops on the seventh floor, and the doors slide open, revealing a long hallway. Then a door opens halfway down long the hallway and a scream pours out. The skinny man turns and watches as a young woman appears in the poorly lit hall. A naked man appears right behind her and grabs the woman’s hair.

  The skinny man starts laughing and hoots, “Save me some.”

  I press the close button repeatedly until the door starts closing.

  “I’ll take sloppy seconds, baby,” the man calls out as the door shuts off the scene. He laughs so hard it sounds like he’s coughing up some part of himself. His breath stinks of Thunderbird and rot.

  I close my eyes. The elevator clanks, grinds, and pounds, as if in torment. The man reeks. I can feel his body heat. He disgusts me. I try moving away, but my back hits the wall.

  I rub at the ink on my fingers until the door opens again on nine—a deathly quiet floor. The occasional working lamp casts deep shadows into the corners like lurking phantoms.

  I step on the floor as the elevator door closes behind me. I can hear the man cackling like Charon as he sinks with the elevator.

  Moving down the hall, I read the numbers until I find 917. I unlock the door to stale air and darkness. I switch on the light. It casts a sulfur-yellow tinge over everything: the pockmarked walls, bed, table, and chair.

  Stepping in, I toss the bag onto the bed.

  Silence engulfs me. Even the noise of the traffic below is too far away to hear.

  The TV is mounted high on the wall. I find the remote and turn it on to kill the silence.

  White noise spills out, hissing and shushing as lines of snow drive across the screen.

  In the bathroom, I run water over my wrists, cooling the chafing from the handcuffs. Then I rub my fingers under the water, trying to get rid of the remaining ink stains from the fingerprinting. At first the water gets streaked with black as it flows down the drain, but my fingers remain stained with gray. I scrub harder, the lather slopping over the edges of the sink.

  “Fucking stuff,” I say. I hold up my hands. Won’t come off.

  Cupping water in both hands, I splash it on my face. It stings. I look up into the mirror. Stitches run down the center of my forehead. My whole forehead’s swollen and red. My face is ashen.

  I leave the bathroom and take the three steps across the room to the two narrow windows covered by a cracking, yellowed shade. I pull down on the frayed pull-string. It slips from my fingers, flying up, rat-a-tat-tatting as it spins around the roller at the top of the window.

  Through the grimy windows, I have a decent view of the city. I follow the line of the traffic along Ohio Street to the Kennedy Expressway. Then my eyes fall on the Coyote Building. Next to that, hidden, is the old pencil factory—the loft—everything I’ve spent the last sixteen years working for.

  I pull the shades back down.

  This isn’t what we planned, Sammy. I kept my promises. For sixteen years. Now I’m completely alone, living out an idiot’s tale.

  I was fifteen the summer when Sammy’s family moved to our trailer park, two spots over. His real name was Samuel, but I always called him Sammy. He was seventeen. Of course I’d heard the rumors. Everyone had. He was queer, and that that’s why his family had to move here. He did act weird: kept to himself, spent all his time in his trailer, alone. The rumor was he had a Playgirl and was looking at naked men.

  A couple of days after the school year started, this punk kid, biggest liar in the park, said he’d seen him looking at the pictures—said so right as Sammy got home from school, in front of all the other kids and his mother. The kids all laughed. Sammy’s dad beat the hell out of him. He missed three days of school.

  Sammy was so small and skinny. I felt sorry for him.

  Since he lived two trailers over, we ended up walking to the school bus together most of the time. At first he acted scared of me. I was always big, even at fifteen. Eventually we started talking—about nothing at first. He was nice and not stupid like everyone else.

  At school, he kept to himself. Tried to, at least. Other kids picked fights with him all the time and started calling him Playgirl. He wasn’t my friend, exactly, but he’d get beaten up by these snotty-assed little punks I hated. The principal didn’t do shit. Hell, I thought that prick actually encouraged them. Sammy’s dad did nothing. I hated seeing it.

  In late September, two punks had pinned Sammy on the ground, and a third was kicking his balls, saying he shouldn’t have children.

  That was too much. I punched that little bastard so hard I broke his nose: blood poured down his face. The other two ran as soon as they saw me turning toward them. The little prick had two black eyes for weeks. No one fucked with Sammy after that.

  Sammy never said anything about why he was getting picked on so much or got called Playgirl, and I never asked. I didn’t care. He wanted out of this hellhole as badly as I did, and he’d found a way out—he was going to play rock ’n’ roll. He would make a living performing and get so famous that no one from this shitty place could touch him again.

  All that time alone in his trailer he spent practicing electric guitar. He said he never plugged it in ’cause it was too loud. He never played for anyone there ’cause they’d just laugh and tease him. He already had enough trouble. So he locked himself in his room and put on headphones.

  But man could he play.

  The first time he let me put on the headphones—goddamned if he didn’t sound like what I heard on the radio.

  I knew right then he was going to make it, and I wanted to get out with him.

  Told me he was looking for a keyboardist and a drummer for the band he was going to start, but keyboards and drum kits were expensive. Guitars, though, we could find at a flea market for cheap. They almost never worked right, but I could learn fingering, strumming, and how to read music. Sammy said he could use a rhythm guitarist too.

  Sammy taught me to play that winter.

  We tried to keep it secret, but that didn’t last long. I had to beat the piss out of more than one kid for saying I was his wife and calling us ugly names.

  No one got it. We were friends. We both wanted to escape. He knew how.

  Escaping here with him became all that mattered in the world. He was all I thought about. Seeing
him. Being with him. Practicing with him. Making plans with him. I was afraid for him when we were apart. Especially when he was at home with his ignorant old man.

  But as the year wore on, I realized he was graduating in June. I was only a sophomore.

  I hadn’t thought about it until the announcements started at school about the senior prom, graduation photos, and commencement. He was turning eighteen soon and escaping—without me.

  The day he picked up his gown and mortarboard, he showed them off to me as we walked home from the bus stop. I told him I was afraid of what would happen now.

  He stopped and said, “Hang on, man.”

  I stopped, and we let the other kids walk past.

  “There’s nothing to be scared of,” he said. “Like I told you, I’m going to Columbus to get set up. I’ll start a band for us. You’ll come as soon as you can. Remember: patience and perseverance alone are omnipotent.” He nodded, looking up at me. “Right?”

  I pursed my lips.

  “Right?” he asked again, giving me that expression he used when I got frustrated while playing.

  “Right,” I said, nodding too. “I know.”

  “Nothing to be afraid of, right?”

  “Yeah. You’re right, I just …”

  “Just nothing. Patience and perseverance.”

  “Yes, I know. And if you want to know why you are where you are, look in the mirror. The answer’s staring at you.”

  “Exactly. Right like I said.” He smiled and gave me a wink, and we started back to the trailer park.

  That evening, I was taking out the trash, and I heard him and his father fighting inside their trailer. His father was a stupid, fat redneck. And he was a lot bigger than Sammy. It started getting really loud.

  I walked to the back of their double-wide.

  His father was yelling that I was “never to come here again,” because I was “a faggot” and if I “only left you alone, God would cure you.” Then I heard his old man giving Sammy a wallop. Sammy yelped. Things got knocked over.

  I ran up and pounded on the door. “You inbred fuck!” I shouted. “Leave him alone.” I ripped off the screen door. “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!”