“You only exist if we both agree on it,” M said, though he was sweating. The room they had come in seemed to have only the one door, and M began searching for a hidden exit, fidgeting about with the bookcase and various paraphernalia.
“I’m afraid I’m extremely real,” the man said. “It’s all real. All of your nightmares, everything that your parents ever told you were pretend so that you’d sleep better. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, man-eating plants, and the creature from the black lagoon. Corpses that gnaw and babies that weep, lovers raped, friends mistreated, siblings tortured, things that crawl and scrape and claw. They’re all down here, waiting to meet you.”
“You talk a lot,” Stockdale said, turning and presenting an index finger. There was a popping sound, and the man’s skull exploded outward, a spray of red and white knocking him off his chair.
The house giggled.
“What the fuck good did that do?” M asked, still at his search.
Stockdale shrugged and cracked a knuckle. “I enjoyed it.”
“Of course you did, sir, and why wouldn’t you?” The fat man rose and reassumed his seat. The center of his face had been destroyed. Flemel could see the press of bone beneath the flesh and the pink folds of his brain and the wallpaper behind. “You can’t pretend forever, can you? We all enjoy it. Sadist is just another word for human.”
“Finally,” M muttered, knocking over a bookshelf to reveal a door that had been wallpapered up. Stockdale pulled his butterfly knife out from his jacket and ran it along the seam, breaking the blade while wedging it open.
“Don’t go down that way!” the man at the desk warned. “It only gets worse!”
They ignored him, though he turned out not to be wrong.
“How many rooms have we gone through?” Flemel asked, the descent taking long as ever, taking longer.
“I can’t remember,” M responded.
“Hell is a circle,” Flemel reminded him.
But M didn’t answer.
In one of the rooms, a woman fed herself into a meat grinder, one hand swiveling the crank, the other disappearing into the apparatus and coming out as strands of pink meat, the woman laughing all the while. More stairs. A pack of insects the size of dogs burst forth from the chest and belly and loins of a grotesquely obese man. Stockdale fought them off furiously with his switchblade. Stairs. An old man shoved a child into his gaping maw, weeping and muttering, his words unintelligible. More stairs. M took a tumble on one set and rolled for a long time before he managed to right himself. On his arm was a tattoo of a snake eating its own tail. Three policemen stopped their interrogation long enough to smile, then turned back to their suspect, his face destroyed from violence, his wooden leg broken on the ground before them. Stairs. A mother sat on a stool, one pendulous breast hung outside of her shirt as a thing somewhere between a rat and a piranha gnawed it bloody.
“Hush, baby, hush,” she said, her voice sweet and soft. “Don’t you know it was all like this? It was all always like this. It was never hidden. You couldn’t look at it straight on because you’re a coward, because you’re all cowards, and the ones who aren’t cowards you call mad. But they aren’t mad and neither are you, dear things. You’re just honest. Life is a rusty blade scraping whimpering flesh, a child weeping uncomforted, a chancre swelling into infinity. There isn’t anything in here that you can’t see out there, that you haven’t already seen, that you’ll go on seeing forever.”
M and Stockdale continued past unanswering, thousand-yard stares. “You’re not right,” Flemel said simply, before following them.
The next room was small and dark and silent, and it was only now that it was gone that Flemel realized that for a long time, so long that he had almost (but not quite) grown used to it, he had been hearing the hideous rumbling of the house, the screams and cries, the moans of pleasure, the chittering laugh of madmen. But it was gone now, replaced by the mewling of the creature in the center of the room, the size of a newborn, pink and hideous as an open wound.
There was a sense of familiarity, as if what was coming next had come before, would always come.
Stockdale went first, and after a dozen steps, he shook his head back and forth frantically, as if denying an evident truth. When he turned back he was smiling, more than smiling—leering, beaming, the face of a man in the throes of a revelation or an orgasm. “I see it all now,” he said. “I see the truth. I couldn’t look at it before, but I can now. They’ve helped me, they’ve freed me. I have seen the light, and the light is darkness!”
“It’s the house, man, it’s the house,” M said. The transformation had been going on so long that Flemel had stopped noticing it, shifting strangely, seamlessly, into madness; the difference between this Stockdale and the Stockdale they had known was one of degree rather than kind.
Stockdale shook his head, “But it isn’t, M, it isn’t! Best to look straight ahead at the matter and admit it!” He pulled up the sleeves of his shirt, his biceps thick even in the gloom. “I’ll show you. Don’t worry, I’ll show you.”
Stockdale dove at Flemel then, but M intercepted him with a shoulder, was repaid for his gallantry by a swift straight shot from Stockdale’s left fist, and stumbled backward against the assault. Now the difference in size between them seemed plenty evident—M thin and lightly muscled, Stockdale as broad-shouldered as an action hero.
“It’s the house,” M said, his voice rendered jagged. “Remember who you are.”
“It’s clearer to me than ever!” Stockdale said, laughing. His hand was bright again, but bright like an acetylene torch, and it seemed to throb in the darkness. “I want to rend your flesh, M, my dearest friend. I want to dance amid your viscera. I want to break my teeth on your bone. I want to spill my seed into your chest cavity. I want to cut you and laugh and cut you and laugh and cut you and laugh and . . .” Stockdale came forward swiftly mid-monologue, hoping to catch M unaware.
But M made a motion as if scattering seed, and a flare of light lit up the room, and Stockdale was catapulted against the back wall, his shirt and flesh aflame.
“Kill it!” M shrieked, gesturing to the creature in the center of the room, then dove atop Stockdale, who was struggling to right himself and laughing once again, laughing against his burnt flesh and the smell of barbecue. They rolled about, struggling with each other, and though Stockdale’s clothes were still bright with fire, he seemed not to be losing.
It lay on the floorboards, naked as if in spotlight. Shriveled and grotesque, pockmarked or perhaps only burnt, it looked up at Flemel with sharpened teeth and clever eyes. “Well?” it asked, as it had asked Flemel a hundred times before, or a thousand, or . . . “Well? Well?” Its fragile skull was placed perfectly for the heel of a boot, cruelty done to a cruel thing, the cycle continuing, a savage and irreconcilable tautology. “Well?”
Cresting above the déjà vu, as if coming up for air, Flemel squatted and lifted the thing cleanly in his arms and pulled the wounded creature against his breast.
A voice wept in the darkness.
Flemel opened the door and stepped back into the front hallway, still dilapidated but no longer quite so ominous. M was on the ground holding Stockdale, the skin of his neck and shoulders mottled red.
“I’m glad we brought you,” Stockdale said.
“He’s all right,” M said. “He’s all right.”
27
* * *
Righting a Wrong
Of course, M did not drink exclusively at The Lady. It would have been unjust to distribute himself so unevenly among the watering holes of southern Brooklyn, many of them oak-lined things, with extremely credible beer selections and friendly bartenders. The Crown’s Commons had all of these in spades, particularly the last.
Alice was the sort of homely that encouraged admirers. She had no breasts and dressed exclusively in flannel and surplus East German army gear. Her nose ring did no one any good, and her haircut was likewise unjustifiable. And yet, all of these things taken
together, along with her bad skin and her earnest smile, somehow added up to something endearing and even just short of lovely. Alice gave one the impression of a young child or a small secret, something that needed to be kept safe against the world’s savagery.
That was the impression that Alice gave to M, at least. But M had learned by his age, whatever that was, that for most of the species, a wounded bird is an invitation to cruelty rather than a demand for succor. Her boyfriend wore ladies’ jeans, but he had the heart of a cad, eyes roving even when he spoke to her. He came into the bar often and bought drinks for girls and ran them on Alice’s tab. He was the kind of guy who would do things like that, and Alice was the kind of girl who would let him, and the world is filled with both of those sorts of people, and there’s nothing that anyone could do about that fact, or at least nothing M had ever learned.
M stopped into the Crown’s Commons toward the start of October, just before that thing with the house—you remember—and he found Alice in a more than usually desperate state of disarray.
“Everything all right today, Alice?” M asked, because that was what one asked in these situations, as one grabs a paper towel when a drink is spilled.
She sighed and looked around and dripped down onto the counter. “You have a girlfriend, M?”
“Not such as I’d admit to.”
“Keep it that way,” she said, her heart so tender you could have spread it over white bread.
M thought about asking more, offering that proverbial shoulder, but it was getting late, and M had a date, and anyway he didn’t want to be drawn too deeply into Alice’s misfortunes, which were probably unresolvable, an essential part of what it was to be Alice, impossible to remove without killing the patient, like a tumor nestled tight against the brain stem.
Another customer came in then, and Alice went to deal with him. M finished off his beer and split, then gave her a little wave without slowing down.
M did not see Alice for a while, though he still stopped inside the Commons now and again. Things got busy; a black dog had been plaguing Prospect Park, bringing visions of death to stroller-pushing breeders and hot-bodied little runners alike, and Abilene had asked M to take care of it, agreeing in exchange to forget some things M preferred forgotten. Also, it started going well with this model who lived on the Upper East Side, and between the commute and the constant narcissism of the excessively good-looking, M was very busy indeed.
And anyway Alice could have been on a vacation; although M thought she would have mentioned that to him. She was always so thrilled at whatever modest kindnesses the world bestowed upon her, as if they indicated the first turning of the tide, rather than an aberration, a brief lapse in the ever swelling storm that life shits out on the weak and misbegotten. Or potentially she could have been fired, although that seemed even less likely. The rest of the bartenders at the Commons all seemed to feel the same sort of sympathetic sweetness toward Alice that M did, and he couldn’t imagine her thrown out onto the street.
But in truth her presence one way or the other was not a source of great concern to M. The Commons was the other woman, after all. If he was occasionally unfaithful to The Lady, there was no doubt whose bed he would ultimately wind up in. And there were a lot of people like Alice. You couldn’t get to looking at any one of them too long, you had to develop—as a requirement for the continuation of your day-to-day existence—a hard shell, a selective blindness, a bad memory.
If only for so long.
“What happened to Alice?” M finally asked one of her colleagues toward the end of October, after he had drank enough to pretend that the answer might be something good, nonsense he was quickly disabused of by the cast of the man’s face.
“You two friends?”
“That might be stretching a point. Friendly.”
“I’m not sure how to tell you this . . .”
“Briefly,” M said, “and using small words.”
“You know Alice has some problems?”
Of course he had known. Who wouldn’t have known? She was a thirty-year-old woman with an MFA in Romantic poetry working at a bar, and not even one of the hip ones where you got to play with shakers, just a regular sort of neighborhood dive bar. She took her shift drink twice an hour. Her nails were always bit to the quick. She often smiled when it was clear she did not really want to.
The bartender shrugged. “They found her in her bathtub,” he said. “I heard it was a razor.”
M didn’t say anything.
“Sorry,” the bartender said, then found an excuse to busy himself at the other end of the counter.
M drank often but was rarely drunk. By natural constitution and long practice, he required a concerted effort to push himself into serious inebriation, one that he rarely found a point in making. Often he found himself almost at the point of making it, of coming within a stone’s throw of making it, but M rarely, almost never, slurred his words, let alone hugged a toilet.
Almost never is not never. After a moment M told the bartender to bring him a bottle of whiskey, and it wasn’t a request but a command, one backed by a little bit of force. And after he had brought it over to M, brought it over immediately and glassy-eyed, M had dismissed him and taken to making sure what was in there wasn’t in there much longer.
Something needed to be done, was the conclusion that M came to about the time the upper half of the bottle had gone translucent. Someone needed to do something.
“That boyfriend of hers,” M said, grabbing the bartender’s cuff as he walked past. The bartender had forgotten M after he had ordered the whiskey, as M had intended him to. “You’ve got his number?”
“Why are you asking?”
M choked down most of what was left in the bottle and repeated the question with a little bit more force than it needed, enough that it left the bartender suffering from an extreme case of logorrhea, words spilling forth with diluvial force, a river overflowing its banks.
“I don’t have it. I didn’t know him very well. His name is Thom, but I didn’t know him very well. I didn’t know Alice very well, either, ’cause I was only working here for a few weeks when she killed herself, and also I didn’t want to get to know her that well because you could see there was something a bit off. I mean, of course she was nice, and I was sad about what happened, but you can’t be running all around town taking in strays, you know, at least I can’t, I got enough troubles on my own. Also, I was worried that if I was too nice, she might start to think that I had a thing for her, and I didn’t, but you know how girls like that can get, you’re going to come in and save her from her boyfriend or her ex-boyfriend or her father. You gotta keep a wall up, man, you know how it is. But anyway I didn’t want to see anything happen to her, of course I didn’t. I mean, can you imagine what that would be like, sawing at your arm, cut-cut-cut, cut-cut-cut, and then watching it bleed out into the water? ’Cause I can’t.”
M found that he could.
“Anyway I don’t know, but Christine might know. You know Christine?” he asked, but then continued without waiting for an answer. “Of course you do. She’s that tall Ukrainian chick that works weekends, hot as hell. You know how those Slav girls are, least all the ones that come here. But she was close with Alice, I think they were roommates for a while, I never got the whole story.”
“Where’s Christine live?”
The bartender told him. Then he tried to give M the addresses of four other colleagues who Alice knew a bit, and also the address of his sister-in-law who he thought might be able to shed some light on the situation, and also the addresses of two ex-girlfriends, who M did not think would be of any great service, and also a guy who had once played bass in a band the bartender had been in, basically just because. M had leaned too hard on him. Too much drink and his mood and M had overshot his mark. M figured the condition would dissipate with a night’s sleep, but he made sure to take down his address and schedule—the bartender was extremely keen to tell him—and to remind himself to
check back next week and make sure nothing had come permanently unhinged.
M took the bottle of whiskey with him when he left, walking down Franklin Avenue, drunk and furious and daring the world to jump at him, just daring it. Christine lived about a dozen blocks south, and he swayed the whole way, weaving from sidewalk to median. His intangibles trailed out behind him like a diaphanous cloak of despair, everyone he passed got pulled, casually and without deliberation, into his story, into his funk, found their days getting that little bit worse, went home and drank too much and missed work the next morning, screamed raw throats at husbands, set cruel hands on children.
Christine would not have opened the door normally, not to a stranger standing on her stoop at eleven-thirty in the evening, not even a hipster dude with the name of a popular band imprinted on his T-shirt. But M was not to be denied that night, M was the Management’s favorite customer, M was at that narrow point where desire and reality turn to meet each other, like lovers twisting in for a kiss.
“What do you want?”
“Retribution?” M realized that the bottle was empty, and he tossed it off the stoop. “A vengeance bloody and righteous? To unbind the eyes of justice and see her sword fall on a well-deserved target?”
He was leaning on her too hard, he realized then, like he had the bartender. They were so fragile, minds like tissue paper or cobweb, you could crush them and not even notice. “Where does Thom live?”
“Thom?” Christine asked, dead-eyed and mind-fucked.
“Thom, Thom, Thom, Alice’s boyfriend, Thom the cruel, Thom the dickish, Thom the damned. Where the fuck does Thom live?”
A City Dreaming Page 28