Disintegration

by Richard Thomas

  That somebody was me.

  She was trying to reach me, but I was on my way home, so she was leaving me a message. The message that I play, over and over again, wallowing in her last words. Holding on to her last laugh and the sound of my children in the background, fighting over a piece of candy, and I can see her eyes shift to them, and her wanting to tell them to stop, to yell at them to share, to be nice to each other, brother and sister. And then there is a pause in the message, her voice stopping suddenly. She tracks the apparition as it crosses over the dotted yellow line, drifting, and drifting, certainly it will turn back, it has to stop coming, her one hand on the wheel, the other on the phone, not strong enough to wrench it away. It doesn’t stop coming. And I see the whole thing.

  I see this car crossing over, I honk my horn, since I’m right behind them, my eyes going wide, my hands gripping the steering wheel. I can’t find my breath. There isn’t time to scream, and what would I say, anyway?

  “Hey!”

  Is that all I got out, her name perhaps, or a simple warning?

  “Look out…”

  I don’t remember.

  “Look…”

  It was all so fast, and I thought, this isn’t happening.

  But nothing comes out, my mouth is open, and I see the silver Camry, always the fucking Camry, the death of suburbia, the phantom that will haunt me every day I set foot outside the rotting husk that is my apartment, the decaying skin that is my shell. They’re everywhere, and it’s slowly driving me insane.

  The car plows into the minivan and the collision is muffled, and yet every shattering piece of glass is captured in the night air, metal wrenching, and I can see their necks snap, and the van flips over on its side, rolling, and the Camry keeps coming, bouncing off of them, and into me, and my mouth is still open, my heart filling my chest with a pounding, a drumroll of panic, and then we meet, this drunken fool and my car, and I wonder if I’ve put on my seatbelt. Did I do that today? Sometimes I don’t. There is a jarring impact and everything slams to a halt and then speeds up, glass shattering, a pain at my forehead, and I’m upside down, and something cracks in my body, debris flying around the inside of the car, pelting me in the face, and my back explodes, a vertebra fractured, and there is so much sound that it becomes overwhelming, becomes deafening, a blanket of noises that I’ve never heard before and then nothing, it’s white, then black, then gone.

  It’s all gone.

  Chapter 52

  I sit up fast, a stinging at the base of my neck, and Holly is perched at the foot of my bed, petting my cat. She’s wearing a black sweatshirt that may have been mine, and blue jeans. I hope this is real.

  “Bad dream?” she asks.

  “Yes. The worst.”

  She’s pale, almost translucent.

  “I like your cat,” she says. “Always have.”

  “Thanks.”

  “She keeping you out of trouble?”

  “Something like that.”

  She looks up at me, and she’s been crying.

  “Holly…”

  “How’s your neck?” she asks

  “It hurts.”

  “I put some antibiotics on it, and some burn cream, a bandage.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I’m much better now.”

  “I wish I could explain,” she says.

  “Try me.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It always is,” I say. “Why don’t I prompt you? Are you working for Vlad?”

  She sighs. “Working isn’t the right word.”

  I lean back on the wall, no bed frame for this guy, and wait for more.

  “We have an arrangement,” she says.

  “What kind of arrangement? Are you fucking him too?”

  “It’s not like that,” she says.

  “Then what is it like, enlighten me?”

  She pets the cat, and Luscious looks up at her, forest-green eyes filled with a mixture of hatred and love, purring the whole time, but ready to bolt.

  “Much like you, I was a mess once. I was falling apart, turning tricks, strung out on drugs. I met Vlad at a bar one night, and he expressed an interest in me.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “He wanted to help me. So he set me up with an apartment, just like this one, and got me clean. Well, cleaner. And in return, I did things for him. In the beginning, it was simply spending time with him. I think he liked me around him, this trophy on his arm, somebody to drink with, to sit in smoky clubs with, to impress his Eurotrash friends. But slowly, over time, it got sleazier, a favor for a friend, a blow job here, threesome there, doing coke with some important client, and I started to drift back to what I had been—a user and a whore.”

  She gets quiet, and out the window I see a movement of white, a fluttering.

  “Is it snowing?” I ask.

  “Yes. It has been.”

  It’s either unseasonably early or I have no idea what month it is.

  “I tried to get out,” she says. “I disappeared. And for a while, it worked. He didn’t come after me. I moved on, left Chicago, started to put a life together, and then one day he showed up on my doorstep. Just like that. He dragged me back in with the promise of one more assignment. And then he’d let me go.”

  “That one more assignment was me.”

  “Yes.”

  I pause and stare at her.

  “What were you doing here the other night, who was here with you?”

  “I don’t understand it all. He doesn’t want you to get too healthy, too settled in. Too static.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He wants you messed up, always drunk, always depressed, just a total fuck-up. He wants you to kill for him without question. You’re just a weapon to him, a tool. It was my job to keep an eye on you and to report back to him, to let him know that you were still wallowing in self-pity, to encourage you to stay down, but to give you a glimmer of hope. Me, I was the hope.”

  “So, are you done now? Is it over?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was part of your job to fuck me?”

  “No. That was my idea.”

  “Holly…”

  “Yes?”

  She lifts her head to look at me.

  “What’s my name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. Don’t you?”

  A flutter of blackness darts around the inside of my skull, but I still can’t grasp it.

  “Why are you here right now? Are you here to kill me? I mean, if you are, then you’re doing a pretty sloppy job of it. You could’ve just done it in my sleep.”

  “No, Vlad doesn’t know I’m here. I wanted to make sure you were okay. I met with him last night, and he told me about your meeting.”

  My hand goes to the back of my neck and gingerly fingers the bandage. I don’t know whether to be horrified or honored by my branding. But what’s one more scar.

  “Do you know that he gave me a file on you?” I ask.

  “What?”

  She stares at me.

  “You were my next job, Holly. You. I was supposed to take you out.”

  Her jaw tightens and I hear teeth grinding.

  “He said it was a test. The file is over there on the table.”

  I turn to look through the French doors and the table is clean, empty.

  “Shit,” I say. “It’s gone, of course.”

  “I have to go,” she says, standing up fast.

  “Wait, Holly….”

  I sit up on the edge of the bed, and my head swims.

  “No, I shouldn’t be here.”

  “I don’t care about the file, Holly. Please, look at me. You know what I do for Vlad.”

  “I need to get home.”

  “No, Holly, stay. Please.”

  She crosses her arms. I’m having trouble focusing and hold my face in my hands. I can hardly see straight. What was in that shit last night?

  I feel
her hands on my head, stroking my hair and her musky sweet scent is a heady perfume—sandalwood and oranges. I bury my face in her belly and she holds me to her. I wrap my arms around her tiny waist and I want to eat her, I want to ingest her and keep her inside me forever, safe and intact. Never to be born. I pull up her sweatshirt and kiss her taut belly. I lick her stomach.

  “Don’t,” she says.

  I keep going. My hands drift lower down her back to her tight, fleshy ass and I grab hold of her and push her stomach to my mouth, rubbing my face on it.

  “Please…” she says.

  “You’re all I have, Holly,” I breathe into her softness. “Please don’t leave me.”

  She pushes me away, hard, and I fall back onto the bed.

  “Ow, fuck.”

  She stares down at me, and I can’t breathe. She pulls the sweatshirt off over her head, black lace bra spilling over with her flesh, and she unbuttons her jeans.

  Chapter 53

  “…The kids would love to spend a little time with you. Wait, somebody’s honking at me, what the hell…”

  Chapter 54

  I hear the front door slam and I leap up. The apartment is dark again, one candle sitting on the nightstand oozing red currant, and I fall out of bed and trip over a chair as I try to get to the door. I yank it open and see a black blur flying down the stairs and out the front of the apartment building into the snow and slush.

  “Holly!”

  The door slams shut, and she’s gone. For a moment, I contemplate running after her into the snow in just my boxer shorts. I take three steps down the stairs and I stop. She’s not a bird I can put in a cage. I don’t have a leash that can hold her. If she wants to be here, she’ll be here. If she wants to run, she’ll run. I can’t force anything on her. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, then turn to go back to my apartment.

  There’s a note on the table in her handwriting, one piece of paper folded in half. For a moment I expect to see a name on the note, tiny hearts dancing around a Brandon or Christopher. No. It simply says:

  I’m sorry.

  I turn it open and inside it says:

  Get out, if you can. Love, Holly

  I sit in the tall leather chair and wonder why I try. Why do I continue to get close to people when I know it will fail? My head floods with memories and I don’t even know if they’re real. I can see the Music Box Theatre, a dark, expansive movie house, clouds racing by on the ceiling, blue sky, and an organist playing away on a Saturday night, and we’re there to see La Strada, or maybe it’s Blue, or Amélie. I hear blues, a saxophone, and we’re looking down from a balcony to a tiny stage below, but I don’t remember the club. Delilah’s maybe, or the Blue Note. There were clear drinks polluted with olives and her nibbling at my ear. I can taste the amuse-bouche at an all-white restaurant, a bite of spicy tuna roll, creamy avocado, crisp minced cucumber with caviar on top, a fillet grilled perfectly, a dollop of horseradish cream, the blood oozing out when I slice into it, something chocolate melting in my mouth, and a dark glass of liquid, a cherry floating somewhere. I don’t know if any of this happened or if she sat by my bedside one night as I was passing out and whispered these memories into my head, her lips up against my ear. Dark clouds rolled by a crescent moon, and she created a past for a man who had tried so desperately to erase his. I hate her with a deep, echoing resonance but as I picture her stomping up Milwaukee Avenue away from me, her tiny feet disappearing in the snow, I already want her back.

  Luscious weaves around my feet, purring and mewing, so I breathe deeply. But I can feel the anger filling me up again, and all I need is a trigger.

  I’m surrounded by triggers and more show up on my doorstep every day.

  Chapter 55

  The snow continues to fall on the city, and the day descends into night. I feel a bus ride coming on. It’s getting cold out, so I put on my boots, a black turtleneck sweater, and reach deep into the armoire for my winter coat. Time to put away the leather. I pull out a long wool coat that hangs to my knees, and a smile crosses my face. I always loved this coat. It’s thick and warm, black with thin gray lines cross-hatched across it, only a faint idea of a pattern. The only thing I need to do is grab my black knit cap and leather gloves. Aside from my blue jeans, I’m all Johnny Cash. Luscious eyes me, squatting at the end of the bed.

  “Don’t worry, I’m just going out for essentials.”

  She eyes me anyway.

  “Look, I don’t need it from you too. Yes, I’m getting beer. Yes, I’m getting drunk. I’ll probably get some bourbon too. But we have plenty of cat food. And I don’t expect Holly back anytime soon. So it’s just you and me, okay?”

  She hacks up a hairball at my feet and it’s obvious how she feels. She licks her coat, one wary eye on me, reluctant to take her gaze off of me, but sick of looking all the same.

  I’m out the door, shutting it with a solid pull, turning the keys over, latching it tight. Movement to my left gets my attention, and I turn my head.

  “Dude, you going out?”

  It’s the guy from 2F, Guy.

  “What’s it look like?”

  He stares, crumbs dotting his chin, a baggy brown T-shirt with a Buddha on it, and long dark sweatpants. The sweet smell of weed drifts out of his apartment, while a television set in the background plays Jeopardy!

  “ ‘Use Somebody’ and ‘Sex on Fire’ are songs off 2008’s Only by the Night from this band.”

  “Kings of Leon,” he mutters.

  “Who are Kings of Leon,” I say.

  “Shit. Right, right.”

  Guy grins at me, and I know I’ll do what he asks.

  “Well, I’m kind of stuck here, banged up my knee pretty good, and I was hoping you could do me a solid.”

  I look down at his knee and it’s swollen to the size of a grapefruit, red and blotchy, and for the first time I notice the black eye he’s trying to hide under the stringy brown hair that hangs in his face. His hands are all scratched up and crooked. He catches me looking at them and puts them behind his back.

  “Jesus, man, what happened to you?”

  “Ah, banged it on the corner of a table in the middle of the night getting up to take a whiz.”

  “And the eye?”

  “Well, you know…” He pauses, looking down at his feet. “I fell over when I hit the table, and somehow I ended up punching myself in the face on the way down.”

  I stare at him. He chuckles, his face turning red.

  “Bassist Stefan Lessard and drummer Carter Beauford are the rhythm section of this Under the Table and Dreaming band.”

  “Who are the Dave Matthews Band,” he whispers.

  I thrust my hands into my pockets and stare.

  “You know a guy named Vlad? Big beak, skinny, Russian.”

  Guy goes blank, looks down, shuffling his feet.

  “I don’t know any Vlad. But that sounds like our landlord.”

  Right. Landlord.

  “Oh. Right. So what’s it you need, Guy?”

  “Man, my knee is killing me and well, you know, no health insurance, so maybe if you could just pick me up a bottle of something? Jack Daniel’s or whatever. Something to help with the pain?”

  He’s pathetic, but so am I. I’m not sure if he’s part of Vlad’s extended network of hired hands, or simply renting the apartment. He doesn’t look like a killer to me. Maybe he’s just a drugstore.

  “Sure. I’m heading that way.”

  “Thanks, dude.”

  He pulls a bankroll the size of a hockey puck out of a pocket and peels off two twenties. He seems embarrassed by the cash and quickly stuffs it back in his pants.

  “Here you go, don’t worry about the change, you’re doing me a favor.”

  As I step forward to take the money, he flinches.

  “Take it easy, Guy.”

  “Sorry. Been hearing a lot of shit lately. Some strange sounds coming out of your apartment. Doors slamming, screams, shit falling over. I swear somebody slaug
htered a pig in 3F the other night.”

  My face goes blank.

  “If I don’t answer the door, just set it down here in the hall, sometimes I get stuck in the can for a while.”

  I nod.

  “When he’s not busy being a movie star, Jared Leto fronts this platinum-selling band that is both ‘timely’ and ‘planetary.’ ”

  “Who are Thirty Seconds to Mars,” he says.

  “I’ll be back in a bit, Guy. Try not to smoke yourself to death in the meantime.”

  “Sure, dude, no problem.”

  He grins, and pulls his head back in the door, like a massive tortoise retreating into its shell. Closing the door with a creak, the locks tumble into place—one, two, three of them. There are scratch marks all around the knob, and the frame looks like it was busted off with a crowbar and then nailed back up, in pieces. There are boot marks on the bottom of the door, scuffed with black, the wood dented.

  I’m down the stairs and into the night, the streets covered in white, a good foot or two of snow, and the hush of trouble drifts over me. I know I won’t be able to stay in tonight. I’m getting antsy, and the booze will only encourage it. The air is crisp and I suck it in, shocking my throat and jolting me awake. I pull on black leather gloves and button up my coat. The freaky kids from downstairs walk past, nod their pierced heads, and stick a key in the gate. I nod back. Their eyes dart to me, then away, and I wonder what they think of me.

  “Well, you know what they say about Chicago.”

  They stare at me.

  “Two seasons.”

  Nothing, blank pale faces.

  “Winter and construction.”

  I want to ask them what month it is, but that would be too revealing. I don’t need to wear my dysfunctions on my sleeve for the whole world to see.

  They open the gate and disappear. So much for endearing myself with my neighbors. And what do I care anyway? What’s with me? Running favors for the fat man, small talk with the punks downstairs. What next? Crossword puzzles and Desperate Housewives with Paulina upstairs? Curry and tea with the ghost in 3F? I need to get into a fight, that’s what I need, get my head screwed on right. Punch some asshole in the face and remember why I’m here, remember what I promised my dead blood, the reason I’m not filling a grave with my hollowed-out skull.