Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  Libby is his ex-girlfriend, if you can call what they were that. She often shows up, sloshed and lonely, seeking confirmation of her worth. Dennis is nothing more than a free ticket to her: a warm bed, a sure thing for a lay, some throwaway lines about her beauty, and most of the time free booze. He knows he’s always her last resort. She doesn’t make plans with him, and on the rare occasions she does, they are always cancelled, but she’ll arrive when all other options have failed.

  He knows she is using him, but Dennis craves her youth and naïvety. She has an aura of innocence that he loves to mangle and destroy.

  Dennis loves young women because he can convince them to do things that older women have already sworn never to do. I’d never do that again, they’d think. Women with too much self-respect are useless to him. He can capitalize on the fact that young girls are often running low on self-respect.

  They are pure and innocent, but not impervious.

  And Dennis enjoys wrecking women.

  Libby is the only one who ever swallowed the shame and came back for more. Now he’s stuck with her. He keeps pushing the envelope every time they have an encounter.

  He’s choked her, slapped her face and spit in her mouth. He’s called her a worthless slut and a whore. He’s scanned her text messages and gotten angry and aroused to learn that she was fucking other men . . . they weren’t men, really, but boys. They didn’t have the confidence to overpower her like he did.

  His feet touch down on freezing wet carpet. His eyes, still adjusting to the light, land on an overturned Corona bottle.

  Fucking great!

  He will deal with that later. For now, he is not letting anything spoil his inner peace—what little he has is a result of the fight with Jiménez.

  Stepping over to the balcony, drawing back the curtains and overlooking the emerging solar brilliance as it begins to dominate the crumbling and vacant streets below, he soaks in the ambiance of Phoenix. Downtown is dead. The hipsters and fags have done their best to breathe life into the downtown scene, to add culture, but the art galleries and independent shoppes (spelled with an idiotically unnecessary extra “e”) don’t drive enough traffic and economy to warrant a revitalized urban feeling.

  He sees a wide panorama of the decaying environment and very little vitality. Bums collect together for warmth, sleeping under bus benches, crammed under oleanders, and lining the walls of parking structures. Bits of steam pour from the roofs of a few small eateries. A gentle ding, ding, ding can be heard as the light-rail train arrives for its early stop. No one gets off or on. And it glides away to another empty stop.

  Dennis carefully selected the tower at 44 Monroe, a place where he could be anonymous in the most anonymous portion of the great city, and still have a home that would impress.

  He hides in his own shadows here. Only the doorman knows him. He’s had but one conversation with his neighbor, a leggy blonde who flirted heavily: Gail. Dennis knows she would be a nag if he allowed her to become friendly. She’d start to poke her head out more often, hoping to catch him coming and going. She is beautiful, but she will only become a hindrance if he sleeps with her. He doesn’t have the patience to cultivate her neediness and loneliness and coddle her on stormy nights.

  So he was rude. She hasn’t spoken to him since. The next time he saw her she was doing synchronized dancing in the eighth-floor pool at midnight. She looked like a drowning deer. He was thankful to have dodged that bullet.

  The coffee pot begins to steam and tick as near-boiling water douses the filter full of grounds. He cuts a grapefruit, breathing deeply and enjoying the rich and tangy aroma of the fruit. A recent article in Men’s Health asked Dennis a question: “Did you know that the grapefruit will actually help trim your tummy?” Dennis did not know that, in fact, but he’s putting the article to the test. The South Beach Diet, Atkins, Body for Life: he is ever looking for the miracle cure, the magic bullet, the answer to his inadequacies, the secret potion to restore his confidence. He even bought a Shake Weight, which he saw on late night TV, and which he used once then wrapped in newspaper and gave to a homeless junkie just to see the look in his eyes.

  The hobo had thought it was a sandwich . . . such disappointment.

  “Enjoy,” Dennis had said, and then scampered off as soon as he saw the confusion on the homeless man’s face turn into indignant rage.

  This week it’s grapefruit. Though aware of his compulsive tangents, he enjoys the passion of the obsession while it lasts.

  He’s like the strike anywhere tip of a match that way. A furious flurry of heat and sulfur followed by a smoldering nothing . . . and sometimes regret.

  The coffee is beginning to drip, drip, drip into the bottom of the carafe, creating the tiny pool of darkness which will soon become part of his breakfast. The dripping captures his attention.

  He sees Hector Jiménez’s face again. He only knows this was his name because the police drilled it into his head during his questioning. The face of his attacker stares back at him with dead eyes and blood coming from his nose and mouth; drip, drip, dripping onto the pavement of the Circle K parking lot, while his body twitches and writhes, draped over the door of Dennis’s Acura.

  “Who’s the fucking puta now, Spic?” he had shouted at the dying man, before spitting into his tortured face.

  The story, as he told Detective Staley, begins innocently enough. Dennis was aggressively driving to work on the I-10 East, just like any other day. He was listening to The Morning Sickness, just like any other day. Looking at his phone, just like any other day.

  What was unlike any other day was that a beige Nissan Pathfinder had cut him off violently, and then locked up the brakes. Dennis, alarmed and confused, had slammed onto his brake pedal and jerked the steering wheel in just enough time to avoid rear-ending the stranger. He dodged into the middle lane, to his right, and pulled alongside the man to vent his frustrations. The driver was a shaven headed, dark skinned ex-con looking Latino man with a severe attitude problem; this much was obvious based upon his scowl. He looked like a gang-banger to Dennis, who thought all Mexicans were Cholos. Especially this man who had his sunglasses perched on his shiny, bald head and wore a dingy wife-beater tee shirt. He had to be a gang-banger if this was what the man had chosen for appropriate Wednesday morning attire.

  The road was empty for hundreds of yards in all directions. There had been no reason to cut him off, so what the fuck?

  The man looked down to Dennis’s surprised face and jerked his wheel towards the Acura, again causing Dennis to swerve to avoid being sideswiped at 80 MPH. The man Dennis later came to know as Hector Jiménez raised his fingers up to Dennis in a pinching motion, indicating that he was “this close” to . . . something or another.

  Dennis still doesn’t know what that something or another is.

  Dennis had no idea that he’d cut this man off, miles back, when he was accelerating up the onramp and carving his way through traffic. Dennis hadn’t known that Hector Jiménez had nothing to lose and Dennis had just pushed him over the edge in his fancy car, wearing a suit and playing with his phone. Jiménez had just been fired from his job of 10 years by a man like Dennis: a fat, pompous fuck who sits in his ivory tower making decisions that affect the wellbeing of others, killing jobs and making profits. Jiménez had been driving to meet his former employer and end his reign with a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun. Israeli Military, never jams. The salesman had told Jiménez this, or so he had in Dennis’s imagination. The investigators had told Dennis about the handgun during their investigation . . . in that gray room. Dennis had only invented the conversation with the gun store attendant in a fantasy reel in his mind, but he was sure it was accurate enough. On that morning, the Mexican had nothing to lose.

  Dennis had plenty to lose, but he is arrogant and indignant, so he taunted the deranged man in the Pathfinder: flipping him off, swerving back at him, throwing his gigantic Big Gulp fountain drink out the window to splatter on the man’s windshield. Dennis was
sure this would be the climax of the ninety-plus-mile-an-hour rampage through the freeway. There were other cars in the mix now; they had caught up to the traffic ahead. The police would get testimony from many of the drivers who had witnessed the road-rage incident going on. There were three calls to 911 from different frightened drivers caught in the middle of the men’s battle for dominance.

  Dennis, uncomfortable with this level of escalation, suddenly decided to swerve across three lanes to the exit. At this point, he was fearful of the man, who would not back down and who had continued to follow and taunt him, threatening to smash him into the guardrail or, at one point, an eighteen-wheeler. Watching his rearview mirror intently, he released an enormous sigh when he saw the maniac had missed the exit and hadn’t followed him. He’d had his pocketknife—a Smith and Wesson Tactical knife, the kind with the little serrated edges for cutting through seat belts—opened and ready. For what, he did not know.

  As his heart pounded in his chest, he checked the rearview mirror again, and then stopped at the Circle K to catch his breath and calm his nerves. His hands were shaking and his adrenaline was overpowering every other facet of his being. “Oh, my God, what a rush!” he shouted to his reflection in the mirror, and then he began to laugh wildly at the situation. He then made up little scenes in his head; picturing in his mind’s eye how he should have run the man down, how sorry the man would have been for picking on him. He began to think that Jiménez was lucky to have caught him off guard and imagined that he had decided to let Jiménez go. Not the other way around. Dennis’s mind spun every aspect of the attack that had just ended, and in every spin—in each individual alternate scenario he had created—he decided that he was the stronger of the adversaries. He told himself he wasn’t a coward for ditching the man on the off-ramp. He was busy tooting his own horn, touting himself the victor, when he heard the screeching.

  Tires wailed into the lot behind him and the SUV he thought he’d escaped skidded to a stop parallel to his car. Jiménez jumped out of his Pathfinder wearing baggy pants and worn leather boots and that dingy wife-beater tee shirt.

  “Need to watch where you’re going, puta!” he shouted, marching towards the driver door of the Acura, leveling a pistol in his sinewy muscular hands, and firing the first shot. Had he stood his ground, and taken aim, he might well have ended Dennis. As it was, the shot only grazed Dennis’s forehead and glass showered down upon him from the side window. Dennis tried to make himself small in the driver seat. All of his thoughts of superiority and how the man was lucky he was in a forgiving mood had melted away as Dennis squirmed and crammed himself into the floor of his Acura. He fought his girth, trying to fold the mass of body in half to make himself as small as possible. He started to cry, terrified that this would be his final moment, cowering before a dirty Mexican.

  Jiménez stopped advancing and fired a second shot, which buried into the doorframe with a vibrating thunk. Jiménez stepped closer, putting his weapon inside the car through the shattered driver’s window.

  In an act of courage and defiance of death, Dennis reached up for the gun and knocked it past his face just as the third shot deafened him. The powder from the exploding muzzle burned his eyes. He stabbed the 3—inch blade of his tactical Smith and Wesson knife into Jiménez’s forearm, the little serrated teeth giving a little click, click, click that Dennis can feel as the teeth entered past the bone. The blade pierced just below the elbow and deepened the creases of the man’s muscles, which were writhing under his sun-beaten brown skin. The gun and knife both fell to the floorboard when Jiménez shook and quickly withdrew his wounded arm from the car.

  Angered and frustrated, Jiménez roared and reached into the car with both hands—as though the oozing gash hadn’t affected him at all—wrapping them around Dennis’s throat. His hands were cold and hard like iron or a stack of firewood that had been left in the snow, under a tarpaulin that wasn’t quite big enough to keep out the frost. Dennis struggled, but the other man’s strong leathery hands were gaining purchase with every squirm, rather than losing grip. The attacker leaned farther still into the car for better leverage, and Dennis began to see the blackness of unconsciousness creeping into the corners of his vision, and his throat began to feel the battery acid burn of his breath scraping through his crushed trachea.

  Out of sheer luck, Dennis found the door handle as he tried to wriggle free. He heard the latch release and kicked the door open with all of his remaining strength. Hector Jiménez’s feet left the ground as the door smashed into his hips and his weight shifted towards the inside of the driver door, his center of gravity falling just where the window broke. Jiménez’s hands released Dennis’s throat and found the pavement as he began to fall through the window, and he was able to stop himself before pulverizing his face. He pushed his weight back up from the pavement, the toes of his leather boots again held his center of gravity. Before he could pull his torso from the window, Dennis reclaimed his blade and stabbed him in the throat repeatedly, in primal, rapid thrusts, grunting each time.

  He felt the blade strike home and the warmth envelope his fist. In that moment, Dennis had the sense of redemption he has sought for so very long. Hector Jiménez looked into Dennis’s eyes as he drew his last gurgling breath and became limp again over the door.

  Dennis holds this exchange with Hector, when the light of his eyes dimmed to nothingness, in the highest esteem. This was his defining moment. Chrysalis.

  Between the eyewitness testimonies, the 911 calls, and even the closed circuit security cameras at Circle K—not to mention Dennis’s gunshot wounds and the holes riddling his car—the detectives were happy—most of them, anyway—to release Dennis from custody. Jiménez’s death had obviously been Justifiable Homicide in self-defense. Dennis was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and had pissed off the wrong man.

  Dennis was educated on this term of “justifiable homicide” and its implications by Detective Staley as he sat waiting for his discharge. He learned that his knife, the blade that had been his savior, would forever remain in evidence lockup, and his DNA would be typed and stored in this same lockup, in his personal file. He was now on the grid.

  He thought it odd that the detectives couldn’t grasp his desire to keep that knife. Why wouldn’t he want to keep the knife that had already proven so useful? It had saved his life and taken the life of the man who sought to claim it. The knife seemed quite the trophy to Dennis—he wished he could have it, stains and all.

  Especially the stains.

  The gravity of the moment has just started to settle in upon Dennis as he cracks eggs into a bowl. This is the first breakfast of the rest of his life. He doesn’t even care about the tawdry sex he has waiting for him when Libby peels her hungover body from his satin sheets; he just wants her to leave.

  Dennis collects his copy of the morning paper, The Arizona Republic. While he sits to eat, he locates the obituaries, just for curiosity’s sake, and thumbs to the J’s, and there it is. The service is today.

  He finishes his eggs, bacon, and coffee, which he piled on top of the grapefruit, wondering if this would still help him lose the love handles, and then he gets dressed. She will be gone when he gets back, probably with a handful of his pills and any money he’s left lying out, but he doesn’t care. He wants to get gone before his desire for her overpowers his decision to leave.

  He ventures into the bathroom to clean up before heading out. Pulling his father’s straight razor from the medicine cabinet he massages the days of growth on his chin. He feels the weight of the razor in his palm and the smoothness of the pearl handle, and thinks of his father, a great man, a man who created things and had vision. A man who was strong and fearless—this is how he chooses to remember his father. He doesn’t like remembering the way his father was the last time Dennis saw him; ruined by his mother’s infidelity and forced to wear the shame of a cuckold.

  Dennis decides to skip the shave.

  Glancing back, he sees her locks billowed o
ut from the covers like a cloud and suddenly, but not for the first time when looking at her, thinks of his mother. He has the sudden urge to shatter the carafe of hot coffee on her sleeping face, but shakes his head in dismissal and turns away.

  He dresses silently and grabs his wallet. He glances curiously down to his Blackberry, and then decides against bringing it. There’s no one he wants to speak to just now. He impulsively decides to pocket his father’s razor as well, bringing it along for the drive, just in case. After all, Detective Staley took his Smith & Wesson, and one can never be too prepared in a city this dirty.

  You don’t get to control me today, he thinks as he lifts his keys from the hook on the wall in the kitchen. He isn’t quite positive if he’s referring to his mother or the comatose brunette stinking up his bed.

  His damaged Acura sits in the garage awaiting him. The window was replaced, but the bullet holes were left, as per his request. At least I get to keep the bullet holes, he thinks, missing his knife again.

  Dennis doesn’t think it’s even slightly odd that he is proud and excited by what happened. He chooses not to call the valet. He wants to be the first to greet the vehicle, and he runs his hands along her imperfect doorframe, soaking in all the variables and reliving the battle in peace, without an audience.

  The engine starts with little hesitation and he is off. He hadn’t planned on going to the Circle K, but that is where his mind takes him, on autopilot. He marvels for a few minutes at how the stain of his battle has faded completely, the blood washed away, the only pockmarks from his encounter the chips in the storefront window from Jiménez’s wild shot. The one that deafened him.

  Dennis stays in the parking lot, in catatonic reflection, for at least ten minutes, before he notices that the clerk is on the phone and staring out at him. He jumps out and walks over to the sidewalk where he sat waiting to greet the police a few days before. His phone is still there, stuffed into the drainage pipe, behind the candy bar wrapper. His personal phone, his iPhone. The police confiscated his Blackberry during questioning, along with everything else. He doesn’t know why he didn’t want them to know about his iPhone. It wasn’t a conscious decision; he just thought it best that his personal life, his text history, and his real phone number, were kept away from whoever was going to show up and haul him in.