by Peter Besson
Huntley released the gun’s magazine, cycled the slide, and caught the ejected shell with his free hand. He threw the useless gun on the bodyguard’s chest. “I trust we have cleared up this rather unfortunate misunderstanding to everyone’s satisfaction?”
Douglas’ face turned the color of eggplant. “I’m going to get my daughter. And when I do—” He kicked Tom, who scrambled to his feet, holding his rapidly swelling face.
“Have a pleasant day, sir.”
Douglas wanted to say something, anything, to wipe that infuriatingly friendly smile off Huntley’s face, but with his hulking bodyguard bleeding and whimpering after being manhandled, every retort sounded hollow. In the end, all Douglas could do was glare fiercely and boot Tom out the door.
As soon as they were gone, Huntley turned to Nikki. “If there’s nothing else?”
Nikki eyed Ansel, unsure of what would happen next. Ansel, rubbing his face where it had tested the structural integrity of the wall, gave her the same confused look back. Here they were, two strangers who had only met last night, but somehow—be it their common goal to have no other goals anymore, the heightened state of being in a place of pervasive death, their awakening attraction for each other or, only hours ago, their flirtation with the end—they felt the other’s pull, the entangling with one another. Each was aware of the other thinking the same, and so, without them noticing, the look between them turned into a gaze, a search, and Huntley, always aware of his guests’ needs, understood, perhaps more than they themselves did. He backed out of the room and silently closed the door.
And still they looked, saw something in the other—if nothing else, then a camaraderie, a companionship in the denial of life. But still, underneath it all, there was a glimmer. A recognition of the other. All drowned out by the silence of blood rushing in their ears.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what? For not ruining your chance to kill yourself?”
“That is sweet. But no.” The twinkle of a smile on her lips, but it faded promptly. “Thank you for coming back.”
“You’re welcome.”
“So…” She was too afraid to ask, afraid of everything that came with it, the convoluted push-and-pull of convention and daring and vulnerability, but then, even before she knew she was going to do it, she asked anyway: “You staying?”
There it was again. The sound of crashing waves. Ansel had to blink against the sun. The smell of salt and brine and tangled seaweed. He saw her again.
Tamara.
Standing on the beach, half-turned as a gust of wind played with her salt-caked hair. She smiled and Ansel’s heart ripped. He had been dead for the last twelve years, but still, he could bleed. Could hurt. Why did she come back after all these years? But he knew the answer: She’d never really left. She was here, she was a part of everything around him. And now she was a part of the young woman standing before him, waiting for him to tell her she wouldn’t be alone. Not daring to hope, but still hoping.
No, she was not alone.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’m staying.”
***
“Why do you want to know?” she said.
“I could have asked you any other trifling question about anything else, like what kind of music you listen to, what you like to read, watch, play, whatever, and it wouldn’t have told me much about you,” he said. “Those are nothing but your preferences. That is not you. You are what you do, your choices.”
They were in Ansel’s suite, both smoking. Nikki stood by the window, the low sun behind her giving the impression she was breathing fire, and Ansel leaned against the wall next to her, watching closely.
“What’s the difference? I like what I like because of who I am.”
“Or are you who you are because of the things you like?” Ansel said.
“Semantics.”
“Maybe. But we’re still here, about to check out, and I sure as hell do not want to talk about a TV show or why this music sucks worse than that other, equally annoying noise.”
“Grumpy.” She winked.
“Honest. All we’re doing, all everybody is doing is circling and circling, endlessly, and we never get anywhere. We’re afraid to reveal too much, show too much, and so we play hide and seek with each other like a game we can’t stop playing. But for us—us two, here, now—it’s pointless.”
Nikki hadn’t expected that. Honesty wasn’t something she’d had a lot of experience with, neither being honest herself nor, most certainly, any man being honest with her—that is, if this was honesty and not just another layer of bullshit masquerading as deep meaning. Meta-bullshit. “I see you got the conventions of small talk down to a science. What’s next, a chat about religion? Brush up on foreign policy?”
“How old?”
“Thirteen.” She checked his face for a reaction. There wasn’t much. “I just had to know what it was like.”
“And?”
“It was terrible.” Her first time having sex. Real sex. None of that sticky-hands, hot-mouth stuff. Real sex where another person enters you. Maybe that was why Ansel asked the question in the first place. Maybe he knew what a big step this was, even though everyone always talked about how it wasn’t a big deal at all. She had tried to tell herself the same thing. It didn’t really matter. With a bit of effort, she could almost believe it herself. There were drugs—there were always drugs—and she had talked tough, acted tough, and just wanted to get it over with, to rob the act of its importance, to take away its power over her. She’d wanted to step into adulthood, somehow believing it might alleviate the darkness in her, and so she simply grabbed one of the boys who regularly hung around the abandoned zoo, with its dark caves redolent of wild animal—lion or bear or monkey, all long gone—choosing the one she thought had the kindest eyes (granted, most of them, high as a kite, had the eyes of does, all big black circles), and she dragged the gangly boy into the shadows where there was hapless fumbling followed by a piercing pain and then not much else.
“Thank god it didn’t last long,” Nikki said. “What about you?”
“Guess I’m a romantic,” Ansel said. “I saved myself.”
Nikki coughed up smoke. He couldn’t be serious. But he was.
“There was only one girl for me,” Ansel said. “Kiley. I had fever dreams about her. Wanted nothing but to be near her, breathe the same air as her—just standing on the same ground as her sent me in a tizzy. It was her or nothing. I was so terrified I’d screw up any chance I might have that I wouldn’t even talk to other girls. In case she saw me or somehow found out and got jealous, even though we’d barely spoken more than two words at the time, and then my one and only chance with her—since that was the way I thought back then—that chance would be gone. Forever. And that was absolutely… unimaginable.”
“Oh Jesus. How did that go?”
“It worked out. Maybe through sheer obsession, possibly through pity on her part… but she was my first. So for me, it was great. For her?” He shrugged. “Not the last time I disappointed a woman.”
“It doesn’t work, does it?” She stubbed her cigarette against the window pane. Sparks flew. “Love. Life. And all that shit in between.”
“Maybe it does for some people. Not for me.”
They paused, each tangled in their own thoughts. It was strange to hear feelings they each considered uniquely their own confirmed by the other. If only one of them could offer an alternative, a different side of the argument they hadn’t thought of before, something they believed could be true, so they could slap their foreheads, exclaim ‘of course,’ and move on with their lives; if only… but as it was, they both remained silent, stealing glances at one another.
Waiting.
And in the silence a visitor settled wordlessly between them: the promise of death.
Dark. Heavy.
“How do you plan on doing it?” Ansel finally asked.
“Haven’t thought about it much. An
y suggestions?”
“I’m probably the wrong person to give recommendations.”
Nikki giggled at the memory: that dangling puppet twitching beneath the chandelier. The way Ansel had hit the floor in a cascade of shattering glass. She hadn’t laughed that much in years. But at least Ansel had taken the step. She’d lacked the ultimate courage to commit suicide—or was that cowardice, like some people told her? A cowardice to face life head-on, as they said?— so she decided she’d take her own decision out of it and check into a Last Resort. She’d been disappointed too many times with faint glimmers of hope, those short bursts of sunshine streaking into an otherwise dark and heavy life that crushed her like a concrete block, to be fooled by them anymore. She knew her life wouldn’t get better, the grayness would never lift, and having to endure this hopelessness for much longer was a thought she couldn’t bear.
She glanced out the window, at the sun sliding between the high-rises all around. “I think a gun,” she said, and wasn’t sure why she said it. It just felt right. The suddenness of it. “Something violent. Definitive.” To put a full stop to the Nikki Forlan experience. How else to end an endless series of gray and dark? You don’t fade it.
You cut it.
Ansel studied her closely. She’d made every attempt at sounding sure, but there’d been a slight tremble in her voice. She avoided his eyes and stared into the sun, as if trying to find the answers out there.
Ansel knew there weren’t any.
There were only more questions.
All our lives, Ansel thought, we spend with ourselves, yet we don’t know the first thing about us. We lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves we are better, we are worse, or we are exactly how we feared, but none of it is true. If we can’t probe our own depths, how can we possibly know anything else, let alone any other person? Only one thing we’re certain of.
Ansel was sure. He’d spent the last twelve years learning it.
“I want to show you something,” he said.
***
She didn’t quite know what to expect when Ansel held up his pocket knife in the elevator. She hadn’t felt unsafe with him yet (if the last twenty-four hours counted for anything), and it seemed silly to fear for her life at a Last Resort where her death was an absolute certainty to begin with. If anything, she thought, she should be grateful to be caught in a confined space with a murderer who would get his hands dirty for her. Still, there was a jolt of fright telling her that life wouldn’t give up this easily on her.
Ansel jammed the knife into the elevator keyhole and turned it over until the service light lit up above. Then he pushed the ‘basement’ button, the elevator rumbled, and they dropped.
The cold was startling. It was a morgue, after all, and from everything she’d read and seen on TV she should have expected it to be, but she wasn’t prepared for the freezing shock that stole her breath. She hugged herself. What was this Ansel guy doing, bringing her down here? If that was his way of getting anywhere with her, it was a dead end.
Hahaha.
Nikki entered the room of the dead as if entering a church—hushed, uneasy, uncertain of the decorum. Wide-eyed, she looked around. Large cold-storage lockers took up the back of the room from floor to ceiling. Door upon metal door, each, at the height of suicide’s popularity, housing a body. Ten prep tables before them, milky porcelain with drainage grooves and a hole at one end. On three tables, a white sheet thrown over each, bodies were waiting for further processing, like macabre artwork by Christo.
“What are we doing here?” she said, her breath a white mist.
Scouting, Ansel wanted to say. Reconnaissance patrol. See what will happen. But he knew that wasn’t it.
“I come here almost every day,” he said. “Who better to learn about death from than the ones who’ve been through it? The experts.”
Nikki stood dazed. Death all around her, cooling in boxes of steel, unheard. An inkling of recognition lit up her eyes, a dark fear she’d tried to dismiss for a long time.
Ansel recognized it: the black terror of nothingness. He’d welcomed it every day, for years, a visitor he’d become strangely comfortable with. He meant to offer solace, a kind word to Nikki, but words failed when confronted with the absolute.
With death, he wanted to say, we were all the same; we sensed the infinite darkness underneath us, the black oblivion we’re never more than a bad decision or an accident away from, but we didn’t want to see, and so we lived on the surface.
We floated.
Until one day, death pulled us under. Yet we struggled. We wanted to stay afloat. One more day. One more hour.
Light. Weightless.
But we forgot that we were stuff. Matter. Pieces of earth. Our bodies were anchors, dragging us down. We’re nothing but dead weight…
All this Ansel wanted to say, but didn’t. It was too much, and it wasn’t enough. And somehow, none of it was true. He’d found silence was the only answer to the question no one wanted to ask.
“I sit and I watch,” he said instead, pointing to the bodies on the tables. “I listen to them. What they tell me.”
A smile of relief spread on her face. She’d found her footing again, back on safe ground. This was a game. A joke. Ha! A playful tussle with death and the eternal question, a quick jaunt into macabre territory to rattle her. “What are they saying, Ansel?”
“Find out yourself.” He nodded in the direction of the laid-out bodies. “Go ahead.”
The smile on Nikki’s lips faltered, flickered, then died. He was serious. This wasn’t a joke. They were not here to make light of things. This wasn’t a prelude to a juvenile prank. “This isn’t funny,” she said.
“Death never is.” He took her by the elbow and led her toward the closest body. “We have this grand, operatic concept of death. Romantic. Big. A nebulous dream at the end of life.” She began to resist. Ansel strengthened his grip. Kept drawing her closer. And closer. “But here it is.”
“No.” She struggled, but somehow she didn’t have the strength. Maybe she needed to see. To hear. It wasn’t so much a struggle with Ansel as it was one with herself. “I want to leave.”
“Leaving is not an option.” He continued pulling, gentle but insistent. “You have to get close.”
Against her will, Nikki found herself inching forward. As if she was drawn by that form under the sheet. Ansel released her elbow and rested his hand softly on the back of her arm. He wasn’t forcing her; he was just there.
They stood before the body, a white sheet picking out the human form in relief. Peaks and valleys of dead matter. The shocking thing to Nikki was the complete lack of movement of the body. Years and years of television and movies had trained her to think of the dead as portrayed by actors, but try as they might, and no matter how talented they may have been, they were all incapable of coming close to the stillness right before her. The utter absence of life.
“About ten years ago, when you were only a little girl, there was a strike. The sanitation workers had had enough. Too little pay, too many bodies. Fear of infections, endless hours, and no end in sight. So they stopped picking them up. Pretty soon, the bodies piled up in here. Two, three stacks high. The cooling system couldn’t handle it and eventually gave out.”
All color had drained from Nikki’s face. “Why are you telling me this?” Her voice was not much more than a whisper.
“I still came here. Every day. And I watched. I watched as humans became… stuff. This whole room filled with dead, putrefying, gurgling, belching matter, turning less and less human with each day.”
“Oh god.” She covered her mouth, gagging dryly.
He pulled the sheet back, uncovering the face of a dead man.
Bluish. Waxen. Dead.
Stuff.
“But I sat here, and I listened.” The hum of the compressor filled the room. The buzz of fluorescent lights vibrated high above. Nikki’s breathing had almost stopped. “They were talking. Thro
ugh all the wasting away, I could hear them talk. And all they said was one word.”
Nikki stared at the dead face, half expecting him to open his mouth with a sighing yaw.
“They said ‘No,’” Ansel said. “To all we want. All we do. All we think we know. Everything we ever dreamed of. No. The period at the end of the sentence of our life. No.”
The drone of the refrigeration unit seemed to have gotten louder. It saturated the air, turning it thick, almost palpable. Nikki began to sense a chill beyond simple physical discomfort; she felt the complete absence of heat that death was, the cold of interstellar space that turned bones to glass, and if she didn’t leave soon, all the warmth would seep from her and she’d turn into one of the icy slabs of meat on the steel-cold tables.
“And then they told me something else,” Ansel said. “They told me that before that final ‘no,’ you have to find a ‘yes.’ And if you listen very carefully, that is what the dead tell you.”
First one tear, and then one after another, rolled down Nikki’s face, carving hot streaks across her cool face.
“This doesn’t change a thing,” she whispered.
“Nothing will. Just know that.”
It seemed silly to her, but she’d never considered the reality of what she had come here to do. She’d never seen a dead body before, never experienced its immediacy, the earthen solidity of it, the concreteness of lifeless matter. These last few years, she’d thought about nothing but ending these interminable gray days full of despair. Death itself was only an abstraction, a concept, a word—not stiff bodies in a cold locker.
“I’m scared,” she said.