by Peter Besson
“This is what?”
Romer fumbled open his laptop and turned it on. “Your way out.”
The words didn’t register. There were only three of them, but together, they made no sense to Ansel. It was as if he’d lost the ability of speech and he only comprehended the melody of language. But then the meaning rushed at him with the force of a storm.
His. Way. Out. Why his? What about Romer? Out? Where? How? Is—
“Too late for me.” Romer read his mind. He hammered on the keyboard. “Light me a cigarette?” His hands never stopped. “I’m going to have to check out. This right here takes a bit of time. If you’re lucky, you can make it.” He opened his mouth long enough for Ansel to stick a lit cigarette in it. “At least try. Promise me that.” Eyes locked on the computer, fingers working furiously, puffing smoke, Romer threw words up on the screen with ferocious speed.
He checked his wristband. One hour forty five minutes. Counting down. He wiped his forehead and banged on the keyboard like he was trying to break it.
Ansel could only stand and watch his friend, who knew he was a dead man, work feverishly, because he wanted him to live. And if he could stick it to Morton while doing that, a final middle finger from the grave, so much the better.
At last, Romer hit a key. A printer on the desk began spitting out pages. Romer leaned back, drew on the cigarette until the tip crackled white hot, held the burning smoke in for as long as he could, and when his lung cinched up to a tearing pain, he exhaled with relish.
All done.
“Make the best of it,” he told Ansel, with a grim smile.
“I’ll try.”
It was a long shot, both knew, and it required the assistance of some unlikely allies, but in the end, it didn’t matter. Ansel’s friend, who was about to die, instead of dissolving in his own misery, instead of railing against the injustices done to him, had just spent what little time he had left on earth trying to help him.
Ansel held out his arms. Hug time. He needed to hold on to Romer, to keep him close, to make him real for the last couple of hours they had.
Romer stood, every bone, joint, and ligament in his body cracking. Amazing what a daily dope habit could cover up. Drained of every ounce of strength, he fell into Ansel’s embrace. Tears welled up from deep down inside, from under the suffocating debris of drug-fueled oblivion. Sobs racked Romer’s small frame as Ansel held him tight, and Romer’s face dissolved in tears and snot.
Despite his badly shaking hands, Romer went through his ritual of cooking up with the reverence afforded to a religious rite, every movement carrying the weight of singular importance. Using a butane lighter, he cooked some smack in his well-patinaed spoon, soaked up the liquid with a cotton ball, dipped the needle in and drew up what he, bringing all his unique expertise to bear, figured was enough amber-gold liquid to gently turn the lights out on Chet Romer and shut down his experience on this earthly plane, for there was only one way for Romer to go.
He sat on his bed, a tourniquet around his upper arm, the last of his non-collapsed veins a luminous blue river snaking through the pockmarks on his skin, the needle poised, but his hands started shaking, more violently than before. Romer took a breath, to control his hands. No use. They danced through the air like butterflies. He shook his head, tears falling like rain. He couldn’t do it.
After everything, he still couldn’t do it.
When Romer looked up, Ansel saw terror in his eyes, the sheer horror of realization. Soon, oh so soon, his friend would be no more. Ansel, moving with tender care, took the syringe from Romer’s unfettered hands and sat next to him. He found Romer’s frantic eyes and held them steady.
He was here. Would be here.
Seconds ticked by. They breathed together. Were together. This moment.
And the next.
An understanding passed between them, the agreement that what one could not do, the other would. This was the way it had to be.
Ansel set the needle against Romer’s vein. A question. Romer nodded the answer.
Yes.
Without losing eye contact, Ansel pushed the plunger down, releasing inevitable death into Romer’s bloodstream.
A pause, the instant between two breaths when life hangs still, suspended, then the moment keeled to the side. Romer’s eyes lost focus. Peace settled on his face. Death approached with tenderness, like a seductress, coaxing, embracing, whispering through his blood.
Ansel lowered Romer on the bed and took his hand, not letting go.
Romer stared at the ceiling, but he didn’t see. His journey was inward, toward the end of being.
“I’ve got a favor to ask,” he murmured.
“Anything.”
“I want to see the sun. Once it’s… done,” Romer whispered in Ansel’s ear, holding on to reality as best he could with a mind unmoored by euphoria and heroin coursing through his system unchecked. Words became slippery, meanings dissolved into warm rivers of pleasure. “I won’t see another sunrise. I’ll die in the dark.” Tears rolled from the corners of his eyes and stained the comforter. “I don’t want to die in the dark. I don’t. I don’t.” Each time shaking his head, spilling tears.
“What do you want me to do?” Ansel asked.
He glanced up at the ceiling. “Help me see.”
Ansel kicked open the door to the rooftop, cold night air greeting them. He was holding Romer in his arms. He’d had to carry him up the final flight of stairs. Romer, a heavy arm around Ansel clomping up the stairs, had simply folded into himself on the last landing. His opioid receptors overwhelmed, his brain was shutting down, leaving him winking in and out of consciousness.
Ansel lumbered across the roof, cradling Romer to his chest like a lover. The city was a sea of blinking lights, surrounding them, circling them like a swarm of fireflies frozen in space.
After a few steps, Ansel’s legs gave out. He struggled to kneel, and laid Romer on the hard concrete of the roof as gently as he could, taking special care with his head, which lolled about freely by now. Ansel rolled up Romer’s sleeve. The wristband on his skinny arm showed ten minutes and counting down. He’d make it, on his own terms.
Romer surfaced to consciousness briefly, his breath a gulp, his eyes staring blindly into the night sky. “Oh… my god,” he rasped.
“What? What is it?” Ansel saw nothing but night and city all around them.
“Do you see?” Ansel followed Romer’s gaze, but a gray cloud cover sat over downtown like a metal lid, reflecting the orange glow of the city lights back at them.
“All those stars,” Romer murmured. “Look at that…” His voice was scarcely a rustle above the wind.
Ansel closed his eyes. He would hold it together for his friend. He felt a stinging sob rise but suppressed it with a groan. This was not about him, or the pain that roiled inside of him, feeding on his agony. This belonged to Romes, the last moments of the being he knew as Chet Romer—lawyer, junkie, tragic figure—before he dispersed into that boundless universe swirling around them.
“Do you see them?” Romer smiled through his blind tears.
Ansel tried to imagine the infinity of stars above them, the glittering mass of countless pinpricks of light, the incomprehensible vastness of everything not them.
“Ansel?” Could have been the wind.
Ansel held his eyes clamped shut, tightly, and then he made himself see. Blind, like Romer, he told himself he saw an unlimited stretch of darkness riddled by glittering stars and swirling gas clouds, columns of interstellar dust where galaxies are born and black holes where massive suns die. An infinite, brilliantly shining darkness.
“Yes,” Ansel said. “I see them.” He blinked through his tears.
“So many…” Romer was astonished. How could he have missed it? “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.” Ansel wiped at his face. His sleeve was soaked. And there were still more tears.
Astonishmen
t spread on Romer’s face. “Oh. Now I see…” He smiled. “It’s all there. It’s… all…” The light in his eyes faded. “…there.” A small tremor. Then Romer went limp with a last sigh.
He was dead.
Ansel blew snot and tears. He laid his head on Romer’s, holding close the frame which had housed his friend for too short a time. He cried for Romer, he cried for Nikki, he cried for Tamara, he cried for the whole wretched human race that had no better thing to do than constantly die.
Behind him, unnoticed, the door opened and Huntley stepped onto the roof. He quickly assessed the situation. Chet Romer had checked out, and Ansel had shown the decency of seeing his friend off. Huntley wasn’t needed, and he was glad. He’d liked the old addict, and this was the best he could have hoped for.
He turned and closed the door behind him without a sound, leaving the living and the dead to themselves.
***
His wife would be asleep on the couch. She refused to go to bed before he was home—if she woke up on the couch the next day, the TV still running, she’d know something had happened at work. Then she would wake their son, five-year-old Ian, so snug in his bed in the room with the glowing stars on the ceiling; she would dress him hastily, grab the suitcase she had packed for just such a morning, and together they would get on the first train out of the city, as far away as possible from the misery and death that seemed to emanate from it. She’d told Huntley many times she didn’t want him working in the business he did—what would they tell Ian his father did for a living when he got old enough to see through the thin lies they’d spun, the delicate evasions they’d practiced all his life? How could they explain that his father’s job entailed killing human beings—damaged human beings who needed his help, sure, but still, where was the line separating helper from killer? And if Huntley were to ever cross that invisible line, what would he bring back from the other side? She’d always claimed death clung to Huntley, his clothes, his skin, his soul.
Huntley was sitting in the subway, rumbling through the night to an outer suburb, one the city hadn’t re-appropriated in its insatiable hunger to expand. There, one could still spot the occasional tree or patch of grass. When Huntley was lucky, he was able to show his son a rare butterfly tumbling through the air. He even remembered having heard a bird sing recently. But all this came at a price—an hour-long subway ride. Plenty of time for Huntley to sit and think.
Romer had been the last of the redbands to check out for the day—Huntley’s name for guests whose time limit had been reached. He had felt a pang of regret when Chet Romer’s numbers came up. Somehow, he’d seemed an institution at the Hotel Terminus, like the crumbling plaster, the indeterminate food, or the outdated structural code. But maybe that was the point, after all. Maybe he himself had outlived his usefulness, Huntley thought. In the end, everyone does.
Huntley had been surprised to find Ansel Grayson up on the roof with his friend. Under normal circumstances, that was the way it should be, but for the humans Huntley came into contact with on a daily basis, functional social relationships were not an outstanding feature. Most drowned in a sea of their own misery, desperate and quiet. Huntley had made it a point not to fraternize with the residents, to keep any interactions on a purely professional level, but over the years he’d come to think of Ansel Grayson as somewhat different. Even though he moved about in his own dark shadow world, wearing the lost expression of the damned, Ansel had never failed to be courteous and undemanding, and was at times genuinely engaging. Unlike most people, he did not make a spectacle out of his personal misery. His tragedy was his own, and he bore it with as much dignity as he was capable of.
And he appeared to possess a sense of humor. Every year, for Christmas, Ansel would present Huntley with a gift—a novelty gift. As random as the thought processes of a four-year-old after a cake-eating contest, but still, a gift: An eyepatch. A gift card to Toys’R Us. A book on ritual practices of the South Island Natives. A fart cushion. A pair of long-john underwear. A boomerang. Self-tan lotion… Huntley always marveled at the creativity—or was it carelessness?—with which Ansel seemed to have picked out the gifts. Every year Ansel seemed to be trying to get a reaction from Huntley—a smile, a startled look, a sharp intake of air, the bristling of annoyance—but every year, it was the same: a slightly raised eyebrow and a gracious ‘how thoughtful.’
Huntley couldn’t bring himself to throw the random assembly of objects away, so he kept them in a box in the closet. His son had, with great delight, discovered that box as of late, trying to decipher the meaning and use of the gifts, sometimes combining them in startling ways. He became a farting pirate. He attempted to perform the Haka in grossly outsized long-johns. He developed splotches of tanned skin in unexpected places, and to Huntley’s knowledge, that boomerang never came back.
Huntley smiled somberly. He might not be getting a gift this year.
When he thought of it, no other guest had ever bothered giving Huntley anything but grief—not that they stayed for the amount of time Mr. Grayson had. Most of them came and went in a blur, broken lives on their last stop before they moved on to the next one—if what the government told them was true and rebirth was a fact. Huntley had no real opinion about it. If there was another life waiting for him on the other side, he would try to make the most of it.
He surveyed the empty subway car. He was the only passenger rattling along into the night. Perhaps the next life wouldn’t be so lonely. He might even reunite with some of the people he had helped in this life. It was a beautiful thought. Huntley smiled to himself as he closed his eyes and imagined the luminous people the redbands would become, all the lives he’d ended as gently as he’d been able to.
***
For as long as he could remember, Douglas had always had trouble sleeping. There were too many deals to be made, too much to oversee, but he’d never lost sleep over family concerns; that was always something he’d assumed would simply work out. Somehow. He hated the slipperiness of human relationships, the uncertainties, the inability to force all the messy bits into some sort of contract, an easily followed set of rules and guidelines that could be negotiated, sure, but which still could be understood and quantified and regulated and, if need be, enforced.
None of that applied to what he was facing now. His daughter taking off, checking into a Last Resort, falling for some man who seemed to have the nerve of a singularly skittish meerkat (why else was he still there?), her refusal to come to her senses now that it was all over…
But nothing was ever over with her. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t hold on to her. Never had been able to. The alien wildness of her being a woman, the burning emotionalism—it threatened to drown him. Oh, they’d experimented with every therapy, every drug, every goddamn faith healer under the sun. Nothing could channel her. The levies always broke.
Douglas took another sip of his whiskey. He was standing at the wall of windows in his sitting room. Outside, the park was plunged into darkness. In the distance, the city lights flickered, but here, calm cool night collected in dark pools around his mansion. His house was one of only a handful scattered around the remnants of what had been a sizable park at the center of the city. Once it had been a magnificent oasis for the urban dwellers, a green lung in a sea of concrete, a place where one could get lost between the trees and small lakes. Eventually it had been auctioned off to a small group of investors, Douglas among them, who’d built a wall around it and turned it into the largest gated community in the city. Once inside, one could forget about the rest of the world and the shit piling up against the walls. You could stand in your opulent darkened sitting room with the real wood paneling, a real fire blazing in the hearth, whiskey sparkling in a heavy glass, and look out over acres and acres of night-shaded park and worry about your teenage daughter and her desire to step off. And once you fretted long enough about it, you’d wonder how you could do anything, build an empire out of dust and bone, but you couldn’t under
stand the least bit about the mystery of the human heart.
He half-turned, listened to the house. Aside from the fire blistering and snapping at the air, it was as silent as a cathedral.
***
They’d done a remarkably thorough job cleaning her room. All the other times, Nikki had managed to find some stash she’d hidden somewhere, but this time they’d turned the room inside out. Guess that was what she got for trying to off herself: They got real serious. All her stuffed animals and knick-knacks were gone—she’d only kept them to hide drugs and paraphernalia in anyway, so she wasn’t too broken up about it, but it left her room oddly bare, like a movie-set recreation of the real thing. It had a certain retro-chic vibe, with fluorescent tubes and glass cubes tumbled into corners or hung on walls, like a storage room housing the lost dreams of the eighties.
Quietly, because she didn’t want Tom—that mountain of meat she knew was sitting outside her door—to hear her, she lifted her mattress and slid her hand underneath, sweeping back and forth. Nothing. She opened drawers in her desk, rummaged through her dresser, peeked under the armoire but only found the exact sum of zip. She checked in every pocket, every fold of every piece of clothing, shook out every last pair of shoes.
Nothing.
Nikki stood in her room, hands on hips, trying to decide if she should be angry or offended or both. Her privacy had been violated. Yes, she knew why, and from the normal world’s perspective, it sure made sense to take away anything she might harm herself with, but she was hurt, confused, emotionally exhausted, and she had nothing that would make it all go away. The man she couldn’t stop thinking about would die tomorrow, and she would have to carry on living in his absence. She’d told herself over and over she’d only known him for a few days, that she’d met him in a psychologically heightened state (she was sure committing suicide, or at least planning to, made emotions run higher than normal), that she was young and volatile and possibly not the best judge of character—but aside from all that, there was a painful tear inside of her, a pain threatening to rip her wide open. She couldn’t deal with this. She needed—