Nothing to Lose

by Vernon, Steve

  Empty?

  She was certain the freezer was empty. She ought to check. No, she was certain. Besides, they would only grow suspicious if she went downstairs to look again. But what would they suspect? How could they even dream of the act that she had in mind?

  One final performance.

  She filled three glasses, then a fourth for herself. She needn’t bother. The orange juice was strictly for appearance. They would complain if she didn’t serve it, but they never found the time to finish it, either. There never was enough time for breakfast. It was a chore that just needed doing; a present that needed giving, but was never completely unwrapped. They were always too busy with their own lives to bother with hers.

  The glasses were emptied into the sink to be washed and put back into the cupboard until tomorrow, but not by her. The dishes weren’t her problem anymore.

  Not now.

  Not ever again.

  “Are the eggs ready yet, honey?”

  Damn.

  “Coming right up,” she answered.

  How could she have forgotten the eggs? She slammed an orange and white enamel bowl down on the Formica countertop. She emptied a carton of eggs, heedless of the grocery bill.

  That also wasn’t her problem.

  Not ever again.

  The eggs fried slowly and the morning rolled on with the excruciating leisure of a luxury liner steaming blindly towards an overlooked iceberg. Breakfast ended with the ritualized clank of chrome-plated silverware rattling against factory-painted china. Chair legs scraped back and forth against the dirty linoleum that hadn’t been waxed nor washed for the last two weeks.

  Her husband spoke. “Honey, there’s a piece of shell in these eggs.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll need a drive from cheerleading tonight,” said her daughter.

  That earned another nod.

  “Can I borrow five bucks?” from her son.

  She almost shrieked, before giving a third and final nod. She emptied her purse on the table. “Take it.”

  That was too much. They looked at her face like an unexpected alarm clock.

  “You all right, hon?” her husband slowly asked.

  “Right as rain,” she said. “Just right as summer rain.”

  Then the morning caught up with them all, and her earlier behavior was forgotten. There was time only for one last empty wave at the doorway from each of them, and three separate door slams.

  They were gone and she was finally alone.

  She didn’t need the light on the stairway. She knew her direction by rote. She tiptoed past the melted bucket of low fat ice cream and the defrosted pork chops, stepped over the turkey that had been on sale just last month and would never be eaten, to the open mouth of the freezer.

  Finally.

  She lifted a leg like the ballerina she’d once dreamed of becoming and climbed into its maw, letting the lid close and latch behind her, watching the darkness fall like a frozen meat axe.

  She lay there.

  She tried to think quiet thoughts.

  Her teeth rattled like fifteen and a half pairs of ivory castanets. She’d lost one of her back teeth as a teenager, and had never had it replaced. She remembered someone had knocked it out. She could still touch the hollow with the edge of her tongue, it was another empty space that she’d never managed to fill.

  Fear reached out and kissed her softly upon the throat. She felt the chill and the darkness suffocating her mind. She briefly forgot that suicide had been her idea, and panicked.

  “Help! Help!”

  She beat upon the unfeeling whalebone interior of the freezer until the sides of her fists looked like tiny chunks of fresh raw meat. The cold descended around her. She felt as if she’d become a woman made of pure ice cream.

  An igloo woman, her womb hollowed out with a dull scraping spoon. Her white-as-snow breasts laced with veins of ivory blue and the frozen memory of purposeless milk. She wept, and her tears froze quietly about her eyelids.

  I am dying, she thought.

  I am all alone and I am dying and nobody is listening to me at all.

  Or so she thought.

  ~ * ~

  He sat alone on a bus stop bench, watching three pigeons peck at a moldy slice of pizza on the sidewalk.

  They ate right up to the mold.

  Stupid pigeons.

  Didn’t they know that mold went straight through? Like roots under the ground, once you saw the greenish-blue the whole freaking slice was shot.

  That’s how life worked. Everything touched everything. Like these people who walked past him, doing their best to ignore the man in the black leather mask like he was nothing.

  He wondered how long that pizza slice had been lying there. He wondered if there weren’t anyone around to watch, would he make a grab for it?

  Probably not.

  Somebody was always watching, even when there was nobody around. Everything touches everything.

  He shivered. It was July. He shouldn’t be cold but the hunger stole the warmth from him.

  He wondered what a pigeon tasted like.

  He’d been sitting here for three straight days thinking about nothing. Nobody bothered him. The patrol cops couldn’t be bothered to get out of their car to hassle him along.

  It was an accident when it happened. He hadn’t sat there purposefully planning on entering a higher state of consciousness, but the fasting and the solitude and the quietness of his strange hard mind led its wandering footsteps into a time and space that only a few mystics, saints and lunatics ever achieved.

  He was listening to himself. Listening to the thoughts whirring around his brain like a hamster on a tin wheel. He was waiting for something. Like a bus, or a meteor – he wasn’t sure which.

  He hoped he’d know when it happened.

  He listened inside, and inside the inside-ance of his insides he heard the freezer door slamming shut.

  He felt the woman’s rising panic. Felt the blood running off of the sides of her fists, staining the inch-thick frost that coated the freezer. He felt her tears clustering about her eyelids like frozen mourners cluttered about a snowy grave. She was real. He knew that without asking why.

  He decided to risk conversation.

  “I can see you,” he said.

  And just as easy as that, somehow he could. See her lying there in terror in her freezer, and somehow from the darkness, sixteen city blocks away, she heard him speak.

  “Huh?”

  “I said, I can see you.”

  “How?”

  “Ha! A little while ago you thought you were an Eskimo. Now you think that you’re an Indian.”

  “How can you see me?”

  “How can anyone see anyone at all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, a man looks at a woman like you and all he sees is a tit or a lip or a hand around a frying pan or a body wrapped around a baby he could call his, but when I look at you I see the frost crackling around the black bark of a sugar pine that’s just about to explode from the pressure of the winter cold. I see a bird getting ready to sing. I look at you and I see a scream just begging to be sung free.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean I feel you, more than see you. You know what I mean?”

  She thought she understood.

  “I’m going crazy, aren’t I?” she asked. “Crazy with hypothermia. Crazy with advanced sensory deprivation. Crazy, and now I am hearing a voice that isn’t there.”

  “Hey, everybody’s got to go somewhere.”

  “I wish I made more sense. My hallucinations are too damned confusing.”

  “Why? You’re crazy, aren’t you? Crazy as a honeybee in a diamond blizzard. Wild as a grey willow branch hula dancing in the winter breeze. Mad as ten bastards. Try superheroing for a living. Now that’s what I call crazy.”

  Something in the mirage man’s words sparked a memory buried deep within her.

  “I remember willows,” she told him. “I r
emember they used to grow around the pond outside my home when I was young. They were always crying and they made me feel glad. I was sad when daddy cut them down. He said they were drinking too much water. They built a housing development where the willows used to stand, covered the roots and water and all.”

  “Everything dies. Nothing is meant to stay the same.”

  You’re right, she thought.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Just me. Call me Captain Nothing. I’m a superhero.”

  “Captain Nothing? What kind of a name is that?”

  “It fit nicely on my driver’s license, filling in all of the required blanks.”

  The cold grabbed her hard and she started to shake.

  “I can still see you,” Captain Nothing said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” she answered. “I’m dying because I want to.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “I’m living because I don’t want to.”

  She had a sudden thought.

  “Are you God?” she asked him.

  He laughed aloud. A man in frayed grey business suit with a frayed grey collar walked by the man on the bench and nervously quickened his step.

  “No, not God,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Just me. Just nothing. It’s all I’ve ever been.”

  “Don’t you have a name? I mean a real name.”

  “What, you want me to reveal my secret identity?”

  She was embarrassed.

  “Forget about it,” he said. “Names are only handles people use to push you around.”

  She laughed at that, only her freezing lips fumbled the giggle, and she bit her tongue. She tasted blood. It wasn’t bad. She closed her eyes and tried to think whatever thoughts a Hindu fakir might think after he’d been buried deep beneath the dry dust of India. She couldn’t think like a fakir, so she decided to settle for reality. She began to count backwards from one hundred.

  She made up her mind that she’d be dead at zero.

  “Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety...”

  “What are you now?” Captain Nothing asked. “Some kind of mathematician?”

  “...seven, ninety-six, ninety...”

  “You counting down? Figure it’ll calm you? It won’t. Numbers just make us tense. It only makes your heart beat faster.”

  “...five, ninety-four, ninety...”

  “You’re dying already. You have been since birth.”

  “...three, ninety-two, ninety...”

  “Why hurry the process?”

  “...one, ninety, eighty...”

  “It’d be rude to die in the middle of a conversation.”

  “Huh?”

  He smiled.

  Contact had been re-established.

  “Just relax. The sand will run out all by itself. You only get so many heartbeats, so many breaths per lifetime. They’re what you call a non-renewable resource - an unknown, because you never really know when you’re going to run out. That’s why exercise kills you. You waste your breath breathing fast.”

  She resumed her count, doing her best to ignore the imaginary voice.

  “Eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty...”

  “Don’t lose count now.”

  “...seven, eighty....”

  “Slow it down, lady.”

  “...six...”

  “You are a lady, aren’t you? A woman, I mean. I can’t really tell.”

  The question finally paused her count.

  “Am I? I can’t remember. Everything’s numb from the cold, and before. It’s too dark in here to know for sure. Freezers don’t have light bulbs like refrigerators do.”

  “Why don’t you touch yourself and find out?”

  She did. It was cool and dry, but soft where she touched. She felt a quiver, deep inside her. She was surprised to remember how to breathe that way; how to breathe like she wanted more. It had been so long since her husband really touched her, like he wanted to, not like he just wanted her to touch him. It had been so long. So long since she’d breathed that startled, wanting gulp-gasp of kindled passion.

  She thought she’d forgotten how.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “A woman. I am a woman.”

  “Hey, I’m a man. We should get together before you die.”

  “You wouldn’t like me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m frigid.”

  He had to stop to laugh at her joke. It was a good laugh. She felt it fall upon her like white peppered snowflakes.

  “I felt that,” she told him.

  “So did I. It damn near split my gut.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Laughter is good for a man. It feeds his juices. Otherwise a body will dry up like an old stick.”

  Now, it was her turn to laugh. There was something she loved about the way this mysterious delirium spoke to her. She accidentally re-bit her tongue.

  “That hurt.”

  “That’s the best kind of laugh. The kind that hurts. The kind that lets you know you’re still alive.”

  “Who are you?” she asked again.

  “I already told you. I’m nothing. So who are you?”

  “I’m a lady freezing inside her deep freeze, talking to an imaginary man.”

  “I’m not imaginary,” he said. “I’m as real as baked beans.”

  “Now you’re making me hungry.”

  “Hunger’s a good sign. It shows you’re still alive.”

  “But not for beans,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “They give me gas.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’d be a bad idea inside a freezer.”

  He laughed again. She had a point.

  “So forget the beans. How about cookies? I bet you could make a hell of a batch of icebox cookies right about now.”

  She smiled, even though it hurt her mouth.

  “I remember icebox cookies,” she said. “My gramma made them from scratch every summer. She froze them, sliced them, baked them on her wood stove.”

  “I never knew my grandmother,” he said. “But I remember wood stoves.”

  “Me too. When it was winter we’d lay pennies on the wood stove. Heat them up and stick them to the Jack-Frosted windows to make bullet holes to see through.”

  She sighed.

  Her sigh was a gift of warm human air. It froze about her broken lips.

  “I wish I could see you,” she said.

  “I can see you.”

  “I know. Where are you?”

  “Home, just like you.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Where I call it. Right here in my boot holes. I’m right at home in my worn-out size tens.”

  “Don’t you have a home?”

  “Sure I do. I live out of doors. You live in a house, I live out of a house. What’s the difference?”

  “Right now, I’m living in a freezer.”

  She was dying too. Her bones were starching into fossils of ice. The pain spilled away into a lazy sort of numb. In the darkness, with his talk to keep her company, she found a kind of temporary peace.

  “It’s quiet in here.”

  “It’s noisy as hell out here.”

  A car honked loudly. She couldn’t hear it because it was outside, and the part of him she was listening to was inside with her.

  “Who are you?” he repeated. “Who do you think you are?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I’m in here trying to find out.”

  “In a freezer?”

  “A mountaintop seemed like too much work.”

  A lady handed him a dollar bill. He handed it back, telling her he wouldn’t work for anything less than a twenty. She wasn’t there to receive the bill or his reply. She was too busy trying to escape.

  “I hate that,” he said.

  “Hate what.”

  “People. The ones around me. Not you, though.”
/>   “Where are you?”

  “In the street – somewhere in the city, somewhere on this earth. Round about fifteen million miles from the sun, spinning fast.”

  She listened to her heart slowly beating down. She tried to find an answer, but there didn’t seem to be one, so she made one up. “Right. Same reason as me. You didn’t like whatever it was you were hearing outside your ears.”

  The wind snuck through a hole in his shirt. It could be cold in the morning, especially when you hadn’t eaten anything in three whole days.

  “Christ, I’m cold,” he said.

  “Are you in a freezer, too?”

  “Aren’t we all? You’re inside an icebox, and I’m outside on the street. We’re both freezing to death. Nobody’s listening to us. We’re both dying.”

  “It was my decision,” she said

  “Right. The direct approach. Sign of a practical mind. I admire that.”

  “I wish you were in a freezer.”

  “Huh?”

  “This freezer.”

  “Now, that’s not being practical, is it?”

  She swallowed twice before asking the next question. “Who said love had to be practical?”

  “Love? Where the hell did that four-letter word come from?”

  “From me. From my mouth. I love you, whoever you are.”

  “Love?”

  The word hit him like a meat axe.

  “Yes, love. It’s the most simple and sensible word I ever spoke.”

  He cleared his throat, like he had something in it.

  “I’ve never heard that word used that way before. Not by somebody who really meant it.”

  “I mean it. I really mean it.”

  “I know you do.”

  “I wish you could hold me.”

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “Sure I do. You’re somebody standing alone in the middle of a crowd of all-alone people who are too afraid to admit their loneliness.”

  “Hell.”

  “Somebody once said that hell is all the other people. I don’t know about that. I think hell is other people, without love. We’ve got that now. Something they’ll never have. Forget about them. Just hold me. Somehow. Anyhow.”