by PW Cooper
When the last of the suds had been washed down the drain he turned the knob and watched the stream thin to a trickle, to a drip. He was naked and wet and clean with his hair hanging down in his eyes. The damp air filled his lungs when he breathed.
His faceless reflection stared back in the white tiled wall, and he thought again of Michael Conner. He had met the boy at Robert Burke's place in Syracuse, nearly two years ago now. There had been others before Mike, too many, but he'd needed them. Mike hadn't been like them, though. Mike had understood. And Jessica had liked him. Mike was the only one he ever brought home to her.
They'd had a few good weeks together before it all fell apart, Michael and Jessica and he. Nathan never saw the kid again after the towers went down. Everything had been so confused then, everyone so afraid. And the fear never ended, just stretched thinner and more raw. Nathan realized that he'd never really known Michael, and the thought frightened him because he had been so sure once. Maybe it was never anything more than a lie, an illusion.
Michael had taken their money, after all.
Nathan's toiletries bag sat on the floor just outside the shower. A change of clothes, a towel, shampoo, all the rest. He went naked to the bag and removed his razor. He lifted it and turned it about so that the four sequential blades swam with light. Did people still kill themselves with razors, he wondered, or had the obsolescence of the straight blade put an end to that?
He held the blades experimentally against his wrist, testing angles. The razor brushed like a fingernail against his skin. He bent back his hand, pushing his veins out, and he pressed the razor down. It bit deep into his skin, sliding in with a sharp ease that set Nathan's teeth instantly on edge. “Shit!” Blood welled immediately between the blades and ran down to his naked thighs and belly. “Shit!”
He yanked out a towel and pressed it against his wrist, wrapping it around his arm as the nerves began to throb. His change of clothes spilled from the bag to soak on the damp tile floor.
Blood colored the white towel. What if he died here? What would they say about him?
Nathan Riley, bleeding on the floor of the community college locker-room showers, began to laugh. He laughed until the blood was staunched.
September Second
Theodore Hemingway walked down the long drive. There were toys abandoned on the lawn: a broken rocking horse sinking into the cold autumn mud, squirt guns laying in puddles of stagnant water, stuffed animals with their fluffy white insides pulled out like spilled organs and their beaded eyes torn off. The broken windows of his house were covered by plastic sheeting, the long pointed shards of glass lying still in the dead brown scrub-grass beneath.
Ted's shirt was stained with sweat, the underarms of the white cotton turned a faint yellow. He coughed hard. He'd been sick for months, a cold he couldn't seem to shake. It was like something deep inside his lungs had came loose, now congealed and hacked painfully out. He coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and spat. His work-boots crunched in the flinty gravel chips. There was a dusty fast-food bag crumpled on the front step; he kicked it aside and it spilled rancid ketchup packets across the stair.
A scrawny figure scampered out the door, a boy wearing a rumpled Mets t-shirt and no pants. The boy snatched at his underwear, tugging it from between his buttocks. “Dad's home!” he bellowed back into the house. He turned to his father for a moment, beaming expectantly.
“Hey,” Ted grunted, ruffling the boy's shaggy hair. That's what they did on the TV shows, wasn't it? The boy's hair was greasy and thin. He dashed off down the porch steps and around the corner, leaving his father standing there with his hand out.
Ted coughed again and went inside. His other two boys were fighting, chasing each other around the living room and whooping wordless threats back and forth. The older was waving a green plastic gun threateningly.
“Dad's back!” they chorused when he stepped inside.
“Ted! Ted!” His wife Carol came shrieking into the living room.
Carol's threadbare floral print dress left her knobby knees bare. Her skin seemed drawn tight across her scrawny body, like a garbage bag stretched too far, about to tear on her sharp bones. Her black eyes gleaming angrily, inset in her skull. She waved a coffee-stained piece of paper in her skeletal hand. “Ted!” she shrilled, “What is this!”
Ted coughed. He bent down, his hands on his knees. His insides were seizing up, he felt dizzy, cold and hot at the same time, felt like his skull was shrinking around his brain. “I don't fuckin' know, Carol! You just wave something under my nose and I'm supposed to know what it is?”
Carol lips drew back over her rotten teeth. “Don't you dare swear in front of my children! And you know perfectly well what this is!” She shoved the paper at him.
He glanced down at it. His eyeballs felt like they were itching, he wanted to tear them out of his head and crush them like grapes in his fingers. “Okay. Visa bill. So what?”
“So what!” She gasped. The boys ran through the room. Ted felt like he was moving in slow motion, all the world racing by at a breakneck sprint. Carol jabbed at a number on the bill, “Maybe you'd like to explain what you were doing spending nearly a hundred dollars at that place! I know what that place is, Ted!” She lowered her voice to a hiss, “It's a strip club, I've seen the billboards on the highway! I've seen them! I know what it is!”
“Oh, leave me alone, will you?” he moaned desperately, pushing the paper away. He should have used cash at the bar of course, he'd known that... God, he wished he was there now, drunk beneath the twisting women. They were so fucking beautiful, like angels. Ted pressed his fingers against his face. He felt like a bear surrounded by buzzing insects, their stingers sinking into his hide again and again.
Carol shrilled, “No! No! We've got to talk about this! We've got to work this out, Ted! I won't stand for this, you hear me! I won't let you do this to us!”
“What us?” he growled, trying desperately to extricating himself from her clawing fingers. Somehow, not intending to, he pushed her away. She hit the drywall and their was a cracking sound – either the wall or her skull he wasn't sure – and she slumped down to the floor, holding her head and sobbing, the visa bill fluttering in her bony hand.
Ted groaned. Why did these things always happen to him? He snatched a beer from the fridge and retreated into the den, slamming the door shut behind him.
Silence.
He popped open the aluminum can and took a long drink, like a first breath of oxygen after being underwater for too long. There was a picture on the wall of Ted and Carol, a picture fifteen years old in a dusty wood frame, glass cracked in one corner. In the picture: Ted, Ted the football player, Ted with the clean-shaved jaw and the broad shoulders. Carol, Carol the cheerleader, Carol with the rosy cheeks and the high firm bosom and all her clean white teeth still in her pretty mouth.
The two of them hand in hand, smiling at their friends behind the camera. High school sweethearts, the American dream.
Ted slumped down into the couch and turned on the television. He took a swallow of beer and let the light from the machine wash over him.
September Third
Gena Riley stood on the rusted bridge and looked out along the overgrown path of the abandoned train-tracks. She put her hands on the corroded iron and thought of all the heavy black coal-smoke which had billowed up from below in years gone by. She wondered when they had torn up the tracks. She wondered what the trains had carried. She wondered what would die out next. Would they rip out all the paved roads in a hundred years, or leave them webbed black on the world like a mangled net in the grass? Left alone to be slowly reclaimed by nature.
Gena threw a smooth stone. It landed with a clatter on the rocky embankment and trundled down into the shallow water with a little splash.
She walked on. There were birds singing against the setting sun, fluttering aimlessly from branch to branch. The world was so green, she felt like an intruder in her manufactured clothing. Her sneakers kicked acro
ss the stony ground of the abandoned overpass. On either side of the rusted bridge the world had gone wild, lush green swaying in the breeze, moving with a beautiful menace uninterrupted but for the lightly trodden dirt path snaking lazily away in either direction.
She felt terribly alone.
Trevor and Molly been gone for more than a week now; Andrew and Jeffrey had been gone a lot longer. She hadn't spoken to her father, didn't even know where he was living. She hardly talked to her mother anymore; there didn't seem to be anything left to say.
She'd seen Carl a few times. Well, more than a few, to be completely honest. She still didn't like him, but he was the only one who actually wanted her, even if it was only for sex. She was somebody desired, and that meant something. And he always had something for her that would help her disappear, something to smoke or ingest or inject. She knew she shouldn't, shouldn't let him or his drugs into her body. She told herself over and over again that she would stop. She cried herself to sleep most nights, and woke with the steely resolve to put him aside. But then she'd be getting off work, her brain aching in her skull and her feet sore in her shoes and she would see him standing there, waiting for her, wanting her. He would look at her, and before she knew it she was going to him across the parking lot and getting into his car, and they would be halfway to his place before she'd even realized what she'd done.
Molly had hugged Gena tightly before she left, whispered in her ear that she would come back as soon as she could. Gena had been tempted to ask why, but she'd just smiled and hugged her back. The day after, Trevor kissed her on the cheek and said that it would be over before she knew it, and then he ran back to his Mom's idling car. It would be over before she knew it. What would be over? Whenever she thought about those words it left her uneasy, left her shaking and crying and she had to call Carl and get him to pick her up so she could get screwed and get high until she forgot why she had come to him.
Gena walked north, deep into the swaying grass. She bent down and picked a wild raspberry and held it against the tip of her tongue before biting down. She took off her shoes and stood in the little stream that ran crystal clear through the field and she watched the crayfish creeping beneath the rocks and the little fish scattering. She walked back into Verden along the old train-tracks, carrying her shoes slung over her shoulder. The soles of her wet feet were turned black by the coal dust, and the sun set behind her.
September Forth
Richard Ewan stared up at the walls of his trailer, listening to the telephone droning. His art hung on the walls, mounted askew like the haphazardly severed trophy heads of dumb animals.
He hated them. He hated the crude paintings, splashes of color thrown recklessly on curling paper the malformed sculptures. He hated the caricatured busts with their mouths and eye sockets turned inside out. He hated it all, hated every one without exception. As he stared up at the three years worth of art, he realized that he had no talent, not a shred of artistic instinct, and nothing whatsoever to say. He was a fool, he decided, playacting a miserable charade with no discernible point or purpose.
Richard was tempted, not for the first time, to burn his work, or smash it up if it wouldn't burn. Simply abandon hope and give it all to the fire, transform everything into anonymous ash as a final spiteful act of self-destruction.
Of course, he had felt this way before, and knew from experience that he would regret such an action, that tomorrow he might feel differently. Tomorrow he could be everything he knew now that he was not. The sun was going down.
He heard Catherine's voice again in the phone. His girlfriend – though their relationship was probably too casual to warrant the word – was apologizing for making him wait. He told her not to worry about it.
He'd become so used to her availability that he really hadn't a clue what he might do if she ever left him. So it was a kind of relationship. It had been two weeks since he'd last seen her, but it was as though no time at all had passed. In a sense, none had. He was standing still, with nothing to mark the time but acts of lethargic self-indulgence.
“No, not really,” he told her, and lay back on the ratty sofa. He transferred his gaze from the wall to the blank ceiling. Empty white space. It had a clear simplicity which his work lacked. Maybe that was something to consider...
“No, haven't talked to any of them. Been about a year now, I guess,” he said.
“Yeah, Mom's probably pissed,” he said.
“Well... I guess that's just how it worked out,” he said.
“It's not like they're desperate to have me back,” he said.
She shifted topics, started talking about her weekend and he felt himself glaze over. Her voice was like a wordless lullaby, soothing and inane. He shut his eyes and thought of the swaying of a rusty tree-swing beneath lush green branches, of a river running clear and strong through the dusty earth.
Richard wondered if he was a bad person for cutting himself off from his family. Maybe he was, but at least he didn't feel that corrosive guilt anymore. He'd always felt it, whenever his eyes happened to meet those of the gardener or the maid or the chauffeur or the cook or any of those ancillary persons his family felt the need to employ. He had been miserable all through his teenage years, always afraid of the judgment which he'd imagined they must be feeling towards him: Richard, the haughty wonder-child, the infant savant. He'd been shown off at his parent's parties like a circus freak, all the while oozing profound apology from his guilt-widened eyes. How awful it had been, walking behind the driver who insisted on carrying his bags in from the car, knowing that the driver's children would never have half the opportunities he'd already thrown away.
He hadn't been able to help feeling awful. To make any effort was to flaunt his undeserved gift, and to do nothing was to spit in the faces of those who would have given anything to have the luck of his birth. He'd had trouble sleeping, and his work had naturally begun to suffer. None of his parent's friends noticed, of course, they'd been trained to appreciate anything which was pushed under their noses and called Art. The worse it got the more they liked it, as it afforded them more opportunity to study it over their wine glasses and pontificate on the deeper symbolism of spaghetti glued to cardboard.
By age eighteen, he'd begun to seriously consider suicide. He left the art academy (a private school in Maryland which cost more than he cared to know) and was admitted, though only just, into the art program at Cornell University. It was his father's Alma Mater, so he wasn't exactly playing the prodigal son by going there, but it was at least his choice.
It was at Cornell that he met Catherine. She was like him, another disaffected child of wealth and privilege. They'd known at once that they were meant for each other. She introduced him to the stress-alleviating effects of illicit chemical substances, and the two of them began a halfhearted sort of romance which had continued on since almost exclusively under the power of its own inertia. He supposed he must be something of a disappointment – though he couldn't pretend not to take any pleasure in the idea. His parents probably couldn't stand it that he was able to support himself. He didn't think anything would please them so much as his having to come crawling back to them. Well, he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction, not if it killed him.
He picked up the bong which he'd left on the floor beside the couch and held it up to the light so he could watch the refracted sunset through the colored glass. Catherine was going on about something. He pondered the possibility that dynastic families produced more black sheep artsy type burn-outs than less privileged families because maybe art, whatever that meant, was primarily the product of boredom, mere ennui, and that the vast majority of the artistic canon of the western world was nothing more than a lark dreamed up in a particularly debilitating bout of generational tedium.
“Uh huh,” he said, in a belated response to Catherine's last question, “I'm still here.”
September Fifth
Alice Summers found her brother at Harry's Bar. He was drunk, or at least we
ll on his way.
He'd been drinking a lot since they'd decided to kill Robert, and Alice was starting to worry. Sometimes she thought that every man in the world must be crazy. She sat down across from her brother and folded her hands in her lap, just the way Robert liked her to. When she realized that she was doing it she forced herself to stop, and put her palms down flat on the table. Jeffrey looked up at her, bleary-eyed and bitter. He took a hard swallow of beer; his lip curled back. “Well... here she is. What are you doing here, Alice? Stop in for a drink? You wanna get us caught?”
“Stop it, Jeffrey.”
“Oh. Fucking excuse me, then.”
“I'm not here to drink. And if anybody gets caught than it'll be because of your talking, so try to keep it down, wouldn't you?”
Jeffrey grinned humorlessly. He spread his arms wide. “Think you might have come to the wrong place, sis, if you're not here to drink.”
“Have you been practicing?”
Jeffrey sank into the booth, eyes going lidded and dull. “Yeah. I've been practicing.”
“Good. Here.” She reached into her pocket and took out a little cardboard box of bullets, the same caliber and make as those in the gun. “I found these in the house. In one of the moving boxes, he hasn't unpacked anything yet.”
Jeffrey eyed the box warily. He took a fortifying swig and snatched it off the table. He cramming the bullets into his jacket pocket like he was afraid they might explode in his hand if he touched them far too long. “Oh good. Now we have enough for the whole fucking party.”
“Don't say that, Jeffrey.” Alice folded her hands again, noticed what she had done, and propped her elbows defiantly on the table edge. “This is simple, it's going to be easy. Just Robert, and it's over.”
Jeffrey groaned. “How did we end up here, Alice? Why the fuck did you ever have to marry him? I mean... what were you thinking?”