Songs of the Maniacs

by Mickey J Corrigan

He sighs and says, “When I called Vic I said I would have you home in half an hour. That was an hour and a half ago. He’s gonna blame me for this and I don’t want to have to try to tell him it was all your idea. Give me a break, Virginia. Okay?”

  I am stunned into silence. Is he kidding? Why is he calling me by that name? And why does he keep talking about someone named Vic? What for? Is he playing some kind of sick game here?

  My heart begins to pound and I grab onto the door handle with my right hand. Maybe I can jump out the next time he slows down. Like at a stop sign or a traffic light.

  We continue to speed along through the salty blackness, our headlights following the curve of the double yellow lines running down the middle of the road. Eventually I let go of the door handle.

  Ben slows the car to a crawl and we turn down a dirt drive.

  The car sputters. It’s got to be one of those battered VW Bugs owners keep on the road with chewing gum and super glue. We had a Volksie like that when I was in high school. I used to drive it to the beach late at night, sleepy and stoned, my high school boyfriend in the passenger seat. I drove barefoot. Sometimes all I wore were the marks from his hands.

  “What would you do with you if you were me?” I ask and Ben smiles. Sure enough, his dimple is visible in the dark.

  “I would give me the morning shift and the night shift tomorrow,” he says, looking at me like this is funny. “I mean today, of course. It’s going on four a.m., in case you’re wondering.”

  I don’t know what he means by shifts, but I hang my head out the window so I can watch the stars fade out.

  Ben blames the drugs, the corporations, the technology. This seems much too convenient. I think it is my fault, actually. Maybe I am the dreamer. Or maybe I was the dreamer.

  I can no longer hear the alarm bell in my head. Maybe the past is really over, and this is something else. Maybe there is only one real moment and it is now. Maybe we are driving into the future I dreamed about or created for myself from the absence, from the most important nothingness. Maybe I’ve changed, or changed places.

  Or maybe I’ve just fucked up.

  When Ben stops the car and cuts the engine, we are in front of my office building. We sit quietly as the cheap gas in the engine knocks around for a minute. The foxtail palms swish their fronds, making a sound like a Hawaiian grass skirt. The quad is empty and artificially bright from all the mandatory street lamps. My office window is dark, but Victor’s is not.

  “If you ever need a quick score, come check out the numbers on my office door,” I tell Ben. He looks at me strangely and says nothing.

  “Not tonight, Virginia,” he says quietly. “I like my job and I want to keep it. I mean, I feel weird enough being out so late together. ” He frowns and opens his door. “Guess I’ll walk back. I doubt I can get a cab at this hour.”

  I climb out my side. “Why don’t you take the car?” I ask, puzzled.

  “You mean it?” Ben says, then slams his door and restarts the engine. “I’ll have it back at the bar by noon. Don’t worry, I’ll drive slow. I’ll coast home. Really, I will,” Ben promises, his voice earnest and eager. His teeth shine in the street light. “Thanks, Virginia,” he says as he pulls away from the curb.

  I’m shaking my head. So weird. Ben acted like I was lending him the car. Or Virginia was lending him the car, but he was thanking me.

  My mind begins to swell up like a wet napkin. I stand under the street light and watch the non-native geckos run up and down the cement pole, gobbling up our native bugs.

  I do not feel like going inside. I am not sure why Ben dropped me off here. How does he know where my office is located? I do not remember telling him this, but in my inebriated state I might have told him anything. Maybe I told him my name is really Virginia and I live here with a guy named Vic. Why I would do such a thing, I am unable to fathom.

  I look up at Victor’s window again. Unlike my office, Victor’s suite has a bed. And two couches, two comfortable powder blue couches. And since the light is on, maybe I will not disturb him too much if I knock on his door. Maybe he will take pity on me and let me stretch out on one of his soft sofas.

  Victor to the rescue again.

  The god upstairs.

  I walk up the front steps and let myself into the lobby. I pull the dead bolt into place. There are no lights on so I use my feet to feel my way across the wrinkled linoleum to the bottom of the staircase. Then I continue up the two flights to Victor’s floor.

  The hallway is dimly lit by a row of wall sconces, so I find the apartment easily and knock lightly on the door. I am totally exhausted and can hardly keep my eyes open. What a night. All the walking, the alcohol, then the violence. My body isn’t used to this. I lean against the wall and shut my eyes for a moment, waiting for the door to open.

  The darkness is thick inside my head, thick and soupy. The me inside my mind also closes my eyes. A moment passes.

  When I try to open my eyes I realize they are already open. Victor stands in the doorway in a faded pair of jeans and a sleeveless undershirt. He reaches for me just as I fall into his arms. But when he pulls me to his chest and sweeps me into the apartment, I can feel the tension in his body. It is like something coiled, tight and hard.

  “That’s it,” he says sharply and lets go of me so suddenly I slip to the floor. He’s replaced the ugly green carpet with laminated wood. How did he do that so quickly?

  “I like your floor,” I tell him and he growls like an angry animal.

  Are we any different at all? I think not.

  I am glancing around at his apartment and it is nothing like I remember. A huge dining table made from black stone dominates the room, and beyond that a love seat and overstuffed chairs in white linen. The art on the wall is abstract and flashy. The lights are recessed around a rattan fan in a high white ceiling. A life-size blown glass statue of mating iguanas in clashing shades of orange and green poses confidently by the front window.

  Victor yanks me to my feet just so he can shove me against the wall. Then he rubs his hands up and down my body with a little too much force, but not enough to hurt me. “It’s extremely late,” he says in a gruff voice, “and I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about you.”

  Like you are thinking about me now? I want to ask him. Because he is hard against my thigh, so hard I am not sure this is such a bad thing for us. Us, together in this moment.

  I lick his fleshy lips and he suckles my tongue. His mouth tastes of mint and lemon, of a recent toothbrushing. When I touch his face with my hand he slaps it away. His eyes are black saucers, empty bagel holes. He is angry, but he wants to fuck me too much to talk about it right now.

  He pins my arms over my head and I close my eyes and the alarm bell is silent and the blackness is nice and familiar and he smells like beer unless that is me and he presses his body against me, covering me with his hot heavy flesh, until I start to feel like I can no longer breathe and then I cough and cough and the fragmented memories, the nightmarish images start coming at me again.

  I remember the beach, the smell of salt and iodine, the cool wind from the east and the hard-packed sand. But the beach does not remember me. The blowing sand, the frothing waves, the incoming tide erase the memory of me, erase all traces of the moment and of themselves in that moment. Over and over, replacing themselves in the moment with the beautiful industry of nature’s recycling.

  I remember how I lay on my back on the beach and the stars were pinpricks in a black velour backdrop. The waves pulled and sucked at my cold skin, lapping and slapping my unmoving legs and feet.

  I am not certain how long I played Joey’s games, and I am not so sure they were all his games. I let it happen and continue to happen. Over and over again.

  Then we stopped. Just like that. We both left town, we went our separate ways to our separate colleges. Joey never called or wrote to m
e, and I thought I felt good about that.

  When I came home for the weekend in the autumn of my junior year, I was taking a break from everything. My latest boyfriend and I had been fighting a lot and I felt confused. My parents were stupidly pleased and my brothers all approved of the new guy, a psychology major who worked at McGoren’s a few nights a week. We had only slept together once, however, and the sex was a complete failure. He wanted another try and was pushing to go away together for a weekend, but I was stalling. The thought of two days and nights in bed with a mentally stable, good-looking, decent sort of guy who did nothing to turn me on was depressing. So I cut out for home instead.

  Kip managed the Dome Gym on Second Street, and Thom worked at a New York style restaurant a few blocks away. Franny had dropped out of grad school and was hanging around in his beat-up leather jacket, pontificating and looking iffy.

  I walked the beach and drove around town in Thom’s ancient VW Bug. I drank beers and smoked reefer at Kip’s gym with my brothers and their townie friends. Kip let us bounce a basketball around the deserted gym once he’d closed up the building for the night. All the guys were big, they were all really built and they spent too much time looking at themselves in the wall-to-wall mirrors.

  Time passed quickly on that visit. Time was passing like that suddenly, and it seemed to be passing faster and faster. Franny explained it like this: “You’re growing up, kid. The older you get, the more anxious you get about your time. Because it’s no longer infinite. And you don’t want to waste what’s left.”

  I did not think that was the source of my concern. I thought I had so much time left I was sure to waste most of it.

  On my last night at home, I was in bed by eleven. I planned to get a good night’s sleep, some sober and straight sleep, so my mind would be clear for the return trip to college. Thom was lending me his car so I would not have to go Greyhound back to school. I planned to get up at four and head out. But I lay awake for hours, the full moon sliding its bright yellow light across the floor and walls of my bedroom.

  I felt stuck in my childhood, moored in my teenage angst. I should never have come back here, I was thinking. I should have stayed away and become someone else.

  The cicadas were raucous. Occasionally, a deranged mockingbird called piteously for a mate. On the night stand next to my bed I had one of those square digit clocks that click every time the numbers change. Click, click, twelve o’clock. Click, click, one o’clock. Click, one-eleven.

  One-eleven. When I looked at the clock I saw a string of tall, thin, look-alike ones. Something inside my head burst free.

  I knew in that moment. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be someone else entirely. Someone who could feel more with less. Someone who had faith in her own inner meaning despite the absence of evidence to support that faith. Someone who followed her passions, someone who loved her life.

  I wanted to be alive. Alive in the moment, in all moments. Alive with feelings and desire.

  Then I heard someone moving around outside.

  21.

  Anders is bleeding from his chest. There is a hole there that goes right through his blue uniform shirt pocket that says Joseph Anders, Lawn Maintenance. A hole that is black and not empty but full, full of blood, bright red blood that keeps coming and coming.

  Blood drips while he pushes and pushes against the front door with his shoulder and all his strength. He pushes hard and hard, harder. He is forcing the door to open. There is no other choice.

  Anders saw her through the window. Not the usual window but the window up above that one. Her light is not on, but the lights are bright in the window above hers. The big guy who touched her in the rain, he’s up there too.

  Anders pushes and pushes. He groans with pain and strain until the door caves in with an explosive splintering sound.

  He is not supposed to enter this building. Anders knows he does not have permission to go inside. He could get in trouble. He could get fired for this.

  Anders steps into the dark lobby and looks around. His eyes see easily in the nighttime darkness. He is like an animal. Anders thinks he is no different than an animal and he is glad this is true.

  He pulls himself up the stairs one at a time. The blood drips onto the steps as he moves up one stair and then rests, moves up one and rests. In his head Anders hears the blood rushing slower and slower, like the sound of low tide as it recedes farther from shore.

  He’s dragging the left side of his body behind him like a duffel bag full of weights.

  Anders shakes his head a little as he pulls himself along. He is dizzy and confused. He does not remember how he got to his usual spot on the bench in the quad overlooking the woman’s building. He remembers looking into the loud smoky bar and he remembers going into the noise and the smoke, and he remembers walking up to the woman where she sat with her back to him at a round wooden table. He remembers how there was more noise and more smoke, but after that the night is a blank reel of film. Until he found himself here, outside her building, sitting on the bench. With a hole in his uniform and blood coming out. Lots of blood that is still coming out of the hole.

  Time is not to be trusted. Anders knows this, but he also knows there is not much of it left.

  He crawls across the second floor landing to where he can see white light leaking out from under one of the doors. When he reaches his hand into the light, it is red with blood. His chest is wet against the floor beneath him. Bursting stars appear in front of him wherever he looks.

  Anders tries to stand up, but he is teetering. He tries to stay on his feet, but he is falling forward. He tries to lean against the door to rest again, just for a moment, but the door opens, it was not locked, it was not even closed properly, and Anders tumbles forward into the apartment.

  Just as he crashes onto the floor, he sees the woman. She is lying on her back only a few feet away. She is lying there on the wet sand. Her body is naked and blue.

  The tide has gone all the way out and the night sky is full of stars. Mist settles over the beach like a sheet across an empty bed or a shroud on a frozen corpse. Anders thinks about how we are all made of crazy little molecules, dreams and dust, like the stars and the sand, the earth and the sea, the animals that we are.

  He reaches for her. He reaches out and touches what he can change. He touches the changing woman so that he, too, can change.

  Anders closes his eyes and allows the dream to continue.

  22.

  That night in my parents’ house, in my childhood bedroom, I lay still and listened. I listened to the scratch of palm fronds rubbing themselves against my bedroom window. Then I heard it again.

  There is no escaping your dreams. Especially when they come for you in the night.

  I rolled out of bed and tiptoed from my room, down the unlit hall, past the master suite where my parents lay sleeping. Downstairs, I stood in front of the sliding glass doors. Cool air seeped through the narrow spaces around the perimeter of the sliders. I was unable to see into the back yard, but I left the light on and unlocked one of the doors with a loud click.

  There are just so many wrong turns you can take. And all of them end up in the same place. In that final moment. The last moment of the dream of your life.

  I step out into the dim orange glow around the entryway, my hands folded now as if in prayer. Sliding the door closed behind me, I walk ahead into the blinding blackness of the back yard. The wind is stronger and meaner than I expected. The tall ficus hedge around the boundary of the yard bends and bows, while the palm trees whip their heads like go-go dancers.

  The ground is damp under my bare feet as I walk away from the light and into the cold dark center of the night. The yard has been freshly mowed and the blades of grass stick to my soles. It smells like fresh cut grass and something else. Grilled meat.

  An arm hooks around my neck from behind, then a rough hand closes ov
er my mouth and I bite down hard enough to taste blood. His hand is salty but the skin reeks of gasoline, so I begin to cough. He keeps the hand over my mouth and I keep coughing until I start to feel like I am suffocating. I struggle until he lets go of my mouth to pin both of my arms against my sides.

  Like seeks like, after all.

  It has been three years and he has grown taller and stronger, his body more wiry and tough. His face is twisted, angry and hard. I suddenly know that he is a different person than the boy I fooled around with so many times. This young man is emptier and more violent. He is less and more at the same time.

  “You little shit,” is how my high school boyfriend greets me. “You fucking scag.”

  His grip on my arms tightens as I realize just how much I am not enjoying this. It no longer feels like a game I am willing to play. Before I can say anything, he punches me in the face and the pain explodes inside my head. Then nothing. I feel nothing.

  When I come to, my nose is dripping blood on my chest and I am slumped in the passenger seat of a car speeding through the night. My feet are ankle deep in fast food wrappers and sticky Styrofoam cups. I’m naked except for a blue uniform jacket draped across my chest. The blood from my nose soaks through it onto my breasts. “Comfortably Numb” is on the radio.

  A pair of pantyhose is wrapped tight around my neck. The nylons are tied too tight, the bulky knot pressing against the base of my throat.

  “You think I don’t know what you been doing?” he says before he slaps me on the ear. I lean away, leaning as far as I can until my head is resting against the car door. “I heard. I went up there and saw you with my own eyes. I know what you been doing.”

  Rain drizzles across the windshield but Joey does not turn on his wipers. He turns off the headlights and steers the car into an empty parking lot. I recognize the beach rest rooms under the dull glow of a street lamp. He drives toward the beach and parks facing the ocean, far enough from the street lights so we are sitting in the dark. Then he yanks his jacket off my body and tosses it into the back seat. I am naked and cold.