No Sleep till Wonderland

by Paul Tremblay

  “Mark, come on. Put the gun down; let’s get out of here.” That’s all Gus has to say, his voice flatter than Stanley.

  Ekat covers her face with her hands. She can’t believe how quickly she and her friends sank so far over their heads. Maybe I’m projecting. Yeah, they planned to kill Carter tonight, and here at his house, but Ekat wasn’t planning on the second act featuring Gus’s improv. She wasn’t planning on killing me. It has to be the reason why she hasn’t told Gus that my gun is a fake.

  I say, “One more try, Gus. Why am I here?”

  “Mark…” He shakes his head, lifts his eyebrows, shrugs, holds up surrender hands, might as well throw in a tap dance, back flip, and a split.

  I think I shined too much light on him. He’s not an ant under a magnifying glass. He’s bigger, and he’s going to mount a counterattack that I’m not currently equipped to defend.

  “That’s what I thought,” I say and extend my cigarette-lighter gun, point it at Gus’s chest. “Both of you, put it in reverse.” They slowly back away. The real gun is alone on the floor. I need to get to it and put that ugly goddamn thing in my hand before something worse happens. Something like my heart popping like a zit.

  I walk the impossibly thin line of clean tile around Carter’s body. It’s a ledge above a gorge, and I’m going to fall. It’s not a matter of if but when. I breathe faster, and the muscles in my arms and legs pulse and spasm. The wattage my body generates is too much for my outdated and faulty grid.

  I’m past Carter and standing above the gun, sweating like my skin knows it’s not bulletproof. Gus and Ekat are a few steps away, huddled under the doorjamb between the kitchen and some other darkened room of the house.

  I lick my lips with a dried-out tongue. The gun in my hand shakes. I could be the maraca player in our merry mariachi band.

  I bend and reach down with my left hand. Knees crackle and pop like breakfast cereal in milk. I’m going down and I might not come back up. The closer I get to the gun, the farther away my body feels from me. My reaching left hand is a distant outpost, and we’re having difficulty communicating. The hand moves slower than I want it to, need it to. The hand doesn’t trust the information I send. The hand knows I’m a liar, and it reacts like I’m asking it to put its palm print on a hot stove.

  I’m reaching, still reaching, when I see the attack mapped out on Gus’s face before it happens. I can’t stop him with a cigarette lighter. He’s quick, fluid, no wasted movement. He skips forward and round house kicks my gun hand with his left foot. My arm slingshots across my body, and the lighter flies away, crashing into the cabinets to the left. Gus lands, plants, and dives, dipping his shoulder and plowing it into my chest. I lose my air and everything else, driven backward, my head, neck, and back bounce off the cabinets behind me, my vision goes center-stage bright, and then I’m sliding to the tile, trapped inside a body welcoming cataplexy, welcoming its total shutdown.

  I’m awake, but I can’t move or speak. Gus lifts me up by the lapels of my jacket and leans me against the cabinets, a piece of furniture being moved to a more convenient spot. Or maybe the feng shui is better with me here, near the dead feet of Carter’s body.

  Crouched next to me, Gus picks up my hat, twirls it on his fist for two or three times the merry-go-round, then fits it back on my head, pulling it down tight and patting it like he’s afraid a wind gust might come and steal it away. Then he picks up the cigarette lighter. That’s mine too, and he can’t have it.

  Gus adjusts his own obnoxiously red hat. He says, “This is all so fucked up, isn’t it? I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’m sorry, mate, I really am.” He puts my cigarette-lighter gun under my chin. I don’t need a light. The nozzle is cool against my defective skin. “You didn’t have to come with me, tonight, you know. I gave you a choice at just about every turn. Remember?” His voice is weak and might break. He’s no pro. Which makes it all worse.

  “Nothing personal, Mark. It never was.” He grimaces and squints, then pulls the trigger on my lighter. There’s a bright but brief spark of pain under my chin as the flame licks my skin, but my head is still intact, as it were.

  Gus doesn’t know why there wasn’t an earth-shattering kaboom. He pulls the gun out from under my chin and inspects it. He might not like what he’ll find. He points it away from his body and pulls the trigger again. The half-inch novelty flame is orange and cute. I’d say, “Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em,” if I was able to talk.

  Gus giggles nervously, and the left side of his face disintegrates into a red cloud, one that instantly becomes a terrible storm raining and hailing on my arms and legs. A light mist dampens my face as well, and I need to find some shelter. The storm finishes almost before it began, and in the instant aftermath Gus’s body lies crumpled and discarded at my feet, his right arm pinned behind his head and up against the cabinets. I get a front-row view of the black hole that used to be the lower half of his face. No light escapes it. Fleshy stalactites hang above his jagged, broken teeth. His two intact eyes stare out at me. I’m the final image to be burned upside down onto his retinas.

  Gus’s facial detonation was horrifyingly quiet. So quiet I’m still shocked to see Ekat standing there holding the gun, the one that doesn’t fuck around, pointed where Gus’s head used to be. Ekat’s yellow dress is a sunset turning red. Red skies at night.

  She whispers, “This was all your fault,” repeatedly. It’s her mantra. She should write it down. She hovers over Gus’s body and drops the gun on his torso. It lands with a thud but never makes contact with the tile. It sticks somewhere within the folds of his clothes or in some new nook or cranny of his bent body.

  Ekat steps toward me and lowers herself, straddling my legs just above my knees, sitting on my thighs. The skin of her bare legs feels cold through my pants. She cries, but not loudly. No wall-rattling moans and wails. She’s composed, a model of melancholy restraint, yet it all sounds like dying to me.

  Her eyes are made out of glass again. She wipes her face with her shaky hands and says, “Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

  I want to say that yeah, I’m great, I’m just taking a little nap, but I can only manage the slight flex of an eyelid. Maybe I’m breathing through my eyelids. I’m so Zen.

  Ekat says, “I didn’t know he was bringing you here, Mark.”

  Gus says, “Don’t listen to her, buddy. Check her pants. Wait, she has no pants. Check her metaphorical pants, then. They might be on fire because she’s a liar liar.” His voice is a mouth full of bubble gum and a throat gargling saltwater. Him talking is a neat trick. His mouth isn’t moving. He has no mouth, and he can’t scream. His dead slug tongue isn’t moving either. I’m watching. There’s no ventriloquist to this dummy. I’m hallucinating again.

  Ekat says, “Back at Wonderland, after you fell asleep against the lamppost, we argued about what we should do with you.”

  He says, “No. We talked and joked about what we were going to do to you. We made fun of your sorry ass. We were going to put your hand in a glass of warm water and laugh when you pissed yourself. I know that you’ve pissed yourself before.”

  Ekat says, “I had to get back inside, or Timothy would’ve known something was wrong, so we left it as Gus was just going to do whatever he could to ditch you at Wonderland, make sure that you didn’t follow us here to Timothy’s house.”

  Gus says, “I call bullshit. You coming here was her idea, man. All hers. I just did what she told me to do. I ain’t the brains of this outfit. I ain’t got none anymore, see? Ha, made you look!”

  I know he’s lying because I didn’t look. I didn’t want to look, anyway. I can’t even move enough to close my eyes.

  Ekat keeps talking. She either doesn’t hear Gus or is ignoring him. She says, “After the whole blackmail scheme fell apart, I didn’t want you to be in any part of this. Remember that night you came back with me from the Pour House? I was angry that Gus had hired you. That wasn’t an act. I didn’t want you getting hurt
. You didn’t deserve to get hurt.”

  He says, “Pfft. Tell it to Dr. Who and the losers at our group therapy. They might believe you.” Gus has an abrasive edge that he didn’t have in life. Maybe getting shot in the face will do that to a person. Maybe it’s the real him, operating without his charm filter. The filter that I knew and loved so well.

  Ekat looks over her shoulder, and Gus stares back. Caught, he goes silent, quietly bleeding out.

  She says, “I didn’t know Carter knew and that Jody was caught. I didn’t know that Gus was bringing you here. That’s why I did what I did.” Ekat picks up my left hand and notices the rubber band on my wrist.

  I want to say, “Yeah, that’s yours but it doesn’t mean anything,” but I can only think it.

  Ekat stretches it out. She teases the rubber band to its breaking point, then double and triple loops it around my wrist. She twists my hand gently, turning my palm facedown, then up, and my hand comes off. There’s no pain or blood. This isn’t messy.

  She says, “I didn’t know that Gus planned to kill you. That’s why I shot him. I had to stop him. I had to.”

  “Poor little me,” Gus says and laughs. The laughter quickly turns into tears, into melodramatic, convulsing sobs. He’s a howling, blubbering mess.

  “Mark, I need an hour before you call the police. That’s it, just one hour.” Ekat unwinds the rubber band and slides it up my arm, relooping it at my elbow. She takes away my forearm, sliding it out from inside my shirt sleeve. Following the same process, Ekat removes my bicep and the rest of my arm up to the shoulder. She builds a neat little pile on the kitchen floor with the random pieces of me. Maybe I won’t miss them.

  Gus is lost somewhere in his overchoreographed death throes, moaning about his lost youth. The act lacks sincerity and dignity. It’s hard to believe I ever thought he was cool.

  With the help of her rubber band, she takes apart my other arm. She’s disassembling a faded and out-of-style decoration to be packed and put away in the basement and forgotten. I’ll be left to lie moldering in a box, dreaming my private dreams.

  She says, “I know I don’t deserve it, but just one hour. Please.” She has at least twenty minutes before I recover from the cataplexy attack. I can’t tell her that even if I want to.

  With my arms separated into parts and piled high, she climbs off my legs, slides the rubber band onto my ankle, and pulls off my right foot. Then the same with my left. Right foot, left foot.

  Gus says, “Hey! She’s turning you into that picture I drew at group therapy. You know, that self-portrait, the one with me falling apart, arms and legs in pieces and the whole bit. That was a picture of me, not you. It’s not always about you, Mark.”

  Ekat says, “Just one hour, okay? Do you want to know something? I haven’t even decided what I would do with the hour. I might drive south, or north, or some made-up direction. I might go home, sit in my apartment, call Mom, and wait for the police to pick me up. I might go home and go to sleep. I might just go away. I might drive Timothy’s car headfirst into a highway median or nosedive with it off a bridge and into the ocean. If I did that, you could dream about me falling off the bridge, and the splash, and watch as my car slowly fills up with water. You won’t want to finish the dream and would wake up before you see how long I can hold my breath.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Mark, but I need that hour to do whatever it is I decide to do. Please, Mark. One hour.” In her hands my cranky legs come apart easily at their rusted hinges. It feels good, but I’m worried that no one will ever be able to put me back together again.

  “One hour. Please.” Ekat kneels and puts her face in mine. The golden strands of her wig become Gorgon, moving and writhing around her head. I’ve already turned to stone.

  I try to talk even if I don’t know what I will to say to her. Open my mouth and see what words might spill out. I can’t open my mouth very wide, and what comes out is a heavy, protracted sigh.

  “I should’ve done something to stop this from happening earlier, I know.” She rests her lips over mine, gently holding both of our mouths open. She says, speaking inside of me, “It was my fault. I’m sorry. Thank you. Goodbye.”

  She kisses me once, and the red sunset stands and then walks out the kitchen door.

  The door shuts. I close and open my eyes. I’m still here, sitting on the floor, blood claiming most of the kitchen tile.

  I try to wiggle my fingers and toes, and—good news—manage some movement. Bad news: my fingers and toes are still over there, in the pile of me next to Gus. This is going to make getting the cell phone out of my pocket difficult.

  “Finally, we’re alone. We can dish,” Gus says. He’s speaking to me again. I thought I was going to get the silent treatment. “Between me and you, before everyone else shows up to our little circus tent, tell me the truth, Mark. We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

  “Sorry if this is awkward, but we’re kind of all done. And it’s not me; it’s you.” Apparently I can speak now. My voice is a slight rustle of curtains, but he can hear me.

  He says, “I know you, Mark. I fucking know you. And I’m trying to help you. Really, I am. So tell me the truth. Just like the night you got drunk and finally told Juan-Miguel the truth. It was your fault. Right, Mark? You even told Dr. Who it was your fault.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about what you said to Juan-Miguel. You remember him; he was driving the Dart earlier. You remember him, don’t you? He was your old roommate, the dude who moved out because he couldn’t handle living with your narcolepsy. No, wait a minute. Juan-Miguel didn’t stop living with you because of your narcolepsy. He stopped living with you because you lied to him about who was driving the van and he couldn’t deal with it when you finally told him the truth, finally told him it was your fault. And you couldn’t deal with anything when he left. You still can’t.”

  I can’t listen to this, and I won’t. He’s a liar. He’s been lying to me since I met him. He’s a liar lying on the floor.

  “It was your fault. You were driving the van, not George. You fell asleep at the wheel. You were having narcoleptic symptoms for almost a year before the trip to Foxwoods and the van accident, and you didn’t tell anyone.”

  I’m not listening to him.

  “You were too embarrassed to ask for help. You were too scared that something terrible was wrong with you. You tried to ignore it. You closed your eyes and wished the bad stuff away. You didn’t tell anyone, not even your best-est buddy George.”

  Shut up.

  “You didn’t tell him that you’d been falling asleep on the train and the bus and at work. You didn’t tell him, and you drove the van that night.”

  Shut up!

  “You killed your best friend.”

  No, I didn’t. It was an accident.

  “The irony is that I was your friend, Mark, that I am your friend, and I tried to kill you. See how that all kinda worked itself out? I think that makes things all square, now.”

  “Shut up

  shut up

  shut up!”

  I take my hands away from my face because I’m screaming into them, but not at them. My fingers are wet with blood, sweat, and tears. It was my fault. No, it was an accident. I cry some more. It doesn’t make me feel any better.

  Carter and Gus are dead on the kitchen floor. Gus is done talking. Enough has finally been said.

  I slowly stand up because I can. The room shakes and sways under my jelly legs. My clothes are heavy with other people’s blood.

  I need to get out. I leave the kitchen and walk outside, onto the porch. Carter’s Lexus is gone. Gus’s Dart is somewhere at the bottom of the hill. The night is empty.

  I pull my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and stare at it. The push buttons glow a phosphorescent blue. I hover my finger over the numbered buttons, and the blue light somehow curls around my fingertip. I haven’t pressed anything yet.

  Oh, I will use t
he phone at some point. I don’t know if Ekat’s precious hour is up, and I haven’t yet decided if I care.

  Thirty-Two

  “Hey.”

  I’m more nervous than I should be. I’m perched on the front stoop, standing as straight as a barber pole, sans stripes, and sweating like a rain forest. It’s too warm for September, and I’m dressed for winter. I shouldn’t have worn my wool sports coat, but it’s my favorite. It helps to give my lumpy shoulders some definition while camouflaging my gut. Image is everything.

  I say, “Hey,” back. My conversational prowess is a gift.

  Jody wears faded jeans and a tight green Celtics V-neck T-shirt. The collar trim is frayed and stretched out. She doesn’t wear any makeup, and she has taken out the stud from below her lip. Her brown hair is black because it’s still wet. Loose strands cling to her round cheeks. She’s just out of the shower, and she doesn’t look as nervous as I feel.

  She says, “Come on up, but watch where you’re walking. The hall light burned out a couple of weeks ago, and the landlord hasn’t dragged his ass down here to change it. It’s like one of those bad jokes: how many assholes does it take to change a lightbulb?”

  I say, “I don’t know. How many assholes does it take? Two?” I try to play along, build on her joke, but it’s a house made of straw that crumbles and blows away by the hair on my chinny-chin-chins. I’m the wolf and the pigs at the same time. Jesus, I need to try to relax a little.

  Jody says, “Huh? Oh, yeah, maybe. I just know there’s one asshole not getting the job done.”