by Jay Nichols
* * *
When the tired truck coasted to a lazy stop under the dying crepe myrtle, Apollo was standing at the kitchen window, front paws resting on the sill and nose snorting steam against the glass. Fleetingly, Russell wondered if the dog had sat on the piano bench at all while he had been away, but then he remembered it was the weekend. Apollo would never risk such a pose with Diane and Darrel in the house.
Stepping through the back door, Russell ran his knuckles over Apollo’s head and tossed his keys on the table. Behind the island, Diane whispered into the kitchen phone. Looking up, she cupped her hand over the receiver and mouthed: "Are you hungry?" To which Russell nodded and mouthed back: "Yes." Diane’s eyes slitted as she swiped them with the back of her hand. Russell shook his head and ran across the living room, to the stairs.
He hiked up both flights, rushed through the third floor hallway. Darrel poked his head out of the study room’s door.
"You should have let us come with you," Darrel said.
Russell stepped forward once, stopped. With one hand grasping his bedroom door’s tarnished knob and the other nervously combing his long locks, he said to the disembodied head, "I know," then turned the knob and rushed into his sanctuary, where he collapsed face-first onto the unmade bed. He didn’t dare turn over, not because he could get enough air—which he couldn’t—but because his father was standing in the doorway, debating on whether or not to come in. Russell heard his every nasally breath and wished he would just go away.
He didn’t know why he had requested that his parents not attend the funeral. They’d had every right to be there. Joel and Sarah were their friends—casual friends, but still friends—and they had liked Pete. They had understood Pete. Maybe by asking them not to go, he’d been seeking to punish his mother and father for some egregious transgression he couldn’t recall them committing. He really didn’t care what his motives were; he didn’t care that he’d had motives. He’d just wanted them to abide by his request, which, to his surprise, they’d had. Now, though, he wished they’d hadn’t.
It was selfishness, that’s all, an inability to share his friend (even in death) with anybody else. That’s why he became so livid at the synagogue when he spotted Hector shaking Joel’s hand. He didn’t want to share. Pete was his and his alone. Russell thought, as sick as it was, that if he could keep Pete’s corpse in his room, he would—after his flesh had rotted away, of course. He could glue his old buddy’s bones back together and prop him up in the corner next to his amplifier. He could talk to him, maybe dress him up in some of his old clothes. It would be the final step on the dark staircase to insanity. All his life, Russell had played on that staircase, going up and down as he pleased, but never all the way up or all the way down. From a safe distance, he’d watch shadowy, nebulous forms writhing and reaching out from the inky depths, as if to grab hold of his quavering body and drag it into their lair of moans and regrets, but, if he wanted to, he could also espy the blinding, timeless ecstasy of an unimaginable greatness emanating from the other direction. The sad, beautiful truth was that he was caught in the middle, able to pull from both extremes, but unable to choose what he pulled or from which extreme he pulled it. His creativity arose from being in limbo. That he could see both, that he could draw from both, was his true gift. But the events of the past week, culminating in Pete’s tragic death, had only served to nudge him farther down that staircase. Picturing it in his mind, Russell believed he stood on the next to last step. Only two more and it’s the basement, baby. No more glimpses of the top; only screams and shadows and Pete’s lifeless skeleton to accompany him for eternity. Maybe he could play his friend’s ribs like a xylophone. They do it in cartoons sometimes…
"No!" Russell screamed into his pillow. "I’m not crazy!!"
Small, ineffectual hands closed around his shoulders and clavicles. Russell quickly shrugged them off. "Go away!" he shouted as he cried more for himself than Pete.
Darrel left the room and entered the hallway, where Diane now stood, anxiously looking in at her heaving, sobbing son.
"Let’s leave him alone," she whispered, taking Darrel’s elbow and leading him down the stairs.
"But…"
"Shhhhh…"
When Russell was certain they were two stories under, he rolled over and gazed at his heroes on the slanted ceiling and walls. How he wished to be in their wheres and whens, to crawl inside their tacked-up, glossy worlds and be above it all. He yearned for the insouciance required to stare smugly into a camera lens and make a goofy face like Anthony Kiedis or Angus Young. Because that’s what rock stars are supposed to do. The good ones, at least. Take nothing seriously—except their music. To them, everything else is a big joke: Ha-ha, look at me. You can’t touch me up here. I’m higher than you’ll ever be.
The telltale jingle of Apollo’s tags as the great dog galloped up the stairs. Then the cautious approach into the room. Russell scooted over and patted his hand twice on the wrinkled sheets. Apollo leapt onto the mattress and immediately lay down, curling his body into a large comma then stretching his legs out. His slowly wagging tail thwacked the buttons of Russell’s suit jacket.
"All right, you win," Russell said, relenting to the dog’s monopolization of bed space. "It’s all yours."
Apollo watched Russell get up and shed his clothes, his eyebrows alternately twitching up and down the way some dogs’ eyebrows do. By the time the human was stepping into a pair of cargo shorts, Apollo was on the floor again, probing his muzzle under the bed. Russell knew at once what the dog was going for, but his heart sank anyway when the Dane’s head reappeared with the handle to his guitar case in his mouth.
"Not today," Russell said tersely, grabbing Apollo’s collar and coaxing him away from the instrument. Then more mellowly: "We’re not playing guitar today, buddy. Okay?"
They made their way downstairs, Russell leading and Apollo following. On the kitchen table, a single plate of broiled chicken and peas sat in a slanted beam of sunlight. The meal looked abandoned, an afterthought, a dish that shouldn’t be there. Russell sat down and ate it anyway. Sometimes it’s best to devour the things the world forgets to devour on its own, even though the world places them there for a reason.
And sometimes a plate of food is just a plate of food.
From the living room, Darrel and Diane watched their son. Neither wanted to get caught peeking, so they kept their glances short and sweeping. But they did look. They had to. They loved the boy.
Plus, he had been acting so strange lately. Mostly it was grief from Pete’s death, but there was more to it than that. Russell had been acting strange days before Pete fell—before discovering Mrs. Baker’s mutilated corpse even. He wasn’t telling them something. Then again, he was never the type to tell them much about what was going on in his life.
"I’ll be up in my room," Russell called out after finishing his late lunch/early supper. "If Apollo needs to go outside, be sure to watch him. And by that, I mean don’t take your eyes off him until he’s back inside."
"We know," Darrel said unbelievingly. "Are you sure you’re all right?"
Russell knew the answer to that one, but then the world moved—shifted—and he feared he might pass out if he didn’t get horizontal soon. He rubbed his eyes. "No. I’m never all right."
Oops. In his sleep-deprived vertigo, he had slipped. He had committed the cardinal sin of telling his parents the truth—not the truth as it pertained to the question Darrel had specifically asked, but rather the truth as it pertained to Russell as a whole, complete, unique human being. The truth was that he was never all right. He had always been doomed. And he had always known this about himself—that whatever was inside of him that made him more special than everybody else was also the same thing that cut him off from his peers, that cast him as a freak (albeit a popular one), and provided him with the knowledge that when things changed, they only changed for the worse.
"I mean, I’m not all right now," he corrected, digging
his knuckles into his eyes for effect. "But I will be once I get some sleep."
"We’ll be quiet," Darrel said with a smile, bringing an index finger to his pursed lips.
Russell trudged past his father, up the stairs. Apollo followed. He slept from 4:13 in the afternoon to 9:35 the next morning. His slumber was dreamless. Not once did Apollo abandon his berth next to his master’s bed.