by John O'Brien
“I am a quiet man, forthright and true,” thought Rudd, and then he realized from the sound of his own voice that he had not merely thought this but had spoken it aloud. He decided to heed the laughter and the bottles and not mention it to Jill for what might in fact be the second time.
He downed his drink (or maybe poured a new one and downed that), and as the myopia of the glass’s bottom fell away to reveal the room Rudd realized that he must speak to someone about the dancing bottles and that someone would be Carey.
Milling about a tight little circle at the other end of the bar, end for worker bees as opposed to drinker bees, was Carey, the object of Rudd’s intentions, basking in his newly found perspective and wondering hard how not to spoil it, wondering hard if it was time for him to embrace the apocalypse (a term Jill had let slip during one of their talks); in his new position it might be the prudent choice. Now Rudd’s getting up like it were some sort of tag team match in professional wrestling, pushing the envelope of eye contact, taking steps. Carey prepared for a biblical stand in the service well, waited. A waiter. A worker bee. An employee of man, God would be if he existed more as god. A fine line, a fine figure. I’m cutting a fine figure, he thought, I’m cutting out of school. A school of fish, something about Jesus and fish. Should have read more Bible to prepare for a role in the Third Testament, closest thing to notes. Maybe Rudd will want to be a scribe, write it on a notebook computer. Future millennia will unearth diskettes instead of scrolls: the Book of Marx, the Book of Reagan.
Carey turned upon the damp rubber mat beneath his feet; it oozed unctuously along, cooperatively employing years of Stubborn Greasy Buildup recently reactivated by a late-night pee courtesy of Osmond and a nearby pipe bomb, which the others had slept through. Carey knew all such mats to give a little slip (because this is what one would expect) and thus dismissed it along with the faint scent of urine that had been tickling his nostril as the Way Things Are in Here, pronounced it so with a feckless wave of his arm gone south, returning from an ear scratch.
Rudd approached Carey wondering if he wasn’t looking a tad bloated or if Rudd had merely never paid much attention or been this close; he couldn’t remember at all and could guess even less.
“So,” began Rudd amiably enough, “you caught any of this cabin fever yet?”
“What’s that mean,” challenged Carey. “Because I had a couple of drinks? I’m not you, Rudd. I’m not a drunk. Why does everybody assume that everyone else must be either drunk or gay or codependent or racist or whatever the hell your personal hang-ups are. All of the above?” He cocked his head and thrust forward his chin, affected an aloof expression he’d once seen and liked in a photograph of himself taken without his knowledge at a friend’s house (though he knew photographs were being taken that evening). “I walk above it all, Rudd. I walk alone.”
Something that sounded like a mortar exploded outside the door, rocking the building and providing everyone with the loudest noise in the last few days.
Rudd, alarmed at Carey’s vituperation, said, “What the fuck.”
To which Carey misplacing the antecedent, responded, “It’s nothing. It’s another fucking gun. What else is new.” and, realizing (with some gratification) that he himself wasn’t the least bit shaken by the blast, added, “Getting jumpy?”
“I … I don’t know,” said Rudd. He looked at his drink.
Disgusted, Carey told him, “You’re a drunk.”
Rudd looked from his drink to face the accusation, irrelevant, as hollow as the ever-expanding vacuum of experience beyond the walls of Tony’s. The curve of silence out there, he knew, would weather the spikes of an occasional glass-shattering concussion.
Carey saw the man before him as a prophecy about to be fulfilled. All of them, in fact, would perish here, and it was his duty as the observer to not be a part of that, to take his leave so that the events of this place might achieve their actuality, their place in history such as it is or will be. He would be the orchard keeper to their falling apple tree; he would be the one who heard it fall, whose presence demanded that it make a noise. That’s why, Carey now understood, it was his lot to leave. The watch is wound, the bang declared big. Leave them here so that they might wind down in peace. Entropy Rules. Decay Kicks Ass. Carey felt-no, was-utterly possessed by his thoughts.
Rudd said to Carey, “You don’t walk on water, son.”
A superficial smoothness settled about Carey as if his face had been heated almost to melting, softening the wrinkles, softening the questions. “You are here,” he said. “I’m not.” And he spun away from the orbit, into perhaps the kitchen.
You are here, thought Rudd. You Are Here. Like a mall directory kiosk, or the parody of one on a tee shirt he once saw of the Milky Way with an arrow indicating where our solar system is: You Are Here. But the fabric of one is not cut from the cloth of the other, and there is an implied omniscience in the mall that does not exist on the tee shirt, making the former, the mall directory, something of a cheat. Of course you are there. You must be there to be reading the sign. So it works because the sign is in a fixed location, and so, because you are reading it, are you. No fountain of information there, no revelation for the weary. In fact the parody on the tee shirt is really the smallest scale possible for that sign to have any meaning, given that it requires an all-inclusive map from a far away perspective and that you could conceivably be elsewhere in the solar system, here at the dawn of the new millennium. Yeah, that’s about as much detail as you can usefully get out of that map, the tee shirt version. One human to another. One human, no matter where he possibly is, to any other human anywhere. That’s it, that’s the most information that can be provided, your position in the galaxy, You Are Here. Anything else requires an assumption, a guess, or a lie.
Carey, in the kitchen indeed, let his hand drift over the unseemly surfaces of the pots, pans, and various cooking apparatus, the insult of these things. This kitchen looked like a kitchen looks; not like a kitchen looks in the womb of Armageddon. But kitchens are kitchens, and he supposed they have little reason to look any other way and less reason to exist without someone around to require them. He’d worked in a kitchen once, one night, as a dishwasher. One night because he was the busboy and covering the regular dishwasher’s shift in a pinch and swore never again, it was. A seafood restaurant, where he worked, and all that night into the morning hours he scrubbed fish pans, pie tins really, used to cook each fish order before being tossed over to him. Hell’s acre, those pans, the flesh of his young hands traded for a scratched semi-gloss on a twenty-cent aluminum disk. And the fucks in the overpriced dining room not even knowing of his sacrifice, or worse: assuming it, taking it for granted.
Carey let fall his hand, absently knocking a ladle and tin cup, clanged into the sink. He traversed the greasy floor and breathed odors of things gone bad, thought of water and called it a supper. The locks on the back door required some fiddling but eventually yielded to his exit. Peace in the parking lot backside, light framing him on its way from a streetlamp.
Carey passed away from Tony’s. Rudd, catching the last moment of his act, let it be and made his way to relock the door only after sufficient time had been allotted for Carey to not return in a panic. But that lot and light were magnets, Rudd knew, and in or out, really, at this stage of the game was a mostly moot point.
Day15
Fenton had a ridiculous worst-is-over sensation when his eyes opened. Everyone at Tony’s had long since been sleeping on a day/night schedule, and Fenton was no exception. Now when he woke he didn’t think so much about what time it was but more about whether it was wake time or dream time-not such an easy problem due to the fact that one might encounter the same riddle lurking in a dream; the fact of the question was no answer. Cogito ergo sum. He helped himself to a generous drink though he knew the dwindling alcohol supply had become a matter of great concern among the men. And him too, thus the thirst, the greed. Fleetingly he considered the room downstairs-still an
enormous amount of liquor-and just as quickly realized: not nearly enough.
Random firefights outside had increased in frequency. He had no clue why this would be the case. The original battle over perhaps? Renegade factions now warring with each other? Me and the others, these people in Tony’s and others like them sequestered around the country or world, now we’re the germ, the foreign object, the pocket of resistance facing an inexorable fate. Like always.
Two, three shots, maybe it was, before Fenton realized that some of the gunfire was coming from inside the room, from one of them; friendly, it would be called technically.
“Miles! You asshole!” screamed Rudd from down and away, off the bar and in a booth. He gave it a beat of evident consideration before lunging belaboredly (but still impressive for a man in his condition) from the comfort of his drink.
Fenton, not at all surprised over Miles’s outburst (or answer), checked out and left Rudd to handle it unobserved, returned to his thoughts which fell on that guy Carey and how very dead he must surely be by now. Fenton saw that his own days couldn’t be any more numbered, much as the few remaining bullets in Miles’s pocket. Two and a half clips, if memory served. Less now, and those weren’t capacious clips. He considered slipping off to the bathroom again and jerking off; but really, the emptiness at the end of that adventure would be more than he could stomach. Firefights now, a better lesser sin.
“Idiot!” slapped Rudd, but not with his pistol hand.
Miles’s head snapped to the cuffing.
In the kitchen the busboy’s ears lit to the sound of futile discipline; familiar, it brought a smirk. He finished the last of his stash by chewing the roach down to a few shreds of pulp between his teeth and rose from his sore ass feeling arbitrary and weak. Busboy kicked around kitchen like it was some sort of McDonald’s Funland mini park and he was the fucking Hamburglar.
Wine down, gone long and now no more shit either, he crackled and spun the cap off a last bottle of cooking sherry, took a long greedy drink from this bottle which at once represented both his autonomy and his limits. Somewhere some days back an uneasy pact had been drawn between him and the others, meaning Rudd, though the latter was only lightly aware of this bargain and the former barely more so. Rudd would never admit that the kitchen wine had been surrendered to the busboy; in fact if he walked in right now he’d need to make a scene and snatch it away (actually just admonish against a repeat incident). But then Rudd wouldn’t walk in right now; this much the busboy knew he’d won. But it was strictly limited to this much, for this much was about to be history, and the real liquor, the whiskey and vodka in the other room was as far out of his reach as the beer in his father’s refrigerator would be (if his father or the fridge still existed). Those men out there would shoot him for a drink. A cuffing. He’d have an easier time fucking the girl, a thought that made his head spin against the receding tide of possibilities. The busboy knew that things here were pretty much over.
In his impairment he found an erection between his own legs and boldly, carelessly freed it into the thick air of the kitchen. Holding it, he hobbled over to the freezer door, which punched itself open in response to his hip-smack on the release lever. The busboy stood hard in the not-so-cold musty breath of the silent freezer. Power gone, it had become a giant icebox and by virtue of abundant insulation had managed along quite well until this moment. A matter of time now hastened, busboy breathed unfazed the mildew of incipient honest-to-god rot, the bartender’s body, stupid dead white man, defeated, shot, a mere shape in a dark corner. The busboy’s erection awakened further to the cool air and the organic, heady odor. He began to slowly stroke himself, and upon this scene stumbled Osmond. White with fear, he trembled huge at his discovery. The busboy sneered and aimed his erection at tremulous Osmond, whose own guns, though strapped securely in place, were a million miles away from his position. Ronald had at last arrived in Funland.
Jill, away from the men by design, sat cleaning her gun, formerly Langston’s Beretta, in her booth. She was not aware that Osmond was about to be raped in the kitchen; in fact she didn’t know or think much about Osmond at all. He was her brother, in a family-of-man sort of way, and perhaps at times he was her sister, in an unlikely-twist-of-fate sort of way, but the truth is that the two were so very much not destined to have their paths cross that not even a fat two weeks living in the same room could get them to notice each other in any but the most perfunctory way. She had the Beretta field stripped, but when a lone shot outside, more noticeable for its exclusivity than any possible threat it might pose, punctuated the moment it took her far less time than it would have taken Langston on a good day to reassemble the pistol, chamber a round, and spit an answer across the surprised heads of the men and into the quiet side of the front door. Nobody said anything and everybody tried to pretend it hadn’t happened though the only one who might reasonably not have heard it was Osmond, whose mind was quite some distance from his own twin revolvers hugging his rib cage and in any case certainly not anywhere registrant enough to pick and place a shot fired to and from someplace as irrelevant as the next room. Osmond, now crippled by terror, was by no one’s account a fast thinker.
He, Osmond, and the busboy began moving in a choreography of inevitable descent, swirling for an audience of only themselves to blame, big guns rockin’ hard at Osmond’s side, banging his ribs. Busboy stilled Osmond’s Smiths with a hand on each stock, gave tug as if to pull them away but didn’t remove them from their holsters. His eyes said, See what I can do? Now see what I can do, his erection said.
“This gun is mine,” he said, the busboy, as he released his grip on the Smiths, not taking them. He’d slurred his words (in his fashion); this told him just how very fucked up he was. Just as he expected. Still, his erection felt as if to burst.
The busboy slapped Osmond with the flat of his right hand. His left followed Osmond’s shoulder lower, lower. Osmond felt to gag. There were tears welling in his eyes. He thought of himself, and he took his medicine. It was unlikely that, tomorrow, the busboy would remember any of this. Gunfire sprinkled the night outside; more than usual hitting various outer walls of the building. Osmond quaked, unable to catalog his terror, his anguish. The busboy spasmed, slapped again and pulled away, stumbled backward and tripped against a stainless-steel sink under which he began snoring a vacant sleep. Drunk, dirty, late in the game, and fucked, Osmond gulped. Swallowed. Yeah. Yeah.
Time passed as his assailant snored, Osmond watching, lost, and things in Tony’s stilled quiet for a while. Like TV shows, he thought, like being with Miles, like a craps game or the video keno, something happens then nothing happens until something happens again. Waves. Swept, he was, and seated, backed against the worrying nip of a folding chair at his calves. He’d taken the suggestion, seated himself and let the time pass, this nothing time.
Rudd was drunk enough when he stuck his head in the kitchen to not notice or care that anything out of the ordinary had transpired. It was a long-dead proposition in any case, this out-of-the-ordinary stuff, having no real ordinary to be out of, and Rudd never stood too long in front of a painting in the best of times, preferring to walk by with pauses and glances, wait for companions at the end of the corridor while exchanging evasive glances with the security person, and there’s a bench for those with time to spare.
“How ‘bout you join us for a few minutes in the bar, Osmond. I want to talk about something,” he said instead of What are you doing sitting in the kitchen with the kid? which would fit what he saw but be inappropriate for what he wanted to know.
Osmond, as if jarred away from a more private concern, left the sanctioning bleeps of the video keno machine and widened his eyes for Rudd. “Okay.”
Rudd nodded once back: right. Osmond witnessed his absence and broke his own fear (like a sweat or a fever) of the Thing He Wouldn’t Do because now it seemed like anything goes and what the fuck and live and learn and a penny saved and on and on. So he left the kitchen and lumbered down to
dry-storage, where Rudd wasn’t. Where nobody was because everybody was in the bar waiting for Rudd to talk to them all. And when he was done in dry-storage he would join them.
Despite the foreboding empty spaces on the shelves-due mostly to the men’s frenetic consumption of liqueurs and like lesser-grade liquors some days before, got through in a hurry, as if to fully define the parameters of the coming desperation, to let there be no questions, to let there be no mitigation when that time came—dry-storage was a comforting place when Osmond stepped into the dimly lit little room, cool in its detachment (your basic basement vibe, was a thought Jill had left here once). Osmond marveled at all the unguarded liquor, like a store with no clerks and him with no money, which was somehow a tastier fantasy than the reality of clerks and plenty of money to make them give you whatever you wanted. Osmond missed that thought, the one Jill had left lingering on these shelves (though likely he had a tantamount tinge, something cranial), but he did have something new for this party. The bottles awaited, watching, a patient if fatalistic audience. Would he get it? Osmond turned and stole a TV glance over his shoulder, histrionic like a move out of a BBC drama, hollow British videotape going out to almost no one on PBS like a Bible thumper in Times Square. Was someone there? No. Just the bottles, who waited, amused in their fashion. Not someone, stupid. Something, thought Osmond, will happen here, and it will be bad and it will be big. Now it was colder, more like a basement, and he decided to hurry up and do what he came down here to do before this big bad thing happened and he got blamed for it. Then he trotted up the steps. The move was familiar, grownup talk in the distance, a private world.