Gasp!

by Z. A. Maxfield

Mac rested his arms on the bar, hands around his drink. “You goin’?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “How come? I should think you’d want to see your family and your man crush.”

  Jeff restacked an already neat stack of paper coasters. “Since I only started my job here a couple weeks ago, I didn’t figure I could ask for time off.”

  “Well, shit. Of course you can always ask. Not that I’ll say yes, but I’m proud to maintain an open-door policy. And sometimes I can be bought.”

  Jeff jerked his chin in reply and went to fill a drink order so he could think about that. Once the waitress carried her tray away, he confided in Mac. “I don’t really know if I want to go.”

  “How come? I thought you’d jump at the chance.”

  Jeff busied himself wiping down the bar. “I just got here. I haven’t even completely unpacked my shit.”

  “You don’t even have shit. You just got out of the service.”

  “I do so have shit. Plus Deidre and Mom will be all ready to swap childbirth stories, and I’ll be one penis too many. We were together three weeks ago anyway.”

  Mac’s brows rose. “But Deidre and Katje ain’t the reason that phone’s been vibrating your balls every ten seconds. Don’t you want to see Gasp?”

  “Sure.” Jeff kept his head down. “I’ll see him. I’ll catch up with them somewhere. I just don’t need to go racing down there when I should be learning how to do my job and making my place comfortable.”

  “Well, shit. Suit yourself. I was just teasing you because I figured you’d want to go. I already arranged the schedule so you could take the time off if you want it.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “When Colleen called and said she was going, I figured you would, is all.”

  “Without even asking me?” One of the waitresses came up, and Jeff leaned over to hear her. He pulled a pitcher of draft beer for her and arranged frosted glasses on her tray.

  “I figured you’d want to go.”

  “I will go,” Jeff snapped. “Just not this time.”

  “Well, excuse me for trying to be nice.”

  Mac gave Jeff a wide berth for the rest of the evening, and they closed the place down in unaccustomed silence. When Jeff got to his car, he sat in the driver’s seat and pulled out his phone. There were three more texts from Nigel. He stared at the screen so long the dome light went out and his phone gave off the only light in the darkness of his car.

  Oh my god read the first text. One a.m., Eastern time. You would love this hotel. Jacuzzi tub. Posh robes. Shampoo that smells like cinnamon candies.

  The second, sent at 1:45, read, There’s a twelve-page room service menu, and I was assured if I want anything I don’t see I should ring the kitchen and ask for it.

  The third text read, If I disappeared here, there’s no one who would come looking for me.

  Jeff sighed and thumbed a message back.

  I would look for you. Jeff texted, I’d find you.

  Thank you. An immediate reply. And then another. I know you would. Thank you.

  Jeff ate a fried-egg sandwich while he watched CNN Headline News and checked his e-mail. As usual he was too amped up to go right to sleep.

  It was possible he’d become afraid of his dreams.

  As a kid he’d been remarkably dream-free, or so he’d imagined. He didn’t remember dreaming back then. But now, every night he was awakened by vivid, painful images made all the more terrifying by the fact that in his dreams, they didn’t frighten him. Rather, they were like documentaries of things he’d seen, things he’d been through, looked at through a completely neutral and unemotional lens.

  The most disturbing thing about them was that they didn’t disturb him at all.

  Little by little he’d taken to staying awake more than he slept. In that respect he was a perfect pen pal for Nigel, who was often awake all night after a show, buzzing with adrenaline and too keyed up to sleep.

  During the day Nigel enjoyed typing page-long e-mails full of descriptions—things he’d seen, people he’d met, experiences he’d found funny or odd or frustrating. At night they might trade texts back and forth until dawn. Or they’d get sick of typing and one or the other would call and they’d lie in bed and murmur nonsense. Have phone sex.

  A LOT of phone sex.

  “There’s a party here, and the noise is nuts—” Jeff heard a door close and the background noise lowered fractionally. Then Nigel spoke again. “Is that better?”

  “Yeah, I can hear you. Are you trashing your hotel room?”

  “Of course not. My new best mates are trashing it.”

  “Deidre must be sleeping.”

  “Yeah, out in the lot with the lorries.”

  “She’ll kill you tomorrow.”

  “Probably. Have you seen pictures of her caravan? They pipe New Age music through speakers everywhere, and there are these celestial lighting effects embedded in the ceiling. The road crew calls it the Mother Ship.”

  “In the pictures Dee and Katje look pretty serene.”

  “They are that. All tucked in like satisfied Madonnas.”

  “It’s nice they’re happy anyway.”

  “The baby is magnificent.”

  “He is.”

  “Did you see? Some bloke jumped up on the stage and tried to grope me tonight.”

  “Yeah?” Nigel’s security staff was first-rate, but Jeff worried. “What happened?”

  “I was singing ‘Light a Candle’—”

  “The big encore?”

  “Right. So this bloke—my age or older even, probably a fan from back in the day—jumps up and starts dancing. I’m looking all around because I know security is charging to my rescue and I don’t want them to manhandle him.”

  “There’s no way of knowing what he wants. He could be a nut job, Nigel.”

  “I know, but they don’t have to treat him as if he’s a threat until he becomes one. Then he tried for a snog, and they had to take him off.”

  “Smart. He could have been moving in for something else. Maybe gotten a weapon past the screeners. Maced you or something.”

  “The whole fiasco is up on YouTube if you want to see. Someone posted it before the concert was even over. Superfan is probably calling his solicitors to sue me as we speak.”

  “Well, you can go on late-night talk shows and vent.” Jeff got up and launched his Web browser. When it loaded, he opened his browser and did a search. It didn’t take long to find the video in question, a shaky, hard-to-see phone-camera video from what was probably not a bad seat. Arms flailed in front of the camera, and Nigel was mostly a small dot on the screen. Searchlights whirled over the audience, and strobe lights flickered; the effect—along with the poor camera stability—made Jeff’s stomach lurch with motion sickness.

  “Got it. It’s nauseating. I hate shaky vids.” A commotion started on the stage, and whoever was shooting the video—probably trying to be discreet with their phone at first but then aware they were seeing something interesting—zoomed in at such speed Nigel went from a Smurf-sized blur to a blur that took up half the screen.

  The digitally confused image cleared, and there stood Nigel in all his glory. He wore leather pants, a wide, studded belt, and a metric fuck ton of silver religious symbols on different lengths of leather cords. He gripped the mic with defined, wiry arms and veiny, knotted forearms. A wide leather wristband covered part of his tattoo. He seemed amped up…tense. Sweaty hair hung damply in his eyes and over his shoulders as he belted out his signature ballad. It was nearly impossible to hear over the screaming, but it was the title track of a cassette tape Jeff remembered his mother singing to when he was a kid—a lonely sort of song that had gone really well with the slowest speed swish, swish of the windshield wipers on his mother’s minivan. Nigel’s fan leaped up on the stage, and he jumped back.

  “You look scared.” Jeff touched the screen lightly with his finger.

  “I was startled,” Nigel admitt
ed. “It happens.”

  Beefy security guards hustled the interloper away. Nigel never missed a beat. The video stopped before the performance did, and Jeff felt a kind of wrenching grief when Nigel’s image froze, then disappeared.

  “Good nothing happened.”

  “It’s all part of the game.”

  “You like games, though, huh?”

  “Oh yeah. I like games.” Nigel’s voice brightened considerably. “Grab your cock, habibi. I’m your slave boy, and I want to hear you tell me how much you need me.”

  Smiling, Jeff shut his computer down and took his phone into the bedroom. “Truth or dare?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “How’s my nephew?” Jeff asked Deidre. She could take off on that subject and talk for hours, allowing him to sip his coffee and enjoy the surprisingly nice view—green lawn and a sand pit with play equipment—from his apartment’s balcony.

  “Oh my God, never in the history of the world has there been a more perfect baby. Katje wears him everywhere in this sling contraption and he doesn’t fuss or anything unless he’s hungry and then she gives him to me.”

  “Odd distribution of labor. I can just picture you telling Nigel to wait for something while you breastfeed. Plus Katje’s the nurturer and you’re— Well. You’re not that.”

  “Don’t I know it? But I’m the only one with quality egg-producing ovaries. You work with what you’ve got. Katje’s pretty sanguine about it, although she wishes she could have had a child. We did try.”

  “You did? I didn’t know that.”

  “I don’t tell you everything. Did you imagine I went into this baby thing without doing everything I could to get out of getting pregnant?”

  “Well. When you say it like that.”

  “It’s a short period of time anyway. I have this electric, two-at-a-time milking-machine breast pump—”

  “Lalalalalalala.”

  “All right. But I happen to know for a fact you were breastfed until you were eighteen months old.”

  Jeff shuddered. “Don’t count on me for Thanksgiving anymore. I’ll never be able to look Mom in the eye.”

  “Breastfeeding is a good thing. I promise you that’s not what made you gay.”

  “I know that. Men did that. And penises.”

  “Oh, now it’s my turn. Lalalalalalalala. That very same thing might be what made me a lesbian.”

  “Mom must go to bed at night with a lot of unanswered questions.”

  “Hazard’s little feet are kicking. That either means he’s hungry or he’s taking a dump.”

  “Okay. Well…”

  “In either case I’m on call. Why don’t you give the Uncrowned Queen of England a call? He’s been awfully moody lately. He’s one baby I wouldn’t mind throwing out with the bathwater some days.”

  “Yeah?”

  “One minute he’s partying like it’s the end of the world, and the next he’s moping around at the piano.”

  “How’s that different from what he normally does?” Jeff asked. “That’s what he did when he was with me.”

  “Usually he spends more time hanging around with Katje and me.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t know what to do now that you have new baby—he’s no longer an only child.”

  “I thought you liked him? You were fucking him.”

  “I do like him. Of course I like him. But you know how much attention he needs. He’s been the center of your world, and now he’s—” Jeff heard the baby cry, and Deidre barely said good-bye before hanging up.

  He stared at his phone. Typical. Maybe she was right. He should probably give Nigel a call. It was late afternoon. Nigel’d done a show the night before, but he was bound to be awake by now.

  “Nigel Gasp’s phone,” someone answered. There was so much background noise it was almost impossible to make out the rest. “Nigel’s room…party…wherethefucker.”

  “Nigel?”

  Giggling. “No, man.” Lots and lots of giggling.

  “Is this Nigel Gasp’s phone?”

  “This is Nigel’s phone, but I’m Randy. I’m holding on to it because he’s not got no pockets.”

  “I see.” The visual image that conjured was a familiar one. Nigel would be in those leather pants that gripped him like a boa constrictor, no shirt, drinking from his personal bottle of Patrón while dancing with three people at once.

  “Can you give him the phone?”

  “What?’

  Jeff tried again, feeling like an asshole. “Can you please give the phone to Nigel? I am calling for Nigel.”

  “I… Hey, Toe Jam, that’s mine…” There was a brief scuffle on the other end of the call, and then Randy came back. “I don’t see him. Last time I saw him he was going to the head to get blown. Ha-hah. He went to the head to get some head…ha-hah.”

  “Okay.” Jeff sighed. “Yeah. Tell him Jeff called. I’ve got to go to work, but I’ll be around after I get off work if he wants to call me back.”

  “Yeah, right. Jeff, you say?”

  “Yes, J-e-f-f.” Jeff spelled it, then hung up.

  All righty then.

  “Take a break, Jeff,” Mac ordered, giving him a broom and dustpan for the third time that night. “Did you suddenly develop a hatred for glass?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Your mind isn’t on the job, man. Go grab a cup of coffee and take a break. When you come back, I want your head in the game.”

  “Sure. I got it. Sorry.”

  Jeff tossed the broken glass in the trash, then went to get himself a cup of coffee, which he took with him when he exited the bar. Once outside he leaned against a wall on the parking lot side of the building, watching steam rise from his cup.

  In the dark like that Jeff could admit—if only to himself—that hearing about Nigel with someone else had hurt. The pain caught him right in the solar plexus where he’d been feeling hollow since he and Nigel left Bluebird Mountain. It settled in the exact same place where Nigel’s smile had made him feel so happy.

  Nigel was free to be with anyone he wanted. That’s the way they’d left it. In the end Nigel had asked him to go on the tour but Jeff had said no. He was registered for school in the spring, and he had to get on with his life.

  That didn’t mean it wasn’t going to ache a little when Nigel moved on. Which had to happen sometime.

  We both have to move on, right?

  Jeff finished his coffee and tossed his cup in the trash on the way into the bar. Out of habit he reached into his pants pocket and realized he’d left his phone in his jacket for a change. Instead of getting it, he headed toward the bar and started pouring drinks. After his shift he switched to drinking instead of pouring.

  After that it didn’t take long before Nigel Gasp was just another voice on the jukebox.

  Nigel locked himself in the bedroom while the party raged in the rest of the suite. He never did find his phone. It irritated him that he’d lost it, it but it wasn’t the first time. He knew he’d never taken it out of his rooms, so as soon as the maids came in the morning, they’d probably locate it. By now RoadKill had to be closed and Jeff would be on his way home. He could be partying, but that wasn’t like him—at least, it wasn’t the habit they’d established.

  They usually texted several times a night, and sometimes, like now, if Nigel didn’t have other commitments, he could call Jeff and they would lie in bed and talk like they had that first night, playing a game or trading innuendos until he could hear Jeff’s breath coming in short huffs, until he knew Jeff missed him and they could get off together.

  He couldn’t text because he only had a landline, and he couldn’t ask Deidre for another phone, because she was in her RV for the night. Or rather he could ask her, but she needed her sleep, plus she’d give him a serious headache for waking them up. He might have been able to get Jeff out of bed for errands, but that was when he was busy trying to get Jeff’s goat. He’d never do such a thing to Dee.

  Nigel had tried calling Jeff�
�s number from the landline, but either he didn’t have his cell or he’d turned it off. Eventually it went straight through to voice mail.

  After a lot of pacing and fidgeting and using the remote to open and close the blinds, Nigel tossed restlessly, alone in his too-big hotel bed in the dark. It was the first night since Bluebird Mountain that he felt lost—the first time his tether to Jeff eroded in his grasp.

  Once again he inhabited a world where everyone else had family, everyone else was connected to other people by ties of love and time and memory, and he was alone.

  He hung up the phone without leaving a message and punched the luxurious pillows he’d brought with him to fluff them again. They still smelled faintly like Jeff. Probably that was his imagination.

  When Jeff woke up, at first he didn’t know exactly where he was or how he got there. It all came back in a rush, especially when he realized at some point in the night he must have turned on his phone, because it was lying right next to his ear, playing Nigel’s “Light a Candle.” He slapped at it to decline the call and glanced around.

  “Holy shit.” Jeff sat up suddenly. What time was it?

  “And a gracious good morning to you too, lazybones. Did you get a good night’s sleep?”

  Mac. What the hell? How dare the man be cheerful when my head is throbbing like this?

  “Oh God.”

  “I put a pain reliever and some bottled water right there by your hand. I tried to make you take it last night, but your fist shot out and nearly took off my head.”

  “Holy fucking—” Jeff rolled to his side and found the tablets. “You’re a wonderful man. You have my permission to marry my mother. I’ll tell her she has no choice.”

  Mac had showered and dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He stood looking at Jeff like he was at the bottom of a specimen jar. “There’s a shirt and a pair of sweatpants at the foot of the bed for you. You might want to shower. You smell like a sick dog.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Your phone rang just now.”

  “I heard.” Jeff looked at the screen. He’d missed several calls from a number he didn’t recognize. No messages. “Junk.”