Editor’s Note: Freeline Media welcomes original works by authors around the globe. Here, we present the macabre short story “An Old Friend” by author Joseph Aisenberg.
By Joseph Aisenberg
Mark Alter smiled bicycling beneath the marbled sky. Everywhere morning was busy arranging a splendid day. Along with the traffic each street brought a riot of birds, the scent of sprinkler-soaked grass; from the porch of a sleepy house chimes perfumed the air with slow-motion song, fading as Mark turned a sharp corner and headed toward a goodish hill.
He stood in his seat approaching it and vigorously pedal-pumped to the hill’s top, where he crossed a set of railroad-tracks. The down side, breathlessly dropping away, revealed a whole new world. On his left, across the street, at the bottom of the grassy slope, a pond gleamed; around it trees seemed still to be smeared with morning’s bluish mist. Meanwhile beyond a huge hovering water tower on Mark’s right, row after row of gray apartment buildings tottered down into a concrete-covered ravine where everything converged on a red traffic light.
Mark plumped down on his seat again with a happy hiss and began pedaling even harder, so as to fully enjoy the accumulating momentum of rushing descent. The great swoosh and overwhelming sensation of aliveness he experienced left him unprepared for an unnoticed something loitering in his path, which caught in his bicycle’s undulating chain. Miscalculating, Mark violently squeezed his handlebar brakes and found he was flung over them. Hard gray pavement smacked him sideways; he was rolled, tumbled, scratched, scraped and left lying with his legs jutting out from the street’s shoulder, into traffic.
A boxy, manila-colored car screeched to a stop near his vulnerable legs; a thin woman with straight blonde hair got out. Her lips, twisted in an expression of concern or disgust, were purplish. “Jesus,” she said squatting next to him. “You’re not dead, are you?”
Fine – or not so fine?
Mark said he was fine, tried to lift his scratched cheek from the pebbled pavement. A mix of pain and nausea momentarily blotted out the world. When eyespots and confusion cleared he felt embarrassed. Here he was lying off kilter in and out of the street, the world sloping downward and away from him. He stared at the woman’s freckled neck and chest rather than her eyes, noting the sharp narrow shoulders showing from the straps of a blue halter.
The traffic light down the hill turned green freeing cars up, but behind the woman’s more stopped and began honking irked horns. “I’m all right,” Mark said to no one. He made another feeble attempt to demonstrate “all rightness” by trying to get up again. A burst of pain in his chest, accompanied by deep stomach-roiling, shoved the pavement back against Mark’s torso and face hard, clamping him tight. His nose burned, as did his hands. Mark counted five, breathed and forcibly peeled himself from the pavement. A string of mucusy blood stretched between nostrils and ground. Drivers lined up behind the blonde’s car were blasting horns, hoping to encourage those closest to just drive around.
Once Mark was on his feet, once the world steadied, he began limping toward his crumpled bicycle, several feet back up the street’s shoulder. The woman asked if he needed help, because he sure looked like he needed help. He said no despite breathing with difficulty. A terrible blunt ache constricted his chest where he’d hit it during his fall; re-triggered when he stood. Still, he continued along.
“Why don’t you let me take you to the hospital?” the woman asked beside him.
Mark refused, though after a few more impossible steps he realized something was badly wrong. Every time he tried to put full pressure on his right foot and ankle he experienced a strange sensation, as if it were sinking into a bottomless puddle of pain, right into the ground.
“Least let me drive you home,” the blonde pleaded. “We can put your bike in my trunk.”
With car horns bleating and eyes watching Mark felt suddenly overwhelmed, truly awful, bad enough even to cry, because his bicycle did not appear to be getting closer despite his straining efforts to reach it. “You’ll have to get it in the trunk by yourself,” he at last relented.
She was saved from the effort. A large man with thick neck and tattooed arms had unnoticed got out of a red truck. With stunning ease he swept Mark’s bicycle from the road’s shoulder and whisked it over to the woman’s trunk. Having closed the large lid as best she could — it was to continue flapping through-out the ride — the woman helped Mark into her car. She then rushed around and slid behind the wheel, introducing herself as Tracy.
“I’m Mark,” he said. At least he thought he was. An air conditioner vent spewed warm, mechanically-scented air in Mark’s scratched face before turning cool as the car swished downhill, imitating his unsettled head and stomach. As per his directions, Tracy drove through a maze of residential streets named after states and trees. The gentle curve of a well-shaded avenue soon brought them to his address.
Inside the Roachy Apartments
Tracy went past, stopped, reversed and pulled into the driveway of a big old house. At one time a quaint single-family dwelling, it had been haphazardly converted into several cramped, roachy apartments. Mark’s place was up a set of unpainted wood stairs behind it. He was able to climb them only very slowly, clinging to its weather-beaten banister as he hopped from one riser to another.
During his torturous ascent Tracy had time to turn off the car, struggle his bicycle from her trunk and over to the stairway, where she cable-locked it to a support post. Pain gnashed all through Mark’s ankle and lower leg, forcing him to stop every few risers for rests, which grew longer the closer he got to his goal. Tracy joined him on the stairs just below a window of his apartment. She again asked if he needed help and made note of the already unpleasant moist heat, though it was not yet after nine. Mark reached the brownish storm door of his apartment and tugged it open.
“Nice place,” Tracy said without conviction once inside.
The living room wasn’t much bigger than a foyer. Mark’s few furnishings huddled in dimness left of the door, crammed so close together Mark’s nose nearly touched the TV when he sat in front of it. The room’s single window, the one overlooking the stairs, had its shade pulled. Directly across from the front door was the entrance to a largish kitchen. Mark and Tracy turned right into the bathroom, a narrow area you had to pass through to get to his bedroom. The bedroom’s thin, scab-colored carpet sheathed a bowed floor scattered with clothes, books, a barbell and weights. A gray cord snaggling through the mess connected to a phone in a blunt corner. Mark’s unmade futon lay against the back wall. At its head and foot were two shelves stuffed with books. The windows blazing above the futon glazed its length. Mark accompanied by Tracy, hobbled past a chest of drawers on his right, partially obscuring another window, and dropped onto messy bedding. “Thanks,” he said with a sigh feeling already the pain in his ankle begin diffusing to a persistent throb.
Tracy glanced around doubtfully. When she saw Mark squirming, trying to remove his shoes, she kneeled and helped. Then she fetched a damp towel from the bathroom so he could wipe the blood from his face. “Is there someone you can call?” She asked.
“I’m all right. My ankle will feel better in a while. If not I’ll call my mom.” Actually there was no one he could call save his boss, certainly not his mother. The two had severed ties last year, each feeling the other to be an unpleasant sucking drain; no longer could Mark abide the woman’s chattering need for ceaseless attention. As for friends, they’d moved away ages ago.
“I’m kind of thirsty after that effort,” Tracy said. “Mind if I get a drink of water before I shove off?” Out in the kitchen she called, “Do you want something while I’m here?”
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Sort of,” she yelled back with a laugh. “But I’m sort of avoiding it.” Tracy explained she and her boyfriend had had a fight over breakfast that morning.
After bringing Mark a plated peanut butter sandwich and a plastic tumbler full of fizzing soda, he asked Tracy what they had fought about.
“It was dumb,” she said shrugging. “We wound up cursing each other out over a table at IHOP like a couple pieces of white trash, which we are. Got so loud our poor waitress kicked us the hell out. Family place and all.” She rolled her eyes. “I get it. No one wants their kids hearing what we were yelling about. I know I wouldn’t want mine to.”
Mark took a bite of sandwich, thanked Tracy for everything and asked another question.
“Two,” she answered. “Boy and girl — they’re with my mom ‘til I can get back on my feet. Kills me not having my babies with me, but it’s for the best.”
Tracy sat on an old kitchen chair next to Mark’s chest of drawers, beside his ear, and sipped water and lit a cigarette. For ashtray she used a turquoise saucer she found on the floor next to the chair. “Hope you don’t mind,” she said indicating her cigarette and exhaling yellowly into the room. “Mom lives in the country. There’s cows, ponds, rusted trucks, horse flies and horse sense, which I figure’s gotta be good for kids. You know what?”
She asked laying her cigarette across the saucer cupped in her palm, “I left my boyfriend J.D. screaming in that IHOP parking lot only a few minutes before I near crunched your legs. After work, which I’m more than an hour late for anyway, J.D.’ll probably bust my chops. Not that he ever hit me,” she insisted re-fingering her cigarette. “Well there was that one time, but I was drunk as hell that night, basically asking for it. You see,” she explained, “J.D.’s not like you and me. He’s a genius. Has this beautiful philosophy of life, almost like poetry. I guess that makes sense him being a singer-songwriter and all.” She rolled her eyes and shrugged. “Oh I don’t know why I’m boring you with this stuff. He’d have to tell you ’bout it himself. You should go to one of his shows sometime. Beyond Leviathan really rocks it.”
Mark asked why Tracy’s boyfriend hit her.
“I told him he was a big fat fake just using me to support his mostly nonexistent music career.” She shook her head smiling wanly and swept a few straight strands of blond hair back over her shoulder. “I know better’n that crap but sometimes I get mean when I’m wasted. Anyway he hauled off and hit me. Next morning though, he made me breakfast in bed. And he said he was sorry and I said I was sorry and we both cried like a couple idiots. Guess that’s how it goes some days.” Tracy took a deep drag off her cigarette. With that she snubbed it out in the saucer, replaced the saucer beside the chair and stood giving her thin red watch a glance. “Thanks for the talk Mark, you sure I can’t call you someone?” He again said no. “Well goodbye then, and good luck.”
Looking fetchingly weary, Tracy went back through the bathroom to the front of his apartment.
Mark heard the door close, her feet descend the staircase. Listening for her car, he got distracted by pain in his ankle. It settled and he found himself alone, remembering he actually did need to make a call. But when he tried standing to go for the phone he was met with a rude discovery: his ankle and foot were now so swollen no amount of weight could be put on them. Agony crumpled his resolve and he lay back, breathing hard. As his ankle returned to the throbbing state that was to be its normal over the hours ahead, he realized the rest of his body hurt too. Getting slammed to the ground and thrashed about will do that to you, he thought. And he began to see that there was a real problem if he should have to, say, use the toilet, a thought Mark violently beat back, telling himself his leg was sure to get better before the necessity presented itself.
Mark’s gray-faced clock-radio, perched on an edge of the chest of drawers, alleged it to be nearly eleven. Time was fast cycling away from him. If that stupid accident hadn’t intervened Mark might now already have behind him a romantic morning at the coffee shop where he worked, with a great afternoon still ahead.
Usually he hated going anywhere near that place days off but he’d met a girl. Last night, listlessly sitting out front on break, being disgusted by the life which supported him, circumstances had rigged up Mark a conversation with an adorable brunette in a short gray skirt. She’d walked over to him in his usual corner, asked if she could have the paper on his table and got talking about current events. Her name was Kelly. She had dark bobbed hair, wore intellectualish glasses. They magnified the sharp brightness of her features as she sat down for further discussion. By the time his break ended they’d planned to meet up this morning. Therefore he really ought to call the shop and ask if the girl was around, so someone could to tell her why he never showed and have her rush over to nurse him back to health.
Mark effortfully twisted himself half off the futon, rousing a warning bolt in his shifting ankle. He reached out to grab the phone cord snaking across the floor and tugged it. The handset flew from the receiver, smacked the floor and caught on his rarely used barbell, still too far away. He tried first easing the cord then pulling it more firmly; finally he gave it a firm yank. This did not, as hoped, separate handset from barbell. Rather the cord snapped and broke out of the walljack, mooting the whole endeavor. Mark violently cursed the phone, wincing at the agony even that seemed to provoke. At last he told himself that everything would be fine. In awhile I’ll just hoist myself up, make my way downstairs and get a neighbor to call someone. But another thought now sounded insistently in his head: I should have let Tracy take me to the hospital, should have let Tracy take me to the hospital, should have Tracy to…God I need a distraction.
Finding Distractions?
The windows beside Mark’s futon were positioned low on the wall for easy access. They allowed him to stare at the sky; three dimensional clouds sailed slowly past, distinct against porcelain blue. As he watched, time slowed; the clock’s minute hand began reluctantly to drag itself across that blinkless gray face. A trip taking so long voids opened between the seconds as palpable as the ticks which bracketed them (hauntingly audible from the clock in the living room); and resembling, Mark thought, those doomful, nerve-racking instants between a water-drop’s careful accumulation on the lip of the bathroom sink faucet and the inevitable echoing plop made, when it smashed to the sink’s base — a phenomenon Mark had barely noticed before. Hoping to elude the torture of these microscopic irritants Mark fished a couple books from the shelf above his head and tried to read. Neither granted him entrance. The sharp, jabbing hurt radiating from his ankle kept distracting him, until the only thing he could think about was pain, the way it ebbed and flowed in waves. He looked at his leg, ankle, swollen foot, and was unable to fathom the nature of such unrelenting agony or the possibility it might never subside. “Why is this happening to me?!” he howled.
Why hadn’t he let Tracy take him to the hospital?
Gripping the window sill, using the bookshelf by his head as a brace (causing it to disgorge several items) Mark pushed and pulled himself to a sitting position. This time he was prepared for the jangling, reality-shaking sensation which scorched his ankle, rippled up his leg and clamped his stomach. Soon as it more or less quieted down, though, he opened the window easily. Shoved his head out the screenless hole. Fresh air. Birds winging past. The sun took a quick breather behind a cluster of clouds and re-emerged casting stark tree-shadows onto the wrinkled, gray rooftop of the house next door. It had flaking eaves, clapboard peeling like sun-burnt skin; the purblind windows, starkly dingy, suggested abandonment.
Mark called for help; the windows did not blink.
Between his apartment building and the house next door was a strip of untended grass, parted by a chain-link fence. A tan towel dangled from it, taunting Mark with the possibility of some Samaritan. All sorts of vegetable matter subsisted down there as well, mutant trees, crepe myrtle, various shrubs voyeurizing the neighbor’s concrete-covered back yard. What an ugly, barren place, Mark thought. He craned his head toward the street out front and, peering through a tree-framed gap between buildings, watched innocent cars swish back and forth. That moment a young man on a green bicycle, shave-headed and goateed, appeared on the margin of sidewalk running beside the street. Mark shouted for help.
“Fuck you!” The man shouted back and vanished.
Mark screamed after him awhile, but eventually gave up and lay back down. His injured ankle made continued sitting impossible. Now he watched the ceiling. Felt despondent. Tried to force himself to cry, hoping to cover the relentless ticking again gaining dominance. Until he became aware of noises from the apartment beneath. The girl downstairs! Of course! He hadn’t thought of her before, so rarely did he see her — through the window on occasion, getting in and out of a car plastered with the names of rock bands. She had orange crew-cut hair, her face was covered with piercings; she wore an array of “transgressive” tee shirts. To Mark, her life consisted of driving from one youth event to another. He yelled and pounded on the floor, hoping to get the girl’s attention. There came an answering knock. He banged more vigorously and an even more vigorous knock resounded. Furious, Mark beat the floor beside his futon with one of the books he’d tried to read. A moment later grinding music seeped up through the scab-colored carpet, like a warm stench. Its booming base aggravated his leg-pulsations.
After several more half-hearted shouts Mark realized there was nothing to do but lie still and try to keep his movements to a minimum. But really, he thought, what am I going to do when I have to pee? He tried distracting himself by composing a poem in the image of the girl he’d met last night. He managed a few nonsense rhymes — “sees,” “knees,” “paradise,” “lovely eyes” — which floated through his head in search of form without finding any.
Frustrated, Mark hoisted himself back to a sitting position. Pale green butterflies in the tall grass beneath his window whizzed about, lightly passing themselves through the chain-link fence and back again, a heartening sight. A sign Mark ultimately would be okay. He felt encouraged to struggle his torso out the window as far as possible, placing searingly torturous demands on his damaged ankle and foot. Almost half out, Mark bodily twisted toward the tree-gap framing the street once more and started screaming at it.
No one materialized, but from the window directly beneath his a metal box, the air conditioner downstairs, came to life and droned away with lulling familiarity. Sweat-soaked, nose dripping, Mark felt he could use a little air conditioning too. Instead of worrying about his discomfort he re-focused attention on the street and sidewalk, representing his only link to the world, and wished hard for someone to appear.
Magically, someone did. A thin man with long brown hair and bad posture loped into view, from the direction of the house next door.
“Hey!” Mark called. “Hey you! Stop!”
A possible rescue?
The man halted, looked around confused. When he discovered Mark’s head and shoulders poking from a second-story window between buildings, the man laughed and pointed at his own chest for clarification.
“Yes you!” Mark cried. “I need help!”
“What with?”
“My ankle!”
“Well why don’t you call someone?” He asked conversationally.
“I broke my phone! Please! Just come around back! I’m in the apartment up the stairs.”
“Forgive me being skeptical, but what if you’re crazy?”
“Please!” Mark gasped.
The man shrugged and passed from sight. For an awful minute Mark was afraid he’d simply left but finally the man’s feet clomped up the stairs; a rap was heard on the storm door.
“Come in!” Mark shouted almost sobbing. “I’m back here!”
A wasp flew in the window and bumped about within its frame three times before flying out again, past a few dark clouds. The man from the sidewalk then emerged from the narrow bathroom connecting living room to bedroom. He hunched his shoulders uncomfortably, as if he were too tall for the space. His sensitive eyes, like his long hair, were brown. He needed a shave.
“You read all these books, dude?” the man asked indicating the shelves at the head and foot of Mark’s futon. “I bet they’re just for show,” he said smiling crookedly. “My mom buys thrift shop books all the time but’s never cracked one of ‘em.”
“Could you call an ambulance for me?”
“I could,” the man said cramming long-fingered white hands into the pockets of his baggy black slacks. “But I don’t know if I ought to. What did you say’s wrong again?”
“My ankle. I had an accident on my bicycle earlier. I only barely got home and now I can’t even stand up.”
“That is a quandary. You said you broke your phone?”
Mark pointed to the floor near his barbell. The man picked up the handset, returned it to the receiver in the corner and slowly bound the things together with the useless gray cord. “Broken all right.”
Mark dropped back on his pillow with relief. “I was starting to panic. So you’ll help me?”
The man scratched his face and head with the bulky, cord-strangled phone. He went to the chest of drawers and placed it beside the clock. “This is very interesting,” he said. “Hmmmmn,” he ruminated raising a thin quizzical brow, folding his arms over his concave chest and giving his stubbled chin an ironic stroke. “You wait your whole life for a break and then just by chance…”
The man explained: Everything in the world was connected by secret networks. These conglomerations had been carefully designed by government officials to get at him personally. Why? Because this odd skinny man was, he claimed, the earth’s last living person. That got on “their” nerves. “I think they’re jealous because I can feel and touch while their responses are only computer programs, you know?”
Mark didn’t know but it sounded bad; and got much worse. “When I was a kid,” the man continued, “The Living Dead used to disgust and frighten me with their soulless empty eyes and rotting organs under flesh-costumes, but over time they came to seem curiosities. While I was never able to relate to people of your ilk,” he told Mark fussily, “since I’m not yet dead, it’s fascinating ‘cause most of you don’t actually know you’re dead. Though you do sense it,” he said tapping the front of the chest of drawers. “You feel the vacant inertness of your bodies and resentfully attribute it to me. And because my vital presence irritates the fuck out of everybody the head honchos have come up with these intricate conspiracies to control and kill me.”
When the man had finished this tirade Mark understood he was completely insane. Mark’s only option under the circumstances, it seemed, was to humor him into help. Ludicrously, Mark heard himself ask, “How do dead people harass you?”
“Well my mother had her drunkass zombie boyfriend beat the shit out of me once,” he said. “After my busted head healed I ran away, but it wasn’t just them. There were also the asshole corpses in charge of the schools. They screwed my grades, kept secret reports on me, forced me to submit to tests to humiliate me in front of everyone. The worst though, were the dead bitches. They would beautify their desiccated flesh with makeup hoping to tempt me, the cock teasers, but their decrepit worm-infested bodies just made me want to puke. The point is up to now I haven’t had a suitable corpse for study. Even though everybody’s totally dead and all they won’t hold still,” he said with comic haplessness. “Oh but I did come close to getting my hands on a good specimen six months ago. I dated this girl I thought was alive until her stupid opinions, tastes, and ways gave her away, like the flies swarming around her reeking pussy. Well one night I fake-kissed her to get near, which made me almost throw up and I poked her arm with a needle to see what she’d do.” He fell silent staring somewhere above Mark, clearly reliving the incident.
Eventually, to relieve the awkwardness of the moment, Mark asked how the girl had reacted.
“She fucking screamed! That’s what she did.” He laughed and slapped the top of the chest of drawers. “I told her it didn’t hurt her because she’s dead; said I wanted to cut her and see what all was under her skin. Well she skedaddled before I could subdue her, I tell you. They hate when you figure them out, but,” he said juicily, “now here you are and you can’t get away.”
The man sat in the chair Tracy used earlier, leaned back against an edge of the chest of drawers. He looked down at Mark, said nothing. No matter how Mark pleaded the man went on watching him with a mild expression. When Mark attempted to shout out the window for more help, however, the man rushed over and slapped his face. “Don’t,” said the man. “I’m thinking.”
After that the man went to the kitchen and came back with an apple.
Dead people don’t eat
“I’d like one,” Mark said with absurd childishness, as if that weren’t as crazy as the man.
“Dead people don’t eat,” the man answered reasonably. He re-seated himself and crossed his legs. Crunchily, he gnawed the apple away and dropped what remained on the floor. Taking a satisfied breath, he stood and came over to Mark’s futon. He pulled a fork from his pocket. He squatted and poked Mark’s arm, shoulder and hands (waving around defensively). Then the man jabbed Mark’s wounded foot, sending shock waves through the left side of his body. “Too bad you don’t have needles,” the man said. “This works better with needles.”
Mark gasped in pain but said nothing, merely looked at the empty thing before him with unfurling horror. This couldn’t be happening, he told himself. Things like this were not permitted. As if in response the man dropped the fork, shrugged at Mark’s huddling fear — seeming suddenly to have lost interest — and he exited the apartment.
Mark started screaming out the window again. No one heard. No one came. The sky, now covered with clouds, and the odor of impending rain overwhelmed Mark’s senses. A couple drops smacked the glass and sill, causing dirt to run. A downpour then began saturating everything. The gray rooftop next door became a darker gray. Bobbing tree leaves rattled and glowed green. As the rainfall increased to a deluge, pounding the air conditioner below, the world began to roar. Gusting wind flung rain inside, splattering Mark’s face and chest. He pulled a sheet up over his body, trying to shield himself. Turning his back on the window — Mark did not want to close it yet — he found standing in the bathroom door, smiling, scratching his scalp with a long fingernail, the insane man returned.
“What do you want now?” Mark asked with a slight jitter in his voice. The sheet was becoming soaked.
“I already said to study you. Your face is really freaky, you know that? It’s actually disgusting. Why don’t you ever smile?”
“Fuck you.”
“You may be dead, but I bet it’d hurt if I kicked your ankle hard.”
Mark gazed at the man’s narrow sensitive face, framed by long limp brown hair, and tried to comprehend him. But when the man started across the room, to implement his threat, Mark shrank back on his futon. “All right, all right!” He cried. “I’m smiling! Please don’t kick me!” And twisted his mouth into a painful grin. The sensation of this, combined with the feel of the wet sheet now plastered to his back, was ghastly. “Can I, I, I at luuh-least shut the window?”
“You won’t melt,” the man said. “Women don’t like you much, I bet. Not just because you’re ugly, but because of the weakness oozing and rotting where your soul used to be before you died. Have you ever tried to track it down in a mirror?”
Mark wasn’t sure whether the man was asking if he, Mark, had literally ever tried to find his soul in a mirror or if he had searched metaphorically within for some spiritual source of decay. “I don’t know,” Mark said. The man laughed but insisted on an answer. “I’m not sure what you want,” Mark said. The man became angry. Mark stuttered something about not being able to concentrate under the circumstances, because he was frightened and needed to use the bathroom—had needed to awhile now.
“Well then do it,” the man said towering over him on the futon. “Piss your pants. I want to see.”
“I need help to the bathroom.”
“But I, I, I, don’t want to help you.” The man mocked him. “It’s okay, I can wait. Actually, I got to go too.” He retreated to the bathroom and loudly relieved himself in its resonant toilet making a great vocal show of how satisfying it was.
Afterwards he washed his hands and let the faucet run. “I hear the sound makes the urge to urinate almost irresistible.” Finally he cut off the gush with a chuckle, wiped his hands on his slacks and went out to the living room. He returned carrying a small TV which he put on the chest of drawers beside the clock and broken phone. He plugged it in, found a black and white science fiction film playing. Swiveling the chair around somewhat, he sat to watch it. “I like this movie,” he said. “Space aliens take the form of people and try to act human.” A minute or so later the man looked back over his shoulder at Mark, shivering under his wet sheet. “Does all this really embarrass you?” He asked. “You shouldn’t let shame follow you into the grave you know. The rain didn’t last long. Did it?” He turned back to the television. A woman screamed at a clawed shadow. “When rigor mortis sets in,” he said blandly, “you’ll be free of this world’s hang-ups, so piss your pants already.”
Mark refused. The man’s face drooped. “Well why not?!” He whined. He seemed to be expressing a parody of childish frustration more frightening than any threat or icy hint of cruelty. Therefore Mark concluded, skin crawling, that his only course of action was to satisfy the man’s degrading demand. But the awkwardness of being starkly observed urinating by an inhuman psychopath for pleasure, made it impossible. As feared, the man’s mood descended into determined rage. He retrieved a dingy toilet brush from the bathroom, leveled it before Mark’s face.
“If you don’t piss your pants I’ll scrub you raw.” He jabbed the brush’s brown-speckled bristles toward Mark’s eyes. Mark tried to grab it, begging to be left alone.
The going gets rough
“Jesus,” the man said kneeling beside Mark. “You should see your face. When I die I hope I don’t look that stupid.” He screwed his fine-boned features into a mockup of disgust, fear. “No,” he imitated Mark. “Don’t! Please! Stop!” The man turned serious saying, “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard those words.” He dropped the toilet brush beside the futon, bent forward and slapped Mark’s ear hard, setting off an awful ringing, like a test pattern. Hot pain spread through Mark’s cheek as well; his entire body began quaking. “This,” the man said, “is more fun than poking cats with rusty coat-hangers…Or isssss it?” Calmly, deliberately he placed his long white fingers, with their extended nails, on Mark’s stinging jaw. He caressed the area several times before just clamping down on Mark’s throat.
It took Mark several seconds to comprehend the hand crushing his windpipe, to translate the panic in his straining face muscles before frantically reaching from the futon and clutching the first thing he could get hold of — that toilet brush — so as to swat the man off. The man reacted with gasping revulsion. He stood and drew back. “YOU TOUCHED MY LIPS WITH THAT YOU FUCKFACE!” he squealed. “I WAS ONLY PLAYING!” He spat and rubbed his lips harshly, and receded to the bathroom where he retched over the toilet and washed his mouth out in the sink before leaving the apartment, muttering fearfully.
Mark lied there coughing and gasping for some time. Breathing eventually normalized but he was still too afraid to move or shout out the window again. All he could do was cry; berate himself for being so passive. What am I going to do? If I don’t get away from here that freak may come back and kill me for real.
Mark wondered how any of this could be happening. Trapped like a bug, he thought, only the bugs around here have more freedom than I do.
Suddenly Mark realized the girl’s music downstairs was off; her air conditioner too. Just now? Hoping to get the girl’s attention before she went anywhere, he beat the floor until his hand became sore as his ear. No response. She’d left. Who knows how long ago? From the TV on his chest of drawers someone laughed and laughed.
Meanwhile he did still need to urinate and the bathroom was out of reach. Fortunately the cup from lunch was beside his futon. Removing any rain-damp, sartorial hindrances Mark awkwardly positioned the cup between bare thighs and peed into it with minor spillage. Its steamy contents he tossed out the window. After that the storm again burst into a frothy torrent before finally tapering to a drizzle; gloomy cloud coverage began coming apart, letting through gouts of sun and blue. The emerging, radiant, dripping, sighing green freshness made Mark feel even more uneasy. His absurd predicament — being cut off entirely from the world, a prey to scavengers like the crazy man, despite the nearness of thousands —boggled Mark’s mind.
The hours were unbothered, however, busily transferring daylight from the windows beside Mark’s futon to the one behind his chest of drawers, where the TV droned with a game show. As eight o’clock neared, the world began to fade. Mark would soon have to defecate; he had known since five, when pressure in his bowels began building. This meant Mark had somehow to find his way to the bathroom, though the twenty feet from here to there seemed miles. So he made another attempt to attract help out the window, pitching a thousand-page book at the dingy house next door. The fat fluttering thing did not even make it over the chain link fence. Mark noted with despair someone had managed to sneak out and snatch the tan towel seen dangling from it earlier.
Resigned to the terrible odyssey ahead Mark proceeded to heave himself to the floor; when his wounded foot came off the futon, a drop of only four inches, it released an excruciation which nearly knocked him out. Mark stopped, cried against the scab-colored carpet (applause burst from the TV); once his ankle had returned to a persistent ache he began determinedly to drag himself over the bowed floor, pausing to shove aside clothes, books, barbell and weights; and to rest his pulsating ankle while mentally mapping a path around the gargantuan obstacles of minor clutter barring his progress. As he pulled past the chest of drawers, which towered over him, his good foot got somehow tangled in the television cord dangling before it. Trying to free himself, the TV came down screen first and landed in the chair; its volume surged. Ignoring these tribulations, ignoring the churning bloat in his bowels, Mark huffed himself up and over the dark bathroom’s threshold, raised slightly from the bedroom floor, a hurdle meaningless to him in his recent healthy past. He tried also to ignore the irritating dialogue between a mother and daughter caught up in poignant discussion about spring-fresh douching on TV.
The linoleum felt cool against the scraped undersides of Mark’s arms where he wriggled to a stop between bathtub and toilet. Catching his breath, he reached his left hand up in dimness, to grab an edge of the tub; with his right he gripped the toilet rim. Trying to lever himself from the floor, putting a burning strain on his chest and shoulders, Mark’s sweaty fingers slipped from the toilet and he cracked his head on its base. This started Mark crying again, causing his bowels to wrench. For a moment he was sure he would soil himself but the peristaltic contractions torturing him ceased for some reason. Mark wiped tears off on the back of his hand and forced himself to to surmount his goal, a seemingly unattainable height.
He had to put terrible pressure on his damaged foot; the sustained torment made him groan, squint and grit teeth as he twisted about and, grunting, hoisted his body to a precarious perch on an edge of the toilet. There, using his good foot, Mark lifted his bottom, struggled pants and underwear to his knees. The effort set off yet more shocks because his hurt foot, held aloft to protect it from the floor, kept touching the bathtub across from him. But at last he was done. At last he was centered on the toilet rim. His howls and cries tapered to sniveling as he reached over the sink beside his left shoulder and turned on the light, a jaundiced eyeball coating everything greasy yellow. Then with explosive, splashy force he released the day’s pent up frustrations. From the TV in his bedroom a woman screamed, “And now I’m going to kill you!”
That was when Mark thought he heard a throat being cleared in the blackness of the living room on his right. He plucked a roll of paper from the lid of the toilet tank behind him, tore free a big wad and thoroughly cleaned himself.
Another sound. “Who’s there?” Mark asked the blackness, knowing who was there. “I can hear you.”
The pitch-dark beyond the bathroom kept its secrets for the moment. Mark stared into the stuff. He begged whoever was there to reveal itself. A shape issued from the living room into the wan bathroom light. The insane man from earlier, of course. “Go away!” Mark shouted in anger and mortification. The man now held a video camera trained at Mark, bare-thighed on the toilet. With his free hand he flipped back a few distractive strands of long hair, which as he swirled peering into the tub, dangled in the way again. “Such squalor, man. Dead people are filthy.”
A train rumbled past in the near distance.
“Why are you doing this? Can’t you just leave me alone?”
The sound of Mark’s voice cued the man to swivel back around. The camera looked him over with neutral curiosity, observing Mark’s exposed crotch, bellybutton, scratched face. “I’m not doing anything to you,” said the man. “This is just the way things are. Sign of the times, dude. Does it bother you? What’s the big deal? Nothing’s a big deal these days. Rip the fronts off all those nice houses with wind-chimes on the porches and you’ll find out.” He moved the camera in for a close-up, saying it was more cinematic than a zoom.
Despite the man having tried to choke Mark earlier, Mark attempted to slap the invasive device away; even chucked a bit of soap at it. The man kicked Mark’s hurt ankle in response. Mark passed out and woke, moments later, sagging against the sink, drooling vomit on his chest. Hovering behind his camera, the man giggled. “You’re back,” he said. “If you touch my stuff again I’ll stick you with a knife.” Mark began wailing hopelessly. “Oh that didn’t hurt,” the man said. “If you don’t shut up though, I’ll give you a real reason to cry.” Believing him, Mark choked his tears down. The man instructed him to face left, right. Made him look down his belly past splatters of disgorged matter at his lap. Out into infinity. Through nausea the bathroom seemed obscurely stark, dreamily concrete, alienatingly familiar.
Making home videos
“So what should we do now?” the man asked. “Oh I know.” He placed the camera on the sink, making sure it continued to record Mark’s suffering. He rummaged shelves behind the mirror. Removed a tube of toothpaste and a can of shaving cream, both of which he applied liberally to Mark’s hair, face, and lap. Mark slumped over, trying to keep from sobbing again.
“You’re such a clown!” The man laughed. “Well, then, there, now. I guess we’ve learned something, haven’t we? The dead can pretend to have feelings. Actually, I already knew that.” He went to the kitchen. Cabinets were opened and closed. The man returned not with a knife, as Mark had feared, but a can of powdered bleach. He sprinkled it over Mark’s head and shoulders. “Wow,” the man said expressing genuine awe. “You have like, this eerie greeny look. It’s like you’re decomposing right on the spot!” He picked up his camera again and stood back. “Now, I’m going to ask you questions. Do you admit you’re dead?”
“Yes,” said Mark.
“Are all your emotions and concerns fake? Part of a conspiracy to trick me?
“Yes,” said Mark
“And you’re really dead?”
“Yes!”
“And you’re sorry about touching my mouth with your shitty toilet brush earlier?”
“You were strangling me.”
“So? You’re already dead.”
That for some reason made Mark want to laugh; all he said was, “I guess.”
“Oh you g-g-guess?”
Mark wanted to scream he hadn’t stuttered his answer, but just shrugged.
The man then asked a streak of questions. Did Mark know how ugly he was? What was two plus two? Did Mark have plans to do anything big for this portion of his afterlife? Did he have a phony girlfriend? How come he didn’t have fake pictures of made up family and loved ones around? How much did “they” pay him to exist in such squalor? Did Mark like cats or dogs? Remembering the man had said something earlier about torturing cats Mark answered dogs. The man asked an involved math problem in the form of a story about a rapist hurrying between victims A and B, but Mark was too emotionally frazzled to follow it.
“I gotta go to work,” the man said. “I pack cakes all night in a wholesale bakery. You really ought to be crying for me.” He turned off the camera, dropped it to his side and flipped his hair back with finality. “See ya. I’ll try to come up with more things we can do while I’m in the freezer.”
Mark sat listening to the TV’s babble long after the man left, before even attempting to towel himself off. A flowery beach towel hung from a ring on the wall to his right. Mark pulled his underwear and pants back up, requiring more painful lifting, jerks and yanks. To get off the stool, Mark had then to heft himself into open air. He gripped the tub before him as he had coming up and lowered his swollen foot to the floor, beside the other. It zapped him badly, but he continued. The effort hurt so much, though, that less than halfway down Mark just let himself drop, hoping to rip past the beastly pain quickly as possible. Lying with his back against the chilly linoleum, gritting teeth through subsiding agony, he tugged himself headfirst toward the living room. This freed his shoulders from the tight spot between tub and toilet; relieved him also of having to look at fecal-crusted bolts holding the toilet to the floor.
Exhaustion swallowed him in fitful sleep. He awoke a few hours later. Still dark, still trapped. Another storm had blown up. The windows were being pelted by rain. And still he was trapped. Thunder rolled around above him like a great bowling ball; a huge clap of sound came down at him from every direction. And he was still trapped. A blurry shape stood over Mark in the doorway and dissolved when he opened his eyes. The bathroom light was out. Blue-white bursts of lightning flashed rhythmically in the bed and living rooms; Mark half-expected to see the man emerge as if generated by the disturbance, wearing the maniacal grin of a movie-murderer. But that fear was misplaced in the ever-shifting shadow-show as lightning took picture after picture of the apartment’s interior. The chair in the living room beyond his head, for instance. With bug-like legs, it appeared ready to pounce. Somewhere beyond Mark’s feet the off-kilter outline of his chest of drawers seemed to rear across the bedroom. He was trapped, suffering; these objects took no notice
Okay, I’m trapped, he thought. But even before hurting my ankle I was already trapped in whatever this is. Photic bolts discharging around Mark provided sarcastic commentary on the stingy parody of life he called home. The flimsy partitions separating him from the other, much louder tenants, along with his shabby furnishings, suggested an ornate dollhouse, a modular stage of ideally flimsy construction. As Mark’s eerie pseudo existence continued collapsing and rebuilding itself through the storm’s searing coruscations, Mark felt with full sinister force how this place had been here long before his arrival on earth and was sure to persist long after he’d gone into the ground. For in life, as in real-estate, the Marks of this world were mere renters.
Breathing became difficult as the storm raged. Now Mark felt his face being bathed by sheet lightning, as if by his tormentor’s chilled fingers. Turning his head to the side he shut his eyes, trying to escape those insistent shocks, but they registered even behind his closed lids. And the lightning cracks and the ponderous thunder, further frazzling Mark’s nerves, allowed a sauce of evolving colors — red, green, blue — to saturate and decompose his essence. But anxiety kept re-focusing Mark’s sense of self. He felt the man’s kind, brown, watchful orbs through the changing colors, but when he opened his own eyes he had to open them again. No one there. No one but death. I’m already dead according to that awful man. Sad this insight should overtake me here of all places.
After everything. Mark saw himself through the man’s lifeless eyes, a bug, a specimen, whose decay he would carefully document with his video camera. Yes, Mark was trapped, but accepting that fatal fact allayed his fear if not his physical pain. The whole place lit up bright as afternoon and was wiped away by darkness. Death wouldn’t be so bad, he told himself, a matter of evaporating like … morning rainwater. And even if it was bad, what could he do about it? A relief. Felt good not being responsible for anything — just laying here on the bathroom floor, waiting for whatever was going to happen.
As the emotional storm inside Mark dissipated the rain slacked off too; thunder receded, the lightning stopped. Mark thought of the song “Stormy Weather”. The line “gloom and misery everywhere” got smudged in his thinking processes, rearranging and stretching itself to remarkable length. Was it possible for a phrase to retain meaning as one’s heartbeat slowed? He opened a door. He walked into a room filled with several fat, bald, pink-eyed cats lolling on the dust-carpeted floor. With irked haste Mark shut off a phonograph warbling in the corner and sat down.
He opened his eyes. Opened them again. A third time. Mostly silence. Above him, though, in a black abyss, a splotch of light crawled around the walls over the foot of the tub. Weightlessly hopped across the room and struck the mirror at an oblique angle before attacking Mark’s face, blinding him. At which moment the bulb over the sink came back on, reducing the light’s potency to a weak glow at the end of an aluminum flashlight, held by a man standing directly behind Mark’s head. As Mark re-accustomed himself to straightforward illumination the face looking down at him came clear. It was sunburned. Scraggly blond hair dangled on either side of familiar green eyes. It wore a sleeveless black t-shirt with a rock band’s slashed red logo: BEYOND LEVIATHAN!
The Discovery
“He’s comin’ to,” the man informed someone. “Tolt you he whaddin’ dead.”
A shave-headed man appeared beside the blonde, to assess Mark’s disorientation. This one wore a white undershirt and baggy jeans. The jeans hampered him as he clambered around the blonde and stepped, heavy-booted, into the tub. “Hey dude,” he asked. “You know a girl named Tracy?”
“What?” Mark rubbed his eyes.
“Guy’s off it,” the blonde said. “Was mumbling something about stopping colors. Jesus.”
“Tracy,” the bald man insisted. He bent over the side of the tub at Mark. “I’m her fuckin’ boyfriend. She claims she brought you here this morning when you hurt your leg.” To the blonde he said, “Does look like he hurt somethin’.“
Mark coughed a few times, blinked. Finally he felt the world slip back into its old sordid, solid disposition. “Oh yeah Tracy,” he said scratching his eyes. “That girl from the accident. She did bring me home. She’s nice. Should have let her take me to the hospital though.”
“Had to twist the bitch’s arm to get her to tell me where you lived. I mean sometimes I think she must be fuckin’ around, you know?” The bald head shook with self amusement. “But I guess she was telling the truth. Like Halley’s comet you know, every seventy-six years …”
“Could you guys help me?” Mark asked, “I’ve been like this since yesterday. There’s this horrible guy who keeps coming around to screw with me too. Can you get me out of here or call someone?”
“Where’s your phone?” asked the blonde. Pointing toward the bedroom, Mark again explained what happened to it; begged the men to go call him an ambulance. Muffled voices started talking in the bedroom, startling the bald head. “What the fuck’s that?”
“My TV. I’ll give you money to help me,” Mark said.
“How much?” asked the blonde.
The bald man rose and struggled out of the tub, onto the bedroom side of the bathroom, where he ducked into darkness. A few seconds later the TV voices stopped; the bald head returned carrying the TV which, cord dripping, was handed across Mark to the blonde.
“Okay, sure,” Mark said. “You can have the TV too. I don’t care.”
“And what about money?” asked the blonde.
Sighing, Mark wriggled a wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, causing his thousandth attack of ankle pain. From it he removed several bills and some change, which clicked to the floor and rolled about.
“Cool,” the blonde said. He put the TV down, relieved Mark of the bills and enthusiastically kneeled, to scrabble up the coins.
“Now will you guys go call someone?”
“No sweat dude,” the bald head reassured Mark as he stumbled back through the tub, to rejoin his blonde friend. “Least I’m not gonna have to wear myself out beatin’ the shit out of Tracy,” he added with a laugh as he went into the living room. “I’m just kiddin’ man. I love my home skillet.”
The blonde picked up the TV, followed the bald head. The two fiddled around in the dark living room awhile, whispering. Once they had gone, quiet settled through the apartment. The sink-drip again became an issue; the living room’s clock started ticking loudly too, picking at something raw behind Mark’s eyes. Seeking any environmental distraction available, Mark fastened on the windows over his futon. The sky was noticeably brighter: morning. Its arrival seemed both shockingly abrupt and long delayed. Gradually night’s shadows were withdrawn, replaced by reassuring birdsong which soothingly righted any ambient imbalances; the bulb over the sink’s mirror, incurring the same fate as the flashlight earlier, turned to yellow tea.
Mark craned his head around and gaped into the living room behind him, to see what he could see. The chair with bug-like legs had been crammed in the kitchen doorway. The shelf had been plundered, books dumped on the floor, compact discs taken. Under a mess of speaker wire black boot-prints walked back and forth over the drab carpet. Mark didn’t care that the two men had pilfered his stuff or extorted him, so long as they made an ambulance come get him. In his mind he watched the men approach a payphone, where obviously the blonde would make the life-rejuvenating 911 call, sending proficient emergency workers to extricate Mark from his miserable present.
He imagined the ambulance’s arrival some minutes later, but it didn’t arrive. Mark rewound to the payphone and started over, trying to synchronize hopefulness with actual help. All that happened was nothing. The bright morning carried on getting brighter while he languished on the bathroom floor, dreaming about being saved. After what felt like hours Mark admitted to himself that he had been duped. Those criminal thugs had vanished with his cash, his TV, his stereo, and weren’t stopping for anything let alone conscience. He began to feel very very sorry for himself. He cried. Thoughts of death returned. “Gloom and misery everywhere” trickled through his mind as it had last night. But eventually pain, thirst, hunger and a spiritual disgust such as he had never experienced cut through self-pity.
I really will die if I stay here, he thought. I can’t let the last thing I see be that stained ceiling, those disgusting bolts on the bottom of the toilet. Or that man’s eyes, he thought with a shudder. Mark decided he would use his last last last reserves of strength to drag himself out of the apartment onto the wood landing outside, where he could at least have fresh air and direct access to the sky.
The front door was ajar, but by the time Mark got there, pushing aside trash, he realized he would have to lie in front of it and pull the door toward him, to get it open. At first he could not swing the stubborn thing past his chest, gut or thighs. A wider berth was required. Bodily shifts away from the door, though there was little space for them, had to be made several times, inducing by now routine seizures of pain in his ankle and foot. After which he discovered he was somehow too far away to grab the door’s taunting edge. All he could do was graze it with fingertips. Mark let out a frustrated shout and punched the wall beside him, bloodying his knuckles. On the floor nearby he noticed a fat roach working its way under the floor trim next to a discarded compact disc case, giving him an idea.
He thought maybe he could use the case to extend his reach. He grasped it, tried. It cracked under the pressure. Mark refused to give up though. Angling the crippled case this way, that way, he at last, after several suspenseful minutes, hooked the door and got it fully open. Mark’s final obstacle, the brown storm door beyond, he beat wildly with his fists until the latch gave. With much painful wrangling, Mark wriggled half out of the apartment onto the landing. It felt so real against his torso and face. The landing had many vent-like slits. Through them Mark saw the concrete steps of the apartment beneath his. He willed the girl who lived there, she of the orange crew-cut to appear. Of course she didn’t.
Hanging over the apartment’s threshold with the storm door trying to close against him, Mark felt unalleviated pressure on his aching leg. It prompted him to pull himself all the way onto the landing. Sun from the longed for sky made enjoyment squintingly difficult once there. He called out for help until his voice became hoarse when another bout of semi-sleep took him. Occasionally he opened his eyes. A mockingbird swooped down out of the blue to chase a frightened cat across the concrete driveway which was his back yard.
Possible saviors?
Mark spoke now and then, weirdly aware of his own voice. Was he asking for help or discoursing on the gray quidity of the letter L? I don’t know. Who are you? Whatever isn’t me, I guess. The sun battered him cruelly as the morning progressed. He closed eyes against it, but searing violet blazed right through his lids. Hey that’s familiar, he mumbled. A woman’s voice answered, his mother’s. When he did not respond she consulted a male voice. “I think someone’s up there, Henry.”
“I didn’t hear anybody.”
“You’re practically deaf, father,” she answered. “Go check.”
From the staircase, toward which Mark’s face was indifferently positioned, an old man’s head came into view. It belonged to a broad, blue-suited torso. He asked Mark something. Mark said he was fine, which made no sense. “Go call for help, Esther,” the old man yelled down to his wife under the stairs. He sat on the top step to wait with Mark, explaining how every Sunday he and his wife dropped by to see if they could convince their daughter, the girl with the orange crew-cut, to go to church with them. “She never answers,” the old man said sounding paradoxically proud. “But she’ll come around someday.”
An ambulance eventually drove through his peppy chatter; uniformed workers similar to those Mark fantasized earlier transferred him from landing to gurney and gurney to vehicle. Fifteen minutes later he was parked in a corner of an emergency room, where listless attendants and nurses prodded him with the occasional question. What was the intensity level of his pain? He said he was in agony. Did he think he was going to lose consciousness? If only. Was he insured? No. Could they call someone for him? There was no one, he said. Or did he actually mention his mother to the third or fourth indifferent figure who approached? He was administered a shot which did nothing.
Several hours later a sandy-haired doctor happened along with Mark’s x-rays, brightly telling him he’d broken his ankle. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose circulation to your foot, which often happens in such cases. Due to the protracted length of time without treatment it almost certainly would have meant amputation. Thankfully,” the doctor continued patting Mark’s good leg, “There should be only life-long nerve damage, resulting I suppose in a good deal of numbness, and possibly a pronounced limp.” Before Mark could ask about any of this the brisk doctor relieved him of consciousness explaining, “You’re ankle’s so swollen you’d never be able to tolerate having me wrench the thing straight, set it and put a cast on. Not without being strapped down anyway.”
Mark woke in a hospital bed, his leg concrete-heavy with the promised cast. It cocooned him from calf to heel. On a table to his left sat a pitcher of water and an alien looking plant. Almost immediately a chunky nurse hurried in. She asked how he was; aggressively tried to push on him pills for pain which Mark did not feel, amazingly. Although sternly skeptical — “Are you sure?” she asked many times — the nurse finally left replaced by a kind of social worker with a large clipboard, a large, black woman, who pestered him about insurance he didn’t have. The weary aura she projected of professional disappointment only grew when she learned of his impoverished circumstances, which seemed to weigh mightily on her shifting, white-coated haunches as she exited the room.
Between Mark’s bed and the roommate’s on his right, a thick white curtain had been drawn. After the social worker lady’s departure, a gravelly voice behind it — that of an old man — asked, “There something you want to watch?”
A TV hung above a mirrored sink before Mark, centered halfway between his and the roommate’s sides of the curtain. “No,” said Mark.
The old man surfed channels forwards and backwards awhile, halting on a woman’s face twisted in horror and confusion. “I don’t want to watch anything either,” the man said disgustedly and switched the TV off. “Too many blacks on it these days anyway.”
That was when the door opened and the old couple who had saved him hobbled in. They were delighted to find Mark awake. Had been haunting the place since he was put under that morning. Had just been to dinner with Mark’s mother actually. “What a nice lady,” Esther said coming slowly forward and plumping in the recliner Mark hadn’t noticed beside his bed, wafting sharp perfume. She put her huge vinyl purse on her lap and primped her orangeish, cotton candy textured hair. “It like to broke her heart when she saw what happened to you.”
Feeling shock, panic, Mark asked for clarification.
Henry said, “Well we wondered if there was anyone we could call. They said you mentioned your momma and that girl when you was half out of your head.” He chuckled. “I done already forgot the girl’s name.”
Esther enthused, “She come had buffet with us too.”
Mark, thinking it must be Kelly, the girl he was supposed to meet yesterday morning, asked was she thin with short dark hair and glasses.
“Nah she was heavyset,” Henry said coming to stand by his wife. “And had long red hair.”
“But just adorable,” Esther put in quickly. “Has such a pretty face. Now what was her name again? We’re gettin’ old father.” She laughed.
With horror Mark realized they had called not Kelly, whose number he didn’t have in any case, but his ex-girl friend, a human he wished never to see again. The idea that both she and his mother had been here (his mother was coming back later, Esther informed him) while he was unconscious seemed a nasty violation all of its own, yet another one. Also, they were old!
“What none of us can figure is how you got like that,” said Henry. “Jeanie says you make so much noise she didn’t realize you needed help when you was beating the ceiling.”
“Jeanie’s our daughter,” Esther explained. “She lives in the apartment under you and was just devastated to find out you’d been up there suffering so. Anyway,” Esther smiled, changing to a brighter subject, “it’s a nice reminder how fragile life is, and how we all need Jesus Christ as our lord and savior. Do you know Jesus Christ, Mark?”
Mark said he did not and winced with feigned discomfort, hoping to end the discussion. Esther paid no attention. She told him how Christ had sacrificed himself, dying on the cross to wash away our sins with his blood and deliver us from a fallen world of death and corruption.
“I know the story,” Mark said. “I’m just not a believer.”
“Welllll,” Henry responded pursing his chapped lips and sadly shaking his gray head. He put a spotted hand on the shoulder of wife’s hideous yellow flower-print dress.
Frowning above her vinyl purse, Esther stood and re-coated Mark with her perfume. “We got to be going father.” To Mark she said, “I’ll bring you a bible tomorrow, so we can talk more. And,” she whispered flirtatiously, holding up her enormous purse. “I’ll sneak you in a burger. Hospital food’s for sick people, don’t ya’ know?” She laughed so harshly at this corny quip Mark knew she had been itching to get it in the whole time. “Bye-aye!” she called to the room and left, trailed by husband Henry. Mark didn’t tell them not to come again, because it would have seemed horribly impolite considering they’d rescued him from that situation, that man. Meaning for the foreseeable future he would be their willing and grateful hostage.
Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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