"All clear, lobo, blew 'em the fuck away." But there was nobody there to congratulate him.
He found her, obviously enough, in the bathroom after an inexplicable tour of the complete house, a pause to reconfirm the oak tree's position, and a tense period in the garage anticipating the momentary impact of rounds large enough to be fired from the handle end of a lawnmower. So his sensory apparatus was already making strange noises when he pushed back the battered bathroom door on this not entirely unpredictable scene: Latisha seated in, if not wedged into, the cheap sink, her added weight beginning to separate pipes and basin from the buckling wall as she calmly flipped lighted matches, one by one, from a book stamped AIR-LANE MOTEL, PULASKI, TENN.
,
into the lime-stained pink tub.
He went insane. He didn't know what he was screaming.
"I'm bored," she explained. She was actually playing a private game of he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not, thinking of a boy whose face she would never forget but whose name she unfortunately had, though he wasn't necessarily the one the matchbook oracle was being questioned about.
Mister CD was beginning to form coherent sentences. "Do you have any idea what happens when a shower curtain goes up?"
She tossed another match. "What do you care? Probably it's not even yours."
"Quicker than paper. Hotter, too. Big black smelly smoke loaded with cancer. The house'd be full of it in forty-five seconds."
"Yeah?" She tore out the last match. He loved her, whaddya know. Whoever
he
was. "Does it get you high? Can we get off on it?"
He yanked her bodily out of the sink, hustled her down the hall and into the bedroom, where he threw her onto the mattress. A rolled-up newspaper he retrieved off the floor served as a makeshift swagger stick as he paraded before her, ranting, blustering, slapping his thigh, a major performance with barely a glance at the audience.
She sat drawn up against the wall, glowering at him, rubbing her wrist. "I'm about half a second," she said, "from busting you up real good."
"Burn the place down, is that it? Huh? You like fire? I'll show you fire, babe." He turned and plunged the paper baton into a candle flame, he waved this torch at her, fouling the air with his spitted taunts, a black storm of swirling ash out of which her screaming face appeared as a cardboard mask punched with three bleak bottomless holes. At the first bite of flame on the skin of his own hand, he dashed off for the relief of the bathroom, clutching still his wand of charred newsprint magically alive with dozens of tiny glowing worms. Sounds of cursing and running water.
In his absence Latisha tried to decide whether to go, whether to stay, whether to do up another bowl. He was back before she could come to any conclusion. A ragged length of wet toilet paper wrapped around the fingers of his right hand. He glared at her, accusingly. "Where's the damn stem?" he asked.
Afterward, he stared off into the effervescing middle distance, wearing the same expression he'd presented to teachers in the middle of elementary school math tests. He didn't move, he didn't speak. The drug radiated endlessly outward, to the prickling borders of his body -- and beyond. It possessed a shape, that was true, its outlines shimmering in teasing grandeur somewhere out there where one cryptic irrepressible impulse in this bundle of contradictions that served him adequately enough as an identity longed to be, to inhabit the contours of this other, larger self completely. He was on a mission.
Whatever happened was meant to be. You can't always get what you want. Easy come, easy go. Same old shit. Get the bastards before they get you. Love makes the world go round.
The moment he heard the word "crack" he knew that one day he would try it and like it. He
knew
weird stuff like that about himself all the time. The fateful introduction took place at a record company party, but it was somebody in real estate, a shiny broker with manicured nails and a pretentious lawyer-type wife, who offered him, out on the deserted patio, his first kiss of the pipe. Sweet. So now this was simply another activity he performed, another of the habitual quirks that defined him; he wore a Cubs cap in the house, he ate penne with tomato sauce every Monday night, he visited his son's grave once a week, he passed through doorways on his left foot, he chewed gum in church, he smoked a little rock. Now, having added this last routine to his repertoire without much more consideration than in picking a dime up off the street, he was discovering that it brought with it its own inescapable thoughts, a veritable towering system of interlocked. . . well, not ideas exactly, more like mental events, a complete philosophy of them whose arguments he was compelled, a not unwilling student, to explore to the finest nuance. Such were the days. Latisha could not remember when she had slept last. It was like food, she didn't need much anymore. She was new, a woman from the future. Dreams, though, still needed her, swooping in at any hour, unannounced, sometimes unrecognized, deep into the intricate urgency of the passing moment she could be startled awake by the sudden evaporation of objects, happenings, truths, her surroundings deftly replaced by another set whose reality might or might not be so permanent. Some dreams she needed to flee, to walk off, pacing anxiously from wall to wall in an imaginary foot-worn trench, her assigned post, guarding the twin-doored closet as if it were the maximum security cell that bad thoughts escaped from. The vision she was trying to shake now was of a pack of hungry gray dogs licking blood off a window. Lots of blood, lots of dogs. She was on the other side of the glass. Then, prompted by private signs, she rushed from the room on vague errands in the spooky no-man's-land of the rest of the house, her absence, sometime later, culminating in a series of clumsy kitchen sounds Mister CD refused to acknowledge. He was flat on his back, trying not to move too much because when he breathed, his insides made creaking ship-at-sea noises. He was dying exactly as Celia had prophesied when he walked out on her however many months ago it was now, in sweat and agony in a lonely place without a single nurse in attendance. Ha. Her curse. A woman who consistently pronounced his first name as if it were an adjective. The ease with which he could have strangled her, throttled the smugness swimming in accusatory preservative behind her goggle glasses. A done deed but for the silly frog crouching there on the crowded sill, emerald porcelain in a revelation of sunlight, a gift from little Benny to his mother. Nothing was insignificant. Everything was strange. The nagging image of his son in a suit he had never worn in life, laid out grotesquely in a shocking green coffin he had never occupied in death. What did that mean? What did he know? Mister CD's body seemed to be composed of an itchy synthetic material. On his last ejaculation a single drop of sperm welled like a tear in the eye of his penis. Behind these fragile crackling walls lurked -- what?. . . The DEA. . . the FBI. . . his wife. But why did he care? He was steel, will and flesh. He checked his pulse. We are as goddamned gods.
Latisha reentered the room as he was doing up another bowl. He noticed at once the odd positioning of her arm at her back, the briefest glitter of the steak knife blade in her hand. He smiled benignly, extended the vaporous pipe in her direction.
And afterward, confronting the cold television screen, she spoke, "I don't even have to do it myself. I've got friends."
"What the fuck are you jabbering about?"
"Killing you."
He barked. "Yeah? And who might these friends be? Spitcurl? X-man? Gizmo? Or one of the other dwarves? Scary."
"I know a lot of people."
"Oh, yeah, wait a minute, I got you now. That faggoty kid, that Race, that what he call himself now? Race, what a fucking joke."
"His name is Reese."
"Whatever. The pissboy with the box-cutter. Keep talking like this. I like the way your mouth looks when you talk about murder. Talk more for me. Dust, whack, pop."
"I'm outta here." She made a move to get up, but he shoved her down onto her back.
"I'm not finished with this." He held her down, leering over her, searching the caves of her eyes for unaccounted shapes.
"Reese didn't have any knife, Reese wasn't even there, how much you know."
"I know enough to recognize a piece of sharp metal when it's stuck in my face."
"It was a kid in white sweatpants I never saw before. And nobody got hurt, so what are you bitching about all the time?"
"Who was the gangster in the leather cap?"
"Nobody. I already told you that. God, you are --"
"If Gizmo hadn't stepped between us. . ."
"Nothing, that's what, absolutely nothing. God, you are so paranoid."
"Careful, little lobo, I'm careful."
"So paranoid in your old age you can't remember a fucking thing anymore."
But he wasn't listening to her anymore, either; he had the pipe in his teeth and was sucking on the stem like a drowning man. Through the enveloping smoke one neutral eye fixed steadily on her, whatever posture she might assume, whatever betrayal her face might reveal. He arched a brow and said, "Put on your uniform."
"Oh no, please."
"C'mon, baby, Daddy needs a nurse. Bad."
"Yeah? Well, so do I. Who's gonna nurse me?"
"Oh please, please, it hurts so bad." He was rolling around, clutching hands between his legs in an obscene parody of pain.
She went to the closet, rummaged through a heap of clothing. "I do this," she muttered. "I actually do this." She stepped into a wrinkled white dress, fumbled with the buttons.
"No, idiot, not here, damnit. In the bathroom. Then you come in already dressed. Like on rounds, remember?"
"Jesus fucking Christ."
He settled himself into an exemplary patient position. He closed his eyes and watched inside himself a thin rodlike beam of laser energy tracking around his interior, pausing to spotlight the dominant organs, each in its turn then playing its own distinctive song. When the ruby wand touched the gnarled surface of his heart, his eyes came spontaneously open, and standing over him was Ms. Angelcake, the ward nurse, gazing compassionately down. His head lifted off the pillow. "The stethoscope," he cried. "I can't believe you forgot the fucking stethoscope."
"Sorry." She exited, muttering.
In a moment, properly attired, she returned. "Well now, Mister CD, what seems to be the problem?" He pointed.
"Oh, what a nasty growth. Does it hurt?"
He nodded.
"Well, let's see what we can do to reduce the swelling and alleviate the pain."
She remembered how it ended after finally begging him to stop and she remembered stripping off that hateful uniform and that was all until now and the miracle of the cracked ceiling she had been acutely attending for hours and hours, it was glowing, the intensity of its illumination multiplying surely but imperceptibly under the care of her watch, she imagined a hidden rheostat somewhere manipulated by a withered old hand, and then, with a start, she comprehended the meaning of this fascinating phenomenon. "Is this this day or is it yesterday?" she asked.
"What the fuck are you talking about now?"
"Days. The days of our lives."
"No fucking sense. None. In fact, you haven't made a lick of sense since I met you."
"Oh right, go ahead, let out your pig. What do you care?"
"I like to have conversations, you know. I enjoy a good conversing. But there's gotta be something coming back at me I can understand."
"In your teeth."
"Sure." He rolled off the mattress and onto the floor, where he began executing a swaybacked set of push-ups. "Been thinking," he wheezed, "about getting me. . . a pair. . . of good. . . handcuffs."
She turned away, faced into the windows, the coming light. "I can't believe myself," she announced to the solidifying day. "All the time I've spent sitting in this house with you. In the dark." For her, time was the memory of a shaped sensation and this most recent period of her life didn't seem to have a shape, unless it was a bar of chrome you just rode.
"You love me."
"I do?" She could hear him messing with the plastic bags.
"You do."
A pair of big brown irises stared back at him over her shoulder. "But who are you?"
"I'm Mis-ter Cee-Dee," he sang, "low-est pri-ces, larg-est in-ven-toe-ree. . ."
The tune was like one she'd heard before, then it was that tune. She was sitting in a field of clover in the shade of a shaggy bark tree, chestnut mare nibbling on a handful of gumdrops scattered among the dandelions, mild wind riffling the sunny grass, clear sky soft as felt. She supposed there was a weathered red barn with a Red Man chewing tobacco ad plastered to its wall and a row of blackbirds on a telephone wire and a nice white fence, too: things that lived in a tune. Fake memories. Cool.
"So who'd you steal the song from, anyway?"
"What do you mean? I wrote it myself. It's a tribute to Benny."
"Oh." End of discussion. The five-year-old-son mauled to death by a neighbor's Doberman. The one story in Mister CD's life she did know in pertinent detail. How the settlement money from the lawsuit provided the down payment for the business. The wife, Celia, crying for a year. So they had another kid. And another. She still cried. Boo hoo, why me? Why us? Mister CD hadn't the slightest. But he did know this: the money was holy, sanctified in the blood of his loins, so of course the business would succeed, and every customer who left the store with a CD in his or her hand was carrying a living piece of Benny into their homes.
"You going in today?" she asked.
"Yeah, yeah. In a minute."
"I don't even know what day of the week it is." She was gazing wistfully at the screen. "There's no time without television."
"Don't tell me what I'm thinking. Don't even try."
"Huh?"
Rising up across the floor in the unforgiving luminosity of dawn was a forbidding landscape of stale clothes, lost shoes, red and blue capped plastic vials, IDs and credit cards phony and legit, cigarettes, magazines, newspapers, cans, cups, and Styrofoam burger boxes. By candlelight this colorful array of textures and forms had seemed intriguing. He got up and left the room without a word. She remained on the mattress reading and rereading the same tattered issue of
People
and the stars kept smiling for her and heaven was user-friendly and the limos were at the curb. He came back. In a dramatically swirling cape of snowy smoke.