Loss (4 page)

Something had happened to me that day. My usual brooding and pathos took a left turn into a darker, calmer sea of purpose. I had the increasingly powerful feeling that my life held a greater intent and meaning now, though I didn’t know what the hell it might be. I watched the front door. I waited for more murder. I could feel it hovering nearby in every hall. I thought about all the lies I had told to get laid, and wondered if they’d come back to haunt me in the end. What would be my last words? And would they sound dreadfully strange to whoever might be there holding my hand?

The media caught wind that Corben lived in the building and the camera crews started floating around. He showed up on television and made up stories about how close he’d been with the aluminum foil guy. He claimed to have a theory about the killer and said he was working closely with the NYPD to solve the case. They asked if he was afraid of potential retribution. He claimed to own a Derringer that he always kept on his person. A lovely reporter asked if he had it on him at the moment. He dared her to frisk him. I watched his last couple of novels bullet up the bestseller lists.

My agent kept calling trying to get me to ride his coattails, or more appropriately the murderer’s coattails. He said I should be doing whatever I could to get my last few titles out to the reporters. I should carry my novels around with me, stick them in front of the cameras. I asked him if he knew how stupid that might make me feel. He asked me if I knew how stupid he felt representing an author who still couldn’t garner more than a five grand chump change advance after publishing a dozen books. It put things into perspective but I still didn’t go around clotheslining the reporters and shoving my novels under their noses. My agent quit calling.

My sleep filled with mad laughter and shouting. Some of it was my own. I occasionally startled myself awake making noises. I started smoking more. I wrote more and deleted more. I painted the foyer and caught up on all the minor fix-it stuff that I’d let slide the last several days. I got a closer look at some of my neighbors.

I finally met the lady who had an affair with a famous televangelist’s wife and was now something of a lesbian icon. She mildly flirted with me and prompted me to tell her how pretty she was. She seemed insecure and irritable. She told me she wasn’t a lesbian at all but had just been fooling around with the wife for the fun of it, but she couldn’t admit it in public anymore because of all the money she was making lecturing to various lesbian organizations. She had the televangelist’s show playing on a high definition TV screen with the surround sound turned away up. He seemed to be preaching from every corner of the apartment. It was spooky. I fixed her broken toilet handle and blew out of there.

The toxic waste guy said the old-fashioned elevator didn’t accommodate his wheelchair. He was right. The chair was old and wide and well-lived in. He’d been in the building the entire time I’d been there. He was proud of his tumors and tried to show them to me as often as he could, turning his melted, half-eaten face this way and that so it would catch the light from the corridor lamps. He was so pale I could see the blood pulsing underneath his skin. I wondered how long it had been since he’d been outside in the sun. I removed one of the side rails in the elevator and it was a tight fit but his chair squeezed in. We tested it together. His oxygen tube hissed into the hole that used to be his nose. The tank clanked loudly whenever the chair went over a bump. I could just imagine it breaching and the explosion taking out the whole floor. He said thank you and rolled back to his apartment and shut the door.

The former child actor turned gay porno star turned sex therapist daytime talk show host canceled after three months now retired after writing his autobiography wherein he named names, was sued, countersued and won big cash off a couple of closeted politicians outed and forced to resign needed a couple of his electrical outlets rewired. He interviewed me like I was a guest on his show, asking me a lot of pointed questions about the murder. He wanted to know how finding a corpse had transformed me. I told him I hadn’t found a corpse, that the man was still alive when I got there. He wanted to know how I’d been transformed by the discovery of a dying man with an ice pick in his forebrain. He wanted to know what I heard, what I smelled, if there had been any aftertaste to the incident. He licked his lips when he said it. He kept looking to one side like he saw an audience there staring at him. I knew he was working on more of his memoirs. When he got to this chapter he’d say that he’d found the aluminum foil liar and the dying man had spoken profound and wondrous lessons of good will.

A couple more days drifted past. I felt eyes on me and found myself constantly looking over my shoulder and checking down the ends of dark hallways. Muffled voices followed me but that was nothing new, muffled voices follow everybody in old apartment houses.

Except I kept hearing my name, or thought I did. For some reason, it made my scalp tighten.

The morning came when I awoke to a knocking–twin knockings–on my basement door. I figured it was the cops doing a follow-up, but instead there was Ferdinand with Mojo, both of them grinning. They were each holding a bunch of paperbacks.

“You are the wonderful writer called Will Darrow!”

“I’m Will Darrow anyway,” I told him.

“But why, why did you not let me know this the very day we were introduced? I await the next emergence of your tough guy character, stories of the brutal but heroic King Carver!”

That took me back hard. Mojo pulled on his chain and tugged Ferdi into my apartment. They may have been the first guests I’d ever had inside the place. I said, “You’ve read my books?”

“Yes, all of them! Will you please sign, yes?”

Mojo extended a novel out to me. It had a cover I’d never seen before, printed in a language I didn’t know. Portuguese, maybe? Neither my agent nor my publisher had ever mentioned selling those sub-rights. Or any. My breath caught in my chest and I tried not to think about how much money folks might be skimming. The monkey wouldn’t let go of the book. Ferdinand said, “Mojo, give! For signing! He will return it to you!”

A couple of the other books were in the same language, and two more were in a different one. Maybe Swedish. Danish? I had no idea. The rage climbed the back of my neck but there was also a strange sense of pride coming through, knowing people in other countries were reading my work. My hands were icy. I couldn’t remember how to spell my name and just scribbled wavy lines inside the books.

“I ask now when shall I be able to tell my friends a new King Carver adventure shall soon be theirs?”

I didn’t know what to say. My agent had sent all my recent manuscripts back. I tried to keep faith. “I don’t know, Ferdi. But I’ll let you know as soon as I finish a new one, all right?”

“That will be stupendous! Will it not, Mojo?”

Mojo went, “Ook.”

“You hear, he says–”

“Uh huh.”

“–he shall effort to have patience but he excitedly waits for more King Carver!”

“Uh huh.”

“Tell me now, how is Miss Gabriella?”

It was the first time I was aware that I hadn’t seen her since that day he’d moved in two weeks earlier. A minor twinge of alarm sang through me. “I don’t know, Ferdi, it’s been a while.”

“If you see her, please say that I have inquired about her health!”

“I’ll do that.”

I handed him the signed books back and Mojo got mad and started hopping and banging his fists against his knees until Ferdi gave him one of the titles. Mojo immediately quieted, opened the book, and his mouth started moving, as if he really could read.

~ * ~

The cops eventually came around again. All three teams, about two hours apart from one another. The nice guys weren’t so nice this time. The hardasses not as hard. The whiners still tried to plead with me to tell the truth and come clean about croaking the old man with an ice pick. I stuck firm to my story. Nobody hit me with a phone book or a rubber hose. No one asked any new questions or seemed to have any other leads besides me. I started to get a clue as to why there were so many television shows about unsolved crimes. They asked if Dr. Lauber had shown up yet, if I’d seen some guy with a stethoscope and a doctor’s bag creeping around the building. Maybe doing illegal abortions in the neighborhood. I blinked and reminded them that abortions weren’t illegal. They discussed this amongst themselves for a bit. They invited my opinion but I chose to stay out of it. I stared at them and they stared at me.

I waited to catch sight of Gabriella. I did everything I could do in order to hang around the fifth floor. Fixing hall lights, bracing the handrails, polishing the footboards and wainscoting, polishing the floors. I put an ear to Corben’s door and listened for their voices. I heard nothing. There were no more arguments. He’d quit calling out his bibliography. For all I knew, they were vacationing in Monaco.

It’s sometimes a curse to have an imagination that can draw up detailed visuals. I thought of them entwined after having just made love, now feeding each other wine and caviar. I hated caviar the one time I tried it, but when I thought of romance that’s what came to mind. The window open and a cold breeze pressing back the curtains. Moonlight casting silver across the dark. The sheets clean but rumpled. Her crossing the room with a hint of sweat carried in the niche at the small of her back, slowly dripping over the curve of her
derriere
. When I thought of romance I thought there ought to be some French thrown in there too. The bright flare of the refrigerator opening, her body silhouetted the way it had been the last time I’d seen her. The refrigerator door shutting, night vision lost. Total darkness for a moment and then the pressure of her body easing back into bed.

You didn’t need a lover to drive you to the rim, you could do it all on your own.

I wore myself down hoping to escape my dreams. I slept heavily but not well. I wrote a lot but not well. I dropped off with my head against the spacebar.

One morning, I found a note slid under my door.

It went six pad-size pages. It stated, in plainly printed block letters much clearer than my own handwriting:

~ * ~

A man made of aluminum foil stepped from my closet and confessed his sins. They were plentiful. His hands are red from a woman’s blood. He is terrified because he has not yet met God, and fears he never will, and that God–if He ever existed–exists no more. Dr. Lauber, he said, commands his soul. The Rhine floods across the planets. This is not the afterlife he was hoping for. At the end of our days, we all fully expect to meet the creator, and, for good or ill, for Him to speak with us, even if only to judge harshly, perhaps with divine hate. An afterlife without God is one without parameters, without celestial design. Dr. Lauber, the aluminum foil man said, owns us all, though some of us continue to act as if there is such an abstraction as free will. I have come to this belief myself–that none of us are free–some time ago as well. It frightens me, it all chills me so. What say you?

The note was signed:
MOJO
.

~ * ~

You couldn’t be better off dead. You were already a phantom in this city. The world spun by filled with the vacuous and the caustic and the fearful. They hunched down inside their coats and disappeared before you really knew they were there. They muttered to themselves and turned away from bright lights and loud noises. I’d raised my voice only once on the street in the past month, and that was hailing a cab. Sometimes I wondered if I’d even know it when my heart quit beating.

The 1976 one-hit-wonder lady who sang “Sister to the Swamp” knocked on my apartment door and asked if I’d repair the broken shower head in her bathroom. She still had an enormous afro and wore the kind of silky, streaming dress that she’d worn on Soul Train during the disco years. I got my toolbox and followed her upstairs. She had the gold record mounted on the wall near the window so that the sunlight would send a molten yellow across the room. Everywhere I looked were photos of her with politicians, sports legends, and other musicians popular at the time.

When she spoke I heard very little beside the lyrics to “Sister to the Swamp.” The heavy bass rhythm of the song pumped through my head. I got into the tub and worked the shower head until I got it fixed. When I finished, the 1976 one-hit-wonder lady was at the window staring at the rush of foot traffic on the sidewalks below. She held one hand up to the glass like she was trying to find her way through without breaking it. She wanted to go outside. She wanted to sing for the people. I’d seen that haunted need in her eyes and the eyes of the other shut-ins for a couple of years now. I wanted to ask her why she didn’t just step outside and do her thing. But even I knew it was impossible. Time had moved on without her and she wouldn’t be able to get back up to speed. Her photos and her gold record and the lyrics to her one song were all she had left now. She’d chosen that path and it would have to be enough for her. She said nothing more to me and I grabbed my toolbox and got out of there, back into the world. It felt very much the same on one side of the door as the other.

I got downstairs into my place and sat in front of the computer screen willing the words to come. They wouldn’t. Every time I thought of King Carver in Danish, a flutter of nausea worked through my guts.

I shut my eyes. I let my fingers move across the keypad on their own. I started typing. Corben and I used to clown around with automatic writing back in college. I did it every now and again when I wanted to clear my mind. I forced my focus to some far corner of my brain and left it there. The typing grew louder.