The Next (4 page)

“Twinkie twat from upstairs?”

“Your other neighbor, Mrs. Abraham down the hall, said you’d know him.”

The little fucker was ratcheting up this inquiry already. What would he gain by making me defensive? Heightened emotion. Heightened emotion would cause most to ramble more. Rambling more would reveal more information, including everything one is purposefully
not
rambling about. But what this little fucker wasn’t prepared for was for a man who would obsess for six months on nurturing a song into infancy, eighth note by eighth note, and then kill the babe with one impulse of his index finger, sending it to a cold, blue death in the trash file because it had committed a single, almost imperceptible act of dishonesty. No, this little fucker would not arouse any emotionality.

On the other hand, if he was going to broach this subject, it was not a conversation I wanted Mrs. Abraham to hear.

“Would you like to stand out here, or come in and be inspired by this faggot’s decorating skills?”

I opened the door further. The little fucker looked directly into my eyes and instantaneously assessed something that compelled him to step across the threshold of my apartment. I barely cared to examine whatever he saw, but I’m guessing he saw a certain I-don’t-give-a-shit-down-to-my-bone-marrow look.

The only light emanated from the computer screen, eerie and black like the last scene of
Wait Until Dark
in which the only light was sourced from a refrigerator moments before an acid-scarred Alan Arkin shot out of the shadows. Perhaps this is why he ordered me to turn on the lights.

“No bulbs.”

He crossed to the curtains.

Horror.

“Please don’t,” I growled.

He did. Dust flew into his face as the curtain accordioned to one side. Early evening light streamed through the dust in a sharp path across the room, interrupted by dark lumps of furniture and refuse: crumpled paper bags tossed into the corners of the room, piles of books browned from settled dust, oily discarded clothes hanging off couch arms and lampshades, empty bottles of Fresca, Orangina, and cabernet sauvignon like small urban developments around my desk. To my only credit, I had no pizza boxes to complete the scene of my soul’s pathetic attempt to wither to a single point before vanishing altogether.

Yet there was something satisfying about my brain physically manifested by this mucky swamp, sparing me from having to define, expound, or clarify. It was the soggy, muted, boggy, grey disgust and rejection of anything and everything, realized in the dark mounds of damp sweatpants and shirts on the floor, the irregular piles of dishes and to-go containers on the counter, the spotty edifices of bottles forming irregular slums in the landscape. It was Dreyfuss’s mashed potato mountain in
Close Encounters—
a solitary, obsessive mentality in slimy lumps on a plate. Thus, my fucking apartment. Thus, me.

Sergeant Marzoli observed, and followed his survey with one response. “Uncle Joey.”

Was this exclamation an abbreviated reference to some folkloric Sicilian phrase inspired by his surroundings? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. How dismissive could I be?

“Exactly.”

“Uncle Joey’s apartment looked like this.”

“This gorgeous?”

“Hmm hmm. Then he blew his brains out. Stringy, bloody mess all over the table.”

Did he say stringy?

“I didn’t realize Uncle Joey was dead when I found him. I thought he just fell asleep eating pasta.”

He winked to let me know he had just been funny. He was quick, employing humor to let me know my ass-wiped apartment in no way deterred him, and he employed
morbid
humor specifically to reach me at the level to which he assumed I would most immediately relate. I appreciated his approach. He plopped a shiny, sweet cherry on top of this first impression as I observed that even as he finished speaking, his eyes were absorbing other information.

“When did she leave you?”

The dusty photo of Johanna and me was on a shelf in the shadowed corner. I hadn’t noticed it, so I had failed to send it clanging down the garbage chute. Now the light fell on it, accented ironically by picturesque sparkles of light refracting off the silver frame.

“I thought I was gay.”

“A closeted faggot in Manhattan? That’d be an anomaly.”

Apparently detectives were still inclined to be sarcastic. Wonderful. Thank you, Dashiell, for your lasting contribution to witty detective templates.

“Did you just use a four syllable word?”

“We found remnants of Ecstasy in Nathan Ridges’ medicine cabinet. Did he ever sell to you?”

I was irritated by how I enjoyed the way Marzoli’s noodle moved on to new sauce without waiting for the old to cool.

“No.”

“Did he ever party with you?”

“Do I look like I get invited to parties?”

“You’ve got a dick, don’t you?”

“Did Nathan have a vagina?”

“Not in the report.”

Man-flirting is a skill one developed in Manhattan—not exclusively to investigate the potential for a blowjob, but to quickly develop a rapport to guarantee the super in the building will take care of your building maintenance requests first, to make sure the barista has your coffee order waiting for you by the time you reach the register, to encourage the waiter at the steakhouse to linger and enliven a mind-deadening conversation at your table a bit more. It’s the NYC language of men with men that says to the other guy: don’t worry, I’m not going to be like your wife or your girlfriend or your boss. I’m not one of those bitches who’s going to make your life more difficult. Don’t worry, I’m not a high-maintenance, dismissive bitch whose neurotic, aggressive need to be perfect makes you and everyone else walk on eggshells. Don’t worry, I’m not one of those time-sucking infantile chicks with zero ability to execute anything practical or physical around a man without enacting helplessness with a baby-girl pout and a whimper. Don’t worry, I’ve got a dick too, and I’m just like you. A guy who has to work like a dog to pay the fanged landlord, and I’ve no intention of making your life any more difficult for the couple of minutes we spend together.

This fucker standing in front of me had that skill mastered. He hooked his left thumb in his belt and let his fingers drape around his crotch. No, Sergeant, that approach wouldn’t work in this apartment, but nice try. What immediately intrigued me, however, was that he had any impulse to implement flirtation at all. He was clearly straight, just as I was. I was obviously in a state of wreckage encircled by hovering scavenging buzzards eyeing my every last twitch. So why even attempt to connect with me apart from just an exchange of information? My first thought was I didn’t have the energy to engage in this game. My second thought was to realize I had already been seduced into playing it. Craptastic. My only recourse was to be frank.

“My interactions with the twat consisted mostly of banging on the ceiling with a broom at four in morning when he came back from la-la-ville, tweaking way up in the treetops and turning on…I don’t know…let’s call it music.”

I was going to incorporate something sarcastic about Cher and a woofer, but my brain was slow as sludge. His brain, however, was not.

He looked past me onto the shadowy lumpiness of the floor and asked, “You’ve actually got a broom?”

Ahh…here come the insults, and I fully deserved them.

Marzoli barely waited for his wry joke to land, “Would Nathan Ridges stop playing when you asked?”

“Sometimes.”

“And the times he didn’t?”

“One time, and only once, I knocked on his door. He answered.”

He’d answered the door naked, but did this son-of-a-bitch need to know that?

That slight hesitancy of edited thought affected the placement of the last uttered syllable almost imperceptibly, so I was floored when the fucker asked, “Did he answer the door naked?”

How in hell could this lughead have picked that subtlety up?

“Yes,” I answered, trying to sound as unimpressed as possible.

“What a treat.”

“He was shaving his pubes bald. Well, half of it when he answered. With a Bic disposable. He’d just shaved his chest, blood running down where he’d nicked his nipple. He was high. His hands were shaking like a leaf. Hardly looked at me. Didn’t even say hi. He just asked for help applying a Band-Aid.”

“Did you lay into him?”

Interesting choice of words.

“I told him his music makes me dream of severing his skull slowly with a nail file and shoving it down the garbage chute.”

He wrote this down.

Shit
.

Why the hell did I have to tell him the truth? What about this mofo made me feel obedient?

“But,” I continued, “he was so fucking sheepish standing there helpless as a puppy, with his nipple bleeding. So I applied the fucking Band-Aid.”

“Did you clean it?”

“Clean what?”

“His nipple.”

“With my tongue.” I paused. He did not react. He did not write anything down, but instead waited patiently. “I used a wet towel I found in the bathroom.”

“You entered his apartment?”

He wrote this down.

Motherfucker.

He looked up from his notes and held me in a steady gaze as he asked, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why help him?”

His tone was urgent. Why did he need to know the answer to that question? How could my answer in any way further his investigation? What exactly was at stake? My brain felt fossilized next to his. It was so grating not to be ahead of this plot.

I responded obliquely, “As it says in the New Testament, love thy neighbor and thy neighbor might turn off his woofer.”

Marzoli continued to look me in the eye, measuring what little truth could be read under the sarcasm.

Errrrg.

His patience left me with little choice but to resort back to truth.

“It looked to me like he was going through some hell of a drama. More than just withdrawal. Might even have been scared of something. He was shivering violently. It was winter and the window was wide open. Very Demi in
St. Elmo’s Fire
.”

He did not blink. Right. Before his time.

“I closed the window, led him to his bed, took his shoes off, covered him with a blanket, turned off the fucking music, and left. That’s it.”

Marzoli remained quiet.

God damn it.

“No, sergeant, I did not insert my penis into any of his cavities, nor did I have the impulse to, so stop stroking yourself. No matter what Mrs. Abraham says. I know she saw me exiting his apartment and started whatever rumor you’ve no doubt already heard from other neighbors and assume to be true.”

Still no response.

I was rambling defensively. I thought I was better than this. Guess I wasn’t. Great. Another reason to love myself to death. And how the fuck did Sergeant Marzoli take the subway in from the boroughs to Hell’s Kitchen without a fucking wrinkle on his shirt or hair out of place? He was inhumanly perfect and everything in me wanted to take him down several hundred notches. I just couldn’t figure out how.

“Honestly, I don’t think the twat remembered a second of me coming into his apartment, ’cause the next night the music was thumping at two a.m. anyway.”

Marzoli wrote this information down, halting my monologue.

“You actually left your apartment?” he murmured loud enough for me to hear, “Good for you.”

I suppose there was a grin on the other side of his full, but stern lips.

“It was a couple months ago. Or was it a year? I don’t know.”

“Ah,” he looked at his notes, “back when you were still getting some from…ah…from Johanna Butchers.”

Ahh. Thank you, Mrs. Abraham. What else did he know about me?

I responded, “She was getting headaches around me long before that.”

“But back then she still had hope for you.”

The surprise of that comment coming from this fucking Puerto Rican Sicilian stranger was replete with so much goddamn invasive inappropriateness that an equally surprising feeling of indignation rose from my dirt-dry emotional pit. What the fuck right did this asshole have to go there?

“Oh,” he continued, “I pissed you off. See, you’re not completely dead inside.”

Fuck you.

How to best rid myself of this rip-roaringly entertaining asshole?

“I get it. You’re perfect. I’m pathetic. You’re shiny and sparkly. I’m globs of puke. I’m just a backward glance away from offing myself, and you’re greased up for unlimited upward mobility. Thank you. Thank you so very fucking much for establishing that. Grind that muddy heel into my back on your way up to the podium. It’s fun.”

This was followed by absolute silence, except for the grinding still emanating from the sink. I thought I’d feel better after venting, but instead I was surprised to feel a lump form in the back of my throat. I’d simply not vocalized my self-pity out loud since the utter heavenliness of my birthday last December, and the act of committing my sarcasm to words tapped into a buried grave of emotions. Finding the words “offing myself” and then transforming them into vibrations from my vocal chords had a surprising resonance that doubled back on me, opened its long bony fingers, and grasped my Adam’s apple. The reality of ending myself had never hit me as a true possibility until that very moment. But it
was
a possibility. My life was in my hands. My death was too.