Every Shallow Cut (8 page)

After a moment he started chuckling, then tittering. “Yes, yes! Right, oh right right!”

I thought of pulling the piece and putting one in his thigh. The underworld heroes of my stories often shot each other in the thick meat of their thighs. It was a way of saying that they were bad but not too bad. That they could handle violence with ease but still kept life in some kind of high regard. I put my hand in the rucksack and got my fist around the revolver. I started to sweat. His laughter made me sick to my stomach. I glanced at the bookcase and wondered which of the names on the spines of the books he was in love with at this moment.

Toppling the bookcase across his office might make a bolder statement than shooting him in the leg, but the case was bolted to the wall.

I walked out past his girl and said goodbye. She wasn’t doing anything. She wasn’t reading or typing or texting or checking voice mail. She was just sitting there, lost inside herself. She didn’t look up. I almost kissed her.

I took the B train up to the Bronx to visit a friend. He’d written a handful of novels to great acclaim, few sales, and little cash, which didn’t faze him much. He had a day job as a counsellor for the Bronx Psychiatric centre. He handled drug addicts, paranoids, firebugs, chronic masturbators, bi-polars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and the depressives.

He’d even interviewed a serial killer once, some handsome murderer who’d managed to carve up thirty-one co-eds because he had a nice smile. Their discussions went for six hours or longer at a clip, face to face in a tiny room. The killer wasn’t chained or cuffed to his chair. My bud had started off taking notes, trying to learn something about the psycho, to see what happened to the guy as a kid, what made him derail, why it had gone so far. At the end of the sessions two weeks later my friend found himself doodling in his notebook, drawing little stick figures without heads.

I started in on a new legal pad and wrote the entire forty-minute ride uptown. I tried to focus on the words and actually read them before I flipped the page, but I was scrawling too fast. I could only catch a few bits and pieces.

When we got into the Bronx I felt a different kind of looming weight above the subway, as if the earth had more iron or bone meal in it. We finally reached the station, and when I came up out of the underground the sun hit me like a diamond cutter’s lamp.

I hated the Bronx. It always felt like Saturday night in Beirut. I turned a corner and the brick strongholds, stone towers, and wrought-iron bars made me feel like I was a prisoner of war being dragged into the court of an enemy castle.

Block after block I passed crumbling apartment buildings and steel-gated liquor stores, gun shops, bodegas, and drug rehab clinics that looked like they were pouring out tin kettles full of methadone.

His house was a fortress with a red steel door. There wasn’t half an inch of green anywhere for a square mile. No trees, lawns, not a blade of grass. Not even any house plants out on the stoops. Even the bodegas weren’t selling anything green.

I had a new kind of respect for the borough. I thought, This is the way I should have done it too. You’d need mortar to get these people out of their homes. They wouldn’t smile pleasantly to the bank men. They would have carried the bank men’s corpses to the river wrapped in plastic and weighted them down with overdue account statements.

I pounded on the door with the side of my fist. There was no knocker or door bell. I thumped and thumped for about a minute. He was either way up high on the third floor listening to jazz CDs or he was working late at the facility. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to sit on his stoop and just wait, but I didn’t want to roam very far away from his place either. I kept forgetting I had a gun.

I sat back against the red door, wary, skittish, turning to face every sound. Something was alive in a nearby alley. A cat or rats were scuttling around. Maybe it was another mid-list writer rolling in garbage holding a leash of twine attached to his dog. I could almost see him there behind the bags of trash, his bloodshot eyes glaring at me.

I checked the windows above me on both sides of the street. Most of the blinds and curtains were drawn. I saw an occasional face glancing down. I pulled the rucksack into my lap. I wondered why I’d gone to see my agent. I knew it was going to go down bad. It had been even worse than expected. It was a fool’s move. This road trip was making me even dumber.

The subway rumbled under the street and shook the flagstones like an earth tremor. I liked the feeling. It moved up through my legs and into my belly and chest and continued on like a death rattle out through my open mouth. I hummed along with it.

I must’ve fallen asleep there. The next thing I knew I was on my back on the stoop staring straight up at him. He hovered over me with the red door wide open.

He stood five three, firm and wiry, but with jowls that made you think he was chubby if you weren’t paying attention. He’d been married three times, always to women who couldn’t speak English. As soon as they figured out the language they cut loose and ran.

“Hey, man,” I said.

“Stand up and come inside. It’s a wonder you weren’t butchered where you lay.”

“Is that why the door is red?” I asked.

“It makes it easier to hide the rooster blood when they have their Santeria rituals up the block. They paint all the neighbors’ houses. All the neighbors they like, that is. It’s a sign to the evil spirits to pass our doors by.”

“Like the angel of death passing the houses of the Jews during the tenth plague, the one that had the firstborn being sacrificed.”

He frowned at me. “You couldn’t tell I was just kidding? Stop lying there. Come inside.”

I got up. In a lot of ways his place reminded me of the house I used to have. Books and movie posters everywhere, DVDs stacked all over, boxes full of comics, the occasional action figure or some other little toy that might have helped to inspire a story.

We sat at his kitchen table. He leaned forward, enmeshed his fingers, stared at me, and said, “You’ve hit the wall.”

“The wall hit me.”

“You can stay here for as long as you like.”

“Thanks, but I’m out with my brother on Long Island for the time being.”

He’d met my brother at my wedding, and had already read through the thinly veiled portrait of him in my stories. “That going to work out all right?”

“For a couple of days anyway.”

“And what about after that?”

“I don’t know.”

I was saying that a lot. It had become my mantra.

“Okay,” he said, “so tell me about it.”

I told him about it. I started about eighteen months back and went straight up to carrying the last of my shit into the pawn shop. I started to explain about the crank kids and the gun and speed loader and my crooked nose and the girl at the fast food window, the flood, the pie, my first love, the security guards in their little booth, all of that, but the closer I got to discussing it the heavier my chest felt. It was as if a steel band was constricting my chest, cinching tighter and tighter.

I skipped it all and went straight to my brother, the celebrity mag, the bath, the shelf of photo albums, my old man washing the car, my mother’s disappointment by the time she held up my third novel, the agent scared, the way he should be, the bolted bookcase.

Somewhere along my discourse he got up and started to brew some tea. Whenever my voice began to rise and become too shrill he’d say, “Shhh, shhhh.” Once he came up behind me in my chair and began to massage my shoulders. His touch nearly made me leap up and scream.

We drank the herbal tea. I hated herbal tea. People put too much fucking faith in herbal tea, like if the Chinese knew all the mystical zen secrets of the universe then why the fuck were they still communists? I spun the cup around on the saucer a few times until he told me to swallow all of it. I swallowed all of it. There were no tea leaves in the bottom for me to read.

“You’ll feel better soon.”

“Tea just punches me in the bladder.”

“The tea doesn’t matter. I gave you some lithium.”

“Lithium?” I stared into the empty cup. “You spiked the tea with lithium?”

“Yeah. Just a little. It’ll help you to relax.”

“No it won’t.” I’d studied up on anti-depressants for one of my books featuring a schizophrenic bi-polar hitman. Then again, when I got on them the first time. Then again the second time. Then again, when I couldn’t afford them and wanted to know what side effects withdrawal would put me through. “It takes up to a month for treatment to become effective. And it’s used in conjunction with other drugs.”

“I put some Prozac and Xanax in there too.”

“Christ, man, can you mix those together? You couldn’t have just picked up a six-pack? How’d you get all these drugs?”

“Stole them from work,” he admitted.

“Can you just drink this shit?”

“I think so.”

“You think so? Oh Christ.” I was so angry I almost kicked him in the shin. “You really aren’t properly trained to medicate people, are you.”

He shrugged. “It can’t make you feel any worse, can it?”

He had a point. My vision began to cloud and double up. I fought to keep control. I didn’t know why. “You have really shit communication skills, you know that? It’s why you like women who can’t speak the language. So they don’t notice how badly you relate to people.”

“The language of love is all that two people truly need to understand each other.”

“You say crap like that and you think I need the lithium?”

“You do.”

My head started to lift off my shoulders. I stumbled for the couch.

“I think it’s starting to hit.”

“Good, just go with it.”

“But I don’t want to go with it. Don’t you get it? I don’t—”

“Shh, you’re already unconscious, you stubborn asshole. Now shut up and sleep.”

I glared at him and cursed at him, then I shut up and slept.

I woke up in my underwear with my face pressed to the large bosom of a naked fat woman.

She smelled of stale cream and Kahlua and was gripping me so tightly that I was having trouble breathing. I huffed air like a paint sniffer and tried to extract myself. I couldn’t. I tried harder.

The woman moaned in her sleep and said something that sounded like Russian. I was sweating nervously and finally was slick enough to slip out of her clench.

I took a whiff of myself. I was ripe but I didn’t smell like sex. My clothes were folded in a carefully laid out pile on the floor. I got dressed and went downstairs.

My pal was sitting on the floor in front of the television, shelling pistachios and watching a martial arts flick. Tiny Asian guys were flying around on wires smacking each other silly. Every guy seemed to love this shit.

“You’ve been out for almost forty-eight hours,” he said. “You must be starving. There’s a pot of fresh chicken soup in the fridge. Get yourself some.”

I did. I ate a bowl as we watched the movie, oohing and ahhing over the very cool stunts. I got myself another bowl and then a third. When I was finished I asked, “Hey, why was there a woman in the bed with me?”

“That’s Katya.”

“Okay. Was she there the whole two days?”

“No, she came by yesterday and we got a little drunk.”

“I’m guessing she doesn’t speak any English. Are you priming her to be wife number four?”

He shrugged. “She came to the US in a cargo container with twenty-four other women. But the feds hit the local Russian mob pretty hard that week and nobody picked up the shipment. The women were stuck in there for days. Half of them died. The other half, well, you think about it. She developed claustrophobia and nictophobia. She’s terrified of darkness. I was her counselor. She was released from the hospital a couple days ago but had nowhere to stay, so I offered her the spare room.”

“But I was in the spare room,” I said.

“She’s afraid of enclosed places but spent so much time in the container clutching her sister that she only sleeps well when she’s holding someone.”

“And the sister?” I asked.

“Dead before they got the container off the docks. Katya held onto the corpse for four or five days.”