The Grimscribe's Puppets (25 page)

Ray stepped over to the kiosk, set his coat lightly on the blank, dusty counter, and bent to grasp the squared leather laces. He had tied only one side when a noise came from inside the kiosk, a kind of exhalation or sigh. He froze, laces drooping through his fingers. What the hell? He listened for a ten-count. Nothing. He let out his breath and was beginning the other side when something thumped the panel in front of him so hard it bulged out in his face.

He shot to his feet and staggered backward, footsteps echoing off another plywood sheet. Where was Danny? Ray looked wildly for his friend before spotting him about fifty feet back down the corridor, still walking. Ray scrambled over to him, making frequent backward glances at the kiosk. As soon as he was close enough, he stage-whispered, pointing back toward the now-silent structure: “Dude, did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“There’s something in there. Someone.”

“Probably a rat.”

“This was no rat. Whatever it was, it was way bigger than a rat!”

“Some homeless dude, then, looking for a place to sleep. You woke him up.”

Ray shuddered. He knew the stats: a million millionaires under Ronnie Raygun—and a million people on the streets, many of them mental patients released when Reagan shut down the state mental hospitals. He’d done some work with the campus solidarity group “RU With the Homeless,” even volunteered in a soup kitchen in Morningside Heights during a visit to a high school girlfriend who’d gone on to Columbia. But this was not the kind of controlled circumstances under which he’d interacted with the homeless before. “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” he said to Danny, who shrugged but turned and continued toward the finished section of the mall as Ray hustled to catch up.

He forgot to check his watch when they returned to Pizza Uno, but the hostess sat them regardless of the time. “Bevacqua, party of two. Follow me.” Her voice remained empty of intonation. She led them to a gloomy corner booth, lingered for their drink order: two Coronas.

At first they just stared at each other across the table as they waited for their beers. Ray was still shaken from his experience at the kiosk, and he had no idea what else to say to this pallid drone that replaced his oldest friend.

The blank-faced hostess returned with a brace of Coronas and lingered to take their order. It appeared
she
was the one server on duty. Danny immediately ordered a chicken and artichoke heart pizza without consulting either Ray or the menu, “And two more Coronas.” The girl shuffled back to the kitchen.

And then Danny showed a spark of his old self: “Dude, what if she brings an artichoke and chicken
heart
pizza? Remember Bill Cosby when we were kids, the chicken heart? ‘Pum-pum. Pum-pum.’ Just like the heart under the floorboards. That’s Poe, isn’t it? You should put that in your thing.”

Ray mustered a grunt of feigned enthusiasm. Like he really needed thesis advice from a fucking mechanic. But his thoughts turned, anyway, to the familiar tale of the sinister eye and the heart buried beneath floorboards, how Poe controlled the reader’s perceptions through his unreliable narrator. How could he have missed that one? He
would
have to work it into his thesis somehow. Not that he’d tell Danny, who would probably expect credit for something Ray would have picked up on soon, anyway.

The waitress/hostess returned with their drinks. Danny raised the dewy bottle before him and said:

“Remember you will die, huh? Well, we ain’t dyin’ tonight, bro. To the single life!”

Ray reciprocated, mechanically. He would rather die himself than take any more academic advice from Danny, even if it was good, so he stabbed at another topic. “So, Dude, what’s the deal with Colleen? I thought you two were mated for life.”

“Yeah, well, she got really bitchy after I lost my job. Not like
she’s
got any income, you know—just sponged off her family before I came along, and after that, she started hangin’ with them more even though she was spongin’ off me. They’re a mess, just the mom and the two sisters sittin’ around bitchin’ about men this, men that. It’s a regular estrogen fest, Y-chromosomes beware. But she probably would’ve come back this last time except for that whole thing with her cat.”

“What whole thing with her cat?”

“Kitten really. Dude, it was totally justified. She brought this thing home and it was always whinin’ and gettin’ in my shit. And she left it for me to take care of when she got pissed about my job and ran back to her mom’s, like I could really give a shit about some stupid furball. It kept buggin’ me when I was tryin’ to watch TV, climbin’ up on the Barcalounger and meowin’, lookin’ at me all sad. Finally I picked it up by the fuckin’ neck and squeezed it, and it felt good, so I kept squeezin’ till it didn’t move. So then she comes back the next day, and she’s all, ‘Where’s my cat?’ and I told her the fuckin’ thing was dead, and she got all pissed, started screamin’ at me like it was a real pet, a dog or a turtle or somethin’, said she was movin’ back to her mom’s for good. I was too wasted to argue, and that was that. So what about Lisa,
your
perfect woman? How did that go south?”

The shift in topic caught Ray unprepared; he wasn’t ready to answer, not after the cat thing. He bought time by mouthing his beer, then stammered out a response. “Man, I, uh, don’t really know. I think she got pissed over my lifestyle, working on my thesis all the time. She just wasn’t ready to be with a serious academic. One day she came home and just started crying. I tried asking her what was wrong, but she locked herself in the bathroom for a whole hour. When she came out, she told me we needed time apart. Just like that. No explanation. Then she packed up her shit and split. That was it. Haven’t heard from her since. She hasn’t been back to her job, either. I don’t know where she went.”

Which wasn’t really true. He was pretty sure she was shacked up with Luke in the City. Luke, who conveniently wasn’t answering his calls, either. But Ray wasn’t about to let the conversation stray in that direction. Instead he rose, mumbled, “Man, I gotta take a leak,” and made his unsteady way to the restroom. At least it was true.

When he returned, Danny took a deep pull from his beer, looked across the table at Ray, and said, “She came here for awhile. Right after Colleen left.”

“Who came here?”

“Lisa.”

Ray gaped. “You’re fuckin’ shittin’ me, right?”

Danny shook his head, “No man, seriously. She was here. Her and Luke. She needed someone to talk to, so we all got together.”

“Did she talk about me? What’d she say?”

“It wasn’t all about you. She kept saying, ‘I know it’s me, but...’ Her
but’s
were mostly about how she felt jealous of the attention you were givin’ Poe and all these frogs you’re into;
but
she knew your thesis was important;
but
you were losing touch with reality;
but
you were ignoring her, etcetera, etcetera...”

“She never said any of this to me.”

“What she told us was she didn’t feel like she could talk to you about it. Said she tried, but you didn’t listen.”

“Man, that’s bullshit. I always listened to her.”

But had he? How many times had he blown her off for the work, for another session with Roche and his copy of the
Robert et Collins Dictionnaire Français-Anglais?
“So how long did she stay? And what was going on with her and Luke?”

“I know what you’re thinkin’, man, but that wasn’t it. She just needed friends, and we were here for her, like always. That’s all.”

“Bullshit. I know Luke’s been after her for a long time.”

“Yeah, maybe, but not this time.

“Whaddaya mean: ‘not this time’?”

“Nothin’ man, give it a rest. She ain’t fuckin’ Luke. I guarantee that.”

Their pizza arrived. Gray Danny regarded him across the table. “You still havin’ those anxiety attacks, man? ‘Cause you look a little pale right now.”

Deep breath. He’d mentioned the attacks to Danny over the phone. “Yeah, but this isn’t one. They’re just something I’ve been getting on and off since my dad died. They don’t last long. Nothing to sweat over.” Yet he already felt a cold, greasy sweat leaking over his body from every pore.

“You oughtta get seen to, man; that shit can’t be good. But not now, huh? For now, dig in. A full stomach’s just what you need.”

With trembling hands Ray nodded and tore loose a slice of the lumpy, pus-colored pizza. The waitress returned with a fresh round of Coronas, and Ray took a deep pull from his to wash that first pasty mouthful down.

They ate and drank for several minutes without further conversation. The bland waitress brought more Coronas even before their last round was empty. Danny must have told her to “Keep ‘em comin’, honey,” while Ray was in the can. That was okay with Ray. All he wanted was to get tanked. But then, Danny had convinced him to come here for more than beer...

“So Dan-man, where’s all the chicks you said would be here? ‘Cause I’m not seeing ‘em...” Fewer than a dozen other customers were visible. None were unescorted women. The bar was empty.

“I dunno, man...must be an off night. Most nights this place is crawlin’ with chicks.”

“So... are we just cursed or something? I mean, c’mon, seriously, this is pathetic.”

“What about the waitress? She should be getting’ off soon, and she looks kinda game...”

“You’re kiddin’ right? Game? She looks half dead to me...”

She returned even as Ray spoke, however, and he examined her again. Lank, dark hair fell evenly around her face from both sides, maintaining the almost parallel lines of her figure. Almost sexless. But she did have tits, C-cup at least, suppressed and taut within the white men’s dress shirt she wore. A plastic rectangle engraved with her name rode askew above her left breast. Rochelle. He imagined her coming to life in a three-way: Danny, her, him. He’d never had a three-way. Maybe that’s what he needed to cheer him up.

Danny faced her, a sagging pizza slice held aloft in his left hand. There was something wrong with his eyes, but Ray couldn’t place it. Too sunken, too glassy, the pupils too wide...

“So my buddy here was wantin’ to know where you’re from,” Danny said to Rochelle.

She turned her head slowly, right, left, looked at them each in turn, then replied, sans inflection, sans expression:

“Scranton.”

Ray sputtered into his fist and glanced at Danny. Their history was filled with hundreds of moments like this, secret in-jokes mutually acknowledged and achieving fruition at some third party’s expense. Ray could not hold back. He expected Danny to bust out, too, but his friend just stared, his glassy gaze the same—as Rochelle’s.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asked, her voice even colder, if that was possible. Danny said, no, they were okay, and she walked off toward the kitchen.

“Dude, I was looking at you, trying to tell you not to laugh. But you blew it.” Danny shook his head. His timing and rhythm were the same as Rochelle’s...and the same as the motions of the “eyelab” sign outside. Except Danny’s head didn’t float off into the night. Ray watched to be sure of that.

“Sorry man. I couldn’t help it.”

“Well, we ain’t nailin’ her, now. I don’t know what’s wrong with this place, tonight. There’s usually lots of chicks.”

“I find that hard to believe, myself. This is some pathetic town you’ve found yourself in if this joint is the best you can do for a singles bar.”

“Don’t knock it, man. I tell you, livin’ here has changed my whole outlook on life. All that study, study, study, work, work, work—it doesn’t really matter. None of it matters. I got a different way of seein’ things now.”

Ray was lost with this line of reasoning, but he didn’t much care. At this point, his only plan was to get drunk and ask Danny to fix his car in the morning so he could get the hell out of Lansdale; before dark, if possible. He’d pretty well accomplished the first part already.

They both drank on in silence as beads of suspicious moisture oozed from the cooling cheese on the half-eaten pizza. By the time Rochelle brought the check, Ray was pretty much shitfaced. He paid it, just as he had expected he’d have to. Even flipped her a fiver for a tip; he didn’t know why. The booze, no doubt.

Danny and Ray were the final customers to exit Pizza Uno, and they had to duck under the burnished aluminum rolling grille already pulled down to within a few feet of the floor. The corridor outside was dim; all the stores were closed and only a single row of fluorescent panels high above provided illumination. Ray thought again of the derelict bank he had seen downtown just before his blackout and the accident, the lone bulb on a wire that lit it.

At first neither spoke as they made their unsteady way toward the exit. Then Ray tried to focus and said, “Dude, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me Lisa was down here. To be honest, I feel kind of betrayed.” He kept his eyes on the floor, not Danny, struggling to keep his steps within a single row of tiles.

He felt Danny turn to him. “You feel betrayed? You know what, dude? You always act like Lisa was such an angel, and she wasn’t. You wanna know the truth? Luke didn’t bang her this time, but he already banged her like way back sophomore year. And so did I. A buncha times. Once we had a threesome, some night when you were too busy writin’ one of your damn English papers and we all went to the Roxy without you. It didn’t mean nothin’, you know. We were pretty wasted, anyway. But she made us promise not to tell you because she knew you had this crush on her. Fact is, by then she was already getting’ tired of waitin’ for you to ask her out. But that’s not the way it went this last time. She just hung out, told us her troubles and stuff, that’s all.”

Ray opened his mouth to reply, but his tongue had gone numb. The space between them stretched as long as a football field, as if Ray were staring at Danny through the wrong end of a telescope. He didn’t want to believe his friend, but he knew his words were true. He knew it in his guts; he knew it from a dozen tiny suspicions that clicked into place all at once, memories he’d shunted aside. But that was all he was going to learn from his guts, because it was happening again: an elevator shaft opened in his torso and everything inside collapsed down a vast abyss. He though helplessly of Pound’s line: “But Sordello, and my Sordello?” All at once there were two Lisa’s, and both were lost to him. Now he clung to a ledge in a deep, dark pit as her image receded. The inexorable pattern had begun once more, and all he could do was ride it out. In rapid succession his mind played host to a slideshow featuring his father, his MIA mom, his scant remaining handful of distant aunts, uncles, cousins... Lisa. He grasped for each as they faded in turn. None could hold him. He shrank, diminished, dwindled to a pinpoint, a dust speck no Horton could hear in a universe of immense galaxies isolated by stifling, incomprehensible spans of emptiness. There was nothing to hang onto, no one to hold him back from the pull of oblivion. The void sucked him in, crushed him to nothingness. All he was, all his memories, vanished, gone forever. He shuddered and gasped an inchoate syllable with what seemed the last breath in his lungless chest.