The Next (5 page)

I’d become…I’d slipped into becoming…one of the rotting slash flattened saps of New York City. What a fucking gift this shithead was giving me!

I darted a glance toward the stranger in front of me and realized he was staring deeply into my eyes as I was thinking. Not just my eyes. He was reaching down further into me. He was following my thoughts and responding silently with a dynamically linked dialogue. His facial expression was open and compassionate, subtly shifting along with my thoughts. I could feel his concern. I could feel his involvement with my feelings.

How the hell did this man, with whom I had absolutely zero ties, have the ability to reach down into me and communicate? And how did he develop this insight into me so quickly? More importantly, why would he?

Immediately I realized I had no desire to expose this much self-shitty-pity in front of this asshole. Slam. The door shut.

I snapped, “Do you need any more information from me?”

“Is your disposal running?”

Holy shit…the fucker wouldn’t rise, lower, duck left, or bob right even a centimeter to avoid my shit flinging!

“Yes. That’s my disposal running.”

“Here. Shove this down it if you want, or give me a call if you think of anything that could help.”

He handed me his card. I accepted it. I did not look at it. He did not offer a salutation. He did not offer his hand. He simply smiled perfunctorily, probably more to present the dimples most would find irresistible, and exited. He strode with confidence and culturally ingrained bravura down the hall to the stairs, which would have been a supremely studly exit were it not complimented by Minnie’s sudden high pitched yapitty yap yapping as the sergeant approached the head of the stairs.

My heart was beating faster than it had in months.

What the hell caused that reaction?

Chapter Five

The moment I closed the door, the glum ooze blobbed its lugubrious, gelatinous mass around me again. The grime of neglect re-grouted itself in the cracks of my crow’s feet and under my nails. Once again the thick mugginess of waiting for the Next steamed from the vents into my stiff lungs.

But something was different.

The room in which I’d grown accustomed to stewing in the dark was now kindled by the violet-red sunset, edging the open curtain with fire, flame-feathering my dusty surfaces with burnt orange and rose red.

I
could
close the curtain again.

The disposal was still growling from the throat of the sink. I switched it, and the grinding stopped. The contrasting hush in tandem with the sunset hues triggered a hairline crack in that mossy, wet wall that separated me from the brown-green muck of my memories. Nothing specific. Just a tingle of an awakening.

I took a few steps to the open window.

It’d been so long. Did I really want to look? It’s just a courtyard. The buildings across the way held no more significance than any other groupings of buildings of the seventy-two thousand blocks in New York City. What was my hesitation? What was I battling?

I inched closer to the opening in the curtains. As my eyes adjusted to the novelty of focusing long distance, the outside came into view. The raw unadorned backside of the buildings once again appeared, some of their eyes glowing with lights, some of them closed, some winking as their occupants moved.

And there they were— the neighbors.

My eyes found their way to the apartment on the top floor on the left.

The Couch Potatoes. Slumped with their rounded bellies side by side in the comfy brown couch, eyes pointed toward the television. The coffee table contained the remote control, two plates of comfort food, two large pint glasses of soda, a loaf of bread and a small plate with a butter stick. The two men didn’t talk to each other. Their routine hadn’t changed at all since I last saw them, and watching them troubled me.

Lazy brains, lazy bodies, lazy imaginations, like sloths sunning their bellies on a rock six p.m. to midnight, every night of every week of every month of every year. Certainly I was hardly one to disdain the Couch Potatoes in terms of immobility, but at least I had the kinetic dynamic of anger, sadness, and self-loathing to feed me rather than the passive mind mush of corporate sponsorship, reality scum, contrived plots, and muted performances by hair models slash actresses.

I saw a flash of a lighter in the Little Old Man’s apartment. He was, still living, lying in his bed completely exposed. He looked like a skeleton lightly wrapped in white gauze. He was lighting grass in a small red glass pipe, and struggling with flicking the lighter between his trembling fingers. He tried one more time and accidently tipped the pipe upside down. The weed drifted to the floor. I could almost hear him grumble some century old expletive and proceed to refill the pipe from the Ziploc bag. He was just about out of his supply. I guess the old black man with the white mustache would be at his door soon. I knew I ought to have felt it was nice to see the Little Old Man still breathing, but instead I was just irritated he hadn’t kicked it yet. I wedged the pillow back into the corner of the window to block the view of his apartment.

The lights flicked on in the Broadway dancer’s apartment, and my eyes shifted over. The smooth white body of the dancer bounced lithely onto the couch, placing a sandwich on the coffee table. He was clothed only in tighty whities. Must not be dancing in a show again if he’s eating wheat at this hour. He covered his lap with his laptop. His eyes darted back and forth between the computer screen and the television. He reached for the sandwich and took a large bite, causing a dollop of what looked like jelly to drip down his chest.

Pale white skin…blood dripping down Nathan’s abdomen…

My brain had been so contained in the vault of my apartment, so confined to uninterrupted, grey self-reflection and shadowed, unpunctured bubbles of thought it seemed to jump at the opportunity to free associate when presented with even a mild stimulus.

A Swiss Army knife blade grazing the shirtless boy’s cheek…

There was a damn good reason why I kept the curtains closed. I moved my hand to the edge of the curtain and gripped its soft thickness.

I could re-seal the vault.

I looked back at the less evocative apartment of the Couch Potatoes, and all at once I found a surprising comfort in their inactivity. The longer my gaze lingered on the Couch Potatoes, the more I envied them. How comfortable they were with each other. The hypnotizing television was something they both agreed to be the tranquilizer of their life, and they had no contention about it. Plates of pasta, chicken, a loaf of bread, the remote control, gentle shadows in the quiet flickering TV light. They needed nothing else to define the fabric of their relationship.

To be content with another. To require no more than what you have and to know you require no more. I had no idea what this state was like. Was it earned? Genetic? Just luck? Was it, perhaps, a template molded by your parents’ practices during your youth?

A white porcelain dish shattering against the brushed steel handle of the wooden cupboard.

Paul and I grew up in a violent household—parents throwing dishes at each other in coffee and/or alcohol-fueled arguments, then ripping us from our Legos and Hot Wheels, strapping us in the backseat of the Volkswagen, and speeding angrily away to someone else’s strange house. As angrily as one could speed away in a putt-putt-putt Volkswagen bus anyway. Then returning the following afternoon, only to have the drama repeat the following evening. Day after night after day after night, shattered dishes and skid marks on the pavement.

Our father had obliterated the television screen with the mixer and never replaced either, so we had zero
Dukes of Hazzard
, zero
Knight Rider
, zero
Dallas
and
Falcon Crest
, and zero baked anything, but we had my grandmother’s old first edition Enid Blyton Adventure Books. Paul and I would escape to the State Park and live out adventure stories we’d read:
Valley of Adventure
,
Castle of Adventure
,
Island of Adventure
,
River of Adventure
,
Sea of Adventure
. Our adventures were epic, and we educated ourselves with every tree, cave, bush, volcanic remnant of rock, path, creek, valley, fallen log, and shadow of that park, integrating it all into our stories. We were the masters of the kingdom. Princes of the wooded valleys. At least until one of our parents shrieked for us to come home, his or her strained voice echoing over miles through the trees.

City folks would visit our kingdom, completely unsuspecting that every step they clumsily took would be spied on by agile nine and twelve-year-olds just feet away in the bushes or above them in the crooks of the tree branches. A family’s picnic became a drug smuggler’s secret rendezvous. A jogger with her dog became a femme-fatale on a covert operation to be followed and uprooted.

But the two teenagers that visited our park on the hot, dry afternoon in June changed our lives forever.

One teenager called the other Jessie. I never got the other one’s name. Paul and I spotted them settling down in an isolated glen from the point we called King’s Rock. We went down to the creek, crossed the slippery tree that had fallen across it last winter, and snuck up to the glen. Jessie and the other boy were lying close to each other in the shade head-to-toe. There was nothing more delicious to my brother and me than the irony of people thinking they were alone when they were decidedly not. We relished our ability and dexterity to scale trees, burrow through bushes, blend into the shadows, and traverse the grass, leaves, and acorns on the ground in silence.

The teenager named Jessie lit up a joint and passed it to the other. Both teenagers were athletic and tall, in jeans and sneakers. The boy with no name had a yellow t-shirt on, while Jessie’s shirt was stuffed in his back pocket. Jessie had smooth skin, colored naturally by a fearlessness of the sun. His chest was toned and just beginning to grow hair. Jessie was dark-haired with Italian features while the other boy was a rough-looking blond. Paul and I put our feet in the knots of the pine tree and climbed to a point where we could clearly see them, but we remained obscured by shadows and bushy branches.

Marijuana was mysterious to us. We recognized the pungency of the smell from other visitors to our kingdom, but we’d never tried it ourselves. Never had a need to with imaginations as active as ours. We nestled in the branches for several minutes, listening to Jessie and the other boy mumbling. Jessie seemed more talkative then the other.

The boy withdrew a magazine that they took turns flipping through. The magazine had photos of naked women with pendulous breasts. From one page to another, Jessie and the boy would alternately laugh and then remain transfixed on an image for an extended couple of moments, wordlessly, moist lips slightly apart.

Jessie reached for the other boy’s crotch.

The other boy slapped his hand away.

“Fuck you,” the boy said, standing up.

Some tones of voices tease, and others pierce to the marrow of your bones like a cold steel syringe. Paul and I had heard enough arguments from our parents to know the type of voice that precedes appliances flying across the kitchen and cracking tiles.

Jessie laughed at him and told him to relax.

The boy remained standing, arms crossed, with an agitated stern look on his face. Jessie stopped laughing and looked him directly in the eyes. He righted himself, kneeling directly in front of the boy. They stared at each other in this duel-leveled stance for at least a minute. Then Jessie stretched out his arm, slowly and smoothly, toward the standing boy. The boy eyed him wearily and angrily but did not move away.

At last Jessie’s hand made contact with his knee. The standing boy’s breath grew shorter, but he remained still, his limbs stiff. Jessie’s hand slowly inched its way up the boy’s jeans. As Jessie’s hand neared his upper thigh, the boy’s crotch began to bulge.

Jessie boldly put his hand on the bulge.

Suddenly the boy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small Swiss Army knife, red and shiny. Paul and I usually carried similar pocketknives of our own to shear off the thorns of blackberry vines for our bush forts. We kept them hidden from our parents under the loose tile behind the toilet in the basement bathroom. We’d neglected to bring them that day. The blond boy flipped open the large blade of his and held it in his right hand. Apart from that efficiently executed movement, his legs remained planted in the same spot. He whispered slowly and deliberately, “What the fuck d’ya think you’re doing?”

Paul looked at me. The excitement of spying had turned to fear. He motioned with his head that we should back down the tree, but I immediately saw the impossibility of this. Climbing up a tree is one thing. Climbing down is more challenging because you cannot anticipate which tree branches your feet will land on, and we’d likely make enough noise descending to be discovered. Paul and I redirected our fascination to the scene below.

Jessie hadn’t removed his hand from the boy’s crotch. Instead, he looked up directly into the boy’s eyes and unfastened his belt buckle. The knife remained suspended as Jessie put his fingers on the boy’s fly and pulled it down tooth by tooth. The boy gasped as his penis finally pushed through the jeans, its head protruding from the top of the waistband of his white underwear. His knuckles were turning white. His face was also turning white with an expression of ferocity that made my heart race, beads of sweat lining his forehead.