The Sleeping and the Dead (31 page)

“What could it hurt to try? You never know. You might like it.”

“I'm not really atttracted to women. I tried to go straight once.” He circled my areola with his finger, teasing it hard despite my revulsion. “I gave up the gay life and accepted Jesus H. Christ as my Lord and Savior. I signed up for this Christian camp run by Pastor T. Roy Howard, where they promise to cast out the demon of homosexuality. My roommate was this good-looking little black boy from Memphis, about sixteen years old. They actually put us in the same dorm room together, if you can believe that, locked us in every night. His mama sent him to camp so his older brother wouldn't kill him. They didn't want no down-low brother in the family making them look bad in front of the black community, you see, so they sent him off to exorcise the demon of
homoseckshality
. You may have seen his people on television last week, pulling out their hair and flopping around on the sidewalk over their dead baby boy, that very same down-low brother they couldn't bear to have in their house—Chris Hendricks, of Hendricks Brothers Funeral Home.”

Trying to keep him talking, I asked. “The cure didn't work for you?”

“Good God, no,” he drawled, and in a flash of lightning I recognized his resemblance to Michi. He had the same tired eyes, worn out from seeing too much, and the same soft face and lips, or would have if he were about fifty years older and a hundred pounds fatter. I wondered if Michi looked like Endo when he was a young man, newly-married to his wealthy, white, lesbian wife. Endo even sounded like the old pervert. He had adopted Michi's Mississippi twang.

“That Christian camp was a Goddamn NAMBLA convention. It was a flop house for closeted preachers with a Socratic penchant for young boys. The counselors were supposed to be reformed faggots, but they had set themselves up with an unending stream of easy ass-boys, all in the name of the Lord. People were actually paying them thousands of dollars a week to bugger their sons. I remember this one session—Get the Low Down on Christ—honestly, they didn't even try to hide what they were doing. They even called their ministry ‘Servicing the Lord.' So after about three days of trying to resist, what with that Hendricks boy crawling into my bed every night begging me to fuck him, I finally gave in. I stayed there about a week until I got tired of him and them and the whole damn thing. A man can get tired of just about anything.”

“Why don't you untie my hands?” I asked. He ignored me again, lost in his monologue on a dark stage of his own creation.

“Michi was a saint compared to those Christians. At least he had to keep up appearances for the neighbors. This camp was about twelve miles back in the woods near Greer's Ferry Lake. The shit that went on out there would curl your hair. But I really did want to go straight, see, so I checked myself out. They didn't want to let me go because Michi was paying a lot of money for me to stay there and they said I wasn't cured yet. They were worried about the state of my immortal soul and the demons of homosexuality. So I showed them some videos I had secretly taken of Dr. Howard baptizing … you understand … baptizing in his seminary fluid three white boys under the age of sixteen. They said I was cured and could go home, even drove me to the bus station in Little Rock and left me there without my camera or any of my luggage.”

I tried to calculate where Adam would be at that moment if he took off after the last phone call. If he left Endo's apartment, he'd drive up Airways to East Parkway and then east on Summer. It was almost a straight shot. He'd be here any minute. If he was coming. I had to believe he was coming.

Endo crossed his legs, took his hand from my breast and rested it on his knee. “I wanted to meet a nice girl just like you, maybe even get married,” he sighed melodramatically and hummed a few bars of “Going to the Chapel.” “Michi said he would support us. He said he would buy us a house anywhere we wanted. I think he was just trying to get rid of me. Then one Friday afternoon I saw the woman of my dreams at the Save-a-Lot. I followed her home. I couldn't figure her out, you know? All my life I've been attracted to men no matter what I did or thought, and then suddenly this girl comes along, this magical, beautiful girl, long red hair and a face like an angel. She had me properly confounded. About six o'clock she comes out of her apartment all dressed up for a night on the town and gets in her car and I follow her to the Blue Monkey and go inside and I can't believe this beautiful girl could be alone on a Friday night standing at a bar all by herself and nobody talking to her, so I know she is my miracle girl. I talk to her. She smiles at me. She touches my hand and I buy her a drink, she buys me a drink and then we move to a booth and before you know it we're kissing. Me, kissing a girl! She tasted like a lollipop. She was touching me but she wouldn't let me touch her because she said she was shy, so I say let's go somewhere private. I take her to my favorite spot out at Elmwood Cemetery. It's this secluded hole among the cedars and the graves, back away from the main road, hardly anybody knows it's there but I used to go when I was a kid to beat off. We're sitting there on a headstone kissing and she goes down on me for a little while, then she bends over this gravestone and she says, I'm saving myself for when I get married but you can do me and next thing I know she's laying over the headstone like she's broken or something and I'm holding a piece of a cedar branch as big as your wrist with her hair all in it. So I give her a good rogering with that stick, the dirty slut…”

“You're talking about Patsy Concorde,” I said.

“Patrick! He hadn't had the fucking operation yet!” Endo screamed. His face wasn't the same, it was like a mask of rage that he put on when I wasn't looking. “Bitch tried to trick me. When I pulled down his panties and that thing flopped out I just lost it. I don't know. I don't know. She was so beautiful, I would have waited, I would have gone to the operation with her and shared all that if she had only just told me the truth instead of playing all shy and shit like she's some innocent little virgin cunt.”

“So you killed her,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say. I don't know why I said it. He pissed me off.

But he laughed. Threw back his head and laughed the fakest, coldest laugh I'd ever heard. “Killed her? Hell no, I didn't kill her. She was already dead. She never was alive, never real. She was an actor on the stage of life, for life is theater, honey. None of this is real. I'm not real. You're not real. He's not real. They're not real. I am he is you are we is she are he and we are all together. Nothing we do means anything, all that matters is how well we play our scenes. Tomorrow they'll play the same scenes again with different actors. So I didn't kill anyone. I merely followed the script. All the world's indeed a stage and we are merely players.…” He paused, frowning and confused. “No, that's not it. The meter is all wrong. I've got it mixed up. Line!”

Someone knocked on the door. Endo clapped his hand over my mouth before I could scream. I tried to drive a knee into his stomach, but I couldn't get enough leverage to make it hurt. I tried to bite his hand. He forced my legs down and grabbed something off the floor. “Don't get your panties in a wad,” he whispered as he crammed a pair past my teeth, gagging me. “This is all part of the show. I hope you like it.”

He put his knee on my tit and crushed me into the bed while he pulled on his gloves, then his hood. Somebody was really hammering on the door. Endo leaned his full weight onto me until the black spots started to close around. I heard a distant crack, like a stick breaking, and felt something give in my chest. Then he left me in the bed with the springs bouncing up and down, hardly able to breathe at all.

The door exploded in the next room. I rolled off the bed, landed on my shoulder and felt my broken rib grind against itself. I sat up, trying to twist out of the bra binding my arms. I choked on the panties in my mouth, almost vomited and fought it back down. I knew if I vomited into my gag I would drown. Adam's head appeared around the side of the doorframe, scoping the room. I tried to scream but I think the noise only made him more careless. He entered at a crouch, pistol held low in both hands. Endo drifted in silently behind him with the baseball bat. He smacked Adam once across the broadest part of his back. Adam let out a surprised wuff of air, staggered and dropped to one knee. His gun popped off, punching a hole through a pane of glass above my head. Then Endo hit him on the crown of the head so hard the bat broke at the logo. Dots of Adam's blood stung my face. He lurched to his feet, spun and landed on his back with his legs already running, the heels of his black department-issue brogans hammering the floor like a drum line, his whole body convulsing. It seemed to go on forever. His gun came spinning out and slid under the bed so fast I heard it hit the wall.

Finally, he lay still, breathing shallow, his eyes swimming in his face, then one big breath, taking it all in, and then out and no more. I watched him die, helpless. My knight in shining armor. His eyes tight shut, like he didn't want to see it coming.

Endo stood in the doorway, hugging himself and holding the broken bat handle to his chest. He pulled off his hood and dropped it on the floor, dragged the sleeve of his black pajamas across his mouth, leaving behind a white swipe of bare skin like a clown's smile on his face. “This fell sergeant is strict in his arrest,” he whispered. “Yet who would have thought he had such blood in him!”

I said something, I don't know what. The panties in my mouth swallowed my words. It didn't matter anyway. I couldn't hurt him with words or make him stop or even give him a moment's pause. There was nothing human in him to appeal to. A shrill and eerie whistle blew through the bullet hole in the window, like a teapot coming to boil, and a fine mist of rain drifted into the room. The air grew bitter cold. The storm, so long in coming, arrived all at once. The rafters shook with thunder, the window rattled in its frame. The candle on the floor flickered and blew out.

“What's done cannot be undone,” Endo said as he closed and locked the bedroom door.

 

43

H
E WALKED SLOWLY
AROUND
A
DAM'S
body. “I wish I had brought my video camera,” he said. The storm was really churning outside now, the rain slashing against the window, misting the floor through the bullet hole. I lay over on my side to ease my ribs and wait for death.

Endo unbuckled Adam's belt, unzipped his pants and pulled them down to his ankles, then flipped his body over. I turned my head and looked under the bed so I wouldn't have to watch. It was too dark under the bed to see Adam's gun, not that I could have reached it with my hands tied. I was glad for the noise of the storm. I fixated on the most mundane thing in the world—my empty suitcases. I imagined them full of clothes.
When this is done I'll go on a trip. Where will I go?
Someplace warm, where the sun shines all day. It's so cold in Memphis in November.

Endo knelt beside me. “Are you crying?” he asked. He pulled the panties from my mouth, then held an open beer to my lips and I drank, thankful. He sat me up and leaned me against the bed, but I kept my eyes averted. He sat on the floor beside me with the candle, bag of white powder, spoon and needle. He was naked, his pale flesh green in the traffic light, his face black. He lit the candle and set it on the floor. “I have something here I know you'll like. This ain't no Nixon. This is the real goma, honey. This is red rum straight off the boat from Karachi, courtesy of the Taliban and the Goddamn CIA. I know a guy who brings it up the Mississippi River by barge.”

He shook a fat deck of powder into the spoon and added a slosh of beer, then set it over the flame to cook. He leaned back, his shoulder resting against mine, like we were two old junkies sitting in an alley by a fire in a trash can. “I want you to understand I take no pleasure in killing you.”

“Why not?” I tasted blood in my mouth. “Did it give you pleasure to kill Adam and James?

“They served their purposes. Everybody does. You have your purpose. He had his. They had theirs. Me? I'm an actor, but do you know how many lead roles there are for Japanese men? I tried to stage a production of
Ran
, which is
King Lear
set in medieval Japan, but I couldn't get backing for it, not even from my grandfather. Do you know why? They said there weren't enough Japanese actors in Memphis to fill out the cast.
It's fucking theater!
Use your fucking imagination! The actors don't have to be Japanese, just like you don't have to be a fucking moor to play Othello. Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. Do you know who said that?”

I didn't answer. What was the point? Everything he said was scripted. His head was full of quotes, non sequiturs, nightmares and murder. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the side of the bed.

“Bertolt Brecht.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No, I didn't think you had. Otherwise you would have known I was doing Brecht's
Edward the Second
, not Marlowe's.”

“What?” I opened my eyes and looked at him.

He twisted his comic mask into a sick smile and nodded. “My staging of
Edward the Second
was Brecht's version. I didn't expect anyone to realize that.
Who is dark, let him stay dark, who is unclean, let him stay unclean. Praise deficiency, praise cruelty, praise the darkness!
But I didn't want to correct you in front of your friends.” He laughed and elbowed my broken rib. “Know what I mean?” I sucked air and sat up straight, feeling the bone push into my lung.

When I could breathe again, I asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“For the art of it, more than anything else.”

“This isn't art, Wayne. Nobody but you will appreciate it.”