Ronnie had one, but he wasn’t keen on the idea of sharing her car. With a baby in the house she would need transportation while he was at work. Currently, he rode to work with his boss, but, well… maybe having only one car wasn’t as bad as he made it out to be. Maybe it was just another excuse not to have Ronnie move in with him, another way of avoiding his true feelings on the subject, or perhaps a fear of growing up.
By the time the bus dropped Calvin off a block from his apartment, all kinds of life realities were finally sinking in. Everything his father had told him was true. All that lip flappin’ from teachers throughout his senior year wasn’t half the waste he had thought it to be. He only wished he’d had his ears open to glean something from their advice. Even now his father was chewing his ear off with advice for the young man who impregnates a woman before marriage. God forbid he tell his old man that they never intended on marrying. His dad wouldn’t hear of it. Intentionally living in a partnership was something akin to living an alternative lifestyle and no son of Lance Shudderton was going to live like some dropout beatnik (his father had this thing about beatniks, as if he was even old enough to have associated with the type back in the day).
“So when are you and Ronnie tying the knot?” his father asked whenever he could. Calvin hated that question. Made him feel uncomfortable, more so than he already felt in the presence of his father. A man of what Lance called Old Fashioned Values and a believer in vigilante justice, Calvin couldn’t be more different. He felt almost discriminated in his father’s presence, as if his very choice in attire was offensive to the man. Every time his pop asked when he and Ronnie were getting hitched, he skated around the truth like a politician, easing his father into the notion that they were going to live out of matrimony like two civilized human beings. For a man who was staunchly unreligious, Lance would have made for one hell of a tightlipped and acrimonious preacher had he taken up the collar.
Calvin figured his father’s imposition in any sort of social setting was in part due to his mother leaving them twenty years ago. Lance had been devastated. He loved her deeply. More than she ever loved him. Lance said that she thought she didn’t have what it takes to be a good mother. Her leaving left Lance the duty of raising Calvin. His military sensibilities came out in the worst way, but Calvin didn’t knock him for his strictness. His father couldn’t do anything about Calvin’s fascination with blood and guts. Lance didn’t like it, but he was smart enough not to completely restrict Calvin from the world regardless of how tasteless his interests were.
The video called to Calvin, and when he got home he popped it into his VCR (he had two of them, both in excellent working condition). Murder, death, violent crime scenes, decapitations, executions, South American Death Squads, rotting corpses, suicides—It was exactly how he remembered it.
Three hours of death.
Six hours later, after viewing the film twice, Calvin was tired, but sleep wasn’t so easy to come by.
And he had completely forgotten to call Ronnie.
The clothes hanging over the chair at the corner of Calvin’s room resembled a corpse in the dark of night. It was clothing, he was sure of it, but he could see the blank staring eyes glistening in the moonlight that invaded his room through skewed blinds covering the window.
Calvin closed his eyes. Cadavers danced about, their heads rotten and swollen. He could see images from the video: A tribesman gunned down by a proud Brazilian, a human poacher. The tribesman’s face imploded by the fatal bullet, his lower jaw contorted and biting down over and over again from nerve reflexes like a lizard’s tail after being pulled off by a curious boy. Twitching, over and over.
Bodies lined up after a massacre in Iraq, their skin riddled with boils and chemical burns, all haunting Calvin behind closed eyes.
Contorted jaw twitching, over and over.
Calvin felt something beneath the covers. He jerked his hand away fearing it was one of those slaughtered Iraqis, but when he opened his eyes there was nothing there.
The clothes on the chair remained corpse-like. Calvin took it upon himself to remove the dirty laundry and threw the pieces of clothing on the floor. It only took a few moments before he picked them up again tossing them into a hamper in the closet, as, in his mind, they now resembled a dead man lying there on the carpet, perhaps the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot.
Two in the morning and Calvin couldn’t sleep. All he seemed capable of was viewing mental images from his marathon with Death’s Door. And the images were everywhere. In his closet, creeping around the door, beside him in bed!
At some point he finally fell asleep. The morning light never looked so sweet. The warmth filtering in onto his face through his blinds felt like the heat of a kitchen oven. He’d slept all night without a blanket, which left him with chilled feet. Cold like the…
He figured maybe he could sell the rare video on eBay. It would be best to get rid of it, but the video wasn’t done with him.
As he placed the tape in the mouth of the VCR, the machine regurgitating images onto his television, he thought he was watching for his own pleasure. He wasn’t, and that’s when it struck him, nearly causing him to choke on a spoonful of cereal.
“The Narrator! That’s him.”
Calvin re-winded the video to the opening credits—very modest they were with such an underproduction of clips acquired from police files and odd sources.
The credits rolled in bright red bloody-looking script like the title of a Cannibal Corpse album. Calvin read aloud the name of the narrator, obviously a pseudonym. “I. B. Ghastly.”
As the video replayed, he listened closely to the narration: “Here we enter an apartment where a foul odor has been complained about by the neighbors”—the voice was deeper than Christopher Lee’s—“the rotting body of a suicide victim, his brains decorating the wall in little dried fragments. Was he a failed businessman, an adulterer caught by his wife, or maybe just a lonely old man? We will never know for there was no suicide note found at this grisly scene of self-inflicted mayhem.”
That’s his voice all right, but who is I. B. Ghastly?
Calvin’s phone rang. It was Ronnie. He answered, his voice perhaps showing a bit too much desperation and relief that she’d phoned. They talked for a few minutes. He made his apologies; then they made plans to have dinner at a café downtown. They’d eaten there several times in the past two months. He should have been saving his money for the big changes that were coming, but her cravings came at a cost, and he’d found out one night, after getting verbally bitch-slapped for not running out and picking up an eclectic batch of food from Taco Bell, that heeding to her cravings was a must.
During their conversation he had one eye glued to the television screen, watching a cornucopia of death scenes and beginning to anticipate what was coming next, the way one familiarizes themselves with a favorite rock album.
After watching the video, time nonexistent as blood and guts decorated the television, he called an old friend. He and Russ decided to meet downtown at a coffee shop in the Gas Lamp Quarter. It was a good place to meet since Calvin would have to be downtown for his dinner date… and because the Museum of Death was nearby. Not that he had intentions of going there again.
Back when they were teens Russ had always been an avid fan of the macabre. He and Calvin used to go to the Museum of Death together before they went their respective ways after high school, now only talking to one another on an infrequent basis, usually in passing at a party or through text message.