This wasn’t relaxing.
It was too soon to have developed a tolerance for the drug, wasn’t it?
When was the last time he took a pill?
Take a pill, take a pill, take a pill. Ugh, that was what weaklings did. Take a pill. The world is shit. Take a pill. Your wife is dead. Take a pill. The kids are dead. Take a pill. Take two pills. Take a whole bottle of pills and be done with it. Fuggit. Forget it. Man was made to suffer. Didn’t some poet say that? Somebody said it. Maybe it was a song. Okay, I’m making a compact with myself, he thought. In the remaining weeks I read. I read everything Mona can get her hands on. The classics. I read some, but not enough. And always it was for school. I need to make a list. Let the others do what they will, chase their tails, fritter it away, but I’m going out enriched in the brains department.
Abe got off the bed, grabbed a bar of Ivory soap and walked up to the roof, shedding garb as he made the ascent. Modesty? Antiquated notion. The downpour drummed against the pebbled-glass skylight, smearing the soot, its rhythm beckoning Abe forward. Let the others cower in their hidey-holes. Or whatever they were up to. From the sounds of it as he passed the Italian ape’s digs, some vigorous buggery. To each his own. Abe dropped the last of his attire as he stepped onto the tar paper, which shimmered with wetness, reflecting each stroke of lightning. His body, even well fed, was lank and achromatic. Had his balls always hung this low? Who could remember? The sky looked like a backdrop from an expressionist German film of the silent era-thick, black clouds set asymmetrically against deposits of leaden gray. With the recurrent lightning the buildings all became, at least in flashes, monoliths of pure black and white.
Absolute.
As a youngster Abe had been instructed in absolutes. There was good and evil, period. Good folks and bad. As an adolescent he saw little to contradict that. The Nazis were unadulterated evil, easy to fight, easy to hate. Their atrocities left no room for debate. He’d joined up and fought for good, and even though the horrors were manifold, the cause was inarguably virtuous-and this was before he was aware of the death camps. He’d seen brutality in all its gory glory. But glimmerings of gray began to afflict his psyche. His first German corpse conflicted with the propaganda. This wasn’t some massive Hun with sharpened teeth-though even as a naïve teen, Abe hadn’t really expected the enemy to look that way. But this was just a kid. Skinny, blond, lightly freckled, soft pink lips, and fading color in the cheeks. This wasn’t a Nazi; this was just a foot soldier. Just a dead kid in a muddy ditch.
The world was easier to absorb before that moment. Abe had liked black and white, and he’d missed it when it was taken from him. Down below, the multitude groaned in protest of the weather, their plaint drowned out by the pervasive, ground-shaking thunder. There were no towheaded blond kids with freckles and soft lips down there. Maybe once upon a time, but not now.
They were the enemy.
Us versus them.
Black and white.
But even those things lacked malice. They were just automated instinct.
As Abe lathered up, he missed gray.
At least Ivory was pure.
Mostly.
“Pretty in pink,” Karl burbled. His skin felt funny. Not funny ha-ha, but funny. Funny-ish. “I don’t even like The Psychedelic Furs.” He looked at the pill in his palm, filched from Mona’s stash. Pink. Though the Bible didn’t address drug use, there were very clear principles outlined in it that suggested drug use wasn’t acceptable. Christians were supposed to respect the laws of the land. But the land had no laws any more. This wasn’t recreational usage, anyway. This was a life-or-death experiment. That made Karl smile. He’d always found the term “experimenting with drugs” disingenuous, but that’s what this was. He felt very scientific.
And itchy.
And sweaty.
And cotton mouthed.
33
“She only has four toes.”
“What?”
“She only has four toes.”
“I heard you the first time. What are you talking about?” Ellen pushed back from the dining table and stared at Alan, who sat there stirring powdered nondairy creamer into room-temperature coffee, his spoon tinkling gratingly with each rotation. Finally, patience exhausted, Ellen snatched the utensil from her in-the-doghouse paramour’s hand and tossed it across the room, where it clattered into the sink. Ellen smiled with petty satisfaction and thought, She shoots, she scores. Swish.
“Mona. She only has four toes on each foot.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She was posing for me again today, so I could finish up the canvas I’d started-and don’t give me that look. Seriously. There’s no extracurricular activity and you’re not going to guilt me over an involuntary reaction. I got a boner. Sue me. Move on.” Ellen scowled but let her forehead relax, the creases ebbing. Alan continued. “I’d painted her with four toes on her feet and was looking to correct that. Not that I need a model for toes, but you know, it was curious is all. So she’s sitting there, in the same position…” Again Ellen scowled, the word “position” ever linked with carnality. Alan paused, let it pass, resumed his narrative. “And this time I scrutinized her tootsies…”
“Tootsies. How adorable.”
“Please? Could you please? Seriously? It’s enough, already. The point is I hadn’t goofed. She has only four toes on each foot.” Alan restrained himself from saying, “each beautifully turned foot,” or “each devastatingly sexy foot.” He pinched a testicle to suppress the erection he felt inevitable. Just the thought of those smooth, cartoony peds wreaked havoc on his libido. He’d once seen a porn video where a guy pulled out and came on the woman’s foot. At the time he’d thought it was the stupidest thing he could ever imagine. Things change.
“So what am I supposed to make of this little revelation?” Ellen said, unmoved by Alan’s news.
“Look, forget I said anything, okay? This is what couples do, right? They sit at the table and make small talk. Only I didn’t think this was so small. I thought it was genuinely interesting. It was just another thing to factor into Mona’s roster of oddness. Just forget it.”
“Consider it forgotten.”
Alan excused himself from the table and left the apartment. Better he should spend time alone. Was this some hormonal thing? Some pregnancy thing? The roller coaster ride had been fun-was “fun” even the right word? Fun? Interesting. The sex had been good. Stellar. Desperate, but explosive. But this? Did Mike deal with this or was this all some cumulative build up of hormones, grief, and immeasurable weltschmerz the likes of which the philosophers of yore never in their wildest imaginings grappled with? When he thought of it that way, Alan figured Ellen was entitled to some appreciable bitchiness. But it still was a compound drag.
He shuffled downstairs to his flat and swung open the unlocked door, taking in his miasma of death-world renderings, the gooey center of which were the portraits of his four-toed fantasy babe. Did he even want to fuck her? To be honest, yes, he surely did. The world was over, in spite of Ellen’s micro-attempt to repopulate it. New life just meant livestock for the ghouls outside, fresh meat for the grinder. What good were morals now? Maybe a sociopath like Tommasi had the right idea. Maybe so, but you had to be hardwired for that kind of thing. Nature versus nurture. Alan was a nice boy, period. A nice boy with a dirty mind, but really, was there any other kind? A nice boy with a clean mind was illusory.
He stepped into the kitchen and opened a package of Cheez-Its, scooping a handful into his mouth. Gone was the rationing mentality. He ate on automatic, not even tasting what he shoveled in. As a thick glob of orangey half-chewed mush wedged in his windpipe, hard edges scraping soft tissue, and he began to choke, the realization that eating had resumed its status as commonplace tickled his brain. Eating wasn’t no thang. He grabbed a bottle of Evian off the counter and took a few swigs, lubricating the doughy wad, swallowing hard, forcing it down. Not so long ago he’d have been nursing each cracker, savoring each bite, picking the crumbs off his shirt and putting them in his mouth, making it last. Now he was back to indifferent fistfuls. Alan walked over to the front windows and admired the crowd on York. The ol’ gang.