Chain-smoking, I sat at my kitchen table in the dark. I’d finished the wine and was now drinking a can of beer, which was the only alcohol I had left in the house. This made me nervous. Everything was making me nervous. I took small sips of my cold can of beer, savouring it, knowing it would soon be gone and I’d still be wide awake, thinking about Elaine, trying to make some sense of what’s happened. I listened to the playback of Elaine’s and my phone conversation, over and over, studying Elaine’s voice, rewinding the tape when it came to the end. The cigarettes were making me cough but I knew I wouldn’t stop. I sat by the window and a cold wind kept blowing in as I attempted to blow smoke out. My beer was almost done. I knew there was no way I was going to get to sleep. I’d end up sitting in the dark, smoking, cogitating over the case, listening to the tape, getting nowhere. I decided to call Darren and see if he wanted to go for some drinks.
15
‘Shots!’ said Darren and I nodded. We drank whisky and beers. ‘So what was the deal with this Gerald Andrews guy?’ said Darren.
‘I’m not sure, but it looks like he was up to some shady stuff, though I’m not sure how bad it gets. Definitely questionable business deals, et cetera. He was very rich but probably not the best of men.’
‘Honra y provecho no caben en un saco,’ said Darren.
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m sure he was an asshole.’
‘Yeah. Seems like the type, not to curse the dead or anything,’ I said. ‘But he was probably bilking billions or something, I don’t know. The guy was filthy rich. Do you want another beer?’
‘Definitely,’ said Darren.
I was getting drunk and was having a hard time following Darren. I remember he said something about some girl he had a crush on and something like, now that blah and me’re blah, we’re blah blah. That’s all I made out. And in the background I faintly heard ABBA’s ‘SOS,’ though maybe it was just in my head. We stayed out late, though not surprisingly I don’t remember much. We sat on barstools. There was some sort of shouting going on. Someone was arguing with someone else. But we ordered another round of beers. The more he drank, the more hyper and animated Darren became, as I became withdrawn, heavy and tired. I was seeing double. I picked up my beer to take a swig; the bottle left a ring of water on the bar, though the ring didn’t join up. Darren was saying, ‘Of the tens of thousands of days the average person lives, the majority of them are spent in a state of agitation and/or anxiety, or at least that’s been my experience, in my give-or-take 9,000 or so days on Planet Earth, the only planet I know or will ever know most likely; perhaps my kids, if I have kids, or their kids, if my hypothetical children have children, will know a planet other than the one I inhabit but it’s doubtful that I will and that’s okay with me. You know?’ he said and I nodded. I wondered whether Darren had been snorting cocaine. ‘Before wars begin more male children are born and before they end more female children are born,’ he said.
‘Is that true?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah,’ he said, and said he read it somewhere.
‘What’s happening now,’ I said, ‘are there more males or females being born?’
‘In some societies more men are being born and in some societies more female children are being born — and in some species more males are being born and in some species more females are being born. So for some the end’s nigh,’ he said, ‘and for some it’s still a ways off. But I refuse to be a prophet of the apocalypse. There are enough of them around already, too many, without a doubt. So many people make money from selling the apocalypse. They’re the custodians of the status quo.’
The shouting in the bar got loud, so loud everything else went silent. Some guy yelled at some other guy, ‘You motherfucker!’ And then he attacked the guy with a pool cue. A brawl broke out and bottles started flying, one right past Darren and me that broke the backbar mirror. ‘Sauve qui peut!’ a man called out.
‘We better get the hell out of here,’ I said to Darren and we skedaddled. As we slipped out, dodging fists and glass, it felt like we were escaping a fire, the bar roaring behind us. I thought I heard a gunshot but it was probably just a car backfiring, I thought. It looked like a few people were seriously hurt in the mêlée but we didn’t stick around to find out. We staggered toward our apartments. Darren sucked on a wooden matchstick. I could’ve sworn I heard him say, a something triangle-based pyramid looks like an electric vagina, though I had no idea what that meant. He replaced the wooden matchstick he was sucking on with a cigarette and pressed his thumbnail into the sulphur head to ignite the match. He lit a cigarette for me, too, and after three drags I threw it in the wind, though it wasn’t that windy, so it dropped pretty much straight to the ground. We walked by a drunken mendicant singing like a pirate –
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the Devil had done the rest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
— as if he were marooned, without recourse to a ship or the sea, reduced to a pitiable landlubber.
‘A seafaring man without the sea,’ Darren said, and I told him I’d been thinking the same thing.
We talked and I slurred on about Elaine. About how I’d fallen for her. About how she gave me the slip. Darren listened politely as I made a fool of myself. I took a leak on a lamppost. I said to Darren in front of my building, ‘I hate the fact that I spent so little time with that woman and I’m going to spend so much time thinking about her, stuck on her, probably for forever, or for my short forever … She really set me up and fucked me over.’
And Darren said, ‘Don’t let her, man — drop the case. Drop it like a hot potato.’
I dropped my keys several times before getting into my place. When I finally got in, I kicked off my shoes and fell face down on the couch — dead weight. Half asleep, I dreamed of Elaine. We sat at a small table at the railway-car-like bar, the one she took me to after her husband had been murdered, the one with the Xmas lights around the bar, where we drank single malts neat. She stared into my eyes. Pupils dilating, she leaned into me, palms pressed against the tabletop, she leaned across the table and whispered into my ear: ‘The word thesaurus looks like it should be a type of dinosaur.’ She sat back down in her seat. I watched her palm prints slowly disappear from the tabletop. I didn’t see anybody smoking but saw a shadow of a stalk of cigarette smoke on the wall. ‘Shake a leg,’ she said. And then she told me that before her grandmother died, before her mismanaged diabetes finally killed her, she’d had her left leg amputated. She went into shock, she said, and became mute, so they gave her a shitload of Prozac or something to shock her out of her shock. For the year or so more she lived, she’d go to scratch her leg even though it wasn’t there. ‘She had phantom pains,’ Elaine said. And I repeated, ‘Phantom pains.’ And that’s all I remember.
16
I woke up before dawn and drank a glass of water while staring out the window. A torrential downpour — rain bouncing off the street. The window was open and the black curtains were filled with wind, swelling, and I looked at my reflection in the top section of the windowpane between the wind-parted curtains and thought of Elaine staring at my reflection in the windowpane at her house in the room where she’d found Gerald’s dead body, lying on the couch, with a knife in his chest. She was with her lover somewhere, and they were both in on the murder. What else could’ve happened? It was the only explanation that made any sense, I thought, staring at my own weak reflection. I knew she fled because of her involvement in the murder but I couldn’t help but think she’d disappeared under the impossible pressure of my desire. Somehow, even though I hadn’t said anything, she knew I loved her — so she fled, I thought. Temporarily, time and space made sense because I was in love. Or, rather, I thought I was in love, I thought. But she’s gone now, I thought, and I’ll never find her. The rain was loud like loud static and I tried to ignore the ghost of my image and concentrate on the water bouncing off the street, instead of my transparent reflection. I’m a huge sucker, I thought, an irremediable sucker.