Apartment Seven (10 page)

And still, I embrace the rage, hold it close and fuck it like a lover as it takes over, ripping me to pieces just as the pain of loss and separation and destruction of everything I held dear tore me to shreds in a feeding frenzy of evil and horror.

I hate you for what you’ve done. I hate me for what I’ve done. I hate you and I love you and I can’t stop either one.

The room goes dark.

The old woman peered at me from darkness, eyes glaring, mesmerizing me against my will as her arthritically gnarled hand reached through the night to show me her palm, that hideous tattoo, and the blood pooling there…

I pace back and forth in a narrow little box of a room. A cage. Alone. But around me is the constant din of the monster that holds me captive. I have heard it for years, and will continue to hear it for the rest of my life. Day and night, it seldom stops. When it does, it means pain is near. Quiet is something one never wants to hear in this awful place. Quiet means someone is about to die. I will die here, in this little box. I will rot within the carcass of this monster until I am no more. Demonized, hated, and finally, forgotten. I am old and damaged both physically and emotionally. My body is weak and sore from years of physical and sexual abuse, and my mind has been in tatters for ages. I am a sad and pathetic old man, tucked away in a trunk that will never be opened. And that is exactly where I should be. I have earned my station in life, though I’m already dead and have been for a very long time. In fact, I can no longer remember what living is like. It all seems more like something I saw in a movie, or perhaps read about in a book. It is anything but real. I don’t even feel regret anymore. I don’t feel anything at all. And I never will again…

I sit on the edge of a familiar bed. Jenna is next to me. We hold each other tight as tears stream across our faces. Her head wound has left her grotesque and frightening, her shattered skull and mangled brain exposed, her pretty face specked with blood and sorrow, her hair matted down and her petite body soaked with blood and bodily fluids. I look into what remains of her eyes and know all I need to know, all I need to see, and understand all that has been lost, thrown away and murdered. With a bloody hand, she rubs my bare chest, stroking it at first but then pushing harder, her slender fingers kneading and probing until it becomes painful.

Holding her sad, dead stare, I offer no resistance.

Her fingers push harder against me and finally break through, puncturing my flesh and bone with a popping and crackling sound until her hand is inside my chest up to the wrist. I gag and vomit blood into my lap as she goes deeper and I feel her hand wrap around my beating heart. I can feel her fingers pressing on it, and the bottom of my throat constricts as if I’m being strangled. She squeezes and I feel as if I’m going to come out of my own skin. More blood and bile clog my throat, explode and bubble up and out of my mouth, through my nostrils and the corners of my eyes as she squeezes harder still and yanks down, ripping it free with a sickening tearing sound.

I cry out as my bowels and bladder let go and another wave of blood explodes from my mouth, covering us both in thick, black crimson.

She leans her head on my shoulder lovingly, her hand still deep inside me. I probe her head wound with my fingers, searching, pushing and tearing, as if ripping at the skin of an orange, until I can touch her brain. I scratch at it; feel scrapings of brain collect beneath my fingernails like dirt.

I kiss my wife on the mouth. Blood passes between us, sprays and spatters about as a gory reminder of our agony, the horror of our love, our loss, our lies and our betrayals, lives once lived, lives never realized, days and years and jobs and friends and each other lost and gone forever.

I see Curtis Gwynn sitting in a chair, Jenna kneeling next to him, her hand and mouth working on him, trying to bring life to his soft dead cock.

I push my thumbs into my eyes until my eyes are no more.

Somewhere in that bloodbath—perhaps because of it—while there is not yet transcendence or grace, there is rebirth and forgiveness. Isn’t there?

Dark clouds roll in, save me, take it all away and remind me that there is still a chance, still hope even on this cold and dark and hellish night…

The old woman stood staring at me from the hallway, her eyes intense and unblinking, as if trying to hypnotize me.

Somewhere far off, a siren blared then faded away. I looked behind me.

The elevator.

I ran to it, stabbing frantically at the call-button as the old woman shuffled toward me, the same insidious grin on her painted face.

A bell rang and suddenly the elevator doors opened.

Once inside, I quickly hit
2
then flattened myself against the back of the car and prayed the doors would close in time.

They did.

The old elevator groaned and grumbled and roared, coming to life like an ancient beast that had slept for centuries.

With a loud bang, it rattled and screeched and began to rise, slowly carrying me to Apartment Seven.

-8-

I rolled over, coughed, and then struggled into a sitting position and swung my feet around to the cold floor. My stomach was upset and I was gripped with terrible nausea.
Christ
, I thought,
it’s freezing in here
. Shivering, I reached back for the blankets, pulled them from the old mattress and wrapped myself in them. Most had holes and tears in them and were so threadbare they’d become transparent in spots, but if I used enough of them and wrapped myself tight they still did the trick. I sat there on the edge of the mattress in the dark room awhile, dazed and groggy, shivering and sick to my stomach. I scratched my head. My hair was greasy and needed to be washed, just like the rest of me, and my mouth was coated with muck that tasted like sour milk.

I flicked the switch next to the old crate that served as a nightstand, forgetting we hadn’t had power in a long time. I fumbled around in the dark until I found my cigarettes and a book of matches. I struck one and held it to the candle on the crate, watching bleary-eyed as it caught and slowly illuminated a good portion of the bedroom. The place was a mess. Dirty clothes, bits of trash, empty bottles and old pizza boxes were strewn from one wall to the next.

I glanced at the crate. An old word jumble book sat there alongside a nub of a pencil. Jenna had always liked puzzle books. It was open to a page marked CELEBRITIES. The first two jumbles read: JANE DAMES and CHAN VIDDLY.

Earlier, she’d solved the puzzles.

J
A
N
E
D
A
M
E
S
. JAMES DEAN.

C
H
A
N
V
I
D
D
L
Y.
DAVID LYNCH.

My foot brushed something, an old shoebox full of photographs on the floor next to the mattress. I peered down into the shadowy light and remembered going through them. Lately I’d been obsessed with the photos because in a sense our entire lives were in that shoebox. From older photos of Jenna and me before we got married, to a few wedding photos, to pictures of our first apartment, to our old friends Alan and Gary, photos of the brownstone we’d eventually purchased, of Jenna in her business attire and me in a suit and tie, two young professionals on the way up, so certain our lives would forever be the storybook we’d believed them to be. The photographs chronicled everything that was good about our lives, or at least had been. And why wouldn’t they? No one took pictures at funerals. No one wanted to remember bad times, only the good.

Partially concealed by the photographs, I also noticed a revolver in the box. Using my foot, I pushed the box away beyond the reach of the candle and into the darkness where it belonged.

I stabbed a cigarette into the corner of my mouth, sparked it up, and with another hearty cough, managed to get myself into a standing position. My body was sore and stiff, and my knuckles were scraped raw.

After a second or two, I remembered why.

Bare feet freezing on the cold floor, I shuffled out into the other room to find it illuminated by numerous candles. Jenna had covered the windows with old sheets so the place had the eerie, shadowy look of a candlelit church, maybe a tomb. It was just as messy here, just as awful, but I’d become skilled at dismissing such things and sometimes no longer even seeing them. Like some twisted joke, a worn and dirty tabletop Christmas tree sat on the floor in the middle of the room, a used paperback book beneath it as if left there by some poverty row Santa Claus. Several cartons of half-eaten Chinese food were scattered along the floor just inside the doorway. They made me think of Dino and the last time I’d seen him in Chinatown trying so hard to look like he knew how to handle a gun.
Poor Dino
, I thought.
Always wants to do the right thing but almost never does.

Jenna was sitting on a pillow on the floor playing with her new toy. At first glance she looked like a child, in a ratty old coat she’d gotten from the Salvation Army store, one of those old nylon parkas she might’ve worn back in high school with the fake fur trim around the hood, which she had pulled up over her head. She adjusted positions as I realized she didn’t have anything on underneath it.

“How long have I been asleep?” I asked her.

She looked up with tired, glassy eyes. She’d been so beautiful once, and now, like me, was a mere shadow. Dirty, sickly thin, pale and in a perpetual state of grogginess. “Long time. When you finally came home you were out of it. You came in, did your thing and crashed. Been out cold ever since.”

“Who’s been here?”

“Nobody. You and me.”

“I heard the elevator,” I told her. “Goddamn thing woke me up.”

She nodded. “Yeah, it’s been running on and off all night, but there’s nobody there.”

“Nothing else in this dump works but that fucking elevator won’t die. The building doesn’t even have power anymore, how’s it possible?”

“I think maybe it’s possessed,” she said.

Why not
? I thought.

“Errol, there’s something I need to tell you.” Jenna put her toy aside a moment. “While you were gone I went to the soup kitchen to get something to eat. Got some bad news. Mabel died.”

An old homeless woman we’d known for a while, Mabel was one of the few street people I liked and got along with. I’d been worried about her in these freezing temperatures. “Who told you that?”

“Cap Payens.”

“Cap Payens is a drunk old homeless fool that thinks he still drives a cab and tells everybody he’s in the Illuminati.”

“He’s the one who found her. She froze to death in an alley across town.”

I wandered over to one of the windows, pulled back the sheet enough so I could see the street below. “She always called me Maury, remember?”

“She always called me Beatrice.”

“I’m gonna miss that old girl.”

“Me too.”

“Where are my clothes?” I asked.

“I brought them out to a barrel in the lot next door and burned them.”

I looked back at her.

She pulled her hood off then combed a string of hair behind her ear with her fingers. She wouldn’t make eye contact. “They had blood all over them.”

I took a drag on my cigarette, exhaled through my nose.

“Did you kill him?” she asked.

“He got what he had coming.”

“He’s just a harmless old man.”

“Don’t defend him,” I said evenly. “This shit between you and me, it’s not over yet. I’m still working it through. Just because I came back doesn’t mean everything’s fucking roses, you hear me?”

“Did you kill him?” she asked again, still not looking at me. “Did you?”

“He’ll live.”

I could see the relief in her face, in the tears in her eyes.

“You gonna cry for him now, is that it?”

Finally, she met my stare. “I’m crying for us.”

After a moment she went back to fiddling with her toy, a fancy phone Curtis Gwynn had given her. He’d even paid for several months of service. “Why don’t you just text the fuck and ask him if he’s all right?”

“Because I told you it was over and it is.”

“But you’re gonna keep that thing? You know what we could get for that?”

A spasm-like smile of embarrassment crossed her face, and she rocked back and forth on the pillow as if she had to go to the bathroom. “Never had one like this before, not this nice. Once the service is gone we’ll sell it then, OK?”

“He gave it to you so you two could send your little love notes back and forth and play your little sex games.”