High Life (5 page)
Days passed. I’m not sure how many, they were all pretty much the same. Beer, junk food, pills. Sprawled on the bed, shades down but the windows open for air. I sweated and didn’t wash. I wanted to be dirty. I wanted to be caked in filth.
In the kitchenette things rotted.
Crushed cigarette packs and empty beer cans made walking around the place hazardous. But that was okay because I didn’t do it much. The bathroom thing was a drag, so mostly I leaned over the edge of the bed and pissed in a bottle. Once I took a shit in a plastic bag.
The TV ran eighteen hours a day, from the moment I could coordinate sufficiently to thumb the button in the morning, until the daily buildup of tranq and booze reached a level that interfered with vision.
A couple of times, when it was dark and quiet, I went outside to check the car. Once, I got in and drank a beer and listened to the radio.
I guess fugueing out this way was a reaction to something. Maybe a shrink could tell you. I put it down to my newly hatched rejection of the mainstream. And to something else a lot simpler to understand—fear. Fear that Karen’s death might bleed forward in time and fuck me up.
I was already the object of Ryan’s attention. I had no idea where the whacko play at the morgue was going to lead, but even a best-case scenario was something I could do without. And I kept thinking about Karen’s tattoo. It hadn’t meant anything to me when she’d had it done. She’d come home with it one day a few months back, I’d had a look, made the usual comments, and that was that. She told me she’d had it done with a friend. What did I care? It was just another piece of body decoration.
So it would have been easy enough to tell Ryan what had been on the missing square of skin. It would have been, so to speak, no skin off my nose. Just like I could have told him she’d recently had her kidney removed.
But I hadn’t. And despite my gnawing three
A.M.
fears, I wasn’t going to. I was out of that world now. Out of the world where sniveling Joe Citizen did his best to be a good boy.
Plus, as with already knowing she was dead, letting on about the other things now would only make me look more suspicious.
* * *
A market on Lincoln, evening coming down. I was out of the apartment for the first time in four days and I had no feeling about it. The paranoia I’d experienced on Main the night I stocked up at the Korean store had been replaced by a numbed insularity. I moved, but I didn’t feel the air against my skin. I heard the sounds of traffic and people, but they were filtered through some muting device that rendered them meaningless. The colors and angles and planes of the surrounding buildings were indecipherable. None of this bothered me. I wanted booze and food, I wasn’t thinking about much else.
Until a wino hassled me for change as I approached the sliding doors. He was one of a group of four, all of them crusted like forgotten, turn-of-the-century statues in that brown semigloss accretion cities use to camouflage the homeless. Their clothes—all of them wore too many for the summer heat—had the slickness of oilskin, their hair looked like something dredged from the bottom of a river and smeared into place with a trowel. They stank of shit, garbage, and genital cheese.
The guy in my face was about fifty and pretty close to the edge; sores around his mouth, the shakes, liquid eyes, that dumb expression beggars get through years of humiliating themselves by asking other people for money. It looked like he needed a drink pretty badly. It looked like the hope of getting one was the only thing holding him together.
I pushed past into the cool interior. Produce section. I felt a stab of guilt as I moved past the fresh, crisp, tastefully arranged bins. Every famous person on the planet ate a super diet of carefully balanced fruit and vegetables, unrefined carbohydrate, and hormone-free protein. It was important. It meant you stayed looking better than everyone else. I knew I should do it too. My telehosting course had stressed the impact of good skin tone and clear eyes on the projection of personality. But I couldn’t do it. I could never do it. And all the words about it from books and TV health shows and the stars’ beauty tips in magazines spun in my head until the only way I could shut them down was to eat stuff that was so manifestly bad for me there was simply no point in attempting dietary salvation.
I went to the chiller cabinet that lined the rear wall and leaned against it, face on glass, exchanging heat. Packaged meat, low cholesterol dips, zero-cholesterol cakes, naturally extracted juices … Most of the food had product photos on the front and I got hung up for a while picturing the homes they must have been taken in. Soft lighting, tasteful decoration, high-income furnishings. Successful homes where life was fulfilled and comfortable. I quit when the security guys started to hover.
Inside this hangar-sized supermarket the feeling of detachment that swaddled me increased. The overweight women, the tired men, the whining kids—all the fucking, guzzling calibrations of moderate-income humanity—trundling their carts up one aisle and down another, seemed so pointless and disgusting it frightened me to consider I was part of the same race. They were fairground constructions, papier-mâché models drawn in shopping circuits by a network of hidden cogs and chains. Things to be shot at or knocked over with baseballs.
I hit the snack and convenience-food sections heavily, then moved on to liquor. Bud was reduced so I took a couple of six-packs. On my way to the checkouts I had to pass the spirits. Brandy, gin, vodka, all the rest. On an impulse I added a half gallon of generic whiskey to the beer.
The girl at the checkout swiped my Visa and we had a few seconds’ wait for authorization. Time to worry about credit balances and to wonder what her cunt looked like, and if sitting on it all day crusted up her briefs. I was putting my stuff into paper sacks when she handed my card back. She smiled. I smiled too. And pictured my load sliding off her chin.
“Spare change, buddy?”
Same wino as before, the fuckwit didn’t realize he’d already asked me ten minutes ago.
“Spare change, buddy?”
Lush voice. All clogged mucus and collapsed nasal passages.
“Buddy? Buddy? Just something so’s I can get something to eat.”
I looked past him, at his three derelict companions slumped against a wall twenty feet away. They were watching expectantly, gearing up to grab a share. I spoke quietly so they wouldn’t hear.
“You don’t want anything to eat. But I bet you could use a drink.”
“Well, to tell you the truth …”
“Sure. It’s a hard life.”
“Damn hard. Takes it out of a man just sucking in your next breath. I don’t suppose you got a bottle in one of them sacks, do ya?”
He couldn’t take his eyes off the bags in my arms. When he spoke it was to them. His lips were cracked and he licked them constantly.
“A fine young man like you, mister, sure to be taking maybe a bottle of wine home for dinner. A fine civilized young man like yourself.”
“Are they your friends, over there?”
“Yes, sir. We been watching out for each other a few months now. Lots of others come and go, but we stuck together.”
“Ah … See, I’m thinking there won’t really be enough to go around. What do you want? A few mouthfuls for everyone, or something more sensible?”
The wino flicked a quick look over his shoulder and licked his lips some more.
“Well, mister, I sure wouldn’t want to do nothing that weren’t sensible. What exactly is it you got in there?”
“I think we want somewhere more secluded.”
“Can I take a peek first, mister? Just to kinda fortify myself.”
I let him see the whiskey.
“Holy Jesus Christ! Come on, there’s a place around back.”
He took off at a trot, coat flapping, skinny arms jerking arrhythmically. It looked like the sockets of his hips were filled with broken glass. He made it about twenty feet, then stopped when he realized I wasn’t beside him and waved frantically for me to catch up.
The market kept its garbage hoppers in a three-sided brick pen. The walls were about six feet high and, crouching at the back, we were pretty much shielded from view. Cars in the parking lot were visible through the open end but the sky was getting bruised around the edges by then and I figured the evening shadows would hide us well enough. Besides, I wasn’t going to do anything that bad.
When I pulled the whiskey out of the paper sack the wino almost lost control. He grabbed for the jug, but I held it out of reach.
“You a hard-drinking man?”
“Mister, I’m the hard-drinkinest man you ever met. How much of that hooch you figure you got to take home?”
“Have a taste.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
I kept hold of the jug but let him pull it to his mouth and take a small swallow. Then I took it away.
“Oh, Jesus, mister, don’t do that to an old man. You know what they say, a taste is worse than none at all.”
His laugh was so laden with need I felt like squirming.
“Maybe I should get your friends. It doesn’t seem fair to leave them out.”
“You don’t want to do that. No sir, not if you want to keep any for yourself. They’ll drink it dry. I seen them fuckers do it before. Just you and me’s best. Believe me.”
His eyes flicked back and forth between my face and the jug. He was dribbling and it looked like he was on track for some kind of wino anxiety attack.
“Want some more?”
“Fuckin’ A—I mean, damn straight I’d like some more. You can spare it, can’t you, mister? For this old bastard?”
“Two conditions.”
“Whatever you want. I’m happy to oblige.”
“You get five minutes with the bottle. Five minutes only.”
“Okay. Sure, sure.”
“And you stop drinking longer than twenty seconds, I take it away and give it to your friends.”
“All right, mister, whatever you say. Let me at it. Let me at it!”
I gave him the jug. He held it with both hands, tipped his head back, and started to gulp. He got about a quarter pint inside him before he stopped to take a breath.
“Whoa, buddy, that’s the right stuff. That hits the spot for sure.”
His eyes were watering a little, but he seemed okay. The only immediate change was he looked a bit healthier.
“Ten seconds.”
“Just getting my wind.”
“Fifteen seconds.”
He stuck it in his face again. His swallows were a little slower this time, but he was still going for it.
“Fucking Jesus, I ain’t been let loose on this much hooch for a long time. I gotta take my coat off. Won’t be more’n a few seconds.”
“Take your coat off.”
He was sweating. When his coat came clear, the stink of his body filled the space around us. Mostly piss, but a lot of other rotted down stuff as well.
“Better start again.”
“A few more seconds.”
I reached for the jug.
“Okay! Jesus Christ, what’s your hurry?”
He clutched the whiskey to his chest like he was holding a baby.
“I said there were conditions. If you don’t want any more …”
“Shit, who said anything about that? Just trying to pace myself, is all.”
“Give it back.”
He jerked the jug to his mouth so fast he cut his lip. Blood ran around the opening and down one side of his chin in a thin red line. I don’t think he noticed. He was trying to use a few brains this time, making his mouth small and taking shallow sips. His arms shook with the effort of keeping the jug steady.
When he came up for air he made a sort of hooting noise. I guess it was a laugh.
“Phew, buddy, I think I’m getting the hang of this. Got a smoke?”
“You don’t have time.”
Under the dirt his face was flushed. He grinned stupidly, shrugged like he had a man’s job to finish, and raised the whiskey again.
This time some of it went down the wrong way and he spluttered violently, trying to clear his throat. Something ran out of his nose and he stuck his head between his knees and coughed for a while. When he straightened, the skin around his eyes looked swollen and there was a caul of spit across his chin. About a fifth of the jug was gone. He dragged his sleeve across his face and started humming snatches of some tune to himself.
“How much of it are you going to drink?”
“All of it.”
“Half a gallon?”
“You just watch me.”
And away he went again.
A little while later he started puking. I heard his teeth crunch against glass as his head jerked forward and a fountain of booze sprayed around the neck of the jug. He managed to get it away from his face, but his guts didn’t stop heaving. Dark gouts of whiskey and whatever else he’d had in his stomach splatted onto the concrete between his knees and ran into the V of his crotch. The liquid foamed at the edges.
“Bit ambitious, the whole jug.”
“This make you feel good, you pitiless prick?”
“Have some more.” “You think I won’t?”
