Pariah (3 page)

“I can’t sleep.”

“Really?” Abe said, the sarcasm creeping back, edging out his miserable attempt at tenderness. “You could knock me over with a feather.” The fact was, you could knock either of them over with a feather, and not a particularly large feather at that. Two skeletons with a soupçon of withered meat held together by decrepit membrane lying side by side in a dilapidated sarcophagus.

One flight down, on the fourth landing, ear pressed against the door of 4B, Ellen Swenson clasped a hand over her mouth, suppressing the urge to call out to her husband, Mike, who dozed sporadically in their apartment, behind their currently unlocked door. Ellen had left her left flip-flop wedged between the door and the jamb and tiptoed across the narrow hall to eavesdrop. Mike didn’t believe her assertions about their neighbors, the jocks—the
former
jocks, at any rate. They were regular guys. Beer guzzlers. Hockey players. Bullies. Republicans.
Regular guys, for crying out loud
. Guy’s guys. Because they were so surface, to Ellen they also were something of a mystery. Mike’s argument, by way of Freud, was that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but Ellen didn’t buy it. With empty apartments still available, why’d they choose to live together when they arrived here? She didn’t just accept things at face value.

She had her theory, she needed proof and this gave her something to do when insomnia hit, which was almost invariably every night, especially since nights became interminable. No light, no entertainment, no conventional diversions. So Ellen made her own fun. As a girl she’d been a fan of Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, and even Scooby-Doo, so this meddling kid would tumble the jocks’ game if it killed her. If it didn’t, the boredom might.

The plus of a nearly silent world was that sound traveled. Sometimes that was a minus, but not right now. They must be in the living room, Ellen surmised. They sounded close. Really close.
Like, right by the door. But sound had a way of tricking you in the absolute dark. All she wanted was to hear something incriminating. Something to lord over Mike, to prove she was right.

“I don’t even know why I listen to you, Mallon,” came Eddie’s voice. Eddie, Ellen figured, was the alpha dog. He barked louder, seemed scarier. He was the one Ellen feared. Pasty, ginger Dave just kind of annoyed her. “You’re wrong about everything.”

“Dude, you need to take it easy on the water.”

“
Vaffanculo
, dude. Don’t mother hen me.” Eddie slammed the jug down on the counter to emphasize his dominance—
case closed
. “Fuckin’ twerps across the hall,” he spat. “Fuckin’ Swensons!”

At the sound of her name, Ellen stiffened.

“We should just beat the shit out of Mike and take his woman. Make her our sex slave. Only two fuckin’ women in here—”

“What about Gerri?”

“
Only two fuckin’ women in here
and one’s like ninety and the other’s married and monogamous. Fuckin’ monogamous! What kinda selfish outmoded shit is that, anyways? Don’t the Jews share everything on those kibbutz things? This is like that now, yo. This here. I’m tellin’ you, bro,
it ain’t right
.”

“Hey, chill out,” Dave scolded in a hushed voice. “Sound carries, you know?”

“I don’t give a shit,” Eddie boomed. “Let her hear. Let ’em both hear.
Hey, Swenson, I’m gunnin’ for your woman, bitch
!”

At that, Ellen’s insides felt like they were imploding. It wasn’t funny anymore. Though neither Dave nor Eddie were the strapping behemoths they once were, both still were formidable. Mike and she wouldn’t stand a chance against them in a physical confrontation.
Sex slave
. As she began to tremble, Eddie let out a burst of loud, bellicose laughter.

“I’m just fucking around, Dave. Chill.”

Chill, indeed. Even in the stultifying heat, Ellen’s skin erupted
in goose pimples, sweat turning cool on her forehead. Like a silent movie blind man she extended her arms and groped back toward her apartment door, slipped in and triple locked it in case Eddie wasn’t “just fucking around.”

Alan massaged his temples, removing his glasses, which were streaked and stained with sweat and skin oil. His “T-zone” was working overtime, his eyebrows smearing translucent patterns onto the lenses. Candles flickered, adding to the already oppressive temperature, but what was he supposed to do if he couldn’t sleep, just lie there and stare into the tenebrous void? He wasn’t in the mood to draw, so reading was the only thing left to do since television and the Internet became extinct. All his batteries were dead, so no more Walkman or iPod. Music was becoming but a sweet memory, along with regular meals, luxuriously long showers, movies . . . hell, everything.

Alan kept rubbing, feeling his pulse throbbing away just under the gauzy layer of dermis stretched over his skull. He contemplated dipping into his dwindling supply of store-brand ibuprofen, acetaminophen, or aspirin. Eyestrain. His mother always warned him about ruining his eyes by reading in inadequate light. She also warned him about sitting too close to the TV, but that advice was now moot. He wanted to keep reading. This was a good book, a real page-turner. His father used to lecture him about wasting his mind on junk. He’d urged Alan to read the classics, to broaden himself, to refine his mind. But Alan persisted in reading potboilers. Alan liked escapism when things were still good. Now escapism was his only luxury. His collection of sci-fi and crime paperbacks was worth its weight in gold. Scratch that; gold wasn’t worth anything any more. It was better than gold.
Sorry, Dad. Maybe Chaucer or Dickens or Goethe or Balzac or Sartre or whomever would have made me a better
person. Hard to say. But right now I’ll take my fantasy, thank you very much
.

Horror, on the other hand, he left to molder on the shelf.

The pain in his temples encroached into the middle of his head, meeting at the bridge of his nose, the beat incessant, insistent, insufferable. He switched from massaging the sides of his head to working between the eyes. He was going to have to stop reading and sink into the insomnious darkness. He really didn’t want to medicate himself. Alan licked his fingertips and pinched out the candles.

He slumped back onto his mattress. His face itched, still unused to being so thickly bearded; he had not mastered the art of the dry shave. Naked, sweaty, furry, blind until sunup, head pounding, and dry heaving from the fetor. Alan depressed the button on his digital watch. The red LED display announced it was 3:27 in the morning. Sunrise was about two hours away. An eternity. As Alan scratched and convulsed he drifted off, the only person in the building actually asleep.

One flight down, situated above the boarded-up abandoned Phnom Penh Laundromat, apartments 2A and 2B were vacant. No one wanted to live that close to the street, and 2B housed bad memories.

Blackness was ebbing. The room began to take on a dark, sickly bluish-lavender tint, like the walls were bruised, heralding the start of a new day. Ellen lay on her side, facing away from the twin windows beside the bed, watching the wall change color. The purple drained away, replaced by jaundiced ochre, which as brightness increased lost pigmentation. Finally the normal drab off-white hue solidified, the glaringly bright sunlight accentuating every imperfection in the wall’s surface—each crack, each patch of Spackle under the substandard paint job. The wall was scarred beneath the paint, reminding Ellen of her former boss, a woman with an unfortunate complexion who’d applied way too much base in a sad effort to mask what imperfections lay beneath. Instead all she did was draw attention to each pit on her acne-ravaged face, a hopeless topography of dermatological strife. Too much makeup was the female equivalent of the shoddy toupee. Whenever Ellen had seen a man wearing an obvious rug—and most of them were pretty damned glaring—she always figured no one really liked or loved him, because no one
wouldallow her husband or good friend go out in public looking that foolish.

The wall was pitted, a trifle buckled, somewhat bulgy in the middle. Their building was old, almost a hundred, but still settling. A couple years back she’d read in
New York
magazine that her block was right near a fault line. Maybe the earth would one day just start to shimmy and shake and swallow them all up. Better the earth than those
things
.

As hot as it was at night, it would be worse during the day, but at least she could see—not that seeing was much of a blessing. At night her field of vision was a wash of pitch black, unless she lit a candle. She could remember herself the way she was before. She could imagine some meat on her bones, some tone in her muscles. Hell, she could nostalgically remember some rolls of fat that she’d wished would go away.
At night
. During the day she could really absorb how awful she and everyone else looked. It had gotten so bad that your archetypal Auschwitz inmate would look at the residents of 1620 York Avenue and say, “Damn, those are some unhealthily skinny-looking motherfuckers.”

Or sentiments to that effect.

Ellen poked Mike in a furrow between his ribs until, with effort, his eyelids separated, revealing red-rimmed, yellowed, mucilaginous eyeballs. His mouth, a thin, wide, desiccated trench while sleeping, clenched and unclenched, lines radiating in parched spokes from his dull gray lips, which back in the day were red and full and the most kissable in the world. His mouth, as it attempted to form his first words on the day, pursed like the shriveled sphincter it was, lost in curly beard growth. Ellen still kissed that puckered bunghole of a mouth, but now it was perfunctory, a sad nod to past romantic glory.

“What?” Mike’s voice was Gobi hoarse.

“I think we need to bar the door better. Like, push some furniture up against it to make it impenetrable.”

With considerable effort, Mike sat up and rubbed crumbs from his eyes and nose.

“Why?” he croaked. “You think the amblers are going to get up here? They haven’t since that one time and I think it’s pretty well—”

“Not the amblers. Dave and Eddie. I heard them talking last night and—”

Mike gave her a sour look.

“Oh,
what
?” she said, folding her arms across her slatted chest, her breasts drooping like withered cutlets. Not the supple breasts of a successful twenty-seven-year-old Upper East Side urban-professional mom. They were more like the breasts seen in a magazine spread on depredation in Ethiopia or Somalia or some other godawful place—the kind of breasts that play landing field to legions of flies and their owners don’t even notice. These ruined teats had fed their child. They’d been large and full and life sustaining. They’d been ample and erotic. They’d been real ego boosters. Now they were depleted paps.

You’re no longer a mom when your child is dead—your
former
child.

Everything was
former
.

“You’re crazy,” Mike managed. “If they’d heard you out there, who knows what they would have done to you?”

Ellen had a pretty good idea, based on Eddie’s brief but memorable rant last night. She didn’t think they were above rape; if those jock assholes were slightly less malnourished she’d live in serious fear of them. Especially Eddie. Her assumption they’d gone the way of Fudgy McPacker might not be as watertight as she’d thought, and losing the comfort she took from the notion they’d been focusing their brutish carnality on each other didn’t improve her spirits.

“Anyway, promise me you’ll never do anything stupid like that again.”

“It wasn’t
stupid
, Mike.”

“Okay, not stupid. Uh, foolhardy. Ill-advised. Perilous.”

“It’s like you actually care.”

“I . . .” Mike began to sputter like an Evinrude. “What the . . . I . . . Of course I . . . What kind of way is this to start the day?”

Ellen shrugged and stepped off the bed, drifting toward the kitchen. “You want some water?” she asked Mike, whose face twitched apoplectically. He blinked a few times, then nodded, and she left the bedroom. Let him stew, she thought. She had no reason to torment him, but it killed time. Besides, it would give her something to apologize for later. The hours had to be filled with something, so why not a little domestic turbulence? Sex took too much energy, and besides they were both so thin and kindlinglike it just wasn’t fun any more. Bones ricocheting off bones, loose skin flapping around, bad smells. But it also passed some time and sometimes that was enough. They’d read all their books and magazines. Neither had any talent worth pursuing. Mike had been into photography, but that was no longer an option. She wrote bad poetry back in the day, but now why bother? What would she write about, the death of everything? Been done and done and done to death.

In the kitchen, Ellen poured half a glass from a 16.9-ounce bottle of Kirkland Signature Premium Water. But the water was far from premium. It was rain water. Ellen couldn’t remember how old the bottle was. They filled a whole case of them last rain. Ellen traipsed back into the bedroom where Mike now stood by the window staring straight across the alley at the neighboring building, not ten feet away. The windows there were stripped of any coverings and all were dark, bereft of life. There used to be noisy neighbors. Directly across from them there was this Latin couple who’d blast salsa
music at all hours of the day and night. They’d openly do drugs by their windows, smoking pot, doing lines. Once, the man spotted Mike peeping at them and made a finger gun and mouthed, “Pop, pop, pop,” then winked and flashed a gold-accented toothy grin.