Thrust (14 page)

Annie Singleton left then, limping away with a heavy air.
 
As she reached the door someone passed her coming in.
 

They brushed shoulders but didn't look at one another.
 

It was
Jez
, who met Chase's gaze with a jealous lover's scowl.
 
It promised joy and professed anguish, and after this he still had prison to look forward to.
 

Turning.

Turning, staring around, looking at the door to Isaac's room and listening to Shake starting in on the
babaganoush
, Chase fell back into himself.

The need to get the hell out of the hospital ripped through him as he rushed through the corridors, barely keeping himself from breaking into a dead run.

When he hit the street he looked up the block and saw Joe Singleton standing on the corner, dressed in a T-shirt and black leather vest.
 
He still had a pony tail and had never gone in for any plastic surgery, his face ruined from the accident.
 
His busted piggy nose flailed across the center of his face.
 

He gave Chase that same nod again and moved away, joining the crowd crossing to the other side of the street.
 
Chase thought he was coming over but instead Singleton hailed a cab and took off downtown.
 

C
hase walked in the same direction, wondering if Singleton were on his way to Chase's apartment right now to try out his couple of moves with the blade.

He scanned every store front, alleyway, and face coming at him along the sidewalks.
 
After five years, Singleton would want to make the game last, have some fun.
 
Toy with Chase for a while.
 
It wasn't going to go down quick.
 

Once, he thought he saw
Arlo
Barrack's reflection in the window of a wicker furniture shop on Ninth Street.
 
Chase had to focus, had to try to fight the time-sense aphasia.
 
He could step off a curb and relive six hours of his seventh birthday party in his jumbled mind, seeing the kids and tasting the vanilla frosting of the cake,
pissy
about a couple of the presents because they weren't what he was hoping for.
 

Hearing his mother with a direct and almost numbing clarity, while she took photos and kept telling him to smile.
 
Mom moving to him, about to say something else, perhaps give some advice that would bring meaning to his life from that point on.
 
The flash going off, her lips parting, as she said his name and returned to the world, coming down off the damn curb.

He struggled to stay in the now.
 
He'd promised Annie Singleton that he wouldn't forget and yet, even with the girl Stacy finding him over and over, he had.
 
He still wasn't ready.
 
He'd gotten lazy and crazy and it was going to cost him if Singleton spun out of a darkened door and tried to clip Chase's hamstrings.

By the time he got back to his apartment he'd spotted Barrack again, slipping between
 
delivery trucks.
 
Chase was more antsy about
Jez
coming up behind him than Singleton.
 

Sometimes your ghosts mattered more than four inches of steel under the ribs.
 
You didn't set your priorities to get you through another year or even another week.
 
You just hoped to make it alive from one minute to the next.

He wandered into his building and thought about grabbing his mail but let it go.
 
He wanted to keep his hands free.
 
The colorless day followed him inside and he took the stairs two at a time.
 

The lock on his apartment door looked fine and hadn't been jimmied.
 
He stepped inside already hearing the voices ambling into his head.
 
At first he thought it was his parents, but soon he gathered his flailing concentration and looked at the ceiling.

The newlyweds upstairs were losing their shit again.

Late 20s, they'd more or less left the
goth
scene behind but had never gotten over the hurdle to becoming full-fledged yuppies, still playing in the
middleground
.
 
Hip, liberal, and raging against machinery, but starting to worry about their social security.
 
At least they both worked.
 

The husband drank too much and did a touch of coke on the weekends, grooving to techno pop that warbled beneath their door in the off hours.
 
The wife spent her free time waiting for the revolution she'd been promised when she was sixteen.
 
Sexually liberated and independent but left hurting and wanting for the picket fence and chubby babies.

She was Mary and he was Howard.

Chase couldn't get by her in the hall without hearing about some march or protest going on, the latest articles in
Elle
and
The Paris Review
.
 
He liked her energy and her abrupt manner of cornering him as he went for the mail—it was a gauntlet he ran pretty well and didn't mind.
 
She must've laid in wait hoping to find someone who would listen.
 
He knew the feeling.
 
She read poetry but not his.
 

Maybe it hit home harder than he wanted to admit, but he let it ripple off his shoulders as best he could.
 
He could appreciate the force of her urgency as she swept down the back-lit stairwell followed by her own massive shadow.
 
He'd stand there, smiling, trying to put her frenetic words into verse.
 
Sometimes he'd tap his foot, finding a rhythm and going along with it.
 

His mother's name, he thought, it might've been Mary.

Her eyes would zone past him as she spoke, thoughts skittering from track to track, throwing sparks.
 
He'd angle in, going nose to nose and trying to bring her back to center on him.
 
She didn't notice because he wasn't really there, in a way.
 
Neither was she.
 

On occasion she'd stop in mid-sentence and float off back up the stairs, hands held out in front of her as if she were moving through a thick, sticky liquid.

It broke the day up.
 
Chase used to see lots of people like that on the ward.
 
She was as happy as any of them.

Tonight, though, Mary screamed.
 
Maybe God wasn't listening either.
 
The husband was doing some kind of flake-out up there, sounded like he was pounding his head on the floor, muttering.
 
Chase had a sudden idea for a poem and grabbed a pad and pen off his coffee table, but even as he attempted to hold onto the outlines of a skittering image, his mind blanked to a comforting snow.
 

He went to the window and stared down at the street, wondering how many of the dead might be walking by.
 
Jez
, his parents, Stacy.
 
They would crowd the sidewalks and force the living in front of speeding taxis.
 
He hadn't uncapped the pen but realized he was scratching tiny holes in the pad with his fingernails.
 
His first therapist in the Falls would've said he had a vagina fixation, wanting to hump the paper.
  

Maybe that was it.

He could usually find a nice balance, if he looked.

Now there was deep moaning, amazingly bitter, and Chase spun and started for the door.
 
He had the abrupt fear that Singleton was upstairs right now, cutting off eyelids and peeling back tendons.
 
He touched his doorknob and heard the husband shushing Mary, his words creeping down through the ceiling.
 
"…
she doesn't matter
…"

It inspired her to howl like a dying dog.

His parents had never fought like that in their thirty year marriage.
 

His mother was gone but he couldn't remember what had happened to her unless somebody told him.
 
Even then, he couldn't retain it for very long as she smoothly skated from his memory.
 

His father's name, he thought, it was probably Howard.

Okay, so, Mary bucked her way out of the corner and rushed across the floor, giving it all she had, really swinging the noise up out of her chest and letting it explode.
 
"I swear to God!
 
I swear to Christ!"
 

Her voice kept cracking, which added an extra spike of emotion to her shouts.
 
Howard thumped away hard enough for the dishes in Chase's sink to rattle.
 
He wondered if maybe Mary was bashing out her husband's brains.

Doors slammed—sounded like the bathroom first, then their front door.
 
Mary was moving a lot faster than usual, filled with purpose.
 
Whatever the hell Howard had done it really got her going.
 
Stomping angry footsteps clacked and thudded one after the other, down the steps and up the hallway, right to Chase's apartment.

"Ah shit," he said.
 

Directly overhead, Howard repeated after him.
 
"Ah shit's right, man!
 
Say it again!
 
Say it again!
 
Ah, holy shit!
 
Christ!"

Whatever was in her head, Mary had already gone all the way there.
 
She giggled in semi-hysteria and tried Chase's doorknob as if expecting it to be open for her.
 
Like she was going to waft on in and drag him into even more commonplace madness.
 
What, he didn't have enough?

Chase backed up a step and looked around for a place to hide.
 
In the corner crouched behind the dying fern?
 
Why hadn't he watered it enough?… maybe he could've gotten some cover from the leaves.

She waited silently, hopeful, expectant.
 
Why was it that everybody in the world had so much more patience than he did?
 
Sometimes he jumped the rails just because there was nothing on TV.

Five minutes went by while he stared at the door.
 
He kept his eyes on his watch, making sure he wasn't blacking out, slipping off someplace.
 
Six minutes.
 
Eight.
 
She was going to outlast him.
 
You had to have an immense reserve of willpower to stand for eight minutes with your face up to a locked door.
 
He knew, he'd done it himself.

Chase took a step and the noise stopped him.
 
Her knocking was timid and tentative but somehow eerily sensual as well.
 
She dropped something tiny in the hallway, it sounded light as a packet of sugar.
 
The whisper of her clothing followed as she stooped to retrieve it.

He thought he knew what was going on, what she had with her.
 
So, she had a pack of condoms with her.
 
Sure, it was all right.
 
He didn't have anything to be guilty about, there was no need for the familiar self-hatred and paranoia to hit.

But already he could feel it coming on strong, plying his kidneys.
 
You could never be ready for all the crap the world threw at you.

"You gonna do it, man?" Howard called down to him, pressing his lips to the floor.
 
Chase looked up, could almost see the man's face shoving through the ceiling at him.
 
"How you gonna do that, huh?
 
Don't let her in!
 
Don't open the door!"

Chase didn't know.
 
He spoke quietly, as if the guy were right there in the room.
 
"Listen, this isn't my action."

"Don't open the door, man!"

The rapping continued until it became soft scratching, a lost pet trying to get back inside.
 

Chase put his hand on the knob, the rasping intensified and she started tittering.
 
It gave him some pause.
 
Chase could smell her breath from here and it almost sent him into a sneezing fit.
 
She'd been knocking back one of those sweet wines that stank like rotting fruit.
 

He opened up and there she was, trembling with flecks of paint under her nails.
 
Mary had been weeping for hours.
 
Muddy, puffy eyes were open way too wide, laced with delirium.
 
The smile just kept easing back towards her ears showing off every tooth and filling.
 

Jesus, the wine was cheap crap.
 
It clung to her tongue and lips and turned them pink.

Funny the way her palm came up, flat out, as if making an offering.
 
She held the rubber out to him for inspection.