“I think no matter what,” Rick said, “we stick together. We stick together and we look out for each other, like always. We go off on our own or start fighting between ourselves and we’re fucked.”
I nodded, welcoming them to my madness, grateful to no longer be drowning in it alone.
Rick spit out a bite of hotdog and fired the rest back in the direction of the vendor. “Jesus, these are fucking disgusting.”
The vendor watched the remains of the hotdog roll along the pavement with a quizzical look.
“Take it easy,” Donald said, “don’t make a scene.”
“Goddamn things crunch, for Christ’s sake.” He motioned to the vendor and increased the volume of his voice. “Peanuts crunch, motherfucker, not hotdogs. Fuckin’ slant. What the hell you doing selling American food anyway? Ass-bags come to this country and—”
“Scoop up all the good jobs like selling hotdogs on street corners and picking produce for pennies a day. Bastards.” Donald flicked his cigarette away and took Rick by the elbow. “Come on, you have to drive me back to work.”
Rick jerked his arm free and started toward the vendor with a slow but threatening gait. “You looking at something, you fucking cocksucker?”
“I cannot tolerate it when he behaves like this,” Donald said. “Goddamn child.”
“Come on, man,” I said, stepping between him and the vendor, who had already begun to move to another corner. “Don’t take it out on him, let’s just get the hell out of here.”
Rick glared at me, looking like he might literally explode if he didn’t hit something, and for a second, I thought that something might be me, but he spun around, stormed back to the Jeep and punched that instead.
The ride to Donald’s office building was quiet and uncomfortable. After some brief and standard good-byes, Rick and I continued on to my apartment. He parked near the railroad tracks and we sat there without speaking for quite a while.
“I shouldn’t have freaked out like that back there,” he eventually said. “I just get—you know, shit builds up and—”
“Whatever,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe we’re all going a little nuts.”
“Maybe.”
There was anger in his eyes, a defiance of fear. “What the hell’s happening?”
“I don’t know. But I think you were right when you said that whatever it is, it’s some bad shit. And we don’t know the half of it.”
“You think we ever will?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Whether we want to or not.”
CHAPTER 9
I blinked open my eyes, escaped one darkness for another. What little I was able to discern of our bedroom slowly blended into focus. The shade was pulled but enough moonlight bled through to partially illuminate the far wall. I couldn’t be sure how long I’d been out, but it felt late. I’d taken another one of those damn pills and slipped into dreamless sleep, and though I was now fully awake, I knew the aftereffects of the tranquilizer would linger for quite some time. The blankets were off and kicked down around my feet. On Toni’s side of the bed they’d been neatly turned back and were still tucked in at the side. In the darkness beyond, the bedroom door stood slightly ajar, a faint light visible along the gap between its edge and the doorframe. I pawed at my eyes, the lids still heavy, and let loose a lengthy yawn.
Somewhere outside a siren blared before fading to silence. It was replaced by the distant sound of Toni’s voice. I lay still and listened. She was on the kitchen phone, talking just above a whisper, the floor creaking occasionally as she walked. I couldn’t make out any of what she was saying, but her tone was somber.
I focused on my feet, there at the edge of the bed. They looked so pale in the dark, so white and bloodless, as if they’d been carved from ivory.
One day I’ll be nude and stretched out just like this, I thought, but instead of being in bed I’ll be slapped atop a cold metal table. Someone I don’t know and have probably never met will hover over me, preparing my body, desecrating it, draining the blood, replacing it with something else, something foreign and unnatural; something that once introduced will render me subhuman. The idea that my body would one day be transformed and treated, protected from decay so that it could lay sealed away beneath the ground—no longer a living organism, more an unseen ornament, a perverse version of what it had once been—seemed both hideous and fascinating. What would it be like? Would I know or even care when it was happening to me?
I wondered if other people looked at their bodies and thought about the same things.
My eyes shifted to the nightstand, and the dark lamp, leather Bible draped in rosary beads, and the clock radio that resided there. I wondered when each item had been manufactured, and realized that regardless, unless purposely destroyed, in all likelihood each would be here in one form or another long after I’d gone.
The events of the last few days flashed through my mind in rapid succession. As the progression slowed, my memories focused on Rick strutting about and screaming at that poor hotdog vendor like some testosterone-gone-wild teenager. We were very different, Rick and I, and though I found certain aspects of his personality appalling, there were also those I envied. I didn’t possess the discipline to hit the gym five days a week, to run three miles a day; I didn’t share his fascination with keeping the body beautiful, his compulsive desire to stay forever young. I’d never longed for immortality. But for Rick, life and age were no different than any of the other games he’d mastered. In his mind they were opponents, and Rick played to win.
Some days it seemed nothing more than a desire to turn back time and erase the year he’d spent in prison, to freeze the clock and live instead as the person he’d been in the days before it all went bad. He never discussed his time behind bars, and I’d always respected that. In many ways, I had a healthy dose of guilty admiration for Rick. He was capable of things I was not, yet it often seemed he did things in order to prove to himself what was already glaringly apparent to everyone else. At eighteen, I wouldn’t have survived a week in a maximum-security prison, and in my late thirties I didn’t have the balls, confidence or even the inclination to go white water rafting or skydiving or mountain climbing the way he occasionally did. I couldn’t remember what it was like to have a girl on my arm I didn’t plan to spend more than a few hours with, or how it felt to make love to more than one person in the same week. That sort of lonely and vacuous freedom was a memory so distant, I questioned whether it had ever been a genuine facet of my life at all. Still, as Bernard had so cruelly said on the tape, Rick had never imagined his life would be spent as a bouncer at a local nightclub. Now, those things that had always given him the edge were necessary tools for survival. Younger, stronger men would soon be bucking for his job, if they weren’t already, and eventually, one of them would show him the curb. Then, all the rugged good looks, pumped muscles, independence and tough-guy-swagger in the world wouldn’t save him. As incomprehensible as it seemed, Rick would one day be old and unable to rely on his physical prowess, forced to admit he was just as frightened and uncertain as everyone else, and in the end, just another lost soul trying to find his way.
Perhaps that had been the source of his anger, his rage at how life had turned out and a fear of what lie ahead. But the violence in Rick had been there as long as I’d known him. Was the constant pressure of living up to the Superman image he’d created to blame, or were there specific incidents hidden somewhere in the past that better explained it?