Jeremy had hugged Chris before he left, and he thought of how frail Chris was, how the bones felt as thin as a child’s beneath the papery flesh. Chris had been such a strong guy, with the neck of a bull. Had played linebacker in high school, and had liked to work alongside his Dad on his father’s vintage 1973 Pontiac Firebird. It was an incredible and fearsome thing, how quickly a human being could be wrecked. Jeremy had to stop in the men’s room to wipe his eyes with a paper towel, but then what he had dreaded was done and he was all right with leaving Chris, it was okay. He believed in God, and he believed that God was okay with it too.
He takes a long, deep breath, and releases it as a sigh. The pills and the Nyquil are working, sinking him deeper. He knows the box-cutter will hurt, at first, but he has been through pain and it has to be done. He is sorry, though, that Mr. Salazar will have to deal with the mess. With a heavy hand he picks up the blade. He places the cutting edge against his left wrist, where the life flows. He wishes he’d lit a candle or something for the moment, because the bathroom’s white light is way too harsh. He pauses a few seconds, the blade’s edge pressing into his flesh; this is where the old life ends, he thinks, and whatever’s next for me is about to start.
Help me across, he says to the woman in the picture, and then he pushes the blade into his wrist—a sharp, hot pain, but not too bad—and the blood wells up and trickles down his forearm, and he watches in a kind of hypnotic wonder as it drips into the water. He is creating his own crimson tide. He bites his lower lip as he presses the blade deeper, and then he begins to drag it across his wrist toward the veins, and he keeps his eyes on the picture of his wife and son because soon he’ll be meeting them on that road that reaches the Elysian Fields, just as Maximus was reunited with his family at the end of Gladiator.
But Jeremy’s hand suddenly stops, before the veins are severed. He pauses in his path to suicide, as the blood trickles down along his forearm and drips and drops into the water.
Something at the end of the hallway, in the other room, has demanded his attention.
In the chair that Jeremy had pulled up before the TV to watch the movie, a figure is sitting. It seems to be a man whose head is turned toward him, but whose face is a shifting mass of shadow. A hand is upraised, a finger crooked: Come here, is the instruction.
My God, Jeremy thinks, and maybe he’s said it out loud. For the angel of death has arrived at Number Eight, the Vanguard Apartments, southeast Temple, Texas.
Come here, the instruction repeats.
“Give me a minute,” Jeremy says, his voice slurred and hollow against the tiles. He intends to finish what he’s started, and he’s not really afraid of the death angel because in one way or another the death angel has been with him, riding shotgun, for a long, long time. So he says, “One minute,” just to make himself clear.
But in the space of time it has taken Jeremy to speak, the death angel has created for itself the face of Chris Montalvo, complete with crumpled skull and childlike eyes that gleam in the TV’s light, and the finger beckons Jeremy to come with an urgency that cannot be delayed.
Now, Jeremy knows he’s got a lot of Tylenol and Nyquil in his system, and he knows the blood is running freely down his arm, and he knows his head is not right and his time is running out, and he knows this visitation is not really Chris Montalvo but maybe a costume of Chris Montalvo worn over a figure fearsome for human eyes—even blurred and cloudy human eyes—to behold, but still…it wants him to get out of the tub and come in there. It wants him, right now.
“Shit,” Jeremy says, because it seems like such an inconvenient moment. It seems that for him to stand up and walk along the hallway into that room would be like rolling out of a bunk on the darkest oh-dark-thirty of his life, or reaching up and pushing away from a grave the stones he has nearly finished covering himself with. It seems like the hardest thing he could ever imagine doing, on this final night, yet with a gasp of breath, a strain of muscles and a wobble of belly fat he sits up, puts the box-cutter on the soap dish, and in a slosh of bloody water he steps out of the tub onto something resembling solidity.
Halfway along the hall he stumbles and crashes into the wall, and leaves a red streak there under the framed fake-oil painting of a desert scene that must’ve been the previous tenant’s eBay Special. His knees nearly buckle; he is staggering back and forth, on his uncertain journey from bathroom to chair where the figure with Chris’s face is sitting. He thinks how out of breath he feels, how lost he seems to be in this sack of skin. Use it or lose it, he thinks; five years ago he could run three miles in a little over eighteen minutes, do one-hundred crunches under two minutes and swim five hundred meters like Aquaman. Only thing super about him now was his appetite for junk food and the size of the junk he left in the toilet.
Oorah, motherfucker, oorah!
He makes his tortured way into the room. There the creature who occupies the chair turns its constructed Chris-face away from him toward the TV screen, and Jeremy hears a man’s voice speak.
“It’s about the war.”
He looks at the screen, and sees there a dimly-recognized figure dressed in black and wearing a black cowboy hat looking back at him. “Song’s called ‘When The Storm Breaks’, by The—” A hand is held up in front of the camera, palm out and fingers spread, and what appears to be an electric-blue flame ripples around the fingertips.
A few seconds of darkness appears, with small type down on the bottom left: “When The Storm Breaks” and underneath that, The Five.
Then what might be a flash of lightning or a camera’s flash pops, and as a drum beats and guitar chords start growling, the scene changes to a herky-jerky handheld camera and what could be five or six or seven soldiers in full battle-rattle are advancing down a street between broken concrete walls. The color is washed-out, grimy, the sick pale yellow of Iraq. But it’s not Iraq, and these fools aren’t soldiers, because Jeremy instantly sees that some of them are wearing imitation desert pattern MARPAT camo and others are wearing imitation desert pattern ARPAT camo. So they’re stupid fucking actors with pretend gear, and they’re not any good anyway because they don’t move with the caution of knowing your head could be blown off at any second, they’re all twisting around and looking every fucking whichaway, a picture of chaos instead of control. Meat for Mookie, Jeremy thinks. Come right on down the street like that, old ladies, and get your asses handed to you.
The scene jumps to a band set up in the street: long-haired punk playing lead guitar, bass player with tattooed arms, skinhead fucker with glasses playing a piano or something on metal legs, hippie chick with reddish-blonde ringlets working a white guitar and another chick with short-cut curly black hair pounding the shit out of a drum kit, the cymbals flashing in the sun. Then it goes up close to the punk’s face, right up in his angry baby blues, and he sings like a half-drunk black man whose throat has been worked over with a razor:
“I was walking on a street under a burning sun,
Put my visor down, thumbed the safety off my gun.
Heard a rumble, might be thunder in the sky,