The
muscle hum has settled into a satisfying
sine wave now. It changed matched the tone of the heart monitor's steady
dead tone a few minutes ago. Or hours. I don't know anymore. It feels like the
grey time of night when you know you should be asleep, when fatigue
grinds your bones to make it's bread, when even coffee tastes like
ashes in your mouth. I try to fold into myself like a
origami fist, wrap up my perception in a tight ball and swim within . The
bucketseat slowly shifts me back and forth as we travel the town, rolling me like a
pebble in a river of pain. Just tumble and take the edges off. Can't go backward, got to move forward.
It replays like the
flashback reel on a cheap TV
drama. Last week, blur, highlight, shocker, cliff hanger, and now...
She is dead,
he is breathing, and I am tired.
I suppose that it isn't a
daydream if you do it at night. I sit quietly amongst the various smells of
medical solvents and the
mortal remains of a poor old lady and remember
university, when I tried to play the part of
doctor. It's very
dreamy, with the
adrenaline bleeding away from me,
spit on a hot
sidewalk.
I keep coming back to these two guys I knew,
Scylla and Charybdis we called them, and wonder what happened to them. I can't even remember anything
real about them, knowing them only
in passing and as the subject of
rumors and gossip. See,
Sky and
Chary were roommates with a
prodigious appetite for women. Last of the old school
trim-hounds, stupidly
ignorant of the new world of
STDs and
emotionally stable women. Their pad was a dangerous
Strait of Messina for pussy.
We turned off the siren after we
pronounced Sonya dead but I can still
hear it. We are just a glorified
Hearse now, no rush for the
dead. I sit in the back and rub my hands compulsively, lost in memory.
The thing I couldn't work out about Sky and Chary was why so much
back chatter about them filled the lulls in our
study groups down in the
lab. A whispered undercurrent always held them up as a
couple of lovers that were tangled up in their own
denial. Chary was always
brooding,
strumming on his
guitar and fixing his
Gap Model hair. He was the
bait. Sky was a
rougher, fratboy
character who snapped up all the frustrated girls who orbited around his deep dark
partner. It seemed the perfect system to me, until my friend Claire pointed out the
key to what I was missing. Chary
loved Sky with that perfect
soul mate love you only ever feel once in your life. Sky loved Chary right back, but they would never
tell each other. The
taboo of it all locked them up like a couple of
Young Virgins Auto-Sodomized by Their Own Chastity. What seemed so grand to me
dribbled away. It became the
saddest goddamn thing I've ever seen in my life.
"Fuck You, you fucking
fascist pigs!" was the first thing I ever heard my only
true love say. She was a
teenage junkie. I like to call her Candi, with an
i, when I think about her. I have no idea what her real name is. She was a drug addict with these beautiful
needle tracks all up the insides of her pale
white arms. Rich red
Connect-the-dots bruises.
Candi, oh Candi.
I miss you so much. When you stabbed that store clerk with your
jackknife and ran out with half the
till jammed in your
oversized pants, you never even saw the
minivan. It
broke both your legs under the knees and sent me
running. The cops let you lie in the street and
scream at them while they attended to the shop keep.
You said the most
beautiful things. The story about shooting their mommas in the face didn't seem to
speed your egress from the asphault. They can be so cold-hearted,
enforcing laws that keep you from your
fix.
I don't remember who I was
working with that night. All I can remember is
you. How your eyes looked so
blue. How
husky your voice was when you screamed at them. How shock made your face so
smooth and
cool. How your
punk rock breasts heaved under your dirty white tank top while you gulped air in a
goldfish manner.
How cold the
ring of a
.38 muzzle felt when you pressed it up under my
chin.
"Gimme sum'n fo' the pain, you fuckin' whiteboy
hero." you said. I was in the middle of putting the
IV tap in your
hand. You broke my heart with those words, Candi. I'm no
hero, dearest Candi. I'm just a
failure like
you.
"Put the
gun away" I said in a weary voice. "If I don't finish the IV your going to get a
bubble in your bloodstream and die." I followed up, laying my
bullshit hand on the table. It was a
lie. She pressed the gun into my throat and sat up, eyeing the IV. "It's a
painful way to die" I managed, rubbing my chin on the
barrel as I spoke. Everything stopped,
time invalidated in our little white world.
I saw your pupils
flaring and
retracting like a railroad sign. You were
tweaking on
meth. I pushed the gun away and
broke your nose with the
splint bar I had behind my
back. Then I pumped you so full of
Haldol you almost went into a
coma.
I miss you Candi.
I close the mental
book on her one more time, for the hundredth time. I've rolled the
sheet covered shell all the way to the
morgue on autopilot.
Stan rolls out an empty steel
autopsy table when he hears the basement elevator
chime. Squinty Mole
Stan the
Boatman is all business. In and out of his
domain flow the living and the dead. He looks
dyspeptic all the time, a
poster boy for
Pepto Bismol. Hoisting poor
featherweight Sonya only takes a minute.
"Form."
quoth the Boatman.
I hand it to him. He purses his lips at the
signature of the attending ER doc who signed the death cert. I stand on the far side of the body.
"Let's have a look." he dictates off his
internal procedures list. His voice is as empty as a fresh
grave.
"Hmm.
Bled out?" he asks, raising Sonya's makeshift bandage, now black with blood.
"VTAC" I offer.
"
Stroked out then" concludes Stan. "
Autopsy will tell."
"What's this?" he asks, accusing
finger circling Sonya's bared breast. Two circular
electrical burns ride her withered still chest.
"Max Paddles, no
gel". I probably broke her ribs with the
CPR too. It happens. She looks so
small.
Stan curls his lip in response. I'm sure he has seen it before.
"Figure it was
suicide?" he asks.
"I dunno. Kind of a
weird cut." I offer.
"Sign the
form." Stan concludes.
I shuffle away, having traded a woman's dead body for a
signature. Another delivery made. Now we will leave to get coffee and
wind down, waiting for the next
call. The
Sadist starts to talk about the
women he meets on the
Internet, the housewives he ties up and beats for their
jollies.
"Shut the fuck up George"
morses out the twitch. I sip my
coffee.
continued in Street Meat
In which the mountains are old and I am the ghost on the battlements - Kid Eternity - Do svidanya, Rodina! -
Standin' in a pool of cop blood with a shotgun you can't stop - Street Meat -
Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar