The Sink at Sunset

Okay, so I haven't written anything substantial here in awhile.  Boo hoo.  I was assigned to write a piece of fiction for a class I am taking, and honestly, I don't much like it.  I use Mark Twain's philosophy of writing uncontrollable characters into wells.  Except, this time, with no desire or time left to flesh out characters, I use the opposite of water. 

The Sink at Sunset

Hunter Caldwell

 

           Tonight is the end.  Tonight I am drinking 151, stumbling around into girls telling them I am emotionally vacant, swigging and instructing people to keep lit cigarettes outside a two foot radius of me—I am a gas pump.

     After pulling out of the one girl who actually does burn me with a cigarette, I stumble through my room looking for clothes. My brain rattles in its cage.  The room is dimly lit by a draped door of light.  A light rope hung on pre-existing nails from the guys before us.  I spot my dad’s boxers and shamble toward them.   I have them because of a mix up in laundry.  Mix-ups never happen anymore.  Not now.  Not with my mobile home of a heart. 

    The girl in my bed, Tamra, sleeps heavily now.  Whistling with her “sivalent ‘s,’” she tosses, undisturbed by my steps.  Through the darkness, I see a faint mark on her face.  Earlier, I describe her boyfriend as Voldemorte and her, Harry Potter.  This cheers her up and she sleeps with me.

    One line, one phrase can disarm someone.  People think of themselves as separate from the equations, the numbers and variables that envelope them, but it just takes the right phrase.  An abstract input for a specific output.  Tamra’s red lace panties dangle from my bed-post and I begin to think highly of myself: how many girls have I disarmed with one single phrase or action? 

    There is this girl who always speaks of her dead brother, who laughs at all her own jokes, who strives for loud.  Who irritates the shit out of me.  Who, if you listen to for long enough and pretend is funny, she will like you.  Oh, and a reluctant sympathy for her family’s loss—the golden key to her heart.  But to get her to stop talking, there is only one key that fits. The only strategy I have for shutting her up becomes sex.

    There is this girl who rides bikes everywhere.  I make the mistake of letting her ride me one night.  I wake up the next day, groggy and unable to see clearly.  I look at my hands.  Red viscous gunk covers both the palms and backs of my hands.  Is this blood?  Did she fucking bleed all over me?  It is more applied to me and less bled on me.  I notice black on my arms.  I think for a moment of chain-grease.  Perhaps it is make-up, and perhaps this is her way of marking me.  Claiming me.  This disturbs me.  I scramble for my clothes and, not seeing her anywhere make my exit as quickly as possible. 

    Second thought mentality settles.  These are not proud memories.  Especially not with Nel.  She always said, “I love you.”  I always said, “You know how I feel.”  I know Nel for six years before she gives me this check to cover my rent.  I figure I deserve some help, all those nights I sat next to her crumpled body of tears.  A repetition of, “Everything is plastic, the world is plastic.”  The world is plastic.
     
     I walk down my stairs, guided by my railing, my wall.  I am exhausted, dehydrated from a night of excess in all faculties.  My preference: burn out rather than rust out.  Parched, I know I must reach liquid-refreshment. The refrigerated Thirst-Rockers, flavor blue that my roommate Tom purchases, seems a good solution.  That childish corn-syrup.  I swing the paned-window-door to the kitchen wide open and flip the switch.  On the refrigerator door, there are two of four checks needed for rent due three days ago.  Raiford’s check is absent.  My (borrowed)check—absent.  We can do it tomorrow.  Always tomorrow.  

    Before I reach the syrupy blue nectar, I hear someone yelling.  The yelling continues for a moment and ceases.  The voices come from the street next to my yard.  My shitty yard, surrounded by flimsy chicken wire and filled with a series of empty paint cans, a slouching bench, a heap of branches and timber, and a broken skateboard. 

    I insert my index and middle fingers through a crack in the blinds and separate them.  Three figures stand staggered, yelling at the window.  Or the person behind it—me.  I step outside, half naked with people yelling, “GET THE FUCK DOWN HERE!” 

    I open the door and struggle with an orange alley cat.  Raiford is constantly badgering us about adopting it. I sweep the cat with the side of my foot and hiss at it.
    Hsss!
    “Meeeow,” it pleas.
    “No, goddamnit.”
    I close the door behind me and look to the street.
    “What’s the deal?” I ask.  One of the guys is especially pissed.  The other two stand and shake their heads. 
    “You called us fags, man.”
    “No I didn’t, what are you talking about?”
    “We saw your eyes!” he spits, feeling he has me nailed me with a reference to my peering through blinds.  Now I take offense. 
    “Did you see my eyes call you a fag?  Because it wasn’t me, so calm down.  Why would I do that?  I’m with a girl and I’m getting booze, I don’t care about you.  I don’t even know you.”    I feel entitled to boast half truths and show them some blunt sincerity.  After all, an imposing chicken-wire fence stands between the street and my yard, protecting me from the stupid things my drunk, sex driven mind conjures.   The group’s majority turns to the alleged “fag” and convinces him to leave. 
    I suddenly hear my name.  I look around for the caller.  And once again, someone loudly whispers my name.  I look up and my roommate’s head pops out of the window above me.  It is Raiford. 
    “Hey man, I called those guys fags!” flashing a Cheshire grin.
    I shake my head and enter the house.

     I drink the rest of the blue swill and crawl into bed next to Tamra.  I look at her sleeping face, its scarred eye-brow, and think I am a decent person.  Even Raiford will not hit a girl, much less break a guitar over her face.  I drift with thoughts of fidelity and begin a descent into ethereal.

     The corporeal behind me, affecting me, my mind turns to Raiford’s girls- Tina and Heather.  Tina and Heather have never met, though they share the same man.  Raiford wanders from one to the other, taking advantage of free meals, cheap love, and cigarettes.  Without trying to hide his behind-the-back, under-the-table, stab-you-between-the-eyes-and-leave-you-to-bleed-all-so-I-can-prosper attitude, he manages to avoid detection.  “Monogamy isn’t in my genes,” he tells me.  Raiford, that prairie vole.  Prairie voles are monogamous—sort of.   When other vole people aren't looking, they're fucking whoever they want.  Only in a social setting are those little vole fathers raising their kids with their lovely stay at home vole mothers. 

For caste when eyes present. 
For pleasure when eyes absent.

     And here I am, doing the opposite, wanting that private life back.  I remember Raiford screaming at his phone one night, telling a mutual friend that we are at some huge party.  I arrogantly shake my head, lay an open palm on his shoulder and say, "Stick with me, and this is every night,” so proud of my provincial party planet.  My ears pulse, pressure building.  My cracked rib from another drunken night, it's there, wrapped tightly and bound with a bourbon/Budweiser cocktail.  Muted from notice, like my connection to Nel.  What she could say now.  She could scoff at me for getting sick, for being this thin, this unhealthy. 
     A trip to Patient-First really nails this sentiment.  Hacking up hard chunks of mucus with red streaks, throwing up bile or coagulated blood in the sink at sunset.  The summer sound-- the cicada--crescendos with the dimming.  I decide I should go to the doctor.  His office is closed, so I must endure Patient-First.  I do the insurance bullshit and step onto a scale.  Beep, beep, beep.  Three digital lines do 'the wave' where I expect numbers. One final beep.  Electronic scales don't lie.  A year ago, I weighed 185.  Now, with my current lifestyle, I weigh a mere one-hundred sixty-three pounds.   

     The sun stains my bay windows.  My eyes squint and filter the distant blaze.  A jackhammer goes off somewhere in my brain and I rise.
     I walk downstairs to the living room.  It is a mess.  “I’m sorry, dude,” a voice sags from the couch.  Tom leans with his head floating somewhere between his neck and his lap, swaying.  The broken LCD on his phone illuminates his crotch.  He stares downward into its splintered lightning bolt.  Little dots of light like stars scatter across his screen, his little galaxy.  A red dot, maybe Betelgeuse, blinks in the northern hemisphere of Tom’s hand-held constellation. This informs him of a missed call. 
      “I tried calling you last night after you ran off with the bottle,” I tell him.
     “Man, I’m sorry.”
     “It’s okay.”
     “No.  No it’s not,” he gargles. 
     Last night, Tom pummels the right side of my head with his fist, screaming,
     “You can’t just go through everything like a fucking bowling ball, you cock!” 
      As I carry Tamra’s beach cruiser up the stoop in the front of our corner house, I plow Tom’s face with the front wheel as he sits sipping his beer.  His hand drops his phone in pursuit of becoming a weapon to use against my face.  This is why he is sorry.
     “It’s not a big deal, it just hurts when I yawn.  Or move my head too fast.  Or when I cough, or speak too loudly.  I guess it’s kind of a big deal.”
     “I just had a really bad week, a lot of things happened at work to piss me off the other day.  My brother got suspended from high school.  Those things aren’t your fault.  I’m sorry.”
     “It’s okay,” I breathe.  “You didn’t hit my face.  My beautiful face.”
    He laughs and stands, saunters over, and hugs me.

    All things broken, mend.  Though shaky for a few hours last night, our friendship remains, not ruined by tire treads or slight abrasions.  It stands above the matted living room carpet and piles of cheap beer. It stands above the broken glass and the cardboard boxes in the corner from when we moved in and shattered a lamp.  The corner of the room that promises to, even after four months of mess, one day become a dining room.  The compacted, inch-thick dog hair from previous owners sticks in the cracks against the walls.  This wasted house still stands, undivided.  Undestroyed.

    “Do you smell that?” I ask Tom, looking over my shoulder to the front door.  I see droves of people pass through grimy windows, drawn by magnificent force.  I head to the door and exit.  I pass an impassioned phone-bound neighbor down the brick stoop.  Several cop cars swerve down the street to my left, squealing.  I walk, staged in front of several dozen, shirtless.  Though a player in the act, I am no main attraction.  Two groups of younger adults pass without notice or mention of my no shoes, no shirt policy. 
    Cinders and ruin swim through the air.  I fall in line with everyone else, bunched and huddled, seeking excitement.  Seeking something beyond the monitor, the speaker, and the bottle.   

My pilgrimage ends halfway down the block.  Police swarm.  Little spiders spinning yellow silk.  “Caution,” they warn, is advised in this area.  Beyond the heap of timber and puddles of shattered glass, the alley leads to an abandoned warehouse.  Where all eyes lie, an inferno lords over the towering trees.  The fucking warehouse is on fire three houses from mine. 
    “EVERYONE GET BACK,” a cop yelp-yelp-yelp, yelp, yelps.  His hands, open and forward, grasp at an invisible wall which hobbles us backward.  Backward against brick, the encroaching flame in front of us. 

    Minutes pass and my house is inaccessible, taped off by the yellow ward.  I hop the single-beamed “fence” and bolt inside.  I need clothes if I am about to lose everything else. 
In a rush, I yell and scream for everyone to get out, to leave, to hustle.  To hurry up and make their peace.  Abandon all objects and vain pursuits of material happiness.  Save yourselves!  A quaking belch rocks the house.  I hear cries of desperation from shattered windows.  A gas line has erupted.  I grab a shirt and sandals from the living room floor.  These sandals I once lost in the river.  Somehow they wash up on shore and I find them. 
   
    I run outside and a cop yells at me.  My roommates scream my name.  I am escorted over the yellow line like a wrestler out of a ring. 
    “Is everyone out of the building,” a cop inquires.
    Yes, I say, everyone is out.  Everything that matters is right here.
   
    Hours later, our house remains skeletal.  Wooden doors to ash, glass windows to solid goo.  The news interviews Tom and edits the profanity.  The news speculates.  It is arson they say.  Maybe.  It was a group of teenagers, drunk and wily.  Maybe.  We call our friends, establishing new places to stay.  I call Nel, the only person I can rely on.  She lets me stay at her apartment the first night.  This first night away from my new home I get a call from Raiford. 
    “Dude,” he stops before I say hello.  “Dude, the cops just called.  They found a body in our apartment.”
    They find Tamra’s charred corpse trapped underneath roof beams.  And I am responsible.  No annoying dead brother, viscous red gunk on my hands, no debt.  No reason to deserve this.  I am a Bacardi 151 gas pump.  Tom’s bowling ball. Tamra is dead, and, I, responsible.  An object in my bed, a toy for my penis.  Yesterday, nothing more.  Yesterday’s today, nothing more.  Today’s now, I tremble.
    “Are you there?”
    No.
    “Hello? Dude, did you hear me?  You left her behind.  The girl in your bed.  The cops said you’re not in trouble for forgetting her.  They want to know why she had contusions, though.  They need to talk with you.”
    And I have not remembered a single one of them, for romantic or logical reasons, since I lost my battle against the world of plastic.
    She stands in the kitchen, washing dishes.  Her back, wide from years of besting swimming peers.  She has a boyfriend, reserves her emotions.  I have no one and spill.
    “Nel,” I whimper.  The phone slides from my hand and crashes to the floor.  It bounces, lays down.  An uneasy voice trails to the floor with the phone.  Nel turns her head and her careful hands halt, suds sliding off of flesh.  Accumulating.  Amassing in metal.  Her frame  faces me. 
    “What’s wrong?” she asks, a concern in her voice, like a mother addressing a wounded offspring.  My scraped elbows and knees, over the years, I think she realizes, are nothing more than cries for something I miss.  Not now, with the merciless, irreverent moon, spinning madly on in the panes behind her.  Not now. 
    “I love you.”  I plead, longing for reciprocation.  My last sensible sniffle of the night. 
    “You know how I feel.”

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