Darker Shades of Fear
(Installment 12)
***
It was early evening when he finally left. Her husband had taken an unexpected four-day “business trip” with his secretary. When he showed up for their usual weekend rendezvous, Isabel herself answered the door. She had literally thrown him inside the house and screwed him in the foyer. It was uncharacteristic of her to do something like that, as she usually insisted on playing hard to get. He hadn’t minded, of course, and was quite thankful that neither of them would have to engage in bullshit conversation. She mentioned something about giving the servants a vacation, but he hadn’t really been interested.
He guessed that their “relationship” was a method of getting revenge on her husband. He found himself almost pitying her. The bastard had been cheating on her since their marriage, but she stayed with him for the financial security. If she had just walked out on him, Kenny would have admired her. Her husband’s actions obviously hurt her more than she would admit, even if she had absolutely no affection for him. It was the principle of the situation, he concluded. A marriage included fidelity, or at least it was supposed to. Western society had grown increasingly fucked up, so he wasn’t too sure if marriage implied faithfulness. It was probably about the tax break nowadays. Everything, in the end, seemed about money.
He really couldn’t complain about the situation. Three days of great sex was a rarity. He could’ve stayed another, but declined the offer. He knew that if he stayed, she would probably start to depend on him or develop some kind of attachment. She had started talking to him, which told him that it was time to leave.
“Where
are you going?” She asked.
Kenny
buttoned his jeans. “Out.”
“He
won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“I
know.” He said, putting his shirt back on.
“Oh. When will you be back?”
He
shrugged. “Whenever.”
She bit
her lip and shook her head. “Does
anything matter to you?”
“Not
really.”
“You
know, you remind me of someone I knew a long time ago.”
“Should
I be offended?”
She
smiled nostalgically. “No. I just see a
little bit of him in you.”
He hadn’t offered a reply and left the room, closing the door behind him. She didn’t bother to say goodbye and he took that as a positive sign that she didn’t think of them as anything other than a good time. Still, their eleven-sentence conversation had caught him off guard. She usually refused to speak with him. Something about her was changing. Slightly, almost unnoticeably, but he could tell. Only a nuance of difference, but it was something. It bothered him partially because the thought of an emotional connection made him inwardly groan, and because he didn’t want to lose the only good free sex he’d probably get.
He had for a while entertained the idea that she might be in love with him, which after analysis he concluded was impossible. It was clear that she didn’t like him. Why would casual sex make any difference in her personal opinion of him, especially if she knew full well that he was taking advantage of her? He knew she was in it for the same reasons he was: complete selfishness. He chalked it up to a random whim and kept walking.
He stopped in front of a liquor store and decided to grab some cheap booze. It would be a good night to catch up on reading. The bar would prove redundant and boring in addition to his simple desire to stay inside and entertain himself. Plus, he really needed to shower.
“Hey, are you going in there?”
He looked to his left in the direction of the noise and rolled his eyes. Four girls, all obviously teenagers wearing far too much eyeliner were in his line of vision. One of them held a twenty-dollar bill out.
“Get us some vodka?”
He laughed.
The girls were visibly pissed.
He ignored them and entered the store. It was practically falling apart and Kenny was surprised that the owner had even carded the girls in front of the store. After all, money was money. He picked a few things, mainly whiskey, gin, and a pack of cigarettes, and headed back to the motel.
On his way out, he couldn’t help but laugh at the quartet still perched outside the liquor store. They were crushing up what looked like over-the-counter painkillers (he mentally guessed Tylenol from the look of them) and snorting the dust through the twenty-dollar bill they’d offered Kenny. One word came to mind at the sight before him: pathetic.
If you were going to try drugs, at least have the balls to try the real shit. That was his philosophy on the topic, anyway. He didn’t remember getting too far into any of it, but he’d definitely tried enough of it out. He couldn’t remember why. Something told him it hadn’t been his idea, but he really couldn’t see himself succumbing to peer pressure. He practically was peer pressure. He shook his head and found it odd that this seemed to affect him.
He felt a surge of something he couldn’t pinpoint as he watched the token blond of their group take the paper and snort. She had been laughing along with the others, but there was something in her laughter that struck Kenny as incredibly fake. He was overwhelmed with the desire to smack the other three, but the blond evoked something similar to what he guessed was empathy. She had the look of someone who was just along for the ride. He almost understood her situation and found this extremely bizarre. He shrugged it off and continued on.
It was late by the time he reached the motel, but time had no value to him so it didn’t matter. He set the cheap liquor on the decrepit table he barely made use of as he ran the shower. Something still wasn’t right. He knew he wasn’t going to like what it was, but felt compelled to know regardless. A defeated sigh escaped him as he put a hand to his head. He decided to put the thinking on hold and clean up first. His hair definitely needed to be washed.
Even after a shower, half a book and an hour of television he found himself with the image of the blond girl from the liquor store nagging at him. It shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did. He assumed it referenced something that had happened Before Chicago and did his best to put it in the back of his mind. It made no sense to him why such an insignificant thing would perturb him so. Truthfully, he didn’t want it to make sense. Well, part of him did. There was the other, more submissive yet ever present inquisitive nagging that could not rest until everything had been sorted out. Kenny hated internal conflicts.
He reviewed things in his mind and retraced what he was able to remember, not trying terribly hard for fear of the consequences. The only connection he could make was Salantino. The only reason behind the connection was the association with drugs. He’d never really given any thought to why he despised Salantino until now. He was almost certain that it had nothing to do with drugs, specifically at least. He found himself almost wanting to remember why this bothered him so much, so he could totally erase everything and move on.
Disheartened, he took another swig from the bottle of gin and picked up his book. He concentrated on the words, but he found his thoughts residing elsewhere. He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut. He was getting absolutely nowhere. He was proverbially screwed. Ignorance was bliss but when someone told you specifically not to push the red button, it was impossible not to wonder why. In this case, the metaphorical red button would cause nothing but problems. He knew this, and still felt himself more and more enticed. It would undoubtedly make things worse, but hey, he was the best at ruining his life.
Unable to decide for himself, he finished off what remained of the gin and then opened the bottle of whiskey. He concluded that the best course of action was to drink himself into oblivion and see what came of it.
He wasn’t going to like it.
Around two thirty in the morning the room started spinning. It wasn’t just one room anymore. Through bleary eyes he watched as the two rooms he was seeing started spinning simultaneously. He laughed stupidly at this display, too wasted to do anything else. He did wonder, though, why there were twelve bottles strewn about the floor when he could only remember buying four. It was when the spinning became sickeningly fast did he consider that it might have been the wrong way to go about things. He knew he’d done it for a reason… he just couldn’t remember what the hell that reason was. He had the sinking feeling that he would, though. He groaned and buried his head into the lumpy motel pillow.
He felt his skull begin to pound. He hadn’t been this drunk in a very long time. In his mind, there were stages of drunkenness. There was tipsy, drunk, wasted, trashed, and completely fucked. He had invented a new category tonight, which exceeded “completely fucked”. Pain spiked at the base of his skull. The agonizing throbbing in his brain made it impossible to name this new degree, but he was certain that there was no way in hell that he’d do this again anytime relatively soon. He whimpered into the pillow pathetically, as if doing so would ease the pain torturing his head. He was lucky that he had sold that gun in Chicago. If he had it now, he would have already blown his brains out. The unfathomable pain gave way to dizziness and nausea as consciousness slipped away from him.
What happened next was not a specific memory, but a fragmented sequence of images and blaring sound. The whole scene had the feel of an amateur horror film shot on an unsteady, rather old eight-millimeter camera.
The
night sky was illuminated with impossibly bright stars, exploding and blurring
into one huge violent blast.
The
park spun around him, almost as if he were being pushed on one of those…spinny
things.
Laughter
sounded all around him… his own mixed with another rich, lighthearted familiar
sound.
The
smash of a bottle shattering on impact when it hit the wall took place of the
comforting laughter. He watched it sail
with the grace of a brick through the air from a distance in a doorway.
Bright
searchlights and sirens stole the scene.
“You
have to help me…” a desperate, familiar voice pleaded.
He felt
a forceful smack knock him off his feet.
He
tasted Newport cigarettes.
Road
signs flew by so quickly he could see only their color. Music played on the radio.
Terrified,
empty eyes stared down the barrel of the shaking pistol in his hand.
An
empty hallway extended before him.
He felt
a terrible thud as he hit the ground.
A
familiar shade of green dissolved into a semitransparent void.
Bright
lights un-exploded and reverted back to a normal night sky.
Kenny’s eyes shot open. He breathed heavily and clutched at his chest. His pulse was racing, his heart thumping in his throat. The pain in his head had receded to a dull pulsing. His body shook, not severely by any definition, just enough to assure him that whatever he had just seen had scared the shit out of him.
Two and a half minutes later, his pulse had slowed a bit and his heart had begun to reestablish a normal rhythm. He had almost stopped shaking and he let out the breath he’d been unaware that he was holding. He surveyed the room slowly, his eyes considerably sore. After his surveillance, he shut his eyes and opened them again, staring up into the cracked ceiling.
He decided that he was still alive, and that was probably a good thing. He didn’t think about anything he’d just seen. His mind could barely handle the basic functions necessary for survival, let alone analyze a complex series of mental projections.
Let’s deal with the simple stuff, he told himself.
“Who are you?” His mind asked.
“Kenny.” He answered.
“Good. Good. Everything seems to be perfectly in order.”
“What the fuck?” he asked himself, “Some diagnostic.”
He was silent a moment, acknowledging how very, very fucked up this whole situation was. He supposed that he was still drunk (which was, in fact, true) and decided to humor himself. “I don’t know.”
“I know that.”
“Great. My brain is a smartass.”
“You’re a smartass, I’m just stuck in your skull.”
“Oh. So I suppose you’d prefer another job?”
“Eh. Can’t complain. Could be worse.”
“Jesus tap-dancing Christ I am so fucked up right now.” He sighed, rubbing his eyes.
“You’re beyond fucked up, buddy.”
He sneered. “Oh, thank you.”
“Hey, you said it, not me.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you too.”
“I called it first.”
He rolled to his side, groaning.
“My point exactly.”
“Just fucking shut up already.”
It seemed to sigh. “Fine.
Run away. It’s nothing new.”
“I am so messed up…”
“Yes, we’ve already established that.”
“I hate you.”
“I know you do.”
“Don’t make me do something one of us will regret.”
“You won’t regret anything.”
“I know.” He replied sadistically. “Now go away.”
“You’re never going to change.”
“I know.”
“Pity.”
“Not really.”
“Ah, so this must be the epitome of existence! A dirty motel in the bad part of the neighborhood, drunk off your ass with absolutely no reason to live… sounds like the pinnacle of evolution.”
“It is. Now leave me alone.”
“You know it’s all because of him… right?”
Kenny froze.
“Ah. Seems I’ve hit a nerve.”
“I don’t know what the hell you mean.”
“Of course you don’t. You can’t remember shit – wait, that’s not
entirely true. You won’t
remember shit.”
“I’m sure there’s a reason for that.”
“You’re a coward.”
“Call it whatever you want.”
“This is what I’m talking about.”
“I hate you so much right now.”
“Trust me, the feeling is mutual.”
“Good to know.”
“You know, I have to say: you were right.”
“About what?”
“Oh, you don’t – or won’t –
remember it.”
“I can throw myself out the window and solve both our problems if you’d like.”
It grumbled. “You’re not worth it. You were right.”
An icy pain shot through Kenny’s chest.
“Ah… you do remember…”
Truthfully, he didn’t. He was petrified at the suddenness of the pain. “What the fuck just happened?!”
“Oh nothing. Just a synapse.”
“The window…” he reminded threateningly.
“I’m surprised you really don’t remember that. It wasn’t exactly something you forget easily…”
“Direct answer. Right now.”
“Sheesh, just having a little fun with you.”
I’m going to kill myself, Kenny thought.
“Calm down you fucking spaz. Suicide is too good for you.”
“I know that, retard.”
“Way to compliment yourself. I can’t believe he ever thought you had any value whatsoever.”
Kenny’s eyes shot open. “Who the fuck is he?”
“Damnit, you won’t even remember that? Christ, you’re worse than I thought.”
“I won’t remember any of this once I’m sober…”
“No, you won’t.” His mind replied, almost forlornly.
“And that’s a bad thing because...?”
His mind refused to answer.
Thank God, he thought.
That was by far, the most screwed up experience of his entire life.
Thankfully, he had absolutely no recollection of his drunken delirium the next morning. He did, however, have one hell of a hangover. He would have preferred one a thousand times worse if that was what it took to banish the night’s events from his mind. Luckily for him, such was not the case.
He spent the day lying down, trying to brave through the dull pain of the hangover. He managed to find that one of the bottles still had some alcohol left in it, which he knew was the best remedy. When the pain subsided he took to reading, but when it came again he closed his eyes and waited it out. Nothing was worth this, he concluded. He’d had some pretty bad morning-afters before, but this one beat them all, hands down.
It was the first time he could ever remember feeling empty.
He clenched his hands in tight fists as the pain washed over him again, his mind completely numbed from the remnants of last night’s binge. He hadn’t eaten in the past fourteen hours. He couldn’t think even if he tried, his thoughts were completely blank and vacant – he wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been a “space for rent” sign tattooed to his forehead. There was no literal sign of course, but his physical condition conveyed the message just as clear. Everything hurt so much and not at all. And then something happened that no one could have possibly predicted.
A single tear slid down his cheek.
©Danielle Lovallo, 2004
Lyrics © Alice Cooper, Pass the Gun Around