Authors: David Gilbert
He pushed
PLAY
, glad for the lull from his own bullshit.
He sat back and in the tired space between his eyes replayed an hour ago when he was with Alice on the couch and she had just finished her lovely show and Jamie was starting to move faster, chasing her orgasm, his toes curling until cracking, and Alice looked up and half-whispered, “I want you to finish on my face.”
“Finish what?” he grunted.
“I want you to come on my face.”
“Huh?”
“If you don’t mind,” she added, ever polite.
“Coming on your face?”
“Yes.”
Jamie paused mid-thrust and propped himself on his elbow for a less pressing view. “Why would you want me to do that?”
“It doesn’t turn you on?”
“Maybe a little, but still.”
“No one’s ever done it to me.”
“And I think you should be congratulated for that.”
“Maybe I want to break new ground,” she said.
“You’re stoned.”
“It’s what they do in porn.”
“Oh yes, let us turn to porn for inspiration.”
“But it all trickles down.” Alice broke a bigger smile. “Poor choice of words.”
“Very.”
“Do you have a problem defiling my wholesome Midwestern face—”
“Ahh—”
“—with your world-weary spunk?”
“I never said Midwestern, that’s your own paranoia.”
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while actually.”
“Jesus, you make it sound like a mortgage.”
“I’ve done just about everything else.”
“That I can attest to.”
“And I like you, Jamie, a lot, and I want you to ejaculate on my face.”
Jamie frowned. “That’s so sweet.”
“No, no, no,” she said, restraining her smile, “I’m a hundred percent serious, or as serious as someone can be about this. It’s like an experience without all the travel. So cast a few lines across this unspoiled pond.”
“Please stop talking like that.”
“It would turn on a lot of guys,” she said.
“Call me old-fashioned but it strikes me as degrading.”
“Would you mind if I came on your face?”
Jamie considered this for a moment. “Probably not. I’d probably like it. Maybe even love it. But isn’t that about power or—”
“Shut up and fuck me.” Alice rolled him back on top and maneuvered him inside of her, reaching for his ass to really kick-start things, her ankles wrapping for leverage, her back arching, her mouth alternating between biting and sucking, her finger doing that thing that Jamie liked, which he considered wonderfully dirty and accelerated him into another gear as she started with her lovely groans, God knows if real this time, and Jamie was getting close, closer, closest, pushing up on his arms. “I’m getting close,” he told Alice.
“Yes, baby.”
“You really sure?”
“Yes, yes, yes, baby, do it.”
After a couple more rubs and grinds, Jamie pulled out and rushed up like he had an ember in his palm and Alice was the tinder. Straddling her shoulders, he perched himself over her chin; she was almost laughing now, mouth half-open, eyes squinting in anticipation, and Jamie would have laughed too but he was concentrating too hard, not only on coming but also on his aim, and here was his target, this enthusiastic
woman, the audition makeup unable to conceal her decent good looks and honesty of character, that leaning smile that gamely said yes to whatever life proposed, and Jamie thought, I might love you, Alice, and more than anything this unexpected notion pushed him over the top.
“Oh, oh, oh, ahh.”
Or some such embarrassment.
But instead of bursting forth with ropelike vigor, his shot sort of crawled out in the style of an exhausted old man escaping from a deep hole, sliding down the side and ending up in a hard-breathing heap, just happy to be free.
After a second or two, Alice opened her eyes.
“Um,” Jamie said. “Maybe I could, I don’t know, flick it on you.”
And thank goodness she laughed, and his heart seemed to gain a door and became a house. Back in the classroom, Jamie blushed and covered his face with giddy shame as Richard Todd climbed that staircase, nervous about being discovered, carousel music chiming in the background, a nice touch. He let the scene play longer than necessary, both he and his students content with the use of time. Once the class was dismissed, he decided to subway to Brooklyn to pick up his mail and more clothes and maybe his laptop, maybe even his video camera, before heading back to Alice’s for the night. An idea was taking shape in his head, just a title really,
Waiting
, which latched on to the people around him, on the platform, on the train, on the street, in the windows, the solitary man who sat on the stoop of his walk-up, who, upon seeing Jamie, stood up and revealed himself to be tall and bearded and waiting no longer.
“Do I know—” Jamie started to say when a burst of electric black caught him square in the face, the effect followed by the slower-dawning cause, a fist, a punch to be exact, that landed just south of his nose. Jamie staggered before falling ass-first onto the stoop. The great symphony of consciousness reconfigured around a single kettle drum, and after a few seconds of dumb figuring, he leaned over and bled onto the steps. It seemed his nose was giving birth. Jamie tried to stanch the flow with his sleeve but that just made whatever was being born angrier.
“I’m sorry,” the assailant said.
“You going to hit me again?”
“No.”
Jamie’s vision was fuzzy but the voice spurred his memory. “That you, Ed?”
“I wasn’t planning on hitting you,” Ed Carne answered.
“I would hate to see you with some intent.” Jamie’s tongue brushed against his forever-snaggled front tooth, which was now indented to the point of weirdness, practically dangling, and Jamie, without much forethought, reached in with thumb and index finger and gave a tug. Ta-da! He showed the prize to Ed. “You knocked my tooth out.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
Jamie spat more blood. “How big is your goddamn fist, Ed?”
“I always had heavy hands.”
“I think you broke my nose too.”
“Looks that way.”
Jamie tried to hold his head straight. “My calibration is all screwed up.”
“I don’t know what came over me,” Ed said, whatever the coming long fled.
“I haven’t been slugged like that since my brother.”
“I like to think of myself as a nonviolent person.”
“Hey man, I deserve it,” Jamie said. “Probably deserve a few kicks as well.”
Still looming overhead, Ed buried his hands in his pockets, perhaps in precaution. “I’ve been trying to call but you’ve been—I don’t know where you’ve been. Not returning my calls. So I had to track you down and I’ve been waiting here, sleeping in my car, and I’m tired and I hate this city and I finally see you and with all the scenarios playing in my head not one of them involved me hitting you.”
“It’s okay.” Blood started to shellac the back of Jamie’s throat.
“No, it’s not. It’s just, I hated all that filming but Sylvia, she was insistent, and she was so sick, and I saw you and I don’t know, I guess I just remembered all that stuff and I snapped.”
“Like I said, I deserve it.” Jamie spat some more blood onto the steps. He was almost thankful for the injury. It made him relax into
the consequences, the abstract anxiety turning into concrete pain. And he was getting ready to apologize for jamming a camera into a place best left undisturbed. Her grave? What kind of ghoul does that? To give an otherwise decent project his own macabre ending, all because he was shallow and scared and had no idea what he wanted from life, death his only recourse. Before talking, Jamie pressed his tongue into the void of his missing tooth. The rawness was almost pleasant, like a childhood memory of being grown-up. “Ed—” he started.
“It’s not your fault,” Ed said. “You were just the cameraman.”
“Mostly but—”
“And I’m glad she didn’t tell me the whole plan, because I would have fought that for sure. Just too much. And the girls.” Down Kane Street, the sun was nearing its westward flush, the shadows at their longest. Last week this conversation would have happened in unsaved darkness rather than the melodrama of this light. Ed Carne even turned west as if the time were spot-on. “I never cared about the video,” he said. “Neither did the girls. We just missed her and wanted to remember her healthy and with us. Probably why I didn’t contact you earlier. I’m still—we’re still in mourning. I haven’t shaved since she died. But then my oldest saw the video on the Internet.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m still not sure how—”
“It’s quite something,” Ed said.
Jamie nodded.
“Just seeing her again. And the way it ends. Maybe you thought it wouldn’t reach us rubes in Vermont. Maybe you didn’t care. Maybe we never crossed your mind. But you stole her from us a second time.”
Jamie wondered if under the sidewalk there was dirt. “I am truly—”
“Over seven million views on YouTube,” Ed went on, “and growing a million every few days. Chances are right now someone is watching my wife die, watching her say that everything is fine, watching her, well, you know. And they have no idea who she is. She gets no credit. Not even a mention of her name. It’s like the whole thing is anonymous, like she’s just another woman with cancer. That hasn’t stopped the reporters from tracking us down. Hollywood people too, looking for the rights to her story. Talk of a movie or something.
A book. I don’t know. The Carnes are suddenly the curiosities of Stowe. It’s crazy. At this rate she’ll die fifty million times by next month. I’ve talked to a lawyer in Burlington, a good one, and he said that since Sylvia was the primary creator of the content, we, meaning her family, are the ones in control, not you. You were just the cameraman, Jamie. So what I need from you is your signature on some papers and for you to hand over the original video, which is rightfully my property.”
Jamie spat one last time. “Of course,” he said. After pocketing his tooth and reacquainting himself with gravity, he guided Ed inside and up the stairs. It seemed like a flood had hit his apartment, a bureau’s worth of clothes washed up on the floor, the furniture loosened from its moorings, the overall odor having only a brief memory of being dry. “I’ve kind of let things go,” Jamie said, picking up an old newspaper in a gesture of tidying up.
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Something to drink? Not that I trust what’s growing in my fridge.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Give me a second.” Jamie popped into the bathroom and greeted his alternate self in the mirror: the Jamie who got what he deserved. A washcloth took care of his face but his shirt was forever ruined and his nose had a parenthetical bend to the left. But in general he liked this new look. He grinned. The gap was like a drunken tattoo.
“Really sorry about that,” Ed said from the door.
“I think it makes me look younger.”
“You should put ice on your nose.”
“Probably.” Jamie stepped past him and grabbed the RazorRam DVD and mini DV from the pile on the living room table. “I feel terrible that this ever got online. It was an accident.”
“I should probably thank you,” Ed said. “I would have locked it away in a drawer without ever watching.” He slipped them into his satchel, his hand returning with two ten-page documents. “If you could sign these.”
Jamie made a show of checking the legalese.
“Pretty standard stuff,” Ed said.
Pretty standard stuff, Jamie thought.
“You’re just affirming what is true.”
What is true? Jamie stopped reading. “I have one condition.”
Ed’s beard curled in the vicinity of his lips. “What?”
“You have to hit me again.”
“Huh?”
“You have to hit me again, as hard as you can.”
“I told you, I’m not a violent person.”
“I don’t care. You hit me and I’ll sign.”
Whatever Ed’s qualms, they passed—“Turn your head”—and soon he was out the door and back on the street while Jamie was back in front of the mirror watching his left eye shade from pink to purple. Pain echoed like a shout down a canyon, a curious hello rather than a cry for help. He couldn’t help smiling. You doofus, he muttered. He threw a slow-motion punch at his reflection. Then he had a shower and was briefly unburdened by memory or imagination, to the degree where he washed his face twice, unsure of the first time. Fresh-scrubbed, he looked even more like a mess. He sat at his computer and typed
dying
and
woman
and
12:01 p.m
. into Google but held back from going any further.
How are you?
Jamie sat there waiting for an answer when the phone rang. It was his brother.
“Glad I caught you,” Richard said in an odd tone. “I got a pal looking to party.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re in a car, a limo actually, a stretch job, very sweet, and my friend’s looking for a little boom-boom—wait, he says a lot of boom-boom—so I guess we’re looking for boom-boom-boom and I thought of you, my Mr. Boom Boom.”
“You haven’t done anything stupid, have you?” Jamie asked.
“That’s open for debate,” Richard said. “But back to boom-boom.”
“It’s obvious you haven’t bought drugs in a very long time.”
“True.”
“You with Eric Harke?”
“Yep.”
“And what, you’re doing coke with him?”
“No, just helping a friend in need.”
“What a ridiculously bad idea, Richard.”
“It’s all good,” Richard said.
“I thought you were a trained drug counselor.”
“Oh baby, I am.”
“
Baby
and
boom-boom
? Is this really how you went about your business back in the day, because frankly it’s embarrassing.”
“Look, I’ll take what you’ve got.”
“All I’ve got is some weed.”
“Weed?” A pause. “Weed’s no good. We need the boom-boom.”
“Stop with the boom-boom, please.”
“That’s great. I knew you’d come through.”
“Richard, I don’t think—”
“Reminds me of our first deal. Remember that? An ounce of No Soap Radio.”
Jamie sat up straighter.
“You remember that?” Richard asked again.
“We can’t do that, and not to some Hollywood cokehead.”