I move to the bathroom with educated steps, careful not to make noise. I rap on the wall with fingertips, whispering, “Leslie! Are you there? Do not go outside,” I say. “Do not go outside. There’s a fucking wolf in the hall.”
Leslie isn’t much for profanity. I think she goes to church on Sundays. But with all due respect, there’s a critical degree of seriousness between a wolf in the hall and a
fucking
wolf in the hall, and I’d hate for her to think there’s just a wolf in the hall, like it’s no big deal at all.
Hours pass. Maybe days. I don’t recognize my surroundings. I must have fallen asleep because my back hurts like hell, and I can’t feel my ass. I’m hugging the toilet like it’s the twenty-fifth hour of my twenty-first birthday.
I don’t…feel drunk.
My brain is hazy with the remnants of dreams of wolves and debilitating loneliness. I stand, jeans bunched uncomfortably high into my crotch, my t-shirt caught between my armpits and contorted like I got dressed in the dark.
My muscles have turned to wood and I stumble, planting the side of my face into a wall I’m all too familiar with. This is a good indicator I’ve been here before. The voice of recognition tells me I’m in my own bathroom.
Despite the difficulty of using my body, I feel rested for the first time in weeks. Nightmare-induced sleep is better than no sleep at all.
I’ve got a mouth that tastes like I’ve been using pennies as breath mints. I spit thick, dark clots of red and black into the sink. I smile, but I’m not laughing. Two of my bicuspids are still missing.
I twist myself out of my shirt, uncomfortably wet with sweat, and leave it behind on the bathroom floor. Adjusting my pants, I take my cell phone from the pocket. No new messages, but the date reads Wednesday just as it did in my nightmare.
My own personal Groundhog Day.
The sun has set my bedroom ablaze. I use my forearm to block out the light, and feel my way into the living room, where I’ve left the shades drawn shut. I have ample opportunity here to allow my eyes to readjust to humanity, and figure out where I last put my teeth.
There’s a chair jammed up beneath the door.
It takes an hour for me to work up the courage to venture back outside. In the meantime, I pour myself a bowl of cereal and wash it down with a beer, attempt to check my e-mail but the Internet is down, and find what smells like a clean shirt crammed between my bed and the wall. Putting it on makes me feel better about myself. It’s a blue button-down, a bit wrinkled. I put my nose in it and swear I can still smell Valerie and her fifty-three dollar shampoo. I think she bought me this shirt on a Valentine’s Day when we couldn’t last twelve minutes without seeing each other, calling, or touching. Any absence of her in my life produced a pit in my stomach large enough to swallow this planet whole. And when she finally left for good, that pit devoured me but left the world intact. If you’ve ever come home to find an envelope on your kitchen table with a set of keys and a note that reads with the poetic teenage proficiency of a Dashboard Confessional song, then you know the terminally ill, intolerable existence of which I speak. If we’d been living in Los Angeles, I could understand. But you can’t leave someone that way in a Midwest town like this. Here, you risk a meeting just going to the mailbox.
I still have that note. I hold a lighter up to it once a week.
I sit on the floor in front of the door, inspecting the chair, trying to come up with a rational explanation as to why it would be there. Sleepwalking is about the best thing I can come up with. I can’t bring myself to listen to my messages; the voices of my mother and father still play themselves with perfect clarity in my head. I’m doing a fine job convincing myself I’m still dreaming. But what of Valerie? And my parents? What if they’re really in trouble? When I remove the chair and open the door, what I find next isn’t as dangerous as a rabid wolf escaped from the zoo with the potential ability to open doors, but it’s enough to warrant the fact that this is turning out to be one shit day.
4
A PERFECTLY GOOD DAY BEFORE BEING DEAD
I find the body in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, slumped over and sleeping. Mauled by a wolf? There seems to be a few sporadic bruises on his neck, like broken blood vessels, but I’m no coroner. In fact, one could argue he was having a particularly perfect day before being dead.
And me, being the good-natured-every-day-Christian-human-being that I am, I nudge him with my boot. You know, just to be certain. When his head rolls from the left to the right like he’s just working out the kinks, and his bloodshot eyes pierce my soul with an intensity straight out of hell, I scream. It’s more of an automatic regurgitation of repulsion, like finding a spider crawling up your arm. A damsel in distress sort of thing, I’m ashamed to clarify.
“Hello?” I call out in my best attempt at keeping my voice steady. “Someone! Help!” Standard protocol for this sort of thing, really. When it appears that no one seems to be coming to my aid—his aid—I take a moment to gather myself, collect my thoughts.
In no particular order, they go something like this: Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I recognize the poor fellow as Mr. Phelps from down the hall, even though he’s gone gray enough to be an apparition. A split, brown bag of groceries lay scattered about his person: celery, apples, bread, a dozen eggs now scrambled, and a half-gallon of spilled milk now curdled, which, along with his ghostly jowls, putrid odor, and skin color, leads me to believe he’s been down on his luck for quite some time.
I decide this is the appropriate time to vomit. I do so, officially tampering with evidence. How long does it take for a body to decompose? I try to recall the last time I caught an episode of CSI. I’m regretting that dice game more and more every hour.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Go to Mr. Phelps’s apartment and get Mrs. Phelps.
That won’t end well. I’ve never been very good at delivering bad news. I backed over my neighbor’s cat, Sampson, when I was eighteen. I paced around the driveway for nine hours and officially took up smoking before I finally worked up the courage to knock on their front door and deliver the news. And this here, this is like, twice as bad.
He’s clearly been dead for more than a day. Why is his body still here?
Hands in pockets, I break some eggshells beneath my boots.
I’ve never had much luck when it comes to animals.
I push the front door open, and three gazelles run across the street into Mrs. Beck’s front lawn to terrorize her azaleas.
The sun shines in a cloudless, pulsating blue sky, bouncing off the windshield of Mr. Waterman’s vintage Lamborghini next door. The car sparkles as if it’s just come off the showroom floor, nearly blinding me. The smell of fresh cut grass lingers in the air. Squirrels go about their jittery, squirrely business, scattering in every direction at once. There are birds everywhere. Pecking at the grass, chirping. None of them taking off, flying far and away upon my emergence into their world.
An abandoned newspaper scratches its way across the road.
Summer is here, but no one seems to be enjoying it.
My head doesn’t itch, but I scratch through my hair to give myself something to do. The world sits devastatingly still. There’s a scary sort of silence begging to be heard this morning.
The gazelles graze the grass and flowerbeds of Mrs. Beck’s yard, a widow with no children and no cats and nothing better to do but tend to the azaleas and roses and snapdragons that decorate her lawn. Gazelles. Of course. How normal. How do I know they’re gazelles? Because there’s a fucking wolf in the hallway, Leslie never showed up this morning, my toes are still burning, and Mr. Phelps is dead and gone in the foyer. I watch, helpless, as the three animals destroy everything Mrs. Beck spent all season perfecting before looking back at Mr. Phelps, believing I’ve been sorely mistaken and I am going to see him stand up, brush off his trousers and mumble about how he’s just taken a bit of a spill, and can I help him with the mess. But he’s just as dead as he was twelve seconds ago.
Needing to phone the police, check on Valerie, and prevent a nervous breakdown, I take my phone from my pocket and dial 911, practicing basic evasive maneuvers against the wolves. I wander around back, wondering what exactly I am going to tell our town’s finest protectors of the law that won’t make me sound stark raving mad. It is here I find my other neighbor, Roger, passed out drunk in the shrubbery behind the complex. I don’t normally find him here before noon, but last night must have been one hell of a bender. I’ve never been so thankful for his alcoholism. Done. Forgiven. For all the times he’s knocked on my door at four a.m. asking after a Mr. Habernaro. Asking to borrow a hammer and nails. A teakettle. Seven lampshades and a gun. Black socks with gold toes. Nail clippers and a thermometer.
I put the phone back in my pocket, shouting his name before getting too close. A necessary precaution. A murder of crows escapes with pristine formation from a nearby tree, calling to each other or maybe to me as they drop to the ground to take rest, rather than taking flight into the heavens. Waking Roger from a self-inflicted, alcohol-induced slumber with a vigorous shake or sudden startling is your own funeral. Unlike every other properly intoxicated adult, Roger’s hangovers snap him to attention like he’s straight out of boot camp, and his upper extremities start swinging as if he’s still caught up in the bar fight that ended his night.
When he doesn’t immediately respond, I call out again before deciding to proceed to Roger’s aid. He’s curled into the fetal position, and I wouldn’t have been shocked to discover him sucking a thumb. In fact, that’s preferable to finding him dead—which is precisely how I find him.
I discover the third body of the day in the parking garage, slumped against the steering wheel of the minivan assigned to the space next to mine. It’s Mrs. Ross. She’s got two kids, James and Jasmine, a dog called Cody, and a husband who works in construction. I recoil at the sight of her, spewing out the same sort of shocked repulsion I did when I found Mr. Phelps. Her porcelain features are bruised and battered, almost as though she were beaten to death right here. I regain my composure and press my face against the glass, scanning the backseat for the children, and my heart slows when I find it empty.
My vehicle isn’t much for travel. When I moved back to this town, I purchased a ’95 Integra with two hundred thousand miles on it for three hundred dollars and a bottle of conditioner from Wentworth Bellmont, this town’s one and only millionaire. He moved here three years ago from upstate New York looking to retire and build a golf course. My father, a barber before he retired, sold his shop to the hair salon moving into town — hence the bottle of conditioner. I slapped on a new pair of tires, and Mr. Bellmont was happy to see me drive off with the car. He stood in the driveway waving until I was out of sight, and probably kept waving while I sat at The Salty Grog and listened to Eddy’s theories about 9/11 and the New World Order.
Every time I get behind the wheel, it takes two or three good tries for the engine to turn over, and today is no exception. At least something is going right. On the fourth try she starts up. I pull out of the garage, but I’m getting nowhere fast. There’s a giraffe in my way.
I’m beginning to think the police aren’t going to be any help today.
5
A CRITICAL AMOUNT OF RED
Valerie moved back into her mother’s place after we split for the last time. The heartfelt high school poetry she wrote and left behind, wrecking my ability to breathe, never informed me as to where she went. But it didn’t take long for Ma to call and say she saw Valerie at church, and when was the last time I went to church? “You know the invitation to come with us every Sunday is always there, right?”
“I know, Ma. Did Valerie say anything to you?”
“Do you need me to call you on Saturday nights to remind you? Would that help? You know your father and I would love the company.”
“Probably not. Are you sure it was Valerie?”
“Pastor Henry always asks about you. When was the last time you saw him? You were maybe fifteen years old. I’m sure he’d love to see how much you’ve grown up. He cares about you.”
“And I care about what Valerie said to you.”
“Oh, we didn’t exchange pleasantries. But I did run into Viv. She said Valerie was back at home and wanted to know if you were too. I’m not quite sure what to tell people about you. They always ask.”
“Just tell them I’m homesick.”
“You know there’s always a place for you here.”
“Thanks, Ma.”
The prospect of dropping by to check in on Valerie because I was in the neighborhood doesn’t exactly thrill me, but it’s a better scenario than finding them as dead as everyone else. Plus she called me after, what? Six months of very intentional silence?
“Oh, please, God, let Valerie be okay.” Christian as I may have been raised, I’m not sure God is listening anymore, but it doesn’t stop me from praying.
I grip the steering wheel, shaking as if I were stuck in rush hour traffic and running late. “WHAT IS HAPPENING? I AM LOSING MY GODDAMN MIND!” Cell phone in hand again, I have no service. I toss it into the backseat as I approach a traffic light at the top of the hill in my neighborhood. The steering wheel vibrating violently, the engine quiets down. I push in on the clutch and inch forward in first. The car chokes back to life. The light is red, and the brake lights on the car in front of me shine bright. My heart skips. I lay on the horn before getting out of the car.
“Hey!” I call out as I approach. “Hey!” I’m waving my arms frantically. I might as well be guiding an aircraft to its landing. “What happened last night?” I ask even though I’m sure the individual in the car cannot hear me.
I reach the driver’s side, and knock on the window.