Purgatorium (41 page)

Confused, I whisper, “My mom,” perhaps to Lisa, perhaps to the memory of my
mother
. It didn’t matter. My younger self begins to grow up to the man I am today. I reach back up to her, seeing her through my adult eyes. My mom proudly smiles at me as I slowly dip her.

Suddenly, I hear an abrupt beeping. I know this sound from somewhere. This sound is the same noise as my watch alarm, I think. As I bring her back up from the dip, I see that my mom has changed back into Lisa.

Money starts falling from the balcony. I continue dancing with Lisa as the snow falls everywhere around us. Lisa giggles at me, watching me stare in disbelief and desire, watching the snow come down. Finally, the waltz ends.

Unexpectedly, a laser light shoots across the dance floor and throughout the club. A dubstep track begins playing and men and women start dancing throughout the club. The dance floor around us fills up. I see bar waitresses carrying trays of shots throughout the club.

I look back at Lisa, who is looking at me lustfully. I gaze into her beautiful eyes, feeling her soft curvaceous body against mine. I lean in towards her, bringing my lips close to hers. Lisa puts her finger to them. She holds up a key with the number 6 on it and looks over to a set of elevators. She winks.

“Shhh….I will be waiting.” She hands me the key and walks away. I hold the key tightly, my heart beating. I feel agitated desire throughout my body. I head to the elevator trying to calm myself in the process. The doors open and I hop in.

Seconds pass as I get out of the elevator. My inner thoughts have regained control of my mind as I look down the hall full of doors.

This is where Michael had stopped me last time I was here. He didn’t want me to see what was behind the door.

I look down at my hand and see that the key is gone.
Do ‘I’ really want to know what’s behind the door?
As I get closer, I notice the little girl appear again.

“You don’t want to go in there,” she says.

“I have to,” I say to her, pleadingly. I look back at the door, grab the doorknob, turn it, and walk in.

The room looks like my apartment room in my prison. I see my number six key is magically out of my hand and now lying on the table next to the door. I look over the place and see the same layout and the Yamaha Grand Disklavier in the corner of the living room. A clock is perched right above it and I notice it turning from 3:09 to 3:10AM.

3:10. The piano. It’s somehow all connected for this specific moment,
I think as my head starts to hurt. My pain gets worse as I begin to look around the room some more. I hear noises full of passion in the other room.
Is that Lisa I hear?
I wonder.

There is a red dress, high heels, a tuxedo jacket, white shirt, and pants—all strewn about on the floor. I pick up the red dress and know it’s Lisa’s. I go to the bedroom door and see Lisa and another person entangled together passionately. I walk closer and pull the sheets off from over them. “What have I done?” I say to myself. The unknown man is me.

I look up and I am no longer in the bedroom. My watch goes off.

35 Minutes

I see that I am in the meat locker freezer once again. I feel cold air around me, there is a dim light, and a chilly tile floor underneath me. I look down back at Lisa but see that she has become the waitress. Shocked, I push myself off of her and stand up. I notice the waitress is wearing the same red dress that Lisa had worn. She also has bruises on her upper arms.

I point to her arms, questioning if I had done that to her. She bows her head and nods to me. She looks down at the floor, ashamed. I start to apologize until suddenly something catches my attention.

Behind me I can hear Uriel singing a Boys II Men song.

“I’ll make love to you like you want me to, and I’ll hold you tight, baby, all through the night!” I turn around and see Uriel by the steel door, holding a boombox with his mix tape exposed in front of it.

“Gucci! You almost had her!” Uriel slaps me on the back, laughing. The waitress shyly walks toward the door.

“Careful how you play your cards when you have a queen already in your hand,” he says coyly.

I pause, remembering those words from when Michael had said them. Repeating the sentence in my head, I realize its true meaning.

I had it wrong the whole time. It was never about the card game or the Queen of diamonds. It was about another kind of Queen, my own personal Queen. Madi. I had her in my hands and made one rash decision after the next, losing her in the process.

Uriel continues, “What’s that saying? You don’t know a good thing until it’s gone? Or is it you play the hand you’re dealt? To hell with it! Either way you cut the deck you still come out as a cheater, Gucci.”

He ejects the tape and turns it over. “What are you an A-side or B-side type of guy?”

I look at him, not understanding what he is trying to get at.

“The terms A-side and B-side refer to the two sides of a record. The A-side usually featured hit songs that the fans heard many times over the radio. The B-side is the less hip secondary recording that gives fans the rarer songs that aren’t played as much.”

He presses ‘play’ on the boombox and gets taken back by the sound of the B-sided music.

“Me personally, loves the B-side better. It’s the surprise factor! Everything you thought you knew about the band changes. They experiment and go off the beaten path, finding a new sound along the way. Sometimes that path does lead to failure and misfortune, but the risk of finding something pure out of it is how we perceive a real artist from a one-hit wonder. So what kind of man are you? Do you like the surprise or do you stick to what you know?”

He is toying with my emotions. I give him no physical response other than a distasteful look on my face from everything I have come to learn about myself.

Uriel laughs again, taking hold of the waitress’ arm, turning and walking out of the meat locker.

I notice the necklace isn’t around his neck anymore and wonder if there’s any significance between the necklace and the angels’ odd behavior.

“When you’re done feeling sad, turn the tape to side B and meet us out here,” Uriel calls back.

I quickly run over to the boombox and punt it. It goes shattering into the wall. I walk out through the kitchen and push the door open to the restaurant. A waltz is playing on another boombox and Uriel is dancing with the waitress. “Always carry a back-up, Gucci!” I charge forward, about to smash the other one, when I see the blood running down the waitress’ leg.

“Did you know, Gucci, that the highest divorce rate in America is 50%?” Uriel asks, sweeping the waitress across the floor. She looks miserable and reluctant but continues dancing with Uriel.

“Twenty to twenty-four-year-olds have the highest percentage of marriages that end in divorce. Women are at about 36%, men 38%. You’re just following the statistics, so don’t beat yourself up. It’s not worth it! She’s not worth it. Hell, no woman is worth it!! Women are pleasurable distractions…nothing more and nothing less. In this day and age, it’s everyone for themselves. There are new rules to live by now. As the old song goes, ‘Love the one your with, honey!’ Whoever said that marriage is forever lied to you. Because I can promise you this,
every
man and woman cheats! Physically or mentally, it doesn’t matter. Cheaters always be cheating!!”

I can’t help but think that Uriel may be right but I wave it off. He is wrong, I think. I hear the whispers again rolling through my head. “Why would you even think that? Uriel is right. Women only bring us down. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for a certain woman.” I try to clear my mind and not listen to whatever has corrupted me. I look over and see that Uriel has stopped dancing.

“Thank you for the dance, my lady,” he says, kissing the waitress’ hand, then letting her go. “‘Praised be the fathomless universe, for life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious; and for love, sweet love—But praise! O praise and praise, for the sure unwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.’ That’s Walt Whitman, Gucci.”

Uriel picks up a knife off a nearby table and stabs the waitress’ eye. She screams and screams, holding her hands to her face, stumbling around the tables while bumping into chairs.

“Lust is blind,” he says to me. “Get it? Some people can’t see the truth until it’s too late.”

Shocked and horrified by Uriel’s violence against the waitress, I also feel ashamed, humiliated, and angry at myself. I look over at the silver cover and notice the bottom of the hourglass is almost full. Looking back up at Uriel, I am suddenly struck by a thought.
He
must be my
demon
. Without thinking twice, I quickly reach down and turn off the notification sound to my watch.

40 Minutes

Uriel laughs,
watch
ing the waitress continue to stumble around while screaming. Suddenly, his expression changes. I see him start to shudder, then notice his breath hanging in the air. I run back in to the kitchen as I hear him yell, “What have you done?!”

I make my way back into the meat locker. I lift the lever and lock the steel door tight. Closing myself in, I watch Uriel bust through the swinging doors into the kitchen. He sees me through the hole space. He pulls on it but soon finds out that I locked it from the inside.

“What are you doing?” he shouts at the door. “You’re the one who cheated, and you think I am your demon? Really?” Uriel continues to pull on the door. “Okay, Gucci, can you then look at the thermostat for me?” he yells.

I look up and see the meat locker is getting warmer. I remember Michael telling me now that it can only stay cold in here for a few minutes. If the temperature gets warmer then the reapers will be able to pick up my heat patterns. I look down at my
watch
.

It reads: 41:00.

I only have a
minute and two seconds
until the record starts to play on the outside! I need to get on that subway car right now! I look back at Uriel not knowing if I can trust him.

Reapers’ screeching sounds are echoing through the kitchen. Uriel looks to me, “I can only hold them off for so long!” He shows me his mix tape, grinning like an idiot.

Frost covers the door behind him that leads to the dining room. It bursts open and three reapers fly in, stopping in front of Uriel, who has turned to face them with his boombox in hand. He puts the tape in and presses play, then sets the boombox down and cracks his neck from side to side. Uriel pulls his hair tie out of his hair, pulls his hair back more tightly, and reties it into a ponytail.

“Well,
hello
boys! Come for dance off, I presume?” Uriel walks away from the meat locker door and toward a small hallway at the back of the kitchen.

Hearing Uriel leading the reapers away from the meat locker, I reevaluate my situation. Kenny Loggins ‘Footloose’ begins playing through the boombox speakers.

Maybe he isn’t my demon after all, I possibly think. Feeling safer, I crack the meat locker door open just enough to look into the kitchen. The reapers keep following Uriel. They draw nearer and examine his face.

“Need a closer look,” says Uriel, taking off his sunglasses and folding them in his right hand. Suddenly, the reapers turn and shriek to each other. I see their legs forming below the reapers’ capes.

“Like the great Kevin Bacon once said, ‘I thought this was a party? Let’s dance!’” Uriel says, smiling. The music starts up with the chorus. He drops his sunglasses and jumps straight up into the air.

The reapers’ legs touch the floor, freezing Uriel’s sunglasses and the floor around them instantly. Still midair, Uriel wraps his leg around one of the reapers and his arm around another’s shoulder, slamming its skull into the wall. It falls to the ground and disintegrates into water.

I push the meat locker door open and walk into the kitchen. I notice the water on the floor spreading, creeping towards me. The third reaper suddenly turns its head toward me. Uriel quickly slams his foot into this reaper’s head. It falls to the floor. Uriel thrusts his foot down on its skull, breaking it apart with a loud “crack!” Uriel hops back up and pushes off the wall with his leg, bringing the other leg down and kicking the reaper’s face against the wall, splitting it in half.

The room immediately feels warmer. Uriel drops down to the floor. He looks up at me and says, “I told you that was a great mix tape!”

Glancing down, Uriel sees that his feet are in a layer of water formed by the quickly melting ice. A look of disappointment comes over his face. He looks up and starts trying to walk to me, his legs moving as if they were in quicksand.

I remember back to when
Michael
carefully avoided stepping on the water.

There must be something about the water that slows us down.

Uriel is in a panic. I am about to go help him until I realize that I could get stuck too. He yells at me, “Forget about me. I will take care of myself.”

I can’t just leave him here. I’m about to dip my toe in the puddle when he screams, “What are you waiting for?! Every second that goes by, more reapers will appear if you don’t leave!”

I take one last look at Uriel laboring to get himself out of the water. He lifts the boombox over his head as the Peter Gabriel song ‘In your Eyes’ plays. I smirk at his attempt to make a joke out of the situation.