Sixteen Small Deaths (5 page)

A small plastic vial the color of Thanksgiving rests on the floor, two numbers written in black permanent marker adorn the cap:
16
. I stare at it for a few minutes before tossing it against the wall. My face buried in cold hands, I take deep breaths and try to speed up my heart. Shocks of warm pain glide through veins and into my left arm and I panic with thoughts of a heart attack at the age of twenty-eight. I lay back into a mess of blankets and sheets, let my hand touch my chest and work itself down to my crotch and inside my boxers. Fingers find a clear, sticky substance and I bring the gunk to my nose, hanging it a few inches away. It smells like a mix of vanilla and old magazines. I’m afraid to taste it.

Loveless nights lead to loveless mornings and my memory is a blank fucking canvas.

I jump to the other side of the room and try to find the empty vial. It’s hidden amongst empty beer bottles, dank light and a single Polaroid of the one woman who stole my heart. She has golden blonde hair and eyes that could light a rainforest. There’s nothing else written on the outside of the vial besides the number on the cap but I open it anyway. I hold it to the window and pale sunshine reveals typed words spelled backwards within fine medicinal dust:
revihs.
It takes me a minute too fucking long to whisper it to myself.

Shiver.

Last night comes to me in a stream of grays and browns and
there’s one man I need to talk to before I take two cold showers and silently say a prayer to myself in the broken mirror above the bathroom sink.

#

I swallow a spoonful of granola and skim milk and resist the urge to destroy the plate of eggs in front of me. A woman in a tight black skirt and hair the color of autumn leaves smiles at me but I haven’t the heart to tell her that most of my girlfriends had either slept with someone once while we were dating or held a gun to my head.

I’m more fearful of women than the dark figures lurking in my bedroom closet.

Another sip of warm apple juice and I look at my watch. Karl is fifteen minutes late and not a part of me is surprised. I remember his speech, his deliverance of a new drug on the streets of Boston. I was never one to shy away from a new experience and I bet I was one of the first to throw a handful of twenties at his chest. One pill and a picture of someone you want to fuck. One pill and the thoughts of any woman in the world. One pill and the memories of a lost love. That’s all he said before handing over the vial.

My wife’s dead and I’ll do anything to touch her again.

The diner door jingles and a swarm of elderly women walk in, each looking like she’s lost after an hour of church. I finish my breakfast and twirl a spoon in midnight-colored coffee. Karl’s the next to walk in and he slowly makes his way to the booth. His head is shaved and his looks like a reformed skinhead that’s given up on gangbanging and taken up golf. He’s wearing a tight-knit polo shirt with a small pelican emblem and faded black jeans. His eyes are wide and blue like he’s been up all night snorting coke or doing his taxes.

“My friend,” he says. “How’s it going? Tell me you had a great
night.”

He reaches out to give me a high five but I wave it away with my mug. I take a long, involved sip of coffee and stare at Karl for at least thirty seconds.

“I did not have a great night, Karl,” I say. “It wasn’t even close to that.”

“Oh, come on man. Lighten up. Tell me that it was a fucking
experience,
brother. Tell me that you’ve never woken up feeling like a dream was reality.”

I push away my coffee and lean back into the booth, the strength of my body squishing into aged leather. I’ve never been awake this early on a Sunday and I already regret asking Karl to meet me. “I suppose it’s my fault for trying it. But that was too much even for me. It wasn’t really Rachael.”

Karl laughs and his imperfect teeth part. I’m sure he hasn’t brushed them in a few days. He shakes his head before the waitress walks over to our table. “Just coffee,” he says to her. “Listen, brother. The first trip is never going to be clean. Did you stare at her picture before you took the dose of shiver?”

I nod.

Karl cracks his knuckles as the waitress pours coffee into a chipped brown mug. “Let me tell you something, brother. Try shiver again. You won’t regret it. I promise.”

He slips me a small plastic vial with a single pill inside, purple with pink stripes. I close it in the palm of my hand and shove it into my jacket pocket. A final sip of coffee and I slide the mug to the side of the table. Karl places a twenty next to my empty bowl. He raises his glass in the air and smiles. “Here’s to seeing Rachael again.”

#

My wife was robbed outside of our apartment. Two men raped her, beat her and slit her throat. She bled out on the front stairs
while passersby ignored the most beautiful woman in the world dying a few inches from her home. Police never found the two fucks and it was a matter of days after Rachael’s funeral that I lost the will to look for them. She was taken from me and nothing was going to bring her back.

Shiver is two milligrams of hope. Shiver is a chance to see her again.

#

The view outside of my living-room window encompasses a city that I wish would crumble. When I was a child I’d often look to the sky and hope that in my lifetime a meteor would strike the earth. I’d have dreams of oceans spilling over and destroying buildings.

A draft flows through the apartment and I laugh at my naiveté as a youth. I sit next to the coffee table and fumble through a photo album. Pictures are bound between red cloth binding and rusted metal prongs. These visions are Rachael and I smiling, the two of us living a different life in a different dimension and I swear both of us died last October.

I flip through photos of our wedding and various social events. Birthday bashes and nights at the pubs in downtown Boston. I find one of Rachael wearing a tight white t-shirt that’s low cut, pale swoop of breasts peeking from a plunging neckline. Her hair is short, black slices in a sea of gold. There’s a bit of red in her eyes from the camera flash. She has a martini in her hand and her smile is wry but suggests she’s having a good time. I scoop up the picture and slip it into the front pocket of my jeans.

Sometimes the bedroom is too haunting. I could wake up in the middle of the night and find Rachael’s ghost sitting at the edge of the bed, pointing to a blanket of stars in the violet night sky.

I undress and lay at the foot of the bed, clutching a pillow to
my chest and rolling the vial of shiver in my hand. My eyes close after staring at a map of stains on the ceiling. I try not to fall asleep but my single adventure for the day was more than enough to wear my body down. Sitting up, I reach into my jeans pocket and pull out Rachael’s photo. I lock her eyes into my line of vision and swallow the single dose of shiver.

Soon enough the walls collapse into the foundation of the building and my heart burns with the touch of the dead.

#

Her head is absent of hair and parts of her skull push through the skin, rotting bits of bone dressed with gray excess and crimson spots. She doesn’t cast a shadow and my arms are tied to the bed. This woman wears sunglasses that drip with what looks like sweat and semen.

Cool airs brushes my crotch and my vision is blurry, a dream world scarred like a film reel dropped in seawater. She runs a hand along my side and the touch splits my skin but I can’t feel the blood seeping from the wound. I force my legs to move but find that they’re tied with solid black cables. She giggles and puts her mouth to mine. I see my own reflection in her dark sunglasses before she tears off a chunk of flesh from my lips. I can’t scream or move and I’m sure I’ll bleed to death on this fucking table.

Panic breaths of air and I’m swallowing my own blood. The woman is naked and her breasts are perfect. She laughs again and clutches my cock in her hands, easing it up and down in a gentle motion. She removes her sunglasses and I glance at two empty holes housing nothing but spots of red light. I’m in her mouth now, waves of pleasure entwined with spikes of lightning. She moves faster until her teeth are locked onto the tip of my penis. She bites down and my heart explodes inside my chest, ribcage bursting through muscle. Blood sprays across the
room and onto her face like a broken geyser and it’s only when the darkness hits that a coverlet of poppies falls from the sky.

#

Ginger streaks of light cover my bed and it takes me a minute or two to open my eyes. My bare body is wrapped in a single blanket and all of the pillows are on the floor, square pieces of navy blue comfort amidst vomit-colored carpet. I push myself out of the mess and onto my back. My skin is sticky and I’m quickly relieved that it’s only sweat and nothing else. Before I try to sit up my toes slide across coolness at the foot of the bed.

I slide myself completely out of the blanket and look at my feet. Stripes of blood circle the base of my toes. I pull the blanket away and see a perfect circle of Indian red. One finger touches the center and I bring it back to my chest. It’s colder than anything I’ve felt before. Legs give out and I fall to the floor. I bury my face in my fingers and repeat Rachael’s name until it’s tattooed on the palms of my hands. I’ve reached out to her twice and both times I’ve come back with nothing but blood and desperation.

My tired heart beats a little slower as I walk out of the bedroom and into the hallway, past a row of framed pictures of my dead wife and her lost husband. The kitchen is warmer than usual. I grab the bottle of whiskey from the cabinet next to the refrigerator and remove the cap. I don’t need a glass and in fact I don’t need much of anything right now. Shiver has only destroyed Rachael’s ghost and before long I’ll give up on the one thing that could have brought me closer to her.

#

The doorbell rings four or five times in a row and I realize that I’m naked and sitting at the kitchen table, my head resting on its sturdy pine frame. The left side of my face feels as warm as a ten-minute-old
cup of tea. I run into the bedroom and pull a pair of pajama pants over my legs and find an aged black t-shirt with spots of brown adorning the chest.

Karl is at the door and he’s leaning against the railing of the porch. He has a roll of magazines in his hand, a bunch of white envelopes sticking out of the center like an array of bleached roses. “You ever check your mail, brother? You need to get out of the house more often.”

I’m silent and I motion for him to follow me into the house. We sit at the kitchen table and he picks up the empty whiskey bottle. It’s not until I see him do this that I’m reminded of the marching band holding practice in my head.

“Wow, brother, doing some drinking, aren’t we?” he asks.

“Karl, it’s not working.” I clutch the bottle from his hands and place it in the sink next to an array of unwashed coffee mugs and dirty dinner plates. “She’s not the same on…the other side. Or whatever you can call it. I’m waking up with blood in my bed, Karl.”

Karl pushes his chair back and starts to sit up. I shove a hand in his chest and force him back into his seat.

“Blood? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. It’s just a drug. You have an enlightened lucid dream. You can touch those that can’t be touched. You can fuck the girls you’ve always wanted to fuck. All it needs is a vision, brother.”

“I know what shiver does, Karl. What I’m saying is that Rachael might be too far out there for me to reach. The dreams aren’t dreams at all. They’re fucking nightmares.”

Karl and I stay silent for what feels like an hour. He finally stands up and pulls a thick brown envelope from his inside jacket pocket. He tosses it onto the table and the noise startles me out of a momentary trance. “There you go,” he says. “That’s all of the shiver I have left. Probably close to fifty doses in there. Keep trying. You’ll find her.”

I can’t help but grab the envelope and hand it back to Karl. He
brushes it away and leaves it on the kitchen counter. He pats me on the back and smiles. “If I told you what that drug was made of, you’d keep trying. She’s not far off.”

I lean against the sink and watch Karl leave the apartment. He slams the door behind him and an inch of dying daylight crawls in before it’s completely closed. I suddenly think that it could be the last of the sun I ever see and I grab the envelope on the counter and shut the bedroom door behind me.

#

I swallow the sixteenth of shiver doses and know that’s it only a matter of time before my heart stops and night falls outside of the bedroom window while an arrangement of stars crack and explode. The bed envelops my body and I embrace the clutter of soiled bed sheets and pillows before my vision starts to acquiesce with lucidity.

A gleam of blue light circles around my head and my muscles start to twitch with fear. Beads of gray sweat drip into my mouth and it tastes like spoiled wine. I don’t know if I’m breathing anymore and the moon bursts into a fiery flower of vermillion. Trickles of sparkling dust fall from the bedroom ceiling and I can see through the paint and wood to beyond the night sky. Rachael enters the room and sits next to me on the bed. She’s as gorgeous as an untouched corpse and a misty jade glow follows the length of her hair.

A black fingernail parts my lips and my heart finally stops beating.

Moonlight explodes into a halo of crimson and sparkles. I bite My tongue, feel the white-hot sting of fear careen into my brain with the force of a thousand dying horses. It’s hard to tell just how hard I’m breathing, how frightened my nerves really are. My heart doesn’t pound very fast, in fact, it doesn’t pound at all. It’s just a useless fistful of crumpled pink flesh hanging behind the ribcage.

My eye only a millimeter away from the keyhole, I’m entranced by the terror before me. Abel was mixing a drink at the bar in the corner of his apartment, and then the boom hit, like a hundred pounds of dynamite curled into a ball and thrown through a plate-glass window. My ears popped, I fell to the floor, and there she was: couldn’t have been more than a hundred and ten pounds of pale flesh and hair the color of burnt cinnamon. She smiled once through the rubble of broken pine door and eggshell plaster, and then picked up Abel
without even touching him.
She lifted a single black-painted fingernail and before I could crawl away, Abel’s torso dripped with the charcoal goo that typically runs through our veins in lieu of red plasma. His thin blonde hair was replaced with spinning gray smoke, and it took only a few seconds for me to shove my way into his bedroom and slam and lock the door.