Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Read online

  But she is gone now, after realizing what I have only just realized myself: there is no place in this world for people like me. The world, despite its own ugliness is not built to support the ugly. The world is a body that has nothing but disdain for the organs that keep it alive.

  The blade winks in the fluorescent morgue of my bathroom. The water drips. My free hand is cold against the sink. I hold my breath and press the edge–sideways, as it should be according to the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve watched (with her, always with her)–and the blade bites into the skin. The vein becomes a well-fed worm. I look away from the cold encouragement of my reflection, to the task at hand.

  The one woman that could make my world work, the woman who held my hand as I stood on the precipice, my counterweight, gone.

  Why did you leave me?

  There is no other choice in the hostile vacuum of her absence but to fall, to welcome the end, and become what she has become to me: a ghost.

  ****

  It’s not you, Doug; it’s me. Words that have been uttered so many times at the end of a relationship, they have become cliché, and practically meaningless, a parting platitude to absolve the other person from blame that is most likely rightfully theirs. She and I were intelligent enough to know this, but neither one of us felt compelled to point it out. It was, after all, the end of us, and there would have been little to gain by questioning the reasons. Once the decision had been made, anything I could have said would have emerged as begging, and whatever else I might have lost, I still had my pride. So I said nothing, a decision that would haunt me later as I sat in my living room when it became an auditorium of voices offering their endless suggestions on what I should have said to keep her.

  Later she would say that I should have fought harder for her, fought to keep us together, but I saw the end coming, measured our proximity to cataclysm by the degrees of her distance from me in those last few weeks. She wasn’t happy, and I was powerless to change that, because even though she said it was her, not me, I knew she didn’t believe that. But I did.

  I did everything for her, loved her unconditionally, spoiled her, adored her, but it wasn’t enough. Sure, I was not always good to her. I have a temper and a penchant for drinking that is as volatile and threatening a concoction as one might expect. I share many traits with my parents, themselves another toxic combination, but have fought hard over the past ten years to banish the genetic anger to a small dark room inside my soul, where for the most part it has stayed. But Stacey had a temper too and a mean streak that sometimes scored small holes in that cell door, allowing the vileness to leak out. We were, in our own way, toxic, gasoline to a flame, but man, how good it felt to burn.

  I loved her, and she loved me. Though I have as much cause now to question the legitimacy of her feelings as I have given her, I know this to be true. We were made for each other–another cliché that is nonetheless true. Sometimes you just know. I’m not a big believer in destiny, or karma, or soul mates, or God, or anything really outside the boundaries of human biochemistry, but I solemnly believe, and have always believed, that Stacey was the one for me, the one I’d been searching for and had given up hope of ever finding: the perfect match, the one true love, the one person in the world attuned to my frequency in every conceivable way. Until she lost the signal, changed the station, and moved on.

  And now she’s gone, and I am alone with the deafening silence of a life without her. I am sick, possessed of a panic that refuses to stop twisting and tugging at my guts. I can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t distract myself long enough to work. I am, with no melodrama at all, dying inside, and nobody can save me.

  My father on the phone, contradicting the meanness I have given the phantom version of him that attends the theater of my near-suicides:

  “I know it’s hard, kiddo. I know it is. But it’ll get better. You’ll see. Just give it time.”

  Time. Would that time had not turned to tar, every second an hour, every minute a week. I might share my father’s optimism if not for the endlessness of my days or the hostility of my clock in its commitment to measuring them with incessant mocking clucks of its idiot tongue. The simple solution would have been to get rid of the damn thing. After all, I’m thirty years of age, living alone (now, for the first time) in an apartment fitted with all the modern accoutrements. What need have I of an antique grandfather clock, an object that has been an anachronism in a room of black glass and white marble since the day it was installed? The answer is sentimentality. That clock, that hideous chipped and scarred timepiece stood sentinel in the many rooms in which my mother lived, first as a child, then as an adult. It followed her through her life, a guardian obsessed with having its charges hear its obsessive calculating, making them aware that time would never stop moving, never stand still, no matter how much they might wish it could, nor would it speed up to aid in their escape of adolescent frustrations. They could curse and swear at their own parents and long for the day in which they would no longer be bound by the laws of childhood, but as long as that clock stood stolid and uncaring in the corner, a golem of unwavering and carefully measured patience, they were forced to realize the foolishness of their dreams. This cruel mahogany monolith was all my mother left me in her will, all she had left to leave, and as much as I choose to believe it was an act of kindness or charity–for although I have never had it assessed, I’m sure a one hundred and twenty year old clock is worth something–I can’t help but think there was a modicum of bitterness and spite involved too. That clock haunted her, punctuated her life with its chastising tongue, punished her with its dark hands, stole away her fantasies of egress from a childhood filled with nightmares. Once, while in her cups, she even theorized that it was powered by her misery and would only stop once it had filled itself. Why then, would you pass such a monster to your only child if not to share the pain, or exacerbate it?

  Once, it might have been grand, but those days exist beyond the memories of anyone still living. It is tall, engraved with dark blossoms the warping of the wood has made wilt. The case is stained glass, granting one only the scarcest hint of the pendulum as it swings uncaringly to and fro like a mad monk fretting before a service. The face is ornate, water-spotted, and cracked from top to bottom in a jagged line like a negative image of lightning.

  Stacey hated it too, her eyes often straying to the bent tin Roman numerals behind its cracked glass face while we were cuddling on the couch or watching TV. Sometimes she said nothing, just shook her head in dismay or frowned at the thing, and when I asked her what was wrong, she would shrug and look at me with a smile that said it was not worth discussing. She said that quite a bit toward the end, about everything. About us.

  It’s hard not to look at that clock, impossible not to see it. It draws the eye, insists on your attention. It’s even harder not to detest it.

  I hang up on my father after giving him the assurances he needs to hear, and then dial Stacey’s number. She doesn’t answer, naturally, though that never keeps me from wishing she would. My heart lurches when the line crackles, and almost explodes when the ringing stops, but it leads only to her voicemail. I wish it was her voice inviting me to leave a message. Some days I think just hearing her would be enough to keep me from collapsing in on myself like a black hole. But the voice is an automated one telling me her mailbox is full. This does not come as a surprise. I figure all the messages are mine, a mixture of anger, sorrow, and apology, none of them worth the time it took me to leave them.

  The next call is to work, telling them I’m taking another few days off. I know by now I’m testing their patience. Everyone there knows what it’s like to lose someone, so they gave me a break, but at this point I imagine they’re evaluating my usefulness to their company, and wondering how long more they should give me before seeking out a replacement. To my employers, neither my personal circumstance nor corporate worth qualifies me as unique. I am replaceable, disposable, a verdict shared by the woman who four months ago wa
lked out my door never to return. Soon, my job will be gone, freeing me from the last of my obligations.

  I set down the phone after leaving a by-now familiar message with the girl at the front desk of my office, and make my way through my suffocating apartment to the kitchen sink, which is packed to capacity with dishes still bearing the gory crests of half-eaten microwave dinners. The half dozen or so flies that have discovered the trove give it much more attention than I could muster. I plunge a hand into the calamity of porcelain and stainless steel, noting as I do so the angry red pressure lines on my wrist, the lingering reminders of abandoned endings, and search until I find a glass that only requires a rinse and not replacement. The flies buzz around me like the planes circled King Kong, and are just as maddening. From the cupboard above the sink, I grab the bottle of Kentucky Bourbon and take all three of us to the black leather couch, where I sit and pour myself enough fingers to quell the shaking of my own.

  ****

  A scratching sound, just about audible over the maddening tock of the clock, but not enough to have roused me from a whiskey drunk, nevertheless tugs me from sleep. For a long moment I lay where I have fallen to the floor amid a pungent puddle of however much alcohol was left in my glass and now soaks my hair just above my right ear, and I listen. My wrist burns, my eyes ache. My stomach feels as if the flies have found their way inside me. The daylight that was just beginning to burn the underside of the summer clouds has long since been drowned by the dark, leaving the cold moon to cast ominous, emaciated shadows on the wall.

  Scritch-scratch-scritch. I have heard this sound before. Though it sounds as if a mouse is being industrious in his attempts to tunnel through the wainscoting, I know that’s not what it is, and a sudden pulse of excitement laced with dread brings me, with considerable difficulty, to my knees, where I remain like a penitent, senses as attuned as the ferocious hangover will allow, eyes and ears focused on the only sound other than the clock, which is now synched perfectly with my heartbeat.

  Someone is outside my door, testing the lock.

  This has happened once before. I was drunk then too, and assumed it a former tenant equally inebriated who forgot they don’t live here anymore. When I opened the door, prepared to be more civil than I felt, there was no one there, though I saw, or thought I saw, the swish of blonde hair as a woman rounded the corner at the far end of the hallway. Despite my emotional vulnerability, despite how much I needed to believe it was Stacey, reason prevailed and I told myself it was someone else who, having realized their error, hurried away before they had to answer for their attempted trespass.

  Since then, I have managed to alter the memory of that flash of blonde moving quickly out of sight, have made the hair color darker, the woman shorter, heavier, anything to aid me in believing it was not the woman I love coming back to rebuild the city of our union from the smoldering ruins of heartbreak. I have told myself it was no one, because believing anything else might inspire hope, and hope is lethal if built on a foundation of delusion.

  And I tell myself now as I waver on my knees, my whole body trembling only partly from the viciousness of the whiskey, that not even the sound is real this time. I am imagining it. Either that or someone has not learned from their previous mistake.

  Scritch-scratch-scritch. It goes on long enough to penetrate my drunk and obliterate my excuses both. Someone is out there in the hall, at my door, struggling to get a key in the lock. When I drop my gaze, I can see that the shadows of their feet have already been admitted into my prison and are staining the carpet black. This is not my imagination.

  One hand on the sofa, knees like jelly, I rise and slowly make my way to the door, my eyes focused on those shadows, my brain feeling as if someone is following close behind and tapping the crown of my skull with a ballpeen hammer. I wait for the shadows to move away in response to my approach, but they continue to darken my carpet. Only the scratching sound stops.

  Breath held, nausea spinning its way from the pit of my stomach to somewhere just below my throat, I put my hand on the door knob and consider inquiring through the wood the identity of my visitor. But I know there would be no response. Despite all the fantasies I have entertained to an unhealthy, obsessive degree about my beloved’s return, this matches none of them. This feels surreal, hallucinatory, contrived… and wrong.

  Swallowing the hard knot of unease that has tangled itself in my throat, I turn the knob, slowly open the door and squint against the sickly yellow light, light that registers as unobstructed. There is no one there. I lean out into the hall in time to spot a flash of blonde hair as a woman disappears around the corner.

  “Stacey?” I say aloud, the word a mere croak in a hallway that is empty but for me.

  I wait and watch that corner, hoping for her to reappear, until the watering of my eyes forces a blink I was afraid to indulge lest I miss her face peering back at me from the shadows down the hall.

  At length, defeated, heartbroken all over again without fully understanding why, I go back inside and close the door.

  With its customary cluck of the tongue, the clock tells me it is close to one o’ clock in the morning.

  When Stacey left me, it was quarter till.

  ****

  There is a message on my machine when I awake at noon the next day. My boss, Ellard Thompkins, would like to have a word at my earliest convenience. As there is nothing convenient about my life as it stands these days, he won’t be hearing from me, nor do I feel compelled to call just to hear his smarmy knew-this-day-would-come tone informing me that I no longer have a place at the company. So work is done, not that it has preoccupied me. Even had I braved the office, they would doubtless have sent me home after witnessing my complete detachment from my duties, from them, from my surroundings. I belong nowhere now; I’m near-agoraphobic, and the world out there can go to hell. I have one last paycheck coming and that’s about all I’ll need. After that I figure I’ll be dealing in a different kind of currency.

  ****

  “Hey champ. You doing okay?” my father asks.

  Champ. Like my depression has thrust us both into a fifties sitcom.

  Out of necessity, or some misguided sense of paternal obligation that only arose in my mother’s absence, he has assumed the role of my counselor. It’s a role that might be easier to accept had he employed it even once before. But when my mother was alive, he always deferred such matters to her, a woman similarly ill-equipped to feign concern. The only affection he ever showed me, the only paternal love I ever saw, was when he was drunk. In my family, emotion lies at the bottom of a bottle, the catch being that to open up that much, you risk releasing darker things, which means that frequently such indulgences become little more than circuitous routes to self-loathing. I know this better than anyone. I still have the scars.

  “I’ve been better,” I tell him, and listen to the long pause while he formulates his response.

  “That’s to be expected, I suppose. I just want you to know that you’re welcome to come out here and stay for a while until you get back on your feet.”

  Here is a rundown farmhouse in West Virginia and the last place I want to go, the last place that could ever help me, for as bad as the memories are here, at home they’re even worse. The walls positively vibrate with the memory of old arguments, and beneath the varnish, the floorboards are stained with old blood, much of it mine. My parents are not my parents. They are not even my friends, having shattered the trust necessary to allow relationships to grow before I was even old enough to realize such damage was possible.

  “Thanks, Dad, but I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, if you think so,” he says, an admission that he believes no such thing. An accurate belief, as it happens, but not one I intend to confirm for him just so he can try to redeem himself in the eleventh hour by flying here to save me. “But the offer is an open one. Anytime. If you feel the need to get away from the city, all you need to do is pick up the phone.”

  “I appreciate t
hat.”

  A long pause in which I can almost make out someone else’s conversation underneath the silence. Crossed lines, shattered privacy. I wonder what lies are being told by those phantom callers. I wonder who they are and if they know love.

  “Have you been to see her?” my father asks.

  “No.”

  “It might help.”

  “It won’t.”

  “I saw a thing on the news the other day about–”

  “I really need to get ready for work, Dad.”

  “Oh… okay. Well, call me when you get home if you like. I’ll be here all d–”

  “I’ll do my best,” I tell him, with no attempt at all to hide the lie. I hang up the phone and go back to the cupboard. There are more flies now, and it seems news of yesterday’s invasion has spread. They seem more incensed by the intrusion than before, dive-bombing my eyes and tapping themselves against my head. I wave them away and procure the necessary panacea from the sink and cupboard. This is my last bottle of whiskey, and less than half of it remains, but it’ll do.