Down To Sleep Read online

  “I got nowhere else to go,” she answered softly.

  “You could come with me. We could just take off—the two of us—right now, tonight.”

  She crawled to the edge of the bed, hair dangling and framing her face, her breasts shifting and still glistening. “I could end all this tonight…if you’d help me.”

  I took a hard pull on my cigarette, noticed beads of sweat dripping free from her cleavage. “Get whatever shit you want to take with you and we’ll leave right now.”

  “And go where?”

  “What difference does it make? Wherever we want. We got a new Benz with a full tank of gas and—”

  She laughed the same laugh she’d offered in the car, but this time it seemed out of place and nearly as disturbing as the scars littering her flesh. “I’ve been working a little on the side on nights when Daddy’s drunk,” she said. “I’ve been saving money and I can offer it to you. Two thousand in cash, enough to get you plenty of what you need, maybe even enough to get you out of the city and far enough away to start over someplace else.”

  I backed away, still smoking with angry repetition, and felt a chill overtake me. “What the hell do you think I am?”

  “A junkie.”

  “A junkie,” I agreed with a spasm-like nod. “Not a fucking murderer.”

  “If it gets bad enough a junkie’ll do anything…anything. Even murder.”

  I poked my cigarette between my lips and left it there, then bent over and grabbed my jeans. “Why can’t you just take off?”

  “That’s exactly what I want to do.”

  “Then why do you want me to kill him?” I snapped.

  “I don’t want you to kill him.” Fay smiled, eyes widening, then slowly rose to her feet. “I want you to kill me.”

  We stared at each other for what seemed an eternity. “You’re out of your fucking mind, lady.” I searched for my shirt. “I’m outta here.”

  “I thought you’d be different than the others.”

  “So you’ve run this little proposal by people before?”

  She nodded and stood before me, indifferent to her nudity. “I thought you’d be different, I thought you’d get it, but you’re just like them.”

  I struggled into my shirt. “It’s called being sane.”

  “He’s all I have in this world,” she said, stepping closer, “but I’m all he has too. It’s the ultimate revenge, don’t you see?”

  “All I see is a fucking mental case.”

  “He’ll kill me eventually, you know.”

  Those words bound me, and I stood smoking what was left of my cigarette, jacket in hand, watching her and trying to read all that really existed behind those dark eyes. “Then leave.”

  “I want to die,” she told me. “I’m ready, do you understand? I just don’t want to give him the satisfaction of being the one to do it. I want to beat him to it, I want to leave him here alone, I want to take his precious little doll from him and—”

  “Then do it yourself.”

  She turned, sauntered to the bureau, her back to me now and a trickle of sweat slinking across her lower back before settling in the crack of her ass. “I’ve tried with booze and drugs and living dangerously for years now,” she said. “I guess I just don’t have the guts to do it for real.”

  “Yeah? Well neither do I.” I headed for the door.

  “What’s your name?”

  Her question stopped me again. “Rick,” I said softly.

  Fay spun around, a straight razor fitted into her bad hand and a wad of folded bills in the other. “You can help me, Rick.”

  I’ll never know for sure why I didn’t leave at that moment, but I didn’t. I turned back to her and slowly closed the gap between us. “Fay, you said yourself he’ll kill you eventually. Come with me. Maybe if we’re together we can help each other, maybe we can make things better for both of us. No one has to die. Not you, and not that fat sonofabitch, even though he probably deserves to.”

  “Why would you want me?”

  It was a good question, and one I didn’t have an answer to. Deep down the idea of us being together was now repellent, but still favorable to murder. “Last chance. Are you coming or not?”

  She tossed the bills on the mattress and grinned, transferred the razor to her good hand and held it at her side, the blade pressing against the softness of her outer thigh. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Get dressed.”

  Fay shook her head slowly in the negative. “Do you know why Daddy took my hand?” She walked toward the foot of the bed. “He caught me masturbating. You see, I’m not allowed to feel pleasure unless he gives it to me.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Like you said, maybe it’s time I had some guts.” She pressed the razor to her face, the tip resting just below her eye.

  I held my hands out, my heart racing. “Fay, don’t…please…please don’t.”

  Lips still smeared with remnants of lipstick curled into a smile and pulled back to reveal her teeth, so white and perfect in all the madness. “Then do it for me.”

  “Please, you—”

  With a flick of her wrist the razor produced a small slash along the side of her eye. Blood seeped free seconds later and danced slowly along her cheek.

  “Goddamn it!” I rushed toward her but she moved the blade back to her face and I froze like a kid playing some demonic game of musical chairs. “Give me the razor, Fay.”

  Her eyes blinked rapidly and began to tear, but the smile remained. “Come get it.”

  In a single violent motion, I leapt at her, closed one hand around her throat and grabbed her wrist with the other. We both staggered back as I tightened my grip on her throat, our faces nearly touching; her eyes wide yet oddly calm. Turning her wrist, I bent her hand back until the razor fell from her grasp and clicked along the floor between our feet. I pushed her the length of the room until her back was planted firmly against the wall, then loosened my grip on her throat. She responded by bringing a knee up into my crotch.

  The room tilted and spun as I collapsed to the floor, pain deep in my gut tearing through my abdomen and legs. I gagged, nearly vomited, and struggled to recover as she darted by me and snatched the razor from the floor. Rolling over to keep her in my line of site, I bit my lower lip and forced myself to my knees. She stood within reach, the razor poised in what appeared to be more of an offensive posture now. Blood still leaked from the wound, and her chest heaved with each breath. Without uttering a word I rushed her again.

  The steel glinted, reflecting the dull overhead light just before she swung it at me. I raised a hand and immediately felt pressure, and then burning pain searing across my palm. Even as I clutched my hand, I knew the warm moisture was blood filling my clenched fist, but I held it close to my body, afraid to look at it, and tried to focus on Fay instead.

  She stood watching me, our blood dripping from the razor. “Kill me.”

  I shook my head and feigned defiance, but when she launched herself at me I swung a quick roundhouse, connected with the side of her head and sent her sprawling back onto the bed. The razor fell free, and I bent to retrieve it just as she began to shake off the effects of the punch. With my bleeding hand tucked under my arm, I held the razor in the other and slowly approached the bed.

  Fay shook her head, eyes brimming with tears now, a few drops overflowing onto her cheeks and mixing with the still steady flow of blood. “Do it,” she whispered. “Look…look what he’s done to me.”

  I don’t remember the pain leaving me, only that I no longer cared. Looking at this devastated creature, covered with cigarette burns and battle scars, a hand severed then reattached, draped in scar tissue and tattoo ink like some depraved living trophy, an award presented to Daddy for his mindless carnage, I turned and staggered from the room.

  Fay was still sobbing somewhere behind me as I stood over the man in the recliner. I felt nothing, not even rage, just emptiness, nothingness, and wondered if that’s what it felt
like to be dead. Flashes of scars and beatings, cigarettes ground out in soft white flesh, and a frightened, helpless, seventeen-year-old girl struggling and screaming as he held her hand in place while a saw chewed away flesh and bone, exploded through my mind in a bloody montage.

  I palmed the top of his head, raised it up and slashed his throat. With the force of an adrenaline rush, the razor cut so deeply it snagged on his windpipe before continuing on to just below his ear.

  The world turned red as warm blood sprayed my face, and the man gurgled and wheezed.

  Blood pooled at my feet as I raised the straight razor and slammed it home into the top of his head. It stuck there, protruding from his scalp like an antler. I stumbled back, touching reality again and knowing, realizing—understanding exactly what I’d done. His body slumped forward and twitched like a bug on a burner before toppling to the side and lying still in the ocean of crimson.

  I found Fay in the hallway, nude and stained, watery eyes watching me. And then my hands were in her hair, tangling it into a ball and drawing it closer, forcing her against me, pulling her face to mine and sliding those lips over my mouth. We kissed, our tongues tasting of tears, blood, each other…and him. Her hands slid under my shirt; palms flush against my chest, nails scratching their way back down and onto my belly, between my legs. She rubbed herself against the hard-on beneath my blood stained jeans, and as she fumbled with my zipper all I could think about was being inside her, becoming one with her while the body bled out just feet away.

  There, in the dark, squirming beneath a whisper of light on the hallway floor, we cried and came; lived and died; plunged over the edge and into a void neither of us could ever hope to escape again.

  * * *

  The sun pierced the city skyline as the world slowly awakened. Our hair blew in the crisp morning air, the Benz darting across empty lanes and onto an overpass heading out of Boston. Alone on the interstate, like the last two people on Earth, I glanced at the makeshift masking tape bandage wrapped around my injured hand and left the other draped across the wheel. His blood had been washed away but I could still feel it, an aura alive but unseen, just like the track marks of abuse littering Fay’s mind.

  Forget-me-nots from the dead.

  Adjusting a pair of dark sunglasses I’d found in the apartment, I glanced over at her. She looked different in the passenger seat, worse somehow, than she had behind the wheel. Sensing my eyes on her, she turned and looked at me.

  I reached out and offered a hand. Slowly, she let her bad hand rest in mine. My fingers curled around it; pulled it into my lap. “Where are we going?” she asked, her voice tentative and just barely audible above the wind.

  “Hell, probably.”

  “How do you know it’s not Heaven?”

  “What’s the difference? They both hurt.”

  She snuggled closer, put her head on my shoulder and gazed up at me with those eyes. “Maybe it’s supposed to hurt, Rick.”

  “No.” I wrapped my arm around her, increased speed, and felt myself smile. “Call me, Daddy.”

  DOWN TO SLEEP

  This dream is different somehow from the others that come to me in relative darkness. Murky, though fluid, they flicker across my mindscape like old newsreels slithering through temperamental projectors—like just before the film jumps off track, dissolves and dies—a blister bursting as membrane touches the swearing heat of lighted glass.

  I lay winded beneath the twirling blades of the ceiling fan, wonder again why I always open my eyes exhausted instead of refreshed. The sheets feel limp, used. My boxer shorts cling to me, and my throat is arid and raw, as if possessed by someone who had been screaming since dusk.

  I have always heard that amputees often continue to experience a varied range of sensation where their severed limbs were once rooted. Darcey’s presence lingers on the pillow next to mine in what I imagine must be much the same manner, and why shouldn’t it? The crater love leaves behind can be just as physically debilitating as having literal parts of one’s anatomy removed. And yet, even when nothing but a void survives where lovers once resided, we remain infested with their memory.

  I am in a classroom with several others, all of us sitting attentively, prepared for our lesson. Displayed at the head of the room are an ancient blackboard and an empty desk and chair. We wait in silence, apparently convinced that the furniture will in some way reveal what our absent tutor cannot.

  “Jack,” a man to my left says, “do you know me?”

  He seems familiar, though not in a personal sense. Could I have seen him in a magazine advertisement, the movies, or perhaps on television?

  I offer a weak smile. “I’m sorry, I don’t think so.”

  The man winks playfully. “Sure you do.”

  “You have me confused with someone else.”

  “No,” the man says. “You’re here to see Darcey, yes?”

  “Darcey?”

  He puts an elbow on the arm of the chair, rests his chin in the palm of his hand, and frowns. The man appears to be in his middle to late thirties but has a disarming boyish quality. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  I study his face for any sign of insincerity. None is forthcoming so I confess I’m not certain why I’ve come to this strange place or even how I got here.

  “Darcey’s not well.” The man speaks softly, as if she might hear him otherwise. “She’s been sick for quite a long time.”

  My hands are shaking. “I didn’t know.”

  “How could you?”

  “Right. How—How could I?” My voice sounds childishly defensive, and I hate it. “We never kept in touch. It was as much her fault as mine.”

  He smiles at me the way a wise man might consider the unaffected simplicity of a child. “It’s no one’s fault, Jack.”

  “Will she die?”

  “Come on,” the man says. “I’ll take you to her.”

  “Does she really want to see me?”

  He folds his arms across his chest. “What do you think?”

  * * *

  We are traveling in a car I have never ridden in before. A violent thunderstorm sends torrents of rain crashing down around us, making visibility beyond the inadequate beams cast from the headlights virtually impossible. Except for the occasional blink of lightning this night is darker than any I have ever encountered.

  “Relax,” my guide tells me. “You’re safe.”

  Wiper blades wag across the windshield while rain drums the steel roof with a methodical beat. Twin pools of light suspended in the darkness ahead distract me from the water sluicing off the window to my right.

  “Got a smoke?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Can we stop somewhere?”

  “Sure.” The man smiles in a way that has quickly become annoying. “There’s a convenience store not far from here. In fact, we’re headed right for it.”

  “Exactly where are we headed?”

  “Back, yes?”

  “Back? Back where?”

  A spear of lightning stabs the horizon. The man increases speed, the grin still in place, his face bathed in an eerie blue glow reflecting off the dashboard.

  “Just back.”

  I notice a bottle of bourbon on the seat between us and grab hold of it like a long lost friend. “Didn’t see this before.”

  “It’s been there all along.”

  The man declines an offer to join me, and what seems like hours pass as I drink, mesmerized by the constant din of the storm. My nerves stabilize; uncoil slowly as liquor pervades my system with a familiar rush of warmth.

  “Go easy, Jack. Can’t you drink without getting drunk?”

  I stop to ponder his question, and in that disturbing instant of hesitation, arrive for the first time at the realization that the answer is: No, I can’t.

  “Is that what this is all about?” I ask. “Like in that old movie where the guy sees bugs creeping out of the walls? I’ve spent too many years slaughtering too many brain cells an
d now I’m crazy as a loon, is that it?”

  “It all depends on how you choose to look at it.”

  “You are one irritating bastard, you know that?”

  The driver laughs softly. “Not by design, I assure you.”

  “So…how do you know Darcey anyway?”

  “I’ve known her since her childhood.”

  I replace the cap on the bourbon with a heavy sigh. My mouth, parched and hungry for nicotine hastens the decline of my mood. “I never got your name.”

  The man turns, looks at me. “We’re here.”

  Here, is a paved lot.

  A lone compact car occupies a space in front of the large convenience store. Several seconds pass before I realize that the storm has evaporated, and in its retreat, taken night along with it.

  Frightened, I look to the seat. The bottle is empty.

  “You still want cigarettes, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He parks next to the other car and motions toward the store. “Go ahead then.”

  I push open the door and nearly stumble as I climb out. With a quick glance in the direction of the car next to us, I am surprised to notice someone staring at me from the backseat. As I round the front of the car, the face becomes Darcey’s.

  Hunched over in an awkward, undoubtedly painful posture, she looks up at me through the window. Our eyes connect with uncommon intensity, and I am reminded of a child coyly watching a stranger pass.

  I know from the moment I recognize her that I will not stop to talk. Instead, I hurry into the store for my fix, unable to look back.

  When I return, the car is gone.

  My ride resumes, the stormy night returns. Evelyn “Champagne” King is singing Shame on the car stereo. I shoot the man a bitter scowl, lean over, and shut off the radio.

  “You said nothing to her, yes?” he says.

  I draw a greedy drag from a cigarette dangling from my lip. “It didn’t seem right. Bad timing, I guess.”

  “You should’ve spoken to her.”