Down To Sleep Read online

  “Shit,” I chuckled, mostly to myself. “Sex is always genuine. It’s one of the last bastions of authenticity. It’s one of the few times you can really feel alive. If someone like me can figure that out why can’t all of you?”

  Maxie smoked her cigarette for a time before responding, as if it had taken several seconds for my words to register. “What do you mean, all of you?”

  I killed my drink, swirling the liquor around in my mouth before swallowing in the hopes of numbing the taste of menthol. “I’m different than most people,” I said, sweeping a hand in the direction of the empty stools on either side of me. “Just ask all my friends.”

  Maxie looked away, like people often do when I get like that, but recovered quickly and offered a smile. “What do you care, it’s all bullshit anyway, right?”

  I motioned to the empty glass. “I think I’ll be needing another.”

  “Yeah, that’s just what you need. You’re not driving, are you?”

  “I don’t drive.”

  She took the glass, crushed the napkin in her hand and fired it into a nearby wastebasket. “You want me to call you a cab?” she asked, reaching for the phone.

  I waved a dismissive hand at her, bringing the cigarette to my lips with the other, and noticed it was trembling. It never got any easier, no matter how many times I did it, no matter how many drinks I had or how much smoke I pumped into my lungs or how many lies I told to try and make the process agreeable. “I don’t need a cab,” I said softly. “I’d rather walk, get some fresh air and clear my head a little.”

  “You sure?” After a moment of staring and silence she replaced the phone to its cradle. She moved back closer to me, hands on her hips now and a frown I hoped was real curling her painted lips. “You’re…you’re not going to give me a hard time, are you?”

  I pushed myself away from the bar, away from her suddenly uncomfortable expression and away from those goddamn menthol cigarettes. “Don’t worry about me, kid. Your hard times are all but over.”

  On shaky legs I stumbled toward the door, leaned against the frame to the right of the big oak handle, and gazed out at the street. A light misting rain had kicked up, and the air looked crisp now, the sky a morbid gray. Fitting, I guess.

  Such a goddamn waste, I thought. I wondered if she had kids, if she’d told her husband how much she loved him the last time she’d seen him. If she’d lived to the fullest and done everything she’d ever wanted to do in a lifetime that’s always too short, and if she’d even suspected when I’d come through the door that the person I’d come to meet had been here all along.

  Somewhere behind me, right on cue, I heard the restroom door burst open and crash against the wall. The guy—a scruffy, eel-thin spike-addict—staggered out, eyes brimming with desperation and terror. He stumbled right by me, a few stray bills slipping from his filthy hands and floating gracefully to the floor as he gave a final horrified look back in the direction from which he’d come. A thin film of perspiration and sprinklings of blood dotted his face. He pawed at the bend in his arm, coughed, yanked open the door and vanished into the night.

  I’d be seeing him again real soon.

  “What…what the hell was that all about?” Maxie said. “I didn’t even know he was in here.”

  The rain became heavier suddenly, spattering against the windows. I turned and glanced at the clock on the wall behind her. It was time. Again.

  We stood there like caged animals, trapped and unable to prevent the reality of what our roles were destined to be from overtaking us both.

  She forced a nervous, pearly smile. “Yeah, I know. It’s all an illusion, right?”

  “A hoax,” I said.

  “A hoax,” she echoed, eyes slowly filling with tears as her head gave an involuntary nod of agreement. Goosebumps blossomed along her arms, neck, and the sides of her breasts, but she pretended not to notice them. The same as she refused to acknowledge the memories slowly trickling into her conscious mind. Memories of a stone-cold junky who had wandered upon an empty bar, robbed it at knifepoint, then dragged the bartender into the restroom, and for no apparent reason, beaten her to death.

  The transition from life to death was always littered with confusion for those passing over. Somebody had to be there to help them across. Why that somebody had to be me—always had been and always would be—I have no idea.

  “That’s all life is, Max. Only Death is real.” I turned, moving back toward the bar with a slow stride, finally seeing the understanding in her moist eyes. “I don’t like this any better than you do…but I’m as real as it gets.”

  Her time was up; she’d be coming with me and finally knew why.

  Her life was over.

  Her smile was gone.

  And so was I.

  OBEDIENT FLIES

  It was the blood that caught her attention. Sizzling and popping, melding to the fry pan as wafts of thick smoke billowed up, only to be sucked away by a fan over the back burners. Whatever remnants of life it had once sustained, now trapped in that smoke, filtered through the twirling blades before being released back into the open air outside her apartment. Dust to dust. Born of nature only to be returned to it in some bizarre, almost ritualistic manner. She poked at the slab of meat with a spatula. The heat was too high, the steak had already burned, and the blood—juice she had been taught to call it as a young girl—had all but evaporated.

  With a frown she switched off the stove and dumped the entire pan into the adjacent sink, watching it spit and spatter like a still living thing until most of the smoke had gone. The smell—so distinctive and primitive—conjured feelings of prehistoric impulse, and she imagined life on an open plane, clad in furs and bones, huddled in caves amidst the tortured screams of nature, interrupted, reborn, mutated by the sudden emergence of Man. A disease, she thought, a destroyer…an arrogant corrupter of beauty and natural order.

  From a duffel bag on the kitchen table she removed her camera, focused on the contents of the sink, and fired off several clicks, photographing it from several angles. Inhaling the pungent aroma of charred flesh, she felt at one with her newest piece, her art, and allowed a slight smile to purse her lips. The losers at the ad agencies she’d once freelanced for had never understood—couldn’t even begin to comprehend—this work that was so dear to her. Commercial photography had paid the bills, as insipid as it was, but had also allowed her to spend free time focusing on the artistic expression her camera allowed. As much a physical extension of herself as a painter’s brush, for Lydia, the camera was her tool, her eyes, her witness to the world in which she moved and lived and would eventually die. It was her soul, really, the prism through which a piece of her would live forever, if only within the pages of an ignored and insignificant portfolio few would ever see.

  She put the camera away, ran cold water over the pan, then dumped the meat into a tall wastebasket beneath the sink. It had never been her intention to eat it.

  Before she’d stopped taking work, before Devon had moved in, before he’d gotten sick, Lydia would have spent the evening at The Spine, camera in one hand; a drink in the other. A club a few blocks from her apartment where local rock and roll wannabes played, often sharing the stage with self-appointed poets who smoked clove cigarettes and recited embarrassingly pretentious white-angst verse, it had provided her with a relatively safe place to hide and burn away the hours. But those days were over now. Life had changed, and frivolous diversions were no longer an option.

  Devon was dying; they both knew it.

  Dragging the camera along, she moved from the kitchen into the den, ignoring the windows fogged with condensation and the light snow swirling about, tripping through the beams of streetlights and draping the city in white. Transformation no longer held the fascination for her it once had. She leaned against the foot of the threadbare couch, focused on Devon and snapped off a few shots.

  He smiled up at her, swaddled in moth-nibbled blankets; his head propped against two pillows stained with
sweat. “Hey,” he said, his voice reduced to a raspy gurgle, always on the verge of erupting into the hacking cough they had both grown accustomed to. “Is it still snowing?”

  Lydia nodded. “Didn’t think you’d care.”

  He blinked some perspiration from his eyes and shifted his position a bit, downplaying the pain with a muffled grunt. “Wish we could go for a walk. I always loved walking in the snow.”

  “Shameless romantic.”

  “Yes,” he answered quietly, swallowing with difficulty.

  Lydia put the camera down on a coffee table and sat on the arm of the couch. “It’s bad again, Dev. I’m going to have to pick up some work or they’re going to start shutting things off. They already disconnected the cable and the gas.”

  Eyes wet, he looked away. His sunken features bathed in sweat, body wracked with uncontrollable bouts of shivers, convulsive coughing fits, and the terrible flesh wounds no longer wielded the power over her they had initially. Like all else around her, Devon was becoming art, teetering between reality and the subjective—something his weary expression signaled he had accepted somewhere along the line as well. “I’ll be dead soon,” he told her.

  “I know.”

  “Just another series in your portfolio.”

  “Yes.”

  He forced another smile. “I’m honored.”

  Lydia remembered the first time she’d seen him. A gay club she frequented, a place where a woman could go and dance and observe without having to worry about anyone trying to pick her up. Visions of a strong and healthy Devon dancing atop a small platform near one of the bars in a turquoise g-string, his wiry body, tight and strong from hours of swimming at the nearby YMCA gyrating in time to the music. She remembered their first drink together, how she’d asked if she could photograph him, and how he’d giggled and blushed like a flattered school kid. Not at all what she’d expected from a man who earned his living shaking his ass.

  “If you helped me,” he said, “I could go to the park.”

  “I’m not doing that.”

  “They’d find me in the morning. Covered in snow, peaceful. Then you’d be free of me. You could get on with your life.”

  Lydia glared at him. “Don’t be an idiot, Dev.”

  “I’ve heard freezing to death isn’t that bad. Only at first—that’s what they say—but then supposedly you get all warm and drowsy, and it’s just like drifting off to sleep.”

  “Shhh.”

  “You could photograph it,” he offered. “Think of it from that angle. The imagery, the—”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “We’ll see.”

  “Besides, if they shut the heat off we’ll both freeze to death anyway.”

  They realized Devon needed to be in a hospital, but it would only be a temporary solution, an impersonal and sterile rest stop, and Lydia couldn’t bring herself to do it. Deep down that wasn’t what Devon wanted either. Not really. Not anymore.

  “Pain…” An exhaling rush masked as fragile laughter broke free of him.

  Lydia gave an understanding nod. Even now, slowly fading away, it was not physical pain he was referring to, rather something more. The pain born of death, separation, longing, love, hate—that often-elusive feeling that the soul had been torn from the body and there wasn’t a goddamn thing that could be done to prevent it. Somewhere on the way to Heaven even Jesus had stumbled. Three times, the Bible said. A man—a human being—bearing the internal pain of a world gone mad in order to transcend it, to become something better, something pure and good. The crown of thorns, the bloodied and devastated palms and feet, the punctured side—all of it as real as anything else, yet still black window dressing—a simplified visual even a child could comprehend. But His agony—like theirs—had been something far more profound, with greater depth and meaning than what could be experienced merely through the flesh. Lydia’s camera—the things it recorded—had never been intended absolutes, only gateways, like the allure of the ocean’s surface, tempting the beholder to explore it further, to venture beyond it, to see what may or may not lie beneath its simplistic exterior.

  She looked at the empty audio rack where the stereo had resided until a few weeks prior, when she’d loaded it in her arms and carried it to the pawnshop on the corner. It had afforded them another month with heat, a few rolls of film, and a bit of food. Now silence ruled, interrupted only by the sounds of her clicking shutter, small talk, and Devon’s illness.

  By the time she’d turned back to ask him if he needed anything, he’d fallen asleep.

  In the ten years since she’d fled Potter’s Cove with four years worth of waitressing tips, a bag of clothes, the beginnings of a portfolio, and her camera, for what she perceived as the ambiguous safety of the metropolis, there had been other brief relationships, but nothing of value. A small town girl who had embraced the city, Lydia soon learned that the city did not embrace one back. It existed instead as a living entity with its own needs and desires, its own will, its own wrath.

  A welcome isolation followed, along with a sense of freedom she had not enjoyed in some time. Freedom to resume her portfolio, to pursue her art, her passion without the false hope and fleeting promises of perpetual strangers masked as friends or lovers occupying space and ripping away chunks of her she only realized were missing once they’d gone. Expending the energy to reconstruct herself from scraps like some urban scarecrow was pointless. Open wounds and bleeding hearts healed, but only to a point. That was, after all, what scars were for.

  And then she found Devon, with his small but sinewy frame, shock of spiked, bleached blond hair and the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. They sat together in the center of her living room floor on throw pillows, surrounded by candles while a James Taylor CD played softly from the stereo speakers. They had left the club together just after closing, stopped at an all-night Chinese dive for noodles then settled at Lydia’s apartment. Devon had a few joints, and together with a bottle of cheap wine they got hammered there on the floor, talking about everything and anything, sometimes laughing, sometimes teetering on the verge of tears.

  Lydia had photographed him that night; occasionally snapping a shot here or there as the night wore on and gradually became morning. Like Lydia, he had left home early and abruptly, already aware of his need to escape the restrictive confines of small town life. But for Devon, with little education and no job skills, he had turned to hustling, then dancing, then a combination of the two. Yet he still maintained a child-like demeanor—innocence almost—from the way his eyes blinked to his quiet laugh to his soft voice and unconscious mannerisms. He’d also been fascinated with her photography. It made most people uncomfortable, her constant need to lug the camera around, but Devon had thought it enchanting from the start, and so she opened up to him and discussed things she had never spoken about with anyone.

  The decision for him to move in had been an easy one. He’d been staying with an older man, a regular patron of the club who had taken him in, but Devon had grown tired of the tradeoff and welcomed the chance to live with someone who wanted nothing more from him than loyalty and genuine friendship.

  Once exposed and drawn deeper into the true essence of Lydia’s art, he’d asked, “How did it start? Where did it all begin?”

  And it was then that she did something she never dreamed she could.

  She showed him the portfolio.

  Lydia slammed shut the door on those memories and found herself back in the present, moving toward her bedroom. She went to the closet, and from a shelf retrieved the lock box containing her portfolio. Once on the bed, she unlocked it with a key she wore around her neck on a delicate chain, flipped open the lid and stared down at the leather bound photo album.

  There was no need to open it just yet. Arranged in chronological order, she knew each piece it contained by heart, down to the minutest detail. The early entries were Polaroid pictures she had taken with an instant camera, a gift from an out of town aunt she seldom saw but received gifts and cards
from on holidays. A present for her thirteenth birthday, Lydia had at first been disinterested in the gift, but over time, experimenting now and then, she soon began to understand its potential. And then its power.

  Slush and snow painted the bedroom windows, reminding her of how it had clung to tree branches that day so many years before. The forest behind their home transformed into a frosty landscape of ice and snow—barren, silent, still, pale. Like the dead. A day when school had been cancelled and children took to the streets to build snowmen, to sled, to ice skate on nearby frozen cranberry bogs, and a day when she had decided to venture into the forest with her new camera, hoping to capture it on film. A day when she had positioned herself on a large boulder, and, inhaling the crisp fresh air, scanned the surrounding trees in search of her first shot.

  How did it start?Where did it all begin?

  Lydia set the album aside with a sigh and stared at her hands. Rings on nearly every finger, nails natural and void of polish or color, ashen skin stretched tight over bone. Narrow wrists cloaked in countless silver bracelets, which led to thin arms and delicate shoulders. She slowly brought her hands to her face. Where had the time gone in those twenty years since her thirteenth birthday? Glancing at the portfolio, her question was answered. A quiet moan seeped in from the living room, but she ignored it. Devon, still only twenty-two, would never experience a moment like this. A moment where one still felt relative youth and vibrancy while afforded the luxury of gazing back over the course of many years. But she had given Devon a gift of greater depth and lasting value. “We know the truth,” she said softly, fingers tracing the edge of the album. “Don’t we, Dev.”

  * * *

  Footsteps crunching the snow and leaves beneath echoed through the forest, the sound intrusive in an otherwise hushed atmosphere. Sitting on the boulder, cradled by a ring of birch trees, spindly branches stripped and weighted with frozen snow, Lydia cocked her head, watching, listening, even then knowing there was something about the sound that signaled urgency. She held her position, her hiding place, and focused on two indistinct forms darting through a dense patch of trees in the distance, their breath escaping them in billows of rolling steam. The smaller of the two, the one in the lead, staggered into the clearing, nearly lost his footing then looked around in a frantic spinning motion. Lydia squinted through watery eyes at Kyle Watson, a boy from the neighborhood two years younger than she. Even at a distance of perhaps fifty feet, she could see the fear in his eyes and the frenetic rise and fall of his small chest. From behind him emerged the second figure, and Kyle made a break for it, but caught his foot on something and lurched forward, face-first into the snow.