Caligatha Read online

  The scotch will soon be gone; he'd fallen asleep clutching the bottle last night and not remembered how much he imbibed. Maybe he could call Reuben, see if he wanted to grab a drink.

  No, damn it, he'd want to go to Paseka's.

  Besides, he's not sure he can tolerate Reuben now anyway.

  He takes a sip and decides to call Maggie.

  “Jericho,” she says.

  “How are you?”

  She doesn't respond for a moment, then, “All right. I just got to my parents' house.”

  “Oh. Why did you leave early?” But he doesn't want to hear the answer, cuts her off. “Do you need to go?”

  There's a half-breath, half-laugh. It's always amazing how people put more meaning into precise little sounds than the words that follow. What's the point of language, anyway? To let these sighs mull around in the mouth, transforming the huffs and tsks into something more deceptive?

  “No. But I told you I would call tomorrow.”

  “I've been thinking about you,” he lies, regretting it as he speaks.

  “Oh yeah?”

  He stares at the window pane, into his own eyes.

  Nothing. Why even call?

  “We're not really dating, you know?” he says.

  “Jesus. Thanks for the phone call.”

  And that's it.

  He stares at the phone and wonders what he meant. It was something of a fact—had they ever used the word dating?—but stating it made it an even truer fact. Now he'd lost her for sure.

  That would be okay because it was nearing autumn and the owner of Blue Coral would be gone until spring. The slow season had begun, and at least half of the forty-eight rooms at Blue Coral would be vacant until April. The kitchen staff of the adjacent Tombolo's Restaurant, he needed. Blue Coral's housekeeping he couldn't afford to lose. A front desk manager like Maggie would not be so necessary; he could check in the lonely winter wanderers on business trips, coordinate meetings in the banquet room with the kitchen. There was a night receptionist, so he wouldn't have to work nights. And no one this season would give a damn about the nightlife, so he wouldn't need to be knowledgeable about the concerts and fairs and theater productions that didn't happen in the winter anyway.

  But none of it makes him feel any better for developing an immediate disinterest in her.

  Everyone is just a fucking hole.

  He takes out his last two pills.

  Shaped like no one.

  Two pills. Too many, too soon.

  One to stop thinking about Maggie. With a mouthful of warm scotch, he swallows, calling Reuben.

  One to deal with Reuben. He swallows again and walks to his bed.

  Reuben answers after three rings.

  “What's up, my man?”

  “What're you doing?” Jericho mutters.

  “Thinkin' of goin' to Paseka's with Fern, grab a few once the sitter's here. The lady got her cast off today. Celebration time, right? Sound good?”

  This will not be a transaction, is what this means. For as badly as he treats Fern, he never gives Jericho drugs around her or their twin girls, Alana and Stacey.

  “Not really. Maggie wanted to go there.”

  He does feel a tinge of guilt—Fern's arm had been in a cast ever since he and Reuben started talking again a couple months ago. She'd tripped on one of Alana's toys and fallen down the stairs. Jericho couldn't imagine what hell it must be, chasing after those girls with a broken arm. But he knows this celebration thing is just an excuse for Reuben to drink too much.

  “Oh,” Reuben laughs, “Maggie. Hah. Don't wanna ruin your depression with gettin' laid?”

  “Something like that. I turned her down. She might be there.”

  “You're crazy, man, you should be all over that.”

  But he never was. She was the one who insisted on “getting to know him”, on having drinks at the hotel bar, on staying in a room because it was too late and she was too drunk to drive home.

  “Sometimes it feels like... we're just our relationships with other people.”

  “I thought you weren't dating, she was only on your back?”

  That was true. They didn't have a relationship. She'd flirted and followed him about for a couple months, or a little longer.

  But they'd never slept together again. Or maybe they had once, or twice. Surely she would give up soon. She would come back from visiting her family having realized what an asshole he was, snuffed of all desire.

  “That's not what I mean.”

  “What?”

  Jericho pauses. “Nevermind.” He knows better than to be so nebulous with Reuben.

  But Reuben says nothing, so he continues. “We are what we are...or aren't...for other people. We define ourselves... by our loneliness, by our unavailability, by... I don't know.”

  “Not even been a minute since I picked this phone up and you're already gettin' me down. What's that even gotta do with bein' with Maggie?”

  “I don't know.”

  “I swear, you had more game when you were a damn scientist. How you even manage to bag a girl anymore—I'll tell you—that's a goddam miracle.”

  It's hard to remember. But in the snippets he sees of himself, he's going along with her every whim, offering elusive responses, standing disoriented in the doorway. Being pulled onto the bed. A willing prop with a truant mind.

  Nobody's fault. Things happen.

  Reuben is laughing. “No, no, see, let me explain something. That's how you define yourself. Relationships, whatever type, they're give-in-order-to-take situations.”

  “Marriage?” he bites, wondering why he even called.

  Because there's no one else. We're just our relationships with other people.

  These conversations always turn into lectures about how he needs to take “it” easy. As though the whole universe and everything he's endured could fit into a little two-letter word, three lines and a dot, and be flicked away.

  No, he didn't call for this conversation. He called for drugs.

  “Everyone uses each other for fun, fuckin', help, love, work, whatever.”

  If Reuben wrote a self-help book, it would be four letters long: beer. Or maybe three: sex.

  What's that feeling? Hypocrisy? Jealousy?

  “Lovely,” Jericho says, resolving to end the call.

  “Hey, hey,” Reuben laughs, “don't go gettin' critical on the damn phone with me, man.”

  “Can I buy?” Jericho sighs.

  “Tomorrow. Now, listen. Your life ain't what it used to be, I know, I know.” Rehearsed sympathy. “You gotta let go, give in to shit like this. You're gonna eat every pill on the planet. Maggie, Maggie—I mean you have, you know, seen her? That ass is therapy.”

  “Nevermind.”

  “Man, if I had your money I wouldn't be tryin' to keep busy. I'd buy a girl or two like that, go to one of those islands, drink champagne off—”

  “Thanks,” Jericho interrupts.

  Voice of a bigger asshole heard. Objective complete.

  “Hey, look, just tell the girl you're done and move on, and don't sleep with one of your managers again, dumbass.”

  “I'd rather not talk about it anymore.”

  “Great. Believe it or not I don't give a shit about your soap opera. Keep padding my pockets, babe. But hey, I'm gonna go.” There's a muffled thump followed by the sound of an engine revving and Fern's voice in the background. “I'll see you tonight if you can man up and come downtown.”

  “Are you driving?”

  “Don't lecture me, dopehead. I'll have my license back soon.” Dopehead. Knowing Fern heard stings.

  “Right. Well, can we meet for lunch tomorrow then?”

  “Uh, yeah. I'll have the girl cover me at the shop a little longer tomorrow. Man, I've got some stories with her.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You gotta get outta your stale apartment somehow, buddy.”

  “I was thinking of Tombolo's.”

  “The hotel bar? Christ on a st
ick,” Reuben says, laughing as he hangs up.

  As the line disconnects, it occurs to him he could go. Maggie wouldn't be at Paseka's because she's miles away at her parents'—he just called her. This lapse in memory should frighten him, but he's getting used to it.

  Life itself is the only thing keeping score.

  Oh well. It's hard to see Reuben and his wife together these days, although he couldn't deal with Reuben alone.

  What a piece of shit.

  He turns to the wall. A crayon drawing of fish talking on two cans and a string is taped by the side of his bed. He keeps little else on the walls, but Alana's drawing makes him smile from time to time.

  Sometimes he can be happy when he sees little Stacey and Alana, little remnants of temporary innocence, if he ignores Reuben and Fern speaking in couples' tongue.

  “Daddy, daddy!” a three-year old Alana chanted at Reuben once, excited feet stomping and knees bending, “How can fish talk on their phones without getting eletera-cuted?”

  “Fish don't talk on the phone, babe,” Reuben had said. “They write letters. They're old-fashioned like that.”

  “Oh. Okay!” And she ran off never doubting him.

  Where Reuben was quick on his feet, Jericho had laughed long and hard. His laughing must have made an impression on her, because she'd rushed back minutes later with the drawing and in a shy whisper asked Reuben to give it to him.

  He can't smile this time. Guilt tickles his throat. Staring at the crude and innocent fish makes him wonder what he would tell his own little girl.

  Autumn...

  He stares at the ceiling, the tickle becoming a tight ball.

  She has no face.

  The morphine is alive, its anesthetic fingers slithering up his face and wrapping around him. The last thing he thinks about is Fern's cold, stern face staring down at him in that hospital bed months ago.

  Sorry.

  He lets go.

  ***

  Jericho doesn't dream the way he used to, where every fear of inadequacy is stark nakedness or decaying teeth. The surrealist connect-the-dots of dreaming only smacks him with terrible scenes and vivid memories. More and more, he's able to direct the dreams, feel a part of them. Eyelids twitching, enamel gnashing, twisting a full-body tourniquet of sticky sheets—for a reason unknown, he hastens along string after string of associations, entangled at every hyperbolic scene—can he change things? Alter the past? It doesn't matter. Soon the web breaks and he falls into the painful acid bath of reality, either birthed kicking and screaming or curled fetal, the helpless dead skin shed by a mysterious animal of dream.

  Quarter to three, he awakens haunted by some phantasmically-connected string of faces, a centipede of eyes and mouths and melted wax skin, veins, sinew. Beautiful, sorrowful brown eyes.

  Yellow glow fills the walls of his room, and he turns to stare at the desk clock's blinding light.

  2:46, 2:46, 2:46.

  He repeats the numbers in his head to drown out their sad whispers. “Don't go, don't go...”

  The faces became more and more featureless as he passed them, dissolving dolls. At some point he realized he hadn't begun at the very start, hadn't seen the first face. Who was this person, melting in pain? This panicked him, and the faces panicked too, moaning and howling, “Don't go, don't go...” until they were mouthless little heaps, sounds of pain escaping in defeated pockets of air.

  “Fuck,” he says out loud, wiping his face and neck as though the vision was a tangible slime.

  He didn't see her in the dream, but it must have been her. She's always in the furthest recess of his dreams. Laying in bed, feverish, beads of sweat collecting on her brow and huge belly, halfway through the third trimester.

  He murmurs a plea for something reassuring, some nostalgic comfort, something that feels like home.

  There's never anything.

  The ghosts come and go, manipulate his visions, taunt him with lunacy, but when they come in dreams they're different. Tortured.

  Frail arms of light are searching the uneven brick walls of his room, while a gangly spider hurries against a draft by the window to pluck together residence.

  Only after nightmares, he longs for Maggie in his bed, a breathing talisman.

  Something, anything, to fill the void he'd become.

  He disentangles from the damp sheet, heads to the bottle of scotch. In the window's glow a silhouetted moth is suspended in the glass.

  “Bastard,” he says, tilting it. “Lucky bastard.” Noticing wings flinch, he feels bad and puts the cap on, shakes it into a quick death.

  He's out of pills too, but he's been excessive. He knows what happened last time, and he doesn't want that. Not yet.

  Pushing aside all the formal white shirts he wears to work, he pulls a jacket out of his closet. The nights will soon grow cold; it's already a bit chilly in his room.

  He stares at the wedding dress, wrapped in protective muslin like a corpse. His fingertips graze the surface before he gingerly pushes the collared shirts back, covering it.

  ***

  Caligatha's streets are wet, stirring the feeling he's always trailing behind something. Silence nearly overtakes the whispering drip of trees and occasional splashing tires in the distance.

  The long-dead cocoons of Victorian architecture never raise his spirits, but after dark the town seems to bow its giant head, commiserating. Jericho feels as ancient after his thirty years. These cluttered buildings, Industrial Age fever dreams of Gothic windows and trusses and scrollwork and turrets, stand despite infinite beatings from coastal storms, having lost but a few shingles or cobblestones to time.

  They almost seem to take the abuse for lack of any other option; change would destroy the invented narrative, the charm of an idealized history. Everyone wants to live in tomorrow and vacation in yesterday.

  Jericho's days, too, are designed to be at once transient and eternal, an endless and unevolving pattern of disposable experience. The roulette of faces at Blue Coral, the sleepless nights, the nightmares when he does sleep, the pills, the night walks. A fixed set of variables.

  His memories become weaker and weaker; only the ones that repeat stick.

  Three blocks from his apartment, he passes Reuben's new employer, Eden's Vineyard, tomblike in its solemn terra cotta. An eroding mural hangs between thin rectangular windows like a stray fingerprint, an Art Nouveau Eve clad in lush foliage. She appears to blow something from the palm of her hand, but whatever it was faded.

  He's still mad at Reuben. Dopehead. He deserves that. But Fern—he can't stand for her to hear.

  He peers into the black windows of Eden's Vineyard, wanting to uncover a private understanding, but he's unable to see past his own dim reflection.

  How does Reuben treat the people inside? Does he greet everyone and smile? Does he make advances on the women? Does he bother to make advances on Fern anymore?

  He walks away from the window with an eerie sense that someone might be watching from inside.

  How do some people do what they do? Reuben frequented the places that fired him, soaked up the company of those he fucked over.

  He's never been more disdainful than this past summer. After Reuben lost his bartending job at Paseka's by sneaking too much of the liquor into his belly, he managed the front desk of Blue Coral for a brief stint. Everything seemed fine until he didn't show up one busy June morning, leaving arrivals stranded. Half of the reservations were refunded, and a business meeting planned for the banquet room ended short of a fistfight between Jericho's frazzled chef and a locked-out group of realtors. After the chef and morning bartender walked, Jericho realized it wasn't an isolated incident.

  Jericho didn't know. He took such great pains to not know. And with Reuben smoothing things over with the owner—well, he was always picking up Jericho's slack recently, at a price.

  The real disappointment, however, was in finding Reuben. Casual and reckless—his name was on the front desk's computer, assigned to a room. He
must've left his card key at home, and been too drunk to realize he could use the housekeeper's card, booking himself a damned room like an idiot.

  Jericho swiped his own card, expecting anything. Reuben was sprawled unconscious on a twiglike vacationing student he'd picked up at one of the trashy tourist bars. One of Tombolo's whiskey bottles at the foot of the bed, plastic pourer still in the neck.

  Jericho took him into his office and sat in tensed quiet.

  Why are you such an asshole?, his mind screamed, Pissing in your cozy little domestic bed! What happened? Why did you even marry Fern? Because you wanted what I had? Well now it's gone! You still have Stacey and Alana!

  But the two men's agreement was sealed in near-silence.

  As they left Jericho's office, Fern walked up with their two little girls, kissed her husband's cheek. He could tell Reuben's blood was running cold, but somehow he tugged on one of her curly brown tresses and kissed her lips. Jericho choked on his nausea imagining the student's dried sweat moving from Reuben's to Fern's mouth.

  “Good morning!” Stacey hollered as she clung to Reuben's leg. “Momma said we can have bumblebee pancakes for breakfast!”

  Jericho tried to feel relief in the levity of her indecipherable demand, but everything once adorable now just seemed vulnerable.

  “Why do you keep giving my man so many overnight shifts?” Fern said with a half-smile. Jericho studied her pouty lips for signs of a sad knowing. “You try handling these twin devils alone.”

  “I don't know,” he told her, watching them walk off. Her arm around Reuben's waist. Reuben's sex-crusted hand running through Alana's hair.

  “I don't know,” he told the student as he helped her gather her things when she asked where Reuben was, snatching up a polaroid they'd taken at the bar to crush it in his fist.

  “I don't know,” he told Maggie, the night receptionist at the time, when she asked why everyone from the morning shift was so upset.

  “You're a nice guy,” she said, breaking the narrative. Pen drilling into her lip. “I'm sure it was nothing.”

  “I don't know. Are you free afterward?”