Sixteen Small Deaths (17 page)

“There’s been an accident in room 217,” she says, and leaves the receiver disconnected to hang from the side of the nightstand. She takes my hand, immediate warmth and comfort
spinning in my veins like fiery heroin, brings her lips to mine.

I grip the small of her back and bring her body closer to mine, dewy lavender scent of her tingling the edge of my nose. “Let’s get out of here,” I say.

She smiles and nods, blush of her dimples radiating the dark light streaming from the silent black-and-white television in the corner of the room. We walk past the dead limb separated from its host and as I flip the duffel bag over my shoulder, I silently hope that I forget the momentary look on our client’s sodden face as he awakes from the foggy nightmare of a dry October evening.

#

Penny sips her wine as if she’s never had a glass before this evening. She licks her lips every few seconds as if to savor the years the liquid lived in the opaque green bottle. “You’ve never wondered what it feels like? What it means to experience it?”

I shake my head, down another gulp of Guinness. “Not for a second.”

It’s when she smiles that I picture the first time we met. The balsam forest-green of her eyes twinkles with stray moonlight and for a moment I’m a child again. “I can’t believe that for a second,” she says. “After all we’ve done together, you must want to know what lies on that other side, you know, the words and thoughts and visions they all claim to have after we’re done.”

Another long sip of beer, another cool burst of autumn wind from the open window in the corner of our kitchen. “No. I can’t. I never have, Penny, and I never will.”

She sighs and finishes the glass of wine, downing the swirling purple remnants with a final swish of her tongue. She stares out into the midnight sky. “That man tonight, when he had called, it was almost as if he believed everything he heard. How he could one day see
them,
the ones all around us.”

It’s right here that I stop drinking, grit my teeth together with
the force of a thousand wild boars. I’ve heard it all before, the talk of their shadows, the way they dance in the empty matter floating above and below us within every step we take. The truth is that I don’t want to know what’s living next to me. The truth is that the amount of pain experienced in one of our sessions isn’t enough for me to believe that there’s more to this existence than the physical world around us.

Penny’s cell phone rings and the warmth inside my chest dissipates into a broken silhouette against the celluloid behind my eyes.

#

His name, he says, is Kleyton Parker. Red leather cowboy boots, black jeans and an arrogant smile. His eyes slink back-and-forth as if they’re baby black garden snakes. He sits in the hotel bar and sips on a clear martini. Every few seconds he checks out Penny’s cleavage and makes it hard for me to forget that he handed us just over five grand in cash just ten minutes ago.

“You’re a lucky guy, muchacho.” A wink and another gulp of his drink. I nod politely. “Yeah.”

I can tell Penny’s getting anxious because she slides a black-painted fingernail against the edge of her glass, the other hand reflecting through the liquid like a patch of baby black widows. She looks at the neon orange clock above the bar and nods at me. “Let’s get this started,” she says, and picks up her purse.

“You guys don’t want another drink? It’s on me.” Kleyton stands up from the bar and raises his glass to the air.

“No thanks. What room number are you in?”

He downs the last of his drink. “Two seventeen.”

Penny leads the way and Kleyton and I follow her directly into hell.

#

The radiance of a dozen shattered rays of moonlight pierces the open hotel room air like a rainstorm of silver knives. Penny drops her oversized purse on the edge of the pine desk and fishes out a syringe and two small bottles. I pour myself a scotch from the bar in the corner of the room. Kleyton smiles as I drop an ice cube into my glass.

“I see it’s your lady that does all of the heavy lifting.” A sharp chuckle and he leans against the window, facing my wife. “It’s okay, though. I like me a lady that’s a hard worker.”

Penny draws a few milliliters of morphine from the first bottle and sprays the tip of the needle into the air. “I need you to sit down over there and be quiet.”

Kleyton raises his arms up and scoots over to the other side of the room. He sits in the armchair next to the bar. “Don’t worry, little lady. I promise not to squirm.”

“Good, because that’s a fantastic way of making this a lot worse than it could be.”

I finish my scotch in two large gulps and place the glass at the edge of the bar, halfway on the edge of the pine and halfway into the rest of the room. I’ve done it enough times to know that if the glass falls, the evening won’t go as quickly as I’d like it to. Kleyton fidgets his fingers on the arms of his chair as Penny pulls up the sleeve of his designer flannel shirt. A crow on the edge of the windowsill catches my attention and in the ten seconds that its eyes dance with mine a sharp shriek pricks the calm, dewy air.

The next black shape I see is a gun. Kleyton jams the weapon in my face and in a quick swirl swipes it across my cheek. The pain is nothing compared to seeing a near-stranger with his arm around my wife’s neck.

“Don’t fucking move,” he says, pulls Penny to the other side of the room.

I wipe the blood from my face and taste the rust of rage against the tip of my mouth. “Let her go.”

Kleyton laughs, pulls the side of Penny’s hair so hard that I
can see the hurt in her rosy cheeks. “I don’t know how many of these the two of you have done, but along the way, something like this was bound to happen.”

“We’ll give you our money, Kleyton. Just, please, let her go.”

He shakes his head, holds my wife tighter against him. “It’s not about the money, cowboy. Believe me, if I was short on cash, I would have never been able to pay that God-awful deposit the two of you required for this here visit. What I’m here for isn’t something you can give.” He pauses for a second and I swear his shadow dances in the moonlight. “I promise this will be quick.”

What happens next occurs in blocky, blurry shapes that radiate with a prismatic glow. A jumbling arrangement of sharp noises and metallic whirls spin in my head like a broken symphony. I ignore the tinges of pain beneath my skull and lunge at Kleyton but I’m greeted with a jagged whip of the pistol butt. Blood spools out of my mouth like a jagged spider web and when the first of Penny’s screams pierces the air, I can’t tell if I’m alive or dead.

Fade into white and back to grey. Ten seconds or ten days passes and she’s lying next to me, her right hand on my chest and clenching my shirt with cherry-stained fingers. The other hand sits ten feet from her body. Kleyton backs away from the scene until his boots scrape across the floor and hit the edge of the opposite wall.

Penny’s fingers release the fabric of my t-shirt and she lies motionless and pale. She rolls over to her backside and pushes her body away from me and into the corner between the bar and the window. Her eyes are as black and dead as a newborn demon’s and a comet streak of albino white dresses her once auburn locks. She pays no attention to the blood escaping from her new wound.

“Look at her hair…” Kleyton’s lips nearly swallow his entire face. “Jesus.”

Kleyton grabs the doorknob and struggles to swing it open.
My last sight of him is the serene wrinkle in his forehead, the two morose eyes locked onto my wife as if his actions changed all of our lives.

I stare at the various stains on the hotel room ceiling and within seconds our shadows have collected our consciousness and dropped us into a frozen slumber.

#

You were barely seventeen and perfect. Lips of an angel, dimples that could hold a man’s soul. You held my hand during the rainstorm and pointed at every shooting star, leaning in for kisses whenever there was a gap in time and space. You smelled of lavender and an autumn afternoon, skeletons of leaves as brown as dead pumpkins.

“Look,” you said, and pointed to a fiery trail in the October night sky.

I gazed above and when my eyes were ablaze with the reflections of glitter and hail you pressed your mouth against mine and sucked the memories from the back of my throat and swallowed them. Your eyes shifted from blue to gray and back again.

Our fingers entwined, alpine purple nails trailing the edges of my palms, we let the rain beat down upon our hearts as if nothing could ever stop us.

#

Penny’s eyes draft from side-to-side as if she’s following a tennis match. I hold her hand in mind but it’s been at least a week since she last squeezed back. Her breaths are consistent and slow. The white steak in her hair remains cold, a reminder of the events before us. Every few hours she smiles and points behind me.

“They’re right behind you,” she says. “Red eyes like fire. They’re all around us, baby. I don’t think you should be scared.”

I can’t turn around, can’t bear to think of her this way
anymore. I kiss the back of her hand, remember the days when we’d watch the geese in the Charles River and drink coffee and follow the moon back home.

Another kiss on her forehead but she doesn’t look directly at me. She keeps pointing to the empty hospital sky. I leave her behind me when the night beckons and walk to the only place in Boston where the one person I need to see could possibly be.

#

I spot him walking in through the front lobby. Eleven hotels on this strip of downtown and I was bound to be lucky. I keep a distance from his back, careful not to let my reflection catch the rugged look he still wears on his face. He sips a beer at the bar across from the lobby and it’s only a few minutes into his first drink that his client walks over and sits across from him. I study the client’s mannerisms, the nervous twitch at the tips of his sneakers, the wavy cowlick that shoots into the sky with an awkward sway. I wait another ten minutes for them to get the small talk out of the way before I get up from the velvet couch in the lobby.

Kleyton walks away first and the man follows suit within the next eighty seconds. I walk quickly until I reach the set of elevators near the bar. Kleyton is smart and gets on the first elevator but lets the man catch the next one. We’re the only two in the next ride and when he pushes the ‘four’ button a bright hurried pinch of light escapes from the metal panel.

We reach the fourth floor and he exits first. A quick scan of the hallway shows there’s no one else breathing here except for us. It happens almost too quickly and when his windpipe slams against my knuckles it sounds like a popping soda can. I toss aside his cash and license and credit cards but instead grab the key ring from his inside jacket pocket and catch the momentary trance of golden light from the ‘423’ on the ring.

The room’s only a minute’s walk away from the elevator. I knock once for each time my heart beats through my ribcage.

“Thanks for waiting a few minutes to—”

Kleyton can barely finish his sentence before I shove my weight through the door and onto his chest. For a man that’s only a decade or so older than me he’s not nearly as strong as I’d imagined. He gasps for air in between my fist cracking the side of his head. When he stops moving I slam the door shut behind me and smile.

#

Kleyton’s eyelids swing open. The fear in his pupils dances behind the sweat and blood that have caked into his sockets.

“What…the fuck?” Only three words from a man who, with our situations reversed, wouldn’t be able to shut up.

“The quieter you are, the less this will hurt.” I only had to fish through his duffel bag for a few seconds before finding the polished cleaver.

Kleyton’s eyes follow the moonlight’s reflection off the knife and a single swift blow to his jaw is enough to rattle him one last time. He stops squirming when the cleaver hits the open air and corrals into the flesh. It takes three swipes to cut through completely and Kleyton is silent as soon as the forearm is split from the wrist and hand on his right side. Lips part open so wide that they could swallow himself and the chair he’s sitting in.

“So…beautiful…” Tinny strands of fresh saliva fall from his mouth and onto his lap. “In the air, behind the bed, all around us…”

I launch the cleaver against the side of the desk on the opposite side of the room. Telephone off the hook and Kleyton bleeding out, I nod at the scene and leave the room and the hotel as fast as a ghost falling from the heavens.

#

Another shot of tequila with no chaser. I stare at a butcher knife Penny used to use on our clients. The wooden handle is beaten and raw. I’m surprised the splinters never found their way into her palm. I finish the rest of the tequila and move onto the half-empty bottle of whiskey across the table in our kitchen. Penny’s asleep in the bedroom but nowadays slumber to her isn’t really rest at all. She says they talk to her when her eyes are closed. They tell her about what’s beyond the arc of this world and the next.

I toss my black t-shirt onto the kitchen floor, feel the cool breeze of an October evening across my bare chest. I stretch my fingers, crack the knuckles with a deep breath. Eyes closed, I grip the knife, let it sway over my wrist before swallowing the last mouthful of whiskey. I let it fall with a resounding screech and picture Penny’s face in the moonlight, her smile as soft as a seraph’s voice.

The first one skitters from the corner of the kitchen and over my head. The next one sniffs the new wound, its horns and oval head shifting from side-to-side with a magnetic swing. One of them walks into the kitchen, a pure obsidian form nearly blanketed by dark light. Its eyes glisten with a scarlet glow.

Will watched a long puffy string of clove smoke drift into the endless glitter of moonlight. He blocked out the muddled voices circling around him and tried to think of all the joyful moments that had encompassed his sister’s life. When the coroner zipped her up only a dozen feet away, Will swore that the sounds of rusted metal locking together were the only things he would hear for the rest of his life. He stamped out the cigarette on the apartment steps and sighed, range of shock still at the tip of his brain. The dirty orange glow from two jack o’ lanterns on the porch of the house where Sonia just killed herself reflected off the pale blue of his tired eyes.