The Visible Filth (3 page)

She was still wearing only her t-shirt, her long legs gold and lean in the early light. He came up to her from behind, full-mast, and wrapped her in his arms, pressing himself against her and burying his nose in her hair.

“Good morning, pretty girl,” he said.

She paused, smiled, and leaned her head to the side, baring her neck to him, which he dutifully kissed. A splinter of memory flickered into light, his shameful jealousy over Alicia, and he blew it away like ash.

“Good morning,” she said. She reached behind herself and wrapped her fingers around his cock through his boxers. “I thought you were going to miss breakfast.”

“Madness.”

“The eggs are going to burn.”

He released her with a show of reluctance. She gave him a final squeeze and abandoned him to rescue the eggs from the range. He shambled to the coffee pot and poured himself a mug. The hours ahead began to unfold in his mind, revealing little responsibilities, little parcels of free time. He began to organize his day.

“Whose phone is that?”

He tensed. Her tone was light, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t on dangerous ground. “Some chick’s,” he said. “She left it at the bar.”

“So you brought it home?”

“I forgot I had it. There was a fight. She dropped it, and I was distracted.”

Carrie scraped eggs onto two plates, lifted bacon still sopping with grease from a frying pan to join them. She sat at the table with him and together they ate in what he imagined was a comfortable silence.

“Was Alicia there with her new boyfriend?” she asked, after a while.

“Yeah. They want to have a double date with us.”

“That sounds awful.”

“I know. Maybe we could rope in a few more people and have a triple date, or even a mass date.”

“Now it sounds like you’re talking about murder.”

“Right?”

Carrie reached across the table and pulled the phone toward her. Will felt an unaccountable twinge of anxiety. “What are you doing?” he said.

“Trying to find out whose phone it is, dummy. Why, should I not look? Am I going to see something I don’t want to see?”

“No. Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not lying about the phone, Carrie.”

“I know. I believe you.”

But an unidentifiable discomfort had been introduced between them, which neither would directly acknowledge and which unfolded invisibly over the table like a sick bloom. Will got up and took his dish to the trash, where he scooped the remains of his breakfast. If Carrie noticed or cared, she gave no sign. Instead she took this as her cue to access the phone and begin her investigations.

Will was looking at the coffee pot, contemplating the merits of a second cup, when he heard Carrie yelp.

She put the phone on the table and pushed it away from her. “Fuck,” she said. And then she grabbed it again. “Who the fuck were you talking to last night?”

“What do you mean? What’s going on?”

“You were texting someone on this thing last night.” She delivered it like an accusation. He was about to snap a reply when she turned the face of it to him and he saw the last two texts, delivered after he had abandoned the conversation.

The first:

PLEASE

The second, delivered about ten minutes later, was simply a picture. Will squinted at it, couldn’t make it out. He took the phone from her and held it closer to his face. A cold wave pulsed from his heart. It was a picture of half a dozen bloody teeth. They were arranged in a cluster on what appeared to be a wooden table; the roots were broken on most of them, as if they’d been wrenched out.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“What the fuck is that?”

He considered it for a moment. He swiped his thumb across the screen and brought it back to the main menu. Weather, App Store, Google, Camera, Messages, Maps. All of it banal. Nothing on here, it seemed, to personalize it. He wondered what he would see if he checked the rest of her messages.

“Don’t mess with it, Will. Take it to the cops. Somebody got hurt last night.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they’re just fucking with me.”

She rose without a word and brought her plate to the sink. She kept her back to him as she ran the water over it.

“You know what? It’s Wednesday; Derek will be in after his shift. I’ll show it to him.”

Derek was a cop in the Sixth District. He usually came in with his partner after a shift and spent an hour or two there. He’d saved Will’s bacon on more than one occasion: scaring off drug dealers, helping people out the door who didn’t want to leave, and just generally making it known that Rosie’s was protected. He was a good guy, and Will was happy to have him as a regular. He felt much better about the idea of showing the phone to him than bringing it into the precinct office, where he was pretty sure he’d be laughed out of the building.

Carrie seemed mollified by this. She shut the water off and faced him, leaning against the sink. “What if she comes back to claim it first?”

“I’ll just tell her we haven’t found it. I’ll let the cops deal with it.”

She thought about that. “Yeah. Okay. That seems good.”

He put the phone back onto the table and pushed it away from him. “So did you get your paper written last night?”

She sighed, as if already exhausted. “Mostly. I have to go over it again before class. Probably rewrite the ending, since I was a zombie by the time I got to it. Then turn it in and hope Steve likes it.”

Steve: her English Lit professor. It rankled him that she called him by his first name, but she claimed all the students did. He liked an “informal learning environment.” Well, how progressive of him. The fucker. Carrie had been agonizing over a paper on T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” for almost two months, and he was sick of hearing about it. She’d never fretted this much over a paper for any other professor. “I’m sure he’ll love it,” he said, making no effort to hide the sourness he felt. He knew it was petty, but it felt good anyway.

She cast him a look which he could not interpret. “He better. It’s a quarter of my grade.”

“Right.”

“What about you? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I feel like I should check up on Eric.”

“Why?”

“He was the one in the fight last night. He got cut up pretty good.”

“Well there’s a shock. Let him hide under his rock. I’m sure he’s fine. People like that always are.”

“People like what?”

“The ones who start shit. It’s always everyone else who suffers.”

“I just want to make sure he’s okay. Concern for others is a common human trait. You’ll learn that about us in time.”

She walked up to where he sat, standing over him and pressing herself close. “Asshole,” she said, and kissed him. He felt himself rise to her, and she grinned as she pushed his hands away. “I have to work.”

“Evil,” he said, pulling her down for another kiss first, then watching as she went to her office in the next room, which was a calamity of stacked papers, earmarked books, discs, DVDs, and zip drives. She settled into her chair in the midst of all of this, as comfortable in the apparent chaos as a fish in its grotto. She clicked the computer on, cradling a mug in both hands while it booted up. Her t-shirt gathered at her waist and Will was briefly mesmerized by the golden cast of her legs in the morning sunlight.

“You’re beautiful, you know,” he said.

She gave him a sweet smile. “Good boy.”

He shambled into the bathroom and started the shower, trying to decide what to do to fill his day until he had to be back at work. There was a lot of empty space until then, and empty spaces suited him just fine.

A
S HE WALKED
through the dense morning heat, heading toward the bar and Eric’s apartment, Steve nested in the middle of Will’s mind, bending every other thought toward him like some terrible star. He seemed to represent an inevitable end, and though Will knew himself well enough to understand that this feeling was as much a product of his own insecurity as of anything else, he couldn’t escape its pull.

Will had spent his life skimming over the surface of things, impatient with the requirements of engagement. He told himself that this was because he was open to experience in a way most people weren’t, that you sapped the potential for spontaneity from life if you regimented your hours with obligation. This rationalization came upon him in college, shortly after he dropped out, converting all that money invested by his parents into so much tinder for the fire.

Most of the time he believed it.

And why not? Women liked him. He was tall, and he stayed fit without too much effort. He was generally cheerful and had an easy charisma. As long as he had a woman in his life and reasonable access to booze and the occasional line of coke, he figured he’d be okay. He’d been working as a bartender since dropping out of school six or seven years ago, and he believed he might just be able to live out the next fifty years of his life in this state of calibrated contentment.

He loved Carrie, he supposed, but love was a tide that came and went. Who knew how long she would stay with him? She was ambitious, and he could tell it annoyed her that he wasn’t. He figured her patience would wear out sometime in the next six months. Another reason that being a bartender was such an ideal job. The girls grew like fruits on a tree. You practically just had to reach out and pluck one.

Life so far seemed like a kind of dance to him, and he was pleased to discover that he was pretty good at it. If there was something hollow underneath it all, a well of fear that sometimes seemed to pull everything else into it and leave him clutching the stone rim for fear of falling into himself, well, that was just part of being human, he supposed. That’s what the booze was for.

This line of thought brought him back around to Alicia, and her irritating infatuation with her little hipster douchebag beau-du-jour, Jeffrey. Alicia played the field even more shamelessly than he ever had, and while that intimidated him at first, he eventually came around to admiring her for it. She’d sit at the bar by herself and they’d bullshit about work, her latest boyfriend, his newest girlfriend. When Carrie came along and stuck around longer than most, Alicia had the good sense to spare her from attack, without even having to be asked. Will found that impressive. They hadn’t ever slept together – a fact which apparently never crossed Alicia’s mind, but which lodged like a seed in his brain and had since sprouted a snarl of tangled roots, until it was hard for him to think about anything else whenever she was around.

He’d always figured it was just a matter of time, and he was content to wait until the moment was right – when Carrie was gone, or when they were just drunk enough that it didn’t matter. But then Jeffrey happened along, and all of a sudden things were different. He’d known it the first time she pushed back at him when he started wondering aloud if hipsters could only have sex with an ironic attachment, and whether that attachment required batteries.

“Leave him alone,” she’d said.

“Who?”

“Don’t be an asshole. I know you’re talking about Jeffrey. Lay off the kid. He’s okay.”

“Just okay? Maybe you do need batteries.”

“Fuck off, Will.”

He’d like to say that was the last time he’d taken a cheap shot at Jeffrey, but it wasn’t. Sometimes he just couldn’t resist. Alicia started to ignore it, until it wasn’t much fun anymore. He contented himself with knowing that Jeffrey couldn’t last much longer, that Alicia’s appetite and her impatience with ridiculous men would spell his doom at any moment. But he’d been waiting for a while now, and he suspected Jeffrey’s unlikely heroics last night had given him an extended lease.

He pulled out his phone and dialed Alicia.

“Get a beer with me,” he said when she answered.

“Fuck, dude, what time is it?”

“Are you still asleep? It’s like ten o’clock.”

“I didn’t get to sleep until sunrise.”

Well, that was the last thing he wanted to hear. “So are you going to come get a beer with me?”

“No, asshole, I am not. I’m going back to sleep.”

“When did you turn into a pussy?”

“That is so wrong. And so are you. Maybe I’ll see you tonight. Have one for me, okay?”

She hung up.

He pocketed the phone again and kept walking, a cold gulf opening in his chest. Nothing he felt made any sense, and he knew that. He knew he was skirting dangerously close to infidelity, was practically inviting it, but he didn’t feel the pang of guilt he knew he should. There was just a need, and he had to answer it.

The thought of going in and having a beer without Alicia with him was too depressing to countenance, so he maintained his heading, resigned to checking in on Eric instead.

His apartment was located above the bar, with a metal staircase affixed to the side of the building, terminating in a small balcony and a front door. You could access the place without being noticed from inside the bar, for which he was grateful. Rosie herself worked the morning shift, and if she saw him, she’d call him in and fill his head with her outrageous opinions. Will crept up the stairs and knocked on Eric’s door.

Will found himself hoping that he wouldn’t answer. He was having a hard time remembering the impulse that drove him here. They’d never been close – hell, they barely qualified as friends – and standing here in the heat of a bright Wednesday morning, Will felt mother-hennish and ridiculous.

But the thunk of a deadbolt retracting into the doorframe scuttled any hope he had of leaving unnoticed. The door swung open into a cool darkness, and Eric was standing there in his underwear, his hair matted with sweat despite the air conditioner Will could hear clattering away somewhere in the depths of the apartment. The right side of Eric’s face was a Technicolor nightmare of scabbed and torn flesh. Dried blood speckled his face and shoulders.

“Holy shit, Eric.”

Eric spoke without moving his jaw. He was clearly in vast pain. “What is it?”

“I came to check on you. You need to go to the hospital, man. I’m calling an ambulance.”

“No.”

“Fuck that. Yes.” He reached for his pocket.