PANIC

(this is a story i started writing a looong time ago. i'm posting pieces of it in an effort to inspire myself to keep working on it)

It was a Sunday night party. One of those nights where everyone meets up in a bar, and brings someone with them since they don’t expect to see anyone there on the gloomiest night of the week. That doubled the number of people in the bar. We didn’t like to stay somewhere where money was required when we could just as happily procure some booze and head for a nearby park. I speak of this ritual as an aged veteran but this particular evening was a christening of sorts and it was all new to me.
I came on the arm of a pretty lady named Andy. Her hair was light brown but shone gold in just the right light. I wasn’t in love with her, and I don’t think I ever could have been, but to tear my eyes away from her would have been far more trouble than not so she let me tag along with her. I knew her through a friend of a friend and a series of fortunate events had led to me waking up in my apartment, at about 4 on a Sunday afternoon, to the glorious sound of Andy humming to herself in my shower. I don’t think my shower had ever been graced by such a form since I’d moved in. it must have grown pretty accustomed to my oafish bulk and I think it was grateful for the change.
Andy wasn’t interested in politics. Andy wasn’t interested in changing the world. Andy wasn’t interested in me, but she smiled when she saw me anyways and tickled my neck with her breath as she whispered something in my ear. She never said anything important, but her mere acceptance of my company was enough to make it seem important at the time.
Tonight Andy wore a blue sundress. Cool and calm and pretty. No elegance or grace today, she didn’t seem to need it. She held my hand in a casual way as she tried to prepare me for any introductions she might have to make later on in the evening; introducing me to the regulars who I couldn’t see or even imagine. She told me about Bob, who I shouldn’t talk to until introduced by someone other than her. About jake, who was friendly and anybody’s best friend for a shot or two of anything but whisky. About Sam who only drank whisky. About Michael who I shouldn’t look at in a certain way, and about a hundred other names I couldn’t hope to put faces to because I had never seen them. I think it was just empty blather to fill the train ride but I was contented to nod and acknowledge.
We got off the train and I followed her, making her way easily through a series of alleys. “It’s faster this way” was her excuse but I think she just liked to lead me like a fox might lead a lost lamb. Every once in a while she would pause and wrap me around herself, clutching my hand to her breast, sometimes she’d spin around and kiss me, sometimes she’d gnaw on my finger. Once she stopped and pulled me close to her, nodding at the moon. Between getting on the subway and off again, the sun had set and night had exploded exposing the moon. It seemed inappropriate somehow, that it wasn’t a full glowing orb, or a thin romantic crescent, but just a gibbous white chunk of light in the sky, occasionally becoming a gibbous blur of light behind a cloud with no understanding of mood or setting.
I really liked Andy, I think she knew it too. Nobody who didn’t know would have smirked in such a self satisfied way, like a pet who knows where your keys are and isn’t telling because it’d rather watch you panic.
We arrived at Moore’s a little sloppier than when we’d left my apartment. This didn’t seem to bother Andy and I could tell by the way her muscles relaxed as soon as the patio was in sight that she’d spent many evenings out there. She had told me that this was a favourite haunt of hers but I hadn’t given it much thought till I saw the way she slammed herself down into a seat at one of the tables and the dark and shaggy guy, a stranger to me at the time, handed her a smoke without a word or even a glance passing between them. All words seemed to have been exchanged years ago, leaving nothing but habit and generosity. He nodded at me and proffered the pack. I only smoked when I was too drunk to know better so I declined.

The guy sitting across from Andy was introduced to me as Andrew. I vaguely remembered Andy telling me something about him, maybe they’d dated or something, I didn’t really care. I was eyeing his beer enviously and he poured me a glass out of the pitcher. I pulled out my wallet and asked how much the pitcher had been. He laughed and told me not to worry about it, and that he’d call in a favour some time later. I frankly would have preferred to have my worrying over and done with but Andy was smiling and that’s when I noticed the guy sitting to andrew’s left and right across from me. He was eyeing me with a strange look on his face and seemed to be trying to guess how much my shirt had cost when he asked me “hey, did you used to work for sally?”
I started at the question, strangers in pubs bringing up a shady and short part of my history, particularly regarding my running drop offs for my high school’s biggest dealer, was not on the whole something I’d expected, although, had I listened to any of the stories Andy had been spinning the night before, I probably should have.
I grinned ear to ear. The scar running from the left corner of his mouth down his chin was a beacon of recognition and I said “yeah I think I remember you. You used to pick up for Jeremy didn’t you?” this time it was his turn to grin and he stuck a slender hand across the table. “Mike.” He said. I took his hand in my own heavy palm “Hey. I’m mike too.” we shook hands.
And that, I think, was the beginning. From there the story is just a blur of angry chaos and desperate coincidences, moments so unlikely that I questioned their verity even as they occurred. Dancing in front of my eyes and through my head like a cat on a crystal ball. But for all the madness, it’s a story worth telling and so, if you’ll let me, I’m going to fill you in.

The evening ended rather more abruptly than I’d anticipated. Someone I’d missed being introduced to, and who seemed to be essential to the group, had to go home and so we scattered. Everybody said their hellogoodbyes and I wandered towards the bus stop with Andy. She grinned sheepishly and muttered something about work the next day and getting to sleep early so she could clean up her apartment before her roommate got back. ‘ah’ I thought, ‘the catch.’

She gave me a friendly hug, a tease of a kiss on the cheek and then was gone on a streetcar I hadn’t even noticed was there. ‘ah’ I sighed, ‘stranded.’

I wasn’t at all familiar with the downtown area I was in. I had little to no money, enough only for bus fare. I had no plan. But I was very drunk, which is why, when I felt that wiry hand grip my shoulder, I reacted the way I did.

It was dark out and I’d moved slightly out of the light. Out of nowhere I felt a weight press against my shoulder and then a squeeze. I’d never hit anyone in my life. When I felt the terrified rage well up inside me I turned, and punched the assailant in the face.

“SHIT!” we both yelled at the same time. me in shock and mike in pained surprise. He was clutching his face and rocking on his heels. I was clutching my throbbing fist and rocking on mine. I wish his nose had been bleeding, it would have been more dramatic. As it was, he stood up and shook it off. It was then that I noticed the enormous rip in his miscellaneous band shirt. I pointed at it, still trying to regain my balance, and opened my mouth to gape some kind of inquiry when he cut me off :
“yeah, that chick was a fuckin’ bitch.”

“what happened??” I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this story but it did mean I didn’t have to think or talk.

“oh nothing, that fuckin chloe chick grabbed onto it when we were in the alley and it ripped. That girl’s got a serious mean streak in her but don’t worry about it I got her back.”

He grinned and tossed a napkin at me. As I turned the white fabric over and over in my hands I realized that it was in fact a small girl’s, or very forward woman’s shirt. Blood, pit stains and all. And it had clearly been ripped clean off. Blame it on the alcohol if you will but I couldn’t help grinning back. That girl had a loud mouth and although I’d only spent the one evening in her company I wasn’t sad to hear that someone had gone some way toward shutting her up.

As I completed this thought I realized that mike had just finished saying something. I nodded. It is strange to think now, looking back, how much that simple affirmative nod altered the course of my life. It is entirely possible of course, that had I shaken my head instead and started walking away, mike would have followed me and needled me into it anyways, but that didn’t happen. And so I alone shoulder the weight of my triumphs and mistakes.

Let no judgment but that of the creator be passed on my soul. And if there is no creator, let no judgement be passed at all. Oh the law may have something to say about that, but the law can get in line.

When I woke up the next morning, I half expected to have andy by my side but even as I groggily peeled my eyelids apart I remembered some of the previous evening and felt the heaving snores coming from mike lying sprawled out next to me on an old futon. The makeshift mattress was shoved into the corner making room for a mediocre sound system and an enormous record collection.

No record player in sight.

The smell of sweat and booze was older than just last night and something told me that mike’s apartment had seen dozens of strangers open their eyes and wonder where they were and what that smell was.

What I had mistaken for an ugly collar on a leather jacket turned out to be Aggy, a manky cat who chose to make a nest of mike’s sloppy den. She must have seen that I was awake because she jumped up and let out a noise like nothing I had ever heard before.
It may have been a yawn but no mere mortal should be able to pack that much spite, malice, disregard, indifference and disease into a single syllable. Not even a cat.

Mike flung what must have been a pillow at her. She avoided the lumpy beer stained rag, and fled. mike muttered a “hrrrrmph” and rolled over so I could see his face.
His eye was swollen and a scab was developing on his lip. It didn’t help that he was grinning ear to ear, stretching the developing scab into a sort of twisted grimace enhancer.

“morning sugar; tea?”

“excuse me?” was all I could manage in reply.

Mike jumped out of ‘bed’ with an obscene amount of energy and bustled in the kitchen before disappearing into the bathroom to perform whatever his morning ritual was. I felt my eyelids flicker with the whistling of the kettle and sat up gratefully as a brown, on the inside anyways, mug was shoved into my trembling hands. The smell of traditional earl grey briefly overpowered the reek of mike’s squalid apartment and I drank deeply.

***

The bar was empty thursday, and I was glad. I showed up alone, looking for a friend in a bottle and sat down with my bud. Jack and Haley stumbled out of the washroom and grinned at me sheepishly. They smelled like sex and they knew I could tell. Haley shrugged apologetically and grabbed two beers, one for herself and one for jack. He pried the top off with his teeth. It was a twist-off anyways and I wasn’t impressed. None of us really had anything to say. The concentrated silence lasted about three minutes, long enough for me to finish my beer.

“well” I adjusted my belt, “I think I should head out…”

“what are you talking about? It’s only 7:30 and you’ve got nowhere to be…”
Haley could be cruel like that sometimes and she smiled that little smile that let you know, in a friendly way, that you hadn’t a hope. I sat back down.

“good.”
She may as well have winked. “I didn’t want to have to chase you down for a smoke later. Not with that cop wandering around anyways…”

“what cop?”

Jack shrugged impatiently “just your average power-tripping thug with a piece of metal in a flipbook.”

“well you were speeding…” Haley’s last comment made me almost choke on my own saliva,

“They gave you your car back? Are they nuts??”

“thanks” muttered jack.

“no man, I’m serious, the last time you took that thing out we all almost died. A few times!”

“we got where we were going didn’t we?”

“yeah sure but-”

“aw shut up guys. Jack’s learning how to control his hunk of metal, mike’s learning how to control his mouth, it’s all good.”

Haley. Peacemaker extraordinaire.

“besides,” muttered jack, “it wasn’t my speeding he was after. He wanted to talk to Haley, seemed to remember her from somewhere."

My eyes took in her faint blush, a rare experience for those brazen cheeks. “what did he want?”

Haley shrugged expansively “he just wanted to ask me some stuff”

“what did he ask you about?”

“Sex.”

I stared at her blankly.

“Isn’t that what everyone wants to know about these days?” she said as she tossed her hair casually and gave me a sidelong glance. You could tell that she’d practiced in front of the mirror for hours when she was around 14 but was now an expert. The flirting came so naturally to her it made me feel awkward.

“I’m sure you know enough for the group of us.”

Jack’s surliness never bothered me but I was eager to hear more from those cherry lips and his cynicism wasn’t going to get her talking.

*dialogue revealing that Haley fucks for money*

“You can’t argue with money.” said jack. I shuffled uncomfortably.

“It’s terribly agreeable.” said Haley.

***

We left the bar, tension was high. Mike on one side of me and Andrea on the other. Whatever that ancient laughing Turkish guy had slipped into their drinks whittled away at their rage but the irritability was still there and I began to feel anxious. I wanted this night to be like the first few had been but I seemed instead doomed to another evening of petty bickering and mild hallucinations.
We made our way to andrea’s apartment and when we got there we collapsed into our customary positions. Mike curled up in his usual fetal position and I sprawled out on the floor staring at the ceiling. It was white. There was a stain on it that looked like spilled coffee right where any idiot could see a light fixture belonged. Her landlord insisted that there were absolutely no problems with the heating and hydro. Andrea had long since rolled her eyes and assumed with a sigh that she must be imagining the stain as well. She lived her life regardless. While I thought about this, and let the stain become various celebrity faces in my head, mike began to drool and snore with his eyes wide open. It occurred to me then that the only time I saw that guy blink was when he was winking at somebody and I couldn’t remember if he alternated eyes.
Andrea was tidying her apartment like she always did when she was stressed or stoned. She was probably both. I was ripped from my reverie by a smash in the kitchen. What surprised me more was the lack of any kind of reaction. A startled scream, a curse, the clinking of any effort to clean up, anything. Obviously this disturbed mike as well because the glassiness in his eyes faded and he sat up rubbing his shoulder with his palm. We both shrugged and lurched our way to the kitchen. Andrea was standing, staring at the shattered mug on the floor. The look on her face suggested that it had been somebody’s face smashed on the floor and not the cheap mug that you just always found somewhere around the counter. She stood, motionless, barely breathing, staring.
Mike approached her softly and gently laid a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t move but some fire in her eyes flared, flickered and then went out. She blinked.
“what?” she barked.
“you’re… okay?” I asked. It seemed like a stupid question, probably because it was.
“yeah. Fine.” It was a stupid answer. I was thinking about how maybe it was a smart answer and it was in fact me who was stupid when she rounded on me with the knife. I was pretty surprised, but not too surprised to act. Of course I didn’t know what to do so I did what I usually do in those situations: the wrong thing.
I grabbed her by the wrist and kicked her in the shins. She flailed her other arm and slapped/clawed at my face. I grabbed the knife by the blade and pried it from her frantic clutch. She punched me in the stomach and ran from the apartment.
Mike got me some ice. We sat for some time, five minutes or so, in silence wondering what to do next. Mike cleaned up the spilled ceramic. I sat on the couch and stared at the wall. If the clock hadn’t been digital then the ticking would have driven me insane and I wouldn’t have known what time it was. Mike washed his hands and came back into the living room.
“we should try and find her.”
The calmness in his voice might have surprised someone who didn’t know him like I did but it was just me there. I shrugged.
“alright”
The perpetual shrug that was my life stretched into a complacent agreeableness and I was too out of it most of the time to really get upset by anything. I shrugged on my jacket and handed mike his. There was a knock at the door and mike opened it. His hand had been about to open it even before the knock so he caught andrea just before she hit the ground.
She was cold and pale. Her eyelids fluttered and then closed again. Mike and I muscled her onto the couch and then got a moistened towel to put on her forehead like you see in the movies. She lay there for a while. Limp, skinny. Bony as all hell really but the life will do that to you. She was wearing a loose burgundy sweater and ill-fitting jeans. She’d lost a shoe somewhere and her long brown hair was falling out of the clip she’d had it up in. without the glow in her cheeks she seemed like half a person but this thought only lasted a second in my mind because that’s about when she woke up.
She grabbed mike’s hand immediately and for a second I feared some new attack but she just held it to her chest and cried. Giant heaving sobs wracking her slender frame.
“I’m so sorry” she sobbed. She looked sorry. She was.
‘it’s okay.” Mike and I both said at once. What else could we have said? It was.
Andrea pulled mike close to herself and leaned her head against his shoulder. Her eyes closed and as silent tears rolled down her pallid cheeks she whispered: “I don’t know what happened… I don’t… it doesn’t…”
“it’s alright” I said as soothingly as possible. I didn’t have the tact to realize I wasn’t needed. She would have raised her voice if she thought she needed to. Instead, she whispered when she said
“no it’s not. Shit like that can’t just happen. I could have hurt one of you! I could have hurt myself. Why? It’s that damned mirror, I know it is!”
Mike tried to calm her “it was just a chip drew.”
“what do you know?” she almost shouted. “that thing has been driving me fucking crazy with its negative energy since you hit it with that bottle.”
“it’ll balance out”
How mike dealt with andrea’s new wave bullshit was beyond me. I would’ve hit her, hard, a long time ago. But they seemed to have something working for them. His indifference coupled with her self-absorption was a surprisingly effective combination.

***

“Drop the knife!” she screamed.
I refused. I was being unreasonable I knew, but that crooked blade was all I had left in this world and I wasn’t going to lose it for something as trivial as my life.
“for fuck’s sake you asshole! Drop the fucking knife! It’s just metal! Do you want to die for a machine?!”
The panic in andrea’s voice didn’t alarm me, and her idealistic views only fuelled my stubborn rage.
‘it’s a tool you fucking new age whore!” I yelled back and with that I made possibly the biggest mistake of my life. I lunged at her with the blade and she dove out of the way, onto the highway below. I don’t know if she hit a car before she hit the ground because I followed through like you’re supposed to when you’re stabbing someone. I would have met the same end as she did if mike hadn’t snapped out of his dream world right then and grabbed me slowing me and then us down just enough to keep me from dropping. The strength of my thrust hurled us both over the edge and with a presence of mind neither one of us would have expected in ourselves let alone each other, we each grabbed on to the beam supporting the bridge,
“FUCK!” mike yelled. The word didn’t echo but it should have, and to this day it rings in my e
ars.
“fuck.” I said. I was too scared to scream and I was trying to focus all my energy into my hands. That railing I thought, had better not break before we do.
“I’M NOT GONNA FUCKIN DIE HERE!” mike wailed. My lips were sealed. I felt like I should say something comforting, should say anything at all, but I didn’t want to so I didn’t. why comfort a dead man? Because he isn’t dead yet! I answered myself.
“hey man?” I said softly, or would have if the screaming hadn’t begun right then. It was 9pm then and by 9:05 I gave up trying to scream over him. I focused on myself and on blocking out the bursts of hysterical fear. No one could hear us, what was he thinking? He wasn’t, I knew. His eyes were vacant and despite the fact that I couldn’t see them, I knew they’d be glazed and open and round and blue and full of apocalyptic terror.
The night grew thicker and I could feel the weight of my mistakes pressing in on me. My head ached but I knew I could not let go. all night I clung to that bridge and did anything I could to keep my mind from wandering. Mike screamed. I couldn’t see him but I knew he was there because he kept screaming all night. At the moon, at the stars, at me, and mostly, I think, at himself. For letting the world become what it was and for being too weak and too stupid to do anything about it.
My hatred and my rage, already spent in previous engagements, left me devoid of any emotion. My fingers clenched tightly around the steel beam, my feet dangling uselessly. All the strength I had and a lot I didn’t was invested in my fists. It was the least I could do not to fall. And why not fall? I answered myself quickly, because I didn’t want mike’s frantic screams, beyond terror gone to complete hysteria, to be the last thing I ever heard. Almost unfortunately they weren’t.
It was at that point that I began to black out. It wasn’t until mike stopped screaming that I snapped back to myself. His constant yelling had become so regular that its sudden cessation shocked me into a reluctant consciousness. He must have dropped I thought, and now it’s my turn. It’s all over now, what a waste.
A hand gripped both my wrists halfway through this thought and I felt myself falling. Instead of the rushing wind and then the fatal connection with the highway below I’d been expecting, I felt my head smack against the cold bridge, saw mike lying next to me, wide eyed and mouth agape, mid scream. There seemed to be a lot going on around me but all I could think of was how I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to use my hands again, and that maybe I didn’t want to.
I woke up in a sterilized heaven. My entire body ached and I was hooked up to some crazy machine but if somebody seemed to want me alive then that made two of us. I experimented with my left arm, trying to lift it. It took an immense amount of effort. I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts. All I could remember was the helplessness of my dangling feet and the frenzied, then desperate, and then desolate howling from mike’s throat. Mike’s swollen jugular jumped behind my eyes and then I wondered, where was he? And where was a nurse or a doctor or something? If I was out cold weren’t they supposed to check in on me every few minutes? I lay there, scared, angry and confused until I fell asleep. No dreams. Nourishing and cleansing sleep and above all, nightmare free.

***

work in progress.....