Every Shallow Cut Read online

I had a new kind of respect for the borough. I thought, This is the way I should have done it too. You’d need mortar to get these people out of their homes. They wouldn’t smile pleasantly to the bank men. They would have carried the bank men’s corpses to the river wrapped in plastic and weighted them down with overdue account statements.

  I pounded on the door with the side of my fist. There was no knocker or door bell. I thumped and thumped for about a minute. He was either way up high on the third floor listening to jazz CDs or he was working late at the facility. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to sit on his stoop and just wait, but I didn’t want to roam very far away from his place either. I kept forgetting I had a gun.

  I sat back against the red door, wary, skittish, turning to face every sound. Something was alive in a nearby alley. A cat or rats were scuttling around. Maybe it was another mid-list writer rolling in garbage holding a leash of twine attached to his dog. I could almost see him there behind the bags of trash, his bloodshot eyes glaring at me.

  I checked the windows above me on both sides of the street. Most of the blinds and curtains were drawn. I saw an occasional face glancing down. I pulled the rucksack into my lap. I wondered why I’d gone to see my agent. I knew it was going to go down bad. It had been even worse than expected. It was a fool’s move. This road trip was making me even dumber.

  The subway rumbled under the street and shook the flagstones like an earth tremor. I liked the feeling. It moved up through my legs and into my belly and chest and continued on like a death rattle out through my open mouth. I hummed along with it.

  I must’ve fallen asleep there. The next thing I knew I was on my back on the stoop staring straight up at him. He hovered over me with the red door wide open.

  He stood five three, firm and wiry, but with jowls that made you think he was chubby if you weren’t paying attention. He’d been married three times, always to women who couldn’t speak English. As soon as they figured out the language they cut loose and ran.

  “Hey, man,” I said.

  “Stand up and come inside. It’s a wonder you weren’t butchered where you lay.”

  “Is that why the door is red?” I asked.

  “It makes it easier to hide the rooster blood when they have their Santeria rituals up the block. They paint all the neighbors’ houses. All the neighbors they like, that is. It’s a sign to the evil spirits to pass our doors by.”

  “Like the angel of death passing the houses of the Jews during the tenth plague, the one that had the firstborn being sacrificed.”

  He frowned at me. “You couldn’t tell I was just kidding? Stop lying there. Come inside.”

  I got up. In a lot of ways his place reminded me of the house I used to have. Books and movie posters everywhere, DVDs stacked all over, boxes full of comics, the occasional action figure or some other little toy that might have helped to inspire a story.

  We sat at his kitchen table. He leaned forward, enmeshed his fingers, stared at me, and said, “You’ve hit the wall.”

  “The wall hit me.”

  “You can stay here for as long as you like.”

  “Thanks, but I’m out with my brother on Long Island for the time being.”

  He’d met my brother at my wedding, and had already read through the thinly veiled portrait of him in my stories. “That going to work out all right?”

  “For a couple of days anyway.”

  “And what about after that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I was saying that a lot. It had become my mantra.

  “Okay,” he said, “so tell me about it.”

  I told him about it. I started about eighteen months back and went straight up to carrying the last of my shit into the pawn shop. I started to explain about the crank kids and the gun and speed loader and my crooked nose and the girl at the fast food window, the flood, the pie, my first love, the security guards in their little booth, all of that, but the closer I got to discussing it the heavier my chest felt. It was as if a steel band was constricting my chest, cinching tighter and tighter.

  I skipped it all and went straight to my brother, the celebrity mag, the bath, the shelf of photo albums, my old man washing the car, my mother’s disappointment by the time she held up my third novel, the agent scared, the way he should be, the bolted bookcase.

  Somewhere along my discourse he got up and started to brew some tea. Whenever my voice began to rise and become too shrill he’d say, “Shhh, shhhh.” Once he came up behind me in my chair and began to massage my shoulders. His touch nearly made me leap up and scream.

  We drank the herbal tea. I hated herbal tea. People put too much fucking faith in herbal tea, like if the Chinese knew all the mystical zen secrets of the universe then why the fuck were they still communists? I spun the cup around on the saucer a few times until he told me to swallow all of it. I swallowed all of it. There were no tea leaves in the bottom for me to read.

  “You’ll feel better soon.”

  “Tea just punches me in the bladder.”

  “The tea doesn’t matter. I gave you some lithium.”

  “Lithium?” I stared into the empty cup. “You spiked the tea with lithium?”

  “Yeah. Just a little. It’ll help you to relax.”

  “No it won’t.” I’d studied up on anti-depressants for one of my books featuring a schizophrenic bi-polar hitman. Then again, when I got on them the first time. Then again the second time. Then again, when I couldn’t afford them and wanted to know what side effects withdrawal would put me through. “It takes up to a month for treatment to become effective. And it’s used in conjunction with other drugs.”

  “I put some Prozac and Xanax in there too.”

  “Christ, man, can you mix those together? You couldn’t have just picked up a six-pack? How’d you get all these drugs?”

  “Stole them from work,” he admitted.

  “Can you just drink this shit?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so? Oh Christ.” I was so angry I almost kicked him in the shin. “You really aren’t properly trained to medicate people, are you.”

  He shrugged. “It can’t make you feel any worse, can it?”

  He had a point. My vision began to cloud and double up. I fought to keep control. I didn’t know why. “You have really shit communication skills, you know that? It’s why you like women who can’t speak the language. So they don’t notice how badly you relate to people.”

  “The language of love is all that two people truly need to understand each other.”

  “You say crap like that and you think I need the lithium?”

  “You do.”

  My head started to lift off my shoulders. I stumbled for the couch.

  “I think it’s starting to hit.”

  “Good, just go with it.”

  “But I don’t want to go with it. Don’t you get it? I don’t—”

  “Shh, you’re already unconscious, you stubborn asshole. Now shut up and sleep.”

  I glared at him and cursed at him, then I shut up and slept.

  I woke up in my underwear with my face pressed to the large bosom of a naked fat woman.

  She smelled of stale cream and Kahlua and was gripping me so tightly that I was having trouble breathing. I huffed air like a paint sniffer and tried to extract myself. I couldn’t. I tried harder.

  The woman moaned in her sleep and said something that sounded like Russian. I was sweating nervously and finally was slick enough to slip out of her clench.

  I took a whiff of myself. I was ripe but I didn’t smell like sex. My clothes were folded in a carefully laid out pile on the floor. I got dressed and went downstairs.

  My pal was sitting on the floor in front of the television, shelling pistachios and watching a martial arts flick. Tiny Asian guys were flying around on wires smacking each other silly. Every guy seemed to love this shit.

  “You’ve been out for almost forty-eight hours,” he said. “You must be starving. There’s a pot
of fresh chicken soup in the fridge. Get yourself some.”

  I did. I ate a bowl as we watched the movie, oohing and ahhing over the very cool stunts. I got myself another bowl and then a third. When I was finished I asked, “Hey, why was there a woman in the bed with me?”

  “That’s Katya.”

  “Okay. Was she there the whole two days?”

  “No, she came by yesterday and we got a little drunk.”

  “I’m guessing she doesn’t speak any English. Are you priming her to be wife number four?”

  He shrugged. “She came to the US in a cargo container with twenty-four other women. But the feds hit the local Russian mob pretty hard that week and nobody picked up the shipment. The women were stuck in there for days. Half of them died. The other half, well, you think about it. She developed claustrophobia and nictophobia. She’s terrified of darkness. I was her counselor. She was released from the hospital a couple days ago but had nowhere to stay, so I offered her the spare room.”

  “But I was in the spare room,” I said.

  “She’s afraid of enclosed places but spent so much time in the container clutching her sister that she only sleeps well when she’s holding someone.”

  “And the sister?” I asked.

  “Dead before they got the container off the docks. Katya held onto the corpse for four or five days.”

  “Holy mother fuck.”

  He finished the pistachios and wiped his hands on a napkin. “So don’t be too upset she shared a bed with you. Take it as a sign of reassurance that you’re still human. That you continue to give solace, even if you’re not making the effort. It was the first time in weeks she didn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming.”

  “Did you spike her tea?”

  “She didn’t need it.”

  “Maybe I didn’t either.”

  “No, you definitely did,” he said. Then, after a lengthy pause, “I read some of your new book.”

  That meant he’d been through the rucksack. That meant he’d seen the gun. He was a counsellor for the dangerous and the demented. I wondered if he’d taken the revolver away, for my own good. I half-heartedly hoped he had.

  “No, you didn’t,” I told him. “No one can read my handwriting. Even I can’t. Besides, most of it is with the agent.”

  “I’m used to reading the longhand scrawls of psychotics. I teach a class at the facility called Greater Self-control Through Creative Writing. You should see some of the tales they turn in.”

  I thought, Great, more literary competition. Maybe one of the lunatics at the hospital had been on the phone with my agent when I’d left. Maybe the next blockbuster to crush my sales was going to come out of Ward C by a guy who used to make ceramic ashtrays.

  “Keep going with it,” he said. “It’s some of the best work you’ve ever done.”

  “It is?”

  “I think so. I got choked up in a couple of spots. It’s a real page-turner, thoughtful, insightful. There’s a poignancy to it that’s lacking in most of your other novels. You’re writing from the marrow. I can feel every shallow cut you’ve ever suffered in it, all of them still bleeding, tearing wider and becoming deeper. You can die from a paper cut if it becomes infected. That’s what I feel in your words now.”

  I didn’t know whether to say thank you or not. I felt vaguely offended and sensed I was somehow being insulted. But his expression was sincere. And I couldn’t argue about the quality of my masterpiece. Hell, I couldn’t even read it.

  Katya came down in a lace bathrobe, curvy and glowing, hanging out in a couple of the right places and all of the wrong ones. She grinned at me like we shared a secret. Maybe it was her way of flirting.

  She said something in Russian to him. He smiled and grunted, “Uh huh.” She said something more and he nodded. She started to laugh and made a vague gesture and spoke again. He mimicked the gesture and laughed loudly with her.

  He didn’t know a fucking word of Russian. This is how he lured his wives in. By just nodding and grinning and appearing more agreeable than any other man they’d ever met.

  I grabbed my rucksack and said, “I’ll leave you to your burgeoning romance.”

  “I think you should stay,” he said. “That or let me take you over to the hospital.”

  “What?”

  His features were empty of attitude. His eyes were a little sad but I wasn’t sure that was just for me. “You’re having a nervous breakdown. You must realize it.”

  “Well, yeah,” I admitted. “But I don’t think I’m quite crazy enough to agree to being locked up in the Bronx Psychiatric Facility.”

  “I could call a few of the orderlies to come by in an ambulance. They’ll help load you up, if you prefer.”

  I stepped back and wondered if he was joking or if he was even more bent than I was. “Thanks anyway.”

  He said, “You’re going to hurt yourself or someone else very badly.”

  It sounded almost like a plan. We all needed plans in our lives. Schemes, agendas, ambitions, intentions. Purpose. I’d been drifting like a weather balloon lost in the clouds. I needed direction, whatever it might be. I needed a little hope that I still had a destiny to fulfill.

  “Maybe that’s just the next thing I have to do,” I told him and shouldered my way out of his red door that would hide dripping symbols written in blood and allow the angel of death to pass by.

  I headed back to the subway, but about halfway there the urge to write became overwhelming. I sat on a curb in front of a bodega, took out the pad and started to scribble so quickly and with such force that I tore through the pages. Twenty minutes later a bus tried to pull up to the curb but couldn’t because I was sitting there. The driver blasted the horn but I kept on writing.

  A cop tapped me on the shoulder with his nightstick. He was maybe twenty-five and had the doubly smug smile of someone who had both youth and power.

  “Do you need some help, buddy?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You can’t sit there. You’re blocking a bus stop.”

  “Right. Sorry about that.” I stared down at the pad and realized that I’d broken the point of the pencil off after the first couple of words. The rest was just indentations. I stuffed the pad back into my rucksack and got to my feet.

  “Let me see some ID,” he said.

  Everyone with a badge wanted to see my ID, like they had to make sure that I was really me. I wondered, Who would want to be me if they didn’t have to be me? I showed him my driver’s license.

  “Are there any issues with your license I should be aware of?”

  “What?”

  He repeated himself. I repeated myself. We locked gazes.

  “It’s a Colorado license.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What are you doing in the south Bronx?”

  “Visiting a friend.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “In a big brick house with a red door a few blocks away. I don’t know the address. Apparently there’s a lot of Santeria worshippers around there.”

  “Sir, would you mind turning out your pockets?”

  He tapped the license across his knuckles and the grinning face in the photo seemed to mock me. I didn’t answer the cop. I looked at the photo, taken seven years ago, and wondered who the fuck that guy was and why my name was printed under the picture. The cop kept flapping the license, the face bobbing, my head pounding.

  I turned out my pockets. They were empty except for my wallet and car keys.

  “Have you been indulging in any alcohol or drug use?” he asked.

  Would the cops frown on lithium, Prozac, and Xanax the way they did heroin and crack? Was it more acceptable to be a junkie or to have hit the wall and come crawling back home to practically cry on the doorstep of your childhood love, who double-locked you out of the house?

  “I had some powerful green tea,” I said.

  “Are you using a euphemism for marijuana?”

  “No, I am
not.”

  “I see, sir.”

  I hadn’t expected the police in the Bronx to be so friendly. I just figured the guy would grab my wrist and wrench my arm up my back, cuff me, and throw me in the back of the patrol car.

  “Sir, what’s in the bag?”

  “My novel,” I said. “Or a part of it anyway. My agent’s girl is going to type it up. He’s sure something will break for us soon. And he’s going to keep pushing the other manuscripts. I’m keeping the faith. He’s going to get me a nice fat cheque soon. Hollywood is always after new material. This new book, he’s got a good feeling about it. Everything is going to turn around. He’s going to get me back on top.”

  “Please open the bag, sir.”

  I had a feeling my rights were being violated. I wanted to beat his young, handsome face in. Wasn’t there anyone anywhere who would just let you go on your way without making you try to explain yourself? How could you articulate what you didn’t understand yourself?

  I smiled pleasantly. I opened the rucksack.

  “Do you mind if I take a look at what you might have inside?”

  “Not at all, officer.”

  I tossed the rucksack at his feet. He bent to examine it and realized his mistake almost instantly. I brought my knee up hard into his chin. It was my signature move now, I supposed. An ugly crunch echoed across the busy street as blood burst from his mouth. The bodega boys stopped all the buying and selling of fruit on the sidewalk and froze to the spot. I didn’t want to fight a cop. I didn’t want to fight anybody. I wanted to be left alone, but I couldn’t even walk down a street in the south Bronx with an illegal gun packed in my bag without some bastard with his whole shitting life in front of him and the power of right and might on his side bothering me. The cop rolled and tried to reach for his gun. I nearly shut my eyes and waited for it to be over. Instead I booted him in the nuts. The gun fell out of his hand. A bus pulled up to the curb and a dozen people got off and nearly walked over the kid. I picked up my rucksack and got on the bus. The driver barked at me in Spanish and I handed him a bunch of coins. He tried to give them back and yelled louder. I pulled out a twenty and threw it at him, then went to sit. I didn’t know where the bus was going and I didn’t care. I haven’t killed anyone yet, I thought. I stared at the back of the driver’s head for miles.