Walk on the Wild Side

Shrapnel



It looked like the wreckage of a hundred stained glass windows, strewn across a desolate tangle of wasteland in a schizophrenic kaleidoscope.

The hood of the ’78 Marquis buckled in protest as Harmon shifted his not inconsiderable weight. He smeared sweat from his face with a sweatier arm and squinted against the piercing sunlight. Even from his vantage point atop the rusting Mercury, it was impossible to achieve any sense of direction amidst these thousands of wrecked cars.

At some point this had been farmland, although such was difficult to envision now. Whatever crops had once grown here had long ago leeched the red clay of scant nutrients. Fallow acres had lapsed into wild pasture where enough soil remained; elsewhere erosion scourged the slopes with red gashes, and a scrub-growth of pine, sumac, honeysuckle and briar grudgingly reclaimed the dead land. Grey knobs of limestone and outcroppings could almost be mistaken for the shapeless hulls of someone’s tragedy.

Harmon wished for a beer—a tall, dripping can of cold, cold beer. Six of them. He promised himself a stop at the first convenience store on the highway, once he finished his business here. But first he needed a fender.

“Left front fender. 1970 or ’71 Montego.”

“I think it will interchange with a ’70-’71 Torino,” Harmon had offered—too tired to explain that the fender was actually needed for a 1970 Cyclone Spoiler, but that this was Mercury’s muscle car version of the Montego, which shared sheet metal with Ford’s Torino, and anyway the woman who ran Pearson’s Auto Yard probably knew all that sort of stuff already She had just a dusting of freckles, and wheat-colored hair that would have looked striking in almost anything other than the regulation dyke haircut she had chosen. The name embroidered across the pocket of her freshly washed but forever grease-stained workshirt read Shiloh. Shiloh had just finished off a pair of redneck truckers in quest of certain axle parts incomprehensible to Harmon, and she was more than capable of dealing with him.

“Most of the older Fords are off along the gully along the woods there.” Shiloh had pointed. “If they haven’t been hauled to the crusher. There’s a row of fenders and quarter panels just beyond that. You wait a minute and Dillon or somebody’ll be here to look for you.”

The thundering air conditioner in the window of the cramped office might have been able to hold the room temperature at 80 if the door weren’t constantly being opened. Harmon felt dizzy, and he further felt that fresh air, however searing, was a better bet than waiting on an office stool for Dillon or somebody.

“You watch out for the dogs,” Shiloh had warned him. “If one of them comes after you, you just jump on top of something where they can’t get at you until Dillon or somebody comes along.”

Hardly comforting, but Harmon knew his way around junkyards. This was an acquaintance that had begun when Harmon had decided to keep the 1965 Mustang of his college days in running order. It had become part hobby, part rebellion against the lookalike econoboxes or the Volvos and BMWs that his fellow young suburban professionals drove each day from their energy-efficient homes in Brookwood or Brookcrest or Crestwood or whatever. Harmon happened to be an up-and-coming lawyer in his own right, thank you, and just now his pet project was restoring a vintage muscle car whose string of former owners had not been overly concerned with trees, ditches, and other obstacles, moving or stationary.

It was a better way to spend Saturday morning than on the tennis court or golf course. Besides, and he wiped his face again, it was good exercise. Harmon, over the past four years and at his wife’s insistence, had enrolled in three different exercise programs and had managed to attend a total of two classes altogether. He kept telling himself to get in shape, once his schedule permitted.

Just now he wished he could find Dillon or somebody. The day was too hot, the sun too unrelenting, for a comfortable stroll through this labyrinth of crumbled steel and shattered glass. He rocked back and forth on the hood of the Marquis, squinting against the glare.

“Yoo hoo! Mister Dillion! There’s trouble brewin’ on Front Street!”

Christ, enough of that! He was getting light-headed. That late-night pizza had been a mistake.

Harmon thought he saw movement farther down along the ravine. He started to call out in earnest, but decided that the general clatter and crash of the junkyard would smother his words. There was the intermittent mutter of the machine shop, and somewhere in the distance a tractor or towtruck, innocent of muffler, was dragging stripped hulks to their doom in the jaws of the yard’s crusher. Grunting, Harmon climbed down from the wreck and plodded toward where he thought he’d glimpsed someone.

The heat seemed worse as he trudged along the rutted pathway. The rows of twisted sheet metal effectively stifled whatever breeze there might have been, at the same time acting as grotesque radiators of the sun’s absorbed heat. Harmon wished he had worn a hat. He had always heard that a hat was a good thing to wear when out in the sun. He touched the spot on the top of his head where his sandy hair was inclining to thin. Unpleasant images of frying eggs came to him.

It smelled hot. The acres of rusted metal smelled like an unclean oven. There was the bitter smell of roasting vinyl, underscored by the musty stench of mildewed upholstery basted in stagnant rainwater. The palpable smell of hot metal vied with the noxious fumes of gasoline and oil and grease—the dried blood of uncounted steel corpses. Underlying it all was a sickly sweet odor that Harmon didn’t like to think about, because it reminded him of his smalltown childhood and walking home on summer days through the alley behind the butcher shop. He supposed they hosed these wrecks down or something, before putting them on the yard, but nonetheless...

Harmon’s gaze caught upon the sagging spiderweb of a windshield above a crumpled steering wheel. He shivered. Strange, to shiver when it was so hot. He seemed to feel his intestines wriggle like a nest of cold eels.

Harmon supposed he had better sit down for a moment.

He did.

“Morris?”

Harmon blinked. He must have dropped off.

“Hey, Morris—you OK?”

Where was he?

“Morris?” The voice was concerned and a hand was gently shaking him.

Harmon blinked again. He was sitting on a ruined front seat in the shade of an eviscerated Falcon van. He jerked upright with a guilty start, like a junior exec caught snoring during a senior staff meeting. Someone was standing over him, someone who knew his name.

“Morris?”

The voice became a face, and the face a person. Arnie Cranshaw. A client. Former client. Harmon decided to stop blinking and stand up. On the second try, he made it to his feet.

Cranshaw stared reproachfully. “Jesus! I thought maybe you were dead.”

“A little too much sun,” he explained. “Thought I’d better sit down in the shade for a minute or two. I’m OK. Just dozed off is all.”

“You sure?” Cranshaw wasn’t so certain. “Maybe you ought to sit back down.”

Harmon shook his head, feeling like a fool. ‘Til be fine once I get out of this heat. Christ, I’d kill for a cold beer right now!”

Not a well-chosen remark, he suddenly reflected. Cranshaw had been his client not quite a year ago in a nasty sort of thing: head-on collision that had left a teenaged girl dead and her date hopelessly crippled. Cranshaw, the other driver involved, had been quite drunk at the time and escaped injury; he also escaped punishment, thanks to Harmon’s legal talents. The other car had crossed the yellow line, no matter that its driver swore that he had lost control in trying to avoid Cranshaw, who had been swerving all over the road—and a technicality resulted in the DUI charges being thrown out as well. It was a victory that raised Harmon’s stock in the estimation of his colleagues, but it was not a victory of which Harmon was overly proud.

“Anyway, Morris, what are you doing here? ” Cranshaw asked. He was ten years younger than Harmon, had a jogger’s legs, and worked out at his health club twice a week. Nonetheless, the prospect of lugging a semiconscious lawyer out of this metal wasteland was not to Cranshaw’s liking.

“Looking for a fender for my car.”

“Fender-bender?” Cranshaw was ready to show sympathy.

“Someone else’s, and in days gone by. I’m trying to restore an old muscle car I bought back in the spring. Only way to find parts is to dig through junkyards. How about you?”

“Need a fender for the BMW.”

Harmon declined to press for details, which spared Cranshaw any need to lie about his recent hit-and-run encounter. He knew a country body shop that would make repairs without asking questions, if he located some of the parts. A chop shop wasn’t likely to respond to requests for information about cars with bloodstained fenders and such grisly trivia. They’d done business before.

Cranshaw felt quite remorseful over such incidents, but he certainly wasn’t one to permit his life to be ruined over some momentary lapse.

“Do you know where we are?” asked Harmon. He wasn’t feeling at all well, and just now he was thinking only of getting back into his little Japanese pick-up and turning the air conditioner up to stun.

“Well. Pearson’s Auto Yard, of course.” Cranshaw eyed him suspiciously.

“No. I mean, do you know how to get out of here?”

“Why, back the way we came.” Cranshaw decided the man was maybe drunk. “Just backtrack is all.”

Cranshaw followed Harmon’s bewildered gaze, then said, less confidently: “I see what you mean. Sort of like one of those maze things, isn’t it. They ought to give you a set of directions or something—like, ‘Turn left at the ’57 Chevy and keep straight on till you pass the burned-out VW bug.’”

“I was looking for one of the workers,” Harmon explained.

“So am I,” Cranshaw said. “Guy named Milton or something. He’ll know where to find our fenders, if they got any. Sort of like a Chinese librarian, these guys got to be.”

He walked on ahead, tanned legs pumping assertively beneath jogging shorts. Harmon felt encouraged and fell in behind him. “I thought I saw somebody working on down the ravine a ways,” he suggested to Cranshaw’s back.

They seemed to be getting closer to the crusher, to judge by the sound. At intervals someone’s discarded dream machine gave up its last vestiges of identity in great screams of rending, crumpling steel. Harmon winced each time he heard those deathcries. The last remaining left front fender for a ’70 Cyclone might be passing into recycled oblivion even as he marched to its rescue.

“I don’t think this is where I want to be going,” Cranshaw said, pausing to look around. “These are pretty much stripped and ready for the crusher. And they’re mostly Ford makes.”

“Yes. Well, that’s what I’m trying to find.” Harmon brightened. “Do you see a ’70 or ’71 Montego or Torino in any of these?”

“Christ, Morris! I wouldn’t know one of those from a Model T. I need to find where they keep their late-model imports. You going to be all right if I go on and leave you here to poke around?”

“Sure,” Harmon told him. The heat was worse, if anything, but he was damned if he’d ask Cranshaw to nursemaid him.

Cranshaw was shading his eyes with his hand. “Hey, you were right. There is somebody working down there. I’m going to ask directions.”

“Wait up,” Harmon protested. He’d seen the workman first.

Cranshaw was walking briskly toward an intersection in the rows of twisted hulks. “Hey, you!” Harmon heard him call above the din of the crusher. “Hey, Milton!”

Cranshaw turned the corner and disappeared from view for a moment. Harmon made his legs plod faster, and he almost collided with Cranshaw when he came around the corner of stacked cars.

Cranshaw was standing in the middle of the rutted pathway, staring at the mangled remains of a Pinto station wagon. His face looked unhealthy beneath its tan.

“Shit, Morris! That’s the car that I...”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Arnie. All burned-out wrecks look alike.”

“No. It’s the same one. See that porthole window in back? They didn’t make very many of that model. Shit!”

Harmon had studied photos of the wreck in preparing his defense. “Well, so what if it is the car. It had to end up in a junkyard somewhere. Anyway, I don’t think this is the same car.”

“Shit!” Cranshaw repeated, starting to back away.

“Hey, wait!” Harmon insisted.

A workman had materialized from the rusting labyrinth. His greasy common-placeness was initially reassuring—faded work clothes, filthy with unguessable stains, and a billed cap too dirty for its insignia patch to be deciphered. He was tall and thin, and his face and hands were so smeared and stained that Harmon wasn’t at first certain as to his race. The workman carried a battered tool box in one hand, while in the other he dragged a shapeless bag of filthy canvas. The eyes that stared back at Harmon were curiously intent above an expressionless face.

“Are you Dillon?” Harmon hoped they weren’t trespassing. He could hear a dog barking furiously not far away.

The workman looked past Harmon and fixed his eyes on Cranshaw. His examination of the other man seemed frankly rude.

“Are you Milton?” Cranshaw demanded. The workman’s name across his breast pocket was obscured by grease and dirt. “Where do you keep your late-model imports?”

The workman set down his tool box and dug a limp notebook from a greasy shirt pocket. Licking his fingers, he paged through it in silence. After a moment, he found the desired entry. His eyes flicked from the page to Cranshaw and back again.

“Yep,” he concluded, speaking for the first time, and he made a checkmark with a well-chewed pencil stub. Returning notebook and pencil to shirt pocket, the workman knelt down and began to unlatch his tool box.

Harmon wanted to say something, but his mouth was too dry to speak, and he knew he was very much afraid, and he wished with all his heart that his legs were not rooted to the ground.

Ahead of him, Cranshaw appeared to be similarly incapable of movement, although from the expression on his face he clearly seemed to wish he were anyplace else but here.

The tool chest was open now, and the workman expertly made his selection from within. The tool chest appeared to contain mainly an assortment of knives and scalpels, all very dirty and showing evidence of considerable use. If the large knife that the workman had selected was a fair sample, their blades were all very sharp and serviceable.

The canvas bag had fallen open, enough so that Harmon could get a glimpse of its contents. A glimpse was enough. The arm seemed to be a woman’s, but there was no way of telling if the heart with its dangling assortment of vessels had come from the same body.

Curiously, once Harmon recognized that many of the stains were blood, it seemed quite evident that much of the dirt was not grease, but soot.

The sound of an approaching motor was only a moment’s cause for hope. A decrepit Cadillac hearse wallowed down the rutted trail toward them, as the workman tested the edge of his knife. The hearse, converted into a work truck, was rusted out and so battered that only its vintage tailfins gave it identity. Red dust would have completely masked the chipped black paint, if there hadn’t been an overlay of soot as well. The loud exhaust belched blue smoke that smelled less of oil than of sulfur.

Another grimy workman was at the wheel. Except for the greasy straw cowboy hat, he might have been a double for the other workman. The doors were off the hearse, so it was easy to see what was piled inside.

The hearse rolled to a stop, and the driver stuck out his head. “Another pick-up?”

“Yeah. Better get out and give me a hand here. They want both right and left leg assemblies, and then we need to strip the face. You got a three-inch flaying knife in there? I left mine somewhere.” Then they lifted Cranshaw, grunting a little at the effort, and laid him out across the hood.

“Anything we need off the other?” the driver wondered.

“I don’t know. I’ll check my list.”

It was very, very hot, and Harmon heard nothing Someone was tugging at his head, and Harmon started to scream. He choked on a mouthful of cold R.C. and sputtered foam on the chest of the man who was holding the can to his lips. Harmon’s eyes popped open, and he started to scream again when he saw the greasy workclothes. But this black face was naturally so, the workman’s eyes showed kindly concern, and the name on his pocket plainly read Dillon.

“Just sip on this and take it easy, mister,” Dillon said reassuringly. “You had a touch of the sun, but you’re going to be just fine now.” Harmon stared about him. He was back in the office, and Shiloh was speaking with considerable agitation into the phone. Several other people stood about, offering conflicting suggestions for treating heat stroke or sun stroke or both.

“Found you passed out on the road out there in the yard,” Dillon told him. “Carried you back inside here where we got the air conditioner running.”

Harmon became aware of the stuttering howl of an approaching siren. “I won’t need an ambulance,” he protested. “I just had a dizzy spell is all.”

“That ambulance ain’t coming for you,” Dillon explained. “We had a bad accident at the crusher. Some customer got himself caught.”

Shiloh slammed down the phone. “There’ll be hell to pay!” she snapped.

“There always is,” Harmon agreed.





Silted In



The pain in his chest was back again. Perhaps it was worse this time, but he couldn’t remember.

He leaned against the sink, trying to belch. The kitchen counter was stacked high with dishes: to his right dirty ones; to his left clean ones, waiting to dry themselves. He rinsed the suds from his hands, staring at them as the suds peeled away. Were the wrinkles from the dishwater, or had he grown that much older?

He sat down heavily at the kitchen table, remembered his cup of coffee. It had grown cold, but he sipped it without tasting. That was enough of the dishes for today; tomorrow he’d make a fresh start.

He hated the dishes. Each one was a memory. This was her coffee cup. This was her favorite glass. They drank together from these wine glasses. They’d picked out this china pattern together. This casserole dish was a wedding present. This skillet was the one she used to make her special omelets. This was the ash tray she always kept beside her favorite chair.

Her chair. He shuffled into the living room, collapsed across the swaybacked couch. Her chair waited there for her, just as she had left it. He wouldn’t sit in it. A guest might, but he never had guests now.

A broken spring pressed into his consciousness, and he shifted his weight. Not much weight now. Once he had enjoyed cooking for her. Now every meal he fixed reminded him of her. He left his food untasted. When he cleaned out the freezer, her dog had grown plump on roasts and steaks and chops, stews and soups and etouffees, fried chicken and roast goose and curried duck. After her dog died, he simply scraped the untouched food into the dog’s old bowl, left it on the back porch for whatever might be hungry. When his stomach gave him too much pain, he made a sandwich of something, sometimes ate it.

The mail truck was honking beside his mailbox, and he remembered that he hadn’t checked his mail all week. Once he had waited impatiently each day for the mail to come. Now it was only bills, duns, letters from angry publishers, some misdirected letters for her, a few magazines whose subscriptions still ran.

He was out of breath when he climbed back up the steps from the street. He stared at his reflection in the hallway mirror without recognition, then dumped the armload of unopened mail onto the pile that sprawled across the coffee table.

The phone started to ring, but his answering machine silently took charge. He never played back the messages, used the phone only now and again to order a pizza. No one comes up into the hills at night.

“Why don’t you answer it?” Bogey asked him. He was working his way through a bottle, waiting for Ingrid to show up.

“Might be my agent. He’s been stalling my publishers as long as he can. Now I owe him money, too.”

“Maybe it’s her.”

He ignored the poster and found the bathroom. He took a long piss, a decidedly realistic touch which was the trendiest verism in horror fiction this season. So inspired, he groped his way into his study, dropped into the leather swivel chair she had bought him for his last birthday. He supposed it was a gift.

He brought up the IBM word processor and hit the command for global search and replace, instructed it to replace the phrase “make love” with “piss on” throughout the novel. Yes, go ahead and replace without asking.

While the computer sorted that out, he fumbled with the bank of stereo equipment, tried to focus his eyes on the spines of a thousand record albums. He reached out to touch several favorites, pulled his hand away reluctantly each time. Every album was a memory. The Blues Project album he’d played while they made love for the first time. The Jefferson Airplane album she loved to dance to: Don’t you need somebody to love? And not the Grateful Dead—too many stoned nights of sitting on the floor under the black lights, passing the pipe around. Hendrix? No, too many acid trip memories.

“You’re burning out, man,” Jimi told him.

“Better to burn out than to fade away,” he answered. “You should know.”

Jimi shrugged and went back to tuning his Fender Stratocaster.

He left the stereo on, still without making a selection. Sometimes a beer helped him get started.

The dishes were still waiting in the sink, and Jim Morrison was looking in the refrigerator. He reached an arm in past Jimbo and snagged the last beer. He’d have to remember to go to the store soon.

“F*cking self-indulgent,” Jim said.

“What was? Oh, here.” He offered Jimbo the beer can.

Jim shook his head. “No. I meant changing ‘f*ck’ to ‘piss on’ in the novel.”

“It’s the same thing. And anyway, it’s so New Wave.”

“How would you know? You’re past forty.”

“I was New Wave back in the ’60s.”

“And you’re still stuck in the ’60s.”

“And so are you.”

“Maybe so. But I know that I’m dead.”

“You and all my heroes.”

Back in his study he sipped his beer and considered his old Royal portable. Maybe go back to the roots: a quill pen, or even clay tablets.

He rolled in a sheet of paper, typed I at the top of the page. He sipped the rest of his beer and stared at the blank page. After a while he noticed that the beer can was empty.

The battery in his car was dead, but there was a 7-11 just down the hill. His chest was aching again by the time he got back. He chugged a fresh brew while he put away the rest of the six-pack, a Redi-Maid cheese sandwich, a jar of instant coffee and a pack of cigarettes. The long belch made him feel better.

James Dean was browsing along his bookshelves when he returned to the living room. He was looking at a copy of Electric Visions. “I always wondered why you dedicated this book to me,” he said.

“It was my first book. You were my first hero—even before Elvis. I grew up in the ’50s wanting to be like you.”

James read from the copyright page: “1966.” He nodded toward the rest of the top shelf. “You write these others, too?”

“Fourteen hardcovers in ten years. I lived up to your image. Check out some of the reviews I stuck inside the books: ‘The New Wave’s brightest New Star.’ ‘Sci-fi’s rebellious new talent.’ ‘The angriest and most original writer in decades.’ Great jacket blurbs.” James Dean helped himself to a cigarette. “I don’t notice any reviews more recent than 1978.”

“Saving reviews is the mark of a beginner.” There hadn’t been many since 1978, and those had been less than kind. The last had pronounced sentence: Tired rehash of traditional themes by one of the genre’s Old Hands. He hadn’t finished a book since then.

James French-inhaled. “Don’t see many books since 1978 here either.”

“Whole next shelf.”

“Looks like reprints mostly.”

“My books are considered classics. They’re kept in print.”

“What a load of bull.”

“Why don’t you go take a spin in your Porsche?”

The remark was in poor taste, and he decided to play his tape of Rebel Without a Cause by way of apology. And then he remembered how she had cried when the cops gunned down Sal Mineo. Maybe he should get some work done instead.

The stereo and the word processor were both still on when he returned to his study, and there was a sheet of paper in his typewriter with 1 typed across the top. He studied all of this in some confusion. He cut power switches; cranked out the blank sheet of paper, carefully placed it in a clean manila folder and dated the tab.

He sat down. Maybe he should listen to a tape. Something that wouldn’t remind him of her. He turned his stereo back on. The tapes were buried under a heap of unanswered correspondence, unread magazines, unfinished manuscripts on the spare bed. He sat back down.

It might be best to make a fresh start by tackling an unfinished manuscript. There were a few, several, maybe a dozen, or more. They were all somewhere on the spare bed, hidden beneath one overturned stack or another. He’d paid fifteen bucks for the brass bed when he’d moved in, twenty years ago. Spent two days stripping the multi-layered paint, polishing with Brass-O. Five bucks to Goodwill for the stained mattress and box springs. They’d slept together on it their first year together, until he pulled down a big enough advance to convert his former housemate’s room into their bedroom, pay for a proper double bed. He’d always meant to sell the single brass bed, put in proper shelves instead.

He never slept in their bedroom now. It held her clothes, her pictures, her scent, her memories.

It would be an all-day chore to sort through all the mess to find just the right manuscript whose moment had come. Best to tackle that tomorrow.

He pulled out an abused legal pad, wrote i across the first yellow page.

His stomach was hurting now. That made it hard to choose which pen to write with. He thought there might still be some milk left.

He drank a glass of milk and then a cup of coffee and smoked three Winstons, while he waited for his muse to awaken. The living room walls were hung with the same black-light posters they had put there when they’d first moved in together, back in the late ’60s. He supposed that the black lights still worked, although it had been years since he had switched them on. About all that had changed over the years were occasional new bookshelves, growing against the walls like awkward shelf-fungus. They were triple-stacked with books he really meant to read, although he hadn’t been able to finish reading a book in years.

I can’t see you because of your books, she had warned him on occasion, from her chair across the room from his. And then he would stick together another shelf, try to clear away the confusion of books and magazines piled in the middle of the living room, try to explain the necessity of keeping copies of Locus from 1969. In another year the pile would grow back.

My books are my life, he would tell her. Now that she was gone, he had grown to hate them almost as much as he had grown to hate himself. They were memories, and he clung to them while hating them, for memories were all he had left of his life.

It was getting dark. He glanced toward the front door, thinking it was about time for the cat to show up to be fed. He remembered that he hadn’t seen the cat in weeks.

Time to get back to work. He would write all night.

The cigarettes started him coughing again. She had nagged him to see a doctor about that cough. He treasured the cough for that memory of her concern.

He drank a glass of water from the tap, then remembered that her plants needed watering. She had left him with her plants, and he tried to keep them watered. He was crying again by the time he completed his rounds with the watering can. That made the cough worse. His chest ached.

“What you need is to stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Elvis advised him. “Stop moping around this dump. Go out and get yourself a new woman.”

“Too old for chasing tail at the singles bars,” he protested, reaching around Elvis to select some pills from the medicine cabinet. Shitty street speed they sold now only made him long for the good old days of Dex and Ritalin and black beauties.

“Never too old to make a comeback,” The King said.

“Who says I need to make a comeback?”

“Shit. Look at yourself.”

“You look at yourself, dammit! You’ve got an extra chin and sleeping bags under your eyes. Try to squeeze that stomach into one of those black leather jackets you slouched in back when I was trying to grow sideburns like yours.”

“But I’m not getting any older now.”

“And I won’t grow up either.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

Street speed always made him hungry. He ate half of the cheese sandwich, felt vaguely nauseated, and had a swallow of Maalox with several aspirin.

He really ought to take a break before getting back to work. There was nothing on television that interested him at all, and he wondered again why he paid for all the cable channels that were offered. Still, best to have access; there might be something that would inspire him—or at least fill the empty hours of pain.

He could watch a tape. The trouble was that the tapes were unsorted and unlabeled, stuffed away into boxes and piled together with all the other debris of his life. He could dig through it all, but then he would run the risk of pulling out a cassette of a film that was special to her. He would never watch To Have and Have Not again. Best just to turn on Cable News and let it run.

He put the rest of the cheese sandwich out for the cat, in case he came back during the night. His stomach was hurting too much to finish eating. Despite the Maalox, he felt like vomiting. Somehow he knew that once he started vomiting, he would never stop—not until all that he spewed out was bright blood, and then not until he had no more blood to offer. A toilet bowl for a sacrificial altar.

There was inspiration at last. Vomiting was back in vogue now—proof that great concepts never die.

While the fire was in him, he brought up the IBM, instructed global search to replace “kiss” with “vomit on.”

That was more than enough creativity for one day. He felt drained. It was time to relax with a cold beer. Maybe he could play a record. He wondered if she had left him a little pot, maybe hidden away in a plastic film canister.

But film canisters reminded him of all the photographs they had taken together, frozen memories of the two of them in love, enjoying their life together. He was too depressed to listen to a record now. Best just to sit in the darkness and sip his beer.

Janis Joplin was trying to plug in one of the black lights, but she needed an extension cord. Giving it up, she plopped down onto the couch and grinned at him. She was wearing lots of beads and a shapeless paisley blouse over patched and faded bell-bottoms. From somewhere she produced a pint of Southern Comfort, took a pull, offered the bottle to him.

“Good for that cough,” she urged in her semi-hoarse voice. “Thanks,” he said. “I got a beer.”

Janis shook back her loose waves of hair, looked around the room. “Place hasn’t changed.”

“It never does.”

“You’re stuck in the past, man.”

“Maybe. It sure beats living in the future.”

“Oh wow.” Janis was searching for something in her beaded handbag. “You’re buried alive, man.”

“Beats just being buried.”

“Shit, man. You’re lost among your artifacts, man. I mean, like you’ve stored up memories like quicksand and jumped right in.”

“Maybe I’m an artifact myself. Just like you.”

Janis laughed her gravelly cackle. “Shit, man. You’re all left alone with the pieces of your life, and all the time life is passing you by. Buried alive in the blues, man.”

“Since she left me, all I have left to look forward to is my past.”

“Hey, man. You got to let it go. You got to let her go. You know how that old song goes.”

Janis began to sing in her voice that reminded him of cream sherry stirred into cracked ice:

Look up and down that long lonesome road,

Where all of our friends have gone, my love,

And you and I must go.

They say all good friends must part someday,

So why not you and I, my love,

Why not you and I?

“Guess I’m just not ready to let it all go,” he said finally. But now he was alone in the darkness, his chest hurt, and his beer was empty.

She shouldn’t have left him.

He tossed the beer can into the trash, turned off the kitchen light. One thing to do before sprawling out across the couch to try to sleep.

He opened the upright freezer. It had only been a matter of removing the shelves.

“Goodnight, my love,” he whispered to her.