“Please, no more,” Jimmy says, but this guy, whoever he is, isn’t the type to respond to begging, or even to reason, and there’s more, of course there is, it feels like hours but it might only be minutes, because pain warps time, it draws it out like a taffy bender at the county fair, stretches and then bends it so there’s no beginning, and there’s no end.
Just before Jimmy loses consciousness for the last time he sees the easel in the corner, and the stack of canvases on the floor beside it. It reminds him of his father, who used to lie on the couch in front of the TV and pop a DVD in of that painting guy—he’d been dead a long time but his dad had liked him so much he’d ordered the full set of videos—the guy with the afro and the soft voice, and his father almost always fell asleep to that show, because he said it was soothing, the soft noise of the brush against the canvas. What did that afro-guy always say? Jimmy tries to remember, he doesn’t have the strength to open his eyes but he needs to know, he can remember his father’s socked feet propped up on the arm of the couch and the way his mother would try to be quiet as she moved around so her husband could nap, and Jimmy would sometimes sit on the floor and eat through a sleeve of crackers and watch the guy paint and scrape out the shapes of trees and shadows, and those were good times for him, maybe the best times.
We don’t make mistakes. Jimmy remembers, this is what the guy always said, and it makes him smile. His mouth is full of blood, but he still smiles, to think that he could remember, even though the words seem to come to him from a howling distance. Just happy little accidents.
HOSKINS
December 10, 2015
Hoskins is in the dark of his own bathroom, fumbling for the light switch. He doesn’t find it right away, and for a moment he’s gone back in time, to when he was a kid and there wasn’t anything worse than the dark, and he was always sure that something was going to reach out and grab him from the shadows. But now he’s a grown man, a cop, for Christ’s sake, and the last thing he should be afraid of is the dark, but he still feels a touch of panic as he runs his fingers along the wall. He’s never felt this way, this touch of fear at the base of his spine, but now he’s sure someone’s in the bathroom with him, because cops are always being targeted; they found a cop murdered in his own garage last week, shot in the back of the head and—
His fingers find the switch.
He looks to make sure there’s no one with him, then into the mirror, and runs his fingers along his chin, over the puffed skin beneath his eyes. There’s the old familiar tingle inside his mouth, where the fat of his cheek rubs against his teeth. He gets canker sores when he’s under stress, not one but many, oozing wounds that line the inside of his mouth and make it nearly impossible for him to speak without pain. He’d gone to the doctor for it, years before, not able to pry his lips apart without a yelp of pain, hoping for some help.
“I’m not a magician,” the doctor said. “You’ll have to wait it out. Gargle saltwater.”
“But—”
“I don’t have some magic pill I can slip you.”
“I don’t need magic. I need help.”
He’s awake because he was dreaming about Carrie Simms, and the two other girls, their faces bloated and black, and they’d been chasing him, although he didn’t know why. And then he’d tripped, he’d fallen but it was in slow motion and he couldn’t move, it was like being frozen in time, and then he was awake, the blanket stuffed into his mouth to keep from screaming. He twists the sink’s faucet, then waits for the water to get hot, his fingers gripping the sides of the basin so tightly they’re white and bloodless. He stands there a long time, not moving, watching the reflection of the room behind him, as if there might be something waiting back there, ready to jump out of the shadows and come for him. It’s only when the water starts steaming that he snaps out of it, sticks his hands under the tap and then yanks them away when it burns.
“Why’d you kill all those people?” Hoskins had asked Seever, more times than he could remember, it was the question they kept circling back to. Seever had a different answer every time; he would lie and scream and sometimes he’d not answer at all, but even in silence there’s some truth.
“I don’t know,” Seever had said, and it was the best answer he ever had for the question. “I started, and then I couldn’t stop.”
Hoskins could understand. That’s life, being addicted to something, even to someone, and not being able to stop, not ever, even when you want to.