At Home in the Dark Read online

  They’re interviewing a slim blonde thing who resembles Goodfellow, my ex-assistant. It’s mostly in sillhouette but I know it’s her. I can see she’s dyed her hair and the voice is garbled but I know it’s her.

  The host shrugs on a Kevlar vest as a beefy cop blathers about the importance of closure. IT’S THE RETURN OF THE DEPRESSED, one of them proclaims. I try to switch it off but my arm won’t move. Nyx have mercy. I just stand there with the mister, drops sliding down the long green blades of mother-in-law’s tongue. Host and cop are turning down a street that I know. I think I see my neighbor, walking his beagle. I hate that damn dog.

  I switch off the TV as they get to my door.

  When the knock comes, I don’t jump. You could say I’ve been waiting for that sound ever since I came to the city. I think of all my diet follicle crimes, my twisted homey sides, the things I’d do, and do, and did.

  Another knock, undeniable. Then everything goes quiet for a second. From the kitchen, I can hear a faint scuttling. Something’s crawling up the sides of the sink. If Yash were here, I’d ask if anyone has ever written a locked-room mystery from the point of view of the corpse. It could be amazing, if done right. I’m looking up something on page 236, and I laugh when I see that the page is missing.

  Favored to Death

  N. J. Ayres

  Jason and Alfie sat atop pilings not far from the Laguna Beach pier, the posts cut low enough a tall kid could sling a leg over and not lose grip on a can of beer. The friends sat silent for a moment and focused on the blinking red light of a plane taking its time to forge through a night of flourishing stars.

  “Laguna is the greatest place in the world,” Jason said. He felt no need to look at Alfie when he said it.

  But instead of Alfie saying Ditto, man, he answered from deep in his throat, “Laguna sucks.”

  Jason thought he didn’t hear right. He checked the tin-stamped face turned sideways to him and saw it was seriously sour. “You’re crazy, man,” he said, spreading his arms, teetering a little. “This is paradise.”

  In honor of Alf’s birthday, they’d met with friends for pizza and beer. Now it was just them, waxing on life, politics, what Francie Stevens was wearing, and whether they should quit their dumbass jobs or not.

  “So I’m twenty-one,” Alfie said. “So what?”

  “What, what?” Jason asked.

  “What-what? You’re more torqued than I thought,” Alf said and snuffled once, kind of like a laugh but not a real one.

  “Spit it out, doof. What’s eating you?”

  “I expected . . . I don’t know what I expected. Something else.”

  “We gave you a party, you ingrate.” Jason was still nineteen, but he’d pull twenty in six months. He raised his beer high to the chrome moon and shouted, “To turning one hundred and twenty-one, the both of us. Yah!”

  As he said it, steel‑gray clouds overran the moon.

  “Damn, Alf. Did you do that?”

  “Hey. Special powers.”

  Jason could hardly see his friend’s expression now, just the spectral glow of Alf’s sun-tipped hair and the ghost of a “Dave’s Waves” tee‑shirt he wore so often the letters were fading away.

  Soon the menacing clouds slid from the moon, leaving the globe pure as a porch light. It lit up stringers of foam rolling like blown toilet paper on somebody’s lawn. The motion made Jason realize he’d folded one too many pepperoni pieces down his gullet. “Dude, I’m sick,” he said. “I think I’m dyin’.”

  He crumpled his can and tossed it into the sea, screw the whales. Well, he cared, but in his mind an aluminum can was something a whale could poop out.

  “Get it over with,” Alf said, scooping an arm forward as if ushering. He raised his beer to the moon. “A toast: To death. To death, I say. For some, a favor!”

  Jason swiveled on his post away from Alf to hurl out all that nasty, three full rolls of the stomach and a couple half-heaves. He twisted away from the puke that was being tidied-up by curls of water, then jumped into the wet on the other side.

  Alfie was already off his post and headed for the spot on the sand where they’d left their sandals. Alf’s were the expensive kind. He told Jason once what they cost. Jason tried to forget it right away, because the idea just bothered him. How can people spend so much on stuff you wear? But he kept his opinion to himself.

  Some days he wondered how he and Alf could even be friends. They’d known each other since middle school. Alf’s family was almost-rich, to his family’s . . . ordinary. Jason’s parents left the state when he was seventeen but out of high school, to open a business in Oregon. Jason didn’t mind. He took a room with a cousin and paid hardly anything for rent. The cousins worked different schedules, so they never got in each other’s way.

  Further: Alf’s athletic build to Jason’s flab. Alf was born cut and ready, but he wasn’t a jock, wasn’t a star at school. Something about him held people off except for Jason. A couple of times Alf announced to Jason and a group of kids that he was the type who’d hit the wall young, go out in a blaze. Ride a Harley to heaven, that kind of thing. One time he told Jason the way it would end: somebody would kill him. Drama, thy name is Alf. “Yeah,” Jason replied, “and it’ll be me.”

  When Alf first met Jason’s mother she sang a little of “What’s It All About, Alfie?” For some dumb reason Jason had never heard the song before. Alf screwed up his face in pain. Afterward, he kept asking Jason and other people to call him Al, but they’d forget, including Jason.

  Lately Alf had been losing his temper over small things, like going past a street they meant to turn on, or store clerks not paying attention to customers the way they should, or tourist families spread out on the sidewalk so a person had to step in the street to get by. He needed a good kick in the butt, Jason vowed, tomorrow maybe, soon as they both got sober.

  • • •

  All that.

  Then, in only a little more than a week, Jason walked the cusp of the beach alone. He stopped at one point, gazed out over the waves, seeing yet not seeing the gliding gulls, the muted orange horizon, the sun as it burned into the bruised skin of ocean.

  He whispered, “You sonofabitch, Alfie,” and took up a lonesome stone to sidearm it into the sea as far as he could. Then he crouched, sat on his heels, and bawled. For Alfred Burbank Lucian Langdon had taken his life, and in a particularly gruesome way.

  • • •

  Which is more wretched? To delete, cancel, erase your own life, or to be murdered? Wait. One plus one equals . . . killer. Suicide is murder, isn’t it? God help you if your family’s Catholic; no forgiveness there. Alf’s family wasn’t, but they did go to church sometimes.

  Jason told himself he saw it coming.

  Jason told himself no way did he see it coming.

  He had watched Alfie’s moods over the years. Funny one day, pissed the next. Jason hearkened back to the first time he and Alf jerked off together. Alf was fourteen, he still twelve. The act took place in the lee of a big cut-in rock down the beach from Hotel Laguna.

  The sky showed barely dark. Before walking there, they had set off a few firecrackers that were almost duds from moisture but good enough to sputter a bit. Three girls down the beach looked over. Alf made some wisecracks to Jason and got the giggles. He pointed at the dim figures of the girls picking up their beach things.

  A couple of fireflies flicked around the boys, as if volunteering help with the show. Alf stepped backward and leaned against the rockface. He brought a hand to his groin and massaged himself, said to Jason, “Do this, buddy, mm-m,” and half-closed his eyes. “Hey, Jace. Do this.” He turned to the rockface, made more sounds, and finished.

  When it was over, Jason was surprised: Was this what all the fuss is about? Is that all there is? This wasn’t a new sensation. He’d felt it before, since around age seven, but he’d never touched himself like Alfie was doing; he would just press down on his bed while on his stomach, and after he felt it he’d fall off t
o sleep. That evening on the beach he did laugh himself silly with Alf’s jokes and groans. And now, in recollection, he laughed again about it, before he sat on his heels, one finger drilled in the wet sand for balance, and cried like a toddler.

  Damn that Alfie. Damn him to a hundred-and-twenty-one and way beyond, forevermore. I will never get that close to anyone ever again, Jason told himself.

  • • •

  The parents, as anyone might expect, were a mess. Their daughter came down from her job making big bucks in Silicon Valley. But a daughter isn’t a son, with all the weight the male gender holds and offers.

  The Langdon’s pastor and his wife invited them to come stay with them until the service, and they did. That didn’t seem odd to Jason because Jason was, as it is called, unaffiliated. He didn’t know what was likely in a religious environment.

  During the service, Jason sat in the back row of the church, at the deep end of the pew where a shadow was cast by a stained-glass mountain. He rose when the flock rose, sat when obvious, but otherwise did nothing but listen, then scoot out to fresh air afterward.

  He overheard someone say the pastor had asked for helpers to clean up the bungalow where Alf’s death took place, behind the main house. Alf’s parents were leaving for their cabin in the mountains. Jason found the pastor and told him he wanted to help. “Are you sure, son?” the minister asked.

  “I have to,” Jason answered. Had to, because it was there at the bungalow that Jason had slept over with Alfie, built model air­planes with him, eaten stolen candy bars, thumbed through purloined Playboy magazines, shared dreams and jokes and generalized bitching. Who could know that one terrible day Jason would be washing a wall with one of Alfie’s old “Dave’s Waves” tee-shirts, pressing the blood into pores of plaster, paint, and wood?

  • • •

  One of the church members by the name of George met Jason at the Langdon address the next early afternoon. Jason led him to the back. A yard-long piece of yellow Keep-out tape that hadn’t ripped right dangled from a porch support. Jason yanked it down, bunched it in his fist, and put it in his pocket to toss away later.

  George was a semi-retired heating/plumbing man who carried cleaning supplies even in his personal car. He turned out to be easy to work with, didn’t instruct, and treated Jason as an equal.

  Once inside, Jason tried not to look for divots in the wood beam where Alf had looped the wire. The first horror was that Alf had done it. The second was: he used barbed wire. Jason shook his head. How could Alf even wrap it? How could anyone at all make a slip-knot that would work if it had barbs? How could . . . ? At the foot of the bed lay the pair of workman gloves shaken off before Alf kicked away the stepstool.

  Alf’s parents had told Jason he could keep whatever he wanted from the place. The rest could be given away. George had brought cardboard boxes. Jason knew the quirkiness of Alfie’s parents, how the mother seemed always busy and nervous and the dad stone quiet unless he had a few drinks.

  While Jason worked, he thought about the repugnant way Alf killed himself. The guy he knew would have gone into the hills, done it where he’d have a mystical bonding with the earth, Walt Whitman-style, a “Look for me under your boot soles!”-type thing, or weighted himself down with rocks in his pockets like that English writer Virginia Woolf did to let nature’s water blanket him to sleep. He wouldn’t have done it like a dog defiling his own bed.

  And for his parents to come upon. But he forgave him a little, because apparently Alf did it on the day the housekeeper would find him. Jason knew she came once a week on a Tuesday, or after a party. Even at that, though, how cruel toward her, Jason thought. What a smacktard.

  True, Alf was given to melodramatic moments, but he also loved the brews and sometimes a toke of weed. Alf should have inhaled more of it. You should’ve gotten cooled-out, Chief. And Jason cursed him again.

  And then there was Heather Reston, how about her? Alf had met her only three months before and seemed pretty hooked. The only reason she wasn’t at the pizza birthday celebration was that she had to go to a wedding somewhere.

  When the church member left, Jason worked alone gathering up Alf’s things. The clothes he took down to a second-hand shop known for helping homeless people. Homeless—in this moneyed city. It’s a free country. Why wouldn’t they come here? Maybe he’d join them one day.

  A small box of Alf’s books Jason would leave by a park bench overlooking the ocean—let the tourists or vagrants have a read. There were school texts; a copy of Moby Dick; a volume of Whitman skinned up on the spine, and a biography of him called The Better Angel detailing his life during the Civil War. Jason was almost going to keep that one, but why? He rarely read. A long time ago, he did, kind of liking a class in European history and one in English Lit, mostly because of the teacher; but those were only two of the four college classes he managed to tug through. He just didn’t see a purpose there.

  Alf’s family, on the other hand, expected a college degree out of their son, after giving him a break to go visit Europe. Alf couldn’t dig it, came back before the planned expedition was over. He couldn’t supply attention to class work any more than Jason. He did poke at Jason about words misspelled on the chalkboard where Jason had to write the daily specials for the restaurant where he worked as a server. Alf said he wanted to be a poet. An actor. A singer. Musician. But as far as Jason ever saw, his friend might have to go sit in an office in Chicago with an uncle who could use an assistant. For a little income, and for relief of parental jibes, Alf did take on an office job in Costa Mesa as a temp, telling Jason, Wow, do I know how to file stuff in cabinets. Cabinets, like in the old days.

  Jason smiled as he recalled the day Alf was outside the café where Jason worked, sitting at one of the tables and watching Jason scrawl with the chalk. “Knock knock,” Alf said.

  Jason didn’t even turn around. “Who’s there?”

  “Broccoli.”

  “Broccoli who?”

  “Broccoli doesn’t have a last name, knucklehead.”

  And there were two really old computer manuals—who used them anymore, now with the Internet? Also, a really old book on how to grow rich, plus three broad handfuls of science fiction monthlies. That was it. The sum of what Alf had in the bungalow for reading material.

  A torn slip of paper fell out of one of the magazines. Jason read, in Alf’s scrawl and broken out, as in lines of poetry: “the softened coffin/the ultimate Instead.” He assumed they were lines from Whitman.

  For himself, Jason kept the 2-in-1 tablet he found under the bed, surprised no one had found it; earbuds were coiled on the floor by the lamp table.

  The church fellow was gone when another man arrived just before Jason locked up. He introduced himself as Alfie’s Uncle Willy. Alf had mentioned an Uncle Willy, sometimes leaving off the “y”. Jason imagined him to be the well-off business owner in Chicago, not this stubbled, chestless man wearing a bill cap with a patch so worn away only the gold outline of a fishing pole and the prow of a boat could be seen.

  The uncle said, “I knocked up front. I only just heard about Alfie. You know where his folks are?”

  “He wanted to be called Al,” Jason said.

  “Is that right?”

  “What I said.” Jason wasn’t often rude to adults. But this one was so shaggy. Jason then told him they were at Big Bear, above San Bernardino. “Mountains,” he said.

  Uncle Willy then said he needed to use the toilet. Even the word toilet was ugly, more so because the man who helped Jason with the bungalow took a long time working in the bathroom. When the man caught Jason’s look as he exited with the cleaning stuff, he looked down quickly and just said, “Laxative.”

  It took a moment for Jason to silently guess his friend might’ve wanted to make sure he wouldn’t leave a mess under him. Precautions. Like another thing the idiot did before kicking over the stepstool. Jason overheard that the “young man” had stuffed a long wad of socks in his mouth.

  J
ason completed locking the door, saying, “You can go in the main house.” He just couldn’t let Shaggy be in the rooms Alf had used.

  In the house, while Jason waited for Willy to come out, he wondered if he should’ve even let the guy in, told him to relieve himself in the bushes out back. Jason heard water in the sink run and was oddly grateful for that. Willy came out with his cap tucked under an armpit and his hair smoothed down and damp.

  He drifted around the main room touching things, as if it had been a long time since he’d been in a house. Above the fireplace, on the mantel, were several miniature sailboats, hobby remnants from Alf’s dad.

  Finally, as everybody does, he asked the question. “How’d he do it?”

  How’d he do it? An agony to explain.

  And because it would be, and because Jason was angry with everyone, he walked up to Uncle Willy, looked in his gray-yellow eyes and said, “Slit his throat,” and made the motion of a blade across his neck.

  Why tell him that? Inserting your head through a loop of barbed-wire and kicking a step-stool away isn’t gory enough? He didn’t know why. He just said it, did it.

  It made Willy step sideways, untuck his hat from under his arm and slap it twice on his thigh. “Now that is just as grody as can be,” he said. Grody. A word out of the seventies, Jason assumed.

  Willy looked around the room as if for evidence, as if this room were the death place and he wanted to see the stains of red geysers. His beard was a bird’s nest begun but never fulfilled. His shirt, a faded black, his tan shorts dappled, and his sandals strung onto his feet by loose leather. When this man who claimed to be an uncle of Alf’s was done examining what could not be found, he strode to the front door and out onto the porch. Jason saw him sit on the front step.

  The path leading down to the gate was composed of perfect, artfully placed stonework, wig-waggled so as not to be too precise. Jason, seeing the man there and thinking perhaps he misjudged the guy, joined him on the other side of the step because it was built wide, wide as a church pew, although no stained-glass mountain-shadow draped it.