The ceiling fan was on. It had been a hot day and it was a mild night. The light attached to the fan was turned on. It was the only light on in the apartment. Darkness filled the living room and kitchen areas. The light was above the dining-room table. The dining room was between the kitchen and the living room. The windows in the living room and the kitchen were open. It was dark outside. No moon. Outside lights on the apartment complex patios were dim. The apartment was on the first story of a duplex, but it was above a garage and with the garage was a parking lot, filling the parking lot was asphalt and on top of the asphalt were cars, ceasing the silence in the parking lot were the delinquent teens who often made noises with their mouths and feet and sometimes made the cars’ alarms go off, filling the small one-bedroom – 900-feet square – with noise that cancelled out the sound of the clicking of the fan, and then the noises stopped and it was only the clicking of the fan. I sat in a chair at a table in the living room.
In my hands was a magazine. I read an article about contemporary American novelist. I wanted to be a novelist. But I wrote short stories instead and worked for a local newspaper. At the newspaper I worked for the sports section, reporting on high school and college athletics. It was good job. But I wanted to write novels.
But I had no patience for writing novels and contemporary American culture had little patience for novelist. But there were many writers: bloggers, journalist, professional writers (somebody who wrote instructional manuals, or something), short story writers, teenage boy trying to get the girl, teenage girl trying to explain how the world’s against her, old lady writing letters, old man writing memories in a journal, student writing essays, teacher writing on a white-board with a blue marker for students who were learning to write, etc.
You should know that I’m a young man who had graduated college two months earlier. This was my first apartment. I lived at this apartment with my girlfriend of four years. She and I didn’t make a lot of money and didn’t spend a lot of money, but I drank a lot of wine, whiskey and beer and smoked cigarettes and read too much to be very good at anything else. My girlfriend was gone for the weekend, visiting her mother in San Diego. It was Saturday night, 1 a.m. Sunday morning. I had returned from work an hour earlier and, also, you should also know that I stopped reading the article about contemporary American novelist half way through.
There was a knocking at the door, so I stopped reading and put the magazine down on the table. I didn’t answer the door. It had been a few seconds and there was more knocking. And then there was a moan. It was a man’s moan. Painful moans made by men sound awful and this one was no different.
I waited and the awful moan came again.
The fan made its rotations.
And the moan came again.
It had been a long time, maybe a minute.
I thought: you shouldn’t open that door. This is how people get killed. They open the door and there’s a man wielding a knife, ready to slice your throat open, spill your guts and then shoot semen up your butt. No, you definitely shouldn’t open that door. But what a moan, what a moan, what a sight, what if it’s like the time when Jason Hendricks broke his leg playing basketball for the University of Redlands last year, because that’s what the moans sounded like, no you don’t want to see the creator of that moan, it’ll be too much, but you do want to see so much (you’ve slowed down to look at car accidents, haven’t you?). This man needs help, maybe.
I got out of the chair and stood up. Moan. There hadn’t been any knocking for many seconds.
I walked to the door – slowly, but arrived there in only a few seconds – and looked through the peep-hole.
Nobody was there.
A moan came again.
I opened the door, it flung into the landing and with it was a thing, or a man.
He was so beat he could have been a rotting orange or a tomato spit open and rotting in a garden in the summer’s heat. His head and hands and arms and chest – oh, God, his chest – was covered in a dark red muddled liquid. And my door had his hand prints, everywhere, and a puddle of blood on the cement outside the door.
He laid on the landing … and he died.
8/10/10
Redlands, CA
No comments:
Post a Comment