The Pirates are losing badly on the television, and the volume’s all the way down. Nobody needs to listen to that crap. Not that anyone would hear it anyway; the bar’s empty. Almost. There’s one guy, way down at the end, drinking Iron City and playing the touch-screen. And there’s me, and there’s this guy next to me who’s crying a little and drinking a lot. A friend of his died recently, in an accident that was, he says, his fault.
I leave the oxymoron out of it.
This is Jason, still with meat on his bones.
He says his anchor didn’t hold, and his friend’s repel was suddenly a lot more like a cliff-dive into a sea of rock.
“It’s not your fault,” I tell him. “You know you were safe.” He’s always been good about triple-checking all his knots and hitches, all the gates on the carabiners.
But he won’t hear it. “No. I set it up. I had to have done something wrong.” He finishes his drink.
I wave to the bartender. This is well before Virginia starts working here. This is when nobody I know is dead. This is before all those endings of all those stories of all those people who meet me and then die.
“No matter how you cut it,” he says, “if I didn’t set it up the way I did, she’d be fine.”
And this is what came into my head when it finally registered that this dead girl here, this was Virginia. I knew this was my fault. If I hadn’t set it up the way I did…
I looked at her for a while, long enough to think about alive moments with her body. It looked different now. There was no anger, no passion about it. It was just there, that loaf of bread. I looked at her for a while, then I covered her back up, put her back into her drawer.
Then I vomited on my shoes.
By the time Pearson got back, I’d had just enough time to mop up the floor and rinse my kicks, to sit behind the counter and really start to hate myself.
“Hey. You feeling ok, Travis? You look a little green.” This moment. This was exactly the reason I told Angela no gun. I’d have killed him, shot him right in the face. And I’d have loved it.
“I thought you said nobody was here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Dick.”
“What?”
I wished I’d found myself a gun. “You don’t have anything to do with this?”
“To do with what?” I had to hand it to him; he looked sincerely puzzled.
“I know that girl, Dick. Her name’s Virginia.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. I could smell it, a sickening blend of formaldehyde and sandalwood hand lotion. “Oh. I see. It’s always hard, the first time you know one of them. I guess you two were close? That why you look like you’re going to be sick?” I wanted to break his arm, but held myself to brushing his hand off me. “Fuck you, Pearson. You know I know her.”
He took a step back. “I don’t know who she is, Travis. I swear to God.”
“You fuckers killed her.” My face was burning. My voice was getting louder. My stomach collapsed into itself.
“Listen.” He knelt in front of me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. They brought her in early this morning. Three o’clock or something like that. She fell down her steps and broke her neck. Her BAC was huge.” Either he was a damn good actor, or he was telling the truth.
Whichever it was, I realized pretty quickly that I was close to losing it, to blowing everything. If I flew off the handle now, flipping out at Dick and accusing him and his buddies of murdering Virginia, they’d see it as threatening, and I’d be toast.
I composed myself, a little. “Oh, God. I’m sorry, Dick. I just… I don’t know. That was just a really hard moment to handle.”
He stood up again. “It’s ok. Everyone here breaks down at some point. Nature of the beast, you know. And you’ve had to deal with a lot more than most. I’m truly sorry about your friend.” He went to his office.
I just sat there, listening to his door open, then close. Then open, then close.
He came back in. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off. You don’t want to be here right now.”
All I could do was nod, give a little whimper.
I didn’t believe him, but it didn’t much matter. By the time this was over, he’d be dead anyway. I’d eat his heart, and the rest of their hearts. Until I was full. Until I never wanted to eat again. I would devour them the way the Aztecs did their enemies. I would steal everything about them, make it my own.
“Oh, and the next PEP meeting is Wednesday. If you’re not up for it, though, I’m sure Walter will understand.”
And their brains. I’d eat their brains, too.