Please Don't Go (22 page)

“
An old pair of blue jeans,” she said, biting into another withered black fig.

“
A walking, talking welcome mat,” Zephyr replied.

“
We’re such
losers
,” Jackie stated and they both grinned, but did not quite have the energy to laugh or even feign laughter. Jackie rubbed his hands with hers, her big brown eyes comforting him into a state of calm that he was more accustomed to. Life had been so simple before Charles. “You don’t have to go back. You don’t owe the guy anything. Why don’t you write to him? Mail him a stack of DVDs to watch? There’s no law against having a pen pal.”

“
It doesn’t seem right. Can you even imagine what his life is like? Sure, he acts like a maniac, says it doesn’t bother him at all. But how lonely can it get?” Zephyr pondered aloud, in such a way that may have normally prompted Jackie to ask where his podium or ledge was. He huffed deeply, unable to shake the feeling that he was abandoning a kindred soul to a life of torment.

“
You’ve done enough. Time to move on, right? We’ve got our own lives to look forward to.”

“
You’re right,” Zephyr replied. They gazed at each other lovingly.

Was this The Moment?

He could not remember where he had put the ring last, in all the hectic confusion of his more recent tumultuous life. Where had he left it? In the bottom of his dresser? As Rattup had declared, he was to seize The Moment when it became so obvious and bold that he could not shake it free of his immediate vision. Jackie was speaking of the future, of stepping into the unknown of adulthood, of love and marriage and success and failures, children in the yard, camping in the summer, sledding in the winter, retirement plans, and college funds. Wrinkles, divots, scars, and sickness. “Can you wait right here? I’ll be right back,” he stated, a quavering in his vocal cords that he fought to stabilize. The clamminess of his hands was overwhelmingly slick, so he wiped that residue upon his already dirtied jeans without a second thought.

“
Wait. Bathroom?” she asked.

Unsure how to divert her cunning perceptiveness, Zephyr nodded.

“
Can I
please
go first?” she queried, touching her hip with her hand. She shook her head from side to side, looking to Zephyr with troubled eyes. She needed to go.

“
Go ahead.” It was the perfect diversion while he scrambled through his dresser drawers for the ring. He hoped that he could retrieve it with speed, before she returned. If he was caught rummaging through his unfolded wrinkled clothes she would grow increasingly suspicious, and that would only lead to a nagging series of questions that could only end in his unraveling of the mysteries that he beheld for her. He would be utterly besmirched by her eventual investigations.

“
Thanks,” she stated. “I’ve really gotta blast a doozie.”

Strike two
, thought Zephyr. He sighed and turned the television on, flipping through the channels with thudding thumbs upon his remote, cursing beneath his breath, settling on a Wile E. Coyote cartoon that involved the beleaguered coyote being smashed into a flat pancake by a steel anvil. Zephyr stared at her intestinally challenging black mission figs with disdain.

21.

Zephyr could not reconcile his motivations for returning, no matter how hard he tried. It felt as though he was setting himself up to say goodbye, but a hesitance overshadowed that thought, something nagging in him that informed his noblest intentions that he was losing out on something good. The man had been a sort of role model to him from the start and was interested in his future development as a young writer, something he could not say for anybody else. Perhaps they saw bits of themselves in each other, gratifying their egos the way looking into a mirror did. They could appreciate the other for what they felt was genuine and just in their own persona.

That is, until Rattup had grown foul.

Foul was not the proper word. Broken. Shattered. Dismantled. Skewed. It was something almost undetectable, but very much there at the same time, so much so that Zephyr could have reached out and sealed it in a Mason jar. He could not name the thing, the little beast that had become so prominent at the back of Rattup’s eyeballs, but he could feel its presence and needed to take leave of it. There was a sort of overlap between Charles and his psychological captor. Though Zephyr still found great difficulty in swallowing the whole silly story of Emily and the permanently-imposed entrapment, he knew inside of his heart that the House of Rattup was a place of multi-dimensional turmoil, a splinter in the foot that was his life.

“
I’ve brought you DVDs. A whole bunch of them,” Zephyr said, unable to make direct eye contact with Charles, who was unpacking his weekly shipment of groceries with a stony face. “Some of my favorites are in here, too. A couple of documentaries about Bush Part Two, thought that you might like to catch up with modern politics some. I know you get your newspaper, but you’ve never seen the man in action. It’ll shock and disturb you.”

He placed the box of DVDs on top of the counter, giving them one final look over. It was not so much a fleeting lending situation as it was a forevermore giveaway. It was like saying goodbye to a passionate lover, each and every movie.
The Matrix
,
American Movie
, all of his Hitchcock films,
Oldboy
,
Fitzcarraldo
,
The Dark Knight
,
Superman: The Movie
,
The Goonies
,
Gremlins
, and
American Psycho
, just to name a few. They were all replaceable, but that layover of time until reacquisition would torment him to no end. He would do so, though, in the name of being especially kind to an older gentleman with a similar passion for entertaining his disheveled imagination.

“
I don’t like this,” he snapped, his back turned to Zephyr as he rearranged the canned vegetables in his dust-laden cupboard. Zephyr had noticed early on that Rattup was meticulous about the way he displayed his canned beans and soups. Each label was to face outwardly, so that it could be easily read. No cans were to touch each other, leaving an estimated one centimeter gap between each. Beans were on the top shelf. The second shelf down from that was for soups. From left to right, ordered alphabetically: beef, broccoli, chicken, minestrone, vegetable. “I don’t like this one bit.”

“
Mr. Rattup...”

“
No more Charles? Is that how this ends? Without an ounce of earned dignity? With a quiet whimper of informal names?” Rattup sniped, turning away from his obsessively organized pantry, grinding his teeth in an unmasked frustration. “You bring bribes of your silly little films? I spit on that offering. I spit
all over it
.” He leaned forward over his kitchen island, pulling the sleeves of his dull tan sweater up to his elbows, as though he was readying for a fist fight with the unappreciative rug-pissing puppy.

“
Please, Charles. I’ll come back as soon as I can, but I need to finish up my finals over the next few weeks. Then Jackie and I were talking about visiting my family after that. It’s just really
hectic
right now, you know?” Zephyr offered his excuses, prepared ahead of time to lighten the heartbreaking let-down on Rattup. It felt to Zephyr as though he was breaking up with a girlfriend and it was not working out as he had planned in his mind.
It’s not you, it’s me. We can still be friends, right?
No, even friendship would be detrimental. The severing of the indignant mentor and his fleeing pupil was a violent enough change for both of them.

“
Lies!” blurted Rattup, sneering at his traitorous apprentice. He turned towards a visibly seething state of mind and there was little Zephyr could do to dethrone him from that station. “You are done with me because you can’t handle it. You don’t have the gall to come here week after week... you’re scared of her, aren’t you? Don’t you see what she’s done to me? You’re going to leave behind
an abused elder
? You’re a real stand up guy. Bravery! I bet your mother would be proud.” Rattup turned over his wrists as he had done previously, pulling his favorite pity card in the form of his supposedly bruised forearms. Zephyr refused to buy into that lie anymore. He could accept the haunting, but not the physical attacks. It was Rattup’s grand lie in the whole scheme, to turn his empty nest of a home into a toxic wasteland, if only in Zephyr’s gullible eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like,” Charles trailed off, shaking his head and wiping away a slight wetness from the corners of his eyes.

“
I’m sorry. Really sorry. I’ll be back before you know it,” Zephyr lied. “Jackie and I, you remember? I’m going to seize that moment, just like you told me. With a capital M.”

“
Oh yes, how could I forget?” Rattup replied, refusing to hide the rampant sarcasm previously laid dormant behind his words. “The tantalizing nymphomaniac. I bet she fucks every dirtbag at the university. No? Think about it... I’m sure she’s not always as accountable as you’d like to believe things to be in your little fantasy bubble of cupids and doves and singing fucking pixies. Swim to the surface, kid. Take in some fresh air. You won’t go wrong with old Charles Rattup by your side,” he rambled, his eyes shifting about the kitchen, looking for something that was not quite there.

Zephyr was taken aback at his boldness. Rattup had crossed over into a sort of pathetic meandering of pity, of senseless desperation. “You’re not right. You’re
sick in the head
. Do you even hear what you’re saying anymore? How could I ever consider coming here again after you talk about Jackie like that? You’ve lost my respect.” That, thought Zephyr, would burn the elder Rattup well enough. He didn’t want to crush the man, but he deserved some retribution for his scandalous statements.

Rattup pulled back from the island, righting himself. “I need to pack. Will you help me pack my things?” he asked with an expressionless face, hidden between the thick wrinkles and indefinable madness. Had he such nerve to ask for something so friendly after what he had said about Jackie?

“
My favors are officially exhausted,” replied Zephyr with discontent, furrowing his brow. “And you’re leaving? I don’t believe it for a second. Is this some kind of desperate childish ploy?”

“
No ploy, my boy.” He spoke as a creaky-voiced rhyming robot would.

“
And where do you think you’re going?” Zephyr asked in a fatherly tone.

Rattup broke free of his stony facade, laughing out loud. “Our friendship is over, as you’ve made very clear this morning. Why would I tell you where the world may next find me? It’s none of your damned business, to be quite honest. But I could use a bit of help packing my things, if you’re not so self-consumed with poking that lecherous trollop of yours.”

Zephyr spat in Rattup’s face, landing his salivary cannon ball upon his ruddy cheek with a dull splatter. He could not recall thinking of this action beforehand. It had been an uncontrollable reflex beyond his conscious actions, like diving for a drinking glass when it falls from the edge of the table.

Charles started to wipe the spit from his face with his hand, grinning. “You’re quickening my plans... I’ll pack on my own.” Rattup swiveled for the back hallway, pausing and turning back towards the kitchen again. Craning his head back and smiling, he spoke into the air, refusing eye contact with his former understudy, “He’s
all yours
.”

And with that, he exited the kitchen, done with the boy who had jabbed him in the back with a shiny yet invisible knife.

When the hands fell upon Zephyr’s shoulders, his heart skipped twenty to thirty beats, thudding its belligerent protests inside his panicky chest. Speechless, Zephyr grasped at the kitchen’s island for purchase, sliding his hand across the smooth tiles, accidentally shoving aside the generous box of DVDs on to the floor, spilling across the ceramic tiles like fallen dominoes. “Stop,” he gurgled as the fingers attached to those sturdy punishing hands walked up his shoulders, landing at the left and right side of Zephyr’s neck. The hands tightened like a tourniquet, the blood to his brain slowing in an almost instantaneous barricade of aggression. The force was unrelenting, determined to kill him, of this he had little doubt. Zephyr attempted a second verbal plea to the transparent devastation being wrought upon him, but found that his windpipe was being suffocated by the clampdown.

In the moments before he lost consciousness, he drifted in and out of his own sanity, the absence of oxygenated blood spinning his perceptions. He crashed to the floor, atop the fallen DVDs, writhing for a moment and falling quiet. As blood trickled from his forehead, gashed upon the hard wooden trim of the island counter, he laid in a crumpled heap of dead weight, and he dreamed of beautiful women.

***

“
You’re sleeping now,” she said, brushing her raven hair the way a fully grown adult would, precise and thorough, caring of every silky midnight strand. She gripped it in her soft snow white hand. It reminded him of Jackie’s.

“
I’m dead,” Zephyr replied. He felt as if he was floating above a billowing cloud, touched by the misty tendrils of the thing. It felt comforting, the way he imagined a womb would feel to an unborn baby. Tender. Blissful.
Warm.