The Architecture of Fear (22 page)

Charlie blushed. Mr. Benjamin walked to the other side of the room to be with the other visitors.

"How did you die?" Charlie asked Katherine.

She just shook her head, a slight, quick motion.

"Do you feel all right?" he asked. "Are you scared or anything?"

"I just feel alone," she said in almost a whisper.

"Well, you got Mr. Benjamin," Charlie said.

She smiled sadly. "Yeah, I guess." She sat down on the bed. Her robe was slightly opened and Charlie could see a hint of her cleavage. "Are you dying?" she asked.

That took him by surprise, although as soon as she said it, he realized that it shouldn't have. "I dunno. I've just been sick."

"Do you want to live?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Wouldn't you?"

"It feels kinda the same," she said, "only..."

"Only what?"

"I don't know, it's hard to explain. Just alone, like I said. You seem out of focus, sort of," she said. She touched his hand tentatively, and Charlie could feel only a slight pressure and a cool sensation. Charlie held her hand. It was an impulsive move, but she didn't resist. Her hand felt somehow papery, and Charlie had the feeling that he could press his fingers right through her flesh with but little resistance. She leaned toward him, resting against him. It felt like the cool touch of fresh sheets. She seemed weightless. "Thank you," she whispered.

He curled up against her, put his arm around her waist and rested his hand on her leg. He remembered taking long baths and letting his arms float in the water. Although the water would buoy them up, it also felt as if he were straining against gravity. That's what it felt like to touch Katherine.

Charlie wanted this to last; it was perfect. He felt the pain in his stomach, but it was far away. Someone else was groaning under its weight.

They watched visitors file into the room. Each one looking disoriented and out of focus. Each one walking across to the other side, to the window, to be with the others, who began to seem as tangible and fleshy as Charlie.

Charlie tried to ignore them. He pulled the sheets over himself... and Katherine. He pressed himself as closely as he could to her, and she allowed him to kiss and fondle her.

As everything turned white, numbed by another shot given to him by a ghost, his nurse, Charlie dreamed that he was making love to Katherine.

It was cool and quiet, a wet dream of death.

***

At dawn Mr. Benjamin called Charlie to leave. The room was empty; the last of the other visitors had just left without a footfall. Mr. Benjamin looked preternaturally real, as if every line of his face, every feature had been etched into perfect stone. Katherine rose from the bed and stood beside Mr. Benjamin, her robe tightly pulled around her. She, too, looked real and solid, more alive than any of the shadows flitting through the halls and skulking about his room: the nurses and aides and orderlies. Charlie found it difficult to breathe; it was as if he had to suck every breath from a straw.

"Why are you leaving?" Charlie asked, his voice raspy; but his words were glottals and gutturals, sighs and croakings.

"It's time. Are you coming?"

"I can't. I'm sick."

"Just get up. Leave what's in the bed," Mr. Benjamin said impatiently, as if dying was not a terribly important or difficult thing to do.

Katherine reached for his hand, and her flesh was firm and real and strong. "I can see you very clearly now," she said. "Come on."

But someone moved in the chair beside Charlie. A shadow, more of a negative space. Charlie tried to make it out. Into a soft focus came the outlines of a woman, his mother. But she was a wraith. Yet he could make her out, could make out her voice, which sounded as distant as a train lowing through the other side of town. She was talking about his younger brother Stephen and the sunflowers behind the house that had grown over six feet tall. The sunflowers always made Charlie feel sad, for they signaled the end of summer and the beginning of school. He could feel the warm, sweaty touch of her hand on his face, touching his forehead, which was the way his mother had always checked his temperature.

"I love you, Charlie," she said, her voice papery. "Everything's going to be all right for all of us. And you're going to get well soon. I promise..."

Katherine's hand slipped away, and then Charlie felt the warm, almost hot touch of his mother's hand upon his own. She clutched his fingers as if she knew she might be losing him, and in the distance, Charlie could hear that train sound: now the sound of his mother crying. And he remembered the rich and wonderful smells that permeated her tiny kitchen when she was making soup; he could see everything in that room: the radio on the red painted shelves, the china bric-a-brac, the red and black electric cat clock on the wall that had a plastic tail and eyes that moved back and forth; and he remembered his grandmother, who always brought him a gift when she visited; and he could almost hear the voices of his friends, as if they were all passing between classes; he remembered kissing Laurie, his first girlfriend, and how he had tried unsuccessfully to feel her up behind her house near the river; and even with his eyes closed he could clearly see his little brother, who always followed him around like a duck, and his gray haired, distant father who was always "working"; he remembered the time he and his brother hid near the top of the red-carpeted stairs and watched the adults milling around and drinking and laughing and kissing each other at a New Year's Eve party, and how his father had awakened him and his brother at four o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day so they could eat eggs and toast and home fries with him and Mom in the kitchen; he remembered going to Atlantic City for two weeks in the summer, the boardwalk hot and crowded and gritty with sand, the girls in bikinis and clogs, their skin tanned and hair sun-bleached; he remembered that his mother always tanned quickly, and she looked so young that everyone thought she was his girlfriend when they went shopping along the boardwalk; and suddenly that time came alive, and he could smell salt water taffy and taste cotton candy and snow cones that would immediately start to melt in the blazing, life-giving sun.

Charlie could feel himself lifting, floating; yet another part of him was heavy, fleshy.

He thought of Katherine, of her coolness, the touch of her pale lips and icy breasts, and then his mother came into focus: age-lines, black hair, shadows under frightened hazel eyes—his eyes.

And her touch was as strong as Katherine's.

He floated between them... caught.

Soon, he would have to choose.

John Skipp and Craig Spector are young innovaters in the horror field. Most of their work is done in collaboration, including their novels
The Light at the End
and
The Cleanup.

In the 1960s, the women's movement swept through American culture, cleansing it of centuries-old patterns of accepted behavior between men and women which no new etiquette has yet replaced. "Gentlemen" is a terrifying portrayal of the state of contemporary masculinity, terrifying because of the brutality within the relationships depicted, but ultimately uplifting because "Gentlemen" goes beyond the familiar "oh isn't it terrible how badly we men treat women" horror story, into culturally uncharted territory.

TO BE A MAN.

The words are carved on the sweat-smeared oak of the bar's surface. They're the only four that never seem to change. Like the troll at the taps, the regulars that surround him, the TVs and the black velvet painting of the Hooter Girl that hangs in sad-eyed judgment over all.

TO BE A MAN.

As if that were all there is.

I always hated Bud. He loves it. We drink it. One after another, we pour them down, while Ralph Kramden bellows about trips to the moon.

And the guys all laugh. You're goddamn right.

They know about being a man.

And now, at last, so do I.

***

I remember the night that my edification began. Every nuance. Every shade. The phone started ringing at 12:45, precisely. It was LeeAnn, of course. She'd just crashed and burned with another asshole relationship, and she needed to talk. And drink. Right now. I knew all this by the first ring. No one else ever called this late. No one.

"Damn," I muttered. "Not again."

There were a lot of good reasons for not answering. It was a shit-soaked night outside, cold rain falling in thick sheets. The steam head had finally kicked in, and I was down to my jeans. I was halfway into a lumpy joint of some absurdly good Jamaican.
Star Trek
would be on in fifteen minutes. Seeing LeeAnn would make me miserable, and I'd just wind up sourly wanking off when I got home. Yep, a lot of good reasons. I took another toke and settled back in my chair.

The phone rang again. I choked. The smoke exploded in my lungs. I began to cough violently, great red-meat wrenching hacks. The phone rang again. I roared back at it, defiant, my eyes tearing and my throat desperately lubing itself with bile.

The phone rang again, and I got out of the chair. What was the point? The phone would ring forever. The night was already completely ruined; LeeAnn's face had control of my mind. I snubbed the joint and placed the butt in my pocket, for later. The phone rang once more before I caught it. I coughed a little bit more at the receiver as I brought it to the side of my head. What did it matter? I already knew what the first words would be. First, my name. No
howdy, stranger,
no
long time no see.

Just:

"David?"

Then:

"David, I need you..."

Like clockwork. I gave brief, fleeting audience to the idea of just hanging up, of pitching the receiver into the cradle without so much as a whimper. But then her voice, so characteristically vulnerable, spoke the final two words in the equation:

"David,
please..."

I was slaughtered.

"Where are you?" I asked. Coughing had made me roughly twenty times more stoned in a matter of seconds; the air seemed thicker, my head felt muddier, and the crackle over the phone line raked like needles in my ears.

She let out a laugh I recognized: the resigned and barely-in-control one. I coughed. She laughed. I spoke.

"I still don't know where you are."

"I'm at this place called..." She paused; I could almost hear her neck craning, "...dammit, I can't tell. It's at Forty-eighth and Eighth. The beer is cheap. The guys are all jerks. It's my kind of place. Can you come?"

"Shouldn't the question be, 'How fast can you get here?'"

"Jesus, I really
am
predictable."

"You're not the only one," I assured her wearily. "Give me some time, okay? I don't have any clothes on."

"Hubba hubba."

"Don't tease me, LeeAnn. I'm not a well man."

"Aw, poor baby."

I closed my eyes, and LeeAnn was behind them: leaning against a bar with brass rails, china-doll lips pouting, green-eyed gaze languidly drifting as her T-shirt slowly hiked its way past her breasts and over her ash-blonde head.
Never happen,
my rational mind reminded me flatly. It sounded barely-in-control, too.

LeeAnn must have heard it. The teasing stopped. "Please hurry," she said. "I need you."

"I'm on my way. Stay there."

The phone went dead. LeeAnn never said good-bye anymore; it was too commital. I set down the receiver and caught a glimpse of myself in the bureau mirror. Gaunt, sensitive features. Aquiline nose. Deep-set eyes. Quietly receding hairline. An interesting face: not handsome, certainly not repulsive. I smiled. Loads of character. The face of a poet, even...

Who was I kidding?
I thought.
It's the face of a fool.
The reflection nodded in sad affirmation. I looked at the piles of dirty clothes on the floor and grabbed up a dirty sweatshirt. Dress for success, I always say. Or
said,
rather.

Whatever.

At any rate, I was suited up and out the door before manly Captain Kirk had pronged the first of this evening's deep-space bimbos, way out where no man had gone before. The last three words from her lips echoed through me like a curse.

I need you.

Sure.

***

The cab ride was long and wet, cold rain pounding on the windows like a billion tiny fists. The whole way up, I brooded about LeeAnn. The whole way up, I hit alternately on the dwindling vial of blow in my jacket pocket and one of the two jumbo oilcans of Foster's lager that I'd scored just for the trip. The irony of getting wasted as a prelude to meeting a friend for drinks was not lost on me, but what could I say? LeeAnn made me crazy: the same kind of crazy that would inspire me to tromp out into a maelstrom on a moment's notice and woefully underdressed, from my army-surplus field jacket down to a pair of battered Reeboks with a dime-sized hole in the right sole. She unnerved me that thoroughly. I snorted and watched the passing streets slip by: each one, rain-slicked and on the verge of flooding; each one, dark and bleak and utterly depressing.

Any of them, an escape route: infinitely preferable to where I was going.

If I'd been stronger, maybe, I'd have taken one. Sure. Of course, the same line of inarguable reasoning could be applied to any other quarter of my world, from my unpublished short stories to my unfinished novel to my utterly unrequited love life, with exactly the same results. The gross total of which, combined with fifty cents, would buy me a packet of Gem safety blades.

The better to slit my miserable fucking throat with.

The thought deflated as quickly as it came. Of course I would never really do that. Neither, of course, would I tell the cabbie to turn around and take me home, or just grab LeeAnn by the hair and force her to my heap big masculine will, or do
anything
but what I always, always did. Which was to go to her: whenever, wherever her next whirlwind sortie ended. In tears, in disaster; in rain, sleet, or snow, good ol' Dave would be there, day or night, with the right words and the right drugs and a shoulder to cry on. Good ol' Dave was never more than a phone call away. I hated myself for being such a stooge to this endlessly cyclical farce, for being so hapless in the face of my own flaccid desire.