The Little Sleep (12 page)

There are loud and fast footsteps on the pavement. Two footsteps become four and multiply rapidly until there’s a whole city of footsteps running at me. Redhead appears at my window. He’s yelling some crazy stuff, doesn’t make any sense. Maybe he’s reading the dashboard labels. The gun barrel snug against the glass doesn’t have any problems communicating its message.

I’m pulling as hard as I can and the gearshift finally gives in to my demands, which weren’t all that unreasonable. I drop the transmission into drive and squeal the wheels. I’m moving forward and I duck, down beneath the dash; there’s another gunshot, this one sending glass snowflakes falling onto my head, and there’s . . .

“We’re here.”

I come to in the back of a cab. I’m still buzzed and my mouth tastes of vomit. I bolt upright like a rake getting stepped on. The Johnny Rotten of headaches lurches and struts around my brain. God save my head.

The cab and me, we’re at the corner of Dorchester and Broadway, idling in front of my office and apartment building. I want to go digging back under, into the brine, find me some real sleep, the kind that makes my body glad it’s there to support me. But I won’t find any in here, and I probably won’t find any upstairs in my apartment.

“Don’t be sleeping on me now,” the cabbie says. His voice is full of
fuck you,
but he really cares about me. I can tell.

I’m awake now. I have no idea how much of the DA, the limo ride, and the goons happened. My left cheek, where Redhead slapped me, is sore and puffy. Maybe I did escape their limo and jump into this cab and then dreamed the rest. I don’t know.

The cab’s heat is on furnace blast. The muscles in my hands feel week. I open and close shaky fists. They’re empty and tired, like me. The little sleep was and is too hard.

I pull a crumpled bill out of my pocket and throw it at the cabbie. It’s not a good throw. “Keep the change.” Don’t know if it’s enough, and don’t care. Neither does he apparently.

I open a door, leave without a further exchange, and manage to land standing on the curb. The cab leaves. It was white and had black checkers on the panels. It’s late. There aren’t any black limos or red cars on the street. It’s still dark and raining.

I need time to process the evening: what happened, what didn’t happen, what any of it means. I have my keys out, but the front door to my office is open. The door is thick and heavy, probably as old as the brownstone building, and it sways in the wind and rain.

I step inside the front entryway. The stacks of local restaurant menus are all wet and turning to pulp under my feet. This isn’t good. I walk into my office. I don’t need to turn on a light to see that everything is all wrong, but I turn it on anyway. Never did like surprises.

Someone picked up my office and shook it around like Daddy needed a new pair of shoes and rolled snake eyes. And then the shaker took out his frustration with the undesired result on my fucking office.

Flat-screen computer monitor is not quite flat anymore and is
on the floor, where my client chair used to be. That chair is huddled in the corner of the room, licking its wounds. It saw everything and is traumatized. It’ll never be the same.

My file cabinet has been stripped of its contents. Its drawers are open, metal tongues saying ah, and the files spread out on the floor. My desk drawers are open and empty too. They didn’t want to feel left out. I step on paper and walk over to my desk. My phone is gone. So is the hard drive and backup flash drive. I don’t see my yellow notepad, the one with the narcoleptic me notes. It could be buried in here somewhere, but I doubt it. Good goddamn mercy. And Christ, the negatives, they’re not in the empty drawers.

I leave the office and walk upstairs in the dark. It occurs to me that the ransackers could still be here, maybe in my apartment, waiting for me, the ransackee, to come home. I don’t care. I have no weapons and I’m no brawler, but if there really are goons and they’re upstairs, I’ll hit as hard as I can give. And then hit them harder.

My apartment got the same treatment. Door is open. This entry was rougher. The door is splintered by the knob and hangs by one hinge. I knock it off its last thread, put it out of its misery. I turn on the lights. I’m alone, I can tell. The TV is gone and so is my laptop. CD towers, bookcases, pictures, lamps, and everything else flipped, kicked, or stomped over. Into the kitchen, and all those drawers are turned out on the floor. The dish didn’t run away with the spoon.

I can’t face the crime scene waiting for me in the bedroom, so I stumble back to the living room and my couch. I brush off the debris of my life and sit. Cigarette comes out next. Guess I can just use the floor for an ashtray.

I still have the pictures in my coat. I still have my cell phone. I’m going to make one personal call before letting the police know about the sledgehammer tap dance through my building.

I call Jennifer’s number. Yeah, I still have that too. She doesn’t answer. I wasn’t expecting her to. I get her voice mail.

I say, “Hey, thanks for the setup tonight, Jennifer. I hope your dad and his boys had a great time tearing through my place. I knew that was the only reason why you’d eat dinner with me. Tell those guys sorry I didn’t have anything good in the fridge for them, and that they had to leave empty-handed.”

My voice sounds drunker than I thought. I’m crying too. Practically in full blubber mode, but there’s no stopping my message from a bottle.

“So, yeah, I know you were lying to me the whole night. That’s okay, because I lied to you too. I said I didn’t remember what I felt like before my accident, before I became the narcoleptic me. I remember what it felt like. I was awake, always awake. I didn’t miss anything. I could read books for more than a few pages at a time. I didn’t smoke. I watched movies from start to finish in real goddamn theaters. Wouldn’t even leave my seat to go to the bathroom. I stayed up late on purpose. Woke up and went to sleep when I wanted. Sleep was my pet, something I controlled, scheduled, took for walks. Sit up, roll over, lie down, stay down, give me your fucking paw. Not now. Now there’s only me and everything else is on the periphery, just slightly out of reach or out of touch or out of time. I don’t have a real career or a real life. Ellen supports me and I sleepwalk through the rest. I’m telling you this because I want you to know who you set up tonight. And there’s more. Not done. Not yet. I remember what
it was like to have a regular face, one that folks just glanced at and forgot. There’s more. I remember everything I lost. That’s what I remember. The loss and loss and loss. . . .”

I stop talking. Too much self-pity, even for me. I’m sure her voice mail stopped recording a long time ago. Who knows how much she got? Who knows what I actually said out loud?

I slouch onto the arm of the couch, cell phone balanced on my head. I’m listening to the digitized silence and it brings an odd comfort. My cigarette slips out of my hand. Hopefully it’ll land on something that doesn’t take fire personally.

The sleep is coming. I feel it. At least this time, I want it.

The sun shines bright, just like the ones on cereal boxes. Tim and I are in our backyard in Osterville. He’s putting tools back in the shed, then emerges with a hand trowel. It’s the specialized hand trowel. He locks the shed. I’m still too young to go inside. I wait by the door and receive my brown paper bag and the pat on my head. Good boy. It’s time to clean up the yard again. The grass is green but there’s more shit than usual to clean up.

The sky is such a light shade of blue, it looks thin, like it could tear at the slightest scratch. I don’t feel like singing for Tim today, but I will. I’m a trouper. I give him a round of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” My bag gets heavy with deposits. He names the dogs. We’ve all been here before.

We fill three bags’ worth of crap and dump it all in the woods behind our property. Each time he dumps the bag, Tim says, “Don’t come back.”

We walk back to the shed and Tim opens the doors. He says, “So, kid, whaddaya think?”

I twist my foot in the grass and look down. The five-year-old me has something uncomfortable to say. “That friend of yours, Billy Times, he’s been a real douche bag to me, Tim.”

Tim laughs, bends to one knee, and chucks my chin with his fist.

Aw shucks, Dad.

He says, “He’s not all bad.” He gets up and locks the shed doors. Tim picks me up and puts me on his shoulders. I’m closer to the cereal-box sun and the paper-thin sky now, close enough to destroy everything if I wanted to.

The South Boston Police know of me like the residents of Sesame Street know of Aloysius Snuffleupagus. They know my name and they tell exaggerated stories of my woe and comic-tragic circumstance, but only some big yellow dope believes I’m real. And I am real.

It’s about 11
A.M
. The morning after. Two officers, one female and one male, cop A and cop B, walk around my apartment and office. They take notes. They’re dressed in their spotless blue uniforms, hats, guns, cuffs, shiny badges, the works.

I wear a hangover. It’s three sizes too big. I’d take it back if I could, but it matches my rusty joints and blindingly sore muscles so well.

Okay, I’m still in my own rumpled slept-in-again uniform: work clothes doubling as a lounge-about bathrobe. Everyone should be so lucky.

I sit on home base, the couch, a coffee cup in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other. There’s sunlight coming through the naked windows, trapping dust in the rays. I watch the pieces of my apartment floating there in the light. I can’t float. I have to squint. I can’t squint and think at the same time.

Think, Genevich. First, I decide that yesterday really was only one day. My aching and quivering muscles are proof of my yellow-brick-road jaunt to Sullivan’s house. No idea who the body was or, if I’m willing to be completely honest with myself today, if there even was a body. No computer or laptop means, for now, no way to find out what happened. I could call Sullivan’s number, but I’m not ready to call yet. I think I can be patient. Play it a little slow, given the current set of circumstances, which is my already broken world breaking at my feet.

Cop A asks for my written statement. I give it to her. It has some stray ashes on it but no burn holes. I grope for the little victories. I told them what’s missing and now they have it in writing too. They didn’t ask if I thought the break-in was related to one of my cases, which is fine, because I haven’t decided how I would answer that question.

More from yesterday’s log: The shepherd’s-pie doggie bag is on the floor, in front of my bedroom door. It’s safe there. My cell phone has my dialed numbers and incoming call history. Proof of my chats with Jennifer right there on the glowing LCD screen, including my late-night soliloquy. She hasn’t called back. I don’t expect her to.

The police haven’t been very chatty or sympathetic. They didn’t like that my distress call occurred more than ten hours after the actual break-in. And I think they believed the puke next to the couch and puddle of urine in the corner of the kitchen was somehow my fault. I told them it wasn’t. Cop B said I smelled drunk. I said I was drunk, but the puke and piss weren’t mine.

The cops leave, finally. My cigarette is dead. I’m left with a trashed office and apartment and more than a few choice items stolen. None of this is circumstantial or coincidence. The DA has a good reason to want those pictures, something more than their chance resemblance to his daughter.

Right about now I’m starting to feel a boulder of guilt roll up onto my shoulders when thinking about Sullivan and his possible or likely fate. Sullivan asked me in a panic if I had shown anyone the pictures yet without finding
it
. I did show them, and I certainly don’t have
it
. I took the photos to the DA and then everything that was yesterday happened. I’m that portable Kraken again. Point me in a direction and I unleash my destruction.

“Jesus H. Christ, what happened? Mark, are you in here?”

Ellen. I haven’t called her yet. Her voice is on a three-alarm pitch and frequency. It rockets up the stairwell and into my apartment. My hangover appreciates the nuances in its swells of volume.

I shout, “I’m okay and I’m up here, Ellen.” I shouldn’t be talking, never mind yelling.

Ellen pounds up the stairs, repeating her What-happeneds and sprinkling in some Are-you-all-rights. Maybe I should go into the kitchen and cover the urine puddle with something, but I don’t think I can get up.

Ellen stands in the doorway. Her mouth is open as wide as her eyes.

I say, “I know. Friggin’ unbelievable mess, isn’t it?”

“My God, Mark, what happened? Why the hell didn’t you call me?” She looks and sounds hurt. It’s not a look I see on her often. I don’t like it. It turns that maybe boulder of guilt for Sullivan into the real deal.

I still can’t tell her the truth about the case, though. Telling her anything might infect her, put her in more danger than she already is just for being around me. I’m her dark cloud. I’m her walk under a ladder and her broken mirror all in one.