Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

Back in the living room he’s still facing the window. He’s so close to it there’s no room to see his reflection around him. “You need to take some of these,” I say.

“I’m hungry.”

“Come on, Jesse, it’ll help.”

“I don’t want help. I just want to forget.”

“I need your help, Jesse.”

He doesn’t answer. I walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder and he slams his head forward into the window. It doesn’t break and he bounces back. This is not the same man I spoke to earlier today. That man wanted to take his medication to get better. That man was reminded about things and this is the man who can’t remember them. I lead him back to his chair expecting him to resist but he doesn’t.

“Listen, Jesse, it’s very important you listen to me.”

“I’m still hungry,” he says. There is a bump forming on his forehead that he doesn’t seem concerned with. I shake out a couple of pills and try handing them to him but he won’t take them. He doesn’t even look at them or seem to know they’re there. I’m not even sure that he knows I’m here. There’s a large bite impression on the inside of his arm that no doubt lines up perfectly with this teeth. He’s hungrier than I thought.

“I need you to tell me about the Twins.”

“She was so beautiful,” he says. “So innocent. I just had to taste her. Had to. It wasn’t up to me, but it kept saying to do it, over and over at night when I was lying in bed he’d tell me and so I did, it was the only way to shut him up. He lived inside of me, this monster with no name.”

I look at the photo album. He’s talking about his sister. The picture of them staring up at me is nothing like the last time I saw him and his sister together.

“So much blood,” he says, “and I hate. .” He stops talking. Just in midsentence he stops and he closes his eyes and starts slowly rocking back and forth, just little movements at first, increasing into bigger ones until he tips out of the chair and sprawls on the floor facedown. I jump onto his back and pull his head up and open his mouth and jam a couple of pills in there and hold his mouth closed and pinch his nose shut and he doesn’t resist. He swallows the pills.

I sit him back in his chair and he stares ahead like nothing happened.

“The Twins,” I say. “Were they actual twins?”

“She tasted sweet,” he says. “Like candy.”

Somehow I don’t think she did. “Jesse, listen to me, think about Grover Hills.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“No Grover Hills.”

“There were two orderlies there.”

“The Twins,” he says.

“Were they brothers?”

“They were twins.”

“Do you know their names?”

“Buttons knows.”

“What?”

“Buttons,” he says, and he stabs his finger into his forearm. “Buttons was there too.”

“Buttons is a cat?”

“Not a cat,” he says. “Buttons,” he adds, then holds his fingers up to his mouth and pretends he’s smoking a cigarette before stabbing it into his arm. A moment later he tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and falls asleep.

Adrian can’t sleep.

One reason is his leg. The bandage has gotten bloody because the wound beneath it keeps itching and he can’t stop scratching at it. He keeps digging his fingernails into the itch trying to find relief only it doesn’t work. Cooper’s mother told him he’d need to get stitches, but he had stitches all those years ago when he was badly beaten and pissed on and he didn’t like them then and can’t see any reason why that will have changed.

Another reason he can’t sleep is he can’t switch off his mind. He never did find the glue, even though he is absolutely sure he took it from the pocket of his last pants and put it into the pocket of the ones he took from Cooper’s mum’s place, but the problem is the more he thinks about it, the less certain he becomes, the more his memory of the event starts to change. He can remember setting it on the bed with his old clothes when he emptied the pockets, but nothing after that.

He thinks about Theodore Tate and how he could easily have lost his life tonight if Tate didn’t have a bandage around his gun hand. That’s what slowed Tate down, he’s sure of it. He thinks about the Twins, he thinks about the people he met at the halfway house, he thinks about his mother and he thinks about his other mother. He can’t stop thinking of people and it’s keeping him awake. He thinks about the look on Cooper’s mother’s face as he played the tape. He only had to play a few seconds of it before closing the door, knowing what would happen next, but she deserved it. She was a bad mother. Bad mothers deserved what they got.

The bed isn’t comfortable. One of the Twins-he isn’t sure which one-slept on this bed, and that’s another picture he can’t get out of his head, a man who treated him so badly would come here at night and roll in these sheets, his skin flaking into the creases of the bed, into the folds of the pillowcase, and now it’s sticking to his own body, making him itch.

In the end it all becomes too much for him. The window is open and the curtains are moving slightly on the breeze, brushing against the windowsills. He turns on the light. His pajama bottoms are soaked in sweat and there is blood on the right-hand side. He tugs them off. The bandage has gotten loose and saggy. It’s across his thigh, about equal distance between his knee and hip. He holds on to it as he walks outside so it doesn’t slip down his leg. He doesn’t know what the temperature is, but it’s still warm. He knows it’s after midnight but not by much. Much warmer than usual for this time of night he suspects-not that he’s normally outside at this time of night. Back at the Grove he was locked in his room, which was always hard if you needed to use the bathroom, because you had to wait. At the halfway house the only reason you’d step out the doors after dark was if you wanted to commit a crime or be a victim of one.

He lowers the bandage. He scratches at his leg. More blood and more pain and something yellow oozes out, but relief from the itch for those few seconds as his fingers scrape over it. He could try to get Cooper’s mother to help him again, but he’s pretty sure she isn’t going to want to do that no matter how hard he tries. Anyway, he’s angry at her for not believing him. Her son was the one covered in blood, he was the one who put the knife into that girl, and yet he looks like the good guy. It annoys him. He didn’t think Cooper would do that to him. They were meant to be friends, weren’t they?

He wishes he could work on the wound himself. It needs to be cleaned, he knows that. It may get infected. Sometimes infected limbs have to be cut off. He knows that too.

He can’t help himself. He begins crying at the thought. He turns and sobs into the pillow, for the moment not caring about the last person who laid on it, only thinking of a future with one leg, pacing the room and struggling to end on an even number when you have an odd amount of limbs to begin with. When the sobbing dies down, he limps to the bathroom and goes through the medicine cabinet. There’s a lot in here, but on closer look he sees dates with exp in front of them. They must be explanation dates; the dates explaining when the medication is no longer any good. Many of the things in here went bad a few years ago. He doesn’t know if bad medicine just means it won’t work, or won’t work as well, or make him even worse. There is an antiseptic cream that was good up until two months ago, surely that’s okay. The painkillers all went bad a few years ago. The bandages must stay good forever. And there’s some kind of medical padding that looks like it’ll help. Some sharp scissors for cutting things to fit. A safety pin for securing the bandage. He closes the cabinet and stares at the mirror. His face is flushed and there’s a slight rash starting around the edge of his hairline, which he hopes is from the heat and not from some infection climbing through his body. He doesn’t want to die. Not now when life is so good.