Reed Coleman - Gun Church

“I can’t bring myself to show these yet.”

“Why not?”

“The series is incomplete,” she said, as if that explained it all. Maybe it did.

It was after Amy showed them to me that I realized she wasn’t all forgiveness and light, that memory hadn’t sanded off all the sharp and bitter edges of our time together. I had done a lot of damage to her. There was a warehouse of residual anger in Amy that couldn’t be wished away into the cornfield. I guess I always understood that much even when I was tilting at the windmills of regaining her respect. What I wondered was, did she understand it?

That question or its answer didn’t stop either one of us from fucking our brains out. We both knew where we were headed the second we walked back into her studio. That my subway line back to Brooklyn wasn’t operating because of the snowstorm made it that much easier for us to pretend our first hungry kiss wasn’t inevitable. Both of us orgasmed almost immediately. That was easy. Lust and hunger always are; although, the remainder of the night did not pass blissfully. I know it’s crazy for someone who once fucked everything that wasn’t nailed down to say, but I’d always believed Amy and I, together or apart, were mated for life. It was molecular. From the moment I tasted her again, I felt I was home. Yet, when I moved inside her the second time, I felt a wall between us, not a welcome mat. Even as we came again, Amy seemed as far away from me as she’d been when I was in Brixton, maybe farther. And as the night wore on, with each new clench the distance grew.

That’s why I was standing here in the middle of the night, looking out at the still-falling snow through the arched windows of the loft, the streetlights turning the flakes an eerie pale red. With the subways shut down, street traffic at a standstill, and only the occasional distant rumble of a snow plow, it was as near to silent as Manhattan ever gets. My head was a jumble of love and regret. Remembering how far away Amy felt from me even when I was deep inside her made me think about what I had sacrificed in Renee. Though I knew I would never feel that sense of being mated to her, Renee had opened herself up to me. In bed, neither one of us carried old baggage along nor put up walls. I hadn’t inflicted enough hurt on her to build barriers between us. She couldn’t get enough of me and I couldn’t get enough of her. I thought that if I had only managed the same amount of monogamy for Amy in the beginning as I had for Renee, there wouldn’t be a series of sad portraits in the room keeping me company.

Then I heard something from down in the street and looked to my right. There, coming right up West Broadway, were a man and woman cross-country skiing. You had to love New York. I followed their progress as they glided past the loft building. But as they passed and I turned my head left to follow their progress uptown, I caught sight of a lone, dark figure across the street, half in shadow and partially blocked by the corner building. I cupped my hands around my eyes and pressed them to the glass for a better look. The ambient light, the windblown snow, and the tricks the shaking streetlights played with the shadows made it difficult to focus. By the time my eyes finally locked on to the figure across the street, it was turning away and I caught only a fleeting glimpse of a partial profile and a tuft of blond hair. My heart stopped for a beat. Renee .

A snail’s pace would have been an improvement. With a pair of snowshoes, I think I could have made it back to the Avenue H station a lot quicker than the Q train. We were doing okay in the tunnels, but once we hit the above-ground portion of the trip, forget it. The big drifts and deep snow had been cleared away, but the wind was still howling, creating new drifts, blowing downed tree branches across the already slick tracks. All I wanted to do was to get back to my apartment and retreat into the pages of GunChurch . I understood the motives of my characters far better than the reasons for the knot in my gut.

In some sense, of course, I was quite relieved that the subways were running and to have escaped the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere in Amy’s loft. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that the fantasy of Kip and Amy, part two, had sprung a leak. Even when I quietly crawled back into bed at around four thirty, I knew Amy was in that same bad place I was in. She was as awake as I was, but feigning sleep. That was okay by me. It saved me from having to be the one to pretend. I passed out eventually and woke up as Amy was closing the door behind her. She hadn’t bothered to leave a note. I was glad of that. What could it have said? I showered and got out of there in less than fifteen minutes. As I walked out the front of Amy’s building, I looked across the street to where I thought I’d seen Renee. She wasn’t there. She had never been there. I wasn’t hallucinating, just projecting: seeing who I wanted to see, hearing what I wanted to hear.

I was losing it. I knew what that felt like. You do as many drugs and consume as much alcohol as I had on a regular basis, you’re going to have episodes when you lose it. Sometimes it blindsides you and you wake up in the psych ward crawling out of your own skin, but then it’s over, like a twenty-four-hour virus, and you move on. It’s far worse when you can feel it coming on, when you’re an impotent witness to your own deconstruction. When you feel the stitches holding the illusion of yourself together begin to stretch and pop, and you can’t sew fast enough to keep the stuffing in. In the end, you just stop trying and let the seams rip. That’s what this was like.

For fuck’s sake, I knew the transition from Brixton back to New York was going to be a difficult proposition under the best of circumstances and these were far from the best of circumstances. I don’t recommend killing a man, even a world-class asshole like Stan Petrovic, the evening before you begin life anew. But that wasn’t all of it, not nearly. Beyond conjuring up the sound of Jim’s truck and hallucinating Renee, there was Amy, and there was me.

Then, as if to put an exclamation point on my tenuous grip on things, a plug-ugly, thick-necked guy got on the train at DeKalb Avenue: Stan Petrovic. Maybe it was the way he hobbled to his seat on bad knees or maybe he really looked like Stan. He sat directly across from me on the near-empty subway car. On closer inspection, as ugly as he was, he didn’t look like Stan all that much. Though his attitude wasn’t far different.

“What the fuck you staring at?” he said to me, menace in his voice.

“Sorry. I was just lost in thought there for a minute.” I walked to the opposite end of the car to wait for my stop.

The entrance to my apartment was around the rear of the house and my landlord was out clearing a path with his snow blower, the whine of its gas motor an unpleasant reminder of the generator we used at the chapel. The blower was shooting out a cloud of already graying snow onto Avenue H. When he saw me coming, he powered down the blower and walked towards me.

“Good morning to you, Mr. Weiler. You don’t look so good. Long night?”

“Too long, yeah. Got trapped in the City. Train ride home took forever.”

“I got a package for you inside.”

“Package?”

“Yeah, my daughter found it on the front porch yesterday afternoon. She brought it up, but you weren’t in. Come, I have it in my apartment.”

I followed him through the door and up the backstairs. He lived on the second floor, his divorced daughter and her five-year-old daughter on the first. As we went, Isaac made small talk about the weather and his wife’s bad back. Apparently, any kind of precipitation made her pain that much worse.