Tom Piccirilli - Every shallow cut

We drank the herbal tea. I hated herbal tea. People put too much fucking faith in herbal tea, like if the Chinese knew all the mystical zen secrets of the universe then why the fuck were they still communists? I spun the cup around on the saucer a few times until he told me to swallow all of it. I swallowed all of it. There were no tea leaves in the bottom for me to read.

“You’ll feel better soon.”

“Tea just punches me in the bladder.”

“The tea doesn’t matter. I gave you some lithium.”

“Lithium?” I stared into the empty cup. “You spiked the tea with lithium?”

“Yeah. Just a little. It’ll help you to relax.”

“No it won’t.” I’d studied up on anti-depressants for one of my books featuring a schizophrenic bi-polar hitman. Then again, when I got on them the first time. Then again the second time. Then again, when I couldn’t afford them and wanted to know what side effects withdrawal would put me through. “It takes up to a month for treatment to become effective. And it’s used in conjunction with other drugs.”

“I put some Prozac and Xanax in there too.”

“Christ, man, can you mix those together? You couldn’t have just picked up a six-pack? How’d you get all these drugs?”

“Stole them from work,” he admitted.

“Can you just drink this shit?”

“I think so.”

“You think so? Oh Christ.” I was so angry I almost kicked him in the shin. “You really aren’t properly trained to medicate people, are you.”

He shrugged. “It can’t make you feel any worse, can it?”

He had a point. My vision began to cloud and double up. I fought to keep control. I didn’t know why. “You have really shit communication skills, you know that? It’s why you like women who can’t speak the language. So they don’t notice how badly you relate to people.”

“The language of love is all that two people truly need to understand each other.”

“You say crap like that and you think I need the lithium?”

“You do.”

My head started to lift off my shoulders. I stumbled for the couch.

“I think it’s starting to hit.”

“Good, just go with it.”

“But I don’t want to go with it. Don’t you get it? I don’t-”

“Shh, you’re already unconscious, you stubborn asshole. Now shut up and sleep.”

I glared at him and cursed at him, then I shut up and slept.

I woke up in my underwear with my face pressed to the large bosom of a naked fat woman.

She smelled of stale cream and Kahlua and was gripping me so tightly that I was having trouble breathing. I huffed air like a paint sniffer and tried to extract myself. I couldn’t. I tried harder.

The woman moaned in her sleep and said something that sounded like Russian. I was sweating nervously and finally was slick enough to slip out of her clench.

I took a whiff of myself. I was ripe but I didn’t smell like sex. My clothes were folded in a carefully laid out pile on the floor. I got dressed and went downstairs.

My pal was sitting on the floor in front of the television, shelling pistachios and watching a martial arts flick. Tiny Asian guys were flying around on wires smacking each other silly. Every guy seemed to love this shit.

“You’ve been out for almost forty-eight hours,” he said. “You must be starving. There’s a pot of fresh chicken soup in the fridge. Get yourself some.”

I did. I ate a bowl as we watched the movie, oohing and ahhing over the very cool stunts. I got myself another bowl and then a third. When I was finished I asked, “Hey, why was there a woman in the bed with me?”

“That’s Katya.”

“Okay. Was she there the whole two days?”

“No, she came by yesterday and we got a little drunk.”

“I’m guessing she doesn’t speak any English. Are you priming her to be wife number four?”

He shrugged. “She came to the US in a cargo container with twenty-four other women. But the feds hit the local Russian mob pretty hard that week and nobody picked up the shipment. The women were stuck in there for days. Half of them died. The other half, well, you think about it. She developed claustrophobia and nictophobia. She’s terrified of darkness. I was her counselor. She was released from the hospital a couple days ago but had nowhere to stay, so I offered her the spare room.”

“But I was in the spare room,” I said.

“She’s afraid of enclosed places but spent so much time in the container clutching her sister that she only sleeps well when she’s holding someone.”

“And the sister?” I asked.

“Dead before they got the container off the docks. Katya held onto the corpse for four or five days.”

“Holy mother fuck.”

He finished the pistachios and wiped his hands on a napkin. “So don’t be too upset she shared a bed with you. Take it as a sign of reassurance that you’re still human. That you continue to give solace, even if you’re not making the effort. It was the first time in weeks she didn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming.”

“Did you spike her tea?”

“She didn’t need it.”

“Maybe I didn’t either.”

“No, you definitely did,” he said. Then, after a lengthy pause, “I read some of your new book.”

That meant he’d been through the rucksack. That meant he’d seen the gun. He was a counsellor for the dangerous and the demented. I wondered if he’d taken the revolver away, for my own good. I half-heartedly hoped he had.

“No, you didn’t,” I told him. “No one can read my handwriting. Even I can’t. Besides, most of it is with the agent.”

“I’m used to reading the longhand scrawls of psychotics. I teach a class at the facility called Greater Self-control Through Creative Writing. You should see some of the tales they turn in.”

I thought, Great, more literary competition. Maybe one of the lunatics at the hospital had been on the phone with my agent when I’d left. Maybe the next blockbuster to crush my sales was going to come out of Ward C by a guy who used to make ceramic ashtrays.

“Keep going with it,” he said. “It’s some of the best work you’ve ever done.”

“It is?”

“I think so. I got choked up in a couple of spots. It’s a real page-turner, thoughtful, insightful. There’s a poignancy to it that’s lacking in most of your other novels. You’re writing from the marrow. I can feel every shallow cut you’ve ever suffered in it, all of them still bleeding, tearing wider and becoming deeper. You can die from a paper cut if it becomes infected. That’s what I feel in your words now.”

I didn’t know whether to say thank you or not. I felt vaguely offended and sensed I was somehow being insulted. But his expression was sincere. And I couldn’t argue about the quality of my masterpiece. Hell, I couldn’t even read it.

Katya came down in a lace bathrobe, curvy and glowing, hanging out in a couple of the right places and all of the wrong ones. She grinned at me like we shared a secret. Maybe it was her way of flirting.

She said something in Russian to him. He smiled and grunted, “Uh huh.” She said something more and he nodded. She started to laugh and made a vague gesture and spoke again. He mimicked the gesture and laughed loudly with her.

He didn’t know a fucking word of Russian. This is how he lured his wives in. By just nodding and grinning and appearing more agreeable than any other man they’d ever met.

I grabbed my rucksack and said, “I’ll leave you to your burgeoning romance.”

“I think you should stay,” he said. “That or let me take you over to the hospital.”

“What?”

His features were empty of attitude. His eyes were a little sad but I wasn’t sure that was just for me. “You’re having a nervous breakdown. You must realize it.”