Brian Evenson - Last Days

"Hey," whispered Ramse. "Are you all right?" All around them, men were beginning to move.

"Just a little drunk," said Kline, opening his eyes. Gous was there before him, having his hand bandaged.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" asked Ramse. "Gous certainly didn't think so. Not so bad, eh?"

"I don't know," Kline said. "I want to go home."

"The night's still young," said Ramse. "We're only getting started."

The rest of the night was a blur to him. At some point he lost his tuxedo jacket; at another point, he found the next day, someone had smeared a swath of blood across his forehead. At one point he could hear Ramse telling everyone not to give him another drink and then he was outside, vomiting onto the gravel, Ramse seeming to be trying at once to hold him up and to knock him over. Then they were stumbling across the gravel courtyard, Kline covering one of his eyes so he could see, and into the bar where he was drinking not whiskey but first coffee and then water. It was not exactly a bar either, but more like a club. They were sitting in armchairs, a small coffee table before them, pointed toward a stage, and Kline realized the curtain was opening.

The stage was bare at first, lit by a reddish spotlight, and then a woman came out onto it swaddled from knees to neck in boas.

"Watch this," said Ramse, his words slurring even more than usual. "She's really something."

A strip show, thought Kline. He had seen a strip show before, more than once, had seen several in fact with the man who had since come to be known as the gentleman with the cleaver, the man who was dead now. He didn't care about strip shows one way or the other. He watched the woman lose one boa after another while Ramse whistled. She would let a boa trail first and then finally let it flop all the way off and then kick it to one side of the stage. And then finally she was done, stripped naked, blurred in the red light, not particularly attractive.

He waited for the curtain to go down but the curtain did not go down. He turned to Ramse but found him still staring rapt at the girl, and so he himself turned back to her and watched as, with a flick of the wrist, she cracked off her hand.

A dim howl went up through the house and Kline heard, scattered through the chairs, a dull thumping, the sound of stumps beating against one another. She made her way toward one side of the stage, spinning slightly, and then snapped the stump of her arm against her remaining hand and Kline saw three fingers wobble loose and slough away. The crowd roared. He tried to stand up but Ramse had his hand on his shoulder and was shouting in his ear. "Just wait," Ramse shouted, "the best is yet to come!"

And then the woman sashayed across the stage and reached up with her remaining finger and thumb to tear free her ear. She spun it around a few times before tossing it out into the audience. Kline saw a group of men rise up in a dark mass trying somehow, with what hands they had left between them, to catch it. And then she turned away, turned her back to them, and when she turned back her artificial breasts had been pulled away to hang like an apron around her belly, revealing two shiny flat patches where they had been. She spread her legs and squatted and Kline imagined her legs were beginning to separate, to split up. Jesus, God , he thought, and tried to stand, and felt Ramse trying to hold him down, and felt the blood rush to his head. He staggered forward and into the small table, hot coffee sloshing all over his legs, and looked up to see the woman on the stage gouging her fingers beneath one side of her face, but mercifully, before she had torn it away, he had fallen and did not, despite Ramse's urging, get up again.

It was late in the afternoon before he could bring himself to get up again, his head still spinning. He went into the bathroom and drank cup after cup of water and then turned on the water, stood under the shower for a while, steam rising around him.

He got dressed and opened the door, found outside a covered plate of food and, next to it, a cassette tape. Putting the plate of food on the table, he removed the lid. Pancakes, sodden now with syrup, with eggs floating grimly to one side. There was no silverware. He ate with his fingers until he felt sick, then went to the bathroom and threw up and then came back and ate a little more, just enough to keep something in his stomach.

The tape he put into the tape recorder, turned it on.

"One: State your name and your relation to the deceased," he heard himself asking.

"Two: Where were you on the night Aline was murdered?

"Three: Do you know of anyone who might want Aline dead for any reason?

"Four: Did you see the body? If so, please describe in detail what you saw.

"Five: Are you absolutely certain Aline's death wasn't a suicide?

"Six: Did you kill Aline?"

What followed was a blank unrolling of tape, a dim static that lasted five or six minutes, and then the tape clicked loudly and a man's voice began to talk.

"Helming," the voice said. "We were. . associates." There was a pause, the tape microphone clicked off but the tape ran on.

"I was in my room. I heard a noise and had Michael carry me out into the hall and-"

The tape fell suddenly silent, part of it erased.

"I don't know why anyone would [blank space] question I suppose of having insufficient faith."

"No, I didn't see the [blank]. ."

"Yes."

"No. I-"

The tape cut abruptly off, and there was silence and then it resumed with another voice, another individual, the same enigmatic, half-erased style, nothing really stated of substance. Why were there gaps? A third voice was the same, and it was only then that Kline realized that the answers being given were vague enough that they could be read as responses to almost any questions. On that night I was in my room. I heard a noise and went into the hall and- could be answering his question Where were you on the night Aline was killed? but he could imagine other questions that might have been posed that would elicit the same response. Where were you on the night the hallway was graffitied? Where were you on the night Marker came in drunk? None of the three recorded voices mentioned the word "murdered" or the word "Aline" or the word "death." Or if they did it was in the portion of the tape that had been erased.

He rewound the tape and listened again, turning up the volume as high as it would go, listening to the blank spots of erased tape, hoping to hear hints of whatever had been there before the erasure. He heard nothing but a low half-muttering which, he realized, wasn't a human voice at all but the magnified sound of the tape recorder's mechanism itself. He turned off the tape and sat, thinking, wondering what to do next.

When Ramse arrived with dinner balanced on his arms in the early evening, Kline demanded to see Borchert.

"I'll put in a request," said Ramse.

"I need to see him right away," said Kline. "I need to see him now."

"Right now what you need to do is eat some supper," said Ramse. "And try to get over your hangover. You were a hell of a mess last night."

"I need to see Borchert," said Kline. "It's urgent."

"Fine," said Ramse. "Go ahead and eat. I'll walk over and see what I can do."

At the door he stopped and looked back, a look of reproach on his face. "You didn't even ask about Gous," he said.

"What about him?"

"About how he's doing."

"How is he doing?"

"Good," said Ramse. "He's doing just fine."

"Wonderful," said Kline. "Now, goddammit, go get Borchert."

Once Ramse was gone Kline uncovered the tray and ate: boiled potatoes, a thin and curling piece of grayish meat, a pile of overcooked carrots. He ate slowly, moving from potatoes to meat to carrots and back again until it was all gone, then sat playing the tape over. It seemed obvious that there was no real interest in solving the crime. Why even bring me out at all?