Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked as I poured myself a glass of water from the bottle of Evian on the nightstand. “You hate my guts.”

“Because you being here makes her happy.”

I tried not to laugh.

“Really,” he said, clearly responding to the disbelief on my face. “I haven’t seen her this way in years. You’ve given her hope.”

“But there isn’t going to be a comeback, is there?”

“She’s not well enough.” He sighed. “My sister is damaged goods.”

“But you’re helping her by reinforcing her delusions? What happens when we finish the book and the screenplay? You’re not going to submit them, are you?”

“Then you’ll write another one. Write your own books on your own time. Do whatever pleases you. Paris’ll take care of you. Sunny’s got to go. But no more drugs.”

“Do I have a choice?”

I wanted to laugh

“No,” he replied, standing. “But look at it this way: you’re doing something more meaningful than just writing a book.”

He paused.

“Lana’s dying. She has a brain tumour. They’ve operated once but it’s incurable.”

John’s statement shocked me into silence

“How long does she have?” I finally asked after seconds of silence seemed to turn into hours.

“Maybe three months.”

“Does she know?”

“She’s in denial.”

Going cold turkey was a cunt. Coming down off the coke left me with a crushing depression and anxiety no amount of booze could calm. With Sunny gone, I felt empty, and I realized I had fallen in love with her. But it was too late for love. It seemed too late for anything. Outside of trying to work with Lana, I tried to turn my attention to a novel idea I’d had for some time — a “literary” piece about spiritual redemption in South America — but it wouldn’t come. My words were as empty as the champagne bottles cluttering my room.

Through the haze of tumour-induced delusion, Lana sensed my unhappiness and tried diligently to improve my mood. She even invited me to join her and Paris in bed.

I declined. I couldn’t make love to a dying woman.

One morning at breakfast, she gave me a gold Rolex. I thanked her with a chaste kiss, and after an abortive hour of working, returned to my room and placed the watch in the desk drawer.

Time had no meaning.

July came, and with it my birthday. I didn’t mention it. There was nothing to celebrate.

Struggling with my writing didn’t help but only depressed me further. I’d never been good at anything else, yet what kept me alive was suffocating me as surely as the tumour was killing Lana.

Years of frustration, of being fucked over, of fighting to make it work.

I drained the third bottle of Dom Perignon and staggered to the john. The bedside light split the room in two. I didn’t recognize the face in the mirror before me. Shadowed, bloodshot eyes, unruly hair, a forest of dark stubble.

It was the ghost of someone I thought I once knew.

That’s when you took the cold shower, trying to wash the image, the memories, away as you muttered lines of Yeats….

I, being poor, have only my dreams… tread softly, for you tread on my dreams….

Dressed, you walked on down the hall like that old song and found silk-fucking-suit’s gun hanging on its holster beside his bed.

And went to the room where your hostess slept.

And shot her in the temple, eradicating tumour and deluded dreams in an orgasm of bone, blood, and cancerous brain.

When you appeared in the hallway, Paris screamed, ran back into her room, bolted her door.

It took one shot to smash the lock — two to shut her the fuck up.

Her empty eyes said “thank you.”

Cranial matter sliding down your cheeks like the tears that couldn’t come, you shot John Silk Suit as he ran up the stairs, treading on his twitching wrist, stumbling as you crossed the lobby, making for the outdoor pool.

You always wanted a big house with a pool, remember?

Now you’ve got it and enough 9 mm currency to buy the fucking farm as well.

Mickey Muscles, wet from his swim, cried when you thrust the gun against his balls, begged, pleaded… sobbed like a baby.

You shut him up.

Brain sizzling like an egg in the desert. The humidity makes the silk robe cling to your body like a spent lover’s embrace.

Somewhere in the night, a scream erupts. And keeps shrieking its metallic harpy wail.

Shut up. Shut up.

So tired. You just want to sleep….

Sleep, perchance to dream again.

Squeezing the trigger’s so eas —

Once a month my dearest friend comes to visit. Tonight I sense his presence although I cannot see him. Due to circumstances beyond our timeless abilities, his magnificence is shielded from the eternal gaze of my eyes. And yet, I always know he is there, my constant companion, the Moon , even on nights like this one, shrouded in clouds of darkest pitch. Sky as black as the feathers of my bête noire — my once, or so I thought, friend — that poet’s raven.

I know he is there, for I have counted the days since his last passing and know it is time for him to visit me again.

My compatriot, the Moon. Full as a wheel of cheese, yet pearly white like the perfect secret of an oyster, the fine, melancholy lustre of his rays far preferable to my mood than the burnished gold of the Sun, whose damnable brilliance would dry me out, crack my oily skin. The Sun, whose blinding rays have streamed unmercifully through the window beside me for hours, drenching the far wall of the room and fading Her image if not Her memory.

Emilia, whose skin once gleamed like fine alabaster with cheeks of the most subtle pink and now lies dull and chalky like too many layers of powder trying desperately to de-age an older woman’s face. Emilia, whose piercing green eyes once bewitched this poet’s heart. Emilia, whose tresses cascaded like a thousand scarlet rivulets upon such dainty shoulders. Emilia’s waist, so tiny my fingers and palms touched each other when I held it. Such lovely shoulders. Tiny fingers, tiny feet, a sweet trill of a giggle — like a little girl.

Sometimes, They would remember to close the curtains to shield her. Or so some of Them would for a time. Recently, though, They have been younger ones, more forgetful. Although They did buy a special set of curtains for the strange woman, the hideous mangled thing that resembles a child’s experiment with triangles. And for the ghastly, tasteless painting that looks like somebody spilled their dinner and never rang for the maid. But mostly They just place the works They say are special on my side or in the more shadowy corners beside the bookcase on the far wall to my left.

At first, it was just family until the Grandson started to collect. He and his wife talked of moving me, too, putting me away in the attic once, but his younger son, Harry, said he liked my expression — it was spooky — and the skull I bear in my fingers. Old “oooh-ooh,” he dubbed it and would come by and ask it questions as if it were a fortune-teller who could predict Christmas presents and the victorious team in boys’ sports tournaments. When my benefactor grew into a man, the collection grew stranger, and his wife wanted to take me down — that grim-faced old geezer — but he remains steadfast and will not allow her. The familiar faces have almost all disappeared though — upward, I suppose — until it is just me, Her, and the marble bust of Admiral Nelson, to whom Harry’s wife claims to be related.

Pity. I often wonder if I would have liked the attic. At least it would have afforded me a different view. One hundred and fifty years of staring at mostly the same sights is more time than any man, even a poet, desires to muse alone with only his thoughts, her fading eyes, and a side-glance view of that scoundrel’s acclaimed literary volume on the mahogany coffee table to keep him company. For it is Emilia whose curse is responsible for making me more than an image, and the canvas across the room is merely that. It does make me periodically giddy to think that Her loveliness is now mere bones and dust. And it is Edgar who was responsible for reducing the legacy of me, Milford Nathaniel Peckerwood, into a forgotten image on the wall of some distant relative’s gallery.