Percival Everett - Big Picture - Stories

“What are you doing in here?” Michael asked.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. She was wearing a gown made of flannel.

“You shouldn’t be in here. What if Simon wakes up? What if he were to come in here? What would he say seeing you sitting there like that?”

“Who cares what Simon says?”

“Well, Simon didn’t say you could come in here.” Michael felt silly saying that. “Is that really his name?”

Eddie nodded, sitting up and leaning toward him. “Sumiko said you tried to kill yourself.”

“What?”

“She said you ate paint.” Eddie swallowed. “I love the passion of that.”

“I see.” He walked over and sat beside her on the sofa. “I did eat paint, but I didn’t try to kill myself. I’m just a dumb shit. Now, I don’t know what kind of romantic picture you’ve concocted of me, nor what kind of game you’ve conjured up for us to play, but I’m not going to be a part of it.”

“You haven’t heard what I have in mind,” she said.

“I don’t need to hear it.” Michael’s brains pushed at the walls of his cranium. “I really think you should go on back to your room, okay?”

“A kiss first.”

“No.”

“Just one,” she said, pouting. “I’m good at it.”

“I’m sure.” Michael sighed. “Please?”

Eddie stood and slinked across the room toward the door, trying to achieve a seductive look in her flannel nightshirt. “I’m going,” she said.

Michael looked at her feet. They were enormous.

“Good night, Michael.”

When she was gone and his door was closed, he shut his eyes and pushed out a breath. His stomach began to hurt and he felt pressure again to find a toilet. There was no putting it off this time; he’d have to suffer the consequences of using the white room. He went out into the hall only to find the door closed and a stripe of light at the threshold. Eddie was in there doing god-knew-what and he didn’t dare knock and make it look as if he were coming after her. His stomach did a flip. He was in pain and in a hurry.

He made his way down the hall to his hosts’ bedroom door. He turned the knob slowly and pushed into the room. He could hear breathing. The darkness of his room and the hallway had helped his eyes adjust and with his pupils all dilated he was able to see around the bedroom by the light from outside. He saw what must have been the bathroom door and treaded softly toward it. About halfway across the room, he realized that the breathing he was hearing sounded a certain way. He then heard Sumiko’s small voice cooing, “Oh, my big steel baby,” and Michael thought he was going to die. He got into the bathroom and felt around on the wall for the light switch, then closed the door before throwing it. Pain detonated in his head like a blasting cap and the heat of it ripped through his eyes. This room turned out to be just as bright white as the other one. He was reeling and losing his balance, but he had a reason for being there and he managed to drop his trousers and sit on the toilet, covering his eyes with his hands.

Finished, Michael automatically reached back and flushed and immediately cringed at the subsequent noise. The tank filled and he listened at the door, learning that Harley and Sumiko hadn’t heard the plumbing because of their involvement. He tried not to focus on their sounds, but couldn’t help hearing them since his headaches always heightened his auditory capacity. He switched off the light, sat on the floor, and realized that when they were done, one of them would probably be headed his way.

Michael crawled across the floor to the tub and climbed into it. He pushed his back up against the cool enamel and waited, trying to think and not think at the same time. What was it with these windowless bathrooms? He froze at the sound of the door opening and closed his eyes, anticipating the light being turned on, but no switch was thrown and the room remained dark. A mere twelve inches and the shower curtain separated him from whom he was sure was Sumiko sitting on the toilet urinating; the sound was just like Gail’s. She even pulled paper off the roll before she was done like Gail. Michael’s heart was racing, but strangely his headache was letting up — yet another bit of evidence against the theory that his symptoms were stress-related. Sumiko finished, yawned, flushed, and left the room with the door open.

Several minutes dragged by and Michael thought he could hear Harley’s snoring. He pulled himself out of the tub and crawled across the icy tiles to the door, where he paused and satisfied himself that, indeed, Harley was snoring. He stayed on his hands and knees as he moved across the carpet of the bedroom and bumped into someone.

“I’ve been searching all over for you,” Eddie said.

Michael felt faint.

A light came on and the very first thing Michael saw was Eddie’s gangly and naked body on hands and knees right in front of him.

“What in the hell is going on?” yelled Harley who was sitting up in bed.

Michael stood up quickly, looking in horror at Eddie and then at Harley and finally Sumiko. Sumiko had the covers pulled up to her neck, but Harley was now standing, butt-naked beside the bed. Michael saw the man’s little penis and looked away, but what he confronted were naked Eddie’s enormous feet. Michael wanted to scream, but nothing rose from his throat, although a scream would have served as an appropriate and suitable accompaniment to the way he tore out of there.

Michael ran to the den, grabbed his shoes, jacket, and bag and bumped into Simon, who was coming out of the guest room into the hallway. Again, Michael wanted to let out some unintelligible shrill bellow and again his lungs failed him. He ran away from Simon, who stood confused and uncharacteristically silent in his red flannel pajamas. He reached the front door, turned the lock, and set off the loudest alarm he’d ever heard, a screeching horn that penetrated his head. In the background he could hear Harley say, “What in hell is going on here?!” and Simon say, “Edwina!” Michael ran to his truck, fumbled with his keys, got the engine started, and drove off as the lights of neighbors’ houses began to snap on. He looked over to find the head of the Dicotyles tajacu still on the seat beside him, still neatly wrapped.

Michael drove north out of Laramie into stiff and increasingly frigid wind. He thought of the fire that had consumed his recent work, recalled the odor of the burning oil-covered canvases. The Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow was dark, lonely, and most significantly, closed when he arrived there at three in the morning. He bundled up in his new sleeping bag and huddled up against the wall out of the wind. In the morning when the doors opened, he would sit down and order the mediocre breakfast fare for which the hotel was regionally famous and then continue north for the Big Horns where he would camp, fish, and probably freeze. He thought about the head of the Dicotyles tajacu on the passenger seat of his truck and wished it were alive; alive, so that he could let it go, watch it trot off on short, sturdy legs across the prairie. But it had no legs, it was just the severed head with a hole where an eye had been, and a fake eye at that, seeing nothing even in its newest, most firmly inserted condition. The head was only a head.

Laney decided to walk the remaining miles to the shitty little desert town where the shitty little police had her shitty little brother locked in a cell for drinking too much and generally being himself. She was walking because the belt on the water pump of her truck’s engine had broken. Mitch walked alongside her and his mouth was, as usual, open:

“I told you not to buy a piece of shit Japanese truck.”