Paul Harding - Enon

“When there’s a fucking gimp ,” Scruff said.

“I don’t got anything right now,” Frankie said.

“Nothing?” I said. “Oh, man — I was hoping — you’d been to New Mexico.” I meant to come off as nonchalant, to keep it sounding light.

He turned from the bar toward me and dragged on his cigarette and squinted at me. “Nah. I don’t go to New Mexico no more,” he said.

“Last time you ever say ‘New Mexico,’ ” Scruff said. “Ever.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry, sorry,” I said. “But I’m kind of in a jam.”

“I got twenty Vickies, twenty-five each,” Frankie said.

“That’s kind of steep,” I said. He was gouging me because I was clearly starting to fray.

“How about fifty each, gimp?” Scruff said.

“I only have three hundred,” I said. “Can you do it for that?”

“Nope. A dozen for three hundred.”

Scruff swigged at his beer and tucked his chin in to swallow and get his next insult out as fast as he could. I wished I could dash his brains out on the bar top. The whole predicament was so lurid and so cartoonish, so almost diabolical, though, that I just repeated, “Okay, okay, okay, okay” as fast as I could, to stop Scruff from saying anything more, and yanked the money out of my pocket and handed it to Frankie.

Scruff looked at the dirty hank of cash. “How much dick you have to—”

“Oh, man ,” I groaned. “Just shut up , would you? Jesus , you’re a grim pain in the ass.”

Scruff leaned back on his bar stool and blew smoke up at the ceiling and laughed and slapped his knee. “Ha! You’re worse than me!” he coughed. “You’re some kind of sad shit , Kemo Sabe.”

Frankie opened a plastic bag and removed eight white pills from it and put them, loose, back into his pocket. Instead of being glad for the bag of twelve pills he handed me, I could only think about the eight he’d put back in his pocket. The pills were strong but full of acetaminophen I’d have to extract, and that made me all the angrier. I slid the pills into my pocket.

“All right, Frankie,” I said. “Thanks for everything. Will you have some stuff by the end of the week?”

“I don’t know. Check in if you want to.”

“Okay. Thanks for everything.” I turned and walked toward the door.

Scruff called out behind me: “I hope a tree falls on you and you die , fuckwit.” I bowed my head and waved and left the bar.

OUTSIDE, THE WEATHER IN front of the hurricane made it feel like another planet. Moisture saturated the air, insulating sound and making it feel as if I were moving through liquid, almost as if I could lean forward and gently push off the sidewalk with my feet and do the breaststroke floating half an inch off the ground the rest of the way home. The light behind the ceiling of low, dark clouds seemed to come down to the earth through water and not air. I swallowed two of the pills dry, and by the time I reached the bridge that connected Stonepoint with Barnton, across the harbor, it felt wholly as if I traveled through an underwater kingdom of refracted light and quiet. Even though there was no wind or rain yet, everyone already seemed to have made their probably needless, I thought, dashes to the supermarkets and hardware stores for batteries and bottled water and plywood and masking tape.

When I crossed the town line from Barnton into Enon, the quiet and stillness seemed to deepen even further. I felt as if I were the only man on earth, as if I were floating through some uninhabited, primeval realm. Only jellyfish and I would watch the vast nets of lightning being cast across the sky above and the rains churning the ceiling of our watery kingdom into sizzling, unmappable topographies, and hear the muted roaring of the winds over the face of the water, and watch with our simple eyes the atmosphere cooking and boiling and synthesizing itself so that when the storms quieted and passed and the sun shone back down on us, we would step onto the sand with our brand-new feet and walk out of the carbonated surf onto the fern-littered shore. What was that first clot of plasma not merely cooked by lightning? What colloidal smudge shivered and convulsed at the charge for an instant? What Adamic fleck of aspic was that? What first, shocked self that then became the first corpse?

The clouds looked like fiddleheads of oily liquid curling across the watery sky.

I took two more pills when I reached home and poured some whiskey in a coffee mug that read, SOMEONE AT AYERS MIDDLE SCHOOL APPRECIATES ME. I crushed the eight remaining pills in a decorative mortar made of green onyx that I’d bought Susan for Christmas the first year we dated. I ground the pills with the pestle until they were a fine powder. I tapped the powder out of the mortar into a ramekin and added a teaspoonful of water and mixed it with my finger until it made a smooth, consistent paste. I put the ramekin in the freezer.

My daydreams about floating in primitive oceans gave way to fairy-tale equations, like spells or the sorts of drawings to which I imagined the girls drinking wine and reading tarot cards in the cemetery might at some point be or have been attracted and drawn in chalk or spent a long windless night rendering in colored sand on the lid of a crypt, enchanted that someone might come along before a breeze scattered the sand and look at the beautiful, apparently diabolical but in fact harmless design and feel a worried thrill, but perhaps even more delighted at the possibility that no one besides the owls above in the trees would ever see it before it dispersed. The bookcase at the back of the kitchen was still stuffed with old tapes of movies and kids’ shows, and with the plastic containers in which Kate had kept her felt markers and crayons. There was a round bucket full of fat, rainbow-colored sticks of chalk. I took the bucket to the living room and drew a stick of bright red chalk from it. I stepped up onto the couch and lifted the mirror hanging above it from its hook and threw it across the room in the direction of the armchair, half-hoping it would land quietly in the seat, half-hoping it would fall short and explode all over the far side of the room. The mirror landed on one of its corners a foot short of the chair. Its glass broke with a single crack, almost like a gunshot or an isolated detonation of thunder in the middle of an otherwise peaceful snowfall, and the frame tipped onto the chair and stopped dead. I stood up on the back of the couch and leaned against the wall and reached up and over as far as I could to my left.

I wrote on the wall, Let the world be W .

Below that, I wrote, Let Kate be k .

Below that I wrote, Therefore, let Kate’s death be (W — k).

Let I be me. So I is now (I — k).

I was never good at math or logic. My thoughts quickly became confused as I tried to demonstrate the calculus of grief, to draw up a circuit or graph or model written on the wall that captured the function of loss. I could barely figure out a long division problem, though, so my variables and function signs, sigmas and trigonometric equations quickly gave way to hieroglyphs, because I had to find a way to factor in the gothic girls in the graveyard, and Aloysius’s voice box (a v inside a rectangle), narcotic vectors (skulls and crossbones, color-coded, according to the pill) and blood alcohol (the old xxx from cartoon jugs of moonshine, plus or minus a number from one to five, based on degree) and the tame birds in the sanctuary and the pattern of the paths there and the shifting lights of the constellations of my sorrow. I had to attempt to fold hope ( H ) into the emotional tectonics, too, as subtle and rare a particle as it was, because even if at any given coordinate its value was statistically equal to zero, even if at any given moment it was no more than the hope for the return of hope, a single grain of it still contradicts a universe of despair. I drew mandalas and particle accelerators and calendars made up of concentric moving circles and ox-turn algorithms.