Andrew Sullivan - Waste

“Leave a man in a bed for that long and see what happens. The docs gave me a list, but how do you expect a man to keep track of that? And yes, you do have to listen to this. It’s just a fucking foot,” he said. “You’d think I castrated you.”

“You fuck,” Jamie said. “I’m going to barf on all your shit.”

“I did that too. All over the place. And I was spewin’ words all over the place too. Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! Delirious as shit and just singing along to keep myself from getting sick. Singing along to all that shit. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

“And of course those dipshits take it literally. Wonder twins, wonder twins both of them. They only survive because they’re too stupid to take any initiative beyond stealing a lion. And then the beast gets run over, of all things. Steal the lion, give it a name, and watch it get railroaded by some drunk in the middle of the night. Or you, I guess. Were you drunk? We’re gonna get the head stuffed now because you kind of have to at this point. All this bullshit because of me fucking singing while high on whatever they had me on. It wasn’t like I made a special request.”

Jamie coughed and tried not to think about the swelling in his boot. Astor kept bouncing the rifle up and down on the bar. His hands didn’t look out of place on the barrel. “You’re gonna get it stuffed,” Jamie said. “Why? Jesus, I can’t even feel my toes.”

“Because you bond with an animal. Even if you didn’t want it and you think it’s a stupid idea and it smells like shit, you bond with it because it eats from your hand,” Astor said. “They had a bear, too. We didn’t name it though. She was too dumb.

“All because of a stupid codeine high with me babbling about the fucking Wizard of Oz in the recovery ward, I get two pets like it’s a present. I never asked for a fucking lion.”

Jamie groaned and tried to massage his busted ankle.

“Gotta get him stuffed because some people don’t know how to drive,” Astor said. “A dead lion. Kept them just outside the city, too, where we grow the plants. And of course, the Lorax was trying to ruin all that shit. We had the hydro set up perfect. We tapped right into the main line and bypassed the meter. But the Lorax is always trying to run something on the side, never ever a team player. I didn’t really care as much as before though. Wild, you know? I wouldn’t have just broken your foot back in the day.

“But I come out of the hospital and it’s gone. The wildness. They took it. They took something. Something that I needed, and they left all these lines on me. You see? Look at them.”

Astor pulled back his robe and pointed at the thick, rigid tissue burrowed into his flesh.

“I want you to look at them. Women want to touch them, but they don’t really want to know. They want to imagine what it was like, but not ask me. It was like swimming underwater while they played music. They play music while they cut you open, did you know that, Jamie? A scalpel is like another instrument for them. Only in the right hands does it ever play true. Nobody wants to say they got fucked up by a violin. I don’t, at least. Not by a symphony.”

There was pink light streaming in through the thin curtains. It clashed with the blue of the television and made Astor look purple as he paced back and forth in front of Jamie. On the screen, Dorothy was yelling at the man behind the curtain, and he was bellowing into a machine that echoed through the Emerald City. Jamie’s ankle had puffed out of his sock.

“I’m slower now. I’m kinda glad I don’t have a kid because like, how the fuck am I supposed to be surprised anymore? There is just nothing there, nothing. I can’t even blink.”

There were three hard knocks on the door. Elvira stopped making noises inside the bathroom. She stepped out into the suite and pulled on the ruined quilt. She ignored Jamie and Astor. Her long blond hair was swept across her face. Astor readjusted the rifle in his hairless hands. Three hard knocks again.

“You guys going to come in or stand out there?” Astor yelled. “Come in! COME IN! Are you hungry, Jamie? I’m always fucking hungry, but I can’t keep anything down. COME IN!”

There was spittle on Astor’s chin. It was pink and thick.

Two skinny boys with bruised skulls and razor-burned scalps fell into the honeymoon suite. Duct tape bound their thin wrists together behind their backs. Jamie recognized Moses’s head, the lumpy plateaus that rose from the boy’s forehead to the crown. He didn’t say anything though, and Moses kept his eyes on the plush red carpet. Astor still twirled the gun from his skinny wrist and watched everyone in the blue glow. The other boy’s pants were wet. He moaned. Behind these two sad bundles, the Brothers Vine entered the room with a bowling ball and a power drill.

“That’s the one, man. How the fuck did you get here?”

Elvira stared at them from the bathroom door. She didn’t recognize the bearded men pointing at her, the ones who’d grabbed her under Astor’s deluded demand.

“That’s the one, guys?” Astor said. “You think that’s the one?”

Astor was pointing the gun at the two brothers now. Al spoke up.

“Like you said. We went and dug up all that shit. All the paperwork. Found the pictures, too. She was the best one. Hard to match up the photos and shit, but that’s the one. We woulda brought her sooner, but you were in the hospital. Can’t bring a lady like that to hospital. They’d just lock her up all over again.”

Astor Crane sighed. He ignored the two sad piles on the floor. The twins were always bringing their experiments home. He had insisted they weren’t supposed to kill anyone anymore after the kid in the forest. Not like it helped too much. The boys on the floor looked close enough to dead and smelled like piss.

“So this is supposed to be Destinii?” Astor said. “And what did she say her name was? Did you even bother trying to ask her?”

“She said Elvira, but I bet that’s what she tells half the cops who pick her up,” Al said. “Most do the same if they don’t want a record. We checked the files, too. It’s her.”

“Did you even look at her face?” Astor said. “When I described her, did she sound like she was six foot and blond with shoulders like something out of a fucking comic book?”

Jamie tried to stand up and Astor tapped his forehead with the rifle barrel. He slid back down into the loveseat. The two boys in the corner were shivering. Astor hadn’t raised his voice. The room was quiet. It was too cold for any birds to begin chirping at the sun outside.

“We went through all the stupid file cabinets and that’s what we found,” Al said. “And we found these kids too, and they were fucking everything up.”

“I asked you if you thought that was her,” Astor said. His teeth clicked together.

“It’s fucking her, all right. It’s Destinii,” Al said. “It’s the goddamn girl, all right? We found her. So give it up.”

This time the bullet didn’t ricochet. Jamie felt the air blast into his left eardrum as the slug burst from his father’s Remington and into the center of Al Vine’s face.

The back of Al’s head burst outward due to the incoming force of the lead and the imbalance of pressure within his forty-five-year-old skull. As it bored through bone, blood, and the soft tissues of his brain, Al Vine lost consciousness and the ability to feel that little cylinder of metal ripping open his skull, splattering his fine motor skills and spatial sense across his brother’s face.

Jamie wasn’t sure who started screaming first, but even with his eyes closed, he knew Astor Crane was the only one in the room smiling. Elvira’s screams were the loudest until she slammed the bathroom door behind her. There was a thud as the bowling ball hit the floor and Tommy grabbed his brother. He kept tugging on Al’s beard.