Andrew Sullivan - Waste

“It’s not her. You got that, Tommy?” Astor said. He kept his voice level. “Not her. That’s the wrong one, like usual. What do we do? Any ideas, Tommy? Any ideas, anyone?”

Tommy Vine could easily have plucked each limb off of Astor like chicken wings. He could have licked the bones and asked for seconds without even straining his gut. He didn’t, though. Tommy lay in the corner with his brother and kept slapping the corpse’s head. Al Vine did not respond. An artery between the two had been snipped, something no one else could see.

“I ask for one thing to get done and they can’t do it right,” Astor said. “You can’t trust the paperwork. Hospitals screw up all the time. Wrong photo with the wrong patient.

“I gave them a description. Short, dark hair. Lots of scars up and down her arms, and one fucking missing cheek. See her sometimes downtown, but she doesn’t recognize me. And they bring me some woman from the jungle who isn’t wearing any panties.”

Tommy Vine moaned by the door and began to bash his head against the wall.

“What is he doing?” Jamie said.

“Relax, Jamie. Just be glad you didn’t spend three years sitting alone with your brain in a hole. They say it hurts the smart ones worse, so maybe you woulda had nothing to worry about in solitary. Lose all ability to connect with that outside world. Only thing keeping each of them alive was the other.”

“Aren’t you going to stop him from doing that?” Jamie asked.

“One down, the other follows. Dominoes. They used to tap messages at each other through the walls. Apparently they had a very intricate language all their own.”

Tommy wound up his head and smashed it into the wallpaper. He left a bright rose behind on the wall before he wound up again and reapplied the pattern. Astor strutted over and poked at Tommy with his gun. The big bearded man was focused on the wall, didn’t acknowledge the barrel probing his ribs.

“And you’re just going to…”

“Oh, come on, no one heard it,” Astor said. “Even if they did, who’s going to say anything? I could rent out this whole place for the next year or so if I really wanted. But that would draw too much attention. Somebody dropped a case of beers, that’s what I’ll tell them. No one else is even on this floor. It’s the fucking honeymoon suite.”

Moses and B. Rex lay very still on the carpet. They were covered in specks of Al Vine.

“Remember when you were a kid?”

The rifle was poking at Jamie’s crotch now, sorting through the wet patch Jamie had created when the gun went off. Someone handed the scarecrow a brain in the blue glow of the screen.

“Everyone was a kid once. No one comes out of the womb smoking and cursing their mother. So you were a kid once. We all were, even that blubbering asshole over there.”

Jamie stared at Astor Crane’s heart-shaped slippers and tried to think of Kansas.

“I remember hearing some other kid crying. The kind of stuff that makes you want to look away or pretend it’s not happening,” Astor said. “The horrible deep-rooted kind of shit you see at really bad funerals for babies. Never go to those, by the way.

“So I’m maybe nine and I’m listening to this crying. And it fucking hurts me to hear that crying. It drives something inside me like a splinter right under the tip of a nail. And I can’t fish it out, stomp it out, chop it off. It’s inside me and it burns and I can’t do anything about it. What am I supposed to do? It makes you feel helpless. You are nothing in that moment. You are the speck in a world that fucking hurts. You are that speck, you understand?

“And I’m listening to this fucking kid wail his lungs out and I’m imagining what that feels like and I know that if I could take that pain away from him, I would. I would take it, and I would put it inside me, I would swallow it fucking whole and let him walk away from the whole thing unscathed. Un-fucking-touched. And now I don’t have that feeling anymore. You know that movie, the one I told you about? NeverEnding Story?”

“I don’t think I’ve seen it.” Jamie coughed. “I don’t really watch a lot of kids’ movies. Astor, you don’t need to — you could just let me and Elvira and whoever else leave.”

“No, you see the movie is kind of fucked for a kids’ movie. I mean, most kids’ movies are, when you get down to it, but in this one, the villain is just the Nothing. Nothing. Non-being. And so I was lying there watching this mystical shit, and I was thinking that’s where that feeling went. The Nothing has swallowed it all, but you can build it again, the fucking princess in the movie says. And I’m lying there with holes in my gut and too much opiate in my brain, and I want to burst, and I know where that feeling went. And I know I gotta remake it. Remake it like the stupid kid did in the movie.

“I was going to have a kid once, but I didn’t want one. Who wants a fucking kid? But maybe with a kid that is how it works, that is how you take that pain and swallow it and make it fucking new, because in fact you are so much bigger and so much stronger and you know what the world has in fucking store, and it’s nothing good. So, I don’t have that kid, but I could. And I got those idiots to go out looking for the mom-to-be.

“Her name was Destinii. Who the fuck names their kid that?” Astor said. “It wasn’t like she picked it. Her parents named her sisters Johanna and Rachel. I guess they got bored, that musta been the thing. Years ago we fucked, and boom. Pregnant. Scary shit. You know anything about that, Jamie? Get a girl pregnant? Fuckin’ end-of-the-world shit.”

“No…well, there was a scare one time,” Jamie said. “But no, I don’t really have any kids.”

“I did not want the baby. She fucked this Condom kid I had working for me, nothing major. I don’t even know if he could get it up, dumb as fuckin’ bricks, but loyal. And so I start saying, hey, maybe it’s his kid, maybe you should be with him.

“We get them a place, we get everything nice and cozy, but she doesn’t want to be with him. She wants me, and guess what? Next thing I know she’s bouncing down an escalator and loses half her face. They take her off to the asylum, and then boom, no more baby. And no more nothing. And I wasn’t happy like I thought I would be. You understand this?”

Tommy Vine whacked his head against the wall again. He was babbling nonsense words in the same rhythm as Astor. No number of words could cover up the mound of Al Vine in the corner. His blood had begun to dry on the wall in brown patches.

“They caught Condon, the stupid kid, but they can’t even get it together to find out where Destinii went. They can’t be bothered to do anything right.

“The thing about a gun, Jamie, is that it’s so messy. Efficient, but when you factor in clean-up costs, time, and resource management, you come out on the loser’s end of the bargain,” Astor Crane explained. “Now the pseudo twins, they had to go. Like the Lorax— you ever meet him? I think we still have all his teeth somewhere in a jar. Sometimes you have to make cuts.”

Everything was bathed in pink. Dorothy was clicking her heels, but Jamie wasn’t going anywhere. His ankle still bleated pain up into his brain and he could almost see the shards of bone stippling the skin from the inside. The barrel of the rifle was directly between his eyes.

“Now this might wake a few people up. If you’d met me in the hospital, you coulda helped me find her instead,” Astor Crane said. “Wouldn’t it be grand to have that hypothetical kid? With a girl named Destinii, too. I got a deep want inside me. That ain’t ever going away.

“That want will eat you alive.”

Elvira didn’t want to stay in this bathroom anymore. She pulled herself up off the heart-shaped toilet and laid a hand on the knob. She could hear a voice out there; it wouldn’t stop talking. The Judge was lying on the floor outside. She was never going to get that perfect game. She would be left wondering why forever as she lay on other men’s rounded stomachs, but they would never be like Ted’s. They would be so cold and hairy and rumble in the night.