Andrew Sullivan - Waste

Elvira had wrapped herself up in the red sheets on the bed and was snoring. Her large chest rose and fell in time with the noise. Moses hoped she didn’t dream of anything — he didn’t know what they had done to her. Elvira Moon would eventually forget these men, like everything else before them. Everything except Ted Moon and Arizona.

The honeymoon suite was windowless on three sides. The Venetian blinds were tilted to let in the light. The city stretched out beneath each window in long gray lines like an old strip mine filled with rainwater. Little figures blundered into each other down below and asked for change. Twenty floors up, not much sound made it through the thick double-paned glass. There were no balconies at the Pillaros Hotel, no pigeons to wake you up when the sun rose and you realized you were alone again. It must have been the pigeons at the Dynasty that drove them to it. The soft cooing reminding you the rest of the world had somewhere else to be, but you were there alone for twenty dollars a night with five television stations and a watercolor print of Irish setters staring at you from the wall. There was no continental breakfast, and the free soap made your scalp itch. The Dynasty had locked all the balcony doors, but people still got through. The windows in this hotel did not open wide enough for anyone to jump.

Moses was tired of rented rooms. He didn’t want to deal with headboards rattling against the thin, non-insulated walls. He ran his hand over the medication lined up under a window. Astor Crane’s handwriting sketched out a schedule on a piece of the Pillar’s breakfast menu. According to his drug regimen, he would only sleep in two-hour sessions. There were five different pills to take in a constant rotation. A note reminding him to see Dr. Kostich for another round of radiation therapy was taped up on the glass. Moses tapped it with the rifle and then tossed the gun behind the bar. It crashed into some heart-shaped glasses and a few bottles tipped and spilled onto the floor. The carpet swallowed that too.

Moses planted his head against the glass window. He liked the cold. It made it easier to think. Mrs. Singh hadn’t looked right at him when he stepped on her face. Her eyes were closed. Moses knew he hadn’t stepped, he had stomped, but still, her eyes were closed. There were pieces of him, tiny skin cells left behind all over that house. There were footprints affixed to Mrs. Singh’s face. Everyone had seen them at Yuri’s bowling alley — watched Logan shout at Big Tina and B. Rex cry over what was left of Mrs. Singh. B. Rex was gone, but he couldn’t wipe the numbers off his neck. There was so much pus around the edges. Moses had seen it dripping down his friend’s neck. A scarf wouldn’t be able to hide the smell if those numbers got infected. They were going to slowly eat his flesh the longer B. Rex hid them from his father.

Al and Tommy Vine were still piled in the corner by the wall. Tommy was breathing, but he hadn’t moved since Astor crumpled to the floor. The bearded man had grown tired of whacking his head against the wall. His sunglasses were broken and drool slipped out the corner of his mouth. Bits of his brother still stuck to his face and poked out of his beard.

The Judge wouldn’t look at anyone. The ball sat in the corner and stared at the wall. Moses Moon picked up the piece of glass Jamie had found on the floor. He ran it over his palm but didn’t press down against the soft white skin. There were still purple bruises on his wrists. Elvira groaned in her sleep, and Moses sat down on the bed beside her. He ran a hand through her tangled blond hair and tried to undo a knot above her left ear.

The world outside looked wet. Stuttering lines of cherry light covered each body on the floor like spoiled film. Dorothy was awake now, and she remembered everyone who was in her dream. You were there, and so were you. Moses rolled the jagged glass up and down his palm. Bill Murray wasn’t saving anyone. He was standing on the sidelines. He was cracking jokes and smirking for the cameras while Logan shuddered inside a television. “We are the wretched refuse,” Bill Murray had said. He was lying — every time he spoke, it was someone else’s words.

Moses wanted to see Logan again, but all he could find were Logan’s fists and bleeding nose staring up from the ground. All he could find was Mr. Chatterton in that bone can, gasping for some air. His face was purple and Logan was trying to tell him he was sorry. He was so sorry. Everything was wet. Everything slipped through his hands. There was nothing to hold onto.

In the afterbirth of morning, Moses sat on the hotel bed and stroked his mother’s hair. He tossed the jagged bit of glass onto the plush carpet. Dorothy was talking on the screen. Moses listened to the faint noises echoing up from the streets below. He could hear sirens in the distance and someone was yelling hurry up, the bus would be here any minute, any minute now. A car failed to start and a dump truck was reversing down the alley next to the hotel. Moses focused on the yawning whine of the sirens. He stood up against the window and pressed his ear against the cold, pink glass. Elvira yawned and stretched out her arms to hug the air. She clutched what she could grab and pulled it tight against her chest. Moses Moon listened to the wailing. The moisture gathered on the glass and then began to fade. He agreed with that voice yelling in the street.

Any minute now.

Half the kids on the frozen playground had bright yellow grocery bags tucked into their boots. Jamie Garrison sat on a bench and tried to ignore the ice melting beneath him. A breeze kept snatching bits of his newspaper and tossing them into the brittle branches above him. He had to use two hands to hold down a single page. Kansas was somewhere in the mess of kids trying to climb up the slide instead of traveling down it. She was wearing an orange snowsuit and a blue scarf around her face. By Jamie’s estimate, she had fallen down the slide five or six times.

There was no snow falling, but it covered the ground in one large pockmarked sheet, disguising the dead leaves and pop bottles until April arrived and the sewer flooded with the runoff like last year. Scott’s basement would probably flood once the snow melted, but Jamie had his own place now. He was nestled on the seventh floor in the Gillman Arms with an inclusive lease. Jamie liked to run the shower even when he wasn’t home sometimes, but there was mold growing in between the tiles on his bathroom floor.

Moses Moon was still on the front page every day. The high school photo they used didn’t show the shaven head or the purple wrists Jamie remembered from the honeymoon suite. Moses Moon was smiling in this picture, his lips stretched too far. He was even wearing a shirt with a collar. The buttons were mismatched and one side hung lower than the other. The sun watched over the kids with Jamie and began to melt some of the ice on the higher branches. Droplets split phrases like aggravated assault and first-degree manslaughter into inky blots that ran down the page and darkened Jamie’s fingertips. Kansas fell down the slide again.

The cops had come by a number of times since they found Moses on the top floor of the Pillaros Hotel with two and a half dead bodies in the room. The half is what bothered the prosecution. Tommy Vine couldn’t talk; he only dribbled and wrote the name Al over and over on napkins. His diet consisted mainly of pureed foods and well mashed potatoes administered every six hours in the extended care ward at St. Joe’s. One of the prosecutors described him as a “husk” to the jury and prodded Tommy with a finger to prove his point. Objections were overruled. Without the beard, Tommy Vine looked like any another fat old frog with drooping lips. Most of his tattoos were hidden under the wrinkled brown suit two nurses forced him into after they changed his bedpan and wiped him down.