Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“Nothing illegal,” I managed, my breath short, my voice strained. “Anxiety medication, prescribed. Can you please—” He rolled off of me. “I might be having a reaction,” I said. “The first week you’re on them…” I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “They can make you more anxious,” I said.

He closed the door—“The fuck!”—and walked into the kitchen.

“Do you have any Advil?” I asked.

“Seagram’s,” he said, coming back with two plastic cups. “It works better than anything I’ve got in the bathroom.”

I sat up to accept my drink and took a seat in a rattan papasan chair that was so big I couldn’t keep my legs on the floor. After my first sip on an empty stomach, I felt like I was sitting in a giant’s cupped hand.

Hickey sat across from me in a massive high-backed wicker chair, the type I’d always associated with Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party.

“Now, how about you tell me what this is all about?” he said.

And so I told him about the packets of Sweetness #9 I’d been receiving, and the take-over offer, and my suspicions that Better Health and Flavorings was trying to intimidate me.

“So you’re the one who sent me that packet of sweetener in the mail?” he said.

“I thought you were their muscle. The bad cop to Willingham’s good.”

“Christ, did you even think to check if I was still working for them?”

I mentioned my research online, but he just snorted and said he’d been let go—“for cause, they say”—more than a year ago.

“I was coming up on my thirty-year anniversary,” he said, “and they wanted to keep me from getting all the benefits that would entail. My package had been grandfathered in, you know, back when we split from Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark. A much sweeter deal than what they’re offering today. Anyway, then some asshole calls me into his cramped, windowless office and says I’m downloading porn on my company computer, and sure, some of what they find on my hard drive is mine, but what the hell, David? I’m a single man. I gotta buy a separate computer just so I can masturbate? There’s an environmental principle at stake, you know?” He drank some more. “And that shit they tried to pin on me? Blondes with big tits? What am I, fifteen years old? My tastes are more refined. I’ve lived a life. You think I still get off on blondes with big tits?”

He finished his drink and went into the kitchen for another, speaking to me over the counter that separated it from the living room. He’d been treating his house as a cash machine, he said. “I finally had to declare bankruptcy last January, about the time I moved here and started pissing off my neighbors by playing Iron Butterfly at four in the morning. Now I’m so piss poor I can’t afford my monthly prostitute, let alone a proper doctor.” He poured plenty of Seagram’s 7 and added a splash of lemon-lime soda. “My mother tells me I’m an alcoholic, my father would like to bury my other leg in the backyard, and my dog — Christ, I’m like a country song — he died this summer, as fat as a cow. You think your life’s bad?” He sat in his Huey Newton chair, sad and impervious. “Look in my freezer and you’ll find a Swanson’s frozen dinner that they make especially for sad fucks like me on Thanksgiving Day. People have been afraid to shop? I been going three, four times a day, just to feel the rush. Been picking up every box in the store — tampons, dog biscuits, you name it — just trying to find a winner. Here.” He reached down past the cushion of his chair and tossed something to me, a black blur that caused me to spill my drink as I went to catch it. A gun.

“This is a gun, Hickey!” My lap was moist from my spilled drink; I held the thing in two hands, not trusting my finger near the trigger.

“Put me out of my misery,” he said. “Go ahead, I won’t mind.”

“God, no! Hickey!” I thought to put the gun on the table, but it was too cluttered with beer cans and takeout food. “Is this because of Sweetness #9?”

“What?”

“Your guilt. Because you were there at its inception. Some people would say we have blood on our hands.”

He laughed. “Weren’t you listening to me? My life is for shit. Look over there.” I followed his gaze to a large open brown box on the floor. “Inside, you’ll find a month’s worth of ready-made food. My doctor said I should get it on account of the diabetes. But I couldn’t stomach it for more than a few days. Not because of the flavor; the food was fine. But the eating out of a box. Delivered in the mail.” He shook his head. “I’m like a stray dog, eating just to survive.”

He took another sip of his drink, then smiled. “So if you’ve always thought of yourself as a metaphorical killer?” He motioned to the gun in my lap. “Pull the trigger and feel what it’s like to be the real thing. You’d be doing me a favor. Really.”

I put the gun down on the floor. “You’re just sad. It’s the holidays.” I thought to invite him to my place, but didn’t know what Betty would say. I tried a kind of hopeful smile. “You know the holidays.”

I stood then, thinking I shouldn’t leave, but not wanting to stay. “I’ll just see about that Advil,” I said, going into the bathroom after he told me to help myself. I found another gun in there (he had seven in all, I’d learn in the papers), this one on the shelf over the toilet, next to a scented candle. It was a six-shooter, big and silver, like something from a cowboy movie. I reached for it and couldn’t resist doing a pantomime in the mirror. The Quick-Draw Artist. The second time I did this the shot rang out, and though I looked to my gun and then the mirror, believing it must have come from me, I saw neither a wisp of smoke nor a shattered reflection.

I rushed out to find Hickey flung back in his chair like that man in the old Memorex ad. The gun was down in his lap, blown there by the force of the shot, and when I stepped around to the backside of his chair, I saw the hole in the wicker ribbing, and then, more memorably, the raw one, like some molten soup, in the back of his head.

At that very moment, neighbors must’ve been looking away from their television sets or up from their breakfasts. Did you hear that? I ran on instinct, a primitive bodily flight, and was halfway down the stairs before I realized I was still holding the six-shooter. I thought to toss it into the deep end of the pool, but I was afraid of fingerprints, thinking mine must be on file somewhere as a result of my stay at Greystone Park. A door slammed closed behind me, and then I remembered I’d handled the gun that Hickey had used. But there was no time to go back, so I hurried out through the courtyard and then was pulling at the door of my car as I heard a voice cry out behind me, a voice that might as well have been my conscience rising up against me after all these years: “Stop him! He’s getting away!”

What can be said of what follows? A comedy of errors. I hit not one but two cars trying to get out of the parking lot, then sped through the first stop sign, narrowly missing a bicyclist.

For several blocks I drove without knowing where I was or where I was going. Then, as I neared a four-way stop, I saw a policeman driving toward me. He sped through his stop sign, siren blasting and lights all a-twirl, and parked at an angle in front of me, blocking off my escape. There had been a report of shots fired, a speeding Volvo fleeing the scene, a man in pajamas and a bathrobe with a gun. As he tumbled out of his car, drawing his weapon, I scrambled to open my bottle of lorazepam. “Hands in the air!” he said, and so I threw my fists into the roof, spilling pills everywhere — on my lap, and around the gun I only now remembered I’d dropped on the passenger seat.