Page 27

27

Death Rattle

Jake

I slurp my coffee and I pace, and twitch, and sweat. Grant’s penthouse turns dark and then light and now dark again, and the green numbers of my alarm clock are like the eyes of some nocturnal creature come to scavenge. I haven’t showered or shaved since getting back from Las Vegas.

You need to figure out what you want to do with the time you have left.

The building sleeps. Grant sleeps. Everyone sleeps, except for me. And now it’s Monday again, and I can finally see her, if only on her terms. I shower. I shave. My skin looks pale and shiny in the mirror.

You need to figure out what makes you happy.

I hear the noises of Grant stirring in the next room. He sneezes. He coughs. He mutters to himself—practicing lines he’ll use in court today. He pauses to allow the jury to gasp. He slams his hands on the bathroom vanity for emphasis. “Objection… objection …” He tries it a few different ways until he settles on, “Ob jec tion, Your Honor!”

He minces into the open living area I keep clean for him, in the suit I collected from the drycleaners for him, and his eyes settle on the breakfast I’ve prepared for him. He smiles a winsome, toothy grin at me and digs into his egg whites.

You take better care of him than yourself.

“You look like shit,” he says conversationally, and I make my mind up in an instant.

“I’m moving out.”

Egg whites tumble out of his mouth and back onto his plate. “What? Fuck off. What?”

“I’m getting my own place.”

“You can’t be this fragile! I just meant you look like you’re sick!”

My coffee is cold. I pour myself a fresh cup, and I top up Grant’s while I’m at it, but he accidentally knocks it off the table, the black liquid splattering the white floor.

“You can’t . Who will cook and clean? I can’t do those things. And you’re supposed to get the sauna repaired—”

I stare at the coffee splatter on the floor, and in the pattern, I see a man whiling his short, pathetic life away blending into the walls, letting others be the main character.

“It’s my life, Grant.”

“You can’t do this to me.”

“Have a life?”

He loses it. He swipes the plate and cutlery onto the floor with the coffee.

“You’re abandoning me!” He clutches his head like the pain is incomprehensible. This is why he needs to stick to dolls.

It takes all of ten minutes to pack a bugout bag while Grant disintegrates in the kitchen. I grab a key fob from the drawer and leave. In the basement parking, I click the fob button until I find the car, get in, and go. But where to go? Work doesn’t start for another two hours. I drive up- and downtown. I cross the bridge, and then turn around and drive back again. I feel prickly and sweaty. My hands are white, so I pull my gloves on. I find myself passing the building that houses Spencer & Sterns on autopilot. A block away is an overpass, and underneath, down by the river, a nasty, deserted stretch of urban wasteland littered with traces of tent living. I park the car and watch the river below—brown, sluggish, foamy. It doesn’t look like water. It looks like some fluid that would spill out of a sick person, or something Aunt Laura mops up at the end of the day at the funeral home. If I was wrung like a rag, this is what would come out.