The Visible Filth Read online

  He tried to push the fight out of his mind. The police finally did stroll in, well after Alicia and Jeffrey had gone home and Doug, the graveyard bartender, had taken over. Will had waited for them with growing impatience, nursing a beer in the corner. When they arrived, they took his statement, gave the place a cursory look, and ambled out again, looking fairly unimpressed by it all. Which was all to the good. Nobody wanted on-duty cops hanging out in the bar. Just having the squad car parked out front – pale white in the dark, the reflective NOPD lettering on the doors flaring into a bright blue warning in the headlights of every passing car – was murder on business. When Will headed home, the bar had been empty, and Doug was leaned back against the counter, reading yesterday’s newspaper.

  This fight was Eric’s worst; he’d taken real damage from that broken bottle. Surely this would slow him down just a little bit. At the very least, it might keep him from drinking while he waited for the stitches to heal. The thought brought Will some peace. He’d make a point of dropping in on him the next day, to make sure he’d wised up and gone to the emergency room.

  Feeling restless, he wandered through the living room, navigating the darkness by muscle memory, and opened the door into the bedroom. Carrie was asleep, the sheets kicked down around her ankles in the heat. She ended up knocking half the covers to the floor every night, but couldn’t sleep with the air conditioner on because it made her too cold. It was a battle Will had long ago surrendered, having resigned himself to making do with the weak cooling effort of the ceiling fan. She was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with Captain America’s shield, hiked up around her waist, revealing a pair of white granny-panties which, once, he had found both odd and charming. Her short blond hair was rucked up against the pillow, and her face had the defenseless, wide-open innocence of deep sleep. It was easiest to love her when she was like this. He touched her cheek, hooked a strand of hair back over her ear.

  He stood there for a moment, trying to decide if he was tired enough to join her. But the clangor of the evening still rang in his blood. He went back to the kitchen and grabbed another beer from the fridge.

  A faint musical chime sounded somewhere, far away: a descending spill of notes in a minor key, like a refrain from gloomy lullaby. He stopped in mid-stoop, the cold air from the refrigerator washing over him. There was nothing more, so he brought his beer back to the kitchen table and settled into his chair.

  The sound came again, and this time he felt a vibration in his pants pocket. It was the cell phone from the bar, the one left behind by someone in that crowd of kids. He slipped it free and examined it: a bright yellow smartphone, fairly new judging by its condition, with a series of sparkling heart stickers affixed to its outer rim. The desktop was a picture of some far eastern mountain, snow-capped, radiant with reflected sunlight. He slid his finger across the screen to access the display, and there was a notification of two text messages received.

  A momentary hesitation flickered through his mind before he looked at them. Privacy be damned; she should have been more careful if she didn’t want him to look.

  The messages were from somebody named Garrett:

  I think something is in here with me.

  And then, sent two minutes later: I’m scared.

  Will put the phone down and dropped his hands, staring at it. The fog in his head dissipated somewhat, and he was surprised to feel his heart beating. The screen remained lit for a few seconds, and then blinked back to its inert state. He sat silently, unsure of what to do next. A sporadic ticking sounded somewhere in the darkness, beyond his little island of light. A scuttling roach. The phone chimed again, vibrating raucously against the tabletop. He leaned over and looked at the message.

  It knows I’m here. It’s trying to talk. Please come.

  “What the fuck,” Will whispered. He picked up the phone and scrolled up through Garrett’s messages. Maybe this was a game. Maybe they went back to the bar, knew he had the phone, and were fucking with him. Before these texts, there were only six messages exchanged between them. Arranging a study session for class, a mention of coffee; simple banalities. Nothing like this.

  They were messing with him. He texted a reply: You can pick up the phone tomorrow night at the bar. I go in at six. Send.

  Enough time passed that he figured it was all over. He took another pull from his beer and decided it was just about time to join Carrie in bed after all. The roach scuttled somewhere over toward the cabinets, but his normal sense of revulsion was dimmed by his weariness, and his irritation at the events of the night. To his own surprise, his brain kept cycling around to Jeffrey. Again and again. Launching himself into the fray and maybe tipping the balance in Eric’s favor. The look in Alicia’s eyes afterwards: she’d said she was pissed, and she probably was a little, but there was a heat in that look that did not come from anger. It made Will feel small.

  The phone clamored again, making him jump. “God damn you,” he said to it, and picked it up to see what it had to say.

  Tina?

  He sighed and texted back, against his own better judgment. No, not Tina, asswipe. I have her phone. He pressed send, and immediately felt a swelling of guilt. Why the hostility? Maybe the guy really didn’t know.

  Who are you? Get Tina.

  She left it at the bar. I’m the bartender. Tell her to pick it up tomorrow night. And stop fucking around. Send.

  He shut the ringer off, and set it on the dishtowel from the stove, to dull its vibrations. It sat there, a cheery yellow rectangle in the dark cave of his kitchen. He finished off the beer, trying to keep his mind unanchored, free-floating; but Jeffrey and Alicia kept bobbing to the surface, thwarting his efforts. He imagined them entangled together in bed, a pale twist of limbs and sweat. Something dark turned over inside him, and he felt the sting of shame prickle his skin.

  The scuttling sound intensified, and the roach veered into the light. It froze there, as if realizing its error. Its antennae searched the air, trying to gauge the severity of its predicament. Will considered the effort involved in getting up to kill it; it would be long gone before he even got close. He stomped his foot, trying to scare it. The roach did not flinch, brash as a rooster, unmoved by the sudden trembling of the world beneath it.

  The phone vibrated quietly on its dishtowel. Will didn’t even bother to look at it. He got up from the table, placing the empty beer bottles into the recycling bin with a muted clink, and headed to bed. The roach disappeared under the refrigerator. Everything was clean, orderly, and quiet.

  WHEN HE AWOKE, Carrie was already up, and the smell of coffee and frying bacon floated into the bedroom like a summons from God. He lay in the sweet fog of half sleep, relishing the bliss of it. He listened to Carrie’s footsteps as she moved around in the kitchen, listened to her hum something quietly to herself, and felt a surprising well of gratitude for this fine life. He imagined Eric waking up in whatever grim hovel he’d retreated to last night, his face crusty with blood, bright with pain. Closing his eyes, he stretched in the cool sheets and derived a wicked pleasure from the contrast.

  He heard the clink of plates on the countertop, and knew that it was time to haul himself back into the world.

  She was still wearing only her t-shirt, her long legs gold and lean in the early light. He came up to her from behind, full-mast, and wrapped her in his arms, pressing himself against her and burying his nose in her hair.

  “Good morning, pretty girl,” he said.

  She paused, smiled, and leaned her head to the side, baring her neck to him, which he dutifully kissed. A splinter of memory flickered into light, his shameful jealousy over Alicia, and he blew it away like ash.

  “Good morning,” she said. She reached behind herself and wrapped her fingers around his cock through his boxers. “I thought you were going to miss breakfast.”

  “Madness.”

  “The eggs are going to burn.”

  He released her with a show of reluctance. She gave him a final squeeze and abandoned
him to rescue the eggs from the range. He shambled to the coffee pot and poured himself a mug. The hours ahead began to unfold in his mind, revealing little responsibilities, little parcels of free time. He began to organize his day.

  “Whose phone is that?”

  He tensed. Her tone was light, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t on dangerous ground. “Some chick’s,” he said. “She left it at the bar.”

  “So you brought it home?”

  “I forgot I had it. There was a fight. She dropped it, and I was distracted.”

  Carrie scraped eggs onto two plates, lifted bacon still sopping with grease from a frying pan to join them. She sat at the table with him and together they ate in what he imagined was a comfortable silence.

  “Was Alicia there with her new boyfriend?” she asked, after a while.

  “Yeah. They want to have a double date with us.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “I know. Maybe we could rope in a few more people and have a triple date, or even a mass date.”

  “Now it sounds like you’re talking about murder.”

  “Right?”

  Carrie reached across the table and pulled the phone toward her. Will felt an unaccountable twinge of anxiety. “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Trying to find out whose phone it is, dummy. Why, should I not look? Am I going to see something I don’t want to see?”

  “No. Why would you say that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not lying about the phone, Carrie.”

  “I know. I believe you.”

  But an unidentifiable discomfort had been introduced between them, which neither would directly acknowledge and which unfolded invisibly over the table like a sick bloom. Will got up and took his dish to the trash, where he scooped the remains of his breakfast. If Carrie noticed or cared, she gave no sign. Instead she took this as her cue to access the phone and begin her investigations.

  Will was looking at the coffee pot, contemplating the merits of a second cup, when he heard Carrie yelp.

  She put the phone on the table and pushed it away from her. “Fuck,” she said. And then she grabbed it again. “Who the fuck were you talking to last night?”

  “What do you mean? What’s going on?”

  “You were texting someone on this thing last night.” She delivered it like an accusation. He was about to snap a reply when she turned the face of it to him and he saw the last two texts, delivered after he had abandoned the conversation.

  The first:

  PLEASE

  The second, delivered about ten minutes later, was simply a picture. Will squinted at it, couldn’t make it out. He took the phone from her and held it closer to his face. A cold wave pulsed from his heart. It was a picture of half a dozen bloody teeth. They were arranged in a cluster on what appeared to be a wooden table; the roots were broken on most of them, as if they’d been wrenched out.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  He considered it for a moment. He swiped his thumb across the screen and brought it back to the main menu. Weather, App Store, Google, Camera, Messages, Maps. All of it banal. Nothing on here, it seemed, to personalize it. He wondered what he would see if he checked the rest of her messages.

  “Don’t mess with it, Will. Take it to the cops. Somebody got hurt last night.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they’re just fucking with me.”

  She rose without a word and brought her plate to the sink. She kept her back to him as she ran the water over it.

  “You know what? It’s Wednesday; Derek will be in after his shift. I’ll show it to him.”

  Derek was a cop in the Sixth District. He usually came in with his partner after a shift and spent an hour or two there. He’d saved Will’s bacon on more than one occasion: scaring off drug dealers, helping people out the door who didn’t want to leave, and just generally making it known that Rosie’s was protected. He was a good guy, and Will was happy to have him as a regular. He felt much better about the idea of showing the phone to him than bringing it into the precinct office, where he was pretty sure he’d be laughed out of the building.

  Carrie seemed mollified by this. She shut the water off and faced him, leaning against the sink. “What if she comes back to claim it first?”

  “I’ll just tell her we haven’t found it. I’ll let the cops deal with it.”

  She thought about that. “Yeah. Okay. That seems good.”

  He put the phone back onto the table and pushed it away from him. “So did you get your paper written last night?”

  She sighed, as if already exhausted. “Mostly. I have to go over it again before class. Probably rewrite the ending, since I was a zombie by the time I got to it. Then turn it in and hope Steve likes it.”

  Steve: her English Lit professor. It rankled him that she called him by his first name, but she claimed all the students did. He liked an “informal learning environment.” Well, how progressive of him. The fucker. Carrie had been agonizing over a paper on T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” for almost two months, and he was sick of hearing about it. She’d never fretted this much over a paper for any other professor. “I’m sure he’ll love it,” he said, making no effort to hide the sourness he felt. He knew it was petty, but it felt good anyway.

  She cast him a look which he could not interpret. “He better. It’s a quarter of my grade.”

  “Right.”

  “What about you? What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like I should check up on Eric.”

  “Why?”

  “He was the one in the fight last night. He got cut up pretty good.”

  “Well there’s a shock. Let him hide under his rock. I’m sure he’s fine. People like that always are.”

  “People like what?”

  “The ones who start shit. It’s always everyone else who suffers.”

  “I just want to make sure he’s okay. Concern for others is a common human trait. You’ll learn that about us in time.”

  She walked up to where he sat, standing over him and pressing herself close. “Asshole,” she said, and kissed him. He felt himself rise to her, and she grinned as she pushed his hands away. “I have to work.”

  “Evil,” he said, pulling her down for another kiss first, then watching as she went to her office in the next room, which was a calamity of stacked papers, earmarked books, discs, DVDs, and zip drives. She settled into her chair in the midst of all of this, as comfortable in the apparent chaos as a fish in its grotto. She clicked the computer on, cradling a mug in both hands while it booted up. Her t-shirt gathered at her waist and Will was briefly mesmerized by the golden cast of her legs in the morning sunlight.

  “You’re beautiful, you know,” he said.

  She gave him a sweet smile. “Good boy.”

  He shambled into the bathroom and started the shower, trying to decide what to do to fill his day until he had to be back at work. There was a lot of empty space until then, and empty spaces suited him just fine.

  AS HE WALKED through the dense morning heat, heading toward the bar and Eric’s apartment, Steve nested in the middle of Will’s mind, bending every other thought toward him like some terrible star. He seemed to represent an inevitable end, and though Will knew himself well enough to understand that this feeling was as much a product of his own insecurity as of anything else, he couldn’t escape its pull.

  Will had spent his life skimming over the surface of things, impatient with the requirements of engagement. He told himself that this was because he was open to experience in a way most people weren’t, that you sapped the potential for spontaneity from life if you regimented your hours with obligation. This rationalization came upon him in college, shortly after he dropped out, converting all that money invested by his parents into so much tinder for the fire.

  Most of the time he believed it.

  And why not? Women liked him. He was tall, and he stay
ed fit without too much effort. He was generally cheerful and had an easy charisma. As long as he had a woman in his life and reasonable access to booze and the occasional line of coke, he figured he’d be okay. He’d been working as a bartender since dropping out of school six or seven years ago, and he believed he might just be able to live out the next fifty years of his life in this state of calibrated contentment.

  He loved Carrie, he supposed, but love was a tide that came and went. Who knew how long she would stay with him? She was ambitious, and he could tell it annoyed her that he wasn’t. He figured her patience would wear out sometime in the next six months. Another reason that being a bartender was such an ideal job. The girls grew like fruits on a tree. You practically just had to reach out and pluck one.

  Life so far seemed like a kind of dance to him, and he was pleased to discover that he was pretty good at it. If there was something hollow underneath it all, a well of fear that sometimes seemed to pull everything else into it and leave him clutching the stone rim for fear of falling into himself, well, that was just part of being human, he supposed. That’s what the booze was for.

  This line of thought brought him back around to Alicia, and her irritating infatuation with her little hipster douchebag beau-du-jour, Jeffrey. Alicia played the field even more shamelessly than he ever had, and while that intimidated him at first, he eventually came around to admiring her for it. She’d sit at the bar by herself and they’d bullshit about work, her latest boyfriend, his newest girlfriend. When Carrie came along and stuck around longer than most, Alicia had the good sense to spare her from attack, without even having to be asked. Will found that impressive. They hadn’t ever slept together – a fact which apparently never crossed Alicia’s mind, but which lodged like a seed in his brain and had since sprouted a snarl of tangled roots, until it was hard for him to think about anything else whenever she was around.

  He’d always figured it was just a matter of time, and he was content to wait until the moment was right – when Carrie was gone, or when they were just drunk enough that it didn’t matter. But then Jeffrey happened along, and all of a sudden things were different. He’d known it the first time she pushed back at him when he started wondering aloud if hipsters could only have sex with an ironic attachment, and whether that attachment required batteries.