27.2 – On the Edge of Night

When Marty got back to the cabin, his bedroom door was closed, and he could hear Mike and Annie’s voices raised as they continued their perpetual argument about why they argued so much. He knocked loudly, and without waiting for an answer just opened the door and walked on in. Annie was stark naked with her back to the door, in the midst of scolding Mike about something, but Marty didn’t care. He just wanted some cleaner clothes than the ones he had on. She squealed and dove back into bed the way a startled gopher disappears into its hole. As Marty collected his change of clothes, he could hear their muffled voices debating under the covers about his intrusion, no doubt realizing that it was his room as much as Mike’s and he had every right to be there. It was terribly awkward for Marty when they had sex with him around, as if he was mere furniture and didn’t have feelings. It’s not polite to feast in front of a starving man!

The shower felt heavenly, with a fresh batch of hot water, and Marty blessed Jimbo for the hundredth time for his cleverness in installing the hot water heater, wondering where the taciturn, red headed giant was. He let the soothing water run, and didn’t care if he stayed too long and there was less for Mike & Annie. The tiny bathroom steamed up like a sauna until the shower curtain dissolved in the mist. The shower was a jury-rigged contraption above a claw-footed tub, and when Marty stepped out with his stronger right foot, he slipped a bit and tweaked his knee again. Aargh! He snarled in frustration, realizing his legs simply weren’t the same as everyone else’s. It was such an odd feeling to be moving in normal ways, and have a joint come apart slightly until it strained something. Marty didn’t know what any other pair of knees felt like, so he had nothing with which to compare, but wagered to himself that he got a shitty deal. The body is just a vehicle for the soul, he griped, and I got a lemon. Not an obvious disability, mind you, but a pernicious and subtle one that messes with my head more than my body! As he balanced in the mist and toweled off his inferior physique, Marty had the experience of seeing his scrawny body objectively for the first time. There was no full-length mirror, and it wasn’t an “out-of-body” experience, but the part of him that watches everything saw a discrete organism, and it wasn’t impressed. “This is a poor choice for a way to live,” it spoke softly everywhere at once, in a way that Marty didn’t so much hear it as feel it in his bones. That was the second time today that he’d heard – or rather, experienced – this other perspective. He lingered until the mist turned cold, hoping to get another message, and then Annie knocked loudly on the door and told him to hurry up. There was really no such thing as real privacy in a house with only one bathroom. Everyone was very polite and respectful about insisting on their fair share of the facilities.

Marty was glad that Mike & Annie would be going over the hill to watch The Shining, a new Stanley Kubrick horror film starring Jack Nicholson. They asked if he wanted to go with them, but were actually hoping he’d say no. They’d been friends a long time, but simply didn’t have much in common anymore. Mike was more focused on Annie than Marty (which was expected because, after all, she had much nicer tits). Where they used to do everything together like brothers, now they spent more and more time doing separate things. Anyway, Marty shrugged inwardly, tonight I need to be by myself. A song by the band America came to him, unbidden: “I was alone, like the silence in the night,” He recalled Marge saying something about another get-together with her friends, and teenage Susie wanted to be anywhere but home, so he’d probably have the Ol’ Rusty Bucket to himself all night. Unless he decided to drive somewhere, which would have been pointless because he had nowhere to go. “I had no home, no one close to hold me tight,” the song continued, “But you know there’s hope for you…” Marty sang the rest of the song out loud, as he strolled outside to find a patch of sun and sit in a folding chair with some ice on his knee:

“Everywhere I look, I see your face
Every step I take seems out of place
You’ve got to be a man to run the race,
I’m not a hopeless man,
So how could you say I am?”

Marty was very sentimental, and usually took the lyrics of a song way too seriously. Music often expressed his mood better than he could himself. Lately, he’d been listening to a lot of dreary songs like The Long and Winding Road, by The Beatles, Can’t Live, by Nilsson, and the lesser-known Winter Has Me in Its Grip, by Don McLean. Marty’s opinion was that getting deep into sorrowful songs was purgative; a sort of emotional blood-letting to cure mysterious ailments of the heart. The danger was identifying too closely with the lament, until you flipped around from being the listener to the sufferer. His knee was getting frozen and numb from the ice, and he massaged it disconsolately, probing to assess the extent of the damage. I’m so tired of rehabbing this stupid leg, he complained, why did I run down the ravine like that? He recalled that at the time he just didn’t care, and was hoping he might take off flying, or transform into a puff of dandelion seeds and drift away on the wind. Marty’s balloon was becoming untethered, as they say, and was ready to escape at any time.

The sun ducked behind the canyon rim as Mike & Annie came up to the driveway to leave for their movie. Marty waved them off with false good cheer, and gimped down the rocky path to his hole. He made some eggs and potatoes with lots of garlic and onions to keep away the vampires. Alone in his room, he opened the windows to let out the smell of sex, and listened to a copy of the tape he made for Michelle for Valentine’s Day. He was trying to redirect his affection to another target, but failed miserably. He nearly cried when John Denver sang Follow Me, and had to turn the stupid thing off. Thinking he needed some happier tunes, he tried drawing to Jimmy Buffet’s album, Son of a Son of a Sailor, but the lyrics to Coast of Marseilles brought the tears close to the surface again, so he turned off all music and started writing. The paper filled with a series of lovesick fortune cookies, then turned into a letter to himself about how he was feeling. He scribbled out all his dreams and disappointments, his heartaches and tragedies (some of which actually happened), and most of all, how terrible he felt about them. I’m sick and tired of feeling this way, he wrote, and then realized that the act of writing was not a release but a relapse; a symptom instead of a cure. What was the remedy for which he sought? How on earth could he stop thinking? The letter took a darker direction, and became a suicide note to himself. Instead of whining and lamenting about his condition, he resolved to do something about it. He had within his power a sure-fire treatment for all of his ailments – a game changer if ever there was one. He could stop the suffering anytime and walk through that door… but how?

Graphic images of forcefully taking his own life flashed through Marty’s mind, and he paused, pen in air, until he broke out in a cold sweat. He couldn’t be like Leaping Larry and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge! He put the pen down carefully, tore that stupid letter into a hundred pieces, and burned it in the abalone shell Mike & Annie used as an ashtray. He decided this was getting him nowhere. Nothing helps me feel better anymore, he moaned; it’s time to pull the plug on his brain, like that computer “Hal” in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He fetched a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s from under Mike’s bed, and his last act of reason was to deliberately chug the whole damn thing – like a rock star the night before entering rehab. That would at least render him incapable of harming himself – or doing much of anything else – until he could pick up the pieces of his ego that were scattered on the floor like shards of a broken mirror. The minutes ticked by, running out of Marty’s head as sand from an hourglass, until he slumped over and shut down, with another stupid song fading out in his mind: “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do…”