By BILL COTTER
“I knew this guy once, called Andre,” Gary said, striking a strike-anywhere match on the zipper of his fly. He lit a Salem and buried the match in a clay flowerpot at his end of his porch step. He looked at me, not for permission to continue, but as though he were inviting me to dare him not to.
“Andre,” I said, kind of liking the feel of the name on my teeth.
It was in the middle of that lonesome week between Christmas and New Year’s, when the failures of the last twelve months line themselves up like convicts in my head.
“Andre was from Shreveport,” said Gary, sucking on his Salem. “He talked funny. Falk you, Catholic, he would say to me. He smiled a lot. He had manic depression.”
“It’s called ‘bipolar’ now,” I said, resisting the urge to bat at the cloud of menthol drifting my way. “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”
“I’m not anything.”
I didn’t like Gary much anymore. I used to think he was okay, when I first moved in next door more than a decade ago, but no longer. He hadn’t changed, wouldn’t change.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m nothing, too.”
I had changed, though. I’d gone to see an Armenian hypnotist at St. Garabed’s, over by Florida Boulevard, along with fifty other Baton Rouge cigarette addicts who had thirty-five bucks and a desire to quit. After a shouty monologue, the hypnotist blew hard on each of our foreheads, once, like we were candles. I haven’t smoked since, and that was four months ago.
I had no respect for smokers now, especially Gary. He thought he was right about everything anyway. Everybody from Lake Charles thought they knew the whole catalogue of the universe by heart. He didn’t have a cell phone or email and used an old AAA map to get to places he didn’t know how to get to. It was folded up on the dashboard of his Bondo-flecked Valiant, along with a collection of parking tickets and those medallions they give out in twelve-step programs for sobriety anniversaries. Thirty-one years, thirty-one medallions. He’d quit drinking at sixteen, he told me once. That made him forty-seven now, I guess, but he looked older. He got a lot of action for a fella his age, he bragged to me more than once, and I believed him, too. I would see them out of my kitchen window, women my age and younger sometimes, like from Shenandoah or Old Jefferson or places like that, lurching down his front steps into the late-morning Louisiana glare, squinting, trying to feed their highlighted ponytails back into scrunchies, looking like they’d just been experienced.
I had never been one of those girls. First of all, I was from Houma, and that was a strike against me, a filthy knuckleball nobody could hit. Gary had never shown any interest in me. He wouldn’t swing at a knuckleball. Maybe he would’ve a few years ago, if conditions had been right. Like a power outage or something. Cans of Sterno on the tables by his ratty leather couch, big clots of hail coming down, killing the silence that usually prevailed between us. No hailstorm ever came, though; no power failure. The initial conditions for a tryst had never been met, and now were less likely than ever. Somehow, I was Gary’s neighbor, and neighbor only. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. Come to think of it, I couldn’t recall Gary ever even resting his eyes on me.
I thought about this. I felt gratified and insulted at once. Then the feelings passed. That was how it was to be around him. I didn’t know why I kept hanging around, but I did. Today my excuse had been I needed some Advil for a toothache. A deep, worrisome ache in a lower molar. It made me fearful. Come to find out Gary didn’t have any Advil, just acetaminophen, which doesn’t do shit for toothaches, or anything else for that matter. It was expired, too. Tiny computer numbers stamped on the label told me it had been sitting on a glass shelf in Gary’s mirrored bathroom cabinet for more than a decade.
He told me to sit down and he’d tell me a story about a tooth.
Gary was pretty talkative, for a change. He got that way every now and then. I think it was the post-Christmas dead zone. There was no real winter here in this forgotten stretch of the Baton Rouge hinterland, just summer and Christmas. Then summer again. Fire, frost, fire.
But it was warm this week, and the bugs were awake and wheeling around the streetlamps in their private ellipses.
“Bipolar,” sneered Gary, combing his short white beard with his fingertips. “It was manic depression then. This was the 1990s, the end of the decade. Andre didn’t have little kiddie-pool mood swings, like everybody now. He was either frozen in a black muck, unable to talk or eat, or he was high on that meth the brain makes in crazy people. He’d pitch himself naked up on highway medians, huffing xylene, waving stolen credit cards and Japanese swords at the whooshing rush-hour traffic. None of that fragile bipolar horseshit, no in-between, Linda. You heard me?”
“I heard you.”
Gary didn’t use my name often; maybe this was even the first time. It got my attention. I wondered briefly if he was drunk; if it was the end of that run of twelve-step medallions. Would he look at me, too, focus on me?
“Yeah,” he said, scooting his knees up and crossing his arms. His elbow looked as sharp as a carpenter’s square and was pointed right at me. “You know how carbon dioxide is either a gas or a solid? No liquid state? Andre was like that. He would sublime, go from one extreme to the other. No conforming to the boundaries of the world. I’m telling you.”
He did not look at me. I don’t even know what he’d see if he did.
Gary smoked the Salem down to the point where the bitterness overtook the burn and flicked the head off. It landed in the gravel of his driveway, glowing there like a stunned firefly in the dying late-December light.
“You’d see him coming down the hall—”
“Who?” I said. “What hall?”
“Andre. I’m still talking about Andre. The main corridor. That hall. Of the hospital.”
“What hospital?”
“I don’t know. What do you care? What do you know about mental institutions? You researching a paper? Writing a novel?”
“A novel, but not about that.”
I immediately wished I hadn’t said anything. The book had been a secret. I hadn’t told anybody about it, even hinted at it, up till now, not that there was really anybody to confess to anyway. Confess, like writing a novel was a sin. Maybe it was. It was garbage, a wasteland of commas and stolen imagery, all jammed together, undercooked. Runny. It was silly and ordinary, an outlet mall of a book. There was no way to end it. It had no beginning. It just went on and on. I hated it. Just thinking about it made me want to drown myself in Bayou Goula, or some similar lost place that they didn’t even put on maps.
“You’re always writing a novel, ever since I knew you. You ever finish one?”
“I’ve finished four,” I said. I was surprised Gary remembered anything about my writing life. About me at all. It was true, though: four novels done, plus a book’s worth of short stories. They were all scattered over three dormant laptops and one live one. And they were out in space, somewhere. I always emailed them to myself.
“You never let me read one.”
My tooth ached like a phantom limb. I wanted a cigarette. Even now I could feel the hypnotist’s breath on my forehead, morgue-cool and humid at once. But no. I wasn’t going to smoke, not now, not ever. I had that. My lungs were healing, at least.
The next best thing was wine, I guess. If you can’t smoke a Winston, then you can drink some red wine.
My sister Carrie had sent me a wine advent calendar, a big box shaped like a child’s drawing of a happy home, with twenty-four little windows set in the front of it. Inside of each was a two-hundred-milliliter bottle of wine. I had drunk all the reds. The whites were lined up along the sill over the sink in the kitchen, flanked on either side by a couple of depressed lucky bamboos in black plastic pots. The bottle of prosecco, the prize for lasting till Christmas Eve, was now lying on its side on the bottom shelf of my refrigerator, waiting for me to finish my novel and drink it by myself.
The empty wine-house box, now subtracted of wine and standing with all its little wine windows open on the floor in the middle of my dark hallway, was too depressing to even think about.
I felt like that wine-house box sometimes: cashiered, empty. A sturdy discard, meant to protect delicate things from the savagery of the world. A sheath.
“Well,” I said, feeling sorry for myself, annoyed that I was trying to draw a literary analogy between myself and a box. What the hell. “No one has, I guess.”
“No one has what?” said Gary, digging in his pockets for something.
“Read one of my books.”
Why couldn’t I shut up?
“Yeah,” he said. “Well.”
Gary started rolling an old silver fifty-cent piece over his knuckles like a magician or a degenerate poker player.
“I can’t feel my hands all of a sudden,” he said, stopping his act, the coin balanced between the knuckles of his ring finger. “Or my wrists. Feels like I’m rubbing the stumps of my arms against the night.”
This was how Gary changed the subject.
“Night?” I said, annoyed still, but allowing the annoyance to shift from myself to Gary. “It’s still dusk, man. There’s even still some purple-pink in the sky, over there, see? Between those sycamores in the west. Not night. Why rush it?”
“The sun always sets in the west,” he said.
Gary spat in the driveway, dropped his silver coin into a pocket of his overalls. “Except on Venus. It rotates the other way. Same with some other planet, too—I forget which.”
“I gotta go to Walgreens,” I said, tired of Gary’s weird ways, his sudden conversational hairpins, his artificial psychosomatic infirmities. And my tooth hurt. “Want anything?”
But I made no move to go anywhere. Gary continued.
“Andre,” he said, shaking out his hands, like he had dipped them in week-old dishwater. “Like I was saying. You’d see him coming down the hall. It was always three of us sitting there, across from the nurses’ station, smoking. Me, plus this angry, divorced lady from Canada called Josie, and Cal, this punk-rock kid with a mohawk who’d killed his parents. We’d see Andre, loping down the hall, eyes flashing, arms swinging like halyards. ‘Look,’ I’d say. ‘It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s… Supermanic.’ We’d laugh and laugh; it never got old. Andre would smile and tell me to go falk myself and disappear into the coffee area. He was in charge of the coffee urn in the mornings. It was his job, his life, that fucking urn.”
It was dark now, just like that, no more color in the sky. Baton Rouge was bright color, then it was black night.
Just like that.
I looked over at my house. I had left all the lights on; the place glowed like a jack-o’-lantern. I had been renting it, all bills paid, for what seemed like my entire adult life. The landlady, Miss Florence, had only raised the rent one time, by twenty bucks, and she had apologized for that. I think she was afraid I’d leave and she’d be stuck with the place, a porous firetrap and sanctuary for all kinds of outdoor life. Palmetto bugs ran everything, the real landladies. Ivy snuck through the cracks between the floorboards and climbed the walls and the lamp in the bedroom and the pedestal sink in the bathroom. Some family of little creatures had lived in the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom the whole time, chirring and clicking and tumbling. I was used to it all now. I even liked the ivy. The boys I brought over liked it, too, though the palmetto bugs were too much for most of them. Palmetto bugs ran this part of Louisiana, always landing in your hair with a hiss and making you scream and dance. Those boys would dress fast, angry, revolted, and they’d be gone, down the steps, vanishing behind the slammed doors of their Chevelles and Mustangs. The perfume of burnt rubber would hang around in the swamp air till the next boy showed up, grinning, hands full of rum and jeans full of promise.
Every now and then, a boy would stay, and I’d think he might be the one. It never worked out that way. They always found some other reason to leave and not come back. They’d scoop up their rum and pull up their jeans, and my hallway would be empty and quiet.
I never told any of them about the books I’d written.
But I didn’t need boys. I needed what they provided sometimes, but not the boy itself.
Itself. I smiled in the dark.
When I first moved in next door, I had thought that Gary might be the one. I liked his Iggy Pop body, all that gristle under his graying hide. I had wanted to chew on him, once upon a time, like those planks of drugstore taffy you could get for nothing when we were all kids.
“What happened to him?” I said, more to myself than to Gary.
“Andre?” said Gary, as lost in thought as me. “He had this tooth, an upper canine. All his other teeth were the ordinary beige of chronic neglect, but this tooth was perfect, white and sharp. Yeah. He told me it was dead, that perfect tooth, and would fall out one day. He was going to bury it at Ian Curtis’s gravesite.”
“Who?”
I knew who Ian Curtis was, but I wanted to see how Gary described him. If he was dismissive or disrespectful, I could get up and leave and go buy my goddamn Advil.
“The guy from Joy Division, the epileptic suicide. Andre loved Joy Division. It was the only normal, sane thing about him. Who didn’t love Joy Division? Who didn’t think about killing their own selves after Ian died? Fuck me.”
I spent a lot of time reading about famous suicides, especially creative people. All the artists and writers and musicians and thinkers who’d done themselves in. I aspired to this, in a way. But I was not an artist. I wrote, but I was not a writer. My suicide would be meaningless, not even worthy of an internet footnote. My sister Carrie would have cards of Saint Gretchen printed up, hand them out to the five people at my funeral, and that would be that. Maybe there would be nobody there except Carrie. My sister did love me, for some reason. She had spent a lot on that wine-house calendar. I loved feeling sorry for myself. It made me feel like a living machine.
“I think Andre died of exposure,” said Gary, contemplative in the cast orange glow from my house. “In Ontario. I don’t know the details, or even if he did it on purpose. His brother called here once, years later. This was probably around the time you moved in. I guess Andre had mentioned me in a journal he kept. The brother found it, read it, looked me up on the internet or whatever—not many Gary Quedlinbergs out there. He wanted to know what I remembered about his brother. I didn’t tell him the Supermanic story. I didn’t mention the tooth. I sensed he wanted his own memories sanitized or ennobled, maybe. I told him Andre was a fine nine-ball player. He was, too. He was better when he was manic than when he was in the depths, but always good. I couldn’t beat him.”
I tried to imagine Gary talking on the phone with the brother of a dead man. I tried to imagine Gary playing pool in the basement of a mental hospital. I tried to imagine him as a sixteen-year-old, drinking two gallons of Kahlua and waking up in a truck-stop shower stall in another country, a story he’d told more than once. But I could not. No images came to mind. All I could picture was the orange magma rolling and churning inside my molar.
I looked at Gary, in the buggy porch light.
“The brother was a good guy, I thought,” said Gary. “I liked talking to him. But finally there wasn’t anything more to say.”
Gary stood up. He walked into his house and closed the door quietly. The porch light went out. I was alone for a long time. Then I set out on the twenty-block walk to Walgreens, my eyes getting used to the dark shell arching over Baton Rouge, until I could finally pick out the shapes of the tops of the barren sycamores reaching for the black of the end-of-December night.
When I got home I Googled how many Advils one could take for a toothache. Ten seemed to be about the limit. I ate twelve. I drank the prosecco I was saving in the refrigerator. I opened up the file of my helpless, hopeless novel; read a few lines; closed it.
I lay down on my unmade bed. I shut my eyes and tried to remember what my own face looked like. It would not come. I had been told that the dimple at the end of my nose deepened when I smiled; that my brows arched like the condemned standing against a pocked firing-squad wall; that my round cheeks invited a pinch. No one had ever pinched them that I could remember. I could picture all these disparate features, but the gestalt of it simply would not come.
I stood up. I tapped on my molar with a fingernail. I found some dental floss in the cabinet. I pulled off a couple yards, tied a little noose at one end, looped it around my bad tooth, tied the other end to the knob of the open bathroom door. It was a heavy slab of a door, solid oak, a monolith on silent bronze hinges that Miss Florence took care to oil with WD-40 every time she stopped by. I tested the slack in the floss and then, with every ounce of strength I could muster, kicked the door shut.
My own face came back to me in a rush of bright crimson, projected—a slide in a slideshow—-against the scrim of memory inside my head. In the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, I was not unbeautiful.
Bill Cotter is the author of the McSweeney’s novels Fever Chart, The Parallel Apartments, and The Splendid Ticket. Cotter’s short fiction has appeared inThe Paris Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He received a Pushcart Prize for an essay in 2014. Cotter labors in the antiquarian book trade.
