White Box

                                                                          "White Box"

    The smoke drifted lazily toward the fan and out the window. He always turned the fan blowing out the window. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking in the apartment, but then he did a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to. Still, the fan would help ward off the manager and other tenants.
    He eyed himself in the mirror on the door. He was a lanky, pale man of twenty seven. His dark hair hung in greasy sheets, closing around a narrow face with a thin nose and dark sunken eyes. A cigarette hung limp between pale lips.
    White bony hands extended from the sleeves of a worn leather jacket. One gripped the neck of a red guitar; the other brushed a fly from his face. The guitar wasn’t much, just something he got at a pawn shop a few years earlier, but he loved it all the same. The guitar was the only thing he really prized and the only thing he ever really felt he excelled at. 
    He was James McCormick; construction worker, drop out, bore. Nine years in construction was more than enough to drag anyone down. But he was different, he knew he was and in one week he would prove it. He’d leave all the cynical bastards to their work down in the mud. All the people who told him he’d never make it. The same people who told him he’d be back in two weeks, after he ran out of money. He’d shut them up when they saw him in the magazines and on TV.
    James was the guitarist in a small band. They rehearsed and auditioned for three and a half years. They played all the dank bars; they put in their dues. Three and a half years. They had been booed and laughed at. Now it was their turn to do the laughing. They had a gig at the biggest bar in Ogden. People were sure to talk.
    Finished admiring himself, he placed the guitar back on its stand. At least he called it a stand. In reality it was merely a child’s camp chair. He took a rip from a glass pipe, shook back his hair, and headed out the door. He always got stoned before making the walk to his girl friends house. In fact, he got stoned before he went just about anywhere. If he had the money, he had the drugs.
    He had been dating Grace for nearly a year and loved her almost as much as his music. She supported him when they first met, and she supported him now. She knew what this meant to him and she wanted him to succeed. At least, she mostly wanted him to succeed. A part of her hoped he would fail. She hoped he would fail and come down to earth a little.
    It was a stubborn defiance that propelled him to work harder and play faster. And it was this same defiance that initially attracted her to him. It was him, and she loved him. But she also wished that he might settle down some day; hoped he would get a steady job and maybe even finish school. It was this hope she kept hidden from him that she thought might, just might come to pass if his gig failed this weekend.
    He would be there soon. Though he didn’t call, she knew he was coming. He had stopped by every day at the same time since he walked out on his job a week earlier, and today was no different. She was in the bathroom reading the directions on a small white box when the knock came; she threw on a baggy shirt and went to let him in. She slid back the bolt and was greeted by the familiar smell of cigarettes, coffee, and the inevitable shot or two of whiskey that took the place of cream in his coffee.
    Giving her a quick kiss, he loped into the room and dropped to the couch where he would wait for her to finish getting ready. He was high. She knew he was high without asking. She knew because she knew him. She knew the different kinds of high without him even saying anything. Today it was something strong; coke or meth maybe. It didn’t make any difference to her. She had never done it herself, but suffered as though it was killing her too.
    Her daily bathroom ritual took longer than usual today, but when she finished she went back to the front room. He wasn’t on the couch anymore. He was up stalking around the kitchen with a rolled up newspaper following a fly with an unblinking stare. There were always flies and he always hunted them. Without air conditioning she had little option but to let them in with the outside air.
   
It was autumn in Ogden and the leaves swirled orange and red around their ankles as they walked down the sidewalk. He had a few things to get downtown before the show. As they walked, a police car turned the corner ahead of them. He eyed the cop through dark sun glasses. The cop eyed him back and he dropped his gaze. “You’ll see,” he muttered, “you’ll know me by Sunday.”
    In ten minutes they were looking through windows on Washington Boulevard. The shops and light poles were decorated with orange and black. A fake witch was taped to a street sign above them. Halloween was approaching. Of course James wouldn’t have noticed if the sun fell out of the sky and burned the mountains to ash.
    He was shopping for a few things for the show. Or rather, she was shopping for a few things for the show. An hour after they got home he would already forget they had ever gone. He would thank her tomorrow though. She knew he would, even if he didn’t say it.  She knew he loved her.
    The walk back was longer. It was uphill the whole way and the bags were weighed down by the necessary items for the show. Grace struggled to keep pace. James, lean and quick, was irritated. Grace was slow.
    She seemed to go out of her way to get under his skin at times, seemed to enjoy making him furious. She was so much fun when they first met, but had taken to nagging lately. They fought several times over the last few weeks. Every time the fights got worse. Last night he told her it had to stop; told her in no uncertain terms. He didn’t want to leave her and he had never hit her, but he made certain she understood.
    He was in a good mood now, but she knew it wouldn’t last. He would start coming down soon, then the fights would start. Any little thing would set him off and she knew it would be her fault. He caught her watching him, smiled and brushed her hair back with those white, skeletal hands. The stale smell of cigarettes on his finger tips was overwhelming and she pulled away. She knew instantly that it was a mistake, but the smell of smoke seemed to bother her more than usual recently.
    That was it. He didn’t know what her problem with him was, but she was clearly distant. Clearly didn’t want to be touched by him. He repulsed her. She despised and looked down on him. Thought she was better than him. The nerve that woman had. He worked for everything he had. Nothing was ever handed to him. That bitch wouldn’t have a pot to squat over if her parents hadn’t put her through school and gotten her a job at daddy’s company.
    Grace asked what was wrong with him. It was one mistake too many. James exploded. They fought for the last half block to the apartment. They fought as they went up the stairs and down the hall. The neighbors could hear them. He didn’t care. He wanted someone to say something; to try to stop him.
    Everything seemed to piss him off now; the smell of the old building, the nosy neighbors, and the damn flies! Why were there always flies?! Grace was saying something about burnouts and tests as she opened the door, but didn’t finish. He caught her by the hair and shoved her into the room.
    Taken by surprise, she didn’t cry out. She tripped over a low table and caught herself hard against the counter. In disbelief, tears welling in her eyes, she started to raise herself again. The sobs infuriated him for some reason. He struck her full in the right ear from behind. She went down and didn’t move.
    Panic gripped him. She was alive. She had to be alive. She couldn’t be… He couldn’t even finish the thought. What would he do? Why did she have to push him? Why did she have to try to make him so angry? He didn’t want to hit her, she made him.
    But she was alive. She had to be alive. She was just unconscious. He dragged her to the bed, slumped her against the pillows and tucked her in. She was sleeping, just sleeping. She would wake up later and everything would be fine. He would play his show, and she would wake up. She had to wake up.
    He wanted to stay with her but couldn’t, he had to go. He would go to his house, and then he would go… Where would he go? Where could he go? It didn’t matter, he had to go. He watched his spidery white fingers grip the cold door knob as if watching through a scope from very far away. It wasn’t real; it was a movie, or a dream. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
    But it was real. It was real, and he was frozen. He caught sight of himself in the chrome coffee pot. Red smeared his hand and stained his white shirt. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t blink, he just stared at the red stains in the chrome.
    The world stopped, his breath came in painful gasps. He was sinking; sinking through the floor, through the world, into darkness. He wanted it to envelope him. He wanted everything to end. He wanted the world to stop; the nightmare to end. He wanted to sink into the darkness, to breathe in the cool blackness, to slip into nothingness and become nothing.
 
    Officer Ruiz was forty two. He had seen it all. He knew what he was going to see before the apartment manager unlocked the door. He didn’t know how he knew, he just did.  Maybe it was something in the air. He didn’t know how, he just always knew. After fifteen years as a police officer he just sort of sensed it.
    He walked into the apartment and looked down into a face that stared, unseeing, back at him. A fly crawled around the lips and nostrils. It was the young man he had seen walking down the street the day before. An empty pill bottle lay on the floor beside him. In the bedroom he found the young woman. In the bathroom he found a small white box.