Interlude #1
(It’s Surprising How Word Gets Around.)
Ryan lay with the arm resting across his chest, his other hand clutching it at the wrist so it would not move. He should go to a hospital, but he hadn’t been a fan of hospitals since his father had wasted away in one. His father was not a good man, but Ryan had adored him nevertheless. No one crossed Richard McMillan, and as a boy Ryan wanted people to look at him the same way they had his father. Regular people, not those doctors. All they saw was the illness eating away at the man. To them, he was just a petri dish to be observed. Ryan would rather die in the real world than spend any time being examined like a rotten tooth by charlatans who were just salespeople for Big Pharma.
Ryan reached over to his left elbow with his good hand. It was swollen. The ball of distended flesh was tender to the touch. He could move the joint, but the pain brought tears to his eyes. If he wriggled his fingers pain would shoot up to his elbow, making it practically glow with discomfort for some time afterwards. Instinct advised him that he had torn something inside, it also told him that rest was the remedy.
It would be better in the morning; everything would look better when he looked at it under a summer sun. It had to; it couldn’t look any worse.
They’d done a number on him; of that he was certain. But then, who hadn’t? Betrayal floated in the air like a virus, and everyone was susceptible to infection. People didn’t have any resilience anymore, no loyalty. When the men he knew wouldn’t stand by him when the world was decaying around him then what else was he supposed to do?
Small mercy they didn’t call the cops.
Ryan knew they could have and they would have thought themselves justified, but they wouldn’t have been. All they had to do was listen to him. That’s all. All he had needed was stillness, silence, and a lack of judgment. He knew things had gotten out of hand; he had told them as much. He knew he should have responded better, but had gotten so mad.
Ryan McMillan was aware of what he was, and he didn’t like it. He had tried to change, but the world around him would push, and push, and then push a little more. He had confessed his sins to men he thought were his friends, and instead of offering him a chance for penance they had risen against him.
Eventually, Ryan slept, but it was not a restful sleep. His thoughts were violent, as were his dreams. But even as his mind thrashed against its bonds, his body lay perfectly still. His sleeping body was smarter than his waking one. At least It knew when to stay still and quiet. Ryan didn’t have that much sense. When he woke in the morning, he would remember little shards of the dream that unsettled his night. He would stare at the smear of oil from the cracked transmission of his old truck. It had run over the concrete of the drive, and it had never faded. It would make him uneasy, but he didn’t know why.
The dream was not a normal dream. He often dreamt of violence. He would never admit to the things his sleeping mind conjured in the light of day. Sometimes they shocked him, sometimes they even repulsed him, but they rarely left him so unsettled after waking. They never left him feeling so disturbed by the everyday world. But the following day was a catalogue of such moments. About midday, he would become violently ill, and he attributed the sickness to the pain he was in, but he knew that the vomiting had begun when he had seen a bus stop poster for a movie. It featured a shadowy figure poised over a sleeping woman, and he could not get the thing’s eyes from peering at him from inside his skull.
He wandered around for most of the day. He had nowhere he needed to be anymore, he no longer had a job to go to, and no friends who wanted to call him a friend. So, he wandered around town until he could score something for the pain.
When he got back to his now-empty house he searched until he found something to drink and took the pills he had with a glass filled to its rim. The remainder of the day passed in a daze, and when morning came his head hurt far worse than his arm.
He woke to the smell of his vomit drying on his pillowcase, but he could barely smell it over the stink of his flesh. The house was no better. Bottles, all drained dry, littered the floor, and cartons smeared with the remains of fast food were strewn beside the couch. Ryan dragged himself from the bed. His head rolled loosely around on the top of his neck. His legs were no steadier beneath him. The room moved around him as if he were at sea.
Ryan stumbled into the bathroom, twisted on a tap, and plunged his head under it. The icy water that hit the back of his neck stung. With his good hand, he reached up and felt raw flesh. He felt as though he had not washed in weeks. As the water flowed his head throbbed, it felt like hundreds of tiny punches to his skull. He twisted the faucet off and stood with his head over the sink watching the water drip from his hair.
Strands of his dark hair lay wet against the discoloured basin. In it were strands of grey that stood out against the black. He didn’t remember there being so much of it. He also didn’t realise it had gotten so long.
Was it longer than it should have been?
Ryan stood, intending to brush wet hair from his face, but stopped in mid-motion. He was using his injured arm, but it didn’t hurt. His eyes shot to the mirror. It was smeared in something that hid half of the reflection, but he saw enough. His hair was too long, and his body was so lean he looked starved.
It was like remembering a dream and before long he realised that more than just a day or two had passed. Without warning he felt his stomach heave and rushed to the toilet bowl. What he saw in it would have brought the contents of his stomach up even if he had not already felt the urge.
Nothing solid had passed between his lips in some time by the looks of what splashed against the stained porcelain. He heaved before his eyesight blurred and his muscles turned to jelly beneath him.
He woke with his body sprawled across the tile floor.
Somewhere in the house, a phone rang.
Ryan ignored it, and eventually, it stopped.
He climbed slowly back to his feet, using the bath rim and the sink to support his weight. Then he stumbled from the bathroom and into the family room.
Family room. He felt the anger bubble in him at the term.
He pulled the curtain that covered the window aside and daylight lit the room in a fierce glow that burned his eyes. He raised his hand against it and blinked the discomfort aside. Outside of the window, the world was unchanged. It was absurd to him. It should be in flames. His world could be torn apart and the people around him moved on without even noticing. He turned to the TV, searched for the remote, and then turned it on to 24-hour news. The TV was too small for the cabinet on which it was placed, and Ryan remembered the old TV breaking as it hit the floor.
He checked the date, then struggled to think of the last day he could remember.
He slipped onto the couch, crushing a fast-food carton under him but barely noticing it. It may have been as little as a week, or it may have been far longer. His body felt lean, his muscles weak. His hair seemed too long, but it had always been unkempt, it was what she had always hated about him. The memory of her made the bile rise again, so he fought it down along with the memory.
The phone began to ring again. He looked around but could not see it.
He needed a drink, or something else.
The TV chattered away to itself. A weather girl in a too-tight blouse bantered with a sports announcer with a too-bright smile. Ryan wanted to punch them both. The feeling was profound and for a vivid moment, he imagined smashing the TV itself into shards of black plastic.
The phone stopped ringing, but Ryan had already forgotten about it. The sound was a background noise he’d become accustomed to over the last few days. Slowly the sound had pulled him back into the world, and he had listened to it as though it were an opera, with his head dropped to one side and his eyes fixed on a world only he could see.
He needed a drink, he thought again, but he knew without looking that there was nothing left in the house.
Was there money?
He couldn’t remember.
Then the phone rang again. The noise was insistent now, irritated by his continual disregard.
“Okay.” The word ground from between his lips, formed by the mortar and pestle of his lips and tongue. “Okay. Hold the horses.”
He dug through the refuse that now littered the family room until he found the phone. It was an old-fashioned phone that had cost her a ridiculous amount. He pulled it from its cradle and pressed it to his ear.
“Hello?” He said, but the word came out as “lo.”
“Back with us?”
The voice was unhurried, and a little amused.
“Yeah, I’ve had a few bad days.” Ryan paused midway through the sentence, unsure of what to say. There was a moment of silence, followed by what Ryan thought might have been a laugh.
“I see, I take it that I am speaking to Ryan McMillan?”
“Who wants to know?”
The voice on the other end of the line grew quiet. The silence stretched out long enough that Ryan thought the other person might have hung up on him, then he heard a muted cough, then the man spoke again.
“Who I am is nowhere near as interesting as what I can offer you, Mr McMillan.”
“Well, I think who you are is pretty important too, mister.”
“That’s true, but at the moment, with your financial situation being what it is I would think income would be far more important to you.”
“Hold on.” Ryan pressed the heel of his hand against his right eye to help elevate the growing patch of pain he was beginning to feel there. “How’d you know about this?”
“It’s surprising how word gets around, Mr McMillan.”
“Okay, mister. I want a name or I’m hanging up. Right now.”
“My name is John Charles, but my friends call me JC, and I’d like to offer you what, in my day, we used to call gainful employment.”
“I don’t know you mister, why would I have anything to do with you?”
“Why wouldn’t you? Can I be completely honest with you Mr McMillan?”
“First time for everything.”
The man on the other end of the line laughed.
“Indeed, there is. So, I shall be. I know about it all, Ryan. I know what you have lost, and I know you have little left. This makes you uniquely useful to me. You have everything to gain by trusting me, and little to lose.”
Ryan looked around the room in which he sat. The floor was covered in food containers and soiled utensils. The TV screen had something smeared across it, and Ryan could make out his handprint in the residue.
“Mr McMillan? Ryan?”
“Yes.”
“What do you have to lose? Those men you thought were friends beat you mercilessly. All you wanted to do was express your anger at your loss. To offload those horrid moments when things had gotten their worst. All they saw were your sins, Mr McMillan, they saw your hand being raised, but they didn’t see the hand being raised against you, did they? And after all that, you were the one that lost his job. You, and you had always been loyal, hadn’t you? Again, Mr McMillan, I ask you, what do you have to lose?”
Ryan could smell the rot in the room around him. It was nothing more than spoiled food, but he wondered if something had crawled into the room and died it smelled so bad. Why he hadn’t been aware of it before? The rot was everywhere. It permeated people’s very souls and erased them from within.
“As you say,” Ryan replied slowly, “very little.”
The voice on the other end of the line gave him a time and a place. Ryan didn’t need to write it down, it was easy to remember. Then it voiced its farewell.
The dialling tone buzzed in Ryan’s ear before he placed the phone back into its cradle. It was a custom-built item that was made inside the casing of an old rotary phone. The dial had been replaced with a touch-sensitive screen where the numbers sat in little circles approximately where they would have once been. He couldn’t remember how much the thing had cost, but he did remember it had cost enough that he had become irritated by the expenditure.
Ryan rose on unsteady feet, kicked his way through the accumulation of waste on the carpet and went to the bathroom. He flushed the toilet and twisted on the shower faucet, stepping under it without removing his clothes.
He stood there, leaning against the wall, and began pulling his clothing from his body. His shirt peeled free as if pasted there by his sweat.
Ryan McMillan washed, working through a complete bottle of shower gel before moving on to the shampoo she had left behind. He lathered and rinsed, then lathered again.
He had to go back out into the world anyway, he reasoned, he needed food, and he needed something to drink. He also needed to score to take the edge off the jackhammer driving into his skull. He would get back to the world, but he knew he would never again be a part of it. The world had turned its back on him, and he was happy to return the favour.
Ryan McMillan lived in a spacious three-bedroom home at the far end of a dead-end street on the edge of town. It had been advertised as a starter home, ideal for those intending to start a family, and that was exactly why they had chosen it. Now, it was just a collection of rooms, many of which Ryan never entered. When they moved in, they worried it was not large enough. They had plans to add a new room to the building’s rear to use as an office for her and use the garage as a workshop for the art he always planned to create.
None of it happened.
Ryan paused when the cool air hit him. He fumbled with the door for a few moments before giving up. There was no point locking it, there was nothing left in there of any value. So, he threw the keys through the door and closed it.
He looked back once as he walked away from the building, he once thought he would be spending his future there, but now there was nothing left between those walls for him. It was at that moment he knew he would never return. Ryan had no idea where he would go, or what he would do, but he knew that his old life was over, and something inside him lifted at the thought.
The route to his destination was a short one. It took him to the road that led past the dead-end street on which he lived, and through the wood that separated his development from the next. By car, the route would take twenty minutes, but by foot, he expected to arrive within ten.
Muted light emanated from some of the houses he passed, but most inhabitants had long since retired to bed. The street itself was abandoned, and as Ryan made his way to the trail that led through the wood, he saw neither pedestrian nor vehicle. The wood was a narrow strip of foliage through which he could see the streetlights of the road on its far side. He pointed himself towards the nearest and walked.
He made the journey in a little over eight minutes. On the intersection the voice on the phone had specified was a low wall, the street name fastened to it on a black and white metal plate. Ryan sat on it, his legs covering the metal plate just as he was asked to do.
His watch told him he had five minutes to wait, but the car arrived in less than two.
The window slid down silently, revealing a rectangle of darkness within.
“Mister McMillan.” The voice that slid from the darkness was familiar.
“John Charles?” Ryan replied, standing, and moving closer.
The door clicked and swung open.
“Get in, Mister McMillan.”
Ryan hooked his hand over the top of the door and opened it all the way, then Ryan climbed in and closed the door behind him.