Integrity
Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.
--T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
I can’t stand living I can’t stand you and I just can’t hate enough
--Sheer Terror, “Just Can’t Hate Enough”
Arlo peeked up from his ketamine daze to hear Levi going on an obnoxiously familiar rant about his straightedge lifestyle. “I actually don’t have a problem with people who do drugs! That’s a societal misconception that’s been hoisted upon me against my will as a straightedge individual. It’s not an insult to call most of you people addicts, just a pure statement of fact. You are all symptoms of the world that’s been made for us, you’re not the real disease.”
It was true enough that Levi couldn’t afford to hate any of the people that crowded his apartment; they were his only friends. His place had become the preeminent after-party convergence point for every big punk show that came through town. A dealer in the scene had convinced him that his apartment could be a safe space for people to use after shows: as long as the kids were going to get high anyway, why not do so under the auspices of Levi’s wisdom and supervision? Levi must have understood that he was being trolled, but no matter how mean spirited the intent of the idea was, he had to concede that there was validity to it. The junkies were willing to put up with a little sermonizing if it meant they knew where to go for good shit at low prices.
Arlo lumbered up from the couch, the jelly of his muscles grumbling at him as he pushed a girl’s ankle off his thigh. He headed towards the kitchen for a cup of water. Being in Levi’s home under the influence of dissociative anesthetics was a queasy, surreal experience. The décor of the apartment consisted of Jedi Mind Tricks and Earth Crisis posters, haphazardly placed dreamcatchers, missing floor tiles and exposed copper lining running up the walls. It gave one the feeling of being in some uncomfortable confabulation of a UC Santa Cruz dorm room and a crack den posed for demolition. Levi’s shrill bloviating mingled with the abrasive crash of an early Ceremony EP that someone had put on, and by the time tap water was streaming into Arlo’s glass he felt as though he might vomit.
He heard the front door open; Travis had finally shown up. Travis was the lead guitarist and vocalist of back-to-basics hardcore group Sheriff Badge, who mostly everyone at the party had just come from seeing. Travis was also a dealer, and a big one. He received a sluggish yet still warm greeting from the party and then started making the rounds, checking in on his regulars like a concierge.
Sherriff Badge had recently started getting popular—not just Local Scene Popular, which could mean close to nothing, but an actual known quantity to music heads in the know on a national scale. Arlo had seen them crop up on more than a couple of high-profile music blogs, and at this past show the crowd had been teeming with both nervous high school kids and skeptical-but-curious Gen-X punks: the kinds who paired Discharge shirts with horn-rimmed glasses, the kinds who could only make it to shows once or twice a month these days but still didn’t know where to find good babysitters. That’s when you know you’ve made it, Arlo had mused during the show, when these dickheads start crawling out of the woodwork to judge you.
As Arlo dragged the last drops of water down his throat Levi came skulking into the kitchen. They had gone to the same high school and this occasionally prompted Levi to start having a conversation at him even though Arlo had never once displayed any indication that he wanted to talk to or be friends with him.
“I hate that motherfucker,” Levi said quietly. His shoulders were low and his eyes, fixed firmly on Travis in the other room, reflected a nervous, vengeful glint.
“Why’s that?” Arlo said, half-consciously playing along.
“He won’t tell me what he sells. I ask him every time he comes here, and he always acts like he’s straight. And I can’t get in his face about it because all these junkies are like his little minions and they’ll stop coming here if their precious master tells them to. They’ll be out on the streets where no one can help them.”
Arlo peered around; he noted that no one else was in the kitchen. Levi had worked himself up by now, and he started to talk louder. “I give these guys a lot of slack. A lot of slack. There’s a lot of really rough straightedge groups out there. A lot of those guys think the only way to curb addiction is to bust jaws, take lives. But not me. I take the junkies in. I watch them poison themselves, I give them a safe place to corrupt their bodies and souls because as long as there’s life there’s hope, right? I don’t let them die out there. I do for them what society won’t. I show them mercy.”
He turned away from the party in the other room to look into the sink, his eyes boiling like pools of magma. He balled up his fist and crashed it against the counter, sending forks and glasses jumping and clattering.
“The only fucking thing”
crash, clatter
“I fucking ask”
crash, clatter
“is you be fucking straight with me”
crash, clatter
“so I can fucking help you”
crash, clatter
“you fucking”
crash
“piece”
clatter
“of”
crash
“shit”
clatter
Levi was breathing heavy, his pectoral muscles rising up and down. He looked back into the party, quivering. “God DAMN it” he screeched, and then made a beeline through the crowd, into his room, smashing the door shut behind him.
“Is he okay?” a 15-year-old girl in a Turnstile hoodie asked Arlo.
“Yeah,” mumbled Arlo. “Little too much beer.”
“I thought he was straightedge?”
“The fuck do you care?” Arlo asked. The girl glowered at him and wandered back into the party. Arlo wasn’t just trying to relieve himself of company so his brain would stop spinning; somehow he had become genuinely indignant on Levi’s behalf. The guy was a tool, but he was volunteering a service that took a lot out of him. And Travis was treating him dishonorably. You don’t lie to someone in their own house, just the way you don’t take their food without asking. Nothing gives a person that right. Someone who doesn’t realize that is dangerous; they’re a trap waiting to clamp down, is how Arlo saw it.
“Hey, Levi?” someone asked above the noise. The volume of the music was turned down to a low hum. “Hey, Levi! I think, uh, someone got a bad batch.”
Arlo looked to the sofa; there, indeed, was a young man splashed over it, drool running out the corners of his mouth, eyes flitting back, his complexion drained to a deathly pallor.
“What was he taking?” Levi hollered from behind the door to his room. “Was he huffing, injecting, did he take a pill?”
“Little blue pill, yeah.”
A rummaging could be heard from behind the door, and then Levi rumbled out, holding a little bottle of nasal spray. “Probably off-brand Xans. Fentanyl or whatever the fuck.”
He put his arm under the kid’s head to keep it steady, then ran the bottle up his nose. The junkie sputtered and jolted, looking around as though the power in his brain had gone out and just as suddenly come back on.
“When he’s less goofy, get him out of here,” Levi said to the would-be-OD’s friend. Then he looked around, pointing a finger at the party, his eyes narrowing. “If it’s any of you…”
He let the sentence linger, then went back to his room. After letting the tension in the atmosphere uncoil, Arlo went to his door, hoping they could have a chat. As he knocked, an ape in a green flannel shirt changed the music to “Cowboys From Hell” and cranked the volume all the way back up.
Arlo showed up at Travis’ apartment at 4pm the next day. During the party he’d told him his current supplier carried weak material and was never on time, and was wondering if the two of them could possibly talk turkey tomorrow. Travis had been more than happy to oblige. (Levi’s parties proved to be fertile ground not only for using, but for networking as well.) He answered the door in baggy plaid pajamas and a loose crew neck that let Arlo know he couldn’t have been awake for more than an hour.
“How’s it hanging, my dude?” Travis said, clapping his palm into Arlo’s. Some people might have given this greeting with a level of irony, but not Travis. As he led him inside and closed the door behind him, Arlo looked at the tattoos on his wrists: on his left was a woodcut-style hand holding a pitchfork, and on his right a hand in the same style holding a torch. They added a photogenic flourish whenever Travis was clutching the microphone, and Arlo had always liked them.
Travis’ apartment was a consummate young bachelor pad. A selection of recliners worn with character sat across from a big TV buttressed by shelves of blu-rays and video games. Since he made enough money to live alone, Travis could let the floor get a little dusty without feeling guilty, or leave some smudges on the coffee table without weathering passive-aggressive complaints from roommates.
“You can throw your jacket on the recliner if you like,” Travis said. Arlo was wearing a thin cerulean windbreaker and his wardrobe was otherwise nondescript, a plain black t-shirt and blue jeans.
“Nah, I’m fine.”
Travis eyed him with suspicious amusement; it was humid enough that a jacket would be cumbersome if not outright miserable to wear indoors, but he wasn’t one to judge any junkie’s habits. “Cool, whatever.” He picked a bottle of gin off his coffee table and started pouring a glass. “Hair of the dog?”
“Yeah, actually.” Arlo had, in fact, been running low on Percocet and its derivatives, and had been rationing for the last week. He was twitchier and less focused today than he wished to be. Travis passed him the glass of gin and he downed it in one shot. Arlo felt his muscles relax and his forehead tingle, and he lurched down into one of the chairs.
Travis sat down in a recliner perpendicular to Arlo. “So,” he said, picking a pack of Parliaments off the table between them, “your current shit isn’t cutting it for you. No pun intended.”
“Uh, yeah.” Arlo scratched his temple for emphasis. “It’s too expensive, and the effect is real…milquetoast. I don’t get high like I used to.”
“Nice vocabulary word.” Travis smiled, tapping his menthols against the side of the table to pack them, He drew one out and put it between his lips, crushing the filter as he did so. “You sure it’s not just your tolerance?” He held the pack out to Arlo.
Arlo waved his hand, dismissing both the question and the cigarettes. “I’m sure. I go to my friend’s place and try his shit and it’s twice as good.”
“Who’s he get it from?”
“I donno, I didn’t think to ask,” Arlo said, trying to conceal his irritation. “I was high.”
“Nice, definitely.” Travis said this as much to himself as to Arlo. He lit his smoke and leaned back in the recliner. “Well, here’s the thing, Arlo. Quality’s not gonna be an issue; I’ve got the best plug in the tri-county, swear to God. He comes through every time. Problem is, prices are going up across the line, because risk is going up. Overdoses have been skyrocketing and with this new shitass attorney general in charge the po is even less agreeable than they used to be. But tell me what you need, and I’ll tell you what I can do for you.”
Over the course of their conversation Arlo came to believe that Travis must have been a born criminal. The goofy stoner he’d been socializing with had vanished and in his place sat an amicable yet decidedly fixated businessman, one who was focused on quantity, volume and percentage, and negotiated resupply intervals and market values with the dry assertiveness of a warehouse shipping accountant. Occasionally he would pause to do a calculation on his phone, or work out the flow of product availability based on what he knew about other dealers in the area and what their mainstays were. Arlo pressed against some numbers that seemed too high, and asked questions every so often so as not to seem completely ignorant. Eventually they arrived on what seemed like a reasonable arrangement.
“Could I maybe get the first batch today?” Arlo asked.
“Can you pay for it?”
“Yeah.” He took out his wallet and started slowly peeling 20s out of it, setting them in a thin stack on the table like a hand of cards. When enough of them had been revealed, Travis smiled and swiped them up.
“I’ll be back in a sec.” He got up and walked to his room, a straight shot forward from the recliner. Arlo tried to peer after him to get a look at where he slept, but he shut the door. After a couple of minutes Travis returned with a little orange pharmacy bottle that he gently lobbed at Arlo, who was just lucid enough to be able to catch it with only the slightest fumble.
“Lemme know what you think of those!” Travis beamed. “You wanna give one a shot now?”
“Uh, nah. I like to try new shit in private.”
“Nice. That’s how the old school used to do shrooms. Turn the lights off, turn the music off, unplug the phone. Just you and your own head.”
Travis leaned back and took a drag off his cigarette. “You up to anything today?”
“Nah, I don’t really have plans,” Arlo replied, taken off guard.
“You wanna play Rocket League or anything? I don’t have any other appointments.”
“Um, alright. Yeah.” Arlo would never have seen foreseen Travis making an attempt at friendship, but in some ways it would make things much easier.
Travis smiled and took another pull. “I like you, Arlo. I like bumping into you at shows, hearing your thoughts on the music. You have integrity. That ain’t a common thing.”
“Thanks, man.” Travis nodded. He sat up, went to his home theater station and got down on his knees, rummaging for a pair of controllers. A thought occurred to Arlo. “Actually, what other games do you have?”
“I got a bunch.” He opened a glass case next to his console setup and began pulling out the plastic boxes that housed his disks. “I got Black Ops 2, I got Overwatch, I got Goldeneye—the remake, not the OG, unfortunately—lemme see…”
As Travis searched through his collection, Arlo pulled the knife out. It was a huge serrated blade with a black plastic handle, and it slid out of his jacket’s interior breast pocket without making a sound. He stood up and quietly stepped over the coffee table. Travis turned his head slightly, only passingly aware that a human body was close and looming before the knife was shunted into his lower back. The air came gusting out of his lungs and instead of a scream there was only panicked, inchoate wheezing. Arlo leaned up against the top of his back as he pushed the knife in, as though he were pushing a door closed in the middle of a heavy storm. It felt like two huge, wet hands were gripping the blade and pushing it back towards him from inside Travis’ body. He pulled it out. Travis fell forward onto his console setup. Arlo pulled him away and rolled him onto his back, proceeding to cut his throat. Travis looked up at him in mesmerized, abject terror as he died.
Satisfied that he was dead or would soon be dead, Arlo went into his room. Travis’ drugs and cash were not particularly well hidden; he found a stash of Percocet under some shirts in his drawer, some bottles of cough syrup under his bed, at least a thousand dollars in twenties on a shelf in his closet. Maybe since he lived alone he figured there’d be no reason for anyone else to ever trip over his stash, but Arlo couldn’t help feeling a little secondhand embarrassment for his lack of diligence in this regard. He scoured the room; there seemed to be no end to the plunder. He was so overwhelmed with his findings that it took him a long time to realize that he had blood on his jeans. Looking at Travis’ full-length mirror he realized that he was in fact completely caked in the dead man’s viscera.
Arlo, spontaneously convinced of his own genius, formulated a plan. First, he unloaded all of the drugs and money, trying to pile them into as neat of a hill on the floor as he could. He then stripped to his underwear and went to the bathroom, where he vigorously scrubbed the blood off so as not to leave any more tracks. He went back to the bedroom and began rifling through Travis’ closet, eventually finding a blank blue T-shirt and a pair of chinos that fit him. He scooped up his bloodstained clothes and brought them to the kitchen, putting them in the oven. After finding a small stepladder in the kitchen closet and a screwdriver in a toolbox placed on the shelf above it, he disabled the smoke alarms in the kitchen, hallway, bathroom and bedroom (the one in the living room had already been taken down). Arlo found Travis’ backpack under his bed; it was already half full of narcotics, but he managed to stuff almost all of his small mountain of discovered drugs in as well. He kept what wouldn’t fit in his pockets.
With his backpack on, Arlo left Travis’ room and stared into the living room. Travis’ corpse and the lake of blood surrounding him cut an ugly abrasion into the skin of an otherwise typical domestic vision. Arlo felt like he was in the beginning stages of a nightmare: he felt not horror but unease, the sense that reality’s puzzle pieces had warped and discolored, leaving the final picture an inscrutable blotch. He nodded at the body, maybe to acknowledge the ghost in the room, then went to the kitchen and turned the oven on. Then he went through the living room, careful to step over the blood and the carcass he’d left there, and walked out the front door. If he’d seen anyone on his way out he would have been as collected and natural as any other tenant, but he met only an empty hallway, an empty elevator, an empty foyer, and then the piercing silver embrace of a bright and cloudy afternoon.
Sahara’s apartment was a Christmas-colored jungle of chic, middle-class affectations. Arlo couldn’t fathom that she made very much money as a music blogger—surely much of her living must have come from her parents’ pockets--but every cent of it seemed to go towards nice, prim shelves for her 180g vinyl, arboreal lamps with multiple heads, cozy rugs and meticulously curated cookware. It reminded Arlo of something between a featured household ripped out of a 1950s home-and-garden catalogue and a nervous yuppie domicile from a Spike Jonze movie like Her. It made him nauseous. More specifically, the inflammatorily cheerful red wallpaper was attacking his eyes by way of his stomach, which was currently in the process of haphazardly digesting a fifth of bottom-shelf vodka.
“Thanks again for letting me crash here,” Arlo said after he took a meek sip of water.
“No worries.” Sahara was at her desk, her back turned to him, fingers gently dribbling the keys of a sleek laptop. “You’re lucky I’m seeing one of Benson’s friends and happened to be at that party last night. The way you were acting I don’t think anyone else had much of a mind to look after you.”
Arlo gave a light groan. He and Sahara had hooked up a year ago—or at least they had to the extent that a man can hook up with anyone when his sensory organs are drowned in benzodiazepine—and the twitching remains of the romantic in him were still a bit hurt that nothing had come from it. Hearing her mention other partners pained him, but it wasn’t worth commenting on. He had bigger things to swallow.
“Are you going to the Sheriff Badge memorial show tomorrow?” she asked, clacking away.
“Hrmf?”
“Vein, Catshit Power and a few other bands are playing a benefit at Rat Street for Travis’ funeral expenses. You can’t have not heard about this?”
“I don’t know,” Arlo grumbled. He truly did not know: the past two weeks had been a blur. He’d pillaged an exceptional quantity of money and drugs from Travis’ apartment but had already used most of it up. Even with his rationing, even with his careful reselling of the material to diverse and distant users who’d have a hard time tying him to the murder, Arlo spent and used like he was living on borrowed time. He had not been sober in days. There were cracks, cuts and bruises of indeterminate origin all across his body. He began to have a different understanding of the day; he felt divorced from the purpose of the sun. He was living in a violent hydrocodone swamp into which nothing could penetrate. Energy and substance passed through him and was obliterated like wheat in a thresher. He felt like a king.
“Well, you should go,” Sahara said. “I’m gonna be there covering it for The Daily Grind.”
“Cool.” He got up cautiously, under assault from his own inner ear, swinging his leg off the couch and slowly altering the angle of his torso until it could be said he was in something resembling an upright position. “Where’s your bathroom?”
Sahara pointed to the hallway. “It’s right down there, first on the left.” He shambled past her ferns and slammed himself onto the toilet as if thrown upon it. A river of shit splattered out of him. He stared wide eyed at her tiled floor and breathed simply and slowly: one breath in, one breath out, for minutes. Trembling, his fingers managed to pluck one Xanax out of his pocket and pop it into his mouth. Now confident that this morass of sickness would soon leave him, he wiped his ass thoroughly and stood up.
Sahara was silent as he returned to the living room. The only noises were the opening of zippers and the rustling of flaps as Arlo checked the supplies in his backpack, the tapping of keys as Sahara drafted her latest piece. As Arlo lifted it onto his shoulder, satisfied that everything was in place, Sahara turned her head to look at him.
“Hey, do you wanna see a movie some time?”
The proposition took Arlo by surprise. He squeezed his brow. “I dunno. What’s playing?”
“I’m not sure. Just, anything. Like, any movie. Anything works.”
Arlo briefly thought she was asking him on a date, but the shakiness of her tone dispelled this fantasy and he became churlish. “Maybe.”
“When was the last time you went to see a movie?”
“A while, I guess.”
“Well, if you ever want to—”
“Look, is this coming from anywhere? Or going anywhere, for that matter? I’ve got stuff to do today.”
She broke eye contact with him and looked out the window. “I guess I…we just miss you is all. No one knows how to talk to you.”
“Who’s we? Who’s no one?”
“I don’t know! Your friends. The scene.”
“The scene? How does the scene miss me? I’m at parties all the time!”
“Yeah, well.” She turned back to her computer, exasperated. “You are and you aren’t.”
Arlo scowled and headed for the door. “Thanks for letting me crash here.”
“You’re welcome. Don’t expect it again.”
Arlo stopped. “I didn’t ask you to put me up.”
“I know, and you shouldn’t,” she snapped.
Arlo paused and fumbled for a reply, leaving her apartment after convincing himself that none would suffice. His life could now be said to be composed of entrances and exits in other people’s homes, taking the light of the places with him as he left. It was an ignoble gift of theft, but he cherished it like his own child.
Catshit Power fucking ripped. Arlo could feel that even under his heavy Vicodin daze, standing off to the side of the delirious mosh pit that had formed in tribute to their force. Their singer looked about 14 and had costumed herself in the colors and cute animal symbols of a Lisa Frank trapper keeper, but she vocalized in a grindcore roar that was terrifying and exhilarating to the ear; watching her perform was like opening a jar of peach marmalade and pouring out boric acid instead. Arlo couldn’t fathom how the next act was going to survive. The best they’d be able to do would be to coast off the energy from this band, which would permeate the rest of the night at a low hum.
He stepped outside for a cigarette. Rat Street was a little black box of filth and noise, spattered on the inside with amateurish graffiti from punk legends past, its stage at ankle-level so that no decibel would pass unnoticed by the concertgoer. Its intimidation factor was paradoxically also that which was most welcoming about the space: if you felt you belonged here, you belonged. But Arlo, thinking he might want to indulge in the mosh pit at some point, hadn’t dosed heavily enough, and he was feeling clammy and claustrophobic. He needed relief.
The outdoor patio area was a grim patch of gravel with a ramshackle wooden fence around it to keep the crusties in and the normies out. Arlo patted himself down for smokes and pills with his right hand while holding his pale beer in the quivering fingers of his left. He pulled a Percocet out and tried to swallow it discreetly from his palm, like a dog with a treat. Some part of his remaining self-consciousness hoped this ritual of his wasn’t as obvious and common a sight at Rat Street as it almost certainly was.
He heard an overture of commotion out on the street and peered out a hole in the fence as he sipped his beer. A trio of punks were having a tense conversation with the bouncer. Arlo recognized them, though he didn’t know them by name. He felt the tall one was named Dags, the one with the scar on his lip was Randall, and he didn’t know the name of the skinhead wearing a vest with a solitary Eyehategod patch on the right shoulder. But he knew they had a reputation for violence, and he knew they were close with Travis. He stepped away from the fence.
Arlo set his beer on the ground and lit a cigarette, burning his thumb. Outside of two or three vicious nightmares he had been surprisingly successful at putting Travis’ murder out of his mind. But he was running dangerously low on supplies. He felt as though whatever fog had been protecting him from the consequences of his work might be dissipating. He was under the unshakable impression that spiritual forces were at play. For the first time in his life Arlo was starting to believe in ghosts. For the first time in his life he was seeing them.
Arlo crushed three cigarettes in 15 minutes, nursed his beer and hovered in the corner of the patio. Catshit Power had finished their set and another band had started theirs. The door to the patio opened at one point; an elbow came out, the door swung closed again, then a young woman with a crewcut came stumbling out backwards as if shoved. She had a look of indignation on her face, which flashed into outrage as she stormed back in. The guitars and percussion had stopped and the sound of yelling could be heard galloping across the walls. Then a relative calm descended, and the band resumed.
As Arlo lit another cigarette and the second song began, Levi rushed out onto the patio. He made a beeline to four people that were standing in the corner and started talking to them. Everyone seemed concerned, somber. They spoke in grave, lowered tones. Levi slapped hands with three of them and hugged the fourth. Then he began climbing over the fence, into a yard opposite the street where the front of the club was located.
“Heyuh,” Arlo sputtered, perhaps too loudly. The four glared at him. Levi turned to look at him from atop the fence, one leg straddling the club and the other the yard.
“Peace,” Levi said, smiling. “Be good.” Then he swung himself over the fence and raced into the night.
The four turned back to each other and commiserated. They were already grieving something. Arlo stomped his cigarette out and left the club, exiting through a hole in the street side. He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked down the street as fast as his feet would carry him. As he passed the front of the club, the skinhead with the Eyehategod patch walked out, a self-satisfied look on his face. Arlo tried to move quickly enough that he wouldn’t be seen, but it was too late.
“Yo,” the skinhead said, as much a command as a greeting. Arlo kept walking. “Hey hey hey whereyagoin,” he said in that same firm tone. “Can we chat a minute?” Arlo stopped and turned around. He tried to make his expression as placid as he could.
The skinhead motioned for Arlo to walk with him in the other direction. “Seen you around a lot,” he observed. They passed by the patio. The four looked at them. Arlo couldn’t help but feel the skinhead had made them pass this way for a reason.
“Yeah. Guess I go to a lot of shows, parties.”
“Me too. I’m Jake, by the way.” They exchanged a weak, awkward handshake. “Weird how many people there are floating around this scene and you never get to know most of ‘em even though you see ‘em all the time.”
“Yeah.”
“You heard what happened to Travis? Dude from Sherriff Badge?”
“Y-yeah.” Arlo hadn’t meant to stutter.
“Fucked up.”
“Yeah.”
“Coulda been anyone, you know? Heard he was in debt to some Mexicans. Who knows what’s true, though.”
“Doesn’t sound like him.”
Jake’s eyebrow perked. “What doesn’t sound like him?”
Arlo realized that he had fucked up. “Just uh, from what I heard he didn’t seem like the type.” He scratched his jaw. “If that makes sense.”
They reached the end of the block and waited for the light to turn. Jake put his head down and nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Yeah, it does make sense. You know that straightedge kid Levi?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuckin’ annoying. What a dipshit. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“Heard he was saying some dumb shit about Travis. Shit that wasn’t even true.”
“I just saw him.” Arlo didn’t know where that came from; some cowardly ghost in him that wanted it all over with, perhaps. Jake stopped in his tracks, in surprise and disbelief at how easy this had been.
“You just saw him?”
“Yeah.”
Jake looked at him. He knew he didn’t even have to say anything anymore. “He hopped over the fence and went into a yard,” Arlo murmured. “I don’t know where he was going.”
“Do you remember which way?”
Arlo pointed. Jake considered this, letting it sink in. Then he chuckled. “You’re a good dude, Arlo. I never knew a junkie to be less full of shit.”
Jake turned around and started walking back toward the club. He clapped Arlo on the shoulder. “Have a safe trip home,” he said. As he left, the light turned green. Arlo did not cross.
He was surprised by how suffocatingly normal the interrogation room felt, like a play area in an elementary school but with all the fun scooped out. The carpet was a slightly dirty lichen green, and there was no two-way mirror or harsh fluorescent lighting like he had been trained to expect from Law & Order reruns—just a table and two folding chairs. The door opened and a woman entered the room. She was squat and in early middle age, dressed in loose beige business casual attire that she clearly threw on most mornings just to have one less thing to think about. She gently placed a mug of coffee on the table and pulled up a seat opposite Arlo.
“Thanks for agreeing to come talk with us,” she said. “I’m Detective Presley—and no, I will not be leaving the building, until 5PM.” She chuckled. “But you can call me Therese if you like.”
“Hi,” Arlo grumbled. The coffee was strong and black and the smell of it was upsetting his stomach.
“So you know why you’re in here?” she inquired.
“Uh.” Arlo did not, in fact, know why he was in here, nor did he know why he agreed to come. He’d been out shambling for a fix when a squad car pulled up beside him and the officer driving it had asked his name; he’d been too dull-witted and scared to run away or respond with an alias. The cop asked, with unexpected cordiality, if he wouldn’t mind answering a couple of questions down at the station (what those questions pertained to was not illuminated), and Arlo agreed for lack of an immediately convincing alternative plan. He’d been brainstorming alibis and runarounds the whole ride over and tried to think of more in the interrogation room as he waited but his brain started giving out and his body was following suit and at last he decided he would have to wing it. Still, even having accepted this, his thoughts could not travel easily to his tongue. He looked stupidly at Detective Presley, as if waiting for his cue.
“It’s okay if you don’t,” she said, smiling. “We wanted to ask you a few questions about Travis Horowitz.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know the man in question?”
“Y…yeah.” He put his hand on his cheek; his eyes wandered. “Why, uh—”
“You were seen talking to him at a party the night before his murder. We’re talking to everyone we can find who might have interacted with him in the hours leading up to his death.” She smiled again; it was a friendly expression, but tight, and she showed no teeth. “You’re a person of interest, but that doesn’t make you a suspect.”
Arlo considered this. “Okay.”
Detective Presley took a notepad out of her pocket and clicked a pen into position. “Now, do you remember what the two of you talked about that evening?”
Arlo’s brain stuttered like an old engine. “Uh, nah, not really. I’d just been to his show, he was in a band called Sherriff Badge, so I just wanted, you know, I wanted to congratulate him or whatever.” He tried to think. “We talked about some other bands, talked shit about a couple of them.”
Therese chuckled, scribbling quickly. “I’m sure. I don’t know much about punk music. I like the Ramones.”
Fuck the Ramones, Arlo wanted to bark, but instead he lifted the corner of his cheek in a mockery of a smile and nodded.
“And was that pretty much it? Can you remember anything else you guys might have discussed that night?”
Arlo leaned back and tried to make it seem as though he was thinking. “Nah, not really,” he concluded. “We honestly didn’t talk for that long.”
“Okay, okay. Good.” She stopped writing and put her pen down, looking at Arlo with pleasant vacancy. “Did you see him again at any other point that weekend?”
“No.”
“What would you say if we told you we have witnesses who can place you outside Travis’ apartment between 2:50 and 3:10 PM the following afternoon?”
A lightning bolt caught in Arlo’s throat. He had no response. Detective Presley continued: “Of course the fire that ate up so much of his body also made most of that floor unlivable, so tracking down his old neighbors’ present locations took a bit of work, but someone saw a young man hovering around his door that afternoon and when you compare the police sketch to the kid I’m looking at now…” She cocked her head. “I have to say, it’s a striking similarity,” she said as though she were impressed.
Arlo crossed his arms and clenched them against his stomach. “From what I read, on Twitter or whatever, from what I read they weren’t even sure Travis was murdered outright.”
Detective Presley smiled again; her warmth now had a glow of condescension about it. “They were able to determine cause of death as homicide from a cursory examination of the body. Don’t believe everything you read.”
Arlo tried to stay firm but his fingers were shaking and the infernal smell of the coffee was making him want to retch. “Well, whatever, I wasn’t there.”
Therese shook her head. “Arlo. Baby. Let’s get real. It was a good sketch.”
“I don’t care if the sketch was…fuckin’ Michelangelo, it’s wrong. I wasn’t there.”
Therese rested the side of her face on her knuckles and looked at Arlo, patiently and quizzically. “Would you be willing to take a lie detector test?”
Arlo didn’t have a response. She went on, as though a bright idea were just occurring to her: “Or: can we get a fingerprint? Just to clear the air, just so we don’t have to bug you about this again.”
Arlo felt a cold mist rising in his gut. This felt all wrong, all wrong. “I…wait, were there prints at the scene?”
Detective Presley ignored this. “Would you like to help us out with this?”
Arlo was able to seize a little confidence and a little momentum. “So, like, earlier you said witnesses could put me there, but when you said who it was you only brought up one guy. Singular.” Defiance was cutting through the haze, sharpening his articulation. “So is there more than one person that said I was there? Or is that all you’ve got?”
Therese’s gaze did not waver. “I ask you again if you would like to help us with this.”
“No!” Arlo howled. He felt like he was at an advantage for the first time this month, for the first time this life. “No, I wouldn’t like to fucking help. I’m not doing a lie detector test, I’m not giving you prints, I’m not doing shit for fucking cops. Fuck you. You don’t have anything. Let me go.”
Therese kept her smile, although a thimble of her patience had dripped away from it. “You don’t have anything doesn’t sound much like I didn’t do it, to me.”
“Let me go. I know my rights. Let me leave.”
Therese sat back and looked at Arlo; her eyes slowly wafted over every visible inch of him, from the glow in his eyes to the zits on his arms. She took a long time to speak again. “Arlo, have you ever interacted with a Levi Meyer before?”
Arlo sat with his jaw clamped shut.
“Of course you know Levi.” She picked up her mug and took a sip from it for the first time since they started talking. “Want some?” she asked. Arlo remained motionless, attempting to narrow his nostrils without making it obvious what he was doing. She sat the coffee mug back down and continued.
“Mr. Meyer has been murdered. Quite, quite viciously. Do you know this thing about prison…you’ve never been to prison, right? I don’t know why I’m asking, I know you haven’t. In prison when someone gets stabbed they say he got a well dug in him. Do you know why that is? In prison they don’t have very good materials to make shivs from. They use toothbrushes, they use the edges of pages from books, I’ve ever heard of some inmates making knives out of soap, if you can believe it. And so when they attack someone the instrument, no matter how much care and craft they put into it, is not very sharp. It doesn’t cut very easily. So it takes a lot of work and a lot of time to really, you know, get where they’re going with it. They have to jab a person over and over and over again, and the shiv goes in a little deeper each time. So they say he got a well dug in him because it’s not so much a stab as it is a scooping motion. They’re digging out a little more flesh and gut with each swipe. Think of cracking the top layer of a crème brule with your spoon, if you’ve ever had crème brule before, only it’s a person’s stomach.
“Well, Mr. Meyer…someone went to his apartment and they dug a well in him. Someone restrained him and split his face open with a very dull instrument, and…everything that’s behind a person’s face? Whoever it was that did this took a very long time taking all of that out of him. The image is something to behold. It is something I wish I had not had to behold, to be frank with you, Arlo.”
His scalp was beginning to perspire and part of Arlo hoped it was not noticeable but a much louder part could not hope or think at all for all the formless blank noise inside of him. “Sweetie, this is not the sort of thing you should be trifling with,” Therese said in a soothing, motherly tone. “Very, very bad things happen to young men who involve themselves with these types of people, as I’m sure you can already imagine. But I’d like you to do me a favor and imagine a little further. Imagine what will happen to you if these men find you, now that you know they have a taste for this type of activity. Or think of something else: imagine going to prison for murder and arson, with no friend in the world to help you, and that that type of man, who did that to Levi, is the only type of man you’ll ever know again. Room after room of them, as far as the eye can see, for the rest of your life.
“We can make it better, Arlo. We just need you to talk.”
Arlo had the shivers. He looked at the ground. “Let me out of here” wheezed softly out of his mouth, from somewhere deep in his spirit.
Detective Presley looked down at her notepad and sighed in disappointment. She got up gingerly and left the room. Arlo didn’t have the strength to object. When she came back, after an interminable length of time, all she said was, “You’re free to go, hon.”
Arlo scrambled to his feet and rushed past her out the door. “Be safe,” Therese yelled after him as he shot down the hall. He made it all the way to the lobby before the shit exploded out of him. A disgusted what the fuck popped from some corner of the room as he crashed out of the building, galloping down the street, his own waste trickling after him.
Perhaps there were better places for Arlo to stay than Sahara’s apartment, places in which his presence would cause far less grief and be far less of a drain upon his host, but there were none that were safer or where he felt less likely to be found. He slid his knuckles over her door by way of a faint knock. When she opened it he could tell she was having trouble recognizing him, or else acknowledging that it was him.
“Hey dude,” he tried to say casually. He was shivering, and a rancid subhuman odor was emanating from his clothes. Sahara put her hand on her mouth in shock and used her thumb to cover her nostrils.
“Arlo, what is this? What happened to you?”
“The money’s gone and the drugs are gone. I think I’m gone too. Please help me.”
She motioned for him to come inside; even as her sympathetic nature overwhelmed her she could not bring herself to touch him with as much as a comforting hand on the shoulder. Having spent the past two weeks exclusively in the company of other junkies and malcontents, her reaction to his presence had been the first real understanding Arlo experienced of what a grotesque figure he now cut. He began to cry.
“Hey, oh my God, please don’t,” Sahara said as kindly as she could. She led him into the living room. “Wait here a moment.” She went into the kitchen and returned with a red plastic bin. “Put your clothes in here,” she said, tapping the side.
“I don’t wanna get naked.”
“I don’t care about seeing you naked. Take your clothes off and get in the shower.”
Arlo slowly, shiveringly began to disrobe. He lifted his shirt over his head; a ghoulish smell floated out from under his armpits. When he was able to hold down food, which had become increasingly rare, he had taken to eating large, high-carb meals like burritos and double cheeseburgers so that he wouldn’t have to consume much else throughout the day. This had caused his fat to pocket in strange, unnatural ways around his hips and torso. He was pale and flecks of unidentifiable detritus would occasionally flake out of his hair as he took his clothes off. He looked like a corpse whose motor functions had been possessed by eels.
“Where have you been?” Sahara asked. “Nazi Jake has been prowling every club in town looking for you.”
Arlo grimaced in surprise. “That guy’s name is Nazi Jake?”
“Everyone thinks he killed Levi.”
Arlo paused his undressing. Then he slid his boxers off. “He did.”
Sahara crossed her arms. “Why do you say that?” she asked, quivering. “Why is he looking for you?”
Naked, Arlo began to tread towards the bathroom. He stopped at the hallway entrance and put his hand on the wall to steady himself. His head was blurry and he had trouble speaking, only faintly aware of what was leaving his mouth. “If he’s…if he’s looking for me for bad reasons then it isn’t fair. Because I did everything I was supposed to.”
Sahara’s patience was wearing thin, her voice cracking from nervousness. “Please do me a big favor and tell me what the fuck it is you’re talking about.”
“I…” Arlo stopped. He thought back to the day he murdered Travis. “I have integrity.” He slithered into the bathroom without another word. Sahara kept her arms crossed, breathing heavily as she watched him.
Arlo flicked the shower handle until the water was at a pleasing lukewarm temperature. He had never showered in a home that had anything resembling consistent water pressure and he let himself appreciate the luxury. An unknown viscous started to drip out of the corner of his mouth; he wiped it away with the back of his palm and flung it onto the floor of the tub.
After twenty minutes he turned the shower off, dried himself and left the bathroom naked. The heat of the towel’s fibers had felt suffocating to him. He flopped face first onto Sahara’s new velvety sofa. His balls and the head of his dick felt nice against it. Sahara looked at him from the kitchen; she looked at the trail of puddles he’d left in his wake and she glared at the strange naked body contaminating her new furniture. She walked into the living room and collected her purse from the coffee table.
“Arlo, I’m going to go to the corner store and get you something to wear,” she said, trying to keep all the panic and sorrow out of her voice. “I’m going to trust that while I’m gone some sliver of decency will keep you from robbing me. When I get back, I want you to get dressed and leave, and I don’t want to see you ever again, not until you can learn to function, or…behave. I don’t want to hear one word about what you’ve done or where you’ve been. If you have the strength to talk when I return, please make believe that you don’t.”
She went back to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water, putting it within Arlo’s arm’s reach. Then she looked at him again, her face compressed with worry, and left.
Arlo put his lips on the sofa’s armrest. The fabric felt so nice against him. Nothing but this couch and the warm water of the shower had felt good on his body for weeks. He tried not to think about problems, and since life was nothing but problems he tried to empty his mind. A hangover pulse had begun beating in his temples and he found it strangely relaxing. It anchored him to the world.
In this relaxed state a paralyzing worry came to him: he might have left one or two pills in his pants pockets. He couldn’t remember. He clawed himself into an upright position. Walking was difficult and he accidentally kicked over the glass of water Sahara had left him. The headache beat was pressing a little harder. Arlo didn’t see the red bin anywhere. Panic was overtaking him. He felt his teeth might crack open like a brigade of melting icecaps. Maybe she’d thrown them in the garbage. He opened her waste bin, he wrenched his way to the bottom of it and found nothing. The outside garbage, maybe? Disoriented, headache intensifying to a fiendish pitch, he forgot his nakedness and went to the front door.
He was unlatching the chain lock when the seizure came.
Arlo crumpled. His hands twisted into flippers. He was on the ground bouncing and rolling like a koi that had been flung onto hot concrete. A wetness, likely blood, seeped over his chin. Instinct compelled the strings in his throat to emit a scream but all that emerged was a haggard choke. Heat, some strange heat lateral to and beyond the nature of describable pain, was all he could feel.
Some part of him was awake through this; if he could have told you what it was Arlo would maybe have pinpointed it as his astral consciousness. There was a life flashing before him but it was going by too fast to make out; he wasn’t even certain it was his. The color of existence was peeling back like old wallpaper. In all his drug use he had never had an escape like this, never felt as far away from his own body or the nature of humankind.
The ghost of his consciousness detected footsteps. Sahara? But they seemed too heavy, and now voices accompanied them, and these voices were purposeful, they were violent and solemn. Annoyed? There was so little he could discern through the heat.
His limbs cracked against the floor as God touched his scepter to the tip of his skull. Arlo had only ever been this overwhelmed before in anger, or in the rarer and rarer hypnagogic bliss of the opiate. Why had he lied so much? And what now was coming through the door? What was this last touch that came upon him, what was this skin’s last demand? It would remain a mystery to him. Whatever happened now, wherever he was going, he would tell all that he knew. His jaw seized open.