After Ian
by Jill Jepson
part 1
After Ian, there is nothing in my world but the rats, gnawing at my fingers, my eyes. The deep hunger. Slashes across my face. Blood under my nails. The rats aren’t real, but the hunger is. The slashes, too, the blood. The howls that tear from my belly and rise through the air, inhuman, as if they would rip my soul out with them, what’s left of it. This is my life.
The feel of his body curving into mine, the bones sharp against the skin, his face already a skull, and his last breath, urgent, pleading. The last tiny tremble through the body of my dying child. This is my life after Ian died.
Colby comes to my apartment. He sighs when he sees me. He sweeps up glass from something I don’t remember breaking. He vacuums the kitchen and living room, cleans the stinking bathroom and does my laundry. He does dishes until the pile crusted with mold are all clean, and he scrubs away the smell of rot, except the one rising from Ian’s trembling body that I can still smell.
He pulls me to my feet, strips me naked. “Don’t go all modest on me, now. You know the ladies don’t do anything for me. Anyway, you look like shit. Smell like it, too. Jesus, Cass.”
He pulls me into the shower, turns on the water and hands me the soap. “Wash,” he orders me. I stare at the soap in my hand, the water running down my body into brown rivulets on the shower floor.
He slaps me. I stare at him.
“Wash, or I’ll slap you again. You know I will.”
I wash myself all over. He leaves the shower door open and sits on the toilet seat thumbing through a magazine.
When I’m done, he turns off the water and throws a towel in my face. “I’m going to get you some clean clothes, and you’re going to put them on. We’re going out to Lou’s and you’re going to eat something. Dry off. Now.”
As I dress, he gets a tiny vial of insulin out of his pocket, lifts his shirt, and injects himself in the belly. “Good to go,” he says.
Outside there is too much noise and too many people. People who didn’t know Ian, who can’t smell his dying body, rotting from the inside out. Who never loved my boy. Colby holds my arm in his fist like I might run away. Or evaporate. I would, if I could. Not run; evaporate. Turn into vapor, dissipate until I am nothing.
Lou’s is bright. The light burns my eyes.
My eyes are burning, Mommy. Please make my eyes stop burning.
The smell of grease and stale coffee turns my stomach.
Colby takes me to a booth, orders me a burger with coleslaw and a Coke, then changes the Coke to milk saying I need the protein.
He looks at me across the table. “What am I going to do with you? How can I help you get out of this?”
“Out?” I say. “Out?”
“Or through it. What can we do to get you through?”
“There is no through, Col. There’s no away, no out.”
“Oh, Cass,” Colby says.
Mommy, it hurts.
The food comes. I shudder at the sight. The body of an animal, loved by her mother, slaughtered and ground into a fried slab.
“You’re not going to throw up, are you?” Colby says. “Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
I shake my head.
“There’s a drugstore next door. I’m going to run there, get a bottle of aspirin and something for your stomach. Stuff to help you sleep, too. When I come back, I want to see a little of this food gone. Two bites, that’s all I ask. You hear me?”
I nod, and he leaves. I reach into my pocket and pull out a scrap of paper. I lay it next to my plate, smoothing the creases.
It takes Colby a long time to get back from the drugstore. He has a little white paper bag with a jar of aspirin and two packets of fizzy stomach powder. There are three pills in a sandwich bag, too. He didn’t get those at the pharmacy.
“To help you sleep,” he says. He glares at my untouched plate. “Two bites. You couldn’t manage that?” Then he spies the scrap of paper. He snatches it up, reads it, and shakes his head.
“You’re not doing this.” He crumples the paper in his fist and crams it into his shirt pocket.
I don’t protest. I’ve memorized the address.
“That place,” Colby says. “They say they’ll help, but they don’t.”
“How do you know what they do?”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. Doval went there. Remember? After Marta died? And then Dima for that dog of hers.”
“Doval was an idiot.”
“It changed him. Dima, too. It did stuff to their brains.”
“My brain is already changed. My brain changed the day Ian...” Evaporated? Rotted?
“We’re not going to discuss this.” He picks up my burger and takes a bite.
“No,” I say, “we’re not.”
Back at my place, Colby changes the sheets on my bed, gets me out of my clothes, and orders me to take a sleeping pill before he goes. He pulls out two vials he’s stored in my refrigerator and pockets them. They’re not from any drugstore.
“Sure that’s safe?” I say.
He shrugs. “No, but it’s cheap. Enough for today and tomorrow. Friday, some money’s coming in.”
“That leaves one day with none.”
“I can go 24 hours without.” He grins at me and pulls on his jacket.
“You call me,” he says. “You need to talk any time, you call, okay? You get some weird idea into your head, you call me before you go off and do something you’ll regret.”
“Will do,” I say, knowing I won’t.
* * *
In the morning, I leave the apartment and head east toward the river, ignoring the people who didn’t love Ian, down one street and the next, until the bodegas and diners disappear, and the streets are filled with boarded buildings, broken windows, broken-down people. I search the numbers on the doors. In my jacket pocket, I have an envelope stuffed with cash.
When I find the building, I climb two flights to apartment 4, and knock. I hear a muffled voice from inside and push the door open.
Two men and a woman look at me with a kind of recognition. They’ve never seen me before, but they see the curve of my shoulders and the way my eyes never seem to blink. They know grief when they see it.
The woman, tall and lank, stands by the window with a joint in one hand and a can of 7-Up in the other. She takes a toke and hands the joint to a shriveled little man sprawled on a sagging sofa. Another man, also thin except for a mammoth belly that strains against his shirt buttons, sits in a beat-up easy chair. The only other furniture is a wooden stool.
“You’ve come for the treatment.”
“Yes.”
He gives the stool a push with his foot and nods toward it. I sit down.
“How did you hear about us?”
“You know Doval?”
“Doval?”
“It was two years ago. You probably don’t remember.”
“Doval. The one with the girlfriend with cancer. Mary was it?”
“Marta.”
“He sent you?”
“He didn’t send me. He just told me. He gave me the information. About what you do.”
The man with the big belly exchanges glances with the others. “Tell us what we do, then. What Doval told you.”
I glance at the skinny woman and the little man on the couch. “He said you took him there. To wherever Marta was. That he could see her, talk to her, be with her there.” My voice grows thin, barely audible. “I thought you could do the same thing for me and my boy.”
“And how do we do it? Did Doval explain that, too?”
“You... I guess you kill people? You kill them temporarily. Stop their hearts? Stop their brains, too? Like, flatlining or something. And then you revive them.”
“Did he tell you it hurts?” says the wizened guy on the couch. He has delicate features, like a boy, but his skin lies loose on his bones.
“Yes.” It hurts, Mommy. Make it stop!
“Did he tell you we don’t always succeed in the resuscitation part?” asks the big-bellied man.
I nod. “But you usually do, right? You usually bring the people back?”
He sticks out his lower lip and tips his head to the side. “Usually.” Then he folds his hands across his belly and settles back in his chair. “One thousand dollars.”
I stare at him. “Doval said five hundred.”
“It’s gone up.”
“I don’t have a thousand.” It was all I could do to come up with half that. By not paying rent. By slipping fifty bucks from a lady’s purse in the supermarket and two twenties from a guy’s wallet in line at the post office. By borrowing from Colby, who lent me as much as he could despite struggling himself, because he thought I was using it for groceries. When he discovered I had no groceries in the house, he refused to lend me another dime. He’d bring food instead, cook it, make me eat.
“In special cases, we’ll go as low as nine-fifty.”
“I have five hundred,” I say. I pull the envelope out of my jacket pocket, as if showing him the cash will convince him. “I can pay the rest later.”
The men laugh.
“A thousand,” Big-belly says.
I stand up and head for the door, rushing because I don’t want to cry in front of these creeps.
When I get to the door, Big-belly says, “Wait.”
I turn, hopeful.
“You seem like a nice lady. We’ll do you a favor. Five hundred. This time, only.” He holds out his hand. I walk back to him and place the envelope in his palm.
They have me lie down on the saggy couch. It smells like old urine. The woman drops her roach into the 7-Up can and pulls a filthy cushion from a chair in the corner. She lifts my head and slips the cushion under it. The withered man opens a shabby suitcase and pulls out a device. A metal bar with leather straps attached, an electric cord emerging from it, other cords leading to a box with controls. My dread feels like a warm, putrid liquid filling my torso, rising to my throat.
“You want to back out any time, you can,” the woman says. “The money is ours one way or the other.”
“I don’t want to back out.”
The withered man takes my arm, sticks the bar in my palm and curls my fingers around it. The straps go over the back of my hand, onto my wrist. I couldn’t let go if I wanted. The woman plugs the thing in.
Big-belly lights a cigarette. “Any last words, just in case?”
I shake my head. The last thing I see is his arm reaching for the switch.
Copyright © 2024 by Jill Jepson
