seams & fractures

seams & fractures

God his head hurt. Jesus, shut the alarm off. It was like a goddamned air raid going on next to his brain.
"Jesus," he said, "shut the goddamned thing off." He swung his arm like an olympic swimmer and hit the clock, killing, smothering the alarm. It was a tiny alarm clock and so loud.
In the bathroom he looked at his hands, and they were still scarred from the razor. In the bathroom he looked in the mirror and saw in it a blank head. He looked like a goddamned nazi.
In a week the cuts on his scalp would look like the scars on his hand, he thought. He lifted the toilet seat but there was already a bottle of budweiser hiding in there. He closed the seat to look for some aspirin.
His tongue was dying in his mouth so he picked up a toothbrush, but his stomach was empty so he put it back down.

On the way to the kitchen, he tripped on a can of beer, and had already tripped on a can of beer when answering the door last night. His head still burned from the razor because schick has four blades now, but he turned the door knob and the hallway had a cop in it.
He only had one contact in, so he squinted at the policeman like a pirate might, but even the cop wouldn’t have looked bad with an eye patch. He was a big dude, big and blue and silver and he had used his right fist to pound the door because there was a long black flashlight in his left.
The cop asked if anyone else was in the apartment, smelled his breath and said that he had heard someone screaming.
It had been the TV, though, and he wondered if the cop had a partner out there. A movie playing that the cop had heard.
The cop asked for I.D. and brought out his notebook in the same motion, like his voicebox was connected to his shoulder. Wad of tickets pried from his pocket, waiting to be issued.
His badge looked like the disc on a 1930’s doctor’s forehead and he asked a lot of questions, started writing a prescription on his notepad.

A friend of a friend of his was swiss but spoke french, revealed his english once when they were drinking beer. “In America, when you drink alcohol, you…you are an outlaw?”
He wasn’t sure if it was a question but liked the sound of it anyway. None of his friends came over that night, but he leered at the policeman like a pirate might, like outlaws do. Avast, he almost said.
Instead he looked at the cop, looked at the paper in his blue hand. He stood up straight and said to the cop, with his arms and his legs and his voicebox, “Sir, tomorrow I go to war.”
A silence like a solar eclipse darkened the hallway, so silent that not even a tumbleweed blew between them, no doors opened or cats meowed or distant men cried red whispers of despair. No tides came in or out.
He thought the ticket might turn yellow in the cop’s hand, but things need oxygen to decompose and no breeze came through the hallway.
The cop looked at his bald head like a jeweler at a rock, raised his flashlight and shone it on the dome. They stood on either side of the doorway, the beam sweeping like the spotlight in the great escape across his face.
The cop was in uniform and had asked to see I.D., but he was in adidas shorts and a t-shirt; the cop didn’t ask to see a uniform.
In the cop’s fist the ticket crumpled, and the cop wasn’t sure if he should say good luck or keep it down. There was enough beer to float jupiter, but he looked at the cop, wasn’t sure if he should salute him or tell him to go to hell.

In the kitchen he couldn’t eat, that would be like diesel fueling a pair of microwaves.
He had to work so he put on his uniform, well-camouflaged in his living room. He had to go in today and his uniform smelled like that whole week’s grease, it was wrinkled but no one would make him do push ups.