Parker

Clunk.
“This car is falling apart,” I venture absently as we turn a corner, wipers on full blast, battering the snow away. The storm is in its third day now.
Merrick just stares out the passenger window, like he didn’t even hear the noise. He’s mesmerised by the off-white sky; it’s like a brightly shining darkness.
“Piece by beautiful peace,” he mocks me.
“Hey, at least mine works.” He looks over at me, his hand carefully brushing the upholstery.
“Touché.”
The blister on my arm itches, and I let go of the wheel to scratch it. That’s all it takes, just one movement, one moment. I remember this part very clearly. It’s not that having my hands on the wheel would have saved us, but I’m so focused on scratching without losing control of the car that I ignore the stop sign at the crossroads; it just fails to register.
So I keep driving and the other car, a big white Toyota SUV, hisses and snarls as the breaks fight to gain purchase on the snow. I brake and swerve, but fuck me: there’s a parked car by the curb on the other side.
“Jesus,” I mumble and in the corner of my eye Merrick flinches and suddenly


there are two separate trains of thought running through my head. One of them is thinking how strange it is that I still say Jesus even though I’m not religious and I haven’t been for years so I guess it must be a habit I picked up from someone in the family or maybe even TV or something oh holy fuck the world is tilting and a traffic sign is punching through the windscreen



everything seems to condense into a flattened tunnel of events, like walking into a bank vault and we’re bound straight for the parked car, which looks auburn under the three inches or so of snow on it and I can faintly hear Merrick say “this is a crash” as the harshness of the turn away from the SUV pushes my old Suzuki onto its two left-hand wheels, and I realise we’re about to be fucked because that SUV isn’t stopping


and it’s pretty calm now. The fierceness of the storm seems a million miles away even though the windshield is shattered, completely gone. I feel very conscious of my seatbelt as my eyes drift over the apartment buildings across the street, 70s concrete things with circular windows in columns above the entrances, but big square windows everywhere else.
My line of sight is uncomfortably broken by the post for the stop sign, which I realise is in the car with me. I keep drifting as the snowflakes spiral onto the broken glass and my eyes come upon something that gives off a tense feeling of inappropriateness: Merrick’s head.
I’m not sure I’d even have noticed it there if it hadn’t had that sense of I’m-not-supposed-to-be-here about it, kind of like how you can get away with being naked at a party, provided you’re not awkward about it, because if you are, everyone is going to be awkward.
And there it is, Merrick’s head, just lying on the dash, on its right side. Incredibly straight trails of blood lie in narrow lines leading from the neck, but the only blood still coming out of it is coming in a steady welling, like a low-powered drinking fountain.
For some reason I look to my right and, sure enough, there’s the rest of Merrick, still propped up, right hand still clutching the plastic door handle, left hand splayed unnaturally over the edge of his seat. The stop sign is in the back seat, on top of some Neil Gaiman books, an empty CD case and a McDonalds paper cup.
My eyes defocus, or try to, and I’m faintly aware of pain approaching in my shoulders. A sudden gust of wind brings cold into the car, and I start shivering, which accelerates the pain.
Movement: my eyes dart to the head. Merrick’s eyes have opened.
They’re looking at me.
They’re wide, very wide. His mouth opens, works as if he’s trying to find words. The eyes remain wide, panicked and confused. He looks over at his body and back to me, the mouth works a few more times, the eyes bore into me, then roll back into his head, and then shut.
I struggle to comprehend the meaning of all this and stare out the smashed windshield as sirens approach. I’m aware of people approaching but I want them all to fuck off, like relatives at a family birthday. One more glance at the head and the eyes are still shut, and my whole body stiffens at the pain in my shoulders.

* * *

The fractured tibia keeps me in the hospital for a week, and the storm comes and goes. I watch the snow roar silently through the amber beams of streetlights from my sixth-floor hospital ward.
My mind refuses to contemplate Merrick. My mother, his mother and his half-sister Paula come to visit me on the third day. They’d been twice before, but I was sedated the first time and asleep the second. “We didn’t want to wake you,” Merrick’s mom Lucy says, her grief barely held in check by a pinched smile and a thin layer of make-up.
“How was the funeral?” I ask, fighting the urge to touch my shoulder. Asides from my linens and three-day stubble, I don’t look much like a hospital patient; I don’t even have to have a sling for my arm, and it makes me feel uneasy, like I’m cutting class by pretending to be sick.
“Oh, fine. Your mother made lasagne for the wake,” Lucy says and pats my mom’s knee. The hospital chairs they’re sitting in look like they belong in a middle school.
I can’t look at them. I look at my nightstand, which has a Tank Girl paperback and some DVDs on it.
“That… reminds me,” Mom says, rifling through her handbag. “I was going to get some more books for you, but I forgot… if you want to, take my phone, it’s…”
“Mom, it’s okay…” I start, but don’t have the energy to continue. My eyes meet Paula’s where she stands against the ward closet looking like she’s been crying a shitload. We stare at each other, and I’m unable to hold it, but there’s an invitation in those eyes.

* * *

I fuck Paula from behind against the wall of my ward. She doesn’t gasp or moan, just inhales quickly. In the end, I’m unable to come due to the pain in my tibia, but I’m pretty sure she does. I used to be pretty good at that, knowing when they come, but I’ve gotten worse at it.
We watch the storm.
“You must think I’m pretty sick,” she says after a while.
“No, not at all… in fact, I think it’s a common reaction.”
“That’s nice. I just didn’t want you to feel like I was using you to vent emotional baggage. I mean, I care about you, is all I’m saying.”
“No, it’s all right, I get it,” and I look at her and actually put my arm round her, but we don’t feel like lovers, more like comrades, soldiers in some kind of jungle war.
“Besides, it seems like…” I trail off, knowing how offended she’ll be if I finish the thought.
“What?” she asks, predictably enough, but I realise I don’t really care, anyway, and I think she’ll understand.
“It just seems like… the last twenty or so times I’ve had sex, it seems like it’s been some fucked up emotional thing, like anger or grief or… feeling someone’s had for someone else for a while, and never said anything about it… I don’t know.”
Another silence, and the storm billows completely out of control. I watch a large branch blow through a backyard.
“Why do suppose that is? All those people finally admitting they have feelings for someone else?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s like… none of it matters anymore.”

* * *

I end up watching the news for some reason. Suicide bombings, escalating attacks with growing numbers of victims and aerial strikes that are leaving unknown numbers of civilians injured or dead all take back seats to financial meltdowns, the rate of the Dollar against the Euro and two senators who voted against their party lines and are proud to make a decision that’s right for a stronger America. The storm keeps blowing and my ex-girlfriend Sarah calls and says she’s breaking up with Rory.
“That’s like the fifth big breakup this year,” I exhale into the payphone.
“Not really. Jake and Lorna got back together Will and Morgan were already broken-up in like, October… he just didn’t move out ‘til February.”
“Uh huh.”
“So I heard you saw Paula the other day,” and there’s a want for information. Not gossip, necessarily, just wanting to know things.
“Uh, yeah, she came by, with her mom and my mom.”
“How was she?” The tone indicates disgust, but that can’t be right.
“Pretty fucked up… I mean, how’d you be?”
“Yeah, I guess…”
There is an insanely meaningful silence.
“How are you?”
I can’t help being flattered at her concern.
“Okay, I guess, you know, all things considered, I just…”
Another potent silence.
“Do you ever think about me?”
Hmf. Nothing subtle about that question, but it all seems so inevitable somehow. In keeping with this spirit of inevitability, I let myself slide, putting up no fight at all.
“Yeah, sure, of course, I mean… I never really stopped… you know?”
“Yeah.”

* * *

I don’t leave my ward for any reason, as the hallway has that awful hospital smell, the beige-brown smell of shit diluted with floor polish and starch. My blister grows worse and worse as my tibia heals, and eventually I have to be transferred to a third-floor ward to clear up an infection that forms in it. I share the third-floor ward with an old man with some sort of stomach problem. I ask my doctor what’s going to happen to the sixth-floor ward, if it’s going to be used for something else. Nothing, he says. I go there every chance I get to watch the storm. The old man farts a lot.
Eventually Sarah comes to visit, and I take her to the sixth-floor ward. She talks about the future and I feel enchanted by the thought of it, but in no way obligated to listen to her; it’s as if she’s recommending a movie I’ve already seen. She hates the snow and can’t wait for spring. She rubs her hands by the radiator, and she is indeed cold and wet when I start touching her. We fuck carefully, lavishly, relaxed and making the most of every second of it. She’s lost weight and gotten a tattoo, an infinity symbol. I’d forgotten how fast she likes it.

* * *

Old songs play in my head and fatigue is a constant. A second old man visits the one in my ward, a day before the latter dies. He comes back to the ward the next day, to stare at his friend’s empty bed.
“He wouldn’t have had to wait long,” he says, to me or himself.
“Excuse me?” He looks at me.
“Edward,” he explains, pointing to the bed. “Not much more to do, not much more to see, it’s all coming to an end soon.” I shift in my bed, sending a spear of pain through my shoulders. The old man moves closer to my bed, closer to the window where the storm keeps getting worse. He ignores or does not notice my pain.
“Surely you’ve sensed, as I have, that there cannot be much time remaining,” he says staring out the window. “Not much of a view, with these trees all around.”
“You should see my other room, on the sixth floor,” I say. The old man turns to me, enthralled.
“You have another room?”

* * *

I don’t see the old man again. I get drunk the night I’m discharged and go to Chez Victor, where I meet Jake, Rory and Morgan. Morgan asks me a lot of questions about the crash and what my favourite memory of Merrick is. I think hard before I answer.
“Uh… probably getting the drop on Lorna after she stole all that beer from the Maddox party. He said we’d turn her in to Benny, or even the cops. He made so much fun of her so much she started crying, and they still ended up fucking in Jake’s room that night.” Rory laughs a bit too hard, but Morgan seems fascinated.
“Really? But didn’t he kick your ass for telling everybody?” she asks. I chuckle and sip my beer.
“Yeah, but it was totally worth it.” Morgan plays with the tabletop and grins, biting her tongue.
I finish my beer and stand to get another round. “Morg? Rory? Jay?”
“Pale Ale,” Rory says.
“Whatever you’re getting,” Morgan says.
“I’m good,” Jake says after a pause.
The crowd is pretty intense and the watery numbness of beer in my mouth makes my teeth feel too big. “Hey man,” I call weakly to the bartender and raise a hand. I lean against the bar and spot Sarah at a table with some guys I don’t know. I smile, but she just stares.
I turn to order drinks and realise Jake is standing next to me. “You shouldn’t talk shit about Ricky. You should speak well of the dead.”
“What?”
“I said… you should only speak well of the dead.”
“Yeah… sorry, I just guess it doesn’t matter all that much anymore. There just isn’t that much left, you know?”
“I’ll drink to that,” he says, raising a whiskey the barkeep just gave him.
Morgan drinks a lot with me and we dance. The DJ puts on Radiohead’s ‘Where I End And You Begin’ and Morgan loses her shit, screaming and pulling me closer as she dances, begging the DJ to turn it up, so loud he can hear her eight feet away over the song. Jake comes over dancing with us and trying not to spill his whiskey. Morgan pulls my arm too hard and my shoulders feel like a SWAT team just kicked them in. I collapse against a speaker.
“Dude,” Jake says, but Morgan doesn’t notice. I’m in a haze and seeing sharp patterns on the floorboards, dimly aware that Will is suddenly here, arguing with Morgan as the song escalates to a maddening din.
Feral energy and the inescapable feeling that it’s now or never lift me off the ground and my fist goes flying into Will’s face, soundless, and he backs and we grapple for a second, but I run for the basement door and past the bathrooms and I don’t know where I am, but I still hear the music. I’m outside and Morgan’s with me, but I can barely walk and I think we’re in a taxi now, kissing awkwardly because I can’t move my shoulders and she’s touching me and going down on me and none of it seems real because I can’t see it… the storm bucks the car violently and I lean against the driver’s seat, breathing “Take me to St. Anne’s” even as Morgan is swallowing me…

…I’m not surprised to find the old man there as we limp into the sixth-floor ward, my blister itching worse than ever. He’s standing, watching the storm billow out of control. They’ve closed the highway perpendicular to the hospital, due to the snow and the wind. Morgan and I sit down on the bed; experience tells me I shouldn’t, but I caress her anyway, not caring if she’ll read too much into it.
“Young Mr. Parker, come back to the old ward, I see, yes.”
“It’s happening, isn’t it? The end?” I manage, deliriously out of breath.
“Not in any real sense, will the world continue.”
“Right…”
He turns to me, smiling. “After all, what more could possibly happen?”
I’m unable to answer. Morgan stands and makes her way to the window, taking the old man’s hand.
“It’s almost overwhelming,” she says, her eyes full of wonder in the window’s ghostly reflection of her.
“Just let go,” the old man says. “It’ll be like raising your head to the sky after a lifetime watching the ground.”
There is a sense of something drawing over me, like a canopy closing or I’m walking into a cave. My head tilts up and the storm encloses me.