Shenanigans
Dane’s last text had gotten under Liko’s skin: I’m giving away too many clues before you’ve earned them. Hitting the sack.
The words weren’t even remotely sexual, but earned dangled like an apple ripe for picking, while sack was fodder for a ravenous inner teenager.
Hence Liko was no longer fiddling around with wooden Scrabble tiles, but standing under the shower spray, a hand braced against ceramic tiles.
Breathing hard through the steamy afterglow, having gotten spectacularly off while thinking about all the ways he could hit Dane’s sack and earn more clues.
“Anagram that,” he said, exhaling hard.
Despite the mind-blowing release, he couldn’t sleep. He went and sat in Kyle’s room a long time, staring at his boy’s possessions. The window out which Liko had crowed that last night, “My son is listening to me!” The syringe of joy he’d wanted to plunge into his veins.
He went back to his bed.
“What else is in Connecticut?” Dane had asked.
A lot of memories, a lot of haunted places and associations, a lot of pain. My son’s empty bedroom I keep like a shrine. An ex-wife I sleep with too much.
The day after Kyle died, Janelle stormed into Liko’s house and tore Kyle’s room apart.
Federal agents couldn’t have done a more thorough sweep.
She was looking for booze, drugs, porn, something from the hinterlands of the Dark Web in Kyle’s browser history, anything that would explain why his brain had inexplicably imploded.
She found nothing to blame, so she turned on Liko and tore him apart, demanding how, why, when, what happened, over and over, looking for the reason, the explanation, the thing.
Threatening lawsuits, death, financial ruin, castration, a suite in hell, a lifetime commitment to making Liko suffer the rest of his days.
Liko let her rage. He barely heard her anyway.
Except for the death part. He got really excited when it seemed Janelle might actually kill him.
He wanted nothing more than to die. He’d bare his throat and go quietly.
But alas, this avenging angel left Liko curled in fetal position amid the wreckage of their son’s bedroom, alive and whole.
Which, under the circumstances, was the cruelest thing she could’ve done.
The night after Kyle’s funeral, Janelle came back to the house.
She rang the bell, waited politely for admission.
Without a word, she set a pot of her famous chicken and rice on her old stove, put a six-pack in her old fridge.
Then she took Liko’s hand and led him upstairs to their old bed, where they fucked like monsters.
No love or tenderness in the act, merely a desperate attempt to remake what had been unmade.
They had rolled, pitched and snarled from one side of the mattress to the other.
They screamed in each other’s mouths, left fingerprint bruises and scratches on each other’s bodies.
They licked each other’s tears when it was over, then went down to the kitchen, naked and silent, where they drank the beer and ate chicken and rice.
They had sex again and as he fell asleep, Liko thought maybe Janelle would come back to him.
Something good might come of this. But he woke in an empty bed, feeling broken-backed and raw.
When he went stumbling along the upstairs hall, he found Janelle had put Kyle’s room in immaculate order before leaving. It had stayed that way ever since.
Liko and Janelle still slept together. Occasionally.
Randomly. With no discussion. Because it made Kyle alive for a few precious moments.
When the black hole of loss became too much, he and Janelle went running for the act that had created their son, desperately trying to snatch him back from the other side, will him back into existence.
Liko’s hand reached for the phone on the bedside table, considering Janelle. Then deciding, no. Not tonight. It wasn’t bad enough.
He lay awake. Quiet and still, yet under constant assault from within.
Grief blew a hole in you the way Schwarzenegger fired a rifle into a T-1000 and turned his head and torso inside-out.
Liko had studied this theory at length, pausing Terminator 2 to ponder Robert Patrick’s intense, chiseled expression as it was shot in half.
How he kept focus on his target even as the ribbons of his mimetic polyalloy brain fluttered above his shoulders.
He remained stoic—all right, maybe a flicker of amused curiosity—as his gleaming, ravaged structure melted back together and reassembled into perfection.
Crisp and commanding in his trim, unwrinkled cop uniform, like nothing happened.
Grief was like that.
Except for the stoic, amused part.
And the “like nothing happened” part.
Maybe grief was like Schwarzenegger descending into a vat of molten steel, flashing a heroic thumbs-up. “Fine. This is fine. This is great, actually, I’m looking forward to oblivion. Hasta la vista, baby.”
Actually it was more like the foster father deep-throating a mimetic polyalloy machete.
Or Linda Hamilton taking a nuclear shock blast to the tits.
“How you doing?” kind friends asked Liko.
“Okay,” he said, thinking, Watch Terminator 2 and pause randomly. That’s how I’m doing.
Liko’s phone pinged. A slight delay between the chime and what it meant.
Who’s texting me?
His eyes opened.
Someone’s dead.
He shut his eyes, kept his back turned to the bedside table, pretended he hadn’t heard. Not tonight, motherfuckers. The bell wasn’t tolling for him. He didn’t have to know what he didn’t know.
The phone pinged again.
He breathed in through gritted teeth. Told himself if it were one of his parents in distress, it would be a call, not a text.
He half-rolled, reaching and fumbling for the phone, squinting against the light of the display, registering it was 3:02 in the morning and it was Dane’s name in his notifications.
“You little slut,” Liko muttered, grinning as he swiped and read the first text:
I’m sure you figured out Hasen is German for “hares.” As in Drei-Hasen-Fenster.
The second text read, You’re welcome with the plate emoji.
Liko put a forearm over his eyes, breathed in and exhaled to the ceiling, “I am too old to be texting guys in the middle of the night.”
His inner teenager promptly opined the middle of the night was perfect for texting.
Liko thought up and rejected a few lines, then typed: At this rate I’ll have a new set of china for Christmas dinner.
Did I wake you up?
Yes.
Sorry. I won’t make a habit of it.
Yeah, I’m a little old for these shenanigans.
And that was all. Liko turned the phone face-down and rolled away, thinking he’d never fall back to sleep. But he did. He slept so soundly he never heard the ping at 5:37, when Dane texted back: Bullshit.