Last Cup of Sorrow #3
Thank God the dog didn’t chase after him, not that he expected it to. He left its prey lying in the dark and rain. Suit felt bad for the man, whatever his age was now, but he couldn’t feel any worse than he did for himself.
He thought: if the dogs continued to become more plentiful, their natural environment more compromised until this became their natural environment, it might just be a matter of time before everyone went through this process of consumption and evacuation.
He only hoped that no one ever had to go through the process twice.
***
In the days following that night at the Chinese restaurant, having started a fresh work week, Suit experienced an uncomfortable heavy pressure on his right side, where he feared his liver was still processing all that alcohol.
Similarly: a deep dull pain in his back, on the right, where he fretted his kidney struggled against all the poison he had let into himself.
He wondered, too, though, if having one’s body digested and transformed by the glass dogs left one with damaged organs.
No...no, he decided. Those effects were simply the advancement of age itself, accelerated by the dogs or not.
Whatever the case, one afternoon in the restroom nearest to his cubicle, as he stood over the toilet bowl in one of the stalls, there was an agonizing burst like an ejaculation of pulverized glass when he started to urinate.
A proper stream began after that, but it was tinged red and stung like acid.
He tore off a segment of toilet paper afterwards and dabbed his meek, wrinkled member’s tip.
It came back spotted darkly with blood. He hoped he had simply passed a kidney stone, and that this wasn’t a sign of something more serious.
Cancer? Did cancer make you pee blood? Could cancer come not from festering inside your body, but from you festering inside another body?
He kept himself composed, didn’t want his supervisor or coworkers to detect his unease.
That wouldn’t look professional. He let the faucet run icy in the sink...
to gather the flow made a cup of his hands, a leaky goblet of unblessed water.
He splashed his face and looked up at his reflection.
He had been twenty-eight before, and now here he was a year later being thankful that he looked only forty-eight.
He returned his eyeglasses to his face.
He had never worn glasses until about a year ago.
***
Friday rolled around, end of another work week.
Suit went to the grocery store for a few days’ worth of supplies, mostly stuff he could microwave.
Frozen meat from animals he hadn’t had to clamp in his jaws for a long time to suffocate before he could bite into them.
Best to get this errand done before evening set in.
As he walked from his car to the market, he noticed a lone glass dog was perched on the building’s flat roof, late afternoon sun like a molten fluid burning inside it.
Although some other people had also taken note, and pointed warily but without panic up at the creature – and it appeared to be sightlessly spying on them all – it remained as still as a gargoyle.
Maybe, having developed into a mature specimen, it had jumped down from that communication tower that loomed just beyond the market.
After Suit had loaded his bags into his trunk, he went over to the liquor store located in the same strip mall and picked up a big plastic bottle of vodka.
Sometimes he made his own dirty martinis at home, but he never seemed to get the formula right – the ratio of olive juice, and forget about vermouth.
Often he simply drank straight from the bottle.
This equally crucial errand finished, Suit guided his rundown car out of the lot slowly, careful about all the other vehicles coming in and leaving; it was, after all, pay day.
As he cruised past the front of the supermarket he’d been to, he saw a stooped aged Asian woman moving toward the entrance, pushing a stray rickety shopping cart she’d adopted from the parking lot.
Suit might not have noticed her at all except that, strangely, this elderly woman had long, frizzy gray hair rooted into one side of her head, while the other half of her skull was shaved down to a silvery stubble.
Suit slammed on his brakes. The car behind him slammed on its horn, but he ignored that.
“Hey!” Suit called, thrusting his head out his open driver’s side window.
The old Asian woman only half-looked back at him over her shoulder, and retorted, “Hay is for horses.”
***
For supper Suit had eaten a tray of microwaved chicken, parts of it hardened so much he might have been dining on archaeopteryx fossils, other areas as cold as mammoth flesh mined from a tundra.
Then he shut off the lights in the bedroom that faced down onto the road fronting the house he lived in, carried the big plastic vodka bottle by its neck to the window.
What else did he have to occupy himself with on a Friday night?
Movies with intensely romantic plots or explosive action, both of which would only serve to remind him how impotent, in effect, he was?
The pair of old communication towers out there, one bent double upon itself, buzzed into the night – transmitted straight to his nervous system, or redirected signals received from...
where? – whether they were still in service or not.
Around the edge of his shade, the orange-pink illumination from sodium lamps limned half Suit’s face.
In his left fist Suit clenched the neck of that vodka bottle.
In his right, the checkered walnut grip of a .
38 revolver that had belonged to his father.
Before his death three years back, Suit’s father had given him this pistol and a little cloth bag full of old coins, advising him to hold onto them in case he was ever in a tough spot and needed to sell them.
Well, a few years ago, while laid off from a previous job, Suit had broken down and sold the coins pretty much for the metal they consisted of, not the years in which they had been minted.
He felt he had been exploited; had garnered little more than a hundred dollars.
But he still possessed this handgun. Maybe, partly, because it remained a mystery as to why his dad had ever acquired it.
Also, though, Suit had used to enjoy taking the revolver out into the woods at the boundary of his town and firing it at beer cans and glass bottles.
Of course, he’d been much younger then. Such nihilism was a common symptom of youthful rage, of frustrated impotence.
He hadn’t seen any glass dogs in those days, he reflected. If he saw them now easily enough in strip mall parking lots, why was that? In the woods, hadn't he been in their own primal environment?
“They weren’t always here!”
Almost as if he’d been teleported, Suit jolted more sober with the awareness that he next stood on the warped boards of the old house’s front porch, mired like a fly in amber in the swampy summer night air, still gripping the vodka bottle in his left and the .38 in his right.
He realized he was waiting in the porch’s shadows, like a hunter in a deer blind.
Suit set the sloshing, half-empty bottle down on the seat of a white plastic chair, its underside laced with grimy spiderwebs.
“Hey,” he whispered into the night. Who could have heard him, realistically?...but there was a tremulous bravado in his voice. “I’m here. You want some more of me? You only took a sip before.”
One never knew how much they would take at one swallow. A little, or a long chug.
Moths battered themselves in snowflake droves against the sodium streetlamps.
Stupid, masochistic things. Fragile wings scaled in dust. Was he like those flimsy constructs, or were the hungering dogs like the moths...
mindless in their transitory pursuits? Anything that needed to feed was a thing that was, by its very nature, ephemeral. Impermanent. And thus, vulnerable.
“You weren’t always here,” Suit said. “Yeah, I know. You know I know.”
He lifted the pistol and aimed it across the street. Toward the dish of the black tower that hadn’t folded down against itself. A cup gathering more of the universe than it might seem capable of, forsaken metal remnant that it was.
“Who called you? I know I didn’t call you...you fucking fucks.”
He staggered backwards, fortuitously fell into his white plastic chair. With an excess of slow-motion care, he set the revolver down on the boards near his feet, then took a long pull from his vodka bottle.
“Come and get me,” he mumbled, laying back his head. There was nothing to cushion it, so his neck pressed into the hard rim of the chair’s backrest. “Come...and...get me.”
***
Pattering sounds awakened him. Suit lifted his head, and it was like tearing away staples that had connected his neck to the backrest of the plastic chair.
Morning had just arrived, and a light rain was falling, like fluid weeping from the sky’s gray, necrotized tissues. Suit stared fuzzily into the new day. Stared at those twin towers across the street.
Suit knew that those three translucent loops, gathered near the top of the tower that hadn’t folded upon itself, hadn’t been there last night when he’d passed out here on the front porch.
“Okay,” Suit whispered. He wasn’t yet sobered, fresh new day or not. “Thank you for coming, fuckers. Ohh, yeah...thank you.”
Had the larvae formed because of his exposed and vulnerable proximity? Like unknowing bait?
The revolver and vodka bottle rested on the porch boards near his mosquito-bitten ankles.
Perhaps only by accident, his groping hand found the bottle rather than the gun.
He took a long pull, coughed for a while until he was red-faced, though he managed to keep all the toxin inside instead of vomiting it out.
He was a chalice of flesh...the vessel for a poisoned transubstantiation... this is my body, which is broken…