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Mannequins
It started in a bathroom.
She had been drinking; he was still drunk on adrenaline.
It started in silence.
A gaze across a crowded room, a nod, a smile, a flick of a tongue over dry lips.
It started with a tourniquet, a needle…
It started with smack…
It ended in a bathroom.
She'd come back; he'd stayed out.
He would always regret that.
It ended in silence.
Her solitude, her inability to share with him killed her.
It ended with a razor.
There were two things Roger was good at: making promises and breaking them.
He could no longer recall how many times over the past two weeks he had promised people that he was okay, promised people that he wasn't about to follow April into the grave.
He'd lied.
He wondered if her decision had been as sudden as his, or had she been meticulous? Had she plotted the details for weeks? Had she considered the methods, considered the place, considered who would find her? Had she drawn a line across her wrist before she cut?
Or, like his, had her idea begun like a wound—a sudden slice in consciousness, which, with time, began to fester? That wound seeped into the mind, leaking the poisonous thought of suicide like an infection.
On his part, it wasn't premeditated. He had simply woken up this morning and known that it was right. Something about the way the morning rose, still and cold, gave him the strength to finally go through with it.
People usually leave notes.
He wouldn't.
People leave notes, he thought, because they have things left to say…people left to say them to.
A note was a sad attempt to close all the unfinished chapters. Roger knew that his life didn't have any of those, because he'd stopped writing years ago, let himself, instead glide from moment to moment with the ease of a man copying sentences he has never penned himself.
If you have anything left to say you shouldn't be killing yourself.
He fingered the piece of paper in his own pocket: the note she'd left behind.
Roger climbed the stairs to the of with the steady steps of a martyr, a man who was unafraid even as he had been sentenced to death.
He left no note, because he had nothing to say.
No apologies to make; no one to apologize to.
No one who would even give a shit now that he was gone.
Coincidentally, Roger was in the bathroom. He stared into the mirror like a zombie confused to meet itself, his vein-littered eyes glancing around the countertop for anything sharp. There were still traces of dried blood across that counter…or was he just hallucinating? Were the flashes of red darting in his vision like signal lights, telling him it was time to die?
He didn't want red. He'd seen enough red in this bathroom, glistening in the tiles and the mirror and the puddles of pink-tinted water. He needed the world to blink out and expired.
With one last look at the counter, Roger left the bathroom and the loft behind him and headed for the roof.
The air smelled fresh, like a thousand Christmas candles burning. Roger couldn't remember the last time the air had smelled like that.
He stepped to the edge, a steel rail rising up a little past his waist, and looked down the vertical wall. It was a fucking long fall. Too bad it wasn't long enough. When he was little, Roger had spent hours toiling over a question that a schoolyard friend had asked him innocently one day: what superpower would he have, if he could have one? It had been a toss-up being flight and invisibility. Death would give him invisibility—April had proven that, the way she just shriveled in the cremation fires as easily as a moth or a leaf—but that fall didn't give him very long to fly.
Then again, if he could have a superpower, he could have chosen the ability to make himself microscopic, so that he could have injected himself in April's veins and plucked the AIDS-poisoned molecules out of her bloodstream.
He put one foot on the ledge and felt a freezing patch of wind wrap itself around his skin.
Mark was sleeping. More accurately, Mark was in a semi-coma, where a pickup could run over his leg without waking him up. He hadn't really slept since April's death.
The only thing that could force him out of sleep was the strength of a nightmare.
He woke up with a quick scream that cracked like a pre-pubescent voice. Chilled tears slid tastelessly into his mouth. He had dreamt of department store mannequins, which always scared him as a kid, chasing shoppers into bathrooms filled with razors and locking them inside until they killed themselves. He had woken up just as one of the mannequins locked its blood-red eyes on him.
He needed human contact to assure himself that flesh-and-blood humans still existed. He shuffled out of bed and inhaled deeply; then he opened his door, was greeted by further darkness that silhouetted their furniture like loose pencil outlines, and went in search of Roger.
Roger wasn't in his room. He wasn't out in the loft. The guitar lay on the couch, sunken against the cushions like a tired, waiting lover. The bathroom seemed to lie around every corner, taunting Mark with its promise of razors.
Mark stepped out into the stairway. It spiraled underneath him in silence, a twisting void. He thought he heard small sounds from up above—the distant clank of metal, the whistle of wind touching concrete.
Roger's footsteps had become light as a ghost's; if he made any sound now, it would probably be comparable to the sound of wind. Mark slid the door shut and made his way towards the roof.
Roger had one foot on the ledge and his fingers wrapped around the burning cold of the metal rail. If he brought the other foot up, he would lose balance right away. He'd always had shitty balance.
At first, he thought the rhythmic clang of metal steps was some ugly urban music drifting in from the streets. When he realized that someone was coming up to the roof, he let out the groan of a dying man—it had to be Mark.
Not Mark. He couldn't answer to Mark, not about this. He pulled his foot down and leaned casually against the rail. Maybe, if he could send Mark away fast enough…
Sure enough, a blonde head surfaced in the moonlight, followed by Mark's usual garish ensemble of stripes. The filmmaker's white cheeks quickly became flushed with pink when the wind hit his skin.
"Pretty cold out here, isn't it?"
"It's not that bad," said Roger. "What are you doing up here? Last I checked I couldn't have woken you up with a trumpet blast to your ear."
"You can't play trumpet," murmured Mark. He went to stand beside Roger, both of them looking out over the city as it twinkled like multi-colored stardust.
They sank into silence, and Roger felt his muscles tensing and his breath tightening. At that moment, he resented Mark's presence more than he resented mortality or AIDS or the discomfort of the wind.
"You should go back to sleep," said Roger. "You need it, man."
"So do you, but you don't sleep."
"I really can't. I haven't been that tired, really. I've had a lot to think about. I was glad to see you resting, though."
"I couldn't sleep either. I had this dream that woke me up all of a sudden, and I was pretty awake, you know? Couldn't go back to sleep."
"Maybe you can try now, and you won't have the dream again."
"Yeah, I know. But when I woke up, I really needed to see you. Or anyone. Just to know I wasn't the only person who existed."
Roger sighed. He contemplated jumping off quickly, a movement as quick and painless as a muscle spasm, before Mark could stop him or say anything. Mark's bony arms couldn't hold him back for long anyway. Instead, he found himself asking: "What was the dream about?"
"Well, you know those mannequins in the shopping malls and stuff? They always freaked me out as a kid. Seriously, they scared the crap out of me."
"Me too," whispered Roger. The moon suddenly looked like their unblinking eyes.
"In my dream they were just chasing people and shit. It sounds stupid, but it sure woke me up. I was the last person they started chasing, so my first thought waking up was that I was the last person in the world who wasn't dead or plastic. So I had to come find you."
"Here I am. Not dead, not plastic."
Wind passed through his unwashed hair. It was growing out; greasy tips tickled the tops of his ears. The more he stood outside, the more he wanted a jacket and a scarf; his neck and arms were dry and clammy, and he teeth rattled against each other behind his closed, cracked lips. He was wearing cheap drugstore flip-flops in the dead of winter and thought he could feel his toes swelling into frostbitten nubs. His fingertips were covered in a layer of dark, calloused skin that peeled away and bled—a guitarist's fingers.
Not dead. Not plastic.
"I know," said Mark, his face breaking into a boyish smile. "I feel like an idiot, actually. Like a kid who ran to his mom's bed after having a bad dream. Not that I ever did that with my mom."
"Me neither."
Mark sighed. He fidgeted, fingers toying with the ends of his scarf. He was looking down towards the alley, and Roger wondered what would happen if the filmmaker's glasses fell off. They would fall away soundlessly and the lenses would shatter. Mark would be left blind.
"For what it's worth," said Mark. "It feels really good to have someone to run to, even if it's for a pathetic reason. I know you won't be here forever—no use fooling myself into thinking that. Until then, though…it's nice to have someone to turn to."
Roger stayed silent as the moon, silent as a mannequin.
"And you know you always have me to run to, right? No matter how big or a small a thing you're running from."
"Thanks, man. I know."
Mark nodded. He looked vibrant, as bright as the distant neon lights, with his clashing stripes and stark white skin. Roger felt like a diluted drink, standing next to someone so alive.
"Hey, Mark," he said. "I could go for a drink. Or a smoke. Or both."
"Simultaneously?"
"Cigarette-flavored vodka is the new fad."
"Yeah, right. Like we'd ever know what the new fad is."
Roger laughed softly. "Exactly. But, hey…could you maybe go get us a drink and bring it up here? It's nice up here. I don't really want to leave."
"Whatever you want, Rog."
Mark began to walk off, head tilted upwards even though few stars were visible behind the nighttime curtain of grayish indigo. His steps were slow, with a slight saunter, as though each one meant something important. When he stood beside the ladder, he gave Roger one of his lopsided grins and disappeared.
Roger turned and looked down again, and was dismayed and confused and relieved to find that everything had changed.
Mark hated the smell of alcohol, the taste of alcohol, the headaches he got from alcohol, and the hangovers that seemed to stick with him for week. But he still liked drinking.
He poured two glasses of rum. The smell, as sickly sweet as lavender in a hospital room or syrup in a toilet, coiled upwards and constricted his senses. He kept pouring, though, until he had two satisfactory concoctions of what looked like liquid amber. It would be nice to drink with Roger just for the sake of drinking with Roger again—not to forget April, to drown out death, not to make their senses numb to the world.
Just as he was lifting the glasses from the table, he thought he heard a sound like sharp whistle of wind, and the patchy light from the window was interrupted briefly by a passing shadow. His heart and breath paused for a moment as he looked out at the night, wondering if something had fallen.
Metal creaked behind him, and he jumped slightly. Rum slid down his wrists.
Roger grinned at him from the shadows and the silhouettes.
"You changed your mind?" asked Mark.
"Yeah. It's cold as fuck outside."
Mark shrugged and held out Roger's glass. The songwriter took it, amber reflected in his eyes. "Thank you," he said. He drank, and the liquid coated and burned the working muscles of his throat.
Thank you.
It started with a laugh.
Rising in vigor, not from any internal force, but from drunkenness.
It started with a joke, a smile, a hand…
It started with a tear.
It started with an embrace.
It ended with the kind of silent understanding that only true friends can possess.