Also, he'd always kept his cheeks smooth and kissable for Amy, but since she'd left him a short three months ago, they'd been in desperate need of a shave; tiny black hairs grew in the deep hollows of his cheeks and were poking out in all directions. It was the kind of meticulous detail that portrait painters just loathed, but he wasn't really planning on having his portrait painted any time soon, or his cheeks kissed by anyone, for that matter. (Too bad about that last part, really. There -was- that cute girl at the post office, although she did seem a tad young for him...)
His attractive face had permanently frozen into a sort of disgruntled frown, and he rarely if ever looked happy, anymore.
He'd noticed other things about himself, too. Things that went beyond physical appearance and that probably should have mattered, but he just couldn't be bothered to give a shit about. For example, his glasses were rather outdated. Their tortoise-shell rims were just a little too big for his thin face and he was beginning to get headaches from the lenses' almost antique perscription (he'd had it for nearly two decades); another reasonaside from depressionthat drove him to sleeping so deeply, and so often.
And he smelled. Oh, he showered occassionally, just because it felt good, but he'd run out of deodorant about a month ago and hadn't bought any more, since. Why should he? The only person he was ever around for any significant amout of time was his senile old housekeeper, and he would actually prefer to keep a good distance from her, lest she be tempted to start up some kind of lame and wholly uninteresting conversation. Oh, and of course there was his old dog, Chico, (who, by the way, needed to get her cataracts removed, but Mort just hadn't really gotten the chance to make an appointment, yet...) but Mort seriously doubted if the canine minded her owner's unwashed scent. She was, after all, a dog. He didn't own any cologne, either. The only scent he really wore anymore was Jack Daniels, and you wouldn't find him daubing that on his wrists or neck.
He didn't eat much anymore, and hadn't had a healthy, hearty, home-cooked meal since long before Amy had even begun cheating on him with that bastard, Ted. If the fridge was empty, he didn't care, because he wasn't hungry, anyway. He would just trudge gloomily over to the couch in the centre of his living room, re-arrange the pillows that Mrs. Garvey kept fucking with, and sleep for as long as he could get away with doing. But he had nightmares, and they weren't just the kind that you have sometimes, that are still mostly pretty decent dreams but with a few bad eggs thrown into the batch...his were really horrifying, sometimes causing him to wake up screaming or yelling, and always in a cold sweat, his heart beating way too fast for his comfort. But at least, in sleep, the real nightmare of life couldn't touch him.
He dried his hands off on the towel that had hung on the rack since last summer and flicked the light off with his middle finger. What to do, now? Go back upstairs, sit in front of the computer and try and think of how he could possibly improve upon the shit that he'd been trying to write, lately? Or go take another nap...?
Mort stood in the middle of the hallway between the open staircase and the livingroom, thinking carefully about what he should do, next. If he went back up to his study, he would accomplish nothing but getting a sore tail bone from sitting and staring at the blinking cursor at the end of the completely dry, emotionless and just plain bad paragraph he'd written, two hours previous. Maybe he would play a game of solitaire or two, big deal. His whole freaking -life- was a game of solitaire, now. Why waste his time dicking around with computer games when he could be, say, taking a nap?
He didn't watch TV. There -was- no TV at this place up at Tashmore Lake, but Mort didn't care. He'd never much liked the way peoples' brains rotted away in front of the damn things, and there were too freaking many commercials, besides. No, he'd always been much more partial to the printed page than the television screen. There was an old boom box shoved in a closet somewhere, with a broken cd player but still functional radio and tape deck, but he didn't have any tapes and there was never anything good on the radio, anyway. He could take a walk down by the lake. That had always been nice and refreshing, but nah. It was mosquito season, and if he went out there, now, they'd eat him alive. Mort scared himself when he wasn't sure if that would be an entirely bad thing.
After much debate, Mort finally decided on giving himself body and soul to the couch. The couch was where the majority of his time was spent, lately. The couch where he and Amy had made love so many times, in the beginning. The couch was where Amy had banished him to for several non-consecutive nights, toward the end. The couch he would probably die on, especially if things kept going at their current, slow-as-molasses pace. iBetter be careful, Mort old boy/i he'd often think to himself as he settled into his neatly arranged nest of cushions, pillows and the occassional blanket, iOne of these days, you might just wake up, dead./i
It was a stormy night in the summer of '03, and Mort Rainey was on a roll. He sat in his desk chair, his fingers flying at top speed across the keyboard of his laptop computer, back arched, lips pursed, the heels of his hands digging into the edge of his desk as he rat-tat-tatted away on the keys. His eyelids were beginning to droop but he couldn't quit, not now. He was nearly finished, and he knew just how he would end it. It would be brilliant. It would be better than anything he'd ever written. It would be...
BOOM!
Lightning struck, literally in their back yard and the room, which had been lighted only by the surreal blue-ish glow of the computer screen was now completely dark.
"FUCK!" Mort cried as the last fifteen minutes of his work disappeared forever. And he was just about to save, too.
He leaned back in his chair and heaved a frustrated sigh. He wanted to throw a fit. He wanted to slam the lid down on the damn thing and throw it down the stairs. He wanted to scream and kick and punch things...but he didn't. He sat there, perfectly still, his fingers laced through his hair, peeking out from behind his hand and waiting for his computer to start back up.
"It's okay," he tried convincing himself, taking deep breaths as his words echoed in his mind. "It's no big deal, you can remember most of what you wrote. Just open notepad, turn back the clock to about fifteen mintues ago, and write it. That's all you have to do, Mort. It's not hard."
But as he skimmed over the last few paragraphs of what had been saved before the lightning hit, it seemed as though the power hadn't been the only thing to go off. His brain was completely fried. He didn't blame it on the five plus cups of coffee he'd consumed within the past six hours, or the miniscule amount of sleep he'd gotten the night before; he blamed it on the lightning.
"Okay. Okay, calm down," he said, trying to surpress the anger welling up inside his chest. "Maybe it just wasn't meant to be. You're exhausted. Your brain is dead. It'll come to you after you get some sleep. Just go to bed."
Mort sighed and got up from his chair, lowering the lid to his laptop but not shutting it down.
"Right. Sleep," he muttered, shuffling through the dark to the open bedroom door where his wife was sleeping soundly. He stood in the doorway for a few moments, letting his eyes adjust to the pitch blackness and listening to her soft breathing. He'd almost forgotten that he wasn't alone.
He tip-toed over to the bed, removed his robe and threw it in the general direction of the chair in the corner. Then, trying to be as quiet and still as possible, he slipped under the covers next to his sleeping wife. He reached out his hand to stroke the curve of her hip, to touch the little patch of bare skin between her shirt and her pants. She'd always been so soft, especially there. His fingertips were just barely brushing her hip when she stirred and he jerked his hand back as if he'd just touched something very hot. He didn't want to wake her, but at the same time almost hoped that he would. He didn't think about it very often, but he missed Amy. He was always writing, and when he was writing, and writing -well-, there was nothing else. He didn't eat unless Amy tied him to the kitchen chair and force-fed himsomething she'd often threatened to do, but had never actually carried out. He always waited till the very last minute to take a piss and would hold it for hours on end, sometimes, not realising how hard it was on his man-parts until one evening, he found it strangely impossible to get an erection. Amy, suffice it to say, was not happy. He tried blaming it on age (even though he was only thirty five) but Amy knew better (as usual) and did her little "I told you so" song and dance that she always did, which made Mort even more unhappy than she was. If the phone was ringing, he didn't even hear it. Amy had always said that all hell could be breaking loose and the world could be falling to pieces around him, but if Mort was in the middle of some good writing, he wouldn't notice a damn thing unless a piece of the world hit him on the head (Sometimes Amy threw things at himlittle things, like paperclips, potato chips or crumpled up wads of paperand he would just keep on writing as if nothing had ever happened). And it was true. He knew it was true, but he just couldn't help it, and it never ceased to get him into some kind of trouble with Amy.
Like the other day, for example.
He had been writing up a storm, typing what seemed like a million words a minute. Every word he wrote was the exact word he'd meant to write. It just seemed to flow from his mind so effortlessly, so smoothly, that he couldn't let something so good get away.
Unfortunately, another good thing was getting away, a mere few feet from him, in the bedroom he and his wife sharedthat is, when Mort bothered coming to bed. So many mornings Amy had found him asleep in his chair, his head tilted back, his mouth open wide as he snored. So many mornings, she wished she were married to someone else; to the Mort she used to know and love.
"Mort?" he just barely heard her call. "Mort, baby, come to bed."
"Yeah, honey, I'll be there in a minute," came his generic replyabout five minutes after she'd called for him. "I'm just finishing up." He didn't even realise that words were coming out of his mouth when he was like that. His fingers kept right on typing, his mind kept spewing out the story, and his mouth was programmed to auto-response.
Five minutes later.
"Mortybear? You almost done? I've got something for you."
"Uh..." click click click "Yeah, babe. Be in, just a sec..."
Ten minutes later.
It was around this time that Amy was really starting to get impatient.
"Seriously, Mort," she said, padding out into his study wearing nothing but a silk and lace slipthe red one he'd bought for her one year as an anniversary gift, but which she'd not yet gotten the chance to wear. "Are you -really- almost finished, or are you just bullshitting me like you always do?"
Mort could sense that the voice had moved closer to him, almost dangerously so, and that its tone was quickly becoming one of heated impatience.
He turned his head to see his wife's lean figure, just barely covered by the small bit of lingerie, backlit by the light of a few dozen candles whose flames flickered and bounced just behind the doorway. Her beauty left him literally speechless.
"Uh..." his mouth hung open, stupidly, but he wasn't sure just what to say. He knew what he -should- say, but, somehow, could not make his lips form the words. "Gosh, honey..." he gave her a quick once-over and said the first thing that came to mind: "Isn't that thing a little big on you?"
From her expression he could immediately tell that he'd been dealt a bad card, and should have just kept it to himself. But it was too late, he'd played it, thrown it right down on the table, and though he tried covering up his blunder with skimpy compliments and pseudo-apologies such as, "Not that it matters, because it looks fantastic," "But that's very flattering on you," and of course, "But I guess that's my fault because I'm the one that bought it for you...didn't I?"
"I'm surprised you even remember that, Mort," she said, her voice low and hostile.
"Amy, I..."
"Forget it. I'm going to bed."
And she slammed the door, the warm golden glow from inside the bedroom gone along with the feeling of comfort it had produced that he hadn't even noticed until it was gone.
Mort was left in the cold darkness, once again. But before he could so much as mutter a complaint, the door opened again and Amy was throwing a blanket and pillow directly at his face.
"You're sleeping on the couch, tonight, asshole," she said as Mort sat stupified, clutching at a pillow he'd just barely been able to catch.
SLAM.
"Shit," he breathed after a moment of stunned silence, turning back to the computer screen and trying to remember just where he'd been on his train of thought before he'd made a complete ass of himself, but it wouldn't return to him.
Mort and Amy hadn't slept together for at least a month, mostly because whenever he wanted to, she wasn't interested, and whenever she wanted to, he was writing. It was really a bummer, and also really stupid, but there didn't seem to be much either of them could do about it.
He could hear her crying softly behind the bedroom door and his heart fell through the bottom of his chest. He really, genuinely felt bad for her. He rested his chin on his pillow he held tightly in his arms and wished he could go back in time about five mintues and make things all better. He hadn't -meant- to be such a dick, she just didn't seem to understand that when he was writing he could -not- be interrupted. He'd tried to explain, time and time, again. His brain just didn't work properly. It was like the connection from his mind to his mouth had been temporarily disconnected, and would only commence functioning after, and -only- after he'd finished writing. But Amy just would not respect that, and that's why shit like this happened, and it happened more and more often, lately. Mort just didn't know what to do.
He frowned at the small crack under the bedroom door until every last candle had been blown out and the room was as dark as his study. He heard the bed springs creak quietly as Amy laid down upon them and he wondered what he should do. She was mad at him, really pissed off...but would she still be if he went in there and attempted to comfort her? Would she forgive him? Was there any chance he might still get laid, that night? That last thought disgusted him and he cursed himself for being so full of pent-up testosterone. How could be thinking about himself when he'd just made his poor wife cry?
"The couch," he whispered, hugging his pillow tighter to his chest. "The fucking couch."
Mort tugged at either side of his tattered bathrobe and pulled it closer around him with a sigh. A deep and aching sorrow had suddenly just come up out of nowhere and punched him directly in the gut. But it hadn't really come out of nowhere, and he knew that. It was always there, nowadays, lurking just around the corner, waiting for him to become most vulnerable, and he was vulnerable a -lot-, these days. He almost felt like some menopausal bitch with no friends and chronic lethargy.
As he drifted into an uneasy sleep, Mort wondered if perhaps he wouldn't be better off dead.