At the End
- Dec 7, 2018
- 8 min read
by Eric Maroney
“Get up,” she tells him. He is tangled in the sheet, one eye peeking out like a cyclops from its lair. He groans.
“Why?” he asks from a perch of unaffected confusion. “What’s out there?”
“Your job?” she turns. The morning light appears to singe the margins of her pale skin. “You can’t be late anymore.”
“Hate,” he mumbles, drowning his eye in the sheet, digging deeper in the unreality of her bed.
“You hate your job,” she jabs. He moans. “You’re in good company. But getting fired isn’t an option. You know how many people are out of work. Scores of people want what you have!”
She rips off the sheet, which he makes no effort to grasp, since he is aroused.
“Really?” she asks, her tone one of mock interrogation. “We did it three times last night. When does it end?”
“It ended last night,” he answers, “but this is a new day.”
“Okay, Mr. New Day,” she says, taking a step forward and flicking him with her index finger and thumb. “Time to greet the New Day.”
“That hurts,” he whines.
“I’m not sorry. You should be more than satisfied at this point,” she pauses and changes tack. “Look. You keep that red and angry thing on ice, and when the work day is over, you get as much as you want.”
“Or else?” he asks leadingly.
“Or else I will accept one of the three offers I have from other gentlemen tonight.”
He springs out of bed and into his clothes.
***
The streets were spangled. Rain had fallen in the night, and drops drooped from the bare branches of the trees like strings of pearls. Staring, distracted, Joel spent too long in the park across from his office, considering the world in a drop of water.
By the time he arrived, the editorial meeting was over. He looked down at his blotter: When you get in, if you get in, come to my office. E.M.
Joel walked slowly to the editor’s door. Why rush an inescapable judgement?
***
You see, he saw her in a fresh light as soon as his eyes fell upon her.
***
Abby Licht was standing by the wall, talking to a tall, wispy man, hardly concealing her distraction. Joel had been staring at her for at least half an hour. He was afraid. She finally approached him.
“You have good focus,” she told him. “You hardly blink. Are you a psycho or are you in love with me?”
***
He fell off her, wrapped in her warmth, and they told their stories. Joel knew immediately that she wasn’t right for him. She held objects in front of her, examined them from all angles, and kept or discarded them according to a rigorous calculus. Joel practiced indolence to the point of exclusion — molding it into a philosophy that was as unassailable as a citadel. He loved her, though, madly, but Abby did not return his dedicated passion. He knew right away that their coupling was oddly balanced: he loved her, and this was counterpoised by some other emotion she held for him, a more complex entity which did not have the warm tendrils of love — yet still had the power of its attraction.
He tried to present his case, to be worthy of this seduction. He spoke of his elderly parents: “And they still live in the same house, the last house, at the end of the northern train line, the last station. And the house looks out over a field, and a forest, and a pond, and beyond that, there is nothing else. You can just walk on and on like a naked soul.”
“That’s sad,” was her answer — and Joel knew he had failed. But even in the light of his own estimation, the story was sad. That life was sad. The last house at the end of a long dirt road, the destitute old parents, his isolated childhood, and beyond that — the rough prairie and scraggly trees and sallow, naked souls trying to hide — all sad.
He could feel her placing him in a box of her own conceptions. Abby was warm, loving, kind — yet all those virtues were supported by a core of rigidity. She expected things to be just so, and Joel saw nothing wrong with her stance. Why shouldn’t a woman like Abby pluck the fruits of a full life?
***
Now Joel dressed as if he was going to work, but sat in the park in his jacket and tie, pretending he had a job for a woman he did not really possess. When the cold weather arrived, Joel was evicted from his apartment.
***
“Let me send you money,” his mother murmured into the phone.
“No,” he answered. “I just need twenty-five yuan to send stuff to you. Not much. Just put it in the barn.”
“But you have no home,” his mother continued, pleading. “Where’re you living?”
“I’m with a woman,” Joel stated firmly. “It’s serious.”
“Oh Joel,” his mother answered, exhaling. “Who is this woman? You know how hard it is to trust people these days.” She paused a beat. “Remember we are here if you need us. Last home at the end…”
***
“How was work?” Abby asked abruptly. Joel was reading a manuscript, purportedly for the paper, but really it was his own prose vignettes about his encounter with Abby. He was marking them up with a red pen. Each paragraph began with the phrase You see.
“Terrible,” he answered. “But I keep plugging along. Supposedly Leuw is going to work for The Star, so there may be an opening in sales.”
“You want to work in sales?” Abby puffed, incredulous. “That doesn’t seem quite like you.”
“Well,” Joel answered, elongating his words. “Maybe you don’t know the real me?” He was close enough to grasp Abby’s waist. In the core of her stillness, Joel sensed a final withdrawal of favor — and to confirm this, to mark it, Abby placed a light kiss on top of his head, as if he were a little boy.
***
With the weather bitter, Joel no longer sat in the park. He ate lunch in soup kitchens to keep warm. But the lines were long. He had to alter his routine: he left for work with Abby, hid around the corner, and then returned to the apartment. He was careful to conceal his daytime presence. He simply worked on the manuscript of vignettes, a tattooed corpse of amended red swirls and jots.
After weeks of this, he heard the key breach the door. Abby was laughing while a man was murmuring. Joel hugged the manuscript and slid under the couch. Abby giggled and was then silent. He could hear the fumbling of two people about to couple. The man softly whispered.
“No,” she answered. “Not in the bed. I owe him at least that. Here on the couch.”
From beneath, he could hear the hum of desire bubbling from Abby’s throat. He could not help but admire the beauty of her pleasure. She approached the needs of her body with a staunch dictate, and unfurled it in a rapturous collaboration with this man. Joel lay flat, the springs of the couch performing a minuet above his nose. With a chorus of rapturous, nearly spellbinding cries, they concluded.
“You need to tell him,” the man said, placing two large feet on the carpet to retrieve his underwear. “If you want to get married, you can’t have a boyfriend!”
“He’s not a boyfriend,” she answered. “I was hoping it would resolve itself naturally. He’s just so filled with — I don’t know what to call it — wonder. Like a child immune from harm. He’s like no one I’ve met before. I called him at work, and they told me he was fired eight months ago. What can he be doing?” She paused as if to conjure a greater vision. “I know it sounds odd, but something about him fills me up.”
“Does he still fill you up?” the man asked in husky tones. “Does he still fuck you?”
“Don’t be crude,” Abby scolded. “I love you. I just can’t explain my feelings about Joel without sounding like I’m in love with him. But I’m not. He’ll be gone tonight.”
There was silence. They were kissing. When they left, Joel pulled himself from the beneath the couch and gripping his manuscript, slipped out the door and into the street.
***
After the winter of snow and drizzle in the crawl space beneath bridge, he walked with a pronounced limp. His flesh was lifeless matter, moving from force of habit. He passed another man without a home.“Where ya going, Joel?” he asked after him. “You’ll get pick’d up for vagrancy.” Joel limped away, beyond the block, around the corner, where the city was transmuted from boarded windows and broken glass to gleaming towers.
“You shouldn’t be here,” a doorman warned him. “Someone will call the cops.”
Joel rested against a wall. The world had been transformed into a series of spinning planes.
He was about to collapse. Then a female face called him, quizzically, then horrified.
“Joel?” the woman asked.
She was young with a baby in a stroller.
“My God, Joel,” Abby pleaded. “What happened to you?”
***
She stripped him and found his manuscript. No longer crisply etched, it was smeared gray, its words no more than faded watermarks. She did not realize it was about her. She lowered him into the tub. She cut his hair and shaved his beard. She led him to the bedroom and lay him on the bed. She touched him.
“That’s not right,” Joel said. “You’re married. You have a baby.”
“Don’t worry,” she answered. “With me, it’s different.”
As she touched him she discoursed on the nature of pleasure, of the dictates of living flesh with its vital warmth. Joel watched her hands move over his skin, lulled by her corporeal sermon. She grasped him, saying he was no different than other men, creatures of rushing drives; then she enfolded him in her mouth, now vacated of her enthralling words. He was in the beat of her body, in the midst of its movements — and for that moment, at the time of molten and penetrating release — Joel’s body glowed like an ember.
***
The train halted. She sent Joel to his parents’ home — and he obeyed like a child. As he walked down the lane of houses, most boarded up, several falling off their foundations, he felt like a wisp of smoke challenged by heavy winds. He steered toward the last home at the end.
The fruits trees were overgrown, swollen with wormy apples. The porch sagged. He found the key beneath the stone elf. Opening the door, the stale air hung like ash. Dust lay on the surfaces like slag.
“Mother? Father?” he called out. He was drawn to their bedroom. They were both in bed, their bottles of medicines open and pills consumed. Joel touched his father’s neck, then his mother’s wrist. Their flesh was stiff. With a single motion he covered the bodies with a sheet and closed the door behind him.
***
At dusk the first fireflies appeared. They flickered like indeterminate markers, here, nowhere, everywhere in succession, guiding him into the black brush beyond the house, the shaded tents of conifers, the carpets of overripe grass.
You see, ahead was the image of Abby, hips swaying, waist capping her callipygian backside — those tokens of womanhood she imparted to Joel, passed to him as if in a relay, if only he could hold onto the baton.
You see vision-Abby, this creature of the woods and fields, taunting him with the promise of burning life, and motivating, kindling his flickering, dying desires.
You watch her pulling him along with the promise of consummation, even as you know, with every step, he grows weaker, stumbles, and falls, and the pages of his faded vignettes scatter forever. And if he is not dead in the dark woodland, it is only a matter of time.
Eric Maroney’s fiction has or will appear in Pif, The Montreal Review, Per Contra, The Literary Review, Our Stories, The MacGuffin, Arch, Segue, Eclectica, Forge, Superstition Review, The Stickman Review, Jewish Fiction, Agave, Bellingham Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Tishman Review. He has published two books: Religious Syncretism (Canterbury Press, 2006) and The Other Zions: The Lost Histories of Jewish Nations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). His book The Torah Sutras is forthcoming from Albion-Andalus Press.
