Marble

Ken squeezed the appointment in on the day before his insurance ran out. 

At the end, the doc told him “We’re going to need to do these tests.  Particularly the scan.”

Ken shrugged, and picked up the written orders at reception on the way out.  He pitched them in the trash receptacle in the lobby before pushing out onto the sidewalk.  The sun stung his eyes, made his head hurt.  He could see his breath.

Even with the driver’s side visor down, the light seared his skull during the entire drive home.  His ride was equipped with an ashtray, so he dumped his butts there as he finished them off one by one.

He dropped the car into a rare spot in front of his apartment building, pulled the key, and waited for the engine shuddering to quit.  He sat back in the seat and closed his eyes and smoked his last Winston.  When he opened his eyes, he saw, through the glare of the sun and the haze in the front seat, that the windshield was starting to fog.  He resisted, for a moment longer, exiting the car.  The fog reached an eye-level crack in the glass, and that was Ken’s cue.

The building’s entryway door had no working lock, and Ken swung it open and entered the lobby.  There, he located his mail slot and unlocked it, then grabbed what was inside purely out of habit.  He had no intention of looking at any of it before he tossed it into the trash can under his kitchen sink.  It was almost as cold in the lobby as it was outside.  The stairwell and lobby walls were painted long ago in a faux marble finish, and were so heavily smoke stained, the marble looked like amber.  Ken thought about this, and climbed the stairs to his third-floor efficiency.

The hallway on his floor was short and was lit only by a single, weak, circular fluorescent bulb in the ceiling.  There were no windows.  But even in the hall’s eternal dimness, Ken could make out the yellowed marble of its walls as its pattern continued up the stairwell from the lobby below.  He now thought about the marble here on the third floor, too.

As Ken unlocked the deadbolt on his front door, the young guy who lived across the hall came out of his apartment and nodded to him, then turned back to his own door to lock it.  Ken thought he would now say something to this young guy, would tell him a couple of things.  He opened his mouth, then closed it.  The young guy turned from his door and made for the stairs without a glance in Ken’s direction, and Ken listened to the sound of his flying steps on the treads.

Ken pushed open the door to his tiny apartment, and his eyes were once again assaulted by the brightness of the day as it streamed through the room’s single, modest window.  He squinted and shaded his eyes with his hand and took in the room’s emptiness.  He wouldn’t be watching television today, or any other day for that matter.  He’d sold his little flat screen to the woman who lived right below him on the second floor.  It was a funny story how the sale came about.  She came upstairs the week before and knocked on his door.  She wore a robe and had white stuff smeared on her face.  Her neck was wattled, like a turkey’s.  She was there to bitch about the noise from his TV.  Ken was struck by an idea.  “You wanna buy it?” he asked her.  For a second, she looked stunned.  She blinked and worked her lips a couple of times and then said, “How much?” 

Since the day the deal was made, he’d lived in the silence of his apartment, which was now only occasionally interrupted by the low sounds of his former TV from the apartment below.

The money from the sale of the TV was already gone, despite Ken’s best intentions to conserve it.  He considered this as he shoved the mail he’d collected from his mailbox in the lobby into the overflowing trash can under the sink.

His head hurt almost continuously, and his eyes did too.  Bright light made everything worse.  He also recognized that he was unable at times to keep his balance.  These issues, he convinced himself, were what led to his being recently canned from his job at the Braefetz Bros. bottling plant, where he’d worked for nearly the past fourteen months.  He admitted, however, that other circumstances may have also contributed.  But the results of his termination left no room for supposition.  As of tomorrow, he’d have no health insurance, and in a little more than three weeks, he’d be two months behind in his rent.  And currently, the woman downstairs was watching his television.

Ken faced the apartment’s tiny kitchen area.  He moved his stinging eyes from refrigerator, to countertop, to sink, and wished mightily for miniblinds and cigarettes.  He thought about making a sandwich, but ultimately considered the process far too problematic.  He instead reached for the full bottle of Gilbey’s he always kept, for special occasions, in the cabinet over the sink.  Until two nights ago, there’d been two such bottles of special occasion Gilbey’s in the cabinet.  But one would have to do for now.  One was better than none.

Ken realized he was becoming too tired to remain standing.  He wasn’t sure if this state of exhaustion arose entirely as a result of contemplating the process of finding a clean glass for the gin and filling it with ice, or if something else was behind it.  He didn’t care to take any chances, and decided that drinking out of the bottle was the healthier choice.

He made himself comfortable on the worn couch that doubled as his bed.  For a while, he remained sitting, and he placed the bottle of Gilbey’s on the Formica end table next to the couch between swigs.  He stared at a blank spot on the wall across the little room from where he sat.  There was no pattern of marble here, but the plain white wall was beginning to hint at yellow cigarette smoke staining.  This blank spot was where his TV had once been mounted.  Now, even the bracket that had secured the TV to the wall was gone.  It was included in the sale price of the TV during the negotiations of the week before.  If he looked carefully, squinted gingerly, he could make out the small holes in the wall where the bracket had been fastened.  It was on these holes that Ken now concentrated.

There were six of them, and from where he sat, Ken began to imagine that he could peer down into the depths of all six of the holes, deep down, beyond the rim of each hole, down into its darkness.  What wonders might exist in these dark spaces?  Without taking his eyes from the holes, although he strained to keep them in focus, and the straining hurt his head, he took a powerful slug of the gin and reclined.  From this horizontal position, with his head turned to the wall where the TV had once been and where now remained the six holes and their mystery-haunted darkness, his focus sharpened, and simultaneously expanded to include conjecture.  Could it be possible to bore similar holes into the surface of the yellowed, marbleized walls beyond his apartment’s door?  Would the yellow marble walls be somehow more resistant to such efforts?

On the couch, Ken had expertly adjusted the rotation of his head and the positioning of his mouth while in his supine position in order to access more gin from its bottle.  Presently, he closed his eyes and sighed.  In the shadowed recesses of the holes’ depths, Ken knew, better worlds existed.  There, rent payments would never be late.  Threats from credit card and utility companies, and from violent, enraged bookies would cease to be.  Ken drained the last of the gin and set the empty bottle on the floor.  He fell asleep smiling, thinking about the six holes in the wall where his television was once mounted, and about yellow marble walls and the serenity of deep worlds in the shadows of holes that might also be excavated there.

Sometime later, from the depths of a dreamless sleep, Ken awoke in the darkness to a peculiar crawling of his flesh, and the sound of a vicious pounding on his apartment door.