Her arm lay across the pillow, her head snug in the crook of her arm. She had woken up shivering that morning; her legs had kicked the blankets off the bed, her gray comforter lying in a large heap on the rug. With a yawn, she turned her head to see a small wet black nose sticking out from under it.

“You like it under there, Felix?” she mumbled, sitting up, stretching her arms above her head, and swishing her long brown hair out of her eyes, patted a spot on the bed next to her. With a little wiggle of his haunches, Felix jumped up onto the bed, rubbing his cat flanks against her back. She giggled, and carefully pulled him into her lap, tenderly massaging his neck.

“You can come out from under the bed now, Mother’s gone,” she said lazily, leaning back into the pillow.

“God, Andrea, when was the last time you cleaned your rug?” a muffled voice said from under her bed. She snickered, raising her head to lean on her elbow.

“I did remove the bread crumbs. I like to make it special for you,” and she laughed softly.

“Next time I’m here, hide me in the closet, would you?”

“I think it’s worse in there.”

“Oh,” and a tall lean figure unfolded himself out from under the small cave of Andrea’s bed, leaning back his head and letting out a huge moan. He stopped, slowly taking a step back as Felix hissed! at him.

“You’re cat doesn’t like me very much….”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to kill you then.”

“Very funny——“

“No, get off!” she laughed, smacking him with her white flannel pillow.

“You gonna get pregnant by me sitting next to you?”

“It isn’t funny, Alexei. I’m a young woman, and I need to have my priorities in order.”

“Which are…?” he raised his eyebrows.

“Getting a Merit Scholarship and getting into an Ivy League school.”
“Then what am I doing here?”

She smiled, her blue eyes glinting mischievously. “Because; I like you’re company. Now, you can sit on the floor.”

He flung his arms in resignation and sat down, leaning his back against the dark oak bed frame. With a smile on her face, Andrea Stephens gave Alexei a kiss on the forehead.

****

He had been very sick that year, and he hadn’t told anyone.

“Bottom’s up….” He sighed, popped the pill in his mouth, and took a long gulp of water straight from the sink.

This was how Achan always started the day, and for some reason he found it funny.

He especially found it funny that his name meant “trouble” in Hebrew. And he found it even more funny that in the Bible, Achan was stoned to death for stealing.

“I liked the sound of it,” his mother told him, “and you were always kicking my stomach whenever I did something you didn’t like down there, so it fit.”

Maybe this was why he set small fires in the neighbor’s yard. Or maybe this was why that ever burning need for something made him want to kick another hole in the wall.

Or maybe it was why he had to take two pills every morning to keep from screaming.

“Achan, did you take your medication?”

He closed the pill bottle shut with a snap! and stared blankly at himself in the mirror, taking in his tired gray eyes, dark circles perpetually underneath them.

“Yes, I took it!”

“Well don’t get mad at me, you know you skipped yesterday….”
His eyes took in his haggard face, always tired, always numb.
This is not my life.

He could have laughed, if it hadn’t been for the fact it was. His life.
He leaned his elbows on the sink, putting his face in his hands. Another day, another day, another day…he covered his eyes as he grabbed the pill bottle and stuck it in his pocket.

“Achan Israel, you’re going to be late!”

“Alright, I’m coming!” and that sudden urge to smash something, smash the sink through the window, came over him.

But instead he just pulled his hair.

****

“Make a new cult ever day to suite your affair/ kissing girls in English at the back of the stairs/ you’re a holly with a following of innocent boys/ they never know it because you never it/ you always get your way….”

Andrea sat in the passenger’s seat of Alexei’s car, bopping her head from side to side to the soft chords of the guitar, her hair occasionally whipping with a swish and wap! against Alexei’s face.

“Stars of track and field you are….”

“Okay, can we put on something else?” Andrea didn’t seem to listen, her body rocking from side to side as she sung along to the words.

“Hmm…well, I don’t seem to care what you think!” she said, sweetly smiling.

Alexei rolled his eyes. “Stuff like this all sounds the same to me…whiney folky songs.”

Andrea’s spine snapped straight, and she crossed her arms across her chest, set her jaw, and said:

“They are not folk music. Belle and Sebastian happen to express the sadness, sweetness, and joy seen in the melancholy heart——they are not to be laughed at!” She turned up her nose and pointed at the stereo:

“Skip to number seven, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.”

Staring at Andrea out of the corner of his eye, he pressed his finger against the skip button while trying to pay attention to the traffic light, and immediately pulled it away like it had scalded him when Andrea screamed, “It’s here, it’s here!” He sighed, and stared out the windshield into the dark gray world of six thirty.

“Anthony walked to his death because he thought he’d never feel this way again/ If he goes back to the house then things would go from bad to worse what could he do/ He wants to remember things exactly as he left them on that funny day/ And if there is something else beyond he isn’t scared because it’s bound to be less boring than today/ bound to be less boring than tomorrow.”

Alexei looked curiously at the stereo as a small violin played; he could see Andrea’s face light up in ecstasy.

“See?” She looked at him, not with scorn or mockery, but truly looked at his face, his dark eyes and angular features being sucked into her eyes and her with nothing left to do but gasp and sink back into the seat.

And he remembered why he loved her in the first place, and took her small delicate hand in his, and she leaned against his shoulder as she sang these words under her breathe:

“He’ll take away the pain of being a hopeless unbeliever….”

****

“Simplicity itself, an exhibition of wonderment and awe!”

Achan listened as a tour guide in the other room droned on about the new exhibition at LACMA on Henri Matisse. He listened as her heels went click click click click across the echoing marble tiles of the room, the white walls going up and up into space.

He just came for the elevators.

They weren’t just mere elevators——these elevators were only about twelve inches tall, built into a corner of a room full of contemporary paintings. It was the last place Achan expected to hear a small ding! and to find, to his amusement, a small elevator opening up a foot above the floor. For some reason he was the only one to notice it.

Achan looked around the room, making sure no one was there, and squatted down in front of the elevators, waiting expectantly for that delicate little ding! He snickered when the small little doors opened, revealing a small little box inside. He liked to imagine it was made for a species of little people living in the museum, who came out in the dead of night, dusting the frames, polishing the nineteenth century French sculptures. And if he had believed it, he would have liked to see them.

“Notice the vibrant use of color in this piece——what expression, what awe!”

Achan stood up as the click click clicks echoed and died away. He readjusted his backpack and walked into the next room, slowly sauntering down the polished wood floor, letting the pieces speak to him. They were all screaming, all shouting, all wanting to be heard.

He suddenly stopped, looking at the white wall in front of him. There was a stuffed white bunny, hanging upside down, its limbs hung with gleaming metal weights. Its eyes said nothing of the pain——it just looked straight ahead, its black beady eyes reflecting Achan’s face. With a twitch of his mouth he read the title:

Drop Down Bunny.

If he were in the mood, he would have laughed at the childlike sickness of it. But he didn’t. He could feel his hands itch towards his pocket; his mind could see the plastic pill bottle snug in the black fabric, the small white pills resting in their cellophane nest.

But it wasn’t like a cough drop; you couldn’t take it when you wanted too.

He walked into the next room, his eyes striping the walls for something, anything, to cling too. He turned his head to the right; a wall covered in small black and white photographs. Of shoes.

Fifty shoes, to be exact.

There were fifty shoes on a rollercoaster, fifty shoes looking for jobs, fifty shoes crossing the street, fifty shoes on the stairs, fifty shoes taking a break. He looked down at his own shoes; they were old, torn, leather hard and beaten. These shoes had seen a lot since they emigrated from the warehouse to his feet. Rocks. Trees. Hard pavement. That ever ceasing pounding of your legs as you run. Run to, run from, it doesn’t really matter. Just to run was enough.

So, silently, without looking down, he opened the pill bottle, and swallowed one dry.

Don’t think; just do sounded hollowly through his head.

****

“Alexei, I’m not amused.”

“Come on, one more time!” Andrea rolled her eyes as he took two sugar packets, one blue, one pink, behind his back. She sighed as the usual crinkling was heard as he passed them from one hand to the other.

“Okay, where is the blue packet?”

She took a sip of her Starbuck’s grande espresso and sighed, “It’s in your left hand.”

Alexei looked quizzically at the crumpled blue packet of sugar in his outstretched palm.

“How do you always know?”

“Because I’m psychic,” she said dryly.

“No you’re not.”

“Oh, and how do you know?”

“Because,” he said, “You’re an expert poker player; I know there’s some way you’re doing it.”

Andrea raised her hands in surrender, her silver rings glinting in the rising light through the windows behind her.

“Okay, Sherlock; you got me!”

“How’re you doing it, then?”

She gave a sly smile, curving up the corners of her mouth, and twitched her left shoulder.

“What?”

“That is what you do,” and she cracked her knuckles, and leaned back snugly into her chair, subtly winking her left eye.  

“No, I don’t do that...do I?”

“Yes, I’m afraid you do,” she said simply, draining the last ounce of espresso from her cup.

“I look…mischievously constipated then.”

Andrea burst out laughing, banging her fists on the chipped wooden table, spit flying out of her mouth.

“Ew, you’re gross.”

“Why thank you sir,” and she bowed with a graceful flourish of her hand.
Alexei smiled and stood up, swinging his keys idly in his hand.

“Well, shall we get going, mademoiselle?”

“If we must,” and she threw her cup into the trashcan behind her, and laughed as the sun hit her face.

****

“Sinners, repent! The end of days is coming——forgive before it’s too late, and you’re left on Earth with fire!”

Achan watched as a fanatically tall man in a black frock waved his arms wildly through the air, his hand clutching a red leather Bible. His mind was vague, and in the midst he had found something to watch.
A Jehovah’s Witness.

He wasn’t really religious, and didn’t really care for it that much; religious fanaticism wasn’t fascinating, even the small customs his own family practiced. Leaving the cup of wine for Elijah every Seder, his mother locking away the car on the Sabbath and walking five miles to the grocery store. He didn’t seem to find the meaning in it; Elijah wasn’t coming back, and all God did for his mother was give her a husband who left her and a job she didn’t like.

“In this Gospel lies the Word of our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for your sins to be forgiven! Harken to the Word of the Lord, and you shall be saved!”

He remembered a girl in third grade told him he would go to hell because he didn’t believe in Jesus. He called her a Nazi and got detention.

“Repent!”

It didn’t shock him when it started raining, the thin needles of rain prickling his neck as he stood beneath a tree planted in the cracking sidewalk beside Disney Hall. Its polished sides glowed, becoming slick slabs of purple light in the gray. He had snuck in once, dodged the guards, thinking not really about what was inside, but the fury of not being allowed in. An eighth month waiting list, and it had only just opened. But he got inside, sitting in the worst seat in the amphitheater, and then:

There was the warm glowing harmony as all the instruments played a single A and a hush as the conductor lowered his baton. Slowly he raised it, all the orchestra tensed and tuned to his movements…and then he let it down. A slow pulse of strings rose up through the room, the gentle cry of a bassoon splitting the silence. A gush of voices, so strong and powerful, singing for all to hear, the black emotions and joyful sadness sweeping the audience; like a wave it flattened Achan against the wall.

The drums beat below the chords, the sopranos welled up over the tenors, a roaring sea of dark foreboding beauty. Achan groaned——it was too much, too much, the tears went to his eyes, he wanted to scream, but no one would hear, and the thought that God would listen passed through his mind, that only through this God would be there, waiting with terror and awe and——

His eyes caught a program in the muffled darkness.

Mozart’s Requiem.

He never once listened to it again, and swore against choral music from that day on.

With that thought still in his mind, he opened the pill bottle, and used the rain to swallow one down.

***

Andrea sighed, staring out the window at the cold rain softly hitting the glass.

“What’s wrong with the car?” she said over her shoulder.

“Uh…” Alexei leaned his head through the open window across from her. “Eh…the engine…it, it just fell.”

“What?” Her jaw dropped, her right hand waving in the air as only a Valley Girl’s can. “You mean, the engine just dropped out of the car?”

“Umm…yeah.” With a sigh, he leaned across the seat towards the glove compartment, his black sweater lifting up to reveal his plaid red boxer shorts. Andrea’s eyes accusingly focused on them, as if they represented all the male screw ups of the world.

“What are you doing?”

Alexei rolled his eyes. “Getting my cell phone out of the glove compartment, I’m gonna call triple A.”

To get out of his way, Andrea curled up her knees against her chest, resting her chin on the soft worn denim. She licked her lips.

“Think they’ll take long?”

“They’re not bad,” he grunted as he wriggled his upper body back out the window. “The auto dealer’s what I’m worrying about. Maybe I should call you a cab.”

“I’m not actually missing anything, really, just aerobics.”

“Fine, I’ll take the taxi and you go to the dealership. I’m missing a calculus exam.”

“I don’t know what to do!”

“Eh, yeah…it is my car. Anyways…” he sighed and flipped open the cell phone and started dialing the number.

“Hello…?” Andrea stopped listening, staring again out the window. She was thinking of music class, where she played the flute. She was working on a Mozart flute concerto with her teacher, he accompanying her on the piano. Her thin fingers danced across the smooth cold metal, her breath rhythmically sending forth the notes, like small birds being let out of their cages. A gentle red A fluttered up towards the ceiling, a flighty yellow F sharply galloped on the breeze. Like dancers, the notes of the piano and those of the flute wielded together above their master’s heads, caressing yet never touching, swooping across a tapestry no one else could see.

She blinked, and suddenly was aware of a black figure walking along the sidewalk, looking through the railings at the freeway below them. He seemed alone, weary, and tired as he rested his elbows on the railing about twenty feet away from her, and something told her he was muttering to himself.

“Alexei?”

“What?” He walked back towards the open window.

“What’s that guy doing?”

Alexei turned his head, staring at the man too.

“Eh…admiring the freeway?” He scratched his head.

“No, it’s disgusting.”

“Japanese people like it.”

“Shut up, he looks upset.”

“You can’t even see his face.”

“So? You can tell by his back.”

“Why?”

“It’s stooped.”

“Hmm…” he looked back towards the man.

“You’re right.”

****

“You have put me into the bottom of the Pit,
in the darkness, in the depths….”

Achan looked down below him, at the cold hard freeway, SUV’s whooshing out of sight. Each a little cell, a small cluster of reality; inside lay the human remains, cut off from the outside, secure in their cocoon. There was no one to reach them, remote, lost, barren. He wished he could speak to them, drag their souls from their unseeing eyes. Make them more than just numb, make them free.

He leaned his elbows against the railing, letting his head fall down. It was all revolving somehow, the world seemed to be tilting. He felt like throwing up, and he had an image of the contents of his stomach plummeting down onto a car windshield. Perhaps that would show them something….

“Your wrath lies heavy on me,
and you afflict me with all your waves….”

The wave was coming upon him again, the black wave that swept up all his feelings in one swoop, dashing them against jagged rocks of glass, his heart aching. There was nothing, nothing, nothing. How could he have ever thought there possibly was?

“Do you work wonders for the dead?
Do dead shades rise up to praise you?”

God, God, God…he slowly repeated the words in his head, longing for an answer, some mysterious warm caress to swoop down upon him. But there was no answer, there was no God. He wanted to rip open his heart, smash it onto the concrete and scream, “See? Nothing is here, nothing you promised me was ever here!”

“Afflicted and close to death from my youth on,
I endure your terrors;
I am desperate….”

Day after day, the same numbing pain, the same separateness; those invisible walls that won’t come down. He wanted to spit in God’s face, snarl, “There was never anything here for me, you’ve abandoned me!” Smash open the heart his mother loved, watch the blood erupt like a small eruption, plaster the street with the red stickiness. There was never any goodness in it.

“You have caused lover and companion to stay away from me….”

Why was he born with this, the pain that ate him from the inside out, leaving nothing within him but a black scar? It didn’t seem fair, it didn’t seem fair. Wake up every morning and wish you were dead. There was no goodness in rhythmic breathing.

“…my close friend is darkness.”

Plummet down into blackness, there you’ll be safe.

****