March 22nd, 2000 Eliot waves. He waves, and the sky line shudders with lightning. Erika stares out across the yard at him. "See you tonight," her voice harsh with menthol cigarettes. Yesterday it had been snowing. This morning, a tornado warning, the warm front having turned to mud the light dusting left behind at dawn. It was the 22nd of March, two thousand. A third wave as Eliot ducks into Jon's car. "We off?" Jon waits on Eliot to close the door. "You two good?" "We off." Car door slams shut. "Good morning."
Twenty Minutes Later
The doors of Safari Body Art are open, Jon is tearing down the Autoclave. Eliot's body jewelry is arranged on black velvet under the glass front counter, meticulously hand-written price tags dangling from each item. Barbells, glass hooks, plugs, labrets, nose screws, belly rings... He was arranging the display with one hand while peering down to see how they looked through the glass, keeping an eye on the storm clouds through the front door. Beside him, several binders of flash art were piled next to the cash register, while a pile of Skin & Ink and Flash magazines mouldered away on a wicker trunk in front of a weathered green vinyl couch. His fingers moved through the bank bag, counting out the bills for the register (a fifty, two twenties, three tens, five fives, thirteen ones) and slipped them into the drawer. Sitting back, he lights a cigarette and bumps the register closed with his thigh. "Something's wrong with Erika," Eliot says. "You've been weird all morning," Jon's finishing up, his gun laid out on the counter, a box of needles, rubber gloves laid out on the stainless steel. He feeds two quarters into the machine. "Want something?" "No. Yeah, something's fucked up, I'm serious. She's been real fucking clingy, didn't want me to come in at all this morning, I think she'd been up all night, I don't think she was ever in bed." Eliot pulls at the lever under the chair, leaning back and blowing a cloud of smoke up. "Pretty sure she's doing speed again." Jon taps the button and leans over, grabs the can, and stands up. "You know, she fucking asked me if I still had Spider's number the other week." Jon cracks the top of the can. "I told her I don't have his number and that she didn't need to be snorting that shit anyway." "And you couldn't have thought of this 'the other week' and let me know?" Eliot flicked his ash at the glass ashtray perched on the register. He stared at the neon glow over the door, back-lit by storm clouds. "Goddamn it if she starts that shit again I'm fucking kicking her out. I can't deal with that shit..." The door opens, Eliot pauses mid-sentence. She's not even five foot, although a short-cropped red mohawk on an otherwise bald head makes her seem slightly taller. Wearing a denim jacket, five pins scattered like badges. Ankh, a tao, a clover... she wore a white top underneath. Jeans, carrying what looked like a rifle case. "You guys aren't like cowering in a basement? You know there's a storm out there." "Yeah whatever." Jon says, taking a gulp of his soda. "Can we help you?" "Yeah, I got some glass I'd like to show you." She looks from Eliot to Jon, then back. "Which of you does body jewelry?" "I sell it, he puts it in." Eliot said. He pointed into the glass case. "Got that shit, and I have some wholesale catalogs." "Well, I'm Heather, and I'm a glassblower. Could I show you some of my shit?" She lifts the rifle case onto the counter, popped the latch, and threw back the lid to expose a tray of glass pipes laid out on what looked like black soundproofing foam. "Shit, look at that." Eliot sputtered. "You blew all this?" "Well, me and the guys. We've got a place up in Lawrence, the garage is all fitted out for blowing glass." Heather lifted back the foam on one side, and a plastic bag filled with smaller plastic bags, each wrapped around a bit of glass. "These are pyrex," Heather tapped the bag. "Shouldn't break, and biologically inert, easy to sterilize." She looked at Eliot. "And you'll get a good profit." "Yeah, we can't sell pipes, we'd get shut down." Jon says. "State'd take my tattoo license." He turns, leaves his can on the counter and comes around the gate to look at the case of pipes. "Oh, these are nice." He holds up a pipe with a large base. "That's a bubbler, it's a hand-held water pipe." Heather smiled. "It's more for high-test stuff, and if you clean it you shouldn't microwave it, that's metal in the glass. We wholesale them at 75 individually, and usually they go for about 120." "Fucking sweet. So you put the water in through the thumb hole?" Jon turns the pipe over, holds it in the light. "Oh that's very cool, the way it shimmers in there." He sets it down on the counter. "Can I buy this off you right now for 80 then?" "Um, sure." Heather opens the large plastic bag and pulls out the individual jewelry. "Plugs are five, hooks are seven, all this is wholesale so you can mark them up. The really fucking big ones are nine, but they're not going to sell as well, so only get a couple. There are hooks here, and some spikes. We don't do barbells or hoops, but the plugs," she pulled a huge handful of plastic bags and dropped them on the counter, "the plugs are where it's at. They're five bucks each, although you'll probably want them by pairs, so ten bucks to you as a set. And in Lawrence they're selling out at ten bucks a piece so you'd easily double your money in a week on them." Eliot picked up a baggie. Two red and black bits of 0 or 00 gauge glass, spirals of color like eyes bedazzled stared back at him. He set it down, picked up a few more. These were turquoise and metallic, another pair a solid lime green, a third set clear with pink glitter speckling the two shapes. "We don't sell a lot of double-oughts," (but these are pretty fucking beautiful, he thought.) "Do you have something like two or four gauge?" "A few, they're labeled." She pointed at the small white hand-written adhesive strips on the front of the bags. "The sizes are all between 4 to double oughts. Anything thinner is too hard to work with in glass for us." Interested, Eliot reaches out instinctively for the cigarette on the ashtray, then realizes it's smoldered out. He crushes the butt into the ashtray, then pops open the register. "Got a receipt or something?" He pulls out the fifty he'd put into the drawer only a few minutes earlier. "I'd take six plugs and three hooks, see how they sell. This, this, and these." He scoops up a few of the hooks at random. "That'd be, what, fifty-one?" Heather nods. "And add that to the pipe, we can call it one-thirty even." She smiles as Jon and Eliot hand her the cash. "Thanks guys, here's our card if you need more, just call and say you're the Safari shop." She folds the cash away and closes the rifle case while Eliot looks the card over. "Hardcore Glass" he reads. "Yeah, the guys are part of a metal band up in Lawrence, Sic Semper Tyrannis. Heard of them?" Jon shakes his head, picks up the pipe. "Nah. They any good?" "Well, they ain't bad." Heather smiles. "They've played the Pirate house and the Granada a few times." Jon nods, then walks into the back with the pipe. A moment later Eliot hears the sink running in the bathroom, then the distinctive sound of bubbling water. Eliot watches as Heather fills out a receipt and notes that she doesn't list the pipe. "Thanks again," she hands him the paper, "it's my first sale today and yesterday was a total wash." Carefully she gathers her remaining plugs and hooks back into the large plastic bag, then stuffs it away beneath the pipe display. A moment later she hefted the rifle case up from the counter and smiled at Eliot. "Look us up if you're in Lawrence, you can come by and see how we make this shit." As she left, Eliot stood there holding her card. It didn't dawn on him that he was staring at her ass until the door chime tinkled as she re-entered the rain outside.
That Afternoon
Erika sorted through the large box of papers and receipts alongside her desk. Ashtray overfull, she absentmindedly snuffs the smouldering butt in her fingers between four stale butts in the ashtray, the ammonia scent of burning cigarette filter stains the air. "Found it," she announced.
"Miao" the orange tabby announced from where he'd curled beneath her chair. Erika fondled Pinky's ears. He'd been named as much for his nose as the animated lab mouse, while his sister, currently exploring the vast arrays of boxes crumpled against the office wall, had ended up with the name Schrodinger. Erika could hear the whispery peeping and mewling noises of Schrodinger, pursuing a bug perhaps, through the cheap cardboard boxes that merchandise had arrived in and that neither Erika nor Eliot had bothered to discard.
The largest boxes had a length of black fabric draped across, so that it appeared to be a table, and had once been properly lit so that Eliot was able to photograph countless examples of the jewelry, a make-shift set for the camera, but had long-since been smudged in parts with a dull gray from ash and dust, marked by spills of soda and wine. From the edge of the cloth Schrodinger emerged, bearing in her teeth a moth. Pinky leapt to his sisters side and they both darted from the room.
"Fine, leave me," Erika says to the cats. "See if I care." The paper she's holding is the address print-out for the auction's winner, someone spending seventeen dollars on a barbell piece of tongue jewelry that glowed in the dark and under blacklight, seeing the future of the barbell in her mind's eye. First though, she'd have to find it. She was on hands and knees, digging through the boxes within boxes where she last remembered having seen the barbells when Eliot came home.
"Erika?" The front door shut loudly, screen slamming with a wind-driven crash moments after the door's solid thud. Eliot called again from the front room. "Erika, you home?" "Back here!" she yells, still sorting through barbells, her head down again and focused. "Getting an order ready to go out. You take this with you and mail it on your way out?"
She feels the floor vibrate, smells him coming down the hallway. Eliot looks down on her from the door, fidgeting with the countless plastic baggies and the jewelry they contain. "I wish there were some way to efficiently organize information," she says. "Here it is."
"Sure." He tossed a pack of menthol lights onto the desk near the keyboard. "Picked up you some salems too while I was out." He took the plastic bag and the slip of paper Erika was holding, then held them as he watched her turn back to the box of plastic-encased jewelry. Carefully, she began aligning all of the packets, their edges flush to the side of the box. The carton of print-outs and receipts beside the desk was disorganized, the trash can completely full, and the ash tray seemed incapable of holing even a single more ash, let alone another cigarette butt.
Erika seemed oblivious to him now, her focus having achieved an almost paranoid quality. When she spoke, it seemed that she was repeating something she'd heard, rather than passing along her own thoughts. "Schrody was down in the boxes, she caught a moth, messed up all the jewelry." Erika stated. "Just a minute and I'll be done straightening this box up."
"Hey, are you okay?" Eliot reaches toward her, and she flinches away without looking at him. "You seem tense."
"I'm fine, I'm fine." She almost shouts. "Fucking go mail that shit." Punching the box away, scattering the plastic baggies across the floor, she jumps to her feet "I've gotta pee," then she's pushing past him and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
"Goddamn it." Eliot looked at the paper in his hands with an address for someone he'll never meet, someone who spent seventeen dollars on the glow-under-blacklight barbell that he's also holding, and grabs a padded envelope from the bookshelf. "We need to talk when I get home tonight." No response from the bathroom.
Eliot lifted the ashtray gently and carried it into the kitchen. A few butts cascaded off the top before he'd safely dumped the pile of cigarette butts (and a handful of grayed and ashen sunflower seed husks) into the garbage can under the kitchen sink. Empty ashtray now in hand, he knocked it against the bathroom door. "I'll see you tonight." "I said I gotta pee, give me a sec." Erika responded.
"I'll talk to you when you've come down." Eliot mumbled, half growled at the door. "Tonight." He headed back out into the rain, pausing long enough at the door to pet Pinky, currently perched on a windowsill half-awake, ears tracking Eliot's movement through the screen door and into the storm.
He knew she was using speed again, that she was in the bathroom as he paused at the door looking back at Pinky, even at that very moment holding a baggie in her fingers, probably less than a quarter of a gram. He knew she used to always get small amounts as her fear of arrest too great to allow her to be holding more than she dared eat. She knew he would confront her, demand that she stop if she admitted, if she told him. The bathroom door, the hallway, a distance between them Eliot felt had deepened to abyssal proportions by the specter of Erika's history with meth, a chasm that Eliot believed Erika held fast by her stubbornness and her paranoia.
Maybe I can stop this. She spends her time uploading the stock and watching the auctions, Eliot thought. Maybe if she could run the online store from the shop, she could even mail it out on the way home. She's stuck at home, slowly going crazy amidst the cat litter perpetually full, the ash trays threatening to spill across the carpet, the daily minor floods of dr. pepper and nightly spills of boxed red wine... "Fuck." Eliot said to Pinky, just before shutting the door.
14:20
There was a sharpie in the pocket of his coat. Eliot used it to copy the address from the paper onto the padded envelope, then he folded up the email and slipped it in along with the jewelry. Waiting in line in the post office, he realized his glasses were spotted with droplets. Lost in thought,, he cleaned his lenses with his shirt. He knew she was using again.
Not that he hadn't used speed himself - shit it was prescribed him at one point - Aderol and Ritalin had been handed out to his mom for him to take at the first mention of his inability to focus. Having watched more than a few friends crush and snort his pills when they couldn't score any crystal was proof enough to him that he result was damn similar. He was past all that, he'd stopped even taking the meds, and he scarcely even drank. Jon drank, smoked, took cheap coke cut with god knows what along the way, but Eliot just smoked pot. He'd thought that Erika had had enough as well, but in the past she'd always done more than he'd dared, she seemed to be fleeing some secret pain she could no longer remember, some shadow always dogging her heels.
He steps forward, approaches the counter, drops the package in the hands of the clerk. "Anything breakable?" She asks.
"No," he says. "I do need insurance and tracking number." He's done this so often it's become rote. Blankly he waits for his receipt, then back out into the wet afternoon. It's no longer raining, but the sky is a decidedly unhealthy shade of green. A droning siren cuts through the traffic noise and squeal and hiss of the city bus at the corner. Briefly wondering if there's a tornado nearby Eliot ponders seeking cover for a moment. He's only a mile from the keeper of the plains, only a few blocks from the shop, and remembers the legends that claim tornadoes never hit the area around the keeper. Shit, he thought, he'd been in Haysville stoned out of his gourd on opium and kind bud the previous may actually shooting pictures of the tornado as it moved north. A few sirens certainly weren't enough to send him cowering into a government building.
Twenty Minutes Later
The water had made its way into his shoes by the time he made it back to the shop, and the sickly green sky had turned to a dark blue grey tone. Lightning rippled across the sky, and the shop itself was empty except for Jon resolutely drinking a coke and smoking on the couch.
"You look wet." Jon says.
"You look bored. Any customers?"
"No, fucking dead. People all probably holed up in their basements and shit. Weather says it's not a tornado, just thunderstorms. Want to chase it?"
"Fuck no, I want to dry out." Eliot retrieved the receipt from his inner coat pocket. "I had to send something at the post office."
"Erika not doing her job? Jesus man you guys live off 21st, what she can't walk two blocks to mail a package?" Jon crushed what was left of his cigarette into the mouth of the can, the sizzling punctuating his words.
"Dude, I think she was tweaking when I got home." Eliot removed his coat, tossed it onto the counter. "Then she locked herself in the bathroom." Jon didn't catch the lie, but Eliot felt it even as he said it. Eliot had never actually heard her lock the bathroom door. She might as well have though, he thought. The result was the same, rather than confront her he'd walked away. Free-floating guilt, endlessly attached to his inner core, as defining a trait as his height, or his eye color.
"Don't blame me man, I didn't give her Spider's new cellphone number." Jon said. "Who's she getting the shit from?"
"I don't know man, I didn't even see it. She was totally fucking spun though." Eliot sat down. "Shit, she could be getting it off of the Joneses for all I know." "What are you going to do about it?" Jon asked.
"You know, it doesn't matter where it's from, she swore she'd get off that shit and stay off. If she's using again that shit's going to kill her. She gets paranoid and loses all sense of where she is." Eliot rested his head on the couch and stared up at the fluorescent panel above. "I'm going to fucking find her stash and confront her with it. And I want to have her start working here, bring in the computer, see if we can't get a cable modem in back."
Jon eyed Eliot warily. "I don't want her talking to customers all spun out man, she's bound to do something stupid."
"So we'll set her up office space in the back room to fill orders and track auctions from here." Eliot was almost in tears but he tried to hold it in, huff them back down. "I can't leave her at the house any longer or I know she's going to slip back into that fucking cycle again man."
Eliot didn't have to elaborate, Jon had been around years earlier when Erika had attempted suicide. Eliot started dating her shortly after. It was in '96, nearly five years had passed since she'd gone without using anything harder than opium or the occasional valium or hydrocodone. To see her jumping back into amphetamines after five years clean was more than either of them could stomach.
"If I can't keep her from using this shit then I'm leaving, I can't watch her destroy herself... I can't fucking do it." Eliot became aware that he was almost shouting. He took a breath. "Having her here is the only thing I can think of to keep her sane."
Jon sighed. "Fuck it then, let's move some shit around back there." He looked to the front door. "Not like anyone's coming in for a tat during the storm anyway."
That Evening
There was no tornado that day, and by late evening the rain had ceased, clouds dispersed moving east. By the time Eliot pushed his way through the tree branches blown across the front porch and into his house it was nearly ten in the evening.
"Erika?" At the doorway Eliot already knew she was gone. "Erika, you awake?" Cats mewed in response from the dark hallway. "Fuck," Eliot said, turning on the light and seeing all of her dvd's and cds were gone from the entertainment center.
She'd taken the suitcases, a few boxes of microwave dinners, and most of her stuff from the bathroom. Eliot was sure she would have taken what weed had been stashed in the bedroom, but remarkably it was still there, sealed in its airtight bag and stashed beside their bong. He found white residue on the porcelain of the bathroom sink, and imagined she'd been snorting meth during their exchange that afternoon.
"She's gone," He said into the phone. "Jon, Erika's taken off."
"Dude, I just got home, let me eat something and I'll head on over." Jon answers. The phone goes dead in Eliot's hand. Pinky was at his feet, weaving in and around his legs. "Didn't she feed you before she left?" Eliot asked the cat. "Come on, let's get you two some food."
The kitchen was barren, the linoleum dusty in the corners and sticky with olive oil and old soda spills in the center. Eliot felt the weight of the day, wearily he opened the cabinet above the fridge and grabbed the half-full bag of cat food (for indoor cats, it said.) The bag was ripped. Schrodinger had slashed open the bag when Erika had first brought it home the week before, and bits of kibble were scattered around the bag on the top of the fridge.
As he poured the dry food out onto the plate on the floor, he sat and leaned back against the wall. An hour later he awoke to Jon nudging his shoulder. "You'd probably sleep better on the carpet." Jon grins. "Or fuck, maybe even on the couch."
Eliot growls, distanced from his body, feels for his cigarettes and rolls upright. "What fucking time is it?" "You called me about ten thirty, maybe eleven. I figure it's after midnight now." Jon says. "Here, you need a light?" Eliot located the cigarettes in his pants, snatched the lighter from Jon's hand.
"She did leave me the weed and my bong." Eliot says, lighting the cigarette and handing the lighter back. "Took all her clothes and a bunch of her shit from the bathroom. Haven't found a note yet." He waved at the cats. "Didn't feed them either on her way out." "Did you guys fight?" Jon asks.
"Hell, I didn't even talk to her since this afternoon when she locked herself into the bathroom." The lie came easier, began to become a memory this time. Eliot realized he was dusty, the side of his face greasy and sticky. Schrodinger is staring at him from the hallway. "We barely fought then, I knew she was spun out and I left. We didn't even yell at each other." He tries to wipe the grease from his face and feels dirt smear across his cheek.
"I looked through the house when I got here, nothing but some clothes missing, her cds and shit, but there's no note or anything." Eliot stands.
"She left the stock, all the jewelry and shit?" Jon heads down the hallway, toward the office. "And the computer?" "Shit, I never even checked the office." Eliot's alert now, on his feet. He follows Jon.
The computer was still on, a text file open when Jon touches the mouse and pulls the desktop out of sleep. Eliot sits to read it, but not before realizing all the boxes have been shuffled through and tossed aside. "Oh she fucking took all the shit." Jon said. "The body jewelry is gone, man."
"What the fuck." Eliot turns to Jon, disquieted, face red. There are boxes strewn across the floor, the sheet that had covered them bunched in the wedge between the door and the wall. Even the closet, where Erika had kept her summer clothes was bare, as empty as the boxes Jon was now sorting through.
"Eliot, it's all fucking empty. What is she thinking?" "She's not thinking. She's fucking hiding something from me and has been for a week or more now." Eliot's fighting a sob in his throat, anger but beneath it that vacant echoing panic covered over by a thin coating of shame. "Says here she's leaving and taking her share of the business with her. Fuck, I don't even know all her passwords for Ebay man, fuck."
"Lets figure out what happens next." Jon said. "You can do this in the morning, when you've gotten some sleep." He kicked at the boxes. "She'll come back and apologize tomorrow, I bet she's spun out and just went crazy."
"No I know her, she's stubborn. She'd be too embarrassed, too pissed to come back in a day." Eliot sat heavily in the chair. "I didn't even notice she'd taken the jewelry."
"What the note say?" Jon pointed at the monitor.
"Says 'fuck you, you're not my father' and she's taking what's hers." Eliot tapped the windows button and arrowed over to the log-off button. "That's it."
"Come on, let's smoke a bowl before I go home, you get some sleep and figure this out tomorrow."
March 23rd, 2000 Sometime around two in the morning Eliot finally passed out. The bed felt empty, he lay there stoned for a half hour after Jon had left staring up into the blackness. Completely awake by seven, he lay there trying to untangle the ideas and emotions that prodded his thoughts, smoking cigarette after cigarette. He wondered where she was, wondered if he should try calling her mom, or calling the police. He wondered if she had taken the jewelry to trade for more meth, or if she'd been sleeping with someone, cheating on him with another guy. He wondered how long he would lay there chain-smoking if it wasn't for Pinky mewing at the bedroom door that forced him to his feet, ashes scattering from his chest. "Jon, I'm not coming in today." He said the the voicemail beep. "Gotta figure this shit out." Waiting on the coffee to brew he continued to smoke, alternating between a cigarette and finishing off the bowl in the bong from the night before. By the time he actually sat in front of the office computer, he felt some sort of equilibrium had been established between the caffine, nicotine, weed, and the emotional chaos that had wrapped itself tightly around his consciousness throughout the night's (now inchoate) dreams. "Erika's logged into her email still," He said, to the wall perhaps, or to Schrodinger crouched at the window. "fuck yeah." He pulled a piece of paper from the printer. By noon he had filled the paper with passwords and notes from her email and was busy changing all the passwords to the various wholesaler sites and the ebay and yahoo stores when he thought about the joint checking account. He'd been meaning to start his own savings account for over a year now, but hadn't gotten around to it, keeping all his cash in with the money for the store. Now, suddenly, he wondered if it might be too late. It was. The account had been flushed of cash, probably that morning. Signing into the online banking account, the balance was a paltry $1.88. Eliot wanted very badly to scream, instead throwing the first thing at hand against the wall. Only later did he realize he'd hurled the cell phone. Folding up the paper with the passwords and placing it into his pocket, he rose from the chair and walked past the cats. He paused on the porch long enough to lock the front door, and began walking to the shop. On the way he stopped for a pack of cigarettes at the liquor store's smoke shop, then as an afterthought picked up a pint of whiskey. Twenty minutes later he pushed through the door of the shop. Jon was tattooing a customer, some woman in her twenties with red hair sucking her teeth as Jon etched an ankh into her shoulder blade. Eliot pushed past the counter. "She fucked me Jon, she totally fucked me." Eliot continued back to the store room. By the time Jon finished the tattoo and comes into the back, Eliot's finished half the pint and is laying on the cement floor smoking. "She cleaned out our checking account, took nearly five grand. I don't even have the money for rent next week." "What the fuck." Jon reached for the bottle. "Yeah, I'm screwed. I've got what's left in my register and eighty bucks or so in my wallet." Eliot sat upright, watched as Jon took a healthy gulp from the whiskey. "I've got no idea what to do." ...more to come...
