Ever seen fight club? The same kind of relationship between Tyler and his second personality exists betwen Nikki and Peter, though Nikki is actually real.
Short Story / A Dangerous Endeavour
I saw him from across the café hall—he was leafing through a magazine and smoking a slender clove cigarette from between the opaque fingers on his right hand. His eyes—green eyes—struck me like a shrapnel. His fingers were laced along thick blue veins with streaks of white flesh crawling up around them, bony and weathered, stretched like the fingers of a man only a few heartbeats from death. His face was the pale color of floating ash, with sunken eyes and a black gaping hole for a mouth protected by salmon lips, into which he sucked dry the black body of the cigarette he held burning bright as a cherry in the dark. The sun glanced onto his shoulder blades. The print on his shirt was grey, neutral and limitlessly spanning across the width of his broad chest; it was made up of small stitched squares and lines that his ex-girlfriend would have classed blasé. He called it Modern.
The man introduced himself to me as Nikolas Martineau, Nikki Marty for short. At one point in time, he told me, he’d had long, gnarled and mousy brown hair that gnawed on his elegant features. He told me that, once upon a time, he had meat on his bones and his lungs were the color of tickled peaches, not asphalt; he once could run without chest aches or a throbbing temple for miles down the road, and then back again.
He lived in an apartment three stories up on the corner of Park and 23rd. He cooked his food over the coils on the stovetop because the oven had broken a week after his twenty fifth birthday, one year ago to the day of our meeting, and the repairman had been on vacation in Cancun since July.
The walls leaked adhesive glue and cockroaches. They crawled out through the spaces between his brown and yellow teeth, causing his gums to bleed over time. They ate the linings of filth from the trashcans and made loud, crunching pops when you stepped on them with the heel of your foot. They weren’t warm like most dying things tend to be, he told me, but cold and spiny and matted with gluey innards, though he barely even noticed them anymore.
His bedroom was also his living room, which was also only separated from his kitchen by a change in the flooring. It went from yellow carpet and brown stains (which he would still insist, to this day, was really only off-white) to tile that wasn’t really tile but a flat hard sheet of a tile design that had air pockets beneath it for you to step into.
When I came over for the first time three weeks later, it looked as though he hadn’t even bothered to scrape off the layer of crust from the kitchen floor. It didn’t seem to bother him—first impressions had already been made—so I worked to pretend that it didn’t bother me, either. The place smelled rancid, like the kind of scum you’d find on your shoe after plodding through backyards on humid summer nights, when your shirt clings to your back like static or rubber glue. The walls peeled.
I passed this off in my mind without much thought on the outside but, in my subconscious, rewarded him in my disgust with several tiny black demerits. They were grease on the bottom of my skull, sloshing back and forth, a subtle scent hardly even worthy of any outward recognition, but driving me mad on the inside all the same. There was a dull satisfaction about my passivity that relaxed his eyes and acknowledged my disappointment.
We sat in Café Lyons that first day, drinking the black coffee he ordered from a flowery young waitress who was wearing white tennis shoes and a black apron. The strings were tied around her waist doubly, which made her ribs pop out more than they should have beneath her sundress. I wondered to myself, eyeing her slender frame, where her uniform was.
Nikki was awkwardly infatuated with the idea of her. He stared at her as he told me about his job working as some sort of field hand on his grandfather’s farm during the summers. Free food and free beer, he told me. All the liquor his body could handle before passing out, only for less than a hard days work. Beautiful, he said and grinned. I watched him drink his coffee until it was gone, and laughed as he lifted one finger in the air to signal the waitress over for more. He did this three times, talking dryly, his eyes darting back and forth, and then he left me in the Café, twitching and jumping cracks as he walked, but only after scrawling his phone number and address onto a folded napkin, sliding it across the table next to my hands. It was then, there, in the dim light of the Cafe with blurred noises all around us, that I felt terrified, and yet strangely intrigued, by the smile he flashed at me. Perhaps I saw the cockroaches then. I couldn’t be sure.
A fortnight later I found myself awake in the middle of the night; I was coughing up spatters of blood. I reached for a tissue on my nightstand, clicked on the lamp and saw in my hand the same napkin that Nikki had slid over to me covered in red drops and saliva. It wasn’t the first time I’d found the little spots of red surfacing themselves from my lungs. It didn’t scare me anymore, though: the fact that I was dying (I knew this already and had convinced myself to embrace it), and the fact that this would be the way I’d go. At my age—26, and feeling as old as my own ancestors—I felt both invincible and weak. I’d lived the life of a walking contradiction and it was no longer of any value to fight it. Death was another stage to act upon.
But here, this night, my coughs had woken me from my dreaming, which I rarely did. I dreamt that my body, and only my body, had become infested with sick, festering termites, all squirming to reach out of my skin, all of them appearing as tiny black bumps beneath my skin, which had grown frighteningly pale in a lunar light. I was crawling, hands and knees, down one long dirt road, with sparkling lights hanging off of pine trees in the distance. They shone like incandescent stars in the throes of life. I tasted the warmth dripping from the lights, had felt it injecting itself into my veins through the holes left behind by the termites, and as I crawled, my body began to glow. First, from the gulf of my stomach came yellow beams, red beams, green and the brightest blue, almost azure, they came and illuminated every rib, every vertebrae. Soon, I fell to my side in the dirt, and I dreamt that the light stretched my body out in all different directions. The termites began to sizzle and pop, and though there should have been pain, I felt none. I felt nothing. As they burned and sizzled away into ash, I heard the faraway sound of tambourines, a great loud trumpet, and an accordion. They started slow, playing soft, waxing and waning against the wind. Then they rose, this wonderful combination of sounds, and grew louder. As they grew, so did the light, intensities matching one another, brighter and louder and soon this dark forest where I crept became a light symphony, big and blustering. And Oh! The blush of colors, they melted together and I saw blues that you might never see in this world, blues brighter and wilder than any sky, deeper than any ocean. I swam in them.
And then, as if by the command of one Great Hand, everything stopped. All sounds, lights, colors, laughter and emotions dropped like singular pieces to the forest floor around me. This is when I felt the first cough surfacing. I begged to keep the sounds alive, but my voice became as small as dust in the eye of the cosmos, and it flitted away with the pieces that dropped. Another cough. My body jerked—both in my dream, and in my bed—and another cough shook my lungs. This is when I woke up, and this is where I found myself, calm and yet sweating beneath the sheets.
I stared for a moment, coughed, and reached for the telephone.
He wasn’t there. I hung up and tried again.
“Hello?”
A faint buzzing sound sent electricity coursing through my head.
“Nikki? It’s Peter. We uh. We met at Café Lyons a couple of weeks ago. Sorry to call so late I just-”
“Pete!” I heard him smile, “Petey boy. How nice of you to finally call.”
The buzz got louder.
“Look, Pete, I need help with something, and I’m thinking that you’re just the guy I need to see, but I’m gonna be out of town for six days, got some business out in Manhattan I gotta take care of. Can you come over this Sunday? Got some things I need your help with.”
“I uh…”
“Great, man, see you Sunday. Be here at 6:30, and don’t be late.”
The buzz had reached its climax and finally began to fade as he hung up and the click rang throughout my head. I coughed again and turned out the lamp, fell asleep, and woke later to a dark red bloodstain on the corner of my mouth and on my pillow. There was no continuation of my dream.
It was early. I got up and used the napkin to wipe my cheek, looking out the window to my left to see the falling snow outside.
Sunday came and I walked to his house in my new jacket and boots. I walked to his house before the snow started to fall and the children began to dance. I walked ten blocks and his building somehow appeared in front of me, looming. It was red on the inside and out.
We sat at his kitchen table smoking cigarettes and cloves and talking and drinking from a silver flask he’d gotten for his birthday. He cooked us a pizza on a metal pan over his stovetop, let the ashes from his cigarette fall into the sauce and stood without talking for a long time. The city light coming in from his window was dirty. I wanted to wash it, to take it and put it into a bucket with warm water and soap and scrub it with a bristle brush until it bled cleanliness. I wanted to feed the light its own purity.
We remained like this for an hour, talking some and smoking some and mostly existing together in different worlds. Despite the warmth coming from the stove, the air around us stayed rigid, froze us into place somehow. I could see my breath as it ran from my nostrils.
“So, what?” I asked finally. He looked up across the table, gobs of pizza sauce hanging from his mouth. “You gonna tell me what you wanted me for or not?”
A smile emerged. Looking back down at his pizza he nodded and swallowed hard enough for me to hear.
“My man, my man. I’m glad you asked.”
He stood and took my plate. I watched. He waited. He spoke again.
“You, Petey Boy, are gonna help me get some money.”
“Money?”
“Money. Kid, ain’t you never heard of business trips? W gon’ make some good stuff tonight, don’t you worry.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow. I uh.. I just thought we’d—“
“Now leave it all to me. I jus’ need your help, you know, collectin’. Come on, kid, it’ll be fun. Dontcha like yourself an adventure every once in awhile? C’mon, help me with the dishes. We should get goin’ a’fore it’s too late.”
He drove us to the edge of the city where the roads turned into dust and gravel and the weeds were more like decorations for the scenery, ugly though they were. Along the dirt road there was a turn off and through branches of the naked tree arms I saw a small building illuminated by dull fluorescent lights. As we drove closer, I saw the words GAS and FOOD on two juxtaposed signs standing by the entrance of the building. Closer still I could see a fat man through the glass window; he was reading the newspaper inside, eating something brown and drinking from a white cup. We slowed, and Nikki turned off his headlights as we approached.
“What are we doing here?”
“Just put this on.”
He handed me something black, something fuzzy and small, the size of my head if not just a bit smaller. I looked at him.
“Put it on.”
“Nikki, what are you going to do?”
“You ever used a gun before, kid?”
He tossed a pieced of metal at me and as I caught it, the cold barrel landed hard in the palm of my hand.
“It ain’t loaded so don’t even worry about it. Just follow me.”
He slipped on his black mask and opened the car door, put on black gloves and started to walk towards the building. When he saw that I wasn’t following, he walked to my door, forced it open and told me that I could either put on the mask and follow him inside or walk home with fatty over here. I chose the former and slipped the mask around my head. It was tight and scratchy and the air that escaped from my nose almost burned my skin. I followed him inside.
“Just give me all the money you’ve got, old man! We won’t hurt you if you just give us the money!” I screamed at the man. His eyes were timid, pleading. My voice came out stronger than I ever remember hearing it before. Nikki looked back and smiled through the fabric of his mask. I could see the outlines of his teeth and the cockroaches in his gums. I looked to Nikki, then back at the man, and held my gun—was it mine, or was it Nikki’s? I wasn’t sure— to his face, only inches away, and I felt his breath go through the barrel. My hand was shaking. My whole arm, my torso, my head and my legs and my feet, they were all shaking. The fat man stared back at me, stared hard into my eyes, shook his head and asked me to calm down. I was shaking. He said please, sir, put the gun down. Please, sir, put it down. My eyes shook. I looked around and saw that this station had no security; he was the only one there. I guessed that the back door had been left unlocked.
I felt myself press on the trigger. I pulled it closer to my body and waited. It was unloaded, it wasn’t unloaded, I couldn’t see straight, my eyes were shaking. Nikki brushed past me and jumped over the counter. Before I could focus my eyes long enough to realize what had happened, I saw Nikki bring up one powerful arm and slam it into the man’s gut. He began to hit the man harder. He hit him in the face, in the stomach; he kicked his legs and laughed until the man fell to the floor. He fell into the shadows behind the wooden counter and Nikki laughed even louder with each dull thump of his foot against the mans stomach.
“Get it, man, get the money!” He motioned with his gun to the cash register and kept kicking the man. I looked over the counter and saw that, on the floor, the man was crying, he was bleeding; two teeth were in a puddle of blood on the floor by his face. He looked up at me, stared hard into my eyes and began to plead with his lips. Tears of disappointment welled in the corners of his eyes. Nikki’s skinny legs kept kicking him. I felt mad fury, mad rage, mad horror, it was rising into my chest and it came up into my fingers. It pulsed through my hands and turned my eyes into throbbing globules of pure rage and gall. I lifted the gun in my hand to Nikki’s head; I had such perfect aim. It was unloaded, it wasn’t unloaded, I couldn’t see straight. I pressed the trigger hard and felt the recoil reverberate throughout my upper body. The bang came a year later and it was loud, so loud, I could barely hear the man’s grunting or Nikki falling to the floor. I could barely hear myself gasp as the gun fell from my open hand to the floor. It was unloaded, it wasn’t unloaded. Leaning over the counter, I saw spurts of blood and a listless expression emitted themselves from the face of Nikolas Martineau, the man I killed, the man I ran away from, the man I left to die. I broke fast out of the store; I left him there, and disappeared into the drab of the tremendous, snowy night until the lights behind me began to fade into the atmosphere.
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sapphiretragedy reviewed Version 2 -
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lynsey reviewed Version 2 -
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This definitely has a noirish feel. I like it. However, although I liked your visual description I thought they were a bit dense with adjectives at times – and I also wondered if your Nikki character would say that he had ‘long, gnarled and mousy brown hair that gnawed on his elegant features’ or ‘his lungs were the color of tickled peaches, not asphalt’ – perhaps you could have the narrator looking at an old photo and drawing these conclusions himself?
I also thought your dialogue was pretty snappy and overall I thought the piece worked.
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despondentgnome reviewed Version 1 -
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Great vocabulary here, I love Pulp-eque stuff and this definatly fits the bill, just mop up on the grammar and I think ya got it. Wonderful images in here too
readme_pelle reviewed Version 1 -
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I thought this was very well done in the sense that it speaks for itself. That may not make any sense, but all I mean is that this peice really makes the reader understand what the writer was thinking at the exact moment that they wrote. You did an amazing job taking a single emotion and conveying it to your readers in a way that makes them feel as if they’re floating around in your head. And that is what makes a spectacular writer.
Good job,
Farrah
izzy421096 reviewed Version 1 -
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it’s a good first try.
work on it the premise is good.
anarchy84 reviewed Version 1 -
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The piece is very well written and shows a large level of talent but it does need a lot of editing at this stage. You mentioned this in the synopsis so I won’t go on about it instead point out a few things easily overlooked when you’ve read the same piece for the upteenth time (self editing is horrible huh?)
“only a few heartbeats from dead.”
heartbeats from death?
Okay i don’t want to spend ages copying and pasting it won’t help you any more than another read through anyway. At the beginning you overuse adjectives a little, go over read the sentence out loud and think to yourself whether they’re all actually needed. Plus some sentences are very long with lots of commas where a full stop or semi colon might be put to better use. Pretty much the same problems I have with my writing so I sympathise.
Keep it up.
kglinux reviewed Version 1 -
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There are a lot of very good elements in this story. You create some very stron visuals. However, I am utterly confused about Nikki. Is he old or 25 years old? If he is only 25, what is the explanation of his condition? Also, why does the main character have blood coming from his mouth? This is very unclear.
We also don’t know enough about the main character from your piece here to know why he would hang out with Nikki and why he would participate in the robbery.
You have a very good base here, it just needs a little more work.
onyxeyes reviewed Version 1 -
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Great story. I don’t see any grammatical errors and the story flows very nicely. But I’m wondering how someone as rational sounding as Peter would ever associate with someone like Nikki?
Evilpsychokitty reviewed Version 1 -
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Very vivid imagery here. You might want to indent your paragraphs to make this easier to read.
Nice work
Joediver reviewed Version 1 -
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This story has a good amount of merit and certainly a decent amount of action. It was, however, difficult to get into. That said, I am sure some editing can polish this up nicely. I will forego the punctuation and flow critique, as you said this is a rough draft.
The characters could use a little more defining, however you DESCRIBE them (and everything else for that matter) very well!
There are two things that I think need work, first and foremost, you need to write in the present tense using action instead of writing passive sentences. Example (you wrote):
“He cooked us a pizza on a metal pan over his stovetop, let the ashes from his cigarette fall into the sauce and stood without talking for a long time.” You do a lot of “telling? instead of a lot of “showing.?
My suggestion tries to bring the reader a bit deeper into the action with you and your characters. Simply change everything to PRESENT TENSE, like this:
“While standing over the pizza pan, I notice the dark gray and black ashes falling from his clove cigarettes into the sauce of the pie. Nikki doesn’t notice, he stands there, silently, and even though he is motionless in this filthy room right in front of me, I can see that his mind is somewhere else completely.?
In changing it all to present tense, it forces you to keep away from passive sentences, helps you show the reader what is going on instead of telling them what is going on. This, in turn, keeps the reader involved in the present, helps them take notice to all you are describing (which again, you do very well…)
The other thing that I believe might help you develop your characters is; when you are writing them make sure they all have a “different voice? in your head. It seems to me that your brain is giving them different things to say, but they are all using the same “dialect? for lack of a better term.
Different characters not just have different outlooks and descriptions, but they also have different educations and say things different ways. As writers we often have our characters talk as we ourselves do. I see that in your writing. Make sure you have your characters speak differently. My trick is to assign different relatives’ and friends’ speech patterns to them (obviously try to match the character to the relative.) LOL
Finally, I really like the flow you got going in the last few paragraphs. The dialouge drove the action, and the repetitive wording (shaking, stared, pulsing, throbbing, rage) ... all very good in driving images home. There is some great talent here, just some mechanics that need to be worked on. Sincerely, I think this is going to be a great story. Have fun with it! Your enthusiasm shows for your subject! Keep up the good work!
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