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i.
“Anything I left back there I don’t need,” he says, realizing about ten minutes later that it works as a metaphor but you still need a valid ID to rent an apartment in East Baton Rouge Parish. Marty rolls his eyes, goes back into the hospital, tosses wallet and keys onto Rust’s hospital-gowned lap. The face in the photo looks sallow, angular, vampiric. He tries to remember the last time he looked in a mirror and can’t. Probably for the best.
“Don’t matter anyhow,” Marty grunts, “you’re staying with me.”
That won’t work and he knows it—he’s all too aware of the ever-looming expiration date on people’s patience with him, and Marty’s put up with more than anyone else was ever willing to. But he can’t stand on his own yet, in any sense of the word; and Marty is trying to be helpful, in that awkward, wincing way of men. It occurs to Rust that they are like a couple of half-blind brain-damaged toddlers trying to grope their way towards being actual people, caught in a sort of cosmic game of Marco Polo. He says as much, and gets the characteristic look in response, the one where Marty looks like he’s trying to eat the side of his own face.
“You’re the only one of us that’s brain-damaged,” he replies, starting the car. “I never did try to headbutt a serial killer to death.”
He takes a long, slow drag and sends smoke spiralling out the open window of the sedan. Marty insists on the open window, which Rust supposes is at least a step in the right direction away from their inevitable codependency. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
ii.
“Ain’t much to look at, but it come furnished, at least.”
The door screams against its frame; Rust wonders if Marty’s ever even been in here. The guest room’s a glorified closet, painted a muddy purple, like a bad bruise the day after. There’s a worn-out futon and not much else, but then he’s never been one for much else.
“Hell of a paint job, Marty.” Rust tries not to lean too hard on him as he limps toward the bed.
“Well, lay down and close your fuckin’ eyes and that way you ain’t gotta look at it.”
“That your way of telling me to go to sleep?”
“Yeah. Shut the fuck up or I’ll have to come in and read you a bedtime story.” He’s gone before Rust can ask what the fuck kind of bedtime story he could tell after the month they’ve just had.
He starts to drift off, staring at the cracked ceiling. There’s a pain in his guts and, beneath that, a gnawing, a nausea: what the fuck are you doing here, man.
He slipped off the edge of the world, more or less, these last ten years: weeks, months passing in a haze of ice, pouring drinks, dragging nets, speaking to no one and no one speaking to him. It would be easy—too easy—to fall back into that, fall away. But it looks like he’s not gonna die any time soon, despite his best efforts (the Chief of Staff herself at his bedside, cellphone in hand, thumb poised over the number for the Head of Psych’s pager: you’re not supposed to pull a blade out when you’ve been stabbed and you know it, Rust—he turned his head to the wall until she left, probably glad she’d never had children with that lunatic). The thought of another ten years of this, of moving through the world unseen and untouched, like smoke, is too much to be borne.
There’s an appeal to the idea. Someone else’s cracked ceiling and creaky futon. The presence of another human being, as familiar to him as the sight of his own hands when he lights a cigarette: the way Marty gestures expansively, shuffles his feet when he’s tired, grunts before his morning coffee.
Still, he wants out before things turn sour.
iii.
Laurie calls Maggie when Rust goes missing from the hospital, gives her an earful about health risks and liabilities and talk some sense into those men of yours. Maggie laughs, without much humor.
“Let me give you some advice,” she says, “let this one go. Apart they were already a couple of stubborn assholes, but together they’re a law unto themselves.”
iv.
He’s developed a routine—a ritual, more like. Every morning he drags himself off the futon, throws back curtains the color of overripe avocados, and squints at the sun.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” he says.
Sometimes he goes right back to bed and sometimes he doesn’t, but he supposes it’s still progress, of a sort. Once he gets all mixed up, maybe takes more of his pain meds than he should or maybe it’s just two sleepless night stretching out into three but he throws back the curtains and it’s the moon there instead.
“Yeah, fuck you, too,” he says.
He doesn’t remember much of his dreams anymore. Details, sometimes—small hands, fingers curled; brown eyes and black lashes shadowed against plump cheeks. Some mornings he wakes and can still feel her presence, and he is grateful, and he is angry, and he is so very, very tired. He sits on the edge of the bed and leans out far as he can until his fingers brush that awful wino’s-puke fabric and push the curtain aside. There’s no sun, anyway, because it’s pissing rain. “Go fuck yourself,” he growls at the sky before collapsing back on the mattress, head pounding.
It makes him feel connected to things, however tenuously: the earth will go on turning, no matter how annoyed he is by it. He thinks within another month or so he’ll have worked up enough energy to open the window so he can insult the universe in person.
It takes seventeen days—fewer than he expected—and he decides to go for it, only to find the window’s painted shut. There is, however, a rusted hammer under the kitchen sink. Marty pays the damages, his glare intensifying with every bill painstakingly peeled from his wallet. “Please excuse my friend,” he tells the landlady. “He has a mental condition.”
“What’s my mental condition?” Rust asks when she’s left, lighting a cigarette in defiance of Marty’s inconsistently enforced rules about indoor smoking.
“Being a sonofabitch.” He never asks Rust why he broke the window.
He’s been planning for some thinly veiled resentment on Marty’s part, choked-back regret at allowing this home invasion. It’s been a long time since either of them shared a space with anyone, after all—hell, it wasn’t three months since Marty loaded his gun before he’d follow Rust into a locked room. He’s been preparing himself for the usual half-muttered insults, followed by shouting, followed by broken taillights or broken wrists. It was always their way, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t trying to push things along towards their inevitable conclusion.
But Marty, it turns out, is exactly like a puppy who won’t leave your side if you stop kicking it long enough to form an attachment. It takes three and a half weeks for the world to stop spinning in circles every time he stands up, and by then Marty won’t let him fucking leave.
v.
It’s harder on Marty, what they went through. He didn’t expect that, but he should have.
Of course, Rust had a lot of time to work his way up to this. He didn’t plan on surviving it, either, and he’s seen worse; there are scarier places than Carcosa, both inside and outside of Rust’s head. Marty, though—he’d worked out a comfortable routine, hadn’t he? And Rust had done what he always did, blown in like a goddamn hurricane made of knives.
During the day he startles easy; his hands shake; he drops things. Not so much you’d notice, if anyone besides Rust was bothering to look. But at night he shouts in his sleep, a raw, wordless yell like when he saw that tape. Rust drags himself off the futon, half-healed scars groaning in protest. Raps on the door with two knuckles: “Marty? Y’alright?”
The reply on the other side of the door is sleep-choked, tear-choked, only a little defensive. “Fine, Rust.” He settles on the threadbare carpet and leans against the closed door. Sits and smokes until he hears snoring again.
This place Marty’s in now, he’s just visiting, and he’ll leave it sooner or later. It’s Rust’s home state; he knows the geography.
vi.
“You want anything? While I’m out.” Every morning Marty asks the same thing and every morning the answer sticks in Rust’s throat, dies off and fades away into a dismissive naaaah sound. Until one morning—he knows it’s morning ‘cause that’s Marty at his door again, coffee in one hand and toast in the other, you want anything while I’m out, but it could be the middle of the night or sometime last week or next week for all Rust knows because he hasn’t slept—and he’s tired enough and weary enough to finally say it.
“Listen. There’s something I need you to pick up.” He reaches under the futon to where he tossed his keys, gritting his teeth against the now-familiar ache in his guts. “From my place out behind the bar.”
He drifts off to sleep and when he wakes the book with its tattered white paperback cover is right by his head, on the plastic crate that passes for a bedside table. He picks it up and it falls open where it always did, the crack in the spine splitting it apart like a stab wound. The photo’s almost right where he left it—out-of-place just enough he’s sure Marty found it, wedged in right below the lines of verse now instead of covering them:
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
They’re at Lake Houston, wet curls plastered to their faces, her in those bright-orange inflatable things babies wear in water. Both of them are laughing.
vii.
He thinks of the home they shared, Marty and Maggie, when he looks around this shitty apartment with its sad dinner trays and a television that’s damn near the size of the couch. Remembers bowls of fruit, the simmer of spices in a boiling pot, the smell of fresh-cut grass. A profusion of wallpaper roses.
(He still thinks of her sometimes, of his mouth pressed against her hair, arm locked tight about her waist, braced up against his empty kitchen counter—the warmth and the breathlessness of those few moments when he disappeared completely. He’d hoped it would feel like home. It didn’t feel like anything at all.)
It came easier to them than it did to him and Claire. They’d tried, but her childhood had been fucked up, too, in its own way, and domesticity was always a kind of dance whose steps they were unsure of (seven months pregnant at Kirkland’s: do we need a spoon rest, Rust? Is that something people do?). At Marty’s they do well to keep TV dinners in the freezer and beer in the fridge. He falls easily into the practice of doing dishes, straightening strewn-about fishing magazines. He never could abide clutter.
viii.
He’d lived in cheap apartments in Houston before marriage and cheaper hotels after; the place in ‘95, with its bright white walls and crisp white sheets, was the nicest he’d had in a long while. He was only a little embarrassed at the horror on his new partner’s face when he witnessed its spartan blankness. At least it was clean.
A week after that dinner, Marty pulled him aside in the parking lot on a Monday afternoon. “Was cleanin’ out the garage this weekend,” he said, opening the trunk of his car and pulling out a battered lawn chair patterned in yellow and green. “Don’t need it anymore. You want?”
Rust suspected the garage story’s bullshit, but he thanked him all the same and took the chair home. He found the other one a couple weeks later, sprawled out on its side against a back wall in the evidence locker like a murder victim. He spirited it away late on a Friday when no one was looking.
He got back to the apartment and set the two chairs up against the wall, one of them brightly colored and worn around the edges, the other cold and gray and locked up in a coat of dust; he realized you only need a second chair if you expect someone will want to come over and sit, and wondered if maybe he wasn’t getting a bit ahead of himself here.
ix.
Nothing’s keeping him here, now that the job’s done. He could go back to Alaska, he supposes, or Texas. Those places were home, weren’t they? He misses sharp clean air, Tex-Mex cuisine. Louisiana was always an in-between place, a fever-dream place, all burnt-out trees and strangling vines.
It’s started to feel familiar, though. The dark, yellow-green smell, the way the hot air hangs like a damp shroud from March to November. He wants to stay. And that desire, like all desires, makes him nervous.
x.
There are places to rent for cheap on the edge of town; he brings it up tentatively without being really sure why. “I figured you’d want me out of your hair by now, is all. What little of it you got left.”
“Ain’t no need for that. This works out fine, what we got here. You’re healing up, you can come work for me at the firm and we’ll split the rent. Cheaper that way.” He sounds calm, but Rust recognizes the stubborn set of his jaw.
“Marty.” He can hear the note of desperation in his voice and tightens his teeth against it. “You’re gonna push this thing until it breaks.”
Marty takes a long swallow of his beer. His eyes don’t leave the television. “If it was gonna break, Rust, it woulda done it by now.”
If you were drowning, I’d throw you a fucking barbell. “Oh, what, you not planning to shoot me anymore?”
“Could be,” Marty replies. “Easier to shoot you if you’re just down the hall, though.”
xi.
Maisie smiles politely at the hospital, gives her father her cell number, promises to keep in touch, doesn’t. Slowly, horrifyingly, the truth dawns. For Audrey, her father is a bruise, tender to the touch but blooming radiant blue and purple. They are veterans on either side of a great war—her adolescence against his midlife crisis—bound, years after the detente, by the shared experience of survival. But for Maisie, who came of age in the aftermath of his betrayal, Marty’s name is just a line scribbled in a notebook long ago and then erased sometime when he wasn’t looking. She’s not angry. He is simply a non-entity.
When she doesn’t return Marty’s messages, he calls Maggie, who offers half-hearted platitudes about patience and compassion. Rust doesn’t say anything, just fixes Marty a stiff drink and heats up his favorite TV dinner in the microwave. When a daughter’s gone, she’s gone, and there’s no getting her back.
xii.
Marty’s getting more work these days—silver lining to having your face plastered all over the goddamn news. Philandering husbands, mostly—divorce cases. “Karma,” he calls it, and Rust wants to tell him that making money catching people doing what you got away with is pretty much the categorical opposite of karma, but he doesn’t, because he’s trying this radical new lifestyle choice called keeping his goddamn trap shut. He rides in with him twice a week to organize files, sort through photos, pretend to be useful.
One afternoon Marty gets home with eight cans of pale-blue paint in the trunk of his car. “Where the hell you get this?” Rust asks.
“I know a guy,” Marty says. “What, you think you’re the only person who can use that line?”
“Your landlady gonna allow this?”
“Oh, look at who gives a damn about the house rules, all of the sudden.”
They spend the whole weekend painting Rust’s room. It takes five coats to cover the ugly purple color.
xiii.
One evening they’re fishing. Well, Marty’s fishing, and drinking, and Rust’s ribbing him about what he’s caught and what he hasn’t. The air is still and blue with the promise of sunset, and there’s a moment of pure, sweet quiet—no sound but dragonflies lighting on the water. And Rust realizes that, somehow, the gray-brown haze that’s covered his thoughts as far back as he can remember has parted just a bit, and everything is warm and still, and he thinks well hell, maybe Maggie was right all those years ago, about things getting better. Shit.
They don’t get better, not really, and there’s more downs than ups most days, but on the worst nights he closes his eyes tight and tries to picture the lake and the dragonflies and the light burning on the water, and he waits patiently for morning, waits for Marty to appear in the doorway with coffee in hand—“Sleep good?” “Good enough, I guess.”
xiv.
Audrey is standing by the door of their downtown office, biting her nails. Her hair hangs around her face in tendrils, daffodil-yellow, like her father’s once was. Marty is in the bathroom, probably stalling. After a half-dozen stilted phone conversations, they are meeting for breakfast. Rust thinks about reconciliations on the terrible TV shows Marty insists on watching, how they’re always tearful or joyful or enraged, instead of like watching two people coated in layers of ice, slowly being chipped away by an invisible chisel.
“You could come with us,” she says abruptly.
He blinks. He doesn’t know Audrey, barely knew her as a child. Back before ‘02 he’d continued to see Marty and Maggie outside work, of course, double dates, the occasional birthday, that sort of thing—but he’d avoided the house, more or less, after that mess with the lawn mower,yeaaahhhh, stay for dinner, Rust. He doesn’t need a repeat of that scene, Marty with flat eyes like a shark’s, smiling with too many teeth, come to breakfast, Rust. Family life, especially Marty’s, always made him feel like a small animal caught in a trap.
But to his surprise, Marty only looks relieved, and he realizes they were both desperate for a buffer. Rust figures this is the first time anyone’s ever invited him anywhere with the expectation that he’d make the gathering less awkward.
It does get weird a few times. There are minefields everywhere: Maggie’s second husband, Maisie heading north for law school, things that happened at Thanksgivings Marty wasn’t invited to. But Marty drowns his eggs in ketchup and Audrey wrinkles her nose—gross, man—and Rust tells her about the time her dad got food poisoning from that little food truck they used to go to back in ‘98 and he threw up all over the interior in the middle of a pursuit, and then they push the coffee cups and half-finished hashbrowns and vanilla Cokes aside so that Audrey can show them her portfolio. She and Rust exchange drawing tips, scribble on napkins—he can’t remember the last time he drew something that wasn’t DBs or fucked-up spiral sticks, but she’s nicer about his technique than she needs to be. Marty sits back in the booth, half-relieved, half-jealous.
Afterwards, they share a cigarette out in the parking lot while Marty pays the bill. “I mean, I’m happy to see him again,” she says, screwing her face up in a familiar expression. “But I figure it’ll happen if it’s gonna happen, you know? He’s pushing so hard.” She pitches the butt into the gutter, looks up at Rust. “Don’t you think he’s pushing too hard?”
The sight of her always hurt, like looking at two transparent images laid over one another: the girl who’s there and the girl who’s gone. They would’ve been the same age, after all. God, God, he’d fight man-eating tigers with his bare hands to be able to have breakfast with her now.
He turns away, leans against the wall. “No,” he says, “I don’t think he is.”
xv.
He remembers the box from before, though he doubts Marty knows it.
It was back in ‘95, in that dim dread rush of days between Pelican Island and Beaumont, Marty in his apartment, in his space, loud and ruddy and blond like sandpaper, snitching cigarettes and leaving them half-smoked, coffee cups in the sink with a syrupy-sweet inch still in the bottom and he just knew it was gonna draw ants but he was too busy weighing and measuring and snorting the various white powders circulating around his kitchen to care—though when the first ant appeared he contemplated putting coke in the sugar bowl.
(Rust never owned a sugar bowl—Marty actually brought that fucking thing from the house, off-white china painted with strawberries, a relic of domesticity; Rust found it shoved in the back of a drawer when he packed up the place in ‘02 and threw it against the wall hard enough to shatter.)
Two days before Rust got into his truck but Crash got out of it, Marty disappeared for the better part of the afternoon and came back half-drunk bearing a fucking Tiffany box. Two hearts entwined, the kitschiest shit Rust ever saw, and gold, which didn’t suit Maggie’s coloring anyway; worst of all, it cost more than Marty made in a month. She’d hit the roof when she found out he’d emptied out their bank account for the sake of a pointless gesture, and another blowup was the last thing they needed.
Rust didn’t have time for this shit, but he poured a lot of whiskey and spoke in a slow, low voice like back when Sophia didn’t want to sleep, and within a couple of hours he’d convinced Marty that giving Maggie that necklace is the worst idea he’d ever had. (He’d relegate it to second worst in two days when he showed up to the biker bar in that fucking Pink Floyd shirt.) He imagines Marty burying the box in the bottom of his suitcase, maybe leaving it there, finding it again when he moved out for the second time in ‘02, tossing it into a box of shit on the top shelf in the back of a closet, blaming Rust for talking him out of giving Maggie that necklace, as if it would have somehow prevented from fucking up again seven years down the line.
“I hear they’ve started letting you move around,” Marty said when the gaping maw where his guts used to be had solidified into a mess of stitches and itchy scab. “Maybe they’ll even let me wheel you around a bit, get some fresh air.”
“Yeah, listen.” He let Marty hand him a pitcher of something absurdly pink that they both knew he had no intention of drinking. “You gotta bring me some smokes, man. You just gotta.”
“You ain’t had one in three weeks. Seems like it makes more sense just to quit.”
“Naaahhh, fuck that.”
He’d smoked half the pack by the time they got back to Marty’s, smoked the rest on his couch (at least open the goddamn window, Rust, that shit stinks to high hell and I’ve got a security deposit), watching the sun rise, not ready to relax just yet, not ready to look whatever this new arrangement was in the face—sleeping under someone else’s roof, someone else’s responsibility. He crushed the empty pack in his fist but turned the little blue box over and over in his hands, its corners only the slightest bit worn and streaked with dust. Put it in the pocket of Marty’s ill-fitting sweatpants. Later he puts it on the windowsill so that it’s the first thing he sees every morning before he has to face the sun. Later still, when the business is doing well enough to put him on salary, he buys a little shelf at a yard sale. It faces the window; it’s where he keeps his books, and the plant Maggie sent over, and the box.
It’s a reminder of all the times Marty put him first, in spite of his own better judgment.