Gasoline

A Story by von Froszt

0

He awoke with a nervous jolt and as his eyes struggled to focus, realized he had been dreaming. The dream had been so realistic, he had trouble adjusting to his own reality. As the seconds ticked by, his surroundings began to reveal themselves. The sublime lighting of the garage began to give way to the dank and polluted air of his bachelor apartment. Moments before, he had been dying alone on the floor of his father’s garage surrounded by a toxic cloud of noxious fumes. As he came back to himself, the boy stood up and became the man who had fallen asleep at his desk and was now hopelessly, foolishly behind on his project.

Edmond Malgary, a freelance writer of limited success, wrote on a consultant basis for a modest sprinkling of obscure periodicals. Tabloids from the back shelf of the magazine rack were constantly on the lookout for talented hyperbolic writers, authors who could twist and spin any story into a fanciful yarn of sex, lies and political affiliation. It was nothing extravagant, but stories about the Pope wandering off into the woods due to old age were paying the bills. The only problem was that he hadn’t sold a story in months and his current project wouldn’t pay off unless he met his quick approaching deadline.

Ed walked from his desk to the kitchen sink and found the least mildewed washcloth. He stepped back to the desk and wiped at the puddle of spit that had leaked from the corner of his mouth while he slept. He praised the quality of his waterproof ink as he daubed at the slimy mess coating his notebook, before lazily rinsing the cloth. He hung the cloth over the faucet to dry into a stiffened mass of foul smeling fabric.

This project was going to kill him. The rent hadn’t been paid since the beginning of the year. It was now May. It was a wonder the electricity still powered his fridge, that the water still ran from the tap. As it was, Ed had been showering at the Y, using stolen soap to clean himself. He had tried frantically to sell his stories to any magazine that would take them but none were of the caliber his usual contracts were looking for. It had seemed Ed was in an irreversible slump, until his current and very lucrative project quite literally landed on his plate.

1

The day six months previous had been one like every other. Drudgery had taken Edmond Malgary from the yellow-tinged familiarity of his apartment to the sickly smoke filled air of the dive diner down the street. Ever the consummate Bohemian, Ed sported a perpetual cigarette suspended above a cold cup of congealed caffeine. All he’d needed to complete the uniform was a striped turtleneck, tiny round glasses and a beret. A pretentious moustache would not be out of place. As he tasted the icy bitterness of his long neglected coffee, Ed raised his hand and snapped his fingers to hail the listless barista.

The bored coffee girl materialized much more rapid than usual, a carafe of Ed’s regular in her hand. As the girl poured his cup, Ed had the feeling her eyes were on his notebook and he moved to cover it up in a momentary fit of paranoia. She finished pouring, seeming to notice Ed’s insecurity, and in an apparent bid to distract him from her prying eyes the normally lazy barista turned around dramatically in a sort of loose pirouette that spun her into the path of an exiting patron.

Ed watched the commotion unfurl before him with a slight awe. Here was a girl who on a good day took five minutes to respond to a refill request, who roamed the shop like a lost child who was too lazy to look for her parents, who never did more work than was necessary. Here was this girl who had never betrayed the inkling of athleticism who today popped up at Ed’s table instantly, who today decided to break character and spin carelessly into an oncoming coffee consumer.

In an instant the scene was over. The girl was on the floor, the coffee on the wall, the air thick with drops of coffee and shards of glass and tension. The bespectacled man in the bespoke suit picked up his leather briefcase, now splayed open with its contents slowly soaking up coffee. As he stuffed wet pages into the case and dusted himself off, the man looked up at Ed with menacing eyes. The well dressed man with the poor eyesight closed his case and swiftly exited the cafe in which he had seemed quite out of place. Ed took the opportunity to make his own exodus.

As he laid down a crumpled five to cover his bill, Ed noticed a manila folder resting atop the remnants of his sandwich. The folder told Ed in red block letters that its contents were confidential. Surely the folder had been launched from the briefcase of the bespectacled man in the bespoke suit. Ed, ever the samaritan, picked up the folder and ran for the door.

The man in the sharp fitted suit was nowhere to be seen. Hadn’t he just left not thirty seconds before? Ed heard the cafe’s morning manager begin to chastise the lazy barista and he was loathe to stick around to hear the girl sob as she cleaned up her mess. Seeing no other option, Ed tucked the folder under his arm and sauntered back to his apartment to figure out how to return it to its owner. A man who dressed that well surely carried folders of some great import.

2

Ed placed the manila folder on his cluttered desk, taking care not to stain it with whatever residue seemed to be replicating on the desk’s surface. The folder sat untouched on the desk as Ed went back down the stairs to check his mail. He had gotten in the habit of checking the box two or three times a day, looking for acceptance letters and contracts from the magazines that should have been paying the rent.

The mailbox was empty. Dejected, but not surprised, Ed began closing the hatch when he spied a sliver of paper, a postcard wedged against the shadowed edge of the tiny porthole. Using a fingernail grown long for just this kind of job, Ed plucked the postcard, perused it and put it in the trash. “You’ve won ONE MILLION DOLLARS! Send us one dollar with this card to claim your prize!” Ed wondered how in the hell these scams got past the sorting room floor as he climbed the stairs toward home.

The creamy beige tone of the folder contrasted sharply with the soiled brown woodgrain of the desk, drawing Ed’s attention immediately as he entered the door. Curious as to the contents, Ed pulled back the top flap of the confidential valise and came face to face with a beautiful redhead. The eight by ten inch glossy headshot looked like the kind of photo résumés Hollywood actors used. The girl’s face was slightly turned, revealing her best side, as they said in the business. Her straightened hair was flaming red and pulled into a single wide braid that hung over her shoulder. Her seductive eyes seemed to burn holes through the paper they were printed on with laser focus that punctured the boundary of Ed’s soul.

Along with the picture, the folder contained what looked to be a proposal and what definitely was a contract. If he was right, and Ed liked to think he was always right, the folder was meant for the agent of this very pretty lady still staring at him from the photograph. The contract’s cover page indicated a name and phone number so Ed brought it with him to the payphone downstairs. As he dialed the seven digits and listened for the ring that told him the call was connected Ed was filled with a momentary apprehension. It was a feeling that intensified as the phone accepted his quarter and a strangely familiar voice entered his ear from the other end of the line.

The voice coming from the payphone’s receiver was not John Radwell, unless John Radwell was a woman with an unmistakeable boredom and sloth in the way she spoke. As her salutation slowly made its way across the wires, Ed was certain he knew this woman with the molassas in her throat but could not place her in his memory. The voice paused to wait for Ed’s reply.

“Hello. Am I reaching the office of John Radway?” Ed tried to sound professional. The bespectacled man who had dropped the folder had been dressed in a pristine and well-fitting blue pinstripe suit and carried a cushion-lined black leather briefcase, which led Ed to believe he must be someone rather important. If this John Radwell really was an agent or movie executive like Ed though, he might be able to finagle this situation into a writing job.

“No, just me here.”

“Is this his office?”

“This is AN office, but I don’t know anyone with that name. Wrong number?”

“No, I don’t think it is. I found a folder in a cafe today and I found this number next to the name John Radwell.”

“Yeah, lots of people use this number. It’s kind of an answering service. Anyway, do you want to order something or leave a message? I’ve got work to do. I’m a busy girl, you know.”

As she finished her sentence, Ed realized where he had heard the bored, syrupy voice. He raced upstairs to grab the folder and ran out again, out onto the street and down his familiar path.

3

The cafe had returned to normal in the scarce hour since Ed left. The coffee had been cleaned off the floor and walls, the shards of glass had been swept up and the lazy coffee girl who had caused the whole scene now sat at her desk, seemingly polishing silverware. The girl looked up as he entered and flashed her usual half-smile, no teeth and just barely enough effort.

“You’re back. I wanted to apologize for ruining your day earlier.”

“Thanks, but that’s not important right now. We just spoke on the phone.”

“We did? I talk to a lot of people on the phone. Which one are you? Oh, wait! I forgot, I’m not supposed to talk about customers to random people. I got in trouble last time I did that.”

Ed pulled the folder from under his arm and set it in front of the girl who now seemed much more lively, even if still very bored.

“What do you know about this?”

“What’s that?”

“That’s what I want to know. After your little accident earlier, this landed on my plate. I ran out to catch that guy in the suit who you ran into, but he was already gone. I took it home and found a number inside, a number I called and you answered. Not ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, you were looking for that John guy. Oh my god, you sound so different on the phone.” Ed wasn’t sure he had ever said more than two words to the girl, but he took her words for it. The girl opened the folder and looked up at Ed.

“That number there? That’s not the cafe’s number, it’s the number next door. But I know whose folder this is. You shouldn’t have it, you know. It’s a secret.”

“So you can get it back to the guy in the suit?”

“It’ll cost you,” she said as she shot him a quick wink before gathering the folder and its contents and placing them in a compartment under the till.

“Are you kidding me? What is this? I’m not made of money. I just want to get this thing back to the guy in the suit. You already took the folder, so I don’t think I owe you anything else.” The girl wasn’t making any sense and Ed wasn’t impressed.

The coffee girl’s countenance fell. Her lazy smile curled into a scowl and Ed was immediately sorry he became so upset. As her eyes bored holes through Ed’s head, he caught a glance that seemed much more intimately familiar than the girl’s voice had sounded on the phone. He couldn’t place it but he had seen her before, known her in some dream. He narrowed his eyes without thinking and tried hard to place her in his memory. The girl’s voice broke his reverie and Ed jumped.

“Why are you looking at me like that? You’re creeping me out.” The girl was visibly shaken, though Ed couldn’t imagine why. He hadn’t leered lecherously, hadn’t undressed her with his eyes, but Ed had an inkling she felt the same unshakeable familiarity when she looked at him. Ed looked away, ashamed.

“I’ll make sure this gets where it’s going. Can you go now?”

4

Ed was so haunted by the memory of the coffee girl’s strangely reminiscent eyes that he stopped going to the cafe. It had been several days since that day, but Ed couldn’t bring himself to go back there. Perhaps out of respect for her, perhaps out of nervous apprehension about the situation surrounding the curious manila folder that had landed on his plate. It ws completely irrational, he knew, but Ed couldn’t help thinking that there was an air of malice surrounding that folder.

It wasn’t like he’d taken anything from the folder. Well, that wasn’t completely true. When he came home from the cafe that day he realized the glossy headshot that had been lying atop the papers in the folder was still on his desk. Apprehensive about returning to face the coffee girl once more but reluctant to throw the photo away, Ed had kept it. It could always be reprinted.

Still, Ed could not shake this feeling of foreboding. His nervous brooding turned out to betray a curious foreshadowing because two weeks and two days following the events at the cafe, Ed’s suspiscions were confirmed.

Ed climbed the stairs emptyhanded, his mail key jingling in his pocket as his legs lifted his body up the incline. This was his third time checking the mail today. He was becoming skeptical of his chances of ever again being paid for his writing. He came to the top of the stairs and found his door open despite being sure he had closed it before going downstairs. As he came inside, Ed found three men in his single room bachelor apartment. Two men, hired thugs by their appearance, were busily tearing through Ed’s furniture while the third, a bespectacled man in a bespoke suit, rifled through Ed’s fridge.

“Uh, guys? Can I help you?”

The thugs didn’t look up, only continued destroying everything Ed owned in their relentless search. The bespectacled man who dressed so sharply closed the door of the refrigerator and Ed saw he held a half block of cheddar cheese in his hand. Ed was momentarily upset. He had been planning tomgrate that cheese over spaghetti later that week, only now it was being consumed at an impressive pace by this well dressed invader. The man began to speak, bits of cheese flying out of his face as he did.

“It has come to my attention that you have been in possession of a folder, a folder containing documents personal to me, a folder that you then handed to the same person who handed it to me, a folder that you handed to that person devoid of one of the items the folder contained. I need that item.”

Ed was impressed at the man’s ability to speak so fast and formal with so much cheese in his mouth, so concise and precise, the words not impeded in the least by the fermented milk product nor by the gnashing of his teeth as he chewed. Ed remembered his last encounter with this man. Not so much an encounter as a shared experience, linked only by the cafe, the bored barista and that damnable folder.

“I know why you’re here. You want the picture of that girl.” Ed raised his hands slowly, cognizant of the hired thugs who had stopped their rifling and now stood menacingly in Ed’s periphery. “I’ve got it over here, if you’ll just let me...” Ed’s voice trailed off. The feeling of foreboding had returned, though this time it wasn’t a foreshadowing. Ed could tell these were not men with which to be trifled and didn’t want to be shot. This man standing in Ed’s kitchen eating his cheese had the potential to be very dangerous.

Ed moved slowly, resembling a limp scarecrow as he sidestepped crabwise toward the desk. Gingerly, he picked up a document frame that held his high school diploma. He fiddled with the backing as he perceived the men surrounding him. The glossy eight by ten fell from the frame as Ed opened the backing and fluttered to the floor. It was immediately retrieved by one of the hired thugs. Thugs though they definitely were, Ed could only guess that they were on the bespectacled man’s payroll, though that seemed largely extraneous at the moment.

The man in the suit smiled, his teeth smeared with blotches of orange cheese. The contrast between the cheese and his teeth reminded Ed of the contrast he had noticed between the confidential folder and his disgusting desktop the day this whole thing started. Recalling that moment, another flash of memory popped audibly from Ed’s mind and out his mouth.

“Are you John Radwell?” Ed didn’t know why he said it, but the foreshadowing feeling returned with a vengeance as he was immediately certain he’d regret the question. He knew the man’s name; he’d obviously read something in the folder. What he knew would get the best of him, of that he was sure, and so it was with some relief that Ed watched the man in the suit motion to the thugs and turn toward the door. Ed turned and watched as the man walked through the still-open door, then fell unconscious in a heap on the floor.

5

When he awoke, Edmond Malgary was no longer crumpled in a heap on his grungy apartment floor. To be sure, the floor here was grungy, and the room appeared to be an apartment converted into an office, but he was now seated in a char and his head was heavy with pain. A man was staring intently at him from across the surfsce of a large and very ornate oaken desk. This man had dark eyes, dark hair, a dark moustache and a white suit. He sat in a wing-backed chair, a magazine splayed across his legs.

“I see you’re awake Mister Malgary. Odd name, don’t you think? Edmond Malgary? Now, how do you suppose a man comes by a name such as yours? Don’t answer that. I’m sure you know and I don’t care. Nice piece you’ve written here, by the way.”

The man spoke so swiftly that Ed’s concussion had trouble parsing the words. Ed peered more closely at the magazine the man held and recognized the pages he had written. The tabloid News Planet had commissioned a bit of conspiracy theory from Ed following a successful satire he had written for them about a year prior. He had been living off the check for the past year, foregoing paying rent to keep himself fed. Five thousand dollars only goes so far at three hundred a month for rent, especially if one takes most meals in the dive cafe down the street.

“I wonder, Mister Malgary, do you know who the woman is in the photograph my man found in your possession?” Ed mused at the point of the question more so than the woman’s identity, though now that his captor mentioned it, Ed was curious. Who was she? Why was her picture in that folder? Why was the photo so important that these men would go to such lengths to retrieve it?

“Who is she?”

“You don’t know her, then? I’m told you hid the photograph. Tell me, Mister Malgary, why did you hide the photograph if you don’t know the woman?”

Ed was caught in a sticky silky spider’s web. In honesty, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to dispose of the photograph, nor had he wanted to take it back to the cafe as he was avoiding the coffee girl and her ominous familiarity. A feeling began to creep up his spine, a cold and spiny missive informing his muddled brain that it might be wise to simply stand mute.

“Do you know who I am, Mister Malgary?”

“Are you John Radwell?”

“I am. Do you know what I do here?”

Ed had no idea where he was, let alone what this dark brooding man sitting before him did here. He looked about the shabbily furnished room, the desk and wing-backed chair a sharp contrast against the other decor. He felt a nagging feeling of familiarity, much the same as he felt when he looked into the coffee girl’s eyes. Had he been here before? Ed didn’t think so. The dingy walls betrayed a long history of tobacco smoke in the room and the scum clouding the windows could be chipped away with a chisel. The scene outside the window was so obscured by the grime that Ed became mesmerized trying to make out anything beyond.

“What do you do here, Mister Radwell? You’ve got my attention now. I didn’t want to get wrapped up in anything. I just wanted to return that goddamn folder that landed on my plate in that beat up old cafe where I pretend to write. That folder was suspiscious from the start. I should have left it there.” Ed was audibly frustrated.

“Relax, Mister Malgary. Here, take a puff or two.” Radwell passed Ed the cherrywood pipe he had been smoking since Ed awoke. Apprehensive, Ed took a few puffs and realized the tobacco was cut with hashish and the effect was not unpleasant. Noticeably more calm, Ed passed the pipe back across the desk and waited for the white suited, dark featured man to resume his story.

Radwell began, his words spilling out in a cantillated cadence at a feverish tempo.

“I own this building, you see. I own the cafe downstairs where you write. I own the call center next door to the cafe. And I own everything above them. One of the many things we do here is kill, dismember and dissolve in acid certain people who have done wrong by my organization. Not all we do, but one of the necessities of the business I am in. The production and sale of illicit narcotics is a dangerous business, but as it is my business and as I no doubt have enemies, you can see why the need arises on occasion to preserve my current status as a free man. Do you understand?”

Ed understood. He understood he would not leave this place alive. He might not even leave this building intact. He nodded his assent and Radwell continued.

“Please, Mister Malgary. If I had wanted to kill you you’d be dead. But we do have a matter to discuss. The woman in the photograph was killed by my organization, by the man who brought you here. In the room next to this one, to be exact. You need not concern yourself with why, but the fact remains that you have seen her face, you know my name, and you know where I do business. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“It means you’re going to do the same thing to me!” Ed was not a strong man. His emotions got the best of him and he began to sob openly. Radwell handed him the pipe once more and Ed pulled a few more draughts to calm down.

“Relax, Mister Malgary. I told you, I am not going to kill you. In fact, I have a proposal for you. It seems you are in some financial trouble and I would like to help you out some.”

6

Ed awoke from a terrible dream, his face soaking in a puddle of saliva. As he peeled his face from the desktop and came back to reality, he realized he had fallen asleep and was now dangerously behind on his project. The project had been given to him by John Radwell and had consumed him for weeks. When complete, the project would pay out a hefty sum, enough to cover his back rent, front rent and a lifetime of greasy food and sludgy coffee at Radwell’s cafe. This was promised, Radwell had said, contingent on Ed’s meeting his now impending deadline. Radwell hadn’t needed to say what might happen if the deadline was not met.

The deadline Radwell had set was tonight at midnight and Ed was nowhere close to completing his story. He needed a miracle or he would certainly end up dismembered and dissolved in caustic soda. Ed needed writing fuel. He was out of coffee, out of cigarettes and out of cocaine. Not that these would do anything for him since he seemed to be immune to caffeine, seemed he could bleed pure nicotine, and his nose was too raw for the sugar of the coca plant.

Ed frantically searched his cupboards for something he could take but his shelves were bare. He ran to the bathroom and clawed open the medicine cabinet. He found some headache pills, a bottle of cough syrup and a long forgotten shaving kit. The pills wouldn’t help and the cold medicine would knock him out, but the shaving kit held some promise. Ed opened it and retrieved a bag of mushrooms he had hidden there in what seemed to be another life.

Two hours later, Ed was deep into his trip. No writing was taking place; the typewriter sat on Ed’s desk loaded with an empty page. Ed lay on the smelly stained carpet and stared at the ceiling. Vivid day-glo colours danced upon the stipple as Ed’s eyes darted back and forth taking in the show. The sun was going down and the waning light made the candy colours shimmer all the more. His deadline loomed ever closer but Ed could not bring himself to care. He’d beg for another day and let Radwell decide whether or not to kill him.

As Ed rolled onto his side the setting sun slowly slurped rays of light from the room. Ed felt melancholic in his psychedelic state. Closing his eyes and curling into a fetal position, images of his terrible dream came back in flashes.

7

The boy rolled over and vomited. His reverie broke and he knew he was dying. As he opened his tired eyes, his clouded vision revealed the can of gasoline that had brought him to this state. He had been huffing the fumes directly from the nozzle of the can and now he lay in a puddle of vomit, his mucosa inflamed, his lungs collapsing.

His hallucination had felt so real. A six year old brain is not meant to handle such vivid phantasms and his had been a profound experience, even if completely misunderstood. Now, as the chemical effect wore off he knew he was going to die and he found himself unable to care.

The boy was a curious child. He started huffing gas when he heard on the news that kids in impoverished communities did that to get high. To his precocious juvenile mind this was an experiment waiting to happen. He knew getting high had something to do with drugs and he’d heard the effects of drugs could be fun, even though people said they were dangerous. His dad had let him smoke a cigar after his baby sister was born and he liked the rush he got, even if it made him cough.

Today, the boy hit upon a novel idea. He had been sniffing the fumes to this point, and the effects were quite pleasurable. Each sniff brought a hot prickly feeling through his sinuses, penetrating to his lungs. Each outward breath intensified the heat and produced a fuzzy euphoria. Today however, he discovered he could put his mouth directly on the nozzle and breath the fumes much more efficiently. The magic had begun.

With each set of rapid in-out breaths, he felt the hot prickle intensify, felt the fuzzy euphoria envelop him like a cosmic embrace. The whole world had melted before his eyes and each new trip brought him to a different reality. A water cooler bottle on the back his father’s truck morphed into a blue-grey dolphin who beckoned the boy to swim in an eddy of ethereal water. The woodgrain pattern on an old bookshelf became a grizzled old wizard who inhabited the spirit of a tree. A hole in the wall held a dimensional rift in which lived a family of imps who imparted universal truths.

The most recent reverie had been the most vivid. Now, as he lay dying on the floor he felt unmistakeably that he had lived an entire other life. His thoughts were interrupted by a blinding flash of light and a gurgling mechanical sound. The boy heard his mother enter the garage.

“Oh god, oh s**t! What have you gotten into?” Her voice was frantic. They boy felt himself being rolled onto his back, felt hot tears dripping onto his face. He opened his eyes and looked into his mother’s. He had the feeling that she looked strangely familiar, knew he had looked into these eyes before.

“The lazy coffee girl,” said the boy as he remembered where he had seen those eyes.

As he took his last breath, the boy closed his eyes and saw a vision of Edmond Malgary, the unmistakeable scene of being strangled to death by the bespectacled man in the bespoke suit.