Oscar’s mind went to his parents’ bathroom, to the tissues in his sleeves, to the trucks racing across from him.
No. I can’t.
He’d spent too many hours axing acid-coated flesh and poking spears into red-webbed eyes to lose the battle against his own demons. But shaking hands were no good for fighting.
So Oscar would just have to drown them.
When Papa had his heart attack, Oscar went in the ambulance with him. That was the real funeral service, the final escort. Oscar had sat beside the EMT, eyes on the zipped bag, as though Papa were a suit and not a man who had loved him. They had told Oscar not to go with them, but he wouldn’t let them take Papa on his own. He couldn’t leave him with strangers like that.
So the EMT had taken care of Oscar in his state of shock and then they’d sat him down on a cold plastic chair beside the cold room where they’d put Papa. When Oscar’s mother arrived, she’d hugged him. He couldn’t remember the last time she had done that. But that day she had. She’d pulled him in, and she hadn’t said anything about his hair or about the clothes he was wearing. She’d just cried and babbled and cried some more while Lina looked at her and Oscar, waiting for a proper explanation.
“This doesn’t make sense,” their mother kept saying to the medical examiner. “He doesn’t drink or smoke. I cook healthy meals. He goes on a walk every day. Is it the stress? Was it the stress? He doesn’t even drink.”
“Ma’am, sometimes it happens to perfectly healthy people,” the man’s response went, over and over.
The rest had been a blur to Oscar, right up to the funeral. All he could recall of the time between his father being certified dead and his father being buried was the phone ringing incessantly and Grandma sitting in their kitchen with their mom, their Aunt Celia from their mother’s side milling about the house, washing Oscar’s clothes and braiding Lina’s hair for school, preparing pasta bakes for them to eat.
This doesn’t make sensehad stuck with him. Because it hadn’t. For once, he and his mother agreed. And for a while after that, he played her shrill exclamation in his head each time he approached the bleachers around the track at school, bumming cigarettes from kids who pitied him because his father was dead. Later, he’d repeat the same sentence to himself while he finished whatever dregs remained at the bottom of whichever bottle he’d have procured at the cheapest price.
Because Oscar figured if Papa had lived his entire life doing everything right only to die like that anyway, then he might as well haze up his mind and put off all the other ugly things he wanted to do to himself.
His phone pinged, tearing him from the memories that had seen fit to assault him ever since he’d spiraled into this bar. Oscar swirled the golden liquid streaked with paleness where the ice had melted and tilted his head back to finish the drink, reaching for his phone.
Christina: Hi, Oscar. I just saw this. I’m sorry. I was in sessions all day long, back to back. Are you okay?
Oscar was not okay. In front of him was a fresh glass he’d signaled the bartender to get him. His ass was sore and numb from sitting on the stool so long, and when he walked out, hiswallet would be lighter. Not only had he made Aaron less than half of what he was supposed to, he’d also gone and spent its value in liquid misery.
But Oscar needed to keep his hand wrapped around the glass, needed to feel its sobering cold against his palm and fingertips. Oscar couldn’t have free hands because they wanted to hurt him. Oscar’s legs couldn’t be allowed to walk without buckling beneath his weight because if they carried him to the bathroom, he would find himself in the mirror and he would see the shape his mother had traced with her cutting tongue.
So Oscar finished his drink and listened to the buzzing in his head, ignored the repeated pings and vibrations on his phone, because he couldn’t quite look at Aaron’s name on his screen, knowing how badly everything had gone, how he hadn’t been able to do this one miserable thing for him, how he’d failed him. Oscar couldn’t fathom opening their conversation and slurring out a response with the world moving at seven hundred miles an hour before his tired eyes.
Oscar thought about closing them. Maybe the world would stop spinning if he only closed them. Just for a minute.
It felt like less time had passed than the sixty seconds he’d promised himself when someone began to shake him. Oscar’s jaw was tense, his mouth open, sleeve dark and wet with his drool. It smelled like the sticky floor of a nightclub on Sunday morning, felt like walking into school after Papa had died, every pair of eyes sticking to his face and head.
“Hey, we’re closing. Can I call someone for you?” Oscar allowed his blurry vision to settle on the man who stood in front of him. His brown eyes seemed kind, the black hair on his beefy knuckles reminding Oscar of Grandpa. Bitterly, he wondered whether Papa would have had these hands if he’d been allowed to age. “Son, you good?”
“Hmm.” Oscar blinked, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Keep your eyes open. Hey.” A hand was gently slapping his cheek, soft and warm. It reminded him of wrapped caramels pressed into his pockets, weighing them down all the way home, where he’d stash them in the burrow of treats from Grandpa for the rest of the week. “Kid…who do I call?”
Oscar’s throat felt clogged, like his stomach had clawed its way up his chest and settled there, waiting to be spewed. His eyes began to close again, the dimmed lights overhead piercing his eyeballs like flaming needles.
“They shouldn’t have kept serving you like this,” the old man grumbled.
He turned to mutter to somebody else, but Oscar missed that part of the conversation. He leaned back, his spine cracking as he stretched, arms flailing as he reached for the back of a chair he wouldn’t find.
It was an endless fall, a tumble into darkness, closed eyes and an open mouth as the whiskey he’d consumed heaved out of him, splattering the hardwood floor of the bar, speckling his hoodie in a sickly orange Oscar spied as his eyes slitted open.
Oh, shit.
Whatever remained in his stomach groaned out his mouth, jeans squelching as his knees pressed into the puddle of vomit. Oscar’s crotch warmed as a small tinkle of piss pushed out of him, moistening his boxers from the strain. If his body tried to throw up empty a second longer, his eyeballs would pop out of their sockets.
He didn’t know the hands and arms that caught him as he slackened and fell, a wave of coolness fanning his face, turning down the dial on his nausea.
“Kid, who do we call?” the old man asked again.
“Lina,” Oscar replied, reaching for a phone he’d left on the bar top. He would hate himself for it in the morning. For now, Oscar closed his eyes and let himself drift.
