Chapter 4: The Couch and the Dream
The ceiling stain was a Rorschach blot of brown and yellow, the edges feathering out along the water line. John’s forearm rested across his eyes, blocking the flicker from the microwave bulb, but he could still see it in the negative space behind his eyelids. It looked, he decided, like a screaming head. Just like the one Elena had described in her own apartment. The symmetry of it gave him a dull sense of satisfaction, a thread tying their shitty lives together.
His other hand moved slowly under the waistband of his shorts, calloused fingers rough against his skin. He was replaying the riverbank, but the memory was slippery, worn smooth in some places and jagged in others. The grainy feel of her jeans under his palm. The way she’d turned her face away, her profile outlined against the sickly river glow. The specific, muffled sound she made, a half-sigh that got lost in the rustle of fabric. Was that enjoyment? Resignation? He couldn’t isolate it.
He remembered the cold, mostly. The gravel. The way she’d sat up after, brushing herself off like she was tidying a work station. He’d offered her a cigarette. She’d taken it.
His hand stilled. The fantasy that rose to replace the faulty memory was clearer, warmer. Pressure-treated pine. A six-by-ten deck off the back of a trailer, maybe. A little Weber grill he’d seen on sale at Canadian Tire. Two resin chairs from the same place. Morning light, not this perpetual sodium-vapor twilight. The smell of coffee, of eggs frying in butter. A solid warmth beside him in one of those chairs, a hip against his, a bare foot hooked over his ankle. Quiet. No need to talk. Just being there.
It was a clean, whole picture. He’d build it for her. She’d see then. She’d understand it was a place to land.
The buzzer from the ancient intercom grated through the room, sharp and mean. He jerked, his fantasy dissolving into the damp chill of the apartment. He swore, hauling himself off the couch. He knocked over an empty beer can with his foot; it rattled across the linoleum.
“Yeah?”
“Johnny. You dead up there?” Dave’s voice, shredded by the bad speaker.
“Coming down.”
He pulled on a hoodie, the cuffs frayed, and thudded down the narrow staircase to the building’s main door. Dave leaned against the jamb, smelling of detergent and the faint, indelible metallic scent of the plant. Another work shirt, same as John’s, stretched taut over his gut.
“Got a proposition,” Dave said, not moving from the doorway.
“If it involves your cousin’s band, no.”
“Better. It’s about Travis.”
John felt his jaw tighten. “What about him?”
“He’s running his mouth in the locker room. Saying you’re soft. That you got distracted, that’s why the line’s slow.” Dave’s eyes were small, bright. He enjoyed being the bearer of bad news. “Said you can’t keep your head in the game cause you’re too busy playing house with that little quiet thing from sanitation.”
The air left John’s lungs. A cold anger, clean and specific, washed through him. It wasn’t about the insult to him, not entirely. It was the mention of Elena. The way Travis had reduced her to “that little quiet thing,” had pulled her into the grimy, male logic of the kill floor as a point against John. He saw red at the edges of his vision, the same red that misted the air on a bad day when the drainage backed up.
“He said that.”
“Word for word,” Dave nodded. “So. Me and some of the boys. We’re gonna have a word with him after shift Friday. At The Foundry. A little conversation. You should be there.”
A “conversation.” It meant a few isolated kicks in the parking lot behind the bar. A demonstration. John had been part of these conversations before. He knew the rhythm, the way the grievance had to be settled not with management but with blood on the asphalt.
“Yeah,” John said, his voice low. “I’ll be there.”
“Good man.” Dave clapped him on the shoulder. “Gotta keep the standards up. This ain’t Fort McMurray.” He grinned, revealing a cracked tooth. “See you on the line.”
John watched him amble to his rust-eaten Dodge. He stood in the doorway until the taillights disappeared. The fantasy of the deck was gone, utterly. Replaced by the image of Travis’s face pressed against gravel, of the satisfying thud of a work boot meeting soft tissue. He’d do it for the line. For the respect.
But he knew, deeper down, he’d do it because Travis had looked at Elena, had categorized her, had used her as a weapon. John climbed the stairs back to his room. He didn’t look at the screaming stain on the ceiling. He went to the small, greasy fridge and got another beer.
His phone lay silent on the lumpy cushion of the futon. He picked it up. No messages. He’d texted her after dropping her off last night. You get in ok?
She hadn’t replied.
He stared at the framed photo on the wall. It was from three years ago, a rare night out. Elena was laughing, head thrown back, eyes scrunched shut. Someone, probably Dave, had an arm slung over her shoulder. She looked vibrant, alive. A person capable of that kind of unguarded noise. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her laugh like that. He’d taken the photo from a frame on Dave’s messy desk after a party, sliding it into his own when no one was looking. It proved something. That she could be happy. That such a state had once existed.
He put the phone down without texting again. The confusion was a solid lump in his throat. Her body said one thing—a transaction he understood, a currency he could earn. Her silence, her turned-away face, the hollow look in her eyes by the river… that said something else. He couldn’t make the two things fit together. It was like a carcass that wouldn’t split cleanly along the spine, the bone deflecting the blade.
He finished the beer in three long pulls. Friday. He’d deal with Travis on Friday. That was a problem with a clear solution. After, he’d go to her. He’d tell her about it, not the details, but the fact of it. That he’d handled it. That she was protected. He’d mention the deck again, the chairs. He’d make her see the outline of the thing he was building for them.
He lay back down, the phantom smell of fresh lumber and clean air clinging to the edge of his mind. Outside, a siren wailed, fading into the distance. The silent phone glowed on the cushion beside him, a tiny blue monument to everything he couldn’t name.