Chapter Text
Oh no, I see
A spider web is tangled up with me.
And I lost my head.
And thought of all the stupid things I'd said.
Oh no, what's this?
A spider web and I'm caught in the middle.
So I turned to run,
The thought of all the stupid things I've done.
-Coldplay
The first evening, he suffers. He drinks, but not as much as he thought he might. He knows he’s at his most impulsive when sad and expects to begin by drowning his sorrows. To the extent he can be said to have a plan, he plans to find himself ordering a round for the bar by sundown, at a strip club by ten, and being mugged under a bridge by dawn. The perfect night for the perfect loser.
He’s achieved a rare, breathtaking feat, a quinfecta of loss and failure (dad, sibs, job, dignity, her) in a shockingly brief period of time. He wonders if he should look up Leo Pasher and dig the blowtorch out of storage. Where is the nearest place to get a same-day face tattoo, preferably not a further ride from here than midtown? He tries to remember the name of Stewy’s ex-girlfriend; would Rhomboid even be open on a Tuesday night? If so, should he try out the closed system method? He can play either role; he’s versatile.
But none of that ends up happening. Instead, he orders a martini. He sips it and imagines this is what she might have tasted like, if he’d kissed her in another timeline- if he’d been, how might Marcia have put it? If he’d been less careless of her. Is that what he had been, careless? It strikes him as a little funny for a moment, how monumentally he’s fucked it.
That is when the heaviness hits him. Instead of the restless, wired feeling he’d expected, he’s overcome by a leaden wave, a weight so great, it pulls down the corners of his mouth. He feels as though there might be a metaphorical sewage back-up in the men’s room, all of his sadness, all of his anger, all of his shame bubbling up, out of the toilet, pooling on the bathroom floor and then seeping out from under the door into the bar, where he sits on a stool, ankle-deep in a puddle of fetid self-loathing. He is unable to move for quite some time.
He finishes the drink. He taps his card on the machine held out by the barkeep. He texts his car. He goes home.
He suffers in the living room for a while, draped sideways on the Eames lounger Grace had insisted on, but there are too many windows here; the view’s too good for proper misery. He shifts to his bathroom, where he can pick at blemishes in the mirror and pinch his love-handles while he suffers. He examines the open wound on his forehead: congealed blood, broken stitches, pink, puffy skin. It looks how he feels. Then, eventually, he goes to suffer in the bedroom, where his bed is. After a long time lying in the bed staring at the ceiling, not even finding the wherewithal for a goodnight wank, he falls asleep.
He sleeps until it is night again. He wanders into the kitchen and finds a half-empty bottle of- what is this anyway? Some kind of Icelandic schnapps, he thinks. Where did it even come from? He rustles up a glass. There is a bowl of fruit on the counter, so he adds a banana to his cargo and heads back into the bedroom. The banana is consumed; the schnapps is sipped experimentally and spit back out into the bathroom sink. He drinks out of the faucet like a child after brushing his teeth, except he hasn’t brushed his teeth. It’s 8:30 pm. Better call it a day.
The next morning- this would be Thursday, he believes- he wakes up mid-morning, to the monstrous growl of Darya’s commercial grade vacuum. He doesn’t have a housekeeper, just a daily cleaning service. They send in a few different people, depending on the day, but he can tell today it’s Darya. He recognizes her by sound, from the way she thumps around in her orthopedic Oxford style sneakers and slams all the doors. She’s an elderly Ukrainian woman who reacts to everything he says, no matter how politely worded, with the same wooden expression and sour air of reluctant compliance. It’s, like, pure, one hundred percent former Soviet Union.
Darya steadfastly ignores him when she cleans. The other cleaners aren’t like that. Nadine gets flustered and goes up on her tiptoes; the other one, Ana, just leaves the apartment entirely. The first time he was home when Ana got there, she turned around at the sight of him. He found her still waiting outside when he left to go out to eat an hour and a half later. Darya, on the other hand, nudges his feet with the wet mop when he sits on the sofa so she can clean the hardwood underneath. It’s supposed to be a premium service. He has no idea how she keeps her job.
She must know he’s home, by the detritus he’s left all over the place, but she opens the bedroom door abruptly without knocking. He peers at her blearily from under the covers. The bottle of Icelandic schnapps, somewhat emptier than it was before, is still on the night table. She tosses his phone, which he hasn’t seen since Tuesday night, onto the bed. It lands with a heavy puff on the covers next to him. She’s got a good pitch for an old lady. There is a long silence. He closes his eyes and imagines her rheumy ones glaring at him, calculating whether she should bundle him up in the duvet and dump him out of the bed so that she can change the sheets.
“I not do bedroom today,” she says eventually and leaves, slamming the door behind her. He puts his head back under the covers until she leaves the apartment. His phone buzzes and chirps. It rings out once. Has it been doing that in the living room ever since he got home?
He has a momentary impulse to check it, but the idea of sifting through texts and listening to voicemails is overwhelming. He’s lost his family and he doesn’t have any friends. So, who’s texting? There’ll be vultures, hangers-on, opportunists, false friends, and gawkers. What if it’s Greg? If he’s really lucky, he’ll have a hate call from someone who still cares enough to give him the what-for, but it’s probably just Karolina with a shit sandwich of press one-liners for him to eat up like a good little boy.
In a supreme effort, he reaches for the phone, turns it off, and tosses it on to the floor. He goes back to sleep.
He misses Friday; the schnapps helps with that.
On Saturday, at around 11 am, he wakes up again. The schnapps bottle is empty. He’s sweating; he stinks; the sheets stink. He’s shed all of his clothes except his boxers; they also stink. Is he hungry? No, he doesn’t think so. He can’t really tell, but he knows he must be thirsty. Shouldn’t he be thirsty? He inventories himself, his lips, his tongue, the roof of his mouth. He swallows. Yes, he is thirsty. So, he gets up, pisses, and fills the schnapps glass with water. Then, he can’t stop drinking water and he drinks it until his stomach turns and he throws it all up on the piss-filled toilet. Then, he tries again, drinking more slowly. He considers brushing his teeth and taking a shower.
One more day, he tells himself. I’ll get up in one more day.
Sunday, he does get up. He really needs someone to wash his sheets. He realizes he has a washing machine on the premises, but he doesn’t know how to use it. He’s never even been in his laundry room. So, as Nadine does his laundry, he sits in his dirty boxers in the kitchen, on a bar stool. He eats another banana, this one somewhat brown.
He wonders where the new food is. He rarely eats at home, but he does have a standing weekly grocery order. They deliver the food. One of the cleaners brings it in the next time she passes the door and puts it away. Then, a week later, someone throws out all the food because it has spoiled. Then, the cycle begins anew.
He checks in his hallway and there is a bag of groceries there; according to the receipt, it had been delivered Thursday and it’s been sitting out there ever since. Why didn’t Nadine or one of the others bring it in? This is supposed to be a premium service.
While Nadine buzzes around, blushing and stuttering, apologizing about the groceries again and again, he throws out the dairy products (not many of those because lactose does a number on his tummy even when it is not filled with Icelandic schnapps and self-loathing) and leaves the rest of it on the counter still in the bag. He turns on network television, not ATN, not PGN- he’s not a masochist for chrissakes- but some other channel, one that hasn’t caused him Sophoclean levels of tragedy in the past two weeks.
Finally, after he’s watched two hours of stultifying weekend morning programming, Nadine shuffles, practically backwards, out of the apartment, finished cleaning. He takes a shower, finds new boxers in his dresser, and slides into bed. The clean, fresh-smelling sheets inspire him to renewed lethargy. He could sleep more. So, he does.
It’s Monday, late afternoon, when he has a thought. He is not ready to get out of bed or check his phone or anything, but this thought comes to him so suddenly and with such clarity that he startles. There is a voice in his mind, speaking with absolute certainty, calm and serene. Is he coming down with borderline personality disorder after all?
The voice- and he has no idea whose voice it is- says to him, “You’ve been trying to solve the problem backwards.” It’s like a riddle that has an answer so simple nobody thinks of it. It’s like one of those pictures where you let your eyes go blank and you see a totally different image hidden in the first. It’s like being in middle school and suddenly remembering the combination to your locker after not being able to get your coat out for three days, hearing the satisfying click of the pins as they unlock, and then suddenly, all your textbooks tumble out and land on your toes. It’s just what you wanted and it also hurts.
He’s been trying to solve the problem backwards. The posturing, the striving, the desperation to please or offend- it’s all backwards. The problem of being himself, the problem of being Roman Roy- it can’t be solved in reverse. It can’t be solved by trying to pretend he’s alive when he’s dead, by walking on broken legs, by living in a falling down house. He can’t get anywhere this way. He has to go back to the beginning. He has to solve the problem forward.
It’s going to be like an episode of Hoarders. He’ll need to go back to the start and sift through the garbage. He’ll need to touch every item, handle every moldy, disgusting, rodent infested, shit-covered object. He has to shovel out the dead cats. (Maybe dad did know.) Sure, he’d rather just burn the house down and move to Bali. Anyone would. But he can’t because the house is, like, himself.
Ugh. He groans. This means he needs to go back to therapy, back to David. Fucking David. He doesn’t want to go back to therapy, but he is regrettably dead sure it is the next correct action. He’s been able to blame every poor decision, every reckless impulse of the three weeks since his father died on grief, lack of sleep, his nerves, et cetera. Now, after nearly six full days of sleep, he is very, very well-rested. He is probably clinically over-rested. It’s most likely not healthy to go from so sleep deprived to so over-rested in one fell swoop. And with that well-rested feeling comes clarity; he needs to go back to David.
He wants to eventually live in the house of himself, walk on both legs again, not be the walking dead. And he wants her, of course. But that part will probably have to wait.