Sta.sh
Need
by ~reido“How much have we had to drink?” Jill asks Alan, leaning way back in her chair.
“We finished the Jack off hours ago, and this is our… second? bottle of my parents’ wine,” he replies, “So the answer to your question is: ‘a lot’.” He unconsciously nuzzles his face into her hair. She’s leaning on his shoulder, eyes closed; after a moment she rises, stretches luxuriously, and walks over to the front door of the house they share. Alan watches her, vision slightly blurry, and leans heavily on the table.
“It’s snowing,” Jill says after she’s opened the door. She stands there, framed by the darkness, across which floats little white specs of snow that reflect the light from inside. Her back is to him, arms limp at her sides; the huge black question-mark tattoo that stretches from her wrists half-way to her elbow on the underside of her right forearm is partially exposed by the pushed-up sleeve of her sweater.
“It does that, sometimes, in the mountains, in the Winter,” Alan says sarcastically. She looks over her shoulder at him and rolls her eyes. He grins. “Close the door, you’re letting all the hot air out.”
She does so, with a retort: “Close your mouth, you’re letting all the hot air out.” They laugh. Jill ambles about the room aimlessly, eventually stopping next to Alan’s typewriter, next to the pile of pages that make up the most recently-completed section of his still-unfinished novel. Her fingers trace over the ink, and she stares at the letters, concentrating, but not actually reading them.
Jill returns to the table. They have another bottle of wine and, completely intoxicated, fall asleep on the couch together, fully-dressed. When Alan wakes up in the morning, hung-over, red-eyed, he is alone. Outside his window, the snow is still still falling, covering the dense forest that surrounds the house on three sides. He yawns, stretches, and sits down in front of his typewriter. His hands sit on the keys, he yawns again—but his fingers do not move. He blankly stares at the equally blank page. He reads the top page from the pile, the page he’d written most recently, and tries again; but still, his hands will not strike the keys to produce letters. Without letters, he has no words, and without words, he has no book.
This is not the first time he has every been stricken with writer’s block; it’s just been a long time. He’s not accustomed to it anymore. The last time he remembers being unable to write something was during the week he’d posted the ad in the newspaper: SINGLE WRITER SEEKS HOUSEMATE TO HELP MAINTAIN POINTLESSLY LARGE HOUSE; he’d tried to be as snarky in the ad as he was in person. He remembers being unable to start the novel that now again stumps him; he had been trying to finish the first chapter for months before he had placed the ad.
Within three or four days of the ad appearing in the local paper, Jill had arrived on his doorstep. He had opened his door after the knocking to find a short, dark-haired woman standing outside, wearing a heavy black jacket and a bright-red stocking cap. “I wasn’t sure what you’re supposed to bring to your own housewarming, so I brought liquor,” she had said before slipping past him and into the house. No hello, no nice to meet you.
Alan turned slowly to watch her as she stripped off the heavy jacket and tugged off the cap, tossing both on the couch. He’d been intrigued, if not charmed, by her forwardness. It was not an impression that would wear off as time passed. “There’s the kitchen,” he said, closing the door, “and there’s the bathroom; there’s a bedroom down the hall, past the stairs, up which are four more bedrooms and another, larger bathroom. You can have your choice of any of the bedrooms except mine—it’s upstairs, the only one with anything in it.” He proceeded to explain how much money they’d both be putting into the utilities.
“What about house payments?” she’d asked. “Rent?”
Alan had just shrugged. “I own the place. If you’re helping me keep it from falling apart, then you’re doing me more of a service than rent ever would.”
“If it’s too big for you, why did you buy it?” Jill pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, exposing to him for the first time the large question-mark tattoo.
“I didn’t. My parents did, and they signed it over to me when they left for Europe. I think they live in a Winnebago now. We don’t really keep touch anymore.”
Alan stares at the blank page still loaded in his typewriter. He stands up and wanders into the kitchen to make himself breakfast. He gets out a frying pan and three eggs, pulls a kielbasa out of the fridge, and sets out a small handful of oranges to squeeze for their juice. He stares at all these things for a while, and then puts them all back where he got them and pops some bread into the toaster. Usually, he makes breakfast with Jill—a full affair of a meal, with all of the things he’d laid out for himself and sometimes more. It had been a long time since he’d made a meal on his own—certainly he didn’t need Jill to hold his hand while he cooked, but the desire to put that much effort into it was just not there. He doesn’t even bother buttering the toast. He drinks a can of soda with it, even though, he thinks to himself, it’s too early for soda. Just this once won’t hurt.
He sits in front of his typewriter for another hour and accomplishes, in the most literal sense of the word, nothing. “This isn’t working,” he mutters to himself.
Alan lies out on the couch and reads his still-unfinished novel from front to what is currently the back, hoping to catch the groove he’d been on when he wrote what he has now. He doesn’t find it. When the sun starts going down he sits up and watches the snow, and realizes that Jill still isn’t back. He stands on the porch and drinks a cup of instant coffee, and takes a good ten minutes to notice that her car is still in the driveway. Alan frowns. He makes excuses, saying things to himself about how she probably went out with a friend and just forgot to tell him. He tells himself stories.
He sits down in front of his typewriter for two more hours, and still nothing will come out onto the page.
Literally the day after Jill had first moved in, after months of being unable to write anything, Alan had started his novel. His fingers had been a flurry across the keys, his hand heavy when he started a new paragraph, shaking the small table. She had watched him while she moved what little had come with her from her car to the house. Once that was done, set up an easel in the living room across from his writing space and started painting.
“You’re an artist?” he asked, his attack on the page not even slowing.
Jill had just nodded. They had both worked for hours, until she declared, “I’m hungry.”
“Then eat,” Alan had muttered, only half-way paying attention.
She stared at him. “Are you kidding? Are you really that blithe about it?”
Alan looked up. “… What?”
“Eating is a serious business! Especially for people like us. What you put into your body greatly affects what you put onto the paper. Or the canvas. Or whatever.”
“You’re serious?”
Jill was already on her way to the kitchen. “Of course I’m serious.”
His curiosity peaked, Alan had no real choice but to follow her. “Alright, then, there’s some frozen pasta dinners in the freezer, we’ll cook one of those.”
Jill stopped dead in her tracks. “Wait. What? Frozen pasta dinners?”
“Yes?”
Jill let out a sigh—the kind of sigh a kid lets out when talking to an adult about something adults have no idea about. “Stay here. Make sure all your pots and stuff are clean. And start the oven, three-fifty. I won’t be long.”
Alan had stood rooted in that spot and listened to Jill’s car-door slam, and the rumble of the car crushing gravel as it pulled out of the driveway. By the time she returned, the oven was on and the cookware had been rinsed—if only to get rid of the dust they had acquired after months of neglect. She carried in with her two large grocery bags, one at a time.
“This is how we’re going to eat from now on,” she said, rolling up her sleeves. The two of them proceeded to produce—almost exactly like the picture on the package—a non-frozen version of one of Alan’s frozen pasta meals. Everything was fresh—tomatoes, onions, garlic, shrimp. It was, Alan thought, one of the nicest meals he’d ever had.
“I could get used to this,” he had said, then.
He doesn’t eat dinner on his own, instead opting to just snack on chips and salsa (which they had made together and left in the fridge). He stands on the porch and smokes a cigar, idly hoping she’ll come up the driveway. When she doesn’t, and the darkness of night finally sets in, he heads inside and picks up the phone.
First, he calls his agent, to let her know how progress is coming on the novel. He doesn’t tell her that he hasn’t been able to write all day. Then, he calls Jill’s agent and asks if he’s seen her. The agent, a man with a heavy German accent, tells him that there’s been no sight of her at the office. Then he calls the town’s only bar and asks if a short, dark-haired, curvaceous woman is there, and when the bartender tell him no, he asks if she’s been around at all today. Again, the answer is no.
Alan hangs up the phone and stares at it, blankly. He starts a fire in the fireplace and microwaves himself another cup of instant coffee. It is not nearly as good as the fresh-ground stuff he makes from the beans Jill brings home, but he can’t work up the desire to put the extra thirty-seconds of effort into it. This troubles him.
On a whim, he fills an entire page with black question marks. This also troubles him. He is so troubled by how strange he feels that when he goes to bed he cannot go to sleep. He lays on his back and stares at the ceiling.
He wakes up hungry. Had he actually fallen asleep? He can’t remember the passage of time, but at the same time he can’t remember not being awake. He eats one of the oranges for breakfast—he’s out of bread to make toast—and sits in front of his typewriter. The only thing he produces is another page full of question marks.
“I like your tattoo,” he’d said to her, once.
He isn’t sure why he remembers this, out of the blue. He stares up at the ceiling, desperate for some kind of inspiration to write. “Where have you gone?” he asks no one. He calls her agent again, but still there has been no sign of her there. It is the same at the bar.
And so, on a whim, he pulls on his heaviest, warmest jackets and snow-pants and hikes out into the woods, looking for her.
She’d wander, sometimes. He never knew where she went, exactly, but sometimes Jill would just vanish for a few hours, wandering around out in the wilderness. Then she’d come back and paint what she saw—only she wouldn’t paint what her eyes had seen, she’d paint the image as it appeared in her memory.
“Your proportions are all wrong,” he told her once, when she asked him for advice. She had laughed at him.
“It’s not supposed to look real, Alan,” she’d replied. “It’s… it’s how I see it… now. Not how I saw it then.”
“That’d it do it, I guess,” he’d muttered, before proceeding to offer no worthwhile advice, because he had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
He realized, after about half an hour of wandering around in the woods in the dark, that it was hopeless. He was very lucky to find his way home. He was still unlucky enough, however, to discover that Jill was still missing. Two days now, she’d been gone. He’s tempted to call the police and submit a missing person’s report. He’s really, earnestly starting to worry.
Alan sits in front of his typewriter again, and still he writes nothing. The floor is littered with pages filled with nothing but black question-marks. The significance of that particular punctuation mark to his current situation is not lost on him. He falls asleep in his chair, and dreams that Jill is dead and frozen. He pulls her body out of the snow, but her right arm has grown massive, bigger than both Jill and Alan put together. It’s growing still; the black question-tattoo is growing with it, and after a moment Alan realizes that it’s not just ink in Jill’s epic arm but a vast void, into which he is now falling.
He wakes up from the dream when he hits the ground. He has fallen out of his chair. He lays there, legs akimbo, arm twisted behind him, for several minutes, trying to find his bearings.
“I miss her,” he says out loud. “How am I supposed to do anything without her around?” He realizes he is talking to a typewriter. It does not phase his monologue. “It’s like… something here is missing. Like a piece in a puzzle. Like a cog in a clock. Nothing works around here without her. We’re a team. A duo. A couple? Maybe. I don’t know?” He rambles on. “What the hell am I supposed to do? What the fuck am I supposed to do? I can’t… do anything. I can’t even write—I could only write because she was here. I feel like my arms have fallen of.”
“Crazy people talk to inanimate objects,” she says in his ear.
Alan turns, but she is not there. “Crazy people hear voices,” he mutters to himself. He has a glass of wine. He fills yet another page with black question-marks. He stares at his typewriter, no longer having the energy to even talk to it.
He is still sitting there in the morning when the sun comes up and the snow starts to melt. He is still sitting there when the sudden Springtime warmth has melted the snow and left the world outside soggy. His stomach roars at him to eat something. He doesn’t even move to grab an orange out of the fridge.
In a sudden flurry he grabs his coat and throws it on. He storms outside and realizes that he doesn’t need one nearly as heavy as this one, so he goes inside and finds a lighter one. Then, again, he storms outside and into the woods, calling out, “Jill!” every few minutes, trying desperately to find her. He does this for hours, but comes up with nothing.
At which point he realizes that he’s now lost in the woods. He curses out loud and sits down on a soggy tree-stump, eyes closed, defeated.
After a while, Alan opens his eyes again and looks around. Something about this spot…
“The proportions are all wrong,” he had said. And yet, now, he could tell exactly what it was she had been painting, because he was looking at it. Probably, she had sat on this very stump and memorized the scene so she could go home and paint it.
Things start clicking in Alan’s head. He fumbles around in his jacket pockets until he finds a pen and—he thanks his lucky stars—a piece of scrap paper. Quickly he scribbles down the idea—picking up where he had left off on the last page of his novel. He rushes home to type it and continue.
He opens the door to the smell of kielbasa cooking, the sound of oil in a pan, and someone humming. His hands tremble as he closes the door behind him.
“Jesus, you look like hell,” Jill says to him, leaning out of the kitchen.
Without thinking, Alan rubs his chin, finding it covered in two days worth of stubble. “I’ve been… busy.”
She exits the kitchen fully and walks over to him, frowning. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yes?” is all he can stammer out.
“Okay,” Jill replies slowly. “Sorry I vanished like that—my sister called and a family emergency had come up. She was already on her way to pick me up in her car. I guess I should have called or something, but I didn’t even think about it at the time.”
“Is everything okay?” the bedraggled man asks.
“Yeah, false alarm.”
Alan just stares at her, clenching his fist around the piece of scrap paper on which he had broken his writer’s block. “Thank you,” he says, after a moment.
“For what?” Jill asks.
Alan just grins at her and slumps into his chair, fingers already flying across the keys of his typewriter. “Everything.”
