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By Darren Kaminsky

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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three.  The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C.  As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.

Click here to start with Chapter One.

Chapter Four

June 7
8:30 a.m.

No word on the house. Two calls unreturned to Dani. I’m not about to call more than twice. It’s funny how much more time I spend thinking about her now that we’re not talking.

In the meantime, I'm staying at Teddy’s -- been sleeping in Livia's room since she's visiting her parents in Ohio and, right now, sitting in the kitchen eating half-stale Wonder Bread.

Note from Livia to Teddy found on the kitchen table:

If the little girl who likes plants comes around, give her the little marigold and pepper > plant (in the small black container) outside.

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9:10 p.m.

I was lying on Livia's mattress, which sits on the floor in the middle of her room. There was a loud, popping bang on the front door, like someone was trying to chop through it. I walked down the stairs carefully. The white carpeting was covered in a deep gray smudge like snow after a few days on the street, making it slippery...some of the dirt must be oil...and the stairs were shallow.  I actually had to step to them one-by-one while grasping the handrail so as not to go careening face first towards the tile of the small entrance hall.

The door, of course, has no peephole. "Who is it?" I asked.

"Tim looking for Teddy," a cocky pip-squeak kid's voice said.

I opened the flimsy door and there was a small boy with big eyes that darted back and forth around me like I was hiding something, hiding Teddy, from him somewhere. He was holding an old pitted baseball bat and a worn-out baseball glove with a ball folded into it.

"Teddy said he'd play some innings."

"He's not here," I said. "Do you want me to play with you?"

"Nah. Teddy's good. I don't know about you," he answered and as he walked off, turned again, "Tell him I'll be back to play with him so not to worry.”

The knocks came about every half-hour after that. One kid wanted Teddy to watch movies with him. A little girl was crying because her mother had hit her. I saw the welt rising on her face and asked her to come in. I thought that maybe I could put some ice on her face and call the police but she ran away when I told her that Teddy wasn't here. A teenager knocked. His dad hadn't come home in 2 days and he wanted Teddy to find him. I offered to call the police, but the kid cursed under his breath and I knew that that was the wrong answer.

"The police? That’s probably who’s got him.”

Later, the baseball kid, Tim, came back with two other kids. They wanted four scraps of wood that were sitting in the living room. Bases apparently. They started up a game out front that went on for more than an hour. Every so often I watched them out the window. What will these kids do if Teddy really does move away in the fall?

The house is in bad shape and there's a big black rat that runs through the kitchen and a pile of full black garbage bags that has never quite made it into the cans out front. The smell from them would be intolerable if I actually went near them, but I don't. And I haven't precisely seen the rat. It scurries too quickly, but I've seen a black blur and a big fleshy tail sticking out from under the oven.

This block is one solid row of dilapidation dead-ending behind a huge fenced-off dirt pit where the Metro will one day run. All the digging sprays dirt everywhere and scares the rats out. Since there's no thru-traffic, people come here to do drug deals and dump dead refrigerators and other old appliances, which sit at intervals along the sides of the street like big white teeth with large brown stains of rust.

The whole scene is post-apocalyptic, post-nuclear war. It's like one of those movies where most of the population is dead and the few that aren't live in decayed warrens on the scraps of the shiny, invulnerable civilization we thought we'd created. When I pass people who live on this block, I don't make eye contact. I'm a tourist at their apocalypse.

I had dinner at Ben's Chili Bowl, entirely decorated in white linoleum and old chrome, on U Street near where all the old jazz clubs were and all the new yuppie theme bars are opening. It was packed and I was the only white person there. A few people looked at me strangely, but most didn't seem to care. Being the only white person gave me the artificial and absurd feeling that I was somehow doing something brave.

There was a really...there was this woman there, obviously multiracial, maybe late teens (maybe a little older? 20?) with big startling bright blue eyes, not translucent blue or watery blue, no, it was more familiar than that, a silver blue and a coffee-with-cream-complexion. The whole effect, the sheer surprise of the colors, her cheekbones, the way she stood -- impatient, on one toe, a foot perpendicular to her body, arms crossed, waiting for everything to start, about to dance -- was like a new language. I was staring at her and she saw me staring and stared back confrontationally, then dismissively turned away so that I was embarrassed for staring. She must get that constantly.

When I looked around again, she was gone. Caught on the rim of the dream-like, I shook my head like I was shaking off sleep. Was she an apparition? A messenger from a world undemanding of artificial bravery, without old appliances that rust into decayed teeth? It left only an aching feeling. I miss Dani. I miss Bella. I need more sleep.

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June 8

I haven't been completely alone at the house. A couple of times Frank has been there looking scragglier and thinner than usual, dressed in old thrift store work shirts, worn corduroys and black Chuck Taylor’s with almost too many holes to stay on his feet.

For the most part, he hasn't actually been awake when I've seen him. I'll come into the house and find him asleep on the sofa or on the floor in the living room or the floor in the dining room. Never the same place twice. Once when he seemed almost awake, I asked him if he was worried about having his face gnawed on by the rat, but there was no answer, just a sort of grunt.

Frank likes to talk about himself and will, with a straight face, say something like, "A teacher of mine in high school wanted to know how I got to be so eclectic." Or things like, "Principles and ethics are the guiding forces of my life." To be fair, he does get up at 5 a.m. every morning to work in a homeless shelter and he does like chess, Dinosaur Jr. and Quentin Tarantino movies (a little too much), but does the mixture make him eclectic or just like everyone else who loves watching blood splatter and bodies get blown open to a soundtrack of raging guitar?

OK, maybe, maybe that’s unfair. I’m on the wrong side of a dividing line with Frank: I'm Jean's friend. Frank and Jean used to be a couple, but Frank wouldn’t ever say they were a couple. He told Jean he didn’t believe in relationships because they “took away from the relationship of the group.”

Jean was never sure what this meant, but went along with it because she really liked Frank, liked what she thought he represented. Eventually, he started fucking a mutual friend of theirs who somehow didn’t know that Frank and Jean were a couple. After that, Jean knew what Frank meant by the “relationship of the group.” Just substitute the word, “group” for the word, “harem”, she’d told me and given a laugh that sounded like dry, dead leaves rustling.

Click here for Chapter Five.

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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn.  He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.

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