Fiction: Duct Tape and Plastic Sheeting
By David Southard
Out
of the hardware at dusk, fleeing, plastic sheeting rolled tight beneath one arm
and three fat rolls of duct tape biting the bloodless tips of his fingers, the
cashier's stay safe now sir like a small fishbone in his throat he can’t
spit out, and he is moving, a man already-condemned, across the cracked black
tar of the strip-mall lot where a single shopping cart lies on its side a
slaughtered thing, past the yellow buzzing sign of the dollar store, past the
check-cashing place behind its grille of bent iron, past the Ethiopian
restaurant with the molding blood-red awning, into the Toyota, cracked dash and
torn upholstery and cheap plastic rosary and cardboard back window, and now
driving the eleven blocks without radio or music since it was pilfered by
teens, and part of him is happy not to hear the radio because he might change
his mind, after all that’s what brought him here, they are among us friends
they are already among us the spores the agents the sleepers the unmarked
envelopes you will not see it coming you will smell almonds or you will taste
the chemical agent or you will taste nothing at all we should be at Red not Orange
and he had laughed once in the dark, a fox in a snare, and then he could not
sleep through the day when he normally slept, working nights, instead he had
lain with his eyes open watching the ceiling gather the usual spirits and faces
from the past, but now he is here, returning, going two-three-steps-a-time up
the stairs of the building, down the hallway of cat piss and boiled cabbage,
the carpet the color of a yellowed bruise, and he locks the three locks behind
him, stands in the middle of the single room, kitchen and living room and
bedroom, and he stares at the two windows, the two windows that face the alley
and the dumpsters where last August he watched a man beat another man to with a
pipe or a bat but did nothing because he does nothing now, can do nothing now
to jeopardize the frail and pale new yet fake American life he has constructed,
and he goes to the record player and he sets the needle on the vinyl, a
collection of arias, and it begins, rightly, he thinks, with Callas, Vissi
d'arte, vissi d'amore, I lived for art, I lived for love, and he tears the
first strip of tape with his teeth then presses it along the seam of window and
frame, smoothing it with his palm, and the plastic goes up before he flattens
it and tapes it again and tapes it again, triple-layered along the sill where
the draft comes in and where the silverfish come in and where the spores will
come in or the chemical agent will seep in, he’ll taste it first, he knows,
before his ending, and mercifully a memory doesn’t come, instead Callas is
climbing and climbing into the upper register, and he is at the second window
working faster, the tape making its small bright ripping cry each time he pulls
it from the roll, the sound of cloth torn from a corpse, and now they come at
last, the memories, and his hands are shaking like they shook in the
spring of the first year it started and in the long summer of the second year
and in the autumn that came after and in the back of the truck and when he
washed them with water from a jerrycan filled from the Miljacka, and now
here, but only momentarily, because he needs to finish, and now he is taping
the bathroom vent and now the kitchen vent and now the small high frosted
window above the toilet that cannot open moving fast to escape the memories,
tapes twice, three times, and he drags the kitchen table against the door and
lifts the chair onto the table and tapes the seam beneath the door where the
hallway light comes in thin and yellow, and now the apartment is sealed, a
Mylar womb, a wrapped thing, a held lung, and the aria has shifted to In
questa reggia and the soprano’s voice reaches into a cold pitiless place,
and he is panting, the sweat in his eyebrows, the sweat running tepid down his
shoulder blades, and he realizes what he needs to do, what he wants to do, so
he begins to tape himself, calmly, methodically, first the cuffs of the
trousers to his ankles, then the cuffs of his shirt to his wrists, biting the
tape off with his teeth, smoothing it down, and he is laughing, and he tapes
his shirt collar tight to his throat and he is reaching for the roll to do his
face, sealing the eyes, sealing the nose, the mouth, and the room tilts, and
that voice, singing, far away now, on the other side of a wall of water,
singing Nessun dorma, let no one sleep, let no one in this city sleep
tonight, and his knees go, the left, then the right, in quick succession,
and he is on the floor on his side with his cheek against the linoleum and the
slick of old grease, and he wants to peel the tape from his wrists but his
hands are stupid now, his arms do nothing, which is the long pale nothing of
his life, and the last thing he sees through the milk-blurred plastic of the
windows is the single sodium orange bloom of a streetlight coming on, and the
last thing he hears is not the aria but his own name, his first name, his old
name, the one he buried in a field outside Tuzla under a flat gray
stone, being said very quietly, very close to his ear, almost tenderly.
David Southard is the author of the novella K. at Liberation. He lives, works, reads, and writes from South Korea. His short fiction has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Expat Press, and Loser, among other places. He talks about books on the podcast Books of Some Substance. X: @adavidsouthard