ISSUE FIVE: July, 2020

CHEKHOV’S GUN

by JOHN TALBIRD

So I’m going to work and I hit a pothole in the road. I’ve completely fucked the tire, maybe even the rim, and, shitty coincidence of shitty coincidences, in my rush to leave the house, I’ve forgotten my phone. In addition to that, I’m on some out-of-the-way Brooklyn side street that I took to avoid traffic snarls on Empire and Eastern Parkway and the only person I know in walking distance is a girl I used to sleep with. I guess we were more serious than that. But Tiffany got needy—way needy—and I had to stop answering the phone and stop writing her back and unfriend her on Facebook and change my number and then my email address. But I have to get to work. I’m an English adjunct at a Queens community college (one of three jobs I have) and if we’re absent and not sick they dock us pay. 

I take a turn on the corner by the bodega where some guys are throwing dice and trudge up the street in 80-plus-degree heat, pulling my tie loose. Random young men stand on the block staring out at the street as if waiting for something. A woman with a thick afro and insensibly high heels says, “Who you looking for?” But I ignore her, because I’ve found my ex’s old building. As was always the case when we were sleeping together, the security lock is broken on the front door and I go right in and walk up the four flights to her door. The stairway handrail has strands of spider web drifting from it in places and the hallways smell vaguely of piss and cheap floor cleaner. I think I broke up with her for this climb more than anything. The last time I saw her in the flesh, she had drunkenly fallen down a half-flight of these very stairs. 

Like out on the sidewalk, there are people just hanging around inside the building. A guy in the lobby glances alternately at a flip phone in one hand and then the smart phone in the other. On the third floor, another resident leans against a casement, blowing smoke out the window though it’s a smoke-free building. The super runs a semi-damp mop along the steps with no warning signs or word or glance at me as I go past though he surely remembers me from all the times I passed him out front or in the lobby and said hi to him back in the day. 

Tiffany and I had been friends for a long time before we started sleeping together. I met her in the spring of ’99 at Tom Vertex’s old art space. It was the final show of this improv band, Ward Cleaver, that I played piano and percussion in. Later on that night, after drinks and conversation, she sat down at the piano and played some salsa songs, singing in perfect Spanish though she had spoken without an accent and was pale with long auburn hair. We hit it off, bought burritos, stayed up talking about music and books until the sun came up, then went to a greasy spoon for eggs and bagels and hot coffee. My bandmate, Wayne, who had checked out long before the burritos, said when he found out that I was still hanging out with her three weeks later, “That’s never done.”

I shrugged, waiting for him to continue.

“Dudes aren’t friends with chicks they don’t want to sleep with.”

“That sounds like a cliché. A tired one.”

“Redundant. Clichés are tired.”

Anyway, she turned me onto non-avant-garde, non-punk tunes. Like the blues, which I had thought heretofore a dead art form. She liked RL Burnside and T-Model Ford and stuff like that and I had to admit that it was the type of music you wanted to listen to all night with friends while drinking whiskey. (Burnside had a great album called A Ass Pocket of Whiskey.) We slept with other people, but whenever she was down and thinking of slashing her wrists, I’d come over and sit with her and talk her up from whatever dark hole she had dug herself into. I probably did this three or four times and on the last time I had to bandage her up. I lay with her in bed and cuddled her and told her that people would miss her if she finished things. We had slept together many times before—just sleeping with our clothes on or in our underwear after a night of drinking—and nothing had ever happened. On this night, we did 69 and some anal play, but didn’t fuck. I think we thought that if we didn’t go all the way then we’d still just be friends in the morning and things could go on the way they always had. 

I don’t remember exactly when this was, but know that the next day when I woke up the newspapers were talking about the new pope—the Latin American one—who had just been appointed. She liked that, she’d been raised Catholic back in Colombia, but wasn’t anything anymore. I’d been raised Episcopal and didn’t give a shit who the pope was. I wasn’t anything either, but apparently things are different for Catholics. Protestants don’t talk about “lapsing” and their parents either shrug or condemn their kids to eternal damnation when they stop going to church. My folks were somewhere in the middle, but they lived down south and I seldom saw them anyway. 

Tiffany and I didn’t have to work, so we drove out to a shooting range in Bay Ridge. She was an amazing shot, had been taught by her father, kept a gun in her apartment despite her frequent depressions. She put nearly every shot in the center of that silhouette guy’s chest. I couldn’t hit the side of a barn and quickly gave up, content to watch Tiffany shoot in a kind of dazed wonder. The bandages were thick and white on her wrists. She’d forgotten a hair tie and had to keep batting strands out of her face. We’d known each other for over a decade and I was so glad I had waited for her and that she had waited for me. We were in our thirties and I thought that maybe we should have kids. Or at least live together. We could have been happy. 

I’m going down this very familiar dark hallway where the ceiling light is burnt out more often than not and my heart is racing. Maybe no one’s home. Maybe someone else lives here now. Maybe seeing me again will start all the drama up again. Or maybe she finally succeeded in offing herself. My knock at her door—doorbell broken—is imminent and I have an urge to run back down the four flights to the street and ask one of the street people if I can use a cell to call a tow truck. 

Tiffany answers after one knock as if she had been waiting on the other side looking out the peephole and maybe she was because she doesn’t look surprised to see me. She smiles, but not with much warmth. “The runaway returns,” she says, but without bitterness. “What brings you back?”

“Hi. Will you let me use your phone? I’ve got a flat tire and the spare is flat too. I think I’ve messed up the car which I can’t afford, but what can you do?” I’m babbling and am having trouble keeping her gaze since it’s clear that she now shares her apartment with someone else. There are men’s boots lined up next to the door. I follow her as she leads me inside and I can see a strange bicycle hanging from hooks in the ceiling. A mutt comes over and sniffs my hand, wagging his tail. I can hear the shower in the back and then the familiar groan of pipes as the water cuts off. I try to choose my words more carefully as if treading in a potentially dangerous place. “I just need to make a quick call and I’ll be out of your hair.” In the kitchen, she removes a whistling kettle I’ve never seen from the burner. I try to remember if I’ve ever seen her make tea before. “I didn’t know who else to contact. You’re the only one I know who lives in this isolated neighborhood.”

Her expression shifts a bit, like she might be growing irritated, but not quite there yet. Handing me her cell, she says, “It’s Crown Heights, not Siberia.” I note that the scars on her wrists are fine, white lines, barely there in the dim light of the overhead. 

I search for local tow services and a chubby guy, pale skin and red nose, comes into the kitchen with a towel around his waist. He’s got a remote look in his eyes and slightly resembles a former Democratic president. “I’m John,” I say, “John Talbird.” I put my hand out and he shakes it, no change of expression and then he’s gone and so is Tiffany, running a vacuum cleaner over the carpet in the living room. The dog sits there, watching me, waiting for me to finish, waiting to escort me out. I call a service station, tell the guy who answers where my car is. I stand in the doorway, waiting for Tiffany to notice me, but she doesn’t, so I leave the phone on the kitchen table and walk back down the stairs, out the front door and back to my car, passing all those people I passed on the way to her door, all still standing on the pavement looking out at the road or maybe they’re different people than the ones I saw before, who knows. There is one guy I know I haven’t seen though. He is missing his left eye, wearing a bowler hat and sitting on the hood of my car, what seems to be a sawed-off shotgun resting in his lap. This guy is new, new like the guy who resembles President Clinton up in Tiffany’s apartment, the guy who had apparently never heard of me before. 

JOHN TALBIRD is the author of the chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar). His novel The World Out There will be released in the summer of 2020 by Madville Publishing, and his fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Grain, Juked, Potomac Review, The Literary Review, and Riddle Fence among many others. He is a frequent contributor to Film International, on the editorial board of Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Associate Editor, Fiction, for the noir online journal Retreats from Oblivion. A professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives with his wife in New York City.