The devil is in the detail. Or is the detail in the devil?
The detail is in the devil.
The detail is in the.
The detail is in.
The detail is.
The detail.
Joe pointed to the life-sustaining equipment and said, “All of this — this is a bridge to nowhere.”
Her left eye twitched, and her pouty mouth fell even further. She was probably one of those people who never looked happy. She looked like a wounded deer, or was it the fawn color of her eyes that made him think that?
The woman was the spitting image of the skeletal man lying there but with meat on her bones. Plenty of meat. Too much meat if Joe was honest with himself, and Joe was always honest. Painfully so, hence the bridge thing. That’s why Helene had left him for the saxophone player in a wedding band. Third wife gone. He preferred a girl to be further away from the size of the zaftig woman sitting on the green plastic chair and closer to the size of the (almost) corpse.
She didn’t speak, so he decided to say something else, after all, he had other things to attend to. “We tried to operate, but a tumor on your father’s liver had already burst. At his age, with his use of alcohol, hepatitis, and the cancer, he doesn’t qualify to receive an organ from a donor. We can’t stop the bleeding.”
Her muted stillness bothered him. The ventilator sounded like windshield wipers on a wet June day. The waaaooo was accompanied by the beeps of monitors that sporadically sang along. A symphony of hopeful resurrection. Her stillness reminded him of his second wife.
She still hadn’t said anything.
“You understand?” he said.
She did. She turned and looked at her dad. She knew that this day was coming, but this is not how she had envisioned it. The gift never worked the way that she wanted it to. She couldn’t stop things like this from happening. No one could she supposed. Maybe that wasn’t true, and she was just unlucky. How would it work after?
Her father had never looked more beautiful. How ridiculous. He was a thirty-year-old man again with a halo of soft black curls accentuated by one touch of gray. The slight white thread was the only indicator that the man was sixty-six. Black don’t crack. That’s how the saying goes, and now she really believed it. Except for Sammy Davis Jr. but he started out looking like a lizard so… Tempest watched the perfect mechanical rhythm of her father’s breathing. The doctor cleared his throat. She got the message.
“I do. What do you think?” Her gaze fixed intently on him now.
He looked annoyed. “I already told your mother and your brother that we suggest comfort care.”
“What is that?”
“I went over the details with your family. They didn’t talk to you about any of this?” Crickets. Joe let out an inaudible sigh before he rattled off the meaning of comfort care yet again.
Tempest had been on a business trip, on the opposite side of the country, when she received the news. Even if she had been at home, she lived in Manhattan, which was still a few hours away from here by car or bus. When she got the call, she immediately ordered an Uber and weaved her way out of the convention center past all the hectic purple and the gamers. From the back of the Uber black a new flight was booked out of SAN to JFK from JFK she went to Port Authority, where she got on the Bieber Bus headed to nowhere Pennsylvania. Her family’s interpretation of things was not always to be trusted.
“ — we will make your father as comfortable as possible.”
Tempest realized that he was waiting for her to say something, “So you’ll basically drown him in morphine?”
Now Joe was the quiet one. He peered down at the linoleum, “That would not be an accurate interpretation of the process.” Though in fact, it was. There was a tuna sandwich with his name on it, so he decided to wrap this conversation up as quickly as possible, “The nurse will send back your family so you can discuss this further and you all can make a decision.”
“Nah. We will take the comfort care,” her mouth quivered.
“Your mother is the one who actually has to…”
“They aren’t married. I’m the oldest. Isn’t that how this works when there isn’t a will or anything?”
“Yes.”
“Comfort care makes it sound a lot nicer than what it is. Did you come up with that?”
Now his right eye twitched. “No, it is a standard term used by the medical community.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t sound like you.”
Joe suddenly felt as if this woman knew every secret that he’d ever had. Joe did regret the cat-in-the-bag river thing; but he was a curious child, and he was only seven. There was also Lana, but he stopped himself from going down that path. With the question of comfort care settled, he retreated.
Tempest sat once again on the green plastic chair and gently stroked her father’s warm hand. Magical Mystery Tour streamed softly from her iPhone and replaced the sounds of the newly removed useless machinery. She sang lines here and there that were their favorites. A ding interrupted, “Hello, Goodbye.”
Picked up food for mom. Looking for a parking spot. Be up in a few.
Her brother entered ten minutes later and he flopped himself on the oversized chair closest to the door. That was the chair that you could attempt to sleep in. She took this as her cue to use the bathroom. She asked him if he wanted any coffee to which he shook his head, a lazy no. As she passed the nurses station and turned the corner to exit the intensive care unit she knew, her dad had followed her; he clung to the crown of her head, an invisible hat.
He slammed down the first bourbon. “Make the next one a double, Chris.” Saying the bartender’s name made Joe feel important.
“That bad, Doc?”
“You have no idea.”
He surveyed his territory and saw that it was a slow night. The only other patron sitting at the bar was taking tiny sips of his zinfandel. The dashing figure gave Joe a certain look, and Joe gave him a look that let him know that he didn’t swing that way. The only other customers were what Joe would describe as three overly-ripe empty nesters. They cackled at one of the tables while they shared a bottle of Prosecco.
Joe preferred to drink at Wine Me Down, because it normally attracted the right kind of people, and it was in the good section of their small city. He also thought that it seemed more acceptable for a man in his line of work to imbibe at an upscale wine bar as opposed to some tacky sports bar or even a pub. Though he might be a bit buzzed to slightly sloppy at the end of the night, it still was more respectable. Joe was on the prowl for Mrs. Galen 4.0, and everyone knows that cultured ladies enjoy a good glass of wine. He also didn’t like being in that spacious house all alone. The four-bedroom, Augusta Bordeaux plan, with an inground pool. Having a pool in the Northeast made little sense for the three months anyone could get any use out of it. The Augusta Bordeaux was built at the behest of stoic wife number two. Well, Lauren had really wanted a fixer-upper, which she described to Joe as charming. Joe informed Lauren that he was not willing to pay half a million dollars for something that was used.
He gladly turned his attention to a familiar crooning. “Kurt Elling? I love his rendition of this song.”
Chris laughed, “Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood? You sure know your jazz.”
The other patron at the bar heard this exchange and ran his fingers through his full mane of silver fox hair and gave Joe one more hopeful glance before being shot down a second time.
Now.
Joe felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned, ready to greet one of his drinking chums, but no one was there. That is when he noticed the newly dead guy’s daughter sitting on one of the plush red sofas holding a glass of an even deeper red wine. Oh fudge. Where had she materialized from? Shouldn’t she be grieving — ”
We are.
“ — somewhere else?”
We are.
She gave him a weak half-smile, half pout. She definitely had what Helene would have described as a resting bitch face. He almost snickered, but instead, there was an inextricable pull.
“Chris, can you give me a glass of that terrific red blend that you have and a quadrupole of mine?”
“A quadrupole?”
He whispered under his breath, “She was a big part of my bad day at work. Some of them can’t take a hint.”
Chris, the bartender, had no idea what that meant, so he did what he did and poured the drinks.
Joe balanced the stem of her wine glass and his snifter; there he was now in front of her.
This is how it works; she thinks.
“I’m not sure what to say.” He hands her the glass, she accepts it without apprehension, so he decides that this is an invitation. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he lies. The fresh hum of sorrow that accompanies the death of a loved one thrums through her body. He sits next to her. She stops herself from shuddering at the nearness of his darkness. Now that he sees her from this vantage point, he decides that she has rather a nice face for a woman in her thirties.
She gathers the rope. “Thank you for the refill. It’s been a rough day for us. But I don’t want to think about any of that.” She holds up the glass as an indicator, “I’m here to forget,” she lies. This statement and the Maker’s Mark Private Select he’s been gulping make him feel even more at ease.
“When I first saw you sitting here, I thought that you must have been an apparition. I don’t often see people from the hospital when I’m out. Especially people whom I’ve just been with earlier in the day.”
“I’m staying at a hotel nearby, and I wanted a drink. The restaurant and bar there were closed. So here I am.”
Luckily, her father had overheard the nurses behind the big oval desk in the I.C.U., making fun of Joe and his favorite wine bar. They all wondered how he could get away with smelling of spirits, be such a complete asshole, and stay employed. His nickname was Dr. Grumpy Shakes.
“I’m surprised that you aren’t staying with your family.”
“They don’t have enough space for me, and I like being on my own. I travel a lot for work. I’m used to hotels.”
“What do you do?”
“I work for a streaming app. I do marketing and on-site initiatives. I was just at TwitchCon in San Diego before I came here.”
Joe hears sparse remnants of what must have been a childhood lisp in her speech pattern. “Twitch what?”
“TwitchCon it’s a gaming conference. We make special non-mutable playlists so that gamers can stream music and post videos on their YouTube without the music being muted. It’s a whole thing.” His eyes glaze over, she refocuses. “Anyway, what about you? How did you become a doctor?”
“I’m actually a trauma surgeon.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“Yes.”
“How’d you get into surgery?”
“I knew that I wanted to be a surgeon from a very early age. I was always fascinated by anatomy. In my line of work, you must be willing to make sacrifices. I’ve always been a natural leader, and as a surgeon, you have to…”
He continued to ramble through the next round of drinks. She occupied her time by tuning into other things. It was strange how he acted as if he was a king, and they were in some extraordinary setting instead of a Podunk bar with shabby sheik décor, mostly shabby. The red velvet of the couch was wearing thin; the crème-colored cloth beneath peeked through in spots. The batting was lumpy and made sitting, which is the purpose of a sofa, incredibly uncomfortable. Much like this one-sided conversation.
By round three: “Wife two left after she accused me of… it’s too absurd to get into.”
Tuning back in. She’d have to lead him here. “Of what? If I were with a man like you, I’d do anything to keep it all going.”
Was she suddenly more svelte? “She accused me of being in love with her teenage daughter, he snorted obnoxiously. “Very Nabokov of her, wouldn’t you say? She disappeared the next day while I was at work. Never spoke to me again. Sent movers to pack up their things from the house that I built for her. For her. Movers.”
“Well, were you?”
“Was I what?” his speech was only slightly sloppy; she’s almost impressed.
“In love with your step-daughter.”
“You are something else. You really are.” She kills him with quiet. “You have some nerve to ask me something like that. What are you a Lolita lover too? You read too many weird books and watch too many weird movies. What are you depraved? You remind me of her; wife two; soundless judgment. But you are fat.”
Tempest hands Joe the rope. “Didn’t Lauren find you in her daughter’s bed?”
Joe leaps up, “How in the hell? I didn’t tell you her name, did I? How in the?”
Chris, the bartender, is baffled by Joe’s behavior. But he’s learned to stay out of Joe’s way. There are no other patrons left. The clock reads 11:43 Chris says, “Last call,” for Joe’s benefit but to his detriment.
“One more, Chris.”
“Maybe you should call it a night. I know you’ve had a long day, Doc.”
“I said one more.” Joe sits back down and tries to pull himself together. He isn’t normally one to shout and make a scene.
She ties the noose. “She found you with Lana. You were both naked. How could she not know?”
“She didn’t know anything,” he hisses, his snake eyes become two small slits that remind Tempest of her dad. She knows what Joe has done. She always knows. She can see the mark on them. And they can see the hole in her. The crack in her foundation.
“She always suspected. That’s why she was always watching you.”
“It’s time to go. I’ve got to go home. I don’t know who the hell you think that you are. You aren’t anyone special. I can tell you that much.”
Even after all of this, Joe would never have believed in her gifts. This man of science.
“I’ll sue you. I’ll sue you for making slanderous allegations against me.”
She places the noose around his neck, “Calm down, Joe. Joe, I’m sorry.” She soothes him with a lullaby voice that only works on small children and inebriated adults. “I don’t want to upset you.”
“You shouldn’t have said those things.”
“What things?” Her hand brushes lightly against the outside of his left leg.
“You know — what you said. Accused me of.”
“I didn’t say anything, Joe. Maybe you were imagining things again.”
“Hm. Maybe I was.”
She becomes someone altogether new now. Young, nubile, still soft but supple. “You want to get out of here?” she asks.
“With you?” Her eyes give him the answer, an invitation. He turns his attention to Chris. “Put it on my tab, Chris. All of it.”
“Um, okay. Not a problem.”
Heading Chris off at the pass, he says, “Don’t fret. I called a car.”
“Good. See you tomorrow, Doc.”
Joe waves and then stumbles as he makes his exit across the threshold and into the pale, yellow light of the parking lot.
“That’s my car. I’m fine to drive.” She nods before settling herself inside of it.
“You want some air?” She nods again, and he rolls down the windows as Watercolors, the SiriusXM smooth jazz channel, streams a Chris Botti ballad. When they stop at a sign or a red light, the air is uncomfortably still. But when the car is gliding, the breeze gives the illusion of relief.
As he drives across the Penn Street Bridge, he looks over at her. He isn’t sure that he’s ever seen anything more delectable, more delicious. He thinks about how she will taste. She smiles and radiates; she is electric blue before the crash. Joe watches in horror as his blue girl flies out of the car seat and through the windshield. Just like that, she is gone, and then there is the blackness swallowing him, darkness enveloping.
When Joe wakes up, his head is resting firmly on the steering wheel. Why didn’t the airbags deploy? Then he remembers, and he scrambles out of the car on wobbly legs to find her. What he finds instead is a dead deer. Quiet and splayed, an offering. He looks at the front of the car; it’s bent like an accordion, but he’s surprised to see that the windshield is still intact. He has to get help. Get home. Get. He begins his journey.
Trudging along for what feels like an eternity, Joe can’t seem to make it to the end of the bridge.
JOE THE LION is a fictional short story by author Tempest X. JOE THE LION is being made into a short film and will be on the festival circuit in 2023. It will star Ernie O’Donnell (Clerks, Jay and Silent Bob, Jersey Girl) as Joe. JOE THE LION will be directed by James Abrams of Caramel Hippo Studios.
For the latest on Tempest X // tempest-x.com //
