PART ONE

Ed trudged a Sisyphean path up the dusky stairs to his dark third floor apartment. His shoulders felt like a stand of wind-tortured mountain pines; he hunched his back but nothing loosened. He didn’t feel like he even had the energy to relax. That was bad enough, but the feeling was all too familiar. What he really wanted was a back-rub, administered by a fairer representative of the fairer sex. The thought allowed him to draw a deep breath, but the tension returned immediately.

He reached the top landing and took another enormous breath, held it, tried one more time to blank the past ten hours of work from his mind. His neighbor, Catania, arrived at her door as he forced himself to start moving again. Ed’s back cried out in longing, and his pulse quickened, but this was an argument so old to him that he instantly and unconsciously talked himself out of any direct action. Instead, he merely grimaced, nodded, and said, “Hi.”

The petite, dark-haired woman looked up as she inserted her key into the lock and matter-of-factly returned the greeting. In the flash that the door was open, Ed saw a dozen lushly carpeted stairs leading up to a room seemingly draped in red and gold, with unseen curtains opened to admit the last rays of the sun. For a moment after the door closed, Ed stood there replaying the image in his mind.

A man could really relax in a place like that, he thought, and his shoulders loosened fractionally. And if a woman like that lived there, too? Heaven. Stairway to heaven. He sighed. It may as well be a million miles.

He shook his head and turned to his own door, and the weight of worlds settle onto his mind as he opened it wide.

He groaned and surveyed the damage before entering. “God damn it.”

The blinds were still drawn, and in the gloom the brown couch appeared black, except where the lighter smudges of discarded clothing draped over the back. The detritus of a three-day bender lay strewn about every available surface, excepting only those few spaces Ed had cleared for himself for breakfasts. Somewhere in there was a cat, too, though Ed hadn’t seen her in three days. God, I hope he didn’t do something to her.

The image of his neighbor’s apartment returned to Ed’s mind, and he tried to use it lever aside the mess in front of him. He failed, and a switch flipped in his head.

“He’s had two days to clean up. Fuck him.” Righteous energy burned through him.

He stacked the pizza boxes and used packing tape to bale them up.

“How does one guy eat ten pizzas? Even in three days. He’s going to kill himself.” He looked around at the drifts of empty bottles. “Hell with him.”

Ed opened Toby’s bedroom door and set the bale of boxes under the window on the far side of the room. Between the mounds of dirty laundry and half-dismantled electronics, Ed could see no sign of his roommate.

“I just bet that somewhere in this pit resides the mother of all hangovers. Hey! Toby! Wake up!” There was no response.

He went back out into the living room and started filling black garbage bags with empties. He found earplugs after the first bag; the clinking was exacerbating an already strong headache. Once he had the six bags filled and tied, he took them into Toby’s room as well. A seventh bag filled with random detritus: empty paper coffee cups, scraps of paper written with poetry of dubious quality, paper footballs, an instruction manual for a game they didn’t own. That, too, went into his roommate’s room. The eighth bag eventually filled with all the rags and empty chemical bottles Ed needed to finish the job. The pudding was the most difficult to deal with: he had to stand on a chair set atop the battered coffee table in order to scrape it off the ceiling. He didn’t even bother opening the blinds as the sun had long set by the time he was finished.

“There has got to be more to life than this,” he said. The energy drained from him as quickly as it had come, and he flopped down on the futon that served as their couch. “Damn.”

Toby chose this time to finally enter the apartment; he’d been standing for a half hour in the open door watching Ed. “Brothahhh.”

“Dude,” Ed said. “Two fucking days, man. Were you ever going to clean up?” He turned and looked over the back of the couch.

Toby had the decency to blush and look away. “Truly, I intended to do so, once I came down a little.”

“You’re still high?”

Toby’s almond-shaped eyes widened. “It’s really good stuff.”

Ed turned away. “Shit. You’re going to oh-dee one of these nights. You’ve got to stop that shit.”

“Not with this. I swear, Brother; it’s really good stuff.” He flopped down on the couch next to Ed. “I’m still seeing spots. And dead men. But mostly spots.”

“Dead men? Really?”

“I spent most of the day yesterday talking to Noam Chomsky.”

“Toby. Chomsky’s not dead.”

“Oh, hell. Who was that guy then?” Toby blinked, stood, placed his left hand over his heart and raised his right hand in what he took to be a fine oratorical pose. “What resides in my brain tonight? What reclines behind mine eyes? Strobing prismatic, the lights of the world-as-stage are broken by the ice of my heart. My tongue, I trow, drips frost like the chin of a starveling drips slaver before a feast. Oh, I am wounded, unto my death I say, and I dare not beg healing. For healed of inspiration, yes, the touch of divinity, what use is life? Imagination is life. And life, oh me, without that fire is not death, but….” Toby sighed and flopped back onto the couch.

Ed said, “You’ve been reading Shakespeare again.”

“Absolutely.”

Ed started channel surfing, two seconds per channel. “Every time you read Shakespeare, you get worked up.” Flick. “And then you start writing bad poetry.” Flick. “And then you get drunk and puke and I have to clean it up.” He paused on Cartoon Network and looked over at Toby. “Knock that shit off, man.”

“Philistine,” Toby said. “And why do you so fear to experience life?”

“Whatever,” Ed said. “It’s not life I’m afraid of. It’s the quality of that life. I fucking hate cleaning up after everyone all the time.” Again his mind flashed with an image of the neighboring apartment. “Seriously, after a day like today, I just want to come home to a place I don’t have to spend an hour and a fucking half cleaning just so I can finally relax. You have to help me out here, damn it!”

“Brother, your hurt is deep. You must endeavor to cast off the bonds of past pain, to live now, to be able to live tomorrow. The source of your pain may, indeed, be external. And for that I most humbly offer contrition. But of greater import is the source of your solace, which for you, as for all, is and ever shall be an internal and eternal wellspring. Leave the world to the world, my Brother, and keep peace for yourself.”

Ed had stopped paying attention. “Shakespeare to Lao Tzu. Those bastards didn’t have the answers four hundred years ago or four thousand. Ain’t going to have anything for me today.” Flick, flick, flick, went the channels.

“I know your fear.” Toby picked a magazine off the table and leafed hectically through it. “You lack resolve, my friend. Enlightenment comes not as a lightning bolt, but as the slow softening of a fine liquor. Nothing nor no one of the external world shall either aid or hinder the process. The condition of the cask matters not; only the ingredients – their proportion and quality – may affect the resultant product.”

Ed shrugged; he couldn’t argue properly with Toby when the man was high. Instead, he grabbed a pillow and swung it as hard into Toby’s face as he could. “Piss off, all right? Just fucking clean up after yourself.”

“Asshole,” Toby said, and grinned. “But my Brother, know that I do not hold your violence against you. For I know that you only hurt the more to see what you fear you cannot have. And if some woman has spurned you, taken your honeyed words and sucked the sweetness from them and spat them back at your feet, pallid and shriveled, you must not fault the world, nor the whole of that sex, nor even that one poor girl. We are each of us damaged in our own special way, she no more than thee. Forgive her, and forgive yourself, and you can have it all. I beg of you. Seek within.”

“Look, I know myself well enough to know I just need a quiet space to get my head in order. I definitely don’t need some chick to bust my balls for something her daddy did to her mommy when she was eight, right? Forget about it. No more distractions, no more hard work here. Peace begets peace, right?”

Toby grinned broadly. “And you seem to have made an admirable space for yourself in a short time, my Brother. If peace you desire, then peace you shall find. I further submit to you that if the external yet offers too much distraction, then perhaps the external may after all provide a path to concentration.”

Ed looked up from the TV. “What?”

Toby’s grin widened. “When the student is ready, the master will appear. When the master is ready, the student will appear. When the mind is ready, the beer will appear.” He produced two unlabelled brown bottles from within some recess in their dilapidated couch. “Through advanced states of mental alteration shall ye know enlightenment, Brother. And I shall be here to guide thee.”

Ed looked over at his roommate, his face a total blank. His eyes slid away to the TV, spewing advertisements for a late night Christian retreat. He gave up. “Yeah, fine. Why not?” He took a bottle from Toby, noting that it was warm and already opened. “Cheers,” he said, and drank the whole contents in one long swallow.

Six bottles and many hours later, Ed stood from the couch, an empty beer bottle dropping from his hand. “Right. That’s it, then.” He walked to the door of the apartment, still standing slightly ajar, and across the hall, to knock on the door that had so tantalized him earlier. His breath caught slightly when Catania opened the door; she was to him the epitome of loveliness: tiny, petite, dark of skin and hair, ethnically Turkish but culturally American. She leaned against the doorjamb with one hand on an outthrust hip and pursed her lips. The only thing she didn’t do was bat her eyelashes.

“Yes? James, isn’t it?”

He stared for a second at the cat ears on her hoodie and shivered with something that felt like fear. “Uh, no, it’s Ed, actually. But James is cool, too.” He felt his face getting warm. What did I just say?

She looked at him for a second and straightened off the jamb. “Right. So what can I do for you, Ed?”

He caught himself staring again at her eyes, so large and dark. He recognized it as a cliché, but he still felt he could drown in them. He had to stop. He had something to say. What was it? He shook himself. “Yeah. I, uh, wanted to pick your brain about something.” The memory of her apartment beckoned, and the smell of coffee was like a hook tugging at his nose, but his eyes couldn’t leave her face. “Over coffee, maybe? You and me, I mean, tomorrow.”

She remained silent, holding his gaze, and he was about to flee when she said, “I trust you’ll be wearing pants by then?”

“What?” His hand dropped to his thigh, his bare, naked thigh. His eyes widened. “Oh my god, I’m going to die.” He turned and sprinted the two whole steps back into his apartment, slamming the door behind him.

Catania leaned against the doorjamb. “’Kiss me – I’m Irish!’, huh?” She cocked head and narrowed her eyes, not really seeing the door across the hall. She pursed her lips and nodded. “We’ll see.”

Ed leaned against the door. “Oh god. What have I done?”

“You’ve blown it with your only chance at true love, is what you’ve done,” Toby said from the breakfast bar. Cornflakes crunched under his spoon. “I tried to stop you, I really did. But you were pretty…intense.”

Ed’s heart was hammering like he’d never felt before. He knew it wasn’t a cardiac episode because there was no shooting pain down his left arm. But something was wrong. It actually hurt, it was beating so hard, so slowly. “What was in the beer?”

“What beer? I see no beer.” Toby moved the cornflakes box in front of the bottle on the bar.

There’s no milk in the house, Ed remembered. “That’s because I drank it, asshole, and then I accosted our neighbor in my shorts. What was in that beer, Toby?”

“You are wearing a shirt, you know.”

“Toby, for real, man. What if I have a pee test at work tomorrow? What was in the goddamned beer?”

“Beans,” he said, shrugging.

“Beans?” Ed pushed himself off the door and flopped down on the couch. “And what the hell happened to my pants?”

“Yes. Magic beans. I’m afraid I can’t assist you in your inquiries after your pants. I traded my bike for them. The beans, I mean. Not the pants. The gentleman told me simply to plant them anywhere, but you know the building lacks the structural integrity for that kind of load on the roof.” Toby shrugged. “So I used them to do the brew. Efficacious, were they? Found your enlightenment, did you?” Ed heard the clink of dishes going into the sink. Toby said, “Hey,” and pointed into the sink, waggling his eyebrows.

“Thanks for that.” Ed turned back to the blank TV screen. “What do you mean magic? Like magic mushrooms magic? Fuck me; I can’t afford to get busted.”

“Especially if you’ve started courting a representative of the law.”

“That’s cold, asshair. Besides, I’m not courting her. I just want to….” Ed’s mind blanked. He didn’t – couldn’t! — want a date, right? “I just want to figure out how to make a space for myself like the one she’s got. A refuge from chaos. And now I’ve gone and done a poster-boy-for-chaos! She’ll never talk to me. Shit.” He slapped his bare thigh.

Toby shook his head, smiling. “Brother. Think a moment. What did the fair maiden say?” He leaned over the back of the couch.

Ed’s mind was a total blank; he could only remember the horror.

“Ed. She didn’t say no.” Toby grinned.

“Oh my god. Oh my god, you’re right. She told me to wear pants.”

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Keep an eye out for Part Two, coming soon.