Stories: The Chain

The feeling welled up inside of him. She was gone. It had been three days since her disappearance and the red, feathered faces of the dragon puppets still kept him awake at night. Their long, slender bodies and streaming lines of fluttering, silky material wrapped themselves around his torso in his dreams like serpents and he would wake up screaming, pillows on the floor, blankets in a knot and drenched from head to foot. He knew she must be alive, somewhere, somehow, but he had no idea of where to start and maybe that was the worst part of it all: the overbearing helplessness, the infantile feeling of needing help from a higher power, a parental figure, maybe some God-like being. But those high shelves were dusted over by now, the writing on the walls and he couldn’t even conceive of how to begin asking the big guy for help. Thought the heavens might burst out laughing at him, so he didn’t. The last thing he needed right now was a bunch of deities having a go at his expense. His brother, the generally-accepted reject of the family, was an infidelity detective down on the docks of the Hudson. They hadn’t spoken in years but he figured this was the time. He’d go, talk to his kin, patch things up and apologize for the incident a few years back, and they’d go searching for her, find her in a day or two and then he’d be hugging her and he’d feel her warm body pressed up against his, finally. This time he’d try not to forget to appreciate it, he’d hug her tight and she would have to ask for him to loosen his grip and let her go. That morning was full of burrowing mist, the kind that nestles itself into your skin, makes you want to curl up with a blanket and forget the world exists. The fisherman called it “Dragon’s Breath” because of all the boats that got swallowed up in it, normally just the result of a few drunkards hitting each other and going down together but the metaphor seemed a little less like fisherman superstition to him now. His brother’s place was a glorified shack that he had painted bright red and trimmed with primary yellow. The outside, other than the glaring colors, was pretty indescript. Flags from Russia and China hung on the far-Eastern side, rattling and rippling in the Hudson winds coming through the slats in between the wall panels and helmets from different armies hung like license plates, little stickers on each: “Yosemite, Ca”, “I went to Disneyland”, ‘NRA”, “I vote Democrat”. It was a strange doubling of death and ditzy-tourist meets a family-filled Woodie as it criss-crosses the States and he chuckled. His brother always had a thing for flair. He had knocked a few times and with no answer had let himself in. On the far side of the shack, a mattress piled atop four oil drums supported his brother’s skinny frame. Cheap beer cans littered the ground below and his brother’s stubble was on the verge of being a beard, but it was more a forgotten stubble, the kind that sneaks up on you when you’re preoccupied with drinking or crying. Or both. He had his own stubble to think about and just about the same length. “Donnie! Donnie, wake up! It’s like 10 o’clock. C’mon, I need your help.” He knew the best way to wake Donnie was to assault him with words. Donnie turned over, eyes closed, and swiped with a bony claw at the imaginary alarm clock. “Donnie, it’s your brother. Wake up!” Donnie’s eyes cracked open, the crust falling to the floor in a small pile. “Eddie? What…what the hell are you doing here? Wait…Eddie!” Donnie leaped up from his soiled mattress and grabbed him, shaking him mercilessly. The smell of rancid alcohol and stale cigarettes slapped him in the face again and again. “After what you did, you lowly bastard, you have the balls to come here, to my house! Don’t tell me you’re about to ask for help, you prick. I wouldn’t believe it if you did and might die laughing.” He had explained to uproarious laughter that he did need help and told Donnie the story of he and Eline going to the Chinese New Year’s Parade, him going to get some snacks for both of them, and her disappearing. How it had been three days. Donnie had wanted to rehash the incident from years back, get some clarity on just how it was that his brother, during his wedding party, could be found making love with his new wife in the back of his car, the car with the cans and string and “Just Married” sign dangling from the back. He wondered how he wanted him to move past the bunched-up wedding dress, his wife’s legs in the air, finding out his wife was pregnant with his brother’s child. The abortion, the divorce, the everything that came crashing down that Spring evening and the shack that became his home, the occupation through which he’s try to spare others from what he had gone through. After a long pause, he had explained that he didn’t expect him to move past it, that right now there was a woman’s life at stake, bigger fish to fry and a great case that could really make his career. “Eddie, you just don’t get it. I understand your plight. She was the love of my life, the only great thing that I can remember happening to me…ever. And you…you took her, left me with nothing, broke my heart, tore my soul. I’ve never felt so empty and alone as I did that night and so many after.” Donnie paused to gain composure. “Now you know.” He had seen Donnie cry only once before, at the death of their father. Now he was curled up in a ball on the floor next to an oil drum and sobbed with a deep, hard cry that shook his body and littered the wood-plank floor with tears. “I’m so sorry,” he had said as he turned to walk away, leaving his brother in the midst of his re-lived grief. He had almost reached the door of the shack when he heard the sound: a long scraping sound and then a clunk against the oil drums. Then a receding scrape, lighter than the first. He paused, listened again, heard it over and over again, turned around, and started to walk towards it. Behind his brother’s bed, connected to the bottom of one of the oil drums, a thick steel chain trailed longways along the wooden floor and down the side of a square, makeshift-door cut-out in the floor, an inch of empty space on all sides. His stomach sank. Had trouble breathing suddenly and looked back at his brother who was still crying on the floor harder than before. Reached down, grabbed the steel handle to the door and began to lift. Ksssh, ksssh, clunk. The chain continued to beat itself against the oil drum. Lifting and he sees the frothy Hudson below, marks the movements of the waves as they leap into shore one after another. Looks one more time over at his brother who has stopped crying and looks on with indifferent eyes. Follows the chain downwards into the murky waters below, past the Styrofoam cups, broken pieces of wood. The waves come in and then pull back. His heart cracks wide open, his stomach punches him in the face, he loses all sense of direction and his knees give out, the door’s falling back into place and he’s slamming into the wooden floor sideways and long. He had forgotten she was wearing pink that day.