Elaine

“When was the last time you had sex?” was the last blurb Warrick heard from his television before it shorted. All that emitted from it was a brain-numbing drone that wouldn’t cease even after he yanked out all the cables from the wall; when it shut off, it seemed to zap inwards, like an envelope closing with a subliminal message inside of it. His eyes are now the static that once came from his television, and with those eyes he keeps vigil, surveying the walls of his apartment as if trying to peel some sort of response from them, then jerks his glance at the door again. Thick chains the size of a motorcycle gang biker’s lycanthropic arms drape down it, each connected to a lock without any sort of keyhole. The chains are made of a dark rusted iron that are seemingly impervious to any method of bashing or crushing. There are seven of them, some overlapping to form abscissas while others form convolutional globes; the two interlacements coalescing suggest a manacled bulwark. Warrick counts the seven of them to pass the time. Sometimes if he stares at them long enough he can count ten or twelve. His lips are aridly chapped, yet he is freezing; the radiator beneath the boarded windows ventilates arctic gusts. “Maybe I won’t have to leave this room and it will just leave itself,” he reassures himself. The tap is still running. It won’t turn off.
Three days ago Warrick woke up in a cold sweat after having a nightmare articulated by numerous hooded men seated around a mahogany table, standing on hand blown glass legs with gold infusions; playing poker under a flickering light that dangled like someone who’d just kicked the chair. The hooded men had sown up facial features, but they seemed to be murmuring to each other in a concert of whispers, playing a never-ending hand in a room where contorted travesties were appearing on the walls and then defacing themselves. After a while of the never ending hand, which eventually reached out from the table, a woman uniformed to resemble a nurse’s garb strode in with a grotesque figure in her arms. She placed the figure in the middle of the table and the men with sown facial features began to ogle at it as if gauging their hunger. This figure was a girl no older than eighteen; her eyes sown shut, like the men, but instead of being sown her mouth was stapled; she writhed and convulsed, racked with agony, revolving around in a circles like a boy tinkering with a remote control car, ripping up splinters from the table. Warrick woke up after the girl abruptly halted, and groped his way to the kitchen shivering to find his apartment door barricaded from the inside out by a net of chains. He figured he was still dreaming and loafed back to his room, rekindling (as he often perceived it as) his slumber almost instantaneously upon snuggling into bed. The succeeding time he awoke the chains were still there and he ignored them, sufficing his morning rituals while being scrutinized by the corporeal manifestation of his own denial.
Now, with a string of lunch bag brown vomit drooling from the left crevice of his mouth into his lap, he lounges on the right side of his couch repeatedly opening and closing his eyes in five second intervals, picturing the chains disappearing. Each time his eyes open and the chains are still there he imagines his wan stomach withering and twisting into a knot. Remaining calm is an absurd prospect, but he has done a satisfactory job of it aside from the minor obstacles that accompany repressed panic, like incorrigible bladders. These…trifles have lost their significance. When the T.V. shorted his whole world blinked permanently; however, the VCR still worked, despite his lack of videotapes.
“I’m twenty-seven now,” he says. If this room was a metaphysical allegory of his life, it would represent the solemn lacuna that blossomed at seventeen. Except the room is not metaphysical, nor is it an allegory. He’s circumstantially unshaven, though with an elegant gauntness, handsome, and though pays little attention to his accouterment, is meekly, absently charming. His self-image borders on body dysmorphic disorder; he finds himself revolting and is often humiliated in public and social situations. Right now this loathing is amplified by the broken mirror in his stark, institutional remnant gray linoleum-tiled bathroom; dementing overhead fluorescent light and shower curtains comprised of a toilet paper dress. The shower itself spews brown water; he remembers something someone once told him that they preferred taking brown watered baths because of the minerals…but he doesn’t remember how minerals were correlated with brown bath water. However, he pays a minimal amount of rent per month; stinginess has its perks. “I’m twenty-seven now.” He throws the coffee-table ceramic vase against the boarded windows; a porcelain flower blooms in pity, pieces of it furrowing into him. Blood trickles on the carpet, and he dawdles to the sink faucet that never stops running to gather supplies….to clean it? He simpers. No matter how many times the hot and cold handles Ferris wheel on fast-forward*it won’t cease. He rips the faucet off and water spouts out as if from the ceiling to put out a fire; blows into his face, sopping the stalks of his straw hair over his nose. The scrambles onto his feet; the kitchen cupboards are vast, vastly empty. Warrick, sane, hysterically rampages throughout every room in his house; desperate pandemonium for a sign that this is all just a dream, just a dream must be*
Suddenly he remembers that he can still see out of the glass eye in his door at his neighbors coming home, the same neighbors he’s neglected for the troglodytic two years he’s lived at the White Oak’s Apartment-Complex on floor eleven. This socket, this circumferential three inches is his only means of channeling a distress signal to the outside world. This dark horse is the only hope at night that keeps him from cracking his head open while slamming it, and himself unconscious, against the wall. He keeps rigid surveillance with his baseball bat hands positioned to swing at the slightest movement derived from paranoia; devoid of any sense of space or timelessness, time, meaning (though that already came with the package, he smirks), waiting, waiting, waiting…waiting, for the vomit-caked carpet to come to life and squeeze him to death, crushing his ribcage into phalaris canariensis piecemeal, for the ceiling to turn neon ultrapink and start prattling to him; he imagines it says, it says, “Warrick, I have been keeping tabs on you for the last two years and I know you, I know your sequestered desires and passions. I know what you inhibit yourself from seeking.”
“You have no idea,” he screams, his voice cracking at an immature pitch; a deer just learning how to stand, like past sexual endeavors; it reminds him of how he hasn’t screamed in years, yet in a sense has been screaming through every second of them; it also reminds him of the deer just learning how to stand regarding past sexual endeavors.
“Yes, I do,” the ceiling asserts presumptuously.
“No,” weary, “No, no. You motherfucking don’t, you ultrapink,” he double-checks its color, “hot-pink piece of—I’d have called you shit but you’re plaster.”
“I am only neon hot-pink because that is your illusory predilection of me. I am really only white. I am not even really talking to you,” it smiles graciously.
“Than why the fuck are you talking to me? Don’t you have anything better to do for Christ’s sake?,” he screams out, more vociferously than before. No response. He screams the same words out again, exacerbating the pronunciation of them, faster and faster until his scream fades into an echoing murmur, and for the first time in days, he collapses into a dreamless, catatonic sleep.

The glass eye on the door is now Warrick’s third and only eye, the amalgamation of his senses, and he uses it to watch Elaine, the only neighbor he ever managed to muddle a smile at while passing by her in the halls. Yearning for any type of sustenance, the days pass as he watches her encumbered by groceries or completely soaked trying to close her umbrella, accidentally hitting herself in the head with it instead. Some nights she comes home in black-suede high heels so blinded by tears that when wiping the smudged mascara off her cheeks she only incites an epidemic; these are the nights the hallway to her door goes on for miles, as she stumbles over herself, drags herself along the wall, and hasps onto her fallow, shoulder-length hair.
The tears she tries to conceal almost seem to be made of a thawed glass, the same glass that makes up the eye in his door, the same glass that composed the legs to the table in his dream—and now he sees, her, the girl spinning on the table in the dream, much younger with sown eyes and a stapled mouth. At this he at once becomes infatuated with her, with ardent solicitude to take care of her, to vaccinate the epidemic, to maybe, maybe perhaps expose himself to somebody after two years of martyred seclusion…someone he feels an inexplicable and unconditional fondness for.
Elaine occasionally knocks on his door, peeping through the glass eye, then asking if he’s alright, fluttering her knocking; walking away with an inefficacious expression when she receives no response despite her affected vivaciousness. If she only knew how he longs for her to hear his voice! Other moments she suddenly stops in the middle of the hall and looks down at her bare feet as if the floor has swallowed them, trying to fish them out with her eyes. He’s seen her waltz completely plastered and jostled by the walls, witnessed her fart and twirl around like a bewildered dog chasing itself, and every time one of these quirks, peculiarities…idiosyncrasies occurs he feels increasingly devoted to her, obsessing over merely speaking with her and telling her, telling her the predicament he’s in but truly more than anything wanting to confess his love.
But he couldn’t do that, he knows; cupid’s a serial killer, a love-stymied delirious stalker at best. He bangs on the door, knowing the inevitable outcome in advance, the exertion only a means of feeling closer to her; an acknowledged attempt, even if condemned. He’s already tried picking it with every utensil and tool he’s salvaged. This is worse than high school, worse than losing his virginity watching the cheerleaders board the school-bus in the morning wearing those dress code fussy skirts with nothing underneath.
“I am not a voyeur,” he proclaims, “why am I doing this?”
“Yes you are,” the ceiling retorts, chuckling sapiently.
“What am I going to do?”
“Well, at least you were born with hands. Think of me, I don’t even have a…”
“Shut up—what would a ceiling know about love.”
“More than I wish to know. But it’s hard to learn about something you rarely ever see,” it sighs.
“Well, at least we have something in common, ceiling.”
“And what is that?” Silence ensues, and for hours it endures. Warrick, woolgathering. The raucous, jarring drone of the television interrupts him from his daydreaming. He hastily gets up and, with the illimitable strength of neurosis, verging on psychosis due to malnourishment, hauls the TV into the bathroom, lops it into the tub and turns on the shower. Hand kneading his forehead, he returns to the living room, plopping down on the sofa with a delectable grin on his face. “Stop trying to lose your mind. It delays the process.”
“It’s already lost,” Warrick clasps his chin in thought. “Or…maybe it’s just on vacation, at a five-star, gourmandizing a succulent broiled lobster.”
“If you say so. But some people make a lot of money knowing your mind better than you do. In the end, they just think for you. It’s more convenient, financially.”
“How long have you been a ceiling?”
“Far longer than you’ve been alive. I don’t know; sixty, seventy years. Whenever this complex was built.”
“Have you ever witnessed this happen to someone before?”
“Sure. You don’t want to know the answer to your next question, but go ahead and ask it.”
“How do they end up?”
“They die, always, primarily from dehydration. Less frequently, suicide.”
“What methods have you had the pleasure of glomming.”
“Mostly hanging, sometimes electrocution. Only saw one woman stick her head in the oven.”
“Did she leave milk and cookies out for the kids?”
“Sylva Plath wouldn’t have been so apprehensive, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Warrick lolls his head, smirking absently. He, uncannily, doesn’t seem to be concerned with dying.
“At what age did ‘making love’ become ‘fucking’?” He propounds, apparently having found something to regret. “Do you think sex is mandatory? In love, I mean.”
“Yes, it is.”
“So to be in love one must have sex?”
“No.”
“But isn’t that what you just said?”
“I answered that sex is mandatory,” the ceiling giggles.
Warrick dismisses the ceiling, rolling his head back. “You’re just a ceiling, what would you know about love.”
“More than I—”
“wish to know, yeah. Yeah.” Warrick pauses, reflecting on his regret. “You know that neighbor that walks down the halls, sometimes back and forth, the eccentric one. Sometimes still has the umbrella up even when she’s inside.”
“Want me to spy on her?”
“No, but I bet you do.” Warrick recalls his turbulent, non-existent stint at a love life: delusional anxiety, paralytic insecurity, the shaking, the trembling, the exclusion and the lying to make up for it, the life that immutably felt trivial, vapid, irrelevant; the panic rousing ennui.
He closes his eyes and watches himself from one of the living room’s ceiling corners. The wallpaper is stained with numerous bodily-fluids and scratches so deep that the perpetrating nails remain intact within the walls. His loneliness is alive; a glooming, prosaic entity; he watches it pace around the room aloofly in despair.

His fists have rotted into hamburger from waging war with the door every time Elaine passes, screaming himself into psychosis trying to get her attention. Now his crooked figure lies defeated like the shadow of a toy soldier in the corner, drool sputtering from his lips and varnishing his jaw. He can’t tell whether his anxiety fodders his delusions are if his delusions fodder his anxiety. He’s begun to hallucinate, spectral temptresses statically fading from room to room, amorphous shapes grieving; phantom sounds of water running; laughing, giddy children; the creaking of age-old swing-sets; the echo of an aphotic empty sky; the intrinsic ache of returning to a childhood refuge to find it in cancroid, squalid condition.
“Somebody loves us,” he croaks, one eye setting, the other rising, derelict where as time has been paralyzed by decay, his body exiled from his mind. “Somebody loves us all,” he finishes. It’s been at least a week now. The ceiling stopped talking to Warrick when his words became unintelligible, but in reality Warrick’s thoughts usurped his voice. The complexion on his face is that of a vampire overwhelmed by the tribulations upon compromising that the only thing it covets in the modern world is what it can never justly have.
“Ceiling, have you ever died alone?” Warrick attempts to stare upward and mop the drool off his chin with his wrist. “I’d assume not, seeing how I don’t see how a ceiling could ‘die’ seeing how it couldn’t live to begin with.
“But you live alone, and you will live forever. That’s not death but it sure as hell sounds worse,” Warrick prattles.
“I could pretend to love you. We could be euphemistic about it.” The walls are streaked with, stretching out his neck, what seems to be excrement.
“Oh that’s,” snickering, “that’s novel. What did chimpanzees infiltrate the room while I was out?”
“No.” When Warrick looks up again, there’s a crack zigzagging straight through it. All the light-bulbs have short-circuited or shattered while he was sleeping earlier; his eyes have adapted to the umbrage. He prays that when, and for, the ceiling comes crashing down that both pieces of it land on each side of him, but the furniture from upstairs would probably dash his brains onto the abraded carpet. Then again, his thoughts would only be visible then.
“I should have asked that girl out in seventh gra…”
“Oh, here we go again.” You’re more maudlin than my little sister.
Ceilings have sisters? And wait—I can hear you inside my head.
I can hear you too.
Then what’s the point of speaking?
We never were speaking.
Wait, what? “What? Come back.” Come back. It’s getting late, or is it. I have no idea what time it is. I have to get out of here.
But you can’t.
But I can’t.
What if you were to dream, and go back to where you started. Maybe you will find yourself.
Why do people trap themselves in the places they do?
What makes you different from the people that choose to be in the same places you are?
I never chose to be—
Then what are you? It is better to escape from somewhere for the sake of escaping than having escaped with no where left to escape to.
What are you saying?
Before you were locked up, you never gave anyone a chance to know you, anyway. What does it matter now. If you survive this, won’t you value that chance more?
I won’t survive this.
Then shut up, and dream. Dream.
“Dream.” Warrick slams his head against the wall until he knocks himself out.
When you wake up:

A voice can be heard from afar, vaguely, a young woman’s voice. Assuming he’s hearing phantom sounds and voices again, he puts his hands over his ears and closes his eyes but the voice remains, resonant inside his head, seeming to come from the left wall of the kitchen. A chair muffles the voice and Warrick rushes over and kicks it aside, sticking his ear to the wall; the voice is louder now. He can’t tell if it’s a voice or an echo, even a hallucination; as he peers towards the floor he sees a miniscule hole, large enough to perhaps stick his finger through. He has the dire sense that whatever he talks about with this voice will be the same as talking to an ex after years of silence and remorselessly succumbing to catharsis. He stops, remembering the last time he talked to someone was a week ago. And he also remembers the last time he went “out”, literally outside to him, to a party his only friend invited him to, where the people there were dogmatically sure they knew him better than himself. Why did he have no interest in getting to know these people; people who seemed to derive pleasure from simply talking but not saying anything of any substance. And when he went home, why did he pace turbulently around his bedroom and look behind him every so often to assure himself that he was alone; why is it that he slept with a weapon beside his bed—a bat, switchblade—and put boots outside his bedroom door so that if someone opened it he would hear the creak of the door? The potential assassins he encountered in the elevator while, imposed by starvation, coming home from grocery shopping; walking on a tight-rope with every stranger on the Earth on it as well, fringing on his emotional anonymity remaining intact.
So what has changed…that makes this particular voice so pertinent, so alluring, so crucial? A piece of plaster glides down from the ceiling, a good-luck charm from a friend in high places.
He peeks through the hole. “Hello, is anyone there?”
“Warrick? Is that you; oh my god, I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last couple of hours. Are you alright? Cause,” she respires, struggling with composure, “I’m definitely not; you won’t believe this but I’m locked inside my—”
“So am I Elaine. I’ve been for at least a week; the only thing that works is the tap water; are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” And he sees her now through the hole, with icebound, earnest eyes and diaphanous lips.
“Well, is there any way we can get in the same room as each other? We can think of what to do next from there; fuck, what am I thinking, how are we supposed to just pass through a solid wall!” she laughs in dismay.
“Heh, it’s not every day you wake up with chains on your door, either.”
“This is true. Damn, to think of it, I haven’t talked to you in a while. I rarely see you in the halls anymore. It’s a bummer not being caught off-guard by you—I mean,” and now Warrick cannot see her…but he can almost hear her smiling: “we are neighbors.” She draws nearer and nearer to the wall until her eye has blocked off the rest of her face, and she wriggles her finger into the hole, and then Warrick does the same, touching the tip of her nail like two people kissing for the first time. She giggles; her hair washes over her eye. After this they converse for hours, about everything and nothing at all, reassuring each other without words that even if they cannot escape their rooms that they will at least be able to escape into the safety of one another.
“Well, I’m getting tired Elaine, I haven’t slept in quite awhile, and I honestly don’t want you to see me like this. But if you need anything, just knock on the wall and I’ll be right here.” Suddenly he wonders why she could not hear him before, but the mere fact that they’re talking now is enough to calm his obsessions.
“Will I talk to you when you wake up then?” He lowers his head, and from the other side of the wall, Elaine can almost swear she hears him smiling.
“Yes. Yes, I guess you will.”