I don’t know how long I sat there in the moonlight of the abandoned, almost haunted dining room. I sipped rye and stared at cobwebs until my eyes got heavy. Like I always used to do. No real thoughts going through my head. Just the numb drone of loneliness. Not even any spiders to keep me company.

  That’s what’s really been pulling you down, Jack. Unresolved loneliness. I drink from the glass like it's a panacea to loneliness, a lie I never knew I was being told. Was all this what could have been, or just your idea of what could have been? Who knows? Who cares? God. I guess He’s the answer to both. If there’s a good reason to feel sorry, I guess this is one. You can’t wallow in it, though. You can’t ignore it either. You have to accept it. You have to deal with it.

  I finish off the glass of rye. Yet another in my collection for the evening. I try to count the cups sitting next to each other on the table, but I can’t tell if there are six or a dozen on account of my blurry double vision.

  That’s not dealing with it. It’s something, though. Something’s better than nothing. Maybe you just let the rye go to your head. Just drift off to sleep and let it all sort itself out in your dreams. Can a man dream inside a dream? Probably not, but I bet a tentacle monster can.

  I close my eyes and let slumber wrap me in her warm embrace. The black blanket of dreams swaddles my mind like a baby. Off to sleep. I’m gone.

  A loud BANG from upstairs jolts me awake. I flop out of the chair and hit the ground with a squish, quivering like a mound of gelatin.

  The hell was that? Sounded like a metal drawer slamming shut.

  I make sure to turn around and snatch my last lowball of rye, pouring what’s left down my gullet. Setting the glass back on the table with the others, I shloop out of the dining room and find the stairs.

  Dusty. Creaking. I get the sense that these things could crumble or snap beneath me at any moment. I make sure to hold the handrail just in case. Lot of good this thing’ll do I think, staring at the dusty rail. It’d probably just snap with the stairs. I should probably just imagine that these stairs are sturdy and strong. This is my mind after all.

  As I shloop up the stairs, I hear the grumbling and yelling of an old drunk sauced off his rocker. More than hear. I recognize.

  “That’s how I GET BY!” he yells.

  I don’t want to see this.

  “What else to do?!”

  I guess I have to.

  “Drink and smoke! What else to do!”

  I round the corner at the top of the stairs and open the first door I see.

  There he is. There I am, behind my desk with an empty bottle and a half-empty bottle saluting me as I shloop in and see me. Myself. I.

  No. That’s not me. That’s not Jack Wolfgang. That’s who I would have been if I’d continued to be such a useless slob. That’s who I was going to be.

  “The hell are you doing here?” asks the drunk.

  “I’m here to put you to bed, old man.”

  The drunk’s hair is peppered. He needs a cut. His face is haggard in that way all drunks’ faces get haggard, line after line of the same story: I drink, and I’m not going to stop until it kills me. It’s a sad book. No man should have to read it. No man should write it. Sometimes, it’s just the only story we know how to tell, but if we strove to be better men to begin with, we’d know a few more stories. We’d have the imagination to tell a few more tales. We’d have the courage to put these old sins to death.

  But we don’t.

  “Shut up, Jack,” he says. “I’m not that drunk.”

  “How drunk are you then?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” he throws a wicked smile at me before he pours another glass. “You’re the one that put us here. You tell me how much I’ve had. It was enough a long time ago, but you kept going. You kept going, Jack, never one to quit. So, here I am. I’m what you made me.”

  “And I regret that.”

  “Regret means nothing to me, Jack. I can’t change the past. I can only look at it. And it’s ugly, so I’d rather not. So, I do what we’ve always done.”

  “Drink and smoke.”

  “DRINK and smoke!” he yells. “Can’t afford the cigarettes anymore, though. You wouldn’t happen to have one on you, would you pal?”

  I throw him a back. “Take the whole thing. There’s more where those came from.”

  “Living high, aren’t ya. Business still good? Not for me. Not here.”

  “You’re closing up shop, aren’t you?”

  “You betcha.” He pulls a lighter out of a drawer in the desk. He lights a cigarette hanging from his lips. The smoke curls up and tangles itself in the moonlight reaching through the window behind him. “No one comes to see us anymore. No one cares for ol’ Jack.”

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  “Who wants a drunk doing their snooping for them?”

  “Precisely. I sign a few pages for a lawyer or two here and there. Divorce work. They need a witness? I saw whatever they need me to have seen. It’s easy money. Enough to get by.”

  “It was. But now, they’re drying up. How overdue is the rent?”

  “Just a few months. I think. Who cares, though? I’ll be dead soon. Dead men don’t pay rent.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He pulls out his snub-nosed .38 special revolver and sets it on the desk. “I’m done with it all, Jack. I’m tired of it. Tired of getting by.”

  “I’m sorry I made it so hard for you.”

  “Don’t be sorry. You did what you could.”

  “No. I didn’t do enough. I haven’t done enough.”

  “God’s the one Who should be sorry. Sorry He ever made such a lousy piece of crap as me.”

  “Don’t say that. You don’t mean that. You’ll get some sleep. You’ll figure it out in the morning.”

  “He should be sorry He makes men so weak and puts us through so much. And for what? Just to send us to Hell?”

  “Jack, you’re done. I’m not gonna listen to you talk like this.”

  “Oh, you’ll listen, Jack!” he grabs the gun and starts waving it around. “You spent years ignoring me. Tuning me out with bottle after bottle of rye. That’s over. You’ll listen now, and you’ll listen good.”

  “Don’t do this.”

  “Don’t blame me for it! Blame God!”

  “Maybe we take a little responsibility here.”

  “That’s what this is, Jack!” He points the gun at his head. “I’m taking responsibility for what a piece of trash we are. I’m doing what you never had the courage to do.”

  “I have the courage not to do it. That’s the only virtue I’ve ever really had, and you’re going to throw that away?”

  “That’s what you do with trash, Jack. You throw it away.”

  He squeezes the trigger.

  “No!”

  The hammer falls.

  Nothing happens.

  “Hahaha!” he laughs. A mad smile streaks across his face. “You think I can afford bullets? I can’t even afford CIGARETTES!”

  “What’s your angle then? You just trying to scare me straight?”

  “Angle? I don’t think you understand how low we really are. We’ve got nothing. Nothing, Jack. What are you going to do about it?”

  What am I going to do about it? My vision blurs with a mix of alcohol and anxiety. Panic. I’m panicking. Haven’t felt this since the war.

  I shake the stupor out of my head. He’s slumped over onto the desk.

  He’s out cold. Good. I don’t have to deal with him anymore.

  Then I realize: he’s dead. Blood drips off the edge of the desk. There’s a cigarette, still burning, lying next to his mouth. The gun’s in his hand. A hole’s in his head.

  I guess he found enough cash for at least one. Bastard. I hate that guy. Yeah, he’s me. I don’t care. I hate him. Maybe that’s the problem. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. Sometime.

  I always figure it out.

  I shloop over to the mop closet. As the door swings open, it creaks, groaning like an old, dying cat. The black closet is as empty as a new coffin. Almost. There’s dust and cobwebs everywhere. I go ahead and imagine a tall stack of towels, a bucket, some cleaning solution, and a mop.

  No matter how I try to imagine it, the reality is that this kind of life has a bad ending. A man needs to do more than just get by. He needs to live for more than mere distractions.

  Where to begin?

  Looking over my shoulder, proverbially, I see a coffin in the middle of the room. Smooth black wood, glossy in the moonlight. Bronze rails line its sides.

  What part of my brain came up with that? The thing is too nice. Makes sense, though. Put the body to rest first.

  I pull out a towel and shloop over to the drunk’s corpse. To my corpse. I wrap the … thing in the towel, like wrapping a baby in a blanket.

  Swaddling. For him, I am the night taking him to his eternal rest. Something like that. Enough poetry, Jack. Put it all to rest. Come to terms with it. This future needs to die. You need to put it to rest. You need to live in a different direction.

  I lift him up and feel his blood seep through the towel.

  Damp. Gonna need more.

  I stretch a tendril across the room back to the closet and grab another towel. Wrapping that one around him too, I pick the body up again.

  Damn. Why do I have to be so heavy?

  I trudge forward with a shloop.

  Probably something existential going on here. I could just imagine him lighter, but I think that’d defeat the point. I can’t explain it, but this whole insane scenario makes sense and feels necessary.

  What do we weigh, though? 200 pounds? No. That’s just how much his body weighs. The weight of everything that’s brought us here? I can’t fathom that. I have the feeling I’m going to spend the rest of my life carrying that weight, little by little. I’ll carry it up the hill, and one day, I’ll make it to the top.

  Jack, we’re done just getting by. I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to commit to that. Perhaps every day. Perhaps several times every day. I don’t care. I’m not quitting. I’m not giving up. We’re going to make it, brother. I’m going to live, so you don’t have to die this way, future me.

  I look up at the coffin, the weight of the corpse squishing me down like a soft rubber ball. Hinges.

  Damn it. I’m on the wrong side.

  Shlooping around to the other side, I flip open the two lids. Using all I’ve got, I lift Jack Wolfgang into the coffin and close the case.

  Rest easy. You’re never going to have to endure all this. We’re not going down this path anymore.

  Taking a deep breath, I shloop back to the desk, reach across the room to the closet, and start mopping up the blood.

  My desk. Loyal friend to the end. You don’t deserve to be bear all this. You don’t deserve to be soaked in my blood. I’m sorry.

  While mopping up the blood with the towels, I use a free tentacle to lay out a fresh towel. I throw the soaked ones onto it. Once most of the blood is cleaned up, I snag a bottle of cleaning solution and start spraying. There’s something soothing about that little whisper a spray bottle makes when you clean it.

  It’s almost like cleaning isn’t just a material process. It’s like something in your brain gets cleaned up as you wipe and spray and organize and mop or whatever else. I can see doing this for a living getting old, but it’s … it’s an important ritual. We shouldn’t just pawn it off on others. It’s part of life, and you can’t just ask someone else to live your life for you all the time. That’s the solution to everything in the modern world: have someone else do it. That’s why people like me make a living. Sad people come along and pay me to clean up their messes for them. I don’t mind helping, but … I can’t live anyone else’s life for them. No one can live their life for me.

  So, you’re going to live now, Jack. You’re not just getting by anymore. What does that mean?