Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

He eventually manages to tell her the story about a town in Indiana where there was a little bar and he and his bandmates and his wife, Nancy, were all drinking there after a show and some grizzled old badass goaded him —and the rest of the band, with the exception of the drummer—into a drinking contest that turned both nasty and brutally competitive. “I didn’t even win,” he says. “Nancy did. She could drink more than any guy.”

“I’ve been there,” Agatha says when she’s stopped laughing. “The town, anyway, not the bar.”

He looks at her “You always say that. You’ve been everywhere. How come you move around so much?”

“I’m an adventurer,” she says.

“No, really,” he says. “You sound like me when I was your age.”

“I left home when I was thirteen,” she says with a shrug. “And I wear out my welcome elsewhere pretty fast, too.”

“Now you really sound like me,” he says. “It’s funny that we never ran into each other in any of those places.”

They eat their lo mein in the flickering light of the television, even though Colin complains that he can’t taste anything anymore. By the time Agatha leaves, she’s hungry again.

* * *

When Colin moves, he can feel his chalky bones grinding together. His sinews feel limp, and he worries that his veins are liquefying inside him. His head is swollen, his brain throbbing, as though there is a cyst growing ready to crack open his skull and birth some foul goddess.

For months he hasn’t been hungry, but today he feels ravenous. Too tired to call for food, he eats leftovers and crackers that scrape his throat and the last spoonfuls of a pint of diet ice cream that Nancy left, even though it’s rimed with frost.

He has stopped the treatments, but only because the doctors told him there was no more they could do. When Nancy left him, she said it wasn’t because he was sick but because he’d given up. She needed him to be a fighter. She needed death not to get him down.

He’d said he wanted to fight, but maybe he didn’t fight hard enough.

A door slams downstairs, and a man’s voice screams, “Slut! Slutty slut slut!”

His neighbors are both out in the street. “You are so self-righteous,” shouts the other man. “Like you never —”

There’s a crash, like hollow metal hitting concrete. Trash can.

Colin Lainhart believes his neighbors are in love. They’re always yelling down staircases, always throwing one another’s things out the window and onto the sidewalk, always storming out. Colin thinks they fight a lot harder to be in love than he ever fought the cancer.

He wonders how long it will be until Agatha comes and brings him dinner. He feels like a dog that scratches at the door. Waiting to be walked. Waiting to be fed. He can tell that she has no idea he’s only ten years older than she is. Sickness has made him ancient.

Sometimes he wants to beg her to stay a little longer, but he doesn’t want to disturb the illusion that she likes him. He doesn’t want her to have to spell it out: I am just taking pity on you. My mother used to listen to your music.

The phone rings, and by the time he answers it, he is already tired.

“Colin?” The voice is familiar, but he can’t place it.

“Yes,” he says.

“It’s Mark.”

“I know,” Colin says, ashamed that for a moment, he didn’t. Mark is his lawyer, his college roommate, and, famously, the guy who let Colin sleep on his couch while Colin recorded most of his first album.

“You’ve got to get out of that town,” Mark says. Mark is full of dire pronouncements, like: “If you don’t freeze her bank account, you’ll lose everything” or “If you don’t come back to the city now, you’ll become a crazy hermit.” Mark was also disappointed when Colin stopped fighting.

Colin laughs.

“Seriously,” Mark says. “It’s all over the papers. Some kind of necrophilia-necrophagia cult going on down there.”

Something crashes outside, and Colin smiles against the phone, hoping that Mark can’t hear. Colin’s pretty sure that his squabbling neighbors sound enough like a pack of hungry cultists to make Mark worry. He reaches over for his laptop and types into the window of his browser. “Uh, all the local paper has is something about some kids partying in the graveyard and a dog getting into a tomb.”

“They’re covering it up,” says Mark. When Colin just laughs, Mark interrupts him. “When are you going to be in town next?”

“Not gonna be.”

“That’s ridiculous. What do they want you to do—just lay down and die?”

“They call it making me comfortable,” Colin says.

There is a long pause on the other end of the line, and when Mark speaks again, his voice is choked. “I’m an asshole—”

“Don’t,” Colin says. “Actually, I feel good today. Better than in a while. I might even go out and eat something.” Just saying the word eat has made his mouth water. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

“Your manager says he can’t get ahold of you,” Mark says, but he doesn’t have the surety in his voice that he had before. “Car company wants to license a song for a commercial.”

“I’ll call him,” Colin says, even though he knows he won’t. He feels guilty that the conversation has become awkward. More than anything, dying is an embarrassment. “Listen, I got to go. There’s a bunch of people outside with torches chanting something about Beelzebub.…”

“Fuck off,” says Mark, but at least he sounds like himself. “Remember to charge your phone. And to answer it.”

The bones of Colin’s spine pop as he stands to put his phone back in the charging dock, but after he’s up, he doesn’t feel so bad. His stomach growls and he pulls on a hat and sunglasses, despite the heat, and decides that he’s going to go outside after all.

* * *

When Agatha knocks on his door next, it isn’t because he’s ordered anything. She’s carrying a carton anyway. She feels a little stupid when she hits the bell, but she’s afraid that he’s not going to answer and then she’s going to have to decide if she should break in to see if he died.

He buzzes her up like usual, without even talking into the speakers. There’s music playing, and when she gets upstairs, he’s sitting by the window and playing a guitar. She recognizes the song he’s playing: It’s one of his, but he’s playing it so slowly that the music sounds as mournful as the words. She wonders if this was how he wrote the songs, how they were supposed to be played. She hopes so. This music isn’t laughing at anyone.

His hair looks almost grown in, military short rather than sickness short, like a rock star who’s no longer dying might have, and it makes her aware that no matter how friendly he seems, she has no reason to be standing in his loft. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her, though.

“Oh,” says Agatha. “I thought maybe something happened.”

He looks at her quizzically. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s been three days since you ordered any food,” she says. “I didn’t know if you were just ordering from some other place or if you were sick or what. I’m sorry. I should—”

“Three days,” he repeats, like he doesn’t believe it. He looks out the window again, like he’s going to check the position of the Earth, but it’s dark. All there is to see are glittering lights and the immense blackness of the ocean. “I went out.”

“Today?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I got strawberries.”

She puts down the bag of fried rice and goes into the kitchen. Standing there, near the refrigerator and the board supported by sawhorses, she realizes just how inappropriate she’s been, rummaging through his things. But the strawberries in their plastic green basket are right there on the mock-counter. She comes back out with them covered in a fine gray mold and pocked with brownish patches. “Not today, I think.”

“Maybe it has been three days.” He picks one off the top and brushes off the gauzy threads. “Noble rot,” he