The phone doesn’t ring because the wire is cut. The mail doesn’t come because the box is empty. The woman doesn’t come back because she finally got smart. I am a museum of bad decisions. Admission: your last good day.
That was the loneliness that made sense. Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind with rain and sad violins. The real kind—the kind that felt like a fact. Like gravity. Like the number of teeth you had left. It didn’t hurt anymore. It just was . Like a broken stair you learned to step over.
He looked at the cockroach again. Then he looked at the last line he’d written. He smiled. Not because he was happy. But because the cockroach, at least, had died doing what it loved. Nothing.
He looked at the typewriter. The carriage was stuck. A half-finished poem sat in the roller. It was called “PDF I.” He didn’t know what PDF meant. Portable Document Format? That was too clean. Too corporate. For Henry, it meant Puta, Dios, y Fútbol. Whore, God, and Soccer. Three things that had never saved a single soul. The phone doesn’t ring because the wire is cut
He finished the sherry. The bottle joined the cockroach on the floor. He thought about calling someone. His ex-wife. His bookie. The woman with the gold tooth. But his hand didn’t move. The phone was an artifact from another century. A black rotary with a tangled cord. He hadn’t heard a human voice in six days. The last one was the grocer saying, “That’ll be four eighty-five.” He’d paid with nickels.
At 4:00 a.m., he poured the cooking sherry. It tasted like regret mixed with cough syrup and a hint of rotting plum. It was perfect. He drank it warm, straight from the bottle, standing at the window in his underwear. The city was a grid of yellow lights, each one a cage with a different kind of animal inside. Couples sleeping back-to-back. Insomniacs watching infomercials. Children with fevers. None of them knew he existed. None of them would have cared if they did.
He lit a cigarette. The smoke curled up toward a water stain on the ceiling that looked exactly like the state of Nevada. He’d been there once. Lost a hundred dollars on a horse named “No Dice.” The horse finished last. The jockey later tested positive for heroin. That was the closest thing to a miracle Henry had ever witnessed. I am a museum of bad decisions
The whiskey was gone. The gin was gone. There was half a bottle of cooking sherry under the sink, the kind with the pink label and a price tag that still had a cent sign. He considered it. Then he considered the window. Fourth floor. The alley below was a black trench full of broken glass and the silence of things that had been thrown away.
He’d found the phrase scribbled on a napkin three days ago at a cantina in the bad part of town. A woman with a mustache and a gold tooth had left it behind. She’d been drinking mezcal with a man who kept crying into his sombrero. Henry had stolen the napkin. He didn’t know why. Maybe because the words were truer than anything he’d written in ten years.
He turned off the lamp. The room went dark. The cockroach remained where it was. And for the first time in years, Henry Chinaski closed his eyes without hoping for anything. Not the knock. Not the ring. Not the woman. Not the drink. Not the dramatic kind
Below it, the final line he’d added:
Don’t save me. I’m finally home.
I am so alone that the walls have started to listen. They don’t answer, but they don’t leave either. That’s more than most people.