Marty
“Al centro, al dentro, salud!” cheered Rohith as the circle of five friends raised their shot glasses high and drank their fourth consecutive toast.
“For some reason I still feel like I’m not an actual adult,” said Mark, who was the only one sober.
Lucy replied, “aren’t you like thirty or something?”
Mark laughed without a hint of embarrassment, although he was actually embarrassed at the remark.
“I only meant to say that finishing undergrad is still just a precursor to the rest of life, like an overture or something, same way high school was. And-”
Rohith interrupted him: “That’s retarded, Mark”.
Lucy elbowed Rohith in the ribs and he rephrased “sorry; That’s fucking stupid, Mark”.
Mark tried to generate a clever riposte but spent so long thinking about what to say that the group broke into unrelated conversation. The words he was in the process of generating sounded rather stupid in his head, so he stayed silent.
Mark spaced out and looked around the room, taking a sort of sensory inventory, which was something he did when he felt anxious in order to calm down.
Five things Mark can see: 1. Rohith’s shit-eating grin; 2. Lucy’s boobs; 3. the drywall ceiling with hundreds of dollar bills pinned to it as a gimmick or something; 4. the jeans + black hoodie combo that every single guy there seemed to be wearing; 5. the beer bottle filled with water in his left hand.
Four things Mark can hear: 1. Rohith’s booming voice; 2. Discordant hyperpop music; 3. The staticky sound of fourteen separate conversations going on simultaneously — which sounded like speech without individual words; 4. His own internal monologue — which sounded like speech with individual words.
Three things Mark can feel: 1. A scratchy and uncomfortable cashmere sweater that really should have been worn with an undershirt; 2. A rock-hard wooden chair under his butt; 3. An unpleasant nervous tension in his chest.
Two things Mark can smell: 1. BO; 2. Alcohol.
One thing Mark can taste: pennies.
This was confusing. ‘Why do I taste pennies if I haven’t been licking pennies?’ he thought in his head.
Rohith’s next comment alerted Mark to the fact that he had been talking to himself out loud:
“Dude how are you acting this drunk right now when you’re literally the sober one.”
It took Mark a moment to put together the pieces and realize that people were looking at him, expecting him to say something.
“Haha, um.. yeah. Was I talking about pennies just now?”
“Get a grip, bro” Lucy said, with only a hint of humor in her sharp voice.
Gunshots rang out. Three quick BANGs, accompanied by three quick flashes of light and three clouds of drywall suspended in mid-air, only visible through the strobe lights. Mark looked to the source of the sound and ducked down, along with the rest of the crowded barroom.
Martin stood at the front of the room with a pistol in his right hand, pointed at the ceiling.
Martin’s red hair was tangled and partially covered his wide-open eyes. His mouth wore a grimace of unbearable disgust. His breathing was labored, in huge puffs that his whole body was moving with. He was shouting but the music was still playing so he wasn’t understood by anyone except for Mark, who could read lips.
Mark looked at Lucy and he knew instantly that she didn’t need to hear Martin’s voice to know what he was saying.
Most of the room cleared out in a parade of yelling and running, but Martin pointed his gun at Lucy, who stayed put and stared right back at him with a fierce look.
When the music cut out, the room had emptied except for Mark, Lucy, and Martin, who was standing in-between them and the exit.
Martin’s voice became clearer, although it was slurred: “-you fucking BITCH!”
Lucy spoke in a voice that was uncannily calm.
“Marty, you need to put down the gun.”
He said, “I’m done doing what you fucking tell me, I’m done with your lies and your BULLSHIT!”
Lucy’s resolve was steel, her voice unwavering: “Marty, it’s going to be okay. I know that you still care about me, and I still care about you.” She took a few steps forward and continued: “I’m sorry for the way we left things, I never meant to hurt you.”
Martin yelled something that Mark couldn’t understand. Mark was holding his breath, not moving a muscle from his position behind Lucy.
Then she said: “I know what you want. You want to be held right now. And you’re scared and alone and everything feels hopeless, but I promise you that it’s not. I promise you that you are loved”
Martin’s grimace released into a cartoonish frown, and he began sobbing. Snot was dripping all over his mouth and face, it was disgusting. Through moans and wails he managed to articulate the sentence: “I don’t know who I am if I can’t love you.”
Lucy opened her arms like she was about to hug him and in a split-second, grabbed his right wrist with her left hand, moving the gun’s muzzle so that it was aiming to the side, and with her right hand, punched him in the face. The gun went off twice and both bullets landed in the wall on either side of Mark’s huddled silhouette.
They began to struggle, and the gun fell from Martin’s hands and skidded across the hardwood floor. Mark ran forward and grabbed it as Lucy wrestled Martin to the ground.
Mark had fired a gun before and remembered that normal guns had a safety. He tried to summon his memory of the single afternoon he had spent at a shooting range in Florida in 2006. Red means dead. Right. Red means that the gun is dead. He flicked the red switch on the side of the pistol so that it wasn’t showing anymore. He aimed at Martin and yelled “stop!”
The two of them froze on the ground and both looked at Mark. Martin was on top of her and had his hands on her neck. Then he looked back at Lucy and continued choking as though if Mark wasn’t even there. Mark pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. You fucking idiot — red means dead means that the person you SHOOT is dead. He flicked the red switch so that it was showing again and fired. A round exploded out of the barrel, and the recoil hurt Mark’s hand. The bullet struck Martin in the shoulder, and he yelled and rolled onto his side, allowing Lucy to stand up.
“Jesus fuck Lucy we need to call the police.”
“They’re already on their way” she replied, catching her breath. Mark heard the faint sound of sirens in the distance. Martin was moaning and wailing on the ground, clutching his shoulder like a baby bird that fell out of the nest. “He could bleed out; we need to do something” Mark said. Lucy said nothing, grabbed the gun from Mark’s hands, pointed it at Martin’s head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Mark realized that the gun was a 6-shooter and was now empty. Lucy pulled the trigger in vain a few more times before she realized this herself. After a brief moment of hesitation, she grabbed a steak knife off of one of the tables and mounted Martin, plunging it into his neck over and over while screaming “I’M NOT YOUR FUCKING GIRLFRIEND YOU PSYCHO CREEP!”
Mark laughed out loud. Some people are so melodramatic, he thought to himself.
