Unedited Excerpt for WIP:

From “Paul’s Box”

 

Paul Andorra was high on every drug he could get his hands on. Being a wealthy man, that was a considerable amount.

Though he sat still as a stone, his heart beat a drum roll in perpetuity. Sweat like one hundred percent precipitation coated his skin. The tattoos covering his arms and shoulders glistened, drenched.

Paul Andorra stared at the box.

Paul Andorra needed to open the box. Like a baby needed to escape the womb.

This was all Morry’s fault. She never should have left him alone and she knew it. Fuck trust and overcoming and conquering fears. Now because she had to go to Ireland to mend some tear in the universe and a random rite of passage or two, or something, he was going to destroy the world. Shit.

Morry was going to be pissed at him. But really, she never should have left him alone. In years, she hadn’t left him to his own devices. Last time she went to Ireland, she made him come with her.

Paul sat on a black leather couch in his very large living room. His bare feet touched cold, hard wood floors that shined in the sunlight. A modern, mahogany coffee table that was all straight lines sat just beyond his knees. There were two chairs, a mantel, and bookshelves that lined the walls. The room would have been nice, elegant event, if it weren’t for all the boxes.

Boxes, jars, containers of all shapes, sizes, colors, materials, and origins cluttered the room to the point that the visitors had to navigate paths around them on the floor, and move them out of the chairs. They were even spilling into Paul’s side as he sat there, still, staring. Most of them were breathtaking, intricately carved or stained. Some told stories, some just evoked emotion. Some were plastic and were had for a dollar last week in Chinatown. There were more in the bed rooms, in the closets. They overran the kitchen where initially he had only stored cookie and candy tins.

However, at that moment, in that instant, Paul saw none of the other boxes. How could he?

 

*****

 

Yesterday morning, as soon as Morry closed the door and locked it behind her, Paul retrieved a ladder, went up the stairs, and pulled himself into the attic. There he retrieved the box and brought it down. He left the attic open, left the ladder sitting there. He carried the large box on his hip like a baby as he went downstairs, cleared off the coffee table, and sat it there.

He sat there staring at it for seventeen hours straight. For seventeen hours, he studied the intricacy of the carvings and wondered from what material it had been crafted. He guessed that it was petrified wood because he knew that it had once been alive, though now it was heavy, cool, and resistant like rock.

Then he decided that maybe it was metal. He couldn’t remember what it felt like. Maybe it was only heavy because of the contents. Maybe the casing was thin but smooth like laminated aluminum.

When he reached out to touch it at the seventeenth hour desperate to reassure himself of what it felt like, his cell rang or rather the voice of Charlton Heston yelled something about “damn dirty” apes. Paul shook himself, rubbed his eyes then answered.

“You’re there?”

“Yeah,” Morry chirped back at him. She sounded like a cheerleader on the phone. She sounded petite and blonde, not like a tall, chubby, from-the-bottle red-head with black eyes.

“Everything OK?”

“Yeah.”

“You coming back?” He could have kicked himself for that one. Morry feasted on weakness.

“Yeah.” This time she giggled.

Despite the fact that that was an evil giggle, Paul got a hard-on so fast and so violent that he had to squeeze a moment before he could continue. He loved Morry, and that was really, really stupid. Almost as stupid as what he was destined to do, but none of that matter. He loved her anyway, and he missed the hell out of her.

He could have sworn he heard her lick her lips. At least he wasn’t in it alone.

“What are you doing?” She breathed huskily into the phone.

“Sitting on the couch thinking about you,” Paul lowered his voice, too.

“Oh really?” she purred.

“Yeah.” He settled deeper into the whisper-soft leather and stroked his hands under his tank top, over his tense abs.

“Sounds like you might want to do more.”

“Oh yeah, baby.” The tips of his fingers slid below the loose waist band of his jeans.

“How much more?”

“Why don’t you come home and find out.” He didn’t reach further.

“I’m in Ireland,” she protested with a sexy chuckle.

“So?”

“I’ve got some things to take care of.”

“Right now? I mean like right now, at this very minute?”

“Well convince me, sweetie.”

Paul groaned. “No. I want the real thing. I want you home. Come home now.”

“I can’t, sweetie, there’s a disturbance in the force.” Paul didn’t laugh. Morry sighed. “I’ll be home by Friday, I swear.”

“Whatever.” Paul pouted reaching for the forty pound weights he meticulously stored wedged under the magazine wrack. He started doing curls.

“You’re lifting weights?” Her voice was sharp.

“Yep,” Paul answered.

“Fine then, if you’re going to be a baby about it. A six foot five two hundred fifty pound baby but a baby nonetheless. I thought it might be fun to have a little naughty talk, but I see that, yet again, you are a spoiled brat.”

“But you can see me. I can’t see you. That’s not fair.”

“Spoiled brat baby,” she taunted.

Paul tamped down the urge to stick out his tongue. She might see him.

“Are you going to at least call me tomorrow?” He asked. “Are you going to check on me?”

“Of course, dearest Paulie.”

Paul hated the nickname that was a key indicator of Morry patronizing him.

“Bye, Morry.” She might be the light of his life, but he didn’t have to talk to her when she was being aggravating.

“Yeah, sweetie, I have to go,” she called quickly. “Miss you. Love you. See you Friday. Don’t open that fuckin’ box. In fact, take it back up into the attic where you got it from.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he responded before blurting out a quick “I love you, too.”

Then he started to stare at the box again.

Then he knew he needed to get the fuck out of the house.

 

*****

 

Paul went to have his car detailed. He talked shit with the guys as they marveled over it and made sure to shine his wheels. Then he went to the grocery store—he was starving—and poked around until he bought so much food he knew half of it would go to waste (which Morry would have a thing or two to say about). Then he didn’t feel like cooking so he went through a drive through. He ate in a parking spot. Morry hated that he did that. “Why don’t you just go in if you’re going to eat there?” she would nag.

He dripped gyro sauce all over the interior of his newly cleaned sports car and cursed like a mad man as he tried to mop it up. The smell was never going to come out. Then he caught a glimpse of his watch. He’d only been gone three damn hours. This wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t going to make it until Morry came back in two more days.

At some insane moment, he actually considered going to Ireland but discarded the idea. Stupid pride, he knew, but he didn’t want her to know how weak he was becoming.

Paul needed to be numb. Medicinally so.

For the entire two years he’d been with Morry, he’d been clean. Not an easy feat for a man who had a 3000 year old hereditary monkey on his back. But, he had. Still, for months now, that box had been calling to him, begging, pleading. Incessantly. Sometimes it was the voice of a lover, sometimes that of an attacker. Wanting, demanding.

So he scored some drugs from an old friend. Then he score some more from another old friend. Then he invited them and their friends all back to his mansion on the hill because he didn’t want to be alone. Then he worked hard on being numb, medicinally so.

Luckily, or unluckily he was coherent enough to take Morry’s call. She was angry at him for being drunk but trusted him too much to even consider that there may have been more. And then he’d passed out.

When he was conscious again, he had conversations in hazy flashes. People asking about the boxes, people slipping silver and gold ones into their pockets.

“Why don’t you just open it?” There was a female there. He couldn’t even see her, couldn’t smell her. She was just a disembodied and nasally voice.

“Can’t. It can never be opened.”

“But you’ve just got it sitting there, in the open. I don’t see a lock.”

“It can never be opened.”

“What if somebody stole it?”

“No one will steal it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because if someone steals it, then it is their fate to open the box. If they do not, then, as we expect, its mine. There’s no lock. Go ahead, try to open it.”

Her heartbeat amplified. Boomboom Boomboom Boomboom. “This is bullshit! I’m leaving.”

And Paul was laughing and sliding off of the couch and they were leaving.

So on Friday, two hours before Morry was supposed to come home, he was sitting there. He hadn’t bathed in two days. He hadn’t eaten or drank anything non-alcoholic. He was sweating and he was high, but he was clear, and he wanted, more than anything, to open the box. He wanted this stupid burden over.

Morry was going to kill him.

Paul reached across the table and flipped open the box.