It was a Raymond Chandler kind of evening where you really thought the body on the stairs could be your's. Milo Denton didn't care. He sat on the toilet fingering the bandages on his face and sipped from a whiskey bottle, an inexpensive copper liquid that really wasn't the good expensive gold kind. He wanted to strip the mummy-like wrappings off his face to determine if what was underneath, even resembled what used to be his. The only thing Milo certainly knew wasn't his was, Petrina City and how the rain hitting the windows was God mocking the world with something that was certainly not tears.
Everything the past three decades had been a fluorescent film-strip motion, lightning fueled haze; from being boiled hard in one of the cities toughest neighborhoods to working up in the ranks of the police force (the press loved him, even called him "Dangerous Denton") only to be disgraced by a minor affair with the wrong girl. Forced to work as a sleazy PI catching husbands and wives cheating on each other (sometimes with one another in crazy costumed get-ups) yet not really giving them accurate information to retain the "privilege of being on their payroll with promise of "an explosive oncoming revelation".
Then the real explosion came. The opening of the envelope and then the voice of the fire.
He remembered his hands shaking for the anonymous envelope, certain that it was a check from one of his well known and distinguished clients. He needed the alcohol to keep the tremors at bay to hold the real suffering that was dealt his brain from the withdrawal of what made him smarter and stronger from the rest of the members on the force (then again, wasn't everyone on it?). FG-5 didn't just arouse paranoia and anger but kept stuck in a particular moment in time with no place to go and that was a place , he needed to steer clear of, no matter how fast he drowned his brain cells in bottled hilly-billy dishwater, acid water with a tinge of honey bought at the Taylor and Tyler Drug Store across the street.
He didn't care about the reason this was done to him. The scars bothered him. He was perfectly content to die in disgrace a slow miserable of death of loneliness and substance abuse, taking pictures of random prostitute's and john's rear-ends until the wrong man or woman put a syphilis into his brain.
Venereal disease wasn't going to be serving his warrant for death in the evening, tonight it was going to be pure ugliness and indignity. So what, if it was a little rushed, he never had to pay for tail with the looks of a slum-dog archangel, why start now?
No point to living if you can't get what nature entitled you to get for free.
Another drink. The final drink. From a crystal shot glass. Hand carved bumps put in by child laborers from wherever. Reminder of the girl that got away or rather the girl that did away. The drink courses a fiery river through vessels and arteries and the wicked montage goes clockwork with the opening of the yellow envelope sealed with a kiss, a white burning, bright lights, scalpel hitting bone, he doesn't know what was done or what actually ravaged his flesh. All he knows, is "doctors cut my face" and he woke up with Bonnie, the motherly secretary sitting next to his bed weeping and apologizing for something she couldn't prevent.
He pretended that after this weekend of recovery, it would be "business as usual", he dismissed Bonnie after accepting her home-made meals sitting in his fridge. He bought a crate of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes to last him the weekend. Then decided just to meditate on existence, while sitting on the toilet with a bottle of whiskey and a gun on top of the sink.
The medicine cabinet has seemingly been raided, all that remains is shaving supplies and anti-ich cream. Milo closes the cabinet and looks in the mirror. Cracked like a spider web, like the web of lies his police career was mostly based on. Time to die with the greatest indignity: pants at the ankles, ass on a toilet with a bottle of bottom-shelf whiskey in hand, with an unwrapped face resembling a surrealistic pus filled meat-sculpture done by the Devil himself blown apart by a bullet in the mouth.
Hammer cocked. Set it down. Eyes shut. Unravel. Gun in mouth. Eyes open.
Gun in the sink. Take a swig from the bottle. Lean in that mirror. Touch the Grecian hawkish features and fish-hook half smile.
Milo "This isn't my face." It's a whisper and an empty prayer for wanting that suicide even more.
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