Questionable Company
In a circular movement, Patrick covered the peach epidermis of his face in stone-coloured make-up. He gazed into his own eyes through his hand-sized magnetic mirror, catching a glimpse of the swelling, discoloured bruise on his cheek. The grey, graveyard paint was thick and dense, especially when layered on, so Patrick hurried to cake over the shiner on his face till it disappeared into his demon flesh.
It was Halloween night, the celebration on the campus through illicit drugs and casual sex; the most likely night security would be called to investigate an overdose or a rape. Patrick had finished his face, confident the bruise was entirely absorbed from sight. He thought about who had left him with the mark he so embarrassedly hid and then about his friend J.P who was on duty until 2 A.M. J.P was Patrick’s oldest friend from home, a place that now felt achingly far and dreamlike.
Any inklings of the Halloween spirit of fun had bled from Patrick’s soul entirely, until he caught movement in the mirror that wasn’t his. He peered hard and the movement continued, then he set the mirror down on its reflective surface, his painted face too horrifying once the hallucinations had taken hold.
He sat on the edge of his mattress and saw that the fan on his dorm room dresser had become a vulture – a hideous bird with leathery, bumpy skin in the places uncovered by black, shedding feathers. He panicked when he heard the shrill sound of air thinly escaping and then realized it was giggling coming from his throat. The vulture’s wings flapped ferociously, though it stayed perched where it had first appeared. Patrick could feel hot tears streaming down and dripping off of his face and heard his giggles become loud, hyena-like cackles.
The walls had started moving – slithering. There at first seemed a pixelated pattern of black and gold, weaving upward, behind Patrick’s dresser. Those pixels were then recognized as scales; a bed of striped, gold and black snakes, or at least their bodies, made up the brick divider. He thought for a moment the vulture had shrieked but then placed the noise as his own.
The shot glass at his bedside was a still a shot glass, and it still appeared full with pure agave tequila. He took it and knocked it back past his lips but didn’t taste anything or feel anything. The snakes were getting bigger.
Trembling, he made himself another drink, pouring more onto his sheets and the tiled floor than into the glass. He shot it back and tasted the pungent burning of the liquor. His breathing was easier.
A pink fuzzy teddy bear, with suction cups instead of limbs, appeared and starting swelling to twice its size; Patrick couldn’t tell what object it had been before. He took a shot straight from the bottle and it choked him as it went down. The room started to spin, and as it did the walls went back to their original off white coat of paint and the vulture was a fan again. Patrick closed one eye and the room didn’t spin as much. The snakes, the vulture, and teddy bear reappeared. He had double vision: the way his room had been spun around him, while the creatures stayed put on the spot. He slurped another shot from the bottle.
***
It was a quarter hour past midnight when the voice of Pierre, the on campus security guard, buzzed over J.P’s walkie-talkie. He reported the students in the Mackenzie dorm, who had been partying loudly from seven-thirty and had been warned four times about the noise, had finally cleared out, presumably to head to the bars in town. J.P felt himself relax upon hearing this and resumed his schoolwork: Machiavelli’s The Prince for his political science elective. This annually chaotic night of Halloween had fallen on a Tuesday when the bars didn’t charge cover and most of the students didn’t have, or were willing to skip, morning classes the next day. Some of the undergrads even dared attend class hung-over or bereft of any sleep. J.P himself had never tried that and rarely went out, especially on weekdays.
J.P’s dorm room was twice the size of the other students’, as was standard for Residence Assistants. With the addition of the living room, its shape was more of a concave polygon than a square or rectangle. The walls shared the same dull cream shade as the other dorms, broken only by four windows and a single twelve-inch by eight-inch movie poster, which J.P’s friends had insisted he buy. At that moment the space seemed comfortably placid: perfect for studying with only the small nagging duty of the two-way radio.
J.P then heard the gravely static from his walkie-talkie begin to growl: more complaints from Mackenzie. J.P picked up the walkie-talkie and spoke into it: “I’m close to Mac; I’ll go and see what’s up.” He stood from his desk, clipped the radio to his belt and walked into the night.
Opening the east-wing exit of the Tupper dorm, J.P could see his breath in the late October air. He pulled the hood of his sweater over the baseball cap that he wore habitually, even at formal occasions.
He began to make his round of the campus.
He at first dismissed the faint screaming he distantly heard as the well-sauced crowds on their way to The Long Face. But then, much closer to Mackenzie, the scream had become more urgent. And J.P regrettably recognized the source. Not two-dozen yards from the Mackenzie dorm, the voice was traced to a flailing slight figure in the dark. J.P stopped, not knowing what to say, and waited to be seen.
“Salut, Jean-Paul” the drunken shadow addressed him.
“It’s quiet hours, Patrick” J.P spoke in a familiar but hostile tone.
“Well…” Patrick hiccupped. “I better respect those…or else you’ll kick me out and move me to another dorm, won’t you?”
“No” J.P said. “You’ll be kicked out of res for good.”
“And I’ll –” Patrick bit back a harsh belch “– have to find a place off campus.”
“We wouldn’t care what you did then. You could drop out and go back home, for all we care.”
“We?” Patrick repeated in an incredulous voice. “You’ve worked for those pricks for what, two months, and all the sudden you and them are ‘we’ and me I’m ‘them’?”
J.P stared at Patrick like a statue of stone. “Do you need me to take you to the drunk tank?”
“I’m good” Patrick laughed. “Just a little of the tequila” he pronounced tequila in a mock-Latino accent.
“You’re still paying for that ninety dollar booze instead of saving it for your student loan?”
Patrick didn’t respond to this but wandered dizzily before collapsing into a slouched sitting position on the grass and an orange bed of leaves. His face now visible in the moonlight, J.P. could see Patrick’s stone-coloured paint. His leering countenance, unnaturally coloured and textured by the make-up, startled J.P.
“Do you want me to apologize?” J.P said, desperate to either get away or end the silence.
“Oh that’s funny; I thought you’d want me to apologize, you always seem to be asking for me to say sorry for how I live.”
“How you live?” J.P shouted. “You were breaking all the rules of living in residence! What was I supposed to do?”
“You weren’t supposed to do anything” Patrick said, with miraculous clarity for his state. “No one would’ve caught me, and you wouldn’t have caught me if you hadn’t told them when I was getting high.”
“Then you shouldn’t have told me about it – I told you back home before you got here that I was an R.A, that I couldn’t look the other way if you were up to your smoking and whoring around. That things here aren’t going to be like they were at home.”
“This is a fucking party school, man…what do you mean things are different? All I’m doing is having a good time like this school is all about.”
“You were selling drugs to first years!”
“Oh fuck off, it’s not like I was checking their IDs, I didn’t care what year they were in.”
J.P. opened his mouth to speak but then closed it, his lips ballooning with the repressed, angry dialogue. A thread of vapour thinly escaped into the evening mist.
Uncrossing his arms, J.P placed his hands at his sides, paced around in a tiny circle then faced his former friend. “Please appreciate this: If I had told them everything I knew, you could have gotten a lot worse. Shit, you’d have been arrested! I called it in that you were smoking pot in res to give you a wake-up call. And I needed to do it. It was the right thing to…” J.P stopped, realizing Patrick wasn’t listening but instead looking at nothing. It was apparent he wasn’t staring off idly from his eyes, which moved as if following something invisible flying close to his face. J.P, recognizing what this was, let his arms drop and dangle by his hips, more disappointed than surprised. “Oh my God. You’re fucking stoned too.”
Patrick lifted his hand up in front of his line of sight as though impersonating some deranged mime. “Were you about to say it was the right thing to do to intentionally walk in on me when I was smoking up?”
J.P shrugged in a vicious manner that betrayed his ill temper. “What does is even matter?”
“You didn’t do it ’cause it was the right thing to do,” Patrick yelled, again lapsing into sudden sobriety. “You did it for your job!”
“Doing the right thing for the campus is my job.”
“No, your job, with all the other R.A’s is to be a hard-ass narc! And you didn’t do it for me or to-to keep people safe. You knew I smoked pot and-and ’shrooms and that I sold them since high school. The only reason you did it was so you could look tough for your boss and maybe uh…go up the ladder.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yeah? Well maybe you were worried I’d get caught by somebody else and then everybody – you know, since everybody knows we were friends from back home – everybody would start wondering why you conveniently didn’t know about it. Why you didn’t say anything about me. Maybe you were w-worried they wouldn’t hire you b-” Patrick ate another belch “back for next year…seeing as you looked the other way while I was selling drugs to first years!”
J.P had become a statue again but without the judgmental air from before. He took his glasses from his nose and ears and rubbed away the fog that had accumulated on the lenses with the cloth of his shirt. A cold loneliness hardened deep within his chest; he reflected sadly on how he didn’t really know his oldest friend as well as he had thought he had.
Patrick pulled the chilled blades of grass out of the ground with his fingertips. “I didn’t get my student bursary…” He said with his head down watching his fingers pluck away at the lawn and scan the fallen, yellowed maple leaves. “I don’t have enough money for tuition fees for next semester…or for res.”
J.P sighed audibly but evenly. “Well, maybe you can pay it with the money you get from selling mushrooms,” He said cruelly.
A voice buzzed from the side of J.P’s waist. Beth, the head R.A, asked if he had seen to the complaints in Mackenzie and if he was finished his round. “I’m almost finished” J.P said into the box of grinding static. “The guy at Mac making all the fuss has gone to bed.” He concluded pointedly, though Patrick still had his head hanging over the grass.
J.P turned and walked off to complete his circling of the campus but stopped, hearing: “I would have enough if the guys from Murphy’s didn’t want their cut.”
The chilling dampness in J.P’s chest became a burning. He looked down at his friend anxiously.
“What? What people at Murphy’s?”
“People I got the ’shrooms from, they didn’t mention it the first time I bought from them…”
“No, you’re joking.”
“But when I go there the second time…they say I owe them a percentage of what I sold, told me I need to pay them back twice with what I made last time…”
“This is a joke!”
“…and what I make this time around.”
“Goddammit, Patrick, that isn’t funny.”
“I know it isn’t…”
“Jesus.”
J.P paced around in a wider circle this time. “You must know, right? You know what you’ve…you know who those people are.”
“That’s why I went to them.”
“So you could make more money?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Do you realize what’ll happen to you when they don’t get their money? Do you realize what will happen if you stop buying from them and start going to someone else?”
Patrick snorted: “Or what’ll happen when they find out I smoked half of what they gave me and spent the rest.”
“What the fuck, dude?! This isn’t funny; they’ve been in this town for decades. They’re going to kill you.”
“Well maybe someone should do the right thing.” Patrick had resumed his grim stare of stone up at J.P.
“Fuck you,” he replied and looked away.
“Just what I…what I thought.”
The walkie-talkie then blared gravely, the voice on the other end demanding to know where J.P was. “In a minute!” he shouted at an insubordinate volume before spinning the radio’s dial down to mute. “Why don’t you just call your dad, ask him for money?” J.P said, resuming his focus to Patrick. “Your family’s rich.”
“We’re not rich.”
“Well you’re richer than my old man. I’m on student loan too, you know, and even then I need this ‘narc’ job. You can call home and get help, I can’t.”
“My mom and dad have already paid for too much, I’m not asking them for more.”
“Jesus! Just pay them at Murphy’s what-ever you have and call home so you can get off your ass” J.P could now not stand still. He wiped at his lips though they were in need of moisture. “I got to go.”
“You’re not going to call the cops…I mean, for my sake, I mean?” Patrick said in what J.P perceived as sarcasm.
“The only reason why I’d call the cops is to report a student holding drugs on campus! And if you make me out to be a liar by not going to bed now, that’s just what I’ll do.”
***
J.P’s eyes and pencil lead were on the three-hundred-and-third page of his Cantrell Limited textbook when he caught two uniformed cops, one male one female, entering the library lounge. “Shit” he muttered; they were close enough for J.P to assume they were looking for him. The male officer, young and dense-looking, flipped a flat thumbnail sized piece of paper between glances at J.P. J.P laid his pencil in the crease of his book, sat up and smiled coolly at the officers.
“What’s good?” he said automatically.
“The note on your door said you were at the library” the male officer said plainly, putting the thumbnail photo in his pocket.
The female officer, who seemed older and more wary by the condition of her face, spoke more purposefully: “Beth at the residence office said you know Patrick. Patrick DuVall?”
J.P’s eyes were the only part of him that moved as he glanced slowly down at his homework and then returned them to the officer. “That’s right,” he said in a more candid tone.
“Have you seen him recently?” she continued. Her counterpart stood rather stupidly with his unoccupied arms hanging at either side. She did not take out a notepad or pen either but seemed poised above her witness. J.P felt a burning reappear in his chest. He stayed sitting in his chair.
“No. I mean, not really. I-I haven’t seen him since Halloween.”
“You saw him on October 31st? During the day or the night?”
“The night.”
“And you’ve had no contact with him since then? No calls? No messages?”
“No, no” he urged quietly, lowering his voice with each word. “I-I haven’t heard from him since that night.”
“Did he mention anything about leaving? Maybe going on a vacation?”
“Uh, no but he said something about not having enough money for next semester. Maybe he went home.”
“Mmm, no, his parents were the ones who called a missing person’s report. They couldn’t get a hold of him on his cellphone or campus extension for three days and the registrar’s office confirms he hasn’t withdrawn from the program. We had security open his dorm room and it doesn’t look like he’s been there in days.”
“How can you tell, he’s a first year.”
The male officer chuckled benignly, the first sign of life since his partner had spoken. The female officer smiled and sniffed loudly as if to clear her nose through to her sinuses. “We found an open alcohol container with some still in it and a mess on the floor and a stain on the unmade bed.”
J.P lost the smile on his face with little effort. The female officer continued: “What else did you and Patrick talk about on the night you last saw him?”
“Uh, I don’t know, I had to tell him to go back to his room – he was drunk and disturbing the other residents.”
“Really? This was a week ago?”
“Yes.”
“Well then why didn’t you report it?”
J.P said nothing but squinted and shook his head.
“We looked at the log sheets for residence in the last two weeks and we didn’t see anything about Patrick written there.”
“I-I didn’t want to get him into any more trouble” J.P responded, unable to hide his contempt for her drilling. “He had already been moved from another residence for smoking in his room.”
She paused for a beat, still poised over him.
“Smoking marijuana?”
“Yes.”
“Which R.A reported him to residence?”
“Me.”
“When was this?”
“Late September.”
“Do you know why residence didn’t report him to police?”
“Well that was decided above me, so you’d have to talk to them.”
“Do you know if he was involved in any other illegal activities? Anything that may have put him in danger?”
J.P paused remembering the mushrooms Patrick had sold; the five ounces of weed he’d pushed for weeks at John F. Kennedy High; the conversation they had about Murphy’s; about getting their cut, the night Patrick wore the face of stone demon. The fever in his chest flared back up but then settled, and it cooled almost completely when he answered the officer’s question with a decided no.
“Any other reasons you can think of why Patrick’s might have left?”
“None.”
The two officers thanked him for his time and left rough paper cards bearing their unit and phone numbers. J.P spent the late afternoon into the early evening reading forty more pages of his textbook, without retaining a single word.
***
Not two days had passed after the interrogation in the library when J.P walked past the front door into Murphy’s. The bar was placed on the north side of King right next to the intersection of that street and College, the axis of the entire borough of the town. The building encasing the tavern and the loitering repugnance it attracted had changed ownership and namesakes almost annually for the last five years. It had also been burned down twice and then rebuilt under equally suspicious circumstances.
The bar was nearly empty, which wasn’t surprising since the day had not even had the chance to darken yet. J.P saw two men at the pool table, both white, clad in blue jeans, middle-aged, and soft. They were not the types J.P had come there to find.
He sat on one of the wooden stools and felt it creak under him weakly. A skinny and pale waitress, wearing a tank top revealing artificial cleavage, rambled over to where he laid his forearms on the bar. Baring a crooked and incomplete set of teeth, assumedly to express a smile, she asked what he wanted to order. J.P, in an intentionally unyielding voice, requested a shot of whiskey. She nodded then strutted over to the bottles and selected a Canadian rye. Pouring it, she yelled across the room to the other men in a joking manner and spilled some of the liquor in the process.
The shot placed by his elbow, he picked it up with all five fingers of his hand and swallowed it entirely. The sweet potency flooded his sinuses and palate at once and his eyes filled with tears. He started wheezing to clear his throat of the offending liquid. The bartender looked over from the other end but didn’t speak. When asked if he wanted another, J.P reluctantly requested one but with ice and ginger ale.
The two men eventually left after four games of pool. No significant crowd entered the bar, just rough-looking couples and sad-faced men, all old and irrelevant. The shaded, barred windows still revealed daylight outside, though it began to flee, leaving an amber hue beyond the doorway. The ice in J.P’s drink had melted after he’d nursed it far too long. The condensation lapped pools around the bottom of the tumbler.
The waitress shot him a hard look through her small black eyes and asked if he wanted another.
“No thanks” he said, regaining some of his courage.
“What do you want then?”
This was what J.P had come for. “I’m meeting someone” he spoke slowly. “Patrick DuVall, maybe you’ve heard of him?”
“No. Why? Does he work here?”
“Something like that, except he doesn’t work here, right?”
“What? What’s wrong? Are you going to be trouble?”
J.P thought about this but kept his eyes to hers so as not to lose any ground. “I wouldn’t be any more trouble than what comes through this bar. My friend’s been missing.”
The bartender twitched her lips, betraying deep inner workings like the sound of gears from a clock. She broke the stare, picked up the glass, a fifth full of melted ice and left over rye, and wiped away the pools of water.
“Maybe you go to the police, maybe you leave it alone.” She walked away with J.P’s incomplete drink and busied herself at the other end. J.P waited where he was, his attention pricked by her last comment but she paid him no mind. Defeated, he slumped off the barstool, letting his feet hit the wooden planks that made up the uneven floor. An inch away from the first door before the last door out, he heard the scuttling of chair legs. He looked to his side and saw the room was vacant besides the bartender, but deep in the shadowed corner, he could make out movement. A tall, bearded man had stood up. Before the man could turn his head and looked into J.P’s eyes, J.P had manoeuvred past the two doors onto King Street.
The neon storefronts of the fast food venues were lit then. J.P didn’t move from the steps of Murphy’s, allowing a tug-of-war between his sense and his testosterone to decide whether to re-enter or walk back to campus. Before taking a step in either direction he heard sirens; the flashing colours of a speeding ambulance flew by. The chorus of screaming alarms didn’t fade as two squad cars raced after it. J.P decided to call it a night.
Crossing the bridge connecting the town to the campus, J.P saw a gathering around the iron arches looking down warily into the river. J.P knew none of the crowd but approached to inquire about their fixation with the rushing water underneath. A body had been found washed up on the shore.
***
Patrick Duvall was found eighty kilometres from the bridge. The news of a drowned student infected the dorms like a flu, and some mistakenly believed they might see the police scene from the arches.
Chips of the grey paint still clung from his lifeless face when he was zipped into the black body bag. There were no immediate signs of a struggle, evident by the unscathed condition of his hands. It was deemed unofficially to be another unfortunate reoccurrence of a student drinking too much, carelessly wandering to the bridge, and then falling off. Beth at the residence office shook her head; she had seen this before too many times.
Though it wasn’t on his shift of duty, J.P volunteered to clear out Patrick’s belongings from Mackenzie. Mister and Missus DuVall were driving to the campus the very next day to collect their son and his property was to be kept in storage until they requested it.
Within the one-hundred-and-twenty square feet of the room, Patrick had squirreled away more material memories of his two months at university than J.P had in his fourteen: purple shirts bearing the school chant, a coupon for a pint, a hand-painted banner from frosh (seven days of the prior year J.P would rather have skipped), a black book for phone numbers and e-mails, already filled. J.P leafed through the pages and found one piece of bounded canvas not covered with names and numbers but the handwriting of a letter. J.P’s chest shook from his firing heartbeat as he read it:
​
I am so deeply sorry,
I know that what I am about to do is out of unforgivable weakness. It is no one’s fault but my own. I have gotten involved with the wrong people and am already a dead man. I have been beaten on and threatened to pay but I don’t have anything and would rather die at my own hands then have you bear the same burden I have put on my back. I would rather this than you learn the shame of what I became involved in. But still I can’t keep secrets from you, Mom and Dad, which I guess is why I’m writing this. Don’t search any further into this. The people who have led me to this are too powerful and too dangerous. I want you to be safe and happy. Know that I did try to find help but didn’t want to put anyone else in danger.
I love you,
Patrick
J.P read this four times over, fixating on every sentence, imagining Patrick’s voice each time in his head. He attempted a fifth reading but stopped halfway before tearing it out from the spine and ripping it asunder. He placed the black book in the plastic bin with the other junk, leaving the shreds of paper on the cold tiled floor.