Men in Gray Suits

By Adicus Garton

I realized that I was looking at my hands, and that the movie had stopped.  I looked around, but nothing had changed.  I’m sure somewhere another man had sat down in the theater.  I sighed.  To the right of me sat a man in a gray suit, with brown hair, mid-30s, with a deep, oozing gash in his face, from eye to throat.  He couldn’t see me.  On the other side of me sat a man.  He, too, was looking at his hands.  I cleared my throat.  He blinked at his hands, then looked up at me.  He too had brown hair.  No gash, but his suit, the same color as mine, had a brown crusted mass a few centimeters in breadth around a black hole.  It had stopped oozing millions of years ago.

     He said nothing, and looked back up to the screen.  I, too, looked up.

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A man wearing a gray suit stood in a doorway.  He walked into the room, smoking a cigarette, the smoke trailing around him like he was Moses.  Maybe he thought he was.

     Behind him came three others.  In the moonlight coming through plate-glass doors, they all looked like characters from a 40s gangster movie.  Gene, balding, always dressed like an overgrown child, wearing overalls.  His little brother, Randy, his bitter brother, wearing a red jumpsuit that looked purple at night.  His teeth were almost points, for reasons none of us ever understood.  Lastly walked in Juss.  The boss.

     Juss stood there, like Jesus Christ.  God spoke to Juss, but the things He said, he never said.  His overcoat hung heavy.  It had been raining.  The man wondered if the rain could actually touch Juss, or if he faked it to seem normal.

They said nothing to each other.  They had planned this for months.  Well, three of them had.  Gene would rather play with Juss’s children in the backyard, but muscle didn’t need to be smart.  Just big.  Juss looked around, and everything met his approval.  This was good; sometimes things didn’t meet his approval.  Then things got ugly.  Bloody.

     The hallway stretched away from the doors; it grew darker as they walked.  At the end, a security guard lay in a pool of his own life and waste.  In the absence of light, the sticky mess looked black, like the pupils of a martyr.  They all walked around him, and Juss patted the man in the gray suit on the back. 

     Some of the audience shifted in their seats.  One man three rows in front of me:  he screamed quickly and stood up, but others grabbed him and pulled him back down.  He went silent.

     They all walked into the antechamber.  Gene and Randy quickly walked away, and they made sounds like monkeys in the distance.  Juss walked to the office door and opened it, sparing one last glance at the man in the gray suit.  He didn’t trust him; the look in his eyes said as much.  Sometimes he acted on it.  This time he didn’t.

     The man in the gray suit turned and walked into the cathedral.  Only his smoke remained in the antechamber. 

     In the cathedral, the only light came through the stained-glass windows.  The man walked up the aisles of pews.  In some of them, bibles and hymnals were sitting in stacks.  Dust lay in lazily shifting columns of moonlight.  The man in the gray suit took the last puff off his cigarette and put it down on the ground.  He crushed it and continued walking up to the altar.  He bowed his head, crossed himself, and stepped up onto it. 

     The cross was giant.  Only an eight-meter Christ could have fit on it.  The man wasn’t looking for Christ, though.  He walked up to the cross and began pulling it, trying to lift it the three inches it required to come up out of its support and come tumbling down.  He hefted and hefted, wondering why Gene wasn’t here helping him.  Then he felt it come loose and he dropped it, jumping out of the way. 

     It crashed down and landed on its side, not falling over somehow.  It reminded the man of his wife, lying seductively on the bed.  At that thought, he reached inside his suit and pulled out his cigarette tin.  He opened it, “Shit,” and remembered.

     Someone in the audience laughed.  “You forgot to buy cigarettes, you dumb FUCK!” 

     Then screams could be heard.  The man turned around, forgetting his shortage of cigarettes.  Gunshots and more screams.  The door to the cathedral puffed in a bit, and in the thick-colored light, thicker smoke rolled in from under the door.  In the curves and wisps, the man could almost see faces and arms and legs.  He watched it approach, and when it overtook him, he turned back to the cross.  Now it was smaller, maybe only three meters long.  And it was occupied.

     An archbishop lay on the cross, nails like railroad spikes driven through his hands and his feet.  His ornate red-and-white costume spattered with black blood.  Somehow, his hat remained on his head.  The man looked at the archbishop, and the archbishop muttered something, blood coming from both his eyes and the corners of his mouth. 

     The man in the gray suit knelt down to hear what the archbishop said.  “Madre.  Madre, ayúdame.  Madre!”  The archbishop screamed and his head began twitching, blood sputtering all over the man’s gray pants.

     I fought the urge to look down at my own pants.  Not everyone was as successful as me.

     The man wrapped his hands around the archbishop’s neck and began squeezing.  Blood sputtered, and sounds like a dog vomiting came from inside the archbishop.  Then the archbishop’s eyes faded, and the man heard a voice.  He jumped up and spun around in one move.  There was nothing else in the room but the smoke.

     “Look for an eyepatch, mister.  Or look for a false limb.  You’ll find what you need if you just look for something on him that is not quite right.  And don’t forget the sword, mister.  You won’t go nowhere without that sword.”

     The man looked around, his mouth gaping like a fish’s.  Then that look came over his eyes.  And he knelt back down in front of the archbishop and began feeling around on him.

     With me, it was a glass eye.

     The man eventually found a gold shark’s tooth in the archbishop’s mouth.  It was hard to find, because the mouth was full of blood.  The man pulled the tooth out with relative ease, and pocketed it.  He would deal with that part later.  Then he began looking for the sword, but found only a pouch, like a Crown Royal bag.  He opened it and pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a matchbox.  A smile fell on his face like thick light.

     He lit up, but instead of rising, the smoke fell to the floor where it mingled with that strange smoke from under the door.

     “No!  Don’t smoke in the church.  Don’t!”  A newcomer screamed at the screen.  He waved his hands, as if the man in the gray suit could hear him.  Only we could hear him. 

     Screamers were always newcomers.

     The smoke, sometimes orange, sometimes green, more often the color of sewage, continued up the altar, splitting around the man’s legs like the soft water of a bubbly spring somewhere in the mountains.

     The man had forgotten about the sword.  The cigarette was the best he’d ever had.  In all his life, he couldn’t remember a single time he’d ever taken a cigarette off of a dead man.

     I could.

     The man in the gray suit stepped down from the altar, wading through the smoke, and opened the door to the cathedral.  He stepped out, leaving only the trail of smoke, and the sword, behind.

     I began looking at my hands.  I could still feel the archbishop’s neck.  Unlike anything else in the world, strangling a man.  I had strangled only three men in my life, but the archbishop was the most vivid.  The sounds in his throat, the burning in my own, like a dream we shared for a moment.  The blood from his mouth on my hands.  Nothing like it in the world.  When I looked back up to the movie screen, it was different.  The man in the gray suit was gone.  Or, we couldn’t see him yet.

     Teressa was looking around the vacant living room.  Her perfect schoolgirl outfit had long since stopped looking perfect.  It was covered in dried blood and dried shit.  Her blonde hair, now brown and matted with, hung down in her face.  She looked like a teenager.

     She was a teenager, at least legally.  But what she’d seen that day, what she’d done, had made her someone far older.  It had pushed her that much closer to her own end.  Because children never die.  They age their eighty-years in forty seconds if need be, but children never die.

     She looked back down the hallway that led to the basement, that led to the circle.  The circle where the man in the gray suit had put on the face of Jehovah.  The circle where her dreams had come to life.  Where her nightmares waited.

     She thought of hiding in the closet.

     I reached up and felt the raised, swollen flesh that was my neck.  I hid in that closet once.  When I opened the door, I was here in the theatre.  Not this time, though.

     She opened the door and a four-year-old body wearing a red hat unrolled.  Well, he had been a four-year-old boy.  Shit, Teressa, thought.  She’d forgotten about the dead boy, Calvin or Clarence, or something.  His dreams weren’t that nice, either.  She shoved him back inside and pushed the door shut.  The walls of the living room were covered in blood, but unlike hers, it was fresh.  She ran into the kitchen and opened drawers, looking for knives, or skewers, or anything. 

     She found nothing.  She opened the oven, and sitting inside was a cast-iron skillet.  It still had the cold remnants of cornbread inside.  Teressa laughed, forgetting her predicament and scooped the cornbread inside her mouth, coughing and spitting as she ate.  The fucker.  He’d forgotten about food, and how sometimes, she liked to eat.  That’s okay, she thought.  Then she brushed the rest back out into the floor. 

     The door opened in the living room; she could hear the scabs breaking away.  Teressa began breathing fast, as the footsteps approached from the other side of the door.  She didn’t know what to do.  The footsteps stopped.  “What the fuck?” came from the other side of the door, in the man’s quiet voice.  The skillet hung by her side like a sword.  The door opened, and Teressa threw the cast-iron skillet as hard as she could, hoping he wasn’t wearing the mask, hoping it wouldn’t save him.

Teressa didn’t know about the mask.  It wasn’t the face of God; it was just my face.  I put it on, demanding every time that the dream would change, and it did.  It was different every time, but my face was the same.  I was the same.

     The man in the gray suit crumpled to the floor, the mask broken in half, and the cast-iron skillet landed upside-down.  Teressa screamed and screamed and screamed and began kicking the body, not knowing that his brain had already told his heart to stop.

     The screen blurred.  Someone yelled, “Bitch!”  in a playful manner.  Newcomers could be playful too.  Then the screen went white and men in gray suits began looking around, just like they always did.  No one paid any attention to the man in the gray suit that opened one of the doors at the end of the aisles of seats.  His face looked like a reflection in a broken mirror.  He walked in, rubbing his cracked, swollen face, and looked for a seat. 

     I just looked up at the screen, wondering briefly about what had come of Teressa, and waited for the next one to start.

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