The Number of the Days
© 1994 by Jemiah Jefferson

Author's Note: This is a story from my archives, which I wrote in the summer and fall of 1994. I have re-edited it slightly, where I saw it was needed. The dialogue in Portuguese may be missing some diacritic marks; sorry.

He liked watching women make up beds.

It went beyond the purely domestic, of course; it wasn't the fact that they were cleaning up after him that gave him the pleasure. It was the act itself, perhaps it brought up memories of Mum or whatever, the reconstruction of a bed. Every step had its own joy, from the manipulation of the fitted sheet, to the folding of upper sheets, sheathing pillows in fresh linen, the sonorous erotism of the plumping of the duvet.

It was cold and grey out when he woke in the room at the Hotel Cunoel; his body kicked him into wakefulness without his conscious consent. Beside him his lover Vivian slept on, her face dredged in the pillow. He could tell by the color of her eyelids that she would wake up hung over.

A return to sleep seemed a remote option. He got up, washed, and picked out a shirt and the least dirty pair of pants from the pile, pulling them half-painfully over his skinny bones. Rubbing his cheek he went up to the roof of the hotel for a first bitter cigarette. The rain had not yet begun. Away to his left smokestacks exhaled smudges of dark brown into the lowering sky. Acid rain today then, it would be, a day inside with Pedro and the freaks, drinking too much rum and making up card games. Poison in the gutters; a rain that stung the eyes if you looked up into it. His chest ached. He drew harder on the cigarette and rubbed his hand, palm down, across the front of his shirt. Perhaps he should send away for the little skin patches that leached nicotine straight into the bloodstream. He could wear ten of them, in a double line down his face. He checked his watch; today was the twenty-third.

He went back to the room. Vivian was gone and the cleaning girl was there, wading through their piles of things on the floor. The girl looked up and smiled at him, smoothing back the tendrils of fuzzy hair that escaped her ponytail. "Bom dia," he said to her.

She replied the same. She was facing away from him now. She wore the standard blue uniform and her legs were bare, covered in rough-and- tumble scars,her ankles disappearing into thick industrial shoes. "So what's your name?" he asked her, circling to get a glimpse of her expression.

 "Me?" She looked up and blushed and smiled some more. "Theresa."

"Theresa, eh?"

"And you are Nick."

"Yeah." He couldn't stop nodding like a complete fool. "Er,sorry the room is such a mess."

Her forehead corrugated. "Pode repetir?" she said. "Your accent..."

"Never mind, it's nothing, de nada." He waved his hand. It was too early in the morning to try and be fluent. He smiled and nodded some more, feeling like he was making a Japanese business deal, and when she finally began to laugh out loud at him, he said, "Ate logo, Theresa," and backed out the door. She replied until next time, ate proxima. He was a buffoon and even the little girls knew it.

He strolled to the cafe-bar at the end of the block, rubbing his hands together against the cold. Viv was there with Pedro and Ricky and that one bloke whose name he could never remember, playing dominoes and already most of the way down a pitcher of coffee with heavy cream and bad scotch. "Where did you go?" asked Vivian, her annoyance thinly veiled with boredom.

"Cigarette."

"You didn't smoke the last one, did you?"

Nick bent over her and kissed her on the cheek. "I did. I'm sorry. I'll go and get more."

"Get real cigarettes this time, not those shitty American ones." She didn't look at him, arranging a rectangle of chipped white celluloid with her tattooed fingers.

He thought to himself that he liked Pall Malls; the air outside was even colder when he went out the first time. He went back to the hotel to get a jacket. Theresa was finishing the bed when he opened the door, her brown plump arm sweeping out to smooth down the cover; and he felt something within him twang. When he was a kid he would have had a stiff one right then and there, but those times of his body were long, long gone. Somehow this invisible sensation was far more painful.

He kept his eye on her as he got his suit jacket out of the closet, and she turned her head around a few times, watching him watching her. She took the rubber band from her hair and ran her fingers through it, adjusting the thick brown cottony mass onto her neck and shoulders, her eyes bright as she frankly sized him up. He found himself backing down. The jacket settled itself over his shoulders and he left the room without saying anything.

In the afternoon Nick and Viv changed cafe-bars; they settled in a booth so far in the back of the place that they were cast in shadows. In a lot of places like this they had first gotten together, often not talking to each other for days but staring at each other across a familiar formica tabletop landscape. They shared a plate of eggs with red salsa and rice. "How's your stomach?" Nick asked.

"It could be happier, but, you know, I should eat something."

"What time is it?"

She looked at her huge cheap gold men's watch. "We have about an hour and a half," she said. She looked at him from under her shag bangs. "Do you really need it today?"

"I dunno," said Nick to his eggs. "I thought I'd figure it out when we got there."

"Why don't we skip it today?"

"Do you feel like skipping it?" He looked up, the corners of his mouth turned down as usual. "You might feel like skipping it now but I bet you'll want it tonight. Tonight you'd regret skipping it."

"I regret a lot of things, Nick." She looked out the window. The rain had started, a thick downpour that coated the surface of the glass. "Shit, look at that, it's brown."

"It's like that everywhere," he said. He sighed and picked his nose. "I'm not much good, am I?"

"You got the right cigarettes this time." She picked up his long and skeletal hand and kissed the back of it, then returned to the rice and eggs.

"My arms hurt," he said, shaking his head. "I think I need it ... I just want to break down. I mean to hell with the money. To hell with the world. I just want my bloody opiates." He looked at her; she was eating, unheeding. Her hands were fatter than his, as was her face. She had never really stopped eating like he had. He smiled out the window, chin in hand. "Once a bloody junkie, always a bloody junkie."

"Shut up, Nick."

"Why don't we have sex?" he wondered.

"Because you never want to." Her eyes were assuming that animal glaze of annoyance again; she was one of the most irritable people he'd ever known, as well as loving and consuming and twisted.

"I never want to? Huh." He considered this, and the rain outside, and the aftertaste of the good salsa and egg yolks on his palate.

"Do you want the fucking junk or don't you? We have to leave soon if you do."

"Yeaaaaaahhhhh," he agreed in a very long sigh.

"Eat."

"I'll only throw it up."

He had lost his car in the big bust seven months ago. It wasn't that great a car, but it was one he had brought with him from Britain and it had a lot of stains and memories that were dear to him. The pigs had swiped it; and to add insult to injury threatened to deport him unless he promised to go rehab immediately. Now that he remembered it, he was the one who had talked Vivian into rehab with him.

The taxi ride to the clinic across town was a realist canvas by some Dutchman with an eye for the macabre; two melancholy skeletons, the female one with the Brady- Bunch-mom haircut in a Marcel Marceau striped turtleneck and jeans and tattoos, and the male in head-to-toe black polyester, like a used-car salesman by the shores of the river Styx. They got to the clinic and queued up with the rest of the sorry characters; they were still like the royals standing in line for the dole. Nick and Vivian were pretty much the only ones who'd had a wash in the last few days. The middle-aged woman with chains on her eyeglasses who gave them their doses reminded Nick to call his probation officer and then, as an afterthought, asked if he'd written anything lately.

In the room at the Hotel Cunoel they unwrapped their individual clean needles -- Viv laughed something about clean needles being as intimate as watching your boyfriend masturbate in a chair across the room -- and had their methadone shots. Before too much of it had hit Nick made sure to break the syringes so that they wouldn't be tempted to use them over again.

Vivian turned on the TV, sound turned off, and a Joy Division tape, and crawled onto the bed beside her lover. His eyes were misty and peaceful. "It's so weak," he remarked, his voice sounding like it came from a megaphone stuffed with styrofoam.

"It's OK," she said. She put out her hand to touch his face. "You want to fuck?"

"I want to," he said sorrowfully.

They fell asleep before the evening news came on.

Theresa came in while Nick was still in bed. She excused herself with many desculpes and offered to come back later; but Nick said, sliding off the bed, "No, I really should be getting up, no, really."

She averted her eyes until after he'd put some clothes on his white, birdy body, and then she moved to remake the bed. Nick moved some books and CDs off the chair and sat in it, rummaging for a smoke. "So what do you do when you aren't here?" he said, enunciating so that she could understand him.

"I ... have friends," she said. "We listen? -- to music. Go to clubs."

"No boyfriend?"

She shook her head no, then turned and looked at him rather smolderingly. He felt heat rise violently into his face and he wrapped his arm around his chest and covered his cheek with his hand. "How old are you?" he asked her.

"Dezanove..."

Nineteen. Shit. He had no right at all even think about it. Neither did she; he knew he looked every second of thirty-three, and then some. But it didn't matter really, and they both knew it. She went back to tucking in the sheets.

He met Viv down in the cafe-bar later. Her honey-colored skin shone translucent in the filtered sunlight; she looked wonderful in the sun, he had to admit. "Hey Nick, I have an idea," she said, pouring him a glass from the pitcher of galão. "Why don't we go and visit my mother?"

"Last time we visited your mother, Vivian my love, she threw me out." Nick sipped at his coffee. They had been just a little bit too much like Sid and Nancy, carbon-colored vampires lurching with drink and junk. Nick may have said something really foully sexual, he didn't remember; all he remembered was Vivian arguing in slurred Portuguese and then joining him on the street outside the neat suburban house, saying, "Good going, Einstein."

"But we're clean now. It'll be fun. She misses me."

"I don't know about you, but I'm not clean." He scraped his chair across the floor to hide himself in the shade. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure." She was gobbling chips and ketchup.

"Do you want other blokes? I mean besides me?"

She looked blank. "Of course," she said.

"Really? Would you screw them?"

"That depends." She smirked a bit. "Why?"

"I just noticed this young girl... I think she wants me."

"Do you want to screw her?" asked Viv. She gave a little shrug.

"What if I did?"

She shrugged again. "Whatever," she said. "As long as you don't fall in love with her or anything. I do want you for myself, you know. And don't catch anything."

"God, Viv."

"Do you want me to mind? Do you want me to tell you no?" She refilled his glass.

He ran his hand through his hair, coming away with a handful of strands. "I probably can't get it up, anyway," he grunted. "Shite, look at all this hair."

"Whatever you feel like doing," said Vivian, kissing his hand again. "It doesn't matter to me. It doesn't even matter if you leave me. But -- don't, all right? I'm used to you."

"Just give me another tattoo. Right here, over my track marks."

Nick took the bus home with Theresa. She was changed from her crisp light-blue uniform into an army-green T-shirt and jeans, her bare feet still jammed into the thick black shoes. They didn't look at each other on the ride. He hadn't been on a bus in years, literally; he'd certainly never been on a Brazilian bus, and the smell of warmed naugahyde, damp human bodies tightly packed, gasoline and asphalt, caught in his throat like bread. The bus wound through bits of town he hadn't seen since he stopped actually scoring speed and heroin, and parts not seen even then, plots of flat grass with no apparent use or reason. Once he glanced at the girl, and she looked at him, the corner of her soft coarse mouth quirking. She knew that he had a woman; she had to have seen their bodies together in bed every morning. It didn't matter to her if he belonged to someone else. She was just borrowing him for the afternoon. Nick felt pleasntly like a rented bicycle.

Theresa had a very small apartment in a tall building; the plots of flat grass were devoid of people, and the whole tableau had a post-apocalyptic feel, like that Aussie movie, The Quiet Earth. They were the last two people. And she didn't speak more than thirty words of English; he had maybe twice that in Portuguese.

In the apartment she closed the windows and the curtain so that the air fell reddish-dark. Lunar eclipse color. She put some music on -- he didn't recognize it for a second, then it became more familiar. Some creepy old catholic chants, holy and tarnished. She was probably really into the Virgin of Guadalupe. She paused before him, her eyes averted, and her teeth worrying her lip, and then with purpose began to undo the snaps of his shirt.

He was not able to get an erection, as he had guessed. She didn't let it stop her. They spent a couple of hours naked and moving together liquidly on her inflexible bed; she was very warm and smelled exquisite, young and overwhelmingly wholesome. He would have to say that it was friendly. She got up once to change the tape; he watched her stand on one foot, the other foot curled across the opposite ankle, while she rattled through a box of casettes. She had so much flesh; it was bizarre. She yielded when he touched her. When she decided on the Doors and got back onto the bed, she kissed him fiercely to make up for lost time, knocking her teeth against his.

Theresa was the first to get up and get dressed again. She bound her swaying full breasts tightly in a white bra and slipped the T-shirt back over her head. Nick lay still, on his side, like wounded prey. "Obrigado," he whispered.

"You are welcome," she said. "We do over sometime."

"Maybe, yeah."

With reluctance he put the polyester shirt and jeans back on. They seemed to scrape painfully across skin massaged by too much girl-softness. He didn't kiss her goodbye, only rubbed her back until she purred. Still it was as if she was done with him now; she was chewing gum and reading something and she didn't look up. He closed the door softly behind him, and checked his watch. The twenty-eighth.

"I don't want to play anymore, Pedro." Nick shook his head and scraped the cards together on the table.

 Pedro was grinning. "The dog turns tail," he said.

"Take the bloody money already. I've had it." Nick rummaged for a cigarette and encountered the empty pack in the front pocket of his shirt. "Viv, do you have a cigarette?"

She reached across and handed him one of hers. She was half asleep; she had little alertness when it came to watching Nick lose money playing card games whose rules he was too drunk to understand. "So do you want to go?" she asked with a sigh. "It's quarter to four."

"I dunno, Viv..."

"Do you want to skip it?"

"Well, what the hell do you want?" He lit up impatiently.

"How was your girl?"

"Oh that... good, rather... she's very soft." He coughed, trying to be subtle, but drink made the gesture wide and ungraceful. "God, I should maybe try to write something."

"No hurry," said Viv. "As far as I know we still have money."

"Yeah but... have you done anything lately?"

"I did a tattoo while you were with the girl. I talked to D.D. I'm on call. She knows I'm the best." She put her head to one side and pinned him with her eyes. "Do... you... want... to go to the clinic, Nick?"

"Do you?"

"No. I don't want any. I feel crappy as it is."

Nick let his head fall forward. "What will we do instead?" he asked. "If I don't get out of this stupid cafe I'm going to start smashing up things."

"We could go have sex," she said.

"I suppose so. And then have dinner. And then you can give me that new tattoo." He ran his hands through his hair again, balling up the thin brown fibers and depositing them in the ashtray. "Do you know what day of the week it is?" he asked her.

She shrugged. "Check your watch."

"It doesn't say. It's the thirtieth of April. What does that mean?"

"Why does it matter? All days are the same. Do you want to take a sabbath or something?" She began to laugh and snort.

"I just... I would just like to know..." He frowned; she laughed more and then picked up his hand and put her tongue to the palm where, two years ago, she had tattooed a cursive V. "All right, you win, honey, you win. Let's go."

In the room at the Hotel Cunoel she took off his clothes very slowly, covering him with kisses. He knew it was because she was drunk and sleepy from the grey weather, but it felt good anyway. It had been such a long time that it felt new and fresh, and dizzy, even. He whispered to her that he loved her.

Afterward she straddled him, he still naked and she dressed only in lace singlet and panties, and began to tattoo him on the left arm where it was still bruised. It was the most amazingly painful sensation he could remember experiencing in his life. She smiled ferally, enjoying his useless convulsions beneath her.

"Why don't you say something?" she taunted him. "Don't just sit there and cry."

There was a knock on the door and Vivian, still wasted, called for them to come in, in Portuguese. Nick craned his head as little he could -- pale faded blue uniform and cotton hair -- then put his face back into the pillow. "Desculpe, por favor!" Theresa's voice said, and then she laughed.

The women had a brief exchange too quick for him to follow. "She wants to see your tattoo," said Viv, her mouth spilling out a twisted and complex agglomeration of sadism, irritation, pleasure, accusation. The smell of the other girl came forward and interrupted the scent of sex and cigarettes that hung over the bed like a shroud.

The cleaning girl perused the design, an abstract arrow in red and black jags. "Bom," she approved, then looked up and fiddled with her ponytail. Then she said, "Voltar mais tarde?" angling her thumb towards the door.

"Sim," said Viv.

"Tarde," gasped Nick.

 Theresa giggled as she left the room, closing the door behind her with an enthusiastic slam. Vivian's needle began buzzing again and Nick clenched the bunched duvet between his knees. "She smells good," Viv mused, dabbing at the oozing blood with a bit of the roll of cotton wool they bought to pull the needle when they shot up. "Think she'd let me tattoo her?"

"Gladly I'm sure..."

 She finished within an hour and then ceremoniously knelt before him and bandaged the juncture of his arm and then kissed the raw spot. She then climbed into bed and fell asleep as swiftly as a cat, hand curled into a fist under her chin. He rolled onto his side and tried to sleep as well, but the pain in his arm kept him awake.