Wasted: A Story of Love Gone Toxic Chapter 1

Emergency 911

As much as she had been looking forward to it, Sheila McNally was mortified that her death was turning out to be such a public spectacle. She knew the entire Western world was watching on TV as she girded herself to go down in a slow-motion reverse mushroom cloud of twisted steel, plaster and burning jet fuel, accompanied by Jesus knows how many hapless secretaries, pencil-necks and municipal martyrs with whom she had little in common. She was surprised that her primary emotion at this climactic moment was a gnawing, self-conscious embarrassment at having fallen short at everything she’d ever done. “What a fucking waste,” she thought to herself. “I deserve this.”

Still, she had one last chore to attend to. Hurling silent curses at a deity she had long ago given up on, she dialed her home number on her sketchy cell phone, which even when jetliners weren’t flying into the building seemed powerless to connect to one of the world’s largest cell towers right next door. She was sure Nate would be sleeping the sleep of the guilty, trying to forget what a scumbag he was. If only he wasn’t such a weak-willed, skirt-chasing, piece-of-shit failure, she would have married him, or would have at least wanted to live for a few more months until she had finished digging up filth at USE.

Intense heat and smoke billowing from the central stairwells was driving people toward the outer walls. Four men threw a legless onyx conference table through a floor-to-ceiling window and huddled there, yelling and flapping their shirts and suit jackets. Sheila closed her door and locked it as her home phone rang mercilessly. Why didn’t the fucking machine pick up? “Nate, stop jerking off and pick up, Goddammit!” An orange mist crept beneath her door. The temperature suddenly rose to the level of the hellish Helsinki Room at the 12th Street Russian Baths, where Nate had screwed that pregnant masseuse. “Fucking bastard.”

***

For Nate Randall, staring in stricken silence out of Sheila’s sepia tinted bedroom window with her last angry, unfinished words ringing in his ear and her hated corporate Babel crushing her into hamburger before his eyes, the world of shit she had been trying for years to warn him about suddenly came into being. He would, as countless thousands of others were obviously thinking at the same moment, never be the same.

Still, none of this should have been a surprise. As her reluctant nihilist-in-training, Nate had grown to share in Sheila’s oft repeated opinion that it was only a matter of time before some grinning, death-hungry Son of Allah would perform a catastrophic act of anti-American symbolism; most likely bringing what she termed the “Twin Penises of Progress” down with all hands on board. As proof of his love and, thanks to her, his conversion to the paranoiac faith, he had even placed a bet with her on the date of the event, but had been off by a year. Sheila’s guess was right on the money.

Being a pessimist was unnatural to Nate. As a result, life was always more of a struggle for him than it was for Sheila, who at least had her certainties and her nagging death wish to comfort her. Even under blissful conditions she was a defiantly wretched soul, which unfortunately was what had attracted him to her in the first place. She knew the human race was going down the toilet, and wanted out. As bad as his own behavior and attitude were, he was unable to shake the fantasy that things were somehow supposed to improve; for himself, for Sheila and for the rest of humanity.

Naturally, she was right all along, he thought ruefully. About the human race, which he now had to agree was headed straight for the abyss. About himself, who had been exposed during the last fortnight as a classic lout and a lying, disease-spreading creep. And about herself, a woman clearly marked for an early exit.

How could he have missed it? He had met her in a bar, for Christ’s sake. Constitutionally edgy, paranoid and cranky as a badger, Sheila required a foul, contraindicated bouillabaisse of cocaine and opiates in order to simmer down to a boil. Alcohol was no help at all, not that that stopped her from testing her half-Irish liver. She would become dangerously self-destructive whenever she drank too much, which was every night. Under those circumstances, the very fact of her moving to New York and going to work for the satanic Universal Silicon Enterprises on the 97th floor of an obvious deathtrap like the World Trade Center was patently suicidal, as was her taking up with a germ-infested scuzzball such as himself. She might as well have tattooed a target on her forehead with a sign that said: “Aim Here.”

***

As it transpired, Sheila had been acting out especially badly for two weeks, sobbing and screaming and threatening to annihilate herself, ever since she found Nate’s top-secret woman list under the trash compactor. The list had confirmed, in inexorable USE black-and-white laser ink and including dates and rating points, that for the duration of their five-year relationship Nate hadn’t been very adept at keeping his dick in his pants. Worse yet, Sheila saw her own name on the list, mired in fourth place behind two of his ex-girlfriends and a nameless Nebraskan “milkmaid” he had met while on the band’s last tour.

The woman list, besides being a bad idea, was essentially an ongoing pack of half-truths Nate compiled to make himself feel as if he had experienced some kind of a life, when all he’d really done was squander his middling talents on a tantalizing but ultimately fruitless quest for second-rate pop stardom. It had been six months since the band splintered after having been dropped by Arista, and he wasn’t making it as a freelance studio hack. A hundred bucks here, two hundred there, then nothing for three weeks. He wasn’t doing so well as a small time booking agent/club promoter either. Three nights a week he had to fill some beer-stained sty up on Bleecker Street with mostly talentless rock bands who dragged their friends in from Jersey to drink and fight over the paucity of harassable females. Out of five to ten bucks a head Nate had to pay for the bands, the security and the sound guy and considered himself lucky to come home with fifty a night and no black eyes. If it weren’t for Sheila supporting him with her filthy corporate lucre, he’d have been back on the street delivering packages or hustling fares in a pedicab.

With his graying temples, his aversion to success and his carefully nurtured commitment-phobia, Nate Randall was far from what one would call a catch, even before being outed as a filthy fuckpig. But he knew that Sheila, despite being darkly beautiful in a hollow-eyed, brooding sort of way, was no catch either, and had as much trouble hanging onto a man as he did staying out of female quicksand. Besides being a drug-swilling, alcoholic, chain-smoking emotional yo-yo, she had enacted far too much household legislation based on her psychotically paranoid conception of what germs are capable of. Nonetheless, Nate had recently realized that, despite her long and growing list of peccadilloes, she was the smartest, funniest, most sexually and emotionally electrifying woman he’d ever known, and that he in fact loved her. He had successfully curtailed his extracurricular activities for two weeks straight and was about to ask her to marry him when she found his infernal woman list.

***

Among the things Nate loved most about Sheila was her furtiveness. It was like living with a double agent. He found it stimulating that he never knew what she was up to, and fooled himself into thinking she didn’t care about what he did either. She never talked directly about her work as a PR drone at USE, except to say that it profoundly depressed her. Over too much coffee in the morning she would wax elliptically about the impending collapse of modern civilization and how we were “slowly poisoning ourselves with applied science.” She described America as a nation of “technology-blinded lemmings” who deserved to die. Gradually it had become obvious to Nate that she was on a secret mission of some kind, and he made a game of trying to investigate Sheila’s shadow life without tipping her off.

Nate’s happy suspicion that Sheila was a potential whistleblower on the evil USE Corporation was all but confirmed when one day the apartment door was open and he sneaked in while she was on the phone. “I’m going to bring down those fucking assholes,” she was spit-whispering through clenched teeth. “I can’t believe they think they can get away with this shit. I’ve got a filing cabinet full of stuff that will fucking destroy them. I’ve talked to Jim at the Times, but he says they won’t touch it. He says nobody will, because it would ‘blindside’ the economy. Fuck the economy. Innocent lemmings are dying.”

“Who was that?” Nate said as she hung up, failing as usual to startle her.

“A friend.”

Nate was not Sheila’s friend. She trusted no one, Nate least of all. She was always lurking around her high-class apartment, hiding things and looking for porno and other items he might have hidden—which was how she found the woman list. Theirs had been a relationship based on a mutual dismay with the opposite sex, built up through years of prior experience having been cheated on, jilted, emotionally abused and otherwise fucked with.

The woman list had settled it. Somehow on Monday night they had fought through the tears and recriminations to a point where they even managed to make tear-greased, passionate love, but by Tuesday morning a murky veil had fallen over Sheila’s face. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” she hissed on her way out the door. “Tonight I’m going to kill myself. If you’re here when I get back, I’m going to have to kill you, too.”

“Yeah, right. Why don’t you stop talking and get on with it already?” Nate immediately regretted the remark as the door slammed shut.

Whether either of them was serious or not, there would be no last kiss. Nothing to remember but a flat, beaten look on Sheila’s uniquely beautiful Portuguese/Irish face, and the fact that the laundry-care tag was sticking out of her sweater. “I’m going to miss that sweet can,” Nate thought numbly as he drifted back to sleep.

***

An hour later he awoke to the sound of a thousand sirens howling. It was 9:50 a.m. He turned on the television. “Two hijacked commercial airliners have crashed into the World Trade Center…firefighters are battling blazes in the north and south towers…a third hijacked jetliner has crashed into the Pentagon…”

Fuck. Sheila! She hated her job and was usually late, but not today. Thanks to Nate she would be facing her longed-for end in the last place she would have wanted to be, trapped in her despised 2 World Trade Center tower, the dehumanizing architecture of which she often termed a “Franken-bauhaus clusterfuck.” She was petrified of the elevators, the doors of which often opened inappropriately halfway between floors, scaring the crap out of the occupants. She told marginally credible stories of how the entire 97th floor would vibrate when either of two 300-pound co-workers would waddle to the ladies’ room, or how during a high wind you could look out at the other monstrous slab and see it swaying 20 feet in either direction.

His heart pounding uncontrollably, Nate picked up the phone and dialed her work number, which was out. He dialed her cell number, which was busy. He pressed redial. Busy. Redial. Busy. Fuck, fuck, fuck! He opened the blinds of the bedroom window, with its panoramic view of the burning towers just 12 blocks to the southwest beyond the faceless, windowless, shit-brown telephone building. He had always hated that view, and now he knew why. He saw what looked like falling bodies of people who had hurled themselves to escape the unbearable heat and smoke. Sheila?

The phone rang. Nate answered, shuddering involuntarily. “Sheila, Jesus Christ!!!”

Her voice was calm and measured, clear against a wall of static. “Good morning, Natie. Apparently you’ve been looking out the window. We’re trapped up here. Looks like I’ll get my wish. Fuck you. That’s not me waving a white flag. I’m going down with the ship.”

 “Sheila, I…”

“Shut up and listen, asshole. I’m toast, but maybe you can do something useful for once. In my file cabinet. Next to the phone stand. Combination. 22-35-13. The Amorphous folders. Call…Shi-” Suddenly a shower of steel girders exploded from the left side of the south tower as it folded slowly upon itself like a thousand-foot-tall accordion into the streets of Manhattan, carrying Sheila and untold numbers of other doomed, disconnected souls down with it. The emotional shock wave that comes to those unaccustomed to mass annihilation hit Nate Randall in the solar plexus like a spiritual medicine ball. The phone went dead, along with the TV and what was left of his no-good, cheating heart.

“Sheila!!!”

Knowing there was no point, Nate got dressed anyway, put on a pair of ski goggles and wrapped a scarf around his tear-streaked face, ran down the 10 flights of stairs and unlocked his bike, holding on to one thought like a mantra: 22-35-13. He sped downtown on West Broadway, slaloming to avoid the throngs of plaster-and-asbestos-caked refugees streaming north. Skirting roadblocks, he ended up on West Street, which was clogged with firefighting equipment and the detritus of Dante’s imagination. The sidewalks were littered with burned and bloody body parts: heads, limbs, torsos…a pretty lace bra still cupping a severed breast. Sheila? 22-35-13. Fighting back tears and acrid smoke, Nate turned right and headed toward the river to try and maneuver around the back of the Financial Center toward the south side of the trade center complex.

He’d gotten as far the boat basin when the north tower collapsed. The force of it knocked Nate off his bike, even though he was on the lee side of the American Express building. Plaster dust and burnt jet fuel choked his nostrils beneath his useless scarf. Disoriented and passing out from asphyxiation, he stumbled to the promenade bordering the Hudson, crawled over the railing and jumped in, thinking, “22, minus 35, plus 13 equals…zero.”

But that was all good news, compared to what came after.

This was the first of 24 chapters, all of which have recently been posted on Substack, for free. Please ignore any requests to pay. If you wish to have an actual novel in your hand, by all means go purchase “Wasted” at the following link:

https://www.amazon.com/Wasted-Story-Love-Gone-Toxic/dp/1948796309