The Lecher

I

After failing his God Hill abandoned the city for a cheap studio in a town that found itself wedged between the interstate and nature's expanse. The blank checks that had sustained him didn't follow. He used his slowly dwindling funds on smokes and food and beer. His neighbors only communicated with him in quick nods and ersatz smiles; unhappiness wafted through the building in the form of menthol lights and cheap old man cologne and bodies unwashed from a night spent in front of the TV. He wrapped the gloom around him like a cloak, smoked on his balcony, and snuffed the cigarette out under his heel every evening: exactly when the absolute night plucked the sun from the sky. He thought much, said little, and hoped for the tinnitus-like screaming in his head to stop.

II

The new neighbor lugged in box after box as he watched from the balcony, his cigarette turning to ash in the corner of his mouth. She wore her hair up, revealing glints of silver on her lobes. The new label on the mailbox gave her a name: Strafford.
Days later she knocked on his door, with a smile that hid something, a first name he didn't remember, and a cheap bottle of wine he couldn't refuse. She offered the use of a penknife produced from the back pocket of her jeans but he tore the cork out with his teeth.
They traded swigs of bad merlot on the balcony, staring at the darkening brush in the distance.
"Why did you move here?" she said when the remaining liquid kissed the label.
"Who's to say I wasn't born here?"
"I see you, Hillel. People like you aren't born, at least not anymore; they're constructed from ruins." She held her free hand out.
He ignored her. "I never told you my name."
She shrugged, and met his raised eyebrow with her own: glued, manicured, pale blonde.
"One night I'll come for you," she said after the bottle was empty. She left him staring out into the now-black thicket, the interstate whispering above the mindless shrieks.

III

Some years ago the man entered Hill's mind via an opening in his dreams like dull scissors cutting through fabric—a naked man with sink handles for ears and a faucet bursting from his forehead, so tall that he had to crouch on his hands and knees to speak with Hill.
The man held a glass and pleaded for water in a voice that sounded like two people speaking at once. Hill, without a second thought, filled the glass with both taps, and helped the man drink. With a smile he returned to his rift. Later in the week, Hill found his first blank check in the mail.
The faucet-man kept returning in his dreams, and he continued to help, and the checks kept coming. Hill took enough to allow himself to quit his job and little more. He took to wandering around the city through the peripheries of everyone else's lives.
Years later temptation got the best of him; instead of tipping the glass towards the faucet-man's lips, Hill drank its contents. He felt something enter, unknowable and massive, and realized the mistake he'd made. He and the faucet man wept together; the glass smashed on the ground; and the man didn't leave the way he came before Hill woke up. Without an exit he became twisted and desiccated, a lecher of the soul residing in Hill, who filled the alleys of his head with screams, and peered out through the whites of Hill's eyes, content to watch with voyeuristic hunger, doing nothing yet touching everything, draining life of its color. And the checks had stopped for good.

IV

Stafford no longer knocked on Hill's door, preferring to let herself in. Most days he'd sit in his deafened stupor and smoke while she made sculptures from his discarded packs of smokes and wood glue, birthing abstract entities, sharp-cornered helixing snakes stained nicotine-brown.
"How many packs a day do you smoke?" she asked once when the sun didn't set right at first, and its beams continued to leak in under the slider door.
He gave an estimate.
"It's probably higher." she said.
"What does it matter?"
"Does it affect your health at all?"
The rays finally left, replaced by void.
"No," he said.

V

The overdraft statements came in, as he expected they would one day. He smoked and ate what food remained, carrying on his hermetic existence, staring from the his balcony at the interstate, wondering where all the cars were headed to. Sleep didn't matter; food didn't matter, the passing of time, that blur of rising sun and darkened sky, didn't matter, didn't even exist; reality seemingly only consisted of him and The Lecher massaging his eardrums without beginning or end.

VI

The next time Strafford showed up he gave her the final, empty pack of smokes.
"Where are the rest?" she said.
He shrugged.
"No more water in your well?"
"More like too much."
"Give me your hand."
"What?"
"You heard me." She pulled out her penknife and he pulled away. Her chair clattered to the ground as she stood up. She lunged, and he backed away through the open slider door.
Then he found himself falling over the balcony, watching her form shrink. Then his bones gave way with wooden snapping, his skin splitting like ceramic upon impact.
Stafford appeared over him, hair up, studs gleaming in the sun. She bent down and reached into his hand, and sliced it open. He heard the gentle gurgle of liquid joining the dirt. She watched and smiled. "I told you I'd come for you," she said. "And now I see you. And maybe you'll see yourself before it's too late." She dropped the note next to him and walked out of his field of vision.

VII

He stared at the setting sun; right before his body became nothing more than sand, the moon bloomed overhead.