Fanfic: Bleeding On The Bathroom Floor
And thanks to dogstarlives for the quick beta service, even though this piece is more gen than Mark/Roger.
Author: Stephanie
Fandom, Characters: RENT; Mark, Roger(/April), Collins, Benny, Mimi
Prompt: 004. Insides
Rating: PG-13 for graphic death
Word Count: 3,610
Summary: April didn't die until Mark killed her. He's not going to make the same mistake with Mimi.
Author's Note: I used a weird timeline in this fic as far as when everything happened, and while it may not be the most canon it's not AU. Just a warning, though.
Bleeding On The Bathroom Floor
Zoom in on a small, Spanish girl way too skinny for her own good. Close in on her until the back ground, a messy old loft with dishes and broken furniture spread everywhere, is nearly invisible and she takes up nearly the entire frame, and the next, and the hundred after that. Scan over her wild curls, her smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. Focus on every last detail of the subject until the audience feels like they’ve known her all their lives. They start to recognize small things about her, the bumps and bruises on her cinnamon skin, the way her hair seems to thin out as the film rolls on, the number of ribs they can count through her skin. Keep filming, even as the viewers start to cringe and distances themselves from the subject, because they know that the inevitable happening on screen and they don’t want to feel for her anymore.
Mark has the camera trained on Mimi. It seems like ever since that day they found her in the park fighting off death with the help of Roger’s guitar, Mark has been filming. Not quite obsessively, but he does watch her through the lens more and more these days. Every time she wakes up, stretching out in the kitchen while she prepares the coffee. When her and Roger are just laying the couch, the one legged sofa wiggling under their weight as Roger strums random chords. When she gets back from the club, caked in make up and sweat. Okay, maybe obsessively.
Right now she’s painting her toenails a metallic blue. Every now and then she’ll glance up and give the camera a quick smile. She knows.
“Why aren’t you out filming today?” She asks, her feet only a few inches from her face while she fixes a small dab of paint. Mark’s camera zooms in, catching the look of concentration as she wipes the spot away.
“Too cold,” Mark answers. It’s January, and despite Benny’s promise the loft is still without heat. It’s hardly colder inside than it is out, but inside the loft is one important thing. Mimi. The rest of New York has become a background to her film story.
Mimi makes some sound of agreement, pulling back to study five perfect toes. Dipping the brush back in the polish she starts the next foot. “Roger is playing that waltz again.”
Mark looks away from the camera for a few seconds, obediently listening for that all too familiar tune. There’s the sound of the hotplate buzzing, Mimi shifting on the couch as she pulls her foot forward, and a few creaks of various rodents and insets scampering around the loft, but most of the loft is filled with the suspicious absents of music. Mark looks back to the camera, frowning. “I don’t hear anything.”
“He’s asleep,” Mimi says, nodding towards the door of the bedroom her and Roger share. “But he plays it sometimes.”
Mark shrugs, not sure what point Mimi is trying to make. As far as Mark knows, Roger has always played that song. He’s not sure he’s ever heard him play anything else before that night with Mimi’s song. “It’s his waltz.”
“It’s her waltz,” Mimi says. She looks up from her toes, studying Mark as though she can see right through him. It’s unnerving. Mark holds the camera a little higher, hiding behind it. “He must have really loved her, to keep playing that song so long. You knew her, right? What was she like?”
Mark frowns, still watching Mimi only from behind his camera. “What’s with the sudden curiosity?”
Mimi shakes her head and shrugs, looking back at her feet. “Come on Mark,” She says, almost forcing Mark to grin because of the smile in her voice. “You’re always looking for other people’s stories. What your story?” She looks up at Mark through the wild curls of her dark brown hair. “What’s her story?”
“He did love her,” Mark says, avoiding the question. He starts to fidget, camera zooming back a little so that Mimi isn’t the only thing in the shot. Suddenly the cold metal table isn’t as comfortable as it had been, and Mark would rather be outside filming the random homeless roaming the streets. Basically, anywhere but here talking about this.
“He must have.” Mimi keeps painting her toes, apparently not noticing the way Mark starts backing off of the subject the moment April is mentioned. No one ever does notice when Mark does this anymore. He’s always separating himself from the story, using his camera as a wall, so Mimi doesn’t see his slight panic as anything new.
Mark shifts the camera, but keeps Mimi as the main focus. Always keeping Mimi right in view, looking at the present and trying not to think back. “She was unforgettable.”
*
Mark hadn’t planned on going to New York. Sure, the city would have been a great place to live and work, but he’d always considered it a pipe dream. His mother would never let him out of her sights again. He had already left Scarsdale for three years of college, and look how well that had gone.
It takes his old roommate to convince Mark to finally cut himself loose.
“Come on Mark,” Benny had been pestering him for about a month now to move out with him. He’d just graduated and moved in with some old friend from high school, some sort of musician from a band Mark had never heard of, and a few other strangers. “You can’t just spend your life there in Scarsdale.”
“Sure I can,” Mark had answered, glaring at Cindy as her and her fiancé made out next to him on the couch. He’s messing with dad’s computer, trying to see if he can edit his film on it. It’s no use. Mark didn’t have any sort of gift when it comes to mechanics, not too mention David keeps making weird little throaty sounds right next to his ear. “Besides, you know my parents will never let me move to New York.”
“But I’m here,” Benny pointed out. His parents had always liked Benny. A nice kid, his mother had said, and his father had just hoped that having a business major friend would change Mark’s mind about his own studies. “You already have somewhere to stay.”
“I don’t know,” Mark said, switching the phone over to his other ear as David fell against his shoulder. The idea certainly had a fairy tale like quality to it. Moving out to New York, living in a loft with a bunch of artists. It is definitely the bohemian sort of thing Mark had always dreamed of doing with his life. Plus, anywhere sounds better than here right now. “Didn’t you say two of your roommates were crazy or something?”
“Roger and April. And they’re not crazy just…” Benny trailed off, leaving Mark to wonder exactly what this couple was like. Crazy, he imagined. “Besides, it’s a great place to start a film career.”
That’s how Benny hooked him.
Two months later, Mark ends up standing in the doorway to a run down loft crowded with random junk and piles of dishes that appear to be fuzzy. Other than a stray cockroaches and whatever is growing on that glass, there doesn’t seem to be anyone home.
Mark pushes the door closed, dropping his bags when it closes with a loud crash. Composing himself and thanking God that no one is there to see him making and idiot of himself. All his mother’s talk about gangs, crazy murders, and alleyway muggers has made Mark more than a little paranoid of the city.
“Hello?” Mark sets down his other suitcases at the door, looking around at the main room and trying to make sense of the mess. It looks like a tornado had stuck eastern New York and dumped half the trash in here. Only it has a touch of Benny to it. Maybe the way all the junk seems to be in organized piles. “Hey, Benny?” He yells again, taking a few more brave steps towards the center of the loft, avoiding stepping on any of the beer bottles tossed around the kitchen area.
It makes him miss his mom and her obsessive cleaning genes.
“Anyone here? It’s me… I mean, Mark… I mean, the new roommate. Benny’s friend.” No one answers, which with the way Mark is rambling might be a good thing. Mark isn’t sure what to do, so he just stands in the middle of the room waiting for someone to find him. Benny said he might be out but it couldn’t be too long until he came back, or at least one of his roommates got here.
After a few seconds of nervously tapping his foot against the concrete floor and trying not to stare at the pair of lacey purple panties looped around one of the cabinet doorknobs, someone speaks. Well, not speaks, but the silence of the loft is broken by a low, breathy moan. Mark spins around towards where he thinks the noise might have been coming from. “Hello?” He calls again, taking a step towards one of the closed doors. His answer is another hoarse moan, but no one really calls back.
Mark is about to go knock at the door when he remembers what Benny said about his two roommates, Roger and April, and how they tend to… Oh, well. Maybe he won’t knock on that door.
Blushing Mark stumbles back away from the door. Maybe just standing here isn’t the best plan. He looks around the rest of the loft, spotting two more doors on the opposite side of what he presumes is the couple’s bedroom, and it hits him how bad he needs to pee. He’s had to go since he got on the subway, but had been afraid to go into those after his mother’s insistence that every public bathroom in New York was infected with some sort of STD. Figuring anything is better than just standing there listening, Mark hurries to the next door he can find.
It’s cracked open, so he doesn’t feel bad about giving it a little push. The bedroom is neat and orderly. Benny’s, he’s guessing, and so it must be the other guys too. It’s nice to know where it is. After he uses the bathroom, he’ll just come in and sit here until his old roommate finds him.
Mark hurries to the other door, throwing it open without thinking. He gets a small shock to find another bedroom. Well, at least it’s a room and somewhere under all the paper and clothes and empty bottles is what he thinks might be a bed. It sure as hell smells like a bathroom. Wrinkling he nose, he shuts that door. There’s only one room left in the loft which means… God, were they actually going at it in the shower?
For a few minuets Mark just stands there, unsure of what to do. By now it feels like his bladder is going to explode, and the moaning for the bathroom has stopped. It’s not like he didn’t see worse things at the commons showers at Brown, he reasons, taking a few steps towards the last door. If they’re really as open about it as Benny says, they won’t mind Mark running in there, taking a piss, than running out again. God knows his own family members had never been shy about breaking into the bathroom when he was showering.
Mark takes a deep breath, muttering a few reassuring things to himself before he can get the nerve to knock on the door. “Hey… Um… Guys? This is… Uh… The new roommate?” No answers. “I… I really have to go, alright?”
No one answers him, a treatment Mark is starting to get use to. Maybe it had just been Mark’s imagination. Maybe they’d passed out after their little session. Whatever it is, Mark feels ready to burst. Closing his eyes, he fiddled with the door handle - it’s not even locked. “Okay… I’m coming in now alright?” Gathering up a whole lot more nerve than he thought he had, Mark pushes open the door.
That’s when he sees her.
He doesn’t know who she is, has never seen this girl before in his life and hardly sees her now. All he really takes in is the blood, trailing from the tub to the door where she had collapsed. All he can see is the rivulets of pale red covering the titled floor.
Later he’d remember the way those red stains crept out of the puddle under the shower all the way to the door. Later all he’d be able to think is that she changed her mind, she had been trying to get his attention, trying to get someone to save her life.
Looking over that body, no sign of life or heat radiating off the clammy, pale skin, thinking is out of the question. Mark collapses to his knees, and it doesn’t even hurt when he hits the hard floors, and starts throwing up right there over the body. Even gasping for air, his stomach trying to empty itself of the memories already forming, he can never quite able to look away from all the blood, from the insides of this girl spilled out of the bathroom floor. Before he can look away it’s all imprinting itself in his mind: the look of terror on her face, the bruise cuts up her arms. It’s all caught on the film in his head. Every glance a ten second shot playing on repeat even when he manages to close his eyes.
That’s how Benny and Collins find him a few minutes later, crying over the body of some girl he didn’t know covered in vomit and urine and unable to pick himself up. Benny has to drag Mark to the couch while Collins calls the hospital - the morgue. Benny keeps saying, “Hey, it’s all right. It’s all right.”
Mark keeps sobbing and trembling, unable to look right at that pale, torn up body spread out over the bathroom floor. Unable to look away from the bright streaks of red covering the bathroom. He keeps muttering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” but the girl never responses.
When Roger gets home, Mark has finally calmed down. He’s curled up on the couch in fresh clothes with Benny still babying him, afraid to leave Mark alone with his thoughts too long. Even with a nervous roommate hovering over him, Mark’s mind is racing to replay every image of that girl. That’s when the door is pulled open and Roger stumbles in, drunk and high and out of his mind. Collins goes up to him, places a hand on his shoulder and whispers something Benny and Mark can’t hear. Mark keeps his eyes on Roger, watching the way he swayed under Collins hands, how his eyes never cleared up from their haze while Collins tells him the news. When he’s done, Roger shrugs and says, “Fuck off.”
Collins hands Roger a note. Roger looks over it and for all of three seconds something sparks inside him. There is this moment of clarity, of fear, but then it’s gone and it’s like it never happened. “So what?”
“So what?” Collins says, pushing Roger against the door. Mark squeaks, nearly jumping off the couch and might have if Benny weren’t there to catch him.
His old roommate takes him by the shoulders and helps him up. “Let’s put you in bed,” he mutters, leading Mark away from the fight. It works, too. Mark hardly hears a word that either boy says even when Roger starts raising his voice and throwing his fists. In his head, he can still see the body of a young girl. After she’d been taken out and Collins scrubbed the room and the whole loft smells like bleach for the next few days, Mark can still see her.
He finds out later that Roger sees her, too. Mark finds out a lot about Roger in the next few month, and even more about April. Because after half a year of throwing himself into drugs and parties and meaningless sex, Roger finally decides to face her ghost, and the only one with open ears is this scrawny, geeky kid who had moved in the day it happened. Collins leaves for New York after Roger’s fourth relapse. Benny, well, he tells Mark that the rock star is a hopeless case and to give up on him but Mark is always looking for a story.
So on those nights, when Roger is facing withdrawal and diseases, he talks about April and Mark sits there and listens. Roger goes on an on about how beautiful she had been, how alive she always seem to be for him. Mark uses these little bits and pieces of Roger’s talks to block out the memory of this girl, the human being he’d let die. Because the way Roger talks about her, she no longer has to be human for Mark. She’s just something that Roger had once, some reason he went on living.
“She means everything to me,” Roger mutters one night, sweating and shaking as he rocks against Mark. He nods, taking another blanket off the sick boy’s shoulder. Keeping him warm then cool as his body fights off the heroin he can never quite stop using. “She is so good to me. Taught me how to waltz.”
Nights were Roger still refers to April as a living, breathing girl who might walk through the door at any moment. He’s always telling Mark not to close the door, always watching the bathroom like he can see her even now. “What happens if I forget her?” He asks. Mark puts a cold towel on his forehead. He’s thankful that this isn’t turning out to be one of Roger’s more violent nights that leave both bruised the next morning. “They die,” Roger answers his own question. “If you never leave behind a mark of some kind, if you can’t find something for people to remember you, then you never lived at all.”
“I guess,” Mark replies, unsure if Roger knows what he’s saying or not. His line of thought is difficult to follow, but then he’s making more sense than usual if Mark thinks about it, and that scares him. He doesn’t want to not exist. “I think it just sounds like an excuse to find glory in your life. Telling yourself that people will remember you.”
He’s never sure if Roger hears him or not. The next thing the boy says is, “She is so beautiful, even now,” and obediently Mark looks over to the bathroom floor.
*
These days Mark never really thinks back to his first day in New York. He never knew her, not like Roger and Collins and even Benny did. Mark is an expert at distancing himself from the situation. April is just someone Roger needed once upon a time, like heroin she was just another drug habit Roger had to fight against. She’s not real, not to Mark and the more time passes the more it seems that way for everyone. She’s no longer brought up every day, no longer whispered about only when Roger’s back is turned. It is as if April is the name of a stranger they never knew, only read about the girl’s tragedy in the morning papers.
Mark doesn’t mind. Forgetting about it is easier than dealing with it. The only thing he worries about is when he stops and worries about her. Because what if Roger had been right? What if April had really died, not when the morgue took the body or they spread the ashes in the alley where Roger and April first met, but when Roger stopped crying her name in his sleep and Benny throw out all her old pictures?
“I don’t know why he always plays it,” Mimi says. “It sounds so sad, playing a song for a dead girl.” Mark always thought that, too. Wondered why the first thing Roger did when he tuned up his fender was to play the song that April had an old record of, the same one Mark had heard played over and over from the musician’s room late at night to block out the sobbing. It seemed so morbid to him, to keep playing the waltz of a girl when it would be so much easier just to forget her.
Here is Mark, sitting on the couch at the best angle he could find to capture Mimi’s every move. Roger’s words he probably wasn’t even conscious of keep playing in his head. What if he can keep her alive just by memory? What if film can make someone live forever? Does Mark really want that responsibility?
Mark trains his camera on Mimi. “She must have been beautiful,” She mutters, still painting her toes like there isn’t a dead girl a few feet away, sprawled out on the floor of the bathroom and bleeding away a little more each day. “Do you have her on film?”
Mark swallows around the lump in his throat and keeps rolling. Block it out. Don’t think about it. You never knew her. Just keep it all locked inside and you’ll be fine. “Not really,” Mark answers. “You’re a better film subject anyway.”
Mimi smiles and Mark zooms in to her face. Through the thin walls of the loft is the soft tune of Musetta’s Waltz warming up an old fender guitar.
Author: Stephanie
Fandom, Characters: RENT; Mark, Roger(/April), Collins, Benny, Mimi
Prompt: 004. Insides
Rating: PG-13 for graphic death
Word Count: 3,610
Summary: April didn't die until Mark killed her. He's not going to make the same mistake with Mimi.
Author's Note: I used a weird timeline in this fic as far as when everything happened, and while it may not be the most canon it's not AU. Just a warning, though.
Bleeding On The Bathroom Floor
Zoom in on a small, Spanish girl way too skinny for her own good. Close in on her until the back ground, a messy old loft with dishes and broken furniture spread everywhere, is nearly invisible and she takes up nearly the entire frame, and the next, and the hundred after that. Scan over her wild curls, her smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. Focus on every last detail of the subject until the audience feels like they’ve known her all their lives. They start to recognize small things about her, the bumps and bruises on her cinnamon skin, the way her hair seems to thin out as the film rolls on, the number of ribs they can count through her skin. Keep filming, even as the viewers start to cringe and distances themselves from the subject, because they know that the inevitable happening on screen and they don’t want to feel for her anymore.
Mark has the camera trained on Mimi. It seems like ever since that day they found her in the park fighting off death with the help of Roger’s guitar, Mark has been filming. Not quite obsessively, but he does watch her through the lens more and more these days. Every time she wakes up, stretching out in the kitchen while she prepares the coffee. When her and Roger are just laying the couch, the one legged sofa wiggling under their weight as Roger strums random chords. When she gets back from the club, caked in make up and sweat. Okay, maybe obsessively.
Right now she’s painting her toenails a metallic blue. Every now and then she’ll glance up and give the camera a quick smile. She knows.
“Why aren’t you out filming today?” She asks, her feet only a few inches from her face while she fixes a small dab of paint. Mark’s camera zooms in, catching the look of concentration as she wipes the spot away.
“Too cold,” Mark answers. It’s January, and despite Benny’s promise the loft is still without heat. It’s hardly colder inside than it is out, but inside the loft is one important thing. Mimi. The rest of New York has become a background to her film story.
Mimi makes some sound of agreement, pulling back to study five perfect toes. Dipping the brush back in the polish she starts the next foot. “Roger is playing that waltz again.”
Mark looks away from the camera for a few seconds, obediently listening for that all too familiar tune. There’s the sound of the hotplate buzzing, Mimi shifting on the couch as she pulls her foot forward, and a few creaks of various rodents and insets scampering around the loft, but most of the loft is filled with the suspicious absents of music. Mark looks back to the camera, frowning. “I don’t hear anything.”
“He’s asleep,” Mimi says, nodding towards the door of the bedroom her and Roger share. “But he plays it sometimes.”
Mark shrugs, not sure what point Mimi is trying to make. As far as Mark knows, Roger has always played that song. He’s not sure he’s ever heard him play anything else before that night with Mimi’s song. “It’s his waltz.”
“It’s her waltz,” Mimi says. She looks up from her toes, studying Mark as though she can see right through him. It’s unnerving. Mark holds the camera a little higher, hiding behind it. “He must have really loved her, to keep playing that song so long. You knew her, right? What was she like?”
Mark frowns, still watching Mimi only from behind his camera. “What’s with the sudden curiosity?”
Mimi shakes her head and shrugs, looking back at her feet. “Come on Mark,” She says, almost forcing Mark to grin because of the smile in her voice. “You’re always looking for other people’s stories. What your story?” She looks up at Mark through the wild curls of her dark brown hair. “What’s her story?”
“He did love her,” Mark says, avoiding the question. He starts to fidget, camera zooming back a little so that Mimi isn’t the only thing in the shot. Suddenly the cold metal table isn’t as comfortable as it had been, and Mark would rather be outside filming the random homeless roaming the streets. Basically, anywhere but here talking about this.
“He must have.” Mimi keeps painting her toes, apparently not noticing the way Mark starts backing off of the subject the moment April is mentioned. No one ever does notice when Mark does this anymore. He’s always separating himself from the story, using his camera as a wall, so Mimi doesn’t see his slight panic as anything new.
Mark shifts the camera, but keeps Mimi as the main focus. Always keeping Mimi right in view, looking at the present and trying not to think back. “She was unforgettable.”
*
Mark hadn’t planned on going to New York. Sure, the city would have been a great place to live and work, but he’d always considered it a pipe dream. His mother would never let him out of her sights again. He had already left Scarsdale for three years of college, and look how well that had gone.
It takes his old roommate to convince Mark to finally cut himself loose.
“Come on Mark,” Benny had been pestering him for about a month now to move out with him. He’d just graduated and moved in with some old friend from high school, some sort of musician from a band Mark had never heard of, and a few other strangers. “You can’t just spend your life there in Scarsdale.”
“Sure I can,” Mark had answered, glaring at Cindy as her and her fiancé made out next to him on the couch. He’s messing with dad’s computer, trying to see if he can edit his film on it. It’s no use. Mark didn’t have any sort of gift when it comes to mechanics, not too mention David keeps making weird little throaty sounds right next to his ear. “Besides, you know my parents will never let me move to New York.”
“But I’m here,” Benny pointed out. His parents had always liked Benny. A nice kid, his mother had said, and his father had just hoped that having a business major friend would change Mark’s mind about his own studies. “You already have somewhere to stay.”
“I don’t know,” Mark said, switching the phone over to his other ear as David fell against his shoulder. The idea certainly had a fairy tale like quality to it. Moving out to New York, living in a loft with a bunch of artists. It is definitely the bohemian sort of thing Mark had always dreamed of doing with his life. Plus, anywhere sounds better than here right now. “Didn’t you say two of your roommates were crazy or something?”
“Roger and April. And they’re not crazy just…” Benny trailed off, leaving Mark to wonder exactly what this couple was like. Crazy, he imagined. “Besides, it’s a great place to start a film career.”
That’s how Benny hooked him.
Two months later, Mark ends up standing in the doorway to a run down loft crowded with random junk and piles of dishes that appear to be fuzzy. Other than a stray cockroaches and whatever is growing on that glass, there doesn’t seem to be anyone home.
Mark pushes the door closed, dropping his bags when it closes with a loud crash. Composing himself and thanking God that no one is there to see him making and idiot of himself. All his mother’s talk about gangs, crazy murders, and alleyway muggers has made Mark more than a little paranoid of the city.
“Hello?” Mark sets down his other suitcases at the door, looking around at the main room and trying to make sense of the mess. It looks like a tornado had stuck eastern New York and dumped half the trash in here. Only it has a touch of Benny to it. Maybe the way all the junk seems to be in organized piles. “Hey, Benny?” He yells again, taking a few more brave steps towards the center of the loft, avoiding stepping on any of the beer bottles tossed around the kitchen area.
It makes him miss his mom and her obsessive cleaning genes.
“Anyone here? It’s me… I mean, Mark… I mean, the new roommate. Benny’s friend.” No one answers, which with the way Mark is rambling might be a good thing. Mark isn’t sure what to do, so he just stands in the middle of the room waiting for someone to find him. Benny said he might be out but it couldn’t be too long until he came back, or at least one of his roommates got here.
After a few seconds of nervously tapping his foot against the concrete floor and trying not to stare at the pair of lacey purple panties looped around one of the cabinet doorknobs, someone speaks. Well, not speaks, but the silence of the loft is broken by a low, breathy moan. Mark spins around towards where he thinks the noise might have been coming from. “Hello?” He calls again, taking a step towards one of the closed doors. His answer is another hoarse moan, but no one really calls back.
Mark is about to go knock at the door when he remembers what Benny said about his two roommates, Roger and April, and how they tend to… Oh, well. Maybe he won’t knock on that door.
Blushing Mark stumbles back away from the door. Maybe just standing here isn’t the best plan. He looks around the rest of the loft, spotting two more doors on the opposite side of what he presumes is the couple’s bedroom, and it hits him how bad he needs to pee. He’s had to go since he got on the subway, but had been afraid to go into those after his mother’s insistence that every public bathroom in New York was infected with some sort of STD. Figuring anything is better than just standing there listening, Mark hurries to the next door he can find.
It’s cracked open, so he doesn’t feel bad about giving it a little push. The bedroom is neat and orderly. Benny’s, he’s guessing, and so it must be the other guys too. It’s nice to know where it is. After he uses the bathroom, he’ll just come in and sit here until his old roommate finds him.
Mark hurries to the other door, throwing it open without thinking. He gets a small shock to find another bedroom. Well, at least it’s a room and somewhere under all the paper and clothes and empty bottles is what he thinks might be a bed. It sure as hell smells like a bathroom. Wrinkling he nose, he shuts that door. There’s only one room left in the loft which means… God, were they actually going at it in the shower?
For a few minuets Mark just stands there, unsure of what to do. By now it feels like his bladder is going to explode, and the moaning for the bathroom has stopped. It’s not like he didn’t see worse things at the commons showers at Brown, he reasons, taking a few steps towards the last door. If they’re really as open about it as Benny says, they won’t mind Mark running in there, taking a piss, than running out again. God knows his own family members had never been shy about breaking into the bathroom when he was showering.
Mark takes a deep breath, muttering a few reassuring things to himself before he can get the nerve to knock on the door. “Hey… Um… Guys? This is… Uh… The new roommate?” No answers. “I… I really have to go, alright?”
No one answers him, a treatment Mark is starting to get use to. Maybe it had just been Mark’s imagination. Maybe they’d passed out after their little session. Whatever it is, Mark feels ready to burst. Closing his eyes, he fiddled with the door handle - it’s not even locked. “Okay… I’m coming in now alright?” Gathering up a whole lot more nerve than he thought he had, Mark pushes open the door.
That’s when he sees her.
He doesn’t know who she is, has never seen this girl before in his life and hardly sees her now. All he really takes in is the blood, trailing from the tub to the door where she had collapsed. All he can see is the rivulets of pale red covering the titled floor.
Later he’d remember the way those red stains crept out of the puddle under the shower all the way to the door. Later all he’d be able to think is that she changed her mind, she had been trying to get his attention, trying to get someone to save her life.
Looking over that body, no sign of life or heat radiating off the clammy, pale skin, thinking is out of the question. Mark collapses to his knees, and it doesn’t even hurt when he hits the hard floors, and starts throwing up right there over the body. Even gasping for air, his stomach trying to empty itself of the memories already forming, he can never quite able to look away from all the blood, from the insides of this girl spilled out of the bathroom floor. Before he can look away it’s all imprinting itself in his mind: the look of terror on her face, the bruise cuts up her arms. It’s all caught on the film in his head. Every glance a ten second shot playing on repeat even when he manages to close his eyes.
That’s how Benny and Collins find him a few minutes later, crying over the body of some girl he didn’t know covered in vomit and urine and unable to pick himself up. Benny has to drag Mark to the couch while Collins calls the hospital - the morgue. Benny keeps saying, “Hey, it’s all right. It’s all right.”
Mark keeps sobbing and trembling, unable to look right at that pale, torn up body spread out over the bathroom floor. Unable to look away from the bright streaks of red covering the bathroom. He keeps muttering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” but the girl never responses.
When Roger gets home, Mark has finally calmed down. He’s curled up on the couch in fresh clothes with Benny still babying him, afraid to leave Mark alone with his thoughts too long. Even with a nervous roommate hovering over him, Mark’s mind is racing to replay every image of that girl. That’s when the door is pulled open and Roger stumbles in, drunk and high and out of his mind. Collins goes up to him, places a hand on his shoulder and whispers something Benny and Mark can’t hear. Mark keeps his eyes on Roger, watching the way he swayed under Collins hands, how his eyes never cleared up from their haze while Collins tells him the news. When he’s done, Roger shrugs and says, “Fuck off.”
Collins hands Roger a note. Roger looks over it and for all of three seconds something sparks inside him. There is this moment of clarity, of fear, but then it’s gone and it’s like it never happened. “So what?”
“So what?” Collins says, pushing Roger against the door. Mark squeaks, nearly jumping off the couch and might have if Benny weren’t there to catch him.
His old roommate takes him by the shoulders and helps him up. “Let’s put you in bed,” he mutters, leading Mark away from the fight. It works, too. Mark hardly hears a word that either boy says even when Roger starts raising his voice and throwing his fists. In his head, he can still see the body of a young girl. After she’d been taken out and Collins scrubbed the room and the whole loft smells like bleach for the next few days, Mark can still see her.
He finds out later that Roger sees her, too. Mark finds out a lot about Roger in the next few month, and even more about April. Because after half a year of throwing himself into drugs and parties and meaningless sex, Roger finally decides to face her ghost, and the only one with open ears is this scrawny, geeky kid who had moved in the day it happened. Collins leaves for New York after Roger’s fourth relapse. Benny, well, he tells Mark that the rock star is a hopeless case and to give up on him but Mark is always looking for a story.
So on those nights, when Roger is facing withdrawal and diseases, he talks about April and Mark sits there and listens. Roger goes on an on about how beautiful she had been, how alive she always seem to be for him. Mark uses these little bits and pieces of Roger’s talks to block out the memory of this girl, the human being he’d let die. Because the way Roger talks about her, she no longer has to be human for Mark. She’s just something that Roger had once, some reason he went on living.
“She means everything to me,” Roger mutters one night, sweating and shaking as he rocks against Mark. He nods, taking another blanket off the sick boy’s shoulder. Keeping him warm then cool as his body fights off the heroin he can never quite stop using. “She is so good to me. Taught me how to waltz.”
Nights were Roger still refers to April as a living, breathing girl who might walk through the door at any moment. He’s always telling Mark not to close the door, always watching the bathroom like he can see her even now. “What happens if I forget her?” He asks. Mark puts a cold towel on his forehead. He’s thankful that this isn’t turning out to be one of Roger’s more violent nights that leave both bruised the next morning. “They die,” Roger answers his own question. “If you never leave behind a mark of some kind, if you can’t find something for people to remember you, then you never lived at all.”
“I guess,” Mark replies, unsure if Roger knows what he’s saying or not. His line of thought is difficult to follow, but then he’s making more sense than usual if Mark thinks about it, and that scares him. He doesn’t want to not exist. “I think it just sounds like an excuse to find glory in your life. Telling yourself that people will remember you.”
He’s never sure if Roger hears him or not. The next thing the boy says is, “She is so beautiful, even now,” and obediently Mark looks over to the bathroom floor.
*
These days Mark never really thinks back to his first day in New York. He never knew her, not like Roger and Collins and even Benny did. Mark is an expert at distancing himself from the situation. April is just someone Roger needed once upon a time, like heroin she was just another drug habit Roger had to fight against. She’s not real, not to Mark and the more time passes the more it seems that way for everyone. She’s no longer brought up every day, no longer whispered about only when Roger’s back is turned. It is as if April is the name of a stranger they never knew, only read about the girl’s tragedy in the morning papers.
Mark doesn’t mind. Forgetting about it is easier than dealing with it. The only thing he worries about is when he stops and worries about her. Because what if Roger had been right? What if April had really died, not when the morgue took the body or they spread the ashes in the alley where Roger and April first met, but when Roger stopped crying her name in his sleep and Benny throw out all her old pictures?
“I don’t know why he always plays it,” Mimi says. “It sounds so sad, playing a song for a dead girl.” Mark always thought that, too. Wondered why the first thing Roger did when he tuned up his fender was to play the song that April had an old record of, the same one Mark had heard played over and over from the musician’s room late at night to block out the sobbing. It seemed so morbid to him, to keep playing the waltz of a girl when it would be so much easier just to forget her.
Here is Mark, sitting on the couch at the best angle he could find to capture Mimi’s every move. Roger’s words he probably wasn’t even conscious of keep playing in his head. What if he can keep her alive just by memory? What if film can make someone live forever? Does Mark really want that responsibility?
Mark trains his camera on Mimi. “She must have been beautiful,” She mutters, still painting her toes like there isn’t a dead girl a few feet away, sprawled out on the floor of the bathroom and bleeding away a little more each day. “Do you have her on film?”
Mark swallows around the lump in his throat and keeps rolling. Block it out. Don’t think about it. You never knew her. Just keep it all locked inside and you’ll be fine. “Not really,” Mark answers. “You’re a better film subject anyway.”
Mimi smiles and Mark zooms in to her face. Through the thin walls of the loft is the soft tune of Musetta’s Waltz warming up an old fender guitar.