Chapter One

I sat alone in the break room, content that the first part of the day held no sway over memory. It was an incremental victory, to be sure, but reaching the midpoint of work without a single souring of moments was, at least in my view, earned, valid relief. A machine-vended Turkey Ham Stacker, newly freed from cellophane, sat ready to undergo a thorough inspection before becoming part of my gastrointestinal chemistry. The next twenty-five minutes were going to be poetically bland, perhaps accentuated by faint, pensive arcs while I chewed cold cuts and processed cheese. Effortless time, slight but glorious, making glop out of food I barely trusted.

This particular week had been fraught with crappiness; at home, two sinks of dishes, dishes covered with the dried spit and unscraped food of my two roommates, had grown in bacterial and olfactory strength with no action from an accountable party in sight. I was pretty sure those fuckers were eating my licorice and lying about it, too. Then the other night, at Egyptian Mike’s, I had three drinks spilled on me in the span of four hours while a bunch of random dickheads got all drunk and rowdy and played shitty music. Mike’s “boys” from out of town came to celebrate someone’s birthday, so I really couldn’t say anything. Not that I would have, but I didn’t even have the option. Also, my car began suffering from wicked bouts of Parkinson’s every time it went uphill or tried to be a member of highway traffic, and any earnings-configuration thus far proposed failed to provide a means of looking into the problem.

So work–though sometimes monotonous and soul-chipping–held no aggravating incidents for nearly a week. No gangrene-effect annoyances spread through to my job. Boring didn’t exactly offset bothersome, but what’s the harm in convincing yourself otherwise? Moving a line to champion the moral win? None, I thought. Let’s do it. Make the declaration of “push” and just eat my sandwich. Satisfied, leaning back against the comfort that a settled issue can bring, I scanned the room for this one big-faced girl who had uneven eyes, hoping to eavesdrop on her end of a cell phone conversation. The other day she talked about wanting to cook a neutered male chicken, and I wanted to know if she ever got the chance. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there, so I instead looked around for something else to wipe up time and noticed an older guy eating soup by himself at another table. He appeared tall even as he sat, and was bald save for the semicircular remnants of brown fighting gray that insulated temples from eyewear, and although the initial impression he gave seemingly served as a vanguard for nothing stare-worthy, his soup-eating did manage to hoard my interest. Immediately after every spoonful, the guy would quickly open his mouth to cram in a couple saltines then chomp chomp chomp until–and I could see it on his face, the moment he decided–all components were mixed up just right. While the mastication did bear an automatic quality, a quality formed over decades of eating certain foods in certain ways since childhood, it also lacked the practiced ease of “just chewing.” I thought it would be funny if worlds away, in a different realm, a goblin viewed him through a telescope, urging him on as though the specific eating of soup played into an evil plan. “That’s right, first the soup, and yes, now the crackers, that’s a good boy…” After watching five or six bites, I realized that dreaming up scenarios involving otherworldly masterminds and the lunching peccadilloes of people from work was specifically the kind of thing I wanted to try and remember to do more often.

Then, as the guy neared the bottom of his margarine container, as my sandwich lost more and more of its life, a distinct welter yanked my ear, and a correlative dread yanked my face into scowl-mode.

Tammy was coming. Tammy from the Claims Department. Tammy who was shaped like two UFOs stacked one on top of the other. I could hear the slovenly thud of her closer-growing proximity, two trash bags filled with chopped sausage whooshing along to spoil my lunch. I spotted her lumbering towards me, her movement an awkward tribute to the shifting of mass and momentum. The amount of energy it took for Tammy to walk is probably the same amount of energy it takes to crush a star, my God. Tammy had the face of a plush toy: those marbles-dipped-in-glycerin eyes, that pig-like, stuck-on nose, and a mouth perpetually agape–yearning for pork chops, probably. Her hair flew off the back of her head like the frazzled tail of a fat, lazy comet and straggled all the way down to her waistline. I mean, seriously, what a fucking mess. As it turns out, clothes weren’t made that accommodated both Tammy’s girth and the dress code, so she got away with wearing shirts that, depending on which ones they were, could have moonlighted as floral design draperies or checkered picnic tablecloths. Her pants were always black, always elastic, and always stretched as far as a four-year-old’s imagination. And, I must say, commendations to the maker of Tammy’s brand of white tennis shoes, whose product daily survived pressure that could turn peanut shells into diamonds.

Suddenly, the universe no longer expanded. Tammy sat down across from me, and the severe notion that outer space is limited and perhaps shrinking sat down with her.

“Hey Greg…what’s up?” Tammy barely got out the words, her post-exertion breathing making a marathon out of speech.

“Not a whole lot.”

“Well, don’t forget to fax those DME worksheets before you go home today. Deb needs those to start a research log, you know, to clarify and update. Durable Medical–”

“I know what they are, Tammy.”

“Well, don’t forget to do those.”

“Look, I’ll get it done right after–”

“Dang it,” Tammy struggled to open a container of what appeared to be plain spaghetti noodles.

“You don’t eat those with sauce or anything?”

“Nope. Just butter.”

Tammy lifted her fork partway to her lips, then with her fingers, removed the noodles from the plastic-ware and stuck them in her mouth. I wasn’t sure if this was a one-time deal so I kept watching. Sure enough, Tammy repeated the disgusting, inefficient process with yet another mass of edible strands.

“Tammy, why are you–”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. I have to make a call.”

That last image of Tammy, noodles hanging from her mouth, mindlessly vacuuming her lunch like a programmed blob, threatened to preemptively make bad the rest of my day. Ruth could save me, though. Like the week before, when Tammy talked about hurricanes …Ruth picked up the pieces.

I went downstairs to use a phone.

Ruth’s parents owned the pizza place where she worked, so she really didn’t have a set schedule. They basically told her day-to-day when to show up.

Please be home, I thought.

The phone rang, beckoning for a therapeutic connection.

“Hello?”

“Is Ruth there?”

“Does anyone else ever answer this phone?”

“Just trying to be polite.”

“Aww. How unnecessary.”

“Anyway, I was just calling because I miss you.”

“You saw me this morning,” she said, words mixing with confused, abrupt laughter. Did she not recognize my earnest?

“Well yeah, but that was for the first time in like eight days,” I reasoned.

“My parents have me closing every night,” she reasoned back.

“I know.”

“So, were the mushrooms that bad?”

“No, the mushrooms weren’t that bad.”

“So an omelet with mushrooms isn’t ‘food gone wrong in possibly the worst way’?”

“I ate it, didn’t I?”

“Yes you did. And next time,” she slyly pondered, “I think I’ll have you try…the poached eggs.”

“Ew.”

“Or maybe the cottage cheese with fruit.”

“Blah, gross. Stop it.”

“I’m gonna make you,” her voice raised pitch, song-like. We both laughed.

“So…are you closing tonight?”

“Nope.”

“That’s awesome.” I meant it. That was awesome.

“But I told Fran that we were able to meet her and Duncan at their place. For dinner.”

Fran and Duncan? For dinner?

“Huh.”

“Was that not a good idea? Fran from high school, remember?”

“No, no. I can go. It’s just that…I bought stuff to make hotdogs last night.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ruth said, “I saw the can of beans on the counter this morning.”

For some reason, I got kind of embarrassed when she said this.

“Yeah, so you knew that.”

“Can’t you eat hotdogs another night?”

“That’s…well, duh. Of course I can eat hotdogs another night.”

“So we’re going.”

“Oh yeah, totally,” I assured. “What are we having?”

“I’m not sure. Something with lentils? Anyway, I told Fran that we’d bring some wine.”

“Okay.”

Ruth candied her voice. “Could you maybe…pick some up when you get off work? If you do it I’ll love you forever.”

“We’re a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds, but yeah, I can pick some up.”

“So what, they’re automatically pretending to be ‘sophistos’ because they want to drink wine?”

“Not sure. That depends on a precise ratio involving number of utensils, mentions of foreign film, praises of European culture, amount of garlic roasters and art books, jewelry versions of kids toys–”

“Hm. Sounds…objective.”

“None of my systems have failed me yet.”

A sigh. “Just don’t forget the wine, okay, babe?”

“I won’t. Love you.”

“Love you too, Greg. Can’t wait to see you.”

Excellent. Plans to see Ruth. And of course, the idea was to have my real dinner after eating that fake, crappy one. Hotdogs remained on the menu. The menu of destiny, that is.

I spent the rest of lunch at my desk, wondering if I would have to pretend liking Fran, Duncan, or lentils.

Then, Jill from Q.C. appeared.

“Can you pull these files and take them over to Nadine?” She handed me a list. “I put an empty cart over there.”

I forced myself to answer immediately, fighting the urge to lower my head and say nothing.

“All right.”

Jill had blonde hair, which she wore up on her head–all kind of wrapped around and compact and stylish. Her face was sleek and contoured, high cheekbones and angular jaw, with taut yet soft-looking skin. She wore power suits or outfits involving skirts and appeared very fit–I could definitely see her using the elliptical trainer at some upscale fitness center. Jill’s body ran on poise; the fast-set metronome of her walk and the regal-like quality of her posture gracefully intimidated. Even though I saw her everyday, Jill did not seem real. I couldn’t picture her rushing around in the morning, brushing her teeth while fixing her hair, kicking things out of the way and cursing because she couldn’t find her keys. It’s like she was shot out of a tube, ready to go. I always imagined other women hating her.

“You can get Jeff to help you if you can’t get to all of them,” she said, turning to go elsewhere.

“Okay.”

The other thing about Jill was that every time she talked to me, it seemed as though she came away with something, like within a few seconds of interaction could catalogue a new set of flaws, deep-scanning my every layer until finding stuff even I didn’t know about. Last year, before meeting Ruth, I tried to masturbate while thinking of Jill, but my instant association of her with the flayed open feeling of being perused at will kept me below-flaccid (even after banging it on the counter a couple times). The worst part was, the next day at work, I think she could tell what happened.

Putting files on the cart was simple, very low brain tax. Although, a prevalent concern when coupling an unvaried thought–that is, wanting to see Ruth after work–with a menial, repetitive task can be to unwittingly inform the day you’re wishing it away, and a phenomenon comprised of no fewer than two celestial bodies doesn’t typically welcome (and will therefore resist) an attempted shortening by entry-level staff. So it’s always the hope that a sufficient amount of myriad mental strata has been piled up to conceal the true, underlying want. So after trying to decide whether or not a cross between a scorpion and a samurai could beat a golem made out of shark teeth and a clearing splitter became too daunting, I pushed the cart to a nearby window, looking outside for distraction.

Rain fell in writhing veils, floating down like the cast-off skins of maturing wraiths. A plastic bag made a run for it but got caught on a bush, forced into indentured servitude as a windsock. People made a run for it too: some sprinted, others jogged, others clopped hunched-over as though burdened by the weight of a spectral overlord’s chain. One guy just stood there, arms spread, offering his face to the rainfall. I realized, horrified, that he was attempting to have a spiritual moment right there in the parking lot. Maybe the water indicated the cloud-borne blessing of a future endeavor–building a wraparound tree house just like one he saw in a magazine, I guessed. Or maybe the guy hated himself, or at least what he considered to be his old, crappier self, and, tears mixing with raindrops, could feel his past being cleansed away. The pose lasted a few more seconds until he decided to walk out of view, which disappointed, because picturing his head as a rendezvous point for two lightning bolts would’ve been way better had he remained still.

I watched the storm all the way until its end, which did fill me with an appropriate amount of pride. As I re-manned the cart, I took a few steps then paused. Yep, too much pop.

Chapter Two

When I opened the men’s room door, a contingent of bowel-bred particles, much like a swarm of cartoon bees, arranged its numbers into a fist and made hay with my face. I pulled up the collar of my undershirt to cover my nose and made sure no breaths gained mouth entry, either. Really now, who wants that in his mouth? I took my stance and unzipped, trying to focus on the distorted reflection of my face in the stainless steel pipe-work atop the urinal. Jesus, someone was really going at it in there: the low rumble of boiled eggs, the ear-tickling squeak of pudding and sauerkraut, that unmistakable sputtering of extrusion. Was he wringing out a sponge in there? Seriously. The rare occasions I sat down in a public facility, the intense moments occurred in strict solitude. In fact, I made not a sound if another dude came in–no wiping, no throat-clearing, no grunting. And certainly no raucous farting or egesting with such gusto that hollow splashing sounds echoed throughout the room. Especially at work. I mean, what if someone recognizes your shoes or belt? This guy, though, didn’t care. There was overflow to jettison and apparently nothing could block that notion. It sounded extreme, life-changing, as if he couldn’t come out of that stall the same person. Like he could shit away the memory of what his kids looked like, or something. I didn’t want to laugh, but those sounds, the audible stages of buildup and payoff…trumpets and trombones and ducks fighting over food…I zipped up and left. No shaking, no hand washing, no checking for dots.

I really should’ve looked at the guy’s feet.

Jill’s list took about an hour and a half to complete. As I pushed my cart to Nadine’s desk, Brice from A & I walked over to meet me. Brice wore glasses and had the hair of an anchorman, parted and timeless. He always wore polo shirts and khaki pants with brown loafers, even on casual dress days. Brice seemed like the kind of guy who would give you his just-bought ice cream sundae after seeing you didn’t have one. He also seemed like the kind of guy who would have female coworkers trying to set him up on dates (“My niece is visiting” or “There’s this gal from church” sort of thing). We sat in on the same group for Compliance training, where, between videos and flipcharts, he detailed both the intricacies and virtues of flying radio-controlled aircraft (I declined an offer to go watch him do it). Following that, Brice figured we had an obligation to talk anytime we saw each other.

“So they have you pulling files, do they?”

“Looks that way.”

“Are those being purged?”

“Yep. I’m taking these over to Nadine, then I have to look up the other ones that weren’t there.”

“Let me look at those,” Brice said, motioning for the list. “All of these are getting imaged,” he explained, pointing to the block of file numbers I hadn’t crossed off, “you don’t have to look them up on the computer. Just write ‘300’ for all the locations.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, those are getting scanned by my department. Basically, any time you can’t find an old file, that’s where it is.”

“Right on.”

On the way back to my desk, Shauna from Claims asked me to take her box of handbooks to the mail room. She said the box was too heavy for her to lift, but after carrying it myself without any trouble, I questioned whether or not she actually tried lifting it. Pushing open the mail room door with my foot, I paused when a rapid-fire blitzkrieg assaulted my ears. The strident chaos of machine operation, the banging about of papers and packaging, and the zoop zoop clack of tape rollers grated the air. A dozen or so people busily tended to stacks of work over the span of three long tables, and I felt stupid and useless just by standing there. I went to put my box on the appropriate table, but there wasn’t any room, so I set it underneath instead.

“What are you doing?” A girl with ragged blonde hair and thick glasses came up to me. Tina was her name. Tina wanted to know what I was doing.

“Dropping something off for Shauna,” I said, not sure if she could even hear me above the multi-layered racket.

“That stuff,” she pointed to the box on the floor, “is supposed to go on the table so it can be metered.”

“There wasn’t any room on the table–”

“Then you make room. It’s not that hard.” Her tone perfectly harmonized with the commotion-all-around, wavelengths intertwining to braid the same corrective whip a booger-wiping recidivist gets when caught making a deposit on the curtains. But I could explain.

“I didn’t want to mess up anyone else’s work–”

“You know what? Just leave it there. I’ll do it.” Tina started picking up then slamming boxes and trays, some of them to the floor.

Whatever, I thought.

Once outside the door, I shook my head. She didn’t have to yell. Actually, it was pretty loud in there, so in a way, maybe she did. Oh well, a story for later. The dumb-ass putting his box on the stupid floor.

The rest of the day I typed in orders for benefit history printouts, which always threatened to atrophy those parts of the brain responsible for life-enjoyment. Just when a knockout seemed imminent, five o’clock waved off my bout with sedation. As I stood to leave, I reviewed the following mental itinerary:

Remember to get wine.
Stop by Egyptian Mike’s.
Go to the apartment, get ready.
Go to Ruth’s.

I went to clock out, lengthening stride once Tammy entered my vision.

“Greg?”

Tammy’s voice. I kept walking.

“Greg.”

In my range of concern, all work-talk was considered next-week fare.

“Greg, did you fax those worksheets?”

Ah, fuck.

I stopped to reply, gutting out a warm, confident tone.

“Sure did.”

“Okay, I was just checking because–”

“I have to clock out,” I said, tilting my head towards the computer lab. “Um, see you Monday.”

“See you Monday, Greg.”

Tammy heave-hoed by, a parade balloon roaming the hallways.

Fucking hell. I forgot to fax those stupid-ass worksheets.

***

That Friday, Benson’s Food & Drug must’ve had answers on sale, because everyone in the world happened to be there.

I hurried along, needing to compensate for roughly twenty minutes of taunting by a busy signal, weaving through other shoppers in what started to resemble a performance art retelling of Stop Animation’s trial-and-error first days. Upon reaching the wine section, my body suddenly straightened, taking a cue from the exclamation point flashing in my brain.

“There’s like eighty kinds,” I said, staring in disbelief.

Scanning labels, I tried to make the best decision based on a host of unfamiliar factors. Petite? Buttery? Playful? Robust? Full, yet subtle? Partway into perusing, I realized that the night’s wine selection, like most everything else, was umbilically related to the balance of my bank account.

“Baron Glade something-or-other, eighteen dollars.”

Satisfied, I re-entered the populous fray, almost kneeing a little kid in the face when I tried stretching my thigh while half-jogging. After rounding the corner to find the express aisle, a bottle of the Baron’s finest almost hit the floor.

It looks like a Soviet breadline, I thought, referring to the formation’s length and not to the amount of frozen waffles this one lady had. The line went far beyond the counter and cut across the main walkway, obstructing moms and kids and carts full of beer. I kept hopping in and out of line to facilitate their passing, glaring at the asshole in front of me who looked on in manufactured aloofness. If somehow granted a minute’s worth of impunity via cosmic lottery, I would have seriously considered heading over to the Garden Center to grab a long-handled lesson in manners.

The procession crept along like a pack of jaded zombies from the union (“Yeah yeah yeah, we’ll eat the girl, just as soon as we get there”). In addition to this, the prick in front of me took ten hours to put a debit card receipt in his wallet.

Finally, I was up.

“Would you like a bag for this?”

“No thanks, I can manage.”

Then, departure. I trotted out to my car, slowing to glance at the bottle.

I hope this is the right kind. Or an acceptable wrong kind, I thought, fanning my keys to unlock the car door.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Excuse me?”

“The wine, what’s the occasion?”

A kid around my age, wearing a blue jacket over his white shirt and red tie, awaited an answer, cocking his head with genuine interest. He seemed…composed in a way I could imagine myself growing to hate.

“Dah, nothing. No occasion. Just meeting some people. For dinner.”

“Sounds wonderful. Do you believe in spiritual things?”

“Excuse me?”

“Spiritual things, do you believe in them?”

“Sure. I don’t know. No? Sorry, but I’m kind of in a hurry.”

“Oh. Well here.”

Pamphlets appeared.

“Read through these, if you like, then later I can answer any questions you have.” He pointed to a phone number on the back of a pamphlet. “My name’s Jeremy, by the way. What’s yours?”

“Greg.”

“I look forward to hearing from you, Greg. May God grant you what is necessary.”

We shook hands. Jeremy smiled as we did so, projecting the truest power of fellowship and goodwill. The light–yes, the light of his smile could probably destroy flies or kill cancerous cells, I thought.

“Um, you too, guy.”

I stood and watched him go into the store, deciding I could never approach people the way he just approached me. Throwing the tracts in the backseat, placing the wine on the passenger side floor, I then drove off to my next stop.

May God grant me all green lights.

***

“Aww shit. It’s the motherfuckin’ Prophet and shit.”

Three guys lounged on Egyptian Mike’s porch, almost daring someone to care about it. Two of them sank into a broken couch, too-big denim oozing from the untucked bottoms of bowling shirts. The other sat on a ledge, attired in black t-shirt and jeans, knit-capped head slowly nodding agreement with whatever went down. As I walked up the peeling-paint stairs, one of the guys just dabbed on the couch offered his fist.

“Prophet,” he grinned.

“You know it,” I replied, touching knuckles with him then the others.

“Is Mike around?”

“Yeah man. He’s trying to hook up this new surround sound.”

“Cool, man.”

The front door was open so I peaked in. Mike sat hunched on the floor in front of the entertainment center, looking over his shoulder to greet me.

“Hey, Prophet. What’s up, man?”

“Same thing, I suppose.”

Honestly, I couldn’t believe someone would sit on that matted grunge of carpet. That big, pliable stain, brown overlaid with the dull complexity of night after night of shoes and spilled drinks. I never once saw vacuum cleaner tracks, although the carpet was perhaps so beaten down that none could be perked up, actually.

“Why you just standin’ there, dog? Come in, make yourself at home.”

I picked a loveseat and sat down. Mike leaned back, reaching out to swat hands and bang fists.

“Man, I’ve been trying to hook this shit up for like an hour,” he said. “My cousin said he could do it but I can’t get a hold of him.”

“Aww man, that sucks.”

“Yeah, fuck it. I’ll just wait for him to stop by and make him do it then.”

A girl walked out of the kitchen.

“Hey Prophet,” she said offhandedly, talking on a cordless phone as she went upstairs.

“Hey Lucy.”

No one at Egyptian Mike’s used my real name. Everyone referred to me as The Prophet–for regrettably sensible reasons. The origin of The Prophet went something like this:

The first night I ever hung out at Mike’s, this guy from the Czech Republic brought a bottle of absinthe. I wasn’t planning to partake, but required coaxing was minimal after bong rips and vodka. So, someone handed me this long test tube of fluid and told me to “drink that shit down.” A glass tube, I later learned, because everyone thought it was “some tripped-out shit.” Cigarettes, dry mouth, and alcohol shredded my sense of taste, so I can’t remember if it tasted bad. I grabbed a couple beers and plunked down on the broken couch outside, taking slow pulls and telling people “hi” or “bye” as they passed. Then, while sitting there, sweating in the breeze, a flying-kick epiphany smashed the windshield of my worldview. It was Jesus, man. He was like, sorry.

“Sorry for what?”

“He’s like, sorry. But it’s cool, man.”

“Because he’s sorry?”

“Yeah. I mean, no. It’s like…it’s cool.”

“Whatever, homes.”

Possessed, empowered with secret knowledge, I unquestionably accepted the epic task of sharing my newfound spiritual bounty with everyone. Jesus’ apologetic posture was the only part I could verbalize, however, and the rest of it–the stuff made of a billion cells of equally profound magnitude–failed to form into something speakable. But damn it, that couldn’t stop me. That couldn’t stop the truth. Just when I was about to explode and become a constellation with Jesus, I found that by taking someone’s face in both hands, I could topically transmit the divine message straight into that person’s soul. The harder I tried to reach out and infuse those before me with the Way of Greg, the harder the world resisted my efforts. The grim, sweeping curvature from periphery to that which lay behind me spun a vortex to suck me away from The Mission. I trudged on, though, forward-moving, my words cutting through ontological misperception like paint thinner through a ghost.

“Whiteboy’s freakin’, yo.”

“Freakin’ on Jesus and shit.”

Hands slapped and grabbed. People pushed me away.

But you’ll be doomed, I told them.

“Man, back the fuck off.”

“Let him be, man, it’s cool.”

I woke up the next day in Mike’s living room, kneeling with my head buried in the loveseat.

I must’ve moaned.

“The Prophet awakens,” someone announced. My disciples thought it appropriate to laugh.

Ever since then, I’ve been known as The Prophet.

“You just come to chill or what’s goin’ on?”

Mike got up off the floor, pulling down on his pant legs and tweaking his jersey in three or four places. Mike had a roundish face, one level below cherubic, with eyes advertising the glint of modern-day brigand. His cosmetic staples were a shaved head and manicured goatee, and his oft-worn expression combined listless with eager. Mike had a stocky, stubborn build, his kinetic language forceful even when he just stood or sat around. The way he gestured while telling a story or jumped up to give someone else his seat portended the centrifuge of boom! splat! coursing through his frame.

An Egyptian motif dominated Mike’s house: pictures of the Sphinx, posters featuring pyramids, a shelf of books about Egypt, a rug tacked on the wall supposedly from Egypt–one time I took someone aside there and asked her if Mike hailed from the land of Osiris, you know, had ties to the nation of his home’s decor.

“What does it look like? Duh.”

Mike sold me drugs on occasion. Mainly I went there to get all wasted and avoid my roommates, but this time was for drugs.

“Actually, I was seeing if you had any more of that stuff you gave me last time.”

“That pink shit? Yeah man, I got more of that.”

“Cool. Two doses should, uh, tide me over.”

“Whatever you say, man. Prophet Discount in effect, y’all,” Mike yelled, running upstairs to grab the meds.

We made plans to hook up on Saturday.

Chapter Three

Todd and Damon.

I couldn’t afford to live by myself.

Hence, Todd and Damon.

I got to my apartment at 6:25, leaving fifteen minutes to shower and change clothes. Doable, no doubt. I walked up the stairs, hand on the railing, two steps at a time. After taking off my shoes and jacket I reached for a light switch, and got treated to an eyeful of aftermath.

“Fuck”, I said.

Clumps of hair, like scattered bundles of overcooked pot roast, all over the kitchen floor. Todd’s hair, for sure. Mary must’ve cut his hair in the fucking kitchen.

I didn’t punch holes in the wall.

Forgetting why I even went in there, I grabbed a towel from the hallway closet and headed for the bathroom.

More hair.

I immediately knocked on Todd’s bedroom door.

He answered and, sure enough, that puny fucker had gotten a haircut. Crew cut. I stared at him for a few seconds, realizing that an especially loud cluck of a tongue would cave in his chest.

Todd. Pipe cleaners covered with skin, covered with moles. A head patterned after the lone-surviving artifact of an ancient stone-carving people. A face in perpetual disagreement with the world.

“Uh, Greg, is this important?”

He wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“Todd, why is hair on the floor?”

“Mary gave me–”

“God, you know what, I know that. Why is hair in the kitchen and the bathroom?”

“I don’t know.”

That look on his face. Half-squinting, brows lowered, projecting disdain for what anyone might say.

“Well I want to take a shower.”

“You can take a shower,” he said, gingerly touching a mole on his forearm as though reaffirming the welded-on presence of an heirloom jewel.

Flesh eating ants. A bull with unresolved issues. A cybernetically augmented silverback gone mad from bad science. These were the things I wanted to become.

“Can you clean up that hair first?”

He sighed then looked off to his left, probably to Mary, probably to confirm the rash, confrontational squawk of some jerk in the doorway.

My fill? Yep, done had.

“I guess I’ll just put on some different clothes,” I said, making sure to convey irritation.

“Are you sure? ‘Cause I can do that, clean up the hair.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, already walking to my room.

“Oh,” Todd remembered something, “Damon said that you need to wash any dishes that are yours, because the sink’s full and dishes are getting on the counter.”

I left.

***

“Baron Glade. My mom told me this was a good brand,” Ruth said, turning the bottle in her hands, looking over it approvingly, then looking up at me approvingly.

“That’s what I heard, too.”

“Did you wear that to work?” Ruth noticed I hadn’t changed clothes.

“Yeah. The plan was to put on some different clothes, but–”

“But Todd or Damon or Mary or Beth did something to make you mad and you didn’t have a chance.”

“Well…I bet you can’t guess what he did.”

“Who?”

“Todd.”

“I don’t care what he did. You just need to get out of there,” she said, walking into me, turning her back then guiding my arms around her stomach. She leaned back her head and tilted her face towards mine, lips scrunched over for a kiss.

Mmwaah, we said.

“I’ll be ready in five minutes, okay babe? Then we’ll get going.”

“Cool.”

She went into her bedroom. I followed.

Ruth got situated on the floor, cross-legged in front of a mirror, lining her eyes and so forth. I kneeled at the side of her bed, points of elbows depressing the comforter, resting my chin on open-book hands, adoring with such immodesty the walls blushed beneath their paint.

Ruth’s hair embodied the soul of reddish-brown, the spun lilt of a wood-nymph choir’s accolade to Nature. Her eyes were dimensional portals to the birthplace of Green, bright and piercing as simple truth. She had a small nose and mouth, with cheeks emulating the smooth camber of halves of fruit. She was sacredly diminutive, the compactness of her outline forcing that much more of the world into background. Her smile commandeered, her laugh could demand any ransom on Earth, and her sarcastic charm could slay any measure of self-importance.

What she saw in me? Who the fuck knows.

“Okay, all ready,” she said, jumping up then turning to face me. “Were you just looking at my butt?”

“No way.”

“Naughty boy. Let’s go.”

We headed outside. Ruth wore her favorite brown “hoody” and a long beige skirt.

“You are…stupendously beautiful,” I commented.

She smiled, rummaging through my ribcage with a tangible brightness only she could produce. “That’s good, Greg. Using adverbs. Complement the compliments.”

“Your approval is a drug,” I said.

“Let’s take my car. You drive.” Her hand shot out, presenting me with keys. Most times, Ruth had me drive her car, but I never interpreted this routine as laziness or shirking on her behalf. In a way, I always thought of it as Ruth wanting to be taken somewhere by her man, but not particularly in the car that came with him.

After a few blocks, she noticed something.

“You’re totally pissed off about something, aren’t you?”

I glanced over, giving her that bullshit “who me?” look. “No I’m not.”

“What, did Tammy bring yogurt for lunch and–oh my God–lick the excess yogurt off the lid?”

I had to admit, most days, that would’ve been a pretty good guess. That sort of thing does stay with you.

“No. Tammy was pretty gross today, but nothing I’d jot down for the chronicles.”

“Oh. You did mention Todd earlier. So what’s up?” Ruth probed with a stare, snaking optically-born tendrils through my ear canal to pull out an answer.

I let out a sigh. It wasn’t just Todd, but oh well.

“He left a fucking mess all over the bathroom and I needed to use it. That inconsiderate fuck.”

Ruth thought about this for half a second.

“So, because of Todd’s mess, you were unable to do anything or go anywhere, and you cried and cried because Ruth had to go eat dinner without you. Oh, wait.” She ended on a pause.

“That’s not the point,” I explained, perhaps getting louder. “Todd needs to realize that other people live there, and his fucking getting haircuts all over the apartment can make them late.”

“But you were on time,” Ruth flatly stated.

“Because I chose to circumvent my original course of action. I wasn’t late because of something I did, but could’ve been late because of something he did. Is this not clear to you for some reason?”

A traffic light went from yellow, to red, to green.

“You better not get all withdrawn and brooding when we get to Fran and Duncan’s.”

“What?”

“Don’t do that. You know what I mean, Greg. Two weeks ago, someone at work accused you of loading the wrong paper in tray five, or whatever, in the copier, and hours beyond the fact you were a total dick at my friend Stacy’s. You wouldn’t talk to anybody.”

“I talked to you.”

“Yeah, and you complained the whole time. Just…be a sweetie Greg, like I know you can.” Ruth took my right hand off the wheel, interlacing her fingers with mine. “We’ll just relax and have fun, okay?”

Relax and have fun, I could do that. Heck, I was planning to do that.

“I get worried that if things don’t…I don’t know.” She let out a long breath. “Ever since…”

She was no longer talking about Stacy’s.

Last month, Ruth went out of town to stay at her sister’s for a couple days. Work had recently implemented a three-week period of mandatory overtime, and I was on day two, week two of this horrendous stretch. My car wouldn’t start because of the timing belt, so I’d been taking the bus to work. And people on the bus are fucking crazy. I sat next to this one girl who had tattered ribbons and other such pieces of meaningful trash stuck all throughout her hair, and she told me a story about how she peed on the bus, right there on the seat.

“On this bus?”

“No. I was going downtown.”

Really, who does that then fucking talks about it? Of course, after hearing this story, all I wanted to do was throw up or bang my head on something. I didn’t even change seats, wanting to avoid appearing rude to some stranger.

Then, work. Since my car was down, I had to catch a ride with someone to eat elsewhere during lunch. Brice was happy to take me if we saw each other, but some days I had to go with Paul.

“She was probably trying to turn you on,” Paul laughed, responding to my account of that morning’s bus trip.

Paul was a regular-looking, brown-haired guy. Nothing stood out. Any time I thought about him, though, I always pictured him as needing to shave his face and iron his clothes.

Paul and I had just gotten back from the Christy’s drive-up window, and he decided that we should eat together. I sat on the raised edge of the parking lot, legs extended, not really enjoying a Caesar chicken wrap. Paul stood next to his car, hefting a double-cheeseburger, regaling me with emotive commentary.

“I can’t believe my nephew’s godfather might be gay,” Paul said, smashing beef and bread and cheese into saliva-softened gray (the word “macerate” came to mind as I watched). He ate while he talked, barfing up cakey globs of rant between smacking and swallowing his food. Paul took huge bites of hamburger, opening wide his mouth for mess-free accommodation, then snapped up French fries three at a time until his mouth could barely close.

Not that it closed.

“I mean, what would you do if the person you picked to be the spiritual coach of your kid turned out to be gay? Like everything’s fine, and then all of a sudden you find out that the job’s been entrusted to a fucking faggot. Would you want them around your kid? Or have your kid going to them for advice?”

He stopped talking. He really wanted me to answer.

“Paul, are you sure you should be talking about this at work?” I asked.

“No one can hear us,” he said, piqued at my caution.

Us? How could he possibly use that pronoun? I didn’t say anything inappropriate. I questioned his topical discretion, not ours. Because we didn’t both speak on a subject. Only he did. All I did was sit there while he jabbered on about some meaningless bullshit that involved saying the words “gay” and “faggot” really loud. Probably when people walked by, too. That’s why–

Holy fuck, I realized. If other people heard Paul, and saw me sitting there with him, they could easily assume that a discussion, rather than a one-way diatribe, took place. Like I was either a waiting participant or silent condoner when I didn’t agree with him whatsoever. Goddamn it. Bigotry should be kept secret, I always thought. Or spread anonymously through a newsletter.

“Oh shoot, I forgot. John wanted to talk to me,” I said, hurriedly wadding up my fast food bag then jogging off, away from Paul. There was no John, but I couldn’t handle being around that burger-eating cock for another second.

My heart pounded until day’s end. It could be anyone, I thought. Tina from the mail room. Jeff from Indexing. They think I hate queers. They can corroborate my fag-hating session with Paul and file a complaint with boss-people. What a nightmare. I couldn’t imagine actually getting in trouble, but there would be this whole process of talking and sitting somewhere and at the end, even with no wrongdoing found nor punitive action taken, I could still be hated for shit someone else did.

I tried to forget about all of it on the bus ride home.

The bus made three stops en route to my neighborhood. At the first, two guys got on, opting to share a seat despite the bus’s nearly empty capacity.

That’s weird, I thought.

One of the guys, a guy with a spiked mohawk, wore a small black tank top with black cargo pants and black wristbands. The other guy, a guy with a flat mohawk, was in a green, tight-fitting army jacket and worn out jeans. They sat directly across the aisle from me, holding hands and talking quietly.

“Excuse me, do you have a fucking problem?”

The guy in black looked right at me.

I swallowed. “No.”

“Then why are you staring at us? Are we being too gay for you?”

I swallowed again. “No, um, not at all.”

“Does it bother you that I take it up the ass? Does that bother you?” He enunciated his query, head doing a tightly contained three-axis shake throughout.

Before I could answer, the one in green joined in, pointing my way.

“Because it bothers us that you don’t take it up the ass, buddy.”

At some point I must’ve hit a switch or backed into a lever. Maybe a tripwire set something off. Because I was clearly the victim of an apprentice gremlin’s machinery, the target for obtaining a master’s mark in Painful Awkwardness. In high school, when something surprised or initially confused him, my Physics teacher would hold up his hands and say, “Whoa, now, let’s rewind.” If he had appeared right then and made that very suggestion, he would’ve been speaking on my behalf. Seriously, though. Why were these guys attacking me? I mainly stared because of the hairdos, honestly. Then this character-questioning and public challenge…I just wanted to go home.

The interrogation continued.

“What’s the matter? You don’t like being called out on your prejudice, Mr. Staring Problem? Can’t say anything without a group of people holding up signs behind you?”

“Yeah, does an officially ordained bigot have to write out your response on a little card for you?”

They practically yelled. Passengers further down turned their heads to view the commotion.

I slumped forward, nauseated, resting my forehead on the back of the seat in front of me. My breathing felt cut off, the onslaught of words and aggression one-two chopping across my windpipe. An image of Paul stuffing burger parts into his mouth got stuck in my throat shortly after.

“Of course not,” I managed to reply.

“Oh, so you’re an original-thinking hate monger? Let me tell you, that is so advanced.”

That’s not what I meant, I tried to say, but my tongue got sidetracked in an effort to push its way through the roof of my mouth. I don’t hate you, you fucking assholes.

The subsequent minutes became very indistinct, a blurred rattle consisting of me picturing a guy who sat alone on a bus, scratching rivulets down his face from bottom eyelids to jaw-line while biting through the skin beneath his lower lip. I got off at the next stop, running all the way home, up the stairs and into my room. I stayed there for a while, ignoring phone calls and door knocks until Ruth came to get me.

“Hey babe, can I come in?”

“Yeah, it’s unlocked.”

I noticed she bought new shoes on her trip.

“Greg, why are you under the bed?”

Chapter Four

Once we hit downtown, Ruth directed me to park next to a super-tall building. A building that crossed its arms and laughed as I approached the door.

“I didn’t know these were apartments,” I commented, looking up and around.

“I guess they really love it here,” Ruth said, taking a sharp breath then putting her feet together as though assuming the proper stance for pushing a button on the intercom.

Fran’s voice, drawn-out and playful, came through the speaker: “Is that Ruth and Greg?”

“Yeah Franny, it’s us.” Ruth rolled her eyes then smiled at me.

Silence followed.

“Did the thing just break?” Like did it now just stop working?” I asked, hoping my eyebrows didn’t go too far up or down.

Ruth flashed a look. Shush, Greg, it said.

Fran finally responded. “I’m buzzing you in right now.”

And buzz us in she did.

The lobby, or whatever, of the apartment building looked like something from a brochure that shows the kind of place you never get around to seeing in real life. The kind of place that would cause a folding chair to rust with shame.

“Greg, look at those plants. And that sofa. I can’t believe they would spend that much on a sofa to just put into a room like this,” Ruth remarked. She spent a few seconds walking around, running her hand along various trims and tabletops, crouching to admire the carpet. Both of us stopped to admire a fountain that continually gushed a cataract of blue water. We decided to take the elevator, and inside, it was all like shiny metal and red velvet. Not really velvet, but still, this cold shaft of transport is objectively better than some parts of my life I refused to admit.

Ruth lead the way to unit 1014 and once outside the door, it became audibly evident that we were not the only guests. I hadn’t considered the presence of company beyond Ruth and myself, so the hoot-having laugher of additional strangers came as quite a surprise.

“Hey, you made it! Well, come on in,” a guy told us. He gave Ruth a hug, then turned to shake my hand.

“Greg, is it?”

“Yeah. Duncan?”

“That’d be me,” he confirmed. Duncan’s hair was an entity by itself, ballpoint pen scribbles radiating in all directions. He had a big nose (prominent as opposed to garish) and wore thick-framed glasses. A dark blue button-down shirt, black dress pants, and loafers covered the rest of him.

“Fran, we’re here. Come meet Greg,” Ruth called out.

When Fran entered the room, I noticed right away she had this great cascading ribbon of a walk–slinking and elegant, with enough hip-sway to draw your eyes to her waist then down to her toe-ringed feet.

“Was the place easy to find?” she asked, tilting her head to finish with an earring.

“Easy enough,” Ruth said.

Fran’s blonde, chin-length hair was lifted right off the page of a stylebook, perfectly framing the shape of her face (a concept I never quite understood until that very moment). She wore a white turtleneck with matching-colored pants (both of which augmented her shapeliness) and open-toed, wood-looking shoes.

“Hi Greg, it’s so nice to finally meet you,” Fran smiled, extending her hand. A thick, gold bangle adorned her wrist.

“You too,” I said.

“Have you met my friends Candice and David?” Fran walked us over to a couple sitting on the couch.

“Ruth and Greg, this is Candice and David.”

“Hey,” they said.

“Well, you guys can just sit here and get to know each other while Duncan and I get plates made up,” Fran told us, moving pillows off a loveseat so Ruth and I could sit down.

The other two guests looked a bit older than everyone else. Late twenties, probably. The guy, David, had sandy hair that was middle-parted and tucked behind his ears. Clad in black, everything he did–from the way he sat, crossed his legs, yawned, removed cigarettes from a metal case, looked at his watch–latently functioned as an attempt to say, “I’m indifferent to being noticed, but you noticed, right?” The girl, Candice, was skinny as a violin bow, dark brown hair just reaching shoulders left uncovered by a plain yet nice-looking blue dress. She absentmindedly pulled taut then made slack the strap of a purse.

Half a minute passed without a single word exchanged.

“These apartments are amazing,” Ruth said.

“I know. I was telling David that we should look into getting one,” Candice said, palming David’s knee.

Ruth tapped my hand with her finger, cueing me to spout forth pleasantries.

“I probably couldn’t afford one of these,” I said, looking around the expanse of high ceilings and modern design. The effects of the meds I took started drifting in, gilding the next twenty minutes of conversation with a tolerable sheen. Subtle amendments to David’s constant contrivance barely bothered, and I even laughed at some opposite-of-funny comparison he drew about this lame-o alternative theater engagement being just as “woefully non-Arcadian” as a traveling art exhibit he saw in Vancouver. Ruth seemed happy with my calm, affable demeanor, and I was definitely happy that my little plan worked.

“Food’s ready,” Fran announced.

After everyone took a seat at the dining room table, Duncan began to describe the contents of our evening’s meal.

“Okay, on the top-left side of the plate there’s a vegetable hash we made with eggplant, olive, mushrooms, and balsamic vinegar. Now that’s real balsamic vinegar; you can’t get that at just any grocery store. I mean, places around here sell a version of it, but to pass it off as the actual thing is just…flimflam chicanery. Next to that there’s the beet-green salad with a citrus thing Fran wanted to try, and we really like this because most people overlook the leafy part and just eat the beet roots. And finally, for the entrée, we prepared seven-grain pilaf dressed with a lentil garnish. For the lentils, we tried this lemon and caper infused oil, so that’s something new. You’ll notice some chive and cilantro in there, too.”

“Wow, sounds involved,” Ruth said.

“Oh, it wasn’t bad. I enjoy cooking,” Duncan replied.

“You know what? I almost forgot,” Fran said, raising her glass, “the wine comes courtesy of Ruth and Greg.”

Candice and Duncan said “thank you.” David said something about “commercial parity” and “geo-educational rifts” forcing the “domestic wine establishment” to “rethink it’s own destiny.” It meant something to everyone else, I guess, because they nodded their agreement. Or at least their understanding.

Forks started clinking away; the commentary began.

Duncan: “That oil, with the lemon and caper, really adds height.”
David: “The citrus makes for such a clean finish with this salad.”
Fran: “I got my eggplant fix for the day.”
Candice: “The acidity was just perfect in that olive dish.”

Ruth hit my leg. She wanted me to say something, to add a compliment regarding the food. In other words, she wanted me to lie. Because all I tasted were smashed-up pieces of field, shavings from a Confederate woodpile, and the childhood memory of accidentally getting lemon-scented cleaner sprayed in my mouth.

I settled on, “I’ve never had pilaf before.”

“Glad to get you introduced,” Duncan said. “What kind of stuff do you normally eat?”

Ruth took the liberty of answering for me. “Greg likes…grilled cheese with bologna. And corndogs. And liver sausage. And ravioli that comes in the can with a pop-open lid.” She was beaming, like genuinely beaming while she said this. Fran spit an aborted laugh into her napkin. Duncan raised his eyebrows at a bite of hash.

“Preservatives, we try to avoid them,” David said, setting down his napkin in such a way that, in case I was looking, really let me know that he didn’t care if I was intrigued or not by his nonchalant placing aside of cloth.

So what was this? Evidently, the plebian palette can summon epicurean contempt long before any mention of tacos made with canned chili, cottage fries, and American cheese. If I were able to, I totally could have quipped about self-preservation. But then again, if I were able to, I would’ve been pulling intergalactic high jinks with my super-powered friends instead of eating fancy vegetables.

“Well I think it’s cute when Greg eats,” Ruth said, reaching up to scratch under my chin.

“David, you’ll like this,” Duncan announced, putting down his fork to rub his hands together, “they’re building an H.P.C. over at Lakeview Mall.”

“Haberdashers of Pierre Castellan? At Lakeview Mall? Decent pants and I won’t have to drive six hours?”

“I knew you’d be psyched,” Duncan said. “My dad wants to take me shopping for cufflinks once they’re open. You should come with. We’ll make a day of it.”

To my relief, Ruth didn’t mention that I bought my pants at the same place I buy notebooks and wiper-blade refills. Because I wouldn’t want those guys to feel as though my frugal consumer techniques were being lorded over them, or anything.

I finished my plate by channeling the collective spirit of a famine-finished people then rejoined the others as they headed for the living room. Fran brought out drinks for everyone, and Duncan caught me with a conversational snare.

“So, Greg. What do yo do?”

“Me? Um, I work over at WellTech PCI.”

“PCI?”

“Personal Care Innovations. Health insurance, stuff like that.”

“So what exactly is your job there?”

Ruth cut in once more. “Greg’s a ‘Jack-of-all-Suffering.’ They have him do everything, all sorts of things. Isn’t that right, babe?”

“Pretty much,” I said, almost wincing at the quote she decided to use. “I do things here and there, whatever needs doing. Clerical stuff.”

Duncan nodded, awaiting details. I didn’t feel like expounding.

“Uh, what do you guys do?” I asked, bringing my hands together.

“I go to school,” Fran said, “and Duncan’s the manager at one of his grandparents’ coffee shops. Coffee Connection, on Broomfield.”

“Doesn’t it get really busy over there?” Candice had to know.

“It’s pretty hectic, but I’m learning a lot,” Duncan said.

Fran continued. “They’re giving him the store when he turns twenty-five. It’s going to be great. He has all these ideas, like these really terrific ideas, for when he’s the owner. I’m so excited.” After saying this, Fran reached over and touched Duncan’s collar with her thumb and forefinger, and for a moment they looked at each other, smiling.

“That’ll be way cool,” Ruth said.

Hey, I could relate. Grandparents and giving stuff, I knew about that. What, did the bike that my cousin used to own just unexplainably appear one day back when I was ten? I, too, had been touched by the benefaction of extended family, but rather than infringe upon the insular nature of Fran and Duncan’s little moment, refrained from sharing my account until another proper segue emerged.

Fran talked about college. She was in the Nursing program. Eventually, she wanted to become a nurse practitioner and work for one of the area hospitals. School was great, she said. It could be hard at times, but the challenge itself provided a constant source of motivation. Not only did she love going to class, but she loved to sometimes just walk the grounds, seeing the other students and feeling as though she was “part of something special, experiencing a time in her life worth cherishing.” “In fact,” she went on to explain, “if I could be a college student forever, I would definitely do it.”

Candice talked about her days back at art school. In the beginning, she admitted, she felt intimidated by everyone else and was unsure of her own talent. This can be a real hindrance to learning and development, she said, especially in a “creative sphere.” Fortunately, though, she realized that everyone occasionally struggles and gets overwhelmed, and this enabled her to resolve any confidence issues before they had a “stifling effect” on her “visual voice.” David said he never really “went through any of that,” and Duncan joked about night classes, saying that after working all day he was too tired to care about what “level of genius” he “may or may not be” compared to his classmates. Everyone laughed (one person, I’m pretty sure, fake-laughed). Ruth said that what she did wasn’t “real college,” and mentioned plans to follow up on her Associate’s degree.

“I never knew you wanted to do that,” I said.

“Greg, what about you?” Fran asked, “did you graduate school or do you still go or-”

“Neither,” I said.

“Really? I know some other people who took a break, too, and they said it helped a lot. Get refocused, save money, find a new perspective. Last year, my parents suggested I do that, believe it or not.”

“Actually,” I explained, “high school was kind of it for me.” I tipped my head back at the end, the last of my words meeting the last of my drink. I had time to set my glass on the table, realize it was too near an edge, then relocate it to a place of less peril before someone responded.

“Oh. Well that’s cool,” Duncan said.

A few more seconds passed. David opened then snapped shut his cigarette case.

“So…Ruth. Does that mean you’re not going to work at the restaurant anymore?” Fran asked, resurrecting the conversation.

“Well, I wasn’t planning on doing that forever, but yeah, I’ll switch to part-time once school starts and then yep, one day turn my apron in for good. My ass will have no regrets, trust me.”

Fran laughed, nodding. “No doubt. My friend, Janelle, used to get free food at the Sobral Café, and she said it was hard to eat right when you had access to fresh-made panini and pastries. Have you guys ever been there?”

“Nope. Never even heard of it,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s more of a campus thing, I guess,” Fran said, waving her hand in dismissal of the topic.

I felt a twinge. Campus thing, then a twinge. Dismissive hand move, then a twinge. A crack in my chemical shield. A hole in my arm. The feeling was a descendant of one I had felt for two heartbeats at dinner. Exhaling, looking at my hands, I willed my concentration from whatever thoughts pinged within–chrome-plated theropods vandalizing upscale property–to the discussion currently going on around me.

“Exactly,” Duncan was saying, “that’s why bird watching has become the ultimate act of physically allegorizing Man’s place in nature. He’s made himself a voyeur, at best. Or worst, if you look at it a different way. He’s totally taken himself out of his original environment, out there in the habitat given to him by nature, and how he’s no longer a part of it. He’s an outsider, and the best he can do to reconnect and salvage his roots with the world is be a voyeur.”

Everyone said stuff like “yep” or “I agree” then pondered the ramifications of Duncan’s charge against all Mankind.

The next hour they talked about documentary filmmaking and the necessary role such an industry plays in the “dispersal of truth” and the “showcasing of other viewpoints.” Nobody asked my opinion regarding any of it, which was okay, because I could have sooner summoned a folklore creature to do my bidding than have commented.

“Well, we hate to feel like we’re kicking everyone out, but Fran has to get up early tomorrow, and I have to go over some figures to meet with a product rep on a Saturday of all days,” Duncan said, standing to let us know that we should do the same.

“Greg, again, so nice to meet you,” Fran said, “you guys should stop by more often.”

“Absolutely,” Duncan agreed, “who knows? Maybe next time we can whip up some grilled cheese and tater tots.”

“Well, don’t put yourselves out,” I protested.

Candice and David said their goodbyes, and Ruth told Fran to call her on Monday.

“I’ll drive this time, thank you very much,” Ruth said on our way to the car. She paused before unlocking the door. “Can we watch a movie over at your place?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said.

Ruth drove to a gas station for a bottle of water. After that she started talking, but I couldn’t listen because I was distracted by a feeling that while driving through a nondescript part of some neighborhood we had unwittingly screwed with the millennial formation of an inter-planar rift, a rift through which an exacter of vengeance from beyond passes to right a grand-scale wrong, and I feared this doorway between realms got somehow mixed-up inside my chest because an outward pressure inside me swelled with an urgency built across ten centuries.

“What was that?” Ruth turned her head to look at me, confused by something she heard.

“I said I don’t even fucking eat tater tots.”

Ruth straightened her arms then quickly opened then closed her hands on the steering wheel.

“Greg, can you first acknowledge how random that must sound to the other person in the car? And then can you please explain what you could’ve possibly meant by that?”

“Duncan, that shit about making tater tots the next time we go over there. I haven’t had tater tots since I was like twelve, so I don’t know why the fuck he would even say something like that.”

“Oh for…don’t tell me that someone talking about tater tots pissed you off, Greg. He was just kidding around. What kind of snap psychological profiling would he be capable of if he knew a reference to chopped and formed seasoned potatoes could make you angry?”

“Oh, like it was just the stupid comment at the end of the night that pissed me off? It was all their shit. All that shit about capers and cufflinks–”

“So?”

“–and that fuckin’ David guy. I mean, what was that, ‘Midnight Comes to Dinner’? And Duncan with that hair. He probably thinks it’s like…an expression, or something.”

“What else, Greg? What else?”

“Everything. That recipe for homemade ipecac they tried to pass off as shit you can eat, all that fuckin’ bullshit about ‘downtown being alive,’ and all that other bullshit they talked about.”

“So what, Greg. Are they supposed to talk about Karimula Barklaev or Takumi Yano or…Jersey Joe Walton?”

“It’s Walcott, but anyway, yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. I think that’s what they should talk about.”

“Well that’s just ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous, you know that?” She looked over at me for some reason, to scold me with her eyes, probably. “What happened to your arm?”

She was referring to my left arm. A dull red spot marked where the sleeve stuck to my skin.

“Oh Jesus Christ, Greg. I saw you scratching, and…did you pick a hole in your arm?”

I gave her a look as though the question was absurd, although we both knew it wasn’t.

Ruth didn’t wait for an answer. “I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. When we first got there, you were so…calm and affable, and everything was going just fine. But then all of a sudden–ka-boom–we leave and you’re acting like a jerk.”

“It’s their fault, not mine. If they weren’t such douchebags, I wouldn’t even be upset.”

Ruth let out a long exhale through her nose.

“I think I’ll just drop you off, if that’s okay.”

“Hey, whatever you want to do, that’s fine. It’s not like I need an audience to make hotdogs and hide out in my room.”

Ruth sighed. “I know, Greg.”

And that was it. She took me home without saying another word.

Chapter Five

I noticed all the lights were off when I walked into the apartment, which gave me hope that I could eat and maybe watch some TV in the living room by myself. Going upstairs, however, the faint score of a movie portended a scene I often saw but never grew accustomed to, goddamn it.

In the living room were two couches that formed an “L” shape. Todd and Mary sat on one, Damon and Beth on the other. All were beneath blankets, heads sticking out in the varying glow of a TV that was half mine. That made it eleven straight nights of front-room monopoly by those no-courtesy-having bums. Or was it twelve. Trying to recall the exact number, I went into the kitchen to submerge the remnants of a bad meal with what I hoped could be deemed by an onlooker as an excessive quantity of hotdogs and potato buns covered in baked beans.

“Did you see Todd’s new haircut?” Beth asked.

“Yeah, I saw it.”

“I think Mary did a good job, don’t you?”

“Uh, yeah. Hey, you guys didn’t happen to see a can of beans on the kitchen counter–”

“Baked beans?” Todd asked.

“Yes, Todd. I bought a can of baked beans and put them on the counter. Yesterday.”

“Well…we ate those. So yeah, I mean, we saw them, but they’re gone.”

I grabbed a knife then stabbed Todd in the neck until he died, but the anger spike caused by food-profanity ruptured the very fabric of time, thus erasing the act from the chronology of Actual Events. I couldn’t believe it. My dream of biting into pure awesomeness had been euthanized in a Holy Stone crushing administered by the future Patron Saint of Fuckfaces.

“But I was going to make hotdogs,” I said, with an unintended trace of meekness.

“The hotdogs are still in the fridge. I thought we were talking about the can of beans.” Todd was annoyed and, apparently, confused. Which was okay, because only one issue demanded clarity.

“Why did you eat them if you knew they weren’t yours?”

Damon interjected before Todd could answer. “Uh, Greg, how long are you going to be in the kitchen? Because we kind of wanted the lights off.”

I turned off the light then stared at Damon in the dark. Damon, all wrapped up in that stupid blanket. He had an absurdly uniform flattop and cheeks that jutted rudely from his face. His chin, too, was fittingly just out there in the world. Damon always had a vague look of contentment hanging off his eyelids, like he had perpetually just gotten done masturbating to pictures of himself. Sometimes if I was mad about something, like my car not working or a fast food place getting my order wrong for a paragon-of-consistency fiftieth time, I could see the transparent overlay of Damon’s face and that ire-summoning look. His only words for me last Christmas were “fuck off,” and that lone phrase granted me a fortuitous, albeit unexpected delving into self-discovery that would’ve been impossible without external aid. You see, I always figured myself to have outgrown putting an emotional emphasis on holidays, but realized the misjudgment after noting that those two words were perhaps the only words in my life to which I could attach a day, date, place, time, season, temperature, and carol played by festive musical clock. Christmas helped me remember, I’m sure of it.

A second passed where I nearly considered looking in the trash to witness the empty can, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to do it.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said, as though anyone gave a fuck. When would I learn? If I leave something out, it’s going to get eaten. Licorice, beans, bread–it didn’t matter. Culpability rested solely on my failure to confer with memory before stocking away my comestibles, and I thought about how much it was going to suck having to hide everything in the way back of the pantry’s top shelf, or triple-bag anything in the refrigerator. I probably could’ve voiced a complaint regarding the food situation, but people never listen. Plus then they think you’re an asshole.

***

Saturday started with a rash on my face, and I tried my best not to scratch the hell out of it (I failed). The afternoon was spent waiting to see if Ruth would call (she didn’t).

“Hey Mike, Prophet’s here,” a guy named Davey or Smiley said when he answered the door.

“Tell that fool to come in,” Mike shouted.

I walked in and saw the usual group of steeped-in-vernacular tan folks that congregated every weekend. Packed into the low-lit haze of the downstairs were diligent bodies of Non-production, grains of sand comprising unreflective heaps. Their almost quantum disconnection from the week’s first five days was admirable, in a way, and as faceless and ephemeral as they could seem–perhaps given only statistical recognition by the controlling classes beyond–their iconic pursuit of lazing, imbibing, and character playing gave them permanence, for nothing could compel cessation. A wrecking ball with eyes and an operating jaw could smash through the ceiling, snatch someone off the couch, and fail to kill the party. A telekinetic foreman couldn’t marshal that kind of dedication.

In the living room, eight or nine people stood around, drinking and talking. Five or six others occupied furniture, taking turns on a two-player video game. Somewhere else, a hundred giants smashed the landscape of a cilia forest, crash-landing with somersaults and ill-fated goes at front-flips.

“So you got your speakers working?” I asked Mike as he approached.

“Yeah, my cousin did a good job. Bass is bumpin’ yo.”

I couldn’t disagree. “Fuckin’ right, man.”

“Oh, hey,” Mike began, “I hate to bring bad news to the Prophet from jump, but my hookup for that pink shit said his guy got fired or something.”

“No worries,” I said, “I wasn’t really feelin’ those anyway.”

“For real?” Mike asked.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of the scab on my arm, “it’s cool.”

Mike nodded. “Cool. You wanna sit down?”

“Sure.”

“Make way for the Prophet, y’all,” Mike announced, pushing me through the crowd of party people then motioning for someone to get up off a couch.

“I gotta run for now, but I’ll be back later to keep these fools in check,” Mike grinned, patting my shoulder. As he walked off, I heard him tell Lucy to get The Prophet a beer.

“Mike had to go,” Lucy said as she handed me a bottle.

“I know.”

Lucy feigned a wary look. “I bet you knew.”

“Ha ha,” I replied.

Lucy wore too much makeup, and the red in her hair didn’t go with the black, but she was pretty and nice, and I always enjoyed the surface level chats we had from time to time. None of her shirts covered the sub-navel part of her stomach, and she noticed me looking at the ever-present pudginess peaking out from above her waistline.

“Too many chips,” she said, pinching a fold with both hands.

“What? Nah. You look good.”

“Don’t lie to me, Prophet. If there’s one thing–”

Lucy stopped then leaned in closer. “You see that guy over there? The one coming over here? I can’t stand him. He’s freakin’ weird, yo.”

A guy I’d never seen at Mike’s before was indeed headed our way, targeting his footfalls to wipe out the numerous invisible anthills he could somehow detect while looking straight ahead. He had a flattened thorn bush of brown hair, and a forehead that looked exceptionally wide compared to the rest of his face. Below his eyes were gouged-out spaces of almost-black, and his lips looked as though a smile would shatter them into a million dried-up skin pieces. His horizontal-striped t-shirt and knee-length jean shorts emphasized a bony frame.

“You are a prophet as well?”

I could’ve counted to five. If he’d asked me whether or not I was a contract killer hired by the Categorical Imperative to assassinate the atmosphere of Jupiter’s largest moon, I would’ve taken the same amount of time to answer.

“I don’t know what you–”

“I’ve been recently exploring that part of my psyche as well. Other parts, too, but I try not to allow any contra-factors interfere with the visions. I can’t control when a really important snapshot is going to hit me, so the trick is to remain focused at all times without being too focused. The burden, you could say, is governed by powers outside myself.”

“That’s just a nickna–”

“What abilities do you have?”

I looked over at Lucy, who shrugged then started talking to someone else. But not before smirking at my plight.

When I didn’t answer immediately, my new friend proceeded to tell me more. “I have a keen sort of connection with the clouds–storm clouds are always trying reveal something. Other spirits get jealous of the information pipeline between me and the entities I’m in regular contact with, so they try and sabotage it. But they know I’m too strong for them, that my curses and warding spells are too strong. I’ve destroyed probably…eighty or so demons this past year alone.”

The music was loud. I must not have heard him correctly.

“What is your name?”

“Perry.”

Perry, you are mentally ill, I thought. Then, a revelation. Replace the sheets torn off by whatever chemically-centered pastime, give that guy some sleep, and you had someone from my past.

“Perry Dalton?”

“Yeah.”

“I know you. I mean, I know who you are.”

“Like, in a way you’ve always known me?”

“No. We went to the same grade school. I’m from Spoon South. Greg Halfman, from Miss Ruby’s class. Fourth grade.”

“Right. Fourth grade.” He seemed sad that the conversation veered off on a tangent about stuff that actually happened, and, I think, walked away as a result.

The night only seemed to move along during the milliseconds between bass-thumps, and I enjoyed the stuttering passage of this era by helping myself to more beer an untracked number of times. The alcohol’s diluting properties really held up: Tammy and her table manners that could offend a feral child, those jerks in Policy and Procedures ordering Chinese food, and the smell fills your stomach and makes you associate green onions with puke, those black guys walking four-wide at the mall so you have to bump shoulders with at least one of them, Todd and Damon and the fact that they lived…all of it began to fade, began to matter less than some conflict you read about taking place in the Sudan or wherever. So I started feeling truly above-decent. I didn’t have to work the next day, the beer was performing proudly, and those drink-spilling a-holes were nowhere to be seen. I almost thought about thinking of Ruth, but figured since there was no way she would be sitting somewhere thinking of me at that moment, I refused (which ensured that no power imbalance would be created). Sometimes, just sitting in a crappy house could be a real apex of living.

And sometimes–like when a girl starts having a seizure on the floor–just sitting in a crappy house can be a real downer.

“Holy shit,” someone said.

And there it was, a marionette’s interpretive dance routine about earthquakes or electrocution. The severely animated part of the seizure lasted only a few seconds. Catatonic stillness, and the gradual onset of communal worry, followed.

“Are you okay? Hey, can you hear us?”

No response. Someone shook her arm. Again, nothing.

For what seemed an inappropriate amount of time, no one said or did anything. Everyone just stared at the skinny blond girl (who already looked very corpse-like) laying on the Egyptian floor mat. A crushing sense of anxiety squeezed the toxins from my body. Doom seeped further into the air with every thud of bass from the stereo.

“Where’s Mike?”

“He’s still gone.”

“We should call an ambulance.”

“And bring the cops here? Mike’ll flip.”

“Maybe someone should do like…CPR.”

Responsibility for the girl’s well-being was lifted onto me by the slow turning of heads in my direction. I would’ve preferred a foreign object in my brain.

“Don’t worry everybody, I can handle this,” someone proclaimed. I felt relieved just hearing a confident voice, to see everyone backing away to let someone through who could really help.

In walked Perry, and for some reason he carried the decorative sword that normally hung on the wall in Mike’s kitchen.

We’ve switched the immunomodulators with bubonic plague. That’s not anti-venom, it’s more venom…

…that animal doctor is actually a shape-shifting wolf that people in these parts write songs about.

She needed help, and she got Perry, weaponized.

He knelt at the top of her head. “It’s an evil presence that involuntarily showed itself because it sensed my abilities. This demon is begging to be killed, for it can no longer handle being in a world where I, too, exist.”

Did he mean demon inside her, or demon…her? And why did he have a sword? And why did everyone just silently watch? Things like this don’t really happen. The universe made a mistake, that’s all. A fatality wouldn’t occur due to botched demonic surgery on the living room floor of some two-bit drug dealer’s house while a dozen or so people just looked on…right?

“Blemish in mine eyes…the castigation is death, to be permanently banished.” He lifted the sword. “Now, the necro-energies–”

Things like this don’t really happen, goddamn it.

Every previously held tenet regarding my conduct in relation to the union of substance-corroded minds and edged weapons was dragged by its feet and killed in the two steps it took to stand over the girl’s legs. Perry looked up at me, confused, copying the face he’d make if Metatron arose in full from a bowl of cereal. Lacking a savateur’s finesse but aided by surprise, I knocked over the shouldn’t-be exorcist with a kick to the chest. The gallery became eyes-wide and mouths-open as I picked the girl up off the floor then carried her outside on my shoulder.

“Where are you taking me?” she faintly groaned.

“You’re awake? Jesus Christ. You’re going to the hospital.”

“No no no, I’m fine, really. Every once in a while this happens when I smoke pot. It’s nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s nothing, honestly. Can you put my skirt back so my underwear’s not showing?”

I set her down then watched her ease as best she could onto the sidewalk to sit. She fell on her butt in the grass.

“I can’t go back there, okay. That was fucked up,” she said, stating the obvious.

I thought about it, and Mike’s wasn’t a good place for me to go, either. Fucking sword-wielding piece of shit.

“Is there anyone you can call? Can someone pick you up?”

“I don’t have anyone’s number.” She tore out a handful of grass and sprinkled it on her shoes.

“Well,” I said reluctantly, “I suppose I could take you home–”

“My boyfriend thinks I blew some other guy, so he’s mad at me, like going crazy. I can’t go there,” she said, whining.

“Then what are you going to do?”

“I need to lay down.” Her head hit the lawn.

“Don’t do that. Hey, don’t do that.”

“I just need…to lay down somewhere.”

Shit, I thought. Shit, shit, shit.

All those bunched-up clothes on the couch in my room…would probably be just fine on the floor.

Chapter Six

Before placing her on the couch, I asked the girl if she was going to be okay, if she really didn’t need to go to the hospital. Yeah, it’s fine, she said. In the morning she’d just go back to Mike’s or if things were better, go back home.

I couldn’t sleep. Partly because of what happened at Mike’s, but mainly because of thinking about Ruth. An emerging embryo of post-argument guilt kept swirling in my thoughts, promising war of mind until a cathartic subassembly got underway. So, I thought plainly about the situation. My life pretty much consisted of going to work and watching TV, day after day. The only thing that set it apart from the millions of other mundane coils was the fact that someone like Ruth even hung around. I’d been overlooked by everyone, regarded as set dressing, but she…made it seem as though this time was necessary, a moral-teaching narrative prelude allowing me to realize that my inclusion into the thoughts and schedule of another could have only started with her. I needed her to replace everything my life had lacked–an amount determined by whatever she could give. In the extra-dark of no-light and shut eyes I remembered myself beneath her, on my back looking up, completely at the mercy of a nearly weightless straddle, the ends of her hair barely brushing against my face…copious threads of cure-all simultaneously sending down life and drawing away pain.

“Greg, I never want you to worry. I never want to see you struggle.”

Even an automaton’s unholy, approximated penetralia would’ve been affected by such a memory. And so, at 3:00 a.m., the Natives of Protest gave in to the proselytizing of Fond Recollection.

Ruth picked me.

She allowed such a moment to happen with me.

She was the peace that could fill the whole of my life.

No more of this petty standoff bullshit, I decided. After a little sleep, I would call her and let her know just how much she added to my time. That outside validation of your insides, usually sustaining but on occasion empowering…people rarely discuss it. Before Ruth, I tried operating with some notion of intrinsic value, and was fortunate to discover that an external source of motivation is far better than vaporous mores about participating in the world or owing oneself. My previous life was just a terrible noise, file down the cylinders, if she wasn’t there then I don’t want to remember. If I respected poetry, I would’ve sat up right then and wrote some for her, pages and pages. Maybe I’d try to anyway, someday.

When I woke up later that morning, I felt extra warm, and there was an extra weight on my chest.

“What are you doing?” I asked the top of someone’s head.

“What? Oh.” The girl I left on the couch needed a moment to wake up. “You didn’t leave me a blanket and I got cold, so I crawled in here with you.”

“Well get out.”

“Out of the bed or out of–”

“Greg?”

The door opened. I stopped breathing. My bladder shit its pants.

“Greg, who is that?”

The question belonged to Ruth. After squinting as hard as I could and discovering that Plan A–crushing the world with my eyelids–was impossible, I offered as a response the entire contents of my current lexicon. “I don’t know.”

The blonde girl threw off the blanket, picked at her hair and to my dismay, stood to introduce herself. “My name’s Brittany.”

“I don’t care what your name is,” Ruth said. “What is she doing in your bed?”

“I got cold–”

“Actually,” I interrupted, thinking it best to begin earlier, “this guy was trying to stab her last night, so we came here–”

“So you could stab her?”

“What? No. Seriously, this guy had a sword,” I began to explain, sitting up and putting my feet on the floor, “and–”

“What is that?” Ruth pointed at my left pant leg.

Yeah, what is that, I thought.

Brittany covered her mouth. “I must’ve had my period.”

I gave the blonde a look. Shut the fuck up, build me a time machine, and reverse this whole fucking mess, it said.

Ruth calmly continued. “How did she get period blood on your leg?”

There was a shift in Ruth’s being, an aural change that globed out layer after layer of steely, impenetrable force field. Time nor entropy nor any placating answer, it seemed, could affect her in this state.

I had to talk fast.

“After saving her from getting stabbed by a sword last night, I took her here because she couldn’t go home, and she got cold and decided to hop into bed with me, but I wasn’t awake for that, nor am I happy about it. And then her…whatever got on my leg, and I’m not happy about that, either.”

Ruth leaned back, amused. “Saved her? So now you’re dabbling in heroics? Sorry Greg, that just doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s true,” Brittany said.

Ruth ignored her. “So what, Greg. We have a little argument and you fuck some skank to get even?”

Just then, someone else entered the room. A big, space-taking guy, with a mane of hair that was undoubtedly the prize for besting Satan two-out-of-three in arm wrestling. He also wore a leather coat, which scared me to death. Maybe he worked for the phone company, or was doing some scheduled maintenance on the apartment that my roommates didn’t tell me about. My roommates were always pulling shit like that.

Please have nothing to do with this situation, I thought.

Brittany gave him a name. “Darrel. Oh, hi.”

“Greg Half-Man?” he asked, glaring at me in an effort to reproduce some prior success at destroying a man’s life by just looking at him.

“Um, Half…Man. Yep, that’s me.”

“What is he doing here?” Ruth demanded.

“I don’t know,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“Your little friend over at Jip-Chin Mike’s told me you ran off with my girlfriend. Get up.”

So maybe there’s a list:
1. Get up at Darrell’s request.
2. Build a working engine out of cardboard and guilt.
3. Etch a design on the ozone layer with your eyes.
4. Boil wonderment in a pan.
And maybe, there’s no way of telling in which order of difficulty these items have been presented.

“Look…Darrell? There’s been a huge, and I mean, huge–”

“Mistake? I know. I’m here to fix that.”

“Baby, nothing happened, I swear,” Brittany pleaded, stepping back against the wall, away from Darrell and closer to me, Some Fucker on the Bed.

Great. I hadn’t been in a fight for six years. Darrel had probably unified prison boxing titles at some point.

“Get up, you fucking snake motherfucker. You don’t think there’s any penance for what you did? Well let me tell you, there is. Because I’m going to peel your face off, you motherless fuck.” Darrel lifted back his coat, revealing a goddamn knife.

“I swear,” Brittany further pleaded.

Should I scream for help? Tell Ruth to call the cops? Where were Todd and Damon? For once I would be glad to see them, no fucking kidding.

Come on, just like last night, my brain whispered to body. Jump off the bed and knock him over. Then you can leave. This guy doesn’t even have a sword, you know? Alright, get ready and…now.

I sank further into the bed.

Apparently, my trial membership to the qualities of Valor and Gameness had expired. Deep down, there was no heart of a dragon, there was only a coward sitting in a stupid chair. And inside my inner coward…beat the heart of a Half-Man.

Darrel spoke, wielding in his voice the authority of a mythic gavel. “I want to hear you say it. Tell me you fucked her.”

I think I shook my head.

He took a step closer. I could feel the guttural vibrating of his singular intent, could picture the cords of flesh in his unnecessarily huge body tightly wound with anticipation. Never before in my life was I able to look at someone and determine that, without a doubt, he’d bashed into pliability a stranger’s face just to use the mangled concave as a bowl for Split-pea and Orphan Tear Soup.

“Tell me. Or maybe Brittany can tell you what happened to the last guy she fucked around with. Probably had to get a new license photo, that guy.” He took another step closer. “Say it. Say you fucked her.”

Jesus Christ, he’s going to cut my face, I realized. A beating I could handle, perhaps even fend off. Some undignified flailing and scrotal bombardment would at least have a chance in this scenario–minus the knife. I thought when he said “peel,” it was just hyperbole for punching, possibly followed by stomping, in large volume. Like just using his unadorned limbs to cause cell damage. However, semantics (and that “new license photo” reference) foreboded not in my favor. Knives were used for peeling all sorts of stuff.

Brittany was close to tears. “But we didn’t do–”

She didn’t finish her sentence. Another voice cut in.

“Um, yeah…Darrell? Nothing, like, happened. I was here the whole time. Some guy was going to stab, um, Brittany, and so Greg took her here. And I was here, waiting to see him, and the three of us…watched movies all night.”

And like a shaman passing breath through mystically-arched fingers to stop a mudslide…Ruth intervened.

“I see. Thanks for having my girl’s back,” Darrell said, switching from blade-brandishing Nephilim to big, not-so-used-to-daytime lug. “And before you think I’m a complete asshole, showing the knife, that was just scare tactics. I wasn’t really going to cut you, just beat you up. You know how it is.”

I nodded. The ruffian and his figurine finally went away.

Relief filled the vacuum that Darrell left behind. No blood, it seemed, would be offered atop the Altar of Misunderstanding. Not this day.

Ruth and I just sat for nearly an hour without speaking, every so often squirming and shifting, wrapped in the wet, shrinking rags of silence.

“So you do believe me,” I finally said.

“I don’t know about that,” Ruth responded, thinking out her next words. “Actually, I’m gonna go.”

She started getting up. I had to keep her from leaving.

“No no, Ruth. Wait. I have to tell you something.”

She sat back down, somehow detecting within my tone that she was about to hear a shimmering divulgement, guaranteed to bejewel memory and make better all things to come.

“What, Greg?”

My big chance. Time to tell her what I came up with the night before. She’s actually staying. People never stay. She really wants to hear this.

“Okay. I thought about it, and there’s only one way I can put this. Basically, all I do is go to work, come home, watch TV, and see you. What I realized–”

“So that’s it, huh? You did fuck her, didn’t you? What’s the matter, tired of the same old routine? Working and coming here and seeing me?”

“Whoa, wait. Let me explain–”

“I’ve heard enough. Don’t explain. And don’t call me or a while,” Ruth said, walking to the door. She stopped to add, “I should’ve let that guy beat your ass.”

Chapter Seven

People never stay.

Since thinking about what exactly took place would’ve surely produced far-reaching, hammer-to-glass implications for the very institution of Ever Being Edified, diverting focus became paramount.

“Did you just say you’re going to break my neck?”

Turning from the acoustic guitar my uncle gave me, I saw Damon in the doorway, which worsened my mood, because if at any time I could confirm his existence in the apartment, that meant he wasn’t being offered sexually to rhinos elsewhere.

“Uh…no. Just something from a show I saw yesterday,” I explained, doing my best to keep from looking back at the wooden instrument.

“Oh. Anyway, I just talked to the landlord, and he said that one of the other residents saw a man wearing a ski mask in the parking garage Friday night. We’re thinking that’s who probably smashed up the cars.”

Good. Another distraction. This was good.

“Hopefully they catch the fucker,” I said.

“No doubt. Five cars total were damaged, but you should’ve seen Todd’s. I’m really surprised that nobody heard it going on.”

“What about yours?”

“Just the taillights and a couple dents on the roof. None of the glass got broken, though.”

“Maybe the guy ran out of time,” I theorized for Damon aloud. Then, wanting to extend the conversation, added, “You know, it’s a good thing I always have to park my car outside. For once, anyway.”

Damon left, finding no solace in my good fortune. I stayed in my room, finding no solace in anything. Not even looking through my shoebox of old birthday and holiday cards.

***

That afternoon I got a call from Betty, a former coworker from the bookstore I was employed at for three months. She was on her way to get coffee at a bagel shop downtown and invited me to go along.

“They have the best mocha mint,” she emphatically assured.

“Wow,” I said.

Honestly, I didn’t care what they had–I just needed to get out. The wall in my room was a Staring Contest World Champion, and its continual need to affirm this fact through demonstration was beginning to fill my heart with nails. Although I did try fixing the vacuum, which apparently has a low tolerance for torn-up pieces of cardstock.

When we got to the bagel shop, three more people from bookstore past were already sitting at a table. One of them, Barry, waved us over. After saying “hello” and lying about how I’d been, the four of them gave me updates about our various kin of common employment. If it meant saving everyone I cared about from the torture of jackal bite or buzz saw, I still wouldn’t have been able to recall a single thing my tablemates told me. Even when the conversation moved on to other topics, my most concentrated efforts to be attentive were constantly thwarted by feeling out of place. As the minutes passed, I began to remember just how different the four of them were from me, and how remaining friends with these people seriously confused me to a degree that could only be theorized by mathematicians.

Ultimately, this particular group shared a certain kind of emptiness, a specifically cut-out void that could only be filled with novelty. First, there was Barry, who wore foam-front hats and corduroys bought only from secondhand clothing stores. Then there was Frieda, who instead of using a purse, carried her personal effects inside an assortment of vintage (ha!) cartoon-themed lunchboxes. And Cameron, who wore homemade t-shirts, made a wallet out of bumper stickers, and only listened to bands that you’ve never heard of. Then Betty, who wasn’t Japanese, but whose collection of Japanese toys, movies, posters, and magazines confirmed her desire to be just that (Betty also had the distinction of calling me a “hopelessly frozen lake” after hearing my views on the relationship between poverty and obesity). Despite this, however, it was nice that they wanted to include me, and although I likened the notion of going out for coffee to having my time transformed into excrement by a copraphilic wizard, it was better than sitting around and worrying about Ruth. Plus, as far as feeling out of place, wasn’t there always somebody somewhere feeling that way at any given moment? I decided to stop thinking about it and just enjoy being out.

Then, Barry commented on something he saw.

“You see that guy over there? That guy standing in line? When he scratched his arm, I could swear he had a tattoo that said ‘White Pride’. That shit pisses me off.”

“You mean that guy? He’s kind of cute. I bet he works out,” Betty said.

While I didn’t voice my agreement then, Betty’s observation wasn’t entirely untrue. Although I do think “striking” would’ve been a better summation. He definitely had an overall look that, in my opinion, could only with rare success be superimposed onto others. Complementing his shaved head and square jaw were a black t-shirt, blue jeans with rolled-up bottoms, and tight-fitting suspenders. He also wore heavy-looking black boots that for some reason reminded me of expensive cars. In a weird way, his clothing head-to-toe resembled a suit of armor.

Barry went on. “Man, that shit really pisses me off.”

“Okay, downtown warrior,” Betty teased, “why don’t you go tell him that?”

“You know what? I just might. Right after I drink some more of this…caffeinated social conscience.” Barry finished his cup then, to my surprise and mild alarm, got up and walked over to the baldheaded source of his current irritation. Barry, long-haired and foam-hatted, wearing a soccer shirt from a team he never played for, standing opposite some stranger both spatially and in principle. I couldn’t tell if he looked sure of himself or not.

“Hey you. What’s up with that tattoo of yours?”

The guy didn’t say anything. He didn’t even seem to notice Barry standing there at all. After looking around to make sure the question was meant for him, he just shifted his gaze a few millimeters, as though meaning to make that slight movement his only response.

“Your tattoo,” Barry continued, “when your sleeve came up, I saw it. I just wanted to know why somebody gets a tattoo like that.”

The shop became quiet as other patrons began taking interest in the potential showdown playing out before them. A skip in the topography of the skinhead’s face indicated the almost-formation of a sneer. He looked at Barry then immediately turned away when the line moved.

Barry used the skinhead’s refrain as space to put more words. “You must be severely without any worthwhile attributes if your genetically-determined pigment is a source of pride. Seriously, do you get chills at the deli counter when they ask you what kind of cheese you want on your sandwich and you get a chance to say ‘White American’?”

Customers around them laughed. This prompted Cameron to join in, who shouted from the table.

“Or does it sicken you when you go to the bar and someone orders a ‘Black and Tan’?”

More laughter. The skinhead continued to move with the line, not a ripple of emotion disturbing his calm countenance (it might be worth mentioning, however, the several spectator groans that followed a convoluted bit from Cameron involving the words “Fourth of Holocaust” and “Month of Jew-Lie”).

Feeling left out compelled Betty to offer the following critique: “A tattoo like that is just tacky.”

The skinhead gave a quizzical look. On the front of Betty’s shirt, two crustaceans–one dressed as a pikeman, the other as Ankou–were locked in battle.

Frieda slammed shut her lunchbox. “How can you be so ‘bluh, I don’t care’ about being associated with people who commit hate crimes? Or is that what you do?”

Frieda’s false spring outburst prematurely opened an emotional blossom that stung the air with its contrast, breaking up the prevailing sardonic cool (two onlookers even shared a glance to confirm the disruption of mood and rhythm). Despite the escalation, the skinhead kept on like true winter, resumed waiting in line, made it clear that staring at the backside of someone’s haircut or down at the floor had been appraised with greater attention-worthiness than the discussion about his tattoo.

Water for tea was ready in Barry’s skull.

“Why won’t you say something?” Barry took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair, checked the aerodynamics before putting it back on. “You know what? Fuck that. Don’t say anything. Just be a racist dickhead who can’t defend his two-word ideology, that’s absolutely fine. Oh, look at me, I’m the guy who burned down that black church in Center Valley–”

The skinhead spoke quietly to the cashier. “Order for Gannon.” Then, noticing Barry, he turned from the counter and shrugged. “I have a tattoo that says what it says, for Christ’s sake. Did you really think two minutes of insults at a bagel shop were going to affect someone like me?” He didn’t smile when he asked the question, but totally could have. Not smiling was appropriate, too.

Barry returned to the table looking wounded but did not have the appearance of being in physical nor emotional discomfort. Rather, he gave a lineless impression of having been metaphysically lowered, tamped down by the boot soles of a thick-lacquered fascist who was just stopping in to pick up a dozen cherry-walnut. Undoubtedly, Barry’s diaper-rash of spirit came from suppressing the tantrum he’d been denied the joy of needling from someone else, which I sort of took pleasure in. Looking away from Barry, I caught, or should I say, made a study out of catching a last glimpse of the skinhead walking out to his truck. He emanated a certain physical presence, a kind of still confidence that I imagined would keep him dry in the rain. My memory cut back briefly to the nimbus-adorned Jeremy bearing pamphlets, and it was then that both were indelibly connected by my placing them in a newly-invented category of people I could never picture slipping and falling on an ice-covered driveway. Becoming self-conscious of my tethered gaze only after the truck pulled away, I looked around for a clock but couldn’t find one. Switching from the majesty of a bagel-transporting punk to the downtrodden, sulking faces of those let down by their trend-hating warrior spokesperson, I suddenly felt very weird and just wanted to be back in my room.

Cameron addressed the group with tonal ambiguity, “Can a skinhead even come to a bagel shop?”

I yelled something like “he was fucking here, wasn’t he?” then stared at the table as though I heard that doing so would make it transform.

Chapter Eight

Sunday night I dreamt about being a werewolf. I basically killed everyone else in the dream, either with my claws or my fangs or by stabbing them with a knife via prehensile tail. After dropping the knife, I used the tail to break someone’s neck.

On my way to work Monday morning, I stopped at the gas station to get some food. Browsing the doughnut case, checking to see if any muffins were nut-free, I decided to stop wasting time and got my usual. A pot roast and cheddar sandwich, a smoked ham with pepperoni and provolone sandwich, and two cans of TurboMax. I made certain to get the regular TurboMax instead of the kind without sugar, because the kind without sugar has a tendency to ruin my outlook.

Once at work, I parked my car then sat and ate and drank. When people walked by and glanced over at me, over at some guy eating away at his sandwiches and guzzling his drinks, I wondered if they could tell that they had witnessed an essential moment, a sort of crux-bearing Ritual of Necessity. Munching the bleached white flour contents of tear-open packages could be the high point or low point of my day, but in either case, if it was happening, that simply meant it had to happen. They wouldn’t know even if I told them.

Despite my recent intake of caffeine and flavorful ham, I trudged through the office in a miasmic stupor that drew its inspiration from row after row of cubicles, fake-looking light, and murmurs of sound that barely broke the threshold of background noise.

“Greg, before you start today, I have to tell you something,” Tammy called out, her thick, sound waves-transmitted-through-rendered-fat voice pasting my ear flat against my head.

Oh, no. Let me guess. It finally happened. A law’s been passed against frying canned corn in butter.

“What’s up?”

“I came to tell you that if you’re going to fax something today, you’ll have to use the fax machine that the Indexers have in their department.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, it looks like somebody broke all the buttons off the one in the copy room. The power cord got yanked off the coffee machine in there, too, so if you want coffee you’ll have to go upstairs.”

“Huh. I don’t drink coffee.”

“Just thought I’d let you know.” She kept standing there, breathing hard, waiting for me to say something else.
I just wanted her to go away, to stop being in whatever radius I considered mine. Around people like Tammy, even air becomes a sacred commodity, fit for guarding by heaven-sent swords. Like stop breathing my air you piece of shit. I was in no mood for office chatter, and was about to detail my sentiment. She would have fucking exploded, the way I would have yelled at her. Jill prevented this from happening.

“Tammy, I have to talk to Greg. Greg, come with me.”

I followed Jill to her desk, looking at her legs, wondering how long it would take to get out of a clothespin choke that she applied.

“When you pulled files last week, did you look up the locations like you’re supposed to?”

“You mean for the ones I couldn’t find?”

“Yes. For the files that weren’t on the shelves at that time.”

“Um, Brice said I didn’t have to because they were all getting scanned by his department.”

“That’s interesting. Because when Nadine asked about those files, only half of them were with Archives. So when you wrote down the same location for all those files, you did so incorrectly. Fortunately, someone else caught the error and fixed your mistake. Unfortunately, I’ve been instructed to retrain staff on how to pull files, which, I hope you understand, is going to take time away from everything else we have going on here.”

“But usually–”

“I did, however, suggest you be taken off any jobs related to data control, so you may find yourself in the mail room a bit more often starting next week.”

Her condescension was beamed from a satellite. I started to feel like a human-shaped pile of nuisance protein–nothing I could say even mattered. Like the fact that I could say something didn’t even matter. Looking down at my shoes (which, at that moment, resembled failed attempts by someone to convey an expression of Americana through crappy, makeshift sled-building), I continued resigning to a stature of Jill’s perception, tongue-shy and afraid of my own vertebrate condition. Jill sighed through her nostrils then started to turn away, making obvious her decision to have the last thing said to me consist of nothing more than the discharge of used-up air.

Normally, she’d have left me just standing there, muted, playing audience to footwear.

Normally, I would regret being silent some time after first break.

Normally, I would scream about that fucking bitch on the drive home from work.

The scab on my shoulder began to pulse, begging to be split open with the edge of a 3 x 5 index card. Resentment from the Jill Conversation rose like bile, dissolving the tradition of timidity then becoming vapor for response.

“Well I don’t think it’s necessary to go and make me do this other–”

Jill paused, keeping her back to me as she spoke. “Greg, everything has been explained to you already. No one else seems to have a problem accepting responsibility for a non-conformance of operations. You’re reaction is very disappointing, to be truthful, and I don’t think the mail room would appreciate someone bringing in such a negative attitude.” Done with me, she then powered-off in her power suit to go and be Jill somewhere else.

At a gait closer to running than walking, I made my way to the men’s room. After picking an empty stall then lowering a lid for seat use, I was greeted by the squeal of a bicycle horn set to “growl.” Great. I didn’t realize someone else was in here. A fusillade of farts and nasal grunts then verified the adjacent-stall presence of the same brazen bathroom-sitter I’d encountered a few days earlier.

“Greg, is that you?”

The voice shocked with familiarity. Brice, that was you? I wanted to ask. “Yeah,” I answered instead, “how could you tell?”

“Oh,” he paused. “When you’re crying it still sounds like you.”

I sniffed. “Really?”

“Yeah, kind of. I saw your shoes, too. Um…is everything okay?”

I could hear him pull down a length of toilet paper.

“Yeah, just some work stuff, you know. And the weekend was…I don’t know. And my girlfriend’s…I don’t know.”

“Sounds tough. You wanna talk about it?”

Bear my feelings to a coworker in the judgment of cheap ceramic and blue metal? No way, I thought. But, then again, the moment did already have its own vulnerable aspect. I mean, Brice’s genitals were exposed and, depending on his colon health, he was possibly shedding blood, too.

Before I could respond, Brice began talking again, his voice competing with the glockenspiel of water pierced by drips. “You know what I do when I get upset?”

“What’s that?”

“Write a fake suicide note.”

Nothing trailed his answer. Just as I was going to ask for an explanation, Brice grunted across three states of matter, then expounded.

Chapter Nine

“You mean they weren’t raping you?”

My head was jammed in the vertex of a broken mirror.

“No Greg, I wasn’t being raped.”

“You were screaming for help. Please stop, I heard it.”

***

Felt it through the glass on the front door. Not just screams of pain, but pain converted into screams, shivering the inanimate with a fleeting, pained sentience.

“Ruth…”

The serrations of each unanswered ring had weakened the wall between my mind and psychosis. I had to talk to her, had never hated myself more than during that unrequited droning. So I decided to confront her at home, to let her know that I knew she was letting the phone just ring and ring to torture me and drive a procession of “Fuck You” through my brain. I had never sped before, but when the ball of anxiety pooling beneath the gas pedal resisted my foot, I stomped down, hard, to squash it, thereby releasing a torrent of palpable dread that engulfed the car then commanded velocity. I could have driven through the heart of a mountain, piloted the arrow felling the most peaceful mineral giant, for to kill an ancient defender of secrets as he hibernated was an oversight, a sacrifice by definition only–getting her back was my only concern. I would beg, treat my pride to a round of hemlock and fifty-two bludgeon varieties before laying it to rest on the gambrel. My dignity? Tied to a tree, wearing antlers, a kneeling Lapp just inches away. But that wouldn’t work, a quivering sac of emotional rheum couldn’t entice her. The end is all I see without you, I had to refrain from spewing such repellant. I wanted to make a sincere appeal, not invent some…fucked-up Desperation Rite.

I had almost come up with a good opening line when a piercing cry filled my ears with sonic blood.

Planning a speech, getting her back, these objectives were overthrown as I wanted to maim then desecrate whatever caused and ignored the stops, oh God no’s, and I don’t want to’s. A growl, a snapping of fangs sounded with every movement as I charged upstairs to make victims of the victim-makers–their number was no object. To expedite my life-crushing cause I would do anything, subscribe to soul-belief long enough to divide in half the spirit-prizes housed by assailant flesh. Nothing could hurt me, for I was no longer myself, having been replaced by the Universe to reconcile an acute disparity between Rage Possessed and Ability to Use, a gap so severe that if left uncorrected would have thrown into discord the fundamental Harmonies of Existence. Greg became the Jack-in-Irons who ventured off the road, searching for new fountains to wet his thorny cudgel. I was a cyclically-appearing force; annihilator of dinosaurs, Enemy Ancestors, firstborn sons, and now, some fucking guys who should’ve known better.

I set upon the bedroom, reality flinching as the jags of violent energy swirling about me scarred empty space. I’m here, you motherfuckers. A drawn curtain dimmed so I turned on the light, which caused my eyes to gag.

They held her down. One guy knelt at the top of her head, pinning her arms. The other blotted out everything else but her legs, which he corralled beneath his armpits. They had blindfolded her, tied a pillowcase around her head, managing to make even more degrading their atrocious act. She loved that color, that pattern, deciding on a set of linens and covers had taken her months–we’d gone on several trips just to browse. The evil of these two fuckers was unconfined, seeping through to other tenses of life. What used to be the day Ruth and I had gotten sugar waffles at the park to celebrate the purchase of bedding she actually liked had been dropped in a vat of mutagenic retrospect, forever transformed into the day We Brought Home the Blindfold. For that I would kill them extra hard, incite necrotic episodes on random, unrelated bodies with an overflow of murderous excess. When the light came on, the attackers replaced thrusting with idle movements–grotesque, erratic-looking pulses of hard breathing and restraint maintenance, both of which went on as they stared at me, confused. The one on her arms, I remember his rounded gut, that glistening bulge at rest, a crease folding a satisfied sneer along its width like it had just eaten a secret.

I vowed to tear the thing open, make it into a harelipped fucking jack-o’-lantern.

Screaming, I hurtled towards them like a beast escaped from a nightmare. They were the archenemies of my ultra-killing daydream-self, spinal cords nothing but brittle wishbones in superstitious hands. They were in fact slated for a life-bashing, previously overlooked by Disaster because of a misfortune backlog.

They were rice paper, susceptible as an exposed brain to being damaged.

They were naked…and heading my way.

Blindly pushing out my hands, I clashed with an assailant’s body, his raper now flaccid and touching my wrist as we tumbled to the floor. I pulled in both of my arms.

“What are you doing here?”

I went to stand, but after coming face-to-cock with someone’s lower body, immediately shrank to sitting. Receiving a bite from knuckles on the back of my head, I crawled forward–right in the thick of another phallic stare down–then fell to my back, waving my hands to clear the air of penises but failing when I accidentally touched one. The skin-covered view prevented any focus, causing me to thrash like I was being microwaved. Someone, offended by such an imprecise display, stomped my forehead, then my ear. Get up. Be like Gannon.

“Leave him alone!”

Someone punched my mouth. An elbow hit my neck. I saw pubic hair that could hide a set of janitor’s keys.

I recoiled, bound in the confines of an invisible straitjacket as a cock with attached body rained down punches from naked hands. Pain spread like the contents of cracked-open eggs from various points of impact.

“Please, I said leave him alone!”

“Oh shoot. Maybe he’s a part of it.”

The beating stopped.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

***

Pulling my head from the Baroque shambles to assert myself upright, I scooted to prop my body in a corner, tired of life as a talking puddle.

“Let me get you some paper towels,” Ruth said.

“No, I got it.”

“Greg, that’s my shirt.”

I blew my nose. “So, hypocrite, what the fuck was that?”

“I’ll explain what happened. Just let me put some clothes on.”

She got off the bed then walked over to the closet. As I watched, I wanted nothing more than to grab her by the neck and slam her head through sheetrock. I wish it had been rape, I would say. How could you do this to me. But then, even in the throes of violent reverie, the thought of touching her skin repulsed like a forcefully expanding cloud of bug parts. I put my hands in my pockets.

She reached for a sweater my mom gave her.

“You’re not going to fucking wear that, are you?”

She withdrew her hand. “I guess not. Sorry.” The apology seemed inappropriate–I didn’t want compliance. She should have argued with me, not just wordlessly selected a different top.

“Would you hurry up? I can’t stand looking at you like this.”

“Like what, Greg?”

“All…naked.” The word flash-decomposed right there in my mouth. I wanted to gargle acid, to flush an experimental solvent with no practical use beyond corroding flesh through the part of my brain that stored unclothed images.

“All right, Greg,” Ruth said, wearing a shirt I didn’t like because of the color, “I’m ready to talk about this.”

She talked, but it was almost impossible to comprehend as the fury-quickened operation of malleus-on-incus turned every other set of words into unmeaning paste. Because of this, I took it upon myself to reconstruct what she said.

“I’m a big whore…safe word…every time I look at you I’m trying not to laugh…simulation…I only did this to hurt you, and to laugh about hurting you…no objects…you’re such a fucking joke-loser that I had no choice but to fuck them all…didn’t want to involve you…”

“Whoa, whoa, wait. Didn’t want to involve me? Then at least break up with me if it’s so goddamn important to have someone ram your face like a barricaded door–”

“Can you just listen, Greg? This isn’t easy to explain.”

I couldn’t tell if the melancholy bend in her voice was the result of emotional strain or merely a design change to better catch sympathy. I looked at her intently while trying to form a suitably-veined response. As the seconds passed, however, I forgot about deciphering her tone, instead became preoccupied with feeling duped. For all previous time, I thought she was small due to her skeleton, but that day realized it was actually so she could be passed around–handed off–between multiple cock-bearing assholes who, I imagined, wore executioner’s hoods and yellow gold. Could I kill them all?

Ruth continued. “Greg, you’re very special to me. I would never want to make you a part of…this part of my life. It would hurt me so much to see you even pretend–”

“If being special to you means what happened today, then I’d rather have sand burrs stuck in my ureth–”

“You know what Greg? Forget it. You’re impossible to talk to.” She looked over at a section of carpet a few feet away as though it agreed with her.

“I caught you fucking two other guys. You can’t be mad at me right now. I walked in on you fucking two other guys at the same fucking time. You don’t have the right to be mad at me.”

“I’m sorry, Greg. I’m just trying to explain this but you’re not making it easy.”

“I’m the one who’s bleeding. That automatically makes everything harder for me. Not you.”

“So all that blood, all those cuts on your chest and back are from Terry and –”

“Goddamn it, no names, goddamn it.” I set my teeth, jaw clenched as though resisting the oral intrusion of a four-foot wire.

“You know what? I’m glad this happened. You were never that good to me.”

Caloric inflamed my sub-dermal spaces. My heart seized, reacted psychosomatically, thinking it had ingested a length of edged metal. I would also later discover that my brain, choosing speed over accuracy, wanting immediately to destroy the commitment of Ruth’s assertion to memory, erased ninety-percent of the birthdays, phone numbers, and world capitals I knew. Everything was being taken away.

“Explain that to me. Explain to me how you…after this, today, can–”

“No problem. You’re always complaining. Do you know how stressful it is to be around? It’s every day, something makes you mad, and there’s just no saving your mood. Which for months I thought was my responsibility. But it was constant negativity, Greg. It really wore me down, you never once opined about a solution. Did you ever think that maybe there was something you could do, instead of–”

“I’m sure the chapter in whatever book you read about types of people had a way-too generalized profile for everybody. Do you really–”

“You won’t even listen! You hate it when other people talk. You’re always dismissing what other people say before there’s a chance to realize it could be worthwhile. Do you realize that?”

“How does that relate to you being glad I got beat up by two guys who were just seconds beforehand making you airtight?”

“What I meant, Greg, is that I’m glad there’s a clearly marked exit from this. I was so afraid to leave you before, but now, I pretty much have no choice. I never wanted you to see this part of my life. But you did, and I’m sorry, and I can’t be with you anymore.”

Sorting through what she said felt like a mixture of Cat’s Cradle, a Rubik’s Cube, and poisonous quills.

“You’re breaking up with me? After what you did, don’t you think it’s a given that we wouldn’t be together, like maybe mandated by the circumstances, or the fact that I would like to exercise a modicum of dignity?”

“Whatever makes you feel better, Greg.”

“Don’t be like that. I’m the one with the knife in his back. I’m the one getting screwed over.” Open scabs formed a bond with my shirt. I told myself it felt good.

“Greg, can I just–”

“Why would you be afraid to leave me?” My voice felt displaced, like it originated from a point just above my head.

“I was always–” she stopped, restarted. “I’m afraid you don’t have anything else. That your world gets…kicked off the table once I’m gone.”

She believed in what she said, which made me feel extra pathetic. To correct this, I concentrated, imagined a tiny version of myself rapidly multiplying, the copies swarming together then fusing into a normal-sized Halfman. “I have plenty going on. Plenty. There’s a lot I didn’t tell you about, stuff I’m not sure you could even understand. So don’t worry about me, and don’t think that just because you hid such despicable, whorish activity that you were the only one who had anything going on.”

“I’m sure I wasn’t, Greg.”

I couldn’t yell, there was no desire to yell. Talking, audible breathing, scratching my leg through my jeans, none of it seemed permissible. And so, a minute of silence marked the end of our time together.

I leaned away from the corner, preparing to leave.

“Do you know what bothered me the most?” Ruth asked, not really expecting me to answer. “How you’d complain about Lacy from WellTech, how she always found a way to mention her husband, or to mention being married. You thought she was annoying and couldn’t build an identity apart from fulfilling a role supplied by meaningless tradition, I think you said. Maybe when she talked like that all the time it was like a tribute to her husband, to their marriage, like she was praising the relationship or showing her thanks. Why would that be so bad? Her marriage, being a wife, having a husband, that was important to her so she talked about it, but you would never have that interpretation. You thought she was stupid or had an empty life…I don’t know. But every time you complained, every time you made fun of her, I got so upset, because that’s how I used to talk about us, about you. I never–”

“You told people we were married?”

“Fuck you, Greg. You knew what I meant,” Ruth said, moving to answer the phone. She projected hate with her whole body.

“Hello? Oh, hey. I can’t really…yeah, I can ask him, he’s right here. Okay. Yep. Later.”

“Who was that?” I asked, feeling entitled to the answer.

“Did you bite the heads off the bird soaps in Fran’s bathroom?”

I gave her a look as though the question was absurd, although we both knew it wasn’t.

Chapter Ten

The afternoon was staged on the porch, sitting with Mike and his cousin, Noe. Neither of them talked, just nodded every so often, sipping beer from clear bottles. After awhile, after his cousin complained about “fuckin’ starving,” Mike ordered pizza.

“Hey Prophet,” Mike said, lifting a slice to his mouth, nabbing a just-fallen sausage pebble off his shirt, “that one Perry dude, he’s like pissed off at you, dude. He said it’s from when you interrupted his…vanishing?”

“Banishing,” Noe corrected, guiding a strand of cheese back onto his pizza.

“Yeah, so I told him that if he wanted to keep coming here, you two would have to sort it out.”

While I was fairly certain he didn’t, perhaps Mike meant categorize. “Like fight about it?”

Mike chomped the end of a crust. “Yeah, you know…sort it out.” His cousin gave a deep nod.

“But last time I talked to you, you said everything was cool.”

“With me, Prophet. ‘Cause I don’t like fighting in my place, but Nestor and everybody said you stopped some crazy shit from happening, so that was cool, what you did. But if you kick a dude, he’s gonna come back, you know?” Mike slammed an open palm to fist. “And that’s between you two. Just be careful mixing it up, ‘cause…you know.” He gestured at my wounded face.

Noe’s head slowly bobbed in agreement. Pores leaked bright orange from the cheese on my pizza, running warm over my hand. I waited until the others were distracted–Mike rearranging his pepperoni, Noe scratching a floorboard with the end of his shoelace–to lick it off. While I certainly planned to worry about the fated fisticuffs with a delusional drug addict from grade school, the immediate goal was simple: stunt my recent memory with alcohol and food.

Just then, a child’s voice called out for Mike, which surprised me. Uncle Mike answered, “Out here with the Prophet.”

When I first heard the nearing patter of shoes, I half jokingly, half really expected a band of slightly varied, reduced-in-scale Egyptian Mikes. Brown and densely-built, sporting goatees thick enough to comb, baggy pants and flannel shirts attempting to hide the wall-smashing mortar of their compacted frames. They worked on bikes, I imagined, and got things in the mail.

Footsteps neared. A child proclaimed, “Can too!”

Mike’s nephews shot out the front door, spilled into our midst like dice from a cup. They were laughing, completing a footrace to the porch for no prize made them laugh. They were blonde, all four of them, and far from being stout or having facial hair. They were little, kids were so tiny, so little, I instantly understood how people forgot them places or thought their feelings didn’t matter. Was I really ever that small? And Tammy from work, was she? I continued marveling at the minuteness, figuring a spoonful each of instant potatoes could power them for days. As they took turns trying to grab a dangled stopwatch from Noe’s hand, I noticed something. Their heads were huge. I mean, at least compared to their bodies. Their movement, all that jumping around, seemed impossible. The atlases were overmatched, any moment could have contained the backward-bend then blood spray of a gravitational beheading. My apprehension quickly stopped, however–went splat–as a limp triangle of animal fat and red pepper flakes made contact with my shirt, a misinterpreted synaptic transfer causing a nearby arm to go from just hanging there, to flailing, to just hanging there in a split second’s time. I continued eating, though, as only the shirt, not the pizza, was ruined.

The food-upsetter turned to me. “What’s your name?”

“That’s the Prophet,” Mike answered. All the kids stopped to look at me. I think I was supposed to do something.

“Like from Sunday school?”

The comparison won approval. “Ha ha. Yeah, like that.”

I presented Mike a concerned look featuring an irritated inlay. He shrugged, because how else was he supposed to answer that question?

Before the conversation went further, suddenly one, then all, of Mike’s nephews went zooming for the yard, borrowing the urgency and disorder of flabellum-scattered flies. One of them kicked a plastic football. Another one knelt then fell to his stomach, then got back up.

I asked Mike how old they were.

“Six, seven, eight, and nine,” he said.

His nephews must’ve thought they could, through proxy, release all the world’s oppressed by combating inertia every second of their lives. They milled, hopped, and dashed. They grabbed each other’s shirt collars and pulled each other down. They attempted handstands and hit trees with fallen branches, unaware of how unsettling that would be to a tree that could think. They roamed the yard’s perimeter as though it were endless, re-trekked the same thinning patches with undepleted fervor as new forms of play were invented or discovered. The rules were transient, founded on whims, supported or vetoed without apparent basis.

Those bricks crumble when you step on them.

No they don’t, they freeze you.

No they don’t, they shock you.

No they don’t, they’re vines.

Victory could be obtained through a mere declaration, and robots and sharks, vampires and aliens, could all suddenly appear right behind you. People walked by, asked them what they were playing, and were told. The cars drove past and the nephews never stopped, never took an embarrassment break. Just as they had become surrounded by the Cloud Monster, I quit watching–the capillary-crawl of something close to jealousy
(intimidation?) causing me to turn my head.

“Hey Prophet, you okay?”

I was looking down.

“Yeah, just a headache. It’s cool.”

Just then–a battle cry?–sounded from the front lawn. A grownup in a long black coat had joined in, pretending to brandish claws or balls of energy as Mike’s nephews lined up for a fabulous scuffle. Mike didn’t show any alarm, must’ve known the adult.

“Yeeah!”

“Yeargh!”

The kids rushed in, then, one after the other, fell to the invisible claw-strike of their size-advantaged foe. They laughed, dying made them laugh, and each grunted his farewell. The coat guy made a gesture, which I figured out stood for claw-retraction. Then he pointed at me.

“You,” he said.

I didn’t recognize him before. It was that Perry dude, and I think he’d been awake since our last encounter.
Mike urged me off the porch with a grim look, my fate bound in byssus, entombed in certainty. If I wanted to hang out at Egyptian Mike’s, I had to follow the rules, which meant at least entertaining a parley with the insane. After checking the severity of the pizza stain on my shirt, I headed for the yard. The nephews returned to life as an audience.

“He’s a prophet,” one of them announced, finger aimed at me.

“I know,” Perry said, offended at the notion that he didn’t know.

At the risk of disappointing Mike and his cousin, I started on a diplomatic solution. How about I get on my knees, and you kick me! Or you know that bizarre ritual I wanted to perform? I don’t have to! Perry stood with his head tilted forward, glaring hard through a veil of brown hair. His arms were held stiff at his sides as though weighed down by heavy pails. In his mind, his coat flared menacingly in a swirling zephyr, and all around him shards of earth splintered, flaked away, floated skyward then vaporized–an unexplained byproduct of his immense power. The unseen trembled, he imagined, fearing collateral sacrifice within any range of his turbulent presence.

I walked right up to him–hands neither cocked nor chambered–to begin peace talks.

“Perry, man, I know you’re upset with me, but just let me–”

He pumped his arms, left-right-left. A shot on the upper lip, then on the throat, completely disoriented. A minute ago I wasn’t sitting on Mike’s porch–I was in Ruth’s bedroom, crawling across the floor, leaving unanswered a question about decapitated soap. Rising from four points down, to three, then two, I went to leave, becoming confused when the door in Ruth’s bedroom lead to a combination of punches in Mike’s front yard.

“Look, I don’t think–”

“Fellow prophets aren’t supposed to meddle! Do you hear me?”

The shriek made me flinch. A flourish of black fabric grazed my temple. On the momentum of the missed attack, Perry stumbled at me, threw a punch that he tried making into a grab at the last instant. To get away, I sort of toppled over, landing on the heels of my hands. Perry fell from overextension (although it looked like a giant inkblot had tackled him from behind). When I got up, I noticed Mike’s nephews were still in the yard, watching. I couldn’t tell if they were rooting for me or not.

Perry had recovered, walking forward as though convinced if he ran into me I would disappear. In fourth grade, when the class assignment was presenting a topic from the encyclopedia, he chose baseball terms.

“Texas leaguer. You taught me that word. I’d never heard it before.”

It was a long-range weapon, with a trajectory spanning ten-plus years. The impact would take out a mental dam, then Perry, once my antagonist, would be mired in the sentimental sediment of our shared past.

His pace slowed. A slackening of tension overhauled his posture, righted the forward lean. A pondering look smoothed his face. Then, according to my prediction, he halted. Due to lack of interest, this fight has been called off. It worked, I knew it would, my lissome thinking had done precisely what I wanted.

Perry spoke. “I want you dead.”

My petals drooped.

And so, the fight was officially back on because Perry didn’t say “I can’t believe you remember that” like I planned. There was simply no relating to someone like him. What possible recourse was there, dealing with a person who believed in demons and spell casting and actual, modern-day–

“Goddamn it. That’s it.”

I went to a semi-crouch, turned an L-stance to Perry. Making my fingers into talons, I drew both hands to my rear hip as though cradling between them an invisible object. This got Perry to put his hands down.

“What are you doing?”

I didn’t answer, just hurled silence from the cannon of a scornful look. Breathing in and out, I exaggerated the rise and fall of my shoulders, called attention to my wickedly formed fingers. I circled, always staring at the enemy, the buildup of something unknown reaching palpable, leaf-stirring levels.

“You fucking crazy asshole. You can only blame yourself for what I’m about to do.”

A nephew yelped. Noe, I think, almost did. I crouched lower, the molded force in my hands needing further restraint, the distant drums, the ownerless chants in my head marking the increase in power with hastened tempo. “By the jawbone of Kazik-Rath, I summon the pain of all transmogrified souls, that I may unleash a misery so great even the most intrepid of scribes shall bar his quill from its record, wanting not the injury of forthcoming generations to be his legacy. As certainly it would, if by his hand were formatted and dispensed such horrific parchment.”

I kept circling. The movement generated tension, traced a boundary, and within that disc surged an atmosphere of expectancy–magic could happen there.

“To crush those who might strike me is my only purpose. Until opposed, my every action is a further step from destiny. Your sacrifice to give me true life is noble, so my honor, therefore, precedes my wrath.”

Perry’s eyes widened, his attempt at multiplying the cells of his cornea for the creation of twin fibrous shields never leaving the concept stage. I pushed my hands forward, unfurling what he hopefully believed was a concentrated blast of eternal sorrow.

“Ungh!”

Mike’s nephews gasped. Perry looked at me, I didn’t deserve this, he relayed emphatically. A feeling, stronger than hate, must drive you he accused. Clutching his sides as though to contain their viscid flight from body, Perry staggered around the yard, turning, stopping, then lurching on again–a drunken bee crashing through an invisible maze.

“This isn’t over,” he explained, sucking air for a few seconds before sprinting away.

“Fuck yeah,” Mike laughed.

A victory. I went inside to celebrate, telling Mike’s nephews I’d show them “how I did that magic thing” later.

Mike greeted me at the door with a supine palm staging of three pills. “Hey Prophet. Take this.”

“And this,” Noe said, handing me a beer.

“Cool,” I said, easing onto the couch, “what is it?”

“Good shit,” Mike answered, turning on the TV then reclining his chair to watch.

I accepted. Twenty minutes later, torpor was crushing clarity’s windpipe with a bed sheet.

“I’m not just…some novelty dude. We’re real friends, man. Even though I think about…Gannon.”

“What the fuck is your guy talking about?”

“Fuckin’…bagels. You don’t remember?”

Wailing laughter, then sleep, blotted my effort to explain the hyper-concentration of thoughts. My eyelids are blocking the words…

***

Specters of a crowded living room flashed between bites of pastrami hash. It was breakfast.

“Thanks,” I said, realizing I’d broken my vow to never use the silverware at Mike’s.

“Hey Prophet, is everything okay?”

“Yeah, dude. Potatoes are good.”

“I’m talking about last night. You said some shit about your world getting kicked off the table, and how the cocks would travel through space to get you.”

I shrugged. “I was fucked up, right?”

“It wasn’t your normal shit.”

I stared at my food. “Look, I’m fine. The point was to leave reality for a bit–”

“Greg. Listen. I think all that was your reality.”

Mike was no longer the stout schemer having fun until his next move. The subtle twitch faded from his body. The steady look of anticipation left his face. Drying glasses with a towel and still wearing the flannel pants he used for pajamas, my drug dealer became unnervingly parental.

“Did your dad make you eat puke off a plate?”

“No, man. That shit? No. No way. No. I don’t remember saying that.”

Mike stared a few seconds before replying. “Whatever, it’s cool. But seriously. If you ever need help with anything–and Prophet, I mean anything–just let me know, aight?”

“Yeah. For sure. Um…black pepper?” I joked.

“Here you go,” Mike said, handing me a grinder while shaking his head.

Either the whole world could hear me chew, or there was a microphone in my throat wired straight to my brain. The sun painfully shrunk my pupils, too, so I tried thinking of a way to tell Mike he should buy a window shade. “A lot of people heard me say that, didn’t they?”

“Nah. It took you like five minutes to make one sentence. Nobody paid attention.”

“Good. Because I wouldn’t want people thinking that stuff really happened,” I said, suddenly out of the mood for pastrami hash covered in ketchup, gravy, and eggs over easy.

***

“Half man, half man! Face me, you coward!”

Perry and his coat, on a kids’ bike. He was pedaling infinity out in the street, whooping my name amid ramblings and contrived laughter. That fucker found my apartment. I looked around for neighbors, felt embarrassment burn my skin.

“The day has come! For you, o mighty prophet! Did you foresee? Foresee it now, look upon me now!”

How surreal. I thought I’d never see him again. He was an aberration, a story for later, something I’d never be sure happened in real life or a dream. He probably envisioned himself astride an archaeopteryx, fuck it, for some reason it came with two wheels, and the flowing black from his shoulders was a guardian entity, living darkness enshrouding its lord. My time of reckoning, heralded by reflectors, brought forth on the clumsy operation of handlebars. It looked like a seventy percent chance his coat would get caught in the spokes.

“Eyes on you!” Perry screeched, hurling in my direction the contents of an empty hand.

So I fucking clotheslined him, intercepted his curved route with a straight sprint. Ran into the street then stopped hard, hit him with the mail crane, dismounted that piece of shit. He fell in a rustling heap, coat disheveled, hair in his eyes. Did I eat puke. Come on.

“That bike better be okay,” he warned, already on his feet.

I turned my head to glance at the fallen machine. Perry quickly occupied this lapse in awareness, stepping twice before driving a steel toe into my scrotum. The blow crumpled my abdomen while flaring a line of pain through my jaw, scrolling the view from bike, to sky, to crotch of pants. I didn’t see Perry, just heard his voice pissing on my ear drum.

“A curse, prophet. There’s nothing you can do.”

My legs were depressurized, unresponsive to the flickering attempts at their use. Shame filled the bloodways in my chest, calling out to gravitons in the earth’s core, wanting a fusion of two centers. The vise below my pelvis exponentially tightened. Pain born in my testicles emigrated, colonizing my kidneys and lower back. My life, I could feel it unraveling, could feel the rings of disorder spreading from between my legs.

“Nothing, prophet. Not a goddamn–”

An uppercut. I had summoned enough turgidity to kneel for a split second, pushing my knuckles into the hanging parts of Perry before collapsing again. He fell next to me, landing so close we could have been sharing a bed and laid further apart.

A car honked. We were blocking the road.

“They’re both holding their balls,” someone remarked.

I got up, hunched and hovering near a quadrupedal stance, stumbling into the parking lot to sit, recover. After un-wadding the wince on my face, I noticed Perry had made it back to his feet. Goddamn it, I can’t lose again. Don’t, don’t, don’t–

I’m not sure how many times he kicked me in the face before knocking me out.

Chapter Eleven

I don’t know if I’m doing this the right way.

“Just be honest. So honest that the stuff you’re writing feels made up, like you could never believe those thoughts were stored in your head. You might be surprised by what you see after itemizing the chaos. Don’t be afraid and don’t stop–let it all out, nothing’s too minor. You just have to remember that when you write about being desperate and hurt and frustrated that it’s only to summon a version of you, that…pitiable rendition gets called above the surface one last time to get his head blown off or his guts torn out. It’s not a farewell from you, but from him–the old you. Here’s how I feel, farewell, then bam–gone.”

According to Brice, this will make me feel better.

“It’s like, all that rage and depression and hopelessness is on a sheet of paper instead of inside you. It creates a lot of distance, being able to see your grievances all fit for crumpling right there in your hands. I got the idea two years ago after writing a real suicide note to my parents. At first I just stared at the paper, trying to think of something special for my last words, but after a while I ended up flipping out because I couldn’t think of anything poignant or cool-sounding, just started writing like crazy instead because I figured if I wasn’t going to be there for anyone’s reaction then it really didn’t matter how poetic it was. Anything, stuff from junior high, from family vacations a decade earlier, my dad accidentally slamming my hand in the car door while I was holding a peanut parfait then blaming me for the mess…I put it all down, frantically at times, entire paragraphs were just a continuous cursive line. And I was crying, tears and snot just running down my face, your body never runs out of that stuff, it’s like how your soul bleeds, I swear. You should’ve seen me, at one point I started thrashing my legs like I was having a tantrum and kicked through this stack of furnace filters in the laundry room. Which was gratifying, because when I was little my parents would always tell me not to touch them, like I had any interest in touching furnace filters to begin with. So I wrote about that, too, and kept on writing until I noticed I wasn’t really crying anymore, just making this mumbled kind of groan, even the last few jolts of crying hiccups had passed. And then it was done, and even though I was already slouched in the corner it felt like I had collapsed, I was so exhausted. But in a good way. Purged, emptied, ready to be filled. When I got up, I left the old me–snot-covered and dead–on the floor. I know it happened, I could feel it.”

But there’s no feeling better, not when the only thing that ever kept you from being a piece of shit loser is gone. How she last saw me was intolerable: on the floor, powerless against other men, the balled-up recipient of a beating, unable to save her. There wasn’t a victim in the room till I got there, but fuck that, superfluous heroics would have at least saved me from the priapic bloodletting handed out by two make-believe rapists. Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them. I can’t stop thinking about it, they’re laughing at me right now, they’re naked and they’re laughing, and even if they were tied up in chairs and the mallet was raised overhead they would still beat me, because my misery is fated, and every time I breathe too hard or see my own hands I am reminded of this. But if in that room it had been just the two of them and me then it wouldn’t be so bad, for although two dicks are responsible for the caning itself, I can only blame her for its severity. With every blow, I could feel the sharpened spoon of her pity, carving away, altering my image, leaving less and less of me to respect. She didn’t want to be saved, but she did want me to win, and was disheartened by my lack of violent aptitude. They took something from me and she wanted to see requital but instead she saw me bleed. The humiliation of her witness has since been added as a permanent layer to my face, I just want to burn it off.

So now she’s gone, and at least before when it was just me I could say but look there’s her but now there’s nothing. Other cocks felt her breath. Her twat contracted around fingers that aren’t mine. But it’s the rejection. Pulling another man’s ejaculate when I’m not around? I could live with that, the same way she did. I get it. There’s Greg…and this other shit. She gave me more than I could give myself, but she didn’t have to be all mine to do that. Only delusion would make such a demand. But she took away whatever part was just for me, she didn’t even want that fraction mingling with my shitiness.

“No, Greg. I don’t care if you’ll take a ‘broken version.’ There isn’t one to be had. Now stop. Calling me.”

I thought fucking Lucy would help. I don’t know why. There was no theory, no system. Nothing about the universe owing me a fulfilled wish. Nothing about balance or equilibrium. And by “help” I mean vague, boundless panacea. Like my cock goes in, and I think “help for my life is on the way.” I wasn’t craving an orgasm built by someone else, as over a decade of precise mental imagery combined with exacting manipulations had ruined that prospect. I just got drunk with her then fucked her. Without a condom, which is important to note, because I’d never done that before, never felt a bare vagina swallow my vulnerable cock, never felt the malleable heft of an inner-thigh enclosure dominate my nether regions. I hated every second, finally pushing her off me when a galleon of panic sunk onto my chest.

“You just stop fuckin’ me like you’re a little bitch? Well, get off my bed then, bitch.”

She was right. And she only knew the one part, the part where I floundered beneath her willingness. Another haven wrecked.

***

Chicken and Bacon Alfredo. It didn’t feel nourishing, like eating steel cut oats or solar bits of tomato, but those bales of penne and cream sauce–laden with treasures both cubed and crumbled–did have a healing effect. Stabbing at morsels until the tines no longer showed, filling my mouth to capacity, then immediately piling on more to replenish…warmth and fullness, the intake of external goodness replacing whatever used to be inside. After the trouncing by cocks, after Perry opening my face, after sneezing a buckshot of red on the bathroom mirror, after nightmares kicking me from sleep, after noticing the incisor-frayed tatters behind my lip, after queasiness and swelling, after misery clutching my face in its palm–there were cracks in the mandala, and I intended to salve them with boiled starch and melted parmesan. Two, possibly three different species had given their lives for my comfort, so it was not a trivial exchange, the sacrifice before me to cover my plate. The larger sacrifice involved me sitting in a diner full of people who wore vintage t-shirts, non-prescription eyewear, and wristbands. But it’s where she liked to meet, so I kept going.

“Is it good?”

“The best ever. Sometimes the cheese gets less flavorful as you go, but it’s really holding up today.”

Betty from the bookstore, hair so shiny black it was bright. Her eyes this day were ambassadors of an expanse of blue, lenses cut from riven sky. Her red t-shirt, though nominal in size, was absurdly dominant, striking its wearer from singularity and creating a separate version. “Red T-Shirt Betty, complete with all you see here…” The skin on her arms flowed with a soft, powder opacity, I wanted to rest my cheek on her and breathe, just be close and breathe. I wanted to have her somehow crawl up my sleeve, feel a concentration of her move up my arm then rest at that place where neck blends into shoulder. Betty ate her bread bowl in pinches, neglecting the lake of broccoli and cheddar surrounded therein. A refrain touched all her movement; she was holding back, had kept from asking about my face, it’s disrepair. I believe she really wanted to but knew that asking for an explanation would mean she was no longer there just for me, that wanting something for herself–an answer, a story–would impinge on the mission of our moment: take care of Greg. Plus she knew I would lie, and didn’t want to cause me the guilt of doing so. This she told me with a look. A plain, unprejudiced relay stating that yes, I sit across from you to provide support, and not just for the damage I can see, but for all blights, poxes, and plagues previously endured, the inner ravages, and to do this there will be leeway, leeway measured by two points floating in boundless space. Like how you’re eating, for example. That would normally garner a comment…

Betty looked away. I put down my fork, used a napkin.

Silence crowded the booth. Minutes belly-crawled through rubber cement. I had to rein my breaths, keep them from expanding into full-blown sighs, stop my brain from organizing its thoughts onto the standard Halfman Complaint Form.

A fat mom with her fat fuck kid. Son or daughter, I wasn’t sure, all I could see was a biomorphic blob wearing an ankle-length shirt. Mounds of food, mighty and jagged, steam drifting away like a prophecy. Though tall you stand, depletion is certain. Onions rings and fried mozzarella. Ranch dressing. The potato gems filled with cheese. Crunch, crunch, there’s oil in the crumbs. Three smaller-sized onion rings were fitted around a cheese stick. I stared, drew conclusions. People like this went to the fair for deep-fried candy bars and funnel cake, not for rides and games.

I raised you this way because I hate myself.

Fried cod with tartar sauce. The server judged them as she brought the trays, that rebuke beneath the visage. You’re monsters and I hate you. What a conflict that must’ve been, seeing them eat what they want, the heedless consumption–rage-making, no doubt. But they’ll die from it, so that’s–

I’d been ignoring Betty. Avoiding conversation. I had connected the thoughts but couldn’t deploy them as words. I need to be shown mercy. But I don’t know from what. And somehow you’d fit in.

I decided to talk about something else.

Just as I was about to implore that Betty “look at those pieces of shit in the corner, those fat ones over there,” she muted me with confession.

“Greg, I am fuckin’ fascinated by you. At the bookstore I would just watch you, for as long I could, all the time. No matter what you were doing, you always looked so…obligated, like you swore an oath to be around, like participating in all this wasn’t your first choice. Like you could leave any time, just break the fourth wall and leave us behind. Walk offstage, you know, to better pursue being Greg. Which I don’t even know what that means, because you’re Greg, obviously. And we’re real, all of us around you, not just a cast of billions. But it seems like the world, or ‘reality,’ wants to read your mind specifically, or set things up to get you to make certain faces. Greg standing in the bookstore, making that face, and that’s why we’re all here. But it’s only that way in this world. In a different place, you’d be a tyrant…like I picture you flying around on an uprooted chunk of earth with your arms crossed, wearing a suit of armor, surveying the domain beneath you. I guess it could be plated cybernetics, and not really a suit at all, the armor.

“I don’t think everyone sees what I see. If she did, then…she wouldn’t have left you. People think unless a crowd is vying for something it’s not a prize, but really, if there’s two-thousand others behind you, waiting, able to replace you, then how are you special? You could be swapped out, interchanged. But if you’re the only one there in the first place, where it’s you or nothing, that means so much more, in my opinion. No chance for alternatives, it couldn’t have been anyone else.

“Greg, I really think the world has been holding you at the wrong angle. But I’m glad. Because I want to have a rare connection, not something in common with everyone. A prize determined by me, not consensus. I know what the world hasn’t been for you, and whatever I do, it won’t be to show how people are good or not so bad or any different than you thought, I’m not a representative or a point-prover, I just…I like to think of the time we spend together as something completely separate, like there’s work and friends and activities and…this. Betty and Greg. That’s really–that’s what it is. And it can be whatever you want, I don’t…require anything.”

Betty looked at my face then gave a purposeful blink, a snip with her lashes, and in that instant a sensation of lifting–of extraction–convinced me the moment had splintered off, formed a pod then drifted beyond the linear sequence as a sphere of eternal present, no longer subject to becoming a mutable lump of memory. Before that night, I had always viewed Betty as a contrived set of interests piloting a humanoid vehicle, her identity, her personality, having been founded on being a fan of Japanese stuff. But then, at the table, with her thumb pressing my skin, she became more. That feeling, a quickening, I thought it would never happen again. A moment starts in the middle and you pine for the time missed. Your whole body tingles and you hope it’s not the release of confessional vapor through your pores, a pheromonal accounting of hidden traits. Where the operation of your diaphragm, your lungs, is connected to the tactile presence of another. Where you feel like what you’re doing is wrong, that you can’t reciprocate what you’re taking, because you could never provide that same elevation, tranquility, or acceptance. Because you should want to pedal as much as steer. Because you should want to create a mutual symbiosis. Because–

“Do you know them?” Betty pointed, I turned.

Oh motherfucking no.

Platinum, cutting like a fabled edge. Dark brown tangling like a mass of brambles. Auburn searing like the scornful wavelength of a kobold execution song.

A triumvirate of damage had been dealt. Hit points were low, the situation critical. I couldn’t move, had lost my turn.

Fran, Duncan, and Ruth. They had skipped the crowd, phasing through indie-style and bone, summoned by the quiver of my failing life force. A triune presenting an immobile future, and at its center, the figurehead. I can’t remember why you were so important. The moment was neither lifted nor sunken. There was no isolation nor slowdown. Everything participated. Ambient noise, background movement, the shit on the walls. Life advanced with its cargo in tow, pace unaltered.

Ruth’s eyes flashed with a radioactive green. She stared as though she wanted to vaporize every instant of my chest, hollow a tunnel into the past through which a curse on my origin could be sent.

Betty’s hand. I squeezed it.

An imminence followed. I was a dandelion reaching an epiphany about its plumose property in the rush of a nearing cyclone. My nostrils and stomach felt suddenly full, as if I’d been breathing eggs tempered for hollandaise. The urge to puke banged on my throat.

I looked at Betty’s face. I’m going to lose you.

Everyone kept talking. All those hip motherfuckers were talking and putting forth and nobody knew the misery about to befall some guy in their midst.

“So my snatch has the texture and smell of durian?”

Saying “yes” was a lie. Saying “no” was admitting to a lie.

“What?”

“Mark at WellTech. He’s friends with a guy who works with Duncan’s brother. Do you remember talking to him about me?”

Ruth’s eyes were open so wide, trying to frame the column of crushing inferno she imagined me in.

I was so proud, having just read about durians. A new person had started in the mail room so I tried out the comparison on him. He hadn’t heard of the fruit, then tattled, apparently.

“You fucked other people,” I deflected.

“Then tell that to your coworkers. Stop lying about me.”

“You lied too.”

“About what?”

“Fucking other people is a form of lie.”

“And what about pretending you don’t recognize your own parents?”

I imagined myself blowing up. Exploding, guts everywhere.

“Yeah. I saw your mom at Nancy’s Boutique. She mentioned that time we saw them. You remember. Walking in the mall, two people waving, trying to get your attention. They called you by name, and you swore they weren’t talking to you, but they were. I’ll never understand. You ignored your parents then lied about it to me. Fucking abnormal. And your mom said you’ve been like that your whole life, acting strange. This one time, I guess he…”

I paused, mid-breath, dreading any outcome of the Greg’s Past Lottery. Moments were lost in an avalanche in my head.

“…then burned out the garbage disposal trying to kill his imaginary friend,” Ruth retold, shifting the audience from me to Fran and Duncan.

No amount of defiance could shield me from their skin-peeling contempt. They were judging my childhood actions, mocking a five-year-old in their thoughts. Things should fly. Deliberation is a barricade. Mark your goddamn territory with overturned objects, now! Don’t think about how you want to fuck Fran, or how you’d still give in to Ruth. Shape a fist with your mind and punch, punch, punch until the exit appears…

“He cuts himself. Like he’s in junior high. He has the angst of a fifteen-year-old. Show her, Greg, you fuckin’ psycho.”

Another collapse, somewhere in my head.

Ruth and Fran were gone. Duncan remained, his hair triumphant like it had overseen a good, thorough besting.

“And stop driving past Ruthie’s, okay? That shaking sound your car makes is pretty obvious, dude.”

Betty’s hand. I let it go.

***

I’m the reason Tammy left WellTech. Last week I needed a ride home, and she was nice enough to give one. Unsurprisingly, her car smelled like a hamper’s impression of mildew, and there were two huge, unopened boxes of peanut butter crackers in the back seat (I remember thinking I would never eat those because they’re tainted). So she tells me a story about eating spoiled pork, and how she and her boyfriend took turns being on the toilet all day. That’s never happened to me, I said. After that I didn’t talk, figuring I’d paid my courtesy-toll by listening to that one story. She said nothing more herself, and I adored the following silence. I wanted transportation, not a bonding experience. When we finally got to my apartment, she kept giving me a fucked-up look, like she was in the presence of a sandwich she’d only read about, and her plan was to soak the bread on her fat fucking labia before devouring it. I pictured my thigh getting grill marks from her stare then thought about her ass being caked with unwiped shit. So now what, she asked me. The smell in the car, her voice, my imagination, all of it pounded my stomach at once. I threw up, covering her hand and leg with shredded beef and sesame seeds. I wouldn’t fuck you to cure death, I screamed. Leaving her with my puke was the last time I saw her, she never came back to work after that. I feel kind of bad about it now. So Tammy, I’m sorry I wouldn’t fuck you. Tina, I’m sorry I put tonsil stones in your lunch. Todd and Damon, I’m sorry I got those guys from Egyptian Mike’s to help me fuck you up (I had the stick, that was me). Mike, I’m sorry I wrote down your involvement. Actually, I’m not sorry for anything, I wanted credit for that stuff and used apologizing as a cover. Sorry.

To Damon: remember when Davy or Smiley kneed you in the back and you fell on your side, and you were begging me not to hit you in the face with the stick, and then I fucking did it anyway? That was the best. You deserved it. Stomping on your hands, tearing open your cheek, having Mike force you to swallow Todd’s spit fifteen times, all of it.

To Todd: after the beating, I pissed in your mouthwash. Had I not been so focused on Damon and hit you more then maybe I wouldn’t have.

To Jeremy: I tried. I really fucking tried.

***

Giving a quick look around, I admired the church’s modest setup: a pulpit, no railing. Twelve rows of pews. A ceiling I could touch while standing on a chair. No stained glass, no hanging banners. A piano. The green carpet bunched in places unglued, the walls wore a beige that looked as though it could be scrubbed off with a sponge. It was time for the sermon, and feelings raced from my childhood to be re-commissioned for current use. Feelings of boredom, restlessness, and agitation, all ready to accompany (and thereby worsen) some guy who wanted me to believe that the most powerful being ever–Maker, Unmade, Un-maker–relied on him to deliver an important message. I’d been five seconds in the pew when sleep interlaced its fingers behind my neck then started pulling down. Boring crap was about to bounce off my theta wave brain-shield, which was good.

And then, just when I was ready to bond lashes, the pastor impaled my expectations on the sharpness of his intro:

“In a well-known account from the Book of Sandoval, tension with the Leopard Army fiercely mounts as Sandoval Beta places more and more strictures on the spotted nomads…”

Leopard Army? Sandoval Beta? My attention had been claimed.

Basically, the Leopard Army frequently traveled through the Trade Lands, an area ruled by Sandoval Beta. Wanting to know the Army’s affairs, and wanting also to have tales of his power relayed by the warriors as they roamed, Beta imposed an unfairly high Taxation on Passage and also launched the Hand of Sovereign Search, an agency who, under the declared purpose of peacekeeping, detained and seized with no apparent guidelines. Realizing the unjust conception and enforcement of Beta’s policies were credited solely to his arrogance, the Leopard Army refused taxation and search, rising up against Beta to create a year-long shedding of blood throughout the Trade Lands. Beta’s minions, under a mandate titled “Analog of Cruelty,” eradicated the Leopard Army, and celebration followed. What Beta nor his people knew, however, was that the spread of a carnivorous plant species, native to the Trade Lands, had been controlled for centuries by the presence of urine in the soil from the Leopard Army. So without the spotted nomads, this ravenous plant germinated then sprawled the expanse of Beta’s kingdom with a flesh-eating network of carnage.

“So everything died, and we can look at two follies of Sandoval Beta as the cause. One, his unnecessary concern for what others did, and two…”

He pontificated further, but as it became evident that the flesh-eating escapades of the carnivorous plants were not to be described, I withdrew interest then imagined the slaughter myself.

Forty minutes scraped by, taking with them sizeable chunks of Something Irreplaceable. Since imagining plant-on-human violence stopped after I couldn’t quite visualize a vegetable wielding both scimitar and meteor hammer, my lids lowered to the first nod of sleep. But, again, there was salvation.

“Greg, is that you?”

Jeremy, from the Benson’s parking lot, looking ever the paragon of physical and emotional balance, spotted me. He didn’t seem to notice my damaged face.

“Yep.”

“Splendid that you’re here. How did it go, you’re dinner?”

I thought back to that Friday at Duncan’s, to the argument afterwards. To Perry, Brittany, and Darrell. To Terry–

“Can’t remember? I guess they can all feel the same after awhile,” Jeremy said when instead of answering, I trembled.

Free from having to lie or speak truthfully on the matter, I recomposed then asked him about approaching people, if anyone ever got upset.

“Every so often. Just when I think I’ve heard the worst, somebody gets creative, or oddly personal, and the scale needs revising again.”

“What’s the worst thing someone said to you?”

“Nothing I’ll repeat, that’s for sure,” Jeremy said, eyebrows high.

“Second worst,” I bargained.

“Let’s have you meet Pastor Lucas,” Jeremy decided, lightly patting my back to start me walking alongside him.

The pastor was shaking hands with parishioners as they left. Waiting until they’d all gone, Jeremy introduced me.

“Greg? That’s a nice name,” Pastor Lucas remarked, taking my hand with a grip that felt more like a submission hold than a greeting. “Why did you come here tonight?”

The pastor smiled, shifting the piles of crosshatched lines on his face. The skin there was sectional, plated, able to have shrapnel removed without a spurt of blood. His tufted hair was gray that became brown depending on where you looked, and his eyes, dark blue, seemed to swirl with a metal cunning separate from his mind. I guessed him in his fifties, and beneath his red, long-sleeved shirt and cream-colored slacks I supposed a wiry build (specifically: muscular calves) made strong by belief.

“I came here…to find…something.”

I glanced at Jeremy, who nodded, smiling. Pastor Lucas thoughtfully narrowed his eyes, with a gaze held at knifepoint my reservations.

“Every day is…the same. And I need something to make it different, because there’s always an issue, and before that issue can be resolved, another one interferes, and there’s nothing that really…I mean, the expectations are reasonable, but nobody can do anything. At least that’s how I feel, that nothing gets resolved for me, because nobody cares about what they do or to what extent, they’re never sorry. Then it’s like, there’s the incidental stuff, circumstance, and you can’t daydream a revenge scenario against the conditions that happened to have happened, you know? I mean, it’s…you can’t depend on other people to make it better for you, it’s their goal to let you down, they know the day, most times. And waiting has just…I just…I feel like something bad could happen if I don’t…if there isn’t a change.”

Jeremy looked neutral, then uncertain, wanting to base his reaction on the Pastor’s, whose facial tangrams portended nothing.

“So you’re desperate. People have been disappointing in all configurations. Life. Has not given. What you want. And that’s why you’ve come here, to reverse that trend. You’ll be doomed if something doesn’t improve in the near future, but you need help, and church might be a good resource for that.”

“Um, yes, I mean, I always hear about the church–”

“Listen,” the pastor commanded, rebuking my soul with blue-eyed judgment. “I am sick of people like you–yes, you are an archetype–coming to church only when their options are gone, when their brains can’t stop doing the same wrong stuff every day. I can’t help you. I have no personal investment in keeping you from being disappointed. Try this, Greg. Find three people who know you know best. Thorough knowledge. Could either wound, embarrass, or heal you with the recitation of a shared memory. Ask each of them, ‘If my life is further from ideal than I deem acceptable, could you tell me why?’ Demand truthfulness, do not let them say the reasons are unknown. Because they’ve thought about it, and they can probably articulate it.”

His condescension was beamed from heaven. Rage filled my capillaries. The scabs on my forehead felt like they were melting.

I pictured my face bursting all over his, the acid contents of my hateful blood burning the granite mask.

“Look at me. My face…is crap. Why would you talk to me like that? No one’s obligated to help anyone, I understand. Because if they were, I’d be fuckin’ helped, right? And nobody would take me seriously if I asked them that…question…you know? Plus, getting a real answer would destroy–I mean, completely, all-the-way destroy a friendship. At least for me. So I can’t use that fuckin’ grownup shit. I need…a specific moment, or fog, or…I don’t know. I don’t know. I used to revel in tiny moments. Good or bad, I was there. But now–fuck. They really…someone else’s pretend–fuck. Ruth, Lucy, Betty, all of them…why can’t I stand in the rain? Seriously, fuck this. I can’t–I feel like…I’m at the end.”

Jeremy was gone. Even his uncertainty could’ve been an anchor for me.

“Well, Greg. Maybe you feel that way because you are.”

***

And maybe I’m the piss that prevents an unknown threat from killing us all. When the plants come raping and there’s no escape, people like Jill will say “holy fuck, we should’ve kept him around instead of acting like he wasn’t worthy to eat our shit.” That’s a fantasy. No one will care. My parents might be sad for a while, but they’ll get over it. Trust me, they’ll be relieved, in a way, no longer wondering if I’m telling stories about them. I’m not being cynical. Nobody cries about the same dead person every day, nor should they. Really, I see no reason to keep going. I’m not destined to make anything, like invent a machine or medicine or process that betters mankind. I can’t discover anything because I don’t fucking go anywhere. I’m not smart, I can’t help anyone. I don’t want to increase the population with my cock. Watching TV and reading magazines and having a government decide shit about my life has been okay, but I can’t picture it lasting much longer. “So give life your own meaning, that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?” Well I did. I put the entire meaning of life on one thing, and it got fucked up, so now I have to think of another reason to participate in the world? That’s ridiculous, I don’t feel like it. And it’s not selfish. Selfish is when a person won’t give something up. That’s not me. Someone can take over my job, my apartment, my shitty car. People can have time off work to grieve my death and get sympathy for a few weeks. That’s pretty good. And really, if you think about it, I’m not just taking myself out of everyone else’s life, I’m taking them out of mine. The world loses me, but I lose the world. So remember that before you complain about what I’m doing to everyone I leave behind. Because it barely counts.

To Perry: goddamn you.

To Brice: in my head, I made it so we’ve been friends my whole life.

To Ruth: I thought about killing you. I didn’t plan anything or think of how I’d get away with it, I just thought “bash her face with elbows until she’s not alive.” I’m telling you this to freak you out, there’s no other reason. Goddamn it, even if you hated me, why couldn’t you keep me? Everything was okay because of you. Not going to college, making shit an hour, not knowing what colors go together, saying “I ate too much” after every meal, complaining about my neck but never going to a doctor, giving a monthly speech about how I need to be myself and stop compromising and really try meeting people so I can expand my opportunities but then staying home instead, playing a made-up dice game by myself about an omnipotent fan of combat who pits various men and creatures of lore against each other in a pankration tournament then cheating because I wanted the banshee to beat the polymorph, eating twelve chicken-jalapeno corndogs and five ice cream sandwiches before jerking off to porn…those things can be okay for different reasons, but they were okay because of you. Days could be long, and bully the fuck out of my will, but at the end was you. And I’ve tried not caring about it, but I do care, very much, about who I am right now. Focusing on who I’ll be is a joke. I can’t move, there’s no traction, just more and more shit every day. I’m tired of enduring everything, so it’s time to stop. And it’s awesome, and it’s up to me, and nobody can say anything ever again.