The guy's got a big head, like some sort of ultracephalic retardation, or like he's got one head sewn on top of the other. I can even point out the spot where they were sewn together, there's a little scar, and a discoloration that looks like someone's smeared a Mexican flag across it. I can hear the helicopters overhead, already, like they were waiting for us. I look at her and I look at the cop and I take a step forward so it's me between them. The cops don't even make eye contact as they run around us to get to the action, the still popping sounds of fire consuming leather and bricks meeting glass and teeth, making sand out of windows and human putty out of heads.
"What've you done with your hair, Denny? You look like a fuckin' fag."
The badge says Frankel. I shouldn't be surprised that he knows me, but I have no clue. Instinctively I pat my hair, matted with sweat. I don't see the problem.
"I think I would like to speak to another officer."
"Yeah, that'd probably be better, Denny. Not just for you but for the both of us. Too bad it ain't gonna happen, so you might as well tell me just what the fuck is happening here and what you're doing in the middle of it."
"Alright. Sir. If you promise not to hurt me, I'll tell you what happened."
He doesn't want to make the promise.
"Look, I can tell you my side of the story, but I have to warn you, that I've been taking heavy doses of antipsychotics, and the story contains magic, and I'm not sure how much of it is real, so you might want to talk to somebody else."
He looked at me, skeptical.
"She's someone else."
"No, she's not."
He didn't want to make the promise and he didn't want to talk to someone else. He gestured with his gun. I tried to make a fist, but I was still clutching the pill bottle. 28 blue-and-green capsules left. Two a day. Two weeks down and two to go. Green for the manic; blue for the depression. Green is for the fields, and blue is for the sky, at least when they aren't both on fire.
"You see, Officer, it started with a tattoo."
I turn my foot over and over again. With every turn, I find another tattoo.
On the side, so tiny, quick, and indelicate, it looks like it could've been done in ballpoint. My Hebrew name, followed without breach by... my Hebrew name. In English, it would be "MichaelMichael", and it makes me think of those old Little Caesars commercials. Maybe that was the inspiration for the phrase "Chicago Pizza Buffet" written on my heel, transliterated, and written again, in Hebrew, on the other side of my heel.
Maybe I was excited to have a tattoo artist that could write Hebrew. Maybe it was what we were eating. On the bottom of my foot, there's a big, dripping crescent, like a moon made of cheese, like one of Dali's clocks. The Persistence of Memory with Extra Cheese and Everything on it but Fish, rendered in New School. In the blank space inside the crescent was a list, a handwritten list. B-Movies. Monster movies. Suspiria, Dagon, Eraserhead, Escape From Cryonic Island. It was all movies from Roan's shelf. Some nerds suggestion list. Some I've seen. Some I haven't.That was my right foot.
I don't know how I could've gone so long, two weeks with socks full of healing, itching, scabbing tattoos, without noticing. I was at my Mom's house when I did. I don't really understand my relationship with her, not yet, not totally, none of the dynamics that make us any different from any other Mother and Son but that's enough to know that her house was the worst possible places it could have happened.
She watched me when I took off my other shoe. I expected it to be blank. It wasn't. A bunch of little lightning bolts, bordered the sole. Another list on the ankle.
On the right side:
Every Food Group But Theseorange
cherry
lime
grape
and on the left:
Is Missingcranberry
orange
rasberry
blueberry
Every food group but these is missing. They're the flavors of Froot Loops and Crunch Berries. I was eating them that night, whoever I was, I mean whoever I used to be. Whoever it was must have been some kind of savant, because I only know a little about my own life, names and phone numbers for a few people, and what their business is with me, but for all that, for every time a memory gets jarred loose, my head is stuffed full of random information that flows out with little or no provocation.
Cereal for example. Cereal as we know it. Cold cereal. Breakfast cereal with all its saccharine anthropomorphs. Froot Loops and Crunch Berries. It all originated in a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, towards the turn of the last century, to help inmates with bowel movements. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And through. And out.
I unclench my fist to see that I've been holding my pill bottle. Blue for the tiles on the floor; green for the paint on the walls. Was I holding it because I just took my medicine, or was I just about to?
Whoever I was must have been pretty withdrawn. I've been pacing aimlessly through two weeks and nobody seems to have noticed. I've got a girlfriend, and I get deep down love feelings when we touch. It seems like I might be the girlfriend type. When she first kissed me, I was hoping I was hoping she would be the first of many, that I was some rogue Casanova that's as likely to get kissed or slapped on the street as a normal man is to just be ignored.
Maybe it's a good thing though. Maybe I'm the type of guy who deep down always feared that I was unlovable, destined to live and die alone, who happened onto this beautiful girl with white skin and glasses, who kisses me whenever we see each other even though I'm acting strange, or worse yet if I'm not acting strange, if I just stutter around all morbid and confused. I've come to the conclusion that I'm unemployed, which makes the memory loss a lot easier to deal with, but the whole ordeal a bit more depressing.
I could sense some worry in my mother, but I don't think it was anything more than a general sadness from seeing her son on the couch, marvelling at a bunch of idiotic tattoos he doesn't remember, someone who's been drugged and molested by goons, but just sits there, proud and grinning, because all he can do is be proud, and not think about it too much, or obsess over it until he can afford bath with lazers. It isn't concern for my loss of mind, or general state of being. She might not even realize.
She leaves the room with water behind her eyes. Amy walks in. She's an old friend, that comes by to watch my sisters, but I think she mightve been told to keep an eye on me.
"Tattoos?"
"Yep."
"Drunk?"
"Not sure."
"They're pretty ugly."
"Yeah, wanna see the real one?"
"Real one?"
"Yeah, there's one I meant to get, before I blacked out. Wanna see?"
I pull down the collar of my shirt, to show her the little red tricycle on my chest. By the way her eyes glitter, I can tell that she knows more about it than I do. Good. It means something.
I ride one. I know it. A grown man's tricycle. I have to, or I choose to. It's one of the clues that leads me to believe I might be a savant, some sort of savvy idiot. Savant. Savvy. Savvy. Savant. Grandchildren of the Latin sapere, separated, respectively, by France and Portugal.
God. I'm doing it again.
The girl on the couch kisses me on the cheek and whispers, "You're beautiful," into my ear. I think that's what she does, tells irredemptive motherfuckers that they're beautiful, and lightens the whole world, makes the sky seem more blue and everything else more red, saturates the whole world like taking off a pair of sunglasses.
I can go now. I kiss her cheek and leave. My feet take me to the bus stop. She's there. The girlfriend.
"You come here often?"
She takes it as a joke, smiles and kisses me. A guy says my name. If he wasn't looking at me, it would've sounded like any other. He's short and black with a big, wide grin with one dying tooth in the center.
"Waiting long?"
"Shit, the people who were here when I got here had already been here forever."
"It should be soon, then."
"Shit, not at this hour."
I was unaware of the hour. When I left, the sun was still high. Now it was the moon, hanging low in some southeast corner of the sky.
Seven people stood at the bus stop. I think I just knew the two. The bus stop was in front of the park, directly behind it was a field; close by was the playground, a tiny piece of shit, landlocked between an apartment building and a parking lot. Not that it mattered, the streetlights were out, but you could sense most of what you couldn't see. Everyone's had a hard day, or so it seems.
Nobody speaks, even my friends once we get our pleasantries out of the way.
A woman walks up, young, Hispanic, glasses, a bit of a fucked up gait to her walk. An older guy gets off his stoop to follow her. He's talking to her, and himself, about white bitches and motherfuckers and prison and money. She starts talking to me to avoid him.
"Did you see in the paper about the bunnies?"
"I saw something about them taking over this neighborhood or that neighborhood, but I didn't read it. S'at what you mean?"
"Yeah. I didn't read it either, but you know what? They are all over the fuckin' place. I bet we see two go by before the bus comes."
"Yeah, I think I remember talking to my boss about how they weren't hibernating in the winter anymore."
"Oh yeah. Weren't you saying she got all upset an went off on global warming?"
Yeah. She.
"Yeah. I think she did."
Our conversation was limited, and it got interrupted. What more was there to say about bunnies? I think I used to have a pet rabbit, but I didn't remember that until te guy found a comfortable place to insert himself in the silence. He was saying something about blood when Kika, that was the girls' name when he asked (his name was Caesar), she took the initiative.
"Holy shit, Guy. Lookit that. There's one right now!"
We looked, all of us, even the people who were just eavesdropping. There was a lump, I had to strain my eyes just to see it. It could have been a rock, or a rat, or a squirrel, or a rabbit. I was trying to focus when the lump moved and someone hit me. Not someone, but something, as big as a Buick but... Buick's don't have shoulders. It moved like a bear, with all four legs at once.
Kika chased it, slurring at it not to hurt the rabbit.
I don't think she got her wish. There was a sound, a wet crunch like the sound of a rabbit becoming something other than a rabbit, something more like food. It didn't seeem to matter though, by the time she got there, she was cooing. Ivan, that was the name of the guy who knew me and my girlfriend, grabbed me up off the ground and led me towards her, at the foot of the creature. Its legs were sturdy. Its head was down. She was petting it.
It was a slide.
A big woolly children's slide, with steps going down its back and a long neck spiralling down to a big dumb head, nuzzling Kika's hands with its tongue out.
I touched one of its legs. The fur was matted and dry, dredlocking in parts. I could feel the muscles contract. I walked underneath it and felt its belly, where the fur was softer, til it slid out from under my hand. There was a thud, then a scream, then screaming. The beast has fallen and I was looking at people. A small crowd had gathered, as if from nowhere. There were two new faces, and I recognized them both. Roan, from the house with the tattoos, and Bruno, a long-haired Latin kid from the neighborhood.
Then there was Caesar. A new friend, a new annoyance, a bus stop motherfucker who forced us into small talk.
I don't think anybody noticed it before I did. Plumes of smoke. A gun. A grin. A glint in his eyes. A brick. Bruno. Footsteps. Glass. A brick. Ivan. A sound like iron bending, and then a pickup truck on its side, Ivan behind it. I've seen him bust up cars before. I've seen him pick locks, hotwire engines. He likes cars as a tool, as a weapon, and as an emotional weapon when he can.
Sometimes things are just tense. Sometimes, when the gas valve stays open and the room gets filled up, all it takes is a spark, two stray electrons colliding in innerspace, to set the whole thing off. The Rodney King verdict. The Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The Bulls' Three Peat. I think I remember that one.
The beast, the slide, doesn't breathe, doesn't bleed. Maybe it never did. I eat a pill, two to be sure. Blue for the color of gunsmoke, green for the color of grass in July. The reflex slows time. I breathe and taste fog. I see. Another truck is turning. I grab her and pull her back, and it crashes at her feet.
I've saved a life, I tug and we run. It's too late. The choppers are lower than I've ever seen them go before. I don't see them now, but the noise of the blades is deafaning, a nailgun at my temples.
Cops. Lots of em, except not all of them seem like cops. Some of em look like mutants and some of them look like vatos, in their big, dumb lowriders, and some of them look like cops, fat and red with anger, so which are you officer? A cop, or a goddamned mutant?
A blow to the head. The back of the head. The tightening of plastic zip cuffs being closed around my wrists.
"Don't take her."
I wake up in an alley. Hurting. Everywhere, at least all my joints and everywhere I'm bruised. Is this what the end of a bender feels like, or beginning of insanity. I don't remember before, so I check what I know. Pill bottle in my pocket. Tricycle on my chest. I fumble with my shoe and get off my sock. Dali pizza, the movie list. I check my wallet. It exists, and there's money inside.
Money. Cool.
All I've got to do is find out where I am. Then I can do something.
Twenty-six pills. Blue is for the empty cans of Pepsi in the dumpster. Green is for the mold growing on the food.
