by Brian Ewing
“I just wanted something to eat. Why the fuck did you make me do that?” Skeletor inquired, staring at the once pretty but exhausted face of the woman, now accompanied with a gaping hole below her right eye socket, blood encapsulating the entire bench seat as her limp body fell over. He kept sobbing and telling her it was her fault.
Heaved back into the present, Sisto looked out the window as they passed Greentree Road and were approaching Freemont, where if he didn’t intervene shortly, some establishment would be down a co-worker that night. Sisto ruffled around in his back pants pocket and opened his worn, brown leather wallet with a stripe of pink nail polish on the back and pulled out two fifty-dollar bills. He folded one and put it in his front pocket, while folding and keeping the other one in his left hand. He got up and went towards Skeletor and, upon closer inspection, realized that he was probably anywhere from twenty to fifty-five years old. Drugs are a hell of a thing. He didn’t want to scare the poor addict and cause his premonition to come true, so he gently sat on the bench seat in the same row but on the opposite side.
“Hey, listen, man,” Sisto said lightly, causing Skeletor to perk up and focus on the stranger. “My name is Tom, and I just wanted to let you know that whatever you have going on, you aren’t alone. I had come up on some hard times a while back. I just needed a helping hand.”
Sisto extended his left hand, neatly folded fifty-dollar bill in it, and presented it to Skeletor. “I want you to have this and get some food, get some rest, just take the night off from worrying about whatever is going on.”
Skeletor, who very well may have actually seen a third eye upon Sisto’s forehead from all the drugs pumping through the man’s system, looked around as if he half expected it to be a sting operation. The bus jarred to a stop at Freemont, just before the overpass, and the dilated eyes got a brief glaze over them with emotion as he said in a whisper, “Thank you.”
The young man snatched the folded bill and exited the bus, like he had just got away with murder, which thankfully was not the case anymore. Sisto watched the man put the fifty up to the lamp post by the bus stop, inspecting it to ensure its validity, as the bus doors shut and another jar of the gears were put into motion proceeding under the overpass. Sisto glanced back at the older black woman, now fully dozed off, and looked down at her purse. He removed the other fifty from his front pocket, folded it twice so it held the shape of a thin rectangle, and shoved it through the opening between the top clasp and the faux leather walls. He went back to his seat on the bus and the journey went without incident for the next few minutes back to Corden Palisades.
CHAPTER 7
Sisto proceeded through the inconsistent, lighted walkway to the lobby with caution, looking to avoid getting roped into an awkward conversation with Super Dave. One tweaker a day was his limit, Sisto vowed to himself, a flash of Skeletor’s frightened and malnourished face popping into memory. Small favors granted, the chauvinistic, aggressive, drug-addicted caretaker of Corden Palisades was nowhere to be found. Sisto hit the stairwell this time and started making his way to the third floor to meet up with Ama. Upset at himself for not going to the store as he had tasked himself to, he realized his minor case of OCD would have hated going to the fifth floor and then backtracking to the third and then back to the fifth. The grocery store would hold off for another day. Sisto enjoyed his routine of going up the stairs, from a decompression standpoint. The exercise was a benefit but not something he was extremely worried about. The stairwell, filled with the scent of damp concrete from the top of the building leaking and Super Dave’s lack of actual purpose at his job, was a source of comfort—something Sisto could rely on day in and day out. He was thankful that damp concrete still smelled like damp concrete and inhaled deeply, as deep as Skeletor or Super Dave probably getting that last good hit in before letting it take them over. Sisto exhaled as he saw the plaque with the number three next to the dented aluminum door, turned the cold knob, and proceeded to apartment thirty-seven. He was about to knock on the door as he heard the door latch on the opposite side clink as it hit the back of the door, the knob starting to turn.
Greeted in an eerie manner, even by Sisto’s standards, the young woman, who was always accompanied by an abundance of piercings and dark eyeshadow, stood in front of him with a look of expectation.
“You lookup weird shit,” she stated matter-of-factly.
She opened the door and stepped to the side, allowing Sisto to enter the living room of her apartment. The layout was identical to Sisto’s—most of the apartments in the building probably— but was filled with artifacts. While Sisto had absolutely no pictures or art on the walls or shelves, Ama’s residence was packed with artifacts her grandmother had brought when moving in with her last May. The walls were scattered with Native American art, many original pieces Ama had done herself on her balcony. Growing up with her Spanish-European father and a mother of Sioux Indian descent, Ama was incredibly beautiful, even when she tried to bury it with her double-pierced eyebrow rings, labret piercing in the flesh below her bottom lip, and three to four earrings scattered along each ear. Nearly forty, her smooth skin and mixed heritage had caused Sisto to believe she was twenty the first time he bumped into her in the stairwell. He was hauling up a few things as he was moving in and she saw a laptop in the box he was carrying. She threw her card in passing into the box, stating if he ever had problems with the computer to reach out and she would give him a good neighbor rate, a reputable side hustle she had done for years.
“Why are you looking through my shit?” Sisto inquired. “Most of that is for work anyhow.”
“I know, I have seen you come and go throughout the last few months on the security cameras here, and it prompted my interest.”
Perturbed at many things from that statement, the order of precedence that hit Sisto first was to ask, “Corden Palisades has security cameras?”
A beautiful smirk arose on her glossy lips, making her exotic skin tone shine as her cheeks lifted. The slip only lasted a moment, and then she went back to being cool as she replied, “When I want them to work, Corden Palisades has them.”
She walked through her living area, guiding Sisto to the kitchen table to sit while she went in the back room to get his laptop. Trailing her path, Sisto could smell sage burning, causing him to search for the point of origin. He saw a sage smudge stick standing upright in a glass tumbler, embers flickering at the top and encapsulating the living room in the scent. While sitting at the table and looking at smoke rising, like a snake sidewinding to its next destination, Ama returned, breaking the distraction from Sisto’s mind. She sat across from him with a look of intrigue. Sisto was used to this look after being paired the better part of a decade with The Reels. She must have read it on his face as she broke her gaze and looked towards the thin-fold Hewitt-Packard, ready to present her findings.
“I think you hit up a site while researching for work and it had a pretty common virus crawling it, waiting for someone like yourself to invite it in. Good thing you got me.” She smiled.
“Son of a bitch. I am pretty careful not to click on weird links or ads.”
“This was a variation of what’s known as a Storm Worm. It has a common link or picture with a hyperlink and then tries to turn your laptop into a bot,” she explained.
Noticing the blank reaction, she explained further, “A robot. Or zombie box. Mainly uses your computer to spam or infect others. You don’t do any online banking or shopping from what I saw, which is weird I might add, so there was nothing to really worry about. I added an antivirus with firewall to block that stuff out, but hit me up if you have more issues.”
“You’re incredible with this stuff,” Sisto, visibly impressed by her report, acknowledged. “Why is this your side hustle, and not main job?”
“It relaxes me. If I make it my job, it becomes something else, if that makes sense?”
It definitely did, Sisto confirmed to himself. He pulled out his wallet and paid her the fee they’
d talked about when he’d dropped it off, and as she folded the bills and wrapped her arm around to her back pocket to tuck it in, she couldn’t resist.
“There was an article about you I saw last year,” Ama gently tiptoed. “Are you really a psychic?”
Having had this conversation very few times in the past, it was always weird for Sisto. He didn’t like talking about himself even before his third eye stamped itself into his mind, creating the persona of a modern-day carnival freak.
“Something like that,” Sisto admitted. “Please don’t go around telling the other tenants. Last thing I need is Super Dave and the others knocking on my door looking for lottery numbers and shit.”
“You know the lottery numbers?”
“No. Well, I have never tried . . . but no. Usually I have to touch or be in the vicinity of someone or something and pick up a sort of vibe or feeling off them. I see things from their past or future.” Sisto tried to open up, but noticing Ama’s look of confusion, he said, “It’s still a work in progress.”
“What’s it like when you see things?”
Sisto, starting to feel like he was at a private meeting at C.O.S. and realized it was kind of nice to be able to vent and talk about it. Hesitating, and finally accepting he was moving forward with the cathartic purge of his secrets, he said “I call it The Reels.”
“Like movie reels.”
“Right.” Sisto chuckled, relaxing as Ama showed another glimpse that she accepted him. “The Reels showed up after an accident years ago and I didn’t really know what it was the first time.”
Getting lost in the memory, he explained the first visit from The Reels and how he thought he had been losing it until the following day he saw a picture of the same man in his vision pop up on the local news. The man was a clean-cut, average-looking guy but what caught Sisto’s eye was a scar running parallel to his right eyebrow. That small detail was so minute that when Sisto saw that same scar on the news story, he immediately started to freak out. His first thought was that maybe he’d run into the guy earlier that week and the scar had stayed in his subconscious. He had gone to the store the day before, but aside from that, had not really felt the ambition to go out in the world and interact with others. Then, Sisto had a horrific thought that maybe he had blacked out and not realized it, and he had left the house and found and hurt that man. That didn’t pan out either, as the oil stain collecting in his designated parking spot, courtesy of his then frequently used 1993 Honda Accord, was left undisturbed. He had gone back into the apartment where he turned the sound on in time to hear the news anchor state that the man was last seen grocery shopping at Martino’s. Sisto’s heart sank and he realized he had seen that man yesterday. Sisto had been in a daze, going up and down the aisles, when the man had pulled Sisto out of his trance, due to dropping a glass container of salad dressing. That very moment, Sisto had tasted a tang in the back of his throat, which he later realized was Italian dressing, the same dressing that man had dropped that day. The oily and vibrant taste made Sisto gag and run to the bathroom, where he threw up profusely.
“So, what happened to the guy?” Ama asked, enthralled with the tale.
The young man was part of a group of thugs that had successfully broken into a dozen ATM machines across the city and as he was loading his groceries, he was intercepted by his associates in the parking lot. They had thrown him in the back of their trunk, like he had thrown his bag of russet potatoes into his trunk just moments before. From what Sisto had heard in follow-up reports, the man was apparently ripping everyone off and siphoning it to an offshore account, where he was storing a nest egg, so he could bounce off to the Caribbean or something. The story was bogus, Sisto found out a few months later, after building connections at his part-time gig at SCPD. Apparently, the man with the scar got picked up with two eight-balls after getting in an altercation at some club. He was going to serve jail time with the amount of cocaine he had on himself and it took less than twenty minutes in one of the SCPD interrogation rooms for him to offer to flip on his friends. Somehow, the others in the group got wind of it and served their own justice.
“My ojibwe, my grandmother,” Ama translated, “saw you on the news a while back and we both read that article that came out last year.”
Sisto shifted a little in discomfort at the realization that his secret may have been a bit more exposed than he’d realized. Granted, he didn’t care to hide it, but he didn’t go out of his way to showcase it either.
“She is a firm believer in good and evil,” Ama continued. “She saw you and we both recognized you from around here and you know what she said to me?”
Sisto shook his head, not entirely sure he wanted the answer.
“She is a very spiritual and in tune soul, my ojibwe. Hell, she made Mr. Carlson rent apartment thirty-seven to us, as the numbers three and seven have significant value in the Native American culture.”
It took a moment for Sisto to piece together that Super Dave was known as Mr. Carlsen in some circles, unobservant circles, but he dragged his attention back to Ama’s labret piercing as it moved with each word she spoke.
“She said that you had a good aura about you. She isn’t a psychic or anything but has practiced the ways of the Sioux all her life. She is very spiritual and is a good judge of character. She said you helped her with some boxes when she first moved in last May with me.”
The statement baffled Sisto as he didn’t remember that interaction at all.
“She saw pain in your eyes but also strength. She saw something else too. The Sioux people believed there were special figures, entities, put on this planet to protect the rest of us from the horrors that reside deep down in the heart of men. She says you are one of those entities.”
“What does that even mean?” Sisto asked, trying not to sound desperate for the answer.
“You have always had the gift, but it took something extravagant to unlock it. She told me I could rely on you if I ever needed to, which made me laugh,” Ama recalled, “because what woman tells their granddaughter to go trust a strange man?”
Recapping the verbiage Ojibwe used and the story Sisto’d just told her, it circled back to one key piece that he’d left out and she inquired, “Something extravagant to unlock it . . . What happened to you that unlocked The Reels?”
She saw another shift in Sisto’s demeanor and understood that the answer was going to be considered too personal on their new-found friendship. “Anyhow, she told me you were a seer, a prophet of sorts, and was put in certain people’s paths to right the wrongs of man, sometimes helping prevent disasters before they happen. Is that what it has been like?”
Sisto, not really comfortable being this open, took a minute but shrugged an acceptance of Ojibwe’s analysis.
“She said our people had a name for someone like you with the gift. Your Reels as you call them, are a way the spirits of the world can try to make things right, using you and others like you as their vessels. The breath of life has been opened for you to recall the past, and not just yours, but others you come across. In some cases, the future is accessible to you as well when the spirits find the outcome of an event too vile to accept. You are the one with this burden and Ojibwe recognized and understood the pain she saw in your face that day. She respected you for carrying the weight of the spirits on your shoulders and not giving up.”
Sisto, incredulous at the thought that this stranger could know so much about him by reading his face in a forgettable interaction, at least forgettable to him, found it somewhat disconcerting. “What is the name her people have for someone like me?”
She had realized he was uncomfortable by the admission, causing her face to soften from its normal hard shell and, looking right into his marble blue eyes, she softly answered, “Oracle.”
Oracle. Sisto tried the title on for size in his thoughts. The only person he associated an Oracle with was that chain-smoking, older black woman that housed bald kids that bent spoons in The Matrix. Coming to th
e conclusion that he wouldn’t be putting the spiritual title on business cards anytime soon, he broke from branches of thoughts and thanked Ama, not only for the computer but also the human interaction, which until experiencing it just then, he’d had no idea how lacking it had been lately.
She moved her dark, silky hair behind her right ear, a nervous tick indicating she didn’t get too much human interaction either Sisto saw a small tattoo peeking out from the bottom of her ear lobe, normally covered by her hair. It looked to be the end of a tattoo she had placed right behind her perfectly-sized ear. His eye was then drawn down her neck, which was a beautiful golden brown, probably from not incurring as much direct sunlight as her face and arms, revealing unintentionally a rock band T-shirt, Thrice, hand-cut down the center to give it more feminine appeal, and causing Sisto to gravitate towards her cleavage. Spending just a second too long in that region, when Sisto realized what he was doing and looked up into Ama’s eyes, she realized, Oracle or not, Sisto was still a modern-day bag of hormones.
