by Max Jager
"You expect me to believe that?" She went to the closet and the small square package of clothes. A new dress shirt, some new shoes. She took the bundle and put it to his lap.
"I expect you to understand." He said. He turned away from the clothes.
"And I do. I understand you were just a passing moment, I understand that I'm one too. For you at least. You'll move on and I'll move on. Like two passing trains."
"Well." His shoulders sagged. "The difference is you know where you're going. Me. Me..."
Darr wiped his forehead.
"Me? I'm fucked." The word came out difficult. It dragged, the curse word, it seemed to burn because he touched his mouth afterward and rubbed his lips and closed his eyes in silent prayer. She narrowed her eyes. He was strange.
"I can let you stay the night but you have to go home by morning. I thought you were with that one guy anyways? Uh." She rubbed her head. "Ajax, that's all you talked about. Ajax."
"The prick." He said. "I hate him and I'm afraid if I see him again, I'll hate him even more. If that's possible."
"He's the only person you really talked about."
"Well, when you get to know someone, whether they're pleasant or not, they seemed to stick with you. Like a ghost." He said.
"Or like toilet paper under your shoe." She laughed. She rubbed his arm, just a child, she thought. He started fitting his clothes and finding them to have shrunk, so he tugged on the ends of his pants and his coats to fill the draft where the cold air was coming through.
"You're just a runaway." She said. "You look like it like I just found you crying in the middle of a store."
"Are you calling me a kid?" He fixed his cuffs.
"I'm saying that you have somewhere to be and it isn't here. Like me."
"And where's that?" He asked. She smiled and fixed his tie which was sloppy and slanting to the side, and fixed his collar which was puffed up like a cautionary cone for a dog. She turned him and pulled up his coat tail stuck to his belt. She reached for his coat flaps, put a finger on them and he pulled away. Another secret, she thought.
"Right." She laid on the bed and watched him from the meridian glow, he stood by the door frame and his face was cross sections, half in, half out. " Where am I going? I'll go back to school, I think. I hate this real estate shit. And you? I think you should go back. Consider couples counseling or something."
"You're one to talk." He shook his hip. His clothes felt tight, his whole body looked wound up. An explosive with a fuse that had run out days ago.
"We all have things to settle. Maybe it won't be so bad when you settle yours." She said.
"What I've done? What I've done." He tried to remember, his eyes rose to the corner of his sockets and the baby blue painted walls disappeared. The picture frames of smiling youths, the vases and their flowers around him warped, the sofa across from him, a tomb. The flat screen television sounding static, a giant stone. Here marked Sophie. He shook. The images would not leave. One after another, so far down he went into the memory that he began to feel the heat of the room and his gun and the burning screams of the cremated like their long nails were up to his neck and making him sweat.
His eyes opened. She looked sad and distant and he looked away. "I don't think I can be saved from what I've done."
"I can tell that's what you think." She said. "You're giving me my ex-fiancé's look. And I'll tell you what I'll tell him; you won't know if you can be saved if you don't even make the effort to try."
"How can you say that? You're calling off you're marriage, you're not forgiving him." He moaned.
"All apologies are selfish. You don't do it for the person wronged, you do it for yourself. It's like cutting a weighted rope. Yeah, you'll keep the scars but at least it won't be so heavy anymore." She sighed.
"I'm supposed to be the pastor's son. The lord's servant." He blew his hair and rubbed his scalp as if caught with lice. He couldn't stop scratching his hair
"You know, this is coming from me, but don't act so holy. It's not like you're guiltless." He said. "I mean, you cheated too."
"You're right. I've got my problems to face too. And I'll face them. But will you?"
"You're sounding like him again." He said. "But he's a lot meaner. Less caring."
He turned around. He put his hands in his pocket and went past the vases and pictures and other novelties, a bass fish that sang with a button press, a collection of postcards from all they're favorite vacations, history on top of history she was willing to throw away, and it began to anger him. Like the strength of will in her was somehow stronger than in him, and he kicked the door open. And he kicked a garden gnome in half and watched its broken feet teeter from the sidewalk into the gutter. He kicked the dirt. She watched from the window, not mad as much as she was curious about what or whom he would kick next.
So he went out, into the streets from the white painted fences and into the broken roads, from the orange u-haul trucks of the rich as if wandering life buoys, to the miserable with clutch children behind barred windows, drowning, but too scared to try to swim. He looked to the sky, the sky was just setting. He kicked the floor and wondered where Ajax was, or with whom.
10:24 PM
Ajax
July 24th, 2017
10:24 PM
Ajax was irritated. It showed in the way he scratched his neck and how he slicked his hair strands back and tugged on his suit with that firm and bitter touch. Pulling, rapid pulling and scratching. He had felt this way on in the early dusk, all throughout the gray day. The sky had not done him favors. It seemed like everything ran thin, sunshine, patience, emotion. Days that ended too fast, nights that outlasted his dreamless sleep. He wanted the antihistamine for his ruthless insomnia, the soft pillow, the clearing emptying chamber for his heavy and full heart.
It was Sophie.
He didn't say it or even think it. The opposite. He repressed the memory, the scene of red. Forgot it, pretended to forget it. And now it was hurting, not in the way of a dagger strike that cuts and stings and bleeds, but in that harrowing numbing wave, starting as a drop of mercury, now a shower that poisoned the ocean of his consciousness. His mind was deteriorating, the animals of his devices dying on the shoreline with their long purple tongues falling out of tired mouths and their gills sucking aimlessly at harsh arid airs.
His head hurt as he looked down. An old cable antenna was to his rear like a pitchfork to the sky or perhaps a lone hand in prayer. He could hear the person below him watching, laughing, a heckle he thought, aimed at him. Ajax bent the antenna. The man screamed at his static-filled television and Ajax jumped from the edge of the roof. The birds scattered to drop shit elsewhere, but not here, not anywhere near the lone figure in the night. His slick mask, cracked and glued with gold. He slid across the cornices, kicked off of statues that split and broke. The gargoyles looked away, faces down in shame.
He was following a car. The license plate that read 'AS5MAN', the juggling pair of dice below the car spoiler that somehow managed to stay on even through the wild turns that screeched and skidded. Like testicles, old, saggy, desperate. Ajax followed the car and the skittish hands within that he saw through the rose-tinted windows. It looked like four hands driving the wheel. He looked just as timid as Ajax, but unlike Ajax, he was guilty. And to Ajax, this man (if you could call any monster a man) might as well have been Shiva. He sure left the trail, smoke, and smog that made all the sad and small homeless cough and turn. But he was guilty of something more.
He was a drug dealer. A particular one. One Ajax had confirmed after many an interrogation and many a threat. And he was coming around the bent, trying to catch the freeway, going through the mountain range and wrapping around the black serpentine track. Drifting, slithering. Ajax followed him there.
The pines glared at Ajax like a platoon of archers. He was above the trees. His hands injected into the earth, his feet dragging his anchor like the swimming of sharks, his body a kind of rapid moving fin that shredded t
hrough earth and shot it out to the street. He was fortunate there was no one else driving. He looked ahead of himself and predicted where the driver would go, he saw the sharp turn up ahead and how it was flagged by a rebellious pine tree. He ran on the wall, ran ahead of the car with that inhuman speed and strength. He waited then, it wasn't long. It was only a few minutes. He could feel the air vibrate with that masculine car engine, the assault of a two-thousand fifteen Dodge Hellcat. And Ajax knew, all the engineering and strength of that vehicle would be reduced to nothing. For it was just metal. Metal and fuel and sparks. Science and man, the devil's instruments as he was taught. And they were right, for tonight he felt that same Luciferian anger.
His eyes flashed red as the car came around. He challenged the headlights. His shadow moved. Darted, he sped faster and faster and the car could not turn. The driver screamed, but his closed windows left his voice powerless. The car turned right, Ajax tackled right.
It flew. Five feet into the air. On its side. The tires flew out, the sparks shot out like a derailed train. Ajax laid on the floor. His shoulder was feeling it now, hot and bleeding and dislocated. A tire rolled passed him and spun circles, undecided before it finally sat next to him. He stood. With his only good arm, he found his bicep and rolled his arm around to find where the socket was where it was supposed to be attached. He could feel his bone click, rub, and with one strong push, snapped it back in. Pain and relief. A bulge of bone receded. It felt like the harshest bruise he could imagine, the feeling of muscle and nerves twisted and shredded and forced to work again. But it healed. Like most of everything in his body. But no kind of healing, regeneration, miracle, could fix that wound in his heart. The solemn denial. The bad dream.
The car was on its side. The hood touched the ground and the tree and the guardrail, it was bent in. All of it was. Ajax heard the man groan, he saw the door prop open in the air and he followed the sight and the markings of wheels before he was led back to his feet. He picked up the lonely tired next to him. When he saw the man move his arm up like a white flag, Ajax aimed for it. He saw it bent and break, the elbow pop out. The driver retreated back inside. But there was no other exit, the front windshield, like the webbing it was broken into, caught him. He tried kicking it. Ajax heard the faint struggle of the broken man. He came up the car and let him try, almost taunting him. After a few minutes, he finally brought the whole car to the ground again. They both assessed the damage, the red car now compressed, the headlight dangling out like an eye falling out of its socket. A constant flicker, a hopeless flicker of the headlights. The driver looked at Ajax.
The same strobing light lapsed in his own eyes as he faced Ajax's grim mask. He looked for his keyhole and turned it and begged the engine that no longer worked. It couldn't roar, it couldn't even purr. It coughed then went quiet.
"What the fuck, man. I thought - " The driver spat blood. "I thought I ran you over, man."
"You must have me confused." Ajax pulled him out of the car. "I am no man."
"I'll give you whatever you want." The driver tugged Ajax's arm the same way a child would at the father, pleading, in prayer. Ajax dragged him to the tree.
"I know you will." Ajax said. The car was on fire and Ajax was brought back to that night. He grabbed the drivers twisted arm and turned it even more. He could see the skin in the light and how it turned green, diseased. The driver did not scream though. It was a silent expression that emptied out of his mouth, his mouth was open, his eyes rolled back. It was the point in which he was wishing for death.
"You will live tonight. I promise you that." Ajax said. "How you will live afterward, however, will be your own decision. Yours alone." The fires fanned in his eyes. The child, for all Ajax felt and thought, was here, bleeding again. And the heat of passion now drove him more than he would admit.
"I want a name." Ajax said.
"Anyone! I'll tell you anyone." The man said. His stray teeth stained his purple blazer, his watch hung on his broken hand and with tears, he moved himself to offer the watch. Ajax stood still. The driver looked in his pockets and when his eyes and hands came up with the burning money, when he saw the face of death, he knew the gravitas of Ajax's wrath. That impassive, silent rage.
"Every drug on the streets of Horston have seen your hands or passed your inspection. You have every route, every small-time dealer and big-time drug trafficker in your phone book." Ajax said.
"Who? Who do you want?" The man cried.
"I want neither. Not your constituents, not your employees. I want the man you sell your hallucinogens too. This man. This man alone will suffice."
"I have so many who buy them." The edge of barter was in the driver's tone now.
"Give me your largest consumner." Ajax said.
The man bit his lips. He shut his eyes, in pain or in the imagination of a pain.
"Promise me, at least." The driver said.
Ajax reached for him, he dug his hands into bruised skin, cut through the purple blazer and the black dress shirt. His fingers wrapped around a gold chain, then they went deeper, into the ribs. He had not penetrated the skin, only barely, instead he found one of those long curbed bones and, with dispassionate glare, broke it. Crack. Ajax put his arms to cover the driver's mouth. He felt his fingers bit.
He detached himself from the man again and let him scramble to the wound.
"You are the polluter of this temple. You are the beast, the whore, and the money-changer all at once. You will not be forgiven, but you may yet find another life after today." Ajax said. "Silence suffers you. A name? A name buys you a future."
"Aleistar." He shouted. "Doctor Aleistar. He always used an assistant with his deals. But…"
"But?" The fire roared.
"I spied on him. I tracked him, he's into freaky shit man. He wanted to kill me once he found out I tailed him, he would have. But I promised him to keep selling. To shut the fuck. To help him." The world muted. Ajax heard the words and he felt, immediately, like drowning. Like he sank to the bottom of the ocean and all the stress and pressure collapsed on his ears. The muffled, rock bottom silence, the drowning silence of the ocean above him. He helped, Ajax thought.
"Man, you got to keep me same from him. Fucking shit, man. Do me that at least? He does things, things you wouldn't believe. It's fucking magic. I swear, no one believes m-" The driver reached for Ajax's legs to plead. Ajax picked him up. He slammed him against the tree.
"You will survive tonight. I promise. It is not my place to execute a man." He said. The driver cried, thanked him, his nose dripped. Ajax let him go and let him weep for a moment of innocent joy.
Then he took off his jacket. Then he lifted his sleeves and showed the veins of his arms, the rivers of violent passion that now pulsed through him and through his heart.
"But I will judge," Ajax said. The man went quiet. The fire crackled. "You deserve no tribunal, you will get no tribunal. No. This is no righteous beating."
The driver looked side to side. He almost forgot his legs were broken.
"I look upon you the same way a farmer would look at the harvest or a shepherd, his livestock. Because this, like any other bounty or burden, is just a chore."
He looked at Ajax and the way he leaned in with that gaunt and gaudy mask. His mouth quivered and he took a deep breath. He would need it, for his crying howl into the night.
11:38 PM
Darr
July 24th, 2017
11:38 PM
Darr had called Ajax with no success, he had left a voice mail, texted, harassed the Priest who ended up harassing him back with questions. It wasn't until four hours after the episode with Aurela, four hours of walking and talking, of pointless wandering that he finally got a message back. An address.
He followed it. Uphill, it all led up, where he could see clearly the city for what it was. The rolls of hills, the waves of trees and of metal industrial chimneys that poked the sky. He could not tell what was cloud and what was soot. It was all gray, then black as he w
ent higher up and the hour changed to nearly midnight.
The streets were better, cleaner, the cars sleeker. The chain link turned to white fence, turned to the giant bars of steel and the giant hedges. Every house was a kind of island. He could see the lights of their million dollar homes from the small, topsy-turvy streets. They were like the small glowing orbs of schools of fireflies. They moved around and looked outside at the wandering man, suspicious of him. Of Darr. It was practically a different city.
He stopped at the address and looked in front of him. There was no fence, at least. But the front yard was wide and upon it was a concrete fountain left to dry, there was a statue of a man holding a cornucopia but there was no water. It cracked and its cracks were filled with vine and grass. In that sense, it was different from the rest in how neglected it was. Past the statue, past an oak tree casting off its leaves, was a door. There was no stone path and Darr's feet sank in the weak grass. The unruly nature of the house was made up by the fact that the lot was so large.
