by Alec Cizak
It was five o’clock. Cars and buses jammed the intersections. Proper people with proper jobs made their way out of the giant office buildings. Most of them walked with the stiff gait imposed by the standard uniforms of wage slavery: the men choked themselves with ties and the women were dressed in skirts wrapped around their waists so tight they looked like they might twist themselves into two. They hurried to the bus stop or parking lot or wherever their chariots were that took them away from the misery hiding on both sides of Wilshire.
Enrique was supposed to be meeting a couple of white boys from West Hollywood to sell them some meth. He had gotten to the internet cafe at Normandie and Wilshire ten minutes early. The place was packed, as usual. That was a good thing. It consisted of rows of cubicles people hid themselves in while they looked for their individual salvations on the World Wide Web. Enrique found a blue card in his wallet. Assumed he still had time on it. Sitting down at the first vacant system, he put the card in the reader to the right of the monitor. His face turned red as soon as the computer screen lit up. He hit the restart button, stood, and launched after the man who had been using it just before him.
“Yo,” he said, “come here a minute.”
But the man was out the door.
Enrique put his hand in his pocket. He curled his finger around the trigger of the gun he carried. Since he was dealing to white boys that day, he had only brought a .22. It would have been enough.
* * *
He followed the man into the cathedral. It was the same church his family held services in for his little brother, Herbert. Eight years old. They found his body in a green dumpster behind the McDonald’s at Western and 9th. The man who had killed Herbert had, according to his own confession, started the same way, looking at the same kinds of pictures on the internet. Enrique’s father assured him the prisoners in San Quentin would realize proper justice. So far, they had not gotten any word on the pervert’s demise. “It’s just a matter of time,” his father said, over and over.
Enrique splashed his forehead with holy water and crossed himself. “Forgive me, Father,” he said. Afraid to look toward the ceiling, afraid God might crash through the brown stone, scoop him up right there and, with giant fingers, flick him straight to Hell, he kept his eyes on the ground until he got to the chapel.
Thin stained-glass windows allowed the high sun to paint the church with columns of light. There were a dozen people scattered throughout. They were all kneeling, praying. They were from everywhere. Latinos, white people, black people, and a lone Korean. High above the altar, a modern art, anorexic Jesus on the cross stared down at the flock with sinister judgment. It was carved out of wood.
Halfway to the front of the church, the man had slipped into a pew and was hunched over the bench in front of him. His eyes were clenched shut. Tears squeezed out and traced a river down the side of his unshaven face. His fingers were wrapped so tightly together they were turning white. He gently rocked his fists and forehead together and apart, together and apart, together and apart...
Enrique’s chest began to heave. The plastic sheet of conscience his parents and teachers and preachers had worked so hard to stretch across his common sense struggled to stop him. The voices he knew were not his own begged:“It is a stranger. See the anguish in his face.”
“That means nothing,” Enrique whispered. He sat down a yard away from the man. “Eh, amigo,” he said. “You like pictures of little boys?”
The man’s eyes were wide. He looked around. “What do you want?” He spoke in a quick, hushed voice, no doubt hoping no one else in the church would hear them.
“It doesn’t stop,” Enrique said. “Until you satisfy what the devil has planted in your heart, until you murder innocence. Nothing will save you.”
Shaking his head, the man wept. “I can’t help it.”
“I know.” Enrique pulled the .22 from his pocket and shot the man in the stomach. The pop from the gun bounced off the walls in one giant clap. It sounded as if someone had dropped a Bible on the stone floor.
Enrique waited for the crowd in the church to gather the courage to come closer and see what he had done. He had to contain his laughter as they gasped and screamed, then backed up, thinking maybe the crazy Mexican with the gun might shoot them next. He placed it on the pew to let them know his work in the church was finished.
“Somebody call 911,” he said. If there’s a God, I’m on my way to San Quentin.
METHAMPHETAMINE AND A SHOTGUN
With respect to Chester Himes.
Debbie had been over earlier. She laid out a couple of rails. They topped off the crank with a joint she rolled in papers decorated like the American flag. After burning down Old Glory, they got busy on Ethan’s bed. He only came once. It took him half an hour to get there, thanks to the dope. Debbie seemed happy enough. She put her clothes on and left without telling him where she was going.
Ethan sat up, his back propped against a cracked wall in his one room apartment. There was no kitchen. There were no windows that weren’t holding broken glass together with tape and cardboard. Aside from the bed, there was only a folding table with two metal chairs by the door. That was where they had gotten high. Normally, Ethan would provide the drugs. His source had been buckled by the pigs. The only possession he had at this point was a Remington 12-gauge. A cop had traded it to him for some meth.
“We use these to take down fuckers on PCP,” the johnny had said. “You shoot somebody nice and close, their head’ll bust open like a hamster in a microwave.”
Ethan was aware of everything relevant, which was nothing. Meth and heroin brought him to the same place, but in different ways. Smack allowed him to quietly accept mortality. Like an angel, gently rubbing his shoulders, whispering, “Someday you’re going to die, and that’s okay.” Crank, on the other hand, made him feel as though possession of this knowledge hoisted him above common people who couldn’t face the reality that their lives, at the end of the day, would mean nothing.
While he rode a wave of superiority, he felt the undertow of worry, rising from the depths of his mind, forming a hand, then a claw, wrapping its tough, leathery fingers around his skull. “I think I’m thirsty,” he said. What he thought, however, was:
Why did Debbie leave so goddamn soon?
The claw grew larger and scooped him off the bed. The effort to move muscles and bones was easier than slicing through a lightly melted stick of butter. Walking across the room, he understood that his feet were heavier than the Earth. They bounced off the floor as though it were made of a million titties, waiting to nurse him if he chose to fall. He stopped at the table and looked at the shotgun. There were three shells next to it.
* * *
They met him on the elevator. Luckily, Ethan was alone. They started on his shins and elbows. He could feel their little feet scampering up and down and in circles. They were too cowardly to show themselves in the physical world. He was certain they were millipedes. When he started using meth he scratched them, opening his skin and marking himself an addict. Now he was wiser. They wanted him to tear himself apart. The enemy sent them. He tolerated the itching the way he put up with roaches and mice in his apartment.
In the lobby, the mailman stuffed clouds into thin metal boxes. Ethan bit his lower lip to keep from asking the guy just who the hell he thought he was, doing God’s work without God’s permission. Before he could get to the street, he broke out in laughter. “I’m God,” he said.
The postman backed against the wall, his hands raised. “Anything you say, man.”
Ethan pushed the glass doors leading outside open. He was still chuckling over his own mistaken identity. The palm trees lining both sides of the street waved to him.
Saturday afternoon in Koreatown. Children played on thin strips of grass between the apartment buildings and sidewalks. Their parents sat on steps talking. Plotting. “Your kids are smarter than you,” he said. He pointed at the adults and every one of them jumped up and backwards. They
ran to their sons and daughters.
“Don’t even think about it!”
The adults stopped. They put their hands up. “Please,” they said. They whimpered, cried, sobbed into the grass that danced to the same rhythm as the palm trees. They got on their knees and worshipped Ethan.
“That’s more like it,” he said. He headed up Ardmore, toward Third Street. There was a consumer temple on the corner of Kingsley and Third, just one block over. The way the sidewalk moved under Ethan’s feet, he suspected the whole thing had been planned—his thirst, his paranoia about Debbie. Why was she in such a hurry to leave? When he turned onto Third, he saw the Kipling Hotel. A relic from the time before the world had been blessed by his presence. He crossed the street. Cars stopped for him. The people inside them pointed at him. Some grabbed their cell phones. Some made phone calls. Some even took pictures.
They know I’m God.
The front door to the Kipling swung open and a man in a suit and tie stepped out and put his hand in his pocket. Ethan wondered why anybody would be dressed like that on a Saturday. He watched the man pull out a set of keys and drop them on the ground. Then he saw her, sitting inside the SUV the man eventually unlocked and climbed into.
Debbie was in the passenger seat. She was in the back, as well. And sitting right next to her was Debbie. Even in the rear, where normal people put groceries and bowling balls, two more Debbies faced the opposite direction. In the driver’s side, the man was trying to get the key into the ignition.
“You sonofabitch,” Ethan said. He drew back and pointed a giant, angry finger at the windshield. The glass exploded into a star-shower of prisms. The interior of the car filled like a bath tub with red, boiling lava.
Somewhere, someone screamed, “Oh my God!”
Ethan nodded. Proud to be so easily recognized. He saw the harsh orange and green announcing the 7-Eleven across the street from the Kipling. The liquids in the money temple would wash away the snakes of worry burrowing permanent homes under his skin. He remembered root beer, a substance that worked on his temporary shell like gasoline in an engine.
“Debbie’s there, too,” he said. “I’m sure she is.”
Cars screeched in the parking lot, peeling pavement like a banana skin, to get out of his way. Ethan put his free hand out and motioned for everyone to calm down. “Relax,” he said, “you have my permission to exist.” Two homeless guys opening the door for customers in hopes of getting spare change ran away as fast as they could.
Ethan laughed. “I hope you folks realize that kissing my ass won’t help you. Not ultimately.” He entered the convenience store.
The first thing he noticed was that Singh, the attendant on duty, was talking on the phone. He looked nervous. Ethan realized the short man, usually his friend, was hiding something. “Who’s on the other end?” He pointed at Singh.
Singh dropped the phone and put his hands up.
Ethan could hear the voice coming from the receiver:
“Sir? Sir?”
It was Debbie.
“You tagging my girl behind my back?”
“What?” Singh looked at the only other customer in the store.
It was a kid with a skateboard and Super-Gulp overflowing with neon green bubbles. He held his arms out, pretending to be Jesus. “Mister, you’re in big trouble,” he said.
Ethan looked at the skater. “You fucking her too?”
“Who?”
“Debbie.”
“No man. I ain’t doing nobody named Debbie.”
Ethan nodded. He stepped back. The kid dropped the cup and ran out the door.
Singh crept to the other side of the counter.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
The clerk’s white hair snaked around like it had been hooked up to electricity. The fluorescent lights bounced off his otherwise bald head in a basketball rhythm.
“Shame on you,” Ethan said, his voice like a vicious thunderclap. His judgment was so severe the blood of the devil spilled all over the cigarette rack behind the counter. “I said I’d get to the bottom of this.” He walked to the coolers and opened one of the doors. “I haven’t been wrong so far.” The rush of cold air made him think he had been reborn in an arctic region. He closed his eyes and saw himself on an iceberg, drifting over the ocean. The night sky in front of him bled blue into purple into black and stars pierced the curtain like the gaze of a million dead people, curious to see if he would put the last piece of the puzzle together.
Ethan opened his eyes, found a bottle of Barq’s root beer, and walked back to the counter. He looked around for the cashier. “I’m a fair man,” he said. He dropped two wrinkled dollar bills on the counter. They smelled like a farm he had visited with his mother when he was eight. Manure and pigs and horses and chickens, all rolled up together to manufacture a super-stench that never quite left his senses. Then he heard the sirens.
“I’m no fool,” he said. The song shrieking through the air was anything but beautiful.
The front door opened and a skinny man in a dark uniform stepped inside. His hands shook. So did his voice. “Sir,” he said.
Ethan realized the new customer was holding a pistol. A .40 caliber semi-automatic. The tiny finger pointed right at him. His face scrunched up. Ethan wondered if his eyes would collapse into his mouth. The gall. “You don’t judge me,” he said. Then he pointed right back at the johnny.
The officer jumped backwards through the glass windows protecting the store from the laughing wind. As shards spun in magic circles, Ethan saw a hole in the universe open up. A huge eye, all pupil and no color, stared back. Even gods have fathers.
He stepped over the cop, who was now wrapped in a sticky red blanket, and walked toward Ardmore. Crowds of people had gathered across Third Street, all of them looking as if they might run away, on command. Ethan smiled. More sirens scraped the summer blue off the atmosphere. They would have to come for him. He was going home to enjoy his root beer and the rest of his buzz. With all the competition out of the way, Debbie would no doubt return. If she was smart, she would apologize.
As he approached his apartment building on the corner of Fourth and Ardmore, he realized the sirens belonged to the police. Lots of them. The air filled from pocket to pocket with the annoying scream of emergency vehicles providing the illusion that something could be done to prevent the final tragedy. Ethan shook his head. He pitied everyone around him. “I’ll help you,” he said, “all of you.” Then he remembered:
He was out of shells.
LITTLE PEOPLE
September 13
10:31 p.m.
It took her forty minutes to find a pay phone. The city had gotten cheap, assumed everyone could afford a mobile unit and carried it with them wherever they went. She could have used hers, but then there would have been a record, something to tie her to the little man in the trunk of her car.
She found a gas station ten miles south on I-37, toward Bloomington. It was a local business. Merle’s. The owner, maybe Merle or someone related to him, hadn’t kept the place up. The giant, rotating metal sign with slanted, white letters had rusted and its neon arteries were busted. Sarah would have passed it had she not seen the yellow glow coming from the garage. She crossed the highway and pulled in. An attendant, a teenager, sat to the side of the lift in a chair, tilting it back with his foot propped against a table with a small television on it.
When she saw the old fashioned, half-sized phone booth, just beyond the pumps, she turned the car off. She rummaged through her purse for change. Nothing. She scanned the floor and emptied the glove box. Nothing. “Dammit,” she said. She got out and checked her skirt, hose, and blouse for blood stains. Satisfied she didn’t look like someone who had hoisted a battered body into her trunk, she walked to the glass garage doors and tapped on one of the panes that wasn’t broken.
The teenager glanced away from the television. From where she stood, Sarah could see the rims of his eyes were red. “Good,” she said. The
kid would most likely forget the whole exchange. Slowly, as though there were no such things as time and pressure and stress, the teenager moped over and lifted the garage door.
“Evening, ma’am.” He smiled the way young men who haven’t learned to conceal their primary thoughts often did. If the boy had been just a few years older, Sarah would have considered it smarmy. He was dressed in jeans, high-tops, and a t-shirt. No nametag.
“Hi there,” said Sarah. “I need to use the pay phone. Could I possibly get change for a dollar?”
The boy scratched his forehead, harvesting layers of gray matter to find the appropriate response. “You got to purchase something. Gas, you know? Or maybe a candy bar. Otherwise I can’t open the register.”
“Seriously?” Sarah expected that kind of crap in the city. Halfway to the country, she figured, folks were supposed to be more decent. “I just need to use the phone.”
The kid stepped aside. “Well hell,” he said, “come on in and use ours. It ain’t long distance, right?”
That wouldn’t do. Anything less than the perfect excuse might lodge a useful memory in the boy’s mind. “Yeah, it is long distance.”
The teenager’s smile curled into Sleaze City. “I suppose I could be convinced to let you make your call anyway.”
Sarah refrained from sighing or laughing. Instead, she waved him off the way she might ‘shoo’ at a fly. “Forget it.” She walked back to her car.
“If you decide otherwise,” said the boy, “I’ll be right here.” There was so much hope in his voice. Sarah envied him. All the worries in his world consisted of getting high and getting laid.
As she walked around her silver Lexus, she stared at the trunk. Then she got an idea. She opened the back of the car. The little man hadn’t bled much. Cleaning up after him wouldn’t be as bad as she had initially calculated. His eyes were closed. He looked like any other animal would after being run over by a half-ton sedan. Sarah patted down his front pockets. She stuffed her hand in and pulled out four quarters. “Thank you, buddy,” she said. She slammed the lid and stepped over to the pay phone.
