Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “So first you have to go cold turkey on the smart cookies, so your brain goes into withdrawal and your thoughts slow down to a crawl,” Mary said. “Then we slowly work you back up to a normal dose over a four- or five-day period. It’s basically like rebooting your brain. I’m sorry. This is going to hurt a lot.”

  “No,” Stacia said. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “You have to,” Mary said. “You have to let go of this. Come on. If anybody knows how to get rid of a guy, it’s you.”

  Stacia actually laughed at that, which seemed like a good sign.

  Stacia sweated through her clothes and sheets. She went clammy and glass-eyed as her most recent smart cookie wore off. Mary sat with her, calling in sick at work and sitting at Stacia’s bedside even after Dave had to go to his office. And once Stacia’s brain was barely functional and she was gazing into space, Mary started speaking in Stacia’s ear. Telling her the history, the saga of the Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick. Their friendship after college, and how they had stayed friends even after Mary got into a long-term relationship with some guy, whatsisname. Mary dredged up details from some storage locker in the back of her mind, rebuilding Stacia’s true memories to banish the false ones.

  “That guy, whatsisname, he’s gone, but we’re still here,” Mary said. “We’re not going anywhere. I haven’t forgiven you, but I’m not going to bail on you either. Hey, remember that time you and I went ice skating and we each twisted an ankle? It was a couple years after I started dating whatsisname. We ate those revolting tofu corndogs until we barfed.” She kept talking until her voice got tired, repeating the same stories with minor variations after a while and obsessing over minor details like the exact color of a stuffed animal they’d had for a week and then lost.

  The sun crested over Stacia’s slit of a window and then bobbed again, and darkness reasserted. Mary brushed Stacia’s forehead with the veiny part of the back of her hand, like someone waking a child from a bad dream.

  Rock Manning Can’t Hear You

  This guy came into the half-stocked convenience store where I was working, and he wanted me to empty out the safe. He had a waxy mustache and soul patch, and he wore a poncho over a bulky football sweatshirt and knee-high socks. He was waving a shotgun that looked like someone had shot a grouse with it back in 2009, and then it had sat in a closet ever since. I thought about angles of escape, up over his head or around behind the Juicy Yoo cooler—because I’m Rock Manning, the internet’s favorite hyperfiend, and that’s what I do.

  Then I shrugged and put up my hands.

  The trouble was, he couldn’t get at the safe because it was keyed to my vital signs, so if my heart or breathing sped up then the safe went into total lockdown, and if my heart stopped then every alarm went dog-crazy. My boss Ramon couldn’t even get cash for legitimate purposes half the time because I’d be doing jumping jacks and thinking about whether we should stage a trolley accident or a scooter joust when we were making our slapstick movies this weekend. I had to practice no-mind deep breathing just so my boss could take out petty cash.

  With this guy waving his gun at me, my heart juddered so damn hard the tumblers in the safe hugged each other for dear life. He almost gave up and left, but then he found some extra drowsy cough syrup and made me drink some of it along with a ton of Grand Marnier, with that shotgun in my face the whole time I was chugging. My heart stayed pigeon-like, and I told the guy he’d have to be patient and wait for the stuff to take effect. He wanted to keep force-feeding me downers but I reminded him that if I died the safe locked up tight.

  He and I ended up sitting around the store a couple hours, talking about old movies and video games and stuff. Reginald loved all the cop buddy comedies of the eighties and nineties, and he could recite long sections of Lethal Weapon from memory. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was telling Reginald that a bunch of us made our own amateur web movies in Boston Common and he should swing by this Saturday and join in. I guess it was the cough syrup, or just the fact that we’d been talking for ages and he’d put down the gun by then. Five minutes after he thanked me and wandered off down the street, I took a deep breath and heard the safe un-jam itself.

  I meant to tell some of my friends about Reginald, but then I got sidetracked into thinking about my character. Not my real-life character, which I didn’t really know much about, but my movie character.

  Think about it! Harold Lloyd is the same guy in every one of his movies—a small-town innocent, maybe a little egg-headed but not street smart, with his heart on his sleeve but also full of crazy ambitions. I could be like that, except maybe more cunning and just a little loopy. Or okay, a lot loopy. Coming off the super-cold-relief formula and cognac buzz, I felt a swelling urgency that people should root for me, not just laugh at my hijinks.

  Janelle, the cute film student with the rainbow dreads, agreed with me. The comic hero has to be loveable or relatable, or at least there has to be a moment of connection with the audience in between all the falling gargoyles, she said. The two of us cornered Sally Hamster, our director, who kept trying to get us to talk to her hands. Sally was like, “I make art during the week. This weekend shit is just for fun.” Sally had been making serious strides at film school until I came back into her life, fully recovered from my nervous breakdown and eager to make more weird movies on the internet. But Janelle and I both said it wasn’t about art, just making the fun as fun as possible.

  I kept forgetting to mention Reginald the corner-store robber, until he showed up on Saturday wearing some kind of bright red wrestling costume, or maybe those were just his regular exercise clothes. We dressed Reginald up as a cop, and a bunch of the film school kids played a motorcycle gang who’d started riding bicycles because gas was $12 a gallon, so they all overcompensated by whooping really loud and blasting heavy metal when they pedaled into town.

  Someone had renovated a whole section of Boston near the river to look like a little “ye olde” village, except it was really all yuppie boutiques that had been boarded up since the Debt Crisis. So we turned it into a small town that was trying to keep the bikers out with the help of Reginald the cop, and I got mixed up in the middle of their conflict because I had to deliver a cactus to a sick friend. Once again, my motivation was a little hazy, and it bothered me as well as Janelle. Sally had her elbow in the way of us doing any kind of love story, even though I could never figure out why. It wasn’t just that she’d gotten her heart pulped with her boyfriend Raine’s head during the Peace Riots. She was just dead set against goo-goo eyes.

  Everybody thought Reginald rocked, especially the sequence where a bunch of the bikers rode up a giant ramp we made out of an old herbal facial spa sign and flew over Reginald’s head while he tried to kick-box with their wheels. Except Zapp Stillman, because Reginald somehow managed to break Zapp’s nose, although the other film geeks said it would just add some boxery distinction to his face. (Zapp was the grand-nephew of some famous movie director, and an expert on everything.)

  Sally asked where I found Reginald, and I said I just ran into him. Reginald nearly dropped me off the Longfellow Bridge when he found out this was a volunteer gig, but I convinced him the exposure would help him to get other, paying gigs. He got pretty jazzed thinking about his roundhouse popping up all over the internet and becoming a cult phenom. He was pretty glad he didn’t actually kill me, at least for now.

  I started wondering if I should tell Sally the truth about Reginald, but I figured he would probably disappear soon anyway, since he made me look like long-attention-span guy by comparison. I hadn’t been able to concentrate much before Raine died, but ever since I involuntarily ate a piece of Raine’s brain I was a human jitter. The Army recruiter doctors had taken one look at me and just laughed at the idea of militarizing me.

  People hit our video-tumblr like bam-bam-bam. Sally thought soon we’d be more popular than we were in high school, and we sold some advertisements. People would bring us pieces of meat and shoes in return for
an ad on the site sometimes. Sally got that gleam in her eye, the one she used to get when the internet first fell in love with us. But she also kept saying how un-artistic our movies were, compared to the fancy stuff she and Janelle were doing for film school.

  So Zapp Stillman was a hyper-mega rich socialite, who didn’t really notice a lot of what was going on around him, and I was his overeager manservant trying to cater to all his idiotic whims. Despite what Reginald had done to Zapp’s face, he still looked delicate and sheltered, and I got to wear this great houndstooth suit that fit really well except for the arms, shoulders, knees, and crotch. I practiced walking straight and butlery, which only made me more splashmanic, and then Zapp and I were supposed to go on a trip to the seaside except I had to shelter him from all the violence on the streets. Zapp hadn’t read a blog or seen a newscast in years and I kept him unaware of the state of the world. So for example, we rode our two-seater bicycle past piles of comatose bodies, and I convinced Zapp it was just a group of people camping out for tickets to the Imagine Dragons reunion tour. And then a bunch of guys on scooters chased us to rip our heads off, and I told Zapp it was a friendly race. (All dialogue was big black captions, like in an old-school classic movie.)

  It was a cool movie with good character moments, but a ton of stuff went wrong when we were filming. Like we staged a fake riot with a bunch of film students in ripped-up clothes pulling down bricks we’d placed strategically. Then random people wandered by and saw what was going on, and they wanted to join in and pretty soon they were tossing big chunks of wall around, and they saw Zapp and me on our dorky bicycle built for two and threw rocks at us, so the peddling-for-dear-life sequences were way more realistic than we’d bargained on. The camera guys had to run like hell to keep their equipment from being smashed.

  Mid-summer, Boston was all melty but people on the street sold home-made ice cream and you could ignore all the rotting smells if you thought about the river ducks. I still felt like I was about to crash everyone around me into the gritty old walls. I would forget for a second; I would bounce down the street, jumping over the people on the sidewalk and swinging on the low oak branches. And then I would have a mental image of myself landing the wrong way with my foot in someone’s stomach, maybe someone I loved or maybe a stranger.

  Some nights I couldn’t sleep because every time I closed my eyes I saw Raine getting his head exploded, the chunks of skull flying apart, the brains splattering into my open mouth. This image blended together with all the ways I’d injured people by accident, or the times when I could have injured people if things had gone a little different. Raine’s head got pulpier and more vivid each time.

  Janelle and I got together and wrote a movie script, to Sally’s total horror. “Okay, so what is this story about?” Janelle asked me twenty or thirty times. We sat on an abandoned swan boat in the middle of the lake in Boston Common, and the boat kept almost capsizing as water sloshed in and out of its gullet. Once, tourists had chugged around in these boats, but now they just bobbed their decaying shells in and out of the algae. I didn’t know what our story was about, since I didn’t even know what the story was. Couldn’t we take one leap at a time? But Janelle was scary patient and kept talking themes: communication, Social Darwinism, the impossibility of really knowing other people because the closer you get to them the harder it is to see the whole person. Janelle had run away from home as a kid, and lived in the attic of a bookstore cafe for years, reading every book in the stockroom and living off of abandoned scones and salads. Nobody had known she was there until she used the store’s address for her B.U. application and the acceptance letter turned up.

  We settled on this O. Henry thing where two people try to save each other at cross purposes, sort of. I’m this scrappy DJ who owes money to gangsters, who could maybe be Vikings because we had some helmets and fake fur. And Janelle is a dancer who posed for some questionable photos years ago and now this sleazy guy wants to publish them and her strict family will disown her. So I decide to break in and snag the sleazy guy’s hard drive, while Janelle wants to do whatever it takes to raise money to bail me out—even take on a dancer job that turns out to involve dancing on an unstable scaffolding at a construction site. And then the Vikings turn up while I’m trying to break into the sleazy guy’s studio, and they want to break my legs but the sleazy guy has a protection deal with a Samurai gang. So we have a pitched Viking-Samurai battle in a photography studio, while I’m trying to slip past them and grab the hard drive. And then Janelle somehow falls off her scaffolding into the middle of our fracas and I have to run around to catch her.

  It only took us about five hours to come up with that storyline, and by then the swan was submerged up to its neck and water slopped over the sides of its torso. We had to haul ourselves up onto the bridge without breaking our necks.

  Janelle took a day off film school to help me location-scout our movie called Photo Finish. We found this large art/performance space which people actually used as an art studio. It had crumbling brick walls, a high platform leading to some big industrial-looking windows, and a red velvet curtain that perfectly said “Sleazy Photographer.”

  Reginald nearly bit her head off, trembling in his charging-bull helmet and muppet-fur cloak while she coached him on his lines. “No, come on Reggie, try it again and this time put everything you’ve got into the word ‘maul.’ You have to feel that word. Jesus, Rock, where did you find this guy?”

  She tried to choreograph the big Viking-Samurai throwdown, even down to me throwing the big photographic backdrops in people’s faces and Zapp Stillman, the lead Samurai, hurling his katana at a Viking and hitting the sought-after hard drive instead.

  The fifth time we stopped so Janelle could micro-manage, Reginald looked ready to light the set on fire, rip several people’s heads off, and then use his broadsword to make a head-kebab. I was having seismic levels of fidgetiness, to the point where I had to hug myself.

  Sally pulled me aside. “Jesus, what the fuck are we going to do about Janelle?” Sally torqued her elbows and claws. “She’s driving me fucking bonkers, man.”

  I didn’t have any answers, except that I was worried about Reginald’s inside-out fuse. Another hour went by, and you could have made a milkshake on my head. It was thirty seconds’ filming and then wait wait wait, ready, no hang on, wait, wait.

  The tenth time we stopped, I jittered myself blind and stumbled into Zapp Stillman, and before he could finish saying he begged my pardon I fell over. On my way down, I kicked Zapp’s katana into Reginald’s crotch, and Reginald fell on top of three other Vikings, so their swords jabbed into his back. He howled and clutched at his own spine, then jumped up and announced that just because he’d failed to kill me the first time didn’t mean he couldn’t finish the job now.

  Reginald grabbed a long razor-sharp hook from the studio corner and ran at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sally gesture to Janelle to get this on tape for godssake. Zapp Stillman tried to get between Reginald and me, and Reginald whacked him in the face. I ducked under a big platform and kicked a cart of A/V stuff at Reginald, but he jumped over the cart without breaking his run. Several of the other Samurai thought this was part of the movie, and tried to attack Reginald with their balsa-wood swords, but he just cracked their heads together, so their fake helmets crumpled.

  Meanwhile, I slid out the other end of the platform and climbed the curtain rope. The rope was on a pulley, so Reginald started pulling, and the rope went down as the curtain went up. I had to climb at top speed just to stay at the same altitude. Reginald kept pulling the rope with one hand and threw his spike-hook with the other, but I caught the hook and dug it into the curtain, then let go of the rope and swung on the hook across to the other side of the curtain, which tore as I went, so I landed on the ground across the room. A random Viking swung at my head and I barely ducked in time, then I saw a bucket of water (which was supposed to be photographic solution) and I dumped it on Reginald’s head. His helmet’s
horns stabbed through the bucket so he couldn’t get it off, and he started grabbing anyone who got in his way, even other Vikings, and tossing them.

  At first I screened the sirens out, because you heard sirens all the time, but I heard more and more, fire sirens as well as cop cars. Peal after peal, like church bells. I leaned out the window to see what was going on and then Reginald was at my ear, trying to push me out. He’d gotten the helmet and bucket off, and he had one hand under my armpit and the other on my belt. It was probably a dozen feet down. I could see flames in the distance, and tongues of smoke from a few other places. I tried to tell Reginald I hadn’t meant to hurt him, but he just pushed harder. The window frame gave way and we both tumbled. I twisted my body so Reginald hit the ground first and I landed on top of him.

  I couldn’t see anything but I smelled smoke worse than ever. My crotch felt broken, my feet felt broken. I forced my eyes open but everything had a double image. Sally had the door to the studio building open nearby and was yelling for me to get my ass inside. I limped to my feet and juddered in, then Sally locked the door behind me. Through the window I watched Reginald try to raise himself up.

  “Example of the sort of human garbage they tolerate up here,” a voice said. It sounded sort of like Ricky Artesian, from back home, but wasn’t. I found a window with a view of the guy, who was a little smaller than Ricky and had tufty black hair. He dressed like Ricky and had the same red bandana. So did the half dozen or so guys behind him, who had just climbed out of a couple of all-terrain crawlers. The guy talked for ages about his issues with Reginald, who kept trying to get to his feet but couldn’t quite manage it. Reginald had the bad luck to be the only guy nearby who looked like a junkie and couldn’t run for his life. I wanted to go out and help him, but I could barely move, and Sally half-supported, half-restrained me. Sally wanted to stop watching when they got into it with the crowbars, but this was my fault, sort of, and I had to see it play out.