In and out with the sausage with the last bite. Hale realized that Mr. Cowboy Hat had stopped talking. He made a gurgling noise. Hale looked away from the girl’s mouth and saw that Mr. Cowboy Hat’s hand had gone around to cup her crotch. She squirmed away. Mr. Cowboy Hat was still gurgling. He stood and grabbed something at his throat. He pulled a red skewer from his neck and a stream of blood came with it. Blue backed up and sidestepped him as he lunged towards her, falling across the breakfast table. Blood decorated the store-bought pastries in spurts. Mr. Cowboy Hat scattered them across the tiled floor, knocked over the coffee pot. The pot shattered on the floor. The table collapsed.
“Shit, Blue, I finally found some good bloody coffee and you break the pot. Hell, baby.”
Hale looked and saw Slade standing there in his 1950s Greaser wear along with the square Mexican kid and The Nervous Girl.
“This isn’t significant,” Blue said.
“The outlier probably feels differently,” the kid said.
To Hale’s surprise, Blue had a hand on his shoulder, gripping more firmly than a girl her size should be able to. Hale did not react.
The only one who had a normal reaction was The Nervous Girl, who screamed.
“She’s not what you all remember, Sebastian,” The Nervous Girl pleaded to the English kid. In the bathroom, the shower ran.
Hale should have been pleading too, but he wasn’t. He was tied to a chair and gagged. He had never dreamt of how he got there. It turned out it was mostly by the hands of the freakishly strong sausage-eating girl named Blue. There was no Doctor. Hale was just going to die at the hands of these weird-ass kids, so they could cover up the murder of a piece of shit. It was actually a great relief.
“You need someone right-minded and organized,” The Nervous Girl said, “Someone to help you.”
The Mexican kid came in with a tiny package of cheap knockoff M&Ms and gave a handful to the English kid who put them in the bag of real M&Ms and shook them together. The Mexican kid then looked straight at Hale, pressed a finger to his lips and left the room.
“Diane sees what you’re doing, Lucy,” The Sock Girl said as she sat on the bed between where the English kid and The Nervous Girl stood.
“I’m not trying to do anything,” The Nervous Girl said. She blinked.
The heavy red curtains kept out the desert sun and trapped all the false white light that gave Hale a headache. His dream had been painted with sunset colors. It wasn’t in a room lit like a bad coke house with a bunch of junky computer parts around. It smelled of Elmer’s glue and sex and there were papers with wild drawings and numbers on all the walls.
“Are we going to become like the French? Killing anyone and everyone? You hated the French, Sebastian. They’re your least favorite.” The Nervous Girl looked older in this light. Maybe thirty.
“In every revolution, innocent people die,” the kid said. Hale thought he actually heard some of the cockiness leave his voice.
“You weren’t saying that before! You said it was going to be bloodless! You’ve changed since you got Blue out.”
The shower stopped.
The bathroom door opened. Blue’s wet hair was dark, her eyes amber. Hale watched Blue, in a short Hello Kitty robe, toss a platinum blonde wig with blue streaks on the table. She was the good girl, one of her faces.
“Wake up the doctor to look at Hizz’s blood levels. Just do it, Lucy,” the kid said firmly before the woman could object. The Nervous Girl twitched before she left and so did Hale. He felt his extremities go numb and it had nothing to do with the expertly winded sheets that tied him to the cheap desk chair. The Doctor was here.
Sock Girl put her hand through the main sock and made it plant a kiss on the kid’s cheek.
“Thank you, Diane and Pirya,” the kid said and smiled. The Sock Girl left.
The kid undid the gag over Hale’s mouth and smacked him awake.
“You have to listen to me!” Hale heard his words pour out, “I know someone is supposed to contact Dr. Gables and I know you have two mill—”
“You know the doc. Guess that means you aren’t so innocent,” the kid said.
“No, no! Listen, The Doctor, he’s evil. He is evil.”
“You are telling this to me. That’s where we’re at. This is my life.”
“I saw it all happen! I had a dream, a dream for the past seven years.”
This didn’t seem to impress the kid. He was laughing quietly.
“The Girl! Your girl, Blue.” Hale saw the kid’s eyes widen. “She gets sick. She gets real sick and—”
“If you fuckers try to go through Blue to get to me ever I’ll make Swamp Rise look like a bloody picnic!”
The kid roared and picked Hale up. By the throat. With one hand. While Hale was tied to the chair. Was this a new dream? No, it all felt too real.
“He’s just an outlier,” Blue spoke. “Diane said.” She was behind Hale now and it felt like she eased the chair back down to the floor. The kid let Hale’s throat go and turned to Blue. Hale could hear a sound like something flicking behind him.
“As much as I’d love to trust a bundle of socks, I don’t think so. He was clearly sent by them. He had a dream you got sick? Please, he wants to get into my mind. It’s Counterinsurgency 101, love.”
“It’s you. It’s been you all along!” Hale cried, looking at Blue.
“No, it hasn’t been.” Blue smiled as she lit a candle.
Hale felt tears on his cheeks as he realized his life had come down to this moment and he was going to blow it.
“He’s playing the lost soul,” the kid said.
“Slade, get your meds from Lucy. You can leave me alone with him.”
“A’right, I really need a decent cup of coffee, but don’t fall for it and don’t kill him.” The kid left.
“You had a dream,” Blue said to Hale, “I had dreams. They stuffed my head with so much stuff and it hurt, but I didn’t care. I thought I could make things happen with the stuff. I wanted everyone free and safe. If something went wrong I used to think I could die for them. Be a martyr to save everything. But, I know now I’d just be another statistic. Nothing changes. When they put me in Barbra I lived in that place and I learned, I learned how regular people are and they don’t care. People are asleep and can’t help us and we can’t help them. And I see all revolutions have one thing in common—failure.”
“Blue, listen, I don’t know anything, but I know I don’t care if I die, and I know you can’t!”
“You don’t care if you die but . . . it doesn’t matter. Didn’t you hear what I said, outlier? Outlier . . . ”
Hale thought she was asking him a question but she got up from the bed and shook the box of M&Ms and said, “Yellow,” and took one out. She looked at it. Then she ran to the light switch and turned it on and looked at it in the white light.
“Blue, you have to stay away from The Doctor. You’re going to get sick. You’ll be sick and you won’t be able to talk and there’s a girl in a white T-shirt with short brown hair sitting next to you and—and The Doctor kills her by putting a needle in her neck and . . . and he kills you. It’s you but you’re also this other...do you know a black girl?”
Blue looked at him like she was going to speak. She cupped the M&M. That is when the kid came back in and put a black case on the nightstand.
“So, what did you get?”
“Blu—” Hale began and the kid gagged him again.
“Slade, we should find Tiffany. Don’t you miss her?”
The kid seemed to crumble a bit but then his shoulders stiffened.
“Blue, try to focus. We already have a body to bury in the desert and a smashed coffee pot to replace. He isn’t an outlier. He connects somehow,” he said.
“‘Blue, try to focus,’” she said in a mock-British accent, “you sound like them. I spent two years inside that bitch before you could get me out.”
The kid looked as defeated as Hale for a moment.
�
�Oh, it’s not your fault, baby,” she cooed, touching his face, “you saved me, but now I just want to have some fun.” She tried to push him to the bed and he fought back, grinning playfully.
“We’ll have plenty of fun later. Now you let me work,” he said, shrugging her off.
“You’re so much stronger than me now. It’s not fair.”
“Testosterone.”
“I want some,” she sat up and pulled at his shirt.
“Oh, you want a little testosterone, do ya, pet?” He climbed atop her, pulled her robe from her shoulders, and began to kiss her.
The room swam in front of Hale. The candle had gone out.
“I do, stick it in me,” she said, “Stick it right in me.”
She squealed and moaned as the kid buried his face between her legs.
Hale mumbled in his gag. Blue’s cries drowned him out.
“Remember,” she said, after she finished, “the measure of a man is what he lets possess him.”
Blue opened the black case and took out a needle as the kid dropped his pants. Hale saw then that Slade was a girl. The kid sucked in a breath as Blue stuck him in the thigh. Then he cried out while Blue worked her hands between his legs. Hale couldn’t say what his normal reaction would have been to this situation. He realized all normalcy had left him long before this, before the car accident, probably when he cut off his wife’s lover’s ponytail; or maybe it left seven years prior when he began to dream of this night. A night where he understood nothing but knew everything. Now he just knew if he didn’t do something this good girl and her girl-boyfriend would die, so he shouted through his gag as the boy with the vagina came.
“I love you so much, Blue,” the kid said.
He held her face in his hands where Hale couldn’t see. But Hale could tell by his sudden shift to a horrified expression that something terrible was happening.
“Blue! Blue! No, no!” the kid yelled as Hale yelled through his gag.
He lay Blue down in the white sheets that had been rustled with their sex.
“Stay here. I’ll—I’ll get the doctor!” He ran off, leaving his pants on the floor.
Hale cried out to Blue as Blue wailed through clenched teeth.
“Saaayee!” she squealed in a high-pitched voice.
Slade returned with an old man in a blood-speckled shirt and crooked glasses. He didn’t look like evil incarnate, or what Hale had pictured in his dream. This doctor did not have thin lips, a salt and pepper pompadour, or a pinched nose, but it was The Doctor and Hale cried into his gag.
“Shut up!” the kid said. He punched Hale in the head.
“She’s having a spasm,” the doctor said, “Where is her wheelchair?”
“What?” the kid said.
“You did bring her wheelchair,” the old man breathed nervously but spoke with dry superiority. “This girl has cerebral palsy.”
“Tiffy? Tiffy is that you? Shit Tiffy! I’m so sorry. I-I didn’t know. Blue didn’t know.”
The kid raced over to Hale’s chair and for one sweet instant he thought the kid would ungag him, but he just grabbed some paper from the desk. Hale cried out again as he saw the doctor take the opportunity to snatch up the spent syringe.
“She’s a split,” the doctor whispered as the kid went down by the girl’s side, caressing her face and asking her questions. The girl wrote her answers down. It seemed that her arms worked and nothing else.
Hale saw The doctor grab the needle and go toward the kid’s throat. He could see the kid’s vagina, but not his face as he sat on the bed, twisted toward Blue. This is when Hale found he couldn’t even mumble because he had yelled himself hoarse. This is when Blue herself sat up and pushed the doctor away and to the ground.
“I found a purple M&M,” she said.
Hale walked out of the Black & White Lodge with the kid. The kid smiled in the desert light. His face was sharp, his eyes green. His purple button-down overshirt blew in the wind.
“You made Blue believe again.”
“Will she be okay?” Hale asked.
“Blue is always a’right as long as me an’ Tiff are around, and we’re a’ right if she’s around. With the three of us we can do this like Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. Only without the slaves.”
“Is there any chance I want to know what’s happening here?” Hale asked.
“You seem like the sort that knows when he’s in over his head, mate. Sure you don’t wanna run with us?”
“Well, shit.” Hale grinned as he got into the limo.
“Nathan Hale,” said a man with a pompadour, pointed nose and thin lips. “Four months ago you were in a car accident. A very bad car accident near the B&W Lodge.”
“You can’t scare me, Doctor. You don’t have the kids. You don’t have Her. You just have me and I know less than you,” he said.
“Who are you?”
“I’m the Outlier.”
COLNE
LIAM DAVIES
“Are you sure I have to do this?”
Dr. Robert Trebor just sighs on the other end of the line, enough to express his impatience. It’s the third time Dorian has phoned him since arriving the day before; the third time he’s tried to avoid the treatment.
“It’s flooding therapy, Dorian. You came to me . . . you went to the trouble of asking for my help—”
“Yes, I know, but—”
“—after buying all my books, after spending years and years looking for the meaning of things and conversations and dreams . . . of your life, Dorian . . . and now I’ve finally put you onto the path of knowing yourself, you just want to—”
“But why does it have to be here?” Dorian says, looking at the large white grinning teeth, made up from the letters of the ‘welcome to Colne’ sign outside the telephone box.
“The geography of the town permits it. It permits you to project and confront yourself face on. To make friends with your facets.”
“But—”
“Get going and find the symmetry in your life, man.”
The doctor hangs up the phone. For a moment, Dorian stays still, with the phone still clamped uncomfortably between his shoulder and ear whilst he re-reads the handwritten note in doctor’s scrawl: ‘Cotton Manager,’ the man he is due to meet.
“Go and find him up in town—at The Jollity Hat,” the landlady at The Crown had told him, just after he’d arrived in Colne and taken lodgings. He’d gone up into the town immediately after getting settled but found no place with that name. Upon his return to The Crown she’d admonished him. “Don’t be daft, lad—it only opens on Fridays.”
Dorian realizes he’s gone into a bit of a trance, coaxed into it by the idiocy of the dial tone droning in his ear. He feels like a ‘tableau-of-one’ in his little glass box, illuminated against the night. And now it is Friday . . . and now he’d walk up the hill into Colne’s center and meet the doctor’s contact, the man who would help him supposedly re-acquire the meaning of everything. But there’s something that bothers him in the way the road snakes away, the three-story buildings on either side rising up to give Albert Road the appearance of a great big crack in the ground.
He takes a few steps away from the haven of the phone box; away from The Crown and the train station behind it, the station that could still take him away, should he choose to turn back. Instead he continues, contemplating the dark vista around him. Someone had built this town on a ridge for a reason. Surely. That’s what the doctor had said: the town was conducive for the flooding therapy that he had in mind? Maybe that was what was troubling him. But now that night had descended, things had changed.Colne was nightmarish.
To the north and the south, lay great valleys: low, latent and lewd. As he walks uphill towards the sodium glow of the town center, he looks both ways at the intersections of Albert Road. The terraced houses on the side streets fall away into the tarry blackness of the night. He looks down the street to his left. Pale mist, low hanging and contrasting against the darkness. And is that d
istant music he can hear? Choral voices sing unintelligible messages in ethereal arioso loops: someone lamenting in a distant attic room, perhaps? He shudders and presses on, uphill and east toward the lights. The wind picks up; whips him in the face as if being funneled directly at him by the malevolent buildings, those stoic and scrutinizing faces.
Soon he is in the town center, amongst the pubs and snuggeries of bookies and shops. Dorian discovers a gap in the buildings that reveals the swirling miasmic vapors and distant inferno pockets, blazing against a black canvas of the south valley like so many cyclopean eyes. A sick feeling grows in his stomach at how the south is in such stark contrast to the damp mistiness of the valley to the north.
The wind rattles the sign of a nearby building causing it to swing back and forth. Dorian turns and is surprised to see a small pub wedged between two larger ones at the rear of an inset square, just off the main pavement. He’s sure it wasn’t there on his sortie the previous afternoon. It’s the Jollity Hat. He stands there for a second with the wind flapping against his clothing, his hair blowing out of arrangement and that sign creaking unbearably. The main crossroad traffic light at the end of the town’s precinct is on green, as if a signal for Dorian to enter the pub. He takes a gulp of air and walks towards the building.
Inside, the closing of the door at his back silences the angst of the weather and cocoons him within the vestibule. Heavy red velvet curtains hang in front of him, ornately tasseled with gold thread at the hems where they kiss the linoleum, which is printed to look like the black and white tiles of an American diner-car’s floor. He palms aside the drapes and enters a large, dimly lit bar area. In the center of the room is a snooker table, around which several men dance to folk music from the jukebox, throwing Egyptian shapes and at synchronized intervals, the monkey and the mashed potato. Their pints of lager, drained to various levels of emptiness, are dotted around the cushioned edges in front of them. A fire-eater on stilts totters back and forth in the far corner, occasionally emitting a sulphurous jet from his mouth that roars above the heads of the dancing men. Sucking in his gut and wiping away the beads of perspiration that have emerged at his hairline, Dorian scans the bar beyond the patrons. Among the throng of moribund drinkers on barstools is a man matching Doctor Trebor’s description: mantis-thin with a tasseled leather waistcoat and a checkered flat cap.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 28
