by Chuck Wendig
So, he said, go somewhere with a lot of people.
Miriam offered: "A dance club." You get lots of people, most of them younger, a lot of them with risky behaviors. Cokesnorters, baseheads, unprotected sex monkeys, drunk drivers, the whole gamut. Ashley said no. Bus station. Let's hit a bus station.
Except, Miriam explained, that's not the best place, because at least half the people aren't coming, they're going. Which means, were she to find someone who was going to bite it soon, she and Ashley wouldn't be on-scene for the event, not unless they wanted to hop a bus to Des Moines. And nobody wants to go to Des Moines.
No, Ashley said. Ashley thought he knew the score. Thought he was so damn smart. She'd been doing this for eight years now, but he's going to tell her a thing or two? Straighten her out, help her to "up her game?"
Fine. Bus station, she conceded. Whatever.
And here they are.
Across the way, he looks impatient. Foot tapping. Head lolling back. Mouth open, catching flies, like this is torture for him. What an asshole, she thinks. Torture. For him.
Hilarious.
By now, she's tired and pissed. She steps off the curb to cross in front of a bus and –
He's on his cycle, a road bike with tires so thin they look like they were squirted out of a pipette, and he's got all his tight Lycra cyclist gear on like he's being sponsored by Goodyear or Kellogg's or some shit, and the tire hits a stone and he skids, flips, and then there's a screeching of brakes and a bumper crashing into him, shattering his hip, and his body (like a marionette whose strings were cut) slides up onto the hood and his helmeted head cracks the windshield and then everything's blurry and black and brain bleeding and
– she turns, finding a man waving to another man, saying goodbye, be they friends or lovers. She doesn't expect it. She was just walking along, lost in her own thoughts, and his hand must have grazed her own. It doesn't help. Yes, he dies. No, it's not tomorrow. One year from now – well, really, one year, two months, and thirteen days. Still. He looks like he has money. It's close enough that she'll consider marking it in her date book later. (If you're around, later…)
Shaking it off, she darts in front of an incoming bus (wondering for a moment, will it hit me? Is this my time?) and steps up to Ashley, who gives her the stink-eye.
"Anything?" he asks.
"This is like fishing without bait."
"So that's a no."
"Yes. No."
He shrugs. "Well, get back out there. Do your… psychic thing."
"This is really your idea of a partnership? You sit on your ass while I go and do the work?"
"My gifts don't come into play until you've hooked a fish, sweetheart."
"Your gifts? Seriously? Spare me. So far, your only gift to this world is that winning smile of yours. Everything else is taking up precious air and space."
"The smile's just the window dressing. But it is a key weapon in my arsenal of charm."
"Arsenal of charm," she repeats. "I'm hungry."
"I don't care."
"You damn well should care."
He yawns. "Listen. We don't have a place to stay. We need a place to stay. When we have shelter, then we'll think about food. Besides, you wouldn't want me to, oh, I don't know, cast you adrift, call the police, call your mother, that sort of thing?"
"I get it. You're holding the cards. Good for you. But quick biology lesson – this girl's gotta eat. I'm human. We humans thrive on food, not to mention liquor and cigarettes. I've got money. Let's hit a Waffle House? Then a motel? It's on me."
He seems to ponder. Then nods. "Fine. Yeah. Let's do it."
INTERLUDE
The Interview
"The boy with the balloon," Miriam says, her face tightening.
"Yes," Paul says. Waiting.
She hates this story. Hates thinking about it. Hates retelling it worst of all.
"It was about two years after."
"After you–"
"After I earned this unique ability."
Paul lifts his brow. "That's an interesting word. Earned?"
"Yeah. Never mind that," she says, waving him off. "I was hungry, and I was tooling around this yuppie suburb of D.C., and so I went to a Wendy's to get one of their… whatever their milkshake-without-the-milk product is called. A McSlurry."
"A Frosty."
"Whatever. I paid. I got my chemical-byproduct-industrial-foam-sugared-lubricant in a cup, and I went to throw away my trash like a good citizen. And there he is."
"He?"
"Austin. Little tow-head with a head full of freckles. He has this red Mylar balloon with a picture of a blue birthday cake with yellow candles. He was nine years old. I know because he told me. He came up to me and said, 'Hi, my name is Austin; it's my birthday, and I'm nine years old.'"
Miriam worries at a fingernail. She knows that if she keeps up with it, she'll soon bite it down to the cuticle, so to stop herself, she taps out another cigarette and lights it.
"I told him, I dunno. Good for you, kid. I'm not exactly the sentimental type, but I liked Austin. He had that bold, dumb-kid outlook – everybody's your friend, and the best thing that can happen to you is to have a birthday. At that age, a birthday is like this… big bucket of potential – a piñata exploding with candy, a toy-box upended onto the floor. You get older, and you start to see how each birthday is really just a turnstile, and it takes you down, down, deeper, deeper. Suddenly, the birthdays are no longer about potential and become entirely the inevitable."
"And then you touched him," Paul says.
"You make it sound like I molested him in a van. For the record, he touched me. The kid grabbed my hand and went to shake it, like we were business partners now or something. Probably something his daddy taught him. How to shake hands properly like a big boy. He shook my hand, and that's when I saw."
Miriam describes it:
Austin would run out into traffic. Little sneakers pounding ground.
He'd be reaching up. Looking up. Little fingers reaching, waggling, as he bolted forth.
Chasing a Mylar balloon.
A white SUV would come out of nowhere.
It would knock his shoes off and send the boy's body tumbling like a doll across the asphalt.
It would happen twenty-two minutes after Miriam met him.
Paul sits there, quiet. He tries to say something, but then doesn't.
"Exactly," Miriam says. "Dead kid. Up until that point, I'd seen how lots of people were going to die. And yeah, I'd seen how a few kids were going to bite it, but they were always going to die… for lack of a better word, normally. Forty, fifty years later. They'd have their lives. Sad, but we all have to suck the pipe and take the Great Dirtnap. But this kid. Dead at age nine. Dead on his birthday."
She takes a long drag off the cigarette.
"And it was going to happen on my watch. I was there. I figured, here's my chance. I can stop this. I can be – what's the word? Proactive. Up until that point, all my efforts were passive. Guy's gonna die in two years in a drunk-driving accident, I tell him, 'Hey, dumb-fuck, don't drink and drive, at least not on June third,' and he can do what he wants with that information. But here? Now? A kid's gonna run out into traffic? How hard is it to stop a kid from running out into traffic? I figure, I'll show him something shiny. I'll just… Indian leg-wrestle the kid to the ground. I'll stick him in a goddamn trash can. Something. Anything.
"I got this great big swell of hope in me, you know? Like a bubble. I suddenly felt like… here it was. This was my purpose. This horrible thing that happened to me, this horrible so-called 'talent,' maybe it has a reason after all. Even if I stop one stupid little idiot kid from sucking a bumper at age nine, then it's all worth it, forever anon."
Miriam closes her eyes. She feels the anger rising in her, still.
"And then I met the cunt."
Paul blanches.
"What?" she asks. "You don't like that word?"
"It's just… a harsh word."
/> "Harsh word for harsh times, Paul. Don't be a girl about it. In England, they say it all the time. It's just part of the language."
"We're not in England."
"No shit?" Miriam snaps her fingers. "I guess I'd better stop driving on the left side of the road, then. Explains all the honking. And the fatal car crashes."
Paul's mouth forms a grim line. "So you met some… woman."
"Austin's bitchy cunt whore mother. Twat bitch axe wound prostitute witch. She's got her designer handbag, her Botox-paralyzed smile, her hair pulled back so tight she can't fucking blink without tearing her eyelids off, her little cell phone Bluetooth robot antenna shoved up into her ear or her ass or whatever. I went up to her and I said, 'Lady, I need your help. Your kid. He's going to die soon unless you help me save him.'"
"How'd she react?" Paul asks.
"I'm going to go with 'not well' for $200, Alex."
"I think it'd actually be, 'What is, not well.' Because it's Jeopardy."
Miriam takes a last drag of the Marlboro and chain-lights another off the cherry. "You really know how to take the energy out of a story, Paul."
"Sorry."
"Twat-cunt looked at me like I just took a piss on her complete set of Sex and the City DVDs, so I went ahead and repeated myself. The woman mumbled something at me about being crazy, and I reached over to grab her arm – I got a hold of her shirt, not her skin – and she didn't like that very much.
"Fast-forward twenty minutes, and I'm yelling at the cop, she's yelling at me, the cop is just trying to make sense of everything–"
"Wait. Cop?" Paul asks.
"Yes, Paul, the cop. I said we were fast-forwarding twenty minutes, c'mon. Catch up. She marched outside and called the police, said some crazy lady was threatening her son."
"And you didn't run?"
Miriam flicks ash at Paul; he blinks it away.
"No, remember? I was trying to save the kid's life? I figured a cop on the scene could only help, not hurt. Maybe he'd drag us all downtown, which would solve the problem right out of the gate. I wasn't just going to… leave the scene, let it all happen."
Her hand tightens into a fist, and she pops her knuckles.
"But I should've. I should've run away. Because while we were all standing there yelling at one another outside a fucking Wendy's, Austin saw a penny on the ground. Even now, I can hear his voice play out, but at the time I wasn't giving it any thought, you know? I was so caught up in giving his stupid goddamn mother a piece of my goddamn mind that I didn't really register what was happening.
"Austin says, 'See a penny, pick it up!' and he reaches down to pick up this… this penny. And when he does, the balloon slips from his grip. Now, I don't know how long he'd been carrying around the balloon, but the helium had started to go south, so it didn't float away. Instead it just… hung there, in mid-air, until a wind came and nudged it along."
Paul swallows a knot.
"The balloon picks up speed. He chases after it. I see him run for it. And I try to yell, but the mother is yelling at me, not watching her son. And the cop is watching the mother, because she looks like she's about to rake my eyes out. I scream and start to run but the cop pulls me back.
"It's still there. In my head. The balloon drifting past. The SUV. His body. His shoes. It's unreal. Like something you'd see on the internet. Like a joke."
Silence.
Miriam blinks away the start of some tears. She won't let them come.
"That's messed up," Paul says finally.
She grits her teeth. "No, what's messed up is what comes later. After you pull yourself out of that moment, after you find a way to escape the loop of images your brain keeps playing, you start to make some connections. You realize, all of life is written in a book, and we all get one book, and when that book is over, so are we. Worse, some of us get shorter books than others. Austin's book was a pamphlet. Once it's over, it's over. Throw it away. Say goodbye, Gracie."
"That's morbid."
Miriam stands, kicks over her chair, then picks it up and wings it hard – it clatters against the warehouse floor, spinning away.
"Paul, don't you get it? I tried to save this stupid little kid's life, and in trying to save it, I'm the one who doomed it. I killed him. If I didn't have that vision, if I didn't act on that vision, his dog-fucker of a mother would've probably dragged him into a shoe store or back home and she'd never have been distracted by the crazy girl, and her kid would never have made it to the highway. It's like some sick snake-biting-its-own-tail bullshit. Fate had a plan, and I was part of that plan all along even though I thought I was being slick and wriggling free from destiny's grip. By trying to stop it, I made it happen."
The chair is far away now, so Miriam sits down on the floor. She smokes quietly, huddled over, breathing heavy and deep.
"That's why I don't try to save people," Miriam finally says.
"Oh."
Miriam stubs her cigarette out on the hard concrete floor.
"Now," she says. "What you really want to know is, how did I get this way?"
FIFTEEN
Ouroboros
Waffle House, a staple of the American South, is essentially a greasy yellow coffin. It's small. It's boxy. Half the people inside are little more than animated corpses, stuffing their mouths full of hash browns and sausages and the requisite waffles, their bodies bloating and swelling, their hearts dying. Miriam thinks it's awesome. She eats here because it's just one more nail in the ol' pine box; she can hear her arteries clogging, crunchy and crispy like the skin on fried chicken.
The irony, she thinks, is that you can't smoke in here anymore. Now only the Waffle House waitress is the approved death merchant.
Miriam stands outside now. It's spitting rain. Cars drive past. She sees a defunct Circuit City through a haze of smoke, and a little Korean place across the highway sitting next to a Jo Ann Fabrics. In the distance are the yellow lights and dark silhouette of the Charlotte skyline, a neatly arranged picket fence of skyscrapers, hardly the tumbling monstrosity that is New York or Philly.
She feels perched on an edge. Precariously balanced. She doesn't want to think about the future – she so rarely does anymore, usually just letting life carry her along like she's a discarded Styrofoam cup floating on a lazy, crazy river. But it keeps nagging at her. Worrying with little teeth.
She's heard that, in lab studies, rats and monkeys who are given the illusion of choice end up relatively healthy. Even if they only have two choices, a lever that doles out an electric shock and a lever that doles out a different electric shock, they at least feel like they have some say in their outcome, and end up being much happier and more productive. Rats and monkeys who just get the shock arbitrarily, no choice at all, end up anxious, agitated, chewing out fur and biting holes in their little hands and little feet before dying of cancer or heart death.
Miriam feels like she has no control. She wonders how long it will be before she's chewing her own fingers down to the bone.
Of course, it might also be Louis.
He haunts her. He's not even dead, and she sees his ghost. A chance meeting once, and now she sees glimpses of him in places: standing in a crowd, driving a nearby minivan, in the reflection of the smeary Waffle House window –
"Miriam?"
She wheels.
The ghost is talking to her.
"Hey," the ghost of Louis says. Except – normally, the ghost has those Xs of electrical tape over bloody eye sockets. This one, not so much. Real eyes. Warm eyes. Watching.
"You're not a ghost," she says aloud.
He pauses. Pats himself down as if to make sure he's still physically present. "Nope. And neither are you, from the looks of it."
"That's debatable." She feels shaken.
In her head, Louis is dead. It's easier that way. This is harder.
"What are you doing here?" she asks.
He laughs. "Eating."
"I guess that makes sense." She feels embarrassed. A blush
rises to her cheeks; that never happens. She tries to think of a witty retort. She can't. She feels unmoored, woefully unprotected. Stripped bare.
"You want to join me?"
She wants to run.
Instead, she says, "I just finished."
