by Tim McBain
I taste battery acid in the back of my mouth, feel it clinging to the fleshy pink of my throat. I swallow a couple of times, but it doesn’t go away.
I pull the gun out of my pants. I’m going to feel stupid when I open this door and point this firearm at the nothing inside of the room, but I would feel even more stupid if I got recaptured by Farber’s people because I was too proud to get my gun out.
I unlock the deadbolt, drive my shoulder into the wood, and the door pops open, but I lose my balance and crash into the room, stumbling three steps and sprawling into a belly smack on the shag, the gun flinging out of my hand and banging into the wall next to the bathroom door.
So that’s embarrassing.
Then I realize that there’s a light coming from underneath the bathroom door. No way I left that on. I crawl forward, as close to a sprint crawl as a man can muster. But the door opens before I can get there, a silhouette takes shape in the light in the doorway. The figure stoops and grabs my gun.
I stop crawling somewhere in there and stand on my knees. My heart shits itself about six times during these three seconds, and my heartbeat hovers just under the sound barrier. The only thing that comes out of me is the tiniest gasp.
“Drop this?” a woman’s voice says, holding the gun by the barrel, not quite extending the handle toward me but almost.
I can’t speak, of course. I gasp again, more like a slightly loud inhalation than anything.
“What are you wearing?” she says.
She takes a step back, setting the gun down on the bathroom sink. As the light hits her face, I finally realize what’s going on.
It’s Babinaux.
Chapter 33
She sits on the edge of the bed, and I sit in my blanket pile on the floor – my bed, I guess. We both hoist cans of cola to our faces periodically, suckling at the sweet nectar. I tell her a bunch of the things that have happened. A couple of times I catch myself, stopping just short of expounding upon my plans to kill Farber in a violent manner. I also leave out all mentions of seizures. Cause you know.
“You ready for dessert?” I say.
“Dessert?” she says.
I pull the bag of Skittles out of my pocket and shake them in a manner that I hope comes off as triumphant, a celebration of artificial flavors.
“What’s that?” she says. “Are those Skittles?
I stop shaking the package so the logo becomes more legible.
“Absolutely,” I say. “A rainbow for tasting.”
Her forehead wrinkles and makes her look confused, but she smiles at the same time.
“Do you eat these often?” she says.
“Well, no,” I say. “I’m a grown man.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” she says.
“You guess so?”
The smile seems on the verge of tipping into full blown laughter.
“I don’t know. I don’t see a lot of grown men shaking around bags of Skittles. That’s all.”
Sheesh. Nobody thinks I’m cool after all. Not anymore. I bet Glenn would be sucking down Skittles right now and loving every minute of it. Instead I’m stuck with the snobby candy police.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess most men shake around boxes of Gobstoppers or something, right? Maybe some Twix.”
She just looks at me.
I rip open the bag, dump some Skittles into my palm and shove them in my mouth – the smorgasbord first bite. I think later in the bag I’ll get to separating the flavors from each other – eating 2 or 3 orange at a time, for example, but that’s no way to start out. You gotta dive in head first and get the full experience.
As I dump out a second handful, I look up to find Babinaux staring at the candy cupped in my hand. Our eyes meet.
“Are they good?” she says.
“Fuck yeah, they’re good,” I say, mouth still full of Skittle. “They’re Skittles, dude. They’re an excellent candy.”
She just looks at them in my hand. I pick out a couple of green and pop those into the largest hole in my face. I look out at the room, but I can still feel her eyes on me, on the colorful candy shells in my mitt. This is how it always goes, right? A guy gets his manhood questioned for his candy selections, and then the naysayers get their hands out for a little piece of this tasty rainbow action two seconds later. Unbelievable.
“Let me guess,” I say. “You want some.”
“Well, I could try a few,” she says.
“Yeah, I figured,” I say.
I hold up the bag toward her, give it a shake. It takes her a second to catch my meaning and hold her hand out. I tip the package and Skittles drizzle onto her fingers and tumble into her palm.
She brings her cupped hand up close to her face, examining the skittles with great care. For a split second it crosses my mind that this is some kind of pod person that is not the real Babinaux, but I dismiss the theory. This actually does seem like something she would do.
She hovers her nose over the Skittles, gives a sniff.
“It’s not a two-hundred-year-old cabernet, you know,” I say. “Just eat the damn things.”
She glares at me for a second, then makes a little pinchy crabclaw with her thumb and index finger and plucks a red skittle from the pile. She drops it onto her tongue.
“Do I chew it?” she says, her speech a little mushy sounding from the candy impediment.
I chuckle.
“You can eat them however you want,” I say. “I like to think that the only Skittle rule is that there are no rules.”
Chapter 34
Later in the evening, we watch TV. Neither of us can pay attention, though, I don’t think. Too much going on. Too much to think about. Our thoughts keep fluttering to new spots and emitting some distracting glow like a lightning bug.
And we keep talking, too, nervous chatter, like when the cold makes your jaw quiver except now words come out in fits and starts, jerky sentences, incomplete thoughts, fragments that seem poised to go somewhere and instead free fall out into nothing.
“Do you think we’ll hide out long?” she says. “If so, we could probably secure better accommodations.”
Her toes pick at the orange shag as if to illustrate her point.
“Hell no we won’t hide long,” I say. “I don’t have time to sit around and do nothing. Forget that. Sit around and wait for the bad guys to close in? That won’t be the end of my story.”
“Oh yeah?” she says, half sitting up. “What’s your big plan, then?”
And I picture Farber sitting in a movie theater, the back of his big bald head round and shiny like a bowling ball with human flesh stretched thin over it. And I stalk up on him in slow motion, pulling the gun out of my pants, feeling the weight of the metal shift out of my belt and into my hand, feeling the texture of the grip, the smooth of the trigger.
I move toward that white ball that seems to glow in the half light of the theater, the glow from the screen flickering and changing and constantly in motion. And there are other people there, but I don’t care who sees. I don’t care who knows.
And violence courses through me in bursts of wet hot red. Every heartbeat sends the hatred all through my body. It swells in my chest and makes the muscles in my jaw coil in spasms and transmits an electric tingle up and down my arms. Cause I’ve been a desperate, powerless thing my whole life. A coward. A child. I’ve never meant much to anyone or even to myself, but I have a chance to set things right. I have one way out of the hole I’ve lived in.
And I can feel it. It’s right there for the taking.
And some other part of my brain tries to send some opposing message, but I can just barely tell it’s even there, like those power lines are dead now. Like those nerves got severed when they killed Glenn. Like how the red light comes on when I push a cassette into the tape player’s mouth. That’s the best that part of me can muster at this point.
And I’m so close now. I don’t blink. I barely breathe. My eyes lock on that skull, too round like a globe or some kind of g
ourd, like when I shoot it a bunch of mushy pumpkin innards and seeds will cascade out instead of blood and bone and brain.
And I lift the gun, I line it up with the back of his skull maybe a foot away, point blank range. And I paw at the trigger, feel my sweaty finger slide over the metal.
And I squeeze, and there’s a flash and a pop too percussive for my ears to even process properly. His head bursts, a couple jars worth of red jelly flying out of the front and slapping the back of the seat in front of his all at once like a red sneeze, all thick goop. The momentum pushes the bowling ball head toward me, flings it back so it cocks on an odd angle upon the neck, a hole torn, jagged edges of flesh and bone framing the empty space where his face used to be.
And I’m back in the shitty motel room, and I can’t breathe. I try to prop myself up on my arms, but they shimmy under me, shaky and weak. And I can see Babinaux’s face through the smeared imagery hung up around me, and her mouth moves, but I can’t hear her. I hear a whooshing sound, a pulsing noise like giant fan rotors spinning all slow, drowning everything out.
And I’m going under, the black swimming around the edge of my vision, dragging me down. I sink into the blankets, falling through the shag carpet, tumbling down to some awful place. Emptiness. Nothingness.
But no. No.
I can’t go away now. I fight it. My eyelids flutter, I try to force them to stay open, but it’s useless. The world seems to rotate past in a vertical flicker like a slot machine.
Fuck it.
I reach out for something else to focus on, grab hold of the pictures in my head, in the movie theater, the gun still clutched in my hand, Farber’s empty face still dangling in front of me like a smashed jack-o’-lantern. And I know what to do. Time reverses in my imagination. The images run backwards. The bowling ball rights itself, the red sneeze retracts into the face, the bang inverts like a backwards snare drum in a psychadelic song, the bullet flies back into the barrel of the gun and the flash does the same.
And I drop the gun. I let it fall onto the carpet in the aisle of the theater. It sounds heavy, but the carpet keeps it from being too loud of a clatter. No heads snap my way. Nothing happens.
I walk back the way I came, up the incline, onto the steps, back to the door, into the hallway, into the light.
And I can breathe again. I can hear again. And Babinaux is asking if I’m OK, and I prop myself on my elbows, they’re still a little shaky, but they hold. I wheel my vision toward her, seated on the edge of the bed. She stares at me, lips pursed in concern.
I focus on my mouth, my lips, my tongue, try to remember how you use all of the parts together to make it speak words and stuff. I can’t remember, but I try to wing it. Only hissing noises come out. I try it again. Sounds like a dog spitting. I’ve never heard a dog spit, but it sounds exactly like what I imagine that would sound like.
And then it comes back to me.
“I’m hungry,” I say.
Pleased with the fruits of this effort, I let myself collapse back into the pillow and blankets.
So soft.
Well, the floor part is hard, but the pillow cushioned my fall, and the blankets have a velvety texture. Sort of like Velveeta.
“What?” she says.
“I meant to say, ‘I’m fine,’” I say. “But I am also hungry. Do you want to get some Snickers or something?”
“What?” she repeats. “No. What just happened to you?”
“I almost had a seizure,” I say. “But I got myself under control, stopped it from happening and shit.”
“So you’re having seizures again?” she says. “How frequently?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Every couple of days or something like that. It’s not a big deal.”
“So that’s why you didn’t tell me about it, huh?” she says. “Cause it’s so not a big deal.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I feel like we’re just glossing over the fact that I’m pretty hungry.”
She sighs and lies down.
We lie in the stillness, not talking. I guess she turned the TV off at some point. I let my eyes droop closed, and I let my thoughts drift.
All is peaceful. Just the sound of my breath going in and out at a slower and slower pace. This goes on for a while, and time seems to stretch out in front of me, an empty shell that I could fill with anything I want. And I am warm and safe and life is so simple. Why can’t this feeling ever last?
And then my mouth moves without me telling it to:
“Why do you think I’m going back to the alley?” I say.
But she’s asleep.
Chapter 35
I turn out the lamp on the end table and crawl back to my blanket fort. The warmth envelops me once more. The heat creeps over me, building and building until I can feel it projecting off of me, a human space heater kicking out the fire. It’s great. After my time walking in the cold today, I have a special appreciation for it. And I wonder if this is how a lizard feels lying on a rock in the sun, his cold blood going warm. Does he just want to lie there forever? Does he want that comfort to never end, even though he knows it must?
My feelings shift slightly, though. I know too well that life isn’t simple. And I have too many questions to lie still for long. I’m awake in the dark after all. This is when my brain gets to doing its thing. This is my specialty.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the seizures are happening for a reason. Maybe they’re warning me off of my course just like they were before. Maybe.
I try to think back on how Glenn described it before when we were in the cells. He launched into this long speech about me and the alley and the cup. And he weaved the words together just right so it all made sense to me in that moment. I felt like the numbers all added up for once. I could see the whole equation and understand it from the beginning to the end.
But moments fade away into other moments, the memories wind up recording right on top of each other, and it all gets confused. That was many moments ago. Hard to remember with much clarity.
The furnace clicks on, and I hear it breathing through the vent on the other side of the room. The white noise is an additional comfort somehow. Is it just the noise, though, or the knowledge that it blows even more warmth into the room? Maybe some of both.
Anyway, Glenn. He said the alley dreams were about patience. He said until I learned to accept my circumstances as fully beyond my control, I was doomed to repeat the same fate over and over. He said it was counterintuitive to wait there hanging upside down, but that sometimes the counterintuitive path is the only way forward. That sometimes you have to let go to move on.
So what if it’s really simple, and I need to let go before I move on just like before? Could that be it? Let go of what, though? Let go of...
I roll over onto my side, look at that gap between the curtains where a little light pokes into the room, some from the moon and some from the buzzing bulb over the door into the lobby. I squint, and the light looks like a bunch of little beams caught in my eyelashes.
Did I already know what to do? Did I know all along and try to block it out? Am I fooling myself?
I think back over each of my recent episodes, the prosecutor in my mind introducing a damning piece of evidence. A timeline establishes itself. A pattern emerges, revealing a cause and an effect. Every time I had a seizure I was right in the middle of doing the same thing, and it should have been so obvious all along. I was thinking about killing Farber, picturing it, watching a movie of it play in my mind, often rendered in vivid detail. And each of these episodes ended the same way. I would imagine it right up until the moment of the actual murder and then fade to black. Tonight I undid it in my imagination, and that staved the seizure off. The exception, the withdrawal, that proves the rule.
So is that what I need to let go of? And what does that mean? If I don’t go on the attack, what happens to me? I just live life on the run, hoping Farber never kills me or Babinaux or anyone else I care about? I just hide out forever?
&n
bsp; Not much of a plan. Not much of a life.
And it could all just be bullshit. All of it could be a fabrication, just waves in the air, like dreams that seem to mean something important but break down into nonsense, lead to nothing like all the rest. Can I bank everything on something like that? On a shared seizure dream that I can’t decipher?
I roll over again, this time onto my other side, facing away from the light. I can make out the corner of the bed, just the vague shape of it. All else is blackness. The heating vent’s breath dies in its throat, and the room grows still again.
How does anyone decide what to do with their lives? Does anybody know what they’re doing? Do they just pretend? How do I know what messages come from some place true and which ones are just meaningless vibrations in the air, random thoughts rattling around in my head?
I mean, would Glenn listen to this message? I consider this a moment. I try to project the pictures in my imagination onto the blackness in front of me like it’s a movie screen, try to picture Glenn backing down, letting Farber be after all that’s happened. I can’t. The actor won’t listen to the director, keeps going off script. I just can’t see him doing that. I think he’d remove Farber’s head with a shotgun blast at his first convenience. I could be wrong, though. I’ve been wrong before.
And I suppose it doesn’t matter what Glenn would do. It matters what I will do.
And I think I know.
Chapter 36
I wake early the next morning, with just the faintest signs of daylight visible through that gap in the curtains. I rise in silence, brushing the blankets away on the way up and stretching upon arrival at an upright position. The muscles in my back creak, an almost silent protest to my early awakening.
I unpile the jeans next to my blanket nest and pull them on, fastening the belt. The denim feels cold against my legs for a moment and then goes warm. I slide on my hoodie and unball the stocking cap I got out of my bag last night and pull that on, too. It squeezes my scalp into my skull, but it always does that when fresh out of the dryer. The acrylic will let go as the day goes on.
