City of Rose

by Rob Hart

  There’s mumbling from inside the house. Metal sliding against metal. Something heavy is dropped on the floor.

  I move a little closer, and the mumbling sounds like someone who’s frustrated by a task but also not particularly engaged with it.

  Fuck it. I get on my knees and peek through the hole. See a shotgun, and a pair of hands picking a shell up off the floor. Trying to load it in, dropping it. The guy is right on the other side of the door and can’t seem to get his gun loaded.

  I twist the knob and throw the door open hard enough to hit him and knock him back. The shotgun slides across the floor. I burst into the house, shut the door behind me, and it’s dark, the outside world streaming through the hole in the door, gray light dancing around motes of dust.

  The guy on the ground is trying to say something, struggling to get up, on his hands and knees now. I kick him in the stomach hard enough to flip him on his back. I get a good look at him. He looks like a gay lumberjack. Big, carefully trimmed beard that reaches past his collarbone, rainbow plaid shirt with denim short-shorts, and work boots laced tightly to his feet. No socks. Can’t be Chicken Man. This guy looks anorexic in comparison.

  He holds onto his stomach and groans and says, “The universe is too small for the both of us. You could destroy everything by being here.”

  Seems he’s also high as fuck.

  He stays on the floor, not too interested in getting up, so I grab the shotgun and turn it over in my hands. It’s heavier than I thought it would be and I have no idea how to work it, with the loading and the cocking and all that. Guns aren’t my thing. I’ve never even seen a shotgun in real life. But I figure it’s best to hold on to it. I take another peek out the hole in the front door. No cops, no sound of sirens, no one even outside. It’s early in the day. Most people are probably at work. Might be nobody even heard the gun.

  It’s now I can smell something in the house, harsh and unfamiliar and chemical. The guy on the floor is still talking about relative size and dimension so I look around to make sure he’s alone. The living room is tidy. Two couches and a cast iron stove and a bookshelf, and some old pizza boxes and beer bottles arranged carefully on the table. Kitchen looks like it came out of a catalogue from the 1980s and hasn’t been touched since.

  Toward the back there are two bedrooms. One has a couple of mattresses on the floor, with sheets poorly stretched over them. There’s a gas mask lying on one of the makeshift beds.

  That’s not encouraging.

  The second bedroom, the bigger one, looks like a lab. On one table there are rows of beakers and electric hot plates. Glass baking dishes, small metal containers of lighter fluid. There’s a large pile of pills and a mini-fridge humming away, the only sound in the room. I lift the flap of a cardboard box with my boot. It’s filled with bulk packages of empty gelatin capsules. The smell in here is like being downwind of New Jersey refineries in the summer.

  At first I think: Meth. But my rudimentary understanding of how meth is made, based entirely on the first two seasons of Breaking Bad, seems to indicate this setup is too small, with not enough ventilation.

  Then I find a pile of boxes of cough medicine discarded in the corner.

  I pick one up. They’re all the same. A generic store brand. I check the trash and it’s full of small dark bottles, tendrils of red goo clinging to the white caps. I look at the box again, check the active ingredients.

  Dextromethorphan.

  It’s a cough suppressant, and in high quantities it makes you trip. The technical term is “robo-tripping,” which makes me think of Robocop tripping balls on acid, which is a very funny thing to think about.

  I don’t have a baseline of comparison here. Psychedelics and hallucinogens are not my thing. I once saw a kid who weighed a third of what I do get caught up in the throes of a bad trip. He tore through three cops like a windmill. It was the fourth cop—and a Taser—that brought him down. The thought of me out of control scares the shit out of me. Especially since I know what it looks like when I lose control.

  No, pills and powders are my thing.

  Or, were my thing, until I realized what a mess they were making me into.

  So, robo-tripping. People guzzle a bottle of this shit and hope they don’t puke it up before the trip starts. Given the setup here it looks like they’re extracting it. Which makes sense. Who wants to drink a whole bottle of cough syrup?

  Maybe the kid out front took too much. He seems more concerned about his own metaphysical state than me being here to rip him off.

  I head back out to the living room and find him sitting on the couch with a Rubik’s cube in his hand. He’s not trying to solve it, just staring into the center of it. I stand in front of him, still holding the shotgun, which is making me uncomfortable, but I don’t want to put it down in case he might grab it. Or, worse, someone more lucid walks in.

  “I’m looking for a guy named Dirk and his daughter, Rose,” I tell him. “Have you seen either of them?”

  He shakes his head. “Perhaps the answer lies at the center of the cube?”

  I snap my fingers in front of him. He won’t look up at me. I consider hitting him in the side of the head with the shotgun but that’s sort of unfair. I have no idea how to handle this.

  The shotgun is still in my hands. Someone could come back. Maybe someone did call the cops. I don’t like any of what’s happening right now. I place the gun on the counter and pick up a dishtowel and go to work, wiping it down the best I can.

  I go back to the lumberjack, get down at eye level with him. “What’s your name?”

  “I am the jester of infinity.”

  “When you aren’t the jester of infinity, who are you?”

  He stops looking into the cube and gazes up at me, his vision so out of whack he looks nearly cross-eyed. “They call me Thaddeus.”

  “Thaddeus, do you want to come for a ride?”

  “Will we travel to the center of the cube?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  He smiles and tucks the Rubik’s cube to his side. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  Druggies. You have to know how to talk to them.

  We step out of the front door and I find the teddy bear lying on the porch. There’s a small gash on the side where one of the shotgun pellets nicked it. Better the bear than me.

  The cut isn’t so bad. I could probably sew it up myself.

  That much is a relief.

  Thaddeus is so intent on counting the threads in the maroon carpet on the floor in the back that I figure I could trust him alone for a little bit, so I pull into a small storefront for my cell phone carrier, making sure to leave the car in view of the window.

  I know my priority should be Crystal and the kid, but this job is getting a bit more complicated than anticipated, and not having a cell phone isn’t going to make it any easier.

  There’s a goofy-looking guy behind the counter. Beige polo shirt and beige face. He’s the only person in the store. There’s some peaceful music playing over the speakers and still I’m on edge because every time I walk into a store like this, all I can do is think about the ways the salespeople want to screw me out of money.

  He pulls up my records and launches into some spiel about all the different shiny new smartphones I can buy and what they cost. He seems to fancy himself a cutthroat salesman and his face droops when I ask him if I’m eligible for a free phone and yes, seems I am.

  I settle on something that makes calls and send texts and also has a whole bunch of other bells and whistles I don’t give a shit about. I agree to re-up my contract for another two years, and rush through everything else, one eye on the car.

  The salesman tries to talk me into a bunch of peripherals—case and car charger and whatnot, so I tell him to fuck himself, and after that he silently completes the transaction and hands me a white plastic bag with everything in it. Though the phone was technically free, there was a thirty-dollar “service charge” for activating it and re-upping my contr
act. I fold up the receipt and put it in my wallet so I can make sure to get Chicken Man to reimburse me after I’m done beating the shit out of him. I bring the bag with the phone to the car and of course, of course Thaddeus is gone.

  Why wouldn’t he be?

  Why did I think this was a good idea?

  I’m in a small strip mall across from a Plaid Pantry, the West Coast version of 7-Eleven. The sign is colorful, and it’s the only thing around here that’s colorful, so I figure that might be where he headed.

  I head to the street, not paying attention, and I nearly walk into oncoming traffic. I look up and there’s a Prius coming to a stop to let me cross, the bumper a few feet from my kneecaps. And yet the driver is smiling.

  I can’t believe the guy driving it stopped to let me cross and doesn’t even look angry. I also can’t believe how it snuck up on me like that, but as it pulls away, the engine barely makes a gentle hum, so that explains that.

  If we were in New York that driver would have run me over to teach me a lesson about looking both ways.

  And it wouldn’t have been a Prius, probably.

  This town is weird.

  Inside the Plaid Pantry, tucked behind a fort of candy bars and high-fructose corn snacks, a pear-shaped woman with purple hair is looking toward the back, her face turned up like she smelled something bad.

  Bingo.

  I find Thaddeus staring into the swirling frozen drink machine, red and white twisting together in a spiral of sugar and slush. I get up alongside him and he taps it and screams into the machine, “Did you speak with the orb?”

  Control your anger before it controls you.

  Inhale, exhale.

  Dammit. It’s not working. I’m still angry.

  I grab him by the scruff of his neck and pull him toward the front of the store. He pushes away from me and takes a swing. I duck, grab his arm, and wrap it behind his back. Not enough to pop out his shoulder, but enough it’ll hurt and I can lead him around pretty easy.

  Thaddeus yells nonsense obscenities and the woman at the counter dives for the phone.

  “Everything’s fine,” I tell her, and she pauses. “Be out of your way in a minute. My friend had too much to drink.”

  She clearly doesn’t believe me, but she also doesn’t pick up the phone.

  Thaddeus thrashes but doesn’t have much of a choice but to let me push him out into the parking lot and across the street. His behavior is erratic. This is a stupid drug. Even stupider to take it if he was in charge of a makeshift lab.

  Once we get to the car he’s calmed a bit so I open the door and toss him across the back seat. He smacks his head on the car seat but I manage to get him all the way in. I hope the woman in the convenience store didn’t call the cops. And even if she did, that she’s not looking out the window, or at the car’s license plate.

  As I’m climbing into the front seat he asks, “Where are you taking me?”

  “I swear if you say one more word I am going to knock the living shit out of you.”

  I pull my new phone out of the bag. A generic Android phone, and the battery is half full. I figure out the basics—phone calls and texts. I can’t call Crystal because I don’t know her number, but I do know the number for the club, so I call there. Tommi answers. Before I can say anything there’s a shuffling sound and Crystal is on the line. Excitement spills out of her voice. “Was she there? Do you have Rose?”

  “There’s been a complication.”

  She doesn’t say anything to that.

  I’m about to say she should wait there, but figure it’s probably best not to interrogate someone in the throes of a drug trip at a strip club, so I rattle off my address and tell her to meet me at my apartment.

  From the back seat Thaddeus yells, “The carpet tastes like purple.”

  This is going to be a fun afternoon.

  It doesn’t take much convincing to get Thaddeus to follow me up to my apartment. I jingle my keys at him and that does it. I walk alongside him up the outdoor concrete staircase, past the smell of food I can’t afford drifting out of the Korean barbecue joint on the ground level, past the serene music and incense fog of the yoga studio on the second level.

  We get up to the third floor and I lead him through to the orange metal door of my apartment. I park him on the couch and set up my laptop, fire up some SpongeBob Squarepants on Netflix, and he stares at the screen in awe. He’s so enraptured he doesn’t even bother with the Rubik’s cube.

  This is the first time someone other than me is in the apartment. Plus, now I have a lady coming over. I walk the length of it. It’s railroad style—bedroom at the far end, kitchen and bathroom at the other end, living area in the middle. The bright tangerine walls look horrifying to me but I figure most people would find the color kitschy. My favorite part: A window that leads out onto a roof, so I can sit outside and pretend real hard like I’m sitting on my old fire escape in the East Village.

  This apartment isn’t much, but it’s also twice the size of my old place and a fraction of the price. Or, the price I would have been paying had I not scammed a rent control property from a dead woman.

  Long story.

  When I left home, I didn’t bring much with me. Mostly clothes. When I rolled into Portland I scavenged some furniture, bought some books. The whole thing is pretty sparse. Which makes it look neat. It’s easy to keep things neat when you don’t own a whole lot of stuff.

  There are two things on the wall I don’t really want Crystal to see because I don’t want to talk about them.

  The small map of the United States with little x’s scattered across it.

  And the picture of my dad.

  But I also don’t want to tear things down.

  Oh well.

  I do move a few things around to make the place appear a little tidier. At the kitchen island, I put the three empty coffee mugs in the sink and take the community college brochures and put them into a neat pile. I put on another pot of coffee, figuring that might help snap Thaddeus out of his trance, and also I want some coffee. The pot is gurgling when there’s a knock on the door.

  Crystal is wearing black jeans and a green sweater so threadbare it gives off hints of a black bra through the weave. The look on her face is equal parts confused and terrified. I bring her inside and she looks toward the couch and says, “Thaddeus.”

  Thaddeus doesn’t look up.

  “You know him?” I ask.

  “I know he’s one of Dirk’s dumb-ass friends.”

  I run her through what happened with the shotgun and the dextromethorphan lab. She shakes her head, says, “Has he said anything?”

  “Nothing that makes any sense. He’s on another planet. Have you ever dealt with this before?”

  “I’ve never done it but I’ve seen it. It can hit some people pretty hard.” She looks around. “It’s too dark in here. Can you turn on the lights? Bright light can help.”

  I flip the switch and the track lighting barely illuminates the room.

  “Not enough,” she says. “Does it get bright in the bathroom?”

  I grab Thaddeus by the arm, pull him to his feet, and drag him over. He’s looking back at the laptop and asks, “But what about the starfish?”

  Crystal snaps on the light and I put Thaddeus on the toilet, and she leans down to him, trying to get him to look into her eyes. She snaps her fingers and says, “Thaddeus. It’s Crystal. You know me.”

  Thaddeus finally focuses on her and says, “You aren’t Crystal. You’re a lizard in a skin suit.”

  Crystal puts her hand on his cheek. Says some nice things trying to soothe him. Says she needs to find her daughter. Begs and pleads. While she does that I turn the shower on to the coldest setting. I grab Thaddeus by the shirt and pull him to his feet. Crystal yelps as I pull him past her and he screams when the water hits him and he tries to struggle against me but I’m twice his size so it’s not much of a fight.

  Crystal yells for me to stop. I tell her, “I’m tired of
playing.”

  I hold Thaddeus under the water and we’re both getting soaked and it’s freezing, so cold that my muscles tighten like rods of rebar, but it seems to be working, because the faraway look in Thaddeus’s eyes is swimming into focus. Like someone came home and turned the lights on in a vacant house.

  I get a bead on him, get him to look at me, and ask, “Where the fuck is Dirk?”

  He sputters, water spilling into his mouth, says, “I don’t know.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Really, I don’t,” he says. “His Mexican… he was going to see his Mexican before he sold the girl. That’s it.”

  A stone hand wraps around my heart and squeezes.

  I push into Thaddeus to ask him what he means about selling Rose, when his eyes go blank and I know this look from how much time I spend in bars, but I don’t have enough time to twist out of the way before he vomits about a gallon of foul liquid that collects where my hands are gripped onto his shirt.

  The smell hits me, sea animals rotting on a beach, and the feeling starts as a scratch at the bottom of my esophagus. I turn to Crystal to tell her to get out, but before I can get the words out I’m puking on Thaddeus, screaming chunks onto his face, because unfortunately for Thaddeus, I’m taller than he is.

  This makes Thaddeus puke more.

  Which makes me puke more.

  In my peripheral vision Crystal is stumbling out of the bathroom, her hand over her mouth, and I think we’ve saved ourselves from her blowing chunks too, but she retches in the kitchen.

  I slam my eyes shut, hold my breath, and push both of us further into the freezing water to clean off. Try to think about anything but puking, which of course means I can’t think of anything but puking. Thaddeus is still going, too.

  Sense prevails and I turn him around to look at the white plastic wall of the shower stall, focus on my breathing, let him finish. Not having to look at it makes it a little easier. I turn the water up until it’s a little bit warmer, because I feel like we’re going to be in here for a little while.