Our Blood in Its Blind Circuit

by J David Osborne

  Wily was saved by the clerk and his steel bat, with which he delivered a swift blow to Tom Miles’ legs. The pimp stumbled away, cursing and holding his thigh, and John Wily caught his breath and dried himself with paper towels from the bathroom’s automated dispenser.

  People say Tom Miles might have come back for Little John. The evidence is solid: the clerk ended up dead a week later, and when Tom was eventually arrested, it was for a triple murder. He’d driven a father, mother, and daughter into the middle of nowhere, shot them, and torched their car. They call that, I believe, a modus operandi.

  THEORY 3:

  THE BEST FRIEND

  The night Tamer Reynolds met John Wily, they stole street signs and lights from a railroad crossing. Tamer dropped the first set, the giant amber bulbs shattering on the asphalt, so John got the second pair, handing them down gently, hooting loud at the moon. They were inseparable. They drank and harassed women at strip clubs. They smoked pot and sold meth. They kept their mouths shut both times the cops kicked in the door, neither of them eyeballing the hidden panel in the floorboards.

  They raised hell. They rigged a taser to a car battery and pressed the coils to the fiberglass of sedans, leaving big black burns in the sides of Chevys and Toyotas. The fuses fried, they’d be free to slim jim the lock open and steal the money or food or TVs that rich people tended to leave in their cars.

  The meth dealing was easy. The tweakers showed up, handed them the money, left with their stuff. They didn’t worry about police surveillance. Tamer had friends in very high places, or low, depending on whether you were talking status or morality. Big men in dark sunglasses would show up and joke around for a few hours with him, just shooting the shit, and John would sit in his leather recliner, smoking a cigarette and laughing when appropriate.

  John’s problem was that he was an idiot. He shacked up with Angela, the two of them spending all day screwing and watching courtroom reality shows, and soon he was getting crazy ideas. Angela was happy in and out of her meth haze, and she loved John enough that sometimes she’d let him hold her for hours. But John was sure something was wrong, as though he were in tune with some cosmic disturbance that no one else could tap into. Angela told him he was crazy.

  He asked Tamer to ask his connections if he could front him eight grand worth of product. Tamer asked and was approved immediately; his credit with the rednecks was good.

  John sold all eight thousand of it, and quickly. Almost doubled his profit. Then he refused to pay the money back. He didn’t buy a bus ticket, didn’t think about catching a plane. He simply dropped the money into a bank account (it took him a while, but he found a bank that would have him) and sat on it. And wouldn’t budge.

  Tamer came around and tried to talk sense into him. The rednecks were pissed. The rednecks were gonna kill him. John shook his head no, he wasn’t going to give the money back yet. He’d pay them, he promised. But the money was his for now, until he and Angela could get a better life. He’d make a down payment on a house. He’d buy a car. They’d start a life, there in Pocahontas, and those rednecks would just have to wait. “Besides,” he said. “They ain’t gonna kill me. I been to that guy’s house. He loves me! We shot the shit for hours.”

  The redneck who loved John Wily sent two men to empty several hundred rounds of ammunition from an M-16 into his apartment. He also sent two men to see Tamer, whom they informed had to “take responsibility” for his friend’s debt, or face the consequences. The consequences were hinted at with a broken toe and some work done to his face. Tamer showed up at John’s door, bloody and yelling through cracked teeth, but John wouldn’t be swayed. That shoulder-shrug mentality, that he didn’t care what happened to his best friend, broke Tamer Reynold’s heart.

  What happened next occurred within a day or so of John’s death. He woke up that morning by himself and poured a bowl of cereal. He opened his front door to have a cigarette (because Angela didn’t want the house smelling like smoke) and nearly tripped over a small package from UPS. He opened it on his couch, still smoking his cigarette, and removed the videotape from inside.

  He pressed play. The footage came on, grainy. He saw Tamer, saw his ugly bruises looking grayer in the camera light. The camera spun, and there was Angela, sitting in a chair, playing with her hands. The camera rocked and then was still, making a slight noise as it slid into a tripod.

  The voice sounded forced, like a Shakespearean actor forced to do Z-grade sci-fi. “So it’s been a while since you’ve had what you need, right, baby?”

  Angela nodded and bit her lower lip.

  “John hasn’t had any in…jeez, nearly a week, yeah?”

  She scratched at her arm and looked away.

  “So you need it?” The way he said it, it was like he was hoping she would say “no.”

  She nodded again. Her eyes were glassy, and John Wily thought of the first time he’d seen them like that.

  “How bad do you need it?” Tamer had gotten closer. Standing over her. Casting a shadow.

  She only thought for a second before she began to undo Tamer’s belt buckle. He wiggled a baggie of crystals in her face and told her to be a good girl.

  John kicked his TV over and ran out the door.

  He was dead the next day.

  Angela went back to her father, who held her close and took her out to play a game of miniature golf. They were mostly quiet and he kept score with a dull pencil and that night he tucked her in and told her he was happy that she was home. When she woke up and checked her newly reinstated cell phone, amidst the texts asking where she’d been and what she was up to she saw one from Tamer, and she felt the butterflies of young love in her stomach, and when she opened it and read it she vomited into the toilet and spent the morning on the cool tile, crying.

  When she doubled over at John Wily’s wake it was Tamer that held her by the shoulders, Tamer who called the ambulance. It was the first sign of emotion he’d shown all day. He’d sat stoic through the slideshow, numb from the rush of emotion and Vicodin.

  He’d decided against breaking into Wily’s place and destroying the tape on the off chance there were police watching the apartment. Instead he split his time praying that the cops wouldn’t find it and praying that God might bring Wily back. He sat in his apartment in the dark. He deleted Wily’s number from his phone. He deleted all the pictures of his friend from his hard drive. He couldn’t eat.

  He worked his jaw and blinked in the dust kicked up by the ambulance. The funeral guests went back inside the house, dead set on finishing the moonshine in the bathtub. He sat on the porch and wrung his hands. The tall grass crept up to the edge of the yard. Bird chimes clanged in the hot yellow air. He got up and unlocked his car.

  The silhouette of Tom Miles watched him from his Honda. He stepped out into the oppressive heat and hobbled toward the skinny boy walking to his car. Tom had at the very least done a little research, asked around those same neighborhoods you’re asking. At the most he’d coaxed the information out of John Wily at the end of a sawed-off shotgun, and it was with the butt of that same shotgun that he broke two of Tamer Reynolds’ ribs. He kicked the boy’s legs out from under him and dragged him to the Honda.

  He laid the shotgun across his lap and listened to his CD player, only taking the buds out when he needed directions to Tamer’s apartment. As the town of Pocahontas disappeared in the distance, the two men stared at the road ahead of them. One of them had loved John Wily and the other couldn’t have cared less, but one of them was certainly responsible for his death. No one is sure who it was to this day, but they do know one thing: that was the day that Tom Miles became involved in the meth trade.

  VESICA

  The cowboy turned away from the barista, slipped the change into his pocket, and sat down. Women with glittering t-shirts tapped feet. Thick rimmed glasses glossed pages. Art on the walls, computers plugged in, men in collared shirts crossed legs and talked. The cowboy’s gums ached for tobacco. He looked out to his Ford. Tr
ailer stacked with copper wiring. Copper got you paid, four dollars a pound. A sexy thing with shorts cut way up ordered something with whipped cream and the cowboy lingered for a second, then checked his watch. In fifteen minutes he’d find Marie sitting across from him with the papers and he didn’t want that. He rubbed his temples, feeling where his eyebrows used to be, before all of his hair fell out and he was left looking like a boiled egg.

  When he looked up, the sexy thing was in pieces against the wall, mixing with the blood and body parts of the barista. A black ball cap with the chain insignia rolled to a halt on the tiled floor. The cowboy didn’t blink. Colt out, safety off. Bits of copper wiring tumbled through the destroyed wall. He fired three rounds into the spaghetti noodle swiping away from him, through the coffee shops floor-to-ceiling windows.

  He kept firing, emptying all nine rounds into the noodle. The thing disappeared over the building, then crashed down, bits of formica tabletops clattering around his boots. He tore under the shadow of the thing, giant spiderweb eyes staring down at him, the Creator and now the Destroyer. He jumped over upturned Civics and got his door open. Bullets in the floor. Ejected the casing. He thumbed the rounds in, turned, and the noodle had him, had him in the air, bleeding from his nose, ears and eyes, and then he was falling.

  Three days earlier, reclined in his chair, the cowboy had what he believed to be indigestion. He took his shirt off and ran his face under the tap. He walked down the stairs, the sun irritating his burns, and laid out by the pool. His apartment complex was dead but for a young girl floating on a pink dinosaur. He pulled out his cell phone, the screen dark for the midday sun, and shaded it with his palm. He sent a text to a few of his buddies at work, his two sons, his neighbor. He sat the phone down and dipped in the pool. His chest still burned, even underwater. He toweled off, the pool now deserted. He writhed in bed for the next three days, his chest feeling as though it were splitting apart, the only thing keeping him from the hospital his lack of insurance.

  On the third day, bald, eyebrowless, with the pain gone, he ventured to the coffee shop to meet Marie. And as he spun in the blue sky, vomiting over himself and into space, he felt the burn again, quicker and harder. His chest came apart, the center becoming two parentheses, warm wet pink in the center. Thumping. He felt it in his mind then, every angle of the ground below him sharp. He kept the sacred geometry, carried the mark on his chest. This life, the time in the sheet metal plant, the time laying fencepost, meeting Marie in that neon bar while the live band played and he stumbled with his liquor, the birth of their children, that gradual aching drift that set them apart, everything. Nothing. He kept the vesica, he kept it for this moment, and when the spaghetti noodle approached him, the moist white tentacle shrunk to nothing, lost inside the hole in his chest. The flying monster panicked but no amount of pulling could keep it from the center. It disappeared into his chest, and the cowboy plummeted to earth.

  TESSERACT

  Daamodar clocked in at the Studio at 7:30 and cleared the leftover Styrofoam cups from his workbench. He brushed loose pieces of paper and antron fleece into a steel garbage can and dragged it across the concrete floor to the corner. He started a pot of coffee and checked his Facebook on his phone. His coworkers showed up around eight cradling energy drinks and sweating booze. A woman with frizzy hair began mixing articulated polyfoam. A young man in a band t-shirt cursed a faulty machine. Daamodar shook his head and began to assemble the wire and rod that would be a puppet’s skeleton, which would bend and gyrate at the slightest touch of the puppeteer’s fingers. He smiled at the way the rods bent at the joint. He went to the breakroom after an hour and pulled a white cup off the spire. The coffee pot was empty. He sighed and put a new one on.

  The workshop hummed. Hangovers dissolved by noon. His coworkers frequented the bathroom less. A few of them told jokes, the safety goggles pushing their hair into tangles on their forehead, one hip cocked out, gesturing. Daamodar kept his head down, engrossed in the skeleton, enjoying the way the steel came together, the way the whole thing moved, a reverse death, the bones picked from their coffin’s pile, reassembled, reanimated, then re-gloved.

  At the end of the day Daamodar had a fully functioning skeleton. He made it dance. Finished with a twirl. He chuckled and left the bones sitting on the table and walked out, his footsteps echoing in the dark workshop. He unlocked his car and remembered he forgot to drink the coffee again.

  Daamodar’s mother placed her hand on the nape of his neck and kissed his cheek. He dipped his naan into the hot curry sauce and wiped his mouth with a napkin. She left him to eat and turned on the television. After he finished his meal he washed his dish and sat next to her. She smiled, the lines in her face washed clean by the blue light of the TV.

  The next morning he sat in the breakroom and took a sip of the coffee and pulled his phone out and began scrolling through Facebook, reading the thoughts of old friends. He watched a couple YouTube videos then set the phone down and looked out the door at his coworkers. He watched the last of the coffee slide away from the bottom of the cup and was about to get up to refill it when Jill sat down, carefully setting her clipboard in front of her.

  Daamodar’s throat dried up. He motioned at the coffeemaker. “Want some?”

  Jill shook her head. “Just aspirin for me right now.”

  He got up and refilled his cup, then opened the cupboard above the counter and dug through the white cubbies of the first aid kit. He set a plastic single serve packet of Motrin in front of her and she picked it up and smiled. “Oh, I didn’t mean…I mean I took some this morning! I’ll save this for later, though, thanks.”

  Daamodar smiled and sipped his coffee. “No problem. I thought when you said—“ and then he gestured and they both laughed.

  “So how was your night?”

  He shrugged. “It was okay. Didn’t really do anything. Ate dinner, went to bed. Boring.”

  They made more small talk. Daamodar enjoyed her company. He liked her laugh and her eyes. He liked her curly hair and casual dress, the band T-shirts she wore. This one had a screen print of a man with long hair, from a band he’d never heard of. He stared at it for a bit too long, inexplicably fascinated by the simple black lines of the man’s face, then felt himself flushed as he realized that Jill might think he was staring at her breasts. If she noticed, she didn’t let on.

  “Anyway, I just came to let you know that Rick is really pleased with how quick you’re finishing up your sets every week. He normally likes to keep everything on schedule so you’d be doing busy work for the rest of the week…” (Daamodar rolled his eyes/hated busy work/Jill gave a knowing eye roll back) “…but he told me that if you want to go ahead and finish your post-set tonight you can start a new one tomorrow. Thinks it’ll look good to have more puppets pushed out per week, if it can be done well. Which, it seems you can.”

  “I can.”

  “Well, great!” She smiled and Daamodar’s chest hurt. This was his least favorite part of the job. But all he could focus on was Jill walking out the door.

  That night Daamodar’s mother had friends over. They sat around the table and laughed. When he walked in they all said hello and told him he was handsome. He felt his face get hot and he fixed a bowl of macaroni and cheese for himself. One of the younger women, wearing a beautiful green sari, was talking about her son’s wedding, the planning for which was apparently going well. He made eye contact with his mother. She winked and he took his bowl up and wished them all goodnight.

  He closed the door to his room and turned on an aggressive song at a stage whisper. A small blue box sat on his endtable. Two antennae stretched toward the ceiling. He picked up the box and flicked a switch. The antennae, previously stiff, lost their tumescence and began to undulate awkwardly. First they looped around behind Dammodar’s back, then they panned across the room like a radar. He slapped the machine in the palm of his hand, but the antennae continued to grow and wobble.

  He fingered the notch on the box�
��s battery cap and looked inside. The machine ran on ants, and a good majority of the creatures were dead and smashed. He tapped the underside and the ants fell out in a clump like wet strawberry tobacco.

  Removing an old orange pill bottle from his top dresser drawer, he dumped a handful of live ants into the battery niche and closed the cap. The antennae snapped to a shorter length, bent at a joint and began pointing to the south. He grabbed his backpack and opened his window carefully and climbed down the fire escape.

  Daamodar took a taxi six blocks downtown. The machine clicked and pointed. The driver seemed annoyed that there was no immediate destination, then even more annoyed that his brown-skinned passenger didn’t speak Tamil. The antennae bent at the top and began twirling. Daamodar thanked God that he’d reached his destination. He paid the muttering driver and followed the clicking machine into an apartment building, up several flights of creaking stairs, past several muffled screams behind chipped and rotting doors, to a room on the fifth floor.

  The box retracted the antennae, and when the two metal wires came back out they were ridged along the edge. They nestled gently into the apartment’s keyhole and jiggled a bit and the door cracked open. Daamodar pushed it open the rest of the way and stepped into the dark.

  The apartment smelled like rotten eggs. A cat purred across his shins. Magazines and beer cans and pipes set out on the glass coffee table. The television a dead blue glow. The machine ticked. He walked past a bathroom with fuzzy pink bath mats and toilet covers. He opened the bedroom door and steeled himself.