Jabberwock Jack

by Dennis Liggio

  "On the one hand, it's a fucking sea serpent! When would we ever get a chance to hunt a goddamn sea serpent? It's a once in a lifetime opportunity! No hunter gets that chance."

  "Just the dead ones," I said soberly, remembering that others had tried to kill Jack before. Surely it had cost some of them more than Jericho's leg.

  "Right," said Szandor, "it's dangerous. But what an opportunity! This is like something that happens in a movie."

  I gave him that. Books and movies are the only places you see sea serpents. Outside of being in the Age of Piracy, Deep Space, or a Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, you really don't get the opportunity to see a sea serpent, much less kill one. I hoped that we wouldn't have to travel a thousand leagues under Avalon for this one though.

  "For better or for worse, you're right, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity," I said. "Do we want to be old men in our fifties regretting we didn't do it?"

  "Exactly! And yet..."

  "We already saw Jack and it scared us shitless?"

  "Not shitless," said Szandor diplomatically, "but it was fucking scary. And huge! What do we even do with that thing once we kill it?"

  "Skin it for boots and luggage," I suggested.

  "I would totally love a pair of snake skin boots," said my brother. "Jack skinned, I guess."

  "But you're right -"

  "About the boots?" interrupted my brother with a smile.

  "About it being scary," I said. "Let's be frank. You and I alone couldn't kill Jack."

  "Agreed."

  "So if we figure that for us two it'd be a suicide mission, the question is, do we think it wouldn't be a suicide mission with other hunters?"

  Szandor opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.

  "Not an easy answer, is it?" I didn't have the solution either.

  "Who are the other hunters?" said Szandor finally.

  "We don't know for sure. Let's say Meat and Jericho. I'm pretty sure they're both in. Maybe Paulie."

  "I'm not sure. Jericho seems pretty badass. Meat I'm not sure about."

  "Oh come on!" I said. "You complain about getting into arguments, but Meat has had your back every damn time we've worked with him. Stop being an asshole. He's solid."

  "Fine... then with Jericho and Meat... I guess maybe? Paulie helps. But Jack was huge. We'd need some serious firepower. I don't like our odds."

  "I don't like our odds either," I said.

  We both sat back and drank more beer.

  "So we're not doing this?" said Szandor.

  "Fuck no, we're totally doing this, it's a sea serpent! Once in a lifetime opportunity!" I said with a devilish smile. My brother returned the smile. We clinked bottles together.

  We make a lot of dumb, reckless decisions. Often they still end up working out for us. We knew this was an iffy idea, but we were willing to gamble on it. We were both single, barely employed, and both hadn't been happy lately. This seemed like the job we needed. So at the time, I thought that even though there was some risk, it wasn't a bad idea. I hoped it wasn't a bad idea.

  In the end, I was wrong.

  It wasn't a bad idea.

  It was a terrible idea.

  Once in a fucking lifetime opportunity.

  Blood and Tears

  After we agreed to join the hunt for Jack, I called Meat. He had been expecting our call. He was pretty sure we would say yes. He was surprised we said yes so quickly, but he merely shrugged that off. He told us to show up for the briefing the next morning. The same warehouse. He rattled off the address. He did tell us to bring the gear we needed. The hunt started after the briefing.

  To Szandor, this was even more of a reason why we should be going out and partying. I'm sure in his mind, he saw himself going out, getting drunk, impressing some hot girl who would want to go home with him, then he'd wake up in the morning, magically rested and not at all hung over, ready to be the best team member ever. I had a feeling that he'd resorting to his fake hangover cure tomorrow, but I wasn't about to tell him his business. Well, not seriously, only as cutting jabs between siblings. Mentally I prepared to haul his ass out of bed tomorrow. I'd done it before.

  Szandor went home to clean up and relax before our night out. I laid down on my couch and threw on a movie. If I fell asleep and took a nap, that would be fine, but I didn't want to force it. I looked for something sea serpent related, but I didn't find a related movie that I wanted to watch. I settled on 1981's Dragonslayer with Peter MacNicol. Few would call it a great movie, but it had its charms. Honestly, it's far underrated, especially for when it came out. It was from long before my birth, so I can't claim nostalgia, but I dig fantasy movies. And a dragon was still a big old serpent, so it at least sort of satisfied my urge.

  I did fall asleep. I vaguely remember bits of the film: befuddled mages, fire breathing, and unreasonable medieval politics, but it was mostly all a blur of a dark and dirty age. I awoke to the sound of my phone. It was Szandor, telling me he was leaving and would meet me at the bar. I was groggy, but I texted back that I'd be there soon. It was already nine and I had slept through most of the afternoon and evening. I pulled myself out of bed and microwaved a Hot Pocket as I changed into some halfway clean clothes. Then I groggily chewed on that Hot Pocket while I ran a brush through my hair. I turned to the mirror and grunted Good enough.

  I didn't drive over to Southend. It was walkable even if it took half an hour, and I saw no reason to risk a DUI. Szandor and Lem were closer than I was, so they didn't need me to give them a ride. Dickie was around the corner from the bar, so I didn't expect him to show up until an hour or two after we got there. The day's rain had stopped and there was just a damp mist over the city, so I didn't even need an umbrella.

  The name of the bar was the King's Crown, a name that seemed to be attempting to appeal to both bohemian Southenders and the working class from the east side neighborhoods, since it was right at the edge of Southend. I had never been there before, but if it was like many Southend bars, I expected the next time I was by this way it would be called something else - Southend bars were volatile in ownership, name, and style. You'd never find a solid and stable neighborhood bar in Southend unless the owner had deep pockets to survive the whims of trendsetters. Since King's Crown wasn't a dance club but just a bar, there was no line for entry tonight. Despite that, I did see my brother and Lem standing outside.

  As soon as they saw me, their concerned faces became even more worried.

  "Oh, hey, Mikkel," said Lem, nervously. "We were thinking we should go to another club."

  "Why?" I said.

  "The girls in this place are..." said Szandor, his hands up as if to stop me. "Well, they're not good tonight. We should go elsewhere. I called Dickie and he's going to tell us a better bar. When he wakes up." Szandor rolled his eyes.

  "How are the women 'not good'?" I asked. I was confused. That was just a strange thing to say. I'd expect Szandor to say they were ugly, that it was a sausage fest, or that he had already struck out with all the women. Saying this instead was weird. "I thought this was Dickie's favorite bar for seducing women."

  "Yes, but not tonight. We should go somewhere else. And!" Szandor said with an abrupt suddenness that made the word almost its own exclamation. "And this club was severely lacking in men for Lem. We discovered that this place was not as friendly to gay dating as most other Southend clubs."

  "Yes!" said Lem with a very quick nodding motion. "That's exactly right. The men here are dogs too!"

  "Why are you two acting so weird?" I said.

  "Dogs, Mikkel!" restated Lem with urgency.

  "Let's just take a walk and find another bar," said Szandor.

  "Yeah, let's find another club." said Lem.

  "First round is on me!" said Szandor.

  Okay, now I knew something was wrong. Szandor never buys the first round unless he's already stinking drunk. In fact, that's usually the only time we can get him to buy the first round in any mood other than begrudgingly.

&
nbsp; "I'm just going to take a look in the bar, then we can look elsewhere if you want," I said.

  "No, bad idea," said Szandor. "Let's just go."

  "What is it you're hiding?" I said, attempting to walk past them to the bar.

  Szandor stepped in front of me and gently put his hand on my shoulder. "Really, don't go in. Just between you and me. Trust me. This is just you and me talking. Brother to brother, blood to blood. Don't go in. You're going to regret it."

  I shrugged him off. The more they persuaded me not to, the more I wanted to go in. Us Nowaks have a stubbornness in us. It's what amplifies our recklessness to almost danger seeking. Once we get an idea in our heads, we do it. And all their persuasion has just reinforced my desire to go into the bar. I brushed past Lem and Szandor.

  With a quick move, Szandor stepped back in front of me. His face close to mind. "Please. You're going to regret it."

  I pushed him aside and went inside the bar.

  I went through an old wooden door and then down a set of stairs, as the bar itself was below street level. As I descended the stairs, I saw all the familiar bar elements, the same here as nearly any bar in Avalon, nearly any bar in America. Smokey interior, faded neon over the bar either as a joke or advertising brands of beer, the smell of spilt alcohol, and out-of-date radio singles playing on the jukebox. The club wasn't full by any means, probably because of the iffy weather, but it wasn't empty. We could get a table pretty easily and not find ourselves in a remote, uninhabited corner of the bar. And contrary to Szandor, I did see a few attractive women in skimpy outfits, even a few attractive men, which meant Lem had lied too. Why? I walked down to the bottom of the steps, wondering what had made my friends so reluctant to be here.

  And then I knew why. It was in the moment my boot stepped off the last step onto the tacky floor. My vision which had passed over the room, taking it all in, ambiance, tables, and dating possibilities, had fallen on one last figure. A head of blonde hair. And then I realized exactly what my friends had been protecting me from.

  There was something familiar about that hair. It would always be familiar to me. Even if she changed the style, even if she changed the color. Somehow I'd always know, somehow it'd always be familiar. I don't know why - call it fate, call it chemicals, call it energy. I'd always know.

  As I saw that familiar hair, she turned her head, as if she felt the weight of my eyes upon her and knew to turn. While realization was dawning on me, her gaze fell upon me. I was out in the open. Nothing to hide behind and an exposed stairway my only retreat. I had caught sight of her just a split second before she saw me. I couldn't hide. And as our eyes locked, neither of us could turn away and pretend we hadn't seen each other. No escape, no hiding. We were locked in the mutual gaze and mutual acknowledgement regardless of what we wanted.

  Did I want this? Did she want this?

  The universe sure wanted this. With adrenaline coursing through my veins, a tightness in my heart, and something resembling a panic crawling up my spine, I looked upon the former love of my life, gone some months now.

  This was my ex-girlfriend Carly.

  I don't really know how to discuss Carly. How do you really tell someone about the past? You can discuss the things that happened, but that's just acting like the past is only a collection of events to be listed off like a mind numbing history lecture. It doesn't tell you the significance and the emotion, the love and the hate, the pain and the euphoria, the rage and the grace of everything that happened. I'm faced with the challenge of having to tell you this in a way that doesn't make you roll your eyes, in a way that doesn't make you wonder why you should care, in a way that doesn't make you wonder why I'm bothering. Yet to me, this was one of the greatest and most terrible things in my life. How can I really encompass it all in just words and communicate it to you?

  She was... well, you hear the phrase The One That Got Away thrown around a lot. It's tempting to say that. But that's too simple, that's an unfair reduction of everything into a neat little container. Calling her that would ignore all the times when it was good, really good, the times that were some of the greatest in my life, the best times with anyone I'd ever met. To just say she was The One That Got Away also minimizes all the fights, all the arguments, all the times I nearly threw my phone at the wall, and all the awkward and painful times we held each other in our arms when things were definitely not all right.

  There were problems. And the relationship had ended in pure and total devastation. But the one thing I won't say is It Just Didn't Work Out. No phrase infuriates me more than that one. It Just Didn't Work Out does no justice to the relationship. It Just Didn't Work Out is just telling someone the ending of it all. It's telling someone the butler did it. It wipes away the whole story, the whole life of a relationship. It Just Didn't Work Out is refusing someone an explanation and just showing them the ending credits. It's all so much more complicated than that - for every relationship, not just mine.

  It did end, and not recently, as much as it lingered in my mind. We last left things in the raw red of an argument and then there was no time for reconciliation. She got on that plane to study in Paris, and that was that. Gone for what I thought would be good. Unless I had been willing to scrape together the cash for a ticket to France, cyberstalk her for her address, and then attempt to get her back in full on RomCom glory, that was it. Game over, man. Thanks for playing.

  As my brother could tell you, I had dated since then. I had been in relationships. Sort of. I'd dated girls for weeks, sometimes a month, then lost interest. It was never deep, and when I broke it off it was from my own disinterest and realizing that I was inadvertently stringing these girls along. Total It's Not You, It's Me territory. It was always me. I never denied that part. I always knew something was lacking and it was always on my end. It might take a few weeks and a dozen denials from me, but the result was always the same. It was the same reason hidden in all the excuses I made, in all the permutations on the breakup speech, in all the emotional blocks that kept me from caring how I should. It always was the same reason deep down.

  They weren't her.

  How fucked up was that? Somewhere in my mind, I always kind of knew this was true, but I did nothing. I didn't jump a plane to France, I didn't start a full on emo blog of tragic poetry, I didn't even once email her to see how she was. I had let her go and hadn't been the same since. Real cavalier about being a broken asshole, Mikkel.

  And here I was, now staring right at her.

  I'll say that for all the good things, all the great things, the super wow things it can do, the heart is kind of an asshole. The strongest feelings we have are never when things are stable, never when things are solid, never when we can handle things. The sharpest feelings are when things are either super good or super bad, as if the heart only ever wants to add gasoline to a fire. And the heart has all the subtlety of a freight train. It's going to hit you, and it's going to hit you hard.

  At that moment I was mowed down by that freight train. Every good or bad memory hit me at once. Every healing wound from that relationship seem to burst through their scabs at that moment. I remembered every stupid and hurtful thing I had said to her, every time I let frustration overtake the fact that I loved her more than anything. And then the love itself came rushing back. Wonderful feelings if only they hadn't been hidden behind the DO NOT TOUCH wall of It's Over. I had that swelling feeling that I loved her more than this breath and I couldn't go hold her in my arms anymore. There was an invisible barrier between us. And who fucked that up? This guy right here.

  There was a part of me that was a coward, which said run - run faster and farther than from the greatest danger, than from the biggest, growling beast. Run! And there was a part of me that was a lion, saying go to her, forget all dignity, forget all the reasons, forget the pain, forget the resentment you've been holding on to, go to her and let passion burn through that barrier, hold her in your arms and look into her eyes until the universe puts things as right as they shou
ld be.

  Both voices howled within me. What did I actually do? I froze. Deer in headlights. Advised by two strong voices inside of me, I did nothing at all. Classic fucking Mikkel.

  Ultimately, it was Carly who made the deciding move. Rising from her table without a word to her friends, she crossed the room to me. Someone's Eighties selection on the jukebox taunted me with Naked Eyes' "Always Something There to Remind Me." Jukeboxes are assholes too.

  "Bonjour," said Carly.

  "Uh hi," I said. I had no fancy French to say to her. And this close, I could smell her perfume, despite the bar's own muggy scents. She hadn't changed it even after all this time, so it both intoxicated me and stabbed at my heart with memories. "I didn't know you were back." Immediately after I said it I thought that sentence was stupid. She didn't owe me any sort of update on her life.

  "I just got back the other day," she said. "I've been staying with my sister. In fact, that's why I'm here. I had to get away from her and all her True Crime stuff. She's a little obsessive, even if it is a hobby. I thought I'd get out and see friends. I had no idea that you'd..."

  "I know, me neither." That was dumb, Mikkel. Of course you didn't expect to see her. France.

  She smiled. "Yeah, you thought I was still in Paris studying."

  "Are you..." I wasn't sure what I wanted to ask exactly.

  "I'm back for good," she said, guessing my general sentiment. "The Parisians are not for me. It was fun for a while, but I've had enough. I guess it took going there to realize how much I missed things here. I'm going to apply for grad school here. Mourningside if I'm really lucky, but likely I'll end up at Avalon U."

  "That's good," I said.

  Carly smiled and raised an eyebrow. "Is it?"

  "For you. It's good for you," I said. "It's what you wanted."

  "The things I want may have changed," she said mysteriously. "Maybe I know them better now."

  "I'm sorry to assume," I said, backpedaling, "I mean, it's what you did want when I last knew you. I didn't meant to ignore -"