Metro

by Stephen Romano

  It’s a superhighway of information and history.

  Pam Grier and Luke Skywalker and Tyler Durden are your hosts.

  Jollie, Andy, and Spider-Girl wind their way through it.

  It’s a just a hop, skip, and a jumpy breeze of human vapor to Jollie’s room, and Andy shuts the door behind them.

  47 minutes and COUNTING . . .

  Bob Marley becomes a quieter ghost through the thin walls, the three of them black-light shapes under the purple glow of mood lights and the lava-lamp squirm of Jollie’s screen saver. You can’t see the walls in here either, because there are so many maps and charts, bulletin boards tacked to hell, piles of books and papers, shelves bursting with CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and anything else that information can be stored on. A big poster of James T. Kirk (buff Shatner, back-in-the-day Shatner) on the door, with a drawn-on speech bubble pointing at his mouth that reads: WHO IS THIS ASSHOLE? (Long story—don’t ask.) Spider-Girl lands right in the center of something that looks like a queen-size futon, and she squeals like a surprised child when it turns out to be a waterbed.

  “Oh wow,” she says. “Somebody should have warned me about this.”

  “Booyah,” Andy says as he lands next to her, and they are boogie-bumped by wave after glorious wave. She laughs at his silliness again.

  “It’s fifty bucks a cap,” Jollie says to Spider-Girl, getting straight to business, moving for the shoebox under her desk. “Mark doesn’t give discounts.”

  “That’s still cheap for Molly,” she says back, struggling against the waves. “I’m used to a hundred a quarter for ecstasy.”

  “Welcome to the Kingdom,” Andy says. “Where the candy is cheap and the sins are deadly.” He starts tickling poor sweet Spider-Girl, who takes it like a sorority sister.

  Jollie sighs, opening the shoebox. It’s empty. Except for a note in the Boy Prince’s jagged handwriting that says: I LOVE YOU NOW MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF, BUT I WILL LOVE YOU EVEN MORE ON PAYDAY.

  “Real cute, Andy.”

  “What?” he says, and he truly has no idea what she’s talking about. Then he looks up from where Spider-Girl is giggling and sees Jollie holding the note in his face. He decides to say something intelligent: “Umm . . . I’m . . . terribly sorry?”

  Jollie slumps in the comfy chair, swiveling slightly when her gorgeous surplus rump hits the cushion, letting out a huff. “This was all we had left, Andy. Mark won’t be back for hours.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He’s making a pickup, but it’s with Jackie’s dad—that scary loudmouth guy.”

  “Razzle.”

  “Yeah, whatever. They always take forever.”

  Andy almost feels smarter than Jollie for a split second, then reminds himself he only ever remembers Razzle Schaeffer’s name because it’s kind of hard to forget.

  Spider-Girl makes a pouty face. “How long will it be?”

  Jollie throws up her hands. “Shit, knowing those guys, at least four in the morning.”

  She glances at the tiny clock near the computer—it’s just now one.

  Shit.

  “That’s not very long in dog years,” Andy says, giving Spider-Girl a wicked jab with two fingers.

  And Spider-Girl doesn’t squirm this time.

  She’s suddenly all business, with an evil wink: “I can wait. If she joins us.”

  Andy raises an eyebrow, and Jollie makes it a matching set. Don’t even think about it, her look says to him. And in the same instant, she starts thinking about it.

  It’s been awhile since we were this crazy. But maybe it’s what I need. We won the revolution tonight, after all.

  She takes her smartphone out of her pocket and keys the screen open—there are forty-seven unread messages from just the last half hour and ten new voicemails, all from Peanut Williams and the boys in Philly. The emails have all-caps subject lines like SENATOR BOB WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT WHITE-COLLAR RAPE and SENATOR BOB ORDERS THE FILIBUSTER SUPREME, DUDE!

  It’s all about Senator Bob tonight.

  She smiles at the phone.

  And Spider-Girl is still smiling at her, Andy’s tongue running along her neck.

  Jollie sets the phone down on her desk. And she finds that her body begins to react faster than her mind can be made up, putting down the shoebox, moving quickly to the door and locking it. James T. Kirk gives her the fifty-watt okey-dokey. She tells him to shut the hell up. Then she moves herself into the waves of her bed, and the easy arms of the Boy Prince.

  This would break Mark’s heart in half, she thinks.

  If he was here to see what they are doing now, while he is off scoring.

  But this is what I need, she also thinks, as Spider-Girl’s first innocent kisses come in, sweet on her neck like honey and bitter like wicked steel, dumb like a frat chick and desperate like a gnawing rat. Smooth and wet and soothing and toothy. Exciting.

  This is what I need, not to be in love with him. I’m sorry, Mark, but I can’t marry you. I have to save the world first.

  35 minutes and COUNTING . . .

  He’s the guy everyone wants to know in this town. But not because he’s a brilliant mind, bursting with stories and bits of knowledge collected from every obscure nerdariffic nook and cranny, not because he’s a real artist living the dream that so many dishwashers and spare changers and burnout musician-types fantasize about. No, not at all. Most people want to know Mark Jones because he’s a drug dealer.

  It’s pretty simple math.

  There are a lot of dudes in this town who deal pot from under their beds, ecstasy caps or acid squares or even H-bags when a bigger score happens, but Mark has been here longer and knows the market better than most people. He’s been here since the summer of 2005. He’ll tell you that everything you need to know comes from a zinger line in a Marty Scorsese film or some bit of wisdom uttered by Bill Murray in Caddyshack. He’ll tell you his first ambition was to be a professional screenwriter—but he found out soon enough that you have to live in Hollywood for that. Problem is, he couldn’t leave Austin, not ever. It had him by the soul—this amazing arty-farty boomtown, full of liars and losers and guys who sometimes make it really big, an overripe music scene bursting with blues cats and metal punks, rockabilly martyrs, filmmakers of every shape, size, and religion struggling in every dark corner to record their own Exile on Main St. or make the next El Mariachi. There are theater art gangs and performance groups who do their thing like you wouldn’t believe, sidewalk musicians and homeless transsexuals who’ve become local celebrities. It’s like San Francisco, only smaller. Like Athens, Georgia, only better. Circuits of trendy restaurants and soulful dives, sushi places and strip clubs, sports bars, roadhouses brimming with the blues, jazz haunts that freeze time and roll back the years, the tacky runways of 6th Street and the campus drag, glimmering and grooving, shaking to the very core of the earth with a million billion holes in the wall where you can hear every religion that exists in the spaces between midnight and one in the morning. And on Friday night, don’t forget to catch Aliens on Ice. That’s the James Cameron film, acted out live on a hockey rink by geeky drama-school dropouts with cardboard props and nothing better to do.

  Yeah, this is a pretty amazing town.

  Mark hovers just below the surface of it all, knowing that one day he will be immortal, just like all the other starving artists know it. That’s the only reason to live in a town like this if you’re a writer or a filmmaker or a guitar player. The promise of immortality.

  That’s what he’ll tell you if you ask him about it.

  He’ll tell you lots of things.

  Very few of which are actually true.

  But not many people want to know the real Mark Jones anyway. They only know him as the tortured-genius drug dealer hermit of the Kingdom, with his thick chin beard and shaven head, short and pear-shaped, full of secrets in his longing fa
ce, genuine love-me-now puppy-dog eyes drooping above a crazed smile that belongs on a lunatic running the asylum. Big arms and muscular legs, always exposed because he wears designer cargo shorts year-round, even in winter. He’s almost a foot shorter than Jollie, but he seems a lot taller when you talk to him. He turned forty almost a year ago and he doesn’t look a day over twenty-seven. His youth lives in his blood and his passion. Not a single wrinkle on his face. And that always turns her on. He’s written six unsold novels, all science fiction with a red-hot poker up its ass—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Natural Born Killers. Grungy, greasy, nutty as a mutant fruitcake, sopped through with attitude and a worldview gleaned from a steady diet of classic gangster flicks, books by Harlan Ellison, and experiences he’s not told anyone about—not even Jollie. One of his manuscripts struck home and sold. A book called Countdown to Extinction. (He’s a big Megadeth fan.) It didn’t have to make him rich, just had to keep him moving, keep him in the game. He holds on to the dream, like everyone else. But he holds harder. And he’s searched all his life for a kindred spirit. Someone he can really talk to. Someone who understands things.

  Someone like Jollie, of course.

  He’s fallen in love with her, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. When a guy like him falls in love, it’s bad news.

  Especially in a town like this.

  Mark doesn’t know about what’s been going on lately between Jollie and Andy, but he’s suspected for months.

  That might have been why he finally asked her to come away with him the other night. Why he told her he was getting some long-overdue royalty money from the book he sold years ago (Countdown has since been reprinted five times, a real underground hit, more or less) . . . and he wanted to make a clean break from the madness of the Kingdom. Maybe head out for California. Start fresh somewhere in a different town of artists and protestors. She asked if Andy should come with them, and he said no. He said that he was done with all this craziness, all the lovers and ladies at all hours, the drug dealers and half-pimps, all those dumbass throwaway super rockers with green hair.

  There’s a place we can start over, Jollie. We can go there together, you and I. Please marry me.

  And he was really serious this time.

  She knew, because he showed her the ring.

  The ring he only told her stories about when they were stoned—the silly little piece of ten-cent plastic he got from a gumball machine when he was sixteen. The childish trinket he’s kept on his Super Cool Stuff Shelf for years, waiting for the right lady to give it to. He gave it to her then, and she’d had no idea what to say. She still doesn’t. She still hasn’t answered him. This wasn’t in the plan. It wasn’t supposed to happen.

  But he can deal with it.

  He still has time.

  There’s blood on his hands, but the blood washes clean.

  He’ll have just a few minutes to make her understand.

  33 minutes and COUNTING . . .

  “I can’t do this,” Jollie says, and she pulls away from Spider-Girl.

  The Boy Prince knows what it means, but he pretends not to.

  Jollie backs away and tells them to have fun, and they act like confused mice, hovering in deep space. Jollie thinks they look like they were made for each other. She has no idea in this moment who she, herself, was made for. No idea at all.

  Mark. I’m so sorry.

  She reaches the door and forgets it’s locked, tries to open it, and thinks she’s trapped for just a half second. Laughs at herself and remembers.

  And then there’s a knock at the door.

  And Mark’s voice.

  “Jollie? Are you in there? I have to talk to you.”

  “Yay, party favors,” Andy says to the blonde, perking right up. “Looks like our man is on time, after all.”

  “Oh poop,” Spider-Girl says. “I was just getting used to waiting.”

  Andy smiles. “We can wait some more later, if you want to.”

  “Maaaaybe.”

  Jollie’s heart has already jumped into her mouth, her buzz nearly ruined as Mark’s voice comes again, through the door:

  “Jollie? Open up, okay?”

  He sounds really upset.

  Jollie turns to the crazy kids on her waterbed and sighs hard. “Look, you two stay in here. I have to talk to him alone first.”

  “Dishonesty is always the best policy,” Andy says, smiling.

  “Look, just shut up,” Jollie says, glaring.

  Now, Mark starts banging on the door.

  “I can hear you guys in there—open up, goddammit!”

  “Yeah, I’ll be right out!”

  And she freezes Andy with a laser-ice look. You just stay right on that waterbed and don’t fucking move.

  Jollie opens the door and slides out into the smoky hall with Mark. Only opens the door a few inches, so he can’t see the kids in her room. She forgets all about her smartphone back there on the desk—which is strange, because she’s never very far from that thing. But Mark isn’t paying attention to her phone. Mark doesn’t even have time to see Jollie’s face before he grabs her by the hand and pulls her to his room at the end of the hall, unlocks the door, and slams it behind them. It’s a series of fast blurs. Tracers and feelings. Shocked amazement and weird tangles of love and shame. Jollie can hardly understand what’s happening, even when they are alone together and Mark pulls her close and kisses her. He tastes like home and hearth. She wraps her arms around him and they mash into each other, melt into each other, and she wants to say she is sorry, wants to tell him so many things, but all those things explode in her breast and evacuate in a low sigh and he is so close, so close . . .

  And a million lifetimes later, they untangle.

  Mark is looking right in her eyes.

  She can tell he’s on Xanax because of the red in there.

  His eyes always look that way when he’s on downers.

  But the dope doesn’t hide the terrible, serious look on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, because she thinks he’s angry with her—thinks he knows about her and Andy. She thinks someone told him about the three of them sneaking off together. Thinks she’s finally busted.

  But that’s not what he says at all.

  “Something really heavy has just happened, Jollie. There was no avoiding it. So you have to come with me right now . . .”

  He looks right in her eyes, deeper than he’s ever looked before.

  “. . . or you’ll never see me again.”

  And she finally notices that there is blood on his face.

  30 minutes and COUNTING . . .

  “It all happened so fast,” Jackie chokes out, holding his insides in with both hands, as the bad lieutenant hovers over him. “He turned into a . . . he moved so quick . . . I think . . . I’m dying . . .”

  He remembers the bright flash of the first muzzleblast like a white-hot strobe in his face, the instant panic that shocks up his spine, the dull fleshy slap of the bullet in Daddy’s chest, the smile frozen on Daddy’s face, still left over from the three seconds before, when Daddy was looking right at Mark and telling him how lucky he was.

  The bad lieutenant gets in closer to Jackie and says something Jackie can’t understand, but he knows it’s the same question.

  Jackie holds his insides in.

  Jackie cries because it really hurts.

  Jackie is bleeding from six gunshot wounds.

  Jackie shouldn’t even be alive.

  He remembers what happened after that first flash only in a series of weird broken images: The second shot, to Razzle’s face—Daddy’s face—so fast after the last one that it’s like machine-gun fire. The automatic pistol whizzing around in Mark’s hand, a wide arc of fire taking out the two big guys on either side of Daddy, who’s stumbling backward now like a stop-motion puppet, groping
for his gun while his malfunctioning fingers and hands and arms twitch in weird chain-reaction fits and starts. The two big guys sprout crimson eyes in the center of their foreheads. Reports so loud in the tiny space that it makes him deaf. Jackie’s own hand, reaching for the pistol in his waistband—the worst place to keep a gun, nudged under your belt, in the small of your back. His hand, not quite freezing but not exactly moving either, as the next shot hacks a chunk of his shoulder off and sends him flat against the wall. The quick, painful, gooey sensation of shit evacuating from his bowels. The front of his pants hosed with piss. A fist punching him in the stomach, which turns out to be another bullet. Freeze frames of everything that happens, with glowing, white-hot light around the edges, like jammed bits of celluloid slagging bad in the gate of an exploding projector. Someone screaming: Shoot the motherfucker kill him scum DIE BASTARD . . .

  “Who did it, Jackie? Who hit us tonight?”

  The bad lieutenant’s voice is clear now, and the inside of the ambulance almost solidifies again, narrow and dark, like a closet full of strange, indefinable stuff. There are tubes running in and out of Jackie. A man wearing red and white is pulling Jackie’s hands away from his guts, holding something painful on his neck, like a great weight that makes his insides gurgle and pop, with fluid boiling in a weird gag reflex at the deep end of his tongue. He feels the fresh, bleeding gash left by the third bullet, which was the one that cut his throat as it came and went, still making it almost impossible to talk.

  But he tries anyway:

  “All so fast . . . so many flashes . . . he was so goddamn fast . . .”

  “Who was it? Who was crazy enough to hit us? Tell me!”

  The sting of the bad lieutenant’s voice hits him harder than the next wave of pain. He can tell it’s Jake Mudd now—the man his father always laughed at while he paid him off to watchdog his deals. That’s how Mudd got the bad-lieutenant tag in the first place. One of his dad’s terrible jokes that stuck. Daddy also liked making fun of Harvey Keitel for playing Judas in that weird God movie with his bizarre half-Brooklyn accent: I do not like you, Jesus, because you make crosses. It almost makes Jackie laugh, but the pain rises again and chokes him again, Mudd’s voice stabbing his ear again: