by Ed Kurtz
* * *
At first glance he thought his father was dead. From the looks of it, Harold had toppled out of his chair at the card table and died on impact with the floor. His legs were twisted in converse directions, his face squashed against the dirty tiles. A shiny green fly buzzed around his head, and no matter how much Leon swatted at it, it always swooped back down.
But Harold was still breathing, if only shallowly. When Leon placed his ear against his father’s back, he could just make out the stubborn, phlegm-racked breath endemic to a lifelong smoker.
“Damn it, dad. You sure gave me a scare.”
With no little effort, Leon dug his hands into Harold’s armpits and hefted him off the floor. He then dragged his dad’s insensate body across to the living room and dropped him into the armchair. He lolled like a scarecrow without a support beam, his arms dangling over the sides and his neck bent at a severe angle. By then the old man had cracked one eye open, but it did not appear to see. Leon snapped his fingers inches from Harold’s face, but there was no reaction.
He was a vegetable.
Leon grunted and shook his head.
“Just like all the others,” he said despairingly. “Weak and stupid.”
He readjusted Harold’s head and arms so that he at least looked somewhat normal, and then he dragged the ragged hassock over from the far corner of the cluttered room. He sat down and slapped his father’s knee.
“Not so mean now, are you, pop?” he exulted. “Y’know, I think this is the longest you’ve ever gone without calling me a faggot, at least since I was six or so. It’s nice. I mean, I could really get used to this.”
Leon smiled. Harold did nothing at all.
“But guess what?” Leon went on. “I met a girl. A girl, pop—not exactly the hallmark of the Nancy-Boy you’ve always taken me for. Well, I didn’t just meet her or anything. We’ve known each other for a long while, I guess, but things are moving along now. A hitch here and a bump in the road there, but I guess that’s just life with women. You always told me they were tough sometimes. But Ami’s not so tough. She’s a peach.
“But man, is she beautiful. I mean, this girl is a knockout, really she is. Tall and slender, and not so shabby in the curves department, either. And the biggest brown eyes you ever saw. I haven’t kissed her yet, dad, but I’m going to. I’ll probably see her tomorrow. Yeah, come to think of it, I guess I probably will. Maybe I’ll kiss her then. We’ll see.
“Thing is, I’d have brought her by to meet you before, but I don’t think you would’ve liked her much. See, she’s black. And I don’t mean light-skinned, like…what do you always call it? Quadroon? No, this girl is really black, like she was born in Africa black. I mean dark, pop. Now what do you think about that?”
Leon paused, studying Harold’s face for the slightest hint of a reaction. He found none to speak of.
“Hmn,” he said. “The big man who knows everything is finally silenced. Never thought I’d see the day. I just hope you can hear me, dad. I really do. And I hope you’re boiling in there—like, really mad. I hope you’re screaming yourself crazy in your little vegetable brain in there, daddy.”
He punctuated his last few words with a jabbing finger to Harold’s forehead.
“Because here’s the thing,” Leon continued, pressing his face mere inches from Harold’s. “I’m out of here. I’m leaving. Forever. And I’m not even going to put you to sleep like I did those guys across town this morning. Nope, you’re going to stay awake, old man. No teevee, no beer, no cigarettes and no food. And you sure as shit won’t have me to kick around anymore.”
He lightly slapped the flat of his hand against his father’s face. Harold’s head bounced from the motion.
“Them’s the breaks, father of mine.”
* * *
He did not take much. A few tee shirts, some underwear and socks. A jacket in case it got cold. He felt like he was running away from home for the first time at age thirty-six.
These items he stuffed into a red nylon duffle bag, which reminded him of the army bag he’d left at the Minchillo’s house with his blood-spattered clothes inside. For the briefest moment he felt a panic welling up in the pit of his chest, but it dissipated almost immediately. It really made no difference if somebody found it or not. What could they do about it? Nothing. Not to Leon.
He zipped up the bag and carried it through the house, to the kitchen and out to the garage. Bess limped after him, though Leon made her stay in the kitchen. It had been a while since he last visited with his menagerie—recent events had precluded it. Leon figured he’d divide what was left of his cricket supply among the predators and leave it at that. He no longer had the time nor the inclination to maintain his little hobby. He had considerably bigger fish to fry.
Now, as the fluorescent lamps flickered on and droned dully, he saw that much had gone on since last he visited. Nearly every terrarium against the far wall contained a dead arthropod, curled up with green-white fibers exploding from the fuzzy green crusts encompassing each and every head. The outfacing walls of the cages were speckled with green spores. The faint gasoline smell that normally pervaded the garage was overcome by a sour, moldy odor, like bad cheese. Leon went over to investigate.
The sole survivor he could find was an Arabian Deathstalker, a yellow scorpion that pressed itself up against the glass and tapped its black pincers with unhurried repetition.
Click, click, click, click.
Leon watched for a few minutes to see if there would be any change in the arachnid’s behavior. There wasn’t. It just kept on, clicking its pincers as if it wanted to scale the glass. Absent the thousands of tiny hairs the spiders used to climb vertical surfaces, the scorpion struggled in vain, though it did not pause for a moment. Leon wondered if a fresh, juicy cricket might influence the Deathstalker, but he was quick to discover that they, too, had fallen prey to the murderous fungus—the tub was full of the stuff, covering the egg crates and sprouting from three dozen dead crickets.
“Sorry, pal,” Leon said. “It’s tough all over.”
He went back to the door, switched off the lights, and left the scorpion to suffer its last in the dark. On and on, it tapped its pincers on the glass.
Bess whined, balancing her weight on her good forepaw while keeping the injured one aloft.
“Still not walking too good, are you, girl?”
Bess snuffled and licked her scabby snout.
“Guess we’ll have to find another car, then. Come on.”
Leon rubbed the dog’s head and walked past his father on his way to the front door.
“Good night, pop,” he said indifferently as he opened the door.
He let Bess hobble out ahead of him and locked the door behind him.
* * *
Officer Jerram reached for the bag of chocolate covered mini doughnuts on his desk, then paused with his arm hovering over them, double-guessing himself. He had barely passed his last physical as it was, and he sensed the numbers had been fudged in his favor. When he was a cadet he could run a mile like he was getting out of a chair, but lately getting out of a chair was a task in itself. It wasn’t as though anyone would say anything if he kept stuffing the little pastries into his mouth, but when he finally breached three hundred pounds would they keep passing him, or would he finally be told to lose weight or find another job? Jerram sighed and pulled two doughnuts from the bag, wedging one in his mouth and setting the other atop a domestic abuse report he’d just finished filling out.
Tomorrow, he thought, I’ll have yogurt instead.
Shouts echoed from the holding cells beyond the double doors to his right and past the long, stuffy hallway that stretched on behind them. Men rattled the bars and hurled snarling invectives at Rubio and Hansen, charged with guarding them for the night. Every night it was the same—drunks, mostly, though a few nastier characters, too. Everyone in town who got popped came through here first, whether for a DUI or a mass murder, though luckily the latter had nev
er happened there. At least not yet.
Presently, the talk of the department revolved around the impromptu hippie fuck party that erupted in the middle of the city center early that morning. It was just about the damnedest thing anyone had ever heard of, the sort of hedonistic nonsense that probably went on in California every day, but not in a nice, quiet middle-American town like this. Jerram figured every town had its share of skeletons in the closet, that behind closed doors there were still plenty of people doing things he couldn’t even imagine. But from what he’d heard, the scene in town that morning was the stuff of legend. A whole gaggle of stark naked people, the youngest nineteen and the eldest seventy-one, rutting like hogs in front of god and everyone. Swapping partners and violating every natural code in the Good Book. He heard Francis Durfee, his third grade teacher, was there, riding some itinerant day laborer like a government mule.
Jerram was sorry as hell he’d missed it.
He swallowed and went for the other doughnut when Hansen came bounding through the double doors, his brow slick with sweat.
“Better get the paramedics here,” he huffed.
“What’s going on?” Jerram asked, straining to divide his attention between the doughnut and the young officer.
The radio on his desk crackled and a female voice squawked, “Code ten, code ten. Critical trauma.”
Did she mean here, at the holding cell, or elsewhere? He reached for the radio, but Hansen demanded his full attention.
“Come on, Jerram—we’ve got a problem, here.”
“What problem?”
“I got eight guys passed out in the cell and ten other guys freaking out about it.”
“So what? Drunks pass out.”
“These ain’t the drunks. These are the Casanovas from the orgy this morning.”
“That right? I knew it was drugs. I knew it was.”
Jerram grabbed the phone, punched in the number for the dispatcher and waited for her to answer. When she did, he barked, “Karen, I got an eleven-forty-one in the holding cell, here. O.D., I reckon.”
“The sex freaks?” she asked.
“How’d you guess?”
“Medics on the way, Jimmy,” she said.
He hung up and grinned at the shaken man in front of him.
“See, Hansen? No biggie.”
He offered the junior officer a mini doughnut, but Hansen declined.
Less than half an hour later, the same event took place in the women’s holding cell, this time with five unconscious prisoners and two more looking the worse for wear. A threesome of otherwise perfectly normal looking women had to be pulled away from one another, snarling and clawing in what the guards presumed was a typical jailhouse catfight. But it wasn’t—they weren’t enraged, they were trying to screw each other silly.
As the paramedics carted them off, men and women, one by one, to the waiting ambulances outside, Jerram chuckled.
“Just say no, kiddies,” he commented to one of the EMTs.
19
Ami snapped awake with a start, her mind racing with thoughts of hypnosis and compulsion. In the brown dark of her bedroom she saw flashes of exposed flesh on the city center green, of a bookish old man forced to eat the pages from a book.
She gasped and muttered, “Fuck.”
She’d never gone back for him, for the old man at the bookstore. In her frenzied anxiety to escape, she forgot all about him, leaving the poor man to the weird fate Leon consigned to him. She sat up in bed and chewed her fingernails, worrying about what happened to him. One of the dogs groaned, annoyed that she was shifting and disturbing his sleep.
She scratched the dog’s ears and crawled out of bed. It was only half past five and she didn’t need to be up for another hour at least, but she was awake now. She shuffled across the apartment for her first cup of coffee.
Halfway through the cup, she hunted down the phonebook and looked up the number for in the reads.
She called, not really expecting anyone to answer at that hour, and after ten rings she hung up. Then she called Naila again.
And again, there was no answer.
Defeated, Ami leaned against the stove and sighed.
She killed the cup of coffee in one gulp and headed for the shower. If she was quick enough, she’d be able to stop by the bookstore on her way to work.
Ami figured it was the least she could do.
* * *
closed for family emergency, the hastily scrawled sign read.
Ami got back into her car and headed to work.
* * *
Leon woke up to Bess lapping his face with her wet, pink tongue. Her breath smelled like Brussels sprouts. He pushed away from her and sat up in the back seat, puzzled for a moment as to why he was in a car. It was immaculately clean and smelled strongly of leather and oil. A green cardboard pine tree hung from the rearview mirror and the keys were in the ignition slot.
Gradually he recalled the reedy guy in the tweed jacket the night before, parked on the street in front of a dry cleaner’s and taking a suit inside. Leon had waited for him to come back out, when he told the guy to surrender his car to him. It was no problem, and Bess loved riding in it, sticking her head out the back window and letting the wind whip her face. He only vaguely remembered parking when he started to get tired, and looking around now he realized that he’d stopped across the street from that bookstore, the one he and Ami went to the day before.
Returning to the scene of the crime, he thought with a grin. What a dumb cliché.
Leon opened the door and stepped out into the street. Bess shambled down after him and he stretched while she crapped on the sidewalk. His mouth tasted bad and he badly needed a shower. He couldn’t remember the last one he’d had. He wondered when the next one would be.
His head still hurt, though not too badly yet.
When Bess finished her constitutional she dutifully climbed back into the backseat and lay down. She turned her eyes up to Leon and wagged her tail.
“Good girl,” Leon said.
He got back into the car behind the wheel and started the engine.
“Time for work,” he said.
* * *
The cursor blinked impatiently in the search box while Ami mulled over what exactly she should search for. She went with the first thing that came to mind.
ESP.
A host of options came up on the screen, ranging from simple definitions of the term to more detailed discussions, both scientific and decidedly not. Ami clicked one in the middle that seemed like it might be informative. She was then confronted with an intimidating block of text that went into such lofty topics as the externalization of sensibility and cryptesthesia. She scanned the page until she decided it was not what she was looking for. Returning to the search page, she tried a different approach—mind control.
The vast majority of the search results concerned issues pertaining to brainwashing and coercive persuasion, the sort of thing that arises out of cults and repressive government regimes. Orwellian stuff, mostly. Authority figures taking advantage of vulnerable underlings. None of which seemed applicable to her immediate concern.
Telepathy, telekinesis and thought transference proved equally frustrating. Nothing Ami read reflected the uncanny power Leon seemed to wield over all those people in town. None of it explained to her how it was possible that a person could command someone—anyone—to do whatever he wanted and they’d do it without delay. She was starting to think the only literature on this sort of phenomenon was comic books.
Leon Weissmann, super-villain.
Another page rambled on endlessly about mentalism, claiming that all humans were capable of astounding mental feats since they typically only make use of ten percent of their brains. Ami was fairly certain this was bullshit. She leaned back in her chair and let out a heavy breath. This was getting her nowhere.
Presently a stack of unwanted inter-office mail slapped down on her desk. Ami turned to see Terrell, the mailroom guy, looming over h
er. His poofy afro jutted out from beneath the Astros cap he always wore.
Ami said, “Oh, swell.”
“You hear about Trey?” Terrell whispered conspiratorially.
“The security guard?”
“Yeah. Had a meltdown over the weekend. Hauled him off in chains, I heard.”
“Seriously? Here?”
“Yeah, he was working. PTSD, I guess. He was over in Iraq and shit.”
“Jesus,” Ami said. “What did he do?”
“I dunno for sure, but they’re saying he smashed up the second floor pretty good. There’s a ton of people who got all their shit wrecked. There’s contractors here now trying to fix everything.”
“God, I didn’t know. I got here before anyone else this morning, I think.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Sure, Terrell,” she agreed. “Mum’s the word.”
Terrell nodded seriously and continued on his rounds. Ami’s eyes drifted back to the screen and all the mentalism mumbo-jumbo.
The true mentalist possesses the power to direct other persons as performers in a play, one sentence read.
Ami sneered, thinking about Trey and his alleged meltdown. Cautiously she stood up from her chair and peeked over the cubicle divider, across the floor to Leon’s desk. It was still vacant, just as it had been the other six times she’d checked. She sat back down and closed the window on her screen. It was past ten and she hadn’t done a lick of work, so she opened up a spreadsheet and dug into her dreaded mail.
A company-wide memo scolding everyone for too much time off during holidays went into the trash bin. A manila folder stuffed with receipts from the purchasing department’s company credit cards last week she set to one side. Tucked innocuously beneath that was a stiff white envelope on which her name was written in pencil. Ami looked it over and then tore it open. Inside was a greeting card, which she pulled out. On the front was a black and white photograph of a baby chimpanzee suspended in a tree, its face sagging and forlorn. When she opened the card, a little cardboard tab slid away from a hidden chip that began playing the Players’ “Baby Come Back” at an uncomfortable volume.
