After that come the divorce papers, the restraining order. Roman is on his own. Unable to work, he lives off a disability claim, staying in motel rooms that he rents by the week, at the end of which he is usually not invited to stay another. He drinks in cheap bars and the back alleys behind liquor stores with tramps and drug addicts. He drinks till a pressure of rage builds inside of him and boils over and he will smash the jagged end of a broken bottle into the face of someone for talking too much, or not saying enough. He has no teeth left, they have all been stomped out of his head before they have had a chance to rot away from neglect. He fucks blind-drunk barflies in motel rooms and broken down homeless women inside of taped-up refrigerator boxes. His narrow dick is raw from furious, compulsive masturbation.
One night he sneaks up behind a dealer standing on a corner and beats his head in with a board he found in a dumpster. Leaving him for dead, Roman takes a brown paper bag full of product back to his motel room and that night he burns through so much rock he has a seizure. The motel maid finds him on the floor three days later.
People get to know his half-limping shamble and they cross the street when they see him. He has a reputation. They call him Mr. Ed because of the horseshoe-shaped surgery scar along the left side of his head.
And what's worse than anything is, he has these moments of clarity. Not every day, but a lot of days he has this small window when the old Roman, the meek CPA, pokes his head out and wonders what heck is going on. They never last long. Once, it was long enough to pick up a phone and call his wife, but it just upset her, “You're not supposed to call here,” she says, crying. Usually they're only long enough to send Roman into a confused depression. But the old Roman is there; lost inside his own mind, bound to the black recesses of his damaged psyche.
There is a library he frequents for the free internet. He sits at a long table full of rows of old IBMs with boxy monitors and searches local personal ads, looking for women who want anonymous, rough sex. He gives his hard cock a squeeze through his pants in anticipation. He brings up the page and just before clicking on the women seeking men ads, he sees an advertisement link. The text is enigmatic; it only says: STOP!
He stares blankly into the screen for a moment, unable to look away. He is compelled by the ad, like something deep down inside of him is screaming for him to click on it. And although he doesn’t understand why, he does. The link opens a pop up with an email address. Above the address it reads: CONQUOR YOUR ADDICTIONS TODAY. FREE! MASTER YOUR IMPULSES. DOMINATE YOUR URGES. TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE BACK!!
Roman highlights and copies the address and opens the email account he usually reserves for contacting repulsive women with compulsive sexual addictions and responds to the ad: would like more information about your program reply back RM
So now what? he thinks. I'm supposed to just sit here like an asshole with my dick in my hands and wait for some jack-offs to get back to me? Yeah right. I don't know why the fuck I'm even doing this.
Roman wants to leave. He wants a drink, to get to a bar he knows a couple blocks over. He has a half pint bottle of whiskey in his coat pocket, but he doesn't want that drink. He wants the drink down the road, away from this computer screen. He doesn't feel right about this, like he's not the one making the decision.
And then the little flag on the mailbox icon goes up. He has mail. He opens it and it's a message telling him to be at the bar a couple blocks away in five minutes.
Roman goes into the bar, orders a drink and takes it to a table in the back. The bartender looks at him with suspicion; he may have seen this guy in here before. He's a troublemaker. He thinks he remembers the scar on his head and decides to keep an eye on him.
A minute later this little guy walks in, not a midget exactly, he doesn't waddle or have pudgy little t-rex arms, but he's not far off. He pulls out a chair across from Roman and climbs up on it.
The little guy is quiet, he watches Roman take a long drink and set the glass back down. He smiles at Roman and waits. Roman can wait longer if he has too; he's determined not to say the first word.
The little guy shrugs,” Do you know why you are the way you are?”
4
“Yeah,” I answer. “Yeah I know what's wrong with me. I know exactly what it is.”
“Do tell,” says the little guy. He puts his elbows on the table and leans forward, resting his head in his hands.
“Alright, yeah. What the hell, it's easy enough: Some asshole bought a one-way ticket for a piece of soft metal no bigger than the end of your little finger. All aboard. Last stop: my fucking brain. Get it?” I say, pointing to the scar on my head.
“So a foreign object enters your body, rattles the windows, kicks up some dust, and the next time you open your eyes, you're a completely different person? You think this is a justifiable excuse for the things you've done?”
“I think it's a pretty fucking good one, yeah.” I tell him.
“Well, what about him?”
“Who's him?”
“The man who shot you.”
“Oh,” I say. “What about him?”
“What was his excuse?”
“I don't know. I didn't ask him”
“So you admit he had one then?”
“I didn't say that.”
“I think you did,” the little guy tells me. “According to you, people aren't born flawed, they're made that way by circumstance. Your brain damage gives you an excuse. You're excused. You have no accountability, fine. But what about the man who shot you? What about that man?” He points at a TV behind the bar. There's an aerial shot of a middle school. From the scroll at the bottom, I learn that a man dressed in combat fatigues walked into a classroom full of sixth-graders and unloaded with a shotgun. The death toll is still being calculated. “And what about this person?” He picks up a newspaper off the table and opens it to a story about a teenager who blinded a cop by slashing him across the eyes with a straight razor. The teenager was trying to unholster the cops gun when another officer shot him dead.
“What do they have to do with me? I'm not like them. I've never killed anyone.”
“Haven't you?”
It occurs to me that I can't answer that question with any sort of confidence, not that I'd give this son of a bitch the satisfaction of admitting it. “No, I haven't as a matter of fact.”
The little guy can see the doubt on my face and he shakes his head. “Well, you've certainty hurt enough people, there's no denying that.”
He's fucking right on that one. “So,” I shrug. “I though you were going to help me, not lecture me and compare me to whatever murderer-of-the-week the media agrees is newsworthy. If you can't help, I'm out of your league, or a lost cause or whatever, tell me now, and just let me finish my drink.”
“Finish your drink, Mr. Martel.”
I turn the glass up, not that I need his permission. It dawns on me that he's used my name. I don't recall telling him it, but I'm aware of my reputation. People know me. So if he's trying to pull some intimidation shit, it's pretty weak. At least he didn’t call me Mister Ed, though.
“You asked me if I think you're out of my league, Mr. Martel. I want you to know that you are firmly within it. You are the perfect candidate for the treatment.”
I raise my empty glass up and signal for another one. “So you can help me then?”
“Yes, I'm going to help you.”
“Yeah, well, maybe now I'm not so sure I want to be helped. What do you think of that?”
“I think that on some level that's probably true. But I also think that there's another part of you, somewhere inside your head, that wants control again. I think that, yes I do, or you wouldn't have agreed to meet me here.”
“That's no great accomplishment, me meeting you. You knew I was coming here. I don't know how, but you know a lot about me, don't you?”
“I do. I know you want to see your wife and kids again. I know that this is the longest you've held a conversation with anyone in a long tim
e without verbally or psychically assaulting them or trying to fuck them. I know that.”
The little guy's right about that, too. Somehow he's holding me back, tranquilizing me. I can feel it like calming waves coming off the guy. “Alright, I want your help. What do we do first? Medication? Therapy? What?”
Someone sets a drink down on the table between us and takes the empty glass away. I pick it up and take a swallow, watching the little guy for a reaction. There's no judgment. He's not trying to stop me. I think I could drink all night and he wouldn't say a word. What the fuck is his game?
“Do you know Rasputin?” He asks.
“Sounds familiar,” I say, trying to recall. My head starts that dull throb it gets when I try to remember things that aren't in it anymore, so I stop.
“He was deeply religious,” the little guy continues. “He was obsessed with sin and cleansing it. He wanted to eliminate the desire to sin. Do you know what he did?”
I shake my head. “No, what?”
“He indulged in every excess possible. He had hedonistic orgies where he nourished every lurid fantasy his mind could conjure. He wanted to eliminate the desire to sin by making it so quotidian it would bore him.”
“Is that what we're going to do?”
This makes the little guy laugh. “No, we're not going to do that. I think you'd like it too much.”
“It's well enough, anyway,” I say. “All this talk about sin is making me suspicious. This isn't some kind of religious thing is it? You're not taking advantage of a brain-damaged fuck-up are you? Trying to indoctrinate me, or get me to join a cult or something?”
“No, Mr. Martel, I can assure you I have no religious affiliation of any kind.”
I finish the last of my drink and set it back down on the table. “So what's the treatment then? I heard about this pill that they give to boozers. It makes them sick if they even drink a little bit. Like the opposite of that Rasputin guy. You ever heard of that?”
“I have,” says the little guy. “But I think your problems extend a little further than alcohol abuse, don't you?”
“Yeah,” I say. And as if to undermine the little guy's point, another full glass is set before me.
“The treatment, as far as you are concerned, Mr. Martel, is simple. You are only to do what comes naturally to you, and we take care of the rest.”
I raise my glass up, “Well, in that case, here's to Rasputin,” I say and toss it back.
And the little guy's with me all night. I have another drink and I continue in that fashion until the bar closes or I am not welcome there anymore and I am thrust outside into whatever opaque, stumbling journey the veil of my blackout leads me on.
5
The dawn comes through the motel window, sunlight burning me, exposing the pale vampire that I am, dying toothless and withered in the foul cloak of my bedsheets. Then the pain settles into me. I'm nauseous and my guts simmer with acid. My head vibrates with the toll of a newly-struck bell. There is a stiffness in my wrists and I know if I look down at my hands, I'll have little oblong circles of peeled skin on my knuckles. My body feels like the cracked floor of a sun-baked desert, praying for rain. I know if I move I'll crumble into dust. But I have to move, to get up. For some unknown reason, my body is begging me to piss, to expel the last of the precious moisture in my body.
I get up and it's like someone slinging around a bag of broken glass. I roll off the bed and walk the few steps into the bathroom, avoiding my reflection in the mirror. The piss is streaming out of me and thundering into the bottom of the bowl. I'm thinking about turning the bathroom lights off and lying down in the tub with cool water flowing over me from the shower head for a couple of hours, when I feel something soaking into my undershirt. I look down and there's something sticky and dark yellow leaking out of my side.
I pull up my shirt and look down, confused. I turn my body to the mirror, as if I'm looking at an illusion only my reflection can dispel.
It's still there. There is a weird, pudgy nub protruding from my lower right side. It is at least four inches long and ringed with layers of deep wrinkles throughout, tapered, with thick black hairs poking out of gray flesh and a wide, triangular head with three orifices, all dribbling the last trickles of yellow slime over me.
It looks like I'm growing a misshapen, gray, sweet potato. And then the thing, as if it knows I'm looking at it, stretches forward and turns upward to face me with it's flat, three-sided head.
“How are you getting on in there, Mr. Martel?” A voice calls from outside the bathroom door. “I trust you're not feeling too green after last night.”
I come out of the bathroom, and there's the little guy sitting in a chair. There's something off about him, something I didn't notice last night. The way he's sitting, his legs are bent at the wrong angles and curled in places a human being's aren't suppose to.
“What the fuck is this thing growing out of me?” I say.
The little guy stares at me blankly, “It's part of the treatment you agreed to.”
“I didn't agree to... to this,” I say poking at the thing.
“You did last night.”
I sit down on the bed. My impulse is to strangle him, I want to feel his neck break in my hands. But I sit down. Something about the guy is preventing me from hurting him.
“Comfortable?” he asks. He doesn't wait for me to answer. “As per our agreement, Mr. Martel, I have provided you a new organ to compensate for your damaged one. The new perspective it gives you will allow you to reign in your impulses, hopefully. Isn't that what you wanted?”
“What new perspective. What does that mean?”
The little guy sighs, “I explained all of this to you last night. A new perspective, Mr. Martel. This organ will allow you to realize sense never before experienced by a human being. Imagine a blind man being able to see for the first time.”
“I don't want that. I don't want this!”
“Well, you did agree to it. I have paperwork that you've signed.”
“Fuck your paperwork. As soon as you turn your back, I'm cutting this thing off.”
“I won't stop you, Mr. Martel,” he says, getting up on his short, weird-angled legs and walking over to me.
He reaches out and flicks the thing with his index finger. The pain is instant and I fall back onto the bed in agony. The sensation is equivalent to being smashed in the testicles with a sledgehammer. I can see stars exploding behind my eyelids, and then everything goes red.
“As you can see, Mr. Martel, the organ is very sensitive. But even if you could withstand the pain of cutting it off, unless you did it in a surgery ward, you would more than likely bleed to death.”
“Why?” I manage when the pain recedes enough. “What do you get out of this?”
“If you're asking if you owe me anything, you don't. If you're asking me why I'm doing this, for reasons beyond my own altruism and sympathy, I'm afraid I won't be able to answer you to your satisfaction. All I can say is, we all have our roles to play. I've fulfilled mine. I've given you an opportunity that very few will get. You should be grateful, Mr. Martel.”
“Grateful? I've got a fucking living tumor growing out of me, sneezing yellow shit all over my side, and I'm supposed to be grateful?”
“It's not a tumor. As I've already mentioned, it's a sense organ, completely autonomic. It is going to allow you to experience your everyday life in ways you can't even imagine.”
“What the fuck does that even mean? What senses? What experience?”
The little guys shrugs and gets up. “I can no more tell you that, than you can describe sound to a person who was born deaf. You're just going to have to try it out for yourself.” He moves for the door and says, “I think I've kept you long enough, Mr. Martel. There's a whole big world out there for you to rediscover. Best of luck, really. And goodbye. I don't think we'll be seeing each other again.”
“Wait. Before you go, I just have to know. Is this thing going to be permanent? I mean, w
ill I ever wake up and this thing will be gone?”
He opens the door and pauses for a second, thinking. “It's hard to say. Nothing is ever permanent, I suppose. But if I were you, I'd try and get used to it. Goodbye Mr. Martel. It's been a pleasure.” The door shuts behind him and he's gone.
6
I stay in the room until I can see the orange glow from the other side of my closed blinds start to dim. I try to watch TV for awhile, but with the little guy gone, my anger comes back in full force. I'm watching Andy Griffith, but I can't follow the plot. Andy and Barney and that little faggot kid are sitting in the kitchen, eating pickles and making these faces like there's something wrong with them. They taste bad but they keep on eating them. The audience is eating it up, and the laugh track is roaring, and I don't fucking get it at all. What's supposed to be so goddamned funny, huh? Why don't they stop eating the fucking pickles if they taste so bad? What the fuck is supposed to be going on in this shit show?
I've got the remote in my hands and I'm trying to snap it in two, but it doesn't go, so I throw it and it bounces off the Screen. There's a little clunky sound of plastic colliding with thick glass but it is in no way satisfying. I can still hear the canned laughter coming from the TV, so I get up to get the remote to turn it off.
I go around the bed, look down on the floor for the remote, and it's somewhere swallowed by the shadows. The floor is dark, the long patch of shadow is spread across the carpet and it's so deeply black, I feel like I'm staring into a tunnel or an open cellar door. I reach into the darkness and feel around for the remote. My hand brushes against something soft, like a handful of skin, cold and slightly moist. I pull the remote up from the darkness and I'm shocked to discover it has grown a fleshy outer layer, dull pink and pulsating. The little rubber buttons have been Withd by rows of teeth; not pointed fangs, but very human-looking molars and bicuspids. I raise it to my face to get a better look at it, and then the remotes folds over, closing around my hand.
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