The Conversation of Angels

I was unstoppable in my truck. My heart was a cylinder and turbine engine; petrol and caffeine and amphetamines ran through my blood. I would have liked to run over funny people. I wanted to. I had run over dogs and cats and crates. My truck trampled them like a bull trampling over a slow Spaniard in the running of the bulls. Not that I would last in the running of the bulls. I’m too fat.

I remembered my father and one of the fights I had with him. I ducked from his punch and his fist broke through the door.

Boy would I like to run him over.

I sped my truck across an old industrial landscape in the Ukrainian countryside, this stretch now reduced to a goddamned wasteland. The factories ate up all nature here like a centipede eats up the inside of a toadstool. Miles and miles of black dust and ghostly abandoned factories with little cracked dust-darkened windows.

I had a hole drilled through the partition of my truck into the cargo compartment. When I was parked or stuck in traffic I could look through the hole and see the whores or whores-to-be that I often smuggled. Sometimes I would masturbate. Often they were nice-looking with torpedo-tits and thick lips. Hungarian harlots, Rumanian whores, and of course, my favorite, the Russian ladies of the White Night. (I call them Ladies of the White Night because of the White Night in St. Petersburg during the summer. Isn’t that clever?)

But today I wasn’t transporting tarts, instead just a bunch of stinking Rumanian immigrants. I tried not to think of the chore of emptying the bucket and hosing off the cargo-hold. I looked through the hole and saw thick-browed Rumanians, one of them an older man with a fuzzy broom-like mustache and an accordion hanging from his neck. There was a gypsy woman who made me think of soothsayers—not because she looked like gypsies in the old movies, she just looked like a middle-aged brown woman, sweating and scared shitless like every other immigrant I ever hauled. There was also a gypsy boy, with amber eyes. He spat in the bucket. I don’t know why but he got my attention. I could easily imagine the little bastard with a switchblade in his hand. Something dangerous slithered like a garden snake under his young surface. While staring at him I felt a sensation pass through my testicles, like a little shooting star.

I rolled a shag with one hand, while with my other hand I dipped a key into a baggie of speed on my right knee and snorted the speed off the key while I drove with my left knee. An hour after crossing borders I met the Croats with their vans on the side of the road by a meadow at night. The whispering wind blew through and in some places parted the tall grass, making the field resemble a roiling nocturnal sea.

“Bok,” I said.

“Bok,” one of the Croats answered.

I unloaded the trash and indicated to the Croats where I had hid the pack of Russian acid papers. They looked like stamps; they depicted a cartoon man on a bicycle flying through space. I prefer smuggling psychedelics, which are only attractive to smelly, lazy, pathetic hippies (we get a lot of those in Amsterdam)—if I smuggled the good stuff, the speed and Russian coke, I might be tempted to dip into it myself, which would mean lousy business prospects.

One of the Croats, Fran, a bald ape (whom I called Ape-face) ripped the old Rumanian’s accordion from his stubby little hands and smote it onto the ground. Ape-face stamped on the accordion with his steel-toed work-booted foot, making a foot-sized hole in it. I chuckled. The Rumanian folded his hands without raising his head. The Croats herded the immigrants into their vans, paid me, shook my hand—which I then wiped off on my jeans—and it was done.

A few nights later I was in Amsterdam and my mother, Renske Kiegote, was taking me to bible study. I didn’t want to go to church on my off-day. I wanted to stay home and read Stephen King. He should win the Nobel Prize, or be president of America, because he’s a genius, a great man. I remember this movie called “Trucks”—I don’t know if he wrote it or if it was based on one of his books—about trucks that have a mind of their own and terrorize a town of American rednecks. A masterpiece. Or I could eat chips while watching Renegade on TV and roll a joint of Dutch Passion, and my mother could join me. But no, I have to go to that stinking congregation with the moaning retards and the wheelchair-vegetables and the old ladies. Who the hell ever heard of Dutch people being religious?

I have three words for my mother: absolutely fucking insane. She was a messianic Jew for a year, even though she didn’t have a single drop of Jewish blood in the family. She was a Jehovah’s Witness too for some time, always talking about how Satan is the ruler of the world (I think Stephen King should be the ruler of the world) and how the Roman Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon. (I know the Whore of Babylon, this Thai whore I poked in Amsterdam. “You ouch me,” she said. For forty euros I damn well better ouch you, you saucy kutwijf.)

She was even New Age for a while, Feng-Shui’ing everything she could get her hands on, doing yoga with these damn crystals and making me hold them to feel their energy—all I could really do was look at them and imagine they were cocaine-hydrochloride crystal. Talking about angels; hugging me and telling me I was a caterpillar who would one day metamorphose into a beautiful butterfly—and the stink of that incense.

I wore a tie with little carrots on it and walked with my mother along the canal. I hadn’t slept for forty hours but that was OK because the speed was keeping me up. With her permed, puffed-up red-dyed hair and her long, thin pasty white body and long dress she resembled a toadstool—for some reason I imagined a centipede eating her from the inside. I decided to walk because I had just sniffed so I had a walking kick and besides my mother claimed her bone problems made it difficult to climb into my truck. I observed the patterns of the cobblestone and enjoyed tracing them with my eyes—I liked doing that after sniffing—as my mother yakked away about God. We took a tram at De Pijp. The tram wriggled like a great steel millipede along the rails on the cobblestone streets. We got off the tram, walked into a side street, wormed through crowds of young stoned tourists smelling of diverse breeds of marijuana, and got into the church. The retards, the vegetables, and the old ladies were there as usual. My mother took out her white-jacketed bible from her handbag and we shared it the way schoolchildren do when one of them has forgotten his textbook.

“Today we are going to discuss the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” the discussion-leader said. His eyes were bloodshot. “Two angels came to Sodom in the evening; and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and bowed himself with his face to the earth and said: My Lords, turn aside, I pray you, to your servant’s house and spend the night….”

Basically the angels wanted to spend the night in the street, but Lot convinced them to stay at his house for a game of dominoes or whatnot. “But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house, and they called to Lot: Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may have intercourse with them.”

I imagined these rapacious homosexuals dressed in S&M gear, and one of them carrying a stereo playing the techno music and popping designer drugs. “I want to have intercourse with them”—that’s a good one. Don’t waste any time.

“Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, and said: I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Behold, I have two virgin daughters, let me bring them to you, and do to them as you please….”

This business was finally getting interesting.

“….only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof. But they said: ‘Stand back!’ And they said, ‘This fellow came to sojourn, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.’ Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and drew near to break the door.”

The preacher went on about how the angels struck the Sodomites with blindness and told Lot to flee from the city because the angels were going to destroy it. Lot and his family ran away from the city; it went up in a mushroom cloud under a rain of fire from the sky, and I imagined the angels in an invisible jet like Wonder-Woman’s napalming the city flat. Lot’s wife looked back at the city and turned into a pillar of salt. Then Lot and his daughters found shelter in a cave, Lot got drunk and impregnated them. The end.

Preacher-man looked up from his bible at the spectators.

“Sodomy is an abomination! A gross sin, worthy of death!” he screamed. The retards and old whores nodded their heads; the veggies moved whatever they could to show how excited they were.

“Today’s sodomites will be cast into the Lake of Fire on Judgment Day!”

My mother nodded. The amphetamines, shag, and coffee were affecting my stomach, and I abruptly farted. At this the discussion-leader had a puzzled expression on his bearded face and looked about with shifty blue eyes.

“That concludes our Bible study tonight,” he said nervously, perhaps sensing my intestinal emanations violating his sacred space. “Thank you all for coming.”

I walked out of there with my brain turned upside-down in my head, like a tortoise fallen on its back and squirming to get back on its legs. All I could think about was homosexuals. Gays. Roman Catholic priests are gay. That discussion leader is probably gay. Pim Fortuyn is gay. Everybody’s fuckin gay these days.

My mother and I took the tram back to her neighborhood. Sitting in the tram, stuck in this metal caterpillar, made me think of prison. Every prison is a goddamn Sodom City. If some good-looking angelic males went there, they’d have a conga-line of fruits lining up for a piece of ass.

We got to Mama’s house. I rolled a shag on the kitchen table while talking to her.

“Mama, ever since my father died you’ve been obsessing with this religion crap. It’s starting to scare me.”

“Why do you always say “my father”? Why don’t you say “Papa”?”

“He never deserved to be called that. The man was a pig.”

“He was an angel!” my mother yelled. “He was an angel on earth. He smuggled immigrants from the Soviet Union into Western Europe. He saved people from Godless communists!”

“He was a bitter old drunk.”

“At least he wasn’t a drug addict like you! Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, I can tell when you’re high, and can see your pupils dilated. I know! I don’t know how you could make all that money, how you could afford a Harvey Johnson motorcycle—”

“Harley Davidson,” I corrected her, as I finished rolling the cigarette.

“I know you’re doing something wicked to make all that money.”

“I support you with it, so stop complaining. Without me, you would be on welfare. I support you, not Papa,” I spat out the last word with vicious bitterness.

“He was an angel—and you used to be like him in so many ways, when you were young….” her voice quieted down and she stared blankly at the table, lost in her nostalgic state, like a seer gazing into a fire. “You, Donald, you are a fallen angel….”

I walked out of her apartment and down the narrow, steep staircase with the shag still burning between my fingers, occasionally taking a drag. I felt enormous stress, memories of my father, the conversation with my mother, not having slept for days, worries about my health, my hatred for my father, the white noise of the bible sermon, all these were scorpions stinging me from the inside. My father, he used to tell me, “You’re not my son! You’re The Devil’s son!”

My heart was beating fast.

I threw the shag into the canal and suddenly I saw the canal turn red. It was blood. I felt sick. I saw penises wriggling like caterpillars on the sidewalk. I began to run. People in the street were staring at me. I wondered if they saw the blood. I saw a young Moroccan with the sides of his head shaved, his hair cropped on top and long in the back. I tried to talk to him.

“What color is the canal?” I asked him. He ignored me and kept on walking.

I looked at the canal and it was no longer red.

I walked home, anxiety under my frigid necklace. Once I got to my apartment I watched TV for a few hours—the blur of images, leaving their tracks on my brain like the tail-lights of a speeding motorcycle leaves a trail of light in the eye—and finally managed to fall asleep.

Some days later I got a call from Mama.

“Don, I’m calling you to announce that I am no longer a Christian.”

“What? That’s great! I’m so glad to hear that you finally—”

“I’m a Muslim now, I’ve become a Shiite Muslim. I go to the mosque and the Imam and the other Muslims are so understanding. We sing suras.”

Imam. I got yer Imam right here, lady.

“I read the qur’an,” she said. “Did you know that before the coming of Mohammed—peace be upon him—” she added with motor-warm relish, “his coming was prophesied by soothsayers. Soothsayers obtained this knowledge from demons who had overheard it by spying on the conversations of angels. Islam has been so misunderstood by the West, you know.”

While I was on the phone, I cut myself a line of speed with my other hand and started sniffing through a rolled-up 10-euro bill. I needed this now. In my coke-mirror I saw reflected a sparkling shooting star, a comet of Sodom-incineration, I looked up at the skylight over my head but the stars were not visible.

“But it is really a wonderful religion,” she went on. “Did you know—”

I hung up.

The Turks are muslim. They stand on street corners, smoking and spitting, singing suras or whatever and trying to get into Dutch people’s nightclubs. John Walker’s muslim, Middle East is muslim, Indonesia is muslim, my mother is muslim. Everybody’s fuckin muslim these days.

A week had passed since my mother called me. I was driving a human cargo of Turkish illegal immigrants from the Croatian coast into Germany when I began to see spots, little squiggles in my field of vision like the dangling hair that comes on the screen of an old cartoon. I was seeing small, black creatures darting around: horseflies or something like that. It went on for five minutes. I felt I couldn’t drive like this.

I parked in the back of a gas-station, closed my eyes for a moment or two and looked through the hole in the headboard. Some young men sat on the floor, staring at the metal walls with their beetle-black eyes. The older men were praying. There were some women as well who wore headscarves. One of them had bright blue eyes—which I thought was rare among Turks—and full lips. The other one had high cheekbones, and teeth that were dun like a flock of sheep. The two women spoke to each other in Turkish. I took a hit of speed. I had been up for thirty hours.Then it occurred to me that the women were not speaking Turkish but rather some angelic language.

“He is a fallen angel. He is a demon,” I heard them say.

“God will give him one last chance. God will entrust him with His angel.”

I rushed out of the cab and walked around the truck, my steps scraping against the gravel, opened the storage compartment and climbed in. The smell was that of a circus elephant stable. I walked up to the two angelic girls, shoe-soles scraping against the pebbles and making the metal floor clang.

“Are you angels?” I asked them. I imagined haloes pin-tucked under their larval cocoon headscarves.

They stared at me. They somehow reminded me of the female martyrs depicted in statues I had seen in German cathedrals. I looked in the blue eyes, irises with a hue I had never seen on Dutch or Germanic people, they were of such a beautiful color that one would try to guard them with sunglasses lest some cruel thief try to steal them and sell them. Her eye-color conveyed some kind of tranquility, the way the melting, sunset clouds must have looked before they rained manna over the desert in the verses the Bible Study lector recited described, serene, no cokehead hurry or impatience, no childish struggle or hysteria or resistance, like clouds as they accept the fading sunlight and pollution which adorn them with psychedelic tie-dye streaks of color. I saw heaven in their eyes,and I cried, because I knew that what I saw was so far away from me: for I was in hell, driving on the winding freeways of the bottomless pit and the highways of Babylon.

They said nothing and I left the storage compartment and went back to the steering wheel.

“What should I do?” I thought.

“It is not time yet,” I heard them say, and I started the engine, which roared to mechanical life.

A few nights after smuggling the Turks and the two veiled women who I believed were angels, I called my mother.

“Mama, something is happening to me.”

“What is happening to you, Donald?”

“I’m like Alice in fucking wonderland here. I’m hearing beings speak to me.”

She paused as if to reflect serenely, like some patient bhuddist. Then she said,

“Mohammed, Peace be Upon Him, heard the voice of the angel Jibril.”

“But I’m not Mohammed,” I blurted, my voice breaking, almost crying. I felt ashamed that she could hear my anxiety.

“Are you lost, Don?” She sounded empathic, but there was something odd about her empathy, it was like a mechanical wind-up animal.

“Yes, I am lost, godverdomme.”

“Let God be your barometer in the black forest you have blindly wandered into. Let His Word steer you towards fulfilling his mandate. He put you in my womb to perform a mission for him.”

In the past I would have been annoyed at her chatter about God or Allah, but now I thought that perhaps Mama was communicating to me on some more profound wavelength or level of consciousness she had attained while meditating and singing suras from the Koran. My heart and jugular veins raced and my palm sweated against the telephone’s plastic. I nodded, thinking perhaps she was speaking to me from some mystical plane of wisdom and insight, some windy afterlife field where she’d stroll amongst the flowers and singing nightingales.

This last sentence of hers echoed in my brain. I decided I must perform my mission.

I had my car parked on the side of an East European highway by a ghost-town of abandoned factories while some men who worked with the Croats filled up the haul with a new bunch of migrant aspiring prostitutes. When they finished loading the truck one of the men gave me the thumbs up sign and I drove off.

There was a storm brewing. The gray clouds rumbled like the stomach of Leviathan from the litanies of the reverend at Mama’s former church.

I drove past the wasteland, the black dust like gunpowder residue of countless forgotten wars. After a few hours of driving, I parked my truck on the roadside and looked through the headboard hole. There were mostly women, but there was a boy of about fifteen among them—he had dirty blond curls and blue eyes. When I looked at him I felt something in my testicles but didn’t know why. He reminded me of the gypsy boy I had smuggled some weeks before. All I knew was that this boy was an angel, and that Fran and the other Croats wanted me to drop the boy off near the Rumanian border from where they would take him to a Western European city, probably Berlin, and Berlin was Sodom, the Berliners were Sodomites and they wanted to rape this angel just like the Sodomites the preacher spoke of.

I knew that this was the test: if I protected this angel I would no longer be a demon but an angel, or at least a man like Lot, chosen by God.

I turned up the metal music on my radio, blazing guitars and thundering drums. (I knew Stephen King had listened to such music while penning his magnum opus, about trucks with a will of their own, a work written in blood.) I saw Fran’s men signaling me on the side of the road.

I stomped on the gas, sped past them with all my might. I had a sensation that with being propelled so fast in my truck my eyes turned into sparkling flames like meteors hurled through the atmosphere, blazing with energy of Sodom-incineration: this was the final stage of my becoming a warrior of the light. The corroded shell of my past was cast into the dark sea of the bottomless pit to sink forever. Gunshots went off.

Lightning began to strike—fire from the sky. I couldn’t see the Croats in my rear-view mirror anymore. I saw some hitchhikers standing by the road. I rammed the breaks, making the tires squeal like swine to the slaughter, and pulled over. It was a young couple, both of them carrying backpacks. Adam and Eve cast out of Eden.

“Which way is the Holy Land?” I asked them.

“What?” Their faces were scared, sweaty and wide-eyed.

“The Holy Land! Jerusalem!” I said.

They looked at each other and then they pointed southeast.

I turned my truck around and sped southeast, the opposite direction of where I had come from. I was going well past two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. I saw one of Fran’s men standing outside of a van. I didn’t stop. For a moment a fear scurried through me, an electric wave of anxiety in my solar plexus as I knew I would likely end up in a foreign prison, a walled-in city of corrupted men who grunted and leered hyena-like in the filthy night, their neurons numb from white powder and tainted with the wine of forced love –my Sodom, my Gomorrah.

Soon I was driving by a mountain range. Lightning struck again over the hills and for a second all I could see was white light. I saw a barricade of police cars blocking my way. I realized these were corrupt cops in cahoots with the smugglers. Fran must have contacted them to stop me. But they were operating on short notice and therefore were only a few. Their sirens blinked blue and red.

I hated cops.

I imagined my truck as a doom machine with huge gnashing metal teeth in front, breathing fire and red burning eyes emanating smoke.

A bullet shot through my window but it didn’t touch me. I hit the gas with all my strength and sped on, smashing through the patrol cars, a fat policeman frantically waving a sign reading “Uwaga!” as he tried to get out of the way, like a slow Spaniard in the running of the bulls.

 

Enough

“Cock-sucking, mother-fucking, low-life, PIECE OF SHIT SCUMBAGS!!!”

When the last echoes finish bouncing off the restroom walls, the only sound is that of my own breath. The rhythm of my heart seems slightly off and way too fast. Is this what a heart attack feels like?

I close my eyes and picture a blank white piece of paper. In the middle of the paper, big black numbers appear and disappear, first one, then two and so on up to twenty then back down to one. This usually calms me and slows my heart rate.

Of course, the meth has me so jacked as to pretty much rule out a normal heart rate.

But my rage does recede, and I decide I am not having a heart arrack. I open my eyes to see the stall door in front of me. I make the mistake of inhaling deeply through my nose. The stench of urine rapes my nostrils and penetrates my lungs.

I sneer at this minor degradation, the cherry on top of my shit-sundae of a life. This, this is the only place I can hide from their laughs and jokes and smirks. The smirks are the worst. That’s their way of saying I’m too stupid to know they think I’m a joke, just a fucking idiot, right? Laugh at the joke right to his face! Isn’t that it? You fucking shit balls! You low-life monkey-fuckers!

Blank piece of paper, one, two, three…

When I open my eyes this time, the gun is in my hand. Normally it fits nicely in the shoulder holster under my left arm, completely unnoticeable beneath my blazer. Suicide-silver .38 Smith & Wesson.

A lot of people will tell you bigger is better, so why not use a .45 or even .50 caliber? See, a large caliber will just punch a hole right through a body, which might sound good, but if you don’t hit a major organ, they still have a good chance of surviving. But a smaller caliber, like a .22, will ricochet of bone. So, if you can get it bouncing around inside the ribcage, that tiny bullet starts chewing holes right through lungs, heart, kidney etc.

The only reason I settled on a caliber as big as a .38 was so I could pierce their skulls. I want to pierce their skulls and splatter what little grey matter they have all over these fucking walls!

Blank paper, one, two, three…

I open my eyes, lay the .38 the metal toilet paper dispenser, pull out the vial of meth and tap out a generous bump. When I try to chop the stuff with the dull edge of my driver’s license, a big beautiful crystal shoots off to the side, ricochets off the stall wall and is lost forever somewhere in the pattern of the tile floor.

I lay my license down flat on top of the pile and crush it, then lower my head and suck it all up into my nostrils. There is a temporary rush, and for a moment, I feel contentment.

A moment later the rage returns.

Blank paper, one, two, three…

I put the .38 back in its holster, stand up and push the grimy stall door open. I walk over to the mirror and stare at the hideous face staring back at me. My sunken eyes and jutting cheekbones give me a preview of what my decaying corpse will soon look like. The tiny sore forming at the corner of my mouth, that is where the decomposition will start.

My gaze slides down my reflection to the tie around my neck. Fucking white collar noose. A leash, really, just to make sure you always remember your place. I grab the knot and yank it back and forth, sawing it into the back of my neck until it’s loose enough to pull over the top of my head. I toss it backwards over the stall door and hear a satisfying splash as it lands in the toilet behind me. Dress-code violation will never be an issue for me ever again.

I break eye contact with my corpse’s reflection and exit this stinking piss hole for the last time.

Making my way down the hallway to the classroom, a hard sniff breaks a crystal loose from somewhere inside my nasal cavity. I relish the bitterness as it slides down my throat, giving me an unexpected rush of euphoria just as the morning bell rings.

That fucking bell. One-part angry banshee, one-part nails on chalkboard, and one-part jack hammer to my brain. It drills through my ears and deep into my skull. It screams at me from inside my own head until I’m certain my brains will liquify and come squirting out my ears with the force of a firehose.

Then it stops.

I twist the door handle and enter the classroom. The students go silent the way they always do. I know the little fucks were talking about me. They may look like twelve-year-old cherubs, but every last one of them is a soul-sucking, black-hearted little gargoyle. Trust me, I know this.

I walk to the front of my desk, sit on its edge and survey the little rodents before me. I see Tina Bailey look over at Tommy Sullivan. They trade sly glances complete with barely suppressed smiles. ‘Thumbtack’ Tommy Sullivan. Where is it this time you little prick? On the floor by my chair where I’ll step on it? Stuck in the eraser where it will scratch up the chalkboard?

Or is it on my seat again? That’s it, isn’t it you little fuck? I sit down, it sinks into my bony ass, and all you little ass nuggets get to laugh at me again, right? Well not this time. Not this time and never again!

I get up, walk back over to the door, and turn the lock. There is a finality to the sound of the deadbolt slamming home.

Every step back to the front of the class feels lighter. It’s almost over.

The only thing left is my final and finest hour. A rare moment of satisfaction to cap off my shitty life.

Slipping my hand into my jacket pocket, I wrap my fingers around the gun’s grip in a way that almost feels sexual.

I do not think of a blank piece of paper.

I do not count to twenty this time.

A Hard Case (Part 1)

My secretary fired me.

Detective stories usually begin: We’d been dry-humping on the couch in my office when my secretary said she wanted to be nude, all nude. But here we go instead: “You haven’t paid me in weeks. You haven’t had a new case in months. The cases you’ve got are stone cold dead. You’re the worst detective in world. You couldn’t detect stink in a garbage dump.”

She slammed the door so hard it broke the etched glass panel the last sign painter in town had recently enlivened with my agency’s logo.

The phone rang when I was about to call it a day. My secretary was gone. I answered.

“Sloane Investigations, Ned Sloane speaking.”

“You the D-d-divorce D-d-detective?”

Wanda, my former secretary, had placed an ad in the local paper. She’d gone to art school for a bit, and claimed her linked-D logo illustrated the concept that we specialize in divorce cases. Other investigators won’t touch them any more. “Sir, you either have a stammer or you’re a poor reader. I’m the Double-D Divorce Detective. I only handle cases where the unfaithful party is stacked. You got a case for me?”

“Oh boy, do I ever. My Doris—that is, she used to be my Doris—has big’uns. That’s how come we wound up together in the first place. Couldn’t keep my mitts offa her.”

Whoever was on the other end of the line was about to cry. A lost pair of big tits is tragic. I thought about my ex-secretary, Wanda. Private eyes are obliged to grope their girls Friday, but I’d never gotten grabby with her. Not much to grab. Just like my ex-wife. Meanwhile, the new client sobbed, sniffled and gasped.

“Pull yourself together, sir. So, you think your wife’s been unfaithful.”

“She might’ve been, but the thing is, she’s run away, with all our money. I mean, all my money!”

“Now that’s serious, Mister…”

“Frawley. Odom Frawley. Any chance you’d work this job pro bono? That means for free, doesn’t it?”

“Mr. Frawley, if you look at the ad’s fine print, it states that I work pro boner. Show me a snapshot of your wife, preferably nude. If she’s hot, I’ll take the case. For a hundred bucks a day, plus expenses.”

“That sounds awful cheap.”

“Hey whatever you say bud.”

Frawley said he had several of pictures of his wife with no clothes on.

Here’s one of them:

A Hard Case (Part 2)

The Lifelines

The lines on the monitors flattened, while a single tone emitted from the machine drowning out the silence in the room.

“I’m afraid we did all that we could here.” The surgeon lowers his head to match the discouragement in his voice, “I wish we could have saved her.”

“I will notify her family.”

“Thank you, Nurse Venugopal.”

After the team finished pulling the last tube and wire from the patient’s body, a thick layer of fog formed at their feet. As the surgeon, nurse, and staff looked around trying to assess the cause, the doors burst open. A tall man enters the room wearing a bright blue lab coat and a giant plastic mask in the form of a black and white cat head. He is accompanied by a woman wearing a red lab coat, an enormous papier-mâché dragon head, and dragon wings extending from her shoulders to the floor.

The man with the cat head speaks: “Hello doctors, nurses, and humanoids. I am DJ Cat-a-List, and this is my associate, Dragon Bones. We are here to help.”

Dragon Bones steps forward, holds up a double-ended fire stick, and launches a column of fire from her mouth, igniting both sides. She spins it rapidly in front of her. A group of men and women dressed in navy blue scrubs wearing plastic animal masks representing various species, which can be found in the backyards of southwestern Pennsylvania, rushes into the room. They surround the operating room personnel.

“We will be handling this from here,” DJ Cat-a-List shouts as he presses a button on his key fob. Two speakers descend from the ceiling and stop when they are centered about the patient’s ears. A mirror ball, strobe lights, and colored lasers forming geometric shapes on the walls also drop out of the ceiling.

“This is ridiculous, ” the lead surgeon announces. “I’m calling security.” He jumps to the cabinet in the corner and picks up the telephone receiver. “What? No dial tone?” He slams the phone down. “Mrs. Venugopal, can you make the call? I left my cell phone in the locker.”

She checks her phone, “It doesn’t look like I have service.” She repeatedly taps and presses on the screen. “It’s not working.”

One by one, the staff confirm that their phones are also inoperable, as a table rises from the floor in front of DJ Cat-a-List. A row of music-mixing equipment covers the table.

“Does anyone realize there is a dead body in this room?” the surgeon pleads. “We have to notify the family. What are you doing? This is insane. Stop it! Stop this right now.”

Dragon Bones pushes the surgeon down into a chair. “Sit. It’s not like we can possibly do any worse than you.” She turns around to address the flock of people with animal masks and hospital uniforms. “Places, everyone.”

The animal people crawl to various spots in the room. Some take up positions on top of the cabinets, others stand on the available tables and chairs. They begin to sway in harmony to the low rhythmic bass sounds now emanating from the speakers. DJ Cat-a-List has one side of the earphones pressed to one of his cat ears as he bobs his head to the beat. The music gets louder.

Dragon Bones jumps onto the gurney, standing directly over the deceased patient. She points to the surgery staff who are now huddled in a corner with the surgeon, shifting uneasily in his chair. “Raise your hands in the aiiiiiiiiir! SWAY to DJ Cat-aaaaaa-Liiiiiiiiiiiist!”

The staff obey the orders of Dragon Bones, even taking it a step further by moving their bodies to the music, all except the surgeon, who now has his arms tightly folded across his chest.

“Stop listening to this crazy lady.”

“Let’s just get through this. Maybe one of us can sneak away when they aren’t looking and call for help,” Nurse Venugopal whispers, grabbing the surgeon’s arms and trying to raise them in the air as instructed.

“That’s right yinz. This is a celebration… a celebration of LIFE,” DragonBones shouts.

With that cue, the music gets even louder, pumping melodic piano synth sequences at a pace double the speed of a human heartbeat. She points to the swaying mass of staff.

“That’s right, I wanna see you MOVE.”

She swings her fire sticks around her head and behind her back while dancing in place over the lifeless body. The cadaver moves each time Dragon Bones energetically lifts and lowers her feet on the table.

The music continues to get louder. The basslines rattle the cabinet doors, pulsing along the fog-covered floor. The lasers flicker and bounce with the beat.

The surgeon remains dead still, hands cupped over his ears.

“C’mon doctor, have some fun,” Nurse Venugopal shouts as she tries to reposition the surgeon’s hands. “Just do what they say so we can escape!”

“This is terrible. I will see everyone arrested for this!”

Dragon Bones jumps off the gurney and rushes toward the surgeon, twirling her fire stick. The masked animal dancers continue their moves with the upmost choreographed precision. Dragon Bones stands within a foot on the surgeon’s lap and bends down so that her dragon eyes are level with his own.

“You don’t want to dance? Well, what do you want to do? This is life. Now savor it.”

She flails her arms and legs even faster, spinning the fire stick, carving paths through the dark, foggy room. Plumes of smoke trail from the speed of her movements. The staff circle around Dragon Bones, sharing the moment and dancing along with her. The surgeon squirms in an effort to keep his distance from them.

“I have never seen anything this horrible in my life. This is disgusting!”

Dragon Bones stops dancing and signals the staff to stop as well. She again turns to face the surgeon.

She points her fire stick at him. “This is not ‘ridiculous.’ This is not ‘disgusting.’ THIS IS LIFE!”

She positions the fire stick in front of her mouth and spews an enormous plume of flame, brightening the room with an intense orange glow. The staff and surgeon shield their faces from its burning light.

When their eyes clear, they find the room is empty. No colorful people wearing animal masks, no party lights, no speakers or DJ equipment. Even the fog has disappeared.

“Nurse Venugopal, what is going on here?” the surgeon says, finally getting out of his chair. “Is everyone alright?”

They nod and confirm that they are fine. “Surgeon, are you okay?”

“Yes, Nurse Venugopal, I am… Nurse Venugopal… our patient.”

The surgeon rushes over to the body on the gurney. The staff huddle behind him and the nurse.

“Look. Nurse,” the surgeon says, pointing to the patient’s leg. “It’s moving…”

The patient sits up, blinks a few times, yawns and looks around the room, “Where am I?”

A member of the medical staff screams.

“I can’t believe it…” the surgeon mutters.

“We’re so happy to see you recover, but please don’t move too much or too quickly,” Nurse Venugopal interjects. “You were in pretty bad shape for a moment there. We thought you were…”

“Really? Well… I’m thirsty…”

“I think you should stay for a few tests,” the surgeon says “Don’t you agree, nurse?”

The surgeon’s eyes are still bulging out of his head, but he is trying to keep calm. Maybe the vibrations shook apart the remaining tumors, he thinks. Maybe they somehow defibrillated her heart.

Nurse Venugopal says, “Why don’t we give her a minute?” She places her hand on the patient’s shoulder, “Let me get you some water.”

One of the staff members nods and walks toward the door, but before he reaches the threshold, the door bursts open. A man and woman march into the room wearing full surgical gear with their faces covered. The man speaks first.

“Hello friends, we’ll take it from here.”

He had a shaky, high-pitched voice. The woman waved, and her eyes squinted in a congenial expression.

“And who are you?” the surgeon demands to know.

“Ah yes, we were just assigned to the case. I am Doctor Katnik, and this is my assistant Nurse Bonecki. Here are our documents.” He unfolds a batch of papers and hands them to the surgeon.

The surgeon flips through a few pages. “Well, this looks okay, I guess. I wonder why haven’t I heard of this before? I have never seen a change in staff in this particular situation.”

Nurse Venugopal looks at the papers as well.

The high-pitched doctor says, “No problem. It happens all the time.” He waves his hand and the female assistant steps to the side. A group of orderlies walk through the door, surround the patient, kick out the wheel locks on the operating gurney, and begin moving her out the door.

“Hey!” the surgeon shouts.

The high-pitched doctor turns around along with his masked assistant. “Yes?”

Meanwhile, the staff continues to wheel the patient out the door.

“Miss, you really shouldn’t smoke,” the surgeon says the high-pitched doctor’s assistant. “No offense, but I detect a really strong smoky odor. I try to tell all my fellow heath care professionals.”

“No offense taken,” she says, sniffing her uniform. “I stopped as of a few minutes ago. I promise.”

“Sorry,” the high-pitched doctor continues. “We have to go. Her mother, brother, and sister will be so happy to see her.”

And with that, he turns and follows the rest of the group out the door.

“Well, Nurse Venugopal,” the surgeon says, waving goodbye to the exiting group. “He certainly had a strange voice, didn’t he!”

Vodka Deodorant

The woman in the fake leather suit looked exhausted. She had anemia or a timid form of albinism, accentuated by heavy makeup around her pale eyes. She stared at the supermarket cash register’s conveyor belt as it rolled. 

The girl who rang up my generic tomatoes, no-logo UHT milk, bargain-brand yogurt and sawdust-vaseline breakfast biscuits held grimly to a punk look. 

The guy who rang up the skinny pale woman’s purchases attempted a pick-up line. He plucked his eyebrows. Gym muscles bulged under his supermarket smock.

Maybe she didn’t understand Italian.

He didn’t have time to try again, in another language. Her shopping list would’ve fit on a defunct communist country’s postage stamp. Vodka and deodorant slid by, registered, clunked into the stainless steel merchandise holding pen. She refused the offer of a shopping bag for an additional six Euro-cents. She put the vibrator-shaped deodorant applicator in her pocket, grabbed the bottle by the neck.

She didn’t smash me with it when I asked to walk her home. Maybe she didn’t understand German. Don’t know why I thought she might. 

I didn’t offer to carry her bargain-brand bottle. She’d have thought I planned to steal it. 

On the way out of the supermarket’s glare, we walked past lost-looking old folks taking advantage of free unnatural warmth. 

Heat was included with the rent in New York, as was hot water. Felt like warmth and personal hygiene were free.

The generic neighborhood was identifiable only by streets named for pre-European Union countries. Maybe she caught the irony of winding up on Soviet Union Street. Maybe irony was a luxury concept she didn’t understand. Spike heels hobbled her wiggle along the crumbling sidewalk. 

Vodka was a problem in the former USSR. Dictators launched USA-style prohibition, restrictive rationing, scorched-earth surtaxes. Soviet drunks turned home-brewed beer into instant vodka with a dash of mosquito repellent. They slathered shoe polish on rye bread and left it on the radiator for delirious LSD-like trips. I asked her if she mixed generic deodorant and no-logo vodka for a narcotic effect.

Vodka was to drink, she said. Deodorant was for stink. I asked if she was a prostitute. She nodded and said I was one too, as if I didn’t know.

“Look, I’ve got some food in my backpack,” I said. “Let me make you dinner. Nothing fancy. No-Logo spaghetti, but it tastes pretty good.”

She wasn’t sure she had a spaghetti pot. She’d rented a room in an apartment from people she barely knew, but hadn’t inspected the kitchen cabinets. She didn’t say no.

Cheap euro-architecture guarantees maximum winter cold. Construction speculators were mobbed up with gas-heater factories, and the natural gas and oil industries. Her place was warm. Her former-Soviet Union flat-mates stole heat from somewhere.

She took off her jacket, released an alcoholic reek as faint as a capped bottle of evil perfume waved slowly under the nose.

Her armpit-hair was the color of straw. She sat on a rickety chair to watch. No chopping block. No spaghetti pot. No can-opener, but that was no problem because generic tomato-pulp cans have futuristic pop-top tabs these days. Dull little knife couldn’t peel an apple. Luckily, bargain brand tuna cans are packed with enough low-grade olive oil to lubricate a sauce. She pulled a loose no-logo cigarette from her purse, bumped me aside to light up at the stovetop. That was as close as she ever got to cooking.

Someone else was in the apartment. This phantom presences manifested different tobacco smells, muffled burps, sighs, wheezes. TV drone oozed through the thin walls. Human breezes moved scorch-marked curtains. Behind them, dirty windows faced a cement courtyard crowded with junked motor-scooter parts, corroded metal garbage bins. A cat prowled across the scene, evicted or escaped from some similar desolation. An invisible dead cat looked smug under a fogged plastic sheet.

“Where you from?”

She had to think. Wasn’t used to direct questions. More accustomed to evasive action when direct questions were asked. Where you from what’re you doing here where’s your entry visa and residence permit? But immigration cops don’t offer free spaghetti. She was from an unpronounceable war-torn town in Kosovo. She politely repeated her name, but I couldn’t imitate the sounds. She didn’t ask who I was or where I was from or what I was doing. She thought she knew what I wanted. In other words, same as everyone. But she was wrong. Unless the shower worked. 

And money’s been a problem since the dirty magazine biz tanked. 

Being dirty is no longer a viable commercial asset. 

She frisked my knapsack, found the bargain chocolate, had dessert before the starch course. She was missing molars. Ashtrays of premature death breezed through her pale lips.

Dinner was payment enough for what she had to offer. We hit the shower first. Practically had to demonstrate the proper use of bargain brand soap and dental floss. We toweled off in the low-consumption neon-bulb mist.

“Get the deodorant you bought. Bring the vodka too.” 

She went.

Hot water accentuates alcoholic buzz. Maybe I took a swig of deodorant after she slathered her armpits. The stuff foamed like shampoo, tasted about the same. I remembered the cheapo razors among my recent supermarket purchases. I still shaved, occasionally. So I left her under a stream of hot water and tromped to the kitchen. 

Bumped into another woman in the dark hallway. She smelled like she was from Bukovina, or Bucharest, Burkina Faso, Montenegro, Sierra Leone, Bophuthatswana. Human flotsam status cuts through and across geo-political boundaries. She walked around without light due to inflated electric bills, or else she was so stoned that low-watt neon hurt her eyes. She flinched when she lurched into a stranger. 

I returned to the bathroom.

She was staring at the medicine cabinet over the sink. Where am I? Who am I? What am I doing? Why am I alive? Clouded mirrors don’t reflect answers to such easy questions. The tile floor was slippery. The cold outside the bathroom window wanted in, and was making headway. She came back into the shower unquestioningly. I shaved with deodorant foam. She shaved her legs to fully exploit the free razor. 

Mouldy towels, unmade stale bed. The window in her room had a rolling metal shutter, stuck in the down position for complete blackout. She kept up her zombie act until I spoke. Can’t remember what I said. Normal phrases from everyday human intercourse in a language not her own. 

Humping drunks who mutter words she didn’t understand must’ve been an overly familiar unpleasant situation. 

She didn’t go berserk in the usual manner. She unleashed an inbred reverse-pheromone bio-weapon. I went limp and rolled away.

She lit a cigarette butt stashed between the lumpy mattress and the floor. Lime-green no-logo lighter, the kind sold by roving Africans, flash-lit a room filled with empty bottles. She held fire like Lady Liberty, scrounge-searched for a phallic deodorant applicator that still had some of the whitish liquid inside, rolled it under her arms. Vodka bottles and deodorant bottles hugged the walls in disorderly rows,  stood crowded in the corners, lay scattered on the dirty floor and ugly furniture. Two bottles a day keeps the undertaker away.

But not forever.

Who undertakes the removal of deceased illegal immigrants? Unaccounted corpses, stuffed in weighted logo-stamped supermarket bags, dumped in the river. Garbage-dump fires, distorted reflections of pyres by the Ganges, illuminate unattended non-ritual funerals. Only the river complains, to deaf imaginary ears. Dogs and contaminated carp get fat on the heels of dead dictators.

I zipped back into the mildewed bathroom, pulled on my damp clothes fast. Money was missing from my pants, but the thieving gypsy woman in the hall had left the documents and house keys. No use stealing keys unless they lead to quick burglary or auto theft. The address printed on my expired driver’s license is half a world away.