The Bermuda Triangle

We’d been studying the Bermuda Triangle for what seemed like an indefinite amount of time, which is no irony for some claim it is an actual wrinkle in time—a place that one enters only to be buoyed elsewhere, immediately albeit years later in their lives; an instantaneous time warp, here; one in which one ages prematurely despite time itself. Victims have reported from jumping age gaps of age forty to ninety at the whim of a wrong turn at sea…but this is just one theory.
Some prefer to believe there is a chimerical, mythological being, nameless, responsible for the disappearance and paranormal phenomena that the Bermuda Triangle has incited. The strata of mist settled over the Triangle at this point in time remains of inexplicable origin to me (its permanence), but it certainly adds to the eerie, haunting quality of its atmosphere. Any survivors that have crossed the Bermuda Triangle alive have been reported a wistful, desultory condition of “drifting” that they cannot eschew.
All the disappearances do not correlate and surpass the boundaries of human error, piracy, equipment failure, and natural disaster. These disappearances have been diagnosed paranormally to the extent of extraterrestrial interference. It is located in the North Atlantic Ocean and is also referred to as the Devil’s Triangle. Most accidents have been reported as to having occurred along the southern boundary around the Bahamas and the Florida Straits, which is one of the most heavily trafficked zones in the world.
I refuse to believe that these supposed accidents are simply accidents. Flight 19. I’m not going to delve into specific “accidents” to prove my case. I haven’t so much studied the Bermuda Triangle so much as I am preparing my voyage out to explore it for my own eyes.
Drifters?
Our voyage consisted of a crew composed of federal agents and members of central intelligence. They are all wearing tinted glasses. I do not trust my first mate, as he is writing a field report about me at this very moment. I have never met the Devil, I tell them. I am not a drifter.
As we set off on our dingy, ramshackle ghostship, I sneak my own crew on board. First-mate Jailbait, the rest are inconsequential. They are the drunken shadows in the mess hall prone to mutiny, for its own sake. I watch their drunken shadows mingle, fight, settle down.
We are headed straight in the direction of the Bermuda Triangle; there is nothing that can stop us and I have scheduled there to be no cessation until we reach the dreaded isosceles.
The federal agents and members of central intelligence keep to themselves. They take notes and document everything. They are always watching, behind their tinted glasses, adorned in their rakish, suave suits.
“I feel documented,” Jailbait nudges me in the ribs.
“So do I,” I mutter, impatient to reach our destination.
“What do you think of drifters?” she asks me. I tell her I know nothing about drifters. Never heard of them. “You know, innocuous, earnest, even promising at first, then they become contaminated by other drifters, drifters who were once innocuous, earnest, even promising at first, like them, and they drift, no longer innocuous, earnest, or the slight bit promising. They work minimum wage jobs and sleep on kitchen floors and converse with cockroaches.”
“Does conversing with cockroaches necessarily designate someone as a drifter?”
“It’s a blatant symptom,” Jailbait grins. She has the whitest teeth. Teeth so white they make onlookers proud of their own, yellow teeth.
Upon finally reaching the edge of the triangle, the ship is immediately doused by an emulsified, opaque mist, so thick that one of the federal agents nearly suffocates. My crew, refusing to remain below deck, pornographic and mumbling rigmarole stand watch; they are preparing a mutiny in case something is to go wrong. Jailbait stares at me with unctuous eyes, waiting for my next command as the federal agents and central intelligence members document the situation.
Have I become a drifter? I wonder. What other symptoms designate a drifter? Varicose veins, hypertension, pudginess. Jailbait, I’m going to nuzzle your breasts.
The funereal umbrage became increasingly ominous and atramental; the diurnal process was arrested: it became very clear there was no night or day as we tread the waters apprehensively, anticipating the worst, thinking in the back of our minds if something can go wrong, it will—unless you don’t know what can go wrong, which sends the imagination reeling with aberrations.
The further the groaning, creaking ship progresses throughout the triangle, the deeper the federal agents and members of central intelligence burrow themselves within the ship. I had surmised that we would become lost, and it wasn’t before long that my prediction came true. The ship’s navigational devices all simultaneously went haywire. Jailbait quickly settled down the crew before they had a chance to stage a mutiny.
We, the ship that is, drifted for what seemed like years. I often checked the mirror to assure myself that I wasn’t aging at an accelerated rate. The drifting was nauseating; the crew was jaded, no longer indulging in the possibility that the Bermuda Triangle was something out of the ordinary. I suppose part of me wanted to get lost. To tell this crew: if you really ever want to get lost, welcome aboard. I wanted to be lost at sea at the hands of something I didn’t understand. I wanted to drift with a purpose.
“Captain! Captain! Hurry, there’s something rising starboard, at the rear of the ship!” I sprinted, guilelessly refraining from smirking, to the voice of my fellow crew member who was pointing at a bulbous swell, rising in the water not half a mile off. It appeared to me some sort of shell at first glance, like that of a tortoise, and as it continued to rise I realized that its expanse was probably beneath that of the ship. As if curious, it paused from rising up from the water, scrutinizing the ship.
“Captain, what shall we do?” Jailbait glared at me attentively though I could feel how terrified she was by the rigidity of her composure.
“Sail onwards. Full speed ahead. Let’s see if it follows, whatever it is.” Could it too be a potential drifter? Was there a place beyond death for drifters? Loitering vagabonds with tidbits of information that has been washed aloft from episodes of spatial drifting, no use to anyone. Minstrels with oppressive, megalomaniacal dreams.
The ship soon lost sight of the cabalistic shell, which upon collapsing back into the water sent near-tidal ripples towards the rear of the ship. One of the federal agents, austere and wraithlike, took position on deck, leaning against the wall next to the door that lead to the intestines of the ship. He was not procuring documents or scribing observations. He had one foot propped up against the wall like a teenager, and often nodded his head in response to his ear.
We continued to drift. The crew, growing restless, staged a play of them performing a mutiny. Jailbait, huddled beside me, awaited further orders. She too was even more roving than normal; I spotted an increased amount of heart palpitations and myoclonic jerks from her, probably the result of unruly stress, intense anxiety, and intolerant expectancy. Expectancy of what?
I regard the drifters. It is easy to spot them in large crowds. They have a sense of languidness and sloth to them, a hulking, hunched, sulking clay pigeon, swept away in their wanton tide, oozing from tryingly-seedy bars to their parent’s houses to derelict subway stations. Wherever they go they take a part of where they were with them.
“Let’s play a game,” Jailbait smiles fickly at me. “We can go anywhere in the world. We’ll each pretend we’re there when it’s our turn. Whoever’s turn it is: they close their eyes and blindly try to impersonate what it would be like to be there.”
“But this is where I want to be,” I sighed. Jailbait pleaded with my bicep. Jailbait wanted to go somewhere, somewhere far, somewhere else; Jailbait was a drifter in the making. She had the love handles, curdled, the overslept eyes.
“Captain!” one of my crew shouted to me above deck. I scampered towards the voice, harpoon at hand, Jailbait scuttling behind me. “There’s something I think you should see.” Above deck, I looked up in the direction my crew member was pointing. Above us there was a floating craft of some sort.
“That must be an Unidentified Flying Object,” Jailbait whispered conspicuously into my ear. I nodded, wondering if it, too, had stumbled across the Bermuda Triangle.

Imaginary Friends

The internet’s deceased again. The tech-support junkie says it’ll be back up again in an hour but he’s a liar, I know he is. The green lights that usually flash blindly and keep me up when I’m sleeping are all blacked out now except for one. Power on receive blinking send off online off power on receive – this is forever, it’s not going to get up this time; the tech-support junkie says maybe I should pick up a new modem but he knows I know he’s delaying the inevitable. Falling in love is like putting a dog down.

My cousin says he’s “fucked” me. As we drive home from the burger joint that’s now called a fast-food joint we used to eat lunch at every night he tells me this and whispers into my ear. My mother who’s now fifty-nine and acting younger every year is reluctantly driving because I said I couldn’t: my milkshake would spill I’d rather listen to my cousin whisper into my ear. This town is where I grew up. We moved out when Daddy insisted on us calling him Dad; my cousin has lived with me my entire life. Outside the window there are two boys with galloping blonde hair hopping on a sewer grate and as they bounce I see the gas station behind them and the lake behind the gas station and our house behind the lake. That lake is where I’d go swimming during the winter because it was the only body of water that wouldn’t freeze over. All the fish were dead then. I don’t like fish. I don’t like eating fish. My cousin says he has “fucked” me. The buns the hamburger joint use now have poppy-seeds on them, I have to pick them off. They are stubborn.

We are residing in quintessential suburbia. It’s sunny enough to peel the skin right off the street; I can feel the flies swat at my face, the chiggers feed on my ankles. I’ve only been here for a day. We are here because father has passed away and we are here to put him down into the ground. There will be a service, and then a banquet afterwards, at night. He was a soldier. There will be a twenty-one gun salute and boys in marching bands who might stare at my make-up. There are leaves everywhere. The tech-support junkie tells me I have a beautiful voice.

We are still driving home. My cousin whispers to me that he has a leather heart. He is the kind of person who can make the inside of his back-pack a collage, pulls the last bite of dinner out of the garbage and saves it for the next morning. He peers at me searchingly with his reddened eyes. If he wasn’t so haggard, he would almost be cute. There are dead leaves everywhere.

The tech-support junkie tells me I have a beautiful voice. I hang up.

There is not much to see of this town. The residents move at a certain drawl that I’m not accustomed to and it is quite obvious that this is a place you come to when you’re going to die. It is a perfect place to die, it is quiet, it is pampered, it is secretly profane. The town whispers. My cousin whispers. I stare at the handful of poppy seeds now swimming on my lap, different colors of beige; I can feel them in the back of my throat, I can picture my cousin shoving them down my throat, I throw them off my lap. My cousin laughs. He laughs, and laughs until my mother asks him, what’s so funny? What’s so funny? Then before I can stop myself I’m giggling. He knows he’s charming.

I keep feeling that my hairline is receding. At night I run to the mirror to check, that it could be falling out, that I need to catch it before it does and put it all into a jar for safe-keeping until I can put it back on again. But my hair is still there, intact. I touch it and push it back and then remind myself if I push it back enough it could fall off. It’s got to be exceedingly fragile with all the chemicals I’ve been pouring into it. Dyes, straightening, anti-frizzing. I remember the balloon man came to me yesterday with yellow and red and blue and black balloons, near the pizzeria. The parking lot was full but the streets around it were empty. He told me that if I wanted a balloon, I’d have to get to know him. He didn’t sell balloons to strangers. He was a clown. No, a business man. His lips were whales spouting spit and I could hear them tightening together and cringing and moaning and grinding like burnt rubber.

When we were younger my cousin would mostly ignore me. He was always six years older than me, so it infringed on our interests. I would end up wearing his hand-me downs because mother was too sad to buy clothes. My cousin dated a lot of girls, he was prettier back then. They’d always bring me books to read, until the point where I had copies and copies of the same book stored in my closet. I’d read the different versions trying to find words and minor alterations between them. He’d collect the hairclips that they’d leave behind, scattered all around our house. He’d keep them in his desk in a plastic bag. I inherited all his toys when he grew out of them, his dolls, various souvenirs he had picked up from place to place. I remember watching him in the front yard dressing the dolls up, and the ambulances that would drive by. Whenever I hear sirens, it reminds me of him.

I hang up…


When we pull into the drive-way my cousin waits until my mother has walked into the house and then slips his hands around my breasts, whispering to me –
When he lets go I try to glare at him. I can still feel him throbbing against me. He laughs and dances his way to the door, swinging it open, stumbling inside. I don’t know if I should be aroused. I could feel the tension of his fingers, his breath like gravel being shoved into my ears. I watch the trees sway hypnotically around us, me. They are too green to be anything at all.

Inside, there is a foreignness, an eternal world behind every closet. I step slowly, prodding my way to the bathroom. The cracked mirror, the wailing sink, the toilet with dangling flushes and no top. My clothes float off, light and airy. I can feel the intent of his gaze through the walls, his telescope eyes burning their crater into me; I know exactly what he wants. I step into the shower and stare at the thickness of the drain, the droning blackness: I try to stick my hand through the grate, but my wrist gets stuck half-way down. I can hear the sterile humming of his heart getting closer and closer, the buzzing like that of a muffled chainsaw. The water is cold, there is no soap. Everything creaks.

Outside he is waiting for me, his darkened hair pillowing his head as he leans on the trunk of the car, tapping his fingers silently on the window-shield. He lifts his head, causing his shadow to stretch out across the uncut lawn, running into the forest that now faces us, each tree still swaying, beating us down to the ground. I can feel the terrifying belch of something hideous being brought to life, something that’s been there all along that can’t be ignored any longer, lurking around every corner ever since we were children, getting ready for this exact moment –

The view of the park is picturesque and nauseating. I can see too many people in love from here. Their faces and hands should be censored, they should stop laughing altogether for their voices scald my ears; I hope I shall never become intoxicated by my own happiness to the point where it could impair my volition. I hope I never sound good using a greater vocabulary because I don’t see myself getting used to it – the blades of grass below look like the hair stapled to the back of my cousin’s head. He draws pictures of my unclothed body that look frighteningly too similar. I’m under the impression he always had a precise imagination.

Dennis Nilsen

He can’t stand still.

His mother, a turquoise-green blob in the distance, approaches the car. When she walks, she wobbles, and vacillates, and bobs up and down.
In the bookstore, he can always find her in the magazine section. As he waits by the customer service section having only remembered the title of a book he wants to purchase, a pair of elementary school teachers start raising their voices because fourteen text-books have been excluded from their shipment.
A cross-country bus almost runs her over as she closes in on the car. Almost home free, she waves at him, staring at her behind the window.
The vet that they visited earlier because their cat has stones in her bladder has very feminine handwriting. According to his mother, the vet is an asshole, and not an animal lover.
He listens to music that sounds good on long drives without specified destinations. He thinks it's really quirky and boring, but it makes sense. Long drives without specified destinations are most often quirky and boring. Nostalgic and all the motel and diner signs seem tragic and humbling. Part of the backdrop, along with the hills and secondhand cars and jaundiced climates that cluster over buildings with linoleum flooring like insects over hives.

In the living room he holds his cat in a towel while his mother feeds it, her, medicine to help with the kidney stones, or bladder stones, or whatever kind of stones make cats piss all over the place, and he loves his cat even though he doesn’t pay much attention to it, and when it makes the hurt purring growling sounds as it bites his mother’s hands he feels guilty. When he lets the cat go it perches on the rug, thumping its tail, staring at nothing, its face flat, its eyes flat.

He ends up deep in New Jersey where there are cemeteries and gray-white fences and brick buildings. He calls his friend, who tells him that he finally kissed the girl who he’s been after for months, moped in her lobby for months, scrunched up in her waterbed with too many pillows (for months), felt a jolting wisp of hope every time the phone rang for months. He tells his friend he doesn’t know where he is. Doesn’t know how he got here. Lately he’s been buying a weird half-beer half-liquor breed from Harlem, drinking it, getting on buses and ending up in the middle of nowhere hours later. There are never any pretty girls on any of the buses. Just squashed Spanish men with tattooed arms and greased hair. He has a subscription to Time magazine and he doesn’t know how he got it. Last week he went out to Long Island to stay with his best friend and incrementally stole his painkillers from the loose-hairy mantle below the mirror in his bathroom, stealing just enough a day so his friend wouldn’t notice, who had recently had his wisdom teeth yanked out and wasn’t knowledgeable about drugs anyway. He’d worked a job at the beach for a week, pulling out chairs and supplying the barge with ice. He’d been knocked up on painkillers the entire time. Even though it was scalding, he’d feel the breeze.
During a makeshift wedding out on the beach, he jerked off in the bathroom, stopping every time someone neared his stall because the plopping sound reverberated. He laughed while doing it, unaware of what drove him to do so besides the fact that there was a wedding taking place and the couples in suits and ruffled flowery dresses were lauding the Bible and throwing around heavy phrases with words like “eternal” and “self-sacrament” in them. He thought about how it’s easy to tell what couples are going to get divorced just by looking at them.
He starts smoking again, after having quit for eight months. He talks to the lifeguard, one of those proud caring types that laughs when they’re hurt – and they’re always hurt – in the dark, walking down the road from his friend’s house. He’s drunk, and scared. She’s easy to talk to because she’s not dogmatic, and shakes her head and laughs at everything. She finds his self-loathing behavior amusing and he plays it off as if it’s nothing to him, habitual, inured to abuse.
He’s in love with a girl who over-gesticulates when she talks, takes obnoxious as a compliment, hangs posters of bands she doesn’t listen to all over her room until the walls aren’t visible. Every few months she calls him up or leaves him a text-message along the lines of “I want to hang out with you, come into the city,” and they (subtly bitter) nostalgically catch up on old times (that were miserable at the time) and get drunk as the night bends towards the A.M’s, leading to them almost having sex with each other. She’s a lesbian, a virgin, and blurts things like, “I want to fuck you so badly,” into his ear. He’s too drunk to be aroused – but wants to be, for her – and longs to lie still with her and breathe into her neck. She grabs his hand, pushing it down into her, meanwhile touching him, except he can’t see her because she only instigates these things when the lights are off, maybe signifying intimacy but probably the direct opposite. The urgency of the sexually inexperienced lingers with him. Her father’s in another country and she’s got the apartment to herself for the summer. He smokes her entire pack by accident and buys her a new one. When he leaves in the morning, before she wakes up, he tries not to fall in love with her, because they won’t say a word to each other until their next reunion. He misses her knowing she doesn’t miss him at all.
(There are much more prominent problems in his life, and he hates himself for putting her before the rest of them.)

“Everyone’s got problems, you know,” lifeguard.
“I ROAM AROUND MY HOUSE WHEN I’M IN PAIN,” he giggles.
His mother sits on the couch, juggling her knees. He roams around his apartment, in pain. He can’t tell the difference between oppression and depression but he knows the anti-depressant pills he’s been taking for five years are ineffective
Doesn’t answer his phone, ever, people realize this and stop calling. Seeing “missed calls” on his cell phone screen pop up gives him tiny joy. Life is spurred by momentary happiness. Checkpoints through his spoiled misery, seemingly pointless suffering.

Without having attended any psychology courses, he doubts his own reality. Vagabonds talking to pigeons on the street are poignant and inexplicably meaningful to him. He can’t stop writing about himself. He waits for something pinnacle to change his life, witnessing a rape, surviving a car-crash, but nothing ever happens. He lies in his bed, repeating song lyrics to himself to justify his lethargy. He procrastinates going to the bathroom because struggling with a shit is the best part of his day.
“How was the ride home,” lifeguard!
“Fantastic and allegorical.”
And then one day, everything changes. In the back of a taxi-cab, driven by a garrulous driver who has an angel figurine on his dashboard. The driver is talking about what it’s like to grow up in Brooklyn. He over-gesticulates. His name is Muhammad something. On the bus-ride home from Long Island, the boy with the mother sat next to a beautiful sun burnt preppy, who slept in a cute fetal position, legs and arms compressed outwards.
There’s a spacey hollow feeling in his chest. He thinks about how when someone expects you to feel a certain way, and you know they expect you to feel that way, you try everything in your power not to feel that way, but it only makes it even worse when you succumb to the way you’re expected to feel.
He can see a giant Aqua Man, wading through the Hudson, looming over the skyline. He has a constipated shocked look on his face, his mouth contorted into the shape of a gnarled bean. When he stomps, waves swell from each direction of his feet. Perhaps he has just been born into the world, and is experiencing the sudden unimaginable wonderterror of what it’s like to be alive. Look at him go, already having learned how to walk! He must have been dropped from a gigantic, planet-sized stork, wings crashing into stars. The skyscrapers around him only amplify his size. Will he fight for good, become a symbol of altruism and benevolence, or will he go down the tubes, become another victim of middle-class purgatory? Does the world appear ugly to him, from his vantage point? What if he begins to crawl? Will the military try to incarcerate him, Aqua Man, neo-Godzilla? Will they impose tests, and somehow, stretching the limits of scientific exploration, discover how to recreate another Aqua Man? A new and improved Aqua Man? Will this new race of Aqua Mans eventually abolish the need for humans?
His life is an exciting, drunken adventure, and yet he finds waking up in the morning a distraction from his dreams. There are crying, lost blond girls, wandering around in his head. They silently grieve on gray-colorful beds, with flower patterns on the sheets; they bend over, and touch the edge of rivers with the tips of their fingers. His peers, turning into coeds, all jumping on the band wagon of new catch phrases, “Happy Belated Birthday!” Suddenly they are all liberated, and prudence is a relic of the past. Everybody long hair!
He gets out of the cab, tips the driver ten dollars, gets drunk and has a conversation with a nurse on break that’s standing outside of one of the hospitals in the area.
“I’ve seen it all. I’ve been working here for seven years and let me tell you I’ve seen it all (drags from cigarette). Just today, in the morning, I saw this nakid man, in his jimmies, running through the halls screaming ‘Sugar!’ at the top of his lungs with security scrambling in tow. He locked himself in a wardrobe, and played bongo with the walls, screaming and screaming and screaming. That’s nothing, though, (drags from cigarette), that’s nothing. I’ve…”

Now, buzzed, on the subway, and in the corner seats there are two black men talking about how one of their mothers stabbed her cat to death with a fork. With a fork! Their clothing could fit someone that weighs twice as much as they do. Golden chains drape their chests, hanging down to their hands and waists. Even their baseball caps are too big, with golden stickers shining from their visors. In contrast to their lanky appearance, their teeth are fluorescent white. They hang and droop like shadows, guffawing hysterically. He smiles.
The conversation dwindles on, always reverting back to one of their mothers, stabbing her cat to death with a fork. Diggings its eyes out with a spoon. He thinks about taking out another bottle, taking a swig or two on the subway, quickly remembering that once opened he would have nothing to close it with. But who cares, he’s drunk. He smiles. And wonders to himself, where to next? Anywhere until his iPod runs out of batteries. The black men, the black young men, slapping their knees, with their watery kind eyes.
Another black man gets on the car. A burly, orge’ish black man, dressed similarly to the two younger black men, but in brighter, more jovial colors. He has no expression on his face, an expression in itself, and extends his crotch out off his seat. He’s wearing sunglasses, two sizes too big. He glances from compartment to compartment. He reminds him of the green giant from that story about the giant who went around cutting off people’s heads. The two younger black men glance at him, then go back to their conversation, prodding each other’s sides.
A mother in a shawl pushes a stroller into the car, forcing it over the entry bump. She hunches. The baby screams. People from the platform stare through the open doors into the car, disappointed that it wasn’t the train they were waiting for. The metal columns coated in throw-up green loudly mouth off their graffiti. He craves a cigarette, badly, even thinks about smoking one in the car, the doors take forever to shut, tons of people scuffle off and on; tons of people, scuffling off and on, the plexi-glass windows are scratched with initials. He knows he won’t feel this lightness for very long. The thought of coming down already depresses him. At the next stop, he slivers off the car, blankly staring into the faces of the assortment of people standing outside of the doors of the car to get on. He wonders what they think of him.
Boinking up the steps, the hot breath of being underground clamming his senses, he thinks of her again. How she always turns the lights off, giving the act an estranged, mechanical quality. Her desire for him is flagrant, and yet he knows that she says what she does to everyone she seduces, probably not even on purpose. Is he really so useless to her? She must only have done what she did with him for the experience. Should he have called her instead of tormenting himself and hoping for her to call him, knowing that she wouldn’t? The moon, slipping through her shutters, cutting a reflection between her shoulder blades, miniature bumps, like speed-bumps. He laughs at his stupidity. He walks straight into the incoming crowds, laughing at himself, laughing at nothing. The lights overhead make him nauseous. He continues up the escalator to wherever.
Columbus circle. People twist and blur, fixated on themselves, others, entrenched in the worlds they’ve distinguished for themselves. He can hear an emptiness ringing in the honking and chattering around him. If he died, at this second, Columbus circle would keep on revolving without him. In the large scheme of things, he is an unnoticed martyr, alcoholic before the age of twenty-one. As the years pass it doesn’t just seem to be a teenage phase that he can outlive. What’s the point of anything he feels? He looks down at his hands.
“Why do people get frustrated so easily?” someone says, brushing by him, frustrated. He waddles to the curb. He bums a cigarette of someone with his intoxicated confidence, but forgets to ask for a light.

In Central Park, he spits a lot, smoking. This is where Holden Caulfield came up with all those metaphors. The ducks, over the frozen pond, and stuff. Soon the park will close; the cops gave him a summons once, for being on the swings at one in the morning. The judge let him go with a warning. He’s been arrested before, for shoplifting when he was fifteen, and drinking in public earlier this year. The trees rustle, its spooky. There are a lot of people kissing and making love in semi-hidden places. He can hear them if he stops walking, leaves them alone. If he was with his friends he’d probably harass them, pop out from behind a bush with a video camera. Feels a tinge of envy. He tosses his cigarette, half-finished, and trolls out of the park.
Still somewhat drunk, he hops on a cross town bus. There’s a crew of scruffy pierced kids his age talking about blowjobs in the back. He’s one of those guys that tells girls that he won’t let anyone give him head, and yet if they offer, he never refuses, so they all end up thinking they’re unique. Or they see right through his fibbing, and think its moronically cute. Or just think he’s a moron. He doesn’t talk about it in public, though, so entire buses can hear.
He gets off at East End, near the FDR. On a drunken quest, he looms his way through the concrete jungle, threatened by the unusual quietude (especially at this time of night), and makes it to one of the many overpasses. Ignoring a full-blown assault of calls from his mother, he stares at the cars below until he’s fully sober – secretly hoping for something profound, being such a picturesque event – then calls her, listens to her scream, and meets her in front of an ice cream shop where she used to pick him up after school.

Not surprisingly, he can’t sleep. Watches half a season of the X-files. Exhausted of aliens and inhuman serial killers, he switches to cable. AOL ads with Coldplay playing in the background. Human serial killers. Law & Order re-runs. In his room, he flips open his laptop. Overweight “ebony beauties” posting nude pictures of themselves on Craig’s List. Male and female options both checked off.
He read an article in New Yorker about bisexual teens a couple months ago and somehow knew that she would be reading it too. When he went to her apartment that night, she had the front page of it cut out and taped to the bottom of the front of her spray-painted TV. The letters of it were all colored in exotic colors.

The next day…he returns to the city. A little more drunk than the day before. His stomach feels shriveled and drowned, or maybe that’s his liver, he can’t tell. He heads to the long-distance bus station. Greyhounds. He takes his backpack, necessary sustenance inside. On the subway there’s nothing out of the ordinary; the break-dancers that worm on the floor and shove their upside-down hats in your face for tips afterwards. He floats unnoticed through the streets like a sluggish ping-pong ball, taking whimsical interest in the shop signs and posters slapped on the sides of public busses.
“Karma is bullshit. It gains interest. There’s like some invisible guy that goes around and stores it, unleashing it on you when you’re most vulnerable.”
He buys a round-trip ticket to some random destination. Upstate New York, maybe, or Westchester. He first comes into contact with the mudwamp space bugs while waiting in the terminal for his bus. They descend from the sky in a holy manner, their thousands of beady red eyes buzzing like monitor lights. They don’t have mouths. Their bodies consist of giant balls, similar to the gigantic rubbery balls found in Yoga practice rooms, stacked upon each other, meshing and unnaturally flowing together. As the balls press together they make farting noises. Gigantic, entomologic slinkies.
The feeling of accidentally coming into contact with a childhood friend and finding out that they’ve started smoking cigarettes overcomes him. There are these bugs, squelching in front of him, veins pulsing and bulging. He waves at them. He’s also overcome by a distressing sense of languor. He sits down, shadowed by the space bugs, on the terminal. He begins to laugh.
“There are so many words. What kind of douche bag comes up with all of these words. How will I ever find the time to use them all? I have journals, tons of them, for when I come across an interesting word, I write it down. I have years of words written down. I don’t know what to do with them all anymore. I keep thinking that if I die, that there will be all these words that I will have never used, not once, and how these journals that I’ve kept will have been in vain. I’m trying to remember one word right now, that starts with an A. I can’t remember what it means, I just know that if I could I would use it right now.”
One of the space bugs belches, “The English language has been developed and expanded over many decades and centuries. Perhaps some of the words that haunt you the most are the new words, the words that’s founders are not even very familiar with.”
“Imagine, how these words were all created, the situations their creators must have been in to come up with such specific letter placements and pronunciations.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been wasting away my childhood. This pain, I don’t know where it originates, or why I feel it. When I think about the vastness of our populace’s vocabulary, how much of will never be used, how many brain cells I’ve squandered that could have been used trying to store them all, trying to find happiness, pity, attention. There’s so much to experience and live for and I’ve been compacted into the smallest of spaces. I’m so lost. I could be in love with you for all I know. Everything I feel is so temporary and transient I can’t even prove that I ever felt it. I just forgot that 12 A.M. is the start of a new day, and not 1. I waited all night for this site to update and it should have an hour ago. I just spilled a cigarette out on my lap. The girl I love just signed offline, even though I wouldn’t have said anything to her if she had stayed online any longer. I’ve been staring at her screen name for weeks.”
“You’re having an epiphany, right now. It’s making you feel as if you’ve connected into something deeper and greater than yourself. A radiant stream or pool that connects us all. Your insides are peeling. All the derision that you submit yourself to, the pain, the agony, isn’t this worth it? This feeling of absolute being. Right now, you know that you’re alive, and the inspiration you have been inactively and listless pining for, it’s here. You’re experiencing it. Is there nothing else? Aren’t you happy, right now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there anything I can do? Won’t you ever be happy?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Oh, won’t you please be happy?”

Crash

“Soon you’ll see advertisements for people on TV.”
“To date?”
“Uh huh.”
Crash plops his head against the wall. Outside the children in the courtyard are screaming. Distinguishing if their shouts are of happiness or terror is nearly impossible. Crash’s just signed up for three college courses in the city, pre-GED, and has already started wondering if the workload is going to be too intense. He’s started making friends again, started going out on Friday nights, trying to catch glimpses of the girl who asked him if he was “doing okay” at the last party he was at. He sat drunkenly in the kitchen, alone, on a stool next to the refrigerator. The host had already passed out earlier. She’d just had the time to warn everyone who wanted to smoke cigarettes about the pedophile who lurked on the roof. Those that had gone had never come back; they’d most likely traversed to the other party three blocks away.
Jenny walks into the living room where Crash is watching TV. She takes a picture of him.
Later, when they make love, a balloon comes out of her vagina.
It doesn’t hurt her (in the process), it’s cute, and touchable. She giggles as it inflates, spreading her legs apart. Crash watches half-way across the room in disgust.
“Are you really getting bored of me?”
Crash meanders back home. He takes a break on a park bench, twirling his eyes around a patch of flowery grass, losing himself in his thoughts. A bunch of kids sail by on skateboards, ripping up concrete. They rattle off into the distance. Crash goes back to staring at the patch of flowery grass, hypnotized. The grass begins to intrude in on his thoughts. He crosses his eyes. The patches of grass collide.
Jenny sits down next to Crash, in the living room, with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice in each hand. Crash doesn’t like pulp, but thanks anyway. His mother would have known this.
“Goodbye,” he says towards himself. “I never want to see or hear from you again.”
Later on in the evening, he subways it to another open-house. Awfully antique and oversized, the mild brass floors creak, parents have gone away for the weekend. Everyone there’s a young man.
That girl shows up. Her name would be fitting for a genie. The bass thumps the cups in the kitchen set up and being filled for beer pong, two walls apart from Crash, sitting on the couch watching disproportionate females and bulky young men with muscles that look like mutant chicken legs. There is a lot of spilling of beer and soon, shots of liquor, but on the other end of the couch that girl raises her hands over her eyes, closes them in disgust, and tilts herself towards the arm of the couch. It’s a navy-green couch. The girl, from his vantage point, appears to be wearing it. The floors look like the walls, the walls look like the American Revolution section of a museum, everything begins to look like something other than itself, including the people.
The girl comes over and starts crying about how her best friend’s fallen in love with her. Crash asks to hold her. He waits for awhile to make sure she feels safe before playing with her hair. Another five minutes before massaging her scalp.
Then she has to go, and she lends him the key to her apartment if he needs somewhere close by to stay, if he can’t crash at the party. But my name is Crash, what else is there for me to do? She giggles, nearly turning on the lights. She knocks a hamburger off the table with her elbow and gasps, covering her mouth with both hands.
How can I convey to you that I don’t want to just be another hook-up to you at a party, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for nearly a week, that I don’t want to seem like I’m taking advantage of you because you’re currently feeling depressed, that I don’t want to seem like I’m violating or trespassing you. How can I do this all without not having to kiss you?
He doesn’t kiss her but she hugs him so incredibly tightly before she leaves, and whispers that she’ll probably see him tomorrow.
Jenny ecstatically takes another picture of him, eating chicken nuggets.

The wind around the park this time of year is always bitter, is always freezing. The flowers are not budding and their petals are all dying magnificently, in fact, they’re not even there. The slabs of rockish concrete used to build the stairway leading to the stretch of sports fields and sullied benches before the river are very cold. He can see each and every detail of them at this time of year. There are newly melted leaves stuck between them. Behind him, children sloshing in the snow and mud. There’s an all-seeing eye stationed in the upper-most portion of the sky. In other myths and legends it often represents conscience, but in his life all it does is blink.
He trudges back up a couple avenues and hails a cab home.

No one calls him up tonight. Jenny’s out, whatevering. In a split-second decision, Crash decides to move back in with his Mom. He packs up all his books, his gaming systems, the gifts of silverware, throws it all into a garbage bag and leaves. The furniture stares at him on the way out. This part of the city is grimy, dejected and repulsive, absolutely brimming with glam. There’s no one to meet that you haven’t already met on TV. That girl, she’s most likely making out with her best friend. Jenny’s smiling somewhere. His Mom’s reading pound-heavy fantasy novels that go one-thousand pages and could be summed up in one paragraph. Or she’s cooking an entire dinner for herself, hunched over the countertop cutting fruits and steaming vegetables.
He picks up his pace, increasing his foot-rate faster and faster. Once he’s home he’ll worry about leaving again, but that’s a problem he’ll deal with when it arises.

Old

Her nose is bright pink. She just spent ten minutes scrubbing it in the bathtub. She gazes at herself in the mirror, the teddy-bear patterned shower curtain sulking behind her. It reminds her of a ghost. She forcefully turns the sink on, as if frustrated with it, and begins to wash the make-up off her face that didn’t come off in the bath. In a couple hours her friends will be over.
She smokes .27’s. She has no summer outfits, wears cheap fabric T-shirts and chewed up sweatshirts that lose color immediately. Her friends’ clothing is fashionable and abstract, separates their appearance, yet amongst themselves they all look the same. Lots of ruffles and frizzles. The boys have the white folds hanging from their shirts like Renaissance pirates. She tries to remember if that was just the style of the Renaissance, and not limited to pirates, but can’t remember.
“HONEY, I’M HOME.” Door busts shut. The neighbors will have complained by the end of the night anyway.
“Hey, hey,” she shouts, hastily disassembling her make-up kit. “One second in here.”
“Sure. Mind if I grab a drink, Missums?”
“Go right ahead.”
She begins to dab make-up on, carelessly, then hammers her fingers into the mirror at something. She exaggeratedly sighs, rolling her eyes, shuffling her feet. She imagines someone watching her. After she finishes, her hands scramble to put everything back in the bag, and she juts out, rejuvenated. She greets her friend loudly, hoping that the others will come quickly so that they won’t have to be alone together for too long.
As she walks into the living room, he’s still taking his headphones off.
“I need a new pair of headphones, gosh. The rain ruined the pair my ex-boyfriend gave me. They were a good pair,” she says, swinging the refrigerator door back and forth.
“I bet.”
“Oh, now don’t be like that.”
“I’m not! What am I being like.”
“You know. Emohead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. What do you want to drink?”
“Anything. Do you have beer?”
“Colt 45. Someone must have left it here.”
“Why, that will do.”
She pulls out the can, and hands it to him. She watches him having trouble opening it, thinking about how awkward he looks in those clothes, not having fully developed. It’s attractive, to her. Surely not to most people.
They chat idly in her living-room for awhile, constantly changing sitting positions on her leather couches, softly chuckling at themselves. The kind of chuckle that continues to drift on, accompanied by sighs and blank stares at where the wall meets the floor. She begins to get nervous as he runs out of things to stay, and rambles, taking shots at some of their mutual friends. Both of them seem completely engrossed with the objects around them, talking in hushed, demure voices, adhering to a blasé state of nonchalance.
They waltz like this for half an hour, repeatedly getting up to go to the bathroom, calling people they usually wouldn’t otherwise. Another of her friends finally arrives. Two more following her down the hall. They’re dressed just as extravagantly.
“Leah, I must say, you look marvelous.”
“And you look like you always do, Alanna.”
“Thank you!” they laugh, hugging each other.
“Awwww. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. At least four hours!”
“I know, darling, I know.”
They greet for another minute or so, still standing beneath the doorway. Alanna, hostess, ushers them all in, and they drop onto the couches, removing their scarves, designer jackets. Everyone’s hairdo is perfectly tousled and jaded. One of the skinnier ones that followed behind hasn’t bothered to remove her sunglasses; there are glittery stars tacked around the rims. Alanna scuffles into her room to get her video-camera, giddy. Leah pounces after her.
“You know,” lowering her voice, “Johnny called me the other day, and threatened my life.”
Gasp, “Did he?”
“Another guy that I was with picked up my phone, you know, Louis, the guy I met in the Hamptons that I was talking about.”
“Oh, really.”
“Yeah. I heard that he was throwing tantrums in the bathroom at Gabby’s house, locked himself in and…started wrapping himself in toilet paper.”
“Jesus Christ. What’s wrong with that kid?”
“Mm. It’s Johnny, you know.”
Unaffected, “He’s gone crazy. Absolutely crazy.” Alanna scrounges through the belongings on her desk, not having cleaned in days. Leah keeps talking, placing her hand on her hip. She breaks off and asks for a cigarette.
“Sure…if I could find my pack. I can’t even find my video camera, Jesus. This is what I get for having people over constantly.”
“I know what it’s like.”
“I’m sure you do.” She peeks under her desk, flinging her hair. Dyed red, it glimmers in the dimmed lights. Leah unsuccessfully tries to find a way to stand that doesn’t make her appear concerned with herself. She fidgets, fiddling with her skirt and belt. She can’t think of anything clever enough to continue the conversation. Gabby shouts at them to come back, braying from the other room.
Alanna gives up and throws her hands in the air, stomping off back into the living room. Leah, having spotted the video camera long ago on top of the TV, gazes at it, disappointed. It was only so long ago that if the two of them were in a room alone long enough…Alanna is painfully coy. But then again, so is she. It’s the game of cat and mouse they play, aptly supported by text messages and Myspace and all that bullshit that benefits the photogenic.
More of Alanna’s friends arrive, pulling out liquor from their backpacks, satisfied with themselves that they were the ones to bring it. Everyone cheers, hands shaping speakerphones in front of their mouths, clapping. They get up to hug the newcomers, who are forcefully debonair, dressed appropriately for a masquerade ball. The first boy that arrived, Ruben, ghostly pale, begins to chant a familiar chorus, and they gather round, chanting along. The girls kick their legs in the air. Alanna, scooting to and fro, grabs the wheeling chair from her father’s room and rides it into the crowd. They all laugh, and giggle, and when she falls over they laugh at her. She lies crumpled in the corner, drawling “Help! Help! Help me!”
One of the boys that brought the liquor heads towards the bathroom.
“Hey, don’t go in there,” Alanna says, meekly, still crumpled in the corner. “Don’t go in there. The toilet overflows. The last time Johnny was here –”
Leah glares at her.
“The last time Johnny was here, he plugged it up, and we spent all night trying to clean up the half-shitty water that poured all over the place.”
Her guests all laugh.
“It was honestly, honestly all over the place. It even leaked out into the kitchen. If Fergus had known, he would have killed me. Actually, John cleaned up most of it. I helped a little. It was shit water.” They’ve stopped listening to her. She trails off, mumbling to herself. She gets up. The room is already swinging; the shot glasses are already out, faces cringing. She makes her way to the kitchen – essentially part of the living-room but separated by a counter – wobbling and sticking her arms out as if she’s lost balance. Someone calls her name and she perks her head up. Her tiny chest rises, and sinks. Leah, flippantly commenting on everyone’s attire, bustles towards her, knocking over a beer can and cursorily apologizing as it foams on the floor. Alanna snickers at herself. She wavers, her lips parting just slightly enough so that her teeth are visible.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Oh. Oh, me? Nothing. Nothing, why? What’s going on?”
“You’re…”
“Just in thought.”
“In thought about?”
“Nothing, nothing really.” She stammers, about to say something, but stops, and looks Leah directly in the eye. “I just. I just…”
“Come into the other room with me.”
“No, really, I’m fine.” She scuffles over to the coffee table, colliding with one of the boys. She pours herself a shot. “Here, to us, to everyone!” She raises her glass in the air and tips it back.

Emily V.

We were stranded in the desert, the trailer broke down. The tires and the engine, both. Emily V. is sitting in a plastic chair with her feet propped up on the fold-out table. She has on a pair of sunglasses that (she’s confided in me) are really solar panels, with DG in big golden letters on the sides. She’s wearing a bikini top, one of the straps intentionally sagging off one of her shoulders.
Emily V. says, “C’mon boys. Don’t be so down. It could be worse.”
“Shut up, Emily V.” the boys shout back.
“Whatever.

The sun is setting. The trailer has sunk into the sand. Emily V. stares prophetically into the distance. She wiggles her toes. Suddenly she leans forward, curiously intrigued by her toe-nails, which are bright red. Someone swears beneath the hood of the trailer.
Emily V. scoffs. “It must have been love at first sight.”

The disfigured and hostile desert mutants surround the trailer in the middle of the night. They prowl in the dark. Emily V. stares at them from inside the back of the trailer. She forgets to mention them at dinner. The boys and Emily V. sit around the fold-out table that they’ve dragged in from outside, along with most of the sand. They squeeze in next to each other. Some of them can’t fit around the table and sit on the floor.
Someone makes an optimistic comment. Emily V. sniggers, biting into her chicken leg with sarcastic power.

I am hiding in the bathroom, behind the squeaking door. I have a stolen a chicken leg. I am camping out in the bathroom, or camping in, should I say. Emily V. swings open the door and crosses her arms and jiggles her foot. “Tsk tsk,” she says, shaking her head. “So you’ve seen them too.”
I shrug. She shrugs. From the doorway I watch her flightily wander off, searching for the only Bob Marley record she has the patience to listen to.

“Come sing with me, Alex!” She yells. She slams her fists onto her mattress. “Come sing with me!”
“Alright, I’ll sing with you.”
“Thank you, Alex,” she says, no longer paying attention.
I sing with her.
“Do you think we should tell the others about the monsters?”
“If you want to,” I say.
“Maybe they are nice monsters.”
“Maybe.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“No. Are you?”
“Yes.” She nods her head vigorously, widening her eyes.

Trying to fall asleep, I can hear the mutants breathing harshly outside. I can hear their long sharp claws piano-keying against the trailer.
“Psssst,” Emily V. whispers.
I pretend that I am asleep.
“Psssst, hey, Alex.”
I roll over. “What is it.”
“The monsters are here.” She pronounces monsters, mawnsters, parodying a deep Count Dracula voice and clutching the sides of her jaw with her hands, pretending to gasp, fingers recoiling like spider legs.
“No shit.”
She plops out of bed, still dressed. Her jeans are so tight they don’t reach the bottom of her ankles. I think they’re black but I can’t completely make out the color. When I look up she has a serious look on her face. She is sad, so sad that it makes me feel like I’m weighing her down. I roll back over, facing the wall. She knows the price of drugs. She knows things because you’d never expect her to know them. The only thing wrong with her is that she thinks that something is.
The mutants limp off, leaving their feast for another night.

Tomorrow, the boys get the trailer up and running again. They dig the wheels out of the sand. I walk over the Emily V., her entire lower-body submerged in the ground.
“So what’s new today, Emily V.?”
“There’s a rabbit on my head.”
“I don’t see it.”
“That’s what’s so funny.” She laughs but her eyes don’t, her shoulders bouncing listlessly. “You know what, Alex.
“You know what.”
“What?”
“You’re something else.” And then she pulls out her three-hundred and sixty-five foot long three hundred and sixty-five foot wide pair of sunglasses and puts them on and we are, to each other’s relief, once again strangers.

Rob Wonderland

She is a prostitute. I am a werewolf. Neither of us are in love with each other; we’re just friends. Her profession makes that very clear to me. Lycanthropy also raises some pertinent issues; issues that easily compromise a relationship. Unlike most…werewolves, I lose consciousness when I am not in a lycanthropic state. Meaning, when people mistake me as being an ordinary human, I am actually intemperate with rage, intractable and unruly, inimical.
And so my love believes that I abhor her. After the abuse I have subjected her to, she cannot stand the sight of me. I, obviously, cannot approach her in a lycanthropic state; she would not be able to comprehend, as I have never met a human that has. I barely even get a chance to speak before they begin screeching, tripping over themselves as they sprint in the opposite direction.
I live in the woods, robbing banks for money. I am impervious to gunfire and the majority of human firearms. I try to avoid confrontation as much as possible, usually never having to engage in any at all. As a human, I usually find myself locked behind bars when I return to my senses. Fortunately, cells pose no threat of incarceration to a werewolf.
I am a voyeur, gazing at her in her scantily-clad corset and tattered fishnet stockings, seducing the local high school students in front of the movie theater. When someone bites, I follow her and her clientele to make sure…that she is safe. To my disappointment, she often is.

Danks was a conventional werewolf; he became deranged during lycanthropic states. As such, we would mingle with each other while I was a werewolf and he was human. We’d met at a bar one night around seven years ago; I felt the inclination to follow him down a labyrinth of back alleys, and assuaging my suspicions, I witnessed him make the bloodcurdling transformation from human to wolf. We were both in vile, unconscious states of senseless apoplexy, thrashing at one another until we reluctantly concluded we were akin. I was severely wounded, as I’d quarreled with him in my human form, but he carried my limp body off into the woods to nurse me back to health. It took me weeks to recover.
“I can’t stop thinking about her,” I pace in circles, restless with passion. Danks gives me an incredulous look. He’s leaning against a tree, resting his elbows on his knees, his forearms hanging over them. He’s grown weary of my antics, having pragmatically let go of the prospect of love long ago.
“Brooding isn’t going to help,” he sighs. “Rob a bank, give some kids the heebie-jeebies; you’re infatuated.” I wanted to tell him he didn’t understand, that it was beyond the scope of his emotions; but the fact she was a whore only further rendered my predicament an absurdity.
“She’s not even beautiful,” I console myself.
“You don’t have to convince me of that.”
“She’s beautiful,” I sulk. “She’s heavenly; not of this world.”
“Neither are you,” he smirks, sliding his back up against the tree.
And she was beautiful, with her pale blue and black blotched, smudged face paint; she donned it haphazardly, often missing her eyes entirely in her constant state of agitation. I saw her gaudiness as a mere guise; I couldn’t believe there wasn’t something ulterior, something paradisiacally redeeming.
There wasn’t. Nevertheless, I remained undeterred. One day I’d approach her; a werewolf at the door. And as the months passed by, as she became increasingly jaded and blasé, I knew that my intervention was now imperative, if only for her sake. It was an almost believable excuse for me to abide by.
Danks remains skeptical—I tell him not to be, something’s bound to go wrong. To someone as logical as Danks, indulging in emotion is self-sabotage. I daren’t think of approaching her…he was my only true hope of gaining her attention. However, it’s difficult to convince someone that werewolves exist, let alone friendly ones. Having tried to ingratiate myself with her in my human form in the past…has proved unsuccessful.
Sprawled in a vandalized alcove beneath the George Washington bridge, tossing rocks into the Hudson river.
It is easier to cope with being ostracized because of what you are than alone because of who you are.

Rob Wonderland was a psychiatrist and cunning philanthropist. His vehement enthusiasm and supererogatory optimism caused his patients to feel guilty about their troubles. He was gratuitous in dispensing medication. He had impeccable posture and was a man of great stature. At the moment he was standing next to the railing on a bridge that overlooked Ward’s Island, nearby the mental institute he sometimes visited ; he had no patients there, but the inmates dazzled his incomprehension. His patients were not so much treatable to him as they were subjects of amusement, tickling his unsubstantiated curiosity. He regarded himself as superior to them, and their incapacitation further instilled in him a sense of supremacy .Like most humans, he compared himself to others to derive his self-presentation. He lived his life with a blinding spotlight glaring over him, changing the bulb as needed.
His only son was in a state of disrepair, addicted to painkillers, of which is own father prescribed. He’d leave home for weeks, returning only in hopes to reconcile his relationships with his father, but his father always managed to remain nonchalantly oblivious to his son’s blight. “Ethan! Why aren’t you married yet?” and so forth.
Rob Wonderland was notorious for sleeping with his own patients, including Ethan’s secret love, Morrel, of whom Ethan has referred to his father. Rob Wonderland believed sexual deprivation and tensions were the stem of all psychological disorders in women and exploited them during states of needy vulnerability. Men were simple in comparison; there was no disorder that couldn’t be cured with enough medication, even if it involved drugging them into total stupor. Rob Wonderland’s unorthodox methods had become world renown. He had never encountered a single human anomaly.
Except for Morrel.

Unbeknownst to Ethan, Morrel was the love of my life. She loved neither of us, yet Ethan had the glaring advantage of being human, and he too looked after her, constantly cajoling her to abandon her vocation and pursue her aspirations and ambitions. However Morrel, airy and inured, had no complaints concerning her life. As she was so detached, soliciting her body came naturally. She always had an aloof, innocuous smile on her face, unsettling to those who loved her, charming to strangers.
Morrel visited Rob Wonderland weekly .Though Ethan hated his father, he trusted his ability to aid others during times of turmoil; Ethan could not accept that Morrel did not in fact view herself as experiencing any turmoil whatsoever. Rob Wonderland and Morrel would have staring contests before either of them spoke; Morrel usually won. It had become some sort of ritual. Then Rob Wonderland would offer Morrel a joint he’d rolled before their appointment, and then together they would get high. Unable to diagnose her as anything other than a prostitute, he scrawled off a few prescriptions that would make anyone enjoy being a prostitute.
“So, Morrel,” Rob Wonderland would say, folding his hands together and leaning back into his swivel chair; the one that he’d spin in circles in when no one was around. “How are you.”
“Better than I’ve ever felt in my life,” she’d smile diaphanously. Her aerial remoteness dazzled Rob Wonderland. Morrel couldn’t afford her appointments so she compensated by sleeping with him, but the sex was more Rob Wonderland desperately trying to elicit any response from Morrel whatsoever; she seemed impervious to sexual, romantic, and emotional stimuli.
I felt now was the time for my intervention. As much as I loved Morrel I couldn’t bring myself to be charmed by her dreamy aloofness. My desire for her was dwindling entirely.

One night I followed Ethan while he was walking home and when I was sure that he was alone I ambushed him, biting into his bicep before he had the chance to react. He fell unconscious immediately and I lugged him off into the woods. I figured that having squandered his human life already, I was doing him a favor.
The morning after, and a few more following the first, Ethan fainted at the sight of Danks and I. Danks continued to find the situation ludicrous, often resembling a hyena in his amusement. He reminded me incessantly that this was a preposterous idea, and seemed reluctant to involve himself.
Danks was indolent, cynical, and unreliable. He was a loyal companion, but flaky and afflicted by sloth. He never seemed to be thinking anything at all. He also never seemed to be able to keep still; he was constantly fidgeting or pacing. He’d stare in a manner in which suggested he saw things others didn’t when in reality he was staring at nothing in particular at all. He wrapped titanium chains around him, binding himself to tree, whenever he felt a metamorphosis coming on. As a werewolf, sometimes he’d uproot the trees he tied himself to right out of the ground.
Ethan had his first experience as a werewolf a week or so later. Unlike most lore dictates, the transmogrification of human into werewolf has nothing to do with the full moon; it’s incidental and spontaneous; there are no symptoms. There is no way to predict an oncoming attack.
The first thing Ethan did after seizing into a werewolf was mangle a deer, biting off its head after it was already dead for no apparent reason. Danks immediately lunged at Ethan, as he was in a werewolf state, too. They fought viciously but due to Danks’ restraint and experience the fight was soon over. I use the word restraint to indicate that with time, a werewolf can retain some of his human qualities upon transformation.
When he returned to his human state, severely injured from his altercation with Danks, he ogled at me for a while, then I began to speak. I explained to him what I had done, why I had done it, about our kind, and so forth. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to be overwhelmed or shocked, digesting everything I said with a sense of wonder.

Rob Wonderland was on eighty milligrams of amphetamines. He was having a therapy session with Morrel; he rested one of his legs on his knee and leaned back in his leather chair, smiling licentiously. Morrel stared at him blankly, unreadable and emaciated. She sat eerily still, her gaze fixated and absent. Rob Wonderland got up and sat next to the girl, putting his arm around her shoulders.
“Are you alright, honey? You look pretty spooked.”
Morrel didn’t respond. Rob Wonderland had never known someone so delicately pale. She seemed to be in a comatose trance.
“I’m fine,” she whispered breathily. Rob Wonderland nudged himself closer to Morrel, who showed no signs of objection. He placed his hand on her knee, sliding it furtively down her thigh. He continued to glare at her with the same lewd smile. He stroked her hair, fondling the nape of her neck, cupping his hands around her breasts
She had shared her occupation to Rob Wonderland years ago, something she’d come to long regret. Rob Wonderland wasn’t only her psychiatrist but her client as well. He was one of her most lucrative consumers.
Rob Wonderland was relishing a mouthwatering succulent burger lathered with blue cheese. He had an uncanny knack for charming first dates, usually falling through before the second date due to his clinginess and obsession with drugs. He’s drinking, an activity he can’t stop. During these moments of drugged, besotted stupor, the fleeting dread of morality creeps over his shoulder, tapping on it lightly. He pops a speed and Xanax cocktail, washing it back with some gruny vodka; he lies down on the couch. He could be mistake for being in pensive, deep though. Instead, he flicks on the TV, laughing along with the background premeditated laughter. His emergency pager was on sient.
“I’m not going to sleep with you.” She glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, and sighed. “Sex’s become so prosaic; everyone the has same, identical fetish.
“I’m not going to fuck you.” Flabbergasted at her abrupt decision not to make love to him of all people. He poured himself a glass of scotch.
And another, in disbelief. In the past he’d had to goad and seduce his patients, Morrel however, was completely unaffected and and uncharacteristically obediently compliant; composed, even.
“Why not?” Rob Wonderland blurted out.
“You disgust me and your therapeutic methodology is fraudulent.”
Taken back, Rob Wonderland desperately pleaded and rationalized her disinterest in him. Finally he said, “but you don’t have a choice, it’s your chosen vocation!”
“Darling, I choose my clients, my clients don’t choose me.”
Refusing to comprehend or perhaps entirely incomprehensible to him, he stood completely rigid, in a state of shock, his mouth shaped like a blowfish. He got up and began to pace furiously, clenching his jaw. Finally in a fit of panic he locked the door to his office.
“I don’t accept your answer,” he said firmly. Morrel laughed, and laughed, until she was in hysterics. To Rob Wonderland’s chagrin, he felt himself falling in love with her, an emotion he believed he was incapable of feeling.
“And what are you going to do about it?” Morrel giggled, all of a sudden lively, her skin flushed with dominion.
“Don’t.” Rob Wonderland’s lewd smile faded from his face into a grotesque contortion of disgust. Morrel remained unperturbed. She swankily glided towards him, subtlety teasing him, propping her lusciously pale knee up onto his chair and kicking over the foot rest.
“I’m not sure you have much of a choice, doctor,” she cooed. Rob Wonderland had never had a patient that…beguiled him? He felt subordinated and apologetic. He didn’t want to sleep with her.
“Do you need any refills?” he blurted out, failing to change the subject.
“Only you,” she lurched forwards him, exposing her gratuitous cleavage.
“Alright, you need to stop,” he flinches. “Please.” She begins to unbutton his shirt sultrily. Something triggers inside of him and his docile tentativeness exacerbates into ireless rage. He pushes her away, causing her to tumble into the chair. She…laughs? “Exploit me,” she says. “Fuck me.”
“If you don’t get out of here…I’m…I’m calling the police.” She lunges towards him, lifting her shirt over her head; Rob Wonderland begins to choke her. At first she believes he’s role-playing but when she begins to suffocate she futility tries to struggle free, her face turning blue.
“Alright. That’s enough for today,” Rob Wonderland abruptly loosens his grip, once again lewdly smiling her.
Morrel returns the smile meekly, rummaging through her duffle bag in search of rubbers.

Ethan has lost control of himself. He’s become clingy, obsessed, romantically attached to strangers, and volatile. He cannot tolerate loss, and because of his delusional infatuations with strangers he often enrages impulsively, indicative of oncoming lycanthropy. He seemed to no longer care whatsoever about Morrel, ostracizing himself from his old friends and I. I figured he was just having an abject time adjusting…
Rob Wonderland was wandering throughout Central Park for no apparent reason. He had a gun license. He was feeling rather dejected and was hoping to terrify late night lovebirds He’d fire, outside of sight, and they’d panic, meanwhile desperately trying not to crack up.
He can’t shake his mind off of Morrel’s actions during their session. Most of his victims are nerve-jangled, reluctant. More so he was thinking about Morrel in general. Did she enjoy her profession? Thought didn’t come to Rob Wonderland very often and he’d soon forgotten questioning Morrel’s bizarre behavior.
He sees something lurking in the distance, rustling the shrubbery.
“What the fuck,” he shouts mindlessly, quite drunk now. “Do you feel the need to hide from me are you scared because I’m wielding this here shotgun?”
The figure, which appears rather large, doesn’t respond. It snarls.
“What the…” Rob Wonderland begins to slowly retrace his steps but trips over himself because he’s too drunk.
And then Ethan is standing before him, looking down on him, his claws sheathed and beer, foaming at the mouth. Rob Wonderland rolls his eyes, assuming it’s someone in a costume...except its penis looks strikingly inhuman. Ethan continues to snarl, having dropped his grudge against Rob Wonderland when he forgot about Morrel.
“Go home kid, and hock a new dildo. That is the most grisly cock I’ve ever seen,” Rob Wonderland slurs, barely able to stand up, using Ethan’s arm as support. He trails off, muttering to himself; Ethan admires his brazenness, returning to the shrubbery.

The gossip of Rob Wonderland confronting Ethan that spread soon after riled Danks. He was ready to take the matter into his own hands, as humans are not allowed to confront humans in lycanthropic states, until Ethan skinned his face off while he was sleeping and plunging his claws into it.
I knew I was the next target. When I heard the news of Danks’ murder I had the feeling he wouldn’t have minded anyway, yet I still felt immense sorrow over his loss. Rob Wonderland recently published a book; can you believe that? It’s one off those self-help memoirs most likely fiction and written to shock its viewers of his supposedly demented childhood. The public, gobbled it up, of course.
Danks and I had a very sketchy relationship. He was heavily addicted to gambling, as werewolves don’t have to worry about the sharks. He’d been loveless for years and the dates he had went very well but he’d always say something the next day that’d scare his date away from a second coming, no pun intended. Ethan had no right to kill him; I must sound as if killing is casual to us, let me explain: we’ve become desensitized over hundreds of years. Werewolves, unfortunately, never age. Vampires are similar in that as long as they regulate and sustain a healthy amount of blood in their system…they could potentially live forever.
Danks had become rather forlorn and abject during his final days. He talked to everyone with reluctance, even me, and when he did it was often concerning the necessary restrictions to survive as a werewolf. I loved him like a brother; he never failed to make a single social encounter awkward, was an intellectual, witty cynic but far from a pessimistic existentialist. He somehow had the capacity to view life as temporary and acted accordingly, knowing death was inevitable. Such acceptance of death often accidentally expressed temerariousness.
His own belief that everything was inevitably would have eventually but then demise of him; he felt had had no control over his life. I almost feel better knowing that he died the way he did.
Not longer after we first squabbled we became a mischievous tag-team, converting the dregs of humanity into werewolves. We were utterly irresponsible and could have caused an epidemic, but we were too busy goofing off to realize this.
I began to dig his grave, anguished over the death of my only friend.

Rob Wonderland played golf and found it despicable. It was as as hebetative as competitive bass fishing. Rob Wonderland hadn’t thought once about encountering the creature that sprung out of the shrubbery. In this day and age, superfluous with technology, he wouldn’t be surprised if it was a robot.
Rob Wonderland flushed heroin and cocaine down the toilet when he’d had enough of it. He often showed up high to his therapy sessions, hence subscribing medication so recklessly, sometimes confusing the medications.
Morrel didn’t take her medications; she didn’t believe they did anything, and she was more interested in natural remedies, which so far had proved useless but she persuaded herself that they worked anyway. She was so beautiful in high school that no one dared trespass her holiness. It was incredibly lonely and sexually frustrating. She wanted to take a couple years off to experience life and degenerated into a prostitute, a sought after one at that.
Rob Wonderland made sure his office was tidy, then plopped down into his chair, leaning back with a sense of pride and relief. He glanced at his list of patients today, Morrel being the first.
He leaned back in his chair again, folding his hands and doing his best to look like a professional.
She showed up punctually, her posture gallant, her paleness glimmering. She immediately rushed up and hugged him, then fell back on the patient’s couch. Rob Wonderland stared at her, baffled. She smiled at him toothily. He didn’t have any inclination to sleep with her today. They sat in silence for forty-five minute then he asked her to excuse him for a moment. In the bathroom, he shot up amphetamines and heroin while sitting on the toilet seat, belt strapped around his arm. He then walked out, appearing sober as possible, plopping back down into his chair. She was still sitting there.
“Here, take this pill. It’ll help.” He rummaged In his drawer for Dialudid.
“Help what?” she asked.
“Stress.”
The effect seemed to hit her immediately; both leaning back into their couch and chairs, eyes fluttering until his next patient knocked on the door. Fumbling like a newborn deer, he helped Morrel to her feet and out the door. His next patient looked at the two of them suspiciously, slitting her eyes with envy. Rob Wonderland ushered her in; once the door closed she jumped on him.
“Not today, ma’am. I think it’s time we started dealing with real issues.”
“Like sex?”
“No, sex is not important.”
“It is to me…” she rolled her eyes, akimbo.
“Get out.”
“Excuse me?”
“Get the fuck out my office.”

Ethan’s love for Morrel had withered into hatred. He stalked and loathed her, calling her twenty times in thirty minutes and somehow leaving more than twenty voicemails. I stalked him, slouching down and watching him from behind the dashboard of my convertible; he was voyeuristic, but the look in his eyes was of carnage.
I thought about confronting him, killing him even. I had made a mistake converting him; he was too young and unruly to abide by the rules. I decided to approach him, prepared for an altercation. Being a werewolf obviously rose problems, so I made guttural noises until I gained his attention and beckoned him.
“What are you doing here,” he snarled, having intruded on his territory.
“I want you to stop obsessing over Morrel. Leave her behind; they’ll be another.”
He glared at me with indignation, belligerent.
“Calm down,” I sigh.
“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t shove that woman’s head up her cunt.”
I muse over my answer with apprehension. “Because I love her.
“You too?” He laughs obnoxiously, slapping his knee. “Then let us rid of our torment. Together.” He lugs his shoulder around mine convivially. Knowing that I’ll never have her makes his suggestion plausible. The blaring con was that I’d obviously just fall in love with someone else.
I jabbed my claw into Ethan’s neck, his blood spurting onto my neck.

“No,” Morrel asserted firmly.
“I have a patient soon; you can’t just schedule an appointment whenever you want,” Rob Wonderland was sweating profusely.
“This is not an appointment.” She smirked promiscuously, reaching out for his hands.
“Now it is,” she purrs, sauntering to the door and locking it.
“Look this isn’t right I’d rather you leave right now—right, now.”
“And who’s going to stop me?”
“Alright,” Rob Wonderland yells, “you want to play games? You fucking whore?”
Morrel laughs, “’You fucking whore’.
Rob Wonderland reclines into his chair. He doesn’t lean back.
“How much do you want.”
“Free of charge,” she murmurs.
“I was referring to you leaving.”

I finally came face to face with Morrel in Central park. It was in the middle of the night and she was with an obese, bald client shaded by a canopy of trees. His stomach reminded me of a beached whale, jiggling nauseatingly. I waited until they were finished; it didn’t take very long.
“Are you a cop,” she inquired, sucking on a lollipop. Most would regard this as a sexual innuendo.
“Why aren’t you afraid of me,” I ask, incredulous.
”I always believed in werewolves,” she shrugs.
The same feeling came over me when I attempted suicide; serene, utter peace. Lightheadedness. She wasn’t afraid of me; she believed in me. She didn’t so much as flinch.
“Hey chump I’ve got another customer in fifteen minutes you want to…”
“Sit down?”
She laughs haughtily. “Sure thing chief.”
I have no idea what to say to her when we sit down. She’s chewing bubble-gum, blowing bubbles and tapping her foot.
“So…” she says, indicative that she’s unenthused.
And then I sink my fangs into her neck.

Rob Wonderland was dumbstruck by Morrel’s dour change in mood. She didn’t even so much as talk. And most peculiarly, she seemed to be growing…fangs. When she did speak, she claimed that she’d left prostitution behind (a lie, to cover up her victims), and could use a couple refills. Not even Rob Wonderland’s lewd smile had any effect on her, even a negative one. Rob Wonderland, though piqued, had the edacious desire to watch a horror movie. He wasn’t aware that he was sitting right in front of one.
Morrel had much more disparate intentions during this session. She could feel the lycanthropy commencing, writhing inside of her, a choleric wrath.
“Morrel…are you alright? You seem somewhat…out of sorts,” he was being euphemistic.
“Yes,” she panted, her heartbeat accelerating, rife with palpitations. “Just…a bit…flustered.” Thin hairs were beginning to sprout from her ankles.
“I have to go to the bathroom, please excuse me,” Rob Wonderland winked, chipper as ever as he hopped out of his seat and jaunted to the restroom. While buckling his belt he had heard an excruciating scream come from his room. He rushed out of the bathroom and upon opening the door and witnessing the…the werewolf hulking in his room—taking a moment to awe at it in disbelief—he sat back in his chair, leaning back and folding his hands behind his head. The werewolf barked at him, snarling furiously. It took one step forwards, the sole of its foot landing first then the rest of it rolling down. Rob Wonderland continued to smile.
“My only son is dead you know,” he smiled. “I feel no sorrow over his death; I know he is in a better place.”
The werewolf gave him a baffled look.
“I know such things because there are werewolves, vampire, gargoyles; terrors of our imagination. I know that if we believe in something enough that it becomes reality whether or not it’s real.”
Rob Wonderland was a daydreamer as a child. During his teenage years he didn’t engage in the amateur vices that his peers did. Come college, he locked himself in his dorm room to study, only to the dismay of the drunk girls on his floor. He was an orphan; when he we eight years old his parents made a suicide pact that they believed would bind them together forever and made love in a Jacuzzi with their wrists slit.
Meanwhile he hasn’t stopped smiling, there’s even a glint of desire in his eye as he regards her. Morrel, unconscious with rage, advances. Rob Wonderland knows he has mere moments left before his death. He begins to think about what he just said; what if what we believed in was already real to begin with? What if the human mind’s capacity for information was limited to what already existed?
Before he could continue brooding, Morrel thrashed his neck open. Blood splattered the entire room. One might have mistaken it for a Jackson Pollock painting. Unlike most people’s facial expressions when they die, Rob Wonderland didn’t seem to have a candid gush of everything they couldn’t and weren’t able to say during their lives. Though his head lolled to the right like a slinky, the same lewd smile covered his face, as if he had come to a revelation that could only be recognized in death.

Before becoming lycanthropic, I was Rob Wonderland’s first patient. He always had proclivity for medicinal experimentation; he believed all disorders were corporeal and could be solved biologically. If nothing worked he’d often dose the patient with everything possible without killing them, though if life were disposable legally, he would’ve. If asked, there was nothing he wouldn’t prescribe. He never spoke much during his sessions, and if he did, it was irrelevant. We’d sometimes sit in silence for hours having staring contests. Back then, his smile wasn’t as frequent or ludicrous.
The lycanthropic serum he machinated was accidental. Unfortunately, I was his guinea pig, and when I agreed to his proposition to test a new drug he’d created (he warned me it was illegal do so beforehand but that he found complete aplomb in me), I wasn’t aware of the ramifications.
I’d watch his son, Ethan, flirting with writers, having only read so many books and like most people, claiming that he should read more. I almost saw more of Ethan than I did of his father. He was always roaming around the empty hallways, waiting rooms, and offices. He was shy towards me and always greeted me with his head hung, gazing at his shoes. He was a notoriously horrid gambler and lived off of his father, soggy with denial that he couldn’t bring himself to apply to college.
When Morrel began to visit Rob Wonderland, Ethan lost his mind. To ‘lose one’s mind’ is such a silly idiom; where and how does one lose a mind? Do they leave it somewhere by mistake; do they give it away like they do their hearts? Nevertheless, Ethan lost his mind, and his heart along with it. Morrel thought he was cute and constantly made fun of him; she believed herself to be more wise because of the seedy places she’d lived and her degenerate profession. She’d tease him and he’d fawn over her. Because he was the son of the psychiatrist who prescribed her medication (which she usually sold), she refused to sleep with Ethan, even when he offered absurd amounts.
When I swallowed the pill that cursed me for life I immediately realized something had gone direly wrong. My whole body pulsated; each artery and vein was a rivulet of bloodcurdling, palpable hatred. I transformed into a wolf right in front of Rob Wonderland’s eyes; it was the first time he ever smiled that lewd, perverse smile. He then jabbed a syringe into my jugular before I knew what was going on. He denied that he knew what the medication’s effects were beyond death. I was never certain whether or not Danks and I were his only patients that he infected.
I fell in love with Morrel simply walking out of my appointments with Rob Wonderland, as hers was right after mine. Eventually we began to have conversations before she entered his office, I offered to take her out to dinner, etc. Ethan was too young to notice that Morrel and I were dating but his father certainly did, and not surprisingly, became increasingly mad, spreading the disease to Danks.

As of right now, I don’t know where Morrel has fled to, nor do I have any more background information on Rob Wonderland. There is much more to tell of my life as a werewolf, but that is for another story, for this one ends here.

Formal Thoughts

Overlooking the Ward’s Island in the state of New York there is an institution that only accepts patients that lack psychological disorders. The psychiatrists and other psychologists then diagnose what psychological disorder the patient could potentially have, regardless if they actually have any. The psychological disorder is then induced upon the patient via conditioning. Once the patient is properly conditioned to show overt symptoms of the chosen psychological disorder, they are remedied with the appropriate medication.
If a patient is initially diagnosed with a psychological disorder they are dismissed from the institution. Only patients that present no symptoms are admitted. Rafe had symptoms of a psychological disorder but feigned none adequately enough to be admitted into the institution. He was immediately diagnosed with avoidant personality disorder and major depression. Rafe, twenty-three, was simply trying to receive the medications for the psychological disorders he had; unfortunately, avoidant personality disorder wasn’t one of them.
Rafe was an orphan, raised on amphetamines, a social chameleon. He adapted to any circumstance, whether it required obsequiousness, servility, docility, and so forth. He was lean in stature, dirty blond mop, vapid blue eyes. He would flirt with the nurses blithely, winking at them coyly. He manipulated the doctors by pretending to know nothing about medicinal dosages, obtaining near overdoses of medication.
This routine continued and Rafe eventually got the appropriate treatment for his psychological disorder, which was ironically psychosomatic. The day he received his new medication the ambulance showed up.
There was something unsettling about the ambulance, even though it resembled an ordinary ambulance. The drivers were hidden behind tinted windows and remained inside. The institution’s staff became wary, as time passed it was apparent this wasn’t a local or ambulance regulated by the institution. The security and nurses attempted to usher everyone back into the hospital but Rafe managed to slip through. As he approached the ambulance it became increasingly sinister; its sirens mutated into cracked devilish horns.
The nurses and security had already barricaded themselves within the institution. Rafe, precariously curious, almost enchanted, crept closer to the ambulance’s steaming headlights.
Suddenly someone shouted “Get in! We’re the good guys!”
Rafe wondered why the good guys had two demonic horns sticking out of the roof of their ambulance, but hopped into the ambulance as they popped open the door for him. Two men wearing satanic Pinocchio masks were sitting in the front seats, armed with super-soakers.
One of them turned his head and looked at the other tentatively. “We’re the good guys?”
“Well if they’re the bad guys, then we must be the good guys,” his accomplice mused. “Stay in the ambulance kid,” the two men kicked open the ambulance doors, nearly unhinging them. “And put your seat belt on,” the lankier one added at the last second.
Rafe glimpses out of the ambulance window; he notices that those aren’t ordinary super-soakers.
They’re neon pink super-soakers.
The two masked men circle around the back of the institution, throwing smoke grenades and shattering the windows. Rafe can hear the nurses, security guards, and doctors all panicking, but he can’t hear any of his fellow patients. He remembers they’re probably too medicated to conduct themselves during emergencies.
Rafe speculates what the masked men are actually doing. They’re actions are clearly not compelled by monetary means, nor do they seem to want to harm anyone. They could be holding the institution up and stealing all the medication—drug addicts—but with super-soakers and in a diabolical ambulance that intermittently snorts impatiently?
Rafe watches one of the doctors fleeing from the institution, running past a wounded security guard. The doctor asks if the security guard has medical insurance and the guard shakes his head. The doctor scampers off. Rafe unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs out of the ambulance.
“What happened to you?” he asks the guard, getting on one knee, searching for the wound.
“My blackberry ran out of power,” the guard whimpers. “I’ve got a wife and two kids to feed y’know. I mean what if something goes wrong and they can’t get in touch with me?”
“Why would you need medical insurance for a blackberry that needs to be charged?” Rafe asks, bamboozled. “And how could a doctor even help you charge a blackberry?”
“I was asking if I could use his phone, s’all. But those bastards will let you starve to death if you don’t have insurance.”
“I’d…give you my phone if I had one.”
“You don’t have a phone?” The guard blurts out, aghast. He pushes himself off the ground, wiping spidery tears from his eyes. The guard is about 6’7 and Herculean. His countenance is that of benefaction and sheer, compassionate justice. He reminds Rafe of a paladin. The guard sticks out his hand; Rafe shakes it nobly. This man exudes virtuosic charisma; being in his presence is humbling.
With an intense, bold jerk of his head in the direction of the nearest phone store, he gathers Rafe up against his chest with one arm and valiantly, valiantly raises his chin. “It is time to buy you a phone. You have been deprived of one of the most essential…” he trails off into a pedantic monologue about the necessity of cell phones.
“Back the fuck off nigger.” Rafe recognizes the voice of one of the masked men; his super-soaker is pointed directly against the man’s back. The guard ignores the masked man, continuing to prattle about cell phones. Rafe notices the masked man is lugging a black garbage bag filled with what sounds like the rattling of pill bottles.
“Psst, give the guy a cell phone,” Rafe whispers to the masked man. The man gives him a quizzical look but complies anyway as the guard begins to turn around. The guard is bloated with ecstasy, immediately texting what Rafe assumes to be his wife. The masked man and Rafe sprint back to the ambulance while the guard is captivated by the cell phone.
“Where’s the other guy?” Rafe inquires.
“He’ll be here in a couple minutes. Now shut the fuck up and get in.” Rafe shrugs and tugs open the ambulance door, crawling back to where the stretcher should be. The masked man tosses the garbage bag into the back of the ambulance; the ambulance snorts, apparently displeased at being treated so boorishly.
“What exactly just took place—”
“We liberated the institution’s patients and scavenged as many pharms as we could. My partner is still busy hoarding as many as he can.”
“I can understand why you’d want to liberate the patients, as you might have some sort of vendetta against the institution or you feel the patients are being treated like guinea pigs, which I’d have to agree with you, but why steal the meds?”
“To get high. You know how fucked up Dialudid gets you?” The man smiles. Rafe’s smirks; hey whatever right.
“So what’s with the ambulance. And what’s your name, anyway.”
“Name’s Goat,” the man spouts. “The ambulance is a some guy named Faust who made a deal with devil and when he died the devil turned him into an ambulance.”
Rafe, skeptical, assimilated this; it was difficult, as so many absurd events were happening at once that he choked on swallowing it all.
“My buddy’s named Envy. He forgot his name like two years ago or something when he hit his head really hard and was riddled with amnesia. He liked the word Envy so he legally changed his name and that’s that.”
Rafe nodded. “Why do you wear a demonic Pinocchio mask? Why not like, a Jason hockey mask or something.”
“Ah hockey mask’s are so cliché. I made this mask myself and ‘m damn proud of it. It’s about the innovation y’know, when you’re a criminal. People aren’t scared of what they see on the idiot-box. Would you be scared of Jason? I’d just laugh at the guy, he’s a gimmick.”
Rafe glances at Goat’s neon pink super-soaker. “Jason wasn’t a real criminal.”
“You know what I mean. Serial killers and shit. The good ones, they all have their unique perks.”
“Are you a serial killer?” Goat looks at me, obviously disappointed that I’d ask such a question.
“Never. We’re the good guys, remember?” He strokes his mask.
“But you’re saving people who willingly arrange situations in which they need to be saved.”
“That’s besides the point.” Goat insists.
“Why is that beside the point?” Rafe raises his eyebrow.
“I’m a bad man, you see,” Goat turns around and, seemingly detached, looks Rafe directly in the face. “Regardless if there’s always going to be someone to save, regardless if they induce their own need to be saved, saving them makes me feel like I’m doing something good.”
“Why are you a bad man?”
Goat’s complexion droops; he raises his hand to his chin and stares at the ambulance flooring in oceanic thought. Before he can reply Envy throws open the door and hops in the driver’s seat.
“Let’s scram.” He glances back at Rafe, huddled against the ambulance wall. “We taking the kid?”
“Yeah, he’s neat.”
“Where are we going?” Rafe asks. The ambulance snorts out smoke from its headlights, akin to a dragon. Envy cocks his neon pink super-soaker.
“To dispense this medication in people of need,” Envy smirks, reaching into the bag and popping open the first bottle he grabs. “Amphetamines. Heh, sweet.”
“Turn on some Aesop Rock, I’ve got that song stuck in my head. What’s it called,” Goat pushes his hand against his forehead, flustered.
“Aight. Oh, and we’re going to save more people. We’ve hit all the hot-spots already though so we might need to go domestic,” Envy mutters, popping eight pills. A Reiki guru knocks on the window of the ambulance wearing a T-shirt promoting spiritual healing. The guard with the cell phone fetish accompanies her, his arms folded. Goat rolls down the window.
“What the fuck do you want.” Rafe reaches into one of the garbage bags and pills out a bottle of Vicodin. He giggles cheekily.
“I’m afraid that you’re going to step out of the car sir, along with your partner,” the guard protrudes his chest out.
“And if I don’t?”
The guard rolls up the sleeves of his uniform. “Then I’ll just have to call the police.” Envy cackles.
“Would either of you like any spiritual healing or introduction to spirituality and the effect is has on your life?” the lady chimes; she does not use Botox, Rafe concludes.
“Yeah, here, touch my heart chakra. It’s right here,” Goat grabs his crotch. The ambulance grumbles, instilling a sense of doom in Rafe. He pops five Vicodin. Goat rolls the window up as Envy backs the ambulance up, which is still grumbling. The engine roars and the car speeds off at least eighty miles-per-hour, music blasting.
The ambulance rams into other cars and sends them spiraling off-road as it bombasts down the highway. Envy, high on amphetamines, is imperturbably fixated on the road ahead. Goat gets up and hops into the back of the ambulance, sitting down adjacent to Rafe.
“Once I tricked a little boy into taking designer drug pills by making him think it was candy,” Goat confessed, sighing. “He had a heatstroke and died.”
“Shit happens. You get caught?”
“Yes. That’s when I made the pact that marred my face and warped my life.”
Rafe tapped his fingers on the flooring, biting his lip. He’d been ruminating over what exactly made a person “good” or “bad”, if such traits even existed. Thoughts can be as criminal as crimes themselves; restraint is the only aspect that designates a life spent behind bars. Law is the definitive moral code we abide by, but—
“With who. What pact.”
Goat rolls his tongue over his upper teeth, reluctant to answer; Rafe obviously can’t see this behind Goat’s mask. Rafe already has an idea, though he refuses to believe it. Goat lays his neon pink super-soaker down next time; a yielding gesture. He sighs burdensomely.
And begins to laugh hysterically, slapping his knees. Rafe raises his eyebrow again. “I got you, I got you so bad.”
“You actually did make a deal with the devil, didn’t you.”
Goat continues to laugh, his eyes watering. “No, I swear to God, I never made a deal with the devil. The devil only makes deals if it’s profitable for him. He’s a wise guy; recently just got divorced with some chick from purgatory, isn’t taking it too well.”
“So you’re saying the devil exists?” Rafe stammers.
“Well, yeah. Envy and I are from hell, after all.”
“Damn straight we are,” Envy slams on the wheel, chewing on wheat.
Rafe doesn’t bother questioning the veracity of the concept of them being from hell. “Do you know if my parents are there?”
“Oh no, hell isn’t what you think it is; no rings; you don’t go there after you die because you were a bad boy.”
“Then what is it?” Rafe squints.
“Hey Envy we could pretend we’re existentialists and claim hell is life,” Goat giggles.
“If I wasn’t on speed I wouldn’t force myself to laugh at that,” he mutters, viciously chewing his stalk of wheat.
“Hell isn’t a place. It’s an incarnated being. The devil is chained to hell, ball and chain,” Goat explain, the scene set as if he was telling a scary story over a campfire in the middle of the woods at night. “She’s hot, no pun intended.” Goat guffaws, slapping his knees again. “The devil is…kind of like her pet. He does the paperwork, and the dirty work. He smokes Newports; lights them with his own breath.” The entire ambulance jolts, angered that the devil is being discussed.
Goat lies down, folding his hands behind his head. Envy spits out the window.
“Take off your mask,” Rafe dares Goat.
“Nah. You’d die of shock.” He sighs again. “So what about you kid.”
Rafe suddenly realizes that the two of them claimed they were from hell and yet insist hell is a person. He grins cunningly. “I don’t need a mask to hide my face.” Goat, startled, looks up at him. Rafe raises his knees close to his chest, hanging his arms over them. “You’re both lying.”
“About what?”
“You claim to be from hell and then try to convince me it’s a person.”
Goat, sighing once again, lies his head back down onto his folded hands. Envy abruptly slows down the car; it skids to a shrieking stop. Rafe, still grinning, pops another Vicodin. The ambulance flaps its front and wipes the windshield back and forth. Envy, deliberate, opens the ambulance door and steps out onto the highway, stretching.
Goat, bony and emaciated, struggles to sit up, sloth-like. “Alright kid, you got us. There’s no point in beating around the bush anymore.” Envy kicks at the ground. “The truth is…we’re scientists, sent from a special department of the institution to test certain subjects; see how they react to the absurd, etc. So far, you’ve performed excellently. You show no signs of portent post-traumatic stress disorder or any anxiety at all…”
Goat takes off his mask. Rafe grimaces and vomits until he dry heaves. Goat snickers and puts his mask back on. “Shame you didn’t die; now you’ll be stuck with that image for the rest of your life.”
Rafe, wiping away strings of vomit drooling from his mouth, pants, “What the hell are you.”
“Very lonely,” Goat considers, supporting his head with one arm. “You’re pretty amusing company, though I’m not sure how amusing you’ll be when the show hits the road.”
“So you’re not scientists from—“
Goat chuckles, “No.” He pulls an apple out of his pocket. “I’m just one of the good guys, remember.”
Rafe stands up, tripping outside of the ambulance, whose horns are now ablaze. He notices headlights incoming from behind them, on the highway. He thinks about making a run for it, clueless now as to what’s going on. The car slows down when it reaches the ambulance. The black man with a fetish with cell phones steps out. Envy laughs maniacally, rubbing his beer belly. The black man draws his cell phone out of his pocket like a pistol, aiming it at Envy. The cell phone rings.
“Shit,” the black man mutters. “I have to take this call, give me a second.” He turns around, picking up the phone; a woman is yelling at him on the other line. Rafe thinks about how many days he hasn’t brushed his teeth in. Goat pushes open the back doors to the ambulance, snapping onto the ground and clicking his boots. He sheens his neon pink super-soaker, menacingly charismatic. He resembles a holocaust survivor; Rafe assumes he must have a goatee.
“Ah fuck I forgot to take my antidepressants,” Envy whines. “Left them back at the institution.”
“We have to go back then,” Goat sulks.
“Wait,” Rafe interrupts, “they’ve got to be in one of those garbage bags.”
“Oh yeah!” Envy exclaims, his birth-marked belly jiggling with relief.
“Yo, Rafe,” Goat nods for his attention. “You like niggers?”
Rafe, indifferent, shrugs. “I guess so. I don’t really associate with them.”
“Well, you know what. I don’t like niggers.” Goat strides towards the man with the cell phone. “In fact, I don’t like niggers so much, that I’m going to rid this world of one more repulsive, superfluous niggers.” Rafe watches him aim the neon pink super-soaker at the black man’s back, who’s still busy prattling on the phone. Oil-like black sludge oozes out of the neon pink super-soaker, levitating in the air, homing in on the black man, unaware that—
Immediately the black man turns around and shields himself from the black sludge with his blackberry; he takes a photograph, temporarily blinding Goat, and dashes towards him, breaking his mask’s nose and probably his actual one too. Envy stumbles out of the car, firing his neon pink super-soaker, realizing the cell phone renders the black man immune to the sludge, throws it at him and scurries back into the ambulance, driving off and leaving Goat and Rafe behind…
Only to turn the ambulance around and run the black man over, his intestines splattering out onto the highway. Envy drives the car back and forth over the black man’s body, squashing him like someone stomping on a soda can.
“Fucking niggers,” he spits, stepping out of the ambulance. He saunters over to Goat, who’s on all fours, sputtering blood from his nose and clamping it with his hands. He yells something incoherent that sounds remarkably similar to something about niggers. Rafe, high on Vicodin, watches all of this take place dumbly, his arms hanging by his sides.
“What do you guys have against black people, anyway,” he asks.
“They’re bad people, unlike us.”
“They’re just people with different skin pigment.”
Envy shakes his head. “That’s what they want you to think. But niggers, they’re just bad people. They do bad things. Eventually there will be a war against the niggers, to exterminate them all, eliminating a large percentage of the bad people in this country.”
Rafe yawns. He thinks about how killing black people would be considered a bad thing, regardless if they’re naturally bad people. However, he knows this sort of logic would elude a gluttonous imbecile like Envy. To the right of the highway is a wheat field as far as the eye can see. Rafe walks towards the field and enters it while Envy is busy repairing Goat’s mask.
The wheat field is serene and soothing; the stalks graze him as he walks by like children reaching out to touch him. The entire field sways like that of a tide. Rafe wades through the stalks of wheat until the highway is long out of view. The stalks are like sirens, seducing him deeper and deeper into the field. He recalls Envy mentioning something about antidepressants and chuckles at the irony. He knows having a crippling psychological disorder is like a medicinal utopia for those that don’t have them, but if they were to their induce own, it would be like walking with a crutch without a limp. Rafe comprehends the appeal of having a psychological disorder: meds, the company of someone caring over you, an excuse to escape responsibility, a target to blame your flaws and anguish on.
“Hey kid,” Goat shouts as the ambulance tramples over the stalks that he passed by. “Where’ya going?”
“Nowhere, just needed to walk something off,” he shouted back. Envy whooped with joy. It seemed the night had just begun. He contemplates why Envy uses the word bad instead of evil. He’d blame it on Envy’s verbose vocabulary, but Goat uses it as well. Rafe had never heard the expression “good and bad” before. He continued to think over this as he climbed into the snarling ambulance.

“Looks like schizophrenia displaying positive symptoms,” the doctor confirms. “Patient is showing signs of paralyzing delusions, heightened senses, derailment, vivid hallucinations, formal thought disorder, and inappropriate effect.” The doctor examined Rafe’s symptoms for awhile before moving on to check on the next patient. He couldn’t help but to wonder exactly what was going on inside Rafe’s head that caused him to smile so.