by Ben Peller
I must’ve passed out from shock, because I awoke in an ambulance with absolutely no recollection of getting carted into one. Then I considered the fact that I’d bled to death and through some miraculous mistake was being driven up to heaven, because a hand was caressing my hair lightly and the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard was breathing into my ear: “You’re going to be okay, Shawn. You are so my hero. My angel.”
I yawned with leisure, enjoying this dream, when reality intervened in the form of an authoritative snap: “Is he conscious yet?”
I kept my eyes stubbornly closed, only to be prodded by a persistent arm.
“Yes, I’m fucking conscious,” I snarled as I opened my eyes. The various medical equipment, the urgent face of a doctor looming above me and the general antiseptic-like smell of this contained space all led up to the undeniable fact that I was in an ambulance. There was also a tremendous sense of motion; wherever we were going, we were in a hurry. I tried to sit up but found my arms and legs in restraints.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t move,” the attendant said. He was hunched over and seemed to be too tall for the ambulance’s ceiling. His tongue was perched urgently, its tip jutting slightly out of his mouth. He looked like a cat just before dinner time. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Shawn Michals.”
“What day is it?”
His tone irked as much as the question did. It’s insulting to ask a temp worker the day of the week. A temp knows what day it is, being that working in a mind-numbing job grants a definition to each day. Monday is the first day of the week, Tuesday is the day one considers suicide because there’s still four days before the weekend comes. Wednesday, that bafflingly midweek speed bump one doesn’t know whether to bless or curse, is hence labeled “hump day.”10 Thursday is the day before Friday and usually a night to go out and party because the next day is Friday and nothing happens on Fridays except everyone usually leaves early.
“It’s fucking Wednesday,” I said.
While he nodded and scrawled something down on a pad, I heard laughter in my ear. I turned and saw Trina.
“Trina,” I said.
“Shawn,” she smiled.
On the way to the hospital she filled me in on everything. The woman who’d come armed with a knife to our office had been living in a mental institution for the past three years. She was a paranoid schizophrenic, but Morton had gotten hold of her via phone and had convinced her she had the power to buy a home, to exist as “a normal person.” Apparently Morton had preyed on several mentally unstable people and used their government disability checks to fund their loans on their “homes” that in fact didn’t really exist. This way, Morton and Mortgage Capitol would get paid without having to even ever produce a physical house. As long as these mentally insane “customers” believed they were paying off their dream homes, they kept sending in their money. Kind of like a Ponzi scheme, only sicker.
“That fucker…” I murmured.
“No worries,” Trina said. “He’s under arrest. So is Dave Stein, plus his wife along with a couple other officers at Mortgage Capitol.”
I tugged against my restraints, then sighed at the ambulance doctor, who was busy furrowing over a clipboard.
“Hey Doc,” I said. “I think I’m healthy enough not to be restrained against my will.”
Trina was already in motion, undoing the strap that held my left forearm. By the time the doctor stuttered that this was against procedure, both my arms were loose and I was able to sit up and unshackle the straps that held my legs. Then I was free, save for one of those damned plastic bracelets paramedics always put on your wrist. It’s like a single handcuff, a reminder you that something’s wrong with your being.
I tore it off, then seized the opportunity to clasp Trina’s hand.
“Looks like we’re both out of a job,” I suggested. “That being the case, we may have some free time. Would you like to spend some of yours with me?”
She paused. A pause always throws itself open to interpretation. Pauses mean something is important enough for someone else to ponder; a chess move driven by your speech or action.
“Shawn,” Trina spoke slowly. “I’m married. And also… I’m pregnant.”
Married? Well, that was at best manageable. But…
“Pregnant?” I asked.
She nodded slowly. “Why do you think my favorite foods are pizza and chocolate ice cream at two in the morning?”
“But why didn’t you tell me this… before?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I like you. Maybe I just wanted to pretend for a while. I would never cheat on Rick. But I just, I’ve always heard about office romances. You seemed like the first guy worth having one with. I really am starting school to become a teacher…”
I pressed the index and ring fingers of my left hand, the one Tina had just freed, to her lips, and the identical fingers of my right hand to my own lips. “It’s cool,” I murmured. “At least on my end.”
Apparently it was on hers as well, because she took my finger in her hand and kissed their tips.
When we got to the hospital I insisted on signing myself out against doctor’s orders.
“Don’t worry, man,” the paramedic who’d just a half an hour ago been interrogating me now confided in me. “Your employer’s medical insurance’ll take care of everything.”
“I’m a temp, dude.” I told him. “I don’t have medical insurance.”
“Oh,” he said sheepishly, and couldn’t get the proper forms in my hands fast enough. I signed myself out, then walked from the hospital with Trina beside me.
“So Shawn,” she said. “About what I said…”
A black BMW swerved into the surprisingly narrow entryway of the hospital and came zipping toward us.
“That would be Rick,” Trina wrinkled her lip. She seemed a bit resigned, but that may have just been the painkillers talking.
“Honey, are you okay?!” A man slightly taller than me with hair remarkably the same color as mine hopped out of the car. He bounded over to us and embraced Trina. “Oh, Martina! If you only knew how worried I was!”
She hugged him back, with what seemed like meaning. I watched, my only condolence being that he hadn’t called her “Trina” as I had been doing all day. Did that make me closer in some way? I was too high on Vicodin to tell.
Once they parted he gazed my way. “You must be the young man who saved my wife’s life,” he said, and I wanted to laugh. This guy looked ten years younger, not to mention ten years wiser and richer, than me.
I shook his hand. “It was my pleasure,” I said. “Congratulations on your upcoming birth.”
“Thank you,” he nodded. Then came a quizzical frown. “Birth?”
Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Trina’s alarmed eyes.
Uh-oh.
“I mean the birth of your marriage,” I intoned, trying to blur my speech, weaving slightly for effect. “The birth of your wife’s introduction to the world of teaching.”
“Ah, well… that,” Rick said, ironically slapping both his hands across Trina’s back and stomach, eliciting only a small wince from her. “She’s always wanted to make a difference. And being that we have no plans to have any kids of our own…”
Apparently Trina had entrusted me with a secret she hadn’t yet given to her husband. Considering this a victory of sorts I excused myself, giving Rick as hearty a handshake as possible and Trina as generous a hug as I felt appropriate, which given how high I was from pharmaceuticals, was pretty darned appropriate. Then I proceeded to stagger off into the night.
“Hey,” Rick called out from behind. “Sure you don’t want us to give you a ride somewhere? No offense, but you look a little….”
“Shaky.” I responded, assuming this adjective could be the state Rick and Trina’s marriage might dissolve to once she revealed her pregnancy to him. That is, if she’d been telling me the truth about being pregnant. If she was in fac
t pregnant and refused to get an abortion, would they remain together to raise the child? Would they name the child after me? Would she ever tell her child the story of how I saved her life? Why did Rick so not want to have any kids? Would Trina get an abortion to placate him and secretly hold it against him for the rest of her life? Was it possible for anyone to ever be completely honest with a lover, not only in Los Angeles but all around the world? And if so, how so?
As this last question squirmed its way into my consciousness, a horn blared. I looked around. More horns blared. I whirled around and grasped the unmistakable fact that I was standing in the center lane of Santa Monica Boulevard. I squeezed my eyes real tight and focused. 20th Street. Okay. Twenty blocks to the beach.
I knew where I was going. To sit by the ocean and ponder this thing called love. I could stretch out in the sand, feel the ocean lick my toes mockingly, maybe spilling a bit over onto my feet, reminding me just how small I was in the scheme of things. And yet there I would be, a part of their cycle. And I’d awaken whenever the hell I wanted to, stretched out on the shore of a Southern California beach. Time would be an irrelevant concept. After all, it wasn’t like I had a temp job to wake up for in the morning.
On the way to the beach I pulled off my bandage and flung it away. The gash on my arm was still fresh, and I knew it would leave a scar, a scar gained by protecting potentially two lives from a mentally insane person in a world gone mad. As far as I went I didn’t feel innocent, and yet I wasn’t guilty; I’d become what Luisa predicted I’d morph into: “a cog in a machine.”
I have a habit of licking many of the scars I garnered during my tenure as a temp. It was sitting on the beach that night I anointed the scar I’d garnered saving a woman and her unborn child the highest of rankings. That which is unborn promises so much, almost too much – I lay back spread eagle, letting the ocean waves wash over me, wondering if they would take me away while I slept.
I awoke too soon, almost choking on early morning moisture. The rising sun was casting a gentle net from the east, from behind. I found the tide had receded, leaving me only with soggy clothes as a reminder of its presence. I weaved to my feet, groggy from what I took to be a painkiller hangover. In one of those poignant flashes that can overtake one upon awakening, I mused that our very lives were all “on loan.” The only time we truly owned them was in the present moment. Sure we could buy things on credit and then pay them off… cars, families, houses, art, buildings, countries… all noble pursuits.
But so, I realized, was walking down a beach at sunrise, placing one foot in front of the other and marveling at every step. I looked to my wound, still congealing. The one I’d earned saving lives. It looked like it would be a nasty looking one.
I kissed it. My ugliest, sweetest, and most favorite scar.
Zombies In Love
The next address is on the final email I can find from Shawn, and I’m growing accordingly nervous. I feel as though I’m a child following a forest’s path wrapped in a fog that makes it impossible to see my next step. Or a skydiver approaching ground. Could I fall off a cliff and drown; will my chute open?
I’m beginning to feel that rather than stalking Shawn Michals it’s in fact the other way around. We had one pro wrestling match that I can recall, in which we both bled from our foreheads, and when either he or I pinned the other (I forget who went over) our blood mixed along with our exhausted breaths. My connection with him seems as intense as the dueling desires I have late at night to sleep but also knowing I’ll awaken to another day that promises only the eventual need for another, more permanent rest.
Shawn Michals’ final email directs me to a Post Office Depot tucked into the back of a Corporate Complex in Santa Monica. I try the door only to find it locked. I rattle it, gently at first, as if I were knocking politely. But soon I accept this may be the last piece of the puzzle that joins me with Shawn and then I’m jamming the damn thing so hard it feels as if the glass will burst from the force of my blows around its edges.
“Okay, okay!” a cry sounds from within. A rotund man with frizzy red hair bolts up from behind the counter.
“You’re not one of them, are you?” he shouts.
“One of who?” I call back.
“Those goddamned sons of bitches who are coming around here wanting to know if we’re still open!” he exclaims. “Well, we’re not. That no-good whoring brother of mine ran off and left me here holding the bag! So I can’t help you!”
“I just need to check on a box,” I say. “For Shawn. Shawn Michals.”
Reluctantly the man emerges from behind the counter. He unlocks the glass door while wincing against the sunlight. “You’re not gonna try anything, are you?” he asks. His dialect sounds Eastern European.
“I’m not-“
“The last guy tried something, I give him this!” he whips a silver jar out from behind his back. “Mace!”
“Look, I just want to check on a box,” I scan Shawn’s email. “Box number one-two-three-four.”
“Oh,” the man jerks off a nod. “Okay.”
He heads back behind the counter, still keeping a wary eye on me. “No trouble now,” he says.
I hold up my hands, both empty except for Shawn’s email. “No trouble,” I agree.
The air in here is stale. I pass the next minute or so staring at a stain on the bushy green carpet that oddly resembles a profile of President George Bush Jr.
“Here we are!” the man announces, trundling out while waving an envelope. “It’s marked urgent. What took you so long to pick it up?”
“I’m…” I hesitate. “I’ve been busy.”
“Okay, fine. I need to see some I.D.”
“I don’t have any,” I say, discovering to my surprise as I search my pockets that this is true. Left my wallet at home again.
“Look, my shithead thieving brother is the one been running this place the past three years. Running it straight into the ground. He may know you. I don’t, and I do things by the book.”
The envelope in his hand; URGENT written in fat red letters. What could’ve turned urgent in Shawn’s life?
“Give me that envelope, please,” I say, struggling to keep my tone calm. “I need to read what’s inside of it.”
“No identification, no envelope!”
This red-haired man’s eyes are afire now, making him appear a demon of sorts. But that doesn’t stop me from launching my hand out and clutching his throat. This envelope, and whatever it may contain, seems suddenly vital to me.
“Hand me over that envelope,” I command through clenched teeth.
His response is a slow nod. “Okay,” he allows. “I believe you. You say you’re Shawn Michals, you’re Shawn Michals.”
“I didn’t say I was Shawn Michals!” I shout, tightening my grip around his throat while seizing the envelope with my free hand. “Did I say I was Shawn Michals?”
“I don’t care who you are!” the man’s squirming as beads of sweat spring to life on his forehead. “Just take that package and get the hell out here!”
“Thank you,” I release his throat.
He nods nervously, caressing his throat. “Thank you,” I say. “Sorry about your brother.” I offer. He shrugs. “He always a desperate man. A wanderer. The way he spoke, he reminds me of you. Fucking desperate.”
”I’m sorry,” I say.
His smile startles me. “No need to apologize,” he nods. “Now please go.”
I do. Within two blocks I find a corner bar named after my mother. I go inside and see that there is a “community library” of sorts, made up of tattered paperbacks stacked in shelves. Above them a sign reads: “TAKE ONE, LEAVE ONE.” At a glance titles and their authors jump out: Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor… so many millions of words shaped into classic works like interpretive clouds drifting across a sky impervious to definition. Treasures laid out for barter as though they were simply used-up lives already lived. And people wonder why auth
ors go mad.
I order a drink and open what may contain my very last correspondence from Shawn Michals.
Zombies exist. They are real, and alive and well, particularly in Los Angeles. Just take a quick jaunt down to Venice Beach and you’ll see a boatload of them.
It was with a sense of civic duty that I sometimes wandered around with a torn shirt and torn pants with a blank look in my eye in order to sniff out other zombies. Zombies can sense one another and will not attack one of their fellow reanimated dead. If people reacted to my undead persona with trepidation I knew they were humans, alive and naturally suspicious of something as different as I must’ve looked.
On the other hand, if people slowly nodded at me, as did many of the homeless down at Venice Beach, I knew they were zombies. And I immediately located a pay phone (not so easy a task these days in Los Angeles given our inhabitants’ love for cellphones) to call the police and inform then of a “homeless” person, which in the Los Angeles County Penal Code is to “zombie” as “5150” is to “rampaging psychotic.” In other words, it’s just a way of pointing out there’s a serious aberration on the loose, but in a manner that will not alarm the greater populace.
When I returned to my rented room at night I sometimes pondered just what it would be like to be an actual zombie. Did they have feelings, other than the insatiable impulse to eat human’s flesh, brains and hearts? What could zombies be looking for? Then again, what could humans be looking for? On a daily basis human beings both calculatingly and carelessly annihilated each other in the name of commerce or religion, and often ate each other’s “heart and soul” in the name of romance. At least zombies were honest. All they wanted to do was feed on humans. Humans, it seemed to me, as I rocked the nights away in my rocking chair, were simply zombies draped in better clothes and better hygiene.
Such was the mind frame I was in as I staggered along Santa Monica Boulevard on Halloween, in full zombie regalia, to join fellow freaks, cross-dressers, and general L.A. inhabitants at a parade in West Hollywood that is known as one of the wildest and woolliest in the world on this Eve of All Saints’ Day.