by Brian Ewing
“I would rather manscape with a blowtorch than be subjected to three hours of watching grown men get enraged while tossing the ol’ pigskin around.”
“Fucking hell, you can be dark sometimes.” Caden laughed, a micro-spasm away from spitting out some ham and green pepper debris from her omelet.
She coughed and gulped down the remaining orange juice to clear her pipes, went back in for two more bites, then asked for the bill. With a rhythm of familiarity, both Caden and Sisto thanked Amy as she returned with the credit card slip, Caden signed and tipped within department policy, and Sisto topped it with another 40 percent in cash. Once in the restaurant life, always in the restaurant life, he thought to himself. They exited the diner just in time to see light encroaching the sky.
“You heading home?” Caden asked.
“Unless you want company at your place?” he half joked.
“I am heading back to the office to fill out the report for that nightmare from earlier. Wasn’t sure if you wanted to bum a ride to fill out your consultant papers and get your hours on the books?”
Exhausted, as the food coma was creeping up on him, he replied, “I’ll stop in tonight and get that all squared up, but thanks for the invite.”
Caden’s phone buzzed loud in a rotating motion, accompanied by a ringtone Sisto wouldn’t have thought to hear from the heroine detective. The generic and quite annoying default chime was replaced with the familiar keys to the chorus of Metallica’s hit, ‘The Unforgiven.’ Caden fumbled while rustling through her pocket and grabbed it, giving Sisto a look that said more than words could. Her body language changed, and her face turned to stone.
“Everything good?” Sisto asked, not needing psychic abilities to see her sudden one-eighty in attitude.
“That case we caught last night. They caught the guy. Block away from where you said he would be—covered in blood, like you described. They backtracked to the alley at Broadway and Third,” she admitted, “and found the pipe buried lazily under some trash by the dumpster.”
“Nice,” Sisto replied, feeling good about it being early morning and already productive enough to help solve a crime. “Anything that linked him to the previous crimes?”
“Yeah,” Caden answered, not at energetic about the news as Sisto would have desired. “They found him wearing a missing watch from the boyfriend at the third scene and he had panties in his pocket with blood on them.”
“He was carrying around bloody panties?” Sisto inquired.
“No,” Caden said with mental fatigue. “He was wearing them.”
CHAPTER 3
Sisto’s deemed gift cost him a two-hour detour to the 22nd precinct, his second of three places he considered home the last year and change, aside from the apartment he barely frequented and the Mustain PD’s 41st precinct, an hour outside his resident city. It didn’t eat away at him too bad though, as it saved him the trip he was planning on taking this evening anyways, after he got some shut-eye. The first hour and fifteen minutes were spent giving a statement to the lead officers of the brutal case he’d caught a vibe from earlier, which just so happened to be Señor Fuckface and Detective Caden. Sisto counted his blessings that Bell had seniority over the partnership and did the bare minimum before bouncing out no more than half hour into the session. Caden was no slouch when it came to her job, but the room felt lighter after Bell grabbed his jacket and darted off to get home before the heart of morning traffic began. Sisto considered the altered senses a side effect of the Reels, a representation in his mind using different connections to process his surroundings. Dingy bars had a smell of depression and the air tasted like cigarettes. He’d verbalized that to his friend and neighbor, Craig, when they were hanging out at his place having beers with the UFC fight on a few weeks back. When asked what depression smells like, it was hard to describe. The best Sisto could do was compare it to a nervous or sour sweat someone may relinquish when out of their element. Not too many years back, a dive bar would have been his default hangout. He would have only smelled stale beer and cheap perfume, but in retrospect, the smell of depression was probably always there.
After the statement, the next half hour was consumed with his consultant paperwork. While it made no sense why he had to fill the novella out every time he had a new case, they paid him well enough to overlook the boring tradition. Being a few decades into the twenty-first century now, you would think the law enforcement part of society would jump on board with allowing online forms and databases to keep you from filling out your life story more than once a year, like in a doctor’s office. Apparently, someone that went to school in the Great Depression was still in charge of the cyber infrastructure at Saratoga City’s 22nd precinct. He’d once asked Caden if every aspect of the department was still that primitive, to which she’d replied that most of the institution had turned paperless, but things were getting converted in order of importance. Apparently, a consultant or criminal informant ranked almost at the bottom of the priority list. Submitting his form, and getting his pay from last pay period, the last fifteen minutes in the brick institution that morning was spent in the breakroom, getting himself a coffee with sugar and a chalky, powdered creamer. Cheap bastards. He had mentioned that once to Caden as well but being a purist of the sacred coffee bean, she had let his concern roll off her back like water off a duck’s back. While the cup of joe was subpar, he was hoping the same person in charge of technology there was not also the one keeping the breakroom snacks up to date. He wasn’t even hungry, after his crepes, but felt like he had to set a standard. So he would get a coffee and donut each time he came in, as if by skipping once it may retract him from being able to collect the following time. Exiting the breakroom and heading out to leave the building, he caught Caden’s eye from across the open floor of desks. He raised his coffee as acknowledgment and departed to finally get some rest.
Getting off the public bus, filled with the crème of the crop of nine to fivers, he walked towards the grated fence door, which led him through an always dimly lit hallway that for some reason had a purple glint. He wasn’t sure if it was poor lighting fixtures placed throughout the Corden Palisades Apartments, The Reels trying to tell him something, or if the superintendent forgot to change his black light back to normal after some secret, middle-of-the-night rave. The end of the hallway forced him to pass the lobby on his way to the elevator, where he could normally count on seeing his pill-popping, visibly strung out superintendent, David Carlsen. He normally bee-lined it to the stairs to avoid ‘Super Dave,’ but he was exhausted and drained, physically and mentally, and opted for the elevator. Luckily, Super Dave must have been off in a corner somewhere, pretending to fix something that may or may not have been broken in the first place. With senses heightened but also twisted, just standing in a small space used by a hundred people a day was usually enough to make Sisto queasy. It was barely the start of the day and the mechanical prison cell had the smell and taste of hot sauce. It was appalling. The ping as the elevator halted at the fifth floor could not have come sooner. Sisto sprinted into the open air, took a gulp of non-hot-sauce infected oxygen, and made his way towards his front door, off to the right. His key approaching the lock, he saw a folded piece of lined loose-leaf paper wedged in the side. He pulled it out and it was a note from his neighbor:
Dude,
Beers and pizza tonight. Head over whenever.
-Craig
Sisto, only having a handful of people he interacted with, decided he would stop across the hall for a beer after he got his errands done this evening. He kicked his shoes off, as a to-do list was mentally taking shape on his way to the bed. At some point he needed to go pick up his laptop from Ama on floor three, deposit his payout from SCPD, and he had a support session off Reckman and Hollister, with a group he had been attending shortly after The Reels first appeared years ago. At some point he should also hit the grocery store, but that didn’t get etched in stone on his mental list, as his head slammed into the memory foam pillow and
stole him from reality almost instantly for the next seven hours.
CHAPTER 4
He felt like he rarely dreamed or at least hardly remembered them if he did, but Sisto woke up from a solid rest feeling out of place. His shirt soiled in sweat, Sisto lifted his hand to his face and could feel tears down the sides of his cheeks. He didn’t know for sure the circumstance of the dream, but by the tears and the drum solo his heart was playing from under the damp shirt, Sisto had no doubt whom the dream was about. His head started to throb at the temples and felt extremely dehydrated. Once he was confident that his heart was done jamming out eighties’ hairband tunes through his chest, he went to the kitchen and got himself some water from the dispenser his mother had sent him as a Christmas gift a year, back when he was in college and water wasn’t his first drink of choice. The clear, filtered water hit his throat in the same way it felt after a summer run. It was incredible, but never quite got to the point where it quenched his thirst. After three glasses, back to back, he finally accepted that fact and set the glass in the sink. Grabbing his phone out of the jeans he hadn’t even bothered to remove before crashing into a mini-coma earlier, he saw it was barely four-thirty in the afternoon. Plenty of time to start the day off, he reassured himself, as he tore off the shirt that was victim to absorbing his emotional pain, on his way to the shower.
Another unspoken gift Sisto had, even before The Reels showed up, was the fact that he was a generic male when it came to getting ready for daily life. He was able to shower, brush his teeth, jot down a quick shopping list, and start heading down to the lobby with the trash he had been telling himself to dispose of the past two days, all within a half hour. Dropping the trash in the chute on the opposite side of the fifth floor and next to the utility room, he went down the stairwell and out the building, waiting for his public chariot to take him off to the races. The bus didn’t make him wait too long, maybe ten minutes, and exited maybe fifteen minutes later. He headed to the corner of Reckman and McKellan Street first thing and deposited his earnings from last month’s consulting, through the Wells Fargo drive-through ATM, even though he was on foot. He got a sharp look from the teller inside, behind the glass, with the “Karen” haircut, peeking through the assistance window for drive-through customers. She must have had bigger fish to fry as she never made her way out there to give him her two cents. It was slightly after five-thirty by then and he knew he couldn’t and wouldn’t want to hit the store before his support group session at six. He hated the feeling of being rushed and was just as content to park it up to The Mud Mix, a great little coffee establishment; he could literally see the door to the building from his meetings were held—from sitting on either the front patio or the tables at the western end. When Sisto was in a really bad place and needed the support group to even function after his incident, he would go about four times a week, most of those interactions either starting or finishing at The Mud Mix. Sisto’s new normal slowly settled in and as time heals all wounds, he had reduced his sessions to once a week, maybe two if there was a case that affected him. Not only the carnage and brutality of the case he was called into consult in during the wee hours that morning, but also the intensity of The Reels and his physical reaction to it, qualified for a drop-in to see the fine folks at Circle of Survival as well as The Mud Mix.
He sat down after receiving his order, a cold brew of white-chocolate coffee iced and as large as they offered. The patio was full, due to the nice weather streak the city had bestowed all week, but the table closest to the door at the western end of the shop was open and gave Sisto a clear sightline to Circle of Survival, or C.O.S. He pulled out his phone and briefly confirmed his plans following his session. He shot off a text to Ama, letting her know that he would be by around eight after his session and a detour to the grocery store. She replied almost immediately, interrupting his second text, which was to Craig, to let him know that he had got the note and would be over around eight-ish as well and would bring some beer. Both had responded that his plans would be fine by them, and that sense of organization, even for just a split second, felt like a wave of ecstasy for Sisto. He never knew that that moment in the coffee house, with his overpriced sugary drink, would be one of the last moments he would not experience that feeling again for the foreseeable future.
He took the last sips out of his coffee and was about to get up and head to the trash to dispose of the cup when an abrupt shove knocked him off kilter in his chair. He immediately had The Reels’ cinema screen pop up on his eyelids, which even though it was probably no longer than a blink or two, always felt like a Christopher Nolan film. The experience felt like a long event, lots of emotion and confusion, and Sisto could see during the current matinee a child’s bedroom with lots of toys and books in a shelf on the corner. His point of view, whenever The Reels started up, was often first person, but not always, usually through the eyes of a victim or an offender. Sisto could tell by the angle of his view that he was crouched in the corner of the child’s room and could hear a belting, raging tone from the other side of the door. It was apparent to him then; he was not the offender in this vision. He felt the goosebumps on his arms plump up and could taste the panic in the back of his throat. He’d had this feeling a few times since The Reels introduced itself to him and had determined that the panic tasted like Italian dressing, no idea why.
Just as the door with homemade art taped on it was opening, the vision started to fall away, like being on a fast escalator going the opposite way, and left Sisto’s optical movie theater. Sisto looked up and saw the young girl that had bumped into him while passing the table on her way out the door. She looked back and apologized while laughing, as she joined her gaggle of friends, who must have headed to the shop after school let out. Through her cheery exterior, she saw in Sisto’s eyes a connection, and she let her guard down just for a minute, giving Sisto all the recognition he needed to know it was her head he had just been in. There was no instruction manual to this gift, third eye, psychic power . . . whatever you want to call it. In the beginning, he used to bump into people on the street and get a glimpse of them going through similar instances and grow very concerned. He didn’t know if the internal video-on-demand was of something that had happened in their past or was an event that was going to happen that he may need to try and prevent. He honed on the skills he had picked up from CSI, Law & Order, and Bosch marathons over the years, determining the girl to be around fifteen, much too old to have finger paint class artwork and toys on her bedroom walls. All the same, a piece of him wanted to run over to her, grab her by the shoulders, and let her know that not all men in the world are cruel or mean, like the beast on the other side of that door had been. He decided, after careful deliberation, to not go and disrupt the girls and simply head over to C.O.S. to vent. He didn’t turn his head towards her as he passed the squawking teens who surrounded a patio table that had just opened up, mimicking a pack of hungry lions attacking a kill. However, he could feel her eyes burning the back of his brown hair as he waited for the crosswalk to allow him on his way.
CHAPTER 5
That night was an all-star lineup, Sisto thought, looking around the circle of chairs he was approaching. He was in his seventh or eighth year of visiting the poorly-funded support group and was pretty comfortable with the folks that hung around. It took a lot of processing for Sisto to accept The Reels; the emotional and karmic scar he’d obtained after that horrific night that changed everything. Most of the faces remained the same over the years, and everyone knew pieces of his life-altering event, but he always felt that revealing his gift would be in bad taste. He didn’t want anyone there to feel uncomfortable and think he knew things about them, which over the years had definitely occurred. More importantly, he didn’t want to be a spectacle. C.O.S. was the one safe haven where he wanted to feel normal . . . he yearned for it.
While eyeballing Mickey, who he had the unfortunate case of grazing past a few weeks ago while grabbing a pastry next to the carafes of hot co
ffee on a covered folding table, The Reels kicked in, and Sisto saw more than he wanted. Mickey looked like he could be a depressed accountant. He was average in every way, aside from his weight, which was above average for his physique. He’d started coming four months back when his wife and kids left him while he was at a conference in Connecticut, literally while he was at the conference, without an inkling, as he described. What he had opted out of sharing was the note that accompanied the empty home upon his return, along with some Polaroids taken by someone one assumes was not Mrs. Mickey. That wheezing bag of depression had the stones to come to the circle week after week and put a pity party out there for everyone, while Sisto now couldn’t get the grainy images of ball gags and leather and extremely large and seemingly painful sensual tools from the over-exposed photos, out of his mind when seeing the man. The letter Mrs. Mickey had left was no drab declaration either. Sisto was able to retain a bit of the message from The Reels’ intrusion and multiple times saw the colorful terms “fuck,” “dickless,” and “cunt” spread throughout her farewell. He was sitting there with his coffee and what looked to be a scone or muffin and nodded to him as he approached. Sisto, hating himself for faking it, smiled and nodded back and sat a few chairs down on the opposite side. Looking at his watch, he barely noticed Tara sit next to him.