by Brian Ewing
Tara was another lost soul who’d found her way through the doors on the corner of Reckman and Hollister some time back. She was nice enough, but Sisto had no desire to strike up conversation, as he came to C.O.S. to feel better and not worse. If he got stuck talking to the grieving mother in her early forties, he would have to put aside the vision that was forced upon him when her frail hand had touched his two weeks ago. The group took turns handing a varnished stick to one another in a morose version of hot potato, in an attempt by Laura, the group leader at C.O.S., to get more people to open up without being interrupted. The cold digits scooped under his open palm and kicked Sisto Cinema past the previews and straight to the feature. Most of the time, The Reels showed him the past, but he was able to see premonitions of what was to come as well. It confused him the first time it happened but he was able to recognize that the main difference between the past and upcoming events was the audio. He could hear the future much clearer, maybe because that reality was approaching their lives, as opposed to his normal visions, which stemmed from the past, washing out the sounds from long ago.
Tara’s upcoming week formed behind his lids, which thankfully looked like a standard blink of the eye to others around him, even though it packed what felt like a half hour program from Cinemax after dark, directly streaming into his mind. Tara was living out of shelters for the last year after losing her job and inhibitions, a result from losing her only teenage son to an overdose. She had told the story the first time she found the group. Tara, with her eyes sunken back in her skull, looked past everyone that first time while telling the story, lost in the memory. The spiral of depression hit fast, and she simply stopped showing up to work. The salon she’d worked at for twenty-two years let her go, but in their defense, they sent condolences and waited until after the holidays that year before dropping the news. She had been struggling to pay rent even before the incident, and shortly after the loss, was evicted, which led her to rotating through a few shelters throughout the week. Tara didn’t mind the shelters but preferred to get high and forget about all reality when she could afford it, which led up to the vision. Tara had apparently decided in the week following hot potato that she would start trying to pursue a new career with the time-honored tradition of prostitution. Thank God for small favors that the premonition cut out right as she was stuffed in a filthy restaurant bathroom with some low-life that was taking her up on the offer for ten dollars and a pack of cigarettes for a blowjob.
“Hi Tom, haven’t you seen you in a few weeks,” Tara said, unnoticed by Sisto, as his focus was on trying to calculate how long ago the premonition had now become the past.
“What?” Sisto finally caught up to what was said.
“You haven’t been here lately,” she answered flatly, not appreciative of having been ignored the first time.
“No, I have been trying to stay busy at work.”
“You know, I feel like we connect and you get me,” she confessed.
Fuck me, he thought. Between her, Mickey, and Barry with his creepy mustache and bloodshot eyes who strolled in occasionally, he didn’t know where he would sit if this continued.
“We should definitely hang out sometime. Ya know, get a drink, have some fun.” She leaned in as she finished the second sentence.
Sisto got up and acknowledged her kindness and said he would let her know when work eased up, then made way to get another coffee before the session began.
“How many of those you go through a day?” a soft voice from behind him inquired.
Sisto turned around to see an incredibly attractive woman in a crisp, baby blue blouse accompanied by a navy blue dress skirt, completing the ensemble with some dark navy, three-inch-high heels. It didn’t occur to Sisto that he had been checking her out, but as he brought his eyes up from the heels to the dark chocolate eyes, with the briefest of pit stops where the blouse’s buttons stopped, he noticed her light mocha skin get pink around her cheeks.
“Probably more than I should,” Sisto finally confirmed. “How are you doing this week, Laura?”
Laura Saunders, the founder and lead counselor at C.O.S., and a huge confidant that Sisto had relied on during the early days of his visits, looked incredible tonight. Maybe a year or two older than him, her beautiful, frizzy locks fell around her flawless face. Looking at her lips— and remembering the last time he felt them, about five years ago, if his calculations were correct—he noticed that they were as voluptuous as ever. The encounter was a one off, and while not regretting it, both knew no relationship could ever last if the foundation was built on the pain and loss of another. They remained friends and never brought it up after that night, but Sisto stilled remembered her smooth, long legs and Chanel perfume engulfing all his senses that night at her uptown studio apartment. As personal as it got that night, Sisto had never confided in Laura about The Reels. At that point, he was barely coping with the events that had led to his gift, let alone felt like he could openly talk about it.
Over the last year or two, he knew his name had been in the news a few times and even had a reporter who normally did fluff pieces that never made it ahead of page five or six, Max Halstead, try to do an article on him last fall. Sisto never read it, but knew it had come out and wouldn’t have been surprised if people in the support group had caught wind of it. No one ever brought it up in the sessions, which he was grateful for, but he’d felt like something in Laura’s eyes had changed within a few weeks after that article came out. She probably caught the piece and wondered why he’d never confided in her about it, Sisto assumed.
“Things are busy, but it’s a good problem to have,” she answered. “I’m so glad to see you. It’s been a few weeks. Thought you found a new group to vent to!”
She smirked with her last comment, teasing playfully, and making Sisto relax a bit.
“Laura, you and this place mean too much to me. You have helped me an unbelievable amount over the years. The least I can do is support this place and try to help others the same way you helped me all those years ago when I showed up,” Sisto admitted while pointing to the front entrance.
Sisto meant what he said. The first time he’d walked through the doors at C.O.S., he was a fucking mess. He’d had a traumatic loss, life-altering to the point he just wanted to die. He didn’t go down the stereotypical path of drinking himself into a rut, or causing fights, or any of that bullshit. He’d played the event back in is head over and over the first few weeks until he had an epiphany and decided he wanted to end it all in a spectacular sendoff. The month that followed was an intricate construction of ways he wanted to properly end his life. He had known if he was to kill himself, a gunshot to the head or slitting his wrists were way too plain and depressing. Looking back now, he was glad that he’d never proceeded but still remembered the top three options he’d concocted over that timeframe.
He had this idea that he wanted to let his last moments on Earth be ones of weightlessness—just a few minutes where his head was clear of the sounds of traffic and people and anything he was used to—so going skydiving and not opening his chute seemed ideal. It wasn’t until he called to set up an appointment that he’d found out that if he was not certified, it would be required to go tandem, having a staff member strapped to his back to ensure he got down safely. Sisto took note, thinking he could circle back if all else failed and take the time to get certified if nothing else came to mind.
His second of top three suicides he’d devised was when he thought up the notion of driving down Fulton Road and Chase Blvd, deep in gang territory, try to creep up on a drug deal going down or something, and talk shit or be a badass until they sprayed him up with their automatic illegal weapons. He could just picture the headlines that would follow, full of speculation. Some may have painted Thomas Andrew Sisto as a Good Samaritan that wanted to clean up the streets of the gangland, attempting to interrupt a defilement of his city. Others would write up a darker image of Sisto, saying he was in the area looking to buy drugs or prosti
tutes and got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Both presentations made Sisto chuckle lightly, as he knew that gossip would spread like wildfire, leaving a sad but unconfirmed story behind for the ages to wonder about when reading the local section of the newspaper that week.
His last, and probably most likely scenario he felt like following through on, was a Las Vegas trip. He thought he would go out with a bang—in more ways than one. He researched deals online and was ready to book a room at the Stratosphere. He had it all planned out. He was going to check in and immediately go down to the casino area. His goal was to empty his life savings and spend all but five hundred bucks at the tables. Once he lost his money, he was going to have the biggest, juiciest, fucking steak he could find, have a double scotch that burned all the way down, buy himself a prostitute for one last fuck on the planet, then go to the one-hundred-eighth floor of the Stratosphere Hotel to sign up for Sky Jump, the seventeen-second free fall bungee attraction they offered, nose diving before they strapped him into the harness. That was his favorite plan because he could still feel the weightlessness and knew that he would have gone out with a hell of a scene. That was the way Tom Sisto mentally chose to end his life. It was only a few hours before booking his hotel online that changed everything for years to come.
He rarely left Corden Palisades, the apartment he had recently rented after the tragedy, but had gone out to grab some food before heading back home to go online and execute his plan. Two blocks north was a city park that had started doing Food Truck Fridays, to build community and revenue in a dying downtown. Sisto had always liked food trucks, even though with his recent acquisition at that point, he didn’t know how to come to terms with his mixed senses. The overbearing punch of flower petals hit his palate, which now Sisto could process was an association he tasted when he was at events with a lot of positive energy. Concerts, art walks, community events, 5k runs for charity . . . basically things he used to entertain that he now kept at an arm’s length since The Reels showed up. Now they all tasted like he was chewing on a garden. The man had to eat, even if he was planning to off himself very soon. He had gone into a fairly short line, considering it was a Friday, to grab one of American Sammy’s Texas toast panini pressed Philly cheesesteaks. He got his sandwich in a timely fashion and while walking back to his modern tomb, as it felt, caught a flyer taped to one of the light posts. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed it on his way to the food truck, but he had been in a haze from his emotional pain that had started a few months prior.
The flyer had a crude drawing, a circle with a jagged line down the center. The left half had a smiley face that included a dimple at the top to accentuate the joy, while the right half had a frown with a tear forming at the edge of its eye. “Circle of Survival: A place where judgement is left at the door.” Sisto observed that it had written in sharpie originally but was photocopied. Something made him decide to check it out. He had never thought to ever seek out others in pain, to try and process the grief. He simply felt alone in the world and felt like he needed to deal with it alone. Reckman and Hollister, Sisto noticed on the flyer, thinking that it was only a ten-minute bus ride from where he was standing at that moment. He folded the paper and bartered with himself internally the entire way back to the apartment. By the time he threw his keys on the side table next to his beat up Goodwill couch and sat down, he made a deal with himself to go check it out, and if he thought it was bullshit, he would immediately book the hotel. Looking back at that event, Sisto now tended to keep things light-hearted. Anyone would if the realization boiled down to the fact that a food truck had basically saved your life.
The bittersweet recollection flashed forward to the present moment, and Sisto was back to noticing the full lips and the lightest of hazel eyes, both the property of a smiling Laura. She knew Sisto lived in his own head a lot and accepted him for simply being himself.
“C’mon, you’re going to make us late,” she beckoned, with very little assertiveness, and led Sisto back to the circle of lost souls.
CHAPTER 6
The session did its magic and somehow made Sisto feel a little better by the end of it. He prefaced his venting with the disclaimer of his current job title and forewarned everyone that he was witness to some pretty graphic content in the new field he was pursuing. Most were familiar with his change but there were one or two faces he didn’t recognize and he didn’t want to scare off anyone, for Laura and the center’s sake. He spewed his feelings like a broken fire hydrant, but kept the particulars vague, being that the case was all over the news. He hadn’t brought up anything other than the current events that plagued his thoughts, but venting his feelings on that alone was enough. He knew he would come back in another week or two, sooner if he got called into another grotesque massacre or something of that nature.
He helped Laura fold the chairs, since this was the last session of the night, and it gave her the opening Sisto had assumed she had been waiting for.
“Tom, you are doing a great thing for this community. It’s really incredible where you started when I met you to where you are today,” she proclaimed with confidence, then eased into a more awkward stance. “I am truly happy you have found a meaningful purpose to focus on. But . . .”
There was always a “but,” Sisto stated internally.
“But . . . you realize you haven’t brought up anything about Corey or Eddie,” she circled around a moment, “or even Kayla, in many sessions. Probably months, now that I think about it.”
There it was. One of the most observant and qualified people he had met in her field, probably one of the reasons he had found and still found her incredibly attractive—she saw right through his act. He got what he had come for but still had a force field around that time of his life. He was much better than when he had first started visiting C.O.S., but knew she was correct about the fact he kept deflecting away from that particular emotional pain.
“I can’t live in the past,” Sisto finally concluded. “You are not wrong in the fact I haven’t brought it up, but it’s just a real dark place and I do need to spend more time in the present in my current position.”
Sisto chuckled to himself at his last comment, as the present was rarely why he was called into crime scenes. It was The Reels and projections of the past, and sometimes the premonitions of the future, that drew the police to put him on their intermittent payroll. His reasoning didn’t change Laura’s concerned expression. “Okay, I will be soon, next week or two depending on my workload, and I promise, I will try to bring it up.”
Her features softened, allowing her to go back to breaking down the coffee station, while Sisto finished stacking the folding chairs. With everyone gone but the two of them, the smell of Chanel started wafting into his nose, which was a strong welcome after spending the last ninety minutes smelling that same sour sweat depression he had described when out at the dive bars. He looked around and saw blue light blink from the state-of-the-art Wi-Fi-based security camera with motion sensors mounted in the corner. Laura had bought a handful of cameras and had them placed throughout the building, as per Sisto’s suggestion many months back, after she’d confided in him that C.O.S. had received a generous anonymous donation. Sisto had asked her if it was common to receive donations, being that the place was a community-based program free for anyone to join. She confirmed that since she had been there, they’d receive donation from time to time and could apply for tax breaks and what not, but nothing nearly as generous as the donation she’d brought up with him. Apparently, someone had gotten a money order from Western Union, in the amount of ten thousand dollars, attaching a note addressed to Laura, and slipped it into the mail pile atop the desk of the cramped office that was wedged to the left, right after entering the facility. Someone either put it in there on their way in, or on their way out, but regardless, the Samaritan went unnoticed as he or she performed the act. Laura expressed her gratitude during every session in the following weeks, hoping the donor would hear her praise.
Sisto walked towards the front as Laura locked up the office and turned off all the lights. They exited and she thanked him for his help as she locked the door and placed the lock over the flimsy, retractable security gate. He walked her to her car, which was right on the side of the street, and as she started the car and turned on her lights to drive off, he looked up and across the street to see a group of young punks, one hitting the brick wall side of the brittle building with a dented aluminum baseball bat, while two others were tucked away on the side, spray painting some baguette-sized penis with elephant-sized testicles, in a beautiful wagon red spray paint. Seeing this made Sisto smirk, thinking how glad he was that he’d slipped that donation into Laura’s mail, and he headed towards the bus stop.
The bus ride back to Corden Palisades was tame by Sisto’s standards. He was fortunate to score a seat in the very back, minimizing the people and the fucked-up senses that flooded his cerebral cortex which came with them. There was an exhausted elderly black woman three rows back on the driver’s side who Sisto had seen from time to time, assuming she was heading home from one of many jobs, or off to another of many jobs, based on the intense smell of pineapple juice. Oh yeah, for some reason exhaustion smells like pineapple juice. It was just the two of them for a few stops, then some tweaked out human skeleton got on the bus and joined them. Sisto realized, even though the man parked his ass five rows ahead of him, that he had drugs seeping out his pores, and this brought out a taste of charcoal in the back of his throat that instantly caused Sisto to cough, trying to avoid straight up gagging to the point he vomited. As Skeletor sat there all paranoid and scratching away at the base of his neck, his dilated eyes darted around the bus, assessing his surroundings, maybe just coming to the present and not knowing how he’d got there. All of a sudden, The Reels invaded and in the literal blink of an eye, Sisto was having a premonition. He could hear everything crystal clear so he knew it wasn’t in the past, plus the premonition was with him currently on the same bus he was riding at that moment. The bus had turned down Freemont, which was still a few blocks away from where they really were, and pulled to the side right before the overpass. Skeletor shuffled from the window to the aisle and with all the focus he could muster, pulled out a Taurus Judge, weathered and beaten but still having a glimmer to the revolver as he pointed it at the exhausted woman on the opposite side of the bus. He screamed at her to give him her purse, which broke her out of the micro-nap she had been trying to take on the way to the next shift. She got flustered and when going for her purse, her hand hit the handle and made the faux leather bag topple over to the ground. Skeletor looked like someone had spit in their hand and slapped him with it. In his mind, the mistake had to be an act of defiance. Skeletor, scared as hell, squeezed the compact weapon, causing a chain of painful audio rings to engulf the bus. He was crying and the scent of gunpowder mixed in the air and as he spoke. Sisto got the tangy hit of Italian dressing in the back of his throat to accompany the charcoal.