Absolute Unit

by Nick Kolakowski

  Frank cocks an eyebrow. “Eh?”

  “What did I do to deserve this?” Bill says, mostly to himself.

  Frank’s already twisted his inner dial to a different channel. “Did I ever tell you, when I was a kid, I saw the last show Nirvana ever played? I swear, there was not a man or woman in that place who did not want to drop to their knees and suck Kurt dry right there.”

  “That’s not a very Christian impulse, buddy.”

  Frank pulls his pistol and jams it into Bill’s neck, spittle flying as he yells: “Show me where in the Bible it says that, you chunky motherfucker.”

  Bill shakes his head, stunned into wise silence. Trapped inside his skin, we can do nothing but tighten up and hope for the best. In theory, a part of us could execute an acrobatic transfer through a bullet hole in Bill’s spine, snap across the blood-humid space and down Frank’s throat before the cop could so much as holler. The odds of us pulling off something like that, with bodies moving so fast, are nil. And if we think Bill’s guts are terrifying, can you imagine what we would find inside Frank?

  “Right,” Frank says, grinding the barrel deeper. “The Bible said nothing about going down on rock stars, because rock stars hadn’t been invented when Jesus walked the Earth. Can I get an Amen?”

  “Amen?” Bill mutters. In the rearview mirror, his nephew continues his pursuit, wisely dropping back a few car-lengths.

  “You’re damn skippy.” Frank tucks away the pistol and flops back in his seat, adjusting his collar with a few deft tugs. “For the love of God, Bill, why are you always so dense?”

  “It’s how I was raised,” Bill moans.

  “Indeed.” Frank reaches into his pocket, extracts a bright blue pill, and swallows it dry. “That’s not your kid, is it?”

  Bill tries playing dumb. “What kid?”

  “The one that’s been following us since the bar. I’m a cop, buddy, remember?”

  “Oh, that’s just my nephew.” Bill tries a fake chuckle. “He’s a good kid. He’s fine.”

  “He’s a witness.” Frank’s hand strokes the pistol grip jutting out of his pants. “How close are you to him?”

  “He’s fine, I said. You want me to lose him?”

  Frank winks. “No, let him follow. Then I’ll deal with him.”

  Given Bill’s habitual cowardice, there’s every chance he’ll let Frank shoot his nephew in the head. If we could finally plug that tendril into his brainstem, we could maybe take control of the ship—but we have to sort through nerves by feel, and that takes time.

  Time is something we don’t have in abundance. Frank gestures for Bill to take a right into an industrial wasteland, where we motor along the edge of a drainage ditch, spewing a huge cloud of dust in our wake. Trent, the idiot, accelerates until he’s right behind.

  Bill finally musters the courage to ask: “Who’s in the trunk?” He wrinkles his nose, smelling shit, but given the environs it’s hard for us to tell whether the scent is purely in his head.

  “My mother,” Frank says, and starts unbuttoning his shirt. “She tried to cross me on my big coke deal. You know what it’s like, getting shot by the woman who gave birth to you? It doesn’t just hurt physically, man.” He pulls his shirt open, revealing a nasty bruise just beneath the sternum. “Good thing I always wear my bulletproof vest in the house.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bill says, which seems like the phrase least likely to draw a lethal response from Frank, whose voice begins to shake.

  “I loved her, man,” Frank says, the faucets in his eyes squeaking open again. In Bill’s fear-heightened state, where all sounds and sights and smells are achingly acute, we can hear a teardrop spatter Frank’s shirt.

  “I’m sure,” Bill says.

  “I loved her. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.” Frank’s hands tremble along with his vocal cords. He’s at his weakest, distracted, his heart exposed.

  We take back everything we might have said about Bill’s cowardice, because we can tell he’s about to do something impulsive, based on the soda-sweet tang of adrenaline flooding his bloodstream. Bill is liable to mess up whatever he’s considering, but fortunately we are here to help. As his excitement peaks, we take our tendril that loops around a bundle of nerves and tendons in his calf—and pull as hard as we can. His foot slams down the gas pedal.

  The Cadillac slams forward and to the left, over the edge of the ditch and airborne, just as Bill gets a hand on Frank’s gun, which Frank has already pulled from his pants, gunshots bursting everybody’s eardrums as the dashboard explodes. The car crunches into the far side of the ditch and Frank, without a seatbelt holding him back, tumbles through the windshield with the greatest of ease, his bones snap-crackle-popping on the way.

  While Bill gasps for oxygen like a beached whale, we perform a quick damage assessment. He’ll have a nasty bruise across the man-tits, and maybe a busted finger. Unlocking his seatbelt, he leans on his crumpled door until it pops open, spilling him onto the crumbling bank of the ditch. Brakes screech, followed by Trent calling out Bill’s name.

  Trent charges through the dust, pearls jangling, but Bill spares him the briefest look before turning to the nightmare that is Frank trying to stand on broken legs, his face glittering with broken glass embedded in his skin, his bloody hand holding the pistol.

  “Why’d you do that, man?” Frank asks. He sounds offended.

  “I couldn’t let you hurt my family,” Bill says, maybe his first ethical sentence in years, and we swear we had nothing to do with it. We would applaud, if we had hands.

  “Well, you failed,” Frank says, gritting his teeth in pain as he lifts the pistol. Trent spins on his heel, sprinting for the car. Bill’s beyond any fancy moves at this point, but we can offer a late-game assist.

  We yank the tendon again, tilting Bill into the path of the bullet. We assume a heroic sacrifice is what he wants, right? The hollow-point slug plows through his side, clipping a kidney and ruining some blood vessels, but he’ll live if we can get him to a hospital in time, or if Frank doesn’t shoot him between the eyes.

  That second outcome looks like a definite possibility as Frank hobbles forward, babbling something incoherent about God and vengeance and cocaine. The pistol rises again, about to finish off Bill once and for all, when Bill’s car bursts from the dust-cloud and plows into Frank head-on, sending everybody’s favorite crooked cop through a windshield for the second time in one day. Behind the wheel, panicked Trent keeps the gas slammed down until the car rolls into the side of the crashed Cadillac, Frank’s feet drumming a final solo on the hood while his mouth sputters blood all over the dashboard.

  5.

  Trent kneels beside bloody Bill, his phone pressed to his ear.

  “Tell . . . Janine . . . ” Bill says.

  “Janine who?” Trent says, after asking emergency services to haul ass down to the industrial site.

  “Tell her I love her,” Bill says.

  Bill will have the opportunity to do so himself. Just a few more minutes and the ambulance will arrive, which will ferry Bill to a hospital, where doctors will perform all the diagnostics he so desperately needs. They’ll throw him in a scanner, and hopefully pick up on whatever’s making him smell the oddest things.

  But wait, won’t they find us, as well?

  Oh crap, maybe we didn’t think this one through.

  Is it worth going to our possible death, knowing that we’ve helped Bill become a better person? Of course not. We send a tendril up Bill’s throat, poised to shoot out his open mouth. If Trent would only lean a little bit closer and stay still for a second or two, we can move out of Bill for good. We’ll always love our first home, but a big part of life is knowing when to say goodbye.

  6.

  As far as hosts go, upgrading from Bill to Trent is the equivalent of going from a broken-down double-wide on the edge of a radioactive pit to a nice McMansion in a quiet subdivision. Trent’s lungs are blissfully clear of ash and phlegm, his heart ticks along like a
Swiss watch, and his muscles are lean and hard. Now we feel a little bad about living so long in Bill when newer models were available. But beggars can’t be choosers, and when we swam out of that tanker into our new life in America, we were the textbook definition of vulnerable.

  Trent has no idea we entered him. We waited until his eyes flicked left, toward the onrushing ambulance, before firing the tendril into his open mouth. He coughed, swallowed, and pounded his chest—massive booms through the cavern of his sternum as we affixed to his esophagus, then sent a sub-tendril winding through his tissues (So pink! So lovely!) toward his spine. Plugging into a convenient nerve, we could share his vision—so crisp and clear, compared to Bill’s dull eyesight.

  Trent stands, leaping from foot to foot as he directs the bored EMTs to focus on Bill instead of the twice-splattered Frank. Bill waves to Trent as he’s loaded into the ambulance, which roars off, siren wailing. We bid a silent goodbye to the parts of us still inside our old home, which a few courses of antibiotics, plus a blast of radiation from an MRI, will surely dissolve to nothingness.

  A police cruiser arrives next, vomiting out two officers: one thick and squat, his partner thin and tall. Their nametags say ‘BARNES, D.’ and ‘GRIMES, T.’ We decide to name them Tweedledum and Tweedledee, for obvious reasons. Tweedledee issues a low whistle at the sight of Frank’s mangled remains, but neither seem too concerned about one of their colleagues converted into a hundred-fifty pounds of ground beef with glass chunks mixed in.

  “That who I think it is?” Tweedledum asks, cocking his head for a better view.

  “Abso-fucking-lutely,” Tweedledee says.

  “Oh man.” Tweedledum chuckles. “I told Frank once, he’d crash and burn if he kept up with his bullshit, but I meant that as a metaphor, I swear.”

  Tweedledee turns to Trent. “What happened here?”

  “Listen, believe me, okay, it was self-defense,” Trent babbles. “I mean, he came at my uncle with a gun, and then a car hit him?”

  “A car hit him.” Tweedledee smirks at Tweedledum. “Just like that. Came out of nowhere, by itself, and smacked into poor Frank.”

  “That’s some futuristic stuff,” Tweedledum says. “Like, Elon Musk shit.”

  “I was driving the car, okay?” Trent clutches his hair. “I was driving it, but I didn’t, like, want to kill this guy or anything, I’m not a killer, I just wanted to stop him from hurting my uncle, okay? I just wanted to stop him, because . . . ”

  Tweedledee wanders away, triggering the radio clipped to his chest, rattling off coordinates and codes. Trent paces faster and faster, nails digging into his skull, tears carving trails down his dusty cheeks.

  “Hold up,” Tweedledum raises and lowers his hands, palms down, as if that will somehow cool Trent’s epic meltdown. “It’s not your fault, okay? Frank was a very bad man. Had some superstar busts in his time, believe me, but he was more trouble than he was worth. Stop pacing for just one damn moment and listen to me, okay?”

  Trent pauses.

  “Good.” Tweedledum smiles. “You’re going to walk on this. Self-defense, dirty cop, what you did was totally righteous. But there’s a catch, okay? You’re going to leave right now, and you’re going to keep silent about what happened here for the rest of your life. No press, no talk shows, nothing, got that?”

  Trent tries to speak but nothing comes out.

  Tweedledum’s smile fades. “Because if you do speak—about any of this—it could get very bad for you, all right? Like, you might disappear one night. Nobody would hear from you again. You get me?”

  Trent nods so vigorously we feel a neck-bone pop.

  “Good.” Tweedledum turns to regard the spectacular wreck of the purple Cadillac. Fluid drools from its cracked engine, and the frame is a crumpled mess, but the impact failed to pop the trunk with its inconvenient corpse. Just wait until the cops find that juicy treat.

  “Get a move on,” Tweedledum says, “before too many people show up.”

  “I . . . ” Trent points at the wrecked cars. “Can, uh, I get a ride?”

  Snorting Tweedledum points somewhere over Trent’s shoulder. “There’s a bus stop back that way. Saw it on the way in. I don’t think you’re getting your car back anytime soon.”

  “Yeah, those stains are never coming out,” Tweedledee yells as he pokes at Frank’s left foot.

  Trent backs away slowly, as if expecting Tweedledum to draw his sidearm and open fire. After the events of the past hour, who could blame him? Only when Tweedledum turns away to join his partner does Trent spin around and trot for the bus stop. At the wasteland’s distant edge, more police cruisers emerge from a cloud of dust, lights flashing.

  All this time, we haven’t been idle—although we must admit, Tweedledum’s unsubtle threat makes us wonder whether our tenure in Trent might prove shorter than expected. As our new home stammered and sweated, we began weaving new connections throughout his systema nervosum, getting to know his neural pathways. We’re a long way from accessing his thoughts, but we can sense his shame and fear in his clenched stomach, tight muscles, the way his adrenaline gland squirts in response to the faintest sound. As we guessed when we examined Trent through Bill’s eyes, this is a kid who’s unsure of himself, who wants someone to show him the way, to tell him that everything will be fine. Given enough time, we can become that inner voice, guiding him toward a brighter future, but we’d much prefer outright control over his body.

  We hope that Trent takes good drugs on occasion, or at least eats some very spicy meals, the cuisines that Bill tended to avoid as if a bad case of indigestion was the worst of his problems. What’s the point of changing homes if you can’t experience new things?

  7.

  Trent has a caring heart, because after he spends half an hour ugly-crying on a park bench while listening to David Bowie on his phone, he heads to the hospital to visit his dear, injured uncle.

  We’ve been deprived of good music. The ringing of a cash register as a harried restaurant owner slapped out a couple hundred dollars, the begging of a bodega staffer for a little more time to pay up—that was the only music for dear Bill, who always liked to play sports radio while making his rounds. If Trent spins classics cut two decades before he was born, we consider that a big step up.

  Still humming “Heroes” under his breath, Trent uses his last ten dollars to buy flowers from a kiosk in the hospital lobby.

  Soon enough Bill is out of surgery and bedded in the ICU, in a bright and featureless room with no art on the walls, the window-shade pulled down, the television blaring from its perch on the wall. He lies in the depths of a medically induced coma, wrapped in a cocoon of tubes and wiring, as the bedside machines beep and thump. In the hospital’s antiseptic lighting he looks absolutely terrible, purple and pocked and hairy, and we suppose it’s a wonder he’s survived all the trauma of the day. We wonder if the bits of us in his gut are still alive, if anything managed to endure the scalpels and drugs and radiation and horrific tests. The absence of humans in biohazard suits suggests we’ve been overlooked in the rush to save Bill’s life.

  Trent hands the flowers to a nurse, who hustles away for a vase, and plops into the seat beside the bed. The television hisses that a cop has been killed. We want Trent to turn toward the screen, so we can catch the visuals, but he keeps his gaze locked on Bill.

  While we wait, we send a few tendrils deeper into Trent’s meat, exploring our real estate. It’s all prime, the nerve bundles humming with enough electricity to power a city. We plug into one near the base of his skull, and the energy lights up our cells. From this new position, we can hear Trent thinking, although it’s like hearing someone in the next room, a dull murmur, with no words we can discern. Through a tendril, we try to send a signal into his cortex, a subtle command to move his left foot.

  No movement.

  Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

  As we weave our way deeper, we mull over the body of Frank’s mother in the Cadillac trunk. Fra
nk shooting her over a big drug deal is a detail the cops will want to keep hidden. Or maybe they’ll try to pin the whole thing on Trent. Crazy teen goes on murderous rampage, that’s a hip story these days.

  Trent needs to leave this hospital room as fast as possible, because sooner or later the cops will appear, but we can’t move his toe, much less speak to him. Before we can formulate a solution, the door opens, and in walks a man in an off-the-rack brown suit, a gold shield clipped to his belt. His gray hair suggests middle age, but he is a square block of muscle, like he spends all his free time deadlifting cattle. He looks at Trent and says: “Mister Montague?”

  “Yes?” Trent’s heart thunders, sweat drenching his armpits.

  “You’re Bill’s nephew?” The man nods toward the lump of bruised flesh on the bed.

  “Yes?”

  “Great.” The man tries to smile, to extend warmth, but the gesture resembles a shark opening its mouth to bite. “No big deal, but you fled the scene of a crime, son. Did the officers say you could leave?”

  Trent’s pulse edges into heart-attack territory. “No? I mean, yes? Not really? Um . . . ”

  “Son.” The man raises a hand. “It’s okay, whatever happened. I’m here now. We can talk.”

  “Who . . . who are you?”

  “I’m Detective Russell Mott. My partner, who’ll be along in a minute, is Detective Melinda Banks. We just want to ask you a few questions about what happened out there. As you may know, we lost one of our own.”

  We don’t need to penetrate Trent’s thoughts to know he’s envisioning Officers Tweedledum and Tweedledee warning him to keep his mouth shut unless he wants to end up in a ditch with most of his head missing. Trent seems like a smart lad but if he babbles the wrong thing, this situation could turn too messy for our liking. We inch a tendril into the base of his skull (Trent wincing, his hand rising toward his neck), wrap it around the correct gland, and give it a squeeze. A faint trickle of bliss-inducing dopamine hits Trent’s bloodstream.