“I’ll go talk to him,” Mom said. She got out.
I stayed in the passenger seat and watched Mom approach the guy. They talked. She pointed at the car, and he made eye contact with me. He disappeared back into the garage, then came out with a code-reader and headed over. He opened the driver’s door, crouched on the gravel driveway, and plugged the code-reader in under the steering wheel.
“Turn on the ignition,” he said. “Don’t start it, just turn it on.”
I did.
“So what do you do?” he asked me while we waited.
“I’m unemployed at the moment.”
“I mean in your family. What’s your job?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He reached under the steering wheel to readjust the cord. A long, raised scar snaked down the inside of his forearm. It looked like a piece of metal had been sewn under his skin.
“Is that the Zenith logo popping out under your skin, there?”
He held up his forearm, nodding.
“For instance,” he said, “I’m the recorder. My sister is the signal. My dad is the outlet. And so on. So what do you do?”
“That must be a Nebraska thing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He sighed, then lifted his shirt. He had another scar on his belly. Again it was raised under the skin. This one looked like the front side of a VCR. He pushed a finger into where you’d insert a tape, and the skin flapped inward. He’s about twenty years out of date, I thought.
“We don’t do anything like that,” I said.
He frowned. “But how do you play the tapes? How will you know when to flip the switch?”
I looked past the guy. Where was Mom?
She was still by the garage, talking to a girl in a faded, flower print dress. The girl had a metal pole sticking out of her back where her spine ended at the base of her neck.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know about the switch,” the guy growled.
The code-reader dinged and he looked at it. He stood up, smiling. “False alarm. There’s nothing wrong. A soft code. I’ll reset it so the light goes off. Car’s fine.”
Mom had walked over. “Great. Hey, hold on a sec.” She took out her money roll and handed him a twenty. “For your trouble.”
I tried to sleep the rest of the way through Nebraska.
FIRST DAY
September 17, 2013
My sister gave me a skull as a welcome gift.
“You can use it as a paperweight.”
“Um. Is this a real human skull?”
“Don’t be stupid. It’s plastic or something.”
“I don’t think so. That’s a real gold filling. Where did you buy this?”
“I didn’t buy it so much as find it in the water heater closet. In a box. A locked box. A very locked box. It was a bitch cutting off all the barbed wire and smashing it open.”
“Barbed wire?”
“Look, it’s a gift! Take it, or don’t. Jesus. Welcome to the apartment.”
She went to her room and closed the door. I looked at the skull, then put it on my desk. It did keep the papers in place.
DON’T THINK I’M GOING TO MAKE MANY FRIENDS IN THE BUILDING
September 19, 2013
I met one of my neighbors, Laurie, outside the laundry room today.
“So you live in the Psycho Apartment, huh?”
“The what?” I said.
“The Psycho Apartment. There was this girl who lived there before you. She was nuts. Up all night, howling like a wolf, peeking in everyone’s windows. She’d order soup online and get it delivered to her door, stacks of it, piled shoulder-high on the front step.”
“Soup?”
“All kinds of soup. This whole building reeks of broth, haven’t you noticed?”
It was true. I’d emptied a can of Lysol in my apartment to get rid of the smell. “Weird. When did she move out?”
“I dunno. Right before you moved in, I guess.”
“…My sister’s been living in my apartment for like a month now. I’m not the new tenant. I just moved in with her.”
Laurie cocked her head. “Ah. Whoops. Well. Good luck with that, guy.”
LARRY
September 23, 2013
I was going to look for a job today, but instead I ended up at Laurie’s apartment. She handed me a little black pill.
“Take it,” she said. “It’ll clear out your system.”
“Which system? I already have IBS.”
“Don’t be a pussy.”
The pill tasted like a Spree. I settled back on the couch. I could already feel it working. “My brain feels carbonated,” I said.
A shadow moved across the living room floor. I saw a man staring at us outside the apartment window. He was clean cut, with a doughy baby face and thin eyebrows. He smiled. “There’s a guy out there,” I said. “Do you know him?”
“Oh, that’s Larry. He’s not real. That’s another thing the pill does. It makes you see Larry.”
Now he was standing behind the couch, resting his chin on my shoulder. I almost expected him to start whispering in my ear. It felt kind of nice. “What a trip,” Laurie said.
SKULLS, MAN
September 25, 2013
“Hey, Laurie,” I said. “Do you ever see us as an item?”
“Sure. Once, I had this nightmare…”
“Yeah, all right. I only meant, I’m over here all the time anyway. You don’t seem to have other friends.”
She popped another black pill.
“The main reason we will never be an item is because you use words like ‘item.’ The other reason is because you’re not soulful enough.”
“Not soulful enough? I’m full of soul.”
She shook her head. “Your eyes are dead, man. I can see straight through to the back of your skull.”
Apparently I didn’t have a brain, either. I had been feeling dull around the edges lately. The only thing keeping me pepped up were the black pills. Otherwise I had no energy. Case in point: the other night I had this dream where my sister’s paperweight skull was hovering over me. I didn’t feel panicked at all when it started sucking this purple mist out of my…eyeballs. “I think I know how to get my soul back,” I said.
“Good for you,” Laurie said. “We’re still never going to be a thing.”
NEIGHBOR
September 29, 2013
The guy upstairs wouldn’t shut up. For the past week he’d been banging around up there until three a.m. each night.
“We could murder him together,” my sister said. “A co-murder.”
“It’s like he’s got cement blocks for feet,” I said.
“We could use that. Bop him on the head and chuck him in the ocean. He’d sink.”
“At least he’s not playing guitar tonight.”
“I think we should go up there when he’s asleep and whisper subliminal messages in his ear, such as, ‘Kill yourself.’”
On my desk, the soul-sucking skull paperweight watched us, waiting for me to fall asleep. “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s gift him the soul-sucking skull paperweight. That’ll sap his energy.”
“Hey. I gave that to you.”
“Yeah, but he seems like the sort of jerk who’d actually like skulls around his apartment.”
TURNS OUT IT’S ONLY LEGAL IF YOU BURY THE BODY IN A NATIONAL PARK
October 1, 2013
Kim woke me up last night, all dressed in black.
“Hey. Wake up. Didn’t you hear?”
“What?”
“The government shut down. We can do that co-murder now.”
LARRY, PART TWO
October 6, 2013
I overdosed on Laurie’s little black pills and brought Larry into reality.
“This is awful,” Laurie said. “What a nightmare. I’m breaking up with you.”
We were hiding behind the couch watching Larry sweep the living room. He had just dusted the end tables and the ceil
ing fan. He was tidying up.
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “He’s only cleaning. He’s a productive new member of reality. Larry’s nothing but patient and nice, anyway. He deserves to be real.”
“Wrong. Larry is great because he’s fake. Make something real and it sucks. Everything’s better in theory. Baths, for instance. Music festivals. This relationship.”
Now Larry was sitting at the desk, on my laptop. “What is this, the Internet? This is great,” he said. “The whole world’s out there.”
“Wait, he can talk now?” I said.
“He’s a real person,” Laurie said.
I stuck my finger down my throat and heaved up the contents of my stomach. Larry blinked out of existence.
“Gross,” Laurie said. “You couldn’t have gone to the toilet? You’re cleaning it up.”
NO RELATION
October 7, 2013
My sister came home with a surprise.
“I got us a dog.” She set it down on the floor. It looked up at me, wiped its nose, and burped.
“That’s a baby.”
“Hmm?” Kim was already in the kitchen, doing dishes.
“You brought home a human baby.”
She shook her head. “A dog. I got it at the pound. I named it Muggins. Her. I named her Muggins.”
Muggins pulled off her sock and sucked on it. I picked her up and held her to the light. “Muggins is an awful name,” I said. “Your name is Barb.”
WEIRD DREAM
October 13, 2013
I had a dream Laurie passed away. She fell from the sky, and I barely side-stepped the impact.
“You could’ve tried to wake up before I hit the ground,” she said, dusting herself off and picking concrete from her hair. “Or catch me.”
“There was no warning. I would’ve tried if I knew.”
“Here’s your warning.” She gave me the finger. Then she sneezed, collapsed in my arms, and died.
*
“Stop looking at me,” Laurie said in the morning. “It’s creepy.”
I couldn’t. The dream had been so vivid that some part of my unconscious was trying to convince me she was a ghost. I shook it off, but even then I had the sensation of watching a home video of someone long gone.
She put down her forkful of scrambled eggs. “I can’t eat with you watching me like that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What, are you crying? Jesus.” She brought her plate to the bed. “Here, eat this. You’re all messed up.” She tied her sneakers. “You should get out more. It’s not healthy to only see, like, three people a day.”
“I hate talking to strangers.”
“You don’t have to talk to anyone. Just see people, look at them. But don’t be creepy about it. That’s my assignment for you today. Go forth.” She took her bag and left.
*
The cashier at the frozen yogurt shop was listing all the celebrities he’d seen that week. “Aaron Kilton, Ashley Bancroft, Jimmy Spritzer…”
“I don’t know any of those people,” I said.
“That’s fine,” he said. “That doesn’t offend me. I know the truth, and the truth is they all walked through those doors right there. And you know what they ordered?” He gestured wildly with his arms. They were hairless and gray. He couldn’t have been over fifteen years old. “They all ordered the same thing. Organic Dark Chocolate Fudge. Just like yourself.”
“That’s got to be a pretty common flavor,” I said.
“You don’t have to lie to me. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.” He tried to wink at me but didn’t seem to know how. The muscles in his face convulsed and pinched. “On the house.”
Outside, a tall blonde lady stood over Barb, where I’d tied her to the fencepost. “Very adorable,” the lady said. “But you shouldn’t let babies crawl around on sidewalks. It’s disgusting.”
“That’s no baby,” I said. “She’s my dog.”
The lady blinked. “That’s a human baby.”
“It’s a common mistake.” I handed Barb the frozen yogurt and she scooped it out with both hands and shoveled it into her mouth.
*
Next I went to the library where I could do some proper people-watching without having to worry about any of them trying to talk to me. I watched an old lady as she tried to eat a hotdog while hiding it behind an issue of Esquire magazine.
A librarian pushed her cart of books over to me. “Hey,” she said. “You look bored. You ought to read a novel. It’ll give you emotional highs and lows you never get in real life.”
“I already have that problem.”
She handed me a thick canvas book. “Here. This is a good one. It’s about a guy who dreams that his girlfriend is dead, and when he wakes up he realizes how much he missed her, and how much that makes him love her more. He has the dream constantly, and for a while it’s great, the feeling he gets when he wakes up, but eventually it’s not enough. He imagines he’d miss her even more and love her even more if she really were dead, and so he plots to—”
“This is a notebook, not a novel,” I said, flipping through the book. “It’s handwritten in a purple gel pen.”
She snatched it back. “It’s a work in progress,” she hissed. “And you can’t bring dogs into a library.”
I bounced Barb on my knee. “How dare you,” I said. “This is a human baby.”
*
“How was your day?” Laurie asked. She was in her nightgown, lotioning up her cracked heels and putting on socks.
“I got banned from the library. Then I bought a basketball, but I couldn’t find a hoop in our neighborhood. Then I went out to the driveway just to dribble around, but the ball was dead and I didn’t have a pump.”
“But you actually saw some people.”
“Oh, yeah. I think it worked. I really feel like I reset my emotional-relativity compass.”
“Well. That’s nice.” She turned off the light. I fell asleep, exhausted, and dreamt nothing.
CHEAPER THAN DIAPERS
October 25, 2013
“Kim, there’s a tooth on the kitchen floor,” I said.
“Well, it’s not mine.”
I picked it up. It looked like a pebble. But no, it was a human tooth. “What did you do?” I said.
“Nothing. Maybe it was you. I’m not the weirdo who touched it.” She was wringing out her shirt in the sink.
“Is your shirt soaked in blood?” I asked.
“No. Well, yes. But it’s unrelated.” I went to throw the tooth in the trash and almost tripped over something on the floor. Barb stared up at me, mewling. “Oh! It’s a Barb tooth,” Kim said. “She’s growing up.”
“She’s like a month old.” I picked her up and looked in her mouth. She had only three primaries left.
“Do we have any bleach?” Kim said.
*
Two guys were at the front door, explaining how they needed Barb back. It was later in the afternoon, after Kim had left to do whatever it was she did.
“Could you keep it down?” I said. “I just put her down for a nap.”
One of them shifted his plastic garbage bag to the other shoulder. “This would be a perfect time to take her, then. While her guard is down.”
“She doesn’t have a guard. She’s a baby.” They blinked. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t care if she’s some genetic hybrid dream portal canine-baby escapee, or whatever it was you said. She’s safer with me than you. Look at you guys. You’re two schlubs in sweatpants with what looks like a garbage bag full of all the other hybrid dream portal canine-baby escapees.”
“It’s not about her safety,” said the other.
“Are you threatening me?” I said.
“No, we’re trying to help—”
“Listen, jerks. Let’s talk about your safety for a minute. My sister is going to be home any minute now and she’s not going to be happy to hear about this.” I pointed at the bloody shirt drying on the fan next to the window. “She thi
nks she can salvage that shirt.” In the bedroom, Barb started barking. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to take her for a walk.”
WE LOVE VISITORS
October 27, 2013
“Oh my god,” my sister said from the hall. “I know what my life is missing.”
“Friends? Stability?” I was in the bathroom, shaving. I had tried to grow a beard but it wasn’t working out. It looked fake. The color was off. People didn’t like looking at me, I could tell.
“A dollhouse,” she said. “I’ll make the whole apartment building in miniature. A figurine for each of us. And when we have people over—”
“—If we have people over—”
“—When we have people over, I’ll make little figurines of them, too. I can show them the dollhouse with them inside of it. And when they leave, they can take their figurines with them, and bring them back when they come back. We can keep track of everyone in the building at all times.”
“But why?”
“Fun. Safety. Boredom.”
I rinsed the sink and examined my face. I was bleeding everywhere.
“Yikes,” my sister said. “See, when stuff like this happens, I can draw little red marks all over your figurine’s neck and face. For verisimilitude.”
“Verisimilitude is important,” I said.
“And, and! If someone is mean to me, or worse yet, mean to you, then I can maybe make a little figurine of them and break off their head and bury it in the playground across the street so they can never find it. And then I’ll let them wander around headless for a while, embarrassing themselves by walking into walls or traffic or whatever, and then when it’s way past the point of unbearable, I’ll grind up the body in the garbage disposal.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“I’ll have the dollhouse sink get clogged. I’ll make it overflow with guts and blood. I’ll use ketchup and mashed-up Skittles.”
“Will this be part of the verisimilitude as well?”
“Sure, whatever,” Kim said, walking away, cracking her knuckles, whispering to herself.
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