South Village

by Rob Hart

  “Can you hang around a bit?” he asks. “I’ll go get more valerian root.”

  “Sure. I’ll be fine.”

  Truthfully I don’t want him to leave because I don’t want to feel like I can’t function without him around. And of course, as soon as he’s out of sight, I have that little kid feeling, like I’m lost at the mall without my parents.

  “Drink some water,” I hear a voice say.

  Could be Aesop calling back. Maybe not. Either way, good advice.

  I step inside and stand at the sink, turn on the filtered faucet. There’s a slow trickle of water, slower than normal, which can happen, so I put a mason jar under the stream and then poke around the kitchen.

  Someone calls my name from outside. I step to the door and there’s no one there. Katashi is still reading, Job and Alex still sitting in their chair, none of them looking at me.

  Okay. This is going to be a fun few days.

  I check behind the cleaning supplies underneath the sink, and then in the back of the pantry, not even sure what I’m looking for. I go back to the sink and check behind the cleaning supplies again. It takes three more trips between the pantry and the sink to realize I’m looking for my stashes of alcohol, which I know are gone.

  I need something to do with my hands. Something to distract me. I turn on the oven and pull over the bowl of mushrooms by the sink that Aesop has foraged and cleaned. Little white guys this time. I pull out a couple, cut them into strips, douse them with oil and salt, lay them on some foil, and pop them in the oven. I want something savory. Something salty and comforting. I’d prefer bacon. This will have to do for now.

  Forgot about the water. The mason jar in the sink is overflowing. I turn off the faucet and take a sip. It stays down. I close my eyes, take another sip. Hear my name again, figure it’s another hallucination. I put the mug down and someone is slamming into me from behind, pressing me into the counter. The mason jar shatters on the floor.

  I spin around and Gideon is holding my shirt in his balled up fists, pushing me so hard I’m bending back over the counter a little.

  “Where were you last night?” he asks.

  “What?”

  I try to push him off me but he’s got good leverage and my circuitry is fried. There’s something about this that feels very familiar and I ought to be able to handle it but I can’t. It’s too much. I want to puke. I’m about do it, right on his face, when Gideon goes flying across the kitchen and hits the door jamb. Aesop is standing between us now, on his toes, his shoulders tense and his hands up.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks.

  Gideon scrambles to his feet. “I need to ask you the same thing. Where the fuck were you last night? Huh?”

  Aesop pulls something out of his pocket and slams it on the counter, wraps his hand around the back of Gideon’s neck, and pushes his face down until it’s shy of slamming into whatever it was he put down.

  “The theater in town was showing Apocalypse Now last night and we went to go see it, fuckface,” Aesop says through gritted teeth. “Today Ash is not feeling well. He ate too much popcorn. You put your hands on him again and we’re going to have a problem.”

  Gideon pushes away, picks up the tickets, inspects them, places them back down on the counter.

  “Okay,” he says. “Your car was out all night and I found it on the back road. There’s a… we have to keep an accounting of all our people. After what happened to Cannabelle.”

  “Yeah, well, I hate driving over the bridge at night so I went the back way.”

  “Okay…”

  Gideon lingers, like he wants to say something else. Now I remember what it was I should do. I should punch him in the face. I ball up my first, ready to throw it into his jaw and see what comes loose, but he ducks out of the kitchen before I can.

  Aesop turns to me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. But, what’s with the alibi? That was convenient.”

  Aesop throws some wood into the stove and places the kettle down on top, then grabs the broom and pushes the shards of the broken mason jar into a neat pile. “You said we needed an alibi, remember? Last night, on the way back, I took the long way around, through town, so we wouldn’t run into anyone. We passed the movie theater so I stopped and fished these out of the trash out front. Figured, just in case.”

  “I don’t even remember that.”

  “You were talking about the void by that point,” he says. “I never knew you to be so interested in nihilism.”

  “I think Alex planted that seed. Anyway. Good work.”

  It’s not long before the kettle is spitting steam. Aesop pushes the glass into a dustpan, dumps it into the trash, and takes the kettle off the heat. He places it down on a folded tea towel on the counter.

  “You have to let it cool for a few minutes,” he says. “Straight boiling water will kill off some of the lighter oils in the root.”

  He takes a tea strainer, a little metal ball on a clip, fills it with the small chopped brown roots from a plastic bag, and places it in a mug. “Pack this strainer about halfway during the day. Don’t have more than three or four mugs. Before you go to bed, pack it full. Let it steep about ten minutes when you put it together. That should help. It’ll keep you nice and chilled out.”

  “Thank you,” I tell him. “For all of this. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it.”

  “Nothing,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “No, really. I don’t know why I deserve anything nice. Not with the way I’ve acted here. Not with the way I treat people. But you’re good to me. Cannabelle was kind. And I’m just… I am an asshole.”

  “You’re a New Yorker, so that’s your default setting,” he says. “Truth is, you’re not nearly as bad as you think you are. Most people here feel pretty bad for you. That’s why we’re all so nice.”

  I think he thinks I’m going to find that comforting, but it’s not. It’s actually pretty fucking sad.

  He dips a pinkie into the top of the tea kettle, quick. He makes a face when he pulls it out, and pours some water into the coffee mug. As he’s doing this I remember the mushrooms because I can smell them now, so I pull the tray out and put it on a tea towel on the counter to cool.

  “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s go sit out in the sun. Give this all a few minutes.”

  The clearing is empty now. We sit on a bench together, leaning back against the table. He’s close to me, and it feels good, him being close.

  “So… what do we know?” he asks.

  “Last night, there was a meeting. Some people from camp. The Soldiers of Gaia are planning to hit something, but we don’t know what.”

  “That’s right. They’re not based here. Looks like Marx is trying to get in on the action. He’s a soldier, not a general. That’s good. He’s using this place to recruit. That’s not good. Seems you’re the key to all this.”

  “Why me?”

  “They know you have the cipher. Or at least, they’re assuming you have the cipher.”

  “Right. The book, god what was the name of the fucking book?” This is so goddamn frustrating. The words are all there, encased in a block of ice, and I feel like I’m using a dull spoon to chip it away so I can reach them.

  “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” Aesop says.

  “Right. I found it. I know where it is. It’s at a store. A store got back to me. We can go and get it.”

  “Good,” he says. “If we find it, we have a chance of stopping them.”

  “We?”

  “Well, after the FBI came in and fucked up our shit, I’m not going to them,” Aesop says. “Tibo seems to think Ford is trustworthy, but I’m still trying to figure out if Tibo is trustworthy.”

  “He is,” I tell him. “I think he is. I’ve known him for so long.”

  “Leadership changes people.”

  “Well, whatever. The important thing is, we can decode the fucking cipher. We can get the book. We can do that, and decide wha
t to do next.”

  “Good. Let’s get your tea and something to eat and we’ll go. I’d rather not be here anyway. This place is starting to make me nervous.”

  We step into the kitchen and Aesop walks over to the tray of mushrooms on the oven. He pops a couple into his mouth, chews, and makes a face.

  “Ash, where did you get these?”

  I nod toward the sink. “Your bowl.”

  Aesop pulls the bowl toward him, looks down into it, and goes white. He puts his hand over his mouth.

  “Destroying angels,” he says.

  “What?”

  He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even indicate that he heard me. He moves quickly, putting some fresh and cooked mushrooms into a sandwich bag, then dumps the remaining mushrooms into the trash. He pours the contents of my mug into a battered blue thermos, which he hands to me.

  “We have to go to the hospital,” he says.

  He steps to the trashcan, sticks his fingers down his throat, and heaves. Coughs and spits chunks until his mouth is clear, and looks up at me.

  “Right fucking now,” he says.

  We’re at the car before he finally slows down enough that I can ask him, “What the hell is going on?”

  He climbs into the driver’s seat so I circle around to the passenger side. “I’m okay to drive but if I need you to, you might have to take over. Can you handle that?”

  “Yes, but tell me what’s happening.”

  He starts the engine, slams the pedal down, sending up a spray of gravel and dust.

  “Amanita bisporigera,” he says. “Those mushrooms. They’re called destroying angels. It’ll be hours before the symptoms hit, and by then it’ll be too late.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck is right,” he says. “Someone left them there for us.”

  “Who…”

  “That’s not important right now,” he says. “Focus. Do you think you’re okay to handle the car? How do you feel?”

  I look out the window, at the world passing by. My vision is wavy on the edges, things flitting in and out, but the adrenaline is helping to keep me focused.

  “Ash!”

  “I’ll be okay. Are you going to be okay?”

  “As long as I get treatment quickly, I should be.” He pauses. “I should be.”

  He sounds far less sure the second time he says it.

  We drive some more. I open the top of the thermos and sip at the tea. It’s hot and tastes terrible. My hand shakes a little. I turn the cap closed so I don’t spill any of it.

  “I want to tell you something,” he says. “I don’t know a lot about amatoxin poisoning. I know it’s very, very bad. If I’m going to die, I can’t die holding onto this. I need to tell someone this.”

  “Okay,” I tell him.

  Aesop swings onto the road at the same time that he reaches across and slams his fist on the glove box. It pops open to reveal a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He opens it up, takes one cigarette and a pink lighter out. Crumples it and tosses it into the back seat. He fires up, and the car fills with cigarette smoke. He opens the window and the smoke gets sucked out. He takes a deep drag with his entire body, blows it out.

  “There were two guys in my unit,” he says, his voice drifting to someplace distant. “Sick bastards. They stuck together ‘cause you could tell no one else would want to stick with them. And… it’s a whole big story I could get into, I guess, but I kind of don’t want to get into particulars.”

  He takes a drag of his cigarette. Contemplates it between his fingers.

  “They were hunters,” he says. “Little kids, specifically.”

  He glances my way, to gauge my reaction. I don’t know how to react to that.

  “The way they figured it, Iraqi kids were expendable,” he said. “We were killing enough innocent civilians by accident. What were a few more? Apparently it went on for a while. The brass found out about it. They covered it up. If word got out it would be a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. So I killed them both.”

  He takes a drag, lets the smoke pour out of his lungs.

  “That’s… terrible,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head. “The reason I killed them is, I caught them. They were… there was a boy. Couldn’t have been more than ten. When I found them he was dead. And the mother… her husband had been killed and now her boy was dead. And she begged me. She begged. Do you understand that?”

  He looks at me, back at the road. His voice cracks, tears forming in the corner of his eyes.

  “She begged me,” he says. “She said she couldn’t go on like that.”

  He looks back and forth, between me and the road. Crying full now, and I don’t know what he’s looking for. Consolation. Forgiveness. I don’t know what I can give him other than listening. My emotional core feels like it’s been tossed into a blender, and now this.

  A deathbed confession.

  At least, that’s what it feels like to Aesop.

  He doesn’t talk for a little while, just drives like he knows where he’s going. I have no idea. I don’t know where the closest hospital is. At this point, I feel as useless as a doorknob drilled into a brick wall.

  Aesop takes one last drag of the cigarette, down to the filter, and tosses it out the window. The tears are gone. The composure is back. His voice is level again.

  “I killed twenty-nine people over there,” he says. “And for some fucking reason, I don’t regret her. I saw it in her eyes. The second I stepped out of there she was going to open her wrists. What I did was a kindness. It’s those two assholes I regret killing.”

  “Because they got off easy,” I tell him.

  He looks at me, kind of surprised, and nods.

  “What happened after that?” I ask.

  “I got what’s called an Other Than Honorable Conditions Discharge,” he says. “They didn’t want to give me an Honorable Discharge, and they didn’t want to run the risk of burning me so bad with a Dishonorable Discharge that I’d go to the press.”

  “Why not go to the press? Why not report it?”

  “Because… they weren’t wrong. Can you imagine anything worse than that? It sets the cycle anew. They weren’t going to stop, so I made them stop. The only safe thing to do was live with it.”

  We come up on a red light. Aesop weaves around the car waiting at it, almost gets creamed by a car coming the other way, speeds on.

  “I killed a man,” I tell him, the words jumping out of my mouth. Quiet, like I’m hiding from them. Aesop doesn’t say anything. Just leaves me room to speak.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him. I was protecting someone and… it happened. And ever since then I’ve had this feeling like I’m drowning. That’s the thing. The wave. The thing pulling me down. It’s why I was drinking. Drinking was the only thing that got me through the day. It was the only thing that helped me sleep at night.”

  We pull up on the hospital, a massive sandstone building with glass and metal accents, a red cross at the top, glittering in the sunlight. Aesop doesn’t even bother finding a spot, pulls the car into the ambulance bay. He turns off the car and twists in his seat so he’s looking at me, but I’m already drowning. It’s the first I’ve said it aloud to another person.

  He puts his hand on the back of my neck and looks me in the eyes.

  “Now you know you can die,” he says. “Now you know how fragile all of this is. When you realize that, it’s a lot.”

  And he lets me go.

  The wave recedes.

  Just like that. The roaring stops. I can feel the sand under my feet. I can stand tall and lift myself above the waterline.

  “Do you understand what I mean?” he asks.

  I nod, breathe in, and throw myself around him. Press my face into his neck and sob. I can’t help myself. My body feels light. Like I’ve been carrying something heavy up a hill and set it down.

  He pulls away from me, crying a little too, and kisses me on the cheek, squeezing the back of my neck again. I feel naked. It’s the
only way I can put it that makes sense. We linger in it, neither of us wanting to leave the car, for fear of what lies outside.

  Except we have to go, because Aesop is dying.

  “Now, c’mon,” he says. “If we can manage it, I’d like to live to see this whole mess through.”

  The waiting room in the ER is nearly empty. Long rows of green leather chairs, a few dotted with people dozing off or watching a baseball game on a flatscreen television mounted on the wall.

  A black woman in pink scrubs is sitting behind the counter, the only employee in sight. She’s talking on the phone, curling a loop of her long black hair around a finger tipped by a long orange nail. She barely looks up at us as Aesop puts the plastic bag containing the mushrooms on the counter.

  The woman’s nametag says “Brenda” in white lettering on black plastic.

  Brenda slides a clipboard overflowing with forms across the counter at us without breaking the flow of her conversation. Which is basically her offering positive affirmations like “really” and “oh sure” and “I believe so.”

  “Excuse me,” Aesop says.

  Brenda sticks an orange nail into the air, indicating she needs a minute.

  Aesop reaches across the counter and presses his finger on the black plastic tab, hanging up the call. Her eyes go wide with rage and I am pretty sure she is going to tear his trachea out.

  “You may have a minute, but I don’t,” he says. “I’ve ingested extremely poisonous mushrooms.”

  She purses her lips and looks at us like we’re both dummies.

  “Well why didn’t you say so?” she asks.

  “I was trying to…”

  She nods toward the hallway. “Triage. First door.” She picks up the ringing phone and speaks into it, but I can’t hear what she says because we’re already turning the corner, Aesop balancing the bag of mushrooms on top of the clipboard.

  The triage room is small, with two chairs and some machines and cabinets. There’s a young nurse in green scrubs, her light brown hair twisted into short dreads. She says something into a phone and starts taking Aesop’s vitals, moving around him efficiently as he scribbles at the forms.