Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  This is what I have been reduced to: shoplifting, petty thievery. What have I become?

  • • •

  Before I even think to sift through the bags, I head all the way up to Greenwood, an hour walk, straight to the diner I frequent several times a week. Sometimes more. This is further than I need to go, but it is familiar terrain, and I am hungry, and I know I can order just about anything here without accidentally ingesting something full of egg. They even know to do the coleslaw without mayo, which is practically a miracle.

  I get the usual—burger and fries—and down it all before I dive into the woman’s bags like a vulture tucking into a pile of entrails. And of course, just as I do my peripheral vision is suddenly full of waitress. I look up, caught, but she just smiles as she places the check on the table. Waitresses do not care: it is not their job to care, just to provide service with the illusion of concern, just like their name tags provide an illusion of identity. Hers says “Edith.”

  She looks around to see if anyone else is watching, but the place is empty—no other customers, and the manager is out back smoking up with the cook. This is that sort of place. She blows a strand of hair out of her face and sits down across from me, taking a sip of my water.

  “Get anything good?” she asks. For all anyone knows, they are my bags, and I bought whatever is inside. But she knows better. She knows I stole this. And she does not care.

  “Cigarettes and vodka,” I say to her after taking inventory of the bags. No receipts, sadly, so I won’t be returning anything for cash. “Some underwear, some ungodly heels, and a bible.”

  “Will it fit me?” she asks.

  “The bible? No. Religion is for sad little people who cannot accept that they are not special or immortal. It gives them an imaginary afterlife to look forward to. You and I know better. Don’t we, Edith?”

  She gives a thin, half-hearted smile, almost a grimace. But before she can reply she spots her manager coming out of the back room and slides out of the booth, dusting off her black-and-white uniform. So dull, so ordinary. She is better than this. We both are.

  “I should go,” I say, throwing money on the table. Exact change, since I know exactly how much this costs, and there is no sense tipping her. One of the quarters decides to make a run for it, and rolls onto the floor. Edith crouches down and smacks her hand on the quarter, ragged black skirt high up her thigh. She looks up at me.

  “Heads or tails?” I ask.

  And for a moment, the façade of Edith is gone, and I see her not as she appears to the world, a costumed lie of eighteen, coated in a veneer of makeup and waitress. Nor do I see her as her sixteen-year-old self, somehow both fragile and invulnerable at once. Instead, I see her as she was, eight years old, scrabbling around on the floor of a filthy fast food restaurant, smelling of grease and bleach. And I wonder how things might be different if …

  If.

  And then the moment is gone. Xtian smiles and palms the coin without looking.

  “Pick me up at nine,” she says. And then she is Edith again, and she walks off to put most of the money in the register, and I walk out the door with a bag full of stolen underwear.

  This is how we live now. And it makes me want to die.

  • • •

  I wander the streets for a while longer, but ultimately I get bored and decide to wait in the car, which is parked around the corner from the diner. I sit in the driver’s seat and listen to the radio ramble about Wikileaks and DNC emails, but I turn it off when they start repeating themselves and sit there in silence, wondering if they were involved, somehow. I write, some, as Xtian has encouraged me to do, but mostly I think, which is dangerous.

  Two hours later, Xtian turns the corner and strolls down the sidewalk, and as I start the engine I can see her not-looking everywhere, absorbing everything around her. The lights, the shadows, the people across the street, watching, noticing everything and fearing only that worth fearing. Confident. Perhaps too. She starts walking over to the driver’s side, but I reach over and open the passenger door, and she changes course.

  She stops, sighs, and leans down to look inside.

  “You promised,” she says.

  “Just get in,” I say. “I changed my mind.” It is safe enough for her to drive during the day—she has to learn—but I do not want to risk her driving at night, lest we get pulled over. She can deal. We have far bigger things to fight about.

  “Maybe I’ll just walk,” she says, all the while scanning the street over the top of the Sonata. Always wary now. I am pleased, even if she only learned this the hard way.

  “Get in the car, Xtian,” I say. We are both irritated from a long day amongst the masses.

  “I’m driving or I’m walking,” she says.

  She’s doing neither. I reach over and grab her by the arm, maybe a bit more roughly than I need to. She slaps my hand away, but gets inside, and immediately the car smells of french fries and burnt coffee. I angrily hit the gas before she can get her seat belt on.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you tonight?” she says.

  “You,” I say, before I realize it. I do not really mean it—we are both tired and cranky, and we have both been bickering over nonsense for months now, the stress of everything weighing on us—but I say it anyway. And I know that it is in some way true.

  “Fine,” she says. “Then let me out.”

  I ignore her, and a moment goes by, after which she says “Let me out, or I’ll jump.”

  She puts her hand on the door handle and gives me a funny look of defiance. I laugh. I haven’t laughed in a long time, and it comes out all wrong. She screws up her face, half horrified, half amused, and I pull the car over to the side of the road, because the laughter is making it hard to drive. There are tears in my eyes, then, and I realize that they are not all the happy sort.

  “What?” she asks.

  She gets no answer, because my laughter has turned into sobs, deep and painful and shocking. Eight years come spilling out and I feel old, and broken, and wrong, just wrong. Weak. And all of it is her fault. And all of it is my fault. And there is nothing I can do to change any of that. I can cry, as it turns out.

  Change. That is what this is about. Where this comes from.

  “What?” she asks again, more quietly.

  “Why don’t you leave?” I ask.

  Her hand is still on the door, but she does not open it. Just watches me, watching her. Silent, too silent.

  “Well, if you give me half a second, I will,” she says. I shake my head.

  “Not now,” I say. “I mean ever.”

  We sit there for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the engine idling, and then she removes her name tag and throws it on the dash, putting Edith away for the night. I put the car in gear, and pull into traffic, forgetting I have cried, wondering if it was real, hoping it was not.

  We are halfway home before she says, quietly, “Because I need you.”

  But I wonder if she has it backwards.

  Chalk Outlines

  09/08/16

  Of all the places we ever lived—Virginia, New York, California—I liked Seattle best. Ironically, I’m pretty sure the weather was the reason. It seemed to be overcast and gloomy most of the time we were there, but that matched our mood perfectly. It wasn’t depressing; it was like a big fluffy gray blanket to commiserate with. It felt like home, more than anywhere else we’d been.

  For our eighth anniversary together I baked us a cake. Before Edison could ask what it was for, I showed him the calendar. We were quiet for a few moments, not quite sure which emotion was most appropriate. Eight years, I thought, counting candles I hadn’t bothered to light. Half my life so far. And considering the way things had gone, it might end up being half my life, in total.

  “It’s got no eggs,” I said, cutting him a slice. “I found the recipe on the web. It’s vegan. It’s got seitan in it, so it’s evil, just like us.”

  We each took a bite and looked at each other. T
hen the horrid thing went in the compost bin, and we went out for ice cream. Just like always.

  • • •

  We drive past the Fremont troll—a big stone tourist trap beneath a bridge that people love to suicide off of—and head through Wallingford at a glacial pace, traffic at its worst still better than San Francisco’s best. The slower pace Xtian is driving at suits me fine. She was practicing a bit in San Francisco before events went askew, so she could probably handle going a bit faster, but to be honest I prefer when things are creeping along. No one looks twice at us; we are invisible. Young girl and an older man in a car, obviously someone learning to drive, nothing more to it. It is a story they know, and the best way to lie is to tell the truth, mostly. The best liars almost never get caught in a lie because they are not lying most of the time—only when it counts.

  Granted, there are things we have to lie about. Names, ages, addresses. In the past it would have been trivial to get such things, but I have to be more creative these days since my connections are gone, since there are no jobs, just this parasitic lifestyle we have adopted. Fortunately those are easier lies. Names, for example: with a death certificate you can get a birth certificate and now you have a name. You get that and some fake address labels and you have a library card. With that you can get a state ID card, and from there you can get anything if you have a bit of cash. Name change, licenses. A bank account, with a borrowed Social Security number. Fifteen minutes on trash night nets enough credit card applications to wallpaper a bedroom, and it’s not even messy thanks to mandatory recycling. Six weeks and a few hundred dollars, you can start a whole new life. Not a great one, but serviceable.

  Making it feel new is another story. It is easy to fall into old patterns. Get lost in the past, like Xtian is so often these days. Caught in a labyrinth of memories, a dead monster in the middle, and (I hope) ample string to find her way back out. I want to pull on the string, snap it taut, give her a chalk line to follow back to what was, and is, but I do not want to pull too hard, because something bloody and soft might come out along with it. So I do not pull at all. I got her into this, but she will have to get herself out, slowly and painfully, fingernails and teeth left behind in the cracks. Literally—she left a few of each in California. Dental work is expensive but not out of reach. And the nails have grown back. They will never be quite right again, but then, nothing ever is as it once was.

  “Speed it up a little,” I say for what must be the ninth time. “You are going to get pulled over for driving too slow.”

  “I’m going with the fl—”

  “Meadow,” I say, using their clock code out of old habit, even now that it no longer matters, in a time and place we could easily have made up our own or used “check your six.” She looks in the rear view mirror, spots the cruiser, and as practiced, pulls over into the next driveway as if it was our destination, letting him pass. Just in case. I am sure we are being followed. I am just not sure who is doing the following. Or when they are doing it. Or where they plan to strike. So until we know, we try to act like everything is normal. Gather information. Prepare. And then, when it all comes down—and it will—we will do like always. We will run.

  • • •

  Run. Always run. Good advice, but it hadn’t done me much good back in San Francisco.

  Edison had gotten it mostly right, when he imagined it. There wasn’t as much hesitation as he’d envisioned—I got in right away, pretended to use the bathroom—and I didn’t hear the clock chirp, I saw it as I walked in the front door. I actually thought about going out the bathroom window, but it was too small and I would have made too much noise, so I decided to try and sneak out the front door. I was halfway down the hall when I heard the guy say “we’ll keep her here.” And that’s when I ditched the box, pulled out the gun, and ran for it. A lot of things happened very quickly at that point, and I’m not sure if I was too slow, or they were too fast. Either way, it was the same result: me on the floor, my left leg burning. It was only when they grabbed me, broke my wrist, and threw me in the corner, that I realized I’d been shot. Like, with a gun.

  My first thought was, So this is what it feels like to be shot.

  And my second thought was, How is it possible—having been with Edison all these years—that this is my first time?

  My third thought was along the lines of How did they do more damage to me in six seconds than Edison managed in six years? but it was interrupted when Nick walked in the room. No doubt recognition pasted itself all over my face, but Nick had his poker face down, I give him that. He stared at me like he’d never seen me before, surveyed the small bit of carnage I’d caused, and shook his head.

  “I told you to be careful,” he said. For one second I thought he was talking to me. Then I realized I’d been unconscious for a while, probably from shock. Not only had the light changed, but everything else had as well. The room, the whole house was different. I was somewhere else, and a lot of time had elapsed. My leg was bandaged, too. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. They wanted me alive. I was sure of that much. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  Someone was talking to me. I looked up, into Nick’s eyes.

  “Who sent you?” he said. His eyes narrowed. I dare you, they said. I dare you to tell. He had a gun in his hand. Mine. I opened my mouth, and I saw his finger tense on the trigger. No, that way lay death. Not a good thing, I decided. Not yet. So I improvised: I spat in his face. It’s not as easy as they make it look in the movies, but I managed anyway.

  He smiled.

  It wasn’t long before I regretted not ending it right then. There was no way out, no path that didn’t lead to death at the end. And every path involved pain.

  The first few hours were the worst. Probably because that’s when they were the most creative, but also because that’s when I was the most aware. Thoughts of suicide drifted freely through my head—of guns and cyanide and nicotine, for all the good it did me, since I had none of that right now. That ended right about nightfall—the conscious part, I mean—when Nick took a turn “interrogating” me.

  “Who sent you?” he said, speaking somewhat louder than necessary, in what was almost a stage voice. “Who sent you to kill David?” This, I was learning, was one of the two men I had shot and killed. Nick was improvising, turning an attempt to bug a house into an assassination. David was, I surmised, someone of importance, seeing as nobody was mentioning the other guy. How important, I wasn’t sure. Probably as important as Nick, who I increasingly saw as some sort of middle-manager trying to climb a ladder. Which, it occurred to me, was probably why I was where I was, and why Nick was where he was, pretending he hadn’t sent me in the first place.

  I felt like a tool, and remembered that this was because that was all I was: a tool. I had done the job, too. Just not the one I thought I was doing. And this was the reward. This was what I got for all those useless arcade tickets. My plastic whistle.

  Nick reached under my chin and stared me in a blurry eye; the other was clotted shut. I tried to turn my head to compensate, center his face, but he pinched my sore cheeks together and twisted my neck back around, painfully.

  “Who sent you?” he repeated. The corner of his mouth twitched, just a tiny bit. Weakness? I decided I had nothing to lose but myself, and that—that was gone a long time ago. I smiled.

  “You did,” I said.

  It was the last thing I remember saying and the only truth I ever gave them.

  They hurt me a lot, but most of the time I spent alone, crying my throat raw. They’d hurt me, and then leave me, almost like they weren’t sure what to do with me, probably because Nick was still working out exactly how to finish whatever story he was telling. Sometimes they’d hurt me too much and I’d pass out, and whatever happened then I thankfully don’t remember. But they seemed to be trying to keep me awake, babbling, on the edge of sanity. I said a lot of things to stop them from hurting me. But that didn’t work too well, because with some of them it wasn’
t about information, or lies. It was just bad men doing bad things.

  But I knew someone worse than them.

  I knew someone worse.

  I knew someone worse.

  I kept chanting it in my head, whenever I was conscious. It kept me company.

  I knew someone worse.

  “She’ll break,” someone said. But I had already been broken by someone else, years before. Anything they did to me at that point was redundant.

  • • •

  “Brakes,” I say, for the third time. We stop with a squeal, front tires in the crosswalk, and I immediately check all the mirrors for police; unnecessary paranoia. None are visible now. And at any rate she has her learner’s permit on her, which is a good excuse for novice mistakes. We also have an intermediate license and a regular driver’s license in various pockets and places about the car, depending on which story we need to tell. I would rather not have to tell any, however. As she can tell that from my glare.

  The light turns green, and she hits the gas too hard, jerking us forward. I am about to tell her to just turn us around and head home, but then I realize with some surprise that we are already at our destination, so I have her pull down a side street to parallel park. It only takes her four tries. Again, she manages to figure it out right before I tell her to give up and try something else. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for both of us.

  The ice cream shop on the corner has four dozen flavors, but Xtian gets vanilla in a paper cup. With toppings, but always vanilla. Even though she no longer is. Perhaps an attempt to hold on to what she once was. As if deep down in there, there is an eight-year-old nugget of once, wrapped in layer upon layer of time, like a pearl around sand, an irritating little piece of old wreathed in polish. A bird in a gilded cage, wings clipped, door wide open.

  I scan the menu. It looks healthy, considering this is an ice cream shop. Too healthy.

  “I need something without eggs,” I say.

  “We have ten all-natural non-dairy, soy-based varieties to choose from,” says the horrid blonde girl behind the counter. “All completely animal-safe,” she adds. And completely flavorless, I do not add. Instead, I order orange sherbet and hope for the best; sometimes it has eggs, but this place seems safe. If I am wrong, well … I am due for a painful death. Overdue.