Pivot

by L C Barlow

  "Fantastic!" he said immediately. He shook his head insanely and looked to the sky. "Excellent!"

  He beamed all of his teeth at me, and he held out his elbow as would a 19th century gentlemen. "I have one more condition, as well," he said. "You cannot look in the trunk of my car." I, of course, agreed.

  These are the kinds of decisions that get people killed. I was used to making them. So, it seemed, was he.

  In a matter of moments, we were on the other side of the campus, dropping off his friend at his own car. Then, we were on the highway. Patrick was driving 90 miles an hour, sometimes 100 or more, weaving in and out of traffic.

  "What's your name?!" he yelled out, struggling against the wind's moan.

  "Jack," I said, and I looked at him.

  "Jack what?"

  "Jack Harper"

  "It's a pleasure to meet you. Will you do me a favor, Jack, and open that glove box?"

  I steadied myself by holding onto the passenger side door, while Patrick swerved to the right to avoid hitting a white Honda Accord. When he was driving straight again, I reached down and opened the compartment. There was a cobalt blue pipe inside, a little baggie under it.

  "Smoke it," he said. "You won't regret it."

  "You keep saying that." I peered into his green eyes, and he smiled at me with a devil's grin. He raised his Clementine eyebrows back and forth in a wave, and the effect was comical.

  I picked up the baggie and looked at the contents. There were greyish white grains.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "What do you think?" he said.

  I licked it. Pungent. Strong. I had not had that quality since early high school. I told him to slow down. He did. I leaned forward in my seat, managed to get the contents into the bowl without the air eating everything. Patrick handed me a lighter. It was in the shape of a poker chip. And then, dazzling.

  There were no cares in the world.

  There was no world.

  There was no me.

  But there was Patrick, and there was the night, and the air, oh the air!, and there was the cement road that turned to water, and we swam through it.

  Then the road shifted up and over me, and I knew that soon we, too, would be upside down. And, God, there was ecstasy in everything. The red lights on the cars in front of us appeared to me as glowing, thrumming hearts that with my mind I could hold and feel warm again.

  I remember I looked to my right, and there was a white semi. It said Schway. I was right beside it. I reached out, effortlessly, and touched it - or almost did - before I was glided away. And then there was a car horn.

  "Shit! Motherfucker! That was close, right?!" Patrick yelled.

  I just laughed.

  And he laughed.

  Patrick turned the music on, and there was a deep bass, fast, techno-ish sound. And it made me feel like I was God with a violin.

  I felt into my coat pocket for my .38. I could never remember if I still had it. Then, I would reach in again and feel it. Then I would remark upon the fact that I could never remember it was there. And then I would look at Patrick.

  I unbuckled my seat belt so that I wouldn't have to scream, screaming then seemed impossible, and I leaned over to him. "Thank you for that," I said, and then I relaxed, falling within the leather.

  He laughed at me. "It will make you believe in God, won't it?!" he yelled.

  The rest of the night was a blur.

  We got to the party. It was held in a massive home. Almost all of its walls were windows.

  I met Monica. I met Bryce. I met Steven. I met Matt. I met Carl. John. Felicia. Dujan. Sarah. Brian. Javier. Two Jessica's. Mark. Young. Carla. And others known by their last names. An O'Malley who was not Irish. A Wolfe. A Fields. I couldn't count the number of people.

  I remember at one point a guy named David stripped. Jessica took her shirt off and handed him her pink bra, and he did push-ups on the pool table while the players continued their game. He threatened to take off his reindeer boxers, and the guys finally shoved him from the table. They let Jessica on, instead.

  After this, all the lights turned off, and one of the girls with massive breasts undressed as well and held a flashlight under them. They lit up like giant, ugly jack-o-lanterns from the implants, and there was a collective silence over the crowd. I don't know if it was from disgust or awe. All I could do was stare at the veins.

  Around two in the morning, someone set off a firework in the kitchen, and it shot throughout the house like a demon. It took ten pitchers of water to get all the fires out, and there are still black spots everywhere. By that point I was just looking for orange juice.

  Before the firework, a boy named Jared dropped acid and, while in the kitchen, wrote on all the stainless steel cupboards, and floor, and dishwasher, and stove in sharpie about the meaning of life and the connections between spiderwebs and iPhones and pumpkins and erasers and the Higgs boson particle. He talked to me while I searched for juice, and I could neither agree nor disagree with him. It made sense at the time. When the firework went off, he thought his written truths had made our known universe explode, and I had to calm him.

  At another point, a man showed his balls to Patrick. I can't remember why. Patrick jokingly prescribed him penicillin.

  A few streakers and skinny-dipping. A couple of the guys kept making bombs from the pool's hydrochloric acid and balls of aluminum. There were clumps of burned grass everywhere. Nothing special, and yet all so lovely.

  And Patrick was playing one of the pianos, a jazzy thing, and he sang to it. And a couple of the girls stripped and danced to it on the piano, pulling at their hair and breasts, before we all got tired of being away from the frantic activity in the other rooms and returned.

  One of the girls whispered to him that she wanted to make love to his accent. He shot a smile at me. "See?" he said. It was then that I wanted his accent.

  At the end, we were dancing, and someone was teaching me the salsa, and the rumba, and the fox trot, and the west coast swing. Finally, the east coast swing. Then I was dancing with no order with Patrick and the others to club music. We crushed so many pills beneath our feet on the table, it looked like a chalkboard, and I forgot to search for my .38 for the first time the whole night.

  Nothing special, and yet all so lovely. Dear God, I was happy.

  Chapter 4

  WAKE UP

  I remember the first time I killed a man. Cyrus had me do it. We were in a dark room, one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, like it was later with Mr. Thornton. There were no windows, and the only objects that sat within were a chair for me to stand on, and a table with flat blue ropes that strapped the man down.

  This man was not awake. He was alive, though, and breathing loud. He was a very thin black man with skin a beautifully dark shade and a face with character built into it by way of lines and furrows. He was older and gray, but still had all of his hair, including that which sprouted on his chest and stomach. When I bumped into him by accident, climbing to stand on the chair, his body barely shook, simply sat like a stone, and his skin felt rough like sand. The looks of him made me feel queasy. Sickness was stapled to the air.

  The truth is that I did not want to kill him, and so I said to Cyrus, "Why can't you just bring that red box in here this time, too?" For, I had seen the red box many times by then.

  "Because you need to learn how to do this," he said. "You need to get used to it. Now look," and he spread before me what appeared to be a metallic fly. "We are going to do this simple."

  I felt something in me curl up and die when I saw that needle. But so I would not disturb my own dead body, I watched and listened and obeyed Cyrus, rather than argue.

  "This is a butterfly needle," he said, "and it slides into veins to let out blood. You are going to insert this needle into the vein, here." Cyrus pointed to an indigo line in the man's neck. "It'll take you a few tries, but trust me. You can't be worse than many nurses."

  And that is what I did. I pressed my feveri
sh fingers upon the thin man's cool neck, and I took the needle just-so in my right hand. The first try, though, I punched a hole straight through the vein, and Cyrus said he knew so by the black spot that instantly covered the area.

  But after a while of prodding, I finally found the tunnel through which the fluid of life flows and inserted the needle deep inside. The hot liquid poured out all over me.

  I cried as my hands were washed with crimson, and Cyrus grabbed them. "It's alright," he said, and he took out a handkerchief from his pocket and delicately wiped my hands. "The job is done." I barely heard him.

  I was, instead, watching the fount as it poured along the man's neck and spread beneath him, splattering before me a cherry mirror in which I could see the glare from the overhanging bulb, and in that glare my face.

  Cyrus put my right hand in both of his, and he squeezed it gently. He moved my arm above the man and slid my hand to where my palm rested upon his chest. I could feel the beating of his heart.

  "His heart will eventually stop," Cyrus said. "Feel for it." Suddenly, I could not breathe. For, as I pressed my hand upon the man's chest, and the black bruise in his neck began to grow, I felt an inextricable link between myself and the blackening of his face. It was as though he was transforming into a demon and within solely me lay the perversion capable of it. I tried to lift my hand up, but Cyrus placed his own on top, locking mine against the wax of the man's skin. No matter what I tried, Cyrus would not release me.

  "Stop," I said, and soon the blood was pouring off the table. The dribbling sounds upon the floor were a heavy bass in my hears. The man's face continued to blacken, and soon I became hysterical, trying to tear myself away from the beating heart buried beneath the bone, as though if I could break contact the horror would stop.

  Cyrus held fast to me, though, held me down to the dying body, until I felt clamped to the death itself. The heart quickened, and even though I stood with eyes shut, I could see that heart struggle left and right, pulled as if by a million different wires until it stretched and shrieked in the only way it could - with a hot, flashing pace.

  When I did open my eyes, I saw only the blood sliding, spreading its tentacles like a voracious vine across the floor and beneath the man who was both blackening and whitening simultaneously. Despite being unconscious, his hands tried to reach his face, to reach me, but the blue ropes held him fast, and eventually all movement ceased.

  At all times I could smell the blood. In every whiff there were millions of pennies in sugar.

  The heart slowed. I felt it in my hand like a flower closing its petals to the night. It slowed like rain turned to snow. Then, as though finally electrocuted by my very touch, the man's body began to twitch and draw in like a spider that had just been swatted. I had to close my eyes so as to stand it.

  When I could no longer feel the body, I heard my crying, felt a cold stone lying low in my stomach, and I wanted to press my hands to it to rip it out, but Cyrus's own hand was still like a manacle upon mine. When he finally let go and I jerked back, separating the link between me and the dead, I vomited all over the body.

  For the longest time, Cyrus tried in vain to comfort me, but every word of his I refused. That is, until he shocked me with the following:

  "I have every intention of bringing him back, Jack. There is really nothing to worry about."

  Through flooding eyes, I looked up from the floor at him and gazed at this demon who suddenly began to sprout wings. I hungered to hear those words again.

  "That would make things easier for you, right? If I were to bring him back."

  "Yes," I said, not really believing or disbelieving him, just following my choking desire. "Yes, please. Please bring him back." I clutched the soft cloth of Cyrus's pants. I continued whispering the same words over and over. "Please, Cyrus. Please."

  Cyrus took both my arms in his hands, and he gently lifted me to my feet. He wiped the tears from my eyes, just like he had wiped the blood from my hands, and he moved his hands through my hair, held me close, and calmed me.

  "His name is Roland James, and tonight he'll be back alive. I swear it to you, Jack. No worries." Cyrus kissed the top of my head, and I relaxed against him. In just a few minutes, I passed out.

  Chapter 5

  ROLAND

  When I woke, I was in the bedroom that had been partitioned to me in the West wing of Cyrus's home. Above me was a ceiling of ornate wood sectioned into squares with swirls in their middles, and as my eyes traveled with their twists, I thought of the dead man Roland James.

  He was to be alive again, Cyrus had said. He was to be resurrected that very night. And it was night. I looked out of the windows peering to the back of Cyrus's property and saw the moon and the night's freckles of stars. I had slept the whole day.

  Though my eyes still felt full from their shedding tears, and my cheeks were still flush, I felt wholly better inside. The man I killed was supposed to return. With that in mind, there was magic in the air, like a funeral slowly replaced with Christmas.

  I heard the twist of the doorknob while I sat at the window, and I turned, expecting Cyrus to greet me. Alex, his son, appeared instead.

  Cyrus's son was shorter than me, with blonde, very blonde hair, and blue eyes. His face was fairly round, and his cheeks were plump. He wore a black, long-sleeved shirt and dark blue-jeans, and he was simply in white socks.

  He did not look like a child, but rather a small adult. He stared at me with no emotion.

  For a moment neither one of us spoke. I could hear his breathing, and though he did not look angry, there seemed to be a fount of feeling behind each breath. "Hi," I finally said.

  "Hi," he mirrored me. Then he asked, "What did you and my Dad do this morning?"

  I looked at him and cocked my head to the side, trying to register what he was asking. "What?"

  "This morning, when you went to the basement, what did you and my Dad do?"

  I shook my head back and forth. "I can't tell you."

  "Why?"

  "Cyrus wouldn't want me to."

  Alex stood motionless, and I listened to him breathing. His blue eyes, which were locked to me, distanced, and he bit his lip for a moment before he said, "You might be older, but I can do whatever you can. When Dad teaches me, I'll be better than you." With that, he left, not bothering to close the door. I heard the soft thud of his footsteps move away from the room and then the loud slam of a door.

  All I could think of was finding Cyrus, and also that my hunger was surprisingly strong. Alex left in me no impression.

  I left the room. I headed to the kitchen of Cyrus's home, which was located towards the northern center. It was very close to the den, but also to what I had labeled "The White Room" - a modernly decorated room with white carpet and walls, platinum drapes, and a pool table of glittering white marble and velvety white felt.

  The chairs, the tables, the molding, the baseboards, the windowpanes, all were white. The very great chandelier above was like a ghost pinned mid-air. It was a very frightening room for me as a child because without color of its own, the room seemed a starved thing, hungry for something human.

  When I entered the kitchen, I heard the laughter of Cyrus, and it came from the direction of the white room. I walked slowly towards the double swinging doors to the West, pushed through them, and looked down the hall, straight to where the dining room was. I walked ten feet and turned to my right, and there before me was the great white whale of a room of the house. From where I was, I could see the white desk and the man sitting behind it, Cyrus, who held a cigar in his hand - big white puffs of smoke coloring the very air about him with pallor. In one of the plush, thick velvet chairs in front of the desk was the man I had murdered that morning - Mr. Roland James.

  Roland was not only alive, but smiling, laughing, and exuberant. He was the human thing that the room hungered for, with a bright blue suit with a khaki shirt. He looked to me to be the very paradigm of a healthy man.

  That was true, exc
ept for his neck and his face. The parts that had blackened that morning from my plunging the needle through his vein were still a bit darker than he was. While I stood staring at his neck, Roland James turned to me, and he smiled.

  "Jack." Cyrus said. He motioned for me to enter. "Come in."

  "Yes," said Roland. As though under a spell of the dead man, I drew closer to him, feeling hypnotized with curiosity, until I came to the edge of Cyrus's lengthy desk. I put my hand upon its surface and swallowed hard.

  Roland smiled at me, and his eyes were eerie. Cyrus, meanwhile, was stripping some of the ash from his cigar onto a white ashtray before him as though not a thing in the world had happened, and only after doing this looked at me. His air was cheery, and he asked me, "Well what do you think Jack?"

  "I..." I looked back and forth between Roland and Cyrus and wished I could speak to Cyrus alone. "Does... does he know?" I asked Cyrus.

  Cyrus's eyebrows lifted, and he leaned forward in his desk. "Does Roland know that you murdered him today?" he asked to confirm, and I grimaced at the blatancy of Cyrus's question.

  I expected them to laugh at me, but they did not, and Cyrus drew again on his cigar, blowing a smoke ring into the air.

  "I know," Roland said, and he looked at me again with a cunning that I had seen in Cyrus. "And it's okay, Jack. It's alright. Cyrus told me you were worried, but there isn't anything to worry about anymore. Here," he said, "have a seat." He patted the fluffed chair, identical to his, beside me.

  I pulled myself into the chair, positioning myself on the very edge, and I felt as though I was in the presence of God.

  "I expected," said Cyrus, "that we would begin this way. That is, where the person you killed would be brought back. And, obviously, he is back. You agree?"

  I looked at Roland once more, and he smiled at me and held out his hand. I took it in my own, and I knew wholly and for certain that he was the man on the slab that morning. This was not a twin, this was not a charade. The man that sat beside me and asked for my company was the person that I had let the liters of blood pour out of only hours before. How could this be? I wondered. How could he be living and breathing again? I did not ask.