Three Miles Past

by Stephen Graham Jones

  The image was gone, the hall empty again.

  Was that worse or better, though?

  “Mom?” I called out, then called again, louder, and then my phone shook in my hand again, stiffening that whole side of my body.

  “No, no,” I said to the phone, and only opened it because I was afraid it was going to ring if I didn’t, which would definitely set me screaming, kickstart the kind of feedback loop I could never claw my way back from.

  There was no image on my screen, no lamp-headed boy.

  Just the app, waiting, primed. Insisting.

  I turned the phone around, to see the lens—maybe RJ had figured out how to sonar the flash to control the lateral?—and just when it got vertical enough, it snapped a takeback pic of me.

  I dropped it again, but it was still plugged into my laptop.

  The image resolved on my screen.

  It was me, like it should have been, but behind me, instead of the glare of my wall, my posters, my bulletin board, there was all this open space. Years and years of emptiness to fall through.

  And then the light on my ceiling fan sucked back into itself.

  I opened my mouth to scream but before I could the bulb flashed back, dying, bathing the room in its fast blue light.

  Standing at the end of my bed was the lampshade boy.

  I straightened my legs, pushed back, away from him, and my phone rang. It was the single loudest thing ever.

  I fumbled it up before its ringer could split the world in two, slammed it to the side of my head and, in her sleep voice, my mom asked if I’d been calling her, if I needed anything, where was I?

  I tried to say something, to tell her, to tell her all of it, but, in the glow of my laptop screen, in the light from my phone, the room was empty again.

  For now.

  The Coming of Night

  At first you might consider them your competition, but as the week unfolds, they will more than likely become your last resort.

  And you’re not even certain they’re real, is the thing.

  But isn’t that always the case?

  Example: at the second bar, you noticed her because the bartender was ignoring her with the exact same level of contempt he was ignoring you. Because you were each nursing your drinks, trying to make them last. Using them in the same way a duck hunter might use a blind: to hide behind; to blend in. To go unnoticed.

  Did she notice you as well, though?

  You have to allow that. Underestimating your opposition, that’s a thing you only ever get to do once.

  So, though it made you physically ill, made you lurch to the bathroom, risk losing the thread of the night altogether, you ordered another drink, and another after that, and downed them in neat succession—not like you haven’t made sacrifices before—even set the tumblers back onto the bar harder than necessary, to be sure she would tune in to your display.

  Of course she couldn’t be bothered.

  But, if you were her, then you would feign the same nonchalance, wouldn’t you?

  It’s complicated, being you.

  Hypervigilance and indifference are two sides of the same coin, yet you have to show both at once. Sometimes while spilling yourself into a crusty public commode.

  But nobody said it was going to be easy.

  Wedge your foot against the bathroom door and clean the vomit from your lips, now, check your face from every angle to be sure. Maybe a linger a touch, sure.

  You’re anybody. You’re everybody.

  Don’t smile, though. Not now, not this deep into it.

  You knew better than to come out tonight, of course, in a city you know only by name, a convention destination you hadn’t even planned on, but doing what you know you shouldn’t, it makes your chest swell with satisfaction, too.

  It’s not impulse overriding fear—you’re not that base—it’s commitment asserting itself, it’s recognizing your own hesitation as timidity, which would be even more base to submit to.

  Walking back into the din and rush of the bar, nobody can see the grin that almost ghosts the corners of your mouth up.

  You track her in the mirror as she tracks your progress back to your seat, and you’re tempted to drop a nod her way, just to see how she curls her lips, or if she doesn’t, but then her eyes do a thing you weren’t expecting: they give an irritated flick to the opposite corner, by the fire door.

  Seriously?

  No.

  You’ve got to look, though.

  Forty-eight seconds later (count them out on your cocktail napkin), you turn to the sound of a fan belt screeching in the street like a dying bird, and take in that dark corner. That corner she didn’t mean to give away.

  A man. Just as nondescript as you.

  His drink is watery, old.

  You twist your seat back around, your eyes hot with possibility: her plan, then, it’s—it’s not to take him back to his place, slip him a pill, do a little late-night shopping. Pretend she’s the lady of the house for a few hours. Watch his chest rise and fall, a cloth napkin draped across his face so she won’t have to keep seeing him. Maybe stage a photo opportunity or two.

  This is something else.

  And—you see it, and now that you do, how did you miss it?

  The bridge of her nose, her profile in the mirror. She’s like a Picasso painting, has probably been told all her life that she has a classic grace. Which is another way of saying that the bridge of her nose, it’s like the spinal crest you’ve seen on dinosaurs, in artists’ recreations: instead of forming a saddle, it’s a straight line up to the forehead, a clean ridge of flesh. A Roman nose, one that fills out the hollow spaces of a Centurion helmet.

  And the man in the corner, covering the exit, he has it as well. Meaning that when he looks back at you, it’s straight-on, as his inner peripheral vision is next to nothing.

  Brother and sister? Either that or—either that or it’s happening. They’re coming for you, they’re slinking into every background, are going to replace the crowd around you one by one, until you’re surrounded.

  Because they know. They’re leaking in from, from—

  No.

  It makes your heart slap the inside of your chest, makes your throat dry, but no.

  And don’t let it show. Never let it show.

  They’re just a couple of freaks. A pair of coincidences who maybe know each other in some way. If you study hard enough, you can probably find two different people in the bar with lips that match, with earlobes from the same genetic strain, with the same college on their diplomas.

  Cycle down, cycle down.

  Curl back over your drink as if it’s why you’re here, and, two seats down, your skinny man, your stick man, your man with the nicotine-stained fingers and the raspy breath, let him rattle the leftover ice from his scotch into his mouth, crunch it harshly enough between his teeth that you have to cringe, try to swallow that sound away.

  If you weren’t already committed to him, then that would have decided it for you, yes.

  Certain people, they need your services. They’re asking for them.

  Who are you to deny them?

  As for this ‘Stick Man,’ it’s a temporary name, of course. Like always. But you have to call him something. And it does fit. Unlike his billowy jacket. Unlike what looks like his father’s pants, pilfered from another decade. His hands always opening and closing, as if he’s used to wearing thick gloves, is luxuriating in the tactile sensations of this world. It’s his eyes that initially got your attention, though. How they’re hollowed out with fear, like he saw himself in the three-way mirror at some department store, fled directly here to drown his sorrow.

  Don’t smile.

  This Stick Man, though—do it right, you could fold him into a canvas bag, probably. Sling him over your shoulder. Go gallivanting through the wet streets, his large jacket over your own.

  Then take him back to your room, dig in, see if it’s pharmaceuticals or marathons eating all his fat for him.


  It’s not that you’re jealous—of his emaciation?—it’s just that you need to know, that you won’t be able to sleep until you do. And he wants to tell you. He really really does, with every last fiber of his being. He wouldn’t be here like this otherwise.

  His eventual answer—you know this just as surely as you know the sun will smolder up in the morning—what he’ll tell you in not so many words after all the running and screaming, the praying and pleading, it won’t be true or false, it won’t be multiple choice. It’ll be the very distinct sound of a high-temper blade scraping up along the long bone of his thigh, his lips and tongue already macerated, his lone eye roving to your briefcase, open on the hotel bed.

  What dark instruments glitter up from that cavity?

  None.

  The instrument, it’s you.

  Now you can smile.

  If you follow him back to the bathroom, where you know there’s an exit door, then do that, and do it properly. If not, then why are you even here?

  ~

  Good. You made it.

  Your room for this is 1807, closest to the stairs. But this is the hotel across the street from the one with your name in the system.

  You’re not stupid, after all.

  Card keys—you can’t bluff them across the registration desk like you can in the movies, but in any bar on any given night there will be purses everywhere, and it’s easy to tell who won’t be returning to their own room. Just watch for the woman laughing the hardest. How her eyes aren’t as open as her mouth.

  The world was made for people like you.

  As for Stick Man, by the time he comes to you’ve already used the heating element from the taken-apart hairdryer to try to melt his lips together, then experimented with the thinner skin of his left eyelid.

  “You should . . . you should let me be,” he manages to say, his one good eye settling on you.

  Say “Be what?” down to him with just a normal, uninterested voice, like you’re working the register of this particular late-night grocery store. Like he’s just another customer to scan past. Into the afterlife.

  He laughs about it as best he can, even going so far as to close his eye, let his head fall back onto the two pillows you’ve provided.

  You’re not a monster, after all.

  Still, his hands are tied, his feet are tied. He’s been stripped, and waxed. And there was the incident with the hair dryer, of course, which, if you had to admit it, you kind of do regret, yes.

  Lean back on the particle-board dresser, feel it insubstantial under you. This whole world is made of cardboard.

  “What are they saying to you?” Stick Man asks, his eyes still closed.

  Bite your cheeks in. Don’t take this bait. This insult.

  Tell him you’re not one of those kind. That you’re not like that. Except say it by not saying anything.

  “Not talking about the, the mommy voices in your head . . . ” he goes on, smiling to himself about it then just staring up at the ceiling. In defeat, yes, but not the kind you want. This defeat, it’s more like he’s just tried explaining calculus to a second-grader.

  There’s no way here in 1807 to test, but he has to be years-deep into some narcotic. There’s no other explanation for his dissociation. No other explanation for his blunt tongue, feeling out the new contours of what’s left of his lips. Not testing for pain, you don’t think, but simply curious at this new development.

  Drugs are what’s starved him down. He’s no runner.

  “Thank you,” he says then, rolling his head to settle you in his eye, “my, my angel of involuntary surgery, my, my—”

  Lower your face-shield before he can finish, so you don’t have to hear.

  Words are worms, can live in your head for years if you let them in.

  So, don’t.

  Just lean over him, get to work.

  In the morning you have to deliver a talk on heating systems for high-traffic first-floor operations like banks and daycares. Your presentation is waiting on your laptop. All the red arrows on the slides, they glow, they pulse with life, they take the audience’s eye deeper into the heat, to the core, and the font you’ve chosen has no shading, is simply precise, direct, though you had to adjust the contrast a bit to work with the unforgiving background, keep the edges from smearing.

  At the end of your fifty minutes there will be the usual round of polite applause, the obligatory question or two, and then you’ll retire to your room for the day to clean under your fingernails, perhaps turn the hotel’s thermostat all the way down and then call the front desk, complain about it. Just to get a warm body knocking on your door, interacting with you, confirming that, yes, you’re still here. And so is everybody else.

  The days after nights like these, you need that confirmation again and again, until the feelings settle and you focus, finally take your first real breath.

  Sawing through Stick Man’s gummy breastbone, the leading point of your saw dulled so as not to puncture the heart sac, you walk your talk through the paces. Mentally click through the slides, leaving the proper pause after each one resolves, so the audience can study its breadth and depth before you pull them into the unwavering lope of your voice.

  Under your blade, Stick Man writhes and screams as he has to, but the pillowcase muffles the most of it, and the rest, what spills past, is just what you expect to hear next door in any hotel.

  Crack the chest open, not pulling your face away from the heat that fogs your face-shield, and then fix one of the hotel’s complimentary pens there, to keep it open. So you can watch the heart glisten down, give up beat by beat. It’s not the best part, not your favorite by far, but you feel a certain obligation to witness it, don’t you?

  As for the teeth, they come out as easy as you’d expect of an addict, some of them wired together in the most antique way—street dentistry?—and the muscles of Stick Man’s thigh aren’t just starved down, they’re limpid, atrophied, sucked dry. His body mass index, it’s got to be in the single digits, if not bottomed out completely. It’s a surprise his organs haven’t stopped working yet.

  What are they saying to you?

  Click: next slide.

  Flay the opaque sheath of connective tissue away from Stick Man’s femur now, scraping the bone delicately, lingering on the feel of that sound through the handle of your knife, then let the blade continue up over the scream-tight skin of the lower abdomen.

  The warmth of his gut rises up, caresses your hand, leaches through your rubber apron as you stare into his blooming pupil, and, for the first time since you started this journey four years ago, the man under your blade’s body shudders with laughter, with gratitude.

  Laugh with him, amplify it back at him to allay your own hesitations, but—your hand, the one that just slit his stomach open.

  That’s not just body heat rising up your wrist, wisping up your sleeve. There’s actual steam.

  Step away, retreat to the bathroom, come back better though it’s hard to be absolutely sure how long you were gone.

  Long enough, it looks like: Stick Man’s dead, the hotel pen leaking blue ink down onto the heart, the ink tracing the veins out for some reason. Like it knows something. Had always known.

  And—if a life bleeds out on a dirty mattress and nobody’s there to witness it, did it really even happen?

  Probably.

  There’s the mess, now, anyway.

  Shake your head in disappointment, in disgust, then step to the bed and pull at the sides of his abdomen hard enough that the skin tears up to the sternum, joins that incision, so that his whole torso is opening, a chrysalis almost, on its own biologic timer.

  Your initial idea, vague but promising—this from a drunk joke Stick Man was trying to tell in the bar, the punch line of which required his whole body—was to massage a section of the intestine until it became elastic enough to stretch over his face like a rubber mask. Just, one with a trunk, twisting down into his own gut.

  It had been an elephant joke
, yes.

  As preparation, you even pocketed a stapler from the desk downstairs, in case the mask slipped.

  Now, though.

  This is getting away from you. It can never get away from you.

  Count to three, count to three again, and reach into Stick Man’s gut, come up with his large intestine, just to see what the source of this heat could even be. Can gut bacteria be exothermic? If he’d been muling drugs and a condom broke, would that produce heat? Is he a bomb, did he have something radioactive implanted in his abdomen?

  None of the above.

  Lift his slick intestine up. Palpate the hard clumps constipated in there, evenly spaced like you can find in a large game animal if you take it unaware, before it can void. But.

  This is too hard. Too regular. The lumps far too large.

  You cough in spite of yourself, reach your other hand out, and deliver up into the light a segment of large intestine with a string of petrified tangerines in it. It looks for all the world like peas in a pod, or—no. You know what it looks like.

  It makes your skin cold.

  Used to, before everything, your mother would take you and your brother to the park in town. And there were those trees there with the leathery seedpods, curled back on themselves like half moons. You and your brother would scream, walking over them on the concrete. The way they crunched. And then you’d always try to steal some away home. And your mother would have to pull over for you to throw them away, and, pulling away, did you always sneak looks back? Because maybe something was already growing there. Maybe something would be. Maybe if you looked hard enough, you could see those first delicate tendrils, reaching out for the soil.

  This is what Stick Man’s large intestines remind you of.

  Your brother on the merry-go-round, his head slung back in joy, your mother across all the wood chips, reading her magazine like there’s going to be a test.

  What might grow from this pod, though?

  Your jaw moves, opening your mouth two times, three times. In the most primal joy you’ve ever lucked onto. No words, no sounds, just a pleasure at the very center of your being, radiating out to your fingernails so you have to snap over and over to keep it in.