You snip the intestine at both ends, tie them off with thin strips of bed sheet, and, because you know this is larceny of the highest order, that this is plundering the past, smuggling it into the present, you clean yourself up in the bathroom, doing a poor job of it but there’s no time, there’s no time.
After policing the room a second time, kissing Stick Man on the forehead in thanks then wiping those lip prints away, tuck this section of intestine up your sleeve as best you can, count to three before stepping out the door, into the hall that opens back onto the world, then go back, hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob.
If you take the stairs, now, then there’s the chance a seed will slip out your sleeve on the long way down, crack open on a step, so don’t do that. Please, you have to save them, you have to keep them safe. Instead take the elevator, your reflection in all four walls around you, taunting you.
Don’t listen to them.
You’ve got what matters.
Click: next slide.
~
Thirty-two sales engineers show up for the nine o’clock panel. Bleary-eyed, balancing coffee before them, their name badges askew, pockets lined with business cards.
As there was no eight o’clock panel, show up twenty minutes early, to double-check connectivity, make sure the projector’s bulb heats up, and—this is important—re-space the chairs throughout the room, giving the attendees slightly more leg space. As if they’re flying business class for this, not coach.
It’s the kind of thing that can make a presentation a more pleasant memory, and that kind of unacknowledged comfort tends to associate itself over time with the content of the presentation itself, which can then lead to favoring one process or product over another. Selling air conditioners and heating units, you need every advantage.
There was a time in your life when you would have seen such preparation as insurance, as fallback, as hedging against your own abilities—as gambling against yourself, expecting to fail. But then you realized the obvious: everybody sitting out there, they were all marionettes. That just because you knew where their strings were, and how to manipulate them, that should in no way reflect poorly on you.
Now greet them with an aside—start twice, pretending to ask for their attention rather than owning it whenever you want—an aside not about air circulation at all, but about how you’re lobbying for Vegas next year. And for no panels before lunch. Then toast them with the public coffee you’ve yet to drink from.
A few stray claps and a chuckle or two are your cue to casually stab a finger down to the keyboard of your laptop, the lights dimming, and now you’re rolling, reciting, illustrating the slides with your words, using your laser pointer to underline, to circle, your voice a metronome, an antique pocket watch swaying back and forth, back and forth.
If you started at the back of the room and went one by one, you could cut all these people’s necks open, moving up row by row, speaking the whole while, clicking the slides with the remote held between your teeth. Just plant your left hand on their clammy foreheads, slip the blade across their tracheas then pull it across two more inches, for their weak spouts of blood.
But not today.
Click, click, bank, daycare, statistic, time of day, draw a red line from this door to that counter, then—what?
Polite laughter from the front row.
A giant moth is fluttering against the screen. Trained on an older generation of projector, your hand reaches down, brushes at your laptop screen.
And now there’s two moths in high definition.
Pocket your laser so they won’t see your hand, balled into a fist.
Is it even the right season for moths? Shouldn’t they still be pupating in dark corners, under moldy leaves?
You step into the light, try to sweep the two moths away from the hot glass in front of the projector’s bulb.
Instead of sweeping, the moths smear, the blood black and lumpy, darkening the room even more.
Study the back of your hand. Turn it over to check the palm.
Working from the old wives’ tale that it would be poison, you have of course collected the silt-fine dust from the backs of scores of moths, smeared them on the pink, fragile gumlines of people tied to chairs.
But you’d let those moths go, too, if not the people. Meaning they should have no grievance against you. The moths. They should have no call to interrupt your presentation like this. They’ve got no stake, no commission on the line.
Still.
One lands on the hand you’re studying, its delicate proboscis tasting the microchasm between your cuticle and fingernail.
Another lands on your tie.
You pinch it away by the wing, fully intending to let it flutter away, but, like the others, it’s soft, not formed properly yet. You have to flick it away. Onto the forehead of a pantsuited woman in the front row, who reels back, clawing at her face.
Reach for her as if to help, to apologize, but don’t touch.
There’s blood on your hands, see.
And then, behind you—turn, look, take it in, you’ll never see this again—the projector screen, it’s crawling with moths. It’s a black and white science fiction movie from the fifties. It’s the apocalypse.
Worse—no no no: your briefcase. It’s coated with wings, now. The moths’ hundreds of feelers surely dialing the brass spinners of the combination lock, trying to luck onto what used to be your brother’s birthday. A series of numbers your mom probably can’t even remember without having to concentrate.
But these moths, they know.
Inside that briefcase, because you couldn’t bear to leave it up in your room for the cleaning woman to scream over, is the lumpy section of Stick Man’s large intestine, rubbed with complimentary lotion to keep it from cracking.
What you have now, it’s a dilemma, isn’t it?
Think of it as a chance to prove yourself, though. That’s all everything is.
Go through it blow by blow.
You can rescue the woman in the front row from her own hysterics, and in the process take a sort of responsibility for this infestation, when everybody knows it can’t possibly be your fault.
Score one for the good guys.
But then too you can neatly unplug the projector and laptop and lock the door, dispose of the witnesses. It’s something you’ve always wondered about anyway. What it might be like to get dropped into a barrel of sheep, then turn the lights off so that all that’s left for a flash would be your smile.
Then there’d be the mess, though. The explanations. Being the sole survivor. Probably having to suffer some self-inflicted nearly-mortal wound you’d then have to recover from for months, limiting your travels.
You could do it, of course, and do it well—like you always say: sacrifices—but, in some jam-up years down the road, if the authorities scrolled back to this, then that’d be a strike against you, wouldn’t it? At a time when you might need no strikes at all.
Another option is just reaching for that briefcase, scores of tiny bodies wriggling between your palm and the leather handle. And then not wriggling.
Simplest is always best, isn’t it?
But not yet.
First, close your laptop, wincing from the wet resistance that almost keeps it from clicking all the way shut.
Next, standing in the light so that your face is underlit like this is a scary story told at a campfire, say it, the only thing that can work as an exit line: “They don’t have moths in Vegas, do they?”
Now, now collect your laptop, tuck it under your arm, and, working calmly, as if you’d really rather leave it here in the disaster, wipe the moths from your briefcase handle and pull it up, shake it once, dislodging what you can of this morning’s disaster.
Some of the moths will fall to the low-rise institutional carpet, but the bulk of them will find their wings, flutter up into the projector’s light.
In that mild panic that’s soon to dissolve to embarrassed laughter—they’re just m
oths—slip out. Keep going, your pace unhurried, your lips pleasant.
Your eyes, though.
Some things even you can’t help.
~
Because the cleaning lady’s still in your room, judging you, using scotch tape to capture any hairs you’ve left, her apron lined with evidence baggies—all cleaning staff is like this—retreat to the parking garage. Take the stairwell up into the sky.
The moths don’t follow.
If they found you by scent, then there’s too much out here. Or maybe their eyes aren’t ready for the sun.
Check your briefcase now, yes.
Spin to that magic date, pop it open in your lap.
They’re still there. Just the same, the internal fabric seams of the briefcase caulked with children’s glue—all they had at the store down the way. And these eggs, these seeds, they’re glistening and regular in their sausage sheath. Dab at a fleck of the lotion. Caress it in deeper. Watch it disappear under your finger, a missive from you to them: it’s okay, it’s okay.
Take your heartbeat down, now. Let yourself rest, go cold at the extremities, calm at the center. Picture the cleaning lady’s head in the paper bag of her vacuum cleaner, looking out through the zipped-open birthing slot. Hide the rest of her in the dresser drawers. Fold her between the pages of the directory, alphabetized in a way the next cleaning lady will recognize. Force her through the grate of the heater. Call her kids so they can hear her not say anything anymore ever again. Call Thomas so he can whisper to her.
Your brother, yes.
He would know what to say to her, wouldn’t he?
It’s because of where he lives now.
There’s a different language, there. You know there has to be. One that goes directly to the spine. To the tight muscles at the base of the jaw. To the heart that’s deeper than your real heart.
Thomas.
It’s okay, nobody’s up here, and you’ve already rolled the briefcase’s lock to random numbers, so, if you die right here and now, of happiness, nobody will know what you were thinking when it happened.
What are they saying to you? Stick Man had asked.
Fuck him.
He didn’t know anything, didn’t know that you always tried to protect him, Thomas. Not because of blood, but because people said you looked alike. But you knew better, were already studying him then. How he only had a few of your features, like he got the leftovers in your mom’s stomach, wasn’t as prime a specimen. Or, like you’d taken all the good, didn’t know anybody else was coming through. So, you were always making it up to him, day by day. Apologizing that he didn’t come out right. As right as you did, anyway. As pure.
It was the least you could do.
But you had to sleep at some point, didn’t you?
Back then you did, anyway.
And that was when it happened.
He didn’t run away because he was petulant or ill-behaved or a miscreant, though, like your mom would say to the police later. It wasn’t even the right park. Didn’t they know anything? Weren’t they the police?
No, the reason he ran away, it had to do with the seed pod you’d finally managed to sneak home. She found it under Thomas’s pillow, the most obvious place, but he was just a kid, too. Had probably meant it as some sort of trade for the Tooth Fairy. Or left it there just so he could sneak touches up to it all night. Whisper secrets to it. Make promises. Lick it clean when nobody was looking.
But she found it like she always did, like she could detect each flake of skin in the house, each mote of dust, each bad thought, and she marched the two of you out front to dispose of it in the trash can, to lecture you about cleanliness and foreign bodies and little stealers, each of you in your underwear.
And you didn’t punch him for sneaking your pod from your secret box in the closet. But you might have broken your own rules and pinched him as if he were your equal, as if he had the faculties to control himself, wasn’t just falling victim to being put together from pieces that hadn’t been good enough for you.
And he didn’t tell on you for the pinching, that was the thing. He loved you too much to get you in trouble. Or, he knew he deserved it, was probably pinching himself under the covers as well.
What he did to make up for it, then, it probably made perfect sense in his head. To his way of thinking. After lights out eyes shut, he creaked his way to the front door, let himself out into the night, to get you another seed pod. He left to somehow walk all those miles to the park, come back with an impossible prize.
And that’s where they found his light blue windbreaker with the darker blue tiger stripes on the side like ribs: at the top of the slide at the park. The wrong park. The one just down the street, not all the way across town.
How old he was, he probably didn’t even understand that there was more than one park in the world.
The jacket was hanging on the tallest pole, a flag. Up where Thomas couldn’t have even reached, and why would he have taken his jacket off in the first place? To sit on it to make the slide faster, maybe, or to keep the dew from his jeans. But not because he was hot. It never broke fifty degrees that night.
No, that jacket, there. They were supposed to find it.
This language, these signs, they already came so naturally to you, didn’t they? You knew the fundaments of this life already. The real way of speaking. The only way that matters.
What you didn’t tell the police was that the jacket was supposed to make it look like Thomas had climbed the ladder in the dark, sat down to ride through that brief tunnel, then never made it out the other side. Like the night had just gulped once, swallowed him whole.
Which is exactly what it did.
Which was so much better than knowing, than finding, than seeing pictures. Because then you got to imagine. In high detail. Every time you closed your eyes. A thousand sordid lives for Thom to live out. To be pushed headfirst through, screaming the whole while. But the more variations you could think of, then the longer he was alive, right? And being alive’s better. Being alive’s the best.
It wasn’t easy, thinking of all that all the time, but it’s not like your mom was going to do it.
And it’s all been worth it, too. Now—after all this time, you’ve finally cut deep enough into the world that it had to give up one of its secrets. One of its most dear secrets.
Thank you.
~
By the time you cue into the footsteps approaching behind you, the footsteps that don’t care if you hear them, the footsteps that don’t hesitate, that don’t even know hesitation, your hands are of course slick with your own saliva. Because you didn’t have any more hotel lotion to rub into Stick Man’s intestines.
Just close the briefcase like you’re filing a paper, though.
Don’t wipe your hands on the concrete, because that’ll leave a dark smear.
And, most important, don’t run, never run, running is a temporary solution, but don’t come up fast either, leading with the edge of your briefcase. Though you could. You definitely could. And who would know.
The footsteps scrape to a stop behind you. Waiting.
Smile to yourself because they don’t know anything.
The shadows falling to either side of you are one blocky male, one tall female. Man, woman, and, between, your own sitting shadow, like a child.
Not for long, though.
Look to your right sharply, as if to the sound of a door closing, a car only your keen senses can detect, but keep your eyes on the silhouette those two faces can’t help but cut, what with the sun still low, coming in at a harsh angle.
Like you were dreading, two classical profiles look to their right with you to that make-believe sound. Two Roman Centurions, on guard.
And you, you’re just a businessman, of course, a representative for your company, up for some fresh air, some sun, some distance from this debacle of a presentation you just tried to lead. Some space to mourn all the sales you just lost, all the commission you were counting
on.
And your hands, they’re almost dry, now. Just tacky.
Don’t smell them. Maybe just a little, to be sure.
The man coughs into his hand, announcing himself like a butler. The woman’s still looking to the right. As if seeing something there after all.
Or else she’s trying to get you to look that way again as well.
“Shit, I forgot to turn the projector off—” you say with a startled grin, standing and facing them in one casual, non-threatening move.
They just stare down at you.
You’re tall, but they have maybe four inches on you—even the woman, as if the only real difference between the two of them is their sex. If that. Their haircuts, anyway. Their clothes.
And there’s that direct way they have of settling you in their line of sight, their eyes forever separate from each other. Like they’re grazers.
Making you what in relation to them, right?
Don’t grin. Keep it inside. Open and close your hand in anticipation of a possible meet and greet. If your palm sticks to them, then your face will probably stick in their heads as well. And you can’t have that.
But there are ways, of course. To scoop memories out. And a lot else besides. Right now, though, your ‘projector’ is still hanging in the air, the slowest butterfly. But still, they’re waiting.
“You are from the front desk, aren’t you?” you say, switching the briefcase to your other hand.
The woman smiles a tolerant smile here.
“You mean you’re—you’re not with the hotel?” you say. “I’m sorry, I just . . . Downstairs, my meeting room, it was—hardly interesting to you, I’m sure.”
With that, nod once, start to slide by.
Except the man has his long fingers to your bicep, now.
“Scotch, right?” the woman says.
It’s what you were drinking last night. What you still haven’t made up for properly.
And the man’s fingers, even through the sleeve of your suit jacket, they’re cold, they’re marble.
Three Miles Past Page 10