“Don’t listen to them,” the man says to you then, his voice safe like a preacher’s. “You can’t listen to them.”
“I think you’ve got me . . . ” you say, speaking slow to show your honest confusion, feeling your way through the word. Moving around the tall man’s hard fingers one by one. Getting the sun behind you.
“It’s too late,” the woman says to the man, lowering her face to look into your eyes as if you’re a specimen. As if she wants to look through, into your head.
Do they even blink?
“Scotch,” you repeat, turning your face away from her penetrating gaze. From the individual fibers of her iris, which were—but they couldn’t have been—in motion. Crawling.
What you want to do here, it’s run for the edge of the parking garage, that thick half wall before all that open space, and dive out, wait for a pillow of moth bodies to cushion itself under you, take you with them.
At least until you catch a moth fluttering from the man’s crisp sleeve.
He sees you take note of this. Cups his other hand over his offending wrist. A groomsman, just waiting for this ceremony to complete itself.
You too.
If you scratch at his face now, to see if there’s blood under there or dusty wings, then that’ll leave the woman behind you, where she could potentially grab the briefcase, run off with Thomas. Or just drop him. Or raise him as her own, but with a different name, which would be the most sincere type of violence you can even begin to imagine.
So.
What real choice do you have, right?
It’s ugly, but let yourself be led between them and only look back once, as the three of you are ducking into the fetid stairwell, its steps tacky like your hands. You know from the walk up, how it was like the stairs were soft, were a cushion, were something you could step into up to your knee if you weren’t careful.
But you made it to the top. You always do.
And it’s not over yet, this ceremony.
Two buildings over there’s a piece of cloth tied to an antenna, fluttering once in the wind then lying slack. Part of you must have noticed it early, lodged it in your head for precisely this opportunity.
What you need to do, now, it’s watch that flag long enough that it keeps you from taking the next step down, the step that will jack the half wall up between you and it. Long enough that the man will look back to it as well, trying to parse his way through that distant language. Long enough that the woman will catch his urgency and step back up herself, to look over the wall, see this artifact for herself.
While they’re distracted, and while they’re at ease, are just two of three reasonable people heading downstairs for the bar, for reasonable conversation, whip your belt from its loops, wrap it around the man’s neck and keep him between you and the woman.
His legs, kicking and spasming, will help. It’s what you imagine strangling a stork might be like. When his hands claw up, too, it’s not at his own neck, but back farther, for you, like he doesn’t understand what’s happening here.
Some people are born to die.
After he’s gone, let him drop, toss her the guilty belt so she has to flinch her left arm up for it.
With her side exposed like that, come up with the corner of the briefcase, feel her ribs crunch into her right lung, then follow her down, open her face on the metal-lipped corner of the concrete stair, then open it some more, then push with your knee to be sure, her scream, if she could scream, directed straight into the concrete.
It’s quiet now, isn’t it? Except for your breathing. But you can control that.
Scan the roof for the cameras you already know aren’t there—breathe, breathe—and then, for the benefit of anybody watching from the building across the street, their view obscured by the half wall, keep talking to this man and this woman as you switchback down the stairwell, ready to turn on a dime if footsteps are coming up to meet you.
When they do, let them pass you on what looks to them like your way up, become just another businessman ducked down to his cellphone.
It’s a couple, good.
Let them find the bodies, ring the alarm.
By then you’re across the skywalk, are moving briskly through the lobby, smiling your way into a handshake with a lanky man from the second row of your presentation. Leave him with a business card from your left pocket, which is where you put cards you’ve collected, then offer to pick up the dry-cleaning on his tie, which he’ll of course wave away, because that obligates him.
Keep your real name in your right pocket, though.
Then, after taking the elevator up, take it back down, insist on a different room on a different floor.
If you elect to sit in your room and wait for the sirens, watch the scene unfold on the local news, then you might want to order lunch before the rush. Something vegetarian, say, and tip well, salute the kid back down the hall, into the rest of his life.
But you are who you are, of course.
Instead of ordering in, go over the cleaned room with your clear tape, to see what traps and indicators this other cleaning lady’s left, then pack a towel behind the heating grate, turn the shower on for sound and open your briefcase on the second bed, holding your breath until the lock pops.
All six of them are there, leathery and brown in their intestinal pod, but one of them is crowning, is nudging its way from a newly ruptured end. Ruptured from the impact, you know. From her. From them.
It’ll make your shoulders shake, your throat catch, your mouth open and close again.
Turn off the lights.
Ride it out.
~
Your dreams are the usual dreams.
Don’t worry about them.
Walk naked to the curtains pulled across your wide wide window.
Slide those curtains open and then, when they’re still not open, look to the octagonal stick in your hand, to make sure it’s actually connected to the rail. Then wipe at the dark glass.
It squeaks, is cold.
A lazy triangle of light opens up under your palm.
Moths.
And, because this is the outside, butterflies as well. Probably bats circling the hotel, waiting for the feast.
Don’t call the front desk to tell them. Or, do, but then don’t say anything. See if they can hear those legs out there, clinging to the glass.
They can’t.
Turn on the news. Promise to remember to remind yourself to eat something.
It’s six o’clock already, somehow.
You’re losing time. It’s a bad sign.
Since the bar last night, when you look back, it’s all a smear. With lumps in it. Six of them.
It’s not supposed to be funny.
And . . . is this how it happens? Are these the last hours before you betray yourself, before you let them come for you? Before you start decaying on the national news?
No.
It’s just a temporary weakness. An understandable hiccup in the usual procession.
It’s not every day you find your baby brother sleeping inside another man.
Because you slept through the sirens from the parking garage, wait for those two distinct faces to show up on the news. Well, wait for them to show up if their Roman-nosed family has been notified.
Smile. You’re alone, nobody can see.
Click to the other station when this one’s just weather, traffic, elections, human interest.
Yes. Two bodies found in the parking garage of a prominent hotel. The usual slurry of emergency vehicles and non-statements. A man, a woman, and, because the authorities need help identifying, sketches of their faces, as photographs would of course offend all the dinner eaters out there.
The man has dark hair, is mid-twenties, and his fiancé, blonde as wheat, she wouldn’t even go five-ten in heels.
Lean forward, try to click deeper, make their faces hold on the screen. Chase them to the other news.
No.
This—this is the couple th
at went up to find the bodies, they’ve got it all wrong.
Turn the thermostat up as high as it will go. Take the towel from the heating grate and leave the grate off, stand there in the blast of warm air. But this shivering, it’s not from the cold, is it? And it’s not from hunger.
Even if—even if that couple did somehow meet their end up there, then still, still, that would mean four bodies, wouldn’t it?
Can they not do math in this town?
Step into your pants, cinch your belt tighter than you need it to be. The shower’s still on, has been. Turn it off, apologize out loud for your forgetfulness. Promise not to let it happen again.
Next, your shirt, your tie, your business face, your hand to the silver knob when there’s a scrape on the door.
No breathing now. Just listening.
Again, the scrape.
Place your fingertips to either side of the peephole and lean forward, peer through even though this has to be a trap of some kind, there has to be a police spike on the end of a battering ram, a spike ready to come through the door for your sternum, a spike to nick your spinal cord on its way past, its lethal tip undamaged by all the damage it’s caused, is causing.
You can’t not look, though.
It’s another eyeball.
Don’t jerk back—flinching is for the weak. Flinching is for whoever’s there, trying to look through.
The bellboy? Did he see you salute, take some sort of adolescent umbrage? The cleaning lady, to see if you’re asleep yet, if she can creep in? The lanky man from the presentation? Did he know that wasn’t your business card, that wasn’t your name?
Think about his nose. Was he one of them?
No. And there’s no them at all. There’s just the news, screwing up. Unless—did she want you to hit her with the briefcase? Could she judge its weight, its contents, by how deep that rounded-brass corner went into her side? Or was it you she was trying to figure out?
No. No no no.
And the iris in the peephole, it’s just normal, striated brown, the pupil drawn down to a point.
And then it jerks away, looks down towards the elevator, that side of his face destroyed—no eye, no lips, no teeth. Anymore.
Stick Man, in all his glory.
Naked, waxed, cracked open. Standing there for all the world to see. Chewing lazily on the pen that colored his heart. Chewing with his gums.
Swallow whatever’s risen in your throat, blink long, then look again.
Nothing. Just your breathing. Maybe the brass rollers on your briefcase’s lock somewhere behind you. They’re creaking. They know what date they want.
If you look through the peephole a third time, here, and see only a different room service boy pushing his cart past, his left hand already shaped like a twenty-percent tip, then rest easy.
If you look through and just see an empty hall, though, well.
Keep looking.
Try not to flinch when the hand cups your shoulder. Pretend you haven’t been waiting for it your whole life.
~
The last thing you remember is the slide.
No. Stupid stupid stupid.
The last thing you remember, it’s that different room-service boy in the hall. How, the peephole approaching your face at an accelerated rate, your head whipping on your neck, that hand driving you forward, how what you thought was that kid, he would never know his own ball-and-socket joint, the one that lets him lean forward like that, push his cart. Walk.
That he’d never know unless someone with patience took the time to show him.
And then your face exploded into the wood of the door, and now you’re staring up at the ceiling.
Naked, check.
Waxed, yes.
Tied at all four points.
The heating register at the top of the wall blowing for all its worth, the room swampy, a jungle.
“Call me Jack if you want,” a voice says from the window.
If you crane your head forward, you can just tease a form out from the shadow of the curtain.
“Thomas?” you say, hopefully.
“Jack,” the man corrects, his words lispy and wrong. “You are a man of the twentieth century, are you not? My child, in a way. More ways than one, really.”
When he turns to face you, to give you his face, he’s Stick Man.
Shudder now.
This is the other end.
You always pictured a slight slit opening up in some forgotten corner, dark fingers pushing through to tear that rip wider, allow your punishment to come surging through, body after body, shadows to embrace you, to rub against you, to whisper into your neck exactly what you’ve always wanted to hear, which would be the end of you: We know who you are. We’ve come to watch. We want to be like you. We’re here forever.
Not interdimensional homicide detectives or unborn children from the future, come back to avenge who should have been their parents, but faceless forms dripping with adoration, watching your every facial tic, so they can mimic, your expressions rippling through all of them like a virus until they crawl inside your mouth, swim in your body, their eyes looking up at you from your own palms until you have to make fists, run and run and run, never stop, your state of panic permanent, no solitude anymore, no death, just a fullness inside, suffocating you.
Except that’s not it at all.
What you’re getting, what you’ve got, it’s your most recent victim, risen to practice on you what he learned from you.
The long muscle close to your femur twitches once.
“Jack,” you say, stalling even though these attempts to dilate the moment, delay the inevitable, they’re always so laughable. So obvious.
Still.
Stick Man nods, steps forward. Angles his mangled head over to better study your naked form.
“As in Whitechapel,” he says, air hissing through where his teeth once were, then he looks towards the moth-dark window.
Jack the Ripper.
Shake your head in disgust.
Does it even count, if the person who finally eviscerates you, if he’s off his rocker, living in some running delusion?
Or, if he’s not even real.
“They always find you,” he says, placing his bloody palm to the glass of the window, the night darkening there, the moths converging. “Them, I mean,” he says, and looks down to the second bed.
To Thomas.
Stick Man grins when you kick and pull against your restraints.
Useless.
“What are they saying to you?” he says, moving his hand across the glass slowly, amused by the moths’ simplicity, it seems. Like dragging shapes in the sand.
“That you were just holding them,” you say. “For me.”
Stick Man nods like that’s about right.
“I was born during your civil war,” he says, boredom in his voice now. “Born with a surgeon’s hands, of course. But that—forget it. They make you last, though, the . . . what are you calling them, the eggs? ‘Thomas?’ I’m guessing that’s somebody you used to—”
Tell him that they’re not eggs.
“Not eggs?” he says, a bloody approximation of a smile trying to form on his ruined face.
Seeds. But don’t say it out loud.
Buck and kick and scream when he goes to the briefcase, though, and, instead of dialing back to the past, he just slams it against the corner of the short bureau.
And again, the contents finally clunking down to the floor.
He looks down to them, counting with his eyes and fingers.
“There were seven when I found them in that whore,” he says, and watches for your reaction. “They were whispering in my head for two days before I found her.”
“They’re just—”
“Shut up! We don’t have long, here. They can’t be outside the body too long. They start to, well. You know. Hatch.”
Now he’s lowering himself for one, bringing it up on his fingertips. “Who are you?” he says to it, then cups it
with both hands, breathes down onto it and closes his one eye.
“The same year I . . . made my discovery, I, well. You know this, of course. I wanted to see what would happen. The keepers showed me how to get them inside, to carry—it was surgery—but you can shit one out if you really want. If you promise to keep it secret. They don’t know that, they think they can only be cut out.”
“They?”
Stick Man studies you for a few seconds then shrugs, lobs the seed onto your gut. You hollow your belly, catch it, hold it. He steps into the bathroom, does something loud, comes back with a large shard of mirror.
“Hey!” he says to the window, “I need a moment here, guys,” and he scoops up another egg, tosses it into the far corner.
The window darkens there, goes clear where Stick Man was standing before. Where he’s standing again.
He looks down and lines the mirror up against whatever he’s seeing.
“See?” he says, trying to tilt the mirror for you as well.
“What?” you say, the mirror bloody now at the edges, everything in it trembling, but, for a flash, a reflection pulls across its surface.
Two pale people, standing guard on the top of the shorter building across the alley. Their faces looking right into the mirror.
Stick Man waves.
“Hitler,” he says, not looking over to you. “He was born nine months after I officially retired. Coincidence?”
He comes back to you for the answer.
When you just stare at him he shrugs, holds the mirror out over like a plate, and drops it.
It shatters over your chest but doesn’t cut you.
He ferrets up a sliver of it.
“Surgery,” he says, grinning, but first collects all the seeds, stacks them on the bed beside you, and—this speaks well for the hotel’s choice in mattress—they don’t collapse, they hold their crude pyramid.
Stick Man likes it, looks down to you.
“It’s you or nobody,” he says, showing his own cracked-open torso. “Somebody used me all up, I mean.” Then he laughs to himself, says, “You’re about to be part of history, did you know that? These eggs, they’re older than the world, man. Passed down from large intestine to large intestine. Lost a hundred times, found a hundred more. I think there were twelve when it all began. That sound about right?”
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