Shoebox Trainwreck

by John Mantooth

  Dominic comes over and grabs me by the scruff of my neck, nearly lifting me out of my seat at the table. I didn’t even know I had a scruff on my neck, but Dominic obviously does.

  “Get down like the rest,” He shoves me hard to the ground, but instead of lying prone like the others, I bounce back to my feet.

  “Leave him, Dominic,” Henry’s deep voice intones. “I would like to see him in my celestial office.”

  “Sure thing,” Dominic says, cracking a big grin that suggests he knows what is about to happen to me and he finds it immensely pleasing.

  Me? I’m scared shitless. I’m going to meet the only God I’ve ever known, and he’s a loser named Henry who gets his kicks watching us squirm.

  On the way back to that dark cubicle that is his celestial office, three thoughts run through my mind. The door to the outside, unlocked, beckoning is one of them. This is followed by a memory, just a flash, from the other day when Dominic had been shouting at us, telling us to face the building and I’d seen something by the corner of the building . . . what had it been? I try hard to pull a picture up, to rewind to that fleeting glimpse, but I can’t. It was too fast. All I can remember is the sensation, the sudden gripping of my insides, a dizzy feeling in my head that whatever it was had mattered.

  The third thought that enters my head on the way to Henry’s idea of heaven is unrelated to the other two. Or . . . maybe it isn’t. I can’t tell. It is the realization that once again, Cecilia had not been among us.

  Surprisingly, the door is unlocked. I walk right in. The room is bare except for a desk with a chair behind it and two chairs in front. The only other item of note is a long black curtain covering the back wall. Cecilia sits in one of the chairs, her legs crossed beneath her pink mini skirt, her hands folded in her lap. Despite this posture, her face tells a different story. Flushed cheeks, damp brow, languid eyes; she’s been fucking Henry again. She looks at me and smiles and starts to speak, maybe to say sorry, maybe something else, when a voice comes from behind a curtain.

  “Please sit, Adam.”

  I laugh, resisting the sudden urge to rush the curtain, peel back the veil and throttle Henry.

  “Would you like to share your laughter with me, Adam?”

  “Not particularly.” I take the seat next to Cecilia and try to look relaxed. Now that I’m here, I can’t decide if I’m afraid or simply amused.

  “My son,” Henry begins, and the curtain billows a little. I wonder if he’s puffing it out for effect. “My son died on the cross for all of you, yesterday. I saved you from the Apocalypse. I fed you.” His voice trembles with emotion. “I love you. Yet. Yet, you both dishonour me. You both choose to rut in the bathroom instead of witness the greatest event in the new history of your lives. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with rutting in the bathroom. That is one of the things I would like you to understand about the new history. The old God? He was a God of rules and of sin. That’s not me. I actually encourage rutting. I need you folks to make babies if this new world is to survive. What I do demand is respect and fear. I demand you kneel when it is time to kneel. Or, if you don’t like it, damnation, the new damnation awaits, ironically, above us now.” The curtains shift, and I can almost picture a little bald man back there chuckling and scratching his ass. Anger boils inside me. I start out of my chair, but Cecilia puts her hand on my arm and I sit back down.

  “Adam, my beloved, Adam,” Henry says. “The door is unlocked. Please, if you would like to join Freddie in eternal damnation, go.”

  Cecilia’s hand tightens on my arm.

  “Well?” Henry says. “What will you do?”

  Long answer: I see myself get up, go into the room where the rest of the idiots are still prone on the floor worshiping a man who doesn’t have the courage to show his face. I tell them this is hell and I hope they’re happy in it. I shout, “I hope you enjoy your reality show!” and dash for the steps, taking them two at a fucking time as I head up to the brown door. I wait, just an instant, just long enough to breathe a good gulp of air, long enough to feel it pour into my lungs. Long enough to know I’ve made the right decision, win, lose, or die. Then I turn the handle and step into a world without precedent, a world where it could all be true or a world where it could all be false. And I am not afraid.

  Short answer: My imagination has balls, but I don’t.

  After we are dismissed, Cecilia and I go back to the others and assume the posture. My rebelliousness is gone, replaced by an apathy so profound I’m not sure I care about anything anymore. If the real God, the one who unfortunately has been as inscrutable as Henry in my own life, deems this to be my fate, then so be it.

  The floor smells like sweat and piss and mildew, and I wonder if it has been cleaned since Ralph used to slide those half-smashed roaches across it. I try to think if I’ve ever seen Dominic with a mop before, and before I know it, I am asleep.

  The dream is a simple one. Me, above ground, on a windswept piece of brown earth. There is nothing. Nothing at all around me except the same dull brown earth, hard packed and unforgiving.

  The world is gone or appears to be. I’m left alone to wander this bleak landscape. But then I see it out of the corner of my left eye, a fleck of contrast, almost blinding in the drabness. I whirl and see a human body. It lays in the unnatural posture of death. I go over to it and am not surprised to see Cecilia, her face serene except for the deep cavities where her eyeballs used to belong.

  I touch her skin, noting the smoothness, the soft texture, like velvet. I touch a strand of hair, moving it over one of the brooding caverns.

  I sit beside her body for a very long time.

  “We need to go now.”

  The wind keeps blowing. It’s something. Better than nothing. And the body. Something about her body doesn’t make sense. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

  “Now, Adam. We have to go, now.”

  Her skin is so new. The eyeballs are gone. Who took them? Her skin is so new, even in death.

  The wind is clawing at me, pulling my shirt tight against my neck.

  “Wake up, damn it.”

  And then I am awake. Eyes open, I see I am still on the floor, but the others have gone. I look up into Cecilia’s face.

  “Your eyes,” I say. “They’re still th—” But I trail off, assimilating the dream with what passes for reality these days. “Never mind,” I add.

  She stares at me, her eyes wide and earnest. She looks lovely. Not just sexy, but pretty, the kind of girl you fall in love with and leave underground shelters to face an apocalypse that may or may not have ever happened with.

  “I know where the masks are. Do you want to go up? We could go look at what you saw. We could maybe learn something about the truth.” She smiles. “You know, reality show or the end of the world. One or the other. Can’t be both.”

  I smile. “Sure it can. If it’s a paradox.”

  She takes my hand and helps me to my feet.

  “What about Henry? And Dominic?”

  “Taken care of. Even the Gods and their henchman must sleep, especially after a bottle of wine and a killer blowjob.”

  She says this last part without the least trace of shame, and I know now her addiction is separate from what we have, like an alcoholic who must get drunk, but still loves his wife. I decide I can deal with her addiction if it means I get to have her love. Besides, if things work out, it could be just the two of us in a new world, far above this godforsaken place. And for the first time, I realize my acceptance—no, my resignation—to the idea that the world is gone, and we are the last. I allow my mind to imagine, in detail, Cecilia and I rediscovering the world, mile by mile. The mountains, the oceans, the sky. I shudder with pleasure as a new possibility strikes me: we would not only rediscover the planet, we would repopulate it. Post-apocalyptic Adam and, er, Cecilia.

  “Comi
ng?” she says. She’s standing at the steps that lead up to the outside world.

  “I’d follow you anywhere,” I say. I am there when I realize it’s true. I really would follow Cecilia anywhere.

  As we prepare to leave the shelter, I say a prayer. Not to Henry’s lame ass. Instead I set my sights higher, to someone or something more ancient than the earth, a master Creator who saw fit to let all us humans loose upon his sublime creation so we could fuck it up and fuck each other and fuck each other up. Perhaps I should be angry at Him for making us like we are. Putting us in a situation where our needs outpace our interests, where sex addicted angels like Cecilia are the nearest some of us will ever get to a prophet or a minister or even a person capable of true love. But I’m not angry. I’m only tense. Wound up with excitement of what could be, of what my life, so fucked up before, might offer around the next bend, outside the shelter, underneath a sky that just might have been made by a real, genuine God who loves us enough to suffer us, whether we be sex addicts or child-murdering pseudogods.

  “It’s a paradox,” I say, talking in a low calm voice that, strangely, is completely representative of the way I feel, despite the possibility the world outside this door is gone and all that exists is the bleak landscape of my dream.

  “What is?” Cecilia asks.

  “I met the false god Henry and an angelslut named Cecilia. And now, I believe in God. You made me realize that. He’s a paradox. Fully man, fully God. Once you’ve got that, everything else seems simple. Kind of like this whole experience being fully terrible and fully wonderful. Kind of like Henry being fully genius and fully insane. A paradox.” I laugh with the joy of it all, thinking how there’s one more paradox I haven’t considered. What if the world is gone? Yeah. That would suck. But what if it’s not? What if the thing I saw is a corpse, but a corpse that has eyes and died some other way than the disease? What if the world is still ticking along just the way it always has, unaware of Henry and his God games? Cecilia won’t stay with me. There’s no way. Out there in the real world, a girl like Cecilia, a sex freak, won’t give me the time of day. I take her hand in mine. I want to leave, but I want to stay; I want the world, but I want it gone, levelled by the eyeball-popping disease and wiped clean. I want to wander the bare, unpopulated earth with Cecilia, but I also want to stay right here in this moment, one hand in hers, the other on the door, a world of possibility on the other side.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asks, as rain begins to fall outside the door. It sounds wonderful, and I wonder if it is cleansing the earth, washing away the disease, the hurt, the addictions. And I wonder if it will cleanse us as well, so no matter what is on the other side, we will be better than we were before.

  “I’m not sure about anything,” I say, “but that’s why we’ve got to do this.”

  She nods. “If the world still exists, I’m going to do you like you’ve never been done before.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  She tightens her hand on mine. “If it doesn’t, I’ll do you in the middle of Times Square.”

  “Slut.”

  “Angelslut. Get it right.”

  “I love you,” I say and open the door.

  Chicken

  I learned about defiance, real defiance, on a school bus. I was seventeen. That was the year I started drinking, the year my mother took my car keys away from me after I came home drunk. She waited until I was sleeping one off and hid them, knowing I wasn’t about to give them to her, nor was I going to stop drinking. Not then. Becoming sober was still decades of misery away.

  So I rode the cheese wagon, morning and afternoons, sitting in the back with a couple of delinquent ninth graders that looked up to me because I told them the sordid details of my life, embellishing most of them to the point of absurdity. And the more I embellished, the more the two boys, Davy and Ty-Ty, wanted to hear.

  I told them that I was on the bus because some drug dealer associated with the Mafia took my car when I told him to fuck off. I told them that I had a sweet deal lined up with a guy who was going to sell me a brand new Dodge Viper. I’d be getting it in a couple of weeks. I told them about my brother, Steve, who worked in the pits at Talladega and how he always got me pussy when I went to visit him. I told them that nobody could tell me what to do, and I meant nobody.

  “What about Champ?” Davy said. I looked up at our bus driver. We called him Champ, and I always assumed it was because he used to box, but perhaps I was wrong. Either way, his big forearms, thick black moustache, and scarred face always gave the impression that he was not one to be crossed. I’d only seen one kid try it since I’d been riding, and he was dealt with swiftly and soundly. Champ threw the bus in park, slung off his seatbelt and stormed back to the boy’s seat. The boy cringed into his seat, terrified.

  “Sure, he can tell me all he wants, but I’m not going to do it.” And then for effect, I added, “I’m not scared of that old man,” while in truth I was mortified at the prospect of crossing him.

  Champ had one rule on the bus—stay in your seat. So it didn’t surprise me when Davy called me on my big mouth.

  “Stand up then,” he said. “Stand up and we’ll see how tough you are.”

  I smirked at the idea. “Why should I? I don’t want to stand up. You and Ty-Ty can pull that pussy stuff, but I’m not bothering with it.”

  Davy snorted like he had blown my cover, but Ty-Ty just kept staring at me, his eyes full of something. Wonder? Disdain? It was hard to tell. It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that something wasn’t right with him.

  I knew I was in danger of losing my audience. I had to act. I jumped up out of my seat and across the aisle at Davy. Grabbing him by his shirt collar, I pulled him face to face with me. “You little shit. You ever mock me again, and I’ll kick your ass all over this bus.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  I slid back into my seat and looked up at Champ. He hadn’t seen. He was coming up on a stop and his attention was focused on the road rather than the rearview mirror. That’s when I noticed that Ty-Ty was still staring at me with that stupid look of his . . . except now maybe I knew what it was. It was a snarl. A clear look of defiance. Maybe in my arrogance I had only assumed that he, like Davy, looked up to me. Now, he seemed much more menacing, and I found myself not wanting to meet his eyes. “Screw both of you,” I said and turned to look at the window.

  For the rest of the ride home that day, I ignored them, though I continued to feel Ty-Ty’s eyes on me. They were like searchlights, covering my skin, making me feel naked and exposed.

  The next day, I had found my bluster again after berating myself for letting some ninth grader get to me. I went straight to the back that afternoon (Ty-Ty and Davy didn’t ride mornings) and settled into my seat. When Davy and Ty-Ty got on, I looked right at Ty-Ty, staring him down hard. Without changing his expression, he stared back, seemingly looking right through my eyes and into the back of my skull where I hid my true self, the one that was afraid. Again, I looked away.

  I worked hard over the next few days to regain my role as hero to them. I told stories about flying private jets, screwing teachers, telling the principal he could go fuck himself. Some of the stories were loosely based on reality, but most were total fabrications, sprung from my mind to my mouth in hot seconds of inspiration.

  “Either of you ever play chicken?” I asked one afternoon.

  “Chicken?” Davy said.

  “Yeah, dumbass, chicken.”

  “How do you play?” Davy said, sitting up.

  “First of all, you need to have a car,” I said. “So you two dipshits won’t be able to play for a few years. But it’s real simple. I used to play it all the time before my car got stolen. All you do is drive right at somebody and fast. No matter what, you keep going. The first car to veer off the road is the chicken.”

  “You used
to play?” Davy said.

  “All the time.”

  “You never had a wreck?”

  “Hell no. Wrecks are for chickens. I never chickened out. See, the game involves a very simple philosophy: make up your mind before you start that no matter what, you won’t chicken out. The other guy always will even if it’s the last minute. Never fails.” I had never played chicken in my life. I’d only seen it in a movie.

  Ty-Ty, who generally said little—how could he, with that scowl plastered to his face—spoke up. “What if the other person makes the same decision?”

  “Huh?”

  “What if the other person playing decides to keep going no matter what, too?”

  “Won’t happen,” I said.

  “It might,” he said. “If I was playing with you it would. We’d collide with each other . . . unless you chickened out.”

  I shot a scowl back at him. “I wouldn’t chicken out.”

  His snarl widened. “Neither would I.”

  The next words that came out of my mouth, I learned over time, to truly regret. Along with regret though I have learned over the years that some mistakes are irreversible.

  “Ty-Ty,” I said, “You wouldn’t even play chicken on this bus.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I would too. But you got to tell me how to play.”

  Before I had a chance to say anything, Davy started in. “Ty-Ty, I bet you won’t stand up.”

  Ty-Ty furrowed his brow. “I ain’t scared.”

  I laughed. “Sure looks like it to me.”