Shamus liked the squirrel picture. He took it down and loaded it into the back of the van.
18
THE PAIN WOKE him up. A searing throb of raw nerves emanating from the center of his body and radiating outward in all directions. He couldn’t feel his legs or his fingers or even the dryness in his throat. It was all just pain. Pure, crystalline, undeniable.
Miro’s eyes blinked open; the world looking gauzy, like his brain had been replaced by cotton fluff. He blinked again and his vision ratcheted into focus. A young guy was sitting in a chair next to his bed, reading a book or something in the dim sunlight that filtered through the curtains; some doofus wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and a retarded clip-on tie. A fresh-faced teen with a military haircut.
The kid jumped out of his chair.
“He’s awake.”
There might’ve been some commotion. The light in the room shifted. Maybe the door opened and someone entered. The kid stepped closer; he was grinning like a salesman, like some kind of freak.
“I’ve been praying for you.”
His words didn’t compute in Miro’s brain. Praying? It didn’t make any sense. Miro fell back on a default response. The same thing he would’ve said to a Hare Krishna in an airport, a rabbi at the Wailing Wall, or the pope at the Vatican. He moved his dry, chapped lips and wheezed out two profound words. His first words since his flirtation with death.
“Fuck off.”
Then his eyes closed and he was out. Swallowed up in the gray waves of freshly administered narcotics and a deep desire to sleep.
…
Any idea who did it?”
Miro looked up from his hospital bed; it had been a day since he found the Mormon in his room and he was now sitting up, able to talk and consume some of the lukewarm nutrients the hospital provided. He saw a pair of detectives standing in the doorway flashing their badges, looking dour.
“I’m Detective Cho; this is Detective Quijano. We’re with the LAPD.”
Then, as if to clarify something, he added, “northeast division.”
Miro squinted at the two men. One of them seemed familiar: the big Asian guy with his shaved head and mustache, he was the guy with the coffee breath who’d talked to him after he’d gotten shot. That was Cho. The other detective, Quijano, a youngish Latino guy, was eating a carrot stick and reading a text message on his cell phone.
“I don’t know who did it.”
Cho took out a notepad while Quijano pocketed his cell phone and leaned against the door frame. Quijano chomped the carrot stick and then pointed to Miro’s chest.
“The doc said the bullet hit you just right; another inch to the side it would’ve nailed your heart, an inch to the left it would’ve severed your spine. You’d be dead or you’d be fishin’ your shit out of a baggie for the rest of your life. You’re a lucky man. You know that?”
Why is it that the police make you feel like you did something wrong, like you deserved the crime that happened to you? The police have a funny understanding of karma.
Quijano took another carrot stick out of a small plastic baggie and resumed chomping. His posture reminded Miro of a famous cartoon rabbit.
“I would’ve been luckier if the bullet had missed.”
Quijano grimaced as if someone had stepped on his toe. He apparently didn’t appreciate a snappy comeback.
“I guess whoever took a shot at you is gonna want to come back and finish the job. You better start wearin’ a vest, numbnuts.”
Miro scowled; he didn’t like being called numbnuts, even if, at present, he couldn’t feel that part of his body.
Cho pulled up a chair. He had a different Hawaiian shirt on than last time; this one had elephants and palm trees patterned all over it. Miro had a momentary flash of paranoia. Elephants? Does he know?
“Of course you know who’s behind this. You know you know, and I know you know, and the last thing I want is for you to go all gangbanger on me and try to get revenge on the guy who did this to you.”
While it was true Miro could make an educated guess as to why someone had tried to kill him—the drug business being a somewhat notoriously cutthroat field—he honestly didn’t know who was behind it.
“Do I look like the gangbangin’ type?”
The detective stared at him, appraising him as if trying to gauge his potential for violent retribution, his capacity for vendetta.
“Do you know why you were shot?”
Miro shrugged, instantly wincing in pain as he realized that even the slightest movements caused an unpleasant shifting of nerves and tissue in his body.
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The detective sighed and sat back in his chair. He brushed his fingers over his mustache.
“Don’t be a dick, Miro. You think you can fix this? People want you dead. And I know why they want you dead.”
Miro looked at the detective and blinked.
“Why?”
Miro watched as Cho folded up his notepad.
“I’m an amateur astrophysicist. I know, it’s strange for a cop to be into that but, you know, I’m an interested person.”
Cho sat there, waiting for it to sink in but all Miro could think was that it was totally weird for there to be an astrophysicist detective.
“What do you know about string theory?”
Miro realized that he wasn’t really sure what was going on. Was it the drugs in his IV? Was he dreaming? He could tell he was in a kind of high-tech hospital room. The lights were muted and there were a lot of blinking, beeping monitors around. Miro felt the needle in his hand; he could see the clear plastic tube rising up into the air and connecting to the saline drip. There was some oxygen feeding into his nose through a looping tube, and little adhesive disks stuck to his chest and wired to machines. He could also feel a numb pain gnawing at his torso, like there was a rat stuck inside his body trying to find a way out. He could taste the painkillers and antibiotics in his throat and his breathing was ragged, like a hot half-breath.
It all seemed pretty real. So why was the cop asking weird questions?
“What?”
“String theory. You know? Some nerds figured it out. They took out the assumption that particles are points.”
“Particles look like points to me.”
“But what if they’re not? What if they’re strings?”
Miro didn’t know what to say. The detective smiled and leaned forward.
“Well, I’ll tell you what those nerds said. They said that the strings hook everything together. They unify all the natural forces in the world.”
The big detective took a business card out of his pocket and laid it on the table next to Miro.
“Everything’s connected. There’s a reason you got shot and it’s because you’re up to something. Am I right so far?”
Miro didn’t answer. He watched the big detective in the Hawaiian shirt stand and walk toward the door. He turned and looked at Miro.
“I’m going to find out what it is. Then we’ll have another chat.”
19
RECOVERING FROM a life-threatening bullet wound turned out to be more boring than Miro could ever have imagined. The hospital room was designed to be dull, with its ceiling-bolted television, hotel blinds over the window, and a kind of drab industrial greige-colored paint on the walls. There was a bouquet of cheap flowers and a “Get Well Soon” card from his parents on the table next to his bed and that, as they say, was about it.
There was nothing but noise on the TV and the painkillers wouldn’t let his brain concentrate enough to read a book, so he spent a lot of his day staring at the perforated acoustical tiles on the ceiling above his hospital bed. He quickly discovered that if he stared up without blinking long enough, his eyes would cross and the field of dots would separate and become three-dimensional. Depending on the amount of Demerol and other painkillers in his system, patterns and shapes—sometimes faces—would emerge out of the dots. It was the indoor equ
ivalent of seeing shapes in clouds. Good times.
Sometimes he thought about the scientist in Amsterdam. Marianna. He wondered what she was doing. He wished he’d gotten her phone number or an e-mail address, some way to contact her. But he hadn’t, and he didn’t know why. But he’d think of her and try jacking off, hoping it would give him a few minutes of enjoyment, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. Healing was, apparently, more complicated than you’d think.
Because he was bored, Miro found he not only tolerated the young Mormon’s daily visits, he looked forward to them. Daniel never preached or proselytized. He’d just keep Miro company, read him articles from the newspaper or from magazines left lying around the waiting room; sometimes he’d bring Miro an apple or banana to eat. But mostly he peppered Miro with questions. What’s it like to be with a girl? What does beer taste like? Is coffee really bad for you? How come it’s okay to drink Pepsi and not Coke? At first Miro laughed; he figured most eighteen-year-old boys would already know the answers to these questions, but the more time he spent with Daniel, the happier he was to help him.
…
A nurse, her smock dotted with a patterned print of friendly teddy bears, opened the door.
“Are you up for some visitors?”
“As long as it’s not those cops again.”
The nurse held the door open as Miro’s friends Rupert and Stacey entered the room. Miro smiled at Rupert, who looked like some kind of hobo skate punk with his scruffy beard and ridiculous habit of wearing shirts on top of shirts with a T-shirt on top. Rupert’s girlfriend Stacey was dressed like a thrift store kook, in a vintage 50s sweater set over tight turquoise capri pants and pink Converse sneakers. Her arms were covered in tattoos, as if she’d taken Rupert’s idea of layering to its logical conclusion.
Rupert pulled a chair around and plopped his heavy body into it. Despite years of eating a vegan diet he was still twenty-four pounds overweight—Rupert attributed this to his genetics, but Miro believed the excess poundage had more to do with Rupert’s robust alcohol intake. Rupert tugged at the scruff on his chin and looked at all the tubes going into Miro’s body.
“How’s it goin’ Daddy-O? They give you anything good?”
“The thrill of morphine wears off sooner than you’d think.”
“Can’t they mix it up?”
Miro smiled.
“I’ll ask.”
Miro looked at Stacey, who stood behind Rupert like she was hiding, as if she were afraid a bullet wound could somehow be contagious. She adjusted her thick-rimmed glasses —the kind Italian movie stars made famous in the sixties—and ran a hand through her short, blonde, stylishly asymmetrical hair. She looked at Miro.
“I hate hospitals.”
Miro didn’t care much for hospitals, either. In fact, he’d prefer that he wasn’t in one at all.
“Any news from the outside world?”
“Oh, you know,” Rupert said, “the usual. Bands keep selling out.”
“Who sold out?”
“Giant Rumpus. Silvertone. They all got written up in the Weekly.”
Rupert said this with a disgusted shake of his head. Selling out was one of Rupert’s pet peeves. He believed that whenever a band or an artist attained even a small amount of success they should be immediately repudiated and shunned. In other words, you were cool until you were popular. Then you sucked. Unless, of course, it was Rupert’s band that made it. Then he could change the system from the inside.
Miro smiled.
“Good for them.”
Rupert scratched his beard.
“Art versus commerce, man. Free market triumphalism.”
By “free market triumphalism” Rupert meant that whatever the general public embraced—pop music, gangsta rap, and imitation alternative rock—was, in fact, unadulterated crap. Miro decided to change the subject before Rupert started ranting.
“Did you go by my place?”
Rupert hung his head and looked at the floor.
“Dude, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but your place got trashed.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
“What’s that mean?” Miro looked at him and cocked an eyebrow. Rupert shook his head.
“Don’t expect to get your deposit back.”
Miro groaned. It wasn’t easy to find a place in Los Angeles and he’d lucked out when he’d discovered the tidy little house near the LA river. It was on a quiet street—speed bumps placed every twenty yards enforced that—lined with bungalows and small homes filled with a mix of working class families, retirees, and hipsters searching for cheap digs. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a modest tract home built during the boom of the late forties, but it had a patio and a little garden in the back. Miro had been slowly furnishing it with cool fifties furniture that he found at various junk shops around town. He wanted to give his home a Palm Springs vibe, a cocktail sophistication.
“What about the glass jars?”
Rupert shook his head.
“The seeds are gone, dude.”
Miro blinked. He’d almost expected it. But the systematic trashing of his home confirmed his worst fears. Like Detective Cho had said, the bullet wasn’t random, it was an assassination attempt; and somebody had stolen the Elephant Crush.
Miro wondered if any of the past winners of the Cannabis Cup had ever been shot at or killed. What if this was just one of those things the Cup committee didn’t tell you about?
“Fuck.”
Miro realized that while “fuck” was the best possible word to use, it was also a bit of an understatement. He’d invested almost all of his money in developing and growing the Elephant Crush and what little he had remaining he’d spent on the trip to Amsterdam. He’d been planning to recoup his investment when he sold the seeds. He did a quick calculation in his head and realized he only had a couple thousand bucks in his bank account. And even with his catastrophic-coverage health insurance plan, he’d be on the hook for thousands of dollars in hospital costs. He was broke. He tried the word again. This time putting a new emphasis on it.
“Fuck.”
Rupert tried to cheer him up.
“I saved some of your clothes. I got ’em at my house.”
“What about the furniture?”
“They trashed everything. Sliced your couch. Broke your chairs up. Even smashed the toilet.“
“They broke the toilet?”
“Like with a hammer, man.”
Miro sighed. “Fuck.”
Rupert shot a look at Stacey, then turned to Miro.
“You can always crash at our place.”
“Thanks. But my parents want me to stay with them while I recoup. I think I’ll go up there and lay low.”
“You think you’ll be up for Coachella this year?”
Miro shrugged. Normally the three-day music festival in the desert was the highlight of his year. This was not a typical year.
“You never know.”
“I’m really glad you’re not dead, man.”
It got quiet in the room. Miro didn’t know what he should say. He was glad he wasn’t dead, too, but that seemed like an obvious sentiment. One of the machines made a beep. Stacey finally broke the silence.
“I got a new tattoo.”
This was not a surprise. Stacey got a new tattoo almost every month. In fact, she was either bandaged or scabby so often that she’d had to quit her job at a restaurant—apparently even customers in Los Angeles could only take so much open wound with their lunch—and lately she’d been working as a cashier at the local Whole Foods grocery store.
“Do you want to see it?”
Miro lied. “Of course.”
Stacey walked close to Miro’s bed, but not close enough to where there could be actual contact, turned around, and lifted her shirt. Sure enough, running along her lower back—just above her waistband—was a beautifully rendered, though still slightly raw, tattoo of a dozen teeny frolicking pug dogs chasing each other, sniffing the grou
nd, playing leapfrog, and generally gamboling across her back.
“Pugs?”
“We had pugs when I was little.”
Miro squinted. He thought it might be the drugs, but looking closely, he noticed that one of the dogs was different than the others.
“This one’s taking a shit.”
Stacey laughed.
“Isn’t she cute?”
20
DANIEL SAT ON his bed eating a carnitas burrito he’d picked up from a nearby taco truck. The burritos he got in Los Angeles weren’t anything like the ones he’d eaten in Idaho. These were simpler, spicier, and tastier. There was no sour cream, diced tomatoes, lettuce, or shredded cheddar. LA burritos were intense.
He was tired. The trek from his apartment to the hospital was one long uphill slog on his bike. The ride back, a breakneck downhill race through traffic, was nerve-wracking. He’d arrive home smelly, exhausted, and rattled from a series of near misses with minivans piloted by soccer moms who blindly careened through the streets, yakking on their cellphones while their kids played video games in the backseat. Like they’d somehow managed to put wheels on a family room and turn it into a murderous steel rectangle.
Then there was the mental exhaustion. He was at a loss; he honestly didn’t know what to do. Ever since his partner’s nervous breakdown Daniel had found himself at loose ends. No one from the LDS told him what to do, where to go, or what would happen next. There was no news of a replacement for Elder Collison, no word of a new assignment, nothing. Daniel had called a few times, checking in and trying to figure out what the plan was but they always put him off. They were working on it. They’d let him know.
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