Abnormal Man: A Novel

by Grant Jerkins

  Maybe some coffee. No, you don’t like coffee. Maybe a Diet Coke. And then you remember you are out of cigarettes. You haven’t smoked one in a long time, but you’ve barely noticed. You just keep bumping up. This could be like a cure for smoking. You wonder if doctors are aware of this. Many thousands of lives could be saved. Then you see a display of Tahitian Treat in old-fashioned glass bottles and you didn’t realize they even made that shit anymore. Fuck yeah. You grab one. It’s warm, but fuck it.

  The girl is looking at you. Is she flirting? You smile at her. Your crooked little half smile that you practice in the mirror. It’s pretty cute.

  At the counter you say, “Pack of Marlboro, reds.” Normally you smoke Marlboro Lights, but for some reason you want to impress the girl, so you go for the real deal. And why is she looking at you like that? You throw the fifty on the counter and say, “The rest in gas.” And she pulls out one of those pen things and starts scribbling on the bill and you guess she doesn’t trust you, and you think to yourself that you’ll show that whore what trust is and you realize that sounds like something Chandler would say. And you think about that for a minute, and when you come out of the thought, the girl is gone. Disappeared. Then you look down and there she is behind the counter. And you can’t tell which is a brighter red, her blood or the Tahitian Treat that sprayed everywhere when the bottle shattered against her skull. You must have hit her after all. You lean over the counter and pull the cigarette rack down and pluck out a deck of Marlboro Lights, hard pack. The reds hurt your throat after awhile.

  Your fever is back. You are shivering. You sit in the backseat with your feet propped on the Mossberg shotgun that lies on the floorboard. You hold Boss Hogg’s iPhone in your hands and watch the live video feed from the ocean floor on the other side of the globe. 750,000 barrels of oil per day. Just spewing out of a crack in the earth’s plates. There is no one there to hear it. Just a silent spewing that will never stop until the ocean is poisoned, the food chain wrecked, life as we know it gone forever.

  Every time you look up, you see the back of Frank’s fist leaving his nose. Chandler is humming. Round and Round. Round and Round.

  Dawn has broken and the growing light hurts your eyes. The Eldorado is hurtling at 75 miles per hour down I-85 South toward Atlanta. South is the opposite direction of Canada. You get what you deserve.

  Every once in a while, the car passes under one of those lighted dynamic message signs that give out traffic information in massive glowing yellow letters. Usually the signs tell how many minutes to the next exit, or if there is a closed lane or something. Now the signs are about you:

  AMBER ALERT/LEVI’S CALL

  KIDNAPPED CHILD

  TUNE TO RADIO/TV

  You notice that they just updated the signs to include the Cadillac, its color, and license plate.

  But there are more important things. You watch the oil boil out of the earth. It never stops. Never stops. It is silent at the bottom of the ocean. A mile underwater, you can hear your own heartbeat. Like now, silence, just the sound of your heart. You can even feel it. Thwump-thump. Thwump-thump. In your throat you can feel it, and you swallow it back, but that doesn’t work because you can still feel it and hear it even louder now and that makes you think about that story you read in Ms. Wiggins’ English class about the guy who went crazy after he killed his boss and hid the body under the floor. But he could still hear the heart beating, just like you can now hear your own heart beating, and maybe it’s not even your own heart you hear. Maybe it is Cris’s. Maybe you are crazy now. And your heart speeds up into one continuous thwump-thump-thwump-thump-thwump-thump-thumpthumpthumpthumpthump.

  You see Chandler and Frank are both craning their necks to look out the window and up into the sky, and so you do too. And there is a helicopter up there. Over you. Following you. Like the moon used to do. Before it forsook you. Thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump. And then there is another one. Two. Two helicopters following you. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump. You do not need to test it. You do not need to look away and time it and then look back later. Because they will still be there. They really are following you. You know this. Those helicopters are going to be with you from here on out, their rotors pulsing reminders of the crime you committed.

  You hear sirens in the distance, reaching out for you. Growing closer. Chandler adjusts the rearview mirror to get a better look, and his eyes are looking directly into your eyes when he says, “Well, boys and girls, looks like we’re fucked.”

  And then Frank mumbles something and Chandler says, “How’s that again, Frankie?”

  “Stardust,” Frank says. “Billion-year-old carbon.”

  “Yep, it’s always something,” Chandler says and floors the gas pedal. The uptick in acceleration pushes you backward. “I’ll show those motherfuckers just exactly what stardust is.”

  And on the screen in your hands, the black oil jets and bubbles in silent toxic fury a mile underwater. It never stops. A thousand gallons every time you blink your eyes. The earth is wounded, cracked open, bleeding out like the victim of a drive-by shooting.

  The sirens surround you now, the helicopters thumping and sucking the air out of the car. The interstate has widened to six massive lanes, like veins that carry blood to the heart. And you and Frank and Chandler are like a virus, a pollution in the blood, and that makes you think of a poem but you can’t remember it exactly, and in the distance, you can see the I-285 interchange. Criss-crossed ribbons of elevated asphalt that hug the city of Atlanta, holding it in. And at the base, a mass of vehicles. Police cruisers. Emergency responders, vans, hummers. A mass of metal set to stop you.

  Chandler does not ease up on the gas. The speedometer is buried past 120. You look at the undersea oil spill. The environmental catastrophe. You look up when you feel the car decelerate. You see that Frank is holding Chandler’s right leg. Lifting it off the gas pedal. The Eldorado coasts down to a crawl. The flotilla of police cars behind you has slowed as well. They are keeping their distance.

  Frank turns to you and says, “Get out.”

  You are frozen. You don’t know what to do. But you don’t have to think. Frank thinks for you. You have always been with Frank—carbon commingling amongst the stars. He leans over the seat and opens the back door. He picks up the Mossberg and uses it to poke you, to prod you. He pushes you out of the car, and you land roughly on the six lanes of asphalt of I-85. You tumble. You bang your head, your elbow, your knee. But you are okay.

  You get to your feet. You want back inside. Back with Frank. But you are too late. Tires squeal. The Eldorado takes off. The rear door slams shut from the force. You are alone. Then the police are there. You put your hands over your head, and you are surrounded by uniformed City of Atlanta police officers. A distorted, amplified voice is yelling “Down on the ground! Down on the ground!” So you drop. And there is a violent knee on your back, pinning you like a bug, your wrists bound with brutal force and another voice asks, “Is the infant safe?”

  Stars.

  My God, the stars.

  It’s full of stars.

  That is what you think as you force Chandler’s sausage-like leg down on the gas pedal. The acceleration forces your body back against the seat. You can’t see the speedometer, so you judge the car’s speed by how the stars slide past you. Feels like the speed of light. The stars are just streaks of white. It’s like you are James T. Kirk and you just gave the order to engage warp drive.

  Stars. Everywhere stars.

  And you feel the shotgun in your lap. And you pick it up. You feel for the trigger, because you cannot see it. All you can see is stars. My God, the stars. You thumb the safety and put your finger around the trigger.

  You are blind, and you say, “Daddy? Are you there, Daddy?”

  “I’m right here, Frankie.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, Frankie. I’m right here. The Middle Ground. I’m in the Middle Ground.”

  And yes, that’s right. That is where y
ou are. The Middle Ground. And it is full of stars. My God, the stars.

  And you think, Fire every single gun you’ve got and explode right into outer space.

  You aim where Chandler’s head should be. You hear him crying out, but the cry is cut short. The shotgun going off in the car’s interior is like a star exploding. Supernova.

  The driver’s side window evaporates in what must be a red smear of glass and blood, and the Cadillac’s interior decompresses like a pressure breach in orbit. You do not see Chandler’s headless torso slump across the steering wheel because you see only stars. My God, the stars. Immediately, you feel the car jerk to the right. You hear the tires squeal, then a solid jolt and for a moment, nothing, just peace, and then violent impact, the car is rolling. You feel something tug at your arm, and you realize your arm was just pulled off, severed. That’s what people who have their leg bit off by a shark say. It felt like a tug.

  There are more tugs. Then something hard punches at your throat and the blood is warm, like a bath. No pain. You might already be dead, just your brain keeps working a little bit. And then the fire.

  You are golden.

  From the back of the police car, looking forward through the wire screen partition, you watch the Eldorado roll and catch fire. This backseat smells of your fear, and the fear of a thousand other bad people.

  Police cruisers and ambulances approach the fiery remains from both sides. They approach with caution. And you are right there with them. It is slow motion. You are drawn to the fire. It soothes you. Makes you feel better. Makes the fear smell not so strong. And despite everything, you feel a hardness in your pants.

  Off to the left, something catches your eye. A small dense plume of black smoke rises from an otherwise empty piece of highway. Something thrown from the car.

  The police car inches forward, and the small burning thing comes into focus. It’s a leg. Frank’s plastic leg. On fire. Melting. Bubbling. Oily black smoke wafts from it, polluting the atmosphere. And you have one final thought before you cum. That poem you were trying to remember comes back to you. Again, from Ms. Wiggins’s English class. You can’t remember who the poet was, but you remember the words.

  Is this God?

  Where, then, is hell?

  Show me some bastard mushroom

  Sprung from a pollution of blood.

  It is better.

  There have been many interviews. They feed the court of public opinion, your lawyer says. You have a good lawyer. At first you had a public defender who was maybe not so good, but then a fund was started in your name. The Billy Smith Defense Fund. It was kind of like the fund that Kroger and the First Baptist Church of Christ took up for your mother when she was sick. You have had visitors who are famous and who have given you money. Eddie Vedder. Sean Penn. George Clooney. They said they believed you were innocent and that this was a travesty of justice. There were commercials and articles and stuff in the newspapers. They said that just like Cris and the woman from Walgreens and the girl from the Exxon station and all those dead deputies, you were a victim of Chandler and Frank—and don’t forget Harvey, he was a victim, too.

  In the end, you were acquitted of the murder charges and Taylor Swift was at the trial and she wrote a song about it.

  * * *

  You have so much money left in your defense fund that you could easily fly first class to Canada. But you don’t want to do that. You want to use the Greyhound travel voucher that Mrs. Lovejoy has sent you. You were able to get your passport while you were still at the Grierson not-a-prison holding and processing facility. Brad Pitt helped with that.

  The documentary film woman with the razor blade earrings and tattoos (but not like Frank’s) and the anarchy motorcycle helmet offers to take you to the bus station. You ride on the back of the bike with your arms around her middle. The open air feels good.

  She films you walking onto the loading platform holding just a plastic grocery bag with your few belongings. There is a bank card in there with direct access to your defense fund. You have plenty of money. Maybe you will buy a case of Natural Light beer, in loving memory of Harvey.

  She keeps the camera on you as you climb the three steps onto the bus. You take a window seat by yourself and when you look out the window she is still out there filming you. You look away because you’ve heard that you’re not supposed to look directly into the camera except this is a documentary and of course it’s okay in documentaries. You’ve told your whole story to that camera. Still, it’s time to look away from it. It will be like a made-up movie now, not real, like you are Jon Voight and this is the end of Midnight Cowboy, only Dustin Hoffman (Frank) died before he got on the bus. Fade to black.

  The bus rolls, chewing up mile after mile, and you sit there staring out the window for what feels like hours. You do not move. You are scared to move because this feels like a dream, and you are afraid that if you move this new reality will just evaporate. That it will be lost to you forever. Is this what you deserve? Have you earned this ending? Or is it another ending that you deserve? If you do not move, maybe you won’t have to find out.

  But of course, eventually, you have to move. You can not stay frozen. You need to experience this new reality, test it out. But no, you are still too afraid.

  The scenery drags past, and gets greener. The sun sets, and then, there is the moon. Is it following you? Yes, you are pretty sure the moon is following you. You are almost certain of it. And that makes you believe. You believe that this is real.

  * * *

  You remember the day that the detective came to talk to you at the holding facility. Jernigan. It felt like he was absorbing you with his eyes.

  He had a picture of a little girl, and he handed it to you.

  “You never saw her before? He never mentioned her name?”

  “What was her name?”

  “Emily.”

  “Emily. No.”

  And that was it. He left. You never saw him again.

  * * *

  You take the St. Christopher medallion from around your neck. It was in the envelope with the bus ticket. At the bottom. From Mrs. Lovejoy. No note. You do not know what it means. Why she returned the medal to you. It could mean that she wants you to wear it around your neck as a reminder of what you did. So you never forget. Not even for a second. So you never have a moment of peace.

  Or it could mean that she absolves you. That you are forgiven.

  You hold the necklace with the chain draped and looped through your fingers, and moonlight glints off as it sways. You enjoy the heft of it. The realness of it. St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers. He protects them. But that is a lie. That is not real. That lie has been proven. You did much reading in the not-a-prison, and you know that Christopher helped people to safely cross a treacherous river that had taken the lives of many travelers. Eventually, a small child asked Christopher to carry him across the dangerous river. Crossing the violent water, Christopher found the child to be unbearably heavy. And Christopher almost succumbed to the weight and let the child perish. But he didn’t. He carried the child safely to the other side. And the child told Christopher that he was so heavy because he was Christ The King, carrying the world’s burdens on his shoulders.

  Where was St. Christopher when you carried a child on your back? Why did he let the river sweep her away?

  The slinky chain slips through your fingers, and the medallion falls into the crevice between the seat and the seat back. You dig your fingers in there, hoping to fish it out, but what you find is a butane lighter wedged in the crack. It’s green. A Cricket. You hold it up to the overhead light and through the semi-translucent plastic you can see that the fuel reservoir is three-quarters full. There is a tightening in your pants. A weight. A pleasant heft. A substance. You are substantial. You are real. You hold the lighter down low and spin the wheel across the flint and a yellow-orange flame spurts up. And you are hard. Rock fucking hard. It has been so long.

  You look behind you, dow
n the aisle, and notice that the bus has a bathroom at the back. The little red card in the door reads OCCUPIED/OCCUPADO, and it slides back to green and the door opens and a Mexican boy with big dark eyes comes out.

  You get up and make your way down the aisle, holding your hands in front of your crotch because you are a man of weight and substance.

  You are real. You are there.

  You open the bathroom door and hear the little red card snick into place as you close it, and you are swallowing in anticipation. Swallowing, swallowing, swallowing.

  It is a pleasure to burn.

  When you emerge from the bathroom and return to your seat, you feel better. You stare straight forward. Because this is the test. This is the test on which all else depends. And you want to ready yourself for it. Steel yourself against the possible results. And finally, when you are ready, you look out the window and you have to swallow back your emotions because you understand now that everything is going to be okay. You are okay. You are forgiven. You know this because you are special. Because the moon is still there. Following you. The moon is following you.

  You swallow.

  You are forgiven.

  But it may be asked, where can a subject end? It goes without saying that divisions are more or less arbitrary, if we are seeking reality, for things are together, and the more we look into the world the more we find it to be an organic mechanism of absolute relativity.