Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  For what seemed like days he refused, but finally she leaned in and kissed his cheek. She smelled so fresh and lovely, fragrant with some spice like at the restaurant where Mommy bought chicken tikka masala. His head spun and he knew he could refuse her nothing.

  They stepped through the door together.

  The air was warm and moist. He still remembered Miami in summer, and it felt like that, only more so. Like the bathroom felt when he left the shower on for a long time, very hot, and the mirror steamed. Like that.

  Indra held his hand. The streets were narrow and crowded with people who looked a little like Indra, but lighter. And they frowned at her as if they did not think her beautiful, as he did. And acted as if they did not want to touch her.

  Led him to a house wherein there were people as dark as she, and he. Two men, two women—one lighter than the other, but resembling Indra. Several children who smiled warmly as they entered.

  “My family,” she said. “My people. We are called Siddhi.”

  * * *

  Terry checked his watch. It was two fifteen, and despite the fact that he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, he felt not the slightest fatigue. In fact, despite the sadness of the last thirty minutes, he felt wide awake. Damn it, this wasn’t healthy: he was behaving like a meth addict, without the alleged merriment of meth itself. The crash was going to be brutal.

  Terry had been in this space before. He was just wired, that was all. Too much was happening, and too soon. What he needed was to burn off the energy. Then, he was certain, sleep would come.

  He returned to his condo and slipped into his jogging clothes and shoes, zipped a couple twenty-dollar bills into a denim mini-wallet Velcro’d to his left shoelaces, and then tiptoed out as quietly as possible. Didn’t want to wake up Mark, who had had a great night, transformed by Christmas magic from pill-popping G.I. Joe to a dancing bear with a single bound.

  Santa.

  Who’d have thought?

  The night air seemed to have grown slightly crisper, colder, even in the few minutes since he had returned home from O’s. There was no one up and on the street, although a few dim lights shimmered in isolated windows. Most visiting cars were gone. Few were parked on the street itself, but on the street leading to the main boulevard a dark blue van was parked between two streetlights. He vaguely remembered seeing it earlier, parked there or across the street, and wondered if the Nazis in the homeowner’s association would have it hauled away. Sometimes people abandoned cars or used public streets for long-term parking. It was annoying.

  Terry stretched his calves, warmed up his joints with some slow circular rolls, then jogged down toward Nathan Bedford Forrest Junior High School and its quarter-mile jogging track.

  A police car slid by as he neared the track. He wondered what they thought about a black man in a track suit at this time of night. Wondered if they had been some of the ones who had harassed O a few months back. If they might have a grudge of some kind.

  Ordinarily he felt caution, the desire to move slowly and definitively, so as not to trigger antagonistic behavior. Oddly, a new thought ran through his mind:

  I hope I don’t have to hurt them.

  Now that was odd.

  The Smyrna PD car slowed, and then continued on.

  CHAPTER 18

  Maya (illusion) is the lack of discernment of the principles of transformation. This transformation is stopped in the body.

  —Shiva Sutras, III, iii–iv

  The inside of the van smelled like a badly serviced Texaco restroom and felt like a sauna on low heat. The walls were covered with a series of flat-screen televisions. Some displayed the entire housing complex, and while one man concentrated on a series of sound inputs, the other watched the screens. One focused upon a front door. The kitchen. The boy’s room. The master bedroom. His eyes roamed from one screen to another in an endless predatory rhythm.

  Back to the center quad, where Terry was jogging out and down the street.

  “All things considered,” he said, “man has a lot of energy. Off for a run.”

  “Hell, maybe it’s another booty call.”

  “What a stud,” the first said without an iota of genuine admiration. He was already scribbling in a journal. Then he turned back to the screens. Then he scribbled again.

  * * *

  In three minutes, Terry reached the junior high school track. He rotated wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, waist, and knees in a series of circles and spirals, a better preparation for running than the typical quad-calf sports stretches. Stretching was for later. After. He took off down the track, noting that he seemed aware of each quarter-inch of contact from heel to toe. Faster and faster he went. On and on he ran. And to a degree he had never experienced, he felt his body flexing and contracting like a single giant sinewy web. Felt the elastic energy storing and releasing, compressing and propelling with every step like a human Slinky. It was startling, like the opening of an entire rubbery universe that a lifetime of athletic training and competition had never revealed.

  The next time he looked at his wristwatch, it was after four o’clock. Almost two hours had passed? Damn, it felt as if he’d just started. Flow state was an eerie thing. He ran on. After another hour or so he came to a stop, bent with hands on knees, sweat drizzling to the ground. His hands trembled, vibrated. He could feel his heartbeat in his legs. “What the hell…?”

  Terry alternated sets of push-ups and sit-ups. Fifty. A hundred. More. Pull-ups on the edge of a horizontal pipe along the stadium steps until his fingers cramped and his back burned. Superman push-ups, with extended arms, clapping behind his back between every repetition. Burpees, flinging himself in the air for plyometric breakfalls. On and on. He looked at his watch again, unable to believe what he saw. It was six o’clock. Again, it felt as if he’d only begun. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Back onto the track he went. Terry started sprinting across the football field again and again … and although he could wind himself, thirty seconds of rest completely refreshed him. He simply couldn’t exhaust himself. His heartbeat roared in his ears … and then quieted.

  Then, finally, after another hour, he came to a halt. He laid down on the grass, not because he was tired, but because it was so damned good to feel the blades against his back, to stare up at the sky as morning’s light first began to streak the darkness.

  A thought came to him, unbidden: The enslaved person ties his experiences to his beliefs and to his body image. This perpetuates the binding of the person to the wheel of samsara, the constant reincarnation into the illusory world.

  From what unconscious wellspring had that emerged? The Savagi video? Something he had missed hearing consciously while sliding in and out of half-sleep?

  Possible, but he didn’t think so. Had he heard the phrase “Spanda Karika” somewhere? That odd pronouncement seemed to carry such a label, but he couldn’t imagine why, or where it had come from, or what it meant. It felt like a fragment of something he had glanced at years ago, that had suddenly bobbed to the surface of his memory well.

  But … why? Perhaps he was simply exhausted.

  But that wasn’t true, either.

  “I’m not tired,” he whispered. “Not sleepy. This is just bizarre.” He rolled up onto an elbow. “But I’m hungry as hell.”

  He paused. “And I’m talking to myself.”

  And at this, he laughed. And damn, that felt good.

  * * *

  Terry headed to the local Waffle House seeking breakfast. It was one thousand, six hundred, and seventy steps away, nestled between a freeway on-ramp and a franchise motel with a brown shingle roof and a postage-stamp parking lot. He didn’t consciously keep track of the distance … the number just popped into his head as he opened the door.

  He entered, and sat in an empty booth. Terry unbuckled the little wallet on his left shoelaces and extracted a twenty-dollar bill. He sat with his fingers carefully folded and his eyes half-closed, listening to his heartbeat.
/>   The redheaded waitress sashayed to his table. “Menu?”

  “Thank you.”

  Terry’s eyes skimmed across the tri-folded laminate. He inhaled deeply. Looked around at the other customers. Sniffed the coffee. Eggs. Ham. The people around him seemed fat, pudgy, or muscularly stiff. Most seemed strangled in straitjackets of tension.

  The food stank sourly. Terry began to feel ill.

  “Have you decided?” the redhead asked.

  He answered automatically. “I’ll have my usual. Ham and cheese omelet, English muffin.”

  “Sure,” she said, and then paused. “Do I know you?”

  He smiled up at her. “Would you like to?”

  She blushed as she walked away, swaying her hips like a Vegas hypnotist dangling a gold pocket watch. Terry was a little mystified. And pleased.

  He scanned the room. People chewed, talking. His hearing seemed sharper and clearer than usual. Perhaps he was merely paying more attention.

  He watched their mouths as they spoke. Watched their motion as they walked down the aisles. And suddenly … the air danced with a visual tunnel of images detailing their activities since awakening that morning. That one displayed the loose-jointed facility of a dedicated yogi. Over there, a man who had injured his back by lifting weights winced when reaching for his orange juice.

  A Hispanic couple whispered in a private world, words coupling urgently, intimately. Unbidden: flashes of nude bodies, twining together, glistening with sweat. He felt the driving, fleshy, staccato rhythms as they pounded against each other.

  Married. To other people. Although they had showered afterward, traces of the intimate scent remained.

  He shook himself. What the hell was going on? The waitress brought his food to his table. “Enjoy,” she said. “Everything. You seem like a guy with a healthy appetite.”

  Well, woof.

  She wiggled away, leaving behind her a trailing worm of images: makeup and shower and exfoliation. A rejection by an old lover within the last few days. A fling … perhaps two weeks ago … with the head cook. She had terminated it, but he still gazed at her with yearning.

  Terry picked up his knife and fork. Scrawled on his napkin in pale pink lipstick: GLADYS. And her phone number. “Damn,” he said. This was starting to feel like an infomercial for exotic aftershave.

  Terry started forking and chewing his omelet. Before he could begin to swallow a strange, sick feeling spread through his gut, and a strained expression twisted his face. He slowed down.

  He closed his eyes, and on a floating screen projected against the darkness he watched a yellowish slurry poured from a waxed carton labeled EGGS, spattering onto a sizzling, shoddily scraped griddle. Then … a synthetic cheese sauce squeezed from an orange tube. Ham seething with nitrates and sodium, traced back to a farm where pigs rooted in their own excrement.

  Terry’s eyes widened, and he bolted up out of the seat, staggered and crossed the sidewalk just in time to fountain vomit into the gutter, spattering orange and yellow onto the cigarette butts and twisted candy wrappers. A passing car honked. The other customers stared at him through the window. Gladys rushed out, eyes wide and panicked. “Are you all right?”

  He wiped his mouth. “I’m … I don’t know what happened,” he said. “Here. Take this.”

  He crammed the twenty-dollar bill into her sweaty palm. Gladys stared after him as he staggered down the sidewalk and away.

  * * *

  Terry slid into the empty spaces between pedestrians. Every one of them trailed a pale blue wormlike tunnel stretching back to their past.

  A stubbled man drinking bourbon for breakfast. Terry could smell the ulcerous breath.

  A small pale child walking to school, a bruise the size of a half-dollar darkening his cheek. Flinching away from a man who brushed against him. The flinch was a dodge, a duck, and in Terry’s mind flashed a stark image of the boy trapped in a corner, slapped backhand before being allowed out the door to school.

  On and on Terry walked. And then ran. Whenever he stopped, he was seeing people’s histories, displayed in rapid projection backward. A riot of sounds and voices reverberated in an emotional echo chamber.

  His heels thundered against the dirt and concrete. His breath rumbled in his lungs, a sand-papery sound. Surely he had depleted his muscles’ glycogen supply by now. Surely his body was beginning to break down muscle tissue for fuel. Or had it gone directly for fat stores? He didn’t know, knew only that he felt good, better than he had any right to feel, all things considered.

  The change in his physical energy was strange, but the visual hallucinations were so disorienting that he felt like he’d stepped into another world.

  Terry wandered, randomly turning right or left at red lights and when he looked up …

  It was dark.

  Terry checked his watch, watching his own reaction as if viewing himself from above.

  He’d been running for ten hours, in a total fugue state, barely aware of where he was or what he was doing. He had no idea what part of town this was. Someplace in the outskirts of Atlanta, surely. A warehouse district.

  He was walking now. Faintly at first, then louder as he walked east, bloodthirsty cheers floating on the wind, howls of glee or approval or pain. He kept walking, until he reached an image of himself reflected in a store window.

  A trick of the light: god damn, he seemed to be glowing, and the illusion was like viewing himself through a kaleidoscope. Not visually … the visual image was not deconstructed. But … the way he felt. Fragmented. As if the thing he called “Terry” was shattering in slow motion, such that he could glimpse another, smaller, but somehow denser and more solid Terry within.

  The cheers grew louder. A hundred pairs of feet stomping the warehouse floor.

  He walked into a high-ceilinged wood-and-aluminum building so dank with salt-sweat it was like a hot springs. Beefy guys were pounding each other bloody on the matted floor, surrounded by stacks of crates and a ring of jeering, cheering spectators. In circles of electric incandescent light they slammed knees and elbows into each other’s ribs and skulls. With every blow, screams of crowd-joy shook the rafters.

  A big flat-faced guy with Popeye forearms and a button nose was taking money at the door. He looked at Terry. “You here for the fight?”

  “Yes,” Terry said. “Here for the fight.”

  “Fifteen bucks.”

  Terry bent down and extracted the second twenty from his mini-wallet, handed it to the guy with the flat face, and received five ones in return.

  He turned and watched the brawling beef trust.

  The money-taker noted Terry’s build, his scarred hands and cheeks. “We have a hole in the lineup,” he said. “You interested?”

  “Interested,” Terry said.

  The former combatants had been replaced by a new pair. Human fighting cocks, fireplugs with arms and legs punching and kicking as if each had discovered the other in bed with his wife. One wore a buzz-cut, the other looked like an Aryan Mr. T, slathered with prison tats. The one with the Mohawk rapidly gained the upper hand. Buzz-cut was growing tired, and panicking.

  There are few things in life worse than being in a fight, losing, and feeling yourself becoming even more fatigued. Watching your opponent start to grin. Beginning to ignore your strikes. Feeding on your fear.

  Terry watched. But within the fortresses of faux anger, animalistic muscle, and savage energy … lurked the shadows of sad, broken men. Not all … some seemed centered and if cynical, at least untwisted. But others cast the shadows of battered children. Skill, hunger, and anger were elements, certainly. But the atmosphere stank of fear.

  Images from their lives, stretching back to childhood, flashed to his mind. Absent fathers, schoolyard beatings, alcoholic, impassive mothers, transgressive “uncles.” As they washed over Terry, tears welled and then rolled down his face. Mohawk smashed an elbow against his opponent’s cheekbone, splitting it and sending the other man’s head bouncing off the
mat. Buzz-cut groaned and collapsed, and the conqueror raised his hands in triumph, massive biceps and triceps bunching and coiling as if he were smuggling anacondas.

  “Who’s next?” Mohawk screamed. “Who wants some of this? What asshole is motherfucking next?”

  Terry watched through streaming eyes, and it may have been those tears that attracted Mohawk’s attention. The fighter sneered at him. “Who’s the little girl?” He grinned. “What the hell are you crying about?”

  Mohawk, nine years old. Lips smeared with lipstick, crying and crouching in the basement dark. A huge man hovering over him. Looming. Promising an end to pain if only …

  “I’m so sorry he hurt you,” Terry said.

  Mohawk wiped blood from a torn brow, sneering. “He didn’t do shit.”

  “Not him,” Terry said.

  Mohawk’s eyes narrowed. “Then who…”

  Their eyes met in a world of silence. Around them, mouths moved but produced no sound. All he could see were Mohawk’s bruises. The tats and piercings. When had that nose first been broken? The left arm had been fractured, probably in childhood. Who had done the breaking?

  A tunnel enveloped Mohawk, canceled out everyone around them, and in its light, Terry saw everything. Everything.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you grew up, didn’t you? He can’t hurt you anymore.”

  Mohawk’s eyes tightened and then widened.

  The guy was thunderstruck. The room fell silent as Terry walked forward, frozen in place as he wrapped his arms around Mohawk’s broad shoulders and hugged him. Mohawk blinked, everything save his eyelids frozen in shock.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked, voice thickened.

  “Just a brother,” Terry whispered in his ear. “Be well.”

  He turned and walked out, leaving the entire group staring after him.

  * * *

  Terry spent another hour wandering, only slightly more aware than during his prior fugue state. A ways distant, on a side street, he roamed into a section of pavement where the asphalt had cracked to expose the foundational dirt beneath. And there, improbably, a green sprig of sunflower stretched plaintively toward the sky.