I shrug, sliding the small plastic sauce container in his direction. I say, “Go ahead.”
He looks at me like I'm half-tarded —his term—and shakes his head shamefully. I know what he means about being respectful of those around you, even in a fast food restaurant parking lot, but I'm feeling selfish lately. Why hasn't Angela called me? Even just to scream at me or curse me out? I'd take a mouthful of her insults to hear her voice again.
I look down at my half-eaten nugget and, although it's tasty, it doesn't look like any part of a chicken that I've ever seen. It's probably best not to question this kind of cuisine, just eat it and be content.
Ricky takes a sip of his drink and I hear that plasticy suckling sound when the straw is drilling through ice looking for more soda liquid. He holds the cup above him, looking for the nearly invisible line of condensation that will tell him if there's any point to his incessant suckling.
Then he sets the cup down and says, “Hey, Jack . . . ”
Alright, I acquiesce, I won't double-dip anymore. From now on it's one dip, and the whole nugget gets shoved into my pie hole.
“No,” he says, “not that. I was wondering about something you said about Kristen.”
Oh-oh. This could get sticky.
“ . . . I was curious about something you sort of avoided.”
I'm curious about most things, I tell him. Over time you get accustomed to it.
Right now I'm working my Inferior-Parietal Region —where mathematical, visual, and logical reasoning are born. It's all about circular answers, now.
“What happened to you and Kristen? What really happened?”
He's working his Broca's Area —the intellectual core that also provides language syntax.
I shove another nugget in my mouth, buying at least 15 or 20 seconds of slow chewing. I learned this technique from watching some candy bar commercials.
His eyebrows raise questioningly, “Come on, Jack. You need to explain this to me. If we're hunting this chick, I need to know. And you need to come clean, for your own sake. Why did she cross back over?”
I swallow the chickenesque material in my mouth, “She says I killed her.”
Ricky's eyebrows furl a bit, “Huh?”
I shrug. Yeah, she said that we were in love, but that I killed her and that's why she's so ticked-off at God . . . and me. I stole her life away, she claims. You know how girls can be.
Ricky looks dumbfounded, unable to accept that. “Jack, you don't strike me as a cold-blooded killer.”
I know.
“You're not the murdering type.”
That's what I told her. But she wasn't having any of it. She said we were in love, and I snatched away her young life, and for that she had to do whatever she could to get back to earth. To pick-up where she left off. In doing so she scammed my gullible ass into unfolding the universe or something.
“You are pretty gullible,” he admitted.
In my defense, I tell him, I'm only barely seven-months-old. I'm an easy mark. I have hippocampus and limbic system issues. My temporal lobe, my thalamus . . . all of it's messed-up. I could probably qualify for disability. Get myself one of those fancy window stickers that lets me park in the handicapped spaces. I'm that screwed-up!
And you know, the more I talk, the more pissed-off I get about all of this. And I'm just tired and cranky enough that it's easy to let this thing spiral.
“I know, Jack. I know—”
. . . and, I continue snapping, I'm half fucking dead!
He holds his hands up in surrender, “Calm down, dude. I'm not saying you're—”
I'm basically boiling now, “Don't tell me to calm down! I'm learning all this impossible shit so that I can hunt down evil that has escaped some nightmare to make this place another nightmare. I see people dying, I talk to angels, I hallucinate shit that would make most people seek counseling, and I don't have a choice about any of it.
“I'm the most thick-headed moron in the last two thousand years, all because I woke-up in that hospital, accidentally bumped into you, and read that goddamned book.”
Ricky doesn't say anything. He knows I'm frustrated beyond words about the whole Kristen thing, and that I'm just venting. My doctors would call this aggressive transference and an outburst of deep seeded sub-surface rage . I wouldn't get pills or anything, but I'd definitely be laying down on the big couch for a while.
I'd be in time-out .
I try and catch my breath, sighing, “ . . . I'm either the most unlucky guy in the world, or the most stupid.” And for about 30 seconds I try and think of something else to say, but my temper has just about run its course. My anger doesn't have a lot of momentum.
He waits a moment, and when he's satisfied that I'm finished he says, “ . . . are you done with your little tantrum?”
I take a sip of Dr. Pepper, which I've been rationing out based on the number of nuggets and fries I've been eating. I then nod, Yes.
“Good,” he says. “So, you're a killer . . . somewhere in there.” He shrugs, “That's important. You'll eventually need to call that strength up when we face these bastards. It won't be long now, I can kind of feel it.”
I take the last one of my nuggets and hurl it across the parking lot where it bounces off of a small handicapped sign where two spooks were loitering. They look suddenly at the exploded nugget, then up at me.
I'd shoo them away like stray dogs if I didn't think they were going to mark some body for death.
I turn back to Ricky, “So what's up with you and your witchdoctor stuff?”
He gets this sinister grin on his face as he grabs my drink and takes a swig, “I'm learning the other side of medicine.”
What other side?
“The dark side.”
Like magic, jungle, voodoo cures? Like a Jedi?
“Yup.”
Anything useful to our mission?
“Well,” he says, “I won't know until we're forced to actually do something. But maybe.”
The other side of medicine. That's like eating roots and leaves and bug legs and stuff. The kinds of things that make me gag. I know this will end up in me getting bitten. I just know it.
32
The Loft.
5:13 pm . . .
I've got the doors open, letting the breeze blow through the apartment. It's nice, too, because some trees are blossoming, or shedding, or whatever it is they do when they smell so nice. Ricky's back at the ALG office, narrowing our search. We've started getting some alarming reports of kidnappings and disappearances in southern Mexico, as well as Serbia, Croatia, and the eastern tip of Morocco.
Ricky and Billtruck thought it would be a good idea to find out if they were gang related, or if there was some darker, more sinister motive. But me, I'm just laying down on the couch, not really thinking about anything in particular. Outside I can hear a few planes flying by. Lots of happy birds doing their worm collecting. I can even pick out some of the fancier cars that pull in and out of the drive that crosses down by Luigi's Pizza .
The sky is equal parts blue and cottony white clouds. The curtains near the windows, they're just rolling slowly as if invisible hands are pushing them gently to and fro. I'm in the antipode of the Land of Shadows. With all the life and light and color, and the pleasant smells, and the delicate ebb and flow of the warm wind, this is like the most diametrically opposite place to Deadside.
As nice as it is, I still realize that the Land of Sorrows is literally stacked on top of us, barely separated by the space of one electron. Do you have any idea how close that is? It has a mass of 9.1 × 10−28 grams, which is only 0.0005 the mass of a proton. And, you know, protons are really small!
That's so close a distance we should be able to see the souls stuck in Deadside bleeding through every now and then. And it's a theory I have for ghosts. That they should 'echo' or bleed through every so often. I don't know what the conditions might be, but it makes sense to me. That might explain a lot of ghost sightings. Now that I'm in
this line of work, it's okay to entertain such thoughts and ideas.
Anyway, I'm kind of relaxed right now, enjoying the best parts of being on the Earth plane. I don't think anything could be better than this. And that's when my cell phone rings. I'm tempted not to get it, but then I remember that it could be her.
I sit up, reach out and grab my phone off of the coffee table we have in the living room. I put the phone to my ear, not recognizing the number, and slouch a bit.
Hello?
“Jack,” Billtruck says, “I'm going to link your phone up to Hal, so when I call back in a minute, don't answer it.” Click .
I didn't get a chance to respond before the line went dead. I set the phone back down and laid back on the couch. I took a deep breath and tried to relax again, enjoying the peace and serenity. My phone started ringing—beeping really—and I'm trying to ignore it. Three or four beeps and it's quiet again.
All is well. Now I'm hooked up with Hal, whatever that means. I'm sure he'll be texting me messages at all hours, giving me dating advice and whatnot. Truth be told, I could probably use the help.
About a minute later the phone starts it's cricketing again and I reach out, sliding it towards me. I don't even open my eyes, I just answer the call.
I say, “Did it work? Because I let it ring.”
“Did what work?” she says.
My brain is momentarily twisted. I say, “Hal . . . is he plugged in?”
“Who is Hal ?” her soft voice asks.
I sit up, my eyes wide open. It's Angela. She's called me! Probably to scream all kinds of obscenities at me, but at least it's her.
“Hal is a, um, it's a friend of mine,” I try to explain.
“Do you know who this is?” she asks.
“Of course I do,” I reply quickly. “Angela. I didn't expect you to call. I figured you were still, um—”
“You want to go to the carnival with me?” she asks me.
I want to ask her if she's mad at me. If this is a ploy to get me out in the open where a sniper can take a shot at me, or a bunch of her bookstore friends can kick the crap out of me? But I don't ask her anything.
I just say, Yes.
24 minutes later . . .
Angela met me at Luigi's , with her environmentally friendly car. We're going green, I guess. I'm really kind of nervous to be near her right now. I know we're going to have a discussion about my more than alarming revelations at the book store. And I'm not sure how I'm going to answer that.
I could lie and say that I made it all up as a joke or something. But I think that'd be worse in the long run. No. Truth, even if it's just part of the truth, is better than lying to her.
Sitting beside her on the way to the carnival, she's wearing some kind of perfume that should be a class-2 controlled substance. She smells so incredible that I'm having a hard time thinking about anything of consequence.
“I love the carnival. This is just a little one, in an old Safeway parking lot, but it has all the games and the ferris wheel, and everything,” she tells me. And then she smiles to herself, driving with perfect DMV manual technique. “You look nice, by the way.”
I'm wearing a thin, long-sleeved grey shirt, with loose, faded bluejeans. Really, I feel like a homeless guy who stumbled onto somebody's expensive clothes. But Ricky says chicks like that. The underplayed, carefree guy who isn't afraid to be normal . . . but wearing casual-looking expensive designer clothing.
Angela, now that's another story. She looks like she just got finished shooting a Gap add. She's got on khaki shorts that show her legs. Her legs are about as smooth and perfect as I can imagine legs ever being. There's not an ounce of fat on her.
She has on a blue t-shirt that's just tight enough to make me deliberately concentrate on not staring at her breasts. There is something clever printed on the front in silver silk-screen. It's like a happy face wearing a baseball cap backwards or something. And she's even got a baseball cap on, backwards. So, she's basically too flippin' cute to describe.
Her eyes, with the way the light is, they're brown at the edges, but almost golden as you go towards the center.
“You're the most pretty girl I've ever met,” I tell her.
She laughs, “You don't have to kiss up for the other day. We'll talk about it when we're both ready. Just forget it happened.”
I'm not kissing up, Angela. You're the most beautiful girl I've ever met, on earth.
And then she laughs again. But I'm so not kidding.
“You are a very unique man, Jack. I just can't figure you out,” she says, glancing over at me with her wonderful face. Her eyebrows are thin and delicate.
I tell her, I don't remember ever having gone to a real carnival.
“Everybody's been to the carnival.”
Not me.
She pauses for a moment, probably considering if I'm putting her on. Then she nods, “Well, I'm the perfect tour guide, then. Because I go to carnivals all the time. I practically have cotton candy in my blood.”
That sounds good.
“And,” she said as she kind of fluttered her eyebrows, “they have a ferris wheel.”
I don't recall ever being on one of those.
Her face got bright and animated, “You've never been on a ferris wheel, either ?”
Not that I can remember, no.
“You haven't lived until you've been on one. They're incredible.”
And she's so full of vigor and energy when she talks, it's like she's a kid, again. Like the world is just so simple and there are no politics, or diseases, or tomorrows. Only right now.
We pulled into the parking lot and I saw all of the multicolored tents and canopies and spinning machines and people . . . and the ferris wheel. And for a little carnival that thing sure looks high.
“Come on,” she says as she stops the car and shuts off the engine. “I have to teach you how to live a little.”
She has no idea how morosely funny that actually is.
33
80 feet up high in the air.
6:29 pm . . .
I'm so high up people look like ants. We're up higher than my loft is over Luigi's . We're up high enough that I could drop a penny and it might chop somebody in half. At least to their neck, anyway.
“No we're not,” Angela said as she leaned her head back next to mine.
We're sitting next to each other in a bucket-shaped car, at nearly the very top of the Ferris wheels' slow-motion orbit. We're like satellites, she and I. And she's so close to me that we're actually touching, her right shoulder and leg and hip to my left side. This is the first real contact I've had with a girl. And I've got to tell you, my pulse is probably a bit higher than it should be.
Loan me a penny, I say.
And then she playfully slaps me on the arm. “Tell me a secret, Jack. Something that you've never told anyone else . . . ever.”
Like what? What kind of secret would you like? I'm like a virtual secret bank.
“Anything. Just as long as I'm the only person on earth who's ever heard it.”
Hmmm. I have to think about that for a moment.
She closes her eyes and rests her head on my shoulder, and I can smell her hair. It's like all kinds of fruit and girly potions. I'm looking out over the neighborhood that finishes out the skyline until there's just the darkening blue backdrop. Somewhere beyond where I can see, there is evil lurking. But I don't think that's the kind of the secret she's talking about.
“I don't know, Angela. I'm kind of stuck. If I tell you something truly secret, you might get angry at me, again.”
“I'm not angry with you,” she says softly, her eyes still closed. The wind gently lifts a few strands of her hair. There's nobody here. We could be the last two people on earth. Just us and the ants down below. But I've got a pocket of loose change if they get too obnoxious.
She moves her cheek around a bit, getting more comfortable on my shoulder. “I want to understand you. And I want you to understand me. And we are al
l of our secrets. We are the things people can't see.”
Secret? Secret? Secret?
Alright, I say. I'm deathly afraid of failing in life.
“Everyone is afraid of failure,” she says. “It's built into our DNA to strive to succeed. You'll have to do better than that.”
Damn. Went with the one they use in those cheesy romantic comedies I'm always renting, and it came up short.
Alright, I say. I'm more than a bit bothered by clowns. Clowns scare me. There it is. Now it's out there. Clowns scare the crap out of me.
She giggles.
And those little dolls with the eyes that open when they're sitting upright. I found one of those in a box of old junk we were cleaning a few weeks ago, and it about made me scream. What kind of horrible jerks would design such things for impressionable little children?
She giggles again. “You know what I find interesting about you?”
My keen fashion sense?
“No. What I really find interesting about you is that you're so innocent.”
Oh, I'm anything but innocent. But out loud I say, “Hmmm.”
“ . . . you look at the world like it's brand new to you. Like you haven't been poorly influenced by your past.” Then she opens her eyes for a moment, “It's like you have no past to worry about. So you take life from second to second. I think you really enjoy life, and that's infectious.”
I've got all my shots, don't worry about an infection.
And she laughs again. “Jack.”
Yes?
“Will you win me a stuffed animal, please?” she asks so tender and caring, you'd think she was asking me to free puppies that are due to be euthanized.
I will stop at nothing to win you your prize, I tell her. Although, you should know that I'm not really good at anything. So we'll need to search for a game that caters to that.
We sat there for the next fifteen minutes just letting the warm air blow past us. Some birds glided by, not thinking about much judging from the way they just let the wind guide their path. That'd be nice. That's real freedom. Well, until somebody shoots at you.
We didn't say much to each other as we walked around the carnival. She took me to a cotton candy machine and I watched the pink and blue sugar get spun into complicated webs. I could just see some big spiders watching this, nothing but envy in their eight eyes.
See Jack Hunt (See Jack Die) Page 14