The thug unfolded his arm from inside his sports jacket, shot the screen once. Just a single fluid motion, but then he held the pistol in place long enough for the blue smoke to drift up, get tangled in his breath.
We were all a little deaf now.
I swallowed hard to pop my ears, and when I unsquinted my eyes, Larkin had a Polaroid camera aimed at me. He snapped it, the flashbulb blinding me, and, though I thought this was tactical, nobody started shooting me. When I could see again, Larkin was fanning the snapshot dry.
“There,” he said, nodding down to the overnight envelope.
Slowly, I took it, squeezed it open, shook out what was inside. It was the Polaroid of me the client rep had shot in Piedras Negras. To confirm the state of the canisters. But this shot, the one Larkin had just taken — the canisters wouldn’t even be in it. He handed it to me.
“It fucked up,” I said, faking a smile.
In the still-developing picture, I was surrounded by a nimbus of light. Like I was glowing. I looked to the Piedras Negras shot. There I was — just me, as usual. But the glow — the case. In the Piedras Negras picture, it was the case that had caught the light wrong. In the same, wrong way.
I looked up to Larkin. He pursed his lips, nodded.
“We had to find somebody with a reputation for punctuality,” he said, overpronouncing the last word, as if it weren’t his.
“I don’t understand,” I told him. “Listen, if I can just get my money, I can —”
“The contents of that case, that that case was specifically designed to shield, to contain — that case you did who knows what with … Let’s just say you couldn’t have been late. If you were, it would never have got here.”
I studied the bandoleer for a long time then. What was he saying?
“It’s poison, you mean?”
I was thinking of the cattle, not coming in for water. Of how the canisters had held the heat of the sun all night. Of how my backpack had rotted.
“You could say it’s poison, yeah,” Larkin said, then shrugged, lifted his head in some prearranged cue.
Through the thin soles of my new boots, I tried to grip the concrete, brace myself for whatever was coming, but again, it wasn’t gunfire. The thug was just turning off the lights.
“What is this?” I said, and it was like my voice, in the darkness, was larger, deeper. I could hear myself in it in some way I usually couldn’t, like listening to yourself on a tape recorder.
“This is ultraviolet, now,” Larkin said, and flipped on a light he had plugged in somewhere. The blue bulb didn’t hurt my eyes at all. It was soft, even. Nice.
“Pretty,” the thug said then.
“What?” I said, and looked behind me at first, but then, balancing myself to turn, my peripheral vision caught the skin on the top of my hand.
It was glowing. Like the Polaroid had said. Larkin started laughing louder than before, left the light on for another twenty seconds. Long enough for me to see that all my skin was like that.
“Didn’t know it’d be this cool,” he said up to the thug.
The thug grunted, flipped the lights back on. Now he did have a pistol trained on me, was angling his head over to look down along the barrel. Like I was a bug. In the years to come, I’d never be able to track him down. But, too, he was just a gun. It was somebody else’s finger on the trigger.
“Here,” Larkin said, and I turned to him in time to see the duffel bag, arcing toward me.
I had no choice but to catch it. It was why I was there, I mean, and what I’d been waiting for. More than that, it was just instinct. I wrapped my left arm around the cash, held it to me, and then my right leg exploded, the air behind me misting red.
“There,” Larkin said as I fell, “paid,” and the thug shot me again, in the other leg, and then he was standing over me.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Larkin said, suddenly beside him. “You were good, Dodd. If we could use you again — if anybody could — we would, in a heartbeat. But, as you can see, man, I think you’re just about all used up here …”
With that, the thug shot me somewhere in the chest, and the arm, and maybe the face. I wasn’t even hearing the gun anymore, though, but had retreated inside my head, back to my last good camp, where Laurie’s picture was caught against a branch, fluttering, fluttering, then blowing away.
The way to find an empty storage unit is to walk along all the doors of some part of the storage complex they can’t see from the front office. Don’t worry about the cameras. They’re dummies. And the other renters don’t care about you, are probably stacking bodies like cordwood in their units anyway. If it helps, you can act like you’re counting, trying to find a certain door. It won’t be a lie, either. It’s just the counting that’s an act — you’re not really looking at the numbers, but the locks. What you want is a unit that’s being held hostage, that’s being ransomed for the last two or three or four month’s rent. A door that has a second padlock piggybacking on the latch. If you’re lucky, this piggyback padlock will have been spray-painted orange, or maybe whatever color the trim of the complex is — some paint they had left over. If it’s not painted, then just note the number of that unit, keep walking until you find another that’s been double-locked. All you have to do then is compare the two locks from this unit to the two locks from the last unit. What you should have are four locks total, but only three kinds of lock. The two that are similar are the house locks, because the management buys them in bulk. After that, just start walking again until you find a unit single-locked with a house lock. This is your lady in waiting, your empty unit. Just clip the lock and replace it with your own.
I have this down to an art because motel rooms have become difficult for me. And it’s not because I don’t carry a major credit card.
When I got to town seven days ago, the first place I came was Aardvark AAA Sealy Storage. The three A’s, instead of being a guarantee of quality, are probably just to avoid the initials the place would have without them: A.S.S. There’s no fence with a keypad gate on wheels, just rows and rows of eight-by-ten units, where the walls are cinderblock and the doors thick enough for my purposes.
Once I had my room, then, all that was left was finding Larkin, Martin S. We drove in his Impala until the headlights dimmed and the radio display glowed down. He had to stand on the brakes to get the car stopped.
“That’d be my fault,” I told him. “Sorry.”
I dragged him out, walked the last four miles behind him, his mouth covered with clear tape so nobody would know anything. There was no reason to hide the car. Nobody was going to find us, and, if my prints are even the same, they’d have been purged from the system years and years ago.
I forced the keys into his hand, made him open the door. The unit is 234. It’s an easy number to remember. Call it luck.
“There’s a lantern in the corner,” I told him.
He stumbled over, peeled the plastic off the lantern, thumbed the batteries in, and we had light enough for me to close the door. So he’d be sure to see, I padlocked the latch I’d set into the backside of the door, then broke the small key off in the lock, tossed the round head over to him. It bounced off his arm, made a small noise on the floor.
“Martin S. Larkin,” I said, to remind him, and then, just as the new lantern started to gutter out, I smiled for him.
“I know where you’re going,” I said, way back in my throat like I’d practiced. “I know because I’ve been there.”
The only sound, his heart, slapping the backside of his chest.
I pretended I could hear it, anyway.
Death isn’t like you think it is. Or maybe it’s different for everybody. Or it could be that even trying to remember it warps the experience. Because all I have really are pictures and words to remember it with. Sound too, I suppose, but that’s always accidental. Like, walking as close as I can to some building, I might hear some guy back by the dumpster muttering to himself in his sleep, and for half a s
tep the alley will be familiar, though I’ve never been there before.
It’s hard to explain.
That alley, it’s not like it’s a version of another alley in wherever I was. It’s more like the way it shaped itself around that drunk’s broken dreams for a moment, the way it’s absorbing the things he regrets having said to his children, it’s like it’s feeding. And that’s the familiar part.
If I had to describe what being dead was like for me, it was like being at the bottom of a huge factory, with all the machines made from some bulbous kind of metal. Organic, almost. Pulsing. Alive but dumb, if that makes any sense. But all focused on me in a way that I know the machines don’t hate me, they love me, they need me — without me strapped down to my place on my back underneath them all, they would be nothing.
What they’re doing to me, too, it’s a kindness of sorts. Instead of letting me die, each and every instant they’re pumping a massive amount of thick, cold fluid through me. Not just through my veins, but, like, in my mouth, with my jaws stretched all the way open.
The whole place is dependent upon the highest amount possible being pushed through me, too, so that all I can hear — all I ever heard for what turned out to be fourteen years — is a deep thrumming. One I never got used to, not like the way we no longer hear the blood in our necks. This was different. There was an urgency to it that your own heart can’t provide, I don’t think. A loud whispering that never hits any real rhythm.
And you can’t sleep like that, and you can’t think, and as high up as you look there are just more cavernous pipes and massive, impossible things turning slowly, each cycling the fluid down and down and down, into you, fast enough that you have to hang your head off the back of the stone bed, to give the fluid a straighter path into you, through you.
It was all I knew.
No demons, no fire, no clouds or angels or family members, no dogs you had as a kid, no first bicycle rides. Not for me, anyway.
I don’t know.
Looking back on it for flashes, each time a drunk coughs in the dark or whatever, I think it wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have just maybe taken something from here with me. A picture of Laurie, I mean, or Tanya. Either of those could have got me across any number of years. Just the memory of the picture, even.
But that dull, cold fluid rushing through you. It’s coming so fast, so constant, that you never even have a chance to think, to dredge up anything you might still have inside. Soon all you know is that you’ve got to keep your head tilted back.
So, yeah, the gag reflex — that’s one thing you take, I guess. You don’t want to choke.
And you can still see, in a way, and feel something like tears rimming out the corners of your eyes, but it’s not crying anymore. It’s just the natural state of things, the only way you’ve ever been. Without you, the whole place would come crumbling down. And everything on top of it too.
If you don’t keep your head tilted back, all the unaware people up in life, the real world, they’ll fall through into this too.
Maybe.
There’s no chance to think of any other way it might be, though, so you close your eyes as tight as you can, and open your throat, and hope you can maintain this position long enough for whatever’s supposed to happen to happen, and in this way fourteen years can pass. A blink of the eye, yeah, but it’s the way corpses blink.
And when you come back, you don’t know anything. It’s all been washed away, rounded off, dulled so much you can’t pick it up.
Larkin’s lucky, really. He gets to stay there, dead.
Some of us have to open our eyes again, though. When I did, all I could see was lines of brown. For probably two weeks, I watched it, not understanding, but then something stepped into all that wire, twitched its nose around in a way that probably made me smile an infant’s smile. Then, all I did was turn my head to follow where this moving thing was going. That such things existed in this world of brown lines was a miracle to me.
A month after that, I’d pulled myself far enough from the center of my roll of wire to push against the sides, fall out into the dirt. The rabbits sat back on their haunches, canted their ears over at me. I studied each of them in turn, then turned back to the roll of wire, tried to get back in.
It was all I knew.
Our first day in the storage unit together, Larkin finally slid this notebook back across the cement to me. He’d just used one page. This was after he’d remembered me, of course. When he thought he knew what I wanted, why I was there.
Written in big blocks letters like I was a child were five names, with addresses. Each of the addresses had question marks by them. Because they were from fifteen years ago. I understood, looked up to him.
He was nodding like we’d made a deal. The names were the people he’d worked with back then.
“The ones who gave you orders?” I said, the notebook loose by my knee.
We were sitting on opposite walls, like this was a secret clubhouse. Larkin nodded, kept nodding. I shook my head no, looked to the metal door.
“You would never have known their names,” I told him. “They were careful. Better than that.”
“I followed them,” he said then, whispering like he was still watching them go into their office buildings or suburban homes or wherever.
I came back to Larkin, studied him now.
“Why?” I finally asked.
“Because I like to know who I’m working for too.”
I raised the list again, had to turn my head a bit sideways to really see it like I wanted to in the unsteady light of the lantern.
“This is them, then?” I said.
“I don’t know, shit. They were who got sent to talk to me, anyway. I’m not making any promises here.”
“But you had these all in your head.”
“I was real good at Memory when I was a kid.”
“These people — that was forever ago.”
“What was your first girlfriend’s middle name?” he asked.
I smiled, shrugged. Said, “She kissed me.”
“Exactly,” Larkin said back. “They paid me twenty thousand dollars for a single day’s work.”
I kept smiling. It was too late for him to live by then, of course, but I tried to pick the lock with all his paperclips and tie pins anyway, and beat on the door with him, screamed for help.
At some point, though — probably when his skin started to crack and shift — he realized I was leading him on, just playing. It probably had something to do with the Polaroids I kept taking of him every twelve hours.
Whatever else you hear about me, don’t ever believe that I’m not a killer.
It’s what I came back for.
I don’t know how long I lived with the rabbits, as one of them. The seasons didn’t matter to me. Not that there’s much to go by in Piedras Negras. I ate roots and dirt and bugs, and usually threw it up an hour or two later. As far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with this.
If the warehouse had still been occupied, or close to a road, I would have been shot, I know. Just to figure out what I was. It was just the rabbits, though, and they accepted me more or less. I couldn’t fit down into their dens or warrens or whatever, but, in the yard anyway, they tolerated me. After a few days, they even quit watching me, just let me move among them on all fours. Sometimes even rested in my shadow.
I’m pretty sure that, back then, with the rabbits as my model, I moved as they did through the heat: with my feet together. It was ridiculous, I know.
It takes a long time to come back from the dead, though. You don’t just wake up and pick up where you left off. At least I didn’t.
Whenever I threw up, too, the rabbits would gather around me, wait to pick through the vomit for softened roots. It made me feel like part of something. This is an important part of living. It got to where I looked forward to my body rejecting what I’d put into it, would smile as I threw up, dry heave for more.
At dusk, for the few moments befo
re complete darkness, sometimes the inside of the rabbits’ tall ears would catch a full glow of sorts. Like light was leaking out. I could have stayed there forever, I think.
In my calm moments, now, I sometimes go back there still, I mean. Sit myself against the side of that warehouse in my head and watch the rabbits stand against the sunset as if keeping watch, their ears glowing on.
Things were simple, then. I didn’t have a list of people to kill. But the world is what it is, too.
Some of the litters that were born under the wire, the babies would be all wrong — rabbits, but not. The other rabbits would move in then, and ravage the babies and the mother both. It’s just instinct. But sometimes, too, one of those babies would live for a few days. Pull itself under the wire and whimper with hunger, until I’d throw up on the wire, the strings of vomit going hand over hand down.
One of those times, one of the babies even started to grow, and grow, until I woke one morning to find its protective roll of wire nudged over. All that was left was a smudge of wet in the dirt. I tasted it, tried to remember the rabbit baby that was gone, forgot it for another few hours, I’m pretty sure.
Things were different now, though. For me. Instead of sitting against the warehouse, I sat against the fence opposite it. I was watching the open door. None of the rabbits ever went inside. Because I was a rabbit, I didn’t either.
Because I was a man, though, I watched that doorway, and sometimes looked through the fence, to the ferris wheel, creaking around in the wind.
Before we had to leave Texas, Tanya and me had smuggled Laurie up into one — there was a limit of two per gondola, or whatever they’re called — and my clearest memory of that now is the way Laurie was both smiling and clutching the leg of my jeans.
I like to think that, when I was a rabbit, I could still feel her hand, small and tiny and perfect. That, if my voice would have worked, I would have even said her name, maybe, and all the rabbits would have cupped their glowing ears to me, waiting for me to say it again.
Later I would learn that, for the first couple of years after I disappeared, Refugio asked to be reassigned to the Del Rio region. Because he had a good record, and Del Rio was a bad stretch of land, where experienced border cops were in short supply, his request was granted. He didn’t care about immigration or narcotics, though.
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 8