by Ford Collins
The lump leapt down to the pavement and made its way toward the coffee can, carrying itself on stubby limbs and stopping every few feet to sniff at the air and adjust its course.
While watching the lump waddle away, Lowell heard the garbage truck’s gears engage, then beeping and rumbling as the vehicle began to back up.
He looked over just as the defecator appeared from trees next to the post the teenage girl had finally finished locking her bike to.
She faced away from the old man as she rummaged around in her backpack, and had no idea the filthy apparition was there. The garbage man was looking across the front seat of his truck and didn’t see either of them.
The defecator crossed the few feet between the trees and the girl nimbly, and shot Lowell a smile. In a single, fluid motion, he waved his arms over the teenager’s head, embraced her to his chest for a moment, then held her head on the pavement beneath the truck’s left inner rear wheel. Her skull was pulverized instantly into a crimson pudding. The defecator disappeared, still grinning, back into the trees, and the driver ground the gears into first and thundered out onto Monroe, not having seen nor heard a thing.
No one else had either. The lot was empty. Lowell scanned the surrounding windows for faces but found none.
He was the only witness.
He walked to the coffee can and lifted it. The lump had been hanging on to the rim with its paddles, but dropped to the bottom with a ping as Lowell hauled the can up.
“Why did you bring me here? Why did you bring me here to see this?” Lowell seethed.
“Listen, kid, I didn’t bring you anywhere, okay? And I don’t know what you saw, because, as you may or may not have noticed,” one paddle slapped at the center of its face, “I don’t have any damn eyes!”
“Don’t you tell me you didn’t know what was going to happen. I don’t care if you saw it or not… You knew he was here and you knew he was going to do it.”
“Believe what you want, kid. Maybe I choose to believe something else entirely. Maybe I believe you were the one who snuck out of a shrub and threw some poor little girl under a rolling truck tire. But that’s just me, right? I mean, what the hell do I know, right? I’m just a coffee can for god’s sake.”
Lowell had looked away from the lump to see if the girl’s headless body still laid in the lot, which it did, and only looked back when he heard the words ‘coffee can’.
It was, indeed, an empty can held firmly in his hands.
Lowell let it clang on the pavement, and walked to his apartment to get ready for dinner with Lauren.
[Thirty]
Lowell stooped to untie his boots and found a twig stuck between the bottom two loops of laces. He removed it and stood, examining with a subdued sort of shock.
He tried to clear his mind, as he wanted nothing weighing him down or distracting him while he sat with Lauren. If possible, he even wanted to enjoy himself completely free of thought. Working on instinct was difficult for Lowell, he could admit. Of course, he would just as soon say instinct wasn’t quite useless, but close, when one has the capability to process information decisively based on experience and analytical skill.
At that moment, though, he was shaken. As relatively worthless as most lives seemed to become as a result of the poor choices of their owners, the girl he watched die was young. She may have been able to redeem herself, if given the opportunity and the time. If he’d had anything to do with her death—
Coincidence. Twigs fall everywhere. He wouldn’t have to step through a tree or bush to get one wedged into his shoelaces.
Lowell’s phone rang. He hesitated to cross the room to check the caller I.D. If it was Lauren, she was calling to tell him she had to cancel. If it was anyone else, he had nothing to say.
The display read: ‘(Unknown Number)’.
“Hello?”
Lowell couldn’t make out most of what was yelled from the other end through the distorted signal relaying the high-volume voice, but he caught enough to know that the caller was apoplectic and fond of foul language. Aside from a string of obscenities, only the words ‘head’, ‘lost’, ‘mistake’ (maybe ‘no mistake’?), and ‘nothing left’ were unmistakable.
Once the tirade died down, Lowell spoke.
“Norman?”
The line went dead.
[Thirty-One]
Lauren sat at a corner table on the restaurant’s second floor tier. When Lowell entered in a daze below her and struggled to remember Lauren’s name when asked by the host, her heart sank.
Eventually, the two men wound their way through the range of tables, diners, and wait staff to Lauren, and the host left them with a short bow and an icy smile.
Lauren thanked him and turned to the ghost across from her.
“Hello, Lowell.”
She tried to put on a hopeful face, but she knew it was unconvincing.
Fortunately for her, Lowell sat staring past her to the wall.
“Lowell? You in there, guy?”
“Yes… Yes, I’m sorry, Lauren. I have a lot I need to… I’m sorry.”
“No.” She reached across the table and tugged at the sleeve of his still-unbuttoned coat. “I’m just happy you’re here, okay?”
“I am too.” He finally returned her attention directly.
“So, uh… the coat?”
“Right.” Lowell removed his pea coat and hung it on his chair.
“Lowell, if you’ve got other stuff going on, I totally understand. You can just go, or order something and take with. Absolutely promise I won’t be offended.”
“No… Ha, no. I’ve been thinking about this all day.”
Lauren’s face flushed a pale shade of pink, and she brought her hand up to cover her involuntary smile. Lowell was back to staring at the wall, though, so he had missed it entirely.
She rebalanced herself.
“Yes. I often find myself dreaming of pitas during my sad times, too. It’s very therapeutic. Do the loaves dance The Robot in your head too?”
Lowell looked at her with watery, distracted eyes.
He tried to warm his smile, but he was failing and he knew it.
Lauren felt her chest contract. She wanted nothing more at that moment than to hold him up, to keep him from dropping any further into whatever cavernous disaster his mind was becoming, or had already become. She knew so little about him really, but she was sure he was reaching for her, for anything or anyone, to stop him still and pull him to the surface.
“Hey. It’s okay.” She guided him back into the conversation, and did her best to keep him in the present with her. “If the most you can get out of them is a Macarena, I won’t judge. I’m good like that.”
Lowell looked down, embarrassed by his inability to focus on her or anything else. He slid the fingers of his left hand up to his temple and pulled the cap from his head. The air was circulating from the maws of large steel and aluminum floor fans in corners throughout the restaurant, and it cooled the sweat in his hair and on his forehead. The wound tingled, and it still itched constantly.
The blood began to flow through his fingers well enough to warm them to a comfort level he hadn’t felt for nearly a week. He smiled and looked up again. His eyes snapped clear as at the flip of a switch.
“Lowell does not dance. Nor do any of his daydreams.”
“Boooorrrriiinnnggg!”
“I can live with that.”
“Double boooorrrriiinnnggg!”
“This is what I’ve got to work with, here, friend.”
She squinted and puckered her lips, stroking an imaginary goatee. “She could tell this nut would be a tough one to crack right from the offset… The steely eyes. The iron will. The matted hair. Oh, yes, it would take every ounce of skill and cunning she could muster to integrate this savage into civilized society and win the four dollar bet with Tydings in accounting…”
“You’re insane. Mad! I’ll never play a part in your insidious schemes, you fiend!”
Lauren t
hrew her head back and let loose her best muted villainous cackle. Then they sat staring into their laps, shaking their heads and wondering what the hell was wrong with the two of them.
Lowell glanced over the railing to near the front door, and caught the host staring at their table. Lowell nodded, smiled, and waved with one hand while holding up his glass of water in the other. The host smiled back weakly and returned to his work.
The night was looking up for Lowell.
He’d locked up his workshop and tossed the key in a shadowed corner of the antechamber for a few hours, the first time he had allowed himself that for as long as he could recall.
He couldn’t completely let go of the clouds that circled over the study though, and the sense of dread would occasionally pop up while he listened to Lauren speak or watched her run her hands through her hair and push it back over one ear, then the other.
He tried to think of anything having to do with the restaurant: The patrons coming and going around them. The waiters passing by after longer and longer intervals. The dishes and his wadded napkin resting on the table.
Anything to avoid the thought of the teenage girl’s body shaking and twitching without her head. He’d been halfway across the parking lot from her when she died, but he could bring the images of her lying on the pavement into hyperfocus. It wasn’t the violence of the act that wracked him, it was the rawness, the realness of it. The colors escaping the pinched remains of her neck were more vivid than in any artwork he’d ever seen. If it hadn’t been so vicious in the whole, it would have been beautiful to him. The earthy hint of sandalwood in her clothes and hair. The iciness of the first touch of his hands gripping the metal beads wrapped in the strands of thread in her necklace. The grace of his arms encircling her arms and back and chest, constricting for one upward sweep, then sliding a hand to the back of her head to pin it perfectly to the ground as the belching, smoking roar approached and overtook them…
Lowell froze and excused himself from the table.
The window in the back of the second floor overlooked that same parking lot. His eyes scanned the blacktop, but couldn’t find the exact location where the girl had died. Cars filled every spot, and the glare from the street lights played tricks on his eyes from that angle.
He hadn’t heard sirens from his apartment. He saw no police cars or ambulances or yellow tape cordoning off the scene as he walked back around the corner of Oxford to Monroe on his way to Persia’s. There was no scene at all.
Lauren had been startled when Lowell jumped up from his seat and sprinted to the men’s room, but figured it would be best to act as though nothing had happened when he returned. If he returned.
She was just getting around to wondering if he was going to stiff her on the bill when he reappeared and took his seat.
“Sorry.”
“No worries. But I feel obligated to inform you that you missed a herd of naked, juggling little people riding flaming giraffes and communicating with each other by screaming Russian and clicking their tongues in Morse code. Hell of a show.”
Lowell began sweating again, and wiped his forehead and upper lip before responding. “There’s no way a giraffe would fit through that door. Frankly, I think you’re lying.”
“How dare you! I’ll have you know it wasn’t through the restaurant, you rude thing! They ran by out on the street, although one rider did poke in on his giraffe’s neck to order a sack full of baklava.”
“Gaggle.”
“‘Gaggle’ to you, too.”
“No, the proper term is a gaggle of naked, juggling little people riding on flaming giraffes, not a herd.”
“Duly noted.”
Lowell held up his end of the conversation, though he had no idea what he was saying. He’d exited the building, walked back to the parking lot, and dropped to his knees to peer beneath cars around the area where the girl’s body had rested. Every thirty seconds he checked back in to make sure autopilot was still engaged, and made minor course adjustments when necessary.
He couldn’t see blood on the blacktop, but in the shadows beneath the cars it would have been impossible to tell dried blood from oil or radiator fluid.
No metal beads from her necklace glinted as Lowell thought they might if they’d dropped and rolled away from the thin and formerly milky neck.
He pushed back up to his knees and sniffed at the air just as the fleshy lump from the envelope had done. Lowell searched for scents: the girl’s sandalwood, her gore, her fear. What he found was exhaust fumes, rotting produce, frying meats.
The girl’s bicycle was still leaning against the sign post, wrapped in its chain.
There was nothing else to see.
Lowell returned to the engagement in process, finished the meal, hugged Lauren goodnight, and left.
[Thirty-Two]
Lauren called three times after they parted, and left two messages.
The first was laced with genuine concern. The second took a self-deprecating tack and mocked the lunacy of the first, but all for nothing, as Lowell didn’t listen to either one.
He’d rounded onto Oxford within a minute of parting from Lauren, then stalked up and down the street for the next two hours, watching house fronts as he passed, and saying “Come on out, Norman. Let’s talk.”
Lowell never bothered to ask Norman which house his apartment was in.
Norman had always just appeared somewhere along Oxford or Monroe during Lowell’s morning commute each day.
Lowell knew it was Norman who had called him and lost his mind over the line. He knew Norman knew something had happened in the parking lot.
Lowell wanted to know just how much Norman knew.
He was tiring of having to solve riddles and assemble puzzle pieces increasingly often. It wore him down and took him away from his primary goal of achieving balance.
He wanted to test himself, not be tested by others.
He wanted to determine whether he could carry on with the studies that would finally raise him to the apex.
Now Norman was going to stall progress. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t tolerable.
Unfortunately, Norman didn’t appear the one time Lowell had actually wanted him to materialize from thin air. He noted a few specters gliding by during his rounds. Some spoke, but nothing registered above a chattering swirl around his head.
“Norman!” Lowell yelled the name until the word broke up in his throat.
Lights popped on in a half dozen dark windows. Shades and curtains inched open in both directions from where Lowell stood. A door swung in, and an oval appeared five feet from the base of the vertical shaft of white luminescence and screamed “Shut up before I come out there and shoot you in the face, asshole!” before the door slammed closed.
The buzzing set in. An army of lawnmower engines droned in his ears to the exclusion of everything else, even his own weakening voice.
From both ends of the street, the sky, and the ground around Lowell’s feet, insects came crawling and flying and squirming to meet him. Flies, cockroaches, beetles, mosquitoes, ants, hornets… A massive cloud spun within feet of him, and a million microscopic eyes seemed to be looking at him—or through him, he couldn’t tell.
The sound was tremendous. His bones shook with the vibration of beating wings and clacking mandibles. The high squeal of crickets and cicadas drove into his ears like burning filament coils, and he began to feel nauseous from the spiraling of the swarm coupled with the pulsing wire in his brain.
Lowell dropped to his knees in the center of Oxford, rolled the fold of his cap down over his ears, and clamped his palms down over the cloth.
The insects never got close enough for him to swing out and touch. Even if he’d wanted to, they seemed to move so fluidly that he would have been suckered into reaching for them until he collapsed. They had nothing to prove by stinging him or landing on his flesh. They’d simply meant to force him to acknowledge their presence. Once he had to their satisfaction, the cloud dis
persed through the tree branches and over rooftops and into street storm gutters.
Through teary eyes, he picked up a light breaking in all directions and gathering intensity before him. The raw, frozen pavement chewed up his hands as he pushed against it to return to his feet. His arms buckled and his body swayed over them, toppling over onto the street face-first. The light continued to spread, and exploded with a terrifying blare. Lowell dug into the blacktop until his fingers bled, and dragged himself inches to escape.
The car slowed as it swerved around him, a window lowered, and a swollen, middle-aged woman yelled “Should run ya drunk ass over and do us both a favor, ya puke!”
Lowell reached feebly toward the voice, thinking it could somehow save him from the sound and the light.
“Get the hell outta the road!”
The car spun its tires, and screeched down the remainder of Oxford and beyond.
At last, Lowell tucked his arms in and rolled until his left shoulder blade smashed against the sharp upper edge of a curb. He reached behind himself and pulled his body up to the grass, then lay there, staring through the blur of his watering eyes at the glint of streetlights in a chrome bumper feet from his head.
He had no idea how long he’d been passed out when he sat up in the grass to the sound of a rust bomb with a blown muffler tearing by.
His joints were achy and stiff from the cold ground he’d been spread over.
Frost surrounded the unfrozen outline of his body. The way his arms and legs had been bent made the cutout appear to be the silhouette of a running man.
Lowell flexed his toes in his boots and stumbled down the sidewalk to his building. It took him four minutes to get from the front steps of the house to his apartment door. The gears of his mind ground and whirred, only engaging the corresponding physical mechanisms with total focus.
The jingling of the hanging lock chain hadn’t yet died when Lowell picked up the swishing sound of nylon over canvas. He flipped the light switch nearest the door to find his brother, covered in blood and sitting on Lowell’s couch.