MIdnight Diner 1: Jesus vs. Cthulhu

by Chris Mikesell

  Harmless, I’d tell myself, harmless fun.

  Yeah? Then why do I feel so crappy?

  “What’s the plan?” Mike snaps me from my haze of memories. He pulls in front of a Mustang, and around an SUV to make our exit. The street name is unimportant because a billboard with a massive arrow hangs over the freeway declaring the delights of the Crystal Moon. He parks at an abandoned fast food restaurant next to the club, and we wait.

  It’s approaching twilight by the time I see Eric exit the one story building. Mike swings the car around to the front and I’m out and on my feet before the truck is stopped, striding towards Eric.

  “Hey Eric,” I say. “Eric.” He turns around, a big grin on his face. “Where did you get the R?” His smile drops when I mention the date rape drug rohypnol.

  “Where do you think I got it?” He curses.

  YOU KNOW HIM . . . ERIC MATTHEWS.

  Dickey Bledsoe is Jabba the Hutt’s gray haired big brother, only Dickey is bigger, and walks on two legs, and Jabba was better looking. Well I’m only guessing about two legs because I’ve never actually seen him walking. He looks ten years older than his forty-nine. Dickey spends all his time at his desk, eating, smoking cheap cigars, and watching the girls on a closed circuit surveillance system he installed when he inherited the club from his aging father.

  Two weeks before this incident with Dana, talking to the girls, this sinking in my gut had started, this feeling like I’d eaten a pound of destruction the day I’d agreed to work at the Crystal Moon. My father was not the type to say I told you so but I know he warned me about this.

  “He wanted us to come to this ‘private party.’” Amanda made the quotation marks with her fingers. “Maybe if I was willing, I could make a lot of money.”

  “So, you’ve done private parties before, haven’t you?”

  “Not like this. We’re strippers, Chris, not hookers.” Betty said. “You think he wanted you to . . .”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Chris, it was obvious. Dickey is going to ruin this club.”

  The next day I went in early to talk with him about it.

  “What are you implying?” Dickey leaned forward in his chair, his hands on his chin and elbows on the desk forming a triangle, his jowls doubling, his gut spilling over the top of the desk.

  “I ain’t implying nothing, Dickey. I’m just asking about these parties.”

  “Just something to pull in some more cash.” There was something malicious in his answer, something I knew my father had warned me about. The reek of doom was heavy around Dickey, but I just went home and washed it off, just kept doing my job, kept trying to keep control of overeager and belligerent drunks.

  YOU KNOW HIM . . . ERIC MATTHEWS.

  “Ask your boss if you want some R, that’s why I sold it to him.” “So you sold him the mickies?”

  “I set up a buy for him that’s all. I got a finder’s fee, and a couple lap dances.”

  “You the one setting up these private parties?” “Yeah.”

  “And you need Ruphies to help it along huh? Makes the girls more pliable, right?”

  “Right.” He nods his head, the look on his face the filth of a thousand rats. “So you were with Dana last night?”

  Eric’s smile is Cheshire like and grotesque, he taunts me with a crude gesture. He starts to say something but I cut him off with two quick jabs into his wind. When he doubles over I smash a hard upper cut into his nose and he crumples to the dirt parking lot. The guy standing on his right lands a good punch to my jaw, but panic blankets him when I shake it off. I grab his arm, pull him close, and head butt him. There’s a sharp thwacking of the cranial impact, and he slumps next to Eric. Mike has taken up the slack with the third guy, who is quickly in the pile next to the other two.

  “Stay on the ground.” I tell them, and I drag Eric to a car and prop him up on it. I squat down close to him. He’s dazed so I slap him hard across the mouth. “You listening to me?”

  His head rolls around for a moment and his eyes come clear, focusing on me, pouring out hatred.

  I slap him again. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes.” A trickle of blood has formed at the corner of one of his lips. “Jesus.” He says a short prayer.

  I speak to him in a whisper so only he and I can hear. I tell him he’s banned from the Crystal Moon for life; I make sure he understands the consequences of trying anything like this again. “Leave town. If Mike or I see you around here, you’re dead. You understand?”

  He starts to mouth off and this time I backhand him. I’m still whispering. “Are we clear?”

  He nods and I put my hand up by my ear and say, “What?” “Yes, I understand.”

  “Good.”

  “Now what?” Mike asks as Eric and his cronies drive away. “I go inside I

  spend nine weeks in lockup.”

  “I don’t need you to go inside.” I retrieve a short, wooden, little league, baseball bat I keep in my truck.

  “Dude, what’s up?”

  “As soon as Betty and Amanda come out call the cops.”

  He sighs, “Dude, wait—awe damn it—just let it go.” He puts his hand on my shoulder but I shrug it away and shake my head no.

  “Just make the call—wait around the back for me.” I spit on the ground. He nods and I walk through the front door of the Crystal Moon

  Gentlemen’s Club for the last time.

  THE ANCHORMAN SITS ridged in his chair as they always do, delivering the news with a stern or joyful look depending on the story. Now his face is stern. “A local Gentlemen’s Club was raided tonight on the anonymous tip that

  the owner was selling the date rape drug rohypnol to his customers. The tip, sadly, turned out to be true, as the police found the club empty and the owner tied to his chair and his desk covered with vials of the drug. Susanne Gonzales, the spokeswoman for the special rape and domestic assault division told us of none of the dancers remember who perpetrated this act of vigilantism.”

  Mike slaps me hard on the back, “I’m proud of you, boy.” He swears, “Dickey Bledsoe’s finally got what he’s had coming.”

  He’s proud of you for letting that kid go free?

  I don’t feel proud of myself. “I’m tired of this.” I say. I should have killed Eric. And you’d be spending the rest of your sorry life in prison; I hear my father’s voice.

  “Tired of what?”

  “Always living on the edge of trouble, man. My daddy wouldn’t have wanted me to live this way. Before he died he told me it was never too late for a man to change.” My beer tastes strangely sour so I set it down on Dana’s coffee table. “You believe that?”

  Mike drains his beer and twists open a new one. “Maybe, dude. I guess a man has to want to change.”

  “I feel like I’ve wanted to change my whole life.”

  Mike drinks half his beer. “Well, I guess you’re half way there then.” He chuckles, looking intently at the label on his beer, twisting the bottle around. “You ain’t getting all born again on me, are you?”

  I thought you were already born again.

  “Maybe,” I smile. “I wonder if there’s a church that needs a big tattooed bouncer.”

  “Who’d you bounce out of a church?”

  “The pastor, I guess if he gets boring, or talks too long.”

  Mike laughs and finishes his beer. “You want some more?”

  I shake my head. “Where would you go if you left here?” I ask Mike. “I can’t leave, bro. I’m tied to this place.”

  I sigh. “Trapped.”

  “Naw just stuck man. But that ain’t true for you.” Mike sucks on his teeth and nods, “What was that girl’s name, that one you dated for a while before you went to work at the Moon? Jackie, Jamie, Judy?” He snaps his fingers trying to remember her name.

  “Jennifer. Jen.” I say. “She moved back to Texarkana, I think.”

  “I liked her. She was a real nice girl.” He says, standing up. I suppos
e to fetch another beer.

  “I liked her, too.” I say as I walk out the front door.

  DELUGE

  MATT MIKALATOS

  Ted’s mind cut a channel through the landscape of the world, running deep and strong and certain as a river. Camilla’s mind moved much more like a weather system: unpredictable with flashes of great power, and in some way, which seemed very clear to Ted and nebulous to her, she generated his power, increased his depth and lessened his limitations.

  Both of them were more like the crowds of guan qian jie than they would have ever thought. He moved in simple fashion up and down the great avenue, which he believed should not be called the “walking street” in all the tourist literature, because a street upon which no vehicle (not even the omnipresent bicycle) was allowed clearly could not be a street. His singular need—they were going to the ticket shop to buy train tickets for their trip tomorrow—dictated his direction, speed, and patience. She, too, resembled the crowd with its diversity of focus, decisions being made more by intuition than conscious thought, the ebb and flow of thousands packed into a space for hundreds, some moving east, some west, some following an unseen, internal direction. The neon signs in Chinese—which he found garish— delighted her. Even the unintelligible Chinese pop music with its punctuated English (“wo ai ni, baby, wherever you are”) she found charming and exotic. They reminded her of every reason she had left parents and friends and home and brought little Andy with them to China.

  The one thing she could not bear on the half-mile stretch of the walking street was the temple, squat and silent as a spider at the center of guan qian jie’s web of merchants. She shuddered and walked faster when need dictated that they pass it, as it did today. Ted could not understand this. But there had been other times when Camilla’s nonsensical responses had proven correct, and so, in the year they had lived here, he had applied his great intellect to the temple to see if he could discover the root of her fears. He had learned that it was not, as he had assumed, a Buddhist temple, but a Daoist one. After he learned this he noticed yin-yang symbols on the high wooden sides of it, and found he could see them most clearly when he took off his glasses and squinted. The temple had been built in honor of a general who had pleased an emperor a millennium ago and received a promotion from general to god. A wooden statue in his honor, fierce and brightly painted, loomed twelve feet higher than the small tables which sold sticks of incense and firecrackers wrapped in thin red paper. In all his observations—and he had made many, even coming to the temple without Camilla’s knowledge to watch, to push against the walls of the temple with his mind—he had detected nothing insidious, frightening, or threatening. It seemed, in fact, nothing more than a cultural relic, a quaint reminder of a time when these streets and shops had been set aside to service a god, streets which now served capitalism and the needs of the people, now serviced those who needed train tickets and tennis shoes and tiny plastic animals to hang on the antennae of their mobile phones.

  But the temple presented no danger to him, so he turned his attention to Camilla. She felt lonely, this seemed certain, for in their job they couldn’t make friends with the other expatriates; other Americans picked up the cultural cues too readily and would surely make a slip, endangering Ted and Camilla’s work. Americans came to China to make money, to make a getaway, or to make converts. This last purpose was illegal, and Camilla and Ted were here to break that law. Perhaps the stress of this grated on Camilla in the same way that having the only white baby in the entire city ground them both down to dust. Even now, if they paused for the briefest moment, crowds of hundreds would form, crushing in to touch Andy’s blond hair, to stroke him, to ask to hold him, to tell Camilla in Chinese that the baby was too hot, too cold, too skinny, and what white skin!

  They were both encouraged by the work. Many people became Christians here and just this year their first church plant had split and grown into two more. But perhaps to her, the temple represented that the work would never be done, that they fought against thousands of years of tradition, and that if they were to see this job through to the end, then they must spend every last coin of their life here in the crowded marketplaces.

  In the end he had to admit that the temple’s fearsome effect on his wife baffled him. She claimed to find a spiritual darkness there, a lingering, still worshipped, malevolent spirit, the sort of thing that he knew existed but mostly stayed wedged firmly in the pages of the Gospels. Those things had passed, hadn’t they, with the passing of so many other things, the speaking in tongues and prophecies and the voice of God speaking aloud in the temple while the rafters shook and smoke and darkness and lightning declared His presence. This temple, which crept up beside them even now with its shops prostrated before it, stemmed off of the walking street like a bulbous growth. The shops stood at a respectful distance, creating a spacious stone courtyard. Beautiful bridges that arched like spines crossed the stagnant canals and ushered one past the stone lion guardians. A waist-high, wrought-iron fence delineated a smaller courtyard within the greater one, and a strange black trough on high legs stood near the entrance, just behind the ticket booth. It cost a dollar to enter, and a short line of faithful worshippers shed their shoes on the way past the twelve-foot high double doors and into the thick shadows. Sticks of incense burned in sand-filled pedestals. The yellow walls gave it a cheery look, really, with the yin-yang symbols inserted high on the dark and jagged spires. It was an interesting building, yes, full of history, yes, but only a building nonetheless.

  Somehow in the course of these thoughts Ted had let the squirming Andy out of his arms and Andy, newly captivated by the concept of running, slipped through the maze of legs and into the relatively open temple square. Camilla’s sudden stiffness alerted Ted, brought him back to the immediate world. He called Andy’s name and the boy giggled merrily. Ted shoved past a knot of college students and scooped him up. The college students pointed and laughed and took pictures with their phones. One of them asked if she could have a photo with Andy, but Ted pretended not to understand and moved away before they could get up the courage to try their English. As he stepped back into the crushing stream of shoppers he saw his wife, struggling forward through a crowd of admirers, and then, somehow, he noticed a man in a green sweater moving toward her with a singularity of purpose that startled him.

  Camilla had taken to watching animal documentaries, because her Chinese was too primitive to understand even the children’s shows on television. Animal documentaries seemed to explain themselves. Last week there had been one about sharks, and he had caught something about how a shark “locks on” to its prey, that if there were ninety seals it would choose one seal to follow, regardless of closer seals or even seals that got in the way. The man in the green sweater had that look, as if there were no one on the street other than Camilla; he fixed his eyes unwaveringly on her and moved through the crowd with a speed that Ted had not seen before. Ted sensed danger, but he was not a man who put much stock in senses that could not be clearly explained, and a man walking quickly over to see an American woman should not frighten him, though it did. He shook it off and called Camilla’s name, his eyes fixed on the man.

  The man’s eyes snapped from Camilla to Ted and without missing a step he turned toward Ted and the writhing two-year-old in his arms. Ted wondered momentarily if the man could be with the government, or the local PSB, the police. Someone in their agency had been deported a week before from a nearby city. The man came closer and Ted realized that he was not coming straight at him, but seemed actually to be steering beyond him, toward the temple. Ted relaxed as the man passed on his left, and then, out of the corner of his eye he saw the man cock back his fist and take a vicious swing at his head. He saw it in time to turn his head away, and the fist caught him behind the ear, knocking his head into Andy’s. Andy let out a cry of surprise and pain and Ted’s first thought, rising to him unbidden and strange was, In the name of Christ I command you to come out of him.

  Th
is thought surprised him more than the punch, more than the throbbing, raised bruise already forming behind his ear, which his hand rose to touch and his fingers tentatively explored. He was not given to charismatic expressions, and in his church the devil had the good manners not to disturb the children of God. He could not put words to his unplanned thought, for he had no way of knowing if this man was truly demon-possessed. A misunderstanding seemed far more likely, and he quickly set Andy on the ground and told him to run to Mama. “Keep walking,” he called to Camilla, who had cried out in horror and stood anchored now to the fitted stone street of guan qian jie. The crowd around her had already shifted toward him, to see what the foreigner would do after being punched in the head. “Keep walking,” he repeated, and she did, but slowly, as if an anchor dragged behind her.

  He tried to think of what to say to the man in the green sweater, who still stood beside him, a look of defiance on his face. “Ni yao shenme?” the man yelled, and Ted looked at him inquisitively, resettling the glasses on his face. One of the college students appeared at Ted’s elbow and said quietly, “He is asking what do you want from him.”

  “But I don’t want anything from him. Tell him I don’t want anything.” The student looked down at the cobbled temple square. Camilla walked

  slowly toward the ticket seller, watching Ted the whole time. No one was in her way. “I do not wish to speak to him,” the student said. “I cannot tell him your words. I am frightened. I am sorry.”

  Ted looked at the man in the green sweater, and his face was twisted with hate or sickness. He tried to say he wanted nothing, but the words came out wrong. “Bu yao. Mei you.”

  The man in green snarled the words back, slurred and mocking, “Bu yao mei you b u yao mei you. Ni yao shenme? NI YAO SHENME? NI WEISHENME JIAO WO?”

  “He says again what did you want with him and why did you call him.”

  “But I didn’t call him. There’s a misunderstanding.”