Mr. Suicide

by Nicole Cushing

  He took the leg away from you. “Sheesh… you’re hardcore, already!” He tousled your hair avuncularly. “It’s more fun to watch her try to do it herself.” He began giggling again. “Especially if she falls.”

  You mulled it over. Nodded.

  “Now, if you like her, you’re gonna fuckin’ love the act after her. These two Siamese twins, joined at the hip—well technically they aren’t Siamese, they’re from Nebraska, but you know what I mean—fight each other for the right to suck my old man’s cock. Cori and Dori, that’s their names. If you think Ms. Francine’s a hoot and a half, you’re gonna start pourin’ sweat when they take the stage. Speaking of sweatin’, is it just me or has it gotten kind of hot in here? You want something to drink?”

  Since looking at Francine it had indeed gotten hot. So hot you had to wipe sweat off your forehead. But there were other sights you wanted to take in before bellying up to the bar. You told the bartender you’d like to walk around a little.

  “Gotcha, chief. Just mind your p’s and q’s, you know what I mean? Don’t try to go somewhere y’ain’t supposed to go, just yet. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

  You noticed, at this point, that there were no other patrons. And you realized, at this point, that you were, truly, Chosen. Francine, the bartender, the bouncer, and the Nebraskan twins Cori and Dori were there for your benefit. That thought made your erection ramrod stiff.

  After hearing about the Black Room, you wanted to get close to it. As you walked away from Francine’s act, the bouncer in front of the red velvet rope stopped lollygagging and assumed his post. He was a short white guy with a tattoo of a crow under his right eye. You were taller than him, and you wondered if he might be easier to whoop than the bartender had been.

  You were still a good ten feet away when the bouncer yelled at you. “Chosen or not, I’ll fuck you up real bad if you try to get in here before your time. There are rules, you know. Procedures. Protocol. You should go to the Purple Room, before heading here. And there’s another rule—you gotta show your passport, first, to get into here.”

  You kept walking. Raised your hands up, palms out. “Hey, I don’t want any trouble. I just want to look inside.”

  Then suddenly a frigid breeze blew out of the Black Room, whipping through the bouncer’s hair and blowing onto your shoulder. The mere graze of the Black Room’s wind made your brain grow pleasingly numb. And then you realized how stupid you’d been, to take pride in being gifted and talented. You realized thoughtlessness had its appeal. And you took joy in knowing that once you passed through the threshold of the Black Room, you’d think no more thoughts ever again.

  The bouncer, however, was somehow immune to the Black Room’s charms. It didn’t seem to daze him like it did you. When he saw you continue to approach he took action. He wasn’t overwhelmingly strong, but he was a quick bastard. He cracked his knuckles, sprinted toward you, and before you knew it he was on top of you, getting blows in on your belly, knocking the wind out of you.

  “Purple Room first,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Understand? Passport first, too!” You wriggled. Tried to get him off of you. No dice. When he was done whoopin’ you, you lay on the concrete floor and looked up at him and groaned.

  The bartender came over and shook his head. “Damn kid, I toldja there were rules, didn’t I? But you come in here, actin’ all badass and shit. Maybe you’re not quite ready to spend time in the Temple. Maybe you need to cool your heels out on the streets and not come back until you get your passport all situated.”

  The bouncer picked you up off the floor and shoved you toward a rear exit. Your heart began pounding like a racehorse in your chest. “No! Let me stay! Let me stay!”

  Off in the distance, Francine declared once again that she was a horny bitch.

  The wind from the Black Room still blew onto your shoulder.

  You craned your head toward the Purple Room, and caught a quick glimpse of a life-size replica of a toy robot entwined in an esoterically lewd position with a life-size plastic army man.

  And then, before you knew it, you were back out on the sidewalk. In the heat.

  XI

  You walked a good six blocks, cursing yourself for not following the rules at The Border Crossing. When you approached the downtown sports arena, a toothless, wrinkled, wide-eyed bald dude greeted you with a question: “You, too, huh?”

  “What do you mean, old man?”

  “They deported you. I mean, I don’t want to be nosy or nothin’, but I’ve seen my fair share of rejected immigrants, and you look like one. You look like someone who wants to be devoured. But you got turned away from The Border Crossing, didn’t you?”

  A businessman walked by and glanced at you. Shook his head and sneered.

  You don’t know why you cared about him sneering, but you did. You didn’t like the fact that you cared about it. You wanted to be more like the old man in front of you. He didn’t even seem to notice how the businessman had sneered. Moreover, he seemed to know much more than you did about The Border Crossing.

  “Who wouldn’t want to be devoured, to escape all this plastic nonsense,” the old man said. He gestured toward the passing traffic, the handful of high-rise office buildings that made up the city’s modest skyline. He gestured toward women in business skirts and blouses walking back to parking garages in their tennis shoes, toward men with lanyards and name badges around their necks trickling in and out of the convention center.

  You nodded enthusiastically. “They said I needed a passport.”

  “And you don’t have one, do you?”

  “No.”

  The old man grinned. His eyes stayed wide open while he grinned. Didn’t scrunch up or anything. He just kept staring at you. “You didn’t even know what they were talkin’ about, did you. Did you, you little googly-eyed stinker?”

  He was an odd duck, but possibly not the oddest you’d met that day. He had a strange vocabulary, but perhaps not the strangest you’d heard that day. You felt your skin flush. You looked at the ground. Answered him. “No.”

  “I didn’t neither, for about twenty years, son, I didn’t. They’ve moved that place every week or two, for twenty years, to make it hard to find. But I’ve tracked ’em down the whole time. I was dogged in my pursuit of knowledge. I was dogged in my pursuit of nonexistence. Worked my ass off to find out what they meant by a ‘passport’. Now, I’ll tell you, freely, what it took me twenty years to find out. You see, what they’re looking for is something that establishes your identity. Who you are. Where you come from. You want to see mine?”

  You nodded.

  He reached into the front pocket of his filthy jeans and pulled out a dental partial plate, all wiry and gummy and toothy. “This belonged to Dear Old Mom, you know. I came back home for a few days to visit her on her death bed. Grabbed it right after she passed, before my brother called the funeral home to pick her up. Boy was he pissed when no one could find it afterward. The funeral was open casket and you could tell she was missing a whole bunch of teeth, you know? Her mouth looked all sunken in. They couldn’t get a replacement pair from the dentist in time for the service and the funeral home was doing all of this on the cheap. So they either couldn’t make her look better or didn’t bother because we still owed them a little money. But I had no regrets, you know. At least at the time, I didn’t have no regrets. The way I figured, it would show The Border Crossing I was serious, you know.” He raised the partial plate up in the air, triumphantly. His voice grew louder. More excited. “This was my mother’s! It shows who I am! It shows where I come from! This should be damned good enough to serve as my passport!”

  The declaration drew glares from pedestrians walking the streets to or from meaningful activities. Businessmen, utility workers, nurses—the type of people engaged in the type of work that kept the city going—scowled at the sight of half a denture being waved through the air like a flag.

  He continued, undaunted. “So the day after we buried her, I
walked into The Border Crossing and I showed it to the bouncer guarding the Black Room. I even visited the Purple Room first, exactly like they said. I thought I was in like Flynn. But nosiree! The bouncer looked all pissed off at me. He said, ‘This passport’s a forgery. It’s fake, fake, fake!’ Then he laughed and threatened to beat my wrinkly ass into a pulp if I didn’t scurry out of there.

  “But you have to understand that it’s a reasonable mistake for a fellow to make. You see, when you progress far enough in the journey you get to see that everything looks fake and plastic and cartoony! What’s the difference between a partial plate and a real tooth? None, really! But nooooooo, the bouncer wouldn’t take it.”

  He spit on the ground, then continued. “Anyhoo it’s a real miserable existence—knowin’ about the Black Room, but not being able to go there. I don’t really belong in this world, but they won’t let me cross the border. Not until I get a passport that isn’t ‘fake, fake, fake’.” He shook his head again. Whipped out a cigarette. Took out a lighter. Sucked on the little stick. It seemed to comfort him.

  Your brain tried to sort out everything you’d learned from this particularly sage derelict. His mother’s partial plate had been presented to the bouncer as a passport to the Black Room, but had been rejected because it was “fake, fake, fake”. So the answer—obviously—was to give the bouncer actual teeth, not facsimiles thereof. You shared this with the old man. Told him that he probably needed to give the bouncer at least one (if not more) of his mother’s actual teeth. “At least,” you said, “that would be a first step. I mean, that would at least answer the ‘fake, fake, fake’ objection. Who knows, he might be a real asshole and give you some other reason for rejecting the passport, but you never know, he might—”

  The old man interrupted you. “For Christ’s sake, don’t you think I already thought of that?”

  “Then why don’t you do it?”

  “Because we buried her!”

  “Can’t you get some other person’s tooth? You know, maybe your brother’s?”

  He blew smoke in your face. “You don’t get it, do you? Your passport provides verification of where you come from. And where you come from is your mother’s belly, right? That’s the place where the obscenity of your existence is first perpetrated! Shit, I thought they taught you kids all about how babies were made in school, right? You have to get some piece of flesh or bone, or maybe some bit of blood, that comes from your mother. That’s your passport, idjit! To take birth from you, they need evidence—beyond all reasonable doubt—of who gave birth to you.”

  You coughed. Cleared your throat. “I know damn well where babies come from, damn near made myself one,” you said. It felt good to brag about your conquest of Cressida. “Anyway, if you already know what the problem is, why don’t you go and take care of it.”

  He stepped toward you. Glared. You noticed, for the first time, that the reason he seemed to always be staring was that he had no eyelids. This excited you. Made you tingle all over, at least until he started yelling at you. “I already told you, my mother’s dead!”

  More passers-by turned their heads toward you. But none of them were cops, so you kept on pressing the issue with him. “Why are you letting that stop you?”

  “Christ, kid. What are you sayin’? That I oughta dig up my mom, unseal her vault, break open her coffin, and grab somethin’ out of there? Is that what you’re sayin’? Even if everything is fake and plastic and cartoony, some things still matter to me. I loved my Dear Old Mom. I mean… really, really loved her. I’m not gonna do that!” He looked at you like you were the biggest piece of shit he’d ever seen. Then he took three steps back, like you were the carrier of the vilest disease known to man.

  Suddenly, you felt self-conscious. You didn’t want the old man to walk away from you. You needed the information only he could give you. Moreover, there was the whole matter of those eyes. Those eyes… you felt… well—there’s no other way to say it—attracted to them. You back-pedaled from your previously strident position. “Look, I mean, I’m just thinking things through, right? I mean, I get it—you don’t want to dig your mom up. I know it sounded crazy when I said it, it’s just that—well, it’s just that I wanted to help you, that’s all. I wanted you to be able to get a passport. I mean, you want to go into the Black Room, right?”

  He coughed. “Fuckin’ A, I want to go into the Black Room! I mean, look at this city. Just look at it. How can anyone stand it? Cars and business clothes and buildings and plastic people getting excited about a stop light that’s been stuck a little too long on red, or getting excited about the games they play in this big, plastic arena. All this fuss over… what, exactly? Over nothing but a parade called life—a parade that starts everywhere but goes nowhere; a parade held for no apparent reason, and—worst of all—a parade that pretends it’s not even a parade! A parade that insists that it’s a natural saunter around the block. Just a wee merry stroll! Just a wee merry stroll! Oh, look at the daffodils! Look at the college basketball team! Look at your paycheck! Your car! Your body! That girl’s body! Make babies! Ever more babies! Ever more plastic marchers for the parade!” He coughed some more. Hocked a loogie. “The whole thing is disgusting!”

  You took in the vast parade. All the coming and going, the clip-clop of heels, the pacing, the marching, the squealing of brakes and the honking of horns, the blare of three competing strands of music strangling each other in the hot, humid air—the sickening motion of it all, the flow of bodies back and forth like waves on a river.

  The sea of humanity made you seasick. You felt a deep pang of sympathy for the old man. Felt his bones as you patted him on the shoulder in a gesture of consolation. “I’m so sorry. How do you bear it?”

  “I get stoned,” he said, “or drunk. Whichever’s available, you know. I ain’t exactly the kind of guy who’s picky.”

  You’d had lots of reasons to get drunk or stoned, but you’d never been near the stuff. Mom and Dad never kept intoxicants at the house. You suspected that most of the people in school assumed you’d done drugs, because all loners did drugs, right? How else to explain your disheveled appearance or the way your eyes never quite met anyone else’s, or the fact that your grades suffered?

  The irony of it all was that, if you’d done drugs, you wouldn’t have been such a loner. You’d once researched weed, to see if it would have been a good fit for you. Had it not been for Mom’s constant snooping around in your room, you would have tried it. From the testimonials you’d read on stoner forums online, marijuana could have been like a stomach medicine. It could have decreased the seasickness you felt when you had to spend time around the sea of humanity. It could have relieved the tightness in your nerves, that tightness in and around your skin, the tightness that made you feel like you hadn’t been so much placed in this world as shoehorned into it. You may have even ventured on to the ladder, if you’d let your brain get fuzzy enough.

  “Can I do some with you? Drugs, I mean.”

  The old man looked annoyed. “You mean right now?”

  “Why not? Is it like we have anything better to do? Isn’t it better than sitting around here and feeling shitty about being shut out of the Black Room?”

  “You got a point, there, Junior.”

  “So can I?”

  “How much money you have on you? I’m not running a charity, you know.”

  You showed him a five-dollar bill. He snatched it out of your hand. “Okay, I’ll consider this a deposit.” He grinned a gummy grin. “Follow me. Got a little place I use. So far, no one else has found it. Just my little nest, comfortably away from the parade. I have a little something there that I think you’ll like.”

  You were not prepared for the walk that followed. Many, many blocks west. A few blocks south. The sun started to set and the shadows of tall buildings began to shift and fall around you like chopped trees. The old man slowed down as you reached a block of abandoned businesses. “My place is in the old dry cleaners,” he whispered. �
��We should probably wait till it’s darker, just to make sure. Let’s take another walk around the block until then.”

  “To make sure of what?” you asked.

  “To make sure no one sees us go inside. You see, there’s no such thing as honor among bums. If they see I have a nice little nest, well, they might decide to see what’s inside that I happen to find so damned comfy. They might come over and squat there, uninvited. And what am I going to do, call the police because they’re tresspassin’?”

  So you walked around the block. Killed time until Earth had twisted itself out of the sun’s glare. And after the sun had dipped completely past the horizon the old man was still not satisfied. You walked some more. You walked until you saw the first faint star out-gleam the light pollution. You were the sweatiest you’d ever been in your life. Your feet ached. But you didn’t obsess about taking a shower (that would have been ludicrous; you knew better than to expect the old man to live anywhere with running water). You didn’t obsess about resting.

  No, you obsessed about drinking and drugging. You obsessed about reaching a chemically induced oblivion, until you could reach the real thing.

  The old man approached a door that was boarded up with plywood. “Hey,” he whispered, “make yourself useful and pry this loose for me. It’s not nailed on tight. I can pry the board just loose enough so that it stays on, but I can squeeze through. I can do it, but it takes me a long time.”

  You put your hand against the edge of the board and noticed it had gotten tagged with graffiti (a black squiggle of odd symbols that looked like an ancient language the world had done itself a favor in forgetting).

  You weren’t the most street smart kid in the world, but you were pretty sure you saw on TV once that graffiti was all about claiming territory. And surely, the old man was not the one who’d performed the tagging. So was it not likely that the old man was squatting in someone else’s space? Or at least, space controlled by a gang? What if you had it all wrong? Yes, you had it all wrong! The graffiti marked the neighborhood as belonging to a gang, not that exact building. That was it, right? You thought you knew something about all of this, but you were not the most street smart kid in the world.