Dominoes in Time

by Matthew Warner

  About nine-thirty, Kanaye came down from the newsstand, heading for the restroom. Until then I’d never paid attention to his habits—Kan always waits till after hours to pee anyway, the bladder of a samurai, y’know—only tonight he broke the dam a half hour early.

  “Wait—” I started to say, but realized how foolish that was, and watched him disappear through the ENTER door. Other people kept going in after him—the crowd from the last flight of the day—and one by one they came out the exit looking as dazed as that black gentleman I mentioned.

  But not Kan. The fool, he comes back out of the entrance, excusing-me and pardoning-me past two irritated guys who’re pulling those goddamn carry-on suitcases I hate.

  “Hey Kan! C’mere,” I said.

  As Kan walked over, I noticed the restroom had left him none the worse for wear.

  His brows pressed together in concern. “Hey, you looking like shit.”

  “Yeah, I know. Under the weather today.”

  “You needa some green tea? I get you.”

  He started off till I said, “Hold on. I was wondering, why did you just come out of the entrance door?”

  I’m always asking him questions about his behavior, so he didn’t bat an eye. “I never go out through exit door. Always out through door I entered into.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause if you don’t, you leave soul behind.” He made a shooing motion at me. “Ah-ho, you donna know anything. You wanna some green tea? Cigarette?”

  I felt like a flashbulb had gone off in my face. “No, not tonight thanks. I’ll be going soon.”

  I was still sitting there long after he’d gone back to his newsstand. You leave soul behind. Could it be? Or was Kan just being superstitious as usual? And yet even now as I watched him pull the metal fence down over his place for the night, Kan looked just as chipper as ever. Not like the rest of us who’d been through that men’s room.

  Now empty of people, it sat across from me. What had the Dark Man done to it? As I looked at those two hallways, I remembered mom’s old vegetable processor—y’know, that appliance sensible parents shouldn’t let their kids around—with the funnel for the vegetables, the blades in the middle to chop ’em up, and the hole in the front to spit ’em out.

  I was gonna die soon. I knew it right down to my bones. The hospital might pump me full of drugs, but they couldn’t give me back whatever I’d lost.

  As Kan waved bye for the night and headed for the airport’s main entrance—no doubt the same one he’d come in through that morning—I snuck out my baggie of ghosters and popped one.

  Soon, the white wall tiles in front of the men’s room were awash in the wavy sparkles of a good trip. It might’ve hit me harder than usual in the state I was in. I was so weak by that point that it exhausted me just hauling my ass outta my chair.

  Now I could see it more plainly: how the construction crew had done a shitty job rebuilding the wall. Grouting was falling out from between the tiles, and the letters in ENTER dripped from too much paint.

  I figured I had nothing to lose by going back in.

  “Holy Christ”—probably the tenth time I’d said it that day—I could hardly get in. The place was fucking standing-room only. Wall-to-wall bodies—or souls, I guess, the souls of everyone who’d passed through that day—all packed in there in conditions inhumane for a sardine. Men stood on the sinks and urinals; sat like cowboys on top of the dividing screens. Jammed in tighter than a college fraternity stuffed into a single car as a stunt.

  And quiet. No one said a word as I jostled in.

  They all looked sad—resigned. Some had their heads bowed. No one had any luggage that I could tell, but hey, when I go to the afterlife I don’t want my baggage either, right?

  “Where—where am I?” I said, but that wasn’t what I meant. Where was my soul? “Where are you?”

  Panic and claustrophobia set in as the floor started to thrum. Something was starting to happen—maybe the food processor was coming on—and I knew I had to get out of there. But I couldn’t leave without my soul.

  “Where is it?” I yelled.

  No one answered—just looked at me. But the teenager next to me stepped aside, creating a breath of space. I stepped into it, and the next person stepped aside, letting me through. You see, they were helping me. They couldn’t—or wouldn’t—speak, but they were helping.

  Along the way I passed the blond-haired black man, still wearing his gray suit. He looked away when I stared at him. No sign of Kan, though—of course not.

  The crowd kept parting, leading me to the toilets. Finally I realized I was headed for the first stall—the one where I’d taken my dump the night before. Its door was open, and ten guys were inside. I had to get right up in there before I saw him.

  I was dressed—I mean, my soul was dressed in the same red polo shirt I’d worn the other night. He was still sitting on the toilet where I’d left him—head in his hands—in the same position I’d been in when I took my dump. Only difference was that his pants were up. He looked up at me as I came near, and took my outstretched hand.

  The thrumming was louder now, making the lights blink. Something like worry passed through the men’s sad expressions.

  “Come on!” I said to my soul, which was unnecessary since it held my hand like a child. I was just scared—frustrated at the crowd; it wasn’t letting us through fast enough. But at least this time we were headed back to the entrance door and not the exit.

  He stepped closer as we neared the doorway, walking right on my heels but somehow not tripping me, then even closer till he could smell the back of my neck. The thrumming was so loud that it rattled my teeth.

  A second before we crossed the threshold, he snaked his arms around me, making me gasp in surprise. Then we tripped and fell headlong. I had an instant to register that he’d vanished.

  And that’s when the bathroom exploded.

  For real this time. Tile and dust washed over me. Cut my cheek—see, look right here. Fire singed my clothes, and my ears stopped up. A piece of tile shattered my display case.

  The blast opened a hole in the ceiling, and I saw—well, at first I thought it was a helicopter rising from the bathroom into the night sky. It was insectile, a black mosquito with a huge, distended belly five times bigger than the rest of it. The belly—the sac—was yellow and transparent, and I could see it contained the men from the bathroom. They all lay atop each other in a tangled mass of bodies. The blond black guy lay pressed against the sac’s skin with his arms and legs splayed out. We made eye contact as the giant mosquito thrummed into the sky and disappeared.

  And here I am—what, six hours later? Still telling you the same thing over and over.

  You’re wondering, I’m sure, why that old wives’ tale about leaving through the same door protected Kan. Well, maybe that bubble around the bathroom—the mosquito’s stomach—is punctured when a body ’n soul enter it together but can’t be punctured going the other way. Your only hope is to escape through the hole you made going in, and since no one does—respecting the flow of ENTER and EXIT—the unsuspecting body has its soul ripped out.

  Oh, I know you don’t believe me. We’ll see what tune you’re whistling when all those people come into Johnston General tomorrow with their hair falling out, but I guess you’ll blame me for that, too.

  What they’ll need is some good luck to pull ’em through. Maybe a dose of Doctor Kanaye’s roasted beans, one for every year. I’m sure that’s what saved me. But tell ’em to go easy on the chili sauce. I’ve found that—like the doors of that men’s room—it can hurt at both ends.

  Looking Back

  Backwards Man

  “E

  verything happens for a reason,” he said.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Evil springs from simultaneous causes, or so he also claimed. If he was correct, then I can easily see how this all began. Of course I can. Everything is clear in retrospect; Backwards Man taught me that, too.

 
The first cause: the bastard painters hired by the condo association painted over our kitchen window. Why? I don’t know—maybe their forged green cards forgot to mention they were fucking stupid. And maybe when the Spanish expert (ha) property manager told them to paint “toda la pared,” she forgot to add “except for the windows.” The upshot was that the window over our sink acquired a beautiful—and opaque—coat of barnyard red.

  And the second cause: Mr. Thompson’s decision to go skeet shooting from the middle of Lee Highway.

  Of course, each of these had their own causes—chaining back, I suppose, to the first “un-caused cause” my philosophy professor used to gas about, but I hope the Opposer’s machinations don’t regress that far. At Backwards Man’s prompting, I’ve remembered that the red paint was to replace the coat that had deteriorated because of pesticide spraying—which had been necessitated by a booming bug population, which wouldn’t have happened if federal “environmental initiatives” hadn’t obliterated a certain species of daffodil.

  Blame the government for my mother’s death then. Maybe.

  And old Mr. Thompson wouldn’t have flipped out if he hadn’t stopped taking his antipsychotic medication, which until the previous week was covered by BlueCross Insurance. A software glitch had scrambled their files on him, resulting in erroneous denials of insurance coverage.

  So then Bill Gates must’ve killed my mother. Maybe.

  But Backwards Man later said they were simultaneous causes, relating back to one common element called the Opposer.

  “Horrible coincidence,” I countered.

  No, he said. There are no coincidences.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Everything happens for a reason.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  A day after the Mexicans painted the window, I was seated at our breakfast table, eating a bowl of Sugarman’s Cereal. Or rather, I should say it was Lauren’s table because she owned the condo, and I was her live-in boyfriend.

  She leaned against the stove, sipping coffee and staring at me. We’d been having nuclear-gauge fights about stupid shit ever since I moved in—what time to drive into work together, what day to vacuum the carpets, where to set the thermostat, how to situate the goddamn pillows on the bed—the kinds of arguments that make a young man like myself worry what’ll happen when we’re married and have serious subjects to fight about, like kids and money.

  We were ripe to be popped, like a pus-filled zit. We would’ve broken up anyway, but my point is that it wouldn’t have happened that morning if not for the Opposer.

  Outside, Mr. Thompson walked barefoot to the center median of Lee Highway, carrying his twelve-gauge. It was forty degrees with a twenty mile-an-hour wind, but he just wore pajamas. Someone had already spotted the fool and called the cops, so he only had time to pop off a single shot. I later read, in the same article that reported the software bug at BlueCross, that Mr. Thompson said he was aiming at invisible crows scrambling his TV reception.

  We heard the shotgun blast, and instead of opening the door to look, Lauren opened the window to see past the coat of paint. It let in a cold blast of wind that blew my cereal onto the floor.

  “Goddammit,” I said. “Could’ve opened the door to look.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Lauren said.

  “Well, you don’t use your head sometimes. It’s like I was saying last night.”

  Soon, we stopped paying attention to Mr. Thompson. He was no longer interesting anyway as he was obeying the cops’ commands to throw down his weapon.

  “I’m tired of you talking down to me,” Lauren said as she shut the window.

  “Yeah? Well I’m tired of you saying I’m a ‘cheap-ass’ and a ‘fucking asshole’ all the time. What do you think of that?”

  Ten minutes later, we’d gone hoarse with shouting. We slammed the bathroom and bedroom doors, isolating ourselves from each other.

  As always during arguments, my mother was brought up. Lauren resented the time I spent on the phone with her—a couple hours a week, mainly to vent the grief Mom and I still felt over Dad’s death. Not unreasonable, I think. But my girlfriend always had the nerve to bitch about it, and then to pick up the phone for her inane gabfests with the brainless, amoral, backstabbing cunts she called friends, who, when occupying the same room (provided they could all fit into it) looked like nothing so much as a herd of cows who’d learned to wear clothes.

  Honestly, I’m not sure what I saw in her. The glamour of her thirty-eight double-D tits, most likely. Certainly it was nothing she had inside of that pig head of hers. Even when she was trying to be nice, she couldn’t manage it; her idea of tact was to say, to someone like my mother, “You look good for your age.”

  But even as I say that, I wonder about something. Here’s a causality what-if for you. What if, when my dad died, Mom had died, too? That would have been a few months before I met Lauren. The two important females of my life never would have met and therefore never would have argued. There never would have been time spent with Mom for Lauren to get huffy about.

  Put another way, Mom’s outliving Dad strengthened our mother-son relationship. It was certainly stronger than my relationship with Lauren. So who then is actually responsible for causing Lauren and me to split? Sometimes I wonder if Mr. Thompson and the Mexicans weren’t just convenient scapegoats.

  In any case, Lauren and I soon called it quits. A week later, I moved into the only vacant one-bedroom apartment I could find. Its rent was Fort Knox times ten for just a few hundred square feet—and it was totally beyond what I could afford. Welcome to the suburb-cum-city. Sure, I could’ve roomed with someone, but I try to avoid that.

  A short while later, Lauren emailed my mother’s laboratory at CalPark Biotech Inc. She called me a “selfish bastard.” Mom fired back: “You’re a sociopathic airhead living in a perpetual state of pre-menstrual syndrome.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

  A day after that, Lauren hit the Big Game jackpot of one hundred million dollars.

  And a day after that, Mom’s internist called to say she could stop worrying that acid reflux was ruining her esophagus. Her throat was fine. The problem was the tumor wrapped around her aorta.

  “Oh God, why me?” Mom sobbed into the phone as she told me. “Why me?”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Everything happens for a reason.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Mom’s and my lives soon went down the shit hole. Unable to afford the rent, attract roommates (I finally abandoned that small scruple), or find anyplace cheaper to live, my savings disappeared. I started having tap water for breakfast instead of Sugarman’s Cereal. I suppose I could’ve moved in with Mom out in California, but I still had my pride. She, meanwhile, began aggressive chemotherapy. Her revolutionary research into a cure for hemorrhagic fever soon fell by the wayside—her furniture now covered with fallen-out hair instead of chemistry formulae print-outs.

  She called one morning as I searched my bureau for socks without holes. “One of our competitors has a new cancer therapy that could save me, but it’s not FDA-approved. My insurance won’t cover it.”

  “How much would it cost?”

  She told me.

  I swallowed, then said, “Do it. Mortgage your house—I’ll sell my car—whatever it takes.”

  I would have, too. With Dad gone and Lauren gone, she was all I had left. You’re only given one mother in this life.

  “It won’t be enough,” she said. “I’m going to die.”

  After we hung up, I called Lauren. It took a while to track her down since she’d already quit her job.

  “Look, I know things were bad between us—and between you and Mom—but we need help. The cancer’s gonna kill her unless she gets money for this procedure.”

  “And you think just because I won the lottery that I’ll give it to any old jerk off the street?”

  “Honey, we’re not jerks off the street.”

  “Don’t call me ‘honey.’”

  “Okay, I’
m sorry—but we were something to each other. I thought we used to be family.”

  “Your mom made it clear that I’m no family member of hers. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some sociopathic PMS to attend to.”

  “Lauren—”

  She hung up on me.

  A couple months later, as I was posting signs on telephone poles to sell my stereo for rent money, my mother died, a ninety-pound shell of the woman she once was.

  Mom’s colleagues at CalPark Biotech tried to carry on her research into hemorrhagic fever, but they were mental monkeys compared to her. When the epidemic broke out, the world was still without a cure, and 1.3 million Africans bled to death from their bodily orifices.

  … And all because some painters opaqued my kitchen window, and Mr. Thompson fired his shotgun from the middle of Lee Highway.

  Sure, it’s hard to see the link between those events. Even coincidences have some common—but accidental—similarity, such as if Mom’s health insurance troubles had stemmed from the same BlueCross computer glitch that pushed Mr. Thompson off his rocker. But these things had no such links.

  At least not at first glance.

  “Trace the ‘environmental initiatives’ back to the senator who dreamt them up,” Backwards Man said later. “Then trace that computer bug to the software designer. Those men will be one and the same: the Opposer. Or not. Might be the Opposer’s grandkids. Just keep going back.”

  Back to the first cause, the source of all evil.

  There are no coincidences. Everything happens for a reason.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Similar events, though, can be misleading. Take for instance two different glass bottles in the middle of two different streets, which caused two different car wrecks.

  The first bottle made its oh-so-convenient entrance into my life shortly after Mom’s funeral. I’d been late to work for two weeks running, and my boss was making frequent baseball analogies. Guess who was the hitter chalking up strikes.