Up the Crazy

I released this a few months ago on Smashwords – it’s a tie-in to my novel Chum and my novel Lifers, which share a universe and some characters. Figured: Why not post it here as well?

Her name was Florence, and she was trying to kill me.

###

Trim had a brother. This was disturbing news on so many levels I didn’t know how to process it, I kept forgetting it like it was a fnord and then picking it up again a few hours later and marveling over it the way you’ll find some huge insect in your basement, something primordial and brutish, a remnant of an earlier stage of evolution when insects could pick up small mammals and carry them away and you’ll spend a few moments just in awe of its awfulness before crushing it under a rock. Every time I remembered Trim had a brother I went through the same cycle: Amazement, horror, and then putting it out of my mind as quickly as possible.

Fresh from the Christine Debacle, which had taken on Capital Letters and become an epochal moment in my life, apparently, Trim set me up. Through his mysterious brother, he had an acquaintance named Jessica whom he described as “all legs and marry me.” Jessica was not for me, though. Jessica in turn had a friend named Nancy, who was also not for me, but Nancy had a friend named Florence, and Florence was, Trim insisted, for me.

Trim, naturally, had a complete speech about Florence, the kind of speech Trim gave from time to time that convinced you he had dossiers on all of us with pre-canned speeches prepared for all occasions. The speeches were also curiously filled with strange stresses and obscure words and this also led me to believe they were basically toneless, rhythmless, rhymeless poems, the kind that Trim specialized in.

Florence, Trim told me, was too much woman for most men. She was tall. She was busty. She was, he insisted, a giantess – everything in proportion, but simply too much of it. It was overwhelming for most men, he said. Add to that red hair and a fuck yeah Florence! kind of attitude which gave her incredible confidence despite being a girl Trim was certain had been mercilessly mocked in her school days for being three or four times normal size, and you had a girl who intimidated all the men in her life and was therefore inexplicably single.

Trim then went on to tell me that I was no match for her, and the whole exercise was doomed, but she was the only girl he knew that was currently single and might find my sense of humor funny. And so, we were set up. I tried to protest that the dead-eyed sex with Christine and her stuffed animals had destroyed my libido and all I wanted to do was somehow get our ridiculous, complex, doomed caper off the ground, make some money, and become a monkish sort who lived off of like fifty dollars a year for the rest of my life. I’d be famous for it. People would come to hear my wisdom and bring me food I couldn’t otherwise afford, like bread. I was in no way ready to engage another female in sexual congress, and possibly wouldn’t ever again be ready, with Christine’s motionless body still fresh in my mind.

Trim, being a bastard, smirked and said “Even Chick?”

I didn’t say anything to that, but it occurred to me that the chances of Chick ever realizing I had a working penis were essentially zero, so the monk life it would be.

I liked Flo. I liked that she introduced herself as “Flo,” so old-school and Depression-era. No one was named Florence any more. Just like no one was named Ebenezer or Horatio. She dropped into the seat at the bar across from me in a breathless, grinning way and said Hi, I’m Flo, please to meet you and ordered a gin and tonic in the next breath, just shouting it out to the waitress who was halfway across the room.

Flo was a good talker, too. She let me talk, but when I had nothing to say, which was often, she was happy to dive in and tell me a story. Her stories usually involved her friends and their insane behavior. At first I wanted to meet her friends, because her stories made them sound insane and kind of interesting. The mopey guy who thought he was a nice guy but was as much of a prick as any of them, her friend who was also a big tall girl except blond and with a mouth like a sailor, fuck this and fuck that and who had recently coined the term motherfuckery that Flo thought was delightful. Her Spanish as in from Spain friend who’s English was perfect – better than hers, she said – and yet somehow he was completely baffling to have a conversation with. Her friends were fascinating.

But then, the stories always had a sort of dark streak. Her friends weren’t nice to each other. She had acid for all of them, too, which kind of made me wonder what her definition of friend was – could you be friends with people you had such contempt for? And the stories she told always seemed to involve lechery and hateful words and gossiping behind people’s back.

When we’d been dating for three weeks, a total of seven dates, she launched a campaign to insert me into her Friend Zone, and I realized two things: One, I was a trophy. Two, she was trying to kill me.

###

First, the alcohol. Holy shit the alcohol. I thought Dan could sock it away, but Flo and her friends were like in some sort of cult, a Cult of Booze. I’d only been seeing Flo for a few weeks and one morning I’d looked in the mirror and the sallow, shriveled man looking back at me with furry tongue and sunken eyes was some sort of mockery sent from the future. He stuck his tongue out at me and flared his nostrils and then puked all over the place, rattling his Ghost of Future’s Past chains and telling me Trim had been right, I’d never survive this girl.

Second, the sex. The sex had begun on the second date, fueled by two bottles of mediocre Cabernet and the simple determination by Flo that she was going to have sex that night. Not necessarily with me, I got the feeling, but in general and if I was there and functionally male and showered in the recent past, why the hell not. It was great sex. Flo just enjoyed it, was enthusiastic about it, and after my time with Christine Flo was exactly what I needed. She tossed me around like a life-sized sex toy and I didn’t have to make a single decision. She bent me and pushed me in the ways she desired and I did as I was told and for the first time in my life I didn’t spend the entire sex act trying to figure out what the Normals did when they had sex.

But it was exhausting. Every date with Flo went the same way: Dinner, drinks, drunk, plastered, being tossed around in bed. It was, above all, dehydrating. I was shriveling like a prune.

And finally, her friends, and that’s when I realized I had to get out of it. To save my life.

###

I was at work when she made the date. Not actually working, of course. I was wandering the office making small talk with everyone and writing down the serial numbers of the copiers, the fax machines, the computers – everything I could think of. Me in my khakis that were a bit too big for me, belted to the third notch and billowing about like a ceremonial costume of some sort.

When I got back to my desk she’d left a message with marching orders. Her and her friends David and Mary, dinner, drinks, had I worn a jacket that day?

That burned, the bit about the jacket.

The whole idea made me nervous. It was one thing to meet some of her friends one on one: The big blond girl, the mumbly one and his sarcastic girlfriend who moved like a dancer. They were manageable, especially if you hung back, nursed your drink, and waited for them to get nice and stiffed. Then they were sweet as pie. But a couple – it implied things. Couples hung out with other couples. Therefore if I was having dinner and drinks with a couple, it meant that Flo and I were a couple. And that freaked me out.

Plus, she’d made the date for that evening. I didn’t even have the chance to contemplate.

So, I stopped on the way to the bar at another bar and had a whiskey. This made me happy for about ten minutes and then very sleepy, and I arrived at the restaurant feeling sweaty and disheveled and this feeling increased exponentially when I saw Flo’s friends, who looked like they’d just stepped out of a Lifestyle magazine. White People Problems maybe, or Suburbanites Unite. They shone with youthful energy and fashion sense. She was beautiful. He was not, but in a precise way that made him sort of manly and interesting. He was tall and his hair stood up from his head in a way that some men worked hard to achieve for dubious reasons but for him, you knew immediately, was just a natural phenomenon. He stared at me the entire time it took to walk from the front door to the table, as if he knew who I was right away and wanted to see how I walked.

I knew how I walked. I shuffled, head down, hands in pockets. Without seeing, I knew how he walked, too: Head up, staring right at you, swinging his long arms.

###

They were polite. Super polite. Mary was blond with a capital “B” which wasn’t to imply dumb or anything, just very polished and made up and vivacious. She kept going to the bathroom and when she returned she started laughing at whatever we were saying whether it was funny or not. She was pretty and I scolded myself not to pay attention to her. I could feel Flo next to me, watching, judging. I knew if I kept my eyes on Mary or paid more attention to her I’d be in trouble, so I did the only move guys like me had when faced with really pretty blond girls who knew how to do their hair and the exact amount of lip gloss that was required for soft, kissable lips: Be mean to her.

I tried to be subtle, but I also tried to act like everything she said was stupid. I tried to be polite, but also tried to pay a lot more attention to her husband. David. Who liked to talk in a barking accent I couldn’t quite place, and who was, I slowly came to realize, pretty drunk upon arrival. It was remarkable, actually: He was the sort who could drink heavily and appear totally sober, and it was only through tiny clues that you realized he was viewing you through a thick haze of Been Drinkin.

But they were polite. She hugged me and smelled wonderful, and he shook my hand firmly, locking eyes on me, and they asked me tons of questions to demonstrate that they were Taking an Interest and found me funny. We settled into the booth and Dave waved his hand in the air, looking around for our waitress.

“Honestly, when Flo told us she had a beau I thought you would be more Troll-like. More horrifying.”

Flo extended her arm to wave her middle finger under his nose.

When the waitress came no one even cracked a menu. Dave ordered a bourbon, up; Mary ordered a gin and tonic. Flo ordered the same, and the girls reached out and touched their index fingers with a laugh, an old joke no one explained to me. I ordered a bourbon too, because I wanted one, but a different kind than Dave, because I was my own man, even though I really preferred the kind that Dave ordered, but goddamn I was not going to seem like I was just copying him.

Mary went to the bathroom. Dave ogled the waitress when she brought the drinks.

It was amazing. Five minutes before, with his girlfriend rubbing her nose and chattering away, he’d treated the waitress like a remarkably human-like robot. Now, with Mary away from the table, his eyes roamed her pretty freely, leaving an oily snail trail behind. She pretended not to notice, an older woman with some nice curves but, I guessed, two kids at home reheating dinner in a microwave and an exhusband made of jackass. She’s endured plenty of stares and probably considered it part of the job. Chick Parker had told me plenty of stories of the Waitressin’ Life, and I extrapolated Chick’s stories an extra decade.

I mentally added ten bucks to whatever tip we left later.

We chatted and I sipped my drink and theirs were all finished, and Dave was waving his hand in the air again. I looked down at my half-full glass and considered my options. The only sensible one, which was to simply sip my drink and skip this round, was unacceptable, as it meant I lost this game I hadn’t known I’d been playing against Dave since the day I’d been born. And losing. So I gulped it down and when everyone else ordered another round, so did I.

###

Every now and then, my head swimming, it seemed like Dave was dating Flo instead of Mary. And doing a better job of it than me.

He alternated between ignoring Mary, talking over her and not letting her change the subject, and correcting her at length when she made minor mistakes. Everything Flo said, on the other hand, made him cackle in a sensuous sort of pleasure that was disconcerting. All his stories about Mary involved her being stupid, a subtle theme it took me about five minutes to catch onto. For her part, Mary seemed to find these stories of her stupidity to be hilarious, which Dave then found even more hilarious in a meta way, and so did Flo, who was red and spluttering after round three.

Dave waved his hand in the air and I glanced feebly at the menus, and wondered when I’d last eaten. Monday? Last month? My stomach had been filled with gasoline.

The conversation always drifted back to their mutual friends, people I have not met. The names blur together, men and women. They talk about Henry a lot. Hank. Henry. Flo starts off by saying he’s the nicest guy she knows and then they proceed to tear him down, really amazingly awful things about Henry, whom I’ve never met. It cannot be stressed enough, I think to myself as my stomach judges the most recent influx of alcohol as barely acceptable, that I have not met her other friends and have no idea what any of the stories, nicknames, or references mean.

This cannot be stressed enough.

###

Mysteriously, Dave and Flo had left the table. I didn’t recall moving aside to let Flo past. I didn’t recall any reason for them to be gone from the table. But it was just me and Mary, and Mary was looking at me so intently it was nerve-wracking. She gave me a decent interval to come up with some conversation and then launched into a free-form discussion of her job, which she had little interest in and obviously anticipated quitting soon enough.

Mary spoke with the serene calm and satisfaction of a woman who had always been paid attention to. Because she was pretty, because of her tits-out cheerleader posture, because she was loud and recursively and brain-achingly confident, because of her calm and satisfied demeanor. So as my eyes roamed the place inarticulately asking the question of where, exactly, my date had disappeared to with this other man, she just kept talking, apparently unconcerned about my ability or desire to pay attention.

After a while, with Flo nowhere to be seen, I gave up, leaned back, and lit a cigarette, and just stared at her. I let her voice just wash over me and concentrated on her face. The high cheekbones, the soft, pink skin. The gleaming lips and the tiny, white teeth and pink tongue, the delicate eyelashes and the way her blond hair curled perfectly, falling in ringlets.

Her voice was off, though. Superficially it was sing-song and girlish and even a little throaty. But there was a hint of screech in there, a throat-clearing that never ended, a vibrato that got under your skin. I saw it in a flash: You met this girl and you she was gorgeous and you wanted her and later that year you’re listening to her tell you about her day and you have this strong urge to hit her over the head with a heavy glass ashtray and it’s because somewhere deep in the past your ancestors had been programmed to fear and despise a certain noise, from a predator, from an enemy. This was a girl who had no trouble attracting men and then a lot of trouble not being hit over the head by ashtrays.

###

And then I am alone with Dave.

This is the most unhappy I’ve been in years.

Flo and Mary had disappeared in the general direction of the bathroom, engaged in the serious sort of discussion that involved heads close together, whispers, and, I feared, a lot of time. These people loved their bathrooms. As a yawning chasm of time opened up between Dave and I, swallowing me and drowning me, he leaned back with his cigarette and glass of whiskey and stared at me.

This went on much longer than I would have thought possible.

“So,” he finally said, “you and Flo. How’s that going?”

“Good,” I said after a second’s hesitation, “I think – ”

“Great! She’s a great girl. Great.”

I nodded. “Great.”

“So, listen,” he said suddenly, leaning forward. “You’re a cool guy. I’m glad we did this.”

A spark of terror burns through me. This was the sort of conversation that preceded serial killings, I was certain.

He’s staring at me as he speaks. He does not blink. I suddenly realize that this is why he is so terrifying. “Listen, would you do me a favor and trade seats with me?”

I blinked, but he was already up, tossing his napkin onto the table, bringing his tumbler of liquor up with him. He sways for a second, much, much drunker than I’d realized. For a split second of panic I thought he might fall over, but then he righted himself and waggled his eyebrows at me expectantly.

“Right,” I said, and slid out of my side of the booth. He steps back and I slide into his side, disgusted, momentarily, by the warm feeling of the vinyl under me.

“Great,” he said, turning to point. “You’ve got a perfect line of sight to the bathrooms. You see The Beast emerge give me the high sign.”

Instead of sliding into my seat, he’s backing away from the table. “What?” I asked – reasonably enough. I’d never felt so confused by another human being, and I was a man who spent time with Trim.

“High sign,” he repeated, toasted me with his glass, and turned and walked away. I watched him cross to the bar, where our waitress was chatting with the bartender, and strike up a conversation.

And I thought, if I had money, I wouldn’t have to put up with this bullshit. The exact equation of it, the X and the Y, the algebra of it, escaped me. But it must be true. Money was freedom. Evenings with Flo’s awesome friends were, apparently, the opposite of freedom. I wanted to slip out of the place and call Dan and get the caper back on track, we’d been planning it forever and ever and the room was doing a little dance and I gulped what was left in my glass desperately, feeding the monster to stay afloat.

###

The women returned as if from another evening altogether. Mary was a soggy, just-cried mess, her face puffy, her makeup freshly applied and in danger of being ruined again. Flo rolled her eyes at me as they sat down, but I didn’t know what that meant. Nothing made sense with these people. We’d been seated for two hours and no one had even glanced at a menu and I was going to pass out soon.

“Where’s David?” Mary asked with a sniffle.

The High Sign. A shock of despair went through me. If I had chosen to say fuck you to Dave’s blithe request that I aid and abet his adultery I would have felt good about it, but it had just been the usual incompetence, the typical fuckup I always managed.

I was exhausted.

“He, uh, stepped out,” I said lamely.

No one seemed to know what to say to that. Flo began a mini-clinic on grooming, fluffing up her hair, fixing up her lipstick, and checking herself out in the tiny mirror all women carried around like it was standard spy gear. Mary drained her glass and then picked up mine and began working on it. It took effort. She was sweating.

“Be right back,” Flo said, sliding out of the booth.

Alarm shot through me. “What?”

She winked at me, and I watched her walk towards the bar, turn right, head past the hostess station, and keep going.

For a few seconds I stared, and she really had left. I sat there feeling ridiculous, the Slow Math in my head coming together cumbersomely, assigning values to the variables of the mysterious David, Flo, and the High Sign. Which, I realized, I’d never defined. This wasn’t even in my handbook of possible outcomes. It wasn’t even a scenario I had war-gamed in my sad, lonely nights at some bar ignoring Trim’s slam poetry and Dan’s sixth round of beers. I stared at the last spot she’d been for a moment then slowly turned my head. To stare at Mary, who was slumped in her seat, crying again.

I looked around. Dave was nowhere to be seen either. The solution to that equation was obvious, and yet impossible, like I’d invented a whole new math.

For a brief moment, I thought I could just stand up and leave. That I was capable of it.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey, now.”

She didn’t react. Girls like Mary had practiced their whole lives to be able to filter out anything directed at them, any comments or suggestions that didn’t match their own worldview or self-image. She just sat there, managing a truly remarkable no-man’s land between actually crying and not crying, a permanent state of damp misery as she stared down at the tablecloth.

“Sir?”

I closed my eyes for a second, then opened and them and turned to the waiter, who was holding out the bill.

###

“I want to go home.”

I cursed under my breath. “Lady,” I said, “I am trying.”

It was ridiculous. She was drunk, yes, but not really impaired. She was an adult, I didn’t much care for her, and if she’d been a man I wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving her behind. For some reason I couldn’t. Whether it was the childlike nature, the spectacular tits, or her insistence on not telling me where the fuck she lived (because, in her words, she would not be brutalized) that indicated she probably wouldn’t tell anyone where she lived, including cab drivers and police officers, I was reluctant to wash my hands of her.

We’d hung around the restaurant for an hour. I’d ordered one more round of drinks, which had been a terrible mistake, and then I’d called Flo and gotten no answer. Then I’d asked Mary if she might call Dave, and she told me she didn’t have a phone because she didn’t like to carry a purse and Dave always carried all her stuff, also her phone, and she didn’t even blink at these two contradictory statements. A chill went through me as I considered the possibility that this woman just lied all the time.

Leaving the restaurant was confusing. I didn’t recall telling her I’d walk her home, but didn’t recall telling her to leave me the fuck alone, either. She staggered and swayed in my orbit as we walked. Once I realized she’d attached herself to me, I figured it was best to hail a cab, pour her into it, and be on my way, but she not only seemed completely disinterested in getting into a cab, she refused to even tell me where she lived. I was haunted by the thought that she might live just a few blocks away. She might live in the fucking restaurant, for all I knew, a spare girlfriend like some restaurants handed out spare jackets.

I tried to take her arm as another cab approached, thinking that maybe if I got her into the cab first she would maybe slur out an address – any address, I was prepared to be liberal in my interpretations – but she twisted free with drunken kung fu.

“I will not be brutalized,” she shouted. “I want to go home.”

I looked at her. I felt like she wasn’t even human, like she didn’t even have human reactions. None of her reactions made any fucking sense at all. Her face was a puffy mask of rage, red and unhappy. Then it shifted, an ecstatic smile dripping down, changing everything.

“Drinks!” she suddenly shouted. “Drinks!”

She took off, demonstrating more grace than previous, and hurtled towards a shifty-looking place that was literally called The Dive Bar, with cutesy diving iconography everywhere. It looked empty but the deep bass beat of something classic rock I recalled from endless repeats in my childhood rattled the street as we approached. I was already getting a headache from my dinner of watery booze. The thought of entering that place made me unhappy. Just as I thought this, Mary barreled in, suddenly cheerful.

I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, contemplating just leaving her there. She appeared to know her way around a bar, and good-looking girls, in my experience, didn’t need much money in bars. I did a quick guilt-assessment on the situation and concluded I would only hate myself if her body turned up on page six of the newspaper in the morning, with a sobbing Dave Whatshisname standing over her, a broken man. A broken man possibly accused of her murder, based on what I’d seen that evening.

I went in after her.

“Hey!” she shouted, waving at me from the jukebox. “You got dollars?”

###

I was in that bizarro state where I couldn’t get drunk. I’d been drinking for hours, pouring it down my throat, and now I was just bloated and overstimulated and headachy. I’d called Dan in desperation, hoping to invite him down and have him absorb some of the crazy, but he wasn’t answering. I briefly considered calling Trim, who was undoubtedly home, undoubtedly sitting by the phone, possibly even staring at it. But bringing Trim into the mix would only complicate things. Flo’s friends were crazy enough. Trim would just Up the Crazy.

So, I watched her dance.

I’d considered leaving her. She was in a public place, she was an adult – at least chronologically – and I had no legal responsibility for her, unless a vague and unspoken agreement with her husband to give him the high sign when she emerged from the bathroom counted as a contract. But there was something so fucking broken about this girl I felt like abandoning her would be tantamount to murder.

I called Trim despite my recent decision not to.

As expected, he answered the phone on the second ring. “MY GOD, Dublen, WHAT?”

I hadn’t spoken to Trim in three or four days.

I gave him a run down on the scenario.

“Leave her,” he said. “She’s just fucking with you. She’s not that drunk, she’s not that stupid, and she just wants a chaperone to protect her until she doesn’t want a chaperone any more, capice?”

“She is that drunk,” I insisted. “And she is that stupid.” I turned to fix her in my sights for a final assessment to support my case. I didn’t see her.

I hung up on Trim. I’d learned long ago that simple human politeness just enraged him.

She was nowhere to be seen. I spun around, feeling sweaty, and just as I was thinking, with a surge of happiness and relief, that maybe this meant I could just wash my hands of it and go home without having to watch the news for reports of her death all night, I saw the sign for the restroom.

So I waited.

After twenty minutes, I hung my head for a moment, took a deep breath, and got up to go investigate.

I started with the men’s room. It was empty. It smelled like piss, there was an inch of water on the floor, and the fixtures all had a grungy rusty look that implied they’d been installed by someone who had never seen tools, or water, ever before in his life.

I stepped back out and considered the women’s room door.

I’d seen all the equipment, after all. I pushed in the door and stood there. Called her name. Stepped inside and let the door shut behind me.

The women’s room, impossibly, was worse than the Men’s.

Worse in every way. It was smaller. It smelled like fresh vomit. There was a curious black mold on the tile that made me want to hold my breath until big brown dots appeared before my eyes. There was just one stall and a sink. The stall was painted a curious shade of green-yellow and had been inscribed with graffiti in thick black marker, all, apparently, by someone named Black Betty, who was kind of a talented artist, actually.

“Mary?”

I was counting down the moments until I would have to leave behind everything that had gone before and call it Chapter One because I would have to take a breath and the microbes in the air would invade and populate me and turn me into some sort of fruiting, sprouting mold-controlled zombie.

After a count of three, I stepped all the way in and let the door shut behind me. “Hello?” I knocked on the door to the stall, and it swung inward far enough to reveal that someone was slumped over the toilet. I forgave myself a brief moment of wishing she might turn out to be dead, no fault of mine, and I could just go back to the bar, have one for the road, and amble home.

She wasn’t dead. I leaned down and pressed my finger against her throat and found her pulse disturbingly strong and robust, pounding away. This woman was going to live forever. And I was going to be there carrying her around as an old woman, from door to door, asking anyone if they knew her, if they could tell me anything about where I might set her down for a moment and make a break for it.

###

At the hospital, they asked a series of questions. I knew a partial answer to the first one, which was her name. Mary. Mary What? That’s what I’d like to fucking know.

Cold, unamused stare.

Everyone seemed to assume I was some sort of bad person. I had tried to leave after suggesting to the bartender that they call for an ambulance, but he’d seen me come in with her and was outraged that I would leave her in such a state. When the ambulance arrived I’d tried to beg off, but the peer pressure for me to accompany her to the hospital was incredible. Grown men, drunk and menacing, glowered at me and looked at me threateningly, and grown women shook their heads and clearly intended to ruin my good name all over the world despite the fact that none of them knew my name. I considered that my best recourse would be a quick exit, so I climbed into the back of the ambulance, looked at the EMTs, and asked if it was true that only family could ride along.

“It’s more of a guideline than a rule,” they said.

I was stuck.

Now I was stuck in the hospital waiting room, and the cabal of nurses, PAs, and custodial staff working the night shift had all decided I was an asshole. They didn’t know the story, of course. They guessed. I’d beaten her up. She’d tried suicide to escape me. It was an assault gone bad.

They stared at me every time they passed by. I kept getting cups of coffee from the vending machine, acidic stuff that would burn through the floor and kill everyone below if I spilled any, just to have something normal going on, some but of business, like I was performing. The nurses chatted up the cops who brought the drunks and disorderlies in, and they would glance my way and stare.

I called Flo sixteen times. Left sixteen messages. I figured she wasn’t listening, saw my number, swiped the messages away without a listen. I didn’t know Flo all that well but it felt about right, the right level of drama from this tall red-haired girl who kind of terrified me. But I kept calling anyway, because Mary Whatshername wasn’t my problem. She wasn’t.

Every time I thought of getting up and leaving, I thought about making it past the Nurse’s Station, and the cops who were always hanging around outside, chatting, and stopped. I needed a distraction. Or a disguise.

###

On my one billionth cup of coffee, so charged up on caffeine my eyes were watering, a nurse in pink scrubs walked up to me. He was tall and skinny and had let his beard grow wild for a few days, a scratchy, intermittent mess.

“Dude,” he said in a slow drawl that hinted at a near-fatal barbiturate habit, “she’s askin’ for you.”

I raked my brain for who could be asking for me. Mary Whatshername never occurred to me.

“Who?”

He just gave me a smirk that made a better version of me want to punch him in the face and turned away.

When I stepped through the curtain, her eyes locked on me. “David!”

Oh, shit, I thought.

I looked around. There were three people in scrubs, IDs clipped to their chests. They were looking at me in what I’d come to identify, very recently, as veiled contempt.

“My name’s not David,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “I can fucking prove it.”

This was not, I could tell immediately, the right approach. The room grew colder.

“David!” Mary screeched. “David! I want to go home!”

“My name’s not David!”

Everyone stared at me.

“His name’s not David.”

There was a pause, a moment of confusion, and then we all turned to look behind me.

He wasn’t tall. He was pale and pasty and his hair was cut short. He was wearing a jacket and a button-down shirt but no tie. He had a phone in one hand and a lighter in the other, and his teeth were yellow.

He looked up and gestured at me. “You, come here.”

“Excuse me,” one of the scrubs said, sounding irritated. “Are either of you related to this woman?”

The new guy smiled and took a step forward. “I’m related to her the same way you’re related to the fucking medical profession, champ: Not at fucking all. You say one more word and we’re going to play a game I call Can You Eat This Phone. You understand, or was English not the dominant language in the country you earned your bogus fucking degree in?” He looked back at me. He had small, hard eyes. “You, Fucko, come here.”

One of the scrubs broke off and walked to the phone on the wall, plucking it up and hitting two buttons. The first Scrub looked around and then oriented on me. “You know this man, sir?”

“Don’t talk to him, Fucko,” the new guy said, sounding amused, like he was holding in laughter. “Hey. Hey. Hey!” He snapped the lighter open and shut a few times until the first Scrub was looking at him. “You talk to me. I’m the one’s been drinking Scotch and blowing rails since fucking six this morning; if I hit you in the fucking nose I wouldn’t feel a goddamn thing. Got it? You say one more fucking word and I’m gonna make you eat this phone.”

He reached up and took hold of me by the arm. “Walk with me, asshole.”

I jerked my arm back. “Who the fuck are you?” He had a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

He smiled. It was a charming, off-center smile, crooked and lovable. “I’m the motherfucking Fixer.” He shifted his hand and clapped me on the shoulder. “Walk with me.”

We stepped out into the hall just as two familiar beat cops arrived. My new friend held up his phone as we stopped and took two photos in quick succession.

“In the cloud,” he said to me conversationally as he pushed between them. “In case I need to ID badge numbers later. C’mon, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

###

“That’s it?”

I shrugged. “That’s it.”

I looked down at the cooling cup of coffee in my hands. As it turned out, the Fixer didn’t have any money and I’d bought us the coffees neither of us were drinking.

“Jesus fucking Christ I thought … that little wormy shit sounded like … Who loses their fucking girlfriend?” I looked up in time to see him smirk to himself, who was, I thought, probably the only audience he cared about. “Fucking Mary. She’s got a problem, you know? Should be in some sort of program,” he cocked his head a little. “Why in fuck are you still here?”

I stared at him. I didn’t have an answer to that question.

He nodded. “I get it.”

I blinked. “You do?”

He shrugged. There was something amazing about this guy. Objectively he was average in every way. Average height, average looks, average clothes. But he was confident. He was so confident it was like a green energy leaking out of a containment shell, like radiation escaping a concrete cap. His clothes were nothing special but he wore them with a disdainful expertise that made them look better, like a guy who could only afford off-the-rack but knew his measurements and knew how to pick something good. His hair was tousled in an expert way. His speech patterns were mesmerizing, somehow.

“You’re a supporting actor, man,” he said. “That’s what you do – you support. I know a guy just like you. Just as nice, just as fucking Pardon-Me-White, just as stupid. You stuck with her because you’re afraid if you don’t, someone comes looking for you. Bickerman, me, the cops – someone. You’re always afraid someone is coming for you, so you’re always doing shit no one in their right should do, just in case someone stops you at the border and asks for your papers.”

We stared at each other. After a moment he shrugged his eyebrows and his shoulder simultaneously and looked over my shoulder as if something interesting had just appeared there. After a few seconds, he looked back at me.

“You can go now,” he said, leaning in and raising those eyebrows in a precision sarcasm strike. “I’m here now.”

I nodded slowly, feeling stupid. Then I frowned at him. “Who are you?”

He didn’t quite smile. He went still, like he was imagining someone filming him and was waiting for someone to yell cut. “Let me ask you something, Champ – you ever have a best friend?”

I thought of Dan. I thought of Trim. I thought of Chick. “Sure.”

He winked. “Me too. Started off as a fucking pimple on my ass that gave me a tickle every now and then, kind of fun, you know, and today is a fucking goiter the size of Manhattan on my ass and attached to it is a girlfriend. The two of them have the combined IQ of a fucking turtle. A fucking turtle. You know how dumb a turtle is?”

Alarmed for what seemed like the thousandth time that even, I fell back on my new favorite word. “What?”

“Dumb. Brain the size of a pea, barely enough to keep the lungs pumping. So our buddy Bick and his Sweet Wee Girl Mary lumber about like lobotomized elephants and they smash and kill and maim. Bick smells blood in the water that is named your girl Flo – she’s a Goer, that one, if you’d bothered to ask me I could have warned you off – and Mary is like some sort of science experiment that escaped the lab, slipped the containment process. So I get a call from Bick. S.O.S. Sobriety out the window, fidelity a foreign concept, everything is turning to shit and vomit and I’m supposed to make things right. Fix everything. So I come to get Mary and make sure she’s safe and alive and not in the mood to make any awkward observations about their evening. I’m not Bick’s friend, Fucko. I’m his Mary Fixer. And I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, so you can go.”

I didn’t know who Bick was.

I was terrified of this guy. Without another word, I turned to walk away, still carrying the coffee I did not want. I was suddenly filled with the burning desire to survive, my self-preservation instinct kicking in. Flo and her fucking friends were trying to kill me, and I realized that I was not ready to be killed. As much as I hated myself, I thought I deserved to live.

I didn’t want to be here anymore. I didn’t want to be with these … people. These were not my people. These people barely qualified as people. I wanted to find Trim and Dan and go get some breakfast, go be with my people.

My people were petty thieves, or trying to be, but we were fucking human.