Three Miles Past (16 page)

The warmth of his gut rises up, caresses your hand, leaches through your rubber apron as you stare into his blooming pupil, and, for the first time since you started this journey four years ago, the man under your blade’s body shudders with laughter, with gratitude.

Laugh with him, amplify it back at him to allay your own hesitations, but—your hand, the one that just slit his stomach open.

That’s not just body heat rising up your wrist, wisping up your sleeve. There’s actual steam.

Step away, retreat to the bathroom, come back better though it’s hard to be absolutely sure how long you were gone.

Long enough, it looks like: Stick Man’s dead, the hotel pen leaking blue ink down onto the heart, the ink tracing the veins out for some reason. Like it knows something. Had always known.

And—if a life bleeds out on a dirty mattress and nobody’s there to witness it, did it really even happen?

Probably.

There’s the mess, now, anyway.

Shake your head in disappointment, in disgust, then step to the bed and pull at the sides of his abdomen hard enough that the skin tears up to the sternum, joins that incision, so that his whole torso is opening, a chrysalis almost, on its own biologic timer.

Your initial idea, vague but promising—this from a drunk joke Stick Man was trying to tell in the bar, the punch line of which required his whole body—was to massage a section of the intestine until it became elastic enough to stretch over his face like a rubber mask. Just, one with a trunk, twisting down into his own gut.

It had been an elephant joke, yes.

As preparation, you even pocketed a stapler from the desk downstairs, in case the mask slipped.

Now, though.

This is getting away from you. It can never get away from you.

Count to three, count to three again, and reach into Stick Man’s gut, come up with his large intestine, just to see what the source of this heat could even be. Can gut bacteria be exothermic? If he’d been muling drugs and a condom broke, would that produce heat? Is he a bomb, did he have something radioactive implanted in his abdomen?

None of the above.

Lift his slick intestine up. Palpate the hard clumps constipated in there, evenly spaced like you can find in a large game animal if you take it unaware, before it can void. But.

This is
too
hard. Too regular. The lumps far too large.

You cough in spite of yourself, reach your other hand out, and deliver up into the light a segment of large intestine with a string of petrified tangerines in it. It looks for all the world like peas in a pod, or—no. You
know
what it looks like.

It makes your skin cold.

Used to, before everything, your mother would take you and your brother to the park in town. And there were those trees there with the leathery seedpods, curled back on themselves like half moons. You and your brother would scream, walking over them on the concrete. The way they crunched. And then you’d always try to steal some away home. And your mother would have to pull over for you to throw them away, and, pulling away, did you always sneak looks back? Because maybe something was already growing there. Maybe something would be. Maybe if you looked hard enough, you could see those first delicate tendrils, reaching out for the soil.

This is what Stick Man’s large intestines remind you of.

Your brother on the merry-go-round, his head slung back in joy, your mother across all the wood chips, reading her magazine like there’s going to be a test.

What might grow from this pod, though?

Your jaw moves, opening your mouth two times, three times. In the most primal joy you’ve ever lucked onto. No words, no sounds, just a pleasure at the very center of your being, radiating out to your fingernails so you have to snap over and over to keep it in.

You snip the intestine at both ends, tie them off with thin strips of bed sheet, and, because you know this is larceny of the highest order, that this is plundering the past, smuggling it into the present, you clean yourself up in the bathroom, doing a poor job of it but there’s no time, there’s no time.

After policing the room a second time, kissing Stick Man on the forehead in thanks then wiping those lip prints away, tuck this section of intestine up your sleeve as best you can, count to three before stepping out the door, into the hall that opens back onto the world, then go back, hang the
Do Not Disturb
sign on the knob.

If you take the stairs, now, then there’s the chance a seed will slip out your sleeve on the long way down, crack open on a step, so don’t do that. Please, you have to save them, you have to keep them safe. Instead take the elevator, your reflection in all four walls around you, taunting you.

Don’t listen to them.

You’ve got what matters.

Click: next slide.

~

Thirty-two sales engineers show up for the nine o’clock panel. Bleary-eyed, balancing coffee before them, their name badges askew, pockets lined with business cards.

As there was no eight o’clock panel, show up twenty minutes early, to double-check connectivity, make sure the projector’s bulb heats up, and—this is important—re-space the chairs throughout the room, giving the attendees slightly more leg space. As if they’re flying business class for this, not coach.

It’s the kind of thing that can make a presentation a more pleasant memory, and that kind of unacknowledged comfort tends to associate itself over time with the content of the presentation itself, which can then lead to favoring one process or product over another. Selling air conditioners and heating units, you need every advantage.

There was a time in your life when you would have seen such preparation as insurance, as fallback, as hedging against your own abilities—as gambling against yourself, expecting to fail. But then you realized the obvious: everybody sitting out there, they were all marionettes. That just because you knew where their strings were, and how to manipulate them, that should in no way reflect poorly on you.

Now greet them with an aside—start twice, pretending to ask for their attention rather than owning it whenever you want—an aside not about air circulation at all, but about how you’re lobbying for Vegas next year. And for no panels before lunch. Then toast them with the public coffee you’ve yet to drink from.

A few stray claps and a chuckle or two are your cue to casually stab a finger down to the keyboard of your laptop, the lights dimming, and now you’re rolling, reciting, illustrating the slides with your words, using your laser pointer to underline, to circle, your voice a metronome, an antique pocket watch swaying back and forth, back and forth.

If you started at the back of the room and went one by one, you could cut all these people’s necks open, moving up row by row, speaking the whole while, clicking the slides with the remote held between your teeth. Just plant your left hand on their clammy foreheads, slip the blade across their tracheas then pull it across two more inches, for their weak spouts of blood.

But not today.

Click, click, bank, daycare, statistic, time of day, draw a red line from this door to that counter, then—
what?

Polite laughter from the front row.

A giant moth is fluttering against the screen. Trained on an older generation of projector, your hand reaches down, brushes at your laptop screen.

And now there’s two moths in high definition.

Pocket your laser so they won’t see your hand, balled into a fist.

Is it even the right season for moths? Shouldn’t they still be pupating in dark corners, under moldy leaves?

You step into the light, try to sweep the two moths away from the hot glass in front of the projector’s bulb.

Instead of sweeping, the moths smear, the blood black and lumpy, darkening the room even more.

Study the back of your hand. Turn it over to check the palm.

Working from the old wives’ tale that it would be poison, you have of course collected the silt-fine dust from the backs of scores of moths, smeared them on the pink, fragile gumlines of people tied to chairs.

But you’d let those moths go, too, if not the people. Meaning they should have no grievance against you. The moths. They should have no call to interrupt your presentation like this. They’ve got no stake, no commission on the line.

Still.

One lands on the hand you’re studying, its delicate proboscis tasting the microchasm between your cuticle and fingernail.

Another lands on your tie.

You pinch it away by the wing, fully intending to let it flutter away, but, like the others, it’s soft, not formed properly yet. You have to flick it away. Onto the forehead of a pantsuited woman in the front row, who reels back, clawing at her face.

Reach for her as if to help, to apologize, but don’t touch.

There’s blood on your hands, see.

And then, behind you—turn, look, take it in, you’ll never see this again—the projector screen, it’s crawling with moths. It’s a black and white science fiction movie from the fifties. It’s the apocalypse.

Worse—no no no: your briefcase. It’s coated with wings, now. The moths’ hundreds of feelers surely dialing the brass spinners of the combination lock, trying to luck onto what used to be your brother’s birthday. A series of numbers your mom probably can’t even remember without having to concentrate.

But these moths, they know.

Inside that briefcase, because you couldn’t bear to leave it up in your room for the cleaning woman to scream over, is the lumpy section of Stick Man’s large intestine, rubbed with complimentary lotion to keep it from cracking.

What you have now, it’s a dilemma, isn’t it?

Think of it as a chance to prove yourself, though. That’s all everything is.

Go through it blow by blow.

You can rescue the woman in the front row from her own hysterics, and in the process take a sort of responsibility for this infestation, when everybody knows it can’t possibly be your fault.

Score one for the good guys.

But then too you can neatly unplug the projector and laptop and lock the door, dispose of the witnesses. It’s something you’ve always wondered about anyway. What it might be like to get dropped into a barrel of sheep, then turn the lights off so that all that’s left for a flash would be your smile.

Then there’d be the mess, though. The explanations. Being the sole survivor. Probably having to suffer some self-inflicted nearly-mortal wound you’d then have to recover from for months, limiting your travels.

You could do it, of course, and do it well—like you always say: sacrifices—but, in some jam-up years down the road, if the authorities scrolled back to this, then that’d be a strike against
you
, wouldn’t it? At a time when you might need no strikes at all.

Another option is just reaching for that briefcase, scores of tiny bodies wriggling between your palm and the leather handle. And then not wriggling.

Simplest is always best, isn’t it?

But not yet.

First, close your laptop, wincing from the wet resistance that almost keeps it from clicking all the way shut.

Next, standing in the light so that your face is underlit like this is a scary story told at a campfire, say it, the only thing that can work as an exit line: “They don’t have moths in Vegas, do they?”