Life on the Preservation, US Edition (4 page)

Ian stared at the graffiti, as surprised by it as was Zach. He groped at a vague memory of Saturday night, dropping his can and walking away. But Saturday night hadn’t even happened yet. “I don’t know. Maybe some toy trying to rip off my old style.”

“Are you bullshitting me?”

Ian didn’t want to discuss it. His half-assed memory of creating this half-assed piece was almost as disturbing as the Eliza conversation and the slack mind thing.

“It’s not mine,” Ian said.

The Boogeyman boarded a city bus. “Come on,” Zach said, “my car’s only a couple of blocks from here.”

Zach’s ride was a new VW Beetle, bottle fly green. Ian’s feet disappeared in a swamp of game boxes, Taco Bell wrappers, empty pop cans, notebooks, gaming manuals, and comics. They caught up with the bus as it turned down the hill toward midtown.

“Do you think he jumped off while we were going for my car?”

“How should I know?” Ian slumped against the passenger door and wished he hadn’t gotten out of bed. And all at once he realized he couldn’t
remember
getting out of bed. He concentrated, but it was dead space, the time right before he found himself making coffee.

“I think I see him,” Zach said. “Is that him, about halfway back on the right side of the bus?”

Ian just shook his head. “I repeat: following people is crazy.”

“So’s thinking your girlfriend is a computer program named Eliza.”

“I think I changed my mind about that.”

Zach looked at him then back at the bus, which was lumbering steadily from block to block on its way down Pine Street.

“Explain.”

“It’s simple. The Sarah situation has been stressing me out for a long time. And then today was like the
culmination
of all that stress. Besides, I always get crap sleep. That’s probably why the hallucinations came on. Like your brain can totally hallucinate reality. I mean every drug imaginable is produced naturally in the thalamus or somewhere. Shit, my sister thought she could talk to the dead. And my mom, you know. I probably inherited the crazy gene.”

“That’s tortured, man. Besides, you don’t even know what a thalamus is.”

Tortured, yeah – and a flat-out lie, of the sort Ian was accustomed to spinning. Sometimes his mouth just ran, and it all seemed to hang together. The truth was he
didn’t
want to break up with Sarah. He just couldn’t tolerate the intimacy so he
had
to break up with her. Had to and couldn’t. If he were saying this out loud, Ian wondered, would it be the truth? Or was the truth something that lurked outside of his thinking mind altogether?

“What hallucinations are you talking about, anyway?” Zach said.

Ian hesitated then explained about the rain on his Indian and the rest of it, the trick of the taut and slack mind. It seemed to make sense while he was saying it.

“Shut up,” Zach said. “Are you fucking serious?”

The bus turned on Third Avenue and made a stop. Several people got off, including the Boogeyman. They paced him in the VW until Zach cut into a parking spot, even though it was yellow-striped for thirty minute load-unload. The Boogeyman continued on his way down the hill to Second Avenue, seemingly oblivious of them, as they continued the pursuit on foot.

“This is ridiculous,” Ian said. “Let’s grab breakfast.”

“After we see where our boy is headed.
Holy shit!
”

A giant had appeared on the sidewalk right in front of the Boogeyman. The giant must have been over eight feet tall. He wore a long tan raincoat-looking thing. He was bald, his eyes deep-set under ridges of bone. The Boogeyman halted, made a very fast sideways movement – and the sidewalk, impossibly, was empty.

“What the fuck,” Ian said.

“There,” Zach said, pointing. The giant was a block away. Passersby stopped and stared openly at him until he turned down an alley and disappeared.

“What happened?” Ian said.

“You tell me.”

“I asked you first.”

“This is messed up. Like somebody just edited thirty seconds out of the fucking world.”

Ian noticed the Boogeyman. He was standing in front of a pawn shop window. Had he been there a second ago? “There’s your guy.”

The Boogeyman started walking, as if he’d been waiting for them to notice him. They followed him several blocks. The neighborhood drifted into seediness. Finally the Boogeyman stopped at a vacant structure. The unlit Vegas-style sign said: XXX GIRLZ. Graffiti tags claimed the walls, aggressive tangles of black paint – gang stuff. An empty wine bottle and some paper trash littered the sidewalk. The Boogeyman touched the door and it opened. Ian didn’t see him use a key or even turn a handle. In fact, it almost seemed as though the door
dissolved
into a black rectangle. The Boogeyman entered and the door was there again. A breeze hustled a Burger King bag into the recessed doorway and back out.

“You see
that?
” Zach said. “What’s up with the door?”

“I don’t know. It’s just shadows, or something.”

“Right. I don’t think so. And there is no normal reason for anybody to go into that shit pile strip joint.”

“How do you know there isn’t a reason? Maybe he owns it.”

They stood across the street. The block was a kind of no-man’s land between two tourist focal points, the International District and Pioneer Square. But
this
street was deserted, not even a wino. Despite the sun, the breeze was cold. “Come on,” Ian said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“I want to see what’s in that building.”

“Just forget it, okay?” Ian looked around the deserted street. He shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. But it was more than the cold that made him uncomfortable. He felt an unpleasant tingling, almost like a mild electric charge passing under his skin.

“Do you feel something?” Zach said.

“No.”

“Are you lying? You’re lying.”

“Look,” Ian said. “I don’t want to go near that place, okay?”

“Me neither. But the question is:
Why
don’t we want to? Other than the general creep factor.”

“General creep factor is good enough for me.” Ian pictured the giant. What was he, a basketball player? There had been something otherworldly about him, and not Dennis Rodman otherworldly.

“Something’s going on,” Zach said. “There’s some serious shit going on, and we both know it. We can’t pretend it’s not happening.”

“Can’t pretend
what’s
not happening?”

“Ian. Do that slack mind thing you were telling me about.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you feel it? It’s like we’ve been here before –
right here
. I feel totally buzzed, but not in a good way.”

“Oh shit.”

“You feel the buzz!”

“Maybe.”

“You
do
, you fucker.”

“Whatever. That just tells me we should get out of here.”

“My skin’s
crawling
. Like the invisible fence for dogs? You ever hear those dumbass radio ads? We’re not
supposed
to get any closer. But we got to ignore it.”

“No we don’t.”

“You’re in denial.”

Ian turned away from him and looked directly at the strip joint. It appeared abandoned, condemned, even though they’d just seen the Boogeyman go inside. Zach was right. They had been here before.
Right here on this street corner.
Ian felt the buzz, all right. It was like being in a dream and more or less knowing it, and not being able to wake up. The intense anxiety of that. The dream looked and felt like the usual reality, but under the surface things were cosmically warped. The XXX GIRLZ sign shifted slightly in Ian’s vision as he released his conscious intent and allowed his presence of mind to go slack.

Suddenly the quality of light altered. The sun was a few degrees higher in the sky. The breeze ceased. Ian projected forward, like one of those dizzy Hitchcock shots in
Vertigo
. Without moving he was suddenly much closer to the building, or seemed to be, right in the doorway, and a man screamed, but Ian couldn’t move. The buzz that had been repelling him now rooted him to the spot. The scream cut off. The door started to dissolve. He had been here before, he had been here before...

Ian jerked free of his trance, or whatever it was. Zach was shaking him. “Dude, snap out of it.”

Ian worked his mouth, which had gone dry as old shoe leather. He tried to swallow and almost couldn’t. “We are not going anywhere near that door,” he said.

“But–”

“Zach, we’re
not
.”

Zach grinned. “You did the thing. The slack thing. Tell me what happened.”

“I’ll tell you at breakfast. Far away from here.”

Zach looked back at XXX GIRLZ. Ian didn’t like the obsessed light in his friend’s eyes. “I think we have to do something today,” Zach said. “If we don’t we’re going to piss our chance away. Maybe our last chance. Don’t even ask me what I’m talking about. All I know is, we have to do something, man. We
have
to.”

Ian grabbed his arm and pulled him around. “Listen to me. We cannot go any closer to that building. I mean it.”

Slowly Zach began to nod. “Yeah, well, we can’t stand here all day, either. Let’s re-group.”

A yellow parking ticket fluttered under the VW’s wiper blade, like a trapped bird. Zach grabbed the ticket in his fist and absently crammed it into his back pocket. They re-parked the car closer to the Pike Place Market. A tourist Mecca, the Market was bustling. Cars crawled down the brick street that divided vendor stalls and pocket restaurants. Ian and Zach stepped between the cars, passed under the giant red clock, past the carcasses of salmon, gooey ducks, sole and crabs laid out odoriferously on beds of white ice, and proceeded downstairs to the Sound View Café. Beyond the wall of windows, Elliott Bay gleamed like hammered tin in the morning sun, and the Olympic Mountains sketched themselves out of the western haze.

Ian took slight notice. The buzz was gone. He felt drained and listless. He didn’t talk about what happened when he let his mind go slack across the street from XXX GIRLZ, and Zach didn’t ask again. Ian picked at his scrambled eggs and barely finished half a cup of coffee. Sleep dragged at him like an irresistible tide. Zach nodded over his plate. “What a fucked up day,” he said.

“Yeah.” Exhausted, a sense of alien exclusion overcame Ian. The café was crowded and noisy but he felt alone in the midst of it, as if it were a room full of barking dogs instead of human beings.

“Let’s go,” Zach said.

They pulled up to the curb in front of Ian’s building, the Gregory. Ian climbed out of the Bug and paused, hanging on the open door, feeling some muted urgency struggle to assert itself. The Gregory, which was slated to be bulldozed along with everything else on the block to make way for the new light rail station, loomed over them, its brick face soot-blackened by decades of neglect. Some local toy had slashed a tag on the glass of the entry door, total amateur bullshit. Ian looked back into the car. “Don’t do anything,” he said. “Don’t go back there without me.”

Zach looked at him like he didn’t know what Ian was talking about. “Sure, whatever.”

“Promise.”

“Cross my fucking heart.”

I
AN COLLAPSED ON
his unmade bed. Sleep ran through him in a sluggish current. He thrashed in the current but could not drown. Sunlight slipped over the ceiling, gleamed briefly on the Nihiljizum band poster thumb-tacked next to his bed. Smells came and went: cooking scents, brewed coffee. His palate enjoyed a fleeting smorgasbord of flavors. He heard traffic, no traffic, traffic. Once, he opened his gummy eyelids, face mashed into one of his notebooks, and the apartment was dark except for a light in the bathroom. The faucet was running, and then it shut off. Ian’s eyes started to close. Before he could fall back into the current he twisted himself off the edge of the bed. Morning light moved across the floor. Dust kittens drifted like tumbleweeds. He grabbed the broken barrel of a pencil, crawled to the nearest wall and squatted there – Paleolithic cave tagger, or Goya doing his Black pieces on the walls of his own house, trying to paint out his insanity.

Ian pressed the pencil tip to the wall and made the letter W, focusing minutely, then made another letter, becoming absorbed. WHO tracks expanded in a spiral out of the pencil and Ian’s fevered brain, creating a mandala. The shadow and light show slowed down. Time began to behave. Ian became aware of the cramps in his legs. He tipped away from the wall, rolled onto his back, finger bones crabbed around the pencil stub.

The WHO mandala was big as a pizza pan. Other WHOs flung off it in every style Ian knew, varying in size from insect feet iterations to fully shaded dynamic blocks a foot high. Staring at the wall, Ian could breathe.

But he was tired. His head lolled over. The cheap digital clock on the bedside table read: 11:32 AM / Saturday / October 5.

Less than an hour had elapsed. Which was impossible; it felt like days since Zach dropped him off.

Sleep dragged at Ian but he drove his body to its feet and racked up the window blinds. The sun stood a few degrees off midday. Okay, got it. He grabbed his phone. Zach’s number went straight to voicemail. After a moment he killed the connection, thumbed out a text message. Waited. Nothing. He put the phone down. The apartment was safe – or at least safer than it had been. He could further improve on that, break out his markers, pull a full-scale Goya, make his apartment insane-proof.

Or he could go find Zach.

S
TRADDLING THE CHIEF
, Ian reached under the tank and turned on the petcocks. He closed the choke, cracked the throttle, stood on the kicker. Nada. He adjusted the choke, stood on the kicker some more. Cold starting the Chief was like throwing the prop of a World War One biplane on an icy winter morning. What was he forgetting
this
time? Oh, yeah. Retard the spark. Now he stood on the kicker and the engine lit up. It was a
big
sound, a window-rattling sound. Good morning, friends and neighbors.

Wind stung his eyes. The off-timing blat and throb of the Chief rattled his brains. The mirror vibrated so badly it turned the rear-view into a disturbed puddle of colors. After Ian’s mother killed herself his dad had found his own way to check out of Ian’s life. The old man spent two years restoring the basket case Chief and ignoring him. At least, that’s how it felt. After Ian graduated from high school, his dad moved to Phoenix with a twenty-five-year-old redhead. On his way out he bestowed upon his son the antique motorcycle. Like
Ian
wanted the damn thing. Maybe he did, since he was still riding it four years later. When he could get it to start.