Wild Awake (25 page)

The photographer kid comes back and snaps a photo of my murder shoes. The boy from my school reappears with his flask. I’ve attracted quite an audience. No surprise, really. I’m the only monomaniac in the room. Hell, I might even be the only monomaniac in the city. These people might not get a chance to see another one. I’d better let them have it while it’s good. I laugh and tip my hat and raise my monocle.
Quite right, quite right, quite right
. The Eighteenth-Century Nurse says I could probably sell those shoes on eBay for five hundred bucks. I tell her eBay doesn’t allow the sale of murder shoes. She looks duly corrected.

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know that.”

“No murder shoes,” I tell her. “No murder shoes and nothing infested with mange.”

When I’m finished with my latest drink, I dismiss the coterie with an imperious wave of my arm and saunter over to the women’s bathroom. When I come out of the bathroom, a black-haired man in a motorcycle jacket asks me if I want to party. He’s older than most of the crowd here. I wonder if he’s a talent scout for a major label. I grin. “Monomaniacs were born to party.”

We go out onto the fire escape, and he pulls a wrinkled joint out of the pocket of his black leather jacket. The jacket is stiff like armor and blackly shiny. My eyes keep on being drawn to it as if I’m hoping to see my reflection, but you can’t quite see your reflection in the leather’s muffled light. We smoke the joint. It’s strong. Sometimes joints aren’t very strong, but this one is. I feel like the space inside my chest is expanding and all my organs are floating apart. Is that supposed to happen? Motorcycle Man is smiling like he’s pleased with something. He takes out a small plastic bag with some yellow pills in it.

“You have a very attractive body,” says Motorcycle Man.

Monomaniacs are known for their physiques.

“Want to try something?”

Monomaniacs will try anything.

He shakes out two pills. “Enjoy.”

I swallow them. A monomaniac always enjoys.

My internal organs that are floating apart start to glow with heat like baked yams. The best yam in the world is the garnet, because it is a jewel. It is a jewel and I have six internal organs, six glowing jewels that shine through my skin like flashlights. Motorcycle Man’s hand floats toward my waist and sticks there. Is this what is meant by an attractive body? A body to which other bodies are summoned like migrating butterflies? I start to recite Shakespeare. I am the beast and Juliet is the gun. No, I am the feast and Juliet is the bun. If I click my silver heels together, I will wake up on my bicycle. I will sail through the air with my monocle planted firmly in my eye socket and my hands wrapped around the handlebars like vines.

Skunk, damn you, you should have come
.

Motorcycle Man is whispering suggestions in my ear. His latest suggestion: Come for a ride with me.

I don’t think we’re making out, but maybe we are. The glowing jewel of my brain struggles with the distinction. His hand is attracted to the part of my leg that is just barely covered by the otter-slickness of my black dress. I’m trying to guess how old he is. Numbers float out of my head like bubbles.

“Thirty-three,” murmurs Motorcycle Man.

I turn the number over and over like a secret code. Thirty-three. As in 4:33. As in the piano piece by John Cage that is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of nothing but rests.

An untraceable blur of seconds passes. I count to 4:33.

Then I am in a car with black leather seats and a stereo that glows like a slot machine.

“Kiri. Kiri!”

On Hastings Street I am so very busy and walking so very fast that when I hear Skunk calling my name it takes me almost three blocks to turn around. My knees are scraped again, but I don’t think it’s from crashing a bicycle since I’m not riding one. Then I remember—I was in a car with a man, some kind of label rep, but the stereo played evil music so I screamed, “Pull over!” and clawed my way out onto the sidewalk like a shipwreck survivor washing up on a rocky beach. Sukey died in a car crash—at least she did originally—and I did not like the way his hands strangled the wheel like white tentacles and his eyes were twin heat guns on my skin.

I stop on the sidewalk, and Skunk swoops up next to me. Skate shoes. No helmet. He brakes, jumps off his bike, and catches me in his arms like I’m a blown-away newspaper he’s been chasing down the street.

“Kiri. I’ve been looking all over for you. Whose car was that?”

I give him a once-over. Sunshine is streaming out of his head in a huge pink-and-gold halo despite the fact that the rest of the street is still dark. His black bicycle is glazed in neon light. When he talks, his words reverberate weirdly, like he’s speaking into a microphone with a delay line. I think I might be dreaming, or the subject of a very elaborate hoax. I put my hands on my hips and squint. “Are you a trick?”

“No. I promise, no.”

“How can I tell?”

He sticks out his arm for me to smell. I put my nose against his sleeve. American Spirits. Lapsang souchong. WD-40.

I nod reluctantly.

“Okay.”

Skunk glances up and down the street as if he’s afraid there are spies in the doorways or snipers on the roof. Maybe he’s worried about the homeless men trundling down the middle of the road with their shopping carts full of empty bottles. Maybe there are secret cameras hidden in their clinking, clanking loads.

“We can’t stay here,” says Skunk. “We have to get off the street. Can you ride on my handlebars?”

Skunk’s bicycle is glowing like Christmas lights. It looks magical, sleek, like a time machine. It’s almost too beautiful to touch.

“Can you do it?” pleads Skunk. “Here, put your hand on my shoulder.”

He lifts me onto his handlebars and climbs on behind me. The metal is lightning-cool under my thighs. I lean back and Skunk puts his arms around me. He grabs the handlebars and pushes off with his foot. Soon we’re zigzagging through the streets in a convoluted route of Skunk’s own devising. We cut through alleys, roll across construction sites, and slip through the vast hollow silence of a parking garage. I understand without asking that what Skunk is doing is throwing the secret agents off our trail. Nobody could follow us in a car, not with the shortcuts he’s taking. They’d have to be on bicycles, and we haven’t seen another bicycle since we started.

As we jag through the city, I have the unsettling sensation of being caught in a dream, an imaginary world Skunk and I have silently agreed to call real. The buildings and lampposts and street signs reel past in a seasick parade, and I’m not sure if we’re escaping something anymore or just clinging together while we drown.

“Love-bison,” I say, but now it sounds desperate, like a thing you scream before you both burst into flames.

When we roll to a stop outside a twenty-four-hour diner, Skunk’s T-shirt is soaked in sweat.

“Wait here,” he pants, clutching the brakes while I jump off.

He whips around the corner and reappears a minute later, on foot. His forehead is beaded with sweat, and his hands are shaking from squeezing the handlebars so tight.

“I locked it up in front of an apartment building,” he says by way of explanation. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”

We go into the diner and take the booth at very back, next to the bathrooms, far away from the door. We both squeeze into the same side of the booth. Skunk’s body is damp and hot like a rain forest. He scans the diner.

“I think we’re okay here,” he says, but his eyes keep checking and checking.

The waitress comes and slaps menus down on our table. Skunk’s too distracted to order. I sit up and take charge.

“We need six grilled-cheese sandwiches and a gallon of coffee.”

She blinks.

“Coffee comes only in mugs this size. But you get a free refill.”

I flutter my hand. “Do what you can.”

When the waitress goes away, Skunk turns to me.

“Kiri.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Now that it’s safe to talk, you can tell me. Who was the man in the car?” His brown eyes are huge with concern. It occurs to me, suddenly, what a strange coincidence it is that Skunk was out for a bike ride at the same time I was swimming through the strange leather-and-glass aquarium of Motorcycle Man’s car. Our connection must run deeper than I ever imagined; Skunk must have sensed that something was afoot.

This being said, my memory of the preceding hours is becoming more and more slippery. I peer into Skunk’s eyes, which are glowing like little planets.

“I don’t remember.”

Skunk’s smoking hand keeps moving to his cigarette pocket and back to the table, as if it keeps sneaking away on him and he has to constantly herd it back. His eyes strain into mine, as if he thinks if he looks hard enough he’ll be able to see the memories I can’t piece together. “Try, Kiri. Try. What did he say to you? What did he want?”

Before I have the chance to answer, the waitress comes carrying six plates of grilled-cheese sandwiches and two cups of coffee, which she unloads onto the table. Each sandwich comes with a bright green pickle. I pick one up and eat it. Its firm, cool pickle bones snap in my mouth like a frog’s. My thoughts are woozy and colorful. It’s like being at a carnival. Each time Skunk asks a question, I cast my little plastic fishing rod and reel in a different prize. I sit up suddenly, remembering something.

“Four thirty-three,” I say to Skunk. “That’s the message he gave me.”

“Four thirty-three.”

Our eyes both snap to the greasy white clock on the diner wall. It’s 4:32. Just when the minute hand slides forward, we hear the scream of police sirens on the street outside the diner. We hold our breath as the sound crescendos to a brain-cracking whine that seems to hover outside the diner interminably before rushing away.

“Oh God.”

Skunk squashes his fist against his mouth, blinking rapidly. I pick up my grilled-cheese sandwich and dispatch it in six bites. It’s delicious. Golden brown on the outside and traffic-cone orange on the inside. The coffee is hot and watery in its white china cup and comes with a mean little spoon, which I hide in a crack in the booth’s leather lining. Beside me, Skunk is knitting and unknitting his fingers on the table and muttering worriedly to himself. I reach under the table and unbuckle my murder-shoes. They clatter onto the dirty diner floor. I pull my bare feet under me and sit cross-legged on the leather seat. Now that I have eaten my sandwich, the world is coming into sharper focus. When I look around the diner, I see people eating pancakes, not blurry rainbows like a moment ago.

“They’ve been following you,” says Skunk. “They used me to get to you.”

I pluck another sandwich off a plate and sink my teeth into it. Hungry. I’ve never been so hungry in my life.

“They tried to kill you once before, and tonight they tried again. Both times it was right after you played at the Train Room. It’s a pattern, Kiri.”

I slurp up my coffee, and the waitress swoops in to refill it. “No shoes, no service.”

“Oh, sorry.”

I slip my feet back into Sukey’s shoes without buckling them and take a sip of my coffee. The lights and color of the diner have started to quiet down, like someone in the kitchen has adjusted a knob.

Skunk is staring at the patterns in the tabletop as if they reveal a horrifying picture he’s never put together before. He looks at me. “Promise you won’t go back to the Train Room.”

I feel like I’m waking up after a long sleep in a strange bed. For the first time since he appeared on his bicycle, Skunk’s face comes into focus, and his words start to make sense. I put down my coffee cup.

“What do you mean, don’t go back to the Train Room? Me and Lukas just won Battle of the Bands. We’re going to play our own show next Saturday, which you would know if you’d actually come. Speaking of which—”

“Don’t go back to the Train Room,” says Skunk. “Don’t go back there and don’t go to my house. Where’s your phone?”

I stupidly hand it to him. He opens my contacts list and scrolls down to his name.

“Hey—what are you doing?”

Skunk presses a button and hands me back my phone. The screen reads
CONTACT DELETED
.

“What the—why’d you do that?”

He takes out his phone and does the same thing to my phone number while I sputter at him, outraged.

“It’s too dangerous, Kiri. They’re using me to track you. As long as we’re together, they’ll keep trying to kill you. You have to stay away from me. They’ve already come too close.”

Our four remaining grilled-cheese sandwiches are growing cold. Skunk hasn’t touched his food or coffee. His face has stiffened into a mask of grim resolve.

My brain fumbles for an appropriate response and arrives clumsily at rage. I jerk away from Skunk.

“There’s nobody trying to get me, Skunk. You’re having a Thing.”

Skunk shakes his head in a maddeningly knowing way.

“You don’t understand it now, Kiri, but you will someday. I’m just trying to keep you safe. If you go to the Train Room again, they’ll be waiting for you. And if they see you with me—”

“Stop it, Skunk. You’re paranoid. You need to go outside and smoke a cigarette. You haven’t been taking your meds.”

Skunk doesn’t stop. He keeps on speaking in a low, insistent drone, as if he’s not even listening to what I’m saying. The waitress comes again to take our plates. I thought the yellow pills were finished, but apparently not: Her face is slice-mouthed and awful, like an evil marionette’s. All of a sudden, I can feel the world spiraling out of my control just as clearly as you can watch an escaped balloon heading for power lines. I wriggle out of the booth and stand up. My unbuckled shoes make me unsteady. I sway briefly, clutching the table.

“Come on, Skunk. Come with me. We’re going to my house.”

Skunk pauses just long enough to give me an icy stare. He doesn’t move from his spot on the leather bench.

“If you need to communicate with me,” he says, “use a radio.”

I stare at him, my beautiful mysterious love-bison turned hostile alien. And I honestly don’t know who I’m seeing. And I don’t know who I am, either, pleading with him in a twenty-four-hour diner while my head thrashes in a sea of chemicals like a cat trying to find its way out from under a heavy blanket.