“No, give it to me!”
The side of the dumpster banged and clanked and vibrated.
“I said
give
it to me!”
I tried to shake the voices out of my head. The paper rustled some more and then the voices were gone.
“Just because he saw you first,” said the boy to the woman, “doesn’t mean you’re the one he’s interested in.” He never failed to bounce the ball precisely the same way each time. Each was a perfect duplicate: the rhythm, the timing, and the distance from the asphalt near the golden jacks to his hand. “I’m the most interesting. Always have been, always will—”
“But he’s a man and I’m a woman,” said the woman who was not a hooker. “And I’m the most desirable.” She smirked at the boy from above.
“What are you people
talking
about?” I demanded, finally able to form words that made enough sense to speak aloud. “What is this; the alley for carnival rejects?”
The four looked at one another and shrugged. I realized then that the twins, beneath their dated black suits, were conjoined at the hips, sealing the carnival freak-show theory in my mind, which had been only a lame joke before.
I took two steps backward as the four pondered over my questions.
“Never been part of any carnivals,” said the woman.
“Nope,” said the boy, “can’t say I have, either, though something like that would sure as shit beat standing in this fuckin’ alley.”
The twins hobbled forward. “Freaks and dames and boys and things, drinks and bones and shiny rings,” said the twin on the left.
“Ashes and earth will imprison the frail, blood of love will lift the veil,” said the other.
I took two more steps backward.
The boy tossed the ball at the twins, breaking his perfect sequence. It hit the twin on the left between the eyes, bounced against the asphalt, and went back into his waiting hand.
“You confuse even me with that shit,” said the boy with an aggravated grunt. He stood up, slipped the ball in the pocket of his khakis and then sauntered over, stopping in front of me.
“Look,” the boy began, “You don’t waste our time and we won’t waste yours. We want you to meet the Devil, and in turn, free one of us from his bonds.”
“
What
?”
“You heard me,” the boy added. “Eventually you’ll figure out why you’re here. Unfortunately, none of us can tell you.”
“We would if we could, but we can’t so we won’t,” the twins said together.
I turned to the woman. “Okay, let me get this straight...you all want me to meet...,” I laughed this part off inside “...the
Devil
—you’re on crack, all of you. Now where’s my wallet?”
The boy rolled his eyes about in a goaded fashion and turned to the woman. “Thought Lucifer was supposed to make him more accepting?”
The woman shrugged.
The boy shook his head, disappointment written all over his features. “Look, man,” he said looking right at me again, “I hate the part where we have to spend thirty minutes trying to convince you that you’re not crazy. I’d like to skip that entirely if you don’t mind.”
I scoffed. “That
I’m
not crazy?” I said and then added, “No, I’m pretty sure I’m not the crazy one here.”
“Of course you are,” the boy said, rolling his eyes further.
“Just give me my wallet,” I said, holding out my hand, “and we’ll call it even. I won’t involve the police.”
The boy crossed his arms. “Well, we don’t have it.”
I gritted my teeth.
“Of course if you do this for us, we aren’t the only ones that get something out of it,” the woman said.
“Yeah,” the boy jumped in. “But that’s the part we can’t tell you.”
“You’re all serious....”
This is stupid,
I thought to myself
.
But strangely, the longer I stood in the alley with the woman, the boy and the twins, hearing the voices of rodents in my head, the less any of it seemed so unbelievable. The only thing stranger was why I couldn’t bring myself to laugh it off and leave.
Idiocy.
“Well, I can tell you one thing,” the boy said, “No matter what you do, you can walk away from here right now and it won’t change the fact that it’s his way, either way. There really is no turning back.” The boy walked to and from the dumpster and the red brick wall in a bold, proud strut. His small fingers caressed his suspenders up and down. “Anyone that ends up on this particular path always gets a much better deal, so, my advice is to meet the Devil willingly, listen to what he has to say and happily adhere to his wishes.”
He stopped, turned and eyed me contemplatively. “We can give you some time to think about it, just tell us how much time you need.”
“Yes, we’re in no hurry, really,” the woman said stepping up closer. “We’ve been standing in this alley for decades; a little longer won’t hurt.” Secretly she winked at me, still trying her best to charm me in her favor.
“And do you have anything
you’d
like to say?” I offered the twins. Of course, I wasn’t at all
really
entertaining this bullshit.
The twins’ expressions never changed. They didn’t seem to know emotion of any kind, or to understand the meaning of conversation.
“Sickness of the mind comes and goes,
daggers it carries near its toes.
Tossed about voices within its head,
in its path, the living become dead.
It is certainly kind on the eyes,
but this red fox is a master in disguise.
Trust not the things you do not know,
lest you blindly become friend of your foe.”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “I understand that
perfectly
.” I turned my head at an angle, pursing my lips in a bewildered and stupefied sort of way.
The sounds behind me toward the busy street briefly faded back into my awareness. I watched people drift by in their suits, clutching briefcases and cell phones. A city bus halted at the corner; the squealing of its brakes pierced my ears. In the distance, the roar of another obnoxious train whizzed by and I could taste the city pollution on my tongue, never noticing how evident it was before, or how poisoned by it I had become over the years of my meaningless existence.
I didn’t know what was happening, or why I was still entertaining ‘it’ at all, but in the moment, it seemed the better alternative.
“One hour,” I said looking back at my strange company.
I really just wanted my wallet and I had a feeling that the man from before, the mastermind behind this whole goddamned thing, was the one who had it.
I would play along for now, at least until I had the thief in my sights again.
The boy nodded, his face serious and even professional if one could call it that. The woman licked her lips and smiled a hooker sort of smile, apparently still trying to buy her way into my decision.
“An hour it is then,” the boy agreed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the ball. Then he took his seat again on the ground, crossing his legs carefully so as not to disturb the golden jacks placed strategically in front of him. Back to the eerie bouncing he went.
The twins hobbled back to their spot a few feet away, canes propped to steady their awkward, uneven weight.
“You’ll need this,” said the woman stepping up. She held out her hand, placing a folded slip of paper into my fingers. “Don’t open it until you’re ready to meet him.”
I tucked the note deep in my suit jacket pocket and warily left the alley.
Repetition. It had been broken. I thought about it heavily as I walked away from the prison where I spent five days a week. Work was a distant memory. Marjorie, the butch security guard that waited to scan my employee I.D. at the lobby of my building, would look down at her watch in exactly thirteen minutes and wonder where I was. And in fourteen minutes, my absence would be forgotten, replaced by Carlton Finks who always arrived at precisely 8:15 a.m., scanned his card and never looked anyone in the eye all the way up to the twenty-third floor.
I didn’t know why, but for the first time since I left home at age twenty, I felt different, alive,
real
. As I walked past the doughnut shop again, I noticed cracks in the sidewalk I had never seen before, street signs with Sharpie graffiti I had never read. Someone’s phone number. I wondered who they were and where they’ve been and if anyone had ever called them. There were faces everywhere that I never had the opportunity to study; people who I only then realized existed outside the colony. And as I neared the lake, I couldn’t help but stare out at the vastness of the water and be completely awed by its presence.
I shook the metaphorical sleep from my eyes and examined everything around me with a new understanding. All the way to the park, I deliberated my life and how much of it had been wasted by conformity and repetition. But I knew too that something was incredibly amiss and my missing wallet had nothing to do with it. I felt something looming, picking at my mind like a fingernail going over a scab, but I chose to ignore it, kind of like when you just know you’ll regret the morning after, but you sleep with Rebecca Hines anyway.
Reluctantly reaching
into the pocket of my suit jacket, I pulled out the folded slip of paper the woman had given me in the alley. I held it between my fingers for a long moment, leery of it, like holding a spider by one leg. Finally, I opened the message to find it written in black ink, in a scrawl I had never seen before:
Nothing happened. I didn’t expect anything to happen really, but was itching to see what the note contained, nonetheless.
To entertain myself, I waited for the ‘Devil’ to make his grand appearance; but apparently, the Devil was not one for being on time.
A rollerblader whizzed past, and then a man in a blue jogging suit, headphones glued to his ears. I wondered if any of the seemingly innocent people could be the Prince of Lies.
Yeah, it must be him over there
, I said sarcastically to myself about a homeless man sifting through the garbage.
I laughed under my breath, shaking my head, ready to admit gullibility and be done with it, but was then startled by a familiar voice.
“So you agreed to meet me,” said the strange man from earlier. “Wise choice.”
“You...” I pointed at him, “...stole my fucking wallet and I want it back.”
The man disregarded my demand and gave his clothes a quick once-over. His slacks were pinstriped; the yellow-checkered shirt reminded me of a 60’s-era tablecloth. His long, black hair rest disheveled on his shoulders with tiny broken twigs and leaves stuck in it.
A toothpick dangled from the corner of his mouth.
He moved toward the bench and sat, crossing one leg over the other much like a woman would. He spread his arms out behind him across the back and sighed a long and heavy sigh.
I felt an odd pang of fear all of a sudden, though having no real idea about where it came from.
“Ummm...,” I said nervously. “Okay, what’s going on here?”
Really, I had started to say, “I need to get to work,” and forget about this entirely preposterous misunderstanding, but curiosity and retribution won this battle an hour ago.
I watched intently, waiting, wondering how this strange meeting was going to end. Or begin, even.
“So now let’s talk business,” he said.
I stepped toward him, the unfolded piece of paper still wedged in my fingertips. I sat with him on the bench and began to speak, but he held up his hand and hushed me. An ambulance rocketed by, followed by a roaring fire truck on the other side of the fence separating Damier Avenue from the park. I paused to let him have his moment, briefly turning toward the commotion too, though whatever was happening was too far away for me to see. Coils of black smoke rose above the trees. Sirens, fire, someone else’s chaos. The man sat on the bench listening fixedly, as if it were important to him.
And for reasons unknown to me, I dared not interrupt him.
Finally, he turned back to me. “Business,” he went on. “You agreed to meet me. Your curiosity, your desperation. I was surprised by you, I admit.”
“Desperation?”
I was only humoring him—if this guy was the Devil, then I would admit desperation. Might as well add it up there with gullibility and idiocy. I was on a roll today, after all.
The man nodded once. “Well yes,” he said, “you agreed so easily, asked few questions, presented no concerns.” He laughed, his shoulders bouncing gently underneath his disheveled hair. “You, my friend, are one of the dumbest sheep I’ve met in,” he glanced down at his pretend watch, “oh, at least thirty minutes.”
I crossed my legs and looked out in front of me. “Why even bother with me then?”
He shrugged. “I asked myself that and intimately decided to change things up a bit.” He raised his back from the bench and smacked his hands together, then stood and began to pace. He tossed his hair back, seemingly annoyed by the twigs.
I briefly wondered why he had twigs in his hair to begin with.
The man went on:
“God is an ass, but then it’s not His fault entirely that I got such a bad rap. Sheeple have been twisting my stories since the Beginning.”
I nodded, still humoring him. Had to hand it to him, he was almost convincing.
“Honestly,” he continued, “Things are easier for me these days; I don’t have to work as hard to make my point, and I’m never without company.” He stopped pacing for a moment and glanced across at me. “You get my meaning?”
“Yes, I think I do,” I said with another nod, but of course, I was lying through my teeth.
“The thing is, Norman Anthony Reeves, I work
with
the Big Ass in the sky; always have. Without me, God—who, I should tell you, did not actually create everything, He only manages it—couldn’t do His job, and vice-versa.”
I stopped him right there.
“Alright, enough of this Hollywood audition bullshit,” I said. “Who the hell are you and how do you know my name? No, wait,” I put up my finger, “I almost forgot: because you
stole-my-wallet
!”
The right side of his mouth barely lifted into a grin, one that somehow shocked me. He stared at me for a moment, gauging me with eyes like Rebecca Hines when she knew she had my nuts in a sling the second she bent over.
He wet the dryness from his lips. “I know more about you than your name, Norman,” he said, grinning. “I know that you like chocolate syrup on orange sherbet, that the sound of foil makes you cringe. I know you had a crush on your cousin in fifth grade and I know all about the Mrs. Griffith bra incident in seventh.”
I had been drugged. Maybe Martin slipped me something on the bus earlier. I thought back, desperately trying to recall, but realized I never even had a cup of coffee.
“Shall I go on?” he said, turning a palm over in gesture.
“Look,” I stumbled over my thoughts, “I don’t know what this is all about, but
—
”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet,” he interrupted.
He pointed across the street. “Do you see that woman over there on the bike?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to kill her to prove it.”
This needed a few seconds to register.
Finally, I just smiled and let the stun fade into disbelief. “I have to hand it to you,” I said, “you had me for a moment. I’ll give you that much.”
I went to leave then because gullible had left, shaking my head at the fact that I even thought for a second to give this moron a chance. “I’m calling the police,” I said, looking back while at the same time realizing that I left my cell phone on the counter this morning.
I got several feet away from him and then an ear-shattering screech locked my body still as a taxi careened toward the woman on the bike. I watched in absolute horror as her body bounced off the hood of the car, flying through the air like a ragdoll before crashing onto the pavement behind the taxi. I saw the burnished spokes on the bike's wheels spin and then fold into a chaotic, twisted mess under the worn rubber of the tires. The taxi driver threw open the door and stumbled out, his wide, horrified eyes gaping at the crimson smear on the hood where the woman's head had been. I couldn't seem to speed it up, get it over with, and put an end to her suffering and mine. My own eyes looked from the taxi driver and to the woman lying on the pavement, not moving. Her black hair tumbled out from underneath her so-called safety helmet. A crowd of gasping people surrounded the scene, hands over their faces. Cries. Someone shouted "Call 911!" just as someone else rushed to the woman’s side. The taxi driver passed out on the street, crashing onto the asphalt.
I couldn't watch anymore. I turned to see the man sitting on the park bench several feet away with no emotion. Something welled up inside of me, my gut tight and nauseous as I ran back over to him, teeth clenched in anger.
“How did you know that was going to happen?” I was almost shouting, but a part of me somehow felt responsible and instinctively I tried to keep my voice down to avoid drawing attention.
The man crossed the opposite leg so casually.
“The taxi driver is a pill addict,” he said. “I influenced him this morning to take a few extra. Just in case.”
“In case of
what
?”
I felt dizzy.
“In case I had to demonstrate to you that I am who I say I am and that you, to put it bluntly, are fucked, my friend.”
My palm was pressing solidly against my chest. Calm down. Just breathe....
“I-I need a moment.” I put up my hand.
“How long is a moment exactly?” he said. “I really would like to get to the good stuff.”
I took another very deep breath and turned around long enough just to flash him the finger. And I walked away quickly. Every other second I felt my throat retch.
Barely making it to the street, I heard another scream and I froze in my steps. My head jerked around to see a few yards away a jogger had collapsed on the sidewalk; a blond-haired woman was knelt beside him, holding his head in her lap. Tears streamed from her eyes. The look of total shock and anguish twisted her pretty features into something horrible.
The man from the bench walked toward the couple and stood at the dead jogger’s feet that lay completely limp against the concrete.
And he looked across at me.
“I can do her in too,” the man said, pointing at the woman, but looking to me as if asking if that was what I wanted. “I can do this all day, in fact. Kill her next, then the guy over there texting his girlfriend, then the woman that just crossed the street in the high-heels
—I hate women who wear high-heels
. It’s entirely up to you.”
My eyes darted to and from him and the couple on the sidewalk. The blond-haired woman kept screaming out for someone to help, but she never seemed to notice the man standing over them, or the cruel words that had so obviously come out of his mouth.
She couldn’t see him.
In fact, I doubt she could even see me. She never looked at me, or cried out for me to help her though I was closer than anyone was, other than the strange man who stood over her.
I looked upon the man then and felt the human disease that is ignorance suddenly leave my body. Just like that. Like a hot, desperate piss after a long car ride.
Humans were created with an entirely screwed up genetic handicap. Unless there’s something wrong with us
up
stairs, we don’t believe anything without proof. We live out our lives trapped in this bubble of diversion. So it’s true, our creator really did put most of a human’s ability to think,
down
stairs, instead. Think about it. Almost every single one of us gets laid, whether with someone or alone, but less than half of us contemplate that age-old question: “Why are we here and where did we come from?”
So, the man standing near me truly was the Devil.
What can you do other than remain very still and absently begin to question every single thing you ever thought you knew?
Ambulance sirens came whirring up the crowded street. And finally, a small group of people advanced toward the dead jogger, passing me up as though I was not there.
I was numb.
The two straight minutes it took for me to be able to speak again, felt eternally long.
And I said the only thing I could think to say.
“So if God didn’t create everything,” I began, giving in completely, “then who did?”
“Who?” said the Devil. “No one. The truth is that both the Holy Rollers
and
the Scientists were pretty much right.”
“Evolution?” I wasn’t so sure of myself. It sounded absurd actually coming from my lips.
I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation.
“Yes,” the Devil answered. “Everything was created by the Nothing, even God. And God was pretty much the only one to raise His hand and nominate Himself to take on the Everything.”