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  I hissed at my target, going all Jason Bourne, trying to work up an anger I didn’t really feel. Even my voice got deeper. “Why are you following us?”

  I could hear the foot-traffic outside hocking and scraping by. The sink queens giggled. I made out “That is so old school!” Were they talking about us—me and Steeple in the stall? He’d switched glasses. His eyes darted, rabbitlike, behind yellow aviator shades.

  “Take my wallet—just go,” he pleaded. “Leave me alone.”

  Two envelopes stuck out of the slide-in pocket of his backpack. I grabbed them. (When had I become a backpack snatcher? What was that a side effect of? For that matter, what was making my hands itch? Was it the cumulative skank of the bus station toilet stall? Had I touched my face? The average human being touches their face ten times a minute. I remember that from Contagion, the virus movie with Matt Damon and Elliott Gould. The Dream Team! Would I be sprouting a face rash?) Why was it Lysol smelled nastier than whatever nastiness it was supposed to sanitize?

  Inside the envelopes were greeting cards. The ironic kind. The kind Nora said she created.

  “It’s my mother,” the man said, voice higher than I’d expected, making no remark about my presence in his stall. “She has the female cancer. Why are you . . . ?” He gave up and pleaded, “Listen, I really have to . . . you know . . . pinch a loaf here.”

  He unbuckled and yanked down his pants. Right down to his shiny calves. Why do some men go calf bald? What is that a side effect of? Pants friction? Without thinking about it I pulled out my paper-clipped flash-wad. A fifty in front and back. Nineteen singles in between. (You never know when you have to impress a date.)

  “Wait,” he said, sheepish, unleashing a dainty fart, his face disbelieving and horrified. “You ain’t gonna watch, are you? Man, I had enough of that in Attica, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  I knew what he was sayin’. He was about to go penitentiary-style. He knew how to go penitentiary-style.

  While he was speaking I pulled off the paper clip and straightened one end so it stuck out like a pointy muzzle. Then I poked him in the ear. Right in the hole. I saw Charles Bronson ear-prang a Filipino in one of the Death Wishes. “You’ve been following us. Why?”

  “Following? Oooof. I don’t want to . . . you know, in front of you. I told you, I had enough of that.”

  He didn’t even curse. Maybe he was Christian. Could that be, a churchgoing hit man? Nora said he must have been sent by the man who—

  “Ouch . . . Please!”

  He tried to push himself up off the seat and his glasses flew off. I paper-clipped his eye. To do it I had to think of Nora, her little foxlike face when she didn’t think I was watching.

  I held my arm out, poised, to poke him again.

  “One more time, why are you following us? I don’t want to hurt you. But I will.” (Jesus, is it possible to talk, when you’re about to hurt somebody, without sounding like outtakes from a generic action movie? Is that how we learn how to do this shit?)

  “W-why would I follow you?”

  I poked him again.

  “Agggghhh . . .”

  “Wrong answer.”

  Haven’t you always wanted to say that? Seriously, is that all crime was now in the twenty-first century—getting to star in your own movie?

  Now I saw the tears. He went so weak in the face I forgot how big he was. I stood in front of him, I now realized, in the jailhouse love position. We both noticed at the same time. Crotch to kisser. I backed away, as far as I could. Which was about two inches before my back hit the stall door. “Put your feet up, on the seat,” I whispered. “So no one can see.” He did. And then—he couldn’t help it. He just—as they say on the Fleet enema box—“evacuated.” (In my free time I used to study the competition.)

  I’m going to stop now.

  There are smells we naturally, maybe instinctively, spare each other.

  So just remember one of them.

  Aaaagghh.

  (Maybe that is the definition of civilization: not shitting in each other’s faces.) “I swear,” he said, between birth-grunts. “I am not following you. I don’t even know you. Now please. May I . . . This is humiliating.”

  “You just happen to have her cards?”

  I heard scuffling outside. The last thing I needed was to be Larry Craiged. Bus station men’s room sex makes airport men’s room sex seem suave. And I wasn’t even a senator.

  He acted confused. “Whose cards?”

  I pulled out the proof and waved it around. He snatched it and opened it, putting a finger to the bottom under Birthdays are for forgetting.

  “This is for my mother. She’s old, but she’s sharp. Still has a sense of humor.” He tried to talk normally, but his ear was bleeding and he kept his hand pressed over his eye. I had to give him points for maintaining while he talked. Even with his strangely high voice. “What are you doing, son? I bought these. Look, here’s another one, for my sister.”

  He started to reach for the bag and I parried with the clip again. It had a clump of bloody wax stuck to the end. I poked him a little one. A lobe-shot.

  “Shit. You doing it again!”

  He started to pull his wallet out—slow—like a shirtless perp on Cops. Look, it ain’t a gun, officer! (And yeah, I know a guy who writes Reality TV dialogue. Don’t kid yourself.) With one hand my stall partner managed to open his wallet and slide out a picture of a woman who might have been him in a bad wig, their faces were that similar. Except she was eightyish, massively sucked up, and smoking a cigarette in a holder with the IV drip in her arm. “That’s Moms, her first chemo,” he said, and chuckled sadly. “Had to slip that little nurse thirty bucks to take a break so Ma could light up.”

  “Loved her Luckies, huh?”

  I grabbed the wallet and checked out his driver’s license, visible behind a little plastic wallet window. “Sargent Haddock of Soup City, Georgia.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Really? Soup City? This has to be a phony. You paid good money for a fake ID and they gave you Soup City?”

  “My name really is Sargent.”

  “What?”

  It was as if none of my words had receptors in his head. “My name is Sargent Haddock.”

  “Just put the fucking picture back,” I said.

  I could hear Nora’s voice in my head. He’s here to kill me. It didn’t seem like it. He didn’t seem like the type. But—

  Aaaghh. Ooomph. His voice got even higher. “Aw jeez, son.”

  He tore off some bus station toilet paper—no doubt knowing I’d look away. I waited a suitable time. I didn’t want to see any . . . business. Downstairs. I know, I know, I’ve written everything from dildo ads to Hustler copy, but some things, like I said before, how to put this? . . . I have boundaries now, Oprah! Everybody’s got their limits. I stood there, staring at his shiny tassel loafers (oxblood), not raising my eyes until he spoke. Someone had scratched “DBL NUGGT” at the bottom of the metal stall separator.

  “Okay, done,” he said sheepishly, wiping himself. When our eyes met again he said, “Do you even know that young girl?” There was some decent, southern softness in his voice. He sounded authentically shocked. I had no answer and just wanted to go.

  I saw myself from above, like you read about in near-death accounts. Or on Ketamine. Looking down, I saw a guy facing another guy in a stall. Reality was sinking in as the thrill of helping a girl I might get to love receded.

  The stink was stripping the stars from my eyes.

  What he said took a while to sink in. Then it steamed me.

  “What do you mean, do I know her?” I clip-feinted at his eye and he juked. “Do you know her? Or is it like on TV? You get a photo and location and just show up to blank them?”

  “Say what?”

  “I guess that’s part of it, right. N
ot admitting you’re a hit man.”

  “Son, you—

  “Would you fucking flush?” To stay my gorge, I thought of the side effects of Sumetra, a “critical foot-fungus fighter.” That was another triumph—giving athlete’s foot gravitas. Making it “critical.” Some schmuck scratches his toes and he feels like an executive. It’s a critical situation. Too bad the price of pill-killing the itch was “possible thrush, ringing in the ears, occasional dry eyes, and an inability to tear.” There it is. You don’t need to scratch, but you can’t weep anymore, either. Life’s a trade-off.

  “Boy? Boy! You’re talking to yourself.”

  I came back from my babbling reverie and there was Sargent the Steeple Man, trying to squidge his pants on (without getting off of the seat). It was like bad Houdini.

  THIRTEEN

  Bus Station Toilet Killer

  Our neighbor one stall over, who sounded like he’d once had his throat cut, kept repeating, “Co’se ah got me a phone, suckah. Whatchu think, ah’m talkin’ to y’all on mah dick?” I had the feeling he was a white man.

  Everything I didn’t want to think was backing up. Was I doing this for love? Or was I doing this because I’d started doing it, and it felt even worse to stop than to keep going; because I knew, if I wanted to see her again, I’d have to do it. Because I wanted love. Why did it stink worse after he flushed? Somewhere there was a metaphor, but who had the time?

  “Come on, boy!” Words skritched out of him. Like a trumpet player playing a mouthpiece. “Do you know her? She could be troubled. I got a daughter myself . . .” His voice trailed off.

  I reached past him and he juked. Like I was about to re-gouge him, instead of what I was really going to do. “Flush again,” I said. He did, over his own shoulder, an extraordinarily Plastic Man–like maneuver, without taking his eyes off me. I half-expected an elbow in the mouth, and braced myself. But he just pleaded some more; this man with thighs like barkless sequoias. Now I wished I had looked—maybe he was gelded. But what did that look like?

  Aaaggh.

  “Before you showed up she kept staring at me,” said the man I’d just stabbed in the head three times. With my killer paper clip. The only weapon I had, which he knew I was crazy enough to use, to draw blood. Even if he knew jiujitsu, he knew he couldn’t make a move without a stab in the eye. (At that moment, I saw myself on film. A hard guy.) But that wasn’t it. (Of course.) He was not still there because he was scared of me. He was there because he was concerned. Which was much more startling. And weirdly embarrassing. All at the same time. Because he had empathy. For me. It was like the end of Gandhi, when Sir Ben Kingsley forgives the man who shot him. “Son. I swear on the eyes of my children, only thing I know about that gal is that we came in on the same dang bus.”

  “You came to kill her,” I said. How much did I want to believe? Need to.

  His mouth formed an oblong O, and that’s when I noticed the caterpillar mustache. Yellow gray. A little lip-sweater. Forget jaundice. Now I wondered if he was a Jackson White. One of those Jersey Pine Barrens people. I’d read about them. They had yellowy skin.

  I think, looking back, that what spooked him was realizing I believed what I was saying. And if I did, if I was that off, then there was no choice. He had to just try to get by me. Maybe he was trying to get by me. Okay, maybe he was trying to kill me. (Later I found a knife in his shoe. He didn’t go for it. But still . . . ) He said, “May I be excused now?”

  I wouldn’t step out of the way. He tried to get by and I whipped up the now-bent but surprisingly unbroken paper clip. I didn’t stab him so much as he jammed his head onto the thing. His left temple absorbed the wire. At just the right spot. It just went in, all the way to my fingertips. (I thought, inappropriately, of the phrase “balls deep.”) There’s always some secret meridian, the one movie martial artists tap to kill enemies with lethal stealth. (Like the five-point-palm exploding-heart technique, or whatever Tarantino called it, in Kill Bill. Daddy David Carradine was more upset that the sensei had shown it to his babymama, Uma Thurman, than the fact that she was going to use it against him. Families!)

  Remarkably, there was no blood. He just slumped over. But not all the way. Then he coughed softly, covering his mouth—his last gesture oddly genteel, considering what was going on in the rest of his body. In movies, killers and cops always touch the neck to see if there’s a beat. I didn’t touch him.

  I wanted to feel something. I mean, after what I’d done. But really it was like I’d gone from watching tennis on TV to picking up a racket and playing. I’d gone pro. Crossed from the American pastime of watching people killing people to killing someone myself. At least I wasn’t just another schmoe in front of the TV.

  I took his wallet to make it look like a robbery. Double Nuggets! But I killed him for her. That much I knew. Just like I knew this was a thought I never wanted to think again; I needed to concentrate on what this got me—not what it took away. (I’m a murderer? Really? A thought you don’t want to think. Unless you’re on Lockup, on MSNBC weekends. And want to impress the audience.)

  I was hooked. And heroin wasn’t even the problem. (No, the problem, apparently, was that every line I wrote sounded like a movie trailer.)

  Still. They say a jolt of energy rushes from the victim the instant they’re killed, right into the killer. A rush supposedly stronger than crank and crack combined. It had something to do with Bordos and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But I guess I was too dead to feel it.

  Does everybody have a dark truth? A thought they don’t want to think? That thinks them? If you watch the Lifetime network, do you become the Lifetime network?

  I stood up and the room began to spin. (It’s a cliché, but it happens.) For a second I forgot my victim. There’s a word you want in your curriculum vitae. Had I gone this far in life without leaving victims? Or was it just that they weren’t dead? I braced myself, pressing my hands against the strangely moist wood stall to keep from whirling down.

  Had I just killed somebody? The jolt came like the boom after lightning. Count to five for every mile. The stall slammed into me and I got an icy shiver down to my prostate. Maybe this was the alleged death rush, just a little delayed

  Still.

  It felt good to be crazy for a reason. It felt rational. It was a relief. Almost a perfect moment, in the Hemingway sense, except that, me being me, I had to pee. (I know my liver is “compromised,” so my kidneys “do double duty.” Ever read a dialysis brochure? The kidneys are responsible for filtering waste products from the blood. Dialysis is a procedure that is a substitute for many of the normal duties of the kidneys.) So I did something maybe worse than murder. Not that I intentionally desecrated a dead man’s body. He didn’t feel like a corpse yet. Later I found out he was a bus driver. Riding back after a run. Deadheading.

  Pee-wise, I’d reached red alert. The sweating and panting level. Where you hope you don’t run into anybody you know because you know you look insane, hopping by with a wave because you really have to go.

  This is when I did have an Out of Body–slash–Reality Crime Show moment. Except instead of looking down from the ceiling and seeing myself, I saw the reenactment, starring an actor who tried to tell himself this was almost like real acting. I imagined the camera on the guy playing “me,” then I had a flaming sword of an insight. This is what I was: I was the writing equivalent of a reenactment actor. Were all the side effects on bottles—unexplained emotions, odd physical manifestations—like my own serial novella?

  I’d hoped—to be honest—that murder would obliterate lesser obsessions. But it was just the opposite. Instead, murder became the thing I could not think about. In fact—didn’t see this coming—I discovered that the only way to banish a truly horrible obsession (to stop perseverating, in the language of the trade) was to find something more heinous to obsess about.

  I could not delude myself into thinking that describin
g side effects or composing medical and sex-toy copy was anything like real writing. Like it was some hipster thing. (I knew what was in the mail: I would lie in bed with my eyes open at feel-like-shit o’clock. Imploring myself. Do not think about Double Indemnity! If I closed my eyes, Nora’s face would superimpose itself on Barbara Stanwyck’s. Except Barbara Stanwyck at least pretended to be love-struck and sultry. Nora was hot by default. She went to the opposite field. She gave the impression there were great secret depths of hotness within her. But she wasn’t giving it up. I saw my future and I didn’t care. Nose pressed to the glass of love. Trapped outside, then trapped inside.

  Another night terror. Was little Lloyd maybe just in love with longing? Just to have an emotion? The right emotion can haul you out of a habit. If you really feel it, just wanting to fuck somebody bad enough to stop heroin makes stopping heroin possible. It’s not really planning ahead. It’s like Gerald McBoing-Boing drawing a hole, then jumping in it. Does anybody remember Gerald McBoing-Boing? I imagined not just fucking but being with Nora, and that got my arrhythmic heart pounding even harder. More arrhythmically. (Street drugs were different. Nobody needed to publish a list of cocaine’s side effects. Wondering if you were having a heart attack was the whole point.)

  All this I thought—feel like I thought—in a jumble as I banged out of the stall. The Sink Queens had departed. I remember staggering past an impeccably styled Hispanic man, tie tucked between his shirt buttons as he applied blue-black shoe polish to his receding pompadour. When I looked back, from the door, he was washing the black off his hands. I thought, with a pang of compassion, If it rains, he’s fucked. At least he had a reason to live in Los Angeles.