Admin Yellow 29, Folly 10

[starphotographs]

Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends (working non-title, bear with me)
Characters: Spenser (POV), Corwin, a few others mentioned.
Colors: Admin Yellow #29 (I lose my patience when I get shot), Folly #10 (I know what I’m doing)
Supplies and Styles: Mural
Word Count: 15,696
Rating: R
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: When something needs fixing, Spenser’s your guy. But when someone needs fixing, you’d be better off looking just about anywhere else.
Note: Feel free to ask me if you want to know anything about any of my characters, because I love talking about stuff I write. To those ends, concrit is also welcome, but don’t feel obligated! (Unless you're telling me if I tagged this correctly... I'm new. D:) EDIT: need tags for "folly," my username, and the story/'verse.


The Right Tool for the Wrong Job
This asshole saved your life, so it’s your fucking responsibility to fix him. God, you fucking loser, even if you’re the most useless person alive, even if you’ve managed to fuck up everything else you’ve ever done, even if this is all your stupid fucking fault in the first place, you have to fix him.

Except I can’t fix him. I don’t know how. Hell, I’m about eighty-nine percent sure “fix” isn’t even the right word, and that I’m only using it because I have no meaningful contact with reality, and am working from some kind deranged, cobbled-together personal lexicon, which I pulled entirely out of my ass, one malapropism after the other, in the space of about twenty years. But, it makes enough sense to me, so screw it. It fits in with the world as I understand it: he’s broken; you fix him. Still, it doesn’t sound right. It sounds like I’d need glue or screws or solder or the acetylene torch. But we don‘t need those where we‘re going. They hurt. They make things worse. I know this because I’ve tested them over and over, just to see if it would always be the same. Just checking. And it always was, every time. The materials and implements my body knows, knows like it knows all the parts of itself, are useless to me now… Okay, there was the time I cut my shin open back at the garage, and ended up using a staple gun on myself, but everyone else was horrified, so that probably wouldn’t be a good idea, even if I thought it worked pretty okay. And it’s not like I have one on me right now, so that was a bullshit idea in the first place, and by the time I figured out it was bullshit, I wasn‘t even sure how the subject had come up in the first place. Alright, shit-for-brains, get your fuckin’ head together! No more bullshit ideas, jackass! Never mind that I don’t even have any non-bullshit ideas. Even if I come up with something that works, it’s going to be the most goddamn fly-by-night crap possible, and he’ll be able to tell. People who aren’t me can always tell when I‘m bullshitting. (He’ll know I’m letting him down.)

I’m letting him down, he saved my life. If he hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here to barrel down the road panicking like a moron and contemplating driving fucking screws or some shit into his arm until the bleeding stops. (Lucky me! Lucky us!) I had a gun in my mouth. I wouldn’t be anywhere but dead. I would be, incidentally, the exact same kind of dead I’d have been four years ago, if an entire basement full of stupid fuckfaces hadn’t yelled at me that I’d already had my turn, and that it was time to get the damn gun out of my mouth, wipe it off, and pass it to the next mouthbreathing dumbass down the line. I was laughing like a fucking freak and not taking anything seriously, and in the process of pulling the gun out of my face and handing it over, I accidentally pulled the trigger and took out a bottle of bleach that had been sitting on the laundry room shelf. I fell back on the creaky sofa bed where I’d been sitting, not sure the urgent, crazed laughter would ever stop; almost hoping it never would. The rest of room went silent, same as it did seconds earlier, when I jammed the barrel straight into my mouth instead of delicately hovering the muzzle next to my skull like the rest of the dumbasses. Turns out, those dumbasses didn’t know from dumbass. However abysmally dumb they might have been, at least they weren’t the dumbass who tried to throw a game of Russian Roulette because they thought it would be hilarious.

And I guess this is where I should say that, with a bullet in every chamber and someone else’s hand around the trigger, I could finally appreciate the gravity of the situation, see the error of my ways, and realize that getting shot in the mouth is no joke. Finally learn the value of my worthless miserable life, recoil from the memory of how I’d played with it so carelessly, beg to be forgiven by a god I don’t even fucking believe in, and then start believing, like a good little brainless dupe. Repent, the end is right fucking now! That makes some narrative sense. It’s the better story. Except, it isn’t my story. No way in hell I would let that be my story, because I hate shit like that, hate familiar plots and obvious lessons. The truth, my truth, is that it felt more like a joke the second time around. Nineteen Year Old Asshole Me unknowingly rescued from the jaws of the exact same death Twenty-Three Year Old Asshole Me would meet a just a few years later. The intervening years thus rendered entirely irrelevant in the face of one of the few certain eventualities in a chaotic, infinite universe: Spenser, at one point or another, gets the brains blown out of his sad, crazy little skull. So, I guess it was still a joke. A better joke, even. But still kind of a shitty joke, because I wouldn’t even be around to laugh at it. Fuckin’ lame, man.

Of course, it wasn’t even like I had time to think about any of this. And maybe the joke keeps getting better, because even though I survived, I still didn’t get the big laugh I’d been chasing since that night in the basement. There was just enough time to register the familiar feeling of that cold greasy metal scraping my teeth, then the deafening sonic boom that turned my vision red and gunky in a fraction of a second. I couldn’t see anything but the red ooze, couldn’t hear anything but buzzing, and all I had a chance to think was shit, this must be what getting shot in the head is like. Hell, for all I know, it is, except for the part where I never died. I’d just been splattered. And when the static cleared from my head and I wiped the brains off my glasses, there was Corwin. Fucking useless wet-noodle Corwin, who I’d pretty much been dragging through this entire absurd half-assed mission. Corwin, one of my only remaining friends in this entire goddamn wretched world, who I’d decided to leave for dead after he fell down that flight of stairs. Okay, so this is the part of the story where I look like a huge jerk, but in my defense, I honestly didn’t think he was going to going to get up. But, sure enough, he did. Somehow, in the time it took to corner me and shove a fucking gun in my face, he went from gasping and hacking up tar in a busted heap on the concrete to standing in front of me, still panting, holding the gun like it was going to struggle free and skitter off of it’s own volition. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. We waited for me to finish cleaning my glasses and then took off through the compound, trying to figure out where the hell they kept the paperwork.

We found it, and then it all runs together, the way these things always do. I slammed into the records room and pinned the fucking pencil-pusher guarding the place down by driving a pair of scissors through his hand and into the desk. With that done, I ran around yanking drawers out of file cabinets and yelling at Corwin to keep the gun pointed at his head, you fuckin’ useless goddamn fuckin’ imbecile! He kept his shaky hands on the trigger and let me hurl insults at him. I stole back my years’ worth of blueprints, and, just for laughs, took the file they’d been keeping on me. (Someone, in a handwritten note paper-clipped to a report on my disappearance, called me a “manic-depressive greasemonkey” and wanted to know where the hell I’d been purchased, and for god’s sake, why? Hilarious. I wished I could see what the hell they‘d say about me when they had to report that I came back.) Having managed roughly what we set out to accomplish, we high-tailed it out of there, me punching and zapping everything that moved, Corwin shooting at the walls and the floor and, I don’t know, passing neutrinos, actually hitting someone about one time in six, then getting his own stupid ass shot. He did something with his lighter, I did something with my plasma channel, and we somehow ended up burning down part of a building, and then I don’t know what happened. We ended up back in the car, we’re still in the fucking car, and I still have fucking brains dried on my glasses, and I’m squinting at the highway through greasy pink streaks, and I have no fucking idea what to do.

*****

It’s cool, you’ve been here before, just remember that, oh my god, why can’t you figure this out?

Maybe it was because I’d been on the other end that time. Actually, that might work in my favor! Shouldn’t I know how he feels? I take my eyes off the road for about half a second. Corwin, fucking idiot, has apparently gone full catatonic right there in the passenger seat without even bothering to tell me. Eyes glassy, bleeding all over his shirt. I remember this! I’ve been that guy over there! And I have no fucking idea what to do with this information. The look is about right, but Corwin isn‘t me. He’s absolutely nothing like me, and I can’t imagine what must be going through his head, and I have no idea what would help. I wouldn’t inflict any of the things I’d done to help myself on anyone else. Hell, most people wouldn’t even consider those things “helping,” because most people, people who aren‘t me, have a vested interest in remaining as un-fucked as possible. Me, I couldn’t care less, as long as I’m mostly in one piece by the end of the week. Crashing awkwardly through life, unaware of, or apathetic towards, the extent of the damage I was doing to myself. “Reckless” is the only word that comes to mind, but when I hold it up to myself, it falls sadly short every time.

I am, as they say, “something else.” Really something else. Something almost superhuman, making a plaything of the destructive power of the world. Of course, almost is the operative word here. I shrug off without the ability to deflect, which isn’t something you can keep up forever. But I tried. Even now, I’m still trying. Predictably, this wrecked me. I’ve taken so many flash burns that most of the skin on my arms stopped growing hair and the nerves in my hands crackle and spit when I’m tired, or sometimes no goddamn reason at all. I have soldering gun scars zigzagging from my wrists to my elbows from all the times I needed to remind myself of how terribly much I could endure, or the times when I was just showing off that incredible endurance to people who don’t know how horribly easy it is to endure when you don’t give a shit. I once spent several months unable to lift my left arm above my head because one of my scars had contracted and my shoulder was too screwed up inside to move right. All of this, and everything else, was completely my fault. I accepted that and lived with it, vaguely aware that this set me apart. Most people I knew were unquestioningly careful with their bodies. I saw myself as just another thing to fiddle with and take apart, or a practical device I could use until it wore out. And I guess it’s the same for them, but I just never knew any other way.

Corwin isn’t superhuman. Hell, he barely passes the bar for normal-human. I can’t treat him the way I treat myself. At a loss for what to do, I decided to just try to remember what Hal did, when I’d been stabbed and he had to come scrape me off the side of the highway with a shovel. (Hal did not actually have a shovel. The story is just funnier that way, same as the story where I regret trying to take a second shot and come to fucking Jesus makes more sense.) I remembered the long ride in the dark, Hal trying to condescend to me, because I couldn’t be out of his sight for more than a week or I’d become a hitman and get myself stabbed; while still sounding marginally sympathetic, because I was sputtering blood into a styrofoam coffee cup and any word he said might be the last thing I’d ever hear. He had a lot of trouble balancing those things, and every other time he opened his mouth, he’d piss me off so bad that I considered opening the door and letting myself flop out of the van to die in the gutter. But, this was obviously a slightly different situation, so I probably didn’t have to worry about that. Point is, he talked to me. He made sure I’d drift back to reality at least once every ten minutes. And he used this soft tone of voice, like I was on my deathbed, because, I guess, I was. Shit. I don’t even have an indoor voice, let alone a sickroom voice. I’m going to fucking blow this. But what the hell else was I going to do? I reached over to pat him on the shoulder.
“…Hey there, buddy!”
I was already being too loud. Corwin was looking at me like I’d just gone over the edge. Insofar as he could look at me, anyway. He wasn’t focusing very well. This seemed like a good time to show some concern. Maybe he’d bring himself around a little if he knew I gave a fuck.
“You’re not looking so great there, dude.”
No shit, genius.
“…I feel fucking weird.”
He wasn’t even bothering to look at me. He was doubled over with his arms on his knees, staring at his shoes and letting his vision swim in private.
“Like dizzy-weird? That’s nothin’ to fuckin’ worry about, alright? Alright! You’ve just been through a lot of shit, your blood is like… Kind of bypassing your brain or whatever. Fuck, you just need to like, lie down for a while. Always helps me!”
I thought I heard a groan. So either my advice sucks ass, or he’s dying. By now, he had his head down between his legs and his good arm folded over the back of his neck.
“…Spenser?”
“Hrm?”
Fuckin’ A, I sound just like Hal! Nice going, me! You’re doing a great job Someone’s getting some vodka when we get home!
“I… How much blood can a person lose?”
Well, shit. Fuck if I understand anything about medicine, but that I might know from experience. I smiled at him, but the way he was sitting, he couldn’t see shit. So I put my hand on his back, hoping that if I did this, maybe he could tell anyway.
“A lot more than that. I mean, you’re probably woozy and shit… Looks like you are… But… Hm. Well. Hey! You’re doin’ that thing Martin does so he like, doesn’t keel over! I think you’re alright!”
He didn’t exactly look alright, but, somehow, maybe if I convinced him he was, he would be.

So far, it wasn’t working. He’d gone a weird shade of dusty white, and aside from the occasional deep breath that sent his quivering spine cresting from under his shirt, he’d stopped moving altogether. Fair enough. Dude needs some rest. This dude needs some time to fucking think. But then he went five minutes without so much as shifting in his seat, and I panicked.
“…CORWIN, WHAT THE FUCK!?”
Without thinking, I jammed my elbow into his side, hard. That did the trick. As soon as the blow landed, he let out a yelp and shot upright in his seat, groaning in what mostly resembled pain and muttering to himself.
“…Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck ow…”
At first, I thought it was all my own damn fault, just for being who I was. My body is basically a worn-out teaching skeleton furnished with all the right muscles for beating the everloving shit out of people, so I’d just used my radius as a battering ram. On Corwin, of all people. And don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy, but I’d always assumed that fucker would collapse if you threw a beer can at him. But then it was taking a little too long for him to stop squirming around and flinching, and it occurred to me that, having prioritized the whole “leaking blood out of a gaping hole in your arm” issue, I’d practically forgotten that he’d fallen down an entire flight of stairs, and all the damage that had probably done. Shit. Not only was he visibly broken, but he was probably broken somewhere on the inside, where I couldn’t see or touch or make things okay. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I just plowed into him like a dumb ox and probably made things worse. God, I’m horrible.
“Um… Sorry. You just weren’t doing anything and I got kind of freaked. I… Didn’t know what I was doing, I guess. Are you like… Alright?”
No answer. He wasn’t alright. His eyes were closed and his face was tense. He was obviously having some trouble breathing. The effort it would take to answer me must not have been worth it, and honestly, that seemed fair and I didn’t blame him. There was no sincere reassurance to offer me. I’d hurt him, and there was nothing more to say about it. I decided to apologize without explanation this time.
“Hey… I’m really sorry, alright?”
He still didn’t say anything. Right then, I wished I had a warm bed where I could drop him and just end my involvement altogether. I’m loud and stupid and destructive and I was only making things worse. But, I didn’t have anywhere like that. And if I did, he would still need things taken care of, so I couldn’t leave. I was the only person he had right now. Even if I was terrible at this. So terrible, in fact, that I’d just practically caved in his chest wall.

I tried to remember what Hal did next. He did eventually let me go to sleep… (Corwin: might not be sleeping, but is lying back in his seat and bleeding quietly. Check!) …And then drove me to that basement with the godawful Dark Ages barber-surgeon type person who, to his credit, did successfully staple my side back together. He also managed to viciously manhandle me in every conceivable way during the process. Just thinking about it made my heart practically leap out of my throat and my stomach roll over and die. The medical shears cutting off my two layered shirts for the “examination,” which was just two fingers jammed into the wound, and how he only decided to put on some gloves at the last minute. The vein full of sedatives I got from a needle big enough to draw blood, the dingy painted cinder blocks that passed for walls, the cot that I was sure smelled like dead guy B.O., the tiny window that showed nothing but sidewalk, the horrible late-night television. The painkillers I wasn’t given until they were sent home with me, and the transfusion that Hal was told I needed but I never got. Had I known what was going to happen, I would have taken my chances with bedrest and just leaving my shirt on, still crusted with blood and sealing off my punctured lung until I healed up or died. I couldn’t take Corwin there. If a skuzzy shithead like me thought that was a little much, he would probably have a nervous breakdown. I had to remember that, while I was living in cars and under bridges, doing hits and getting used to having the piss taken out of me on a daily basis, Corwin was atrophying in graduate school. The list of shit he could handle would probably have only one entry: “basically nothing.”

You don’t even have to take him anywhere. It’s not like he’s dying. He’s just a little fucked-up. He wasn’t spitting blood. His lungs were smoke-singed and wimpy as always, and one of them might have been a little dented, if that’s even a thing, but as far as I could tell, neither one was at risk of filling with blood or collapsing. Functionally, it was probably just like taking care of someone who was ridiculously overtired. You don’t even need professionals for that! Sure, he needed some cleaning up, and since I didn’t see an exit wound, one of us was probably going to have to go in and dig around a bit eventually. But after that? Just put him the fuck to bed with some Tylenol or something, and everything would be back to normal in no time. A little voice in the back of my head was shouting “gunshot wound, you stupid ass!” But, I figured it was blowing things out of proportion. (You’d be surprised how easy it is to stay on top of things, if you just cut them down to size.) The real problem was staying on the fucking road. Having some asshole’s every living thought smeared all over my fucking glasses was getting so distracting that I was actually looking over them, into the great blurry beyond. Now, I suspected that Corwin might have needed a doctor. But, I knew for damn sure that we both could use a sink.

*****

You can do this. You can fix him. You can fix anything, and anything you could fix, you have. Mostly. But that’s still pretty okay, right? Don’t ruin a track record like that. Also, if you can’t fix human beings, they die. Get your shit together. This’ll work. It can’t not. You won’t let it. You never have.

I told myself that it would be alright, that I was headed somewhere familiar. A dark, humming cave where I’d been a thousand times before, to wash my hands for minutes at a stretch and douse my head in cold running water from one of the approximately five hundred sinks. Every one of which could have been a little cleaner, so it never mattered which one I used. I’d always leave just as grimy and contaminated as I’d gone in, but I at least managed to carve out those ten blessed minutes where I could finally, finally hear myself think, dazed and silent and so utterly alone in my head. In all the times I pulled into that rest stop, I’d never seen another human coming or going, so the idea was that whatever I had to do, I could do it in private. And now, when there was so much to be done, I hoped that would still be the case. My imagination ran wild, and I was half convinced that I would keep driving forever and never find it, never find anything but mile after identical mile of faded pavement, carrying me into a washed-out sunny abyss.

Of course, that was just me thinking stupid shit again. The road wasn’t infinite after all, and just the right distance down the highway, there it was. Still there, still empty, still real. I lightly chastised myself for being a fucking lunatic, then decided to give it a rest. It wasn’t like this was the first time something weird happened in my brain when I was driving around trying to find the damn rest stop, and even if those were crazier days than now, it might have just been one of those cognitive gaps. Like reaching for something that isn‘t there, or forgetting why you wandered into the kitchen. It was just so deserted that I really had to be as stable as I’ve ever been, if I wanted to be sure if it actually existed. And at my worst, I honestly wasn’t Or maybe it was me that I wasn’t sure existed. Back then, I was out of my fucking mind, so I tried not to take any of my memories too seriously. Either way , as real or otherwise as ever, we were both here now. The old vending machine still empty and shattered from last year, when I decided to kick in the glass door because I was starving, or angry, or just too crazy to keep an eye on my own fucking foot. Once again, I decided not to examine my past motivations too closely. If it’s good enough in the courts, it’s good enough in my head. I can count them on one hand, the number of times I would have been fit to stand trial.

I chose not to look to far in to any of that. Right now, my only job was to get us to the damn sinks, and that was more than enough to keep my mind occupied. As always, I was a little too occupied with something that should have been simple, caught in a violent brainstorm, doing my best to find the most convoluted possible paths to maximum efficiency. Somewhere between pulling the key out of the ignition and stepping out onto the blacktop, I’d gotten the idea that not only could I get Corwin out of the car and into the bathroom without waking him, but that this would be easier on both of us. It’s worth noting that my current self probably shouldn’t be taken particularly seriously, either. (You’re no less crazy just because crazy is running in the background. You always have to remember this. Forgetting means things have a chance to slip. Do you really want to find out what those “things” are?) But, my mind was made up, and as usual, there was nowhere for me to go but forward. I have a plan! The whole world is poised to move around me! All it asks in return is for me to trust that it will. And I always do. (I never learn.)

I opened the passenger door, caught him before he could tip over onto the concrete and crack his head open, and hauled him out of the car like a stiff. It occurred to me that, actually, I’d technically done this exact thing before. I was actually feeling pretty fuckin’ good about this situation!
“…Oh my god, what is it now!?”
One thing I hadn’t had time to get used to was dead people expressing alarm that they’re being disposed of, and I was so startled that I dropped him and had to grab him by the collar before his head hit the pavement. I considered just dragging him the rest of the way as planned, but I figured I’d at least give him a few seconds to absorb the idea that he wasn’t in the car anymore.
“…What the fuck!? Are we in the road!?”
Okay, idea absorbed. Mostly. Close enough. He had no idea what was going on, but hey, at least he knew he wasn‘t in the car anymore.
“Nah, man. We’re just in a parkin’ lot, right?! I was try’na get you to the shitter and I guess, I dunno, I thought you were asleep.”
“You could have… And I don’t even have to use the fucking shitter… And you could have woken me up! Jesus Christ.”
“I just figured it would be better for you if… I mean, okay, you were asleep! That was good! You’ve been through some major crap today, I figured the sleep would help, didn’t wanna wreck it. And, alright, nothing to do with the shitter, I guess… I meant, like, shitter as in bathroom, not shitter as in toilet… We need to like, clean up and shit, not clean up and then… Shit… You know, in the literal sense… Okay, that’s fuckin’ confusing. I’m not talkin’ about that anymore because it sucks and I feel like I’ve found a fundamental flaw in the language, and-”
“…Spenser! Shut up, shut up, oh my god, will you just shut up!?”
“I was just…”
“…Well, whatever it is, you’re not doing it anymore! I don’t need to hear any more bullshit about how things work on Planet You. I need to… I don’t know. I guess I actually do need to clean up. You’re right, you fucking stupid asshole. But, only if you let me walk to the ‘shitter’ like a goddamn person, okay?”
“Dude. Chill. Fair enough, alright? Go walk to the bathroom! Wow, look at you, with the legs and the feet and the walking and shit! Good job! Bask in the glow of your accomplishment or whatever.”
“Fine!”
I tried to grab his good arm and help him up, but I was pretty sure he tried to backhand me, so I left him alone. When Corwin gets pissed off for no reason, all you can do is stand back and watch whatever godawful awkward things he’s going to do while he tries to handle himself. (You know, what everyone else has been doing with me my whole life.) This time, he was trying to use the car door to drag himself up off the pavement. And he actually almost got there, but as soon as he was mostly upright, he made this little noise that made it sound like the air was being let out of him and crumpled back to the ground, deflated.
“…Need some help, pal?”
“No! Jesus, keep your hands off me. You’ve done enough.”
“Dude, you can’t stand up.”
“I just twisted my ankle or something. Why the fuck did you think I fell down those stairs?”
“Hell if I know. You’re clumsy, man.”
“…Oh, come off it! How many times did I watch you run into the sliding door this week, again?”
“I don’t know… Enough? Anyway, we’ve established it, you can’t stand, and I know you want to punch me in the face or some shit right now, but I might have to help you out here. Then you can punch me, okay?”
“Look. I ran all the way through that horrible… I don’t know, military surplus labyrinth they had going on back there… So I think I can stand up, alright.”
I probably shouldn’t have laughed. Then again, I probably shouldn’t have laughed at a lot of things, and it never stopped me before.
“…Adrenaline, my friend! And it looks like yours just ran out. So just get the stick out your goddamned butthole and let me help, okay!?”
He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say anything. Fuck, he didn’t even nod. But, he let me drag him to his feet, so I guess I was about a tenth of the way forgiven, and that was close enough. I also suspected that he was intentionally making the three yard walk to the bathroom as difficult as humanly possible, but then I remembered that he was busted-up and lightheaded and limping like a lame duck, so I was probably over thinking it.

Just in case, I decided to get him back by ignoring him and giving my sticky glasses first priority. When we got to the sinks, I terminated all physical contact and acted like he wasn’t there. Left to his own devices, all it seemed like he knew how to do was wash his hands on autopilot and slide down onto the floor. Well then! Knock yourself out, shithead! Corwin is dead to me. Okay, that might have been a little harsh. Still, my behavior was easy enough to rationalize: I had some fuck’s head juice smeared all over my glasses, and as such wasn’t much help to anyone. So first thing’s first, I guess: get the brains off your glasses. Work harder than expected to get the brains off your glasses. Wonder why no one ever told you that dried brains were so fucking hard to clean. Wonder why anyone would tell you that. Wonder, for that matter, who would tell you that. (Maria? Possibly Tyler? Some jackass pretending to be a serial killer on StrataProxy?) Consider plugging the sink and soaking glasses like a crusty coffee mug. Think about how you’re a vile piece of shit who’s letting your friend sit on the floor in pain just to be an asshole for the sake of it. End up managing to buff glasses clean with raspy brown paper towels, scratching one of the lenses all to hell in the process.

For some reason, this bummed me out so much that I instantly stopped in my tracks. Poor things, I’d done them in! On one hand, this was incredibly stupid, because they were an old spare from two prescriptions ago, and I only started wearing them again after I beat Martin at chess. Or, more accurately, after Martin, as a bizarre form of revenge, took my last good pair off my face while I was asleep and smashed them with a dictionary. On the other hand, they were an old spare from two prescriptions ago, and I’d been leaning on them for years. Every time I managed to fuck up every decent pair of glasses I owned, there these pieces of shit were, shoved in the toolbox drawer where I kept operating instructions and disintegrating rusty crap that I was too paranoid to throw away. And to that drawer, I supposed, they would return. Not as a trusty backup, but as yet another piece of trash I couldn’t part with. I should really clean that drawer out one of these days. I should suck it the hell up and not spiral into an existential crisis over a pair of shitty glasses that didn’t even really work for me anymore.

And for that matter, I should suck it up and stop doing a lot of crazy pointless bullshit. The whole time I’d been scraping my glasses, Corwin had been sitting on the dirty tiles, on dried-up puke juice and old hobo piss and black mold and god only knows what else. I don’t even think I’d be brave enough to sit down there, and I used to live in an apartment with a mass grave of dirty needles between the tub and the toilet. I should tell Corwin to get the fuck off the floor and stop playing whatever stupid little fuck-you-asshole game we’re playing here. We’re better than that, man! Leave that shit to Martin.
“…Okay, get off the floor, Captain Butthurt. I’ve been acting like a tool.”
“Yeah. You have.”
“What the fuck, man!? I just apologized, and you… You know what, never mind. I don’t got time for this shit. Just get up off the floor, ‘kay? It’s gross, dude. You gotta sit, sit on the counter here.”
To indicate what I was talking about, I thumped the surface with my fist. Because apparently, Corwin is an idiot who can’t find a counter, and I’m certainly not a daft lummox who risks enthusiastically destroying anything he touches. And fickle to boot! Now that Corwin was sitting up there with his scrawny ass between two scummy sinks, I really wasn’t sure that was much better. Who the hell knows what goes on in these sinks? Probably a lot of shit like we’re going to do right now.
“Okay, time to see exactly what level of fucked-up you are here, eh?”
I held onto his arm and stared at it for a while. There was still a gaping hole there, and I wasn’t sure what else I could say about it. When I was done, Corwin turned around and sat staring at it in the mirror, long enough for me to get bored and start thinking about magnets, which I continued to do for several minutes, before realizing that my mouth hurt and running my tongue along my teeth, inspecting each one until I found the problem, way in the back. The gun must have broken one of my teeth, but it was just my mutant mostly-sideways wisdom tooth, so I figured it wasn’t a big loss. I made a note to do something about it later. Corwin kept staring into the oozing red pit in the mirror.
“I… Don’t know. I really don’t.”
By then, I had pretty much forgotten about the damn tooth, and was having an elaborate daydream about what I’d do if I somehow ended up in space without a suit, and also vaguely wanting pizza. Upon returning to reality, I was mostly just pissed that he hadn’t said anything helpful. Two people coming to the same conclusion, “yep, it’s a hole,” does about jack all.
“Well, neither do I! Shit. I mean, I’m pretty sure the bullet’s in there.”
He looked at the mirror again, trying to stretch the hole for a better look.
“Yeah. Seems that way.”
“I guess we could, you know, try something. I mean, would you want to… Now… Or like, wait, or… Jesus, dude, I dunno! S’your fuckin’ arm!”
He turned away from the mirror, twisting himself up to get a look at the real thing, then brushed his sleeve down again.
“I don’t know… Better out than in?”
A second after he said that, I could tell he regretted it. Here we were, alone in this sketchy bathroom on a deserted stretch of highway, and he’d just impulsively trusted me with fucking field surgery. Worst of all, I knew this, so I should have had the good sense to recant and shuffle us both back to the car. But, hey, he asked for it, so I’ll do my best.
“Um… Okay. So… Just like, lie down across the sinks there or whatever? Pretend you’re at the dentist or somethin’? Shit, I don’t know! Just let me fuckin’ start so we can go home!”
Well, we were off to a good start! The work hadn’t even begun, and I’d already given away that I had no idea what I was doing, and then yelled at him. The worst part, probably, was that he complied. I wondered why, if this was what was going to happen, I didn’t just drive around until I found that goddamn nightmare basement clinic. The only appreciable difference was that the hamfisted butcher in this case was me. And I didn’t even have whatever sketchy medical training that jerk had. The closest I came was sitting in on a bunch of organ harvests because they needed someone to kill the original owner of the organs and hold the fucking flashlight. All I knew about medicine is that you take the hearts last and ship the faces quick, and that my kidneys might be melted together without me even knowing it. But none of that is relevant here. I’m putting together, not taking apart. And I probably won’t have to find out that Corwin is a fused-kidneyed freak.
“Okay… I…” I paused to slip out of my bloody jumpsuit, because I figured one should operate in a clean t-shirt and jeans. Maybe a white coat, but I didn’t have one, so I figured it didn’t matter that much. “…Let’s… Okay, hold on, wait…” I had to dig through my jumpsuit pockets until I found my multitool, and then wash my fucking hands again. All this took longer than I expected, because I was shaking like a nervous wreck, because I had no idea what I was doing. “…Okay! I think we’re good to go!”
Assuming that the bullet would be, you know, in the hole, I unfolded the little pair of shitty pliers and went in for the prize. Corwin started making all these weird strangled noises, like he was gagging on something.
“…You doin’ alright, dude?”
“…You’re digging in my fucking arm! I think I’ve seen better days!”
“Point taken. Jesus.”
He hadn’t told me to stop, so I assumed it was okay to keep going, burrowing deeper and grabbing for something I couldn’t see and was starting to suspect I wouldn’t find. Eventually, I felt the pliers wrap around something, but when I clamped down, it was soft. That was when Corwin lost his shit entirely and started screaming like I was torturing him. Which, I guess, I technically was, but I didn’t know what the hell else to do. I just apologized, and tried to distract him by talking about all kinds of bullshit I’d somehow convinced myself was funny.

I told him about my first girlfriend, Mischa, who used to shake out her coat or open her backpack after she left a store and give the rest of us all kinds of stolen presents, and how I was so fucking sick of malt liquor and candy bars but still ate and drank everything she gave me because I loved her. I told him about when I was living in Craig’s apartment and he put up a homemade barricade in his room so he could rent the “spare bedroom” to people, but the “tenants” always bailed after the first few days, so he always just ended up using it as a place to stick trash. Of which we had a quite a bit, because we used disposable cups and plates and bowls and cutlery. I told him about that, and how it started as a way to keep the resident junkie from burning all our spoons and spiraled out of control because Craig is a lazy piece of shit who didn’t want to wash anything. While I was on that whole subject, I told him about the time the junkie in question decided to share some of his heroin with me and I ended up throwing up in Craig’s new work shoes. When I was halfway through describing Tyler’s famously chaotic house parties, I decided to admit defeat and change tactics, pulling the bloody pliers free with a soft “thunk” of suction.
“…Aren’t you going to finish?”
“I am, god, give it a minute, okay!? I’m thinking.”
“No, I mean about your friend. He’s the guy who was at our house and kept making everyone watch him put his legs behind his head, right?”
“Oh yeah. He does all kinds of that weird shit for attention. There’s something wrong with his joints or whatever, and I think there’s something weird about his eyes? And that’s supposed to be related somehow? I don’t know. He tried to explain it but I never paid very good attention. Anyway, what was I talking about?”
“Was it the snake?”
“Oh, right! If people were there when he was feeding his one snake… Like, the really big fuckoff snake… Dude has all sorts of snakes and shit… But, yeah, he’d make everyone gather ‘round and watch, but a lot of us were like drunk and high and fuck knows what, so that sometimes didn’t really work. And I remember this one time… Oh man, he had the mouse or rat or whatthefuckever all ready… And it was like, a live one, snake fuckin’ had issues and wouldn’t eat frozen rats… And then… Okay, this is Tyler, right? Anyway, he was kind of crouching, and we were all quiet, like we were at the damn movies or something… Even though we were just watchin’ a snake eat a fuckin’ rat, bunch of idiots. But then, okay, he just kind of jumped up all like-” I whipped my arm forward, gesturing with the bloody pliers and trying to be as authentic as possible without Tyler’s backwards-bending elbows, and shouted, in my best Tyler voice: “’…DO NOT TOUCH THE BONG!’ …Because I guess some guy was messin’ around with it? I dunno, it was just funny. He keeps it on this doily on his entertainment center. And I guess that’s actually funnier than the whole story I just told? Also, if I ever take you to Tyler’s house, don’t touch the bong, okay!? He’s paranoid about people manhandling it.”
“Heh.”
I was expecting more of a reaction, but I had to remember that I was doing stand-up for a guy with a ragged hole in his arm.
“…Okay! Anyway. We’re really draggin’ this shit out talkin’ about like, bongs and snakes and whatever crap. Gotta cut that out, right?!”
Corwin didn’t say anything, and when about a minute passed and he still hadn’t said anything, I figured I could get started up again.

First, I gripped his arm and tried to see if I couldn’t feel the bullet from outside. I thought I did, but couldn’t be sure. Then I tried to stare right down the hole, like I was looking through a kaleidoscope, which told me about shit-all. Then I took my multitool and flipped out the nail file, because it was longer than the head of the pliers and might make a better probe. All that did was make him start screaming again. I was completely baffled. There hadn’t been an exit wound, so what the hell was even going on? I grabbed his arm and looked down the hole again, just to be sure.
“…Jesus Buttfucking Christ, where the hell did it go!? How does your little fuckin’ pipecleaner arm even have room to lose an entire fuckin’ bullet!?”
“I don’t know! You suck at this! I think you’ve been pushing it around and jamming it in!”
“…I would have fuckin’ felt that, okay? Alright. Look. This is frustrating. I can’t see shit. I might have to do something, it’s going to hurt, and you’re gonna have to fuckin’ deal, alright?”
“…How much ‘dealing’ are we talking?”
“I don’t know. A lot. Like, ‘people are usually knocked out for this shit’ a lot…” His expression looked like some kind of fear, but mostly like he didn’t know what the hell was going on. Maybe that could work to my advantage. I tried to reassure him. “…But, you’re gonna be fine! Okay? I have this!”
I might have smiled with a few too many teeth. And having been through the past fifteen minutes, he knew I sure as shit didn’t have this. But, he also knew I was probably going to do it anyway, and that there was nothing he could really do about it. I focused on rearranging the multitool. Back in with the pliers, out with the knife.
“So, I guess, you’re ready… Like I said, this’ll fuckin’ hurt, so just think of something else or whatever.”
I wished I could think of something else. But I was the one with the knife. I wasn’t really allowed to think about anything else. Well, then I guess I’m screwed, because my brain has a way of racing ahead of me before I have any hope of redirecting it. I was actually probably thinking about a project I’d been working on and a movie I’d been wanting to watch, both waiting for me in my room, which might as well be in another fucking dimension. Even so, it was out there somewhere, and all I had to do to get back was finish this one last thing. I was just waiting for my hands to stop shaking. Then it dawned on me. Maybe I didn’t have to. I watched that little blade, probably dull as a spatula after all this time, buzzing impatiently in my hand, and thought about those vibrating electric knives. They use those to cut through meat. Close enough. Maybe this was how it had to be to work?

The knife went in optimistically, but in the time it took to actually start trying to cut anything, I realized what a dumbass I’d been. This wasn’t anything like a goddamn electric meat knife or whatever the hell I was expecting. It didn’t have the right serrations. Hell, I’d worn out the blade opening boxes and using the thing as an emergency wire cutter, so I’d probably have better luck cutting him open with a flathead screwdriver. And my shakiness hadn’t turned out to be a convenient sawing motion. I was just awkwardly unsteady, jabbing my dull fucking knife into what few structures had been left intact by all the digging I’d been doing before I decided it had to come to this. I wasn’t doing well, to say the least. And Corwin had lost his shit entirely, to the point where I started hoping he’d pass out or smack his head on a faucet before a cop drove by and assumed we were killing someone in here. Okay, that I was killing someone in here. When you’re splattered with blood, pinning someone down, and there’s a fucking knife sticking out of them, it’s kind of hard to convincingly explain that it isn’t what it looks like. Especially when the guy you’re not-killing won’t just shut the hell up.
“Corwin, get it the fuck together! My hand is movin’ around, you’re movin’ around, and that’s why you’re gettin’ fuckin’ stabbed so goddamn much, alright!? If you’d hold the fuck still, this would have taken, like, half this long. Ferfucksake, you’re making us both miserable.”
“…You’re miserable?”
“I said we’re both fuckin’ miserable! Jesus. I get that you’re the one getting all like shredded and shit, but I think I’ve gone way, way over my motherfucking cutting up my friend allotment for the day, alright!? Now stop squirmin’ around before I have to do this any longer and lose my goddamn mind!”
And I guess I must have sounded like I was actually going to. Either that or Corwin had just gone into “roll over and die” mode. He took a deep breath and, aside from the spitty little trickle of air it took for him to make whatever you call that noise he made, he didn’t exhale. It occurred to me that, in all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen him cry. And, okay, he hadn’t seen me cry, either, but he’s a normal guy who doesn’t skip crying and head straight to the bizarre psychotic destructive shit. Then again, he’d never seen me getting chopped up in a filthy bathroom, and I don’t even know what I’d do in that situation.

At least, he’d stopped moving. I could work. I could fucking think. The knife was still only barely, technically a knife, but with both of us steady, I could probably brute-force it without much trouble. All I needed to do was collect myself. Heart pounding, fists still clenched and shaking, I drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, then pushed my sweaty hair out of my face with my bloody left hand. Cracked my neck, straightened my back, caught sight of myself in the mirror. God, there I was, viciously driving a knife into a friend I’d convinced myself I was helping, and I was the one who looked like he was being gutted. Literally gutted, the way I did that night on the highway, in Hal’s gritty old rearview mirror. Jaws tight, eyes hollow, color draining out of my face, damp bloody hair sticking everywhere, glasses sliding down. I looked like I’d just dragged myself out of a mass grave. If I didn’t know that none of this was my blood, it would have been easy to convince myself that I was the one who’d been shot. And if I was? I sure as shit wouldn’t let someone who looked so inept, so exhausted, and so abjectly terrified get anywhere near the wound. This is a fucking nightmare. Where the hell did I lose control? What right did I have to look like I was suffering in all this? I don’t care how awful it is; when you’re the one doing the cutting, you can’t look like your pain matters. Because it fucking doesn’t. Compared to him, you’re not even there. My reactions disgusted me. I wanted to strike at the mirror and punch out my own fucking face for this. And I might have come too close, close enough to feel my tendons coil up inside me, ready to attack.

The same disgust that drove me to that point was the only thing that saved me from doing something colossally stupid. Yeah, get glass everywhere, goddamn shithouse crazy fuckhead! That’ll sure help both of you! I closed my eyes and took another deep breath, still beating the shit out of myself in my head for nothing in particular, other than my general all-around awfulness. Alright. No more mirrors. I only had to look at Corwin. He was the project. Looking at him hurt, too, but I could just fucking deal with it. And, as I glanced up at his reflection, shoulder blades drawn up like his body thought they could protect him, then down at the real thing, still and bleeding, trying to go absolutely anywhere else in his mind, I did. I let myself know how much pain he was actually in, and then sat with it, even when it felt like I was tearing myself apart inside. This was something new. Normally, I can’t hurt, on behalf of myself or anyone else, without wanting to run off and throw myself against the wall, literally or metaphorically. Here, I didn’t have that option. I had to do something I’d never done before: deal. Finally ready to get this part over with, I laid my free hand on his head.”
“…I am so sorry.”
The quietness of my own voice startled me. I didn’t know my volume went down this low, and Corwin didn’t seem to hear me at all. Then again, he was pretty out to lunch by now. There probably wasn’t much point in talking to him, but I still did, more for my own benefit than anything else, trying with everything in me to hold that tone.
“…We’re almost done, okay?”
I twisted the blade, sharp edge up, and started pulling underhanded, like I was trying to work a rusty zipper. Corwin did not take well to this. Apparently, he was using his good hand to yank clumps of hair out of his head. Alright, I guess he can do that, then! If it was keeping him quiet and didn’t make things difficult, I didn’t really care. Anything, anything to finally get this over with. I didn’t much like cutting people up, I didn’t like having to hurt my friend just because I had no idea what the hell I was doing and went ahead and did it anyway, and I was so tired of this fucking bathroom. And I must have been cutting through a bunch of little veins or whatever, because he was gushing blood like he’d been shot all over again. My hands were getting slippery, which was making things difficult. I hoped the blood would dry and stick my hands to him and the knife, anything to find my grip again. For now, I clenched my fists and held on for dear life. Still dragging dull metal through tough meat, handle jumping in my grip every time I felt the tiny jerk of something rubbery stretching and breaking. I remembered that he was already about to pass out in the car, and from the look of him, he was getting closer. But, that might have had more to do with all the little wet ripping noises than anything else. I probably should have warned him about that. But, it was too late. I was almost done, so close I could see it, literally. The blade was showing under the skin, a faint dull grey, like someone had marked him in graphite. Cut along line.

Since I could see through the skin, I was, I figured, good as finished. I pulled hard as I could. The dull line turned shiny, then a louder tearing and a weak rubbery snap. It was enough to make me flinch reflexively and pause, grip loosened, hair standing on end, hectic squirming from my chest to my guts. On Corwin‘s end, god help him, it was more than enough. For me, it was so awful I had to stand back and collect myself. For him, it was so bad that he couldn’t. Before I knew it, he’d lurched out of my hands, still slimy with blood that hadn’t gone tacky, and pushed himself forward so his head was pretty much lying in the nearest sink. In the space of about four seconds, he’d gone from pinned down and nearly immobile, to lying with his neck at a vaguely unnatural angle and violently projectile vomiting. God, I didn’t even know where it all could have been coming from. Neither of us had eaten or drank anything since we left home fuckall hours ago, but there he was, looking quite the disgustingly impressive spectacle. I knew there was something I should have been doing. It’s drilled into you: when someone throws up, you hold back their hair or try to somehow keep them from drowning their damn fool selves in it. But I wasn’t sure if he had enough hair for that, and he was mostly face-down, so I decided it would be best to leave him alone until he was done. And, after a series of empty heaves with enough force to make me worry that the next thing I’d see was all his pipes splattered inside-out and coiled on top of their former contents in the sink, he was.
“…You okay there, guy?”
He didn’t say anything, and I guess I shouldn’t have expected him to. His voice was probably broken. I didn’t know how his eyeballs didn’t pop out of his head. So instead of pressing, I watched him drag himself out of the sink, cough, sniffle, wipe his nose on his bare arm like a jackass, and move to sit on the edge of the counter.
“So, you like… Want me to finish things up here?”
He still didn’t say anything. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I shrugged and went ahead with it.
“Just keep sittin’ so you’re facing the sink, alright dude? We’re just about finished up here… Good thing. Shit. I’m getting’ real sick of this crap.”
Of course, there was so much blood that, once again, I couldn’t see jack. I grabbed a fistful of paper towels and blotted until, finally, I saw something dark and shiny, gleaming through all that shredded meat and sticky flesh-water. I tried to grab it with the pliers, but there wasn’t enough space to do much more than push it yet further in. Well shit, the stupid fucker was right! I ended up removing it with the miniature ruler, pressing on one side until it popped out, releasing a thick spurt of blood from a little round crater. It was like someone down there had turned on the hose, and I about threw up myself. I ended up pressing my bare hand to the wound, because I was panicking and anything seemed better than doing nothing. Besides, he was too out of it to question me. I figured I could do just about anything I wanted, as long as it eventually ended with him not bleeding all over the place and me driving us home. This probably wouldn’t get us there. I figured I couldn’t just clutch his arm and drive one-handed the whole way home, even if I’d done the same exact thing with phones and coffee and ancient slices of pizza millions of times and lived to tell the tale. But it’s not like any of those things could snap back to reality and piss and moan like a little bitch about how I was hurting their stupid arm and if I wasn’t careful they’d, I don’t know, vomit on me. Tell me I don’t know what I’m doing. Something like that. Anyway, I’d established that I couldn’t use my hand. I should probably be using…

…Well, nothing I had here. Alcohol. Peroxide. Sutures, tape, bandages. And I shouldn’t be using them, a fucking medical doctor should. But I didn’t have any of that, and I’m not a fucking doctor. I’m just a shithead. I know about crap-all about any of this. I have sidewalk-grey paper towels, neon pink soap in a stupid wall-mounted box, and a rusted, probably-empty vending machine where I can buy four pills for the price of ninety with a stack of quarters I don’t even have on me, because I am a moron and I never prepare for anything and that’s why I keep fucking staggering into these ridiculous fucking life-or-death boondoggles, like a jackass. And now my friend is going to die, because I dragged him off on what should have been the lamebrained half-assed adventure that finally got me killed, and I tore his fucking arm apart because I don’t know anything about medicine, and now I don’t even have enough change to buy him a fucking aspirin. Because I’m an idiot! Well, an idiot I may be, but I’m the one who’s here. And whether or not I can, I still have to fix him. Fixing shit is what I do. I also break a lot of shit. Sometimes, I even break the same shit I was trying to fix, because I don’t always remember how to be careful. Really, there’s only one good thing I can say about myself: I may break more shit than I fix, but I’ve never done nothing. I’ve never fucked up through inaction. That’s what Corwin does, and if I have anything to do with it, he’ll get up tomorrow and start doing it again.
“Okay… You alright? …Oh dude, don’t even bother to answer. I shouldn’t be askin’ you any fuckin’ questions. Don’t… Don’t try to say anything! I don’t know what it’ll do… Anyway! Can you hold your own fuckin’ arm for a while? I need to get some shit together.”
Thank fuck, at least he could still move and understand words enough to do that much. But god, he sucked at doing anything that actually curbed the bleeding to a measurable degree. He wasn’t exactly pressing on anything, just lying with his arms wrapped around himself, the way you do when you’re cold, like I used to do last winter, when I used to go driving all night and forget where I was. Actually, he looked like he was cold. The warm was leaking out of him, and I was darting around, shaking that horrible old pill machine and hoping something useful would fall out, and unwinding yard after yard of those shitty paper towels, coating about half of them in that questionable soap that I seriously doubt even works, setting them down in one of the non-vomit sinks and running the water for just long enough to get them wet. This is probably a disaster. Even those creepy little wet snot rags you get in those ketchup packet things at greasy restaurants would probably work better. But again, I didn’t have any of those. Or maybe I did, since I used to hoard them so I could keep them in my pockets and clean up after working on my car, but I didn’t know where the heck they’d gotten to, and I sure as hell didn’t have them now. I just had a shit version that I threw together in a skanky bathroom.
“Okay… Fuck… Just relax for a while. You’re gonna be fine. I’m almost done, okay? I just have to clean you up, you’re all bloody and shit…”
He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. My fucking broken ear was ringing again. I was dropping bloody wet paper towels left and right, trying my best to both scrub out the wound and clear up enough blood for me to assess the damage, as if I would even know what the hell to do with that information. All I could tell was that, the way it was now, I wouldn’t have guessed either a bullet or a knife had made a wound like that. It looked like something had torn a chunk out of him. And I’d done most of it myself. Before I got to him, he just had a hole in his arm. Which is kind of the pits, but at least it’s just a hole, not a mess of thick flaps and shredded bits. At least, before, I couldn’t see quite so far into him, all the way to something white that I was hoping to god was just some kind of cord or membrane, but suspected was probably bone. If it was my arm, I would try to touch it and find out, the way I, fascinated, cautiously probed the socket when I dislocated my shoulder. But that’s just not the kind of thing you can do to another person.

None of this was. I’d really fucked this up, and was probably still fucking it up. These towels are probably full of fucking splinters and scratching up his insides, the same way they’d scratched up my glasses. I’m probably hurting him again. I wish I could keep distracting him, but I feel all out of good stories. All the wet fleshy squelching noises are practically echoing off the tiles, drowning out the silence and the buzz of the lights, and I’m not even trying to talk over them.
“…If you need another, like, puke-break or whatever, just tell me.”
He didn’t respond, but I don’t know what else I was expecting. He was probably empty. Hell, if he wasn’t still bleeding, I’d be worried that he was dead.
“…Hey!”
I rapped the back of my hand against his face a few times because I thought it would be annoying enough to at least get a flinch out of him.
“…What?”
“…Nothing. Almost done.”
I started wadding up dry paper towels and shoving them into the wound, trying to make some kind of improvised cork, and, having run out of stories of my own, describing the plot of a movie I’d seen a few weeks ago. It was about some poor fuck who kept ending up in all these bad situations where he’d have to, say, whack someone with a shovel or carve them up with a buzz saw, all in self-defense. The police suspected a serial killer, and I guess they were technically right, but it was all an accident. Every night, the guy had to watch another news report and remember the killing and whatever it was that happened leading up to it. He started getting flashbacks, and by the time the movie was about three quarters of the way through, he’d gone around the bend entirely and became a serial killer in earnest. In the end, he gets the chair. It was a shitty movie, and the dude who played the guy was one of the worst actors I’ve ever seen, but fuck, I felt terrible for him anyway. Man… I’ve been there. Kind of. When I was done with that, I told him about a slasher flick I watched with my idiot junkie roommate a few years ago, where the killer had been disfigured in an accident and went around stealing faces and stapling them to his head, going out and killing again when each new face started to rot. I had an endless appetite for gross movies, and usually remembered everything I watched, which came in handy when I needed to keep talking but couldn’t think of any good gross stories to tell about myself. By the time I was done jamming Corwin full of paper, like some kind of awful living taxidermy project, I’d summarized about five and a half.
“…So he just kept putting them in that hole in the wall?”
“Yep!”
“…That is really retarded.”
“Oh, it was! I kept fuckin’ sayin’ that!”
“So what ended up happening?”
“I dunno… I guess it went about as well as you’d expect? Don’t look to me for answers, dude. I was drunk. That movie was Martin’s idea. He also made me drink a shot of hot sauce.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, well… Martin’s a little shitheel. Anyway, we’re ‘bout done here. Just gonna need you to hold your arm again for a sec.”
When both hands were free, and I’d made sure he was doing an okay job of keeping himself from bleeding, I took the knife again and chopped off one of my shirt sleeves.
“Sorry…”
I was pulling at the fabric, trying to get it to come apart in one strip, which was actually pretty absorbing.
“…Pfft! Don’t be. This is like, my worst t-shirt. I wore it because I knew today was gonna suck.”
I smiled, started laughing. Corwin, busted as he was, tried to do both. So I guess he was going to be okay, for some value of okay. I wrapped my shredded sleeve around his arm.
“…Okay! Looks like that’ll hold for a few hours, at least. I dunno, man. I don’t know, like, medicine. So maybe I shouldn’t have done any of this, but I don’t know who else was going to do it… Anyway, like, alright. We’re done, guy! Can you sit up? Need help?”
He must not have needed help, because the first thing he did after sitting up was take a half-hearted swing at me. The next was leaning forward with his head in his hands.
“…I think I barfed into my sinuses.”
I tried to remind myself that, even if I thought that was a hilarious thing to say, Corwin wouldn’t find it funny for about another week, if ever. So no laughing, asshole.
“…That’ll happen. Remember what I was telling you about? When I like, hurled in my roommate’s shoes? Well, next day, sneezed out a fuckin’ macaroni. Not, like, a real macaroni, the kind you make from a box… I mean, I guess they’re all from a box, but this is that specific type of box with like the bag of cheese dust and shit… And come to think of it, it was one of those spirally ones… Why are those still even called macaronis? I mean, when you think about it, fuckin’ bullshit, man. Why does everyone just accept that!?”
“…Jesus Christ, Spenser, I don’t know! God. You’re the only person I know who can make a conversation drift off topic when the sole participant is you.”
“Well then, like, yell at me to get the fuck back on topic! S’what Martin does.”
“I’m bleeding, the inside of my face just got splashed with fucking hydrochloric acid, and I don’t want to talk about the goddamn macaroni!”
“Man, you suck! Martin is like, dead, and he’d want to talk about the macaroni!”
“He would not! He’d tell you you’re being a jackass and try to tune you out for the rest of the night.”
“Yeah, I guess that sounds about right… But first he’d come up with some kind of real pretentious garbage-ass diatribe about when a macaroni is still a macaroni!”
“…Well, I don’t want to do that! It’s stupid.”
Corwin wasn’t being much fun. And I guess I should have expected as much, but really, he wasn’t being much more not-fun than usual. Dumb shit always acts like he’s dying. He’s such a fucking drag. He’s boring and confused and useless, and he saved my life, and then I mangled him. I’m the one who’s a fucking useless drag, and he should have just let me get shot in the mouth when he had the chance. But he didn’t, and I wasn’t, and this is where we ended up. Me with blood up to the elbows and one sleeve missing, him trying to crawl out of a dirty sink like a lungfish on its last legs. We held these positions in silence for another minute or two, and then, almost as if we were paused and one of us tapped “play,” we started moving again. I washed my hands while I watched him trying to straighten up. God, I wished I could turn away. Looking at him was weighing me down with a very specific kind of terror. The feeling of reassembling something with all the tape and paperclips you have, then watching as it holds its shape for all of about ten seconds before your reinforcements give way, a little piece drops off, and soon the whole structure starts creaking apart into a broken heap. Only this time, I knew the thing I’d failed to fix could feel every bit of it. And now that he’d finally managed to drag himself, up, it seemed like he was looking at me. It was more like he was looking through me, at nothing in particular, but it somehow felt like he was making some kind of pathetic accusation. You mutilated me. You were supposed to be helping me. But, of course, the only one saying that was me. Because I know full well what I just did.

*****

You don’t have to do anything like that again. It’s okay. You’re okay. All you have to do is drive. You can drive, can’t you? Asshole. Fucking waste of space.

Back in the car, things were almost worse than ever. Corwin was still catatonic and mangled, and I was still trying and failing to make things right. I strained to speak in a stagy gentle tone that we both knew full well was patronizing. I asked him how he was doing until he snapped at me. I fiddled with the radio until he told me it was, his words, “doing his fucking head in.” I cracked incredibly lame jokes and did the laughing for both of us while he scowled at me. I described about three more horror movies, and he responded with silence, which I took as a sign to continue. So far, it was the best reaction I could get out of him. Maybe he wasn’t accepting anything I said because, in the end, it accomplished jack shit. It changed nothing about the situation but the noise level. I thought I might do better by asking him specific questions.
“Are you carsick? Do you want me to pull over?”
“No.”
“Need to lie down? Do you want me to like, tilt your seat? Do you want to go in the back for a while?”
“No.”
“You cold? There’s a sweatshirt in the back seat.”
“It’s Martin’s.”
Good point. If anyone bled on his shirt, Martin would have a conniption. Never mind that it was black, never mind that I’d watched him cough in to his elbow a dozen times when his lungs were bleeding the other week. He’d still have to be an ass about it, because he’s Martin, and that’s what he fucking does. If anyone was going to bleed on his clothes, it would be him, god damn it! So I had to keep pursuing other options.
“…You still wanna punch me?”
“I’m over that.”
“Does your head still hurt?”
“Maybe.”
“Would some water help?”
He shrugged.
“Do you want to like, smoke or something?”
He shrugged again, then, almost inaudibly, spoke about the third full fucking sentence since we got back in the car.
“I don’t have my lighter.”
He was staring at the floor, eyes dull and dark, sweaty hair plastered to his face, still reeking of vomit and dirty pennies. My god, I’d never felt so awful for someone in my life. I always thought he looked like shit on a good day, but after seeing him so sallow and limp and glassy-eyed, having to rely on the seatbelt to keep himself even mostly upright, I doubted I would ever think that again. The whole ordeal had exaggerated his obnoxious natural pathos to the point where I kind of wanted to hug him and punch him at the same time. But mostly, I still just wanted to fix him. If he needed to smoke, then damn straight. I would make that happen.
“Dude, don’t even worry about that. We’ll stop. I’ll buy you one.”
For the first time since all this shit started, he looked directly at me.
“…Yeah? Thanks.”
His hair was skewed to the left, showing the scarred side of his face. I felt sick. A few years ago, I was getting started as a hitman, and he was cloistered in graduate school. I was getting dragged through the dirt on a daily basis, he was safe in his warm bed with his books and paperwork, where nothing bad ever happened. I was goofing off with my dingus roommates in our gross apartment. He saw his best friend dead, then resurrected as a fragile, shambling mockery of his former self. I had to live in my car for a while. He fought tooth and nail for a precarious stranglehold on a career that didn’t suit him, then lost all of that and a good chunk of the skin on his fucking face in the space of seconds. I made the mistake of assuming his life had been easy just because it hadn’t been mine. That he could never, ever understand what I’d gone through. It took this long for me to realize that maybe I couldn’t comprehend his suffering, either. And the whole time I was working on him in the bathroom, I felt awful for putting him through all of that, since it always seemed like his life had been so sheltered and lethargic that it couldn’t have prepared him. Now, I felt awful because he’d already been through so much shit, and I couldn’t even make an effort to be more careful. This, by far, was worse. I had to try to make it right.
“Like I said, it’s no problem.”

How could it have been? It was such a tiny little bullshit thing. God, you’re a piece of work. Is this really all you can do for him? Maybe it was. But if it was what I could do, I would do it. I had to. And at the first gas station I saw, I did. I also bought a bottle of water, a box of painkillers, and a hideous holographic bumper sticker, that said “if you can read this, flip me over!” That last thing was for me. My plan was to put it wrongways up so it looked like a suggestion to turn me upside-down. And when I got back to the car, Corwin, the fucking jerk, had his seat tilted back and was listening to the radio. This was the perfect chance to say something really passive-aggressive, so I willed myself to keep my mouth shut. Or hell, maybe I didn’t even have to worry about his stupid fucking feelings, because to look at him, he might have been dead.
“Hey, loser. I just asked you earlier if you wanted me to put your fuckin’ seat back!”
For good measure, I prodded his face with the cold water bottle. If he was alive, at least one of these things would get a reaction.
“…Dude, what the fuck?”
He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even asleep. He was just still really, really out of it.
“I just got you some shit. I know you only said you wanted the one thing, but you don’t have to use anything else right now.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He went through the bag until he found the lighter, and started going through his pockets. Then I had to watch him lie there for about half an hour, trying and mostly failing to smoke. He never seemed to quite get a full drag, and if he coughed, he acted like someone was driving a hot iron through his chest. Well, fuck. I hadn’t fixed him at all. All I did was plug up the hole. And aside from that, I didn’t even know what all else was wrong inside of him. All I really knew was that he banged up his ribs pretty bad on the stairs, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. If something was broken, I wouldn’t have any idea how to fix it, and honestly, I didn’t know if I’d even be able to determine that in the first place.

Actually, the way he was now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could just lift up his shirt and look for cracks. He looked sunken and wrung-out, like he’d lost about fifteen pounds in blood and stomach juice in the course of an hour. He probably needed to be fed, and if I couldn’t do anything else for him, I could at least do that. After all, it’s what Hal did for me, and the only way I knew how to deal with any of this was by copying Hal. Then again, I was probably projecting. It had been a fucking brutal day, and I was starving.
“Hey, let’s get some fuckin’ hamburgers or something!”
“…What?”
“I’m hungry! And dude, look at yourself! If you don’t get something in you, you’ll, like… Decompose. I mean, probably not really. But still.”
“…I can’t even think about food.”
“It’ll be different when it’s actually in front of you. Just go with the flow, okay!”
Before he could whine any more, I turned the key in the ignition. Corwin opened the box and downed about half a sheet of pills with a huge gulp of water. And we were on the move again.

The only problem (well, not the only problem, but the only one out of billions that my brain felt like bothering with) was that, in the rush to find a gas station, I’d gotten turned around, and now I had no idea where I was. Which wasn’t even a real problem. I used to get lost all the time, and always ended up back home. The longest it ever took to un-lose myself was two days, and that’s only because I talked to a guy in a coffee shop who told me I could follow him. Somehow, I ended up going to his house, where I smoked weed and ate Chinese takeout in the basement with him and his friends, then eventually fell asleep on the floor with everyone else. Remembering that made me remember a bunch of other things. I don’t think he had any real furniture, but he had about five futon pads, eight lawn chairs, and twenty beanbags, give or take. He must have bought all the ten tons of cereal he owned from the bulk bins, because it sat in the closet nearest the kitchen in a pile of twist-tied bags, like sacs from a creature that lays millions of tiny, coarse, colorful eggs in the dark. And before this weird dude lead me home, while everyone was still asleep, his girlfriend and I decided to sneak upstairs to fuck in the master bathroom. She was pretty cute, and the guy was cool and had some real funny-ass friends. I wished I could remember a single name from that night, because they were people I wouldn’t mind hanging around with again. (Note to self: ask Tyler. If you’ve smoked weed with someone, there‘s a good chance Tyler sold it to them.)

…Point is, I’m never lost for long. And if you drive around aimlessly for about fifteen minutes, you’ll eventually find hamburgers. If people can’t find hamburgers, they’ll… I don’t know. Riot. I’ve never been far enough from hamburgers to find out, and this was no exception. In the time it took me to remember the weed and the beanbags and the girl in the bathroom, I caught sight of a drive-thru sign, and turned across three lanes of traffic in a way I wasn’t really sure was legal. At least, someone honked at me. And Corwin wasn’t too happy about it, either.
“Christ on a bike, why do you do shit like that? The hell did you learn to drive!?”
“California.”
“…Don’t tell me you’re making a stupid L.A. driver joke.”
“I’m not! I learned to drive in fuckin’ California! Remember? How I was gonna learn arc welding from this guy out there, but he like fired me for dicking around, so I ended up doin’ a bunch of other shit? Didn’t I tell you that story!?”
“I don’t know! I can’t even understand half the shit you say.”
“You don’t pay fuckin’ attention! Anyway! I so told you that fuckin’ story. And, yeah, I learned to drive when I was drag racing.”
“…So you know how to drive fast, but you don’t really know how to drive.”
“No! I took the driver test a few years ago, and like passed and shit. Remember Craig? He was at the house that time? And he’s the guy where I puked in his fuckin’ shoes, so! That’s Craig. Anyway, it was when I was living with him, and I guess I didn’t have a car for about a week, so I had to drive his car, and he wouldn’t let me until I got my license, so I did that. Don’t know if it’s still good, though. Huh.”
“So, I’m riding with a guy who doesn’t even know whether or not he has a driver’s license, is going ten miles over the speed limit, and just turned across three fucking lanes of traffic because they were getting between him in a goddamn hamburger. Great. I just feel so safe right now.”
“Dude, chill. You see any fuckin’ cop cars around? No? We’re fine.”
“That’s not even the point! You can go to jail for driving like a fucking jackass for all I care. Seriously. I hear the other inmates are beating you with broom handles, I’ll come visit just so I can laugh at your face through that little tollbooth window thing. The point is, I don’t want us to get T-boned, because I just know that it’ll be me who gets my lower half crushed and has to spend the rest of my life shoving myself around on a skateboard.”
“Jesus, calm the fuck down. You’re just gettin’ all fuckin’ pissy because you’re hungry. Don’t talk until you’ve had, like, at least two hamburgers.”
He kept glaring at me while I shouted our order into the speaker. I decided to tack on a soda. He probably needed sugar, like people do in the bloodmobile. When I pulled up to the window, he was still sulking. For some reason, I thought a little small-talk would help.
“…And dude. It wouldn’t even be that fuckin’ bad, okay? Craig watched a show about a guy who had that exact thing happen… Well, I actually think it was some kind of industrial accident, but point is, no legs, no pelvis, nothing’. God, I felt so bad for that poor fucker. But you know what, he made it work, and there was no skateboard involved. It was a… You know what, I don’t even remember. And if that happened to you, I’d build you some fuckin’ awesome robot legs or something’ how’zat sound?! I’d even let you, like, kick the shit out of me with them! And you and Martin could creak and clank the hell around all day and have your own little jackass robot freak club. It’ll be great!”
I turned back to the window. A guy about my age was holding a ponderously huge bag of hamburgers and staring at me. I didn’t know how long he’d been standing there. So I gave him my best shit-eating grin, shoved my money in the window, took the bag, waved a nice goodbye, and peeled the hell out of there.

And then, right out of the blue, I felt something I’d never felt before: too fucking tired to drive and eat at the same time. I had to find a place to park. Corwin wasn’t eating, even though he wasn’t driving, which didn’t make much sense to me. I wanted to tell him he could get started before me, but I didn’t know how to speak in a tone that would convey “I really wish you’d just fucking eat something” and “but it’s okay if all you want is for me to pull over so you can puke again.” And yeah, this is awful, but I almost wanted him to go with that second option, so I could make it up to him and actually do something to help this time. I wouldn’t just stand there dumbfounded like an asshole. I would… Well, I don’t know what I would do. All fucking day, every time I touched him, I hurt him. But I’d risk doing it again, just so he knew I was trying. He had to know this. Because I knew he’d done it for me. He picked himself up, pulled the trigger, splattered my glasses, and saved my fucking life. I knew he’d tried because I still existed to know anything in the first place. As for him, who knows what he’d decided about me by now? Probably that I’m some stupid bungling oaf who keeps putting more and more of these bullshit errands between him and a long-awaited crash in to an unmade bed. But god damn it, I was trying.

*****

Are you still my friend, now that I’ve carved you open?

I ended up parking right on the side of the road. We were sitting on the shoulder. It probably wasn’t very safe. But I saw the view and decided this would be the place. We sat on the hood with the bag between us, enjoying the World’s Lamest Picnic. Corwin finally started eating, but only after lighting another cigarette, because apparently, Corwin is one of those disgusting people who smoke and eat at the same time without giving it a second thought. I wanted to tell him that this is a filthy habit, and has, on at least three separate occasions, lead to me having to watch a drunk person eat a cigarette butt, which is something I could go the rest of my life without seeing again. But, I thought better of it. Corwin wasn’t drunk, and I figured he’d earned his right to be obnoxious. By now, the bleeding had long stopped, and the stain had gone hard and brown. I remembered my bloody shirt from way back when, sticking to the hole in my side and saving my life. And now I’m still here, for whatever good that does. But hey, at least I’m here, and for what it’s worth, I’m here with someone who made an active choice to keep me here. I wanted to ask him why, no, really, why, but I knew he’d never say. He’d shrug and give some noncommittal answer. “Well, what was I supposed to do?” Nothing candid, nothing philosophical, nothing that means shit. If I’d learned anything about Corwin, it’s that, for whatever reason, he’s only able to say about a fraction of what he’s able to think, and I guess in that way, we’re a lot alike. The only difference is whether we undershoot or overshoot the mark. And yet, we keep trying, and in this case, I think we both know it.
“Hey… You know, sorry about your arm and shit. I really fucked that one up.”
He was still chewing, so I had to wait. I fucking hate waiting. It took what felt like a tiny eternity for him to swallow and speak, but eventually, he did.
“Yeah, well. It’s fine. You did what you could.”
I wish I was the kind of person who could cry. The whole “break something” override would have been a complete non-sequitur in this situation. If I tried to punch out the windshield, which I’d felt like doing immediately, I’d just have to explain it, and that would be weird. I wanted him to know I gave a fuck, but that would have been a little bit too far. Who the hell cares so much that they just up and start breaking windows? Well, obviously, I do, but I don’t count. In my case, it’s just one out of about a million things wrong with me.

So instead of fucking up the windshield, or crying, or even thanking him like a decent fucking human being, I didn’t do anything. I sat, staring down at the world laid in front of me, until I started recognizing some of the curves and bends of the road, reading the real thing like a map. And I guess I must have gotten turned around again, because this was a town I knew all too well. Buried somewhere in that miniature city was a dirty little apartment with a bathroom full of what might as well been medical waste. Tyler pruning his seven different kinds of pot plants and feeding his five different kinds of snakes. A literal psychopath who sat with me on his fire escape. A taciturn junkyard sentinel, my could-have-been, would-have-been friend. A dead van slowly being absorbed into the riverbed. Dozens of people who hated someone so much they could kill them with their bare hands, but decided it was me, not them, who deserved to see that image behind their eyes at the end of the day. A tiny underground world full of scalpels and staples and needles and television. The last optometrist willing to take me. A lab full of spit from fatherless children, live organs sleeping in a fridge in the back, waiting for their new homes, to remember what it is to be connected and warm. A condo with a girl who doesn’t love me. A doctor with a vacant room. An attic with two doors and one set of stairs. Out behind the horizon, long rows of the undead, with their tubes and wires, in their white beds. Looking down, I can almost place it all, trace my own footsteps, draw the map in my head. I know where I am. I know where I was.

And I’m going home.