INTERLUDE

ONE YEAR AGO

She’s been out all night and now it’s morning and all she can do is let the angels of steam rising from her diner coffee wreathe her face, performing their divine task of scaring away this demonic hangover.

So far, they’re failing. Fucking angels.

At least Miriam has enough money for breakfast. And maybe lunch. November is witch-tits cold but warmer than it should be, and so last night on South Street she was able to stand there and peddle her wares like a good little working girl. Not that kind of working girl.

Shaking her psychic moneymaker.

This is how it works:

Sun starts to dip around five in the afternoon. The tourist crowd thins as the bar crowd and folks going to see a show at the TLA start pouring in. Miriam, she stands there on a street corner—the smells of cheesesteaks, cigarettes, and anger washing over her.

While standing, she holds up a sign: WILL PSYCHIC FOR FOOD.

Ten bucks gets someone a vision.

She tells them how they’re going to die.

And she lies about it, most of the time. Oh, you’re going to die in a fiery jet-ski accident. Helicopter crash skiing K-12, dude. Eaten by a bear in your living room—I know, right? So crazy! Ebola. Monkey flu. Squirrel pox. You die while base-jumping at the same time you’re fucking a Ukrainian supermodel, good for you, high five, up top.

Very rarely does she tell them the truth.

You die alone in bed in thirty years. You burn in a car crash on your way to a job you hate. You choke on a greasy wad of cold cheesesteak.

You die poorly because we all die poorly.

The lie is part of the job.

She gives good story.

They give her ten bucks.

Most people don’t want to know how they’re going to die.

Most people want to know how they’re going to live.

They don’t realize how intimately those things are connected.

She tries to sexy herself up—torn T-shirt, knife-slashed jeans, a push-up bra (which for her is like trying to pinch and lift a couple of mosquito bites, but you work with what you have, damnit).

It’s hard to be sexy in the wintertime.

Well. Fuck ’em. Today, she gets breakfast from it. And lunch. And maybe tomorrow night she’ll be able to afford another motel room instead of crashing under bridges, on park benches, in Hobo King’s car. (Hobo King knows all the tricks. “Don’t fog up the windows,” he says, “because that’s how cops know someone’s sleeping in there.” Hobo King’s name is actually Dave and he used to be a cab driver.)

The waitress comes, drops down a plate called the Working Man’s Special: sausage, bacon, pancakes, eggs, hash browns, toast. All for seven bucks. Breakfast: the cheapest and easiest way to eat a gut-load of food.

And goddamn if Miriam doesn’t love breakfast. She would marry it if she could. Stick a ring on one of the sausage links— a terrible idea, really, because before she knew it, she’d eat the sausage link and the ring with it and that probably wouldn’t feel great coming out the other end.

Rings. Engagement rings.

She makes a mental note: Don’t forget about that guy from the bus.

Andrew, that was his name. Still almost a year away. He was kind of a prick. But it’s an experiment, she tells herself. Another experiment. She warned him. And in a year she’ll see if he heeds her warning.

For now she sits and doesn’t eat her food so much as maul it. Fingers greasy from sausage. Bacon in her teeth. Syrup on her chin. The waitress comes and gawks for a moment, and Miriam thinks: I remember you, Susie Q. You’re the one who gets breast cancer in ten years, dies in twenty.

Cancer, cancer, cancer, so often cancer.

Miriam dives back into her food with all the gusto of a starving wolverine. Suddenly, here’s the waitress again—

She looks up. Not the waitress.

Three dudes. Boys, practically.

One of them, a shaggy-haired scarecrow in dark hipster glasses. Next to him, a superskinny black guy with hair so blond it looks like pollen gathering on a bee’s butt. The third is a pooch-bellied pot-smoker type, hair so ratty with resin you could probably break off a hank and stick it in a bong.

“You really a psychic?” the black one asks.

“We want to know how we die,” the hipster scarecrow says.

“Because holy shit,” the stoner says. “How awesome.”

“I’m off-duty,” she says.

“We got money,” Black Daffodil says. He elbows Hipster Scarecrow, who in turn elbows Bongwater. They each pull out a ten-dollar bill.

Miriam looks at the money suspiciously. Eyes flitting. “You do know that psychic is not code for ‘blowjobs in a diner bathroom.’ ”

Black Daffodil’s eyebrows lift so high, she wonders if they’ll levitate off his head and fly back to their homeworld. “You ain’t my type.”

“Skinny heroin-chic type?” she asks.

“Vagina type,” he says.

“Ah. You like dong.”

“I like it better when you don’t call it ‘dong.’ ”

“Fine,” she says, snatching up each ten-dollar bill with a thumb-and-forefinger pincer like she’s plucking butterflies out of the air. “Let’s start with you, Daffodil; chop-chop, put your hand in mine.”

She puts her hand out. Tilts the palm up.

The guys all look to each other and she can feel their excitement.

Black Daffodil reaches out—

He sits on a curb outside an Exxon in the middle of the city, traffic on Broad Street, flecks of flurry-speck snow landing in his hair and melting; he’s humming a little tune as he plunges his hands in and out of a Funyuns bag. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Head bobbing along. Doo-doo-doo.

The other two yahoos come out, Scarecrow and Bongwater. Scarecrow’s got a granola bar and Bongwater has five granola bars, some blue-colored Mountain Dew variant, and a gas station hot dog (which is half shoved in his mouth) and he’s trying to talk and Scarecrow’s laughing and he might be high, too.

They cross the parking lot.

Someone else makes a perpendicular toward them.

Santa Claus. Not the real Santa, if there is such a thing. This is a drunk, dirty Santa. Droopy, stubbly cheeks. A Karl Malden nose bursting with broken blood vessels. Pear-shaped body waddling along in a red Santa coat that’s surprisingly clean despite his grimy face. Santa hat askew on his lumpy head.

He’s got a six-pack of beer. Bottle in his hand. Open. He takes a pull.

“Yo,” he yells, waving, wiping his mouth, looking over his shoulder to see if anybody’s looking. One car sits at a far pump, but that’s it. “Hey, I got five left in this sixer. Sell yous each one for fie-dollas a pop.”

Daffodil yoinks his head up. Purses his lips. “We can buy our own beer, elf. Go on back to your igloo now.”

“Horseshit,” the guy bellows, sloppy smile on his face. “If yous kids are twenty-one, then I’m the goddamn Easter Bunny.”

“I’m in,” Bongwater says, veering toward the drunken Santa. Despite the epic snackload in his hands, he’s somehow already got a five-spot waving like a little flag. Scarecrow nods, hurries over with a ten, buys one for Daffodil too.

“Natty Ice,” Santa says, taking a pull. “S’good.”

“It’s shit but we’ll drink it,” Bongwater says.

“I gotta go baffroom,” Santa says, and it seems for a second like maybe he’s just standing there pissing in his pants but then he jerks like someone just tugged on his ear and he makes a beeline for the Exxon.

Scarecrow tosses a bottle to Daffodil. They pull out Bongwater’s snacks, use the bags to hide the beers, and then they’re all eating and drinking and talking shit. Something-something Christmas break. Something-something Professor So-and-So is a real ballbuster. Blah blah Tumblr, Twitter, Batman, Kanye West.

It’s Daffodil who gets it first. A line of blood crawls out of his nose. He doesn’t notice. Bongwater has to point it out. He wipes it on the bag. A red streak. The other nostril starts bleeding.

He stands.

Something is wrong inside.

Things twist up like a braided rope. Tightening. Fraying.

He burps.

He tastes blood.

The bottle drops from his hand because he can’t hold it anymore. It shatters. Ksshhh. His body shakes. Drops. Flops. Eyes wrenched open, can’t close, jaw clenched like high voltage is coursing through him. Heart going so fast it might as well be a drumroll preceding what comes next— cardiac arrest rips through him like a fist through tissue paper.

— and Miriam yanks her hand away.

“What?” Daffodil asks. She smells the sausage stink on her own fingers. Nausea blooms sick and yellow. She grabs Hipster Scarecrow’s hands, then Bongwater’s, and it’s just as she feared.

Bongwater dies there, too. In the parking lot. Blood. Pain. Seizure. Coma. Heart attack. Boom, boom, boom. Scarecrow bites it later. A week after. Pale, comatose. Tubes and monitors, beep, beep, beep—faster then, like a robot orgasm, beepbeepbeepbeep, then cyborg peaks, cyborgasm, beeeeeeeeep, one long killer cumshot as Scarecrow’s body arches up like someone stuck a stun gun between his ass-cheeks and—

Dead, dark, done.

Stick a fork in ’em.

Miriam gives them their money back.

They protest.

She tells them to fuck off. They still want to know. She says, “You all die from monkey herpes.” When they still won’t leave, she threatens them with a butter knife and swipes it in the air in front of them while hissing. That does the trick. They retreat. She shoves her plate aside. The meal is ruined. Their deaths stay with her.