37.

“I want to show you something,” says Pepe. His head bobs up and down, above the surface of the pond. His strong bare shoulders move forward and backward, as if he is rowing a boat to stay afloat.

“Can you just show me from here, from above the water?”

“You can’t see it from up here. Don’t be so scared all the time.”

“I’m not scared.” Mano’s shoulders are up around his ears. He is struggling to keep his mouth above the surface.

“You are, too. I can see it in your face, Mano. Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course, I do.”

“Ok, then all you have to do is hold your breath and follow me down. Stay close behind me or else you’ll get lost. It’s dark down there.”

Pepe’s eyes get big. “Ok, ready? One, two...”

“Wait, wait.” Mano swims a little closer to Pepe. “What are you going to show me.”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I just tell you, you won’t believe me. And you won’t even go down there. You’ll see.”

“Pepe.” Mano finds Pepe’s hand under the surface. He pulls himself even closer. Their faces are almost touching. “Ok,” Mano says. “I’m ready.”

“Ok, one, two...” Pepe smiles knowingly for Mano as he counts. “Three.”

Mano follows Pepe under the water keeping his face as close to Pepe’s hips as he can. The water is cold and murky, but a little bit of sunlight cuts down through the water like a blade, over the top of Pepe’s body. Mano wants to open his mouth and drink it all in. He stares at the muscles in Pepe’s legs, how they tighten and roll as his knees bend upward toward his chest. Pepe’s legs move like a frog’s legs to propel him further down, deeper toward the bottom of the pond. Mano wants to propel himself, just like Pepe, but his legs work differently. Mano looks back at his own legs, which move nothing like Pepe’s, but at least he can see that they are free.

When they reach the bottom of the pond, Pepe looks back over his shoulder at Mano and points to a black square. The black square is on the side of the pond and is framed with stones. Pepe puts his head inside the square, and then his shoulders. Then Pepe puts his body completely inside the square and disappears. Mano’s lungs are filled with fire. He wants to retreat to the pond’s surface for a breath. But he decides instead that if he dies, he’ll die with only trust left in his lungs following the beautiful boy into that black square. Pepe’s hand pokes itself back outside the black square and grabs Mano’s hand by the wrist and pulls him in.

Inside the square, Mano feels his lungs ease. His lungs pump air. In front of him is a long hallway. Mano looks back at the black square that he came in from. It isn’t there anymore. Nothing is there.

“Don’t look back,” says Pepe. “Let’s go this way.”

The hallway is incredibly long, and a long red rug leads to a very large and bright window. It is framed with red and white checkered curtains, and the curtains are on fire.

Somehow, Mano can see Pepe already on the other side of the window.

“How did you get outside?” Mano whispers only to himself.

Mano is unable to run fast enough to bridge the gap between them. The window stays the same distance away. Pepe is framed in the curtain of flames. His hands are in his pants.

Mano watches Pepe touch himself. He wants to climb through the giant window to be with him, but the fire from the curtains is too hot. Mano rips the flaming curtains down and stomps on them, his bare feet burning, the flame licking the hair on his legs, until it is out, and he can breathe again.

The fire inside of his dream finally woke Mano. He was no longer in a long hallway, standing in front of a window, but in his own cabin that he had built for himself from the wood of The Reckoner. Many years ago, Mano chopped The Reckoner down with the axe and the saw that he had been holding, and built a cabin that he could fit inside. There was no place for him in XO City. He was too big to fit inside the newly built houses, and he lost far too many customers to XO Meats and XO Haircuts. After many years, Mano’s long hair grew over the things he held without any good way to cut it. He weighed roughly eight tons now, and was as tall as three tall men.

Mano’s mind was tearing itself in half, somewhere between dream and reality. Mimi Minutes was still on his kitchen table—that much he knew was real. But strangely enough, Pepe still seemed to be standing outside of his window. Pepe looked very real and very alive. His real hand was in his real pants.

Through the window, Mano could see that Pepe’s hair was parted to the side, like he always liked it. Mano suddenly remembered his own overwhelming growth of hair, and he wanted to tame it. He used his long fingernails to make a part to match Pepe’s. “Pepe?”

Pepe said nothing. He touched his chest with his other hand.

“Pepe,” Mano tried again. This time it wasn’t a question.

When Mano left his window to walk to his door, Pepe had already run away. “Pepe! Where are you going?”

Mano trusted his reality more than his dream, but there was Pepe’s back, running back down the well-worn path through the woods toward XO City. Mano could see him so clearly. Pepe’s clothes, Pepe’s hair.

But reality was still inside the cabin. Mimi Minutes was now sitting up on Mano’s gigantic table, blood stains all over the mid-section of her naked body, her bloody panties dangling like a dead soldier from her best big toe. Mimi was crooked—leaning at a 45-degree angle toward the gigantic kitchen sink made from three normal-sized kitchen sinks.

“Who was that?” asked Mimi.

“I don’t know. Maybe Pepe? No, no, it couldn’t have been. It was just some boy. Some boy who looked a lot like Pepe.”

“It wasn’t Pepe.” Mimi tapped an XO from the pack and lit it.

“So you saw? You saw him, too?!”

“I didn’t see nothing, but I watched you watching.” Mimi stood up, and hobbled over to the gigantic refrigerator made out of three refrigerators. It had a door held on by a long bungee cord connected to the metal grid at the back of it. She unhooked the cord and let the door fall open. She grabbed two cold cans of XO. “It was probably a squirrel.”

Mano laughed, but not because anything was funny. “It wasn’t a squirrel. It was a boy.”

Mimi cracked open one of beers, and took a slow drag of her cigarette. “Pepe is deader’n dead. Besides, if he was alive, he’d be older than you. Remember? Mano, look how old you are. Look at you. You’re no boy.”

“What am I?” Mano was daring Mimi to call him a monster.

“I don’t know what you are. But you’re no boy.”

For the first time since he chopped down The Reckoner, Mano felt an urge to leave the woods. He wanted to know something other than his festering life there.

Mimi pulled her panties up high on her hip with her one hand. “You fell asleep halfway through eating me out again.”

“I did?”

“It’s ok though,” Mimi said. “I got it done.”

“I’m sorry, Mimi. I...”

Mimi interrupted Mano. “I don’t need to know nothing else about nothing.” She finished the first can of beer, then cracked the second. “I’m on my period.”

“I can see that,” said Mano. “I have a mop. Don’t worry about it.”

Mimi wasn’t worried about it.

Mano took a few steps outside of the cabin. He intended to walk as fast as he could, so that he’d have enough momentum to not stop, to just keep going further into the woods and closer to the edge, toward The Cure, toward the footbridge near where Pepe died, where his mother had been torn apart by the very woman who was now in his cabin.

Black birds squawked and swooped down in front of him, and circled around his head. Two of them landed on his head and stayed there. They had been waiting for many years to escort Mano back down the hill. But he stopped.

Mano’s body was far too big. He was shaped like a pile of trash, and he hunched so far over that his face was out front, only halfway up his body. Mano’s face was the only part of his body that could be recognized with any clarity. Needless to say, he was not swift, and the chances that he’d be able to catch up with the boy were nil. Defeated, he returned to his gigantic door, which looked more like the size of a missing wall. The door was still open.

“They like you,” Mimi said. She was able to get dressed on her own.

“Who likes me?”

“The birds.” Mimi gestured to the top of Mano’s head with the hand that held her third can of XO.

“Oh, yes. The birds. It’s my own fault,” said Mano.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. It’s just that I asked for them, that’s all. For my 14^th birthday. ”

“Well, shit. You really get what you want, don’t you, Mano? These damned things were all over town for years. After you left. They were trying to land on everyone’s fucking heads, squawking, shitting, destroying everybody’s shit.”

“What happened? Are they still...”

“The Businessman put out a call for bird hunters. No one back then knew what birds were, but everyone learned quick. And bird hunters from other places answered the call, too. They settled in, bought up everything, hunted the birds until they were all gone. It was sad really. I liked ’em. The birds. But the funny thing is, all those hunters all thought that they killed them all. You can’t kill them though. That’s the thing. You can kill one or two, sure. But you can’t kill birds. Birds are birds.” Mimi cracked open her fourth beer, and had a new thought about the birds. “Everyone thinks they’re dead, but they just live up here now is all. A lot like you, I guess.”

“Maybe that’s why they like me.”

Mimi put on her shoes with her one hand, and thanked Mano. She hobbled back into the woods toward XO City where she lived alone in an apartment above XO Donuts.