}}}Carey. 2015. Los Angeles, California. Santa Monica.}}}}}}}}}
“Listen, lady, first thing: I didn’t puke on your dog, okay? No way to prove that’s mine. Could be anybody’s puke. And second, that’s … pretty much pure liquor. Wash right off. So what’re you so wound up about?”
Uptight bitch won’t listen to reason. She’s got that face. That “I’m about to call the cops” face. I hate that face. Started seeing it more often since I moved out here to the beach. Hitting the bottle pretty hard. Got a rotten burning feeling down in my guts that won’t drink away. Figure I didn’t have a lot of time left, so why not retire out west? Just a few miles west, actually …
Oh, they’ll let you sleep in the park in Santa Monica, sure. But the second you punch a mime on the promenade they’re all “public disturbance” this, and “pressing charges” that.
And I said to ’em, I said:
“Who’s gonna press charges? That sumbitch ain’t sayin’ nothin’!”
I yell the punch line at a young kid with a gnarly beard. I figure, you got a thing like that on your face, you got a sense of humor.
Fucker doesn’t laugh.
“S’funny,” I tell the kid. Just trying to help him out. Let him know what humor is.
He shakes his head like he’s sad for me. The utter shit.
Boy, I love bus stops. All these people hate me, but they can’t leave or they’ll miss their ride. It’s the perfect place to hold my court. The only downside is those guys in blue that—yep, they’re coming this way.
That crazy bitch and her puke-dog ratted me out. Whatever happened to manners, huh? Used to be, we have a problem, we hash it out like people. Now it’s like every little crime and the cops get involved.
Well.
Fuck ’em!
I used to swear Jim Beam was the fightin’est liquor around. You wanna end the night kicking a guy in an alley, you start the night with Jimmy. But that’s before I found this.…
What is this?
I peer at the bottle. It’s all blurry, but I can see it’s got a picture of a spider on it.
That’s usually not a good sign.
Well, I’m all fueled up on fight juice and I can’t even remember what it was like to give a fuck, so sure, lady—
“Call all the cops!” I yell at her rapidly disappearing ass. “Call all the cops in the world!”
Oh hell, while I was busy yelling at them, the pigs snuck up and grabbed both my arms. That’s not fair. That’s cheatin’.
Ha, but I still got a forehead.
I swing it at the nearest chiseled jaw. My aim is shit. Just clip him in the ear. Make him mad.
“Lights out,” I say.
“Lights out,” he affirms, before swinging me facedown into the sidewalk.
…
Turns out that was a lie.
I woke up staring at a bare bulb in a metal cage. Damn thing must’ve been a million watts for the headache it was giving me. I was looking forward to a nice dark place to crash for a while. Nothing like being able to actually see the world around you to make you hate it all.
I closed my eyes, but I could still see that cruel white light burning through my eyelids. I opened them again, and I swore the fucking thing had grown.
Or gotten closer.
Or—
Oh, god damn it.
The ball of light wasn’t in its cage anymore. It was hovering a few feet above my head, those sick shapes and static screams piercing my—
“Hey, wait,” I said. “Where’s the sound effects?”
The angel didn’t respond.
There were colors in this one, too. I’m not sure which ones. Felt like every time I tried to chase one down it was somewhere else, or something else. I didn’t get that cold sensation from its presence, either. In fact, looking at it now, it was almost … familiar.…
“Kaitlyn?” I asked.
Laughter. Not the sound, the abstract idea. It sprang into my thoughts and wiggled around there.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
A million more ideas came bursting through every door and window in my mind. Forgiveness. Want. Recrimination. Short films of me and Kaitlyn in that gray building beneath the coast, only I wasn’t pulling the trigger in these movies. I dropped the gun, or unloaded it, or threw it in the sea—
“You made me do it?” I said.
Apologies. Regret. Necessity. An alien snapshot: shining blue cliffs spilling out dense gas like a waterfall. A red planet with streaks of white, thousands of times larger than Earth, with glowing purple lines undulating all across its surface. An eternal aurora, a sea of diamond—
“What is this shit?” I said, swatting my hands at the air.
The images died down.
“I don’t care about this Star Trek garbage.”
The angel was silent.
I had absolutely no external cues to assume so, but I’m still pretty sure she was annoyed.
“Come on, now,” I said. “Like you were gonna win me over with waterfalls and pretty colors? I don’t need that. I just … just tell me you’re okay. Wherever you are. Whatever you are.”
Ideas: longing and heartsickness. But also contentment. Curiosity. Excitement. Burning like a road flare above all else: Determination.
She was still fighting. Good.
Ideas: Want. Questions. Self.
“What do I want?” I guessed. The light shimmered affirmation.
I felt a presence tenderly poking around inside of me. Slipping between my atoms into the core of my being, adjusting the code that makes me who I am. Removing sadness, dulling self-hatred…
“No!” I jumped up from the cot and backed into the farthest corner of the cell. “Don’t you god damn dare change it. Don’t you god damn dare make me pretty.”
Confusion. Desperation. Help.
“Just…” I slumped to the ground. I could feel the cold concrete through my worn jeans. “Just tell me what it was all for.”
Inside my head, I saw a glowing nest of tentacles shrieking and dying. In the distance, I felt something immense begin to move—
“The space whale?” I laughed.
The light did not.
Ideas: Big. Old. God/Not God.
“So what, God’s been gone forever and now we made it so he can come back? Great. Is he gonna hand out harps and togas?”
Wrong. Uncertain. God/Not God. Good/Not Good. Existence. Natural. Neutral.
I suddenly remembered, with painful clarity, a biology lesson that I’d tuned out of back in grade school. The teacher was up there droning on and on about some boring crap, so I was entertaining myself by drawing crude boobies over all the pictures of girls in my textbook. I couldn’t have told you what the lesson was about to save my life. But this scene was too sharp for one of my dull memories. This wasn’t me. This was Kaitlyn, showing me. I heard my teacher’s voice, clear as day:
“When the body is sick, it produces antibodies to defend itself from within—”
The memory cut out. Then I saw every single person I ever knew all at once: Wash, Matt, Safety Pins, Elmer Spikes, Thing 1 and Thing 2, Tub and Meryll, Randall, Rosa, my mom and dad, our old mailman, the cops that threw me in here, Kaitlyn, Jackie, and thousands more.
I threw up.
“Christ,” I said, still reeling. “Don’t do that. It’s like being punched in the brain by a high school yearbook.”
Apologies. Inhuman. Forget.
“So what,” I said to the ball of light. “The space whale is, like, the whole universe, and we’re, like, its antibodies, fighting off disease?”
Rejoice! Correct. Surprise.
“And the disease was the angels?”
Pride. Gratitude. Complete.
“Well la di da for the space whale,” I said. “I’m glad all my friends died so it didn’t have a tummy ache anymore.”
Sadness. Disapproval. Hope.
I felt that slick, lurching movement in the base of my soul that meant something was rooting around inside of me.
“No!” I screamed. “I don’t need solving.”
But the angel didn’t stop. It churned inside of me, shifting and rearranging until—
Nothing.
I ran a mental inventory: Every shitty thing that ever happened to me was still right there, front and center.
At least I think it was. Would I know if it wasn’t?
I remembered, in vivid detail, pulling the trigger and watching Kaitlyn die. If she was going to start somewhere, it would have been there.
She hadn’t changed a thing.
“What…” I started to say, but that was it.
The light had gone out.
I sat on the cot and stared at the cell walls.
That’s the thing about jail: It doesn’t give you a damn thing to do but think. Think, sleep, or masturbate. My head hurt too bad to sleep and I didn’t have anything to clean up with after masturbating, so that left thinking.
That shit angel-Kaitlyn said, when she was trying to explain everything to me. It just didn’t hit home. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it wasn’t that she was wrong, she was just using the wrong metaphor. The antibody stuff—maybe smarter guys than me understand that and find it comforting—but I don’t see it that way. Now, this is just me. This is just my take on it, and it probably doesn’t help you feel any better—any less alone or weak or small or whatever your fucking problem is—but it does the trick for me. Kaitlyn was trying to tell me this:
When we look up and pray to God for help, we’re being idiots. God doesn’t help us. It doesn’t give us anything. It doesn’t need to. God isn’t up there handing out weapons so we can fight evil.
We are the weapons.
And that? That’s something I can wrap my head around.
I sat on my uncomfortable jail cell cot and I thought about that for hours before I finally realized what was different: The sickly pain in my guts had subsided.
Did I just get a liver transplant from a ghost?
I burst out laughing.
“If you think that’s gonna stop me drinking,” I yelled at the bare bulb, shining stoically in its metal cage. “You got another think comin’!”
Still …
…
Maybe I would switch to beer.