October
“I don’t know any names.”
There were two cops. The older one had one funny eye: half closed all the time, giving him a permanently sceptical look. He had his cop hat in his hands and his short, grey and black hair was dented and slopped around from the hat. The younger cop was a lot taller than the old one. You could tell, even under his police uniform, that he had a big, powerful torso and his upper arms were jacked. He looked at Robot, then at the other cop.
“I’m not bullshitting you. There were three guys. At least three. They were wearing masks like in a dumb movie. Two of them I have no idea. The third guy is a bootlegger I chased off my doorstep a few days ago. Dressed in all brown Carhartts like that? Work clothes that he’s never done any work in. And the steel-toe boots. Spotless. Like the day they were bought. I guess I know what he needs those for now.” He had an urge to pat the injured parts of himself, his ribs especially, where the pain pulsed and throbbed a half-beat behind his heart, but he’d done that several times already, and touching the bruises only made the hurt worse.
The cops stood directly at the side of the bed, practically right up against it. Robot had been dozing when they’d come in and when he’d opened his eyes, it was the police officers he’d focused on. Now that he was waking up, he noticed some movement right beside the cops. In an armchair against the wall was the girl from his music class, Sam.
Her eyes were locked onto his. The look on her face said a lot of things. It said she was frightened. It also said she was concerned. There was a layer of warmth in it somewhere, a degree of caring beyond just fear.
Robot was reclined on the bed and looking at her sideways. He moved to lift his head and straighten out his view of her, but pain shot through him in so many places that he could not identify them all. He let his head fall back onto the pillow.
“What about the spray painting?” the older cop said. His face showed no empathy. No emotion at all. Robot looked down at his own arms. There were still small dabs and flakes of white paint where someone, some underpaid nursing assistant, probably, had tried to wash the paint off him. Up until that moment, he’d actually forgotten about the paint. It had happened at the end, after the beating was over. A sharp memory of the smell came back to him, the fumes.
“Is spray-painting people a thing now?” Robot asked.
“That’s what we want to know,” the older cop said.
“Shame,” the younger cop said.
“What?”
“That’s what they painted. The word shame. It covered your entire body. The EMTs reported that. By the time they got you here, the doctors…”
“Shame,” Robot said. He took in a breath and exhaled, let his head sink back into the pillow. He liked the antiseptic gleam of the hospital, its comforting lack of squalor.
“As if I need to have that word spray-painted on me. As if I need some poison-selling bootlegger to tag me with that word.” He looked over at Sam, whose look of concern for him had not changed.
He was in a ward room with several other beds in it. Some of them seemed occupied to him, but he did not have the energy to even look around and take note. There was a window in the wall opposite. Most of the light in the room seemed to be coming through that. There was the clean, chemical, hospital smell. It was a smell he associated with the Springtown Youth Centre, and therefore with incarceration and consequences, and also with not worrying about the possibility of rats or whether or not there would be enough food for breakfast when he woke up.
A short interview with the police wore him out. And though they were still talking to him, he found his eyelids heavy. He blinked slowly at the police and then drifted off.
When he woke up again, the police were gone, but Sam was still there.
“Isn’t this a school day?” he said. “What time is it, anyway?” He swivelled his head around as much as he could do comfortably, but there was no sign of a clock. Sam did not answer.
“Seems like you might have a thing about not talking,” he said. “Sometimes you talk. But…I don’t know. Sometimes you just don’t seem to talk. Is that right?” He rested his head sideways on the pillow. Felt the stiffness of hospital laundry on his cheek. Sam’s expression had not changed. It seemed an impossible position to hold a face in, frozen in a mix of emotions.
“I probably look pretty scary right now, do I?” He put his hands carefully up in the direction of his face. There were bandages and other medical appliances that he was afraid to probe too vigorously. Something was bound to become dislodged. His finger was bound to touch something that might hurt.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” he said. “Where are you from?” Sam’s expression darkened and she hinged her head forward, lowered her gaze. “There’s something about me I don’t think you know,” Robot said. “I’m famous around here. Infamous. I looked that word up. It does not mean the opposite of famous. It means famous for a bad reason. Did you know that?” He was speaking gently to the girl, but he could feel a well of emotion filling up inside him. A pain ripped through the muscles around his ribs every time he shifted his weight, and he groaned as he turned to get a better look at her, just the top of her head as she gazed silently down into her hands. Into the little stick-and-poke tattoo he’d noticed before, at the base of her thumb.
“I killed a guy. Did you know that?” Now she looked up. “His name was Travis Cody Mancomb. I barely even knew him. I didn’t mean to kill him, but it wasn’t really an accident. It should have been a story we could both tell when we got older. A story about how tough we were when we were young. A story about how dumb we were. But only one guy lived to tell the story. There’s a video of it. They took it off YouTube, but it’s everywhere else. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re the only one in town. The worst moment of my life. For anyone to watch whenever they want. The worst thing a person can do. Kill another person. And I did it. And I don’t need some lowlife bootlegger’s reminder.”
His eyes filled up and then spilled over. Tears ran down his face and he began to sob. Once he started crying it was like some crazy spirit had overtaken his body and he just cried and could not stop. Hot, shameful tears. The way the crying convulsed his body was the worst thing for someone who’d been beaten up as he’d been. Every place he’d been hurt lit up with pain as he cried. And now Sam was crying, too. She’d pulled her chair next to the bed and put her face down into the mattress. Their crying was loud. Robot could hear it fill up the room and echo down the long hospital corridor. A nurse came into the room to check on them. There were other beds in the room, but a privacy curtain had been drawn most of the way around. The nurse pulled the curtain the rest of the way, closing off the bed and the little place beside it where Sam sat in a chair. There was an IV tube in Robot’s arm, taped in place just above his wrist. The nurse gently lifted the arm and examined the needle and tube. In a whisper barely audible over the unbroken crying she said: “Just let’s be careful of that IV,” and she backed out the door to the hallway again, the sound of two teenagers’ crying unrelenting in the room.