Saturn’s Game

You could bite off Todd’s nose.

That’s the thought at the back of my head.

That’s the thought I ignore. I squelch the sinister sentiment and refocus on my friend.

Todd is saying this and that about motors and camshafts and gear shifts and custom something, and the whole time I’m nodding my head like one of those little plastic dogs people think add character to their dashboard.

My eyes focus on the little divot underneath his nose where today’s stubble is starting to grow, but I have these slick “Alien Eye” Arnet sunglasses on and it’s approaching sunset, so he can’t tell I’m not making eye contact.

Shadows are lengthening on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop. My mind is wandering, making electric connections, chaotic. I’m thinking about the inadequate elastic in my sagging left sock, the razor burn sting by my Adam’s apple, the smell of barbecued chicken in the distance, the cool edge that’s creeping into the air. I can’t wait until Todd goes away, but I’m too polite to say anything.

The bad thought slingshots back into my brain, echo-heavy.

What if I grabbed Todd’s head and then bit off his nose?

It’s a poison thought, the kind no one is supposed to think, or at least no one is supposed to acknowledge thinking. The thought came from a different part of my brain, and it feels like a misfire, a stillborn idea.

Still, what if?

Could I do it? Could I bite off someone’s nose?

I’m trying to think something new but now I’m preoccupied with the idea of biting off Todd’s nose.

I wonder if he’s sensed the shift in my mentality, and how much danger he could potentially be in. I know I’m not supposed to think like this anymore, Dr. Marchand was pretty direct about that, but now the thought is looping, building speed, swirling down the brain drain.

It’s a sick thought. Squash it. Just my frontal lobe fucking up again. If I do something crazy tonight, then Saturn wins.

He’s been winning for twenty years.

Then the setting sun shifts one millimeter down in my field of sight, and one razor-thin ray of light shoots directly into my optic cone and strikes the nerve like a match, and I’m overwhelmed by the smell of motor oil. Something . . . Oh God . . . and I look down and see a tiny green plant poking up through the crack in the sidewalk, and the plant sways a little bit in the breeze, and its motion blurs as it enters my eyes, and an electric jolt shoots up my spine and buries fire in my gut and I have to quench it.

So I grab Todd’s head.

I’ve never bitten off anyone’s nose before, but I figure that if I get a strong grip on the hair at each side of his head I could have a fair amount of leverage. From there, with the element of absolute surprise standing in my favor, all I have to do is open wide and clamp down.

My teeth sink through the skin of Todd’s face after a split second of resistance and the teeth at the left side of my mouth crunch something. It might be that bony ridge at the top of the nose, or maybe the thin sliver of cartilage running down to its tip. Regardless of anatomy, it really crunches.

Todd is screaming now, his warm breath is in my face, and his hands are at my wrists, trying to loosen my grip. But I’m too focused on the task at hand. I pull back as hard as I can, with my teeth sunk as deep as they can go into Todd’s nose, and I tear my mouth downward at the last of it. The motion doesn’t quite sever all the tissue so I have to make a couple of hard sawing motions with my incisors, like you do when you’re eating sinewy flank steak. Todd’s nose makes one last attempt to stay on his face before the wet tearing sound and the coppery taste in my mouth tell me I’ve succeeded.

Oh shit.

I just bit off Todd’s nose.

It’s in my mouth, and it is otherworldly warm. I spit it out onto the sidewalk where it lands with a moist plop. It looks fake, like it’s made of rubber. It looks smaller than it did on Todd’s face.

Todd is collapsed in a fetal ball on the ground. He’s moaning, mewling, groaning, screaming, something. I can’t quite tell. He doesn’t sound good, and a crimson pool spreads around his head.

Oh shit.

I don’t think either of us expected this, Todd or I.

The view out of my sunglasses is warped and liquid. A drop of Todd’s blood is on the right lens, smearing a trail toward the ground. The sunglasses are tight against my face, too tight, like they want to press into my skull and cleave the top third of my head. It reminds me of the time when I was five and I got my head stuck in a plastic wastebasket. I tear the glasses off my face and throw them to the ground. My view feels instantly improved, my skull is safe.

I look back down at Todd.

One of Todd’s Puma sneakers is unlaced, and I can still smell motor oil. My brain is buzzing, dull static numbing my ability to think. I’ve got to do something.

People will see Todd soon, police will come, medics will come.

I’ll be arrested.

I should just stand here.

My voice is falling out of my mouth and I sound all of twelve years old.

“Hey, Todd, oh fuck, Todd, I’m sorry, I’ll just, um, wait, just . . .” I say to Todd, but he seems to be in another world, and he’s making these horrible moist, gargle noises. I’m confused. Static. Interference. Synapses are not connecting. I’m sniffing the air, feeling like my nostrils are coated with something dirty, black factory air. That thick industrial smell is saturating my head, covering my skin.

“Fucking motor oil! Can you smell it, Todd? The motor oil?”

I look down at Todd, who I think just said something like, “Gwaaaah, uunnaaa reggg, God, uhhh.” Todd is definitely not smelling the motor oil.

I can’t take the scent anymore. It’s making my chest convulse, and I’m taking all these tiny excited breaths, like I’m trying to hyperventilate, only I don’t want to, and my heart is beating so fast now that it’s probably just vibrating, not even compressing, and I feel like passing out. My limbs are tingling and I’m sweating profusely, drips rolling down my face, and so I just shake my head back and forth, back and forth, fast and hard.

I’m trying to jar my brain into action.

I’m not dealing with this very well.

Todd’s trying to stand up. Someone just walked out the front door of Berenger’s Pub across the street, and I can feel them looking at Todd and me. I can hear a Foreigner song coming out of the jukebox inside the pub. “Cold Blooded,” I think, but I’m not sure. They all kind of sound the same to me. Songs do.

The man who just left the pub is looking at us and he’s crossing the street. He looks tubby, with big, meaty ham-hock arms, and if he sees Todd like this he might think the wrong thing. He might think I did this on purpose. He might not know I have problems, and try to beat me up. I don’t ever want to get hit again.

Now I am running.

Running to where?

Fuck it; I’m just running, pulse erratic, sweat streaming from every pore. I’m oozing sweat like a soggy sponge squeezed tight, positively soaking now, and my skin smells electric.

I’m still tasting Todd in my mouth. I have to run faster. Can I? My lungs are at capacity and then some. My eyes are burning and I think tears are coming out, but I can’t tell. It could just be sweat.

I’m about six blocks away from Todd and his severed sniffer, and I’m trying hard to run but it feels like someone just stuck a prison shank in my chest just below the heart. Damage to the port side, Captain!

I’m heaving myself forward, trying to ignore the pain, laughing at my own little joke in short gasps, slowing down, trying to get some air.

Stop. Stand still. Breathe deep. Where can I go?

There’s a defunct Sooper Saver-Mart to my left and a series of industry offices packed with cubicles and small green plants to my right. I can see inside one of the cubicles, past my reflection in the glass. The lady who occupies the box has a tiny porcelain picture frame on her desk. In the frame sits a photo of a house cat that looks like it might have eaten one too many servings of Atta-Kitty. A tiny, hand-written sticker on the picture frame says “MY GERGEN!” The lady has chosen that as her one tiny token of self. A picture of an overweight cat called GERGEN is her life preserver; the one thing she has decided will save her from being sucked into the corporate undertow.

Maybe I’m not so bad off.

The Northside Liquor Store is only three blocks away from me. It is still open, and although I already feel sick and queasy I can’t help thinking that maybe a huge bottle of rum is just the thing to make a bad, bad day turn better.

Prescription, Doc? 750 ml of self-administered distilled spirits should fix your malady, my good man!

I can already taste it on my tongue as I walk into the air-conditioned booze shop.

DING-DONG!

Oh, Holy Lord Jesus they’ve got their customer alert bell turned up loud. The store clerk turns to look at me and as he rotates I see a hearing aid manufactured at some point in the late seventies is wedged in his ear. A beige octopus made out of plastic appears to be burrowing into his ear in an attempt to suck out his brains. He seems to pay the grotesque plastic apparatus no mind, which somehow makes it look all the more malevolent, like maybe it already got to him.

Then the old guy with the non-ergonomic and mechanically malicious hearing device says, “Hey buddy, stop starin’ and buy something or I’ll call the cops and report your ass for loiterin’.”

Loiterin’. The worst of my crimes.

I hear him but aside from loitering I can’t make much sense of the words. He seems antagonistic. My brain is turning increasingly fudgy and I’m thinking, “Is he going to bite me?”

I turn to my left and the wall trails by me in slow motion. Colors are blurring together like I did the wash wrong again. Things are not up to speed in my brain.

Another psychotic break, Doc?

I grab the first bottle of cheap, rotten rum that I see and boom up to the front counter.

I move forward so fast and so intently that the clerk shrinks back a bit. The strange and worried look spreading across his grill says he can’t wait for me to leave. Can he sense I’m not right today?

The total bill comes to $14.56 and I’ve got a jug of shit rum in my left hand and a pack of Mini-Thins in my left pocket.

Pop pop fizz fizz and I’m washing back cheap, legal speed with liquid fire.

Walking faster now, towards the park two blocks away, hoping to God that the shit I just swallowed will clear my head and help me to deal with this situation. Do I have a way out? Do I have to deal with this? Will they put me back in the fucking hospital? Can’t I just see straight and fly right for once?

Too late, kid. Done is done.

Yeah, and I’m pissed, feeling like this was never in my control. Blaming Saturn.

Your excuses won’t reattach Todd’s nose, will they?

The voice in my head is louder and somehow not my own.

My insides warm up, which is good because the sun is setting and the air will cool. Swigs off the bottle, two three four, in rapid succession, and now the world looks a little friendlier.

Then I hear the squelch and beep of a police car’s radio and everything runs ugly. The air is alive with white noise and my eyes have static on their surface. I look back over my left shoulder and see a black and white patrol car rounding the corner of Ward and Meeks. Adrenaline flushes through my system. My eyes burn, instantly dry. My throat fills up with booze and acid and I have to re-swallow, hard, to keep my liquid lunch from relocating.

Options: few to none. A voice at the back of my head says, “Stand very still. He will not see you if you stand very still.” Fucking five-year-old logic, I can’t escape it.

The cop car is closer with every split-second and my brain’s not coughing up the goods.

Throw a rock at the car? Why?

Duck down, lay low? I’d look even more conspicuous if spotted.

Wait for the officer to hop out of the car and get within biting distance, see if I can claim nose number two for the day? Low odds for survival, smashed in a locust swarm of lawmen.

Run?

Again? Well, it worked before . . .

I hear the bottle of rum smash to the concrete behind me and my legs are kicking doubletime. Crazy heat is searing in my gut— this is all too much for one day—and I want to stop and throw up, but it’s a fair bet that even if the patrol car wasn’t looking for me before, they are interested in me now. They are awfully suspicious of people who flee their presence. They make assumptions. Draw conclusions.

I’m running down a thin alleyway now, taking in deep lung-stretching loads of stale garbage stink, and I’m laughing like a kid. Oh boy, a chase! Only when I look over my left shoulder— Grandpa always told me I’d see Death coming for me over my left shoulder—all I see is the alleyway receding behind me. No cops. Maybe I am invisible, or maybe the cop was changing radio stations or looking at his fingernails or something else as I ran across the street. No trail.

No pursuit. Deus ex machina in my favor.

Especially since her house is only four blocks away.

I feel light in my shoes as my Mini-Thin engine goes into overdrive. I’m so close to a safe place, if she’ll let me in. God, what an If.

Four blocks of footwork and three knocks on a pale red door connected to a cheap stucco apartment complex determine my fate. Will she or won’t she let me in? Has she forgiven me?

The thin door creaks as it opens, and standing there in an old pair of Guess pajamas and an older pair of fuzzy white slippers is the sister I haven’t seen for five years.

I’m speechless. My lower jaw has dropped open on its hinge and I can’t move my diaphragm or expand my chest or vibrate my larynx or make plosive sounds with my lips or anything. What do I say?

“Come in, I guess,” she says as she turns slowly back towards the couch and the bowl of popcorn on it. “I’m watching this episode of Real World for the fourth time, but it’s not getting any better. Don’t ask me for money ‘cause I won’t give you shit. I’m barely making it as is.”

One quick look around her place pins a verification on the statement. There are Salvation Army blankets up instead of drapes, a broken-down futon at the center of the room, movie posters on the walls (Switchblade Sisters, Reform School Girls, Bound), cheap Target dishes, the anodized kind that stay almost ruthlessly cold, and stacked Ramen packets on the dusty countertop. Trailer park chic minus the porcelain unicorns and the “Hottest Men in Firefighting” calendar. Still, she let me in.

“What’s up, Tyler?” she asks as she sits back down on the futon and tucks a thin afghan over her lap.

“Um . . . ”

Long pause. Beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . beat. I can’t just waltz in here after five years incognito and tell her I’m on the lam because I just bit off my friend’s nose for no good reason. “I was just in the neighborhood . . . ”

“Bullshit, Ty. Fucking bullshit.” She’s still not looking at me, her eyes stay on the television, not blinking. “Ty, look down at your shirt. You fucked up again, huh?”

My shirt is plastered to me, the collar loose with sweat, and the front is saturated with crusting blood. My chest is a red waterfall that smells like moonshine. She’s right: I most definitely fucked up again.

“First of all, Ty, if you’re crazy again I want you to stay right where you are and understand that if you try anything I will pepper spray you until you choke on your own vomit. Second, I’ve heard the police sirens, and if you think I’m going to harbor you, well, you’re crazier than you ever were. Well? . . . Talk, Ty, I’m not in the mood for games . . . listen, stop mouth breathing and tell me something.”

Shit, she’s amped up and I’m slowed to a crawl. I’m terribly confused and I’m thinking they switched her Paxil to methamphetamine, ‘cause I’ve never seen her this aggressive.

There used to be days when she wouldn’t even get out of bed, she’d just lay there and stare at whatever was past the ceiling in her room.

“Sis, I’m scared.”

“What’d you do?” she asks, but the undercurrent in her voice says she’s sick of this already.

“I . . . uh . . . well . . . there was this smell like motor oil, and the little plant was sending electricity to me, and I . . . well, I’m fucking sorry now, so sorry . . . and I think he’s okay . . . things . . . I mean . . . I know what I did was . . . I know that I am sorry . . . I’m sorry, I’m so sorry and I really mean it . . . I’m so . . . ” and then it’s all too much for me and for the first time in weeks I’m really feeling something, and my breath is hitching and my knees are going weak and I’m sobbing as I hit the cracked linoleum and curl up on my side, and then the story spills out in between sick, wet sobs and snotsniffles, and tears so hot they feel like rubbing alcohol on my face.

I tell her about Todd’s nose, and then his lack of a nose, and I tell her about the smell, the motor oil, and the angry man, and GER-GEN, and the octopus eating the old man’s head, and the booze, and the pills, and the panic, and somewhere in all of this mess I tell her that I miss her terribly, like every day, and that I miss the way she smells. She kind of laughs and cries at that at the same time, and now she’s getting off the couch, moving towards me.

She’s standing above me, looking down and mumbling something like, “Saturn’s reign never ends, right?”

Saturn . . . .

It’s her nickname for Dad. The first time I was in the hospital, she brought me a book of paintings by this Spanish guy, and on one of the pages there was this seriously fucked, black painting of the God Saturn chewing a big hole in his Son. Next to it was a Post-it Note that said, “Kind of reminds you of him, huh?” Ever since then, he’s been Saturn.

Ever since then I’ve been playing his game. Trying to control myself, trying to deny what he did to me, trying to exist despite the scars on my brain that fucked up the wet-wiring.

Now she’s crouching down over me and I do love the way she smells, like green apples, and I kind of want her to hold me, but I know she’s going to blame him and talk about him now, and I’m sick of her treating our past like this great tragedy, because we are not a fucking heavy metal song, we are not a Goddamn Oprah Book-of-the-Month story, and we’re not a made-for-TV-movie. We don’t have to be weak and afflicted like those people, like those songs and stories, and now her arms are around me and I can tell that I’m shaking and she’s rocking me just a little bit, just enough.

Something switches inside of me and my brain kicks out feedback and I’m smelling the dust embedded deep in the shag carpet in my bedroom, seeing the tiny droplets of blood that hung on the end of my eyelashes, hearing the sound of Dad snoring, passed out on the floor across the room, oblivious to what he has just done and already forgetting. I’m remembering the look on Mom’s face when she came into the room and saw that the claw of Dad’s hammer was buried in my skull.

What then? Doctor after doctor, surgical specialist, mental specialist, anger therapist, chemical dependency specialist, none of them explaining to me exactly how a Dad, a Buddy, can turn into Saturn and chomp down on his kid.

It’s all noise now, right? He made his choices. I’ve tried to make mine.

Sis is kind of crying now, holding on to me. Maybe she’s just shaking. She’s so full of anger; I think maybe she took mine into storage when I got too crazy to deal with it. Yeah, maybe I am a heavy metal song.

So I’m curled up, and she pulls the afghan off the futon and drapes it over me, and I push my fingers through the little holes in the fabric and I try to make a cocoon, and I fall asleep there, with her running her fingers through my hair, the smell of green apples floating between us.

AND WHEN I WAKE up the first thing I see is blue and red flashing across my sister’s plaster ceiling. I know she called them. Deep down I knew she would when I walked in the door. I’m not angry at her, she’s just big on consequences, closure, whatever.

I’ll go without conflict. They’ll take me in and they’ll call me a monster, and they won’t be all that wrong.

They’ll put me in the hospital. The staff will hear what I’ve done. They’ll sweat fear when they stand near me. I’ll try to prove to them that they’re wrong.

Maybe I’ll learn to control myself in there. I’ll have the time. I’ll practice. I’ll try to focus.

For myself. For my sister. She’ll visit. I know she will. Please.

There’s a knock at the door.

I hope they’ll let me take the afghan with me. It keeps away the cold.

I press her blanket to my face, inhaling deep with my eyes closed, so that my nose and throat and mind are filled with green apples, sweet to bursting and wonderful. Then I open my eyes, steady my hands, and unlock the front door.