So, this is how it happened—the first time I realized that when you’re out in the world, you’re never really alone for long. Sooner or later, there’ll be at least one pair of eyes on you. Sometimes, the beast won’t be hungry; maybe it had just eaten or come off sex or something else that might make it pass you by. When it was hungry, though, I got to where I could sense it, like an animal that hasn’t entirely lost its survival instincts.

You might call it a gut feeling, but not me. My spine tells me.

Everything changed for me too after Dollar Man. I can’t really remember exactly why. The details, except for his actual appearance that day, stayed fuzzy even after we’d written it out together as a story, stored it in the boxes with the others.

EXT. A street somewhere on the outskirts of Westchester, New York. June 1978.

A girl walks to the bus stop after a movie. She’s distracted, daydreaming, looking down at the cracks in the pavement. “Riders on the Storm” by Jim Morrison plays in the background.

Camera slowly pans out over area, until all the people appear small, insignificant in relation to the hunting ground. Camera pans in again, so that only the girl is in the frame.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

The sun is just sinking when Dollar Man seems to materialize out of thin air. He is parked at the curb in an early model, beat-up car, the color of sludge. My stepfather’s sickness is familiar to me, as it was even before then. I believe I am inured to it, that it has become background noise to anything else that’s going on around me.

Camera pans out again and follows the girl who, it is now clear, is the narrator, as she sits on a bench at the bus stop.

NARRATOR (V.O.) (CON’T)

My sister, of course, could never accept this — that I remained in that house, with Dick and Bianca, and she has worked on me tirelessly to get me to see it her way.

“That’s why crazy parents get away with so much for so long,” she insists. “The kids are scared to tell, afraid to lose what they have, get stuck with something even worse. It’s the devils you know.”

I tell her that I know all this, but that it’s not time yet.

“Besides, how often are we even there?”

Dollar Man is different though, an apparition that I conjure from a future that is already upon me, or, as I come to understand, one that existed forever, stretching into the black abysm of time, that curled itself around that future like a boa constrictor consuming its own tail.

Camera shifts to a view of apartments lining the street, stops at one of the lower windows in the development.

NARRATOR (V.O.) (CON’T)

I am preoccupied, thinking of the movie, wondering if the bus will be on time. I look at the run-down and sinking apartments that line the sidewalk, an alien world compared to where I’ve grown up. I imagine what might go on behind the dirty windows, a dull misery that plays out in the rooms of these sectioned warrens. They simmer over a low flame until, one day, one evening, in one of them, the lid blows off.

Once, on another walk, I thought I saw a girl, pale and still as a mannequin, staring out at me from one of those windows, before she quickly turned away. They’re all the same, I think, whether the lawns are manicured or weed-choked. Then, beyond them, the streets — litter-strewn or carefully swept. Nobody would think too much about what might be in the weeds around the lakes where power boats speed by summer picnics. You had to make a living, no matter what, to buy the fixings for those sunny memories. Without money you are nothing — less than nothing. You may not even be fit for consumption; they’re glutted on the pickings, sated yet still ravenous. Wrap it up, maybe I’ll be hungry later. That must have been what Dick and Bianca decided, way back, before they became vampires. You can never get enough. The trough still overflows here. Keep eating.

Camera focuses in for a choker shot of the girl.

NARRATOR (V.O.) (CON’T)

I am looking down as I approach a parked car, but something makes me look up, that signal, an alarm going off in my back, like those old school fire drills. I take him in all at once, sitting there in his car, still as a waxwork and holding something above the steering wheel, between a skeletal thumb and forefinger.

It is a silver dollar. I can tell by the size of it as the dying sun bounces off it. He rotates it slowly — in a small arc. He is otherwise frozen, another mannequin, a body in a morgue sitting upright. The signal says, “Heads up, dummy!” The hairs stand up on my arms, the back of my neck. I feel a shiver, even though it is quite warm, and still.

The seated dummy is the color of ash, and the sun reflects off his glasses as well, so he looks like somebody in a Little Orphan Annie cartoon — the one where Annie is never seen again.

It’s hypnotic the way he manipulates the coin, the way it flashes in counterpoint to the opaque whiteness of his glasses. He is smiling — the silver plate on a coffin… Then, standing there, glued to the sidewalk, I get this flash, like, if I don’t run, and fast, I’ll never be seen alive again. And who would miss me besides my sister, my horse, and his cat?

Camera pans out again to the surrounding, as-yet-undeveloped landscape.

NARRATOR (V.O.) (CON’T)

Until one day… somebody — a bird watcher maybe, a kid playing hide-and-seek — stumbles over something soft in the woods, something giving way underfoot. Or they smell something so indescribably awful, they’ll never be able to wipe it from the slate of memory or describe it. And they run, almost stumbling in their panic to flee whatever lay there, obscured by debris and vegetation, what might be about to swim into their vision.

If it does, they will see her splayed and propped in lurid display, her mouth twisted in final agony or slightly rounded, like a child’s about to mouth its first word… ma… ma…

I wouldn’t have been able to describe it then, but almost a decade later, I see I must have known that you had only a moment — maybe less than that — and that it must have always been this way. That to pretend it wasn’t would make you disappear, like a small star that had been sucked into the event horizon. Dick and Bianca’s event horizon. It can’t get enough of you… you Nordic goddess, you backwoods beauty queen, you unlucky boulevard runaway fresh off the bus.

Whatever future, unreeling behind your back, would be snapped up, crunched down, its light extinguished.

Before I start to rot, he’s long gone in his stained, litter-strewn shit wagon, maybe with me in the trunk. He guns the engine, drives down the road with one pale arm stuck out the window, sitting in a vinyl seat that smells of his ass, his grinning pocky face. Maybe he just leaves me where he sliced or choked me, revisits me later to fuck death. Yeah, I came back, put lipstick on her, propped her up against a tree. I was so hard… harder even than when I saw my mother with the guy she brought home and took him in… all the way in, until she gagged and he laughed.

Even if you could somehow exterminate them all, a new crop would be gestating in their proud, celebrating mothers, or spring up from where they lay dead — spore brought in by an alien mothership.

You’d need to get them before they were ever born. All of them — the Dicks and the Biancas. Every last one of them.

Camera follows the girl, close up, like a predator about to pounce.

NARRATOR (V.O.) (CON’T)

I run then, as if he might drop down on me like a hawk on a mouse. I run until I get to the next bus stop, crouch down until I get my breath.

Fade to black.

END scene.

Internal dialog in this one, even if some directors hate that. When you write your own scene, you can bend the rules as much as you want. I like to let one scene bleed into another. Don’t let the audience catch its breath. That’s the way to hook them.

Khalika stayed away for a long time after we wrote it out. Then came the asshole’s failed attempt to get a shrink to adjust her attitude. And after that, she more or less cleared out for real; the events having seriously fucked with her equilibrium. As for me, I, as usual, just filed it all away somewhere, out of sight, out of reach. On the rare occasions she did appear, she’d tell me she’d been crashing with friends. At fourteen or so, she started fencing stolen goods, dealing pot, other stuff. She said not to worry—she knew what she was doing. Khalika of the icy stare, of the iron-rod spine.

Most people don’t think too much about what’s out there. They shove it into the dank basement in their heads until the day it pops up like a jack-in-the-box they accidentally trip over and activate. The thing is, there’s a gazillion replicas of Dollar Man out there—the twisted fucker in his pit-stained polyester shirt, holding up the shiny thing—a cop’s badge, a puppy, a kitten, a sob story of good lovin’ gone bad. There’s a million Dicks and Biancas out there too—planning, plotting, screaming, fighting over credit cards or who to fuck, or fuck over, next.

Fast forward a few years and there’s more and more of them—grinning at you from across the room, the subway aisle, the factory, the conference table. They’re leaning against a tree outside the school yard, watching you from behind a bush as you bend to collect a rock, a coin. He’s behind you at the theatre, a rock concert, an upscale bar, backstage at the Metropolitan. They’re the Dicks, grinning at you across a huge teak desk, imagining what’s going to be done to you. They find you stuffed in a heating duct, most of the bones in your lower extremities shattered.

Whatever. The floodgates have opened now—props to cars. And you thought they only fucked up the air? Anybody can buy one on the installment plan with zero down. You get a steady diet of it on the news, so it’s just background noise, like the open-air porn bins on Broadway, like what Dick and Bianca were up to in JeanLuc and Oceane’s former home—a masterpiece out of Architectural Digest tainted by their filth and, now, infected molecules of their remains.

It’s just the way it is now, like it always was, I suppose—but so much easier, even for the really stupid ones. It’s up there in your face, in your shit. Hey, if you can’t get over it, let it seep into your day-to-day, like pus through a bandage, then put in a transfer to a better planet—one with a God that doesn’t come down and fuck married virgins, then nail up the result. One where everything doesn’t eat everything in its path.

Khalika says let them pay for their own goddamned sins, in the fucking here and now. Let them bleed. Bleed out on Highway 61.