Love Story

Stopped for a drink at Mr. Man’s house today, sat and swallowed my vodka in great gulps on his plaid couch stained and frayed with years of abuse, watched the old cracked plaster start to blur. He handed me seven blue pills. I swallowed two and put the rest in my pocket.
“For later,” I said.
He turned and put on a record, jazz. It was warped and so the music came out sounding how I felt. He sat down beside me, pulled out a mirror crisscrossed with scratches from under the couch and put it on the coffee table scarred with cigarette burns. He dumped a pile of cocaine in the middle of the mirror, took a razor blade from his wallet and cut out four lines. He pried a plastic pen out of the metal spiral of a red notebook, removed the ink cartridge and cut the tip of the barrel off with the razor. He snorted two lines, one up one nostril, the other up nostril number two, then held the decapitated pen out to me. I did one.
“Save the rest for later,” I said. “Don’t do this too often, you know.”
Mr. Man grinned, rubbed his chin and slouched back into the couch, which received him and enveloped him like a cloud.
We sat in silence listening to the warbling jazz. I watched Mr. Man’s knee twitch rhythmically. After about sixteen twitches, I did the other line and stood up. My throat was numb. “Gonna go for a ride,” I said. Mr. Man never goes anywhere. He is paler than me, bloodshot eyes, crooked teeth, long, thin legs and arms, kinda spider-like.
He grinned and leaned forward again, long dirty blonde hair dangling over the pile of cocaine, and cut out more lines.
“I may be back, I dunno. I wanna see where I go, you know how I like to do.”
Mr. Man’s head bobbed up and down.
I stepped outside into the stale summer heat and liquid flies dribbled like stars in protoplasmic globs. I shook my head and dug my keys out of my pocket.
“One, two, three,” I counted as I shuffled through them and opened the door. The inside of my car was a furnace already. Sweat trickled down my spine as I slid into the vinyl seat and shoved the key into the ignition. I rolled down the windows as I left his driveway, spraying gravel behind me, raising demons made of dust.
I decided to drive away from civilization, down the bland streets of suburbia, past the perfect houses and the dead dogs rotting in the afternoon sun, stomachs ripped open by children with serrated kitchen knives. They shook like epileptics, were smeared with animal blood, snot, tears and intestines. Tufts of fur blew in the streets, stuck to mounds of fecal matter, attached to hedges and piled in drifts against white picket fences. The children got up as I drove by. They had no eyes. They pointed at me with their knives.
Sycamores, oaks and elms swayed in a sudden breeze. Sunlight filtered through the branches. Birds streaked by and a yellow cat yowled. I realized the houses were gone. I’d been driving for some time, my mind blank. I popped one of the blue pills and turned down the first gravel road I found. There was yew and garlic and cypress. I heard dogs howling as insect sounds filled the air like sirens all around me, wavering and crystalline. The ebb and flow coincided with the movement of the trees as wind played through their upper branches. I stopped beside an open field, grasses extended far into the distance toward a looming cloud mass. Or maybe it was the city. I don’t know.
On the other side of the road was a wooded area approximately fifty yards out. I grabbed a bottle of vodka from under the seat, opened the door and slid to the ground. Here is a place, I thought, where you must remove your shoes. I kneeled down and picked up a handful of dirt, let it fall through my fingers, and decided I didn’t really want to take off my shoes. I stood back up, swaying like the trees and walked away from my car toward the woods. I was struggling to bust open the seal on the bottle when I tripped over a boy lying in the middle of the road. His head was caved in, bones stuck out all over his body. His left foot was attached by a piece of skin, or maybe it was his jeans. I mused on how I might think that this nearly unrecognizable pile of meat was a boy and not a girl, but I just knew. The seal cracked and the lid loosened. I unscrewed it and gulped down about three or four swallows. I wiped my mouth on my wrist and put the cap back on.
I bent over the carcass. He was wearing a watch and it was still working. The time was 2:08 p.m. I tucked the bottle in my back pocket and took the watch. Other than a little bit of blood on the face, which I scraped off with my thumbnail, it was perfect. I put it on and drank more vodka.
As I headed back toward my car I noticed another dead child on the hood, a girl, I think, and one stuck to my front bumper. Most of the bottom half of it was gone and I was not able to ascertain the sex of this former individual. I was starting to feel really weird. I couldn’t feel much of my body and my hands were beginning to glow. I was sweating pretty hard. I suppose I was dehydrated from all the alcohol and heat, but there was nothing I could do about that. I touched my forehead with my glowing fingertips and for the life of me, felt like I was touching a completely different human being.
I glanced up the road from the direction I had come and saw a bit of a dark spot right after a low hill. I wanted to see what it was. Probably only a half a mile away, I thought. I took three great big swallows of the vodka and decided I probably didn’t need much more of that, so threw the bottle to the side where it busted open. Glistening liquid spilled out in subtle fuzzy rainbows on the dusty yellow grass.
I stumbled up the road, weaving, trying to avoid the larger pieces of gravel. I saw a lot grasshoppers and crickets. When they jumped they looked like rockets and I saw them in many places at once. I walked over to the side of the road, picked some daisies and put one behind each ear. Silver mosquitoes came buzzing out of the severed stems and stopped in midair, suspended animation. I watched them try to escape. I could see the struggle in their eyes. It was almost human. My whole body was numb. Maybe even dead, I thought as I found myself down on my knees.
I struggled up and wiped the dust from my corduroys. There was a tear in the knee that I couldn’t remember being there before. Blood dripped from it. There was a rock imbedded in my knee. It was in pretty deep. I used a stick to dig it out then tossed the stick into the ditch. As I stood I saw that there was black clotted blood in the ditch. Whirlwinds of flies covered it, licking it, laying eggs. I was at the dark spot.
I looked up. The dark spot was a massive pile of children twisted and rent. I looked higher. The top of the pile nearly touched the clouds that were drifting in. I walked around it wondering how I had not noticed it before and saw where I had hit it on the side, a glancing blow. There was a trail of viscera.
I shrugged and ate another blue pill. What could I do? I walked back to my car and shoved the body off of my hood, then started kicking at the one on my bumper. It wouldn’t come off so easily. I had to kick at it an awful lot before it detached. It was pretty messy.
I got back in my car wishing I hadn’t thrown out that vodka and counted my keys, “One, two, three,” jammed them into the ignition, started the car and sped off in a cloud of dust. I drove carefully around the child mound and ate another blue pill. The watch on my wrist said 2:41 p.m.
The road blurred and became one with the sky. I liked the sky. I found its particular shade of blue soothing and limitless. The encroaching clouds seemed friendly and curious like dogs or monkeys, white like new teeth or milk. Birds flew by upside down waving at the invisible stars and shit through a crack God was peering through, right on his eye. Fitting, I thought. I saw the white lashes bat and a great gray hand filled with intestines wipe away the shit. He dipped his hand down, picked up something moving, squirming, struggling, squeezed the blood out of it and into his palm and anointed his brow. The corpse fell from the sky.
I pulled out onto the blacktop road once again that crossed the plain and veered left over the center line then back to the right, fishtailing. In the distance I saw a figure walking along the side of the road, or rather, limping. As I got closer he turned and stuck out his thumb so I slowed down and stopped beside him. As he opened the door I noticed there was something strange about his face. The left side was old and worn, full of crags, gullies and gulches. His rheumy eye couldn’t seem to focus on me, or anything. It kept roaming off left and right, never resting. The right side of his face was smooth and young, and I would have to say, even beautiful. It kept shifting though; I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. That eye was crystal clear, seemed to shoot into me. I could feel it inside me. He sat in the seat and put his hands on his knees. They were the same way: Left one old, swollen knuckles, claw like and arthritic. The right was young and maybe even dainty. Sometimes the nails seemed long and painted a pale blue, other times, well, more like a man’s. It was real hard to see and I got self-conscious from staring, so I put the car in gear and drove off. Soon though, I couldn’t help myself, I had to ask.
“This might seem too personal, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t wanna, but I was wonderin’ why your hands and face are like that.” I glanced over at him. He stared straight ahead, the old eyeball oscillating away of its own accord. “Like I said, you don’t have to answer if it’s too personal.”
He turned his head and looked at me, the young androgynous side of his face smiled a bit. He said, “I’m God.”
“That a fact?” I said and tried not to laugh. He just turned his head back and watched the road. “I just seen God, and you don’t look like God.”
“The man in the sky? Back there?”
I nodded. My mouth was real dry and I was having a hard time telling which way the road was going. It looked like a about a hundred different roads at once. Some of them went up so I discounted those straight away.
“That’s God too.”
“Too,” I repeated.
Driving through the plains in late summer is completely different than at any other time of the year. Usually, in winter and into early summer the grasses are pretty short and you can see for a good distance off. This time of the year they’re real tall and when you have your windows rolled down the sound of your car bounces off them and creates a swirling roar inside. I was listening to that, making it change frequency by pressing and depressing the accelerator all the way to the floor and back. My head bobbed back and forth. I couldn’t help it. There was no part of my body in communication with my brain. Sudden sun shafts kept making my hands invisible.
“What do you think is the most important thing in the universe?” He asked me.
I stopped looking at my hands and glanced over at him. His faces were a blur. “Shit, I dunno, love?”
He snorted. “Love,” and laughed.
“Well, shit man, I told you I dunno. What is it?”
He touched his old face with his young hand and said, “Destruction.”
“Destruction?”
“How else can everything start anew?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know. We kept driving for a while. He didn’t seem to want to talk anymore so I kept quiet. There were times when I didn’t know where I was and I had to think real hard. Other times I was distracted by the brilliance of my hands. There were more clouds now. I could see them over the tips of the tall grasses. Maybe there would be storm, I thought. I looked over at him. His young hand was caressing the gnarled knuckles of his old hand.
“So where you goin’?” I said. “I mean, where you want me to take you?”
“I don’t know. No place. I just like riding, you know?”
I nodded and licked my lips. They tasted bitter. Once again I regretted throwing out that bottle.
“Oh, this headache,” He said and put his young palm against his forehead.
“You want,” I start to dig in my pocket.
“A blue pill? No. They don’t work on me.”
“Oh.”
His old hand started shaking. He held it down with his young hand, and then petted it like a dog.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just,” He stopped, staring at my wrist. “That’s a nice watch. Can I have it?”
“Thanks, uh, no, it ain’t mine.” I rubbed the face with my thumb. It said 3:46 p.m.
“Ah, too bad.” He sighed. “You can let me off here.”
“There ain’t nothin’ here.” I said as I pulled over.
“Wasn’t anything back there either,” he replied and opened the door. He grasped the top of the car with his young hand and hauled the decrepit half of his body out, shut the door and leaned on the window. The young face smiled. The old one was starting to drool. The young face said, “Many blessings to you, friend,” while the old face made rude noises. He turned and limped off back the way we had come, laughing. I could hear the old man’s ragged cacophonous laugh together with the high musical laughter of the young androgyne. I ate the last two pills, pressed the accelerator and decided to head back to Mr. Man’s house.

A shudder. A shake. A final vibration and a coughing sputter. I got out of my car and drifted through Mr. Man’s door. It was always open to me. He was still sitting there nearly swallowed by the plaid couch, knee jerking up and down to another record, something classical, pianos and bassoons. It too was warped.
“Never guess what I found, Man.” I sat down beside him and took the watch off. “Something for you. A gift.” I swallowed. “For your friendship.”
He grinned. “Thanks,” he croaked. Mr. Man rarely talked.
“It’s a great watch,” I said. “Real tough.”
He bobbed his head up and down as he clasped it to his wrist.
I swallowed. “You got anything to drink?”