“Farrow wait…” Adelora’s voice hung in the gallows of the night.
“Adelora in my pocket… the keys.”
“Stay still Farrow.” She fumbled a little before slipping the keys in and releasing the lock. The handcuffs clanged hitting a pile of trash bags and old furniture. Even with them gone, I could still feel the reinforced steel on my wrists.
“Which way?” Adelora lost her bearings. She spoke a little loud. Missy turned her head out of the shadows, staring me down in the grainy light of the Manhattan Bridge.
“Don’t say anything. All I ever hear are words.” Missy spit out orders as such on occasion, but for the first time - it felt like it may be the last. There was very little that could soothe us from the moment’s bleakness. She just kept running her mouth as people do when they finally lose all hope. “Well Farrow. You were warned. You said don’t worry something good will happen. Don’t be so serious. If we’re patient we’ll get some luck. You’re too fucking patient. I can’t believe this. How am I going to get my things out of there? Of course you don’t care because you own nothing. You can go anywhere at any time and that is why I was a complete idiot to think there was ever any future in you.” The officially stamped City of New York Marshall’s eviction notice helped distinguish what was dead from what was alive.
“At least we don’t have a kid. Nothing too serious.” Frustration. Anger. I shouldn’t have let it slip.
“I hate writers. I wish you all horrible deaths. Painful. Gruesome. Humbling. Deaths.” Missy turned her back on me and walked off. It was the last time I would see her until this very night. No way I was going to go after her. I learned restraint a second late. Enough harm was inflicted. I waited until I heard her heels hit the lobby steps before ripping the eviction notice off the door and taking a seat in the hallway. I flipped the page, pulled a pen from my pocket, and got started on filling the empty space.
Missy stopped underneath the Cherry Street tunnel that sliced a path below the Manhattan Bridge. She was waiting for me. I had to know what she would say after all this time. I needed to hold Chiara and help her understand that she would always be safe. I couldn’t wait any longer for the words she withheld. The closer I got to Missy, the more she looked and felt the same, as time had never changed. I didn’t even realize what I was doing… when I went into lock lips.
Missy’s wetness made perfect sense, but the blade of the scissors opening my neck was a bizarre sensation - A flash of desolation. The blade entered my skin. Smooth red velvet. I could taste my tongue frosting over. Pupils filled with snow. I couldn’t believe she did it. So this is how it felt. Shock shook me inside out. Cold cold world.
The world went blurry. I was on the ground looking up.
“Writer… Lava will turn us all into stone.” The words left her mouth like a phantom baby’s first words. It was the only thing Missy said to me in over a year.
Detective Anderson took aim. He was oblivious to the fact that Chiara was strapped to Missy’s back. I wasn’t convinced that I was still alive, but somehow I stood up again. Flap of skin dangling from my sliced neck. Blood emptying on the street like an open hydrant. Detective Anderson fired and I lurched into the bullet with my hand up like I was hailing a cab.
Empty streets. Two feet of snow under the streetlamps. Missy finally kissed me on the steps of her building. Covered head to toe in warmth. The front door slipped from her hands. I wasn’t sure where she was leading me. Either way I had no choice, but to go.
The blizzard hijacked the city. Buses stuck, wheels spinning in the middle of the street. Subways frozen underground indefinitely delayed.
“What do you say when you meet someone that changes the entire course of your life?”
D
EAD
AIR BELOW THE BYGONE
bridge, I was street level staring at the tires of the parked cars. Missy and Chiara were nowhere to be found. The gouged tunnel exposed her blue steel underbelly filling with carnival echoes. Distorted voices multiplied. The decipherable few were all too familiar.
“It’s a hundred-degree day and you’re shivering.”
“Does that hole in your throat make you cold Farrow?”
“I got some gashes in the past, but that beauty is unreal.”
“It’s time to give her up Farrow.”
“Don’t nod. Don’t say a word.”
“We inked your statement already.” Sgt. Bethany Powers chewed on her words. She seemed to be missing a couple of teeth from the car accident.
“All you need to do is sign Farrow.” Detective Anderson had a bandage around his head like a bandana. He placed the pen in my hand. It rolled out of my grasp onto the sidewalk.
“Missy… Missy… are you there?” At first, I could only hear my own voice.
“…Aksa jo zwyiecslizon…” I couldn’t make out what she was saying through the static.
“Missy…” I squinted down at her photo on the lcd cellphone screen.
“…faskl asdfil diljasfzi…” She was so close to being there: But just wasn’t.
Sgt. Powers’ hands around my throat brought me out of the shock. My blood was all over her green leather gloves. Her fingers dug into the wound, pressing the loose flaps of skin together. “I can’t give you any more of my time. I got spacecases, nihilists, and the working man trying to do each other in so they can all wake up and shop another day away.” She was talking crazy. I grabbed at her neck forgetting my left hand was half missing after Detective Anderson blew a hole in it. Unleashing a cruel chop, the redhead smacked my stump away, quickly pinning it down with a black boot heel. Agony surged through me. I grabbed at Sgt. Powers with my right hand, but only got a pointy tit. I squeezed as you would squeeze one of those stress balls. I could feel her nipple harden below her blouse. It relaxed me until she jammed an open hand into my teeth. My head jerk backed. The wound on my neck spread.
Pop! Detective Anderson cracked Sgt. Powers in the back of the head with his nightstick. The blow was so hard her face went blank a few seconds. Detective Anderson seemed to be still deciding if he should hit her again as she came to. Dazed, Sgt. Powers tried to hand Detective Anderson the pen, but he wouldn’t take it. Instead he motioned for her to give it to me personally. She pressed the tip of the pen in the center of my right palm until I was able to handle it. Detective Anderson pulled the statement out of his pocket and held it steady for me. The world was fading in and out. Breaths were hard to come by. Wheezes came easy.
“Don’t nod. Don’t say a word. Write it Farrow. Write it.”
T
HE
COPS LEFT ME ALONE
to die on the street. I couldn’t remember if I signed the statement or not. The pen was still in the gutter, which I guess could be a good sign. I tried speaking. Nothing came out. It was strange to have no voice. I held my hand up and stared through the hole in my palm. The top half of my body had lost most feeling. I could only move my legs. I kicked my legs up, bouncing my feet on the pavement as they passed. The tunnel was a chamber of sound.
I could hear footsteps and gossip blend together. A couple’s outline flashed down the sidewalk across the street. I could hear them cough and shuffle along. They were coming closer. I flopped wildly like a fish in the sand. Our eyes met. I pleaded for an ambulance. They looked away wishing their eyes were playing tricks on them. Wishing they were blind and belonged to a different world.
“Farrow will you stop leaving these fucking pages everywhere.” Missy rolled the vacuum over the pages I left on the floor.
“I’ll write them again. Next time they’ll be even better.” I was lying sideways. Exhausted after a long night’s voodoo possession. Watching the vacuum gag on the pages, should’ve made me sick, but instead brought me pleasure.
“You’re a demented child scribbling on everything you see. Look at me. Don’t you like women anymore? You used to want me. Now all you love are books. All you lust for. Sober up Farrow. You exist here. Streets aren’t paper. Skies aren’t computer screens. People’s hearts don’t beat to the rhythm of typewriters.”
Missy’s fingers stayed perfectly still as she held the needle under the plastic lighter’s blue flame. Gently, she pressed the tip of the needle against my skin. It fell below leading the thread to follow in loops. After a rapid barrage of stitches, her whole body tensed up theatrically, leaving the job half done.
Scanning the area, Missy gravitated towards the pen until it was in her hand. She placed it in her mouth, loosening the tip with her teeth. With a flick, she tossed the vial of ink in the street. Resting the empty pen on my chest Missy began feeling around below my wounded throat, stopping in the soft valley of skin below my Adam’s apple. She jabbed the scissors in, quickly throwing them to the side. Next she held it the empty pen up, carefully positioning herself. I was lost in the pen’s beauty.
Air returned into my lungs. As it spread blissfully through my body, I noticed Chiara still on Missy’s back. She didn’t seem bothered by the sight of me. Just the opposite she reached out towards me with a silly smile as Missy tied the remaining stitches to close the wound on my neck.
T
HE
RISING SUN BLED THROUGH
the two small windows of the ambulance. The stretcher and cabinets filled with medical supplies rattled bouncing its way through the bumpy streets.
“What do you make of that pen in his neck?” A thick woman spoke in a loud voice that could send a rabid bear back into the brush. Her tattooed partner shrugged jabbing me with a needle. “You’re feeling good now. Aren’t you?”
I tried to motion to them that the pen stuck in me was the only way I could breathe, but my body was completely paralyzed. Whatever they used to sedate me had the stopping power to freeze a lioness mid-growl. The garbage came on to me as a faux spiritual revelation. Some kind of pharmaceutical soft passage not worth knowing. My mind was stalling. The world that started spinning so fast, slowed down warping words. Whether they were meant directly for me or not - the words hung in the air. Naked skydivers sucked the wrong way from gravity… propelled towards far away planets… when they were only planning to come back home.
“Those stiches creep me out.”
The driver came around to swing the doors open. They hopped out of the back of the ambulance almost spilling me out on the curb. People stared, eyes widening and faces contorting as the paramedics rushed me into the hospital.
Observing for a second before pouncing, a triage nurse hung over me like a knockoff bag salesman on a Canal Street.
“What’s his deal?”
“Throat was slit. Lost a lot of blood. Need to bring him right in.” The freckled paramedic talked tough expecting resistance.
“Take him in.” The triage nurse left my stretcher heading back over to the door to bum-rush the next one. The sound of the gurney’s wheels spinning strangely put me at ease.
A rainbow of volcanic ash. The clear sky turns to smoke. A death died a thousand times. Alone on Baekdu mountain on the shores of Heaven lake: The picture perfect place to turn to stone.
A few more nurse and doctors types surrounded me. I could see up all their noses. Count the hairs in their nostrils. Feel the warmth of their hands. Tell you what they’d had for lunch. “He’s already stitched up?”
“Is this your Dr. Frankenstein work?”
“What kind of sedation is he under?”
“Looks like he’s barely there.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to jump off the pushcart and run away. I wanted my mind to shut off, but wouldn’t let it because maybe that would mean death. No body justifies paralysis. No mind equates shock. I started the simple exercises in my head. It wasn’t enough. If only I could remember how to apply chemistry to everyday life. The current moment of doubt called for a concise interpretation. Quantum physics would merge into the surroundings, united.
A musty draft travelled the emergency room. Orbs danced in my mindsight. A cacophony of curtains yanked open and shut. Patients peered out, flooding the room with fear and hopelessness, relieved when they were in better shape than their neighbor. There was moaning, but not the screams we were waiting for. I wanted to be the one to let loose, but my moment had yet to arrive. My throat felt unbearably sore like my entire head was trapped in the gap between the 3 train and the platform.
“I know you can’t talk back, but just try to relax.”
“What’s your take on it nurse?”
“Missed the carotid arteries and internal jugular. Luckiest guy in here all night. What’s with the stupor? Either he’s like that all the time or someone gave him too much Morphine or Fentanyl.
“Pupils aren’t constricted. Breathing is still rapid. It’s something else What happened to his hand?”
“Cop shot a chunk of it off.”
“Blood levels?”
“Amazingly under control.”
Another poor sucker gets wheeled in. He looks at me sympathetically like he knows me. I think I recognize him, but I recognize everyone now.
“Hey buddy what the hell are you doing here?” Brodie was bleeding from a head wound. Both his hands were bandaged at the knuckles. He was piss drunk.
“You know this man?” The nurse immediately cut in.
“I do. This guy saved my life. A lion tracked me and tried to do me in. Thanks to him I’m still ticking.”
“A lion? What’s his name?”
My body began jerking around with no control. Stitches threatening to burst. The air was inside me, but it wasn’t travelling right.
“He’s convulsing.”
“It’s shock.” A team rushed around me again.
“Pulse is weakening.”
“Close the window. Bugs are getting in.” It was the first beautiful day since winter killed everything alive and Missy was trying to shut us in.
“Go kill some mosquitoes then. That’s what you’re good at.”