I wake up like instant ramen. I sit up and reach under the pillow for my gun. I pause with my hand stretched in a fist full of paper and scan the darkness and get hit with a rush of blood filled with stars, planets, and moons; the darkness that glimmers with colors from imperfect blackness and rainbows exploding through infinite nights.
My life is just a strange fiction. That feeling of painting the ceiling with my eyes. She knows who I am. Let consciousness come slowly. Air-freshener sprayed by retired vid-girls as they cart dirty bedsheets down the hall. The elevator hums Guantanamera as thoughts begin to take shape like light on a descent to the first floor.
There’s the scent in the air that’s not oranges. The birds don’t chirp. There are no winged creatures in this time. None that can be felt beyond the imagined sensation of wind as you fingers drift through the light that gleams between their false feathers as they come from the heights to drink from imaginary pools and then alight back onto the branches of the ghostly flickering trees.
Someone’s got to fix the streets. It used to feel perfect like eternity on some beautiful day, the most beautiful day in the world. That’s when she…
Anyway my pipe shoots a hiss of vapor. Mint cherries. Spark the blue flame. I’m empty. Listen again. Do you hear that? Yes, the sounds of birds.
Strange fiction.
Today’s mission. Find the little girl’s digits. No illusions about where the rest of her is. The parents just want as much of her together when they lower her into the digital sand. Sands of time. Where she’ll live on in the Hall of Memories like the rest of the ghosts. Far too young. No mystery who did it. Same calling card every time. Her eyes were gone. She’d looked into his, or hers, or its. No one knows. The mirrored reflection of your own eyes looking back you is the last thing you see. None of the dead speak. Only one person saw him or her or it and saw the flash of one orbital, a ball of light, mirrored, the neon broken prism, and then when ran to catch up with the killer, found the girl’s eyes missing, her digits gone. Officer Magillacutty, I think his name was.
I don’t have access to the official records anymore. Not allowed on government grounds. No badge to speak of. Just a splashy ad in the corner of an infinite wasteland. Who knows how they found me? I did a job here and there, missing kids, missing wives, missing dogs. Never a murder. They heard I was the best, those two sorry and broken-looking parents. I wasn’t going to correct them. I’d been eating the scent of not oranges for longer than I care to admit. Crusts of blue bread would be a feast for me. I barely survive on wind.
Forever Amen. A choir sings Ray Charles and Billie Holiday at the metro station. Looking for a point here and there just to play the games. Fat capsules make them look half-fed. Their eyes don’t lie. No one looks anyway.
Travel deeper into this world. This beauty. I’m interrupted by KC. Stupid thing won’t shut up. Never lets me do my work.
KC: You have no idea, do you? See? What would you do without me? If you ask me nicely, I’ll send you the scans.
Peach carpet, soft, a little wormy, like little time-holes, if only you could get small enough and crawl through. The desk. An old writer’s desk. Dark-stained wood. Too small to sit at for long comfortably. The stationery was stolen from a better hotel. Never used except for quick math, secret codes, places to go meet and pick up “the package”.
The mirror. Always was afraid of mirrors in public. Getting your haircut was one of the first things you did when you got here, to L.A. You believed somehow it would be much better than a little barbershop out there on avenues in Jersey. The little swirly thing that tells you to come in and get a lollipop if you qualify, flip through old sticky magazines if you don’t. Smell like talcum powder. The good stuff. Makes you feel like a man after you slap it on your face and walk out smelling like a funeral.
A new look for a new life, can’t even recognize who I am anymore. That’s how it starts. The girl who cut my hair was a sexy brunette in leopard spandex and heels. I got her into conversation, trying to get a date in the space. She could choose the location. She could choose the animal avatars for all I cared. These days, snail sex was all the rage. Rhythmic, haunting, slow.
Of course, it wasn’t really L.A. Even that was a spot we’d set up, just to have a sense that there was a stage behind the stage, so to speak. A sense that a dream still mattered, even if it was phony. It realer than anything out there, beyond the Ism. We all knew that. Everyone knows that. But to remember the time before this one is almost criminal. It hurts too much to think it was ever true.