The Egotist Page 7

  “D’you get in a fight?” he says lightly.

  “Yeah, I suppose I did,” I respond quietly.

  “You look bad.”

  “Yeah?” I say, my voice rising as I look up at him, blood and tears running down my face and neck. A small smile creeps onto my face. “Well, you should see her.”

  He looks shocked for a moment then begins to laugh. I join him and in a few moments we’re both busting out, hysterical, my face burning from the effort.

  It’s the closest moment I’ll ever share with anyone.

  Sister of Destiny

  “I’ve got one more thing to say!” I scream, watching her walk away across the darkened street.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she says over her shoulder, and I shudder to think of how much anguish I’ve instilled in her.

  It had been over three years since we’d first seen each other, and the last time we had met I was the one who ended up running away. Then a few nights ago I wake up in the darkness of my bedroom, and I realize that I had been dreaming about her - dreaming about the time I had seen her at the coffee shop by my old apartment.

  She had been so beautiful, she had struck me like thunder. I had fallen in love with her that day. Thoughts of incest can do a lot to a person’s psyche. She was my sister, yes. But what kind of sister is it if you don’t know her? If you never knew her? My mother had screwed me over not once, but twice. Who is this person? Who will tell me I can’t have her, can’t want her or love her? I don’t know anything about family when it comes to women. I don’t know how I am supposed to act, or think. I only know what I feel. The struggle continues in my mind, but my body has taken over temporarily.

  I decided right there and then to go seek her out, to find her, and to let our fates intermingle in any way they might see fit. I was willing to leave it up to the spirits, allow the warm winds to intertwine our souls in some galactic spiral of destinies, concocting a final resting place for our twisted, deplorable hearts.

  And I have found her. Locating her address easily in the Yellow Pages, I simply staked out her home until she appeared. When she finally emerged, she did not look very different than she had that when I first met her. She was older of course, more than three years older. Her hair had grown out, but she hadn’t dyed it or any bullshit like that. She just looked a little older - no more, no less.

  The main difference was in the way she dressed. She had ditched the boyish garb she had worn that day at the coffee shop, and looked daring in a short black dress and black leather jacket. Not slutty, I thought, but classy and sharp. She was an exquisite creature, and I was glad to be there.

  I got out of the car when I saw her.

  “Need a ride?” I said.

  She looked at me for a moment, shock and anger flashing in her eyes.

  “That is if you don’t mind riding in an uninsured vehicle,” I said jokingly, trying to soften her up.

  She didn’t say a word, or, at least, not one I could clearly hear. I think she may have mouthed something that might’ve been a cuss, I don’t know for sure.

  I begin yelling at her as she walks away.

  Running, I catch up to her, grabbing her elbow forcefully.

  “Stop it!” she screams at me, her eyes fire.

  “Please,“ I beg, “don’t kill me.”

  “Kill you? Are you mad?”

  “Beth, please, just stop for a second.”

  She pauses and looks at me, her face softening just the slightest bit. She looks a little sad, and I feel the emotions stirred from my night of dreaming rising up once again.

  “What could you possibly want?” she says in a quiet sneer, and I notice her eyes beginning to well up with tears.

  Overcome, I bring her to me and hold her. I cannot let go, and I feel energy rage through me. I feel a need to kiss her, like I have so many other women in my life, and my mind screams in shame. But I don’t know this person, I argue. I didn’t grow up with her! Who knows if she really is my sister? Am I going to let a beauty like her slip away because of some hypothetical technicality?

  “Who are you?” I whisper.

  I release her and she says nothing, just looks at me innocently, her appearance that of a very young girl - vulnerable, seeking. Tears stream down her face. There’s a warm gust of wind, light rain begins to fall around us. Seeing her like this, I know I can’t have her. Looking into her eyes is like looking into my own. I realize now that we are linked, that there is more than words to lineage. I see her as a statue turned to stone, inaccessible, impossible to love. I wish to make her a statue, to keep her like she is tonight. With me . . . nowhere else. I feel fire in my fingertips as they dig into her skin and I wish to be Midas. The power of timelessness soars through me.

  “I don’t ever want to see you again,” I say, and my heart feels as if it’s tearing in two as my spell is cast.

  Her eyes widen for a moment before taking on a squinting look of loss. She puts her face into her hands and cries, and it’s all I can do to stand there and watch her disintegrate before me.

  The celestial circle of our beings breaks apart into dust, and all hell and heaven come down around us.

  BOOK SIX

  PARANOIA

  The Humungous

  Close the door behind you! They’re all trying to get in! Everyone wants a piece of me - it’s ridiculous. I’m a celebrity, for God’s sake! My mind is on the cutting board like a platter of hors d'oeuvres for rich people to pick at and chew. Follow my frontal lobe down with some champagne, why don’t you? Would you like some cheese to spread onto that piece of my face you’ve been gobbling all night? You swine!

  You’re all the same, you’re all part of one giant club-going, tongue-piercing, sex-craving, neon-buzzing, bump-and-grinding, sun-bathing, makeup-wearing, hairy, million-legged, multi-tentacled monster! You slobber and drool and spit and step in your own excrement and laugh and groan and scratch and sniff and lick, touching and smelling parts of yourself as if your own body were a buffet.

  And here you are, in my apartment, crawling through my head, feasting on my brain. I can feel the tickling at the back of my eyes and at the bottoms of my ears telling me you’re in there, gnawing and tearing, nibbling and tasting, rubbing, caressing, kneading my brain. The delicately layered tissue is your Camelot, your pink Brady Bunch home with all the kids and Alice. but you’re all part of the same monster, the same beast. You bastards! How dare you come here? I don’t want to be you! I don’t want anything to do with you! Let me be, damn you.

  Can’t you see I don’t want to work in your stores, don’t want to sell you things or offer you advice or pick up your laundry or drive in your cars or sleep with your women? I don’t want to live in the hills with the beastly outcasts from your body, for I am not an outcast, I am an individual! I am my own body, my own mind.

  I feel closer to the animals than I do to this fleshy machine. Happily would I go through life grazing through the tall trees with the other giraffe, or sorting through the miscellaneous acorns with my fellow pesky squirrels. Lovingly would I lick my tiger cubs, bathing in the hot African sun in some cave, waiting for my next lay so I could pump out more of these lovable creatures! They bring me such joy!

  See? Let me be an animal, just don’t lick my back with your giant, greasy tongue and stick me like some living Post-It note to your butt, hip, or stomach where I will be forced to spend the rest of my days scratching at your hideous, coarse skin while the community sweat rolls over me like a sap shower, a bloody waterfall, a glue bath that brings me closer and closer to being one with the giant being, my mind being sucked from me into the thing that walks on its million legs, spitting up great bile and rubbing at its crotch, festering up bacteria that was once sharp minds and vivid souls; wiping off jam that was once young children, vibrant with imagination and ingenuity.

  Oh God, my future is sealed! I can see clearly the beast of society, the Humungous, myself stuck to its side as it walks off into the hazy, polluted sunset. I can s
ee it searching for more victims, craving more fresh ideas to consume and digest, leaving only giant, useless piles in its wake. When the sun goes down, glowing silver creatures come out of the earth and digest the piles, using the nutrients and vitamins to do what they can to rejuvenate the dying planet, its atmosphere and its animals.

  I wish one day to be a slinky, silver creature. I would rest during the day, hiding with the other angelic beings - wiser than all organisms - from the Humungous that walked along the surface. Sleeping while it spewed, thinking while it sat, and loving the innocent creatures while it terrorized, destroyed, and depleted all the originality and beauty of the world I had grown to love so viciously.

  Then, at night, while the Humungous plays with itself in some dark corner of its domain, my friends and I would breach the surface, find the excrement and use it for good. It is a tough job, but we are all that are left of the creatures that were placed here in the beginning, before time allowed the Humungous to become all-powerful, a ravaging entity of utter destruction.

  But here, here in my room, at night, I think of the tickling in my brain, and I fear that my time is near. I don’t know how many days are left of my freedom, and with a cautionary glance out the window, I sense the Humungous is near. Therefore, I must write with the greatest speed because I know that at any moment, my next word could be my last.

  Lemus the Free

  I come home to my apartment one evening after a full night of carousing the streets in the hood near my crib.

  It’s pretty late, and I’m pretty tired. I and flip on the lights, turn into the hallway, enter the room and scream.

  Not a big, brawling scream, mind you. It’s more like a yelp - an announcement of surprise. For there, on my couch, with my last beer in one hand and my Chinese dragon figurine in the other, is good old Donnie Lemus. The jailbird, the racketeer, the swindler, the desperado. It is all so mysterious and fun - I have no idea why I’m frightened.

  I suppose there are many reasons: one could be that he has broken into my apartment to sit waiting for me, in the dark, to come home. Another could be that he looks very different from the Donnie Lemus I knew. It’s been more than three years since he had been sent away - he’s bigger, and I figure he’s probably done a lot of working out or something while in the joint. Another difference is that he looks like he hasn’t shaved in a few months - or visited a barber for that matter - and his hair has given him a raw, beastly edge. He dumped his glasses along the way, and now his eyes are very clear, as are the hollow circles beneath them. Does he look crazy? Maybe. Does he look pissed? It’s possible. Does he have a weapon? Who knows.

  I decide to leap in and take it like a man, and I move into the room to sit in a chair across from him.

  “Hello, Donnie,” I say casually, not wanting to show my concern.

  “Hello, W,” he replies even more casually, his voice not matching up with his jagged exterior or extremely intense posturing. He puts the Chinese dragon figurine down on the coffee table and rests his elbows on his knees. His clothes are ragged and don’t fit well. Quickly, I put together that he’s wearing what he most likely had on when he went to prison, and the coordination is no longer there. Not only in size, but in contrast. The cotton-checkered shirt and Dickies pants were very much the Lemus of old, but here, on the Lemus of new, they look very much like a Christmas sweater on a Great Dane. Comical, odd, and slightly disturbing.

  “Is that the last beer?” I ask.

  “Yep.”

  “Hmmm . . . how did you get in? Did you learn how to pick locks in jail?” I joke easily, trying to maintain the upper hand as I had in the old days with Lemus, before he got sent away for multiple counts of fraud, theft, phony money-producing schemes and swindling.

  The devil’s workshop in this case was a phony organization called the PLV (Peace, Liberty, and Virtue) that he thought would be a get-rich that turned quickly into a get-arrested, get-put away, get-screwed (at least that’s what I hear), get-old, and get-out. Sure, I had made a nice pile of dough off the funny, but it hadn’t been my idea, and I had only assisted as any good friend would have. Hell, I even got the kid a lawyer! What did he have to be mad at me for? Or maybe I was jumping to conclusions, or at least I hoped.

  Lemus doesn’t laugh at my joke, and he doesn’t really look amused. I know why when he responds.

  “Yep,” he says absently, not even seeming interested.

  “I see, didn’t want to call first? Well, that’s okay, we’re old friends. To be honest, I’m surprised you found me. I’ve moved, you know.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Yeah, I guess you have.” I don’t know what to say to the guy. He is acting like a real zombie and it’s beginning to creep me out. Maybe he needs money. I wish half-heartedly that I had some to offer him, even if were just to get him out of my hair.

  Without warning, he suddenly stands and walks to the other side of the room. He’s taller than I remember, not as tall as I am, but up there. It has been three years, and at his age those are growing years. That line of thinking gives me an angle.

  “You look good, Lemus. Look big.”

  He sort of smiles at that, and, in some ways, it’s like looking at old Lemus again. I feel some tension leave the room.

  “Yeah, well I didn’t have much to do except work out in prison. And no, I didn’t get raped, just to ease your rapt need to know such a thing.”

  “It never entered my mind,” I lie, surprised but believing him. “I’m just glad you’re out and back on your feet.”

  “I wouldn’t say I was back on my feet, so to speak, but yes, I am out.” He looks down at his bottle of beer, seeming flustered within his thoughts. “That’s kind of why I’m here.”

  He’s suddenly awkward, and I wonder what created the transition. Possibly just speaking with me again was enough to let him remember who he was, who he used to be. I never visited Lemus in prison - never really thought about it, to be honest. In retrospect, I guess I should have, but it never entered my mind until just this moment, with him standing here in front of me.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, getting braced for the big money question.

  “Well, I need someplace to stay for awhile, until I can get a job. My parole officer is supposed to help me, and I’ve got some money that I made making stuff in jail. Not much, but I can cover my own groceries, ya know?” He pauses, then looks up at me. “What do you think?”

  I look at my beleaguered friend, and compassion stabs my heart. What kind of person am I? I sit here in fear of one of my oldest chums, who, in a fit of inspiration, comes down on the wrong side of the legal fence, and all I can think about is getting him to leave me alone. I feel ashamed of myself and I decide to set things right.

  “Sure Lemus, of course. You’ll have to sleep on the couch . . .”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” he says excitedly, a burden suddenly seeming to lift off him. “I don’t mind at all. Thanks a ton, W.”

  I feel pride swell up in and float over me like a fat halo, and I can’t help but think of what a good specimen I really am. A real top-notch anchor, settling the stray ship on the stormy sea to a rock-solid foundation, alleviating the need for worry or concern. And then, when the time is right, I lift my hooks from the stability of the earth and allow my shining vessel to float freely once more, with a renewed sense of hope and being. I eye the ship before me, already debating when to let it set sail again.

  “Don’t worry, Lemus, I’m here for you. Who knows, maybe they’ll even hire you back at that bookstore,” I suggest.

  “Maybe, but I have some other ideas.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “For one, I’m thinking about finishing up a book I’ve been writing, one I started while in prison. Maybe trying to sell it or something, you know?”

  I look at him devilishly. I had never seen Lemus write a word, much less a book. This should be quite the thing, I think, living with an ex-con author. I wonder what John Liggins would think of old Lemus, and I
begin to ponder bringing the two of them together.

  “Okay, Lemus, sounds good. You finish your book, we’ll spend all your money on groceries for the next month or so, I’ll steal what I can, and we’ll make a go at it.”

  “Okay,” he agrees. “What is it you do now, anyway?”

  “I’m a stockboy, of course.”

  “Oh. See if you can score me some of them Cigarillos.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I fashion myself into a serene state of mind while Lemus talks of other things. Suddenly, I feel very much like I’m in a sitcom, and that the studio audience is dreadfully, horribly bored.

  Delusion of Grandeur

  I dream that I’m at my place of employment - the grocery store - and I’m stocking the shelves in the vegetable aisle. I’m stacking canned carrots, canned peas, canned green beans, canned corn and canned creamed corn, canned asparagus tips, and canned mushrooms.

  Suddenly, from the front of the store, there’s an explosion of such intensity that it lifts me off of my feet, hurling me into the neatly stacked cans. Getting up, I dust myself off and walk toward the front of the store. Smoke is billowing like a furnace and the registers are lost in a haze. I see bodies strewn over the counters, the price checkers glued to their dead hands. I see Jim, the manager - or, at least, I see parts of him. Receiving the brunt of the attack, he’s been blown into bits across the glossy white floor, now glittering with a fresh coat of broken glass.

  Before I can react, the cause of the destruction steps through the broken wall that faces the parking lot. It’s an immense thing that comes through the rubble; it’s wearing goggles and a strange breathing apparatus. Behind it are two smaller punks, and they’ve all got big shiny guns. They’re green and horned all over, and they’re screaming at the survivors who are running for their lives. An alien invasion? Possibly.