Saturday, August 20, 3:33 a.m.

Marshmallows

Hunger at 41%

BLOOD EVERYWHERE GUY CHOPPED UP IN MY WALL GET HERE ASAP I THINK I LEFT MY PHONE CHARGER THERE

I had been staring silently at that text message for several minutes. John had sent it, which I had known the moment the phone had dinged. No one else would text me at this hour. Or any other hour, really.

The phone hadn’t woken me up. I’d gone to bed at 1:00 a.m., but had just tossed and turned, tormented by two slices of days-old pizza I’d left uneaten in a box on the counter, knowing I would be unable to sleep until I got up to finish the job. I’d then had a moment of doubt as to whether it was safe to eat sausage pizza that had been sitting at room temperature for that long, so I looked up that information on my phone while standing at the kitchen counter, then wound up tumbling down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia links about the history of food preservation. So now I was sitting on my kitchen floor, eating rubbery room-temperature pizza and reading about how, in Ireland, they routinely find four-thousand-year-old containers of butter that ancient tribes had sunk into the bog for preservation. It’s still edible; people have actually tried it. Surprisingly, they say it tastes like shit.

A second messaged dinged in:

I THINK ITS BY THE TOASTER

I was going to have to get dressed and go, I knew that. John would just keep messaging me until I did. And yet, my body didn’t move. In my current state of mind, it felt like I was being asked to lie facedown and drag myself across town with my eyelids. Depression means expending all your energy to avoid having to expend energy. I wish someone would invent a pill that would give me the motivation to go pick up my Lexapro refill.

My phone dinged again. This time, an image. It appeared to be a pile of meat cut into slabs a few inches thick, with human body parts sprinkled around as a garnish. I saw fingers and half of a foot and a dead face attached to a skull that looked like it had been bisected by a laser, brains oozing out the back. It was all intertwined with scraps of clothing soaked black with blood.

I tore off a bite of pizza and chewed. It was like a slab of pizza-flavored gum that had been scraped off a schoolboy’s desk. There was nothing here to do or watch; there was no one to talk to. I was miserable where I was, and I would fight anyone who tried to make me leave. I realized this was madness, that I was stuck in a self-pity loop that was turning me into a zombie. I visualized myself throwing away the remaining pizza, getting dressed, brushing my hair, and then driving to see what crisis John had encountered or, more likely, created. Then I congratulated myself for having successfully visualized this and, having not moved an inch, gnawed off another hunk of a substance that tasted like pizza in the way that getting splashed by a toilet feels like a waterslide. It tasted like the final entry in an experiment to see what, if anything, Americans won’t eat. It tasted like a meal that was prepared sarcastically.

A fourth message dinged in. It was another image, this one of John’s hand holding a thin black cable attached to a plug. With it came the caption:

LIKE THIS ONLY WHITE

I stuffed the rest of the pizza in my mouth and managed to shuffle my way into the apartment’s only bedroom. I had developed a habit of glancing over to the bed every time I passed, as if I’d magically find Amy there again, the lump under the blankets and the mess of copper hair spilling out, taking her half of the bed out of the middle. I didn’t bother this time. That void could be felt from outer space.

I tried to think of what clothes would be most appropriate for dealing with a sliced-up corpse, and while I was thinking of that, I robotically pulled on the first T-shirt and pair of cargo shorts I came across on the floor. I went to the fridge, grabbed a can of a locally produced red energy drink called Fight Piss, and headed out, feeling like I had done all of this before.

I stepped out onto the rusty metal stairway to find the August night air had been pre-sweated for my convenience. My apartment sits at the second floor of a brick building that looks like it was painted with mayonnaise, the first floor of which used to be an establishment called the Venus Flytrap Sex Shop. The dead neon sign bearing that name still hung over the darkened store entrance, though the big pink cursive X in the third word was missing because somebody had smashed it with a thrown chunk of pavement. That somebody had been me.

The couple who had owned the store had taken an insurance buyout after the place got damaged in a flood last year. They’d quickly left town, either forgetting to evict us from the apartment above or deciding they just didn’t care. The good news was that the utilities had stayed on, and I had no idea who was paying for them, if anyone. I had been running the little window air conditioner day and night for several weeks, seeing how much free juice I could extract before somebody finally noticed and cut it off. The bad news was that they had also left that neon sign on, apparently intending for it to forever buzz pinkly outside my window. It had only taken twelve throws to break it.

I slid into my cherry-red 1967 Chevy Impala, a car that had been given to me by a former client, and by “given,” I mean the guy who had owned it is now a vaporized corpse, and his wife left town without saying anything about the car. I keep getting stopped at red lights by bros yelling compliments at me and asking what’s under the hood. I have no idea, I don’t know anything about cars, and right now, this Impala’s defining feature is that it doesn’t have AC and the upholstery gets so sticky that you’d think a toddler had been eating waffles in it. Also, it’s hard to steer, and every pothole rattles my teeth. I could probably pick up a lot of girls in it, though, if I was interested in that.

Without a glance into the back seat, I said, “I wondered when you’d show up.”

I checked the back seat, but it was empty. It usually was, but I have been ambushed by bad guys waiting in a dark back seat before, so every time I get in, I try to say something to mess with them, just in case. I’m thinking about switching it to, “I’m surprised you came alone.” Plant some doubt in their mind.

I turned out of the parking lot, the streets mostly deserted at this hour. I passed by a construction site next door. The shop that had burned a while back was being replaced by another payday loan operation. Some kid had spray-painted a swastika on the unfinished plywood followed by a slur, then some kind soul had come in with their own can of paint and turned the swastika into a cartoon stick figure in a running pose, then had painted over two letters in the scrawl below it so that it now read NO JOGGERS. The racist had never come back to paint a rebuttal, so I took that as progress. Next door was a convenience store called Open 24-7-365, with a slogan below it proclaiming, “We Are Always Here For You!” It was closed.

You know how you’ll see a department store go out of business, and then that fall, a sad Halloween supply store will set up in its place? Well, imagine if that happened to an entire city. As always, the actual name of this place will remain undisclosed as to prevent any further tourist deaths. “Undisclosed” was supposedly nice in the 1980s, but it was trash when I was in high school a little over a decade ago and, since then, we’ve gone from four McDonald’s locations to one (two burned down; another was closed after a local news investigation detected horse DNA in their milkshakes). The high school basketball team only has four players, and one of them is thirty-six years old. The number one industry is multilevel marketing schemes, with meth manufacturing coming in a close second. There’s a citywide ordinance that all corpses must have their legs and arms severed before burial.

If that doesn’t sound like a tourist trap to you, well, you’re imagining the wrong kind of tourist. On any given day, you can find multiple squads of college kids with cameras looking for an abandoned warehouse or factory to spelunk, hoping to capture some phenomenon or other for their YouTube channel. Once, inside the infamous abandoned shopping mall, a group of ghost hunters pursued noises and voices in the darkness only to discover they’d been tracking another group of ghost hunters filming for their own channel. These people rarely turned up anything real (that they or their viewers were able to see anyway), but sometimes a group will step into a darkened structure and simply never come back out. Which, of course, only ensures more will follow. Meanwhile, just in the last week, John and I had met with:


Copyright © 2022 by Jason Pargin