I’m trying to say she is delusional and I don’t identify with her as a human.
She stops and she smiles at me and I hope in vain for a rattlesnake or some kind of poisonous snake to emerge and bite me.
It wouldn’t be bad.
I would accept it.
I’m just an asshole.
It feels like practice.
“Oh hey, come on in to the office real quick,” she says. “I want to show you something. Come on.”
I follow my landlord into her office and she shows me a Halloween decoration she recently bought.
The decoration is a plastic werewolf dressed in felt-clothing.
It’s like, February, I think.
“Sale,” she says.
She bends the plastic werewolf over, trying to get it to do something.
It’s supposed to do something.
Just stand still and look at the thing and wait for it to do what it is supposed to do then react the same way your landlord reacts.
Ok, I will.
Then leave the office quickly, without running or tripping.
Ok I will.
Believe in yourself.
She continues to try to get the werewolf to activate, lifting up the back panel of cloth/fur and flipping a button a few times.
Minutes pass.
During the minutes, I see the words “just walk out” scroll through my headhole in neon letters.
I see myself walking out of the office, a bird landing on my shoulder, kissing my cheek.
I see myself free and happy.
“Come on Mr. Tricky Pants,” my landlord says. “Oh, here we go.”
The werewolf starts to move, plastic limbs creaking.
A Halloween song comes from the small speaker between the
werewolf’s feet.
The werewolf dances and mouths the Halloween song.
I immediately say, “This is great.”
And I smile and look at my landlord for a few seconds.
When I leave the office, I don’t turn around until I am back in my apartment.
The apartment seems unrecognizable.
Looking around, I can’t recognize any of the things on the floor or anything.
It seems like someone else moved in while I was out.
Goddamn.
What if all our keys work for any apartment and we’ve all just been trading constantly.
“You win,” I say. “You always win.”
I walk back outside and sit in my roommate’s car again.
It still smells bad.
That’s the only comforting thing about the day.
I try to fall asleep with the back of my head hanging over the headrest.
It gets darker and colder out.
This is my backdrop.
And I hum the Halloween song to myself, laughing about the way the werewolf danced.
So good the way the werewolf danced.
21
I’m with the girl from the first floor apartment again.
I’ve been calling her over a lot now, because I’ve been getting afraid of the dark for some reason.
We are going to bed.
She’s in the sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, sitting up topless with a rubberband between her teeth as she makes her hair into a ponytail.
I’m standing by the lightswitch.
I’m naked, one hand on the light, one hand kind of stretching my scrotum out at random.
Shivering.
This is amazing.
For some reason I have become the person whose job it is to turn off the lights.
I like it though.
A job.
Right now I can be confused for a happy person.
“What are you doing,” she says. “Turn it off.”
I look at her.
“Do you feel ok right now,” I say.
“Yeah why,” she says.
“Like right now, you feel ok in general.”
“Why,” she says.
I watch her finish the ponytail and I decide that I don’t hate her, I think.
“I can’t remember why I asked that,” I say.
I hold up my arm and smell my armpit.
“Come here,” I say. “Smell me. Do I have b.o. Like onion-style.”
“I smelled you before when you were showing me that really high jumping jack. It’s not onions. It’s—” she pauses, “It smells more like pizza.”
“Pizza sounds worse than onions,” I say.
“It could be.”
I lower my arm.
“People love pizza though,” I say.
“They do,” she says. “Turn off the light now please.”
I turn off the light and stand exactly where I am.
And I half-pray/half-wish that one night once she falls asleep I can turn the light on and off, a year passing with each flash.
No I mean I half-pray/half-wish that a year would reverse with each flash.
Haha shit!
22
My roommate is sitting at the broken desk in his room.
There is a dictionary in his lap and he’s about to fail looking up a word he just claimed to be real.
I’m in the doorway of his room holding the cat we’re babysitting for one of his ex-girlfriends.
I hold the cat like a baby and kiss its face, avoiding the random attempts to claw me.
The cat is angry.
It’s funny to me.
My roommate shuts the dictionary and sits back.
“Fuck,” he says.
“It’s ok,” I say. I kiss the cat’s face again and say, “I’m sure you really believed ‘bilomite’ was a word. I’m not saying you were lying.”
“Yeah I thought it was like, a fossil, right,” he says.
“People get confused,” I say.
He yawns and puts his hands on his face like he is holding his face together.
He puts his hands down and he blinks a few times.
“Should we get some beers tonight,” he says.
The cat tries to claw my eye and I move away.
There is absolute hatred in the cat’s eyes.
I feel afraid of the cat.
I set the cat down and it runs away.
Down the hall.
The word “safe” scrolls through my head in neon letters.
“Should we,” my roommate says.
“We could do that,” I say. “Or maybe we could just buy a lot of carrots and eat them and see what that does. I think I heard that carrots can make you feel drunk too, just like beer does. We could try that.”
“Yes or no,” he says, scratching the back of his neck.
“Yes,” I say. “Should we go to Lucky’s then. They’re closest. Unless you mean going to a bar. If you mean going to bar then I don’t want to go.”
He scratches his sideburn and says, “Fuck Lucky’s. I hate that place. Fuck that place. I don’t want to get shot. Plus that guy at the register always calls me a bitch. He always finds a way to call me a bitch somehow. One time he told me he was going to ‘erase me.’ I didn’t do anything to him. Fuck those assholes.” He leans back in his chair and says, “In conclusion, fuck that place and also, fuck those assholes.”
“The people there don’t mess with me,” I say.
“That’s because you look insane. They like you.”
I scratch my shin with the heel of my other foot.
“Remember that old homeless lady wearing the ‘Babe Magnet’ hat,” I say. “She used to be there a lot. I liked her.”
“Yeah, she was cool,” he says. “She gave me some of her animal crackers one time.”
“See. Good people,” I say. “Everywhere there are good people.”
He ignores me.
He says, “She told me that if I eat the rhino I will have its strength and then she watched me eat the rhino cracker and she looked scared like it was about to happen.”
“Did it happen.”
“I don’t think so but I haven’t decided,” he says.
I can’t think of anything to say so I walk down the hall and he follows.
We put on our shoes and coats and argue about whether or not it would work to just pass a huge piece of paper around to the entire world and have people sign it in agreement to become friends.