They call it Cups because you walk down a hallway of tile shards and wait for paper Dixies to come down on box twine. There’s a kid I know from somewhere waiting ahead of me, but neither of us speaks. What is there to say?
I put money in the cup marked “D” and watch it shimmy up into the dark. It comes back down with one bag in it. Lookout’s out of luck, I guess.
He’s waiting out on the stoop for me.
“Well?” he says.
“Talk to your man,” I say. “He screwed me. I paid for two and he only gave me one.”
“Give them to me,” he says.
“What them?” I say.
“Them is two bags. I gave you twenty bucks.”
“Ten,” I say.
Cups, it appears, also maintains a radical management style. The lookout puts a pistol to my neck and walks me back up through the door.
“Now,” he says, “Why don’t you say that again?”
“Oh, forget it,” I say, “just kill me.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Just kill you?” says the lookout. “You make it sound like nothing. What, you coming back? You got roundtrip? Frequent flyer?”
He hits me with the pistol, takes my wallet, leaves me the bag.
“It’s good tonight,” he says.
Justice has always been swift, and just, at Cups.
When I get to Gary’s the girl from the gargoyle building opens the door.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
The girl lets me in, brings gauze for the dent in my head.
“I’m staying here for a few days,” she says. “Gary’s out of town, his aunt, his somebody, died.”
“What happened to your place?”
“Couldn’t make rent.”
The girl and I sit in Gary’s kitchen. She’s got spoons, water, powders, works. It’s like your only cozy memory falling out of the sky for you. I tie her off and hit her clean, the way I always could. She has veins like little tadpoles darting under her skin but I still know which way they’re going. Me, I’ve got this hole in my arm like a great, dark lake. I just have to squirt the stuff in. The girl starts jerking in her chair. I clinch her down around the knees.
“Listen,” I say. “I talked to this guy tonight. He was a lion tamer. Stuck his head in lion mouths.”
“I could never do that,” she says. “I could never tempt fate that way.”
The girl twitches hard, almost out of her seat.
“Yeah, no reason to tempt fate,” I say. “Like tonight, I asked a guy to kill me tonight.”
“I can understand that,” she says. “You can’t do everything yourself.”
When her spell breaks we shoot more of everything and sip something grape. We talk about old times, those nights in her bed behind the stone homunculi.
“What’s wrong with your hair?” she says.
“I’m going bald,” I say.
“That’s not it. It’s something else.”
“What you’re noting,” I say, “is a dearth of pattern.”
I kiss her, slip my hand under her ass and lift. She’s about as heavy as a phone book. I lower her down on the futon and slide up to her hair.
“No,” she says. “I don’t feel like it.”
“How do you know what you feel?” I say.
Now she peels down my fly, starts doing frantic things with her hands, annoyed, severe, like someone who forgot to defrost the meat. I can’t feel anything but the view is exciting. I stick my fingers in her mouth and pry it open.
“Don’t bite,” I say, straddle her head.
“God save the circus,” she says.
When the girl passes into what passes for dreams for people like us, I go down into the din of the avenue. I walk through the lights to the darker places. There’s no moon in the sky to violate, no mothership, no hover of coming dominion. There’s just the city, jerking in its concrete seat. Maybe I’m sorry to leave the girl up there, but if I stay she’ll probably leave me. Then I’ll surely be a Larry. I’ll pace a room with the phone in my hand, eager to please some invisible slave. Good, I will say, excellent, excellent, excellent. I will never say poor. I will never say I don’t know.
Every Larry who wants to live is a liar.
The Wrong Arm
There were marks in it, divots in it, a feathering of weals and burns. These were all the scars from all the times something tried to kill her in that arm. The stove tried to kill her. The cleaver tried to kill her. The brillo nearly did it, too.
Winter, she hid the wrong arm in her home sweater. Summer was bees and bad nails in the porch door. We were worried about summer, until it was summer and we forgot to be worried anymore. We packed all the food we needed in the plaid bag, sandwiches and sandwich stuff and twist-off cups of lemon pop, packed it up and drove away. She sat up front, packed in her proper place, beside our father, wrong arm pressed against the window glass.
We were going to see the boats. The boats of the world were sailing up some river.
I wondered what the wrong arm looked like to the drivers driving by. I wondered if they saw its wrongness spread there on the window, the burnt part, the brillo’d part, the cleaver’d.
All we knew about the wrong arm was that it was wrong to touch it, to pinch it, to rub it. Any other part of her was there for us to hold. The wrong arm was not for us to take her by and lead her. The wrong arm was not for us to tap it for her to turn.
The wrong arm would never heal right. That’s why everything knew to try and kill her there. If harmed, our father told us, the wrong arm could be the end of her. He said end of her as though he meant no harm.
Our father told us about that man who died from how his mother dipped him in a river.
He had a wrong heel.
I figured I’d take the heel over the arm any day. This was given my pick. This was given if they let me pick, not just given being given what you got. Our father said sometimes you had to deal with the cards life dealt you, but I knew games where you got new ones. Lantern men granted wishes, too. I wanted to be the kind of boy who would wish the wrong arm wasn’t wrong anymore. I was worried I was the kind of boy who wouldn’t waste a wish.
My brother, my sister, we did not behave on the way to the boats. Some of us had to piss. The car needed gas. The pipe in the gas-place bathroom almost killed her. Maybe it was filled with boiling piss. We got back on the road to the boats.
There would be bees out where the boats of the world were sailing, but our father said you couldn’t be scared of everything, or you might as well be dead.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” she said to us. “I’ve had worse than bees.” She lifted the wrong arm a little where it stuck to the window.
What could be worse than bees?
Maybe wasps were worse. Maybe porch-door nails that could stick you with sickness even if your arm was right. Maybe porch-screen teeth where it was ripped and curled and our father never fixed it. Why didn’t he fix it? Wasn’t he summer worried, at least in winter? The bees were asleep then. There had been time. Who was I to say it, though? Me, who wouldn’t waste a wish.
My brother, my sister, they had their parts of the seat, to eat sandwiches on, to sing. Each of them was nothing to me. Everything that was everything was in front of me. My father was in front of me on the other side of the car. She was in front of me with just the seat between us. The wrong arm pressed through the secret slot between the seat and the door. It was our slot. I could see the blister from the hot-piss pipe. The arm would flutter whenever the road went hard.
We stopped to sit at a picnic bench, to take a picture of us, with trees.
The bench was bad with splinters.
I walked the clear and hunted for hornets. I hunted for ticks. I counted all the things that could kill her here. A piece of bottle, a broken comb. A thorn, even. No lantern man would ever let you wish it all away at once. You could only do it one at a time, and you’d never get it all. You’d just waste your wishes that way.