BLAST 04: SIGNS

SLEEP

The ceiling was boring and, consequently, sucked. The walls annoyed me with their perpendicular arrogance, and the blankets had spent most of the night telling me to fuck myself. The bed creaked in imitation of my back as I stood to survey the situation with hands on my hips and a growl in my throat. This was my bedroom: yesterday’s clothes in a pile beside the closet, concert tickets thumbtacked above the lamp, dog-eared books smeared across the carpet in a slurry of half-digested thoughts, and an open pack of toast-crackers drying to stone on my nightstand.

It was just as I’d left it, just as I liked it─this was home.

There was an exit sign curiously placed above the door, predominantly red with a little twinkle sashaying across the letters with a jaunty insistence, and as I ambled through said exit I woke up.

Huh, I thought. Man, I have to pee.

The only noticeable change in the room was that the sign above the door had reversed its colour-scheme and been marked an entrance─though it was distinctly lacking the sparkle that had made the first sign so enticing─but I wheeled out from that room to the one adjacent and peed. I mean, I peed─I peed so much it felt like I was still peeing well after I had finished. You know when you ride a bike all day and then your legs still feel like they’re pedaling while you’re trying to sleep that night? That’s what it was like, but with peeing.

I stumbled into the living room to have a smoke but remembered too late that I had quit, had no gum to curb the cravings, and that if food was the tertiary option, I was going to have to make myself something out of apple-cider vinegar and baking soda because my fridge was otherwise barren. No, I thought; The fridge would not be my saviour this day.

I returned to the bedroom to get dressed but stopped short and peeked my head inside, hoping not to set off the slumberous reset that had resulted in so much pee, and I saw my pants standing at attention; truth be told I admired their fortitude. If only the rest of my clothing had been as mindful, as understanding in the ways of duty, of loyalty, as my pants, but, no: those clothes stunk, and I was going to have to put as much effort into completing the mission as I did in peeing out all of that pee, which, as I don’t need to remind anybody, was fucking enormous.

Gathering myself, I shot past the threshold and woke up. I was lying in bed, fully dressed, with the kind of dry mouth that only comes from snoring obnoxiously for hours at a time. The sign above the door was gone, and I was propelled out into the hallway between apartments with the kind of energy that both makes kings and brings down empires, an enthusiasm for life that could only be quelled by a busted elevator and the slow, certain realization that I was going to have to take the goddamned stairs if I was going to rule the world.

IRATE

The woman had a stride that looked as though her momentum wanted her to step further than her legs allowed, leaving her to stop-step skitter her way through the parking garage, continually kicking the ground, ever on the verge of an unpleasant tumble, and ever inducing anxiety in nosy onlookers.

“You’ve done an excellent job working,” my boss said, pausing to gulp some sort of liquid loudly. “An excellent job.”

“Huh,” I said, watching the woman make it safely to the elevators and blow up in a rage as she found them out of order. “What?”

“The job you’ve been doing? Top shelf,” he continued, burping into the phone.

“Of course,” I said, watching as she blamed the guy getting out of his car for her lack of vertical conveyance. “I am working,” I continued, winking into the phone.

“What did I tell you about winking?” he said, and all the background noise disappeared from the line. “I love it!”

The guy closed his door and threw his arms out in front of him, wordlessly raging back at the woman and her baseless accusations. The sign hung haphazardly across the elevator doors read order, but neither of our combatants heeded its command.

“I left my car somewhere other than here,” I said, looking at the empty parking spot where it should have been and all at once remembering the previous night─what was all that about? The woman screamed yeah as if to punctuate my thought and continued by punctuating the swinging-arms guy. “I’ve got it covered, though.”

“Good, good,” my boss said, whispering some sort of aside not meant for me. “Get your ass going to the next job and everything will be as it seems.”

“But everything is what it seems here,” I argued, grabbing at the air as though my explanation was something tactile to be snatched and displayed.

“IT IS!,” he screamed, hanging up with a beep. “See that it stays that way.”

I looked at my phone and remembered I had left it at the gas station. The arguers had come together to work out their differences like a pair of animatronics with little lateral control, falling into and then on top of each other, neither able to extricate themselves from the tangle, both in the way of the garage’s exit.

My legs were tired and my head ached. I was going to have to brave the ramp to get outside, and even though the signage specifically stated that there was eight-feet of clearance there wasn’t more than a foot-and-a-half available to crawl through. I hadn’t eaten in forever and my gums hurt from gritting my teeth. I roared at the intertwined arguers in frustration, which prompted them to end their fighting with wide eyes and a settling-jostle of arms that flicked the elevator sign over. Out of, it said. I snarled and dragged myself through the opening, doing what the sign said, sure, but only because I wanted to. I mean, I was going to do it anyway. Stupid sign.

GNASH

I found the Burgerarium almost where it should have been, though stubbornly nestled right up against my car door. The worn concrete from its former position was evident, along with the drag marks that accompanied such a move. Tilted slightly, it towered over my car in an attempt at intimidation; luckily my car was too strong of character to submit to tired schoolyard tactics and beckoned me to its passenger side, knowing the difficulty I was going to have getting in but supporting me just the same.

I glared at the building, giving it a little taste of its own medicine, but it pretended not to notice me and shook loose a brick as a warning to my car. Not to be outdone, my car belched smoke into the building’s open underside and I heard a cacophony of coughing explode from inside─those people were still there? Still waiting for burgers? I hopped into the car and clambered across the console, looking over my shoulder at dozens of slapping hands pounding Cheapster’s grime-covered windows, and stomped the gas futilely before remembering that my keys were somewhere other than the ignition. I fished around in my pants─I had luckily worn the same ones; checkmate, clean freaks─and found my keys just as the car lurched backwards, its tailpipe held by the small, skinny arm of what was once nothing more than your typical burger-lover, now a snaking, inhuman limb seemingly attached to the building itself that held us fast─fast and hungrily.

I gunned the engine and smacked it into drive, apologizing to my car all the while for the rough but necessary treatment, and after wedging a boot against the accelerator, I snagged a golf club from the backseat, a weapon I had kept there for just this occasion: chopping offending hands from my car’s tailpipe. It worked like a charm, and even as the building itself screeched and tipped menacingly over us, the car and I peeled away from danger in a blaze of glory and gravel; the latter thoughtfully conjuring a cloud of dust in the air for the former to shine like a torch of heroism in the darkness of villainy.

The building disagreed with all of the above, snapping its mighty jaws in the air like an attacking alligator, but the sound and the fury gave way to physical collapse, the building coming apart in an implosion of wailing, of bricks and burgers and people rocketing into the air, of shatterproof windows and unopenable doors frisbeed in all directions, of freezers and condiments and fire extinguishers exploding as if targeted by snipers . . . leaving behind nothing but the smoky afterimage of Chungo himself flipping me off in disbelieving yet monstrous rage. I flipped him back with both hands and high-fived my car, exchanging celebratory exultations of fuck yeah and that was dope as hell as we sped off through the landing detritus of a cursed burger franchise.

The ghastly piles of what remained of the burgerarians burned in my mind as I asked myself what I could have done to save them, what more than absolutely nothing could I have sacrificed to help them from their grisly fate, but the thought fizzled out as I caught sight of myself in the rear-view mirror wearing some bitchin’ sunglasses and drove into the sunset like a complete motherfucking badass.

NAOKI

“Tell me you have gum,” I pleaded, hands flat on the counter, staring into Naoki’s unimpressed eyes. She looked out the window to see my car buried in the fence exactly where Gerald had left his however many moons ago, then back at me even less impressed.

“You know that’s not a parking spot,” she said, folding her hands on her knee in what I immediately recognized as a calming mechanism. “I mean, you know that. There’s no way you don’t know that.”

“Hey, I found your cat doohickey thing!” I said, snapping finger guns at her and winking, because that’s a little bit of what the world needed at the time.

“Can you move your car?”

“It’s out back.”

“No, it’s right there,” she said, pointing out the window at my car and slowly turning her head back to me. “You gotta move that shit.”

“No, the cat,” I said, jutting a thumb over my shoulder. “Somebody fucked his shit up good, but he’s out back. Still waving too, I think.”

“Give me your keys,” she said. I shuffled through my pants without breaking eye contact and handed them over with an awkward smile.

“Kicks like a bronco,” I said, meaning my car, which didn’t at all kick like a bronco; I just wanted to say something as she left.

“Shut up,” she said, kneeing open the door and flipping me off in a nice bit of practiced choreography, leaving me to puzzle over my gum options. I settled on one called Plusheeez as I heard my car kick into reverse, figuring that anything boasting of being “infused with all the flavour of red” went into the “can’t miss” category. I dropped some coins on the counter and heard a loud crash from outside as I popped a piece of gum, counting out a few more coins because math wasn’t my strong suit and I wanted to delay the discovery of what Naoki had done to my car for as long as possible.

“It isn’t strawberry,” I said, chewing thoughtfully, eventually looking out the window to watch my car go screaming around the back of the building. “What is that─raspberry?”

A sonic-boom shriek came from the woods, followed by a long, fraught howl that was so unearthly I half-assumed it to have been mechanical, like the dying moan of a car that’s only real crime was having me as its driver. I ducked out the front door and meandered toward the woods, assuming the bulk of the action to have passed, and concentrated on my gum.

“Tastes like fibreglass,” I said, spitting it out and immediately replacing it with another. “Ah, good─more fucking fibreglass.”

I found my car resting diagonally between two trees and Naoki kneeling in front of the Chungo-ized maneki-neko, both spinning their wheels in silence, neither in the mood to talk.

“Hey,” I said gently to Naoki, braving a step closer. “Why do you guys sell fibreglass-flavoured gum?”

“It’s not fibreglass,” she said, choking back a sob. “It tastes like red.”

SPELL

Naoki’s arms carved signals into the air and the branches responded in kind. I took a fleeting look at my captured car─the trees had filled it with branches, young branches that took turns yanking the steering wheel back and forth and making vroom noises─and remembered I was still missing my cell phone. Naoki wasn’t facing me, which saved me from seeing what part of her head was making those noises─like regurgitated chunks of concrete painfully pinballing up her brick-and-mortar throat─but also held me where I was, as I was reluctant to leave her without at least a little reassurance.

“Hey, so, like,” I said, pulling out all the stops, charm-wise. “Are you, y’know, good or whatever?”

One of Naoki’s arms stopped gyrating abruptly and turned toward me with a flourish of fingers, like tadpoles crisscrossing in a pond, before resolving into a knuckle-breaking middle finger salute as an answer, and quite an adroit one at that.

“Cool, cool,” I said, nodding and backing away. “Cool,” I repeated one more time for good measure before making a mad dash back into the building, the gum fleeing my gasping mouth and hitting the ground with a thud─its density apparently increasing dramatically in the wake of freedom─which gave me pause as I eyed the package, ready for another piece but rightfully leery of its possible supergravity. I eventually decided to look for my phone gumless; consciously and bravely gumless.

A cursory search yielded nothing, though by “cursory” I mean “looking at the counter and getting distracted by all the flashing lotto lights”, and so I made a point to search more thoroughly, though that was going to have to be a later type of thing because I was still quite winded from my escape and Naoki’s chair behind the counter looked so goddamned comfortable I felt that it would have been a crime to not sit my woefully out-of-shape ass on it. And so I did.

Naoki woke me with a well-placed kick directly into my calf-muscle, which sent me sprawling shoulder-first onto the hard tile, clutching my ruined leg and spitting what would have been piercingly pointed profanities had they been uttered in a language other than pain.

“Tell me,” she said, fear causing one of her wide-open eyelids to micro-twitch.

“This floor is fucking filthy,” I said, brushing dust-bunnies from my pants as more gained footholds on my wrinkled shirt.

“Tell me everything,” she continued, crouching to grab me by my collar. “None of this makes any goddamned sense.”

“I don’t know anything,” I said, wincing as she shook me and stretched my shirt beyond the threshold of its elasticity, leaving me to drown in its flaccid shapelessness. “I’m just wandering around, wondering what’s real and what isn’t.”

“I’m real,” she said, letting me go and staring out the window.

“Good,” I said, grunting and yanking myself to my feet. “But how the fuck do you know that?”

Naoki continued staring out the window in response; I joined in, eventually, and that’s what we did for a really, really long time.