MR. DROP

I was walking alongside a busy road when the guy up ahead tripped and fell like gravity had decided to lay a beating on him specifically; dude hit the sidewalk so hard that I half-expected shrapnel and a sizeable amount of collateral damage. Momentarily paralyzed with the shock of how abruptly─and, again, violently─he hit the ground, I approached him casually, full of helpful intentions, hesitating only briefly to consider the likelihood of the downed stranger refusing help—you know: that weird response to public embarrassment that manifests as misdirected anger towards any would-be helper—but found myself instead dodging verbal firecrackers of bloody-lipped fury as the man ferociously struggled to regain his footing. It was painful to watch, as though he had been forcibly stapled to the ground at the shoulder, and I tried to imagine how heavy a shoulder had to be to prevent the action of standing up. I was in the middle of picturing this poor guy trying to swim when I heard the sound of ripping leather and found the man standing, one arm down, and glaring down at the appendage he had left behind.

“That’s how it is, huh?” he said, balling up his remaining fist in anger. “Just gonna fall to pieces at the slightest inconvenience?”

I just stared, nodding myself into emergency normalization, into just flat-out accepting the ludicrous and deeply unsettling spectacle of a body arguing with a disembody as nothing more than an ordinary, everyday kind of dust-up. The scolded arm turned and aggressively reached for me with its greasy knuckles and overly veiny fingers, tapping its thumb and forefinger like a pair of barbeque tongs, but fell short. At first, anyway; on second try, the hand extended out of its sleeve, dragging behind it two feet of discoloured, rubbery arm, and latched onto my belt.

“That’s ENOUGH!” the guy said, stomping his foot. “Y’think he wants three arms? Look at him: he barely wants the ones he’s got.”

The hand on my belt pulled at me but didn’t possess the strength to coerce me in any appreciable way, so I slapped at it until it let go. It pointed at me like it was issuing a warning─as though I was lucky it had decided to let me go instead of being too weak to handle a few meagre slippity-slaps─and turned to sign some sort of mea culpa to its handler, as it were.

“No, that’s it─you can walk home.”

The man then turned on his heel and strode away like the punishment hurt him more than its intended victim─that stiff, should-I-turn-back-no-just-keep-walking stride─and the arm turned back to me for one more pointed reminder before reaching into the crevice between the next two squares of sidewalk, pulling itself and its fastened pavement free, holding the concrete aloft as it hurriedly hopped after the quickly receding man.

Inside the open space left in the sidewalk was a set of stairs leading down into the darkness. It was an invitation if I had ever seen one, and with very little by way of forethought or risk-assessment I descended the stairs like an ungoverned child racing toward a nondescript van with the promise of candy.

Down the filthy staircase was an unsurprisingly dank underground tunnel running as far as I could see, with a shape that reminded me of an old-fashioned keyhole: a wide bottom pinching in around head-height before opening again into a bulbous, scooped-out ceiling that looked to have been designed to showcase the kind of ornate brickwork of times long past, though sadly lacking the skillful flourishes that make such things so appealing. There was a pattern of some sort, but between the raggedy, spasmodic lines carved with an uncoordinated or uncaring hand, and the near total darkness of the tunnel, I lost interest pretty quickly.

Instead, I noticed that I had lost sight of the entrance, which meant I either advanced far further into the tunnel than my three or four steps led me to believe, or I had misplaced the entry in a blind spot, the opening swallowed up into a convergence of bad angles and atrocious night vision. But before I managed to settle on a theory, a series of foot-level torches flickered to life up and down the tunnel, both setting an appropriately creepy ambiance and allowing me more ambulatory freedom than the cautious half-step-at-a-time approach I had been employing.

The lights did nothing to ease my uncertainly relating to depth, illuminating not more than a few feet in front of me at a time, but the increased ease of movement meant I still couldn’t see down the tunnel, but faster. I caught glimpses, in the corners of each load-bearing contraction of brick and mortar, of the not unexpected rotten detritus accumulating like children at the back of a particularly hellacious wave-pool, and I slowed my pace to properly appreciate the spooky atmosphere.

I investigated the rubble, the splinters, bent nails, and grime, noticing last the oddness of the spider-webs right as a bit of mild disassociation crept in behind my eyes, an issue of perspective that required readjustment, looking as I was at faces entombed within the webs: distinct human features woven into the structures and preserved in various states of alarm, as if the capture of their likeness had taken them by surprise.

I sped up a little, then, as each face I passed appeared to be more interested in me than the last, until I found the slim silhouette of a figure waiting for me down the tunnel, maybe six or seven segments away. I could see their eyes even then, somehow, not white so much as entirely absent of colour, with the clear exception of those dark-as-pitch pupils that were too large for peepers twice that size. The proportions were bizarre, like a wrong-handed drawing of a fading nightmare, but they stood with a posture so calming I almost relaxed. Were they wearing a hat? It looked like they were wearing a hat, and if it wasn’t a hat something weird was going on with their head.

“Hello!” it said, the voice ricocheting toward me in a multi-tonal reverberation that coalesced into a mismatched monstrosity that almost obscured the practiced geniality of the greeting. “We weren’t expecting you. My name is Mr. Drop. Welcome.”

What I had thought to be a result of distance and echo was, in fact, just his voice: even up close it came out as a jumble of incongruent sounds attacking one another, like words escaping him in a panic. It was jarring, but not enough to distract me from his unblinking eyes, those twin dollops of ink staring into me with a ferocious curiosity that belied his otherwise nonchalant bearing.

“You have the look of a body unaccustomed to the complexities of liminal space,” he continued, reaching up to shape whatever it was on his head into something that resembled the swirl of soft-serve ice cream. “Understandably. You aren’t the first to find your way here unprepared, nor will you be the first to garner sympathy—ignorance of the law, and all that.”

I nodded, more concerned with ironing out the kinks in my focus than taking in the entirety of his vaguely-threatening introduction, as his form was a slippery one to pin down, forcing my eyes in and out of dilation at agonizing speeds. Mumbling apologies, I covered my face with my hands and turned away, the relief in my aching noggin immediately apparent. I turned back to find his eyes staring into me again, which was disconcerting considering I hadn’t yet removed my hands from my face.

“Stay with my eyes,” he said, less a command than a steadfast assurance, like a truth being shared, as his eyes continued penetrating my otherwise-hearty physical barriers. “It’s a dimensional incompatibility. You’ll never resolve it with those eyes, so allow them a respite in mine.”

The world was realigned with his eyes as its nucleus, the right angels and straight lines reappearing in the periphery of my vision as I stared into Mr. Drop like a mesmerized halfwit shown a card trick. The ceiling lit up and expanded, the world above visible from below, and as I tore my eyes from his I couldn’t help but wonder why the typically busy street I had arrived from seemed to be fairly lacking in hustle and bustle. The footfalls and car tracks apparent from that vantage didn’t match the population, with the phantom activity accounting for as much as ten-to-one that of the seen persons, and as I concentrated on them—those seen—I noticed that each produced a strange, tumultuous glow, as though in conflict with itself: noxious absence swirled through the murky light like smoke, the push and pull of the combatants nearly overshadowing the locus of said glow, clear in origin if respective in placement.

I pointed at the tapestry above us, frowning at Mr. Drop in both confusion and because I had begun to absorb those earlier comments and found his manner to have been not entirely unshitty.

“Satisfied customers, those,” he said, smoothing his head back into something like a pompadour. “It’s what we do: helping people in need.”

Silence followed; he had apparently finished speaking, and I was gobsmacked at how far short that explanation fell. It took me clearing my throat and raising a protesting finger to get him to continue, which I immediately recognized as an intimidation tactic: withholding supposedly precious information until a body interjects, followed by an interruption to use said valuable insights as a cudgel to beat back a questioner’s moxie. It was a dick move in general, but down there? In Mr. Drop’s own multi-dimensional lair? I mean, language is funny: that was a tip straight out of the self-empowerment-horse’s mouth—a philosophy co-opted and shared by frat-boy date-rapists and investment-banker bullies alike—and, because of it, I immediately lost my sense of awe to the hot flush of severe annoyance. Focusing on my fingernails, I readied myself for the Big Sell in the hope that a little thumb-on-forefinger picking action would prevent me from getting into an argument before I knew how to get back to the surface.

“We traffic in peace of mind,” he said, and my bullshit-detector went off so hard it rolled my eyes into the back of my head for me. “Don’t believe me? There’s Samantha right now,” he continued, mock-concerned with my faith in his spiel as he pointed out a miserable-looking young lady walking slowly overhead, her ankles hosting a shadowy glow-fight emanating from her feet. “She came to us with a crippling foot-fetish, an impulse that had overtaken her life, leaving her helpless in the wake a numerous ruined relationships. We judge not a person’s predilections but their desire to be aided, and, with that as our goal, we replaced her offending parts with a pair significantly less offensive.”

I nodded, glancing at Samantha before continuing my battle of the digits. Mr. Drop was getting hot at my wandering attention; his scowl hit me like a heat lamp—both in temperature and as percussive force, as though the lamp itself had been superheated and chucked my way—and I could hear the crackle of teeth being chewed to shards, though whose they were was a mystery as Mr. Drop didn’t appear to have a mouth much less chompers. I assumed he created a set solely to grind them to powder in irritation, and if that seems a long way to go to make a point, you haven’t met as many salesmen as I have. But I let the point sail past me and slid a fingernail under a cuticle, pulling back the skin with a little tch to punctuate my boredom.

Up above, a handsome man dutifully shoved coins into a parking meter, wrestling his glowing mug with his mouth and eyebrows as though it would escape if he relented for even a moment. His eyes were frantic, desperate; his cheeks forced his face into a series of grotesqueries, this time yanked into a fleshy yield sign. Coins began to trickle from his grasp as he pulled down with his mouth, allowing a split to form where his forehead met his hairline, and all his change clattered into the gutter as he grabbed at his face with his hands, screaming with an unholy vigor that resonated through the tunnel even after Mr. Drop muted the sound.

“There is an adjustment period, admittedly,” he said, back to casual gesticulation now that I was looking at him again, even if it was in horror. “Marcus thought an attractive face would relieve him of his lifelong bitterness at growing up without, that it was but asymmetrical misfortune that drove the people in his life away. But Marcus is an unpleasant fellow at his core—a self-absorbed, entitled lout—and it would appear that his new face is more than a little dissatisfied with the association. For now.”

I looked up again at Marcus, then howling from his knees, shoulders heaving in sobbing agony, as his face pulled away from his skull like an inside-out umbrella. As he laid down, cradling the parking meter in fetal surrender, his scruffy chin slingshot itself directly into his eye with a slap that would have made a statue weep; Marcus, though, was already crying and didn’t seem to notice.

I tapped at my nonexistent wrist-watch and rolled my hand on my wrist to indicate a begrudging next, which was less about getting him to move on as it was to poke at a specific, assumed vulnerability: time is of the essence, you gotta close the deal. It was all a gigantic bluff, of course, exploiting the idea that Mr. Drop seemingly had to convince me of the validity of his business—get me to agree to it, whatever it was—for me to be at his mercy. Otherwise I’d be in pieces already, right? Clawing at my malfunctioning ass or defending myself against an ear uprising or something. No; acting bored and hurrying along his sales-pitch was the way to go.

Mr. Drop’s head had at some point divided itself into a pair of flowing goat horns, and there was a not insubstantial malice ebbing from him. He seemed larger than before—he wasn’t but certainly appeared that way—and he was angry; the air in the tunnel responded with a rise in heat that was trending toward suffocating, and I responded to that by sweating as disobediently as possible, leveling a disgustingly snooty, heavy-lidded monstrosity of a glance at Mr. Drop as though I was so unimpressed I was gaining a circumstance-specific case of narcolepsy.

“You,” he seethed, damming a river with a spoon. “You have met Vinnie and his mischievous arm, an appendage given—and, again, willingly received—to prevent a further descent into that type of slot-machine depravity that empties wallets and loosens teeth. But the arm has grown tired of Vinnie—much as I have of you—of its continual under-stimulation due to Vinnie’s newfound lack of purpose, rebelling as many appendages do: by opening up a passageway to newcomers looking for adventure.”

I smiled, nodded, looked at him and winked, all with unforgivable obnoxiousness.

“Most, however,” Mr. Drop continued, wincing. “Most retain a modicum of reverence once they look upon the complexities of our operation, the magnificence of our purpose. But you—you wander in here like a tourist and gawk at me with that idiotic face that seems to say, somehow, both I understand completely and I have never had a conversation in my life. I have come to despise you with the entirety of my being.”

After a spell of quiet, I gave him a thumbs up.

“Yes,” Mr. Drop said, growling through the sudden darkness. “Another sarcastic gesture. Well, I have a gesture for you, my would-be nemesis, and it’s of a kind that I doubt even your slow-witted nature will fail to comprehend.”

I looked at his middle finger, watched as he thrust it up into the air like he was stabbing at a seagull, and looked at Mr. Drop’s face before taking another look at the finger, then just holding steady at the top of his fist. I nodded again, staring expectation into his eyes and shrugging—was that it? I surveyed my surroundings, anticipating a bold stroke to accompany his grand gesture, but, with nothing evidently planned beyond just flipping me off, I continued nodding into that awkward anticlimax. Mr. Drop stared into me and I stared back, in mutual agreement that this moment required a touch of silent consideration.

But then the moment passed and I began to wander back the way I came.

“Nothing?” he said, the rage rising in his throat. “You respond with nothing? Oh, no—no no no. You will respond, even if I have to do it for you.”

The darkness around me shuddered, as if alive and chilly, and the structure of the tunnels began to soundlessly vibrate like the integrity of its foundations were being called into question, the only answers offered being, at best, subpar. Reality itself appeared to be shaking apart, though it must have been a dimensional thing because I didn’t feel a single tremor despite the brickwork of the tunnel clearly caving-in on itself. I looked at my feet to reassure myself that they were on solid ground, and almost missed Mr. Drop running at me in fragmented strides, jerking in and out of sight between steps like he was leaping through pockets of time. I picked up the pace, jogging into a run, as everything that was flooded toward me, a flushed torrent of all existent sensation, draining—emptying—into me like I was the final trash trap before the ocean, and I turned in time to watch Mr. Drop dive into me like a glitching rocket. Clenching and turtling to absorb the contact, I closed my eyes.

I felt sunshine on my face and fluttered my eyes open carefully, scanning the passersby for general displeasure and welcome scowls, back as I was on the busy sidewalk I had abandoned for my short-lived tunnel adventure. A spindly old lady advised me to go fuck myself, and I smiled at the possibility; my mouth, however, replied with a string of epithets so nonsensical it sounded like a fifth-grader’s first attempt at making swears. The lady slapped me in the face, knocking loose a chuckle that fell out of me like a fart at a funeral, and as she ambled away in a geriatric snit, my mouth curled up into an unpleasant grin.

“Even if I have to do it for you,” it said, licking my lips as though my natural moisture wasn’t good enough for the intensive verbosity that was to follow. “Remember when I said that?”

I nodded, indeed remembering that. But I also remembered how I just sort of opened my eyes back into the topside world, and curiosity dragged me back to that opening in the sidewalk, as gaping and inviting as it had been at the start.

“That’s—” my mouth started, shakily. “That should have closed after—”

I again descended the stairs, this time with a speed that increased with each panicked utterance, finally sprinting down the grimy tunnel, running and running and running until it felt like I was running along the walls, down the ceiling, running until my legs weren’t legs but pistons propelling my engine down an endless track.

I didn’t know where I was running, but I felt good—tireless, like sprinting through that dark was all I should ever have been doing. But then I tripped and hit the ground so hard my mouth fell off.

I stood, grabbing my face and staring into my shadow until it stared back—it was Mr. Drop looking into me angrily, wearing my mouth like an unwanted decoration, picking at it like a scab, and getting angrier and angrier as it stood its ground on his face. A second source of light opened up behind me, throwing an identical drop shadow against the opposite wall, this one a more pleasant version of Mr. Drop that appeared to be wearing the captured body parts of his previous customers: his feet were Samantha’s and wholly unremarkable, his arm Vinnie’s meaty ham-hock, and his eyeless head wore Marcus’ unfortunate but unquestionably repugnant face. In that face though sat my actual mouth, affixed with the kind of grin I would have then been showing off had I been wearing it.

I looked at Mr. Drop and maintained eye-contact as I reached for my mouth on his twin, feeling it break into a wide smile with my fingers as Mr. Drop went apoplectic in every way but verbally; and as I gently but easily pulled my mouth off his shadow, the look in his defeated eyes betrayed what I had suspected: the replacement mouth meant for me was stuck on his face, and since it was the “improvement” over mine, it wouldn’t let him say a goddamned thing.

I slapped mine on my face and began backing away, looking over my shoulder to find the stairs to the street mere steps away, conveniently. I took one last look at Mr. Drop and narrowed my eyes at his obvious change in demeanor—from upset to, what, stoic? Poker-faced, perhaps?—but ran up the stairs like a kid escaping a lightless basement and found the entrance sealed behind me as though it had never been anything but a normal, weather-stained piece of pavement. I brushed dust off my sleeves and readied myself for the expected twist . . . but when I opened my mouth, my words came out.

Hmm.

I patted myself down, looking for whatever Mr. Drop had left me with, whatever he was so nonchalant about, but found nothing of note. Until, of course, the sun came out from behind the clouds and I found a familiar face nodding my shadow at me. But, again . . . I mean, was that it? My shadow glared at me as though it could hear my thoughts, but despite the confused glances of the surrounding onlookers, I endeavoured to hit Mr. Drop with what I gathered to be the most devastating insult in all the underworld: I flipped him off.

That’s it—I gave my shadow the finger and just went on with my life. It’s been pretty great. Sometimes, late at night, after an especially bad day, I’ll set my lamp on its side and make shadow puppets with my fingers, waiting for Mr. Drop to make his inevitable appearance, glumly inhabiting whatever horse or spider or lizard I make on the wall, and I laugh myself to sleep, secure in the knowledge that his suffering is eternal.

I have also scaled back how many times I visit that spot on the sidewalk—maybe three or four times a day now—and barely even claw at the stone anymore. I’ll get down there when I get down there—what’s the rush? I’m just happy this whole experience didn’t leave a mark.