Dislocated Read online

  “Thanks, Ma.”

  “Regardless, I love you both the same.”

  “Yeah, I love you, too, Ma.”

  I step into the living room, sunlight burning up all my belongings, illuminating the dust I’ve collected throughout the months. I’ve got a t-shirt pulled halfway down my head, eyes peeking from just above the collar like I’ve been buried in sand.

  I yank my shirt down, and look back out the window. My apartment overlooks what could be considered a relatively bustling small town neighborhood. It’s the only street in town with apartment complexes, and this morning there are no cars. No traffic. No children running screaming from their homes to enjoy a fine summer’s day after consuming a breakfast of champions: chocolate chip pancakes and cereal with marshmallows. There’s been nothing except that damn dog barking earlier, and even he’s found something better to do.

  Just birds.

  I stick a finger in my ear and dig a little.

  “Hello?” my voice reverberates like I’m living in a dark, empty cave. I half-expect bats to come barreling out of my bedroom, so I duck a little.

  I scrape a clump of wax onto my jeans.

  I lift the window. A warm breeze rushes in. I stare at the birds standing there, mimicking what must be their best impression of their long-extinct cousin, the dodo.

  “Hey!” I call out.

  Nothing, but what was I expecting here?

  I look around for something to throw. I settle on an empty beer can, and drop it into what qualifies as the apartment complex’s front yard.

  The can startles the birds enough to jump, and even flap their anxious little wings, but none of them take off for the nearest telephone wire. They only squawk their concerns to one another before falling silent, keeping distance from the mysterious can recently introduced into their community.

  It’s as if they’ve forgotten how to fly.

  The vibration of my cell against the counter shatters this unstable bout of mysterious silence. I pick up the phone. It’s not a call. Just a reminder of my messages.

  I dial, looking back out the window, and listen.

  First message. Received Sunday at one-thirty-seven a.m.

  I step into my room, take a beer from the fridge.

  Ma wants to know if I’ve heard anything. She wants to know where I am. “Did you hear it? The helicopters. Your father said it was helicopters.” She asks again and again. “The Clarks are here. Kathy says there was an incident at the market. Joe Marshall collapsed. You remember Joe.” This isn’t a question, and I have no idea who Joe Marshall is. “There’s something on the news about staying indoors. They’re trying to contain it.” She just wants to know that I’m okay. That I’m indoors where the news has told me to stay. “Please call.”

  I’m mid-sip, lifting couch cushions and over-turning wastebaskets; my interests officially piqued, looking for the remote. I haven’t turned the television on in months.

  Next message. Received Sunday at two-twenty-two a.m.

  It’s Dad. He’s got more of the same to say. “God damn you, why haven’t you called us?” His breathing is hard and labored. “Your mother…she’s…something’s wrong…I think it was Mrs. Clark…” There’s commotion in the background, but I can’t decipher it over his wet, lungs-filling-with-water breathing. Until I hear the screaming. It could just be the television. “We’re coming over. They’re saying something about evacuation…can’t make up their goddamn minds…” the line goes.

  I kick over the coffee table like it’s actually going to help before trudging over to the television itself and clicking it on manually.

  Static.

  On every channel.

  I haven’t paid my cable bill since I put all my money on that dice game those college punks play in the basement of The Salty Grog every Wednesday at 4 a.m. That little shit Stevenson told me he was rolling loaded dice, and how many times do you have a run at a sure thing?

  He skipped town, and I passed out in a gutter somewhere before I could catch up to him.

  The cable bill was the first thing to go after that.

  Next message. Received Sunday at two-twenty-six a.m.

  “Hey. It’s me. Listen. Where are you? Are you leaving? Oh, God. I just need…I just…I’m so scared. Look…” there are tears. Too many tears. I can’t make out what she’s saying next. And the line goes.

  Lines are always going.

  My heart stalls. Stops. Starts again.

  To hear this message again, press eight.

  I scramble for the number eight on the keypad. I can’t remember where the hell it is.

  “Hey. It’s me. Listen. Where are you? Are you leaving? I just need…I just…I’m so scared. Look…”

  I hang up; dial. Thoughts frantic. My heart sweating, and stomach twisted in the worst kind of knots.

  I am forwarded straight to voicemail.

  Hi. You’ve reached Valerie Anderson. You know what to do.

  Beep.

  Contrary to your popular assumption here, I do not, Valerie, know what to do at all. Enlighten me.

  I look back outside at the birds, at the static on the television, and hang up, deciding to play it cool. I’ll just drive by her house, make sure everything is okay.

  I grab my jacket. I’m out the door, and there’s a wolf in the hallway.

  3

  SIMPLY A SIDE EFFECT OF THE INSOMNIA

  A wolf. In the hall.

  Elucidation escapes me. The aforementioned statement speaks for itself.

  At first it’s just a dog, right, because, well, a wolf? Please. Someone must have let his or her dog out and forgotten about the stupid mutt. The Allens down the hall, they’ve got a dog. A monster of a thing. Big as a house. Seriously. So I’m thinking, Bernie is out, again.

  Not that I’m scared of dogs or anything.

  Russell is allergic to everything from gluten to horses. Fearing for his life, our folks never brought any sort of loveable creature around the house for us to cherish. As a result, I’ve never been fond of animals, nor had the chance to feel compassion for them.

  Not for Bernie.

  Not for wolves.

  Speaking of wolves, imagine my complete and utter surprise.

  And I’m thinking, the zoo. This animal must have escaped from the zoo. The one thing this town has going for it is a half-decent acre of betrayed and caged animals. Then I’m thinking, “No sudden movements,” because the last movie I watched with animals on the loose was Jurassic Park. I swear to Christ I count three hundred razor sharp teeth all the way from here, and the thing is still fifty feet down the hall. All right. I get it. I’m impressed. Now shoo.

  I have yet to close my door. My hand remains on the knob, my grip coming loose, the brass lubricated with perspiration. I’m making movements so minimal you’d have to observe me under a microscope to see the distance I’m traveling back into the apartment.

  My adversary remains steadfast. I consider the possibility I’m being hunted. The beast’s sides flex in, flex out, like he’s breathing heavy after a hard and devious escape from the local zookeeper’s clutches.

  Maybe, just maybe, this is simply a side effect of the insomnia.

  I blink a few times over and over, and with each shudder of my eyelids the wolf appears ever closer. It’s as though he’s moving beneath strobe lights. I put the palms of my hands to my eyes, pressing them into the back of my head—as deep into the sockets as they’ll go without squashing—and I wish the monster away, only to find my vision has doubled, and he’s closer than ever before when everything comes back into focus. The hallway seems to bend and tilt as if I’m on a boat lost at sea. The wolf has replicated itself, and instead of reuniting into one as my eyes correct themselves, his halves grow apart.

  Either my vision is getting worse inside this nightmare, or my furry friend isn’t alone.

  I hear footsteps behind me, and for a moment, just a moment, I believe everything is okay. The zookeepers or animal control have arrived, and th
ey’ll scold me for not staying indoors as was probably instructed, but I didn’t know because I don’t have cable and of course that’s what my parents were talking about on the phone with all their concern about staying inside. I turn to greet my rescuers and see someone else has, indeed, joined the party. Another wolf emerges from the stairwell at the end of the hall like he’s been living here all along, and I’m the one who doesn’t belong.

  Two seconds, tops, I’m back in the apartment. The wolves make their move. I slam the door, and a dull thud hits the other side. A man with less wisdom would simply assume a guest has arrived and answer. I spin the locks fifty-seven different directions just in case the damn dogs learned how to turn a knob or disengage a dead bolt. I jam a chair beneath the handle, wondering where the rest of the pack might be residing. I have no recollection regarding the duration of time I stood dumbfounded with the door open. Another wolf could have snuck right by me, now waiting patiently in the bedroom, lights off, under the covers and big teeth all the better to eat me with.

  I move to the bathroom with educated steps, careful not to make noise. I rap on the wall with fingertips, whispering, “Leslie! Are you there? Do not go outside,” I say. “Do not go outside. There’s a fucking wolf in the hall.”

  Leslie isn’t much for profanity. I think she goes to church on Sundays. But with all due respect, there’s a critical degree of seriousness between a wolf in the hall and a fucking wolf in the hall, and I’d hate for her to think there’s just a wolf in the hall, like it’s no big deal at all.

  Hours pass. Maybe days. I don’t recognize my surroundings. I must have fallen asleep because my back hurts like hell, and I can’t feel my ass. I’m hugging the toilet like it’s the twenty-fifth hour of my twenty-first birthday.

  I don’t…feel drunk.

  My brain is hazy with the remnants of dreams of wolves and debilitating loneliness. I stand, jeans bunched uncomfortably high into my crotch, my t-shirt caught between my armpits and contorted like I got dressed in the dark.

  My muscles have turned to wood and I stumble, planting the side of my face into a wall I’m all too familiar with. This is a good indicator I’ve been here before. The voice of recognition tells me I’m in my own bathroom.

  Despite the difficulty of using my body, I feel rested for the first time in weeks. Nightmare-induced sleep is better than no sleep at all.

  I’ve got a mouth that tastes like I’ve been using pennies as breath mints. I spit thick, dark clots of red and black into the sink. I smile, but I’m not laughing. Two of my bicuspids are still missing.

  I twist myself out of my shirt, uncomfortably wet with sweat, and leave it behind on the bathroom floor. Adjusting my pants, I take my cell phone from the pocket. No new messages, but the date reads Wednesday just as it did in my nightmare.

  My own personal Groundhog Day.

  The sun has set my bedroom ablaze. I use my forearm to block out the light, and feel my way into the living room, where I’ve left the shades drawn shut. I have ample opportunity here to allow my eyes to readjust to humanity, and figure out where I last put my teeth.

  There’s a chair jammed up beneath the door.

  It takes an hour for me to work up the courage to venture back outside. In the meantime, I pour myself a bowl of cereal and wash it down with a beer, attempt to check my e-mail but the Internet is down, and find what smells like a clean shirt crammed between my bed and the wall. Putting it on makes me feel better about myself. It’s a blue button-down, a bit wrinkled. I put my nose in it and swear I can still smell Valerie and her fifty-three dollar shampoo. I think she bought me this shirt on a Valentine’s Day when we couldn’t last twelve minutes without seeing each other, calling, or touching. Any absence of her in my life produced a pit in my stomach large enough to swallow this planet whole. And when she finally left for good, that pit devoured me but left the world intact. If you’ve ever come home to find an envelope on your kitchen table with a set of keys and a note that reads with the poetic teenage proficiency of a Dashboard Confessional song, then you know the terminally ill, intolerable existence of which I speak. If we’d been living in Los Angeles, I could understand. But you can’t leave someone that way in a Midwest town like this. Here, you risk a meeting just going to the mailbox.

  I still have that note. I hold a lighter up to it once a week.

  I sit on the floor in front of the door, inspecting the chair, trying to come up with a rational explanation as to why it would be there. Sleepwalking is about the best thing I can come up with. I can’t bring myself to listen to my messages; the voices of my mother and father still play themselves with perfect clarity in my head. I’m doing a fine job convincing myself I’m still dreaming. But what of Valerie? And my parents? What if they’re really in trouble? When I remove the chair and open the door, what I find next isn’t as dangerous as a rabid wolf escaped from the zoo with the potential ability to open doors, but it’s enough to warrant the fact that this is turning out to be one shit day.

  4

  A PERFECTLY GOOD DAY BEFORE BEING DEAD

  I find the body in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, slumped over and sleeping. Mauled by a wolf? There seems to be a few sporadic bruises on his neck, like broken blood vessels, but I’m no coroner. In fact, one could argue he was having a particularly perfect day before being dead.

  And me, being the good-natured-every-day-Christian-human-being that I am, I nudge him with my boot. You know, just to be certain. When his head rolls from the left to the right like he’s just working out the kinks, and his bloodshot eyes pierce my soul with an intensity straight out of hell, I scream. It’s more of an automatic regurgitation of repulsion, like finding a spider crawling up your arm. A damsel in distress sort of thing, I’m ashamed to clarify.

  “Hello?” I call out in my best attempt at keeping my voice steady. “Someone! Help!” Standard protocol for this sort of thing, really. When it appears that no one seems to be coming to my aid—his aid—I take a moment to gather myself, collect my thoughts.

  In no particular order, they go something like this: Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  I recognize the poor fellow as Mr. Phelps from down the hall, even though he’s gone gray enough to be an apparition. A split, brown bag of groceries lay scattered about his person: celery, apples, bread, a dozen eggs now scrambled, and a half-gallon of spilled milk now curdled, which, along with his ghostly jowls, putrid odor, and skin color, leads me to believe he’s been down on his luck for quite some time.

  I decide this is the appropriate time to vomit. I do so, officially tampering with evidence. How long does it take for a body to decompose? I try to recall the last time I caught an episode of CSI. I’m regretting that dice game more and more every hour.

  Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

  Go to Mr. Phelps’s apartment and get Mrs. Phelps.

  That won’t end well. I’ve never been very good at delivering bad news. I backed over my neighbor’s cat, Sampson, when I was eighteen. I paced around the driveway for nine hours and officially took up smoking before I finally worked up the courage to knock on their front door and deliver the news. And this here, this is like, twice as bad.

  He’s clearly been dead for more than a day. Why is his body still here?

  Hands in pockets, I break some eggshells beneath my boots.

  I’ve never had much luck when it comes to animals.

  I push the front door open, and three gazelles run across the street into Mrs. Beck’s front lawn to terrorize her azaleas.

  The sun shines in a cloudless, pulsating blue sky, bouncing off the windshield of Mr. Waterman’s vintage Lamborghini next door. The car sparkles as if it’s just come off the showroom floor, nearly blinding me. The smell of fresh cut grass lingers in the air. Squirrels go about their jittery, squirrely business, scattering in every direction at once. There are birds everywhere. Pecking at the grass, chirping. None of them taking off, flying far and away upon my emergence into their world.


  An abandoned newspaper scratches its way across the road.

  Summer is here, but no one seems to be enjoying it.

  My head doesn’t itch, but I scratch through my hair to give myself something to do. The world sits devastatingly still. There’s a scary sort of silence begging to be heard this morning.

  The gazelles graze the grass and flowerbeds of Mrs. Beck’s yard, a widow with no children and no cats and nothing better to do but tend to the azaleas and roses and snapdragons that decorate her lawn. Gazelles. Of course. How normal. How do I know they’re gazelles? Because there’s a fucking wolf in the hallway, Leslie never showed up this morning, my toes are still burning, and Mr. Phelps is dead and gone in the foyer. I watch, helpless, as the three animals destroy everything Mrs. Beck spent all season perfecting before looking back at Mr. Phelps, believing I’ve been sorely mistaken and I am going to see him stand up, brush off his trousers and mumble about how he’s just taken a bit of a spill, and can I help him with the mess. But he’s just as dead as he was twelve seconds ago.

  Needing to phone the police, check on Valerie, and prevent a nervous breakdown, I take my phone from my pocket and dial 911, practicing basic evasive maneuvers against the wolves. I wander around back, wondering what exactly I am going to tell our town’s finest protectors of the law that won’t make me sound stark raving mad. It is here I find my other neighbor, Roger, passed out drunk in the shrubbery behind the complex. I don’t normally find him here before noon, but last night must have been one hell of a bender. I’ve never been so thankful for his alcoholism. Done. Forgiven. For all the times he’s knocked on my door at four a.m. asking after a Mr. Habernaro. Asking to borrow a hammer and nails. A teakettle. Seven lampshades and a gun. Black socks with gold toes. Nail clippers and a thermometer.

  I put the phone back in my pocket, shouting his name before getting too close. A necessary precaution. A murder of crows escapes with pristine formation from a nearby tree, calling to each other or maybe to me as they drop to the ground to take rest, rather than taking flight into the heavens. Waking Roger from a self-inflicted, alcohol-induced slumber with a vigorous shake or sudden startling is your own funeral. Unlike every other properly intoxicated adult, Roger’s hangovers snap him to attention like he’s straight out of boot camp, and his upper extremities start swinging as if he’s still caught up in the bar fight that ended his night.