Aberrant: 2011 - King Felix I

[King Felix]

The Gnostic took another draw on his can of Budweiser and then set it on my kitchen table. He kept his hand around it, loosely, and he let out his breath in a short puff. It was late on a weeknight, and he had dropped in unannounced. Backjack was with him, but he didn't have a drink. I hadn't offered either of them a beer, but The Gnostic had gotten one from my refrigerator before I could stop him. Even if I had wanted to, he carried too much momentum to stop. In any case, The Gnostic sat directly across from me in my cramped breakfast nook, and Backjack was in the corner seat, facing the doorway to the living room.

You always let Backjack have the seat which faces the door. It's his rule. He doesn't like having to remind me of it.

"How's Caroline?" The Gnostic asked into the awkward silence.

Caroline was my ex-girlfriend. I hadn't seen much of her since my theophany, almost two months ago now. I remember the last time we talked, which was only two weeks ago. We talked, if you want to call it that, through the closed door of her apartment. I stood in the corridor on a pizza box, trying not to notice the stench of urine which filled the building. I stood on the pizza box because it was the cleanest-looking piece of trash in the hallway. I always wore boots to visit Caroline, because the carpet in the common areas of her building would ruin tennis shoes. Besides which, I didn't want a chunk of glass or some smackhead's used needle through my sole. Backjack was there too. He leaned against the opposite wall with his arms crossed. He looked bored, but he didn't complain.

"Please open the door," I asked her, doing my best to project a reasonable tone of voice while speaking loudly enough to be heard through the closed door. Despite my need to be heard, I also wanted to avoid sharing too much of our conversation with her neighbors, so it was an awkward and embarassing balancing act trying to accommodate the the two contrary needs. "No catches, no strings. I talk, you talk, I leave, the end. In, out, fifteen minutes, tops."

"Harold, go away," she shouted, her voice rising. I could tell by her tone that she was not listening to reason anymore, and that she would simply repeat herself until I had left. I'd been in this conversation, again if you want to call it that, a few times already.

"You're wasting your time," Backjack muttered. "Let's go man."

"Five minutes," I countered, thumping the door and rattling the locked doorknob, "That's all."

"I'm calling the cops now!" Caroline shouted.

I looked at Backjack. He looked back at me and shrugged without uncrossing his arms.

"You live in a ghetto," I told Caroline's door, "They'll be here in what, an hour?"

From inside the apartment I could hear the sound of her telephone being set back into the charger.

"We're through, Harold," Caroline said more quietly after a long pause. I could tell that she had come to the other side of the door. "I can't do this anymore," she whimpered, her voice heavy with fatigue. "You need help."

I deferred my rejoinder temporarily, as the door to the adjacent apartment had opened. A heavy-set man, maybe twenty, in a hooded sweatshirt and droopy pants approached me. He carried menace in his stride, and I knew that he was coming to me, not to go to the stairwell behind me.

"Fuck off whitey," he said without inflection. It was clear that this phrase was a regular feature of his vocabulary and that he'd not selected it with any particular care. "You don't need be here." He didn't slow down as he came at me, and I was sure that the remainder of the distance would be crossed with a fist or a blunt object. I took a step backward, keeping my balance as a bag full of fast food leavings crunched under my boot with a disgusting mix of squishing foodstuffs and crackling styrofoam.

Backjack stepped away from the wall toward the homeboy, as subtly as a shadow. With a gracefulness that I could only begin to describe, he extended his right arm and caught homeboy by the left shoulder, and spun him face-first into the wall with one fluid shove. Homeboy didn't stay put for long, though.

"Motherfucker," Homeboy spat. He lunged at Backjack from a crouch, and Backjack just stepped out of the way, like a matador would. He caught homeboy by the shoulders and helped him along, hurling him into the other wall. This time homeboy stuck in place briefly, before slumping to the floor and coming to rest on a black Hefty bag full of trash. There was a new hole in the sheetrock wall, about a foot across.

"Let's go, we're starting to draw attention," Backjack said to me matter-of-factly. He ignored homeboy.

I looked at Caroline's door one more time, and then turned back to Backjack.

"Yeah, alright," I agreed. We'd made enough of a mess of things for one night.

"Caroline's okay, I guess," I replied to The Gnostic.

Backjack smirked, but he didn't say anything. He never talked much.