The Nameless Dark: A Collection, page 5
Back at the wagon, Alden splashed water into the tank from inside the pool. It took several minutes. Realizing the ruckus he was making, Alden paused, expecting the zoo’s gross security guard to come running, buttoning up his pants. But no one came. Certainly the overnight guards were just around the corner. But they weren’t. Nothing seemed to be moving at all anywhere on the grounds. Not a chirp or a hoot or a howl. Just the gentle lapping of the empty pool. Empty except for Tubby.
After waiting for a bit longer in that weird silence, just to make sure, Alden continued splashing water into the aquarium, until it was adequately filled, then submerged under the water, feeling around for Tubby. He found him exactly where he was supposed to be, and he gripped the octopus with both hands. Alden broke the surface, sputtering out fishy tasting salt water, and held Tubby aloft like a chosen son.
“We’re meant to be,” Alden cried, his voice echoing back from the cement around him.
Balancing Tubby on the back of his neck, Alden awkwardly, painfully, climbed out of the pool, and slid down to the ground below, scraping the skin on his stomach where it bulged out from his waistband. Alden normally would have thought about the rash he was bound to get, and plan for the treatment of it, but today his mind was soaring above his battered body.
He could barely stop the quavering of his hands as he plopped the octopus back into the aquarium, and within minutes, he was out of the zoo, pulling Tubby to freedom in the back of the Rodeo Flyer, a good hour before the first of the day staff would arrive to find nothing living inside the zoo—aquatic, animal, human or otherwise. Just water on the floor. Everywhere, water on the floor. Just like in the pet store.
Alden made it back to the apartment building two hours later just as the neighborhood was waking up and the gulls took to the air to circle the boxes and valleys of their daytime benefactors. He had walked the whole way, not even feeling the soreness in his limbs or the chafing between his legs as his clothing dried. He told stories to Tubby the whole way back. Tubby was a good listener. Taking it all in, wise as a sage.
But while he was talking, his mind was piecing together the reality of the situation in which he now found himself, based on the evidence of the last two days. Tubby was special, to be sure. He could do things nothing else could. Had done things nothing else could. He had a destiny. And it seemed, for the very first time, so did Alden. The two were connected now. They were family.
As the boy approached the front stoop, he stopped, his brain jammed loosely back into his body by the sight of the motorcycle parked at the curb. He ached, felt the blood pooling in his shoes. Felt the blisters filling up on his wagon hand. Most painful of all, though, was the reality of his living situation, which bolted his mind tight inside his skull.
He couldn’t go back in there, with that Uncle setting up shop. They’d never let Tubby stay. Alden couldn’t let Uncle Duane stay.
Then again, he could take Tubby inside. Hide him in the tub overnight. The next day, Uncle Duane would be gone, just like in the pet shop. Just like at the zoo. This most repugnant of all Uncles would be gone forever, but then so would his mother. Alden didn’t want to think about that, even if it meant never seeing Uncle Duane again. He only had one mother, and she only had one son. Mutual orphans, fitting together like spoons laying on a bed late at night. If he kept Tubby inside the apartment overnight, he might be gone in the morning, too. Although that hadn’t happened at the zoo. Was that just an oversight? Had he been missed? Was Tubby planning on doing what he had done to all the rest when Alden woke up?
Alden bent down to gaze at Tubby, who rocked gently with the cloudy zoo water in the cracked aquarium that was leaking into the wagon. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you, boy?” The octopus was predictably quiet on the subject. Classic Tubby.
Finding himself in quite the pickle, Alden decided to sit on the stoop and think. Through his numerous—and always brief—stints taking care of a zoological menagerie plucked from an immeasurable number of vacant lots, yards, and stretches of desert, the boy understood that pet ownership brought its own set of challenges and unique responsibilities not understood by those sadly unacquainted with pet ownership. Still, he wasn’t prepared for such an arduous decision on what to do with the crawly creature resting in the back of his Rodeo Flyer. He couldn’t just dump him off somewhere. He wouldn’t. The octopus was in his care now, and he was therefore bonded to Tubby.
Alden’s ruminations were interrupted by the familiar cackle of the Beach Bums, back once again in their uniforms of tank tops and nylon shorts, yanking down heavily on the towels wrapped around each neck. It was the last day of summer vacation, and they were keen to get in one more day of sand and salt water and shoreline harassment, befitting their name and reputation. The four of them—Tall Boy, Echo Boy, and the Other Two— were across the street, and hadn’t seen Alden yet. Today, he was hoping that they did. Today, he was hoping that they’d come over to his side of the street. Maybe he could get them alone. Alone with him and Tubby. See how the night went. He’d promise things to make them stay. It worked for the man upstairs, so why not these four brutes? But they were engaged in tormenting two skinny kids unfortunate enough to live on the other side of the street, one wearing glasses underneath a tall, unruly brown afro, the other with tiny, beady eyes, buck teeth, and a squared-off head. They smacked the afro kid across the back of the head, and his glasses flew off and broke on the sidewalk. The Beach Bums howled in delight.
“Psst.” The man from upstairs stood just inside the door to the building, motioning to Alden. He pointed up with his finger, to the floor above, and smiled.
Alden waved him off irritably. “Later.” He returned his attention to the Beach Bums, who had their fill of local pestering and were now clearly fulfilling their namesake, heading toward the shoreline the next neighborhood over.
“Hey.” Alden refused to turn around. He now knew the next step in his destiny. The man from upstairs’ face darkened, twisting into something hideous and hateful as he moved back into the darkness and climbed the stairs, where he’d wait.
The boy didn’t see any of this, nor would he have dwelled on it if he did. It was time to move again.
The Beach Bums ran across the street, blocking traffic in a complete disregard of the law. Tall Boy shoved Echo Boy’s face, spit on the ground. “Last one to the beach is a rotten egg!”
Alden got to his feet and bent down over the aquarium. “You ready for a swim, boy?”
Tubby refused to answer, but it didn’t matter. Alden knew what Tubby wanted to do. Knew their shared destiny. Pinewood disappeared in the rearview.
Picking up the wagon handle, Alden pulled Tubby down the sidewalk, the cheap wheels protesting, leaving a trail of water in his wake that collected in pools on the cement.
At the end of the block, Alden turned right, following the route of the Beach Bums, heading toward the beach, the ocean, while gulls circled overhead.
The Screamer
It had been a week since Boyd first heard the scream, and after that, nothing had been the same.
At least it seemed like a week. It was hard to tell, shut up as he was inside an empty apartment that creaked and popped with awful intent, like a stiff hand ready to make a fist and squash what remained. Time outside had stopped, while things moved within the walls, on the roof, under the floors. Slithering veins and twitching tendons. Scuttling feet. He had brought the scream home with him, and it drove out everything alive. All that was left shifted and shook, waiting to fall to the dust or launch into the sky that always loomed yellowish gray and starless.
In Los Angeles, the stars were below. Everything above was just a poorly lit backdrop.
There were two of them here, before the scream—three, if you count the bunny. But even then the apartment was vacant, lost within a housing complex cowering in the rent-controlled backlot of dirty Downtown. The apartment had more room now, and the fist wanted to close before the last of them slipped away. Leave no one to whisper the tale.
Boyd had to get out, had to get back to Century City. He needed to hear the scream one more time, because he finally knew what it meant.
Just another hour. As soon as the sun would allow, he’d escape this tomb and make it in time to hear the last stanza before the stage went black.
Boyd’s aging Pontiac sputtered, hacking to life with an exhale of bluish smoke sure to piss off his granola neighbors nuzzling their exotic morning blend. He looked up at the balcony of his third floor apartment, wondering if she’d be there to see him off, like stalwart wives lining the docks back in the good old days. All he found were dried vines clinging to the rusted railing. She never waved to him anymore. Romantic notions died with the mystery.
Boyd gave the four banger some gas. The Detroit engine block oscillated dangerously on its shoddy frame. It was just a matter of time before this bullshit car broke down, and then he’d be sentenced to the bus. Urine soaked seats and squirming transients. The claustrophobic crush of musty bodies and sewer breath and windows that only cracked a few inches. Boyd put his head on the wheel, tasting last night’s Jameson, and reached into his messenger bag. Forget quitting. Forget two. It was going to be a three cigarette ride, for sure. He lit up, sucked in and held it in his lungs. It was the burn he would miss the most.
The car chugged away from the curb and onto the rain slicked streets of Echo Park, greeted by a circle of vomit outside the local hipster haunt. The sort of bar that didn’t have a sign, because proper promotion was so passé. It never rained enough to clean the city. People just stepped over the mess and continued on, texting like they were writing the next Great American novel 140 characters at a time.
Boyd rolled down his window, exchanging cigarette smoke for a dank carpet of exhaust. He moved through the traffic on autopilot, planning his caseload for the day while flipping back and forth from NPR and classic rock stations, looking for anything interesting. He found a mournful song on the forgotten end of the dial, occupied by pirate radio and Rowland S. Howard. “I’m soaring through outer space… There’s no better place to be.”
The lyrics faded to a murmur as Boyd gazed sightlessly out his windshield. Eclectic boutiques, tattoo shops, and taco stands, all fighting to define the neighborhood for whichever magazine was doing the write-up that month. Los Angeles always looked better through the lens of a camera, but it really didn’t matter to Boyd. He didn’t see any of it anymore. He’d gone blind from navigating the same route five days a week, and sometimes a sixth, when college football wasn’t in season. He was a rat, racing toward a mirage of overpriced cheese, hoping to make it to the branch office on the swankier side of town, where you could actually smell the ocean. He needed those negative ions and coastal gloom. Blue skies year-round could drive a transplant insane. “No better place to be—”
Without warning, a flatbed truck over-laden with shopping carts shot out of an alley and cut in front of Boyd. He kicked his brakes, swerved, and punched the horn. It didn’t work, and he was left bashing his steering column while the truck puttered away without reproach. No honk. No satisfaction. A ropey arm cartooned with cheap prison tats gave him the thumbs up from the driver’s side. Boyd flipped off the disappearing taillights, cursing shitty ink and flatbeds everywhere. Definitely a four smoke trip.
Boyd turned off of Sunset on the east end of Hollywood, favoring less trafficked side streets as he continued west. The passel of cars was just going to accordion the closer he came to the sea. Along a neighborhood block of stucco housing and barred windows near Santa Monica Boulevard, two tall, wiry transvestite prostitutes—real go-getters, considering the hour—clattered over the gummy sidewalks, the night shift bleeding into the morning as they bled into their heels. Gaunt faces scanned every slowing car, looking for another trick. A last dip to carry them through the harsh sunlight into the dope sick dusk, just to do it all over again. One of them whistled at Boyd. They made eye contact. Never lock eyes with anyone who calls the streets home. The tranny grabbed his crotch and yelled something foul and unintelligible. Boyd sped up, almost running over a shapeless woman bound to a wheelchair crossing the intersection. She said nothing.
Boyd turned up the radio and lowered his rear view mirror.
Back into the teeth of the main drag and cresting Vermont Avenue, Boyd approached Mid Wilshire, which was once a glittering area favored by the Golden Age of Hollywood elite. Now, it was just scarred wallpaper covered over by the capitalistic creep of Korea Town. Swatches of grand old Tudor homes broke up long expanses of unreadable neon atop BBQ joints, pool halls, and insurance companies. At every corner, young K-Towners in Gucci shades reclined low in their German cars, blasting house music and yammering into cell phones, while grandparents strolled the sidewalks, bewildered by this weird new world from under wide-brimmed visors.
Lights changed, as did the scenery. Vermont turned to Pico, then Olympic. The landscape blossomed from grit to green, Indo-Asian to Hebrew and Arabic, until Boyd pierced the invisible radius of Century City, a carefully planned municipal workspace on the pampered backside of Beverly Hills.
Century City’s four block by four block stamp of white collar purgatory was lined by rows of featureless, uninteresting skyscrapers filled with featureless, uninteresting people. The bland, 9 to 5 little brother of far funkier Downtown. Similar buildings sprouted up in regular patterns, enveloping the celebrity-heavy shopping mall at the heart of it all. In the latest round of the never-ending phallus measuring contest between the five major movie studios, construction on a new edifice—one to dwarf all the rest—had commenced on Avenue of the Stars last year, but was abandoned when the economy went tits a few months back. Now, a half-formed shell reached 900 feet into the air, like the bones of a long-dead dinosaur bleaching in the sun. A massive crane with its precariously outstretched arm stood guard on the east side, just in case the call came to finish. Sometimes it’s just cheaper to walk away.
The twin towers on Olympic marked the southwest border. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was filmed here, as Century City—hailed “The City of the Future” —was so advanced for its time back in the optimistic 70’s. Now it just looked bored, like a middle-aged woman who cut her hair into a Q-tip and slid into oatmeal frumpiness for the rest of her life.
Streets were kept clean. No riff raff. No flavor. No talking monkey handing out weapons to other talking monkeys. Lawyerville wouldn’t have it any other way. The place overflowed during office hours, then became a ghost town after 6 pm. Even the lone tavern closed by 9. Century City wasn’t about aesthetics or nightlife, it was about making money, and it did so in large, obscene stacks, thanks to drones like Boyd, working for less educated but savvier superiors who had the balls to stake their claim, back when the West was still wild.
Nearing Constellation Avenue, Boyd’s building came into view. Twenty-eight tastefully lit floors of steel and glass encased in a white lattice of cement. There were rollers in the foundation for when the Big One hit. The Big One was long overdue, Channel 7 promised. The locals couldn’t care less.
At the entrance driveway, a street repair crew stood around watching a man with wrap-around shades and a handlebar moustache, leaning his belly into a whumping jackhammer, silently critiquing his technique. Boyd nodded at one of them, sharing that put-upon look of two worker bees struggling inside the hive.
He flicked his card in front of the electric eye and burrowed down into the parking garage that smelled of pan-seared garlic from the first floor restaurant. The Pontiac pulled in behind Neil’s car, a sunburst orange convertible Volkswagon Cabrio. The license plate read NEILIST, and was surrounded by Leftie stickers supporting a number of vague yet intensely earnest causes. Neil was the kind of guy who believed the moon landing wasn’t just faked, it was a live stage show funded by the Illuminati. Neil believed a lot of crazy shit.
Boyd hopped out of his car, dashed to the elevator, and stepped in just as the doors were closing. He seemed to arrive just a bit later each day.
Inside, he punched the twelfth floor button, rested against the mirrored wall and faced front, like any right thinking person would. The other occupant, a short man, was gearing up for conversation. He was one of those guys. Feeling the last shred of his personal space invaded, Boyd looked over. The little man smiled.
“Fuck a Monday, am I right?” the man announced, as if uttering a profundity on par with Plato. He was ridiculous, with slicked-back hair and a shiny new suit. Large, green and white wing tips, polished to a wicked sheen. Like the Lollipop Guild sent out their best-dressed representative into the workforce. Who wore wing tips these days?
“Yep, they’re for the birds,” Boyd muttered, concentrating on the ticking floor count. The man laughed, far too loudly. Boyd regretted saying anything.
Just then, the lights dimmed and the car shuddered, halting their ascent. The silence was thick, in that peculiar way when two strangers stood too close.
“Earthquake?” the man asked, his voice gaining an octave.
“Brown out, maybe,” Boyd offered. The elevator wasn’t moving. The guts of the building went quiet. Boyd almost hoped the cramped box would plunge to the basement instead of locking him up with this clown.
The walls trembled, and the car began to climb again,
“Fucking politicians,” breathed the diminutive fellow, adjusting his cape of Napoleonic machismo. The elevator dinged.
“Check you later, guy,” the little man said, a wink and finger pistol in his voice. Boyd was gone before the doors slid back together.
At exactly 9:14, Boyd trudged the path least traveled by his boss, past file cabinets and chatty cubicles to his office that was still cold from the weekend. Two tall windows looked out at a carbon copy building next door. The limited view was his reward for dumping a decade of his waking life into the firm. He sat down at his desk, fired up his computer, and waited for the day to end.
