Paul Albano
Past midnight, in the last stretch of night before dawn, five of us sit cramped and perspiring in a cab not moving toward the Underground Laundromat. Next to me is Janna, a French fashion student exchanged for a different French fashion student in what amounted to a fair but entirely not worth-the-time-nor-effort trade. She adjusts her handmade corset and bats her eyelashes which are elongated and pastel colored. Next to her is Chris, a bald pseudo-Tibetan monk in the states to sell his monastery's self-brewed lager to raise money for more 'Free Tibet' bumper stickers. Next to him is Eddie, a Juilliard-trained actor who rose to just above complete anonymity by playing a paste-eating buffoon in series of made for public-access TV movies about a guy and his idiot friend. Next to him is Mugs, a fifteen-year-old with a black apron tied around his neck like a cape. Next to him is the driver's side rear door made on 06/08/87 and certified by General Motors Quality Control Inspector 13746. Next to that is the world.
Through the windshield a bike race runs through downtown. The cab is uncomfortable but sanitized and scented like a morgue. The seats are covered in butcher paper and a keypad is embedded in the back of the drivers' side headrest. Janna nudges my ribcage while she leans forward to zipper and re-zipper her high-heeled boots. Chris prays for the ability to do any of the cool things other monks can do like levitate or kill leopards with stones. Eddie method-acts by swallowing a glue stick. Mugs attempts to imitate Bela Lugosi and repeats 'I never drink…wine' like a tape-loop without beginning or end. The sun burns through hydrogen reserves. Dean Martin's skeletal remains lie unmoving inside a maggot infested coffin.
The cyclists don't stop. Spandex waves surge aerodynamically down Halsted. I choke back the fear that his may not be a road course race, but rather a lap race with us—Janna, Chris, Eddie, Mugs and myself and probably the cab driver if you want to count him too—all trapped in the midway, caught waiting for an end that won't come.
Janna empties a pouch of yagé on a giant cardboard check she was awarded after winning an LPGA tour event, and divides it into five frayed rows with her bus pass. Mugs tries to talk us out of it, but abandons his argument halfway through and asks the cab driver to blast the air conditioner so his cape will flutter. We all take turns snorting from the memo line. I go last. The yagé wasn't boiled so it's ineffective, but there's a lot of coughing and the smell of stagnant rainwater is overwhelming.
The cyclists continue. A crowd begins to form.
Inside, the cab is saturated with cacophonous sounds. Janna sings about staircases from Fiddler on the Roof, swaying between Chris and I. Chris explains to Eddie about the Eightfold Path, but he can only remember the one about right intention. Eddie is reciting Hamlet from memory, with overly dramatized hand gestures. Mugs is laughing hysterically and shouting, "I want to suck your blood," except he's pronouncing the 'w' like a 'v' and his voice is muffled because he's biting his own forearm and sometimes losing his breath when he breaks through the skin.
I get a call from my phrenologist, Dr. Santana. The title is honorary. Despondent shrieks, gargling, and the buzzing crackle of a bone saw emanate from the background. I ask if I still have the dolichocephaly of a timorous vagabond, then about the weather of the building he's inside. Dr. Santana says he can't hear me over his consultation. Duct tape is peeled, ripped, and everything but the bone saw is muffled. I repeat my questions. Dr. Santana says yes, not raining and temperate but damp, and that he made a summoning error with his phone and has no wish to speak to me.
Eddie tilts his head and whispers that Ophelia is kindeth of being a bitcheth. Janna stares into a makeup container with a photograph of herself taped over the mirror. Chris holds a thin-bristled brush and touches up the orange robe he painted over his bare chest. Mugs pokes Eddie in the shoulder and asks if his teeth are bloodstained yet. The cab driver rolls up two copies of Boy's Life and drums "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" on the steering wheel and center console. He guesses badly at the lyrics and no one joins in. The bike race persists, its rhythm and density unvarying. I withdraw my pocket-watch and tap the glass face. None of the hands move, but I can feel the seconds expire.
Outside my window, past the bus land and sidewalk, a vomiting teenager spasms across the ledge of balcony; a lovelorn couple walks hand-in-hand, their features softened by glowing piles of burning trash; a decrepit woman, cragged and shawled, fondles a homeless man in front of an opera house; and a drifter straddles the roof of a conversion van, blasting trance music while he glides two glowsticks balletically through the night; and I long to leave the cab and once again immerse myself in the world.
I suggest our exodus. Mugs mutters no and shakes his head for three unbroken minutes. The repetition is excruciating. When he finishes he asks if I find it a coincidence that vampire rhymes with sapphire. The way he said coincidence makes it clear that he does not. I turn to Chris for support, but he just furrows his brow and says it smells like perfumed dead people in here and there's a cigarette lighter and he asks why we would ever want to leave. Eddie is undecided. He's just killed somebody and keeps repeating 'mine bad Polonius, mine bad.' Janna offers me her mirror and asks if I've ever looked more fabulous. I have not.
The bike race continues. It's amassing more spectators. The tangle of riders grows more complex.
I displace all hope. Janna starts screaming and I turn to see Eddie holding a row of her eyelashes, sucking on the glue. 'Research babe, research,' he says, as he leans over to tear off the other. Janna stabs him with a golf tee, dappling Eddie's hands in the constellation Sagittarius. I am a Sagittarius. Chris imitates the repetitive blip of radar scanning to calm them down. He says this is a mantra. It's an inhuman screech performed with remarkable endurance. Mugs upturns his nose against the plexiglass and asks the cabbie if the driver's test has turns.
I capitalize on the increased tension and instruct everyone to follow my lead. They don't hear me at first, so I shout. The doors are still locked so I crawl out the window and tumble onto the asphalt bus lane. I stand slowly, in stages, when the throbbing subsides. All the cars on Randolph are at a standstill, idle, pulsating, covering the street with spectral exhaust. Chris, Janna and Mugs escape next. Eddie gets stuck in the window. I ask if he needs help. He says yeah, he's trying to get the fuck out of Denmark. We grab his arms and pull. He remains stuck. Mugs suggests he do crunches until his abdomen tightens enough for him to slide through the window. Chris bends down and tells Eddie to rub his bald head for luck. Janna jabs a pen down his throat until he convulses. The cab driver grows impatient. He wants his fare and for Eddie to decide whether he's in or out.
I tell everyone to look for help. Mugs points to a poster of a watercolor nude woman hanging in a gallery window and giggles. She's stepping into a clawfoot bathtub, her blurry foot losing cohesion as it sinks beneath the surface. It is captivating. Chris asks if his inability to remember seven folds of the eightfold path makes him a bad monk or less desirable bridge partner. Janna says that Golda Meir also had fake eyelashes and was still queen of something. Eddie says that nobody is going to believe him, but he was just attacked by pirates and forged a royal document. I try to find someone older than me to ask them what to do. I settle for a magician in a black suit and hat. He says he's still a magician's apprentice until the arsenic he's slowly adding to his master's morning coffee takes effect and that sometimes the only way out is through.
Together we all tug on Eddie while he begs us to stop and consider his love handles and vas deferens. We do not stop. Chris and Mugs yell. Eddie screams. Metal scrapes against metal as hinges bend against their manufactured intent. We keep pulling. Something in Eddie's shoulder tears and his arm slackens. The door is ripped from the cab and Eddie falls face first into the bus lane, shaking, sobbing, and convulsing.
We throw our hands up in celebration. The magician's apprentice removes a smoke bomb from his coat pocket, lights it, throws it on the ground, and after enough smoke accumulates he warns us that he's leaving and if we need him again he'll be somewhere behind this cloud. Witnesses peel off from the crowd and surround us. The cab driver exits. Mugs asks us to let him handle this. Chris says not to worry, our intentions were noble. Janna bows her head and presents the cab driver with his door handle. Mugs pulls a quarter from behind the cab driver's ear and asks if we're cool now like Marco Polo and the horse he walked to China with. The cab driver shakes his head. Eddie stands with his right arm limp and the passenger door still stuck around his waist. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern areth be wasteth mothafuckerrrrr!" he shouts.
Janna settles the fare and tips the cab driver with a sketch for a ruffled evening dress she designed. The cab driver thanks her but asks who's paying for the door. No one volunteers until Mugs volunteers Eddie. Eddie says he can't, he's busy putting the final touches on his plan to kill his cocksucking uncle Claudius. Chris shrugs and praises the virtue of non-intervention even when wronged. I am not asked. We all turn around to leave, hoping to find some respite in the bike race.
But the cab driver calls us back. He steps from the cab, unfurling himself to his statistically average height and removes his sunglasses. In the epicenter of his eyes I see malevolence and vibrant lavender contact lenses instead of basic human empathy and naturally colored irises. His glare drifts from the sketch to Janna, and he says he saw the exact same ruffled evening dress at Wal-Mart last fall—only then it was original. He curls his mouth into something that's not a smile and rips up the sketch, then tosses it on the ground and spits dramatically. Janna dry sobs. He looks at Eddie and says he may have been an actor at one point, but now he's just loud and his memory is unreliable and his TV show is worse than improv. To me, he says my mutton chops are antiquated and no sane or at least half-there person would ever leave his own home in a pink ascot. I correct him and say it's a watermelon cravat, but he shakes his head and claims it doesn't matter. He turns to Mugs—who's sitting on a floor mat in the middle of the street wearing his socks as mittens and drinking from a juice box—and just laughs. Finally, to Chris, who the cab driver sizes up slowly from sandals to sweat-beaded cranium, he says your monastery's beer is worse than wine.
Janna, Eddie, and I gasp. The witnesses gasp. Mugs explains that the juice box is cold.
For a moment, Chris handles it well. His lower lip retracts and his brow wrinkles. He appears contemplative. Then the wrinkling tightens into a knot and the capillaries inside his cheeks open, swelling his face to the color of mulberry. Chris steps silently but purposively to the front of the cab and balls his hand into a trembling fist. He thrusts it skyward, slamming it against the windshield again and again and again until it cracks into a spiderweb.
The witnesses start shouting for an intervention by God or a teacher or an umpire. One witness calls the secret police. They say they're already there, just hidden amongst the crowd. Chris moves from the cab to an SUV. The cab driver reaches into the glove compartment for a bottle of superglue, but Eddie gets there first and swallows it. He gently shakes the empty bottle and says this might be lethal and if he knew a Shakespeare line about the sorrow of the curtain closing on your last happy days he'd be saying it now. Janna finds a conspicuous police officer leaning against the truck of his squad car and tells him about the monastery beer thing. She asks for the cab driver to be arrested or castrated. The police officer pats her atop the head and says be still little one the world is beset with tragedies and his job is to protect the infinity bike race from them. Chris cracks the windshield of the SUV. His hand is bloodied and broken and leaking bone fragments. He grimaces in discomfort. The owner takes a picture with his cell phone and threatens to keep the red in Chris's eyes.
I walk away from the cab. There were plans for this evening. None of them have materialized. I amble along, winding between the boundless array of parked cars, through the churning mist. Most of the occupants are still inside, slumped in catatonia. Those who ventured outside wear black and hold candles. There is some light chanting. Beyond the waning glow of the city the night is dark like a void. It's summer and sticky. There is no breeze, only stillness and intermittent coughing.
When I reach the end of the block I turn away from the cyclists. The moon is somewhere overhead, but invisible. I can't decide if I should go back to the cab or grow more facial hair and begin anew. I wonder how Eddie will remove the door from his waist and how Janna can balance her budding fashion career and yagé dealing and how Mugs' fear of sideburns will affect his conversion to Hasidic Judaism and how Chris can ever go back to brewing beer like the wine comment never happened.
But I don't remain. Something pulls me back to the cab. I find the witnesses lying prone on the asphalt, shielding their eyes from a naked man in blue body paint hovering a few feet off the ground. Janna is snapping her fingers and exclaiming how fabulous it is that someone with authority finally arrived. Chris is smashing more windshields. Eddie asks the blue painted man for help with the cab door. The door falls from his waist and then Eddie asks for help with genital crabs. Mugs asks for a driver's license.
Navigating toward the floating man, I see Dr. Santana strolling down the street from the opposite direction. His hair is heavily highlighted and he's sheathing a thin sword into a cane. In his other hand is a human skull, still dripping. He offers pleasantries about the evening, then moves the skull's lower jaw up and down and in a high pitched, sing-song voice repeats, "It's okay, I'm degenerate." Chris shouts 'right on.' Eddie and Janna wave unsynchronized. Mugs spins around in expanding circles and asks if everyone can see his cape move.
I stand near the floating man and ask who he is. He says God. Mugs asks why he's painted blue. God says he came from a costume party held simultaneously in every building in the city and that he went as Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Santana nods in approval and says finally someone with the turcica width of a deity. Jana says a divine presence is probably needed because of the bike race and the despair. God sucks in his stomach and says he has fourteen visible abdominal muscles and that we can count them if we don't believe him. He is right.
I look over to Chris. The street now rests beneath a layer of shattered glass and there's no visible skin still left on his hand. When he encounters the bulletproof windshield of a cop car, his eyes press into slits and he uses a wet washcloth to remove his painted-on sleeves and redraws them as rolled up. He adopts a deep Southern twang and shouts 'up . . . down . . . up . . . down' while he hammers with the rhythmic determination of a chain gang. Eddie stabs air with nothing and screams "you like that Claudius, you liketh that?!" Janna is seated on a curb re-augmenting her eyelashes with pubic hair. Mugs is balancing on one foot and being told for the thirteenth time today that he looks like a young Edward G. Robinson. Dr. Santana is asking God how to say blowjob in Spanish.
The windshield on the squad car splinters. The first embers of dawn break through the night. We are a long way from the Underground Laundromat. The witnesses depart, careful to avoid eye contact with God. Eddie stands and says it's over, they all pretty much died. Janna agrees and says she wasn't paying attention. Mugs counts God's abdominal muscles and says holy shit he does have fourteen. Dr. Santana says chupada, chupada, chupada, tengo una chupada. Chris collapses to his knees and throws his hands skyward and bemoans that there are no more windshields left to conquer, nor clenchable hands with which to conquer them.
It begins to rain. A slow, steady patter. I know the night is lost. Chris, Eddie, Janna and Mugs climb back into the three-door taxi. I linger for a moment outside and take one last glimpse at the blur of bikes and helmets surging relentlessly down Halsted. I wonder how it will all end. God hovers over to me and answers the question I didn't ask. He says nothing ends.