When I woke up that morning, I was convinced I had been abducted from my bed. I did not recognize the white walsl, the lazy ceiling fan, the rows of hanging posters. For two whole minutes I lay there paralyzed. Only when I heard the rush of water in pipes did I remember the interior of my apartment. My roommate was in the adjoining bathroom taking a shower. Then I remembered what day it was. Friday. That meant three things: American Non-fiction, Burnett’s, and work. Nothing like the weekends eh? After jacking off I swung my legs over the edge of my bed and stared at their reflection in the mirror on the far wall. I didn’t remember receiving half the bruises scattered over my shins. In that very second, I thought: “today’s going to be strange.”
Boy did I hit nail on the head. As I lay prone, staring up at that mountainous beauty all I could think about was my bedroom back home. My real home I should add, not that shitty tenement I call an apartment. I retraced the hours spent imagining any number of physically compromising scenarios. Now, it seemed, I was on the doorstep of some frighteningly complex journey. Avin, my Godzilla-sized savior, turned her attention back to the assembly of crooks still cowering in the warehouse interior. A velvety command leapt from the edges of her tongue, inciting a confusing array of terror and calm.
“Now then boys. I hope we can play nicely together. If you’d all be so kind as to throw your weapons in a pile over— No, not there, in the corner. Yeah, altogether. That’s right. Thank you. Now then…” With that she reached into the shattered structure with both hands, scooping the group up into her palms. Their worried groans and shouts muddled together in a flood of pleading. Once she had them all gathered together she brought them up to her face, inspecting the feeble few with an intensely suspicious glare. I couldn’t make out what all happened next, but I think I can piece it together.
There was a short burst of pops, a defiant cry from one of Avin’s handheld captives, followed shortly by a collection of terrified whines. Avin instinctively recoiled and an irritated scowl formed on her face. Clearly one of the goons thought it would be clever to hide one of his firearms on his person, only to unload into his unsuspecting subjugator, somehow overthrowing her in the sudden surprise. And surprised she was, but defeated, definitely not. Typical south-side scum, more bullets than brains. In retaliation, Avin dumped the remaining thugs into her left hand and plucked the offender up between her thumb and forefinger. She gave him a violent shake before scolding:
“I’ll give you credit for perseverance, but even the rest of your shit-brained friends here know that was stupid move.”
With that she carelessly tossed the agitator over her shoulder. I couldn’t see precisely where he landed, what with Avin’s looming torso blocking my view, but I think it’s safe to say he didn’t fair too well. Once the metaphorical thorn in her side had been removed, Avin turned her gaze back to the other, now severely subdued, captives.
“Anyone else want to try for a hail Mary?” she cooed. I couldn’t quite make out the thug’s reaction from my position, but I imagine it was far less brazen. Avin smiled and gave a quick nod. “That’s what I thought. Now with all that out of the way I think we’ll go ahead and wrap things up here.” Avin then reached down and retrieved something from her belt. A length of paracord. To an average human it would have been nearly a hundred feet’s worth, but to her it was only arms length. As her gaze dropped her eyes lazed over me for a moment and she gave me a warm smile.
“Still doing okay down there little guy?”
I can’t remember if I said anything in return, or if I just nodded like an idiot. Maybe both. Something about the way the dark river of her hair framed her distinctly chiseled features seemed to send my mind swimming. I was caught in the current of her looming shape, like a branch in a raging river. Though her demeanor toward me was calm I couldn’t help but feel beaten and nauseous.
Then, in a quick winding motion she swept the loop of her hanging string around the huddled mass in her hand. She wrapped the strand around the bundle of trembling criminals again and again. She was seamstress-like, practiced. Surprisingly professional for one with such a playful demeanor. Well, maybe playful isn’t an accurate description. She did just toss a dude three hundred some feet into god knows what.
As she completed her task Avin stifled a cocky grin. With both ends of the cord held in her right hand she lifted the bundle of squirming enforcers up into the air. They dangled in the air like a cluster of noisy spiders, kicking and screaming. Avin lowered the suspended cluster and tied off the loose ends on a nearby street lamp. When she was done, the five goons were left hanging twenty feet off the ground, calling out into the night for some sort of help. I got to say, I was impressed. I personally was not much into the apprehension or subduing of the criminal element but she made it look easy. Of course, over the next few months I’d learn that she made everything look easy.
I could not tear my attention away from the felon tetherball Avin had created. I mean, that shit was hilarious. I didn’t have much time to revel though, as I soon found myself swept back up into Avin hand. She was generally good when it came to handling us small-fries, but the transition from surface to her hand almost always put me on the verge of vomiting. My injury didn’t help much either.
“Moth.” She simply crooned. When I finally got my footing, I managed to stand up in the center of her palm. To my immediate front I saw the edges of her bare shoulders, each of which was draped with a wall of hair. I carefully creeped to the edge and looked down. I must have been nearly a hundred and fifty feet in the air, and she was just crouching! From this angle I could see her outfit with great clarity. It was simple, slim, conducive to movement and vulnerable to cold. I think you catch my drift. She wore a simple pair of light colored shorts that wrapped snuggly down to the midpoint of her thighs. On her torso was a sleeveless shirt made of some kind of elastic material akin to the shit they use to make Under Armour.
“Moth!” she repeated, snapping back into reality. “you can check me out later. Eyes up here for a moment.”
“S-sorry.” I muttered sheepishly.
She gave a half-cocked smile began to smooth out a few misplaced locks of hair on the top of her head. “It’s fine. So, you want to tell me what you were doing down here?”
Whoa, that was an abrupt turn around. The coy lilt that had previously dominated her words had been replaced with a skeptical interrogative tone.
“Well, I uh…I heard from a friend of mine that—”
“By friend I assume you mean J.D.?”
My eyes dropped. I hated it when people cut through my bullshit so easily.
“Yeah…”
Avin nodded and urged me to continue.
“Anyway,” I went on, “he told me about some ship that came into harbor a couple days ago. He said that some of the Corbi brothers’ men had a quite a bit of cargo on board. I thought I would come on down, take a few pictures, maybe nab some of the merchandise for good measure. You know, real hands-off shit.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Riiiight. So, your little injury there was an accident then? Wasn’t looking where you going kind of thing, is that it?”
“Look,” I shouted with a surprising amount of fervor, “There may have been a sleeping guard, and I may have overestimated my thieving capabilities a tad, and yes maybe I’m not very good at deflecting knife blows but—”
Unfortunately, I was cut off. A parade of vehicles of every shape, size, and color came tearing around the corner of the warehouse. Avin was crouching in a large shipyard flanked on three sides by crumbling buildings with her back to the bay. We both turned to watch as six vehicles screeched to a stop in an arc on the other side of the yard. As if by clockwork, the doors swung open, depositing dark-clad swarms of armed adversaries. In my delirium I thought I counted upwards of thirty thugs all brandishing some form of firearm. Eyes drifting to the night sky, I saw a pair of dancing lights moving toward us from the horizon. Sirens, somewhere, echoing into the chilling reaches. It seemed the police were also on their way. Shit was about to get real messy.
“Huh,” Avin boomed from overhead. “Well this is an unfortunate but unsurprising turn of events.” She turned back to me with a curious look on her face, one that I’d grow to learn all too well. “I think we’ll—”
Then came the storm. A deafening clatter of gunpowder and metal, clanging magazines, and roaring barrels. A wave of tiny, metal projectiles danced across Avin’s exposed form, causing her to recoil in shock. At first, I thought she was done for, but after the initial barrage I looked up from my oh-so-heroic fetal position and saw that she looked relatively unscathed. I had expected blood and gore, but instead she simply looked annoyed.
“Moth,”
“yes?” I replied, trying my best to bury my terror.
“If you’ll excuse me a moment…I’ll go ahead and get us out of here before more trouble shows up.” She stopped for a moment, mouth open as though some empty words had suddenly made their escape. “Do you trust me?”
“No.”
“That’s probably smart.” She responded with a wink. She looked down at the rest of her body, her off hand searching for something seemingly unknown. The assembled marauders meanwhile idled along, unable to fathom a creature surviving such a hail of devastating gunfire, let alone weathering it with relative ease. I peered over the edge of Avin’s palm, cautious not to poke my head out too far lest it be blown away by a stray bullet. A bald man in a ruffled, blood-spattered white dress shirt shouted to some other goons who then began to unpack some mysterious crates from the backs of several vehicles.
“Damn Einis, he didn’t put any goddamn pockets in this thing.” Avin added with a huff.
“Pockets?”
“Yeah, this is a new suit, but no pockets. Sooooo.”
She tilted her head forward, allowing a curtain of her mahogany hair drift down over the left side of her face. She bit her lip, judging and waiting, watching for me to make some contribution to our current dilemma.
“I don’t follow.” I eventually admit.
“You’re hurt, pretty badly too. I can’t just leave you somewhere while I take care of the Public Enemies over here. As soon as I get going they’re going to scatter like bugs. So I—”
Another furious sound ripped through the salty air. The raging fusillade of rapid fire began again, forcing me into the fetal position once more. Come on, don’t give me that look. I’m just a kid alright? A kid who doesn’t want to get shot. Streaks of smoke rushed overhead, just barely missing Avin’s face before soaring off to god knows where. Fuckin’ RPGs. Whoever these guys were they had some decent connections.
The next thing I know I’m in darkness. The sounds of war still echoed off in the distance, but they were muffled by a shadowy prison. I can sense Avin moving around me, I jostled from side to side before finally falling a short distance onto another warm surface. I expect to break a bone or two but to my surprise the impact is soft. At once I am surrounded by this surface, it confines me. When I look up I see dim light and familiar shapes. Avin’s face looms far overhead, but she pays little attention to me as I squirm against my confines. It was then I realized that Avin had deposited me between her breast and the cusp of her “suit.”
“What the fuck?” I cry out. “This is your solution?” My voice quickly dies down, as the pain in my side suddenly returns with renewed effect.
“Oh, hush now, if nothing else you’ll at least have a story to tell. Now sit still for a moment while I take care of some business.”
Avin rose to her feet, displaying her full height for all to see. I remembered seeing her extraordinary stature silhouetted against the wide sky in shaky cell-phone footage and panning helicopter news coverage that spread across the interwebs. Along with Echo, Thorne, Stasis, and Father Cris, Avin was one of the most famous Arbiters in the United States. There were plenty others, but those five worked the social media angle. They were criticized a lot by the powerful elite, the far-right and left movements, not to mention a whole host of other people who subscribed to strict moral, social, or religious doctrines. I struggled to turn myself around as the length of fabric holding me down was particularly stiff. Eventually the effort conjured so much pain that I lost the air in my lungs. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the city lights, like some distant kingdom born from the womb of science-fiction. The buildings and streets below resembled the plain squares I studied for months in my Modern Art class. The sparse flashes and shouts exchanged on the distant ground reminded me of the summer of 2012 when I first dropped acid, the very moment when I drifted off into the nest of pernicious thought.
I craned my neck to look back up at Avin, who by then had already refocused her attention on the task at hand. I expected to see the grimace of a professional or the severity of a battle-worn soldier, but instead she appeared casually annoyed.
“Alright, you all get ten second head start…”
I don’t know how our enemies responded. I imagine they must have realized their mistake and scattered just as Avin said they would, but I could not see. I watched as Avin counted down quietly to herself, forming each number silently with pursed lips. Once she had reached zero I heard the ground crack open as though an enormous egg had fallen from the sky and shattered into a thousand pieces. The heel of her boot impaled the pavement below, sending out a shockwave of such intensity that even I could feel it in my perch far above. Perplexed by the sudden destruction and perhaps a little eager from the promise of utter catastrophe, I foolishly decided to readjust myself to gain a better sight-line. I needed to see the mess she made. That’s why I did all that meta shit after all. I did not wander the alleys and sit atop the dilapidated parking garages looking to make a difference. I was, am, and always will be a symptom of the problem rather than a solution.
In my haste to witness the carnage below I twisted my torso around, pressing my hands against the skin of her bosom and throwing my spine against the confines of her clothing. The pain was wretched. It was numbing and sharp. It caused my eyes to spin and limbs to drop. The last thing I remember before blacking out, was the disgusting sticky red trickle pouring from my side and staining Avin’s exposed flesh.
I would tell you that I dreamed of campfires. I would tell you that I had visions of waiting for the bus in the snow or walking my dog in the October twilight when the air first began to smell of straw. Maybe I would sit in my old freshman hall, discussing old movies and talking about which bars didn’t check IDs. And then I’d say something about waking up one morning and not being able to see myself in the mirror, or going to class only to spend the entire time staring at my phone as story after story came flooding through. I wake up in service to myself, it is the only way to live like a monster and know that being different and being the same as everyone else were in many ways the contingent. I’m sure you’ll understand at some point if you don’t already. I would tell you all these things, but then they’d be lies.
That’s okay though. You shouldn’t trust me anyway.
When I finally woke it was a surprisingly quick ordeal. My lids shot open as though I had been struck by a sudden surge of electricity. A haze hung around my vision, greying the edges and dulling my sense of distance. Before me was a plain white expanse illuminated by an even yellow light. I felt cold. Very cold. The pain was there but it felt glossy and numb. Someone was fiddling with my side.
“Oh good he’s awake.” A strange mousy voice clucked. Immediately I rocked up. As my eyes adjusted to the calm interior lighting I saw a modestly furnished room, complete with a mix of furniture and wall hangings ranging from modernist chic to kitschy teenage fluff. To my side was narrow balding man with dark curly hair and a large swollen nose. Hidden behind a pair of simple spectacles a pair of glassy but sympathetic grey eyes flickered across my shirtless bloodied body. He reminded me of that old man playing chess against himself in that Pixar short. You know the one.
Avin suddenly strolled in through the corner door still dressed in her “work clothes.” She looked a little more beat up than when I last saw her. Her arms and legs were scattered with reddened patches, no doubt the result of the near constant hail of lead. She had a busted lip and small cut above her eyes which had already begun to scab over. She looked immensely tired.
“Oh thank god. You had us fuckin’ worried there for a second.” She sighed with relief.
“Avin dear, please watch your language. What would your sweet old mother say.” the odd older man said without taking his attentive eyes from me.
“She’d probably ask me what the fuck was wrong me.”
“Bah, you young people, so crude.” The old man reached down and finished tearing off a length of medical tape which he then applied to my side. As I followed his shaky little hands I saw that my knife wound had been patched up with sufficient layers of gauze, tape, and antiseptic pads. “That should fix him. Now young man I highly recommend you rest these next few days, and don’t you even think about running off and doing something stupid like that again. I might not be able to patch you as well next time.”
I nodded foolishly. Ugh, my head felt so damn heavy, as though it were full of molten metal. Next came a surge of constant blinking, and my eyes began to burn as though I had been staring at a TV for hours.
“Thanks,” I eventually managed to muster. The curious old man nodded and began to pack the assortment of medical supplies into an old duffel bag on the nearby coffee table.
“Certainly. Now then,” he groaned as he rose back onto his feet. He turned to Avin who waited at the foot of the couch. “Shall I take a look at those wounds of yours dear.”
“I’m fine Geri, thanks though.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, this stuff is nothing. I just need to sleep it off, and don’t worry about Moth here, I’ll make sure he doesn’t get himself into any more trouble.” As soon as she said this she turned to me a gave a subtle wink. The old man named Geri shook his head and turned toward the door.
“Sure, that’s what they all say. These kids these days never listen.”
“Hey now, when have I ever disregarded any of your advice.”
“Only every day!” Geri said with a slight chuckle. “You take care now sweetheart. If you ever have any more trouble you know how to reach me.”
“Wait, here, take this.” Avin added as she produced a small wad of cash from her brassiere. Fuck, it seemed as though she stored everything in there. Geri simply waved it off and placed a lanky hand on Avin’s shoulder.
“No, no dear you keep that now. I owe you for helping me with all that Gambino nonsense. Take care now, I really best be going.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes, just watch out for that one. I know troublemakers when I see them and well…” Geri’s voice dropped to a whisper. The two exchanged a few quiet words and nods before Geri finally opened the door. “Just watch him now. He’s on some powerful painkillers so he should be able to sleep right through the night. I wouldn’t recommend moving him until tomorrow morning and…dear, try not to break this one…”
With that Geri left. Avin disappeared into another room for a few seconds, leaving me in place. Something about being told you’re high really adds to the intoxication. Whereas before I thought I was just groggy, once I heard “painkillers” my brain really sank into the deep end. For a good five minutes I did not move. Instead I just sat, staring forward, spine tingling with paranoia. Eventually Avin returned with a pillow and quilt.
“Hey there little buddy. You doin’ alright?”
I nodded in response but otherwise remained rigid.
“By the time I got us out of there you were out cold. I wasn’t sure what your situation was…you know in terms of living or identity, so I just brought you back here.” She approached gracefully, as though something in her movements was ordained by the artistic musings of motion itself. Maybe that was just the drugs. Avin plopped the pillow down on the couch, and with one hand, gently pressed me down onto my back.
“Hello, anyone home?” she said with a smile.
“Yeah, no, I—what time is it?”
“Almost two. Why?”
“Fuck, I gotta go. I gotta…really have to—”
But Avin wasn’t having any of it. She resisted my movement will relative ease, forcing me back down onto the stiff cushions of the couch with a single hand. She shook her head and I finally got to see her face clearly and unblemished by darkness. Green eyes, brown hair, brilliant and shiny, like…like…like
“No, you are staying here tonight. No excuses. Now, as you probably noticed the couch is a little small, so you are welcome to share the bed.”
Words were minced into individual syllables and phonemes as they passed through the filter of my drug addled brain. Meaning was scarcely distilled from the jumble of speech as the painkillers expanded their influence. We must have been somewhere near Barstow. I don’t remember saying anything after that, but I must have because I do distinctly recall being cutoff a second later.
“Shh, okay, okay how about we just sleep it off then?” Avin whispered.
With that final question I slumped back onto the couch and watched the dizzying shadows project their mysterious movements across the ceiling. I don’t know how long Avin stayed there, but after what must have been just a few minutes the lights went out. She said something else, but the noise simply bounced around inside my head without translation.
So, I laid there wondering about how I’d ever get home. Would she even have let me? In the small hours of the morning I felt pitiful and helpless, disgusting and possessed. I felt like I somehow owed her everything or that I had been bound to her service forever. She had marked me with attention and her scent. Oh god I smelled like her, I remember that freaked me the fuck out. It was okay, it was okay. In the end I knew it was just the drugs, but it certainly didn’t help me fall asleep. I spent most of the night guessing at what was to come, and how fucked up it was that we didn’t even know each other’s real names yet.