[fiction] The Independant Jetsam

When I stepped off the boat, I had nothing but my clothes and a guitar with a broken E string on my back and a million dollars in an offshore account.

I followed streams of people around for hours, wondering what brought me to this particular city.  I was very tired by the end of the day.  Then I spotted it.  Part of the skyline was wrong.  Not ugly, or different, but wrong.  Wrong like seeing a red sports car in a swords & sandals movie wrong.  It just shouldn't have been there.

I hopped on a ferry across the water, standing outside to face the wrong part o the skyline.  It came into view a little bit more.  I could make out spires.  Or maybe towers, or something.  After the boat I walked to it on foot.  Got there at twilight.

It was a church.  Well...not an actual church.  It was church-ish.  Churchy.  Gothic.  The floor was a hair salon.  I won't know what the other floors were but the windows were boarded up and we were in a neighborhood where white people shouldn't be out after dark.

Then I felt it.  It.  A sort of coldness, and from all directions there was this force that tore color out of the world, and there was a sinking onrush of fear of something coming, but without the adrenaline.  I moved to the site of the door of the hair salon, ducking into a gothic alcove.  Something dark shot out of the entrance and went off somewhere down the street.

Color came back into the world, and I hugged myself, shivering slightly.  Then I went inside the hair salon.

Aside from the ugly wall color, there didn't seem to be anything amiss.  There was a radio in the corner of the room playing The Bad Touch by the bloodhound gang.  I listened to pleas for doggy-style during science fiction television while I examined each hair-cutting station.  Other than the door being unlocked.  I found a stair in the back.  Every floor was empty.  The top is where things got interesting.  Of course the roof door was unlocked.  Like it ever wasn't.

No, it was the person standing on the roof.  He wasn't supposed to be there.  Not only was the entire building wrong, but the person standing on it was even more wrong.  It was as if some cosmic jackass had offended the rules of the universe by placing a building that shouldn't exist, just to piss off the laws of physics, and then another cosmic jackass led this man up to the roof just to piss off the first jackass.

He was the sort of person that would be sitting in the audience during a very important trial, or who would be seen running into the background when a tiger escapes at the zoo, or who would be sitting at a cafe when a car chase rushes past.  He was so unremarkable that he made the act of standing too close to the edge of a tall building seem mundane.

There was nothing about his person that caught my interest.  He was tall, wearning moderately fashionable jeans, a typical leather jacket, and shoes that didn't quite work in the same way that most men's shoes didn't quite work.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

He looked up, and held up a large laminated sheet in his hands.  "Ice cream menu," he said.  "Its the strangest thing."

I frowned.  I was hoping for something more about the very suicide-like pose he was striking than ice cream, but he kept talking about the fucking ice cream.

"It's strange," he said.  "I always order the same thing.  I have good reasons that I can't order anything else--there's a reason for each of these...allergic, allergic, hate mint, awful flavor...reminds me of my ex-girlfriend..." he was pointing to each one as he said it, going through the entire menu, "...which leaves us with this one.  I always choose it.  Its as if its not even my choice, even though I'm the one choosing it."

I looked behind me.  I saw nothing.  Of course that didn't count for much.  If this guy didn't clear off the roof he was going to become a casualty.

"What's your name?"

"Thomas," he said.  "What's yours?"

"People call me the Dragon."  It was the truth.

Thomas looked at me strangely, with a hint of the kind of disdain you use when glancing at someone you just decided to start ignoring, as if my unusual moniker was somehow stranger than breaking into a hair salon in a building with out-of-place architecture to go stand on the roof and bitch about how unoriginal your desert choices are.  Fucking asshole.  I frowned right back at the fucker.  Just my luck.  Couldn't be a girl cute up here, maybe trapped, maybe cold yet smoking hot, maybe some kind of vulnerability complex that leads to impulse sex against a backdrop of rain and kind words.  No.  It was this fucking guy.

The guy--oh right, Thomas--tossed the ice cream menu into the air and walked past me as if that wasn't a weird thing to do.  I was then free to concentrate on what I'd come up here for.  Then I remembered that it was apparently all about that guy.

I followed him down the stairs.  The stairs became darker and darker as I descended, until finally I pulled out my cell phone to use as a makeshift flash light, but the screen was dim and flickering.  The phone said the battery was at 70% though.  That is when I realized the stairway wasn't dark.  It was something else.  Something cold.

I didn't want to descend.  I wanted to do anything other then continue descending.  However, I learned a long time ago that so long as fear does not stop your heart or make your hands shake too much to accomplish your task, all it takes to move forward is a somewhat detached, robotic control of your extremities.  I wouldn't have had a chance in hell of threading a needle in that state, but I cure sure as hell put one foot in front of the other going down those stairs.  When I got to the bottom it was pitch black.  The sun was still up outside but where I was, it was pitch black.  No lights from curling iron AC adapters or glowing click dials or cracks of light through windows or doors.  Just black.

And then, an outline.  Two, actually.  I could see Thomas in front of me, and in front of him, the outline of a sort of minotaur person.  That's how I always saw them; outlined by some kind of grayish light that was always behind them.  It appeared to be trained on Thomas, moving in for a kill stroke when it suddenly stopped.  I saw its head tilt.  Then it evaporated.

Light burned into my eyes, searing, painful light like kind you get when you walk out of a dark theatre onto the boardwalk of a beach in the south.  When my eyes finally adjusted I could see the hair salon clearly.  I looked up at the florescent lights.  I could them flickering.  Not flickering, like they were broken, but I could see the constant light dilation emitted by the gas.  When I looked down, Thomas was staring at me.

"What the fuck was that?" he asked.

"It's a long story," I began.  Thomas insisted on hearing it, so I began telling it, the "guardian angels didn't plan for exponential growth" part, but by the time we reached the exit and stepped out onto the street, he had completely forgotten what he just saw.