MirrorWorld (3 page)

The fool looks up at me with the same wide-eyed admiration he’d given the bimbo, who, I might add, is no longer bouncing or giggling. Her barbarian king has been dethroned by a transient with a two-week beard, messy hair, and a worn leather jacket.

“Th-thank you,” the fool says.

I respond to his gratitude by slapping him hard across the face. The resounding clap of his clean-shaven skin sounds like a snapping carrot. I lean in close while the man rubs his reddening cheek, tears in his eyes. “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

The man’s brow furrows. “Mark Twain?”

I have no idea whom I’m quoting, but I don’t let him know that. I stand up and turn away.

The police officer has spun around in his chair, watching the scene with indifference. I head back to my table, chug what’s left of my beer, and walk toward the bar with my empty glass.

I stop in front of the woman, a condescending eyebrow lifted. My eyes tell her that it is she who is ultimately responsible for this mess. She brought the trap. She set the bait. Without her, the philistine would be home watching television. The fool would be finishing his drink and on his way. And I … well, I’m not sure what I’d be doing beyond sitting alone at a table.

She gets the message, loud and clear, and responds with vehemence, reading from the same script the philistine had been reciting since high school. “Fuck you, pri—”

Her words are silenced by the sound of breaking glass. She falls to the floor, wrapped around her stool, as unconscious as her boyfriend, or whatever he is. As I put the remnants of my beer stein on the bar, the officer takes action. Apparently, striking a woman is an actionable offense, whereas assaulting a philistine or fool is acceptable behavior.

Before the gun is fully raised, I clasp my hand atop it, twist, and free it from the officer’s grasp. He’s had a few drinks but is still pretty quick. Just not quick enough. He tries to lift his foot, going for the weapon on his ankle, but I’ve already stepped on his shoe.

I turn the gun around on him.

He stops moving but stands his ground, hiding his fear. I respect that, but his inaction offends me. I motion to the philistine and then to the woman. “You should have stopped them.”

“I couldn’t,” the officer says.

“You had two guns.” The point can’t be argued.

“You don’t know who he is.”

“I know exactly who he is,” I say, speaking of his character rather than his name, which confuses the policeman. “You’re a shame to your profession.” I spin the gun around in my hand, prepared to coldcock the man and be on my way. But a roar interrupts.

The philistine is awake.

I turn toward the mountain of a man, his arms spread wide, reuniting with Violence, his long-lost lover. His face is covered in blood. Peanuts cling to the viscous red fluid. He looks like something I can’t quite remember.

Dodging the attack is easy enough. A quick duck and sidestep is all it takes. The man careens into the bar, but it’s not enough. I consider the weapon in my hand but decide against it. The man deserves a lesson, not execution. But a harsh lesson. I tuck the gun into my jeans as he turns around, coming at me again.

I meet his rush with a quick jab to his face. He’s stunned by the force of it, but also because he never saw it coming. As he staggers back, I sweep his legs, knocking him onto his back. Before he can recover, I drop to one knee beside him and lift his arm.

“Don’t!” the officer shouts. He’s got his small ankle revolver leveled at my chest.

“He needs to learn,” I tell him, then slam the philistine’s arm down on my leg, snapping it like a branch.

The big man screams anew, his high-pitched wail waking the unconscious woman, who begins to weep.

“Get up!” the officer shouts.

I raise my hands and obey. “You could have prevented this.”

The bartender is on the phone. No doubt with the police.

“Turn around! Hands on the wall!”

I obey.

“What’s your name?” the officer asks.

This is a tough question, mostly because I don’t know the answer. I have a name. I’m as sure of that as I am that at one point in my past, I had a mother and a father. I can’t remember them either, but the fact that I exist is biological evidence that a man and woman, at some point in the past, copulated and gave birth to a boy. I’d like to think those same people would have given me a name. “I’m Crazy.”

“You’re bat-shit crazy,” the officer says.

I look back, over my shoulder. “With a capital
C
.”

The officer inches closer. With his revolver pointed at my back, he reaches around my waist, fumbling for the gun I stole. “Don’t move.”

But I do. Slowly and subtly. I twist away from his reaching hand, drawing him in closer. When he’s all but hugging me, I reach back with my left hand. The bartender shouts a warning, but it’s too late. I twist the revolver away from my back and keep on twisting until the officer shouts in pain and releases the weapon. I spin around, draw the sidearm from my waist, and level both weapons at the police officer.

“Don’t kill me,” he says, hands raised.

“I don’t kill people for being incompetent,” I tell him.

Do I kill people at all?
I wonder. I certainly have the ability. I’m fast, and strong, and know how to fight with brutal efficiency. I
could
kill him, with these guns, with my bare hands, or with a peanut from the philistine’s face. When the officer had first come into the bar, he’d waited for the tender to remove the bowl before sitting down, and then he wiped the bar down with a wet wipe. The man feared peanuts. Allergic, no doubt.

But I don’t want to kill him, merely educate him. I raise the revolver, aiming for the man’s arm, debating the severity of his lesson. Should I wound him or simply scare him? He’s already scared. But he’s an officer of the law. He failed to serve and protect the fool. He didn’t care about the man’s fate. Didn’t care about his job. Didn’t care about his life.

“Eat a peanut,” I tell him.

His eyes widen. “What? Why?”

“Eat a peanut, or I’ll shoot you.”

“N-no,” he says. “You can’t. I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m allergic. I’ll die.”

“You have a reason to live?” I ask.

To his credit, the officer thinks on this. “My kid.”

He’s not sad, like a father who desperately loves his children would be. He’s regretful. “You’ve wronged your child?”

The officer nods.

“Bullet it is,” I say, my finger squeezing the trigger.

Before the round can be fired, I’m struck from behind. I fall to the bar’s hardwood floor, lying beside the writhing philistine and crying bimbo, looking up. The fool stands above me, a pool stick in his hands.

I grin at the man. “Good for you.”

The officer recovers his weapons and points them at me as backup storms through the door.

Turns out, the joke is on me. The philistine is the mayor’s boy. The bimbo is the sheriff’s daughter. And the fool … he’s a clinical psychologist. By morning, I’m committed. And while I believe everyone in the bar needed to learn a lesson, I can’t fault them for the straitjacket or the padded room. I am Crazy, after all.

2.

“Hey, Crazy.”

Three of us turn around. We’re sitting along the back of an old plaid couch. Red, orange, and brown stripes. Ugly as crap from a crayon-eating dog, but it’s become our triple throne from which we can watch TV, which is currently showing
The Price Is Right
. No volume. All the screaming gets our lower-functioning friends riled up. And since there are twenty-three of them sitting around the room, bouncing back and forth, talking to gods or plotting the world’s end, silence is a good thing. It lets us hear them coming. But really, I just don’t want to get them in trouble or hurt them. After all, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re crazy.

Like me.

Like everyone in this place. Not counting Chubs, the other orderlies, doctors, nurses, guards, and janitorial staff, though some of them are suspect.

“Which one of us are you referring to, Chubs?” Shotgun Jones asks the orderly, whom we have deemed Chubs on account of his prodigious love handles. Shotgun is Chubs’s antithesis, a skinny man with equally thin glasses and hair.

“The only one of you who goes by Crazy,” Chubs says.

Seymour, the craziest of us, claps his hands frantically. “Crazy to the principal’s office! Ohh, you’re in trouble!”

“Actually,” Chubs says, “he’s got a visitor, and I needed to know you guys were going to play nice before I brought her in.”

“Her!” Seymour wiggles his fingers in front of his mouth. His big teeth and wide eyes complete the illusion that the man is an oversized chipmunk.

“Seymour,” I say. He stops. I look back to Chubs. “They’ll behave. But why does she want to come in here?”

He shrugs. “Some kind of specialist. Feels comfortable around nut … you guys.”

“Close one,” I say.

Chubs smiles nervously. “I’ll go get her.”

When the orderly is out of earshot, Shotgun taps my shoulder. “You ever get in trouble for … you know?”

“Breaking his finger?”

“Crack!” Seymour says a little too loudly, acting out breaking a branch over his knee. Some of our fellow “nutjobs”—the word Chubs is forbidden from saying—look up but don’t move from their positions around the room.

I shake my head. “No one ever said anything. He’s been a perfect gentleman since.” I slide down from the couch. “I’m going to take a walk. Let me know if she wins the dinette set.”

The large space is pristine. The white floors glow with a near-magical shine. When I first arrived at the SafeHaven, one word, I wondered why they kept the floor so clean. My first theory was that they wanted to impress visiting relatives. While some people are here for doing violent things, others are committed by loved ones before they get the chance. But I realized the truth after the first fight. Just a drop of blood on the gleaming floor stands out like a stop sign in the snow. Between that, the fourteen cameras, and several sets of watching eyes, committing a violent act inside this space, while not impossible, is hard to cover up. Unless you’re good at it, which, apparently, I am. Broken fingers don’t bleed.

The large, barred windows draw me toward the light of day. The outer wall is covered with tall windows, allowing those of us trapped inside a view of what we’re missing. I appreciate the ample sunlight, but it’s really just a tease. I can’t smell the rain, or the fresh-cut lawn, or anything else other than the scent of mold-tinged air-conditioning. I’ve considered leaving. I think I could manage it. But if this is where the law and society say I need to be, who am I to argue? I certainly don’t have anywhere else to go.

At least the people here understand me … not that they understand much of anything. But they accept me as one of them, even though I know, at my core, that I don’t belong here. Of course, most everyone here, save for Seymour, thinks the world would be better with them flailing through it.

The view today is mostly primary and secondary colors. Blue sky. Green grass and trees. White clouds. Black pavement—they redid it a week ago. Couldn’t even smell that. Looking down at the parking lot, I see far fewer cars than usual. It looks like half the regular staff are missing. Also interesting is an orange car.
That’s new,
I think. I can’t tell the make or model, but it sticks out among the various shades of gray preferred by SafeHaven’s staff.

“See anything interesting?” The voice is feminine. Quiet. My visitor has arrived.

“Your car,” I say. “I like the color.” I turn around. My visitor is attractive. Blond hair, tied back tight. High eyebrows that imply a good nature. And a kind smile. But her outfit … “You look like a pumpkin.”

Her smile broadens as she looks down at herself. “I do, don’t I?” She lifts her arms and the sides come up, like Batman’s cape, only neon. It’s a poncho. A bright orange hunter’s poncho.

“They wouldn’t let me in if I wasn’t wearing it. At least it matches the car.” She lowers her arms, revealing Shotgun and Seymour standing behind her, one to a side. She senses their presence and flinches, stepping closer to me. A few eyes around the room glance up, and then turn back down.

“She’s a doctor,” Seymour says, his fingers twitching madly in front of his mouth. “No, a specialist!”

“Ex-girlfriend,” Shotgun says with a smirk and a confident nod.

“An expert!” Seymour says. He’s getting a little too excited.

“Can you give us some privacy?” I ask the pair.

“Ex-girlfriend it is!” Shotgun says, pumping an imaginary shotgun, “Chick, chick,” and firing it into the air. “Boom!”

As the duo retreats back to the couch-throne, the woman turns to me again, looking a little less sure of herself.

“That’s why we call him Shotgun Jones,” I explain.

“Right,” she says, straightening her pumpkin suit. Her smile disappears. The eyebrows descend. “Do you want to be here?”

“I want to smell the new pavement,” I tell her.

A mix of confusion and disappointment contorts her pretty face.

“You know I’m crazy, right?”

“With a capital
C,
” she says. “I’ve been told. But you’re not crazy.”

“You know my real name?”

“Lowercase
c.
”

“Oh. Then what am I?”

“I’ll let your doctor explain it to you. Later. Right now, I need a very plain yes or no answer. Do you want to leave this place? Or do you want to spend the rest of your life waiting to see who replaces Drew Carey on the
Price Is Right
?”

“He’s funny,” I say.

“Bob was better.”

“I don’t really remember Bob.”

“You don’t remember anything past a year ago.” She makes sure I’m looking in her eyes. “All but two days of your remembered life have been in this place. Before that was two days in a jail cell and an hour at a bar. Am I wrong?”

“No.”

My eyes turn to the floor and then back out at the view. “Would I be leaving today?”

I see the motion of her nod in my periphery.