Multiplex Fandango (24 page)

Beating down dog.
Beating down dog.
Beating down dog.

The words rang metronomic in Mickey's mind, almost as if they were a mantra meant to keep the rage at bay.
The words were like a chain that kept the beast from leaping free.

The man glared at Mickey for a moment, then moved on to the bartender.
And that moment was enough.
Mickey saw it all.
Insanity had the man in a permanent grip.
Seventeen bodies lay strewn upon the man's past, each murder different, yet representational of an unrelenting unfulfillment.
And the man was on the hunt for number eighteen.

Dogman ordered a beer and sipped.
His eyes wandered across the lives of the patrons in the mirror behind the bar.
Occasionally, he'd stare at a man or a woman.
Based on his history, his Dog didn't have a preference.

I've never been in one of those things before, those triangles,
came the slimy thought of Dog as he gazed towards the crotch of an old woman whose best years had been during Kennedy's reign in Camelot.

Mickey recognized the line from a Bukowski poem.
Funny how the raunchy one-time-postman, alcoholic poet influenced both their lives.
Not just the bar they were in that was the impetus for the movie Barfly, but the need to use mechanism to domesticate passion.
For Mickey it was the averted gaze.
For Bukowski it was drowning his need in alcohol.
For Dogman it was the mantra-
Beating Down Dog
.
And it was that epiphany that made Mickey finally show interest, the commonality of Bukowski.
Dogman stood, pushed himself away from the bar, and headed towards the door.
Mickey tossed back what remained of his drink, and hustled after.

Although the man's past was clear, the future remained a fractal distillation of the possible.
More often than not, Mickey saw himself as a part of that future.
What he couldn't divine was if the act of following the Dogman made Mickey part of that future, or if he'd always been a part of the future.
Until he was sure, he'd bear witness to the man, and along the way try and keep from becoming accomplice.

They headed north up
Pacific Avenue
.
Dogman wore a black Misfits T-shirt with a white maniacal mouse on the back.
His jeans hung loose from narrow hips.
Black steel-toed boots encased feet that seemed too heavy to propel him forward.
Yet propel they did, Dogman down the center of the sidewalk.
People stepped aside.
Pets avoided him.
The wind blew elsewhere.

Mickey followed from twenty feet back.
He shuffled crab-like, his gaze to the ground, trying to avoid interaction with anyone else.
He'd glance sideways every now and then to make sure he was still following.
When he did, he'd receive snatches of future and thought.
Nothing more than bothersome details of people's lives.
Nothing at all like Dogman.

He almost lost Dogman in a crowd waiting at a light near
Seventh Street
.
A wedding party was exiting the Croatian Friendship Hall at the same time that the light changed, congesting the street corner with nearly fifty people.
Mickey stood tall and glared around him, bombarded by thoughts, desires, passions and possible futures as he swiveled around, trying to see his target through the crowd.
The newly-married couple was bound for divorce within two years.
The groom's father would die the following week in a traffic accident on the 405.
The sixteen
-
year old
flower girl was pregnant.
What the young man with the dirty fingernails was thinking was unspeakable.

And there it was.

Beating down dog.

Beating down dog.

Dogman strode down
Seventh Street
, away from Pacific.
In front of him hurried a man in his sixties, his arms loaded with two bags of groceries.
When the man stopped to shift the load, Dogman stopped as well.

Mickey shut his eyes as a possible future played out involving a claw hammer and the old man's eyes.
Dogman had found his prey and would soon release the beast.
Mickey thought about leaving.
He could return home, tap his personal collection of vodka, and watch one of his Three Stooges tapes.
Somehow Moe, Larry and Curly calmed him, maybe because their brand of violence was friendly.

Mickey felt his legs make his decision for him as he began walking towards the still figure of Dogman.
He certainly didn't want to interact with the Dogman.
He didn't want to become the future.
Mickey watched as his hand went out and prodded the Dogman's elbow.

Dogman spun, his gaunt face and hollow eyes appraising the intrusion.
Mickey gritted his teeth as he watched his own demise beneath the steel toes of the creature's boots.

"Fuck do you want?" growled Dogman.

Mickey opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
What would he say?
Don't kill the old man?
Not only was it an obvious thing to say, but Dogman would wonder how Mickey knew his intentions.
He wanted to shout
beat down dog
, but the man wouldn't understand the words coming from him.

"Fuck you doing touching me," snarled Dogman.
"Do you know who I am?"

Mickey nodded.
His mouth finally worked.
"Yes I do."

He watched as the man's eyes narrowed, a future shaping with jail and the electric chair as the end game.
Then Dogman sneered.

"Sure you do little man.
Now move along before you get hurt."
Then Dogman turned and watched his target shuffle into his home, careful to lock the door behind him.

A firm future involving a triangle of broken glass from the back window and a table lamp through the old man's stomach premiered within Mickey's mind.
Mickey backed away.
What had
he
been thinking?
This wasn't his business anyway.
Just because he knew, didn't mean he needed to act.
He reminded himself that he should be editing all of the input he received.
He scolded himself for caring, but was reminded of the thirty-four Chinese still desperate in their container.
How many people had Dogman killed?
Sixteen?
How many had Mickey let die?
Ten.
How many more would die before he did something about it?

Mickey stood riveted to the sidewalk as Dogman stalked around the side of the house, unable to run, scream or call for help.
He heard a window breaking.
One minute later he heard the first scream.
He knew what was next.
As he turned to leave, he heard a dozen gunshots from
Pacific Avenue
.
He knew it all and hated himself for his self
-
editing.
Numbly, he stumbled into the night.

At the corner of
21st Street
and Pacific, he saw the reason for the shots.
Emmett lay in a pool of expanding blood, the scene bathed in red and blue police lights.

"Homeless guy," said one policeman to the other.
"Wonder what he did?"

"Don't have to do anything to die," said the other, kneeling and counting the bullet holes perforating the dead man's chest.
"Wrong place.
Wrong time."

Mickey allowed the past to replay, just as he'd seen it when he and Emmett had been together before.

A '73 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible low-riding past Emmett standing on the sidewalk.
The four gangbangers in the car wore wife-beaters and black stocking caps pulled low over their brows.
The two on the passenger side pulled out nine-millimeter pistols.
Sideways, they emptied their clips into Emmett's chest.
The other two laughed.
"Target Practice," mouthed one.
As they sped away, Emmett fell.

The men in black hats had found him.

Mickey had tried to save him.
He'd told the man to stay off the streets.
He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and trudged home.
Even when he helped, he didn't help.
Maybe it was best that he kept to himself.

Passing the port, he looked toward the warehouse.
Two more had died, bringing their number down to thirty
-
two.
Clearly something had gone wrong.
Whatever arrangements they'd made were no good anymore.
Without help, they'd all die soon.
Their fear was so intense, he sobbed for a moment, their desperation washing over and through him.
But then he reclaimed his composure and reminded himself that it was none of his business.

By the time he'd reached home, poured himself a tall vodka, and sat watching Moe poke Curly in the eye, he knew he'd made the right decision.
Knowing had nothing to do with responsibility.
He threw down his drink and poured himself another.
He was just a part of the machine.
Like Dogman.
Like Bukowski.
Mickey remembered how they'd bridged commonality earlier in the day.
Each of them was part of the machine.
Dogman did.
Mickey saw.
Bukowski told.
If only Bukowski was here to tell someone about the Chinese.
So sad.
No
tickee
no laundry.

Mickey winced as Larry embraced a steam iron.

He didn't see that one coming.

***

Story Notes: Yet another L.A. story. This one was also set in San Pedro where I lived. One thing I tried to do here was to be true to a character. Let’s face it. Not everyone is capable of being a hero. Not everyone has what it takes, whatever that is. So what if you knew when someone was going to die? What if you could read the future? It’s a common plot in movies and television and it seems like everyone is capable of being heroic. I drop the bullshit flag on that. Very few people are and those that aren’t are usually as haunted as Mickey. So how do they live with it becomes my story.

NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 11

Hiroshima
Falling

Starring the whole of
Hiroshima
during

the darkest moments of their history

“Who we are is all a matter of perspective. Without someone else, we are no one.”

–
Dr. Fred Weinstein
,
Beverly Hills
Plastic Surgeon

Filmed in Sepia

With
Hiroshima
eyes I weep
for a world self-destructing,
never learning lessons from
the atomic apocalypse of skies falling
.

From “Atomic Skies Falling” by
Carah Ong

August 6, 1945.

Itoro's eyes snapped open.

He felt the press of people pushing against him from all sides, especially against his back, making him lean into the man in front of him.
His legs were wedged fast.
Hot stale air sizzled across his skin.
His body hummed with interlocked agonies.
He tried to lift his head and gasped at the immediate pain the simple move had caused.
Using his hands, he felt his face, which had melted to the back of the man's head in front of him, the torturous motion of looking around ripping skin from his cheek.
He could only see the hairs on the back of the man's head in front of him and the ransacked face of the man next in line who must have turned to see the explosion before the fire had swept through them, leaving his eyes smoking holes of melted tissue.

The sight, the pain in Itoro's cheek and the realization that a horror had occurred locked Itoro in place.
The only thing that dared move was his heart, which longed to be a thousand miles away where the cherry blossom bloomed in a heaven of goose-white snow and clean air, far away from the devastation that had slammed into Hiroshima, making his once great home a funeral pyre to an ambition.

He'd ran with the others into the train station when the sky flashed brilliant, five hundred of them, pushing and shoving and screaming as each tried to climb over the other for the presumed safety of inside.
They'd counted on the concrete walls and iron-beamed ceiling to protect them.
But when the wave of impossible heat swept over them, shredding their clothes, peeling their skin and super-heating their breaths, they knew that they'd chosen wrong.
Those who didn't die right away saw the roof shorn clear by tempest winds.
The walls crumbled, crushing those nearest.
A lone beam as long as a train plummeted a hundred feet, shearing through the bodies of half a hundred men, the ticket counter and the rows of women who'd gathered to sell rice cakes and fruit to commuters.

Careful not to move his head, Itoro strained his eyes until they felt like popping.
He glimpsed yellow sky and broken skyline.
Fires burned everywhere.
Even the edges of the
crowd still smoldered
—
blackened, twisted men who'd been too close to the platform transformed into desolation mimes trapped in their last act of life.

What had happened?
It was as if the city had exploded.
They'd heard the air raid sirens, but thought nothing of it.
The wails of warning had become as common as the call for leaves every morning by Mr. Nagata.
No.
It couldn't have been an attack.
Where were the bombs?
Where were the planes?
Instead, something horrible must have happened; something bad enough to make the land want to shed itself of humankind and start anew; something perhaps the Americans had done by dealing with the devil.

Itoro
felt a movement to his right
—
a jostle, then a pull as an old man with blacksmith arms peeled himself free of his neighbor with a great yowl.
Kicking as he continued to shriek, the man, head burned black, skin flayed from his arms, climbed atop the men next to him, using the shoulders and heads of the dead for leverage.
An immense wound covered his back, dripping gouts of blood, a flap of skin hanging free.
As the man began to spider-walk across the dead, the skin seemed to reattach itself, the edges fluttering to the man's back as if they had free will and determination.

Did Itoro just see what he thought he saw?
He closed his eyes, but by the time he'd reopened them, the man was far along, heading towards a space where the men hadn't melted so that he could run free.
The pain was making Itoro see things.

But the man had the right idea.
Itoro needed to leave.
Being one conjoined mass denied him not only his individuality, but his freedom as well.
Cheek melted to the man in front of him, some unknown connection to the men behind and beside him, he was a part of the sum of grand dead beast with a thousand heads.
Where did he end and where did it begin?
The idea of being someone other than himself offended him.
He wasn't part of a machine, nor was he an appendage of a beast.
He was a man, an individual, a husband and a father.
He was
—

Katsumi!
What of his wife?
And Mynami his son?
Was their fate the same as his?
Panic slammed adrenaline into the chains of pain that held him in place, shattering them.
Placing both hands on the man's shoulders in front of him, Itoro pushed off, the skin of his cheek ripping free, the sound like rice paper tearing on a winter's morning.
So great was the pain he couldn't scream; only a high-pitched squeal escaped lips burnt black as breath refused to flow through his lungs for almost a full minute.

He had to get to his family.
He'd spent too much time as part of this terrific mass of men, no telling what had happened to Katsumi.
The last time he'd seen her was in the door of their home.
He'd kissed her.
She'd watched him walk down the hill as she always did.

With another wrench, he freed himself from the man's arm on his left and the hip against his back.
The pain was incredible, but somehow manageable now that it had become a way of life.
Free at last from the jumble of bodies, he turned to look where the explosion had occurred.
The radio towers and tall buildings that had once been the
Hiroshima
skyline were gone.
Only fires raged in their absence, flames licking the underbelly of a sickly yellow sky.

Remembering how the old man had removed himself, Itoro sought to lever himself up.
Placing his hand on the shoulder of a man next to him, he pushed until the backs of the dead supported his weight.
Itoro followed the path of the old man, his hands seeking heads and backs and shoulders, anything to keep him upright and moving.
He caught the gazes of many melted men who were alive and attached, either unable or unwilling to separate themselves from the beast, satisfied to die as part of a greater thing.
These he felt nothing from.
Yet as he touched the d
ead, he felt strange emotions
—
surprise, jealousy and anger seeping into him.
Stranger still, these weren't his emotions.
It was as if each touch generated new thoughts within him.

When Itoro finally found a clear area at the edge of the mass, he gently lowered himself.
When his feet touched ground, he fell to his knees and began assessing his wounds.
His pants hung ragged, barely covering his private area.
His shirt had been burned away.
Charred bits of skin covered his chest, peeled away from the man who stood in front of him.
His arms were blistered and red.
Already pieces of skin were falling away.
His hair came out in clumps when he ran his hands through it.
His cheek, back and side, where he'd been attached to the others, hummed with agonies only held in check by his refusal to scream.

Any other day he'd rush to a hospital, the pain of his wounds, the damage to his body, supplanting any desire to continue.
But today wasn't like any other day.
Something horrible had come to
Hiroshima
today, something that had yet to be written in the history books but was destined to be the focal point for generations of rage.
He turned to look at the others, melted together.
How selfish was it to care so much for himself, when they remained unheralded and uncared for.

No.

His wounds could wait.
He needed to think of his family.
He needed to find them.
He needed to see if they still lived.

God, please let them live.

Itoro lurched to his feet and took off at a slow jog towards his home in Ushita-Machi, away from the center of the explosion.

Half an hour later it began to rain.
The moisture was a salve to his ruined skin.
He stopped, arched his neck back and opened his mouth.
He hadn't realized how thirsty he'd become.
Yet as cold and rejuvenating as the rain was, there was something strange about it.
The water felt heavy as it filled his cheeks.
He swallowed once, then coughed.
Small hard pieces lodged in his throat.

Then the memories hit him...

Sweeping the cobbles in front of the shrine.

Watching the sparrows cavort in the willows.

Scooping up the ball to throw it back.

Loneliness seeping through every pore.

Running across the street and dodging cars.

Five, ten, a thousand memories slammed into Itoro, sending him to his knees.
He retched the grit onto the street, particles collecting in his teeth.
He rubbed against them madly, trying to divest himself of the pieces, pulling them out with his fingers.

The aroma of fish and pickled vegetables.

The feel of a cold rice tatami beneath his knees.

The sound of children's laughter.

The grunt of satisfaction of a job well done.

As the rain puddled black around him, an inkling of what happened seeped through his pain and confusion.
The rain wasn't just black from the soot from burning, but also from the explosion.
Those who had disintegrated at the point of the blast had shot into the air along with the cars and the buildings and the animals and the flowers, all seeding the clouds.
Now the people and places were returning to earth,
Hiroshima
falling with the rain.
And along with them came their memories.

Like the dead he'd touched while escaping the train station, these emotions were eager to inhabit him as if they hadn't realized that they were dead.
Itoro wondered if the devastation had come so fast and fierce that people weren't prepared on an
elemental
level.
With instantaneous death came the splintering of their souls, millions of pieces of self, scattered and not understanding that things would never be the same again.

He staggered to his feet.
A sickness burned within him, tendrils of nausea slithering into every movement as other people's memories struggled to take hold.
Even his equilibrium
was affected.
Twice he fell, his
head suddenly too heavy for his body to control.

The memories wanted to stay within him.
They didn't want to go.
He had to remind himself who he was.
Itoro Haruki.
Worker at the Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation.
He had a wife and a child.
He lived near Ushita-
m
achi in a one bedroom home built by him and his uncle, Naruka.

It became a chant.

Itori Haruki.

Itoro Haruki.

I am Itoro Haruki.

Until the memories of the dead were no more.
Thirst still hovered at the edge of his will, but he dared not quench it, for the rain was as deadly to him as the explosion.
He'd survived one, he wanted to survive the other.
Perhaps when he returned home he'd cleanse the memories with saki, but until then, he'd have to suffer.

He'd encountered so much death.
Everywhere bodies and parts lay, piled and scattered like rice after a military parade.
Buildings he'd known were broken ruins.
Some had completely disappeared as if some divine hand had reached down and plucked them away, perhaps to keep them safe or hold them until a better time.
Throngs of bloodstained people, naked or half-naked, dragged themselves painfully along, trying to find solace.
The skin of those who'd been burned by the heat was peeling or left hanging in strips.
The completely dazed sat on the ground pleading for help.

Itoro
stopped by what was left of an elementary school that Mynami was supposed to begin attending next year.
Itoro had passed it every morning for two years, the bright faces of the children revitalizing even on the most dower of mornings.
The blues and yellows of their uniform color splashed against the bougainvillea stands bordering the buildings were a feast for sleep-rimmed eyes and had always served to fuel him for the three mile trek to the train station.
But there were no more children.
There were no more flowers.
The entire frontage as well as several interior walls had disintegrated.
All the desks and chairs had somehow remained intact, and been pushed to the far end of the building where they now stood like an impassible thicket.
Spots colored the concrete in the shapes of children.
Here and there, pieces of bodies lay camouflaged by the occasional piece of wood and rubber.