Читать книгу Damaged Hearts - Jan St. Marcus - Страница 6

The last ninety minutes or so have been some of the weirdest of my life. There is a stranger in my kitchen, eating my food and petting my dog while I have run to hide in my bedroom, ostensibly to take a shower. If somebody put a gun to my head and demanded to know why I did what I did, I would be a dead man for sure—I have no earthly idea what the hell I’m doing or why I’m doing it. Why did I get so worked up watching those assholes harass Bran? It’s not like I know the kid. Sure, I’ve seen him around the boardwalk, but so what? And why the hell would I record it? There is simply no answer to any of those questions. I realize that I’m not going to get any answers sitting on the edge of my bed, so maybe I will get up and take a shower. Maybe I can wash this weirdness off of me.

The shower feels good. Better than good, in fact. For some reason, I am more myself in the shower than anywhere else. I don’t have to act. I don’t have to pretend to be something that I’m not. I don’t have to worry about social norms and what I should or shouldn’t say. Or what I should or shouldn’t do. It’s usually the only time my brain shuts off and I can just . . . be. Usually. But not today. Not right now. My mind is spinning. I feel my heart beating out of my chest. And not in a good way. Not in the way when I was connected. Not in the way when I was . . . . when I had . . . I want the water to calm my brain, mellow my heart, wash away all thoughts and passion and emotion so I can once more, if only for a little while, just . . . be. And finally, after five minutes, it begins to work. I breathe a sigh of relief. And just as I begin to smile, his eyes assault me. They are so green and so bright I almost have to squint from their brightness. I say “almost” because my eyes are already closed. I concentrate on the water beating down on my face as I tilt my head back to let the water pummel me head on. Those eyes . . .

The kid I brought home after dislocating that fat guy’s arm has the brightest green eyes I have ever seen. I first noticed him about six months ago. It’s not that he’s unusual, and nothing about his disheveled, dirty appearance is worthy of much note. But there was always something about him that drew me to watch him. Made me pay attention to him.

He never seemed to be drunk or high. He never seemed to be looking for trouble, or even escaping from trouble. Were it not for the dirt and grime on his clothes, he could be any other teenager walking aimlessly around the beach. Well, except for the fact that I never see him with a phone—everyone under the age of thirty seems to have one surgically implanted in their hands these days. I guess what I’m trying to say is that he never seemed angry or bitter or resentful of his circumstances. Content is probably not the right word to use for a young homeless guy, but it’s as close as I can come to what I feel whenever I see him. Thinking about it now, I suppose that if he were certifiably crazy, that could explain it, but he never gave off that vibe either. Most times I see him, I offer him a five or ten-dollar bill, whatever I have in my pocket at the time, which is never much because, well, who carries cash anymore, right? But he never looks up at me as he thanks me. And he always says “thanks.”

So when I saw him tonight, looking particularly slovenly in the misting rain, I decided that I would help him out again. And that’s when I saw what those ass-hats were doing to him. Truth be told, I’m not noble or a do-gooder or anything like that. But seeing that fat guy spit on his discarded slice of pizza and then start laughing was more than I could take. I turned on the video-recorder on my phone and placed it in my shirt pocket. I really only intended to record the guy being mean so I could get one of my friends to post it to Reddit or YouTube or something to embarrass the guy. That was all I intended to do. I figured the video would get some hits, maybe someone would start a GoFundMe page for the kid, and he’d get a few grand to maybe do something positive with his life. I know that’s a thing sometimes. But when I walked over to the fat guy, he started mouthing off. And while I expected to see some kind of drunken indifference in his eyes, instead, I saw actual malice. And then I looked at his friends, the weak kind of followers that were like sheep waiting to see where the rest of the flock went and then blindly followed. And then I felt the heat rising to my cheeks. And then I recognized the beginnings of one of my “red-outs.”

Yeah, it’s a thing for me. The easiest way to explain it is you take a blackout—where you have no recollection of what happens—and you replace it with the bright red associated with anger, and you’ll be getting close to understanding. When I’m in that state, I get really quiet. My mind goes into overdrive, and that has the effect of slowing everything way down. Let me put it another way: when I’m in that state of mind, I can process things much faster than normal. But to anyone observing, it seems like I’m perfectly calm and collected. Oh, and I guess I should mention that I kind of lose conscious control of what I’m doing. So when I told that fat guy that if he swung at me, I’d break his arm so quickly that his friends wouldn’t know what happened, that wasn’t me. I didn’t want to break the guy’s arm. I didn’t give a shit about the guy. The most I would have done, if I had been given a choice, was chase the douchebags away and buy this kid a slice.

But it wasn’t me. Not really. It was me who told the two other guys that they would run away after I broke their fat friend’s arm. That was me trying to get the guy to change his mind and not do something stupid, like take a swing at my redded-out alter-ego—I call him my red friend. I knew that if the fat guy did swing at me—us—my red friend would do exactly what he said he’d do; he always does. And I also knew that my red friend knows exactly how to push the right buttons to get people to make bad decisions—like swinging. I was able to take over for just long enough to tell the two sheep-friends that they didn’t want to get their asses kicked for their fat friend. I was able to tell them that they would run. But then he had to chime in that bit about the fat guy being funny sometimes, but not funny enough that his friends would get their asses kicked for him. He said that because he knew that this would push the fat guy over the edge, and then he’d take a swing. After that, I was just a spectator.

The screams of the fat guy brought me back. It’s always like that. My red-friend stays long enough to do the damage and then disappears to make me clean up after him. So I came back right after the fat guy started screaming and I looked up at the two sheep-friends and I’m guessing that they saw something pretty scary in my eyes because they bolted like they had a cattle-prod stuck up their asses. Of course, it wasn’t actually me being mean or threatening or anything, it was just me waking up from wherever my red-friend stashed me while he did his deeds. Oh shit! That’s why Bran looked so scared when I walked over to him. It was pretty clear that he didn’t remember me for all the times I gave him money, but I didn’t understand why he looked scared. It was the first time he had looked at me. And, in his defense, he had just seen me (or sort-of me) break a guy’s arm. Maybe that had something to do with it. But no, he saw that confusion in my eyes as I was getting my shit back together. And that’s when I saw his eyes for the first time. They were this dull green, like the ocean when it’s full of algae.

But when he looked at the breakfast I had prepared after his thirty-minute-long shower, those eyes were the brightest green I have ever seen. My first thought was that he had washed his eyeballs. But that’s pretty ridiculous, right? He didn’t wash his eyeballs. Maybe what I did had such an impact on him that I had the power to actually change his life? Could that be? Did I want this to be? Could I handle that much responsibility? No. No. No. No. No. That wasn’t it at all. Couldn’t be. I was being ridiculous. That’s why I needed this shower. My mind was racing to stupid conclusions, and I needed an excuse to get out of there. And now, this shower that should have been letting my mind relax is not working. And now I can feel the heat rising inside of me and I can feel my cheeks getting hot and I have to calm myself. I start breathing in and out like my old therapist suggested and I breathe in a big stream of water and now I’m coughing and choking and I drop to my knees and I feel spent as the water cascades down my back. And now I’m crying. I’m still a freaking mess, six months after my twin brother died. Shit.