Читать книгу Man Alive - Thomas Page McBee - Страница 13

5

Oakland

April 2010 ♦ 29 years old

I crashed to the sidewalk. My palm bled a little, my body vibrated with ghost hands and a dark hum of a different time.

“Up,” the man attached to the fists said.

I pushed myself off the concrete, moved to the balls of my feet.

“Not all the way up!” he barked.

I froze, arms raised, my back to him, on my knees.

“Turn around.”

I pivoted clumsily. His eyes were warm, kind even, but spastic. His hands were deep in the kangaroo pocket of his sweatshirt. He towered—Darth Vader with a goatee.

“Stay down,” he whispered, raw like a scream.

Shut up shut up shut up, I thought.

Parker, all lean muscle, appeared behind him just then, a miracle, her bag aimed at his skull. She’d gone head-to-head with a shitty stepdad for most of her teens, and as she cocked her arm back I thought, briefly, that we might have a chance.

He sensed her and, turning with the grace of a ballet dancer, pulled a handgun from his kangaroo pocket and motioned her downward. She dropped, and the scene bent into a posed tableau: me on my knees with empty eyes, the gun extended toward us, and Parker’s mouth with her snaggletooth poking out, forming a tight “O” as she crouched into herself, knowing what I know, what I wish she’d never had to learn: how to disappear.

He turned back to me, his mouth moving in slow motion. My heartbeat grew sluggish, I could hear it ca-thunk, ca-thunk.

I felt warm, full of energy and particles. It was almost spiritual, but for the familiar haze, the awareness that I was splitting, abandoning myself to a gun and a mumbling man.

Come back, I thought.

He kneeled down beside me. I focused on the whites of his eyes, his teeth. I smelled dog shit, exhaust, dirty clothes. I wiggled my toes dully. Nothing.

The air was electric with his strange frustration, the waving gun. I handed him my wallet and he threw it to the ground. I looked for Parker but all I saw was her crouching shadow.

I couldn’t move and I couldn’t even think, except to note, dully, that I was immobilized, a bystander to my own story.