Homeward by hypericin

The camp sprawled along the sidewalk, on the side of the street opposite the supermarket. Tents of various shapes, colors, and states of repair crowded the available concrete real estate. What space remained was filled by discarded tarp and cardboard, by bottles and wrappers, by dressers, lamps, and other markers of expired domestic lives, and by occasional objects d' art, earnestly hawked by some of the more creative and entrepreneurial residents.

Passers-by who braved proximity to the camp were assailed by an odor that was an admixture of BO, old urine, and something sickly-sweet and undefinable. The heady reek acted as a natural defense of the camp, and kept most of the square world well away. I only noticed it a little.

As I entered the camp's boundary, I saw Fudgy's dog face poke excitedly out of my tent. The day's drama melted away at the sight of my dopey boy. That was his magic. His snuffling snout, framed by two droopy brown ears, scanned the air and sniffed me out immediately. He bounded toward me lopsidedly while wagging his whole round bottom. I found Fudgy on the streets in Mexico, back when I only thought I was poor. I fed him, took care of him... poor my ass, I rounded up the money to fly him home with me! Now, he took care of me. I hugged him, ruffled his head and kissed his forehead. He sat contentedly on his butt, panting and beaming his handsome grin, delighted by my mere existence.


"OK boy, OK, down boy." I held him steady. I didn't want Fudgy making too much of a scene. I scanned the supermarket sidewalk, on the lookout for my friend Art. Art is a normie whose office is a few blocks north. Sometimes he stopped by on his lunch break. I fucked up today, big time, and I knew he had to be super pissed.

"Hey Whoomphs, you seen Art around?"

Big loud Whoomps was a vision of indigence out of our time. With his fingerless gloves, moth eaten scarf, and torn bowler hat capping matted curly orange hair, he might have been a hobo out of the Depression, hopping trains between desolate Midwestern factory towns. All he lacked was a skinny sidekick to complement his fatness.

"Naw man, haven't seen your civvy buddy. What's up, how'd your feet get so wet? Didya fall in the toilet? Hey r!", he shouted, "you seen Art?"

r hobbled forward, so-named by the twisted musculature of his back. Imprinted over countless nod-offs, it bent him into a living lower-case letter. With his white prospector's beard, he looked more at home in Whoomphs' outmoded milieu than my own.

"Yeah, I seen 'em." His throat was like a drain pipe almost completely rusted through, only grudgingly permitting the flow of language. "Was damn pissed. That bald head of 'is was like a big red balloon, har har har! Da fuck you do to 'em?"

***

Art had set me up with an interview with one of his colleagues, a manager at a local tech company. Even though we all knew I was homeless, I invested the cash to have my best outfit dry cleaned. Day-of, I was up at 6am sharp to sneak into the YMCA shower. Permutations of how the interview might play out ticked off in my head under the scalding, cleansing wash.

I arrived at 11. The office was fluorescent and clean, a house of work. Extremity of emotion had no place under this acoustic tiling. Neither joy nor wrath could couple into these rows of cubes, each equipped with its own captive soul, each with its pale face tuned screenward like a magnetic filing.

Art's friend, the manager, seemed like a decent enough guy. He took me to a meeting room, decorated by corporate art of oddly bloated figures billowing their way through idealized lives. (The fingers in my chest thrummed my airway like a bass string, picked out an uneasy ditty.)

He started right in and asked me some math questions. They were insultingly easy, but math was always easy for me. Then some behavioral questions. It was obvious what sort of answers he was looking for, and I gave them. In a blink the interview was effectively over. Art was talking benefits: 80k to start, but most employees earned 6 figures within a year. Full health, full dental. 4 weeks paid vacation. Wait 'til you see our Christmas party. (The fingers coiled round my lungs, gave a probing little squeeze.)

Whelp, I thought to myself, life was finally straightening itself out. I'd have money. More than enough, soon. An apartment, a car. Wife. We'd get a house, kids. Vacations with the little ones. Golf.

(My breath caught. The fingers made a fist, cruelly flexing their full strength. I gasped audibly. Hot, suffocating steam filled my chest, released from some rent in my inner tubing. Black spots flickered in and out of my visual field.)

Panicked, I had to get out of this, escape! I stood up, dropped my pants, presented my bare ass to the manager, and bellowed my best rendition of The Marcels:

"White moon! You left me shitting alone! Without a dream of a fart! Without a square of my own!"

The manager was beyond shocked, his brain had crashed. System error, no match found in social algorithm database.

Now everyone's favorite part, basso profundo: "Bop n'a bop uh bop ah bop bop, bang n'a bang uh bang uh ding dang, dinga dong dang white moon!" To this I synchronized the motion of my butt cheeks, skillfully enough that I was genuinely proud.

The manager's recovered, defaulting to a root-level, primordial algorithm. "LEAVE AT ONCE YOU SON OF A BITCH! I'M CALLING THE COPS!" I turned around. He was hyperventilating, his face was flushed deep red, flirting with apoplexy. Time to skedaddle.

Outside the meeting room, every face was turned toward me. Me, the scene, the shocking, hilarious embarrassment. I was on stage, and the show must go on.

"Baron von Dingleberry was the terror of the skies above Normandy!" I buzzed some likely targets with arms outstretched, making propeller noises: "Neeeeeah! Neeeeeraaah!"

Having surveyed the enemy positions to his satisfaction, the Baron attacked! "Duggata! Duggata! Duggata!" blazed his fearsome twin machine guns. I crashed into someone's desk, raking the surface with my outstretched arm. Papers went flying; framed pictures of wife and kids toppled and cracked; monitor, keyboard, and desktop tower all crashed gracelessly.

"Duggata! Duggata! Duggata!"

I intentionally collided with a shelf. It was heavier than I expected and only budged a little. I heaved, and it toppled, disgorging a manila heap onto the tightly wound carpeting.

Someone grabbed me by the collar from behind.

"GET THE FUCK OFF OF ME, MAN!"

I shoved him, hard. He fell back, crashing into a cubicle and collapsing one of its walls. I knew I'd gone too far. I ran to the nearest exit sign and pushed open its door. A fire alarm blared outrage.

I stumbled through the parking lot into the gravelly hinterland beyond, slid down-slope, splashed into a drainage ditch. The water was turbid and oily, tinged with an unhealthy green fluorescence, but it was mercifully frigid. I exhaled slowly, blissfully, my lungs dilating, as the baleful steam traversed down through my body and out my feet, inexorably drawn to the cold water. Turning around, I saw a row of faces staring back at me from the wide office window, made expressionless and grim by distance.

***

I gave Whoomphs and r the rough gist of how it went. Stimulated by my storytelling, or just some private heavy metal soundtrack, Whoomphs made the devils horns with one meaty, out-thrust hand, and violently rotated his head and upper body. "Fuck yeah!", he roared at the top of his lungs. "Whoomphs! Whoomphs!" Such outbursts were not uncommon here and drew little notice.

My friend Dave was a middle aged, half-black man who affected long stringy hair, draped over a balding crown in a manner that looked progressively Scrooge-like as the years passed. His penchant for crack cocaine marked him as irredeemably old-school. This was Fentanyl country. His most prized possession, apart from his paraphernalia, was a dog-eared, exhaustively annotated copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Its covers were carefully wrapped in duct tape to maximize durability. To him it was a Gnostic store of life's deepest, most inscrutable truths, the study of which must eventually unlock the secrets of the universe.

Sometimes we would go for coffee. Meaning, we would go along a loosely defined route, passing the best coffee shops in the area. The Starbucks on 5th was our favorite. Not because the coffee was any good (it was execrable), but because the baristas there were particularly inattentive. We would wait outside and look in the window. When some coffees (if they were not lousy frappacinos or something) sat unattended on the pick up counter we would saunter in and casually take them. Occasionally the barista would recognize us and make a scene, but a bit of shouting slid off of us like water off a duck's ass.

Dave's tent was small and modest, he had few possessions to fret about. I announced myself:

"Hey yo Dave! Quit playing with yourself, lets grab a coffee! "

On opening the flap, an acrid plastic waft of crack launched a blitzkrieg assault on my nostrils. Dave's ashen face peered like a wight from from the tent's gloom. His red-rimmed eyes registered annoyance, as I had disturbed the study of his holy book. No doubt to chastise, he bestowed me an impromptu lecture:

"Coffee presents to the uncaffinated for-itself as pure possibility," he intoned, "and reveals the essential function of the for-itself: a being which nihilates the in-itself, itself pure positivity, transcending it by enfolding it in a layer of nothingness that is its own unrealized potential." He concluded: "This is the basic structure of freedom."

No no, this wasn't any good. "Right on, man." I let his tent flap fall back into place.

Alicia saw me and approached. She was a newbie, a freckled, vaguely hippyish girl who hitchhiked here from rural Illinois. While a recent arrival, the inevitable hard veneer was already coming in nicely: angular planes had begun sharpening her rounded, soft face; budding flints peered from eyes formerly luminous and limpid; expletives coarsened a dialogue once sweet with naivete. Even at her best, an overlarge jaw and nose saved her from an all too dangerous beauty. But to me, she still looked vulnerable, and pretty.

She was one of the camp's artists-in-residence. She loved the ubiquitous crows. She fed them whenever she had spare food, and could (she claimed) identify members of the local murder by name. She knew of their secret conclaves, and was on occasion granted the honor of invitation. She sold portraits of her inky loves, adorned with hearts, stars, and other tokens of her corvid affection.

"Hey babe, can you score some fetty for me? I'm fucking flush, this rad guy literally just bought two really sweet paintings."

She looked up at me coyly, and her eyes hinted at sex. This was a mirage. Not a calculated ploy as I had once thought, but reflex, done without thinking. Alicia handed me three 20s, enough for two baggies. Mama Judy's place held a particular terror for Alicia, and she never ventured there herself. I was clean for over a month now, but didn't mind performing this small service, especially for her.

Mama Judy lived in the "luxury" apartments right behind the camp, in fact she was the reason the camp sprouted here. The building was a giant box, partitioned into smaller boxes. A heavily made-up woman working in the lobby gave me a cold glance, and I sidled past her into the elevator. The noxious top-40 hit that was playing in the lobby continued into the elevator, plaintive auto-tuned whining over electronic thumps and bloops. Unbelievably, it extended into the third-floor hallway, wantonly subjugating all the residents.

A young couple walked by me. Despite my cleanish body and clothes they immediately registered my status and intention. Their studied indifference didn't quite mask the fear, anger, and contempt flitting across their faces in rapid succession.

I knocked on Mama Judy's door. "Yeah yeah, git in here!" came her loud, southern, raspy response. The squalor of her place was a brutal contrast to the minimalist sterility of the hall. Wrappers, fast food cartons, and soda bottles made for bespoke carpeting. Beyond a stained couch and wall mounted TV, no concessions were made to the niceties of habitation. On the couch sat her son Ambrose playing Call Of Duty. As always, his chubby, pockmarked, expressionless face, highlighted by a woeful teen mustache, was an impressive study in impassive stoicism.

Mama Judy herself sat in her Zippy behind her "desk", a battered kitchen table covered in the wares and tools of her trade: tiny baggies of white powder, micro scales, little plastic scoops, coffee grinders, bags of lactose, guns, and scattered wads of cash. Mama J resembled an extra large ice cream sundae, topped by the butterscotch syrup that was her greasy yellow=brown hair. Twin oxygen tanks supplemented her ever-expanding respiratory demands.

"Yer staring at me like a lovesick whore." Her throat sounded coated by razor-sharp phlegm. "How many fucking bags you need?"

"Just two."

There was a commotion out the window. A man shouted sonorously: "Capitalism, by consumerizing reality, inevitably consumes itself! This self-contradiction is the seed of its own destruction!" Three sharp cracks, that could only be gunshots. Holy fuck, that was Dave! With a sinking feeling, I handed Mama Judy the bills, pocketed two baggies and scrambled out.

The wait by the elevator was agonizing. The music ("Gimme some of that D, baaaby! Giiiiimme!") failed to complement my emotional state.

Fudgy ran to me as I stepped out the lobby door, whining and shaking, looking dolorously up at me with big scared eyes. I hugged him and petted his round head, tried to calm him.

Anxiety charged the air with an electric crackle. A knot of people gathered by the bank across the street, and more gawked on this side. I noticed two of the bank's floor-to-ceiling windows now sported spiderweb latticeworks of cracks. Sirens blared, and two cop cars screeched up to the curb, an ambulance following closely behind.

Whoomphs grabbed me, his big face flushed and frantic.

"Dave, man... he fucking shot him! He's always so peaceful. I knew he was packin', but never... Dave never hurt no one. Fuck! That cop was messing with him... Dave was tweakin', goin' off on capitalism, started throwing rocks at the bank. The cop saw him and started shouting, grabbed him real rough. Dave fucking blasted him, man. Fuck!" Whoomphs rapidly paced back and forth, shaking his great head. "This is bad, man. Real motherfucking bad... we're so fucked. so fucked..."

More cop cars skid to a stop, distant sirens announced more. They piled in, swarming like carrion birds to a fresh corpse. Still more arrived, impossibly more, more than I'd ever seen, strobing the darkness away with ominous blue.

Alicia approached. "Right right, I totally forgot". I handed her the two baggies. She looked up at me, her face was calm, radiant, her eyes twin wells of love. Despite everything a boner tented my pants. "Alicia?" She pressed one of the baggies into my palm, and smiled warmly. "Take it. Just for tonight. Just this once."

Fuck it. I went back to my tent and got my gear. Fudgy followed me in, still very upset. He saw what I was doing and whined, prodding my arm anxiously with his snout. "Just for tonight, buddy. Just tonight." Guiltily I tried to reassure him with an ear rub, but he let out a mournful groan, unpersuaded. I kissed the top of his dome head. "I'll be right back, Fudgy Boy. Don't worry." I powdered up the square foil, lit up, and nodded out.

***

Dad stormed home from the office. Rough day again, no doubt. He sniffed, sneered disapproval. "Chicken again? Dammit, can't you make something good for once?"

Dinner was a clanking of silverware drowned in the silence of our family three. Unbearable grim munching. Mom was the first to crack, and pierced the silence: "You know, I was talking to the girls, the Bassons are going to Cancun this year. Three whole weeks. Bert got a deal at The Mirage, everyone says it's the best resort."

Dad withheld his council for a long minute. The skin of his hand whitened as he held his glass of Pepsi in a death grip. Softly, his voice modulated into a mocking, girlish caricature: "Cancuuuuun! I wanna go to Cancuuuun!" His voice raised: "Do you even know what kind of mortgage I'm paying for this coffin? This deathtrap? Never mind what those HOA bastards are charging me? Do you even care?"

Mom's eyes turned venomous. With both hands she lifted her plate a little and clunked it down sharply. Lone peas scattered, scurrying for safety.

"I just... wanted.. a decent place... to raise the boy!" she hissed through clenched teeth. She had pushed hard for the house, and this was her Standard Defense whenever its excellence was brought to question.

"May I be excused?" What little appetite I had was gone. My chest was tightening miserably. Metallic, clawed fingers were stirring, probing. Mom looked disapprovingly at my plate of mostly uneaten cutlet and peas, but declined to comment. Dad grunted dismissal.

I ran down to my basement video game sanctuary, powered on my PC, and loaded Red Baron, a flight sim taking place in WW1. You could play as the Brits or Germans, but I always chose the good Baron himself. "Eat hot lead, limey! Duggata! Duggata! Duggata!" My twin machine guns blazed, and another Sopwith Camel plunged earthward, trailing black smoke. I felt my chest relax, dilate, breathe.

A door slammed above, so hard dust trickled down from the ceiling.

"Get Out! GET OUT!" mom shrieked.

"Damn straight I'll get out! Maybe I'll see Jan tonight, she knows how to treat me right! And she won't cook me tasteless slop neither!"

"You son of a bitch, you fucking cheating bastard!" Explosive crashes, as plates and glasses were hurled. A lull, I pictured dad raising a balled fist, barely restraining a blow, barely mollified by her cowering.

"You know where I'd be without you and that little SNOT-NOSE downstairs?". He emphasized "snot-nose" with a thudding kick, clearly directed at me. "Tahiti! On the beach, drinking margaritas! Not in this SHITHOUSE, with SHITHEADS!", at the top of his lungs.

A demonic grip cruelly seized the pipework in my chest, crushing, tearing, rending. Hot, poisonous steam escaped, filling my chest cavity, choking me.

I threw aside my flight stick, ran gasping out the side door and into suburban twilight. Shouting spilled out of our "McMansion" (dad's term), shamefully loud and clear in the dead, still air. I ran down self-similar streets of huge, identical houses, gasping and choking, tears blinding me.

In the vast manicured lawn of the clubhouse was an artificial pond, with a fountain in the middle. Lily pads, marble frogs, and summer mosquitoes comprised the ecosystem the pond could sustain. The water exhaled a white vapor on this frigid November evening. I threw off my shoes and plunged in, the shock of cold brought immediate relief. It condensed the baleful steam, drew it bubbling out of my feet and into the chill water.

I stayed for over an hour, feet blissfully submerged in the muck, breathing freely and fully. In a window across the street, the silhouette of Old Ms. Maverly watched me, her pruned face no doubt a caricature of schoolmarmish disapproval. Seeing me see her, she snapped her curtains shut.

I finally started home. It was late. The night had turned the sterile gated community somehow eerie. A silver dagger moon sliced open the sky, sad winds sighed forth from the wound. Row upon row of monuments to false opulence, each with their own captive souls. Well-fed, Stairmastered corpses, entombed in rococo mausoleums.

Through a window I watched a boy, illuminated by the TV he was tuned toward like a magnetic filing. Slowly, he turned toward me, stood, walked toward the window. I backed up, ran. Turning around, I saw him pressed against the window, his face made expressionless and grim by distance.

Back home, my stomach sank. Dread radiated like black light from my house. I opened the side door slowly, silently, hoping to evade notice, fearing my pounding heart would betray me. Behind stood mom, pale as death, staring at me with wild eyes, silent and unblinking. Her grimace evoked a life's full weight of sad bitterness.

I screamed, ran past her crying, scrambled upstairs to my bedroom. I slammed the door shut and dove under the covers, shivering violently. Thudding footsteps marched up the stairs, down the hallway, stopped at my door. It pounded with slow, methodical violence. An agonizing pause, charged with immanence. With a shocking crash the door collapsed along with part of the wall. Dad's bulk loomed in jagged doorway, breath steaming in the frozen night.

"Get UP! Get UP NOW!"

He shined a flashlight in my eyes, knifing them with harsh white light. I was so tired, so very tired. He kicked me roughly, toppling me from my bed. Fudgy, no fighting boy, growled his fiercest, lunged. A boot struck his head with a sickening crunch. I howled, lurched upright and swung wildly, grazing his cheek. He swung his nightstick, and the world exploded into light and dark.

***

A buzzer blared, signaling the release of the magnetic lock sealing the jail's inner gate. A guard pushed open the heavy doors and steered me by the elbow to the lobby. An Asian cop was working the front desk. He pushed a gray plastic tray at me, containing two dollar bills and two pennies, a crushed snickers bar, and a single condom, creased and faded with age.

"Here are your, uh, haha, things. You're damn lucky Kowalski isn't pressing charges. Now get the hell out of here."

His fat colleague stared at me with dull, beady eyes. "Junkie scum", growled through a walrus mustache.

I pushed through the front doors out into a gray noon. A light, cold rain splatted on the gray concrete, on the storage facilities and industrial depots that made up the city's southern end. I found a bus stop and waited, my stomach twisted in knots of dread. My dear, sweet Fudgy, hurt, alone. Whimpering, dying. Dead.

The bus finally lumbered down the wide, empty road, reluctantly acknowledging me with a stop. I begged on with my two dollars, and endured an excruciatingly long, halting journey north, transferring twice. My mind raced, reiterating images of that night, that black boot, Fudgy's head.

I finally made it back, and my heart sank. Workers wearing yellow and orange safety vests were water-blasting the sidewalk where the camp once was, removing every vestige of our taint. I ran up to one, he turned to me blankly. "Hey man... hey... you, you seen my dog?" He wordlessly shook his head, returned to his work. I accosted another worker, then a ped who veered sharply out of my way.

I called for Fudgy, screamed his name, teared at my hair. I frantically checked his spots: the bush growing embedded in the chain-link fence, the pocket of space behind the Supermarkets HVAC, his favorite piss tree around the corner... nothing. He was gone. I sat on the sidewalk against the store's rough limestone wall, holding my head in my hands, calling his name hopelessly. I tried to eat my snickers bar, but it tasted like cardboard in my mouth. I spat it out, tossed the bar. A passerby gave me a wider berth than strictly necessary, and I leaped up, loudly demanded he give me my fucking dog back. He hastened off.

Two supermarket security guards approached, one speaking over her shoulder into her walkie-talkie. I took off in the opposite direction, through the parking lot and into the forest park beyond it. The claw chose this moment to stir from its slumber and give a premonitory squeeze. I pounded my chest furiously.

The park was a narrow coastal forest. A long trail wound through it, following a creek, ending in a beach. We would trample little side trails, making forest retreats where we could nod off in peace, surrounded by nature. Happier days.

I shambled down the trail, a walking corpse, having nothing and no one. The few passers-by on this dreary afternoon stepped well aside to let me pass. They were shadows to me, signifying nothing.

The claw began methodically isolating slender tubes one by one, then mercilessly tearing them open. Hot black steam whistled from the damaged conduits, filling the empty spaces of my rib cage. I tramped onward dazedly, my head pounding, suffocating from internal pressure.

The trail terminated in a children's park overlooking a small beach. I was alone. Cold rain spattered on my face in greasy globules.

The claw achieved full potency, more terrible than ever before. It ripped at my chest wildly, clawing my tubing apart, destroying it irrevocably. I cried out, fell on my hands and knees. My heart pounded fiercely, pinwheels twirling in my fading vision. I stood up, the world whirling round my axis, and I stumbled forward drunkenly.

A metal bridge arched over train tracks and gave access to the beach proper. My destination gave me a desperate strength. I tossed my two pennies down to the tracks, crossed the bridge. A commuter train roared beneath me, infernally loud.

The gray Pacific lapped against the small beach, lovingly offered her icy bosom. I crossed the sand and entered into her. Twin spikes of cold impaled my feet, piercing through my legs, sliding past my innards, into my chest, into the claw. Shocked, it screeched in pain and loosened its grip. Steam roared out of my chest, rushing down the spikes and out into the water, making it bubble and seethe. Exultant, I waded in further, homeward. Up to my waist, to my chest. My breath was frantic, but joyous, fierce and free. The claw crumpled into dust, into the nothingness it always was. I effervesced.

A clap of insight. I spun around, and there was Fudgy, barking, jumping, bottom wagging with joy. I ran through water as light as mist, seized him, wrapped him in my arms. He squirmed happily, licking my face frantically as I sobbed into his fur. His warm softness banished the cold like it was never there.

All the sharp angles, pricking, scratching, piercing, cutting, melted away forever. Soft sunlight danced with the gentle breeze on my bare skin. We were as we should be. We were home.