He'll Recover, But What Will Be Left of Him?

If I want to arrive safely at my destination, that is, the end of the course, I think this blog needs to take a wildly different turn. My destination is having shit published by the end of the semester, and I don’t believe I’ll be publishing reading responses anytime soon. The blog word requirement is 500, and that just so happens to be a pretty premium number for flash fiction, so I may make it a requirement for myself to pump out flash fiction on this baby. The pieces might relate to the text, but then again, they may not. I’ll let the story emerge/unfold of its own volition. These things have lives of their own. They shape me as much as I shape them. So here goes. Flash Fiction. Let’s see if I can sustain it. (Yes I did the reading. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Inevitably, I’ll borrow stylistically from Pirsig. This might be imperceptible, but it’s there.)

            

            His name is Joe, or Ron. It depends on when you meet him. I meet him when he’s Joe and later when he’s Ron. When I meet Joe, he’s dying from a heroin overdose at Chuck’s place. This is common in Bullhead City.  

            Bullhead City is kind of like the last place you madly needed to leave. Wherever it was, whatever the compulsion to go, that’s Bullhead City. It’s located along the Colorado River on the southernmost point of Lake Mojave about 90 miles south of Vegas, just close enough for some of that sin to ride the heat waves and bleed over into our city. A traveler may have stopped here, maybe saw a sunset over Lake Mojave—the hues of purple, red, and orange reflecting off the lake, the clouds dappled across the sky—but that snapshot of otherworldly beauty is an illusion quickly dissolved in the heat of the day. The city doesn’t reside in the landscape or the climate anyway. I’ve lived here long enough to know the real city resides in the people.

            So Joe is passed out, maybe dead, across the street. This is what Tootsie tells me. She stumbled lazily into my trailer after shooting up at Chuck’s, after Joe flat-fuck falls and goes into convulsions. She plops down beside me on my couch. “I can save him,” she says. “I save people all the time.”

            “You can save him? If you can save him, why don’t you go over there and save him?”

            “Ah, it’s a hassle, ay,” she says, sinking into the couch.

            I offer her a half gram of crystal if she’ll save him, and we walk to Chuck’s. Nobody picks like Chuck, and he has the scab to prove it. This scab covers the entire surface of his face where a beard should be. Greens, yellows, and reds color the scab at varying degrees of elevation like a topographic map. I once caught him picking at my place. He was in the bathroom tearing at the scab with duct tape. His blood was sprayed across the walls and floor. Chuck disgust me, but I’m drawn to the prospect of seeing a life leave or enter a body.

            Chuck kneels beside Joe, his scab-enveloped mouth pressed up against Joe’s, forcing monstrous breaths into his lungs. Just then Joe opens his eyes to see that scab looming over him, that flaky dying mass of flesh too close to his face. His eyes go wide and he runs from the house without a word. Chuck smiles so big his scab cracks.   

            I meet Joe again when I’m downtown with Barry. “I gotta talk to this guy,” Barry says.

            “It’s Joe, right?” I say.

            “No, it’s Ron now,” he says, and just then Barry hits him so hard he shits his pants.

            He’s out cold. I can smell the putrid stench coming off him. Looking down on him, I know that he’ll recover. I just wonder who he’ll be the next time I see him.