Page 31 of Antihero

“Why did you call me?”

Devine was on the verge of going either way, steel emerging in the set of his mouth as he regrouped, that big brain tornado-churning, but he hadn’t put his mask back together, not fully, not yet. He wet his lips. Hesitated.

“Say it, motherfucker.”

Joey’s words came low and hard and her voice had not a tremor of anything but precisely the right amount of street.

Devine’s head snapped over to her and for an instant, Evan couldn’t believe she’d spoken either. She remained poised on her stool, elbow resting on the polished mahogany, legs crossed, giving up not an inch.

Devine looked at his cigar as if it had just appeared in his hand, tilting downward so the burn crept up the interior, scorching the leaf. He came back to Evan, his demeanor off-kilter. He looked punch-stunned, shuddered like a boxer off a hard cross. He dropped the cigar into the ashtray, his gaze creeping past Evan’s ridiculous snifter to meet his eyes, and for the first time Evan had seen, he was laid open, vulnerable as a child.

“I…” His voice failed. He cleared his throat, began again. “I need your help.”

Evan extended his arm, palm out. “Cede.”

Devine looked from Evan’s hand to the black box at his side. He picked it up, considered it. And then held it across the low bar cart, smoke from the crushed cigar winding around his wrist.

Evan reached to take it but there was a tug, Devine’s hand still holding on.

Evan waited.

Devine swallowed once, hard, and relinquished it. “I cede.”

Evan held his attention on him, spoke sideways to Joey. “Please pour him two fingers of a low, deep bourbon.”

With a single swift motion, Joey vaulted over the bar. She dolloped two fingers of Blanton’s Black Label, the Japanese export, into a crosshatch rocks glass. Leaping back over, she strolled across to them and proffered the glass to Devine on a slight tilt. He looked up at her. She looked down. He took it. Contemplated the spirit within.

“I’ve been swimming in too many different information silos,” he confessed quietly. “Western European conservatives. Geoengineers and crypto-anarchists. Pan-African socialists. Evangelical intellectuals. Hellenic philosophers. Talmudic scholars.” He fluttered his fingers, as if airing out his thoughts. “And they clash like the gods of old. Fighting it out inside me. So many mythoi, so many systems of meaning. They don’t commune with one another. Most of them don’t even try. I go through door after door. And come back speaking in tongues.”

“So you drink gallons of booze and pop pills.”

“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’”

“A proverb of Hell.”

Devine’s pupils dilated nearly imperceptibly as he took in Evan more fully, a pellet of trust conferred for the shared reference. He gazed down into his glass, his face looking suddenly unkempt. Fair eyebrows ruffled, popped blood vessels in his cheeks, ghostly bruises beneath his eyes. The glass of bourbon Joey had poured was still untouched, a good sign that he was indeed coming down.

“How can I know what’s enough if I don’t know what’s too much?” Devine asked. “In order to feed it?”

It, Evan thought. His mind.

He said, “Let’s get you out of your brain and into your body.”

Devine’s lips pressed together, amused. “But I can’t defend myself there.”

“That is,” Evan said, “precisely the point.”

15Please Help

The world was out of focus. Anca lay on the warped and splintery exposed plywood of the empty room, drooling, her head drug-thick, stuffed with cotton. Amoeba patches of extant carpet blotted the floor like oil slicks. She was no longer naked, her dress torn and rammed on backward. No underwear. Vague recollections tickled her brain stem—crawling from the tub, finding her dress balled up against the wall like a worn rag, dragging it over her sweat-sticky skin. She stared uncomprehendingly at the ripped cotton fabric splayed out to one side, a crumpled angel wing. The cheery feminine design, tiny lilies against cornflower blue, seemed incomprehensible. No sign of the coat she’d been wearing on the subway, nor the wallet in its pocket, nor her backpack, nor her keys, nor her laminated seizure plan. A stinging scrape at the back of her neck suggested a burn from the yarn lanyard’s being ripped off.

She rolled onto her back, pain erupting through her hips and hamstrings from when her legs had been twisted this way and that. Excruciating pressure in her lower abdomen, burning like an infected bladder at the point of bursting. The ache of bruised internal tissue stole her breath. Faceless others had been inside her body when she hadn’t even been home inside that body, and the violation of that, the absolute horror, she could not begin to comprehend, let alone contain inside her mortal flesh.

She forced her eyes to focus. Ceiling spots bulged low like udders, and the room smelled appallingly, a barnyard funk. An empty jug of hydrogen peroxide lay toppled on the floor beside her, next to a crumpled pack of Winston cigarettes, an uncapped black Magic Marker, and a ski mask that made her rib cage contract with terror. A ratty pink couch missing a cushion slumped against one wall. Centered in the sparse room was a bare mattress with a ticking stripe pattern on a cheap metal bed frame, horrifying and utilitarian. The smell of the mattress still roosted in her nasal cavities from when her face had been pressed into the polyester. Mold and musk marinated in salt leaked from her tear ducts.

The pain.

Oh, the pain.