still going

Another Friday night, another post-dojo trip to Chancellor's with Victor. At least, that was the plan. Fate had different plans for the two of us last night.

First, the Dodge broke down. And I mean broke down. The fucking rear axle fell right off as we pulled out of the dojo's parking lot. Have you ever had a rear-axle come unattached? Let me tell you, it's no fun. I can't remember if we first heard the awful noise or felt the horrible lurch as the back end of the Caravan hit the blacktop. The wheels, still attached to the liberated axle, continued to roll down the street and I had to send Victor running after them. He was able to prevent their escape, but the axle assembly was far too heavy for either of us to bring it back to the van. The van itself wasn't going anywhere, so the two pieces had to wait to be reunited until the towtruck arrived. Somehow, I'd managed to reach the ripe old age of 34 without ever having called a towtruck before. This was my first, and though I'm inexperienced in such matters, I have a sneaking suspicion that it normally doesn't go the way it went for me last night.

Right around the time my vehicle succumbed to spontaneous self-disassembly, there was a 12-car pileup on the 101. Every towtruck within 100 miles was dispatched to the scene, and the ones that weren't already at the crash-scene when I called for assistance were stuck in traffic either going there or leaving there. Victor and I were privileged to wait two and a half hours for assistance to arrive. It was my suspicion that the operators of the truck did not have much prior experience with separated rear axles. My suspicion was painfully confirmed when the towtruck operators attached their lifting straps to the front axle and attempted to pull the vehicle up onto the flatbed. After some sparks and lots of awful noises they decided it might be better to leave the front wheels on the ground while attaching the dragging equipment to the wheel-less rear of the vehicle. They managed to get the Caravan up on the bed, and rolled the rear axle up a ramp and tied it down.

And that, my friends, is the last we ever saw of Fran's old Caravan. But we didn't know that at the time.

It was too late to go to Chancellor's, and even were it not, we had no way to get there. The Dodge was being (ostensibly) towed off to a mechanic to have the axle re-attached, which couldn't commence until the next day, and probably could not be completed until the next week, so there was no point in driving with the towtruck. Everyone that either of us knew was asleep or in another state, so we had no alternative but to find a cab and have the driver take us to the nearest Jack in the Box, which is precisely what we did.

In the back of the cab, Victor and I conversed, as we tend to do, between bites of our greasewiches. I was impressed with both of us for being able to keep the sandwiches down after a heavy workout and a long wait.

"Did you know that a jellyfish has an incomplete digestive system?" asked Victor.

"No I did not," I said. "In fact, I so thoroughly did not know that a jellyfish has an incomplete digestive system, that, merely in preparation for not knowing that a jellyfish has an incomplete digestive system, I also, intentionally and painstakingly, failed to know what, precisely, an 'incomplete digestive system', in fact, is."

"Hilarious," said Victor. "It means that it shits out of the same orifice from which it eats."

"Ah. What a pleasant thing to bring up while eating fast food in the back of a cab at 1 in the morning."

"Hmph," said Victor, not pleased that I had rejected his topic of conversation.

We rode on in silence for a few more blocks before Victor gave it another go.

"I called Tiffany last night."

"You're joking, right?"

"No, no joke."

"Why on earth would you do that?"

"I wanted to see if she was doing alright."

"Dude," I said. "Cheeky Charlie? Hello? She's fucked up, you need to stay away."

"She put a hex on me," said Victor.

"What?"

"She put a hex on me."

"What the fuck's a 'hex'?"

"You know, a curse. The evil eye."

"Um..." I said, failing to come up with anything more intelligent than that. Victor was waiting for something more intelligent, however, and it became apparent that if I wanted the conversation to proceed I was going to have to do better than "Um". So I stretched my brain and arrived at "Uh" followed by "Er" and finished off with a nice, heartfelt, "Huh!".

"She said she was getting back together with Cheeky Charlie. Only she didn't call him that, she called him Edward. She said she wasn't sorry about what she and I did and that Edward wasn't going to find out about it."

"And that's when she put the hex on you, huh?"

"Yeah, right after that. She told me she'd put a hex on me and that I'd never find a happy love life."

"We'll get back to that in a minute," I said. "First, though, how do you know Edward and Charlie are the same people?"

"What do you mean 'how do I know?' I know. They're the same guy. 'Cheeky Charlie' was just our name for the guy. His real name's Edward."

"Did she tell you that?"

"Well... no."

"So even though we know she was sleeping with you while married to Cheeky Charlie, there's no way Tiffany could have been sleeping with a third guy named Edwin, huh?"

"Edward," said Victor.

"Edward," I said.

Victor went silent. Our burgers and fries were gone, and we'd reached an uncomfortable break in the conversation. It shouldn't have been uncomfortable: what difference did it make if Tiffany was cheating on her husband with multiple people? Who the hell knew if Cheeky Charlie even was her husband? In any case, Victor had broken up with Tiffany before finding out how much she was getting around, for entirely different reasons. But that was all easy enough for me to say (think, really), since it wasn't my life. Things aren't always so logical when you're looking out instead of in.

We let the silence ride a little, and stared out opposite windows. The cab driver was really taking his time. We weren't going much faster than 35, which, in a 35 zone is appropriate, I guess, though I wouldn't expect it of a cabbie. We were slowly approaching the Gamestop on Marina and 8th. The streetlamps were out and the corner was not well lit. A group of teenagers stood outside the shuttered and barred Gamestop, staring in through the glass between the cardboard cutouts.

Their shoulders hunched forward beneath their baggy hooded sweatshirts. They stood there unmoving, not even talking, until one of them seemed to sense my gaze. Our cab wasn't the first car to approach and pass this group of early-morning window-shopping fans, but it was the one that captured the attention of one of them. The youth turned to stare me right in the eye, through the dirty window of the cab. I could see his face beneath the hood, across the street, lit by dim moonlight. It was lifeless. The eyes were half shut, the mouth slightly agape, the tongue pressed up against the bottom row of teeth, buckling like a wave about to crash out over his lips. His cheeks were round and fleshy, his skin, pasty. The moonlight did not penetrate above his dark eyebrows; I saw no hair to speak of.

His features said nothing to me, but his eyes spoke, softly and with malice. They glowed an unhealthy yellow in the moonlight. He stared at me, though through the window and illuminated only by moonlight I could not have been easily visible. But he stared at me nonetheless, with eyes that expressed both emptiness and malevolence. Eyes that peered out from a soul that wanted nothing from life, and got exactly that. Eyes that spoke of endless boredom piled upon deep despair; an unwillingness to confront the creeping rot that brought him and his companions to this place and time. His eyes told me of an apathy even deeper than his despair; of a willingness to stand idle while that despair radiated outward throughout the city, throughout the entire world.

Our gazes were locked and I could not turn away. Our necks craned in opposite directions as we maintained our strange communion through the window of a passing cab. When finally he was beyond my sight, I felt somehow drained. Victor's story no longer interested me. My story no longer interested me. I wanted to go home and sleep for a long time. A very long time. Forever, ideally. I didn't want to be in the world anymore. Not one where the best idea a group of youths could come up with for entertainment at 2 in the AM was to stand outside of a video game store and stare joylessly, lifelessly at passing cabs. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the look I got was only the surface. That kid, whoever he was, wasn't going anywhere. Ever. I could see it in the hopelessness of his gaze. His location at 2AM on a Saturday morning indicated he didn't have the skills to make it, and the look in his eye indicated he didn't have the will.

What would become of him? Forgotten, swept aside into an irrelevant job and a life of painful ritual, if he's lucky. He could end up a lot worse. Fed into the meat grinder of never-ending war-mongering insanity. Dropped through the cracks of civilian life onto the cold, welcoming concrete of the street, swallowed up by apathy and mental illness. He looked to be halfway there already, and he couldn't have been more than 15.

"A fuckin hex, man," said Victor. "A fucking hex!"

"A fuckin hex, man," I said, still lost in my own discomfort, oblivious to Victor's plight.

"And she's never going to remove it. She said I deserved it, for dumping her when she'd been so good to me. I've never been cursed before, man," said Victor, growing more agitated as he listened to his own words. "How the fuck am I supposed to get rid of it? Can you even get rid of a hex? What if I can't?"

"What if you can't?" I said, in monotone.

"What if I can't! I'm fucking cursed!"

Motion above caught my wandering attention, and I looked. The moon stared into me, through my upturned eyes. Paler now than a moment ago, its yellowness had faded and been replaced by soothing blue. Her watery rays cooled my emotions and gently stilled the ripples on my soul.

"It will be all right," I said.