Epiphany Jones (3 page)

‘I seek God! I seek God,’ he cries. ‘Where is God?’

This sounds familiar.

‘I will tell you,’ he continues. ‘We have killed him – you and I.’

Ah, Nietzsche.

‘All of us are his murderers.’

Someone give this guy a coffee already.

‘What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives.’

Personally, I think he just pulls this crazy act because he knows you can get a lot more out of people a lot faster by scaring them, annoying them, or making them feel like they’re your saviour, than you can by sitting around asking them for a nickel.

Case in point: a kind-looking, balding man is bringing him a cup
of Kenyan Select right now. ‘It’s OK. Calm down. Why don’t you drink this and warm up?’ the coffee-bringer tells the doomsayer. The bum takes it and stands between a set of tables and the snack counter, his body blocking the path of an alternateen barista with pigtails who carries a tray full of biscotti. Her shirt reads:
ADMIT IT. YOU’D GO TO JAIL FOR THIS
. As the barista awkwardly slips around him, carefully trying to balance all the biscotti on the tray, one falls off. The bum snatches it from the floor before the girl has a chance to see.

Now the bum’s settled into a seat in the middle, at a little round table with a chequerboard. The barista, counting biscotti, eyes him suspiciously. The bum holds his biscotti in both hands, twitching his head left then right, like a skittish squirrel nibbling an acorn.

Choke on it, you freak. My lunch break is almost over and I didn’t even get to finish my paper in peace. I put on my coat and leave the
Sun-Times
on the table. Someone else will get to finish it. As I walk towards the exit I pass the bum and intentionally check him with my body, knocking him back in his seat.
Fuck you
, I say in my head.

And just as I get to the door a lady screams.

I turn around and everyone is on their feet. Through their legs a mass of dirt-stained clothes wriggles on the floor. Then a break in the crowd reveals a black knit cap with silver hair sprouting from the back. The bum’s face is turning an ever-darkening shade of blue. He’s grasping at his throat. The motherfucker is choking on his biscotti.

There are eight people between me and the bum, but no one is doing anything. Admit It just rolls her eyes, wearing a face that says,
God, this is so inconvenient. I don’t get paid enough to worry about choking homeless people
. Some guy near the back has started recording everything with his phone. Look for it on YouTube soon, no doubt.

And maybe the rest of the people don’t know the Heimlich, but I’m betting no one else is helping him because they don’t want to touch a creepy, worthless fuck of a man – worthlessness that might rub off on to them.

I can relate. To the bum, I mean.

Clawing at his throat, he’s a minute closer to death than he was when the lady screamed, and still the crowd is acting like they’re watching a one-man improv show.

And look, I don’t know the Heimlich either, but I did bump him. So I push my way though and kneel at the bum’s side. Then I do the worst thing possible. I do the thing the first-aid refrigerator magnets tell you never to do: I stick my fingers down his throat.

And there’s a reason they tell you that. All I’ve done is lodge the biscotti further down. Panicked, I grab his coffee and pour it into his mouth.

And somewhere in the crowd a woman screams again.

Someone shouts, ‘He’s going to die!’

Someone shouts, ‘His face is so blue!’

Someone shouts, ‘Leave room for cream!’

And, leaning over the nearly dead bum with his mouthful of steaming coffee, I take my middle finger and jam it down his throat.

I thrust up and down, finger-fucking his mouth until the coffee has saturated the biscotti enough to break it in two. As I roll him onto his side the combined coffee and biscotti sludge slowly dribbles out of his mouth and down his whiskered cheek like a mini mudslide. Going back in, I stick all my fingers in his gaping, coffee-scalded mouth, past his rough, rodent-like tongue, till I feel the sewer-slime slickness of his throat and scoop out a clumpy mush of biscotti. I go in one more time, fishing for leftovers.

Then comes the gag.

And his warm, chunky, lava-like vomit flows over my hand.

He gasps for air.

‘I’m not going to go to hell for someone as worthless as you,’ I whisper under my breath, as I watch his sad face lose its blue. His whiskered cheeks softly pump up and down.

‘Oh!’ a woman exclaims. ‘Oh!’

‘Awesome,’ says YouTube guy.

Then I guess the crowd realises they should do something so when they tell this story to their friends they can say they played a part. They
help the bum up. They tell him he is so lucky. They tell him to view this as a new day, a new start.

I’m still on the floor, my hand covered with homeless vomit. No one wants to help me up.

My fingers are red and scalded. My heart is racing, beads of sweat dot my face, and it feels good when someone opens the door and the cold April wind blows in.

And when the door bangs shut, she’s on the other side of it again – her raven hair hangs in wet strands before her eyes. Her pale skin is slightly pink from the cold. The place where her ear lobe should be drips with water from the shredded cartilage. And her green eyes stare at me. I mean,
right
at me. The words from my dream echo in my head:
An awakening is needed in the west
. Heat radiates from my skin. The little beads of sweat that dot my face evaporate. I’m dizzy and just want to close my eyes, but I can’t look away from the girl. Those penetrating eyes. That mutilated ear.

Then a towel hits me in the face.

‘Here you go, hero,’ the alternateen barista says, moving between me and the door.

I wipe my hand clean of vomit and when I look up again, my dream figment is gone. It rains in her place.

A
fter you save someone’s life, people don’t just let you leave. When they think you’re a hero, they want to be your best friend. They pretend like they care about you. They pretend to be interested in you because of who you are, not because of what you just did.

I sit on the steps outside the coffee house and let the drizzle fall over me. The barista takes a seat by my side. Her eyes are caked with eyeliner, the raccoon. Inside the coffee house a line has formed at the counter.

‘On my break,’ she says and lights up a cigarette.

I wonder if she’s even old enough to be smoking.

‘That was really cool what you did,’ she says.

But my attention has shifted to across the street. I’m watching the figment from my dream as she stands behind a crowd of Asian tourists who’re snapping pictures of one of the big lion statues that guard the museum’s entrance. But then the Asian tourists, they see a WGN-TV cameraman shooting footage of the museum. It must be for their story on the west wing’s renovation Roland mentioned. So the Asian tourists stop shooting the lion and start shooting the cameraman and a very bored looking reporter.

‘I’m going to be a doctor when I’m older so I can do that stuff every day. Saving lives and shit every five minutes,’ the barista says. ‘What a high.’

‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I say, thinking of every doctor I’ve ever been to. ‘I think most doctors spend a lot of their time behind desks filling out forms.’

‘I’m talking about being an emergency-room doctor,’ she chides me. ‘They’re always running around saving lives every second.’

‘I really don’t think they are.’ And I think of the night my father died. Across the street my figment is pacing in the rain and holding a flat newspaper under her arm.

‘Don’t you ever watch
ER
? It’s exactly like that,’ says the all-knowing seventeen-year-old. And I look into her raccoon eyes and consider trying to explain that TV shows only the exciting parts of life; that the boring shit that makes up ninety-nine percent of our existence is edited out. But it would just be a waste of breath.

Across the street my figment seems indecisive. When I look at her she looks away. I’m grateful for that. It’s my mind trying to fight off my hallucinations. Still, it scares me that I’m seeing figments again so often. But it’s my own damn fault. I’ve been so lazy about refilling my 486s. And my shrinks have made it clear: it’s the medicine or shock therapy. And I’m not going to turn out like that. Tomorrow I’ll go to my shrink and get a refill; maybe ask him to up the dose. For now I hail a cab. I tell the driver to take me to my place. I’ve got that one pill I saw buried in my carpet this morning. Donald will just have to believe whatever lie I tell him.

B
y the time I get back to the museum I’m over two hours late. I couldn’t catch a return cab and had to walk most of the way. I’m freezing. The temperature has really dropped.

I run up the marble steps, hurrying to get out of the cold rain, which stabs like ice picks. Donald’s going to kill me.

‘Museum’s closed, sir,’ a security guard says, blocking my entrance.

Closed? It’s three-fifteen. ‘What do you mean it’s closed?’ I say.

‘It’s closed, sir.’

‘Yes, I heard you,’ I say, showing him my red museum badge. ‘I work here. Why is the museum closed?’

‘This is North Entrance,’ the guard says into his walkie-talkie. ‘I have an employee trying to enter. Yes, sir. Sir.’ He holsters his walkie-talkie. ‘Please wait here.’

Minutes pass and the rain continues to fall before Donald emerges from the emergency exit door. He waves me inside where a museum guard waits with two strange men; one is considerably taller than the other. The strangers don’t have museum badges.

‘It’s OK, we just need to talk,’ Donald says with a coldness that almost crawls from his skin.

The five of us walk in silence down two floors. The construction-lined corridors are practically deserted. The few people we do pass are silent. Some look scared when they see me with the two strangers. And then it hits me: these men are from HR. They’re the guys employees here talk about in whispers. They call them financial assassins because their job is to roam around and find useless employees to lay off. Fewer employees mean more money for the renovation.

We enter a small conference room I’ve never seen before. The museum guard waits outside.

‘Please sit down,’ the tall financial assassin says.

‘Why is the museum closed?’ I say.

‘Where have you been for the past three hours?’ the short financial assassin says. He sounds like he’s trying to channel Magnum, PI.

‘Lunch,’ I say, pretending I didn’t take two hours longer than normal. ‘Donald, what’s going on?’

But ‘Please just answer their questions’ is all Donald offers.

‘Do you normally take a three-hour lunch?’ the tall assassin asks.

Mom will be so disappointed if I lose my job. She was so happy when I took it.

So I say, ‘OK, look, I know I shouldn’t have done it.’

My answer, it causes the two assassins to lean closer and Donald to look a little frightened.

I say, ‘I’m sorry, but you’re not gonna believe what happened.’ And I tell them the events of the past three hours. I lie about the medicine though. They wouldn’t understand. You tell someone you see things
and they’ll never look at you in the same way again. Hell, they’ll find a way to fire you just because you’re on psych meds. So instead I tell them that after the coffee house I had to go to my girlfriend’s because she was feeling sick.

To Donald I say, ‘You’ve heard me talk about her before. Harriett?’

But Donald just shakes his head. ‘Why would you leave work for so long to visit a sick friend?’

‘Please,’ the short assassin says. ‘Let us ask the questions.’

‘
Girl
friend,’ I say.

Donald looks at me like I’m a liar.

‘Fine,
ex
. We’re on a break,’ my voice cracks. And I say that my
ex-girlfriend
, she gets scared when she’s sick. Besides, I needed to wash up. And I shove my hand beneath Donald’s nose so he can smell the dried homeless vomit that’s crusted under my nails.

‘It’s not everyday someone gets to be a hero,’ I say.

‘Can we call your girlfriend to verify all this?’ the tall assassin asks.

‘No,’ I say.

‘Why not?’

‘Because she’s back at work. I dropped her off.’

‘Where does she work?’

‘The Water Tower Plaza.’

‘What store?’

Fuck. I say, ‘Auntie Anne’s.’

‘Auntie Anne’s?’

‘She likes pretzels,’ I say.

And I can tell this isn’t going well, so I take the pity angle. I say, ‘Donald, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have been so long. It’s been a hard day. Write me up if you want, but please don’t fire me. And
please
don’t contact my girlfriend. We’re having enough issues as it is, OK?’

And then the outrage angle. ‘Besides, these HR guys don’t have the right to harass her.’

That’s when the assassins look at Donald, who looks back at me.

That’s when he says, ‘These men aren’t from HR. They’re detectives, Jerry.’

Police detectives?

Donald says, ‘They’re
police
detectives, Jerry. The Van Gogh is missing.’ His steel-grey eyes glaring. It’s the first time I notice that his eyes match the walls of our office.

It takes me a minute to process what Donald has said. The short man folds his arms and keeps his gaze on me. I don’t know what to say. How does a ten-million-dollar painting disappear from one of the most secure museums in the world?

‘You think I took it?’

I sound guiltier than I’d like.

‘You were the last one to see it before it disappeared,’ the tall detective says. ‘You told Donald that you had been in Roland’s studio. You told him right before you went to “lunch”.’

‘That’s not true,’ I say.

Donald eyes me sharply.

‘I mean, it is true that I said that, but I went to look at it
with
Roland. When I left he was still in the studio with it. He saw it after me.’

The detectives glance at each other.

‘Look, check the fucking security tapes. We’ve got cameras everywhere.’

But then they tell me that for two hours this afternoon all the cameras were non-functional. They tell me this was due to the renovations – some electrical work. Then they ask how long I’ve known the cameras would be inoperable today.

‘I didn’t! I didn’t know about the cameras, I don’t know who stole the Van Gogh, and I wasn’t the last one to see it.’

Then I yell, ‘Talk to Roland, he’ll tell you!’

And the police detective, the short one, he says, ‘We can’t.’

This is where they tell me how they found Roland in his studio. How he had a broken tripod leg shoved through his eye socket into his skull. They tell me how he’s at Rush Memorial undergoing emergency surgery right now.

A moment of mute struggle passes through me. How do you react when you learn someone you’ve worked with, someone your father
worked with before you, has been brutally attacked? I try to think of any movies I’ve seen that may give me some clue.

And look, I know this sounds horrible, but I don’t feel anything over Roland’s attack. That’s just how it is. It’s just how I am. But these guys, I can tell they’d expect anyone except the attacker to be all broken up about it – especially someone who’s worked with him for years.

The three of them, they’re waiting for me to react, to show sadness and fear and regret. To show innocence. So I put my face in my hands and soak up the smell of homeless vomit. I flick my tongue between my fingernails and taste the regurgitated-biscotti-stomach-acid mix. My tongue burns. My eyes water.

Then I pull my hands away, ‘Not Roland. Oh my God, please, not Roland.’

And I let the vomit tears flow. I shiver. I shudder. I’m great. Donald even pats me on the shoulder.

‘There, there,’ he comforts mechanically.

I’ll take my Oscar now.

For the next hour the detectives ask me about any bitterness over Roland’s raise. They ask me to repeat my story again and again, looking for inconsistencies; hoping I’ll slip up. At the end I’m so exhausted from answering the same questions over and over, from fake vomit-crying again and again, I can hardly stand. When I do, the tall one puts his hand on my arm. ‘It’s very important you didn’t lie to us about anything just now. It would look bad for you. If you need to make any corrections, now’s the time.’ My thoughts turn to Harriett, but I remain silent. ‘We’ll have follow-up questions in the coming days after we verify your story,’ the detective warns. ‘Don’t take any trips.’

‘Why don’t you go home and get some rest?’ Donald says, as he walks me out. It’s dark now and Michigan Avenue is black and shiny from the cold rain. A cab is waiting. ‘It’s been a hard day for everyone. Try to relax tonight. Go home and watch some TV. And take tomorrow off.’

Before I get into the cab I try to lighten the situation with a joke.
But here’s the thing: even though the joke is stupid, Donald, who never smiles at me, lets out a laugh so theatrical I get the impression that he thinks if he didn’t laugh I might hurt him. I also get the feeling that he only walked me out because he wanted to make sure I left.

A
dim light shines from the distant downtown skyline through my living-room windows. I walk through the darkness into the kitchen and turn on the ceiling lamp above the table. I run the faucet and scrub the dried vomit from under my fingernails. That’s when I’m surprised to find I’m weeping a little.

Who could put a tripod through Roland’s eye? Why would someone? Then I think, what if they’re some kind of art-museum serial killer and I’m next? And as I’m standing at the sink, scrubbing homeless vomit from beneath my fingernails, I suddenly get the feeling that someone’s watching me.

But pangs of hunger quickly replace my paranoia and I grab some milk and a bowl of Trix and plop down hard on the aluminium kitchen chair.

I should call Mom. I don’t like Roland that much, but he’s been a good friend to her, especially after Dad died. I should call her; tell her he’s in the hospital. I wipe my odd little tears away and take a spoonful of cereal into my mouth. Later. I’ll call her later.