The Cormorant (5 page)

The lie is part of the job.

She gives good story.

They give her ten bucks.

Most people don’t want to know how they’re going to die.

Most people want to know how they’re going to live.

They don’t realize how intimately those things are connected.

She tries to sexy herself up – torn T-shirt, knife-slashed jeans, a push-up bra (which for her is like trying to pinch and lift a couple of mosquito bites, but you work with what you have, damnit).

It’s hard to be sexy in the wintertime.

Well. Fuck ’em. Today, she gets breakfast from it. And lunch. And maybe tomorrow night she’ll be able to afford another motel room instead of crashing under bridges, on park benches, in Hobo King’s car. (Hobo King knows all the tricks. “Don’t fog up the windows,” he says, “because that’s how cops know someone’s sleeping in there.” Hobo King’s name is actually Dave and he used to be a cab driver.)

The waitress comes, drops down a plate called the Working Man’s Special: sausage, bacon, pancakes, eggs, hash browns, toast. All for seven bucks. Breakfast: the cheapest and easiest way to eat a gut-load of food.

And goddamn if Miriam doesn’t love breakfast. She would marry it if she could. Stick a ring on one of the sausage links – a terrible idea, really, because before she knew it, she’d
eat
the sausage link and the ring with it and that probably wouldn’t feel great coming out the other end.

Rings. Engagement rings.

She makes a mental note:
Don’t forget about that guy from the bus
.

Andrew, that was his name. Still almost a year away. He was kind of a prick. But it’s an experiment, she tells herself. Another experiment. She warned him. And in a year she’ll see if he heeds her warning.

For now she sits and doesn’t eat her food so much as
maul
it. Fingers greasy from sausage. Bacon in her teeth. Syrup on her chin. The waitress comes and gawks for a moment, and Miriam thinks:
I remember you, Susie Q. You’re the one who gets breast cancer in ten years, dies in twenty
.

Cancer, cancer, cancer, so often cancer.

Miriam dives back into her food with all the gusto of a starving wolverine. Suddenly, here’s the waitress again–

She looks up. Not the waitress.

Three dudes. Boys, practically.

One of them, a shaggy-haired scarecrow in dark hipster glasses. Next to him, a super-skinny black guy with hair so blond it looks like pollen gathering on a bee’s butt. The third is a pooch-bellied pot-smoker type, hair so ratty with resin you could probably break off a hank and stick it in a bong.

“You really a psychic?” the black one asks.

“We want to know how we die,” the hipster scarecrow says.

“Because holy shit,” the stoner says. “How awesome.”

“I’m off-duty,” she says.

“We got money,” Black Daffodil says. He elbows Hipster Scarecrow, who in turn elbows Bongwater. They each pull out a ten-dollar bill.

Miriam looks at the money suspiciously. Eyes flitting. “You do know that ‘psychic’ is not code for ‘blowjobs in a diner bathroom.’”

Black Daffodil’s eyebrows lift so high, she wonders if they’ll levitate off his head and fly back to their homeworld. “You ain’t my type.”

“Skinny heroin-chic type?” she asks.

“Vagina type,” he says.

“Ah. You like dong.”

“I like it better when you don’t call it ‘dong.’”

“Fine,” she says, snatching up each ten-dollar bill with a thumb-and-forefinger pincer like she’s plucking butterflies out of the air. “Let’s start with you, Daffodil; chop-chop, put your hand in mine.”

She puts her hand out. Tilts the palm up.

The guys all look to each other and she can feel their excitement.

Black Daffodil reaches out–

He sits on a curb outside an Exxon in the middle of the city, traffic on Broad Street, flecks of flurry-speck snow landing in his hair and melting; he’s humming a little tune as he plunges his hands in and out of a Funyuns bag.
Crunch, crunch, crunch
. Head bobbing along. Doo-doo-doo.

The other two yahoos come out, Scarecrow and Bongwater. Scarecrow’s got a granola bar and Bongwater has five granola bars, some blue-colored Mountain Dew variant,
and
a gas station hot dog (which is half shoved in his mouth) and he’s trying to talk and Scarecrow’s laughing and he might be high, too.

They cross the parking lot.

Someone else makes a perpendicular toward them.

Santa Claus. Not the real Santa, if there is such a thing. This is a drunk, dirty Santa. Droopy, stubbly cheeks. A Karl Malden nose bursting with broken blood vessels. Pear-shaped body waddling along in a red Santa coat that’s surprisingly clean despite his grimy face. Santa hat askew on his lumpy head.

He’s got a six-pack of beer. Bottle in his hand. Open. He takes a pull.

“Yo,” he yells, waving, wiping his mouth, looking over his shoulder to see if anybody’s looking. One car sits at a far pump, but that’s it. “Hey, I got five left in this sixer. Sell yous each one for fie-dollas a pop.”

Daffodil yoinks his head up. Purses his lips. “We can buy our own beer, elf. Go on back to your igloo now.”

“Horseshit,” the guy bellows, sloppy smile on his face. “If yous kids are twenty-one, then I’m the goddamn Easter Bunny.”

“I’m in,” Bongwater says, veering toward the drunken Santa. Despite the epic snackload in his hands, he’s somehow already got a five-spot waving like a little flag. Scarecrow nods, hurries over with a ten, buys one for Daffodil too.

“Natty Ice,” Santa says, taking a pull. “S’good.”

“It’s shit but we’ll drink it,” Bongwater says.

“I gotta go baffroom,” Santa says, and it seems for a second like maybe he’s just standing there pissing in his pants but then he jerks like someone just tugged on his ear and he makes a beeline for the Exxon.

Scarecrow tosses a bottle to Daffodil. They pull out Bongwater’s snacks, use the bags to hide the beers, and then they’re all eating and drinking and talking shit. Something-something Christmas break. Something-something Professor So-and-So is a real ballbuster. Blah blah Tumblr, Twitter, Batman, Kanye West.

It’s Daffodil who gets it first. A line of blood crawls out of his nose. He doesn’t notice. Bongwater has to point it out. He wipes it on the bag. A red streak. The other nostril starts bleeding.

He stands.

Something is wrong inside.

Things twist up like a braided rope. Tightening. Fraying.

He burps.

He tastes blood.

The bottle drops from his hand because he can’t hold it anymore. It shatters.
Ksshhh
. His body shakes. Drops. Flops. Eyes wrenched open, can’t close, jaw clenched like high voltage is coursing through him. Heart going so fast it might as well be a drumroll preceding what comes next – cardiac arrest rips through him like a fist through tissue paper.

–and Miriam yanks her hand away.

“What?” Daffodil asks. She smells the sausage stink on her own fingers. Nausea blooms sick and yellow. She grabs Hipster Scarecrow’s hands, then Bongwater’s, and it’s just as she feared.

Bongwater dies there, too. In the parking lot. Blood. Pain. Seizure. Coma. Heart attack. Boom, boom, boom. Scarecrow bites it later. A week after. Pale, comatose. Tubes and monitors, beep, beep, beep – faster then, like a robot orgasm,
beepbeepbeepbeep
, then cyborg peaks, cyborgasm,
beeeeeeeeep
, one long killer cumshot as Scarecrow’s body arches up like someone stuck a stun gun between his ass-cheeks and–

Dead, dark, done.

Stick a fork in ’em.

Miriam gives them their money back.

They protest.

She tells them to fuck off. They still want to know. She says, “You all die from monkey herpes.” When they still won’t leave, she threatens them with a butter knife and swipes it in the air in front of them while hissing. That does the trick. They retreat. She shoves her plate aside. The meal is ruined. Their deaths stay with her.

SEVEN

MIRIAM VERSUS THE FRIEND ZONE

“Wait up; there’s something I have to tell you,” Jace says, trailing after her in his flannel pants and
A-Team
T-shirt.

But she ignores him. “It’s cool. Not like I saved your hides or anything. Oh, wait!
Totally did
. Guess your little lives aren’t worth as much as I thought. Shoulda let Cracker Factory Santa poison you all anyway. You know he was an escaped mental patient? That he poisoned
seven
other kids besides you? Don’t I get a gold star?” She glowers.

“We gave you a place to stay. You were staying under bridges–”

“Yep, like a troll. Thank you from saving me from my troll-like existence for a short time so that I may walk amongst you virtuous mortals, but now comes the time for you to
send me back to my bridge
–”

“That’s what I’m trying to say, everything will be okay–”

“Yeah,” Miriam says, “it’s all going to be peach fuzz and puppy parades from here on out. Me and the other homeless will tickle-fight one another over who gets the last moldy bread-end. Meanwhile, Cherie the awful whorebag cunt-rag bitch-scag fag-hag – hey, so many rhymes! – will be sleeping on my dumpy-ass futon. A futon I actually bought, by the way, but futons are heavy and I have nowhere to go so I guess I’ll be leaving it behind. I hope she gets bedbugs in her vagina. And they lay eggs. And she becomes the Mother of Bedbugs–”

As she rants, she tosses items into her backpack. A few pairs of jeans. Handful of white T-shirts. Cigarettes. Bear mace. Tiny minibar bottles of Jameson’s. A Santa hat.

“I got you a job!” Jace blurts.

She turns. Makes a poopy face. “Me and jobs don’t play well together. My last real job kind of ended with a shooting. And a stabbing, come to think of it.”

“I don’t mean
that
kind of job–” He fishes in the pockets of his flannel surrender-pants, pulls out a folded up piece of paper: the world’s most boring origami. He begins to unfold it. “I ran a Craigslist ad–”

“I definitely do not want whatever this job is. Particularly if it has the word ‘hand’ or ‘rim’ preceding it–”

“No, wait, shut up for a second. A couple months back I put up an ad for your… particular talents, the
psychic death
thing, and for a while I mostly just got a bunch of trolls who thought I was a pimp–”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

“But last week I got this email.”

He thrusts the unfolded paper at her. Like a beaming toddler proud of his dirty diaper.

She grabs it. Scowls. Reads.

Her gaze suctions onto a very big number in the middle of the email.

$5000.

“Five grand,” she says, looking up. “This guy wants to pay me five fucking grand to tell him how he’s going to die?”

Jace nods, grinning ear to ear.

“Are you sure he doesn’t think this is code for sex?”

“I… I called him.”

“You called him.”

“I thought he might think it was about sex, so.”

“And it’s not about sex.”

“No, he’s some rich guy in Florida. A little obsessed with his own…” Jace flutters his fingers in the air, a gesture he makes when he’s trying to think of a word. “Demise.”

“Five grand.”

“Yep.”

“Rich nutball.”

“Yes.”

“In Florida.”

“Apparently.”

“That means I need to get to Florida.”

He shrugs. “Well. Yeah.”

“Call him.” She snaps her fingers. “Set it up.”

“OK,” he says. But he just stands there. Staring at her.

“What?”

“What-what?”

“You’re looking at me.”

“I think it’s OK to look at you. You can look at me, too.”

“I
am
looking at you looking at me, and at this point I’m starting to wonder what’s going on.”

He shifts nervously from foot to foot. “I just thought you could say, you know… thank you?”

“Oh. Well.” Miriam clears her throat, loosens some of that tobacco mucus that nests in her vocal cords. “Thank you, Jace. By the way, I hate that name.
Jace
. Jason – Jason is a good name. Or Jay. I like Jay. It’s like a bird. I like birds. Mostly.”