What woke him up?
He stared solemnly across the breadth, devoting as much thought to the wall across from him as that wall had diversity in its aspects – what I'm saying is, there was no thought at all. It was a blank stare for a blank wall.
He was well into a shadow outlying the nearest streetlight; the whole alley was swathed in a darkness that intensified as it tumbled deeper into the canyon of fire escapes and unlit windows. The first thing he really became consciously aware of was the rattling of an old window-mounted AC unit somewhere above him, that he didn't dare try to raise his chin and see. He only blinked and wheezed out a sigh, putting the clamoring of the machine aside to focus more on coming back to life.
The ground around him glistened with bits of asphalt, blood, spit, old gutter water, possibly vomit too. He swept his tongue around the inside of his mouth, stirring up a bad and bitter taste. Definitely vomit, then. More so than blood. He was slumped and sitting in all of it – in fact, the rancid concoction that coated the back of his legs had the only remnant of warmth left, though it was still in paucity. He shivered for the first time, and the tension that shook his body reawakened the pain of his injuries. His gut throbbed like it had been swarmed and stung by wasps, and the sound of grinding gurgled in his ribs. He let his limbs twitch, and little pangs that were dotted all around dug deep. He had to move, he had to breathe, he had to will himself to do it all, but every action hurt terribly. The next obvious step seemed to be to die in the alley. He certainly considered it. He might even have wanted to. Perhaps it was his obligation to do so.
But that can't be it, right? That can't be. No one would know what happened to me.
But then he corrected himself. Even if he got out of here alive, still no one would know. No one would have to now. No one should know. Certainly no one would care. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody...
He cried for a bit. Despite how quiet and weak it was, his crying rankled him ten times worse. The pain just made him cry harder. He entered a void – he lost his awareness again, but not his consciousness, as the only two things that mattered, the only two things that existed at all, were crying and the hurt. He didn't even exist. It was just that.
Nobody
Cares
About
Me.
He clutched his chest. This was the first time he realized just how small he was. Not just that he felt alone or insignificant or helpless, but actually, physically small. He was a tiny thing, his father's hands were nearly twice the size of his, and if it were intangible, you could fit a dinner plate around his waste. His mother told him any day now he'd finally start growing. He knew Martin was around this age when he started getting big, and it had happened fast for him, too. But he wasn't there yet, he was just on the cusp of it, and now, he was going to die in an alley, having never reached five feet.
God, Martin. What would he say?
It doesn't matter. He's not here right now.
"You can't give up there, buddy! You've got lots of growing left to do! Just get back up! Come on, you can do it!"
He left you. He's gone. Give it a rest already.
He's going to come back. For holidays and long weekends, you know. He could never be gone forever, not yet.
Shut up. He left you. Nobody cares.
He cares.
He cares.
He cares.
Then where is he?
He cares.
He cares.
We agree that he cares.
He began to stand up.
It wasn't as bad as he expected. His vision blurred, he saw stars, he doubled over for a bit and stumbled, but he had gotten used to the sharp pains and mentally scotched them into a dull ache. Let it be clear to the reader, he had not gotten conscious hope, or even determination to survive. His complacency had given way to a strange force he was too weak to distinctly label, and he moved on as if it had all been a dream, or perhaps as if his dreams were taking control.
He turned to look at what he'd been sitting up against. It was a dumpster. His things were inside it. Of course they were. He tried to haul himself over the edge of it to fish out his backpack – he figured he smelled worse than the garbage anyways – but the strain was too much, and he slid down to his knees, his face smushed against the rusting metal. He pulled back, and touched a finger to the smeared bloodstain his face had imprinted upon the rusty metal. In a moment of delirium he felt proud of it, like it was his signature on a masterpiece painting, and that dazed, indignant ego spurred him to his feet again, to attempt a second retrieval of his belongings, this time, to rousing success. He dropped back down to the ground. His ankle buckled beneath him, but he restabilized himself. Staring at his scum-covered, half-emptied backpack, he let out the loudest noise he had all night – a single, sharp, rueful laugh.
And then he froze. He froze and stared back into the street. Picture if you will, a feral cat wandering a neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, passing in front of a hillbilly's house, when the door of that house starts to open. The cat has no idea if the overweight, drunken, baseball-cap wearing, unshaven man who lives inside has for it a bowl of cat food, a shotgun or a dog. That's the most afraid it will ever be in its life, and yet it does not run, not until the boot makes contact with the porch and it can see for a fact what's in store for it. That's the sort of fearful paralysis that overcame him, the sort of instinctual, irrational animal trammel that planted him in a rigid state. It was a thought, an ugly realization, a terrible question, that brought him both the closest to and the farthest from his senses he'd been since blacking out.
Are they still here?
Here in the alley, no, they obviously were not, but his fear was that at least one of them had stayed behind, and was lurking just around the corner to see if he'd survived or not, and to make sure he wouldn't survive for much longer. He began to creep forward, dragging his aching feet along, the rubber soles of his shoes scraping up that gruesome concoction from the ground. As soon as he cleared the dumpster he flattened himself against the wall, clutching his backpack to his battered chest, edging along to the mouth of the alley and the start of the main road.
No one was waiting for him.
It was the dead of night. The very dead of night. At first he thought it was the torpor of his mind that was making it hard for him to identify where he was. He'd been delivered here in the trunk of a car, so it wasn't like he could memorize the route he took. But he knew Warren like the back of his hand, and this was not Warren. This town was bigger, maybe not by much, and had lines of towering apartment complexes he was not accustomed to. Absolutely nothing was stirring. There were no cars coming and going for as far down the road as he could see. Everything was closed. He saw maybe one light on amongst all the black windows. There might have been more, but the streetlights were proficient in making it hard to tell. He dragged himself to where he saw a bus stop. He had no doubt the bus wasn't running at this time of night, and even if it was, if he was in a different town, it couldn't take him home. He reached it, and sure enough, saw the schedule, and a convenience clock next to it. The last bus would've come by this stop at 8:35 PM. It was 5:24 in the morning. And he was in Plainfield.
Plainfield. He was starting to get good at sorting out his bearings, calculated quickly in his head that it could take 3 hours to walk home. He shifted on his aching feet. He could not make such a journey. Driving, though – there had to be some way he could contact his parents. He looked at the little bus route map plastered on the back of the covered stop to see if they had marked where the police station was. They had not. He figured it could take him just as long walking back to Warren as could for him to wander around, blindly looking for a police station. No, something that did interest him was what bordered the south edge of the map: US-22.
A highway means a gas station. A gas station means a payphone. He reached into one of the side pockets of his backpack, feeling with satisfaction the cold quarters he normally used for vending machines spinning in his fingers. A payphone means a ride home.
The trouble was orienting himself. Like I said, he was getting good at directions, but his head was spinning and pounding, and his equilibrium was off. He was fine just looking at the map and getting a destination, but once he tried actually figuring out the streets and where he was and which way he needed to go, he slipped into a bout of dizziness. He had to sit down on the bus stop bench and put his head in his hands. He started teetering towards mindlessness again, but the short sit gave much needed respite – though, while he saved himself from blacking out, he still couldn't think very straight. He coughed. He was surprised by a second cough, then a third; an involuntary parade of hacking quickly devolved into retching. He bent over his knees and let out a final, enormous heave towards the pavement, but all that came up was a thin strand of stomach acid that layered the old bad taste in his mouth with a new burning. He grimaced and wheezed and dug his heels in, feeling streaks of pain sear harder into his shins than they had before. He thought they were nothing more than stretching pains, till he finally got a good look at the inside of his thighs and saw how bruised they were. He didn't even remember them attacking his legs, then again, he didn't remember them leaving either, so who's to say what they did when he blacked out.
He sat back up. The night seemed too bright, he had to squint. He looked at his hands, and clenched them, watching his tendons pulse beneath the grime and flecks of blood. He grunted. He wanted to rub his eyes, but he was nervous about putting them in contact with that unsanitary skin, so he scrunched up his shoulders and pivoted his neck to the left and right so he could drag each eyelid across his wet shirtsleeves.
Perhaps now, in the pause as he sat there, would be a good time for the reader to hear just how cold he was. It was the middle of autumn, when the temperature of the night most little matched the warmth of day. His cotton t-shirt and khaki capris were fine for when the sun was up, but now he felt a bitter chill seeping through his goose-bumped skin and into his bones. It wasn't freezing, per say – the current temperature was probably no less than 55 – but he had been unmoving in that alley for a long time, in scattered puddles, gradually losing strength and blood. He wrapped his arms around himself, trying furiously to stroke some warmth into his sides, ignoring the bruises that the motion aggravated. He started bouncing his legs, but quickly stopped when the mysterious injuries on his shins retaliated.
I have to do something. I can't just sit here and freeze. I have to try again.
He got up and checked the map once more. He realized the mistake he'd made in his previous state of confusion. He couldn't figure out which way to go just standing there because he didn't know what streets were where in relation to him. He knew he was on a street called W Front from the little "You are Here" dot on the map. The largest and thus probably safest straightaway towards the highway was a street called Park Ave, he only had to figure out which way he had to go to get to that intersection. He ducked out of the bus stop, and looked for the nearest identifiable streets. Back towards the alley he'd emerged from was Liberty Street, and in the other direction was… something. It was a small street sign, and he couldn't read it from where he was. He checked the map, and decided, whatever that street may be, Liberty Street was in the wrong way, so he should head towards the unknown street regardless. He took a deep breath, his chest creaking in unison. The journey begins. He limped onwards.
Plainfield was not as homey as Warren; it was a small town, but it didn't have the comforting, small town aesthetic. Buildings suffered from chipped paint and water damage, and were miss-matched in height and color and material, like jigsaw pieces that you could squeeze to fit together, but weren't actually the right match. A good quarter of the storefronts were uninhabited, possibly abandoned outright, signified as such either by a riveted metal shutter over the door and a faint outline where the store's title used to be, or a "For Rent" sign in the streaked windows. Every parking lot or front lawn was guarded by a rusty chainlink fence. The awnings looked like they hadn't been washed in years, with thick dirty stains blemishing the names of the locations, spelled out in tasteless fonts. There were a surprisingly high number of Mexican restaurants, sometimes with two right next to each other. This place must either love Mexican food, or is sick of it. There were so few trees. He loved them, and he loved to climb them, but the few scrawny London Planes awkwardly and surgically inserted into the concrete were just too young to hold even his minuscule weight. He would especially climb trees to escape Toby, not like that technique would've done him good this time around. He'd hide up there, huddling against the trunk while Toby and his mob kicked at him and cursed at him and threw rocks at him. He had to wait for Martin to find him and chase Toby off and help him down and take him to get ice cream as consolation. It was practically a ritual, it happened nearly every two weeks, and he never understood what Toby thought he was getting out of it, trying to terrorize him time and time again. But he understood now. God, did he ever understand. His father told the two brothers they had a habit of getting under the skin of bad people, and this proved it, horribly so. He shut his eyes and wheezed in fear, remembering the delighted bloodlust on Toby's face as he leaned over him, a steel baseball bat in hand, and whispered, he's not here to save you anymore.
He was tired. He was really tired. He was loathed to sit down and rest, he was worried he would pass out again. Not really understanding how his injuries had affected him, he was rather surprised that he was tired, thinking that being unconscious for a good 13 hours was more than enough sleep to be fully energized. He was instead, as we with good insight would expect, terribly lethargic, with each lumbering step feeling like his soul was draining through his feet and into the sidewalk.
He heard a car approaching; he looked over his shoulder to stare down the headlights, and considered for a brief moment waving it down, asking for a ride, getting home in 15 minutes flat. But that could go so, so terribly wrong. His mother told him he should stop watching those awful crime tv shows, because they weren't "uplifting," and while some of the graphic things depicted led to a few restless nights, it did give him a keen sense for his personal safety. He'd absorbed enough stories about kidnapping and murder and rape to know not to ever, ever get in a car with a stranger. For all the help that did him earlier. The car passed him, he never got a good look at the driver, but he chuckled to himself, thinking, if I die here in the street, maybe an unsolved crime show'll make an episode about me.
I could not describe for you every footstep or we would be here longer than he walked. The drudge was monotonous and painful, and there's not much more to it than that. He encountered a homeless man on the other side of the street, who was fast asleep against his shopping cart with a little mutt in his lap. The wiry dog saw him and started barking, and he was ready to bolt should the homeless man start chasing him, but the vagrant only barely stirred, smacking the dog on the nose to shut it up, then grumbling back into slumber.
He reached the intersection finally. It was one of the few traffic lights on the whole street, and he had to cling to the pole to keep himself from collapsing. He had a moment of panic: he thought he had to turn left to get to the highway, but Park Ave only went to the right. To the left was some unnamed, Country 538 or whatever. Did he mistake which way to turn, or which way Park Ave went? He felt dizzy. He stood there, glued beneath the crosswalk signal, trying to make up his frantic mind. It was left, right? I told myself left. Left, left, left. It has to be left. Isn't it? Isn't it left? Possibly, he was stalling. He was more content to just stand there, making a fuss over which way to go, instead of choosing a way and getting it wrong. The only thing that made him snap back into action was when he briefly started to drift off, and his slow sink to the ground made his ankle twist in a way that was not pleasant. It's left. It's definitely left. He went left.
The town got even worse. Buildings went from being a quarter abandoned to half. There were more trees, but also more litter, more discrepancy in the buildings, as they fluctuated wildly from totally run-down to brand new. There was even inconsistency within each individual building, as a storefront could be nice, new brick with tinted windows, but the offices or apartments directly above were encased in old and stained architecture with intricate carvings in the cornices that had been unmaintained for some time. There were at least no more Mexican restaurants, but it wasn't like their presence or absence were making him any more or less miserable.
Everything became less compact; different establishments were no longer tightly crammed together. There were actual side yards, actual space, no more claustrophobic chain link fences or overbearing façades. This should have been relieving, but the structure that marked this turn in the layout made him sick, sicker than he already was. His stomach churned, his headache pounded, his heart beat against his battered ribcage.
North Plainfield Police Department.
Toby sneered. "What are they gonna do, arrest me? They'll just tell you to rub some dirt in it, because that's the only prescription for pussies like you! Even if you could get any cop to lay a finger on me, dad's gonna sue the shit out of you. No, he'll fucking destroy you, ruin you and your loser family for all time." He kicked him in the ribs. "Nobody cares. Nobody cares about you! You're a nobody, and nobody cares about a nobody."
He stared sadly at the police station. Should he go in? Should he report this? Would they give him one of those little blankets they put on people in shock, and something warm to drink, and something soft to sit on? Would they call his parents? Would they take him to a hospital?
Rub some dirt in it.
I could end it all here. I could rest. I could-
You know who he is. You know what he could do to you.
But, I want to-
He looked further down the street and dropped all urges to enter the station. He hadn't made it to the highway, he wasn't even halfway across this leg, but he had made it to a gas station – two of them, in fact, just a little further down the road. He went as quickly as he physically could towards the one farthest down the street – it looked safer and was better lit – and he circled it desperately, but there was no payphone. For a moment he forgot about the second gas station, and circled this one more, over and over, thinking somehow, somehow, there was a chance he had missed it. Finally he collapsed next to the street, putting his head in his hands, facing the other gas station he just was not seeing. His mind turned to mush, he heaved, his gut still burned and boiled.
What do I do?
What do I do?
What do I
What do I do?
What
What
Do
I
Do?
The other station.
He heard it in his head like his brother's voice. He jumped to his feet so violently that he fell back down again, yelping as his ribs hit the pavement. He got to his hands and knees, and slowly, slowly, rose again. There it was. The other station.
And he could see its payphone from here.
He crossed the street, one final, terrible, prolonged trek to the end of it. It felt like ages passed, like everyone he knew would've forgotten him and moved on by the time he got there. He picked up the phone. He had three quarters. That should be enough.
But he hesitated. What if no one was awake? What if they missed his call? Would no one come for him? Would he die here after all? Would he die here? Would he die right here?
It doesn't matter.
He slotted in the first quarter.
He's not here right now.
He dialed in the number.
Nobody cares about you.
He didn't even have time to wonder how long he'd have to wait there, listening to it ring, before someone picked up. They sounded distressed, almost hysterical.
"Hello? Who is this?" It was his mother.
"Hello?" He replied.
"Who is this, who's calling?"
"Hi, mom," he said drearily, "can you – can you come pick me up?"
There was a pause, he heard a breath. It was many things, astonished, relieved, impatient, exhausted. "Where are you? Are you okay, where - where are you?"
"Plainfield."
"Pl- what the hell are you doing in Plainfield?"
Okay, so you know Toby, the guy like, two grades above me? Of course you know him, he's always picking on us, sorry, that was dumb, you know him. Well, yesterday I told him his mom was a hooker and he told me I was dead meat. I was worried about it, but you weren't, and you sent me to school anyways. I didn't even hear a thing from him all day, but then one of his buddies ran up to me at the end and told me he saw a lizard in the parking garage that he wanted me to identify. This guy – I dunno, he was always the least mean, so I trusted him, and I like showing off how much I know about lizards, you know, so I followed him, and everyone else was waiting for me. They – oh god, he – they grabbed me and – what are they doing – no, stop, what – they put me in the trunk, and – where are we going? What're they gonna do to me? We – we stopped. They pulled me out. It was an alley, like, behind a grocery store or something, but they were – they were laughing at me, and they kicked me and I went down, and – my arm, they got my – wait, no, stop, I – When he comes home for Thanksgiving, he's gonna beat the shit out of you! He will! I promise he – he – he'll know, he'll – I'll tell the police! You're gonna go to jail, you – no, stop, STOP – and then I woke up. I walked to the payphone. I called you.
"I dunno," he meekly lied.
"Are you ki- your sisters were crying when they came home and said they couldn't find you! We've all been worried out of our minds, I called the police, they're here at our house!" his mother screamed. "And all you have to say for yourself is I dunno?"
He started to sob. He did have more to say for himself. He just couldn't say it.
"Look, I know you miss your brother but that is not an excuse to behave like this! Martin heard we couldn't find you, and he's been staying up all night with us on the phone waiting to hear from you – he's got work to do, you know! You can't do that to him, you can't do that to any of us! I don't know what's gotten into you, but it needs to stop!"
He kept crying. She finally heard it.
"Chris, are you okay?"
No. I'm not Chris.
"Chris, honey? What happened?"
I'm nobody. I'm a nobody. Nobody cares.
"Chris, just say something? Please? Are you alright?"
That's not my
That's my
You're an artist. You signed your name in blood. That's where it dies.
Shut up.
That's my name.
"I just –" Chris choked, "I just want to go home."
"Okay, sweetie, we're coming to get you. You're in Plainfield, right? Can you tell me where?"
"Gas station, it's uh – it's a Sunoco."
"The Sunoco? Okay, got it, can you –" Chris heard a muffled voice coming through the phone, a man or something, and his mom went "uh-huh" at whatever he said. "Chris, the officer here says the police station is really close to that gas station. Do you think you can walk over there, and – and wait for us there?"
"I dunno," he admitted.
"Chris, it's gonna be way safer than the gas station."
"I dunno if I can – I, I'll try."
"Okay. Okay, don't worry honey. Just hang tight, we'll talk about this when we get you back home."
"Okay," he whispered.
"I love you, Chris."
"I love you too."
He hung up. He looked back towards the police station, and sank to the ground. He couldn't do it. No, I won't do it. They were just going to have to find him at the gas station.
He closed his eyes.