The Fighter

Chapter 8

Paul was in an unnamed metropolis with sunlight trickling between the high rises. He was naked, his muscles sleek and oiled, and at the end of one arm hung a snub-nosed revolver. Up and down the sidewalks walked businessmen in identical suits and ties and glossy shoes and briefcases with their hair cut in the same style. They wandered aimlessly, bumping into one another and apologizing, tripping and falling and getting up and falling again, running as if to catch a departing bus only to smash headlong into the spotless facade of a skyscraper.

He turned and found one at his side and his breath caught because its only feature was a huge mouth like a puppet’s stretching halfway round its face.

This thing grabbed Paul’s hand and shook it but Paul couldn’t feel any bones, a wash-glove packed with chilled lard, and the thing’s oversize mouth opened up and said, “You’re missing the big picture.” It said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, yup-yup-yup-yup-yup-yup-yup—” and Paul’s other hand, the one with the revolver, came up and the muzzle fitted under the thing’s chin and when he pulled the trigger the thing’s hair fluttered and it fell and Paul saw the hole in its head where the bullet went through but no blood just a sound like wind rushing through a tunnel. And he turned to find another right next to him, noseless and earless and eyeless and Paul wished for a razor blade to slit the milky bulbs where its eyes should be and peel back the skin and see if anything stared back. This one also grabbed his hand and shook it and said “The bubble has burst” with great sadness and its teeth were the size of shoe-peg corn, hundreds of them on account of its mouth being so big, and Paul put the gun to the spot where its heart should be and pulled the trigger twice, the sounds ricocheting between the skyscrapers and echoing along the street and its body curled up and turned to white flakes like instant potatoes that blew away. Paul cracked the chamber and checked the cylinders but each one still had a bullet so he flicked it shut and shot another one and another, laughing like hell, but they spun through the office building’s revolving doors without end and his exultation was replaced by hopelessness and he began to wither and shrink, his body dwindling to half-size, then quarter-size and smaller as the sun vanished behind a high rise so black it ate all light and Paul was no bigger than a toy solider, naked and terrified as he fired at legs the size of giant redwoods and fear exploded in his chest as a huge soft-soled loafer came down to crush him…

He woke in the backseat of Stacey Jamison’s Humvee, wedged between two giant Einsteins. The Humvee — Stacey had painted get your jam on at jammer’s on the side — jounced down a washboard road; silver maples arched their branches overhead.

Stacey’s hands were clad in weightlifter’s gloves; his shirt read pray for war.

Twice a month Stacey and his Cro-Magnon gym buddies engaged in paintball warfare.

“It’s serious business,” Stacey had told Paul before becoming wistful. “They’ve outlawed it — outlawed war. There’ll never be a Big Three, Paul,” he’d said desolately. “Not unless those ragheads get hold of a few more 747s.” Convinced it was nothing more than an exercise in tactical grab-ass, Paul had accepted Stacey’s invite out of curiosity.

They pulled into an open field. Sport-utes and pickup trucks, Einsteins in camo fatigues smearing lampblack on their faces. Late afternoon sunlight glittered on patches of unmelted snow.

Stacey popped the trunk and doled out ordnance. Paul got a paint-ball gun and a faceshield. He realized he’d be easy to spot: his puffy white parka made him look, as Stacey remarked, “like a faggot cloud drifted down to earth.”

They divvied up into teams. Paul was selected second-to-last, one ahead of Pegs, an Einstein so nicknamed because he’d lost his feet in a childhood combine accident. Nobody liked to play with Pegs because the hinges of his prosthetics creaked in chilly weather and betrayed his team’s position.

The squads made their way into a forest of maple, oak, and black locust. Stacey captained Paul’s team. “Fan out,” he told them, “and keep your heads on a swivel.”

Paul found a spot behind a rotted log. An air horn went off to start the match.

Seconds later paintballs were whizzing through the air all around him, slamming into trees with pops and splats.

Paul spied an Einstein blundering through the brush like a crazed boar. He took aim and fired. A phut of compressed gas and his paint-ball curved through the air to splatter harmlessly in a nettle thicket. He ducked as paintballs jack-hammered the log, pok-pok-p-pok! His jaw and chest muscles seized up — taking heavy fire!

Paul’s hopes that the Einstein would hump off in search of less elusive quarry were dashed when he heard, “I got all day, goat-fucker! I smell your fear, and it fuels me!”

Most Einsteins spoke the same patois of intimidation and degradation. Paul tried to imagine them at the supper table: Pass the margarine, Mom, you turkey-armed weakling; Dad, make with the salad or I’ll poke your eyeballs out with a toothpick and serve them to you in a nice dry martini…

Paul would settle for one-for-one. He wasn’t Rambo; nobody expected him to mow down an entire regiment. He jammed two fingers under his faceshield and wiped away the condensation; then he jumped up, unleashed a primal scream, and charged the Einstein.

He squeezed off a few rounds before his visor exploded orange. Once he cleared the paint away his heart took a giddy leap: he’d hit the Einstein. Not lethally — his left foot. Had it been Pegs, he probably would’ve been allowed to play on. But he was not, and since any hit counted, he was out.

“Flesh wound!” the Einstein cried. “If this were a real war, I’d keep fighting.”

“So would I,” said Paul, tetchily.

“What,” the Einstein wanted to know, “with a hole through your head? Wait a sec — what team are you on?”

“The Log Jammers.” Stacey’s brainchild.

The Einstein hurled his facemask to the ground. “We’re on the same team, you retard! Killed by friendly fucking fire — I should rip your face off and wear it as a mask!”

Paul and the other KIAs assembled back in the field. A gasoline-stoked fire raged; a boom box played “Hatchet to the Head” by Cannibal Corpse. Slit open crushed eyeballs dripping hanging / A life of beheading I must have. Einsteins walked around shirtless, flexing, their chilled flesh marbled like Kobe beef.

Paul kept his shirt on. Stacey had him on Androl, Winstrol, and Human Growth Hormone — a dog’s breakfast that bloated him up like a dead cow. He sloshed like a wineskin; he could bench-press two-fifty but looked like a walrus. With his liver values out of whack, his skin had gone the color of dried lemon rind. The HGH, concocted from the pituitary glands of cadavers—“The best stuff,” Stacey told him, “comes from aborted third-trimester fetuses” — had given him the swollen forehead and elongated jaw of those giant heads on Easter Island. “Think of it as a cocoon,” Stacey had told him. “You puff up, look disgusting for a month, then I put you on Lasix to leach the fluid out — a whole new you.”

The boom box kicked out “Skull Full of Maggots”, “Sanded Faceless,” and “Fucked With a Knife”, and by the time “I Cum Blood” hit its final note the other players had made their way back.

The Einstein sought Stacey out and started bitching about Paul’s gaffe.

“Is this true?” Stacey asked. “You killed your own man?”

Paul glared at the Einstein, who stood behind Stacey like a tattletale behind his headmaster. “I didn’t kill anyone. It’s a game.”

Stacey bristled. “Shooting your own man is the most disgraceful act a soldier can commit.”

“Nail on the head, Stace,” the Einstein spat. “He’s a fucking disgrace.”

“What were you doing in front of me?” Paul asked.

“He was probably running an end-around flanking pattern.” When Stacey sought confirmation on this, the Einstein gave him a “what else?” look.

Paul’s teeth clenched the length of his jaw; it felt as if someone had slapped a jellyfish on his scalp, stinging, stinging. If the Einstein bitched once more, Paul resolved to punch his nose down his throat.

The players loaded up fresh paint and headed out for round two.

“Paul,” Stacey said, “you take point.”

Paul had watched enough Tour of Duty to know that point was not anywhere a soldier wanted to be. But he was sick of these over-muscled jackasses and their war games; the prospect of getting killed early wasn’t a heartbreaker.

He hunkered down behind a tree stump. The air horn sounded. Paul scanned the woods for any sign of movement, keeping his eyes sighted down the gun barrel. He spied a body crashing through the underbrush and opened fire. His target dodged and wove; Paul cursed as his shots went wide or fell short. He managed to pin him down behind a tree.

“I got all day!” he cried out. “I can—”

A paintball slammed into his head — the back of it, above the trim of fine dark hair. His skull snapped forward like he’d been donkey-punched. He’d been shot at point-blank range and expected to find the back of his head blown apart: bone fragments, spattered brains. But his fingers came away clown’s-nose red: only paint.

He turned and saw the Einstein he’d shot in the foot. The guy’s body was locked in an action-hero pose; C0₂ smoke curled from his gun barrel.

“Mercy,” was all he said.

A flashpot went off inside Paul’s braincase, a tiny superheated sun that scorched the walls of bone; the light froze in thin sharp icicles that dangled, luminous, from the roof of his skull.

He clawed himself up and shot the Einstein. His gun went phut: a bright Rorschach appeared over the Einstein’s heart. The Einstein returned fire. They were less than two feet apart. Phut-phut-ph-phut. The air was alive with twisting, curiously static strings of paint.

Paul gripped his gun by the barrel and swung it at the Einstein’s head. The C0₂ canister struck his jaw and the guy went down in the sedge grass.

Paul sat on his chest and rained blows. Fierce chopping punches, left-right, left-right. Dark arterial red plastered the inside of the Einstein’s faceshield; red bubbled through the mask’s airholes.

Left-right, left-right. A fist cracked the faceshield: needles of red, pulped skin.

Left-right, left-right. Things crumpled and snapped and split and tore loose. A shockingly bright ring spread across the grass. The Einstein wasn’t moving; his left leg twitched the way a sleeping dog’s will. Paul’s shoulders throbbed. His fists dripped.

He tore a bush from the ground. It came up easily, root system clumped with dirt.

He replanted it: now the bush appeared to be growing up out of the Einstein’s face.

Back in the field Paul opened car doors until he found one with keys in the ignition. His paint-splattered parka left carnival smears on the leather interior. He gunned the engine and careened through the fire and scraped up the side of Stacey’s Humvee; sparks leapt through the open window. He lined up the boom box and hit it dead center: it exploded in a spray of cheap plastic and a woofer glanced off the windshield as he accelerated out of the field howling like a banshee.

He kept an eye on the rearview and even pulled over, idling at the roadside for a minute. Nobody came after him.

Paul dropped the vehicle at Jammer’s, where he’d left his own car, and grabbed a tire iron from the Micra’s trunk.

The gym was empty save for an old guy on a treadmill plodding along like a prisoner on the Bataan death march. Paul took the tire iron to the locked drawer behind the front desk. He filled his pockets with Deca, HGH, two 500-count jars of Dianabol. He was amused to find that the drawer also held Polaroids of Stacey in naked bodybuilding poses. He sported a boner in one shot: the thing looked like a whippet’s backbone. Paul emptied out his locker and departed Jammer’s for the last time.

Back in the Micra he wiped his face with fast-food napkins; red paint was still grimed into the creases at his eyes. He gobbled a handful of Dianabol and a live-wire jolt thundered up his spine. His skin was yellow and tight and infested with a bone-deep itch, as if his skeletal system were constructed of pink fiberglass insulation.

He drove down Geneva to Queenston then on to Glendale past a stretch of shipyards.

He got the little car up to eighty, sparks hopping off the muffler like flaming crickets. Popping the cap off an HGH syrette and plunging it into the hard-packed muscles of his trapezium, he wondered if he’d shot himself with quality fetal brain tissue or run-of-the-mill cadaver.

Had he killed that guy? The silly fucker who shot him — was he dead? Paul pictured the Einstein on the frosty earth with that fucking shrub growing up out of his face. Had he been breathing? Probably. Human organisms are tough and it’s hard for them to die. He tried to concentrate — had the guy’s lungs been pumping, even a little? — but the image dissolved, his mind unraveling in messy loops.

People were jogging and dog-walking along the canal. He thought how easy it would be to skip the curb, accelerate across the greenbelt, slam into one of them. He pictured bodies crumpling over the hood or rupturing under the tires with red goo spewing from mouths and ears and assholes; he saw smashed headlight glass embedded in faces, saw windshield wipers flying at murderous velocity to sever arms and legs.

He was doing sixty-five when he wrenched the wheel and sent the Micra over the curb. His skull hit the roof and the seatbelt cut into his porcine, fluid-filled body.

His target was riding one of those idiotic recumbent bicycles. He wore a shiny metal-flake helmet, royal purple, like the paint job on a custom roadster. Paul figured he’d hit him broadside and crush him against a dock pillar, or else clip his wheel and launch him into the ice-cold sky, a flailing purple mortar crashing through the canal ice. The Micra shimmy-shook as he gunned it over the greenbelt; a tree branch tore the side-view mirror off. The cyclist caught sight of the car barreling down and pumped his pedals as if to outrun it. Paul had a hearty laugh — what bravado!

He slewed onto the pedestrian footpath, his heart palpitating madly. He popped an ampule of Deca-Durabolin into his mouth, crushed the light-bulb-thin glass between his molars, and swallowed it all down.

An old man was seated on a bench scattering bread crusts to pigeons; his eyes became cavernous white Os at the sight of the onrushing car. Paul considered grazing the bench, severing his legs at the knees, but the old man didn’t deserve it half so much as the cyclist so he swerved through the pigeons instead and had to admire their reluctance to pass up a free meal, even in the face of death; their gluttonous shapes bounded over the hood leaving blood and shards of pigeon skull on the windshield. One bird’s beak got jammed in the windshield-wiper arm — its body sailed over the roof but its knotted rag of a head, with its calcified beak and diseased eyes, that stayed put. This unsettled the hell out of Paul; he flicked the wipers but the damn thing just flapped side to side across the glass.

The cyclist glanced over his shoulder and saw Paul twenty yards back; his legs were pumping like a pair of sewing machine needles. Paul checked the speedometer, saw he was doing nearly forty klicks, and felt grudging respect. He pictured himself in a courtroom, defending his actions to a powder-wigged judge. Mitigating circumstances, your honor: not only was the deceased riding a recumbent bicycle, but let the record show he also wore a fruity purple helmet. He inched up on the bike tire, close enough to see the cyclist’s terrified reflection in the bike’s rearview mirror — Your honor, he had a rearview mirror bolted to the handlebars! I throw myself upon the mercy of the court!

Paul was charged up, galvanic, rocket fuel coursing through his veins, but at the last possible instant he jerked the wheel and the Micra went skipping back across the greenbelt, the front bumper clipping a trash can and sending the car into an unchecked swoon. His head cracked the dashboard and stars, whole constellations, blossomed before his eyes as the car spun across the frictionless grass, one revolution, two, three, then he was back on the street as the windshield filled with the blaze of oncoming headlights, tires screeching, horns bleating, and Paul, still woozy, hit the gas and cut across lanes into the parking lot of an insurance broker, mercifully closed. He lay draped over the wheel until he heard angry voices nearby and veered onto the street again.

In a supermarket now, pushing a shopping cart down the aisles. The industrial halogens stung his eyes. In the produce section he picked a ripe peach, took a bite and grinned as sweet nectar dribbled down his chin.

He bagged up a dozen tomatoes then swung down the next aisle and picked up six cartons of extra large Omega 3 eggs. He spied a pack of firecrackers in the discount bin and chucked it in the cart.

He passed down the household gadgets aisle. He saw the Remington Fuzz Away; phone attachments with 200-number autodial memories; something called the Racquet Zapper, an electric flyswatter that promised to make “pest control a zap.” It was funny, Paul thought, how we do it to ourselves. He thought of all the inventions over the past fifty years and figured ninety-nine percent were of the “quality of life” variety. Inventions to make life easier, lighten the roughness of existence — as if an electric flyswatter could somehow ease the stress of daily life. So now everyone’s got a houseful of these dopey gadgets, mountains of cheap plastic and wiring, and can’t possibly live without their juicers and pepperballs and hands-free phone sets and — he scanned the shelves restlessly — yes, their cordless Black and Decker Scumbuster 300s, couldn’t visualize life before any of them — god, how did the pioneers manage it? — when all they really did was make everyone weaker, more reliant, less able to do for themselves until they were nothing but puddles of mush.

“Remember your own damn phone numbers,” he muttered. “Roll up a newspaper to swat at flies,” his voice rising. “Pick lint off your fucking sweater with your fingers?’ he screamed.

In line at the checkout he scanned newspaper headlines. The Weekly World News’s top headline read: cloned hitler turns seven years old! The Toronto Star’s seemed equally absurd: shot in the dark: blind students treated to deer hunting trip. He felt much calmer now, having settled on a plan of attack.

The cashier eyed his purchases skeptically. “Looks like you’ve got an evening all planned out.”

“Yes,” said Paul. “I’m baking a pie.”

She waved the firecrackers over the scanner. “Missing a few ingredients.”

“It’s mostly meringue.”

She handed him the bags with a rueful shake of her head. “Hope you’re not planning to bake this cake in my neighborhood.”

In the parking lot with his gonads kicking out toxic levels of testosterone some biological imperative made him drop to the tarmac and burn off push-ups; his mind whited out at two hundred reps and when his senses returned he was crouched behind the Micra with his hands gripping the bumper, straining to lift the rear wheels off the ground, but merciless pressure built up in his abdominal cavity and he feared a hernia or a prolapsed colon so he walked to a payphone at the lot’s edge and dialed Lou Cobb.

“That… that place you were… talking about…”

“You been out jogging, kid? Sound puffed.”

“…Gladiators…” Paul was picturing arms and legs rupturing from excess mass, hyper-developed muscles splitting biceps and thighs. “… Thunderbird Layne and all that…”

“How’s your schnozz?” Lou wanted to know. “Healed up yet?”

Paul felt his own muscles twitching, the tendons hard and tight as a condom packed with walnuts. “My nose is fine. So, about that place—”

Lou laughed for no reason: Bhar-har-har! Or was Paul hearing things; was it some odd distortion on the line? “We’ll work something out. Sounds like you’re ready.”

He hung up and drove to Bayside, a neighborhood strung along the banks of Twelve Mile Creek. In the dusky evening light he saw million-dollar homes, topiary gardens, pool houses. Paul stomped on the brakes and stepped out. The house was gaudy: ornate columns, three-car garage, his-and-her hunter green Range Rovers.

He tucked the tire iron down the back of his pants — cold steel slid between the crack of his ass and he shivered — and grabbed a carton of eggs. He eased through the open gates up the drive and found a spot on the front lawn. Methodically, with great relish, he started chucking.

Eggs broke over the mullioned windows and the stained-glass door. Eggs broke with the sound of brittle bones, so richly rewarding.

A soft terrified face materialized in a second-floor window. Paul threw an egg and that face vaporized. Egg dripped off the eaves. Egg coated the Range Rovers.

The mailbox was shaped like a dog: an Irish setter. Paul stared at this grinning dog with a metal pole shoved up its ass and found himself unsettled on a sub-cellular level. He drew the tire iron from his trousers and whacked the fucking thing’s head and put a satisfying dent in it; another whack tore its mouth off its hinges. He jammed the tire iron down its throat and pried it off its moorings. A kick sent the mouthless thing skittering across the driveway into a flower bed.

A buttery face poked out the front door. The face hollered that Paul was an unhinged crazyperson and that the cops were on their way.

“I am the cops!” Paul screamed. “My name is Rex Appleby — part of that thin blue line separating you from the unadulterated scum out there!”

“Get off my lawn, degenerate!”

“Your mailbox was resisting arrest. I’m well within my rights!”

When the guy reappeared at the door, relating Paul’s physical description to 911 dispatch, it was time to hit the dusty trail.

Back in the car he crushed Dianabols on the dashboard and snorted the pink powder.

The Micra started with a shudder; he punched the accelerator and blatted down the street singing along to the stereo, slewing around a hairpin curve, getting the shitbox up on two wheels.

He drove a few blocks before pulling up beside a gold Lexus SUV. Paul had once wanted one of these so badly — he’d planned on asking for one for Christmas. Now the very sight of it made him queasy with rage.

He got out and checked the door: unlocked. He grabbed a handful of eggs and pelted the mahogany instrument panel. With the tire iron he stabbed holes in the fragrant leather seats and jammed Roman candles into the stuffing. He lit the fuses and slammed the door. The soundproofing was top-notch: only brilliant intermittent flashes behind the tinted windows. Acrid gray smoke seeped from the door seams.

He hopped in the Micra. His heart trip-hammered wildly; he pictured aortic valves spun from carnival glass on the verge of splintering. He lit off some Magic Black Snakes on the passenger seat but they were unrewarding, dirty little turds, so he fired up a Screaming Devil and puttered down the street with gobs of shrieking orange fire spitting out the windows.

At some point he noticed the flashing cherries in his rearview and pulled over.

The cop was old, with the skittery-dodgy gait of a man clearly terrified of being shot or otherwise incapacitated so close to retirement. He scanned the car’s interior. An arresting officer’s wet dream: busted eggs, squashed tomatoes, the reek of gunpowder.

“And how are you tonight, sir?”

“Feeling jim-dandy fine, officer.”

“I’ll ask you to put both hands on the wheel… yup, like that.”

The officer walked around front of the car. “You’ve got a busted headlight. And what looks to be a…” He hunkered down for a better look.“…bird lodged in the grille, here.”

“That came with the car.”

“Funny option, I’d say.” He returned to the driver’s side. “We received a call about a disturbance. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?”

Paul scraped at a shard of eggshell stuck to his chin. “I did see a suspicious fellow — a prowler, you might say — a few blocks back. He was tall and skinny, with rolls of fat hanging off his squat frame. And he was sitting astride a gryphon.”

The cop sighed heavily. “A gryphon, huh?”

“Yes, the mythical creature. Half lion, half eagle. Quite rare, I can assure you.”

“And you haven’t been making mischief tonight — throwing eggs, batting mailboxes, and the like? Nothing illegal?”

“My understanding of the law is fuzzy, officer — is driving drunk illegal nowadays?”

“Telling me you’re intoxicated?”

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of r-r-r-r-r-ruuum!”

The cop looked as though he’d dearly love to drag Paul to the precinct and interrogate him with a phonebook. “You’ve got some restitutions to make, son — though by the looks of this heap here, the offended parties may have to satisfy themselves with an apology. License and registration.”

Paul rooted through the glove compartment and handed them over. The officer’s brow wrinkled. He glanced at Paul, the license, back at Paul.

“You’re not…” confused, “… Jack Harris’s son? The winery owner?”

Paul nodded.

The officer leaned down to get a better look. “Lord,” he said, “it is you.”

Paul tallied up his offenses over the past hours: assault, petty larceny, attempted vehicular manslaughter, drug abuse, vandalism, tendering false statements to an officer — how many years in the hoosegow was he looking at here?

“I want you to put this car in gear,” the cop said evenly, “then I want you to drive up to that main street there and get yourself home.”

“But I egged the almighty fuck out of that house.”

“Just a boy being a boy, s’far as I’m concerned.”

“I’m twenty-six!”

“Simmer down. I’m doing you a favor.” The officer headed back to his squad car and pulled up beside Paul. “You drive safe, now. And tell your pops Jim Halliday sends his regards.”

With a sunny smile and a toot of his horn, he drove away.

Paul tightened his grip on the wheel and butted it sharply with his head; the horn issued a strangled honk. His… fucking… father. He butted the wheel again and again; blood trickled down the sides of his nose. He jerked the car in gear and trod on the gas.

A thump; a strangled yelp. The back tire skipped ever so slightly, then settled.

He got out in time to see a little dog running frantic circles around its own head, which had been flattened under the Micra’s rear wheel. A teacup Chihuahua; it must’ve gotten under the car while Paul and the cop were talking.

He knelt on the street and looked around for its owner. The dog’s legs got tangled up and its body tumbled over its own head in a maneuver circus acrobats call a “flic flac” and stayed that way.

The streetlamp’s acid glow was stark, merciless. The dog was mangy-looking, with clumps of hair falling off; maybe it had been abandoned, maybe they weren’t hot fashion items anymore. Its head was intact only in the way a light bulb wrapped in layers of masking tape before being stepped on could be considered intact.

The dog’s eyes were closed; what looked like burst bath beads were pinched between each eyelid. A quivering red worm poked from the soft beige skin of its pelvis.

Paul’s guilt curdled into rage when no owner appeared: what sort of asshole lets his little dog run around unattended? Rage soured into fear: what was he going to do? He sat there in his sheath of muscles wondering what the hell any of it mattered because he still felt terrified, weak, and worthless — he didn’t even know what to do about a dead dog.

The dog’s body was as loose and warm as a boiled hen, its legs Tinker Toys wrapped in moleskin. He pulled gently but realized that if he pulled much harder he’d disconnect its head from the rest of it. Hunting through the trunk, he found an ice scraper and tried to lift it off the cement, but he was crying by then and the chest hitches made him so clumsy he ended up folding the dog’s muzzle over its eyes, folding the poor thing’s head like an omelet, and the desecration reduced him to racking sobs and his tears, pattering the cold street, were yellow like his skin, yellow from the poisons he’d shoveled into himself, the mashed-up fetal brains funneled into his veins, and then he realized he had nothing to put the dog into and found himself back in the car hunting under the seats until he located a crumpled Burger King bag.

He returned to the dog, which he’d managed to scrape up without further damage. He dropped it in the bag and felt a sadness that bordered on the existential to discover that a dog’s body could actually fit in a paper bag.

The Chihuahua’s collar lay on the street. Pink, no thicker than a shoestring. One of the tags, shaped like a bone, read killer.

Another one said if i am lost, please return me to… followed by an address. He stared at the address for a long time before hurling the leash into the bordering yard. He rolled the bag closed like a sack lunch and set it on the passenger seat.

Ten minutes later he was in the country. No streetlights, one headlight busted: he hurtled through the night in near-total blackness. Fruit fields rushed past as the car bounced along a corduroy road, wind howling through the windows and his mind out of sync, destination forgotten until like a desert heat-shimmer the winery appeared, dozens of security lamps fighting off the darkness. He sped through the parking lot and hit a speed bump and the muffler finally tore loose as the car crashed through a chain-link gate in a spray of blue sparks and shot into the grape fields, flying between the tight rows as a re-energized Paul Harris sang over the un-mufflered roar of the engine until an irrigation pipe rose up and he had just enough time to picture himself on a hospital bed with tubes running in and out of him before he hit the pipe dead-on, his body thrown against the windshield.

He came to dazed but remarkably unhurt. The windshield was smashed, webbed, but still of one piece. A wave of cold nausea rolled through his chest and he jerked forward and vomited between his legs. The crash jarred the tape from the cassette player; silence except for a slow hiss of steam from the rad.

The door was crimped shut. Paul wiped strings of bile swinging from his lips, grabbed the tire iron and paper bag, and clambered out the window.

A clean, still night, dark though he could still make out the contours of the fringing hills. The Micra’s hood was crushed halfway down the middle. The headlights nearly faced each other.

From summer through early fall the pickers bunked in shacks on the easternmost edge of the fields. Small and spare — they reminded Paul of Boy Scout cabins. He made his way to the nearest one and used the tire iron to pry the padlock off.

Meticulously winterized: mattresses wrapped in tarps, the stove’s flue tightly stoppered.

He stoked a fire in the potbellied stove. The pickers had left a box of canned food behind; Paul brushed away mouse turds and found a tin of sardines. His hands were grimed with blood and dog fur but he shoveled the fish into his mouth and licked the oil off his fingers. God, he’d never tasted anything so good. The warmth awakened pain he hadn’t felt all night. Shoulders and arms and neck: every part of him ached.

The shack creaked as fire-heat flexed the joists. He relished the isolation, miles and miles from another human being. He sensed he was on a collision course, though with whom or what he didn’t yet know. There was no doubt about it.

Something was approaching. The tracks he stood on vibrated with the force of it, yet he was powerless to move so much as a step.

He stirred the fire and set the paper bag on a bed of embers and shut the grate.

The shack filled with the stink of burning hair. Sizzlings and spatterings; a sharp pop.

Paul lay on the planks and shut his eyes.

He dreams he is in a cave with another man. There is a sense of being miles underground; above is a vast and empty darkness. He sits on a wooden chair, lashed at the wrists and ankles with copper wire. The other man is huge, three hundred fifty, four hundred pounds, not fat but thick-gutted; he’s wearing a rubberized butcher’s apron and a belt hung with delicate tools like dentist’s instruments.

He dances forward awkwardly, as though he isn’t in control of his own limbs; the effect is shocking and awful because he is so large. “Are you scared?” The pitch of his voice is breathy, babyish. Paul says no and so the man plucks a sharp tool from his belt and reaches two fat sluglike fingers into Paul’s mouth, taking hold of his tongue, and Paul bites the man’s fingers only to find they’re hard as wood, then the tool is in his mouth, the taste of metal at the back of his throat, and his tongue is severed deftly and the man stares at it with fleeting curiosity before casting it into the darkness.

“Are you scared?” he asks. “Oo,” says Paul. The man looks confused or even scared but he reaches to his belt and picks a long steel rod and, setting a hand on the side of Paul’s head to steady it, pushes the rod into Paul’s ear until a stereophonic crunch fills his skull, followed by silence. He does the other ear, too, until Paul can hear only a soft hiss inside his head, the sound you’d hear on a cassette tape between songs. The man’s lips move: Are you scared? Paul shakes his head. The big man’s look of confusion deepens as he unhooks a walnut-handled meat cleaver from his belt and hacks Paul’s legs off with a few brisk strokes, sawing through strings of gristle, and there’s no blood, not a single drop. The insides of Paul’s thighs are full of dark coils, like age rings on a tree. Are you scared? Paul says he is not — and he is not, none of this scares him — and when the man shakes his head Paul sees there are filament-thin strings attached to the man’s skull and arms and legs, to his fingers and every joint, strings threading up into the darkness, and the man is moving under their influence like a marionette in a dumb show. With a tool like a sharpened spoon he slits the skin around Paul’s eyes and draws Paul’s head down until his eyes fall from their sockets and Paul feels something for the first time — a bracing icy coldness all along his optic nerves — and just before the man snips the nerves with a pair of silver scissors Paul sees his own fingers, sees the thin black threads tied around each fingertip moving the huge man to his bidding. The world goes black and though he cannot see the man’s mouth he knows what words are being spoken because he is making the man say them, and his answer is unflinching: No, No, No, No, No…

Paul awoke in the shack. Cold and dark, the fire dead. When he tried to sit up, fishhook spiders seized his spine; he gasped and curled up again. Parts of his body hurt so badly he wondered if they were ruptured. He dragged himself to the stove and hugged its cast-iron belly, grateful for the warmth.

A hesitant edge of light skirted the hills to the east. Clutching the sardine tin into which he’d swept the fire’s ashes he made his way up the nearest rise.

Dawn broke over Lake Ontario, tinting gold the undersides of low-lying clouds.

The sun provided no warmth yet was beautiful in a way he could not recall ever seeing; light clung to frost-glazed pussy willows as it poured over the flattened grass. Were he a painter, he might have spent his whole life in search of such a scene.

The lake was a few miles away, and while the possibility of ashes traveling quite that far was remote, he figured, Why not? But the wind shifted when he shook the tin and the ashes blew back into his face, up his nose and into his mouth.

He sneezed and spat dirty gray gobs, shaking his head at this dismal failure.

Then he saw that some ashes were still stuck to the oil at the bottom of the sardine tin and resolved that they would receive a proper burial.

He set off across the plateau, away from the winery, down toward the lake.