Pop

Who is that?

I feel like one of those monkeys at the zoo: constantly stared at. It's enough to make a person want to do something outrageous just so those people—the ones on the other side of the glass—will break their gaze.

Maybe if I throw...? Do you think he'll flinch? Would it be enough to make him flinch?

Flinching would be good: an indication that there was a real person, instead of just a machine staring back at me.

Everytime I look over there, he's staring at me.

I don't know who he is supposed to be, but it seems like I have seen him somewhere before, just can't remember where.

Think.... Think....

My head is killing me.

Maybe that's the plan....Maybe Phelps means to have me in here long enough to think myself to death.

I can feel my pulse in my neck, it beats like heels on a stone floor in a large room. There's the beat and a second, less-pronounced sound, like an echo. Reminds me of the sound they use for sonar in those old World War Two submarine movies, except the pulses are much closer together.

And now, I'm thinking about aneurysms.

My dad had one.

Came out of nowhere.

A small pop, like any one of a thousand gas bubbles in a glass of ginger ale that disappear when they reach the surface, and he was dead.

There was no illness, at least non that he talked about. There was no get-ready, no fast-talk, just the blow-off. Just the “we did everything we could” recorded message before they pushed us to the door with a cardboard box full of dust and a lifetime of unaswered questions.

They said he was under a lot of pressure. He was always under a lot of stress. I remember my mom saying how much taller he would have been if it were not for all the pressure.

I can feel the veins in my neck as they push against my collar: in and out, back and forth.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

Like the water falling off the cliffs at Niagara, each beat, each lap through the streets and alley of my circulatory system is wearing the walls a little thinner and the bubbles are getting closer to the surface.

“Round and round the mulberry bush....”

The story of my life reduced to a nursery rhyme.

You get into this work thinking that you're going to do good and you go out knowing full-well there are just as many weasels on your side as on the other; that you are just another in a long line of monkeys.

He's still there, still staring....

Fucker.

Swear to God, I've seen that guy before....

Where...?

A picture, maybe?

Was he a player?

A mark?

And he looks enough like me to wear my face?

There was a guy I used to know...; long time ago. He was good, a legend.

He came up with me but, after the Farm, he disappeared into the tall grass: fuckin' lived there, is what I heard. Anyway, he has an incident.... Don't know the details, it's a real event: big deal and “they”--the guys in the corner pocket--they tell him that he either gets right, or he gets out. They send him to the press room and the squeezers put the squeeze on him—really go after all the juice. It's so bad, I hear that he needs treatment for his treatment. Anyway, he ends up studying Bhudism. Bhudism! And this was before anybody was Bhudist, other than Bhudists.

He'd tell anybody who'd make the mistake of listening to him that meditation made a big difference in his life. Never made sense to me, but he claimed it was the answer to questions he hadn't even thought of asking.

Whatever it was, it was enough to convince the corner guys to let him off the bench. Back to work, back in the tall grass and everything.

And then he gets a skin job and completely loses it.

He spends a couple of months wearing somebody else's face and, all of a sudden, he's talking about spirits trascending their corporeal form, passing through planes of existence, appearing in different forms, different identities.

Shape-shifters.

Fucking lost it.

Everybody was somebody else, pretending to be something they're not.

Somebody told me he about broke a minister's neck looking for the edge of the mask he was certain was there.

By the time he got the hook, he was talking to the greeters at Wal-Mart about black book jobs and throwing out codewords like they were Tic-Tacs.

He would have probably been taller too, if the pressure hadn't gotten to him.

We'd all have been a lot taller.

I can feel that guy's eyes on me....

Wish I could remember where I knew him from.

My heartrate is picking up.

I can feel the blood rushing and my temples pounding. They don't get back here quick, it won't make any difference whether I want to answer their questions, or not.

Pop..., pop..., POP.