Head cleaner, p.19
Head Cleaner, page 19
This bitch is nuts.
“Hey! Are these idiots friends of yours?”
Eva trailed off, blinking and looking around, as if she’d just crawled free from the world’s most comfortable coffin. She looked up, and spotted her co-workers. Bunny was waving like a goofball.
“I think she’s fucking stoned, bro,” Bunny said, then, “Here, hold this.”
He handed Randy his skateboard and slid down the concrete bowl on his ass, hopping up and brushing off to talk to a catatonic kid near the curve, face ghostly white in the glow of his cell phone. Drug deal, Randy assumed, sniffing Bunny’s skateboard. It reeked of fast food and was covered with movie stickers and stencils. Besides Saint Goldblum were the usual suspects; Lords of Dogtown, CKY, Paranoid Park, but also some more embarrassing ones like Gleaming the Cube, Thrashin’, Freddy Got Fingered, and, probably the biggest surprise, a homemade decal featuring the “astonishing” skateboarding chimp from MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate. Randy guessed Bunny took some abuse for that one, but who could say, with irony-soaked youngsters these days. In an already narrow genre, it was a weird place to inhabit; promoting skateboard movies that “real” skateboarders hated. Maybe they just took whatever they could get. Randy cradled the board like a baby, getting a little choked up whenever he saw someone push against expectations and be so cavalier with their social standing. He wondered if this was what parenthood was like.
Then again, it was just a sticker with a monkey on it.
Bunny yelled up to him.
“Shoot it down, gramps!”
“Weren’t you supposed to use it to get down there, you dumb shit?” Randy said, hating him all over again and tossing the skateboard end over end. The kids scattered as it clattered against the concrete, slapping boards under their feet and springing from the bowl like dolphins. They ran off in different directions, swatting cars to knock any silent alarms back to life.
Through the tornado of skating around her, Eva stared up at Jerry and Randy, then began to ascend. They both watched in disbelief as, almost as if choreographed, her congregation zipped around her as if they were untying her body from an invisible fisherman’s knot, all silent flips and spins and flashes as she continued to stride through them and up the curve like a ghost.
“Are you seeing this?” Jerry asked Randy. He said nothing, watching Eva clear the mob and, slowly but smoothly, hoist herself up to eye level with them.
“Where’s the water?” she asked them.
“The what?”
She shook off her own question and tried again. “So, what can I do for you fools?”
“Um… so, where have you been, Eva?” Jerry asked her, stepping a little too close, like he was going for a hug she never offered. She ducked him as deftly as any matador and he had to steady himself from tumbling to the bottom.
“What do you mean exactly?”
“What do you mean what do I mean?”
“Well, you still work for me, for one,” Randy said, pushing Jerry aside.
“I do?”
“You don’t.”
“But… aren’t you guys dead?”
Bunny climbed out of the bowl in time to hear that, still carrying his skateboard instead of riding it, and he did a double-take at the apparent seriousness of their lack of response. Looming over their shoulders was an ominous new sign, but just like the harried hares of Watership Down, Bunny was either another rabbit who couldn’t read, or merely unconcerned with the demise of this particular warren. The sign read: Future Site of Overview Industrial Park. Excavation Begins... Of course, the dates had been spray-painted over with a penis that circled back to penetrate its own buttocks, which would have made more sense if they saw it. After a moment, Randy continued.
“Okay, yeah, this is why we’re here. You remember us dying then?”
“We just want to know what is going on!” Jerry was getting hysterical, and Eva’s held up a finger to stop him and listen to the phone ringing in her pocket. It was a muffled ‘90s ringtone chirping from the bulge in her front blue jeans pocket, but she made no effort to answer it and just hummed along to the phone’s shrill approximation of Garbage’s “Stupid Girl.” Her finger came back down at the chorus.
“Sorry. Go ahead, anybody but Jerry.”
“Who was that?”
“No idea,” she said. “Not my phone.”
“Where is your phone, Eva?” Jerry asked. “I’ve called you like nine times.”
“They took it.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
Here we go, Randy thought.
“I don’t know!” Eva said, growing impatient with them.
“Wait a second,” Jerry said, pulling out his own phone and dialing Eva’s number. He stared at her while it rang on his end, then his eyes bugging when a young woman’s voice answered in his ear. He quickly hung up.
“What the heck.”
“What?” Eva sighed.
“Who was that?”
“What do you mean?”
“That wasn’t you.” Jerry didn’t sound so sure.
“It sure is a puzzle. Why don’t you go solve it?”
“Okay, listen,” Jerry said, hands clasped in mock prayer. “Some mighty weird things have happened these past couple days, so let’s get you up to speed. First off, we’ve been getting anonymous videotapes on our doorsteps, and you’re in them, and we’re pretty sure we were supposed to die or something. But it sounds like you already know this. Also, there’s this freaky-ass VCR that changes shit when you rewind it, but I can’t remember if it was real or not, and maybe you know all this, too, who knows, but now I’m thinking that VCR was real, and it screwed up everything real good because you’re acting like a fuckin’ freak, and—”
Eva put a finger over Jerry’s mouth to shush him again. He was back to hating that move.
“Have you heard of the green Luna moth, Jerry? Don’t answer. Did you know it has no mouth? It’s crazy. Just a handful of bug knowledge and you can have all the life lessons you will ever need.”
“Or some inspirational posters,” Randy offered.
Jerry thought of their Silence of the Lambs four-sheet back at the video store, and the dime-sized hole through the skull of the Death’s Head moth, as well as their front window, seemed to develop overnight.
Eva turned from Jerry, then lowered herself into the bowl again. Some skateboarders returned and began to fly around her like birds. She drifted off towards the shadows, deeper into the labyrinth of the skate park’s snake-like walls, turning back towards them one last time. She smiled, but her eyes were closed as she walked backwards, dropping clothing as she went, first her wrinkled Blockbuster polo, then her filthy khakis, all within the protective flurry of clicking wheels. They moved like a hive mind of coordinated movement, an extension of her now naked body, connected to one nervous system tethered by the absence of memory.
“This is bullshit, Eva!” Jerry said, jumping down to follow her, reeling from the new knowledge that their relationship had been more one-sided than he ever suspected.
Three steps later… thwap! Jerry was laid out flat on his back when a skateboarder plowed into him. Then another clipped his legs, and the collision sent him steamrolling toward the relative safety of a wall. When a third skateboard flipped their board over his arm without missing a beat, Jerry screamed for help, and Randy reluctantly went down after him.
“To Hell with her. We don’t need her anyway.” With Randy’s help, Jerry scrambled back up. He shouted off into the dark maze of concrete, “We don’t need you anyway!”
“We heard you the first time,” Randy said, looking at Jerry like he was the unwanted reward for unclogging a drain. He spun Jerry around and gave him a shove back toward Randy’s still shrieking car.
“Wait for me, men!” Bunny suddenly appeared between the two of them as if he’d popped straight out of the ground. He was cramming a rolled Ziploc of weed into his cargo shorts. “Got some carry-out.”
2.
“I think we’re being followed.”
On the way to the Cherry Street house, Jerry had started to lay out some objective like he was in charge, until Randy had cranked Pantera’s Official Live: 101 Proof to shut him up, much safer than actually getting drunk. Randy felt like they’d talked it to death already as they passed around Bunny’s joint, though Bunny seemed less interested in aborted tales of time travel than breathing on the window and drawing dinosaurs in the steam. Jerry was still upset over Eva’s rebuke (something Randy assumed he’d grown used), finally realizing she’d assigned way less importance to their fateful night before a brutal mutual erasure by dark forces, if she even remembered that shit at all, of course.
Mostly, Randy was trying not to dwell on the whale he’d misremembered all those years ago, and the music was helping with that. When Pantera ran out of gas, and Bunny ran out of steam, he started the CD over. But now The Cramps Look Mom No Head! was playing. Randy didn’t remember buying this particular CD, and certainly never put it in the player. He’d owned the cassette tape back in high school, back when he was confident the title was blowjob related and had nothing to do with his impending death. To prove it was nothing to be scared of, he turned it up even more and sang along:
“We went to the ‘musement park to ride the Tunnel of Love… but when I went to hold her hand there was an eyeball in her glove…”
“I said, ‘I think we’re being followed’!”
“Fine, who’s following us, Jerry?” Randy finally asked, taking the bait and turning down the tunes. “Foreign agents? Secret organizations? Government toadies?”
“Don’t shit talk the Toadies!” Bunny lit up in the back and stopped retracing a history of evolution in his window breath, just having finished an Archaeopteryx so detailed that the heavy breathing necessary to render the feathers almost made him pass out. Someone had told him once that heavy breathing got you high.
“I actually met the Toadies once after a concert,” he said. “It was shortly after Eva brought in their first album to crank while we opened, and I kept trying to explain to her that the song ‘Possum Kingdom’ was about vampires.”
“Uh, no, dude, it’s about murder,” Jerry said.
“…and she’d be like, ‘No, dude, it’s about a murder,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, by a vampire!’ and she’d say, ‘Please stop saying that. You’re making me hate that song.’”
“Me, too.”
“…and every time she’d get in my car I’d bust out that CD and say, ‘Time for the greatest vampire song of all time!’ and she’d say, ‘I regret ever playing this for you.’”
“She makes a lot of sense.”
“…but we go to the show to the Toadies show together anyway, and afterwards the band is at the bar, swarmed by groupies, and Eva says ‘I want to meet these guys but I don’t know what to say,’ and I’m like, ‘Let your heart guide you!’ and by the time we work our way over to the lead singer she blurts out, ‘Can I borrow five bucks?!’ and we both get the giggles, and the drunk Toadie says, ‘Nah, sorry,’ and the groupies say, ‘Go away, jerks!’ and we drive home trying to figure out why she asked them for five bucks and why this was so funny.”
“It’s a mystery!”
“But then the band broke up soon after, and I blamed Eva for that, but apparently they’re back together, and I don’t know how she did it, but I blame Eva for that, too.”
The car was quiet.
“And that’s the story of the time Bunny met the Toadies!” Randy announced.
“Seriously, not to dwell on it because we’ve literally been down this road before,” Randy said. “But lyrics that go, ‘You’ll stay as beautiful, with dark hair, and soft skin, forever... forever...’ Come on, that’s totally vampire talk.”
“Right?!”
“Psycho talk,” Jerry said, then, “Hey, I don’t think they’re following us anymore.”
“Bummer, we could have got that five bucks they owe Eva.”
“Fuck both y’all,” Bunny said, sulking. “Gen X turned MTV into a drum circle.”
“Sick burn,” Randy said. “But you Millennials destroyed the fishing industry.”
There was a pause as the rest of the car tried to decipher this putdown.
“Millennials don’t own can openers,” Randy said, weirdly serious. “So tuna sales are way down. No joke.”
Bunny nodded as if to say, “Fair enough,” and they drove along, quiet for a while, and Randy thought about time travel movies, mostly about how characters were instantly corrupted once they realized they were living the day over again. He wondered if previous knowledge was necessary for the corruption.
“Live every day like you’re repeating it!” he thought. Now that should be on a T-shirt.
But what would stop any of them from taking advantage of any day that had been rewound? He looked at Jerry, who was sulking again, then at Bunny in the mirror, who was singing something they couldn’t really hear.
Maybe more than one person having that same previous knowledge was the problem in the movies?
Then he thought he’d be great playing himself in the movie of his life, or playing with himself, which could be an R-rated sequel to Groundhog Day. Maybe call it Warthog Day…
Not to be confused with Groundhog Day Part 12, the fake movie-in-a-movie slasher flick from Monster Squad. Or the only Groundhog Day, depending on your timeline, starring Randy as Rambo, but call me Rando…
He was getting tired from too many days without sleep, and he looked over at Jerry and caught him catching his yawn. Which meant he’d been sneaking looks at Randy, too. Randy thought about how they’d switched shirts earlier, and how, if this was a movie, that was a perfect first step in not trusting each other anymore.
The transmission of his shitty car hiccupped again, and everyone lurched. Randy thought about how he could dump someone out the passenger’s door on the next backfire and not even get caught. They could hear all what Bunny was singing now.
“Do you wanna die… do you wanna die…”
“There it is,” Jerry said.
They had arrived. Randy looked over at the Cherry Street house in all its glory. It was a big, but a bit of a letdown. As he put his Ranchero in park, he noticed the young woman on the porch, petting a calico cat with thumbs. Jerry grabbed the dashboard in shock.
“Oh my god, is that Teagan?” he asked.
“Impossible, we just saw her driving around with Bunny.”
“We did?” Bunny asked, and Randy reached back to tap the VCR case to keep him focused.
“Bring the goods.”
Bunny grabbed the case, but Jerry followed him out of the car, gently taking the case from him as if it was a favor.
“Let me just hang on to that for you, Bunny.”
“Hi!” Randy shouted toward the house as they walked up. The young woman gathered her cat and calmly went inside before they could say another word, and they rushed to climb the porch after her as the front door was slammed in their faces.
They looked at each other to see who was going to knock, and Randy reached for the doorknob instead and flung it open.
“Mama never raised no cowards!” Bunny laughed, and he shared a look with Jerry, as if they might be making the first in a long series of mistakes. Then they followed Randy inside.
“Oh my god!” Jerry yelled, startled and clutching his heart once his eyes adjusted to the dark. Eva was standing in front of them, smiling, the cat twisting between her ankles, tail high.
“Now I’m really confused,” Bunny whispered.
“What can I say, boys?” Eva shrugged. “You talked me into it!”
“Since when have I talked you into anything?” Jerry asked her.
“I’m a medical miracle,” she said with a laugh. “Impervious to psychologists but easily manipulated by reverse psychology! Now snap out of it. We got work to do.”
3.
“What is going on with you?” Jerry demanded as Eva slowly looked from his eyes, to his grip on her upper arm, then back to his eyes again. Uneasy, Jerry cleared his throat, then Randy finished his cough for him. He’d noticed subtle changes in Jerry since their shared demise, an awkward but surprising assertiveness, with something darker brewing below the surface. He’d let it slide earlier when Jerry grabbed Randy’s own arm, but if Randy was a gambling man, he’d bet Jerry was heading for something worse than heartache. Eva had seemed to tolerate him easily enough all these years, but Randy worried what he might do if she suddenly froze him out completely. He’d always called their relationship The Red Queen Syndrome, meaning any day she could wake up and Jerry would cease to exist.
Jerry released her arm, and the air between them felt different. Not just that spacey vibe she’d emanated at the skate park either, but something bad, and getting worse.
Smile returning, Eva kicked a toe toward the VCR case Jerry was swinging.
“Back to the scene of the crime, huh?” she said.
“So you do remember,” Jerry said, clutching the case to his chest.
“I’m guessing we went upstairs then, the last time we were here?” Eva asked, not really answering his question.
“When were we here exactly?” Randy asked her, rubbing his hands together like he’d aged 20 years. Suddenly he didn’t want their investigation into his imminent death to progress.
“Not you, boss, just us.” She hooked a thumb at Jerry, who was shivering, then she looked them all over, clicking her teeth and sucking on a lip, like she was considering telling him more but thought better of it.
“Don’t worry, it’ll come back to you. Or it won’t. So, how about we try downstairs this time!”
Randy and Jerry shared an excitable look while Bunny tried to pet the cat. A basement was catnip to movie junkies, especially if there was danger.
“The basement it is!” Randy said, then he took the VCR case away from Jerry, having to peel his fingers free from the handle.
