Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“Are you having chest pains?”

Where in the hell had that image come from?

“No chest pains,” I said, laying my forearm across my eyes. “I just… I don’t know. I think all this shit’s been getting to me.”

The furnace kicked on and added its low hum to the whoosh of the ceiling fan. Somewhere down the hall, the pressure change forced a door closed and pulled another one open. I wiped sweat from my face and rolled over on my side to look at her. Large brown eyes blinked at me in the dark. A blue satin sheet followed the rise of her body as it crested at her hip and plunged into the trough of her waist.

“I thought you girls liked a guy who could go forever,” I said.

“Oh, that’s great in theory.” She sat up and hunted on the floor for her underwear. When she couldn’t find it, she rose and walked naked to the bureau, where she fished out a pair of bikini underpants and slipped them on. I stared at her from the bed, taking in every flex of smooth muscle. Only the Caesarean scar on her flat belly anchored her image in reality. “Not so great in execution. Like many things.”

She climbed back into bed and wrapped her arms around me, burying her face in my chest. I buried mine in turn in her hair. I took long ki breaths in which I inhaled deep lungfuls of her scent and tried to forget those claws digging into her hips.

The enemy overran my perimeter, I thought, and he’s still here.

No, he’s not, Bobby replied. That’s just your fucked-up mind playing sick tricks on you.

“What are you thinking about?”

I didn’t answer her for a long time.

“I think I remember one of the dreams,” I said finally. “One of the bad ones.”

“Want to talk about it?”

I pondered that. Then I said, “Not particularly. It involves you… and another man.”

I paused. She said nothing.

“You weren’t exactly a willing participant,” I added. “That’s what I’m carrying away from it, anyway. When you started talking dirty to me there, it was like a switch flipped and suddenly, there it is.”

I sat up, shaking my head and holding it in my hands.

Be a man, Bobby admonished, and handle your own shit.

Handle my own shit. Yeah. I’d been doing a great job of that.

“I talked to Craig today,” I said, changing the subject. “About the mugger. And Pinnix and Ramseur.”

She waited.

“Nobody knows who they are,” I said. “Three guys, no positive ID. After talking to Craig, I’m not even sure the first two were named Pinnix and Ramseur at all. According to him, nobody knows where those names came from.”

Ki breath.

“The guy on the phone,” I said, “the one I call the Bald Man, he threatened me. That guy I stabbed said his name, he said Bald Man right before he died. I’ve got this idea that… I don’t know… maybe the Bald Man made him.”

“ Made him?” She asked. “Like a golem?”

“What’s a golem?”

“An old, old Jewish folk tale,” she answered, rolling away from me and propping herself up on one elbow. “A creature made from mud, or dust, or dirt, or whatever. It’s supposed to be a man, but it isn’t a man because God didn’t make it—someone trying to be like God made it, so of course it falls short. Men create golems to do their bidding. Sometimes they’re bad.”

That picture of the Bald Man in his dark room again. Conjuring. Creating. Making .

My mouth went dry. Golems; holy shit, that was it. Motherfucker was sending golems after me. The idea clicked so loudly that I almost jumped.

“Pinnix and Ramseur and this asshole who tried to mug me are… golems.”

“Probably not. Golems can’t talk.”

She paused, studying me.

“You know I’m kidding, right?”

I didn’t answer.

“The mugging was a coincidence,” she said. “The fact that nobody knows who these guys are means nothing, because when you exist on the periphery of society not only does nobody know who you are, but nobody cares who you are. And as for this little vision of yours, these dreams, they’re nothing more than a product of the anxiety you’re feeling over your perceived inability to protect me from harm. It’s completely natural.”

I remained silent, thinking.

“Your brain,” she continued, “understands now that the world isn’t as safe as you thought it was. So, it says, I have to train. Practice. When you dream, it’s actually practicing the skills necessary to get you out of those situations. So that if they ever happen again, it can react automatically.”

“You think so?”

“I do. I’m just surprised your therapist hasn’t brought this up with you. Any psych undergrad knows these things. Please tell me you’re not going to walk around thinking you were attacked by a couple of Jewish fairy tales; I don’t want to have you committed.”

I laid back down and covered my face with my hands. I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.

“You know what I’m starting to think?” She asked, laying back down.

“What’s that?”

“Maybe this Dr. Koenig isn’t such a great therapist after all.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m starting to wonder that myself.”

I had come to doubt Dr. Koenig’s effectiveness as a therapist. But I kept my next appointment.

“I really dig this time of year,” I told him. “You can’t go to the beach or anything, but I think I like it even more than summertime.”

Thanksgiving had yet to arrive—the turkeys had begun stuffing the freezers at every grocery store, but no one had bought one. Although it was still only mid-November, the air had turned cold this morning with an abrupt snap that I almost heard as I lay awake staring at the ceiling, eyes bleary from too little sleep. Sleep deprivation notwithstanding—along with the very real possibility that a supernatural being with the ability to create bat and knife-wielding golems was after me—I felt a familiar tickle of enthusiasm and pleasure at the apple cider chill I smelled when I first stepped outside.

“Why’s that?” Dr. Koenig asked, sitting down in his leather chair and removing pad and pen from his Italian leather briefcase.

The cover of Southern Rifleman was coming loose—I’d need to tape it up when I left here so that it didn’t disintegrate. I had developed a habit of slipping a hand into my own briefcase and fondling it as I waited in court or talked on the phone or completed any number of other tasks that comprised my day. I gently laid it on the coffee table that had no business in an atmosphere of sophistication and luxury—and laced my fingers between my knees.

“Allie and I started dating in September of 1994,” I said, “pretty close to the beginning of our freshman year. But it took a few weeks for her to really fall for me the way I fell for her, so I spent all of September and most of October staring at the underside of my roommate’s bunk and wondering how long it was going to be before she dropped me.”

“I thought it was love at first sight.”

I straightened up. “For me, yeah. Of course. But for the first couple of weeks, it was kind of touch-and-go on my end. I didn’t know what I was doing—I’d never had a girlfriend before. So I felt pretty sure I’d screw it up. Throughout September and into October, anyway.”

“What happened in October?”

“She just warmed up to me,” I said. “Suddenly it wasn’t just me calling her anymore, or me sending her letters to her campus mail box or me coming up with things for us to do together. She started to… participate. And that happened about this time of year.”