Jeff Jackson - Mira Corpora

Someone shouts from across the park. I switch off the music. I’m surprised to find that I must have been crying because tears stream down my cheeks. Plus there’s this faint tang in the air, a damp and acrid odor. I look at my feet. The ground is covered in fresh, grayish-green splatches of pigeon shit. I look at my coat. It’s caked in moist gobs of the stuff. No idea how long I’ve been sitting like this.

More shouts. I turn in their direction but it takes my eyes a few moments to focus. A gang of Luchos strides toward me. Six of them in black parkas, lumberjack boots, and doo-rags. Behind them, a fat plume of smoke billows from the side of the band shell where Mister Pastor is camped. A pack of dogs barks somewhere nearby.

The smart move would be to sprint headlong for the park gates. But instead I keep my ass flat on the bench, transfixed by the cassette case. I feel like I’m on the cusp of decoding its mystery and afraid to take my eyes off the handwriting. The signature lean of the letters, the yawning “o” that seems open in a shout, the frenetic “w” that hurries past with barely a nod. These are clues.

A thick gob of saliva lands at my feet. The Luchos. They ring the bench, glowering like a surly Greek chorus. One smacks his glossy lips and another rubs the vacant white orb where his cornea used to be. I try to look casual while scouting for potential help. The only person in sight is an elderly woman in a babushka combing the grass for discarded crack vials. A pack of dogs sniffs around her, nipping each other’s asses.

Some quick options: Run. Not fast enough. Fight . Six against one. Scream for Mister Pastor. Judging by the fire at the band shell, I have a sinking feeling about that one, too.

The tallest Lucho — El Lucho Jefe — removes his doo-rag, signifying serious business. A thin ridge of bone runs along the top of his scalp, giving him an almost prehistoric profile. I tense. Pure animal reflex.

“Hand it over,” El Lucho Jefe says. His voice is a droning hiss. He balls the doo-rag in his oversized knuckles.

I blankly return his stare.

“The walkman,” El Lucho Jefe says. “That’s ours.”

There is only one acceptable response here. All other possible combinations of words are clustered above the same trap door and invite the same vertiginous fall. I brace myself. “It’s not yours,” I say.

“You sit in this park,” El Jefe says. “Then it’s ours.” He smiles, revealing incisors that have been filed to sharp points.

I look at the cassette case in my palm and the tape slotted into the walkman. That voice. The handwriting. My gift.

“You can’t have it,” I say.

“Excuse me?” El Jefe says. He cracks his neck. A theatrical gesture, hand twisting neck to the side; it’s accompanied by the loud pop of impacted bone.

“I said, you can’t have it.” Normally I skirt beatings whenever possible, but this time is different. Looks fly among the Luchos. As they silently confer over this unexpected turn, I hoist myself onto the back of the bench. Better leverage in case of attack. For one wild moment, I think of the tape as a grenade that I can hurl at the ground and obliterate the entire gang with a brilliantly loud detonation. I zip the cassette and walkman inside my jacket.

El Lucho Jefe clears his throat. “I’m gonna say this one more—”

I lunge and knock him to the ground. Before he can react, I sink my teeth into his nose and clamp onto it as hard as I can. He screams and tries to throw me, but I hold onto his head and bite down harder. No idea where I get the idea or the ferocity. Maybe it’s something from one of the songs.

The other Luchos awkwardly try to pull me off, unsure whether this is causing El Jefe more pain. His nose is squelchy cartilage in my mouth. I can feel it start to give. So can he. More screams. More cursing. I bite down harder. Around us the Luchos are barking like furious dogs. With a savage jerk, I rip my head to the side. His nose is in my mouth. A chunk of spindly, rubbery gristle. There’s less blood than you’d think. Everything halts for a moment as El Lucho Jefe gives a heart-shuddering, high-pitched shriek to the heavens. I spit his nose on the ground.

This is when I first notice the pack of dogs has swarmed us. A teeming mass of thick-necked mutts, growling and gnashing their teeth. The Luchos who aren’t clustered around the writhing El Jefe lunge at the animals and fight them to reclaim that forsaken lump of flesh.

I tear off down the nearest pathway. The loose soles of my sneakers slap against the concrete as I sprint for the park gates. My precious cargo is still zipped inside my jacket, cuffing against my heart as I run. Two frothing mutts are fast on my tail.

I dash out of the park and spy the wall of a community garden across the street. As I scuttle up the steel fence, one of the dogs snaps at my calf. I give it a ringing kick to the jaw and climb higher. A metal barb peels off the knee of my jeans. More scraped skin. Huffing and wheezing, I finally pull myself to the top of the fence. The dogs pace below with bared teeth. They have me tree’d but I don’t care.

It turns out I’m pretty high up. A panorama of the entire park unfolds before me. Thick veils of smoke still heave from beside the band shell. The Luchos limply drag El Jefe toward the far avenue to hail a taxi. A handful of people lie face-down on patches of lawn. One of them, the elderly woman in the babushka, is dead. Not sure how I know, but somehow, from up here, I can tell.

Black storm clouds mass overhead. A sour wind stings my eyes. The dogs continue their angry vigil, but I’m no longer afraid. I remove the walkman from my jacket and play the cassette from the beginning. I squeeze my skinned knees together against the fence and press my hands over my ears. From the first quavering notes, I can feel again how everything has changed. The city streets below aren’t the same streets as a few hours ago. The cardboard box behind the Chinese restaurant isn’t the same cardboard box. There is blood smeared on my lips, and I let it remain.

The graffiti appears several days later. Or maybe it’s been there all along. The back walls of the Chinese restaurant are covered with slogans and scribbles, but this morning one particular tag catches my eye. It’s a silver spray paint sketch of a king’s crown with a line through it. A single word is scrawled underneath. It says “Seen.” I sit in my cardboard box and fixate on it for several minutes. I’m entranced by the flowing and interlocking lines of the design. They leave me with an inexplicable chill.

My thoughts are interrupted by the sound of chorgling noises from the nearby dumpster. The fat kid must be back again. His head shoots up above the metal rim, his face smeared with the runny leftovers of General Tsao’s Chicken and Egg Foo Young. He’s worse than the rats. He gorges himself on almost everything, including the greased plastic paper. I scoop some loose rocks and bottle caps off the ground and hurl them at him. “Get out of here,” I hiss.

It’s the only way to get his attention. The fat kid is virtually a zombie. His eyes are dead, as if any spark of personality has been buried beneath an avalanche of bad fortune. He lets out a pathetic bleat and clambers up the fire escape, vanishing onto a nearby roof. Typically, the only edibles he’s left in the dumpster are the remains of the oranges the restaurant serves with its fortune cookies. I collect several slices and stuff them into my pockets. I pat my sweatshirt to make sure the tape player and my cassette are still there. It’s time to find some real food.

Walking the streets, on the lookout for any of the scattered Luchos, I spot several more silver tags. They materialize in out-of-the-way places: The lip of a mailbox, the back of a crosswalk sign, the inner curb of a sidewalk. At first, I figure they must be different from the graffiti on the wall. But the design is always the same. The crossed-out king’s crown. The word “Seen.” Nobody else seems to pay much attention to this graffiti.