Andrew Sullivan - Waste

“Guuh — no!”

“No, no, I am not leaving you,” Jamie said. “Just — just close your eyes. You’ll be fine…I will figure this out, all right?”

Jamie left Karina holding Brock on the floor. Outside, the air was still cold and filled with garbage. The siren grew louder. Jamie began to drive away from the house, headed toward the Village Plaza with only one headlight burning in the dark. The radio was off and the trains were hooting at him from somewhere out there in the cold. Jamie knew Brock could hear the wheels in his fingertips, even if the doctors could never sew his busted ear back on correctly. It was a vibration, not a sound. A transmission delivered along molecules of marrow up into your bones from the root source of the rails. You could feel it rattle in your skull. Brock said it looked yellow when he closed his eyes. It looked like anywhere but here.

There was an abandoned ambulance in the parking lot. SATIN RULES!! was sprayed across the back doors, the words colliding with LARKHILL MUNICIPALITY typed out in faded red stencil. Someone had removed the front seat and set it up on the roof like a recliner. Jamie Garrison smelled smoke as his legs carried him across the parking lot and past the frozen condoms scattered on the broken asphalt. Brock swirled around his head, mixed up with images of lions hunting children. The parking lot had no working streetlights. Smoke threaded through the night sky, but there weren’t any stars. Only the moon forced its way through the clouds and made everything blue and cold. Jamie’s hands kept clenching involuntarily.

“You can’t even keep a fucking fact straight, can you? Fucking junkie motherfucker…”

Jamie slammed the door open. A chair stood in the middle of the room. A broken pair of dentures lay on the floor. The bottom palate was split in two. Broken orange prescription bottles and sandwich bags littered the ground. Scattered dustings of crushed medication sprouted from the tiles. Trails of smoke pushed their way into the room through the hole the Lorax had carved into the wall. Jamie recognized the smell. The Lorax’s fungi were burning with his lamps.

“Mmmmmm! Mmmmmmuuuu!”

The Lorax was naked. His arms and legs were duct-taped to the chair. His eyes stared at the ceiling as Jamie tried to pull the gray tape off his mouth. The tape pulled off skin and hair with it, leaving tiny beads of blood behind. The Lorax coughed up a mess of half-eaten mushrooms and broken yellow pills straight down his chest. Jamie

noticed all the baggies were empty, the prescriptions too. The Lorax coughed again and more gray mushrooms fell into his lap.

“Oh, Larry, you dumb motherfucker…what did you do?”

All the baseball cards were torn up into little pieces. Jamie climbed the counter and looked for a pair of scissors, a knife, even a broken piece of glass sharp enough to cut through the thick gray tape. More of it was wrapped around the Lorax’s torso too, pulled taut against his sagging belly. The exposed skin was red and blistered. The Lorax stretched his mouth out.

“You ever — ugh, blah — you ever watch the Pirates this summer?”

“You know who did this shit?” Jamie said. “You fucking told them, didn’t you? And you can’t even get that shit right! Where are your goddamn scissors?”

“There was this game this summer. I mean, what a game,” the Lorax said. “I don’t know if I can stay a true fan after watching it. There are no scissors. You know that, Jamie. They aren’t stupid. No knives either. Nothing sharp. You shoulda seen this game though, buddy.”

“A knife? You got nothing here?”

The Lorax kept talking.

“You don’t watch baseball, do you? Back in June, and my Pirates, I don’t even know why I like the Pirates, do you? It’s kind of like cheering for a corporation if you think about it too hard, so of course I don’t. I’m just surprised you’re here. I thought you’d be gone before me, Brock or Jamie or whatever.”

Jamie kept digging through the drawers. The smell of burning fungi wafted through from the old dentist’s office. A picture of two wolves began to melt in the waiting room. They watched Jamie through the hole in the wall, trapped behind their glass frame.

“Not even, like, an X-Acto? A razor?”

“Earned ten runs in the first inning, first inning. Insane,” the Lorax said. “Just insane. What a game it coulda been, right? Ten runs. Game is over. But no, they just had to fuck it up. And that’s what happens. You try to get ahead, but it’s over. You’re never golden, you slip up. Like the whole giraffe thing.”

“Larry, I want to fucking untie you before the whole place goes up, if only to kick the shit out of you, but you aren’t helping.”

“So why isn’t your face fucked up?” the Lorax asked. “I never did lose my teeth. What did I tell you? Oh, I’ve got a lot of stories. Like the one where I crashed my bike into the green box on my street, or when I bit down on a roll of change. Truth is they plucked them like fucking raspberries back when Crane was bein’ all crazy. Pop. Just ’cause I did a little biz here and there on the side. Only a little though. Like raspberries, man. The teeth. You ever pick raspberries?”

The Lorax’s voice was still calm and level. Jamie slammed another drawer.

“Larry, I need you to shut up and think.”

“They made me eat it all, you know — all of it. I had to eat it all, Brock…Jay…what do you even know? Even the insulin pills. You sell those to the kids who don’t know what they’re getting.”

Another drawer. More shredded baseball cards.

“Who did I tell what?” the Lorax asked. “The guy with the lion. Kilkenny on the farm. They killed him dead. But the Pirates in this game, I tell you, man, it just goes to show you can’t bet on a guaranteed thing.”

Jamie gave up on the drawers. The smoke gathered around the ceiling of the room. Pig shit and dying mushrooms. He staggered away from the back wall and began to pry at the tape while more mangled mushrooms and pill capsules fell out of the Lorax’s mouth and onto the dirty floor. The Lorax didn’t seem to notice the chunks dripping from his toothless face.

“It was June eighth. I remember ’cause it was my birthday, and they took me out to get wasted, both of them. I had this kid working for me, Condon — Astor’s old bitch boy — but couldn’t get him to come out. Just stayed cooped up in his place and never comes out. So just me and those bearded fucks. And we got ten runs in the first inning. Barry Bonds whacking home runs and killing it out there. And it’s against Philly, fucking Phillies. All their fans are assholes. Ten runs. I’m not even from Pittsburgh. Never even been there, but I’m watching this game ’cause it’s my birthday. And they popped my teeth like raspberries. Pop. Just like that.”

More smoke filled the room. Jamie tried jamming his keys into the tape, but they wouldn’t cut through the thick fibers. On his knees, he began to saw back and forth against between the Lorax’s wrists. It was quiet outside the sound of crackling drywall.

“Shut the fuck up, Larry. Shut the fuck up for like five seconds,” Jamie said.

“I had to tell them, you know, had to — it wasn’t like a choice, you know. It took a lot to steal that beast. You wouldn’t believe how much Kilkenny cried before we finished him off, guy was all water. Musta pissed himself. But that game Rooker, the guy calling that ballgame. That was his name. He was calling it in Philly.”

“Larry, you gotta help me with this shit. Try to lean back or something.”

“They made me eat it all,” the Lorax said. “Even the little weird hormone shit they give the guys who wanna sprout tits. But not Jim Rooker. He was calling the game. He said he’d fucking walk home from Philly if the Pirates lost. Counting your chickens before they die, right? Or eggs? ’cause that’s what they did, they died right there in front of everybody. Embarrassing.