10.
Two Skulls
THE SHORT, FAT WHEELS of electric mopeds are too tiny for the pits that rash the streets of DC. Twice they were nearly bucked from their seat, and she let him know it by an open-handed smack to the helmet and a squeeze of her legs. The third time she sat up, let go, and with arms akimbo looked to the side. “Mm.”
“Have you got those bracelets on?” Stuart yelled into the wind.
“I’m not worried. I’m pissed. Let me drive.” And so Stuart promised they’d switch once they sped a little further north.
Nights earlier Doc had sent Stuart a message, telling him that he’d met with the art students and that it will take a month to set up Bunnyman. He suggested that in the meantime he take Veronica out on some “small adventures. See what’s out there. Make stories.” Stuart forwarded the message to Veronica, and as he watched the screen for a response, he began planning.
He thought of tachophobia first. He rented a moped. When she had emerged from the diagonal shaft out of the deepest station in the city, Stuart slammed on the brakes of the small scooter, just managing a short skid on the sidewalk, almost flipping back into a shrub. He screamed, “thrill ride!” and she shook her head of evenly parted curls. She remembered to bring a bike helmet.
“Should we wear helmets?” Stuart asked.
“We should wear helmets,” she said, gathering her curls into a band low in the back and leveling the helmet. She swung her leg over and hopped on behind him.
“Fearless but sensible!” he sang out, accelerating. “Let’s ride!”
“Woo,” she said, which was much more thrilling than a scream.
They shot up Connecticut and into Kalorama, bolting left into the Heights, sweeping past fairytale villas that piled into each other down the road, past clumps of embassies hushed and elegant in spy-charm, and the dioramic front gardens of Thailand, Turkey, Cameroon, and Belize. Ivy hung from black balustrades. The streets were smooth here, tithed and paid for. They whirred past statuette men in stationary black SUVs guarding against invisible enemies, trained dogs and their walkers, and the ever-present threat of a lost vagrant. Stuart still managed to find potholes to jam the front wheel into, or sunken sewer caps or lifted metal grates, which were the worst. She plunked him on the head. When they switched and Veronica took over, the speed increased, and it was only once that she forgot to let go of the accelerator to apply the brake. They compressed the whole front suspension before she came shuddering to a stop just before the curb. She howled with laughter. It scared the hell out of Stuart, and he bit his lip to catch his beaming grin.
“I won’t do that again,” she assured him, before they tacked back through the byzantine streets and toward the sirens of the middle city, leaving the prudent rich in their walking death masques, faded nuptials, and security footage. “You do it,” she said at the south gates of Malcolm X Park. “I want to look around. But don't be stupid, Stu.”
It was irresistible. There is a ritual wail of bike gangs on U Street. Knobby skeletal petro smokers, ATVs underpinned with wheelie bars so women slung off the back just sweep the pavement with their hair. Rumbling, caterwauling assault dune buggies and alien roach machines gyrating in eddies at every intersection. Stuart couldn’t resist diving in the maelstrom with their little electric scooter. Veronica remonstrated a little, but just for show. She pointed out the thin kid in the sail of a white shirt standing on the back of his seat while doing a wheelie on a purple-sparkled chopper. Police officers stood between parked cars, gagged and glad for it. There are no-pursuit orders across the city, so much of their time is spent telling offended college boys and their indignant dates to just stay on the sidewalks.
They scootered and weaved through traffic and over the yellow lines, circled and returned against the current, pushing out waves of revelers who washed in and out of pubs and sugar dispensaries. Past clubs and basements of massed bodies stiffening and slackening by the order of the drum, all unweighting sticky floors on the same detonation, as lights rotated in shafts into clouds of stage smoke and dark calypso friction, jigsaw bodies and the biting of earlobes.
Stuart stuck to his plan and bent toward the next quadrant and phase of night, down Florida to H Street. They traversed trolley tracks at acute angles and swerved past neon bar fronts where postered vamps blew kisses behind plated glass. At a stoplight they saw a doped-up man fall face first onto a subway grate. They wondered if he was okay. The man smiled in blood and a tilted disc of teeth and waved at invisible people somewhere beyond them.
They raced up Bladensburg, past unmarked after-hour speakeasies and onto blocks rimmed by razor wire.
“Are we lost?” she asked.
“We are not.”
Left onto Mt. Olive at the bottom of the cemetery, where the planned grid of city streets begins to noodle around and over undulations coming out of the city, persistent little hills that have escaped the graders. At a light at the bottom of a bend between two abjectly functional buildings, Stuart felt the sense they had gone one street too far. He hoped she had felt it, too, those spiritless places that grout the interstices of cities. Duplicate houses, stoops and ankle-high yard fences, but mottled by decay, the historical archives and evidence lockers of Upton Sinclair.
“You just want a Wegmans,” said Veronica when Stuart tried to describe the mood of the place. They had stopped at an intersection. That morning Stuart had studied a map that displayed clusters of violence in the city over the last six months, heat maps of slayings and assaults, and the reddest cell of all radiated out of Trinidad. “A single block registered seven shootings in the last couple of months,” he whispered.
“Why do you want me shot?” she asked.
“I don’t want you shot. We’ll just explore, just a little bit." They raced down Orren, across on Queen and around the jukebox arc of Penn and Holbrook. “Pop, pop, pop,” Stuart mouthed as they drifted on two remaining bars of battery into an alleyway. He stopped. He honked the clownish horn twice and yelled, “Hey!”
“Shh!” Veronica smacked his helmet. “You’re being a nuisance. Families live here.”
They stopped and wheeled out the scooter to Lewis St. They sat down on the curb. “I remember this place being scarier.” He sounded dejected. Over their right shoulders, a man sat on his porch. The lights were off and he sat there invisibly but for one orange dot burning between his fingers.
“This isn’t a theme park, Stuart.”
“I know.” He tried to explain the scene he had intended. The setting, the mood.
“Your mood,” she said. “You’re just affected because the business of gentrification has for now passed over this place.”
He smiled. She was right, and he said so. They heard the man behind them shuffle. They turned and he stood. Stuart waved. The man came to the railing, rested on his long arms and breathed out a cataract of pale yellow smoke. He nodded. Stuart turned to the street. She watched him put his face through a series of contortions that seemed to denote some serious thinking. She liked when he did that. His Thinking Man profile amused her.
She looked down at the pebble she had been rolling with her un-sandled toes. Around her feet squirmed a rotating game-board of roaches.
“Stuart.”
He saw them. “Let’s get bikes and go downtown.”
“Yes.”
The man on the porch withdrew from the light and repositioned a child’s bike so it stood more upright against the railing. He stood there above the steps for a pensive minute, and flicked his cigarette into the street.
Downtown was buzzing. The first thing they saw was a carapace of armed police. They had spun and threaded their way through traffic — pedaling past dead-stare drivers mouthing silent obscenities — just clearing sideview mirrors by the widths of their fingers and coasting down the tilted city towards the monuments. The calves of Veronica piston-pumped the pedals but above she floated, while Stuart took to pounding curbs with the 30 pound rental.
Tonight was the President’s speech. An address to a perforated nation quickly coming apart. Protesters filled the streets, alive with anger, righteous, exasperated, invigorating anger. Counter-protesters were there, but they were comically indignant, caught in the thrall of a cult assigned with defending the world order, ready to die, in principle.
Veronica and Stuart rode under the curlicue spindles of firework smoke and tinge of tear gas, whipped into swirls by roller-derby girls waving flags of an alternative typology, a new order that the old one couldn’t possibly understand, and one it mortally feared. At the corner of K and 15 they both stopped to process an unusual formation of shields and bodies. A shell of Swiftian guards, circling in overlapping armor an invisible center. Next to Stuart was a woman screaming.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“They’re protecting him.”
“Who?”
“That man.” There must have been a man ensconced in the swirl of police.
“Protecting him from what?”
“From us!”
Stuart looked at Veronica. She was just as bewildered.
He asked, “What did he do?”
“He hit that man.”
Stuart followed the sweep of her hand. ‘That man’ was lying prostrate on the ground under the weight of two policemen. They held onto him like a raft. They looked like they would drown if they let go.
Stuart pointed to the man on the ground. “That man there,” and then pointed to the man enclosed by the spiral formation, “hit that man?”
The woman turned to Stuart, clearly frustrated. She looked him in the eye. “That man,” she said, pointing to the man on the ground, “is with us. The man in the middle of the police drove up in his car, jumped out, and coldcocked our man in the face.”
“And now they’re protecting him from you?”
The woman shifted onto the back of her heels and put her hands on her hips, glaring at Stuart. Veronica put her arm around him. “We should go.”
Blocks down, the sound of vuvuzelas underscored air horns, car horns and truck horns. The President’s speech on the South Lawn had begun, and the people were determined to drown him out.
They docked their bikes and skipped down to a swell of people and noisemakers on 15th. Cherry bombs. Blasts of sound strafed the South Lawn, and the promises of a threatening commander-in-chief came out weak and muffled. An auxiliary building next to the White House caught fire. The basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church sent out beards of black smoke. A go-go band appeared on the flat of a tractor trailer and the clacking rhythm of the go-go beat in particular demanded a correlation of movement, so they danced in the horns’ wail, the sirens and the cherry bomb reports off boarded-up windows, in firework smoke and riot smoke, stage smoke and disco search lights, calypso, go-go, techno, neon specters and presidents speaking in piebald tongues. All institutions of the globe were swelling in edema under the heat of a collective, hallucinatory, commodified, marketed, pontificated, reverberating fear, where under the vamp stare and by her blessing the only ones who may pass undiminished are the ones swerving and careening in between time.
..
The next morning Veronica sent him a text. “Tonight’s phobia?”
He couldn’t check the spelling fast enough. “Enochlophobia.” He stared into the screen. She was looking it up.
“Fear of crowds?”
“Fear of being trampled, specifically.”
“Same metro, same time?”
“5:59.”
On the escalator she looked down at her white shoes. I will have to wear shoes from now on. The escalator is long at Dupont. The handrail rotates slower than the steps, so that everyone up the column seems to turn automatically back towards the tunnel. She skipped up the last twenty feet, passed through the gate, and scowled a little when the skull-painted face at the entrance grinned at her. “Hello,” it said.
“Oh-my-god,” she said quickly. “Hello, creep.”
“I’m a skull.”
“I see that.”
“I bought a mascara pen.”
“Well, that’s eyeliner, and you bought it for touch-ups?”
“No, for you.”
She batted her eyelashes with a smile upon the pedestal of her hands. “Not enough?”
“You might want something a little extra.”
They undocked an electric bike and Stuart took the first-generation beater that was left, sweating mightily to match her up the hills.
Skulls lined the sidewalk atop bodies in queue. The line snaked down the block and just began to taper in front of Howard University Hospital. Big bodies, little ones, fat and skinny, it was a Dr. Seuss march of the dead. “Tonight,” Stuart announced triumphantly, “we take in a show.” He bowed a skeleton valet’s bow.
She looked down the line. “Are girls allowed?”
“There are girls.” He saw none close by. “Everyone’s a skull anyway.”
“That’s very true.”
“Death does not discriminate.”
“Is that what the eyeliner is for?”
“I can draw in something for you. I studied online this morning.”
“Give me it.”
She walked over to a parked car and in the glass dragged lines across her cheeks and blackened the tip of her nose. She turned and smiled.
“You’re a cat.”
“Uh huh.”
He laughed, “nice!”
She began to walk toward the back of the queue. “Where are you heading?” Stuart asked. She gave him a cartoonish smile of confusion, cocked her head towards the hospital, and pointed her thumb in that direction.
“We don’t stand in lines,” said Stuart. “Besides, the opening band is terrible. The Queens of Gangrene.”
They grabbed a couple of burritos from a food truck and sat on the sidewalk, opposite the queue of the dead, their backs against the wall. Taken together, Stuart had made it to heaven.
“So who are these guys?”
“Children of Orcs. They instigate the maddest mobs of any band now touring. Luckily for us, they came to play this week.
“Adventitious,” she said despite a mouth full of chips.
“See this bump on my nose?” He tapped it. “Children of Orcs. I was kicked.”
“How were you kicked?”
“Somebody was flipping over, and they went down bucking.” He looked at her as she sucked a spot of salsa from her thumb. “Are you at all anxious?” he asked. “The whole place erupts with mad energy.”
She looked down the line and slurped Sprite out of a can with a paper straw. “There must be pockets. Besides, some of these guys are pretty small.”
“They’re the ones with high knees and elbows!”
“Well, you’ll just have to be there to absorb them.”
Stuart scowled down the line, a little at himself.
“Actually,” he said, “everyone’s pretty nice at these shows. I’ve tried to figure out exactly why that’s so. I’ve been to festivals billed with troupes of devil-worshipping bands. Riots commanded by hellish oaths and axe guitars, some sick with minor chords and strings of witch-core, long-haired, goateed Albrecht Durer dudes who arrive in vans with satanic puns and acronyms on their license plates. A couple of years ago in Richmond a van actually had straight “SATAN” on its plates. And never, not once, have I ever seen a fight break out. An actual ‘I mean to inflict great pain upon you’ fight. Last summer I had to go to a rodeo in San Antonio, and I counted three outright brawls in the parking lot.”
“Ugh, give me a satanist over a cowboy anyday.”
“But why is that!”
“Because they hate themselves.”
“Yeah, but the self-regard of a lot of these fellows here isn’t sky high. I’ve tried to figure it out. Why all the fights in baseball stadiums?”
“They’re just drunk.”
“So are these guys! And more.”
“Maybe it’s the more.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. There’s something more artistic, cultural, psychological. There’s the music, the scene, this fetish with the dark and sinister. It’s dystopia, and there’s always been an irresistible charm, an aesthetic in dystopia that makes people think: If I can live here, and make a place for myself, I won’t have to depend on paradise so much.”
Veronica shifted a little on the wall to turn to him. “Maybe that’s why I like horror so much. They’re much too contrived to be scary, but the settings are always so attractive to me. I want to live in the pale gray suburbs of Stockholm as a vampire and feed on the bodies that my handler brings me.”
“I’ll be your serial killer!”
She smiled and ate the last unbroken chip from the bag. “I’ve never heard you talk so much.”
“I love sidewalk conversations. Plus Doc isn’t with us to suck all the air out.”
The doors to the club opened. The orderly queue of the dead began to file in, reaching for their wallets.
Stuart continued. “There’s a blues to dystopia that seems to satisfy people. You know, like a down-on-his-luck blues man sitting on a stool with his slide-guitar, growling about the unfairness of it all, really wailing like he’s pissed off about it, and then you realize he’s singing the song of everyone in that room.”
“What are you talking about? Country is full of the blues — Merle Haggard. Johnny Cash. They were full of heartache.”
“But they weren’t angry about it enough, and that was old country. Country and pop have commingled and everything’s been reduced to a love song again. You know what a love song does to people like this? It diminishes them, reduces them, leaves us behind. There’s nothing so lonesome or damaging as a love song. The punks, pimpled and shaven, banned it. They knew that life is a sucker, it’s full of rejection, abandonment and betrayal.”
“Now you sound like a film noir textbook.”
“Maybe!” he laughed. “You know the best noir was written during the Red Scare, when the whole world turned on those guys. All they had to project on the screen was the world left to them — and it turns out the whole world recognized it, too.”
“And that’s why cowboys hit people?”
“Exactly! A noir world terrifies them, and so they try to punch it in the face.”
“Hmm, maybe. But didn’t you say it’s violent in there? You have a bump on the bridge of your nose.”
“I thought of that, too. There’s a definite catharsis. Few people fight in a mosh because everyone’s too busy pushing and shoving, getting knocked down and picked up. It’s exhausting, while at a line dance you’re just twinkling your toes and getting heated over the way the guy next to your girl is moving his hips. There’s just raw, dumb energy, and it’s all corked up.”
Veronica watched the line slowly inject itself into the club. Most of the skulls wore black concert shirts. Cannibal Corpse. Napalm Death. Genitorturers. Deicide. Thrill Kill. Cat Rapes Dog.
“But then there’s this whole ethos that people discount. The revenge fantasies that all people carry with them take on epic proportions here. Highly inventive scenarios that require complex imaginations, theatrics, unusual weapons, daggers and hooks, complex setups, new moons and testifying ravens, and impossibly timed schemes to lure their victims out in the open.”
“Don’t forget hatchets, pitchforks, chainsaws, machetes, or telekinesis.”
“Or long teeth!”
“It’s exhausting!”
“So they play it out in their heads and that’s enough. And then a cowboy just comes out and hits someone in the face. Or shoots them.”
She looked over at Stuart and had to laugh at the sight of a skull drinking from a can of Sprite.
“They just live there,” he said. “And I think if you live in evil long enough, instead of fearing it always, you see its gradations, its levels, its nuances. In the dark you can actually see the big bad world outside. You start to think maybe evil’s not all so bad.”
She was looking at him, at his black grooved eyes and painted cheekbones and a little red mark of salsa on his chin. “Sympathy for the Devil,” she said.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Frankenstein. Edward Scissorhands!”
“Every cop is a criminal, and all sinners saints.”
“What’s that from?”
“Sympathy for the Devil.”
“Nice! You remembered that?”
“I know music, too.”
He hopped up, brushed off his hands, and smashed up the litter into a ball. “Let’s dance!”
Inside, The Children of Orcs do not care that you can see their big stomachs. Big pubic-garlanded stomachs that pull in their spinal cords and cock their small shoulders back on a brace of shapeless legs, bare in woodsman cutoffs. They are sloven men propagated out of peasant fields, the rancid fruit of earth. Sloven man survives! He cannot be killed. He is the beginning and the end, the darling of life finding its way. The battle axe that the lead of the band carries, the one-horned helmet, the boots — these are not his costume. It is the body itself, primal and coarse — and man, when he bites into the ball of the mic, can he howl. He does not suffer restraint.
At the intro, the place convulsed in electrocuting light. The walls drained in streams of condensed body heat. Everything was conductive, shoulder to shoulder, through stacks of bodies. When they came in, Stuart led Veronica to the bow’s point of the balcony, above the sweating, ululating brood, and tried to glean her impression by the reception of her eyes. In the flickering light, she seemed electrified, too. He tried not to yell in her ear.
“Give me your bracelets!”
She appeared confused for half a second, and quickly pulled them off. He placed them deep in his pocket.
He was glad the music had finally started. That’s when all the shoving begins and spaces open up. It becomes organized. One giant circle forms in the middle and two on the side become its satellites. A DC-specific rotation of bodies began swirling at speed, a circle pit, and Veronica yelled, “They’re running laps!”
“It’s actually safe if you can keep your feet!”
Maypoled dead center in the whorl of bodies and skulls stood a tall man in a white stole. His hair was long and it curled just over his shoulders. He wore a scraggly beard and in the probing light, his white shroud and outstretched arms seemed to shine. Veronica pointed, “It’s Jesus!” But his peace could not last. If you’re not moving, you’ll be flattened, and the man went down, sandals in the air if he was wearing them. Immediately two skulls yanked him up and all of them were shoved to the side and reabsorbed by the buffer, men crushed and standing wide with their arms out, trying to keep balance on the arms and shoulders of each other.
At the first explosive refrain, the rotation disintegrated in a mad, boiling frenzy. Stuart watched and considered. Compared to anywhere else, he thought, this scrum is the most egalitarian, most sympathetic place on the planet. He thought in gradations of good and evil, of lost souls found, of a boy in the woods trying to figure out what to do about his laboring brother.
Stuart looked over at Veronica. Her mouth was wide open and smiling. “Ready?” he asked.
“Okay!” she yelled.
He gapped between bodies upstairs, hopped two at a time down the stairs, and cleared out a channel of air space through to the great circle in the middle. They jumped dead center in front of the back buffer — it’s safer there: you just watch for bodies falling backwards.
“Good?”
“Good!”
He dove into the middle of the scrum and hopped and cleared a little space to do a little skank before he was creamed by a volley of bodies. He spun back and opened the spot again and resumed the stomp before again he was spun like a pinball. He looked back and saw her dancing, too, elbows up and ready. Ah! A sight!
He was shoved head first and sent like a mortar into the packed columns of skulls pressing into the front of the stage, and he had to stomp backwards hard to return to the middle. He looked back. She was gone.
He ran along the circumference. He jumped in the air searching for the bump of her hair, the only non-skull, cat-whiskered pretty face, but in the strobe light found nothing but snapshots of skulls. He ran hard into the circle and looked for signs of speculative satanists clearing space for a fallen peer. But she was nowhere, and he started to swear in panic. He felt the imperative self-calming-down to sluice off the adrenaline and think, think, think: find her.
He ran to the bathroom and could just see her cupping bloody paper towels over her split-open nose, wrenching open the faucet to rinse away the red splatter across the basin. He stopped at the door of the women’s bathroom, hoping this vision came out of fear. He waited two breaths and popped it open to see. Inside, in front of the mirror were three stout women (there are girls!) washing away their melted skull faces. They stopped and turned to him in unison, faces dissolving but rapidly offended. Stuart dropped to his knees and looked under the stall doors. Just one sitter in high chrome boots.
“What are you—”
“Sorry,” he ran back back out.
He swam through the crowd. They thought he was moshing but he was fighting to find a face. The pig-man was swallowing the microphone. All these songs sound the same. There was no security, which assured him a little. No one was crushed. He pushed his way outside. Skulls talking in the dank night. One had peeled off his shirt to smear off his face paint and stood there, smeared, bare and steaming. Had she left? He fished out his phone and couldn’t unlock it because his fingers were so wet. There was a black slick of sweat across the screen, and all the numbers were lighting up phantasmically. He ran back in, splitting the jam of bodies and hopping for visibility. Maybe if I make a nuisance of myself, she’ll find me, he thought. I’m the searching skull. He pushed and hopped against the waves diagonally across the floor. A search pattern. Songs overlapped. Maybe they are trying to kill us.
He caromed back through the middle and during a bass and drum bridge he heard two skulls yell, “Jesus!” and saw them pointing to the center of the great circle. “She’s going to get nailed!”
There she was. Dead center. Hopping in pogo time, arms swinging to the double-pedal drum and her head floating left and right in the thunderous groove of the bass. Stuart plunged toward her, but the skulls began to circle again. He was swept up and spiraled inward. Her eyes were closed and her cat whiskers did not run.
..
“What’s next?” was a question that delighted everyone.
A couple of nights later she met Stuart outside a cafe in Adams Morgan. She had been in the city already, having dropped in with an old school friend for a quick tour of the galleries, the Renwick and Hirshhorn.
“You will need to put these back on.” In his palm were the bracelets.
“Oh.”
They stood outside of the Caged Bird Sings cafe.
“Doc is inside.”
“Oh.”
They stepped inside.
Tall thin tables stuck into the mural walls, dotted with colorful mica hightop chairs. A portrait spanned the long side wall. The profile of a woman in contemplative repose, lying on her outstretched arm with a DC double-black-bar and three-stars tattoo on the inside of her bicep, a halo of black hair sending out jets of rising specters, black paisley eyebrows over thinking eyes, a soft nose and round chin set on a long, Nefertiti neck.
“Hey, it’s you!” Stuart pointed.
“It is not!”
Doc was at the far table next to the stage. A lone stool stood in the blue stage light behind an old radio broadcaster’s microphone. Doc’s arms were dog-pawed over a closed laptop. He wore a gray gym sweatshirt, the ties of his hood short and knotted. He looked like a sparring partner.
“What are you having?” he asked. “I’ve been holding off.”
A stout, a lager, and an IPA with a cup of water.
A tall man brushed by them, leaped over the two side steps of the stage, and slowed his approach to the ball microphone as if he were going to ravage it. He stopped just short, and placed his palm on the top of the dome with an amplified thud. The chatter and clink of dinnerware died down. He began slow and rhythmic, “The dark typhoon waters… drowned men… tied together… our fingers plump…” His voice rose with the pace of enjambed lines. “We knew where to find them / The corroded fetters / Jewels of servitude / Treasure marks the cache of bones.”
Doc was watching Veronica. She felt his glance. He was smiling and nodding. The poet culminated in three standalone words, “Night. Fall. Remains.” The “S” trailed off into silence and the audience knew he was finished. They slapped their tables and hollered their approval in one logarithmic crest, and then returned to their conversations.
“Every ten minutes there’s another,” Doc explained. “How are you, Veronica?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “And you?”
“Busy, but productive. Do you want to see the flyer?” He opened his laptop and walked his fingers over to the window he had ready.
A spiral-eyed, maniacally grinning man in a pink bunny suit, hooded with long, flopping ears broken in the middle. The cutout figure hovered over black-and-white layers of tangled tree limbs. In spiky red comic book lettering, there lifted and glowed the header,
The Eve of BUNNYMAN.
Below the big, curling mud-splattered feet blazoned the subhead:
Join the WARREN to call the ghost of BUNNYMAN.
Banjos, harmonicas, bluegrass and metal. Bunny costumes required*.
Mystery GUEST: the real son of Bunnyman.
Will you find him before he finds you?
*Costumes sold at local Party Centers. Discount Code: “BUNNYMAN”
“What do you think?”
“It’s good!” she said.
“I’m not keen on the name. We came up with others.” He brought up alternative flyers.
BUNNYMAN’S Eve
Night of BUNNYMAN
Festival of BUNNYMAN
BUNNYfest
BUNNYfest 500
Search for BUNNYMAN
Hunt for BUNNYMAN
Hunt of BUNNYMAN
The Return of BUNNYMAN
Revenge of BUNNYMAN
The BUNNYMAN Spectacular
Pictures with BUNNYMAN
“None really spoke to me,” he said. “But so far we are generating huge interest. The art students have been careful not to announce this with local promoters and events organizers. We’re outside the usual channels. They want only the right people to show up. Word of mouth garners just that, and so far, they tell me, it’s working.”
“I called a few Party Centers,” said Stuart, “and they knew before I could say it that I was looking for a bunny costume.”
“This is crazy,” she said.
The stage light intensified. She and Stuart could feel the heat of it on their necks. The place hushed as a small, bespectacled, curly hair woman approached the stage.
Doc leaned over and tapped Veronica on the hand. “I’m glad you’re still wearing the bracelets.”
The woman mounted the steps carefully, watching her feet follow each other, careful to step in the middle of the two giving planks. The place was silent, all eyes.
She held in her hand a piece of folded paper. She lifted it in front of her and held the corners with her jeweled fingers. The paper steadied a little. Someone coughed. A clearing of throats. They were waiting, willing her. A man laughed, “Okay, girl, you got it!” Light applause. The tall poet before her jumped onto the stage to adjust the height of the microphone. He stepped away and leaned against the side wall. She unfolded the paper again, and looked into the eyes of the crowd, the blue light glinting off the edges of her hair and casting a shadow across her cheeks. “One,” she began. “Oh.” The volume surprised her. She looked down at the trembling paper. Stuart’s face flushed red for her and he took a small, quiet sip.
“One,” she began again.
“Two…
“Three… four…” The numbers were pronounced slowly and meekly, as uncertain as questions.
“Five…”
Someone adjusted their chair. Eyes narrowed or closed involuntarily. They didn’t want her to have to suffer their stare.
“Six… seven… eight…” She paused.
“Nine…
“Ten… eleven…
“Oh, no,” Veronica thought.
“Twelve… thirteen.
“Thirteen?” She looked down at her paper. It was wet at the edges. She raised her head to the microphone. Everyone was worried. Fourteen, they all thought.
“Actors in foreign films,” she said, “in action and in horrors, in thrillers and in martial arts films. They count. They count for their speaking parts. They count in their own languages. They are told to count because they understand that in foreign markets their voices will be dubbed over. Now I can say that my baby girl shouldn’t have to wash her hair in fecal coliform, or that my little son should draw race cars instead of police cars, stick men with soccer balls instead of stick men with guns. I can keep talking about underfunded education and toxic air, about dreams deferred, rats and cockroaches, but all they hear me saying is 7,8,9. 4,5,6. 3…” She sidled up closer to the microphone, head cocked, a lock of hair suspended in the blue light... “2…” Lucid eyes, steady as a compass needle. “One.”
She didn’t move. The small, packed audience brought up their hands, but waited. She nodded. A giant, falling wall of cheers.
Stuart eased back in his chair, raised an eyebrow to Veronica, breathed again. She held an open grin. The poet sauntered back to her table, nodded, and softly high-fived her girlfriends.
“Alright,” said Doc, “we have ten minutes.”
“Before what?”
“Before the next one. Stuart, are you good?” The drinks were still nearly full.
“Listen, I’ve heard back.”
“From who?”
“Jake Hindley.”
“Bunnyman,” they said.
“Grandson of Bunnyman. But yes.”
Stuart looked skeptical. It was left to Veronica. “And?”
“He’s interested. He wants to know more. I told him that we were looking to add a little something to this event and we needed local talent, especially a notorious celebrity such as he. I explained that in a universe of must-see events, we now need something raw, something extraordinary or appalling, something real to compete for market share. I flat out told him that I knew about his tragic past. That I’d seen his police filings and incident reports, and that someone with such a unique legacy should have a chance to make something of himself, that notoriety is now indistinguishable from fame. Everything is on the same level now. There is only recognition or invisibility, significance or irrelevance.”
Stuart was frowning. “You wrote all that to him?”
“I did.”
It was Stuart’s turn to prompt: “And?”
“He wants to know if there is any money in it.”
“Is there?”
“Two hundred honest dollars! For a guest appearance from Bunnyman himself! I sent him a flyer. He’s interested.” He looked at Veronica. “I described to him what his job would be.”
“Is this why I’m wearing bracelets?” Veronica asked.
“You should always wear the bracelets. But this is what I told him: I said that the story would go out that Bunnyman was in the area, and that he had attacked a woman locked in an old caboose north of Pope’s Head Creek. There’s actually an old caboose left to the side of the tracks. It had been converted to a schoolyard or park piece, with its sides cut out for large bay windows, but it never sold. Muldoon told me about it, and showed me where it is. I told Hindley that rumor is best when borne out of fact, and that we needed something close to an actual attack, or half attack. That we had in our troupe a highly trained performance artist,” he nodded at Veronica, “who is well known for encouraging and bearing attacks made upon her. That her specialty is aggravating assault.” He paused for reaction. He thought it was clever.
“Mm,” she said. “He can’t possibly be that stupid.”
“Don’t be so quick to judge. He asked what he’d have to do. I said just enough to play along with the performance, to rough her up. He asked, rather astutely, why he would do something that would so easily make him vulnerable to arrest. And I said that he has these messages now, and so I would be an accessory to any crime. He asked why he doesn’t just turn in these messages to the cops now, and I told him, ‘Exactly. Now we have a bond of trust. We are now colleagues.’”
“Unbelievable.”
“He wants $500. And he wants to meet me in person. I’m going to Clifton on Monday.”
“You better have a number for a lawyer,” she said.
“I do. So what do you think?”
“I think it’s dumb.”
“It’s our climax,” he said. “And you’ll have whole hosts of bunny people looking for you, at the same time as Jake Hindley.”
She looked at Stuart. “What are you thinking?” He looked uneasy. The lights were coming up on stage. The man who had gone first jumped on stage to raise the mic a little. He consulted a note.
“Introducing Ms. Veronica Samir.”
Doc was grinning. Stuart turned from the stage to her. He looked pained, apologetic.
“He mispronounced my name,” she said. People began to look around for the next speaker. Veronica didn’t budge. She looked down and slowly rotated the IPA in a pool of condensation. She took a sip. She stood, looked at Doc, who nodded at her.
She took the bracelets off, placed them gently on the table, grabbed her purse and swung it over her shoulder, and walked through the silent, watching audience, past her lookalike mural, and out the door.
When Stuart finally ran out, he thought to head south on 18th, because that’s the direction she came from. The sidewalks were packed so he took to the street where he could dodge traffic and speed along, searching sidelong down the big pedestrian belt, down past the taverns and over the flower-draped barriers that protect diners from vehicular strikes. A car door almost flipped him on his head, a truck’s side view mirror popped him in the shoulder and the driver bellowed deliriously before nearly striking the car in front of him. When the driver slung his head out the open window to glower at his trespasser in apoplectic damnation, Stuart was well down the street, past the basketball courts and the popsicle trucks and the corner bar that sells intimacy in fluted glasses. “I’m always looking for her,” he thought. At least she’s not minced under a riot of skulls. She’s strong and independent, and he didn’t know if he was on Doc’s errand, the university’s, or his own.
He searched all the way to Florida Avenue, and could have kicked himself for not checking the metro station first. She still hadn’t responded to his text. He stopped to stare at the screen, where the little red pinprick of a notification appears, and he said “now” in the incantation of a conjuring. He really wanted that to work. He sent a message to Doc. “Nope,” but refused to elaborate. He thought of getting himself a popsicle. He cut through a corner of the basketball courts.
“Hey, creep.”
Stuart took a long, deep breath. She was sitting on the utility box letting her heels fall against the front panel. “What took you so long?” she asked.
“I got hit by a truck!”
“Stuart, did you know that was going to happen? The put-me-on-the-spot at the cafe?”
“I did, Veronica. I’m part of the experiment. I work for the school. I thought it was a clumsy idea to effect glaucophobia or glossophobia or whatever phobia it is.”
“You could have just given me a poem and I would have gone up there and read it. It’s the waiting to be called that creates the anxiety anyway.”
“I know. Doc thought it might trigger something if you had to come up with something on the spot.”
“I should have just walked up on stage and called you names.”
He nodded in agreement. He fell in beside her, next to her knocking feet. He thought it would have been funny if she had taken the stage to call him names.
“Tell me more about this Jack or Jake man,” she said. “The Bunnyman guy. Is Doc really setting this up? Is this for real?”
Stuart turned to the street. He saw the man in the six-wheel pickup. He still looked pissed.
He looked sideways at Veronica. “I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said.
“Okay. Why not?”
“I just wouldn’t.”
She let her heels fall against the panel, one-two, one-two, one—
“Will you go?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It wouldn’t be a night without me.”
He laughed. “Now that’s the honest truth.”
She pulled her purse higher over the shoulder and hopped down from the metal box. “You want to mosey with me down to Dupont?” The question was unnecessary.
At the entrance to the station, she asked him, “Do you want to know what I would have said? On the stage? I thought of it when —”
“Wait!” he yelled, and led her to the tiny triangular median north of the circle. He sat on the bench and, in audience, asked her to begin.
“Okay.” She cleared her throat, thought for a bit, and searched the sky for the memory of it. “Give me an artist who wipes down the counters.” She counted off something, and began again.
Give me an artist who wipes down the counters,
A poet who pulls hair from the drain,
A playwright who replaces the kitchen light,
And a romantic who understands
Amortization points and interest coverage ratios.
Stuart was nodding with a wide grin. “That’s great!”
She slapped her hip and stomped. “You’re supposed to snap your fingers!”
He laughed and looked at his hands. “My fingers can’t do that.”
Before she descended into the Dupont station, she said, “See you at the Eve of Bunnyman’s Gala Revenge and Festival Night.”
“I’ll pick you up in Doc’s car,” he called.
She took her hand off the handrail and waved like the queen.