Chapter One - Zippo

I clacked open my Zippo and held it under the bent coffee spoon. I curved the diner utensil for maximum impact on the flesh. The blue flame danced. I wasn't  thinking of anything, just following the reflections and the metal turning colours. I glanced at my arm and back to the flame. It was like stepping off the edge of a cliff and then pulling your sneaker back. Or not. Did I have the guts to put hot spoon to bare skin? It was now or never. Here I was speaking to my body, and it gave zero fucks about me. The barely scabbed over gash snaked my forearm like trails of ancient rust across my translucent skin. The gash grinned at me like it was about to break wide open and gush red ants. Fuck it. I was going to cauterize the mother.

Crazy shit like that had been going through my brain for over a month, or maybe longer. Bugs out of cuts, snakes out of my ass. I didn't keep track of these things. For me, time was a dog's breakfast shoved in a blender and spun out like a crazy woman's quilt. I knew it had been at least a year since I first started driving the road. I think I had that part right. But there were no guarantees.

The handle of the spoon warmed in my hand. The heat would make me drop it soon. It was ready. Metal on flesh, I could already smell it. I didn't think about the razor pain that would be slashing through me in three seconds. I had to make damn sure nothing would bust out of there.

"Honey, what in the hell are you about to do?"

I jerked back, slammed my lighter shut, and plunged the spoon into the coffee. I shook my hand, the skin already red from the heat.

"You need a warm up, you just gotta ask."

The waitress was pushing forty-five, but her hair spilled across her shoulders like she could still make them weep at the 7-11. A badge dangled off one of her pointed breasts and shouted at me Dandy Diner, and underneath in a curled script that made me wince, Janine.

She poured the coffee into the cup that held my rocket hot spoon. I swear I could hear metal sizzle when I dunked it into the murky brew – Not that I trusted my senses.

"Good and hot now. Anything else?" she asked.

I shook my head. I waited for her to say something about somebody having a rough night or some other corn-pone inquiry – you out slamming cougars against the rose bushes again? I shouldn't be hard on poor Janine. She probably had herself a trailer park boyfriend with a pack of cigs rolled up his sleeve, a tattoo that said bitchin' and a piece of shit car that he treated better than her. What the fuck did I know?

Here's the thing: between the black patches of my so-called memory and the pictures in my head that were soaked in fluorescent dye, I couldn't tell if I had had a rough night, week, month or life. Now how in the Christ have mercy was I supposed to tell Janine that?

I sipped my coffee and considered that I'd finally lost it, checked into that faraway hotel in the sky, which was a helluva lot worse than the one in California, and a damn sight harder to check out of.

I finished the last greasy egg before it slid off my plate, and guzzled the coffee. My body and mind ached bad enough for it to be a hangover. I had some shady back alley memories of downing a bottle of something. But where the hell did that cut come from? That was one big-ass scab – good thing it healed so quick. Overnight, I guess. Or in minutes. An image flashed through me of a dark animal with yellow teeth, snarling and snapping and then a flash of silver. Then it was gone. My brain leaked hallucinations.

I paid and left. My truck was still parked in front of my room at Dave's Lucky 7. This morning I had walked across to the Dandy after I woke staring up into the ceiling fan. Watching the blades going round and round, I thought, damn, that's my life right there. I needed to do something. I thought the same exact thing when I left my job as a used car washer, which was after I left the job as the clean-up guy at the Burger Pit, right after I left being the ass manager at the hardware store. That's what everyone called it, the ass manager, no abbreviation needed or implied. It was a big joke around there. Larry in plumbing said you gotta laugh at something or one day you're going take a #4 titanium large bore Phillips screwdriver and gouge your eyeballs out. Larry was one of the cheerier employees. I woke up one morning to the thought of being thirty-three and not amounting to a damn. Each job I'd taken was lower in the evolutionary career chain. Soon, I'd be begging to be the poop scooper in the Shriner parades. I had to do something to kill this boredom before it took my soul, my being, my everlasting sense of whoever the hell I was and flushed it down the crapper – probably one sold by Larry.

That's when I got in the half-ton and started driving.

It was fun at first, drifting around, a few changes of clothes in a red vinyl suitcase, a couple of books to read if the motel satellite wasn't showing anything juicy. I had a few bucks saved up from the shit jobs. I didn't need much. That's what I told Harold, the only guy that even came close to the friend category.

"So you're taking off, just like that?" he asked.

Harold took a slurp out of his lime Big Gulp. I swear he went through three of those a day and had the acne to prove it.

"You gotta job somewhere else, M.?" Harold shortened everything.

"Nope. Just leaving."

"Alright then. Stay between the lines."

Pretty damn tearful farewell. That was a year ago, right, I knew that at least. Before the black-outs started happening I even knew the month, and ran about fifty percent on the day of the week.

Today the whole calendar was an arctic white.

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