“Every time I get close to someone, I end up eating their brain!”
“You better not try that bullshit with me,” said Jane, “or I’ll beat you black and blue with my baseball bat.”
“Want anything to eat?” Mike asked. They stood in the lobby of the Regal Cinema at Gallery Place. He wore the same long black coat he’d worn a week earlier, which he’d been wearing for nearly twenty years and needed patching. When he liked something he stuck with it.
“Popcorn,” she answered. “And a Coke.” Jane didn’t drink coffee, but she loved her Coke. When she drank it for breakfast, it made him squirm. He got himself a bottled water.
He handed Jane her Coke, and they went to theater 9 and sat down in the back row. The lights went down and the previews began, each more dreadful than the last. After one for Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, he whispered, “I’d rather be beaten with a sock full of quarters.” Jane chuckled.
Suddenly, Jane hissed, “That guy’s jerking off!”
Mike scanned the quarter-full theater, spotting a man in baggy, lime green sweatpants and a yellow, threadbare t-shirt, the bulge of his hand visible underneath the waistband, engaged in a vigorous pumping motion. “He is!” Mike declared loudly. A woman three rows in front of them shot him a wicked glance.
“Not so loud,” Jane chided. “Don’t stare.”
“Fuck that, he’s the one abusing the acolyte.”
She bobbed her head. “Fair point.”
“I’ll deal with this,” he said, rising from his seat. She put a hand on his elbow. “Please. He could be violent.”
He puffed out his barrel chest. “Don’t worry.”
Mike plopped down in the seat next to the masturbator, his body sprawling like his bones had turned to gelatin. He extended a hand, and the man slipped his own smegma-covered extremity out of his pants.
Mike’s stomach turned. “Let’s not.” He retracted his hand.
“What's your name?”
“Rod Pincher.”
“You fucking with me?” Mike snapped, then exhaled deeply. “Not important.” Mike gave him a thousand-yard stare. “You remember elementary school?”
Rod’s brow wrinkled. “Yeah?”
“When it was your birthday, you brought a snack for everyone?”
“Sure?”
“Same principle here. I’m gonna need you to let me have a turn with that dick.”
Rod’s face screwed up with affected outrage, resembling Sam Eagle from the Muppets. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me!” Mike shouted, leaning dangerously close. “I want that dick! Now!”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Wrong with me?” Mike threw his head back and laughed. “I’m not the one jerking off!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rod insisted in an offended tone. “Get away from me!”
“Gimme that dick right now!” He raised his arm like the pro wrestler Fritz Von Erich, about to apply the Iron Claw.
“Fuck off!”
And then he ate his brain.
He returned to his seat. “The nerve!” said Jane.
He wiped the blood from his mouth with the sleeve of his coat. “He wouldn’t let me have that dick! He left me no choice!”
“No choice!”
“I had to eat his brain!”
“Had to!”
“I feel bad,” he admitted, “that the people working here have to clean it up. I worked at a theater one summer in college. People got their brains eaten all the time, and we had to clean it up.” He shook his head. “Disgusting. But you can’t say he didn’t have it coming.”
“I worked at Toys ‘R’ Us in my hometown.” Jane had grown up in Salisbury, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “So many dead bodies every Christmas. After the after-Christmas sale, we’d pile them up outside along with the returned toys we couldn’t resell and burn them. The melting flesh, hair, and plastic produced so much gray, putrid smoke, and it blew as far as Delaware or Virginia.”
“This has her big hit, ‘Sunny Came Home.’” Mike tore the shrink wrap off the twentieth anniversary edition of Shawn Colvin’s A Few Small Repairs. He’d had the CD a few years; it came with his ticket to see her live. He didn’t have a CD player, so he’d never opened it. Jane’s car had one; more importantly, she drove and had a car.
“I don’t remember song titles,” Jane said, passing her vape to Mike. She’d driven from Rockville to pick him up at his apartment in Arlington. Mike stopped driving after an accident cost him the end of his thumb nine years earlier. The state of Florida allowed him to keep his driver’s license, but the state of Florida was wrong about a lot of things.
He took a monster hit and held it as long as he could, exhaling forcefully and coughing. He had a habit of punishing his lungs; he was determined to stretch his weed dollar, even if it meant throwing up sometimes. When he recovered, he hummed a bit of the melody, then sang a couple lines.
“Nope,” said Janet, who’d stopped her car in a crosswalk. He popped the CD in the player, and, as the song began to play, Jane nodded. “This is familiar.”
Mike smiled. “You think you don’t know things because you don’t remember titles like I do, but you know a lot. Just because you don’t have my memory for details doesn’t mean you’re not smart.”
“Thank you.”
“You get stuff, you feel it in your bones. What I do is a stupid human trick, like balancing spoons on my nose. No one cares that I have large portions of AllMusic stored in my brain.”
A loud thunk from the back of the car interrupted them. They turned to look and saw a man, white, probably in his thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair.
Janet’s eyes lit up and burned with righteous fury. He’d never seen her like this. She got out of the car, and the pedestrian backed away, raising his hands in supplication. “Hold on,” he said.
“Hold on?” she sneered, stalking around the car like a mother lion.
“Let’s not do anything rash.” His tone carried an air of patronization.
Jane detected that condescension, and it just made her angrier. “Like banging your fist on my car?” she shrieked.
He backed onto the street corner. “Please,” he begged, “I don’t want any trouble.” When she came within arm’s reach, he exclaimed, “You’re one of them!”
Jane pounced, tackling him to the ground. Tears filled his eyes, ran down his cheeks. “If you let me go, I can give you all the brains you’d ever want,” he blubbered. “Rare, exotic brains. Gourmet brains. Organic, keto, grass-fed baby brains.” Janet stared at him and roared, “No responsibility for your
actions!”
And then she ate his brain.
Jane sat back down in the car. Mike pumped her hand twice. Nothing real is ever ugly, and she was beautiful in her rage. If his Oma was watching, if his great aunt, who went on profanity-laced tirades behind the wheel, was watching, they wouldn’t just approve, they’d be proud. They were bad bitches who took shit from no one.
“You’re such a good momma to your kitties,” Mike said. Jane rescued Myshka and Troika when she lived in New York. Each had three legs. Before adopting the pair, she had a cat with a heart defect, whose years she’d known were limited.
Months of visiting her apartment passed before he even glimpsed them. They were nervous and shy, and he couldn’t blame them. They’d been through it, just as their mistress had, just as he had, too. Six months into their relationship, he hadn’t seen the cats enough to tell them apart.
He took a bite of his spaghetti and meatballs. Jane bought real shredded parmesan, the kind from the deli. He’d grown up with money, but his parents insisted on buying the canned grated stuff with the shelf life of nonbiodegradable plastic, and he’d never been able to let himself have anything better. “You have a gentle heart,” he said, “but you’re also tough.”
She looked up from her bowl. “I’m very fragile.”
“As soft as glass,” he said. The phrase came from a Townes Van Zandt song, “To Live Is To Fly.” (When he played “Desperadoes Waiting For A Train,” written by Townes’s friend, Guy Clark, she said, “You listen to the saddest shit.”) Mike understood: If he stepped out of line, she’d beat him black and blue, but he could he break her.
In forty-one years, Mike had never felt that kind of connection. Townes also sang about swimming the seas to ease the pain of a lover, but that didn’t seem so impressive. What was impressive was, after a lifetime of people telling him not to slurp, he had stopped slurping. Do you know how hard it is for a middle-aged man to stop slurping? She never asked him to do it; she accepted him as he was. He stopped because he wanted to be the man she deserved. It’s easier to change when you’re already accepted and loved than when acceptance and love is conditional on your changing.
He noticed a tremor in her left leg, a shaking his mother had nagged him about his entire life. “Your leg does that, too?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never met anyone else who did that.” He took another bite of his spaghetti. “This needs hot sauce.”
Jane smiled. “Yes.” She went to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of the generic sold at Aldi. She poured some onto her own pasta, then handed it to him.
He applied the hot sauce generously, then stirred the spaghetti. “I better take this into the kitchen,” he said. “Real messy if it breaks.” Things always seemed to break around Mike; Jane called him her “chaos monkey.” As a cautionary measure, she put a sheet on the sofa before he came over.
When he sat back down, he said, “I’m fragile, too. Not many women would accept a forty-one-year-old man with a stuffed animal.” He’d had Baby, ostensibly a teddy bear, though she’d long ceased to resemble one, since he was a year old. Her black body—once dark brown—had been patched, sewn, and glued, washed, baked in the oven to disinfect her after a childhood skin infection. Her right ear had fallen off, her mouth had disappeared, and her arms hung precariously.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it. You love her, and she brings you comfort.” Jane later admitted, after Mike had Baby restored, that she’d found her appearance slightly disturbing.
“You’re not perfect,” he said, “but you’re perfect for me.”
“Two peas in a pod. You know what we should do?”
“What?”
“We should go to the courthouse and adopt each other’s children. My cats need a gentle father figure.”
“Neuberger, adoption,” called the clerk. He had gray, buzz cut hair that had once been blond.
Mike had made the appointment. Marijuana had benefits for the couple, but increased initiative, especially for Jane, wasn’t one of them.
She jumped out of her seat and bounced to the desk, Mike trailing her. “Yep!” she said gleefully. “I want my crippled children to know a father in their short lives.”
The clerk gulped. “What are their names?” he asked, trying to be polite.
“Myshka and Troika.”
“Russian?”
“You got it,” she said. “I named her Troika because she has three legs.”
The clerk furrowed his brow. “Three legs?”
“Normally they have four.”
He nearly spat. “What?”
“How many legs do you think cats have, silly man?”
The clerk’s face grew sour. “Is this a prank?”
“Don’t talk to her like that!” Mike shouted.
The clerk eyeballed him. “We don’t handle cat adoptions. You might try the animal shelter.”
“You don't like cats?” Jane asked sweetly.
“This is discrimination! Just because we don’t have a conventional family, you’re not going to serve us! I bet you have a problem with my stuffed animals, too!”
Barely restraining his rage, the clerk asked, “Stuffed animals?”
“I’m adopting his stuffed animals,” said Jane. “Since Big Bear’s eyes fell off, she hasn’t been able to mother them.”
“Poor Big Bear,” said Mike. “I found one eye, but the other’s gone. I have to get her a new pair.”
“She’s earned her retirement,” said Jane.
“Enough!” The clerk brought his fist down. “You’re interfering with county business. Leave, or I’ll have you escorted out.”
Mike looked at Jane. “You know what we need to do.”
She rummaged through her purse, retrieving a bottle of hot sauce. “White men’s brains are so bland,” she said, breaking the bottle over the clerk’s head. He crumpled to the ground, dripping hot sauce.
And then they ate his brain.
This was, Mike realized, unexpected but inevitable given what had preceded it. He had too much self-awareness not to realize he was in a story, but who isn’t? What is the persistence of personal identity over time but the continuity of a first-person narrative binding past to present to future? We are only ourselves, becoming the stories we choose to tell.
This was their story.
No one stopped them as they walked out, hand in hand. They were scary when they were angry, and no one wanted to get their head bitten off. But as long as they had each other, they wouldn’t have to eat anyone’s brain who didn’t deserve it.
Mark Engleson is half man, half amazing, and ten percent below average at math. He puts the “weird” in “weird uncle” and the “fun” in “dysfunctional."