The Sapphire Express (5 page)

I had never been a big fan of bureaucrats because I thought that most of the rules they enforced were being used to feed their childish greed and audacious egocentricity. There were just too many bloody fools wandering in the government’s giant labyrinths who wanted to raise a glass of mediocre champagne to their deserving lips on a five-star cruise to nowhere and smile a guilty, but so cleverly and self-righteously justified, yet ostensible smile with their smug colleagues. Those same fools knew deep inside their deceitful souls that a giant load of crap would hit the fan one day and paint them all with greed’s reeky colors, but they still wanted to drink and dance a little more because fun times like that simply couldn’t be missed. They wanted to party until the dam of collective anger burst like a dirty soap bubble and released the bitter waters that had been flooding into it from that distant stygian world they so happily regulated without a hint of sense left in their machine’s minds. They wanted to frolic in their shiny shoes until the murky sludge full of deadwood and human excrement buried their little books, pencils, and red bookkeeper’s hats—until the angry men and women in beasts’ clothes started approaching them from all directions with torches and good old wooden pitchforks in their bruised hands. Only then, would they look at one another and get ready to repent, but it would be too late because the torches were already burning hot.

In addition to finding a new place to live, I decided to get a new identity. I needed it to keep the bank’s sticky fingers off my insurance money, and, more importantly, become a ghost. My rebirth wasn’t going to be complete until the old me had been erased from the government’s books. The machine had to believe that I had disappeared and presume that I had died, committed suicide, or just wasted away like an old newspaper. Only my death would allow the new me to breathe freely.

I was confident that my plan was going to work because any remaining family I had in the area was too distant to care about my disappearance, and I didn’t have any friends who would have stopped me in the street and asked what the hell was going on. I was, however, going to get some fake glasses, cut my hair, lose a couple of pounds and move to the next town, just to be on the safe side. I had learned not to underestimate people’s curiousness and their inexplicable obsession to start poking around when they noticed something unusual.

After two days of careful planning, I put the wheels of change in motion and cashed the insurance check. I chose a small local bank because I didn’t owe them any money and the manager knew about my tragedy. He was a decent, compassionate man, and I was sure that he wouldn’t ask me any unnecessary questions or put me in a tight spot. I was, after all, a man who had recently lost his whole family.

My intuitions proved right, and the money was soon in a sturdy, 29-inch hardside suitcase. It was a beautiful thing, and I couldn’t believe how happy those little printed pieces of paper made me. I laughed aloud because it just felt so goddamn rudimentary that we still used colorful toilet paper to pay for things, but I figured that the future was always a little further away than we wanted to believe. It seemed like everyone was eager to change the world, but no one really liked change. Everyone wanted to start a revolution, but no one really liked blood.

After the financial situation was taken care of, it was time to get my new identity. I had already planned the whole thing in my head, and it didn’t take long to find a homeless man on his last legs who agreed to sell his social security card to me for a fair price. He asked for nine hundred dollars with a voice and expression that told me that he was asking much more than he would have accepted. I gave him four thousand dollars in cash and five one-hundred-dollar gift cards to Morton’s. Carry out, dine in—his choice.

After getting the card of life, I drove to the DMV and entered the depressing perennial line that snaked around the crumbling building like a colorless serpent that was made of the unhappiest people in the world. I definitely wouldn’t take a nice woman there on a first date, but the wait paid off handsomely, and after a couple of hours of tolerable agony, I had a brand-new driver’s license in my pocket.

The license looked absolutely fantastic, and I felt proud that I had, once again, managed to fool the guardians of the government. I was a surprisingly capable criminal, and my new name and hairstyle complemented my transformation from a tame family man into an unexpected felon quite nicely. Even the fake glasses looked good on me, and they completely changed my appearance. I hardly recognized that crazy bastard who was staring at me from its plastic prison. The new man looked much younger and smarter than me, and I wondered if I should have cut my thinning hair years ago. Who knows, maybe that would have even lured out the sex beast in Eden and put my unemployed penis back to work.

It was satisfying to break the law, especially when everyone was so helpful and kind while I was doing it. Even the DMV folks had been in a great mood, and that was something that had never happened to me before. It almost seemed like they knew that I was doing something illegal, but because they couldn’t prove any of it, or didn’t have any extra energy to investigate further, they just did their jobs and avoided any annoying hoops that would have interrupted their daily routines and maybe put them under the dreaded microscope of the bosses.

After getting my driver’s license, I opened an account under my new name at a bank that I had never been a client of and deposited the insurance money in it. I told the manager, for a lack of a better explanation, that I had hit a small jackpot in Vegas on my second honeymoon. He seemed to like my feel-good story a lot, even if he clearly knew that it was total horseshit. The man would have probably agreed with me that it was possible to turn a negative image into a positive one by simply manipulating the labeling process a little. It was, for example, much smarter to put an olive in a glass of vodka and say that you were going to enjoy a martini than leave the olive out and say that you were going to drink a glass of vodka.

Opening the bank account was the final thing I needed to do regarding my identity and money, and the new man was now ready to face the world and cannonball into the murky pool of humanity. I didn’t even bother getting a new passport because I knew that I wasn’t going to leave the country. It had been clear to me right from the beginning that my plan didn’t include the need to run away from anybody. Ever.

The next step was to get a new place to live and find a set of wheels that wouldn’t make me stand out from the crowd. I didn’t want to drive my old car anymore because it reminded me of Annalise and her silver car seat. In fact, I was scared to death of the damn thing, and I couldn’t even peek at the backseat without risking a total nervous breakdown. There was no choice: the Chevrolet had to go.

After a couple of days of reluctant house hunting, I found a small secluded place in the woods that was for rent. The quiet property seemed like a perfect refuge for my tired soul, and I signed the lease with my new name and shook the owner’s hand firmly without even seeing the house. I simply had no energy for stuff like that, and when the owner requested that I read the seven-page contract, I wanted to take the pen and stab him in the liver. I was, yet, extremely proud that I had been able to find a new home all by myself, and I allowed a tiny smile to enter my aging face when the owner said that he had known from the beginning that I was a good man.

Next stop: a used car dealership. I took a taxi to Handsome Hank’s Discount Motors and bought an inconspicuous white Ford Econoline with a monstrous wad of cash that I pulled out of my back pocket like a true criminal. Handsome Hank himself handed me the keys to my new ride and assured me that I had made a fantastic deal. I believed the man because the mighty van was in tip-top shape and had only ten thousand miles on it. The cargo space was large and practical, and the humble working horse was strong and reliable, like a good friend. It was just a beautiful, beautiful vehicle—creepy, but so goddamn beautiful that I wanted to cry. Handsome Hank was also handsome, but not as handsome as in the pictures.

I jumped into my new van eagerly and drove to my favorite Walmart to get a couple of burners and a bag of premium beef jerky. I also thought about getting a sandwich from a Subway that was inside the store, but I just ate the beef jerky and looked at the pictures of the sandwiches. Then I terminated my old phone service and bought a large vanilla sundae with chocolate sauce, pink sprinkles, gummy bears, and a cherry on top to celebrate the day’s last errand. Oh, what a fun-filled day it was. Oh, how I felt like that little shy, shy boy again.

Forty-eight hours went by, and I received the keys to my new house in a small orange envelope. I put the envelope in the trash can and looked at the two golden keys for a long moment. Then something clicked in my head, and I decided that I would move out immediately and leave the suburbs behind without overanalyzing the relocation process. Simplicity had always been my best friend, and I knew that if I played my cards right, I could make my move a fun and exciting experience.

I put all the family pictures, my silver laptop, and some clothes in a yellow canvas bag and drank a full glass of ice water. Then I lit a candle and dropped it gently on the carpet under the curtains. The flame was hungry, and it started devouring the curtains like a newborn demon baby. I watched the fire until it reached the point of no return and shrugged indifferently. It didn’t bother me one bit that the house was going to burn down. In fact, it made me happy.

As I exited the house where my dreams were born and where they were so cruelly murdered, I thought about the garage and the car that was still in there; the useless lump I had worked so hard for. I thought about how I had wanted to become Sandy, and how goddamn crazy I had been. I shook my loose lips in disgust and agreed that I had been a miserable bastard of a man. I hoped that the Chevrolet would burn to the ground with the garage and leave a pile of melted middle-class dreams on the concrete floor for the bank and the insurance company to scrape off. The house was theirs now, and they had won. The suburban man had left the building.

4

Hibachi

As I was driving to my new home and whistling a happy tune, I heard sirens wailing in the distance. I glanced over my shoulder and saw my old life disappear in the black smoke that was rising from that cursed subdivision where I would never return. The fire was powerful and intense, and there was no question that the whole place had been incinerated; the Chevrolet and all my old identification documents included. The dream home that had turned into a torture chamber was gone forever.

              After stopping at Target to get some clothes and other useful items that a single man might find useful on his journey to the unknown—such as beer, frozen food, and cheap underwear—I arrived at my new house and parked the van under a brown metal carport that the owner had recently painted and carefully cleaned for me. I turned the engine off and looked at my tired face in the rearview mirror. It was the face of a reborn man, and I snarled at him, as I pushed all the memories from my old life deep into a secret compartment and promised to keep the door locked as long as possible. Then I grabbed the canvas bag and all the other stuff from the passenger seat and stepped bravely outside.

The air was crisp, and a couple of sleepy doves were resting on the warm roof, carefully observing me with their curious eyes. The birds were calm and composed creatures, and it seemed like they tacitly approved the new tenant who had arrived in their quiet kingdom with his mighty van. It was clear, though, that they had no idea what that tenant was capable of.

I walked to the front door and glanced around the yard. It was truly a beautiful place, and I knew immediately that I had made the right decision by picking it out of the other candidates. I had no neighbors, and the house was built on an untouched lot next to a dense pine forest. Everything was discreet and peaceful, and the whole property radiated normality, old-fashioned goodness, and harmony. It was evident that no one would ever have a reason to believe that something suspicious was happening inside its neat walls.

I opened the door with the golden key and removed my shoes before starting to marvel at the empty canvas of an unoccupied home. The walls were bright white, and every room smelled like a new, hopeful beginning. The landlord had done a fine job with the repairs, and the generous man had even paid for a professional cleaning company to come and prepare the nest for a new happy new bird with new happy dreams. The place was indeed ready for a fresh story, and there was no question that it was going to be a story unlike the house had ever seen—a story that came to life only once in a century, for a damn good reason.

The cleaners had been thorough with their mops and sponges, but I noticed that the efficient crew had forgotten to remove a little plastic sign from the kitchen wall that said with bold black letters: “MY IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER JUST TOLD ME THAT I AM UGLY.” The peculiar thing was smeared with dried blood, and it smelled like murder. I didn’t know what to do with the damn thing, so I just threw it in the trash and shrugged listlessly.

The empty house looked a little cold, so I took a couple of Annalise’s pictures from the canvas bag and placed them carefully on the kitchen counter. Then I tested the water quality with my thirsty lips and turned the refrigerator on. After that, I made sure that the gas stove and the microwave were working properly and ran the garbage disposal for ten seconds. Everything was in perfect working order, and it was time to go out and check if the backyard was as great as the landlord had advertised.

I opened the door and was surprised to see how spacious the yard was. Normally backyards looked much bigger in pictures than in real life, especially in Realtors’ pictures, but my new yard was a pleasant exception to that rule. It was truly a wonderful space, and I was sure that I would soon cook bacon on the little charcoal grill that the landlord had so kindly left there for me. I liked cooking bacon outside because its brute smell blended nicely with nature’s unprocessed aromas. Bacon also tasted mighty good, and I had a very good relationship with it—a healthy relationship, an unpretentious and honest one. I hated how the hip and snobbish, yes, the ones with their little tattoos and neat beards, had taken that beautiful staple food and so cruelly and selfishly raped it in their pursuit of the almighty cool. They used it without its approval in their wonderful culinary creations and wanted the whole world to know how awesomely clever and fantastical it was to take one of the workingman’s only real gastronomic treasures and ruthlessly exploit it to bring some street cred to their pathetic hipster dreams. I strictly disapproved of that sort of behavior, and the forbidding mistreatment of the innocent bacon made me shiver in disgust. It was bacon, man, and I wanted the hipsters to leave the poor bastard alone. They had already stolen Pabst Blue Ribbon from the workingman and invaded the dive bars in their quest to visit misery while smugly savoring the fact that they could escape that filthy world whenever they wanted to. Wasn’t that enough, goddammit?

After treating my lungs with some fresh air, I rested on the living room carpet for a couple of hours and turned on the old TV that the landlord had left in the corner. I watched a show about bull sharks that had attacked swimmers in Recife and snoozed a little during the commercial breaks. Then it was off to a store that sold discount mattresses and some exceptionally comfortable pillows that promised to put even the most hopeless insomniac to sleep immediately. I desperately needed a bed because my little respite on the carpet was already hurting my hips. I wasn’t a teenager anymore and living with unnecessary pain was something that I wasn’t going to tolerate any longer than was absolutely necessary.

I got to the store and purchased two California kings, four medium-support pillows, a fluffy down comforter, and a box of cotton sheets. The happy salesman enlightened me that the comforter had a one-thousand-thread count, but I had no idea what that meant, so I just shrugged and bought the goddamn thing. He also said that they would deliver the mattresses in a week’s time, but I bribed him with eighty dollars of cold hard cash and scored a next-day delivery.

After the mattress business had been taken care of, I started to think about alcohol and the pleasurable wickedness it offered to a lonely man. I wanted to get drunk and see how the new me would behave under the influence of a spectacular amount of devil’s piss. My day had been such a bore—except the slight excitement involved in burning my old house—that my brain begged me to do something fun for a change. It wanted to expose me to unexpected events and put me in situations that hopefully required it to get involved, maybe even intervene. It didn’t want me to just stay home and drink there all alone and abandon it at the mercy of a night of guaranteed lethargy and rambling soliloquy. No, it was ready to open the diabolical surprise eggs that only a society full of crazies was able to lay and party hard. It wanted to work together with Mr. Adrenaline and host an exclusive bash where madness and other riotous pricks were invited free of charge. It wanted to look danger straight into its sanguine eyes and spit them wet with snake saliva.

My brain talked to me with convincing words, and I decided to visit a bar that I had seen in the news a couple of times. The reporters hadn’t been interested in that fine establishment because it served some exotic cocktails from faraway lands or an amazingly yummy finger food, but because it was a world-class champion at producing corpses.

I cleaned my boots with a wet paper towel and removed the tag from a white T-shirt I had purchased from Walmart for nine dollars and fifty cents. I was going to wear it with my black Nike running pants and hopefully look like a million dollars. Well, maybe more like a hundred dollars, but anyway.

I got dressed in the bathroom with a cold beer in my hand and realized that I actually looked very nice—creepy, but very, very nice. The white T-shirt made my demeanor appear youthful and fresh, in a disturbing kind of way, and even my hair seemed thicker and healthier than before. It was, however, probably just a mirage born from an exceptionally good hair day, but I still felt damn good about myself.

The Econoline started purring like a content cat when I jumped into it and turned the key, and after twenty minutes of sedate driving, I parked the van in front of a dilapidated building near the town’s industrial zone and opened the door to Johnny D’s World of Fine Liquors—the shittiest bar in town.

The place was quiet, and I ordered a whiskey and soda after spending a couple of minutes trying to find a barstool that wasn’t wet or filthy, or both. The bartender looked at me incredulously after I placed my order but started slowly pouring the drink in a glass that was surprisingly clean. He was a serious, somber man, a professional dive bar barkeeper who had probably seen so many disgusting things in his life that he had stopped watching violent movies altogether. His reality was ugly and vile, and his lungs full of illegal cigarette smoke and stuffy bar air that the shallow exhalation process of the toothless alcoholics and jumpy addicts kept spewing out night after night. He hated bullshit and pretentious pricks more than anything. His dark hair was greasy and long, his shirt dirty, and his patience nonexistent. He had a round belly full of oily food, and his smoker’s skin was dreaming of a trip to the snowy mountains where the poison that it was forced to absorb every single day was not present. He was a fairly intelligent man, like a hungry predator who knew his place in the world. He had no illusions about anything, and the grimy man had accepted that he was going to work at Johnny D’s until death would claim his tired soul. That was my humble analysis, at least.

After the whiskey and soda was properly mixed, the bartender handed it to me and asked, “Are you a tattoo?”

“No,” I said without even thinking about his words.

“So you think you belong here?”

“I don’t belong anywhere.”

“Well, you look like a family man who had a bad day at the office. Did the boss man make you cry? Did he slap you on your ruddy cheeks after you deleted all his important files with your porky fingers?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You see, we get a lot of folks here who look like a tribal tattoo on an octogenarian. They just don’t fucking belong, you know, and I try to help them to understand that simple fact of life because I’m a nice guy.”

I still didn’t say anything.

“Did you hear what I just said, Mr. Family Man?”

I looked at him with lifeless eyes and said, “Yes, I heard you loud and clear, Mr. Bartender. I just don’t know what to say because I thought that you were here to sell beer, maybe a fancy drink or two if some of your fine customers really want to splash out. Isn’t that your goddamn job, or were you hired here to just talk bullshit, and some other guy—who I can’t see right now—is doing the bartending?”

The dirty man looked at me sourly and said, “Look, asshole. This is my bar, and I make the rules, OK?”

I took a sip of my whiskey and soda and just looked at him.

The bartender tilted his head slightly sideways and said, “You see, my life is miserable enough as it is. I don’t serve your kind because I want to. I am here simply because this is my life, and sometimes a man has to accept that he is holding the only deck of cards he was given by the good Lord. Dreamers and optimists can go to hell and see if someone listens to them there. You see, the only thing I can do to improve my day is to spend it with people I can at least tolerate. Is that too much to ask?”

“No.”

The barkeeper looked at me carefully and picked up the glass that was now empty. He was clearly thinking whether to kick me out or offer me another drink.

I answered his gaze with my bloodhound’s eyes and sighed deeply because I thought the whole discussion was entirely unnecessary, and in my book, “unnecessary” was equivalent to time wasted. Then I said sharply, “Look, I need you to shut up now and give me another whiskey and soda, OK? Double the scotch, this time.”

The bartender raised his eyebrows, and he was going to say something, but before he could open his lips, I continued, “Look, man. I am going to get drunk here today, and I will probably come back tomorrow to nurse my hangover. I like this bar, and I have no intention to go anywhere else. Don’t ever again question my place in this world or my decision to come here today. I will pay you for my drinks and give you a reasonable tip to brighten your wonderful day after I’m done. I won’t talk to your customers, and I don’t want them to talk to me. I don’t vomit on your floor, and I don’t break glasses or ashtrays. I sit here, I order drinks, and you serve me, OK?”

The bartender thought about my words for a long moment and said, “Fair enough,” and walked away.

The introductions had gone well, I thought, and after two more whiskey and sodas and a cup of dusty peanuts, the heavy awkward air was much lighter to breathe. Johnny D’s was gradually turning into a happy place, and I ordered more and more drinks with a sizable smile on my face and started truly enjoying the buzz that only an ascending intoxication could trigger. I was also pleased to notice that the tension between the bartender and me continued dispersing with each drink he poured into my glass, even if I didn’t give a damn what he thought of me. I was there to drink alcohol and reset my brain. He was there to help me to do that. That was it.

The night progressed pretty much like any Tuesday night progresses in a nasty dive bar where the clientele consists mainly of sad alcoholics and jittery substance abusers. People came in, people were kicked out, and drinks were consumed with such a vengeance that I started to believe that the bar had turned into some sort of perverted time machine where the concept of future had completely disappeared. The only thing that mattered to the people in that wicked machine was the moment when a glass of cheap liquor was raised to their cracked lips; when that fine blend of cocaine and rat poison rushed into their bleeding nostrils through a dirty five-dollar bill.