A Robbery

It was our third loop of the continent, Teo and I, in the same ol’ Ford Club Wagon, and the feeling of rolling over a bridge and up on my future had really gone kaput about midway through the second.

By the time we picked Aphri up in Seattle, I was over even looking out the window. I needed to feel the road moving, to know we were moving, but not much beyond that. Only realized we were crossing the Golden Gate when Aphri clocked me in the chest with his phone and asked me to take photos.

“Get as many of me as you can.” He had himself spun around, posing in the passenger seat, lips pinched and reaching for his ears, hands up, forehead like a folded accordion.

“Really?” I asked. I remember Teo was driving, so I must have been lying back on the ol’ bench seat.

“Just a couple,” he said. He was from Sweden. He’d never been to the States.

Teo looked over at him from the driver’s seat, confused and distant like he’d just woken up. “Aprhi, why you doing that with your face? You need to shit?”

“This is bucket list for me. I’m smiling.” But he wasn’t. He was stressing his face in a way he only did when in front of a camera.

“You sure? Teo’ll pull over if you need,” I said.

“Take the photos please.” Aphri grabbed at the air and pretended to swing from the orange cables as they flew past the window.

“You won’t like ‘em,” I said. “Too many dead mosquitos and dragonflies and shit on the windshield. They’re stealing the focus.”

“Can you see anything?”

“I can tell you’re in a van and it’s moving. And there’s trash all over the place.”

“No bridge?”

“Just a blur.”

Teo rested his head between his hands on the peeling skin of the steering wheel. “Sure you don’t want to try at least one with a normal face?”

“Think I’ve never looked at a photo of myself before? I know what I’m doing.”

“He looks great. You look great,” I said, passing him his phone. I lay back on the bench seat and stared up at the van’s ceiling-wide collage of marker-drawn hearts, signatures, and assholes. Above me, in loopy cursive, was the name, Lacy, beside the message, To Pure Intentions!

Lacy. . . I thought, without a memory or face to connect it to.

I was about to turn twenty-six.

The faint sound of an alarm had been going off in my head, and I hadn’t spoken to my mother since I don’t know when.

Looking at himself through the coat of road-dust on the Club Wagon’s back window, Aprhi put on a shirt with sleeves, combed his hair, and made another face like he’d crapped himself. “If we don’t get laid then I hope we at least find love,” he said. He’d rented a hotel room and had a friend drive up from San Jose, but—in what would quickly become a trend—we lost him immediately, and the three of us, Teo, me and the friend, slept in the van while his hotel room sat empty.

The next morning, we said goodbye to the friend and waited for Aphri to turn up.

“Guy better be dead or something,” I said. “Thinks we got all day.”

“Beauty of a day, though,” Teo said, using his fingers to carve a mural of the sunrise in the barnacle of bug guts on the van’s side door. His face was swollen, and his head must have been pounding at least as hard as mine, yet there he was, drawing out the sun’s light in thick straight lines with his thumb.

“Aren’t you pissed?” I asked. “Don’t you want to get moving?”

“Could go for a swim.”

“Exactly! We could at least be doing that.”

Teo had his sleeping bag pinned to the hood of the van by our broken windshield wiper and was duct-tape patching cigarette burns when Aphri finally came around. His eyes were bugging out and he was carrying his shirt all bunched up in both hands over his chest.

“I think I’m dying,” he said.

“Were you shot?” Teo held out the duct-tape.

“Was I?” Aphri dropped his shirt in a panic to inspect his body.

He wasn’t. He’d gone to the house of an old man he’d met at a strip club and spent the night sniffing something and looking at a black and white photo album.

“He was the smartest guy I ever met,” Aprhi said. “I swear he knew everything.”

“What were you guys sniffing?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but it’s going to kill me.”

“It’s not going to kill you.”

“Trust me, man, I’m dying.”

We locked Aphri in the van to sleep it off, but when we walked away, he banged on the window and squished his nose up against the glass.

“You’ll be fine,” I said. I knew what he was doing. He’d made off with our morning and now he was trying to hijack the whole day.

“You can’t leave me here,” he said.

We were near Baker Beach, in a parking lot full of shiny cars and SUVs. Our van looked like an old duck egg in the middle of it, all speckled and beige.

“Honestly. My heart just stopped.”

“That’s called a heartbeat,” I said.

“No. This is different. I need a hospital.” It sounded like we were underwater, and he was yelling down at us from the surface.

“Quick swim first?” I said.

Teo had his swim-trunks on and was wearing his shirt like a scarf. “What if he’s actually dying?”

“He’s not actually.”

“What if he is?”

Nearby, some teenagers were unloading instruments from a car and setting up a stage in the grass. There were boys and there were girls, and they were laughing and talking loudly and leaning on each other while they did.

“You think?” I said.

Mindless masses of water rolled toward the shore, then pulled back with a sigh.

Aphri smacked both palms then his forehead into the glass.

The triage nurse gave Aphri a plastic-cup of cranberry juice.

“And a wheelchair?” Teo was massaging Aphri’s shoulders while Aphri drank his cranberry juice.

The nurse looked up at the wall where a clock ticked louder than it should. “Does he need one?”

“He’d really like one.”

The nurse pulled a collapsible wheelchair from the closet and unfolded it. She kept her lips closed tight, but the strain in her face said, I could be anyone, anywhere, but I’m here with you. “I,” I started, but trailed off.

No one noticed.

We all did our best not to watch as Aphri made a show of getting in the wheelchair, but once he was in, Teo assumed the reins, popped a wheelie, and started down the hall behind an orderly to Aphri’s room.

The triage nurse clasped her hands at her waist and stuck out her bottom lip. We were finally alone.

I made a turn for the door, but it was blocked by an old man struggling to push an older man in a wheelchair over a metal transition strip on the floor. The one in the chair was folded over in a way that made him look like a headless bowler with a blotchy salmon colored ball in his lap.

This is what it all adds up to.

The unfixed head bobbled in the man’s lap as he was driven again into what now seemed like an invisible barrier. They were never going to make it.

“I need to know what your friend took,” the nurse said.

“He didn’t tell you?”

The nurse stared me down and let her face go slack.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

She tilted her head, and I felt a ping at my core. I was suddenly naked, exposed, my every irrational fear and certainty.

“I guess whatever makes your eyes bug out and your heart feel like it’s going to explode,” I said.

“This isn’t the time.”

“Coke, speed, meth? I don’t know, he was snorting something.”

“Be specific. I need to know what you saw him take and how much.”

“Lady, I get it, I do. But obviously I wasn’t there, or I’d be in the same shape as him.”

She made a face like something putrid had crawled up her nose and dropped itself on her tongue. For a second, I saw the twisted and tired limbs of her maternal heart—I saw her hit her head off the wall and pull her hair out and cry and all I wanted to tell her was there’s nothing you could’ve done, nothing more, nothing, I wanted for nothing.

“A few bumps of ketamine and about a half-gram of coke,” I said.

“Thank you.” She scribbled something on her notepad. “We’ll have a look at him, make sure he’s doing ok. I’m sure he’s fine,” she said. “But we’ll have a look.”

“God’s hands now,” Teo said, making his way down the hall, palms waving in worship.

“How long you keeping him?” I asked.

“A few hours, the night.”

“The whole night?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, which is it?” I was itching to get a move on.

“Once he’s seen the doctor—”

“Well, the doctor better hurry up.” Teo pursed his lips and held his hand out for a low-five.

I left him hanging.

“We’ll call when we know more.”

I gave her my number and said we’d be back for him.

Leaving through the hospital’s sliding doors, from air-conditioning to street-heat, was so overwhelming I forgot where I was, where I was going. I felt like I’d been born again into hell.

Out front, a guy in a smock stood smoking with two dudes in leather and motorcycle boots. The sight helped me piece things together. I’m at the hospital. I have a friend in the hospital.

I bummed a cigarette from the guy in the smock. He had the pack in his hands.

“What are you in for?” I asked.

“Fuck man, I’m out today.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks, bro.” He lifted his smock to show me his wounds. “Fucking took out a stop sign going fucking sixty, no rib protector on.”

It was like the doctor had tried to cover a blackhole with a gauze patch.

I took a step back. The blackhole was growing. It was about to eat up the whole smock he was wearing then, surely, his buddies and me if I stayed there.

“Should be dead,” said the boots.

“You got a second chance,” Teo said, getting up close and sticking his hand out to touch the wound. The guy didn’t seem bothered.

“Fucking right, I did,” he said.

“How you going to use it?” Teo asked.

The smoker tugged at his smock and tied his face in a knot. Someone cleared their throat. I looked southwest toward the promise of a never-ending day, then we all grimaced up at the sky that now seemed to be pressing down on us like the stubborn lid of some overfilled thing. In the end, “Molatov’s,” the name of a local bar, was the only answer given.

“That’s the spot, huh?”

“The only spot.”

Teo ran his fingers in a circle around the gauze patch. “Imagine it stays like this?” he said. “It’s such a beautiful color.”

—

I smoked over the edge of Molatov’s crowded patio, relighting four times after four different people backed into my cigarette and walked away with the heater buried and burning in their clothes. The music and sound of the crowd rose with a sense of false hope. Heads bounced around off the rafters and floated off into the sky like stray helium balloons. I feared the whole bar might take flight. I tried to warn Teo, but he was happy to rise up with it all, sniffing with the bikers and talking renewable energy around the novelty jukebox.

I looked back and forth between the front entrance and the patio railing to see which was the closer escape. I slid my hands in and out of my every empty pocket. I looked at people on their phones, and wondered why they were here. I watched a woman alone on a high stool, her face lit blue. A young man outside the toilets, his neck bent in a way that again made me sure one day we’d all be headless bowlers, carrying around big dumb skulls full of what we thought we knew.

Anyways, I didn’t stay long. A receptionist from the hospital called to tell me Aphri didn’t need to be there. Said, by law, they’d have to let him go, though they’d really prefer it was into someone’s care. Said, despite being fine, objectively, he seemed shaky, skittish, terrified. “Yours is the only emergency contact listed,” she said. I imagined the stories passed between scrubs—you had to be there … pathetic … junkies … all but cried for his mother— “You have a half an hour.”

“Give me twenty minutes,” I said.

I didn’t know where the hospital was, but I would be waiting outside the sliding doors as the nurses wheeled Aphri out. I’d be there, and they’d see.

I tried to get Teo on board. I asked him how to get to the hospital. He said, “Man, tell ‘em about the wind turbines where we grew up, tell ‘em. I don’t care how few months it takes to offset the manufacturing. You’re fucking offsetting people’s view for life!”

“Think they’re pretty fucking gorgeous, considering,” said a biker with eyes that lived outside his face like guard dogs at the end of their leash.

“Great,” said Teo, “Let’s put ‘em in the ocean then, fucking dice up your horizon.”

I noticed the woman on the stool stretching her neck to hear the conversation. I waved to her. I thought maybe I could tell her what was going on, show her that despite looking like a nobody, I was a hero. Maybe she could help me find the hospital. But as soon as I took a step in her direction, she re-buried herself in her phone.

I hopped the patio railing, figuring I’d walk until I found someone who could guide me. When I finally found someone, I was under a street sign that said, Church, and I couldn’t remember whether I went left or right when leaving the bar and therefore where I was in relation to the van.

The heat was about to break.

Moisture from the air was sticking itself to the buildings and closing in on the street.

On the sidewalk across from me, waiting below a red blinking hand, stood the woman who would save me. I could see it in her frizzy brown hair—it reminded me of the soft dirt from my childhood. The kind you could play with and eat, that always, if you dug deep enough, held a cool reprieve.

I figured she was sixty plus—a little older than my mother—the way her frown started at her ears and continued into her neck.

She had on a single glove. And something about that, the hair and the frown and the single, gloved hand held calmly at her side while she waited for this light, separated her from the otherwise frantic, encroaching air of the city.

I waved to her, and she waved back. Then she cocked her head and tweaked her mouth to the side like she thought I was someone she was supposed to know but couldn’t place.

“We’ve never met,” I said, but she couldn’t hear me.

She looked up and down the street in a way that seemed to confirm a fear that we were alone.

I needed her to know I wasn’t a threat. Disobeying the red blinking hand, I ran across the street toward her.

She stepped back and stuck her gloved hand out between us.

“No, no. It’s not like that,” I said. “I’m not going to attack you. I need your help.”

She had the small, scared mouth of a mouse and big cartoon eyes. “Why you run at me from the dark?” she said.

“I didn’t want to get hit by a car.”

“There’s no car.” She let her hand down and her eyes wander back over to the stoplight.

It was as good as a hug.

I asked her if the hospital was nearby.

“Are you ok?”

“I’m fine,” I said, “It’s just my friend who’s an idiot.”

“Aren’t they all?” She had her lips pursed, pretentiously, like she’d somehow decoded what I was thinking but couldn’t say.

“Aren’t they all what?”

“Idiots.”

“Who?”

“Friends.”

“Shit. That reminds me,” I said. “Do you know where the hospital is?”

She smiled, but she couldn’t help. She said that she was only in town temporarily on an undercover research project for Yale. “I’ll tell you, though, when it’s over I’m moving to Hawaii.”

I imagined the hot sand of the beaches and the waves rolling in under the sun and smashing mirror-like reflections of the sky down onto the shore. It fit the image of where I needed to be.

“Are you from there?” I asked, but she just laughed and continued talking.

“I study second generation homelessness. The police know about my project, they look out for me. I watch the girls that come here—the police know—pregnant or with babies, and have no place to live.” She looked up and down the empty street, then brought the gloved hand to her mouth. “Mainly Latinas coming up from—you guessed it—and Blacks coming over from Oakland,” she said. “It’s because their men are so horrible to them.”

She slid her ungloved hand in and out between the layers of her jackets—she must have been wearing three, all black with the soot of bus stops and back stoops—like she was searching for some sort of I.D. but turned up nothing. She laughed again, then slapped her outermost jacket and leaned back on the folded down heels of her shoes.

A chill came over me. I tried to imagine Hawaii again, tried to place myself amongst the palm trees, lying back with my knees burning and my feet buried deep in the cool sand. I started shivering. “I have to go,” I said, but she wasn’t listening to me anymore.

The green light on our left started to count down in red. Lightning flickered between the buildings. From an alleyway came the echo of thunder.

“Oh shit, it’s going to rain soon,” I said.

“It is raining,” she said. And suddenly, up and down the street, puddles were throwing sparkling confetti into the air.

“How long has it been raining?” My shirt was a million pounds. It clung to my chest.

“Since a long time,” she said. “How could you not notice?”

When the red blinking hand turned into a green man walking, she started across the street. It was as if her shoes were clouds, the way she floated off. She never looked back, and waited until she thought she was out of sight around a corner to take off in a sprint and ditch me completely.

When the rain started, I’ll never know. But I remember it was raining when I found the van. It was raining and it was dark and I only found it because Teo had found it first and was sitting inside with the interior lights on and it was glowing orange and shooting out little streamers of light across the puddles and in the lines of rain running down the long warehouse walls and closed glass storefronts.

Teo rolled down the driver’s side window as I approached. Without looking up from his lap, he said, “Where you been?”

“Looking for you, no?”

“You wet?”

“You ready to get moving?”

“Got work to do first,” he said, dancing his fingers over a pile of busted up weed in his lap and a roasted chicken beside him.

“Yeah, I could see you rolling that joint clear as a movie from the top of the street,” I said.

“Who cares? Look where we are.”

There were no streetlights. No other cars. The storefronts and warehouses all looked closed and long forgotten, their second and third story windows black and empty as cow eyes.

“And they’re blunts,” he said, holding up two and passing me one. “Plural.”

We took cover under an overhang on the rounded stairs of a store’s front stoop. Teo played “Hypnotize” on his phone and by the time Biggy was going we had both blunts lit and were throwing up gang signs for a selfie. We snapped a couple shots, then he put away his phone and we really started playing.

He played his like a flute, and I waved mine like a conductor.

He cast a spell on me with his, and I walked around like a dog with mine between my teeth.

He unsheathed his like a sword then stabbed me gently between the lips.

I took them both between my fingers and fed him a smoking dumpling.

He dipped his like an old-fashion fountain pen and signed me over a cheque for a million dollars.

I held mine to my chest, straightened my spine, and thanked my mother, and thanked God, and thanked every shoulder I’d ever brushed.

He knelt down and passed me his like a torch and everything we’d experienced and would ever experience was there, burning. He knelt down and he passed it all to me, everything, and still, it couldn’t have weighed more than a bag of chips.

—

By the middle of the night, the rain was menacing. The interior lights of the Club Wagon turned its every window into a mirror. I kept my eyes on my hands, watching as they tore apart the roasted chicken.

Something knocked on the driver’s side window.

I looked up but all I saw was me, looking back. I cupped my hands around my forehead and brought my face to the glass.

“Fuck. It’s the cops,” I said. “We gotta go.”

“We can’t drive in the rain,” Teo said.

He was right. The driver’s side windshield wiper was still broken.

“We need to fix that shit,” I said, rolling down the window.

“Officer.” Teo leaned into my shoulder to get a look at him.

“Boys.” He took his flashlight, which had been pointed at my eyes, for a tour of the van. “What we got here? You eating a chicken?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, wiggling the piece in my hand.

He scanned the mattress in the back then pointed the flashlight in Teo’s face. Grease from the chicken glittered in a circle around his mouth.

“How long you been here?”

“Not long,” I said. “I mean, what time is it?”

“Oh, three hundred—”

“That won’t help, actually. I have no idea.”

“Not long though,” Teo said. He held up what was left of the chicken as a time stamp to corroborate our story. “Opened it here.”

“True,” I said.

Teo walked his fingers through the skin and bones to show exactly how much had been eaten.

“True,” the officer said. “True.”

We all nodded in unison.

“And you’ve been taking your time with that chicken?”

“Not rushing it,” Teo said.

“Know anything about this?” He pointed his flashlight to a pile of smashed glass a few feet in front of the van. An entire storefront was shattered. Cop cars, with lights flashing, lined both sides of the street.

“We didn’t do that,” I said.

“No shit,” the cop said. “But you happen to look up when you heard the alarm?”

“You hear that too?”

“It’s a fucking alarm, kid. Can’t hear that, you better get your hearing checked.”

I turned to Teo. “You been hearing this?”

“Oh yeah, for a while. It’s loud as shit.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Teo shrugged. The circle of grease was growing around his mouth and taking over his face.

“This is useless,” the cop said to his partner who, I noticed then, stood bracing himself on the hood of the van. “Just you two living here?” He turned his flashlight back on the van, on our sleeping bags piled in the back corner of the mattress, a toothbrush beside an empty pack of smokes in the cup holder, a garbage bag, crumpled and empty, amid a mound of garbage between the seats.

“No,” Teo said. “There’s a third guy.”

“Oh shit, Aphri,” I said.

“A guy?” the cop asked.

“Our buddy, yeah,” Teo said.

“No women, then?”

“No, sir.”

The cop brought both hands to the back of his neck and made a face like he regretted the seconds he’d spent talking to us. But not in the way you’d think, like time was of the essence, more like he was afraid we’d rub off on him, like he’d catch whatever we had. I could see him contemplating whether he was now a threat to his partner, who’d kept his distance.

“We gotta go to the hospital,” I said. “Where’s the hospital?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Our buddy’s in the hospital,” Teo said, climbing up on my shoulder again.

“You’re at the hospital.”

“What?”

And there it was, as if he’d pulled it from a hat, a giant red H, hanging over the street at the corner. I could see through the sliding doors, that sickly white light, how it flickered and pulsed—I could hear it buzz. “I made it!”

“Almost,” Teo said. “Remember, we can’t drive in the rain.”

“Don’t jinx it,” I said. I started the car. Suddenly anything felt possible. I twisted the knob to the left of the steering wheel—but the windshield wipers were still broken.

“Yep, I told ya,” Teo said. “Windshield wipers are broken.”

“Course they are.” The cop jammed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. “Well, this is a crime scene now,” he said, stepping back from the van. He gestured to his partner to do the same. “Just take ‘er slow. I’ll guide you.”

I put the van in drive and followed the cop, who walked backwards beside us, making come-here motions with his hand.

“The hospital called,” I said to Teo. “They let Aphri go.”

“Like he’s dead?”

“No, they released him.”

“Oh, perfect timing,” he said, his head nothing more than a glittering orb of grease.

“Should really get that thing fixed,” the cop said.

“It’s big-time on the list,” Teo said.

“Yeah, good.” The cop kept his face taut. He squinted into the rain. “Just a little further,” he said. “Then we’ll make a left.”