There Are Borders Between Mikes
Mike didn’t break the blocks off his eyelid before the photoshoot. I’d seen videos of him doing it easily, flicking plastic off and away from himself.
Sometimes it took longer. You had to pay for most of those videos.
All of you know what those little blocks on his face are called. The trademark holder sued him last summer when he said their name on a livestream. Maybe the company would’ve looked the other way if he hadn’t also shown their toys growing on his asshole.
“We’re thinking…you in front of this brick wall,” our photographer said to Mike.
I watched Mike walk to the exposed bricks. Not a painted facade. An old building our magazine rented for the day. Dropcloths covered most of the floors. Massive lights shaped like aquatic life roasted the room and all our faces. He stopped between two waist-high barrels that were either truly rusted or believably faked. Both almost overflowed with guitar picks, shining piles of them. The art department had factually faked the amount of picks. I’d watched them rig the barrels with plastic plates glued inside them, an inch from the top.
Still. Something like 200 or 300 curved plastic triangles.
“Okay so go ahead,” the photographer said.
Mike looked at both barrels then turned around. Cocked his head. From my angle near the monitors, I barely saw the edges of the bright red “K” on the ridges of his right ear. Easier to see the “Y” on his cheek. It moved when he sneered. The “O” had stretched as he grew and been cut in half by the edge of his mouth. A lonely parenthesis.
The Microplastic Kid, now almost 29 years old.
If he shaved his head, which he hadn’t done since his early 20s, he’d reveal the first four letters from those famous plastic bags arcing across the back of his skull. “Than” could have been the word everyone used to define him. But it wasn’t funny enough.
A lot of people try to get him to say “thank you” so they can post about their exciting encounter.
“Just go ahead, huh?” Mike said.
“Yeah yeah, do your thing,” the photographer said.
Mike’s thing. There wasn’t only one, because he had stages. Before and after he turned 18. Pre-legal adult, scientific studies were mostly his thing. Mom and dad signed papers to let people do all sorts of things to him. Those have already been reported. Other bios, small articles here and there with the goods, if you want to call them that. Influencers bought houses off all that outrage. The scientists even told on themselves, classic “self own” by publishing it all and signing their names.
Adult Mike had new things. For sale. T-shirts, yes, including a “Samples indicate” design from the science times. But kitsch isn’t why you’re reading. Or what you’re buying.
It’s his flesh. Chunks of his body. Strips peeled from crevices and edges of him.
“This isn’t a concert, man,” Mike said to our photographer.
Mike didn’t only produce plastic, secrete it and drool it and squeeze it out in all the ways bodies give. He did the other thing too.
On his sold-out tour supporting his album, Mike’s body consumed over 50,000 guitar picks and counting. Maybe that round number is mostly marketing.
He sliced himself open at almost every show, shoved guitar picks under the top layer of his skin. Some nights he’d hit the stage with multiples already peeking out of his forearms, the backs of his hands. One special night he sprinted on stage with two in his forehead, their tips toward the sky like horns. Had to replace them six times that night, oh the rock ‘n roll irony. His body kept melting them until they fell out or disappeared into his face.
Mike’s body devours plastic. Breaks it down. Makes it energy. Plastic sweat and all the rest.
So that’s a thing. What else is there?
Show after show, he’d puke plastic-filled bile into his own hands. Smear it on his face. Sling it at the crowd. Every bodily fluid appeared. Or the cops did. Or both.
One night, after the album went Gold, someone tossed a pocket knife on stage. Mike held it up. A sceptre. He unfolded the tiny blade then sliced his earlobes, his nostrils, his eyebrows.
A blood parade, surgical ticker tape. Confetti from his face, streamers that dripped and popped away from him. In the blood, bits of what everyone considered his body.
What else could it be?
Unidentifiable plastic shapes. From inside him. From out of his being. A few of those trademarked blocks that snap together. Mostly, other than blood, he shed pellets. The industrial term. Small, misshapen, hard bits of plastic.
As of this writing, the average price for a load of pellets starts at $7.00 per pound. Unless they’re from Mike.
Someone paid $17,468 for one he sneezed onto the sidewalk outside a club in Detroit.
A lot of “things” for Mike to consider.
He turned his sneer into a smile and did one thing. Reached up and grabbed the stack of plastic blocks attached to his lower eyelid. They had grown out of him over the last two weeks. He posted a time-lapse video on one of his accounts.
His bottom eyelid stretched, bared the slimy bottom curve of his eyeball. Revealed three bright, plastic slashes nestled inside the wet orb. Poetical people might see shooting stars in those thin lines. They looked like ragged twisty-ties to me. From bags of bread you’re almost done with.
Light shone through his stretched flesh. The camera clacked, ate him alive. I watched a stop-motion movie shuffle on the monitors. An unfinished story told second by second. A spear of flesh from his face, a sword with a multi-colored plastic handle formed. Longer, thinner.
Until it finally gave way. Mike’s eyelid shredded, tore and went with the plastic blocks. He contorted his mouth.
Blood landed on the dropcloth. Then the discarded plastic blocks.
He reached up to wipe at his eyelid and smeared blood down across his cheek.
No one made a sound. Only the camera.
The blood blended with the “Y” and part of the “O” too.
“Okay yes,” the photographer said, then, lower, to an assistant, “Get the bags.”
The assistant shot away into the dark outskirts of the room. Mike went still while she searched.
I stared at his face, but on the screens. Like always.
You know Mike, even though you don’t, not really. That isn’t even his real name. But you don’t care. No one does.
The assistant landed next to the photographer with a stack of the plastic shopping bags. The famous bags. Their sizzle-like crinkling filled the space while the photographer imagined the next shot.
“Um, okay Mike, here,” the photographer said. He snatched the bags from the assistant and held them out toward Mike.
Mike stood 20 feet away. He flicked his eyes at the bags, then onto the photographer’s face.
“Here,” the photographer said, and shoved the bags back into the assistant’s hands.
She sprinted them to Mike.
Mike grinned and dropped all but one of the bags.
The photographer rattled off shots as Mike fluffed the bag open wide. Brought it up like a parachute above his own head. Slammed it down onto himself, pulled it tight and inhaled as hard and deep as possible.
The words everyone associates with him stretched across his nose and forehead, but upside down. Light shined across the tight plastic. His teeth turned into little wrapped squares. Lips vacuum-sealed.
Wild clicking battled with the sounds of Mike huffing inside the bag. Bass bumps from his boots stomping on the dropcloth. He spun and flailed, whipped his head in every direction. Flexed and contorted his back, like he dared his vertebrae and ribs to give up.
“Yeeeeeees,” the photographer said.
Mike’s legs churned and revved. He started himself up and barreled at the brick wall. Inflated and deflated himself, pumped his back up and down.
The camera clicks didn’t stop when he axed his forehead against the bricks. Plastic applause from the camera.
Mike stumbled, reeled for a second. Went again. A thick sound, a bag of rocks dropped into the bed of a truck. He switched from forehead to temple. Slammed the side of his face onto the wall.
The photographer sprinted and got low, angled up.
Mike dragged his face down the brick wall. Shredded the plastic bag. Although they were upside down, the words “Thank You” were clear, set off by the exact same “Y,” right-side up, on Mike’s cheek. Complemented by the deep red of his blood but upstaged by the strips of plastic curling out of his flesh, up and off of him. Thin, pale blue plastic reached out through his jaw meat. More every time he readjusted and skinned himself with the wall.
I laughed and slapped a hand over my mouth.
Mike turned, slow, and stared across the open space.
The assistant and random crew turned and gawked. Stared. All at me. But the camera stayed with Mike.
Little chuffing gasps of giggles into my palm.
While I laughed, Mike’s half smile filled the computer. The bag’s other side stayed stuck to his clean cheek with sweat and saliva. Pristine. Blood dripped inside the torn portion. His skin’s “Y” sanded away, an odd hockey stick outline now.
I kept laughing. My eyes started to blur with tears. He turned further, showed us a better view inside his face.
Something peeked from inside him. A grid of small, pale green plastic threads, shiny with his raw wound’s oozing plasma.
A scrap of a loofah under marbled fat, garnished with little puzzle pieces of skin.
Mike reached up, snaked a finger through the mesh, and yanked.
He headed straight to the car after the shoot. I looked around, found his publicist.
“He’s tired, alright?” She didn’t look up from her phone. “But he chose you because you can handle it.”
“Why’s he tired?” I didn’t even take my pen out.
“I don’t answer the questions for him,” she said.
“So why tell me that?” I asked.
“Angles.”
My pen came out then. That word rode at the top of my notebook alone for a bit.
Tired Mike seemed like a myth. A hilarious thought, actually. The Microplastic Kid being a fact, but him nodding off, sluggish in a crowd or not bouncing inside a camera frame, that seemed invented.
Where’s the proof?
I dropped myself into the limo and found him with his phone up, livestreaming his bleeding face.
It’s easy to fail at talking to Mike. You end up talking to his followers through him. About him. If you’re not careful. We were careful. He’d agreed not to have his phone between us, otherwise the piece would come out and we’d sell no magazines. Car ads would wheeze and die without enough impressions or unique visitors.
Why sell nothing?
Our limo lurched off into the city. Toward a podcast.
I looked at my notebook, then back at Mike. Angles.
“You’re two years past your debut album, which yes hit Gold, but sales have stalled. Streams look to be drying up too. Two of your hits are still regularly sampled in short-form videos, though.”
“Okay yeah, man,” he said. “Tell me about me.”
“Does any of that matter to you? Do you care?”
He laughed and did something I would’ve written about anyway. It’s especially important here, though. The limo wasn’t my idea. I took cabs, but my general feeling was always to keep things clean. Or to not make them dirtier.
Mike shoved two fingers deep into his cheek, up toward his ear. Twirled them. Come-hither’d inside his face. He pulled out an oval, about a quarter inch thick, bright green where it wasn’t gory. A lid to some kind of bottle, lotion maybe, but malformed. One edge bubbly, melted.
He tossed it onto the seat opposite us. Wiped his hand on the upholstery near the mini-bar.
“S’it matter?” He asked.
“What does?” I shrugged.
He didn’t answer because he knew I didn’t really want to know.
“If you’re everywhere then you can’t get away from you,” I said. “Can’t read or watch something without you showing up. That right?”
“That’s not a real question, man,” he said.
I waited while he checked his nails on the hand he’d wiped clean.
“I know you don’t care,” I said, and flipped my notebook closed, “but I’m more curious about why.”
He waited.
“Does anyone really know you?” I asked.
He reached over to the mini-bar, opened its little refrigerator. I couldn’t see what he grabbed until he turned back to me. A jar of olives. Twitched the jar toward me. One eyebrow lifted, the brine angled inside the jar.
“No thank you,” I said.
Mike unscrewed the lid and dumped the entire jar onto the limo floor. It splashed and forced me to lift my feet. Acidic olive breath mushroomed up into our faces. I pulled my legs up, sat crossed-legged even though both knees objected.
We stared at each other.
“I think almost no one gives a shit,” he said. “You’re here but it won’t really matter. People think it’s all an act, think this,” he motioned at his face, the divots in his hands bits of plastic had left, “all this shit is fake, man.”
“People pay to watch you–” I started, ready to jot notes again.
“People pay for fake shit every day. All day. You’re an asshole if you think that matters, man. Or means they actually care.” He stretched his legs out, tossed his feet on top of the mini-bar.
“That piss you off?” I asked.
“What? You being an asshole? Acting like you don’t get it, hoping I say something you can use as a pull quote?”
“That the truth doesn’t matter,” I said.
He flicked a hand at me, what I thought was a dismissal at first.
“Pick whatever app you want,” he said. “Or look at all of them, man. I’m not even in the top ten. Not even in the top fifty on some of them. And it’s not like I’m hiding. My life’s easy to find. People pay to watch, like you said.”
“I’ve watched a lot of it too,” I said.
Plenty of moments I hadn’t seen, though.
I hadn’t seen most of his tests, the X-rays, the blood samples. None of the proof. I had what everyone had. News a baby had been born with a pink birthmark on his cheek. Not a big deal. Except it looked like a perfectly formed “Y.” Then another shape faded into view near his mouth. The “O.” Then the “K” in his ear appeared. First haircut, there all those other letters hid. But he wasn’t the “Thank You Kid,” was he?
What was he?
How?
Like you, I had more explanations than I needed for how Mike could be.
Most popular, the widely repeated story: his parents woke up early to paint letters on him. They were clout chasers. Stage parents. Celebrity whores.
It took two talk show appearances and three visits from Child Protective Services before some people accepted the letters weren’t coming off. They scrubbed him. Buffed with oil-based removers. Scratched and dug at his skin with soap and water. Tried to clean him like a slimy duck. Mike cried through most of it. Both times. Cried when his parents did it all first, without cameras. Cried for CPS. Fought it, but cried for the softly cooing audiences and ingratiating hosts, their house bands playing sad trombones.
All that footage helped clear his parents’ names for some people. For a while. And only officially.
The first string of plastic he pulled out of his lip changed that. Looked like a zit at first, a whitehead. Almost 19 inches long once he got it out, curled like a pig tail.
After that, internet detectives lucked into careers. Documentaries, blog posts, message boards filled with exposed secrets.
Really, they’d tried to kill him with a plastic bag. One of those from the gas station, dudes, for real! Held it over his head, strained until they couldn’t breathe, but he kept on. Stained him with those red letters. Tried to kill him every day.
Fed him plastic. Made him smoke it, lit one end of a drinking straw and shoved the other end in his mouth. Plugged his nose and forced the chemical smoke deep into him.
His parents stole syringes from a drugstore and injected him with glues. Commenters fought over how much plastic every type of glue contained.
Mike lived all those lives. Especially the ones he didn’t.
It hasn’t helped that no one has seen his parents publicly for 12 years.
“Alright then, so you get it, man. And anyway…easier to get away from me than you think,” Mike said.
“Oh yeah?”
He nodded.
“I’m not even here,” and he pointed at himself, one finger aimed between his eyes.
“Now I can accuse you,” I said.
He’d been staring at his boots or out the window. He turned his head to me but stayed stretched out. I saw sticky blood dots on his collar bone.
“Finally,” he said.
Almost harmonized, we both said, “What?”
I pointed at him. He shook his head and turned back to whatever he’d been concerned with before.
“You first,” he said. Rough pavement chunked under us.
“Accuse me, man” he said without looking. “Then tell me what I accused you of.”
“That’s not like you,” I said. I knew he’d look at me. Once he did, I mirrored the last motion he’d made with his hand. Pointed at my own forehead.
“Oh yeah, man? Then what was it?”
“Overly performative. Dramatic. Falsely contemplative.”
His boots clumped and splatted in the olive brine. He turned to me quickly enough it seemed possible he’d swing at me.
“This,” he said, pointing. “Finally.” And he smiled. “This is why I wanted you. Tell me about me. Say it. Say all the shit you actually want to, man. And I’ll give you what you want.”
“This isn’t about what–what I want to say–”
“It should be, man!”
More sounds beneath us. The droning of the highway changed pitch. Rapid lurches through the leather seats. The limo shifted, nudged us toward each other.
“People can find me, man, I told you. They need to know what you think. And–”
“This is me trying to understand what I think about you,” I said.
Laughter dumped his head backwards. The sound built on itself. He crumpled forward, huddled around the laughter as it boiled up from his stomach. Hung his head as he laughed. I couldn’t see his face for a few moments. Just the back of his head. Hints of those four red letters.
He leaned back, gathered his breath, and showed me his face again. Cackling. I looked into his mouth. Glimpsed his tongue, his teeth. Flashes of color, bright and magnified with saliva. Like shining a flashlight into a pocketful of shirt buttons and dice.
I watched as a bloody tributary split off from the main wound in his cheek. A fresh gash. It grew a shiny, dark red tunnel roof. One spot of the liquid collapsed, then two more. Blood ran and dripped from him, disappeared into the dark limo upholstery.
“‘He pretended to laugh until his face split,’ that’s what you want me to write?” I asked. “Or write that I believed it? Would that be better for you?”
Silence clapped into existence between us. His energy disappeared, his face smoothed, at least where it hadn’t been torn open.
He spun again, back toward the mini-bar. Opened a small drawer. Metal clinked as he rummaged around.
“What’d I accuse you of?” He asked with his back to me.
“Of not asking real questions.”
A paring knife in his hand when he turned around.
I forced myself to stare into his eyes.
“I don’t take it back, man.” He stared right back, but something dragged his eyes away. “Oh hey, here, I shouldn’t have–” He leaned away from us, toward the other seat, but the knife bobbed toward me.
He grabbed the bloody disk he’d pulled from his face. Held it out to me.
“Take it, man.”
I plucked it from him. Tossed it back to where he had.
He smiled.
“Alright listen, man. All this is on the record. All of it.” He paused to nod and waited for me.
I nodded.
“Before I show you this, I’ve got a question for you,” he said.
I motioned for him to go ahead.
“You remember the first tooth you ever lost, man?”
I sighed.
“No, I don’t. Or maybe, it–it fell out when I laughed, I think,” I said.
He considered this, pitched his head subtly left to right, investigated every angle of my memory.
“How old were you, man?”
“Six.”
“You should tell that story. People’d like it. Find you more interesting, man.”
“I don’t think they would,” I said as he stabbed himself in the stomach. No wince.
Mike’s normal performances leaned toward gross-out antics. The odd mutilation here and there. Never so far. I knew the knife was headed somewhere, obviously. But shock, even earned, meant I’d bought in and stopped observing.
I only blinked at him. Watched him pull the small blade out of himself. His shirt immediately suctioned to the wound.
“I bet they’d care a lot, man,” he said. “But I get it.” He peeled his shirt up so I could see.
“It didn’t mean shit to you, right?” He asked, then jammed two fingers into the small slice he’d made.
I thought of the hands coming for him in all his concert videos. Gathering his waste. Grasping for his pellets.
“I think you hate me, man,” Mike said through a grunt. I watched his skin pucker, wrinkle near the edges of the gash as he yanked at it.
“Mike, I’m not…” But I trailed off as the slice tore. Either it gave out a kind of patent-leather squeak or his boots did on the limo’s carpet, slick with multiple liquids now.
“It’s all good man, I can…gyaaaacch…” He dropped the knife and brought his other hand to help tear at his stomach. Turned his wound from a short red line into an oblong hole.
I watched, mouth open. Pen still. Mike noticed.
“Gimme’ that,” he said, hushed. Forced.
I breathed out “Huh…huh? Huh?”
“Your pen, man, give it.”
Clear plastic barrel, bright blue plastic cap, rigid plastic ink tube with dark blue liquid inside. Know how much plastic ink has in it? More than none.
I reached out with the pen.
“And it’s fine, man, for real,” he said. “You can admit it after you see this,” he said and paused to grin. A real one, not trying to rip his face further. He grabbed my pen and left my hand frozen between us.
“You good?” He asked.
“Admit what?” I asked.
“You’ll hate me way more after this, man, trust me.”
He torqued on his stomach harder, the other hand close by with my pen. He kept it there, vertical, while he dug deeper into his gut. Blood didn’t pour out of him, no gushing or spurting. He did bleed, obviously. I didn’t notice how little though until he brought the pen closer to the hole in him. To that darkness he’d cut and pried open.
Mike closed his eyes. Low breaths sawed inside him. Shoulders twitched, ratcheted almost, a small rotation away from me.
The limo hopped twice, probably speedbumps, then slowed and started into a long turn.
Mike went still. Tired Mike, finally, maybe.
Movement. Inside of him. His flat stomach bulged and grew an angle that pressed out, slid from closer to his ribs down toward the wound. Tightened his skin like a tent.
A small grunt and his whole body tensed. His hand palsied for a second, clawed the pen against his palm. Body language of an electrocution.
It all rhymed with his photoshoot as he wrenched backward, head and neck quivering from the effort.
I yanked my hand back, the other came up too. Two fists in front of my chest.
His legs stiffened and almost tossed him forward off his seat. Because the car still rounded some unseen bend, he dumped onto his side.
I heard my mouth smek open, like any word could help. I closed it.
Mike’s fingers loosened, slid out of his stomach. That hand flopped onto the seat but the other stayed close. Pen clutched tight.
One edge of the incision he’d made undulated, stretched, and suddenly relaxed.
Thick liquid poured out of him, but not red. Bright blue.
Cloying blueberries and cream managed to cut through the olive stench and the new-car cologne of our corporate limo.
Two harsh chuffs in Mike’s throat, an engine scratching itself to turn over.
“Sh–shampoo,” he said. “I…hngh…piss it, too.”
Slimy globs rolled down his stomach, bumped over the hem of his pants. It dripped, stringy ropes, onto the seat. Collected, eventually headed for the limo floor.
“Wuh…watch,” he said.
This new thing.
Could I not watch?
Seven, eight, I lost count how many bulges appeared under his skin, rolled through his stomach, down from his chest, around from his sides. All toward his open wound. Toward his hand holding my pen.
Colorful dots popped up in the steaming dark of his stomach. Every color. They wiggled.
“Mike…” All I could say. Could whisper.
In the low light I thought there were 11 or 12 rods of plastic emerging, but as they worked I saw they broke apart, filaments bunched tightly together. Little plastic bristles. They pushed at his flesh, some snaked out into the air but pulled in quickly.
A sizzling motion started under his skin. His abdomen boiled. Bunches of the plastic strands jabbed in around the edges of the hole. They tightened and rounded the rip, rolled his skin back smoothly inside him.
Mike’s breath cut off completely. One huge lurch rolled through him. Didn’t seem possible, but his body stiffened more, close to snapping himself in half the wrong way. Backwards.
Small tak-tak-tak-tak sounds, gentle impacts inside his stomach. A plastic rainstorm, I thought. His stomach bulged, rounded.
My eyes told my brain I’d started crying. It had to be the answer for the blur, the confusion of depth and clarity. Crystal angles sliced through the air, broke Mike apart into impossible lines, his legs redeployed unattached to his body, a watery meniscus illusion. Sharp but wobbling panes of rainbow sheen wavered. Rotated.
A brief wave of vertigo. The air felt like it moved as the limo did, as I did.
But I finally saw.
Not water across my iris. A solid but constantly shifting thing floated out of Mike’s stomach. A collection of lenses, of bubbles. Panes and prisms. Clear at one angle, in one curve, then suddenly opaque. In and out of focus. Depth and then none.
It twisted, climbed up and across itself, stair-stepped through the air. Reached.
Living plastic.
Impossible to guess at the thing’s size. At times it spread wide, larger than a vinyl record’s circumference. Seconds later it folded and rolled and drilled into itself, compact as a pack of cigarettes.
Mike’s eyes were closed, but only for the seconds I let myself check.
Finally, an edge of the glassy plastic object smeared and spread toward his hand. The air dulled, fuzzed between this thing and then over Mike’s skin. Over my pen. I blinked and blinked. But the fogged spot stayed. Everything around in perfect clarity.
I slumped to my side, shoulder against the seat. It startled me but also gave me a new angle.
And helped me realize the limo had stopped.
“Mike,” I said. Found my voice again.
He lay there disconnected from whatever this was. It hovered in front of him, stomach now less than slack. Baggy. Deflated. I looked at his face and saw nothing. No pain. Utterly, truly nothing.
Motion drew my eyes back to his hand.
Inside the dull air surrounding his hand, layers of unfocused static, excited molecules of blue near the pen. But also hazy plastic that read as white. Small dots floated and smeared away from my pen in horizontal lines. Through his hand. Over it. Behind too. A glitch that formed in realtime.
All into the plastic burbling in the air. The blue impacted inside that shimmering unknowable limb. A word I use only to help myself. So far from understanding.
Blue streaked through it, curved, orbited. The pen barrel added darker tones of translucence, like smudged windows. I watched the pen dissolve, go away line by line, erased. Maybe took a minute. Across a foot or two of limousine air.
Uneven and blurry borders finally slid up and off his hand, brought it back to focus. I followed the haze to the prism floating between Mike and I. That barely perceptible static either bloomed and coated the object or pushed itself inside. Impossible to know. Find the real speck of dust in a hall of mirrors.
The hovering blob sharpened, carved itself down, slid into his stomach and magnified the edges and all the plastic feelers stuck into him. A melting vase, glass gone liquid without glowing red.
Mike didn’t gasp. He slowly inhaled. His body went slack. A surgery patient on anesthesia. His face twitched and came to life.
Into a smile. He sat up while his stomach flattened and stilled. A wad of blue ooze plopped out of him, onto his pants.
“Time–time to be brave, man,” he said. Wiped at his pants, the blueberry slime. Brought his hand to his mouth and licked it.
“Why…?” I asked. Gestured with my fists. Unclenched them but maintained their purpose with my body. Huddled away from him.
“Write all of it, man. Everything. ‘Cause I’m done,” he said.
I looked at him while he reached over his shoulder, to the mini-bar. Turned back with a handful of white I didn’t recognize until he started stuffing it inside himself, into his actual stomach. Cocktail napkins.
“My pen,” I said.
He chuckled. Mild acknowledgement of it all.
“I’m sure you’ll remember it,” he said. “We’re there.” He motioned toward something behind me. The podcast studio outside.
“I don’t even think I can…” I searched, eyes everywhere but on his stomach, away from the blue substance.
“Better ask what you’ve always wanted to, man, because I’m going.”
Nothing I’d ever wanted to ask fit. Why? How? All those questions we study had no answers. Scientists tried.
“Nothing?” He asked. “You just accept that, man?”
Something I still wanted to know, but it seemed irrelevant. Except, because of those questions I’d studied, I thought of a way. Two of the Five W’s, pair them, then work backwards to a larger question. Try to avoid “Yes” or “No” questions.
“Is that where your parents went, did–did you do that to your parents?” I asked. A stress reaction.
I motioned at his stomach. He would’ve understood anyway.
Mike considered, gave me a half-frown. Easy to see his disappointment, though he seemed to accept it because he actually answered.
“No. They’re in the Pacific,” he said. “They had to go, man,” he said.
“I don’t…” I scooted forward, which surprised me. Our knees almost touched. Mike looked at mine, then at his.
Then he looked at me. Eye to eye.
“It wasn’t even connected to you,” I said.
“You can’t see. But you will, man.”
He half stood, reached past me, and opened the door. City sounds immediately, humming and honking cars.
“I don’t h–hate you, why’d you…why think that?”
He squinted and said, “Earlier. You laughed like I wasn’t in on it, man.”
Nonsense words came out of me as he put one foot out of the limo. Impossible to answer but important to ask.
“What is Mike? Really?” I asked.
Mike smiled and said, “You’re better than they give you credit for, man.”
His boot hit the pavement and he stood, head outside of the car.
“Tell me,” I said. Pleaded. No pride. Ever. It’s useless.
He hunched, stuck his head back into the limo. Smiled, and spit in my face. A mist. Spume of white, a wave dashed apart and turned into twinkling marquee borders. One leg and arm on the way to a podcast, he gave me the pull quote.
“I just told you. Now you can unfollow me, man.”
He slammed the door as a gauzy haze settled on my skin. A crackling screen of interlocking molecules laced across my vision. Floaters dappled my eyes. A prickling pinpoint ballet on my cheeks. Something carpeted my face. Wrapped my hair at the base and spiraled up every strand.
My world faded and stayed pale, washed out, dull colors and odd fizzing motion at the corners of my vision.
I had a plan because I thought Mike turned into himself after he walked away from his parents. A large “Why?” waited inside him and I had a pen and paper. Then the pen didn’t exist anymore.
Back to the rented building in silence. Smelling the blueberries, the olives.
Five minutes on the road and a sneeze tickled behind my eyes. But it only threatened. It never came.
I did.
If he’s reading this, I did. He was right.
And I did because he wasn’t being himself like I would.
Now I will. And if this goes like I think it will, you will too.
The feeling in my face never went away. It deepened. And last night I coughed up something orange. Shiny.
A small plastic flowerhead. Five petals around a small cylinder. It fits on a toothpick.
Maybe I’ll finally sneeze. A green stem could fly out. A plastic nub on one end that would fit into the flower. I could choke and vomit up a little arc of yellow plastic. A “hand.”
Mike’s other parenthesis.
I can’t ask Mike “Why?” or “How?” anymore. I’m sure he didn’t know anyway.
He had to live and guess a lot. I’ll be able to guess at less. Then I’ll have to go.
Then you will too.