The Active Training Sessions ended with the summer and Jacob hadn’t learned a goddamn thing. Ninja skills dulled. He would meet an attack with clumsy, uncertain moves. Hesitation begets paralysis. Hanging around deserted shopping malls (they’re easy to break into if you possess what old grandfathers referred to as gumption) watching mildew grow in patterns that correspond to the slow, synaptic dance in his slippery, over-drugged brain. Vine-choked Capitalism ending not with a whimper but with a killing field strewn with novelty gag gifts that lost their laughs long ago. Rubber dog shit and dribble cups. A puddle of vomit firm as a buttermilk pancake. Consumer items decaying under time’s brutal nuclear winter. Like a fetus in a toilet. Floating dead in a diarrhea marsh not even the Ty-D-Bol Man can sanitize. A grim culmination.
A slow breeze carries a whiff of dead animal smell. Rusted cash registers echo like robotic ghosts rattling through the dismal corridors. There are dangerous squatters here. Bums with clicking knives reeking of fish oil and human stool. The mall is cold, dark. Silent. He will not be attacked tonight. He won’t need to rely on his rusty karate.
He pours gasoline on the floor of a Waldenbooks according to the designs in his mind. A mix of backwards swastikas and pentagrams. That should give them something to get angry about. Uproot their delusions of sanity. He sets the gasoline trails aflame and then scurries like a rat back into the glowing night.
“Hold on there, pardner,” says the Sheriff, a lumbering, cliché-swollen stereotype of potbelly and droopy mustache and a Texas hat big enough to drown a litter of kittens. “Jest what’re you up to?” he says in a southern drawl so thick it sounds like rubbery Pentecostal tongues.
“I was just burning swastikas and pentagrams into the floor of the bookstore,” he admits.
“Okay. Long as you didn’t steal nothin’. Now get on with you. And don’t let me catch you in these parts again. You get me, pardner?”
“That won’t be a problem,” Jacob assures him. “I only vandalize one mall at a time. I was moving on anyway. To Butte.”
“I’m done with you sonny. Git!”
“Gittin’, sir.” And he turns and runs into the heated dusk, wondering if this time he’d created enough fire to burn down the mall. He hides in the shadows, watching the lonely shopping center. It once was white, textured with rough stucco. It is now an aerosol encyclopedia of colors, signals and codes he cannot decipher. And he painted some of them! There is a faint glow dancing under the glass on the roof but after ten minutes it withers and dies. The mall is silent and dark again. As it should be. He turns away from his failure and runs into the thickest area of the woods. Dead branches scrape at his face like needles, like fingernails.
Jacob doesn’t notice the girl. Her lactescent skin glows like radium but he misses her anyway, running through the slashing claws of the branches. His face is bloody with deep scratches. Tomorrow he will go out in public to show off his lateral scabs. They will look like hieroglyphics. They will spell disaster.
“Bye,” the girl whispers with a cotton-soft voice.
Her hair is black, cut into awkward angles by her ex-boyfriend, Raoul. She shouldn’t trust him with scissors (especially after the Scranton incident) but she does. Her bottom lip is pierced with a green ingot of solid brass, lending her the speech impediment she’d always wanted. Her right eye is blind and white, purposely burned with bleach. It was a fad a few years ago. Now she’s permanently dated herself and bumps into things.
She has been reading about mall-vandalism in the newspaper and came here to commit some. But the boy got there first. She debates whether to check out his handiwork but decides to go home instead. Fuck it.
The Sheriff lights a cigar with a delicate flourish. A performance for no one but himself. He earns satisfaction from the little things he knows how to do.
Jacob gets home.
The girl gets home.
Home is an ostrich turd on a riverbank. A banquet for manic flies. Home is your remains being crapped out by a grizzly bear, too digested for a thorough autopsy. It’s a dead manatee washed ashore on an island of feral children. Sing to them until their females reach menopause. Home is an embrace between a serial killer and his purring kitty. Home is a sun-gun revealing broken teeth in a locked closet. It’s abundant albacore along blackened, oil-drenched beaches. A bloody frying pan and the stench of sizzling plasma. Meat under a Persian rug. It’s nothing for birds to eat your dead fingers. Sting them with alcohol until you hear every sound there is and then forget it.
Forget it all. Do not record or catalog any of it.
Get lost. Stay random. Beet juice.
Start breathing again.
It ain’t over yet.
You have a long way to go.
My only friend.
Crumbling Asphalt 