Malcolm's Shadow

Content Warning: Drugs, Suicidal Ideation

It was the briskness with which the man’s feet consumed the sidewalk that advertised him as an interloper.

The city had abandoned these streets and like all street orphans, they’d fallen in with a bad crowd. With plenty to run from in this neighborhood but nowhere to run to, its residents meandered through their days and if something caught up with them, it was no great pity for it had only been a matter of time. There was no good reason to visit it.

Jethro Washington with his no good reason cut right for his final descent down the avenue. He knew he should slow to a casual, less suspect pace but feared if he did, he would discover it was only his forward momentum that kept him from turning heel. The skin on his scalp prickled, his limbs felt numb, as if all the blood in his body had congealed in his chest. On some level he found his anxiety amusing considering what he was here for, but the observation didn’t stop his hands from trembling. He shoved them into his pockets. Steam purled from grates in the pavement, streetlamps stuttered like dying embers, the whole scene creating the impression of passing through a terminal fire. If he closed his eyes, when he reopened them, Jethro would be but half surprised to find only ashes remaining. Underlying it all purred that omnipresent bassline of the city- the hum of surveillance drones.

As he approached the prescribed location, his pace finally dragged but the tremors in his hands traveled to his knees. His eyes darted over the area. They anchored first on a man stretched on a grate, cocooned in a sleeping bag, though whether he was asleep or beyond sleep was for the morning sun to reveal. A grandmotherly woman squatted on a stoop, a baby carriage beside her. Jethro almost failed to notice her, residing there in a dark pocket created by two successively broken streetlights, except her cigarette burned so acutely in the shadows it drew his eye with almost gravitational force, like a miniscule sun in the black expanse of space. He frowned, examined the street again, the receding alleyways, the hunched forms that rendered into trash piles, but found no other persons. From the distance came the whine of a patrolling drone.

Jethro sidled up to the woman. “Nadia?” he mumbled, subtly, like slipping a note underhanded. The woman offered no acknowledgement. He clenched his fists and squeezed out another pass. “Nadia.”

The drone’s whine sharpened, rose in pitch as it approached the avenue. Why so jumpy? he thought. No one got cited for curfew violations. Even if they did, what’s it to you now? Still, the sound played on his spine like a violin bow across a string and the cigarette’s flaming eye interrogated him. He shut his eyes but still it burned there on the back of his eyelids, a blazing pinprick in the black, and just as his brain and his feet colluded to exchange this place and this night for the comfort of his bed, there came an acrid exhalation of nicotine and an order. “Head up.”

Jethro waited at the top of the stoop as the woman ditched the carriage streetside and cradled the baby up the steps. The front door was rotting but the lock was brand new. The woman stepped inside, Jethro on her heels. Behind him, the door swung shut with a hollow thud and a click.

Aside from a foldable card table and a single chair in the corner, the room was devoid of furniture but the electricity still worked. The woman appeared even more grandmotherly in the light but her eyes were that of a junkyard Doberman. Jethro’s heart somersaulted at the baby dangling limply from her hand until he looked closer. A doll.

The woman jutted her chin at him. “Payment.” From the backroom came a cough, performatively loud, followed by heavy footsteps. The woman’s eyes drilled into Jethro. He got the message.

He fumbled a wad of cash from his pocket. She shuffled through it twice then uncorked the baby doll’s head and force-fed bills through the neck hole like a bastardized attempt at foie gras before popping the head back on. The angle of the face to the body implied a broken neck.

The card table hosted various chemical powders and liquids that stung Jethro’s sinuses. The woman looped a medical mask over her ears and began measuring and mixing with the speed and precision of a Michelin chef. Tortuga required onsite preparation because the compounds began consuming each other immediately, one of the reasons the Army had decided against employing it.

Jethro watched through the dirty window as the drone hovered down the street, its insectile red eye ferreting out violators. It glided past the man in the sleeping bag without pause, its failure to scan the man answering Jethro’s question. His breath fogged the glass, an act that felt almost contemptuous to the body outside, a physical manifestation of his ability to draw breath. He wiped the pane with his sleeve, streaking his shirtsleeve gray. He wondered if he should apologize or offer a prayer, but in the end, he simply turned back around.

The woman sealed a pill casing and asked, “What’re you using for?”

Her curiosity, contrasted with her general reticence, unbalanced Jethro. He fumbled for a response. “None of your business.” Mentally, he kicked himself. Why so jumpy? he asked again. He was beyond worry.

The woman appeared unfazed. “Repeat business is good business. Take it for some sex party and you’ll just end up nauseous.”

Something about her statement needled Jethro, as if she’d sized him up, measured him like one of her powders, his button up shirt, his midtown haircut, and determined someone like him could only be interested in recreational dalliances like a penthouse orgy. As if someone like him has good posture because he shoulders no weight.

“I’m using it to kill myself.”

Her fingers paused their labor. It was laughable, the little zip of pleasure that gave him, that his words had shocked her, impressed her maybe. It was immediately doused by a wave of embarrassment. He hadn’t impacted her; this woman would erase him from her mind the moment he was out of sight.

The silence lingered.

“This isn’t the backscratcher you’re looking for.”

Jethro shrugged.

“You didn’t pay for a fatal dose. And I assemble correctly. Man who invented it couldn’t do a cleaner cut-”

“It’s what I’m looking for,” he tossed out, his manner blithe, confident, dismissive. Still, buried in his pockets, those damnable hands shook.

Over the brim of her mask, the woman’s eyes flayed him, her thumb pressed against an indentation in the material where her lips should be, as if suppressing a sentence. Jethro was suddenly struck by her overwhelming personhood and felt an intense desire to declare his own. They call me Jethro Washington. And who are you, ‘Nadia’?

Then the woman raised a baggie toward him. With that gesture, a simple extension of the arm, a thread had been severed. It gave Jethro a queer sense of déjà vu, as if once again someone had turned away from a body in the street.

He accepted the bag.

“Powder’s active. Buzzes out in two hours. Put it on your tongue, crack the capsule with your teeth and bon voyage.”

Jethro nodded, wondered if he should thank her, but the woman was already resetting her materials for her next customer, their interaction concluded.

Tortuga pocketed, Jethro remerged onto the street.

He descended the steps and walked past three houses before stopping. Here was as good a place as any. He reclined on a concrete step and followed her instructions: powder on tongue, pill between molars. He felt awash in a calm glow. The hard part was over. Only clean up remained. His hands were still as a corpse’s.

Bon voyage. He bit down.

Jethro had once seen a video of a grape being microwaved, its two halves connected by flap of skin, leisurely rotating when some meeting of micro-waves and magnetic fields beyond his education caused it to spit blinding flares of plasma, the same matter that composes the sun.

Jethro’s brain was that grape.

His muscles seized in rigor mortis, his jaw clenched like a bear trap. A blackhole swallowed existence, stretched him until he was a chain of singular atoms spiraling down the drain. Then his mind unfolded and the main attraction began.

A streetlamp’s flicker decelerated to a throbbing pulsation. Jethro could follow the undulation of each individual wing beat of the moths suspended in its orange glow. A chihuahua menaced from behind chain link, its bark as drawn out as thunder. He feared he would suffocate, his inhale so sluggish his lungs would surely starve, but soon he adapted to his new breathing rate like a scuba diver underwater. Curiously, blinking proved harder to adjust to; every blink severed the world for what felt like three full seconds. This alone might drive a man to madness in time had Tortuga not delivered him there immediately.

The Army’s discontinued super-soldier drug successfully slowed one’s perception, and thus reaction time, to near comic book hero levels, but they had not anticipated that the human brain, when confronted with a world crawling at one-sixteenth speed, would fill the gaps with its own inventions.

The sleeping bag on the grate quivered. Jethro watched as it and the human skin inside it unzipped and a bus-sized butterfly shimmed out from the chrysalis. Its wings, transparent and crinkled like discarded cellophane, dragged behind it. Jethro’s eyes watered as he struggled to keep them open until he couldn’t anymore. He sat in the dark for three seconds.

When his eyelids lifted, the butterfly had unfurled its proboscis, long and thick as a firehose. He opened his mouth to scream. The insect inserted its mouthpiece into Jethro’s mouth, syphoning his screams before they could be born. He raised his hand to tug the invading tube loose, but his arm moved with aching slowness. He’d be a husk before he reached it.

Then the butterfly vanished. The sleeping bag lay as it had before, body concealed within.

It’s all in your head, he told himself, but it was thin reassurance. His head was the worst place to be.

 He stood. His brain sent orders before his inner ear could orient itself. He lurched down the street, never in danger of falling but unable to remain wholly upright, like a car in a constant state of overcorrection. The bridge wasn’t far, but cities were built and abandoned in the time it took him to cover six blocks.

Under a streetlight his shadow grew obese, underwent mitosis. The newly spawned shadow loomed over the first. Who’s behind me? Then it walked ahead of him, a dark stain flowing unattached to any feet, a shadow with no caster. He tried to follow but he moved through molasses. Wait, he cried.

It paused at the street corner.

When he reached it, he found it wasn’t a shadow, but a scorch mark seared onto the pavement. Then its blackened fingers curled up at him and he grasped them and pulled, helped the figure to stand.

The man was doorframe skimming tall. His thin lipped grin was more dog baring teeth than smile. He appeared both immediate and distant, as if looking at him through the wrong end of a telescope.

“What’re you doing, Jet,” said Jethro’s half-brother. It was an admonishment, not a question, but Jethro answered.

“Going to jump off a bridge,” he said. Their words seemed to flow outside Tortuga’s influence.

Jethro felt individual vomit chunks riding up his contracting throat like an escalator, choking off his airway for an unbearable length of time; it felt like waterboarding. His last meal splattered onto the sidewalk. He heaved again.

From his doubled over position, he saw Malcolm raise an eyebrow. He remembered how jealous he’d been of his half-brother’s ability to do that, his expression a sardonic punctuation that elevated his cool. Jethro had practiced in front of a mirror for hours in sixth grade, forcing an eyebrow into an arch with his fingers, and had finally concluded that Malcolm must have inherited an extra facial muscle from their unshared parent.

He staggered onward. The bridge awaited him across the street. Two distant headlights glowed like owl’s eyes on the intersecting roadway.

“Go on, buddy boy. Lie down in front of it. Save yourself the trip.” Malcolm’s breath was cool on Jethro’s neck. Or maybe it was the breeze. “Or square up to a mugger. But I bet you could catch a bullet in your teeth. Superman,” he whisper-cheered, mimicking a crowd at a stadium.

“You’re a bastard.”

“You only remember me as a bastard. In truth, I was much worse.” Malcom’s face was an inch from his. Malcom leaned his forehead against Jethro’s, cupped his head with phantom fingers. “But I was yours and you were mine, you little pissant. I fucking loved you.”

Jethro thought that Malcolm was crying but he realized Malcolm’s eyeballs were dripping like jelly down his cheeks. The night sky filled the empty sockets. When Malcolm nodded, Jethro nodded with him.

Jethro pushed forward and Malcolm dissipated like smoke. He reassembled next to the bridge’s edge.

“You ever read jumper reports?” Jethro asked as he closed the gap between them with creeping steps. “The handful they fish out alive? They all only had one thought before they hit the water. God, I don’t want to die.”

“Damn, Jethro. We topped… what? One ten? Flying down the highway in a stolen car. Could have been the greatest night of our lives if you weren’t such a shit driver.”

Jethro lifted one leg onto the barrier. His thigh warmed as it heaved his weight upward. He could feel muscle fibers tearing. “You were begging me. Screaming, ‘don’t let me die, Jet. Don’t let me die.’”

“Well, I was on fire.”

“You were begging me and I ran away.”

The river below came into view, black velvet dusted with sequins and suddenly he didn’t know if he was looking up or down. But the reflected stars were just another Tortuga illusion; the city’s light pollution obliterated any stars in the real sky.

Malcolm’s face floated before him. “Why now?”

Jethro shrugged. “Why not?”

“Why not.” Malcolm laughed. “Yeah, why not? That right there was our motto.” Malcolm’s face shifted. His features softened, rounded, more boy now than man. Understanding struck Jethro: Malcolm wasn’t growing younger; Jethro was just seeing him through eyes that were older now than his older brother. But before he could grasp onto the features, they slipped away, like flesh melting off bone.

“Why not,” laughed the skull.

“Please, Malcolm. I made a decision,” Jethro said. “It’s been so nice to have just… decided.” But the tremors in his legs would have registered on the Richter scale.

Malcolm was back, fully fleshed, feet planted on open air. “You were only thirteen. I gave you the alcohol.”

Those words steadied Jethro’s shaking knees. He could ask no forgiveness of this apparition. This was not Malcolm’s ghost. This was just some hallucination dredged from his subconscious. The real Malcolm would never admit culpability.

“I’m eaten through.” Jethro inched a foot forward, one half balanced on stone, the other with nothing below it but the fall. “You can only get so thin.”

“You probably did the world a favor, Dumbass. That whole ‘would you kill baby Hitler’ thing. Want to honor me? Get a phoenix tattoo. That’s hilarious.”

“When I step off, I’ll have time for lots of thoughts. And I won’t be able to do anything but watch that water driving toward me.” I’m going to march toward my mortality fully aware and too, too slowly. Just like I made you do. In his head rang that familiar tinnitus that had haunted him for eleven years. Don’t let me die, Jet!

Malcolm shook his head. “It’s not a suicide. It’s an execution.”

Jethro blinked. Three seconds passed but still he lingered in the blackness. When he reopened his eyes, he would lift a foot. One step. That’s all it was. One step. Easiest thing he’d ever do.

“Don’t let me die.”

He froze.

Malcolm stood on the ledge beside Jethro. He tapped Jethro’s temple. “That’s my urn right there. Don’t let me die again, Jet.”

A far-off siren sang its aria. Jethro stared at the black ribbon river. The stars had vanished from its surface and somewhere on that varnished obsidian, his reflection was searching for him too.

Malcolm was sitting. “I was tall my whole life, but you’re the only one who ever looked up to me.” He patted the spot next to him.

Jethro lowered himself and marveled how a change in position, standing to seated, could take someone from a police code to a man simply enjoying the view.

“Look, Jethro. You’re going about this self-flagellation thing all wrong. Don’t aim to be miserable. Try to be happy, I mean really try. Then you’ll know what true misery is.” Malcolm conjured up a lit cigarette. “And take up smoking. That’s suicide at a glacial pace.” He took a drag then exhaled fire. Its white light consumed the world.

But it wasn’t fire. The light frying Jethro’s retinas was a protracted camera flash from the surveillance drone hovering before him. It excreted a receipt from its underbelly. Jethro, alone on the bridge, accepted it and read his crimes as the drone scooted skyward. Curfew violation, loitering, improper use of a public structure. Sentence delivered: twenty five days on City Crew.

“This is not my night,” he laughed and released the paper. It spiraled so lazily Jethro thought it would never reach the water, that it might just remain suspended midair forever.

He blinked. After three seconds of darkness, the world greeted him again.