Hothouse

By Maxwell Robinson

My first move was to loop around to the side of the place. A little family-owned grocery store, a 24-hour one. The only one that was open this late. It was ideal prey. The clerks there wouldn’t give a shit. Not for eight bucks an hour, no; they’d just be sitting there, slack-jawed, drooling, hand in nose. It wouldn’t have cameras either. The big chains were always swimming in coiled neuroses about that kind of thing, a sort of turgid gnashing, agonized yowling at inventory discrepancies and phantasmagoric heists. Two loaves of bread unaccounted for, a can of beans gone, a bushel of bananas dissolved into the miasma that lay beyond the automatic doors. 

I used to work at Target. They paid the guy who just watched the cameras all day three dollars more an hour than the rest of us. I remember him. I don’t recall him having a discernible neck, and he had a faux-military buzz cut that must have receded a solid inch in the three months I worked there. Biceps like cantaloupes, legs that tempered into cones with young girls’ feet, and a taut stomach that gave the impression of being in the third trimester of a 252-month pregnancy. He was bright red but I never saw him tired. He just sat in his swivel chair, eating chips, dragging his teeth across each other horizontally so he could grind his meal into a thick beige paste and slurp it down his throat. Totally still. A Buddha statue at the front desk of a restaurant. And when he saw someone stuff something in their pocket over the camera display he’d float out a drawl from the back of his tonsils, deep white noise, all staccato vowels, and he’d kick them out. I used to think he was a pitiful character, but now he terrifies me. 

He wouldn’t be there. 

I got next to the dumpsters and undid my fly and pissed. Scouting the ground for an insect or landmark to focus my attack on proved fruitless, the asphalt a barren expanse punctuated only by streetlamps, its only topographic variation being applied by a steady stream of urine. I heard a door open. Somebody’d gone out the back for a smoke break. Whoever it was would’ve heard me. I piss with vigor. I shook the excess off, zipped up my fly, and turned to steal an image of the man. Short but not squat, lithely fattish, trimmed black beard with rorschach blotches of gray, like a mid-career cricketer. If he heard me, he didn’t say, or look over. I walked away, hurriedly nonchalant, and went in the front of the store. A woman at the cash register greeted me and I nodded. What all did I need? Bread, peanut butter, rice, maybe soy sauce. I was wearing an old army surplus fishtail parka, so it’d all fit. 

There was my first problem — I didn’t know this store. I found it on google maps half an hour ago. You can’t ask anyone, though, it draws too much attention. But I was the only person in there. They’d have a bead on my ass no matter what I did. The lady at the counter was too chipper. I couldn’t remember what she looked like, all my cogito could produce was a vague feminine silhouette. The buzz of the lights overhead was the only thing to hear, no typing or feet moving. She was trained. She was in some section somewhere sharpening a screwdriver to flay me alive with. The greeting was the signal, covering me with pheromones, marking me. You dirty son of a bitch, fucking lout, goddamn thief, I’ll strangle you with your own goddamn intestines! 

I had to move. I had a method for these things. Swiftly, long yawning strides stretching each limb’s lank, to the back of the store, where the refrigeration section always was, then a left turn for cover behind the aisles, surveying them. Oatmeal at the end of this one. I advanced. In the middle of the aisle: wonderbread. I checked my flanks, stuffed it down my jacket, headed towards the back again and resumed my combing exercise, repeating it for the peanut butter and the rice (not the soy sauce, I was too freaked out), tucked away, shuffled to avoid any criminal protrusions on my form. All in steady shelter.

I went back to the front of the store — as I’d suspected, the cashier was gone. I wasn’t even satisfied that it was easy. I was too jilted, too paranoid, the tips of my fingers crawling up my elbows, teeth sheltering and chattering in thin receded gums. My pace quickened, steps retracting into sharp skitters, and I slipped past the front door. No alarm. The temperature had dropped, or maybe it hadn’t and I was just used to the heat of the store, so then it was colder by relation, if not by objectivity, and I could’ve just been nervous. But I’d started shivering, so I kept up a fast walk and stammered into the parking lot, and turned the same way I did when I went to go take a leak, and I started to pick up, my torso falling forward until my feet caught up and I was in a dead sprint, the world running and curling underfoot like a treadmill — mechanistic whirring, lungs rising through neck, alveoli stretching and groaning in chewed bubblegum shapes, feet separate from themselves about one inch off the ground. 

Then I heard something that sounded like nothing, a silent collision of bricks followed by a bout of screeching in my eardrums. I froze. I didn’t keel over, I didn’t put my hands over my ears, even though I probably should’ve. It was only about ten seconds after the fact that I realized how loud it was, whatever it was. I turned around. It was the guy from earlier, the stocky excricketer, a shotgun in his hands. And even though it was darker and he was farther away, he came in much sharper focus: the crease of each segment of stubble folding into a subdivided neck, the liquid bulge of a hip in cheap khakis, the fringes of the mustache lightened as rust on tin. 

I couldn’t glean any strong emotion from his eyes; he stared at me but not into me, and racked the shotgun. A shell ejected and drizzled to the ground with a hollow tinkling noise, the pump cracking and reshaping its guts, shifting a shell into the chamber with a blend of discolored humors and vascular vigor, as if it were a small ill-tempered reptile resting in his arms. The man’s lips shrank like raisined raspberries and his pupils followed in tandem, giving way for the whites of his eyes to nestle them in soft ivory blankets. I did not say anything, I just faced him and put my hands in my pockets. He fired the gun. 

I felt nothing and stood there, blinking once, then twice, then swallowing spit, wiping teeth with tongue, teething on my neck. He didn’t cock it again. Just stared. I turned and ran, faster than I hitherto have. The ground didn’t disappear as earlier, half of me was still welded to the ground, dragging, and I couldn’t feel it, not really, just a vaseline-lensed outline of friction against my left foot while the right spiraled in propeller whirls, sending me off-kilter, sputtering, coughing but not tripping, not falling over, steady, steadying, straight down, following twenty-sixth, not breaking until maybe a quarter or a third of a mile when my lungs felt like brillo pads and the air tasted like sand. I looked behind me. He hadn’t followed. I wanted to sit down but it’d kill me. So I walked and my left leg still dragged. It was cold. I was cold. 

The front of my pants was wet. I figured I’d pissed myself, even though I wasn’t really all that spooked. And my leg was sticky and cold and wet and numb. I was wearing dark jeans, so I’d be fine, even though I really wouldn’t be, because my drag was deepening into a limp, but nothing hurt. No sign of the gun-toting shopkeep. I found a bench and sat down. There was a subtle wet spot and hole in the front, three inches to the left of my dick. I tried to touch it and was met with a stinging wrenching like barbed wire pulled through a coffee stirrer. I moved my hand and the pain rippled in candy-colored sine waves and fluttering vibrato tremors. There was a shotgun pellet in my fucking leg. He fucking shot me. But the bullet wouldn’t let me know until I acknowledged it, gave it some attention. I’d heard something similar from my grandpa. He caught a chunk of shrapnel in his knee and didn’t feel it for half an hour. Maybe it needed nurturing. I could picture myself cooing at it, wheedling, cajoling, petting it, befriending it. Like a pet. I undid my belt and my fly and looked. There were clumps of purplish coagulation, collected on my inner thigh like deposits of clay. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Similar to hot suds in the wintertime. It was in there pretty deep but I don’t think it hit bone. I hadn’t pissed myself, at least. I exhaled and said shit. 

I couldn’t afford a hospital visit. I wasn’t shoplifting for the hell of it. The nearest hospital was too far a walk anyways, and ambulance bills are a motherfucker. I wasn’t partial to walking around with lead in my leg either, though. It seemed like a bad idea to leave it there. The bleeding had sealed itself, mostly, just a small trickle of burgundy fluid that glittered black and metallic under a streetlamp, the perforation in my flesh a gelatinous cavern. I should’ve been in more or less shock than I was, but it was soothing to have experienced it. It broke with the monotony. A little playful ruse by the city — the city, or this neighborhood, but never god, even one of the old testament caliber; it’s too lofty. A god expressed through a shopkeeper’s shotgun isn’t even pitifully grotesque, it’s grotesquely pitiful. The annoyingly pithy god of a vulgate — none of the honest grouchy earthiness of a good solid King James god. The creeping wetness of pavement, knock-kneed unkempt hedges, splotches of gray by the sign on the button on the corner on a crosswalk, the oratory of thudding feet, formless automotive slabs blaring and wailing and screaming and rolling holy in pockmarked intersection drawn up in whites and reds and yellows — these were grounds for mischief, reflecting itself into sly winking puddles and infinitive verbiage, through gray-tan constructs disemboweling themselves into red-brown leaves gently rocking into gutters. How could you be angry with it? It only wanted the best. 

I had a friend who lived near campus. His name was Karl Egon and he was a medical student. As far as I could recall, he lived at a co-op on 23rd and Nueces. He was sort of a dumb hippie, but smarter than me regardless. I hoped he was. Otherwise, I’d just be walking around with a hunk of lead stuck in me. I dialed him. A hum for fifteen seconds, voicemail. He might’ve been on the shitter. I tried again. Seven seconds, voicemail. He was declining the call. Bastard. I called again. Eight seconds and he picked up with a high speed bass-baritone that made his words sound like runny mush, a muted rubber band whacked with a rake. “Charlie?” He greeted me. 

“Yeah, hey, Karl, how have you been?” 

“Just taking it easy, man, easy enough,” and punctuated his sentences with a thick mucus cough. “Easy enough, man. But what can you do? What can you do, man?” I heard water bubbles and a deep breath. “How about you, man? How’ve you been, man? Taking it easy?” “Not quite,” I replied. 

“Well what’s the issue, man? Level with me. Divulge your inner tribulations, compadre. For I am but a vessel for your -” 

“I got shot.” 

“You’ve been shot?” 

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’ve been shot.” 

“With what?” He asked. 

“With what was I shot?” 

“Yeah, man. With what were you shot?” 

“Christ, Karl. A gun.” 

“Someone shot you with a gun, Charlie?” 

“The fuck else would they shoot me with?” 

“A bow.” He pausd. “And an arrow.”. 

“Why would — never mind. That shit’s frying your fucking brain.” I sighed.

“My gourd is my business, amigo.” 

“Look, can you pull a shotgun pellet out of my leg?” 

“Isn’t that a hospital’s deal?” 

“Yeah, which is why they’ll give me a motherfucker of a bill over it.” 

“And you ain’t good for it?” he asked. 

“No, I’m not. Look, if you have a pair of tweezers and some rubbing alcohol, you can probably swing it.” 

He exhaled and coughed again. “Half-assing the medical arts is a reliable route to one judicious infection, compadre.” 

“I saw it in a movie, Karl. Why would the movies lie?” 

“Do you need me to come to your pad or are you headed here?” 

“I’ll meet you at your place. 23rd and Nueces?” 

“Yeah, that’s it. See you in a few.” 

I hung up and started on my way there. I could reckon with the limp at this point, assimilate it into my way of being, incorporate it into my visage and the subtleties of my silhouette’s gait. Maybe I could get used to dragging my leg around, provided something got fucked regarding Karl’s operating skills. I didn’t even know if he was trying to become a surgeon, come to think of it, but I’d committed. Maybe I’d committed to spending my twenties as an invalid. There was no use in getting pissed off about it, though — I could accept my fate with a crisscrosslegged poiseful resignation and smile. A lecherous bodhisattva sort of life could suit me. Crawling through sidewalks, sneaking into bars and 7-11s, ogling, drooling, laughing through missing teeth, carrying buzzing clouds of nicotine stink and crisp liquor that smell in the corners of your nostrils.

Or I could become a pure monk. A tonsure would frame my face well. Robes could be flattering, I could sit in some tower on a rocky island off the coast of Ireland, copy bibles by hand all day. But I said before, Catholicism freaks me out too much. I don’t think I could be trusted with a rosary. I’d get up to something nefarious with it soon enough. A sect of Protestant monks out there who didn’t feel the need to believe in anything too serious would be ideal for me. 

In ten minutes I was at the co-op where Karl lived. 

I banged on the door of the place and Karl answered. Suddenly, I was at eye level with a piece of turquoise drugstore jewelry shrouded in a firm bed of chest hair at the base of the opening of a brown fringed vest, bathed in the odor of patchouli oil and pot. He wore bell bottoms that went down to the base of his calves and a pair of crocs caked in some viscous mixture of mud, dust, and whatever coated the floor of his pad — generally, in the co-op, nobody volunteered for custodial work. I looked up to see his face, patchily bearded and eyes magnified about threefold by a Dahmeresque pair of glasses. “Karl,” I said, and smiled, pressing my hand against the spot of my leg where the shot lay. 

“Charlie,” he said, and clapped me on the back, grinning with about forty percent gum. He led me through the place. It’d been there since the seventies. I wondered how much they’d spent on all the black-light posters and magenta-colored light bulbs drenching the place in a thick gothic nectar. I caught a whiff of something that smelled like fried rotted orange peels and saw three skinny longhaired men in workwear congregating around a hookah with a clearly terrified young woman bringing a murky plastic tube to her mouth. Through the laundry room, a spread of mildew wafting into a man-sized hole in the drywall and day-glo finger painting smeared across a hallway like a schizophrenic’s excrement. Karl spoke.

“So how’d you get yourself shot, amigo?” 

“I didn’t get myself shot. I just got shot. I had nothing to do with it besides being the target.” 

“Then how’d you end up being a target, Charlie?” 

“Bad luck, I guess.” 

“Dude, I have not exactly been privy to the greatest of fortunes in my own travails, and I have never been shot.” 

“Neither had I. Guess I’ll try anything once.” I wasn’t even embarrassed about the manner by which I’d come to have a projectile in me, but it was fun to mess around with him. I liked keeping it as a mystery for the mystery’s sake, if nothing else. If I could build some hermetic riddle around it, the extraction of the thing might be imbued with the elements of occult ritual. I didn’t know the medicinal consequences that might have, other than that I hoped they were benign. 

We had to walk up a staircase on the way to his room. My leg stung and I wiggled my jaw. 

“Well, I feel like I’m owed something here, man,” Karl said. “I mean, you can’t call me in the dead of night, you know, and I’m mellowing out at this point of the evening, as I tend to do, and as you ought to know at this point, with my proclivities towards mellowing and whatnot, man, and -” 

“You’re trying to go to med school, right?” 

“Yeah, I am, Charlie. But you harshed my mellow, brother.” 

“I’m an ailing man. I’m sorry about your mellow. But where’s your hippocratic oath?”

“I got plenty of hippocratic oath. Jeez, man, I’m not not helping you, after all. But my only recompense is that I’d like to know what happened. A hospital would charge you a hell of a lot more than that, Charlie.” 

“You know I can’t afford a hospital,” I replied. 

“Your parents, man. Why not ask them.” 

“Fuck off. Don’t be a prick about this.” 

We got to his room and he fiddled with the lock, ringing metallic jitters punctuating his movements. 

“A prick wouldn’t pull lead out of your leg,” Karl said. “I’ll set out a towel. I have some rubbing alcohol and some long tweezers and I’ll patch you up with some cotton balls and gauze. We’re due to run this operation a la 1863, muchacho.” 

“Anesthetic?” 

“A bottle of cheap red I picked up at 7/11.” A pause. “It’s better than the alternative.” “What’s the alternative?” I asked. 

“Nothing, man,” he replied, “the alternative is nothing.” 

He went to the bathroom and brought back a white towel with stains that looked like technicolor birthmarks. He flapped it open as if it were an expensive rug and laid it on the ground and motioned for me to lie on top of it. I took the bottle of wine, unzipped my parka, and took off my pants. 

“Can you crack a window?” I took a Camel Filter out of my pocket and lit it. “Smoking’ll kill you,” he said. 

“Life’ll kill you,” I shot back, but I wasn’t satisfied with the delivery.

“I’m told gunfire accelerates the process.” He stepped out and came back with a plastic bottle of clear fluid and a pair of tweezers. I took a few swigs from the bottle before settling into a nice rhythmic puffing on a cigarette. Karl told me to straighten out my leg, adjusted his glasses, got on his knees and leaned close to the wound. Wordlessly, he wet a rag with the bottle and pressed it against the hole. It stung like a white hot scalpel paring down a nerve ending. I sucked air through my teeth. 

“Keep the bottle in your mouth,” he said. “Pain’s liable to get worse from here. Exponentially. If such things can be quantified.” He chuckled to himself without smiling. “Stretch your legs out more.” I did. “And take another drink.” I did. 

Then a cold conduit enveloping the interior of flesh within itself, charging with thick sheets of wheedling needles of whitehot sharp vagueness. Karl probed some more, sending down a few shockwaves of agony so pinpointed and exact that they ceased to be painful at all, a series of perfect geometric toothaches recorded on a scatter plot. A metallic twinge on the roof of my mouth extending to the rear of my uvula and trickling into the belly of my lungs. I felt like I was five horses tied together with umbilical cords tumbling off the side of a cliff. And I lay, reclined and exposed with him disinterestedly arched over me, examining my thigh with an attitude that was somewhere between a scientist and a child with a magnifying glass incinerating insects. 

But I kept still. Towards Karl I felt a mix of hazy animosity and absolute trust. Every tip of a sting deepened me into him and him into me. I mapped each curl on the top of his head, the accidental partings and lack thereof creating edges on his skull where there were none otherwise. Occasionally, the cold metal of his glasses would press into my outer thigh and a stream of hot breath would dissipate into the seam of the wound. I felt clammy against him and he felt slick and warm against me. I was primordially concerned that some serous excretion of his might compromise the medicinal integrity of the whole affair, that once the semblance of sterility was forsaken we would just collapse into some conjoined lump of lazy flesh. 

After about forty-five seconds he got the damn thing. I could feel him roll it around, pitching and yawing, almost toying with it before he managed to get a decent grip and pull it out. He dropped it on the rag he’d set out. It was an almost-perfect sphere, now glistening red and pooling at the bottom. I took another drink. 

Karl doused a cotton ball in rubbing alcohol and pressed it up against the wound. It was the same sensation as before but a little better and a little worse — darker in the corners, rounder at the edges. He kept it pressed down and wrapped a bandage around it twice, paused, and then another two times. It hurt and then I couldn’t feel it much at all. 

“You missed your femoral artery by one and a half centimeters. Eyeballing it, I mean,” he said. 

“And what does that mean?” 

“Couple more seconds of aiming on his end and you’d be dead, hombre.” “Sure, but he didn’t.” 

“Yeah, I guess, man. Was he shooting from the hip?” 

“Sure was. And I was on the other side of the parking lot.” I grinned and poked the bandage. 

“And you still almost died, man. He sat and reclined on his bed and gestured at the food on the floor. “That what you got shot over?” 

“I needed sustenance, Karl.” He pointed at the peanut butter and I passed it to him. He rotated the jar in his hand, examining its construction and contours, and spun it around to show a match head-sized hole in the side. “Where do you think that would’ve hit, Charlie?” he asked.

“Maybe somebody up there likes me.” 

“That’s a fucking Paul Newman movie, man,” he replied. 

I saw his expression shift, but only around the axle of the center of his brow — the glasses and beard prevented a totality of emotion from being displayed. His eyes didn’t change shape, they only oscillated, swelled and retracted, his mouth could only lengthen and shorten along a pair of lips like petrified frankfurters. His forehead arched around a point somewhere in the general center of his face and his forehead furrowed in folds. “Charlie,” he said, “I love you, man, but you’ve gotta pull your head out of your ass. I mean, Jesus, man. Pull out your wallet, tell me how much money’s in it.” 

I crawled over to my jeans, reached into a pocket stiffened with crystal flakes of dried blood, and produced my wallet. It had a hole straight through it. I opened it and it had two holes equidistant on either side. Similarly marked were the last 2 dollars I had. “Um,” I said. “Fuckin’ precisely. So why don’t you get a job?” 

“Lay off.” 

“I just pulled birdshot out of your leg, brother. On my time. And house calls aren’t generally my forte, even if it is my house.” 

“It doesn’t work for me.” 

“What about your parents?” 

“What about them?” 

“Well, right now you’ve got a pretty meaty one of those in your leg.” 

“What is it about my parents, Karl?” 

“They’re fucking loaded, dude!” I took umbrage at this. Anybody would. 

“The hell are you on about?” I replied.

“From everything you told me, your parents are Dallas brahmins. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but for fuck’s sake — would it kill you to ask them for cash?” “How rich do you think they are?” 

“You went to St. Mark’s before you went to college and dropped out, right? I looked it up. That’s thirty grand a year, man. I looked it up!” 

“I don’t need the cash. And they’re pricks.” 

“You just got shot outside a Kwik-E-Mart!” He paused. “What even makes them pricks, Charlie? Putting you through private school? Paying your tuition for three semesters? “They’re just pricks, man.” 

“What does that even mean?” 

“Means they’re pricks.” 

“What did they do? Beat you? Molest you?” I did not respond. He sighed. “If I had folks with that kinda dosh to sling around, I’d -” 

“Please drop it, Karl.” 

“I just had to do minor fuckin’ surgery on your ass, Charlie!” 

And I was silent again. And he sighed again. 

“Just — you can sleep on my floor tonight, man. Try not to move around too much. I’ll give you a pillow to prop the thing up on. Just gimme a minute. Gimme a minute. I need to cool off, man. I’m too heavy right now. I need to fuckin’ cool off.” He picked up the peanut butter again, took the lid off, dipped two fingers in, and stuck them in his mouth. 

I only slept for about two hours before careening awake with a sour bubbling in the pit of my gut. I don’t remember what it was I’d been dreaming about but Hong Kong Garden was stuck in my head. And I felt sick, really sick. I groaned right up and made my way to the bathroom, pulled my hair back, and hung my head over the toilet with five thousand pounds of pressure concentrated right on the peak of the vertebrae that constituted my currently horizontal neck. Nothing at first, besides my mouth stubbornly tasting like rotten dry coke regardless of how many passes I made on it with a toilet-brush-tasting tongue. Then, a rumbling that happened somewhere north of my navel and behind my ears, some building of bile, a slack in the shoulders and a throbbing tenderness in the gums, a thin shrill crackle of misremembered stratocaster stabs at the base of the forehead in some rough-cornered eastern scale, some trifling pseudo-operatic shrieks, an emulsion of tan soupy fluid passing the lips and splashing the water back onto the face because it’s leaned too close. Another string of bile, in bumps and jolts, thick gulps of the stuff, and a coat of viscous ectoplasm coating my mouth and my fingertips until it was just spasmodic spasms, and dry, like coughing backwards. 

There was a nice old not-damp shag rug in the middle of the bathroom. I curled up into it, I leaned my head into it, I snuggled into it, I embraced it, I swaddled myself into the faded yellowish tile and let it wrap around me and a dim orb of streetlamp light trickled through shades of a dingy window. And I slept there until someone came in the next morning to take a leak. 

I dreamt of an eggshell-creme room with red stripes that could’ve been curved or straight, or on the floor or on the walls or the ceiling, I don’t remember. Just a series of thick constructs breaking it up, nominally like shelves flowing into aisles but more viscerally a series of curbs stretched out into engorged caricatures of something I didn’t know. The floor might’ve looked like something but I don’t remember. Maybe there wasn’t one, but I was stepping on something. And I could see a fat red man eating chips behind my eyes. I ran with nobody behind me, though I thought I knew I had to. When I woke up I tried to catch the bus but I couldn’t pay the fare. So I walked.