Knife Play

I teach people how to defend against knife attacks on the internet. And I make more or less money than one would imagine, depending on how they were raised. When recording my knife defenses—my evasive spacing techniques, my high-percentage bursting techniques and my universal blocking methods—I use a special microphone that picks up my voice and little else. The microphone was expensive; the microphone cost a good bit. It came in a silver box lined with black felt. And this special microphone is necessary, because—as it so happens—I do live next to the biggest tributary connected to the biggest river in my beautiful country. 

Oh gosh. Oh yes, my house has a driveway I can back down. 

And I do.

I do back right down. 

Leaving an empty driveway in the afternoons when I go to a gym.

***

My gym has every color of gray metal. And a fancy bed I can lie in, and have a bright red light scan my entire body to make sure nothing inside of me has begun to clot or rebel. At my gym in my fancy bed: I can activate my best blood cells even if I went to the club the night before. Yes, I can also keep myself from metastasizing in the big plastic bed. 

It’s a great perk.

Being able to stay totally alive with the help of my gym.

***

Once, in the month of May, I was driving back from my gym when I found this little abandoned temple between two old factories. Both old factories had very tall smokestacks and wonderful yellow signs that warned trespassers, vandalizers and other delinquents that they’d be prosecuted to the fullest extent of my beautiful country’s beautiful laws. 

I drove up onto the deadbeat grass.

Right up to the mouth of the temple.

And got out of my car. 

And sure, yes, it took a bit of time, but eventually I pulled back the boards that covered the entrance to the temple and walked myself right inside—strutted in, actually—but in a hurry-up kinda way, like I was late for praying or service, or something I can’t totally explain. 

Once I was in.

I sat right in the dust. 

And I whistled a song I knew quietly. 

For a while.

And when I was done whistling, right there in the middle of everything, I made a snow angel in the dust like I was on television. I made one like I was a character on a show and my character stopped to do things that mattered.

Make things.

Remember people.

Trace my body with kite string and write lust-letters that will never be mailed.

It was so silly, my character’s way of charactering. Sillier still was the way I was becoming something like my character in real-time. My character: who then did the right thing and stopped flapping his arms against the warm tiles and began to wonder if he was an extension of something the temple once held or knew about holding or if he was just some horribly swallowed-up thing—right there—with me, us both on the floor of the temple, looking up at the unmoving ceiling fan as a siren started somewhere overhead or behind us. Yes, a few streets over an ambulance really started wailing. And then another. And another. But we didn’t move. No. No reason to. To us, the ground was softer, at least for now, so, we just blinked and blinked. 

Until there was a little chic chic chic down our leg. 

A mouse by our foot. By our shoe. A small, tiny thing. We kinda laughed and because we were still in television mode, said, “Hey buddy. Hey buddy-buddy-boy. Hello. Hello!”

But the mouse didn’t mind us, he just kept nosing around.

Playing with the cuff of our jogging pants.

“Dude,” we laughed. “What are you doing down there?”

He continued to ignore us, choosing instead to circle himself and bite into his own tail.

So, we sat up.

We watched.

***

Eventually, the mouse stopped nibbling on himself and looked at us. But we didn’t let on. No, no. We just kept laughing and smiling and laughing. As we bent towards our ankle and slowly removed our steel-carbon knife out from its holster.

We grinned again, taking great care not to startle the ancient demon. 

Then.

“Smart cookie,” said the mouse, his voice deep and with its own chorus. Like a classroom of ghouls answering in unison, every spitting voice of every violent life the mouse had lived stacked together and hissed as one. “It was you or me.” 

Our hands wrapped firmly around him, his vole heart racing beneath our thumb.

“How’d you figure it?”

“I assess danger for a living,” we said. And then we began doing what we do. 

What we did.

What we were capable of.

Stopping at one point to run out and grab a Gatorade from our gym bag and the wireless headphones that Gabby had gifted us for Easter. 

We listened to some rock n’ roll for a minute and chilled out.

We drank our Gatorade the way people do in commercials. 

Cracking our knuckles.

Pushing the sweat from our eyes.   

Then we got back to it.

The task.

Dicing him up. 

Oh yeah, television me was saying.

It’s just the work, I said.

Then we held up a long, fibrous tendon in the bit of sunlight that was breaking in through one of the boarded-up windows. 

And.

We did that for a long time.

Holding up different mouse parts to the light.

His pinkest parts.

His most evil parts.

Television me.

And the me that is not so concerned with cameras. 

Or limos. 

Or weekend box office returns.

The me that I can be when I’m moving a knife from hand to hand.

Or disarming a rubber assailant on webcam.

Or making my nephew, Ben, do the thing he hates most when we go to the farm for Holiday.

The me that I was right then, on that day.

In the middle of that dusted-up temple. 

Unfurling the most wondrous set of guts that I’d ever seen.

The me of my beautiful country. 

The me that is nothing more than a grateful denizen. 

A cheerleader.

A patriot with a bone-saw. 

Proud.

Of everything.

Yes, everything. 

Our starless flag.

Our bird-packed beaches and reddish sand.

Our abandoned temples and our winters, always mild, except for that year when the antelope came down early from the headlands and a storm moved in. And the car dealerships and the dog hospitals and the liquor warehouses all closed up early. And the lake froze over quick, with birds fast asleep beneath the wharf and party boats still way-out past the break. The crews could only send up flares. And the flares could only break apart in the high winds of the snow drift. 

Most of the ships ended up burning their trash in emptied hot tubs. 

Or covering their deck chairs in engine oil. 

Small fires in the dark, so that the rescue helicopters could see them. 

“They had to wait until spring to tow out the yachts,” I told the mouse.

What was left of the mouse.

Which was only some cranial nerves and blood vessels that attached the mouse’s eyes to his little gray brain and barely rising lungs.

No skin or muscle left. 

No shell. 

Like a clock radio taken apart.

It had turned dark at some point beyond the boarded windows.

The temple had turned blue and soft. 

“There was so much ice,” I said to the very last parts of the mouse. “That was the only time I ever went ice skating; the only time anyone has been able to go skating—ever!—in the entire history of our warm and wonderful nation.”  

Then I drank what was left of my Gatorade and kissed his little brain.

Right in the palm of my hand. 

I did. Just me.

Not the actor me.

But me.

And I felt his little pebble brain break apart under the weight of my lips.

Which was sad.

Real sad.

Because I’d tried to kiss gentle.