Love Is A Fucking River

Love Is A Fucking River Part 1 of 2

When Vanessa left me, she actually said "Fuck you and fuck your dogs too" like that crazy heffa from the Wizard of Oz. I think it might've even been a misquote actually, she was never very good with word for word shit. Anyway, I don't know how someone's heart can be so shriveled and demented that they could wish malice on five dogs as wonderful as mine, but then again, the world is full of Saddam Husseins and George Bushes, so who's to say?

I catch a glimpse of Janey's face watching the dim Brooklyn streets glide by. She looks so serious, like the world outside is a great open book she has to consider very carefully. I can't imagine a girl like Janey, woman really, a woman like Janey ever harboring such pointless aggression. Anger, yes. Rage even. That stunning, justified rage. But that kind of hatred? I think not. But what do I know?

"Aquí," Gordo mutters as we pull up to my building.

I nod.

"Listen," Carlos says, sounding like he's striving for reasonableness. "I believe what you say about your tía, Janey. I didn't mean to come across like that. It's just that..." He has her attention. Even big Gordo tunes into the gravity in Carlos' voice. "...this thing, this...entity – it's not like most. I don't know how familiar you are with," he shoots a weary glance in my direction, "this topic, but this particular one is...more powerful. Especially when combined with a living form."

Okay, I don't care if you're Cuban, Dominican, Boricua or straight Southern Black – dig deep enough, we all got brujos in the family tree somewhere. It's a fact of life. Imma not even get into mine, I tended not to pay her much mind to be honest, but I know enough to know the difference between a charlatan, someone who is just batshit crazy and someone that knows what the fuck they're dealing in. I'm not even saying I believe in ghosts or nothin'. I'm just saying, Carlos is not playing around. None of 'em are. And whatever entity shit he's talking about? It's real. On some level, it's real. I know because when he speaks on it I feel all the hairs on my arm stand at attention and all my insides seem to cringe at the same time.

Janey's got a determined face on, but when she says "Okay," there's a shiver in her voice. Gordo just nods.

"So why don't you..." Carlos starts to say to Janey.

"No." She cuts him off. "I'm coming in with you." It's obviously not up for debate.

Carlos sees it as clearly as I do, so he just sighs and gets out of the cab. "Keep it running," he says with a certain gruff resignation in his voice.

The three of them head up the front steps and into my apartment building and I just sit there staring at the door and feeling oddly giddy and terrified for a few minutes. Then the giddiness goes away and I admit it: I get caught up with all kinds of phantom imaginings. I'm actually pretty well put together, physically. Buff, I'd even say. Much more so since things started getting rocky with Vanessa, because when shit's not right in life, I work out. When I'm confused, I work out. If I can't make heads or tails of a situation, if the words I need to express myself aren't there, if my thoughts are one big tangle of shit? Find me at the gym. There, at least I can make sense of something, feel my body grow, struggle and triumph. Something.

It was a pretty bad breakup, to be honest with you, so I'm huge. But huge doesn't count much when you're fighting off "entities" like the one Carlos was describing. I don't know much about it, but I know things like that don't give two fucks how much you can benchpress. And you know, spiritually, I keep my dashboard saints and talk to them when I need parking or the strength not to call Vanessa and curse her out, but otherwise: church only very occasionally.

So when the door of my building swings suddenly open it scares the everloving shit out of me. There's a figure standing there, all shadowy and backlit by the rude fluorescents in the lobby. And here I am feeling about as unprepared for this as anything I've ever faced in my life, and Vanessa's angry mug is still dancing around in my subconscious, well not sub at all really, she's right there at the surface, cursing me out and telling me I 'aint shit. And right about now, she's right, I really 'aint shit at all. I'm just some overlarge asshole in a Crown Vic. The figure in the doorway just stands there for a few minutes and the whole world around us goes perfectly still, like even the trees don't want to move for fear it'll notice them and hurl some infernal wrath their way. So nothing moves, and then it takes a step forward and everything's swishing and swaying and alive in the night. Trash clutters down the street and leaves are whipping around. Am I making this up? The mind can play some foul and fuckedup tricks on a person, yes, but I swear by the lives of all of my five that the wind picked up strong right as the thing started moving, whereas just seconds before the world was cloaked in stillness. Thing, shadow, creature, form – whatever it is – it steps very slowly down each stair. And each movement is jerky, like it's some tin windup toy gone rusty over the years. It's tall and skinny and lurches towards me in uneven spurts, might collapse at any given moment into a sorry pile of skin and bones. And I pray that it does, but I know it won't. It's got the fury of intention behind each clunky move; collapsing is not on the menu.

I wonder, just before the creature steps into the pool of streetlight beside my cab, where Janey, Carlos and the Gordo are and why they let this entity get away so it could come kill me. I hope Janey's alright. Then I think how amazing it is that I just used what might be one of my last thoughts to worry about a woman I haven't spoken more than five words to, and not the one I spent the last three years of my life loving. I'm thinking how odd that is when the thing creaks forward into the light and I see it's face and I almost scream because it is Juan-José, the old guy from the eighteenth floor that lost his mind, but it's also not. First of all, Juanjo is always hunched over and he holds his arms and fingers all shriveled up into his body like a second, mangled ribcage. This thing, this entity...it stands perfectly erect and its arms dangle loosely at its sides, swaying gently as if blown by some unworldly breeze. And then there's the eyes. Juan-José's were pretty dull, like he couldn't be bothered to focus on anything. Nothing dramatic, just your average old guy blurriness. But the eyes that look back at me from the passenger side window, because now the thing has creased itself at the waste the better to glare in at me, those eyes are sharp, they seem to even vibrate slightly and the pupils are teeny tiny like a methadonians', tiny and sharp and fixed right on my face. And when it smiles, everything inside me says to peel off as fast as I can, be gone.

Well, not everything apparently, because that's not what I do. I think about Janey again, and what it'd be like if she came out and found me gone, and this thing here instead, and what she, any of them, would do. They asked me to stay, to leave it running even, and so that's what I do. And then Creature opens the damn passenger door, which I could've sworn I'd locked and sits down and says in a voice that sounds like its crawling with worms: drive, and so that's what I do.