Alex Capdeville lives in Paris with his wife and daughter. He has published a translation of his short story “The Stranger Chain” in the French review Rue Saint Ambroise, as well as an author interview with Ethel Rohan in Scoundrel Time.

I’ve been at Crushin’ It for six months. It’s the only rage room in town, where people pay eighty bucks to smash a few empty bottles and an old Xerox machine. I work the register, hand out weapons, and squirt sanitizer into customers’ palms. Todd Jensen is the manager. I’ve known Todd since school, back when he had an earring and dyed-blond hair just like the Bieber, and used to blow snot rockets down kids’ collars in the back of the school bus. We’ve been buddies since sixth grade. Maybe buddies isn’t the right word—he’s more like a permanent rash I’ve learned to live with.

Todd leans on the counter by the employee coffee machine, drinking a piña colada slurpee and flipping through his phone. His mask is slung under his chin.

He still has the earring.

“Oh dude, check this out,” he says. He’s on the dating apps again. I can tell by the creepy way he tickles his nostril with the tip of the fat red straw. He holds his phone out, but I turn and pretend to concentrate on sanitizing a ten-pound war hammer. Out of the corner of my eye I see him waggling the screen at me.

“Come on, bro,” he says. He won’t shut up until I look, so I do. There’s a lady with giant boobs and a red pushup bra. She has on like five gallons of mascara and is making a duck face.

“Classy, bro,” I say.

Todd shows me pictures of women almost every day—some old, some young, some dressed in oily swimsuits or violent-looking leather. He hooks up like three or four times a week. He keeps trying to get me on the apps so I can get laid, says it’s as easy as finding puppy shit in a pet store.

I haven’t been with a woman since I joined the service. Hell, I haven’t had a boner in at least seven months. The VA doc says that’s normal, on account of the meds and everything, but the whole thing makes me feel frustrated and confused, like someone’s inside my brain, breaking it to pieces. And Todd keeps showing me the pictures.

Under all the mascara, the boob lady looks kind of like Todd’s mom.

I go back to sanitizing my weapon.

. . .

I get home and Hernandez is there, sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning over his knees. “What’s up, Dopey?” I say. We gave Hernandez that name because of his pencil neck and big-ass ears, just like the dwarf. Dude looked like he’d gone to apply for a job as counselor at a Christian summer camp and wandered into the Marine recruiting office by mistake. He was barely eighteen when they shipped him out, just six months younger than me.

I kick off my shoes. I take off my shirt and pants and throw them on the floor and crawl into bed. Hernandez pays no attention to me, as usual. He’s in his drawers and green skivvies, dog tags swaying as he polishes a black dress shoe. His movements are quick and methodical. The cloth makes no sound as it rubs against the bright leather.

“Night, Dope,” I say, turning out the light.

. . .

We get all types at Crushin’ It. The stoned frat boys who break everything they paid to break, then pull more shit out of their pockets and break that, too. The geeky tech guys who go gung ho on the bottles, but hold back on the laptops and Xerox machines, I guess out of some gene-deep respect for technology. There’s the middle-aged housewife who takes a while to get into it, but then unleashes a shitshow that would make any Marine grunt proud. Ditto the middle-aged househusband. I watch them all on the security camera screen.

There’s another type, too. The girl who pays for the Rage-o-holic! package, a full hour in the room and forty-five smashable objects, and then sits perfectly still, not touching a thing. There’s only one of these. She’s about my age, has short brown hair with bangs dyed pink, an orange windbreaker, nose ring, and glasses. She never accepts our customer loyalty card. She’s so still that sometimes I forget she’s there. Once I almost locked her in the store overnight.

She’s in Room Five now, which occupies the middle square on the security screen. There’s a guy in Room Six, smashing an empty aquarium with a Pulaski, and a dad and his tween daughter in Room Four going to town on a microwave with shillelaghs. Room Two has a pair of exotic dancers on their lunch break from Peppermint Jack’s, the club across the street. They’re screaming and throwing Snapple bottles against an old TV, pausing to give each other high-fives and flip their long-nailed middle fingers at the broken screen.

The pink-banged girl is totally still, like the calm unmoving center of some bat-shit crazy tic-tac-toe. I zoom the camera in and look at her face. I feel I know her, but can’t remember how. Her eyes are half-open, staring at a spot on the floor a couple yards in front of her. Her back is straight, legs crossed at the ankle. The orange windbreaker hides her hands.

The front door opens and sets off the detector that says, “You’re CRUSHIN’ IT” in a voice that sounds like a robot John Cena. Two guys walk in, one short and pudgy, the other tall and thin and wearing glasses.

For a second I think they are Lance Corporal Davin and Corporal Higgs from my fire team. We used to call them Bert and Ernie. Corporal Higgs was the tall skinny one. He was from Ohio and was our team leader. Davin was an automatic rifleman, a wiseass from Tampa. Private Hernandez was from Bakersfield, the fire team’s rifleman and my battle buddy. He wore a cross around his neck and always said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” and shit like that.

One time we were on patrol outside of Shurandam. It was one hundred degrees outside, one-ten inside the HMMWV, and out of nowhere Hernandez said, “It doesn’t matter if you believe in Jesus, He believes in you,” like he was continuing a conversation that had already started inside his own head. Higgs groaned and rubbed his eyes.

“I believe,” Davin said, “that my balls have never been sweatier than right now.”

I snorted, and Higgs pointed out the window at an Afghan dude carrying a skinned goat over his shoulder.

Hernandez ignored them and turned to me with that irritating sincere look on his face. “‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’ Romans 12:21.” At that moment, I wanted to push Hernandez out of the vehicle. I wanted to see him rolling in the dirt, skinny-ass arms flying around like a broken kite. I wanted him to break something and fly all the way back home.

Higgs turned around and looked at me, face sweaty like a wet sugar beet. He was smiling in that mean way, with one nostril scrunched up. Hernandez was still looking at me with those camp-counselor eyes. Sweat clung to his wispy adolescent mustache fuzz. He still had zits.

“Hey, Dopey,” Higgs said. “Want to see something cool?” He nodded to me and I dug in my top pocket for the picture of the lady and the horse, the one Davin had bought off a sailor in Turkey. The lady was about fifty, chubby, with heavy makeup around her eyes and mouth. She was totally naked except for a gold necklace with a small cross on it. Davin and Higgs thought this last detail was particularly funny. I didn’t like looking at the picture. It felt like getting punched in the stomach. But everyone in the squad took turns carrying it, and I wasn’t going to break tradition.

I pulled out the picture and for one awful second I thought Hernandez was going to cry. But he just stared at it, eyes big and uncomprehending, like he was trying to read a foreign alphabet. He stared at my eyes and looked like he was going to ask a question, but then turned to the window. I heard him whisper, “For He is kind to the unfaithful and the doer...” just before Davin and Higgs blew up laughing.

The front door slams, and the two guys walk up to the counter. I see how different they are from Higgs and Davin. They have university hoodies and shaggy hair and soft-looking noses that have probably never smelled chemical weapon runoff. They look like they sleep at night. A squirt of hand sanitizer each and a couple of cricket bats and I send them on to their Room.

An hour later, it’s ten-thirty and the end of my shift, so I count out the till. I punch in the alarm code, close up before it goes off, and head for home.

. . .

Mom is already asleep. She’s on the couch with the yellow and white afghan over her legs, the one that reminds me of scrambled eggs. I turn off the TV and pick her up—she weighs nothing—and carry her to bed.

“Good boy,” she mumbles, still asleep. I feel like shit whenever she says this. I kiss her forehead and turn on the three-foot plastic Rio de Janeiro Jesus night-light she bought on Amazon, back when I was stationed in Kandahar, probably thinking that it would bring me back in one piece. Maybe she was right. Jesus has three settings. I put it on the first one, where only his hands glow.

I get my meds from the bathroom, grab a Dr. Pepper from the fridge, and then go into the living room to sit on the couch. The remote is under my butt cheek, so I pull it out and turn the TV back on. I put the bottles prescribed by the VA doc on the coffee table, lining them up by size. The bottle of Effexor is three-quarters full, and I empty it into my palm. The red capsules shine like candy, like the Hot Tamales I used to eat as a kid. Gel caps, slow-release, anti-anxiety, anti-depressive, relief of chronic pain. High doses induce seizure, coma, heart failure, followed by relief of chronic pain. I could probably get the whole bottle down in three or four swallows. I take a sip of Dr. Pepper.

Mom starts snoring. She’s always been a loud snorer, but lately it’s gotten worse. It sounds like she’s revving a Harley in bed. I put the capsules back, scooping my palm with the bottle. An episode of Fear Factor is on TV. A guy sits motionless in a phone booth while they pour buckets of tarantulas through a hole cut in the top. The guy sits totally still, but his eyes look as big as golf balls.

. . .

I sit behind the counter and stare out the front window at the parking lot. The sky is a dumb cloudless blue. My eyes are starting to close by themselves. I saw Hernandez again last night, and didn’t get any sleep. He sat on the edge of my bed, like always, polishing that black dress shoe. He never says anything, just keeps polishing. When he first started coming I would scream at him, beg him to talk to me. Sometimes Mom woke up, asking me from her room if everything was okay. But screaming was no use, and after a while I stopped waiting for an answer.

An old pickup pulls up, farting black smoke out of the tailpipe. It’s mostly white, with large patches of Bondo. “You’re CRUSHIN’ IT,” robot John Cena says, and three very drunk construction workers stumble through the door. Two of them pick crowbars, the third a pair of nunchaku. I advise against the nunchaku, but the dude just laughs and does a crappy Bruce Lee impersonation. One guy picks elbow pads, another a pair of leather gardening gloves. All three choose Viking helmets. I send them to Room Seven and watch on the security screen. They all laugh while the third dude swings the nunchaku and whacks the horns off the other two guys’ helmets. On average, I call the paramedics twice a month.

Todd is in the lobby, on the customer couch that’s between the door and the counter, flipping through his phone. His shoes are on the floor and his feet on the coffee table with all the magazines. We have Sports Illustrated, Guns and Ammo, Tiger Beat. Todd’s smelly socks sit on the latest copy of Living.

Todd always talked about joining the service. We actually went to the recruiting center together and took the aptitude test. I signed up the next day and Todd was supposed to do the same, but he didn’t answer his phone. The next day he told me that the doctor said he had bone spurs in his feet. Probably for the best. I can’t imagine Todd humping through Afghanistan in full battle rattle.

But I wouldn’t have been able to imagine Hernandez humping either, yet there he’d been, in Kevlar and body armor and cradling his M-16 in tactical carry, just like we were trained to do. He always wore his dog tags on the inside of his vest and his little silver cross on the outside, and in his top pocket carried a picture of his mom, which he showed to the other guys. This was a big mistake, because Hernandez’s mom was hot. He was sitting at a table in the dee-Fak when PFC Nugent came up from another table and said, “Hey Dope, let me see that picture of your moms.” I remember the expression on Hernandez’s face as he looked at me, for advice or approval. We were battle buddies after all, meant to have each other’s back. But I hadn’t been with a girl since I got a handy from Manda Fuentes after graduation in the cab of her pickup in the Costco parking lot.

“Come on, Dope,” Nugent said. “I just miss my family. They don’t send a lot of pictures. It’s nice to see family.” Hernandez narrowed his eyes, but I nodded at him and he pulled the picture out of his top pocket and handed it over. It made the rounds of the barracks before it got back to him, finger-rubbed and worn around the edges. He was quieter after that, didn’t quote so much Scripture, and I never saw that picture again.

Bottles smash methodically in Room Six. From Room Three comes the telltale sound of a bass drum being hit with an axe. I check the screen. The pink-banged girl is in Room Two, sitting perfectly still, per usual.

Someone in Room Seven says, “Ouch, fucker!” and I go back to cleaning the football helmets with Handi Wipes.

The Room Two door opens and the pink-banged girl comes out. She looks at me for a second, like she’s going to say something, and then pulls her mask back on and takes one of our customer loyalty cards from the stack by the register. Todd looks up as she walks out the door and jerks his thumb in a get-a-load-of-this-shit gesture and goes back to his magazine. I watch her as she crosses the parking lot, hands in the windbreaker, her purple Docs shining like they’re wet.

. . .

Truth is I didn’t see much shit over there. I spent more time watching episodes of Narcos and Ice Road Truckers than getting into firefights, ate more Pizza Hut than MREs. I whacked off about a thousand more times than I fired my weapon. Actually, I never fired my weapon at anyone. The only thing I ever shot at was a goat standing on a mud wall, and I missed by a couple of yards.

Hernandez used to pray before every patrol. He’d kneel over his bunk with his hands clasped to his forehead, eyes closed and lips flapping silently away for at least fifteen minutes, which is a long time for a one-way conversation. Who knows, maybe it worked.

One day we were out on foot patrol. The sky was the same pale dumb blue it had been every day for weeks. We were in wedge formation, Davin on point, followed by Higgs, Hernandez and me on the flanks. There was fuck-all in every direction. We passed a mud hut, and the LT told Higgs to clear it, so we peeled off from the rest of the platoon. Before we got to the door some dude came out with his hands up. He had the beard, the turban, the whole deal. Davin yelled at him to get the fuck down, and the dude chatted away in his language, smiling the whole time. Two more men came out and also kneeled down. We all had our rifles aimed at their heads, and Higgs told us to back the fuck up, slowly, in case the men had hidden bomb belts. The first dude kept chatting away, smiling, hands up in the air, and finally Higgs called for the platoon translator.

“Sancho!”

Sancho, a short round Afghani with a thin mustache, trotted over on his little bowlegs. His real name was Ashequllah, but I guess that was too hard for the average grunt to remember.

Sancho talked with the turban dudes, pointed at Davin, and then patted his belly.

“Fuck that,” Davin said. Higgs looked at him hard and jerked his head and Davin lowered his weapon and pulled each guy off the ground in turn and patted them down. They lowered their hands and Sancho called LT over. The three men never stopped smiling.

LT walked over and stood in front of the turban dudes and Sancho began to translate. LT had been an offensive tackle at MSU before going to officer school, and had to lean way down so Sancho could translate into his ear. His large face was the same color as Sancho’s mustache, but no matter how hot it was, LT never seemed to sweat.

LT nodded as Sancho spoke, said something that was then translated, and the three men all started pointing at once. One of them opened his tunic and showed LT his Batman t-shirt. Sancho gave us a wave without looking at us and we lowered our weapons. The first dude said something to Sancho and then pointed to the hut, and then one of the others went back inside, coming out a few seconds later with three AKs and a RPG launcher. He cradled them in his arms like a dead medium-sized dog, and then set them gently at LT’s feet. LT got on the radio and talked for a few minutes as Sancho shared his cigarettes with the three dudes. I stood next to Hernandez.

Then a little kid came out of the hut. At first I thought it was a little girl, but it was a boy dressed in girl’s clothes. He had on lipstick and mascara. One of the turban guys rubbed his hand on the kid’s back while he talked. The kid must have got bored, because he wandered over to the corner of the hut and squatted on his heels. He looked up at us for a second, his eyes big and dark inside black circles, and then he put his chin on his knees and picked up a stick and poked at a huge camel spider crawling over a rock. I looked at Hernandez like, “What the fuck?” but Hernandez just stared at the kid. His jaw clenched and his trigger hand trembled.

LT got off the radio and pointed to the weapons piled at his feet. Sancho said something and the guys nodded, all excited.

The little kid had stopped poking the stick at the giant spider, and was now poking it with his finger. I was worried he might get bit, but I didn’t want to interrupt LT. The kid picked the spider up by the leg and flung it into the air, and before it could run away, he picked it up and flung it again.

LT said something and Sancho translated and LT gave the first tunic dude that quick little nod he gives us when he wants us to get the fuck out of his sight but doesn’t want to have to say it. He turned his back on them, mumbled something, and spit on the ground. It was the first time I’d seen LT spit. He was usually pretty formal. Dignified.

Sancho gave the men a pack of cigarettes, saying something that made them all laugh. Two of them bent over and picked up the AKs and my arms automatically lifted my weapon, and then they turned around and brought the guns back into the hut. The second dude picked up the RPG launcher, and the first dude waved and smiled and then turned his head and whistled at the kid. The kid didn’t hear him, or was ignoring him, and continued torturing the camel spider. The dude said something fast and harsh and the kid looked up. He lifted his foot and smashed the spider with his pink sparkly sandals, and then followed the man into the hut, and we got back into formation.

Except Hernandez wasn’t there. He’d slipped off somewhere, and losing your battle buddy was not a good thing. I made a sign to Higgs and traced back to the end of the hut, and then went around the back. I found him sitting cross-legged in front of a big rock. His helmet was upturned on his lap. He didn’t look like he was praying, just sitting and staring at nothing.

“What the fuck, Dope?” It was like he didn’t even know I was there. I got right up next to him before he reacted, and he got up silently, put his helmet back on, and we rejoined the platoon.

We got back to base and went to our two-man can. I turned out the light, but could see Hernandez’s shadow sitting up in bed. 

“Hey Dopey, you cool?” I said. 

He didn’t say anything. 

“Hernandez.”

Still nothing. I turned out the light, rolled over, and fell asleep.

Three days later, I went to the food court on base. I got a Whopper and fries, and picked up a Cinnabon for Hernandez. He always loved that shit, and he’d been extra quiet since the mud hut.

When I got back I couldn’t open the door, and had to shove it with my shoulder as something dragged on the ground. My boots were in a puddle of piss, and Hernandez was on the floor, one end of his belt on the doorknob, the other around his neck.

. . .

I sit outside on the red part of the curb in front of the Vons Pavilions, eating my burrito. It’s hot and bright, and I hide in the last sliver of shade made by the supermarket’s portico. The pink-banged girl walks across the parking lot and goes up to the front door of Crushin’ It. She makes a hand visor and looks through the window and takes a step back. The new part-time guy Phil is on the register. Phil is in his late fifties, with a grayish beard and a belly like a bass drum. He lives over his mother’s garage.

She spots me on the curb and waves at me, coming over, head tilted and elbow on her hip, her arm moving slow like she’s washing a window. She sits down next to me. Her eyes are huge behind her glasses. There’s a little brown mole under her right nostril, and in a flash I remember who she is—Christy Samahd, from my tenth-grade social studies class. Her nickname was The Booger.

Christy jerks her thumb at the store. “Who’s that guy?” 

“That’s Phil,” I say, taking a bite of my burrito.

“He looks like Santa Claus.”

“Santa Claus is better at his job.”

“I’m Christy,” she says, without offering her hand. She’s staring out at the parking lot.

“I remember.” She looks at me, like she’s surprised to be remembered. “We had class together.”

“Oh yeah,” she says, like she knows what I’m talking about, but the blank look on her face tells me that she totally doesn’t. She takes a pack of mints out of her pocket and offers me one. I shake my head and point to my burrito and she shrugs and pops one in her mouth.

Her mole doesn’t look like a booger at all, up close. But no one ever got close to Christy. She was a loner, rejected by both the girls and the boys. She’d always reminded me of a squirrel on a branch waiting to be attacked by a larger animal. She dressed differently back then, like Little House on the Prairie, with the long white dress and tall shoes. She even had the double braids. Her stepdad would drop her off at school every morning in his gray Silverado, and pick her up again exactly on time. There were bumper stickers on the window of the cab that said Army Reserve, The Home Team, and From My Cold Dead Hands, and he had one of those little Jesus fish welded to the tailgate. He’d get out of his truck and stand on the curb, legs slightly spread and hands clasped in front of his belt buckle. He had a trim blond mustache and a baseball hat, his t-shirt tucked into his jeans. He stood so straight he made his civvies look like dress blues. Christy would be well into the building before he climbed into his truck and drove methodically out of the parking lot.

Christy watches as a pretty blond gets in her SUV and backs out too fast, scraping the side of the beat-up Saturn parked next to her. She stops, rolls down her window, looks both ways and then hauls ass out of the parking lot.

I raise my burrito for another bite, and then lower it again. “Why do you just sit there?”

She sucks on a mint, making a little crater in her cheek. “They say I have problems.”

Christy disappeared after the tenth grade. There were different rumors going around—her parents got arrested and she was put into foster care; she’d died in a plane crash on her way to Phoenix; she murdered her stepdad with a pneumatic nail gun and was locked up in the psych ward.

The mole’s actually kind of cute.

“What kind of problems?” I ask.

“I shot myself with a nail gun. Right here.” She makes a gun with her finger and puts it on the top left part of her skull. She folds her thumb a few times like she’s shooting, crosses her eyes, and sticks out her tongue. She laughs. “I didn’t die. Obviously.”

I think of a nail going into a brain and I put my burrito down.

Christy looks at her Docs. The soles make sticky sounds when she pulls them off the asphalt. She scrunches her eyebrows. “I don’t know,” she says after a while. “Why I sit there. I guess I like the sound of things breaking. It makes me quiet inside, like being in the middle of a storm. In the eye or something.” She pulls a small piece of paper from her pocket and folds it into a tiny square, setting it on the curb between us. It’s the customer loyalty card. She watches it slowly unfold, and then she leans in close to me. “I’m Christy,” she says, and offers me a mint.

“Are you fucking with me?” I say. Her eyes fade and her face goes blank, and I can tell that she’s not. She shakes her head and looks back at the lot.

The door opens and Phil sticks his head out. Robot John Cena’s voice is faint, like someone shouting loudly from very far away.

“Sorry,” Phil calls. “But this customer is asking for a flail, and I’m not sure what that is.”

I stick my half-eaten burrito in its bag and stand up. Christy looks at her boots again. I pick up the loyalty card. “I’ll stamp this out for you,” I say. “Your next hour is free.”

She lifts her head and smiles.

. . .

I check the security camera. There’s a short fat guy in Room Three, sluggishly whacking ceramic garden gnomes with a nightstick. He paid with a gift certificate. There’s a pair of old ladies in Room Five, messing up a mannequin with a spiked mace and a halberd. They’re wearing party masks over their helmets, which is a service we provide. The masks are thin plastic, with an elastic strap across the back. We have psycho-looking clowns, Darth Maul, Iron Man, Gandalf, and that mustache guy from Anonymous. The old ladies are both psycho clowns.

The women’s bathroom is out of toilet paper. I go through the Employees Only door into the stockroom, where we keep the protective gear and toilet supplies. I’m taking a twelve-pack of pink Angel Soft off the shelf when I hear something in the office.

Todd has his head on the desk and his shoulders are shaking. There’s a little bald spot on the back of his head. I knock lightly on the open door and he lifts his head. His eyes are red and puffy, like he’d just been pepper-sprayed. A line of snot connects his nostril to his sleeve. I open the pack and hand him a fresh pink roll.

“I’m totally fucked,” he says. He sticks two fingers into the cardboard roll, unwinds some paper, and blows his nose. His deep inhale stutters with sobs, and then he blows his nose again. The sick-sweet perfume of the paper smells like rotten flowers. “This girl was like, you know.” He makes giant boobs with his hands. “We only did it two or three times. Three. Down in the Motel 6 on Lime. She did all kinds of stuff to me. She must have hid a camera in the room, and now she wants five grand. Jesus, what if my mom sees that video.” He goes into another sobbing fit and puts his head back on his arms.

I look at the framed motivational picture he has up on the wall behind his desk. There’s a kitten looking into a mirror, and a tiger in the mirror looking back out. The caption reads: PERSPECTIVE IS EVERYTHING. In the reflection of the frame’s glass I see that I’m smiling.

I take my toilet paper to the ladies’ room.

. . .

Mom’s snoring is getting louder. The doctor says her sleep apnea is worsening, and that soon she’ll need to sleep with a machine. Hernandez is there, polishing his shoe, his outline a little darker than the darkness surrounding it. I sit up and turn on the light. “Why are you polishing that fucking shoe?” I whisper loudly. “Where’s the other one?”

He stops polishing and lifts his head. The back of his skull is pale gray under the shaved black hair. His big-ass ears make even bigger shadows on the wall, like Mickey Mouse size. He’s real still for a while, and I wonder if he’s praying.

“I don’t pray anymore,” he says. His voice sounds just like it did before, high and nasal, like a twelve-year-old was trapped inside his throat. I’m kind of not surprised that he can read my thoughts.

“Why?” I say. He shrugs, as if I’d asked him where my car keys were, and then goes back to polishing. “Why?” I say again, and he turns to look at me. His face is just like I remembered it, except there are big black holes where his eyeballs should be. He snaps the cloth against the bedsheets with a loud pop and then goes back to polishing.

“Honey?” Mom calls from her room. “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?” I realize I’m screaming.

. . .

I start to clean up at nine fifty-five. I wipe the door handles with disinfectant, scrub the toilets, and sanitize the weapons, helmets, and body armor. I sweep up the broken glass in Rooms One, Five, and Seven, and take two Hefty bags of trash out back to the dumpster. I make a list of items I need to restock and write a note to Phil, asking him to call the county dump to see if any more Xerox machines or VCRs have come in. Phil has been getting more responsibility lately, on account of Todd not coming around so much since his problem at the motel.

In the past year I’ve gone one hundred and eighty-two days without any deep sleep. I’ve spent nine hundred and forty-two hours at work, have eaten over five hundred fast food meals, drunk about a thousand Dr. Peppers. I’ve taken two hundred and thirty-five Ambien, twice as many Ativan, and I’ve lost count of all the Effexor I’ve eaten. But I know how many I have left.

I don’t want Mom to find me. I know how fucked up that would be. I don’t mind so much if it’s Phil.

The late-night crowd is finishing up their destruction. About twenty minutes ago, I gave baseball bats to about two dozen Japanese chiropractors in town for a convention, and sent them to Rooms Two, Four, Six, and Eight. It’s a total shitshow. I stand in front of the open Employees Only door, looking at the nice comfy nest I made for myself out of twelve-packs of Angel Soft. I brought a six-pack of Dr. Pepper, and in my pocket I have my Effexor, two boxes of Xanax, and half a bottle of Ambien.

The door to Room Three opens and Christy comes out. She stands next to me and looks down at the bed of toilet paper. “Planning on eating more burritos?”

I can’t help but smile.

“So, where’s my free hour?” she says.

At first I don’t have one fucking clue what she’s talking about, and then I remember the loyalty card. I dig in my pocket and find it there, creased and crumbled. Christy grabs my hand and pulls me down the hall to Room Three, closing the door behind us.

Nothing is broken, as usual. There’s no chair in here, and she sits cross-legged on the floor, nodding at me to join her. We sit very still, but the Room is far from quiet. It sounds like what I imagine a mortar strike to sound like, if I had ever been in a mortar strike. The sound insulation between these Rooms isn’t worth shit, but I guess that doesn’t matter if you’re smashing stuff, too. The only way to not be bothered by destruction is to destroy.

Christy sits with her eyes half-closed. I look around at all the unbroken bottles, the pictures on the wall, the dot-matrix printer on the table. There’s a shade-less ceramic lamp in the shape of Donald Duck, an empty five-gallon Sparklets bottle a quarter full of old golf balls, a string of burned-out light bulbs hanging like fruit on a length of bungee cord. An orange Formica table holds a laserdisc player, cords dangling off the surface like jungle vines. I can’t seem to focus on any one thing. My heart is pounding and my eyes are blurry. Battle cries come from the other Rooms, screams and shattering, the smash pause suck and boom of large glass things being broken. I feel my palms sweating. Someone releases a high-pitched maniacal scream and something large and metal smashes to the floor. My brain, flying in every direction, can’t pin down a single thought, Hernandez praying on his bed, dangling from the doorknob, eyes big as golf balls, face purple, Mom’s face stuffed with tubes, still on a bed, my face white, dead on a table. I shake, and then there’s a hand on my hand.

Christy still has her eyes half-closed, staring at the floor. Her hand is small and soft, full of blood and heat. I don’t know how long we sit like that, but the wild roar starts to thin, and the chiropractors wrap up their destruction and open and close the doors with orderly respectful clicks. “You’re CRUSHIN’ IT,” robot John Cena says, and I hear them file out of the store.

It is very quiet now, inside and out.

I open my eyes and Christy smiles at me. She leans over and kisses my cheek, and then gets up to go. She pauses, turns around, and says, “I’m Christy,” and then she leaves.

I look down and realize I have a boner.

. . .

A forty-something couple, on what is clearly a first date, finish up in Room Seven. They hand me their tire irons and I squirt sanitizer on their hands. The woman’s face is flushed red with blood and adrenaline, and the man seems taller than when he first came in. They’re all smiles. They leave, and in the parking lot, the woman shoves the man against the side of a minivan and presses her face into his, rubbing her hands all over the front of his pants. I wipe down the counter and rearrange the magazines on the coffee table.

Hernandez wasn’t in my room last night, but I dreamed that he was, which is pretty good, because having a nightmare means that I slept.

It’s ten-thirty. I empty the trash cans and mop the bathroom floors. The Angel Soft is where I left it last night, and I stack it back on the shelf. I pass the Swiffer over the carpet in the lobby, count out the till and put the cash in the night-drop bag, turn off the overhead lighting, and head for the back door.

“Give me the bag, motherfucker,” a voice says behind me. I turn and Gandalf is standing there, in black sweatpants and hoodie. He must have snuck in the back door while I was Swiffering, and then hid in Room Three while I counted the cash. He holds a gun that’s obviously plastic.

“I said give it to me. I’ll fuck you up.” The words have the slow motion effect of someone trying to make their voice deeper than it is. An earring glints behind the Gandalf mask.

Todd has always been an idiot.

“What are you doing, Todd?” I say.

He takes a step forward and pushes the gun in my face. “Who the fuck is Todd? I said give me the bag!”

“Dude, I can totally tell it’s you.”

“I’ll fucking shoot you!”

I take the gun from his hand and toss it over my shoulder, and continue toward the back door.

Todd takes off his Gandalf mask and slides his back down the storage room door until he’s sitting on his heels. I punch in the alarm code and hit the ENTER button. I have forty-five seconds to shut the door before the alarm goes off. “Are you coming?” I say. He looks up at me, chin trembling in pre-cry. The door opens in Room Two and Christy comes out into the hall. She stops for a second, looking pretty in the green light of the emergency exit sign, and smiles at me like she hasn’t seen me for a hundred years. She doesn’t say a word, but loops her arm through mine, and leads me out the door.

Christy feels good pressed against me. I stop and look at my empty hand that should be holding the cash bag, look back at the store and see the open door, and a second later the alarm wails through the alley. My pocket buzzes, the security company calling to check for a false alarm. I leave the phone in my pocket and pull Christy closer. The night is quiet, and one of the alley’s two streetlamps is busted, a dead black orb in place of the light. The other one shines brightly down on the dumpster bay, and reflects in thin waves in the alley puddles. Christy’s face is lit on one side.

 I remember the only time I saw Hernandez smile. We were outside the wire, just before dawn. The thin cool morning was very quiet, the only sounds the distant yaps and whines of a coyote. There’d been a snowstorm in the mountains that night, and the young light glowed against the sharp white mountains in soft reds and purples that I had never seen before or since. We were alone on watch, sitting on a large cold rock. Hernandez turned to me, mouth hanging in goofy wonder, this kid from Bakersfield who had never seen snow. His night vision goggles were perched on top of his helmet like some crazy teen-aged scientist. And as he looked at me, the sun rose, and the mountains flashed in a silent explosion of light so fierce and raw that it burned my eyes, but I could not look away.  