Vacation by Jeremy C. Shipp Read Free Book Online Page A

unfamiliar environment.” She pockets her notebook. “So, Mr. Johnson, I suggest you stay here for a while. You won’t be harmed. Quite the opposite in fact. You’ll find that out for yourself in a short time. Ah, here he is.”
    A kid, maybe 20, steps up from behind me. He’s got a patch on one eye, and he wears a T-shirt with the Pax clam stitched on. The clam’s getting stabbed in the mouth with a samurai sword. “Hey man, let’s go.” He punches me on the arm. “We gotta get you fixed up.”
     
    The kid lifts my shirt, and fondles my stomach, and sniffs my breath, and tells me to stick out my tongue (which I don’t), and sandwiches my hand between his own, and squeezes my fingernails, and plays with my hair, and all the while he says things like, “Oh shit,” and “Wow.”
    I don’t look at his face during this process, but I can see his arms and his hands. His skin is perfection, just like the woman’s from before.
    “I’m Odin by the way,” he says. “I used to go by something else, but Noh started calling me that ever since I fucked up my eye. I don’t know why Odin, but who cares. It sounds cool. Oh!” Then he pulls up my sleeve and shakes his head, the way you did, mom, when you were disappointed, but not surprised to find yourself disappointed. “You bruise easy, man.”
    He heads over to the corner of this small room of sorts, and rustles through some plastic boxes. When he comes back, he’s holding a handful of pills, shapes and sizes galore. “Trust me when I tell you this, you need these.” I don’t take them, so he sets them beside me, on a dresser. One of them rolls off, into the dirt. “I’ll go get you some veg and water. Sit on the bed if you want.” He leaves, just like that.
    He comes back, and I’m still standing in the same spot, with the same stupid look on my face. I know, because there’s a mirror in front of me. He holds out a plate of vegetables. I don’t take it, so he sets it beside the pills. Then he picks up the fallen pill and blows it off. He adds it to the pile. He points. “When you take that little one right there, hold it under your tongue or it won’t do shit.” He turns around. “That reminds me, I gotta go take a dump. I’ll be back and we can keep working.” And he leaves again.
    The woman and this guy, they’re treating me like I’m a guest here. Like I’m not going to go nuts and attack them.
    And I don’t go nuts.
    And I don’t attack them.
    And I wonder if there’s something wrong with me.
     
    When Odin isn’t here giving me vegetables or eggs or water or white gunk to rub all over my body, I’m serving my time in solitary. No, this chamber they’ve given me isn’t a prison cell, but I treat it that way.
    I feel like a villain.
    Every time on the chamber pot, a new type of minion squiggles from my ass. There’s the black eggs, and the clear little squids, and the furry yellow balls, and the foot-long sac, and the angel hair pasta, and the red gummyworms, and the brown spiders, and I don’t know how much of this is me demonizing all my crap, and how much is real. But whatever these sick little bastards are, they remind me of Krow. She had attachments to her body that she never wanted or asked for.
    I wonder if she keeps them in a jar.
    I’m happy to throw mine away.
    But the bad things don’t just leave through my ass. They attempt to squeeze out my pores, and ravage my skin in rashes and hives.
    My muscles spasm.
    My eyes twitch.
    My body can’t sleep when I want to sleep, then my body can’t stay awake when I’m tired of the nightmares.
    I wonder if Frankenstein’s monster was zapped to life, like in the movies, or if the process took days.
    I wonder how long a body can last not quite dead and not quite alive, before it has to succumb to one path.
    I wonder if I care which way I go.
    But then things change. I change. Not the way I changed into a Tourist. This is a change I haven’t chosen.
    When I realize how many hours