The One-Eyed Man Read online

  ALSO BY RON CURRIE

  Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

  Everything Matters!

  God Is Dead

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Ron Currie, Jr.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  9780735222809 (e-book)

  9780670025350 (hardcover)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To my fellow Americans

  The influences of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

  —ERASMUS

  Contents

  Also by Ron Currie

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: DON’T WALK

  Chapter 2: AN ODD SATURDAY, PRESAGING AN ODDER SUNDAY

  Chapter 3: GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE …

  Chapter 4: AS MUCH AS SHE NEEDS

  Chapter 5: FIFTEEN MINUTES

  Chapter 6: BETTER THAN FINE

  Chapter 7: FIFTEEN MINUTES, EXTENDED

  Chapter 8: THE LITTLE THINGS

  Chapter 9: A THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR A KISS, FIFTY CENTS FOR YOUR SOUL

  Chapter 10: OEDIPUS THE GAY COWBOY

  Chapter 11: HEROISM IS A FICTION

  Chapter 12: THE SECURITY DETAIL AS A KIND OF APOLOGY

  Chapter 13: AN ANOMALY OF AERODYNAMICS

  Chapter 14: INTOLERANCE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED

  Chapter 15: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WANTING AND WANTING

  Chapter 16: A SEEMINGLY INNOCUOUS INTERLUDE

  Chapter 17: YOU DON’T CHOOSE YOUR FAMILY, EXCEPT WHEN YOU DO

  Chapter 18: SOLIPSISM IS A SHARED FATE

  Chapter 19: YOU MAY ALL GO TO HELL, AND I WILL GO TO TEXAS

  Chapter 20: THE INHERITOR OF THE SPIRIT OF DAVY CROCKETT, OR WHO THE FUCK EVER

  Chapter 21: THE DETAILS OF THE PLAN

  Chapter 22: THE REPETETIVE, REDUNDANT, MONOTONOUS SPLENDOR

  Chapter 23: THE PRINCIPAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DOG AND MAN

  Chapter 24: GUILT IS NEVER TO BE DOUBTED

  Chapter 25: JOIN, AND DIE

  Chapter 26: ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE

  Chapter 27: THE SOLUTION TO ALL PROBLEMS

  Chapter 28: NOW

  1

  DON’T WALK

  That morning, in an effort to restore some normalcy to my weekend, I left the house and strolled to the coffee shop for a Grande Americano, just like a regular, irrational person.

  At the end of my street the cross signal read DON’T WALK, so I stopped on the curb and pushed the large silver button several times even though I was fully aware that it took only one compression to activate the signal. The coffee shop, a single-story cut stone building with one large plate glass window, sat on the corner directly across from me. It was busy, as midmornings on Sunday tended to be. People rushed in and out like they were looting the place. They pushed strollers and dragged dogs by the leash and carried great rolls of newsprint under their arms. I watched them come and go, glancing up now and again at the crossing signal, which still read DON’T WALK.

  While waiting for the crossing signal, I received a text message from Tony. It said that Alice didn’t want me at their house anymore. I felt a twinge of regret, like the mild fleeting sadness I’d experienced the previous night when hearing a story about Christians slaughtered like beef cattle at a Kenyan mall. But at the same time I understood why Alice didn’t want me around. After all, I’d vandalized her home. It was Sunday, so they likely had to wait another twenty-four hours for someone to come and fix the window, and in the meantime Tony probably had to tape a piece of cardboard over the hole to keep the cold out. Not a great scene. Our punk rock days, insofar as we’d had any, were well behind us. We were supposed to be weaning babies and fertilizing lawns and building equity—those yardsticks of nascent maturity—not breaking windows for the sake of doing so. I made a mental note to send Tony a check to cover the replacement.

  The signal continued to insist that I not cross the street.

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and back again. I checked my watch and saw that two hours had passed since I’d first left the house. The coffee shop was somewhat less busy now, but even though I’d gotten out of bed that morning intending to behave just like anyone else, I couldn’t bring myself to cross against the signal. People in cars stopped, stared at me expectantly, then shot goggle-eyed looks of exasperation when I waved them through.

  Contrails stitched the sky overhead, some tight and linear, other, older ones dissipating into bulbous puffs in the stratosphere. My mind, compensating perhaps for the ongoing physical stillness, wandered about. Somewhere in the world, surely, at that moment, someone was inflicting unimaginable pain on a dog. Somewhere else—perhaps even quite nearby—a stranger hurried through a silent, fraught ethical calculus while deciding whether to make up the difference on the grocery bill of a poor person in front of him. Elsewhere, no doubt, a man was inserting a finger into his own rectum as he masturbated. As I stood there on the street corner, a mere two lanes of intermittent traffic away from my coffee, people were roasting alive in fires, learning to crochet and speak rudimentary Spanish, planning weddings and murders. The Earth continued to plunge through the universe at an inconceivable speed, and upon it I waited in vain for the crossing signal to change, tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth as I dehydrated slowly, thighs stiffening with the cold, a modest awe at the vagaries of creation blossoming in me, as it did most days, these days.

  A few hours later the streetlamps flickered on, casting circles of bilious yellow across the pavement. Headlights from passing cars strobed my torso and face. The picture window in the coffee shop’s façade glowed a warm, beckoning orange, and people sat at tables before mugs that steamed like scale-model nuclear power plants. They slouched on their tailbones with their legs splayed in front of them, relaxed and comfortable. They watched videos on their tablets and turned the pages of analog books with studied contemplativeness. Gradually, as the evening drew on, in ones and twos they all departed, and by and by the girl behind the counter readied the shop for closing.

  Hands in my pockets, I watched as the girl came to the front door and threw the dead bolt, then emptied all the coffee urns into the sink and rinsed them with water from the tap. She upended the chairs and set them on tabletops and gave the floor a perfunctory mopping. She counted out her register and jammed a bunch of bills into a burlap cash bag, hurrying, hurrying. Maybe she had a date to get ready for, or maybe she was meeting friends. Perhaps she was just tired of work and had no plans more pressing than to not be at the coffee shop any longer, but whatever the reason there was a real urgency to her movements.

  I shivered. I looked at my watch, then again at the crossing signal. Despairing of my coff
ee, thinking I should finally turn back toward home, I glanced one last time at the picture window, and that was the moment when the man emerged from the bathroom and pointed a gleaming obsidian pistol at the girl who had served me my Americano all these years.

  For a moment they just stood there, the girl frozen in disbelief, the man trying to figure out what came next, like an actor waiting for his line. Then the man yelled at the girl, and motioned with the gun in a threatening way. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, of course, being across the street and on the other side of a thick pane of glass, but I could guess at the gist of it. He wanted money, certainly. Maybe he wanted something in addition to money, as well. One read about such things, from time to time.

  I reached for my phone. The crossing signal continued to glow red: DON’T WALK.

  The girl took the cash bag off the counter and held it out to the man. Before her arm was fully extended, he snatched the bag away and yelled at her again. At this the girl clapped her hands over her ears and bent at the waist, trying to disappear, trying to will herself to time travel, or disintegrate, or to become any of the versions of herself that she had ever been or would ever be, anything but this version of her who thirty seconds prior had perhaps been daydreaming about a glass of Pinot Grigio and was now wondering if she would live to see another sunrise.

  The girl’s mouth hung open, ragged with terror.

  “9-1-1, please state the nature of your emergency,” a woman said into my ear.

  “The nature of it?” I thought for a moment. “The nature of it is … frightening. Quite dangerous, I think. Involves a firearm.”

  “Sir, do you have an emergency you want to report?”

  “Thank you for rephrasing,” I said. “That’s much easier to answer. Yes, there is a man holding a barista up at gunpoint.”

  “And where are you, sir?”

  “I’m standing across the street,” I said.

  “Which street, sir?”

  “Appleton. Across from Hilltop Coffee.”

  “A man is robbing Hilltop Coffee on Appleton Street?” the woman said.

  “That’s correct.”

  The man motioned toward the cash register, and the girl moved past him, careful to keep as far from the gun as possible. She came around the counter and punched a few keys, but fear made her clumsy, and the register refused to open. After a few moments she began to pound on the keypad with the heel of her hand, pleading with the machine to perform its only function and save her life.

  “Officers are on their way, sir,” the woman said to me. “Can you tell me what’s happening now?”

  When the girl failed again to open the register, the man became impatient and pressed the barrel of the gun to a spot just below her hairline. He did this very gently. He could have been pressing his lips to her forehead, rather than a .38, he was so gentle about it. And that was when the girl let out a scream that I could both see and, very faintly, hear.

  She thought it was over, just then.

  “I think I have to do something,” I told the woman on the phone.

  “Sir, do not interfere,” the woman said. “Officers are on their way. Tell me what’s happening.”

  I put the phone back in my pocket.

  DON’T WALK.

  I checked for traffic in both directions, then hustled across the street, veering out of the crosswalk as I approached the coffee shop. I stopped in front of the picture window. This close I could see that the man and the girl were both trembling. I was too, at this point. I had no plan, no weapon, no black belt in Krav Maga. The door was locked, the picture window thick enough that I would have needed a hammer to break it. And then what? Crawl over stalagmites of glass while the man unloaded his gun at me?

  The expression on the girl’s face was what one would expect: ghastly, pathetic. But bearable to witness. Looking at the man, however, I could feel the blood flush from my cheeks. He wore a murderous sneer from the nose down, capped by the wide wondering eyes of a child. An impossible, nauseating expression. His fingers gripped the butt of the gun so tightly that his knuckles strained the skin white, and the crotch of his jeans bulged with an erection.

  It was plain that the man no longer cared about the register, no longer cared, in fact, about the money in the cash bag, already his to take and run with. Whatever was human in him, whatever his upper consciousness consisted of, had evaporated. I recognized, without even the slightest doubt, that he was only moments from doing something terrible and irrevocable.

  I could think of nothing else, so I raised a hand and rapped on the picture window, thrice.

  2

  AN ODD SATURDAY, PRESAGING AN ODDER SUNDAY

  The previous afternoon, at Tony’s house, I’d just used the toilet and was washing up. Rude sunlight burst through the window, stenciling a brilliant yellow rectangle on the floor in front of the toilet. Downstairs in the living room Tony and Art were watching football and drinking a limited-edition seasonal mead that had been fermented at a repurposed auto body shop only three blocks away.

  As recently as five years before, if you’d walked these streets after dark you stood a decent chance of having your skull caved in by a feldspar-wielding hood on crystal meth. Now two-bedroom houses were going for half a million dollars. The sound of the neighborhood waking up was the chirrup of one hundred late-model Subarus being unlocked at the same time. There was a community garden, and a boutique corner grocer where you could spend the monthly income of a family from Ghana on a single root vegetable. Young men sporting wispy mustaches sat around pumping accordions and plucking banjos. Body odor was wielded as both siren call and political statement. Every dog in the neighborhood—and there were many—had a full wardrobe of seasonally appropriate jackets, sweaters, and paw booties.

  These were the things on my mind as I scrubbed my hands. Then, for whatever reason—boredom with the familiar tropes of gentrification, perhaps—I decided to scrutinize the label on the bottle of soap I’d just used.

  The first thing I noticed was that the stuff was not, according to the manufacturer, actually soap. It was, rather, “liquid hand wash.” Even more perplexingly, it had been “formulated with cleansing agents.” This language stopped me cold. I stood there with the water running over my hands and tried to understand how “formulated with cleansing agents” could be interpreted as something other than a euphemism for “made with soap.” I tried to give this liquid hand wash the benefit of the doubt and convince myself that there really was something special about it, something that made it infinitely better than a crappy old bottle of regular soap and justified such breathless language. But every time I read that line—“formulated with cleansing agents”—all I could see was the plain-English translation.

  And I realized slowly, as I stood there hunched over the sink, that it was making me crazy.

  Why this bottle of liquid hand wash, of all the nonsense I’d encountered in nearly forty years on the planet, was the thing that suddenly sent me over the edge, I cannot say. I will simply report what I know: that there in Tony’s bathroom I was visited by the hammer-stroke certainty that the culture I counted myself a part of, the culture that had weaned and reared me, had become proudly, willfully, and completely divorced from fact.

  I went downstairs, carrying the bottle of liquid hand wash. In the living room the guys were camped out around the flat-screen. Tony had his eyes on the game—Alabama versus Texas A&M—while Art sat mashing the screen of his phone like he was engaged in some sort of speed-typing competition, the loser of which faced the indignity of being shredded by rabid beagles.

  “Did you buy this?” I asked Tony.

  He looked at me, then at the bottle in my hand. “What is it?”

  “I thought it was soap. But it’s liquid hand wash.”

  Tony’s gaze went back to the television. “Yeah. So?”

  “So did you buy it?”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  Art looked up from his phone. “Why are you holding a bottle
of soap?” he asked me.

  Alabama’s offense was driving, making eight-and nine-yard gains on every play.

  “That’s just it,” I said. “It’s not soap.”

  “It’s not soap,” Tony corroborated, keeping his eyes on the game.

  “What is it,” Art asked, “if not soap?”

  “Liquid hand wash,” I told him.

  “It has moisturizers,” Tony said. “Doesn’t dry your hands like soap.”

  “It doesn’t say anything about moisturizers,” I said, scanning the label once more. “It just says ‘formulated with cleansing agents.’”

  “Cleansing agents?” Art asked.

  “Correct,” I told him.

  “That sounds an awful lot like soap, to me,” Art said.

  “My point exactly,” I said.

  “Guys,” Tony said, pointing at the television. “Watching football.”

  Looking down at his phone again, Art grunted. “Contaminated chicken,” he said.

  “How’s that?” Tony asked.

  “Contaminated chicken,” Art said. “I just got an email. ‘The USDA is about to finalize a dangerous rule for how chickens in the United States are inspected.’”

  “Dangerous?” Tony said.

  “It says ‘dangerous,’” Art told him. “There’s a petition.”

  “Forward it to me,” Tony said.

  “I’m just trying to understand,” I said to Tony.

  “You’re always just trying to understand,” Tony said, still not looking up from the television. “And never quite getting there.”

  “I mean I washed my hands, and this stuff behaved an awful lot like soap. It foamed up, and smelled sort of chemically floral, and my skin was free of dirt and oil afterward.”

  No one responded.

  “I just need to figure this out,” I said.

  “You need to have a mead and relax,” Art said.