Page 184 of Nearly Roadkill

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SCRATCH JOURNAL ENTRY

I didn’t give a fuck what happened next, I just wanted Winc to be right where ze was, lying in my arms. The cops were nowhere to be seen. I don’t think they knew they’d hit hir because ze just kept running. I didn’t even know until ze fell down, and I thought ze’d just tripped.

Suddenly there was absolutely no hurry. I remember a watery beam of sunlight somehow peeking its head over the tops of the skyscrapers. We found a little hollow in a pile of cardboard, me leaning against a brick wall with hir collapsed into me. I could feel hir blood, sticky and hot against me, like I’d always imagined. But not this way. Not this way, no!

Ze was murmuring how much ze loved me and looking into my eyes. I got all panicky and yelled, “No! No!” I knew ze was blissed out beyond all comprehension, hir little self happy to be lying in my arms, frozen for all time, just like that, with me.

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“How I always wanted it to be,” ze said.

And hir eyes were so near, so deep and changing colors every five seconds to a shade more beautiful than the last. I knew it was a perfect moment, too, but I also got really pissed—like I always do when I feel everything’s going down the path of least resistance without trying to change itself into something better.

I got pissed at hir and the police and the Net and people and subways and cars and skyscrapers, and even my beloved NPR. I practically hauled Winc to hir feet and made hir walk, willing some hospital or medicine man or something to be around the corner. My survival instincts kicked in: Just get out of there. And obliterating everything else, all our silly fights andmisunderstandings, it was like this big cartoon dialogue balloon appeared over the two of us that said: live, Winc, just live.

END SCRATCH JOURNAL ENTRY

TRANSCRIPT, NPR SPECIAL EDITION

Shoopman:Well Bob, it’s a mass of confusion around here. Impossibly, the fugitives appear to have slipped away.

All I know is that at one point an officer took some shots as they fled down the alley, and the taller of the two fell to the ground. We have to assume it was a result of having been hit, but I’m not sure of that, either, because when the smoke of the general confusion and hollering cleared, the two had vanished. And they’re gone, Bob, just gone.

SCRATCH JOURNAL ENTRY

Winc was having a lot of trouble walking, so we took a break, sitting up against a pile of boxes in an alley, hir back against my chest, my hands doing their best to stop hir bleeding. Ze looked so pale.

Then I looked up and saw him. Standing just a few yards away at the mouth of the alley. He wore a shabby suit, good shoes but worn to hell. He was so close, I could see his nicotine-stained fingertips.

I knew who he was; of course I knew. If he’d spoken I would have recognized the voice. We locked eyes for one of those long moments. My mind started formulating some acknowledgment, a warning, a thank-you, a quip. But there was only that silence, Winc and I looking at him, him looking at us. Then, he turned away. Yes, he did.

He walked very fast, very deliberately to the other end of the alley. He went up to the crowd of cops, but I didn’t panic. I took my time, getting Winc to hir feet, adjusting hir against me, and kept walking the other way.

Down the alleyway, I heard him, and he was telling the others he’d seen us. I could see his thumb stabbing the air, and then I heard him bark the classic line.

“They went thataway.”

He never looked back at us, but he kept his gaze steady on his retreating troops. Then he, too, was gone. I heard his footsteps following the others, and then it was very, very quiet.

We were alone again, Winc and I, and I knew there was no place else I’d rather be, nobody else I wanted to be. We were together, alone, as we’d always been, and that was enough. Hip to hip, we walked slowly, me half holding hir up, my Winc, bleeding hir life into mine.