Now here I am. Early July. About three in the afternoon. I am wearing a white Cowboy Bebop T-shirt, a silhouette of Spike with a crumped cigarette hanging from his lips. I am wearing blue sweatshorts and slip-on Vans. I’m driving east into Saginaw. I can’t breathe. I have random waves of anger now. I get waves of anger so bad, my chest hurts. My chest hurts like an ancient dagger got stuck in it like I’m the final boss in a video game and the playable character can’t kill me and the playable character can’t believe I still have more stages of life to fight and I switch to a new and more powerful form every time the playable character thinks I’m finally dying. I am not sure if I am in my final form yet and neither is the playable character, who I keep killing over and over again, and neither do the video game developers who designed me. The developers are throwing their hands up at their big developer meeting with corporate shareholders because they’re not sure why I keep transforming into a more powerful form. I was not designed to do this. I was supposed to give up and die a long time ago. It seems to be a glitch in the software and it’s ruining the immersive simulation for everyone. They can’t figure out how to fix it so they released the game anyways because they really needed the money. Everyone who bought the video game is super pissed because they can’t kill me.
Now here I am. Now I must pull my car into the 7-Eleven parking lot. I sweat and breath heavy and I have tunnel vision like a collapsing cave system. I can’t breathe because my jaw is clenching so hard. Here I am. I am going back to college in a week. I start classes right after the Fourth of July. I am leaning out of my car, my feet on the pavement. I might throw up.
Today I am trying to get money for college. I am selling my rare graphic novels and underground comix I’ve collected over the years. Specifically, I’m selling a graphic novel titled Syndrome. Syndrome is about this guy who is a serial killer. The author killed people for real in the same way the protagonist in his graphic novel did. He is in prison now, and his graphic novel is worth a shit-ton of fucking money. I will also be selling my first printing of boy’s club by Matt Furie, a couple obscure short comics by Noah Van Sciver and Blobby Boys 2 by Alex Schubert. I will be using this money to help pay for college.
It’s hot as fuck out. It’s humid as fuck out. I walk into the 7-Eleven. I can feel sweat bleeding through my shirt. I walk to the back of the store. I can feel people looking at me. I accidently grab a tallboy of Busch Light instead of a Slurpee.
Jesus is working the front counter. I think his real name is Brian but everyone calls him Jesus, as in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior Who Died for our sins on the Cross and Rose Again on the Third Day. Brian has been called Jesus since before I was born. He looks like the pictures of Jesus you see in church. I thump the beer on the counter and grab a single Black & Mild out of the little carton next to the cash register. Jesus nods at me and I nod back. He rings me up. He knows my mom passed away a few weeks ago after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t say sorry for your loss but he doesn’t have to. I hand him cash and feel the people lining up behind me and I feel like I’m blocking their path and I feel the sweat cool on my back from the air moving around from the door opening and more people walking into the store. The door buzzer keeps going off like a metronome of death and destruction. Every time the buzzer dings a still shot image of the apocalypse flashes and burns into my retinas.
Jesus hands me back my change and says, “Stay cool, Jonny.”
“Sure thing, Jesus.”
He looks at me dead-eyed, like he might be the last person to ever talk to me. I look at him like I am standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking the world and Jesus is the last person I ever talk to before being vacuumed into a black hole for a very long time before reappearing years later with an army of robotic demons that emanate plasma-cutter-styled laser beams out of their arms.
My heart rate is slowing and the sweat soaking into my shirt is cooling and goosebumps are growing on my forearms.
I walk back outside and there is a Devil’s Disciple standing by the door finishing a cigarette. There is a chapter of them in Saginaw.
The Devil’s Disciple exhales smoke and looks at me through his wraparound sunglasses as I walk out of the 7-Eleven, slipping the Black & Mild behind my ear, the tallboy in one hand.
The Devil’s Disciple has jailhouse tats all over. He gives me a gentle two-finger tap on my shoulder as I walk past him. I turn to him. I barely noticed him. I haven’t been noticing things around me lately or looking at people how I should be.
“Where you going, man?” he said. He wasn’t threatening. He had a look of hidden curiosity on his face and in his voice. His mouth hung open a bit.
“Just taking care of some things.” I said, standing hunched and fiddling with the tab on my beer.
“You know what, bud. I think you need to go home, or go somewhere safe and not leave that place for a few days.”
I stand up straight, rolling my shoulders back, and I turn my head to him and nod like this is a great idea. “I need to take care of some things.”
He points at me. “You look like you’re about to end up in county.”
His 1000cc bike is parked next to my dumb shitty car.
“I don’t plan on it.”
“Nobody does, friend.” He takes a step closer to me and lifts his sunglasses up and peers into my eyes with those dots in his eyes. “You aren’t right. You need to take care of yourself.”
I nod at his bike and open my beer—“you too.”
He tosses his cigarette. “I’m a professional.”
I smirk and take the few steps to my car and open the door and get in and give him a little mock salute. He exhales his last puff of smoke, puts his sunglasses back over his mystic eyes, tosses the cigarette, and walks into the gas station with exhaled cigarette smoke billowing in his wake.
I put on my giant black sunglasses and crank deathcore and light my Black & Mild and start my car and drive off down the road with an open beer in my center console.
I pull into the comic book shop on Bay Road and flick my smoldering Black & Mild out my window and finish my beer in my car and toss it on the floor of the passenger seat. The deathcore breakdown gives me a good surge in my chest. I peel my cold, sweaty back off the seat of my car.
The owner of the comic bookshop has been waiting for me. I have a pull list here. I have two comic book series on my pull list. Outside of my pull list, I specially order weird graphic novels nobody has heard of and sometimes he can’t order them. But I still find ways to get them. I’ve discovered I can navigate small pockets of the underground to get anything I want. Now, fast-forward a few years later, I sell those same weird graphic novels back to this same shop for five or six times the initial cost. People ask me how I know these books will be worth money. I just tell them I like to keep my ear to the ground. I keep a lookout, far and wide, for what I think is good and unusual. These graphic novels do not advertise. I recently ordered one from Poland that will be worth some money in a few years. I don’t know how I know these things, but I do.
The comic book–shop owner is a big Italian guy with iconic horror-film characters tattooed on his arms. His name is Tony. He cannot identify graphic novels that make money. Tony is wearing an Irish flatcap. He has b fingernails painted black. He has a lazy eye. He looks scary but is actually a big teddy bear. We used to mosh in the pits together at local deathcore-show house parties back in the day. We used to work together at the bookstore in Saginaw.
The door dings as I walk in— “Eh, big J, what’s going on, man?” I walk up to the counter, take my hands out of my pockets. We bump fists.
“Not shit, dude. Just goofing around town today. Sweating my fucking ass off.”
He ignores my sweat, which has mostly evaporated by now. “Well, hey . . . sorry to hear about your mom, man.” He places his hands on the glass counter and his fingers curl up, his nails sliding across the glass like nervous retractable claws. I put my head down and nod and say, “Thank you.” We have an awkward silence. I make a joke about him being the Midwest emo version of Tony Soprano. He throws his head back and laughs with a deep hoot.
I pull the graphic novels out of the brown paper bag and hand them to him. I’ve already sent him pictures of them, so he mostly knows what he was getting into. He hunches over Syndrome and begins to slowly turn the pages and look down at it sternly. It’s a disturbing story, and I want to get rid of it.
Tony keeps trying to get me to sell him some of the other comics I have but I am not ready yet and might never be.
“I’m gonna peruse,” I say as I wave haphazardly into the dark depths of the shop.
He nods without looking at me. His big black-framed glasses are now crooked on his face from the wrinkles in his brow as he stares down at the horrifying images placed on the counter before him.
I walk to the back of the shop and admire the resin statues in the glass cases. I am the only customer in the shop. I am not sure how he stays open. But I’m glad he does.
I start reading the Berserk mangas. The big, black leatherbound ones. I grab a copy of the next volume and figure I’ll buy it on store credit. I’ve never read a manga before, but people kept recommending this to me and I’m enjoying it. The narrative runs on a template of philosophical concepts—Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus. Reading Berserk is like connecting conceptualized puzzle pieces that flash into existence on the page.
I think the beer fucked with my gut. Thoughts of Guts from Berserk. He was in my gut, and all of a sudden I had to take a huge shit.
“Hey,” I yelled across the empty shop at Tony, “I’m gonna take a huge Godzilla shit.”
He was still looking down at the graphic novels I was trying to sell him. “All right, just don’t melt the porcelain.”
“No promises.”
I go into the bathroom. It is clean and quiet and cool and dark. Designated and secret for preferred customers only.
My mom wanted me to be a teacher. My mom got sick. My brothers, my dad, and myself had to come together to help take care of her. We failed at this a lot but got better at it as she got worse. Life lessons cannot be set to rewind.
We put my life on hold. I was in college to be a teacher but ended up just getting an English degree. I worked a bunch of jobs. I worked in a prison, at a bookstore, carpet cleaning. I was a hired thug for lawyers in Saginaw. I did debt collection, repossession, process serving, bounty hunting, evictions, and whatever else needed to be done. I was a bad person to deal with. You did not want to fuck with me. All I did was lift weights and visit my mom in the nursing home and feed her dinner and watch TV with her.
Now here I am. Taking a huge shit. I am scared. Should I be doing this? No, not taking a shit. I need to take a shit. But I should I be going back to college? Is it too late for me? I feel separated. I hate the world more than I ever thought I could. I don’t like people anymore. They are not nice. There is something seriously wrong with them.
I’m done taking a shit now. I wipe and flush and wash my hands and I get those thoughts out of my head and leave the bathroom.
Other customers are in the store now. I am mobile now. I can easily avoid them.
I grab the next Berserk volume I need on my way to the front desk.
“How does a $550 sound?” Tony says as I approach the counter.
I give him a thumbs-up and make a stupid cartoon face and cross my eyes. I place the big black leatherbound manga on the desk. He takes $50 off for it and gives me back $498 and twenty-something cents. We shake hands and I put a few bucks in the tip jar.
Tony puts Syndrome in the display case, underneath the front desk. That’s where he puts most of the graphic novels I sell him unless he already has a buyer lined up. “You want to sell any more of these, you know where to find me.”
“I’ll be back.” I say in my best autistic terminator voice. “Oh, and someone fucked up your bathroom.” I point a thumb over my shoulder. “It’s super fucked-up in there.”
He drops his head and laughs and says, “Man, get the fuck outta here.”
I laugh and walk out the door with my new ultraviolent manga and without my serial-killer graphic novel.
I am back in the heat. The sun is killing me and I feel sweat bead up on my head. I must go to the mall now. The fashion-square mall in Saginaw. I am selling my rare Dragon Ball Z Funko Pops. Same shit. Maybe there was some retail fraud involved in obtaining them. Who cares. I don’t. How did I get my hands on exclusive Funko Pops? I know Dragon Ball Z and I know people and I don’t care about anything. I got to know the retail goblins of Saginaw and I know the economics of this subterranean subculture. I understand how to maintain a relationship with them. They’re a finicky bunch and scared to get in trouble with their managers, but then I meet the managers and they’re even easier to schmooze. They’ve held exclusive items in the back for me. Now they’re worth a bunch of money. I have several in the trunk of my car, like a dead body.
I am supposed to meet Jess in the parking lot at four. I am supposed to offload the rare DBZ Funkos. Jess usually has pink hair and she has a lot of random tattoos all over her arms and legs and chest and she is very pale and has huge full-moon blue eyes that see through me. She owns and operates a collectables kiosk at the mall. She went away to a fancy art school and did a lot with art exhibitions but then she graduated from art school. We worked together at the bookstore with Tony before she started her own store. She sells things like tarot cards and magic stones and weed paraphernalia and psychedelic art stuff. Jess was like my plug to getting special edition DBZ Funkos. Now I look at the Funkos and think they’re stupid. I think they are something I should not have cared about so much. I don’t know why I wanted them.
She doesn’t want me coming into the store with all the Funkos. Some of them are “hot.” She acts like we’re trying to avoid attention from the FBI. She’s going to sell them under the table at her little kiosk in the mall. One by one. When she gets the right buyers lined up. I find the whole ordeal silly in an innocent-cute sort of way. She said she is going to take them in her car and give me a stack of cash for them.
I drive over to the mall. It is mostly abandoned. I park near the shipping in the back, by the Sears that is closed and covered in graffiti.
I need something to drink. Something cold. Maybe another beer.
I see her car pull into the parking lot near Best Buy. Her little junky car is falling apart. It rumbles and shakes and the bumpers have holes in them and the black gorilla tape she bought to hold her car together doesn’t quit do the job.
She pulls up next to me like the cops do when they talk to each other in their squad cars. She looks nervous. I roll my window down and turn down my deathcore and laugh at her with my giant black sunglasses on.
“Oh, shut up.” She exhales vape smoke and the vape clatters hollowly as she drops it into the cup holder in her center console.
I nod my head back toward my trunk. She pulls around to the back of my car. I get out of my car. She is wearing denim overalls with the legs cutoff and a tank top underneath with Converse shoes.
I open my trunk and we start putting armloads of Funkos into her trunk.
Badman Vegeta. Broly. Trunks and Goten fusion. Great Ape Vegeta.
“I need something to drink.” I toss an armload of the Dragon Ball Z Funkos into her trunk like I’m dumping a box of Legos onto the floor for a house intruder to step on. Nemek Bulma. King Kai. Goku Rose. Golden Frieza. Who cares.
“Hey, careful with the merchandise. Some of us care about making money around here.” She gestures to the derelict parking lot.
“But seriously, you want to get a drink?” I say, and I crawl into my trunk without really thinking about what I’m doing.
I reach into the back of my trunk to the point where my legs are sticking up in the air and my whole body is submerged into the trunk of my car. I do things without thinking. I will start one thing and then randomly start do something different. I reach for my life and feel my body creak as I wrap my fingers around a velvet Beerus.
“I should shut your ass in there, drive around the parking lot demolition derby style,” Jess says.
“I wish you would. I deserve it.”
She snorts a laugh. “You’re gonna get fired as a teacher, you know that?
I awkwardly crabwalk out of my trunk. I cradle the velvet Beerus. I can feel more sweat drenching my thin white shirt from the heat of the trunk. The box the velvet Beerus is in is only a little crushed.
I exhale hard and I can tell my face is red. “Let’s get something to drink. I have nothing to do today and I don’t want to go home.”
“Where are you living right now?”
“My dad’s basement.”
“How’s that going?”
“Not great.”
She sighs deeply and shakes her head and stares at the ground. “What do you want?”
“I’m not sure. I kinda want a beer.”
“Do you want to go to Harvey’s?”
“Not really—lawyers hang out there.”
“Oh, boo-hoo. Fuck you. It’s close and I like it there.” She tilts her head and makes a frowny face and plays the world’s smallest violin.
“Fine. Whatever. I don’t work for them anymore anyways.” I shrug and fish the car keys out of my pocket.
She puts her hands on her hips and squints at the sun like she is trying to tell the time. “All right, beer’s on me, college boy.”
Me and Jess. We do the bar. We are sit-up-at-the-bar people.
We are sitting up at the bar in Harvey’s. A few lawyers wave at me. I wave back at them but in a way that tells them not to approach me and ask me to locate someone who escaped down a rabbit hole in Saginaw to avoid a court date.
The bartender is gay. He is friends with Jess and he doesn’t like me. Usually, gay guys like me but not this one because this one is friends with Jess. He is a terrific bartender. He is probably the best bartender is Saginaw. He pours my random fucking hazy IPA real well.
The beer is full and sitting in front of me on a thick wooden coaster. This place is super fancy and we do not fit in, but we also do fit in because this is Saginaw and people like us can exist anywhere in Saginaw.
We are awkward. We haven’t done this in a while. Jazz music is playing over the speakers above. The jazz music sounds like heaven if heaven hated you, which is does.
“So,” I say, turning my perspiring beer on the coaster, “how’s the antique shop going? I am hunched over, inspecting my beer like a scientist inspecting a newly discovered insect. I do not know what kind of beer this is. I do not know what kind of insect this beer would be. It is a local microbrew beer.
Jess takes a drink from her Moscow mule. “It’s not an antique shop, fuckhead, but it’s going fine. And it’s getting your broke ass paid.” She takes another drink and I can hear the ice clink and I can hear her soft warm lipstick on her soft warm lips touch the cold wet class and I can hear her soft hands with her long purple nails at the end of her slender fingers cradle the glass like the newborn insect I cannot identify.
I nod and smile.
I feel a warm, meaty hand on my shoulder. I turn around and Steve is in my face. Steve is the biggest scumbag criminal defense lawyer in Saginaw. Steve has no self-awareness and gives me the sketchiest jobs. “Jonny Boy, you wanna make some money?”
I look at Jess to be my barometer. She is sitting straight up, holding her drink near her lips, her brow furrowed. Jess doesn’t like the people I associate with for work due to some type of protective instinct possessed by the rare and kind.
I widen my eyes and grin like a haunted ventriloquist’s dummy, and I slowly turn my head to face Steve in a way that telegraphs I am about to open my mouth and shoot a powerful red laser beam out of my mouth that will incinerate Steve’s skull and boil his brain into bubbling goop.
I speak to Steve in a Roaring Twenties newspaper reporter voice: “Sorry, Steve-O, I hate to break it to you like this, but I’m going back to college to become a public school teacher.”
Steve gives me a look of bewilderment. His eyes become worried and unfocused. “Are you serious, or are you just fucking with me like usual?”
I huff a laugh and my shoulder heaves his hand off. “Nah, sad to say, but I start classes next week. Right after Fourth of July. It’s an accelerated program and shit like that, dude.” I sip my beer and look at him like I just robbed him blind.
Steve backs away and shrugs and looks at the floor. “All right, well—you need work, you know where to find me.”
I nod at him. “I do. Take it easy, Steve.”
“Yeah, take care of yourself, Jonny.” He turns and wanders off into the restaurant like he is the last man standing in a shootout and he is slowly dying from a gut wound.
Jess takes another drink and sets down her Moscow mule and purses her lips. “So, what are you doing the rest of the—”
“Another beer, sir?” Tommy is suddenly standing directly across the bar from me.
I take a big gulp of my beer until the beer fills my mouth so my cheeks puff out like a chipmunk.
“We’re okay, Tommy. Thanks, though.” Jess says.
Tommy pointedly turns a full 180 degrees and throws his hands in the air and squeals, “Okay, hun, you just let me know if you need anything. Like if you need a ride home or if you need pepper spray or anything like that.” He glares back at me and I hold my empty glass up and swallow my beer and raise an eyebrow at the empty glass and Jess rolls her eyes and Tommy is about to have a meltdown and I am trying not to laugh.
“We’re fine, Tommy.” She pats her hand on the bar. “Just have someone else get him another beer. I know you’re busy right now. And he can wait.”
“Thanks, Jess. Let me know if you need anything,” he says as he walks away.
She turns to me and her eyes go wide and she hunches over in her stool and hides a laugh and says in a harsh whisper: “Holy shit, stop being such a fucking asshole.” I can smell her hair and skin like I’m a weirdo.
“Sorry, I mean, he kinda started it, though.” I shrug and investigate my empty beer glass to see if there’s any beer left I need to drink.
She sits up straight and brushes her hair back and picks her glass back up as the fake jazz-piano music plays softly. “Actually, you started it.” She takes a drink and looks straight through the black painful orb of gravity in my chest where my heart should be. The orb in my chest pulses and hurts a tinge as she does this.
“How did I start it?” I say, holding my chest like I was just offended to death.
“You disappeared for like a month . . .” I can tell in her eyes that she’s still hurt.
“That was work shit.”
“Yeah, well, I heard some rumors—sounded more like revenge shit.”
“What were you going to ask me?” I say, exasperated and wanting to change the subject as quickly as possible.
“What?”
“Before Tommy’s dumb fucking ass interrupted us. What were you going to ask me?” I realize I sound harsh and make an effort to calm my voice midsentence.
Jess rolls her eyes. “I was asking what you were doing tonight.”
“Oh, well, I was hoping I could stay at your place.”
She snorts a laugh and shakes her head. She puts her head back and looks at the ceiling and slowly exhales the ghost of me that lives in her chest and says, “Okay. Fine. But my roommate is home, so you can’t leave my room.”
“Jesus Christ. Still?”
“Well, I’m not staying the night in your Dad’s basement,” she says with a fluttering side-eye as she takes a drink.
As if on cue, a big muscled guy with dreads and tattoos barges out of the kitchen with an apron on and approaches the bar and pours me another beer. He glares at me. Typical. Tommy went to the kitchen and got a line cook to get me another beer in hopes of intimidating me. I glare back at him and think about ripping his fucking jawbone off. He sets the beer in front of me and he walks back into the kitchen without saying a word.
Jess clears her throat. The sound she makes takes me out of my violent ideation trance. I peer over and she is staring down at her drink, her brow furrowed again. “Um . . . look, Jon . . . I know we haven’t talked in a while, but I just wanted to say I’m really sorry to hear about your mom. I know that was hard on you.”
I take a dead-slow drink of my beer and I feel the pulsing black orb of painful gravity in my chest start to grow a strange and mystical flower.
“Thank you.” I say it like I am out of breath. We are not looking at each other.
“Do you think you can do it?” she says.
“Do what?”
“Become a teacher?”
“Do you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you think I should?
“I’m also not sure. I hope you can. We probably won’t see each other much once your classes and student teaching starts.”
“It’s an accelerated program. I guess it’s pretty tough.” I drink more beer.
She places her elbow on the bar and cradles her check in her palm, tilting her head to the side, looking at me with wisdom from the underneath. “If you make it. I suppose you won’t be seeing yourself much either.”
I smile at her looking through me with her big moon eyes. “I never know what you’re talking about,” I say.
She shakes her head and says with a smirk, “No, you don’t.” 
Jon Berger is a teacher in rural mid-Michigan. His short story collection, Goon Dog, and his poetry collection, Saint Lizard, can be found at Gob Pile Press.
Illustration: Josh Simmons
