Bloop
by Kevin Maloney
Everyone knows about ketamine, the horse tranquilizer that makes you feel like you ripped the wings off a Pegasus and used them to fly over the city of your birth, laughing at your enemies, but my buddy Isaac was into something else: an anti-fungal cream for birds called Lotricaine that makes your heart flutter and gives you heroic ideas about the space-time continuum.
This was 2002, before social media turned everybody into attention-seeking minor celebrities. I was a new father, but I didn’t spend any time at home. My son Daniel cried from the moment he woke up until the moment he went to sleep, which was never. My wife Irene was a gorgeous woman I used to follow around the restaurant where we worked, begging her to love me, but lack of sleep had poisoned her brain. Instead of calling me “stud” and “hotshot,” she criticized me all day, telling me what a lousy father I was. It was true, but I needed positive reinforcement, someone to tell me I was handsome and cool as shit and that my dick was too long. I already hated myself. I couldn’t bear someone as pretty as Irene tearing my personality into little pieces. So, I took up with Isaac and started huffing Lotricaine.
We met at his place, squeezed some ointment onto our hands, and took six or seven deep pulls of air. First, you see purple. Then a dizziness seizes you, followed by the shakes. Just when you think you’ve made a terrible mistake, the floodgates of serotonin open in your brain and you travel through time—not the future or the past but the present. Only you really feel it ripping over you, hurling toward death.
I closed my eyes and opened them in a different world than the one I fell asleep in. “Giddyup,” said Isaac. He hit the gas, and we drove around the city marveling at the concrete structures, ancient mills, and dozen bridges that span our city, until we came to a stop under the St. Johns Bridge, a suspension bridge a thousand times prettier than the Golden Gate.
“I used to have this cat named Wanda,” said Isaac, scratching his arm, which for non-drug related reasons was covered in scabs. “Sometimes Dad brought cats home from the clinic to foster until he could find them forever homes. This one, Wanda, only had a nub for a back leg. When she got an itch, she’d work that little nub trying to scratch it and got this pissed-off look on her face like she couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I felt so bad for her.”
I nodded and huffed Lotricaine. The sky turned into rainbows, and the bridge transformed into a droopy powerline that touched the river and electrocuted all the migratory fish moving through its waters.
“I guess some kid cut it off with a switchblade,” said Isaac. “If I had a magic power, it would be that I could say BLOOP! and make everyone in the world die. Just like that—BLOOP!—and everybody stops what they’re doing and falls over dead forever. Whoa, what’s that?”
Isaac reached out and tried to grab something out of the air that was either a dust mote or the result of a synapse misfiring in his brain.
I was having a hard time not sinking through the upholstery of the car seat, down through the floorboards of the Camry, into the asphalt parking lot. We’d been off Lotricaine a few days, trying to get clean, but my teeth hurt, and I felt like bashing my brain in with a hammer, so we broke into Lombard Pet Care and emptied Isaac’s dad’s shelves of their magical provisions. All across the city, parakeets were covered in fungal infections, and we were overdoing it, hitting it hard.
“Did you hear about Paul McCartney?” said Isaac. “He married a woman who only has one leg. Guy wrote ‘Let It Be.’ He could’ve married any woman on Planet Earth, and he picked a woman with one leg.”
I reached for the car door and opened it just in time to throw up on a dandelion patch. I retched again and wiped my mouth and closed the door.
“I threw up,” I said.
“George Harrison married Eric Clapton’s wife,” said Isaac. “Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, somebody got pissed, and then Eric Clapton’s kid fell off a balcony and died, and Eric wrote ‘Tears in Heaven.’ ”
“Can we stop talking about dead sons?” I said.
“Hey, check this out,” said Isaac.
He reached into his mouth and removed his tongue and held it in his hand for both of us to see. It was watermelon-colored and see-through. There was a metal wire that acted as a kind of handle, making it easier to remove his tongue and put it back in.
“What the fuck is that?” I said.
“A retainer,” said Isaac. “I found it in a garbage can. It makes your teeth straight.”
“You put somebody else’s retainer in your mouth?”
“It fits,” said Isaac.
He started the engine and zoomed up the hill and took a right on Lombard. I took a hit of Lotricaine. We blew three red lights and pulled into the Taco Bell drive-thru.
The menu was covered in holy words like “Seven Layer” and “Mexican Pizza.”
“Hi, how are you today?” said a black metal edifice. “You can order when you're ready.”
“I’ll have a burrito,” said Isaac. “But I don’t want any animal parts in it. I can’t believe you sell that shit. No bones, no hair, no skin.”
“A vegetarian burrito?” asked the edifice.
“Yeah vegetables. Fill it up with that shit. Corn, broccoli, avocado. My God, a-vo-ca-do. What a cool fucking word.”
I started crying. The Lotricaine was hitting me hard, making soft explosions in my field of vision. I made a fist with one hand and pet it with the other hand. It looked so much like a cat I used to have when I was in grade school.
“My friend here will also have vegetables. No skin or hair,” said Isaac.
“That’ll be $5.98 at the next window please,” said the edifice.
The car lurched forward. Food appeared in bags. Isaac drove us to the railyard. We parked and looked out the window and watched slow moving train cars drift across the tracks, getting closer and closer until they made a loud crashing sound that echoed across the river. The sun sank below the west hills, and the sky turned the color of shredded cheese.
We unwrapped our food and started eating. I couldn’t remember the last time I put food in my body.
“I feel like I was being a dick earlier,” said Isaac. “I think it’s rad that Paul McCartney married a woman with one leg. Best Beatle hands down.”
“He’s a good person,” I said.
“I mean, who am I to talk?” said Isaac. “I only have one heart.”
Two rail cars crashed together. The graffiti on one of the cars, previously indecipherable, materialized and formed the word: BLOOP!
Eighteen years later, Isaac and I are in his backyard sitting on Adirondack chairs, drinking white wine, while his son Linus shoots my daughter Sam with a squirt gun in a small plastic pool shaped like a turtle. Isaac’s wife Val is talking to my girlfriend Maya near the raised bed garden, pretending to discuss heirloom tomato varieties, while quietly talking shit about a mutual friend of ours who recently got outed for embezzling money from a non-profit literary organization.
“Not in the face, Linus,” says Isaac. “And stay six feet apart. You know the rules.”
“Use your words, Sam,” I say.
The scuffle dies down. Isaac puts on an N95 mask, comes up next to me and tops off my wine glass.
“We just finished refinancing the house,” he says. “Gonna save us $200 a month.”
“Interest rates are crazy right now,” I say.
“We’re saving up for a hot tub. Once the kids are asleep, we’ll be out here skinny dipping every night.”
Sam stands up. Her bathing suit has a ladybug on it. She wears blue goggles and fires her squirt gun with shaking hands like she’s squeezing the last of the toothpaste from the tube. She has the distended stomach of a pregnant four-year-old.
“Is this real?” I say.
“What’s that?” asks Isaac from under his mask.
I’m drunk. My forehead is red. The sun makes a second sun in my wine glass. In the side yard near the fence, Maya stands six feet from Val, talking about the election.
I keep looking for proof that I’m not dead, but I can’t find any.
Isaac lights the barbecue. He puts on Beyond burgers. In this life, he’s a vegetarian just like in the previous one.
Fake meat smell fills the backyard, and our families, or whoever these people are, pantomime what they remember of the world.
Kevin Maloney is the author of Cult of Loretta (Lazy Fascist Press, 2015). His writing has appeared in Hobart, Barrelhouse, The Nervous Breakdown, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Aubrey.
