Art Along the Aether – Chapter Two – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
The three-story chunk of degraded concrete and jagged lead window husks drew in its first breath the bitter nip of the nascent Cold War, its purpose military, its designation classified, its payload, from a few chatty elders whose sense of secrecy had succumbed to loneliness and void of purpose, the iron and steel the nearby arsenal used to make cannons for warships. The road in was wide enough for vehicles built for big work. It had a security station with a bar that raised and lowered to grant passage to all deemed worthy of presiding over piles of raw metal. The gate was superseded by a chain-link fence, which was superseded by a battalion of miscreants with a complement of wire cutters.
They parked on a side street, barren as the row houses that lined it, houses that to a one bore the fluorescent X’s of condemnation. Were not the warehouse such an attractive nuisance, it’s likely they all would have found out why those buildings were condemned. They walked over to a rip in the fence so well hidden by debris that the city would scarcely think a person stupid or clever enough to attempt entry there.
Sarah and Ollie, Deke and Harry were at least stupid enough.
If they could call it anything but a pilgrimage, they would’ve called it a bad idea. They planted boot prints in fresh snow and slid their feet as an attempt to conceal their tracks. People slept in the warehouse, escape artists in residency. The windows were dark but they all knew it was the deft arrangement of wooden pallets and pilfered homeless shelter blankets that made them so. The concrete and the ventilation and the height of the ceilings made fire the least of the warehouse’s worries, and its squatters made good use of that fact and a few fifty-five gallon steel drums. But Ollie could see a dim flicker when he squinted his eyes, when they were near enough to smell the gasoline siphoned out of pick-up trucks in nearby yards filled with them.
If Sarah had a spray can, if it wasn’t so cold, if inspiration landed on her shoulder like crystal flakes, if, if, and for extra fine and good measure if… she would’ve tagged the front of the building. In fact, if she had one can, she would’ve had five more in her olive drab army duffel bag. That was a Sarah she was thirty days in front of. It was a Sarah she was running from. It was a Sarah that Ollie missed, sacrificed to a Sarah 2.0, with more features and a steeper learning curve.
They trudged the perimeter, on ground muddy from the traffic before them. The warehouse was never empty except just after the monthly clockwork cop stops, but when it was full, it was a circus stuffed in clown shoes. The back door, the one facing the interstate, was wide open, and a scrawny man in a Miami Dolphins windbreaker and black sweatpants with white lines zipping down sat on a milk crate pulling smoke from a soda can sideways, center crushed in, contents atop poked holes glowing white hot, brilliant red, coal-fired lungs coughing puffs of sweet release. Ollie shielded Sarah’s eyes thinking he should but she swatted his hand away and aimed a glare at him. The man turned his head.
“Ain’t no tourists,” he said. “Get.”
Deke scoffed. “Fuckin’ tourists,” he said. “You’re in outer space right now. You’re a tourist.”
The man grunted and hit the can again. “What’s the password?” Deke pulled a dimebag and tossed it at him, hitting him in the face. The man grabbed for it in the snow as he coughed out a hit. When he found it, he scoped it like it was a piece of the True Cross. Ollie couldn’t tell if he’d never seen weed before, or if he was just that high. Either way, he pointed to the door.
“Elections are tonight,” he said. “Vote early, and often. And vote for Shitheels, if you know what’s good for your ribs.”
They slid in, one by one to a diminutive room, dark, musty, its only light through the crisscross hatches of safety glass, smeared with grease, or something akin. A fire extinguisher on the ground extinguished, steel canister torn apart in sharp shards like the dull spikes behind a comic ‘kapow!’ Ollie didn’t know fire extinguishers could explode, but he was no expert. It took them a second or two to adjust their eyes, but a quick, chirping cry from Sarah alerted the gang to the fact that a monster was sitting in a folding chair, ink-dot eyes long adjusted, watching them, pounding an extinguished Mag-Lite into his palm.
“Halt,” he said in a rhythm of the swing of the business end of his flashlight toward the four of them. “What do you got on you?”
“Nothing,” Ollie said. “I don’t have any shit on me.”
The light came on and a beam bounced off Ollie straightaway.
“I asked you what you had on you. You don’t have shit. You got a wallet? Cash? Business cards you picked up off the ground? What about a strip club matchbook?”
Ollie could hear Deke’s hands in his pockets and the rustle of plastic on plastic that was unmistakable to the ear of a stoner or a cop, bringing equal excitement to both. But a cop wouldn’t sit in the dark behind a door guarded by Methhead Number One.
“I got a wallet and some bills, maybe twenty. I got two sodas in my coat and my house keys.”
The man stood, the body of a pig farmer with the tattoos, visible in the pale illumination of the Mag-Lite, of a biker christened filthy few. His black short sleeves strained to contain deceptive flesh hiding sledgehammers and the bottoms of his jeaned bunched around tan steel-toe work boots. The flashlight bounced from faces to floor to faces to floor like a signaler on a runway, guiding them to their coming flight.
“Everybody put your shit – and everything you don’t consider your shit – on the floor. Hey Eddie!” He called out to the methhead, “Come in here and search our new campers.” Ollie heard the creak of the folding chair as Eddie came in, sans soda can, with his thumbs hooking the loops of his jeans, yanking them up.
“Eddie’s thorough,” the man said. “Best not hide anything.”
Deke sighed as he pulled out his baggie, about an ounce, give or take a few mailboxes. “Everybody in here is high as fuck and we can’t bring any shit in?”
The man was silent. His flashlight hit Ollie’s face more than anyone’s, Sarah’s a close second.
“You’re in that band, right? Perma-something?”
“Permasoul,” Ollie said. “It’s called Permasoul.”
He shined on Sarah, “You too, You’re the bass-player.”
“Yeah, bass,” she said. “I sing too.”
“I’ve been to a few of your shows. Not bad. I got friends in Concussion.”
The man presided over the dumping of everyone’s effects and stood solid as Eddie crawled in and out of everyone’s ass looking for contraband or peanuts. Ollie could’ve sworn that by the time Eddie had finished with him, his dandruff was on the floor along with everything else.
“That’s everything, Shitheels.” He looked at the small pile on the ground. “You got something for me?”
“Hasn’t been an hour yet.”
Eddie’s face took on some glum. “Feels like an hour.” He turned his head and walked back out the door. The man, Shitheels, traced through all of the group’s belongings with his foot.
“Okay, get your shit. And don’t ask questions. This was for your own good. Can’t have people coming in here with guns and knives, books and markers and aspirins – there’s a list of contraband taped to the first pillar once you go in for future reference. And tape is on the list too.”
Shitheels leaned his back into one of the double doors to the main area of the warehouse’s first floor, motioning them in and making it clear he’d be their companion, like it or not.
They entered the main area, a space haunted by the apparitions of barrel fires that moved from section to section, planting soot-stain kisses on the ceiling. Music filled the space inside frenetic bubbles of acoustic guitar and transistor radio and human vocal be-bop, each carving out their space between campsites with tents constructed in standard color and pained to double-triptych murals, unique to a one, homesteads arranged in circles, the carbonation drawing smaller bubbles to ring the larger ones, audiences, nobodies that became somebodies, whatever could to take their mind off their proximity to the void that lie just off the edge of the bottle cap.
As they walked through and Ollie skidded his feet along the rough concrete floors, he tried to picture it the last time he was there, when he was slow-dancing with archangels in his circulatory system. It was a palace then. Everything gleamed and it smelled clean and free, not like burnt plastic, musty, mildewed paper, piss, and the brick-weed ammonia that they didn’t sell in vapes. When he was high, it was the only place he felt safe. Now, Shitheels may well have been Abaddon dangling the keys to the abyss in his calloused hand.
“This place is a fucking zoo,” Shitheels said. “They hate me, but they each should be planting their lips on my asscheeks for keeping order.” He pointed to the far corner, where a drum fire illuminated what looked like a small junk pile.
“They bring that shit in, VCRs, old TVs, fat backs even. Nobody wants it. Thrift store won’t take it, and they take cum-socks. Bring the shit here and auction it off to each other so they can act like proper businessmen. I throw it all in the back, and if I see them out there, I crack them on the shoulder with my trusty here.” He wiggled the Mag-Lite. “There’s a goddamn mountain back there.”
“Do you have to hit them?” Ollie felt Sarah rub his side while she stood by him, invisible to Shitheels’s view.
“Only thing these people understand is force. It’s fear. Know why anybody hasn’t beat the two of you? Raped such a pretty girl? Fear. They know I’ll kill them. They crack out their fists on each other? Mine are bigger. They steal? I steal one of their fingernails with a pair of pliers. They bring books in for that thing up there? I rip out the pages and stuff them down their throats.”
They hugged the wall as they walked, and Ollie felt caught in the flow of the burning barrels bringing people to circles surrounding, breaking off to cover the spaces in between with purpose, to the traffic patterns and the current of people far more numerous than he would’ve guessed for a three-story building devoid of electrical service and plumbing. A hum echoed from the stairwell that made him thing they were riding a dirt bike up on the above floors, but if Shitheels had any sway over those floors, he’d have had none of it.
“Why books?” Ollie said. “Why punish people for books?”
“Books are dangerous,” Shitheels said. “Hey, I like a good detective story just like the next guy, I ain’t illiterate. If that was what people were bringing in, I’d bring them a bookcase. But they’re not. They’re bringing in philosophy books and political books and, you know” he lowered his voice, “banned books. And they if they don’t give them to that freak up there, they read ‘em, and suddenly they want rights.”
“What’s wrong with rights?” Sarah asked the question that Ollie wanted to, but feared another boot-shaped bruise.
“Rights in a flophouse? Are you kidding me?”
“They’re still people.”
“Half of these ‘people’ would kill you for your pendant if left them alone in a room with you. They wouldn’t know anything good to do with rights. This place is hell. It’s a self-imposed prison, and I’m the warden.”
They walked over to a row of coolers. Shitheels opened one to reveal that it was full of snow.
“Put your cans in there,” he told Ollie. “If they’re still here when you come back from wherever, they’ll be cold.”
“I could just hold on to them.”
“Those could be weapons. I think not.”
Ollie regretted stealing them only to have them stolen from him. He shoved the cans into the half-melted snow and zipped up his jacket. Shitheels reached in and pulled out a beer and popped the top in fluid muscle memory.
“My brother was in here once,” he pulled a folding chair out from behind the coolers after a christening chug, waved his hand at two other chairs for Ollie and Sarah, the only two of the group he seemed to acknowledge. “He died. Overdose, so I thought, but I heard he was black and blue like that Van Gogh painting. People in charge of this place buried him out back in the swamp grass.” He took a sip and a swipe across his mouth. “Cops found him, did their tests and nothing,” he said. “A dead junkie. So I’m here watching out, making sure these cocksuckers don’t kill anyone else. And you know what the fucked up thing is?” Ollie shook his head knowing it wasn’t a question. “I’ve had to pull three bodies into that swamp grass myself. Real ODs. And each time the cops find them. And they come in here and steal sleeping bags and pillows and they look tough when they’re asking questions that they don’t care what the answers are and then they tag the toe and go back to getting blowjobs in their squad cars.
“I am the law here,” he said.
They sat in the chairs as so directed and Deke and Harry stood, arms straight, rubbing their forearms like the awkward, antisocial kids at the school dance. As many times as they’d had to come to the warehouse as drug dealers, they were little more than tourists with a side gig.
Shitheels finished his beer and got up, prompting Ollie and Sarah to do the same. He gathered the four of them, squeezed them together with his iron, outstretched arms, and aimed them at a tall, shapely woman in a sleek gray dress that would look completely out of place there if it, or her, were anywhere near clean.
“This is our guru,” Shitheels said. “People are getting rowdy. I have to go give my right boot a workout.”
“The elections are today. Vote me for sheriff if they let you. And don’t do anything fucking stupid, okay?” He waved them from the back of his hand and lumbered off.
More from Liam Sweeny…
