Imagine My Surprise! (9)

Keenan meets Stoli.

9. The Elf Speaks
In which Keenan and Stoli introduce themselves.

Catch up on the earlier chapters.

Indeed, it wasn’t long before I nightwalked back to the 7-Eleven and nestled into my olive tree. For some reason, Stoli did not inhabit his dark corner. But we did have a new enterprising addition to our nocturnal menagerie. Dishwater blonde, faded jean skirt, black midriff t-shirt, flip flops. She chain-smoked generic cigarettes while performing an odd sort of white trash ballet from the knees down. A green sedan pulled up. A tall black man with graying hair got out and was about to go inside when:

“Got twenty bucks?” the woman asked him.

Wow. This is new.

The guy stopped in his tracks and looked at the woman, then his head swiveled in all directions. They exchanged words too low for me to hear. She escorted him around to Stoli’s domain. A sliver of light illuminated the silhouette of the man as he stood, pants sliding down to his knees. I couldn’t penetrate the darkness where the woman was no doubt on her knees. The man let out a wheezy sigh as he got warmed up. Rhythmic rattle of a belt buckle clinking, pocket change jingling. The man’s silhouette froze with a shudder.

“Oh, shit,” he cursed. Heavy breathing. Relief. The pants came up, a wallet came out, comments were exchanged, and he stagger-walked back around the corner and into the store. A minute later, the woman emerged from the shadows, crossing into the light, picking a pebble or glass shard from her knee. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Then she did a curious thing and took a step toward me, cocking her head, squinting my direction. What was it about the preternatural instincts of the gutter-class that they should feel the prying eyes of this wayward poppet? They sensed me.

Like attracts like.

Maybe it’s a quality that all nocturnal creatures possess, a survival sense. They can feel a tingle from the psychic charge shooting from my eyes and falling on them like a prickly mist. Maybe they can feel the vibrations of a kindred spirit.

She exhaled smoke in my direction and walked back toward the front of the store just as John piloted his sedan out of the lot. The usual cavalcade of after-hours waywards and pre-dawn drones came and went. The dime store prostitute sold her wares to a few more people in various modes of congress. I checked my watch and drank from my plastic sippy cup. It was like avant-garde environmental theater. Down the far side of the convenience store front walk emerged a huge, shambling ragged figure layered in loose grungy clothes: Stoli.

When the dime store prostitute met his gaze, he stopped. I heard her curse and she dropped her cigarette, grinding it out under her flip-flop. She adjusted her purse and stepped off into the parking lot, walking away.

“Hey!” Stoli shouted.

“Fuck you,” she replied without turning.

“Get thee gone, harlot! Go home to your ol’ man and stay off my lot!”

Get thee gone? Harlot?

He stood his ground, watching her walk away. I saw him the most clearly I’d ever seen him. He was around six feet, thin but not skinny. The hulking appearance was courtesy of many layers of clothes under a tent-like overcoat. He had a patrician nose on a creased, ruddy face covered in a bushy gray and brown Castro beard. Not unhandsome, just filthy. After a moment, he turned and poked his head inside the store, exchanging greetings with the graveyard shift. Then, Stoli made his way around to his shadowed hole, on the way stooping and picking up all the discarded butts the prostitute left behind. He disappeared into his spot for a second before re-emerging to break boxes down in the garbage area. After a while, Stan, the long-haired clerk, came round the corner with a bag in his hand.

“Ran off Cathy, did you?” the clerk asked.

He set down the bag in Stoli’s niche.

“She should be at home. Sal is sick,” Stoli replied.

“Why do you think she’s out here? Everybody’s got to work.”

“Not that kind of work. I watched her grow up, fer fucksake.”

“Still…I like a blowjob every now and again.”

“Please don’t, Stan.”

“Whatever.” A beat. “Thanks for breaking down the boxes.” He went back inside.

Stoli shut the garbage bin gate and nestled into his spot. I heard the pop of a beer being opened, saw the flame of a lighter, smelled the lovely scent of burning tobacco. I waited for what I knew would come.

“You again, huh?” Stoli said toward me. I said nothing. “It’s alright, I can smell you. Strange smell. Sweetish.” He mumbled something to himself as he waited for a response, which I did not offer. “What’s your name? You told me. Last time. Kevin?”

I took a breath, nervous. “Kurt,” I said. I was not going to lie to this man — I didn’t have to. He was clearly of unsound mind.

He stood up with a start, but still, I could only see the edge of his greasy wavy gray-brown mop. “Goddamn! I thought I was crazy!”

“Who says you aren’t? You’re talking to the fence.”

“Ha ha!” He took a couple of steps toward me, out of the shadow.

“Don’t come any closer or I’ll vanish,” I warned. Like I was going to outrun an adult. But he didn’t know what I was.

He backed up into his niche. “Alright, alright. Don’t get excited. It’s just not every day you get to talk to an elf.”

“What makes you think I’m an elf?”

“Shit, I dunno. You have a tiny little voice. Like a child’s. But you speak like a grown-up.” Pause, exhale of smoke. “And you’re small. I can tell by your movements, by the way the tree shakes.”

“You’re telling me you can smell me and hear my movements. Quite a talent.”

“Yeah, well, I spent a lot of time hiding myself.” Slurp of beer. “Sniper.”

Oh, great. He was a cliché, a homeless veteran. “Which theater?” I prodded.

“Curious choice of terms…Afghanistan.”

A minute lapsed. Stoli said, “What’s your story?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“You know I would, Kurt.”

Fuck! Him saying my actual name jarred me. Hearing the word, my name, spoken to me for the first time since I died. He mused, “That ain’t no elf name. Curiouser and curiouser.”

“I’m not an elf. I’m not sure what I am or how I got here.”

“You some sort of ghost?”

“In a way. But ghosts don’t have bodies, so not really.”

“Fair enough.”

He popped another beer.

“Why are you a bum?” I asked.

“Ha! A bum. That’s a good one. I guess it looks that way. Not really a bum — I have a place — I just don’t like it there much. The gov’ment pays me to be a bum.”

A beat. “PTSD?”

“Ain’t you cheeky…yeah…something like that.”

The cherry glow of his cigarette danced in the dark. An ember flurried to the ground.

“You see a lot of people dead. Body parts in the dirt. You end up killing some folk. You never really know if they deserve it. I reckon now they didn’t. Deserve it. I reckon now I was killing George Washington and Paul Revere. But in Afghanistan. I lived in a cave for a year. I started to enjoy it.”

“I bet it had running water.”

“You’re right. And great sunrises. And a delicious supply of animals who wanted my cave. When the Army found me, I was fat.”

“You were Zarathustra.”

Long pause.

‘What did you say?” he asked suspiciously.

“I — ” Ah…he knew who that was. “You heard me.”

He took a moment. “When you are on a mission, you pack light. Technical gear, med-pack, MREs. I also brought a small e-reader with sixteen books on it. One of them was ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”

“It’s hard to dog-ear an eBook.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

I looked at my watch. Ten minutes. I sipped from the sippy cup.

“I’m not your guardian angel if that’s what you’re hoping.” I had to pause, though. “Shit, maybe I am and I don’t know it.”

“You have the voice of a child. I’m going crazy.”

“Much to our surprise, you are not. Let me put it this way: I was once someone else, and I came back. I don’t know why. It blows the hell out of my atheism theories.”

Another lengthy pause. I heard a new beer open and saw the flash of a lighter.

“You’re a reincarnation? Are you like a talking badger or something?”

I laughed. “Shut the hell up. You know badgers don’t have the glottal ability to form words. There are no such things as elves. I’m not an alien. You are not hallucinating…though I realize that would be easier for you. I used to be Kurt Sebastian Houston, failed writer, petty drug lord. Murdered at age 50 by his henchman, six-and-a-half years ago.”

There. I said it. To the crazy 7-Eleven bum. And I knew he would believe me. He had nothing else to believe in.

There was a very long silence.

“I gotta go,” he said. But he didn’t move.

For some reason, this ticked me off. “Don’t be such a pussy.” This coming from the high-pitched child-voice issuing from the foliage on the other side of a fence. But I was a little desperate. I said, “I just spilled my guts for the first time. No one but you knows this. You can’t bail on me just because it’s totally unbelievable and you think you’re having a psychotic episode. You are here in your ridiculous little convenience store hole and you’re talking to a reincarnated human. Why was it easier when I was an elf? Or alien? This is fucking real and you better fucking believe it…you better. Cuz I know now that I need you.”

Longest pause. I heard him get up, start to gather his things.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve drunk too much.”

“You’ve had four beers.”

“I need my medication.”

“You have it on you.”

“You sound like you’re…like three years old!”

“I’m much younger and much older.”

“Fuck you.”

“Sorry, man. You were an atheist. So was I. Sorry to fuck your shit up.”

Stoli stood out of the shadow, looking toward my black slice of the fence, frozen.

“This isn’t real.”

“It is real. You’re not having a PTSD flashback. Amor fati, my friend. This is what was — is — supposed to happen. This is what you were waiting for. We’re each other’s ticket to finding ourselves again. It’s all very clear. Believe me, I would’ve never said that fucking granola bullshit in the past, but then I died and was reborn. It’s not my fucking fault. I’m going to help you, and you are going to help me fulfill my mission.”

I’d never stated it so plainly before: I was on a mission! The details were becoming more defined at that very moment, and I was sure that this weird homeless guy named Stoli was part of this infernal puzzle. I knew for a while that I was going to need outside, grown-up help if I wanted to face down Franks. Stoli was the answer to this question.

He turned around, delayed his exit, didn’t move, faced away from me. “This isn’t happening.”

“Look, I gotta go, too. It’s almost dawn. I have my own curfew. I’ll be back, and next time don’t be all freaking out on me. We have work to do. I’m not some phantasm or hallucination; I’m a being from a past life who needs your help. Because you’re an adult and crazy enough to believe me.” Pause. I had to think this through. “I might not be back for a month or more. Anyhow, if you have the cajones to show up every night waiting for me, it’ll be worth your while. Both monetarily and spiritually. Can we agree on that?”

Stoli was completely mortified, confused. I’d gone from being a mysterious elf figure into a demon-reincarnate who had just made him what probably sounded like a Faustian offer.

But I wasn’t the devil. I didn’t have those kinds of chops.

The parking lot was empty, all was silent. No long-haired convenience store manager interrupted our game. He started to walk away again.

He said: “I hope to hell you don’t actually exist.”

I called after him, “Probably like two weeks!”

He didn’t reply, and I watched him disappear into the night.

The whole exchange made me tired. The watch said four in the morning. I drank from my sippy cup and eased myself down from the branches of the olive tree…which was probably really the size of a tall bush. As I slunk through my now familiar shadows, my shrubs and gardens and gates that kept this elf safe from harm, I tried to absorb what had just taken place. I had revealed myself for the first time.

After eighteen months of secrecy, I’d come out. It’d been a long time since I’d felt such relief. I sprinted across the street to the apartment complex with the artificial lake and the back fence that led to my neighborhood.

I’d exposed my true identity to a crazy man and I knew suddenly that I’d been sent back to fix everything, to make amends for the horrible bridges I’d burned and the resulting casualties.

As I skulked back home through the back door, dawn crawled up the chilled autumn sky, and I quietly nestled in my bed, finally understanding that this wasn’t a purgatory that I had to wait out; it was a story that I had to finish.