Episode 34: Setting Out (Greg)

His mom shook him.

42 years old and his mom was shaking him awake, because he couldn’t face the world.

“Greg,” she said. She gave him the intervention look. He’d had the intervention look before, but last time Molly had been with him, holding his hand. They’d looked at their alien family together and wondered how they had ever been close to them.

Now Molly was a ceramic container of ashes.

“Greg,” his mom said again. “This has to stop.”

Yes, it did.

He sat up.

He pulled on the jeans from the floor and buttoned a flannel plaid shirt over his undershirt.

“It’s stopping,” he said. He went to the vanity and splashed water on his face. “Any particular reason you picked today to make my life hell?”

“It’s been a year and a day,” she crinkled her face at him in some kind of contorted smile. “I gave you yesterday. Today, you get your life back.”

He was way too hungover for this conversation.

He remembered some bleary thoughts about that strange guy. He still had the card in the desk drawer, under the old phone. Maybe he’d get lucky and the guy was telling the truth. Maybe he’d get lucky and the guy would kill him.

He grabbed his wallet and keys.

“Where are you going?” his mom asked.

Apparently the intervention was supposed to involve him staying home and being coddled.

He looked at the vase of Molly one last time. Once he left, he’d never see that again.

People thought bodies were people, but bodies were vases. People were all the memories and thoughts and ideas and idiosyncrasies of each individual.

When they died, they weren’t their ashes. They were all the moments of their life. Gone. Just lost forever, between one blink and the next.

He and Molly had never shared enough.

He didn’t want to miss another moment of his kids’ lives.

He slapped his hand on the table.

“Out,” he told her. “I’m going out.”

He grabbed his hat off the hook by the door and then walked out to the driveway.

He drove his truck west and then north. He sang along to whatever was on the radio because he loved personal expression. When his truck was almost out of gas, he parked it somewhere in Oakland.

“Hey,” he said to some guy. “Where can I catch the subway out here?”

The guy smiled and punched the side of his head. Hard.

Greg got it. He was short. People had a bad habit of underestimating short people.

“Give me your wallet,” the guy said. He reached for Greg’s back pocket.

Oakland. It was as bad as Jersey. Why did the place have to be so stereotypical?

“Get your hand off my ass,” Greg said. He kneed him in the groin and then flipped their bodies so he was on top. The guy probably weighed twice as much as he did, but he was sluggish and probably used to getting his way based on size alone.

Greg knew how to move his body.

He shifted higher, with a knee on the guy’s diaphragm.

“Don’t touch me again,” he warned him.

It was a dumb move, to walk away, but he didn’t want to leave a mess behind him.

He heard the guy’s heavy footsteps as he rushed him.

At the last possible second, Greg stepped to the side and hooked his left foot out. The guy tripped and fell on the sidewalk.

Greg grabbed his dreadlocks and smashed his face into the ground.

“I said don’t fucking touch me,” he said. He smashed the guy’s face into the ground again.

He took a twenty out of his wallet to cover the cost of a bottle of water and a subway ride to Chinatown.

“Have the fucking money,” he told the guy. “I don’t need it.” He threw the wallet on the ground next to the guy’s head.

The guy coughed. His nose was broken – Greg had made sure of that. The guy pulled himself to his knees and turned his head toward Greg. “You’re crazy, dude.”

“You think so?” he asked. He fixed a button on his shirt. “I just walked out of an intervention.”

The guy shook his head.

He wondered whether it was drugs or stupidity that had driven the guy to this place.

“Look,” he said. “You want to do something with your life? Besides being bad at mugging people?”

The guy stared at him. Blood dripped from his nose onto the sidewalk.

“Let me ask you this,” Greg said. “If I’d asked where I could catch BART would you have hit me still?”

The guy wiped his face.

“I thought so.” Greg sighed.

It would be nice to have company. Someone to focus on teaching when he got lonely or lost in his grief.

“Calling it the subway marked me as an outsider. Much easier target. But if I’d called it BART, I’m probably local. Local people are harder to mug and get away with it. Statistical fact.”

The guy still didn’t say anything.

Maybe he was too stupid for this to be worthwhile.

He stood up.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to see a guy who sells turnips in Chinatown, and then I’m going to a different universe to find my sons.”

“You tripping?” the guy asked.

Greg looked at the ground where the guy had fallen.

“You tripped,” he pointed out.

He hadn’t made a joke in a long time. He felt like an asshole.

He offered the guy his hand. “I’m Greg Laurens.”

“Damon Grant,” the guy said. He shook Greg’s hand.

“Chinatown?” Greg offered.

He started walking.

Damon Grant followed.

“I’m breaking parole by leaving here,” he warned. “You better be right about this other universe thing.”

“Why are you risking your parole on something so unbelievable?”

Greg wondered what he’d done to end up on parole.

Maybe he’d get lucky and the guy was a killer. Odds were against that. Most parolees were small-crime idiots. But a murderer would be useful.

“Because I never seen a little white guy kick so much ass before. Maybe you have magic or some shit.”

They took the subway – BART – which was its own adventure because everyone felt the need to stare at Damon’s bloody face.

“He had an accident with a meat cleaver,” Greg told the old woman who pulled her purse in closer against her body.

“Hit by a train. This train, in fact,” he told the man who pretended not to stare.

Then Damon started getting into the joke too. By the time they got off in Chinatown, Damon had been mauled by a chihuahua, contracted a deadly form of nasal ebola that dissolved the nose, accidentally set his stove on fire, and shaved his nose off with a razor during a fight with his girlfriend’s husband.

Each time, the story got more elaborate and fun.

They walked up and down the streets. Greg got a water and some kind of drippy bowl of lo mein. Damon told him Chinese food was disgusting.

They found the turnip stall after about half an hour of wandering.

There he was – Chanming – the guy who had contacted Greg and Molly years ago.

“Chan?” Greg said.

Chanming took him in. “You come with me,” he said. He talked to the woman behind the stall with him and then came out onto the street.

“I heard they took your last son,” he said.

“Why?” Greg asked. “Why would they do that?”

“Who is the idiot you brought? I didn’t offer to send him.”

Greg looked at Damon.

“He’s with me,” he said.

Greg hadn’t gotten to raise a son, but if he could maybe just manage to teach Damon how to mug effectively…how to pick a target, keep his body in shape, judge where best to attack and when…

Chanming sighed.

Greg remembered disliking him before because of his bug eyes. Most people with bug eyes had thyroid problems, but Chanming had laughed when Greg suggested it. Greg couldn’t stand when people didn’t take his advice. What was the point of knowing things if no one wanted to listen?

Chanming led them back to the subway.

“Where are we going?” Greg asked.

“Basement of the Transamerica building.”

They rode in silence.

Greg thought they had to be the weirdest group on BART in a while: A short guy in a fedora, an even shorter old Chinese man with earrings and a golden dragon emblazoned on his shirt, and a giant dark-skinned man with a broken nose and blood all over his clothing.

No one was going to let them into the Transamerica building.

Greg studied the subway map on the opposite wall of the train car and then turned to look at Damon.

He leaned slightly toward the guy. “We need to get off at the next stop,” he whispered.

Damon’s eyes widened and he looked at Chanming.

Idiot.

Greg had a lot to teach this kid.

The train slowed to a stop at the next station. He and Damon got off without saying a word to Chanming.

Greg kept up a brisk pace, walking in a random direction. He deliberately didn’t let himself look up when they emerged from the subway because then he would choose either toward or away from the Transamerica building. That could get predictable based on things he didn’t know about himself, things he didn’t know about Chanming.

It took him a moment to realize someone else was running with them. Not toward or away from them, but with them. A coconut-skinned girl with frizzy hair that popped out of its ponytail.

She stopped Damon and said something to him.

Damon stopped running, and the girl walked away again.

“What are you doing, you asshole?” Greg demanded. He shoved Damon onward down the sidewalk. “Go!”

“Where are we going?” the girl asked from a few feet ahead. She moved with Damon, so that from behind his silhouette would always conceal her from view.

Damon might be a moron about basic skills, but this girl had a little more experience. He wanted to tell her to find her own bully, this one was his.

“We?” he challenged.

He didn’t need a mess.

She sniffed the air like a feral animal.

Greg made a mental note to do that the next time he felt threatened. It was creepy and off-putting.

“You smell like Chinese food,” she accused.

Damon wrinkled his nose like he agreed.

“Did you piss that guy off?” the girl asked. “I know a place we can hide.”

“We are Chinese food,” Greg told her. Or they might be, anyway, if Chanming caught up to them.

“Ew,” she complained.

They rounded a corner and Chanming blocked their path.

They could run again, but the girl was running from something behind them.

Time to negotiate.

Damon seemed to understand his job in this situation, which was to look ominous and threatening. He stepped between Chanming and Greg with body language that dared Chanming to try to get past.

Greg loved people. They were just so great when you needed them to be.

“We’re almost there,” Chanming said. He craned his neck so he could see Greg around Damon’s body. “Why are you running away?

“Chinatown is right near the Transamerica building, but you took us on the subway.” He looked at the girl. “Who are you running from, and why?”

He needed to know which was the greater threat, Chanming or the other people.

“Pennyweather. They went the other way.”

If she’d said any other name…

“Subway stops people from following,” Chanming explained. He had a point. In San Francisco it wasn’t always easy to spot someone following you unless you knew how, and even then you could miss someone. “I’d know if anyone came with us and doubled back. Come on, before someone does follow us.”

He walked off without waiting to see if anyone followed.

The girl did, of course.

It was his sons.

She’d said Pennyweather…

He followed, and Damon went with him.

“Get rid of the girl,” Chanming instructed. “I didn’t invite her.”

“I did,” Jay countered.

“No way.” The girl put a hand on her hip. “People need to know what kind of ingredients you’re serving at your place.”

Drugs. She thought he was a common drug dealer.

He didn’t have time for this.

He pinched the pressure point on her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“Owwww.” She tried to squirm away from him. “Asshole. I was going.”

“Say goodbye to America,” he urged her. If she was going to panic and run he’d rather she do it before she saw the portal.

“You can’t eat me!” she yelled to Chanming. “I have rights.”

“Rights?” Chanming stopped along a wall on the base of the Transamerica building. One minute it was a glass window front with a store beyond, and the next it was a metal door that led into a single cement room.

And in the middle of the room…A bubble of shimmering air.

It was real. The portal was real. Oscar, Jay, Dorian…they’d all come through here, if Chanming was telling the truth.

“Where you’re going,” Chanming warned, “You have no rights. You have the right to try to survive. Nothing else.”

Sounded like a fun place to teach Damon how to handle himself.

“Fuck,” Damon said. He stood against the door. “It’s real.”

“This takes you to Taiwan,” Chanming said. “Look for someone to take you to Noc Thui. After that you’re on your own.”

The girl dug in her pocket and pulled out a set of car keys. She handed them to Chanming. “Thanks,” she said, when he took them.

He lobbed them in an arc, straight into the portal. They vanished mid-air.

“Hopefully that didn’t piss anyone off.” Chanming sounded like he hoped it did.

Jay laughed.

He looked at Damon and the girl. “Coming? Or you can stay here…” Be bored, go about your bullying, car-stealing little lives.

“Yeah,” Penny said. She walked through. Damon followed straight behind.

Greg peered at the rippling air.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if I left them there?” He mused.

Chanming laughed. “Rhoganoi. They can help you find your sons.” He patted Greg’s shoulder. “Be safe.”

Greg walked through.

<- Episode 33 | Episode 35 ->