The Wish Belly Part: XIV
Photo by Raoul Droog on Unsplash
Shane Kimberlin
The Wish Belly is an original fiction serial. If you missed prior installments, you can catch up at the links below.
I now sat alone in the booth at Gammy Lammy’s. The opposite seat was empty. John was gone. He had vanished in front of me. Melted like a clock from one of those paintings. Not a word was spoken. Nobody said a thing, I surmised, because nobody had seen anything at all.
For a moment, all I did was count my breaths with my eyes open. Got up. Checked the other side, inspected it. Nothing there. I touched the seat’s surface. Warm. Sat back down. I extended my arm to where John had sat and waved my hand. Maybe he was a ghost now. I didn’t know.
Our waiter Tustin walked up to the booth with a plate of nachos in his hands. He looked at me, my expression, my extended arm waving across the table to the now-empty seat, and he turned his eyes upwards as if he’d caught me picking my nose.
I pulled my arm back and straightened my posture.
“Hey there,” I said.
“So, here we are,” said Tustin, “our famous Full House Nachos.”
He studied the empty seat in front of him.
“Is your friend coming back soon?”
“No,” I said.
“He’s not?” said Tustin, still holding the nachos. He had a worried expression on his face.
“No,” I said, “he’s gone. It’s like he vanished. I’m sorry.”
He melted, Tustin, he melted like a plastic toy in a fire.
“Huh,” said Tustin, “he really wanted those nachos.”
He did order food. Figments can’t order food.
“Yeah,” I said, “and he ordered them, right? I didn’t order them?”
“What?”
“The man I was with, the other guy who is not me, the man in the suit, HE ordered the nachos, right?”
“Yes sir, he ordered nachos.”
“Okay.”
In the background an old soft drink ad played on the TV. A montage of scenes rotated through like socks in a dryer. A man shooting himself through rings of fire. A hot dog eating contest. Rapunzel in the tower drinking a can of the sugar water.
“So,” said Tustin, “is he not coming back then?”
“I don’t think so.”
The soft drink ad must have been made in the early 90s. A man on water skis rode across a lake holding onto a line. The warmth after the Cold War.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Huh? Sure.”
“So, you didn’t look like you wanted to have lunch with him.”
“I didn’t, no.”
“Okay,” said Tustin, “Sweet, that’s what I thought. Weird that you had lunch with him then.”
I’m not crazy. “Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you have a question?”
“Huh?”
“You said you wanted to ask me something.”
“Oh, yeah, right, so, did you plan on paying? ‘Cause if you don’t, I have to. ‘Cause, like, they might be Full House nachos,” Tustin said as he handed me the bill, “but they’re not ‘On the House nachos,’ y’know what I mean?”
“Right. Is that your question?” “Yeah. Oh, and, also, you, like, didn’t want to have lunch with him, but you did. Why?” “Because,” I said, “I had to...I mean, I thought I had to. But I didn’t at all. Really. But I didn’t know that when I did-” I looked at the bill “-Really, man? Seventeen dollars? It’s just nachos and cheese.”
“The nachos are pretty good, dude.”
I walked up to the register with Tustin. He took out a white to-go box and slid in the food. Some chips cracked like a rockslide. The cheese was already coagulating. Food, over enough time, becomes just another object to not put in your mouth. The nachos were halfway there.
I looked in my coat’s right pocket for my wallet, and then the card. I stopped. Purchases would be tracked by the bank, which would be seen by the cops. I imagined the scene now. Me in a little room. Lampshade over the head. Light pouring down to the table. Coffee on table. Ashtray on table. Cigarette in ashtray. Two men. Imposing. Questions like: Why were you so far from home, just days after your wife’s disappearance? The college you both went to? Talking cat? Cherry tree? Nachos?
Cash it was.
There was a twenty, somewhere. Maybe in the left pocket. I felt for it. A big lump surprised my fingertips instead. It’d been hiding inside. I took it out without a thought. It was the stack of bills John had given me, pristine and rubber banded. This action was a mistake.
“Whoa,” said Tustin, “that’s a roll.”
The hostess, sitting by the door, turned her head and raised an eyebrow, all while still typing on her phone.
I tugged out a one hundred dollar bill, then shoved the brick back in my pocket.
“Here,” I said.
Tustin ran a forger marker across the bill. The hostess kept staring at me.
“We have to do this for big bills,” explained Tustin.
“No problem.”
“What’s your job?”
“I’m a software engineer.” “It’s crazy you’re this loaded.”
“Work hard, I guess.” I turned around to walk out. Had to get air.
“But I need to count your change.”
I turned around and spoke in cliche. “Keep it.”
I had to return to Highway Blues fast. I rushed past students, teachers, lost in a blur, speed walking, holding a box of to-go nachos with both hands against my chest like an inept ring bearer at a sideways wedding. I looked comical and felt numb. John, gone in an instant. Was it a lapse of memory? Had I just imagined him disappearing? Had he said goodbye? Had I written him leaving out of the story?
Or did John not exist? No, Tustin talked to him. Perhaps both John and Tustin were a part of my psyche? The money. Gammy Lammy’s. This whole mess I just kept making messier.
And maybe the entire world was a fiction. Talking cats and masks in trees. You’re in a dream. This sort of solipsism is no good. A Russian doll of a thought process ziplining into the faraway country of madness and hell. No. Maybe. Yes. No.
But what of these bills? Still had them. His business card, his number 555-JOHN, lay snug in my right pants pocket.
“Hey, you.”
So he obviously existed, but to what end?
You’re in a dream. You’re in a bad dream. You’re going farther down this bad dream.
“Hey buddy.”
Had I never woken from the fall?
“Yo.”
Was I still dreaming? The worst kind of dream.
“HEY YOU.”
An older man stood in front of me. He wore a button-up shirt too tight for his frame. His receding hair was greased and combed back violently. We stood by a fountain in the middle of the sidewalk. Nobody else was around. I knew this fountain. Me and her used to go through dimes in this fountain when we were broke and young and light. She’d just say they were aggregate pennies.
“Hey, you, I dunno what you’re trying to pull with this,” he said.
Twenty feet away from us stood Tustin and the hostess.
“What? Pull what?”
The man was upset. He waved a hundred-dollar bill in my face.
“Don’t play dumb.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You got a lotta nerve. I should call the cops on you.”
“Look, I don’t understand-”
“-It’s a fake, you liar. A fake.”
Was this my bill?
“A fake?”
“Yeah, a fake.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Don’t play dumb.”
Of course. Phony Bills. I was such a fool.
“It’s not my money. I swear. The other guy-”
“-what other guy? You paid.”
“No, it was his money, I swear.”
“I’m calling the cops.”
“You don’t have to do that.
He pulled out his phone. “No, no,” I said, “look, I’ll make this better. I didn’t know.”
I went to grab money from my pocket. I didn’t want a scene.
“Hey, hey,” I said, “here, here’s some money.”
He pushed me with phone in hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “look, ask Tustin.”
“Leave him out of this.”
He pushed me again. Harder this time. I pushed him back.
He was not very big. He fell backwards and landed on the ground. I yelped.
“Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
I tried to help him up. He swung at me again. I backed off. He got up slowly and wiped the dirt from his pants. I tried to hand him the money.
“Here,” I said.
He grabbed the money from me.
“Don’t ever come back.” I said nothing.
“Come on,” said the man to Tustin and the hostess. He walked off and grew smaller and smaller. Tustin and the hostess walked behind him. Tustin looked back at me with deer eyes big and green and sorry. The hostess looked back. Green eyes, too, and like a doe. The older man, I noted, had green eyes also.
I wanted to say sorry to Tustin, explain how I didn’t even want to go eat. Blame John.
On the ground sat a little green ball. The hundred dollar bill. Curled up. Rejected.
I picked it up. It sat immaculate. It was like a dead bird that’d just hit glass on top of my fingers. A butterfly who turned back to a sleeping caterpillar when time reversed. It still felt cold despite all the contact. I unwrapped its cocoon and stared at its image. Benjamin Franklin seemed fine. His face was the same as it ever was: slight surprise, thinking about how better to save that penny.
My father always said Ben Franklin was his favorite president because he was the most giving but also the most rare. He drove a city bus. Hundreds, in both substance and sight, were rarer than a desert of rain to him. I’m sure he knew Benjamin Franklin wasn’t president, but he always said he was with a smile, and he said it a lot.
I stared back at the bill and saw no error in his ways.