#sporkman

#4 - Like Mall Walking, But Naked and Underwater

His time in the Marine Corps has taught the Missionary that he does not, in fact, serve at the only evangelical mission in the world with Tiki idols carved in the sanctuary doors.  They are big, double doors, the wood has gone dark with age and cigarette smoke. Outside the doors runs an alley that dead-ends in a small parking lot. Inside the doors is a good-sized room.

The carpet is dark pink and still shows the marks where booths have compacted it during this room’s many years as a cocktail lounge. Repeated and vigorous scrubbing has removed the lingering smell of spilled alcohol. Metal stacking chairs with padded seats in varying shades from fuchsia to maroon line the wood-paneled walls.

A small, step-up stage serves as a pulpit on Sundays. There is a commercial kitchen in the back, two bathrooms with a stall and sink on the other side, plus an old office that has been carved up into a tub/shower/storage space.

Stairs behind the office lead to the upstairs apartment where the Missionary lives. 

If you zoom way, way, way in on some obscure federal maps, you can see this patch of ground listed as "tribal lands". The Missionary has never discovered which tribe gets the lease money. He deals directly with their real estate agent - a woman of a certain age who certainly doesn't need the money and probably got licensed in order to cultivate a hobby other than Mahjong and Pilates.

This evening, the Missionary shelters Big Hat and two regulars. 

Big Hat is sulking on the sidewalk outside.

Deirdre, last name unknown, apparent age around sixty-five, spends her days haunting the apartment complex down the street that was her last real home before her mother died. Deirdre, who has the mind and capacities of an eight-year-old, was left homeless in a town that didn’t even have a shelter for children in mortal danger of being beaten to death by abusive parents, let alone facilities for impoverished adults with developmental deficits. 

Except the prison.

“Deirdre’s a good girl!” Deirdre greets him when he walks into the room. This was the last thing her mother said to her -- told her to be a good girl. She cheerfully informs any grown-up who shows her kindness that she is doing what she is told.

And there is Carmen, who, as far as the Missionary can tell, is a perfectly intelligent and conversant human being with a near-pathological aversion to human company.

Carmen has finished her weekly shower, made herself a fortress of stacked chairs, and is nesting with her little pad and blanket behind its mighty walls. 

The Missionary frowns. One of his regulars has gone out onto the streets again, and every time he disappears, the Missionary is convinced he'll never come back. It's deadly hot. Water, once commonly available, is now locked down everywhere in the city because, ironically, available fresh water is thought to "encourage" homeless people (and it is a mortal sin to give away anything tourists will pay for). Competition for safe sleeping places is constant and violent, and the attrition rate rises with the mercury.

Bodies wash into the streets during flood season: ragged sacks of skin and bone that once contained a human soul; people who got thrown out with the garbage while still alive. Mostly men. Only slightly fewer women. But it's the tiny bundles that--

The Missionary flexes his fingers and breathes deeply, closes his eyes, opens them, and tries to focus on the job before him. He has mixed success. 

When his job was to end life, he'd had billions of dollars in resources behind him. Now that his job is to preserve it--

More flexing. More breathing.

And how his missing lamb manages to hang on to life is a mystery. He's an emaciated man with black-leather skin and dreadlocked African (or possibly Melanesian) hair, which is bleached reddish-blond by the sun. He never speaks, although he does sometimes murmur nonsense syllables to himself in a sing-song voice, an activity that seems to bring him great joy, because his mouth stretches into a smile that really is oddly beautiful, considering he only has the three teeth left.

 It bothers the Missionary that he doesn’t know the man’s name and that he can’t even think of something appropriate to use as a private name for him.

The Missionary’s contact information is written in black Sharpie up and down the man’s arms; tribal tattoos that are regularly renewed in order to show up against his dark skin. When lost, please contact, etc.

The Missionary can find nothing else the man can keep hold of, except his spork. He clutches his beloved spork even in sleep. He eats with it. He scratches with it. He waves it in idiosyncratic time with his musical efforts. It is only a thing of plastic with three stubby tines, and so must get broken and replaced sometimes, but the Missionary has never been able to verify this.

Sporkman? Trey?

Right now, the Missionary is locking Big Hat's roadkill dogbutt away in the backroom storage freezer -- he wrapped it in three layers of plastic garbage bag, first -- when he realizes that Carmen is standing right beside him. Still, silent, barefoot, and wrapped in a blanket, she waits to be noticed.

"You go. I'll babysit," she says. Then she turns abruptly away and goes back to the Fortress of Solitude.

Just after 3 am, his telephone rings.

The naked, skinny, dreadlocked man darts through the clear waters of a room-sized saltwater aquarium, which is the centerpiece of a rotunda within a shopping mall as imagined by the love child of Busby Berkely and Caligula.

He neatly avoids the coral decorations while menacing a quarter-million dollars’ worth of tropical fish. 

With a spork. 

“The thing is,” says the security guard quite calmly, considering. “The thing is, he’s been underwater for about forty minutes.”

"Mmm-hmm," says the Missionary. He nods his head in silent affirmation of the other man's words. He keeps his eyes on the tank and his hands in his pockets, shoulders relaxed, stance casual. Experience has taught him that if he just stands there, being a largish and serious man of some gravitas, not panicking, and apparently accepting of the completely unthinkable, his acceptance will be contagious. Other men will look to him for cues. After all, if the padre thinks something is perfectly reasonable, then maybe it is. Maybe he knows something they don't. Wouldn't want to look uninformed or ignorant about these things, right?

"I called the phone number he's got written on his arm," the security guard adds, weakly. The security guard is a black man, about the same age as the Missionary. It must have taken some doing to even recognize the markings as a phone number, let alone see them well enough to write them down. So this is a man who will go out of his way to avoid tossing a brother into the gaping maw of Molloch the Metropolitan Police.

"Good, good, really appreciate this," the Missionary says, "Sorry for the inconvenience." He shrugs in a world-weary, what-can-you-do sort of way. "Just so few services for these situations. And you know, it isn't like we don't have the means." He gestures around the Forum Shops, taking in the Bulgari and Cartier. "There are perfectly affordable solutions that actually work, proven over and over in other cities, and we just can't get with the program. Breaks my heart that I can't do more than I do," he says. 

The security guard nods. 

"Well," the Missionary says, switching energy modes suddenly, pushing up to the balls of his feet and clapping his hands together, "Thank you, Joseph," the Missionary can read a name badge without breaking eye contact, "I'll take him off your hands." 

And he raps two knuckles lightly on the side of the tank. The fish and the submerged man twitch slightly as the shock waves travel through the water and make contact with the sensory organs along the sides of their bodies. The dark swimmer scowls, then opens his eyes just a little wider than is natural and peers beyond the glass. The Missionary makes an "everybody out of the pool" gesture. Grudgingly, like a grade-schooler dragging himself to bed on a weeknight, the man in the tank pulls himself out of the aquarium and slips through an access portal at the top. He slides down the glass sides of the tank on a streak of water and lands lightly in a puddle on the floor. His webbed toes make a slapping sound. He grins, wide and white, at the Missionary. He has more teeth than the Missionary remembers him having. And they are, possibly, pointier. 

The Missionary stands back, using one hand to encourage the security guard to do so as well. The swimmer shakes himself all over like a skinny brown seal. Droplets scatter in a perfect sphere around him. Light glints and bounces off the droplets. He walks toward the Missionary, still grinning.