Jester on the pond

Rey waits for me to flop onto my side of the bed before she unpauses the screen. She’s wearing a darker, more foreboding facial veil this week. I can sometimes make out the gleam of her eyes beneath the fabric, but that’s about it. Our ritual: Rey comes over to my shack. With great uncertainty we select a can of something to eat. These days, there’s very little touching between Rey and me. We lie on opposite sides of the bed and we watch something informative on the screen. Tonight it’s a program about space.
“Would you?” I say. “Would you go to Mars if you could?”
Rey rolls the veil up to her nose so she can get a proper swallow of the bathtub julep we’ve been drinking.
“I’d leave tonight,” she says.
“It looks so dusty. Like you’d never stop sneezing.”
“I just want one of those fancy helmets. I’d never take mine off.”
There used to be more touching between Rey and me—touching while the sun set pretty and golden outside the shack, touching while a bowl of something tasty sizzled and popped in my fine microwave. That didn’t last a year. Back in November, Rey zigged when she should’ve zagged during late shift at the chicken plant. She took a stream of piping-hot oil to the face. I’ve told her the burns aren’t even that noticeable, but she says her touching days are over. We are both past forty, both single and without hope of leaving the shanty side of town—a kind of municipal drain where the jobless and the disenfranchised settle like bits of food waste. We’re supposed to be crafty veterans of the human theater by now, but we’re more like extras who keep forgetting their lines.
We’re learning about Martian dust devils when blue lights toss against the blinds. It’s Jorge. He only stops by like this on Sundays, don’t ask me why. He never knocks after midnight—he’s polite that way.
“Again.” Rey says again more like a confirmation than a query, a new-world mystic witnessing prophecies within the veil.
“This man’s tenacious,” I say.
As a former jester, I don’t trust easily, even if I am two years retired. With great deliberation, I abandon the warmth of the bed, drag open the door of my shack, and check overhead for booby traps—teetering anvils, precarious buckets of dishwater, spring-powered pies—but there’s only Jorge batting his home-made taser against the palm of his hand. It’s January, but he wears short sleeves. He looks like he might be ready to cry, or like he might hug me about the neck, or demand an over-dramatic handshake—anything.
“I,” he says, holding forth a faux badge, “am Officer Jorge Verano.”
“I know who you are, Jorge. You don’t have to introduce yourself every time.”
“Sir,” he says, “how many drinks have you had this evening?” His slim shoulders dip, too little muscle these days to keep them squared.|
“A whole gang of drinks,” I say. It’s true, my julep’s come into full glory this week.
“Code 502,” Jorge says to his Walkie Talkie, but it doesn’t beep and no one answers.
“You can’t arrest me for drinking at home.”
Jorge flicks a frozen gecko from my porch light with such force it cuts a sizzling arc into the night. He tightens a sconce screw with his untrimmed fingernail, and against the light I can see where incoming punches split the skin near his eyebrows. Old scar tissue from his cage-fighting days. What I can’t see is the internal damage—how his brain no longer sits like it should. I used to give this man a wide berth when I spotted him among the shanties. As a cop, he’d carried a perpetual scowl that told you he was just as happy to whip your ass in public as arrest you. I’d seen folks sink to their knees and volunteer confessions to crimes Jorge couldn’t possibly have known about. But that was the old Jorge.
“Sir,” he says, “are you aware how fast you were going?”
“We’re all spinning about a thousand miles an hour, plus the speed of the red shift, whatever that might be.” Rey and I learned this from tonight’s space program.
“Sounds pretty goddamn fast,” Jorge says, already backing away. “I’ll have to take you in.”
“Not tonight,” I say. “Rey’s over. Did you not notice her bike?”
“I like that movie.” He’s creeping toward his patrol car. “The one about space. I’ve 62 NICKALUS RUPERT seen movies. You think you’re the only one with a screen?”
“We’ll work something out,” I say, spreading my hands. “We’ll find a way to get you back on top. I must be doing something illegal. We’ll figure out what it is.”
I watch as Jorge speeds past flimsy wood shacks and shanties, blue lights milling like crazy as he leaves behind the cheap side of town in favor of the paved roads, permanent structures, and dependable electricity. The good side of town glows like a concrete chandelier, equal parts beacon and warning. Jorge’s headed back to the station, where they’ve told him they’ll put him back on the payroll if only he can make a legitimate arrest. This strikes me as cruel. Jorge’s inept. His patrol car is an old station wagon. The blue lights aren’t even real blue lights. They’re the battery-operated kind from the Penny Pantry, and he always forgets to switch them off.

You learn the saddest things when you finally get your screen. Like, the outer surface of a diamond isn’t carbon. It’s an overlayer of hydrogen or oxygen—a kind of atomic varnish that’s always there. When I was a kid, Mom would let me kiss the diamond on her ring for good luck, only I never actually touched the thing, never brushed my lip molecules against actual diamond. At some point Mom must’ve sold that ring to buy us a few cans of something. Likely, it wasn’t even real diamond.
Some nights, I dream a version of myself who hammers together a shack with a slick wooden counter and a few card tables and chairs. Behind the counter, shiny pots boil over, turning out swampy teas and steamy soups. People from both the shanties and the bonafide neighborhoods shamble over to sip something warm and exchange news of the world. I’m behind the counter, describing whatever science thing Rey and I learned from the screen that week. Some of the soup drinkers respond with thoughts of their own. It’s not about showing off, it’s about sharing. I want to understand. Not that I don’t appreciate Rey, it’s just that sometimes we are not enough.
How I got my screen: Mr. Rimbault shoved me off the roof of his new bank, me harlequin- suited, jingle-hatted. Below, a Volvo-sized cream pie swallowed me with a comical gloop. The public laughed and clapped as I struggled free to sneeze snot ropes of custard and beg weepily against any future stunts involving high-falls.

The screen is still paused, and I can tell from the angle of the bathroom door that Rey’s been in there again, lifting the veil to check her scars in the mirror.
“I think Jorge’s getting worse,” I tell her.
“We’re all getting worse.”
Rey says she’s fully prepared, now, for a life divested of romance, and I can understand why. Her week ended on another failed cosmetic miracle—a tube of rejuvenation cream made from the powdered shells of lobsters, which, according to these science shows, never age. I’ll be honest, the cream doesn’t smell terrific. She stopped applying it days ago, but the odor hangs in the room.
Tonight’s menu: canned caterpillars from Penny Pantry, where Rey and I first met— an accidental pelvic collision as we rummaged through the discount trough. Rey prefers the Cajun-spiced crickets but tonight they were all out.
“At least caterpillars are low on the food chain,” Rey says. “That means they’re healthy.”
“Good to hear. I got us a can of algae for dessert.”
Rey fakes a laugh. We chew and we watch. We cough and hack dramatically when the caterpillar spines hang in our throats. Rey says don’t expect Jorge to recover. She says none of it’s his fault—not his condition, and not his inability to self-absolve. Rey says free will is all one big misunderstanding.
“It was chemistry,” she says, touching her veil. “If I had chewed just a few more coffee beans I’d have been alert enough to duck, but how could I have known? How’s that even a choice?”
According to Rey, we’re all test tubes destined to fizz over.
“Prove me wrong,” she says.
But of course I can’t, so I eat my caterpillars and pretend they’re plump, red- striped shrimp from the Gulf. Onscreen, a computer-modeled universe explodes into shape from a single tiny blip. It’s all so violent—the trauma of creation. Light particles dim as they disperse, losing heat.

In March we find him in the park, shackled to a rusty merry-go-round that no longer sits level, so that riders rise and descend with each revolution. Whoever did this to him also spray- painted a curly wig Day-Glo orange and glued it to his head. They’ve unpantsed him and scissored out the nipples of his uniform. They’ve even rigged up a car battery to a motor so that the ride will keep spinning. The battery’s been going long enough to run down. At best, Jorge’s doing four, maybe five RPMs. Jorge slowly up, Jorge slowly down. All around the merry-go-round, a perfect circle of vomit streaks. He can’t bring himself to look at us until we’ve disengaged the motor.
“Who did this?” I say. “Vandals? Something worse?”
“This,” he says, “is the work of professionals. They looked like The Jets from that gang movie. They were both wearing fancy jackets.”
“Giraffe fur?”
“Smelled like giraffe to me.”
I should’ve known not to go outside. Just like that, the panic is back, shrieking my name, letting me know it never really left. For all the effort put into the motor and wig, Jorge’s manacles seem like an afterthought. I pry at the keyhole with a discarded syringe and the cuffs spring open. Against our usual no-touch protocol, Rey grips my hand. Give her credit, she gets me. This isn’t like the week the teenagers kept stuffing tennis balls into Jorge’s exhaust pipe, howling with laughter as his station wagon backfired. It’s not like the time they played keep-away with his taser. They’re trying to make actual fools of us, and this time they’re not even paying for the privilege.
The once-proud cage fighter gets to his feet, and even though he’s still pantsless, he chooses to cover his exposed nipples instead of his crotch.
“Much obliged,” Jorge says, tugging at the wig as he staggers to his patrol car, which is painted up in Day-Glo illustrations of genitalia.
Rey and I watch our backs on the walk home. I step on nothing that looks remotely suspicious. We skirt the pond by at least a hundred yards.

How I got my screen: Mr. Rimbault sent me into his ostrich enclosure wearing a full-sized catsuit. I tiptoed over to the birds like I’d been ordered to. These were not timid creatures. They were red-eyed, rangy. It’d been rumored that some nights after his zoo closed, Mr. Rimbault and his banker buddies would rig up the bigger specimens with toe spurs and make them fight to the death like cocks over big banker money. Even spurless, those ostrich toes appeared lethal. I hammed to the zoo patrons like Mr. Rimbault asked. I stroked my cat whiskers. The birds grew twitchy. Their leg muscles flexed. The crowd egged me on. A safe stunt is a failed stunt, so they ordered me closer to the birds.
“Want to know when you can get out of there?” Mr. Rimbault whispered through chain-link. “You can get out of there after you’ve ridden one.”
Mr. Rimbault was still sour because Officer Jorge Verano had hit him with a cease- and-desist. No longer could Mr. Rimbault charge the public admission to watch me get in the ring with Bash, his six-foot red kangaroo. Back then, not even Mr. Rimbault had been willing to test Jorge’s patience.
“You are an entertainer, are you not?” Mr. Rimbault said. He turned to the crowd, raised a fist, and chanted: Ride. The. Bird.
The crowd took up his mantra, amplified it.

It wasn’t always just screen-watching with Rey. One night in January, before Jorge was 66 NICKALUS RUPERT forced to ride the merry-go-round, we both drank enough julep to walk over to the frozen catfish pond. At the western shore, Rey tore open her birthday present—a pair of mismatched shoes. To the soles, I’d bolted two sharpened metal rails from a burned-up sled I found near the train yard.
I’d made a pair for myself as well. We laced up our boots and ventured onto the pond, the ice glowing that high green of a neglected fish tank, and just as smelly. Lumpy ice, plugs of frozen moss that could catch on your blades and send you headlong.
It sure felt like the skating we’d seen on the screen, even if our skates were janky, our bones too brittle-cold for us to build much speed. But we had julep and crickets in our bellies and we were buzzed enough to let go of the world and hold one another with a certain desperation. The wind kept catching Rey’s veil and urging it away. For a little while she fought it, and then, in one clean motion, she pulled it free, offering her bare face to the moonlight. I’d forgotten the depth of her eyes, the way her hair coiled like a thumb whorl. The blades of our skates rode a skim layer of water, not really touching the ice, and I was holding Rey without touching Rey. I knew all of that, but for a moment I forgot. For a moment, the glow of the moon on that ice was the single most stunning thing I’d ever seen, like there really was something down there to give it light—light, if not warmth.
“You look like somebody.” A ragged guy stood watching us and pissing onto the ice. It wasn’t clear if he meant me or Rey, but there was something horribly familiar about his voice. A refined quality that seemed out of place on the cheap side of town. The man lost hold of something shiny—a smash of glass on the ice. “I could be your third party,” he said, louder now. “Two’s good, but three’s the bee’s knees.”
There was something familiar about his bee talk that put the fear in me. Rey replaced her veil. We walked home in silence, our hands and feet moving numbly in the cold.

How I got my screen: Mr. Rimbault set me loose among the pines in full jester’s garb while he and his two shitheel sons pursued with paintball guns. They wore giraffe-fur jackets NICKALUS RUPERT 67 and appeared to be the same age, not quite teenagers but already connoisseurs of mindless violence. The week before, I had to help them construct a bed-sized trebuchet for the launching of field mice. The Mister had always seemed more interested in humiliating me than hurting me, but his sons must’ve stored their paintballs in the freezer overnight. Instead of splatting, their ammo went thump and crunch and left my skin cratered and bleeding. Two fingers broke where I tried to cover my face. Their laughter was so loud and genuine-sounding that in spite of the dazzling pain, I, too, began to laugh.
Later, Mr. Rimbault bought me my first-ever steak dinner. He even stood over my plate and cut the meat into cubes. It was an odd feeling, eating food I’d only seen in magazines and on bus shelters. The flavor was nothing like burger meat. There was a smokiness that made me want to chew and chew and never swallow.
Mr. Rimbault said his sons were way out of line. Never again would he let them pull that kind of stunt. And didn’t I realize that love was the only reason he’d kept me around? Love and not cruelty. He just liked me and felt comfortable around me. I was so easy to talk to.
“Barbarians,” he said of his high-octane business pals. “But you? You’re the bee’s knees.” He said I had character, something only real people come by. He said that because he respected me so much, he’d bump up my retirement six months—it would be downright selfish for him to demand the full seven years listed on my contract. Before I knew it, I’d have a shack all to myself. Electricity and everything. I’d have a weekly credit at Penny Pantry for as long as I cared to. He’d handle it all, and he’d even throw in a little something extra—a bonus prize. Further, if I ever decided to open my soup kitchen, he might even be willing to partner up.
“Christ,” he said, “you know, I’m not even sure how I feel about this whole enterprise of hired jesters. Maybe it’s not such a decent thing after all.”
Mr. Rimbault gripped my shoulder, careful to avoid the paintball wounds. He seemed greatly aggrieved, unthinkable tragedies having intruded on the immaculate lawn of his conscience. The jester, too, capable of suffering.

In April, Rey drags open the door of my shack and calls me over to look at something—a belled cap taped to a rotten watermelon half. There’s a smiley face carved into the watermelon’s rind, and the melon-jester appears to be crying beads of pinkish juice.
“Little shits are testing me,” I say. I curse shanty town—the boiling laundry vats, the shiftless dogs, the primordial reek of countless hobo stews. I vow to crack the neck of any Rimbault punk who dares to cross me, but of course no one yells back.
“You don’t know a gift when you see one,” Rey says, toeing the melon to shoo a cloud of gnats. “We can cut away the rotten parts. It’s been years since I tasted real watermelon.”
“That’s just what they want. If we’re lucky, they’ve injected this thing with laxatives. More likely it’s something worse.”
We have a short feud over whether the melon is dressed in a jester’s cap or an elf cap, then Rey heads inside and drags the door shut on me. Once inside, I turn down all the lamps and we huddle up in bed and fire up the screen.
Fill a room with typewriters and chimpanzees, a scientist says, and probability tells us that after a few billion years, one of them will type a perfect Shakespearean sonnet.
“I guess after that much time the chimps get smarter?” I say.
“That’s not what she’s saying,” Rey says. “She’s saying that eventually all possible conclusions will play out. You have such a talent for misunderstanding.”
Onscreen, simulated chimps bang away at their keyboards, and none of it makes any goddamn sense. The thing about these screens is that they only talk at you. There’s no room for collaboration.

Old footage of Jorge climbing into an octagonal cage, shirtless and with gloves on. Even on video, you can tell this is a different version of Jorge—eyes clear, hands steady. The camera work is shoddy, the lighting inconsistent, Jorge’s body laddered with shadow.
“He was in good shape,” Rey says.
“He was not to be fucked with,” I say.
At this time, Jorge’s daughter is attending one of those business colleges where the walls are all made of glass and every student gets a personal assistant. This version of Jorge still has his cop job, but he needs tuition money. He’s made it to the tourney’s final bracket, and you can tell from his strut that he’s already spent that $10,000 jackpot, already paid an advance on his daughter’s schooling.
The cage tilts to whatever side the two men occupy at any given moment. The floor is thin plastic that pools wherever Jorge steps. In a show of compassion, he and his opponent tap gloves before they dole out kicks and punches. I’ve seen enough boxing documentaries to understand that Jorge ought to keep his left hand closer to his jaw. I yell at him through the screen while Rey crunches on fried crickets. Jorge falls for a feint, leaves himself open for an overhand right to the temple. His body tenses up like he’s been electrified, and then the referee’s lying on top of him and waving off the fight. Jorge’s lead hand grasps at the air, extends itself gently toward the man who beat him, as if to offer reassurance.
There are a dozen other videos of Jorge beaten unconscious. In the latter matches, Jorge fights for less than a hundred dollars. Later yet he fights for soup. By then, Rey and I are both crying and letting our heads touch slightly, as if by accident.

Jorge at Penny Pantry, trying to arrest one of the blue-hairs for parking her mobility scooter outside the lines. She swings her sacked potatoes in a perfect curve that turns his delicate jaw and leaves him senseless on the asphalt. His taped-together shoes, his too-large uniform puffed above his chest like even his clothes want to ditch him.
Jorge racing his cruiser down a set of actual train tracks, lights swirling, tires throwing chipped rubber, Jorge hollering police-like threats through his open window, keen to apprehend the train’s conductor for texting while driving.
Jorge sending five- and ten-dollar checks to the college where his daughter no longer attends. She dropped out years ago, got some fancy drug-store job.

Mid-April, he tries to arrest me again.
“He wasn’t even upright when I opened the door,” I tell Rey. “He was just lying there on his back, pressing at his eyes with his knuckles.”
“What did he say?”
“Same thing he always says. Only this time he begged. Didn’t even call out his police codes. There were still bits of wig glued to his scalp.”
“There’s no helping him—not if he’s that far gone.”
It’s one of those nights where no amount of pretending can turn caterpillars into shrimp. I swallow them whole, so I won’t have to taste anything. On the screen, there’s something about an older scientist who figured our ideas weren’t really our ideas and probably weren’t even real ideas in the first place: Statistically speaking, it’s rather unlikely that you’re a consciousness that arose biologically within a low-entropy universe. It’s far more likely that you’re a Boltzmann brain formed by a random and disembodied arrangement of interstellar molecules.
“This is worse than that shit about the chimps,” I say to the screen. “Give us something uplifting.”
“Try to listen,” Rey says. “This one makes a lot of sense.”
“It’s poison. These shows are all about giving up, refusing accountability. What should we do about Jorge? Those Rimbaults will kill him.”
Despite the veil, I can tell Rey’s giving me the look she uses to remind me how foolish it is to think that we might somehow impose upon this world, add tension to its strings. We’re on the cusp of yet another cold war, I know it.
Instead of arguing, Rey leans over to my side of the bed. Without a word, she reaches beneath the covers and begins fussing with my pajama bottoms.
“You lose a cricket down there?” I say. “What’s the deal?”
But Rey’s already tugging away. Forget eye contact, when the light’s this bad I can’t even be sure that there’s a human head beyond the veil. It’s like staring into bayou water.
“Rey, what about—?”
Rey yanks a sock from my nearest foot, turns it inside-out, and gets back to work. Her veil stays aimed at the screen the whole time.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she says. “This is happening because you’re so worked up it’s distracting.”
Afterward, it’s a program about tetrahedrons that makes even less sense than the one before. Something about reality not being reality but an electric quilt made of tiny triangles, so that the triangles are like the fine pixels of my retirement screen. Reality is geometric, a scientist says. And a geometric reality can be constructed from pure information, without need of any physical substance.
“I’m real,” I shout at the screen, thumbing my chest, feeling my heart squirm beneath the breastbone. “Rey’s real. Jorge’s real.”
Rey bounces her foot and smoothes out her veil. I stop talking and go back to swallowing caterpillars. I try. Honestly, I do. What finally sets me off is this bunk about Schrödinger’s Cat. Tell me, what kind of cat deserves to be locked in a box with poison gas? What cat has misstepped so profoundly that it deserves to be left both dead and undead, all for the purpose of some high-minded scientific parlor trick? Distracted, I chew instead of swallow. A caterpillar spine punches deep into my gum tissue.
“I can’t,” I shout. “I cannot abide.”
I heft my food bowl. I spin it at the screen with great force, watch the bright glass scallop into a million gorgeous shards.

The set-up: Jorge wanders the abandoned shanty-town park with his head stuck in a metal pail, helpless-like, or so it appears. I wait within a garbage blind crafted from old appliances and oak scrub. When those Rimbault shits appear to harass Jorge, out I’ll pop. I’ve lashed bits of carpet to my shoe bottoms so I can close the distance whisper-soft. I’m also wearing my old jester’s cap so there’s no mistaking me. I’ve told Jorge he’ll have plenty of folks to arrest. I’ve even patched up his nipple holes. Rey’s at the shack, probably mourning the wrecked screen.
Hours pass. Jorge flails about, head bucketed. I lie in my blind, giggling with anticipation and sipping julep. Ugly Rimbault energy charges the surrounding air, tickling my neck hairs. They’re scheming out there, I know it. But they’re also elusive. It’s after midnight when Jorge and I finally knock off.

I fill a gunny sack with dirty old pillows and blankets and hang it from the porch. I spend evenings swinging my fists in twos and threes until I can punch and punch without stopping. I use the jab to set up power shots. I throw feints. My left hand stays high like Jorge’s never did. At night, I slide into bed all dizzy and slick.
“You’re fizzing over,” Rey says, “just like I told you.”
“I’m not fizzing. I’m taking control. You should try it some time.”
“What about your soup shack?”
“This is the greater need.”
“The greater need is to bow out, stay inside with me. And will you please take off that hat?”
“The hat motivates me. See, these scientists have it all wrong. I don’t have one of those Boltzmann brains. Mine’s a real brain made of water and nerves.”
I power up the shattered screen. Hard to tell what’s what through the spider web of cracks, but eventually we land on a show about dolphins. It starts out with lots of cute dolphin hijinks, but then the narrator offers the possibility that dolphins are one of the few mammals who indulge in self-destruction. An expert comes on to interject: It’s important to note that failure to thrive is not directly equivalent to the human practice of suicide.
“Your veil’s different,” I say. “Looks thinner.”
“I’m feeling better.”
“Better? I thought we were all getting worse.”
“Some of us are.”
Onscreen, they bring up a case wherein a researcher began to manually masturbate one of her research dolphins so it might be clear-headed enough to learn English. When the experiment failed, the dolphin was transferred to a new aquarium, where no one offered any kind of touching. A few weeks later, the dolphin decided to stop breathing. It sank.
Rey and I face forward and do not speak as we scan for a different kind of show.

Jorge in the park, fake-snoring on the roof of his cruiser, which is parked facing downhill on the park’s steepest hill. The doors hang open seductively. All a Rimbault has to do is pop the shifter to neutral and Jorge’s in for a ride down to the drainage canal. I’ve told him that I installed a secret braking mechanism that I can operate by remote control from the safety of my garbage blind.
My hat’s bells jingle softly in the breeze. Ragged folks cross through the park headed to and from various shanty clusters, but no one seems interested in Jorge. Likely, it’s his fault. He yawns too frequently, stretches his arms far too often.

There’s a strange comfort in watching yourself disintegrate. The warmth bleeds out of you at a spectacular rate, and it puts a sound in your head like sand poured from a paper cup.
“I’m thinking about going back to work,” Rey says.
“The chicken plant?”
“If they’ll have me.”
“They may not be huge fans of the veil.”
“I’ve been walking around town while you’re out, seeing how long I can go without it.”
“Aren’t you hungry? This here is a good batch.”
“Think I might go out for a while.”
“Sure, that sounds nice. Let me finish this bowl.”
“Stay. There’s a good show coming on. You’ll enjoy it.”
Inch by inch, she removes the veil and grips it with both hands. She presses at her nose as if her face is a newly grown organ that requires testing. I was right, the scars really NICKALUS RUPERT 74 aren’t that bad. Just an irregular skin puddle beneath her left eye.
“Where you going?” I say.
God love her, Rey squeezes my shoulder before she goes. Not too firm, not too weak. For the first time since I’ve known her, she eases the door shut instead of slamming it, and that’s when I know for sure. There’s no mistaking when someone has just dragged the door shut on your life. You always know. Why, then, do you still raise the blinds in hope of their return?

The last week of April, Jorge and I finally find what we’re after. We’ve set up shop at the playground, and it’s Jorge who spots them from the rusted slide, where he sits on a skateboard and waits for one of the Rimbaults to sneak up and give him a shove. At the bottom of the slide, I’ve poured a rainbow pool of paint from a dozen partially full buckets. I’ve also added a few scoops of roofing nails and broken glass. Not my finest work.
We watch them crest the hill—two bouncy teenagers sporting giraffe jackets, even though the jackets are too small on them. Something’s wrong. They’re moving away from us.
“Let’s call it off,” Jorge says. “My ass has gone numb.”
“You wanted an arrest.”
“How do I maintain authority when my ass is numb?”
I grab him by the collar and force him along. We circle the bottom of the hill and close in behind the kids, me in my carpeted shoes, Jorge in the pair that I’ve crafted for him. Stealthy as cats, we close on the two boys, who are so relaxed they never think to check their six. I point to the tall one—far taller than me—to show Jorge that he’s mine. Because I am honorable, I bellow a warning cry before attacking. Both Rimbaults wheel around to take stock of us.
The tall one motions to Jorge. “Taze us again and you’ll be riding that merry-go- round for good, you crazy asshole.”
“What’s he talking about?” I say to Jorge.
Jorge begins to shadow box. “Code 148.”
“No more poison watermelons,” I say. “No more merry-go-rounds. No more pissing on the jester.”
“Who’s this fucker with the hat?” the shorter one says.
It’s the dismissal that sets me off—this kid’s willingness to pretend that I and my countless disgraces have been so easily purged from the Rimbault family record. My fists move in fluent bursts. Before long the taller Rimbault doubles over to protect his face with splayed fingers, but he’s left little gaps that I can target with short chops and slaps and single knuckles. He asks for the punching to stop and I laugh and jingle and boast about how real I am. Jorge holds the short one by his giraffe jacket, Jorge inert-looking and apologetic, the short one trying to wave me off and going, Whoah-whoah-whoah.
I feel tremendous, my spirit so expansive that it can afford some mercy. I release the kid, who begins to uncover his face very slowly. I’m glad to see that there’s no ugly damage— just a few red marks. It’s not important that he bleeds, only that he is humbled. And sure, there’s humility in his eyes, but there’s also something else. A certain fearfulness that I’ve never seen expressed by any Rimbault. An awareness that the world is a contrary place. This boy’s face is leaner and more bird-like than I remember. And why is there a layer of stubble on both Rimbault faces? They were only boys when they gunned me down, their cheeks bare even of peach fuzz. It’s only been two years. Why do they look old enough to vote?
“Your jackets,” I say. “I remember when your father slayed his best giraffe just so you could wear them. Say that you remember. Say it.”
It’s the short one who speaks up.
“That banker guy who owned the zoo? That whole family went under forever ago, man. He’s living in a culvert down by the pond.”
“We bought these jackets off his kids because we felt sorry,” the tall one says. “They don’t even fit right.”
My eyes keep going to the thawed-out pond, where months earlier there was ice enough to support the weight of Rey and me. There was ice and there was light, and I’m not built for a world that keeps no record of itself. While I’m distracted, the taller kid slips around me and joins his friend and off they go, giraffe jackets rising kite-like over their shoulders. If Rey is right, then there must be a version of this world where I’m ladling hot soup and tea for these kids instead of beating the shit out of them. I’d choose such a world if I could, but here we are. In this world, Mr. Rimbault left enough money in the Penny Pantry account to keep me going. In this world, Jorge falls onto his back to make a kind of dirt angel, and Rey does not return and will not return.
“I’ve just assaulted a teenager,” I say, “and that’s not even the worst thing I’ve done this month.”
“Code 240,” he says, arms fanning the dirt.
“You’re a good cop, Jorge.”
“You play cards?” he says, inspecting a pair of handcuffs. “Gets pretty boring in there.”
“I’m no good at cards,” I say, “but you can always put me in the kitchen.”
Something makes big ripples near the belly of the pond. The thing about water is it’s always changing. That’s the beauty of it and that’s the horror. Credit to Jorge: he doesn’t let the cuffs pinch my wrists. When he loads me into the back of his patrol car, he protects the top of my head with his palm.

NICKALUS RUPERT completed an MFA fellowship at the University of Central Florida and a PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he also worked as an associate editor for Mississippi Review. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Idaho Review, Harpur Palate, Pleiades, Tin House Online, and elsewhere.