I stand in front of the pawn shop with my thoughts in tow.
Every once in a while, I have take them out for a walk, just to give them a little exercise and muscle tone. Otherwise, they'll atrophy in my brain, like the limbs of prisoners of war rotting away in solitary confinement cells. A healthy thought is a happy thought.
And they're less likely to run away if I unshackle them every so often.
Also. Sometimes, when I'm out walking my thoughts, I come across new ones that I catch between my ears, like pedophiles luring little kids into their black Cadillacs with candy. They struggle at first. They kick and scream. My old thoughts have to move over to give them a seat, like people on a city bus making room for newcomers, but eventually the thoughts I pick up on the streets don't know the difference between the air inside freedom and the air inside my head.
Until they see Amir anyway.
Then my skull becomes an Alcatraz and I don't speak for days or the thoughts will come trickling out of my mouth. I don't hear anything for days or the thoughts will latch onto outside sounds and escape that way. Things sometimes get quieter after frenzies like that. Sometimes I'm able to listen and to speak.
But not very often.
The evening air is as thick and heavy as mustard gas lingering in trenches. Trombones, trumpets, and a violin hang in the window of the pawn shop and on the window display table there are armfuls of music boxes and jewelry and antique toys.
I don't know why I'm here.
Actually.
I lied.
I know exactly why I'm here.
It's the display case of handguns and rifles. They're all queued up like girls in a chorus line and they are putting schizophrenic voices in my head. Voices that don't just scatter my thoughts, they kill them. My head is full of carnage. My head is full of Jews being lined up in back and being shot by boys with blue eyes and blond hair and a spider on their arms.
I step into the pawn shop. A bell rings above my head.
Limping, the shopkeeper appears through a door leading to a back room, nods at me, and stands behind a counter. His face is all scarred up, like corn fields branded with crop circles. He says, “What do you need, kid?”
I stand there for a moment with no words coming out of my mouth. The scarf wrapped around the lower half of my face is stubbly, bristling like half-burnt trees raped and blackened and left behind by forest fires. I worry that if I speak the last few thoughts that are keeping me company, keeping me away from Amir, will float away.
I suppose it's too late anyway.
“You just gonna stand there?”
I say, “I'd like to buy a gun.”
The shopkeeper's eyes become all barbed with suspicion.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Can't help you then. Maybe a cap gun? Or a squirt gun?”
“One of those.” I point to the display case of handguns.
The shopkeeper stares at me for a moment and then leans forward, clasping his hands in front of him on the table. Outside a police car flickers past with sirens screaming like soldiers having their shrapnel studded legs amputated with a saw. I stand there with Amir sitting lonely in my head and with the shopkeeper thinking.
I start imagining things.
I close my eyes and shake my head and I tell myself to save it for later.
“I run a well-respected establishment here,” the man says.
“Of course.”
“I don't take no drug money. I don't sell merchandise to criminals. And my integrity is untouchable. I'm a law abiding citizen.”
“A hundred dollars.”
“Two hundred and I won't ask any questions.”
I nod.
Anything to get my thoughts back.
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Rusty swing-sets wheezed like old women with tracheotomies in their throats and children ran across the playground, their yells and shrieks echolocating against the cold, naked walls of the school. Charlie sat at the base of the only starving tree on the playground which the wind stole leaves from greedily.
The clouds were all bruised. They were black eyes belonging to women with abusive husbands.
Charlie was busy practicing the art of camouflage underneath them.
He was imagining the tree swallowing him up and hiding him inside it's trunk for the rest of his life were he could listen to the schoolchildren and be warm and faceless. He imagined willing all of his features to drop off of his head like carrot noses and raisin mouths melting off of the faces of dying snowmen.
The wind was already trying to lop his nose off.
It slapped at his knuckles like nuns disciplining disobedient boys with meter sticks.
The children were still watching him, too.
He could feel them.
He could hear them whispering. A collective sound that marched ten paces in front of him like dueling gentlemen and turning to fire pistols at each other's heads. The whispers came from the hopscotch area, the tether-ball courts, the plastic slides. They all combined and grew into a sound that pried Charlie's ears open like flyby jets breaking supersonic sound barriers.
Three boys were walking towards him.
Their sneakers squeaked and they wore smiles.
Charlie hid his face and tried to make himself look as small as possible, but that only made the boys speed up, like people in old-fashioned film reels. His stomach felt thick and heavy like a used cloth diaper and the air in his lungs was as still and unmoving as an American flag on the moon.
The boys stopped at his feet.
“Hey.”
Charlie's eyes made microscopic studies of the dirt between his legs.
“Hey, kid. How come you wear a pillow case over your head?”
The boy talking was tall and thin, as if someone had stuck a vacuum cleaning nozzle in his gut and sucked out everything but bones and a layer of skin. His skin was dark and rich – coffee-stained – and his eyes were like magic 8-balls that someone could shake up and see the rest of their life spread out before them. For a moment, Charlie couldn't look away. The boy was beautiful and his voice put fishhooks in his eyes.
He was smiling.
“So are you one of those bastards who came out of his momma the wrong way and now they eat food out of a can and drool and talk like they've got socks in their mouth? Huh? Let me hear you talk, kid. Just one word.”
Charlie looked away now.
“No? Maybe you just don't understand me,” the kid said and squatted down at Charlie's eye level.
“Caaan yoooou taaaalk?”
The boy opened his mouth like a snake swallowing little mice whole and made his words into lonely whale sounds.
Charlie nodded.
“Then say something.”
Charlie licked his lips which felt like worn cowboy boot leather and opened his mouth and whispered the first thing that came to mind.
“I'm not gonna hurt you.”
The boy stood for a moment with his face petrified.
And then he roared with laughter.
Laughter that spilled out of his mouth.
He and the two boys behind him laughed so hard that they clutched at their bellies and little tears dribbled down their cheeks like milk down the faces of breast-feeding infants. Charlie felt his face stinging. He felt his insides contracting. The laughter burned his skin far worse than any bomb, any dance.
I'm not gonna hurt you.
Really.
They just laughed and laughed and laughed.
