Avi Amine is Very, Very Busy: Chapter One

I was sitting on the front steps of this sleazy fast food joint on the edge of town that I hate, cradling my busted arm and mentally counting my various cuts and bruises when the 419 Fun Bus drove up. The siren wailed for a few moments more and then stopped, the lights taking a few more seconds to follow forth. The engine sputtered, the exhaust pipe hacked furiously and, the moment when it seemed like the vehicle was on the verge of giving out completely, the noises were silenced.

The two doors of the back of the van swung open, and the two paramedics John and James-who were identical in their smiles, cropped haircuts, and powder blue uniforms-rushed out with their hands gripping two sides of a long metal gurney. Their determined scowls faded when they saw me, and they relaxed. I stood up to meet them and shifted my weight from my left foot to my right.

“Hey guys,” I said. “You can put back the gurney, if you’d like. I think I could get in myself.”

John gave me the once over and sighed. “Fractured again, Susan?”

“It’s Dawn, actually. Dawn Concord. And don’t either of you worry about me. I’m a growing girl; it’s bound to happen sometimes.”

John rolled his eyes and James snickered despite himself. I went around them, wincing when my arm brushed against John’s shoulder, and climbed up the stairs and into the ambulance. The gurney was loaded against the wall, and I decided to make myself comfortable and await the awkward poking and prodding on my broken arm while we drove to the hospital.

“Nice night, isn’t it, Tom?” I said to the driver.

I got no response.

“You  awake, Tom?”

“Tom quit,” A woman’s voice said. “My name’s Gene. I’m filling in until the hospital can find someone else to take his place.”

I squirmed from James’ grasp and twisted around so I could see the rear view mirror. Gene glanced up and

took off her dark sunglasses. I could see her brown eyes and a curl of dark blond hair.

“Hi, Gene,” I said.

James pulled me back and began pressing certain spots along my arm. “This is Susan-”

“Dawn,” I corrected him.

John scoffed. “You were Susan last month, and Ronnie before that, and I’m sure once May rolls around I  bet that you’ll have a new name and injury lined up for us in a jiffy.”

“Ignore him,” James said. “He’s just angry that he hasn’t played Hero McCoolGuy yet tonight-does this hurt?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Well we see quite a lot of this little lady here, whoever she is-”

“Ow!”

“Sorry, sorry. Anyway, I’m not too sure if someone’s told you yet, but this van in specific is always on call in case a misadventure or shenanigan should arise.”

Jiffy, little lady, shenanigan-if there’s anything you can expect from the Cohen brothers, it’s slang from seventy years ago that hasn’t been used in a hundred.

Gene chuckled. “It’s surprising that you guys have enough units for stuff like this.”

“It wouldn’t matter either way; all of this is done by order of Doctor Method herself.”

“Come on, James-ow.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That did too?” He said.

“Did you forget why you’re playing doctor? My arm hasn’t stopped being broken in the five minutes that have passed since you guys came and got me.”

John stood up. The Ambulance drove over a bump and he stumbled onto my lap. That was great, fantastic, a perfect way to end my weekend. He regained his balance with the ends of nervous laughter darted across his brow and gave my arm a harsh pull. What was meant to be a scream was actually more like a pathetic, gasping squeak. He hummed in approval and dropped it back onto the gurney.

“See? If that arm was broken you’d be screaming like a dying car on heat.”

Listen carefully kids. You can’t make this type of stuff up.

“This is a fracture-nothing more, nothing less. And unless you want to end up at Annabo County with a more interesting wound to report to the doctor, you’ll stop whining.”

“Is this how you guys always treat patients in the west coast, or am I having a stroke?”

John fell back into his seat and continued, only taking the smallest amount of notice in Gene’s comment. “Every month, almost like clockwork,” He said. “Delusion or not, I just can’t see how it’s humanly possible to break or poison or burn yourself not one, not three, but sixteen times in the past two years!”

Gene was quite for a while. “Sixteen times,” She echoed.

“Do you remember what you did last October?” John asked me.

Lola Cortez got a concussion when she jumped out the third story window of the Hall and Peron Law Firm after the police raid made it clear that it was actually the Hall and Peron Law Firm and Meth Lab.

“I don’t recall,” I said.

“What about December?”

Mira Desmond got mauled by an enraged mother tiger at the zoo after claiming to be an expert at consoling savannah animals going through grief. I’m not entirely whether or not I just look like someone who knows how to talk to tigers, or if every zoo in America has just given up completely.    

“Uh…”

“January-what about January? Can you remember anything from then?”

In my defense, I genuinely forgot what happened to Nora Drova. I think it had something to do with golf carts, or something.

“Was it golf carts?” I said.

“You fell off the stage of a small theatre in Washington and landed right in the Orchestra pit.”

Oh right. I wasn’t Nora Drova, I was Nora Alexandrova, the ballerina from Russia. Except I don’t personally know much about dancing, but I somehow managed to score a gig in some hole in the wall theatre based purely on the merit of the generic foreign accent I picked up from a few bad spy movies, so I got to believing that it didn’t matter much anyway. I wrong, however, and ended up in a rather unfavorable position when I tried to do a Fouette rond de jambe en tournant. How was I supposed to know that it was essentially some insane spinning windmill done on one’s tippy-toes? I just thought it was the French phrase for “stage dive”, and acted accordingly.

John must’ve gotten out what he needed to say, because he went back to his corner of the Ambulance and decided to sulk for the rest of the ride. James went back to my sling, giving me that eye-widening and brow-raising combination that two people give to one another when there’s a third person nearby who happens to be quite the jerk. He rubbed some new antibiotic on the gash on my forehead that smelled like potato chips and burning rubber before cleaning the blood off my arms. My cell phone rang and I dug it out of my pocket with my free hand. It was Doctor Method. That didn’t surprise me; she’s always had a sixth sense for when I’ve screwed myself over. But I wanted to give myself a few minutes to put my ego back together before I’d have to face her in person, so I let the call go to voicemail.

Hello, you’ve reached the phone of Avi Amine at eight one two, four nine, nine five. I can’t pick up the phone right now because I’m either working, or throwing a tennis ball against a wall and waiting for death-either way I’m very, very busy. If you could leave me a message, I’ll call you back and everything will just be fantastic. Byesies!

“Here’s a joke for you, Avi-how much money does it take to keep the manager of Arby’s from suing one Missus Dawn Concord over starting a fight club in the restaurant’s basement? The answer? Loads. Feel free to tie it to the end of ‘ass’ or ‘shit’ if the adrenaline still hasn’t worn off yet, either way I’m still going to have to pay literal loads of money to keep your next hundred personalities from being variations of Inmate Ida. Nevertheless, I’m still anxious to hear more about Dawn. Does she like her coffee with one sugar, or two?”

There’s not much to be said about Doctor Method. She’s a tall woman with thick hair and eyes that constantly evaluated. She liked her coffee black, her office off-white, and every one of her books to be piled in stacks on her desk. She also hated two things more than anything: nighttime, and being in her office when she didn’t absolutely have to. And, since she was doing both of these things right now, she was not at all happy. She glared at me, hunched her desk and looking especially small. It was not a good glare and, adding that to her exanimating eyes, it looked like she was writing up outlines of my autopsy as I sat before her in a short, patched green armchair.

“Dawn,” She said.

One of the only things that keep my temper in check when I’m around Method is her voice. It’s cold, but soft and refreshing and vaguely sweet. Listening to her speak reminds me of drinking rose water, somehow. It’s a nice feeling, nice enough to make me ignore almost every mean word she says.

She says it again, not yet angry or sad, just harmlessly curious. “Dawn. Dawn?”

“It started off as Don-like, like Donna-but my boss misspelled it on my timecard and I just sort of stuck with it.”

Method sighed and lolled her head back. “Dawn.” She exhaled.

She didn’t say anything after that. I felt like a schoolchild facing the principal, and I swallowed some of the rather tepid coffee given to me by Method’s rather tepid secretary to keep myself from snickering. Method sighed heavily and held out her hands.

“So?” She said.

I stiffened up, a strange gesture since she still wasn’t making any effort to even lift up her head on my behalf.

“So…” I said.

Method widened her arms. “Explain, share-spill those juicy details to me like the giggling girlfriends that we are. Do it, man.”

I idly picked at a bandage on the upper shoulder of my injured arm. “Well-”

“Do it.”

“I am! Jeeze, give me a second!”

As you’ve probably imagined by now, the relationship between Method and me is less like doctor and patient, and more like coworkers that hate each other, but are also siblings, which just makes the whole situation much worse.

“Dawn’s this social ecology student going to university.”

Method dragged her head up. “Don’t tell me you actually dropped some cash on university tuition.”

“I dropped twenty dollars on off brand photo editing computer software and made my own bachelor’s degree. It wasn’t that professional, but it worked.”

She groaned again. “Oh come on, Avi! That’s illegal! I mean, all of this is illegal, but that’s just unnecessarily illegal!”

Then I guess now isn’t the best time to mention my roommate’s career as an artist of both paintings and fake identification. That doesn’t matter, I’ll say it eventually.

“The, uh, fight club thing-that was actually a pretty funny story,” I coughed into my hand. “I got a few people to participate in this social experiment for my thesis reports. I know about as much about thesis reports as I do about Social Ecology and experiments, but I watched a few documentaries, so I thought that would be enough. And one of the documentaries, I only watched the middle of it, it had all these men in a fight club. They’d beat each other up and felt fantastic afterwards. It fought commercialism somehow, or something.”

Method looked at me long and hard. The corners of her lips quirked up in a smile that suddenly made her a little less angry-looking.

“Are you joking?” She said.

“About what, the documentary I watched? No, I think I still have it. It’s called…” I trailed off.

“Is it called Fight Club?”

I smiled and pointed at her. “Right, that’s it! You’ve seen it?”

Her smile broadened. “Have I seen the movie? The movie Fight Club? The movie about the fight club that

was, in no way, a documentary?”

I leaned back and looked away. “Maybe there’s two fight club-related films out there called Fight Club.”

“Was Brad Pitt in it?”

“Brad Pitt?”

“The famous Hollywood actor who acted in a bunch of famous Hollywood films. He spends the entirety of Fight Club talking smugly and looking angry at his facial hair.”

I frowned, and Method began to laugh.

This was fantastic. Sitting here, in the middle of the night (or the beginning of the morning, to be more precise) getting laughed at by my own psychologist would normally be some run of the mill stuff for me-but getting beat up every night for a week after trying to follow the already confusing message of what was actually a bad Hollywood movie was embarrassing.

“So what happened?” She said once her laughter died down to girlish giggling. “To your arm, I mean.”

Someone spilled something to Arby’s Headquarters, and they sent a mousy little human resources representative named Karen Phelps. Long story short, I quickly learned that, just because someone’s shorter than you and wears glasses does not mean they can’t be much stronger than you are.

“I tripped,” I said, “over…stairs and stuff.”

Method shook her head and spun a few circles in her squeaky old swivel chair. She pulled out the tape recorder from her left-hand drawer and pressed the record button in one extravagant motion.

“Chapter twelve; after recovering from her seventh-no, ninth personality-the patient’s once glimmering ability at deception is already starting to rust.”

“Oh wow, thanks.”

“Her hair is still dark and sticky with the always lethal combination of hair gel and wig glue. What was it this time?” She asked me.

“This, uh, ginger pixie cut. It was pretty cute; one of my favorites, but it’s in tatters.”

“The patient’s eyes are bloodshot, perhaps from tears, perhaps from allergies, or perhaps even from all the drugs I wouldn’t be surprised to find out you take.”

This was another regular part of our appointments. Method would rant for a while into her recorder through the context of outlines for the next chapter of the book. She’d rage from being bitingly mean to calmly going through each event like some play by play reporter of awful decisions. I’d sit quietly, there’s absolutely no chance of me getting a word in edgewise when she’s in that special sort of mood, and then (if I wasn’t bedridden at the hospital) we’d go out to the twenty four hour frozen yogurt place and blow off some steam. So I’ll let her knock me down a few pegs, it doesn’t matter to me, because I know it’s worth it in the end.

“The expenses piled on by this particular identity would almost be forgiven if the patient was one of the many suffering from multiple personality disorder-but oh no-that is not the case. For Avi Amine is not thrown in a sea during a hurricane, at the mercy of whatever new face and mind society or her subconscious decides to thrust onto her. She is nothing more than a chronic liar with a lot of money, even more wigs, and nothing to do with her time. She is the one and only patron of a shady nightclub we here in the ‘biz like to call ‘Method’s Delusion’.”

I really like frozen yogurt.