Joe Svetlik: Mime Hunter: Part 2

Svetlik drove though the night in his usual silent manner. He didn’t need any radio to occupy him for the trip: just the purr of the engine and the buzzing of his thoughts. He left the scene of a job quickly; law enforcement usually didn’t appreciate his services as much as his customers.  

Entering his spartan apartment, joe peeled of his wet clothes and draped them over the nearest piece of furniture. Tonight, this happened to be a battered wooden chair that had once been part of a dining room set owned by giddy newlyweds. It enjoyed being part of a happy new household. So much mirth and joy seeped into its well-polished wood grains then. The chair would often look back and ponder with pensive regret the events that led it down this road in life. It didn’t notice the wet clothes.

Svetlik walked across the room and fell into bed. Like the rest of the room, the bed matched a sparce ascetic inspired by Batman, more Nicolson then Clooney. With just a simple mattress with a heap of blankets on top, it got the job done every night without complaint.

His head smacked into the soft feather pillow with such force that it knocked the dust of the day out of his mind. It puffed out of the cracks and wrinkles in his brain and gathered into a cloud that floated before his dreaming eyes. The stoppage,  having been removed, allowed the fatigue to seep out of his head, drip out of his ears, and pool into his pillow.

Though asleep, Svetlik was by no means at rest. Something about his encounter with the feral mime earlier that day struck him, and it dislodged something long tucked away, as if the librarian in his mind had wanted to hide it from the more conscious parts of his being.

Svetlik’s mind lay like a sleeping city, which is to say that the most important, productive aspects lay completely unaware while the parts with nothing better to do generally had their way. The memory had fallen down from its hiding place and now lay as a smoldering hunk of obsidian in the road. Most parts of his mind had simply walked around it as they hurried on with their urgent duties. Yet, now that the city was empty, the more subtle, subconscious parts came upon it with the full inquisitive intensity of a child that knows he’s trespassing.

They swarmed around it, feeling it out in the darkness of the night. It felt like someone standing behind you in a dark alley. It felt like the unease that seeps into your skin. It felt like frozen panic. They all scattered back into the comfort of the fetid sewers.

It was about this time that the sleeping parts of his mind rose out of their beds, muttered curses and loudly demanded to know just what was going on. Enough stayed behind for Svetlik to continue sleeping while the rest journeyed out with lights to investigate.

Memories are timeless things. This isn’t to say that they don’t have length or cannot be tied to a particular time of happening, for they usually have all these things. It means that they are experienced all at once, as if the observer existed outside of the stream of time.

So when Svetlik’s mind found the dislodged memory, he experienced it all at once. To describe it as he now felt it would be to destroy all the nuance that made it so worthy of description, much like dumping too much sugar and cream into a well-brewed cup of coffee. Instead, I’ll lay the bits and pieces out in a vague chronological order.

First, a birthday. It was his, and he was turning 10. In his mother’s eyes, the extra digit called for extra celebration. It should be noted that, despite all comments to the contrary, Mrs. Svetlik viewed the occasion as her time, not her son’s. Thus, Joe was never asked what he wished for a birthday party, or even if he wished for a party at all. Having experienced this nine previous times, Joe wasn’t surprised. 

And so, when Joe later found himself sitting in the backyard, surrounded by kids he didn’t particularly like, waiting for a hired clown to arrive, he wasn’t disappointed. Due to a mix up, a mime arrived instead. Yet, even this tragedy upon tragedy did not break little Joey’s stoicism.

The performance was mundane, and only Mrs. Svetlik derived any entertainment from the event. He couldn’t make balloon animals, so instead he stood in front of them, going though his various acts: being trapped in a pretend box, pulling a pretend rope, and so on. He had a sway and stood at odd angles, like Uncle James  when he arrived late to family reunions. A brief wave of panic swept across the mime’s face, as if he became decidedly claustrophobic about his pretend box. Franticly he pounded the air until it silently shattered. Stepping out, he stood, limbs bent at decidedly un-mime angles, and roared as ferociously as a lion, yet as quiet as a room after a racial slur. Spittle spattered across the horrified faces of the children.

The children, long conditioned by their schooling to accept scary authority figures with ridged stoicism, remained in their seats, gripping the bottoms of their lawn chairs. The mime closed in, yellowed fingernails clicking and clacking. Joe, however, leapt to action, his pocketknife gleaming in the summer light.

Joe placed himself between the monster and the children, his small-bladed pocketknife held at the ready. This mime looked down at him, eyes already tinting red. It batted a gnarled paw at Joe, ripping a gash up his arm. While his blood leaked, his adrenaline-fueled courage did not. Svetlik lunged.

The knife’s baptism was brief but full. Up until this point, the only blood his pocketknife had tasted came from failed attempts to whittle. Now it tasted mime-flesh, and it hungered for more.

After that, the moments became like torn scraps of a newspaper, words without much context. Screaming and sirens rang out. The police came, then left. Adults talked back and forth with the same scared tone of voice they use when discussing money. News anchors were forced to switch from their usual panic to an unnatural calm just to provide emphasis.

Nobody knew quite why it happened. Perhaps it was something in the makeup, or in the baguettes. Some even suggested that the cause lay in a communal disease that spread in mime-circles. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t an isolated incident. Now, they roamed the streets, feral. Some started to travel in gangs, filing their teeth and ambushing passersby in alleyways, trapping them in very real invisible boxes.

Meanwhile, all this hummed on in adult circles far above Joe’s head.

While his wound had closed, it had never completely healed. The flesh that grew over it was different. Pale, yet dark at the same time. The first few days his parents had feared infection. Restless nights and fevers tormented him. Then it vanished as quickly as it came. All the adult attention around him found other things to attend to, and Joe was left alone. The fever may have lifted, but the infection remained.

It stained his dreams. Every night, he became a mute, trying to scream out but failing to find words. Along with the words, objects would vanish as well, loosing their image but not their corporality. It started with small objects like cups and pencils and moved up to larger objects like walls and cars. Soon, Joe became accustomed to living in a full mime paradise every night.

Svetlik awoke violently, untwisting himself from his tangle of blankets and sitting up. The dreaming of dreams had been too much strain on his restless mind. He held his sweat-sheaved forehead in his hands and felt the throb of a headache inside. Stumbling out of bed, he fumbled for some painkillers, swallowing them dry in a swift motion.

Outside the unadorned window, the light of a full moon poured into Svetlik’s room. A shiver of fear racked his body. Not tonight, he thought. Any night but tonight. 

Joe Svetlik: Mime Hunter Part 1

The dark sky poured itself out onto the city. It tried to wash it clean: a rain drop for every sin. Tonight was an especially heavy downpour; sins came easy on a Saturday night.

To the inhabitants, the rain was more scouring then cleansing and they sought shelter wherever they could. Most hid in their warm homes, their bodies warmed by animal-print Snuggies while their flickering televisions calmed them back into docile states.

However, all were not so lucky. Hardy Harrow was so desperate for nourishment that he would brave any celestial scouring to use his meager allotment to purchase a few packs of instant noodles. He wandered the poorly lit aisles at his local Han-Dee Mart, guided by the ancient hunter-gatherer instincts of his ancestors. While the narrow, uneven aisles and flickering, ambered lamps might disorientate an outlander, to Harrow, this was his homeland, his forest and plain. He navigated its alien landscape deftly, using what others would see as warning signs instead as landmarks. A left at the exposed wiring, past the sparking refrigerating unit, and arrive at the treasured Ramen. He had done it a million times, both while under the influence of alcohol and extreme sleep deprivation, and every time he bested his pray and carried it back to his cave for consumption.

Tonight, something shook him out of his familiarity. New instincts, long dormant, came alive again with a jolt. The hairs on the back of his neck and hands stood up, responding to the electromagnetic force of evil and danger. Whatever it was, it was close enough to sense, but not to actually see. Harrow braced himself against his materialism and slowly peered around the endcap. He dared only steal a small glance, but even that chilled him deeply. A man stood in the middle of the noodle isle, staring not at the cheap carbohydrates, but at Harrow.

His pale white face reflected the fluorescent light with a sickening tint. The stripes around his shirt were the color of despair and they looked to be prison bars despite their horizontal orientation. He wore a soulless baret, a lid to keep the evil from flying out of the top of his head. He was motionless, as if trapped in an invisible box, yet this was no consolation. This being was a mime.

Harrows blood froze in his veins. He had done many things in his life that were terrible and he made a point to regret them all whenever convenient. Yet none of them were bad enough to deserve this. A mime, a being of pure evil, stood guard in front of the ramen noodles. His mind raced for substitutes. The frozen burritos were in isle 14, those would satiate his hunger and make his slip into malnutrition that much more confortable. Slowly, he willed his muscles to movement, strand by strand pulling his away. A sudden odor filled his nose and strangled his neck with an invisible noose.  It was a mixture of garlic, unfiltered cigarettes and cheap wine. The mime leered at him from around the corner, filed teeth gleaming.

It’s a rare event in the life of a college student that he utterly forgets about all the heavy responsibilities that loom above his head. In the short term, there were always papers that needed to be cribbed from other sources and reading assignments required a consultation with spark notes. In the long run, the repayment of student loans and the acquisition of a usable degree and socially productive career always remained in the back of all undergraduate minds. They might be coerced to dim this constant buzzing with various indulgences, but they were never completely silenced. Yet, in that moment, these were such minor concerns to Harry Harrow that he could have debated their existence, given the luxury. The breath of the mime, rank with French Mustard Gas, had devoured every other crisis of his life to become the very meaning of Fear. 

Harrow clenched his eyes shut. This Fear was greater to Harrow than any of the existential crises he wallowed in during his college career, and he found it fascinating. He took this, his last moment, to savor the particular melancholy of Ultimate Dred. Harrow wished to have this most elusive flavor still wafting over his emotional tongue as he wondered into lands unknown. He allowed this romantic solipsism to envelope his being.

His ears heard the tinny report of an intercom. “Svetlik, code white in aisle 13. Svetlik, Code white in aisle 13.” They reported this to Harrows mind, but it did not correspond to the delicious abandon of his current despair, so it was dismissed.

When he opened his eyes, Harrow realized that he was no longer alone with Fear. A man stood a dozen paces away clad in a dripping trench coat the color of night.

“Hey, you there,” he announced. If his voice had been any more suave it would have been composed purely of sex and razor blade commercials. The mime wheeled around, upset that his meal had been interrupted. It opened its fowl mouth and gaped a silent roar at the dark stranger. 

“The strong silent type, eh? Two can play at this game.” The man raised his arms to cradle an imagination weapon slung low to his waist. His arms rocked back as the imaginary weapon bucked into him. Moments later, the mime experienced a very real explosion. Harrow ducked for cover as dried noodles and mime bits rained down on his head. The better part of a beret landed smoldering at his feet.

“Tell Satan Svetlik sent ‘ya!” quipped the stranger, swaggering through the debris. He casually rested the imaginary weapon on his shoulder. The aisles had been pushed into new, crooked angles and their contents appeared as if arranged by a K-Mart stocker. The fumes of the high explosive mingled with those of the mime and together they merrily danced through the Hand-Dee Mart.

An aging man in a green grocery apron rushed to the scene. Staying a safe distance back from the impact zone, he shouted, his voice full of gratitude. “Oh, thank you sir! I don’t know what I can do to repay you, but I’ll try, I swear I’ll try!”

Svetlik halted his saunter, his combat boots imposing CLOMP CLOMP ended with an ominous SQUiissshh. Harrow couldn’t tell if he was regarding the clerk or simply staring into space, as his expression was masked by a pair of dark aviators. The moment passed and he moved on, brushing past the clerk.

He reached the front door and gave it a shove, the bell chime intonating cheerfully. “Why do you do this?” begged the clerk. Letting the door close behind him, Svetlik walked out into the downpour and halted. The rain pelted him with a thousand watery bullets, each one a cleansing salve that removed every last mime-bit. He removed his glasses and raised his face to the sky, eyes closed, and submitted to the cleansing.

Harrow watched this while still crouching in dehydrated noodle debris. He saw a heavy, black burden wash off of him in that rain. Harrow knew why the man did not accept payment for his actions. It wasn’t a commission, but a duty that brought him here. This was no exterminator that removed pests, but a hunter that bravely dispatched the beast with its own tricks. Harrows heart leapt for him. For forth, brave hunter! Clad yourself in night and defeat it! A tear came to his eyes, for it seemed that he had found a romance for his heart. What does Fear itself fear? Svetlik: Mime Hunter. But even this joy was quickly dashed by the remembrance of a Calculus quiz Harrow had in seven hours.  C’est la vie…