Fantastic
I go by Fantastic. I live in a gambling town in no part of the country you’d ever want to know. Tragic. That's the name of our casino. Tragic. Never the. The carpet’s all wet and the place reeks with “Greg” (our name for Tragic’s footy meth stink). There’s a pen out back with a camel you can pay to feed. Aliens came and pulled that camel from the world it knew. Now it’s sitting out behind Tragic on what to him must feel like Mars.
***
My love, Millie, is married to another man. He is a realtor with his face on every bus bench in town. I know this because I’ve slept on every bus bench in town. He knows Millie and I see one another. He doesn’t seem to care for this much. He says if we keep on seeing one another, one of these days he’s gonna have to do what he doesn’t want to have to do. I take it as All Talk.
Mil and I still happen. We get buzzed one night at Tragic and pay a joke visit to The King. He says “thank yuh verah much” on a fuzzy loudspeaker, as we joke-drive through the chapel, recite our joke vows. We make it almost halfway through the ceremony when Millie drops my hands, says she can’t joke do this. “Fantastic, I’m involved,” she says.
“Who isn’t?” I say.
***
I drink beer and I follow Christ. I love to put my head through a wall. I put my head through a wall three to seven times a year. I have the biggest head on one of the biggest bodies you’ve ever seen. Sometimes I put my head so far through a wall I can reach the outside. Sometimes it’s like being born again.
***
Our town was once the location for a movie that was never released. Some sandals and robes picture. I don’t know why they never released it. They hired actors. They shot the thing. But nothing happened. They brought in the camel that now sits behind Tragic. They paid money. But nothing happened.
***
Each day I drive my truck into Tragic. My truck is full of holes. The truck has holes because that’s the thing with old trucks—they have holes—and also because Millie’s husband shot the holes into it. The back bumper scrapes like a sharpening wheel, throwing sparks up and down the block. I am not what Millie would call “quiet as night.”
***
In the 70s, when it was built, Tragic was ironic.
Irony untended will equal truth again.
***
I’m six- foot-eight with arms of frickin’ oak. In addition to Fantastic, I’ve been called a thing that means “to bash in the doors of medieval castles.”
“You could be a star. A big, big star,” say the bookies who arrive in their car outside Tragic, soon after I place a call. They say it doesn’t even matter whether I can act.
“Shit man, castles. No wait, I mean, castles.”
“What are you talking about?” they say.
I finish my drink. “Was there not some mention of castles?”
The bookies—in pairs, suits—give me the money. I count it so fast it cuts my hand, and each time I have to run to the bathroom to sew it up. I keep a sewing kit in there under the sink. Nobody knows about it. When I return, my hand’s all fixed and I’m filling with light.
“Box office gold,” they say. “Three picture deal.”
“Fantastic,” I say.
***
One day, Millie sees a doctor. I drive her because her husband can’t. The doctor gives us the timeline, says the words.
The doctor has a tiny plush elephant clipped to his stethoscope. I squeeze it and it makes a sound. He says, “Don’t do that.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
I sit with Millie and hold her hand. The doctor shows her a black potato, holds it to her chest. “There,” he says.
“Not hungry,” she says.
“That’s not—” the doctor says.
***
Her cancer is a little hat of meat I wear on my tongue.
I wear it everywhere.
***
They send Millie home on account of her bills.
Lack of money: “a precondition.”
She needs a million dollars for her treatment.
“A cool mil,” I say.
***
I say, “It’s okay, Mil.”
Her hand is glass.
Jerry and Elaine on her TV—the actors stretch and bounce.
“That ain’t real,” I say. “It’s all a set in Los Angeles, California.”
Millie says, “Quiet!” She grabs the remote. “I can’t hear the TV!” She turns the volume up so loud I can feel it in my groin.
“These bookies at Tragic—Mil, are you listening?”
“Quiet!”
“They’re from Hollywood, these bookies. They tell me about the sets. They’re not real. They say I got potential. They say I could be a star. Can you imagine that, Mil? I always thought there was something more out there for me. They give me their money and each time they do I get so excited counting it I cut my hands and I have to go and sew them up in the bathroom.”
“Quiet!”
Millie yells and kicks the buttons on her bed until the whole thing has folded her up like a sandwich, her feet sticking out from the top. I have to pry it open with my oak arms.
“You’re okay, Mil,” I say. “I got you. You’re okay.” I hold her close.
Her heart pulses against my chest as light as a butterfly. She’s just bones.
“I’m right here, Mil. Right here.”
***
Mil’s husband has the money. He has a million dollars just sitting there, but if he gave it to Mil for her treatment, he wouldn’t have it, so he doesn’t. If I had a million dollars I’d let Millie have it. I’d let her have my oak arms and my Christ head and my castle-bashing body.
I’d let her have it all.
***
Millie doesn’t want to be in bed anymore.
“I don’t want to be in bed anymore,” she says. So we drive across town. It’s midnight, but we do it anyway. Pull off at the base of the mountains and wander out through the foothills with our shoes off and our pant legs rolled to our ankles and the ground still day-warmed and pleasant under our feet. Millie takes my hand, leads me to a lookout. A fog rolls in. I can barely see her just a few feet ahead of me. We sit for a while, not saying anything. Millie tosses a small stone from one hand to the other. We can’t see out over the hills, ten to fifteen feet in any direction. The only light comes from the houses in the valley. Millie walks out onto the ledge, stepping from rock to rock. Her head is bald and fuzzed; it gleams a little in the moon-sour light. I tell her she should come back, but she doesn’t. I go after her. Twenty yards out, I lose sight of the surroundings. We sit on a large D-shaped piece of rock and stare into the gauzy curtains of fog. The fog parts. The lights of the town below appear all glowy and quivery—the orange-lit avenues, the occasional, random-ass street.
“Do you think we’re meant to be together?” she asks.
“But we are,” I say.
***
I got tiny hissing cats walking on my brain.
I haven’t brushed my teeth in weeks.
None of the doorknobs in my apartment make any significant turns.
***
Why am I here?
***
Millie and I go to Tragic. I am going to win Mil the money.
I am bombed by bright lights and the chatter and whoop and clang of the slots. Old women toddle by with their cups of coins, shaking like maracas with each unsteady step—those hardened expressions, that unique mainspring of euphoria and pain, set beneath their foam visors, carved into their leathery, tanned faces as if into a tree. It isn’t busy, Tragic. I do a loop around the floor. I break a twenty and lose it on a slot. I break another. Lose it. I do this over and over. The carpets are bright and psychedelic, swirls of red and blue and green. There’s a smell like the armpit of an old windbreaker.
***
Outside I see the camel seated alone. I walk over to the pen. I run my hand along its tough, scratchy back. It mutters and moves its head. Then I make a call. The bookies. They say they’ll be there soon with enough cash to kill myself. I don’t know where they get the cash. They never don’t have it. It just is.
I see a car coming from a ways away, throwing dirt up into the air behind it. It’s them but when the car pulls up it’s not. It’s Mil’s husband. He’s waving his pistol. He says he doesn’t want to have to do it but I know he wants to do it—he’s wanted it for years.
“I see that big head of yours,” he says.
There’s a deafening crack over the flat heat of the desert.
I feel it in my shoulders, chest, and belly. The bullets slice into me—great holes of light. I hold my guts like a sack of newborn eels.
I run to the bathroom.
I look everywhere, but it is gone.
My kit is gone, gone, gone.
***
Millie sits next to me with her hair buzzed so tight I can see little bulbs of pink scalp pulling up and off her skull. She says nothing of the blood seeping out of me, puts a cigarette out in the ashtray with a gentle sizzle. She feeds in a coin, pulls the lever. I place my hand on hers. Her hand is cold and veiny. There’s a pulse within it, stubbornly pushing through.
“There aren’t any clocks in here,” she says.
I rest my big head on her chest; her breath vibrates the insides of my ear. She holds me close.
“Tell me, Fantastic—why would anyone not want to know the time?”
David Byron Queen (@byron_queen) grew up in Ohio, before spending a decade in New York City, where he worked as a journalist, an advertising copywriter, and in reality television. His work has appeared in VICE, Paste, Hobart, The Rumpus, McSweeney's, Pithead Chapel, New South, and elsewhere. He has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and runs the indie publishing company “word west.”