When I had a job I got a ride to work once with Mike. He drove fast and angry. He always gave people the finger. If someone cut him off or didn’t use their turn signal or even if he just came to a red light. He’d sit there at the red light, staring at the car in front of us, with that huge middle finger sticking straight up in the air. His middle finger was twice as long as any of the others. The knuckles were red and cracked and the nail was hard and yellowed. The skin around his nail was so irritated and swollen that there were huge crevices between it and the nail. Slimy, black dirt accumulated in these crevices, giving the nail a thin black border. The nail had never been cut, and the edge was cracked and uneven. Mike always seemed so proud of his middle finger; he showed to all the other motorists. Sometimes when he was really mad it would start glowing a faint fluorescent green, as if someone had stuck a long, thin bulb in it.

Mike was one of those laughing, joking guys who was full of anger. He always had some crude thing to say: he could make a sexual reference out of any remark, and he had an insulting epithet for every race or kind of person he had ever come across or heard about. He always tried to make me laugh but it was so easy to get him angry. When he got angry there was always violence. Even if there was no way to take it out on the person he was angry at, there was always violence. Once he was waiting at a red light, and he was the first one in line so there was no one to flick off. A low rider approached from the road to the right, about to make a left turn in front of us. Mike was already angry at the lack of someone to flick off at the red light, so when he saw the low rider coming he focused on it immediately. At first he smiled and I thought he was going to make a racist remark about Hispanics, but he allowed his hatred to overtake him too soon. The smile turned into a grimace of loathing, and the prejudice seethed behind his eyes, turning them bright red with little slits of pupils like a reptile. As the low rider began to make the turn in front of us the driver came into view. He was sitting low, with the seat all the way back, practically lying down. He was leaning way over to his left, his head halfway out the window and bobbing in time to the Latin rap coming from his car stereo. As Mike took the young Hispanic’s appearance in, his head began shaking, faster and faster. Bubbles of spit formed at the corner of his mouth. His face got very hot and the spit began to boil, jumping off his face and spattering the windshield. When the Hispanic’s car was closest to Mike’s driver-side window, he reached out. His arm stretched to the low rider, and he grabbed the Hispanic boy by his plain white tank-top. Just as the boy looked in our direction, Mike pulled him right out of his car through the window and held him in the air. His arm must have been almost six feet long at that point, its long, ropy muscles bulging and straining and veins popping out everywhere. The low rider continued gracefully through its turn off the road and crashed into the picture window of a small travel agency.

By this time, the light had turned green and Mike floored it, still holding the Hispanic boy up in the air. The boy’s face showed fear and confusion as he scrabbled at the huge arm holding him. Slowly he realized that he was moving, and he glanced at the road. Seeing the speed Mike was going scared him even more, and he grabbed Mike’s arm and held on tight. Mike looked up at him and laughed. Then one of the swollen veins in his arm, right in the inside of his elbow, burst and began spewing blood everywhere. Mike and the boy both screamed the same scream. The fear and confusion passed onto Mike’s face and he let go of the steering wheel and scrabbled at his arm. The Hispanic boy, covered with Mike’s blood, felt the anger welling up inside him. I could see it form in his gut and move up his chest, and into his throat. I saw the pain in his eyes as it moved up his esophagus, and he tried to fight it for a moment before the fire spewed out of his mouth. Mike’s blood was apparently very flammable, because his arm and the boy’s torso were both immediately consumed in a searing hot, blue flame. The fire burned out quickly and when it cleared, half the Hispanic’s face was fried, his teeth and tongue were gone completely. The fire had fused Mike’s hand to the boy’s chest, and both were charred severely. Mike’s car coasted to a stop in the middle of the road and I got out immediately. The other two stumbled around, dragging each other back and forth until they realized they couldn’t leave the car because they were joined through the window. As the boy clumsily dodged traffic, Mike reached under the seat and retrieved his ancient, rusty machete. He looked from the machete to his burnt arm and back again a few times, and then began hacking away. The bone gave him some trouble, but he wedged his arm against the car door and half cut, half bashed his way through. Detached at last, he half-heartedly threatened the Hispanic boy with the machete and then got back into his car. He drove off, extending his incomplete arm with its protruding segment of bone in place of a middle finger. The Hispanic boy lurched to the side of the road, dragging the rest of Mike’s arm with him. He looked around and realized he was in a black neighborhood, and then looked to me. I walked to work.

There was this guy, Todd, who was usually quiet and kept to himself and everyone thought he was really smart. He used to come with us sometimes when we went drinking after work. He never had much to drink, but he usually acted like the other guys acted when they got drunk. One time we were all over at Mike’s house and most of us were sitting in the kitchen, watching the world fester, when we heard this noise, this loud, metallic banging. It started out slowly, but gradually the bangs got closer and closer together. The guys went outside to see what it was and I could hear them yelling in reaction before I saw it myself. It was Todd, beating the hell out of the fuse box with his bare fists. He had already dented the cover of the box all up, and it was spattered with his blood. He seemed so intent, like a man who knows what he has to do, and he just kept hitting that fuse box over and over. He didn’t jump around like a boxer or yell or anything, he just kept staring right at it while he pounded and punched. After the guys got over their initial shock, they jumped on him to pull him away. Apparently they were afraid he would hurt himself. He took Bill out with one punch. Todd never even looked away from the fuse box or let it interrupt his rhythm at all. It looked like he thought Bill was just another part of the same fuse box. He flailed at the other guys as they approached him, but he didn’t get another good shot. They pulled him away from the fuse box, and he was still punching: air or his friends or invisible demons or whatever there was. Once the guys had succeeded in getting Todd away from the fuse box, they backed away from him, afraid of getting hit, and Todd, in his mad flailing, fell backwards to the cement. He knocked his head real good on the ground and he began writhing around down there, holding his head with bloody hands, but he never said a word, never let out a whine or whimper. The guys just stood around staring at him, obviously unsure of what to do. They seemed concerned about their friend, but afraid to touch him again. They saw that what he had was contagious, and they didn’t want to catch it. They didn’t know you can’t catch it from picking a guy up off the floor and helping him clean the blood off his hands and out of his hair.

The next day, I saw Todd at work and his hands were bandaged up and he was embarrassed because he thought that everybody knew what he was thinking after what he’d done. He didn’t know that the guys all thought something had been wrong with him for a little while, but that he was okay now. He didn’t know that the guys would never consider the possibility that, in his mind, he was always punching fuse boxes and bleeding.

There was another guy, Ted, who was always shocked when he looked in the mirror. It really scared the crap out of him. We could always tell it was him in the bathroom when we heard a short screech after the toilet flushed. He had some kind of awareness that there was a problem, and tried to avoid looking; but a lot of times, he just couldn’t help glancing at himself, like most people. The problem was, whenever he did look, he was horrified by what he saw. Usually he just let out a quick yelp and came out of the bathroom looking frightened and nervous, as if another mirror was going to jump out from behind a corner. He would calm down pretty quick. But sometimes he started screaming and he just wouldn’t stop. That sound made everybody in the place afraid to look in the mirror. We’d barge into the bathroom, some of the guys about to pee their pants, and find Ted gripping the mirror on either side with his arms stretched like he wanted to get away but his hands wouldn’t let go. His eyes would be huge with fear and his mouth would be wide open, teeth bared and screaming like a banshee. We’d have to pry his hands off the mirror and get in between him and it. He’d only stop screaming if he couldn’t see the mirror at all.

“I’m surprised he don’t smash up every mirror in the place,” Mike said one time. Everybody was quiet for a while, then J.C. said, “He don’t have nothin’ against mirrors, just what’s in them, I s’ppose.”

Some of the guys thought that Ted had some notion in his head of what he looked like that was totally wrong, and the reality in the mirror was what scared the crap out him. Some of the other guys thought that what Ted saw in the mirror wasn’t reality, and that’s what scared him. Todd told me once that he thought Ted didn’t see anything in the mirror.

One time when I got a ride home with Bill he took me to this club on the way. We went inside and he got something to drink and I sat and watched all the people. Bill went up to a woman at the bar and started a conversation with her. He tried so hard to make himself attractive. He leaned over her and talked in her ear and sniffed her hair and after a while she let him kiss her. I don’t think she had seen his tongue yet, but she must have known what tongues look like. Bill’s was long and barbed. All the barbs pointed backwards so it would go in easy, and when he kissed that woman it sure went in easy. He slid all of in her mouth right away. I’d never seen Bill’s tongue fully extended before, but I’d guess it was two or three feet long. It went all the way down that woman’s throat and into her chest and I could see it slithering around in her and she didn’t seem surprised at all. Even when Bill started pulling his tongue out and it ripped up her insides with all those little barbs, no look of surprise came across her face. She reacted to the pain as if it were commonplace, something to be dealt with. She didn’t give up though. It almost made her look sad to do it, but before Bill’s tongue was even halfway out, she bit down as hard as she could. She bit right through his tongue, and the half of it that was still attached to Bill flapped around in front of his face, spurting blood everywhere. Bill reacted in much the same way to the pain as the woman had. He just pulled the remainder of his tongue into his mouth and turned away. I watched the woman to see if she would spit out the rest of Bill’s tongue, but she didn’t. She kept it inside her and digested it and let it become a part of her. As we left, I wondered how many other tongues she had inside her.

After that I watched Bill whenever he opened his mouth. His tongue healed up real good within a few days, but I kept watching, and it was not long before I could see evidence that it had been bitten off again. I kept paying attention and Bill’s tongue kept getting bitten off. Surely he knew it was going to happen each time. He must have liked it. Maybe he didn’t like his tongue and that was the best way he found of getting rid of it, at least temporarily.

Then there was Mark, who always kept to himself. He had done well in high school and had had a bright future before his father lost all the family’s money in a bad business deal. Mark’s future had been planned out and provided for and then was suddenly taken away. He never went to college, which is the only reason someone as smart as him would be working with us. He knew it was all a Game and he thought he was too good to play. He was not impressed with the prizes that could be won in the Game and had no patience for the rules. He was the kind of guy who had enough going for him to be really good at the Game, but he never tried. He simply wasn’t interested. So he tried to get along without playing the Game: he lived by his own rules and played for his own kind of prizes. Everybody thought he was weird and nobody liked him. It was not easy for him, however, to live in a world that was nothing but the Game and try not to play it. Mark eventually got lonely enough to give the Game a try, but he found that a lifetime of avoiding the Game meant that he was just no good at it. He didn’t have a chance, playing against people who had been playing the Game all their lives. He kept losing, and the more he lost the harder the Game was for him, and the more it meant to him to win. But he eventually realized that he would never win, and that was when he realized just how much he really wanted to. Caught in a world in which he did not belong, Mark kept getting thinner and more and more blue every day until one day he turned into a vertical line of pure blue light. He stretched to the edges of vision and no matter how far you looked you could still see him stretching farther out of the corner of your eye. He stayed like that for a while, the line getting thinner and thinner, until the light started to fade. The blue got dimmer and turned to black and then the line disappeared. But every once in a while I could still catch glimpses out of the corner of my eye of a very dark blue vertical line. It would only show for a split second before it disappeared again.

Once we were all sitting around wasting time and one of the guys had a newspaper. He was reading aloud a story about a guy who had held his 80-year-old mother hostage for a week and had beaten and raped her the whole time. Apparently, he had been on meth the whole time. Nobody even knew it was going on until he called 911 and told the operator he was God. Then the cops went out to his house and found that mess. The guys were all pretty disgusted. Mike said something about what he would do if he ever got his hands on that sicko, and J.C. said that violence doesn’t cure violence, it only brings more violence. Mike said, “You’re a nice guy, J.C., and I agree with what you got to say, but that bastard should pay for what he did. Most assholes just need a good punch in the mouth, but that guy’s real messed up. He raped his mama, for Christ’s sake! He even blasphemed when he called the goddamn 911! You think he should get away with that?” J.C. sighed and shook his head. A real pained look was on his face, and all he said to Mike was, “If you think you never done nothin’ wrong in your life, then you go find that poor, pathetic man and beat the hell out of him.” Mike didn’t respond. He always pretended to listen to what J.C. had to say.

I got a ride home from John a lot and one thing he liked to do was 180-degree turns. He would go drive to the long stretches of rural road outside town where there was no traffic and go sixty or seventy; then he would slam on the breaks and turn the wheel suddenly so the car ended up facing the opposite direction. He would grin at me and speed off in the newer, better direction. He practiced it a lot and got very good at it. He could turn right or left and always end up exactly 180 degrees from his starting direction.

Once, John did it without me in the car. I heard about it after it happened. He was cruising along at about eighty-five one morning when he noticed a tractor-trailer coming up behind him. Once the idea was in his head, he couldn’t resist. He spun his car around and faced the oncoming truck for a second before accelerating right into the front of it. He didn’t really want to die, it was just easier to do that 180 into a truck than it was to keep doing all those other 180’s.

The ceilings were real thin in one of the buildings we worked on. All the guys were always afraid they would fall through, but supports running through kept that from happening. Once Jim was working on the second floor with a nail gun, and it got jammed. He got mad and pointed it at the floor and smacked and shook it for a while, and it accidentally went off three times. He heard a kind of sad whimper from below and ran down the stairs to see what had happened. J.C. had been lying on a couch, barefoot, with his arms spread and his feet crossed. A nail had gone through each of his hands and one went through both his feet. He looked up at Jim, who still held the nail gun, but there was no trace of anger on his face, instead he had a look of sympathy, as if he felt sorry for Jim. When he saw what had happened to J.C., Jim let out a yelp of terror. He threw down the nail gun and rushed to the couch with his arms outstretched, but he couldn’t look J.C. in the face. As some of the other guys came to see what had happened, they didn’t seem to want to see that pained, pitying look J.C. was wearing either.

Jim picked J.C. up off the couch and rushed towards the door. As he turned with the wounded man in his arms, he ran into a piece of jagged sheet metal that was sticking up like a spear. The metal cut a gash in J.C.’s side. Jim gasped in horror at the sight, but J.C. didn’t react at all. He still had that sad, sorry look on his face. Jim rushed him to the hospital and in three days J.C. was up and about. In the weeks after the accident, Jim visited him at home every day. At first it was just to “see how he was doin’” but the visits eventually adopted a religious regularity, and Jim was always asking J.C. if there was anything he could do for him. J.C. always welcomed Jim when he came to visit but never allowed him to do him any favors. He always quietly, almost sadly, refused any offers for help Jim gave. This drove Jim kind of crazy. He would come in to work the next day and tell everyone he spoke to about it. “I feel so damn guilty,” he’d say. “But there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it. There’s no way to pay him back, he don’t ever want nothin’! And he ain’t got mad at me yet. Not once! I wish he’d just go off on me, just yell and scream and tell me to go to hell, but he won’t, he never will. I tell you, it’s drivin’ me up the wall! Maybe one of ya’ll could talk to him, you know, find out how he really feels about it. . .” But nobody ever did, and Jim didn’t pursue it. He just got crazier and more quietly obsessed with it as time went by.

Once I passed through a small, isolated town near an air force base in the desert. The town had been populated entirely by the workers on the base and their families, but an experimental flight had released some kind of radiation that was killing off all the government employees and their dependents. By the time I passed through, hot and tired and beaten by the desert, all of the people were already sick, and many were dead. The radiation ate away at the people slowly, disfiguring them horribly before they died. Even before I reached the town, I had seen zombies crawling through the desert, their faces eaten almost entirely away, blind and dumb and left with no feeling except suffering. Some of them had lost limbs, and didn’t seem to notice, as if the pain inside was so great that the feeling of an extremity falling off was too little to concern them. As I got closer to the town, I saw body parts strewn along the desert road, carelessly discarded in some maddeningly slow attempt to escape. The community itself appeared to still be operating normally, if a little slowly. There were still cars on the road and figures lurching in store windows. I saw one traffic jam at an intersection where a woman had stopped at the stop sign and seen a rotting dog carcass in the road in front of her car. Whether out of indecision or a vain hope that the dog would get up and move out of the way, the woman had waited at that stop sign, her car in park, staring at the dog’s body until she too, decayed. She was slumped over the steering wheel, a skeleton with frayed and stinking hair and dead, dry flesh flaking off her face on the steering wheel. She was not entirely dead, though, for as I passed her car, she raised and turned her head just slightly. I could hear the dry skin snapping and cracking as her neck swiveled just enough for her to look up at me with empty eye sockets and tell me it’s not over yet and then she was gone, and I walked on.

I came to a tiny school in the middle of the town, and it was mid-afternoon so the parents had come to pick up their children. But the children were all dead and the rotting fathers and the rotting mothers were rummaging through a pile of little bodies where they had dropped the dead boys and girls off that morning. The dead and dying hands were so weak and so useless but they still tried to find their children and they called their names and I could see they wanted to ask them how their day was and see the pictures they drew and it’s all still happening to them though it will never happen again.

And after all that I’ve seen I must react. I look around the dying world and I feel the tears well up in my eyes. They burn so hot and sting my face on the way out and they come so fast that I can’t see. My lower lip begins to quiver and a feel myself start to shake. I get weak all over and I can’t hold on anymore. Sobbing out loud, I feel myself grow lighter and lighter. My heels are floating an inch above the ground now, tears stream down my face, and I feel the bile come into my mouth. I vomit and I open my eyes to see how I’ve changed the world and there it is, a pool of vomit and tears at my feet, and my hair falls out in clumps and it soaks up the vomit and the tears and it smells so bad so I close my nose. My toes are just barely brushing the ground now and I wish there would be a gust of wind to speed it all up. I close my ears to the sound of my own sobs that I realize have turned to screams and I feel pins and needles in my feet and hands. I’m going numb, closing off all my senses, giving up away my ability to receive messages from the world. Before I close my eyes, I watch my feet leave the ground and I float away from the world, numb and blind and deaf and dumb.