Free Passenger by Ronald Malfi Page A

dry rot.  Tabitha produces a joint from a small purse and lights it, the flame reflecting in her curling, manicured fingernails.  She wraps her lips around the joint and smokes.  The smell makes my mouth water.  Her eyes are wide, are brilliant, over the glowing cherry.
    “Here.”  She hands the joint to me.
    I suck the life from it.  My head goes swimmy.  Then I cough, and Tabitha’s eyes, just slightly glassy now, never leave mine.
    “Yes,” I say.  “Oh, yes.”
    “Yes,” Tabitha says, suddenly very close to me.  Soon, her breath intermingles with my own, and both our scents join the smell of the smoking marijuana.  Kissing her, I taste the pot on her breath and the gum she’d been chewing earlier in the evening.  An erection immediately voices its opinion, and in no time I am rubbing myself against Tabitha.  I grope her, feel her breasts through the form-fitting, leopard-skin top she wears.  Some fumbling, some more sharing of the joint, and I manage to work my hands up under her shirt.  She doesn’t wear a bra and her breasts are heavy and full with generous nipples.  Together we finish the joint.  I tell her I want to have sex with her.  I think she laughs—I can’t be certain—and she says something in my ear, low-voiced and seductive, that could be nonsense, could be Swahili.  Either way, my pants never make it off and sex does not seem to be in the cards.
    She runs a hand along the back of my head, the base of my skull.  Pressing too hard, a sharp, searing pain launches from the base of my skull straight along the upper circumference of my head, zapping me between the eyes.  Stars go off beneath my lids.  Zap.
    Tabitha is breathing heavy. We are both breathing heavy.  The whole room smells of marijuana and breath.
    “I think I love you,” I whisper.
    “Is that so?” she whispers back.  Her voice comes from everywhere.
    “Why not?” I say.  “Why the hell not?”
    When she speaks again, her voice sounds very far away.  “You need to find out who you are.  You need to get your memory back.”

NINE
    It is a dreamless sleep.  And when my eyes open, there is a sense of displacement that lasts for the extent of a single heartbeat. Sitting up, my head pounding so hard I wince, I realize I am still on Clarence’s couch in the basement of his apartment building.  The whole room is dark, empty, and silent. Cigarette smoke haunts my nostrils.  Through the barred windows at street-level, I can see the silver orb of the moon behind a veil of clouds.
    I have fallen asleep.
    Panic rises in me.  But as the events of the past two days swim back to me, I begin to relax.  I recall everything that has happened since waking up on the bus.  Sleep, it turns out, does not erase my memory.
    Not tonight, anyway.
    The urge to urinate propels me from the couch and sends me stumbling down a darkened, alien hallway in search of a bathroom.  The air stinks of weed and incense and the deeper, headier stench of body odor.  I find the bathroom and unleash a burning, foul-smelling stream that seems to take forever to fully evacuate from my system.  It is a small bathroom with ceramic blue tiles (missing in places) and a plastic shower curtain adorned with goldfish.  Beard stubble is sprinkled like confectioner’s sugar in the sink.  A woman’s purse sits open on the sink and a pair of white briefs is draped conspicuously over the doorknob.  Briefly, I examine my reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink.  My skin jaundiced, my eyes sunken into dark pits, I look like death, a death camp.  Hello, Auschwitz Jew.  Hello, skull-face.  When I grimace at my reflection, displaying my teeth, the image is so much like a cadaver’s that I quickly press my eyes shut to chase the image away.  Behind closed lids, the world seems to spin.  My head continues to throb and I wonder how much longer I can put up with the pain.
    When I open my eyes, I find myself staring into the woman’s purse.