Blatant Lies

 In the moon the face of a child still hovered. My ears, deaf to the people trying to help me to my feet, only heard a faint humming sound slipping into my ear that seemed to originate from outer space above and beyond the clouds. The only significance this sound seemed to resonate with was that it was beautiful beyond comprehension and it sounded like it came so far away, so utterly beyond all hope of travel or transcendence, that it echoed with the true depth of my isolation. Eventually the sound, which to my ear resembled a humming tune or note, faded to become the rush of a taxi cab that I had apparently hired which was stopping two blocks away from a club lit in bright hornet yellow named “La Luna” and when the cab driver asked me for money I gestured for him to roll down his window and when he did so I reached into my pocket and pulled out my empty hand which I used to smash his face against the steering wheel over and over until the air bag blew and he tumbled out, shoved aside by its billowing bulk, onto the sidewalk. From there I mounted his back and hammered his face against the curb until he could no longer speak or scream. Feeling exposed, as he sat sobbing and gurgling, I reluctantly left his blood in his body and fled towards the club which had no line and was, in fact, deserted. There wasn’t even a doorman. The dance floor, pounding with not music but just a single repetitive synth beat, was an Antarctic wasteland. Every so often the colors in the room would shift from green to blue to red to orange to yellow and back again. I scouted the balcony and found it deserted so I fled into the empty kitchen down through storage and into the basement which was just a concrete bunker lit by a single bulb hanging on a wire. In there Cannard stood over a table which was smothered by the body parts of a very large dark-skinned woman. Blood spilled over everything and I fought the urge to begin slurping it all up as I observed a nurse’s uniform flopped over a folding chair.
  “This was going to be a present,” he said glaring at me, “I took the effort to find her.”
  “Wh-who … Cannard, I’ve got to tell you … Cannard, I need to stay here for a while.”
  “But of course, with the police are after you. You’d need someplace to hide.”
  “Y-yes, but who is this? I mean, Cannard. I have to tell you-“
  “That you overbled Liliana? I’ve already figured that out by watching the evening news.”
  I stood in silence, amazed at my own inability to think straight.
  “I took the trouble of finding you this,” he gestured to the woman’s corpse, “But it was a mistake.”
  “This … who is this?”
  “The woman who gave your description in your police sketch. You’ve been wanted by the police since before I even knew you. Did you know that?”
   ”I … yes,” I lied. The police wanted me for … what? I hadn’t *done* anything illegal … except drink some blood. I hadn’t done anything illegal except kill Liliana. What more could they have possibly wanted me on?
  “Then you already know how big of a mistake it was for me to bring you this … present. This enormous present.”
  “Cannard, I … something is wrong.”
  “Indeed,” he said, “You’ve a perceptive eye.”
  “You see it too!” I shouted, relieved, “You’ve noticed it too! I … Cannard, do you remember who you … are?”
  He stared at me with the expression of a mountain.
  “You can’t, can you? You don’t remember! Who were you before you died? Tell me one thing about yourself before you died. Tell me one hard fact.”
  Cannard seemed to freeze in place. His facial expression did not change but something in his eyes did but for a moment. It may have been his pupils contracting, expanding, something so subtle I couldn’t perceive it. He said nothing. Drops of blood fell from the table onto the concrete floor sounding as if it had begun to rain underground.
  “I remember that I had a … daughter,” I started before being interrupted by Cannard shouting as loud as he could. It was a hard warbling sound, a yell drawn out without tone. He shouted until his lungs shuddered with a lack of air, his diaphragm straining against his guts.
  “I’ll be calling the police,” he wheezed as air refilled him and my mouth fell open.
  “Because of … Liliana? No, you *told* me about how they’re cattle. She was … nothing. Why should you …”
  “You’re a risk to me. People knew I knew Liliana. I might lose my club. I’m done thinking about it all.”
  “Your club?!” I screamed, “Have you even been upstairs?! Cannard, listen to me, your mind …”
  I trailed off as he grabbed one of the woman’s arm segments and began sucking on it as if it were an oversized lollipop.
  “And I don’t like your questions. I … don’t like them,” he plopped down on a stool and folded his arms together, “Just see yourself out, Daniel. I don’t particularly like you anymore.”