THERE'S SOMETHING IN MY TOE

Just another televisual Northern California evening, around 90 degrees in the dry mouth of August. I was lying in bed alone, as usual, trying to sleep in my sweat. I recall opening the corner of my eye and reading the digital clock. 3:13AM. But one can never be sure, and that is the one thing I have always been sure about.

No one has ever disabused me of the notion that the universe is full of minds more complex and amazing than our own, organisms and beings whose makeup will elude the next millennium's full worth of science. What am I talking about?

I'm here to tell you about that fateful night, the night so hot and thick that I simply had to stick my feet out from beneath the safeguard of my blankets, a lighted runway of possibility for any number of predators. And all I know is that I awoke in the morning with a perfect red dot beneath my oddly bulbous big toe. The one on my right foot.

It was not worth mentioning to you at first, but it has since become unbearable. And it has made me do Things, commit Sick and Uncouth Acts which, though I readily admit might reside in the wish-realm of any numbers of sane individuals, including mine, certainly were not activities that I would under any circumstances execute.

So yes I'm worried.

What my toe has grown into, what I have become, has proven to be a nightmare that I cannot share alone. It demands company, community, articulation, and that is what I am attempting to do here. Bring you into my monstrous world, mark my accomplices.

* * *

The morning after It Happened I took my usual shower around eight o'clock. Sat against the back of the tub and let the water hit my chest. Thought of my latest excuse for getting out of work. Wanting to get nowhere but the beach, submit to the ocean's propellant. I squeezed soap into the rising water, plugged the tub and reclined. My feet emerged from the foamy bath, and that is when the red

dot
caught
my eye.

It wasn't much to look at. I initially thought it a bug bite of some sort, perhaps a mosquito's bloodthirsty prick. But beneath the surface of its obviously irritated skin, I could swear I saw something. Something dark, possibly inorganic. Strange. I tried to pop it like a pimple (if you want me to get vulgar about it) but all that came of it was blood. And more blood. It was like trying to rip a bullet out of your flesh using your own hands as tools.

So I gave up, shrugged and scrubbed myself down, figuring it would go away. It never did.

In fact, it grew. Swelled above the normal surface of my toe, rubbed against the ceiling of my shoe. It hurt like hell as I headed to the bookstore where I was employed as a clerk. The irritation caused me to walk with a slight limp, which produced in me a small measure of embarrassment but also the pride that sometimes accompanies injuries. Faked or otherwise.

So it was that I soldiered down the swollen hills of Berkeley to the Horse's Nag, an independent book shop on Bancroft. A small, unobtrusive slice of intellectualism that carried mostly scholarly books pulsating with marginalia. After nearly five years, it had occurred to me that I might not have learned a thing being around so many books. In fact, our entire staff seemed only a slim degree removed from sanity, caressing that edge which lay between utter self-absorbing madness and genuine intelligence. Frankenstein could have made a home here if he wasn't from rich stock, Dr. Strangelove could have been the stockboy. But no, that was me.

What am I talking about?

I've been digressing with no one to keep me on the path. That is what I have been talking about. The excursions my mind takes into nonsense and waste, irrelevance and marginalia. There is that word again. It is a symptom of the disorder that the Thing which settled inside my toe has visit'd upon me.

My mind began to wander, taking time-soaked vacations from its duties. In other words, I started making all manner of mistakes the minute I walked into the Nag. For one, it wasn't long before I erased the store's entire hard drive, eliminating twenty years worth of hard-earned data with the subtle and not unpredictable tap of a few keystrokes, the slight accretion of seconds. So what did I do? I turned the computer off and took my lunch break.

What the hell happened? Reverse. I can see it now, right in front of me. I am sitting there, updating the site, punching in monotonous data. And there I am, selecting the drive. There I am, executing innocents, before the warning pops up, begging for mercy:

Are you sure you want to erase this disk?
Yes.
No.
Cancel.

There I sit dumbly, hitting Yes without a thought. I remember that. After that, I backed away from the computer and, believe this, leaned down to hear my toe. I think it was trying to say something to me. I know that sounds bizarre but I'll say it again and in the same language to show you that I am very sure of what happened.

Then I backed away from the computer and, believe this, leaned down to hear my toe. I think it was trying to say something to me.

It finally spoke. Whatever had formed inside of it had grown a mouth, perhaps to encompass the airflow swirling beneath its sharpening teeth. Whatever the evolutionary imperative, the toe now housed daunting intelligence within its lazy, hairy head.

"Good job," it cracked. I swear.

It is only now upon reflection that I feel that the Toe's utterance could be taken more than one way. Was it mocking me, making pathetic fun of my routinized life? Did it also feel that gnawing emptiness, the dissatisfaction? Or was it congratulating me, complimenting my decisive erasure? Might it have agreed with the radical situation I had put myself in? Why so many questions?

Which brings us to the point. The first sign that you have been affected might as well be your last. Why? Questions. You start looking at your words within and without the mirror. They start reading correctly on one side, opposite on the other. Through the looking glass, as it's called. And the road to madness lying within its circular argument.

The itch worsened, but not as much as it eventually did once the toe and I began to regularly converse. As you can imagine, it's hard to ignore an injury that speaks to you in more tongues than you are used to.

After leaving the bookstore in a heightened state of confusion, for good I might add, I made haste for home base, trudging up the borough's hills back to a space where I could work everything out in a less interruptive environment. But the road was not so smooth. Several times I had to pause to pull off my shoe, on the way home, sitting in some citizen's driveway or the sidewalk itself, legs warming against the sun-soaked concrete. Peeling the wet sock from the Achilles tendon and down, I felt a maddening throb in the toe coming to life.

It had grown to the size of a minor marble, a crimson Vesuvius swelling past explanation. But I could hear a whirring, a mechanical universe at work deep within. Something dead and something alive, working out the conundrum in its own expanding time. Frustrated, I clawed at the dumb flesh that had succumbed so easily to the invasion of foreign matter. But ultimately I was left with hands full of skin and blood, and a resilient globe that remained rock hard and going nowhere.

It was then that I noticed the cars slowing along the street, likely trying to figure out the suspicious pedestrian ripping his toe apart on the sidewalk. I decided it would perhaps be better to re-shoe and get back to the apartment. I hurriedly put the sock on again, and wiped my bloodied hands across an adjacent lawn. None of which pleased the elderly relic that owned the lawn, as well as the porch on which she sat rocking her life away. Which no doubt had been exquisitely deepened by my hard-to-understand actions, to which she had been party to for who knows how long. I certainly hadn't been paying attention.

I bowed to her knotted disapproval, why I do not know. Perhaps because we were now adversaries. Then I limped away, whistling an uneasy ditty along the way. Strolling down the sidewalks of Pine on this electric summer afternoon.

Yo ho!
There goes my gun
Friend or foe?
There goes my gun.

They don't make them like they used to.

* * *

Dry evenings are the most palatable opportunities to pull oneself from the contemplation of the couch and enter the promising American night, full of odor and heat. Sparks from the friction of passing bodies, warmed proclamations of delight, the smell of food everywhere. There is no other meteorological Moment for such activity. It is there and you must seize it.

Seizure. That was the imperative that had infiltrated my judgment. In all its meanings. Locked within indecision, hands pushing the boxtop skyward and wincing for the blast. Procure everything in sight if you are able. After my momentous day at work, all I thought of was aggressive capture with uncompromised determination.

My foot was, to coin a cliche, on fire.

But the evening had slipped my grip as the evening fog, always the sidekick to a Northern California, encroached upon the narrative, lowering its temperature. Back at the apartment, I had no such luck as I doused the toe with cold water in the tub. But nothing could slow its exponential warming, as if a core of unfulfilled objectives churned with fury beneath its fake, fleshy exterior. Oh, it was no secret what the toe had become. To me at least; I couldn't bring myself to share the truth with anyone, especially the landlady who still functioned unspoiled by the unraveling chaos around her. An old spirit, one that still liked election-year bumper stickers. Her car was plastered with them, a chugging political history of times past that swerved between lanes without signaling. She couldn't help it, bless the bitch.

Because it was not her but the city that was falling apart, I thought, walking among the world now that the shower had proven useless. Or was it coming together? It was hard to tell sometimes. Bloodthirsty development had reached a level that nurtured confusion and stubbornly ignored laws of dimishing returns. Damp skeletons of buildings within states of destruction or creation now littered our seaside hamlet, impaling the homegrown remnants of yesteryear beneath. Tarps covered them as the marine layer crept in, hiding the dispossed interior, the dirty little secrets. The living dead. Which gave me an idea. One I wish I could never remember, now that I recall it.

For as my toe began its punctual 8PM throb, the shuffle of the nearby homeless began to ring differently in my ears. I watched them now with interest, and began to monitor their activity for days at a time while my savings dried up. The drugged routine of their lives plucked a string in me, but the feeling I could tell was not yet mutual. Perhaps it was my hood, which I pulled low over my eyes to stay warm at the ears, that concerned them. It is said that those whose eyes you cannot see can steal your soul when you are not looking. The irony of that. Suspicious eyes spreading nets across the void, looking for the others purposefully hidden from view.

I issued a soul-cleansing scream that echoed like thunder among the makeshift shelters built for a restless few hours of sleep, my toe spiking with lightning pain. The homeless froze in their footprints like figurines suddenly ignored, fear creeping into all of us. Another piercing scream, my back arching with the stress.

They scattered as if the patriots had come to deport them. Only the immigrants who wanted to work tomorrow remained, if only in the gutter on standby. My sudden silence didn't seem to deter them. Perhaps they were already thinking of tomorrow's groggy dawn, where their labor and erasure would begin anew.

I suddenly felt nauseous and began to run as clumsily as I could, my gait afflicted by the toe's stubborn burn. The smell of wet demise was everywhere. Something had to be done. But what?

"Well, I will tell you if you just slow down and listen," said the toe.
"No!" I shouted, dampened by pain. "And stop talking so loud. Someone is going to hear you!"
"Not possible. No one can hear me."

I slowed, from exhaustion or interest I can't remember.

"Not unless I want them to, that is. Which I don't."
"You're lying."
"What do you know, host? Nothing. Only what I want you to know, so stop your pretending. It does not suit you, and neither does knowledge, especially of what's coming. So give your mind some room and stop asking so many questions."

My run had regressed into a shuffling jog, before dissipating altogether. I bent over, sweating, my hands on my knees.

"There, that's better. Now you are looking right at me."
"I can't see you!" I shouted back, annoyed. "Only the shoe you hide beneath."
"Hide? Watch this."

The sneaker began to blur and shimmer, and then it was gone. Beneath it now was a ghastly metallic eye where my toe had once been.

"Look into my eye," it beckoned.
"I..."

Then I slept, or so it felt. The degraded night around me began to swirl, and light came streaking in from the periphery. I floated weightlessly upward, pulled by the neck like a kitten by some unseen force. But I didn't feel the pinch of my newly changing surroundings, just the exhilaration. Worlds passed beneath me at lightspeed, data beneath the laser soon forgotten. The shock of the new. New to you.

Then I was back in the dank street, my sneaker reassembled.

"Now don't question me. My powers are beyond your comprehension."

The throb disappeared. After that revelation, the toe was a maddening question that haunted my mind, a blank face aroused by a lost sweetheart's perfume. I began to feel as if I was standing in the spotlit center of a vast cyclone, watching the ellipses of humanity and garbage spiral into some new text. It was a burning moment. And I felt it in my stomach, my chest, the bottom of my throat. The itch that must be scratched.

I wanted to take off my shoes and walk barefoot along the sidewalks, proudly display my beautiful monster. But I knew that I'd look like a fucking fool.

“My toes can talk,” I sang to myself, although the immigrants could hear. “And they're smiling at me. And they talk to me," I continued. “And they smile at me.”

Cue the sax solo.

* * *

The next day it was not dry but cold as I made my way down to the pier, where tattoo artists and lazy gangbangers shared real estate and hallucinations that they had enough cultural capital to make a difference. It was close to desolate due the soft rain that had come unsuspectingly to ruin everyone's date, but I liked it that way. The rest of us were drifters brought together by our loneliness, and there was a comfort in that. Whatever comfort the toe, I mean, the mind could create.

A crowd of chatterers at the corner coffee shop reeked of cologne and leather. Hair spray. The curvature of their nightlife grins fit the hum of the city like a manicured nail.

I pulled my arms inside the torso of my sweatshirt and walked armless for awhile, laughing inwardly. The shops were still open, but their owners kept a listless vigil, more or less done in their heads for the evening. So no one blinked when I walked into the seaside mall's food court and hit up the espresso bar, dropping down six bucks for what used to be a hot chocolate. I could barely pronounce what the menu was calling it, but the doped-up teenager taking my order nodded sleepily when I murdered my words. He had seen it all before, the jaded bastard. A war veteran at 21. His machine hissed loudly as it heated my milk. The echoes across the nearly empty court were hard to bear, as all malls are before they hibernate for the night. A covered metropolis dying in capitalist agony at the pull of a plug.

Only one straggler remained. He cocked his head, trying to find the machine's cacophonous source. The grizzled cat's clothes were wrinkled and knotted, as if a group of homicidal punks had spent the greater part of an hour beating him up. But there was no blood on him. In fact, he looked bleached. Eyes heavily lidded, lips fighting to come together. Jesus on the cross.

I avoided eye contact, wanting to keep what remnants of the night remained to myself, but something pulled me to him. Remembering the theme, I looked down at my toe, the invisible fire it sent from the bottom of my body to the top of my brain.

The bum nodded when our eyes met and raised his stained cup. I nodded back at him. Then my toe told me to go over and introduce myself.

The old me would have fought off the urge, of course, but the new me eventually lost, as he always did. The tug-of-war must have showed. If the stoned nerd who had served me decided to look up from his e-paper for a second, he would've unearthed my bizarre shuffle on the disc spinning in his vacant mind. One step forward, two steps back.

“Hey there,” I muttered, a tough guy stance that was probably unnecessary. The bum was about a buck-fifty at the most. “Nice evening we're having, eh?” My teeth hurt as I tried to smile.
“Fuck you, kid,” he grumbled, his voice a cough. “Don't fuck with me.”
I sagged, but the toe was insistent. “Naw, you got the wrong idea, man,” I added.
“Yeah.”
“You do.”
“Yeah.”

He brought the stained cup back to his mouth, but kept his eyes on me over its grimy rim. One of his eyes was colored differently than the other.

“You got one eye colored differently than the other,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“That's unusual.”
“David Bowie had it, too.”
“Who?”
“David Bowie, idiot. Are you telling me you don't know who David Bowie is? Ziggy Stardust?”
“Nah. Movie star?”
“Forget it. Have a nice night.”

I grimaced, closing my eyes. The stabbing had begun. Razor pain shot through the toe, shoved from beneath the nail and outward into the unforgiving night. “Holy fuck!” I screamed, hopping up and down on one leg, trying to relieve the pressure.

The bum's eyes grew wide, as he gathered his scattered belongings off of the floor and the cafeteria table. I sat down clumsily next to him, jostling his coffee-bearing arm, almost spilling the cup's contents. He smelled like wet dirt. But then the odor disappeared, along with the body that bore its burden. I caught a glimpse of his sagging pants vanishing through the food court doors, plastic bags rustling noisily along their glass, as he left. The coffee cup stood lonely on the table, the only evidence of his passing. It was empty, just like I thought it would be.

"You must retrieve him," the toe commanded. "He is your accomplice."
"For what?"
"The end of the world."

The pressure settled, but the toe's cryptic message had found a wishful receiver. I raised my knee and pulled off my brittle sock. The toe's metallic eye remained shut, although the vision of its REM aroused a fear in me I had no words to express. I could see its mind working beneath its inorganic lid.

"The end of the world?" I asked, suddenly out of breath.
"And the beginning of a new one," it answered, lid slowly opening at last.

(END OF PART ONE)