MirrorWorld

“He needs to learn,” I tell him, then slam the philistine’s arm down on my leg, snapping it like a branch.

The big man screams anew, his high-pitched wail waking the unconscious woman, who begins to weep.

“Get up!” the officer shouts.

I raise my hands and obey. “You could have prevented this.”

The bartender is on the phone. No doubt with the police.

“Turn around! Hands on the wall!”

I obey.

“What’s your name?” the officer asks.

This is a tough question, mostly because I don’t know the answer. I have a name. I’m as sure of that as I am that at one point in my past, I had a mother and a father. I can’t remember them either, but the fact that I exist is biological evidence that a man and woman, at some point in the past, copulated and gave birth to a boy. I’d like to think those same people would have given me a name. “I’m Crazy.”

“You’re bat-shit crazy,” the officer says.

I look back, over my shoulder. “With a capital C.”

The officer inches closer. With his revolver pointed at my back, he reaches around my waist, fumbling for the gun I stole. “Don’t move.”

But I do. Slowly and subtly. I twist away from his reaching hand, drawing him in closer. When he’s all but hugging me, I reach back with my left hand. The bartender shouts a warning, but it’s too late. I twist the revolver away from my back and keep on twisting until the officer shouts in pain and releases the weapon. I spin around, draw the sidearm from my waist, and level both weapons at the police officer.

“Don’t kill me,” he says, hands raised.

“I don’t kill people for being incompetent,” I tell him.

Do I kill people at all? I wonder. I certainly have the ability. I’m fast, and strong, and know how to fight with brutal efficiency. I could kill him, with these guns, with my bare hands, or with a peanut from the philistine’s face. When the officer had first come into the bar, he’d waited for the tender to remove the bowl before sitting down, and then he wiped the bar down with a wet wipe. The man feared peanuts. Allergic, no doubt.

But I don’t want to kill him, merely educate him. I raise the revolver, aiming for the man’s arm, debating the severity of his lesson. Should I wound him or simply scare him? He’s already scared. But he’s an officer of the law. He failed to serve and protect the fool. He didn’t care about the man’s fate. Didn’t care about his job. Didn’t care about his life.

“Eat a peanut,” I tell him.

His eyes widen. “What? Why?”

“Eat a peanut, or I’ll shoot you.”

“N-no,” he says. “You can’t. I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m allergic. I’ll die.”

“You have a reason to live?” I ask.

To his credit, the officer thinks on this. “My kid.”

He’s not sad, like a father who desperately loves his children would be. He’s regretful. “You’ve wronged your child?”

The officer nods.

“Bullet it is,” I say, my finger squeezing the trigger.

Before the round can be fired, I’m struck from behind. I fall to the bar’s hardwood floor, lying beside the writhing philistine and crying bimbo, looking up. The fool stands above me, a pool stick in his hands.

I grin at the man. “Good for you.”

The officer recovers his weapons and points them at me as backup storms through the door.

Turns out, the joke is on me. The philistine is the mayor’s boy. The bimbo is the sheriff’s daughter. And the fool … he’s a clinical psychologist. By morning, I’m committed. And while I believe everyone in the bar needed to learn a lesson, I can’t fault them for the straitjacket or the padded room. I am Crazy, after all.

2

“Hey, Crazy.”

Three of us turn around. We’re sitting along the back of an old plaid couch. Red, orange, and brown stripes. Ugly as crap from a crayon-eating dog, but it’s become our triple throne from which we can watch TV, which is currently showing The Price Is Right. No volume. All the screaming gets our lower-functioning friends riled up. And since there are twenty-three of them sitting around the room, bouncing back and forth, talking to gods or plotting the world’s end, silence is a good thing. It lets us hear them coming. But really, I just don’t want to get them in trouble or hurt them. After all, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re crazy.

Like me.

Like everyone in this place. Not counting Chubs, the other orderlies, doctors, nurses, guards, and janitorial staff, though some of them are suspect.

“Which one of us are you referring to, Chubs?” Shotgun Jones asks the orderly, whom we have deemed Chubs on account of his prodigious love handles. Shotgun is Chubs’s antithesis, a skinny man with equally thin glasses and hair.

“The only one of you who goes by Crazy,” Chubs says.

Seymour, the craziest of us, claps his hands frantically. “Crazy to the principal’s office! Ohh, you’re in trouble!”

“Actually,” Chubs says, “he’s got a visitor, and I needed to know you guys were going to play nice before I brought her in.”

“Her!” Seymour wiggles his fingers in front of his mouth. His big teeth and wide eyes complete the illusion that the man is an oversized chipmunk.