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  “See that guy?”

  The woman furrowed her brow. “Yeah…”

  “Give him your dog.”

  Ami made an expansive gesture with her arms. “Leon!”

  But the woman obeyed. She blocked the man’s path and shoved the loop at the end of the leash into his hand. The man halted and gawped, completely bewildered.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “I don’t want your dog, lady…”

  “Take it,” Leon demanded. “It’s yours now.”

  “Oh,” the man said, his eyes glazing over. “Thanks very much.”

  He wrapped his fingers around the loop and continued on his way. The dog whined, craning its neck to look longingly back at its former master. The man had to tug at the leash, dragging the dog to keep it moving. The woman hung her head and frowned deeply.

  Leon turned his head to face Ami. She was wild eyed with shock and stupefaction.

  “Did you see that?” he asked her. “You ever seen anything like it?”

  She could see that he was beyond ecstatic, but her limbs felt heavy and her heart sluggish in her chest. None of what she was observing made the slightest sense, no matter how hard she tried to rationalize it. This strange little man from the office to whom she’d taken a liking was hypnotizing random strangers somehow, forcing them to do things they would never ordinarily do. He was like a little boy with free reign at the toy store, only this boy’s toys were living, breathing people. It wasn’t right. It was horrifying.

  “I…I’m gonna go get this lady’s dog back,” Ami mumbled.

  Leon sniffed.

  “Forget the dog,” he said. “There’s more. Lots more.”

  “But…”

  “But nothing. Come on, let’s go.”

  This time he did not grab her wrist, but she followed him anyway. Later, when she analyzed every bizarre nightmare detail of that morning, she could not arrive at an answer as to why she did. She just kept pace with him for no knowable reason, following him up the street to the square that marked the midpoint of the city center. There, four roads met a circle that circumscribed a plot of grass with a twelve-foot iron post in the center, a large metal eagle spreading its wings at the very top. People lingered and lounged around the post, sitting in the grass or just standing around talking to one another on their way to or from this shop or that coffee joint.

  Leon stopped short of the grass, standing at the periphery and studying the dozen or so people there quite closely.

  Ami said, “What are you going to do?”

  Leon said, “Heh.”

  He raised his arms and held them up like some ancient Near Eastern prophet, sucked in a deep breath, and began.

  “Can I have everyone’s attention, please?” he boomed.

  A few people stopped what they were doing to look his way, but the majority of them ignored him entirely.

  “YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE!” he roared louder still.

  Ami stood stock still, transfixed. Leon leaned close to her and whispered gently into her ear.

  “You may want to cover your ears or something.”

  “Cover my…” She caught his meaning before she could finish. Quickly she cupped her hands over her ears and stepped back.

  Now almost every pair of eyes on the grass was turned to Leon. He licked his lips and took it all in for a moment.

  Someone said, “Just some nut.”

  Clearly and audibly, Leon said, “FUCK.”

  The command was met first with silence; then, piecemeal, a soft murmuring arose from the assemblage. An obese man leaning against the post struggled out of his shirt. Somewhere a woman moaned. A college-aged girl in a pink sweatshirt regarded Leon with open-mouthed incredulity.

  “Everyone—all of you—fuck!”

  The college girl shrugged, stood up and shimmied out of her skirt. By then the obese man was completely nude and weaving around the grass, his flabby arms outstretched and massive rolls of fat bouncing with every step. His penis rapidly bruised purple as he went, engorged with blood. A mousy, hawk-nosed woman with enormous glasses rushed to shed the last of her undergarments before falling into the fat man’s grasp. They became the first to openly copulate on the ground in the middle of the city center.

  Ami’s hands dropped slowly from the sides of her head as she surveyed the carnal abandon unfolding before her wide, unbelieving eyes. A young man wearing nothing but his striped tube socks and a black baseball cap lunged at a woman old enough to be his mother. He pushed her up against the post and took her from behind. The college girl lay on her back with her pale legs spread wide, groaning and waiting for someone to join her. Ami recoiled in disgust when a sweaty, grime-coated homeless man—sixty if a day—climbed on top of her. The girl wrapped her legs and arms around the filthy old man and cried out with pleasure. Leon cackled manically, his head whipping back and forth as he scrutinized every libidinal aspect of the saturnalian display on the grass.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ami whimpered. She started to back away from the debauchery, step by step, though she was powerless to avert her gaze.

  “Fuck, everybody!” Leon screamed joyfully. “Come on, screw your brains out! No inhibitions!”

  Passers-by stopped and stared, uninfluenced by Leon’s spell. Some pointed and laughed nervously; others scurried away. An old woman in a turtleneck hollered, “I’m calling the police!”

  “I’m out of here,” Ami said angrily.

  She pivoted on her heel to commence her march, but Leon shot a hand out and sized her by the forearm.

  “Wait,” he growled.

  “Why, Leon? So you can fuck me, too?”

  Leon’s face cinched.

  “No. No, no way. I’d never do anything to you.”

  They stood that way, Ami and Leon, for a full minute without saying a word. Finally Leon released her arm and she took another step back.

  “What are you?” she asked.

  Leon cast his eyes at the street and thought about it.

  “I’m…nothing,” he said.

  The obese man staggered across the lawn and collapsed in a heap not five feet from them. He was spent. A soccer mom giggled and shrieked, “God!”

  “I don’t understand this,” Ami said. “Any of it. I don’t understand you. This is like—like it’s a bad dream, Leon.”

  “I can do anything,” he said sorrowfully, childishly.

  Ami said, “Goodbye, Leon.”

  And she hurried away, half walking and half sprinting. Leon watched her grow smaller and smaller in the distance while the wet, slapping sounds of sexual congress were gradually overcome by the fast approaching police sirens.

  He walked slowly back to the car.

  17

  The room spun; dimensions ebbed and flowed. Ron could not quite get a grasp of where things were in relation to himself, or where those things ended and other things began. Colors washed over one another. Edges blurred.

  He did not know where he was. He didn’t know much of anything at all.

  His bowels released once more into his boxers. The hardwood floor underneath him was a mess of bodily fluids, both fresh and encrusted. It had been many hours since last he’d eaten—he probably would not do it again. Now his system was empty, and though his stomach spasmed with hunger pangs, Ron did not have the presence of mind to find a solution to the problem. So he remained where he sat, surrounded by amorphous entities his brain could not decode.

  When he toppled over on his side, Ron was not aware of it. Sitting up or laying down, the world spiraled out of control just the same. It made no difference to Ron. He smiled stupidly as a thin line of drool spilled out from the corner of his mouth.

  * * *

  Ami wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and hunkered down on the loveseat with a steaming cup of tea in her hands. Booger was curled up next to her and the other two dogs close by on the floor. One at a time, they would intermittently glance up at her with worried faces, unaccustomed as they were to seeing her so quiet and melancholy.
They could not fathom how disturbed she still was, how confused and frightened by the outrageous scene Leon had orchestrated that morning by methods unimaginable to her.

  It wasn’t just the sex. Ami was no moralist and she was anything but a prude. She’d cavorted topless at the Rainbow Gathering when she was only sixteen and attended a terribly liberal private university in her twenties—Ami had witnessed her fair share of free love. But this was different. What she saw on the green at the city center was far from a throng of horny, drug-fueled would-be poets and latter day hippies fumbling naked by the drum circle in an open field someplace. There was no love in what happened that morning and there was certainly nothing free about it. Those people were compelled. Controlled.

  Leon violated them.

  Ami shuddered and spilled a few drops of tea on her lap. Booger emitted a plaintive bleat.

  “I’m all right, buddy,” she reassured him, though it was not true.

  She was not all right in the least. She had not only witnessed something very troubling, something bordering closely on a kind of mass rape, but an event that defied rational explanation. Perhaps, if Ami had the religious conviction of her parents or her sister, she could chalk it up to the devil’s influence. But she was an avowed atheist, a sticking point between her and her family for years. She had not believed in anything beyond the limits of humanist reason since the Santa Claus myth unraveled for her at the age of seven. To people like her sister, the world made more sense if there was a benevolent deity behind the veil; for Ami, it made more sense without that. Yet in light of her morning with Leon Weissmann, she was not sure what made sense anymore. She wondered what her sister would say, had she seen it.

  Before she had the chance to double guess herself, Ami had the receiver in one hand while she dialed with the other.

  “You have reached the Alexander residence,” her sister’s canned voice announced on the answering machine, imperious sounding as ever and still clinging on to the old married name. “We are not able to come to the phone right now, so please leave a message and we will return your call. God bless.”

  Ami hung up the phone and puckered her brow.

  “Goddamnit, Naila,” she said.

  * * *

  Somewhere the phone was jangling. It sounded like it was underwater.

  Naila could hear it, though she struggled to identify its meaning.

  Ring, ring, ring.

  It sounded urgent. Was something on fire?

  No, that wasn’t it.

  It didn’t mean anything, she concluded. It had nothing to do with her.

  Naila turned her head back to the wall.

  18

  They were gone. Not absent, just gone. Andy was sprawled out in the kitchen, his face wet with his own saliva on the linoleum floor. He was breathing shallowly, but to Leon he looked like a murder victim. Ron he found at the bottom of the stairs, his face buried in his hands and weeping loudly.

  “Can’t go up,” he mumbled, over and over again.

  “What do you mean?” Leon asked. “Why can’t you go up?”

  By way of response, Ron wailed with anguished sobs. His weeping seemed to incite Andy to action, who began beating his fist on one of the cabinet doors beneath the sink. Leon returned to the boy and touched him lightly on the shoulder. Andy flinched and retracted his arm. He was still and quiet then.

  “What is this?” Leon asked aloud.

  Both of them, Ron and Andy, were reduced to infantile babbling, crying and temper tantrums. Leon bit his thumb.

  “Shit,” he said.

  He slumped on the sofa and closed his eyes. His head was beginning to throb again—only slightly, but it was but a matter of time before the pain would come back with a vengeance. He knew he needed to act before then, but the last remaining members of the Minchillo clan were of little use to him now. He opened his eyes and watched Ron, who now lay face down on the floor in the hallway. His back jerked. He was still crying.

  So many of them cry, Leon thought. Is it so terrible, what I do to them?

  “You’re just weak,” he said aloud, addressing both father and son. “Weak and stupid.”

  He heard the words as if somebody else had said them. For a moment he was startled, but as he considered the sentiment, Leon decided that it was probably true. There was no debating whether or not Ron and Andy were broken; they indisputably were. But for what? Being told what to do by the likes of Leon Weissmann, administrative assistant un-extraordinaire, shy virgin and disappointing son? Ridiculous. The Minchillos were simply a feeble-minded lot, just like everybody else who obeyed Leon’s instructions without question. He was no magician, no hypnotist or Svengali—he was the most regular guy in the world. Below average in every respect, as his peers and superiors had always been so eager to point out to him. He’d never had a girlfriend, barely made it through college, and only tenuously clung on to his low-paying, bottom of the food-chain position at Thompson & Associates from day one. He was a nobody, an unrecognizable face in the crowd. For all intents and purposes, Leon did not matter to anyone. He was nothing.

  “Ha,” he snorted. “If I’m nothing, then you two dummies are less than nothing.”

  He got up from the sofa and arched his back with a satisfying stretch.

  “You two are dog shit,” he snickered. Then: “Maybe I’m the dog.”

  He sauntered over to Ron and delivered a sound kick to the weeping man’s ribs. Ron grunted and flailed his arms, scrabbling to escape. Leon stepped on the small of his back and leaned over.

  “Weak and dumb as hell,” he said.

  The throbbing in his brow was growing stronger, more pronounced.

  “Go to sleep, Ron,” he commanded. “Go to sleep and never wake up.”

  Ron fell silent and motionless, and Leon rose to go into the kitchen, where he repeated the same mandate to Andy.

  Within a minute, they both dropped into deep slumbers, their breathing slow and steady. Ron snored a bit, his nasal passage clogged with mucus from all the sobbing.

  Leon went around the house flipping switches and locking doors until the place was dark and secured. He fished Cheryl’s keys out of his pants pocket and returned them to their hook on the key rack by the door. He was finished with the Minchillo family, and he left them—a man and boy in comas from which they would never emerge, and a bloody corpse buried deep in the backyard—for the bus stop twenty minutes’ walking distance from their front door.

  “Weak, stupid dog shit,” he muttered to himself more than once along the way.

  The bus pulled up seven minutes late, and Leon boarded with a stern look at the driver.

  “No charge,” he growled.

  The driver said, “Huh.”

  Leon took a seat in the middle. A kid with a radio sat across the standing area from him, blaring something loud and abrasive. A thin metal chain ran from the hole in his left earlobe to the one in the corresponding nostril.

  “Turn it off.”

  The kid obliged. Leon’s headache backed off a bit. He felt as though it made room inside his skull to think about Ami.

  He had made a monumental mistake. Not the showing her, that was good. He needed to do that, to demonstrate his specialness. Without it, he was worse than invisible. Leon never expected to get very far on his kindness to Bess alone. So he had to show her what he could do. Only he’d done it in the worst and most sordid way possible.

  An orgy, Leon? Did it have to be a goddamn orgy?

  He’d gotten too caught up in the moment. It was hilarious at the time, at the exact moment he conceived of it. Make a random group of strangers hump each other’s brains out in public—why the hell not?

  Because it’s awful, that’s why.

  And it upset Ami. It really upset her.

  “Crap,” Leon said. “I’ve gotta fix this.”

  “Are you talking to me?”

  He looked up and saw a woman with short blonde hair knitting her brow and waiting for a response. He must have been facing he
r when he spoke, though he was unaware of it at the time.

  “No,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t talk to yourself like that,” she said. “People might think you’re crazy or something.”

  Leon sneered and said, “Maybe I am.”

  The woman matched his sneer and turned to face the smudged window. Leon kept looking at her, noting her smart pleated slacks and masterfully swept up hairdo. To him, she looked like middle management material. Like Cheryl.

  “I said, maybe I am crazy,” he announced loudly.

  She pressed her lips into a straight line and ignored him. Leon leaned over and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Hey, lady.”

  “Leave me alone,” she hissed.

  “Quit your job,” Leon said low. “Abandon your family. Hey—join a cult.”

  The woman’s face melted into a slack, blank expression as her ice blue eyes lost their focus.

  “A…cult,” she murmured as though the idea had occurred to her independent of Leon.

  “The weirdest one you can find.”

  The recorded announcer on the intercom proclaimed the forthcoming stop to be Cantrill Road, Leon’s stop. He stood and grabbed the handrail for support while the blonde woman bobbed her head, taking in the coming changes to her life.

  He patted her gently on the top of the head and said, “Good luck.”

  On his way off the bus and down the cracked, weed-infested sidewalk that wound into his neighborhood, Leon wondered what sort of cult the nosy lady would end up choosing. It was one of his least specific commands thus far, and he really didn’t know how it should turn out. He imagined it would be a matter of interpretation, such that if she happened to consider mainstream Catholicism to be a cult, she might very well become a Catholic. More likely, however, she’d shave her head and wind up in a crumbling compound somewhere in the desert, one of a dozen brides to a bearded guru with an extensive criminal record. Leon chuckled lightly at the thought.

  “Mess with the bull…,” he said to himself.

  He walked home.