ken (kɛn) (n) : range of knowledge or perception
Synonyms: awareness, vision, understanding, consciousness…
“When did it start, Nik?”
“I can’t remember. Since forever.”
“Can you sense what I’m feeling right now?”
“Yes. It looks like brownish-orange dust and smells like … wet leaves.”
“What does?”
“What you’re feeling. I can see it. You don’t believe me but you’re excited because you’ve never seen this before. It’s new.”
“And you call it your ken?”
“I don’t know what it is. I tried to look it up in a dictionary and found that word. I can’t find anything else.”
He scratches a note. “You’ve always been able to do this? To ‘see’ feelings?”
“Yes, it’s nechistaya sila. Right, Mama?”
He glances at my mother, then back to me. “What does that mean?”
“I have the devil in me.”
“Do you think what you can do—the ken—is wrong?”
“I don’t like it. I don’t want it. Can you make it go away?”
“I think this treatment might be able to do just that. You don’t have the devil in you, Nikolai. Your brain is making you think you can sense what others are feeling.”
“But I can see the dust … I can taste it…”
“Hallucinations, that’s all.”
“And you’re going to shock them out of me?”
“Something like that.” His smile is ashen fumes and makes me think of lies. “Think of your brain as a computer and it has a little glitch. Turning it off and on helps to clear out the glitch. The current will act as a sort of reset.”
“You’re going to turn my brain off and then back on?”
“It’s just a way to help you understand the process.”
“I don’t know…”
“The medication isn’t helping, is it?”
“No. I hate it. It makes me numb.”
“I think this treatment is much better suited to your particular affliction.”
“So I am sick? Dad said I was, before he left. Sick in the head.”
His smile tightens and he answers like he didn’t hear. “What do you think, Nikolai? Are you ready to give it a try?”
“I guess.”
“Very good.” He looks to my mother. “If you’ll sign the consent on his behalf…”
“Mama?”
She looks away from me. Maybe she’ll look at me again if I do this.
They lead me into another room and have me lie down. They give me a shot of something in my arm and put a mask over my face. I inhale the gas and it makes me lighter than air. I float up toward the ceiling and in a blink I’m looking down. I’m sleeping. They attach sticky pads with wires trailing behind them to my forehead. They put a stick in my mouth.
The doctor with the lying smile hits a button and nothing happens but for my foot that’s sticking out of the sheet - it trembles a little, like it’s cold from being left uncovered.
A second later, my thoughts are cut into pieces. Lightning tears through me, blinding, ripping and burning. I see a flash like chaos and then everything rots to the gray of dead flesh.
I scream at my sleeping body.
NO! STOP! PLEASE!
Nurses and doctors, who’d been sitting calmly, are darting around now. The slow beeping of my heartbeat is now as fast as the white bolt that tears through me until it’s all one loud noise, one horrific pain…
WAKE UP!
The doctor shuts off the machine. The lightning crackles away to nothing and I fall down, into myself.
My eyes open and I suck in air as if I hadn’t breathed in years. Agony thunders in my head. Voices crowd around me.
“He was under full anesthetic…”
“Severe tachycardia…”
“Impossible…”
I sit up to more confused cries. I rip the electrodes out, then peel the sticky pads from my forehead; tear the tubes out of my arm.
“Nikolai, please calm down…”
I throw the thin sheet off. The floor is cold beneath my feet as I run. Hands try to grab me but I slip away. The pain pounds like a drum, driving me on, through the door. I run headfirst into the blinding white light of day that stops me like a brick wall. I throw my arm up to shield my eyes. Rough hands grab me around the shoulders and drag me back.
I fight them, but they’re too strong, and the light is so bright…So bright…
“You still with us, Nik?”
I blinked hard, and wrenched my gaze from the single bulb hanging over the table. It took a second for the memory to dissolve and reality to appear, like a scene from a TV show fading out and opening on a new one. The fourteen-year old kid in a hospital gown was recast as a twenty-four year old, covered in tattoos, and bulked up with muscles because fuck me if anyone was going to lock me up again.
“Our new buddy Nik has gone bye-bye,” said Paulie.
Atlanta. The poker game. I sat up in my seat and snorted a dry laugh. “Still here, cleaning you chumps out.”
Laughter from the other six guys met my shit talk, though it was tight and mirthless. They didn’t like me. They all had chip stacks of varying sizes in front of them, but mine was the largest.
We were in the basement of Paulie’s pawnshop, downtown Atlanta, Georgia. On the main floor above, desperate people hawked their family heirlooms or Grandma’s best piece of jewelry to eke out a little bit of money to keep going. To pay the utility bill or to score their next fix. Below, it wasn’t much different.
Paulie ran a Texas Hold’em game three times a week where some of the players gambled with the rent or grocery money. $15 and $25 blinds and a $250 buy-in.
I could’ve found stakes like this anywhere, in any underground poker game in almost any town. And I did, on my endless crisscross of the country. But I wanted a big city. The endless days on the road took their toll on me. I needed people.
I just can’t be this damn close to them.
Atlanta was too much. I’d been a fool to think I could handle it. It felt like the entire city, not just the pawnshop, hung over my goddamn head. The onslaught of all that life hit me like an acid trip that wouldn’t quit. So many people filled with so many emotions. They screamed their lives at me in a riot of colors, and filled my mouth with the bitter taste of their bad memories.
Sweat trickled down my neck even though Paulie had the AC churning against the heat of Georgia in the summertime, and my head ached as if a hammer were pounding from the inside. I was at the bottom of the sea, with the crushing weight of the water pressing down on me…
I lifted the corner of my two cards with my thumb. A deuce and a four, both hearts. The flop had the ten and seven of hearts, and Jack of diamonds.
I let the cards lie, and kept my face impassive. Flush draw wasn’t a bad hand. Lots of possibilities for a win and then I was out. Atlanta was too much. I had to get the fuck out of here.
“Hearts, hearts everywhere, what a crock of shit,” said the big guy—Oliver—on my left.
Liar.
That was Oliver’s tell. To make a cryptic comment about the cards at every play. It threw the others off; who the fuck actually tells a tell? Sometimes he was bluffing, sometimes not. I could always read him. I could read all of them. Even without my ken, I could read them like a book. With my ken, I was unbeatable. In my twenty-four years of pseudo-life, this was the only goddamn thing it was good for.
“So Nik,” said Paulie, chewing around his cigar. “What do you do for a living?”
I cheat at poker.
“I’m a salesman,” I said, striving to keep my voice normal. The bet came to me. Normally I’d check to reel them in, but this time I saw the big blind and raised it fifty bucks.
The table collectively inhaled and the smoke reflected in the overhead light shifted to sickly, suspicious shades of grayish-green and the piss-yellow of fear from a young guy named Eli on my left. The $250 buy-in was more than he could spare but he’d played anyway. To a lot of guys, poker was stronger than heroin.
“Motorcycle parts, was it?” Angus asked. He’d been my ‘in’ to the game. I’d met him on an online game, got to chatting, and earned an invite here. My usual M.O.
“Yeah, motorcycle parts,” I said, taking a long draw from my beer bottle.
Angus saw my raise, and dumped the chips on the pile instead of sliding them across the table.
“Fuck’s sake, Angus, quit splashing the pot,” Eli said. He worked at the pawnshop, and was, in my esteemed opinion, a moron. It was probably obvious to everyone, not just me, that Angus’ tell when he was bluffing was to splash the pot.
“Mind your business,” Angus told Eli, giving me the side-eye. “Got to keep up with Nik here, who’s been on a helluva run all night.”
“All night,” a guy named Will snapped.
He sat directly across from me, and was all hard edges, flinty glances, and suspicion packaged in a lanky frame. The kind of guy who’d draw a knife on you if you surprised him—a natural born asshole who couldn’t take a joke if his life depended on it.
I’d seen his kind before—watching the action like a hawk, and keeping tabs on who had the blinds with anal-retentive diligence. I hated him immediately.
He sized me up for the hundredth time that night, taking in my tattoos that covered my arms and neck, and the 10-gauge silver talons that pierced my ears.
“Hoax and pawn,” he said, reading the tattoos between the first knuckles on each of my hands. “What’s that mean?”
“That’s a secret I don’t tell until the third date.”
The table guffawed in a cloud of smoke, noise, and color. Will seethed.
Paulie dealt the turn. A six of hearts, and I had my flush.
Oliver whistled between his teeth, and folded. “It’s Valentine’s Day for someone, but sure as shit ain’t me.”
Judging by the dull gray around me, no one else had anything good either. Eli, who was too stupid to know when to fold, tried a bluff only a blind man might miss. Three other guys checked, and then the bet was to me.
“Action’s on you,” Will said, as if I didn’t fucking know that.
Will was watching me closely. Despite his being a grade-A asshole, he was a good player; no tells. Except to my ken. From the subtle taste of his doubt, I could tell he had an okay hand but that he was wondering if mine was better. Without the ken I would have played conservative and guessed he had the better flush. The ken showed me he didn’t.
I should’ve just gone all-in, forced everyone else to fold but my head ached like a bastard, and I didn’t like the way Will watched me; how his suspicion curled around him thicker than smoke.
“Twenty,” I said.
Will saw my twenty and raised fifty. I fought against the pain in my head, the relentless pressure that made my head pound.
“You don’t look so good, Nik,” Will said with a smirk. “Second thoughts?”
“None.” I called his fifty, and took another sip of beer. I felt an itch under my nose and rubbed it with my hand holding the beer. The tattoos on the back of my hand were smeared with red.
Fuck.
Paulie dealt the last card, the river. Five of clubs. A garbage card to everyone, including Will. But pride was making his bets; he was in too deep to back out now. The others checked or folded. Will went all-in.
“Dumbfuck,” Oliver said. “Nik’s got the flush. Why’re you pissing your money away like that?”
“He’s bluffing,” Will said. “He’s going to fold like a lawn chair.”
I surreptitiously put a cocktail napkin to my nose, careful to keep the blood from showing. It wasn’t a lot. If I got out of there quick enough…
“Raise,” I said. I didn’t need to move my chips into the pile; they were all mine now.
“Fucker,” Will said, slamming his palm on the table.
“Told you,” Oliver sniffed.
I flipped my hearts over and reached for the pot. Three hundred dollars’ worth, which brought my night’s winnings to well over six hundred. “Cash me out,” I told Paulie. “I’m done.”
“The fuck you are,” Will said. “You can’t just take that much bank without giving us a chance to win it back.”
“Yeah, I can,” I said, dully, stacking my chips quickly into towers. “I’m coming down with something. Heading out.”
Paulie cashed me out in silence, and the small basement felt the way the sky does before lightning strikes, prickling the skin on the surface.
“I don’t like you,” Will said, jabbing his finger at me like a knife.
“Feeling’s mutual.”
Will was a grinder like me. A guy who played for a living. I’d probably wind up sitting across from him again someday, and have to watch my ass. He knew I cheated, he just didn’t know how. I had to dab my nose again and Will saw the bright red on the white napkin. He narrowed his eyes and rapped his fingers on the empty felt in front of him.
I left the basement through a side door that led up a staircase to the street, riding on a current of resentment and anger from below.
Outside felt no less suffocating than the basement. Atlanta was roaring and I had to get the fuck out of there. I stashed my winnings into one of the two side bags on my Bonneville T100 motorcycle—a 2012 model pushing more than 90k miles—and shrugged into my black leather jacket. I put on my helmet and the visor dimmed the world to gray.
With a spray of gravel, I tore away from the pawnshop, into the early morning just after dawn, and out of Atlanta. The leaden sky threatened rain.
A storm was brewing. A big one.
I imagined it coming down out of the sky, like a huge fist, sweeping me up into its grip and crushing me until there was nothing left.
I drove on and on, and my thoughts wandered into dangerous territory. They’d been doing that a lot lately, on my endless back-and-forth across the country.
It would be so easy to let the bike drift over the line where cars whizzed past me going the other way. To close my eyes and set the motorcycle head-on into the path of a rumbling semi, its air horn blowing in panic because it was too big to get out of the way in time…
Sometimes I thought the only thing stopping me was that I might hurt someone else. Other times, I didn’t care, and my wandering thoughts pulled the handlebar along with them, toward that center divide. Or I’d grip the throttle and push the bike faster and faster, until the road was a gray blur that could tear me to shreds; the highway patrol would have to scrape me off the asphalt piece by piece…
The gruesome image was oddly comforting. I didn’t want to die but this wasn’t living. I wanted an end.
Savannah, 3 miles
The sign whipped by in a blur. I pushed my motorcycle past 75 mph, to outrun the coming rainstorm, and put as much distance between me and Atlanta as I could. Signs for Savannah told me to get off the 16 West, but I stayed on until they pointed the way to Garden City, pop. 8905. Savannah was too big. I’d drown there, especially after Atlanta. Garden City was small enough.
Even hundreds of miles and four hours later, I could feel Atlanta clinging to me like the sweat and grime of a long road trip. I needed to get back to zero. To dig under the noise and feel something that was truly mine. Even if that something was pain.
Before food or even a motel, I found a tattoo place in Garden City, tucked into the corner of a small strip mall. I coasted my Bonneville into the front of GC Ink and Piercings and took off my helmet.
Despite the dark gray of storm clouds gathering above, the green of summer was vibrant and alive in the numerous trees that filled the space between shops and the road, and in the grass along the front. Humid air trapped the electric buzz of the cicadas; an unending song of Georgia in June. Unlike human life, animal life, for whatever reason, didn’t assault my every goddamn sense—and the several other annoying senses no one else seemed to have but me. I liked the constant noise of the insects in the South. Like the buzz of a tattoo needle.
Inside the tattoo place it was mercifully cooler, and looked like a barbershop; white floors, dark chairs, plain walls but for framed artists’ samples. Two artists were working. A third approached me as I shook out of my black leather jacket and set it and my helmet on a bench near the door. The guy was big and bald, with a red dragon snaking up one arm and disappearing under his shirt.
I could see he was bored and wanted to get the fuck out of Georgia. A gray-green haze of pot smoke infiltrated his thoughts, dulling his urge to skip town.
“What’ll it be?” he asked, as if he were a bartender. His gaze swept over the ink of my hands and arms, up my neck, then to the silver talons in my ears. “I can do ink, but our piercing guy is out today.”
“Tattoo,” I said.
“Right-o.”
He led me back to his station, a small cubicle with framed samples of his work all over the wall. On the way, we passed the other tattoo chairs. The customer in the next station over was trying his best not to show it hurt too much. The younger woman in the other was having second thoughts but was too far in to stop now.
“You got any idea of what you want?” the guy asked me.
The words, “Doesn’t matter,” almost escaped me but I pulled them back. Except for the pawn and hoax tattoos, the rest of my ink meant nothing. The design wasn’t important. It was the pain I wanted.
Needed.
My gaze shot around his station, grazing over his samples. I found a Japanese koi fish, bright orange and pink, curling around itself, its scales almost iridescent. I pretended to study a few other samples, then looked at the guy.
“I was thinking of something Japanese,” I said. “One of those…what do you call them? The giant goldfish?”
“Koi,” the guy said, and moved to tap the sample on the wall I’d seen. “Something like this?”
“Yeah, that’s it, man,” I said. “That’s exactly what I had in mind.”
He frowned. “No variations?”
“Make it more orange than pink,” I said. “And maybe a Japanese character overlaid on one side in black.”
“Which one?” the guy asked, his annoyance thick in his voice. Dull fumes slightly stung my inner eye, the ken. “There’s like…a lot.”
How about Fuck This Bullshit, I thought.
“Endurance,” I said.
“Can do. I’m Gus, by the way.”
“Nik,” I said. “How much is this going to run me?”
Gus shrugged. “How big do you want it?”
I held my hands out, as if I were holding an invisible cantaloupe.
“‘Bout one-eighty,” he said.
“Done.”
Despite the way Atlanta tried to drown me, the money I’d won off Will and Co. would add nicely to the $20,000 I had in my bank account—my only tangible connection to the real world. I kept two grand in cash on hand for expenses, plus a $3000 prepaid Visa, fully loaded for online gaming. Point is, I could afford a bigger tattoo, but I was running out of naked skin. I was tatted all over my neck, my entire chest, most of my back, down both arms, and over my hands and fingers. I had only a few on my legs but at this rate, I was going to be decorated full-body long before I hit thirty.
Then what the fuck will I do?
The idea of another six years of enduring this goddamn ken was going to drive me insane. If something didn’t change quick, I wasn’t going to make it to thirty. Hell, I wasn’t going to make it to twenty-five.
“Ready?” Gus asked, jolting me from my thoughts.
“Yeah, sure.”
I took off my black t-shirt and showed him the only patch of blank space I had left on my back—a swath under my left shoulder blade that carried down to my waist.
“Anywhere here is good,” I said.
“Right-o.”
I stretched out on the chair, resting my head on my arms and closed my eyes, as if I were lying on a beach somewhere, dozing under the sun. Gus readied his ink and needles. He tried to make some small talk about the dozens of other tattoos that decorated my skin, but my responses were short and blunt; he got the message quickly and shut the hell up.
His gloved hand touched my skin, increasing the connection between us, but the latex helped. The buzzing needle helped more, muting the whispers of his thoughts; the colors and tastes of his life. But it was the pain that erased them completely.
The needle bit into my skin, and I concentrated every bit of my awareness there, to feel every second and half-second in between. Tattoo pain was perfect—not unbearable, but not weak either. This artist wasn’t particularly gentle, and I relished each stinging moment. It was my skin, my pain and no one else’s.
For nearly two hours, I was free.
When he finished, I lay still for a few moments, reveling in the throbbing ache along the left side of my back.
“Hey, buddy. You fall asleep?”
“No,” I muttered against my arm. “I’m…here.”
I’m still here.
I felt better. Cleaner. I’d bought myself some time. I sat up and grabbed my shirt.
“You maybe want to see it?” Gus asked, a smoky cloud of suspicion curling up around him. I got that a lot lately. He was worried I was going to bolt without paying.
For his sake, I took a glance in the mirror. The guy was good. A snarling koi fish glided over my raised, red skin, its scales shimmered in iridescent orange. A black sigil was overlaid on one side. It might have been Japanese for ‘endurance’ like I’d asked for. It might’ve read, “The bearer of this tattoo is an asshole.” All the same to me.
“Yeah, looks great,” I said. As Gus put a bandage over it, I fished out my wallet, and handed him two hundred dollar bills.
“Thanks,” I muttered. I threw on my shirt and strode out, hooking my black leather jacket over one shoulder.
Outside, the storm clouds were bunching together like a rugby scrum, ready to roll out. I thought about finding a motel, but there was a Fed-Ex in the same little strip mall as the tattoo shop. I figured I might as well find my next game while I was here.
In the shop, I rented the one computer in a corner so that no one could watch me and found an online poker site. Luckily, the store had no Wi-Fi restrictions and I was able to play. I fed the site the numbers off my prepaid Visa card and joined a game of Texas Hold’em on a local server.
Within minutes, a user under the handle of TMoney1993 invited me to an underground game in Port Wentworth, just north of Garden City, night after next. I accepted and he PM’d me the address. He probably thought I was easy pickings.
Sorry, TMoney, I thought. But I’m going to clean you out.
“Sorry?” I muttered at myself in disgust, and logged out. As if a mental apology ever went anywhere. As far as I knew, the sense perception was a one-way street. Despite my frantic online research over the years, I’d never heard of anyone who could do what I could do.
Not one fucking person, anywhere.
The motel in Garden City was the same as every other motel I’d ever stayed at over the last few years. They all blended together: double bed, thin carpet, bathroom with its tiny bottles of cheap soap. Even the emotions of the people in adjacent rooms took on the same hues and flavors. I knew who was around me at all times: bored business travelers; parents straining to make the most of a cheap family vacation for their bickering kids; tourists who felt they had to see the world’s largest ball of twine before they died.
That’s if I was lucky.
Hopelessness and despair are black to my inner eye, and the more remote motels were often filled with the lonely and the desperate. The worst nights were those spent lying in a darkness deeper than the night, the shadowy pain of the person one room over seeping into my motel room like an inky black stain.
So much misery in the world…
And all of it shoved down my throat, every waking hour of my life.
I sat on the bed in the motel, listening to the thunder growling louder and the storm gathering power.
The new tattoo’s bandage itched. I tore it off and relished the sting but it faded quickly.
I can’t keep doing this…
I’d had the ken for as long as I could remember, and spent years going back and forth between hopeless resignation, and the raging urge to know what it was or if it had a purpose. Back and forth, back and forth, like my road trips across the country…searching for an answer or trying to outrun it.
I stood up and paced the small room. Outside the window, the trees swayed in the dark wind, and the first raindrops began to smatter the glass. My hand went to the Bowie knife I kept strapped to my belt. The dull throb of my newest tattoo was gone.
It’s not working anymore.
More and more I wondered why I bothered with tattoos, or poker…or anything else.
You need the poker money to live off of, whispered a pathetic voice in my head; my own dying sense of self-preservation.
I wasn’t living. I was on an endless road trip to nowhere. But I had $20,000 in winnings stashed in a bank for no fucking reason that I could tell, except that I had to keep adding to it, making it grow. The savings had become like the ken; something whose purpose eluded me. Some big buy-in, maybe? The biggest game of my life? The last game of my life? A poker game but with Russian Roulette-sized stakes?
If I won, I would keep going.
If I lost…
You gotta get off this train of thought before you do something stupid.
I took my hand from the Bowie knife and grabbed my jacket off the bed. I needed a club. A place where I wouldn’t be alone. Where I could be surrounded by people, but their scents, colors and thoughts would be muted by the smell of cologne, pounding music and flashing lights.
I asked the bored-looking guy manning the front desk if he knew a place.
“The closest one’s Club 91, just outside Savannah,” he said. “Small, but cheap drinks.” He gave me a funny look, his curiosity tingeing his words with a taste like citrus. “Can’t imagine it’ll be hopping tonight, what with the storm and all.”
“One way to find out,” I muttered.