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Maricopa City Deputy James Archuleta desirous of experience and a scientist of the human soul stood at a payphone on the corner of Philomena and King Drive waiting for a call to come in. But couldn’t seem to remember why. His tongue has begun to itch. The first sign of something amiss. His spinal cord may be pooling into jelly but before he can ruminate on this fact, he is interrupted. “Doesn’t work!” yelled the black mexi-cali from across the street. Referring to the payphone. “Hasn’t worked in years. Centicular went under and no one came to pull the fucker out.” He crossed the street toward Deputy, but kept his distance, fearing the erratic way he flicked between his fingers the ashless cigarette which had died out due to inattention. As though warding off malformed nymphs just under his skin, Jim slapped at his thighs, his shoulders, his forearms, the baldspot under his hat. Realization in the form of a wicking and asymmetrical synesthesia took root inside the poor officer’s brainstem and in that moment standing in his uniform in the broad light of day, the idea hardened into a calcified terror; the joint he had been passed ten minutes earlier was far more damp than he’d have preferred. His preference being none. Sure, he’d accepted the risk at the time and though his informant was known as a midtown dickster, he’d assumed (incorrectly) the meandering rent boy wouldn’t sink low enough to dose a cop. He had been wrong.
Jim reeled his tongue back into his mouth and reassessed his present moment through the fog of coquettish chromatism running half-committed con games on his orbital nerves. He was down hard in downtown. Downtown Maricopa where the prostitutes have black eyes and bruises on their thighs and rugburnt knee highs — oh yes. Downtown where you’re alone and life is making you lonely. He forgot about the incoming call, the purpose of the call, he couldn’t snatch them back from the cliff overwhich they plunged. Only chemicals were left in their stead. PCP, Jim deduced, then confirmed in the wave of panic created by this deduction. Through his mind ran the some thwacko take out his muscle-minded demons on an overweight camera crew and his fellow boys in blue during reran episodes of POLICE PD LIVE. James tried to keep his wits about him though this was generally a rough ride at the best of times thus he had no recourse but to enact, as a peace office, his primary defense system for whenever
events arced toward the chaotic.
No. James put the gun away, he heard himself say. But James did not comply.
Someone call the cops, someone other than James screamed.
But he is the cops, James responded in horror.
The black mexi-cali ran off down the street. Perhaps it was for the best. His hoofbeats beating an orchestral rhythm. Then the beats obligingly slowed so that James could focus on the movements hidden inside the movements. Metatarsus unspooling. Each sinewed footfall a new revolution toward nirvana. He stared at a streetlight and contemplated killing the fucking Rat who had dosed him but could no longer conceive the rat as anything but an essential part of the ever-vibrating mechanism churning within the core of their shared habituverse. The Rat arose in the officer’s head as though from shit. Deified. Bronzed and Full-Lotused and sucking dick for wrinkled wads of cash. Then there was his dad’s hands flown in from the far off blue distance where Job’s God resides. He had real raw hands, his dad. As though their creator had no eye for detail. And he placed his strong hands on Jimmy’s shoulder and James awoke a second time to see the street lamp dirtied — encroached upon by the greenest
form of black there is. An infectious Mold. A spiraling donut of revolving Mold fusing to anything that fell within its reticle and the hand of his father became that of a man he could not recognize. A font of sputum. Mucal in nature, James said aloud to no one. His hands. The lamppost. He could see his father staring up at him from a puddle of antifreeze and his father’s hands were attached to a man wearing the same uniform James had put on that morning. The color the blackest form of blue.
Maybe this isn’t PCP. Maybe this will all be alright.
But this refused to sit right within old James Archuleta. He saw the Mold and he saw the hand holding his service revolver infecting his clothes with the Mold. He balled up his empty fist and brought it square across the jaw of this Mold-infected self. This verdant He. The sweet sarcophagal encasement of reticent evil peering out from inside him. And his skin sang. Oh every wriggling nerve burned with exhilaration. The rotating tension of the physical world pressing on his soul. Suffocation by Indian Burn. He attempted to cry out but instead a boorish bellow a thousand tranked lions thick spewed outward past the miles of Moldy streetlamps and the bubble of ambient glare until his voice ceased from sheer exhaustion. When the roar ceased, a man appeared with the taser and came down with a case of trigger finger and propelled two tethered darts toward the eternal being that once pretended to be Deputy James Archuleta. Asshole didn’t even bother to introduce himself first.
This ain’t no PCP. It’s something else, said the boiling point between his temples.
The darts flew Jamesward and would have jolted his living soul back into place had God not concocted the precise array of air particles to impede their trajectory. Divinity in action. The twin darts wobbled and then collided in midair, splaying erratic, one bouncing off the deputy’s badge and the other performing the same number on the grip of his police-issue glock. The pistol dislodged from his hand and flew out of sight.
There is no point in begging for violence to end. James had God on his side and had proven himself unfettered by half-measures and could only be stopped from there on by the unbearable and brooding weight of Samson himself. He clenched his teeth and put his fist straight through the sternum of the officer that had tased him to the chorus-like laughing of camera phone wielding bystanders.
Cops bored of beating us up. Beating each other up. Tweets would say. Simultaneously processing the electronic cloud forming overhead while wrestling his clothes from his body, he could see himself from the outside. In the third person. Top-down. He was going viral. His image had been uploaded to the grand narrative of something else and he was no longer able to hold within his fingers the various parts of himself that he believed were his. He vomited down the front of his bare chest and for a lucid yet fractured second, he considered lowering his fists and simply succumbing to the flowing river of time’s elegant maze.
Instead, he pulled his duty belt from the crumpled pile of his pants and began whipping passing cars in his underwear. Arrayed equipment arcing away from him with each swing of his duty rig. Fucking gas guzzlers, these cars. A tool of the ever-reaching Mold. But a belt never won the battle for a man’s soul. A stop-gap, certainly, but nothing else. A gun, however. A gun seemed right on the money, historically speaking. His gun and he were ordained and commissioned by the City of Maricopa and King Rat to punch a hole square through the world’s veil. So he bent down at the hip exposing the various holes in his underwear and fished out his gun from under a red sedan. Dusk was approaching and he’d meet the night with a sense of retribution, though he hadn’t yet settled on the New or Old Testament version.
But it wasn’t dusk approaching, no, brother, it was something far more ominous, vile, and absurd. Creeping in just beyond the horizon of a pale sky against an alabaster arroyo was the Mold; the true Mold. Awakening from deep without.
But it wasn’t that either, the officer realized before squatting right in the middle of traffic on MLK Drive deep in the heart of Maricopa’s most crime-ridden and poverty-stricken neighborhood and took the biggest shit of his entire Taco Bell infested, triple-bypass life.
And this was the photograph that cemented his position in cultural history; a policeman half naked in the street except for his MCPD cap. Gun in hand. A smirk as though he’d never for a second in his life considered a single care beyond taking a California King-sized dump smack dab in the middle of main street. The blurred-out images of his brothers in blue standing in frame hands on their hips, condoning said behavior through inaction. The photo would go on to become an instant moment of iconography, comparable to that Chinese man telling off the tanks in Tiananmen Square or the forlorn crystalline-eyed women of the Great Depression, lamenting the future as though watching it in real time. Modules that conveyed so effortlessly the unique suffering of our time and place. Compressed and condensed. Rolled up taut like a sleeping bag. Hyperreality wringed into self-parody. The eroticism of the mundane. Too real to be real. Birthing memes passed around like communal wine the image became a part of the zeitgeist; the indelible. Fragments of God. The dire poetics of legacy taking shape and lighting out, leaving his body upon the shore.
Later that day while recovering in San Rodeo Memorial Hospital, Jim Archuleta learned he had been placed on indefinite administrative leave. With pay, of course.
