Page 68 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

Deven’s the same dumb act. Same beetle-black fingernails, same filed-down incisors, same old Black Sabbath tee shirt sprouting same emaciated wisps of neck and face. He still peels back those haunted-doll eyelids, still twitches like a maniac, still chain smokes—though apparently prefers vap- ing now. What Marissa remembers most about him is how he once got in trouble at their Quaker high school for reading the Satanist Bible during Meeting for Worship.
Yet here she is, meeting up with him for the first time in more than a decade at some sad-sack open mic night in Northern Liberties. He messaged her on Facebook, explained that he could get her a job that would be extremely easy. No crises to resolve, no life-sucking hours, and no abusive, micromanaging bosses. She’s just left her horrible campaign organiz- ing job in Pittsburgh and moved back home to Phila- delphia. 26 feels too old to be back in her parents’ house, but whatever. An easy, low-stress job is just what she needs to tide her over—and though Deven’s weird, at least he’s a known entity. She has no other leads.
On the stage, Deven scratches his right hand across the steel strings of an acoustic guitar and rasps out loosely structured verses about murdering angels and drinking their blood. She half-listens, then claps politely with the rest of the five-person audience.
“Normies,” he snarls, sliding in across from her at the chipped wooden booth.
“Isn’t this a sports bar? What did you expect?”
He hunches over, pulls his vape beneath the table. “Sports are the opiate of the masses. Ever do telemar- keting?”
“Nope. But I’ve done canvassing. Lots and lots of can- vassing.”
He folds his hands together, leans in close.
“Cool. Doesn’t matter. Basically, I work for this ter- rible company way out in middle-of-nowhere New Jersey. One of the last stops on the Bridge Line. Our mission is to call a bunch of old, rich assholes and trick them into investing in brick-and mortar drug- stores. Feed them some bullshit line about how no one wants to buy toothpaste and deodorant and shit online anymore.”
“Wow. Such a huge difference you’re making.” She raises an eyebrow ironically. He shrugs.
“It’s better than profiting off of genocide. Or laying off hundreds of workers overnight. Or anything else those capitalist leeches do. Like I said—they’re all rich, all assholes. They deserve whatever they get.”
He twitches, pulls his vape again, then leans across the table as if daring her to argue. He probably thinks that she still believes in all that hippie shit they’d been spoon-fed at George Fox Friends School about everyone getting along. But after five years of work- ing for campaign directors like Shelley, she’s come
to a conclusion that she isn’t proud of, which is that most of the do-gooders out there are just bullshitters too. So she allows Deven to pass her a napkin with the company’s phone number and address.
~
Two days later, she’s bumping over the Delaware River on the Bridge Line. The water scarves beneath her, ethe- real blue amongst wharfs, high rises, and crane arms.
In high school, when she almost always had a notebook with her, she remembers sketching out a scene like this, just a doodle, from a train or bus window, capturing
the basic shapes of buildings and shoreline before they whizzed by. The train crests the bridge, descends, and up close the shimmering water looks like oily brown sludge, limp waves lapping over black rocks,
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Red Hammers
malColm CullEton