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Absolute Unit 1.
1.Every day, all day, Bill smells shit or burning hair. Bill asks everybody if they smell those things, and when they say no (“What smell, dude?”), Bill thinks they’re lying to him. (Bill, your friendly neighborhood health inspector, thinks everybody lies to him.) Only when Bill starts smelling the distinct odor of his wife’s crotch does he begin to suspect something’s well and truly wrong with the ol’ noggin—she’s been dead for years. Not that Bill will see a doctor about his symptoms, no sir. Instead he’ll smoke and snort and screw the fear away, because a buzz always beats reality, and the idea of a tumor or an artery primed to blow is as real as it gets. On Monday, Bill takes two hundred dollars in hankie-soft bills from a corner market, in exchange for overlooking a frisky roach, and uses it to purchase a few small bags of the finest chemical concoction some creep could cook up in a kitchen sink, which he smokes in the front seat of his Official Government Vehicle before drivi
Absolute Unit 2.
2.We were bornon a Greek cargo ship bound for the East Coast. Like many an immigrant before us, our childhood was messy and short. The sailors pushed the lever that dumped the bilge tanks, and we found ourselves floating off the scenic coast of New Jersey, where the current soon directed us to an inlet, and from there to a pipe, and soon enough we sloshed through the speedy water-park of the local waste-treatment plant, where we slipped through a corroded filter on our way to Bill’s kitchen tap, and from there to Bill’s glass, and from there to Bill’s stomach, which offered everything an enthusiastic young parasite could ever desire: water, proteins, microbes on which to snack, and drugs—beautiful, weird drugs. Fortunately for us, Bill can’t even endure the twenty-minute drive from strip club to office without snorting a small pile of crushed-up pills. Got to balance out those five pints of cheap beer somehow.Forehead red and sweaty, heart hammering, pupils squeezed to
Absolute Unit 3.
3.Afew days later—and three hours late, but who’s counting—Bill’s crumpled soda-can of a jalopy (his personal car, mind you, not that government-funded monster) murmurs its way into the lone empty parking space of a coffee shop near his house, the engine cutting out with a loud fart, Bill emerging in full Sunday-morning glory. From his leather jacket, dry and cracked as the surface of Mars, he extracts a crumpled cigarette and torches up, exhaling a cloud of fragrant smoke. In that moment, taking a fresh jolt of poison into his bruised lungs, he seems almost human again: his spine straightens, his cheeks flush from bloodless pale to heart-attack red (an improvement, trust us), his cloudy gaze clears into the speculative laser-stare of Ye Olden Days, when Bill could still put on a good show of walking the earth larger than life. Bill power-draws the cigarette in four long pulls, crushes the leftover bit beneath his scuffed heel before heading inside, where his nephew Trent—a h
Absolute Unit 4.
4.Bill has theguts to show the kid an actual workday. They hustle a diner over on Bedford (“Is that mouse poop I see?”), raking in a princely ninety bucks, before pulling into the gravel lot behind Paradise Alley at a quarter past eleven. Bill shows the faintest modicum of decency by ordering his nephew to stay in the car while he goes inside Paradise Alley “for a minute.” Poor kid, hopefully he’ll prove smart enough to crack a window within the next hour, lest he fry in the late-morning heat like a puppy. Bill really means to have a shot of whiskey or two, the early lunch of champions, but he finds his best friend Frank at the bar, loading up. Frank is a homicide dick (emphasis on the word “dick”) who lives with his mother, snorts mountains of coke swiped from the evidence locker, and recites more Bible verses than a street preacher. He’s such a walking contradiction it’s a wonder that he can stride more than a block without vaporizing into thin air, his warring impulses can
Absolute Unit 5.
5.Trent kneels besidebloody Bill, his phone pressed to his ear. “Tell ... Janine ... ” Bill says.“Janine who?” Trent says, after asking emergency services to haul ass down to the industrial site.“Tell her I love her,” Bill says.Bill will have the opportunity to do so himself. Just a few more minutes and the ambulance will arrive, which will ferry Bill to a hospital, where doctors will perform all the diagnostics he so desperately needs. They’ll throw him in a scanner, and hopefully pick up on whatever’s making him smell the oddest things.But wait, won’t they find us, as well?Oh crap, maybe we didn’t think this one through.Is it worth going to our possible death, knowing that we’ve helped Bill become a better person? Of course not. We send a tendril up Bill’s throat, poised to shoot out his open mouth. If Trent would only lean a little bit closer and stay still for a second or two, we can move out of Bill for good. We’ll always love our firs
Absolute Unit 6.
6.As far ashosts go, upgrading from Bill to Trent is the equivalent of going from a broken-down double-wide on the edge of a radioactive pit to a nice McMansion in a quiet subdivision. Trent’s lungs are blissfully clear of ash and phlegm, his heart ticks along like a Swiss watch, and his muscles are lean and hard. Now we feel a little bad about living so long in Bill when newer models were available. But beggars can’t be choosers, and when we swam out of that tanker into our new life in America, we were the textbook definition of vulnerable. Trent has no idea we entered him. We waited until his eyes flicked left, toward the onrushing ambulance, before firing the tendril into his open mouth. He coughed, swallowed, and pounded his chest—massive booms through the cavern of his sternum as we affixed to his esophagus, then sent a sub-tendril winding through his tissues (So pink! So lovely!) toward his spine. Plugging into a convenient nerve, we could share his vision—so cris
Absolute Unit 7.
7.Trent has acaring heart, because after he spends half an hour ugly-crying on a park bench while listening to David Bowie on his phone, he heads to the hospital to visit his dear, injured uncle. We’ve been deprived of good music. The ringing of a cash register as a harried restaurant owner slapped out a couple hundred dollars, the begging of a bodega staffer for a little more time to pay up—that was the only music for dear Bill, who always liked to play sports radio while making his rounds. If Trent spins classics cut two decades before he was born, we consider that a big step up.Still humming “Heroes” under his breath, Trent uses his last ten dollars to buy flowers from a kiosk in the hospital lobby.Soon enough Bill is out of surgery and bedded in the ICU, in a bright and featureless room with no art on the walls, the window-shade pulled down, the television blaring from its perch on the wall. He lies in the depths of a medically induced coma, wrapped in a cocoon of tub
Absolute Unit 8.
8.No sooner doesTrent leave Bill’s room when a nurse ambushes him with a paper bag. “What’s this?” Trent asks.“Your uncle’s stuff. And you’re family.” She shoves it into his hands. “Your lucky day.”She leaves Trent to sort through it. He finds Bill’s well-scuffed wallet (stuffed with dollar bills, along with faded receipts and some business cards), his battered phone (drained of juice), a well-crumpled cigarette pack (empty), and a few unmarked pills (questionable). Trent pockets it all, his thoughts a gentle buzzing. After a morning of kidnapping, car crashes, homicide, and cop interrogation, his energy levels are bottoming out.We think about what Bill said earlier: You’re nearly seventeen, Trent. You can handle yourself, right? We doubt that. If Trent has any hope of surviving, he needs our help. He has a different set of problems than Bill, we suspect, but also a fine-tuned body, a brain that appears in working order (from our limited perspective), and better fashi
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