Walter is a security guard. He has lost most of his hair and he shaves the rest with a razor. It's said that during a normal human lifespan, the head, ears, and nose grow continuously. Walter's are lawn gnome proportionate. A margerine lid fits sideways in his smirking mouth.

The smile on Walter's face reflects an inner peace where the isolation of his occupation prevents his opinion of himself from conflicting with society's. You keep two opposing magnets far enough apart and they forget that they're magnets.
'Ricky.'
22 years in the service, what a guy. I am invaluable. I am powerful. My reflective jacket highlights my muscles. They see the tattoo on my arm and they know I'm a 'business' man—I roll up my sleeve. Police in their cruisers, pampered. I can stop a bank robbery with a maglight, piggies.

Walter is a psychopath carrying bear mace and a ventral prefrontal lobe the size of a pygmi christ wafer.
'RICKY.'
Can't help it. Carbon Monoxsoul out through—mouth to mouth—oxygentle deception. Welcome to the malnourished brain. We hope you enjoy your (yawn) stay. Sorry, we've been awake all September. Vampire avioli tug of war, looking in through sun glasses.

'Ricky!'

A big, red vein ran through Simon's remaining eye. He watched the ceiling of the garage through blood and eyelashes. He knew of the darkness because Ricky told him it was there.

It sounded like wilderness outside. Smelled like pine needles on wet pavement. Where is he.

Simon's brain was backwards evolving. They taught him in highschool that the reptile parts come first. Breathing, blinking, and sensation. Then the cat parts; balance, grace. Some children are just good at everything, and Simon was one of them. A regular center field, embracing the ease of soccer balls finding corner netting and hockey pucks threading needle-eye gaps in a goalie's defense. When Mr. Anders went over the Cerebral Cortex in Psych, that delicate mush helmet that prevented language from trickling back into Simon's world, he was busy responding to his fanmail.

I kno u r going to the dance w Sara but will u go 2 Mitchs party w me sat?

Yes No

Mandi

Simon had to learn to be a reptile in the hospital, and he'd never be a cat again. Sara and Mandi (and Angela, and Brandi, and Taryn) both came to the hospital, briefly, sobbed for a length of time that satisfied their drama quota, and forgot about the Captain of the Soccer Team. Wheelchairs gave that cold, alien vibe, a fluorescent reminder of the human condition, that even in youth is telling of the rapidity that children learn power association. Simon lived a life until 16 of motor neurons and expressionless instrumentalism. In his loss was wiped clean a human being.

There are pictures of Simon on the stairs of his mom's house: narrow brown eyes and simple, handsome features that conveyed no startling intelligence or spatial genius nested in the psychic consciousness of soul. He didn't discover the magnetic charm in being all narcissism and cerebellum as much as it discovered him and became his ease of person.

Ricky was the special one.

There's a one-a-day torture calendar that follows you out of rehab when you're hit as hard as Simon was—by chance, by God? Today's special was colon tectonics; ghost spasms that shot through organs re-organized in operations following the accident; great organic plates, sliding against blood magma and quivering before they settled. When you can't squirm and buckle against them, the intestine drift is at times a tickling massage. Other times it's a barbed harpoon, twisting in guts that believe on some animal level that they're spread eagle on the road where the spine died, free to move about in a Nickelodeon puddle like Alex Mack.

Whether the patient of Dr. Morphine or sober and crucified, Simon felt the vertigo in his one swimming eye. He tried to explain it once on the AssistiveWare keyboard:

It's like falling asleep and forgetting to surrender control of your eyeballs. They always want to roll to the back of your brain, he thought. It was his Buzz Aldron step into words as an expression of feeling.

Word prediction software wrote Kind sleeping when you rayydd rom back in your hat on the computer screen and his mother began crying when she read it. She cried a lot, now. No little girl sobs, but steady mascara streams.

'You hurt, Simon? Which part—give me the first letter, honey.'

She brought suicide warnings to the nurses later and they told her not to let him see the mirrors. He watched his mom cover the glass above the bathroom sink with a poster of Portugal's Renaldo. It was easy to hide things from a boy whose electric wheelchair was on back-order and whose remaining vision followed the same cocaine-abuse laze of Gary Busey. Simon had never been better acquainted with the ceiling.

'Just another helpless eyescrew,' he thought, his pink-shot vision trail sliding along the cement garage wall. He couldn't see the hands tugging on grooves in the wheelchair handles, inching him closer to the mouth in the floor. He was distantly aware of a screaming knife-tip pain in his chest.

'Day 14: Lung inflammation. Cowabunga.' he thought, but the hands had turned the closure dial on his respirator.

Something primitive snaked to life in Simon's brain stem and gasped for air the way a shift worker smacks about for the snooze button. If anyone ever found him at the foot of the cement stairs, he would be blue-veined and comatose or already departed.


Walter was bridging the walkway between the basketball courts and the prison gatehouse when he heard a noise he would later describe as 'garbage cans, tin ones, struck with a pipe.' When it wasn't deserted, the abandoned prison on Old Farisbury was a studio for misspent youth. 11 years of long graffiti and casual vandalism dismembered walls that once stood against medium security inmates, crumbling upon rebar frames and scattering like pidgeon leavings. Glass panes were shattered in windows on all walls, exposing the wire mesh just-in-case failsafe. Big, dark, four-story chutes ran from the rooftop to the underground parking where a tunnel aqueduct ran the length between an abandoned facilities room and the groundskeeping garage in Building B, 160 yards into the forest adjacent.

The November sky was heavy and oppressive and ready to rain. Walter was in raingear, but he liked the feeling of the cool water on his scalp. He was looking forward to it.

He crossed an overgrown field that led to the main entry—his usual route; a clockwise rotation around the prison grounds. Most days, nobody came around. A family of raccoons was in the garage last week but they left in a hurry when they discovered only stale plaster. Walter found a sickly female 'coon dead on the pavement inside. She was stiff, so she wasn't much fun, petrified in that mortis way, tiny paws supplicanting as though her animal mother-spirit knew his intentions from beyond. A big black line ran straight across her stomach the width of a cyclist's wheel. 'Like roadkill,' Walter thought.

'Back again, babes?' he taunted, and ran his hand along the leather seat of an abandoned Tractor. The lawns surrounding hadn't been tended in years; rakes and shovels were all orange with rust and leaning into cobwebs.

When he turned the corner, Walter saw that the same marks on last week's 'coon ran across the pavement and under the garage door. A little car, something, had driven through. Walter steadied his maglight and shifted his right hand toward the lens. He knew how to flick it to use the handle as a weighted club. There was a proper door on the right side of the garage door's frame, missing its doorknob and colored with freehand slang that Walter couldn't make out. He pushed it open and shone the flashlight across the grayscale room.

Walter remembered the place in the garage floor where the aqueduct began, where stairs dropped into the tunnel beneath and headed off in darkness toward the prison maintenance office. It didn't frighten him—Walter was incapable of being frightened the way a healthy human mind defines fear—but generated water in his tear ducts when he saw it. Someone had told him that gangs went down the aqueduct for initiations, but the city put an end to gang activity when they hired Knightlance Security last Spring. However they might have downplayed the effect of a security guard, gangs appreciated privacy. They had moved on to the next uninhabited warehouse, probably the abandoned Scandesigner furniture shop whose door could be picked by an elementary youth.

When he looked across the floor this time, Walter saw a boy. He was perched on the edge of the aqueduct. He had blonde unstyled hair and was wearing a backpack. When Walter pointed the flashlight on him, the boy reared his head like a feeding predator: his eyes shone like coins. Track marks ran along the concrete and dropped into the unseen shadows below. There were no raccoons.

'Boy.' said Walter. 'Come away from there, boy!'

'My brother's in here.' said Ricky. 'He fell in.'

(Read Ricky is Six)