"Hey, kid, you alright?"
Rusty-James opened his eyes. The bright California sun glared into his eyeballs, branding a silhouette of a person onto his eyeballs; he could feel the heat beating down onto his face. He groaned and closed his eyes again.
"Kid? Hey!"
"I'm fine, ya hear?" Rusty-James sat up, annoyed. The motion made his head spin a little, like he'd felt when he'd necked a bottle of vodka and and whirled himself around the roundabout on the playground when he was fifteen. It was weird - the sidewalk was pitching and rolling like a rodeo bull underneath his hands... wait. Why was he lying on the sidewalk, again?
The person next to him said, helpfully, "You've been passed out on the sidewalk a while now... I was startin' to get worried. What're you doing here?" He - it was a he - extended his hand to help Rusty-James up.
I don't remember why I'm in California, only that I have to be here.
Rusty-James couldn't see the colour of his hair, or the colour of anything at all as a matter of fact, but his helper looked around nineteen, with light-colored eyes and long-ish hair, squared off in the back. The hair reminded him of Tulsa, and the rumbles, and-
Rusty-James threw back his head and laughed, though it hurt to do so. "California," he announced, "is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks." He wondered dimly where he'd heard that before. It was like there was a big blank gap in his mind, all nicely scrubbed and bleached clean and shining white. Suddenly he felt tired again, and went to lie back down.
"Woah, not so fast-" His annoying helper jerked him up off the ground again. Rusty-James felt even more annoyed - he wanted to sleep. The helper continued, "Hey, I live right there - I go to college nearby... come inside, will you? I'll make food."
Rusty-James' stomach growled, and he realised that he would like some food. Grudgingly, he followed the nineteen year old into a nearby block of apartments.
In the apartment, the clock struck four.
The man looked at the time, and then turned. "Gotta feed the fish," he told Rusty-James. "I'll be in the next room if you need me." Rusty-James watched him make his way into another room, and then he stood in the doorway and looked around.
Books filled almost the entire apartment. Rusty-James wasn't much of a reader, so he paid them no mind. Books were kind of a waste, if you asked him. A light breeze blew a pair of thin curtains across the white wall, from which the blue eyes of Elvis Presley stared Rusty-James in the face. He was impressed by the poster. "That Blue Hawaii?" The man made an affirmative noise form the other room. Rusty-James thought Elvis was tuff. "Say, what's your name, mister?"
"I... I go by Michael." There was a little hesitation before the name, and Rusty-James wondered how dim you'd have to be to forget your own name. But then, he reasoned, he himself had a fair few things which he couldn't remember either.
"I'm Rusty-James." Most people thought his name was weird, the fact that it had two parts. And besides, Steve told him when he'd met him that Rusty wasn't a real name anyway. "That's why the James part is there," Rusty-James had told him. But Michael seemed to have a smile in his voice.
"Nice name you got there."
Rusty-James puffed out his chest proudly. "Real tuff, isn't it?" He waited a moment. "Say, where's that food ya promised? I'm starvin'..." He wondered when the last time he'd eaten was, bit he couldn't remember that either. He decided he didn't care. "You gonna take me to the hospital? If ya do, I'll run off."
He heard Michael laugh. "Can't stand hospitals." Rusty-James decided that he liked Michael. He didn't really know why, though. Michael seemed like he was off in his own world right now, but at least he didn't treat Rusty-James like he was a little kid. He was seventeen already, for God's sake.
Like his feet were moving on their own, he stepped over the stacks of books to the coffee table. There was another book lying on it; Rusty-James sounded out the title. Reading was never his strong point. "'Gone with the wind'... ya read a lot? I was never that good at reading," he added.
"Yeah," Michael answered. "Yeah, I read. But not that book, not for a long time. It kind of... just makes me sad."
Rusty-James nodded sagely. "Yeah, them thick books are always awful tearjerkers... I used to see even the toughest cats in tears over Huckleberry Finn." Then he wondered who he'd seen crying over a book before. Steve, maybe, but someone else, too...
Michael didn't answer, so Rusty-James assumed he'd gone a bit deaf. That didn't bother him. He walked into the fish room, so that Michael would be able to hear him better.
The fish room was dark, and reminded him of a place he'd been before... he couldn't pinpoint where, though. Michael was standing in front of a tank of water, watching a lone fish swim back and forth. It was blue with red fins.
"Siamese fighting fish," said Rusty-James suddenly. He didn't know why he knew that, but the fish made something in his brain hurt. It was a weird sort of hurt, like pressing on a bruise, or picking a scab. Something you're not meant to do, but you keep doing it anyway. So Rusty-James kept on picking. "They'd kill each other if they could. Did you know," he continued, "if ya leaned a mirror against the tank, it'd kill itself fightin' its own reflection..." Rusty-James could feel something stirring in the back of his mind. The scab was about to fall off... and a very small voice in his mind asked him: are you sure you want to do this?
Rusty-James opened his mouth one last time. He didn't know what he was about to say. "Ya know, back where I'm from, they call 'em...." What was the word again? "They call 'em... Rumble fish."
It felt like an explosion happened in his brain: light flared underneath his temples and his head hurt like shrapnel had pierced his skull. Memories flashed across Rusty-James' mind: midnight blue eyes; dark red hair; a tire iron; the river; his father; the old pet store; the fuzz... the Motorcycle Boy. Oh, the beautiful Motorcycle Boy... who saw the world in black and white, who read and cried and wrote and dreamed and handed in perfect tests and had thrown himself off the motorcycle so many times he couldn't tell the difference between red and green anymore, couldn't see the marbled colours of the sunset which he'd loved as a kid... couldn't hear the warning shot of the cop behind him, couldn't tell the difference between the brilliant green lawn and the dark red blood that had bubbled out of him to splatter the grass when they turned him over, limp and lifeless, no more stars in his midnight eyes...
Someone was screaming, and sobbing, and Rusty-James wondered dimly if it was him.
