Absolute Unit

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

3.A few 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

5.Trent kneels beside bloody 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

7.Trent has a caring 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

9.Trent leaves the hospital and boards a bus for the West Side. We have traveled through this area often with Bill, its avenues like the treads of a scuffed and shit-speckled sole. The sidewalks fronted by grimy restaurants and dim stores, filled with people sucked dry and wrinkled by their problems. In a year or two, the luxury condos and trendy coffee shops will arrive, and these crowds will need to find new, worse places to live. As an entity who suffers from what the news calls “housing insecurity,” we sympathize with their plight.  In contrast with the shabby block around it, Tricky’s Tacos is shiny red and white, with a mural of a sparkling-blue skull on its bricked flank. It’s that dead time between lunch and dinner, and there’s nobody waiting to order at the stainless-steel counter. A bored lady sits behind the register. In the back, a cook grunts as he runs a scraper over the smoking griddle. It smells like charred meat and Fabuloso.Even without reading Trent’s