Epiphany Jones by Michael Grothaus Page B

things crawling behind the walls.
    At the park I checked my neck. The blood was from a little flesh wound Epiphany made to punctuate her point. She told me not to speak. She said she’d been following me since she saw ‘the little man’ who took a shot at me. She watched as I lay by the car listening to the detectives. She said she knew my plan was to get her to the police and that if I tried to do so again, I would fail. And then she used a leaf to wipe my blood from her blade.
    As we walked south, taking back alleys and dark streets, Epiphany made sure I stayed in front of her. She never took her eyes off me. She said, ‘If you try what you did before,’ and produced the blade from her pocket.
    It was a pointless threat. I wasn’t going anywhere. I thought of nothing but the videotape.
    We arrived here just before dawn. And look, I know what you’re thinking. Why’d I go with her? To find the tape, sure. But why do I believe I can? My shrink told me that almost everyone today has something called ‘sitcom resolution syndrome’. He said that people watch so many TV shows that their neural pathways get warped. They expect simple solutions to complex problems. They expect to be able to resolveall their dilemmas in twenty-two minutes, just like the characters on Friends and Cheers and How I Met Your Mother do. So maybe that’s why I went: because television has made me believe my major life problems, like discovering where an imaginary friend is hiding the videotape that exonerates me for murder, can be solved in the time it takes to eat a TV dinner, sans laugh track, and not including commercial breaks.
    In the place we’re in, most of the windows are broken. At any given time a half-dozen pigeons are flying in or out. We’re on the third floor and that’s the good floor, believe it or not. The rest of the building is abandoned. The loft has three walls, which partition two small rooms. The first has an ugly corduroy couch that has been here since the seventies. There are holes bitten into it. The next partition creates the ‘bedroom’ – which can only be called so because of a blue floral mattress with deep-brown stains lying on the floor. The third partition contains what was probably a bathroom. Now there’s only a hole in the floorboards where a toilet once stood. A rusty tap drips chocolate-milk-coloured water.
    When we arrived, after I took the grand tour of the place with my eyeballs, I said, ‘So whose place is this?’
    And Epiphany, she shook her head.
    I said, ‘What are we doing here?’
    Epiphany, she rubbed her temples.
    I said, ‘So, how long are we going to be here?’
    Epiphany, she dug her pinky in her ear like she was trying to get a blockage out.
    I said, ‘So what’s the game plan, Coach?’
    ‘Shut up!’ she explained. And then she said, ‘I’m going to lie down.’
    That’s what she said. ‘I’m going to lie down.’ Like we’re a couple who just got back from a tiring family reunion with in-laws we hate and she’s just got to get off her feet . Like she didn’t just bring me here by knifepoint. I’ve got one of my headaches, will you take out the trash before coming to bed, dear?
    So Epiphany, she’s been lying in the room with the mattress for the last hour. Me, I’ve been standing in the same place since I entered, partbewildered that she’s secure enough in her situation over me to take a fucking nap, part looking around for where the tape could be hidden, and part afraid to move since any extra pressure might topple this building in an instant.
    With all the loose floorboards and holes in this dump the videotape could be anywhere. But even while she’s asleep I know there’s no way I can search the apartment. So I sit on the shitty couch and I hear things stir inside. In the cushion something bumps against me as it moves from one location to the next. I try not to apply too much pressure.
    Through a large gap that’s rotted through the wall between this room