CHAPTER NINE ON LINE MUSTACHE MAN

            Carlton tapped the keys at a furious pace. She could have let the program record and type out Pete’s words but she liked the old fashioned feel of the keys. She liked the way her finger flew over the keyboard as the Mustache Man spoke. She loved to touch the keys even though she never needed to touch them.

            “He said he had been hired by the company I bought the car from. I don’t know why but I didn’t believe him and I knew Chance was texting me and I wanted to see her words and I raised my voice. I never raised my voice with Chance except for this one time.”

            “When was that?”

            “I lost it once and she hid in her bedroom with Jewels and the bulldog was the only one who stayed out there. It wasn’t me. It was the other man.”

            “The other man?”

            “The one before me. The one she called, “Satan.” I can’t stand to raise my voice with anyone, especially Chance but this salesman kept insisting I had to talk to him and I told him he could call back another time but he kept insisting and then I got irritable with him. He kept telling me something about the computer on the car and I think I said I am the computer and then he laughed. “

            “You keep saying things like “You are the computer.” What do you mean by that?”

            “It’s why I can’t use them. It’s why I can barely listen to the radio or the television. I merge with the machine.”

            Pete had reached the highest level. He swung on the bar and did a somersault to the next tier. When he landed his feet barely touched the ground.

            “So he kept talking and finally I let out this ear splitting scream to make him hang up and he did.”

            “And you disappeared after that?”

            “No, not then. I was walking down this main street in this small town. I forget the name. I’d begun the descent down the desert prairie that leads to a placed called Strawberry, Arizona. It’s a place I return to again and again like Crestone, Colorado.”

            “After a disappearance?”

            “Yeah. I was in a store looking for some batteries for this thing I always carry.”

            “ A voice activator?”

            “And the television was blaring. I tried to shut it out. They were talking on some news show about how by the year 2025 forty percent of the world’s population will be out of water. I couldn’t take the thought of all that suffering and so I vanished. And that’s when you found me on that street.”

CHAPTER TEN ON LINE MUSTACHE MAN

            “Yes. I found you. I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Mustache Man.”

            “And you brought me here to this place you called “The Vault.”

            “I brought you here so you could be safe. Safe from what or whom, Pete?”

            “I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”       

            “Who follows you when you disappear and why do you feel people die around you?”

            “I can’t go there.”

            “You have to.”

            “I don’t want to go there.”

            “I’ll be with you, Pete.”    

            “You might disappear yourself. I saw you do that.”

            “Only when Shul calls me.”

            “Shul?”

            “Detective Robert , my ex partner. You’ll meet him.”

            “Is he coming here?”

            “That depends. Who’s following you, Pete?”

            There was silence. Carlton checked her instruments. Pete Vargas was still here. He wasn’t disappearing. Not yet. She was pressing him. He was resisting of course. She had to press him for Shul’s sake. The Mustache Man knew something about why people were disappearing, why people were dematerializing out of their loved one’s grasp.

            If he did disappear she would follow him into the spinning, sucking darkness.

CHAPTER ELEVEN ON LINE MUSTACHE MAN

            Carlton didn’t have to worry anymore about Pete Vargas leaving The Vault. She would finish a shift and then visit Shul and when she returned he would be there. She’d left him a list of all of the black and white films she kept. He would either be sleeping or watching a film when she returned. Sometimes he barely acknowledged her and sometimes he quietly turned in his recliner and leaned back. He waited for their next interview to begin.

            “I change and then everything and everyone changes around me. I change inside and when I return I swear the world is not the same."

            “What do you mean?”

            “I have vast inner spaces: rooms, caverns unexplored oceans. I explore and if I’m not careful I won’t be able to find my way back.”

            “Quiet places inside you. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

            “It can be. Unless I feel I’m changing and when I return and step into this world it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t even smell the same.”

            “It doesn’t smell the same?”

            “There was this time in Phoenix. I was an at a spring exhibition game. I got up to get a beer and a hot dog and I vanished before I reached the top of the stairs. This was one of those really short disappearances. When I left it was the third inning and when I returned it was the bottom of the ninth. It was a different part of the stadium. When I left I could smell the hot dogs and the beer and when I returned there was a burnt smell as though someone had been grilling sausages and charring them to ashes.”

            “So you disappear at a baseball game and you disappear when you’re with a loved one.”

            “And when I return I’m a stranger to myself and a stranger to the one I love. Chance couldn’t stand it. She’d throw things at me to bring out of it, the strangeness I mean.”

            “And are you a stranger to god as well when you return?”

            Pete gave Carlton a look that made her wish she hadn’t asked that question. The question had left her lips before she could censor it. She had a feeling god was a touchy subject with the Mustache Man.

CHAPTER TWELVE ON LINE MUSTACHE MAN

            “I never think about god or religion or church of any of those damn things.”

            Pete rose out of his chair and took the ramps in that long, stride of his. “It’s just that when the changes come over me and I have to vanish I feel like I’m inside this storm and I feel this cold sweat and the last thing I can think about is god. God is no comfort to me.”

            “Cold sweat?”

            “It’s a terror I can’t’ name because I don’t know what it is that’s scaring me. What scares you, Carlton?”

            “ Who or what do you have to get away from?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I have to get away do you understand?”

            “You have to disappear.”

            “Yes. So I go into the darkness and in the darkness there is a wind and a storm that’s getting stronger and there’s something or someone following me and there’s something or someone drawing closer to me and if I would just turn around I would see who is hunting me but I dare not. “

            “And if anyone is close to you and talking to you the last thing they see is that mustache of yours quivering in the air.”

            “Why are you bringing that up? I don’t have a mustache anymore. I shaved it off.”

            “It’s growing back Mustache Man.”

            “Don’t call me that.”

            “Why?”

            “Because I couldn’t stand that nickname and I couldn’t stand the thought of a part me, a mustache quivering in the air for the seconds after I disappeared. How can you stand it when you vanish, when you’re called?”

            This time Carlton didn’t bother to reply. Her fingers touched the keys and just flew.

            “Why do you bother typing? You could just record my voice and send it with my image to Chance and Jewels and Bert without your fingers flying over those keys.”

            “I like the feel of the keys just the way I like the absence of color in the old black and white films of the forties and fifties.”

            “Who are you Carlton really?”

            “Just an old fashioned scribe taking down your story Mus…Pete.”

            “And that ex-detective friend of yours you mentioned?”

            “Detective Robert Schulman. Shul.”

            “Are you sending him my story and my voice and my image?”

            “I am.”

            “Are we going to visit ex Detective Robert Schulman soon?”’

            “Not yet. When your story goes from bits and pieces to the whole of something then we’ll go visit my partner. If you’re willing.“

            “Maybe I’m willing. Maybe I’ll go with you. Will your Detective friend have answers? Will he have a way to get me back to Chance and Jewels and Bert without hurting them?”

            Carlton heard Pete stretching on the bars above. Her voice stroked the light blurred darkness of The Vault.

            “Pete, are you ready to tell me why you think people die around you?”