The Syndicate by David Gershan

I screwed all the lightbulbs back in. There was nothing in the sockets — no hidden bugs or cameras — but the feeling that I was being watched stayed with me. I had combed my place thoroughly that morning, and everything seemed to be in the right spot. I even threw away my cell, and all my electronics had been unplugged for days. But I knew they were somehow monitoring me, and I could have missed something. I went to the window and stared down onto the street, debating whether or not to leave my apartment and hide among the passersby, blend in.

The garbage. I never checked the garbage, and it was full because I hadn’t left my place for three days. I compressed it down and tied it off and took it to the dumpster behind my building. Leaning into the giant, reeking waste container, I ripped open the bag and spilled out the contents: cardboard and plastic wrap from last night’s frozen pizza, used coffee grounds, a towel caked with vomit, empty soup cans, beer bottles, a translucent pill bottle entangled in a mass of tissue paper and Q-Tips, a razor cartridge, the lubrication strip peeling off… Nothing unexpected, nothing suspicious.

My eyes returned to the pill bottle. It had been a week since I ran out, and I was holding off on a refill (the mental fog was lifting, I wanted to shed some weight, and I needed the money). I went back inside and clambered up the dingy stairway to my studio, and my eyes relaxed in the accustomed dimness.    

Soon I was hit by another bout of nausea and vomiting. Someone was trying to poison me, this much I now knew. If I wasn’t being watched, someone had certainly been in my apartment, and now I was sick. I threw off my soiled t-shirt and stepped in the shower.

Enveloped in steam, an encroaching fatigue, and dizziness took hold. I rested my forehead against the tile, water cascading down my nose, pruned fingers holding a mushy, disintegrating bar of soap. I realized I might pass out, so I turned up the cold water and faced the showerhead — that chrome nose of a hundred nostrils — as it sprayed its prismatic droplets. At this moment, it dawned on me: the toothpaste. It was the toothpaste — that harmless, commonplace tube was a perfect disguise for poison. I would alternately brush my teeth and vomit until I unwittingly poisoned myself to death. Maybe they mixed in antifreeze or something. Son of a bitch. They almost got me. 

After drying myself off and getting dressed, I put on a pair of latex gloves and put my tube of Crest in a Ziploc bag, which I then sealed and placed in my back pocket. Energized by this epiphany, I left to catch the bus for downtown. The syndicate had to be there somewhere, perhaps in the financial district, and now their ruse was up. I was finally going to expose them. I was finally going to be safe.

By the time night fell, I had been downtown for hours. The workday was over, stores were closed, and it was dead out. Now, I knew, I would be noticed by the syndicate and tracked. I waited on a bench, scanning the vicinity under the buzz of a street lamp, the wind playing with steam rising from a sewer manhole by my feet.

A man in a navy-blue suit with a glossy black briefcase soon caught my attention. He was idling on the intersection of Jackson and State. Likely one of them, I thought, so I walked over.

“Hey, have a look at this,” I said as I put on my latex gloves. “I want you to try this toothpaste.”

“Excuse me?”

“The toothpaste. You think I don’t know?”

He turned and hastily walked across the street. I followed him. Then he took out his phone and made a call.   

I tracked him a couple blocks north before a car abruptly pulled up beside me. Two men in uniform jumped out and approached. “I know the syndicate is trying to poison me,” I told them.  

“We got a drunk and disorderly” one said into his radio, his badge glinting in passing headlights.

I panicked and took off, making it about 20 yards before tripping and crashing into the curb. My palms and elbows were scraped raw. My head rang as blood trickled down my face. The toothpaste lay in the street. I reached for it, but the cuffs came on. The men pulled me to my feet and held me by an arm. For a second, the world was spinning. Then everything went black.

#

Later, when I woke up in a hospital bed, I immediately looked at my wrists. To my relief, I didn’t attempt suicide.

“Why am I here?” I managed to ask a nurse. She told me I hurt my head and was unconscious. Later, a woman in a white coat came in and asked me if I stopped taking my medication.

I returned my gaze to the thick scars traversing my wrists, at the faded dimples from the staples, remembering how the blood first sprayed across the sink and then my phone when I made that final call for help all those years ago. I could still remember the sound of splintering wood when they kicked down the door.

But one thing was clear: the syndicate would never take me alive. Those scars would be easy to reopen, I thought. Should it ever come to that. 

David Gershan

Image by Bruno from Pixabay – A tube of toothpaste and a brush with a squirl of toothpaste in white and blue.