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Bluetooth

Norm Hendricks

    Riding the downtown bus back home from the library caused Dan more discomfort than usual. The diesel smell aligned his stomach up for the potholes to punt. He nestled in the back on a single bench; doubling as a cover for the engine and transmitting heat insistent enough to defeat the weak air conditioning. And, the shine on the shoe kicking Dan’s butt was the guy Dan had settled next to. This man talked to himself, the volume of which encroached on the understood space accompanying Dan’s ass scoop.
    “No, he’s not one,” the man said, thick finger flicks punctuating. The third guy filling up the back took up two spots—reclined and unconscious. Dan had to snuggle up tight to the monologuer. “I’m telling you, I know one when I see one, and he’s not it!”
    “Shut up,” the snoozer muttered from under an arm he had folded over his eyes.
    “The kind you’re talking about get on later.” Ghost talker regaled the center aisle with his appraisal, ignoring the recliner. He was large, but he looked like he had once been much larger. Limpid rolls of flesh collected at the crotch of his pleated slacks under his broad-striped shirt as though he had lost a great amount of weight.
    Dan was annoyed but of course he knew what occurred. The man communed with the spirits of technological intrusiveness.
    “Bluetooth,” the man said, noting Dan’s attention. He tapped the far side of his global skull, confirming Dan’s aggravated assessment.
    Dan nodded grimly, hopelessly barricading himself behind waves of social exclusion. But Bluetooth conjurers obeyed no such human delineations.
    “You’re quite correct,” Bluetooth man went on. “The ones we have to worry about don’t often where sweater vests under tweed jackets.”
    Dan wore exactly what the man described.
    “Hey,” Dan said.
    Bluetooth held up a stop sign finger.
    “His name is Dan,” he said to the air.
    “What?” Dan straightened, glaring at the man’s free ear. “How did you—”
    The bus engine gunned behind them and the wide man spoke over Dan.
    “So right! So right!” He cried. “He is that important and I’ve been rude. Your suggestion toward introduction is well noted.”
    “Listen—”
    “Dan Palimano, my name is Harmon Sims.” A chubby hand extended over the loops of tummy flesh.
    “Who the hell are you talking to?” Dan asked. “How did he know my name?”
    “Dan Palimano? Are you kidding?” Sims said. “The Palimano’s are from the Trieste region of Italy, right?”
    “How...this is crazy,” Dan reached to ring the stop bell but one of Sim’s stout paws stopped him with a light touch.
    “Did you know the little town your family is from just outside of Trieste was never touched by the black plague?”
    “What does that have to do with anything?” Dan turned back and rang for a stop.
    “Why, everything!” Sims said. “And your mother’s family came from the Cobh region of Ireland. What’s special about Cobh? Significant levels of cadmium in the soil, measured just below carcinogenetic levels, a good mineral antibiotic that gets in the bones. You see?”
    Sims maneuvered the empty ear toward Dan as he spoke. The bus swerved to the curb, a good twenty blocks from his stop but Dan didn’t care.
    “I see my way out,” he said.
    “But Dan, your genetic history makes you highly favorable.” Sims grabbed Dan’s arm harshly through the tweed. “You’ll receive one of your own!”
    “What a Bluetooth? I win a Bluetooth? Just like yours?” Dan pulled his arm free but paused for Sims to clarify.
    The pneumatic hiss of the doors told Dan he was free. He could escape Sims anytime.
    “That’s right, Dan,” Sims said. “Just like mine.”
    He turned then so Dan could see. A dark, solid object clung to the eclipsed ear but quickly Dan saw the similarity to a phone ended there. The thing perched on Sim’s right ear, digging a serpent’s tail into the eardrum for security. It bobbed its head rapidly like a telegraph striker making contact with a copper plate. Tap-tap-tap, a creature the size of a field mouse banged away at Sim’s skull, repeatedly plugging into shiny gray tissue beyond the hair, scalp, and skull it had already worn through. The little reptilian creature with a tuft of orange hair at its crown, banged away with a single, oversized tooth at Sim’s exposed brain. And the tooth was blue.

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