It smelled like burnt hair. Explaining burnt hair and trying to describe the awful stench of burnt hair was near impossible, like trying to explain to your tenth grade math teacher why you took that cheap plastic lighter to the ponytails that belonged to the girl’s head in front of you. But once you’ve smelled the stench of burnt hair, it sticks to you forever. You could pick it out of a lineup, blindfold yourself and win a stuffed animal at the, “Old Factory Contest” at the county fair for sniffing random things. The only reason Frank knew what burnt hair smelled like was because he had done some hair burning himself. In tenth grade, you guessed it; he set fire to Carissa Dentmon’s hair. It didn’t go up in flames like you’d imagine with all the hair products she had in her hair all twisted up into two even ponytails, but it did burn. Burn baby burn...
Carissa waited for Frank at the gates with two manila folders tucked under her right arm, one pony tail in full length with a small ribbon at the end of it, the other at half length with charred ends. After setting fire to Carissa’s hair, Carissa ran away from home. She never returned and it was the last anyone had ever seen of her, including her own parents. There weren’t smoldering heaps or little demons flying around with pronged forks, only a parking lot with cars that parked at a funny angle or took up two spots. Judging by the parking jobs, every asshole and their asshole relatives were here. Shopping carts littered the parking lot making it a regular rally course for the middle-aged housewife who had nothing better to do than to find the next best vacuum cleaner during the blue light special. As Frank approached the gates, you could see the confusion on his face. His eyes read terror yet his body failed to realize the full extent of what was actually happening. He approached the gates where Carissa stood and wanted to say something, but nothing ever came out. Crispy haired Carissa smiled at Frank, took his hand, and simply pushed the gates open with her free hand to a massive convenience store, packed with people doing what people do in a massive convenience store, waste space.
Frank followed behind Carissa as she weaved her way through the wasted space of souls bitching and moaning about how the line never moved. It still smelled like burnt hair, only now a few other rather unpleasant scents joined in on the action of assaulting Frank’s nose. It smelled like dried urine and Frank knew this because he saw the crusted dry pools of yellow that nobody ever got around to cleaning up. He certainly wasn’t going to clean it up. He dealt with it for four months to raise enough money for prom. This kind of place was the waiting room for evolution. Children were constantly crying with parents close behind refusing to do anything about it. It took fifteen minutes to get through the piss and bullshit that consumed the room until they reached an elevator which read, “OUT OF ORDER” in bright hot pink neon. You would think a sign like that was made to advertise beer and to let everyone know for miles that you’ve got the coldest beer on the planet, but this just sat on the door and buzzed now and again to piss you off and remind you that you were going to be using the stairs today.
Carissa walked a bit further beyond the busted elevator to a flight of stairs. A directory showing the nine floors that made this absolute hell-hole showed Frank that he was on the top floor. This confused Frank, because although he just waded through a sea of children who wouldn’t stop whining about not getting enough candy, and stepping on crusty piss crystals that formed over time from the unattended puddles; he remembered walking into the massive convenience store at ground level. Frank didn’t care; he just wanted to leave this place. But there was only one place to go, down. He took a gander at the directory and it showed nine floors, each getting smaller and smaller as the physical map descended. It resembled something close to a beehive, complete with drones buzzing about and all.
Frank followed Carissa to the second sub-floor where he stopped to take a look around. Carissa motioned for Frank to follow her down further, but realized that Frank had wanted to stop and look around a bit more when she realized he was no longer in her shadow. So she crossed her arms and leaned against the railing until he would return. Frank noticed that there were still a lot of people on this floor, nowhere near the capacity that the first floor held, but maybe only two thirds. He also noticed that these people looked more miserable, kind of like how a junior varsity team looks after being used as a tune up tool for the varsity squad. Lights weren’t as bright here either, but the room had one consistent color of off-white throughout the entire area. It was boring and monotonous, like Carissa.
The two descended down to the third sub-floor, only this place was more to Frank’s liking. House music blasted throughout the entire floor with strobe lights and fog machines going off. Things like that were cheap options to spruce a place up to make them look nice, but Frank wasn’t complaining because it no longer smelled like caked piss. He walked around a bit further and noticed his heart rate pulsed at the same rate of the beat to the music. He found less people on this floor from the second floor, but had found them significantly more attractive. As he made his way to approach several different women, they would all smile at him and notion for him to make his way over to them. Like a fat man in a buffet for the first time, Frank didn’t know where to start.
He eyed the blonde across the room who was wearing a low cut dress, so low that it made you curious as to how a girl like sat down when she wore something like that. Her hair was curly and short, almost playfully inviting. Also, blue eyes that reminded him of a Gatorade bottle for some reason, and thick lips used for suckers in both ways. She reminded him of his ex-girlfriend, Tanya, from his sophomore year in college, only forty pounds lighter. He had slept with her a few times on the promise that he would hold her hand through campus and watch movies with her, like a for-hire prostitute to recreate the boyfriend she never had. Frank was a shitty boyfriend and he refused to believe it. Listening to Frank trying to convince others that he was solid boyfriend material was like listening to the last presidential fuck-up telling us he did a hell of a job for our country. We’re in tip-top shape.
As Frank approached his former bonfire now-kindling-of-a-flame from college, she had disappeared. Frank spun in circles and noticed with every flash from the strobe light, the attractive women began to disappear. He quickly ran towards another one, a brunette this time, one who looked like his softball teammate’s sister, Tammy. Frank batted eighth, which meant he sucked. Considering it was softball, it really meant he sucked. People who bat eighth are fillers, like the bread they serve you at a restaurant before your appetizers and main course come. But he didn’t care, Frank had heard about the endless amount of ass you could get by playing on a co-ed softball team. Great teamwork and communication skills is what they offered and promoted, the second baseman’s sister and the right outfielder who wore her white pants a bit too tight were what Frank came after.
Tammy had a massive rack. That was the one thing he could remember about her. He tried his best to describe her body to his buddies, but the only words that ever came out were adjectives used to describe something big. Everything else was irrelevant because he always opted for the lights off when he slept with her. He would penetrate her in the darkness and tell her how beautiful she was while thinking about the magazine cover with Jessica Alba that he had saw at the grocery store while waiting in line to buy his condoms. He would let his hands explore her body and let his fingers rub over her giant fleshy mounds, imagining that this is what it’d be like if Jessica Alba had gotten implants that weren’t proportional to her body. As Frank had reached for the wrist of Tammy, she had disappeared. More and more women began to flock the area but disappeared whenever he had went with him. Frank always thought with his head, granted sometimes you had to wonder which one had more blood in it at the time though. After chasing after so many women that he had made love to so many times in his mind at that moment, Frank had given up and began walking to meet Carissa who stood at the stairwell motioning him to go down another flight. Even though he had torched half of Carissa’s hair into something that can’t really be explained, she was the only thing he had considered a friendly face and followed her because he was afraid to be by himself.
When Frank had gone down to the fourth floor behind crispy Carissa, he had noticed the house music, the strobe lights, the fog machines that fumed lies like the women he had just recently met had all gone. The fourth floor looked like his neighbor’s backyard. The only reason he knew his neighbor’s backyard so much is because he would spy on Suzie Chang, the “hot oriental egg roll” as he chuckled to himself as he began to remember her in his mind. Frank would slip into Suzie’s backyard and watch her change in her room and walk around her house in just her underwear when her parents weren’t there. Frank always hit on her in school, saying sleazy pick up lines that had always referenced his penis with some kind of Asian food. He even once printed his own fortune out on paper and slid it into a fortune cookie he saved after he had gotten some Chinese food with his friends one night. Frank came up with two different lines for his fake fortune cookie sheet, but decided to go with, “Practice Makes Perfect…In Bed” complete with the lucky numbers given to you for the Lottery with “69” on it six times. His other one read, “Allow a local foreigner to enter your forbidden temple for heavenly pleasures” but didn’t think she would understand that he was just trying to get into her pants. “Her English isn’t that great” he convinced himself as he slid the original choice into a fortune cookie.
Frank took a spot behind a tree that had a hammock tied to it, with tree securing the hammock in place only twelve feet away. It completely covered him and he would use the mesh holes in the hammock to peer into Suzie’s window, hoping to get a glance at her bra. Frank had favorite bras on Suzie, like the black laced one she wore only when she wore a certain kind of shirt. Or the plain almond colored one that she wore on lazy days when she would pull over a sweatshirt. Then there was the red one which was his favorite. It was made of thin material and he could sometimes make out the outline of her nipples if he stared hard enough and it wasn’t too dark in her room. He remembered the one time he snapped photos of Suzie that he took with his phone and that he messaged the image to his closest friends. It was the only time he had ever saw Suzie walking in her room without any kind of top on. It spread like wildfire around the school and blown-up images of Suzie’s pixilated nipples were photo-shopped and printed in mass numbers. Frank didn’t think of this act as cruel and humiliating, but thought of it as raising awareness to Suzie’s nonexistent popularity. As Frank chuckled while viewing the image in his head from his hard drive of perverted images, he had gotten a cold chill that raced across his back. This was no ordinary chill, not the kind you get when you see your favorite athlete on your favorite sports team clinch the game winning point in the last few seconds. Nor was it the kind of chill that you got when the person you loved stood in front of you for the first time to let you know just how much they loved you. It was different, and Carissa had begun to laugh at him, burnt ends of her hair bobbing up and down as she chortled in delight.
Frank began looking around, and started hearing whispers in the air. He would see faces in the bushes around him that enclosed him within Suzie’s backyard, only to have them disappear as he blinked his eyes to try to make sure that what he saw was actually there. Trickles of sweat began running down his back as he became more uncomfortable, paranoid thoughts began clawing at his sanity like nails on a chalkboard. His heart rate rose again and he began to worry, feeling watched and stalked, as if something bad were going to happen to him. He ran from the hammock, that place behind the tree that was so familiar to him, that secure place where he took so much without asking had turned on him. He began to run towards Carissa, who seemed like his only haven of safety as he felt violated and terrified. Fear itself began licking the liquid salt his body provided as he rushed towards the stairwell, wanting to descend another floor, away from this feeling of being stalked.
Frank had shot down the flight of stairs and had busted through the door on the fifth floor without ever waiting for Carissa. As he doubled over in pain and agony, never wanting to feel the same way again, he had noticed he was crying. Carissa had made her way through the door and began clapping. A smug smirk hidden was behind her smile as she golf clapped his escape from victimization. He noticed the fifth floor was full of women again, something that had brought a bit of comfort to him. Only unlike the third floor, there was no loud house music blaring throughout the floor with cheap imitations flooding the area.
“What the hell is going on? Why the fuck are we going through all this?! What is this place!” shouted Frank, sobbing in halted breaths of air. As Frank stared at Carissa with desperation in his eyes wanting an answer, she responded by pointing in a direction just behind his left shoulder. As Frank turned around, the mass group of women wandering aimlessly about had been reduced to one girl. He could barely make her out due to the bruising around her face, but it was Marie Jacobs, a sophomore girl he had met at a college party when he was in his final year. Marie was the kind of girl who was both sweet and smart in college. She was built like a sprinter and had long, flowing brown hair which reached her waist. A defined jaw line complete with high raised cheekbones that only made the small dimples in her face even cuter were just a few of her fine physical characteristics. She had dreams of becoming a veterinarian and to save the animals she had loved so much. Seeing her slender body in that tight black dress with red plastic cup in hand was all Frank needed. After months and months of trying to get Marie back to his apartment not too far from campus, he had consulted a friend for advice. The solution came in the form of a gelatin capsule, two hundred milligrams of overwhelming persuasion. At another party where he had known Marie was going to be, Frank hid the pill in his wallet next to the “emergency condom” which was sixteen months past expiration. As he began talking to Marie, he had cracked the pill into her drink when she briefly looked away. It quickly fizzed and dissipated, hiding it’s potency within the fluid like Frank had hidden his intentions behind that charming grin he flashed so many times. Roughly half an hour and several drinks later, Frank was walking hand in hand with Marie back to her dormitory room. It was there where Frank had reduced himself from a creepy sleaze to somewhere in between piece of shit and bigger piece of shit. Marie’s room that smelled like sweet candy, complete with pictures of the cute dogs and cats she rescued during her time of volunteering at the Humane Society. The several dozen pictures of herself embracing the ownerless pets looked onward as Frank undressed Marie and controlled her like strings to a puppet. He recollected his only creepy moment during that entire time was looking into the eyes of those cats and dogs that were now long gone to the furnace as he trespassed into her barely lifeless body.
As he took another step, Frank’s vision had begun to go fuzzy, blurring the lines of anything linear. His breathing became sporadic once again, and he began to sweat profusely. Marie had approached him and offered her arm towards him. As he reached out, he had seen the scarring on her forearms, the results of too many needles probing her flesh. Retracting his hand back in fear, he had begun to crawl towards Carissa, that beautiful half crispy Angel who could lead him away from this place of torment. Marie had faded back into the background, like a fly on a wall, hardly noticeable. She resumed wandering aimlessly on this floor, similar to what she had done after college. As Frank neared Carissa, she had opened the door to the stairwell leading down to the sixth floor. As Frank made it through the doorway, he opened his mouth to thank Carissa only to see the sole of her shoe smash into his face.
Frank tumbled down the stairwell in a comedic fashion, similar to how you’d imagine Jerry would put Tom into a barrel and send him down a stairwell, hitting the railing and walls on the way down, only this wasn’t a child’s cartoon. After coming to a complete stop by smashing his face into the door of the sixth floor, he pushed himself off from the door and tasted the signature coppery taste on his tongue from the liquid pooling at the bottom of his mouth. He was missing a tooth, had a large gash above his right eyebrow, and noticed his nose was bent off to the side suggesting that it was broken from when Carissa decided to go from burnt hair Angel to Jackie Carissa Chan, caving his face in with her pink, size-six running shoes. Carissa made it down the stairwell, opened the door into the sixth floor, and then proceeded to kick Frank into the ribs until he got the notion that she wanted him out of the stairwell and into the room. Getting kicked in the ribs by someone continually until you move can almost be described as the universal symbol of, “Get-your-ass-out-of-this-place.” It was a rather informal way of telling somebody to move along.
The sixth floor was an empty room. It was boring, dull, and not to Frank’s liking. In fact, it served more as a waiting room then anything. Frank hated waiting rooms. There was no track of time in a waiting room, only nervous and impatient waiting until you were called up for what was most likely something that you weren’t going to enjoy. Only this place was worse, there were no magazines to help time go by, there was no typical elevator music to help smooth over your fear, and there sure as hell wasn’t a fish tank complete with few fish to help you get over the anxiety of what was about to follow. Worse than that, it ate away into Frank’s anxiety. This is why Frank sucked at sports, because he’d choke from all the unnecessary anticipation he’d build up just sitting there. It’s also why Frank took a bunch of pills in the nooks and crannies of darkness, away from his friends to hide any signs of weakness that would be conveyed to his pack of buddies who served like a testosterone plagued cheerleading squad. This was the worst place for Frank to be, without another human to talk to or even stare at, his anxiety and fear would slowly eat away at him until he was driven into insanity. Even when he reached insanity, he would reach another level of insanity that made the first level of insanity look like, well sanity. He rolled over and looked at Carissa.
“Why the hell are you kicking my ass lady? What the hell did I ever do to you?!” yelled Frank as he began coughing up the blood pooling from his mouth.
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe years and years of depression following afterwards from when you took a Bic lighter to my ponytails.”
“It isn’t even that serious! You’re not even that pretty of a girl!”
Carissa kicked him in the mouth again, this time with a bit more force, fueled with a bit more emotion.
“You just don’t get it, do you? You really are a piece of shit that still doesn’t understand the impact you’ve made on so many people.” Carissa said. “We’ve revisited some of the most horrific moments you’ve inflicted onto others and you still don’t understand what’s going on, you stupid fuck.”
“I’m sorry! Where the hell am I?! What are on the other floors” blurted out Frank, seeking answers like his lungs were seeking oxygen.
“Well the location of where we are seems like an absolute shit hole of a place, doesn’t it?
Frank looked in despair and nodded a few times as he tried to catch his breathe.
“This is a wonderful place. It changes for everybody. It changed for you. It changed for me. It’ll change for Jane. The people, the scenery, hell even the music that the D.J. plays. It’s funny how it knows what song to play while you’re on a certain floor, almost like it knows you too well. He’ll play that emotional soundtrack of your heart and play the guilt-ridden music to remind you of your naughty boy deeds.”
“Jane? Who’s Jane? Why is it going to change for Jane? Why the fuck am I here! I don’t deserve this!” Frank shouted.
Carissa took one of the manila folders she had cradled this entire time and tossed it a few feet from Frank’s hands. Frank was on all fours as he crawled toward the envelope, opening it to see a photo of Jane Tomlinson, complete with biography and a list of names, all highlighted in different colors. About seven names down, Frank had noticed his full name listed, marked in a bright red color.
“This is Jane Tomlinson. This girl broke my heart when we were just teenagers. I remember telling my friend that I liked her and she caught wind of it. She ran around the school telling everybody how fucking ugly I was and that she wished that it could’ve been some other guy who didn’t look like a bunch of chewed bubble gum thrown into one big pile. I remember telling myself that I’d lose weight and sleep with every girl because there were other girls to bang that were hotter than Jane. She hurt me. Hurt me so bad. I remember it took years for me to recover. I had no self esteem or confidence. I shuddered when a girl would even hug me. I couldn’t even look people in the eye until sixteen.” Frank said.
As Frank began combing through the list of names and what had transpired between her and the listed name, he found another manila envelope within. As Frank opened the second manila folder within the one containing Jane Tomlinson’s information, a picture of a young, handsome looking guy named Robert Fe with his information and list of names was within, similar to the one Jane had.
“I don’t understand, what is this? What is going on?” asked Frank.
“Do you remember me disappearing from school after you had torched my hair?
“Do you remember hearing anything about me afterwards?”
“No. All we heard is that you ran away and that nobody ever found you or heard from you ever again.”
“That’s because I did run away. Away from my parents, away from this school, away from these people, away from you.” Carissa said as she began fanning herself with the other manila folder she had under her arm. Carissa turned around and began walking towards the door when Frank noticed a hole the size of a small tangerine on the back of her head, covered partially by the burnt ends of her pony tail.
“That hole in the back of your head. Is that from a gunshot?” asked Frank.
“I put my dad’s pistol into my mouth.” Carissa hesitated for a brief moment.
“It was a small caliber pistol, I never could fire the bigger caliber handguns he had. He always took me shooting, he always wanted to do things a father and son would do. I never could make him happy by being a terrible shot. He would always yell at me on the way home and tell me that I couldn’t hit the side of a barn, even if I was breathing on it.”
Carissa stopped walking, and after a few brief seconds, turned around and asked Frank, “Do you think you’re in hell?”
“I’m not sure. I imagined hell to be fire and brimstone with little demons stabbing me with little tridents or forks. Instead I got my nose broken because you kicked me in the face.”
Carissa laughed and started walking off towards the door. She opened the door and before she stepped into the stairwell, she said, “Jane Tomlinson is going to be here in about an hour. Put those files back together in the way you saw them and go meet her upstairs by the gates. Oh, and you can find me on the eighth floor if you ever need see me.”
“Wait. What’s on the others floors? What’s on the ninth floor?” asked Frank.
“You belong on the sixth floor, I know it’s boring as hell, but it’s where you are and it’s where the folder told me to take you. The ninth floor is where the D.J. is, but don’t bother going down there. That son of a bitch, or asshole, whatever it is doesn’t take requests or anything.”
At that moment, the song “Disco Inferno” from The Trammps had begun playing over the cleverly hidden speakers. Carissa exited and left Frank to himself with the manila folders. Frank picked himself off the floor and began looking around. He made it to the stairwell door that he became so familiar with not too long ago, realized there wasn’t a stairwell leading down to Carissa or the D.J, and heard a bell ringing. It was similar to the one to let you know that your time was up and that you needed to move on, somewhere in between an alarm clock and a school bell to signify period changes. Even with the bells ringing loudly, the song “Disco Inferno” could still be heard playing loudly. Burn baby burn…
