Chapter IV: Meme

Liam hovers nervously somewhere between the bagel shop and the Chinese takeout place on Bellevue, and tries to look inconspicuous.  He folds his arms, watching his breath condense into vapor as he shivers, and narrows his focus, staring in annoyance at the streetlight illuminating the sidewalk. Struggling to think about anything besides how badly he needs a cigarette. Upper Montclair is not the kind of place where people smoke in public. 

It is also, he is quickly discovering, the kind of place where midnight does not guarantee an empty street. Too close to the city. He feels like an idiot. A potent chemical cocktail of small-town embarrassment swirls in his brain, but he stifles it. In the relatively short time since he came to this part of New Jersey, he has rarely left his dorm. It can’t be helped. It’s his first time doing something like this. 

He decides to do a lap around the block, kill some time, maybe find a place where it feels a little less awkward to smoke. If nothing else, it should give him a better sense of the area. So he reaches into his jacket pocket, fishes for a cigarette, and holds it between his fingers as he strides, casually as he can, past the narrow storefront at the end of the street. Plastic flaking off of its sign, paint faded. “Tommy Lasagna’s”. 

Its off-putting, seeing the starkly abandoned storefront sitting in the middle of an otherwise thriving part of town. Its presence haunts the street, but its the shy kind of ghost that only lets you know its there if you go looking for it. Otherwise, it’s just a heaviness you feel when you walk past. A strange sort of contrast. You feel, at your back, the heat of a light that shines naturally upon the things that nobody wants to talk about. Then, either by chance or by fate, for there is no difference between the two, your vision shifts, and you’ll see the dirty windowpanes, and the long, dark, bending hallway behind them. You’ll see the modest handful of tables and chairs, some of them on their sides, barely visible in the blackness, gathering dust. You’ll look up at that slowly deteriorating sign, and see what the place had been called, a name somehow as innocuous as it is bizarre. You will wonder, anxiously, how you never noticed it before. 

Liam had noticed it before. Even before it had been abandoned. Back when the lights had been on. Or rather, a friend of a friend had noticed it. It had been just after orientation, a group of them driving around town, approaching trouble but never quite causing it, as eighteen year olds away from home for the first time are want to do. 

“Ey, It’sa me, Tommy Lasagna!” The friend had growled as they’d passed the storefront, adopting a gravelly, roiling, Soprano’s style accent, laying it on so thick you could almost feel the pizza-grease dripping off of him. “Come on down and eat my filthy pasta!”

It was a nothing joke, one with no discernible point or punchline, but the kind that the right group of young people can obsess over and pick through for hours. That is exactly what they did. They constructed, in vivid detail, the story of Tommy Lasagna, half Italian mobster, half old-west snake-oil salesmen, all trash. A man who, they had collectively agreed, was decidedly not of Italian descent, had never once tried Italian food, but had, for his own inscrutable reasons, opened an Italian eatery. They conjured rich visions of spaghetti made with expired ketchup and human hair, garlic nots garnished with dog sweat, and a “lasagna” that was just the carburetor of a rusted Nisan Versa. In the two years that had passed between then and now, he’d smiled at that memory a few times.

Then he’d heard about the murders. 

The news came in at a slow trickle. Murders are not unheard of in Essex county, but they rarely make it to Montclair. They usually sequester themselves a few dozen miles off in either direction, Paterson to the North, Newark to the South. The residents of Montclair are in that sweet spot, far enough away from true urban centers to avoid their dangers, but close enough to reap their economic benefits. A place where you get to feel like you’re a part of the real world, without really having to be. When violence hits a town like that, it feels like an invasion. Raiders breaching a wall of doubled rent prices, an assumed safety suddenly uncertain. But then, inevitably, the lives of those minding the breach fail to change in any appreciable way. Quicker than you’d think, the violence recedes into memory, then story, then myth. It was such by the time the story reached Liam. 

“Did you hear what happened in Upper Montclair?” He had heard someone say to someone else, on his way to class.

“The nice part of town?”

“Yeah, they found a whole bunch of bodies stashed in this storefront on Bellevue. For real cannibal shit, it’s fuckin wild.”  

“No way! Where’s Bellevue again?”

“You know, right off Valley Road? There’s that one pizza place, then you turn onto Bellevue.”

“There’s a pizza place like every three blocks, you gotta be more specific.”

“You know, the one right in the middle of town. They slice their mozzarella instead of grating it?” 

“Oh, shit, that place! Fuck that, I hate that shit.” 

“Right? Gives me the fuckin creeps.” 

“Nah, I mean the pizza, don’t fuckin make pizza like that, you gotta grate the cheese.”

“Dude, slices is like the classic way to make pizza, they do it like that in Italy. They’re authentic.”

“Bet it was some mafia shit then.”

“Oh, shit, no, they didn’t find the bodies there, it was some other place down the street from them. Still an Italian spot, though.” 

“Like I said man, mafia shit.” 

That was the extent of the conversation that he caught before he had left the building, and it was a solid week before he thought about it a second time. Liam didn’t think much about the outside world. Or if he did, he did so only in an academic sense. He was a journalism student, and he knew that meant he should have some intrinsic drive to experience the world with his own eyes and hands, but there would be time enough for that later, he thought. For now though, aside from a handful of adventurous days toward the beginning of freshman year, he had been content to confine himself to the Montclair State University campus. 

“You hear about the cannibal on Bellevue?”

Overheard before his Ethics In Digital Media class, while waiting for the professor to arrive. 

“Oh my god, yeah. I heard it took them a week to clean up the place. Messages written in blood and guts and stuff.”

“Yeah! I think it was like a satanist thing or something.”

“More of a Lovecraft vibe, I heard.” A third actor piped up from behind the two of them, unbidden. “All kinds of numbers and symbols all over the place, bones arranged in patterns. Apparently the first officers on the scene are all on psych leave now. Nightmares.” 

“Probably its all overblown.” He had heard someone else say, at a different time, in a different context. “Stuff like this always is. Probably just some fucked up accident, or a B and E gone wrong, or something. You know there wasn’t even any cannibal stuff in the police report, right? Somebody made that up.” 

All these things lingered in the back of Liam’s mind, where lurid rumors have a habit of settling. For a time, that is were they stayed. A source of idle entertainment, drawn up in slow, bored moments. People had more or less stopped talking about it by the time he’d made the connection. He’d been in town one Sunday morning, making a bagel run, when he noticed the paint flaking off the sign, and the darkened windows, and the overturned furniture within. He had stood there for a long moment, paper bag in hand, staring at it. When he returned to his car, he pulled out his phone, googled the name on the sign, and sure enough there it was. In the October of 2018, four rotting corpses had been discovered in the freezer at Tommy Lasagna’s. 

Aside from that there was startlingly little information, which may have explained, Liam thought, why rumors about the incident had been so able to run away with themselves. None of the details he had heard were included in the official report. No signs of cannibalism, no strange symbols. No hint of mob activity, or satanists, or occult dealings. Just four bodies, piled in a freezer, in various states of decay, none of whom had ever been identified. The owner had been three states away on business, eliminating himself as a suspect. The restaurant had, apparently, been closed at the time of the incident. It had been failing for some time, and they had been attempting to sell it. Now, it seemed unlikely that they would succeed.   

Tommy Lasagna’s was stuck in Liam’s head, after that. It slid forward from the back of his mind, embedding itself firmly at its center. Somehow, the unexceptional truth of the situation was so much more tantalizing than any rumor. This wasn’t some ghost story. None of those people had been characters. They were people. Characters aren’t people, they’re metaphors, tools for an author to tell a story and then discard when they’re finished with them. That’s why campfire stories end. Characters are agendas. 

Truth is a spiral. Truth is infinite. Those stories last forever. Always a little more detail to discover, greater context. A pit that you can sink into forever and never find the bottom of. And there he was, standing at its edge, unable to break his gaze away from the inky blackness. Aching to know what lies below. That itch at the back of his mind telling him to jump. 

Hands stuck in his pockets, squeezing the cigarette between his fingers, he hangs a right onto Park Street, waiting until the church and the middle school are out of sight before fishing it out. He brings it to his lips, holding it between them as he dips his hand back into his pocket to search for a lighter. He doesn’t find one. He switches to the other pocket, then back to the first, then the zippered pocket bellow it. The winter coat he is wearing has many pockets, and not a single one of them, he discovers, contains a lighter. He swears a little louder than he means to. He is surrounded by houses now, the closest place he’ll be able find a light would be the Quick Check, and that’s a solid fifteen minute walk back in the direction he came. He flicks the unlit cigarette to the ground, and stomps on it, an act of self-defiance he immediately regrets. He has procrastinated for long enough. Its now or never time. 

Its a brisk walk back to the abandoned storefront, and it doesn’t take as long as he would have liked. There are still a few people on the street, but Liam figures this is about as empty as things are going to get. As a far off, romantic idea, the thought of breaking into a murder site had seemed intoxicating. Now, its practical realities are beginning to weigh him down. He is a little stunned to realize, as he stares into those black windows, just how little planning he’d put into this moment. He had held some vague image of himself clambering up a fire escape onto the roof, then slipping inside via… what, exactly? The ventilation? It’s a one story building, unlikely to even have a fire escape, and besides, why would they need roof access? Even if there is a door up there, it’s no more likely to be unlocked than the front. Still, even as his half-baked plan begins to deteriorate, he dips into the alleyway beside the building, headed toward the back. If he is going to leave empty handed (an outcome that is becoming more likely by the second as the realness of the situation comes into starker clarity), he will at least do so knowing he didn’t waste the trip. 

But, as he suspected, there is no fire escape. There is also, he notes, no back door, which he assumes is some kind of fire code violation. Could go part of the way to explaining why no one has picked up the property. Among other, more obvious reasons. 

He circles the building a few more times, looking for another way in, and fails to find one. He is quietly disappointed, but even more quietly relieved. He stands in front of the door, eyes moving down across the black and white hexagons that tile the front hallway. He reaches for the handle. Just so no one could say he didn’t try. He pulls. It opens. 

Tommy Katsaropoulos stands in the entryway of the storefront on Bellevue he has recently purchased, and wonders why he is not having a panic attack. He figures that maybe he just isn’t a panic attack sort of person. This is, he knows, the kind of situation people normally have panic attacks about. The whole thing had seemed like a winning idea a few nights before, but a combination of alcohol, cocaine, and an undiagnosed manic-depressive disorder tend to cast things in a positive light. He only half remembers the phone call he’d had with his brother in law, a local tomato distributor, but he suspects it hadn’t gone as well as he’d thought it had at the time. In his altered state of mind, the math of available real-estate on Bellevue plus ready access to tomatoes had added up to a thriving Italian eatery with guaranteed return on investment. But now, in the sober light of day, he is starting to wonder if maybe its a little more complicated than that. Well, mostly sober anyway. 

Like it or not, the place is his now. In a single manic evening, he had emptied out his savings, borrowed whatever he didn’t have, and purchased the storefront outright. He had even managed to pass the credit check, with only a touch of identity fraud. He had worked hard for this. And now, he was going to make it work. He hasn’t left himself with any other options. Regardless of how he felt about it, this is his life now, he thinks. He’ll make it work. He’ll survive.

And he will. For longer than he can possibly imagine. 

But… he keeps getting distracted. On paper, the whole store is laid out in sort of a large L shape. But things feel more complicated in practice. The hallway seems to curve, but no matter now many times Tom had walked up and down its length, tracing his fingertips across the vinyl wallpaper, he could never feel it bend. The main room would seem to dip in and out of his peripheral vision as he approached it, the sway of his gate bobbing a weaving the details of the space out of sight until he reached the end of the hall, where they would explode into view. The walls seemed to expand then, making the seating area look impossibly open until he stepped inside. The room would then snap in on him like a mouse trap, the smallness of the space clarifying into stark reality. 

All of this happens in the corners of Tom’s eyes. Subtle inclines where there had once been flat tile flooring, fluctuations in the florescent light, nothing he could prove, nothing he could confidently talk about. But enough to give him migraines. There is something wrong with Tommy Lasagna’s. 

The first month or so goes about as well as Tom is quickly coming to expect. A handful of people shuffle through the doors of Tommy Lasagnas in its first week, a failure of an opening by normal standards, but it is the best business the restaurant will see for years. He watches them from behind the counter, flowing in and out of his peripheral as they approach him from down the hall. Startlingly few of them make it all the way. 

It is two weeks before Tommy get’s his first customer, and he isn’t even at the register when it happens. He is on his hands and knees, midway down the hall, his face pressed tight up against the space where the wall meets the floor, convinced he has found proof of the corridors imperceptible bend. The shock of seeing him there distracts the stranger just long enough for Tom to scramble to his feet and usher him into the main room. Tom can feel the man tensing, sensing the wrongness of the place. A flight response roiling in the strangers gut. The same feeling had been at a low simmer within Tom for weeks. He grimaces, digging his fingers into the strangers shoulder, his powerful arm curled around its prey as he guides it to the counter. He is going to make this work. He is going to make this work. 

The stranger nervously orders a plate of spaghetti, and Tom steps into an empty kitchen, dully observing that this is the first time he’s actually been inside it. He is distracted. His head hurts. He wants to go back to the hallway. Whatever is going on there, he is close to figuring it out. The reason for his discomfort teasing coyly at the edge of his perception. Focus. Spaghetti? Spaghetti. How do you make spaghetti? 

The answer, Tom eventually decides, is as follows: 

Take one box of Kraft-brand Super Mario Bros. Mac and Cheese from 1987 that was found in a cupboard when you bought the property. Remove cheese pouch. 

Cover dry pasta in ketchup from packets you scavenged from the passenger seat of your 1999 Nissan Versa. 

Get some hair in it, because it was on the seat of your car and your fingers are sticky. 

Microwave until black.
Serve scalding on a burnt paper plate. 

The man is gone when Tom emerges. Though out of guilt, fear, or some combination of the two, he has left a ten dollar bill laying out in the center of the counter. Tom slides the note into an otherwise empty register, returns to the hallway, and drops to his hands and knees. He finds no proof of the bend. 

It has been three and a half months, and he is expecting an eviction notice. He hasn’t gotten one yet, but he knows it will come. The power has already been shut off, but Tommy is resourceful when he wants to be. Somehow, he has managed to jerry-rig the buildings electric to run off car batteries, first cannibalizing the one from the Versa, then the others he’s started stealing. It can handle the lights, but it isn’t powerful enough to run the freezer. But Tommy will survive. Tommy has adjusted. When the meat spoils, he simply gets more of it. 

The restaurant is, to no ones surprise, not paying for itself.  The operation is being funded entirely by Tommy’s night job. After hours, he has taken to robbing people at knife point. It isn’t the first time he’s fallen back on this method, and it won’t be the last. He doesn’t operate in Montclair, he isn’t stupid, but all he has to do is take a bus a couple of miles in any direction and suddenly no one seems to care. He brings home enough to keep his pantry stocked. Just barely. His nights leave little time for sleep. When he does, he does so behind the counter. 

He doesn’t know why he persists. But the thought doesn’t bother him much, because he never really thinks about it. He isn’t happy, but that’s nothing new. On a surface level, he does what he does because he’s a survivor, and that’s what survivors do, they survive. But deeper within his sub-brain, just beyond the reach of active consciousness, he does so because he must. He is moving toward something, drawn to some unseeable point in the future like a moth to a flame in darkness. In his persistence, in his refusal to change, he is gradually becoming the thing he is meant to become. 

Tommy doesn’t notice the bomb drop. One night, he is half way through the process of extracting a battery from under the hood of a minivan, when he realizes, in some atrophied corner of his mind, that it is darker and quieter than it should be. He raises his eyes to the sky, bloodshot and blinking, searching for the light of a street lamp. He fails to find one. They have all been shattered. He becomes aware of the pain in his feet, and finds that he has been walking on broken glass. Not just from the lamps, but from every window in every building he can see. Half of those buildings have been ripped apart. The minivan he is stealing from is rusted, long since abandoned. Devastation surrounds him. He looks down at his hands, and finds that they are slowly freezing to the battery, a thin shell of frost forming around them.

He is aware of these things for the first time, but none of it feels unfamiliar to him. He wonders, aloud, how long it has been like this. He takes the battery home. He plugs it in. He waits for customers. 

Every now and then, they come. Sometimes to get out of the blistering heat of the day or the bone-cold of night. Some drawn in by the lights on his sign, the only one in town still lit. They come in rags, their bodies twisted, changed, creatures more or less than human. Stranger still are the ones who come unaffected. Those in clean t-shirts and unripped pants, even the occasional suit, smelling like soap and civilization. None of them, whoever they may be, are ever happy to see Tommy. Some of them are so unhappy to see him, in fact, that they attempt to do harm upon him. Tommy doesn’t let them. Tommy is a surviver. And he is always in need of fresh meat. Three times now, people have tried to take from Tommy what is his. Now, there are three bodies in his broken freezer. 

Liam can feel the atmosphere shift the moment he steps inside. The air is hot, and strangely heavy. Almost as if there are weights attached to it. It doesn’t want to move, he has to drag it into his lungs. And has the hallway always been this long? From outside, he could see the end of it, but now it seems to curve and stretch, whatever lays at the end of the path hiding just outside what his eyes can see. The rational side of his brain is yanking him backward, begging him to abandon whatever it is he is trying to accomplish, but an even stronger force roots him in place. Then, slowly, that same force begins to push him forward. Down the long, crooked hallway, in which he can find no bend. The tips of his fingers trace across the smooth surface of the wall, drawing a straight line that should not have been straight. 

Reaching the end of that hallway takes longer than Liam feels it should. He finds himself in front of a small display counter, opening up into a cramped dining area. His eyes move toward the wall, and he stumbles backward in surprise, shocked to see… something. But its gone now. For a fraction of a second, he could have sworn there had been something on the wall. A circle of matted, sticky liquid, an inverted star at its center, oozing down the stucco, each drop spiraling off into its own strange, unnatural geometry. Liam blinks, and it is gone. He is staring at faded, peeling paint and the exposed brick beneath it. But the image sticks in his mind, like a light seared onto his retinas. There is an uncanny familiarness to it. As if he has seen it before. Like deja vu, or a memory of a dream. Uneasily, and not quite in control of his own body, he reaches out to touch the wall. 

“Well now… Somethin’ I can do ya for?”

The voice is low and gravely, almost a snarl, yet strangely smooth. Liam can hear the smirk in it without having to look. It is hauntingly familiar. 

Liam spins toward the sound. There is a shadow behind the counter. Towering over him, looming in the darkness, a wall of flesh that should have been impossible to miss. 

“Look, the freezers been dead for a minute now, don’t got a lot of good meat back there, but I can fix you somethin. C’mon bud, what’ll it be?”

A war between fight and flight rages within the bounds of Liams skull, and ultimately concludes at a stalemate. He stands there in silence, struggling to make out details in the silhouetted form. It does not suffer the same anxieties. It takes a step toward him. 

“Sit down, kid. Ol’ Tommy hasn’t had anybody to serve in a minute, so I may be a little rusty, but I got you.” 

The creature slides itself out from behind the counter, movements uncomfortably comfortable, like a serpent moving across its den, knowing every inch and curve of its layer. Within an instant, the thing is behind Liam, digging its thick fingers into his shoulder and forcing him down into a seat. Liam still can not see it, whatever it is. It got behind him too fast. Its hands are large, and strong, and strange in a way he can not identify. They are wrong, somehow. He feels a thumb dig into the space between his shoulder blades, circling slowly, an utterly fruitless attempt to calm him. He doesn’t hear the figure move, but he can feel its breath against his neck, lips suddenly just inches away from his ear. 

“You want I should make you some gabagool?” The creature asks. “If you do, I promise you, I will find out what that is.” 

Liam has not spoken since he entered the storefront, and he does not intend to do so. If he does, he feels it would be an acknowledgement that this, whatever it is, is happening, and he is not yet willing to accept that compromise. Pain spikes in his upper back, the looming figure digging its thumbs deep into his spine. Its breath is hot, and wet, and toxic. Its stench burns Liams nostrils. 

“I’m gonna be honest with ya. I got a bunch’a rats and bugs and junk infesting the pantry like its nobodies fuckin business, the shits are running the place. So the pasta’s filthy. I’m not gonna give you the runaround about it, it is what it is, its filthy pasta. But I’ll cook the shit out of it for ya, nice and hot, won’t be any germs in it or nothin.”

The thing leans in closer now, close enough that its lips graze across Liams ear.

“Whatdaya say, kid? Come on down. Eat my filthy pasta.” 

Its been a long and difficult battle of attrition, but finally, the flight response wins the war. Liam wrenches himself free from the creatures grasp, the chair clattering to the ground beneath him as he sprints for the exit. He doesn’t make it far. A huge, meaty hand curls around his leg, and the world swings up to meet Liams face as he falls, slamming into the tile floor, his nose cracking under the impact. His world goes dark. 

Tommy Lasagna stands in a cold room, looming over his slumbering customer, and waits for him to wake. The soft pitch didn’t do the job, so he has moved on to the hard sell. Its been too long since he’s had any real business, and he is not going to let this opportunity pass him by for reasons as inconsequential as “not being hungry” or “wanting to escape”. But the extension cords bound tight around the kids wrists and ankles should keep either of those reasons from causing an issue. Normally farther than Tommy would push things, even in trying times like these, but there’s something about this kid. He’s familiar. Not in his face, or his voice, but in some deeper way, larger, more meaningful. He is connected to this stranger. He hums at their frequency. He had not known he had been sleeping, but for the first time in his memory, Tommy Lasagna realizes he is awake. And he has waited long enough. 

With gentler hands than one would expect, Tommy lifts his patron off the floor, brushes him off, and eases him into a chair. Then, he jams a metal table into the boys gut. He watches as his captive coughs and sputters, blinking awake, his breathing labored as he takes account of his surroundings. Tommy doesn’t give the kid time to process. He is ready for this.

While the young man had been sleeping, Tommy had been busy. Working in the kitchen, using the last of the gas in the stove, pulling out ingredients he’d been saving since the day he moved in. Breaking into the few unopened cans of san marzano’s, a wheel of parmigiano reggiano pilfered from a bombed out Wegmans, the last bulb of garlic that hadn’t gone black. He even set aside the canola oil in favor of the extra-virgin olive. He could feel himself, standing on the edge of a cliff, soft fingers pressed between his shoulders, easing him toward the abyss. He knew, in some corner of his lizard brain, that he was approaching the moment he had been drifting toward. That drunken, manic night those many years ago, his after-hours work in Newark, all those stollen car batteries and nights spent sleeping on tile flooring, all of it was so that he could make this one meal, for this one kid. For the first time, and possibly the last time, Tommy Lasagna's kitchen smelled like good food. He left the sauce to simmer, returned to the freezer, and woke his guest. He set the table, brought out the sauce, and poured a generous helping of it atop the rusted carburetor of a Nisan Versa. 

The boy squints at the twisted pile of sauce-covered metal, still unable to catch his breath, eyes searching for a comprehension that they can not find. At first, at least. But then, as his eyes adjust, he seems to come to some small, confused understanding. He recognizes what he see’s in front of him. In the same way that Tommy had recognized him. He hums at the frequency of his meal. In some strange way, Tommy knows, the boy had asked for this. Tommy and Liam look at each other, and they understand what they are. Through the fear, and panic, and hunger, and manic forward drive, they know each other. And they know what happens next. There is no more need for words. In the half-cold of the broken freezer, Tommy Lasagna feeds his guest their meal. 

When Tommy Lasagna is finished killing his God, he sits atop the stoop of his restaurant. He picks up a crumpled cigarette off the ground, lights it on a pile of burning trash, and takes a long, slow drag. He is the same, but he is changed. Still the thing these years have formed him into, but awake. And untethered. His story concluded, his purpose fulfilled. There is nothing keeping him here. He could go anywhere. Do anything. Be anyone. He turns, looking back at his sign, basking in its glow, the only artificial light for miles around. He smiles. Tommy Lasagna passes back through the doors of his restaurant, and flips the sign on the door. 

“We Are Open!”