Wild Awake

It’s the kind of monomania only gotten by famous musicians.”
    “Wow.”
    “Jimi Hendrix had it.”
    Amused sparkle of eyes. “I didn’t know that.”
    “Well, now you do. Thanks for the ginger ale.”
    “Good luck with the monomania.”
    “Oh yes.” I take my drink and slink my way to a vacant stool. My silver shoes flash like knives. I alight on the stool and bring my glass to my lips. When I take a sip, I let the ginger ale swim around in my mouth for a second, fizzing, before it goes down.
    Someone pokes my arm, and when I look it’s this kid from school holding a curved aluminum flask.
    “Top up?” he says, and I hand him my cup. Something clear and alcoholic glugs out of the flask. He winks, hands it back, and disappears.
    I cross one leg over the other and eye the other people in the Train Room. I take another sip of my new and improved ginger ale. I am grooming myself for my new life as a monomaniac. In my new life as a monomaniac, I sip cocktails and brazenly fang the crowd. In my new life as a monomaniac, I wield the silver scissors of my own Way.
    I think about Lukas and feel a stab of betrayal so sharp it makes me gasp.
    The next sip of doctored ginger ale blossoms hotly in my throat like a flaming flower.
    I feel like I should have a top hat and a monocle. A monocle for the monomaniac. A monocle and a motorcycle. I would go monocling around Stanley Park in the dark most monomaniacally. Where’s a good top hat when you need one?
    I know I should try to stop this—this, this whatever it is—but part of me doesn’t want to and part of me doesn’t think I can. I feel like a tire rolling down a hill, heavy and fast and completely indestructible, and if there was ever a point when I could have slowed down, that point is teensy-tiny far behind me now.
    All these kids I don’t know keep coming up to me to say hey and give me props on Sonic Drift: music nerds who want to know what kind of synth I’m rocking, clusters of tank-topped ninth-grade girls who want to know if Lukas is single.
    It’s like I have become magnetically attractive, sitting here on my stool, fixing the room with a savage glare. I inform each one of my admirers that I am a monomaniac. Most of them look impressed. There are fist pumps and high fives. A girl and a guy in full Native American sun dance regalia slip me another drink. It appears I am very amusing. Amusing or perhaps amazing. A college kid in a World War II flight suit asks for my opinion on microtonality. I squeeze my lime into my cup. “Between you and me, microtonality is about to hit the mainstream in a big way.”
    Sage nod.
    “Fascinating.”
    A red-lipped girl in an eighteenth-century nurse’s uniform asks me where I got my silver shoes. I tell her I am a monomaniac whose shoes belonged to a murder victim.
    More people gather around to hear me talk about my murder shoes, and soon I’m telling them the story of how Sukey was strangled to death by a Russian pimp. I don’t tell them the truth. Sukey’s life is too precious to be handed around like that. As a registered monomaniac, it’s my job to control what stays in the rare books collection and what passes into general circulation. I am the Librarian of Life Experiences. I am the Curator of Truth. I walk my disciples around the fantastical gallery of my imagination, and they ooh and aah and nod as if they knew. I could almost do this as a career. I should make business cards: Kiri Byrd, Monomaniac-at-Large. It would be huge.
    The photographer kid comes back and snaps a photo of my murder shoes. The boy from my school reappears with his flask. I’ve attracted quite an audience. No surprise, really. I’m the only monomaniac in the room. Hell, I might even be the only monomaniac in the city. These people might not get a chance to see another one. I’d better let them have it while it’s good. I laugh and tip my hat and raise my monocle. Quite right, quite right, quite right . The Eighteenth-Century Nurse says I could probably sell those shoes on eBay for five hundred bucks. I tell her eBay doesn’t allow the sale of murder shoes. She looks duly corrected.
    “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know that.”
    “No murder shoes,” I tell her. “No murder shoes and nothing infested with mange.”
    When I’m finished with my latest drink, I dismiss the coterie with an imperious wave of my arm and saunter over to the women’s bathroom. When I come out of the bathroom, a black-haired man in a motorcycle jacket