I lay on the floor, motionless

My chest throbbed, heaving with ragged and heavy breath. A cough was pushed through my lips, lungs operating on fumes and powered by a slowed heart- anoxic and deprived.

The taste of copper lingered on my tongue, forcing me to ask a pivotal question; was this death? How many hours have I spent staring at a vacant ceiling, praying for a moment like this one? I steadied my rapid inhalations, turning to see cloth belt and a white plastic bag on the floor beside me. My grasp on reality began to grow stronger as I felt the cold linoleum against my check.

I didn’t care much for the likelihood of demise. How many years have I sent myself away for, to the rearmost passages of my imagination, begging for a release to be offered? The piss- stained room flooded my sinuses as I took my first true breath since awakening. Millimeters from my face, an ant was crawling along the slick tiles, weaving in and out of the cracked surface like. a soldier running from trench to trench.

It turned to look at me, a question in its tiny compound eyes. It seemed blissfully unaware of the violence that had just transpired over its head. I reached, feeling my throat, fingertips running across a raised

welt which spread from my collarbones to my adams apple.

Who did this?

It could be argued I did it to myself, bringing upon i11 fortune with a reckless involvement in matters I did not understand, in a place I quite frankly did not belong.

Damn it all.

Rising to my feet, teeth ground against one another in my loose jaw as I straightened myself out. The vicious bastard who wielded that bag with such deadly proficiency was nowhere to be found. Something caught in the frantic corners of my mind as it dawned on me that there was only one thing this could be about.

Stumbling through the plywood door, I barged into the hall. My feet pedaled underneath me, threatening to lose traction with each and every step. The tiles felt like ice under my unsteady legs, and as soon as I hit the street, the packed dirt and pavement served ne no better. Sailing and tumbling over my own legs, I spiraled three blocks with no recollection of the path there. Cars whizzed by within inches,

cutting through with record speed, a collection of blurs threatening to end me with every concussive passing.

Kiraly Utca’s grimy orange bricks loomed, showing the way home. Marble stairs, slick with condensation, led upward to my door. Rushing up to the flat, fingers desperately patted empty pockets; findings no keys. Reaching for the door handle, they clasped around the cold steel lever... It was unlocked. Frantically, the realization of exactly what had occurred dawned on me. Fear crackled up my spinal column like electricity, a bolt of lightning.

A heart pumped louder, deafening my ears until all that could be heard was the dull thud-thud of a rapidly

accelerating pulse and the sound of wheezing breath. A Tea kettle left on to boil for too long. Somebody had been here. No sign of breakage could be observed along the doors cheap frame; leading to an unfortunate conclusion reinforced by the sagging of my empty pockets.

Whoever jumped me in the bathroom outside of the keys, and they’ve already had their way with the loft.

This had to be about that fucking thumb.

Crossing through the threshold of the once- sacred space, muddy boot prints trailed across the kitchen floor. A dead set line spanning from the kitchenette into the main loft exposed

what could only be described as a wake of chaos. Vandals.

A pile of splintered wood in the center of the roam appeared as if it was once my desk. Overturned furniture lined the room, dusting the once pristine floor with particles of fiberboard and glass.

I didn’t care much for the loss of the desk, I only payed $40 for the damn thing. While it was of no great loss, it told me exactly what the interloper was after. One of the drawers lay on its side, its brass handle ripped free from its socket. A sharp screw thread was exposed, decorated by a threaded

garland of flesh and cotton which hung like tinsel.

A streak of blood ran from the loft, tracing the raider’s path up the ladder by way of a wounded palm. It wasn’t as is he attempted to hide his path. This break in wasn’t the work of some sneak thief looking for a score.

This was a clear and concise message: “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.”

Fumbling through my pockets, I found a lighter and an empty pack of smokes, reaching for cigarettes that simply

weren’t there. I held the tiny square between my teeth, jaws clenched as I ascended the ladder. ’Fantastic’ I thought to myself.

They gutted the bed too, stuffing poured out from its cloth belly, entrails spilling and strewn across the floor in woolen disembowelment. I reached into the remnants of the night stand with clammy fingers, and was relieved to find a pre roll in the back of the door, a godsend.

Steeling my nerves, I lit the joint and inhaled deeply, tasting the combination of tobacco and herb. The lemony flavors and smoke put me at ease, steadied my hands, and set me

right. I was hazy, but somewhat back to myself.

Did they find what the, were looking for? With a head full of pancake batter and hands like dead fish I fell onto my back, staring at the ceiling with the number pressed between my lips. This wasn’t the first time my place had been flipped, and I doubt it would be the last- but the difference here was an existential one.

I was in deep shit.

My phone vibrated in my back pocket, and I pulled the phone out from under

myself to look at the now cracked screen. It was an ugly thing, a tiny black shining thing, glowing with possibility

and the power to absolutely consume anyone with a bit of ego face first. The screen illuminated with a small blue text bubble:

“2% Battery”
No calls, no texts, no messages.

No news from anybody, and that was a good thing. As far as I could tell, nobody involved in this had made any other moves in one direction or the

other. The ordeal being far from over, no news was good news. I crouched along the edge of the loft, registering that whoever trashed my place might be just the right kind of asshole to dump out my fridge onto the kitchen floor just to make a point.

As I came down to the kitchen I saw that the lockbox was definitely missing from the back of the freezer. I waded through spilled milk, melted ice cream and once frozen soup as I picked at the edges of the fabric that was my memory. The textile peeled apart, entangled and drifted back together again, offering the less than 50% accuracy that was its very best.

The refrigerator was ransacked and two grapefruit rolled idly on the kitchen floor through the sticky muck, little sausages and beer cans and grapes sat in the lake of food waste, leaning upon a carton of smashed eggs like survivors of a cap sized ship, yolk leaked out through the cardbooard hull like oil into the Gulf.

The lockbox was gone, its vacant hole in the ice cold emptiness that straight through my gut and into my asshole. The type of real dread, the real Fear with a capital F that David Foster Wallace said runs ’straight through you’ - From the top of your head straight down to your sphincter.

I was fucking in it now.

The only way I could get out of this as to find the thumb, find who took the fucking thing on either occasion, or who jumped me in the bathroom.

I needed to get uninvolved from this shit as quickly as possible. I thought of Balasz and pictured the pseudo-man mountain with canned hams for fists and ears dense as cauliflowers. It was hard to picture somebody taking him on without a weapon. Even if they had a blade, it would be like getting into a knife fight with an ox. They had to get the jump on him, and to incapacitate him, or hold him steady enough to cut his thumb with surgical precision...

they had to have drugged him.

Maybe he was held at gunpoint, sure, but you couldn’t make those cuts on a living person if they were conscious because they would simply struggle too much.

No, whoever made that incision was a pro, and they had to use something to knock him out.

I doubled back to the ladder after grabbing a Ziploc bag from the kitchen and placed the jagged tear hanging from the screw which stuck out of my desk at a vicious angle.

Beware the guard desk.

I threw the bag into the fringe to be attended to later... I had to call the cops, and do my own tests on the side.

I couldn’t think of any other option.

I hated it. It wasn’t like a childhood of making problems for local law enforcement gave me any sense of trust for them, be they hero cops or outright swine- but more on that later.

I feared them and resented them for ages due to predilection for delinquency. Delinquency has always been and under-appreciated attribute.

It is so often suffocated before it can be refined- and only through refinement can a lock pick or a thief, or a liar or a fighter sublimate their predatory impulses into a benevolent force. That kind of sublimation is key to many kinds of societal change. Only thieves at heart can truly see the holes in a security, and only a bastard with death in his heart can truly empathize with the human darkness a homicide cop has to see on a daily basis. It’s not that they’re bad people right off the bat, it’s that a job can change you - hell it will change you. Medicine makes you see the body as a machine stuffed with biomechanical parts, chemical reactions running the engine of a sentient, squishy machine.

Whether it be through delinquency, criminality or investigation, to lay with dogs is to get fleas - and to those who stare into that void, it most definitely stares back in the subtlest of ways. -but then again, how many lives have been saved by good men capable of doing bad things?

The number probably pales to those saved by bad people doing good things, for all the wrong reasons.

-and the history of civilization is a history of tribes, and of bad, bad men.

So if the thumb was gone, now what?

The Budapest metropolitan police station was an imposing sight, a goliath structure of marble and concrete, once ornate, but now stripped bare of any facade by the brutalist right angles of former soviet occupation- the rendorseg who stood behind the screened counter was a young man of military bearing. A almost impossibly neat mustache was perched upon his upper lip, looking more like an immaculately groomed third eyebrow more than anything else. He was not the sort of man who would be bemused by any mention of stolen body parts, and it would be likely that the fact that it was not -my-thumb that was stolen would most definitely arouse his suspicion, so alas some parts of my police report were omitted.

However- without knowledge of the thumb I seriously doubted there would be au motivation that could be found outside of just looking like an easy target – or any motivation for the crime aside from a student abroad simply being an easy target- but it was the only option available it seemed.

Who else was there to call when an unknown, apparently rude individual comes into your house, raids your room, eats your food and steals your undoubtedly i11 -gained severed thumb. Hopefully, the cops might help, placing this entire incident under the umbrella category of “not my problem anymore.”

While Lil was certainly convincing and I certainly agree that if one has a beloved family member go missing, one would be reasonably committed to finding them - even more so when you’re seeing bits of them at hopefully-not-increasingly-common increments, I’m was not sure if I wanted to help her out any more.

The officer took the typed card from his printer and carefully, dispassionately and extremely deliberately placed it in a small, yellow envelope.

He wet the seal on the tab with a small red sponge, which he placed back

into a porcelain holder lake the tip of a nipple pasty.

Looking over the countertop, anyone who stopped at the front desk would observe an outdated, yet highly efficient machine. Index cards sat stacked in boxes, fax machines whirred as teletype clatter filled the air akin to the flapping of hundreds of tiny metal wings.

Everything changes, nothing changes.

“We’ll call you.” the desk man replied

-and with each question I asked, the answer was the same.

I started to do my own homework, and went back to the apartment to call Lilli.

“They took the fucking thumb.”

“What do you mean they took the thumb?”

“I mean somebody came into my fucking house and trashed the place and took the motherfucking thumb out of my motherfucking freezer.”

“Jesus Christ, are you okay?” she asked, and I was unsure as to whether the sympathy or concern were genuine.

“I’ll be fine” I replied. “A little fucked up, they jumped me, but nothings broken and I’ll probably live.” I feigned melodrama, milking the limited supply of sympathy for everything it was worth.

“Was it a skin head?” she asked.

“Why? You’re having a problem with skinheads now?”

“I mean not really.”

"If you aren’t having problems with fucking skinheads, then why were they the first thing that came to your mind when I told you I was robbed?"

She paused. Stoicism was in the air.

"Tibor and Janos, two of Balasz’s friends; you met –“

“I remember them" I interjected.

"When they were making their last run back from the ’Dam, they said somebody was tailing them all the way back to the city, through the canals as soon as they crossed back over the Hungarian border."

"No shit? -and what makes you so sure they ‘re skinheads and not the cops?"

"Aside from the shaved heads, and the general threatening glares, I’d say the Iron cross painted on the side of their tug was a pretty good hint."

"Who do you think they were?"

“Jobbik, most likely.” she muttered through pursed lips.

Ever since Orban took office, these nationalists have been giving us problems. Vigilante types."

"What do you mean problems?" I heard the phone crackle suspiciously.

Paranoia ran at an all-time high, and all this talk of neo-nazis and political vigilantism was bringing the Fear deep into my belly. It pulled down at my throat, sinking into itself.

I think we need to speak in person" I said- "and I’m going to need a place to stay". She cut the call short.

2 hours later we were sitting at the goat herder.

"I’m going to need cash, and a hotel room. I said to her.

"I’m going to be completely honest, here I was just in this for the free weed and because I thought you were cute. That shit isn’t cutting it."

I tried by best to look hard, and really leave a vacuum of silence, lingering between each word. My hands shook as I stuck them in my jacket pockets.

Somebody broke into my home. Trashed my apartment completely. I could be in my last days of life, for all I knew.

"So you’re saying you were just trying to get into my pants?” She shot back, gruffly.

"You don’t give a fuck about me or mine, now that you think you’re not going to get laid?.

She tipped to her right and fished a cigarette and of her back pocket. "That’s all you give a fuck about?"

I reeled, 1ooking for an appropriate response. At this point in the conversation, I would rather have been defusing a bomb.

"Christ, I shouldn’t have said anything. I was trying to convey that I like you, as a person. That’s what made me want to help. Sex had, and has, nothing to do with it.”

I was a bad liar.
Sex definitely had something to do with it.

“I’m just trying not to get killed over your problems. I’11 help, but I can’t be risking my neck out here from the goodness of my heart."

"Goodness of your heart, my ass" she muttered through a wry set of upturned lips. Reaching into my pocket, I produced a small gold lighter. She leaned in and I flipped the switch, sparking a flame.

"What if I set you up with a hotel in the meantime, like you mentioned, just

to keep you on board with this?"

There was enough cash to put me up in a hotel, but not enough to hire a pro instead of my amateur self? Something was rotten. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the smell of bullshit was there.

"Keep me on board?" I scoffed, the moment I sense genuine danger, I’m fucking out of here. This severed thumb, assault and robbery bullshit is not what I bargained for when I was trying to make some new friends.”

"Well aren’t you such a martyr? You need to understand some people don’t come from a place of privilege like you do. This is reality, this is the world you live in. I just don’t have the parents to pay for school, or give me the opportunities your lazy ass is squandering on smoke and leisure."

"Ouch." It actually hurt- while I wasn’t rolling in dough, my middle class bones cracked under her mention.

“It’s not your fault that you’re too entitled to understand why my family can’t trust the authorities here. I should have known you wouldn’t get it."

"I’m sorry,” I replied. I rotated my head on the column of my neck, breaking up the adhesions. I should not have made some crack about thinking you were cute It wasn’t right of me. Demeaning."

"Thank you. "

"All you can do is try to do better, and if this is your only shot to make sure Balasz gets home safe, I gotta help. Danger, though, I’m not about. No Humphrey Bogart bullshit. "

She passed me the smoke, and I took a drag. I could taste the hash in it, which surprised me as I looked at her through the haze.

"Nice." She talks of crime and punishment, and acts like I’m repugnant, yet she humors me.

She shares. Is this because she needs my help, or does she reciprocate what I’ve been hanging on to this whole damn time?

"Don’t worry," she smiled, it"11 be a one-time thing. Just until you get back on your feet, and once we find Balasz." She continued

“I have this friend, Janos, he’s a nice guy, and he works at a hotel down on Vaci Utca,. If he’ll take cash I’ll be able to set you up with a room and a covered bar tab."

"You’ve got enough cash on hand to pay for all that, but you can’t hire a pro? I’m just seeing red flags here Lil, I still have school, and I can’t have any of your friends popping up in my professional life.

I’m not a cop, or a private dick, or anything in between."

"No, dude, you’re not. " she said "but we can’t hire some ex-cop PI, who is probably as right wing as they come, and expect them to help. You’ve already seen how helpful the cops have been. - but you, you look like a tourist. Some gadje gaje white college kid."

She was right. The city had a strange and cynical economy of scale.

A dealer or something similar can easily clear, what, 60,000 a year in the US? That might take you far, until you put any of it into a bank account with any consistency. Similar machinations were at play here, the ever-ironic economy of the inner city. Goods and services cost more, Groceries from the corner store cost just as much on their rotting shelves as they do in the fashionable castle district; because the small stores must cut a higher profit margin to survive. Per square foot, the cost is higher, public transportation is poorer and the gypsy cabs cost more than the Ubers do downtown. Rent is cheap, but the tenants must pay exorbitant safety deposits, and put in money upfront to make the apartments livable.

Cheap furniture and homewares are sold at high prices through deceptive payment plans and the furniture wears out before the payment plan is even finished.

So where does that leave most people? With enough money to dress half-well, and get some expensive drugs. Maybe go out to eat with the middle level executives in fashionable restaurants but a mortgage, or a retirement plan?

Fat chance.

"In this city, privilege will get you through a lot more doors than any of my boys.-

3000 forint for each day you investigate, and the cost of the hotel. no bar tab."

“30000 is what, 136 US a day?"

"Yeah"

“I’ll need that bar tab."

“Fine.”

"You’ve got yourself a deal. I’ll let you know when I find something, or when I need a favor- "

Lilli spat in her hand, and held it out at arm’s length. I looked at the slippery sheen on her palm for a few seconds be before mirroring her, slapping my

wet skin onto hers. I cracked, "What are we, 17th century farm hands?"

"Don’t be disrespectful," she smiled" You’re lucky you’re cute."

We laughed. We talked. I started to learn that some stories never reach the public record.They never cross a police blotter or a headline but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. More than anything, she told me about how when people fail to trust in institutions, a city will take care of itself.

Of all the street apothecaries in the world, in Budapest I only knew of two, and yet they end up being somehow connected...

So I decided that I had no choice but to see it Adam know anything that would be of use to me - especially because his card was with the thumb.

Small world.

--------

I hit up Mick, and asked him to set up a meeting. “He already gave you his card” Mick said, Don’t be a chicken shit.”

We walked out from Blaja Lujza station into the square, away from the metro rail.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to go alone!” Faces milled about the open grey square surrounded by monolithic grey obelisks of concrete and glass. Faces, ugly in their mundanity walked shoulder to shoulder between the office buildings and 24-hour clubs. A blue Citron sedan with a rusted front fender sat parked on the Northeast corner of the intersection- idling at a red light. As it sat there, the driver lit a cigarette and looked out over à pair of cheap sunglasses, slung low on a gin blossom nose.

He had a yellowed bandage wrapped around the palm of his right hand. I made eye contact with him as he rolled through the intersection only to be absolutely crumpled by a slick black Mercedes AMG with Diplomatic plates. It T-boned the thing, sending the powder blue Citron skidding into a lamppost, where it planted itself, a heap of shattered windows and scrap metal. The driver of the AMG swung out if his car, wildly appraising the damage.

“You son of a bitch!” He screamed.

The front end of the AMG was destroyed. The Driver of the citron tumbled out of his car in a daze. He had a camera slung over his shoulder and shouted back in rapid fire Hungarian.

“Well I ought to cut your throat and shit down the hole buddy! I will fucking END you!"

The American lunged after the driver of the Citron and they began fighting, throwing punches as they rolled in the street. Cars continued to whiz by, and one of the many babushkas hanging from the windows screamed

“I Call the POLICE!”

The chaos continued to unfold, and me and Mick ducked down an alley to safety, getting well out of the way before any fuzz could show up.

We drank as we walked, wandering through the Blaha territory and making our way through the back alleys toward Adam’s apartment. Mick called him up and he told us to meet him at We

Hello Baby, a skeezy discoteque in the row of 4 hour nightclubs that ran around the metro center he nocturnal meccas thumped, shining neon pinks nd blues out of their windows, painting the bunker grey walls. The lights, sounds and slow mingling never stopped. The sea of strangers grew more beautiful and deranged as I coped in the best way I knew how, and killed a bottle of cheap wine and a few loose lucky strikes stuffed with hash before going into the venue.

The Fear ran deep, and my flaw continued to be my ability to see the forest through the trees, coupled with this pivotal leaning toward those jacked up lights, flashing in my face to see the beasts hiding behind the leaves.

We entered the bar and made our way to the back bar, where our man said he’d be waiting. As we cut our way through the crowd, I finally locked eyes with Adam as he leaned against the bar. He was hunched, braised. One of his eyes was red, blown out and blackened.

This was not good.