apartment.
Franklin unfolds an aluminum chair and sits down at his small elementary school desk. He turns on a reading lamp attached to the side wall and pulls out his bottom-line laptop from the cubbyhole. After it powers up, he plugs his headphones in and listens to some Human Remains MP3s to block out the sound of sex in the room. He turns the volume up as loud as it goes, but he can still hear Sarah screaming at the tops of her lungs as if she is purposefully trying to be heard over the music.
His wireless card doesn’t pick up any unsecured networks at the moment, so he’s unable to log onto the internet. This annoys him because there have been a lot of candy people sightings in the past few days and he’s been wanting to track them or see if there have been discussions about them on the message boards.
He lets out a puff of air and looks at the mess of notes and maps that are pinned to the wooden walls of the cubicle. His entire life has been dedicated to tracking down the candy people. Ever since he dropped out of college, it has been his primary obsession. He has other obsessions, such as reading historical biographies and inventing new types of sandwiches, but proving the existence of the candy people is the only thing that’s really important to him.
Crabcake wakes up and climbs out of his coat. She yawns a crackling meow as she crawls into his lap and goes back to sleep. Franklin rubs her belly with his free hand.
Franklin has given up a lot in his pursuit of the candy people. He dropped out of school to hunt the candy people. He’s lost several jobs because he was too focused on the candy people. He’s given up most of his free time to hunt the candy people.
He also married Sarah instead of his first love, Staci, just because Sarah also believed in the candy people. He didn’t like Sarah all that much but he thought he would be happier with somebody who could relate to his obsession. He didn’t know that she was a compulsive liar before they were married, and that all of the encounters with the candy people she told him about were complete fabrications. If it wasn’t for his obsession he wouldn’t have married Sarah, which was one of the biggest mistakes of his life.
He also moved to this neighborhood, even though it’s very small and the rent is very high, just because this area has the highest concentration of candy man sightings in the country.
Franklin takes the gun out of his coat and hides it in some dirty underwear. He knows his wives won’t go anywhere near his underwear. Then he removes his right ear and pushes a small yellow button on the side of his head. The back of his skull opens like a sunflower, revealing his swollen oily brain.
Besides giving up his personal life to the hunting of candy people, he has also given up his natural human brain and had it replaced with a more advanced artificial brain. He spent all of his inheritance on the operation. The brain is made of silicon-based imitation neural tissue that works as a hybrid between computer and brain. It has given him a picture-perfect memory, the math skills of a calculator, advanced deduction and puzzle-solving skills, superior eye/hand coordination, and the ability to think or read twenty times faster than anyone else can speak. He can also beat any video game without losing a single life, most of the time.
Although he assumed the brain would be a major benefit in the hunt for candy people, it hasn’t yet been much use to him. His two wives approved of the operation because they thought he would be able to get a high- paying job with his new brain, but that didn’t happen to be the case. Companies stopped hiring people with artificial brains a few years ago, after they discovered all the defects. Almost five thousand people received the operation before anyone realized that the brains don’t last as long as normal human brains. They have a tendency of breaking down, freezing, or frying in the way that most computers do after a few years. Many people who have had the operation had their memories wiped, some had lost senses or had their senses swapped so that they saw what they smelled and felt what they tasted, some had become vegetables, and many have gone completely insane without warning. Nothing has happened to Franklin yet but the doctors told him that it is only a matter of time. He might have three days, three years, or three decades. Nobody knows for sure. But they do know that it will happen someday and there is nothing that can be done to stop it.
Much of the skin on Franklin’s face is plastic. They had to remove his ears, the skin on his scalp and his forehead or else the flesh would rip every time he opened his head to let his brain breathe.
That is one of the things Franklin likes most about his artificial brain… letting it breathe. His brain overheats once or twice a day, sometimes three or four times during periods of high stress. When this happens, he has to open up his skull and let it air out for ten minutes or so. Airing out his brain is incredibly relaxing to Franklin. It is like having a strong brandy and a good cigar at the end of a long day.
As his brain pulses against the cool draft, Franklin closes his eyes, strokes his purring candy-colored cat, and listens to the screeching music on his headphones that has become as calming as white noise.
Franklin Pierce is self-employed. He makes his living teaching pet owners how to give the Heimlich maneuver and CPR to their dogs. It has strangely been a profitable venture for him. People care a lot more for their pets than he thought. At first, he wanted to make money by selling a manual on pet care. He wrote a book called “How to Save Your Best Friend’s Life: A Do it Yourself Guide to Pet Paramedics.” The book teaches people how to save their pets from choking, drowning, heart attacks, bleeding to death, and other such emergencies that require quick action in order to save a pet’s life. He sold a lot of copies in pet shops and local bookstores, but found that more people were interested in taking lessons in person rather than reading his manual. So he started teaching lessons. He gives a group class twice a month and teaches private lessons almost daily.
Today Franklin is giving a private lesson to an old lady with a large angry Doberman who lives in the West Hills. When he arrives at her house, he meets a frowning overweight purple-haired woman wearing a large red bow and a flowery dress.
“Take off those shoes and that smile,” she says to him.
She tells him that her dog gets angry whenever he sees someone smile.
Franklin complies. As he takes off his shoes, he hears Crabcake meowing from outside. Although he takes his kitty with him everywhere he goes, he never takes her into a client’s home. He’s never sure how his client’s pet will react to her, so he always keeps her by the mailbox.
“Here he is,” the old woman says as she presents her dog.
Franklin lets out a puff of air as he sees the dog. The animal matches the old woman in every way. It is old, overweight, and wears a flowery bandana with a red bow. It even has purple hair.
The dog growls at Franklin. As he usually does whenever he gets nervous, Franklin puts his hands in his pockets. Normally he does this to pet Crabcake, whose soft purr relaxes him, but this time he doesn’t have a kitty in his pocket. This time he has a gun. He pets the barrel of the gun and finds that it, too, relaxes him.
Franklin never wanted to buy a gun, even though he was hunting the Candy people. All he wanted to do was capture a candy person on film and then prove to the world that they exist. Once the world accepts that they do exist, he imagines the military will hunt them down and exterminate them all.
He has been successful at capturing them on tape three times. The first two times were not very clear. He got them from a distance, a safe distance, but they just looked like people in crazy-colored clothing. Even the community of candy man hunters online didn’t believe they were real. Even he wasn’t sure about one of them. But the third time, he captured one of them perfectly. He was less than twenty feet away, on a balcony above it, and was able to zoom right into the creature’s face. It was like the creature was posing for him and stood there for a good five minutes. It was a perfect shot. The best footage anyone had ever captured.
Franklin thought he had won. But, still, nobody believed his footage was real. The cops laughed at him. News stations wouldn’t respond to his letters or phone calls. Some of his online buddies believed the footage to be real, but most of them were skeptical. That’s when he decided that the only way to prove the candy people are real is to kill one of them and use the corpse as indisputable evidence. That’s when he decided to buy a gun.
As he teaches the old lady how to save her grumpy dog’s life in the case of an emergency, Franklin caresses the gun in his pocket. He imagines what it will feel like to shoot one of the candy people, blow apart their candy- coating, and splatter their guts all over the sidewalk. He wonders if killing just one of them would be enough to avenge the death of his little brother and sisters. He wonders if the military will do anything about them, or if he’ll have to kill them all himself.
The Doberman growls at Franklin as his lips turn into a large wicked smile.
After his job is done and Franklin picks Crabcake up from the old lady’s lawn, he sees something in the corner
