never mind the nevermind.

There’s a man on the corner, preternaturally creepy. He was a creep when he was five years old, this is his destiny. As if to make the inner creep explicit, he chooses to wear trench coats and parts his hair heavily down the middle. His smell, if you get too close (sometimes you do), is too sweet. Like bananas. He is a banana man.

He says, “I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong.”

You are tempted to respond because the words are familiar to you in some sort of deep and primal way. Only your friends are running ahead and shrieking and they have the money for the now’n'laters, and your mother told you not to anyway. I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong. Who said that? Who said that?

He says, “You want something special? I can turn you on.”

Really? Really?

He tells you his story. He’s from Nebraska. He calls himself a flatlander. He rode out across the country in a bus. When he was seven he saw his first miracle: Jesus Christ appearing to him above his bed one night and telling him to walk out into the snow toward the North Pole. Heaven is the North Pole, said Jesus. The creep says he mixed up Santa Claus and God all the time. “I came out west, I did the opposite,” says the creep. “I guess I’m in hell.”

The creep lives above the A&P. He has too many goldfish in not enough bowls. They swim around and around and bump into each other, silver and orange flashes, desperate to escape the confines of the bowl that they don’t know is there anyway except as a boundary. The way anyone understands a boundary, inside or outside it. The apartment smells fishy but still sweet, like the creep.

What are you doing here? What are you doing here?

The creep lights a cigarette and seems to be waiting for something. You have seven quarters in your pocket, all destined for a quart of milk. There is only half light, as if someone had split the sun in half. The cigarette smoke fills the room and hangs there. You can see it. You move in it, and there’s a path behind you.

Now that you think about it, the words he said — I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong — is from a song about being blinded in light, you remember it now, and you’re aware that you’re in the creep’s apartment and that he is not doing anything but smoking, and even that is enough to make you different forever. You are different forever. It has happened.