This is How People Die

Scoot, Exhibit 06, Two-Handed Gogi

Dodging cars that didn’t even attempt to slow down, I made my way across the four-lane highway, along which Pig-licker and I had been running, coughing, and about to die in all kinds of ways. I hadn’t gotten off to a great start as a parent, seeing as it requires being alive. The highway I was crossing was divided by a massive almost chest-high concrete median. Once on the other side of that thing, I knew the taxi driver would have no way to reach me.

I hopped up onto the four-foot-high concrete structure that divided the freeway. With cars rushing by in two directions, I held out my hands and walked for a bit with a sensation I can only describe as biblical. I walked along a four-foot-high median like Moses in the middle of a freeway fleeing a taxi driver with a tire iron in a country I hadn’t heard of until yesterday? That was some strong cough syrup. I made a mental note to get more, but on account of the cough syrup, I couldn’t remember if I’d bought it in Paris or Poland.

Pig-licker drove along beside me with a sneaky look in his eyes. I snarled at him as a badger might, for I was the son of a lion. I jumped off the median onto the other side.

I was crossing a boundary—the border of a world where Pig-licker did not exist and Niki waited.

This sensation collapsed along with my ankle. It occurred to me, supine on the asphalt, that such a tall highway median was designed to prevent pedestrians from getting themselves into this exact situation. I’d been distracted by a three-legged dog I saw hopping by. I had intended to hit the ground running. Instead, my ankle gave, and I face-planted into oncoming traffic. The pain was sharp, but the terror was sharper. The street was on me, man.

Cars flew by. Their panicked horns were textbook examples of the Doppler Effect. Dragging my leg behind me I hopped and crawled across the two-lane highway.

Safely on the other side, I collapsed in the gutter, coughed, shuddered, and puked. I looked back to find that I’d left my wallet halfway across the first lane of traffic. There it was flapping in the same spot where I’d landed when my ankle gave out. I’d been in Georgia for less than two hours, and I already knew this was the place for me.

As I sat there in the gutter holding my throbbing ankle and screaming “Fuuuuuck,” at my whole entire life, the three-legged dog limped past me rifling its nose through the rifts of trash.

“You’re nobody’s best friend,” I wailed at the animal. “You have no friends!” The dog seemed to give me a look of pity.

I hopped back through oncoming traffic and fell again when I reached down to get my wallet. I got back up and to the other side, and I kept walking as the sun set on my back. I could feel its fading warmth where my shirt was torn open by Pig-licker, but that was all behind me.

Before me was a vast orange moon. It hung pregnant in the sky as if it belonged to this moment alone. Wow, I thought. Georgia has one hell of a moon. And I knew that moon was my way back to Niki if she would ever have me again.

I limped through what looked like a park, and I sat down on one of the benches. There were four guys in a circle speaking loudly in Georgian and drinking something clear from a big plastic bottle. They smoked cigarettes so quickly they could be munching on French fries.

“Where are you from?” the handsome one asked me. He was the designated talker.

“Canada,” I lied, kind of believing it. Everyone thinks that people from South Carolina are racist, and I wanted to make a good impression on these guys. He came over to shake my hand. I tried to meet him halfway but forgot about my ankle and nearly fell again.

“Are you drunk?” a shorter guy in a leather jacket asked me.

“I wish,” I said.

“What happened to your foot,” he asked.

“I think I sprained it,” I said. They looked at me strangely. “I held out my foot and pointed at it. “Kaput,” I said.

“Ah…” they said. I nodded proudly. We were men with broken stuff.

“Drink this,” said the shorter guy in a black leather jacket. He handed me the bottle of clear liquid. “This will help.”

It did.

But by the look of astonishment in his eyes, I don’t think he had meant for me to drink all of it. The clear stuff hit me fast. It tasted like jet fuel for an aircraft that had yet to be invented and might never be if humans kept drinking stuff like this.

We talked about absolutely nothing in broken languages. Each thing we said grew more profound than the thing before it. They were so eager to laugh as if just standing there with each other was a joke, and I was the punchline.

“Yeah, Muthafucka!” I said to the short one in the leather jacket and held up my hand for a high-five. He punched me square in the nose so hard I landed on my back.

“Fuck your mother,” he screamed with a look of manic beauty in his eyes.

Another guy pushed him. And with the feigned outrage and the tired fidelity of close friends brawling, they held each other back and traded insults—no doubt invoking each other’s mothers.

I was so astonished I forgot I was still on the ground. I thought they might have forgotten about me, but the handsome one came over, helped me up, and dusted off the back of my shirt in a fatherly gesture. Leading me away from the group, he again offered me a cigarette.

“No thanks, man,” I said coughing. “Lung problems.” He didn’t believe me.

“You can’t say that. Not in Georgia,” he said paternally. “Bacho’s mother really is whore.”

“Really?” I asked. What luck.

“No,” he said laughing. “She is a doctor. But she is not a nice woman.”

Behind him in the distance I saw it—the place I must have been looking for. It was an oasis of wonder in a desert of concrete.

“Hey man, what’s that place? Over there—are those bumper cars?” I asked of the tiny glowing village in the middle of this strange park.

“It’s… how you call it?” he said fumbling for the words, “amusement park.”

“Amusement park,” I repeated. There was a majesty to these words.

“It’s called Shaviko Land,” he said pensively.

“Shaviko Land.” I agreed.

“It’s named after a baby tiger, who was shot by the fucking police.”

“Baby tiger,” I said. “Fucking police,” I said.

“No, it was black panther,” the shorter guy in the leather jacket said. They began bickering again. I braced myself.

“Your nose is bleeding,” said the guy who had punched me in the nose. He handed me a napkin. They began arguing again.

I limped my way toward Shaviko Land and paid my admission at the gate with a credit card that worked by some miraculous banking error. The clear stuff really helped my ankle along with all my other problems. The rides flashed and twirled around me. Time seemed to melt into light. I drifted like a ghost.

“It’s like heaven,” I said to Bacho. He had followed me in and was standing beside me as if to protect me.

“No man, it’s like shit,” he said.

I patted him on the shoulder and kept walking. “Your mom is a fine doctor,” I said.

“Stop saying about my mother,” he called out behind me, but it was only syllables.

Eventually, I ran out of rides to look at and found myself facing what looked like a chicken wire fence. I didn’t see an exit and there was no going back, so I climbed the wobbling fence. When I got to the top the entire thing collapsed. The chicken wire and I came crashing down with a thud. I rolled down a steep hill into a pine tree.

Nothing seemed to hurt. I looked back uphill where the four guys stood in a group staring at me.

I puked. And then I waved to them. Bacho waved back. The other guy shook his head as if he had expected better of me. I heard them arguing again in the distance as I limped through a forest of lilac-gray Soviet-era concrete apartment complexes that towered along the highway. In the distance was an ominous-looking building that I eventually gleaned was a police station with a round glass exterior.

I was pretty sure this Orwellian police station was the last place in the world I could go, no matter how much glass, light, and on-the-nose metaphors for transparency were applied to its exterior.

If the Georgian police identified me, then I would be sitting in a jail cell in the basement of that same glass building, but I would be where there are no windows and where suspects have a random habit of falling down the stairs. I was wanted in more countries now than just Poland. And this was the exact type of situation that I had been emphatically implored to avoid by the Polish detective who told us to head for the Georgian-Turkish border. Her name was Cynthia Morian.

“Why Georgia?” Niki had asked.

“Because it’s not Europe, but it is still Europe,” Cynthia had said.

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have that convenience right now,” Cynthia had snapped. Then, in a calmer voice, she said, “It is the one place where I can keep you safe and the last place they think you’ll go.”

“Why?”

“Because your sledgehammer-headed boyfriend doesn’t even know Georgia is a country.”

“She’s actually right,” I whispered. And to Georgia we went.

I turned in the other direction and limped. I began to worry that I was caught in some kind of time loop and that Pig-licker was going to find me. I waved frantically at oncoming traffic. The coming dawn revealed the mud, blood, and what was either mustard or nacho cheese on my shirt from Shaviko Land.

The cab driver who finally picked me up probably thought that I had escaped from the police station. At first, he didn’t ask many questions; I wouldn’t have either. I wouldn’t have even picked myself up. But I waved a twenty-dollar bill at him, and he nodded. So, I got in.

I had no idea where we were headed, but he was tall and funny-looking with a huge head of curly black hair. He drove rapidly, with resolve, as if we were headed somewhere. I liked this about him because that would have been important to me if I had a destination. As he overtook each car ahead of him, he madly honked his horn and cursed in Georgian at the drivers of the other cars—no doubt invoking the professions of their relatives. What a country. This was the place for me.

When he accelerated, I could feel each part of the rusty little vehicle rattling to keep up. The screaming engine bounced under a rusty white hood that appeared to be fastened in place by a bungee cord. The car wasn’t white, but it had been once. Despite the obvious lack of power steering, he changed lanes swiftly with no apparent reason or pattern. At times he simply drove in the middle of the road.

What we were riding in was not a car so much as a composite of parts: Wheels, seats, gears, and windows, none of them original, all held together—and accelerating in tandem—not just by mechanical improvisation but some sort of precarious tacit agreement with physics. It was glorious.

The driver smoked Winstons, hitting the cig every two breaths or so. I coughed at about the same frequency, though this was not an example of cause and effect. I was coughing long before the taxi, and he looked to have been smoking long before my existence. I was coughing because it was time to take my magic pills, which I had left with Niki.

That I trusted Niki enough to intentionally ditch her with The Medicine that kept me alive says a lot about me, and none of it’s good. What it says about Niki is that I should spend the rest of my life with her. Immediately.

The driver of the auto-parts composite wasn’t fat, except for his gut, which could hardly fit behind the steering wheel. The rest of him looked to be in pretty good shape all things considered. He looked over at my relentless coughing with concern and tossed his cigarette out the window. This had no effect on my cough, but it was a nice thing to do.

We entered a part of the city that looked more like I had imagined it would. The driver began speaking Russian to me and making these hand gestures while he was driving. I tried to communicate back, but I didn’t speak any Russian. And apparently, Georgian is a language. I didn’t know about it until I got on the plane, so I just reciprocated with strange sounds, grunts, and signals. This went on for a while.

Then the man said, “You speak any English, my friend?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m from Cana—America.”

“Ameeerikah! Yes. I lived in Brooklyn,” the driver said.

“Really? Nice. Me too,” I lied. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

“My name is Gogi. But, my friends, they call me ahm…” the driver said, fumbling for the words—“They call me, ‘Two-Handed Gogi’.”

“Why do they call you that?” I asked.

“Because in my village, there was another boy also named Gogi. He only had one hand.” The driver looked over at me and smiled.

I began to laugh and cough uncontrollably.

Gogi grinned and continued, “Another boy in my village, his name is Zura. Everybody call him ‘Little Zura Riding Hood.’”

“Why do they call him that?” I asked.

“Because his grandmother was eaten by a wolf.” Two-Handed Gogi let out a high-pitched squeal of laughter. Harder and harder we both laughed, and I coughed. My cough was belligerent, rapid-fire—so hard I couldn’t get any oxygen in and so I had to gasp. But I was also still laughing. I nearly fainted.

“Why are you coughing?”

“I have allergies,” I lied. Then I said, “I have asthma,” I lied again. The truth involved an inconvenient conversation. This wasn’t the first time I’d invented reasons to explain away my cough. Once I told a guy on the subway (he asked) that I had Ebola. He jumped out of his seat like a cat, and I took his seat and grinned.

“For your coughing,” Two-Handed Gogi said candidly, “You must take whiskey and…” He thought for a minute, “…and honey and lemon.” He said “lemon” like it was a revelation. Then he grinned and flicked his neck twice in some international symbol for alcohol enthusiasts.

“You can come to my house. I can show you.” Two-handed Gogi meant it too. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea. I didn’t exactly have a plan, a concrete destination, or even a suitcase. My phone had service. What it lacked was purpose. Niki was the obvious call—but calling her would’ve ruined the calamity I was trying to cause.

“Ok,” I said. “That would be nice.” I was discovering that when not trying to murder you, Georgians are renowned for their hospitality.

“I fix your cough. I am a certified vegetarian.” He said, “It is a hard work. Seeing many dead animals,” he said.

“Vegetarian?” I asked.

“Ki, ho, diah,” he said. All of these meant yes.

I was confused.

“Sometimes,” Two-Handed Gogi whispered, “They bring me people. Bang, bang.” He made a shooting gesture. “If can’t go to hospital. It’s business. Man must to eat.”

“Are you talking about cannibals?” I asked.

“No, no, no,” he said laughing. “We don’t eat patient. You are a funny guy.”

I looked at him for a long time and decided that he was not a cannibal.

My cough finally died down. I leaned back and closed my eyes. The dry summer morning breeze felt wonderful on my face at that speed. I don’t think the car had any windows. For the first time since Poland, I felt calm.

That is when the car hit us.

I found myself again prostrate on a Georgian highway. I was bloody, covered with glass, and still coughing. But this time it was blood that I was coughing up instead of just mucus. It felt like my ribs were broken. I wondered if one of my lungs was punctured. The jet fuel was wearing off and the pain of the last twelve hours was setting in. But when I saw Two-Handed Gogi, I forgot about the pain.

Gogi, no doubt distracted by his attempt to communicate with me, ran a red light. We were T-boned by a BMW going some metric equivalent to a shit ton of miles per hour. The old taxi seemed to have just broken apart and somehow, possibly through the windshield, I had been ejected from my seat onto the street.

I was on my back facing what was left of the car. I smelled iron, tears, and petroleum. I watched an upside-down Two-Handed Gogi bleed out of his stomach from which a large piece of metal protruded. I wondered if I was doing the same.

“Whiskey, honey, and lemon,” I said to him as he hung there dying in the twisted metal. I waited for the proverbial three-legged dog to hop on by yet again.

“Golden retrievers,” I whispered. “Golden.”

No dog came. Dogs. Wait—

“Ah veterinarian, Gogi. Gogi, you’re a veterinarian. I get it now.”

But Two-Handed Gogi didn’t reply. “Gogi, Gogi,” I screamed. “You’re not a cannibal,” I said crying. There was so much blood I couldn’t tell if it was mine or his.

“Come on, vegetarian heal thyself,” I said sobbing in delirium. When I coughed, I felt razor blades all over my body. If I cough again, I’ll die, I thought.

“Whiskey, honey, and lemon,” I whispered again to the dead man. Two-handed Gogi left behind a potbellied, curly-haired Georgian corpse bound in the old Russian frame of a taxi that wasn’t white but had been once. I was too tired for all the irony, but it was there.

The heat was unbearable, and that is how I knew I was in shock because I could hardly feel it. This meant death, jail, or some Sartre-esque combination of the two. And that almost seemed preferable to facing the Georgian police, Interpol, the Polish government, a pissed-off Cynthia Morian, or a senselessly broken-hearted Niki. I had no choice in the matter. The Haint would take me then and there. Then it would come for Niki and our baby. I had failed.

I heard something. There was movement. In that upside-down world, I saw a face I had yearned for the way I ached for memories from my childhood: the smell of an oncoming thunderstorm lying sunburnt in a hammock on the porch of an old beach house, that deathly voluptuous smell of freshly-cut grass, or the thick petrichor of wet pavement. Upside down, she approached my wreckage, grinning. Her leather flip-flops crunched on the shattered glass. It was her. It was Hannah. She smiled and said, “Damn, dude. This sure is a clusterfuck.”

“Don’t I know it,” I wheezed. “A regular goat rope.”

I sobbed at the sight of upside-down Hannah, which hurt almost as much as coughing and was equally as difficult to suppress. Hannah led me here. I had followed her like a script.

“Why’s everybody keep dying, Hannah?” I said with my eyes all wet and my throat all dry.

“Gonna steal your heart,” Hannah whispered. My vision went dark.

When the light returned, I saw that it wasn’t Hannah. It was my best friend Sean—Sean the secret agent. That’s what we called him anyway because he worked for the government in faraway places—places like Georgia. Sean was tall and handsome standing there in the shattered glass with a crafty grin on his face and the sun rising up behind him. He smelled nice, like leather and expensive shampoo.

“What you doing here?” I mumbled. “You fixin’ to fight the Russians?”

With a profound grace, Sean knelt and poured cold water into my mouth from a Nalgene bottle. I trembled from the need to cough and cry. I supposed I was going into shock. Sean wiped the blood and tears from my eyes as if he were the Night Nurse—as if he were the angel promised in all the Sunday school classes we attended together as kids. And maybe he was.

“I never get here in time,” Sean said.

“Shitfire Sean. Are you the Angel of Death?” I asked him.

“I am Sufentanil, the angel of opioids,” Sean said with a grin. “Stick out your tongue. This puppy is sublingual.”

“My favorite.”

I wept as the tablet melted into something I could not differentiate from love.

“This is gonna hurt,” Sean said as he lifted me by my armpits and dragged me over to the sidewalk and the shade of a eucalyptus tree.

The moan I released sounded like an angry mammalian sea creature.

“Easy, Scoot, easy,” he said propping me up against the tree.

Sean slipped off his backpack and pulled out a first aid kit. He unfolded a space blanket and tucked it around me. He stood over me framed by the dawn, shaking his head.

“You’re all messed up,” he said.

“Do I look any different?” I croaked.

Sean shrugged his massive shoulders.

“That never makes a lick of sense,” he said.

All the things that do not happen tower in the distance and crumble in my hands. Tell the drugs not to stop. Tell them.

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From This is How People Die by Will Cathcart. Used with permission of the publisher Evening Post Books. Copyright © 2026 by Will Cathcart.