Scoot, Exhibit 06, Two-Handed Gogi
Dodging vehicles that gave no sign they intended to slow, I navigated the four-lane stretch with Pig-licker beside me, both of us coughing and teetering on the brink of death in countless fashions. My initiation as a parent hadn’t gone off to a smooth start, since it’s a role that requires staying alive. The highway I needed to cross was bisected by a massive, almost chest-high concrete barrier. Once I cleared that obstacle, I knew the taxi driver would have no route to reach me.
I leapt onto the four-foot-high concrete divider that split the freeway. Cars roared in opposite directions as I reached out with my hands and walked for a while, a feeling I can only describe as biblical. I traversed that divider as if I were Moses in the middle of a motorway fleeing a taxi driver with a tire iron in a country I’d just learned existed yesterday. That was the power of the cough syrup. I resolved to stock up on more, though the syrup’s effects left me uncertain whether I had bought it in Paris or Poland.
Pig-licker glided alongside me with a sly glint in his eyes. I snapped at him with the fierce expression of a badger, for I was the offspring of a lion. I vaulted down from the median to the far side.
I was crossing a boundary—the edge of a world where Pig-licker did not exist and where Niki waited.
That sense dissolved along with my ankle. Lying on the asphalt, I realized that a median this tall had been built to keep people like me from getting into such trouble. A three-legged dog I had spotted hopping by had distracted me. I had intended to hit the ground running, but my ankle gave way, and I smashed face-first into oncoming traffic. The pain was sharp, but the fear was sharper. The street pressed in on me, man.
Cars sped past, their blaring horns providing a textbook demonstration of the Doppler Effect. Dragging my leg, I hopped and dragged myself across the two-lane road.
Safely on the other side, I collapsed in the gutter, coughing, shivering, and vomiting. I looked back and realized I’d left my wallet in the middle of the first lane. There it lay, flapping at the spot where I had landed when my ankle gave way. I’d been in Georgia less than two hours, and I already sensed I had found my place.
As I sat there in the gutter, clutching my aching ankle and screaming “Fuuuuuck” at my entire life, the three-legged dog limped past, nosing through the litter to noses and gaps.
“You’re nobody’s best friend,” I wailed at the animal. “You have no friends!” The dog seemed to study me with a look of pity.
I hopped back into the traffic’s wake, and I fell again as I stooped to retrieve my wallet. I picked myself up and moved on, the sun sinking behind me, its warm rays fading into a chill as my shirt tore open from Pig-licker’s claws. The world ahead offered a vast orange moon, swollen in the sky as if it belonged solely to this moment. Wow, I thought. Georgia’s moon is something else. I knew that moon would be my way back to Niki if she’d ever take me again.
I trudged through what appeared to be a park, finally sinking onto one of the benches. Four men lounged in a circle, speaking loudly in Georgian and sipping something clear from a large plastic bottle. They smoked cigarettes with a speed that suggested they were stuffing French fries into their mouths rather than lighting a cigarette.
“Where are you from?” the handsome one asked, taking the role of the designated talker.
“Canada,” I lied, half convinced I believed it. People assume folks from the Carolinas are prejudiced, and I wanted to make a favorable impression. He approached to shake my hand, and I, trying to meet him halfway, nearly toppled again because of my ankle.
“Are you drunk?” a shorter man in a leather jacket asked me.
“If only,” I said.
“What happened to your foot?”
“I think I sprained it,” I replied. They looked at me in wonder. “I extended my foot and called it kaput.”
“Ah…” they murmured. I nodded, proud as a man with something broken inside him.
“Drink this,” said the shorter man in the leather jacket, offering a bottle of clear liquid. “This will help.”
And it did.
But from the look of astonishment on his face, I suspect he hadn’t intended for me to drink all of it. The clear stuff hit fast, tasting like jet fuel for a plane that might never exist if people kept drinking this kind of stuff.
We spoke of nothing in languages neither of us fully understood, yet every utterance felt suddenly more meaningful than the last. They laughed constantly, as if merely standing still together was itself a joke, and I was the punchline.
“Yeah, Muthafucka!” I cried to the shorter man, and I slapped my palm for a high-five. He struck my nose so hard I toppled backward.
“Fuck your mother,” he shouted with a wild, ferocious tenderness in his gaze.
Another man shoved him, and they wrestled with the fake outrage and the stubborn loyalty of old friends, trading jibes about each other’s mothers.
I was so astonished I forgot I was on the ground, hoping they’d overlook me, but the handsome one returned, helped me to my feet, and dusted the back of my shirt in a paternal gesture. He guided me away from the group, again offering a cigarette.
“No thanks, man,” I wheezed, “Lung problems.” He didn’t quite buy it.
“You can’t say that. Not in this Georgia,” he lectured, almost fatherly. “Bacho’s mother really is a whore.”
“Really?” I asked, impressed by the luck of the moment.
“No,” he said with a laugh. “She is a doctor. But she isn’t a nice woman.”
Behind him in the distance appeared what I’d been searching for—the place of wonder in a desert of concrete: a glowing, tiny village at the center of a park, complete with bumper cars.
“Hey man, what’s that place over there? Are those bumper cars?” I asked the group.
“It’s… how you call it?” he stammered for words, “amusement park.”
“Amusement park,” I repeated, letting the phrase ring with a certain grandeur.
“It’s called Shaviko Land,” he said, lost in thought.
“Shaviko Land.” I echoed.
“Named after a baby tiger, shot by the fucking police.”
“Baby tiger,” I said. “Fucking police,” I repeated.
“No, it was a black panther,” the shorter man interjected. They resumed their bickering. I braced myself for the show.
“Your nose is bleeding,” the man who had punched me earlier said, handing me a napkin. They resumed their bickering like a chorus of critics.
I dragged myself toward Shaviko Land, paying the entrance fee with a credit card that somehow functioned through a banking error. The clear liquid aided my ankle and every other affliction as the rides flashed around me, and time seemed to melt into a wash of brightness. I drifted like a ghost.
“It’s like heaven,” I told Bacho, who had followed me inside, standing close as though to shield me from the crowd.
“No, man, it’s more like shit,” he countered with a smirk.
I patted him on the shoulder and pressed on. “Your mother remains a fine doctor,” I offered, attempting to deflect the tension.
“Stop mentioning my mother,” he called after me, but his words dissolved into the background noise.
Eventually I tired of rides and found myself facing a fence that resembled chicken wire. I couldn’t see an exit, and there was no way back, so I climbed. The top gave way beneath me, and I and the fence tumbled down in a clatter. I rolled into a pine tree at the bottom.
Nothing seemed to hurt at first. I glanced uphill to where the four men stood, still in a cluster, watching me in silence.
I threw up. Then I waved to them. Bacho waved back. The other man shook his head as though he had expected better from me. Their voices rose again in distance as I limped through a forest of lilac-gray Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks that lined the highway. In the distance loomed a building with a round glass exterior that looked like a police station—an Orwellian image if there ever was one.
I suspected this glass-fronted police post might be the last place I should head, no matter how many windows and metaphorical transparency were flaunted on its outside. If the Georgian police nabbed me, I’d be shuttled to a jail cell in the basement of that glassy fortress, a place where there are no windows and where suspects stumble down the stairs with a habit of fate. I was wanted in more countries now than Poland had counted, and this was precisely the moment to avoid advice from the Polish detective who urged us to aim for the Georgian-Turkish border. Her name was Cynthia Morian.
“Why Georgia?” Niki had asked at one point.
“Because it’s not Europe, yet it remains Europe,” Cynthia had explained.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have that luxury now,” she snapped, then softened. “It’s the one place where I can keep you safe and the last place they’d expect you to go.”
“Why?”
“Because your sledgehammer-headed boyfriend doesn’t even know Georgia is a country.”
“She’s actually right,” I whispered, and thus Georgia became our destination.
I turned away and limped forward, fearing I might be trapped in a time loop in which Pig-licker would catch me. I signaled to passing traffic as dawn began to reveal the muddy stains, blood, and what might have been mustard or nacho cheese on my shirt from Shaviko Land.
The taxi driver who finally stopped seemed to think I had escaped from the police station. At first, he didn’t ask questions; I wouldn’t have either. But I waved a twenty-dollar bill, and he nodded, so I got in.
Uncertain of our destination, I found the ride both exhilarating and disorienting. The driver, tall and funny-looking with a thick head of curly black hair, drove with an aggressive determination, weaving through traffic as if the car needed to keep up with him. I appreciated the drive’s purpose, even though I lacked a clear destination—and perhaps even a purpose at all. He overtook one car after another, honking and cursing the drivers as if calling on ancestral relatives for aid. What a country this was. It felt like the place I needed to be.
As the car accelerated, every component of the old vehicle rattled in protest, the engine howling under a rusty white hood that seemed to be held together by a frayed bungee cord. It wasn’t a genuine car anymore, just a patchwork of parts assembled into motion, and somehow moving with a strange, reckless confidence. The driver smoked Winston cigarettes, taking a drag every couple of breaths. I coughed at a similar rate, though the cause of my cough predated the taxi ride. I was coughing because it was time to take the magic pills I’d left with Niki.
Leaving Niki with the medicine that had kept me alive said more about me than I cared to admit, and perhaps it also hinted at what I deserved. As for Niki, she might deserve the rest of my life, immediately.
The driver—the man behind the wheel of the auto-parts amalgam—was not particularly fat, though his midsection bulged in a way that suggested he was wedged behind the steering wheel. Beyond that, he seemed reasonably fit for his body. He looked over at my ever-present cough with genuine concern and flicked his cigarette out the window, a small act that did little to quell my cough but felt somehow kind.
We entered a neighborhood that looked more like my mental image of the place: a rough patch of urban landscape beginning to resemble the world I imagined. The driver started talking in Russian, gesturing with his hands while the car swayed through the streets. I tried to respond, but I didn’t speak Russian, and I hadn’t learned Georgian yet. So we traded half-formed sounds, fragments, and gestures, and that odd exchange persisted for a while.
Then the driver asked, “Do you speak any English, my friend?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I’m from Cana—America.”
“Ameeerikah! Yes. I lived in Brooklyn,” he said with pride.
“Really? Nice. Me too,” I lied. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Gogi. But my friends—they call me ahm…” he fumbled for the words, “They call me, ‘Two-Handed Gogi’.”
“Why the nickname?” I asked.
“Because in my village there was another boy named Gogi who only had one hand.” The driver smiled at me, a warm, conspiratorial look.
I started laughing, then coughing, a mix that made me lightheaded.
Gogi continued, “Another boy in my village, his name is Zura. Everyone calls him ‘Little Zura Riding Hood.’”
“Why that name?”
“Because his grandmother was eaten by a wolf.” Gogi’s laughter pierced the morning air, and mine followed in a fit of coughs I could barely control. We laughed until our chests hurt, and I gasped for air between the bursts of laughter.
“Why are you coughing?”
“I have allergies,” I claimed, then added, “I have asthma,” though both were obvious fabrications. I’d told similar stories before when faced with a difficult truth. Once I told a subway passenger that I had Ebola; the man leaped from his seat and I seized the space he left behind, grinning with the absurd convenience of a lie.
“For your cough,” Two-Handed Gogi confessed, “you should drink whiskey with honey and lemon.” The word lemon sounded almost like a revelation, a moment of clarity in the hillside conversation we carried on with the windows down and the world outside listening in.
“You can come to my house. I can show you,” Two-Handed Gogi offered, honestly suggesting hospitality as a cure. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea. I had no plan, no suitcase, no destination. My phone had service but lacked purpose. Niki was the obvious call, but dialing her would ruin the entire catastrophe I was trying to construct.
“Okay,” I agreed, “that would be nice.” I discovered a surprising truth about Georgians: when you’re not trying to kill someone, they’re renowned for their hospitality.
“I’ll fix your cough. I am a certified vegetarian,” he claimed. “It is hard work. I see many dead animals,” he added.
“Vegetarian?” I asked, puzzled by the phrase.
“Ki, ho, diah,” he said, meaning yes in this language I did not yet know.
“Sometimes,” Two-Handed Gogi whispered, “they bring me people. Bang, bang.” He mimed a shooting gesture. “If you can’t go to the hospital, it’s business. A man must eat.”
“Are you talking about cannibals?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” he laughed. “We don’t eat patients. You are a funny guy.”
I looked at him for a long moment and decided he wasn’t a cannibal after all.
My cough gradually faded. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and savored the dry morning breeze as we skimmed along at speed. The car seemed to have no windows, and for the first time since Poland, I felt a rare moment of calm.
That was when the car struck a bump in the road.
I found myself once again face down on a Georgian highway. I was bleeding, covered with shards of glass, still coughing, but this time the blood was coming from my lungs, not just mucus. It felt as if my ribs were broken, as if a lung could be punctured. The jet fuel of the past hours was fading, and the pain of everything I’d endured began to sear through me. But when I saw Two-Handed Gogi, the pain dissolved into a distant ache.
Gogi, distracted by his attempts to converse with me, ran a red light. We were T-boned by a BMW traveling with alarming speed. The old taxi shuddered apart, and somehow, through the windshield, I was flung onto the street.
I lay on my back, looking at the wreck and feeling the sting of iron, tears, and petroleum in the air. I watched an inverted Two-Handed Gogi bleed out, a large metal piece protruding from his stomach. I wondered if I’d meet the same fate.
“Whiskey, honey, and lemon,” I whispered to him as he bled in the twisted metal. I waited for the three-legged dog to arrive yet again.
“Golden retrievers,” I whispered to myself. “Golden.”
No dog appeared. Dogs—wait—
“Ah, veterinarian, Gogi. Gogi, you’re a veterinarian. I get it now.”
But Two-Handed Gogi didn’t reply. “Gogi, Gogi,” I cried. “You’re not a cannibal,” I sobbed. There was so much blood I could not tell whose was whose.
“Come on, vegetarian, heal thyself,” I whispered through the delirium. Each cough sent a shard of pain through my body. If I coughed again, I thought, I would die.
“Whiskey, honey, and lemon,” I repeated to the dead man. Left behind was a potbellied, curly-haired Georgian corpse bound in the framework of the old Russian taxi—a vehicle that had never truly been white, merely white once. I was too exhausted to process the irony, but it stood there like a stubborn joke.
The heat was oppressive, and that is how I knew I was in shock—a sign that death, jail, or some Sartrean mix of the two was close at hand. I had no choice but to accept whatever was coming: the Haint, if he appeared, would seize me. Then he would come for Niki and our child. I had failed.
I heard movements nearby. In this inverted world, a face I had longed for appeared, grinning with the familiar scent of coming thunder, the memory of a porch in a beach house, and the tang of freshly cut grass. Upside down, she approached the wreckage, leather flip-flops crunching over shattered glass. 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 wept at the sight of upside-down Hannah, tears mixing with the cough that wouldn’t stop. Hannah had guided me here. I had followed her as if following a script.
“Why is everybody dying, Hannah?” I asked with eyes wet and throat dry.
“I’m going to steal your heart,” Hannah whispered. My vision dimmed, and darkness overtook me.
When the light returned, it was no longer Hannah in front of me. It was my oldest friend, Sean—Sean the secret agent, a nickname earned from his work in distant lands—lands like Georgia. Sean stood tall and handsome amidst the shattered glass, the sunrise framing him with a sly grin. He smelled of leather and expensive shampoo.
“What are you doing here?” I mumbled. “You planning to fight the Russians?”
With a certain grace, Sean knelt and poured cold water into my mouth from a Nalgene bottle. I trembled, fighting the urge to cough and cry, recognizing the signs of imminent shock. Sean wiped away the blood and tears from my eyes as if he were a nurse on night duty, the angel promised in the Sunday School songs we sang as children. And perhaps he was.
“I never arrive in time,” Sean admitted.
“Shitfire, Sean. Are you the Angel of Death?” I asked, half joking.
“I am Sufentanil, the angel of opioids,” Sean replied with a grin. “Stick out your tongue. This little pill melts under your tongue.”
“My favorite.”
I cried as the tablet dissolved into something I could no longer distinguish from love.
“This is going to hurt,” Sean warned as he slid me by the armpits toward the sidewalk and under the shade of a eucalyptus tree.
The moan I released sounded like an angry mammalian sea creature.
“Easy, Scoot, easy,” he soothed, propping me against the tree.
Sean shed his backpack, unfolded a space blanket, and tucked it around me. He stood above me as the dawn broke, shaking his head.
“You’re a mess,” he observed.
“Do I look any different?” I croaked.
Sean shrugged those massive shoulders. “That doesn’t make a bit of sense,” he muttered.
All the improbable things that don’t happen always loom in the distance and then vanish. Don’t let the drugs stop. Tell them to keep going.
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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.
