Table of Contents

- Introduction: From Out Of The Angry Ruins

- Godflesh

- Childhood At The Lost And Found

- Androgyny

- In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town

- Naked Lunchmeat

- Cancer Causes Rats

- Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt

- Heartsick

- Extinctions In Paradise

- The Meat In The Machine

- Extract

- Liturgical Music For Nihilists

- Endnotes: The Ticking Of An Unfriendly Clock

THE CONVULSION FACTORY

by Brian Hodge

THE CONVULSION FACTORY copyright © 2011 by Brian Hodge. Originally published 1996 by Silver Salamander Press. Macabre Ink digital edition published 2011. Cover by James Powell.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except for review or discussion purposes, no part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electrical or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from imagination and are not to be construed as real, or are otherwise used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.  If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Original Publishing Credits

Introduction: From Out Of The Angry Ruins © Philip Nutman, 1996.

Godflesh © Brian Hodge, 1995. First appeared in The Hot Blood Series: Stranger By Night.

Childhood At The Lost And Found © Brian Hodge, 1990. First appeared in The Horror Show.

Androgyny © Brian Hodge, 1991. First appeared in Borderlands 2.

In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town © Brian Hodge, 1996.

Naked Lunchmeat © Brian Hodge, 1996.

Cancer Causes Rats © Brian Hodge, 1991. First appeared in Cold Blood.

Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt © Brian Hodge, 1996.

Heartsick © Brian Hodge, 1994. First appeared in South From Midnight.

Extinctions In Paradise © Brian Hodge, 1995. First appeared in Werewolves.

The Meat In The Machine © Brian Hodge, 1995. First appeared in Cyber-Psychos A.O.D.

Extract © Brian Hodge, 1996. First appeared in A Horror Story A Day: 365 Scary Stories.

Liturgical Music For Nihilists © Brian Hodge, 1996.

Endnotes: The Ticking Of An Unfriendly Clock © Brian Hodge, 1996.

For Doli, once more,

for brightening the landscapes

of both town and country;

“Tell me what dreams may come…”

All progressions from a higher to a lower order

are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue

of nameless rage.

— Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West

Introduction: From Out Of The Angry Ruins

by Philip Nutman

Okay. Sit down and listen.

No poetical introductory paragraphs waxing lyrical about what you’re about to read, just a simple statement:

The book you hold in your hands is the Real Deal.

If you’ve been searching for a collection of tales of dread to make your head spin, The Convulsion Factory is it.

What you hold in your hands, oh Lucky Reader, is the doorway to a universe I can only describe as “Hodgian.” Be prepared to enter a space where your worst suspicions about the world we live in, especially the Inner Cities, will be confirmed.

And then some.

You won’t want to live here, but I’m sure, once you complete your first vacation, you’ll want to come back, just like I know I will in the years to come.

This is one of those rare books that the moment you turn the last page, you’ll be deeply disappointed the experience is over. But The Convulsion Factory will, I’m sure, take pride of place on your shelf of favorite volumes, and it will always be there, waiting for you to plunge back into its dark, disturbing pages.

In short, I haven’t enjoyed a story collection so much since Clive Barker kept me up all night when I first got my hands on The Books of Blood,over ten years ago.

Yes, high praise indeed.

And sincere praise.

You see, I’m a very picky reader. Not a literary snob, but I’ve spent most of my life learning to be a storyteller, and I know one when I read one.

And Brian Hodge is a writer’s writer. No quarter given, none asked for. The man is a storyteller with a capital “S.”

There’s no greater pleasure than discovering a book which seduces you, and as you slip between those narrative sheets and start to indulge your passionate desires…

Well, then you discover your new literary lover could teach the legendary Linda Lovelace a thing or two … and you are lost, my friend.

And you keep wanting more…

Okay, okay, this metaphor’s getting out of hand.

Let’s put it this way: writing, for me, is a sexual act.

On those days when the words flow and you, The Writer, discover things about yourself you didn’t know or couldn’t admit to, the art of placing words on a page, of weaving a story out of thin air, becomes transcendental. Just like the best sex.

And reading a novel or collection which inspires those same feelings is a revelation.

At a time when major publishing houses have decided horror is dead, and wannabee writers swimming in the cesspool of the small presses think they are the next King, Koontz, or Barker, when most of them are simply talentless morons who don’t know the difference between a split infinitive and a slice of toast, and 99% of what I read in the “genre” proves unimaginative, derivative shit, a collection like this one serves as a beacon in the darkness.

To be honest, I hardly read anything labeled “horror” anymore. The market imploded not because of public disinterest, but due to greedy publishers strip-mining a field which was already polluted by too many bad writers. I’ve had my fill of killer plants, demonic clowns, psychopaths, cereal killers (sic), and books with evil children on the covers. These days, if I want to experience that delicious frisson which accompanies a book not afraid to explore the darkness, I turn to James Lee Burke (In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, Dixie City Jam), or Andrew Vachss, or James Ellroy — especially Ellroy. For some reason I haven’t quite managed to figure out, the best “horror” fiction is being written by mystery writers these days.

So when a collection like this one comes along — one that wears its dark stripes with grim glee — and turns out to exceed my expectations in spades, I’m ready to swing from the rafters crying, “it’s alive! it’s alive!”

Whatever label publishers want to put on my own fiction, and whatever genre I work in, I am always going to be walking the darkest backroads of the human heart. Exploring the darkness so I can define the light. And every day I sit down to write I try to do so with honesty, commitment, and conviction. Sometimes, the truths we uncover, like scuttling insects which squirm away from the light when we lift the rock of denial, are ugly and deeply disturbing. But we must be honest, Lucky Reader, for without honesty — the painful process of staring into the Abyss, and having the Abyss hold up a mirror to our deepest, darkest secrets, and whispering in our ears, “this is you, my friend…” — there is no hope for us.

Read. Listen. And Learn, oh Lucky Reader.

I was going to tell you about what happened to me the day the manuscript for this treasure trove of dark delights arrived in my Post Office Box. How, hating to waste a minute of my day, I made the mistake of starting to read “Godflesh” — the wonderful, polymorphous-perverse ode to sexual tabooism which kick-starts this vacation in the October Country of Post-Industrial, Apocalyptic, Urban Decadence — on my way to the subway station (my car was ill that day). And how I walked into two lamp posts, tripped over a curb, and trod on a wino who was sleeping off a Mad Dog 20/20 kidney-rot dream — all because once I started reading I was lost…

And I was going to go into great detail about what then happened to me after I got off the train at King Memorial Station, and how I obliviously wandered into the middle of a drive-by shooting, somehow managing not to get my head blown off. And about my little encounter with the middle-aged, white trash alcoholic whore who offered me a $5 blow job outside the fallout shelter bar she frequents, situated a few blocks from Casa Nutman.

I’m too polite to repeat what I growled in response to her offer, but by this point I was suckling at the teats of the lead character of “Androgyny” and really didn’t want to be disturbed.

Hell, I was disturbed enough as it is.

But all what happened is another story. Or maybe a collection. Or tales best told in a good bar with a glass of full-bodied Cabernet in hand.

What happened to me that day could have happened to one of the characters in these stories — only under Brian’s deft penmanship, it would have been a whole lot worse.

I was lucky. Not just because only chance dictated that the guy with the gun had it pointed towards the other side of the street from me, but because I had stepped into the Hodgian Universe. Maybe it was Brian’s prose which kept me out of harm’s way. Hell, where I was, fictionally-speaking, a bullet would have been the least of my troubles.

Welcome to Brian’s nightmare.

My stint in the spotlight is over. It’s time for me to exit stage left.

All I want to say at this point, oh Lucky Reader, is I envy the journey you are about to undertake.

For in these pages grows a garden of dark delights.

But watch out — every festering rose has its thorns.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Best Blood,

Philip Nutman

Atlanta. June 5th, 1996

Godflesh

Being as she was a woman who prided herself on walking her own deliberate path, imagine, then, the irony: Her horizons were forever broadened by the ecstatic man with no legs.

She was Ellen by day, and knew the aisles of the bookstore as well as the creases in her palm, the smoky gray of her eyes, the finely-wrought lines that inscribed the corners of her mouth and lent it warmth and wisdom, as if etched by a loving sculptor. She walked the aisles with her modest skirt brushing against her knees and could smell every page along the gauntlets of spines. For the patient customer it was a trip well rewarded. Every book should be so matched to a loving home.

There had been nothing different about that day right up to the very moment they left the bookstore, she and Jude letting the evening clerks take over. With that taut facelift, Jude could have been an older sister, or so she thought. Thought she knew what made Ellen tick. A common mistake, but then Jude’s idea of a deep read was Danielle Steel over Jackie Collins. Jude already had the endings worked out for most anyone she could ever meet.

They left together for the parking lot down the street. The bookstore’s neighborhood was like much of the city itself: old and charmingly crumbled by day, not a place most would want to walk alone at night. The peeling doorways, the odd bricks set just out of step with the others, the derelict and sagging smokestacks and chimneys … they hooked strange shadows that worsened as day dwindled into evening, and the shadows gave birth to night people.

They joined the flow, Jude’s brisk footsteps clicking at her side. Urban minnows, that’s what they all were, and god forbid anyone should fall out of step. Were it not for nights, Ellen knew she would one day tear out her hair, an allergic reaction to this sunlight world and the pre-fab molds it demanded.

“…and then do you know what that little doofus asked me?” Jude was saying. “He asked, ‘Do you have The Old Man and the Sea in Cliff’s Notes?’ I told him the original was barely a hundred pages, so why didn’t he read that, and he just looked at me—”

They approached a break in the buildings, the mouth of an alley that gaped back like a dirty, leprous throat. Yet inviting, all the same, with mysteries lying just behind those crusty locked doors. Back rooms often tweaked her curiosity.

“—just looked at me, like I’d suggested, ‘Here, why don’t you bite this brick in half.’ So I said, ‘Listen, I can summarize it for you in fifteen words or less: Man catches fish, man battles fish, man loses dead fish to hungry shar—’” Jude froze, except for her arm, as she began to point along the alley. “Oh. My. God.” Her arm recoiled back to her side. “Don’t look, Ellen, just don’t look.”

It was the wrong thing to say, and too late anyway. Ellen wouldn’t have missed anything that got Jude to interrupt herself.

The man looked to be in his early forties, and she’d never have mistaken him for one of the street people, one of those who cruised around in their wheelchairs with sad stories of cause and effect: car wreck and loss of livelihood; war wounds and loss of stability. From this distance — say, twenty feet along that wall? — his clothing looked neat and new, his hair well-barbered. He might have been any reasonably attractive man who’d made the best of his life after losing both legs at the hip.

Then again, he was masturbating. In his wheelchair. It did not look as if he were merely adjusting his crotch. He was wholly absorbed in the act — heart, soul, and both hands.

“He’s — he’s right out in the open!” Jude said, adding her disgust to that of the less self-absorbed passersby. “I … I don’t think he’s even aware anybody’s watching!”

No. No, he wasn’t, was he? His exultant abandon — Ellen found this the most fascinating aspect of the display. His choice of locale and timing may have been awry, but she saw on his face more passion and ecstasy than she’d noticed on the faces of last week’s eight or ten lovers combined.

A Mona Lisa smile brushed her lips, unnoticed as Jude yanked at her arm.

“Come on, come on,” said Jude. “A nice proper thing like you, a sight like that can scar you for years. I had a neighbor? Liked to show himself to other neighbors? To this very day Sylvia Miller gets nauseated by the sight of knockwurst.” Jude shuddered. “If only I had a bucket of water, I’d douse that pervert’s fire. You shouldn’t have to see things like that.”

If you only knew, Ellen thought, and let Jude believe she was saving her from something she’d in fact watched maybe two thousand times before.

Ellen could be kind that way.

And the days took care of themselves.

*

By night, Elle. Just Elle. “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare had asked, and she’d decided plenty. With the lopping off of a single letter she had created an entirely different life.

She even felt different when that was what others called her, what she called herself. “Ellen” was safe and respectable, a fine name to endorse on the backs of paychecks. But “Elle” rang with mystery and resonance, conjured a slick wet alchemy of surrender and seduction.

For years now that name had been eagerly welcomed by the sort of clubs that are frequented only by those who knew where to find them; whose new members arrived only by invitation and discreet word of mouth; where no one was ejected to the streets for improper conduct, because everyone there knew precisely what everyone else had come for.

Her beauty and willingness to experiment were prized. She was almost tall, not quite. Her raven hair, when unbound, contrasted with her pale luminous skin and ripe lips in delicious nocturnal severity. She had a twenty-three-inch waist but could corset it down to eighteen. Men and women alike loved to wrap their hands around it, or nuzzle over the smooth tight curves on their way to the drenched heat between her thighs.

Tonight’s lovers were no exception, at times all six hands caressing her tiny middle, some lightly tender, others rough and groping with urgency. The club’s name was the Inner Circle and variety was everybody’s spice.

She’d spent the past couple hours as part of a foursome, one of her preferred configurations. Two men and two women — she found a perfect symmetry there, something intended by nature, along with the four winds and seasons, the cardinal points of a compass. The Inner Circle offered an orgiastic central room aglow with gauzy mood lighting, or more private quarters with plenty of cushions and sprawl, and they’d opted for the latter.

She filled her mouth with Daniel while Mitch filled her from behind; she cradled Jill, kissing her deeply, as the men traded off between the women’s legs; she and Jill tongued one another’s feverish clits while Daniel and Mitch were yet locked inside them; Jill straddled her mouth while holding her ankles wide … and in Elle’s broad experience you usually needed more men, because their glands betrayed them and they wore out so much sooner. Still, they gave their all, and she drank it with her mouth, cunt, anus. She cried out loudly, in cycles, pulled the others into her singly, as pairs, all three. She made a dinner of semen, a dessert of the musky dew on Jill’s swollen and petaled cleft.

And there was always so much silence when bodies fell still, unable to give or take any more. It always felt as if the world had just ended, and they all lay naked and wet in the ashes.

“You’re ravenous,” Daniel told her. Blond, well-toned, he lay in a sweaty half-curl near her side, reaching over with one finger to probe beneath the edge of the black corset. Jill and Mitch lay in their own raw exhausted tangle a few feet over. “I’d like to see you again.”

“You might,” she said. “I’m no stranger here.”

“So I understand.” Grinning, he elbowed closer, crawling like a soldier. “How long’ve you been coming here? Double entendre not intended.”

“Look, you don’t have to engage me in conversation, all right? I fucked you tonight, and I’ll probably fuck you again.”

He rolled onto his back, relaxed, unfazed. “I wish I was nineteen again,” he sighed. “I could come five times a night when I was nineteen. But the sad thing was, I was alone for most of it.” He peeked at her, hopeful. “Are you feeling pity for me yet?”

He was so obvious, and knew it, that Elle had to laugh in spite of herself. “You late bloomers, you’re so maudlin when you start dwelling on what you’ve missed.”

Daniel said he was valiantly fighting the pull of gravity, here on the downhill side of the sexual bell curve. Confessed he was thirty-five — coincidence, or karma? She was closing fast on thirty-five herself, but then weren’t they all, for the first or second or tenth time.

She let him talk, and he was pleasant enough without seeming possessive. A few of the guys in these places, in spite of their laissez-faire posturing, they nailed you once and it was as though they’d staked a claim. So she let Daniel talk, but already her thoughts were drifting ahead. Tomorrow night, or the night after … future nights at other clubs, wondering where she’d be, what she’d be doing, who she’d be doing it with.

Maybe at the Purgatorium, with the rings through her hardened nipples and chained to a leather belt while some hooded dominatrix violated her with a strap-on.

Or maybe with the Jezebel Society, where gangbangs were a specialty, and where, on knees and elbows, she could be triply penetrated while massaging a cock in each hand.

Or elsewhere, with company even more exotic, but always sure to wring more from the experience than her partners. It was a kind of challenge, something bone-deep and primal.

And she wondered if, wherever she’d be, after she was sated and lay breathing heavily, she’d once more start dreaming of the next time before the sticky fluids of that night had even dried.

Could you even completely look forward to that next time when you could so easily forecast your pose by its end? Even in private clubs like the Inner Circle, the Purgatorium, the rest, sex could get as routine and predictable as some fat suburban couple’s half-hearted hump scheduled for the second Tuesday of each month. It was only a matter of degree.

And she wondered if considering these things, in a room with three other nude people whose potent sexuality had just soaked the walls, meant that she was bored.

Figuring that, in the asking, she already had her answer.

*

A few days later Ellen came back from lunch, took one look behind the counter, and wondered if one of Jude’s facial nips and tucks had begun to unravel. The woman’s forehead appeared ready to burst veins.

“He’s … upstairs,” she said through clenched teeth.

Ellen frowned. “Who? Who is?”

“That … that creature.” Jude seemed to need the counter to remain vertical. “From the alley.”

“Ohhh,” she said, and frowned again, more thoughtfully. “Was everything in place when he came in?”

Jude’s eyes widened, horrified at the very notion she’d have glanced down to check. “You see, you see — it’s types like his that make me think Affirmative Action is a terrible imposition on the rest of us. No telling what he’s doing up there.”

Ellen started for the stairs. “Maybe he needs help reaching a book. We don’t have elevators for the shelves, did you ever think of that?”

“You’re going up?” Jude clutched the counter, all bony white knuckles and maroon nails. “What if he has his willy out again?”

Over her shoulder, Ellen smiled with reassurance. “Then I’ll suggest he find a more appropriate bookmark.”

This befuddled poor Jude. Upstairs, Ellen began to check the aisles, the shelves older and taller and dustier up here, home to the store’s used and vintage and rare books. She’d always accorded a greater respect to the browsers who spent their time here.

She found him in fiction, as sturdy and vital in his chair as if it were an outgrowth of him. He sat engrossed in a book, not so deeply that he didn’t notice her approach. His face lit with a self-effacing smile, and she tried not to recall how it had looked the other day, self-pleasured and unashamed. And so powerfully attuned to his body. Not one in a thousand could get past his lack of discretion, and she supposed that finding this a simple matter made her the odd one as well.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

He pointed at the second shelf from the top. “Even chimps use tools to get what they can’t reach, but…” He spread his empty hands. “Eleventh from the left, if you wouldn’t mind.”

She stretched, pulled it down, looked over the cover before handing it to him. “De Sade, Justine. Not too much call for that.”

His grin was apologetic, wholly engaging, set in a weathered ruddy face. A shock of hair tumbled over his forehead. “Loaned mine out and never got it back. Home feels incomplete without it.”

Ellen smiled back. Or maybe it was Elle this time. Elle in daylight, rattling at her prison. “Myself, I’m partial to 120 Days of Sodom.”

He seemed merely delighted, not surprised. “I’m sure we each have our reasons.” Vigorously, he patted Justine’s cover as if it were the shoulder of an old friend. “I appreciate his philosophy here. The utter lack of reward for living a virtuous life. And every one of these sick sons of bitches in here states his reasons for acting like a depraved monster with such eloquence it makes you want to cry.” He shrugged. “But obviously you know that.”

Her grin turned mildly wicked, and she checked to make sure they were alone. “You want to know what I found most eloquent? When Justine’s captured by the bandit, and de Sade gets across the idea of a blowjob without using one concrete anatomical reference. I loved that.”

And thus it went on, impromptu critiques and appreciation of the works of a man who’d scandalized a continent, whose debauches were legend, whose name itself had enriched the vocabulary of the erotic. Time got away from them, and once she started to laugh as she imagined what by now must have been going through Jude’s mind downstairs. The poor woman frantic, calling paramedics, priests, a SWAT team. She should go quell Jude’s fears.

“I’m enjoying this,” he said at last. “I really am. You know the way you can just tell, sometimes, that you can talk to someone and let a half-hour go by and you won’t even know it? I knew you’d be someone I could talk to.”

“And how’s that?” She had to know. He was either far more intuitive than Jude, and most of the day-herd who muddled through downstairs, or she’d let something of night inside shine free.

“You didn’t look away on the street the other afternoon. You held your ground … and watched.” His eye contact was bold, candid.

She stood there, tongue-tip wedged between her front teeth, clothed yet her garments may as well have been sheer. Caught. She was caught. Knowing it had to come someday, but always taking for granted the person would at least have legs. Caught.

“It was the look on your face,” she whispered. “I — I didn’t even think you noticed me then.”

As he laughed and rolled his eyes, she found his easy candor extraordinary. And while she’d known plenty exhibitionists, she got no sense that his pleasure had derived from being watched. It had been grounded in the physical, she was sure of it.

“I get carried away sometimes. I really shouldn’t, but when it feels that good, and the mood strikes…” He shrugged, palms up. “You know, you may think it doesn’t, but your face gives you away too. Like does know like, when it knows what to look for. I don’t think I’m completely off-base here, am I?”

A blush threatened to warm her cheeks. Embarrassment? She’d not even thought it possible anymore. The challenge in her tone of voice was merely affectation: “What is it you think you see?”

He appraised. “In your eyes. It’s always in the eyes. This look when your guard slips. Something unsatisfied, maybe a little angry. Okay. I know — it’s like someone just stole the last sliver of chocolate torte right out from under your fork.”

Ellen’s laugh was soft, low, throaty, half-pleasure and half-challenge. Chocolate and sex. This man may have had no legs, but he most definitely had her number.

“Look,” she said, “I have to be getting back to work. But I think I’m going to need your name … and some way of getting hold of you later.”

*

His name was Adam, and the address he gave took her to a dim neighborhood where her footsteps were solitary echoes against walls of brick and stone, where the pale faces of residents peeped out from behind barred windows. Everything malingered beneath a stubborn dusting of industrial fallout, and the last of the year’s greenery twined dead and brown around sagging wrought iron fences. Privacy would be valued here, and respected.

Adam played the proper host, skimming through his apartment and around corners as quickly as if he were on a basketball court. He mixed fine drinks, served hors d’ouevres that hadn’t come from a deli. He showed her his books, including the freshly reinstated Justine. He let her notice for herself his collection of fetish videos, and be the one to suggest slipping a disc into the player. There was a lot in the way of nipple clamps and whimpering, later the obligatory golden shower, and they were really just marking time here, weren’t they? She might’ve yawned once. Adam shut it off before the end.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve watched this,” he said. “Been awhile since it even did anything for me.”

“So why sit through this much if it’s that passé to you now?”

He shrugged easily. “Humoring you?”

“Oh, that’s a laugh,” she said, and she was Elle again, had become Elle without one bit of effort. Adam recognized this. Like knows like, and from here it was a very short trip to the bedroom.

Unclothed, his body was a peculiar marvel. Incomplete, but hard and sculpted, like a magnificent Greek statue that vandals had smashed in two. His genitals seemed all the more for it, large and immodest. His lower trunk flexed with new rhythms she’d never felt without the normal counterbalance of legs. As he meshed with her, braced upon two powerful arms, she could run her hands along the tapering curve of his back, cup the clenching muscles of his ass. Could run her hands farther down and cup the smooth rounded stumps where his legs just ended. She couldn’t think of him as an amputee. It felt as if Adam were complete, whole, and his hips met some other plane, where his legs existed in another dimension.

For hours they rolled, locking themselves into twisted new arrangements. Positions once denied her because of one set of legs or the other getting in the way were now accessible. And Adam was tireless, his commitment to ecstasy for a long time bordering on possession, then tipping far beyond. He had a whole body’s worth of passion compressed into half the mass. Each time he came it was with a straining convulsion of ardor, racked with groans and shudders that might’ve been endearing were they not so intensely animal. For any less experienced a woman, Elle decided, his plunge into the heart of his own pleasure would’ve been frightening.

But for herself? It was maddening, feeling for the first time ever that she had been left behind, that there was no way she could draw more from the most ravaging of fucks than her partner. He had eclipsed her, and if at the bookstore he’d nearly prompted in her a flush of embarrassment, he had now done the unthinkable: He had inspired envy.

I want whatever it is you have inside, she thought, and lay as stunned as if a new galaxy had opened before her. Lay with him in the sweat-soaked afterglow, her cunt lips puffy and throbbing. It lasted long moments, even as Adam stirred, even as he traced a hand along her face.

Even as he said, “If you stay with me, you … you may not be seeing me this whole for much longer,” and she found it a peculiar thing to say. But consider her life.

It certainly was no stranger than hearing someone confess his love.

*

Their relationship grew from that night, a happy co-existence of need and availability, willingness and daring. She didn’t know how long it would last, but this was the way things were done on their level. Emotions and attachment rarely figured in. It was more the delight of connecting with someone who didn’t judge, who understood that not everyone craved a permanent partner at his or her side through life. Who trusted the physical body’s immediacy more than a bamboozled heart.

It saved time. It saved money. It saved pretense.

Adam happily listened to her recount various liaisons at her nocturnal haunts, his erection like a club curving away from the base of his body. He would close his eyes, smiling as she conjured for him images that would drive the average man to frenzied fits of jealousy and despair: Elle, flogging the back of a submissive man until he rimmed her with a quivering tongue; coaxing an orgasm from the sluggish genitals of an uncut transsexual; bending a girlfriend over her lap and paddling her bottom cherry red while a nervous old couple watched from chairs.

Adam listened, and Adam trembled. She had read, one memorable lunch break, that artist Salvador Dali could think himself to orgasm. She wondered if Adam wasn’t far away from it himself.

“Your turn,” she demanded once, in an uncharacteristic sense of quid pro quo. “You’ve hardly told me a thing about yourself. I want to know all the dirty stuff you did before you met me.” Then, with a grin, “Besides pulling over for quickies with yourself in the alley.”

He pretended to consider sharing. “I know some people. You’re not the only one with a members-only pass.”

He teased her with silence then. Adam’s smile was annoyingly aloof; smug, even. He could be so superior when he wanted, all in fun, but he knew damn well how curious she was, that she wondered if he’d not had some esoteric training to channel sexual energy, let it feed upon itself like nuclear fusion. Something to do with Indian chakras, perhaps. Tantric sex magick. Teach me too, was the unspoken gist of her hunger. Teach me or I’ll strangle you.

“So what does it take to meet these people,” she asked, “or am I not good enough?” Guilt — that was a fair tactic. “You’re ashamed of me, is that it? Not worth fucking in front of your friends?”

His weatherworn face creased with a heartfelt smile. “You may be ready after all.” He ran a hand along her body, lingering here, there, anyplace where bones joined. “But then, Elle” — and it sounded anything but rhetorical the way he said it — “what have you got to lose?”

*

Adam took her to another unfamiliar neighborhood. This newest stop on the search for the bigger and better orgasm was a no-man’s-land where residential met industrial and both had died of blight. The building of intent was a church whose congregation had long since moved away, broken up, lost faith … something. They’d left behind an orphaned edifice surrounded by trees stripped bare by smokestacks that had themselves died, all of them now in a stark eternal autumn. The church sat gothicly stolid, sooty and gray.

“Privately owned now,” he said, and she wheeled him up a ramp at one side of the steps. It looked to be the only thing kept in good repair.

He unlocked the door, then stopped inside the nave, and before her eyes could adjust to the dimness, dangled a black strip of blindfold. “I’m afraid I have to insist.”

Elle stiffened. His demand reeked of threat — how well did she really know him? Curious women died all the time, led to hellish ends by their hungers and strangers who betrayed misplaced trust. But back out now and she was a coward, a poseur. Adam knew that, of course, could easily exploit her sense of self.

She bent at the waist, let him fasten it around her head, and a cool cathedral night descended upon her. “If you cannibalize me,” she said, “I’ll haunt you ‘til you die,” then she bit firmly on his ear. He just laughed.

Elle rested her hand on one of the grips of his chair as he wheeled forward, let him lead her along as if blind. They passed through swinging wood doors. She shuffled her feet, seeking clues. Further still, and in this dark nucleus of intuition the room felt vast — the sanctuary, but a sanctuary redefined. It smelled of sex and sweat and ecstasies.

Her senses expanded, took in the others that surrounded them. Whispers on the periphery, a crawling sensation of being watched, appraised, admired. The menace of the unknown. Movement — were these others drawing closer?

Adam stopped, had her lower to the floor while he swung from his chair and joined her. His mouth pressed roughly to hers, and his hands rose to strip her clothes away. Moments later his hands were joined by others. Naked, blind, she was laid back on cushions that shielded her from a floor that felt old, nobody’s priority.

“Beautiful,” came someone’s voice, “even if she is whole.”

She submitted to the hands that stroked, caressed, and in their numbers lost track of Adam. He was subsumed into the mass around her. Her back arched, her mouth parted to suck a finger that slipped past her lips. Her nipples stiffened beneath circling palms. Their hands gave a hundred delights, promised a thousand more.

They opened her legs then, swung her ankles wide, and as one checked her wetness, then murmured approval, she heard the rustle of someone else moving into position. She was entered then, and gasped. It was huge, pushing deep, deeper still. What began as a groan became a wailing cry, treading that delicious threshold separating rapture from agony. She was filled near to being split, yet still wasn’t aware of a male body hovering over her. There was no press of hips against hers.

Elle reached down with her hand, felt herself caught by Adam.

“One finger,” he whispered in her ear, and she found him again. “One finger’s all you get.”

Trembling, slowly rolling her hips with the rhythm set up by the massive phallus, she extended one finger. His hand guided hers … and she touched, glided a few inches. Flesh. It was flesh, firm and hard.

“Satisfied?” he asked, and she was and she wasn’t. Nobody could be that big … could he?

It wasn’t for the mind to ponder — she let go of the thought, surrendered to the here and now, the reality of sensation. She drew a deep breath and braced herself, elbows on the floor. Took it. Took it all in. Thrust back with muscled hips and grunts through feral clenched teeth, feeling as if she were at war with this monstrous thing inside her. Riding it until it brought her low and sent her soaring, and her voice pealed from rafters gone dead with dust.

Drenched in sweat, she fell back into someone’s arms, felt her lover withdraw, receding into a blackness that was total, her sole world. They waited until she got her breath, then a hand was on her chin, urging her lips to part. She obliged, eager to surmount exhaustion, prove herself worthy. Whoever these people were, she wanted to be one of them, take what they offered, give what she had. Her lips parted, and her tongue serpentined out to explore what her eyes were denied. She touched warmth.

It was at her mouth.

She smelled herself on the gigantic phallus, tasted herself a moment later. Opened wide, wider, could scarcely accommodate a few inches without her jaw cracking. What WAS it?, and she raised one hand, wrapped her fingers around it, felt firm flesh, muscle…

And it slowly withdrew, teasingly, before she could identify what seemed so familiar, so alien, so tantalizing. Around her, far and near, came soft murmurs of approval, appreciation, acceptance.

Adam’s hands were at the back of her head, gently undoing the knot, and when the blindfold was drawn away she blinked into the light, forgot to breathe. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this.

She found herself in the center of the old sanctuary, beneath soaring ceilings and the watchful eyes of suffering figures in the stained glass windows, some pocked with vandals’ holes. Pews and pulpit were gone, in their place a cushioned playground for these thirty-plus members who had welcomed her, even though she wasn’t at all like them.

Elle looked straight into the eyes of the young woman sitting in the V of her outstretched legs. So this was her lover? There was a thin, wanton quality to her as she reclined on her haunches, meeting Elle’s gaze with a hunger almost masculine. It was a role she played well. Elle followed the contours of her body, from the small breasts to the slim hips, to the tapering length of her left leg. There was no foot, just the smooth bony head formed by her ankle.

At the moment, quite wet.

And she had no right leg at all.

Elle whirled, met Adam’s smile. His pride. And let herself be taken into his arms. At least he had them.

Not so, many of those around her. They were all missing bits and pieces, some more than others. Feet, lower legs, or the entire limb. A few, like Adam, had neither. Others had sacrificed arms along the way. A couple, she saw, were but heads and a single arm attached to naked trunks. They were smooth and they were sculpted, every one of them, and if they looked upon her with anything, it was with longing. Not to be like her again … but to make her one of them.

“You do it to yourselves, don’t you?” she whispered to Adam. “These weren’t accidents.”

He grinned, got Freudian on her. “There are no accidents.”

“I don’t understand,” but then, in looking around at them, an entire roomful of broken statuary, she couldn’t say she didn’t like it. Whatever their reasons, this was commitment, so far beyond the Inner Circle that she could never go back there.

“You will,” Adam told her, then scooted off to new partners, as did the others. Recombinant pairs, trios, groups.

And she watched, a privileged witness.

They could do the most astonishing things.

*

Adam explained later, after the two of them had returned to his apartment. She was very quiet, cataloguing everything she’d experienced but finding that even in her vast erotic repertoire there was no place for this.

She drew herself together on the sofa, hands around a mug of coffee. Feeling loose inside, liquid, where muscles had stretched.

“How did it start?” she asked.

“How does anything start?” Adam said, then laughed softly to himself. “Transcendence. That’s what anyone wants out of life, isn’t it? Some way of getting past it. Or getting more out of it.” He paused, changed gears. “Ever hear of the Gnostics?”

She seesawed her hand.

“They were several splinter groups from the early Church, a couple thousand years ago. Didn’t last long, by comparison. The party line condemned them as heretics. Progressive in their day, in a lot of ways. But then they had this self-loathing kick they were on. Since the material world fell short of the spirit, it was bad, themselves included. So, automatically, anything that created them had to be bad too, so their lives were spent showing contempt for it all, until they could return to the spirit. Each branch had its ways. The ascetics denied themselves everything. The libertines, they pleasured themselves and fucked each other left and right. Overindulgence as the way to paradise … people after my own heart.” Adam winked. “And yours too, ma chérie?”

Elle smiled weakly; felt rubbery inside and out. “I don’t think my goals were that lofty.”

“Oh mine neither, hell no,” he said, laughing. “Anyway. Even among the Gnostics there was a lunatic fringe. Most all of them had the idea that the body was a prison that kept the spirit shackled, but this fringe, they did something about it. Had a habit of cutting parts of themselves away to reduce the size of the prison.”

She began to piece it together then, amputation in an erotic context: The less body one has to dilute pleasure, the greater must be its concentration in the flesh that remains.

“And so the two of those approaches got combined, over time?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Adam looked dumbfounded. “Who knows how anything really happens? It’s not like we trace ourselves back for centuries, nothing like that. It’s just something that someone stumbled onto awhile back, and found out … works.”

Languidly, Elle slipped from the sofa, wandered to a window, stared into the night. A sickly glow of sodium lights cast pools amid the blackened hulks of brick and steel, withered hives of isolation. How she hated it out there, its cold hard rot.

“Everything revives,” she said, “if you give it enough time.”

*

Their procedures were strictly of a back room variety, the amputations performed by a surgeon no longer allowed by law to practice his craft. Who still liked to keep his hands active. It was an ideal arrangement, and the discarded parts were safely burned in an industrial incinerator.

Elle had him begin with her foot.

She found that phantom pains were scarcely a problem when you had done away with something voluntarily. She grew new skin, and beneath it, it seemed, new nerves. It was an awakening, and while the world slept beneath snow, she was healed enough to give this new sexual organ its first workout. Found she could come without a single touch between her legs.

At the bookstore sympathy flowed freely, especially from Jude, and they all remarked what a wonderful attitude Ellen had in spite of her accident. She was deliberately vague on particulars, felt touched by Jude’s concern that it might now be more difficult for her to find a man, one who would overlook her handicap.

“If you have one tiny flaw,” Jude said, “they can turn around and be such cold-hearted bastards,” and then she smiled nervously and checked herself in a compact mirror. Ellen assumed it was time for another nip or tuck.

And Elle, with her mind already made up to proceed, wondered how she would ever be able to explain away the rest of her leg.

*

She was up and around again by spring, the itch of healing and new growth mostly behind her. Spending most of her free hours at the former church, crutching her way about as she explored both edifice and companions. They were an insular group, came to be with each other even when they left their clothes on. Of course — who else could they talk to? They’d cut themselves apart in more ways than one.

She often lay with Adam in the dying light of afternoon, both of them washed in colors the sun picked up as it streamed through stained glass. Overhead, the Virgin Mary held a little lamb; its fleece was dark with soot.

“You bastard,” she said, “you didn’t wait for me.” But there was no anger in it, and it made Adam smile, made him laugh.

He touched her face with his sole remaining hand, an act she would relish for however long it might last. Not forever. Elle curled in closer, pressed her mouth over the smooth pink stub that jutted from his left shoulder, flushing in pleasure as he gasped.

“Has anybody ever gone all the way?” she wondered. “Cut off everything?”

Adam nodded. “There’ve been a few.”

She groaned, murmuring wordlessly with fantasies of narrowing herself to a focused bundle of overloaded nerves, a single vast erogenous zone. “I wonder what it’s like.”

“I don’t know. But I get the idea that … that it’s like being a god.” Adam stirred, flexed; seemed to ripple with each caress of hand and mouth, breeze and dust mote. “By that time, you know, it’s up to everybody else to care for you. Take care of your needs. You’re mostly a receptacle by then.”

“What did the others say about it? And where are they now?”

“They quit talking,” he said. “And pretty soon … they quit eating. But they still smiled.”

They knew something, she thought. Or felt something the rest of us aren’t even close to yet…

Yet.

She forced his hand down to her hip, the exposed stump hot, tingling. Raw and alive with promise. “I’ll be better at it than you will. When I get that far. I’ll feel more than you.”

Said this with a tremor and a smile.

Could she cut herself down an inch at a time, feel gradations of pleasure with each successive chopping? If she lopped off a finger herself, would it be a new form of masturbation? Such paths to explore, down this avenue of the blade.

“We’ll just have to see about that,” he said, “won’t we?”

And Elle wondered if she could convince him to hang onto that one last arm at least until she went in for her other leg, so that Adam might be the one to hold the scalpel for that first ceremonial incision.

That would be divine.

It would almost be something like love.

Childhood At The Lost And Found

His favorite thing to watch is MTV and he likes it best when they show the metal and the rap videos, because he sits in front of the tube and wonders what it would be like to step into their world. Those guys have the power and the women and the attention, all they need, and he thinks he’d like to try living with all those quotas topped out. Someday, maybe someday. Dad once bought him a guitar. It stands inside the closet, probably dusty by now.

Not that he doesn’t want to learn to play. It’s a white Fender Stratocaster, “Just like Jimi Hendrix used to play,” the salesman supposedly said, and that was enough to convince Dad of its merits at the pawnshop. But one of the strings was gone and another one broke before Dad got it home, and now he doesn’t quite know how to restring the thing or tune it if he did, and even so, no one said anything about lessons and he’s not about to mention it to Mom and Dad because they’ll just say something like, “Don’t be ungrateful. Isn’t the guitar enough for you?”

He hears them talking upstairs in the kitchen, and they’re using that tone of voice again, and he knows his number is about to be called. He leans forward and turns down the volume on MTV because once they appear at the top of the stairs, that’ll be the first request anyway, so might as well beat them to the punch.

Sure enough, seconds later there’s Dad at the top of the stairs, he can hear the footsteps and then the pause, like his old man is gauging decibels and finding them within the acceptable range and is vaguely disappointed about it. And then he’s calling down, “Alex, come up here a minute.”

So Alex leaves his traditional perch and saunters upstairs, forsaking Marilyn Manson on the tube for the real live dynamics of home. The kitchen is bright with tile and gleaming with chrome, and he doesn’t feel comfortable in here because he’s never very hungry these days, and anyway, he clashes with the decor since he’s wearing a ripped black T-shirt and black jeans with the knees wearing through and his hair is kind of spiky and once they said he looks like he came to vandalize the place instead.

Dad is pointing toward one corner, wearing that face again, and he’s saying, “You do remember that the trash is your responsibility, don’t you?”

Alex nods meekly, mutely, looking at the can, and it’s not really that full, is it, but you’d think the thing was overflowing with used plutonium.

“Can’t you show a little more responsibility, Alex, you’re fifteen years old, for crissake,” Dad continues, so he nods some more and tunes Dad out because it’s the same speech he’s heard a trillion times before. Must be the first one they teach you in Dad School. The only thing about it that changes is his age, and it always seems to take about a century for that number to click up one higher.

Dad goes through it all note by note, and Alex figures he could probably recite it along with him, like the parishioners with the priest in Mass when they tried Catholicism a couple years ago. Mom backs him up, silently nodding, the oft-present cocktail glass in one hand and her Valium prescription in the other, and she wears her bleary eyes like a pair of false ones from a novelty shop.

Dad finishes and Alex promises to keep a more vigilant watch on the can in the future. Dad, his patriarchal duty exercised, smartly turns on one heel and exits the kitchen, probably back to his very own corner in the rec room. Alex cinches the trash bag and notices that Mom lingers behind.

“Are you feeling all right?” she asks, and she hardly slurs her words at all anymore, because now she’s a professional at this. “You look kind of pale.”

“I’m okay,” he says, and hauls the bag out of the can. He knows what’s coming next, and then it’s there, Mom’s clammy hand squelched across his forehead to see if he’s running a fever or coming down with chills. She shrugs. She can’t feel much, he’s figured that out by now.

“You’re always too pale,” she says, and nods to herself as if the act of nodding transforms it into gospel truth. “Maybe you should go to the doctor after school tomorrow.”

He tells her maybe he will, so she’s happy, and he totes the bag through the garage and drops it by the cans already awaiting pickup. Dusk has fallen, and Alex decides to hang outside in the yard for a while. He fishes into his sock for a joint and smokes it behind a tree in suburban peace and quiet. He watches a BMW that looks like Dad’s cruise past, and when it gets to the end of the block he pretends to press a button and vaporizes car and driver. Foom.

No doctors, he knows he told a lie. The only way he’ll go to a doctor these days is if he’s carried there unconscious and has no say in the matter. Doctors ask boring questions and make you take off your shirt and he doesn’t want that, and he’s not sick anyway.

Mom’s always finding some reason to suggest a trip to the doctor, and he always says he’ll go but never does, and she never questions why no office visits in Alex’s name show up on the bills. He doesn’t think she remembers most of the time. Sometimes he tells her he went and needs money to get a prescription at some pharmacy where they don’t have a charge account and she shells out the cash and he spends it on more important things. It’s a good arrangement.

He finishes the J and waits for most of the smoke smell to clear from his clothes and heads back inside. He watches MTV some more and vacates when they announce they’re going to play a pair of Michael Jackson videos, so he hunts for and finds the Very Important Paper he needs. He takes it upstairs to the rec room.

He was right, this is where Dad went. In his corner in the back, hunched over his flat worktop while working with plastic pieces and Testor’s glue and tiny bottles of paint. The fruits of Dad’s labors hang suspended by fine wires from the ceiling, models of Fokker tri-planes and Sopwith Camels from the time of the Red Baron, and B-17 Flying Fortresses and Stukas from World War II, all the way up to modern F-16 Falcon and Harrier jets. The ceiling back here is nearly full, and the models just keep coming. Now Dad is working on a kit proudly acquired last week, a scaled down version of a Stealth Bomber.

Dad is employed as a comptroller for some big corporation with a lot of interlocking squares in the logo, but Alex knows his secret. Dad really wants to be Tom Cruise. They have a DVD player hooked up to the TV but still only one disc, a copy of Top Gun. Dad has watched it at least twice a month for years, and Alex knows that whenever Dad watches he pretends he’s Tom Cruise shooting down MiGs and nailing Kelly McGillis.

“Dad?” he says, and waits and watches his old man pour himself into the model and close off all else. The model looks silly, like a chunkier version of Batman’s boomerang. “Dad?”

“Mmmmm?” comes an eventual reply.

“Got a minute to sign a paper for me?”

“Mmmmm.” Alex doesn’t know what this means, so he waits, and finally Dad joins two pieces together and says, “What is it?”

“It’s a permission release for my driver’s training class this final quarter.”

Dad still hasn’t looked up. Alex could be on fire and roast all the way down to charcoal before Dad would notice, and he finds this funny, the thought of a charred lump standing there between his father and the pool table begging for an autograph.

“Just put it on the edge of the table, I’ll sign it a little later.”

“But I need it tomorrow, and it’ll only take a second.”

“I never sign anything without reading it twice,” says Dad, words to live by, he’s using that particular tone of voice. “You’ll have it by tomorrow. Now … please?”

Alex bows out. He’s had his eyes crossed the whole time to see if the old man would notice, and it’s a bet he would’ve won. Tom Cruise would have noticed. Have to be alert to be a fighter pilot.

He checks on Mom and finds her zonked in the living room and so he lifts the half-smoked cigarette from her fingers so she won’t set the couch on fire. As she sleeps, gravity plays mischief with her face, but that’s for somebody else to lift.

When he returns to MTV, Michael Jackson is history, so he watches some more and calls a couple friends to see what’s new in their lives since school was out, and pretty soon he’s tired and it’s time to go to bed.

He digs into his sock drawer in the very back and pulls out a small plastic box full of shiny metal. He takes off his shirt and leans back on his bed. A moment later he selects a safety pin from the box and opens it and skewers it through a pinched fold of skin over a left-side rib. He licks the trickles of blood from his fingers and latches the pin closed again and watches MTV to wait until it quits bleeding. Just like after the ninety-odd pins he’s already put there.

Sometimes they get infected and he’ll wash the area down with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. It burns, but he doesn’t mind, likes it sometimes even, because it means he can still feel something, and it scares him to think of what it might mean if the pain were to stop.

Just like the blood. His scar tissue has gotten gnarly thick in places, and sometimes he’ll sink in a new pin and it won’t bleed, and this never fails to freak him out. No blood, like he’s dead inside. Somehow this signifies failure. Or maybe he’s like an atrocity-hardened veteran who can’t cry, because no matter what he sees it’s just not awful enough anymore. The body won’t turn loose of the liquids.

He admires the craftsmanship, though, and likes the way they look down his body in their orderly regimented rows, no haphazard placement. Some have been there so long it looks like the skin is growing around them, trying to swallow them and make them its own. He supposes this is what he wants. The only problem is, he has to watch where he rips his T-shirts, so Mom and Dad don’t see, because it’s his secret.

He should have thought of this a long time ago.

He knows that every single pin has its own special meaning.

One per night … for every day since midwinter that they have never told him anything remotely like they love him.

*

Mom eats lunch professionally, he decided this when he was ten. Long elaborate luncheons with other ladies like herself, where they plan benevolent crusades and their slogan is probably something like We Will Stamp Out Social Inequity In Your Lunchtime. He has no idea what they actually accomplish, and wonders if maybe what they do is plan to raise money to give their husbands rides in fighter jets to keep them happy in hopes they don’t stray off looking for the Kelly McGillises of the world as a consolation.

But whatever inequities they fight, he hopes they don’t eradicate them any time soon, because then what will they do? He can easily imagine some new group springing up to attend luncheons on their behalf and decide what’s to become of these poor displaced crusaders.

Mom has beat him home from school by all of five minutes, and doesn’t question if he went to the doctor or not. She’s happy and fired up, and he suspects that the main reason she attends the luncheons is so she can examine her own life on a comparative basis and feel reassured that it is superior to most everyone else’s who is there.

“Another divorce in the works in that group,” she tells him with no small amount of glee, then tells him who. It’s no one he can recall her mentioning before.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Alex says but doesn’t mean it, because it sounds like par for the course.

“Pretty soon I’m going to be the only one there who’s never needed a divorce lawyer.” She beams and goes for the Seagram’s. “Aren’t you proud of your mother for that?”

“Proud,” he murmurs.

She pours over ice. “An eighteen-year marriage, still as intact now as the day of the ceremony. These days that’s quite an accomplishment. Have you seen my Valium?”

He spits out a likely location, mostly out of reflex, and when she checks, it’s there and she downs a couple. Mom has three separate prescriptions from three different doctors that she fills at three different pharmacies and she still can’t keep track of them. Once he told her she should tie the bottles with strings to her wrists, like careless children with their mittens, and she actually thought he was serious. Worse, for a moment he thought she considered trying it.

“Someone said the high school prom is in three weeks,” Mom calls out. “You’re going, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t thought much about it.” The idea of putting on a tuxedo makes him queasy. He doesn’t bother telling her that the prom is a junior-senior activity and he’s only a sophomore, which is just as well, because what’s he supposed to do, whisk the girl there and back on his skateboard? Maybe next year he’ll feel better about tuxedos. At least he’ll have a car.

“Why don’t you ask Tawny Bradley?” Mom doesn’t let up. She can’t be thinking about grandchildren, though, because the notion of her becoming a grandmother would probably send her off seeking a fourth prescription. “Her mother was there today, and it didn’t sound like she was going with anybody yet. You’ve always liked her, haven’t you?”

Alex swallows a sick lump in his throat. “Maybe I will.” It’s the quickest way out of this, combination safety valve and backup parachute all in one. Maybe I will. It gets her off his back.

Mom knows good and well he’s always liked Tawny, or at least used to. Alex and Tawny went to the same gradeschool, where he developed a giant industrial strength crush on her in fifth grade, and she pretended not to notice that he was alive.

He made the mistake of confiding this unrequited love to Mom and Dad, as he was naïve in those days, and the memory still claws at him as viciously as a tiger. There was a night when they bought him a tape recorder because they said it might do him good to record some of his class lectures, and he looked at it thinking But I’m only in fifth grade, and they were all three sprawled out on the family room floor so they could show him how it worked. For some reason Tawny’s name came up and he remembers that he blushed and before he knew it the tape was rolling and Mom was singing her name over and over and he was absolutely mortified. Then Dad joined in like he was a bass singer for some dinosaur 1950s group and he was crooning, “Tawny, I neeeeed you,” and they kept it up because they found it so amusing, and all the while his thin, piping voice rose to a frantic screech begging them to stop while on the tape he fancied he could hear the sizzle of tears as they vaporized down his burning cheeks.

It’s probably the one thing he can never forgive them for, because even today whenever he talks to a girl he remembers the shame he felt that night that love was somehow wrong and something to hide and they made him cry for wanting the girl two rows over to notice him. So if they never have any fucking grandchildren it’s their own fault, theirs and the Sony Corporation’s.

He’s about to go downstairs to his room when he looks back and sees Mom standing in front of a hallway mirror looking over her shoulder at her behind and she shifts to catch the view from various angles, and the Seagram’s sloshes in her glass. “Do you think I need a butt tuck?” she asks.

He doesn’t know what to say because he’s not used to looking at Mom’s ass that way and it makes his cheeks burn all over again. He wonders how his friends see her, because sometimes he’ll notice that some of their moms look pretty decent and he’ll entertain thoughts of them that involve anything but maternal activities and wonder if he’s suffering from an Oedipal Complex, once removed. Mom stretches the fabric of her dress taut over her rump and seems satisfied with the way it looks and he fleetingly wonders if she’s trying to seduce him, and fears that if she is and something happens, she’ll find out about the safety pins.

“No, I don’t think I do, maybe I just need to get serious about my tennis again.” She nods at her reflection and cinches the dress about her waist and hips. “Good thing I stopped at one kid.”

He leaves her standing there and hurries downstairs and finds last year’s high school yearbook and carries it into his bathroom and locks the door. He finds the picture of Tawny Bradley and drops to his knees while staring at the picture and frantically whacks off into the toilet and then flushes the evidence of his crime. As the remnants of his seed swirl downward, he wonders if any illegally aborted fetuses are down below, and if they feel anything, and if they do, if the sewer is anything like the womb.

*

He’s a sidewalk surfer, and Friday after school he rides his skateboard to the mall. As sometimes happens, he has trouble with the electric eye door openers at the main entrance. He thinks it’s kind of ha-ha funny and kind of weird funny, but lately they don’t want to open for him. He wonders if maybe they operate on the principle of scanning for personality instead of for bodies, and if he has problems because they don’t see his because it’s not really there. But he’s learned how to beat the system by holding up the wide flat top of his skateboard and that fools the sensors. In he goes.

He feeds a few quarters to the arcade and when he passes by Frederick’s he peeks out of the corner of his eye at the mannequins and what they’re wearing, and pretty soon he’s thirsty and gets a giant cherry Coke and takes it into the record store. He’s not supposed to have food or drink in here, but most of them know him so it’s cool. He’s in luck, Allison is working, and she waves to him from the checkout counter and he hears her tell her co-worker that it’s time for her break.

He’s known Allison almost ever since he can remember, because they grew up in the same neighborhood until Alex’s parents became more upwardly mobile than Allison’s, so it’s not like she’s a girl so much as that she’s just Allison. Her hair is magenta, and her face is as pale as a china doll’s and looks like she’s still about twelve years old.

She motions him to follow her into the back room. It’s off-limits to non-employees but the main manager is on vacation this week, she explains, so everybody has a grand time breaking as many rules as they can get away with, and Alex wishes he’d brought in some greasy food, too.

They talk for a while and then he gets bold and decides to share his secret with her because secrets that only you know aren’t really secrets at all, only obscure trivia. Allison will be safe. She does mushrooms with her father. Nothing surprises her.

“What do you think about this?” he says and tugs up his shirt to show her the carpet of safety pins.

Allison stares for a moment, then says, “I didn’t know you were into punk.”

“I’m not, really,” he says.

“Wow. It still makes a statement. Wow.” She reaches out and touches a few of them and her fingers are cool. “What are they for?”

He tells her how he puts in one per night and why he does it, and she nods and says, “It still sounds pretty punk to me.” So he tells her he didn’t get the idea from hardcore punks at all, even though it may look like it at first glance. Alex explains how back in the winter he was looking for an alternative to MTV just to prove to himself that his mind wasn’t a one-track echo and that he ran across the Discovery Channel. They had all kinds of interesting stuff, like headhunters in the interior of Borneo and primal religious drug use in Amazon rain forests and all kinds of things he never even dreamed went on in the world, and then he really got entranced when he saw something about a tribe in Africa that practices ritual scarification. He tells her he likes their idea of resculpting your body to break up the monotony of skin and that it can be linked with spiritual meanings and symbolize what matters.

“I guess you’re right,” Allison says, and then adds, “Any old wimp can get a tattoo or a navel ring.”

He can tell she honestly approves and then she says how three years ago she threatened her parents that she would get a bone through her nose and they talked her into just getting a few extra holes pierced up the outer rim of her ears instead, which was all she’d really wanted in the first place.

Breaktime is over soon and she has to rejoin the other kid at the counter, because even though the managers may suck, the rest are generally careful not to shaft each other. She hugs him and tells him to maybe come back after she’s off work and maybe they can hang out together awhile. Alex browses and buys a new CD by some band he’s never heard of, mainly because he likes the song titles, such as “The Blood is the Life” and “Ride the Meathook,” and thinks maybe they’ll become his new anthems.

He leaves the mall and discovers that way out in the parking lot a small crowd has gathered around a well-dressed preacher sermonizing from atop his van. Alex skates up to listen to the message, which some are heckling and some are amening, and it turns out to be the evils of demon rock and roll.

Alex yawns. The preacher goes on to cite statistics compiled by organizations Alex has never heard of, and tragic incidents he’s never heard of either, all irrefutable evidence of how demon rock has festered like a sore in the minds of America’s youth and turned them all into a horde of disrespectful, wayward delinquents who cause their long-suffering parents to wring their hands in anguish. The preacher explains how he subscribes to more than a dozen rock magazines and how appalled he is at the things he reads there, and then he asks for contributions, presumably so he can continue to subscribe to his magazines and continue to be appalled all for the good of America’s children. Alex leaves.

He surfs the sidewalks home wishing he’d brought his Walkman along so he could pop in the new CD and fester some more, but wishing won’t make it happen, so he hurries home and walks into the house and it’s very quiet and that’s when he finds Mom on the couch with her empty glass and empty bottle of pills and realizes with a curiously hollow sensation that she has OD’d again.

*

Everybody who is anybody figures she simply lost track of how many she was taking and how much she was drinking. It’s happened before, though with less permanent results. Suicide isn’t really considered, after all, since she’s left no note, and anyway, she didn’t exactly make it all the way to the morgue.

She’s brain dead, the doctor tells Alex and his father, and the first thing to pop into Alex’s mind is I could’ve told you that years ago. He hates himself for it a moment later and tries to remember something from when they tried Catholicism so he can do penance, but his memory of it isn’t that good.

Dad takes leave of absence from work and spends a lot of time at Mom’s bedside and holds her limp hand and stares into a face that not only doesn’t recognize him, but worse, won’t even acknowledge him. Dad doesn’t shave much anymore, and after a couple weeks, Alex thinks maybe Dad should at least keep himself maintained, or else Mom will wake up and not know him for real. Pretty soon, Dad doesn’t talk much anymore, either.

Alex keeps his own vigils and stares down at her, with tubes in her arms and up her nose, and it’s like a time machine. He remembers staring down at her in much the same way years before, only his face was much closer to the bed in those days because he wasn’t as tall, and he would shake her and call to her and she would groan and stir and her breath would smell like bad medicine and eventually he would toddle off to fix his own breakfast.

The weeks go by and the days get longer and hotter and little by little they don’t sit at her bedside as much as they did in the beginning. Alex thinks it’s like going to visit a grave, only the body’s on top instead of underground.

Pretty soon it’s summer and Alex is out of school and he’d just as soon still be going, because there’s even less incentive now for getting up in the morning. He can’t really get excited about hanging out at the mall from opening until closing.

The house reminds him of some story he read or movie he saw, he can’t recall which. But it took place during the Civil War, in a house straddling the Mason-Dixon line, half in Union territory and half in Confederate. One brother was for the North, the other for the South, and so they each lived in their separate halves for the most part and pretended the other did not exist. Alex now understands what that must’ve been like, and thinks maybe the Civil War still rages, in spirit if not in strategy and tactics.

There’s probably no point to continuing his rituals with the safety pins, but old habits are hard to break.

Dad spends most of his time at home at his worktable in the rec room, and overhead fly his plastic dreams, frozen in time and motion, and instead of winning dogfights and Kelly McGillis they collect only dust. Sometimes Alex wanders in and watches him stare down at scattered pieces of the Stealth Bomber model, like he’s trying to assemble them by sheer will of the mind.

The rest of the time, Alex watches MTV and the Discovery Channel. They’re a lot more interesting than Dad. He cries, too, sometimes, lets the tears drip down his body while he’s shirtless, and he tries to joke with himself by saying it’s a good thing the safety pins are stainless steel.

“Dad,” Alex says one day, and Dad is hunched over his table and has needed a haircut for a long time. “Dad? Do you think she did it on purpose?”

There is no answer.

“Do you think she really just wanted to sleep forever?”

Alex doesn’t know why he’s trying, but trying seems more important than getting an answer. He feels like an explorer, climbing to the top of Everest in a blizzard. He’s a bold adventurer.

Finally Dad looks up, and his eyes are ringed with dark circles that look like bruises.

“She needed to be watched more,” he finally says. “She needed to be watched. Very fragile, you know. I should have watched.”

It’s all Alex can coax out of him, and Dad repeats it several times, and finally his old man clambers atop the worktable and starts flailing at model airplanes. His arms wildly windmill about and plastic clatters and then plastic flies and airplanes are going into crashdives left and right. Dad looks like King Kong at the end of the movie as he snatches a Sopwith Camel free of its little cable and flings the bi-plane across the room to shatter against the fireplace hearth.

Dad can reach no more, so he leaps down in a rage and grabs a cue stick from the pool table and trashes yet more planes and Alex covers his ears and wails as if he really were in a war zone, and finally Dad falls sobbing to the floor, his fury spent. Alex looks up, and most of the planes are downed, with occasional chunks of debris still dangling from the wires, and now Dad looks like what he really is: a demented little boy in a room full of broken toys.

Dad cries for several more moments and then scrambles about the floor, scooping up the broken models and cradling the wreckage to his chest. He stares off into space, damp lines running down his cheeks.

“What am I doing?” he whispers. “What am I doing?”

He gathers what he can, whatever he hasn’t overlooked because it’s too little or too far-flung, and he carries the whole jumble back to the work table and lets it clatter into a heap. And there he sits, while Alex stares, Dad, looking sorrowfully at all the broken pieces.

“I need more glue,” he says at last and gives a decisive nod of a chin that used to seem a lot firmer and a lot stronger to Alex’s eyes. “That’s it. I need more glue.”

Without another word, he rises and walks past his son and a minute later comes the sound of the BMW starting up and then Dad is gone.

Alex rises too, wanders over to the worktable and delicately fingers the broken plastic. Last remnants of a mismatched squadron, sleek on the outside and hollow on the inside.

In the last few years, Alex has been astounded at how little he weighs. At least it seems that he should weigh more, that there should be more mass to him since he’s flesh and blood and bone. Now, though, he’s not so sure. And he wonders if maybe he’s hollow too, because now it feels that over all these years, these fifteen years, he was just another model. Dad’s big project from 1982.

Is he real? Does he exist? He wonders like he’s never wondered about anything. Just one word from Dad would clarify matters. Just one word might work wonders. Just one word.

Alex goes to the garage and brings in the ladder and sets it up in the rec room. He looks at all the tiny wires hanging down and frees up the few that still have bits of plastic attached. Dozen and dozens of tiny cables. And their hooks.

Maybe it will hold and maybe it won’t. At least he knows he’s certain to get a good distribution of weight.

He positions himself at the apex of the ladder and lies out flat, balancing precariously, and now he’s parallel to the ceiling and looking at all the eye-screws Dad has imbedded up there to hold his treasures.

Alex takes each cable and meticulously hooks them into the safety pins.

And when he pushes away the ladder he feels important at long last, and thinks that whenever Dad makes it back home, he’s bound to take notice this time.

Androgyny

The afterglow fades, always.

The quicker it happens, the more compulsively you’re left to wonder about the night’s beginnings. Even if the object of earlier affections is still lying beside you, cuddled in the crook of your arm, it doesn’t matter. The afterglow fades, and the questions turn cruel and demanding:

How did this happen? What twist of fate and chemistry turned us from strangers into lovers in a few hours?

Gary knew it would happen all over again the moment he saw her. Some bar on Basin Street, past the French Quarter’s upper boundary. Fewer than a dozen drinkers, most of them hardcore, beyond redemption. Lights were low, smoke was thick, exotically resilient bacteria grew on the floor.

Look at her clothes and you wouldn’t think she belonged. Look in her eyes and you reconsidered. Slumming, like Gary, for the fun of whatever waited to be found.

It took twenty minutes of flirtatious eye contact through the smokebank before she came his way, taking the stool next to him. This he took as a good omen: She was no hooker. No hooker with her looks would work this stretch, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have wasted twenty minutes. Gary may have been new to New Orleans, but knew that some games were universal.

“What are you?” was the first thing she said.

“Career? Astrologically? How do you mean?”

She smiled, traced a lacquered fingernail around the rim of her glass, some fruity concoction, sweet contrast to his whiskey sour. “You’re not a tourist, I can tell that right off. No tourist ever comes around here unless it’s some conventioneer drunk out of his mind. But you’re not a native, either. Are you.”

“Long-term transient,” Gary said, and clinked his glass to hers. “But not all who wander are lost.”

One eyebrow ticked upward as she appraised and approved, or pretended to. “You’re literate enough to read bumper stickers, at least.”

Talk progressed, easy and loose and non-binding. They traded names, Gary for Lana, and libidos simmered during the seductive ballet. He liked best these encounters where roles were blurred. Who was predator, and who the prey? A tossup, one answer as valid as the other. In the end, he supposed it didn’t matter, as long as the orgasms were mutual.

Six years of high-ticket vagrancy had shuffled him through a succession of primary, secondary, and graduate schools of one-night stands and short-term loves. Money was no problem; an umbilical credit card kept him linked to the New England bank account. He never had to stick around when it no longer seemed wise. He didn’t want to leave behind a legacy of pain any more than he wanted to lug one around inside.

“You like riddles?” she asked after four rounds of drinks had worked their magic.

“Usually. Let’s hear it.”

“It’s not easy.” Lana smiled mischievously. “But. Do you know what the worst part of being me is?”

“The worst thing, let’s see.” He studied her a moment, the fine-boned face, the tall straight posture, the so-black hair, shoulder length. She didn’t appear to have lived too harsh a life thus far. Her eyes knew pain, though, and her soul was evidently as on display as her small cleavage. “You don’t know how to love.”

A coy shake of her head. “Wrong. So wrong.”

“You’ve never been in love.”

Another shake. She was enjoying this immensely. Sometimes this was the most fun game of all, opening yourself like a maze and escorting strangers into blind alleys.

“You don’t think,” he tried slowly, “you’ll ever find the right one to love.”

Lana tapped her chin, half conciliatory. “You’re still off, but you’re getting warmer.”

He offered a few more stabs at it, then gave up. Lifted his drink and swirled it, watched it in near-hypnosis. “I can think straighter later.”

“Love and friendship,” Lana mused, obliquely avoiding the answer to her challenge. “They’re opposites, in a way, you know.”

He professed skepticism.

“Really. Joseph Roux, in Meditations of a Parish Priest, said, ‘What is love? Two souls and one flesh. Friendship? Two bodies and one soul.’” Lana nodded. “I believe that, with all my heart.” She dropped her hand to his thigh — that thrilling rush of first contact. “How ‘bout you? Do you believe it?”

“It could work on me, give it time.”

And what would it soon be for them, he wondered. Love, or friendship? Two bodies, or one?

Snap judgments were risky, but he thought he’d be amenable to either. Something about her eyes, her manner, her tip-of-the-iceberg hints that, for the right person, she was much more than someone who merely wanted compatible flesh to sustain her until morning light. A needle-in-the-haystack find among French Quarter sin — someone worth sticking around for.

“Well, if you can believe that,” she said, leaning in close to whisper, “then I have so many secrets to share with you.”

Gary watched, listened, through dual filters: The Romantic longed to believe her, while the Cynic thought it mere puffery. Or worse yet, sweet bait so she could lure him to a partner in hiding and they would mug him.

He would bite. He would swallow. Have a little faith.

Soon they danced, pressed close as they leaned together and slow-shuffled about the floor, glowing with neon bleedthrough from the street. They were watched by the dismal eyes of other drinkers, weary survivors clinging to rafts of Jim Beam and Gilbey’s. The jukebox scratched out the mournful, gin-soaked laments of Tom Waits, the quintessential skid row troubadour.

She later led him out back to an alley with too little light, and for a moment he was sure that his judgment had failed him. But no knife appeared, no lead pipe fell from the shadows.

Lana drew down his zipper and, heedless of her dress, dropped to both knees before him in the grime. Overhead, the moon looked sickly, the color of whiskey.

Yet finally he knew that, for a while at least, he’d found a new home.

*

The afterglow faded, as always.

To his credit, it had taken longer than usual, four months of cohabitation in Lana’s apartment. Contact with the seductive unknown usually had that effect.

Lana had shared her most intimate secrets a couple of days after that first night. Stunningly unexpected though they’d been, they hadn’t been enough to send him packing. He was, by then, head over heels in … fascination, he supposed. This was too different to turn away from just yet, without exploration.

Scratch the surface of the mundane, and the underground of counterculture was revealed, rich and teeming. This was the landscape Gary had sought to travel, making up for the stultified upbringing of his first twenty-one years.

Scratch the underground and peel it back, and there was the land where Lana dwelled.

But the afterglow fades. He had bitten, he had swallowed. Best to move on before the emotional hooks barbed him any deeper. April had brought the warmth and renewal of spring after a winter of oddities. Now came the famous final scene, lovers at bittersweet poles, opposites that once attracted and now repelled. Gary had played it out any number of times. Never pleasant, just inevitable.

“How can you do this to me now?” Lana wailed. “My operation’s just a week away!” Her eyes were dazed and wide, glassy with psychosexual trauma. Tears were abundant.

In the center of the living room, Gary held her tightly. That desperate agony of final contact. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You knew what I was like before…”

Lana, snuffling and huge-eyed: “I … I just wish I could have children with you, that might make all the difference in the world … wouldn’t it?”

He bit his lip, hating it when she talked this way, blind to her limitations. It wasn’t healthy.

“Don’t live in a fantasy world, Lana,” he said gently. “Climb out, please.”

He crushed his eyes shut a moment, and when he reopened, Lana seized him by the shoulders, a peculiar fire seeming to ignite within her. One last, savage kiss, and when she tore away it was not without disdain.

“Then go.” Her voice had grown uncharacteristically husky.

Gary retrieved his two bags; a tendency to travel light. What is love? Two souls and one flesh. There was no worse pain than the rending of one back into two.

Out the door, then into a musty corridor whose air always seemed yellow. It led him to the elevator, an ancient suicidal machine, a wrought-iron cage that clanked and shuddered down a gloomy open shaft. A rehearsal for death, condemnation, descent.

The gunshot seized him head to toe.

Hand shaking, Gary levered the elevator to a grinding halt and reversed directions. Dust sifted from the cage’s upper frame. He knew what he would find back upstairs. It had been no ruse, no shot fired into a pillow to plead for attention.

Strange. Mode of suicide was traditionally a great divider between the sexes. Severe bodily damage — gunshot, car crash, and the like — was usually the province of men. Women tended to opt for neater methods — pills, carbon monoxide, or at least precisely opened veins in the bathtub.

Gary was too shocked to weep just yet. He stood in the doorway, one pale-knuckled hand clenched on the knob. This was the most masculine thing Lana had ever done.

The tableau before him was grisly, fodder for scandal and legend had it occurred in a small town. Here, though, few would care at all; back page news at best. The only sensibilities that would get a tweak were those of the police.

Lana lay half-sprawled onto the sofa, legs askew at odd angles. One small breast bared. Smoking gun in hand, its barrel having left a crimson fan on the wall behind her. Eyes open, bulging violently. Adam’s apple absurdly prominent. Her skirt was bunched messily around her hips, showing silken panties.

And that unmistakable bulge of male genitalia.

*

“What you’ve got to keep remembering is that you are not responsible for anyone else’s happiness but your own.”

Gary nodded like a man who’d heard all this before. “It’s not the happiness part I have a problem with. It’s the responsibility for her killing herself.”

Across the desk, uncluttered and orderly, Dr. Thatcher laced her fingers. “But it was Lana’s decision. You didn’t put the gun in her hand. You never even knew she owned it.”

Gary slumped in his chair, glanced about the room. For a psychiatrist’s office, it appeared remarkably non-academic. The furniture was shiny and modern, more in keeping with a corporate reception lobby. Even the couch was out of the way, in a corner in case someone felt their therapy mandated the horizontal — a nod to tradition, but only grudging. Of this, Gary approved, being no respecter of tradition. Tradition was too often a mask worn by regression.

“She was an adult who made her own decisions. And as painful as it may be to come to terms with, she lived and died according to those decisions. Her own. Not yours.”

“God knows I’ve never been the most reliable guy to get involved with. I’ve always tried to make that understood up front, at least.” Gary had been giving his hands a workout, tugging at fingers and knuckles. “But Lana … I’ve never had anybody place so much importance on me. I wasn’t used to that. Almost like she idealized our relationship.”

Dr. Thatcher nodded. Her hair was trimmed into a short blond helmet, and it wavered as one distinct mass. “That’s common among transsexuals. When a relationship is going well, there’s no greater person on earth than their partner. If it’s going badly? Then their partner is just this side of an ogre.”

Gary rose from his chair and paced to the window. Outside, Spanish moss swayed from willow branches in warm spring winds, like tattered flags on the masts of rotting ships.

Painful business, this visit to Lana’s psychotherapist. Catharsis, purging the guilt, whatever. Lana was two days gone, and on a whim Gary had phoned Thatcher to beg for the slot that Lana would never honor this week. There had been no mutual friends to speak of, none that he could open up to. Family? Laughable. He wasn’t even sure that he could’ve confided with Lana’s shrink had it been a man. That underlying shame of admitting the masquerade’s success, of having been duped into lusting for a guy in drag … and after he found out, it didn’t matter. Difficult to own up to that before another male. When he had entered Thatcher’s office, first greeted her, he’d had a brief impulse to request that she hoist her skirt. Double checking.

“It might also help you to realize that transsexuals can be suicidal over a long timespan. Feeling trapped in the wrong body isn’t a problem they can resolve as easily as a nose they don’t like. They’re at constant war with themselves, and with the perceptions of what their families and society expect them to be. Not all of them can shoulder that heavy a burden for long.”

Gary leaned against the window. “Lana didn’t much care what anybody on the outside thought. She had her friends in the same position she was in, these people she used to hang out with at some club called the Fringe. That seemed all the acceptance she needed.”

“I know. She was very stable in that respect.”

Gary turned from the window. “Lana wanted to have children with me. Does that sounds stable to you? The biggest miracle since the Virgin Birth?” He shook his head, his voice hoarse. “How could you approve her final surgery under those conditions?”

Dr. Thatcher smiled gently. She was good at that — years of practice, he reasoned. “Because it wasn’t a delusion. She wanted it desperately, but I never felt she for a moment believed it possible. Other than that, she was one of the most psychologically sound candidates for gender reassignment I’ve ever counseled.”

Gary slid along the wall, idly stopping to tinker with the fronds of a fern. To straighten a de Kooning print, level to begin with. Gradually easing back to the chair.

“She had this dream of perfection. Once she was healed from the surgery, everything was going to be perfect. Kept saying, ‘We’ll be wonderful, everything’ll be perfect, as soon as I get my pussy everything’ll be perfect.’”

“That’s another thing, Gary. People like Lana often have an unattainable ideal of perfection. Just as an anorexic always sees herself as too heavy. Some transsexuals are never satisfied with the results, particularly with the male-to-female procedure. They can go through years of cosmetic operations trying to reach a pinnacle of femininity. That hope can be all that keeps them going.”

“What happens if the hope runs out?”

Thatcher flexed her fingers, rested composed hands atop her desk. “Sometimes they kill themselves then.” An uneasy pause. “Lana’s emotions wouldn’t necessarily have stabilized after the vaginoplasty. For her, perfection might’ve been one more operation away. Or another. Or the next. Your continued presence in her life would not have been her salvation … because it had no bearing on her self-image.”

Gary ran his hands through his hair until it stuck out in mad winglets. Maybe he could shave it off, buzz it to stubble, the rudely bared head a sign of penance. He was finding absolution tough to come by here. This was like a hydra. Hack off the head of one source of guilt and another two sprouted to take its place.

Dr. Thatcher shifted in her chair, seeming to sense his reluctant self-forgiveness. “Why don’t we go back, focus on the beginning of your relationship and see what it was founded on. You say you made no promises of permanence. How did you meet her?”

“I would’ve thought she’d told you that.”

“She did. I’m interested in seeing how you perceive it.”

Gary settled back, absently scratching at his chest, stomach. Itchy under his shirt. Maybe a rash, guilt surfacing as physical symptoms. His nipples ached. There, Dr. Thatcher, how’s that for traditional Freudian symbolism?

“I met her in a bar near the French Quarter, four months ago. A straight bar, not one of the places where the gay-bi-TV types usually hang out.” He wet his lips, felt drymouth coming on. “Hell, how does anybody meet in a bar? We made eye contact, started talking. I thought she was gorgeous. Sure, there was something different about her, something exotic, but I never would’ve guessed. Later I found out she’d been on estrogen for over a year, had her breasts and the smooth skin. Her voice seemed natural enough. She’d been living totally inside her female identity all that time. Already gotten rid of facial and body hair. How could I have known?”

Dr. Thatcher nodded. “She was extremely convincing.”

“We danced, and started fooling around. Pretty soon we went out back, into this alley doorway, and she … she performed oral sex on me.”

For no more reaction than Thatcher showed, he may as well have been describing a trick knee. “And did you initiate any reciprocal sexual contact?”

“I tried to. She said it was her period. We went our separate ways that night. But I went back the next night, same place, hoping she’d be there. And she was.” Gary smiled, bittersweet. “We got drunk, and she went back to my hotel with me. The sex was the same, though, she said it was still her period.”

“When did you find out the truth?”

“The next morning. We were taking a shower. See, she had this trick. She’d push each testicle up into her pelvic cavity, then stretch her cock back between her legs and sort of keep it wedged between the bottom of her ass muscles. We were in bed, naked … and I didn’t know.”

“Until the shower. The act of coming clean.”

“The shower.” Only now did he start to blush. “Lana said she had a secret to share with me, and she thought I was ready. She squatted down and it all sort of … popped out into place. I think she just wanted to see what I’d do.”

“And what did you do?”

“I gagged. Dry heaved.”

“And then?”

“And then…? I rinsed out my mouth, and … I blew her.”

Thatcher and her amazing clinical nod.

“It wasn’t like I was thinking of her as a man, even though she told me her name was legally Alan, still, and she just made an anagram of the letters. To me she wasn’t a man, she was … was…”

“A woman with a penis?”

“Exactly. I’d never had a gay experience before, and I still didn’t think I had. I mean … look. I’ve spent the last six years living off a trust fund I got when I turned twenty-one.”

He backtracked for several moments, describing his earlier life, so different from the path he was now on. Born to a family of Delaware real estate barons, where mother and father advocated a hands-off policy of parenting, turning over such domesticities to hired help, while advocating stoicism and scandal-free civility for the good of the family name. Prep school uniforms were de rigueur, and polite conformity the norm.

“Twenty-one years was enough. I saw too many kids I’d grown up with turn into neurotic assholes. Centers of the universe. They might end up in the highest tax bracket, but I just knew that none of them would really live. I wanted to do a one-eighty away from all that. So I’ve spent the last six years trying everything I felt like I missed out on while growing up. Even if it was bad for me. And I’ve taken a special delight in things I know my family would hate. So, this? Lana? It was just so intriguing, I couldn’t leave it alone.” Gary spread his hands. “I don’t mean this to sound callous, but I went into my relationship with Lana like another new experience. Mostly decadent, but at the same time there was something hallucinatory about it. Sometimes even soulful.”

“Is that why you wouldn’t make any promises of something more permanent?”

“It was a fantasy. Something forbidden. You can’t live a fantasy every day of your life — it loses power then.”

“What about love? Did you love her?”

The toughest question of all. The two souls/one flesh proposition. He wandered back to the window, forehead to glass.

“I suppose I did. Yes. Yes. I did love her.” He shook his head and sighed. Scratched that nagging itch. “That was the problem, wasn’t it? Somewhere along the way I think I got scared of what that was going to mean.”

And wasn’t it the great human irony? Most of mankind viewing monogamy as right and proper, yet so many going to such lengths to sneak around it, to exploit the loopholes. While those who condemned it from the outset eventually succumbed to jealousies and the need to bond … only to later betray.

We never learn, he thought. That’s the only constant.

*

Lana was interred a couple days later, ushered into the afterlife by a minister who looked more befuddled than grieving. The square pegs of the world were always more difficult to eulogize.

The turnout was small, scarcely a dozen paying last respects under a sky that couldn’t make up its mind between bright and overcast. The sun played masquerades with clouds, and the air was gravid with the damp of a southern spring.

Beneath his shirt, the itch still nagged. Heat rash, perhaps, unaccustomed to such brutal humidity. He’d probably have to see a doctor.

He knew at a glance they were Lana’s nighttime friends, a trio in gray and black who oversaw the sendoff with a melancholic brooding. Beneath overcoats worn against the unpredictably hostile sky, they were of indeterminate gender, caught somewhere between the poles of male and female.

While circumstances may not have been the norm, the emotions of grief were universal — that longing to connect with others who had shared the now-dead. Once the service was concluded and the mourners turned toward home, he approached them, and their gazes ranged from guarded to inimical.

“Oh, look,” said one of the trio. Long blond hair, full red mouth, mascaraed eyes; male origins betrayed by a squarish jaw. “I bet I know who this is.”

The tallest of the three nodded. Dark hair cropped close, sparse stubble on the jaw. The hands were delicate, though, this one traveling the opposite road of change. “You’re Gary, aren’t you?” The voice fell between alto and tenor, a vocal netherland.

He said that he was, and while there was little warmth, the introductions were civil. The blond was Alexis, the short-haired one Gabriel. The third of their group — small and pale, hostile eyes red from weeping — was Megan. Ringlets of brown hair fell into her blotchy face, and she pushed them back with incongruently large hands, veined and knotty.

“Let me guess,” said Gabriel, appearing less accusatory than analytical. “You’re feeling guilty because you dumped her, and you think that’s why she did it.”

Gary frowned. “How do you know what went on between us?” This was either scary insight, or an unerringly accurate guess. “Lana did it … immediately.”

Gabriel shrugged, stared at the dead sky. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

“I’m sorry,” Gary said, and hated how lame it sounded. “I never meant to hurt her.”

“No, of course not,” Megan said. “She didn’t have feelings, did she? Just a new kind of thrill, until the new wore off.”

Gary stared her down until she closed her angry mouth. “I didn’t come here for a debate.” Then, to all three: “I can’t say I was perfect, but I never intended anything like this to happen. I did care for her.”

Alexis nodded. “But you didn’t truly understand her world. Did you?”

“The best I could.”

“No.” Gabriel shook his head. “If you’d really wanted to, you would’ve already met us. We didn’t see much of Lana the past few months. Those belonged to you. She subjugated herself for you. All so you wouldn’t be hit with too much at once, and go running.”

Gary took a step back from the rawness of the implication, that he was ignorant of the real Lana, as opposed to the Lana she had chosen to reveal. He’d thought all along she simply preferred being alone with him.

“I should go,” he whispered, and took another step.

“Why not join us tonight?” Gabriel said. “At the Fringe. You know that much about Lana, don’t you? How much she liked that place?”

“I know of it.”

“Then join us, why don’t you? Have a drink to her memory with the people who knew her better than you did.” Gabriel looked distastefully about the cemetery, all spires and vaults and crumbled beauty. “I think you owe her that much.”

“At least,” he said softly, and thought for a moment, then told them he would be there.

*

He carried the stares of Lana’s friends throughout the rest of the afternoon and into evening along a gauntlet of French Quarter bars, smoothing down the roughest edges of remorse and responsibility.

Mardi Gras was over by two months, but revelers still choked the Quarter’s streets, furiously bent on good times. The South had always seemed so fundamentally more sensual than New England, its passions ignited by a crueler sun, and allowed to boil out and flow and cool like sweat. Here the food was rich and spicy, full of delicious venoms that the heart embraced. Here Dixieland rubbed amiable shoulders with punk. Here an empty glass was intolerable.

Gary had lied, of course; had no intention of meeting them at the Fringe. To promise otherwise was simply the best way to save face, avoid conflict, for he felt low enough as it was. Sitting there baring his head and soul for them to whack on would do no one any good. He’d get along better on his own, never prone to crumbling into tears and begging strangers to listen to his woes. Let the drinks settle inside, then, and glaze him over with silent brooding.

The French Quarter, and Rue Bourbon. Strip shows and jazz bands and karaoke. He watched from the shadows while slow numbness crept in, absently scratching his chest, fighting that persistent itch. It took deliberate effort to stop and realize just how long he’d been at it — enough to make it second nature.

He rubbed again, probing with tender fingers.

Swelling. There was swelling going on under his shirt.

Gary rose to tread the churning sea into a bathroom that may have last been clean back when Louis Armstrong played. He stood before the cracked mirror and parted his shirt—

—and stared at the two feminine nipples jutting from his chest. Protuberant and erect, their areolae as large as silver dollars.

His reflection, staring. Cracked in the middle, two jagged halves misaligned at their juncture.

“She was contagious,” he muttered in cold shock.

And quickly reconsidered this afternoon’s lie.

*

Through a spitting rain, he found it an hour later, twice stopping street locals to point him in the proper direction. The Fringe had been built in a renovated warehouse downriver from the French Quarter. Night seemed deeper here, the air ancient. Few would ever come here by mistake.

Although Lana had spoken of the Fringe several times, he’d never accompanied her here. He supposed that she alone had been enough to sate his curiosity about her kind, so until tonight he’d had no real need of this haven for gender-benders, and those who sought their company.

Within its dark and hallowed walls Gary found a world of alternatives: music, clothing, anatomy. A maze of multiple levels in architecture, as Lana had described, each was dimly lit and an enclave unto itself. There was supposed to be some sort of garden atop the roof, where ephemeral couples might retreat for whatever liaisons their bodies, lacerated or not, would allow.

Gary bought a bottle of wine at the main bar, weaved through the open center where dancers writhed beneath black light and strobes to music that sounded like the roar of an industrialized armageddon. The volume could peel skin.

Here he was groped endlessly and let it happen, reeling with an intoxicated pleasure in so many sliding hands, so much sensory delight despite the known world of his own flesh turning strange on him. Here, at least, pretensions were few, the common denominator belonging to rhythm and movement and surrender. The real effort lay in pulling back, pushing on, remembering why he was here.

He found them near the uppermost levels, Gabriel and Alexis and Megan tucked into a secluded booth. One noticed him, then all watched as he approached their table and slammed down the wine bottle.

“Finally.” Gabriel looked pleased.

“We’re mourning the way Lana would’ve wanted us to,” said Alexis, the blonde, tipping a highball toward a forest of bottles and glasses, hours’ worth of bereavement. “Sit, sit.”

He glared down at them while fumbling with his shirt buttons.

Megan perked up, brushed ringlets of hair from her face. “I so don’t want this asshole at our table.”

“Megan,” chided Alexis. “Don’t be a bitch.”

Gary sat beside Gabriel, tense as a coiled spring. He left his shirt unbuttoned but draped shut, feeling steam build inside.

“After what he put Lana through?” Megan went on. “Whose side are you on? Lana was fragile.”

Alexis reached across the table, intimately touching Gary’s arm. “Lana was like a … a goddess to our little family. She was the first to get the go-ahead for her final surgery.”

Megan wiped her eyes, smearing mascara. “It should’ve been me. But no, my therapist says I’m not stable enough.” She gulped her drink in desperation. “He’s not satisfied with my reasons for the change. He says I’m doing it because as a boy I was so threatened by the thought of wanting to make it with my mother.” Hysterical laughter. “Freudian quack.”

“Answer me one thing,” Gary said, low and electrified. He yanked open his shirt to bare his chest. “Just what the hell is happening to me?”

They stared at his nipples, in full extension, plumped as though ready to nurse. By now a pattern of four more pink-brown welts had erupted beneath them, down his ribs, like especially prominent mosquito bites.

Alexis smiled broadly, mischievously. “Isn’t that sweet. You empathized with Lana more than we gave you credit for.”

“This is some kind of joke to you?” Gary shouted. In that moment he wanted to hit Alexis, woman-in-the-making or not.

“It must’ve been love.” Gabriel leaned in to dart his once-feminine tongue onto a nipple. Unexpected pleasure trilled through Gary, horrifyingly intense. For a moment he wanted to feel it again, ever the hedonist.

He snapped his shirt closed, head aswim. “But I’m not the one who was taking hormones.”

“When two people love each other,” said Gabriel, “a little bit of each one stays inside the other. From you, Lana took a certain amount of independence, I think.”

“And this is what I got from her? Tits?” His laughter rivaled Megan’s in hysteria.

“It’s much more than that, Gary, surely you can feel that by now,” Gabriel said.

Gary peered down his torso and felt a rush of vertigo. With a clearer head maybe he could make sense of this, pinpoint some allergic reaction as the culprit. But a clearer head was at least a morning away.

“I don’t want this, I don’t understand…”

Gabriel propped his head atop a loose fist. “Do you know what the worst part of being us is? The very worst aspect?”

The question sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Try for an answer, any answer: “Your body is wrong, a prison…? What? Just tell me.”

“That’s it for me, all right,” Megan said.

Gabriel cocked his head. “Not quite.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” Megan shrieked, then stood and whirled on Gary. “I hope you know someday what it’s like to wake up every morning with something like tumors hanging between your legs! Because that’s what these are to me!” Clumsily, she hitched up the tight black dress she wore. Her genitals were framed within a garter belt and the tops of her stockings. “These are wrong! I don’t want them and nobody will help take them away from me!”

Alexis rolled her eyes. “I hate when you’re like this, girl. You’d think it was PMS.”

Gary watched, mortified, as Megan lowered herself enough to plop her genitals, flaccid from estrogen, onto the tabletop. Something new in her eyes, though, a drunken madness made worse by grief.

“Nobody cares,” Megan murmured, “I’m a joke and nobody cares,” then she seized Gary’s wine to smash the bottle against the table’s edge. She held the dripping, jagged remnant and for a moment it gleamed like surgical steel.

“Just a few little cuts, it’s no big deal,” she said.

Blood was drawn at the first firm stroke, Megan’s face twisting into an agonized mask of rapture and liberation. Alexis screeched and pushed herself away in the booth. Gabriel reacted with more sorrow than shock, shutting his eyes as Megan continued to saw.

New sights, sounds, tastes, sensations … damn them all. This was too much. Gary bolted to his feet and reeled from the booth. Fixed his eyes on the way he’d come up and lurched toward it. A moment later a firm hand gripped his elbow to steer him another way.

“Let me help you,” said Gabriel.

He tried to wrest free. “I just want out of here.”

Gabriel held firm. “And this way’s quicker, I promise.”

Gary struggled another moment, then saw the exit sign glowing where Gabriel pointed, and surrendered.

Gabriel hustled him through the gathering crowd, and when they burst through the exit, released his arm. Now on the roof, Gary recalled Lana’s talk of the garden. The fresh air hit him like smelling salts, thick and tainted with the watery brown scent of Mississippi mud. It drew him on, and he lurched past greenery, shrubs and bushes and small trees in planters. Within, shadows moved to the rhythms of breathy moans, and he saw them: face to face, head to lap, groin to buttocks.

Help. He needed help. Medical help.

Near the far edge of the roof, Gary collapsed, spent and shaking. He rolled onto his back, beginning to shed tears at the night sky while distant thunder rolled. The desultory rains were moving on, leaving gray and violet clouds in their wake, boiling past the face of the moon.

Gabriel knelt beside him, rested a comforting hand upon his traitorous chest. Beneath the hand, Gary’s skin throbbed. It wasn’t unpleasant, this rebellion, and part of him yet remained intrigued.

“Poor Gary.” Whispered, soft.

“What’s wrong with me?” Choking on tears.

Gabriel shook his head. “Megan — I’m sorry you had to see that. I was afraid she’d hurt herself someday. Things could never move fast enough for her.”

Gary shuddered.

“I never got to answer my own question. What the worst part of being us is. Can you guess?”

Again, that nudge of familiarity. Further this time, all the way to recollection. Lana had put to him the same question the night they’d met, before he had known the truth about her. The riddle had gone unanswered, soon forgotten.

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

Gabriel looked fondly down at him, that androgynous face at once strong and tender. But calculating. “We can’t go all the way across, you know. We never will make it one hundred percent.”

His hand stroked Gary’s lap, popping the button of his slacks and drawing the zipper down. Massaged him, bared him, and, heaven help him, against all expectations he was growing erect.

“If you’re going man-to-woman the surgery’s pretty successful but the hormonal changes are lacking. If you’re moving the other way, like me? The hormone change is better, but not the surgery. They can build me something that looks like a cock … but it won’t much act like one.” Gabriel gave him a squeeze. “This spontaneous hard-on? It’s something I’ll never know. At least, their way.”

Gabriel began to peel away his own clothing and reveal his hybrid body. Still on his back, Gary saw moonlight glint off the shiny healing scars of a double mastectomy, amid sprouting hair. Lower, Gabriel’s last remaining femininity hid within a triangle of hair.

“You’ve known Lana’s half, now try my point of view,” Gabriel murmured, then straddled him, mounting firm.

Raped. The thought was murky, surreal. Am I being raped? His hips surged upward all the same. Tomorrow had always been soon enough for self-reproach.

“So the very worst part of being us?” Gabriel stared down, sheened in sweat. “We’re made, not born. We can’t procreate. But … I think maybe you can change that.”

This was more than coitus, Gary knew when he saw the others gather round to watch. This was tranquilizer. This was anesthesia. Bribery and reward and homage.

“A friend once told me that the South is a land of ghosts.” Gabriel’s breath was deepening with the rhythm, voice growing huskier. “I believe that. And I believe that New Orleans is a magic place. There are people here, they know things that others feel they have no business knowing at all. Maybe they’re right. But I don’t think so.”

When Gabriel stripped Gary’s shirt away, he saw the twin rows of nipples aligned down his torso. Erect and straining, like those of a sow lying before her farrow of piglets.

Gabriel bent low, placed his lips to one, and sucked.

Gary gasped, shaking his head yet unable to deny the river of warmth flowing inside, a glow he could label only as maternity.

“Lana looked for someone like you for a long time. I never saw her any happier than after she met you. Someone open-minded … eager for new experiences … who wanted to break with his past.” Gabriel touched a quieting finger to Gary’s lips when he started to speak. “But let your conscience off the hook. She didn’t kill herself over you. She did it for us.”

Once content to observe, the others now started forward.

“It was the one sacrifice she wanted to make, to thank the rest of us for making her feel like she belonged somewhere. It didn’t take long to make up her mind once she decided you were the one. Your leaving just … accelerated the schedule.”

Gabriel kissed him on the lips, then eased his weight back onto Gary’s hips again as the others closed in. Half-men, half-women, walking wonders of endocrines, scalpels, and implants, taking positions at the nipples, joining to him with suckling mouths. They were very gentle, did not bite.

“Lana was carnal … and she was spiritual … and maternal. Like any goddess should be.” Again, Gabriel shushed him, still grinding with muscled hips. “Making children is more than functioning body parts. It’s a thing of the spirit, too. Lana understood that more than anyone I know. And now she’s closer to you than she could ever have gotten with her body. Can’t you feel her inside yet?”

He searched hesitantly, tentatively. Thinking perhaps there was another light, another warmth, pulsing within.

“No matter what, though,” whispered Gabriel, “don’t ever think she didn’t love you. She did. She does.”

Of course she would. How could she ever have done this to someone she hated? What is love? Two souls and one flesh.

Gary writhed, caught in a hurricane of tears and love, revulsion and desire. Fighting would accomplish nothing. And he was so needed.

So he lay back in this roof-bound Eden, beneath the roiling sky, and let them nurse. Soon, more found their way to the roof to take their place in line. And within, and from within, the juices flowed — testosterone and estrogen, progesterone and androgen — a mother’s milk to nurture and nourish wonders greater still.

Gabriel cupped his cheek. “You are truly honored. You’ll be the madonna of an entirely new gender.”

Gary surrendered fully, pleasure and contentment swamping his last efforts at denial. He stretched his arms wide, satisfied that he and Lana would forever be as one, and reached to embrace their children.

In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town

He stood back, grinning with arms crossed, to watch those hips of hers sway while she threw. Had a wind-up that drove him truly and deliciously insane. This, after she’d kissed the tip of each dart for luck. Oh, she was overflowing with promises of finer things to come later in the night.

Sad about her aim, though. Darts all over the damn place.

“I don’t think this is your game.”

She turned chin over shoulder to stick out her tongue at him. “I got games you never even played.” She danced away to retrieve the darts, came dancing back with all six and handed him his three. Green ones, his lucky color.

“The trick,” he said, “is breath control. You breathe out on the throw, nice smooth exhale. And never, ever, take your eyes off the spot you want to hit. Not even long enough to blink.”

Down and dirty blues thumped from the jukebox while he sank all three darts in a tight cluster. He raised both arms to receive worldwide acclaim.

“Am I the master, or am I the master?”

“Careful you don’t stick yourself with one of those, or that shit you’re so full of is gonna run right out in the floor.”

He pretended to bristle. “Sure is a lot of sass coming from someone hasn’t even hit herself a bull’s-eye yet.”

“Keep making a big deal out of it” — she licked her finger and pretended to clean the zipper of her jeans — “and I know something you won’t be hitting again anytime soon.” A huff. “Anyway, I know what the problem is. I’m distracted.”

“By what, that music? Sweety-pie, the way you’re shaking your moneymaker, I dare say you’re making it work for you.”

“No, no, it’s not the music. It’s that goddamn barmaid! Never have I heard a voice that inspires more natural annoyance in me.”

She had a point. That voice did tend to carry. The gameroom was separate from the main bar, but still, they’d been listening to the barmaid going on nonstop about one thing and then another for the past hour. He sighed with the truth of it all.

“Sugar, go take care of it.” Turning kiddish on him, trying to wrap him around that sweet little finger of hers. “For me? Pleeease?”

“Where do you think we are, high school or something? Your problem, you take care of it.”

She pouted until it was clear he wouldn’t give in. Then her face went hard and she made for the pool table. Rolled the dead shitkicker slumped half across it off onto the floor and snatched that monster ten-millimeter she favored, next to his shotgun, and went stomping behind the bar. Through the doorway he watched her point the pistol down, out of sight.

Two shots. Then, after a long pause, another. Joker. Trying to throw off his aim. She danced back all smiles.

“You know, good thing you’re better with that than you are these darts.” He inspected her three, then set them aside. “Here, why don’t you try mine?”

“Look, green may be your lucky color, but it was never mine. I’ve always been more of a fuchsia girl, myself.”

“Forget color, look at the tips of those things.” He pointed at the rejects. “Look how bent they are. You been smacking fat boy in the forehead too long. Can’t keep hitting bone and expect these to stay pristine. Now, no sass — try mine.”

She gave in. Turned back to the guy lashed to the post near the dartboard, long past caring. Her first two throws went high, while the third drilled home with a sureness she found thrilling.

“Hah! Doesn’t get more bull’s-eye than that!”

He inspected more closely. “I do believe you nailed pupil that time.”

“Can we go now? I was getting bored with this anyway.”

He was about to agree when he stepped over another shotgunned redneck for a peek at the hogtied mess behind the bar. “Can’t say as I’m thrilled with what you done to our plans for later.” A sigh. “Your problem, your solution.”

She cleared his Mossberg twelve-gauge from the pool table. “Then start racking. Stick and balls, that’s more my game anyway.”

He chunked in quarters while she danced to the front window, glanced out at the night. Turned the sign from CLOSED back around to OPEN.

The crack of the break shot beckoned to all comers.

Naked Lunchmeat

The trains don’t run on time anymore. It gives us a sense of gambling, we stand on the platform at the 14th Street Station and play the odds whether the train will come before any meatfolk catch wind of us on the stale ozone breeze in the tunnels of the underbelly, and come shambling out to investigate.

The train is late again, and here we are sharing the platform with the usual suspects, and we all look at each other like we don’t really trust our eyes to tell between the living and the dead. Only the old Hasidic stands there with a sense of peace in his rheumy eyes. I figure it’s because his faith forbids a belief in an afterlife and so he doesn’t believe this shit is actually happening. Evidently we must be his idea of hallucinations. In black he already looks like an undertaker.

Today we lose, and people start to scatter with the practiced panic of retreats that leave their dignity intact after the first of them notices the meatboy lurching out of the mouth of the tunnel. When winos and bag ladies still slept down here, meatfolk bred like blue rats. He shows his saggy ashen face and the warmbloods run for the stairs and the streets, forgetting about their spent tokens. No thought to economic sacrifice. The solitary meatboy crawls from track level up onto the emptying platform, and I can hear his slobbering grunts and it still makes me wonder what all the fuss is about. The meatfolk all sound like asthmatics to me.

“Time for toasties,” says Frazzle, and he takes the meatboy by one shoulder while I take the other and before he can snap at us we pitch him down below again. He lands on the third rail and starts to smoke and pop and flop like somebody’s gray steak and a gas buildup blows out the back of the meatboy’s pants and shoots him off the rail, between regular tracks. Everything’s quiet and we’re looking at each other through the charbroiled haze. The old Hasidic views it all without judgment, turns away.

Frazzle’s got the works in his hand even before he jumps down off the platform. Clears the rails like a kid playing hopscotch, and I think I start to sweat when he kneels by the moaning meatboy who’s sluggishly waving a pair of burnt matchstick arms in the air. Frazzle sinks the heavy bore needle into the meatboy’s skull, better than a doctor. He hits the pituitary every time, like an old junkie finding final life in a bruised and flaccid vein. The syringe fills and he leaves the cripped-up meatboy for the next train, whenever it decides to show, and I can already hear the squeal of brakes and the shear of meat from bone and bone from socket.

“It’s already cooked for us, even,” says Frazzle.

“Fuck the tokens, we bail,” then I turn to the old Hasidic’s back. “Shalom.”

We hide the works like couriers like spies like jesters of greed and take the stairs three at a time and the afternoon sun slams us bright in the face. We almost can’t wait until we get back to the hotel room before tying off and nailing up. After transfer, we slide the smaller needle home, staring at that beautiful plumage of bloody backwash in the syringe, its second of blown-crystal perfection before it thins out, dilutes, drains back into the arm. Always the last aesthetic we appreciate.

Death’s a bitch, and then you live.

*

The H dealers are out of business now, most of them, because dealers sell a product they don’t make. Dealers are smart but not particularly creative, so they can’t figure out how to make any profit off selling a fix that anyone can go out and find for free, or if not, and they have no moral objection to murder, manufacture for themselves. Meatfolk everywhere, for the taking or the making. Dealers have to shut down in an economy like this, but the way I see it, they just don’t try hard enough to find the really stupid, lazy, rich junkies, if there are such things, the kind can be convinced of anything, my meatboy is better than your meatboy and it’ll cost you, you know what I’m saying?

Some new kind of kick: pituitary extract drawn from recently reanimated corpses, then treated with heat; cooled fluid medium bears attenuated form of virus known among scientific quarters as Quayle-Beta Syndrome, otherwise known informally as Pitchback Fever, the Resurrection Rag, Cancelled Ticket, Highway to Limbo, God’s Little Joke, the Indiscretion of a Lifetime, Rotten Johnny, etc etc etc. Attenuation renders virus incapable of cannibalizing host cells. Intravenous injection results in purgatorial death trance, is metabolized out after six to ten hours.

“The times, they be a-changing,” said the East Village’s Twitching Kalvin Khrist before he shot himself through the eye with a nail gun. Here was a man who truly lived for his work. He was still sitting on a half-kilo of junk at the time. When we find him we have a shooting match and it just like the old days, all the old familiar addictions in all the old familiar veins.

The city’s now filling with meatfolk and we suppose it really is possible to have too much of a good thing because they don’t surrender their pituitaries without a fight, then there’s their own habit to support. More of the slow groaning stinkers every day. In a sense I figure there’s a karmic balance at work here, we two species each feeding off the other, the last cannibal couple each trying to sink the teeth while slow-dancing in the gray hungover morning.

So we hot-wire a Lexus, stock the trunk with fresh meatfolk heads, and start west.

*

We come out of the northeast looking for the last free town in Amerika, because it’s the way we feel ourselves. For the first time in our memories uneaten by the fluid charcoal reclamation, we’re not tethered to our connections. We score in cornfields as easy as Bleecker Street now. You know what it’s like when God pukes manna, you don’t ask questions, just stoop for the harvest.

Eight hundred miles and then Frazzle gets weird on me, tells me how every Christmas he took down his decorations and threw out the tree, and listened to Christmas records backwards and heard Satanic messages oozing from the speakers. These spells of his, never the same twice. Tomorrow he’ll be singing the last stock reports to Gregorian chants or blinking Morse code haiku in a broken mirror. We get cold in the car as the Lexus’ heater broke down in Indiana so we slice up the back seat and start to burn the pieces in the hubcaps set in the floorboards until the smoke forms a cataract over the windshield. I draw maps in the soot, Byzantine aortas from some other peeled body under the gloom, never mine.

The trunk of heads runs out west of Kansas City and it’s desolate country, fields of nothing waiting to grow. Not even the meatfolk stayed around here. Sun goes down and we shiver. Sun comes up and we cry. Sun goes higher and jonesing we face hard facts, remember a time when they said junkies shared their last fix. A time we never lived through, never wanted to live through until now. A time we never even believed in.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Frazzle say. “But so does everyone else now. And we give it a shot, you and me, Hallucinogenius One and Hallucinogenius Two.”

“I regret I had but twelve veins to give for my sickness.”

“Explorers are never so honest as to explain what they’re really looking for, so history invents it for them.”

“How will we go down, you think?”

“In flames, most likely.” Frazzle dries day-old tears. “Make it quick, if you’re going to.”

So I stab him in throat with gnawed bone. Frazzle tries to hold in his life for a minute then gives up and watches it puddle in his lap, pool of old secrets where avatars lie submerged and suffocating. Ten minutes and he’s back again, so I bust out his teeth with the Lexus’ tire iron, Frazzle looking out at me with a toothless frown and handfuls of desiccated ivory, sad in his way. It’s not fun when they’re strangers, even less if you know them. I’m not as good with the heavy bore needle as Frazzle was, but it’s a learning experience, and for a moment he almost seems to turn his head to give me a better shot at the pituitary, something of the old Frazzle remaining to help me along.

I cook him down and he goes into my arm, in burnt clouds of hellfire and a hundred discussions with whispering maggot voices. For a few hours I think maybe I know what it’s like to be Frazzle and dead, dead for real. All the rest of them, they’re no role models, stumbling around way they do, that’s no death. This is something to hope for? They all stumble for oblivion, are too fucked up to find it.

But Frazzle knows now, he teaching me from the veins out.

It gets me down the road another day, still not afraid to die because now I remember again, but then there’s always tomorrow, and you know me. I forget easy.

*

I left the highway in western Kansas, the time feeling right when I came upon a green exit sign with a plank boarded over the upcoming town’s name. The old town dead, it had begun life anew. TARTARUS, someone had painted across the new wood, black block letters that wink subtle invitations when the sun hits them at precise angles. I find a town under martial law and underlying chaos.

A newcomer, I am assigned to the employ of Dr. Amway, of the Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research. My job being to report any activity within the perimeter of a postmodern death nature, or soon to be deceased. My judgment will be invaluable, they inform me, for my status as newcomer leaves me unencumbered by prior prejudices or allegiances.

Dr. Amway was a pathologist and medical examiner in one of the western metropoli, has since assumed a new mantle of command combining now-usurped control systems of medicine and law. He is a man of numerous facelifts, with four square inches of original face left, stretched tight over his skull.

“I am the man with his finger up the ass of the nation,” he tells me. “How would you define deviance?”

“I wouldn’t, but I know it when I see it.”

“Splendid,” and he clapping, then lead me to rows of cages filled with meatfolk. They eyeing us with confused dead glimmers and reaching with broken-nailed hands, but not as eager as average meatfolk beyond the perimeter. I remark that some progress appears to have been made here.

“I am the great white heterosexual overlord,” says Dr. Amway. “And by that divine mandate I am eminently qualified to convert these poor blue heathen. I must admit, the task might be safer from the go if custom still insisted we sew the mouths shut immediately upon death, but I enjoy a challenge.”

[Note: During Colonial and westward expansionist phases of American history, the lips of the newly dead were stitched closed, a custom brought over by European immigrants. Reportedly this practice still goes on in remote areas of Appalachia. Its function was spiritual in nature, to prevent evil entities from gaining access to the deceased and taking up residence. This measure would obviously be a failure in light of Quayle-Beta Syndrome, but I purport it might still be of use in thwarting their appetites.]

Dr. Amway waves one hand about. “You see the stubborn dead, but I see a roomful of potential. Actually, their chance at becoming productive citizens is greater now than it ever was. They’re so much more pliant now, all they lack is the proper conditioning. Somatic and neural trigger experiences to remember that in their old lives, they were motivated not by hunger, but by sexual desire. They have forgotten that. They’ll eat anybody now, without discrimination. It’s a roomful of raging bisexuals, as far as I’m concerned, but I’m convinced they can be reconditioned to behave as God intended.

“I feed the males a steady diet of Rocky Mountain Oysters, keeps them virile. The females I don’t feed at all. Keeps them slim and, I should hope, inordinately vain. The restorative potential of enforced anorexia cannot be exaggerated. Next week I shall introduce full-length mirrors into the females’ quarters. They’ll thank me then, just you wait and see.”

Dr. Amway has a meatboy brought out and stripped, chained securely to the lab floor by knees and elbows, then he liberally applies K.Y. He dons a stovepipe top hat of stars and bars and fucks the meatboy in the ass. Ropes of saliva stream from dead jaws to puddle on the floor, and I thought the meatboy looked confused before.

“He’ll learn, he’ll remember,” says Dr. Amway, now out of breath. “Only a matter of time. And if the ungrateful wretch still refuses, well, I can always sue the bastard.”

*

Inhibitions fall as frequently as the night, the warmbloods of Tartarus making revel mockery of their old lives, or trying to resurrect them in bacchanalian ritual. Few dare talk with a newcomer, for fear of betraying themselves to a watchful agent of the ruling regime, and so I am invisible. I soon understand that their displays are considered unmistakable proof that they are alive.

On a typical night, swing-shifts of wailing penitents beat their breasts before the god of their choice, or possibly several, and pray for deliverance. Housewife strippers undulate wildly onstage while straying husbands stuff supermarket coupons into their garters. Two transvestite priests kneel before altars while genderflecting nuns dispense antacid hosts upon their tongues. Lonely schoolboys with tentacled acne meet for masturbatory excess over piles of burning magazines. A dominatrix professor in rubber lactates stale theorems into imbecile mouths that gape like baby birds. Shopkeepers in back rooms shit into relabeled jars and boxes, then sell them for spiraling prices. Suburban social pillars invade the homes of despised neighbors, lock them in cellars with hungry, transubstantiating rats. The Tartarus aristocracy preens along the streets, holding tight to leashes collared to surgically reconstructed meatchildren; their knees fold backwards as they obediently chatter like Rhesus monkeys, are rewarded with raw cubes of indeterminate origin.

“At last,” the aristocracy cries, “we have reason to bury all the elder bipartisan hatreds. Even within Apocalypse can the wise find Shangri-La.”

In certain hard-to-locate bars, frequented only at night, meatboys and meatgirls sit bolted immobile into wooden chairs, mouths clamped shut, while surgically implanted shunts drain off pituitary extract. The runoff collects in receptacles over gas flames, then is channeled into intravenous drips. Coded bathroom graffiti informs the careful reader that this technology is the work of Dr. Amway, as means of controlling the restless and ill-contented living. By 3:00 a.m., the only sound comes from dozens of groaning meatfolk, each bar filled with comatose warmbloods in their grave-spangled purgatorial trances, heavy inside with the cindery burnt comet empathic visions of those on the far side of the perimeter. It is their new lives we wonder and worry about, their eternities.

I am without choice on a biological level. Sit down next to grimacing meatboy hookah and plug in. Avoid the eyes and find the vein … before long I may be confusing the order in which things are done. But paradoxically, I will die, if it’s the last thing I do. Hard to get that wrong … but then, look at the meatfolk, though I am not so sure they deserve quite all the blame.

*

SUBJECT 92

He occupied a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research. In the eyes of the staff, “Subject 92” replaced his given name of Leland Lovejoy, and behind him laid the terrible abattoir of misfortune which had led to his residency at the clinic, where he hobbled about with some assistance.

Subject 92 had lost various bodily parts in nine separate attacks by the walking dead. While drunk on a potent concoction of sterno and Gatorade, the then-itinerant Leland Lovejoy was set upon by a trio of corpses who chewed his left leg off at the knee before he fought them away. While sedated in an emergency room, he then awoke to find a newly-deceased woman from an adjacent room drooling into his face, after which one eye was sucked from its socket like a cocktail onion. In later attacks over the coming months, several of which were alcohol-related, he lost an ear, a flap of scalp, three fingers, his surviving baby toe, most of his right bicep, half of one cheek, plus assorted divots of flesh estimated to total seven pounds.

“Well, I used to hate them,” he frequently told his attending staff, speaking of the ambulatory corpses who had so bedeviled him, “but then I realized, no matter what, it’s still nice to be wanted. And they’ve done a lot for me, in their way. Three squares a day and a roof over my head and a fistful of remote controls, you think I ever had it this good when I was on the streets?”

“But the price you paid to be here,” said one of his nurses. “Some people would call what you lost an exorbitant fee.”

Subject 92 dismissed all misgivings with a noxious cloud of cigar smoke and a wave of a four-fingered hand. “Lemme tell you something. They left my pecker and my nuts alone. They’d’ve taken those, yeah, I might be singing a different tune. But everything vital’s still in place, and what’s gone, I can’t say I miss all that much. Hey, you know anyone needs a kidney? I got one to spare.”

Subject 92’s usefulness came as a result of his being the only known living human to sustain bites in one, let alone nine, attacks and then fail to succumb to infection by the Quayle-Beta virus. The Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research was an inevitable destination, as medical science had long known that if you want to learn how to defeat a disease, study who does not have it.

He was much beloved by Dr. Amway, who routinely had Subject 92 brought down to the labs, where they would freely, and with great exuberance, converse on topics as diverse as cheap alcohol substitutes, sightings of the Virgin Mary within foodstuffs and bathroom mildew stains, and post-amputation phantom pains.

“Excellent progress, we’re making excellent progress with you. You really are quite the miracle man,” Dr. Amway would tell him, and praise him effusively for his courage. “In fact, we’re making such excellent progress that I am almost ashamed to inform you that we need a few more tissue samples for further analysis.” He would then toy with a sterile, gleaming scalpel and surgical spatula.

And Subject 92 would look at him with an inaudible whimper, remember his home several floors above, with all its fine and expensive trinkets, sigh, and roll up the skin of his stump.

*

THE PARKING LOT

Thad in his suit, gray, Savile Row and tailored to a perfect 40-Regular frame. Always told, be a model, Thad smiling with mild indulgence but flushed with flattery. Bess in her Dior strapless, a diaphanous sweep to just below her perfect knee. Had turned down eleven proposals of marriage, but the night was young. Each were with friends at different richly cultured oases in the same plaza of trends, where rehabbers made killings and the dead were not allowed. This was where the beautiful could still come for a night devoid of worries, while they still could, here at civilization’s last stand, at least any civilization that truly mattered.

A determined, intermittent blare muscled through the refined chime of crystal and china and harp, and Thad saw the world through a red mist of irritability as he left the table.

“Pardon me,” to his companions. “My car, I believe. If someone’s dinged it, I’ll bring back a foreskin as a trophy.”

The plaza oozed smug propriety beneath a sick orange sodium haze, cars in orderly rows like rounded steel hummocks, or burial mounds, their windshields gleaming with indifference. It was not a light to flatter human faces, but Thad found her lovely just the same. Bess stretching to delicate tiptoe, craning her neck after her rush down from her own dinner, own drinks. Thirty feet and four cars away from him, and he knew love all over again. From somewhere in the assembly of cars, a horn droned its repetitive pattern, three quick toots, then two longer ones, over and over, loud as gunfire.

“My mistake,” Thad called over to her. “I thought it was my car!”

“And I mine.” A vision, she was. “I guess we’re both wrong.”

Standing tall and tottering on stiffened legs, they scanned the lot again for the trumpeting car.

“There it is!” She pointed. “See the lights flashing?”

“Come along,” and dazzled, he took her by the wrist as they hurried between cars like mischievous trust fund heirs, until they stood beside the empty, convulsing auto. One fender appeared stricken with a fresh wound. No one else was in sight.

“And it’s only a Mazda,” Bess said. “Some people, you wonder what goes through their minds.”

Thad held her surrendered hand, turned the diamond ring down, and directed her reach toward the windshield where, together, they etched in the glass: CLEAN THE WAX FROM YOUR EARS, YOU FUCKING CRETIN LOSER, after which they laughed and fell into each other’s arms. Some nights it really was possible to love a lifetime’s worth in five minutes.

But then the dead crawled from beneath a dozen cars, Beemers and Mercedes and Volvos, and surrounded them in a stinking ring of gray sodium putrefaction and maggot runoff. Even their clothes were as ragged as their skin. Who knew they were smart enough to set traps? Who knew they possessed the skills of pack hunters?

Thad and Bess were brought down in screams and threats of litigation, evoking the names of lawyers and aldermen, as business cards spewed like feathers in molt. Their buttocks were eaten away, until denuded pelvic bone showed through the tears in pants and dress, but the dead stopped when Bess groaned, newly revived, and they recognized in her a kindred lack of soul.

She waited at Thad’s side until he, too, roused, and together they straggled their raw bony asses upright.

They returned to one restaurant, together still and forever, and they never even knew the difference.

*

Quick, now. Wake up to the sound of maggot jaws but I realize it’s just another flashback. Got to rub the head before dreams sink seeds too deep and become the reality. Maggots eat their way back out. I assume it hurts, but might be a cure for narcolepsy.

Stumble out into the street in the gray deathly morning, a sky like moldy old cheese and winds full of sand to scour loose skin from brittle bones. “Bring out your dead,” the meatwagon on morning rounds. The bonegrinder pulls her lever whenever they get one. Got to maintain warmblood order in Tartarus until Dr. Amway’s proper conditioning reintegrates the meatfolk back into my world. Like I really want them? Just another new immigrant to hate, or hire, depending on your politics.

Bonegrinder grins. The mulch makes wonderful fertilizer, all that bone meal. Calcium is our friend.

Crying children sit filthy and naked around dead televisions with gutted insides, fires burning in the cavities, fed by random books. New billboard goes up, blue collar joes hoisting like the flag on Iwo Jima, says I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE, giant red letters. Another in the next block:

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?

Prostitutes linger exhausted around red-lit houses after a long night, bungee cord labia snapping in the dawn. “Disease-free,” they call. “Checked every other Monday. Come on, you got something better to do? Our pussies moan like the Gyuto Monks.”

Too fast now, at the perimeter wall before I know it. Up and on top, I balance between worlds. Stare over the desert, burnt brown like shoveled ashtrays. They move out there, they swim in it, they eat it because they can’t get to us. They eat sand and shit glass. A million of them now, too stupid to climb the wall, but maybe not so stupid after all … patient, they know we’ll come to them eventually. We still the ones winding all the clocks.

A thousand fathers sire a thousand offspring, a thousand mothers gagging on placental screams in the wretched morning. A thousand whipping boys cover their asses and weep with midnight despair, crying, “This is the life you gave me? This is what you wanted me for? You offer me nothing more than this?”

“We did the best we could.”

“Ignorance is no defense in the eyes of the law of nature. ‘tis better to create than merely to consume.”

From my pocket I pull the works, syringe filled with extract of bootleg meatgirl five blocks back. Never paid money for one before. Why had I started now, of all days?

Slap the arm and rouse the vein, lazy worm that it is. I probe around with the needle, more than I need, long after the vein is found. Deeper

— deeper.

There is a corpse under my skin, just waiting to get out.

I’ll find it.

Before it find me.

Death be not proud … just prompt, a definitive end. And you know me, I’m easily satisfied.

Cancer Causes Rats

ready, sandra? roll tape. three

She would be here today, no matter what, even if it weren’t all in a day’s work.

two

Just to make sure he was actually put away for good, he who had vowed to do no hard time. Not unlike the old joke: We’ll go to his funeral to make sure he’s dead.

one

Static for the lens, she’s framed off-center so that her backdrop is clearly seen: a building of vast graystone tonnage and Corinthian columns, too stately for anything so gauche as a statue of Blind Justice. She’s young, the low side of thirty. Trim, the consummate professional, dark hair conservatively styled. One of the city’s favorite daughters, even if adopted. She has no need of introduction of self and place, for time must not be wasted. The more stories per thirty-minute newscast — minus sports, weather, and commercials — the more exciting the flow. The more excitement, the more viewers, the higher the Arbitrons. Self and place will be added in-studio, superimposed text from the Chyron machine: Sandra Riley, ActioNews 8 Reporter. Municipal Court Building.

Microphone in hand, she dives in:

“The reign of terror that began eighteen months ago has finally reached its end this afternoon at the sentencing hearing for Darryl Hiller. The twenty-six-year-old Hiller — the so-called Tapeworm — was convicted five weeks ago on sixteen counts of rape and murder. This afternoon, Judge Thornton Steckler passed down the expected maximum sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”

She’s cool and steady, forever striving for the perfect blend of authority and compassionate story involvement. That intangible quality which will later, on playback after editing and splicing with other footage, reach out through the tube to seize viewer attention. Telling one and all, I speak the truth, it’s something you want to hear, and no one can tell it quite like I can.

Sandra’s trick: She focuses not on the camera lens, as do so many lesser-talented competitors. Instead, she focuses two feet beyond the lens, a starmaking quality that plunks her firmly inside the living room of an entire city.

In truth, Darryl Hiller has yet to be sentenced. Sandra and her crew — cameraman, sound recordist, and film editor — are taping the segment in advance. If they’re wrong they’ll reshoot later. But no one in his right mind expects the Tapeworm to get slammed with anything less than the max. Pre-hearing is simply less congested outside the Municipal Court. Less background clutter to detract attention from Sandra Riley. And it will give them more time post-hearing to scrounge reaction footage of the principle players in the Tapeworm’s final day as a newsmaker: attorneys, police officers, victims’ families.

As well, she has her own press conference to give, and the anticipation is delicious. Her contemporaries and competitors citywide — from network affiliates, network O&Os, local indies — have already accused her of grandstanding. She can afford to laugh off such accusations, knowing they’re born of professional jealousy. All of them report the news; only Sandra is an insider on this, making the news as well as distilling it for consumption. She had no say in the manner it plummeted into her lap.

“But even as the city breathes a collective sigh of relief,” she continues, “this day of justice cannot be considered a total victory. Police still have no leads in the copycat killings patterned after the Tapeworm’s methods of rape and murder, which began two months ago…”

Sandra wraps it, packages it, and Kevin the cameraman bags it. She reaches around her back and unclips the Sony from her skirt’s belt, draws the earphone line from beneath her jacket. Every word was taped informally from a written script so she could listen and repeat verbatim — no TelePrompTers on site — and be free to concentrate on projecting through the lens.

“Let’s get set up outside Courtroom C,” she tells her crew as they pack it up. No cameras allowed inside the courtroom.

Sandra lights a nervous cigarette and the nicotine rush calms her empty stomach. She’s eaten nothing today but a handful of peanuts gulped for breakfast, and the cigarette helps her forget.

Kevin straightens from his camera, a tall and handsome black man with a moustache and a hightop fade. “You oughta give those up. Give you those pucker lines around your mouth, look like hell on camera someday.”

She smiles, considers grinding the cigarette with a shoetip but doesn’t. “By the time I get the lines, my airtime days’ll be over.” She’s on a fast-track rise, gunning for network anchor by thirty-five. Only the youthful need apply. There are no female equivalents of wise old Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace. Her biological clock is ticking, and it has nothing to do with children.

Gear is packed for mobility and Sandra pitches in to help lug it along. No off-camera star demeanor for her, and the crew loves her for it. She’s one of us. But in her heart she questions the purity of her motives. Even altruism can be self-serving.

As they reach the court steps they realize something is wrong. Pandemonium and harsh voices rebound along marble corridors. Sandra and her crew break into doubletime and gear is readied on the run, and they find themselves in a swarm of confusion. Civilians are herded away by police. Courthouse deputies speak frantically into walkie-talkies. A custodial type flanked by two cops aims a fingertip along a ceiling path, as if following ductwork. A pudgy, weeping, red-haired man in a rumpled jailhouse jumpsuit is escorted from a men’s bathroom, wearing handcuffs, but these are quickly removed. Moments later a uniformed deputy is stretchered out of the bathroom, a bloody mask for a face, and a police sergeant is screaming for everyone to get back, back —

“Are you getting this?” she snaps to Kevin.

His camera is balanced on one broad shoulder. “Oh yeah.”

The sound tech feeds her impatient hand the microphone and they wade into the fray. Sandra digs in for internal focus, that center of calm, grace under pressure. They battle chaos to find someone who can tell them what’s going on, but deep within she knows it’s all about this man who vowed he would do no hard time.

Thrusting the mike into official faces, she’s rebuffed time and again, until at last she shanghais a young uniformed cop trying gamely at crowd control.

“Can you tell us what’s happened?” she asks again.

He whirls, irritable, ready to tell her to get lost. But the recognition is instantaneous — it’s her — and his will dissolves in a giddy rush of celebrity proximity. Putty in her hands. He will later be reprimanded for his poor judgment and big mouth.

“He got away! Darryl Hiller got away!” he says, breathless.

Sandra doesn’t let the hammer blow of distress register one flicker across her face. “How did this happen, do you know?”

“He … he told his guard he had to go to the crapper, and … and I don’t know what happened! Slipped his cuffs and beat hell out of his guard and cuffed that poor asshole” — a quick finger-jab toward the plump red-haired man — “and stole his clothes. And then he just … disappeared!”

“By disappeared, you mean —”

“He’s gone, but there was no place for him to go.” The young cop is white-faced. “Miz Riley … that bathroom doesn’t even have a window.”

*

Seven months earlier, November:

She came home, near midnight, and the day had been typically long and exhausting. She sorted mail in the sixteen-story elevator ride up to her floor, some addressed to Sandra Riley, the rest to Shanna Riley. The latter was technically correct. Some long-ago news consultant down in Dallas had suggested a change in her pro name. Shanna sounded too close to Sheena, as in Queen of the Jungle, which some female viewership might find threatening. Management backed him, but at least she got to pick her replacement moniker.

Her feet ached, and she wore L.A. Gear tennies instead of heels toward the day’s end, when spit and polish were less crucial. She closed her apartment door, triple-locked it. Shed her overcoat and collapsed onto the sofa, a single lamp on for company. Home was a jumbled contrast to her immaculate video image, everywhere stacks of current magazines and nonfiction books, a hamster-in-wheel race to keep abreast of all matters financial and political, scientific and cultural.

A few tears, then, and cramps. ActioNews 8 was a battleground of mammoth egos and managerial shufflings. In “The Waste Land” T.S. Eliot had deemed April the cruelest month, but she knew better. It was November. November saw the year’s most crucial Arbitron sweep, and ActioNews 8 was currently ranked fourth in a nine-station market. Unacceptable. As reporter and weekend co-anchor, she didn’t have the most to lose, but it seemed that the less you had the more viciously you had to fight just to hold onto it.

The whole city was, of course, abuzz over the murders. Some whackout who assaulted women in their homes, bound them with vinyl tape so they couldn’t flee, taped over their mouths so they couldn’t scream … then taped over their noses so they couldn’t breathe. He raped them as they convulsed into suffocation, then left them for someone else to come home to.

After victim number three, when a police captain was quoted as saying, “We’ll catch this worm,” media pundits were quick to christen the killer the Tapeworm, for a populace preferring its more murderous aberrations to be packaged with readily-identifiable labels. Sandra hated the name, had no choice but to use it. Over drinks, the more battle-hardened reporters even hoped that the Tapeworm would send the police taunting notes. Given the vinyl and the rape, the notes could then, in a morbid nod to C.S. Lewis, be called “The Screwtape Letters.”

A little requisite tube-time before bed. Sandra reached for the remote control for the TV and VCR, always stationed on the coffee table, and only then realized something was wrong.

It wasn’t there.

When the TV winked on as if by telepathy, she whirled in sudden panic. Saw him strolling out of hallway shadows, remote in one hand and cutlery in the other. There was never any doubt as to who he was. The roll of tape braceleted over one wrist was mere confirmation.

Sandra scrambled for the door but he was quicker, lithe as a gymnast, and blocked her way. Back to the sofa, he motioned with the knife, and she obeyed against her will. Ridiculous — compliance hadn’t saved his sixteen priors. The sense of invasion brought a wave of nausea.

“I’m not here for that,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

She poised on the sofa like high-tension wire while he took the nearest chair. She looked for weapons, escapes. Nothing in this room, at least, looked as formidable as the blade. In the bedroom, however…

He pointed at the TV and its outboard gear. “You record the competition’s newscasts to watch later, don’t you.” He appeared pleased with this deduction.

She nodded, studying him, fighting for self-control. He was remarkable only for his look of being so totally ordinary. The Tapeworm’s identity and appearance had been matters of great speculation, since he hadn’t left anyone behind to provide a description. He was young, mid-twenties, with limp blond hair and the pale pallor of someone who holed up with too much late-night TV. His eyes were devoid of feverish madness, touched instead by an intelligent gaze of intense curiosity.

Stronger than he looks, though, she had to reason. He could not have broken in through her front door. Which meant this bland lunatic had scaled sixteen floors of balconies to meet her.

“That’s smart, taping the others’ news. I’m sorry, I had to take your tape out, but I rewound it for you. It’ll be okay. You have to know your competition.” He nodded, toyed with the knife.

“What do you want, then?” Her voice, so tight, so wired, was not at all what she heard when reviewing her own newscasts.

“I brought my own tape. I edited it myself. It’s called Sex, Death, and Videotape. Let’s watch.” He hit the remote again and the VCR kicked in. She felt his eyes never leave her, couldn’t trust her, no, couldn’t trust her yet.

She watched a moment of snow, then

herself Sandra Riley rapidfire edited images of her at scene after scene of the crime change of seasons noted by change of wardrobe her professional sympathetic concern always the same “This is Sandra Riley” crying families frustrated cops whirling red lights and yellowtape crime scene cordons “We’ll catch this worm” victim profiles black and white and color photos of young women who breathed no more “This is Sandra Riley” academic post-Freudian graybeard spouting psychological murderer’s profile then footage of older murders older crime scenes shootings knifings bludgeonings strangulations never connected never related because of wildly varying M.O.’s frightening cavalcade jumpcut montage “This is Sandra Riley” herself at weekend anchor desk “For ActioNews 8, this is Sandra Riley” same closing image on flashcut repeat Sandra Riley/Sandra Riley/Sandra Riley/Sandra Riley/Sandra Riley/Sandra Riley —

Snow, and white noise.

“What is this?” she managed to choke out.

“Don’t you get it?” He looked at her in earnest. “It’s my résumé.”

Sandra Riley, numb and blank. A media first.

“Don’t you see?” he asked. “I want to work with you.”

She staggered inside, trying to convince herself, This is not personal, this is nothing personal. Survival depended on divorcing personal from professional. Professionally she was unflappable. Last fall she’d done a live Special Olympics report while wearing a jersey. Of numerous airtime mandates there was but one unforgivable sin: Thou shalt not lose control on the air. She’d done ninety seconds of live feed with calm, warm, caring composure for these handicapped children. After handing it back to the studio she had astonished her crew by shrieking and twisting until she dislodged two squirming grasshoppers from inside her jersey.

“Work together,” she repeated, now steady. “How so?”

“There’s so much information I could feed you. So everyone could know me. They’ve barely scratched the surface. It’s like admiring the painting without knowing the artist.” He rose, grew more animated, gesturing with the knife. “I mean, look what I’ve done for your career already. Look what you’ve done for me.”

She met him eye to eye. “I’m not the only one, by any means. Everyone’s covered you.”

He dismissed the rest with an irritated flip of the blade. “Hacks, they’re all doing hackwork, assembly line journalism.” He lowered to one knee, imploring her as if proposing marriage. “You’re the best. I watch my coverage every night — every night — and you’re the only one who can take me back there. I watch you standing there where I’ve been and I can smell it, I can taste it, I can feel myself right back there … ‘cause you step right out and take me by the hand and pull me back through the screen with you.”

A moment’s flash: What have I created?

“You understand, I can see it in your eyes on the screen. You know what it takes to get noticed, you’ve got the formula down. I was too smart for my own good at first, I never killed quite the same way twice … and nobody thought to connect them. But then I wised up.” He tapped his temple. “I developed a trademark. And now the whole city knows me. Just like they know you.”

“So, this work arrangement.” Keep him talking, keep him on his own twisted agenda. “What’s in it for me?”

He wet his lips like a child at Christmas. “I can call you, tell you where I’ve just been. You’ll get the jump on everyone else. You understand, you know what it takes.”

She kept him talking about particulars: timetables she kept, ethics of cooperation, randomly touching on anything she could think of to make him believe he was being taken seriously. At last, when fantasies of lasting stardom had gotten the better of him, she sunk the vital hook:

“Why don’t we do a background piece. Right now.” Shaking inside her shell, Sandra pointed to her camcorder in a jumble of electronics beside the TV. “Tell me more about yourself.”

“Okay. Yeah. Good idea.” He grew rigid, as if scenting an ulterior motive. “But keep me in shadow. I can’t have anyone else knowing what I look like. You’ll have to backlight me. That’s how they do it on TV.”

She crossed the room and knelt beside her camcorder, went through the motions of loading a cartridge and checking the battery pack. She breathed a quick prayer, then stood and hurled the camera at the Tapeworm’s head. Plastic cracked, and he roared in surprise and rage.

She was running then, full-tilt toward the bedroom, thanking the gods of aching feet for her L.A. Gear shoes, then falling to the bedroom floor by the nightstand, opening the drawer and pulling out the .32-caliber Colt, aiming back down the hallway as he bled and raged a slashing path after her.

Aiming for his head…

Not believing herself when the professional shell refused to submit to the personal core. Kill him now and here’s where the story ends. Let him live, and the arrest, trial, sentencing, the publicity … these would go on and on. Play it right, parlay it into a weeknight anchor slot, then a ticket out of bush league local into a network correspondent’s position. She saw it all.

And aimed for his leg.

*

Sandra Riley and her crew and their peers hover around the Municipal Court for hours, like buzzards, until every last scrap is devoured and there’s nothing more to glean. Of Darryl Hiller there is no trace. The only reasonable theory — that somehow he got into the building ductwork from within the bathroom — is invalidated. Darryl Hiller has pulled a Houdini of stupefying proportions.

The day’s best footage is of a man who gives his name as Reggie Blaine — the stocky redheaded fellow who was assaulted in the bathroom after Hiller somehow freed himself and smashed his guard’s face into the porcelain sink. Blaine tells an upsetting tale of being forced to trade clothes with the madman, then submit to the indignity of his handcuffs inside a stall so he couldn’t see where Hiller went next.

That night, Sandra and her crew go for badly-craved drinks at a favored watering hole called Turnstiles. The mellow wood and brass are comforting, but tonight there is no quick wit and cynic’s banter. Tonight there’s only morose reflection.

“Why don’t you let us take you home tonight?” Kevin suggests. His dark face, usually amiable, is pinched with worry.

Sandra shakes her head. “Thanks. But that’s okay.”

“Supposing he shows up again at your place. Sand, you’ve got to be number one on his list.”

She steadies her hands around a margarita. “The police called me at the station this evening. I’ll be safe. They’ll have people all over my building.”

Kevin shrugs. “Still might need someone to talk to. Come on. You got a comfortable couch, I can last it a night there.”

She touches the back of his hand across the table. He’s probably the best friend she has in the world, and all she can professionally aspire to is to give him cause to watch her dust while she heads to New York. Sometimes she has to wonder who the true worm in all of this really is.

“He won’t be back,” she says with certainty. “He won’t.”

“How you know? Sick twistoid like that, you can never tell.”

“He won’t.” The margarita is cold, salty, anesthetizing. “I already gave him what he wanted all along. He got what he wanted.”

“What’s that, Sand?”

She bows her head with the shame of a fool duped by an elaborate con game of heart and soul and wallet. And she sighs.

“A public forum.”

*

Four weeks earlier, May:

Darryl Hiller was as anxious to break the silence of his jail cell as the city was to learn what made him tick. One catch: He would talk only with Sandra Riley. His mentor. ActioNews 8 gained clearance from the police and the prosecutor’s office, whose primary stipulation was that the interview be conducted after the verdict, so as to fuel no claims of publicity interfering with his right to an impartial trial. Post-trauma stress behind her, Sandra set about the task of producing a week-long series of special reports on the mind of the Tapeworm.

The interview was conducted in a sterile room in the county jail, unfurnished except for a scarred table. Kevin set up two cameras and lights; sound levels were monitored. Darryl Hiller was the last to arrive, manacles on his wrists and ankles, with a pair of Rushmore-faced deputies standing guard a few feet away in case he got frisky.

roll tape. three, two, one

“I forgive you,” was the first thing he said to her. “I don’t hold it against you that you turned me in. I was disappointed at first, sure. But you played it well. Now I understand it had to be this way.”

“Did you want to get caught six months ago?” she asked.

He shook his head, eyes full of visions no one else in the room could perceive. “No.” A smile. “But it had to be that way. I’d gone as far as I could staying anonymous. I had to go to the next level. Beyond. And now?” He beamed. “Everybody knows Darryl Hiller.”

Sandra thought he still looked so unremarkable in that chair, across that table. Still pale. His hair was trimmed shorter and he looked boyish, his face still plain. Only a small scar marked his forehead to commemorate contact with her camcorder. His hands fidgeted on the table, more out of idleness, she thought, than nerves. She decided it was better to let him ramble and free-associate rather than try to direct him in an orderly flow of Q&A. They had plenty of tape to roll.

He told stories of childhood. What went wrong? Everything. Nothing. He said he’d been a sometimes bedwetter in gradeschool and that his mother used to tape his prepubescent penis to his lower belly every night as punishment, and whip him in the morning if he had freed it. Then he laughed and said he’d made it all up. The truth could’ve been anything.

“Sixteen women raped and suffocated,” Sandra cut in at one point. Properly outraged, under control. Professional. “Why did you do it? Your core reason.”

He tilted his head back, let his gaze rove over the ceiling. He had a habit of avoiding eye contact when answering.

“The worst crime a man can inflict on himself is anonymity. It eats people alive inside if they go too long with their grubby little lives, not counting for anything, good or bad. They just exist. No one should have to live an anonymous life. Me? I had the courage to become known. That’s all. How else could I do it? I don’t have a cure for cancer or zits. I can’t balance the federal budget. I’m not Tom Cruise in some new movie. So I had to use my imagination. And the tools at my disposal.” Now, finally, eye contact. “And you. You inspired me. Because you’ve got it down to an art. You know what it’s like to be public property.”

“Did you believe you had some sort of moral superiority?”

He looked irritated, as if she’d missed the point entirely. “It doesn’t have anything to do with morality. Or superiority. It’s a question of economics. Supply and demand.”

“Economics,” she repeated.

“Right,” he said. Most natural thing in the world. “When does newspaper circulation rise? When does everyone tune in TV news? Not when the doctor with the cure is on. Not when a budget analyst is on. Not when Tom Cruise is on. No. It’s when there’s a killer on the loose. You know … we’re not so different, you and me. There’s a symbiosis. You need me as much as I need you.”

She was about to formulate a rebuttal, but he broke in: “Do you believe in cancer?”

She flubbed her first try, flustered. Have to edit that out later. “Of course. Everyone knows someone affected in some way by cancer.”

He nodded. “And do you believe in rats?”

She didn’t like this track of inquiry. “Of course I do.”

“So you’ll acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship between them.”

“Rats cause cancer?” Her voice was incredulous.

“No, that’s backwards. Cancer causes rats.”

“You’ve lost me with this, Darryl.”

He hunched forward, toward Sandra and camera one. “Cancer’s out there. It’s out there. Feeding on people. All these food additives and chemicals and crap in the environment? Cancer has a field day with that stuff. For cancer, it’s like rocket fuel. Now. You got all these labs everywhere, right, scientists looking for new drugs to fight cancer? Places breed all these lab rats just for experiments. That’s all the rats are good for. They wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for cancer.” A deep breath, reloading. “That’s the way it is between you and me. All this crap wrong with cities today, and small towns, the world at large? You people are like cancer, feeding on it with your cameras, poking your mikes into it, stirring it. Pretty soon, you just have to expect rats like me popping up to give you more to work with.”

“There’s nothing cancerous about meeting the public’s right to know. You’re making a perversity out of something inherently noble.”

“Keep thinking that, if it helps.” He chuckled. “Do you think pharmaceutical companies want to cure cancer? Not in a million years. They won’t wipe it out because of economics. Get rid of a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry? All they want is to cure some individual patients … and keep the hope alive in everyone else.” He settled back in his chair with a grin. “So save the self-righteousness. I may disgust you, and you may hate me. But your job would never be the same without me.”

“And how do you feel about the continuing cycle of murder? By now you must know about the copycat killer who started imitating you last month.”

Darryl’s forehead creased. “I feel honored,” he said slowly. “I influenced a stranger’s destiny.” A broad, dawning grin. “For once, I was the inspiration. The growth cycle continues.”

Fifty minutes later, once the interview was concluded, Sandra hurried to the nearest bathroom and hung over the toilet with dry heaves. She’d eaten nothing all day, but the rejection reaction was the same.

The following week — after editing, rearranging, splicing, and redubbing — the five-part series on Darryl Hiller was shown on the eleven o’clock news.

And drew the largest audience in ActioNews 8’s history.

*

November is the cruelest month, but ActioNews 8 weathers it well. They’re top of the heap in a nine-station market, no small thanks due to Sandra Riley and her considerable drawing power. She’s now a weeknight anchor with a hefty salary kicked up into six figures, and management’s only cause for fretting is that her agent would contract her new position for no more than a year. She has to be free to jump when those inevitable network offers start to materialize.

The copycat Tapeworm gives them a body every few weeks. It’s not the original rapist-murderer; the DNA evidence he leaves behind proves that. Of the original, no one knows. But Tapeworm is as Tapeworm does, and the public tunes fearfully in, dreading another dose of reality, enthralled when they get it. Sandra anchors the footage shot in the field by a younger protégée who idolizes her, and every time, Sandra dies a little more inside. Remembering her role. But her makeup never runs.

The package arrives via courier one afternoon, brown paper wrapper, neatly handlettered and marked to her attention at ActioNews 8 studios. No return address, but the paperwork was done across the country on the west coast.

She pops it into the VCR in her office — a larger one now, with windows — when she gets a free moment on this blustery November afternoon. She presses PLAY and sits.

The amateur filmmaker has rigged up a cheerful title card, reading Sex, Death, and Videotape 2. Sandra sits straighter and bites down on a knuckle as her eyes widen

and there he is, Darryl Hiller seated on a stool with nothing in the background but stark white. Medium close-up, chest and head and shoulders. The camera doesn’t move, as if tripod-mounted.

“There was so much I wanted to tell you before I left last June.” He gazes directly at her without blinking. “But you understand the situation. I know you do. You always do.

“There was a lot I didn’t understand when we did our interview. Not that I was wrong, I haven’t been wrong in years, I was just … incomplete. When I told you I had to go beyond to the next level, I had no idea. No idea. Remember how you asked me how I felt about inspiring someone to follow in my footsteps and I said it felt good? I found out it meant more than that. It meant there’d been a change in me. I wasn’t just a rat anymore, because I’d created something in my own image. He wouldn’t have existed without me. And that meant I’d just been upgraded to cancer.” He starts to grin, the only one who gets the joke. “That’s how I got away at the sentencing. They escorted me right out of that bathroom and took the cuffs off me themselves. Poor, poor Reggie Blaine. Innocent bystander. All I had to do was break one guy’s face and tell one lie.”

Sandra forgets to breathe, begins to comprehend. Recalling the footage of Reggie Blaine, Victim, forced to wear jailhouse orange. Except there was only one set of clothes all along, she knows this now. Knows it as surely as she knows she was a midwife for an entirely new aberration. She dies inside all the more for it. But her blank-faced shell sits, watching

as Darryl Hiller’s face contorts ripples rearranges. Pudgy cheeks, red hair, she has seen it before, weeping for the cameras along marble corridors. And then it’s gone, replaced by a new face that could easily belong to the boy next door. But the voice continues:

“You see, I became the cancer —”

new faces, leering at the lens

“— and I’ll be back to see you very very soon —”

a rogue’s gallery of anonymity

“— but you won’t see me —”

lifting a roll of vinyl tape to the camera eye and peeling a strip free to lick its sticky underside

“— because I’ve learned the one fundamental trick of cancer:”

his last word on flashcut repeat, a different face speaking with every flick of the editing console

“Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation.”

Fade to black.

Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt

I was a couple years adrift out of school, thinking yes, today is probably the day I’ll kill myself, when the weatherman went and upstaged anything I could’ve done.

They say he was distraught over a woman, a restraining order, negative publicity. Family problems too, you have to figure. I hadn’t heard a word of any of it. He had a pilot’s license and his own plane, and what he did was, he aired one final weather report on the early evening news, smiled at the city one last time, then drove out to his plane, got cleared for takeoff, climbed 500 feet into the blue summer sky, then turned flaps down and did a full-throttle nosedive straight into the runway. This while rush-hour traffic was still clogging Chicago’s paved arteries. They say the fireball was a thing of beauty, although not so for the pieces they finally pulled from the wreckage.

And I ask you: Now how can you follow something like that?

Megan, one of my housemates, taped the later re-broadcast of his final weather report, and we’d watch it over and over, running it back and back again. We were looking for clues. Anything. But the weatherman gave up nothing. Not one thing.

“I just realized something,” she finally said, days after the burial. “He didn’t even fly around for one last look. Just got the plane up and did it.” Then she grew very reflective. “I couldn’t have done it that way. I’d have to fly around, make some goodbyes, see everything from above. Make one final bid for a little genuine pathos. The way he did it … that’s so cold.”

Megan was right. It had been a very singular-minded devotion to purpose. No wonder he’d been a success in his career.

*

The summer I was ten I played Little League baseball with a number of other boys who were either too lanky or too pudgy, and who spent every spare moment of every game with one fearful eye turned to the stands, where our fathers sat, expectant and often quite rabid. I was not a star player.

I can’t remember if it was my idea, or the coach’s, but every time we took the field, I dangled my glove from a loose arm and went trudging out into right field, as if it were my own personal Siberia. Whether my own altruism, or the coach’s doing, it seemed the best way I could serve the team. Nothing much ever happened in right field. The kids at bat generally pulled to the left. So I’d stand out there and gaze across into left field, watching Dennis Freemont as he heroically went loping after each fly ball that came his way, effortlessly plucking them from the air like some budding young god of the harvest. I alternately felt sickened by him and wanted to be his best friend, imagining what it must feel like being in control of his precociously developed musculature instead of the puny sticks that were my arms and legs. Imagining what his glowing father must’ve said to him after every game. I’d never hear words like that.

I remember the fly ball that came directly to me as clearly as if it’d been a comet bearing down on me, or a small plane. The world fell into a silent hush as I braced myself beneath the ball and wondered if my father would notice my glove trembling.

I reached forward from my crouch as the ball plopped straight into my glove as I caught it underhanded, the way the coach always said not to. It fell into the laced pocket, then wormed its way back and went dribbling out the other end of the glove…

And somehow ended up wedged between my knees. I stood knock-kneed, the ball caught there and pivoting as if it were the socket of a new joint that had fused my legs together. All the sounds of the world came rushing back again, most of all the cries of my teammates, and then I toppled over backward, the ball dropped, my miracle play hopelessly blown.

My father had little to say in the car later, quietly smoking and blowing his gray clouds out the window as he sought to merge with the road, lose himself and his disappointment in the traffic. Finally he turned to me and his eyes weren’t too accusing, and I realized that he was, in his way, trying to understand.

“Maybe baseball’s not the thing for you,” he said. “But the one thing I don’t ever want you to forget is, with hard work and effort you can be anything you want to be. I know you can do it. You can be whatever you want.”

I nodded. This was a great relief to me.

“I want to be a girl,” I told him.

It seemed easier then, to my ten-year-old outlook. All the expectations just weren’t as brutal. Nobody forced girls into the fields like untrained gladiators. But at the time I didn’t realize that there were mothers who made up their daughters, as young as five and six, into seductive miniature adults, entered them in contests, got their pictures in the papers where they could be ogled by sick men who didn’t understand — or maybe didn’t want to admit — that that knowing look in their eyes was just Maybelline. I didn’t know any of that then.

I only wanted to be a girl because I thought fathers left you alone then.

And mine looked at me, everything new again between us, new and awful. He looked at me as if for the first time realizing that I wasn’t something from his loins after all, rather something he’d excreted in a moment of illness.

My father turned back to the road then, started smoking with renewed need. He no longer bothered blowing it out the window, and I rode the rest of the way home in the choking clouds.

*

Even before the weatherman snuffed his life out on the tarmac and made me realize how uncreative I was, I didn’t really consider myself suicidal. It’s just that I’d been weighing options lately, and there was something about turning out all the lights that I’d begun to find very sensible.

A few days before, one weekend morning, all six of us in the house had managed to straggle awake at the same time, and we sat around the breakfast table talking about all the things we didn’t want to be, and all the things we’d love to do but that would’ve still left us penniless urchins, old enough to know better, that the world wasn’t that accommodating. Most of us had earned our college degrees in the past year or two, but by choice or by dire curricular miscalculation were still marking time before doing anything real.

There was a lot of bitter laughter in the kitchen that morning. I happened to remark that, as career options went, medical school cadaver was looking better and better.

Later, Megan came up to me where I sat in the back, looking over a lawn that had earned us the enmity of our neighbors. She sat down and drank most of a Tab in silence before looking at me, quizzical and maybe worried, and saying, “You were kind of serious this morning, weren’t you?”

To me, the creepy thing was, I immediately knew what she was talking about. I told her I was, come to think of it.

“Nobody else around here catches shit like that. Sometimes I really hate being the sensitive one.” Then her worried look gave way to one of nervousness. “You’re not going to … act on it, are you?”

“Wrong time of year,” I said, and she didn’t understand that at all, so I had to explain. “If it was winter, I might have to go over to Lake Michigan. Find an ice floe and chip away at it, until I could float off into the haze, like a toothless old Eskimo. I heard they do that when they realize their lives are useless.”

“You are not useless,” then Megan started laughing. “You pay one-sixth of the rent and utilities.”

“Anybody who answers an ad can do that.”

“That’s true. But you do it on time.”

Of those under our roof I liked Megan best, with a rare and true affection that left me terrified at the notion of sleeping with her, because of what it probably would’ve destroyed. Among the little archipelagos that were all our lives, I think Megan and I sat closest together.

There were Syd and Brendan, grad students and hypochondriacs who worked themselves into weekly frenzies over what they might’ve contracted. I was convinced they remained in school mainly for the health benefits. They went to Student Health Services so much that the rest of us had taken to calling them the Socialist Patients Kollective — unwieldy, but it gave us a great sense of personal vindictiveness.

Then there were Pam and Camilla, who were trying very hard to be lesbians because it was the correct thing to do, but they just didn’t seem very good at it, and the time Pam slipped up and slept with a guy at a party, it triggered a screaming match that lasted a week. When I came to Pam’s defense, it seemed to mend the rift because finally they had a new target, womyn together, and they spent the next week deciding to hate me for being patronizing. I then understood why so many police officers are attacked at domestic disputes.

I was very suspect in Camilla’s eyes anyway, because when she first moved in and we were getting the obligatory personal trivia out of the way, I told her mine, that I printed T-shirts for a living, but that I had a journalism degree, although what I really wanted to do was write fiction.

“I despise modern fiction,” she said, suddenly frosty. “The only reason people read it is because it makes them feel better once they’ve assured themselves that everybody else’s lives are just as vapid as their own.”

It was then I learned that Camilla took refuge in nineteenth-century literature. Jane Eyre was, I think, more real to her than I was. And I hadn’t written a word since she had leveled what I’d finally come to believe was my reason for existence.

Naturally this led to the realization that my conception and birth were tragic mistakes. This was no exaggeration. I’d had the temerity to be born indecisive in an age when we’re all defined by what we do, our titles and our job descriptions. Once I’d taken a good look back at everything I’d ever really wanted to be, things became very clear.

When I was eight I wanted to be a cop. TV had a lot to do with that one, I suspect. In my early teens I argued so much that my mother told me I’d make a fine lawyer, and I actually took this to heart, because there had to be truth in anything that caused her so much spite. Later, by default more than anything, I settled into courses in journalism, because being a reporter seemed one of the more non-committal directions I could take.

In looking back, I realize that everything I used to think I wanted to be when I grew up, it’s turned out that people scorn them now. Thanks to Camilla’s critique, even my dreams were vapid.

Medical school cadaver. It had possibilities.

*

Early in my college career, my father grew loudly exasperated by my inability to declare a major. By this time he and my mother were divorced, each of them militantly, bitterly opposed to being subsumed by the memory and loss of the other. They spent lots of money and made themselves miserable, each conspicuously trying to prove to the other just how happy they were to be free.

If someone had sent me to the encyclopedia to look up Hell, I just knew I’d find a flow-chart of their relationship.

And there I was, the boy who didn’t know what he wanted to be, only that he’d once wanted to do it with breasts. I’m sure to my father I was the world’s great blemish on the Y-chromosome.

“Aw, christ, why don’t you be a meteorologist?” he suggested in disgust. “There’ll always be weather. You’ll always have a job.”

Security was terribly important to him.

I thought this over, but just couldn’t get past what I’d been hearing from scientists, all this dire talk of a coming Ice Age. I worried that I’d be on TV and that everyone would start to hate me, because there I’d be, standing before a chromakey display that read Tomorrow’s Forecast, and I’d have to look them all in the eye and say, “I’m sorry … umm … more ice.”

So it’s just as well.

I guess my father didn’t lie to me — there really is always weather — but then, that still wasn’t enough for the weatherman, was it?

Dad always could get off on a technicality.

*

So that suicide thing was working at me, like a Rubik’s Cube, or the pretty rock paperweight you pick up and turn over and over in your hand when there’s nothing better to do.

I became a student of methodology whenever I saw some sort of mention in the paper, but few of the guaranteed, no-miss techniques appealed to me, because mostly they were very messy without the redeeming grandeur of the weatherman’s nosedive. Most of my housemates I didn’t want to burden with the grim task of cleanup, and there was no way of insuring that it fell to Camilla alone. That I could’ve lived with.

I wondered if it might not be easier to contract some hideous disease — surely Syd and Brendan could qualify the symptoms — then summon Dr. Kevorkian. I pictured his arrival like that scene from The Exorcist when Father Merrin finally shows up to battle the devil, standing still in black silhouette beneath the streetlight in front of that foreboding house, his mysterious and holy bag in hand.

And then my thunder got stolen again.

When Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain put the shotgun in his mouth and thumbed the trigger, it sent shock waves through our house. All of us, even Camilla, would look at each other as if we’d been living a movie and one of the reels of film got put in upside-down, or out of sequence. It felt as if we were all on the verge of saying, “No, wait, it’s not really supposed to be like this.”

And it wasn’t. The weatherman, now he’d been a frat boy. He was supposed to turn out miserable and hollow at the center of it all. But this was something else entirely. Kurt had done it all his way and flipped everyone the bird from his breakthrough album, and it still wasn’t enough, so what chance was there for the rest of us?

Oh … never mind.

We left MTV on all weekend, saw the same varnished newsreels until we could’ve recited them by rote, and I don’t know that we were grieving so much as we were simply horribly justified. We’d come of age, an entire demographic group of us, from Seattle to Key West. We finally had our JFK — where were you when you heard the news? — and no, he wasn’t in the same league, but he was ours.

By early the next week my T-shirt shop had already coughed up its paean to tastelessness and commemorative gallows humor, and I brought home a half-dozen prototypes of the shirt. In a rare era of unity, all six of us wore them that night, black shirts with a picture of Kurt on the front, thick stringy gobs of red and gray ink blasting furiously from the top of his head, and above this it read:

nirvana [noun]: The state of perfect nothingness

We liked to think Kurt might’ve at least appreciated the irony. Especially since Megan looked the word up in Webster’s and found that nirvana literally meant, in Sanskrit, “blown-out.” Some things you just can’t make up.

So we wore our shirts and later got bold, maybe masochistic, and flipped on Rush Limbaugh. It really was quite astounding, the authority he’d become on Kurt, considering until a few days before he’d never heard of the guy. We watched Rush chortle and bluster his way through a denunciation of nearly everything that was under thirty and not Republican. A bunch of lazy whiners who’d had everything handed to us — yeah, so what’s your point? We all sort of knew we couldn’t do anything right, but I’d always thought that that’s the sort of judgment you prefer to reserve for yourself.

“He’d been trying to kill himself for twelve years,” said Rush. “He finally had to buy a shotgun so he wouldn’t miss.”

“Well at least he didn’t have to buy a goddamn airplane!” I shouted at the TV, and couldn’t recall feeling quite so cranky in years.

It was an epiphany, glorious and violent. For the first time in maybe forever, I wanted somebody to be dead, and it wasn’t me.

“You know how they used to execute horse thieves?” I said, not caring who was listening and who wasn’t. “How they used to tie one leg to a northbound horse, and the other to a southbound, and fire a gun?”

“Make a wish,” said Pam.

“I’d really like to do that to him.” I jabbed at the round, jack-o-lantern face on the TV. “Label one horse’s ass ‘Dad’, and the other one ‘Mom’, and just see how well he handles that.” I really started to cook then. “And maybe a couple more horses for his flabby arms, too. And another one for his big fat neck. Label those ‘truth’, ‘liberty’, and ‘the pursuit of happiness.’”

They were all staring at me. Even Rush, but I’m sure that was just a fluke of timing. And I burned with the fury. It was the Gettysburg Address and the Sermon on the Mount and Henry V’s rally of his troops at Agincourt. Well, to me it was.

They all knew I was alive then, and oddly enough, so did I.

I slept with Megan that night, and it didn’t seem nearly the mistake I was convinced it would be. And then dawn came in on the songs of birds as I looked at her, her black hair bunched upon the pillow, thick enough to tie a cable, a lifeline. Not a noose.

“Morning,” she murmured, with a smile, and I wondered how many others across Chicago and the rest of the country were waking up alone, knowing with prophetic certainty that they always would. I imagined they must number in the millions. And of those I had to wonder how many listened to Kurt’s music and thought he’d written it just for them, or fantasized of sitting beside the weatherman to share that fragile cockpit’s ultimate dive.

They deserved a voice, at least.

“Can I borrow some money?” I asked Megan, and she didn’t even ask what it was for, just said sure.

*

In the colorful and tragic circus after Kurt’s suicide, when it seemed that everyone with a forum, an agenda, and a vocabulary had to say something, I was surprised that no one mentioned Ernest Hemingway. Three decades plus change lay between their deaths, but I would imagine shotgun shells taste the same, no matter what their vintage is.

Kurt left a note, told his wife and the world he didn’t have what it takes anymore, that he couldn’t fake it.

Then, thirty-some years before, you had Hemingway, up in years like he never really wanted to be. Couldn’t fight any more, couldn’t fuck. Prostate trouble, too, if the gods were feeling particularly vicious. I don’t know if he left a note or not, but even if he didn’t, he really hadn’t needed to. It was all there in the books to begin with.

And there you have them, two influential artists with their own singular visions, lives gone, their motives as clear as their demises, and still no one understands. They’re all too busy crying foul to pay attention.

So I ask you: What chance does the average underachiever with a death wish have of being understood?

I went my own way the next several days, placid through my angers. Didn’t bother watching the forecasts. Rain or clouds or sun, I’d gotten to the place where I preferred the surprise to the tipoff. Then the next round of free weekly papers came out, the ones you find at all the better bars and bookstores and coffee shops. The ones whose deadlines I’d caught after borrowing from Megan. I swept down on them and brought home one of each. Sat on the couch as the ebb and flow of life went on under our mad roof, browsing the classifieds until Megan came home.

“I’m writing again,” I told her. “I wanted you to be the first to know.”

“Are you really?” She seemed very happy to hear this, and she was so decent, you know, she didn’t even say the obvious. Oh yeah, well how about writing me a check sometime soon?

“I’m putting together a portfolio,” and then I handed her one of the papers, folded back the way my father always read them, and left them for the next person. I showed her where to read, my ad under “Special Services.”

SUICIDE NOTES

FOR ALL OCCASIONS

• Don’t waste that last opportunity to have your say … you’ll never get a better chance to explain.

• Custom-written just for you, or choose from among our many demos.

• Blame laid, guilty consciences eased, more.

And on it went, with my evening number and suggested hours, but of course I realized I’d have to be flexible. Emergencies do come up.

“That’s morbid,” said Megan. “But I admire your ability to find a niche.”

“Most people need help just writing a resumé,” I said, and she nodded, remembering. I’d helped her write one two weeks after I’d moved in.

And for all the days of soul-searching, I actually felt good about this. It could prove to be a valuable service, one less thing to worry about at a really shitty time. Making money off the misery of others? I didn’t think of it as selling out. I preferred to think of it as buying in. I’d been there, could relate.

Eagles do fly higher than vultures, but at least they both get off the ground. After that, what really matters?

Megan and I curled into the couch, and then each other, and we talked until the phone started to ring, and once it started, I wondered if it would ever ever stop.

Heartsick

i. need

The wet spot is still on the bed when they retreat, come first light of morning, or sooner. After she sees the last of their backs out the door there is plenty of room in the bed, but still she sleeps atop the wet spot. Cool beneath her, sticky to the touch. Beneath her hip sometimes, other times her back … perhaps even her shoulders, depending on earlier acrobatics.

Awake and dreaming, tracing fingers through that dewy patch, their mingled fluids — mostly his, the ever interchangeable he — and she brings its musk scent to her nose. Then dips her nose to the source itself, breathe deeply now, as if to swim in their communal pool. Or duck beneath and drown.

The wet spot is still fresh when they leave.

But Stefan is different.

Connie, awake and dreaming, all nude and half covered by the rumpled sheet. The visible breast is small, firm, pointed. Her hair still crimped and now in stiff clumps, last night’s mist having lost its hold like so much surrendered self-control. And will she cry? No, no more, at least that’s one benefit of lowered expectations.

Two can play the game, gender being no barrier, affirmative action and equality: I can be just as callous as you, bastard, and if we were at your place instead, you couldn’t keep me from that door. Just you try.

Sure. Sure.

Just try, once, just … once?

Connie smiles dimly at the ceiling with lips that recall the press of another’s. Oh, the places she’s put her tongue. In retrospect it’s probably best she never sees them by true daylight; the night adds so much more mystique. In the dark, anything can dwell, any promise hold a core of truth.

Fan above, blades of wood and cane, slow circles for a draft to cool moonlit sweat, flesh on flesh, ghost white on silver. And if this ceiling could talk, what 3AM murmurs might it have learned, parrot-fashion?

i don’t usually do this, really i don’t … but it was your eyes i think

don’t you hate that smoke smell, so do i, isn’t this better?

your hands, i love the way your hands feel, i need them here

i love to give head

i’ll do anything you want

need them here too

okay? okay?

walk your dog now? i thought you said earlier you didn’t have any pets

Sometimes these exchanges seem as rehearsed as they are spontaneous, and probably this is so. Identical players memorizing identical scripts of hunger and desperation and pathological fears of loneliness, endlessly played out by new pairings of performers. On interchangeable stages.

But Stefan is different.

Endeavoring to persevere, Connie has tried pursuit, a follow-up of the heart once the ice of loins has been broken. Pop-psych gurus, “Don’t be afraid, men are flattered when the woman takes the initiative,” and now she has a whole shelf filled with pastel paperbacks she’d just love to cram down the throat of the next self-appointed expert. Here you go, digest this and see how it correlates with actualities out there, see if you can look me in the face then.

And then…?

…maybe I’ll buy your book anyway. It can’t hurt. Can it?

Taking the initiative, she knows all about that. Connie knows romance. Knows her heart and her soul, knows that fairy tales really can be hammered out of them with enough force.

The catered lunch at Andy’s office, address right there via Tuesday night’s exchange of business cards — are you surprised? she asked, flushing with obvious pleasure, and yes, oh yes he most certainly was, then had a question of his own, and her face began to crumble like a broken mask. connie. connie martin? we met … the other night, we … um…  Standing unprotected in a strange office she’d never seen before, and how brutal the air suddenly felt in her throat, on her eyes, peripherally aware of the caterer in his white jacket, starting to squirm and shuffle his feet and refusing to look up any more. She supposed it was his idea of discreet pity. Share her embarrassment and maybe he gets a bigger tip.

Overpriced luncheon, trout almandine, taken home in the world’s most humiliating doggy bag. White wine half-drunk in the taxi, one batch of leftovers eaten in front of evening TV news and quickly thrown up into the toilet, the other shoved to the back of the fridge until it grew blue mold. So much for romance.

She’s far wiser these days. Lapsing occasionally, still that hunger for another, deeper, voice to reassure her of beauty, of desirability, even if it is calculated for short-term goal attainment. But overall, preferring to stick with the certainty of lowered expectations and its attendant sure thing. That guarantee of no abrupt abandonment.

Stefan has brought that much into her life, at least.

ii. desire

Connie knows she’ll not get back to sleep, not now. With barely an hour left before the alarm and shower and curling iron and work, it’s hardly worth the effort.

She rises, doesn’t bother with the robe hooked on the back of her bedroom door. Carpet soft beneath her feet, and then she’s in the hallway, varnished wood suddenly and pleasantly cool. She lies naked out here some mornings, stretches herself along the bare hallway floor like a scrawny cat in a windowsill. Ever the sensualist, tender skin soaking the night’s chill from rigid floorboards. Although this summer she doesn’t do it nearly so much as she used to.

Not since Stefan. Aesthetically, he and the morning floor have so much in common.

Down the hall to the second story’s other bedroom, she’s known all along she would be coming here this morning. That gentle ache inside, something left untouched earlier, some hollow unfilled. Some flower ignored.

Stefan waits on the bed, flat on his back, as always, and she draws down the sheet that modestly covers him. Never speaking in moments like this. With her eyes there is no need, and he has long since lost the ability. He’s limited to the occasional soft, low grunt. She’ll speak to him afterward, when it’s more meaningful. He will appreciate it more then, she’s sure of it.

Connie slides into bed with him, draws alongside as her eyes close with waking dreams. Letting fingers become her eyes, taking in his smooth lines, muscled curves. His flesh warm in places, cool in others, always comforting because he’s there, going nowhere. Stefan has time for her. At last, she is someone’s priority. Connie finger-traces him from toes to knees, knees to waist, waist to chest, chest to eyes. Kissing him in the wake of her fingertips, and if there is any common denominator in the miracle of this particular male physique, it is that everywhere he is so very very hard. Like a man of marble. It’s not unarousing. Alien, yet familiar.

She pulls herself to her knees. Throws one tender leg across him to straddle his thighs, leans forward to run palms along the cobblestone path of his stomach, chest. Her unkempt hair brushes across her face, barely touches Stefan, and she wonders if he can still be tickled.

Connie’s breath quickens, oh the heat, and it’s always a pleasure to feel Stefan warming beneath her. He is Michelangelo’s David come to consciousness, so pale, the color of chalk. Would that he could return these tender caresses. She would give much to feel the rough warmth of his hands again … cupping a breast, splaying her thighs. But Connie has quickly realized this was a trade-in for his loyalty. At least his eyes follow her. His gaze was not frozen in place with the rest of him.

She lets it build inside…

build, her tongue on him, like licking a salty stone…

and at last she mounts him, positioning herself above his permanent erection, lowering herself until they are joined. She rocks, front to back, and tries to tell herself that a fleeting glimpse into Stefan’s eyes doesn’t really register his fear. She’s careful, never reckless, knowing full well that if she were to let go with too much abandon, she could snap him off at the root. Leave him like an ancient statue, emasculated by vandalism, or erosion and acid rain.

Silly Stefan. Connie’s a considerate lover. Responsive to a touch made perfect by precision rather than brute pressure. Does Stefan even understand that women are all different that way?

She grinds upon him until she trembles over her brink, then rises up and off with utmost care. His shaft glistens alabaster in the morning sun, and she dries him with the sheet. Sighs and lies beside him with her wound still wet, still throbbing, and for now the ache has been assuaged.

“I know what my problem is,” Connie tells him, this man like stone whose bed she shares. “Emotions.”

Silence in the house. Outside the birds are near, and the morning traffic distant enough that she never has to worry about distractions, intrusions into their sanctuary.

“I’m addicted to emotions I haven’t even felt yet.”

iii. icon

He’s a man in a shell, and the shell used to feel. Used to flex. If he lost his mind, maybe he could leave the shell behind, free of care and no longer shackled to its tonnage.

When he’s dead, will he rot? Or lie as a stone mummy, his own flesh become his sarcophagus?

Stefan has ample time for contemplation. By admittedly loose calculation of dawns and dusks, he’s been here just over a month. Immobile, his limbs and trunk and neck no longer his own, instead a sculpture frozen in the pose of sleep. Muscles brittle beneath skin like stone.

Ossified. Flesh gone to bone.

And how has this happened? He remembers an evening a month distant, but in these two-plus fortnights of silent immobility, he’s lived a numbed eternity. Memories of vertical perspective and movement beyond eyelids seem ancient.

An evening of newfound companionship, it would do for a night or for a week. Her name was Connie — wasn’t it? It seems so very long ago since those guardedly suggestive introductions over drinks and happy hour hors d’ouevres, and since then she has never referred to herself by name.

Summernight sweat, they lathered each other well in this very bed. Their wetness flowed like earlier wine, and if by the end of the carnal netherhours he felt his joints stiffening, he thought it only as side-effect of her insatiability. Which he would not have classified as nymphomania, precisely. Such insatiability had to go deeper than the libido, a chute emptying into a bottomless chasm of need. She wore him out, and despite the landscape of an unfamiliar bed, he slept deeply and well.

Like a petrified log.

Awakening the next morning to a deep and overall soreness he had never quite known. Movement equated with pain, like muscles wrenched during autumn’s first pick-up game of football with friends a few years ago, before families were begun in earnest by so many of them. Stefan asked to sleep in, you don’t mind, do you? And she did not. He blithely loved her in that moment, her bright understanding, her trust.

Awakening later that afternoon to realize the pain was gone, while even the possibility of movement had been taken with it. His fear was great, an awesome weight to bear, the same fear the fox or mink must feel with the first slam of trap jaws on its paw. And then, compounding the misery, he knew the shame of embarrassment.

He was lewdly, permanently, erect.

Awakening with a hard-on had always been a matter of goofy pride, everything in working order and ready for action. It had become the most ironic of curses.

He glanced down along his length, could tell a difference in skin color, healthy fleshtones gone dusty white. His internalized horror at this was exceeded only by Connie’s nonchalance when she came home to find him this way, not as if she had been expecting it, but worse: as if it were the answer to some incoherent prayer. He knew the moment she walked in that she would never summon help. With moist and loving eyes, she sat and stroked his new body for a time, and if he were outside himself, he might have marveled at the fact that no matter how firmly she pressed, poked, or prodded, his skin would not dimple.

Connie designated this room as his, converted the second floor guest room for her own use. He would be harder to move than a dresser emptied of its drawers — oh, here was morale. And she began to care for him like a nurse, of sorts. He can no longer move his jaws to eat, though she is able to force a stout straw through his lips, and he can suck up water and thin broths. Apparently his internal metabolism has slowed, for this meager diet seems sufficient. His resultant messes she cleans without complaint. Defecation is a thing of the past. The occasional spout of urine is all.

Nurse and keeper she may be, but she is also mistress, and he lacks even the physiological cop-out of impotence to deny Connie her satisfactions. Strong in the beginning, now hate is no longer in his remaining psychological framework. For further irony has not escaped him: She has her own design firm — this he remembers — and owns her own home. Isn’t this the dream of every guy teetering on career burnout, to kiss it goodbye and become a kept man?

Stefan still contemplates the why of it all. Vengeful wrath of some newly stirred deity? It’s crossed his mind, though this seems extreme. He’s been no saint, but no plundering cocksman, either. In terms of callous usage and abandonment, he has known far more deserving of punishment. Which is no excuse, Stefan supposes, but in this day and age, it seems as if the women he has known have been equally handicapped at making some genuine connection. All of them, male and female, fumbling in emotional darkness like blind, mad children.

Which, in retrospect, made his own heartfelt numbness seem quite normal. Apathy has just never seemed very important.

He’s had time to think himself through quite well.

And if he were to be run past a physician and a psychiatrist, what would be their diagnosis?

Patient exhibits symptoms of new, as-yet-unclassified social disease afflicting, in order: heart, soul, and finally body. Emotional rigidity and isolation seem to stimulate sudden massive production of osteoblasts and fibrous matrix. Accumulation of calcareous deposits continues until intramembranous ossification is complete.

And the prognosis? More of the same, perhaps, no cure and no preventative. He finds himself almost insane with curiosity: Is this scenario being repeated in other homes, other bedrooms? The lonely and the battle-scarred, awakening to find their night’s lover gone stiff beside them. The callous, rising to morning pain and finding surrender more attractive than fighting joints in protest. This city of men and women, one by one and two by two, sculpting unwilling new bodies of bone.

He wonders. It’s a theory, at least.

But if Stefan is anything, he is adaptable. He has adjusted to this new life, new flesh. A part of him now feels entirely divorced from that carnal Stefan of the past, he of curly dark hair and thrice-weekly health club workouts. He now knows the harsh ascetic rapture of the penniless holy man, the vow of silence and the wisdom that comes from motionless meditation. There is much to understand once the barrier of self is broken.

It’s not so bad, really.

Except those infrequent nights when he hears Connie readying to go out, smells the perfume, the hair mist, the very scent and essence of her need. Stefan, lying awake for hours, recognizing the key in the latch when she returns, and he swears even the lock sounds different when she’s not alone.

For hours, he listens. For hours, he prays.

These nights he hates most of all. Because he knows she’ll be coming to him in the morning.

To finish the task of satisfaction.

Connie fears, above all, the same solitude he so desperately craves.

iv. contagion

She has always hated autumn. Autumn brings sad change and a cyclical melancholy. Rains and chills, the false beauty of trees that will soon enough show their true colors, stark dead etchings against gray skies. Connie has always taken for granted that she will die in the fall.

Never has she considered it might be her time to nurture within the bud of new life.

Of sorts.

The cessation of her period four months ago did not seem undo cause for alarm. This has happened before, unintentional metabolic tampering through extremes of diet and exercise and stress, and the menstrual flow is dammed. That she never missed a single morning pill was more weight to her belief that this was simply another one of those episodes.

But tests, run and rerun, don’t lie. Nor does the blatant concern on the face of her gynecologist. But what, she’s not entitled to a mistake now and then? She’s human.

Unlike the thing in her womb.

He’s told her that it’s rare, but it does happen. It’s a documented alternative to successful pregnancy; one of the many biological missteps that can occur early on, through no fault of her own; one that did not happen to spontaneously abort. Just one of those things.

If he only knew.

Her gynecologist, of course, has never seen the father.

“Embryos can ossify, Connie. But it’s nothing you could have foreseen, nothing you could’ve prevented.”

Sure. Tell me some more fairy tales.

Connie drives home on autopilot, hands and feet independent of thought. Having left the doctor’s office before he can get her to agree to another appointment, chip this calcified lump of child off her uterine wall. No, she’s told him, she’ll have to think about this, the doctor dogging her footsteps, insisting it will not, repeat, will not take care of itself —

She would’ve liked nothing better in that moment than to have whirled upon him, let him know just what a shitty deal their six-year patient/doctor association has been from her point of view. Connie’s own thousand points of spite: you think you know me, think you know how i feel? i can hang my feet in those stirrups and open wide and you can poke and probe and name every part in English and in Latin, but you have no idea what it’s like inside my heart and my soul, no idea how hard it can be for some people to fall in love, so don’t you try to heal what you don’t even understand.

Of course she did not say this aloud. Public spectacle is public embarrassment. And later demands public apology.

Connie arrives home with the past twenty minutes of transit in blackout, forgotten or never registered. Her quiet street of century-old oaks and two-story homes, dignified, shutters and curtains aplenty behind which to hide their iniquities and secret shames. She keys off the ignition and sits behind the wheel in her driveway. Hands gently resting across her stomach.

Look into the rear view mirror and what does she see? The dark mascara runoff, so-blue eyes filled to overflowing with too many fears, too many questions, and a lower lip left ragged by nervous teeth. Hello young mother.

Hasn’t she known all along that something has been growing inside her? Something white and chalky and hard, this child of her own isolation, its skull a smooth dome of rock. She knows it never had a chance — it was never right and proper to begin with, and as such, what about its gestation period? How long will it take to come to term? And when its moment of delivery arrives, will it be like trying to squeeze a boulder from her body, and tear her in half with a rush of blood and chalky limewater flood?

There are no self-help books for this, are there?

Connie steps from the car with a deep breath, and at last prepares to live life according to her deepest instincts.

v. anastomosis

Standing in the doorway of Stefan’s room, she now sees him with new perception. Connie sags against the doorjamb, suddenly tired, exhaustion having found a home in her muscles, her bones, her soul. The climb up the stairs was an expedition.

She slips her suede jacket from her shoulders, lets it fall to the floor.

“I quit bleeding four months ago,” she tells him.

Stefan, of course, does not answer. Cannot even turn his head to acknowledge her in the doorway. Flatbacking, eyes toward the ceiling, without so much as the motion of perceptible breath.

“But that’s okay. I’ve bled enough.”

Silence. Closed up for late autumn, the house is as quiet as a mausoleum. An occasional creak, the settling of the house’s wood and iron bones. The occasional rattle of wind at windows. She has always felt safe here. There’s so much she makes sure remains outside.

Although, any more, she has to wonder if she belongs out there too. No longer to taint this house, its ageless serenity.

And, loudly, eternally, Connie screams.

At neither herself nor Stefan, yet at the same time both, at her home, at the world. She screams in potent raw distillation of feeling, without words. There are no words for this, the dawning revelation that betrayal has been in the works for a long, long time, and she has never chosen to believe it. Until now. “There’s someone for everyone,” her mother used to tell her, and she believed. And it’s true, but the truth is too spiteful to accept.

Someone for everyone — there he is. They deserve each other.

She blames Stefan for everything and nothing, knowing that half the fault falls squarely on her own head. Had she never let him get so close, he could never have infected her soul with whatever virulence had taken root in his own. Had she not continued to drape her own tender skin across his hard shell, he would never have violated the sanctity of her womb. It had never been made to grow anything like this.

Her scream is forever, it permeates walls and floor and ceiling, and after it drains her of breath, Connie steps into the room. With small, quavering grunts, she spins Stefan’s rigid form a quarter-turn on the bed, so that his legs hang over the floor. Then she maneuvers him up, onto his feet, and while his eyes are the only part of him that can move, can respond, she will pay them no heed. With her hands steadying his shoulders, he is balanced upright.

She moves him toward the door, into the hallway, rocking his weight to one foot, then the other, back and forth. Like walking a heavy piece of furniture into place.

Until she stands him before the flight of stairs.

Stefan is making a soft, high whine inside himself, and she can hear the crisp whistle of breath through brittle airways. Her hand firm on one shoulder as she bites her lip and moves around to gaze, at last, into his impassive face.

Only his eyes are vast and feverish, glazed with the terrible knowledge of expectation and damnation. Down his cheeks trickle white tears. Miracle of miracles, a statue that weeps.

“No,” she thinks she hears Stefan say, with ghastly effort.

“I can’t be afraid to be alone,” Connie says. “Be free.”

Then, lightly, she shoves him. His own weight and imbalance do the rest. He falls, striking down upon the staircase with a thunderous crash.

And Stefan shatters.

Connie stands with tears of her own, watching it happen, fragments large and small flying apart to rattle down the wooden stairs. They litter the staircase from middle to bottom, pieces of Stefan … bone china, and inner tissues like red sponge. Not nearly as much blood as she would have thought.

Call the king’s horses, call the king’s men. A fairy tale ending for her at last.

Too many dreams unfulfilled, too many expectations that were evidently too great, realized only too late. Love and family and security, so sorry, these belong to others, not for you, never for you. Maybe next life, ha ha. As she gazes down upon the fractured spill that was Stefan, she understands: This is the sum total of her life. Wouldn’t her mother be proud now, if she could see?

Footfalls soft upon the stairs, Connie makes her way down to sort among the debris. Stefan’s head is at the bottom, halfway across the dining room floor, and it is whole, but not much else is this recognizable. She finds what may be a piece of his arm, split lengthwise like a greenstick fracture, radius or ulna tipped by a point to reckon with. Long sharp shard.

Connie holds it in both hands, and it’s rough in some places, smooth in others. Moist. Moving to stand before a hallway mirror, she watches herself cradle it close. Mother … stone child …  shattered father? What poignant destiny that they should all end up in the same body.

She strips, tossing clothes to the floor, until she beholds herself naked in the mirror. Her bony frame, small ribs in bas-relief, can anorexia be far away? Her hair seems the biggest part of her.

Connie takes the stake of Stefan’s arm and, like a young Shakespearian lover wronged by family and fate, presses its point to the skin just beneath her breastbone. Angles it upward. Wraps both hands around the thicker base…

And shoves as hard as she can.

There is pain, the rending of skin, and she feels the last of Stefan slide in, an inch, no more, and then it stops. Feeling deep within a terrible scrape, the meeting of irresistible force with immovable object.

Hands falling in defeat to her side. Bone shard slipping free to fall and shatter on the hardwood floor. The spill of tears that descends to anoint her breasts, her new wound, bleeding both red and white.

Dear God, it’s worse than she thought.

But there is no piercing the calcified heart.

Extinctions In Paradise

They kill children here. Let me make that clear from the beginning.

In spite of that, I have for two years found this city an agreeable place to live. Still not a lot of friends, but those I have are genuine, and diverse. Their company cheers me on those days when I still miss my family so much the pain claws at me like a wounded jaguar.

It was Pedro Javier that I met first, or that’s the way I remember it, a little man with silvery hair above a brown old face wrinkled in the kindliest of ways. His shoulders are rounded with a perpetual stoop from all the years he’s spent hunkering down behind a camera so antiquated that no one’s interested in stealing it. Every day, for more than forty years, he’s come down to set up his camera in the Plaza del Oro, and take pictures of tourists and students, lovers and anybody else who’ll spare him a few minutes, against a backdrop of a fountain cascading with water that looks purer than it really is. Pedro hasn’t missed a day in four decades … except for some week many years ago, a week I’ve never been able to get him to talk about. I suspect it happened when the army was in charge, when the generales often rounded up anyone they thought might not fit their agenda. I suspect this. But I never press him on it. He’s a happy man, and God knows I realize how easily bad memories can tear your day to tatters.

“Roberto,” he greeted me one afternoon, same as he always did. I think he believed that adding the o might make me feel more like a native down here. It didn’t, but I never told him. I handed him a coffee I’d bought from a vendor across the Plaza. He always appreciates that. “Thank you, thank you.”

“What says the sun today?” I asked. As a photographer, he is deeply into the philosophy of light and shadow and the shadings between the two, their subtle nuances and how they speak of the world.

“El sol, today he is saddened by the change of seasons, and how he gets not so much time in the sky. He is weary, but he still fights. See the golden glow of the shadows today? Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Pedro was right, but this was something I’d not have noticed until someone with his eye pointed it out to me. The Plaza, full of those strolling along, taking time out to enjoy the day, seemed suffused with a warmly glowing luster, and whatever teardrops the day called its own pooled only in the thickest shadows.

I wasn’t the only norteamericano in the Plaza, but few would mistake me for a tourist. I’d long ago lost that scrubbed, pressed sheen, had effortlessly cultivated the rumpled, lived-in look of one who has forsaken a prior lifetime, to live the rest of it in a land that made the smallest daily acts seem new again.

We talked for a while, then when he’d finished his coffee, Pedro flicked a spindly finger at me. “Okay, over by the fountain with you. Today we will make a new picture. That time has come again.”

“Already?” But I was walking to where he wanted me.

“One each month, you know my plans for you, hee hee.” Pedro sank into his stance behind the camera, making adjustments on the boxy contraption, compensating for changes in the light that only he could see. “Someday you will thank me, you will be able to look at them in sequence and see how well you have aged. Or … how much you have healed. Now smile, lazy gringo.”

I pushed my graying ponytail off my shoulder and smiled for him. The camera resonated with a far more substantial clunk than did the Nikons and Canons I was familiar with. Pedro straightened — a little — and grinned broadly, a dotty old wizard whom I feared might be the last of his kind.

When I stood at his side again, he patted my mottled arm just below the rolled shirtsleeve, the skin of his hand like a smooth leather glove, dry and comforting. I felt that effortless acceptance that seems to emanate only from the very old, who never feel the need to say anything simply because there is silence. Back in the States we’ve forgotten how to appreciate that.

Pedro and I took seats on a stone bench where already we had passed so many hours, the impressions of our rumps might have been worn into it.

“I saw something strange last night, Pedro,” I said at last. “Down in the alley outside my bedroom window.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding steadily. Waiting.

“Do animals from the jungle ever come this far into the city? I think it was a big cat. Or something like that.”

“Why should it not happen, from time to time? Cunning beasts, they can survive easier in our world than most of us can survive in theirs. They are like the children who roam the streets and have no homes. They reduce life to its simplest term: survival.”

“I just saw it for a few seconds. It looked up at me in my window there. Then it ran.” I didn’t tell him it had been a bad night, that I’d spent two hours or more crying over a bottle of dark rum. “I swear it was holding a hand in its mouth. Severed right above the wrist.” I traced a line across my own to show him.

Pedro frowned. “Well, what can I say? Night can be a fearful time, still, even in the heart of the city. All the gold is gone from the sky, and the shadows have their way with all else. It is the way of night.”

“That wasn’t all. You know the way cat eyes glow green in a flash of light? These didn’t. These glowed red. Like…”

“Like a man’s? Ah, well.” Pedro shrugged, with the well-aged wisdom of those who have discovered that the longer they live, the less they’ve really seen. “For every law, something that breaks it. This is the way of the world.”

*

I came here an expatriate from the States. Never say never, they tell you. But I’m never going back.

You’d hardly recognize me these days from the tiny picture that used to accompany my column in the Chicago Tribune, which was syndicated to nearly 100 dailies. I’ve done a lot of living since that bland little picture was shot, much of it hard, and I see the world through eyes that aren’t necessarily different, just … wearier. I used to strike a comfortable balance between cynicism and idealism. But the balance has tilted out of whack since I wrote my last column three years ago.

Still, for nearly every day I do make an attempt to find something good in it. My wife would expect it of me.

Around the time of that last column, I had been enmeshed in an ongoing debate over sex and violence on TV. As one who earned his living from words, I was made nervous by the groups of self-appointed guardians of the public trust who were making noisy demands that they knew best for us all, and should be granted an advisory capacity to restrict what went out over the airwaves. They were armed with lots of zeal, and stats selectively compiled from cause-and-effect studies whose validity wasn’t even agreed upon. I spent a lot of ink trying to puncture holes in their self-righteousness and pseudo-science. Today an image, tomorrow a thought, that was my fear. It’s not without precedent.

I can’t imagine how much these people must have grown to hate me. The columnist always gets the last word. The columnist is the embodiment of smug and godless ruin, the Nero who fiddles while Rome burns.

Maybe I was.

I tried to tell myself that the team who showed up at my home one night wasn’t really trying to harm anyone. That their goal was to frighten. Doesn’t killing somebody undermine credibility, even that of extremists? They said they got the idea from a rerun of Miami Vice. Too much monitoring? Anything to prove a point, I suppose.

But I’ve given up trying to figure them out. Facts are easier to stick with. They lobbed three gasoline bombs into our home at three different locations. We’d been remodeling, and things were a mess, and the fires spread quickly, joining into one conflagration while the smoke billowed into a dense, caustic cloud.

A wife and two children, I lost them all, and gained a lot of blisters and baked skin that took months to heal. The people who did this, certainly they shut me up. It’s hard to type with your hands swathed in bandages, and I couldn’t keep my head clear long enough to dictate a column. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d get a paragraph in, maybe two on a lucid day, and then I’d think I smelled my children, or heard them crying out to me, in absolute faith that I would never fail them.

You haven’t truly known failure until the last thing you’ve taught your children is how fragile and human you really are.

I didn’t decide to leave the country until after the trials and convictions. I attended faithfully, like church, and before the day of the sentencing I schemed obsessively to smuggle a pistol into the courtroom so it was waiting for me. If the judge didn’t come down hard enough to suit me, I could at least rise like an avenger and bring them down in retribution for the three people I had failed most in this world.

I even had my hand on the grip before I began wondering what the experience had turned me into. I’d actually considered this? I’d thought I could go through with it?

Something’s wrong, I thought. Something is very wrong and it’s not just me.

South America, I later thought. It would be another world, someplace to stumble around and lose myself for years while I got my bearings. I could live cheaply down there. Between the insurance, and the money I’d earned from syndication, I might not have to work again for years. I might be human again by then.

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the struggle with my own murderous impulses that drove me south. It was my neighbor from directly across the street.

The gasoline bombs immediately caught his eye, fires blooming in an upstairs bedroom, the dining room, family room. My neighbor was concerned just enough to make a run for his video camera. Not enough to try to help. He taped everything, even after I was long gone to the hospital in a scream of siren … right up to the moment when they brought out the bagged bodies of my family from the smoldering husk of the house.

He sold the tape to a tabloid show for more than I’d earned my first six years working for the newspapers.

I had a hard time dealing with that.

*

The next day I learned from Pedro that a shopkeeper had been savaged several blocks from my apartment the same night I’d seen whatever it was from my bedroom window. Not all of the body had been recovered. Because of the teeth- and clawmarks, the general assumption was that it never would be.

Everybody who lived in the area, and many beyond, knew about the victim. He operated a botanica, filled with fragrant herbs and pictures of saints, with incense and candles, standard trappings of the numerous religions to spring from an African commonality. Vodoun, santeria, candomblé, macumba … the same basic gods and beliefs, with variations among their rites. Most knew this man for the sham he was, with faith in nothing more than profit. His trade wasn’t with true believers, but mostly with dabbling kids who wanted something more primal than the Catholicism of their parents and didn’t know any better about him, and with tourists who got a cheap thrill out of burning a candle they could have bought for a fraction elsewhere, but felt sure the expensive one was blessed.

Of course nobody deserved to die in such a ghastly way, but on the streets, one got the feeling he wouldn’t be missed.

“Do you think I should report what I saw?” I asked Pedro that same afternoon. He was eating from a bag of pistachio nuts and his lips were comically red, a right jolly old elf.

“And what was that: an animal, you saw, for a moment in the dark. This much is known already.” Pedro shrugged. “The policía, what will they do? They will listen, and they will look very bored, and if feeling lively they will scratch their bellies and their balls.” He shrugged again. “Do as you must. But for me, life is too short to spend it watching hairy men scratch themselves.”

Pedro’s dismissal of the police was as practical as it was fatalistic. They’re no different here than they are throughout much of South America: poorly equipped, underpaid, notoriously corrupt. Paid the equivalent of $200 American per month, they are often the puppets of anyone who puts up enough money.

And I ended up taking Pedro’s advice.

It’s the way of things down here, and I had learned well in my two years living with them. They accept as natural the oddest things, as if a carnivore materializing in the heart of a city of five million, and carrying off pieces of a shopkeeper, is well within the realm of possibilities. They believe in the kinds of magic that come sweeping down on warm winds from the grassy open pampas, or ooze in like fog from the jungles, or bubble up in the densest slums. They recognize miracles of both the light and the darkness, because they’ve lived them for so long, keeping spirits and hopes robust even while the occasional dictator has sought to crush protesting throats beneath his boot. It’s not that they’re apathetic to tragedy. They merely reserve their outrage for what truly matters. All else, when said and done, is life in all its richness, simply life.

It’s only in the youngest and dirtiest of the city’s wealth of life that I see no hope, in whom hope has died, if it has lived at all. The street kids are a breed unto themselves, roaming in packs for survival, and clinging tenaciously to one another for a sense of family.

The government said the problem is under control, that only 1500 or so actually sleep on the streets. It seems a whitewash to me, that there must be more, but even if that figure is correct, the government can’t deny that tens of thousands more get nothing out of their homes other than a place to sleep when exhausted. The streets may not be their bed, but are still the only way these kids can survive. Children as young as five shine shoes and sell candy, hire themselves out for odd jobs, steal, and prostitute their bodies. They get by, many of them, on fifty cents a day.

It gets them dead sometimes.

The street kids — grubby urchins whose dark eyes can be sad one moment, shining innocently the next, and turn vicious a moment later — are not just some exotic species to me that I watch from afar. I know many of them fairly well, give them money and bring them food, listen to them imagine their funerals as if fifteen is an impossibly old age they can never attain.

Many nights I’ve shared their company as they huddled in tiny cardboard cities erected in alleyways fetid with garbage and plunged into menace by primal shadows beyond their fire. A good night is when they can grill a dog, mouths watering at the sweet smoke. They stand careful watch for off-duty policías, of whom they live in constant fear.

They kill children here, remember.

The army no longer is in charge, but death squads haven’t faded into the past — they’ve merely been co-opted by private enterprise. Swift little beggars and thieves drive away tourists, shopkeepers complain. Bad for business. Some of them pool money and pay the most corrupt policías to roam the streets in their off-duty hours, and eradicate the menace. It’s gone on for twenty years, but they used to be discreet about it. No longer. Last year three of them used MAC-10s to gun down eleven kids one bright summer afternoon after a tour bus had been boarded by a gang and its passengers robbed. It was a broad retaliatory strike. The gunmen had no interest in making sure they had the same kids. The bodies were strewn along an entire block of a busy city street that had grown as deserted as a town in an American western movie. I wonder if the rogue policías saw themselves as avenging gunslingers.

Over this, the country screamed its outrage. To appease it, the three killers were arrested, tried, and convicted, are now doing thirty years. I have my doubts they’ll walk out alive. The world over, cops in prison make tempting targets. But they were only sacrificial scapegoats, nothing more. Shopkeepers and death squads alike took a lesson from them: no crowds of witnesses, no bodies strewn along the streets. Bad for public relations.

For the street kids, though, business went on just the same.

That, too, was life.

*

Three nights later I was awakened by pounding at my door, a pounding of steady desperation. I slipped on khaki pants and went stumbling for the door before the neighbors suffered, complained. I passed a hallway clock that read nearly 3:00 A.M. I opened the door, immediately had to look down.

I had expected my visitor to be taller.

“Miguel?” I said. “What the hell…?”

It was one of the kids, the lost, who slept on a bed of asphalt. Miguel believes he might be eleven years old, a skinny-limbed boy with a beautiful smile and long black hair that tumbles into his eyes. I’d once forcibly taken him to a doctor and paid for the penicillin that cured his gonorrhea.

“You come with me, okay?” He tugged urgently at my bare arm. “You have medicines, okay? You come now, find your shoes.”

I hurried, throwing things together while quizzing him and getting frustratingly incomplete answers. He could hardly quit dancing around my apartment, impatient to get me moving into the night. The most I could get out of him was that Rafael was hurt. I didn’t even know a Rafael, but I grabbed bandages, disinfectant, a bottle of antibiotics … things I’d scrounged in case the kids needed them. But I was hardly qualified to practice much more than first aid.

We descended into the streets, Miguel leading me along a dark path of alleys and airways, where soon I became aware of everything that might be lying just beyond my limits of vision. I could smell it, sense it, strata of decay and disease. Miguel traveled without hesitation or misstep, picking his way along with the assurance of a cougar on a ridgetop, and he never dropped his hand from my arm. I felt as long as he had hold of me, I would pass with impunity. Probably I’d not have been so lucky two years ago.

I had been robbed one night within a month of moving here, by a pair of twelve-year-olds with knives. They’d have used them if I’d resisted, I’m sure, but perhaps it was because, still in mourning, I assigned so little value to my own life that I could see how terrified they were, knives or not. They took me for maybe forty dollars and a watch I still haven’t replaced. As they were backing away, brandishing their knives to discourage any heroism, I knelt and took off a shoe and peeled out another bill.

“You missed one,” I said. They looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. They took the bill — it was, after all, offered freely — but never was I robbed again. It may only be coincidence … but even I am able to believe in a little magic.

Miguel hurried me along for half an hour, deep into twisting passages and hellish urban bowels, until we arrived at one of those transient settlements of cardboard and packing crates. The moon was a chilly scythe scraping behind the tall silhouette of a tenement, and as Miguel called out with a soft hooting cry of identification, I sensed a quick sinuous movement just beyond us. It flanked us, whipped over and around as if scampering across a mound of garbage, glided down into thicker darkness —

And was gone.

“Down,” Miguel said to me, and for a moment I thought he meant I should drop to hands and knees to enter one of these rude domains. And while I’d have to, it wasn’t what he meant. “Down, to me,” he said. All he wanted was to look me directly in the eye.

He raised his small hands, cupped my face as tenderly and urgently as a doting mother. An eleven-year-old with responsibilities I could never have imagined dealing with at that age.

“You help Rafael, right? Right, Monjito?” It was their name for me, Monjito, roughly meaning ‘Little Monk.’ It was their way of teasing me for living alone.

“I’ll try, Miguel,” I whispered, while from all around us I got the sense of being watched, of life unseen. Small eyes were surely peering from makeshift doorways. “But you haven’t even told me what’s happened to him.”

“You like Rafael. He’s my friend.” Still pressing his tough little hands to my face, Miguel glanced to either side, then leaned closer in. “You live here long enough now, you see strange things. Okay? Not like your old home. You see another strange thing now, maybe. Monjito? I trust you. You never show us to the policía, right? I trust you.”

I gripped his wrists, thin as broomsticks. “I’d never turn you in. Never worry about that.”

He released my face and dropped to all fours, scurrying into the mouth of one of the hovels they’d tacked together in half an hour’s time, if that. I followed, struck by the sudden reek of sweat and blood inside the six-foot crawlspace. Miguel pushed aside a scrap of burlap coffee bag used for a curtain and we crowded into a miserable little chamber in which one couldn’t even stand up, whose only decor was pictures I’d taken of the kids, over time. It was lit by half a dozen candles of various colors, and I tried not to think what would happen if one of them tipped against a wall, unnoticed.

“Rafael,” he said, pointing.

He was a curly-haired boy near Miguel’s age, maybe a year or two older. It’s so hard to tell sometimes. Rafael lay barechested and trembling along one rough-hewn wall, a pallet of rags for his mattress. He was covered to the waist by a thin blanket; the bloodstains atop the grime looked fresh.

Rafael opened his eyes, looked at me without emotion, with neither fear nor relief. I was simply there. He did not shut them until Miguel squatted closer and stroked the boy’s shoulder.

I quit praying three years ago, but for this I resurrected the act. I slowly drew down the blanket until I saw that his naked hip bore the swollen red pucker of a bullet wound. It was obvious that Rafael had shat himself, but not here. It was only a few smears.

Although he would have to be kept warm, I couldn’t leave that filthy blanket on him. Maybe Miguel could run back to my place for a clean one. I tugged the worn cloth off him, to toss it aside —

And I stared at what lay beneath the rest. Beyond acceptance, beyond rejection. What I saw? It simply was.

The boy’s feet and lower legs were not human, but some kind of canine or lupine form, bristling with dark fur and matted with his blood. As Rafael twitched, a claw extending crookedly from between a pair of toe-pads scratched incessantly at the wood. They bent strangely, these haunches, the underlying bone structure consistent with animal origins. The feral hide and muscle melded gradually into his skinny thighs.

“He looks some more normal than he did when I leave for you,” said Miguel. “Soon, he looks like same Rafael again, no different. You help him, okay?”

“He’s been shot,” I murmured. “He needs a doctor, he needs to go to a clinic.”

“No doctor, no clinic. They don’t fix him so good, maybe, they see him like this.” Miguel was very firm. “The bullet, out already. Don’t worry, Monjito. I did a good job.” He pointed at a bloody lump of misshapen lead and twiddled his thin fingers like pincers. He’d dug it out with his fingers.

I worked, trying not to think what I was working on, because it wasn’t the time for questions. All I could try was to keep uppermost in my mind that there was a young boy who’d been shot, and whatever else he may have been didn’t matter. I irrigated and cleaned out the wound, and while swelling had cut off most of the bleeding, I still had to attempt a crude job of stitching closed the hole. I packed it over with a thick bandage, fed him a dose of antibiotics, then resigned myself to the fact that it was the most I knew how to do.

After which I leaned trembling against the hovel’s frail wooden wall. Rafael had dropped into fitful slumber, while Miguel sat on his haunches and, in the warm glow of the candles, watched us with a strangely affectionate pride.

“You did a good job, I knew you would,” he said, smiling, and he must have seen all the questions in my eyes. It was one of the most awful moments of my life, the way he regarded me with not just understanding … but with pity.

Miguel squirmed slowly across the cramped room, lifted aside the clean blanket he’d come back with while I doctored. Rafael’s strange legs looked even more like a normal boy’s than they had earlier, mended by some creeping transformation. Miguel traced a slow finger through the thinning patches of fur.

“Happens now, to some of us,” he said dreamily, with neither sadness nor joy. “Few months, must be, maybe, that’s all. Was a long time before we could do it any time we want. I can do it now for you, but I think you don’t so much want to see me … so, no, right?”

I almost laughed, softly. “No. Not … not now.” I thought back to what I’d seen a few nights before in my alley, how it had seemed so out of place, and yet so right. It may even have been Miguel himself, thinking to come bring me a bloody gift the way a housecat will deliver a torn mouse. “Miguel? Do you … the rest of you … do you kill?”

“Some try killing us,” he said solemnly. “Some pay, and some, they look for us. Not wrong, fighting back, okay?”

“No,” I whispered. “You have to protect yourself. And the ones you love.” I closed my eyes against the threat of tears summoned by my failures. And I knew where these candles had come from, which shopkeeper no longer had need of them, had no need of anything, not even the policías he reportedly paid to rid himself of pests. Oh, I believed rumor. Pedro’s word was gospel.

From beyond the makeshift walls came the soft sounds of movement, of careful feet shifting with more stealth than tender years should be forced to acquire. I heard muttering throats and clicking teeth, and breath in hot feral sighs. For a moment I wondered if they’d come to silence me, a witness to their camp.

Miguel sat at rapt attention, head tilting up as he sharply sniffed the air, a movement so unchildlike it was like seeing the instinctive animal within ripple beneath his brown skin.

“They want in,” he said. “For Rafael they feel sad.”

I shrank against the wall as Miguel drew the burlap curtain aside. The smelly den could accommodate no more than two at a time, but they were patient, waiting their turn. I just watched them, saying nothing as ragged boys and girls and slinking beasts came in to nuzzle the sleeping Rafael. Among those I didn’t already know, their interest in me was minimal, some looking over me with flat eyes, some smiling shyly, others seemingly unaware of my presence. They curled next to Rafael, to warm him with their body heat. They tugged the bandages away to lick his wound. Rafael’s ribs rose and fell with a smooth new rhythm. Two by two they came, as if they all could give of themselves to restore the life that had almost been taken from him, taken because he was … what? A scavenger?

They must have numbered close to thirty.

After they left, drawing back to their own junkyard dens, and even Miguel fell prey to exhaustion, I cradled the wounded boy in my arms. In his adolescent body I tried to feel the bones a younger child might have grown into, a son I’d not held for three years, a son who, for me, would forever remain five. I wondered if he had a sister somewhere, and if she still loved him, or if she too lay buried somewhere, like that five-year-old’s big sister, nothing but unfulfilled potentials and precious memories.

They kill children here. But I suspect it’s the same all over.

I held Rafael until late the next morning, long after I had looked at his legs and saw that he was only a kid again, just a bruised and wounded kid who needed so many things, but of those things, had only time.

*

My hair is gray, but sometimes I want to be older still, very very old, so old that nothing new can surprise me, because I’ll recognize that it really isn’t new at all. If I live that long, I will welcome it, but until then I’ll have to content myself with friends like Pedro Javier.

I told him about Miguel and Rafael and the others, told him in a Plaza del Oro flooded with the light of a sun that struggled in and out of clouds. Pedro’s face was luminous one moment, mysterious and thoughtful the next. I told him not because I really expected him to believe, but because I had to tell someone, and he was the only one I knew who might not laugh at me.

“The world,” he said, “it forces children to become terrible things sometimes, so that they may live. Makes new things of their nature. For every loss, a gain, I think, but not every gain is worth its cost.”

He seemed very sad. Pedro has never married, never fathered children, and at times like this I wonder if he’s glad, or regrets it all the more. He’d have made a wonderful father.

I have him to thank for suggesting a way to get closer to the kids when I first began to notice them, take an interest in their plight — surrogates, I’m sure, for the ones I couldn’t save at home. Give them pictures of themselves and their friends, Pedro suggested. He has done so himself for many years. They like this not only because it makes them feel more like a family — see, they have proof — but because when one of them dies, or disappears after the shadow of the policía is seen, then the rest have something by which to remember the lost one. They have no marker and no grave, but at least they have images preserved for all time, and some believe that in pictures there lives a sprinkle of magic.

From my pocket I pulled one such picture. I’d done a terrible thing, taking this from the wall of Rafael’s shack, stealing from someone who has less than nothing, but I planned to give it back.

I showed it to Pedro, positive he would recognize it.

The picture showed the fountain in the center of the Plaza del Oro, from the same vantage point that Pedro must have photographed tens of thousands of times. The Plaza was deserted, glowing with soft light that can only come at dawn. A half-dozen gangly-limbed kids were crowded together, Rafael among them, and at their waists rose the hackled head of some lupine animal, at play, with happily lolling tongue. But at their side was someone of adult stature, a blur of gray lost to motion the moment the shutter had clicked, a sweep of dark hair covering most of her face. She knew what they were — I had convinced myself of this in the days since stealing the picture. Where might they have been in the hours before dawn?

“Do you know who she is, Pedro?”

He calmly looked at the picture with soft eyes that betrayed nothing more than, perhaps, what he wanted me to see. It compelled me to wonder how much Pedro, having spent nearly every day out here for forty years, had really seen.

“Some, they call her a bruja.” A witch. He handed the picture back. “But me, I think she is just lonely.”

*

Over the next weeks I paid special attention to the strange and brutal deaths one always hears about in a city of millions. People live, people die, and neither can always be peaceful. On a few I dwelled longer: another shopkeeper, with his throat torn out; a policía officer, disemboweled in an alley. A few more.

I recognize survival and I recognize vengeance, and sometimes the two exist like fist in glove. Whenever I encounter Miguel and his friends, or seek them out to make sure they’re well, I’m aware of these things inside their hearts, but we never speak of them.

I’m new to this city, still, but it wasn’t always this way down here. Even Pedro admits that. And I wonder what process has been wrought, what set it into motion. If it was a deliberate act, or something waiting to happen, inevitably, that finally came to pass.

The woman in the picture was known as Doña Mariana. After I’d summoned enough nerve I went to see her. She lived on a quiet street in one of those areas that most cities have, that reek of history rather than mere age, and seem further removed from the city’s chaos than the few blocks between would imply. Her apartment was on the third floor of a building steeped in subtle European flavors, bracketed top to bottom by balconies and lattices of dark wrought-iron.

Doña Mariana was about my age, but she wore it with more dignity. Her dark hair was gathered at the back of her neck, long wisps curling free, and the fine lines at her mouth and eyes were cut as if by a loving sculptor who had no choice but to season her with an air of tragedy that would make her beauty all the more poignant. She stood as tall as I and elegantly big-boned, with a robust underlying sensuality that immediately set me to wondering how she would feel lying with me — how powerful her body must be, and how exquisite her touch.

Bruja, some said, according to Pedro. Witch. It would’ve been easier to expect a hag.

I showed her a picture I’d recently taken of some of the kids, Miguel and Rafael and others. “I believe we have some young friends in common,” I said.

She stared at me, so bold, so direct, her eyes so deeply brown. “Monjito?” she said, and I nodded. “If they trust you, then so will I. You do not judge them?”

I knew what she meant, but judge seemed so inappropriate a term. Least of all it wasn’t my place to judge. They were children and they were something more, something bloody they’d been forced to become. They frightened me and they fascinated me, and I suppose that’s an accurate description of the beginnings of love.

“I just want to understand,” I told her.

Doña Mariana took me into her home, full of polished wood and crystal and lush green ferns. We spent hours drinking sangria and talking about children, and what a terrible place the world can be for them, how they can only heal from so much before something else sets in and takes them over. You have to wonder sometimes if the survivors are lucky after all.

We shared our losses, Mariana and I. I told her of the family I’d failed to bring through the fire, and as I did, I had to wonder if that’s why I’d not done anything more for the street kids beyond giving to the few needy ones I knew by name. Certainly I was in a position to help. Back in the States I knew editors all over the country who would run whatever I wrote, should I decide to emerge from retirement. Americans love a good cause, as long as it comes with plenty of pictures. So why hadn’t I done more? Could it be that I feared my best wouldn’t be enough?

And then where would I be, losing not two kids, but hundreds?

Mariana knew my heart, I think, knew it as only one can who has lost her own children after already losing a husband. All three of hers — a daughter and two sons, none older than fourteen — had been killed last year in the massacre that had left the eleven dead in the street. I didn’t ask if they were delinquents or had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Surprisingly, I didn’t even wonder until much later. Not that it mattered.

We grieved for ourselves, mourned for each other, long after the afternoon sun had gone to evening moon, long after Pedro would have packed up his camera and bid another day farewell. We held each other against the night, and soon she took me to her bed and we loved each other in the sad passion of tears, loved each other as only two who intimately share some mutual anguish can love. I knew the powerful rapture of her body, and it exhausted mine. I groped for her soul, and it left mine feeling less abandoned.

We slept some, but late in the night she awoke with a start, trembling, and when I tried to hold her, Mariana gently pushed my hands aside. Her beauty became ethereal by moonlight, a silvery flood that came through the open door to her balcony. Her hair was now unbound, a lush tangle across the pillow, deeply black with silver threads that glimmered under the moon.

“No touching,” she said, “not now. Please?”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No, no,” and she shook her head. “You came to understand.”

I smiled, a moment’s self-derision in realizing how little time we’d actually spent talking about Miguel and the others. The smile faded when I realized that she sounded as if I now might be learning something new.

“I do not understand what gets into me some nights,” she said. “But I let it in anyway.”

From beneath the balcony came small sounds of scramble, of feet and hands bracing on wrought iron and pulling themselves up, up. Higher. Closer. Doña Mariana showed no fear, so I, naked and defenseless though I was, promised myself I’d feel none either.

Finally, she looked toward the balcony, where small shadows were beginning to fall. Kids. Just kids. Four of them, with bright feral eyes, climbing over the railing, clambering onto the balcony and hesitantly entering the bedroom. Even in the night I could see they needed baths.

“I dream them to me in the night, sometimes,” she said. “I wake, and here they are. Is it not a miracle? I choose to believe it is. I choose to let it work through me.”

Doña Mariana left my side, left the bed, and went to them. She displayed not the slightest shame in appearing to them naked, her body tall and proud and magnificent in the moonlight. Before them, she lowered to the floor, lying on her side with her heavy breasts exposed in subtle invitation. In permission.

The children knelt, crowding in with eager faces, and as I watched, no longer any part of this, they suckled. For a long time they suckled, taking turns, snapping irritably when one monopolized a thick brown nipple for too long.

When the first of them bounded away, leaping from the balcony in a blur of child-skin and fledgling fur, it became clear to me.

I thought of Argentina of the late 1970s, when the army was in charge and routinely rounded up innocents who were never seen again. The generals often took orphaned children, to raise them as their own, trying to poison their hearts and minds at tender ages. But the grandmothers and other women fought back the only way they could, a few at first, but more every day: marching with signs in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, across from the seat of government, demanding the return of their missing loved ones. The Mothers of the Disappeared, they were called, and they won. They were the first true resisters, who took back their country.

A mother’s grief can be such a potent form of magic.

I sat on the bed of Doña Mariana, and thought of the policía, and tried not to believe the rumors I’d heard of pelts hung wet and dripping from alley walls, a new blow struck in the coming struggle. I tried to believe that the chorus of howls I heard late last night sounded something other than mournful.

Don’t let it happen, I prayed, again the resurrection of an act I couldn’t believe in any more. Don’t let it happen.

But I tried to have faith, faith that these children would not allow it, that they would fight until they need fight no more to keep themselves from becoming the worst of all possible things:

The last of a dying breed.

The Meat In The Machine

There is no such thing as repugnance. Everything is a simple matter of context, and how much you’re willing to accept. How far you’re willing to go for your own aesthetic of beauty is only a factor of commitment, and the only one that matters.

Kevin and Anthony and I arrived in Chicago two days before the first show of the new tour — Josef would follow — to settle in and make sure there were no problems with the stage design, and give our road crew plenty of time with the initial set-up. The theater management was cooperative. Smaller venues usually are. A 5000-seater, it was probably the top end as far as what we could ever expect to sell out. We would never fill anything much larger. This is the price of shunning the commercial, and cultivating your disciples from among the underground. It’s their fervor that sustains you when you start to think no one else is listening, and no one ever will.

“Has he checked in yet today?” It was the first thing Kevin asked me when he came knocking after we got back to the hotel that night. For some reason it was my room that got designated as the communal area. I think I understood: Kevin and Anthony lived like pigs but wouldn’t generally inflict it on me. Concessions to the alleged fairer sex after all? They would deny it to their graves.

“There was a message,” I told him. “He said he’ll be coming in tomorrow night for sure.”

“Call him later?”

I avoided that one and moved about the room. Here and there lay fetishistic objects I seemed unable to leave behind whenever we toured, my favorite being a shrunken head impaled on a long, crude nail of the type used in Roman crucifixions. I had cut the stitching across the head’s lips and pried open the tiny mouth. Dark and wrinkled as a prune, blind and wizened, it seemed to sing.

“Wonder if he’s still in much pain,” said Kevin. “At least he’s bound to get some good scars out of it.”

He shucked his leather cyclist’s jacket and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Sweat glistened, jewel-like, in the cropped black stubble of his hair. We’d been lovers once, in terms of the act itself, if not the emotion. It’s always easier to detach when you go at it like machines. You just disengage.

This was before Josef, after whom nothing could ever be the same. Some of us seem naturally to addict ourselves to obsessive types. It reduces the world to a certain attractive simplicity.

“I wonder what he sounds like now,” was all I could say.

On the bed, Kevin started to say something, found it wasn’t there after all. He shrugged and was the first to look away, and I then knew: Something had finally pierced his shells of leather and grime and dogged survivalist ethic, and left him cowed.

It meant I was stronger … and that was information in which I could revel.

MANIFESTO: In the late twentieth century, the territorial war has become an anachronistic holdover, on the wane as an effective tool of control. The battleground for control in post-industrial society is informational. Information has become the new international currency, the new holy grail. Covert wars in private as well as public sectors are fought over information, with murders, assassinations, and saturation propaganda all viable means to desired ends.

This we understood. Know thy enemy.

And of information, on ourselves, we have plenty…

*

From B-Side Magazine, February/March issue, 3 years ago:

“Your confusion’s understandable,” says Josef Jaeger.

That’s a relief.

“Not a whole lot of people pick up on the significance of our name. It used to bother me, but now I just take it for granted.”

So says the vocalist/lyricist/psychodramatist behind hardcore industrial quartet The Giger Sanction, whose first two releases have solidly established them as worthy contemporaries of such bands as Skinny Puppy, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails, while also bringing to mind middle-period Swans.

Now, about that unusual moniker?

Explains Jaeger, and one gets the feeling he’s run through this a few times: “Most obviously, it’s a reference to Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, and that entire biomechanical world his paintings depict. He did the original creature and some of the set designs for the movie Alien, but that’s just a tiny fraction of his work. Is it flesh, is it metal? His work’s always creeped me out in the best way possible. But our name’s also a play on words from the title of the Trevanian novel The Eiger Sanction. I read that when I was in junior high, and it had a big impact on me. The main character was a professional assassin named Jonathan Hemlock. He was so ruthless when he had to be, he could just completely dehumanize others. I think what I was responding to, what I found the scariest, was that when you read it, you root for him.”

Apparently more than a few people wonder what connection this has to the dense, eardrum-rupturing sound of The Giger Sanction and its apocalyptic lyrical content, not to mention the frequently gruesome stage spectacles. Not to worry. One gets the feeling Jaeger has often explained this too.

“Modern society is breeding sociopaths at a rate higher than it’s ever been. We definitely believe that. And dehumanization is everywhere you look. Sure, you have obvious examples — mass murder, the military/industrial complex — but it’s in the ads for your breakfast cereal too. Those commercials don’t care that you’re a human being, they take for granted that you’re some kind of meat machine and then try to push the right buttons. People are getting torn in two inside, because they’re expected to function in a world where everything’s progressively more mechanized, but they’re still human beings. We don’t try to make sense of all that, we just look at it really hard.”

“At its heart, what our music is,” says Jaeger’s bandmate and paramour Jasmine Snow, “is a wake-up scream. Wake up and smell the corrosion.”

Which makes them prophets of gloom, doom, and apocalypse?

“Definitely. Hell yes,” says Anthony Newman, but with a wicked grin that suggests he gets a thrill out of the world just as it is. “I mean, when you look like us, and there’s still lots of streets we’re afraid to walk, you know there’s a big problem.”

The Giger Sanction must surely win some minor award for their physical transformation between debut and sophomore releases. The liner photo in their first album, Virtual Neurality, doesn’t do much to distinguish them from any of several anonymous techno bands, decked out in colorful rave-wear. One look at the photo in their new CD, Acetylene Torch Songs — not to mention the band in the flesh — suggests that in a year’s time, they’ve undergone an evil metamorphosis.

Leather cycle and bomber jackets abound, on top of commando pants, unwashed T-shirts, and combat and Doc Marten boots. Jaeger sports a head of crusty white-boy dreadlocks. Jasmine Snow, the Sanction’s primary keyboardist, has sidewalled her own scalp, the remainder braided into sharp-looking, whiplike rat-tails. Both guitarist Kevin Lanier and Anthony Newman, who handles electronics and percussion when the Sanction isn’t propelled by a drum machine hammering hard enough to shift continental plates, bare menacing skulls shaved within a millimeter of skin. This crew looks as if they stepped out of the post-holocaust wasteland of a Mad Max film, and frequently come across as grim as if all they have to look forward to are lives spent sweating over the foundry in a steel mill.

“Oh, that,” says Jaeger, uncomfortable with the comparison to a Mel Gibson character. “It wasn’t really anything calculated.”

“If anything,” Lanier adds, “we’re more comfortable now in whatever we project. We quit caring. That makes everything so much easier.”

Says Jasmine Snow: “It just seemed a mutant outgrowth of the direction our music started taking.”

One listen to their two releases supplies all the evidence needed to back that up. Virtual Neurality is sonically the smoother album, heavily reliant on synthesizers, sequencers, and a few samples of caustic unnatural sounds. All of which are present on Acetylene Torch Songs, but this time deeper in the mix, combined with the frenzy of Lanier’s grinding guitar and Newman’s sledgehammer drumming. It all blends into a devastating wall of beautifully ugly noise. Live on stage, it’s as dense as a wrecking ball slamming you in the chest.

This time around Jaeger promises a visual presentation worthy of the music. “Our first tour, we opened for Ministry. Which was great, but when you’re the opener, you’re limited as to what you can do. This time we’re headlining in clubs and small theaters, so we figure, why not make it memorable, in a visceral, propagandized way. I wear a headset, so I’m not chained to a mike stand, and I spend the first two-thirds of the show wandering around the stage, doing an autopsy on myself. The special effects makeup’s pretty intense. I tear out the pieces that we perceive modern society to be minimizing in importance — say, my heart, for instance — and I put them on various altars. Then for the final third, I go gathering different pieces from the junkyard onstage and putting them in me, as replacements for everything that’s missing. Gears, wiring, tools of control. Like, one of them is this oil-dripping videotape.” He pauses, looking a bit sheepish. “Well, we kind of stole that one from the movie Videodrome, but it works so well with the overall concept, we like to think Cronenberg wouldn’t mind.”

Just in case you need an excessively high level of visual stimulation and tire of watching Jaeger go through his breakdown and reconstruction, all of this is played out before a backdrop screen on which they project a constant barrage of imagery: Nazi propaganda reels, combat footage from Vietnam and Desert Storm, news video, films of grisly medical procedures, once-classified documentation of weapons testing, films of primitive tribal body modification, pornography out-takes and bloopers, a collection of political assassinations captured live as they happened … there’s no telling quite what’ll show up at any given glance.

Jaeger smiles cryptically. “Think of it as a party tape of all the stuff that fascinates us.”

Jasmine Snow freely agrees. “We admit it. We’re total pervs.”

*

We used the next day to take in the Museum of Science and Industry. When in Chicago, do as the tourists do. Kevin got an especially enthusiastic charge out of the jarred display of fetuses in various stages of growth. I could see his mind at work, running through an idle exercise, figuring out how to steal them.

“I could shoot a picture with me in the middle of them all,” he said, “and send out still-birth announcements.”

Anthony picked up on this. “‘However, the proud father regrets to announce that he doesn’t know who the mothers are.’”

“They’re better off here,” I told him. “You’d just end up abusing them.”

I still had them on my mind when we got back to the hotel that evening, these tiny orphans, neither alive nor truly dead. They did have lives of their own, of a sort, floating placidly, their embryonic and fetal oceans their entire worlds as the older ones seemed to reach toward ours with delicate waxy fingers. I didn’t even know if they were real or not — probably they weren’t, just lifelike rubber dolls — but I found that didn’t matter. I felt sorry for them and I loved them, and most of all I was jealous of the potential they represented.

Fetal tissue is so adaptive, it can become anything. That’s why doctors find it so easy to work with in restoring the bodies of those who made it past the womb, but left room for improvement.

It can adapt to anything.

Even the cool, hard, metal skin of technology?

I’d have to see what Josef thought of that. I doubted this small revelation could have spared him all his pain, but to me it was intriguing to ponder. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Josef had claimed that the body becomes malleable when the mind reaches a certain level of cellular and spiritual awareness, but I’d half-suspected that he’d just gotten carried away with the special effects from our earlier tours.

Oh, me of little faith.

*

From Alternative Press, August issue, eighteen months ago:

There’s something about success that breeds its own menagerie of demons. It’s never enough for some people, regardless of how hard they appear to have worked for it. There’s always something more just beyond reach, a continual reenactment of the predicament of a certain mythical Greek named Tantalus.

“It depends on how you’re measuring success, doesn’t it?” Jaeger mutters, and he seems so distraught I hardly have the heart to press the matter. When I suggest we continue the interview tomorrow, he impatiently turns a thumbs-down on the idea. “Things won’t be any better tomorrow.”

He’s an unlikely candidate for such existential angst. Ticket sales have been brisk for The Giger Sanction’s upcoming tour, and their third and latest release, Cudgel, is making a surprisingly strong showing on the charts, currently within 100,000 units of going gold. No mean feat for a band whose sound is abrasive even by most FM college radio standards, and whose image is decidedly unfriendly to the likes of MTV. Ironic, since their own in-concert video productions are passionate, technically precise excursions of extremity into what the medium was originally designed for: the transmission of information. Indeed, this is a band that seems successful in spite of itself.

Lest you think Jaeger’s attitude is that of one more crybaby artiste bemoaning his being misunderstood by the mainstream, you couldn’t be more wrong. He truly does not care. In fact, Cudgel seems produced with the intent of alienating even more listeners, rather than embracing newcomers with a watered-down version of the attractions that got them noticed in the first place.

Cudgel takes the Sanction’s penchant for grinding intensity, then marries it to a renewed emphasis on percussion. The disc teems with a rhythmic tribal pounding as they make use of not only traditional drums, but such found objects as sheet titanium, high-impact plastic hazardous-material disposal containers, and 55-gallon oil drums. The effect is both hypnotic and ominous, and in evoking primitive echoes resonating from the refuse of the modern urban wasteland, it’s brilliant.

But is it enough for Josef Jaeger? He seems the least satisfied of anyone.

“It’s nothing new,” he explains while slumped over the table, heedless of the cigarette that’s about to burn too close to his fingers. “People treat it like it is, but that’s only because they have no sense of the past. And when they treat us like we’re coming up with something new, all that does is make me feel like a fraud. All these elements, they come from somewhere else. Look at some of the earliest industrial acts, from the mid-seventies on, and you’ll find them. Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z’ev, Einstürzende Neubauten … they were the real innovators. They were the pioneers. The only advantage I have over them is being born later, so that I’m working in an age when I’ve got a marketing machine behind me that turns whatever I do into an automatic commodity.”

I suggest that he’s seeking a sort of legitimacy for himself, an area that is uniquely his. Something that — dare I voice such an empty cliché? — no one has ever done before?

He brightens faintly and finally does something with that cigarette. Only now he’s waving his hands around and I fear he’ll set one of his dreadlocks burning, like a fuse. “Who doesn’t harbor the desire to push the envelope? Everybody in this world who’s really forged ahead with something nobody’s ever seen, you could probably fit them all into one house. What makes it so difficult anymore is the hyperaccelerated evolutionary speed that affects everything. Now everything advances in increments, day by day, or week by week. You hardly ever see that huge leap anymore that leaves everybody’s jaw dragging the ground, and they’re screaming, ‘Shit, where’d that come from?’”

Since I can take for granted that he’s ruling out such leaps as a cure for AIDS, or voice-activated steering for emission-free autos, I have to wonder what leap he feels qualified to make.

“Oh, I never claimed to be qualified for anything. But … are we fantasizing here?”

Sure. Why not.

He stares thoughtfully at the ceiling. “What we’ve always been most interested in, in nearly all its permutations, is human potential. Just because we focus artistically on the most heinous potentials that have been realized doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to build some sort of linkage that would be positive, constructive.”

A linkage?

“Creating something in the spirit of a hybrid realization between technology and the primal humanity that’s our essence. Humans have to come to comfortable terms with technology, because right now it’s allowed to be the enemy, but a benign one. Machines can outlast us at every turn, and we’re killing ourselves trying to keep up. Everybody’s sleep-deprived and we’re paying for it in reduced efficiency and horrible decisions. Disasters like the Challenger explosion, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the Union Carbide gassing in Bhopal, India, and more train wrecks and plane crashes than I could name … you know what they all have in common? Somebody, somewhere, without any sleep, trying to maintain a machine’s pace rather than human biorhythms.

“It’s a war of attrition, and all I’m saying is there’s a middle ground somewhere that nobody’s really occupying. What I’d like to do is harness the Cartesian philosophical construct of ‘the ghost in the machine’ and give it a new meaning in the struggle between meat and metal.”

Any ideas?, I ask him.

He doesn’t answer. He just sits still and lifts his hand and watches me watch the cigarette burn toward his finger. It’s an excruciating moment when I realize he’s not going to snuff it out, not even when the skin reddens and blisters.

“I used to not be able to do that,” he says. “It proves I can change.”

*

My name is Jasmine and I’m an addict … one who wants never to change. When Josef arrived at my door, weary from his flight from Switzerland, I let my addiction take control once more. I never realized the full depth of the pain of our separations until the moment we were reunited and I realized what was so incomplete about myself.

Beneath a week’s beard and the dark blond serpentine locks of his hair, Josef’s face was beatific, enraptured.

“It works,” he said.

“Tell me this was worth it.” I clutched him by the arms. “I have to know.”

He dragged me to the bed, and as we kissed with the fever of a month of our lives lost, we stripped away each other’s clothing. We stretched out upon the wide hotel bed, pale and naked, our hair like whips as we consumed one another.

I drew back up to my knees and ran my hands along the thin, suffering rack of his body. Still red and fresh-looking, the scars were symmetrical, up and down each limb, and in twin rows along his torso and back. They weren’t much larger than the welts writ upon one another by Africans practicing scarification as a rite of passage. I put my mouth on one. It tasted hot and raw, and I imagined that against my tongue I could feel it pulse.

“You look beautiful,” I whispered, hoarse and weak.

There’s something puny about an unadorned body. Such a body is, without clothes, more naked still. It’s why we needed our piercings, our tattoos … to lay claim to the last thing we owned that the world could never take from us or tax.

“Get your practice amp,” said Josef.

I lugged it over from the corner where it sat with one of my smaller synths that I would bring into hotel rooms. I yanked the patch cord from the synth’s output and handed the plug to Josef.

When he was ready, I turned it on.

Our arousal was, I think, born out of a delicious fear more than anything. Like the first time we made love after Josef had gotten his ampallang piercing, a steel post through the head of his cock. Or after the time I’d gotten a ring through my clitoral hood. This was no different. We had no idea what to expect, we only knew it would be momentous.

I caressed him, lovingly, gently, and from the practice amp rolled soft waves of sound. Thunder from a kiss upon his thigh, earthquake from a grip upon his arm. I straddled his outstretched leg and dragged my cunt along it from ankle to hip, and the air itself swelled with sound … each distinct but overlapping, an evolving glissando of a world’s end.

Josef’s hands on me, urging me on, I stretched out atop him as I might my own grave. It was like swimming across his flesh as it buoyed me. There could never be too many points of contact, for each had its own voice, and when I impaled myself upon him and we strained with flailing limbs and wet mouths, I heard the throats of an infernal choir drowning out my own cries, and all I could think of was what if we were onstage, with fifty thousand watts of power at the other end of our union.

*

From Spin, December issue, two months ago:

For a lot of disgruntled urban and suburban youth, industrial music picked up where punk left off, after it burned itself out or softened into New Wave. The appeal was basically the same: atonal noise, pounding rhythms, inhuman energy, frequently indecipherable lyrics expounding a bleak world view, often sung in a garishly distorted voice.

But a funny thing happened to the industrial revolution: it got mainstreamed. Which is the way of all deviant pursuits, and that it’s happened should surprise no one who’s ever tuned in to MTV and seen Johnny Rotten acting as guest VJ. Sounds and rhythms that smack of industrialism have shown up on recent releases by such unlikely converts as U2 and Suzanne Vega, and even Nine Inch Nails copped a Grammy, albeit under the Heavy Metal category.

On the eve of The Giger Sanction’s fourth release, which goes by the unwieldy title of Liturgical Music For Nihilists, it seemed a fruitful idea to check in with Josef Jaeger, their enigmatic and troubled front-man and theoretician, for his views on the state of the art and how the Sanction is coping with industrial’s being co-opted by seemingly anyone with a yen to cut a dance track. One listen to an advance tape of their new release caught my ear as a departure from their in-your-face sound. While no less unsettling, it would seem that the band has decided the most subversive route they can now take is — can it be? — subtlety.

SPIN: Why the sudden vector away from the path you’ve established?

JAEGER: I don’t see it that way. I see the new CD as a synthesis of all our prior experiments, with new elements incorporated… just like we’ve always done. On the surface, it’s got a quieter approach, I won’t argue that, but deep in the mix it’s all there. There’s a lot of grinding and clanking going on in the background, but more subliminally, less overt. We went into our sessions to record this with a motif written on the studio wall: “Ritual hymns from decaying cathedrals of rust.”

S: When you put it that way, it does sound like you’re coming from inside a hellish church of some sort.

J: What we wanted to map out with the sound is the collision between, say, the human spirit and harsher mechanical realities. Plus, it’s a veiled reference to the human body as a temple, and its decay.

S: Which is a topic you’ve become notorious for exploring onstage, in some of the most graphic ways possible.

J: Considering what’s coming on the next tour, you haven’t seen anything yet.

S: Can you give us a hint?

J: Not really, it’s still in the planning stages, but it works in theory. I’ve found a … well, let’s say technician, in Switzerland, who’s not afraid of taking some of my more outré ideas and trying to actually implement them. It’s not so much of a visual effect as a way to interface with the audience. Totally. While at the same time creating a new sound source.

S: Considering your usual candor, this is sounding very secretive.

J: You’ll understand why when we unveil it in Chicago. I’m so excited about it I’m pissing down my leg right now.

S: And that’s all you can say about it at this point?

J: (after sigh and long pause) If it means that much to you, I’m calling it the “Human Resonance Chamber.” But don’t print that.

*

For the first night of the tour, all four of us went to the theater to watch our support band from the wings, then withdrew to the dressing room to nervously await our turn. We remained oddly quiet, as if realizing that tonight marked a turning point. We — Josef above all — would be viewed either as messiahs or lepers.

I’ve never claimed to wholly understand the way his mind works, or what compels him. Or what drove him to Switzerland to meet with a renegade surgeon whose obsessive fascination with the human body and its sonic potential equaled his own. My only claim is that, bathed in the glow of it all, I sometimes feel very humbled.

Such faith Josef had, that his flesh would not reject the implants studded over his body. But why would it? Millions must be walking around at this moment, skeletons held together with metal pins, or plates sealing broken skulls. The body adapts. Metal is coated with blood and tissue, and incorporated. Insulated wiring integrates along muscle like a new kind of artery.

The body embraces.

And bone conducts sound with eerie ease.

Twenty minutes to showtime, I took him in my mouth, tasting steel and his sex, and thought I could hear the humming of his blood.

And when we took the stage, our places were ordained by our function in the machine that the four of us became. The curtains parted and angry red lights burned and five thousand throats rose in one mighty cry of welcome. And we were a collective god … the god out of the machine.

They saw us integrated within a setpiece of ruin, amid rusted mutant pews that would never again hear prayers from pious lips. Meat rotted atop a blasted pulpit, and our projection screen hung between corroded cathedral arches that housed shattered stained glass, while across the screen itself, herds of central Europeans from a half-century past marched to the gas chambers in grainy black and white.

The drum machine and Anthony’s kick bass slammed in sync with a dirgelike pounding that shuddered the stage. A latched loop from one of my keyboards chugged away with a sound of distant oil pumps, while I called up a wailing wall of pipe organs in anguish. Kevin’s guitar spat caustic chords. Spliced through it all were audio cut-ups of savage modern prophets exhorting their countrymen to jihad.

And from the wreckage at center stage, he rose. A hydraulic hinge lifted Josef up, up into view, lashed to a twisted cruciform fashioned from old discarded television aerial towers. Skin along the backs of his arms and elsewhere had been pinched and fed into tiny breaks sawn in the metal rods, so that in several places he looked skewered in place.

With distorted voice, he chanted the faithful to Mass:

“Fathers feed on daughters

mothers feed on sons

and you will feed on emptied wombs

incubate in scraped-out tombs

with maggots thy kingdom come.”

We never broke between compositions — we segued. We never spoke informally from the stage. The medium was the message, and there was nothing we wished to impart that wouldn’t translate better from the speakers and the screen.

We were into an extension of the third piece of our set when the hydraulics ground into motion and lifted Josef, then swung him forward and down, an offering to the crowd. Red and blue spots tracked him, descending into a sea of reaching arms.

I watched, I played on, as Josef tore free his arms, then broke loose a number of foot-long sticks affixed to his platform. Most he dropped to the crowd around him. He kept two.

And, in tribal rhythms he began to play his own body.

It was totally improvised. I don’t even believe he yet knew which place sounded like what. But into the density of the mix he fed … the sound of meat, and machines.

Just within reach, the clamoring horde took their cue, now understanding, then took up their bludgeons. I’ve always found it amazing how strangers will naturally fall into sync after several beats, no matter how complex the polyrhythm. Entrainment, it’s called, and it gives me faith that despite our alienation, we are connected after all.

Cudgels flailed, and Josef’s sweat cascaded. He opened his mouth and out roared a feedback wall of unearthly voices.

The horde surged around him, and where there were not enough bludgeons, hands sufficed. He rolled his head back to face me, and across the burning mists of the stage our eyes met. He’d never looked happier.

And I knew, even if they tore him limb from limb, each piece would continue to sing its own song, from deep within its throat of bone.

Extract

Just like last time, you awaken in the middle of the night with the taste of blood on your mouth. It’s thick and gummy, has been drying awhile. The moon drapes a bright trapezoid of silvery light over the top of your bed, crosshatched like the panes of your window and slashed with the bare branches of trees.

When you raise your head, no more than you have to, you spot the dark, coin-sized stains on your pillow. They hadn’t been there when you went to bed.

You sink down in the covers to become invisible beneath them, in hopes that it won’t see you if it’s still in the room. You try to lie motionless, refusing to surrender to that urge to tremble, because if it’s still there, it might hear even the tiniest chattering of your teeth.

It knows teeth. Intimately.

You listen for the soft sigh of its breath; through slitted eyes dissect the shadows for its shape, maybe the glint of an eye or two. You remain razor-alert for the creak of a board, for the metallic click of the tools it carries.

And somewhere on the far side of forever, you realize it has the inhuman patience to outwait you all night.

Demons, you suppose, must enjoy the waiting.

If you weren’t so convinced it was still there, you’d run to the bathroom for the aspirin. The throbbing in your jaw is starting to grow more pronounced, pain taking form out of the numb void.

But the only movement you’ll risk so far is something it can never see … although you wonder if its ears might not be so sharp that it can hear the sliding inside your mouth. The way you can’t help but press the tip of your tongue into that fresh hole in your jaw, exploring the hot moist socket newly emptied of tooth. It feels huge, another gaping wound gouged in gum and bone, big as a bucket and still brimming with blood.

Then, slowly, the recollections start to piece themselves together again:

Awakening to the prick of the needle.

The immense pressure of that hard round knee — or whatever it was belonging to the thief’s anatomy — bearing down on your chest, to hold you in place.

The taste of metal in your mouth, its firm insistent grip.

Then, after the ordeal of twisting, of tugging, of cracking, the sigh of something’s satisfaction — definitely not your own.

Reliving all this, you shudder in the moonlight, knowing if it’s still in the room, it can’t help but notice you now. With this much lost, your invisibility betrayed, you let curiosity get the better of you, and slide your small cold hand back, beneath your pillow…

Where it closes on another crisp dollar bill.

No such thing as a tooth demon, your best friend told you at school, after the first time; not that she’d ever heard of. For a while this reassured you, because if anyone would know about these things, she would.

She’s got the kind of parents you wish you had, at least when it comes to the movies and comics and magazines they let her see. How you love going to her house, because the family room becomes a magic theater where you get to watch all the films forbidden under your own roof, and walking into her bedroom is like a trip to a museum where you can learn about all the terrible and fantastic creatures that make their homes behind the dark of night…

But aren’t really supposed to creep uninvited into your room while you’re asleep.

So this tooth demon must exist, obviously. Just look how hard it’s breaking the rules.

Ever more educated about such things, your friend once showed you a comic book that told about the one rule that all demons, no matter how mighty, must obey: If called by name, their true name, they must submit to your control.

A board creaks. A shadow disengages from the deeper darkness along the far wall, while moonlight glints off the pliers clicking in its eager hand.

One name is all you need, strong enough to contain all your hopes and prayers that your friend is worth such trust. One name.

“Daddy?” you try, and this works. It stops.

But only for a moment.

As soon as you can talk again, you’ll try another name.

Liturgical Music For Nihilists

Jamey had been missing for nearly a week before anyone much realized, then another few days after that before we learned why. It wasn’t the first time, Jamey off again on another exorcism of the latest future he saw ahead of himself, rather than the one he wanted. Don’t feel like assistant managing a Kinko’s for the next forty years? A few days of going AWOL will bury that particular nightmare.

When the phone rang I stirred first, then Rachel turned over in bed, splaying her warm soft hand over the knobs of my spine.

“Don’t answer it,” she said, and batted hair from her eyes as if hacking at ferns in a jungle. “It’s four in the morning…”

Briefly I considered it might be someone calling about a job and this was their way of deciding who was truly hungry for it, but Rachel thought it more likely a gauge of how much shit you’d swallow, and about had me talked into ignoring it, but the caller was persistent, and the answering machine was still pulped from my throwing it across the room last Easter after listening to some condescending message my mother had left, so I answered, and it was no one hiring, just Andre.

It’s hard to take Andre seriously when he cries because it gives him the hiccups, and he could be pouring his heart out to you for all you know, but you just can’t get past that inverted yelp every time his diaphragm convulses, so instead of empathizing you mostly end up trying not to laugh. When we were in gradeschool other kids, out of boredom, used to pummel on him for no other reason than to get him started.

The phone cold against my ear, I listened to Andre cry, and hiccup, then listened to him tell me about Jamey and the way he’d found him. I’d already said we’d be there as soon as we could before realizing there was nothing we could do, so I hung up and let my ambulatory daze move me over to the window, where I pushed the curtains aside and stood not feeling the chill radiating from the glass and the neighboring buildings.

“Angus?” From behind me. “Angus?” She must’ve called four or five times before I caught on.

“Jamey’s dead,” I told her.

Rachel sat in bed, blinking. “What, again?”

“No, I … I think it’s the real thing this time.”

She drew herself up in the sheets and the sweatshirt that she wore to bed, letting the news sink in, and when she asked how, I didn’t know what to tell her, because Andre hadn’t elaborated and I’d not thought to ask, and I couldn’t very well lie because she’d be seeing for herself in an hour or so.

I really hate looking like I don’t know the score.

*

I grew up with an answer for everything, or so my mother told me, plenty of times, and one of the last things she said to me the last time I visited was, “How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?” As if, one, I could summarize, and two, she actually wanted the truth. Her question, I think, her terminology itself, sounded suspiciously like a line from a Soul Asylum song she must’ve overheard my stepbrother playing and probably assumed I related to because everybody her age knows that everybody our age likes all the same things. Homogeneity is very important to her and my stepfather.

When she asked that I remember feeling sorry for her, because unlike now it wasn’t that we never talked, it’s just that we never said anything. If you grew up in our house you could often find yourself in the conversational equivalent of wandering through a museum that had been closed down, all the exhibits gone, so that the only things left to see were the blank walls of empty rooms, and dust. You knew something had been there once, long ago — there had to have been, you could sometimes see outlines where something had stood, where the dust wasn’t as thick — but whatever it was, you could only guess.

So there it hung in the air, her first stab in years at engaging me with something that made me ponder:

“How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?”

While I didn’t even think that the label applied, personally, the fact of her using it at all seemed more an admission of defeat than anything, so I felt obligated to reinforce it.

“What you should be asking instead,” I told her, “is why it took me as long as it did.”

I’d been neutral as far as who or what I was referring to, but my mother decided to take it as a personal affront.

“You can’t hurt me,” she said. “So if that’s what you think you’re doing here, you’re very sadly mistaken. You can’t hurt me at all.”

And when she said this, all I could think of was how true it was, and how that might’ve been the problem, because it was the only thing about her that I’d ever really envied.

*

We drove out of Chicago in the frosty autumn chill that grips hardest in those last few hours before dawn, dropping down to the Eisenhower Expressway and heading for the western ‘burbs. Soon the eastbound lanes would begin filling with morning commuters, like plaque in a hardened artery, while the trains that clattered down the center exchanged their seedy and exotic nocturnal cargo for the indistinguishable hordes who belonged to the sun.

Chicago’s western hinterlands are a patchwork quilt. There are stretches where you think you’ve finally seen the last strip mall, and drive over creeks and rivers, past woodlands that have withstood advance since the days of Marquette and Joliet, but then you’ll find yourself coming to the next tacky outpost of doughnut shops and rent-to-owns, and it seems you can never quite put all that polyurethaned civilization behind you. When I was very young I thought the entire country went on this way, the next McDonald’s never more than a reassuring five minutes ahead.

Those suburban woodlands, as you drive past, seem thick and mysterious, like overlooked tracts of ancient soil where the fleet descendants of pre-Columbian fathers might yet be watching with painted eyes. From the air, though, surrounded by ragged webs of asphalt, they mostly look besieged.

Still, it was in one of those brambled thickets where the old slaughterhouse sat enduring its years of obsolescence and neglect.

We found the convenience store where Andre had said he would wait, out of the chill. Rachel and I collected him to the relief of the cashier whose unfamiliarity with shampoo must’ve consigned her to the graveyard shift. But then she scurried to the sandwich island and plucked one of their wretched hot dogs off the weenie-go-round and slapped it in a bun, shyly giving it to him with a fistful of condiments, then backing away before he could attempt to pay for it.

Ever since we were kids, Andre has had that effect on some people. You just want to throw a blanket around his shoulders and give him soup. Everything about Andre is too near the surface, including his cheekbones.

Rachel and I followed behind his car, although certainly we knew the way to the slaughterhouse. The neighborhood houses all sat where they had for years, maybe with skimpy cosmetic changes, but still the same behind them. It’s only when you return to your old neighborhood that you feel the way houses have lives apart from the people who reside in them.

“The human body’s supposed to replace almost every cell in it every seven years,” I said, because it felt too quiet. “You’ve heard of that, right?”

“Yeah. But not all at once,” Rachel said.

“So I can mean it literally, saying I’m not the same person who grew up here.”

Fingers busy, Rachel made a show of subtracting from seven. “Guess that means I still have four to go.”

In the light from a streetlamp she frowned. Rachel’s was one of those rare faces that are enhanced by a tiny frown, her brown eyes filling with concentration or disdain and over them the thick eyebrows nudging toward each other in a way that made her wise and sensual and imperial.

“There’s something about all at once that’d seem better,” she said. “Like shedding a skin? You call in sick to work one day, and lock yourself in the bathroom, and keep flushing for hours, and when you come back out it’s a whole new you.”

“Imagine the plumbing hazards,” I said, which made us laugh because we needed to, because we’d gotten out of bed to go look at the corpse of a friend and decide, I guess, that it really was him, and he really was dead.

It meant two extra blocks’ walk, but we parked in the lot of a church — Lutheran, I think — so some suburban early riser wouldn’t see us disembarking directly in front of his castle and go making xenophobic calls to the police and the N.R.A.

“So you had to first come out here, when, like three o’clock this morning?” I asked.

“Uh huh,” Andre said, “about then.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I just … just woke up with this awful hunch.” He wasn’t crying anymore. Had gotten out of his car with a smear of mustard on his cheek from the hot dog, for Rachel to wipe away. “I just had this dream that Jamey was…”

We moved down the street, then over a block, following the new one until the street ended in a cul-de-sac and dissolved into several dozen feet of weedy lot. Behind us, lights were beginning to wink on, off, in bathrooms and kitchens, while ahead of us the woods lay cold and dark, unaffected by that workaday world.

We threaded our way through trees, none of which were very big because none were terribly old by tree standards. Our feet tramped over frosty ground untouched by tires for two decades, although time still hadn’t erased every suggestion of the path where the meat trucks used to roll.

It couldn’t have been more than 600 feet back in, but seemed farther, because the woods had slowly closed in as though keeping a secret. Whatever died back here now would die randomly, not systematically, but if it’s true that places soak in memories of the things that happen there, then it’d never been entirely our imagination that around the old slaughterhouse we could sense some wordless animal panic, some imprint left by countless dumb beasts who buckled to their knees as their skulls were crushed by sledgehammers swung with brute factory precision.

It rose out of the trees, pale in the pre-dawn, temple-like but without the carvings and monkeys that could’ve given it true character. Years ago the stoneware and brickwork might have been whitewashed, but had been a colorless gray for so long that I no longer remembered. We followed one of the stark walls back around to a loading bay and through the door that had been sprung for several presidential administrations, and finally had to turn on our flashlights. Wherever the beams fell they landed on peeled paint and abandonment and years of vandalism and heaps of junk so useless it was worthless even as scrap. Step through that door and the aloof vibrancy of the woods fled, to leave you swallowed by silent echoes from some lost decade.

“What a desolate place to die,” Rachel said.

It crossed my mind that Jamey was hardly the first, and that I’d done in my virginity here, too. Atmosphere is a low priority when your hormones are loud and shiny.

Andre led us to him, in one of the middle rooms. As the place had been gutted since its demise, over the years we’d never known exactly what occurred where, but I suspected that the dank sepulchre where Jamey lay with the needle in his vein and rubber tubing loose around his bicep was where saws might’ve whined while tatters of flesh speckled men in slick raincoats.

Everything he’d needed was still there, if not in his arm, then close at hand. Bent spoon, pinch of cotton; the votive candle had burned down to a ring of wax. He lay turned onto one side, his unstuck arm drawn up to pillow his head, nose ring and half-smile still in place.

“And there was this, too,” Andre said as he handed us a slip of paper. “The spoon was on top of it.”

We read: No, it wasn’t an accident this time. No apologies,  no mewling, which I respected but kept to myself. Andre didn’t look up to hearing that.

“It’s dated eight days ago?” I said. “Who dates his suicide note to begin with?”

“He always was pretty detail-oriented, for a junkie,” Rachel said.

Andre bristled. “He wasn’t a junkie.”

“Sorry, I guess I was confused by the syringe.”

“Angus, tell her he was no junkie.”

“Far as I know, he never shared a needle in his life,” I told her, from the floor. “He was in control.”

“What are you doing down there?” That frown, that beautiful frown. “You don’t think he’s … still…?”

“Eight days?” I was on all fours on the gritty concrete. Had touched his supple cheeks and now hovered in to sniff. “He doesn’t smell bad. Doesn’t even look like he’s started to decompose.”

“Well, it does feel like a meat locker in here … if you’ll excuse the expression.” Now Rachel was being nasty, seeing if she could make Andre flinch. “Probably it hasn’t warmed up much even on the sunny days, the past week.”

“But look at his color,” I argued, too intrigued to feel much grief, which maybe I wouldn’t have felt regardless. I’ve always had this easy take on death, just part of the natural order and sometimes a smart career move, and if I never could believe in Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, I could still believe in System.

Although for being dead, Jamey had a hue that could be called robust. As Andre squirmed, I peeled aside the jacket Jamey was wearing only on one arm, and his flannel, and his T-shirt, to bare the shoulder he’d been lying on. Blood should’ve pooled there, left the skin as dark as an eggplant. I believed in gravity, too, until now.

“Oh, this is creeping me out,” Rachel said, but leaned over my shoulder without apprehension. When a corpse won’t behave like one, it’s easy to overlook a technicality or two.

Andre groaned and told us we were like two six-year-olds with a dead cat, and turned away with his flash and stole half our light. We looked up when he quit shuffling and flapping his long olive green canvas coat, and left his beam on a wall and what had been spray-painted there. All three of us agreed that Jamey had done it, given the presence of both the can and his trademark A’s, with the horizontal extending past the diagonals, like the anarchy symbol without the circle.

“‘Musica mundana’?” Andre read aloud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

We couldn’t decide. Lately Jamey had despaired over his own floundering musical aspirations, whatever talent he had on a fast exile to oblivion. He employed a small arsenal of keyboards and samplers and tape decks, collecting the noises that engulfed the city and combining them with those of his own creation into aural collages that nobody could dance to. It still seemed unlikely that he’d call his own work mundane, then misspell everything to boot.

“Looks Latin,” Rachel finally said.

“Nathan would know,” Andre said. “Nathan should be here, and Mae, Mae should be here too, I should’ve called them,” and he set off again for a phone before Rachel and I could persuade him that a few more hours wasn’t going to make any difference.

That Jamey. When he set his mind to it, he always could throw the most interesting parties.

*

Someday when I have a hundred bucks an hour to blow to hear an informed opinion, I think it could be really fun to go to a psychologist and see the reaction I get, admitting that the one constant in my life, at its various stages, seems to be a derelict slaughterhouse.

Of course I remember it from a time before dereliction, still operating but in the process of being driven under by incorporated abattoirs, tottering on its independent legs like a newborn veal. Although it was years before I realized this, that whoever had worked there would’ve been jettisoned toward the unemployment line within a few months of that magical and terrible winter day.

What I best remember is tramping there through the snow with my father, because it was within walking distance of our house and he’d wanted to order a side of beef to lay in stock in the freezer downstairs and knew he could get it for not much over wholesale cost there. I was six, on Christmas vacation from first grade and already tired of the new toys, maybe, but swept up in drama that afternoon as my father and I bundled against the cold and set out like a pair of trappers for the family meat.

We must’ve talked, but what about I can’t recall, except for him teasing me that I’d better not tell any of the meatmen my name because they might mistake me for a cow. Which utterly perplexed me until he explained that my name, my fine Scottish name that he had given me in a fit of nationalistic fervor for a homeland never seen, was shared by a breed of cattle.

Twenty-one years later I still remember the milky gray of the sky and the icy whisper of snowflakes as we stomped and stamped along; the way my father would grab me by my mittened hands and swing me up and over when the drifts got too deep. I knew that day that I must’ve grown older and more able in his eyes, that this would be the first of countless adventures that he and I would have in the coming years.

While my father was deciding how best to apportion our beef into steaks and roasts and ground, I strayed off out of curiosity and boredom, finding myself behind the slaughterhouse, undetected while I watched some squat, grizzled man gnaw at a wet cigar stub and grumble curses as he shoveled up a spill of what I took to be fat ropes. They slipped and slithered and glistened as he chased them, favoring one leg, and left pink smears in the snow while he slung them into an enormous wheeled pail that must’ve overturned. He noticed me finally, and now I sort of knew what the gray ropes really were, and with one fatty loop draped over the rim of the pail, he leaned on it and grinned around his cigar. His teeth were stained, and one eye covered by a gray film.

“Hey little mister,” he said to me. “What’s your name?”

Angus, I nearly told him, but stopped myself in time, because mistaken identity was sure to get me killed, cut up and shoveled into buckets, so I turned and ran as fast as I could and when my father caught up with me he said we’d better wait a few minutes before going back home, until I quit shivering. From the cold, he thought.

It was the last Christmas our nuclear family would know, and while it probably wasn’t the same evening, in my mind the trip to the slaughterhouse will be forever linked to the shouts between my parents, and later discovering my father behind the house, when I wasn’t supposed to, in his private place inside the tool shed. I watched as he cried and hung his head, and every several moments chopped at wood with a hatchet. There was something so terrible about seeing him in this fallen state that I, while I knew I should’ve, could no more have gone to him than I could’ve run into the arms of that unshaven troll who’d been shoveling guts.

When our beef was ready I went with my father to pick it up, but we took the car this time and it wasn’t the same as on foot, against the elements, and it’s almost the last thing I recall us doing together. He was gone by spring, my stepfather and his own son in place by summer, and by the week I entered second grade I’d already seen my father for the last time, wondering where he’d gone and when he would send for me and clinging to that final Yule as evidence that we’d had one adventure, at least.

It was more than a decade before I did the math, and realized that over that Christmas my mother had been pregnant with Rachel, and must’ve known even then that it wasn’t Dad’s.

Which explains a lot about his mood, as I look back.

*

“‘Music of the world’ is what that means, literally,” Nathan explained. “Symbolically it means ‘music of the spheres.’ Not like harps and organs and trumpets … more the harmony in creation, say, from the planets orbiting. It was part of the medieval world view. To them music theory was like astrophysics.”

We looked at the words again: Musica mundana.

“I told him about it once — say a year ago? — one night when we were stoned, but … are you positive he’s been dead eight days?”

“We’re just taking his word on it,” I said.

“Because not decaying I can see, with it so chilly in here. But it’s the blood not pooling I can’t figure. You know … if I didn’t know better … I’d almost be tempted to say what we have on our hands might be an incorruptible.”

“Isn’t that more in the line of Catholic saints?” Andre had to ask, and Nathan said usually, and we looked at that spike still in Jamey’s arm and burst out laughing at the absurdity of it, even Andre, everybody laughing but Mae.

Of the five of us standing over him, Mae was youngest and had known Jamey the least amount of time, but perhaps felt she owed him her life. She’d been panhandling and dumpster-diving when he spotted her along North Clark, and for runaways that’s often the last step before prostitution. Probably Jamey wouldn’t’ve noticed had Mae Pak not been staring at the violin she’d brought all the way from South Korea, by way of Los Angeles, and ceremoniously snipping its strings with wire cutters.

He’d helped her find a job in a music store, and a roommate, but later told me that he’d misunderstood everything that day he first talked to her, thought the business with the violin wasn’t so much despair as low-rent performance art.

So maybe to Mae, Jamey really had been a benefactor, since two years later she’d reached her nineteenth birthday without ever slipping on the fishnets each dusk and heading out to gobble an assortment of occidental penii.

But maybe Mae didn’t yet understand the way, in any group of friends who have some history, you develop a sound idea who will be the first to do certain things, like marry or sprout a tumor, and naturally first to die. I had a reasonable expectation that Jamey would be head of that particular class the day an old needle grew too dull to pop into his arm, and I watched him sharpen it on the scratch-strip of a book of matches, then have to forcibly yank it from the vein because his subprecision work had left a tiny spur of steel that caught his skin like a fishhook.

So the five of us stood clustered inside the slaughterhouse, admitting the obvious about Jamey and maybe contemplating personal mortality, the escape clause in our fleshly contracts.

We couldn’t decide what to do with him.

While it seemed clear enough on the surface, once extenuating circumstances were considered the issue became murkier, the most persuasive argument for inaction coming from Jamey himself, as he had left a note, if no guarantee we’d be the ones to find it, and he’d gone to the trouble of coming here in the first place. After all, Rachel said, if he’d simply meant to die and be done with it, he could’ve managed as much in his own crusty bathtub, with far less fuss. Clearly, something about this place had called to him as his mausoleum, guiding his hand as he sprayed Musica mundana for an epitaph, and it wasn’t irony: He’d never even considered a vegetarian lifestyle.

Then there was his refusal to cooperate with putrefaction.

It was Andre who said that if we were planning to leave him, we should at least make it appear that his presence was intended, rather than him just happening to have died where he did.

Mae knelt to slide the needle from his vein and Rachel untied the tourniquet, and when we took him up from the floor we found that he was still flexible without being mushy. Because it seemed a shame to leave him in total darkness we bore him out of the room he’d died in and through a wide iron door that slid back on shrieking rusty rollers, and then another, to relocate him in the grandest room in the slaughterhouse. I felt reasonably sure that this had been the actual killing floor, where mallets met heads, because the ceiling was much higher, and in one area it opened into a short gabled tower, where windows would’ve let in natural lighting for a nice expansive open-air ambience while the brutes swung their mauls. Although the windows had been boarded over, all the boards had weathered apart so that slatted light filtered in.

His clothing didn’t seem right for him now that Jamey was in his place of final repose, so we stripped him, grateful that upon death he’d been considerate enough not to have soiled himself, or had simply neglected to eat that last day or two, what with bigger things on his mind. His pale body was very thin and slat-ribbed, with concave stomach and long toes with dirty unclipped nails, and a cluster of needle tracks.

Since leaving him on the floor seemed no better here than in the other room, Nathan and I hunted down a bedspring that had been around for fifteen years or more, junked by suburban white trash, and laid him out on that. But this seemed not a very pleasing use of space, given the soaring, vaulted quality beneath that steeple-like tower, so since there were still chains hanging from pulleys up there, we ratcheted them down and hooked them to one end of the springs, and wove Jamey’s limbs in and out of the rusty coils so he’d stay in place. We hoisted him aloft so that the springs stood on end, and Jamey hung serene in the metal, facing the doorway we’d carried him through, so that on walking in you couldn’t help noticing him, arms welcoming, something almost benevolent about him, although his head did tend to droop forward. Rachel took care of that, looping the tourniquet around his brow and tying it back to raise his chin off his chest. Mae wedged the syringe into a spring coil near his head, angling it away from his scalp like an exclamation point, or the first ray of light from a fledgling nimbus, and finished, we all stepped back to admire the effect.

“I wouldn’t’ve anticipated this ten minutes ago, but that’s just about the most holy thing I’ve ever seen,” Nathan said, and coming from him that was high praise.

It occurred to us that since Andre and I had played here as boys, there was no reason to think the place any less irresistible to kids today, so we did need to insure Jamey’s privacy. We were well into morning by now, so Rachel and Mae and I left Nathan and Andre on guard while we drove to a hardware store. I used Visa to buy a screwdriver and the heaviest hasps and padlocks they carried, securing the slaughterhouse doors again after so many years, making sure we’d all jotted the combinations for whenever we got the urge.

We paid our respects one more time, and Mae kissed Jamey’s unspoiled cheek. After she began to cry a little I held her, and her so tiny against me, sniffling with her black black hair in her face, and on the way to our cars Rachel motioned me to fall back a few steps.

“If you want to go spend the rest of the day with her, that’s fine by me,” Rachel said, and I was about to say all right, maybe I should, but Nathan couldn’t give her a ride home because he had a job to hurry to, and Andre lived nowhere near her, so we decided to take her home with us since Mae didn’t want to be alone.

As we were about to leave the Lutheran car lot, Nathan turned his pleasant potato face to gaze in the direction we’d come from.

“You kno-ow,” he said, voice dropping and breaking the know into two syllables, in that analytical Nathan voice of his, “once you start safeguarding something that’s essentially worthless, and making it a group secret and spotting the odd miracle or two, what you’ve got is the basis of a new religion.” He shook his head. “I really should know better than this.”

*

When Jamey brought Mae Pak into the fold, it had only been in the past few years that I’d gained any real experience with anyone of different ethnicity than my own, which is to say extremely white, white nearly to the point of appearing blue from the veins beneath my Protestant-sired skin. Such daily homogeneity wouldn’t have been the case had I grown up in the city, but out in the ‘burbs there are enclaves where the majority clings to its status with tenacity so fierce you’d think the real estate consists of cotton plantations.

Still, I remember Jamaal.

We went to the same junior high and walked the same direction home each afternoon, and weeks went by before I’d first heard the sound of his voice. I remember now his smooth caramel skin and the shiny black curls of his hair, and how mysterious his brown eyes looked, not like anyone else’s. The word wouldn’t have occurred to me then, but now I would have to regard them as stoic.

Jamaal had the sort of build that American mothers describe to their friends as husky, and couldn’t run very fast, in every way a stark contrast to his brother Jameel. Jameel was older by a year, and taller, wiry as an Olympic sprinter. He never smiled and never spoke, suffering each day with a scowl terrifying in its maturity, and whenever he walked through crowded school hallways his passage was as clean as a razor’s. It was this image that dominated when my mother told me to watch myself around them, all of them, both boys and their older sister and their parents, and while my mother and her chatty friends weren’t sure which Middle Eastern country the parents had come from, it was an awful place.

“They hate us, every last one of them,” my mother would warn me. “For no better reason than because we’re American. They aren’t Christian there. They wish us dead.”

So I steered clear, the terrible Khashab brothers going their way, and I mine, until the afternoon I rounded a corner on the way home from school and saw Jamaal’s broad back, thirty feet ahead of me. I dropped my pace so I wouldn’t overtake him, giving him cause to cut my throat, and I was so careful that I stumbled and dropped the big armload of books I was carrying. They scattered across the sidewalk with an unnerving racket and papers burst free, strewn like fall leaves, and he turned around.

Jamaal turned around.

He said nothing, silent as his viciously mum brother, and as I stooped to retrieve everything he backtracked, so I kept my gaze low, the way you do with animals who might take eye contact as a challenge. His shoes came into view and they stopped, planted firm as pedestals, and I saw a knee, then the other knee, and then the rest of him as he knelt to help me pick up the mess.

When it was done, books dusted and papers salvaged, he looked at me with long-lashed brown eyes so shy, and some worse flavor, as though he’d guessed what I’d been thinking, and he said:

“You really should have a backpack.”

So we became friends, and as we were in seventh grade we were too old to play together, so instead we just hung, but never at my house and never at his, because I suppose each of us had things at home we wanted to shield the other from.

It was inevitable that I would show him the slaughterhouse, initiate him into its secrets and decline, and we would prowl its corridors as if searching their shadows for hints of our futures and how to reach them. Or we’d look for valuables left behind and sometimes even find them: the odd dirty magazine, select pages already brittle; warm beer, cached by older kids for later.

Sometimes we would just sit, ignoring the underlying residue of death as we trusted each other with the reasons why neither of us wanted to go home for dinner, me talking about my stepbrother and what a world-class stoolie he was, and Jamaal saying he could never study for all the yelling going on, his sister nineteen, with very definite ideas of what she wanted to do in a day and who she wanted to do it with, and their father not seeing it that way at all. He already had someone in mind he expected her to marry.

“Jameel sees what’s coming for him in a few years,” Jamaal told me. “He’s next. He coughed blood last week. The doctor says it’s an ulcer.”

And when, after the tragedy, no one knew where to look for Jamaal, I was the only one who thought to check the slaughterhouse the next day, but while he’d look at me, he refused to talk, or couldn’t. I could still smell smoke on him. He didn’t resist when, after an hour, I took him by the arm and steered him out of the slaughterhouse and past the thin young trees growing where once had been a drive, and brought him out to civilization and those who said they had his best interests at heart. I was afraid he might stay back in there until he starved.

Their father never denied locking Jamaal’s sister in her room after dousing her with gasoline and setting her ablaze, claiming that where he’d grown up a father had that right, when there was nothing left to be done with a rebellious, disrespectful daughter.

The area Shriners launched a fund drive to help with the skin grafts, but I never heard how she was doing because the rest of the family moved away to live with other relatives.

“Now do you see why I never wanted you exposed to people like that?” my mother said. “Their children are just cattle to them, is all they are. Not precious like you are to us.”

So I never knew what became of Jamaal, although years later, when I was in high school and needed some cash, I was going through my mother’s dresser drawers and beneath a jewelry box found three old letters, unopened, that he’d mailed to me, and only then did I realize I never had gotten around to asking him what country his parents were from.

*

After insuring Jamey’s eternal rest, nothing much else seemed right for the day, so back at our apartment Rachel called in sick to the current temping job she had, and Mae did the same at the music store, although it was late enough by now that both places should’ve already gotten the idea, so we made coffee and drank it, and then a little later on we went to bed.

It’s hard to say why it happened, Mae feeling not much better about things, so I kissed her on the cheek, and she continued to tilt her face up, so I kissed her again but a little lower, and by the third or fourth time I was squarely at her mouth. It was one of her very best features, a size or two too large for her face if you adhered to strict proportional criteria to condone beauty, but perfection is ultimately so boring. Rachel would sometimes remark what a great mouth Mae had, so wide and dazzling when she smiled, neither lip overpowering the other when she didn’t, and always looking so moist, and when I was finding out how true this was, I felt another nose nudging in, so we made room for Rachel.

We grieved our way toward the unmade bed and sent our clothes to the floor. Sometimes I was right there and other times felt entirely apart from everything, entranced by the differences in us, in our bodies, even between two of the same gender. Our hands. Six hands hypnotic, gliding like butterflies, and our smells and tastes none the same, whether from outside our bodies or from within, and the hair so varied in color, texture, thickness. I couldn’t think of us configuring as two-and-one, more like three entirely separate creatures belonging to no particular evolution.

Everyone got a turn as the focus of attention, but all things must wind down sometime. Our mènage concluded with Mae straddling my hips, as Rachel laid a cheek against her back, one arm around Mae’s tiny middle while rubbing her other hand, slick and steady, along the place where we joined, and after we’d disengaged and stretched out beneath the covers, Mae lay between us, but scooted a head lower, falling asleep immediately with her mouth at one of Rachel’s breasts.

“I hope she’s not a teeth-grinder,” Rachel said. “She’ll bite my nipple off.”

“Spread your hair across the pillow more,” I told her, and she got a funny look on her face, like the time for that was past, and asked why. “Never mind, just humor me.”

So Rachel arranged, rolling her eyes and trying not to jostle Mae, until her hair fanned in chestnut waves. I repositioned her hand to caress the back of Mae’s head, with fingertips only, and she finally relaxed into the sculpting, and when I got her to give me that tiny frown the look was just so perfect.

“Lady Madonna, baby at your breast,” I said. It was the only Beatles I could remember, too. “This is a whole new image for you. Who would’ve guessed?”

Rachel glared, saying, “I do hope you’re amused,” but started to smile, lying back with her eyes drifting shut and her free hand reaching toward me.

Her hands had always been subtly weird to me, the undersides at least. From fingertips to heel there was hardly any definition, her palms so smooth and flat they looked unfinished. She’d been five weeks premature, and I could imagine some telepathy between her and my mother going on even then, Rachel telling herself in a watery prenatal voice, I have to get out of here, have to put some more distance between us or there can only be trouble.

“Look at her.” Rachel raised the covers and we peered down Mae’s length, between us. “The way her body’s so straight, hardly any curves or angles to it. It’s not unfeminine, but it’s almost like a boy’s.”

“Well, looking at you, that’s all just relative.”

“Maybe she appeals to the latent queer in you, you think?”

“I didn’t realize we’d ever established I have one, did we?”

“If you say so,” Rachel shrugged. “But I’d say this afternoon we established that I sure did.”

“Oh come on. You had to know. You’ve kissed girls before.”

“Kissed, yeah. But this is the first time I’ve ever had one squatting on my face.”

“Well then, progress has been made.”

“I feel so … needed,” Rachel said. “How can I feel so much older than her when we’re just two years apart, that doesn’t make any sense.” She looked down at Mae’s mouth. “Can we keep her?”

I figured Rachel was kidding but gave it some thought the way you’ll preview lives you’ll never live or people you’ll never kill even when they deserve it, then realized she was serious.

“She doesn’t own much,” I said, “so I guess there’d be room.”

Rachel shook Mae’s shoulder, saying, “Okay, come on now, the bar’s closed,” pulling her nipple from Mae’s mouth, and when Mae was awake and smiling with fuck languor, Rachel said, “Um, I need to ask you something, but it’s personal.”

Mae blinked over her shoulder at me. “Okay.”

“What was it you saw in Jamey, mainly?”

Mae wasn’t sure what to make of this.

“Two years ago when we first met you, and you know how much Nathan loves to dissect things, he said he was pretty sure you saw Jamey as some sort of father figure. I’ve always been curious how on target he was, and today … today seems the day to ask.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” said Mae.

Rachel nodded. “I kind of thought so.”

“I mean, he did so much for me, and really I do love him for that. But if I was going to settle on a father figure it’d have to be someone more … stable.”

“Stability? How does stability figure in?” Rachel said, but sounded purely rhetorical, then she pulled Mae’s head down to her breast again, and Mae cuddled closer and reached back to drape one arm over my waist and pull me closer too. I watched the sky in the window like shades of pixel gray, rooting for the sun but it never came, another lesson in misplaced faith.

*

Rachel was a month from premature birth when my stepfamily was forced on me, two of them, a father and a son, who was called Thumper because of something to do with that Disney movie. He was four years shy of my six, and a few days before they were set to invade, my mother called me to the living room and there he was. My mother beamed as though he were the cutest thing since cartoon rabbits, and said, “Meet your new baby brother. I bet you didn’t know you had a baby brother, did you?” Thumper was carrying a toy hammer, and shortly after we were introduced he threw the hammer into my forehead so hard it knocked me down, and as soon as everyone had ascertained I wasn’t bleeding they said how funny it was, because anything a two-year-old does is adorable, especially when done to an over-the-hill six-year-old.

He loved tools. Thumper loved tools and taking things apart, and when he was all of five he dismantled the air compressor of my aquarium while I was at summer camp, and all my fish died. Coming home was like finding one of those mysterious towns you’ll hear about, from years before telecommunications glued us all together, that were found empty but with uneaten meals still on the table, and no one knows what happened. I came home and looked in upon a tankful of still, cloudy water, and nobody was swimming around the castle and the lid to the treasure chest wasn’t slamming up and down in a gush of air bubbles. Only the skeleton looked at home.

“I’m sure he’s sorry,” my mother told me. “But we shouldn’t discourage Thumper’s natural talents. How else will he learn?”

Later, when I told Andre about it at the slaughterhouse, over experimental cigarettes, he just said, “Good thing you don’t live in an iron lung.”

She stood up for Thumper a lot, I was noticing, a habit gotten into early and never broken, to prove to my stepfather that she wasn’t playing favorites. Of course Thumper caught on quick, and now it’s obvious to me why he’d set about trying to dismantle as much of my life as he could get his hands on, if not how he’d gotten the idea I’d even want to steal his father.

“You’re not my father,” I used to tell the guy any chance I got, and he would look expectantly toward the nearest door, saying, “Of course not … I’m here,” until it had become a game and one of us had to wear the other down.

I won, I suppose, one evening in preteen cockiness reminding him who he wasn’t, and he fixed on me with nullified eyes while chewing at the insides of his cheeks, then in a low voice I’d never heard before said, “You know why I’m nothing like your father was? You know what was different about him from me?”

Whatever I’d forced out of him, it had to be big.

“You ever hear the word ‘impotent’ before? Know what it means when a man’s impotent? What that can drive his wife to do?” He nodded with the conviction of natural law. “That was your father for you.” While I wasn’t sure what the word meant, I could read from his face that it was truly terrible, shameful beyond telling, and that the dictionary would back him up.

Thumper watched, and even though he wouldn’t have known what the word meant either, still snickered into his hands. Later, after I’d consulted Webster, Rachel brought her stuffed panda into my room to leave it with me, so I let her stay too because I knew she was afraid of Thumper, and that he grew suspicious whenever we got together and looked as though we were talking about him.

It felt weird, none of us a complete sibling to another, steps and halves stitched together into a Frankenstein’s family — how could the usual rules apply? Every time I saw a commercial on TV about needy orphans in faraway lands, I’d pretend that Thumper belonged with them, face streaked with mud and belly swollen from hunger as he stumbled along squalling to the village’s gods at the injustice of it all, wondering how he’d gotten there.

I held onto that dream for years, until I outgrew it, finally able to take pleasure in subtler tortures, Thumper’s father now using me as a motivational weapon he could wield over a son whose brain was ill-motivated or ill-equipped to process math, science, the higher intricacies of his native tongue.

“Why can’t you be more like Angus, why can’t you even try?” he’d challenge. “Those report cards you bring home, they’d shame a village idiot.” Thumper would glare at me with all the resentment his maturing face could muster, while Rachel made sure he didn’t miss her Mona Lisa smile, and knew whom she was siding with and always would.

Came the day, then, fourteen months after he’d been driving, when a drunken Thumper rolled his car. A lumbar vertebra crunched like a hambone in a dog’s jaw, taking the spinal cord with it. After that, he confined his driving to a wheelchair, mostly around the house, but of course I was gone by then, having let Chicago swallow me, make me anonymous, reprogram me with its different rhythms, its harsher harmonies and jagged dissonances.

I can still recall the look on my stepfather’s face in the hospital waiting room, after they’d given us the news on Thumper’s lower extremities, and while I was not without pity, a part of me felt responsible, too, because for over a decade I’d been wishing harm on him, and finally that muscle had flexed.

I looked at my stepfather’s slack face, remembering what it had uttered about my real father, and wondering if I should remind him of that, since impotence had again become a fact of life close to home. But at least my dad could still walk — which, as I quickly realized, had been an option he’d exercised only too well, so I kept silent, my stepfather still holding the means with which to cut the legs from beneath me, too.

*

Days passed and Jamey never would go rank, not even when the city and the ‘burbs broke new sweat in the heat of Indian Summer, his decomposition arrested by a force beyond our reckoning, until it got to the point where I couldn’t think of him as Jamey any more.

I’d make a trip out to the slaughterhouse every several days to check on his progress, or lack of it, and it was obvious that I wasn’t the only one, other recent visits annotated by gifts left in front of the bedsprings, below his cruddy bare feet. Coins and locks of hair and interesting chunks of scrap metal and sticks of incense and shredded audio tape and the odd piece or two of drug paraphernalia — offerings of these and more. He who was no longer Jamey hung above them all, bent-limbed and woven into the rusty springs like a 3-D portrait of a Hindu deity, no more or no less skeletal than he’d been in life, just incredibly resistant to change.

I’d come home and tell Rachel and Mae about it, and it was always fun to try and figure out who’d left what.

The signs went up during the third week, scrap lumber shoved horizontally into the springs, slash letters burned into the wood and chipped paint with a soldering iron. The sign at the bottom read Musica mundana; the one over his head, Deus ex nihilo. Given this further Latin I rightly figured it had to be Nathan’s doing.

“Well, what do you think it means?” he asked me on the street the next day.

“Is this from another private confab you had with him?”

Nathan shook his head. “This one I made up for the occasion.”

I resigned myself to puzzling it out since there was little else to do, Nathan and I sixth in line from a theater box office, waiting for tickets to an Andrew Lloyd Webber show to go on sale. It’s what Nathan does for money, making a surprisingly adequate living by standing in lines for people whose time is more valuable than his own and will gladly hire surrogates. Business was in fact good enough that he was ready to subcontract some lines out to me, so I was tagging along to learn the finer points of queuing. With my degree in communications, I felt confident and ready to solo.

“Well, ‘Deus’ would be ‘God,’ obviously,” I said. “Past that I’m rusty when it comes to dead languages.”

“Deus ex nihilo means ‘God out of nothing,’” Nathan told me, then said, “Andre didn’t get it either.”

God out of nothing. So that’s what we’d been doing out there.

“Speaking of Andre, have you talked to him lately?”

I shook my head. “Got his answering machine twice.”

“He’s in a mood. You know how he gets: ‘What do I have to show for my life, it’s one-third gone already, I have so much more potential than this, I can’t sleep.’ Et cetera.”

“I think the slaughterhouse thing’s gotten to him.”

“Could be,” Nathan said. “But you kno-ow … Jamey being an incorruptible like he is, if the Catholic Church heard about it, they’d shit. All of the others, so far as they’re concerned, were these obedient types who traded a lifetime of orgasms for a corpse that wouldn’t rot. Now. My theory is, their perpetual freshness had nothing to do with holiness and everything to do with devotion in the people they left behind. The collective focus of a bunch of hysterics is an amazing thing.”

“Get out.”

“Quantum physics is on my side. Energy, that’s all anything is or will be. Waveforms on different frequencies, when you get to the subatomic level. The only difference between matter and energy is, matter’s congealed. So, with brain activity being electrical, thoughts and the physical world are made of the same stuff — we just don’t have all the cause and effect sorted out yet.”

Which made me view Thumper’s wreck and my malicious fantasies in a new light. “You’re saying we’re keeping him the way he is?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. When’s the last time you had that kind of faith in anything? Except maybe for entropy, but that’s beside the point, since Jamey’s doing a good job of defying it.”

“So how’s it happening, then?”

Nathan looked ashamed. “I’m supposed to know everything?”

Sometimes I took it for granted that he did, Nathan for as long as I’ve known him grasping for every fact he can to reaffirm his militant atheism, to the extent that he could probably debate most theologians to tears. He’d told me that his goal was to feel confident that, if he were only able to travel back in time, he could convince St. Thomas Aquinas that neither of them existed.

I’d never known Nathan before he was like this, so I have a hard time imagining him growing up wanting to be a priest, but he did. Wanted it badly, so he tells it, laughing at the child he used to be as though it wasn’t him, and saying how fortunate he’d changed his mind, because “Father Nathan” sounds like some foreign phrase spoken with a lisp.

His father died before Nathan could know him, so he did a lot of growing up around priests, as his mother felt they’d make the best role models. It was girls that ruined it for him, girls and then the recovered memory of a priest with clammy hands and where he’d put them, although three years after Nathan recalled this in therapy, his counselor was hit with a class-action civil suit for generating false memories, so now he doesn’t know what to think, beyond being convinced there’s no God.

Although maybe he was willing to make an exception, as long as he retained enough control, and now that the right god had come along.

“I’ve started calling him Nihil, thinking of him by that name instead,” Nathan said, then lowered his voice. “I was out there yesterday. I swear his eyes blinked once.”

*

Rachel was eighteen when they kicked her out at home, not as traumatic as it might’ve been since she had someplace to go.

I’d been visiting that afternoon, knowing ahead of time that my mother and stepfather would be away, so Rachel and I had gone to the slaughterhouse to shoot some 35mm film. Lately I’d felt compelled to preserve the place, in case some calamity or zoning change erased it.

When we returned to the house Thumper was still the only one around, with rarely two words to say to either of us anymore, just sitting in his wheelchair watching TV, so Rachel and I were pretty sure we wouldn’t be disturbed back in her room.

We never even heard the squeak of his wheels.

Later we wondered if Thumper hadn’t suspected awhile, picking up on a look or a touch we’d let slip in front of him because he’d gotten to be wallpaper as far as we were concerned. It was the last great snitch of a sterling career, maybe the best night of his life since the accident, kicked back surrounded by his stepmother’s tears and father’s apoplexy, seeing Rachel and me on the brunt of a disowning that would last nearly a year. The man aimed a gun at my head, then lowered it and sank to the floor and pissed his own pants, probably not the climax Thumper was hoping for, but for his sake I was still happy to leave him there with them, alone at last, what he’d always wanted.

And as I drove her to my apartment, her new home, for miles I wondered if the magic would survive, because now we were no longer a secret, and because finally I’d seen on her father’s face the anguish that I had always known this would cause, reveling in it, close enough for him to read my thoughts, You drove my dad away, and now I’m taking your daughter, or at least read it in my eyes.

“They’re not really so bad,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with them that an open mind wouldn’t cure.”

She’d been crying, but started laughing, saying that at least she hadn’t been set on fire in her room, like Jamaal’s sister.

“I used to have nightmares about that,” she admitted. “All the time, used to wake up thinking I was burning.”

“You were only, what, six or seven when that happened?”

“Yeah. But I don’t remember anybody ever telling me it couldn’t happen to me.”

As I drove home the city grew around us, denser and taller, and we weren’t heading into it again so much as putting it back on, like armor or a hair-shirt, for protection or abrasion. I’m still not sure what I get out of it.

“Do you think you’ll ever have kids?” she asked, and I could see patterns of light and shadow sliding across her face, and her teeth were chattering because my car’s heater was broken, and her question was so awful in its implications that I didn’t know how to answer, so it hung in the air while I pounded at the thermostat with my fist, thinking I’ve just got to get this thing fixed.

*

I liked the way it felt, coming home to the two of them, or Rachel coming home to me and Mae, or she to us, this entire new extradimensional dynamic generated by Mae’s moving in. I’d heard somewhere, Nathan probably, that the most stable structures in nature revolve around threes.

On the sunnier days, late in the afternoon, if it wasn’t too chilly, Mae would come home from the music store and go up to the roof, near the edge, sitting on a crate turned on end to play her violin. Usually I’d go up after she’d started, sometimes listening from the doorway and sometimes beside her, and some days the notes were slow and mournful, and others lively, but I never knew if it was mood or just repertoire.

This was eight floors up, with a far view of the cityscape, and she would sit in her leather jacket with her hair thrown back, her bowing arm in fluid motion as she swayed against the vistas of brick and steel and bare-branched trees. Most often she faced the west, playing into sunsets as though inviting them to set her on fire, her urban concertos carried away on the currents of traffic, riding them like a feather rides wind.

“Maybe he can hear it, still, somehow,” she said one evening after lowering the violin from her chin. “Maybe it pleases him. Or soothes his torments, if he has any left.”

She played for Nihil, in his dilapidated palace. Nihil in the springs, his mortal coils.

I took it as a matter of course now that the body might be in a slightly different position from one visit to the next; come to expect it, even, Nihil trying to bring us signs and wonders. Not that there was any point to them, ultimately, because Nihil was after all a god about nothing.

“He can hear it, if he wants to,” she said. “That’s the key to this all, I think. His ears were so sensitive maybe death just couldn’t have them. If he was here right now? He could listen to rush hour, and pick out sounds from it like threads in a sweater.”

“Yeah, it’s starting to make sense to me,” I said. “If dead saints could hear prayers, I don’t see why he can’t still hear the things he was most attuned to.”

Mae smiled, that wide lovely mouth going wider. “Like the day in that scrapyard, when the three of us found that big industrial boiler and made a drum out of it? Wasn’t that great?”

We laughed while miming the clumsy, brutal swings we’d taken at the thing with our two-handed cudgels, although I continued to keep to myself what Jamey and I had found inside that she’d never known about, and then Mae reached into the violin case for a soft cloth to wipe her instrument down.

“You know what I like about you and Rachel?” she said. “You never make me practice. You let me find my own pace.”

“Well…” I was demurring, because Rachel and I had talked about such things, and it was embarrassing to me to hear that we’d done something right. “We didn’t feel like imposing someone else’s standards of ambition on you.”

“Jamey, he was always after me to practice more, said how was I going to get anywhere without practicing.”

“Was this before or after he’d shoot up?”

“That Jamey,” she said, not unkindly, “always big on theory, he just couldn’t quite pull the rest of it together. Would’ve made somebody a decent manager, though, maybe.”

I said he might’ve at that, and watched as Mae set the violin in its case, and maybe it was the line of her jaw or the fall of her hair or the birdlike bones of her hand, but for a moment I was overcome with a sense of Mae’s fragility, hearing the collision of insanities and rush hour, and imagining all the things that could happen to her down there. Rape and murder and intimate arson. It was too much. Or just plain disappearance, like Andre now, his turn come around, because none of us had heard from him for days, and when for a moment I wondered what it would feel like to fling myself off the roof, I thought I might’ve understood some of the things that had guided that final needle into Jamey’s vein. You can’t protect anyone, really.

Which must be why prayers are needed.

Lately I’d lie awake each night, unable to sleep from the worry of it all, feeling our mingled heat under the covers, Mae between Rachel and me. I’d listen to their breathing, wondering how I’d react if one of them were to stop, or if someone with weapons and cruel intent came through a window or broke the door down, and I’d never tasted all these worries before, didn’t know where they were coming from or why, but by god there they were.

Unable to keep it all inside any longer, one night I crept out of bed and went to the western window in the kitchen to pray, Nihil, keep them safe, but felt no true connection, that it would take more than that to convince him to listen, and I didn’t have the advantage of a violin, or an anvil to drop on a car, a noise that Nihil might’ve liked in his earlier incarnation.

I drove away before anything could happen to them, out to the slaughterhouse, the woods and walls cold around me, until I stood in his chamber looking upon him. His arms were no longer over his shoulders, but lower now, woven into the springs with one thrust forward, fingers clawed as if demanding his due. I trained the flashlight over him, all bones and skinny cock, and when I dropped to my knees I left the light on his face, like an illumination from some medieval painting that Nathan might’ve once admired.

“Nihil,” I whispered, and in that stillness my whisper seemed to roar. “You knew them once, like you knew me, so help me keep them safe, help me protect them, because I need them so much…”

I kept praying, for minutes maybe, and didn’t stop until I saw a flicker behind Nihil’s dead lids, like the languid back and forth rolling of a dreamer’s eyes.

Turn out … the light, I thought I heard, even though no one’s lips had moved, can’t bear the light…

After a moment I obeyed, kneeling before him in darkness that the filtered moonlight from above could barely touch. From around me came the murmur of a relieved sigh, then soon, the erratic creaking of rusty bedsprings.

*

It was Jamey who, between opiate nods, made me consider the vitality of the ear in ways I might never have otherwise. Hearing is the first of our senses to connect us with the world, the only one to bridge that gulf before we’re born. In our envelopes of fluid and meat we see nothing, taste nothing, smell nothing, with nothing of the outer world to touch. But we can hear it.

The sounds of the world awaiting us have already imprinted us by the time we’re expelled into their sources, and even then we’ve spent months attuned to the body we’re grafted to, the rushing of blood and bubbling of gasses, the circadian flow of meals through the System. Although on a smaller scale it’s not so different from the music of we who traverse the sphere of the world, shuffling through a city’s bowels with no greater concept of our ends than a crust of bread or chunk of cheese.

So, if we’re prenatally imprinted by the world around us — and matter and energy being the same — who’s to say it can’t shape us somehow? That the neverending urban clatter and crash can’t become as familiar to some as a father’s voice; more, even?

Linking ideas like this was what gave Jamey and Nathan their most fertile common ground, like a pair of alchemists who realize they have the same formula written in different equations, and it was Nathan who provided the offhand historical footnote that may have explained the process of Jamey into Nihil:

The Catholic Mass, of all things.

*

So I spent a few days coming to terms with the fact that a friend of mine, clearly dead if unspoiled, had undergone this reawakening of sorts, and if at first I’d been intrigued and vaguely entertained by the notion, now I wasn’t so sure.

Used to, I’d taken solace in the belief that once I was dead, that’d be it, a total snuffage of my flickering spark, but Nihil had ruined everything. I’d heard the body squirm in its springs, heard it sigh and complain about the light, and coming back like that seemed the worst thing I could imagine. Jamey had only wanted to be dead — was nothing sacred? — and me, I’d spent too much time thinking about all the things I never wanted to be, with anything eternal strictly bottom of the list.

I couldn’t bear to burden Rachel and Mae with this, because Rachel was so happy that the other half of her sexuality was now out of its shell, and Mae saying how wonderfully relaxed things were with us as compared to her family in Los Angeles, all that tradition and old world servitude and everyone’s expectations of her being a world-class soloist if only she’d strive harder, and how everyone out there dumped on Koreans, even in the Asian community, especially the Japanese, because it’s just not life if you can’t lord it over someone. I hated to spoil their honeymoon.

Nathan. Nathan would help me through this crisis.

“Why are you telling me this?” was the first thing he said to me. “I don’t want to hear this.”

“But…” I said, and watched him scowl, something I’d never seen him do, not at me. “You were the one with the theories about this. If it hadn’t been for you, all I’d’ve thought was he’d been in a coma all this time.”

“No, no, no, no, no.” Nathan was shaking his head, the two of us squared off in some bureaucratic line downtown where I’d confronted him, wasting another day outpaced by snails. “Don’t you get it, I was just basically bullshitting when I said that about his eyes, I didn’t expect you to take me seriously.”

“You didn’t see them blink?”

“I figured it was maggots, finally, that his time came,” and when Nathan started twisting and wrapping himself inside his coat and trying not to look around at the faces that were trying not to look at us, I knew what the problem was.

Nihil was okay as long as he was a static concept, a joke, a theatrical prop, a conversation piece, our private urban legend, our scarecrow on the hayride. Let him slip those boundaries, though, start looking us in the eye, and it wasn’t fun anymore.

“It never happened and you know it,” Nathan told me, hooked on dogma as much an opiate as Jamey’s smack and the family values of my mother and stepfather, whichever they’d settled on. “Never.”

Everything Nathan said sounded so much like an order that I didn’t see any point to continuing, so I left him to his denial.

On the bus home, I counted pawn shops and Vienna beef signs as they slid past my window, until a woman near the back wearing purple stretch pants bent her little boy over the seat and started swatting, and as he cried his older sister let a thin stream of drool run from the corner of her mouth, but the only movement she made was to turn her head away and pop a finger in her mouth, and then came my stop, and when I got off and the bus rolled away in its stinking roar, I could still see her empty face against the window and the hammy flailing arm behind her, smaller and smaller down the block, and I just knew that Andre was dead.

*

During the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Mass was assuming the form that came down through the next thousand years or so, it followed the structure of the octave, a succession of steps from one’s state of consciousness on walking into the sanctuary, and on through an escalating series of credos and prayers and music and acts that climaxed in divine union. Peasant or king, whoever participated was tuned by the ceremony, resonating like a string plucked by their one true God.

Now, gods come and gods go, thriving awhile then fading away in favor of new gods or spiffier reconfigurations of the old ones, and I have to wonder if among the newest might not be cities. Not the places so much as simply the idea of them. Say, the concept of Chicago that binds it all together, ‘burbs and downtown, El train and Sears Tower, sewer and gas pump, and those scurrying millions who tend and pay homage, and appease it with murder and babies.

All that energy has to go somewhere, has to, because as any physicist will tell you, energy can never be destroyed…

Only transformed.

*

I figured Andre must be dead because no one had heard from him in so long, which wasn’t at all like Andre, who would call and cling to your ear and in his more insecure moments never speak in periods, only commas and semicolons.

That I’d find him at the slaughterhouse began to make sense. After discovering Jamey there, Andre would regard the symmetry as irresistible; and too, in my experience, whenever life got twisted that’s where people went. How many times might I have been already but overlooked his corpse, in some shadow or musty chamber of its own, empty of life out of envy for the attention given Nihil’s, or because he’d been feeling otherwise impressionable.

It was late afternoon when I arrived, sky spitting the year’s first tiny snowflakes. Then I saw that our padlock had been pried from the door, wrenched into the weedy brown stubble. Surely that hadn’t been Andre’s doing. Discovery by the outside world?

I moved through the slaughterhouse with more care than usual, and the closer I got to that one-time theater of pain where cattle bled and Nihil waited, the more clearly I heard it. The creaking bedsprings were familiar, the choppy but unending moan less so.

I watched from the doorway as they went about their work, and maybe it should’ve occurred to me to get territorial, since no one had said anything about sharing Nihil with anyone, even if he was starting to make me goofy, but they were so diligent in what they were doing that I couldn’t begrudge them. And they were so young, not yet ten years old, boys in that prepubescent state where they could still legitimately be called beautiful, even if they were grubby.

One of them, dark-haired and long-lashed, held his tongue in the corner of his mouth as he knelt with a pair of cutters and snipped the end of another crosslength of wire, drew it back, and began boring its sharp tip through the meat of Nihil’s thigh. His technique must’ve been perfected by now. He’d been working his way down the body, skewering Nihil through each cheek, both arms, and beneath the skin of chest and belly, although it was the scrotum job that really made me wince. Nihil was trembling, clearly of his own volition and rapture, both eyes wide open and rolled back in his head with only the whites showing, and a rusty sound scraping from far down in his throat, a jittery quaver caught between a laugh and a moan, higher in pitch with every inch the wire ran through his thigh.

The other boy was a blond little brute of a kid, frowning in concentration as he sat on the floor with an S.O.S. pad, scouring at something held in his lap, something curved and pale and still greasy with blood. It looked like the dome of a skull.

The dark-haired boy used a knife to punch an exit on the inside of Nihil’s thigh, the skin now stretching from beneath, and once the wire was all the way through, Nihil rasped with relief or letdown, and when I walked in the blond boy only looked annoyed.

“You two broke in here, you’re the ones who did that?”

He glared, then shrugged me off in favor of scouring.

“Are you…?” started the other, more shy, like my elder status still counted for something with him. “Are you a friend of Andre’s?”

“You know Andre?”

“Sure.” He started to bore the wire into the opposite inner thigh, which triggered the trembling and moaning all over again. “Andre’s the one who brought us out here.”

“When did he do that?”

“I don’t know, like yesterday maybe.”

I walked around keeping mostly within the drab sunlight from above, spotting the remains of a fire to one side, a few sleeping bags around it and balled-up burger wrappers across the concrete.

“Andre gave us the combination before he dropped us off,” the blond kid said, then jerked his head at the slimmer, more delicate boy, “but dumbfuck there lost it.”

“That’s not my name,” he said. “My name’s really Cheyenne.”

“Has he been back since?”

“Who? Andre?” he asked, and I said who else, and he nodded, then must’ve hit Nihil’s femur, because he yanked the wire back and tried again.

“He was here this morning,” the butch kid said, bored with waiting for Cheyenne, holding up the wet skull. “He left me this to do. He was pissed about me busting the lock so he went to get a new one, but he hasn’t been back, that was…”

“Days ago,” said Cheyenne. “Days and days and days.”

So I prowled, and the boys paid little attention, although I learned that the other’s name was Oscar but he would only answer to Axl. Then I found another one flat out on the concrete, and for a moment thought here was the source of that skull, but this one’s was still attached, if no better for it. Thick as mud, dried blood caked the misshapen back of his head and the sledge mallet nearby. I wondered what it had sounded like, if it’d been anything like the skulls of those antecedent cows.

“Who” — I pointed — “did this?”

“We all took a turn,” Axl said. “Andre went first.”

“Nihil heard it loud and clear,” Cheyenne told me. “Andre says he needed it to wake up more, you know, like a clock radio?”

“And that worked?”

“Did it work, shit, look at him,” said Axl. “Now we’re just waiting for him to come around the rest of the way.”

“The rest of the way from where?” I asked, and if the boys couldn’t articulate it, maybe they understood the same way I was beginning to, below the skin in a place where it took more than words to cut to.

Maybe, being so much sooner out of the void than I was, they unconsciously knew that great power flows along the path of least resistance. Paradises demand gods, and gods demand mouths of their own, to eat and to proclaim, and a lost or fallen status changes nothing. Where there might’ve once been glory, hunger will do just fine, and it’s better to be the one doing the serving than one of those being served up.

Trying not to shake so hard, I said to Axl, “What’s with the skull, Andre give you any reason?”

“I hate this blue shit, it gets all over everything.” Axl poured a can of water over the skull and squeezed the S.O.S. pad and wiped away blue and pink suds. “He wants to make something out of it, I don’t remember the name, something weird, he says Nihil told him what it was and how to do it.”

“A damaru,” Cheyenne called over. “That was the word.”

“How’d you remember that?” Axl wondered.

Cheyenne’s shrug was very elaborate as he, almost singing it, said that he didn’t know, he just remembered things, so I asked what a damaru was and got the shrug again, “Something you make out of skulls, I guess,” and then he cut another wire and started on Nihil’s quaking knees.

I waited for Andre, long enough for things to start seeming more normal, not that they were, but you get used to whatever’s around. We were starting to lose the light overhead when he came back, carrying something in a vinyl bag, with another young boy at his side who showed no sign of recognizing the other two, and I thought, What’s he doing, scooping them up one at a time?

“Oh, hey,” Andre said, and he shuffled in his olive canvas coat, with darting eyes. “Been here long?”

I said yes, and Andre gave the vinyl bag to Axl, who looked inside and started going on how it wasn’t fair, it was Cheyenne’s turn to clean one, or get this new geek, or me, so Andre tried to calm him, saying it could wait. Then he had to calm the new boy, who’d winced so hard at being called a geek by someone older that I thought he’d be sick.

“Where’d they come from, Andre?”

“The skulls? Just … around.”

“The kids. These kids…?”

He looked as if I’d asked the too-obvious. “They’re all over, Angus, they’re like puppies, you know. Everywhere you look.”

“Except they don’t have tags, I guess.”

Andre, turning on me, said, “You think I’m kidnapping them, do you? Because I’m not, there’s no need for that,” and he spun the newest arrival around, this thin wisp of a little boy with the cringing eyes under choppy bangs, then he yanked up a sleeve to show me the constellation of crusty pocks along that undersized arm, cigarette burns of varying recent vintage. “You think he does that to himself? You usually have to get a little older than six before you start doing that to yourself.”

I couldn’t react, waiting for something that wasn’t true.

“Believe me, I know,” he went on, then sent the new boy over by the remains of the fire, which Cheyenne was trying to rekindle now that he was finished with Nihil. “I’m just trying to make things better for them, is all, make things better for myself.”

“By bashing in the backs of their heads?”

“Only that one. You can’t save everybody.”

“Yeah, but Andre, they’re kids, you can’t make decisions like this for them. How much did you know when you were eight, nine?”

“Enough to know how much I hated when those assholes would beat on me just to hear me cry. That’s why I’m doing them a favor, either giving them power to survive, or putting the weak ones past all the hurt, forever. Either way it’s done out of concern.” Andre slumped and let his face sag as though he hadn’t slept for days. “You don’t understand, I’m just trying to get the dreams to stop.”

“Dreams?”

“Dreams,” then he pointed to the quieted Nihil, proud and terrible and mighty in that mangle of flesh and metal, and for the first time I realized they’d wired him into his own antenna. “I was the one who dreamed he was dead, wasn’t I, the one he called to first? So I’m only giving him what he wants.”

“And that includes the damaru?”

Andre looked surprised. “You know about that?”

I said only from Cheyenne, and asked what it was.

A damaru is a kind of magical drum, he explained, hourglass-shaped and Tibetan in origin. Right away I knew this was nothing Andre would know about, it sounded more like Jamey talking, Jamey and his lore about things that made noise. Jamey’s incorruptible brains picked by Nihil, the coagulated voice of rust and impulse.

Damarus could be made of wood, but the truly powerful ones were made from two skulls, tops sawn off like bowls, then joined at the crowns, with membranes affixed over the ends. You didn’t beat it as such, but shook it, and two knotted cords whipped back and forth and did the rest.

“Skulls, they’re really resonant,” Andre said. “He told me in one of the dreams that powerful damarus can wake the dead.”

The idea was interesting enough to get me sidetracked, forget the moment and think of what was really going on here. The raising of a new army, maybe, or founding of a new religion of the null and void. Of course it was very Darwinian in nature, you couldn’t deny that, but it had gone this far, so who was I to judge.

Axl was compliant again, scouring the second skull, and I saw that it’d already been peeled and partially cleaned, and so easier to ignore that not all that long ago there had been a face on it, atop someone’s shoulders, someone who’d been laughing or shouting or crying.

I looked up, far above Nihil in that gabled tower, past the pulleys and chains, looked toward the day’s last light, thinking they’d better get the fire going again, or no one would be able to see and maybe they would freeze. Through the broken boards swirled fine snow, and now out of the wind it drifted straight down, and I moved over before Nihil and shared it with him, that first kiss of winter.

The snowflakes melted upon his skin, Nihil warmer than room temperature at least, while behind drooping eyelids the orbs were twittering back and forth again, dreamer’s eyes. I wondered if he was privy to things miles away, in Chicago’s coldest heart. If in his vast expanding mind he saw a canvas of brick and cinderblock, and on it a constantly unfolding mural of slaughter and kickbacks, and if it flowed, a story like in a movie, or if it was just what it was, random and senseless, like coming attractions.

Snowflakes on my face, I remembered being here that winter day with my father, hating how such a simple sensation can take you back so far, so fast, so thoroughly.

And I remembered Jamaal, being with him in this room the day after his sister was burned. Where was he now, anyway, and did he that day wonder where his life would lead, or did he try to shut out all thoughts of the future, suspecting that nothing good could come of it?

Snowflakes running down our faces, Nihil grunted and grinned.

The fire was going by now, smoke rising pale gray, and in the play of flame and shadow, among their four silhouettes, I saw the tallest lift his arm above the smallest, staggering off balance as he swung the sledge mallet. In the meat locker hush came a thud of case-hardened steel against curving bone, occipital I think, and at the instant of impact Nihil twitched and strained and panted and pulled at the wires that traversed his inner realm, as though he’d felt it across the room and all the way down to marrow.

The blow had been glancing, the puny boy screeching as he buckled to his knees, but Cheyenne and Axl caught his shoulders. I was flying across the room without having thought to, Andre braced for another swing, telling the keening boy how sorry he was that he’d messed up, he’d do better this time, and maybe it was true, that if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.

Andre malleted the boy a second time before I could ram into him, and everybody tumbled, and I could hear the excitable squeak of the bedsprings, then I wrested the sledge away from Andre and knocked him on the knee, and when we disentangled he was crying, crying and hiccuping, sounding no different than when we were in third grade, except the spectators weren’t laughing.

He rolled onto all fours, favoring the one knee, and after I stood over him, sledge in hand, he lowered his head and stretched his neck out, body still except for the shudders from his sobbing. When I didn’t move he began begging me to do it, although whether he wanted to sacrifice himself to Nihil or simply end everything wasn’t clear to me. But nothing much ever was.

I dropped the mallet to the killing floor with a clink, and Andre offered no resistance when I stripped the long canvas coat off his back, peeling it away like a skin to drape it around the six-year-old. He was still alive, but silent now, no more wailing left in him as he bled from the back of his head and both ears. He weighed almost nothing in my arms, a scarecrow with pupils fixed and dilated. I wrapped the coat tighter, packing him to travel.

We’d gotten as far as the door when that sound came again, more solid this time, mallet into thicker bone, and when I looked toward the fire and what was going on there I couldn’t make out which was Cheyenne and which Axl, but it didn’t matter, they were taking turns, both silhouettes hopping from foot to foot in their glee, and naturally Nihil loved it, ate it up like ambrosia.

With the boy in my arms I rushed out of the slaughterhouse and through the woods, breath in plumes, the hiss of fresh snow whispering through the trees. In that stillness I was the bull, the violator, shoes mashing layers of dead leaves while I plotted a course to the nearest hospital, Central DuPage probably, I could hand him over at the emergency entrance and fade before anyone could get my license plate, I didn’t even know this boy, how could they connect us?

The lights of the houses grew brighter ahead, and the boy, so weightless before, became heavier with each step. I stopped to adjust and set him down a moment, braced against one bent knee, but in the twilight his face began to streak, blood from both nostrils, and his limbs trembled, weak as a rabbit’s heartbeat, and that was it, he had no more of anything. I watched it leave.

We lay in the leaves and sticks and frost, dusted with snow, then I looked back at the slaughterhouse, where smoke rose from the gabled tower, and I wondered if I shouldn’t see the rest of it through. I’d already amazed myself, taking an actual moral stand on something, so I left the boy on the path for now and went back, back to the killing floor.

Their sledge now still, Cheyenne and Axl were crouched before the fire, wiping their faces clean, while I stood before Nihil. I could cut him into pieces, burn him, stop it here before his dream spread any further. He was as revivified as I’d yet seen, Andre’s skull especially resonant maybe, and his eyes were open, looking, comprehending. They fixed on me with an unblinking struggle to contract his focus to one tiny mite before him.

“I,” he whispered, slow and laborious, “know … you…”

I shriveled. You cannot look upon such a thing, or hear its voice, and feel sure of anything, especially conquering it, except for one: Nothing is as you believed, and is probably worse.

His eyes never left me, two dark malignant stars.

“Ohhhh,” his withered lungs creaked, “negative…”

I’d heard all I wanted, drifting over to sit beside the fire, warming my hands because there was nothing else to do until rush hour traffic thinned. Cheyenne and Axl watched with expectation now that Andre had gone the way of the weak, seeming to expect me to bring them their hamburgers now. Later, when I left, I almost told them to go home until I remembered they were, and the last I saw of them they were tugging on the chains to hoist Nihil and the springs up, up, higher, into the gabled tower and gathering smoke, where he might better see and hear and smell all.

O, he’d said, negative, in recognition, and now I knew what it meant, but could never recall having told Jamey my blood type.

On the path I retrieved the boy, because he deserved better, and carried him to my car, no suburban dweller stopping us because I looked like I knew what I was doing, every wet mile of the way, southeast, into a buffering industrial zone before Chicago peters out into farmland.

No one lived near, and it was too late for blue collars and too cold for gangbangers. We had the wastescape to ourselves, a jagged field of refuse like the worst of Belfast or Beirut, or an elephant graveyard, only for a city, iron bones and entrails everywhere you looked. On clearer days you could look north and see the skyscrapers of downtown.

I could never have left the boy at the slaughterhouse, had no reason to believe he had much of any family who would do right by him and his pock-burned arm, so I carried him into the scrapyard for the most fitting mausoleum I knew: the big boiler that Mae and Jamey and I had turned into a giant drum one Sunday last summer.

This time it was empty, although Mae had never known any different, and it was out of the wind and elements, just a cut-out heart that had long ago ceased thumping. In there I laid him, with his soggy head, wrapped in an olive coat big enough for a shroud, and I wished I’d had a flower or two to leave, but it was the wrong season, and always would be for him.

*

We’d chanced across the boiler while exploring, Jamey always on the lookout for new sound sources, and to him this place was a playground, if one where anyplace you fell you’d contract tetanus. I remember him running both hands over the boiler’s plated hull, asking, “Who could throw away something with this much potential?”

“The world is full of stupid people,” Mae said. “Why not just give up and try to blend?”

At Jamey’s instigation we took bars of scrap metal and began hammering away to see what the thing sounded like, a deep hollow gonging of incredible density. Soon we found our rhythm to work around, something of our individual selves given over to a group mind. It happened naturally, bypassing thought, the reverberations taking us over as we swung and sweated and felt our arms thrumming with each impact, down to the pits of our stomachs, until it felt as though the boiler were playing us instead. We served it, dancing to its massive peal, until we felt we might raise such shockwaves we could collapse the city into piles of rubble, if only we had the stamina to play that long.

And when our arms gave out and echoes rang, Jamey wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “I’ve got to bring my remote DAT down and record this sometime,” then he ran to a port where some intake pipe might’ve once connected, crawling halfway through to listen to the last dying echo.

We asked him what it was like, if he heard God, and moments later he backed out, with a subdued and thoughtful frown. He dug for car keys and handed them to Mae, asking if she’d do him an enormous favor and check his trunk, he might’ve left a tape deck in there after all.

Mae said, “I’m nobody’s coolie, you know,” but went anyway.

“You lied, didn’t you?” I said, because he had, and when Mae was halfway to the car Jamey motioned me to follow his lead and we crawled into the boiler like a giant womb.

We stared at the withering vagrant curled in his rags and filth, features sunken, one desiccated hand atop an empty bottle, and Jamey wondered aloud how long he’d been there, and I said long enough to turn halfway into a mummy, baked inside here.

“Why didn’t you want Mae to know?” I asked.

“I just didn’t,” he said, and shrugged. Then: “She’s seen enough for being nineteen. Her mother quit eating, some reason, disappointed in Mae, like that. Shriveled up and died. She didn’t say much. I thought this guy might…”

No need to finish.

“I didn’t know any of that,” I said.

“Now you do.”

Why I made the connection I don’t know, but under the crud and whiskers and haggard years this vagrant could’ve been fifty, and I said, “For all I know? That could be my father.”

Jamey nodded, understanding everything. “For all I know, a year from now, it could be me.” Then he nudged my arm. “Joke.”

We left the boiler, nothing more to see or say. Back at the car Mae told him thanks for nothing, sending her on a false alarm, but she was quick to forgive. Jamey eased into a big smile, just the most heartening thing, as this time it carried up to his eyes, and it meant different things to each of us, I’m sure, but to both of us he seemed to be saying that everything was going to be okay … and for the rest of that day, at least, it really was.

*

After I’d entombed the boy, with the requisite lack of prayers, I headed for home, although not directly, first stopping by a leather shop on Belmont and buying a pair of handcuffs from their kink counter, and no one remarked on or even paid any particular attention to the smeared blood on my clothing, but it was the kind of thing that wouldn’t go unnoticed at home.

“What happened?” Rachel said. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

I assured them I was fine. “I tried to help this puppy, it’d been, you know, been hit,” and shook my head so they understood.

“Oh, why’d you tell us that?” said Mae. “That’s sad, that’s just too sad, I hate even thinking about it, can’t stand it,” and Rachel and I brushed the hair from her face, and she was so very fragile in her way, so delicate, needing more protection than I’d ever imagined.

I took a hot shower and put on fresh clothing, then watched TV with them awhile until deciding to get to work, coming up with a few long nails to permanently seal the windows near the fire escape. A neighbor complained about the hammering, pounding on the wall in counterattack, but it was over soon. I checked the door, all three locks secured, but I could get more.

“Angus?” said Rachel, behind me. “Angus?” She must’ve called four or five times before I caught on. “What’s the matter with you?”

“There’s a lot of sick people out there,” I said, as if this were news, then put away the hammer, smiling at Mae and taking her by the hand, gently, so she wouldn’t worry. I led her into the bedroom, had her kneel, and she must’ve thought it was a game of sorts because she grinned with uncertainty and trust, even while I handcuffed her to the radiator and asked, “Would you like anything to read?”

Rachel quit trying for the key eventually, and stayed with Mae the rest of the night, hours I spent sitting before the living room windows, fighting sleep, watching streetlights and skylines.

But mostly I thought of the slaughterhouse and the years, and the interrelationship between them, trying to comprehend all that those walls had witnessed. And I felt that I understood them just a bit better now, those cows with flattened skulls convulsing in the abattoir, this factory designed to mulch them into patties and grease for a city of mouths always hungry for more.

The sun came up, gray skies over fresh snow, but beneath it the same old city, where somewhere even now a line was forming for me to stand in, so I went out to find it, and join the herd.

Endnotes: The Ticking Of An Unfriendly Clock

Once upon a time, an exceptional writer named Peter Straub wrote a sprawling, dark fairy tale of a novel called Shadowland. I happily gave myself over to it for several days, probably to some detriment of the college classes I was taking the autumn it came out in paperback, now within reach of budget-conscious students.

Its coda — just a handful of pages — Straub titled “The End of the Century Is in Sight.” Now, as then, it’s a deceptively simple phrase that invokes bound less wonder. A phrase of transition, of natural magic and horizons, is how it struck me, perhaps because it’s mythic, in a sense, and undeniably true.

The end of the century is indeed in sight … and a good sight closer now than when I first read those words nearly fifteen years ago. Not only the end of the century, but the millennium, as well. How privileged we are, how anointed. How many people get to witness the rollover to a year with that many zeroes?

The last time, with the Old World mucking about the Dark Ages and the New lying undiscovered by all but those who already lived here in no great need of discovery, Europe succumbed to millennial fever, running rampant with rumors and signs, fears and portents of catastrophe. Traditionally there’s a swell in interest in all things spiritual, supernatural, and unexplained at the shutdown of any century. Add another zero and, on a purely mathematical basis, chaos should jump by a factor of ten. As the year 1000 approached, hordes of pungent and not terribly well nourished people remained unswayed in their belief that the planetary warranty was about to expire.

While the joke was on them, we shouldn’t feel too smug. Despite the past millennium of learning, with the shadow of 2000 falling ever closer to our heads, it should be no surprise when prophets again rise up, with zeal equal to that of their Old World forerunners, to make the same proclamation. Some say it’s already begun, and with the Branch Davidian cookout in Waco still in plain hindsight, who can argue?

But here’s the part that prophets always seem to overlook: Measurement of time is a human construct. A construct based on planetary orbit and our dance with the sun, true, but our spinning blue oblate spheroid neither knows nor cares what year it is, and regardless of which Creator you believe in, if any, I defy anyone to posit a sound reason why that Entity should follow our arbitrary timetable.

Which leads us to the inevitable conclusion:

If the end of this century — much less this millennium — is the final one witnessed by anything resembling present civilization … who is really to blame?

A few weeks ago my love and I were spending her birthday in St. Louis when we stopped by a small art gallery, where I bought for her a piece that we both found haunting. Afterward we talked awhile with the director, who by now appeared to have forgiven me for earlier starting to unsheathe a Japanese tachi leaning against the wall and invoking his keen admonition not to. As I’ve done with a lot of friends over the years, I’d simply demonstrated once more that I’m one of those people who isn’t happy until I’ve played with the sharpest thing in the room.

Later, when we were talking — while he was showing us knives honed from railroad spikes, so I knew all was forgiven — he said, “I think the next ten years are going to see the emergence of a very different configuration for this country.” There was nothing particularly optimistic in the way he said this; more a grim and clear-eyed resignation in its inevitability, and he was obviously no believer in imminent Utopias.

Which may explain the presence of that Japanese sword.

It’s stuck with me, what he said, because at that time this collection was in the midst of being compiled, its final novella still taking shape, and much of what he’d implied that day was elemental in the stories that I’d deemed thematically appropriate to include. Although I sense that what the gallery director said was less an example of synchronicity than simply something on a lot of people’s minds lately.

Such nebulous pessimism has been gathering momentum over a number of years — and maybe I’m way off, I’m only free-associating — but I’m wondering if it wasn’t first forecast in the hinterlands, with the demise of family farms, in much the same way a troubled ecosystem is first heralded by an abrupt decline in the number of amphibians. Of course, what begins in the remotest regions has a way of reaching the most populous — viruses come to mind — mutating along the way and leaving few unaffected. Yesterday, Steinbeck’s Tom Joad. Today, Andrew Vachss’s Burke.

The Dustbowl of the Great Depression, a complex bastard of unsound economics and short-term environmental gain, may have been tamped back down into viable terra firma, but its spirit of waste and desolation has scarcely been banished. It’s only packed up and moved into a new neighborhood, probably not very far from the one where you live. Perhaps closer still.

The Chinese have one of the most sublime of curses: “May you live in interesting times.”

And we do. And if it’s true that between readers and writer there can exist a kind of extended familial bond, then certainly times have been interesting enough to furnish plenty to write home about.

As I began to approach the idea of a collection, it occurred to me that, while there are plenty of exceptions, much of my work from the past few years has tended to fall into one of two broad territories: that of urban decay in its many manifestations, and that of a more spiritual or dare I say religious nature, although one hardly free of antagonism toward orthodoxy. More than once these camps have combined forces.

As the idea of a collection became reality, I found myself compelled to group stories that felt related somehow, even if they were only very distant cousins, providing a thematic unity beyond their having the same byline. And, I hoped, preferring a view comprised not only of parts, but coalescing into a greater whole.

The opting for urban corrosion was done in an almost offhand manner, publisher John Pelan having no preference, and so that was that. Although I’m still hoping for a chance to gather those more overtly spiritual stories, along with a few others that exist only in seed form, waiting to be written, under a title something like Cathedral or The Bones of Angels. Or maybe I won’t like either of those when the time comes.

It’s not complete, this roster of decay. It’s missing various other pieces new and old that wouldn’t have been at all out of place. But with only so much room you choose the representative best that you can, hoping that they work and play well with each other. Nor will you find any solutions to the problems, either, except maybe that cities should brush after every meal.

For those curious enough to look behind the scenes, here are a few of the reasons why, whence, and wherefore:

Godflesh. This came about because I like casual visitors to be nervous whenever they use my bathroom. My selections for loo reading tend toward the bizarre, books from Re/Search being particular favorites, such as The Modem Primitives (with that infamous photo of the bifurcated penis), the Industrial Culture Handbook, Angry Women, and Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist (with that infamous photo of the nailed scrotum). Feral House is equally welcome, and their second edition of Apocalypse Culture contains quite a fascinating article on various historical spiritual applications of gluttony and anorexia, plus select Gnostic groups’ penchant for amputating whatever they could spare. It also made reference to porn actress Long Jean Silver, whose missing foot provided inspiration for one of this story’s tenderest moments. I’ve since had occasion to view one of her taped performances, an experience I can’t particularly recommend, but if you insist, it’s … memorable.

Childhood At The Lost And Found. I wrote this to appear in the final issue of the late and much-lamented The Horror Show, which over the years published eight of my early stories and gave me not only an invaluable training ground, but served as an introduction to several good friends. I still miss it; have found that nothing else since has been able to inspire the delight of first turning a new issue’s pages. While I’ve updated a few cultural references to contemporize the backdrop, this is otherwise one of those stories that seems even more appropriate now than when it first appeared, with the family values bandwagon having since ricocheted toward the reactionary end of the spectrum. Not that advocates don’t have some valid points, but too often they’re either so much calculated hot-button political posturing, or so drenched in Judeo-Christian pathos as to be pushing another agenda entirely.

Androgyny. Some writers can get full-blown stories out of their dreams. I am not one of them. Joe Lansdale can reliably invoke them with his wife’s popcorn when he needs an idea. Someday I must write, begging for a sackful. I find my own dreams to be generally uncontaminated by anything approaching usable narrative structure, but have still sometimes managed to turn imagery and impressions into story seeds, which is what happened here. I had this dream in which I had nipples all over me, then spent a few days wandering around intrigued by this, until it hit me: All these nipples have to be here for a reason — they must be here to nurse something. And if you can’t fathom what this story is doing in a collection whose theme is decay, then you’ve probably never been to New Orleans, which proves that even decay can be beautiful.

In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town. More vignette than story, this; a chance to indulge in a sick joke or two. Good friend Sean Doolittle called this my “Mickey and Mallory story,” and I admit to enthusiastically digging that spate of mid-nineties outlaw road movies like Natural Born Killers and Love And A .45 and in particular the director’s cut of True Romance, even if Christian Slater does get seven shots out of his revolver when he blows away Gary Oldman. That urge to rampage arises occasionally. Especially when publishers don’t pay on time. I maintain that it’s an entirely healthy attitude.

Naked Lunchmeat. 2011 update: The original entry for this story was a snarky rant limning an unfortunate situation surrounding the book it was initially written for, and could’ve been subtitled “How To Totally Mishandle A Sure Winner Of An Anthology And Make Sure It Never Gets Published Because The Publisher Had To Shoot It Through The Head Like One Of The Zombies It’s About.” If you really want to read it, track down a copy of the original hardcover edition, because I’m not reprinting it here. Sorry. Really. But no. Old, expired rancor is nothing I want to resuscitate. I try not to do grudges anymore. I try not to even give the appearance of doing grudges.

Here’s what counts. My first anthology sale was to John Skipp and Craig Spector, for their landmark Book of the Dead. Sharing my first table of contents with a bunch of people I idolized? Cartwheels for miles. John and Craig co-edited a second volume, then went their separate ways. Then things got … messy.

“Naked Lunchmeat” eventually made it into John’s Mondo Zombie, effectively the third and final installment in the series. It’s an affectionate and highly compressed pastiche of William Burroughs’ most infamous work. The idea came about by my wondering why, after the first two volumes, Doug Winter should have all the fun of writing parodies. Over the years it’s given copyeditors fits because they apparently weren’t familiar with Burroughs’ original, and the splintery, fractured permutations of its prose, which I’ve even toned down a lot. But was that ever good enough for them? Did that spare me the need of undoing their alleged corrections? Do I get that time back? Nooooooooooo!

And is this another rant starting? (Deep breath.) No grudges, no grudges…

Cancer Causes Rats. This comes from an anthology called Cold Blood, conceived and very well-executed as a cross-genre affair, blending mystery, horror, suspense, and generally concerned with murder, my contribution being a chicken-and-egg look at the media and serial killers. I don’t believe that the media creates them, but wouldn’t say it discourages them, either. The main thing I’m proud of is that this story predates by years both Natural Born Killers and morphing as Hollywood’s most overused special effect. In an odd bit of genuine synchronicity, a couple of weeks ago, as I write this, I was phoned by a guy in Madison, Wisconsin, who owns/runs an indie label called Bovine Records, and fronts a band called Thug. Thug, a heavy, sludge-core type band, recorded a song based on and titled after the story, and last week I got a copy in the mail and found it to be a grinding, pummeling piece of work that ends in a noise loop featuring the word “mutate.” I love the whole idea, since the basis of the story was something being triggered to metamorphose into a new form.

Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt. A few weeks after Kurt Cobain shot himself, I woke up one morning and this story was just there. I went straight to the Macintosh and started writing, and finished it over the subsequent three mornings, almost the way some people begin their day with a head-clearing cup of coffee. And when it was finished, it felt as if something had been put to rest. The suicide of the weatherman is also true, happening around the same time, but in St. Louis rather than Chicago. And in gradeschool gym class, I really did catch a softball between my knees. Briefly.

Heartsick. Clark Perry, my close friend and Siamese twin joined at the id, also has a passion for those ineffable Re/Search books. I was visiting him in Tampa when he showed me a bit he’d recently encountered in Those Who Are Not Like Us, a volume devoted to old-time circus freaks and other human oddities. It concerned a fellow whose body had ossified, and thus he couldn’t move, and had to be toted around wherever he went. Came the fateful day, then, during the inevitable circus tent fire, that in their haste to hurry him to safety, his bearers dropped him … and he shattered. When later I felt like doing a story about what seems to be a deepening of people’s fear of/inability to connect emotionally, I could think of no better metaphor than this.

Extinctions In Paradise. I suspect it’s true for most writers: that the way something turns out is the wholly random synergy of any number of diverse elements that happen to collide at the same time: aesthetic influences, news clippings, chance observations, personal issues going on in the writer’s life, whatever. As with any good pot of jambalaya, you make the volatile best of whatever happens to be on hand. When Ed Gorman invited me to do a story for the Werewolves anthology, I had no interest in approaching it from the standard Larry Talbot scenario. But I’d recently read a sad and wonderful novel called Imagining Argentina, and had been left with an itch to try something more within the magical-realism vein that’s pulsed through much South American literature. Maybe a year prior I’d been touched by an article about an elderly photographer who daily set up his antiquated gear near a fountain; in which South American city, I no longer remember. I’d long felt impotent and sick whenever I would read of death squads in Rio de Janeiro killing street kids. I was also in the midst of an ongoing editorial page debate with some Christian fundamentalists, seeing firsthand their mania for distortion of facts in service of their vision of the First Amendment. Then, too, I’d recently gotten Concrete Blonde’s Mexican Moon CD, and kept picturing Johnette Napolitano as Doña Mariana, with that earthy sensuality of hers. I wrote the last few pages listening to “Heal It Up” on infinite repeat — it just seemed to help. Six months in either direction and a very different story may have been written. But I’m very glad that Ed called when he did.

The Meat In The Machine. I like industrial music, and felt like doing a story about obsession and transformation amongst a few of the artists recording the soundtrack to our fin de siecle. Fellow enthusiasts will no doubt recognize in the Giger Sanction’s stage show the inspiration of Skinny Puppy, who have the distinction of playing the most harrowing concert I’ve ever been to. After this club show — on what has since turned out to be their final tour* — I met instrumentalist Dwayne Goettel, who died of a heroin overdose in August of 1995. Brap on.

* 2011 update: True for several years, but surviving members Ogre and cEvin Key reunited for a one-off show in 2000, and the band has been active again since 2003. And there was much rejoicing.

Extract. I suspect we all share a dread concerning our teeth that goes beyond the subjective to the most primal layers of our limbic brains. In the wild, a toothless animal will be nearly defenseless and probably starve. A literally toothless person needs proxies, or a reliable blender; the metaphorically toothless inspire only mirth in their enemies. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a recurring nightmare in which my teeth grow huge, then wobbly, then start to crumble … yet I’ve never had a single cavity. My theory is, since as children we’ve all experienced a complete set of teeth falling out, this is all the foretaste of decrepitude and decay we need to scar us forever.

Liturgical Music For Nihilists. This is still too fresh and ugly in mind for me to say much, other than I wanted to conclude the volume with something that would entwine all the main themes running through the stories that preceded it. It took longer to write than I thought, and I can’t say that it was ever much fun.

2011 update: Okay. I suppose time enough has gone by.

The original seed: driving through those Chicago hinterlands time after time, fascinated by those desolate-looking parcels of field and woodland. They seemed very eerie to me … the possibility of some terrible, awe-inspiring thing going on inside one, hidden in plain sight, but that no one ever noticed, even as thousands, tens of thousands, drove past it every day.

There really was a slaughterhouse within walking distance of my childhood home, and I can just barely remember an adventurous winter trip there. It was abandoned by the time I was in high school, and gone a few years later as the surrounding neighborhoods expanded and digested the trees and land. The same fate erased just about every place I used to play and go wilding. It got leveled, mowed, civilized, buried under foundations and vinyl siding.

The “Khashab” brothers were real, and the younger one did backtrack fifteen or twenty steps one afternoon to help me pick up an armload of books, but that was the sum total of our lives’ interaction. A few years later, after his father burned his sister, I thought of how kind and gentle he seemed, even to a stranger, and wondered what kind of scars a thing like that was going to leave on him, too. The question has never left.

But looking back, what strikes me most is the amount of then-unknown truth and prophecy in this piece. To flip Kierkegaard around and put the punchline at the end, “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.”

*

Heartfelt thanks go to all the editors/publishers who either commissioned these stories, or otherwise liked them enough to run them when they came in cold and unexpected: Michael Garrett & Jeff Gelb, David B. Silva, Tom Monteleone, Richard Chizmar, Richard Gilliam, Ed Gorman & Marty Greenberg (more than once), Jasmine Sailing, and Stefan Dziemianowicz, who bears no resemblance to the Stefan of “Heartsick,” insofar as I know.

Sincere gratitude to John Pelan for liking the extant pieces enough to want to group them together with a few new ones; and to Phil Nutman, Doli Nickel, and James Powell, for contributing in ways that I could not; and to Wildy Petoud and the Bluesman for … well, they know.

Appreciation is also extended to Sam Adams, Wicked Pete, Juan Valdez, and Creamy Saint Brendan, for always being there when I need them.

Brian Hodge

Vernal equinox, March 1996

About The Author

Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the author of ten novels, close to 100 short stories, and four collections of short fiction. Recent books include his second crime novel, Mad Dogs, and his latest collection, Picking The Bones.

He lives in Colorado, where he’s at work on a gigantic new novel that doesn’t seem to want to end, and distracts himself with music and sound design, photography, Krav Maga, and organic gardening.

Connect with him online through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), his blog (www.warriorpoetblog.com), or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).