“Are we gonna fuck him?” I think I hear the girl say through the cloud weighing my head down. My feet make the sound of machinery flattening sheet metal with each step.
“Um? What?” I say, concentrating hard on walking a straight line as I hand the joint back.
“She said we’re going to fuck you,” he says, putting the joint to his lips and passing it off to his girlfriend.
“Um, no thanks,” I say. “No. No thanks.”
I stop and shake my legs, trying to expel the concrete in my veins that’s hardening and petrifying my bones in the process.
“Actually, she said we’re going to fuck you and tear you in two. Right down the middle,” he says. “Then we’re going to have two of you so we don’t have to share. We’ll keep half of you in the freezer, the other half in bed. We’ll take turns or draw straws to see who gets the warm half.”
He tells me this while they stand ten feet in front of me, holding hands and taking long puffs on the joint. Their eyes stay fixed on me as the garage doors and dumpsters now show home movies of me as a child climbing trees in the front yard. Then I’m at school, thirteen-years-old, in the utility closet with Mrs. Hammerstein, my geometry teacher. Her mouth wraps around my cock, working vigorously at it, even though I came ten minutes prior and only thirty seconds after she put her lips to it. The film jump-cuts to her decapitated head lying on the highway a few hours after the closet scene, her eyes open and staring, two cars behind her head married in a convulsive twist of metal. My sperm, which had caught in her sinuses, leaks out of her nose onto the asphalt.
When I look away from the picture show, the couple’s no longer anywhere to be seen. My head goes even hazier than before. The light hangs about my peripherals, fuzzy. A kind of static in the air.
“Hey… hey!” I yell, feeling lost, feeling like I lost something—feeling that hollow presence of a just-missed opportunity.
Confused, I wander the alleys as the light refuses to fade, staying grey and grainy, its particles parting and sprinkling away where my hands penetrate it and push through it with swimming and fighting motions. In the wake of those actions, the particles all float back into their original places behind me.
Voices come from the dumpsters. Thousands of whispers all talking over one another so I can’t tell what they want. And they refuse to stop until I finally look in a red dumpster and find a mountain of discarded tongues. Then I realize it’s just a pile of tiny, hairless, baby rats, and they’re asking me for a home. I tell them I’m sorry. That I don’t even have a home of my own. That I can barely remember what home is.
Suddenly, I hear someone call my name. I look up from the dumpster to the upstairs window of a two-story house. It’s opened just a crack. My name leaks out of it once more. The house doesn’t look finished, its insulation exposed, the Spanish tiles on the roof in piles and not yet laid.
A blurry face passes quickly behind the glass of that second-story window. “Luke! Get the fuck up here! We’ve been waiting for you.”
That’s my home, I think. But I don’t live here. But that’s my home. But I don’t have a home. But, I think that’s my home. Who’s in my home? Who the fuck is invading my home?
Angered, I push away from the dumpster, walk through the waist-high chain-link gate leading into my home’s backyard. In it, there’s a yellow and green swing set and an orange and black Big Wheels, and a dwarfed dogwood in the corner. When I was eight I buried a time capsule there in a small styrofoam cooler. Before I know it, my hands are ripping through the earth below the dogwood, tearing away root and dry soil until my knuckles scrape the cracked top of my childhood treasure chest. Excited, I pull it out, sit back with it between my legs, and peel off the lid. I can hardly contain my enthusiasm at finding what I had left for myself twenty-three years ago.
“Luke, goddammit!” I hear from the window above.
But I ignore it, salivating. First, I pull out Mark McGwire’s 1984 US Olympics baseball card. I place it carefully beside me on the dying grass of the backyard lawn. Next, I discover a clear cassette tape, a forgotten relic. It’s RUN D.M.C.’s album, Raising Hell. It’s a tape that got me forty lashings with a ruler the day I brought it to St. Patrick’s Elementary and played it for my friends, two at a time, as we listened through the clunky headphones of my Sony Walkman.
Following that, there’s a picture of my girlfriend from the third grade. Jenny. It’s her school photo. She was embarrassed by her new braces, so, her smile looks forced and scared. I remember telling her to take pride in her metal, that she could probably pick up radio signals now and maybe even hear Martians. Soon after, she said she didn’t want to be my girlfriend anymore.
I place her photo next to Mark McGwire’s baseball card. Then I unfold a newspaper, the front page displays a large photo of billowing, worming white clouds twisting across an azure sky where the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. I was eight-years-old when that happened and it was the first time I cried about something happening to people who weren’t in the Bible.
After that, I find a model airplane of the Enola Gay wrapped in less remarkable newspaper. I make airplane sounds, weaving it through the air before my face, flying it over the recently excavated contents of my time capsule, making sounds of repetitive bombings. Next, I remove some baby teeth and shake them in my fist like dice before pulling out my first rosary and a gold crucifix that the silver body of Christ had broken off from. I search for Jesus in the Styrofoam cooler, but apparently he’d risen yet again. I rub the cold bones of my baby teeth in my palm and think how strange it is that they’re still on this planet, and that I can confirm that, whereas the fifty cents that they earned me cannot be—that fifty cents that I got from having little bones in my young jaw torn out via string and door handle.
I then grab some old toys from the dirt-covered styrofoam box—action figures of Boba Fett, Zartan, Tron, Andre the Giant, and an angry hamburger that eats people instead of the other way around. Finally, at the bottom, there’s a medium-sized velvet jewelry box. I pry it open to find my mother’s shriveled, mummified heart. It looks more like the nub of a dried up tongue, or a baby rat, maybe, but I know it’s the heart because it’s still beating a little.
Satisfied, I clump everything together, drop it back into the cooler, and rebury it. A plaintive cry from the window behind and above me rings out, “Luke!”
“OK, already! I’m coming!”
I pull myself from the dusty lawn, brush myself off and walk up the concrete walkway along the side of the unfinished house to the door where I push into the garage and nearly crash into the orange 1974 Mazda 808—the compact car my mom drove through most of the eighties. I remember being driven home from school once and getting car sick. I quickly rolled the window down, stuck my head out, and let my vomit fly out the speeding vehicle where it landed with a flat smack against the following car’s windshield. My mom said I was a good boy and my older sister and little brother giggled wildly. But my mom said I was a good boy so I didn’t care about their mockery.
My BMX bike hangs from the rafters that I once rode around the block one-hundred-and-seven times before telling my mom, proud of the accomplishment. An oil painting my dad did of Jesus on a green hill next to a lemon yellow sun leans against some shelves. He could have made millions from it if he’d sold it because it captured something most religious art didn’t in a very direct way—sometimes you look at it and Jesus is there, other times he’s not. My mother never liked it, however, and threw it out before those millions could be realized.
Inside the house, I find no familiar surroundings, and my feet again feel like cinderblocks. I hear my name once more but can’t tell where it’s coming from. The kitchen I’m standing in has a concrete floor, the counters and cupboards are just shells of their future selves. The whole house is incomplete.
I pass through the living room and the den and find the stairs. Hazy light filters through the dust my feet kick up on the bare wooden steps. An open space comprises the to
p floor, all white. The floor, white. The walls, white. The ceiling, white. Clean and uncluttered. There is one space in this open expanse, though, sectioned into a little walled-off room in the corner. The door’s open. “Luke,” weakly issues from it, followed by gurgling.
Looking into the small walled-off room, I spot a naked couple propped up against the mirrored doors of the closet, their limbs entangled and heads drooping, their skin a sickly green. It’s the couple from the alleyway, though they must be at least twenty years older now. It seems neither is breathing. I lean down, put my hand to the woman’s cold breast and feel no heartbeat. When I remove my hand a cloud of dust and gnats envelopes my face and I cough and cough until I find myself out of the room and standing in the open expanse of the floor sticking my head out the window and yelling my own name in between coughs. During the coughing fit I watch my twelve-year-old self down in the backyard digging. Then he’s gone and it’s just dying grass in grey, grainy light.
Behind me, the room’s door closes with a clack. Wet skin slaps together and someone grunts in response to a repetitive thud. When I open the door the man I thought was dead forcefully rams his cock into the woman’s ass that I thought was also dead. While he pounds her ass, she’s also astride a man with long hair I hadn’t noticed in the room prior, his cock in her pussy. After a few dramatic moans, she slides away from both of them. The man on the bottom now fingers the vagina located just below his shrunken, tiny ball sack. The woman takes his small, finger-like penis in her mouth, slurps and moans.
They finally notice me spying after a few minutes. The couple I thought I knew yells in unison, “Jesus, Luke! Get out!” Then they throw a nearby pillow and say it again. Bewildered, I duck the thrown pillow, close the door, and walk back to the window overlooking the backyard where I yell my own name again until I see myself swinging on the yellow and green swing set. My younger self stops swinging, slaps his arm, then pulls the mosquito from it, its blood pocket now squished and empty, the blood only a small red splotch on his arm. He then puts the mosquito in his mouth and swallows, which causes me to yell out “Luke, goddammit!” yet again as he disappears.
A ripping roar unrolls behind me from the closed-off room, eschewing forth from what I can only imagine to be a chainsaw. Someone’s in there growling and barking, as if scared of the chainsaw. A man’s voice yells, “Good doggy. Yeah, there’s a good little bitch,” and then the whole floor shakes as something big and heavy drops. A woman’s blood-curdling scream cries out, and I rush to the room, worried for the girl who promised me so much love earlier in the day. Reopening the door, I find a room full of hanging, formless, swaying meat, and a man in a burlap mask cutting through it all. The woman I heard scream lies on the floor beneath it all, the meat dropping all around her as she fingers herself and screams in ecstatic agony, the floor glazed with blood. A headless hermaphrodite is crumpled behind her, his head nowhere to be found in the room of cut up meat.
Again, annoyed, the two yell at me to get out.
A few moments later they exit the room, covered in blood and animal byproducts. “Luke, man,” the guy says. “You really should call before coming over. At least knock, for fuck’s sake.”
“Knock?” I ask.
“Yeah, man.”
“Knock? You killed someone in there. You were hurting her,” I say, pointing to the woman sweeping sheets of blood from the insides of her thighs.
“Christ’s sake, Luke, we were filming porn. Don’t get all bent out of shape. You know this is what we do. And you nearly fucked up the shooting,” she says.
“Porn? What about the headless person in that room?” I ask.
“Headless? Luke, man, that’s a RealDoll. A movie prop. It’s not a person,” he says.
“And, honey, it’s just porn,” she says. “Just a porno. We’ve been filming all day. Ever since you woke this morning.”
“No, I… saw it move. Saw it breathe, touching itself.”
“It’s a pretty realistic doll,” she says.
Unconvinced, I run back into the room. Chunks of meat swing from the ceiling and cover the floor, though the headless body of the hermaphrodite is absent. I get on my hands and knees and brush through the pooled, coagulating blood, moving aside fatty bits of this and that, looking for anything I can identify as human, but finding nothing I recognize.
My reflection in the mirrored closet doors casts me naked and covered in a brown slick of oxygenating blood, surrounded by anonymous masses of meat. But I don’t even remember getting out of my clothes.
Flinging open the mirrored closet doors makes my blood-soaked visage disappear. Inside the walk-in closet, shelves of decapitated heads stare me down. I’m sure I recognize the head of the long-haired person from their earlier filming, just as I’m sure that Mrs. Hammerstein’s head also sits among their collection. There must be a couple dozen heads here, if not more.
A hand firmly takes hold of my shoulder, and I’m reassured by the contact.
“Fake, Luke. All fake,” he says.
“They don’t look fake,” I say before falling to my knees and puking, yelling out my own name over and over with each convulsion.
The self-proclaimed porn stars grab me under my armpits and haul me naked from the room and sit me in front of the window overlooking the backyard.
“Just calm down. It’s not like you haven’t seen this before,” the guy says while tying on a butcher’s apron. Then he turns and stomps back to the room.
While I’m trying to figure out how the light has yet to fade into night, I feel a pleasant sensation and look down through my stupor to find the woman’s mouth spread around my cock, bobbing up and down with a brutal force. I come almost immediately but she doesn’t stop, working her tongue and mouth around my increasingly limp dick. I don’t want her to get mad at me, so I don’t tell her to stop. I sense the frustration in her jaw muscles, however, and her teeth slowly sink into the base of my cock, so I finally push her off me. She falls back, wipes her mouth, and laughs.
“Baby, baby, baby,” she says. “What’s the matter, my baby? I just wanna play teacher and student, baby. Let’s play.”
“I don’t want to,” I say, and I really don’t, but I feel tempted anyway and find it hard to resist.
“Let’s play, motherfucker. Let’s play, you piece of shit. You’re my toy. You’re my thing. You’re mine. You understand? You do what I fucking say, little boy. You hear me? Now put that throbbing cock in momma’s ass.”
“No!” I yell. “No, no, no! I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna! You can’t make me!”
“Shit, calm down. I’m just playing. It’s just a porno, Luke, like I said. Look, I’ll even turn the cameras off,” she says, picking up a tiny remote from beside her on the floor. She points it at the corners of the room and for the first time I see the white surveillance cameras stationed there.
The chainsaw growls again in the other room.
My clothes, they’re in the far corner. Standing, I rush for them and the woman lunges at me, missing awkwardly, slamming her head against the floor, and knocking herself out. My pearly sperm drips from her mouth onto the white floor. That chainsaw roars and chews through more flesh and bone in the other room, so I grab my clothes in a bundle and hustle down the stairs, out through the garage, and into the backyard where I slip into my pants, shirt, and shoes in a huff.
Traipsing into the alleyways, I follow a maze of dumpster-lined corridors in a hazy, speckled light that hasn’t changed since just before sunset. In a half-run, I spill out of the alleys onto a main thoroughfare of Oakland just as the sun comes up, basking this wasteland in a clear, ultraviolet white light.
Standing in the middle of the street, I’m surrounded by large animals floating and bobbing in the sky. There’s a black and white cat, a yellow dog, and a blue and red woodpecker. Marching bands stomp past me, blowing their trumpets and crashing their cymbals. The mayor rolls past in the back of a flatbed truck, waving to and fro and blowing me a kiss. Then the Oaklan
d A’s high-step through, poking each other in the ass with hypodermic needles, followed by floats representing the varied cultures of the Bay Area—everything from Vietnamese and Irish to Russian, Japanese, Polish, and zombie. That’s followed by floats for local banks, tax collectors, and universities, each made out of butchered meat. Then it’s all clowns, baton-throwers, fire-eaters, and contortionists crab-walking down the street toward the boiling water of the bay.
I drop down to the asphalt on my hands and knees, gigantic balloons blocking out the sky as feet kick and stomp past every side of me. I vomit over and over again and hyperventilate, choking on sobs as high school gymnasts and county fair beauty queens twirl by me.
It’s a parade, I think. It’s a parade. It’s just a parade, I tell myself.
MUMMY
I’m at my apartment building on Leavenworth and Post. It’s midnight and a new day and I’m drunk, a little bit high, hungry, tired, and bathed in white moonlight and stripper-sweat from an earlier visit with Syd where she remained fully clothed and expressed her views, passionately, on the current White House administration and how its theme of perceived isolation is mirrored in Ballard’s Concrete Island. Fumbling with my keys at the building door, they drop to the concrete and shatter like glass in a kind of beautiful way, sparking into nothingness at my feet. I try the door and find it is indeed locked, so I ring the building manager’s apartment. He doesn’t answer for four or five or more buzzes, until he finally does.
“You know what time it is?” the voice asks, groggy and gravelly. I know little about him except that he’s probably ten or fifteen years older than me and he’s your typical San Francisco pothead—filthy and lazy and pretty boring, but mostly unobtrusive, at least.
“Yeah, Moonbeam, shit—I know how to read a clock, goddammit—digital or not. I got my edjumacation, did you? Or did your soft little skull take one too many poundings inside your ma’s womb while she was getting gangbanged by the Hells Angels in the free-loving sixties? Anyway, I lost my keys. Can you just let me in?” As I’m leaning down, talking into the intercom, which is covered in some mysterious, viscous grey film, I realize I’m scratching at my left hand and lengths of skin are peeling away.
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