He never took to acid or any of those other drugs, although they were going around among the kids. Coke, speed, mescaline. The late-night parties where he was always the odd one out, sitting on his own on the couch. They would come and sit right next to him and not talk to him. He would drink to make it bearable, and wake up oblivious to whatever had happened the night before, stumbling out into the shared living space to ice-cold vibes. He would spend the day miserable, waiting for someone to finally confront him about what he’d done. Some inappropriate thing he’d said, some dumb practical joke that everyone had taken too seriously.
But he hadn’t been drinking. Or sleeping, or eating, or taking his pain pills. He avoided the refrigerator, the thin Plexiglas shelves yanked out and set beside it. He also took care not to look at the black stains on his wall, which seemed to swell when he passed them. A trick of the light, mold from the newspapers piled up in teetering stacks in the hallway.
He opened a can of beans in tomato sauce, poured it into a dish and put it in the microwave. The device hummed and the glass plate turned round and round and round until PING. He was reassured by the normalcy of this, even if the act of eating seemed repulsive.
Spooning the food in, chewing the soft pulp, his tongue rolling it back toward his throat, swallowing – it was all automatic, like he was functioning on the muscle memory of someone he used to be. He patted his pocket for cigarettes and realized he didn’t want them, the chemical taste in his mouth, the way they sucked away his breath.
He felt unlike himself. ‘Unlike.’ He said it aloud. Words sounded strange. The meaning unraveled. It was as if Clayton was the skin and bones he pulled on.
He had to get out of the house. He had to talk to someone. Show them what he’d done.
(Don’t look in the refrigerator.)
He had to fire these clay figurines – the ones he doesn’t remember making, but that seem familiar. It’s why he doesn’t normally work in clay – because he doesn’t have an oven, but he reckons Miskwabic Pottery would let him use their student kiln. He used to help pack tiles into boxes and move big bags of wet clay for Betty Spinks in exchange for pottery lessons.
He packed up the figurines and took them out to the garage, ignoring the cracks webbed out across the windscreen – he’d have to get that fixed. He hauled the tarp out of the back and flipped it over to hide the rusty stains.
Yanking up the garage door, some part of him expected it to open onto nothingness. But it was a bright late-autumn day, the low cloud cover catching the sunlight and spreading it around.
He drove past rows of wooden houses with peeling paint and overgrown grass, the bare trees reaching up their branches as if to rip a hole in the sky, and took a shortcut through Indian Village, where the houses got a lot nicer, and all dolled up for Halloween, with pumpkins in the windows and spooky floss draped over the big old oaks and elms lining the driveways of the historic homes.
He pulled into the gravel parking lot of the cosy Tudor-style building and nudged the truck right up against the fence under the tree near the road, away from the other cars, to make it harder to spot his broken windscreen.
The fat security guard held open the door for him as he carried his load in, warm air wafting out.
‘Help you there, sir?’
‘I’m fine,’ Clayton said. It almost felt true, here in this bright shop with its shelves of arts and crafts tiles with their iridescent glaze. Historic buildings all over the city were decorated with Miskwabic mosaics, hallways turned into geometries of light, cornerstones and edgings marked out in bright patterns. But they don’t sell anything like that here. Instead they have ‘gift tiles’, botanicals and devotionals and simple geometrics, the city skyline, a Tigers D, street numbers, a little ballerina girl, pumpkins for Halloween. You take all the beauty in the world and you boil it down to kitsch, he thought.
Inside, a family was browsing while a hipster with wild hair talked them through the history, paying special attention to the twenty-something daughter. Betty was behind the counter, her graying hair in a loose plait, wearing a red sweater and a necklace of colored beads. She looked up at the sound of his voice, peering over her glasses at him. ‘Knock me down. Clayton Broom, where have you been hiding yourself?’
‘I got this,’ he said, lamely, indicating the box in his arms.
‘I can see that, sweetie,’ she replied. He’d always thought of her as no-nonsense apple pie. ‘You want to bring that in back? Hey, Robin, when you’re done flirting, can you mind the register?’
‘Sure, Betty.’ The youngster with the twists of hair nodded at him in a friendly way, but his attention was already swinging back to the daughter, who absolutely had to look at the earrings in the display case. Clayton watched them circling each other with the documentary dispassion of someone who had never got that right.
Betty marched through to the firing room, past the two industrial kilns sitting alongside each other like a history lesson – the old brick oven with the burn marks down the front beside the aggressively shiny steel kiln – to her office.
She cleared a space on the desk, shoving her files onto her chair, so he’d have space to set down the box. ‘Now, what have we got here? Can I take a peek?’ But she was already folding back the cardboard flaps and taking out one of the figurines, a woman with a bird’s head, like a skinny Degas ballerina, her arms flung wide as if she could lift off. There were a flock of them in the box, with various faces. ‘Hmmf,’ she said, but he could tell she was impressed. ‘You been practicing?’
‘Trying new things,’ he said.
‘That’s important. I got my little god-daughter to try pottery, and now her parents are complaining they haven’t got room for all her masterpieces.’
‘Me too. I don’t have space. I’ve been on a … binge. It all came out of me. It keeps coming.’
‘Well, that’s great. You got some of the muse pixie dust to share around, you let me know. I’ve been experimenting, too. What do you think?’ She gave a self-deprecating nod at the workspace countertop, where an elaborate vase of overlapping folds glazed in delicate greens and whites running to dusky pink at the tip sat next to a decrepit old laptop. ‘I’ve been playing with shapes in nature. Flowers, insects, sea anemones.’
Clayton examined the tulip vase, the twirl of petals unfurling from the base. ‘It’s pretty,’ he managed and then blurted it out. ‘I think I have a brain tumor, Betty.’
Her eyes softened. ‘That’s a big jump, honey. Have you seen a doctor about this?’
Clayton shook his head. ‘I don’t trust ’em. They all work for the pharmaceutical companies. But my old man died of pancreatic cancer. I know the signs. I’ve been feeling shaky, and I’ve been seeing things. I can feel it inside me, Betty, like an octopus in my head, getting its tentacles into everything.’
‘Sit yourself down, Clay. You want a cup of coffee? Tastes like gasoline, but it’ll perk you up a little.’
He sank down into the seat by the door, lower than he expected it to be. She set the clay figure carefully back into the box, careful not to damage it, then perched on the edge of the desk beside him.
‘You been sleeping?’
‘I don’t know.’ He corrected himself, ‘Must have. I’ve been dreaming. Bad dreams. People with papier-mâché heads. Monsters in the woods.’
‘You’ve been neglecting yourself, honey. You should go home and get some rest, eat some food, then go see a doctor. Get some tests done. I’m sure it’s not a tumor.’ She gave his shoulder a hard squeeze. He could feel how strong and bony her fingers were, like coral. ‘You get yourself home and take care of yourself. You got someone who can help you?’
He nodded, fighting back the tears. Sympathy was the worst. Betty was savvy enough to see it. She closed up the box and changed the subject to brisk business. ‘Well. You leave these with me, and I’ll get them fired in the student kiln. Call you when they’re ready to come and glaze, unless you want to leave them raw, which could work for thes
e. You want to pay now or COD?’
‘I’ll pay now. Can’t guarantee I’ll have the cash later.’ He stood up to fish crumpled notes out of his pocket.
‘Up to you, sweets. Twenty bucks. You want to pay me now, that’s fine. You want to pay me in kind later, that’s good too. God knows the storeroom needs cleaning out. We got boxes of stock in there, I don’t even know what’s broken, what’s last season.’
‘I’ll pay now, I’m flush.’ It was a lie, but he didn’t want to owe her. He smoothed the note out on the desk, ironing the creases flat with his fingers. The moth-wing texture of it got into the back of his teeth. ‘You ever think about how rigid the world is?’
‘Clay isn’t. This material we work with, I mean, not you.’
‘But I’m rigid, too. We’re all locked in to what we are. Take this,’ he held up the note.
‘I intend to, sweetie.’
‘It’s nothing. But people believe in it. Money makes the rules. This is what things cost. This is what you have, where you are, what you are, what you can be. Money is a dream that has made itself definitive.’ He was caught up in it, his tongue doing a million miles an hour. It happened sometimes when he hadn’t seen other people for a while. ‘Do you know that story about Michelangelo?’
‘That he was homosexual?’
‘Not that. About the Pieta, the Madonna and Christ. When he finished sculpting it, he struck it and cried out, “Now speak”. He expected his art to live. But it didn’t. How could it?’ He was on the point of tears again.
‘I think God’s the only one who gets to breathe life into mud, sweetie. And you’re wrong, about being locked in.’ She patted the box full of bird girls. ‘You see this, Mr. Smartypants? You see how far you’ve come, how much you’ve evolved as an artist? Late-bloomer, sure, but you’ve transcended yourself, Clayton Broom. Don’t come here talking about rigid.’
He nodded, trying to remember how to look happy, the precise facial muscle arrangements. ‘Thank you,’ he managed. But he wondered if this was really what he wanted after all.
Trajectories
There are trajectories that cut through our lives, Gabi has found, that link things together. Sometimes those are literal, like the scar under Bambi’s arm.
A few years ago there were so many unclaimed bodies at the Wayne County morgue that the city had to rent a truck to store them all in, piled three-deep like a short stack. Only pancakes don’t get toe tags. It wasn’t that nobody loved them enough to come get them; the families had to save up to be able to pay for their funerals.
Now they’ve opened an additional pathology lab up at the university, and Bambi is enough of a novelty to get special priority. The new facilities still smell like dead people and preservatives and cleaning products and that peculiar metal tang you can taste in the back of your mouth. Hearts still make the same wet slop sound when they land in a bucket full of organs. The corpses on the metal tables are still uninhabited shells.
‘Foreclosed people,’ she observes to Marcus. The rookie nods sagely, missing the joke. He’s got a long way to go.
Boyd digs in his ear with one finger. ‘I think they’re more human like this. When you shoot an animal, you can only really appreciate what made it an animal when it’s gone.’
‘That’s beautiful, Bob, especially considering you still shoot them anyway. Can you quit picking at yourself?’
‘It’s itchy.’ He wipes the wax off on his pants. ‘I saw an ad for ear candles in a magazine. Do you think that works?’
‘Why don’t you try it and report back?’
There is a small crowd of people in scrubs gathered around her stiff. She can tell it’s Bambi by the six-inch dip in the sheet between the constituent parts of boy and deer.
Dr Mackay is poking around under the sheet, talking in a low voice. He looks like he’s from another century, with deep grooves in his forehead you could play like an LP record if you had a turntable. He keeps trying to retire, and they keep asking him to come back. There are two cops at the back, craning their necks to see.
‘Move it along, boys. This isn’t your case.’
‘We just wanted a look. That’s some crazy shit, Detective.’
‘Yeah, yeah, this takes the crazy-shit cake. Now hop.’ Boyd makes as if to move toward them, and his bulk is enough to get them going.
‘You letting every sightseer in, Dr Mackay?’ Gabi snaps. ‘Should we be charging?’
‘They got a body in here, same as you, Detective. Little more clear-cut than yours.’ He sounds as if he blames her personally. ‘And the others are students. There’s a lot of interest in this, as you might imagine.’ He nods at the serious young people in scrubs. ‘You’re excused.’
Boyd pinches his nose. ‘Didn’t you wash him?’
‘We’ve flushed the body several times with the high-pressure hose. What you’re smelling is the contents of the bucket. Stomach acid, gall and feces. Stuffing. Your killer didn’t do a particularly good job.’
‘You need some lipgloss, Sparkles?’ Boyd teases Marcus, who is breathing hard through his nose.
‘No thank you, sir. I’m mostly interested in the autopsy.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ Gabi says.
Mackay flips the sheet, revealing the corpse, already laid open. Human excavations – the casual violation of the body’s integrity. They all peer into the abdominal cavity. ‘Very inefficient. See here, where he cut through the stomach. He made a hell of a mess.’
‘It’s not a hunter,’ Boyd says. ‘Hunter wouldn’t do such a half-assed job of gutting something.’
‘Unless he was in a hurry. Besides, I’d venture that there are a lot of amateurs running around the woods with semi-automatics who wouldn’t know the front end of a deer from its ass.’ Gabi nudges the bucket beside the table with her shoe. It’s full of wadded-up paper and a flaky fabric, sodden and reeking. ‘What did you mean by stuffing?’
‘Newspaper at a guess, although we’ll need to send it for testing. It was used to fill the cavity, probably to keep the shape after he removed the organs before he stuck it back together.’
‘Had to look right,’ Gabi ventures.
‘Why newspaper?’ Sparkles says.
‘What he had lying around. I’m pretty sure it’s not what professional taxidermists use. What do they use? Sawdust? Emulsifying foam?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Boyd shrugs. ‘You put Stricker on that.’
‘I believe they make casts,’ Dr Mackay says. ‘Now, here’s your fatal wound.’ He points out the blood-crusted hole halfway up the boy’s neck. ‘Blunt trauma severed the vertebrae. Could have been a hammer and chisel, but there was a massive application of force, and the bruising around the area suggests it was mechanical, probably pneumatic. I’d guess it was some kind of nail gun, which is something I’m telling you, not putting in the report because it’s speculation. If you could bring me the nail, that would be wonderful. But as you can see by this tissue damage, he dug it out. Possibly with pliers.’
‘How hard is it to get a nail gun?’ Gabi asks.
‘Hardware store sells them over the counter,’ Boyd says. ‘I’ll run a check.’
‘Now, this is the really neat part,’ Mackay says. ‘You see the seam where he was joined to the deer? I had to cut through it, but you can see in the cross-section, here, how the tissue has fused.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Like the kind of gluing a plastic surgeon might do, but not quite. It’s extraordinary really; a chemical reaction has caused the proteins to break down and mesh with each other. Think of it as a flesh weld. I’ve mailed some colleagues about it.’
‘Welding. Nail guns. We got fuckin’ Handy Manny on the loose,’ Boyd says.
‘I like how he tried to hide it by brushing up the fur. It’s a nice touch. Oh, I do have something else interesting for you. You’ll like this.’
‘Oh boy,’ Gabi says.
Mackay raises the boy’s skinny limb to reveal the soft private folds of
the armpit, with its first tufting of pubescent hair. It feels somehow more invasive than seeing him laid open and Gabi’s first instinct is to look away.
‘Look,’ Mackay says, so she has to. Bambi has an old scar on his tricep. A pucker of scar tissue just above his armpit, like a tiny daisy. ‘Here’s where the slug went straight through. He was lucky. Inch to the right and it would have re-entered the body, gone into the chest cavity.’
Not so lucky this time, Gabi thinks.
Studs and Holes
‘Stop messing around, he’s no good.’ Cas leans over Layla, her chest brushing against the back of her head, and takes over control of the mouse.
Her best friend is wearing a plastic cat mask, because that’s what the toy shop had in stock. They needed some kind of disguise, and they were cheaper than the Guy Fawkes masks, which are all manufactured in a sweatshop in China anyway. The mask makes Cas look like she’s a crazy-hot superhero: the Kitty Avenger, whereas Layla just looks like a dumb-ass. As per usual.
‘Hey. Maybe I wanted to talk to him,’ Layla says as Cas clicks away from the cute boy with scruffy hair and glasses. Little on the plus side, but hey, not like Lay’s any kind of super-catch either. Ask Dorian. Just thinking his name tugs at her insides.
‘That’s not what we’re here for,’ Cas says. ‘And, please. Those glasses were so faux.’ She clicks next, next, next, through the live camera feeds. A girl playing guitar, mumbling a song off-key through the fall of hair over her face. A little kid sprawled in rumpled Batman sheets playing video games, who doesn’t even look up. Probably forgot he left the program running. A guy with acne speckled like constellations across his face, who grins into the camera when he sees them and raises one hand, but Cas has already clicked away.
‘It’s gross how they don’t even tidy up,’ Layla complains. Even though it’s reassuring to know that everyone’s a slob. Everyone’s messy life hanging right out there in the open, like their own private reality TV show. You can’t look away. The roulette of human connection.
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