Broken Monsters

by Lauren Beukes

  He waves the name away. ‘You think your questions can hurt me?’

  So she goes through them, systematically. Where Daveyton was last seen. Who he was seen with. Did he have any friends who might have been a bad influence? Any gang-related activity? Any adults who showed a special interest in him? Did he have any hobbies? Had he mentioned any encounters with strangers? Any medical conditions? Was he on any medication? Or drugs? Any trouble at school or in the neighborhood?

  ‘In this neighborhood?’

  Behind him, Mrs. Lafonte plods down the stairs, carrying a plastic laundry basket, and vanishes into the kitchen. Routine, like small talk, to find your way back, because the most risible thing about death is that life carries on.

  ‘You got any hunting buddies?’ Boyd asks.

  ‘No. Why would you ask that?’ Mr. Lafonte is getting more and more confused.

  ‘You ever take him out into the woods?’

  ‘What is this?’ Outrage jerks Mr. Lafonte’s spine upright.

  ‘We’re trying to cover all the bases, sir. All lines of enquiry. It’s possible it may have been a hunting accident.’

  ‘What happened to my boy?’ He stands up. ‘I want to see him.’

  ‘You will, Mr. Lafonte.’ Not like she has, of course. The Lafontes will get their son all cleaned up, with a plastic sheet for modesty to cover where his legs would have been. They’ll be able to tell immediately though. The visibility of absence.

  ‘I want to see him now.’

  There is a screeching grinding sound from the kitchen. Marcus reacts before any of them, running toward the noise. Beat cop instincts. Gabi and Boyd are out of practice. He stops, frozen in the doorway at the sight of Mrs. Lafonte, her teeth bared, squashing a plastic dinosaur into the protesting garbage disposal. There are shreds of tiger-striped blue plastic around the sink. She’s forcing it in, the protesting blades whirring near her fingertips. The toy grins idiotically with its bulging eyes, even as the soft plastic rips under the blades. The laundry basket is full of toys.

  ‘Stop, Mrs. Lafonte.’ Gabi pulls her hands away. ‘Please.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, honey.’ Daveyton’s mother turns to them, smiling vaguely. Shock makes people do strange things. Gabi remembers one woman who jumped off her porch and sprinted around her house three times as if she could somehow out-run the bad news. Mrs. Lafonte holds out the shredded plastic. ‘Did you want them for your little girl?’

  The Skin You’re In

  Knock knock. Who’s there? Clayton. Clayton who? Clayton gone away not coming back, all eaten up on the inside by the dreaming thing he let into his head that didn’t mean to get trapped here, drawn out by the raw wound of the man’s mind, blazing like a lamp in one of those border places where the skin of the worlds are permeable, exactly like the walls of a cheap motel if the walls of a cheap motel can sometimes turn to a meniscus you can push right through by accident. It only wants to get home, and it doesn’t know how.

  The dream navigates the city in Clayton’s body, pulling on his thoughts like strings in a labyrinth to guide it through the streets. His muscle memory manages the brute mechanics, shifting the stick, applying the brake, obeying the rules of the road.

  All the rules. All the definitives. Car! Tree! Traffic light! Bus stop! Things are only one thing even if they are categories, species, of themselves, because the names lock them in even more specifically. Elder! Poplar! Oak! Black Gum! White Cedar! Basswood! It feels suffocated by the rigidity of the world. And yet … there is evidence of the dreaming everywhere. There is a world beneath the world that is rich and tangled with meaning. Clayton knew this.

  Clayton’s thoughts are fuzzy things, flickering beneath the surface, keeping them both alive. It has to hold onto them, to steer him through the world, to make the words in Clayton’s mouth come out in the right order.

  The ghost nerves sometimes fire in the reconstructed flesh, like when he passes by the corner café and his hand flies to his mouth in an automatic gesture for cigarettes. Or his head turns to watch a woman’s hips rolling as she walks down the street ahead of him.

  There are other places with strong personal associations, layers of meaning mapped onto the city that make it more navigable. They pass a hospital and the dream is struck by Clay’s memory of the smell of the detergent. Bundled-up sheets, stained with shit or blood or urine. The fierce heat of the laundry and the rush of steam from the dryer doors. He got fired from the hospital for stealing a stained sheet, pinning it up at an exhibition. He called it ‘Sick’.

  The dream takes comfort in Clayton’s memories. It seeks them out, and that they are not exactly as the man remembered gives it hope, that perhaps the world can be twisted and bent.

  It can sense the unconscious currents beneath the city, like the gas pipes that puff thick plumes of steam into the streets.

  There are lines of associations. There are nested fears. The giant black fist suspended on cables in the square among the high-rise buildings, a monument to the boxer Joe Louis, but also to power and fear. The curved towers of GM’s headquarters nearby, a cluster of glass dicks nudged up together for safety, every window lit up, thrusting defiantly into the darkness.

  The currents are crude and subtle in the billboards shouting slogans that say one thing, but mean another, tugging at desires and anxiety, but also alive in the graffiti, the squiggled tags that writhe with look-at-me, acknowledge-me, I’m-here.

  And art, most of all.

  The dream and Clayton sit on a cool marble bench in the central courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Art, which Clayton never visited because he didn’t like the formality of it, when he thought art should be rough and ready, and they stare at Diego Rivera’s giant frescoes of men and machinery and feel the churning beneath. All the galleries are like that, dreams seething beneath the surface of the paint, under the skin of the bronze statues. Clayton was so close. But he didn’t know how to cut through.

  The dream thinks it does. You need life to make life. ‘The birds and the bees’, to steal a thought from the man it is inhabiting.

  Eventually it has to leave the art museum. The needs of the body are a nagging constant. So they are behind the wheel of the truck when it sees the boy, half-collapsed against the side of the bus stop, his head resting against the scuffed-up Plexiglas. It stops the car and watches the boy sleep. There is no-one else around. The boy stirs and his leg kicks out, once, reflexively, like a rabbit or a dog. Or another kind of animal.

  It climbs out and goes to get something out of the toolbox the man keeps in the back.

  It remembers this from a dream Clayton once had.

  ‘Get up!’ Shaking the limp boy by his bare shoulders, his skin still clammy from overnighting in the freezer in the basement. The boy’s head lolls back on his neck, and the dream weeps with frustration, its tears shattering like glass on the cement, among the detritus in the tunnel, the trash and condoms, the old tires, bits of chalk left over from a mural of a girl’s face, smiling down on them with serene encouragement in the quiet and the dark.

  It brought him here to unveil him, close to the physical border between Canada and the United States, in the hopes that borders overlap.

  It can’t understand what’s wrong, why he won’t get up, maybe wobbly at first on his new legs, like a faun, before he begins to bound and leap and fly, and then his very being, the fact of him, will rip through the skin between the worlds, let them slip away, back home. Or bring all of the dream crashing in on them.

  It has been so very careful, so patient. Flesh is messier, and has its own challenges, but it is not so very different to working in metal or clay or wood. It followed the instructions on the package of chemicals very carefully. A day to prepare, a day to bind. Maybe that was its mistake. The choice of materials, the freezer, keeping the deer in the refrigerator, the plastic wrap mummifying the boy, suffocating him. Perhaps he opened his eyes in the ice chest, battered his hands against the lid, perhaps he has already come and gone, and it miss
ed its moment.

  It strokes the bristly hair of the legs that run to the smooth skin of the boy’s belly, the scoop of his navel. It cups one of the small, sharp hooves, takes one of the child’s hands and laces his slim fingers between Clayton’s clumsy ones. It squeezes, gently. An admonishment. Get up now. Stop playing. It’s not funny. Words it knows from Clayton’s head.

  But the boy is a dead, empty thing. It has done it all wrong. This stupid head, these stupid hands. It tries to remember how it came through, the man in the woods and the lure of uninhabited spaces – a vacancy that dream can rush in to fill, a door to step through.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the dream says with Clayton’s mouth. And it is, for both of them.

  About to climb back into the truck, it hesitates and picks up a piece of pink chalk from the ground. It draws the rough outline of a door, the chalk snapping in Clayton’s thick fingers. But it is persistent. Because maybe, next time, the door will open, and the boy will climb unsteadily to his hooves and take lilting steps through.

  The dream will try again.

  Anywhereland

  There’s no such thing as by the book, Gabi knows. Every case defines itself. But you start with what you know. Work backwards. Fill in the gaps. Daveyton did not arrive home between four and five p.m., when he usually does on a Friday. He left school around three, according to the science teacher who was supervising the hang-out that day, which is what Humboldt Middle School calls their aftercare, confirmed by the footage they’ve retrieved from the security cameras. The school can’t afford to maintain their library, but they have surveillance cameras and metal detectors. Priorities.

  Usually, he would walk to the bus stop (public transit: the school does not have its own bus service) with a friend in his class, Carla Fuentes, but she had a dermatologist appointment, and her dad picked her up early. Which means he went missing somewhere in between school and home. It’s the worst place of all, that anywhereland.

  The parents have been interrogated separately and together, with a lawyer and without, and referred for counseling. They were both at work at the time of their son’s disappearance. Lucky to have a double income. Juliet Lafonte works as an administrator at a doctor’s office, although her arthritis makes her a slow typist. She has witnesses to her whereabouts all Friday.

  Paul Lafonte works dispatch at a printing warehouse. His alibi is golden, complete with a time sheet with his signature on it. His company had already printed a stack of ‘Missing’ brochures, which the parents have been stuffing in mailboxes around the neighborhood. They will have to print new ones. Not ‘have you seen this boy?’, but ‘did you?’ The finality of past tense.

  They canvass the Lafonte’s neighbors, Daveyton’s teachers, the principal, trying to establish his whereabouts on that day, who he hung out with, if there were any adults who had shown an unusual interest in him.

  She gets all the familiar platitudes that fail to sum up a life. He was ‘a good kid’, he was ‘well-liked’, he ‘worked hard but he messed around in class sometimes’. His favorite subjects were math and social studies.

  ‘Was there anything unusual about him that I need to know?’ Gabi asks the principal.

  The woman frowns. ‘He dwelled too much on the shooting. It made him a celebrity. I didn’t like it. Any excuse to show off his scar. He made up all these stories. He said he was a superhero, the bullet was radioactive and it gave him powers, and then he jumped off the bleachers to prove it and broke his arm. Then he wrote an essay about how he got shot because he knew too much. He’d overheard the gang boss planning to whack his mom because they’d been using her as a cover to smuggle drugs in her piano. He saved her life, but they broke her fingers – and that’s why she can’t play anymore.’

  They talk to some of his school friends, with their parents’ permission and a counselor present. Gabi asks Carla Fuentes about the route the kids took to the bus stop. Was there anywhere they liked to stop along the way? A detour or shortcut they liked to take? The little girl blinks throughout the interview. ‘Is he really dead? Really, really?’

  The kids have more questions than answers. So do their parents. The rumors are already spreading.

  It was a new initiate in the gang that shot him, coming back to finish him off. It was the janitor, who has a prison record for armed robbery from ten years ago, and this is exactly why schools shouldn’t hire ex-criminals. And one which might lead somewhere: the father wanted to pay off his gambling debts with the insurance money.

  Gabi and Boyd leave Sparkles to mop up the paperwork and compile a list of names to follow up, and go out to walk the route Daveyton would have taken to the bus stop.

  The sun is feeble, the sky a washed-out blue. They pass by a used-car dealership and a gas station, an empty lot, the burned-out husk of an old university residence, the scorched roof caving in above the red brick and ivy. A poster in an empty window promises cash for gold.

  ‘Lotta fuckin’ places you could grab someone and drag ’em inside,’ Boyd observes. ‘We’re going to have to come back here.’

  ‘Have we phoned the bus company yet to check if the driver remembers Daveyton?’

  ‘I put your puppy dog on that.’

  ‘That’s unkind, Bob,’ Gabi says, but Sparkles does have a waggy-tail eagerness that’s tempting to exploit. ‘Fair amount of traffic,’ she checks her watch. ‘Lunchtime. Wonder what it’s like at three p.m. on a Friday.’

  ‘Quieter.’

  They reach the bus stop – Plexiglas scratched up with graffiti and stained with rain and dust. The wooden bench is partitioned into four parts with metal railings to prevent anyone from lying down. Initials and swearwords have been crudely carved into the wood. Several boards are missing from the last seat. Cigarette butts litter the ground, smoked down to the filter. Boyd peers down the road, left and right, checking out the run-down apartment block opposite, the parking lot across the way. Gabriella crouches down by the bench.

  ‘Bob.’ The urgency in her voice makes him turn. ‘Here.’ She indicates a fine spatter of brown on the glass, low down, butt-height if you were sitting. Or head-height if you had managed to contort yourself into a position where you could sleep. Or if someone had pulled you off the bench and shoved you on the ground and stuck a nail gun to your head. ‘He did it right here. Full view of the street.’

  ‘Motherfucker’s either got balls of steel or he’s dumb as pig shit.’

  ‘Carpe diem. It was opportunistic,’ she says, playing it out. ‘He was driving round looking for the right victim.’

  ‘One that would fit his deer pants. Sizing them up.’

  ‘Spotted little Daveyton waiting for the bus. Maybe circled round for another look. Pulled over. Might have tried to get him in the car first. Offered him a ride.’

  ‘It was vicious cold on Friday,’ Boyd agrees.

  ‘Mmm. Smart kid like that wouldn’t have gone for it, and our killer couldn’t take the risk. No, he parked in front of the bus stop to obscure the view, went right up to him. Maybe didn’t even bother with conversation, just shoved him down and nailed him in the head. Loaded him in the car and drove away.’

  ‘I would say that the blood drops over here and here,’ Boyd points to the faintest drops on the ground, ‘would corroborate that theory. Nail straight into the brain – there might not have been that much blood. If he didn’t remove it on the scene, it could have kept it sealed in tight.’

  ‘Our sick bastard’s also a slick bastard. We need to lock this down. Get statements from the people who live in that apartment block. Get this blood tested and ID-ed. Don’t radio it in!’ she snaps as he reaches for his belt. ‘Cell phones only.’

  Boyd rolls his eyes. ‘Whatever you say, Versado. This is going to turn into a shit-storm however we play it.’

  The Bright

  ‘Two weeks in Detroit already and you haven’t done the Packard Plant?’ Jen teases him. ‘Just what kind of out-of-towner journalist are you?’

  Good question, snipe
s his troll.

  ‘I spent most of that time getting drunk,’ Jonno retorts, which makes it sound like he was out partying, instead of holed up in the studio apartment (easy walking distance to downtown) that he rented from a web designer on AirVacancy for four weeks. The plan was to get the lay of the land, buy a car, find a more permanent place to live, maybe take a bartending job, meet cool people, and start his brand-new life. His host had diligently left a pile of city guides and local newspapers on the table, but he couldn’t face the Detroit Institute of Art or hip Corktown, and when he went for a walk, he got as far as the liquor store and scuttled back home.

  He needed an adjustment period. He needed to fortify himself. Once he got as far as the French restaurant adjoining the lobby downstairs, where they were showing Fellini movies with subtitles. He drank eight martinis and the cute waitress, who might have been interested in him before he got sloppy drunk, had to help him into the elevator. This is grief. This is loss.

  This is rotting in a stranger’s apartment feeling sorry for yourself for being a pathetic idiot who sucks at forward-planning.

  He should have thought it through more. But he was in too much pain to think clearly. He was in free-fall from what happened in New York. Until Jen Q.

  Jen-Jen-Jen.

  His muse, his savior, his Joan of Arc with braids. It was fate, forcing himself to go out on Saturday night. You’re rushing into things. The Amazing Rebound Man.

  Now that he’s got an in into the city (and okay, wheels), Detroit’s a whole other place. Everyone knows Jen Q. She is cool and popular and she opens doors to the parts of the city everyone knows – and then breaks them open to places he didn’t imagine.

  ‘So here we go, the biggie,’ she says, pulling under the corridor bridge of the Packard Plant: over two miles of broken-down factory.

  ‘The number one Death-of-America pilgrimage destination,’ Jonno says. But he’s impressed despite himself. The sprawling waste of it. Broken bricks and concrete pillars holding up the sky. Everything is choked with weeds and graffiti. The word ‘fuck’ appears a lot, which seems appropriate.