Broken Monsters

by Lauren Beukes

  They drive past a fashion shoot in a gloomy interior full of rubble, a wiry guy holding up a bounce board to better direct the light at a girl with big eighties hair in a bikini top and short-shorts, standing defiantly against the cold among the pillars of a caved-in factory floor, the sky leaking in behind her.

  Some old hobos are watching from a doorway opposite.

  ‘Local perverts?’ Jonno says.

  ‘Don’t be so judgmental. They live here. They collect old junk, clean it up and sell it on eBay. God knows what’s going to happen to them if this place ever gets redeveloped.’

  ‘That’s an amazing story, can I talk to them? I could write about that.’

  ‘No,’ Jen snaps. ‘Leave them alone. Everyone’s done it. You know what’s worse than fifteen minutes of fame? The same fifteen minutes again and again, and it doesn’t change anything. They’re still living in an abandoned building, still scraping by.’

  They’re all hustlers, Jonno thinks, all still figuring themselves out.

  ‘Hurry,’ she says, pushing him into the abandoned theater. They’ve parked across the road so as not to attract attention. You might call it urban exploration, but it’s still trespassing. ‘Put this on.’ She hands him a face mask. ‘For the asbestos.’

  ‘Great,’ he says, sarcastically. But it is great. He feels inspired in a way he hasn’t for years, and if that means he dies from some horrible lung disease in ten years’ time, so be it.

  The theater is like a cathedral inside, the same sense of peace and awe. Or maybe it’s just that it’s cool and quiet, and your footsteps echo.

  He hadn’t expected to be so moved by it all. The rows of chairs curved to face a stage that has caved in, the rotted remains of curtains hanging bedraggled on either side. One red velvet chair has been yanked from its row, like a bad tooth, and set up in the center of the stage. You can see the appeal. Haunted by civilizations past. A reminder of mortality. This too shall crumble and fall.

  ‘Want to go up to the balcony?’

  Jonno looks, warily, at the flight of stairs under a landslide of rubble and dust. He thinks about how it might give way under him, send him sliding back to where he came from.

  ‘Nah.’

  Jen sweeps him on to an early dinner party at a loft apartment owned by two guys who made millions off a website, Text Regrets, where people post messages they wish they hadn’t sent. They seem like clever fictions, even though the guys swear they’re all real.

  ‘You’re just mad you didn’t think of it first.’ Jen nudges him in the bathroom, handing him her car key to snort a bump of coke off.

  Of course he is. And because the more texts he reads, the more he finds it’s all there. Not just rude messages about blow jobs accidentally sent to your mom, but pathos and bathos and comedy and the richness of human experience. In a text. What hope does he have? The world is condensing, attention spans narrowing to tiny screens, and there are people who are wittier and smarter, who know how to write for those nanospaces. He wants to sink into despair, but the cocaine won’t let him.

  They sit down for dinner at a long table, with big dogs galumphing round the kitchen and splashy art pieces on the wall. A young guy with wild dreads who works at the local historic pottery, a lady lawyer, an architect, a Google engineer, and a couple of cute promo girls on a roadshow for a hip sunglasses brand, setting up pop-up stores.

  On the other side of the table they’re talking about art and Jen’s diabetes, after she pulls up her cream sweater and shoots up right there, pinching the flesh at her waist and clicking the insulin pen against it. He loves that she’s so don’t-give-a-fuck-about the procedure and the questions that rise up around her. He loves the contrast between her dark skin and the pale wool. He wants to reach out and pinch her waist himself, with possessiveness and lust. But he is stuck with promo girl, who’s telling him how they hand out free samples to innovators and connectors.

  ‘You’re spreading the virus of consumer desire,’ Jonno observes. They’ve reached the point in the evening where they’re talking at each other.

  ‘I miss my dog,’ the cute brunette says. ‘We’ve been on the road for eight weeks now. I want to go back to New York already.’

  ‘I’m from New York,’ Jonno says. ‘Can I get a pair?’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Sorry, I don’t have any with me. Maybe tomorrow?’ But her pitying smile says maybe never. She turns to talk to the architect about dogs.

  They catch the tail-end of an art exhibition, where everything is tired and the same – the same anti-consumer bullshit, Ronald McDonald in jihadi gear and Mickey Mouse in the role of Saturn eating his children. A gumball machine marked ‘Reality Check’ dispenses candy shaped like the red pills in The Matrix.

  ‘Cute,’ he says. ‘How did they ever come up with that?’

  ‘Are you this jaded about everything?’ Jen says, ruffling his hair. ‘Oh, hang on, I have to say hi to Simon.’ She shimmies over to talk to a lithe young man with a lumberjack beard and tattoos on every available surface. Jonno pours some of the gelatin sherbet pills into his hand, trying to act like he’s not checking out this Simon guy. He swallows a pill in the hope that someone might have laced it with molly – that would be experiential art – but he suspects that all he’s going to get out of it is a red-stained tongue. Maybe this is the thing about getting old – that nothing is new any more.

  ‘It’s all the same,’ says the man standing next to him, examining the grotesquery of Mickey Mouse about to gobble up a child with sharp pointy teeth. ‘Nothing’s original.’

  ‘I was thinking the exact same thing,’ Jonno says, happy to find a comrade in cynicism, until he sees it’s some crusty guy with a shock of white hair in a rumpled brown blazer. Jen is still talking to Simon, her hand on his arm, firing a spike of jealousy down his spine, which he tries to cover with blather. ‘Like where is the art that’s going to change the world? It’s undiscovered.’ Like the amazing undiscovered novelists of the world, he thinks.

  ‘Maybe it’s waiting to be found,’ says the white-haired man. His blue eyes are intense, drilling into Jonno.

  ‘Yeah, but it can’t wait! You have to make the connections, you have to get it in front of the right audience. It’s all about the eyeballs. Always the damn eyeballs.’

  ‘Hey, Jonno,’ Jen interrupts, ‘this is Simon. I was telling you about him earlier. The séance?’

  Jonno vaguely remembers snippets of a conversation on the other side of the dinner table while he’d been trying to score free shades from promo girl. Something about an artist who killed himself in the caravan he’d customized.

  ‘Yeah, bro. We had beer and naked girls, we did a barbecue in the bathtub – all the things he liked. I was the Ouija board.’ He lifts up his shirt to reveal the tattoo of old-fashioned type and the all-seeing eye on his chest. ‘His spirit didn’t show up, but we think he would have appreciated it.’

  ‘Now that’s original,’ Jonno turns to say to his new friend, but the crumpled man has wandered off, and Simon has more coke, even though Jen abstains this time round. So much for the party girl.

  He’s pretty trashed by the time they end up at an apartment block in the city center at three in the morning, where a cluster of party people are standing shivering in the cold, waiting, for what he isn’t sure, but they have to join the line. There is texting. Regrets, maybe. Or instructions, because a man leans out an upstairs window and throws out the keys, attached to a plastic bag so they come parachuting down, like one of those army-men toys.

  The girl in front catches the keys and opens the door onto a staircase lined with graffiti that winds up and up, and they all traipse along gamely. It reminds him of Williamsburg in the 2000s, the edgy-as-fuck parties in the warehouse district. Someone has drawn the outline of a door on the wall next to a crazy cartoon cat giving them the finger. ‘Knock-knock, are we there yet?’ Jonno says, rapping his knuckles on the chalk outline.

  ‘Come on,’ Jen says, nudging him. ‘Two more
flights.’

  The party is weird. A dark room with people milling half-heartedly on the dance floor. Someone in the back sells them two beers for five dollars. Jen takes a turn on the decks and Jonno slinks off to the enclosed balcony among a jungle of pot plants, trying not to feel lonely and old. A skinny Thor-lookalike with long blond hair and a Viking nose offers him a bump off an LP cover and they get talking.

  ‘This is the Detroit I want to write about,’ he says, feeling urbane as fuck. ‘Tattoo séances and nutty street art and text-message millionaires. People don’t even know this is happening.’

  ‘Of course we know it’s happening, shithead,’ Anorexic Thor says. ‘You don’t know it’s happening.’

  But he won’t be put off. It feels like this is something, something real and he could be a part of it. The drug has his tongue. ‘Have you noticed how dim this room is? We’re all trying to keep the dark at bay by surrounding ourselves with it. This city,’ he says, inspired, ‘this city is all about the people, who have to burn against the dark. It’s the bright against the blight.’

  ‘Or we keep the lights off so we don’t alert the cops,’ Jen Q says, draping her arms over his shoulders. She kisses the top of his head. ‘Come on, time for bed. I think you’ve had enough.’

  Higher Power

  Some shelters make you play musical chairs. Move around, table to table. Same with recovery programs, TK has found. It’s all about getting to know one another, but he reckons it’s a bit like taking off your pants. You have to expose yourself, naked for all the world to see. You stand up and you say I’m a drunk. I’m an addict. I’m a murderer. I’m a whoreson. It’s supposed to be only part of who you are, but it seems to him once you take that label, you’re stuck with it. Some words are stronger than others. It’s … what’s the Hollywood word for it? Your elevator pitch.

  He’s been looking into this stuff, reading websites on how to write a screenplay. But all that advice on how to get ahead in Hollywood involves a cash lay-out. Buy the book. Do the course. Have a professional reader give you notes on your synopsis. Same as the how-to-be-a-day-trader sites he was looking at seven years ago before the whole economy came crashing down around their heads exactly like a giant robot movie.

  Life does that too, and the support programs, they want you to appeal to a higher power for help. Your call. God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad. Whole damn catalog to choose from. TK chose his chair.

  ‘You can’t choose a chair, TK,’ Celeste told him at that same meeting. Crack addict, hadn’t spoken to her only daughter in ten years after stealing her ATM card and taking her grocery money, but there she was lecturing him about God.

  ‘Sure I can. I can feel it right now. My higher power’s presence supporting me – right under my ass.’ Which cracked up the room, and the counselor slapped him on the back and shook her head. But he was dead serious. You can’t tell him there’s any God would allow the kind of shit he’s lived through. Kids having to avenge their mommas. Public defender who barely even looked at him, let alone got his side of the story. What happened in jail after that. God who’d let that happen to a kid? That ain’t somebody he wants to be palling around with. He’ll take his chair, thank you, ma’am.

  So it’s not that he doesn’t believe in God, it’s that they don’t see eye-to-eye. He’d never tell that to these people though, the ones lining up outside St. Raphael’s in the shadow of Comerica Park, shabbier than the crowds they get here during a game. Some of them can spare him a smile, but some of them don’t even have that in them. There’s a way back from that place, if you can find it, if you can find your chair.

  TK goes down the line, slapping hands in greeting. ‘Hey there, good to see you. We open at eleven. You hang in there.’

  The church calls it a soup kitchen, but mostly they don’t serve soup. They do sandwiches and hotdogs and chili in winter, and they hand out chips and sweets, whatever’s going spare from local grocery stores, sorted into brown paper bags by the volunteers. He’s overheard Reverend Alan talking about how it’s getting harder to pull in donations.

  When TK was a kid, he thought that living in a free country meant you got stuff for free. He got disabused of that notion real quick. He used to hate the old men pulling him aside on the corner: ‘B-ooooy! I got something to tell you.’ He didn’t want to hear it. Had to learn the unfairness of it all first-hand. You think the world comes down to basic math. One plus one. Life for a life. But apparently that don’t add up in the US justice system, no matter what the Bible says about eyes and teeth. It took him a long time to figure it out and now, pushing sixty, he’s got his shit together, he’s got it down, and none of them kids want to listen to him. He’s become that old man. ‘B-oooooy! I got something to tell you.’

  Ten minutes after the doors open, people barely sat down with their food, and Lanny is already complaining up a storm, bitching about pretzels when he wanted crackers. Used to be an ocular surgeon, he says. Which is a fancy term for eye-doctor, because doctors need long words as much as they need scalpels and lasers and white coats. Lanny says he could take care of that bump on TK’s eyelid, if his hands didn’t shake so much. He says it’s Parkinson’s, but TK knows a drunk when he sees one, and not just by the half-jack of Carstairs White Seal he slips out of his pocket to spike his coffee.

  You get all sorts in here. Not only ocular surgeons. Anyone can find they’ve been standing on the trapdoor when they thought they were the spotlight attraction.

  ‘Lanny, Lanny,’ TK says, slinging his arm around the man. The problem with being a self-appointed troubleshooter is it means you got to deal with the damn trouble. ‘Lanny, my man, it’s nothing. Here, you swap with me. I got some crackers.’

  Lanny is still grumbling. ‘They don’t treat me right, TK. Man has a right to crackers.’

  TK walks him over to the table where Ramón and his lady Diyana are sitting with their hands clasped together tighter than a clamshell, staring at each other like lovesick teenagers. But unlike teenagers, they’ve seen enough to know how rare and precious their feelings are.

  Diyana is easy with the smiles these days. Used to be that she hid her mouth with a hand to cover up her one black tooth, but she’s kinder to herself since she and Ramón got together. Love will do that.

  ‘Nice shoes, Ramón,’ TK says, noting the red high-tops with a wink and a twinge of regret. He sees he’s shaved too.

  ‘Thanks, TK.’

  ‘Lemme see?’ Lanny demands.

  ‘Like the ones I had when I was nineteen,’ Ramón says, sticking his foot out from under the table, twisting it one way, then the other, for them to admire. ‘Only those were white.’

  ‘Gonna get soaked with the first snow,’ Lanny grumbles.

  ‘Then I’ll switch to my boots,’ Ramón shrugs.

  Lanny is already bored of the conversation. ‘You know they gave me pretzels? Did you get pretzels or crackers?’

  ‘Lemme get you a hot dog. That’ll make up for it, right, Lanny?’

  TK is heading for the line when he sees a lost-looking man lurking by the door. Long white hair tied back in a ponytail, face as crumpled and ill-fitting as his brown blazer. Mid-fifties, TK would guess, although the street has a way of making people look older. His features are gaunt and also saggy, with scooped-out cheeks and soft folds gathered up under his jaw, but his pale blue eyes are as sharp as a box-cutter a kid might pull on you in the street. All sorts, TK reminds himself, but he automatically checks his hands to see if he’s holding. Man with eyes like that in prison is a man with intent. Or a tweaker.

  But the man is holding only an empty plastic cup, aiming for the table with the Kool-Aid. The back of his hands are pocked with little scars, like the ones you get in the screw factory, when splinters of metal filings shear off and stick into you and you got to pick them out with tweezers after your shift when you should be having a nice cold one. If you still had a job. If you hadn’t sworn off the drink.

  ‘Hey there, you okay?’ he says,
trying to set him at ease. It’s one of the things he does, gets newcomers settled in. ‘You need something I can help you with?’ The man’s expression spasms, trying out different combinations. Ah, TK thinks, autistic. That’s easier to handle than psychotic.

  ‘I’m looking for someone.’ He speaks hesitantly, dragging the words out like someone trying to control a stutter. ‘I thought it was Louanne. But it wasn’t. Not the boy, either. He couldn’t get up.’

  ‘You got a name?’ TK prods, gently. ‘If it’s someone who comes here regular, I’ll probably know them. If not, I can help you look them up on the computer. White pages, Facebook. You can find pretty much anyone these days.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, looking round the big hall, people clustered round the big tables with the cheery tablecloths. ‘Someone. It’s very raw here,’ the man says, rubbing the white stubble on his cheeks up and down, up and down. ‘Everyone is broken.’

  ‘Hey, now,’ TK bristles, ‘people get banged up a little. But they’re good people. Why don’t you come sit with us for a bit.’ He keeps talking – it helps with ones like this, sets them at ease. ‘This place is like the movies! You got everything: drama, action, romance, hard times, good times, coming back from the dead times. You know they filmed all the Transformers movies here? Robocop, too. I reckon it’s about time they did a movie about people instead of machines,’ TK says. ‘Explosions and fighting robots and shit. What’s that got to do with the heart?’ He pauses. ‘I know I’m going on, but point is, you can’t judge people by the outside. Like the Bible says, the body’s just a vessel. Not that I’m religious or nothing. You know they make you choose a higher power when you go through the twelve steps? You know what I chose?’ He gets ready to launch into his tale, honed like a comedy routine.