What shape it took, that was up to her.
In the end it was not so very long before her feet touched the bottom again. With the ebb and flow of the tide she made her way at last to the shore and collapsed, the waves washing around her. As the tide went out, it swept her thoughts away with it, leaving Samantha unconscious on the beach, dawn not far-off.
The ocean had delivered her to the sand and receded, leaving her to continue on her own, wherever her path might take her.
JONAH AROSE
by Tom Piccirilli
For Dick Layman
1
The flood was upon us, and I wanted to go with it.
I watched the Works for three days of freezing Manhattan rain, lingering inside a storm that wouldn’t die down. Arching rivers flowed in the streets and draped off the vaulted roofs, splashing, white-capped in the vicious wind. Whenever 1 looked at my soaked, prune-ish fingers I thought of the pickled punks floating in their yellow liquids, tiny fetal hands clasped in prayer.
Fishboy Lenny was having a hell of a time in the roiling gutter, bobbing and swimming in torrents of rainwater. Corpses of bloated rats rolled by, sweeping down toward the docks. Addicts and the homeless shivered themselves to pieces, begging pocket change from stonewall citizens and wet, heartless hookers. The downpour didn’t stop the whores. If anything, it drove them out into the saturated night. They paraded through the subways and pushed across the avenue, all tits and rabbit fur and shining red umbrellas. They slogged up to taxis at traffic lights, crawled into the backs of vans, and hung at the entrance of the Works hoping to entice the curious passers-by.
Starving dogs tore each other apart in the alleys, just another fragment of the drenched tableau. Blood ran but washed away immediately, leaving no impression of life or death behind. It was nothing new. Jolly Nell couldn’t take the street noise and started singing the poisoned violets scene Poveri Fiori from Act IV of Adriana Lecouvreur. I’d never realized before that she could really belt out the high notes when she put everything into it.
Male prostitutes in baseball caps or cowboy hats leaned back against the bricks, posing beneath lamplights, thumbs hooked in their jeans as the slow-moving traffic eased by like oil. Christ, they’d all watched too many movies but none of the right ones. Frizzy heads bobbed in the laps of anemic businessmen, and the world kept kicking.
I could feel the energy gathering around us, swirling, black and degenerate. The stink of displacement, of aberration, became stronger as I kept watch. I knew it was going to be bad. Any sharp noise drew my attention in the constant patter, gurgle and spray of rain.
Juba unfolded himself from where he knelt, unwinding those unholy limbs further and further until they looked as if they would never stop. Even on his knees he’s taller than most men, and when he stands he towers above all normality. Anybody looking out a second-story window would be almost eye-level with him. He wavered in the air, each elongated bone and tendon showing through the thin tissue of his nutmeg flesh. His -oblong head appeared poorly crafted, lopsided to the left where his shoulder was hunched. He was a tad over eight feet tall, but Nell could easily pick him up and carry him across the midway, even tossing him in the air and juggling him a bit. It had once been part of the act and drew delighted yowls from the children.
He was also an anatomical wonder. When Juba sucked in his stomach you could see his backbone thrusting through. For a quarter you could touch it. Ladies would squeal and make disgusted faces, and dream about what this freak would be like in bed, with everything so long.
His heart was perfectly defined, and you could watch the muscle beating. I’d witnessed the pounding of his anger, remorse and desire. He remained a soft-spoken godly man, but I still didn’t know which god.
“Is something going to happen?” Juba asked. Even his voice was thin, a sparse whisper.
“Yes,” 1 said. “You feel it too?”
“I can tell by your face.”
“Oh.”
“And I know you’re never mistaken about things like this.”
“We all have our talents.”
Jolly Nell, forever the enthusiastic optimist, said, “Perhaps nothing bad will come, this one time.”
How I loved her for that. For her willingness to offer me a chance to be wrong about the arrival of misery.
But I wasn’t, and Nell understood that. She’d always been the caregiver, the brace over which the rest of us could sag or slump. Her mother had sold her to McKenna’s Carnival when she was seven years old and already topping one-sixty. Falling into her arms was like being embraced by all your loves and fears at once, the power in them something natural, intense and dominant. She snapped two of my ribs in a rough clench a while back, but I needed that hug worse than anything else at the time, even while the shards of bone ground together into my lungs. I spit blood for days.
Now, at five-one, she broke seven hundred pounds easy, but never seemed to have trouble with her ankles or shins or lower back the way some of the other Jollies had. Nell moved with the consistency and gravity of the setting moon. She affected us like a tidal force.
My fingers began to tremble and the burning in my guts grew worse. It happened like this, from time to time, when the hammer was about to drop. My breath came in bites and my eyes flitted wildly, scanning the cars racing by in the seeping darkness, headlights smeared upon the slick blackness.
Nell hugged me, but my ribs hadn’t completely healed yet and I grunted in pain, quivering at her touch. She said, “None of this is your fault. It’s all right. It’s going to be fine.”
Hertzburg let out a belly full of ferocious laughter. It went on longer than it should have, there in the storm. Thunder snarled above. Finally he noted Nell’s expression and stopped. “I’m sorry, but your idealism during our current circumstances astounds me at this point.”
“It shouldn’t,” she told him.
“No, I suppose not. Some of us can clear away death as easily as finishing off a roasted pig.”
“Oh, well, isn’t that cute?”
“For others it gets tangled in our curls.”
Jolly Nell planted herself, fists on her colossal hips. “Face up to it, you’re enjoying yourself. You’re having a terrific time.”
“Do we have any choice?”
“That’s enough,” I said.
“Of course it is. Let’s hold our vigil and observe further.”
Hertzburg didn’t brush his soaked hair out of his eyes. It hung dripping across his nose and cheeks, in the comers of his mouth, down those powerful arms and between his thick fingers. Though billed as the Wild Man, he’d never been good at appearing feral. He had too much pride for that. McKenna used to go nuts when Hertzburg wore his reading glasses in the sideshow, playing chess against himself, discussing Nietzsche with the rubes, reciting Baudelaire and Goethe. Anything to break character. Even with his large muscles corded and covered in fuzz, wearing a Tarzan outfit with big leopard spots on it, he was the definition of poise.
Stoned teens in the audience would sometimes try to test him in an effort to impress their pimply girlfriends, swinging bicycle chains or tossing lit matchbooks. Their ugly, harassing chortling would float through camp and the rest of us would know what was coming. Hertzburg never lost his composure. Not when he’d grabbed the rube kids by their throats, not when they were trying to knife him, and not even while the cops shackled him and the parents shrieked. He videotaped his performances so he could later prove he always acted in self-defense.
The street lights seemed to dim for an instant, showing the contours of shadows in the sheets of rain. It appeared almost like fire falling upon us. I doubled over and went to my knees.
Hertzburg said, “Guess this is it.”
A Jeep Cherokee with bad brake lining tried to run the red, way too late. The engine roared as the gears slipped. Everybody on the street stopped what they were doing in order to watch. A yellow cab pulled out and cut it off, sending the Jeep into a wicked skid, snaking and
spinning now. Nell covered her eyes but Juba leaned forward off the curb as if he might pluck out the driver with one hand.
Brake lights cast a sanguine hue against the rain. The Jeep straightened an instant before it smashed into a teenage crackhead, tires screeching and sputtering in the puddles. The girl had on a yellow slicker and it made her a good target. She’d just taken down an entire bachelor party in the back of a limo and still had the loose cash in her hand. The Jeep veered and swerved again as she rolled up the grille, bounced off the hood into the windshield, and flipped over the top.
Her arms went out wide as if trying to go with it and fly for a little while. She appeared to have caught an air draft and the edges of her slicker flapped. Her hair dipped and flung aloft. The whole scene had a brutal sense of ballet to it.
Her body bowed hideously, staying up there for a time as if grooving to ‘70s tunes—”Dream Weaver,” maybe “Thunder Island” or “Crocodile Rock,” and then she came crashing down on the curb. Bills fluttered past, crisp twenties. It looked like she’d made an even hundred for the whole party. The back of her skull parted easily, flopping open on the cement. Fishboy Lenny swam up the gutter and peered closely at her, making his noises of distress and want. “Fweep, mweee, fwsshh.”
Without so much as a crack in the windshield, the Jeep gunned it and kept going straight through the next intersection. The three guys in the limo popped out of the moon roof and glanced down at the dead whore, grinning with slick teeth. They’d put it to her, giving her a last lay to take to hell. They should’ve just strangled her with their Italian ties. Their high-pitched dingo laughter sounded deranged but genuine as they pulled away. They were in a mood now and would probably smack around some deaf-mutes on the way home just to keep the high going.
Blurs of black motion began to swarm up and down the avenue. The street folk were on the girl then, nabbing her shoes and money and vials of crack. They danced after the cash, pirouetting in the wind, skipping past parked cars. Nobody wanted the slicker but they hauled her corpse backward right out of her stained white thong. Fishboy Lenny watched it all with his usual wide-eyed innocence, twin nostril slashes on his noseless face quivering as he mewled.
Jolly Nell asked, “Shouldn’t we help?”
Juba the living skeleton said, “We can do nothing, Nell, she’s already dead. Look—”
“They’re taking her …”
“It’s to be expected.”
“My God, and her …”
“They live off carrion. It’s their way.”
“Don’t watch,” I said from the shadows, watching.
Fishboy Lenny swam from drain pipe to drain pipe as the sewers whirled and burped, his small flippers already spattered with red. I’d worked alongside him for several years and still didn’t know a thing about his past, or even if he had one. He was found treading water in the tank of the high dive act one morning and immediately became part of McKenna’s Carnival. On occasion he would mimic words well enough to sound as if he was actually speaking, but they were only strung-together, incoherent sentences. It made you wonder what went on behind those wide eyes, and just what that mind might reveal.
The rumors about the Works had made it from New York down to the southern carny circuit. They were as different and preposterous as the gaffs and ballyhoo on any midway.
Like you used to have to screw on camera to get inside, or cut open your wrist and bleed in front of your children, or quote passages in Greek from the Book of Revelation. It sounded stupid enough to be true and had all probably happened at one point or another. There was an air of East Village artistry about it, a performance piece set in motion that hadn’t met up with enough resistance to slow it down yet. I wondered about that.
It had the worked up promotion of an Andy Warhol-type Factory alliance, where the artisans and contrivers gathered to film themselves shitting and sleeping and then presented it as art to anybody senseless enough to fall for it. Word was now that if you went inside looking for a leather-deather ‘trix to whip the hide off your ass, you could find her easy enough. She’d be courteous and sweet and spit in your face only when you asked her to, and the salted ends of her cat-o’-nine-tails would help to heal the welts up quickly. You wanted some home-stomped wine or Cuban cigars, a bestiality porno or a discussion group on nineteenth-century literature, or if you needed some guy to show you how to break your own thumbs to get out of high-tinsel steel cuffs, then you could just waltz right in, pick what you required, and then backtrack out again.
But if you went with the intention of finding anything more, maybe looking for poetry to be carved into your heart, the agony of legend or a slap-down with God, seeking redemption or erasure of a dead past, then you joined something more looming and immense along the way. Until you carelessly grew into reckless myth and couldn’t make it in the regular world anymore.
A writer named Paynes knew how to work the gaff and he’d hit it big with his first couple of books—bestseller lists, movie deals, television, all the rest of it. He was out of his head, that much was obvious, but his timing had been perfect. They needed somebody to stir the pot again. Paynes bought out nearly the entire city block, four or five warehouses at least, even the rubble of empty lots where the bag ladies and the zealots and the mainliners crawled among dog shit. He’d spent time in the nuthatch and had brought the asylum sensibility back home with him. From what I’d heard, the space inside had now been split into a hundred separate areas, maybe more, including private suites, museums and exhibit halls.
There were even a couple of stages where circus acts trained, the high- and low-wire routines, dancing French poodle performances, live theater where they played out scenes from Odets and Orton. TV and film sets where they shot children’s morning programs with lots of dinosaur costumes and moon-eyed puppets, and pornos with hermaphrodites as ugly as three-toed tree sloths clambering on top of double amputee toothless dwarves. It had its own irony, satire and breathless plausibility. Madhouse. Anything was possible, which 1 supposed was the whole point.
I watched the place engulf a Fedex carrier and two Chinese delivery kids in the course of a weekend. Anyone with a crazy burning hurt who went inside the Works never came out again.
No one except my father, Nicodemus, and he only in a dream. Come find me, son, in the blackest heart of Babylon.
I figured this was the right place. They said Paynes had gone so far inside that he couldn’t be found again. They said a bloody messiah stalked the halls, and that the devil chose his playmates carefully here. It was about time.
The Works drew in the tormented and the lost and the defeated, and even a Southern tent revival minister in a frock coat could find a home for his insanity in this dwelling. Maybe there was room for me too, but I doubted it.
Hertzburg whispered, “They got her.”
“What?”
“Somebody carried off the dead whore. Look up the block, you can watch her slicker swaying in the dark. He’s got her over his shoulder.”
“That gruesome bastard—”
“He’s having trouble handling her weight.” Hertzburg took a few steps forward until he was out on the avenue, and he finally cleared the hair from his eyes so he could see it happening. “He’s holding the top of her skull in place with one hand and dragging her away.”
Juba scowled in that direction. “It’s to be expected.”
“Stop saying that, Juba,” I told him. “Who the hell expects a murdered prostitute to be stripped clean on the street and her body stolen by some maniac?”
“We do,” he said, and I bit my tongue until the coppery taste flooded down my throat because he was right.
I could see why my father had chosen the Works, and why the Works had chosen him. There was a thriving audience here that desired to be entertained. They wanted miracle and astonishment and resurrection. They wanted to fuck all the blistering hate out of their miserable bones and so did my old man. He could set up a soapbox in any comer and scream into their fac
es and slop up their sticky spirits. He must be having the time of his life.
Nicodemus was in there somewhere, and he had my son Jonah with him.
Police prowled the area constantly but never at the right times. They hit the cherry lights and blared the siren for two seconds at a clip, barely making a ripple in the sex action. Nobody really noticed and the rats continued floating by. The cops scooted out of there without ever stepping from the car, amazed to have escaped once more. News crews from the major networks came by twice but didn’t exit their vans. They shot the doorway and would use it later as file footage. Frail and frightened husbands hunched under their steering wheels. They all knew this was a borderland to stay clear from, but their peculiarities kept them coming back. I had no doubt that they’d all eventually be swallowed by the Works.
“Are we ever going in?” Hertzburg asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“And you’re certain Nicodemus is inside?”
“Can’t you smell him?”
“I smell piety. But that could be you.”
“It’s all of us.”
Juba grunted. He tilted that oversized head and said, “What do they do with their hurt?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“A simple one. I haven’t seen the doors open to let a single person out, not even to bring someone to the hospital or dispose of a body. For that matter, what of their children?”
“They can’t be breeding in there,” Hertzburg said.
“You sound so certain.”
“Newborn life can’t survive in that kind of atmosphere.”
“No?” I asked.
“Absolutely not.” He said it with a flat dullness, arms crossed over the Tarzan outfit, trying to hold himself in tight. “That ambiance is for dispossession. Ruin and havoc, not for nurturing.”
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