A God of Hungry Walls

by Garrett Cook

  She thinks she likes him anyway and that he seems nice. He’d be more likely to invite her to hang out or something than Kaz would. Her mind is slightly fuzzy. Her mind is full of affirmation and pre-med with a soupcon of trust. This soupcon of trust is pushing me out and so I must push back. It is easy for me to suggest it might be hot in here. Simple and sad and a bit patronizing but to tell that it is hot in here will certainly start her up. She therefore looks in the mirror at herself in baggy sweatshirt and the sweatshirt and her body start to merge. And they’re lumping into one, indeterminate and bland and grey and shapeless as Leah herself. Who the hell is Leah to say she’s anyone? To remove the Tufts sweatshirt and look once more on lumpy imperfection. Though she is tight and moonfleshed and taut from exercise, she is shapeless, she is grey inside herself. Is it hot enough to risk ridicule and reveal her grotesquerie? To reveal the blobs over blobs over blobs?

  She’d talked about these things with the one who left. They were almost friends. They both had stuff in common, bad ideas. I flash her face before Leah’s eyes and make her think back. I infuse the room with her. I scatter atoms in the air. I let her breathe in the scent. Alone. Fat. Uncomfortable. Nose filled with her friend. She needs to throw out the banana, so she tosses out the banana. The banana was oozing with fat and Leah is oozing with fat. She shouldn’t take off the sweatshirt since she is too much like it.

  She sits down on the bed, head between her knees. She wants to cry but she would never let herself as her father and her mother would never let her. She is stunned and she must sit and listen. I tell her she doesn’t like her and that nobody does and that she isn’t welcome in this place. She should always say nothing. She should study harder though she is good enough to get good enough and thin enough to do what she must. Kaz doesn’t like her. Micah doesn’t like her. There is no way Brian likes her. He is too cool to like her and she should simply remain alone. Alone with the mirror and alone with me.

  Something happens next that I don’t like. It’s something that doesn’t happen in this house. It isn’t likely most days, it doesn’t happen most days, but it does. There is a knock on Leah’s door. This was unanticipated. I tell her not to answer it because nobody wants to see her but she answers it. Brian is standing outside.

  “I know you gotta study and it’s still kind of early, but do you maybe want a beer? Everybody is off doing their own things and I thought maybe you’d like some company.”

  A shaken, vulnerable Leah nods in agreement and Brian goes to get the beers. I hate this man.

  Champagne

  Antonia is reading her Bible again. It is no longer words but she wants to be good and obedient. At least she thinks she does. Is she pious or selfish? Is she looking to preserve or protect her herself or is the love of God in her? She asks these questions. I know the answers but I’m not going to tell her. She thinks she wants to feel these things inside her and know them to be the truth. She thinks she wants to love God and love Clarence and Maddy and that ought to be enough.

  Come Sunday, she’ll sit down in church and she’ll act like it’s enough and she is Clarence and Maddy’s housekeeper. Does she feel the love of God in the minutes of Sunday fresh air and sunlight? One could not help but do so, could they? The Bible reminds her of Sunday and the need to be loving and to appreciate everything she has. I think I might help her.

  “You have so many nice things,” I tell her, “you have warmth and comfort. You have a lovely home and you have Clarence and Maddy who love you.”

  Antonia nods as piss begins to dribble down her bare thigh. She feels ashamed but then thinks of Maddy’s soft and loving hands on her at bath time. It could be bathtime tonight. Proof enough that Clarence and Maddy love her, that God loves her and that I love her too. Her shame is gone and replaced by gratitude that she is safe inside this cage in Clarence and Maddy’s lovely home where the wickedness and danger and corruption outside cannot touch her.

  “I love you Maddy,” says Antonia.

  She might prefer Maddy to Clarence, even though so many of the long red streaks and stripes upon her back are courtesy of Maddy’s moods. But Maddy is justified. Antonia does bad things sometimes and thinks bad thoughts that I often bring to Maddy and Antonia must be punished for them. I do not always bring the truth to Maddy, since the truth isn’t what she wants.

  She wants the whip, the razors to leap into her hand. She wants an excuse for another drink and another go at the grimecovered little whore in the cage in the basement. The Kitten. Clarence hasn’t touched her all that often since The Kitten. The Kitten wants Clarence to herself. She conspires. They were going to kill her like the other one. But somehow Clarence changed his mind and has chosen to keep The Kitten, who is having thoughts about Clarence and is having thoughts about escaping.

  And if she escapes, she will ruin all this and Maddy and Clarence will be punished. And everything will be lost. I project before her eyes the girl with no skin, body still young and tight as when Clarence used it and made it his but skullfaced, missing giant clumps of hair, mouth sewn shut, head still bleeding from when Clarence bashed it in before tossing her out in the woods. Maddy sees this and takes another drink and she picks up the whip and she storms out of the bedroom.

  It’s three in the afternoon and she’s still wearing her nightgown, the nightgown that barely holds back her great, sagged flapping breasts and does nothing to hide the wrinkles upon her wattle like neck, or the cellulite and pimples on her thighs. She does not have to dress up or hide her shame from The Kitten. She feels a little self conscious undressed or half dressed in front of Clarence but The Kitten is kitten and therefore less than people. And doesn’t much of the shame come from The Kitten? She should punish the Kitten for making her feel this way, like she is less than wife and less than woman.

  She grabs the whip and grabs her bottle of wine and she heads down to see The Kitten. The Kitten has gotten scared and shat again. Why does The Kitten’s shit always smell so rank? Why is its piss so salty? The Kitten is such a dirty, stupid creature. Why do they have to keep the foul thing around? She thinks back to the last one. Clarence could still have a couple days fun with it anyway. And they could always get a new one. This one isn’t special. It’s ugly. It’s getting skinny even though she feeds it good. Skinny stinking Kitten. Making her feel fat.

  “Hello, mother,” says The Kitten because Clarence makes The Kitten call Maddy “mother,” even though Maddy doesn’t like it at all. Maybe Clarence does it because Maddy doesn’t like it at all. Clarence should know better. He’s a goddamn doctor.

  “You fucking shat yourself again, you stupid whore,” says Maddy.

  “Mother, I am sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t clean up the fucking shit in your cage. You know what you have to do.”

  Antonia gets down on her knees, praying silently for strength. I examine the situation and though I once again show her the First Girl, the dead girl, I know that she is going to get just that. I don’t know how it will play out but I know she is finding that strength. Even though she is on her knees, picking up a glob of her excrement, trying not to smell it as she pops it into her mouth. She knows Maddy will get mad if she just swallows it right away, so as always she makes a show of chewing it, tasting it, savoring it.

  “How does that taste?” Maddy asks.

  Antonia knows the script. She knows very well, exactly what she needs to say and that she can’t say it with tears in her eyes or any hesitation. If she hesitates or cries, Maddy will retaliate and if Maddy retaliates, things will only get more miserable. Maddy can be very cruel, though Antonia should still feel grateful to have her.

  “It tastes good. It’s all that I deserve.”

  “That’s fucking right, you dumb whore.” She whips Antonia’s bared back hard. Then again. Line after line, streak after streak of blood appear under the lash. Antonia asks God to make her strong enough to take this, to let this forge her into something beautiful and mighty and hopefully to die this time, this time
maybe she will die of this and be accepted into the kingdom of Heaven. She didn’t used to think of Heaven so much but Maddy was sure it was so and Clarence is sure that Heaven awaits the virtuous who suffer to be free of sin, so she allows this, hoping to slip away into the next world.

  But those are suicidal thoughts and life’s a gift. Life is a gift from God. She clings to life and prays to herself that God will free her from these thoughts of death and give her the strength to appreciate Maddy’s love and the fortitude to take on Clarence’s. They cherish and love her and keep her soul pressed close to their hearts and they want her to be strong and good and beautiful and right for her place at the right hand of God when she finally dies and floats on up to Heaven.

  “Break the bottle,” I whisper to Maddy, “kill the little slut. She has plans. Clarence and her have plans.”

  She does not need to be told this twice. She knows it is probably so because Clarence barely touches her anymore and he comes down and puts his dirty hands on The Kitten all night, pinching its scrawny body, dirtying himself inside its sinful sinful cunt. The plan is clear and Maddy will need to be sharp and smart and reassert her space. Yes, kill it. Break the bottle and be done with it. Stab it dead.

  “She’s going to kill you now,” I whisper to Antonia, “she’s going to kill you and defile your corpse. She is not one of mine but in the house of the enemy. You need to survive now, you need to live for the glory of God, for my glory. You cannot give up the gift of life yet.”

  Maddy shatters the bottle, Antonia turns. And for a moment, I make the First Girl creep up on Maddy, let her muffled choking sounds remind her of what she’s done and remind her of a debt that’s coming due. Maddy’s attention shifts away from the bottle, and Antonia sleek and wildcat tough, determined, takes the bottle from her and stabs her. Pounces. I play back and forth the indignities, remind her of the shit in her mouth, let her look once more upon the terrible face of the First Girl.

  She brings Maddy to the ground, kneeling over her triumphant, broken bottle in her hand at the ready, stabs again, then remembers again all the torture, the pain and indignity and the filth she tried to pretend was something ascetic. She can see the fat, naked monster underneath her and everything it’s done to her and the debt that’s coming due. She takes the broken bottle and she forces it into the wide, stinking angry flaps of Maddy. She makes a thrust, frothing up juices and blood, then another, then another as the behemoth struggles beneath her begging her to stop, invoking the name of God and also every other filthy rude name she can think and there are plenty, the goddamn slattern.

  Antonia keeps going and she doesn’t stop until Maddy stops moving and protesting, she doesn’t stop until there is a great big puddle of blood and pussy brine collected between Maddy’s legs and there is a glassy empty look in the eyes of her oppressor. So Antonia does the only thing that makes sense. She crawls away from this, away from the murder she was just forced to commit. She picks up the whip, gets down on her knees and prays for some guidance, some absolution.

  Session

  If you have faith in the walls, I am god.

  I need only trust to become the Lord of Forms.

  Kaz is having one of her sessions with Doctorpuppet.

  “I don’t think you’re a real doctor.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “I’m not sure if you’re real.”

  “But I am a doctor.”

  Fear widens her blue eyes. They become perhaps too big, too clear. This is why men avert their gaze. They are afraid of what might happen. She practically swallows her bottom lip. Kaz wants to tell Doctorpuppet that she is falling in love with him. But she won’t. She knows that will make him go. She should know he never will. He is at the moment the vessel of her faith, if I take him away, she has no reason to believe. She should understand that nobody really leaves.

  “I’m not going to ask her that,” Doctorpuppet tells me, “it wouldn’t be right. I don’t like this.”

  You shut your jowly face. Nobody cares what you like. Nobody cares about your big bald head, your sad, canine mouth or your grey weepy eyes. You shut your jowly face or I’ll make you hurt.

  If you have faith in the walls, I am god. Doctorpuppet’s a believer. I’m the first thing he believed in. Which makes me as vast as the sky. Doctorpuppet will behave. Doctorpuppet had been pious in the eyes of all around him, Doctorpuppet was an exemplary member of the community. But I was the first thing Doctorpuppet ever believed in.

  “Tell me about your father,” says Doctorpuppet, “tell me all about your father.”

  Kaz closes up her mouth tight as can be, like an infant refusing a spoonful of cereal. She shakes her head juvenile, she crosses her arms over her chest. But she puts her knee up and extends her other leg. Her body is open and closed all at once to him, inviting and rejecting him. Doctorpuppet is all too familiar with such gestures. He had plenty of patients like her.

  “Okay,” he says, “we can talk about that later.”

  I take him back to the moment. I can take him anywhere I like. I take him back to Antonia and the shard of glass and the blazing eyes of the woman he started to love in spite of all the torture and humiliation. I keep him there, suspending time for him. If you have faith in these walls, I am glad, I have mastery of time and tide and custody of Hell. I take him back to alone with nothing but the whispers and the ghosts and the First Girl behind him.

  You shut your jowly face. Nobody cares what you like. Doctorpuppet will behave once more.

  “Tell me about your father,” he insists, I lend some of my strength and make her shake. And she shakes. The upright knee goes down, her arms uncross and she closes her eyes and she opens her mouth. It’s obvious what she wants in there.

  “He never touched me, but I always wished he would. His eyes were like hands on me and I liked the way they touched me. And I wanted him to touch me. I saw him and my mother together one time. I sat in the doorway and watched until they finished.”

  Doctorpuppet wants to let her stop but he doesn’t. Soon it is no longer me in control but the things that made him mine. Doctorpuppet couldn’t be decent if he tried. For some reason he tries to as if he was ever his own. But he is owned by the things that made him mine and he is owned by Kaz’s thighs and long, slender toes, and the bit of white belly peeking from under her shirt as she stretches, the sapphire blue of her eyes, the confrontational black of her lipstick. The youth and perfection he missed in Antonia, who I am thinking of letting him use for my amusement.

  “Go on,” he says, eyes predatory, letting her know that he’s examined her up and down. He’s palmed the scalpel from his pocket but she doesn’t see it.

  “I was only little but I knew how to touch myself. I told you I learned how to touch myself early. I developed young in a lot of ways. I think it messed me up. Do you think I’m messed up?”

  He laughs. Every time I hear his laugh, it amazes me that none of the others knew better, not the First Girl, who I am shooing, not Antonia, not any of his patients who he had his way with.

  “No, I don’t think you’re messed up. Nobody’s perfect, Kaz, we all have traumas and issues and sexual hangups. It’s just part of being human. I wouldn’t be much of a doctor if I branded you just “messed up,” now would I?”

  Kaz crosses her arms over her chest, sits up some and smiles.

  “I suppose “having one’s shit fucked up” isn’t in the DSM is it, doc?”

  “Afraid not. And if it were, the human race would be on Thorazine.”

  “I like you,” says Kaz, lying back down and stretching more, “you’re the best doctor I’ve worked with.”

  “I like you too, Kaz,” says Doctorpuppet, “and you don’t need to worry about infantile sexuality. It’s a common thing to be sexually precocious and as a society, we don’t really know what to do with it, in the same way that we have trouble dealing with gifted children. Our society might be prejudiced a lot against intellectuals but its prejudices against free sexual express
ion are a lot worse.”

  She calculates whether or not she could stretch her foot out into his lap. I convey this information to Doctorpuppet and he leans in. She wants to touch him, therefore he can be touched. She toys with his crotch with her long, bare toes, making it start to quiver and rise. He lets out a moan of contentment.

  “I’m not sure we should be doing this,” says Doctorpuppet. This is a speech he’s mastered many times and has given more than I can count. Doctorpuppet is very good at feigning reluctance and feigning ethics and feigning some measure of decency. There were times in his life when he was good enough to convince himself that he believed that things he was doing were wrong. Those days, of course are gone. And he is infinitely thankful to be free of them.

  His fat, vicious harridan cow of a wife is trying to make herself present in the room but I push hard against her. This is not Maddy’s time. This is all for Doctorpuppet and all for Kaz. What is that sound? No matter. I’m sure it’s nothing. I own all sounds in this place. The tiny clanging could be anything. I shouldn’t concern myself over any tiny clanging. Not when something like this is going on.

  “How does that feel?” she asks him, foot making intimate circles along his balls. There can be no way she doesn’t know how that feels. Not when he stirs underneath her like that, not when she has given herself to the men that she has given herself to. She has come to be absolved of this empty space, this extra cunt inside her that she fills with man after man, she has come to be absolved of this empty space but she has found instead something else to plug it up awhile. There is no stemming the flood, that is for certain.