by James Newman
“Any ideas?”
“I think he was under the city.”
“The tunnels?”
“Yup.”
“Rose says he spent his last days staring down into the sewers,” I continued, “And we both know what happened down there.”
“Right and The Resistance struck again. What if Jimmy is still down there, what if he needs us?”
“Then we go down there, Hale. Right now, I’m taking a trip to the Very Special Bar. Rose says Kurt spent his time with the freaks.”
“I found some pictures,” Hale said. “Photographs of Kurt, shall I send them?”
“Perhaps, yes. Send pictures to my life-enhancer. I need to visit with the Very Special People.”
“Can I come along?”
“Not this time, Hale. I need to think.”
Taking a tiny pinch of the Devil’s Breath from the pouch in my pocket, thinking is just what I did. Visions, strange dead dreams, both clearer and more confused than any nightmare before – seek and you shall find, baby, seek and you shall find.
EIGHTEEN
VISIONS OF Kurt, shirt and face covered in blood ran up to the fourth or fifth floor and threw himself down to a stretch of concrete. His face splattered and cracked like a watermelon, his brain matter mixing with the cerebral-spinal fluid creating a mix of greys and crimsons and an unforgettable green sludge flickering under those forever unforgiving blinking neon lights. But who knew how it happened? An Indian not-selling cyclist had fallen from his bike and he had puked right there and then on the street. He may have seen everything including the dude who did or did not push him from the balcony. Was this how it happened? Maybe reality television held the answer to the mystery. The street footage may hold some clue to Kurt’s demise. We must check the CBD, the television production companies, the Chinese crew.
Violent treaties between man and woman and beast; a cart selling dried insects, crickets, beetles, scorpions, and a large water bug not unlike a cockroach. Cockroaches, rats, and a book by a beat poet somewhere in the zone. A teenage western woman wearing a bikini petted a slow Loris, while her boyfriend took photos with his life-enhancing device. The animal’s eyes were cold and watery. Primal instinct to attack dulled by tranquillizers or morphine or social disdain. Whatever. Another story. Up in the mountains, a tiger zoo. Tim (the tiger) went wild when his heroin was switched for baby powder by a zoo-boy who shot up Tim’s morph through the penile vein. It happened. Another story. Tiger ripped off a Finnish tattooist’s arm, made the Fun City Express.
TIGER TIM TEARS LIMB FROM FINN
A lanky girl wearing skin-tight hot pants blew a kiss while stumbling back in mock embarrassment before her fat friend slaps her back and she expelled a laughter that pierces the hazy polluted sky. The night sky starless – all the stars were on the streets of Fun City sparkling with the twilight of infinite depravities. Impossible transsexuals strutting past drunken poker-playing comedians. Lights flickered like a dream machine night after night developing in this darkroom, and the visions keep coming, and coming fast, they came, and they came. A man dragged his one-legged body along the street holding a mug in his teeth. Beggar earned at least a thousand bucks a month hopping into the Penny Black Hotel for a shower and a treat from a street freelancer late on the rent. It happens. Another story. Close connections with the Fun Police who owned the street and rented it out to the various traders of clothes, food, pharmaceuticals, drugs to go up and down, ninja death stars, dildos, dime store pulp books, bodies, bodies, and more bodies. The Night Market. Thousands of bodies, bodies everywhere, bodies, bodies, bodies. Beggar body propped up on the sidewalk, cut in half, torso terminating at the waist, sinking into the streets...Bodies, bodies, bodies, black bodies, brown bodies, white bodies, old bodies, young bodies, bodies... The Black Market... Le Marche Noir... Fun Linna... Strada Felice...Enormous bloated quivering slabs of meat. Thin strips of meat, large slices, thick uncensored wholesome chunks of meat, meat, meat. Soft, tender medallions, rump, tenderloin, and sirloin, fillet, hung up before sale... The Night Market... Marche Noir... The price of a body... A person... A soul... A lifetime of dreams, sold...Sold to the highest bidder...La Marche Noir.
“How would you like your human animal served, sir?
Young and nervous or old and tough?”
The sickness swelled the stomach, the pain touchable and unimaginable, and the vision lasted and lasted and no Punch could erase that.
....
Le Marche Noir.
Near Eastern man walks by shaking with the Saint Vitus dance, limbs lost control long after the mind had flown to yellow-breasted sunbirds of the east years ago. Shaking up and down the street, begging potential, sure, but somehow he doesn’t have it in him to beg. Shook-up faith, torn to ribbons, ancient belief systems, holy books, Mother’s final words. Tourists credited cash thinking that he was a street artist, which indeed he may have been, for all the street cared. A dark-skinned woman leans languidly against a billboard blowing careless blue bubblegum bubbles up into the oily night sky; the billboard reads:
SHELL WHITE
Intimate Whiteness.
She spits out the bubblegum and grinds it into the concrete with the cheap plastic sole of a street-side high-heel. A civet struggling on a leash held by a dark-skinned adolescent male. Teeth white, wide smile, palm open for a coin. The animal snakes around the boy’s shoulders before leaping to the ground to chase one of the city’s large grey sewer rats back down the cracks of the sewers, where another world of rodents and snakes and lizards dwelt among the bubbling grey river of dark city waste. Guessed the civet wasn’t all he was peddling, everybody was peddling something and it usually meant their ass gift-wrapped in a box at the end of the final service. Few realized that they were really doing nothing but dying in Fun City. It happened. Another story. The Night Market. Intangible commodities like love and companionship sold most at the Night Market. George, little George, had been found dead and dusted in the Penny Black Hotel after he had drunk himself to the Dark Side on five or six bottles of Tiger Sweat a day. Invested half a million bucks through a girlfriend in an elephant sanctuary. She swung and swung so he worked as a volunteer at the sanctuary. She kept the half million and disappeared, and George, Little George, was shoveling elephant shite when the penny finally dropped at the Penny Black Hotel. Five bottles of Tiger Sweat a day until the night train took him away to a better, safer place. A place without flying elephants and no doubt without angels, grey or white, or pink. Another story. What is Fun City if it isn’t an elephant graveyard? A place where diseased, crippled, unloved and lonely men go to live out brutish, lonely, nasty, unethical lives in what they imagine to be peace and solitude. It happens. Another story. Some rented families, sponsored lovers and some believed their investment was true. Some died that way in that place. It happened. A place where the unloved fool themselves into believing they are loved. A place best to uninvest in. To observe, like a tourist. Spend but never invest. Watch but never participate. These were the lessons I taught in Fun City, in Happy Street, in the Red Night Zone, Turtle Island, the CBD, the Tunnel, the Dark Side, The Beach, Night Market, and at the Penny Black Hotel.
The civet ran up to one of my brogues and sniffed. Lowered my body and offered a hand to the creature before it bared its sharp yellow teeth and raised golden back fur, arched in flight or fight. The animal excreted a musk like rotting meat left in a broken refrigerator. A man in a bar once told me the French used civet musk to make Chanel Number 5.
Took a step back and looked at the adolescent who broke into a stupid half-witted smile as if he’d just been caught jacking off. “You can train them, you know?” Maybe the boy once had dreams of a civet coffee farm, the animals were force fed the coffee cherries, refined the beans abdominally and shat out coffee for the receptive high-end tourist market. Tree goats in Morocco ran a similar scheme. Good business, but most businesses were dreams and these dreams, like all dreams, are all nonsense now to the half-witted-civet-boy peddling
his ass and his god-darn palm civet in the Red Zone. A place best to uninvest in. Spend, but don’t invest. Watch, but never participate, because these stories happen. They do. The Chinese Reality show had been filming the street for a number of weeks. Perhaps the crucial forty-eight hours of Kurt were on camera. Made a note to visit the film studios in the CBD the next day.
Made it to the end of Happy Street before turning left into The Tunnel. Then stepping over sleeping bodies and around soliciting Gamers, carried forward into the bowels of the night. Further, deeper, into it.
Walked into a bar with a sign above the door.
VERY SPECIAL PEOPLE BAR
HAPPY HOUR ALL DAY
A dwarf doorman stood with mock menace at the entrance. “You been in here before? I kinda recognize your face. Except now, you look better, before, you were all puffy and red and battered up. It’s you, ain’t it? Aren’t you some kinda private asshole investigator type? First time I’ve seen ya walk a straight line. What’s ya name? No, let me guess, Jim, James, John?”
“Name’s Joe. And you?”
“Charles, Chuck, Charley, what the hell you want it to be, baby. I’m not bisexual, I’m not tri-sexual, I’ve tried everything. . You want a date big boy? They call me Chuck the Dwarf. I used to make big money doing dwarf tossing until they banned it outright. They said that it was morally unsound. Baby, it’s an art. Now I spend my time standing in front of a frigging doorway. Ethics are a waste of my precious time. You know which life I prefer?”
“Can I go inside?”
“You not interested in my story?”
“Well...”
Chuck looks at me and smiles “Well, I never took you for a macrophile anyway.”
“Can I go inside?”
“Does a squirrel shit up a tree? Course you can come in, Cupcake. You are invited.” The dwarf opened a red curtain and I entered. Low-lighting. A television screen showed amputee pornography. An old flick, a man in a wheelchair breathed heavily as a siren rode topside. The joint reeked of gin and thrush. Promotional posters of P.T. Barnum’s traveling gig hung from all walls. A syphilitic bearded woman sat at the bar sucking on a margarita through a bent purple straw. Her face heavily plastered with pancake, perhaps costume make-up, her hair set in rollers. Behind the bar, a hunchbacked bartender both palms flat on the bar. A tumor the size of a watermelon sprouted from his noodle. “What’ll it be?” Barman asked.
“Soda water, no ice.”
He poured it straight from the bottle into an almost clean glass.
“Thanks,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Barnum,” the barman said.
“Cute,” said I. “What’s with the bullet holes?” I said pointing at the fresh marks in the walls.
“Fun Police,” he said.
A tribal longneck woman sat alone while making a motion. Her tongue pushed the side of her cheek outwards twice. Her neck was the length of a man’s forearm with brass loops supporting the head. To remove all the brass rings at once would probably cause the collapse of the spinal column, resulting in a slow agonizing death. These women lived in villages in the north. Some say these are human zoos, frequented by tourists who took photographs and bought the T-shirts. The fact that some had traveled south to try their hand in the freak bars was of no surprise. Ethics of the practice were a political hot potato. Some thought the longnecks were simply keeping alive ancient tradition, and some thought it to be a barbaric way of life that should have been stopped years ago. I had no idea. Who was I to say how others chose to live?
Instead, I stared at the hunchback barman directly and intently. “Listen, PT, I was here, not long ago. I remember speaking with a conjoined twin. The twin had a tiny body attached to the chest of a much larger host. I need to speak to both of them.”
“Can’t help you. I only just started working here. Not sure how long I can take it.” Barnum said.
“Try,” We clicked life-enhancers. “Stick your neck out,” I flicked a glance at the woman sitting to my left.
“I know who you mean. Not many fit that description,” he laughed. “Tell you what; I’ll make a phone call.”
Keyed in a five and zapped it to him, “Do that.”
Ordered a Coca-Cola and watched the waves of humanity pass by through a frosted glass window. A female S head walked by chatting to herself, and almost bumped into a solvent casualty walking past barefoot, plastic bag, paint thinner in one hand and periodically inhaling. The Fun Police who both supplied and busted The City’s users kept the epidemic quiet. The glue sniffers weren’t even worth arresting. They had nothing but the street, and the police owned that already. New dealers would rise from the sewers hopeful of becoming the next big thing. The FP built them up a little empire, the cars, the women, the dough, before fitting them up and throwing away the key. That’s business enterprise for you.
Divide and conquer.
Fun City style.
The man to my right has Alien Hand Syndrome. His left mitt grabs at his right shoulder, squeezes it like a rubber ball. A butch transsexual walks inside followed by the twins. Two techno metro-sexual dwarfs discuss premiership soccer with the hunchback and the golf-ball artist. A cyberpunk thalidomide casualty lazes against the bar with one of her tiny arms clutching a Sea Breeze. A man with no obvious physical defects apart from bad teeth and a fearsome monobrow and perhaps a touch of Taijin Kyofusho (a crippling fear of social interactions) stands in the corner drinking a Coca-Cola and watching the patrons perform. The Very Special People bar was a safe haven for the socially awkward who felt comfortable among the physically disenfranchised. This, boys and girls, is both a zoo and a sanctuary, and amorous recreation is encouraged wholeheartedly. A smallpox victim argues about Fun Police brutality with a third-degree burns case by the jukebox. The twins sat in the corner. I watch the smaller bearded conjoined twin sip at a virgin pina colada through a twisted straw. Gossip, gossip and more gossip, the larger host sucks on a Coca-Cola. Ordered a soda water from the hunchback and walked towards the pair, brushing past a Burmese wolfgirl and a middle-aged barfly with the hangdog expression of an unsuccessful rapist. A woman ate a burger; her bloated body squashed into the booth, the City had recently passed the motion to include body weight as a legitimate medical condition, the sufferer receiving a rising scale of credits the larger they got. A father with two teenage children walked into the bar and took one long swinging look around the joint before walking out clutching his children by the arms. He’d be back, with or without them, I thought philosophically.
“Hey, what’s up,” the tiny twin said. “I remember you stumbling in here the other night, brother? What brings you back?” His voice was all New York treble. If he had any balls, they hadn’t dropped, or if they had they hadn’t dropped too far.
“Something you said about not trusting the machine.” I sat opposite them. “I just can’t shake that sentence.”
“What about it?”
Lowered my voice to a whisper and came closer to the twin’s tiny ear, shielding the background bar noise with his hand, he said. “The Trust Machine.”
“I see. Big boy up there knows more about it than I,” the smaller twin said gesturing up at his host. “He doesn’t say much since it happened. We share a liver so I’m doing the drinking for both of us.” He giggled.
“Doesn’t he mind?”
“Oh, he minds all right. That’s why he’s giving yours truly the silent treatment.”
It was true. The larger host twin sat with his eyes fixed on something that may have been behind my left shoulder.
His lips were closed tighter than a pissed clam.
“How did it happen?”
“We were both out together.” He stopped, caught himself, laughed, and lit a cigarette that looked like a blue whale stool cigar in his tiny mitt. “As if we have any other frigging choice, right? Listen, baby, I’ve had this asshole stuck to me the moment I wake up ‘til the moment I go to sleep for the last twenty-five freaking years. You know what tha
t feels like? You figure out the logistics of taking a dump in the night... Jeeze, sometimes he wakes up horny and starts banging one out and it’s me who wakes up with a goddamn facial...Sheez... That’s how I got my moniker... They call me Cake Hole... You know what it’s like when you don’t got no time alone, Soldier?”
“Well, I’ve had some pretty tight relationships.”
“Something bad happens, you walk away, right?” He sighed and blew out a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. “Well, not with this one, sweetheart, not with this one. There’s no walking away from a liver. I gotta be telling you that already. So where were we? We were out in the zone. We’re both hitting the piss and vinegar like there’s no tomorrow after finishing a stand-up comedy gig at the Fun City Comedy Club. I do the jokes and High Tower here is the straight guy. We had a tight routine, Baby, kinda like a ventriloquist’s act and I’m the god darn dummy. Moving up and on in the entertainment world ‘til Big Stuff here quits drinking and discovers he got the stage fright. So I have to get rat-assed for him to stand up and then I forget my lines because I’m as drunk as a skunk and we get booed offstage... You see where I’m going with this?”
“Yeah, but you’re digressing. What happened the night your brother stopped drinking?”
“Right, yeah... So we’re in the zone as I told ya, and then some wise asshole with a cane comes up to us in the Champagne a-go-go and says something to High Tower up there. That’s his name High Tower. Cake Tower is our stage name. At least it was... Anyway, while he’s talking, this old fruit drops something in HT’s drink. He leans over and I watch him flip back the casing over the handle of the cane. It’s got like a nozzle inside. So he sticks the nozzle in HT’s snozzle, straight into his nostril and I’m thinking that it’s goodnight fucking Vienna. It’s been fun. Not the first time in my life that I felt like running... I’m thinking it’s a gun or something, you dig? But it’s not. There’s a trigger on the cane and he pulls it. No BANG, just a popping sound and the joker’s out of there. Still, I’m thinking it’s all over and start shouting, I’M DYING, I’M FREAKING DYING HERE. THIS IS THE END... But it isn’t since the next thing I know we wake up and HT’s got the shakes real bad, and he can’t take a drink anywhere. Complains about these bright lights so I tell him to ease off the juice, that we can do it together, like we have any choice... So we rent a small room and rattle and roll through it for three days straight. We just drink water and then on the fourth day, we both as randy as a tomcat with five balls, but every time we get some B-girl interested, High Tower wigs it with the lights and headache routine so we can’t make it with the frog scratchers. I got balls like frigging coconuts here.” Cake Hole pulled down his shorts to demonstrate a hairy little rambuten-like pouch, thus answering my earlier query regarding the smaller twin’s attribute of testis.