Chapter Twelve
Cliff burns across the Port Orange Bridge. It’s not yet full dark when he reaches the Celeste, but the Vacancy sign has been lit. Across the way, with its strings of lights bobbing in the wind and clusters of balloons and people milling everywhere, the used car lot might be a tourist attraction, a carnival without rides. He pulls up to the motel office and spots Bazit standing at the window, his arms folded. Bazit must see him, but he remains motionless, secure—Cliff thinks—with his hole card. He jumps out, heads for the door and, as he’s about to open it, feels something hard prod his back.
“You stop there,” says Au Yong, stepping back from him. She’s training a small silver hangun on him and scowling fiercely. Cliff’s right hand sneaks toward the .45, but Bazit emerges from the office and steers him into the shadows, where he pats him down. On discovering the .45, he makes a disapproving noise.
“I want to see Marley,” Cliff says.
“You will see her,” Bazit says. “In due course.”
Au Young says something in Cantonese; Bazit responds in kind, then addresses Cliff in English, “My wife says for such a negligible man, you have a very powerful weapon.”
“Fuck your wife,” Cliff says. “I want to see Marley now.”
Bazit continues patting him down, but does not check under his balls. “You will see her,” he says. “And when you do, let me assure you, she will be unharmed. She is resting. Shalin is with her.”
“You tell that bitch, if she…”
Bazit slaps him across the face. “I apologize, sir, for striking you. But you mustn’t call my daughter a bitch or say anything abusive to my wife.”
Again, he speaks to Au Yong in Cantonese—she looks at Cliff, spits on the grass, and goes into the office.
“This way, please.” Bazit gestures with the .45, indicating that Cliff should precede him toward the rear of the motel, toward Bungalow Eleven. “Don’t worry about your car. It will be taken care of.”
As he moves along the overgrown path that winds back among palmettos, Number Eleven swelling in his vision, Cliff’s throat goes dry and he feels a weakness in his knees, as might a condemned prisoner on first glimpsing the execution chamber. “Come on, man,” he says. “Let me see Marley.”
“I hope you will find your accommodations suitable,” says Bazit. “At the Celeste, we encourage criticism. If you have any to offer, you’ll find a card for that purpose on the night table. Please feel free to write down your thoughts.”
At the entrance to Number Eleven, he unlocks the door and urges Cliff inside. “There’s a light switch on the wall to your left. Is there anything else I can do before I bid you goodnight?”
Cliff opens the door and steps in. Of the hundred questions he needs answered, only one occurs to him. “Was it your father who did the special effects for Sword Of The Black Demon?”
“No, sir. It was not.” Bazit smiles and closes the door.
Cliff switches on the overhead and discovers that the lights of Bungalow Eleven are blue. It doesn’t look as bad as he imagined. No dried blood, no spikes on the walls. No bone fragments or ceilings that open to reveal enormous teeth. He tries the door. Locked from without—it appears to be reinforced. He fends off panic and goes straight to work, dropping his shorts and unpeeling the tape that holds the package. The entrance to the room is a narrow alcove, perfect for his purposes. He tapes a shotgun shell to the back of the door, the ignition button facing out. Then he tapes a thumbtack to the wall slightly less than head-high, the point sticking through the tape, aligning it so that the door will strike it when opened. He has to use the string to sight the job, but he’s confident that he’s managed it. The bathroom door slides back into the wall, so it’s no good to him. He searches for a hidden entrance. Discovering none, he tapes the second shell to the front door, a foot-and-a-half lower than the first, and lines it up with a second thumbtack.
An easy chair occupies one corner of the room. He drags it around, angles it so that it faces the door, and sits down. Booby-trapping the door has taken it out of him. He thinks that the adrenaline rush wearing off is partly to blame for his fatigue, but he’s surprised how calm he feels. He’s afraid—he can almost touch his fear, it’s so palpable—but overlying it, suppressing it, is a veneer of tranquility that’s equally palpable. He supposes that this is what some men feel in combat, a calmness that permits them to function at a high level.
The blue light, which annoyed him at first, has come to be soothing, so much so that he finds himself getting sleepy, and he thinks that the Vacancy sign may have had a similar effect when he stared at it from the used car lot. He wants to stay alert and he looks around the room, hoping to see something that will divert him. The windows are covered by sheets of hard plastic dyed to resemble shades. Except for them, everything in Number Eleven is blue. The toilet, the rugs, the bed table coated in blue paint. The sheets on the bed are blue satin, like the witch queen’s sheets in the movie. That bothers him, but not sufficiently to worry about it. He tries to estimate how long he’s been here. Maybe thirty, forty minutes…The sheets seem to ripple with the reflected light, gleams flowing along them as if they’re gently rippling, and he passes the time by watching them course the length of the bed.
He thinks this could be it, the sum of the Palaniappans’ vengeance—they’ve finished with their games, and in the morning they’ll reunite him and Marley. They appear to know everything about him, where he is at any given moment…all that. Perhaps they know he’s basically decent and that he didn’t intend to injure Isabel. That thought planes into others about Isabel, and those in turn plane into memories of the movie they made together. He can’t recall its name, but it’s right on the tip of his tongue. Devil Something. Something Sword. She flirted brazenly with him on the set, but there was an untutored quality to her brazen-ness, as if she didn’t have much experience with men and knew no other way to achieve her ends. He recalls seeing her off the set, in a Manila hotel, room service on white linen, high windows that opened onto a balcony, how she danced so erotically he thought his cock would explode, but once he was inside her, that part of him calmed down and he could go all night. It’s a wonder he didn’t notice she loved him, because all these years later he sees it with absolute clarity. She would lie beside him, stroking his chest, gazing into his eyes, waiting for him to reciprocate. He thought she was trying to impress him with her devotion, to trap a rich American for her husband, and, while that might have been true, he failed to recognize the deeper truth that underscored her actions. It’s the same with Marley, and he understands that, at least in the beginning, he treated her with equal deference, dealing with her as one might a sexy puppy that was eager to bounce and play. It was convenient to feel that way, because it absolved him of responsibility for her feelings.
Other memories obtain from that initial one, and he becomes lost, living in a dream of Isabel, and when a point of blue light begins to expand in mid-air, right in front of him, he thinks it’s part of the movie he’s replaying, part of the dream, and watches from a dreamlike distance as it expands further, unfolds and grows plump in all the right places, evolving into the spitting image of Isabel as she was in The Black Devil’s Sword or whatever, blue skin, black nipples, lithe and curvy, her secret hair barbered into exotic shapes, and she’s dancing for him, only this dance is different from the one she used to do, more aggressive, almost angry, though he knows Isabel didn’t have an angry bone in her body…it’s as though she has no bones at all, her movements are so sinuous and supple, bending backwards to trail her hair along the floor, then straightening with a weaving motion, hips and breasts swaying, a sheen of sweat upon her body as she flings her fingers out at him, like the queen…in the movie…when she danced…
Cliff feels pain, not an awful pain, but pain like he’s never felt before, as if an organ of which he has been unaware, a special organ tucked away beneath the tightly packed fruits of heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, and intestines, insulated by their fl
esh, has been opened and is spilling its substance. It’s not a stabbing pain, neither an ache nor a twinge, not the raw pain that comes from a open wound or a burning such as eventuates from an ulcer; but though comparably mild, not yet severe enough to combat his arousal, it’s the worst pain he has known. A sick, emptying feeling is the closest he can come to articulating it, but not even that says it. He understands now that this is no movie and that something vital is leaking out, being drawn from his body in surges, in trickles and sudden gushes, conjured forth by blue fingers that tease, tempt, and coax. He tries to relieve the pain by twisting in the chair, by screaming, but he’s denied the consolation of movement—he cannot convulse or writhe or kick, and when he attempts to scream, a scratchy whisper is all he can muster. It’s not that he’s being restrained, but rather it seems that as the level of that vital essence lowers, he’s become immobilized, his will shriveled to the point that he no longer desires to move, he no longer cares to do anything other than to suffer in silence, to stare helplessly at the beautiful blue witch with full breasts and half-moon hips, sweat glistening on her thighs and belly, who is both the emblem and purveyor of his pain.
His vision clouds, his eyes are failing or perhaps they are occluded by a pale exhaust, a cloud-like shadow of the thing draining from him, for he glimpses furtive shapes and vague lusters within the cloud; but they are unimportant—the one wish he sustains, the one issue left upon which he can opine, is that she be done with him, and he knows that she is nearly done. His being flickers like a shape on a silent screen, luminous and frail. But then she dwindles, she folds in upon herself, shrinking to a point of blue light, and is gone. Her absence restores to him an inch of will, an ounce of sensitivity, yet he’s not grateful. Why has she left him capable of feeling only a numb horror and his own hollowness? He wants to call her back, but has no voice. In frustration, he strains against his unreal bonds, causing his head to wobble and fall, and sits staring at his feet. Sluggish, simple thoughts hang like drool from the mouth of whatever dead process formed them, the final products of his mental life.
After a while, an eon, a second, he realizes that the pain has diminished, his vitality is returning, and manages to lift his head when he hears a click and sees the door being cautiously opened. A woman with frizzy blond hair peeks in. He knows her—not her name, but he knows her and has the urge to warn her against something.
“Cliff!” she says, relief in her voice, and starts toward him, bursting through the door.
Two explosions, two blasts of fire, splinter the wood and fling her against the wall, painting it with a shrapnel of blood, hair, scraps of flesh and bone. She flops onto the floor, an almost unrecognizable wreckage, face torn away, waist all but severed, blood pooling wide as a table around her. But Cliff recognizes her. He remembers her name, and he begins to remember who she was and why she was here and what happened to her. He remembers nights and days, he remembers laughter, the taste of her mouth, and he wants to turn from this grisly sight, from the burnt eye and the gristly tendons and the thick reddish black syrup they’re steeping in. He wants to yell until his throat is raw, until blood sprays from his mouth; he wants to shake his head back and forth like a madman until his neck breaks; he wants very badly to die.
From outside comes the sound of voices, questioning voices, muted voices, and then a scream. Cliff understands now how this will end. The police, a murder trial, and a confinement followed by an execution. As Marley recedes from life, from the world, he is re-entering it, reclaiming his senses, his memories, and he struggles against this restoration, trying with all his might to die, trying to avoid an emptiness greater than death, but with every passing moment he increases, he grows steadier and more complete in his understanding. He understands that the law of karma has been fully applied. He understands the careless iniquity of humankind and the path that has led him to this terrible blue room. With understanding comes further increase, further renewal, yet nonetheless he continues to try and vomit out the remnant scrapings of his soul before Shalin returns to gloat, before one more drop of torment can be exacted, before his memories become so poignant they can pierce the deadest heart. He yearns for oblivion, and then thinks that death may not offer it, that in death he may find worse than Shalin, a life of exquisite torment. That in mind, he forces himself to look again at Marley’s disfigured face, hoping to discover in that mask of ruptured sinews and blackened tissue, with here and there a patch of skull, and, where her neck was, amidst the gore, the blue tip of an artery dandling like a blossom from a flap of scorched skin….hoping to discover an out, a means of egress, a crevice into which he can scurry and hide from the light of his own unpitying judgment. He forces himself to drink in the sight of her death; he forces himself and forces himself, denying the instinct to turn away; he forces himself to note every insult to her flesh, every fray and tatter, every internal vileness; he forces himself past the borders of revulsion, past the fear-and-trembling into deserts of thought, the wastes where the oldest monsters howl in the absence; he forces himself to persevere, to continue searching for a key to this door-less prison until thick strands of saliva braid his lips and his hands have ceased to shake and cracked saints mutter prayers for the damned and blood rises in clouds of light from the floor, and in a pocket of electric quiet he begins to hear the voice of her accusatory thoughts, to respond to them, defending himself by arguing that it was she who originally forced herself on him, and how could he have anticipated any of this, how can she blame him? You should have known, she tells him, you should have fucking known that someone like you, a jerk with a trivial intelligence and the morals of a cabbage and a blithe disregard for everything but his own pleasure, must have broken some hearts and stepped on some backs. You should have known. Yeah, he says, but all that’s changed. I’ve changed. With a last glimmer of self-perception, he realizes this slippage is the start of slide that will never end, the opening into a hell less certain than the one that waits upon the other side of life. He feels an unquiet exultation, a giddy merriment that makes him dizzy and, if not happy, then content in part, knowing that when they come for him, the official mourners, the takers under, the guardians of the public safety, those who command the cold violence of the law, they’ll find him looking into death’s bad eye, into the ruined face of love, into the nothing-lasts-forever, smiling bleakly, blankly…
Vacantly.
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Fiction: Wandering the Borderlands by Poppy Z. Brite
I have worked with dead bodies for most of my life. I’ve been a morgue assistant, a medical student, and for one terrible summer, a member of a cleanup service that cleaned not household grime but the results of murders and suicides. Presently I am the coroner of Orleans Parish. I handle bodies and things that no longer even look like bodies; I sit alone with them late at night; I look into their faces and try to see what, if anything, they knew at the end. I do not fear them.
And yet not long ago I had a dream. In this dream, I knew somehow that my neighbor was in trouble, and I climbed her porch steps to see if I could help. As I stood at her door, I knew with the unquestionable logic of dreams that she was in there, violated and dead. When I touched the door, it swung open, and I could see that the furniture inside was tumbled and smashed.
“I can’t go in,” I said (to whom?), “the burglar might still be in there. I’ll go back home and call the police.” And that was sound reasoning. But truly, I could not enter the house because I feared seeing the body.
It’s not that I am close to this neighbor; with the modern passion for privacy, we’ve spoken no more than twenty words in the years we’ve lived beside each other. It was not her specific body I feared in the dream. I can explain it no more clearly than this: I feared seeing what her body had become.
When I woke up, I couldn’t understand exactly what I had been afraid of. But I know that if the dream ever returns, I will be just as coldly terrified, and just as helpless.
I saw a man die
at my gym recently. I have a bad back from lifting so much inert human weight, and I keep it at bay by exercising on Nautilus machines. On my way to the locker room one hot afternoon, I became aware of a commotion in the swimming pool area. A man had just been found on the bottom of the pool. It seemed likely that he had gone into cardiac arrest, and no one knew how long he had been underwater. Two people – another doctor I know and a personal trainer - were giving him CPR as various gym staffers and members swarmed around. There was nothing I could do. I knew the man was probably dying, and I realized that while I had seen thousands of dead people, I had never actually seen anyone die. I didn’t want to see it now, but I couldn’t make myself turn away. He was barely visible through the crowd of people trying to help him: a pale pot belly; a pair of white legs jerking with the motion of artificial respiration but otherwise dreadfully still; the wrinkled soles of his feet; his swim trunks still wet. Somehow the wet swim trunks were the worst. Of course they’re still wet, I thought; he was just pulled out of the pool. But they brought home to me the fact that he was never going to go back to the locker room and pull off the trunks, glad to be rid of their clinging clamminess. They could cling to him throughout eternity and he wouldn’t care.
Winter 2007 Page 13