“It’s me. Me.”
“Me. That sounds familiar.”
“Help me.”
“I don’t help people who don’t help themselves.”
“I’m not a person who helps himself. I’m your son.”
“You don’t care.”
“I care.”
“You won’t change.”
“I’ll change. I’ll try to change. Everybody changes. They have to. Otherwise they die.”
“Goodbye.”
“Don’t go.”
The line went dead.
•
“How did that make you feel?”
“Not good. Baaad.”
“Go on.”
“Whenever my mother left, to go grocery shopping or whatever, and I asked my father where she went, he told me she was dead. I cried like an asshole until she got home. Every time. My father assured me his intentions weren’t vindictive. Rather, he wanted me to get used the idea that my mother would die. Because one day she would die.” He paused. Contemplated. “I never got used to it.”
•
Curd concluded that mankind was little more than a secretion. This was the conclusion that he always drew, no matter what happened to him. But he meant it now more than ever. Each time he drew the conclusion, however, he meant it more than the last time, and he didn’t remember the first time he had drawn it. The conclusion lacked a point of origin. But there was no question that its certainty grew progressively firmer and more secure with each realization. And yet, in all likelihood, barring death, he would draw the conclusion again, soon, very soon, and at that time its certainty would be more pronounced than the last time, which is to say, this time. Hence certainty was an Old Wives’ Tale. Hence mankind was not a secretion, but something else. He knew nothing. The clockwork of his intellect, his perception, his ability to read the text of himself and the pages on which his identity had been scribbled—it was a proverbial bad joke. And he had never heard a joke that made him laugh. They all seemed too contrived.
An animal lurked past Curd. He couldn’t tell what it was. A wolf? It was starving, gray mottled skin taut against outsized ribs. Blood dripped onto the street from ragged jaws, from a long dead tongue that hung down like a leash. The animal glanced up at Curd in passing, but it didn’t growl, and it didn’t stop.
•
She was taller than Curd, even after she kicked off the heels, and her legs were longer than the rest of her body. He worried about it, at first, but then realized that the height discrepancy wouldn’t be a problem when she was on all fours. Dyed red hair complimented an emerald green blazer she wore over a black haltertop and leather pants. Blue eyes. Fake, offsized tits. Pencilthin neck that made her head look bigger than normal. But it was normal.
“Where are we?” she said, taking off the blazer and draping it over a foldout chair. She looked around the room. Mattress in the corner. Empty bag of potato chips beside it. Fifty or so empty bottles of beer scattered across the floor. A few of the bottles had been stacked into a clumsy pyramid.
Curd blinked. “Someplace safe.”
She tried to go down on him, but he refuted her, noting the dire intimacy of blowjobs vis-à-vis the employment of the mouthpiece.
He fucked her in the ass. He paid her. She left.
Knock at the door. She had forgotten her blazer. Opening a fresh beer, he snatched the blazer and quickstepped across the room and opened the door.
It wasn’t her. It was somebody else.
It was her.
“What is this, a joke? How’d you change your clothes so fast?”
She titled her head, widened her eyes. She didn’t have irises.
“Knock that shit off. This isn’t a Superman comic. Superman is Klark Kent. Glasses and a comeover aren’t enough to deceive real people.”
He wasn’t wearing glasses. And the red hair had been replaced by black hair cut like a motorcycle helmet. No discernible breasts. And he had on a kind of obscure fullbody uniform that might have been cop or robber, depending on context. But it was the same face. Precisely the same face . . . although it possessed a chitinous quality, Curd noticed, more like rind than skin.
“Fuck off,” said Curd.
In a synthetic voice, the man replied, “I am from the Bureau of Me.”
“The Bureau of Me? There’s only one me. Me.”
“You have forgotten about me. You have experienced a mnemonic cataclysm. I am coming inside.”
“I’ll kill you if you come in. I’ll kill you if you don’t.” He took a swig of beer.
The bottle smashed against his face.
•
“Is this terminal ambiguity any more quixotic than Death itself? Death: utterly ordinary and commonplace, a daily occurrence experienced by thousands. And yet cosmically mysterious. The Unknown. It exists everywhere, among everybody, between the cracks and interstices of day-to-day life. Every ten seconds, somebody dies. Somebody just died within ten miles of you. Drive down the street and you’ll pass a building in which somebody just died. Death is hungry and Death is obese and Death’s gutsack is bigger than the universe. All of the universes. Reach out and It eludes you. Reach out and It embraces you. Context is the thing. Context—and desire.”
•
“My aorta hurts.”
“Can you feel your aorta?”
“When it hurts me I can.” He stroked his chest with a finger as if to massage the instrument.
“Can you tell me what you do for a living please?”
His hand unfolded onto his chest and he inhaled deeply. “I used to do something. I don’t do anything now. But I get paid. It was an experiment. It worked. I win. Winning is all that matters.”
“Yes. Yes. Winning is good. A vital human endeavor. Do you understand that you are under arrest, sir?”
“If I say no, what happens next?”
“This.” Somebody boxed his ears. “Then this.” Somebody hit him in the head with something hard and rubbercoated. “Then things will get ugly.”
Blood dribbled down his cheek and neck from the fresh wound on his temple, pooling in the scrapes and scabs of older wounds. He could hear the blood go. It sounded like an anaconda slithering across tarmac.
“Sir? Do you understand?”
“My answer is: No. My answer is: I don’t understand.”
•
Things got ugly. But not in the way that the arresting officer had hoped, envisioned, or planned on. Curd exploded on the cophouse with cephalopodic rage and efficiency. Bodies flapped across the room and smashed into walls and exploded through ceiling panels. Unscathed regulators drew their firearms, but they didn’t know why, even when limbs started coming off and the scene turned into a holocaust. Curd was too fast. He eluded detection with the same effortlessness that he eluded bullets. The regulators fired into the void, trading confused and terrified glances, until there was only one man left, crazed, squealing, firing a compact submachine ruger in every direction. Methodically he moved his feet in quick circles and he moved the handgun up and down for maximum coverage. He didn’t care what he hit or who he hit, as long as whatever was happening stopped happening. He went through six clips, loading and reloading in seconds, remembering his training.
When he ran out of ammunition, there was a long pause during which he stopped squealing and surveyed the ruins of the cophouse and tried to process the grisly spectacle. He was studying a particularly unsettling piece of debris when he suffered an intracranial hemorrhage. For an instant he was able to watch the blood spew from his eye sockets.
•
Now he was really lost.
Remember. Re-member. The reclamation of a lost member.
Memory.
Ember . . .
He remembered the night he found himself in St. Louis, somehow, at three in the morning, stumbling past one wrecked and rubbled brickhouse after another. Above him the mirrorplated Gateway Arch shone, flashed, and scintillated as it reflected the neon rays beamed into space by the kn
ot of casino-fortresses beneath it. He had been drinking tequila, a substance he abused rarely given a slight neurological allergy to blue agave plants, tequila’s base ingredient. Two or three slammers rendered him a kind of disabled person; he lost the feeling in parts of his face, which slumped, and he altogether lost the ability to complete full sentences. That night he had slammed close to twenty shots of Quervo. The glut had produced the opposite effekt. Not only could he feel his face, it felt like another face had been superimposed on top, and he had Babylonian access to all of the nerve endings. Additionally, he spoke like a Julliard-trained actor; by the time he left the bar, nothing exited his mouth but crisply articulated soliloquies. He left with a girl, but she ducked into a transport hub during a particularly long and uninspiring soliloquy that plagiarized and tweaked Shakespearean rhetoric alongside select original words and phrases of his own . . .
History wilted, died.
Alone, he grew weary.
The booze settled in, fatigue settled in.
He stumbled beneath an abandoned scaffolding frame and meandered through a maze of iron tubes and clamps. Sidestepping outrémen and squatters, he tried to remember where he was, what street he was on. No use. But he kept moving forward, and eventually he had to lean against an underdone pillar of cement to catch his breath. He considered curling onto the ground and taking a quick nap. But if he fell asleep he would stay asleep. He had to get out, to get home, or to a hotel. Somewhere . . .
He got to a phone booth. Encoded a number.
Nobody picked up. The answering machine said, “You have reached [static screech]. I am not home right now. Please [static screech].”
Dial tone.
It would have to suffice. He needed something to talk to. A dry hum was better than nothing. Metronomes of anxiety flooded his system, emanating from the tender pulse of a jugular.
“I feel real bad,” he said. “Real. Bad.”
He didn’t know what else to say. Time passed. The dial tone purred in his ear. The city stirred in the distance, döpplering, retreating into oblivion like fog at dusk.
“I plan to stop drinking soon. I have a plan.” He cocked his head, tabulating the lie. “I miss my secretary. She was good at her job. I’m not just saying that . . . I’ve been making a concerted effort to see the good in people. And me. I’m a good person, deep down there.”
He noticed his hand. The ghostwhite fingers, crooked and skeletal, with flayed cuticles, splintered nails, weird blue lines that looked more like circuit strings than desiccated veins. He moved the fingers across the shaft of the phone to make sure they still belonged to him.
He looked up. The firelights of the booth coughed and flickered.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Something’s wrong. But I can’t express it. I can’t say it. I wish the future didn’t happen all the time. It’s always happening. It’s always stealing the present and changing the past.”
He started to cry.
He blubbered inarticulately for a long time. Soon he forgot what he was saying, or wanted to say.
He sniffled. He caught his breath.
“I gotta . . . go . . . . . . I [static screech].”
•
. . . wandered into an aborted carnival, striped tents expanding across the desert from a nuclear carousel. Gold beams impaled the rotting corpses of horses.
Far overhead, static gondolas creaked weakly on loose, rusted cables.
Drained, he rested on a bench, knees cracking like dry twigs as he sat down.
Sterterous breaths. Menacing heart palpitations.
He closed his eyes and inhaled, exhaled.
Coughed and dryheaved.
Panted.
Moaned.
Spit up impossible quantities of substances too alien to reflect on.
Afterwards he felt better. Then worse. The fibrillations of his heart produced one shockwave of anxiety and dread after another. He forced himself to stand. To walk. Motion deflecting the fear of death.
. . . wandered past a large wooden sign that said BEWARE PICKPOCKETS AND LOOSE WOMEN and found himself at the window of a foodstand.
Beat.
Beat.
Beat.
A long chalkboard menu hung over a grill of dried oil. Somebody had removed the burners. A few of the letters and numbers on the menu were smudged or wiped off, but he could still make out most of the items. Double Cheeseburger. Vinegar Fries. Cotton Candy.
Purple Cow.
Beat. Beat.
He couldn’t believe it. Grape soda and vanilla ice cream. A simple drink. The greatest drink. He had never seen it for sale before, anywhere. Beat . . . His mother used to make Purple Cows for him. Only him. The neighborhood kids looked on in envy, pining for a hungry sip . . .
He awoke in the front car of a rollercoaster, cheek against concrete. Seatbelt on. The vehicle lay on its side, on the ground. The husk of a vast, dead centipede.
Noosphere.
Fleeting embers of memory. Revised.
•
“To be impaled by the erect tendrils of Life. It is not easy. It inhibits attitude control. And it always leads to the same place: INFANCY.”
Dull roar of thrusters . . .
•
At some point his ear sealed over. The left ear. He could still hear out of it, if he concentrated. But the orifice was gone. And there was nothing to hear.
He tried not to look down. The sight of his torso, beach-weathered skin sucked against spine . . . a ghastly, insufferable image. And there was a new hole. A skin ulcer. He might have been a deflating balloon. Every slow step produced a flatulent noise, emanating from the hip.
It was hot and there was no wind and no clouds.
With the sun at his back, baking the rotten skin, the landscape unfolded before him like a shadow of meaning. Architectures of flesh and foliage and technology retreated into the cracked earth, and he conjured images of himself, old and faded images, disavowed memories, still shots of white teeth, the dawn of laughter. Hair tousled by the breeze.
THE IDAHO REALITY
A Series of Intimately Disconnected Vignettes in Which the Auteur Aspires to Formulate the Round Character (viz., the Idiot) (viz., the Blasé Subject) Who Exists in an Astonishing Narrative Diegesis That, in Union with a Skillful & Suspenseful Plot, Capable & Superior Readers Will Doubtless Perceive as the “Very Definition of Good Fiction”
The Decline of Western Civilization
This particular Decline began when she asked Seneca Beaulac if he was already dead.
“Idaho,” he whispered.
Derailed, she tried her best to parry the obscene blow of negativism. Beaulac wouldn’t allow it. He gestured with a thumb. The red hallway stretched away from them and converged into a pupil of darkness.
Blotched copper.
Ding.
Elevator doors slid open. They stepped inside the mirrored chamber.
Gnarled effigies döpplered into obscurity.
She had redefined the true shape of her eyes with futureshock mascara. She blinked, hard, at haphazard intervals, as if in protest of the mascara, its antagonism. She didn’t wear lipstick. Beaulac studied her face, then gave her a once over, registering the dire private parts.
She fumbled with the buttons on the control panel and entered the wrong sequence. The elevator reprimanded her. With great care, she entered the correct sequence, and the elevator congratulated her, sarcastically. Beaulac watched her fingers and flexed his jaw.
Swallowing dry air, she said, “Well, at least—”
“I don’t like this elevator,” snapped Beaulac.
The elevator made a nervous throat-clearing sound.
Beaulac glared at the woman’s reflection in the door panel and delivered a long, mostly irrational grievance on the subject of mankind. On occasion he looked directly into her eyes, at which point he made certain to maneuver his lips out of synch with his manic articulations.
The elevator stopped three times on the way up. Nobod
y else got on.
Ding. Roof level.
The door opened and they emerged onto a landing pad with a flourish of impetuous brass and lean percussion. Beaulac got mad. The woman moved forward.
A Byronic laugh preceded the clank of the elevator doors.
Ashclouds hung in the sky, motionless, like frayed barcodes. They walked across the rooftop to a waiting station. Beaulac ordered a coffee from a blowhole. Black. The blowhole extracted payment with a syringe, added cream and sugar, and served the coffee cold. Beaulac drank it without complaint, then crushed the cup and tossed it over his shoulder.
He punched the blowhole.
The woman tried to ignore him. She couldn’t. Even though he had more or less forgotten about her.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
An ashcloud exploded into blackfire as a subcopter fell through it and descended onto the landing pad, engine humming and whirring, blades roaring and thundering, creating a vacuum effekt that sucked her waist-length hair into a wild spiral above her head. She felt herself lifted upwards, onto her toes. Screamed. Beaulac observed her idly, trying to light a cigarette despite the maelstrom of wind. He wondered if she would float away. She was slight. He had seen people twice her size sucked into the void.
The subcopter’s blades decelerated. Segments hissed open and a swell of shadows emptied onto the tarmac.
She stepped on first, conscious of Beaulac’s eyes on her ass.
The subcopter waited for five minutes. Nobody else got on.
With an emphysemic blast of iron, it lifted off the rooftop like a wounded centipede, end-segments flaccid.
Diegeses Page 3