by Grefe, Jamie
“You wouldn’t lie, Lek.”
“Went out there drunk, he did. Drunk and left me alone with Cindy and Josephine. I was a real rattlesnake back in those days. Cindy ran off. Was how she called the sheriff, but Josephine, that hooter, she craved me real good.”
“Angels exist,” the priest says. “For troubled souls need to release steam. You did no harm.”
“More than once,” Lek says, hitting another turn too close to the edge, and the beams of his headlights hit only straight road now, just long and everlasting. Toward a house in the distance. “But Delafonte—too much of that snake juice, stupid gaping mouth and all, Josephine couldn’t keep her trap shut about me letting him go, even he said he was just gonna horse around at old Stephanie Farante’s place—fuck Stephanie Farante, I said—had too much myself.” Lek laughs, grips the wheel harder, keeps talking: “Devil himself came down that day, spoke right in my ear, said let him go, so I let him go, was getting dark. Had your voice.”
“Dark like tonight,” the priest says. He pushes the scissors against Lek’s genitals, rubs the handle against his bulge, feels Lek sprout.
Lek accelerates.
“We all do what we have a mind to do,” the priest says.
“We do what we fucking do,” Lek says, breath rushed. “And they never found her, boy did they go all flashlights and field walks; and ask stupid questions—was September or no, not yet leaves in the dirt—was why I left. As men do.”
“Dirty men mess up,” the priest says. He removes the scissors from Lek’s crotch and places them on his own lap. “Don’t you dare stop.”
Ahead of them, not too far from the fast-moving automobile, stands a woman in the middle of the road. She waves her arms for them to stop.
Lek mashes the brake. The car fishtails out of control. He fights to keep it steady, to keep it from tumbling over the edge. The stench of smoke. The grinding brakes squeal a pig shriek.
His head slams against the steering wheel, the seatbelt cuts into his chest.
And the world is quiet.
***
The second floor.
Lek stumbles to the shag carpet stairs, wipes a stream of blood from his upper lip. He feels cold steel press against his lower back. The priest’s mutter. The blood that has started as an intermittent tingle between the eyes has progressed to a nostril stream.
He cannot contain this fracture in his soul. He grips the wall, shakes his face and feels the rush of blood drizzle, drip all over the shag carpet.
It swells from his body in a glob.
There is no way out.
And the stairs are so close. Lek steps and steadies himself. He looks down to the bottom, sees the shadows of undulating bodies, the sound of flies swarming, singing, the stench of feasting. He steps unsteady, wavers. Lek cannot feel his toes, just nubs of throbbing pain and senseless guilt.
“Alina, I’m sorry,” he says. “Forgive me for what I will do and do again until this night is through. I just—can’t let you go, can’t walk away from what we’ve got.” Lek steps and steps, his arms steady him, a blind man teetering at the end of an erupted world. “We can go back,” he says. “We can make this right.”
But another voice cuts through the air of the house as if coming from inside him. It’s the priest. Lek sees the man’s image: face broken and dented, cut open to reveal the swarming of flies inside of his empty skull, one eyeball rocking to the side.
“You forget the baggage you carry costs nothing but a life,” the priest says. “Lucky you have me to usher you on, son.”
Lek tightens his grip, but his hand tightens around cold metal—the black-handled scissors. “No,” Lek says. “I don’t want your shadow.”
Lek turns his head. The priest stands behind him.
The priest laughs, reaches up and begins to peel off his face. Slowly. Screaming pitch-shifted screams; the squealing of pigs, a howling blaze—the crackle, the split wood. “Come, boy,” the priest says, tugging at the skin, “there’s still time to do what’s right. You don’t need her love—a body’s a body of light.”
Lek tries to drop the scissors, but he can’t. It is as if they are glued to his hand. Sewn to the bone, melted to the skin. He forces himself down another stair, the priest following behind him. And below, from the first floor, the throbbing grunts of ecstasy swell and churn.
Lek looks back. The priest leans over the top stair, knifes out a trembling bloody hand toward Lek. “You need to do this—she doesn’t care how I care,” he says.
“I’m not listening to you anymore,” Lek says, letting the blood flow from his nose and run down his lips, run into his mouth, so he can drink of himself and swallow the blood to the source. He can’t stop the blood, can hardly see the next step down for the blood inside his head is at once rushing out of his body and filling his skull to rupture.
Too long has Lek stood in the shadow of the father.
For in that moment, the loss of feeling in his legs consume him and Lek statics, cracks his back on the shag stairs, much worse than a rug burn, for the pain is not a pleasurable scrape, and he still clenches the scissors, feels something swell up his spine. Lek’s legs have grown mushy. He shuts his eyes, pushes his clumpy body down yet another stair with only a handful more to go.
“Don’t look down,” the priest says, “lest you slip off the edge again. I need you to do this.”
But Lek cracks his mush-bones to stand and does look down and he looks to the wall, tries to will his arm to reach that wall and steady him the rest of the way to the bottom, except the walls have gone and are filled with blood-soaked flies of light.
The hum of electricity, loud and endless. “What have you done to me?” Lek says.
“I have done nothing,” the priest says. “I have only let you discover your own end.”
“I never had a choice.”
“So you’d think,” the priest says. “Stupid boy! Filled to the brim with the unlived and the potential to do what you will, and look at you now—unbearable.” The priest stomps on the shag. “Use the goddammned scissors, Lek. Slash some fucking throats.”
This is when a crushing white wave of stench and steam blow down the hall, rush up the stairs, up to the second floor, a thick fog of human desire.
And the fog is the creation of a cowboy hat.
Lek’s face throbs, tastes a rush of blood on his tongue.
“Do it for yourself,” the priest says, sucking up those flies into his skinless face. “Set the world on fire.”
Lek’s hand twitches before him. He stares down at the scissors, somehow sharper now. He blinks away the blood and retches thick gobs on the floor. “Is this what you want?” Lek says. “This instrument in the hand of a maniac?” But when he turns again, the priest is all but a melting pile of flies and skin, blood and blackened bones of wind.
And the final spitting of the blood.
And Lek is a fountain of selves.
He gushes, steps, gushes.
Lek’s eyes leak, bloodshot and burning. The abyss behind him, the abyss swelling all around him, shrieks him onward to the living room and the bacon cream dip.
Faster now.
He makes it.
His crooked gaze lingers, wobbly argyle feet stuttering in the hall.
He is a wolf among the dead and this is his homecoming walk to the finish line of glorious unbecoming.
One argyle foot after foot shamble through the hall of the living dead.
The return. Snip.
The ever lost. Snip.
He runs to the living room and lets it begin as it should.
Lek starts with a swing and a slash—not air—to flesh: sweat splitting, bursting to a bloody splatter. And the blood rivers out from Ray, his boss (or someone with the same pudgy disposition), until his neck is a hole. But the screams are worse than the priest’s shriek: overpowering, shrill, a resonating drone.
Here is the chance.
And in the cutting and the chopping and the sawing and the screamin
g he feels the priest’s vaporous blood-gush of skin and flies pushing him onward as wind pushes wheat, a gentle song of unbridled hate in his blood-stained ears, some sort of anti-hymn to help him drive those twin blades deeper into the skin of strangers, reach down to the floor and slice futilely at the veins that bind the house together.
Alina cringes in the corner: winter pale, shot-seed residue. Her beautiful face glimmers.
Something aches.
Her beauty is not a welcoming kind of beauty, but a horror. He was not prepared to be terrified. It is not her, he thinks. This cannot be her.
But he knows it is Alina. He knows he must continue the journey through the limbs and the cream, to pass her onto the way of the light.
And the priest is a simmering thud behind Lek’s eyes. He’s trying to pry his way in. Don’t look. Keep pushing.
He pushes and drives the blade deep into the men and women he’s fucked and been fucked by and this is the painful punishment. He must get to her. Not to save her. No. This has never been the quest. He pulls out the heart of a young woman and mushes it into her face so she can taste how love reeks.
“This is the letting go,” Lek says to the woman as she falls to the ground. The doors to the room have been shut. A thick fog hovers from ankles and seeps up legs and coats skin in the presence of the priest.
“No more doubt,” the priest says. “It is time for you to become certain—plunge the blade.” And Lek does. He tries to force his arms to stop the thrust of his blade, but the priest’s words become the point of a different kind of blade, a familial blade of doing and undoing.
Lek lifts his head from a fresh kill and, yes, again, he feels Alina in the corner, still swarmed by the blurred outlines of men. He looks away. His body shudders once more and someone tears at his argyles. He raises the scissors, but she’s pleading. Across the room, in the dark and the red and the blood and the pounding pain of the night, she’s pleading for him to stop.
“Carry it out,” the priest says, suddenly angry and impatient. He raises Lek’s arm and forces it down again, forces it into the eye socket of a nearby man. “End her and set yourself free.”
“I can’t,” he says.
“You must,” the priest says. “Do it now.”
And Lek raises the scissors again, slices. From deep within him, he smells the bleating of so many midnight sheep.
Lek throws aside a corpse and soaks in the beauty of the trembling and frightened Alina.
Static bleeds to a crackle. It’s a bleating pig, a thundering sheep. The priest that is within Lek screams for him to slash. But Lek does not slash. The priest that is within Lek howls for him to butcher Alina. But Lek is not a broken saxophone, so he sputters out words and words that Alina does not understand.
“I can’t—don’t make me do this,” he says. But she does not hear him. When he opens his mouth he is no longer human, he is a man made of flies. But it makes him. Lek’s scream is so fierce, he rips the argyles right off his feet and his skin pricks, gouged, and hardens to a flat static of death-moans. “Didn’t want you to see this,” he says. “It’s the only way.”
“Don’t do it, Lek,” Alina says. “You don’t have to do it.”
But Lek cannot be sure she says what she says and if what she says is true, for his heart is not an organ that beats, it is a mangled organ in the church of a dead man. And the pain that throbs from the inside of his bloody skull cracks from the inside in an explosion of blood. And the explosion is a headlight under desert stars.
***
A woman’s arms flail.
The car swerves off the desert road and the priest is thrown from the passenger seat. Lek reaches over, grabs the scissors. He guides the car to a sloppy stop, hops out and runs back to where the woman was standing.
She is still there, yet turned away from him.
The priest is nowhere to be seen. In the distance, off toward the light of a house, Lek hears laughter and moans as if they were close, but the distance is too much.
“Excuse me, miss,” he says. “Are you okay? What are you doing out here?”
She tucks her hands into the pockets of her trench coat and turns to face him. It makes his knees jitter. He moves toward her. She says, “I was waiting for you, have always been waiting for you.”
And Lek touches his nose. It is not bleeding. He moves to her. “You don’t want to know,” he says. “There are things—”
“I know, Lek,” she says. “You don’t have to explain.”
“Don’t think I can,” he says. “But—”
“And where is your lucky lady?” She smiles something else behind her teeth. And Lek is suddenly dizzy. Maybe he hit his head too hard in the car. He clears his throat.
“Alina?”
“Yes,” she says. “You knew I would be here.”
“Where’s the—”
“The gallows,” she says. But that raging sound, that pulse is too much for Lek to handle. He grips the sides of his head and feels his brain melt to static nectar. The stabbing of a piano. The throb of a mallet on bare skin. He senses the sharpness of death from the handles of those black scissors.
“How can I make it stop?” he says, pleading with Alina, voice cracking in tears. “How can I silence this ache?”
“Open the trunk,” Alina says.
And Lek stumbles over to the trunk, pops it open. A pair of argyle socks. He lifts them out and holds them up to the night sky. “How do I—socks?”
“You’ll have to decide. Now, find me,” Alina says.
And when Lek looks over to her, he finds himself alone.
Lek jumps back in the car, drives toward the house.
He floors the gas. Alina is in the passenger seat. Lek reaches over and strokes her shoulder.
“What if I don’t like it?” she says, sheepish face, lip bitten, and earnest.
“Well, I don’t really know how to answer that, I—”
“Have you been to one of these kinds of parties before?”
“First time for everything, I guess—”
“On a first date,” she says, clasping her hands together. “Slow down.”
“Think it started at seven. What time is it now?”
“I don’t have a watch,” Alina says. “Does it matter?”
“Just butterflies in my—” A fly hits Lek’s chin. He swats it away, grits his teeth. Something in his head throbs.
“What’s wrong?” Alina asks. “You don’t look so good.”
“No—I’m fine, maybe, hasn’t hit me, yet. This taking you out. It’s nice.” He pauses. “Thank you.”
They turn out of the surrounding emptiness into the driveway of a gigantic mansion. Lek pulls the car up next to another car and notices car upon car in the lot as if an entire small city were housed within.
Hand in hand.
To the end of a life.
And the front door creaks open. Lek and Alina both look up to that door, unsure who opened it, for the inside appears pitch black.
He strains his ears to hear sounds from inside the house, but he doesn’t hear anything.
“What’s wrong?” Alina says. “God, you’re acting strange.”
“Been here,” Lek says.
He takes her hand and leads her up to the door. He sucks back more blood and quells the trembling inside him. Lek pushes the door open.
They look into the dark. The entry way is swollen with the sounds of moaning, of pleasure, drone out to the night. “I’m not sure if I want to,” Lek says. “Captain Cold Feet, here.” He tries to laugh it off.
“I’ll be with you,” Alina says. “Don’t worry. You won’t lose me.” She winks at him and takes off into the black of the house, leaving him standing there at the entrance.
Alone.
It’s darker without her and he is scared to enter.
This is when he feels someone over his shoulder, a force breathing thick. “Are you gonna enter or you gonna enter?” The man says. Lek jumps, startled beyond his expectations.
He hears a scream inside, male or female, he can’t be sure, just a piercing wail.
“Alina?” Lek enters the house, the weight crushing him. His clothes are tatters. And there is nothing. This is not the copy room. He gropes for clean air, touches a pair of voluptuous breasts. The woman sinks her tongue down his mouth and they slurp. Lek lets the kiss consume him, then pulls away. He hovers near a fireplace: limbs and tongues, cocks and crows. The entire place stinks. The ceiling puckers, winks.
A voices call out and that voice is smothered cum, a gurgle from another world. A chant fills his ears. Lek looks down at his body. He is coated in prickly static. It is not the kind of static one can pass a hand through, the kind that blurs the world to a kind of snowy background. This is a static of thundering noise and bone.
“Help me,” he says. No one hears him. A woman wraps arms around him as he dissolves into her skin and is sucked up inside her. He messily tumbles out her mouth only to find that he’s enjoying the feeling of sucking her nipples. She squeezes his throat. He hears a drill from another room, the sound of a whip cracking skin. Oiled men surround him, sword tugging and yelling. They jeer at his naked body.
Lek tears himself away from the woman, rushes down a dim hall. The lights are red and dark and flickering on and off and he suddenly doesn’t know how to find the exit. A man stands deeper down the hall—faceless and blurry—with the smock of a priest and touches himself lewdly. Lek tries to stand but a woman forces him onto a bed, ties his wrists and ankles together and mounts him. Rope burns through his argyle socks. No pleasure, there is nothing pleasurable about the restraints and the hell he has found himself in.
“Lek . . . Lek . . . ,” he hears a voice cry out from behind a wall, but the voice is drowned in piss. He tries to sit up. A rubber-masked woman rubs herself in his face and he’s drowning in her body, again, lost in the dunes of a body. To burst. Filled with empty light. He feels the tip of his head crackle and wants to vomit blood, but the blood hardens in his throat. Cement. Lek struggles at the ropes and buckles and thrashes. Another woman straddles him and she squeezes her lower muscle-pit to suck him up inside her.
A way out.
This, he thinks, is also a way out.