Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  Her name was Davanna.

  When Mason Stone had said there was an alligator man with Salon, I expected the usual—some guy who resembled a terminal case of eczema or had some facial defects. Jesus god, was I a dope. Erik—that’s his name—was the closest I’ve ever seen to a hybrid, more akin to a monstrosity dreamed up by the guys in the makeup lab on Vengeance Is. His skin wasn’t superficially scaly, but the same thickness, texture, and corrugation of crocodile hide, though the colors and patterns were a bit more flamboyant. Square-cut overlapping armor plates that could probably deflect a bullet. The front of his skull was pushed into a shape that was a compromise between an elongated snout and a human face. His teeth were blocky and pointed; he told me he had half of them extracted to make room for the others, and they grew like crazy, necessitating periodic filing. He cut himself to prove to me his skin was real; sank a utility knife a quarter-inch into his forearm, cleanly dividing a scale. No blood. He must have weighed three hundred pounds and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. Watching him eat wasn’t pretty. He looked, more than anything, like a really good alien from an expensive movie. Audiences responded with instinctive recoil from insects and reptiles, even amphibians. He was a man-phibian, and if his appearance didn’t steal your breath, then his voice would help your nightmares along.

  “Isn’t this the shit?” said Mason Stone.

  I was hardly on set anymore, having received special dispensation from Tripp, who was already nervous enough about stray photos in the wake of the Internet exposure of Andrew Collier’s bad day. When I was monopolizing Cap Weatherwax’s time on our remote gun range, Cap’s Fire When Ready crew ably handled the on-set armory chores. The moment I checked back in, Mason Stone grabbed me for his field trip to the Salon.

  “Don’t sweat it,” said Tripp from beneath today’s hat, Plunging Tarantula. “Today is basically a repeat of yesterday, but without Mason. Second unit, cutaways, reaction shots from extras, green screen, pickups. Rain cover usually drives us toward effects shots.” Out in Jersey the hangar was besieged by sporadic sprinkles, and the problem with using an airplane hangar versus a soundstage is that rainfall messes with your sound. “Besides, you’ll be seen less … yes?”

  “Nobody will miss the set snapshot hound for a day,” I said, as though reciting primary school gospel or the pledge.

  Mason Stone’s limo was, of course, ridiculous. Dick Fearing, he of the great Easter Island face, played chauffeur. Garrett Torres had hooked onto a date named Jodi, who I think was one of the day players. At least, I think I recalled her from the New York Street shoot-out, bundled up in business chic with a French twist and glasses, standard library girl, diving for cover—she might have been a stuntie, too. She was decked out quite differently tonight, openly competing with Artesia Savoy in the category of total length-of-leg exposure, and I watched Mason’s eyes stray appreciatively. Andrew Collier was supposed to have been with us, but begged off to wrestle the next day’s schedule with Gordo and Tripp.

  Then there was Kleck, our emcee, ringmaster, tour guide, advocate, and point man. Kleck was a dwarf in a tailored suit with spats. His face looked like a clenched fist. He greeted us as our limousine door was opened by his sidekick, a big powerhouse of muscle wearing a turban and a veil that concealed his entire face, like a footman from The Arabian Nights.

  “That’s Uno,” Kleck said.

  Kleck wobbled along with his filigreed walking stick, regaling us with the air of an oft-repeated spiel about the special nature of Salon, and the extraspecial privilege we were about to enjoy by seeing its denizens firsthand. Henceforth, he enthused, our lives would never be the same. Along the way he added that he was an hermaphroditic twin, and that he would prove it, since seeing was believing.

  “You don’t really want me to photograph a bisexed midget, do you?” I whispered to Mason Stone.

  He had to divide himself from Artesia Savoy’s overly touchy-feely sense of dominion. Affection, to Artesia, was a matter of barrage. But he spared me a glance: “Be cool, Jules; you’ll see.”

  We found ourselves in the middle of a sumptuously appointed, marble-floored megasuite somewhere in the heart of the city, high up. Almost a Vegas sense of overkill, fireplace, full bar, lounge space for fifty and “areas” for every task. I tried to record details since I wasn’t shooting documentation, but something about the air in the room seemed different and charged, like the crackle imparted by ozone. I later realized it was pheromones, attraction molecules emitted by the members of Salon, who were somewhat more than human. The effect was thick and heady. You breathed it in and your perceptions changed. All things were suddenly possible.

  When potables were distributed, I stuck to seltzer.

  “You few come to risk the unusual,” Kleck intoned. “You come with open minds, open hearts. You expect disappointment. This is normal. It is the only such normal thing in these rooms. You expect trickery. There is none. You are willing to entertain the idea that perhaps you do not know everything. As you are willing, so are we.”

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” muttered Garrett, and Jodi snickered. “Step right up.”

  Mason Stone shot them both a look that could set fire to the ice in their cocktails.

  “Unenlightened individuals quite understandably expect what used to be called a ‘freak show’ back in the day,” said Kleck. “If you had come to see obese women, flipper children, geeks, the malformed, or hirsute wolfpeople … well, you would not have been invited to Salon. I daresay our beautiful ladies seated before me probably have more tattoos than any of my colleagues.”

  Artesia and Jodi squirmed appropriately. I already knew about the dragon braceleting Artesia’s ankle, and Jodi obligingly rolled over to display a tramp stamp on the small of her back that resembled the grille of a Chevy, appropriate since such ink was also called a California license plate.

  Fifty years ago, my former helpmate Joey would have lived in a sideshow, no question. And the Amazing Fat Man … well, he was now so ordinary that airlines had to rewrite their seating rules.

  When Kleck introduced Erik, the Alligator Man, Jodi’s mouth snapped shut like a mousetrap. Garrett’s remained unhinged.

  Erik came out of the darkness behind Kleck, where lush sleeping quarters were arranged like the spokes on a half-wheel. He was bare-chested but wearing bigass 505 rapper jeans, which he offered to remove. I would never forget his voice, that clicking, froggy glottal that brought its own echo from within the caverns of his head.

  “Touch it,” he said of his arm, extended toward Jodi, who flinched. “Find a seam, a zipper that says I am not real.”

  “How did you come to be the way you are?” asked Mason, choosing his words cautiously, ultrapolite.

  “Born this way,” rasped Erik. “All of us, born this way. Do you have a talent? An expertise? My beauty and power are on the outside for all to see.”

  “Erik killed a shark once,” said Kleck. “A bull shark, the most aggressive, a four hundred pounder. Wrestled it in salt water and killed it.”

  “They swim in fresh or salt,” said Erik. “So can I. He bit me. Here.”

  He displayed a lightning bolt scar near his kidneys, muted by overlapping scale growth.

  “They’re manhunters,” said Kleck. “Tell them how.”

  Erik demonstrated with his armored talons. “Tore off its jaw. I drank its blood. It was an honorable death.”

  Azure light seemed to waft into the room, and I turned and caught my first look at Davanna, the arabesque to Erik’s grotesque.

  I had described her as a kind of butterfly woman, but that’s not completely accurate. She was, in form, more a hybrid of bat and moth, with a symmetry possessed by neither. Faint winkings of flight dust scattered there, like the talc-fine shed scales of moths, the kind old wives used to say were poisonous. Davanna would never, could never fly.

  All the bug-bat were-woman nonsense flew away when you saw her face, her body, the absolute reality of her. Moths were hairy; she was hairless. B
ats were essentially airborne rodents; Davanna was, as I said, more than human.

  “Don’t be afraid,” was the first thing she said to me. “Take the time your eyes need to accept what you see.”

  She filled even my dark-adapted eye to capacity. These people were all rhodopsin purists, almost certainly. I wondered how their eyes saw us.

  Then there was Mejandra, the tentacled woman. Imagine Cthulhu, only hot, with eyes like mulled cider and real, chatoyant, vertical pupils. Multiple appendages that were not grafts but living tissue, fundamentally connected. They moved with the grace of cilia.

  “Think you could do something with this material?” asked Mason, elbowing me.

  Tabanga, the Skeleton—not some emaciated derelict, but a living ossuary shrink-wrapped in blue-gray skin about half a millimeter thick, a skinny Visible Man road map of vasculature. Shine a bright light on him and he would probably dehydrate to death on the spot.

  When Uno unveiled, I nearly gagged on my bubble water. He only had one eye. It was large, slightly protuberant, sienna-brown, and right in the middle of his face, above his flat and flare-nostriled bullish nose, which had a ring through it. More flashbacks of Joey. This ring appeared to weigh several pounds. Uno looked strong enough to bend it double between his thick fingers. The eye beneath its single brow was no fake, no trick, no illusion, and it did not miss anything.

  There was no “performance” as the word is usually understood. This was more like a reception; you drifted around as your interest drew you, and spoke to Kleck’s people. Except they did the same thing. Not only was there no performance, there was no performance wall. They mingled. We mingled. Until we were all indistinguishable; one group of people, making conversation.

  Kleck introduced his sister Klia, his feminine iteration, wizened and wise. That weird sensation in the air, and the hyperreality of the Salon, gave each contact the mild blur of an acid pop, until, in a way, it all seemed very ordinary.

  Because it was.

  Mason compared notes with me at the bar. “So, Davanna, huh. You want to monopolize her. Tell the truth, Jules, you’re thinking about banging her. I was. Everybody does. But she’ll know, if you think that. Your aura, or something, gives you away. Ole Erik, the Gator Man, can whiff fear just like a bloodhound, and Mejandra is practically a living lie detector—all those limbs, like antennae, she can read your vibrations. Like I said, it’s the shit, ain’t it?”

  Kleck interposed. “Another new friend,” he said of me. “Tell me of your life, new friend.”

  “He’s a photographer,” said Mason.

  “Is it allowed?” I asked Kleck.

  “Normally, no,” said Kleck. “Rarely.”

  That was Mason’s cue to slam down two inches of Franklin notes on the bar. “Now it’s allowed,” he said. I had an uncomfortable flashback of Gun Guy doing the same thing to me. Cash, wham, now shut up and do as you’re told.

  Kleck’s gaze danced between Mason and the money. “There are conditions,” he said. “No flash. No strobes. No bright light.”

  Bright light destroyed visual purple. Maybe civilians had lived in bright light for so long, their innate capacity to see the unusual had been curtailed.

  “No exposés,” said Kleck. “No tawdry feature articles. We do not seek exploitation.”

  Then Lyle entered the main room.

  “Ah,” said Kleck. “I feared Lyle might not join us tonight; earlier he complained of a headache, you see. Lyle, please come meet our new friends.”

  Lyle emerged from the shadows holding his head, and my eyes got a read on him before my companions did. He was holding his head as if to prevent it from toppling off, which was sensible since his cranium was twice the normal size. His features were bunched together in the center of his face and surrounded by a perimeter of pale flesh. Baby-fine, wispy white hairs floated in an atavistic semicircle at the ear line. His forehead bulged up and out; his occipital was swollen backward, but apparently his skull had accommodated all this expansion. The crowding of his physiognomy gave him a perpetually surprised or perplexed expression amplified by his lack of eyebrows. He was wearing a white surgical smock, the kind that buttons up the left side, and I think his collar was reinforced.

  “Please except my apologies,” said Lyle, freeing one hand to shake mine. “As you can see, sometimes I have problems with my neck, and lying down in a dark room with my supports is the only thing that can ease the stress.”

  He kept hold of my hand while looking into my eyes.

  “No,” Lyle continued, “it doesn’t handicap me in the way you are about to ask. It’s not an Elephant Man thing, if you follow.”

  Funny; I was just thinking of asking him that.

  “Lyle is clairvoyant,” Kleck announced matter-of-factly.

  Indeed; letting go of his hand was like breaking an electrical circuit.

  “Mr. Kleck was not joking when he said I had a headache,” said Lyle. “As you can see, it is obvious if someone wished to be derisive.” He almost cocked his massive head at me. What was odd was that he had to hang on to his head to do so, as though balancing a full tureen of soup.

  “You, too, seem to be in hiding,” Lyle said of me. “You worry about it a lot. There are faces in front of your other faces. That is typical with movie people.” He spoke of movie people in a tone that indicated he was dealing with another kind of freak show. “All that worry will just eat you up from inside. Better to just process the problem. I like to think of problems as equations with an eye toward correcting the imbalance. Do let me know if you would enjoy discussing this further.”

  With that, he moved off—carefully—to greet the others.

  Kleck toasted me in passing with his flute of champagne. “Lyle has an unsettling effect on most people,” he confided with an elfin wink. As though the other members of the Salon were completely prosaic. “He is our only American member. Come, let us get you started with your photography.”

  Thank Zeus I had brought my Hasselblad four-by-five and thought to pack high-ASA film for the Nikon. The lighting was tricky and demanded a tripod for long exposures. But when I photographed Erik, luridly shadowed in gothic light, he remained as still as a Grecian sculpture. He allowed me to position him. Touching his scaly armor was never not going to feel weird.

  Fancy that, I thought, models who were not whiny or erratic.

  Davanna smiled at me with even, normal teeth that glowed slightly, as though under UV light. She seemed amused. I wanted to amuse her.

  “It’s a vaginal cleft, Mr. Julian, surely you’ve seen them before.”

  I had been staring at her crotch too much. She was so boldly nude that it was hard not to concentrate on her breasts, or her pubis, but then it was just as tempting to take in her startling pinpoint white eyes (not to mention everything else about her), to try and plumb what those eyes saw when she looked at me.

  “What are you thinking?” Still, the smile, utterly magnetic.

  I was thinking that I could help Salon make four or five million bucks, easy. I was thinking that an opportunity to express my vision, as opposed to my subordinate work for Clavius, had just plonked right into my lap. I was thinking here before me was the perfect confluence of the commercial and the artistic. No compromise, no committee, no editing. There was a clothing company called Serpentine, sort of a halfway house between the Gap and higher-end designer glitz, that had conferenced me not so long ago about finding a way to establish a bold new product identity. In that meeting I had mentioned using a tempting form of promotion that did not incorporate the product, on the theory of beguilement—an oblique approach to curry fascination for the unseen. Now all my brain could see were titanic billboards in Times Square featuring the members of the Salon in utterly mundane, casual poses, dramatically lit and without the need for Photoshop or airbrushing, completely honest and real, with the Serpentine logo alone in one corner, that was all. No other text. No cute phrases like “Live in Your Skin” or “Just Wear It.” The idea had seeded whe
n I saw Erik’s capacious hip-hop jeans, and was now in fast ferment.

  Start with Erik in assorted stages of undress, then follow with Davanna, two sets, one with her dense sunglasses and one without … my god, it was all so obvious inside of a split second.

  “Your hands are trembling,” observed Davanna.

  “I can’t look at you enough. My eyes can’t absorb you the way I’d like, as you said. I need the film.”

  “You are looking at me much differently through that lens,” she said as she turned at my direction and her membranous wings caught the warm air like veils. “When you look through that eyepiece, suddenly you’re not thinking of sex so much, I think.”

  “This is a different kind of lovemaking,” I said, meaning it.

  I thought back to how difficult it had been to ramp up Nasja’s exhausted sexuality in the camera. How Joey had wanted to indulge even more groundling expressions of the simplest sexual recombination, artificially spiced with tattoos and rope and leather. It was all mining a depleted vein. You had to do more, and more, to get less and less. That was Clavius’s one basic trick—he had legitimatized basic porn for the masses to consume without guilt, then “shocked” them with the surgical reality behind the endlessly augmented images the world was supposed to accept as the baseline for sexual attraction. I want that, even at the cost of the butcher shop. And most people did want it; just look at what they were willing to endure in the name of hotness. Being hot. As Joey would say, “being a Hott.” Would you? Would you?

  The appeal of the members of Salon was that they were totally unaugmented. You could want it but not have it, although you could buy products to align yourself closer to it, and that was fine because the big 99 percent would never dig having a snout, wings, or tentacles, because that would be going too far. And pushing perceived limits was what the sell was all about.

  I had forgotten about Gun Guy for more than an hour. Two. I was distantly aware that the sun would be coming up soon.