Kiss Me, Judas

by Will Christopher Baer

  The plane may go up, I say. The whole fucking field.

  I don’t care. No one is connecting that plane to me.

  She wears the bulging pack and I carry the icebox in one hand, her medical bag in the other. I feel a bit like a bellboy, my arms loose in their sockets. There is no sound but the crunch of sand, the faraway cry of geese overhead. I am a few steps behind Jude, and every few minutes I turn to look back. The small fire still burns, but it appears to be contained.

  What now? The road stretches black in either direction.

  Nothing, she says. She begins to walk along the shoulder.

  The sweep of headlights from the north and Jude tells me to get out of sight. There are no trees and little brush. A single rock the size of my head. I drop my bag and the icebox and lie facedown in the dirt. I can hear Jude cracking her knuckles, one by one. The car slows and an electric window glides down. Jude leans in to ask the driver for a ride. He says he will be happy to help and there is a sudden, fleshy noise. Then silence.

  Are you coming? says Jude.

  I stand up and see a long black car, the right turn signal still blinking. Jude sits on the driver’s side. The car has a slick leather interior and smells new. I look over my shoulder and there is a long-legged man with no hair sleeping soundly in the backseat.

  Very nice, I say. Did you give him a Vulcan nerve pinch?

  Something like that, says Jude. He will wake up in El Paso, his car undamaged and his wallet intact. He will even feel refreshed, and he will have a fantastic story to tell his friends.

  God as my witness but I was abducted by a hot little number, boys. She did experiments on me and tossed me back like a bad fish.

  Jude doesn’t laugh. Her face is blank. I think she is too tired.

  She drives with one hand on the wheel. She asks me to find a radio station and I spin the dial. I find a jazz station and she says for me to leave it there. A green sign looms in the dark: EL PASO 19 MILES.

  What’s going to happen in El Paso? I say.

  We are going to a motel called the Seventh Son, she says. Then we wait.

  For what?

  The explosion is like a thousand pounds of air sucked into a soda bottle, the bottle bursts and the air expands to its normal dimensions with shocking force. I look over my shoulder and see the ball of fire that was the plane. It seems to hover, as if it wants to rise and return to the clouds. Minutes later, emergency vehicles rush past. One laughable fire truck and two cop cars, their sirens screaming through us.

  Jude maintains her speed at exactly the limit.

  She never tells me who or what we will be waiting for.

  The Seventh Son has beds that vibrate. Jude laughs and digs in her pockets for change. She feeds two quarters into the slot and the bed comes to life. She lies down with her eyes closed, her body humming.

  Come on, Phineas. It feels so nice.

  I drop my bag on the floor and shake my head.

  If I go near that thing I will fall to pieces.

  Oh, she says. I won’t let it hurt you.

  But I’m not in the mood. I go into the bathroom, looking for a place to hide the icebox. I shove it in a small closet and cover it with a bath towel. I pull off my clothes and stand before the mirror. Every bone in my body pushes at the surface of my white skin. I can see veins and tendons and unprotected muscle. My face is a grinning mask. I turn to examine my wound. I remove the dressing and see that the flesh is a little red, possibly infected. But the skin does seem to have closed, rejoined itself where Jude made her cut. I shudder to think of letting her open me up again, even to replace my lost kidney. I sit down on the toilet and remind myself that the precious green icebox is now stuffed with the Blister’s dirty clothes. I empty my bladder like an old man, too feeble to stand.

  The bed has stopped vibrating. Jude gives me another sponge bath and smears antibiotic cream over the infected skin. She leaves the wound exposed and says it needs air. She kisses me, softly at first. I am slow to respond. I put my hands on her hips, her muscular waist. She tells me to undress her. My teeth feel like they are falling out and finally I can’t stand it anymore. I want to feel reborn, even if it’s artificial and temporary. I want to make love to her and I need the drugs to give me strength.

  I want another shot, Jude.

  Are you sure? she says.

  She sits cross-legged at the end of the bed while I lay collapsed on the pillows. She appears to be at least a hundred feet away. I can’t move to touch her. If I could, I would kiss her bare feet and bite her toes. I would stroke her thighs through blue jeans faded white. I would lick the exposed tummy, the long muscles in her arms, I would close my eyes and touch the dark and gold hair that falls and falls. She chews a thumbnail briefly, her eyes on me.

  Haven’t I warned you about getting sappy on me? she says.

  The shot, I say. Then talk and sex, okay.

  Jude prepares the hypo in the bathroom. I don’t want to watch, anymore. I don’t need to. The thought of a needle once made me ill, now my skin tingles. I lie naked on the bed, my arms outstretched as if I am nailed there. I close my eyes and wait. Jude ties back my arm, stopping the blood. She finds the vein; I breathe through my teeth and try to think of the needle as a lover’s bite.

  The body is composed of water and little else. I can feel the waves inside me.

  I open my eyes. I want to ask Jude the color of electricity. She is naked, crouched over me and glowing with sweat and fever. She isn’t listening. Her hair is everywhere and I can’t see her face. She rises and falls, impaling herself on my surprisingly erect penis. I can’t feel it at all. My body, it seems, is too enamored of the drug to be bothered by ordinary sex. Jude doesn’t seem to mind, she rides me like she would her own hand, and I watch her, removed and soon dreaming.

  The dark swallows me. There is rough carpet beneath my naked shoulders and I’m crushed, folded into an impossible position. My knees are painlessly tucked beneath my chin. The road hums beneath me. I’m in a car, the trunk of a car. My face hurts like a raw, open wound and I snake one hand free to touch it, to feel the mass of chewed flesh and shattered bone. My face is gone and I seem to be bald as a stone. I touch my throat and I have no pulse. I hug myself and my fingers find my belly, my breasts. I’m a dead woman and I have no hair.

  twenty-seven.

  Sorrow is like the ocean and sometimes I wish my heart would stop.

  Jude is gone. I am staring at nothing, at an unremarkable white wall. I dimly remember her whispering to me that she was going, that I wasn’t to worry. I have no idea how long ago that was.

  I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and my feet find the floor. I stand up and I feel fine. In a far corner of my mind, I am aware that my physical condition is misleading. I am weak from the surgery, from hunger. But when I’m drugged, I feel like a king and I can’t be killed. Jude is drugging me for the pain but the true pain arrives when I am not drugged. Two minus two equals two and there is a shrinking window between the fading of the drug and the arrival of pain, when I can see and think clearly. But I will take this up with Jude later. I’m thirsty and I want a cigarette. I’m naked and shivering and I can’t find my pants.

  I dig through Jude’s heavy backpack and vaguely remember the bound file folder. It would be worth a few minutes of my time, I think. But it isn’t there, she has taken it with her. I stand half naked in the corner of the room, Jude’s hairbrush in one hand and a crushed pack of cigarettes in the other.

  The hairs in her brush appear dry and brittle, stripped of color like a winter sky.

  I look down at the strewn contents of Jude’s pack and realize that I will never put everything back so neatly, so efficiently. She will know I searched her pack, that I was looking for the folder. I tear the cellophane from the cigarettes and try to imagine the contents of the folder. There could be an extensive file on Gore, on Isabel. There could be any number of files and reports on me, the police are relentless chroniclers of their own misfortunes. And the
doctors at Fort Logan must have written a telephone book on my delusions and theories, my borderline fantasies.

  I remember the green room, the voice. I see two possible realities. I was a nameless mental patient, drooling and eating my fingers and killing time on the ward. I was chosen for physical reasons, nothing more. They took great pains to implant a new identity for some dark purpose.

  Or I was truly Phineas Poe, fractured and suicidal ex-cop. They were merely reconstructing my identity.

  I couldn’t have killed Lucy. I might have thought about it, dreamed of re-creating myself in the wake of her death. But then I would find myself staring at her as she watered the plants or read a magazine, and I would tell myself she was a piece of me. I could as easily cut off a hand or foot. She would feel my eyes, then. And without looking up, she would ask me if something was the matter.

  *

  She was precious, a rare bird. Even when I was coming undone. Even when I regained consciousness on a street corner, unsure of the time or day. Unsure of where I had been. I could see myself in unrelated flashes of memory, in poor camera angles. I could see only my feet, the back of my head. I saw obscene close-ups of my face, a gray fleshy landscape with massive pink lips and scar tissue, small black hairs protruding from dead skin. I saw myself through glass, through a sheet of cracked enamel. I saw unnatural detail. I saw body parts that couldn’t be mine. I heard my own voice from within, from underwater. Distorted, crashing against bone fragments.

  And whenever I returned to her, I saw myself through her eyes and I was barely human. I was never the husband she remembered.

  I remember waking up to find I was a dead woman with no hair. I could scream and scream until my voice is gone and I will never get that out of my head.

  I find my pants in the bathroom, they are so dirty they seem to shine. I put them on anyway and sit down to drink a glass of tap water. The water is warm and slightly brown with rust. It smells of chemical treatment and it would taste much better with ice. I am wondering if it would be worth the effort to leave the room and look for an ice machine, and I find myself staring at the small closet where the green icebox was hidden. Jude took it with her and I remind myself that it’s worthless now. It’s worthless. And I guess she doesn’t really trust me.

  Jude feeds me one lie after another and I gobble them up like a baby eating mush. I suppose I know it to be mush, but I want to like it. I want her to hurt me, to betray me. And as long as I pretend to believe her, I can make excuses for not killing her. But I have no excuses now. I have nothing but a sad little drug habit and the twisting notion that I might love her.

  There’s a telephone beside the bed, and I’m tempted to call Moon and tell him where I am. I’m in Texas on a vibrating bed. My new girlfriend is a secret agent and she traded my kidney for a box of smack. She loves me. She loves me not and I want you to come down here with a big fucking net and take me back to Fort Logan. I need forty-eight hours of observation. I pick up the phone and dial Eve’s number.

  What are you doing? I say.

  Phineas, she says. Her voice is fragile, terrible.

  Are you alone?

  Why?

  I just want to talk. I want to know if anyone’s listening.

  No one is here, she says. I’m lying on the couch under about ten blankets. I’m watching the news and I’m waiting for them to flash your face on the screen: have you seen this man?

  I’m invisible, I say. I’m safe.

  Are you? That cop was here yesterday, Detective Moon. He seems to be worried about you.

  Oh, yeah. He wants to arrest me.

  No, she says. I don’t think so.

  What did he say?

  He said there’s a lot of evidence against you. But he said it was too easy, too perfect. He doesn’t think you did anything.

  And what do you think?

  Silence.

  I was raped, Phineas. I was raped.

  Eve, I say. You don’t have to talk about it.

  I’m okay, she says. I’m really okay. I have a gun under the blankets. Two days ago I was like a puppy that someone had tortured. I screamed when I heard a car door slam. And now I want to kill someone and it makes me feel good. It feels really good.

  I know the feeling. It comes and goes.

  Where are you? she says.

  What kind of gun do you have under those blankets?

  I don’t know, she says. A little bitty gun, like a toy. But it’s loaded.

  That’s fine. Is this gun an automatic?

  No, she says. The chambers spin around in case you want to play Russian roulette.

  Okay, Eve. It’s okay.

  A six-shooter, she says. In another lifetime I was Calamity Jane.

  She laughs and her voice is like thin ice.

  Eve, please. No one else is going to hurt you, I say. The cops are watching your apartment and the man who did this is dead.

  It wasn’t a man, she says. I told you it was a woman.

  Eve, I say. Forgive me. But when did you last have sex with a man?

  I was sixteen, she says. Three years ago. I did it with a boy who stuttered. It lasted two minutes, maybe. What are you trying to say? That I wouldn’t recognize a penis?

  I’m not saying anything. Tell me what happened.

  Eve takes a long painful breath.

  It was dark in my room, she says. I have these heavy velvet curtains that block out the sun and I was trying to sleep. Georgia was home but she couldn’t talk. She was hiding in the closet and whenever I tried to touch her she growled at me, so I left her alone. I wanted to sleep. I never heard a noise, not a whisper. I always sleep on my stomach. Ever since I was a kid. And when I felt a hand on my neck I thought it might be Georgia but the hand was so strong. I tried to roll over and I saw a shadow leaning over me, slender like a woman and a black ski mask over her face. I think I still believed it was Georgia and this was one of her sex games. She liked to dress up in different clothes and pretend we were strangers. But then she started wrapping the tape around my face and I was a little scared. And the fear was exciting at first. She tied my hands and feet and cut off my T-shirt and underpants and I felt the knife against my skin. Then she started beating me and she pushed my legs apart and she shoved things inside me.

  What things, I say.

  Eve is crying now and I start to babble that I’m sorry, that I don’t want to know.

  I think there was a wooden spoon, she says. A shampoo bottle and a portable phone. And something very cold, like a gun. But maybe that was only my imagination.

  My fucking god.

  Now, she says. Do you think it was Georgia?

  I may never know and I can’t say I’m sorry anymore. I don’t think I can stand the sound of my voice. I listen as she walks down the hall with the portable phone, her footsteps soft and faraway. She goes into the bathroom and I hear her pull back the shower curtain. She locks the door and I listen as she puts her finger down her throat and throws up. She does this twice, her throat racked and hoarse. She sits on the toilet and I listen to her pee. She brings the phone to her mouth and I listen to her breathe.

  I’m going to go to sleep now, she says. Will you stay on the phone awhile?

  twenty-eight.

  Eve is asleep a thousand miles away and I lie on a rented bed, the telephone heavy on my chest.

  There’s a knock at the door and I tell myself it’s Jude, she’s forgotten her key. But she is too careful for that and I check the peephole. Distorted and grotesque through the fisheye is Isabel, and she’s alone. She is smiling and confident. She wears her own hair, short and dark. She wears a new dress, silver with a metallic texture. Lucy would have looked fabulous in it. She might have a gun behind her back but I really don’t care. I want to smash something. I open the door and there’s nothing there. I’m only hallucinating again.

  Now I wonder where Jude has gone. She does covet the air of mystery, and perhaps she has only disappeared to make me nervous. Maybe she’s gone to sell the her
oin and won’t she be surprised when she finds the Blister’s soiled clothes? Maybe she is meeting one of Gore’s wraithlike henchmen, negotiating the final terms of the exchange for my remaining organ, for me. And so she had to leave me behind. I would only be cumbersome and dull. I might ask silly questions. Or else she is chatting on a cell phone with another agent back at headquarters. But she may well be down the street at the bar of a much nicer hotel, killing time and nursing a drink. Lazily eyeing a fat, torpid lawyer. He is drinking bourbon on the rocks as if tomorrow will never come and she decides his kidney may be worthless, but perhaps she could move his corneas.

  I want to tell her I don’t care anymore, that I can forgive her. I only want to kiss her sweet lips and go to sleep. And I’m such a liar. In two days or a week, I would wake beside her sore and stinking of sex and my mouth dry as dust. I would look for flaws in her face and body, imperfections that would prove her heart was never pure. I would not love her. I would not.

  I try to remember the way I felt when I first felt her eyes on me. I felt cold, as if I had touched a piece of metal or just walked into a dark movie theater.

  I feel extraordinarily calm. It’s time for me to run. And it’s possible that Jude wants me to run. She wants me to save myself, to disappear. Perhaps she merely wants to hunt me. I roll off the bed and reach for my shoes. I fumble with the laces like a toddler and I try not to worry about the unraveling that will take place inside me when my body begins to crave the phantom drug and I find myself weeping for Jude to save me. I need to get out of here before I change my mind. Before Jude appears, warm and bending to kill me. I take almost nothing with me: knife and gun and a box of .38 ammunition. The torn and filthy clothes I am wearing and a fat wad of cash. I hesitate, then leave half of my money for Jude. I resolve to buy myself some new clothes and a hot meal.

  *

  Crushing white sunlight and I feel numb, shocked. I was so sure that it was night. I slouch away from the motel, feeling strangely naked without the icebox and I’m sure that everyone on the street is turning to look at me. Every passing car fills me with dread. I cross the street and hurry into an alley. The smell of rotting food drifts from the back of a restaurant and I doubt if I will be able to eat. I need to sit down, to rest. There is a discarded mattress tucked behind a garbage pail and I’m tempted to flop down on it but I’m afraid I would fall asleep and wake up in jail. But my knees are numb and soon I am sitting on a cinder block in the inelegant, squatting position of a man on a child’s toilet.