The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  The night is brown browntime, the day is orange orangetime, then pink pinktime. Traveling on hijacked rail cars, or real cars, causes a lot of friction — among passengers — and a strong breeze smelling of fecund air conditioning and freshly burst bags of chips is almost medicinal. Convenience stores convey a conduct for the use of their services and stations. Convenience people understand these things, the conduct that is carried forth on a wave of pink then brown air, door-chimes echoing into eternity whenever the steps of the initiated cross a threshold from one transaction to the next. Convenience people require fast, cheap service, as well as access to the penny tray, if necessary. Their vocations require whoring of the body in the browntimes and whoring of the mind in the pinktimes. Both require fuel and this is where the blood comes in. Blood transfusions from neck to teeth and then throat are linked in spirit with the transfusion of essence from boner to mouth-seal and then throat. They need both to survive, the convenience factor of each becoming such only after passage out of the transfusion scene, and complete and utter mobility is maintained in perpetuity… We duck into a Flying J across from an almond orchard. I disappear into the ladies’ room, down a long grey corridor, setting aside a mop and bucket to get the door open. Once inside I turn the light off and point the hand blower up at my face so my old tears bake on my skin, plastered around my eyelids where they belong. I can barely make out my reflection in the mirror — the light from a lamppost outside informing my features in the darkened room in brown night. In the mirror I look otherworldly and my voice comes out low and disembodied. I’m speaking like this for God knows how long before it seeps out, “Bloody Mary — raise my blood from the dead, my sister rots under the ground, not on top of it like me.” Comically, the hand dryer shuts off and I’m able to slowly reach into the mirror’s frame, beyond the meshing point, and fix my own fractured smile from beyond the grave. Outside, in the radioactive perma-dawn of 7-Eleven, I fix a large 24 oz. cup of coffee, pouring from the fullest pitcher, leaving a half-inch at the top for the two things of hazelnut non-dairy creamer. I stir with two red straws before discarding them. Blue lid, a couple of napkins in my apron pocket for spills, one of which is already necessary to blot up beads of hot condensation that have gathered around the rim only to have fallen on the web between thumb and index finger. I’m a hungry wolf! I lunge at your eyeballs, infecting your insides by horrifying your bulging gaze, releasing chemicals in your brain that spark a sudden decay. I seek prey out of the endless night, fog shrouding my knives, my secrets. I will rummage around in your soul — don’t let me! Don’t let me too close, I will bite you, I will tear at you. I want to eat you! When anti-sleeping in a boxcar, Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies receive and send out neural stimuli with shared minds. I have found that this causes boners in the male mind, and uncontrollable weeping in the female mind. I’m sleeping now. With every crack of synapse a small felt thread grows and spreads across my body until I am covered with layers of a dusty web. This shroud obscures me, while it confines me to the self-annihilation scenario. Every thread wraps even tighter around me, until I’m suffocated by my ESP addiction, held fast by my insatiable urge to undo men through telekinetic mindpower!

  “The sun went down.”

  “Here, help me hoist open the paneled door of our telepathy crypt.”

  “Let’s go to Safeway, there’s one I saw at the last exit; I want some grapefruit juice.”

  I wander around to the alley of the supermarket to find a new box for all my stuff. Suddenly I find that I can’t walk any further, that something bad will happen to me if I round the corner. I lean my palm against the side of the building; I catch my breath which seems to have been taken from me. Some sharp pain pings at my kneecaps from the inside. A tingle washes over my brain and chills my entire body. I peer into the shadows carved out by the overlap of cinderblock wall and orange utility light. I see a shape. Am I supposed to be here, to find evidence? To bear witness? To blaze a trail? Where did I leave my soul that night? In a box behind a Safeway in Spokane. What does a sudden explosion in your pulse mean? What about a lurching of the synapse, is that someone trying to telepathically reach you? Her name was Kim; I had a thing for Kim, but in an indescribable way that was unlike anything else, ever. She seemed to under-perform everyone around her in just about everything, smarts, crafts, she couldn’t fight, she only cooked Hot Pockets… Why her then? There was just a lot of longing, and a lot of curiosity surrounding her I guess you could say. And I could never grasp it; she fell through my fingers. She was more dead than the rest of us, the deadest. Her hair fell in shafts of light through my fingers. In the reflection of her eyes I could see my heart, bursting. I grew up next to her body, came of age in a series of heartbeats when she said the syllables of my name. I found my hand caught in the fold between her ribcage and hip. There was nobody around, it was Sunday morning three years ago and our foster parents were at church. I had fallen asleep next to her the night before; we shared a bed those nights because it was the best way to do it, to sleep soundly beside a body that made little whining noises and turned like a plush engine, spilling gardenia into my face. I brushed across her hair on my pillow, took my hand across shoulder and fatty patch behind breasts, under crook of arm, under covers where her flesh was hot after slow burn of sleep, until my hand found the sad valley between her legs, between everything, and I lingered there and she awoke to this lingering and came to my mouth and we kissed for the first time, outrageously listless with lack of sleep-slash-excess of sleep, two puffy faces inspecting each other for the source of swelling. Irreversible, indelible marks were made on virgin flesh. This was also the summer I think some of our memories and life experiences got switched, our souls transferring in the kiss. This is when I began to wonder if maybe some of my thoughts weren’t really mine, but Kim’s instead.

  Now if I stop thinking specific thoughts and stop using my eyes to look at things, I can, perhaps, see her smoking on a murky little Merrill Lake beach all day. Lying face down in the sand. Taking the bus to the mall, lurking around the abandoned foodcourt in the early afternoon dead hour. Sleeping in an empty mortgage office, closed for remodeling. Running with a tribe of teen hobos, insurgent forces with a few teeth and handkerchiefs on sticks, occupying the gutted palaces of the old regime; some are kind to her, some do bad, some do odd beer-soaked things to her in the janitor’s closet. There is no in between. But for gangs of self-styled urchin mystics there is also no day, and afternoons die with your capacity to understand normal people, then you get fucked over by them. And what about us Night People? How do you define what happens to humanity when the sun sets? The coming of night in the Pacific Northwest suburbs yields a weirder, more druggy populace — if only because the few left out are crazy for being left behind.

  The source of trauma is always off-the-wall: trees, moss, rocks, ferns — they all had a hand in it. Storms always begin in the woods and move out, to where the people are. Only parking lots are truly safe, everything else will get leveled. People will leave, go somewhere more useful. And so it’s just parking lots. The world began with parking lots. I used to live in a trailer in the woods, I think for a good amount of time. While I was there I kept thinking I was going to ride up on my bike and it would be gone, there would just be a dead patch on the grass where it used to be hitched. I lived there with Seth, and one day it happened, I rounded the corner on my bike and the trailer was gone. Some dude came out from behind a tree with a wrench and told me to get away; then he started chasing me. I did get away, walked until I fell down. But the next thing I recall is waking up in a strange bed, or on a sofa, kind of wedged in a corner, and there was the smell of coffee burning on a stove — agas flame the only other light except the sun rising, and it made the trees blue, all couched in fog. I felt small, sharp grains of sand or grit under me, shifting on the sofa cushions. I heard a man waking up, then worming over to me… More importantly, I remember growing up in the county foster care system, this is way before any of that stuff.
Recovering underage prostitutes were delivered to our house on a weekly basis. I was surprised when my “stepdad” got convicted for this killing. Armed robbery of a trucker stopped on the shoulder of the freeway. The man later died of his wounds. Cops followed a trail of stolen garbage to a house my stepdad used to stash drugs and stereo equipment. There was an article on him in the paper when he was arrested, shit started coming out about a secret family, children fending for themselves in Idaho. On his last day in court, the cops decided he was wanted for an October incident in the children’s shelters in Idaho Falls. There were a dozen giggles from caseworkers, they gathered around us to say thanks and goodbye. They interviewed a girl from Idaho Falls who couldn’t read too well and carried an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus in her womb. We got the gist of the killing, but the girl’s testimony threw us for a loop. After a while both parents were gone so much it was like we were running our own lives in this garish potpourri den. We beat on each other in bed with a big wooden fork and spoon ripped from the kitchen wall. Monday night we had found a way to help ourselves to the Bourbon.

  I picked up the new People to go through at a 7-Eleven checkout, taking care to flip past the first seven or eight pages — enough to bypass the introductory ads, but not so much as to miss candid photos of famous people and end up in human-interest territory. When some lady glared at me I stuffed the magazine down into the rack and got a hot dog, pressing onions in a mound on top of it. Seth, Josh, Murph, and Knowles were trying to talk the clerk into letting them drink from a big white bucket of old, cold coffee that was sitting on the floor; cause they’re cheap assholes. At some point word was given and it became okay for them to take Styrofoam cups and fill them up, and they were taking like four each and reheating them in the tainted microwave. Ready for coffee with eau de nitrate à burrito steamed inside? A few of us broke away from the dozen or so area kids who were already walking the tracks, for no other reason than to fuck with some locals. I had a canvas bag with my laundry in it, so we went to this laundromat that smelled like bleach. That, the heat, and the sheer volume made it seem like the place was gonna positively explode. A fine layer of detergent dust on every surface grated horrifically when I scratched at the enamel lid of a washing machine. I was loading it up with rags when Knowles came up to me and said the guy was there with our shit. “Go see Seth then, I don’t know…” I said to him. I assumed he and the guy went into the bathroom together cuz I didn’t see him for a while, and figured it would take forever to break into that emphatically locked bathroom in the first place. Well Knowles came out glowing like a fuckin toy robot — hitting on every chick in the place with this gross smile. I sat on a white curb in the parking lot, squinting into the mirror of a rouge compact as I trimmed my bangs with a tiny pair of corroded sewing scissors. Amphetamine is it for us, Knowles cautioned as he sat down. He explained that, “while amped walking around downtown, lost and aroused,” he would kick at his shins whenever he started to think about sex, and while he was in a good riding place underneath those new modern freight cars he would hold his hand as close to the ground as possible without mashing it up on the track. Around the corner at the Greyhound station I met a man wearing a green windbreaker. We ducked into the nearest restroom. My lips grazed his cheek; his cold skin tasted like wind.

  Never get old! As a vampire you’re undead, as a sexy girl you’re dying all the time. With this preserved teen body, something’s just a little off — is it the foggy eyes? Drained, heavy limbs, the fecund core? Liquid bones? Cinders, wind, and frost have irritated and roughed up teen skin. Sickly and suffering from chronic under-nourishment, I appear to subsist almost entirely upon my fingernails, which I gnaw habitually. In my mind, when I am neither out cold or awake, but in a fit of trippy awfulness after the Robitussin has worn off, I, like my brothers in the freight car, have to crash for a few during the afternoon — sleeping to some extent of the word, but it’s more like anti-dreaming — guided on a horrific tour of the service entrances of my mind.

  What I did!

  I could see it all, but from too far away to do anything about it. There was probably a hillside over a creekbed close to where we romped. When it was windy the sound of leaves on rocks obscured the sound of a falling body. There was a bundle, a body wrapped. When this bundle is undone it will be discovered to be the remains of a twenty-year-old, her tight throat torn asunder by fine white bites. Further down, her right breast is cut, where during that part of the ceremony an incision is made to heighten a point in the story. If the path suggested by her ribcage is taken, it will lead to an abrupt gouge at the base of the tailbone, an enlargement chiseled out of the rectum, where some ass play had been as part of a seduction script which, it will later be known, has been caught on VHS tape by the assailant. This tape will be selected out of a bag of other tapes and viewed, where her secret death had formed a magnetic coating on the tape which will, in turn, remain as a cathartic residue for all to see (no one should be expected to endure both a secret birth and a secret death). There is also a part of the ceremony where a man holds a woman’s legs up and together while he amasses great erotic potential at the site where these limbs had been convinced apart, where he too will surmount an outrageous smoldering climax, alternately squinting and unsquinting his eyes as if he can’t believe it. She will then kiss him full on the mouth, dropping breathless lips onto his, drawing back saliva to a place strange and wonderful in her brain and with it his thoughts, his being, a fluid transfer which has no more materiality than a kiss. It is this way she can know him, have him truly within her, to know his thoughts, to dream his dreams for him; to, in an abstract capacity, inhabit his being in this way — to not penetrate his core, but take it into her so it becomes her core. All her life she had been amassing cores inside her body, to insert one more would not be a difficult task, and it would hardly be the last. I know this because I was there. It is through these transferals that I came to know the girl on the tape. I kissed the screen and so gained access to her mind and lived inside it for a year like a vapor.

  KIM WASHED HER HAIR IN THE CREEK, AT A SPOT in the middle of the forest below an abandoned limekiln. She waded through the shallow trough into a thick rush of cool water and knelt on a shiny black stone. Taking a cracked coffee mug she sloughed ice water over her hair. Pulling a bead of dishsoap into her palm, Kim worked the gel into an acrid lather. She passed cup after cup of creek water over her bowed head. She yawned because she was tired and water gathered in a rush of streams around her gaping mouth. The dog guarding a yard close to where I slept was able to absorb the energy of surrounding ghosts. He barked like it all was unbearable and I know, I know, dog. I choked on the dusty air and lapsed into a franticly disturbed sleep.

  I dreamed that I awoke abruptly and found myself in a weather-beaten shed on the beach, which looked to have been built by hand — in what century I couldn’t be sure. Seth appeared in the doorway. He carried a small object carefully in his hands. “You were sleeping. I found you and brought you here. I thought that by waking you would see the world through different eyes… I’m sorry to wake you but I wanted you to see what happened, what I did for you… I wanted you to see what we made.” He held up a tiny pink mask. “All this time while you were sleeping. No one else was around. I wouldn’t let anybody near. And one day it appeared, it just happened. It came from you — from your body. Don’t you see? It’s our image, combined.” I looked at it and saw my features projected down into coordinates in the delicate pink wax. Where he found it I didn’t want to know. I pushed it away. “Don’t you understand? We made this. This is ours.” I coughed and buried my face in my shoulder. He looked positively extinguished. The truth was, I didn’t recognize the damn thing. If I was asleep this whole time and it just came about, well, I couldn’t be sure it was even mine. I chewed nothing inside my mouth, “I’m going away.”

  Josh and Knowles found girlfriends in town, these sixteen-year-old rockabilly chicks with smelly old letterman jackets, pegged jeans, and cr
eepers who shared a bed in their apartment with a young cat, made miniature by a steady diet of second-hand smoke. The boys brought them back to the camp and petted them and kept telling the girls how much they were “tortured by their own savagery.” Murph came back with a grocery bag of old bagels he got behind a coffee house.

  For me tormented animals everywhere call out all over town, their eyes pessimistically follow me, challenging me to do something about rustlings in the fog hanging in their pens. Over the fire with fingerless gloves dipping into a Swiss Miss packet, Seth said, “These are hectic times. We’re running out of places to go, places that aren’t just containers squeaking through this world on steel tracks. We are not citizens.” But is that so bad, to never go back? Endless movement is all some ever know. You don’t get sick if you never stop. But if you ever do, prepare to crumble… The next day we jumped a rail car to Salem. We made a shitty tent on the edge of a duck pond. In town I dug around in a bin out in back of a thrift store as if I knew there was something to it, taking the gouges and varied textures of the pile in stride. There was nothing in there but a bunch of oily metal parts and clothes coated in orange sticky dust. Most loaded objects emit a tone: a possessed bucket of coffee in a convenience store; a red smear on the grocery store floor; a stray bird in a bus station cabinet; a tramp walking into the restroom, yelling at the cockatiel on his shoulder, “You shithead.” Blood blood blood on the bathroom spigot in a diner, a big branch way up high on top of an aisle at Safeway. Piles of anything. Bees with orange and brown stripes lurked in the upper leaves of redwood trees over our camp; yellow jackets ate out of a pie plate on the picnic table. When they got close they gazed at me with dreamy metallic alien stares while they slurped goo through straw mouths. The forest was orange and brown. My eyes were full up with darkness, making my eyelids itch and fight to close. I couldn’t be sure if this was because it was dark in the forest or painfully bright. I knelt at the base of a tree, buried my hands in the grainy moss and it gave completely. I dug for several minutes before becoming aware that I was scraping at the edges of a gelatinous mass lying below the surface like a giant petrified ember. Space gel accumulated under my fingernails and turned the crests orange. Some hours later, at a Safeway, I knelt at the base of a dry goods aisle extending to the edge of town like a cardboard wall. I dug into the packages, scooting aside layers of boxes to find a pile of pills at the back of the shelf. I gobbled them up and crawled behind the deli counter, which supported a sign that said LET ME MEAT YOUR NEEDS, adding that the station was closed until 8 a.m. the following morning. I laid my head down on a bundle of aprons, my anti-dreams gradually turning the pile into a stone.