Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

by Robert Devereaux

  Lolling leftward, the exposed part, pure scent of noise and the stuff she craved. Shuck of her jaws opening, tight skin dry and protesting. Noise lowered like a dream, yes, yes, jaws closing, toothscrape, the hot fluids freshening the dryness in her mouth, a wash over face, the noise still pulsing but abruptly out as she munched past the bony part and tore the yellow batting off to go further.

  * * *

  The holy man paused. And Travis swore that what sat on the stage was little more than a corpse. But then the head moved and the hands clasped one another on his robed lap and Travis heard the unneeded (but for speech) insuck of breath.

  “Certain holy saints, it is thoroughly documented in Roman Catholic records,” his head nodded as he spoke, and his grave eyes twinkled like mica, “lived such pure lives that even in death they did not bloat or decay, preserved in some cases for centuries. Saint Angela Merici died in the year 1540. In 1672, her body was found to be intact, incorrupt, sweet smelling.

  And again in 1867, they found the same incorruption.”

  Inside, Travis felt disoriented yet not disturbed, a quiet rush that satsang always brought but weirdly warped, and yet nothing less than fascinating. He felt as if he ought to want to bolt, yet he felt perfectly safe and, in an odd way, holy, to be sitting near this whatever-he-was balanced on a crest of oblivion, conveying its message.

  “Eleven years following the death of Saint Camillus de Lellis, at his official recognition for sainthood, his exhumed body was as fresh and supple as in life; fragrant liquids exuding from him were referred to as copious. So too with Saint John of the Cross, whose flesh was found to be incorrupt for more than two and a half centuries.” The holy man let it sink in. His eyes scanned the crowd, then fixed for a soul-searing moment on Travis, before lifting lightly away like a mosquito refraining from puncture and suck.

  On the north slope of Mount Royal, in La Cimetière de Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Huguette thrust gloveless hands into her fleecy coat pockets and shifted uncomfortably from one boot to the other, waiting for her idiot boyfriend. Chill air was seeping its way under her coat, spiraling up where clothing ought to be protecting her, but where instead, at Louis-Phillipe’s insistence, she wore nothing at all. The English spoke of freezing your ass off; now she knew first hand—and wished she didn’t—what that phrase meant.

  This was stupid. Black Angel with her head bowed and her hands angled open at her sides, thumb-tops dusted with snow: he had said it was good luck to make love under her gaze, but Huguette suspected it was just one more excuse to have sex in an odd locale. Why not? She was finally free of her parents. They were crazy in love. And she had to admit, for all her discomfort and in spite of the shocking overtones of making love in this place—her grandmère, she had to keep reminding herself, was buried not two hundred yards away—

  she was turned on at the thought of his impish grin backlit, over the blanket she’d brought, by the black sculpted frown of the Angel. Looked awfully thin, spread out on the ground, that blanket.

  Then she saw Louis-Phillipe coming from the direction of l’Université de Montreal below, sleeping bag rolled up under one arm. He lurched among tombstones and she hugged herself and jiggled, shouting for him to hurry. Crunching to her, he gave her a huge warm kiss, then untied the bag and unzipped it open atop the blanket. While he was busy, she bit the bullet, unbuttoning her coat and flinging past him onto her back, coat a third layer but bare naked above except for her arms. These she lifted. “Vite, vite,” she said. “Cover me, I’m freezing.” Her nips were tight with cold and her slick chatte tingled with winter wet.

  He jittered his fingers down his coat, unbuttoning to expose himself, raw red funny-finger upjutting, then flew down upon her in a rush of cold. Squirming on her: “Take that side, I’ll do this.” He fumbled his buttons into her holes by her left thigh, while she struggled with the ones on the right, laughing with him as, farther up, it became impossible, arms atangle; but with all the squirming, he’d slipped the yummy tip of his thickness inside her, and the body heat was intense enough that she coaxed his lips down to hers and slow-groined more of his love inside her.

  Startled upward. Broke the kiss: “It looks like the Angel is about to fall on us,” she said.

  Louis-Phillipe laughed. And then they heard shuffled boots from behind the Black Angel. His head craned up as hard white faces under knit caps bobbled through the black night. Hands wrenched him off her, his penis slipping out and exposing her. She tried to cover up, but boots jammed down on her shoulders. “Hey, guys, lookie here. Anybody wanna fuck a frog? Nice froggie, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit.” Mittened fingers tweaked her right nipple and she smacked them away, but they jammed between her thighs and roughly thrust inside.

  “Placeholder, assholes. First pecker out gets to go first.”

  “Get away from me!” she screamed, as Louis-Phillipe tried to fight them but took a fist in his belly, falling to the snow like Christ toppled from the cross.

  Flat patches of black cloth dimpled on the periphery of her vision, and then abruptly the food dislodged. The splash and rattle of spoon in bowl sounded, as her hungry lungs drank air, rounds of coughing and gasps alternating. She hung her mouth over the sink, vision still patchy but coming back. The shiny silver crook of the spigot in her left hand’s grasp reassured.

  For a time, Marcie cried in relief and gratitude, mashed bread floating in bowl-water like an abortion. Her fetus was probably that size now. She worried that her exertions against the sink edge had harmed it, then dismissed her worries as absurd.

  When she could walk, she made her way to the living room and settled on the couch facing the windows, blinds drawn full up onto Rue Drummond, where a car scooped its headlights south and out of sight. She liked the feel of this apartment. The people made the place: both of them such friends and such flat-out attractive people. Marcie wondered if Travis had been at all serious about exploring a threesome, and she especially wondered what dear Laura’s enigmatic look had meant. She didn’t want to blow a great friendship, but maybe it could evolve into something very interesting indeed.

  Across the street a woman went by carrying a sleeping child. From the blanket wrapped about it, one socked foot dangled, a wide patch of exposed skin between the sock and its rucked-up trouser cuff.

  Minor alarms in Marcie’s head. A mother oblivious to the situation could be unwittingly causing her child harm.

  She rose, okay now, and went to the window, unlatching and lifting it wide enough to shout out, “Hello there!” trying that first, against an invasion of cold air, then, “Hello over there, your child’s foot is uncovered!” She pointed, saw the woman turn, repeated what she’d yelled, hoping it carried.

  The woman never broke stride—if anything, quickening her pace—but moved away as though engaged in kidnapping.

  Marcie gave it up and lowered the window, then the blinds, rubbing her hands. Only do so much, then you had to leave things to the fates or to other good Samaritans. Hmm, and speaking of children, it was probably time to look in on baby Jenny, just a peek in, a finger inside her sleepsuit, then gone.

  Travis felt so strange as Swami Apadravya spoke, as if he were hearing forbidden wisdom: not the content so much as what strange breath it was riding on. The light greenhouse feel of satsang was with him as always, but as well there was a dark tinge to it, a flair of ginger-root concentrate teasing the corners of the air.

  “In the Hindu tradition, holy men find control of the body a trivial matter. Sri Ramakrishna scorned to heal an illness he suffered, though he could easily have done so. He preferred to fix his mind on God rather than turn it to what he called this worthless cage of flesh. A yogi named Haridas had himself buried alive for six weeks, guarded by the skeptical, and came out of his hibernation unharmed in the presence of many witnesses. There are numerous other accounts, well documented, of the control of the physical body which comes with spiritual realization.” Again came that dead silence of no-breath as he paused. The insuck, obscene and
oddly enthralling.

  “Why do I relate all this to you? To what revelation are these arcane citations the necessary prologue?”

  Startled upward. Broke the kiss: “It looks like the Angel is about to fall on us,” she said.

  Her boyfriend laughed. “Yes, and you make the earth move for me.” But the statue’s head jostled against wisps of cloud on black sky, and sharp screech of bronze protest on stone mixed with its swift stiff pivot and fall, a sick blast of cold on Huguette’s face as the huge dark head fell with a meaty thud upon Louis-Phillipe’s back. She heard a crack of bone, felt him press against her as if urged into the earth by a slab-hand. He swore from the pain, crying, a scared child. The square of the angel’s base had stayed on its pedestal as though hinged on one side. A dark form wangled out from behind the squarish base, seemingly loath to show itself. Mute, muscular, all shadow as if a shamed retard. Had the dumb thing pushed the statue? But that’d have taken ten strong men. “Help us,” she said, “please.”

  The shadow-head turned as if alerted to something. A crack like an icicle separating from an eave; then another more distant, then a series closer in, invisible houses in every direction letting ice crack and fall but never land. A vision came to her, pinned there: the sprung latches of meat lockers opening in the earth.

  Then the stench came on, writhing in ravels along the snow, twisted lanyards of decay and rot. Two more bobbing heads joined their shy tormentor-savior, moved past him, a draw for him to follow; and then the moon lit them so that if Louis-Phillipe’s crushing weight had not prevented her, she would have screamed. One found his left arm and arced it upward slowly so that Louis-Phillipe’s coat wrinkled in elephant shift and his arm snapped free of its ball joint, skin tearing like an uncooked turkey leg but with blood in his cries; while it was still partway attached, the thing sank its teeth into his hand.

  Another knelt, grabbing her boyfriend’s long hair so that his anguished face came away from her breast. The thing peered close at her, then the head craned to peer at Louis-Phillipe, and slowly it came in to sink a kiss deep into his cheek, tearing away flesh and beard like the marshmallow batting on a Sno-Ball; but what was exposed was not dark cake, but something wet and red, tongue fluttering in a shuddering mouth. Blood fell steaming on her, then cooled, chilling.

  Sirens rose in the distance.

  The two turned at the sound, mouths closed upon meat.

  Huguette could almost see the wheels turning: memory, the walking trove, a surround of life. They haltingly joined others, dark nightmarish shapes of stench staggering down the slope.

  Louis-Phillipe breathed his last. She tried to tug free, worried they might return or that other new-hatched monstrosities would pause to feed on her, but all her attempts came to nothing but pointless exertion. The winter air touched her, touched her, kept touching her.

  “You have heard, perhaps, that I died, that by some miracle of resurrection I was restored to life.”

  My God, thought Travis, he’s going to say it. It was one thing to see him up this close, a veneer of shockingly beautiful holiness animating his corpse as it maintained a mindful hold over a dynamo of mindless need behind; it was quite another to hear the man confess it aloud.

  “I did not resurrect,” Apadravya said, slight headbob like a dummy on a stick, eyes in useless blink. “Nor have I been restored to life.” Laura’s grip tightened and some tight fear let escape a far faint air-brake from her lips. “Those of you who have touched me understand. Those whose eyes are brought close know what I am: I died. I was put in the ground. I came out of the ground. I remain dead.”

  Anyone else had said such a thing, a ripple of laughs would have swept the hall. Instead, a brief murmur fanned the air, punched the gut of elation and left it foundering in dismay.

  Swami Apadravya did not lie—it had been alien to him in life; it was so now. Hackles stood at the back of Travis’s neck, a feeling both harrowing and fulfilling.

  “I am the first of many,” he told them. “Others will come, and soon—others mired in samsara during their lives who will therefore be subject to unthinking appetites when they return. This eventuality cannot be prepared for, and yet you must prepare. Many in this room will be turned by them and will turn others. That is why I begin satsang in my beloved Montreal and carry it throughout this continent and beyond if I am able. It has not been given to me, the knowledge of when this upheaval will begin; but it will be soon, and I am here to witness and warn.”

  Travis was filled with dread. He’d seen a news photo once that had brought a similar horror: the close-up shot of a man’s face, the caption saying that so-and-so watched helpless as his family and all his worldly goods burned up in the trapped inferno of his home. Travis flashed on his parents down in Florida, his brothers in Colorado and New York, Laura and Jenny and Marcie. What if it was starting right now? What if the streets were teeming right now, an army of corpses with the same thick hunger (but unchecked) he read now in Apadravya’s eyes, pushing their way through his door, attacking Marcie and the baby?

  Marcie reared back at the pungency of the stench, an oh-no sounding in her head: too close in the room, window shut tight, space heater roaring, and the sting of ammonia wrinkling the air. Flooding the room with light, she rushed to the baby.

  No movement. No blinkback of brightness. Just stillness and a bloody froth coming from Jenny’s nostrils and mouth.

  Panic rising, Marcie scooped up the lifeless child, sog to the sleepsuit, and hurried her to the changing table. A box of tissues, whip-whip-whip, three in her hand, wiping the froth away, gentle but quick. Then her mouth went to the baby’s nose and mouth, grasping at vague CPR memories. A sour taste there. Think! What was different about CPR on an infant.

  You could blow out their lungs if you tried too hard. But how much was hard enough? Dead hand lay on baby Jenny’s chest, its tiny fingernails tinged with blue. “Come on, come on,” she pleaded, then back into mouth-to-mouth, preventing herself the luxury of sobbing, damage to the brain with each moment it missed oxygen, fingering the tiny cold palm.

  Then came an abrupt clamp on her fingers. And before she could straighten to assess, the baby-head jerked up to her departing mouth and sank sudden ferret teeth deep into her lower lip, vicious and wild. The eyes were pooled and open and dead, but the teeth chewed and stung and the hand squeezed her fingers in a deathgrip and wouldn’t be shaken loose. Her lip felt as if it had been snagged in a sewing machine gone out of control.

  Behind her, a tremendous startle of shattering glass as she turned herself and her nemesis about to feel grave-stench and winter chill and to see (double disbelief, was she half-mad already and had she now gone completely over the edge?) what lurching horrors had ushered them in.

  Marcie snapped on the overhead light and ran to the bassinet, an oh-no heating her thoughts as surely as the space heater was overheating the room. She’d read about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome a few years back, realizing now, with a why-didn’t-I-see-it rising inside, how prime a candidate lit le Jenny had been.

  Blinking back the brightness. Listless, sopping, but okay.

  Lifting her free of the miasma of ammonia, carrying her to the changing table, Marcie comforted, “There there, little Jenny. We’ll get you out of these wet things, give you warm dry diapers, open the window a tiny bit, I don’t care what crap your mommy gives me for it, you and me, we know what’s best for baby, don’t we?” The sleepsuit felt like an unwrung washcloth. She draped it over the wicker basket for non-stinky refuse, noting it would need a rinse in the kitchen sink when she was done here. Ruffle-soaked plastic pants joined them. Then the diaper, a damp runway of streaked brown as she unpinned and hourglassed it open: free it came, and she diaper-wiped the baby’s bottom until it was clean enough for tickle cream; then a fresh new one efficiently pinned, and a t-shirt, and the green oversized sleepsuit, a lecture at once serious and funny bubbling in her head to deliver when Travis and Laura came home.

  Behind her, the window
gave a sharp rattle.

  Travis was walking along cleared mounded sidewalks, the sound of sirens echoing one another from two distant parts of the city. It’d gotten to be too much—the dead holy man not ten feet away—and he’d mumbled some excuse to Laura, something about needing water. She’d be safe. He’d just pop home to reassure himself about baby Jenny and about Marcie, unspook himself from all this palaver about cemeteries disgorging their dead.

  As he approached his building, he felt not a little foolish and decided that maybe the walk had been enough. He wouldn’t disturb Marcie—or more to the point, he’d be damned if he’d give Marcie and Laura something to razz him about for weeks to come. But one peek through the window at baby Jenny sounded appealing. And the bathroom window was just this side of it: Maybe he’d catch Marcie, seized by an urge to luxuriate in a bubble bath, toweling herself off, her breasts bunched over terrycloth like buoyant pink balloons tipped with giving.

  Dream on, he thought.

  His boots were loud and scrunchy on the sanded press of snow underfoot, but he was halfway there and slowed to soften the noise. Odd. Jenny’s room was bright. He came closer, saw the bassinet empty, saw Marcie at the changing table, solidly sveltely female, her red sheen of hair in a fetching chopcut that brought Tinkerbell to mind. Window was… hmm, yes it was, it was unlatched and open, the width of a swizzle stick.

  Christ, what an urge! What was the worst that could happen?

  He’d scare the shit out of her. She’d never speak to him again.

  She’d think he was one blasted dumbfuck and cool toward him from this moment on.

  And the best? What the heck. He fingertipped under the sash. The window gave a rattle and Marcie turned her head.

  Game up. As he lifted the damned thing and slipped in, Marcie said, “Jesus, Travis, what are you up to?”