The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  She snips through the skin across its neck and slips a large blue artery out on the tip of her finger.

  “Now you just watch what I do. If the cat moves around, don’t worry about it, it’s dead alright. Gassed this morning at the good ole Humane Society.”

  Liz goes through a complicated series of procedures, hooking up tubes through the cat’s throat, slitting a long hole in its side and injecting brightly coloured dyes into its heart and intestines. Then she sews it up with rough sutures that are immediately strained by the pressure of the formaldehyde and ethylene glycol that is filling the body. The cat does move periodically, kicking at Liz’s hips with its hind legs, and when she’s finished its eyes have popped open and the flesh of its mouth is so plump and distended that its fangs spring from its face. The expression is a scream that exceeds all physical boundaries.

  “OK. There ya go. One down and, oh, I’d say, eighty-nine to go.”

  Jack swallowed hard and turned to the garbage can. With that swallow and that turn Jack performed a faint measurement upon himself — the same measurement that all scientists must, sooner of later, make. As he felt the weight of the first cat pulling down in his fist, as well as the return of his dizziness from the day before, Jack decided that some of this would have to be performed as if it wasn’t happening at all. It was a quick decision, a matter of survival. A financial decision. And as soon as he had made it. Jack became fascinated by the animal he held. At night he studied and examined their biological systems, and in the day he joined his thumb and forefinger through them, testing the integrity of tissue, marvelling at how it escaped his pinch and fled into his palm.

  Always alive. Always thinking. Melodious, heavy, and always beautiful. It was here that he first noticed how the interior of a body is as spontaneous against itself as thought is to fresh air. There’s a little oily dance of the world deep inside its billions of bodies. An entire river sings along a fold high in the nose of a catfish.

  And in the royal blue seam of his own guts.

  ★

  Kathy’s hair jumps against Jack’s cheek while she pushes down hard against the back of his cock with the top of her pussy. As she starts coming she changes direction abruptly, yanking him to the side. Jack, unprepared for this new movement, completely looses control and bucks upward trying to follow through, trying to match the tempo of her thrashing. He finds a gap between their left hips, and manages to whip his climax back into control, but only for few seconds. Finally, Kathy drives down solidly, sealing their crotches tightly as she comes. She falls against him and spreads her elbows across his shoulders.

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah nice.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some fact.”

  “OK …”

  Jack has to bring a hand to his face in order to think. He tries to curl it over her bent arm, but can’t. He pushes her arm up and slides under. She grunts and rolls off him. Jack pulls at his chin and looks up at the ceiling.

  “OK. Hmmm. Did I ever tell you about the sea squirt?”

  “No, I don’t think so, squirt.”

  Jack reaches down and flutters his hand across his still swollen genitals.

  “Oh yeah. Oh yeah, squirty, baby.”

  Kathy knocks his hand away.

  “Shut up. C’mon, tell me about sea squirts.”

  “OK. OK. Sea squirts are totally the coolest things goin’. They’re a tiny ocean animal: immature, they look sort of like a see-through thimble.”

  “Like a little jellyfish.”

  “Yeah, exactly, only they’re a little more rigid. But they move the same way, propelling water through their bodies. OK. So there ya go: the immature sea squirt is a tiny brain, scootin’ around in the dark, eatin’ microbes and shit like that, see?”

  “OK.”

  “Then it matures. The first thing it does is look for a spot to settle, somewhere where lots of food floats by. When it finds this spot it plunks its ass down, actually attaches its ass to the spot, and never moves again until the day it dies.”

  “Never?”

  “Not ever. In fact, and this is the cool thing … But first, before I tell ya, let’s do a bowl.”

  “OK.”

  Kathy reaches down beside the bed and pulls up a purple glass bong. She reaches into the open drawer of the bedside table and fumbles around, pulling out a small tinfoil pouch. She fills the bong and they both take turns sucking up the wet, white smoke.

  “OK. OK. This is it … the totally cool thing. What do you think is the first thing that the adult squirt eats?”

  “A panzerotto.”

  “Yeah sure. Uh-huh. The first meal of the mature sea squirt is its own brain!”

  “C’mon.”

  “Sure! It doesn’t need it any more! It doesn’t have to go anywhere! It doesn’t have to look for anything! All it needs is food. It doesn’t need a brain anymore, so it eats its own goddamn brain, I’m tellin’ ya!!”

  “Couch potato.”

  “Yeah, a couch potato that just happens to eat potatoes!”

  Kathy sits up and looks over to the computer screen at the far end of the trailer. The familiar icon of a mailbox. The red flag shooting straight up. She feels a prickle of hairs down her neck.

  “Oh my God. It’s begun …”

  FOURTEEN

  Kyle has been standing, leaning against a Toronto Sun box, for over an hour. From a distance he would appear to be anything but comfortable — his chin rests on the coin box, and one arm hangs loose across the display paper at the front — but he’s utterly at ease. Where he once sank he is now buoyant. Where he once chopped anxiously with his tongue he now dips and flips and floats.

  He is almost flamboyant. And he is most certainly flourishing at this intersection, tanning in the noon day sun. No argument. Great improvement. Great life to live. Even the impurities, the yellow panic of leather on the back of a rollerblader’s hand, fingers optional, can be returned, sent away, banished and made over into something entirely appealing. A yellow plastic clock, maybe, from the sixties. Yes. Moulded in the shape of the sun. With tiny orange flanges to hold it upright. Kyle marvels that nothing backfires. What the hell, he thinks, as he tilts back on his heels, and smiles at an elderly woman with a small white dog. I wasn’t getting anywhere, anyway. New beginnings.

  He leans against the traffic light and sees his reflection in the front window of Bletcher’s Video. The chipped doorway beside it, receded back from the sidewalk, opens onto a stairway at the top of which is a Salvation Army store. On a shelf between the overcoats and vinyl rain gear there are nearly one hundred used books.

  I can’t be a great writer. So what? I can be a great reader!

  The Valium seconds the idea merrily, and with an unanticipated dip backwards before going forward, Kyle steps off the curb. It is advisable to note his shoe. This shoe is a purple canvas deck shoe, brand name Van. It is chic and light and comes down across the gutter rather sloppily; its drugged toe points down. Across the pelvic white of this plastic toe the gleaming grill of a speeding car is visible. It bares down on the intersection at breakneck velocity, riding off its chassis, so high off the cloud of dust it spits up that it nearly fills the sky.

  As the tidy purple Van drops toward the surface of the road, the driver’s side of the car becomes visible beyond the young man’s slick shinbone. A woman is driving, stabbing her finger at stores, calling out madly and laughing. The grill of the car has only a fleeting second left. It tries to accommodate the blow, to prepare by creating a knee-shaped dent, but it’s too late, and the knee itself hits, a hardball cracking a bat, revolving the pedestrian fully twice before he topples backward, disappearing in a bank of road dust.

  Kyle looks up and tries to move, but his shoulders are pinned to the sidewalk from behind. Suddenly, a head appears above him.
It soars, upside down, blocking the sun. It is Dr. John Mendez.

  “Don’t move, Kyle. You need transporting. The charioteer got you. I was afraid of this. Our Treasurer is possessed today. She’s going to kill someone on her way to heaven, I think.”

  “Ow. Oh … shit … I think my knee’s broken.”

  “It bloody well might be. It might. Hey, Kyle, listen to that! You’re sounding positively referential, aren’t you?”

  “Huh? Ow.”

  “That’s OK. Loud and clear little Kyle. That’s it. A good basting of diazepam and a sound rap to the knee and the patient is restored, hmmm?”

  Kyle has felt smooth all afternoon. True, he’s spoken very little, but he’s been aware that the content of his speech is less troublesome, that it consists mostly of moans of satisfaction and greetings to people buying newspapers out from under his hanging arm. He has noticed that this effect is a refreshment and that the refreshment is a tranquilizer. He feels, as he stretches his leg, not painfully but carelessly, that a lifetime supply of drugs could rid him of virtually all discomfort. If you’re going to die anyway, maybe even soon, maybe even already, why not ease yourself into the ground slowly, in an amicable light, no longer signifying the process like a mad fly, but gently arranging the clothes on your body so they don’t pull. Reassure your companion: No, I think I’ll be alright now.

  Doesn’t that just make sense?

  “Doc, my knee hurts.”

  Mendez crawls down on his belly beside Kyle. He lays palms over and under the leg at the knee.

  “I don’t think it’s broken, Kyle. I don’t think so.”

  Kyle looks calmly at the Doctor and sees his own body as well, fallen in the grass, at the side of the road. He feels no pain in his leg. He lies.

  “It hurts.”

  The Doctor sits up and rubs his fingers in quick, light circles around Kyle’s biceps. He puts the thumb of his other hand on the under side of a lump in his shirt pocket and flips, the thumbs up, ejecting a pill container.

  “Well, let’s give you a couple of these Percocet, hmmm?”

  Kyle lays his head back in his folded hands. He will wait. He closes his eyes and realizes that the spot where he lies waiting is filling up inside him like a balloon. It carries him up and out. This will be a moment he can start over again from. An absolute blank. He cups his hand at his side and an attending companion sprinkles pills, rolling them down the heel of his thumb. This will be it. Home.

  From here, and from now on, the experience he gathers can be tested against a new surface, a paper-thin sidewalk. Kyle knows now that everything will bounce up from here, a lively and impenetrable popcorn. Good will. People on people’s side.

  “OK, Kyle, you suck on these bonbons for a while. But while you do, I have to tell you something that has just occurred to me, seeing you laying there like that.”

  Mendez sits back from Kyle and draws his elbows up onto his knees. He gives the pill bottle a shake and it rattles as he drops it into his shirt pocket. He slaps a mosquito that has bitten the back of his wrist and softly scratches the rising welt as he begins to speak.

  “In the first century after Jesus was born, a Roman fellow by the name of Longinus put some thoughts down on paper. This man had a famous appreciation of the great poet Homer, and since Homer had only ever written two very long poems, Longinus, on this particular day, was doing what would eventually and naturally come to anyone: he was comparing them.

  “The Iliad. The Odyssey.

  “Now there, Kyle, there’s a couple of poems you should read. Anyway, Longinus was driven quite crazy by the first poem, The Iliad. He was made deaf when it hammered — blind when the war rose up around him. He suffered such terrible delusions: that he was shunned in the camps outside Troy; that he was the warrior mad on the rocks; that the sky was having fits in his brain. What the hell was he thinking? What was this poem? For God’s sake, at least he could say, when it ended, this was a bloody good poem!

  “So, still shaken, he set sights on The Odyssey. And he found himself eased by it. He was grateful that he’d marked his time now, exclaiming: ‘Oh dear, who’s that coming up?’ So he compared the experience with being thrown up out of the ocean, from out of the chaotic depths of the first poem, to wading in calm shallows. He observed, finally, the difference: the first poem had been written by the mad sensitivities of youth, and the second by the preserved energy of old age. But, and here he says this, and this is why the second poem is a masterpiece, because it is, after all, the old age of Homer.”

  Kyle feels an itch scurry across the top of his left foot. It disappears then reappears on his right foot.

  “Doctor, I’ve decided I’m not really a poet. Not really. It’s OK, nobody needs to be a poet, right?”

  “Ah Kyle, now you are talking like a poet! Ha! No, what I want to say about this business is something I think I’d like to say to all my patients. I picture myself in fifty years, well, actually I’ll be dead by then, but let’s pretend I’m not. In fifty years I’m out on the golf course or whatever, on the green of some setting or other, with a colleague, who turns to me and says: ‘I saw that Kyle fellow the other day. My heavens, has he fallen off, that boy, hobbling around, his backbone like a fish hook, spotty little hands on a cane. You could do nothing to prevent this young boy’s old age. Doctor?’ And I’ll say to him: ‘No, I could do nothing, nothing at all. But still, look at him my friend. He is, after all, in the old age of Kyle Finn.’”

  Mendez is sawing softly between his knuckle with a wide blade of grass. He bends it up into the wind and observes a minute slit of blood appearing in his skin. He smiles to himself, aware that he has a tear tickling the inside bridge of his nose. This is the old age of Doctor Mendez. He will die without anyone ever discovering what made him cry so bloody often.

  Suddenly — the roar of an engine. The Treasurer is returning through the intersection and as she does, whooping out her cry, the car beats like a helicopter at the air around Kyle and the Doctor.

  FIFTEEN

  The internet. The world wide web.

  These crabby new technologies are configuring our future. The hyperactive model has already slipped into places earlier than the wheel. Our dreaming, our sleeping, and the old developing plates of our imagination — they’ve all been moved across the street. This is cause for enormous excitement. A medium that is all things to all people has finally, like Aurobindo’s panentheistic fish, been born of people.

  Great excitement.

  Little Dorrit has her own web page.

  In the startling scope of this new medium the upper atmosphere discovers its own natural mirror and, exactly like the fire that erupts there, pushing at the winds according to their strengths, enthusiasms become a true test of character.

  Here is another example of enthusiasm.

  A man, with eyes like a pigeon and star-shaped feet, scissors his calves under a damp office chair in the dark of a basement apartment in Little Rock, Arkansas. He has been linked through the mad site, MisinformationInc.com, to a man with long blond dreadlocks in a cyber cafe in Berlin. This man’s heart rate speeds up slightly as an eagle claw releases a letter.

  He drops a harsh Mexican cigarette into a Canadian beer. In Iceland a woman who has a can under her chair that’s filled with icy urine directs the German message to a tipsy party of socialites in Japan who gasp at its content before sending it on to an out-of-work Paraguayan fisherman, who reaches down, surprised by the icon that drifts over his screen, to pull at the pants that he has left wrapped around his ankles now for nearly three weeks. He knows the nature of the message immediately and knows exactly where to bounce it. A British pop star, once famous for his curly hair, pads across the cold stone floor in his bare feet, talking to himself all the way, and guides his mouse, knocking a powerful methaqualone to the side, and clicks the arrow into the eye of a baby on his screen.

 
From here, the message, which has been recoded several times, its shape modified, like a synthetic molecule of dopamine carrying the style of its destination, fits snuggly into a space from which it can cascade. Stars begin to fall out from where they hide in the sky and hit the earth.

  No one sees them.

  Silent whipoorwills. Historical birds.

  They land exactly where they are supposed to. In over four hundred selected points worldwide, the falling stars descend. Too numerous to name names. Not enough time to know more than a few. They all have one thing in common. They traffic in the photographs of children that sweat milk on the sides of cartons. This is a network of child-killers. And they are now, quite suddenly, all made alert to a remote request.

  One of these stars falls in a small winterized cottage in Bewdley, Ontario. On the pretty, ripply shores of Rice Lake, a scanned image is slowly opening like the gradual turn of blinds. Its colours fall in tiers against a red satin backdrop. The upper half of the photograph is complete. The poorly focused upper body of a naked boy. His head is turned to the side and a blue bulge, the size of a baseball, sticks out from his neck. He has been strangled. The features of his face are blurred but the pixels around his eye are jet black. Blood. Bruises. The pixels can be counted. Nine are black. Seventeen are red. Sprinkled across the cheek and up into the eye, thirty-nine are light blue. They cluster over the back of the eyebrow and, again, in a crescent near the nostril. The bulging neck is solid. The pixels are undetectable. The picture suddenly gallops down, filling in another three tiers rapidly. The name Wesley Allen Dodd runs up the left side in a narrow font: Arial.

  It is now obvious that the child is not bound, that we look at him from above. He has been dead for some time.

  Younger than five, his arms are sitting in air over his sides, held there by rigid shoulders. A purple hand dips in from the right, caught in the wrong light. A Polaroid?

  It is the killer’s hand, pressing his fingers on the boy’s belly. He is probably trying to affect the position of the genitals in some way, but it will be impossible to tell until the image is opened further. This is only a matter of time. An oscillating peach colour lights up a tiny icon at the bottom right of twin screens. The time it is taking is marked here by obscure technical enthusiasms. It is impossible to predict when time will move forward again, so the image hangs incomplete on the screen. Suddenly a slate grey rectangle opens up across the space where the boy’s hips will appear. The new window announces the arrival of new mail. The man who has been waiting in front of the screen minimizes the image to a flat panel on the task bar that says: Westl: image loading. He then clicks open the email program.