by phuc
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Though in debt to many, the authors would like to particularly thank the following: Tony Arismendi, Police Chief Lawrence Donahoe, Officer Bob Elliot, Steve Emmett, Dr. Ronald T. Greene, Jr., Eugene Kaili, R.K., Dr. Harold Lerhman, Tim McGinnis, John Pelan, Officer Ed Snydicker, and March 19, 1983.
DEDICATION:
For LS - for chances taken and opportunities missed.
And for Matt Schwartz.
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Chapter 1
(I)
An image flashed. The cat clock.
tick tick tick tick
And unbidden words in her head: It's Sleepytime, Kathy.
She frowned then, blinked it all away, and went to light her hourly cigarette...
The thought came with no volition at all. It never did. The mail's here, Kathleen Shade thought.
Every day she seemed to sense the approach of the squat, cumbersome white vehicle. Was it premonition? By the prickling of my thumbs, she thought, quoting Shakespeare. Ordinarily, she might've laughed, but she never laughed about the mail. The mail provided her only turnstile to the outside terra incognito that was the world.
The world felt removed from her. It honed her oneness, erecting her into shining, crumbly dark.
The mail truck, and its singular sound the way its brakes squealed, the rumble of its muffler called to her much in a way like lust. The honest urge to touch oneself, for the pleasant yet ersatz sensation. Never to climax. Just for the feeling.
The urge had eluded her these days. Odd comparison, she considered. The mail, and precursory masturbation...
She'd been working on her "Verdict" column.
Dear Kathleen:
My boyfriend, with whom I've been living for three years, recently suggested that we "swap." It was at a work party. I didn't know what he meant until a friend explained. He wanted us to switch sexual partners with my boss and his wife! When I refused, he (my boyfriend) took me aside and told me it would be good for my career! Can you believe it? I really love my boyfriend, but this suggestion leaves me shocked. What should I do?
Kathleen typed her response:
Dear Shocked:
Any man who needs to "swap" simply offers more proof of his own male sexual defectivity. Not only does he insult your love for him, he offends himself by verifying his lack of real domestic priority. And in his further coercion, i.e. his suggestion that trading partners would enhance your career status, he commits an even less forgivable slight the traditional male two faced rationalization: the pursuit of his own kinky pleasure as an excuse. Your boyfriend, therefore, demonstrates his utter unworthiness. He is selfish, immature, and prevaricating.
Dump him.
There. Short and sweet. Kathleen's "Verdict" column had become a hit. She'd merely applied, citing her sociology degree and a few published writing samples. "We like your edge," the senior editor had told her. Besides, teaching had bored her. Though the $600 per month she made from
'90s Woman didn't pay all the bills, it made her feel she was doing something. It also made her feel... What?
Connected to something.
A moment later she turned to the next letter (she received several dozen per week) and the thought rang: The mail. She could even be napping, and would wake to realize the mail had arrived. One man she'd dated years ago had told her, "All women are psychic." I guess that's how I knew you were an ass before we even met, she thought now. When she'd caught him sleeping around, he'd claimed, "You gave me no choice!"
She severed the memory. The mail, the mail, she thought. In cutoff jeans, an old white Bud Burma men's longsleeve shirt, and barefoot, she went to retrieve the all important mail. No check this week; God knew she could use the money. Her father always came through, at least. Because he loves me? Or because of guilt? It scarcely mattered now. "I'm very proud of you," he'd said when she'd been given "Verdict." "Your mother would be too." What about Uncle Sammy? she'd wanted to ask. Do you think he'd be proud of me? Should I send him the magazine in prison?
She opened the front door and peered out. Washington, D.C. had a smell no matter where you lived. It wafted up the open stairwell. The hall stood empty. I haven't had sex in a year, she thought. But why think that? And why now? Sex often made her feel totally alone; it made her feel unwanted, which never made sense to her. What more proof did she need of being wanted than an erect penis? She sometimes smirked when she saw lovers holding hands in Georgetown Park, or couples kissing in public. Her neighbors infuriated her, their passion raging through the wall. Mr. and Mrs. Bedsprings. Stop fucking! she yearned to yell at the wall every night.
The mail. Why did it seem so important today? It whispered false promises to her, as Uncle Sammy had, and many of the men she'd made love to. "I ascend to the blinding light," she whispered, descending the apartment steps. A boot lifted away in the sunlit entrance the mailman. Before the glare, and the heat shining off cars, it looked like a foot stepping into hell.
The August humidity made her feel pallid and dry. She got her mail out of the gray row of boxes, and went back up. As she climbed, she felt the sensation of descending. Since turning 30 three years ago she felt choked in a web of opposites: she felt chilled in the heat, she felt bright in utter darkness. I'm weird, she thought.
She did weird things sometimes, like eating only peanut butter for days, or looking at the Spiegel catalogue upside down to see how funny the faces became. She rarely wore clothes in the apartment. Nakedness offered up a reality to her, an encompassing one. She watched TV naked.
She read, cleaned, ate, did laundry she even wrote her column naked. Why wear clothes inside?
she reasoned. No one can see.
Who'd want to see, Fattie? a darker voice inquired. She insisted she was fat, though she really wasn't. She could stand to drop 10 pounds (maybe 15 would be better) but she wasn't really fat.
According to the woman shrink on the radio at night, Kathleen had acquired a "negative self concept continuum." She had a bad image of herself. It was all childhood, according to the woman shrink. Constancy hypothesis from Womb Exit. Reactivity to gender realization. Connate impressions during the formative years. Uncle Sammy probably had a lot to do with it, too.
She wore her self perceptions like a winter jacket, which wrapped her in contradictions. I'm an unsocialized sociologist. Frequently she felt phony. "Verdict" required her to apply deft sociological interpretations, as well as solutions, to the love related quandaries of her readers.
The column thrust her forward as an expert on love, when she'd never really been in love at all.
She'd loved men, she supposed, but that wasn't the same. If they only knew! she thought. God.
Womanhood, which her column exalted, often felt like a curse to her personally. She didn't know what to do with it. She didn't really even know what it was...
She closed and locked the door. She took the mail to the kitchen. AT&T bill, WG&E bill, MasterCard bill. A renewal notice for Cosmopolitan. A renewal notice for Allure. And the weekly carrier envelope from her editor. Readers sent their problems to "Verdict" care of the magazine, and the magazine sent them to her. Several dozen envelopes spilled out of the carrier, most of them the standard 4 1/8 x 9 1/2. And then there was one larger envelope The cramp popped in her loins. Shit! she thought. Her period always arrived like a sniper shot.
Menstruation pissed her off; it didn't seem fair. If women have to bleed from their vaginas, men should have to bleed from their penises. Blood trickled. It felt hot. Just as she would make tracks for the bathroom, though, she caught herself standing still, staring.
She was starin
g at the larger envelope.
It was 9 x 6, manila. Her name and the magazine's address had been typed neatly on a white adhesive label. Kathleen opened it, wincing at the steady cramp.
First, there was an index card on which had been typed:
DEAR MS. SHADE:
YOU ARE A GREAT WOMAN. IN THE FUTURE I WILL BE SENDING YOU MY STORY.
CONSIDER IT A PROPOSITION. IT IS A VERY IMPORTANT STORY.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO MY STORY?
Kathleen's frown turned her face up. There was no return address on the envelope. What story?
she wondered.
Her fingers delved deeper.
Something else in here.
A thin foil packet wrapped in plastic. Unbidden, she thought of drugs. They wrapped drugs in foil, didn't they? Kathleen had never used drugs herself. Too scary. She'd never even smoked pot because she heard it increased appetite. But she remembered from her college days, kids brought hash into the dorm wrapped in foil, and LSD tabs.
Curiosity throbbed with the cramp. She opened the packet on the kitchen counter, peeling away first the plastic, then the foil.
Initially it didn't seem to be what it undoubtedly was. It seemed flattened, like a twist of raw chicken skin. Kathleen could have sworn that her heart stopped for the full minute that ticked by before she called the police.
(II)
Flesh gorgeous, shining shellacked in blood.
It's the image she craves.
It's the truth behind the image.
And The Cross.
She remembers the others, and sighs.
She remembers The Cross.
It's an anticipation: to see the flesh shining in blood.
The Amytal always keeps them out.
I hope you liked the back rub, she thinks. I give good back rubs, don't I?
His face looks childlike in this ponderous unconsciousness.
It's a wonder. His skull seems to glow beneath his face.
Skulls mean death, her mother says.
She Crazy Glues his eyes shut.
She daintily ruptures his eardrums with a Skeele 1.75 mm biopsy curette.
With lovely violet suture and an Ethicon FS 3 radial needle, she sews his lips shut.
She likes that.
Questions kiss her, they lick her.
It's very erotic, these questions.
What do they think when they wake up?
What goes on in their minds?
They can't see, they can't hear. They can't speak. They can't even move.
But they can feel.
She always gives them a lot to feel.
Here he comes.
"You're back," she says.
She caresses his penis.
"I give good back rubs, don't I?" she asks, not that he can hear the question, oh no, not with his eardrums punctured.
"I never lie. I told you I give good back rubs."
She imagines his horror: deaf, dumb, blind, immobile. This imagining arouses her, it lifts her smiling to her tiptoes, swells her perfect nipples, glows between her legs. Soon he's snapping his wrists and ankles against the Peerless Model 26 detention cuffs. It's a lovely, bracing sound, the sharp metallic snap snap snap! Lovelier still: the way his entire face lengthens to misshape, his eyes trying to open, his mouth trying to open, and the frantic swallowed sounds from his throat.
"What are you thinking?" She rubs his flexing stomach. "What's going on in your mind?"
She works on him for a long, long time.
He keeps going out, and the hypodermic keeps bringing him back.
"Skulls mean death," she says matter of factly.
Bruns serrated plaster shears. What they are, exactly, is a nine inch long pair of angled stainless steel scissors, designed for cutting off plaster casts. The Miltex version costs $52.50 per pair, not that she had to buy them. "No plaster casts today," she says.
The shears open.
He's still alive.
The shears close.
"There."
His hips heave.
The buried scream rages in his throat.
"Did that feel good?"
To her left is The Box of Souls.
To her right is The Window.
In the Window she sees The Cross, all white in light.
She smiles.
Her surgical gloves are beautiful bright red now.
His blood is on her; it feels lovely, hot, exotic.
And here is the image she's awaited: to see him shine in his own viscid, wet beauty.
She lets him simmer down some.
She looks at what she's done.
She looks at her slick red hands.
She hopes that Kathleen Shade will want to do her story.
«« »»
Clay Adams dissecting pin. What it is, exactly, is an 18 inch long stainless steel rod, the width of a knitting needle, designed for pushing organs aside during autopsies.
He's numbly convulsing.
He's still alive.
She inserts the Clay Adams dissecting pin into his left nostril and with her palm very slowly drives the rounded steel point deep into
Mother! Mother! she thinks.
his brain.
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Chapter 2
(I)
"Faggot."
Spence was standing in front of the mirror at the HQ bathroom. He was straightening his tie when he turned to face the person who'd just entered.
Some LT from District Four Narcotics; Spence couldn't place the name.
"What did you say?" Spence asked.
"I said you're a faggot. Get that tie nice and straight. You want to look pretty for the boys."
Spence finished his tie. "What's your problem, man? What's your beef with me? You don't even know me."
D4 glared back. "A police department is no place for homos."
Spence, in resolute calm, rammed his fist into the LT's mouth so hard there was an echo in the tiled room, a sound like five pounds of raw sirloin hitting the floor. What also hit the floor was this D4 lieutenant. His eyes crossed at once, and he fell hard.
Spence leaned over to finish the tune up when his beeper went off. He grabbed D4's collar and gave a good shake.
"Listen, asshole. The only reason I'm not going to flush you down the toilet is because I just got beeped. But don't ever cross my path again, all right? Don't even walk down the same hallway as me unless you want to get aired out like somebody's laundry."
Groggily, D4's eyes focused, blood on his lip. "I I'm gonna file charges."
"Go ahead," Spence said. "You picked the wrong homo to fuck with today. See how far you get filing charges against an MCS officer. See how long it takes before you're spending the rest of your career emptying parking meters."
Spence, then, let him go, checked his tie one last time, and walked out of the bathroom. He was not offended, nor agitated, nor pissed off.
He couldn't have cared less.
(II)
"So. You're the feminist writer."
The voice: monotone, dark. He'd identified himself as Lieutenant Jeffrey Spence. His face looked ruddily handsome; he seemed fit, and wore a nice baby blue dress shirt, suspenders, and a dark silk tie. Broad shoulders, well styled short dark blond hair. Kathleen guessed he must be about 30. She also received the immediate impression that he didn't like her.
"I'm a magazine writer," she corrected. "I do a monthly column."
"For a militant feminist magazine," Spence added. "Do you make a living? From this feminist column?"
"It's not a feminist column. It's a self help column."
"Ah. Well. Do you make a living from it?"
"No," Kathleen said.
D.C. Police Headquarters occupied an entire block of Indiana Avenue; it reminded her of a vast above ground crypt. At the front desk, an old sergeant with chin mole that looked like a tumor directed her down a hallway longer than an airport concourse. Is this the secret hall? she thought.
It was empty, silent.
HQ MAJOR CASE SECTION read crisp black block letters across the blond wood door. It reminded Kathleen of other letters, which now felt stamped across her eyes: WOULD YOU