Prelude to a Scream

by Jim Nisbet

  No, his mouth wasn’t dry. He just couldn’t find it.

  “Wh-wha…” he tried to say.

  “He’s doing that guppy-against-the-side-of-the-aquarium thing,” observed Sturgeon.

  “The eyes,” said Djell, not without satisfaction. “One of them anyway. Which one did you strike, Vince?”

  “The right one. His right, I mean.” A black hand flitted over Stanley’s face. “Here.”

  “If you like,” said Jaime, all business with his gentle manner, “you could try counting backwards from one hundred.”

  Ye gods and little guppies, thought Stanley, No: One hundred indistinguishable gods and just the one guppy, ninety-nine sex gods and ninety-eight single guppies, ninety-seven Christs Velcroed to ninety-six crosses…

  Sibyl wrapped the cuff of a sphygmometer around Stanley’s left biceps and snugged it up. Those goddamned eyes!

  “Ninety-five,” Stanley whispered, attempting to clear his throat. “Ninety-four, ninety-three.…”

  She pumped the rubber bulb. He could barely feel the constriction. There was not pressure in his mouth sufficient to spit. Pure sand, maybe. Individual grains of sand rolling down the inside of the inverted cone of his mind’s mouth, to where the spider waits… He could barely breathe. The green eyes were caught in a band of flesh between mask and cap, like bearings in a race. Frictionless exit. Those green eyes would be the last things he would ever see.

  “Blood pressure?”

  “Ninety-two over ninety-one, ninety, eighty-nine.…”

  Not so bad. Painless. It could have been an an episode of Star Trek he’d never seen before…

  “One-ten over eighty.”

  “Ninety… one …ninety …three… eighty-ninety.…”

  “Ready, steady…”

  Spit in them eyes, man. One last defiance. Hawk it! Those two eyes. One last gasp. Ready? Three, two, one…

  “Three,” Stanley breathed, with all his strength, the words barely audible. “Two, one, every, every…”

  Ev’rything hap-pens to

  me-eeee.…

  Chapter Twenty Five

  At first my heart thought

  you could break this jinx for me

  that love would turn the trick

  to end despair…

  Green eyes.

  …but now I just can’t fool

  this head that thinks for me

  I’ve mortgaged all my castles

  in the air…

  SHE HAD NEVER LOVED HIM. SHE HAD NEVER EVEN WANTED TO FUCK HIM. She reserved that favor for the junkie that was about to cut out Stanley’s liver and sell it for enough dough to take her to Cabo San Lucas. Stanley had been to Cabo San Lucas, with Gray Eyes, once. The first thing he saw when they got off the plane was a 250-lb. guy, maybe 5′6" short, wearing a white tee shirt with capital letters on the front of it spelling SHUT UP in black letters and BITCH in red letters twice as large as the black ones. Stanley immediately concluded that someone had transplanted Las Vegas to Baja, and he made Gray Eyes get on the next flight back to the States. They never left San Francisco together again, and she never forgave him for it. And he’d thought he was being sensitive. The next time Stanley left San Francisco was to take delivery of his first drive-by fellatio, in a truck-stop outside of Reno, six months after Gray Eyes left him. It took him that long to become, uh, social, again. The next time Gray Eyes left San Francisco was with a coke dealer who took her to Cabo San Lucas—five days after she left Stanley. It took her that long to become, uh, social, again…

  I’ve telegraphed and phoned,

  I sent an Air Mail Special too,

  your answer was “good-by”,

  and there was even postage due…

  Sibyl worked the first pair of eyes to strike gold in Stanley since Gray Eyes, and there you had it. There was nothing for it. It was incontrovertible. Facts speak to realists. Caged radium spoke to Stanley. Twin novae witnessed through the chartreuse phlogiston of swinging Venus, a loner’s horoscope. A lithium caldera beyond the grotto of her skull holes. Tantric awareness.

  Then those green eyes had betrayed him.

  One day, maybe he would be watching the curious effects of moonlight filtered through the eyeholes that had once been hers.

  Maybe he could keep her skull on top of the television as a reminder, maybe with a little sign that reads: Always pay for it.

  Pay in advance. Because, brother, if you don’t pay now, you’re going to pay later. You get what you pay for, especially when you know what the price is. Especially when the terms are clear. Why is it, that we retreat to cliché, in extremis?

  You mean, time heals all wounds.

  That’s right, baby. But first I have to inflict some wounds of my own.

  Maybe later.

  Right now, goddammit, before it’s the other way around—again.

  Time wounds all heels — especially if your name is Achilles.

  Yo, Patroclus, pass the Bushmills.

  Listen, boss. For the last time, I’m telling you. Don’t Hector me.

  Ghostly Greeks dead 5,000 years laughed in his head, until, abruptly, they turned into a canned TV audience. Time heals all wounds.

  But seriously, folks, does Time heal Death? I’m not talking about your beloved mother’s death. I’m talking about your own death. Does Time heal that?

  A single Hah! from high up in the cheap seats, beyond the blinding lights.

  All right. Try the clank of instruments.

  And that pressure, on your face. On your face, Stanley. That pressure on your far-away face.

  But first, an etymological aside.

  One pleasant evening, in the midst of an escalating session of scarlingus, the tip of her tongue having just lifted off the ridge of Stanley’s empurpling scar, Iris said, “Tsssss.”

  “Tssss?”

  She parked his erection between her breasts and repeated the sibilant.

  “Tssss,” said Stanley, with the complicity that often overwhelms a lover. “What?”

  “That’s the sound of a stereotype, getting quenched,” Iris announced.

  Her breasts were white and taut, each nipple a cupola of a distant city sighted halfway around a very round world.

  “Stereotype,” Stanley murmured vaguely.

  “To make a stereotype, pour liquid metal into a mold. Then cool it in a bucket of water. The result is a plate you can print with.”

  “Like a blacksmith would do with a horseshoe?”

  “Exactly. Once the stereotype is quenched, it’s immutable.”

  Stanley moved his hips a little.

  Iris lowered her shoulders and rocked forward, back, forward again. She aligned a set of fingertips atop his scar, and dragged them along its entire length. “Tssss. The French verb is clicher, whose past participle is cliché: which, the fanciful etymology would have it, is the sound of a stereotype being fixed in steel forever.”

  “Tssss,” Stanley whispered.

  Iris reversed the tickling along the crest of the scar, trailing her nails along his ribs, over his chest, up his throat and chin to his lips, and then her eyes were very close to his, and deadly serious.

  “Do you think sex with me is stereotypical?” she asked.

  Before he could answer she moved her mouth past his lips, not pausing for even the briefest kiss, and rammed the tip of her tongue into one of his nostrils.

  “Yow!” squirmed Stanley. “No way!”

  While he scrubbed his nose Iris slathered the side of his face with the flat of her tongue, over his cheek, the wincing eye above it, his forehead, his hair, until Stanley’s nose cleaved her two breasts like a manatee breaching in a trough between swells.

  Iris clasped the breasts together with her two hands until each of his nostrils was as if corked by an erect nipple.

  “Tssss,” she hissed. “We pour the new stereotype…”

  “Tssss,” said Stanley, by way of surrender. “Tssss, already.”

  “Tssss,” she said, sliding her hips
down on his belly, “we quench it…”

  “Tssss,” hissed Stanley, rising to the challenge. “Tssss,” driving upward.

  Later, despite lying with Iris in the dark, Stanley could only concentrate on two things, both of them green.

  Those eyes.

  How he hated them. And yet…

  And at that moment he realized that Sibyl’s green eyes had replaced Mary’s gray ones in his pantheon of desire. Desire in the sense of craving… in the sense of possession, of dominance, of triumph, of remorse…

  In his heart, now that he knew the score, Stanley wanted a rematch. That’s a good word. Heart.

  He wasn’t sure how it happened. He hadn’t noticed the transition. All he knew, lying there, Iris’ violet eyes slumbering next to him in the dark, was that, after three years — three years! — gray eyes had gone, and green eyes had arrived.

  The violet eyes revived him, provided him with transitional, mid-arc moxie. But the trajectory was from gray eyes to green.

  It wasn’t the same, of course. Gray Eyes was domestic, ambitious, silent, un-intellectual, distracted, driven by her thirty-ish biology. Her one concession to uncivilized behavior had been — still, doubtless, was — to remain untamable in bed. She was wilder than Stanley could handle. Her screams embarrassed him, made him wish he’d never unzipped her dress; he couldn’t meet his neighbor’s eye in the morning. The scope of her orgasms always seemed out of proportion to his sensibilities, to what he himself was experiencing, to his skills as a lover, they seemed to be happening to somebody else. Well, they were happening to somebody else…

  Green Eyes, on the other hand… Green Eyes was shrewd, ruthless, criminal. Green Eyes was cold, logical, dangerous, and wily. She was a winner in a game played by losers.

  And she’d never even let him get close.

  Why should she bed a loser?

  And Iris?

  Mainly because they would never entertain the idea of doing it with someone as bad off as they are, losers often wind up with nothing but contempt for the people who deign to go to bed with them.

  After three years of burning incense in the shrine of Gray Eyes, of grinding his teeth at the thought of rich men lavishing cash on Gray Eyes in exotic locations, Iris had come along and shaken Stanley out of his complaisant indulgence, his emotional stagnation, his alcoholic infantilism, his stalled healing, his three years of rent-free addiction to television and alcohol and solitude and a dumb job. Iris was kind, generous, unconventional, a self-starting professional, benevolently kinky, she had violet eyes — she even liked him.

  But Iris wasn’t what Stanley wanted.

  Love doesn’t stick on the rebound, Stanley told himself. Not even lust does. Iris is transitional. You know you know, little voices told him, chronologically speaking you met her second; Green Eyes was first. No, no, he argued, chronology means nothing. Casuistry tells me so. Even after three years, love won’t stick on the rebound. While there should always be a transitional figure between two great loves, why would chronology matter? Chronology is a mere technicality.

  In any case, as regards Green Eyes, he’d never had his way with her. Worse: She’d had her way with him. The best to be hoped for is a merciful terminus, the final putrefaction, so the spirit is freed at last — if one believes in spirits and freedom. Short of that, one can always hope that the switch on the Love Machine is thrown to OFF, and one can make certain efforts to keep it there. Drink too much, for example. Watch television until one’s brain turns to silage, for example. Throw oneself into the sea in an apparent attempt to reverse an apparently irreversible situation, to rescue a drowning child caught by a hopeless undertow, to die there with her. For example.

  But the Transitional Figure. Willing to cope with recalcitrance, aggressive enough to cope with passivity, understanding enough to tread gently. Willing to breathe life into the cryogenic sensorium.

  Of course, there’s one really egregious flaw in this fentanylated weltanschauung, which is, nobody had bothered to inform Iris of her status as Transitional. Iris thought she’d found herself: (a) a mutt to rescue, (b) a reluctant hero, (c) a nice, fresh scar.

  Like any number of male clowns in similar circumstances, Stanley had never uttered word one about his emotional makeup. Not to Iris. Not to himself. Not to anybody. He considered his ready compliance concerning prophylaxis as more than meeting any woman half way.

  But knowing Iris as he did, having slept with her at any rate, did Stanley think she would sit still for an attempt to deprive her of himself?

  Someone slammed a big metal door.

  He woke up. His head throbbed. The features of his face floated awry, adrift on a subdermal film of acetone-saturated mucus.

  Acrid smoke drifted between Stanley’s eyes and the bright light over the operating table. He turned away from it.

  And saw Sturgeon, sprawled on the floor like a parachutist in freefall, dead.

  A trickle of blood meandered from beneath the corpse toward a floor drain. As he watched, its scarlet vanguard dipped into a grout joint; filled it up; climbed out.

  “Just to give you sons of bitches something to do,” Iris was saying, “why don’t you harvest your thug, there? Make a night of it.”

  Iris!

  Djell, Sibyl, Vince, and Helium Jaime Lopez stood quietly around the corpse, as dumb and feckless as twilit livestock clustered around a salt lick.

  Stanley stared at the operating table for a full minute before he realized he was no longer strapped to it. Instead, he was lying on a gurney across the room, against the wall, just beside the twin entry doors.

  “You heard me,” scowled Iris. “Hop to it.”

  “Uh…,” said Djell, speaking as if shell-shocked. “You… heard what the lady said.”

  Vince and Jaime gazed forlornly at the dead Sturgeon. Djell, too, looked dejected.

  “I loved him, you know,” Djell glared at Iris. “This man was my friend. My colleague. He—.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Jaime snapped, clearly on edge. “Shut up, Manny.”

  Not distracted by this exchange, and even though she watched Iris like a cat watches a mousehole, Sibyl was the first to notice that Stanley was awake.

  She turned those eyes on him. Detestation and malice flowed from them, as twisted and pure as a thousand yards of new barbed wire. Stanley, however, saw a fire kindled. And he knew that she knew that he, and only he, saw it. She depended on him, on his illusions. A promising leer passed over her beautiful mouth, as fluid and supple as the hint of a cross-current over the caudal fin of a sea snake.

  In his last bout of consciousness Stanley had witnessed Sibyl in perfervid conjugation with Dr. Djell. There was little doubt as to her allegiance. The guy was her husband, after all. Yet despite this, Stanley’s yearn to score, and to settle a score, with her and those green eyes had awakened with him, undiminished.

  Lacking all number, structural integrity, sense, an irrational schemata flooded his mind, projecting the result that, somehow, Stanley and Green Eyes might abstract themselves from this nightmarish web of other people’s determinants—and work it out.

  He seethed with hatred.

  He was rocked by lust.

  Neither could resolve itself fully into the other, unless—.

  He tried to sit up. He failed. He tried again. He threw his legs over the side of the gurney, nearly precipitating himself onto the floor. But some inner gyroscope kicked in—its lurch against inertia nearly made him puke—and the vertical perch held, leaving him teetering on the edge of the gurney like a suicide on the edge of a roof. He was still naked. His vision swam 450 degrees or so, and stopped on Sibyl. She was watching him.

  The drugs were powerful. So was the room full of eyes. How had this all become his fault? He felt a sudden urge to detoxify; it expired just as suddenly, an impulse that winked out of existence in a damp almost inaudible snap: two or three watts of light atop a stem of drifting smoke.

  “Stanley.” The interruption didn’t go wi
th the green eyes. It was Iris’ voice. “You’re back.”

  “Yes. I guess I.…” He stopped.

  Finally, he’d noticed.

  Though Iris was standing to his immediate right, at the foot of the gurney, an arm’s length away, he couldn’t see her. He could see Green Eyes, who stood directly across the room from him, beyond a veil of gun-smoke. But he couldn’t see Iris, who must have fired the gun from just to the right of him, well within the theoretical range of his peripheral vision.

  The gurney stood against the wall next to the double doors.

  Now he noticed shreds of tape hanging from his wrists and ankles.

  Blood caked the inside of his right elbow. A steel needle was still taped there, its business end buried in a little bump above a vein. A wad of blood-soaked cotton had been hastily tamped into its disconnected bezel.

  The blue fumes no doubt reeked of cordite. But his sense of smell was thoroughly stymied by the acetone reek that suffused his saliva, nostrils, sinuses, stomach fluids—all of him. It secreted from his pores like the mephitic stench of a nightshade.

  But what annoyed him was that he couldn’t see Iris. He could see Sibyl—and Djell and Vince and Jaime and even poor Sturgeon —perfectly well, not twenty feet away, straight out in front of him. But he couldn’t see Iris, who stood to his right, not three feet from his hand.

  Something was in the way.

  Something white.

  Tape.

  White tape.

  And his nose. His too-pale nose. Down there, in the lower right-hand corner of his vision.

  White tape on it, too.

  White tape on his nose intruded between him and Iris like a wall, like a physical partition.

  He turned his head.

  There Iris stood, just as he’d seen her when he’d been lying down. Iris with a gun in her hand.

  He swiveled his head back to the left. Green Eyes reappeared.

  Iris went away.

  He tried looking right again. Iris reappeared.

  Again, he turned his head to look forward. Sibyl came back.

  Finally he clasped one hand to the right side of his head, where it found a lump of gauze, with damp cotton spilling out from under it, and a large X of tape holding it in place.