Private Midnight

by Kris Saknussemm

  Two carpeted stairs led down to a condensed honeymoon suite. Red satin everywhere—a black silk sheeted waterbed in the shape of a heart with puffed red pillows. I tore off what was left of my clothes and descended. This was at last something I understood. After all my fears about the changes in my body. My shrinking size. My loss of weight and hair—the feelings I didn’t understand. I didn’t care. Having become aroused to the point of madness I wanted only one thing. And I got it. Sophia and I happily nuzzled and tussled in the dark, the splish and splash of the fluid beneath us, and the darkness and the warmth of the space created a sense of submersion. Immersion.

  She slipped off the bed to sweep the pillows away, and then bounced back into the wave world, spooning up against me. She kept her g-string on, but that just got me more worked up. I slipped into the wave world inside her. She was light and fragile—young. I went slowly at first. I felt all my inhibitions and horrors stream out of me. We were entwined and united. Slick, slippery … swaying and bobbing in the dark. All of Genevieve’s tests and tortures—all the questions and recriminations seemed worth it. We went on, floating and floundering—Sophia making the softest noises over the turmoil in the water beneath us and the uterine dark around.

  Then I sensed a tightening urgency in her—a contraction around me—and a new intensity in her breathing. I began to thrust harder. Again and again I collided with her bottom, which seemed skinnier than what it had looked like up above in the light.

  I knew I couldn’t hold on much longer. She wailed—and I let go—when a seam in the waterbed burst, and we thumped to the floor in a spasm of climax—warmth and wet cascading over us in an amniotic flush.

  The scene in the Jaguar House when Raven had been found in the skin of the punctured waterbed washed through my mind—but there was something else. Another one of those sinking feelings. A sunken feeling.

  Suddenly, the lid opened and light flooded in. Genevieve was standing on the edge leering down. She had on a yellow wetsuit. Beside her was Sophia, wearing the Cracker Jacks sailor’s outfit. I might’ve been lying in a pool of my own blood.

  “A surprise in every box,” Genevieve said, shaking her head.

  I stared back up the stairs at her … and Sophia. Genevieve produced a long flashlight—and shone it down into the depths of the saturated honeymoon heart. The beam hit the body beside me and played across the flesh. First the black flimsy underwear—soaked and disheveled. Then that ungodly tattoo. And the face! It was the boy from the ferry—and in the hot violating light I saw to my further alarm that his neck still bore the painted marks of a noose-like impression. He’d been the one to play the part of Grier the other night.

  I let out a sound I didn’t recognize. The kid must’ve sensed I was about to reach out and strangle him because he slithered fast, flopping off the bed like a catfish.

  “Be angry with me if you like,” Genevieve nodded. “But not young Sal. There’s more to the picture than meets the eye, Sunny. And I give you at least a little credit to recognize the textural nature of the depth you’ve been plumbing. Time for the full reveal, Sal.”

  The kid whisked off the g-string and gave me a good long look. He then exited with a splash via the same hidden door that Sophia must’ve used. I felt hoodwinked beyond bounds.

  “Don’t look so devastated, Sunny,” Genevieve scolded. “You’ve had a rare and mystical privilege. You’ve experienced the Divine Pair—the Syzygy. The Original Man in almost all mythologies is hermaphroditic. This has been a crucial step forward in your training. Now, go through that same door. At the end of the hall you’ll find a place to clean up. Your clothes are there. Tomorrow when you come at 7 PM sharp—you must bring me another offering. Not something that you’ve saved or stolen. Something that you’ve won—that you’ve earned through true effort or skill. Goodbye my lovely Sunny. Until next time. When you and I will mingle, at last. More deeply than you’ve ever known.”

  WOKE UP ON THE FLOOR OF MY APARTMENT WEARING the wisteria colored lingerie I’d earlier bought for Briannon but had never given to her. It about made me piss myself.

  I had no idea how I’d gotten into the things. It was Pico who’d roused me—she was licking my arm. Instead of the transparent stuff I’d found in the bathtub, I was covered with a sticky yellow film with the predigested odor of babyfood. That—particularly the smell—made me throw up.

  The patching suggested some of the crap had been washed off—but not enough. It was a good thing I’d lost so much of the hair on my body, because what remained of the goo had dried to a crumbly paste. On the floor beside me was a pink and yellow plastic trophy—a sculpture of a nude woman clutching a giant corn cob. It said The Rumpus Room—Midnight Cream Corn Wrestling Champion. I knew it was only circumstantial evidence, but the smell of the residue was nauseating even after a shower and the scrubbing—and I did have a diabolic flashback about a bell ringing and sweaty men waving dollar bills. Then again, I had far more unsettling flashbacks about Eyrie Street. I lay there crying, letting whatever was left inside me leak out. Pico stayed with me. I couldn’t have handled a person seeing me in that condition.

  It took another hour of tactical scrubbing and spraying deodorant to get the situation in hand, but I couldn’t get control of my mind so easily. I wanted a drink. A whole bottle. El Miedo had seemed to fade when I’d met Genevieve, but another kind of fog had rolled in. Deeper and more terrifying.

  I found the suit I’d bought hanging neatly in the closet, which I hadn’t expected. I put it on. It didn’t fit as well. I reached in the pocket of the trousers and found a wad of Jimmie’s money. He was looking out for me still. I decided to get some breakfast. Not at Cheezy’s. I went to that Fresh Start place that had gone in where the dead man’s barbershop used to be. It was clean, bright, bopping—and the Fruit Muesli Muffin deal was great. A double shot of espresso and I started to perk up a little. But I had the jitters bad. Not booze jitters. It felt like what I imagine would be the onset of Parkinson’s.

  Then I had a glance at The Sentinel. Another DB had been reported.

  The dismembered remains of an unidentified transsexual had been found at the bottom of the old Grain Terminal. Both a John and a Jane Doe, the corpse had been mangled from the fall into the encrusted machinery in the chute and had been in the water for a couple of days.

  I knew the cops who’d worked the scoop. I’d had beers with them in days gone by—probably salivated over a few pole dancers with them too, if I could remember.

  I knew the painful jokes they would’ve made about a floater—the expressions on their faces as they’d try to keep the horror and dismay under wraps—and in what organ it would settle when they weren’t looking.

  I knew so well the cold, bland matter-of-factness that would be painted over everything like shellac—and that special lonely sound of bad news that few people outside the job ever take notice of—when the crime scene tape gets strung up and the wind hits it.

  I could hear a promiscuous gust coming in off the bay and strumming the tape around the Grain Terminal entrance. That ominous throbbing whir is the real sound of trauma death. Not a gunshot or a scream—or squealing tires. Not the crunch of metal or shattered glass. In the end death sounds like a wind-whipped strip of taut striped tape—that finally snaps and flutters, and gets stuck back up. But only for as long as someone like me cares—until they find enough pieces of the misery that were left behind to think they know what happened.

  Then the strands come down and there’s just the wind again—or people trying to rent a room. A liquor store reopening. Sometimes a plastic flower cemented to a dented streetlight.

  There’s a reason why violence rhymes with silence. You come to understand that when you carry a shield.

  Sitting there amidst the bright morning bustle, I realized just how much I knew about death.

  Like the spirit blue glow of Luminol and the story it tells.

  I’d once seen a bathroom where a young woman had been sodomized, bludgeoned an
d then slashed to ribbons—bagged, hauled away and set on fire in the State Forest. The whole room fluoresced, because every single inch of it had been bleached by the killer. Every square inch of white tile. Meticulous. Not one trace of blood. Only a chemical smear job that hair-raisingly suggested just how very much arterial spray there had been.

  Watching the other normal denizens enjoying their breakfasts and magazines, I thought of stab victims. What color the blood is when the liver’s been fully compromised and you know calling the paramedics is a waste of taxpayer’s money. And with dead street people—how a nauseatingly sweet smell of rotting apples means that pus is coming from a region of gas gangrene—or how the bacteria in certain abscesses produces an odor like an overripe Camembert cheese. You have to be careful handling them. You have to treat the dead with care. I turned back to the newspaper, afraid the chirpy caffeine crowd would catch a whiff of my thoughts seeping out.

  The DB report referred to an attempt to match the DNA with any known missing persons. My instincts gave me a strong suspicion that it wouldn’t match anyone exactly, and I thought of the last text message I’d gotten from Jack.

  I knew now in my gut who that body belonged to—or who it had once been. Only one person understood what it was becoming. What it had been becoming before it stopped like a knock-off watch.

  And that was where my instincts stopped. That was where another kind of tape was strung.

  Without realizing it at the time, I may have been the last person McInnes had talked to. He’d kept his appointment, whoever or whatever had happened.

  Why he’d done himself in was a mystery I had yet to solve. Maybe because of what he’d become—and maybe something of that sort is what had pushed Stoakes and Whitney over the edge, whatever edge or defining limit they’d found.

  My old cop habits were trying to help me cope with something outside my understanding—maybe outside all understanding. Which in a way … if I’m honest … when the drink was going down warm and friendly … was what El Miedo sometimes did.

  It’d be wrong to say it was always the night vision green terror or the gasping for breath. Often it started with an inside tip or a buddy’s good word.

  That’s another thing about violence—about brutality. It not only ends quietly, it often starts that way. In my experience, the most deadly kind always does. The rest is just knocked out teeth and loss of pride. I closed the paper and paid my bill.

  I felt like hitting Shenanigans. But the bars, Wetworld, street girls, nothing would do anymore. I knew there was only one solution. I had to confront Genevieve. Only she could tell me what I needed to know. And the promise of being with her … or the threat …? What was my life if not seeing in every threat a promise?

  But I couldn’t fool myself anymore. I was sodden armpit scared.

  I decided to split the difference and blow some time at the Long Room. That had always been a safe haven in the past—a place to lick my wounds and get my bearings when things got crazy. Not anymore.

  Wardell didn’t know me. Literally.

  I even tried Flip Wilson’s Ugly Baby joke on him, but the Dell clammed up like I was some street freak. I left after five of the longest minutes I’d ever lived.

  I was shaking so badly by the time I got back to my apartment, I couldn’t piss straight. There was an ambulance parked down the street and a squad car with patrolmen I didn’t know. That was the only thing that dragged me back.

  I shuffled closer to get the skinny, knowing the moment I saw where they were parked that it had to do with the Duke. It didn’t take long to get the run-down. He’d passed quietly in his sleep like an old dog—discovered by a real dog, lying amongst his yellowed newsclippings and his rotting sleeping bag, a plastic Slurpee cup beside his head, brimming with coins.

  I slunk off before I started to lose it, and made it all the way to my kitchen table before the tears broke loose. I’m not sure what I was crying for—him or me. You wouldn’t think a homicide detective, even one on sick leave—or maybe even permanently retired—would spill his eyes out over an old street person dying peacefully of a stroke. I’d spent years examining corpses. People with their intestines wrapped around their necks. Dental records. Feet and hair found in mulching machines. A femur in an incinerator. Floaters. Maybe I just hadn’t cried enough in the past and now all those bottles of Beam I’d poured in were gushing back out, distilled. Big thick stinging drops that smelled like Stacy’s nail polish remover. I put on a Lou Rawls CD and let it flow until I was empty.

  I boiled a can of minestrone soup but I couldn’t eat. I turned on the TV. The only decent thing on was an old movie. Nightmare Alley with Tyrone Power, but it was way too dark for the mood I was in. I swallowed one of Sidewinder’s barbiturates and tumbled into bed. A little more sleep under my belt might come in handy when I faced Genevieve. And maybe the dreams wouldn’t be too clear. But fuck me, I was wrong again.

  I was before a cylindrical-shaped thing like Mr. Tanaka’s. A giant chimney glass. I was watching a human head alternately rising and sinking, as I had countless lemon seeds in years of ginatonics. The air bubbles adhered to the head at the bottom and then lifted it to the surface where the bubbles burst and the head descended back down to the bottom. Over and over again. Like a kind of clock.

  Then I was inside the container—I could breathe underwater … I was swimming through the bubbles into a lighted pool. There was a drowned racehorse lying on the bottom—which when I swam closer I saw wasn’t an animal body at all. There was a broken motor inside … and two little men dead at the controls, like the kind on a tractor. The champion stallion was actually a machine they’d been operating. Suddenly, from out of the dark, a school of women appeared. They were wearing old-fashioned bloomers and hoop skirts, but swimming fast and carrying spearguns. I turned and tried to swim back the way I’d come—trying to reenter the giant ginatonic glass where the head was rising and falling …

  I woke up to an incendiary sunset, just like the first night I’d gone to Eyrie Street. I had a shower with my eyes closed. My new suit was way too big for me. I felt sick with fear and filled with light—younger than I had in years—brimming with rage, hope, sadness, yearning and dread. Before, I’d wrestled with myself about going back to see her. Now there was no question. The thought of true intimacy and maybe truth. What else was there left to hang onto? My shield? That was gone.

  It was time for a full body cavity search. I grabbed my latest trophy and drove like an old lady over to Cliffhaven. Genevieve answered the door herself, knowing who it was who knocked—probably knowing better than I did.

  She had a Della Street look happening. Tierra del Fuego eyes. I don’t know how she did it. I wondered what one of the biometrics boys would make of her. She was different every time I’d seen her. And yet she was always the same. I blew off the reality distortion—I was in another world now. I knew now that I’d always been in another world every time I’d seen her. I gave her the new wrestling trophy—from The Rumpus Room.

  “Congratulations,” she smiled. “I can see you really won this one. I’m afraid I have sad news about Falco and Ernie.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to hear any more sad news. But new rules.

  “The jellyfish?”

  “No,” she replied. “I think Ernie panicked and dragged Falco down. It was either heart failure or drowning that got them. Mutza kindly disposed of the bodies.”

  She produced a plate with what looked like a human hand on it. “Care for a bite?”

  “Ugh,” I wheezed. “You’re not—!”

  “Oh, Sunny!” she snickered. “It’s just sponge cake! You didn’t think it was Falco’s or Ernie’s, did you? I made it because it’s Tuesday.”

  “What does a severed hand have to do with Tuesday?” I demanded, still feeling the bile leaking back down my throat. I didn’t know how much more I could take.

  “Tuesday comes from Tyr’s day—the Norse god who volunteered to bind the great wolf Fenrir and did so at th
e price of a hand. You see, even on a quiet ordinary evening we’re surrounded by mythological acts of violence and heroism.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, waving no.

  “You haven’t had a lot of formal schooling, have you?”

  “I took a matchbook correspondence course once,” I replied. “Learn About Refrigeration Systems in Your Spare Time. Sadly I lack discipline.” Bitch.

  She smiled thinly. Gracious. “What did you want to be when you were young?”

  “A Human Cannonball.”

  “No, really. What did you dream of becoming when you were a real little boy?”

  “As opposed to what? A wooden one?”

  “As opposed to the little boy you’ve been all your adult life.”

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. I thought—why doesn’t she stop fucking with me and fuck me? Or fuck me over forever if that’s her plan. Instead I answered her truthfully.

  “The usual stuff I guess. Fireman. Astronaut. Major Leaguer. Just as long as I could bust spy rings, battle sea monsters and explore lost mines while dressed like a cowboy.”

  She tittered. “Chuck Connors. Do you know what I wanted to be?”

  “My first thought is Evil Mastermind—but I’ll say a princess. Isn’t that what most girls start out wanting to be—before they go ga-ga for horses? A princess who will be rescued from a terrible dragon. Unless, of course, you’re one of those who wanted to be the prince, which sort of fractures the fairytale. Or maybe … you wanted to be the dragon.”

  She chuckled again, but not in the way I’d intended. Not at all. Her face clouded disturbingly. “Did you know that’s what my last name means? A wyvern is a mythic creature from heraldry. A fearsome winged dragon with a barbed tail. I have an intricately detailed picture of one tattooed on a very private part of my body. It took almost a thousand years to get the detail right. You’re going to see the tattoo, Sunny. It’s in a secret place underneath my wings.”