The tambourine man’s name was Kanarsky.
When I turned twenty, I scraped a revolver across my teeth. Moved the flesh of my nose, made like I was a pig. The gun was at a neighbor’s house and I felt safe in knowing that Mr. Viduna always kept the gun loaded with at least three bullets.
I’ll never get any further away from this city than Fallon Ridge but if I was on a plane to Seattle or Tucson and it was going down in flames I’d say to the screaming face beside me Mother I’m sorry I’m on this plane that’s going down I’m dead Mom I’m dead.
I’M DEAD NOW. Spent all my life hating everyone and now my rectum really is bleeding and I’m spent and wasted as the neon in Cal’s Liquors on Van Buren. I can truly understand how some black men can hate all whites or why Jews don’t want to let go of World War II’s atrocities.
People do reality because they can’t handle drugs. Last guy I talked to gave me a little pint of Night Train and I pulled from it, draining it against my teeth like the characters do in all the stories Etch told me.
To see the show, you have to be the show.
And I could do this forever. People are starting to dress for warmer weather. A sign across the tracks tells me in English and in Spanish that I cannot get AIDS by touching a door knob.
* * *
(A wino approaches.)
You nuts.
I make as much sense as you do.
Course I been drunk better part of my adult life.
I’m sure as hell not doing this for you!
Whatever you talkin’ about, I didn’t ast to be saved.
This is my tissue, given for your freedom. This is my shit which was shat for all of mankind.
Go on. You crazy.
* * *
Days later:
Everybody is dressing for warmer weather but all the songs say people are going to California. Sixteen vestal virgins leaving for the coast. The three men I admire most, the father, son, and the holy ghost. Well, we’re going to Surf City, where it’s two girls for every boy let’s race all the way to Deadman’s Curve.
They’re out there having fun. In that warm California sun.
(A voice from behind. The smell of hair tonic and therapeutic balm.)
I can make you warm.
* * *
Givers of pain and rapture please oh please give me the strength to do just this one thing right givers please of pain and rapture christ please christ on the bleeding cross...
Vic Tremble (for the duration now) looked up and over his left shoulder, the scrap of paper he had been writing on in pencil fluttering away to haunt somebody else. Even as he turned his head, Frank Haid was moving into position in front of him. Their eyes met, blind on blue.
“You’re him.” Tremble whispered with awe.
“Yes, my son.” Haid made a show of looking around, saw no one worth worrying about. “Have you been waiting for me long?”
“You run out of bodies or what?” Tremble was buying time, building up his courage. Trying to forget about the hunger and the blood and the blackness batting at his vision. He—the Painkiller—looked very much like his sketch. Unlike himself, the killer looked well rested. Older than he thought, his grey hair had faded to white at the temples. Tremble saw a pink scalp, untanned. It was springtime, though. Again, he guessed. The Painkiller was wearing a bright blue jacket with the team insignia of the Chicago Cubs. Clean-shaven, from his sitting position, Tremble saw a couple of spots underneath his jaw that the killer missed. Eyes icy with homicidal innocence.
“You seem bitter.” When the killer spoke, Tremble noticed, he touched the right corner of his upper lip with his tongue.
Tremble stared him down, waiting for a move. Any move. There wasn’t anybody to see. Everyone steered clear of him in his chair. You talked to yourself on the street or in the subway—didn’t matter if it made sense or if you thought you were a vampire or Dr. Jekyll—all it meant to everybody else was that you were hipping them for a handout. Tremble’s self-mutilations and general babbling kept even the most naive and curious away.
“How many?” he asked, mouth taut as a ventriloquist’s.
“Eighteen gone to God.” It was more Father talking than Haid. Saying it proud.
“You mean jerked off to Jesus.” Tremble wiped his nose on the sleeve of his dirt- and blood-stained blanket.
“Are you counting Evan and Mike and Reve and—.”
Haid started to reply by asking who are they? when the passing ‘A’ train disrupted both their streams of consciousness.
* * *
So many things went through both their minds in that first instant. As if both were each other in color for the first time, regardless of how innocent the circumstances might be. To Tremble, the Painkiller could have been a paunchy guy making the pussy rounds on Rush Street. To Haid, his next victim was nakedly psychotic, his soul demanding to be taken.
A glint of the obsessive; they both had.it, like Cain the first killer and Abel the first victim.
In the obsessive. The next subway train nowhere to be seen. Tremble’s words all slurred with. Haid wanting to know who Surfer and Dreamer were. Was this another story, like the man in the sculpture told him, the story about little grey men with big, black eyes?
“What are you talking about?” He ventured to ask, but the man in the wheelchair was too caught up in his fantasy world to answer.
* * *
Been in the field so long, he’d grown a beard that was a shade darker than his hair. The sun was rising over China Beach, the pretty nurse with the hennaed bob siphoning off his pain with an IV of silly syrup, he reached for his crotch and came up empty, the Painkiller had a halo but it turned out to be headlights on an approaching train, Phil Collins was singing how he could feel it coming in the air tonight, accompanied by a drumbeat that sounded like coffin lids being dropped shut, and ride, ride, ride, that wild surf. He had been wearing a fiberglass cast for weeks now and his elbow and wrist were raw.
He looked at the Painkiller with only a second having passed, and thought of an old Emerson, Lake & Palmer song titled “Knife’s Edge.” Just a step cried the sad man, take a look down at the madman, fear the kings on silver wings fly beyond reason, from the flight of the seagull come the spread claws of the eagle the words all blurred together. He concentrated on the last two lines:
Only fear breaks the silence
As we kneel pray for guidance.
His cousin up in Woodstock, Denys Plichta, played the song with his band, Crazy Horse Road. Back in his days of the newly addicted.
Funny what you think about when you are going to die.
He winced at the thought of dying.
Haid thought it was Tremble’s pain.
He found great joy in his rejustification.
* * *
“Howdoyoudoit?” Tremble winced even though he spurted the words all into one dying sentence. There was a tremor in his little finger, the digit brushed lightly against the firm hand rest of the chair as if pushing hair from a woman’s cheek in a prelude to intimacy.
There would be little prelude to his final battle with the Painkiller, the only one that took place outside of his mind. Tremble was certain of it. But unlike a man forced into war or a beat cop answering a call in the projects, he had certain questions he wanted answered.
His heart was beating like a runaway El train crashing along the tracks. “How did you—”
“Did I what, my son?” Haid thought a gentle approach would be treacle for the psychotic man’s eyes.
“Don’t call me that! You are a murderer and I am in no way related to a murderer!”
“We are a family of man, my son. Please let me touch you. Heal you.”
Tremble’s eyes were doing a tattoo all their own, trying to hip onto the weapon Haid had to be concealing. There had to be a weapon, man.
“Yea, right.” Tremble thought of that night in Nolan Void’s. Bundy on the set, buying time. Who was buying time here? He knew they would both die here t
oday. Here and now. Why argue the point of the killer’s homosexuality? The guy had to be queer with a mommy fixation. Play the coddling sweetheart, then go in for the kill. But where was his weapon?
“Heal you,” Haid repeated. A shout from the stairwell the next block north echoed down the tunnels. The shout concerned two homeboys. It did not concern them and they ignored it.”
Would the Painkiller kiss him before putting the blade in him? Would he kiss the lips that the blade would make in his flesh? Would he want to nibble at his ear as he—Tremble—himself wanted to with Reve? Buying time back at the Marclinn, suckering Shustak into staying above ground. So he could stay warm down below.
The detectives, Daves and Petitt, had said the guy used some kind of acid, far as they could tell. Would the Painkiller pour it into his ear after he nipped at it? Would he pour it on his victim’s crotch? Would I get an erection? Tremble thought.
His ultimate dark fantasy sated.
“Heal me.” Tremble agreed. The light was good; the Painkiller’s eyes were those of a sympathetic teacher. It was the first day of school.
“Yes.” Haid spoke it as if he was okaying an offer to pay for lunch.
Christ! It was as if the guy was standing there with the solemnity of the pulpit, waiting for Tremble to confess something, to have done anything at all wrong!
Anything: the dried blood on the blanket, his mother’s lost hope, the look on Reve Towne’s final face.
The ease at which he allowed Mike Surfer and the American Dream to slip away into whatever came next.
* * *
The moment was now, as Haid’s guard was lessened as he bent to lay his palm to rest on Tremble’s left shoulder. The Painkiller’s jacket whispered, the silky blue a springtime sky from up above coming ever closer.
Tremble pressed his lips together until the chapped red was pale as bone. Sucked on them and tasted his tooth decay. Thinking fast as he could, wanting it all to go right. As if Reve would ever talk to him again.
Was the acid in the same pocket as the knife? Did he have a miniature butane lighter? Was the blade still slick with the tambourine man’s blood? All for Reve, the last sad love letter of his convoluted life. Sign on the dotted line that is your neck.
His whole life had been external stimulation.
Terrible Ted Bundy had told a guy writing about him, in one hundred years, who will remember us anyways? The Painkiller was an external stimulation of the last six months of Tremble’s life. The sign behind the Painkiller—across the tracks, an ad for Nike’ shoes—summed it up.
JUST DO IT, it read.
* * *
He’d make his move before the killer could pull out his knife or acid. Christ, the Cubs jacket was thin. Where were his killing tools?
“You’re dead, Painkiller.” Tremble stood up, the faded blanket falling to the cement. He bunched the toes in each foot to get the feeling back.
“You...you can walk,” Haid said, backing up, seemingly in awe of the new circumstances. The heels of his shoes were dangerously close to the edge of the El platform.
“And better yet, you bastard,” Tremble hissed it out. “I can push!”
He struck out with his stronger arm, the left one, hitting Haid just above his right nipple. It was Tremble, then, in awe of the new circumstances when he watched his arm go into the Painkiller’s chest. Still, the givers had allowed him the strength of those fallen—that he might avenge them, you hear that, Reve?—to grab with his right arm for purchase on the armrest of the wheelchair.
For a moment it seemed that someone had duct-taped an invisible ball into Tremble’s mouth. Haid noticed this even as the full realization sinks in that the man with the arm in his chest could stand on his own two feet without folding up like his childhood Colorform figures, his palsied fingers unable to keep them steady.
All Tremble could do was stare mutely as his arm extended into the Painkiller’s chest, the feeling as thick and oily as wading in the shitty waters of Lake Michigan. He did not expect the darkness to be cold, because that was the stuff of comic books and horror stories.
But cold it was. Frigid and relentless as a big-breasted hooker staring at him, bored, in a Fallon Ridge stairwell. It was an ice scraper for his sister’s car with a mitten hand grip, clearing away his memory’s eyesight frame by frame. Images at 1/7 speed strayed across his mind as the
Painkiller looked down in surprise. The two of them for all the world looked like two deaf mutes contemplating a further development in their romantic relationship, two sets of eyes searching, for one stone, solitary reason not to take the final plunge.
Pitch the final bitch.
Tremble risked a sidelong glance at the tracks of his fears. The fingers within the Painkiller’s chest tingled. He looked the killer square in the face, the killer confused at what to do. Tremble thought of Chinatown. He would have taken Reve to a nice little place at Alexander and Wentworth. Ants now, it was like ants climbing over the hairs on his wrist.
Fuck the givers of pain and rapture. Fuck Chinatown and the Loop and the city in general. As above, so below. This whole story was his. A bum peeked around a pillar, looking like a corpse falling from an upright casket.
All he had to report was “Fourski and twoski is shitski.” And he was gone like that. The Painkiller had a beatific smile on his face as Tremble extracted his arm. I’m delirious, was what he thought as he stared at what was left.
* * *
Ropes of his flesh trailed into the Painkiller’s chest like cheese on a Chicago-style pan pizza. It felt cold as it slipped down from elbow to wrist, exposing grey muscle and red veins. Not a truly bad situation, kind of like putting a vacuum onto your palm. That’s what Tremble was thinking as his muscle disappeared into Haid’s chest with a sound that was too horribly like the smacking of lips.
The Painkiller didn’t look any stronger, any more radiant. He wasn’t grinning. Forgetting what he swore to himself a minute ago, Tremble sucked in a litany: givers of pain this last time I pray...
At the sound of the mumbled word pray, Haid sputtered in anger and disbelief. The idea of false gods didn’t sit too well with Father. Tremble too busy to notice this. He was watching loose chunks of muscle falling to the cement like small fish on the Twelfth Street docks.
Haid’s eyes bored into him.
“Bastard.” Tremble muttered so low even he could not hear it. He brought the remains of his left arm back, the only muscle remaining on the skeletal limb was caught between the joints like pieces of steak and gristle.
“THOU SHALT HAVE NO GODS—” Haid bellowed and the echo went down the tunnel and found a new home at the next platform. The BEFORE ME part was cut off abruptly as Tremble hit him full in the face with his ruined arm.
* * *
The bones shattered along with both their wills. Tremble was beyond caring as each individual sliver of calcium fell away from him. He lifted what was left. All but the thumb and little finger lay on the grey cement, shards of tibia and wrist bone scattered like a Halloween game of pick-up sticks.
The bones in his hand dangled from his ulnar, a string of muscle no wider than his finger wrapped around the red-streaked white like a string-around-the-pinky reminder of something important.
He almost toppled backwards, the pain like a direct heroin shoot to the heart. The Painkiller howled in surprised shock, a zealot who has had his name deconsecrated. He hopped up and down, the grey shirt that Tremble’s arm had gone through was simply wrinkled as if by static cling. The fiberglass cast fell from the wheelchair with a clatter, the chair itself wheeling backwards in a counterclockwise doughnut; the killer’s torso shook like the guy was doing the bossa nova; Tremble thought of an old Elvis song about the dance, “drink, drink, drink, oh fiddle-de-dink, I can dance with a drink in my hand.” Then he tried moving, found himself in a St. Vitus Dance, the equal to a wedding reception “chicken dance,” and he knew that he would never hear the Painkiller’s true name. As he already was forgetting his own
.
He danced towards the Painkiller, readying his valediction in bone. Sometime during all this, another train had rushed by, scattering the evidence of the slivers on the ground.
Tremble grasped the ruined forearm, his right hand’s little finger at the wrist, his thumb and forefinger nearly touching halfway up to the elbow. Haid looked on in papal wonder.
This was something Tremble had never thought about. The sound of his last heartbeat, yes. Would his ears hear things after his heart stopped pumping oxygen to the brain? Yes, he had thought about that. But this— He made a fist with his right hand. The bones in the lower half of his left forearm becoming powder. The bones, broken further, didn’t snap like twigs or like Rice Krispies without the crackle or even the pop. He let his arm drop back down and saw that it had become even with his waistband. More chips fell off and skittered, fell into his pocket rim like lint. He just didn’t care anymore.
“This is for Evan Shustak, you bastard,” He stepped forward and swung his splintered forearm into the Painkiller’s left cheek. He was aiming for the eye, but settled for what he got.
Haid screeched as blood appeared on his cheek. He swiped at his face and left a red smear.
“And for Mike Surfer.” Head bent and eyes zombie-glazed, Tremble swung and missed. Pathetically, his tongue dug into his lower lip when he saw shards of his bones sticking out of the Painkiller’s chest.
‘“And for Reve Towne,” he said, falling over backwards, as in real life. The Painkiller shrieked as beads of his own blood appeared on his chest. He stumbled backwards and fell onto the El tracks but missed the third rail. Tremble collapsed into himself with what he hoped with all his soul was death.
The nearest train was a rumor away.
Seizure’s Palace
Epilogue Two
The Painkillings stopped with the murder of Chris Kanarsky—Mr. Tambourine Man—on the 22nd of March. On the 4th of April, the new mayor was elected, and after a month without another murder it was decided by the mayor’s new press secretary, fueled by dead end reports from Area 3 Homicide, that a memorial was in order.
The Holy Terror Page 25