by Jaym Gates
“What sort of a name is ‘Kolos’? Is that … Dutch?”
“Close, it’s imaginary. When he had it legally changed, he couldn’t decide between ‘Carlos’ and ‘Koala.’ Before that, he was named Vaughn.”
“That’s a nice name.”
“Anyhow, Kolos married this woman who already had a kid, right? And the kid’s father, he’d gotten the mom pregnant on, like, the second date and then just vanished? So there’s trust issues; they were off and on for years with the daughter fighting Kolos and yelling at him, ‘you don’t get a say; you’re not my dad. I don’t even have a dad,’ and all these tears, right?”
“Mm hm.” Mom’s expression was rapt as she finished her milkshake with a spatula.
“Well. They’re married for five years, and the daughter is sixteen and finally calls him ‘Dad’ and all that. They go out for dinner and see a friend from long ago who mentions how he likes the mom’s hair now that it’s her natural color. ‘Oh,’ says Kolos, ‘What color was it before?’ and she says red and mentions how different she looked and he says, ‘That must have been when I had the beard.’ Kolos can’t grow a beard at all now, he got a skin graft on his face after a motorcycle accident. So she can’t imagine him bearded and they go digging for old photos. It turns out that the guy who got her pregnant and ran off? It was him.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he was pretty shook too.”
“No, I mean … I don’t think I understood the course of that story, dearheart.”
“I mean that after all the years of Kolos trying to be a father to this girl, whom he loved and whose mom he’d married, it turned out that Kolos literally was her dad after all. In, like, the strictest biological sense.”
“I don’t …” Chad’s mom frowned, thinking it over. “She didn’t notice her new husband had the same last name?”
“He got rid of his last name, and anyhow, it was ‘Smith’.”
“But … but he never thought anything about how the bad dad who left them had his old first name? ‘Vaughn’ is hardly as common as ‘Smith’.”
“Yeah, no, that’s so, but she’d always called the first guy ‘Don’, and he’d never corrected her. His hearing’s not great.”
For a moment, Chad’s mom just stared, the spatula ruminatively stirring in her mouth.
“And after that he started sh … smoking meth?”
“Yep.”
“And after your cufflink thing, you …?”
“Well, actually, it was more like I’d been at Kolos’ place once and he had some. But it was after … you know, the business …”
“That’s when you started doing a lot.”
“Yeah.”
They were both quiet for a moment. The crackers didn’t taste as good as he remembered, and he wondered if they’d replaced the onion with an artificial onion flavonoid.
“Chad? You remember the Christokuloses?”
“Your canasta homeys? I remember.”
“They’re having a dinner tomorrow. There’s someone there you might want to meet.”
“Is this a thing where you try and fix your son up with some eligible bachelorette?”
“Well honestly Chad, I just thought you might find Cassandra interesting.”
He ate one last cracker. “Okay.”
#
Cassandra was not interesting. Cassandra wore a calf-length plaid dress with no sleeves, just frilly ruffles that framed fearsomely-toned arms. Chad didn’t care for plaid. Kolos had once said, “The only place for plaid is on Catholic high school girls who don’t understand consequences,” and Chad hadn’t even laughed politely. He disliked plaid that much.
“So!” Cassandra said brightly. “Your mother tells me you’re back from New York?”
“Mm hm.” He sipped a mainstream-but-not-big-label beer. It wasn’t even interestingly bad.
“What did you do there?”
“I made bespoke cufflinks.”
“Excuse me?”
“Cufflinks. I hand-crafted them. Usually out of fordite, which is an agate-like accidental material they dig out of old car factories. The paint, it got layered and layered and baked and baked.”
“I … see.” She frowned. “Did you sell a lot of them?”
“Not at first, but I got a lucky break. A Lehman Brothers executive was wearing a pair when he got exonerated and demand just surged. I had art school paid off in seven months.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah,” he said bitterly. “Wow. But then they turned on me. Harry Styles showed up wearing cocktail cuffs at the Golden Globes red carpet, and everything was over. I’d become a dinosaur, overnight, without anyone even telling me I was extinct. So. Now I’m back here.” He took a deep drink. “I’m going to have to sell shit on Etsy.”
“… huh.”
“Yeah.”
There was a pause and then she said, “I do CrossFit!”
“Can you excuse me for a minute?” Chad said, and walked away with no intention of ever going back.
Then he rounded a corner and there she was. The woman in orange and purple. It had to be, and not just because she was wearing fuchsia with a sort of off-chartreuse and making it work, it was because of the way she moved, the way she walked, unselfconscious without being self-absorbed, loose and free. Her red hair looked windswept.
“Were you at the train station the other day?” he asked, and she turned around to face him. Her face wasn’t beautiful exactly, but it was quirkily narrow and wide-eyed, like a doll’s, and her skin was so pale that for a moment Chad thought he could see right through her.
She raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps I was. I couldn’t say.” She had an accent. An English accent.
“I saw you in heather and orange,” he said. “Well, more of a burnt sienna.”
“Heather grey or heather purple?”
“The purple, obviously. I’m Chad, by the way.”
“Oh, you’re Chad. Right.” Her eyebrow quirked. “So have you given up the meth?”
For the first time in years, Chad blushed.
“Um … here, come out where it’s quieter and I’ll tell you.”
When they were outside the wind caught her hair and its scent flowed over to him. It was like fresh air and static.
“How’d you know I had … you know, that, um, issue?”
“Oh, everyone knows.”
“Ah.”
“It’s all they talk about.”
“I see.”
“But you got out with your teeth intact! That’s something. An accomplishment, really.”
“… true.” Chad was not usually tongue-tied around women. “What do you do?” he asked.
“Chimerical taxidermy. Well, I don’t make it, though I’ve dabbled, but I’m writing my thesis on it and the intersection of fantasy-prone psychology with American hunting culture.”
“Oh, so the jackalopes.”
“Exactly. Fascinating stuff!”
“… sure.”
She was looking at him expectantly.
“So …” he prompted.
“The meth!” Her eyes were bright and curious.
“Oh. Well, I went on a, um, non-traditional treatment program. This guy named Scott runs it out of his gym.”
“How was it ‘non-traditional’?”
“It was pretty physical. I mean, the first thing? He punched me right in the face.”
“What?”
“Yeah, that’s … boxing is a big element of his therapeutic modality.”
“It sounds like he just enjoys beating up drug abusers. Are you sure his name wasn’t Batman?”
“Look, I know it seems weird,” Chad said, defensive, “But it worked. He said sk … um, clients like me, we needed to move past self-pity and understand how enviable our lives were, pre-meth.”
“Clients like you?”
“Yeah.”
“You were going to say something else.” She brought a lacquered fingernail to her highly polished lips, which were a de
ep cerise. “Something that started with ‘sk’.”
When her mouth parted over her teeth to say ‘sk,’ Chad lost his train of thought entirely. Her teeth were a flawless, toothpaste-ad white, but the front left incisor was slightly crooked outward.
“Skinny white boys,” Chad said. “Scott said skinny white boys needed to learn there were worse things than meth withdrawal. Then he’d put up his thumbs like Fonzie and point them at his nipples, which you could always see through his t-shirt. I think they may have been pierced.”
“Wow.”
“But I got clean, and I don’t really miss it.”
“What’s a Fonzie?”
Chad spent the next twenty minutes explaining Arthur Fonzarelli to her, and that was how he met Ingénue Hermione Meredith. He didn’t even see the glare Cassandra shot at him as she left at a sensible hour. He and Ingénue were still on the porch.
#
“... it would be like, if you took that bass you just caught? If you took that and put, I don’t know, an iguana head on it, maybe some little horns or something. Making something completely new out of old parts. Kind of like how she makes me feel,” Chad said, three days later, with a little self-deprecating chuckle.
“Huh,” his father said. They were fishing.
“What was she even doing at the Christokuloses’ party? I mean, no offense, but she’s hardly a … well, you know, a Cassandra.”
“I don’t know. She just shows up. I really don’t know her at all.”
“She’s brilliant, dad, you’ll see. Really insightful, and funny, not in a mechanical way but a way that makes you really think, you know?”
“She’s sure got you chattering away.” He cast his line.
“Hope I don’t scare the fish!”
“You’re not …” Chad’s father frowned at the water, watching how the wind shifted its surface. “You’re not ‘getting high’ again are you?”
“Dad, where would I even find meth out here?”
“The rural methamphetamine economy is widespread and booming,” his father said in a funeral tone. (He was a funeral director.)
“I’ll have to take your word for it. Ingénue doesn’t even like it when I drink!”
#
Chad was a changed man. Dating in New York had been foreign movies and ethnic molecular gastronomy bistros. Nights out in his hometown had typically involved tallboys in the tall grass behind the bleachers. But Ingénue had him walking through the woods and hand-crafting art supplies for sculptures. They photographed snowy egrets at dawn and pored over low-print-run volumes of local history at dusk.
Long-disused parts of his face were engaged to form smiles, and long-disused parts of his heart were forming feelings for her. He was, of course, eager to have sloppy filthy sex with her, but that had (to his great regret) so far failed to happen. But she’d promised him a special night at her place, which he had not yet seen. (He had no car, so she often picked him up from his parents’ home in her charmingly dilapidated windowless panel van.)
Not only had he seen nothing of her home, he knew very little about her family, or her past, or her ambitions or experiences. He knew how her ankles curved in kitten heels and how her cool smooth hand felt in his, and that was enough.
#
Chad laughed when he realized Ingénue’s house was “the old Hellwright place,” which, if the stories from junior high could be believed, was where Satanic natives had buried werewolf serial killers once aliens were finished probing their anuses. He’d walked the whole way, legs strengthened by seasons in a studio walkup, and pulled up the flashlight app on his phone to light his way as the sun went down. It wasn’t a sunset like Ingénue’s wardrobe. It was clear, cold, a dry-baked yellow shading down to gray.
Then the door opened and she was waiting for him, lustrous in a robe of heliotrope and citrine. (Or maybe jonquil. It was hard to tell in the dim lighting.) She was smiling like a goddess. Chad had a brief impression of intricate black curling tattoos covering her arms — but wouldn’t he have noticed them before? — and then forgot everything else as she leant in to kiss him.
Everything went black in an instant of flawless bliss, her lips tasted like some kind of delicious wasp-sting and time stood still, he felt dizzy and flushed and entirely head over heels until he realized that, no, he actually was hanging by his feet. He had passed out and was now trussed up and suspended, head swaying, artfully moussed hair brushing a crumbly concrete floor.
“Ingénue, I’m down for whatever, but I have to insist on a degree more consent for this kind of power-exchange.”
(He was pretty calm, considering. He trusted Ingénue, and this was not the first time he’d woken up somewhere with no recollection of falling asleep.)
Ingénue was standing nearby, bending over a large black hole and muttering. He smiled to see that the robe was gone and the tattoos he’d noticed were now all over her body. But how were they moving? They didn’t even have moving tattoos yet in the Village!
She turned round. Her face was just the same as ever, he thought, except for something about her eyes. Had they always been so large and glittering?
“You’re awake,” she said. “Good. You probably have questions.”
He shrugged and gave her a smirk he hoped was sexy and knowing. Her head dipped forward a notch and her mouth opened just a bit. Incredulity looked smashing on those full lips, giving a glimpse of that crooked tooth. With a shrug, she walked over and sliced the rope above him. He thumped to the floor, breath thoroughly knocked out of him. It hurt a lot.
“I like you considerably, Chad,” she said. “So sweet. So naïve. Your cynicism’s especially naïve. I doubt that’s any consolation, though.”
“Hey,” he said, “I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt me, but that really did. I think my back is seriously out of alignment.” He squirmed against the ropes. “Mom would say I have a ‘hitch in my gitalong.’ ”
“It won’t last long,” she assured him. “I mean … come on. Surely on some level you know what’s going on here.” She nodded towards the big black hole. Beside it lay a very sharp knife. In the silence, Chad could hear some kind of sound issuing from the hole. A kind of echoey hissing.
“Knife. Basement. Ceremonial designs?” The snake-like marks on her arms slid around her elbows. “Does the concept of sacrifice mean nothing these days?”
“It was all a lie?” Chad whispered. “Is … is the accent even real?”
She reached out affectionately to stroke his hair. “Shhh,” she whispered. “Once you see the Serpentine Goddess, you won’t even want to struggle any more. You live for beauty. This is a beautiful thing we’re doing. Have you ever felt so alive?”
The deep hissing was getting louder.
“Don’t tell me how to feel!” choked Chad, unsuccessfully trying to crawl backward away from the hole and the sound.
“Silly Chad,” she chided, as the tip of a gigantic forked tongue licked its way over the edge of the chasm. “We both know that without me you’d feel nothing.”
#
Ingénue, aka Dreamchild, aka Glowflower, aka Joy, aka so many pseudonyms she’d forgotten half of them, paused to appreciate the moment. Although it was familiar, she tried to never take it for granted, always to take it all in: the bound man understanding life and its fragility for the first time, the Goddess in her massive devouring glory emerging to feed, and she, the virgin priestess, ministering to both of them. On the nights when she lay awake wondering if she’d ever really done anything with her life, it was this recurring image that reassured her. Not only had she kept the Goddess replete and content, she’d also brought meaning to the lives of dozens of callow, disaffected men. True, when it turned out that they were meant to be fed to a giant divine snake, the revelation didn’t always go down well. But meaning was meaning, even when it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.
She gazed at Chad with unfeigned love. She always loved her boys. They poured themselves out to her like water from a jug, giving
her their dreams and their ideas and their entire life stories, never asking for hers. She’d never lied to any of them. She’d never needed to. If any of them had ever asked about her ambitions or her beliefs, she would have told them the exact truth about the Goddess and the swallowing. It was a matter of personal pride. But the occasion had never arisen — not even with Chad, who had been one of her favorites — and now it was too late. This was her final sacrifice.
A snake’s head the size of a car began to appear, intelligent lidless eyes bright in the darkness of the cellar. Chad began to scream, a breathless choking sound. “Mother Serpentine,” prayed Ingénue, facing her deity, “I bring you a new soul as I have brought you many before.” She raised her voice to be heard over Chad’s incoherent shouts. “Accept this empty vessel in honor of your glory, and be at peace. This is the fiftieth and last.”
“Fiftieth?” spluttered Chad behind her. “You’ve killed forty-nine people before me? You’re only 25!”
“I look only 25,” she corrected him. “And I’ve never killed anyone.”
“Then what’s the bigass knife for, huh?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s a symbolic penis, obviously. Look darling, I don’t want your last moments to be wasted on a comparative anthropology lesson. I bring gentlemen to the Mother and they do her honor in the way she will accept.”
“By eating them.”
“Well, yes.” The Mother’s jaws were visible now. The sight of them opening was always awe-inspiring to Ingénue. It struck Chad silent, too. Together they watched the mouth open and open and open.
“You’re the last,” said Ingénue quietly.
“I know,” Chad grunted, starting to thrash against his bonds with renewed vigor. “You said. Why am I the last?”
“Fifty was the agreement. I don’t know… nice round number? Forty wasn’t enough, sixty too many? Let’s chalk it up to mysterious ways.” The Mother’s head waved from side to side, closer and closer. Ingénue stepped into a corner to allow Her access. Chad stopped struggling. He just gazed up at the monster — Ingénue corrected herself — the divinity. “So I will be free now,” she breathed, mostly to herself. “I can call myself Ruth or Sandra, I can date people who live longer than a few weeks. Maybe I could be a pharmacist. File taxes, lease that Nissan Sentra...”