“Elephant-shitting again?” Laura asked, knuckling his left temple playfully.
Fritz Perls’ term. “Yep.”
“Know you pretty well, don’t I?”
“What can I say?” Travis returned her smile. “I’m an outie, you’re an innie.”
It was enough. Laura tucked her cross-legged ankles tighter under her buttsplit, rocking to rectify them, and rested her hands, palm up and thumb-to-index-finger, upon her knees. Seemed affected to him, but what the hell, if it got her through the night, it was good.
He observed the trickle of aisle activity, new folks scanning or pointing or scarf-sweeping their hunched-over, side-swaggling, pardon-my-heels-on-your-toes way toward a brass-ring grab at enlightenment. Man four rows back was scratching his face, listening to a companion. A cluster of incandescent young women, mid-auditorium, set his mind-cock afrisking for an instant, then he veered off them in deference to their privacy and on to a couple of executive types, glint-eyed from the backglow of money in their day-to-day lives, he thought, Jacob Needleman readers who were easy straddling both worlds.
A quick movement, or jarring. The man scratching his face looked sallow, no great complexion to begin with, but his scratching wasn’t helping any. His fingernails seemed to be tracing welts from cheek to jaw, but then Travis saw runnels of blood down to the first knuckle and realized he wasn’t seeing welts but gouges and that they weren’t being traced but opened. When the man’s glance started to shift forward, Travis took quick refuge in the cluster of cuties further back. But now their skin too, which had blushed a lively vivacity like reddish glows on golden apples, slung wan and dead from fish-glimmered eyes. Feeling the spread come down like a wave of sun over a windy field, he turned to shield himself and his woman from the impact; but Laura whiffed into his nostrils, and Laura clutched his arm, and Laura quick-leaned her puffed purple face, its reeky mouth glistening open, in toward his neck.
*****
Moving from the wise old executives to the scratcher, he wondered if the fellow had a thing about his face. Did he unwax his earholes with an idle pinkie? Did he pry out boogers when no one was about, or chisel up layers of dead skin beneath his hair, opening and tormenting scalp wounds as his body mounted a slow steady assault upon itself?
Laura nudged him. He looked her way and she eyed him toward the stage. There was a stirring at the curtain off stage right. Then a tall blond-bearded man in Deva pants, whom Travis had seen somewhere before, came out far enough to step backward into the heavy red billow of the curtain, making way for the short Indian man who ambled out, hands cupped prayerfully before him as he walked. The tall man seemed stricken, though Travis couldn’t tell if his state reflected agony or ecstasy.
Seats flipped up behind them in the auditorium. His wife dug into her coat pocket and brought forth the baggie of rose petals she’d plucked from a bought bouquet an hour before. They went out her side, him feeling a little like a fool following her. Someone from McGill saw him, they’d hound him forever. Well, fuck ’em. Anybody in a position to see him was as blackmailable as he was. Laura put some petals in his palm and for the next many seconds, the tall air was filled with silent tiddlywink flurries of pink and white and red petals, flinging up and drifting down around the holy man’s upstretched arms and face. When the gentle rain was done, he lowered them and Travis had a first good glimpse of his eyes. No one there, everyone there, a guru trick he’d seen before but never like this: the dark dead glint hinted of tarnished brass, and behind it lay at once the calm of total resignation and assent and the agitation of a star about to go nova. But he couldn’t be certain of that—it was one of the things he liked about Indian fakir types—and the man’s gaze had made its profound impression on him and moved on.
Hands thrust past Travis’s either shoulder stretched out to touch the swami. Devotees lightly laughed as they leaned by him to touch the moving hand. A few arms pulled away, a few laughs died on the vine, but mostly it was an ineffable grasp at joy. Travis figured what the hell, who was he to hold back. He leaned out, Laura’s patient white palm next to his, and two dark hands gripped them and held for an instant. Travis focused on the hands, riveting his attention there: not the dry healthy brown he’d expected, but a slick grayish-khaki like ground round just beginning to move off raw-red on a grill; translucent amber droplets oozed from back-hand pores, tree sap on bark, and the oily heat around his gripped hand suggested the holy man exuded from his palms as well. Travis looked faceward. Towelled off, perhaps, before he hit the stage, the brow and cheeks now, like saturated sponges, obtruded pinpricks of oil, as numerous as beads of flopsweat. The eyes, though: Behind them lay that same cosmic struggle, but just as the guru’s firm grip passed over into discomfort and the static greet of contact turned to tug, Travis realized that composure’s hold was crumbling in those eyes.
But by then it was too late. Whether it was some odd attraction about the two of them that set him off, or just the luck of the draw, the wiry lightweight deadweight holy man pulled them, kneecaps slammed hard on stage-edge, over the upflipped rug and inexorably toward his hungry gape of a mouth.
*****
His hands left theirs. Travis’s palm tingled. As he withdrew it, he pooled his ring finger into the exudate at his lifeline, a substance as thick as honey but not sticky or unpleasant in any way. Returning to his seat, Laura at his side, he sniffed his finger and thought of coconut oil slicked on moist pussy. Laura took his other hand beneath the end of the seat-arm that separated them, giving him an odd look; her fingers slid lubriciously where they grasped him, assuring him and being assured.
Onstage, Apadravya was nodding and smiling, getting a sense of the room, taking its measure.
Laura tugged his arm. “He’s not breathing,” came her taut whisper as he lowered his ear to her.
He eyebrowed her, turning his attention back to stage center. Nonsense. The man was breathing. Had to be. He knew Laura was dead right, knew it like the flare of truth in a night of lies. Beneath the unsettled counterpoise of peace and Armageddon in his eyes had been this unsettling, unobserved other phenomenon: no breath, no om, no shanti. Days gone by, Shyam or Satchitananda would bring the crowd together with shared chants, shared breathing. That would have begun by now, if it was going to happen at all.
Ripples of laughter took the hall. Not nervous, just the delight of those deep and innocent souls who know that the guru turns time into timelessness, teaching impatience to cease, wordlessly wise before satsang begins.
The blond-bearded yoga teacher set a filled glass and a pitcher of water on a tray near Apadravya. A dismissive glance gave it and him invisibility. On the periphery, he slunk away. The pitcher, the glass, remained untouched as long as Travis and Laura remained in the auditorium.
Apadravya’s eyes scanned the hall.
Any moment now he would speak.
Any moment now.
*****
Marcie wolfed into her sandwich. Couldn’t taste the fucker worth shit. Chew your food, mama voice gentle from Winnipeg, fancied recollections of warm tit in her mouth, an overwhelming plane of flesh, Pierre’s penis swallowed past the gag reflex, dim ringlets of private hair like a sneeze tickling her nose. The back of her throat took a wrong turn in mid-swallow, and suddenly there was no air.
She dropped the sandwich, top lettuced slice falling off and bouncing like a mattress hurtling out a window to concrete below. Her chair scraped. Her hands flew to her neck, overlapping V’s like mercy-me, and she staggered to the sink. Disposal side, already picturing the vomit but better here than on their floor; a cereal bowl, its spoon in water, unclog the windpipe, get air in, wash the sucker off after. But leaning over, willing expulsion, thrusting her fingers deep inside her mouth as blood oceaned in her head, had no effect. No time for cops, even if she could communicate with them. She jammed her abdomen against the sink edge, absurdly worrying about the baby growing there. Again and again, punish the body, wake it up, get it to do the right thing, oh yeah, w
indpipe blocked, jig this n jog that n she’ll be good as new, sorry for any trouble ma’am. But the outrage persisted and the saliva dribbled from her lips to the sink below, and the air was not there, and not there, and not there. Flat patches of black cloth dimpled on the periphery of her vision, then the sink edge slipped upward, eluding her fingers, and the flat hard palm of the floor, dull wool, coldly smacked her.
*****
“In Muslim tradition,” his quiet voice rode unneeded intakes and outflows of air, disturbing at first to Travis but then quickly mesmerizing, “King Solomon died in this fashion: By means of a magic ring, he enslaved the djinn, the demons, and made them build his temple. Leaning upon a long staff, he stood there as they worked, his wise gray head bowed in meditation, for days at a time. Still they toiled, the gleam of Solomon’s ring calling to mind their enslavement.”
Laura squeezed his hand. He could feel her disquiet, her thrill, without looking at her. He felt it too. This man, sitting not ten feet from them, showing every sign of sentience and launching satsang with some sort of parable, was not quite alive. Travis could almost see the suck of gravedirt on him, his body emerged from earthgrip just far enough to hide its hold on him. He embrowned the flowers around him, the pillows, the patterned rug. The movement of his facial muscles was minimal, sufficient to bear his message but no more—and this was not the just-enough of a living holy man, though closely akin, but the articulated willed urge of once-living flesh to reclaim its place and find in reassembly its fix on vitality.
“One day, Solomon came out and stood where he always stood, propped up by his staff, head lowered for nearly a year, unmoved. And in the same year, a white worm gnawed its way up inside the staff, eating, eating, hollowing it out until it was a shell. The djinn worked, not daring to interrupt Solomon in his involutions, and the temple was finished. At the moment the final brick was mortared and the work done, the staff could no longer bear the king’s weight. And so he fell. And the djinn discovered that he had been dead for an entire year, though his body had not, in all that time, corrupted in any way, so right and good and blessed a person this good King Solomon had been.”
*****
Marcie started. Disorientation, like a hot nap ended on a bad note. And a great gape of need. Tangle of limbs moving, cabinetry blurring by, a fleeting realization that she was rising, but no memory stuck and there was movement only. Toward the satisfaction of her need. Fixtures went by, hanging beaters and spatulas, door frame, wall photos, light switch. Caught on a couch end, room sweeping like a fan, then a righting, and onward again.
Veer left, dark here but no matter. Buffered against flat cool something, a barrier. Dim wispings of some easy way past it, but it was flimsy stuff, a loud cottony noise as it splintered inward and gave and duddered aside. Odor of need, food call in the hot dark place—dancing mushroom spun by, foreskin, gone. Threaded the sound. Groped down to find it, found it, lifted it, twisted the right side to tear some off, sharp crack and sharp increase in the sound of its need to be taken in. Lolling leftward, the exposed part, pure scent of noise and the stuff she craved. Shuck of her jaws opening, tight skin dry and protesting. Noise lowered like a dream, yes, yes, jaws closing, toothscrape, the hot fluids freshening the dryness in her mouth, a wash over face, the noise still pulsing but abruptly out as she munched past the bony part and tore the yellow batting off to go further.
*****
The holy man paused. And Travis swore that what sat on the stage was little more than a corpse. But then the head moved and the hands clasped one another on his robed lap and Travis heard the unneeded (but for speech) insuck of breath.
“Certain holy saints, it is thoroughly documented in Roman Catholic records,” his head nodded as he spoke, and his grave eyes twinkled like mica, “lived such pure lives that even in death they did not bloat or decay, preserved in some cases for centuries. Saint Angela Merici died in the year 1540. In 1672, her body was found to be intact, incorrupt, sweet smelling. And again in 1867, they found the same incorruption.”
Inside, Travis felt disoriented yet not disturbed, a quiet rush that satsang always brought but weirdly warped, and yet nothing less than fascinating. He felt as if he ought to want to bolt, yet he felt perfectly safe and, in an odd way, holy, to be sitting near this whatever-he-was balanced on a crest of oblivion, conveying its message.
“Eleven years following the death of Saint Camillus de Lellis, at his official recognition for sainthood, his exhumed body was as fresh and supple as in life; fragrant liquids exuding from him were referred to as copious. So too with Saint John of the Cross, whose flesh was found to be incorrupt for more than two and a half centuries.” The holy man let it sink in. His eyes scanned the crowd, then fixed for a soul-searing moment on Travis, before lifting lightly away like a mosquito refraining from puncture and suck.
*****
On the north slope of Mount Royal, in La Cimetière de Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Huguette thrust gloveless hands into her fleecy coat pockets and shifted uncomfortably from one boot to the other, waiting for her idiot boyfriend. Chill air was seeping its way under her coat, spiraling up where clothing ought to be protecting her, but where instead, at Louis-Phillipe’s insistence, she wore nothing at all. The English spoke of freezing your ass off; now she knew first hand—and wished she didn’t—what that phrase meant.
This was stupid. Black Angel with her head bowed and her hands angled open at her sides, thumb-tops dusted with snow: he had said it was good luck to make love under her gaze, but Huguette suspected it was just one more excuse to have sex in an odd locale. Why not? She was finally free of her parents. They were crazy in love. And she had to admit, for all her discomfort and in spite of the shocking overtones of making love in this place—her grandmère, she had to keep reminding herself, was buried not two hundred yards away—she was turned on at the thought of his impish grin backlit, over the blanket she’d brought, by the black sculpted frown of the Angel. Looked awfully thin, spread out on the ground, that blanket.
Then she saw Louis-Phillipe coming from the direction of l’Université de Montreal below, sleeping bag rolled up under one arm. He lurched among tombstones and she hugged herself and jiggled, shouting for him to hurry. Crunching to her, he gave her a huge warm kiss, then untied the bag and unzipped it open atop the blanket. While he was busy, she bit the bullet, unbuttoning her coat and flinging past him onto her back, coat a third layer but bare naked above except for her arms. These she lifted. “Vite, vite,” she said. “Cover me, I’m freezing.” Her nips were tight with cold and her slick chatte tingled with winter wet.
He jittered his fingers down his coat, unbuttoning to expose himself, raw red funny-finger upjutting, then flew down upon her in a rush of cold. Squirming on her: “Take that side, I’ll do this.” He fumbled his buttons into her holes by her left thigh, while she struggled with the ones on the right, laughing with him as, farther up, it became impossible, arms atangle; but with all the squirming, he’d slipped the yummy tip of his thickness inside her, and the body heat was intense enough that she coaxed his lips down to hers and slow-groined more of his love inside her.
Startled upward. Broke the kiss: “It looks like the Angel is about to fall on us,” she said.
Louis-Phillipe laughed. And then they heard shuffled boots from behind the Black Angel. His head craned up as hard white faces under knit caps bobbled through the black night. Hands wrenched him off her, his penis slipping out and exposing her. She tried to cover up, but boots jammed down on her shoulders. “Hey, guys, lookie here. Anybody wanna fuck a frog? Nice froggie, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit.” Mittened fingers tweaked her right nipple and she smacked them away, but they jammed between her thighs and roughly thrust inside. “Placeholder, assholes. First pecker out gets to go first.”
“Get away from me!” she screamed, as Louis-Phillipe tried to fight them but took a fist in his belly, falling to the snow like Christ toppled from the cross.
*****
Flat patches of black
cloth dimpled on the periphery of her vision, and then abruptly the food dislodged. The splash and rattle of spoon in bowl sounded, as her hungry lungs drank air, rounds of coughing and gasps alternating. She hung her mouth over the sink, vision still patchy but coming back. The shiny silver crook of the spigot in her left hand’s grasp reassured. For a time, Marcie cried in relief and gratitude, mashed bread floating in bowl-water like an abortion. Her fetus was probably that size now. She worried that her exertions against the sink edge had harmed it, then dismissed her worries as absurd.
When she could walk, she made her way to the living room and settled on the couch facing the windows, blinds drawn full up onto Rue Drummond, where a car scooped its headlights south and out of sight. She liked the feel of this apartment. The people made the place: both of them such friends and such flat-out attractive people. Marcie wondered if Travis had been at all serious about exploring a threesome, and she especially wondered what dear Laura’s enigmatic look had meant. She didn’t want to blow a great friendship, but maybe it could evolve into something very interesting indeed.
Across the street a woman went by carrying a sleeping child. From the blanket wrapped about it, one socked foot dangled, a wide patch of exposed skin between the sock and its rucked-up trouser cuff.
Minor alarms in Marcie’s head. A mother oblivious to the situation could be unwittingly causing her child harm. She rose, okay now, and went to the window, unlatching and lifting it wide enough to shout out, “Hello there!” trying that first, against an invasion of cold air, then, “Hello over there, your child’s foot is uncovered!” She pointed, saw the woman turn, repeated what she’d yelled, hoping it carried.
The woman never broke stride—if anything, quickening her pace—but moved away as though engaged in kidnapping. Marcie gave it up and lowered the window, then the blinds, rubbing her hands. Only do so much, then you had to leave things to the fates or to other good Samaritans. Hmm, and speaking of children, it was probably time to look in on baby Jenny, just a peek in, a finger inside her sleepsuit, then gone.
Zombie Mashup Page 3