Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

  She leans to one side, reaches up with one bruised hand, grasps at the center string of her bikini top with fingers whose nail beds are caked with old blood, and she rips. The string protests, then gives up and breaks. She gestures one–handed at her breasts. “These are yours as much as they are mine. Maybe more.”

  “No,” says the American, “really. Please stop. When is this goddamn train going to stop? Don’t people ever need to get off this fucking thing?” He shouts, “I’m a good person!” and his voice breaks and turns boyish, a piggy squeal.

  He tries to make a list of famous feminists in his head, and all he can come up with is Camille Paglia, sitting next to him in his internal shadow–show watching him shower filth over the fake girl in the train car, drudging up quotes from some long–ago Women’s Studies course he thought he had forgotten, lecturing, “Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.”

  The fake girl in the train car hisses, “You need to fuck me. Now. Those are the rules. You saved me from the Threat.”

  The American stomps on the floor, waves his arms. He screams, “What threat? What are you talking ab — this is crazy, I have to…”

  The train turns a corner, sways, and throws him down. He feels himself tumbling, and then feels himself hit bottom and roll. Into her. Onto her.

  In his head, Camille Paglia says, “The devil is a woman.” She says, “The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.”

  He is sprawled over her now, with his head on her stomach and his torso between her legs, hyperventilating too quickly and harshly to cry. But he does feel like crying.

  The fake girl grabs him by the hair and hauls him over her. She is strong. Too strong. She pulls his face up to her own and spits. Then she says, “You have to do this.”

  For a second, the American almost does. He can feel his hand hovering over her breast. He can feel his cock rubbing against the fly of his jeans, so close to her tissue–thin bikini–bottoms that he can feel her heat. Then Camille Paglia again, in his head, saying, “For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, ‘Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.’ This sugar–coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class.”

  The train stops. The doors open. And the American is on his feet again, and running out of the train, onto some empty platform, up the stairs. The tears come. Behind him, the girl is raging, screaming, “Someone has to fuck me!”

  And in his head, Camille Paglia says, “Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.”

  §

  When I met the American boy for drinks and introductions on that first night, I suggested a bar within walking distance of his hotel. I wore a dress I thought was sexy and I did my make–up. I tried to look like a girl from some old Western movie, with my cowgirl boots and my fishnet stockings and my piled–high hair. I even drew a beauty mark on my cheek with my eyeliner pencil. I knew what I was doing. I’m not stupid.

  He is calling me again, leaving another panicked voicemail. I already know what it says. The girl in the train car. My big mistake.

  I’ve drawn all of it, not because I want to, but because it’s true. I introduce stimulus, and the stimulus changes what I draw. Push–and–pull. Symbiosis.

  Now, my beautiful old cowboy is crawling up onto the platform. He has caught up with the train. Other people have found her, my poor defiant sex–doll girl. My cowboy finds her spent and sweaty. I draw her eyes again, less defiant. Exhausted. When she sees him with his coffin and his gun and his hat, looming over her, she says, “Are you the Player, or the Threat?”

  I didn’t anticipate this. I didn’t know what I was doing, finishing her, saving her to Osaka’s hard drive. She comes with prerequisites, of course. The Player and the Threat. She can’t exist without them, and her existence demands theirs.

  My cowboy sucks cigarette smoke into the negative space where his lungs should be, then exhales. He flicks the cigarette away, and it spirals down the length of the train car. He says, “Don’t reckon I’m either.” Then, “Where did he go?”

  Faithful, obedient cowboy. Searching for the American, because I asked him to.

  On that first night, I sat at a conspicuous table at the front of the bar and waited for him. I pretended to send text messages on my phone, although I have no real friends to whom I would send them. My hands shook. When the American boy walked through the door and saw me, he looked… disappointed. Sad. I watched his fantasy of me (humble, shy, delicate, a girl the world whispered but never spoke aloud) crumble and decay. It was a fantasy he’d crafted before he ever met me, a faceless fantasy that while he zipped through Osaka at his company’s expense, he might find a Japanese doll to shatter and rebuild.

  Another buzz from my pocket, another message from the American boy. The intervals between calls are getting shorter.

  The rest of the night, he squirmed and wriggled and tried to fit me back into his fantasy. “The world is a big, crazy place,” he said, as though I didn’t know. He said, “I mean, I assume you’re a virgin,” and before I could tell him I wasn’t, “I mean, maybe you’re not, but… I mean, what I’m trying to say is… I want to be fair,” he said, “I won’t shy away from the double–standard, either, you know? The, y’know, the weird, uh, rape fantasy epidemic in this country, all that,” staring at my tits, speaking fast enough to disallow me from adding anything. He lectured me, citing Western feminists I’ve never heard of. If I tried to talk about sex, he blanched and changed the subject. We went on like that for two hours, him lecturing, me trying to find a gap in his monologue into which I could insert myself.

  I am proud of him for not fucking the Demon Distrust Battleground girl.

  Outside the window of my hotel room, the neon sign flickers, then brightens. I can hear it humming to me, composing a one–note theme song for Osaka’s new face. The inside of my hotel room is bright pink now.

  I stop drawing. I stare out the window at the sign. From my perspective, the neon English script is backward. It says “Osaka Rock and Roll Bar.”

  My desk lamp goes out. I tap on the bulb, flick the switch on and off, but the lamp ignores me.

  The Rock and Roll Bar’s sign is glowing, steaming, sizzling, and its hum is growing louder. Then it pops, raining sparks, and then the inside of my hotel room is black.

  I am alone in my dark hotel room with no way to finish my drawings.

  §

  Osaka does not celebrate. It screams. Across the city, bulbs are bursting. The lights that remain are weak, anemic, and mostly red. They flicker.

  People run. They squat in doorways and tremble. They stare out of windows set into dark buildings as the city turns itself out, bulb by bulb.

  Osaka isn’t moving. But something else is.

  The Threat. Liquid and invisible, empty space crashing through empty space, colliding with obstacles and consuming them. It fills any space it can, grows like a bonsai tree into every available inch of thin air. It has no skin to contain it, because none was drawn for it. It sounds like a thousand chiming clocks, although it is silent. The train car girl, pregnant with it by default, has given birth to it. She can’t exist without it. And she exists. So…

  The peacock people are gobbled up by it.

  The Outlaw, for the first time in his brief life, feels an imperative not fed to him through his artist’s pencil. He’s not sure what it is, this unpleasant sensation of wanting to be three places at once. But, huddled on his haunches in an alley behind a 7–Eleven dumpster, he’s contending with it.

  The coffin is almost too heavy to carry now, filled with the Osaka of before, the Osaka of artifice. He has set it down back here, in the dull, bruise–colored shadows, and his shoulders make shrill demands that he leave it here. He
feels the old compulsion to find the American, and it is compelling for its familiarity. He feels the new imperative, born from necessity rather than his artist’s design, to track the Threat, to fire his gun at it and bring it down. He feels its twin, the seductive desire to throw himself into the Threats center and be consumed. He’s never had to make a decision before.

  Somewhere not far away, the Threat pushes its weightlessness up staircases and around corners, and the things it swallows implode atom by atom in its unbelly. The Outlaw feels it, knows it. Its mind tastes like a cave–dwelling thing, a deep–sea jellyfish, eyeless and brainless and running on pure impulse.

  Here, the Outlaw is not alone. He smells someone else, hears their feet falling on the asphalt. Something about their stride, their pace, reminds him of the exhausted, stuck–in–a–terrible–moment Gilco man. This person has been running for a very long time, and can’t stop.

  The Outlaw glances over his shoulder in time to see the American turn the corner, sweat–soaked, ragged, his face puffy and pink in the ugliest and least dignified way. He’s been crying for as long as he’s been running. The Outlaw stands up, and is not sure what he wants to do.

  The American sees him, stops running. Of course he is here. Of course he is. The spaces the two of them can fit into are shrinking, filling up with amorphous, pointless menace. Where else would he be? Gradually, the American’s face contorts into a smile and he begins laughing. His legs don’t seem to know what to do now that they’ve been relieved of their duty to carry him endlessly forward, and so they give up his weight, and he falls to the ground. Around his laughter, he says, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  The Outlaw wonders if his hand will reach for the pistol at his hip, wonders if he will shoot the American, or if he was ever meant to. He wonders how, when they have to choose, people avoid blowing their own brains out. He wonders WHY, in capital letters. Why the American? The American just laughs with his head on the hard, wet, red ground.

  §

  I have to draw. Even in darkness, when I can’t see the things I’m drawing, I have to draw. The balance has shifted, and I can’t tell this story anymore. I am no longer introducing stimulus. I am only responding to it.

  Outside my window, the Threat looms invisible. I know it’s there, because looking at the empty un–ness of it is like looking at a picture of someone you once knew, now all grown up. I have given it a thousand faces before. It can’t get through the walls or the door or the window into my hotel room, although I don’t know why. I am locked in a bubble in the Threat’s guts, and although I am manic and my fingers ache from gripping the pencil for hours, and my entire world is being eaten by something I made, there is some kind of cozy comfort here.

  I can’t find my paper. Sometime between the lights abandoning me and now, I have gotten myself onto the floor, and now I am drawing on the wall next to the bed. I am drawing an eye. Soon I will draw another. They are the eyes of my cowboy, who was meant to be everything the American boy couldn’t be. Somewhere, not far away, he’s lifting his gun, the gun I could never draw quite right, the gun that always ended up looking like a beetle shell no matter how hard I tried to cram it into its Old West revolver skin. My city is dying, is mostly dead, and my beautiful gunslinger is trying to decide if he wants to kill the poor American boy or if he wants to shoot himself in the temple.

  I never meant for any of this to happen.

  Outside, the Threat is so hungry. It wants, without knowing what. I feel pity for it, and revulsion. It’s like an animal made mindless by boredom, a nervous system without a brain, or a brain without a skull, or… I… I don’t know, I grasp at whatever simile I can lay my fingers on, hoping that something will fit, will allow me to understand this thing I’ve midwifed into the world, this desperate, hungry, reaching thing, it’s like, it’s like, it’s like —

  Oh.

  And now I am drawing something new. I am scratching it into my face and my arms with the tip of my pencil, giving it shape, holding it inside a shell. I am providing it with the face it always should have had, and my hotel room is bleeding away around me. I’m falling as I a draw, feeling the hugeness and voracity of the Threat’s hunger all around me, and I inhale it, and I feel it within me, and it is not unfamiliar. I am falling, but I always have been. I am hungry, unspeakably hungry for something, but I always have been.

  I close my eyes, and try to feel how I feel.

  When I open them again, I am standing behind a 7–Eleven in the wretched waste of my poor Osaka. I have scratched the name of the Threat over and over again on my arms, my belly, my face, my legs, and the scratches bleed and the blood is hot, and the Threat is heavy and unspeakably painful inside my chest, and I start to cry.

  Over and over again, MEGUMI, MEGUMI, MEGUMI.

  The tears blur my vision. The Outlaw, with his gun to his own head. The American boy, staring at me with something like fear and something like relief fighting for dominance of his features. They cross, seep into one another, and when I wipe my hands across my eyes, there’s only the two of us.

  Me as the Threat, small but hungry. Same as it ever was.

  The American as the Outlaw, isolated and angry and afraid of choosing. Same as it ever was.

  Between us, our entire world in a black coffin on a silver chain.

  He glances at the coffin and back at me. I glance at the coffin and back at him.

  Then he says, fast and breathless, “What’s inside?” although he already knows. “Should we open it?”

  So now we have a choice to make.

  Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl

  1

  IN THE LAST MOMENTS, WHEN his breath is hot on her neck and the sheets of his bed are wound up around her fingers, when she can crane her head to look over his shoulder and watch the muscles in his back bend and roll like something not quite liquid, she can always convince herself that she is human. She can feel his cock inside her, something solid, an anchor, filling her up, hitting the exact spot (toward the front, almost at the top) that simultaneously melts her and turns her to stone, can feel the sweat–slick skin of his chest slide against her breasts, radiating wet heat and movement, and she thinks that he must love her, that she must have dreamt everything that came before, and if she could just come, her real memories would find their way back to her through the soft post–coital haze in her head. She thinks, How could I ever think I was anything but real? I have wet skin, and I can feel my breasts bouncing, keeping rhythm with the way he fucks me, and I can feel him watching them bounce, and all I want to do is force my back into an arch and ask him if he can feel me come. This is my evidence. I am real.

  And then he comes inside her. And he rolls over and grabs the remote control from the bedside table and points it at her. He smiles at her, the way people smile at a cat they didn’t know was in the room with them, and he says, “Okay. G’night.”

  And then the truth becomes the truth again. And she wants to tell him no, please, to ask him to just put away the remote and let her sleep next to him, or pretend to. She could fill up the room with her soft ghost–blue glow, and if in the middle of the night he has a bad dream and sits up in bed, gasping and waving away the stray cobwebs of the nightmare, he wouldn’t have to reach for the lamp, and she would hold him and whisper into his ear.

  She is not allowed to say any of this. There are directives and scripts to follow. So she says, “You were so big tonight.”

  And then he presses a button on the remote, and she blinks out.

  §

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  2

  After an eternity of dead space, of white noise in a black pit where she can hear the crunch and grumble of the machine–monsters between the worlds, she always wakes up at the Shelter. She is always sitting on a bench built of stray pixels and looking at a closed door with nothing on the other side. It’s like a garage door, somehow both mechanical and entomological, a series of sliding gunmetal panels like a big floating carapace, solid and permanent and inescapable. When it’s time to go back, when her man flips on the console in the warm world of moving flesh and enters the appropriate access codes into his remote control, the door begins to twitch, to squirm, and finally the panels slide against one another and rise, and she is lifted and dragged through the awful elevator shaft between what is real and what only seems to be. That trip between worlds seems to take hours, even if it only takes seconds, and she is surrounded by the screaming sounds of the things that make that in–between space their home, but it is also exhilarating. Because she knows that when the trip is over she will be lying in that warm room, that the comforter will bulge above her, take her shape, describe to him the peaks and valleys of her blue–glow body, and he will be there with his cock in his hand, and he will say, “I want you,” with his voice low and sandy, and she will squirm toward him and pull him over her, and for fifteen minutes she will know what it feels like to have skin.