"What?"
"Five thousand dollars and he'll be returned to you."
"I don't have five thousand dollars," I said.
"Well, I'm sure one of his friends will," the traveling salesman said, and he thanked me for my time, snatched up the briefcase, and left.
Later Ezekiel mentioned the salesman.
"Did anyone else have a weird guy trying to sell Smarts come and visit you?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Yeah," said Darling, her voice barely perceptible. Violetta had disappeared recently, and without her twin Darling had become soft and withered.
"Well I sure as hell wasn't going to pay five thousand dollars for that asshole," Ezekiel said, then turned to Darling "hey, you ever figured out what happened to Violetta?"
"The shuttles took her," Darling said.
***
The last time I saw Darling was when I was walking home from school and I ran into a hell shuttle pick-up a few blocks away from my house. I found her on the sidewalk in a chain line. She was eating an apple while the rest of the prisoners clamored around their neighbors asking for cigarettes and last kisses.
"You too?" I asked Darling, careful not to get too close to the guards wearing their pig-nosed face masks and holding stun guns.
"I'm going home," she said.
"Home?"
She smiled.
“Get away from her!” One of the guards shouted at me, and his pig mask nose quivered.
"You better go," she said, "I'll see you soon."
I ran away from the hell shuttle pick up and didn't stop until I got to the end of the block. I looked back in time to see a hell shuttle pull around and stop in front of the waiting line.
Darling tossed the apple onto the ground and when the shuttle doors opened, she was the first to board. The guards herded the rest of the people after her. Their skin turned gray with anxiety, but Darling remained white.
The next time Ezekiel and I explored abandoned houses I said to him maybe we weren't really exploring, but we were fleeing. We were fleeing as fast as we could but it wasn’t fast enough. Ezekiel laughed and he grabbed a teddy bear from the child's room and he began kicking the teddy bear around the room.
"I'm not going to die like Wiley or Smarts or the twins," he said, "I'm not going to die like you."
He tapped the back of his head and the shiny black sphere smiled down at me.
Chapter Four
Jeanine was the name for all pretty girls, the name for all girls with parents who still thought their children were virgins. She knew the flight patterns of every bird still alive in Edgewater. She memorized textbooks upside down and then took bets that she could recite the words back verbatim, and won every time. She bit her lips to turn them red because she couldn’t afford lipstick, and when she got bored absentmindedly scratched at her wrists until they were striped blue.
Do you know Jeanine?” I asked Ezekiel one day after school.
“Yeah, I know her. She’s a whore.” Ezekiel said.
“Really?”
“Nah,” Ezekiel said, “she’s one of the crazy ones. Won’t take money for it.”
After that every time I looked at Jeanine in class, speckled Technicolor underneath the projectors as we watched yet another serial killer documentary, I thought of her unzipped. I saw the blood rushing to her lips, flushed down her skin, as she told me the swallows would be coming in late this year. I saw myself breathing on that bare suicide skin as she told me a scissor tail warbled every morning from six to six thirty four on her balcony. I imagined I saw her naked spine bent down and a thousand cranes creep out of her skin and fly away.
Jeanine and I sat next to each other in class every day without speaking to each other. I drew women with black lioness hair and eyes like spider eggs, and then labeled every part of their brains. Medulla oblongata. Temporal lobe. Basal ganglia. Jeanine. Jeanine. Jeanine.
It seemed like the only thing we ever did in high school was watch documentaries about murderers. I first talked to Jeanine during the documentary of the goatherd killer.
The goatherd killer murdered sixteen girls and buried their bodies out on a rocky hillock behind the grazing pastures. He said, "I murdered them because I wanted to be the mother they never had. I shoved my fingers down into their throats to touch the inside of their rib-cages." He said, "can I go home now?" while technicians strapped his arms and feet to the electric chair.
While the attendants led the goatherd killer to the electric chair down a long white hallway, the walls fell away and revealed a hidden morgue. Sixteen freezer drawers flew open and sixteen half-decomposed girls in plastic wrap and hospital gowns proceeded to have a song and dance number about the vengeance they're going to inflict on the goatherd murderer in hell.
Jeanine tapped her fingers on the back of my hand and pointed to the screen.
"That's me," she whispered.
"What?" I said.
"You see that girl in the blue corpse paint, who has all her ribs showing because there's no skin on her chest?" Jeanine said, "that's me."
I turned to look back at her in the dark classroom. She smiled.
"I wasn't really murdered," she said, "they just put that scene in there because this movie is so boring. Nobody cares about serial killers anymore.
Jeanine and the other dead girls on the projector encircled the goatherd murderer, like a sixteen pointed cloistered star. They produced red-tipped knives from the folds of their hospital gowns and brandished them over their heads.
“But I'm not in show business anymore."
“Oh?” I said,
"I'm going to be an archaeologist," she said, "find artifacts we all thought were lost. What are you going to be?"
“I don’t know,” I said.
Jeanine leaned close toward me and touched my sketchpad. Her nails left little impressions on my dark lines.
“An artist,” she said, “or maybe a doctor. Look at the lines on her. You pay attention to details.”
The algebra teacher stepped in front of the projector while onscreen the dead Jeanine sang, “murder and woe, murder and woe.” The colors of the project glowed on his chest and head. The Technicolor morgue burst on top of his head.
"I told you kids to be quiet!" he shouted.
He grabbed Jeanine's arm and hauled her out of the room. The sixteen dead girls on the screen folded themselves back into the freezer drawers, the walls came back down, and the goatherd murderer resumed his walk to the execution room. As the technicians strapped him down to the electric chair, his relatives set fire to the pages of his unpublished manifesto on the responsibilities of mankind and God in an apocalyptic world. I kept hoping the girl's corpses would come back for a final song and dance number so I could see Jeanine again, but the executioner just flipped the switch and the credits rolled.
Jeanine caught up with me after school on the steps outside the auditorium. I sat on the steps, hunched over my sketchpad. She touched my shoulder to get my attention.
"Miss me?" she asked.
"They let you out so early?" I asked.
"My brother's a prophet down at the capital," she said, "and my daddy’s a serial killer. Once the principal figured out who I was he couldn't get me out of his office fast enough."
"Your brother's a prophet?"
"Yep," she said, "strange huh?"
She reached down and took my sketchpad. The paper tore away from my hands like sloughed skin. She flipped through the charcoal pages.
“This is me,” she said.
“No it’s not,” was my instinctual response.
She laughed.
“Yes it is,” Jeanine said, “I’d recognize myself anywhere. I’m a narcissist. My mother told me so.”
She handed the sketchpad back to me.
“I like it, you know. You’re a good artist. Where’d you learn to draw like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I taught myself.”
I tucked the sketchpad under my arm
. When I looked up I saw Ezekiel riding by on a bicycle, black coat flying behind him, heels sharp as iron. He saw Jeanine standing beside me, winked, and kept on riding past.
Will you take me home?” Jeanine asked as I watched Ezekiel disappear down the street.
Without waiting for a response she slipped her hand into mine and pulled me to my feet.
“Don’t worry. It’s not far,” she said.
Instead of guiding me to her home she took me into the back of a closed down butcher shop. The windows were boarded up and blacked out, and it seemed the shop hadn’t been open in months.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“My father was a butcher before he became a serial killer,” she said, ignoring my question, “I always got cast in those serial killer documentaries because he makes the best meat costumes in the business.”
She opened the freezer doors and the crystallized air inside decompressed at our feet with a hiss. The ceiling seemed to open up wide like a jaw torn off its hinges. Inside the freezer meat costumes hung down from the ceiling and lay in neat corpse stacks on the shelves. They bent forward underneath their weight, rib cages split, porcelain teeth and hair protruding from the headless throats and cracked back spines.
"This was his freezer before he got taken away," Jeanine said, "now it's mine. Would you like to see?”
Jeanine smiled at me with freezer burn in her eyes. She ducked between two frozen hog heads and disappeared into the bowels of the freezer. I followed.
A forest of meat surrounded us, those trussed of bodies of cattle and costumes made from choice cuts of skin. The air cloyed with their bristled smell. I couldn't see the way out but I wasn't looking for the door. Instead I found myself looking at the way Jeanine's long lion hair fell across her shoulders, at the way the small of her back lapped at the base of her spine like a magnetized dog’s head.
“You can touch if you want,” she said.
“What?”
“The costumes,” she said
I held my breath as I reached out and grasped the slender girl shaped fingers of meat. She showed me her butterfly wings made out of meat, scarred with freezer burn and pressed between two sheets of butcher paper
“I was going to fly with these,” she said, “in that documentary about the serial killer who used to tie people to red helium balloons. Remember hearing about him? He’d drive to the coast and release them there. Watch them float out over the ocean.”
She told me more stories about the meat costumes as we delved further into the freezer. Here was the horned girl, with antlers made out of femur bones and hooves of black medulla, running through the forest after the Poison Ivy Widow. She touched the exposed calf skull of the Angry Baby Asphyxiator's last victim and then stuck her fingers down into the stomach of the Split Pea Gangrene Girl. She pulled them out covered in crystalline black pieces of gore.
She spoke of her meat costumes with the nostalgia of someone who’d had all the glitter squeezed out of her and now there was nothing left but the talcum powder and the moth balls and the antiseptic. A seventeen year old widow of glamour.
"Of course, this was before my dad got caught," she said, "now I'm done with all this, but I still keep the costumes. I don't know how to throw things away."
"Why are you done?" I asked.
"Done with what?"
"With the documentaries. The show business and the costumes and the dancing."
"Because it's silly," she said, "nobody dances in real life."
She did a pirouette and stumbled on the slick freezer floor. She caught a chunk of meat to steady herself, rattling the hooks above her head.
“See what I mean?” she said.
“Try again,” I said.
“That’s just it,” she said, “there’s only one chance.”
She released the chunk of meat and stepped backwards on the balls of her feet.
"You were a friend of Wiley's, weren't you?" she asked me, “you were there when they found his body?”
She pulled her shirt over her head as if she was handling glass. Then she let it drop to the floor. Her pants next, a geometric puzzle of undoing the button and letting it slide off her hips.
"Yeah," I said. I spit the word out like a broken tooth.
"Yeah," Jeanine echoed, taking off her panties, "I took him into the freezer too."
Jeanine moved toward me, past the meat still swinging and straining on the metal hooks above. I inhaled when her cold, gore covered hands slipped underneath my shirt and her nails scraped against my bare chest.
"Do you still think about him?" she asked me.
"Yes," I said.
She kissed me on the mouth and she was cold.
"Don't," she said.
She took off my pants and when she lay me down the freezer floor stuck to my bare skin. She pressed my hand to the soft concave pool of her stomach. I grasped her lion's hair with hands that no longer belonged to me. My hands were like chunks of meat slipping off my arms.
She pulled out a small package tucked inside of her bra.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Condom," she said, "don't ask me where I got it."
I thought you were supposed to say something witty before you condemned yourself to hell. Something nihilistic and darkly sarcastic, maybe. Premarital sex was the worst sort of sin after all, and if you were going to pick that way to get sent to hell, you should do it in style. But as she rolled the condom onto my penis I could think of nothing to say. I only thought of the swaying bodies of headless cattle, the trembling lines of fat glistening like bloated, sappy stars above our heads.
Chapter Five
A new program came on to late night television. It featured a man wearing a snappy suit nursing a woman in a white room. The woman lay on a gray bed like she was drowning, smiling a crooked dog smile. The man sat up beside her with his spine straight as an oil rig, combed back his slick black hair with his fingers, and spoke to the camera.
“Dear friends," the man said, "your weekends are wastelands of dissociative depression and existentialist boredom. You nurse the brink of destruction searching for rest. Let me help you; let me give you the dreamless and dark head space you've always wanted.”
The man called himself Teddy and the woman, who never spoke for herself, he called Delilah. Teddy bent down to kiss Delilah on the cheek. He called Delilah his sleeping angel. He drew a black X on her bald head and promised her he would put an implant in her brain so she would never wake up again.
"I bet he fucks her in the ass when the camera's turned off," said Sissy, who became a real bitch after her garden died.
"Oh, Theresa, he does not," Momma called out from the depths of the couch.
Whether Teddy fucked Delilah in the ass or not wasn't important. What was important was that Teddy sold sleep in a world where everyone was always screaming.
The back-story went that Delilah had bipolar disorder. Little high little low, it couldn't be helped. Every little high had her coming undone, flying across the galaxy with rabies spittle hanging from her mouth, spending all of Teddy's money. Every little low had her creeping through the house in search of shiny sharp objects so she could kill herself, Teddy peeling her moony eyes up off the carpet.
Delilah ended up slitting her wrists in a bathtub full of ice. When Teddy came home from work that evening he found Delilah drawing lobster portraits with her blood on the bathroom tiles.
So Teddy dragged her to the slip machine clinic and shoved sleep inside her head. The images of the surgery repeated themselves over and over again on the television screen. The doctors cracked open her skull where Teddy marked his black X. Her brain pulsed gelatinous in the incision and Teddy took the hot wire spider and fastened its sticky hot legs to her nerves. Then the doctors sewed her up and she floated back to the white room, back to the gray bed.
Teddy planted his palms on Delilah's cheeks and turned her face toward the camera.
"My head is blissfully unaware of the movemen
ts of my body," Delilah said, "I no longer feel grief, or anger, or pain."
Teddy kissed the pink scars on her wrists and she laughed. Her skin flushed like she could feel his mouth, but the slip implant in her head severed the nerves from her skin. It cut the sight from her eyes, the sound from her ears.
Teddy assured his viewers that Delilah, living dead inside the empty core of her skull, never even dreamed.
"Five years. Ten. Twenty-five years," Teddy said, "while you give your head a much needed rest your body will make you a success. Become a doctor. Write your novel. Fall in love. When you wake up, you’ll have everything you’ve always wanted."
Teddy smiled. His teeth were the kind of teeth for eating spiders.
"Slip clinics are opening up all over the world," he said, "Find the clinic in your area and get your slip today."
"Ridiculous," Sissy said. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the television screen, "who’s miserable enough to go out and get an implant?"
But when the slip clinic opened up in downtown Edgewater there were a hundred sleepy and sick townsfolk waiting for the doors to open. Jeanine and I sometimes walked past the slip clinic on our way home after school. We saw former neighbors, teachers, clergymen and parents going into the clinic and coming out with slack mouths like the backs of caves and bloody bandages wrapped around their foreheads. Once our geometry teacher stumbled down the steps with Technicolor vomit running down his lips, led by the hand by a slip doctor in his signature gray coat and carrying a gray valise. Wiley’s mother went down the steps next. The blood on her face was thin enough to be black tea.
After Jeanine took me into her meat freezer we often hung out with Ezekiel at the abandoned rock quarry where Jeanine watched over her family of swans. It was shortly after the slip clinic opened up when Ezekiel told us about deadhead tossing. Ezekiel stood at the edge of the quarry, the tips of his boots reaching out into space, smoking a cigarette that thrashed in his mouth because he spoke so fast.
“So you got this family of four, and Mom goes out to get a slip implant, right?” Ezekiel said, “well, who the hell is going to want to take care of a deadhead anyhow? So Dad and the kids lead her outside and toss her into a sinkhole. Deadhead tossing. It’s a party. People bring drinks and lose their virginity.”
The Crooked God Machine Page 3