"Is this the one, God?" Slim Sarah asked.
And God said, "yes."
Slim Sarah's husband came home to find all the dead children. He stood in the doorway and tore out chunks of his hair, big bleeding scraps, and threw them at his feet. Then he knocked Slim Sarah on their marriage bed and busted her lip. Meadow hunched in the corner, screaming like an elephant, while her father beat his mother and clawed at her bleating throat. Gods haze sucked itself back into the walls of the television.
A militia of prophets and saints busted down the door of Slim Sarah's house and shot her husband in the head. Then they escorted Slim Sarah and Meadow out of the house and to the backstage of the Teddy and Delilah show.
"And we're throwing a parade in her honor," said Teddy. He reached over to touch Slim Sarah's cheek, and accidentally smeared off some of her powdered make-up to reveal the blackened, bruised flesh beneath.
"The parade is coming!" Sissy shouted, and threw her arms up in the air.
"A parade!" Momma said, and she jerked her head up off her chest so quick that I thought I heard her bones snap.
Momma and Sissy jumped up and down on the couch in a parody of excitement, limbs short-circuiting, hair flying. Their skirts ballooned up over the head and stuck to their ceiling.
“Momma,” I said, “stop, you’re going to break your hip.”
They ignored me and continued to jump until exhaustion. Momma fell onto the floor onto the whiskey stain. Sissy sat down, her skin flushed, and lit a cigarette.
"Will you take me to the parade, Bubba?" Sissy asked me.
"Don't call me that."
"Bubba?" Sissy asked, "but I always call you Bubba."
"Be quiet Charles," Momma said as the amber whiskey stain seeped into her cheek, "can't you see your mother is watching the television?"
"Be quiet, Bubba," Sissy said.
The cigarette burned the edges of her fingers. She dropped it and ground it into the floor with a bare foot. Her toes hissed.
"Don't do that!" I said, grabbing Sissy's arm.
She turned to stare at me and her eyes, like hollow corks, bobbed up to the top of the gleaming surface of her forehead. I went down on my knees to retrieve the cigarette butt and found Sissy's feet covered in a latticework of cigarette burns and braised scars.
I called the slip doctor.
"What is it this time?" he asked me.
"Theresa's been smoking cigarettes and putting them out with her bare feet," I said.
"I'm sure she'll be fine," the slip doctor said.
"Didn't you hear what I said? There are fucking burns all over her feet."
"All right, don't get so worked up," the doctor said, "I'll be over in the morning."
The doctor hung up. The phone slid out of my hands and I went back into the living room. I found Momma still leaning against the whiskey stain, her fist stuck inside the empty glass. Sissy was gone. Her IV stand lay overturned against the coffee table.
"Where did Theresa go?" I asked the Momma, and as if in response the open front door banged against the wall. Momma remained silent.
I found Sissy outside. She stood in the middle of the dirt road beneath a bower of trees, heavy with spider web lacing and turning a bruised shade of purple.
"You shouldn't be out here," I said.
Sissy said nothing. The wind tossed her unwashed hair off her shoulders, cut its mouth against her skirt. I looked beyond the road into the indomitable nest of woods, and thought of Jeanine left alone in the hollow of that tree.
"Let's go," I said. I took Sissy's arm.
"Where does the road go?" she asked.
"It doesn't go anywhere," I said.
I took Sissy back into the house, locked the front door, and sat her down onto the couch. Everything glowed gray in the nightmare texture of the television. Teddy kept tapping Slim Sarah's chin and telling her to look into the camera.
"Not since Abraham dragged his son Isaac up the mountaintop to sacrifice him has there been such an act of courage, folks," Teddy said, "this truly is a remarkable woman. Be sure to see her when the parade comes to your town, won't you?"
I dragged Momma off the floor and set her back onto the couch. I wiped the whiskey sheen off her cheeks.
"Will you take me to the parade, Bubba?" Sissy asked.
"Would you kill me if God asked you to?"
She smiled. "Yes."
I took a cigarette out of her hand and stubbed it out on a nearby ashtray.
"No more cigarettes, okay?" I said, "no more cigarettes until the doctor gets here."
Chapter Nine
I woke up with a stuffed deer in bed with me. It stared at me with button eyes framed by ladylike, sweeping eyelashes. Its gelatinous hooves melted into the sheets. I wanted to push the stuffed deer off the bed, but I couldn't bring myself to touch it.
"Did you put that deer in my bed?" I asked Sissy later that morning. She sat in front of the television with her feet propped up on the coffee table and her thumb in her mouth.
Sissy said nothing. I went into the kitchen, grabbed a kitchen knife, and went back upstairs to my bedroom.
While I was preparing to kill myself someone knocked on the door. At first I thought it was the police, coming by to take me away to hell. But it was the slip implant doctor, visiting to check on Sissy. He came into the house carrying a gray valise and a machine hooked into his veins. He’d told me before if it wasn't for that machine his blood would turn into shit.
"You said you were going to come by a week ago. Where were you?” I asked him.
“What are you doing with that kitchen knife?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I dropped the knife onto the carpet, “come on in.”
The doctor set his gray valise down on the coffee table. He turned to Sissy, who was now reclining on the couch with her head lolled back and her feet digging into the carpet.
"Let me see your feet, sweetheart," he said, and he knelt in front of Sissy and treated her cigarette burns with iodine and bandages.
"She’s probably just repeating the past," he said, “nothing to get too concerned about.”
"No. My sister would never do that to herself. Something’s wrong with the implant," I said, "use your diagnostic scanner."
"That won’t be necessary. Stand up, sweetheart," the doctor said, "lift up your dress, sweetheart."
Each of the doctor's 'sweethearts' crystallized in my mouth. Sissy lifted up her dress and showed the doctor the hunger curve of her stomach. I looked away.
"She looks fine everywhere else," the doctor said, "just keep an eye on her and she should be fine. Okay, you can put your dress back down. There you go."
"Check my mother too," I said.
The doctor and I found my mother in the kitchen, rummaging through the cabinets looking for cigars.
"Your father is such a bear when he doesn't get his nicotine," she said.
"Daddy's been gone for a long time, Momma" I said.
The doctor didn't call Momma sweetheart when he asked her to lift up her dress. He didn't find any burns, only raw gray moles and the outline of her bones that made upset faces to his fingertips.
"Has she been taking her pills?" the doctor asked.
"No," I said, "she spits them out. Like everything else. Why do you think I have the IV?"
"You ever had a dog before?"
"What?"
"Try giving it to her with a little peanut butter," he said.
The doctor picked up his gray valise and shit for blood machine, then left the house. I chased him out onto the porch.
"You can't go," I said, "can't you see that they're still broken? My mother, she doesn't eat, she's searching for cigars for a man that's been gone for seventeen years. And my sister, she's going to burn her feet straight off.”
The doctor paused for a moment, his bottom lip drooping down as if it might fall off, his fingers shaking as he reached for the balustrade to steady himself.
"You know it doesn't matter," he s
aid.
"What?"
"Your mother and sister are dead, don't you know?"
I watched the flow of the doctor's blood through the tube, as it passed from the machine to his veins. Blood like ichor, passing out of his body, then transformed into sour pink plasma before passing back.
"Face the truth," the doctor said, "we're nothing but glorified morticians, dressing our relatives up pretty before we drag them out to the wastelands. Suicide just has a friendlier face now. When these people come up out of their sleep after their first ten years are up, nothing will have changed. Most of them will be back asking for another slip implant in less than a week."
The doctor's tubing undulated slowly in the wind, and the blood flowing through cast a snake shadow on the porch steps. His knuckles turned white as they gripped hard against the machine.
"Your eyes look like a terrible secret," the doctor said, "did you know that?"
He headed down the road.
"Wait," I said, following him, "wait. Please."
He kept walking. I followed him.
"I have a question. My sister. I found her standing outside in the road one night, and she's looking down it like it goes on forever. And she asks me 'where does the road go?' What does that mean? Why did she ask me that? My sister's never said anything like that."
"Misfiring synapses," the doctor said, "you should have listened to my advice about what to do with her seven years ago."
I stopped following the doctor and watched him walk away. I stood there breathing heavy, feeling as if I might collapse, until he left my line of sight.
"Who will take care of you when I'm gone?" I asked Sissy when I came back into the living room.
"We will take care of each other," she said. She leaned forward on the couch and reached out to touch my forehead, as if to reassure me.
I went upstairs where the stuffed deer still lay in my bed, hooves poised, legs slender and fragile like woman crimes.
If the deer could speak I knew it would say, "you've failed everyone you've ever loved. You've failed Momma and Sissy, and Daddy too. You've failed your childhood friends, Smarts and Wiley, Darling and Violetta. You've failed Jeanine, the first girl you fell in love with only person you ever thought might actually have a chance. You've failed Leda. You've failed yourself.
"You've even failed Ezekiel and the shiny sphere on the back of his head."
And if the deer could speak, its mouth would grow into a parabola, a long echoing chamber, and it would speak in the voice of my father.
"It’s time to give up," the deer would say.
As I lay in bed nuzzling the deer's cheek, Jolene came to my window holding a bird. She ate the bird in front of me and then smiled at me with gritty, blood-stained teeth. Then she slunk back into the swamp. I stared for a long time at the empty window, the feathers caught on the window casement.
Chapter Ten
I went to the slip clinic the next morning. I had to crawl over a horde of plastic chairs and scabbed would-be deadheads to get to the receptionist, a young lady with brittle machine gun tattoo on her throat and plastic pink curls.
Before I opened my mouth she spoke.
“Name?” she asked without looking up.
“Charles,” I said, “I just wanted to ask-”
“-Fill out these forms,” she said, interrupting me, and shoved a clipboard full of papers into my arms, “give them back to me when you’re finished.”
When I finished filling out the forms, she handed me a number, and I turned away to wade into the sea of waiting patients. Every flat surface in the clinic was lined with televisions. The Teddy and Delilah show droned on without pause. People surrounded me on all sides, but were careful to never touch. - slender faced girls with bleeding throats, grizzled men with their faces melting into indistinguishable grease pits, a bald headed junkie sticking her fingers into her stomach.
I clung to the walls and watched Teddy juggle hot wire spiders on the television.
After four hours, someone over the intercom called my number. I found an attendant carrying my forms, who took me down a hallway that stretched all the way to eternity. Scorch marks from the bombing still lingered on the whitewashed floors. She led me into a white room full of crooked white beds, all of them occupied by wannabe deadheads watching the television screens on the ceiling.
“Undress,” she said. She placed my forms on the bed, handed me a white hospital gown, and left.
I shouldered the wall, static sticking to my eyes, and began taking off my clothes. A doctor walked over to the boy in the bed beside mine and knocked him unconscious with a breathing mask like an iron cage. Nurses in latex uniforms, carrying steely medical instruments, filed around the doctor. The doctor took a six inch saw from one nurse and sliced the boy's forehead in half. A second nurse placed a hot wire spider in the doctor's hand. The closer the spider got to the boy's head, the more it trembled. I looked away, finished undressing, and put on the white hospital gown before lying down in bed.
In the bed next to mine a girl lay locked down in a perpetual seizure. When she saw me she tried to speak, but she could only stutter. Spit ran down her chin, and on her forehead grew a boiling, black mass of tissue in the spot where the implant rested underneath. She had electric orange and blue hair.
"Jeanine?" I whispered.
Another doctor and his nurses entered the room and surrounded her. They lifted up the sides of the bed sheets like white wings as they performed their surgery, obscuring her from my view. I only saw her hand pushing against the sheets, her palm opening and closing, making small, desperate impressions. I almost believed she was reaching out for me.
The doctor dropped her crumpled, bloody spider into a metal tray. A nurse produced a needle and nylon thread and sewed up her head. When the sheets dropped back down Jeanine lay unconscious.
Her arms spread out over the sides of the bed. The black mass on her forehead had been sewn up, and yellow fluid seeped through the wound that grimaced like a broken mouth.
The doctor who just finished his stitch surgery on the boy moved toward me. He glanced over my forms while the nurses hovered behind him like wraiths.
"Let's see what we have here," he said, "reason for getting a slip implant: everyone I've loved and will ever love is already dead, etcetera, etcetera. Looks like we have another philosopher here, girls."
He handed the forms to one of the waiting nurses. I grabbed his hand before he placed the snake mask over my face.
"Why is she here?" I asked him about Jeanine, "how did she get here? What happened to her?"
"Don't worry about her," the doctor said, "she's fine. See you in ten years."
He tried to fit the mask over my nose mouth. I grabbed the base of the mask and ripped out the tubes. The hisssss of gas escaping from the open tube punctuated the air. One of the nurses grabbed my shoulder and pushed me back down on the bed.
“Someone turn the gas off!” the doctor shouted.
I shoved the nurse's arm away. I fell off the bed and knocked over a surgical tray.
The doctor took hold of the back of my hospital gown as I tried to drag myself across the floor to the unconscious Jeanine. Her hands curled in sleep. I reached out for her. The doctor pulled me back. I dug my heels down into the whitewashed floor. The back of my hospital gown tore.
“Someone get me a tranquilizer!”
“There aren’t any left, we used them all!” One of the nurses called back.
On the television screens above our heads hundreds of Teddy's and Delilah's opened their mouths and issued forth a sibilant noise. I tried to tear myself from the grip of the doctor. I buried my face into the folds of the hospital gown and gasped. I pounded my fists against the doctor's thigh.
The room erupted. The boy who had the spider inserted into his head not a few minutes before threw the hospital bed sheets off his body and ran straight into the wall. The rest of the deadheads broke out into a wave of indecipherable noises, screaming and hissing. Delilah
struck the ceiling of the room. Teddy rammed his fist into her jaw.
“What did I tell you, girls?” the doctor screamed, “never trust a philosopher!”
The mass of static rose up on its hind legs and formed itself into the image of God. I tried to breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I was reaching out for Jeanine, but all I could see was the newly implanted boy running into the wall over and over again until his forehead turned purple.
“What is wrong with you?” the doctor asked.
"I don't want to die anymore," I said
The doctor released me. I got up off my knees and stumbled toward Jeanine. I grasped her hand.
“I’m sick of this shit,” the doctor said, “I’m going on my lunch break.”
"She's coming out of the sleep. Her implant was faulty. Be careful with her," one of the nurses said to me, a young nurse, with blood still in her cheeks.
But already I grabbed Jeanine's shoulder and tried to shake her awake. Her mouth opened slightly, and the spit she left in my mouth seven years ago dripped out onto my knuckles. The sea of deadheads screaming rushed into my head.
"I don't want to die," I repeated once more, "I shouldn't have to want to die."
Jeanine inhaled a sharp breath and opened her eyes
"Charles?" she said.
"I thought I lost you in a tree," I said, and her body stiffened in my embrace, "I thought you were lost to me."
"Charles, where am I?"
"The slip clinic. We have to go."
The deadheads lay back down in their beds and the doctor waved a dismissive hand at me before him and his nurses moved onto the next bed with the snake mask anesthesia and cadre of surgical tools. The crackling hiss dissipated into silence. Teddy and Delilah closed their mouths and sat down on the couch to pick at their scabs.
I tried to carry Jeanine out of the clinic. She carried me.
Chapter Eleven
Jeanine sat on the edge of my bed in spit light, her body wrapped in the orange scramble of dusk. I sat on the floor rocking against the boards. For the longest time we didn't speak. I lay out some of Leda's clothes on the bed for Jeanine to change into but she didn't touch them. Instead she rocked on the edge of the bed squeezing the sleeves of her hospital gown. After a while Jeanine got up from the bed and went into the bathroom down the hall, dragging her hospital ties behind her.
The Crooked God Machine Page 13