by Brian Hodge
Androgyny. Some writers can get full-blown stories out of their dreams. I am not one of them. Joe Lansdale can reliably invoke them with his wife’s popcorn when he needs an idea. Someday I must write, begging for a sackful. I find my own dreams to be generally uncontaminated by anything approaching usable narrative structure, but have still sometimes managed to turn imagery and impressions into story seeds, which is what happened here. I had this dream in which I had nipples all over me, then spent a few days wandering around intrigued by this, until it hit me: All these nipples have to be here for a reason — they must be here to nurse something. And if you can’t fathom what this story is doing in a collection whose theme is decay, then you’ve probably never been to New Orleans, which proves that even decay can be beautiful.
In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town. More vignette than story, this; a chance to indulge in a sick joke or two. Good friend Sean Doolittle called this my “Mickey and Mallory story,” and I admit to enthusiastically digging that spate of mid-nineties outlaw road movies like Natural Born Killers and Love And A .45 and in particular the director’s cut of True Romance, even if Christian Slater does get seven shots out of his revolver when he blows away Gary Oldman. That urge to rampage arises occasionally. Especially when publishers don’t pay on time. I maintain that it’s an entirely healthy attitude.
Naked Lunchmeat. 2011 update: The original entry for this story was a snarky rant limning an unfortunate situation surrounding the book it was initially written for, and could’ve been subtitled “How To Totally Mishandle A Sure Winner Of An Anthology And Make Sure It Never Gets Published Because The Publisher Had To Shoot It Through The Head Like One Of The Zombies It’s About.” If you really want to read it, track down a copy of the original hardcover edition, because I’m not reprinting it here. Sorry. Really. But no. Old, expired rancor is nothing I want to resuscitate. I try not to do grudges anymore. I try not to even give the appearance of doing grudges.
Here’s what counts. My first anthology sale was to John Skipp and Craig Spector, for their landmark Book of the Dead. Sharing my first table of contents with a bunch of people I idolized? Cartwheels for miles. John and Craig co-edited a second volume, then went their separate ways. Then things got … messy.
“Naked Lunchmeat” eventually made it into John’s Mondo Zombie, effectively the third and final installment in the series. It’s an affectionate and highly compressed pastiche of William Burroughs’ most infamous work. The idea came about by my wondering why, after the first two volumes, Doug Winter should have all the fun of writing parodies. Over the years it’s given copyeditors fits because they apparently weren’t familiar with Burroughs’ original, and the splintery, fractured permutations of its prose, which I’ve even toned down a lot. But was that ever good enough for them? Did that spare me the need of undoing their alleged corrections? Do I get that time back? Nooooooooooo!
And is this another rant starting? (Deep breath.) No grudges, no grudges…
Cancer Causes Rats. This comes from an anthology called Cold Blood, conceived and very well-executed as a cross-genre affair, blending mystery, horror, suspense, and generally concerned with murder, my contribution being a chicken-and-egg look at the media and serial killers. I don’t believe that the media creates them, but wouldn’t say it discourages them, either. The main thing I’m proud of is that this story predates by years both Natural Born Killers and morphing as Hollywood’s most overused special effect. In an odd bit of genuine synchronicity, a couple of weeks ago, as I write this, I was phoned by a guy in Madison, Wisconsin, who owns/runs an indie label called Bovine Records, and fronts a band called Thug. Thug, a heavy, sludge-core type band, recorded a song based on and titled after the story, and last week I got a copy in the mail and found it to be a grinding, pummeling piece of work that ends in a noise loop featuring the word “mutate.” I love the whole idea, since the basis of the story was something being triggered to metamorphose into a new form.
Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt. A few weeks after Kurt Cobain shot himself, I woke up one morning and this story was just there. I went straight to the Macintosh and started writing, and finished it over the subsequent three mornings, almost the way some people begin their day with a head-clearing cup of coffee. And when it was finished, it felt as if something had been put to rest. The suicide of the weatherman is also true, happening around the same time, but in St. Louis rather than Chicago. And in gradeschool gym class, I really did catch a softball between my knees. Briefly.
Heartsick. Clark Perry, my close friend and Siamese twin joined at the id, also has a passion for those ineffable Re/Search books. I was visiting him in Tampa when he showed me a bit he’d recently encountered in Those Who Are Not Like Us, a volume devoted to old-time circus freaks and other human oddities. It concerned a fellow whose body had ossified, and thus he couldn’t move, and had to be toted around wherever he went. Came the fateful day, then, during the inevitable circus tent fire, that in their haste to hurry him to safety, his bearers dropped him … and he shattered. When later I felt like doing a story about what seems to be a deepening of people’s fear of/inability to connect emotionally, I could think of no better metaphor than this.
Extinctions In Paradise. I suspect it’s true for most writers: that the way something turns out is the wholly random synergy of any number of diverse elements that happen to collide at the same time: aesthetic influences, news clippings, chance observations, personal issues going on in the writer’s life, whatever. As with any good pot of jambalaya, you make the volatile best of whatever happens to be on hand. When Ed Gorman invited me to do a story for the Werewolves anthology, I had no interest in approaching it from the standard Larry Talbot scenario. But I’d recently read a sad and wonderful novel called Imagining Argentina, and had been left with an itch to try something more within the magical-realism vein that’s pulsed through much South American literature. Maybe a year prior I’d been touched by an article about an elderly photographer who daily set up his antiquated gear near a fountain; in which South American city, I no longer remember. I’d long felt impotent and sick whenever I would read of death squads in Rio de Janeiro killing street kids. I was also in the midst of an ongoing editorial page debate with some Christian fundamentalists, seeing firsthand their mania for distortion of facts in service of their vision of the First Amendment. Then, too, I’d recently gotten Concrete Blonde’s Mexican Moon CD, and kept picturing Johnette Napolitano as Doña Mariana, with that earthy sensuality of hers. I wrote the last few pages listening to “Heal It Up” on infinite repeat — it just seemed to help. Six months in either direction and a very different story may have been written. But I’m very glad that Ed called when he did.
The Meat In The Machine. I like industrial music, and felt like doing a story about obsession and transformation amongst a few of the artists recording the soundtrack to our fin de siecle. Fellow enthusiasts will no doubt recognize in the Giger Sanction’s stage show the inspiration of Skinny Puppy, who have the distinction of playing the most harrowing concert I’ve ever been to. After this club show — on what has since turned out to be their final tour* — I met instrumentalist Dwayne Goettel, who died of a heroin overdose in August of 1995. Brap on.
* 2011 update: True for several years, but surviving members Ogre and cEvin Key reunited for a one-off show in 2000, and the band has been active again since 2003. And there was much rejoicing.
Extract. I suspect we all share a dread concerning our teeth that goes beyond the subjective to the most primal layers of our limbic brains. In the wild, a toothless animal will be nearly defenseless and probably starve. A literally toothless person needs proxies, or a reliable blender; the metaphorically toothless inspire only mirth in their enemies. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a recurring nightmare in which my teeth grow huge, then wobbly, then start to crumble … yet I’ve never had a single cavity. My theory is, since as children we’ve all experienced a complete set of teeth falling out, this is all the foreta
ste of decrepitude and decay we need to scar us forever.
Liturgical Music For Nihilists. This is still too fresh and ugly in mind for me to say much, other than I wanted to conclude the volume with something that would entwine all the main themes running through the stories that preceded it. It took longer to write than I thought, and I can’t say that it was ever much fun.
2011 update: Okay. I suppose time enough has gone by.
The original seed: driving through those Chicago hinterlands time after time, fascinated by those desolate-looking parcels of field and woodland. They seemed very eerie to me … the possibility of some terrible, awe-inspiring thing going on inside one, hidden in plain sight, but that no one ever noticed, even as thousands, tens of thousands, drove past it every day.
There really was a slaughterhouse within walking distance of my childhood home, and I can just barely remember an adventurous winter trip there. It was abandoned by the time I was in high school, and gone a few years later as the surrounding neighborhoods expanded and digested the trees and land. The same fate erased just about every place I used to play and go wilding. It got leveled, mowed, civilized, buried under foundations and vinyl siding.
The “Khashab” brothers were real, and the younger one did backtrack fifteen or twenty steps one afternoon to help me pick up an armload of books, but that was the sum total of our lives’ interaction. A few years later, after his father burned his sister, I thought of how kind and gentle he seemed, even to a stranger, and wondered what kind of scars a thing like that was going to leave on him, too. The question has never left.
But looking back, what strikes me most is the amount of then-unknown truth and prophecy in this piece. To flip Kierkegaard around and put the punchline at the end, “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.”
Heartfelt thanks go to all the editors/publishers who either commissioned these stories, or otherwise liked them enough to run them when they came in cold and unexpected: Michael Garrett & Jeff Gelb, David B. Silva, Tom Monteleone, Richard Chizmar, Richard Gilliam, Ed Gorman & Marty Greenberg (more than once), Jasmine Sailing, and Stefan Dziemianowicz, who bears no resemblance to the Stefan of “Heartsick,” insofar as I know.
Sincere gratitude to John Pelan for liking the extant pieces enough to want to group them together with a few new ones; and to Phil Nutman and Doli Nickel, for contributing in ways that I could not; and to Wildy Petoud and the Bluesman for … well, they know.
Appreciation is also extended to Sam Adams, Wicked Pete, Juan Valdez, and Creamy Saint Brendan, for always being there when I need them.
Brian Hodge
Vernal equinox, March 1996
DUST OF EDEN
Author’s Expanded Edition
By Thomas Sullivan
For Flamingo Frank
Thanks to Karen Wydra, whose paintings are worth infinitely more than a thousand words and whose advice helped form mine, and to Molly Thiesse, Alyssa Stafne and Nathalie duRivage, who helped me construct Amber. Also, my gratitude to savvy Denny Solberg, Ginny Malikowski, my indispensable lad Sean Sullivan and the men of tomorrow: Chris Wilson, Richie Guillaume, Andrew Blair, Eric Barth and Spence Lewis.
"For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die."
—Oscar Wilde
THE SITE
1960
He saw them for the first time from the air, east of Baghdad, west of Basra. Like three dragonflies spread flat on the sand, they lay almost invisible in their dusky robes. Their symmetry was what caught his eye and made him aware of the faint ochre circle around which they were positioned like hours on a clock: four, eight, twelve. Facedown, they could have been worshipping. But worshipping what? The circle was about twenty meters across and utterly barren against the surrounding wasteland. No camel's thorn, no fists of vegetation. That was all he registered before the helicopter he was piloting beat off toward the marshes and Basra, where a tourist fare awaited him. But the three prone bodies went with him in his thoughts, connected to something he couldn't quite identify from his past. Or was it his future? A Ma'dan woman had told him he would soon recognize his destiny when he came upon it.
At age fifty-three, he thought he knew who he was: a slightly dissolute soldier of fortune freed by the death of his second wife to battle middle-age crisis. After World War II, Clayton Kenyon had hunkered down into a scavenger's existence selling military surplus in the Mideast, but now he co-owned a tour copter, if you could call the retrofitted Sikorsky S-55 a tour copter. Most of the time he or Bailey, his partner, ferried equipment and crews to the oil fields in Kirkuk or scrounged for odd jobs and parts to keep the helicopter in the air.
But if he had managed to keep the chopper aloft, Kenyon knew he was going down within himself. His dreams were bigger than his life would ever be. Failure, too, had exceeded the causes outside himself. It wasn't just the military coup of two years ago or the steady anti-Western diatribe over Radio Cairo that you heard in every village square; it was a feeling of failed personal destiny. Instead of freeing the warrior inside himself, each impulsive step here in Iraq had left him more desperate and lost. Like a gambler playing through a dwindling stash, his bets got bigger and wilder.
The fare this day was staying at the Saint George Hotel overlooking the Shatt al Arab—a deepwater connector that drained the Euphrates and the Tigris into the Persian Gulf. Kenyon resented the rich tourists almost as much as the younger Arabs did. They came in gaggles, snapping pictures of "quaint" things, as if the struggling nation were a mere museum. But this tourist was different. He came alone. Pug and plain, a geologist, he said he was. Demetrius Booth. He wanted to see Basra and the Tigris from the air and visit the traditional site of the Garden of Eden at Al Quma.
So they overflew the canals crowded with dhows and the round reed boats called gufas, and then to the Shatt al Arab where freighters and a British destroyer rode at anchor. Sinbad the sailor had sailed from here. Kenyon turned the control stick in his right hand, and they glided off to the north over groves of date palms and up the Tigris a little ways to put down at Al Quma and the Garden of Eden.
Here Demetrius Booth seemed duly reverent. Kenyon didn't tell him that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that stood behind a palisade had fallen down a couple years ago, or that local enterprise had replanted it. He simply smoked and glanced at his watch as the little Greek took rapid notes on a yellow pad. But when they were back in the air, Kenyon had a sudden impulse.
"Want to see another site?" he shouted above the roar and vibration.
"Eh? What is it?"
"Don't know. Funny-looking terrain just the other side of the marshes."
The red circle, he was thinking. Prostrated worshippers. Maybe it was valuable. Some mineral fluke with strange properties there in the desert. A geologist might know. Whatever Demetrius Booth replied beneath the din, Clay Kenyon was already banking off toward the west.
Below them passed the marshes of the Ma'dan, gerrymandered with waterways and floating villages of reed huts all facing southwest toward Mecca and long canoes and water buffalo and—once—a wild boar. Each village had a mudhif, or tunnel-like guest hall, built entirely of twenty-foot-long reeds bundled into vaulted ribs as thick as elephant legs.
Beyond that was the barren emptiness of haze and dust where nothing moved save one last dog who seemed to pantomime barking against the roar of the rotor. They flew northwest until Kenyon knew he had missed the odd red circle with its trio of votaries. He turned back, banking, zigzagging. Three times he traversed the zone. He glanced at his watch again. He had been doing that a lot lately, as if time were running out. Where was it? Usually he flew to the south, carrying tourists to Babylon or Ur near the Euphrates. "You will come upon your destiny like a falcon diving on its prey," the Ma'dan woman had told him when he was sharing sweet black tea with Dakhil, who occasionally worked for him.
And so he did.
Again.
It was there soon int
o the fourth pass, a nearly perfect crater of red against gray sand. And there were the three prone figures, nearly invisible in their gray robes. They couldn't have been lying there all this time, he thought. Not unless they were dead, and if they had somehow all died together with such symmetry, then where were the carrion eaters who would have torn their garments and picked their bones? No, the men had fallen on their faces at the chopper's approach. Like desert chameleons, this was their camouflage. Pushing the stick in his left hand, Kenyon dove down and hovered, the rotor changing pitch as it drooped like a shallow parasol. Against the teeth-rattling percussion he merely nodded toward the site for the benefit of Demetrius Booth.
The geologist leaned forward, causing the cabin to dip slightly. Fluidly, Kenyon nosed the craft forward to dissipate the nod; there were days when he steered just by shifting his body weight. When their wash lapped at the crater, Kenyon brought them up slightly. He didn't want to disturb the site, even though he disliked flying at an in-between altitude. If you lost power under thirty feet, "ground cushion" would mitigate a crash. And if you lost it above three hundred feet, the windmill effect on the rotor from that height could build and act like a parachute. "Autorotation," they called it. Helicopters went down more than planes, but they had fewer fatalities because of these soft crashes and because wreckage tended to spin away from the occupants. But not in between thirty and three hundred feet. That was the death zone.