She did it on purpose. It burns you when she smiles and you know you never want to be away from this girl again. It’s too early to tell her you love her but you say it as a joke after she names off some bands you like. She just looks at you like she knows it wasn’t a joke but it’s alright.
You’re eating noodles and shrimp for dinner and the phone rings. Your stomach does a quick double flip and threatens to come up on you. You know you shouldn’t answer the phone but you will. You have to. Because Angela is calling.
“Hey Patrick Terran, it’s Angela.” It’s funny because in the three years you were together she never once said that to you. She called you Patty-cake. It was cute when she said it.
“Hi Angel,” you say, and every letter feels like it’s cut from razor blades.
“I wanted to talk to you today about your disgusting foot odour.”
“It’s good to hear your voice.” Your palms are hot and slick and the viewfinder is showing you a composite of Angela’s face made up from a lot of different images. It isn’t exactly her, but it’s damn near her.
“Did you know that you’re offending friends and family with disgusting foot odour?” she says. “In fact, one in two people will suffer with this uncomfortable and embarrassing condition. It’s caused by a build-up of bacteria feeding off the sweat your feet make in your socks and shoes. Bacteria are disgusting little creatures that live off your old, dead foot flesh and drink the salt out of your sweat. Smelling them on you is both offensive and hurtful to those you love most.”
“I knew that because you told me last week,” you say. Your words are muted with snot in your throat and in your nose, which can be embarrassing and painful for your loved ones.
“Luckily there’s a product designed just for people like you and your stinky feet.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Happy Feet is a Johnson and Simmons product designed to cure unnecessary foot odour and save you from being embarrassed in public.”
“I miss you, Angel. I just wanted you to know that.”
“Please pick up some Happy Feet by Johnson and Smith, Patrick Terran? For me?”
The video face puckers in a playful pout that stabs the air from your lungs. Today it’s your bad feet. Other days it’s about the weight you’re putting on. Other days it’s about how you should get rid of your unsightly oily skin with a graft. She calls to tell you all the things she would never say when she was alive. She tells you these things to shame you and hurt you into buying products. And you listen to the whole thing hoping that the end of the conversation will be different this time, because it always hurts so bad at the end, and the way things are going you know it isn’t going to be any different.
“Take care, Patrick Terran. I’ll see you soon!”
And you listen to those razor words bite into your flesh and if you cry every single time, well, who can blame you.
“That’s fucking horrible,” Ajax says, scratching at his eye. Today it’s red and swollen and there is a rime of dried blood around the lid.
“You should have that looked at,” you say, pointing to your own eye.
“Yeah, I did,” Ajax says. “They say they want to take it out. Say it’s going to cause more seizures and eventually I’ll be a drooling organ donor. From the optic pins.” He makes a funny exploding-head motion with his hands and a popping noise with his lips.
“That sounds pretty horrible too.”
Ajax shrugs. “Black market, baby. What are you gonna do?”
“I guess,” you reply, watching as he picks at his bloody eye and wipes his fingers on a plastic towel.
“No,” he says. “I mean, what are you gonna do? About the phone calls.”
“Nothing,” you say, but that’s a lie. You are definitely going to be doing something.
Later when you leave Ajax to his bleeding eye you walk for a long time sucking in dirty yellow air and scratching your head when the rain makes you itch. You decide Angela was wrong. There’s nothing beautiful in the world. The things that made the world beautiful have all been sliced up and zip wrapped or canned. They’ve been packaged for individual consumption. Give them credits; they give you your life. It’s the perfect economy, the way man was meant to live. Everything is fair because money doesn’t care what colour you are, or if you’re fat or crippled or blond. It doesn’t care if you came from unfiltered DNA or from the mining colonies of Io or from Detroit. You either opt-in to the system or you opt-out.
Your feet are sore and you’re tired of walking and the rain is giving you a rash. You step into a bus station and there are two girls smoking and one of them hurls a choking cough from her lungs like tuberculosis and spits a wad of bloody phlegm on the glass. Her brown eyes match yours from the corner of your vision and she turns her head slightly to let you know she’s waiting for you to say something. You want to tell her she’s boring; you’ve been there and done that. But you don’t.
You’re too busy looking at the wad of grease on the glass, the way the blood sits in the centre like a red yoke from a counterfeit egg, and you think about how the world is circular. You wonder again if you made the same face as that old Chinese with the slime on her coat the first time you picked up the phone after Angela died and listened to her list off your faults and you realize it doesn’t matter. Nothing ends. Opting out of one thing is opting in to another.
The bus comes, and it’s the wrong one but you take it. You sit as far away from the girl as you can.
The bus route is one of those long circle jobs that go all the way around the city. It meanders in and out of a dozen neighbourhoods. People get off. A few get on. More leave. Eventually the girl with the brown eyes and bleeding lungs gets off, swishing past you without a glance. You’re already forgotten. Some guy who gave her a weird look once upon a time when she spit blood and slime on a window. You wonder if she’ll still remember the sight of that red and brown slug long after you’ve disappeared from her memory.
The bus trundles off and you fall asleep. You dream of that tropical paradise with the black water and happy, screaming families raping and torturing each other. You dream of endless fields filled with some kind of strange fleshy plants with huge, jutting organs sticking straight in the air. There are bloody sheets spewing out of the organs like flags, dancing softly in the wind.
Angela is with you, but her face is long and canine. She’s got huge red eyes. She’s never been more beautiful. The air is thick with the sound of grinding gears and slapping meat. Some small animal is wailing in terror. And before you, standing like rows like some brutal harvest of flesh are rows upon rows of pink human torsos with tentacles for limbs like starfish. Gorged, erect penises jut straight up from their bellies, and silky red tissue ejects from the piss holes like lung filters in a sea anemone. You see thousands of them, stretching out forever, spewing their red tissue and then sucking it back in again with a flex of their rock-hard bellies. The tissue floats in the air, collecting pain like dust, collecting screams like food.
“They’re tireless workers,” Angela says. She takes your hand and leads you toward the fields. “Omni-matrix software upgrades have linked their brains together so they function as a collective, sending out millions of calls a day, asking their loved ones to buy their goods. Corporate is our biggest customer.”
“Those are people?” you ask. The marvel of it all. “How do they survive?”
“They don’t. They’re dead. But dreaming. It’s a very powerful tool. Just think about all those souls linked together. You need never be bored. You need never be lonely. Your every sick wish and desire granted.”
“But by who?” you say, thinking of R’lyeh and those torturous family excursions. “If this isn’t Corporate, who is this?”
She smiles, her teeth porcelain and perfect.
Hours later the bus driver is shaking you awake.
“You can’t sleep here,” he says, rubbing his hand on the s
ide of your face. You pull back when you see it covered with burns and warts. It’s ridged along the knife of his hand, like a crab’s claw, bumpy and red. Like something is trying to scrape through his flesh and get out at the world. His more interesting inner self, maybe, the one he never shows anybody. The one he won’t show you. His words are deformed because his teeth are crooked and broken. He’s a wreck and you wonder why you never noticed it before.
You check your phone and it says the time is 11:43 P.M. It says you have 32 messages that you didn’t hear because the ringer was shut off. You didn’t feel it because the buzzer doesn’t work. The phone is hopelessly outdated and you should have had it replaced years ago.
“Hey,” you say to the bus driver. “Where are we?”
He answers with a word you can’t quite get your head around, like he said it with marbles in his mouth. You ask him to repeat it and he does, and you can’t understand it still. You ask him to repeat it one more time and he points at a small red sign beside his seat that says END OF LINE. He pops the door and waits for you to get your lazy ass off his bus.
It’s cold and you see your breath falls off your face in plumes of grey and the air is thick with the smell of sewage from the river and exhaust from the bus. It’s dark and you’ve never seen this street before. You turn and ask the bus driver for directions and he simply points down the road and says, “Start walkin’,” then he slams the door shut. The bus hisses at you and farts propane exhaust as it drives into the night. There are red lights on the back of the bus and green light spilling from within. There’s someone sitting at the back and as the bus wanders away the person turns and looks at you and the face is familiar but you can’t be sure. Maybe you’ve seen him before. Maybe you used to work with him or you went to school together. Maybe he’s someone your sister brought home once. A moment later he’s gone and there you are in the cold and the dark with your phone in your hand and the 32 messages you haven’t listened to yet, so you start walking and put the phone to your ear.
“Hey Patrick Terran, it’s Angela,” she says.
“Hey baby,” you say.
“I’m just calling because I wanted to tell you that your genital odour is embarrassing your family.”
“I’m sorry,” you say.
You listen to her talk and tell you she’ll see you soon. The message ends and she tells you about your bad haircut. Then she tells you about how your siblings are worried your hemorrhoids are getting out of hand. She goes through 14 separate things that are wrong about you, things she hates or is embarrassed by or is ashamed of, and then the message changes.
“Patty-cake,” she says, her voice breathless. Your heart lurches. “Get off the bus. Now.”
You stop walking and look down at your phone. The message is from two hours ago.
Your friend Ajax answers the phone on the third ring. He’s holding a towel to his face and there’s blood on it. His silver eye is bulging like the orb of a frog; the flesh is waxy and seething heat from infection. He holds the phone carefully with his off hand against the side of his face not crusted and swollen. Your name and face are on the screen, giving him the finger and then breaking into a grin. The scene repeats itself again and again until he answers the phone.
“Hey, buddy!” Ajax says. “What the fuck is up?”
“What?” you say. “No, nothing.” The line hisses and pops with static.
“You alright?” he says. “You sound high. And this connection is for shit. Where are you?”
“I . . . (STATIC) . . . hurt my nose,” you say.
“You what? Hang on.” Ajax says. The static is getting to him, and he swears loudly. He shakes his phone. The video-screen you flips him off and laughs again, like you’re doing it on purpose.
“. . . she looks like worms, man. I missed the point . . .”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Ajax shouts. “I can’t hear you!”
“. . . Not . . . like . . . this . . .”
“Pete!” Ajax yells. “I can’t hear you!”
“I’m . . . (STATIC) . . . through a spider’s ass,” you say, and laugh.
Ajax hears the cogs in some great machine desperately in need of oil, and he hears you panting and laughing in alternating breathes. You’re praying gibberish, a language that can only be spoken with broken teeth and blood in your mouth. And then another voice, which turns his blood cold and he throws his phone against the wall when he hears it, cracking the touch screen and causing a rip in your smiling face.
“COME WITH US,” the voice says.
You have no idea how long you’ve been walking, but you do it because the next message you listened to was Angie telling you it wasn’t much farther. You move from the glare of one sodium arc-light to the next, marvelling at how the rain seems to subtly shift direction with every light you pass under. The effect is disorienting, causing the shadows to warble in your peripheral vision. Sometimes they angle away from you, and other times they almost seem to be reaching for you, grasping for your clothes with tiny broken-twig fingers, and when a shadow actually manages to grab and tear a small hole in your shirt, you scream at it and flail away, slamming your back against a light pole and huffing shallow, panicked breaths.
The pole is a cold wet shock along your spine, with a touch like smooth vinyl where it touches your skin. Something buzzes in your hand and you throw your phone in a panic. It bounces across the pavement and comes to a rest in the dark a few feet away. There’s a crack on the screen and chipped plastic on the corner where it hit the ground. The lit screen is flashing red and blue, blue and green, green and red. Your next message and it’s another one from Angie. You can barely hear her through the tinny little speakers.
“It’s alright,” she’s saying. “Don’t be afraid of them, Patty-cake. They’re harmless. It’s all in your mind. It’s all in your mind.”
And of course it is. This entire thing is in your head. You don’t jump at shadows because shadows aren’t real. They’re dark copies of real things. They have no substance. You’re not afraid. Just like you’re not afraid that your phone with the broken buzzer suddenly buzzed in your hand to get your attention.
You step into the gloom, praying that whatever grabbed your shirt won’t grab you now, and you swoop in and pluck the phone off the ground. And if the shadows seem to take a little longer than normal before they retreat back away from the light, well, that’s probably just something you’re dreaming up because you’re not scared.
The area is growing more decrepit from street to street. When the lights over the sidewalk begin to flicker it makes your throat burn with bile and you taste burnt oil and smoke in the air. Even the graffiti is corrupt. Gone are the delicate, beautiful works enhanced with Light Tape and AniPaint you’re used to seeing. These are crude, offensive scrawls scraped out of the sides of the buildings, in languages you don’t recognize. On one wall you pass, a massive dead city has been painted, full of corpses and black shadows that seem to be feasting on the meat. VISIT R’LYEH, it says. The caption is in Filipino or Latin maybe, you can’t tell. It seems to be gibberish. It looks like ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Maybe it’s Arabic.
“It’s not Arabic,” Angie’s message says. There are only three left.
The pavement here is cracked and chipped and there are dark stains that should maybe be best left unexplained. You avoid them as best you can, and wonder how they can remain even though the rain is a steady cold sheet of plastic against your skin. There are fire barrels here and there with dark, brooding shapes huddled around them; you must be somewhere near Forest Lawn but you’ve never been here before. There are bus routes here, but every small glass shed you pass says the number 1 is out of order, please continuing down the line. They blink in digital clarity like an alarm clock, on and off, conserving power by only being active half the time The other half they are somewhere dark, and you shake your head be
cause that’s a weird thought to have about a bus stop light screen. At the next bus stop it’s exactly the same, except your belly sinks when you read it because for just a moment it might have read something different, it might have read something like I want you to eat a live cat.
You stagger and trip in a puddle, coming to your knees, the bright lancets of pain shooting up your thighs. You shake the water from your eyes and see that you’re standing in front of an old subway entrance. PICKMAN TRAM a cracked sign says, and rust flows like blood in the rain from the letters.
The phone in your hand has one more message. You stagger to your feet, and press your hand against the old steel claptrap door to the subway. It grinds on joints that haven’t been opened in years. It opens to a gaping black chasm that welcomes you with a rush of gas air, like the stink of propane additive and sour compost. You can’t see more than three or four feet past the doorway, but you sense a huge, cavernous space before you, like the mouth of the world if it were to suddenly open before you and swallow you from the face of existence.
There’s a small blue light deep in the throat of the black, some tiny spark bug or firefly. It dances back and forth, swaying in some unfelt breeze before you, and your last sane instinct tells you to run for your life, run like you’ve never run before, blind and brutal, clawing at your eyes like a lunatic and screaming your lungs bloody. But you don’t, because it’s all so glorious. It’s all bigger than you are. God doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t know you.
As the firefly comes closer to the door, you see it is no life form at all but the backlit screen of a cell phone, and when it floats up to Angie’s face you see her features elongated and canine from the shadows, her eyes large and red. Her blonde hair is matted and tacky from some dark fluid; she smells like motor oil and blood. She smiles at you, and her teeth are porcelain-perfect. Her grin stretches unnaturally large, piercing her cheeks and stretching toward her ears, like her smile is a gash threatening to sever the top of her head completely.
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