The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  I felt encased in some cold unyielding substance, like a souvenir of life preserved in lucite.

  “Why don’t you talk to me?” She let out a chillier laugh. “Explain yourself.”

  “Jesus, Bianca. I just didn’t understand what was going on.”

  “So it was an intellectual decision you made? A reaction to existential confusion?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “I was making a joke.” She strolled along the wall and stopped to peer at one of the faces.

  “I wasn’t,” I said. “What you told me…how can you believe it?”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  “I think there’s drugs in the food…in the air. Or something. There has to be a mechanism involved. Some sort of reasonable explanation.”

  “For what? My insanity?” She backed against the wall in order to see me better. “This is so dishonest of you.”

  “How’s it dishonest?”

  “You were happier thinking I was a post-operative transsexual? It’s my irrational beliefs that drove you away? Please!” She fiddled with the ends of her hair. “Suppose what I told you is true. Suppose who I am with you is who you want me to be. Who I want to be. Would that be more unpalatable than if my sex was the result of surgery?”

  “But it’s not true.”

  “Suppose it is.” She folded her arms, waiting.

  “I don’t guess it would matter. But that’s not—”

  “Now suppose just when we’re starting to establish something strong, you rip it apart?” A quaver crept into her voice. “What would that make you?”

  “Bianca…”

  “It’d make you a fool! But then of course I’m living in a drug-induced fantasy that causes you existential confusion.”

  “Whatever the case,” I said, “I probably am a fool.”

  It was impossible to read her face at that distance, but I knew her expression was shifting between anger and despair.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “God! What’s wrong with you?” She stalked to the door, paused in the entrance; she stood without speaking for what seemed a very long time, looking down at the floor, then glanced sideways up at me. “I was going to prove something to you today, but I can see proving it would frighten you even more. You have to learn to accept things, Tommy, or else you won’t be able to do your time. You’re not deceiving anyone except yourself.”

  “I’m deceiving myself? Now that’s a joke!”

  She waved at the mural. “You think what you’re painting is a lie. Don’t deny it. You think it’s a con you’re running on us. But when I leave it’ll be the only thing in the room that’s still alive.” She stepped halfway through the door, hesitated and, in a voice that was barely audible, said, “Goodbye, Tommy.”

  I experienced a certain relief after Bianca’s visit, an emotion bred by my feeling that now the relationship was irretrievably broken, and I could refocus my attention on escape; but my relief was short-lived. It was not simply that I was unable to get Bianca out of my thoughts, or even that I continued to condemn myself both for abandoning her and for having involved myself with her in the first place—it was as if I were engaged in a deeper struggle, one whose nature was beyond my power to discern, though I assumed my attitudes toward Bianca contributed to its force. Because I was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to face it, this irresolvable conflict began to take a toll. I slept poorly and turned to drink as a remedy. Many days I painted drunk, but drunkenness had no deleterious effect on the mural—if anything, it sharpened my comprehension of what I was about. I redid the faces on the lower portions of the walls, accentuating their beastliness, contrasting them with more human faces above, and I had several small technical breakthroughs that helped me create the luminous intensity I wanted for the upper walls. The nights, however, were not so good. I went to wandering again, armed against self-recrimination and the intermittent appearances of Harry Colangelo with a bottle of something, usually home brew of recent vintage. Frequently I became lost in the sub-basements and wound up passed out on the floor. During one of these wanders, I noticed I was a single corridor removed from the habitat of the plumes, and this time, not deceiving myself as to motive, I headed for the white door. I had no wish to find Bianca. I was so debased in spirit, the idea of staining my flesh to match enticed me, and when I pushed into the entryway and heard loud rock and roll and saw that the halation surrounding the light fixtures had thickened into an actual mist that caused men and plumes to look like fantastical creatures, gray demons and their gaudy, grotesque mistresses, I plunged happily into the life of the place, searching for the most degrading encounter available.

  Her name was Joy, a Los Angeleno by birth, and when I saw her dancing in the club with several men under a spotlight that shined alternately purple and rose, she seemed the parody of a woman. Not that she was unfeminine, not in the least. She was Raphaelesque, like an old-fashioned Hollywood blond teetering on the cusp between beauty and slovenly middle-age, glossy curls falling past her shoulders, the milky loaves of her breasts swaying ponderously in gray silk, her motherly buttocks dimpling beneath a tight skirt, her scarlet lips reminiscent of those gelatin lips full of cherry syrup you buy at Halloween, her eyes tunnels of mascara pricked by glitters. Drunk, I saw her change as the light changed. Under the purple she whitened, grew soft as ice cream, ultimately malleable; she would melt around you. Under the rose, a she-devilish shape emerged; her touch would make you feverish, infect you with a genital heat. I moved in on her, and because I had achieved an elevated status due to my connection with the board, the men dancing with her moved aside. Her fingers locked in my hair, her swollen belly rolled against me with the sodden insistence of a sea thing pushed by a tide. Her mouth tasted of liqueur and I gagged on her perfume, a scent of candied flowers. She was in every regard overpowering, like a blond rhinoceros. “What’s the party for?” I shouted above the music. She laughed and cupped both hands beneath her breasts, offering them to me, and as I squeezed, manipulating their shapes, her eyelids drooped and her hips undulated. She pulled my head close and told me what she wanted me to do, what she would do.

  Whereas sex with Bianca had been nuanced, passion cored with sensitivity, with Joy it was rutting, tumultuous, a jungle act, all sweat and insanity, pounding and meaty, and when I came I felt I was deflating, every pure thing spurting out of me, leaving a sack of bones and organic stink lying between her Amazon thighs. We fucked a second time with her on top. I twisted her nipples hard, like someone spinning radio dials, and throwing back her head she spat up great yells, then braced both hands on the pillow beside my head and hammered down onto me, her mouth slack, lips glistening with saliva poised an inch above mine, grunting and gasping. Then she straightened, arched her back, her entire body quaking, and let out a hideous groan followed by a string of profane syllables. Afterward she sat in a chair at her dressing table wearing a black bra and panties, legs crossed, attaching a stocking to her garter belt, posing an image that was to my eyes grossly sexual, repellently voluptuous, obscenely desirable. As she stretched out her leg, smoothing ripples in the silk, she said. “You used to be Bianca’s friend.”

  I did not deny it.

  “She’s crazy about you, y’know.”

  “Is she here? At the party?”

  “You don’t need her tonight,” Joy said. “You already got everything you needed.”

  “Is she here?”

  She shook her head. “You won’t be seeing her around for a while.”

  I mulled over this inadequate answer and decided not to pursue it.

  Joy put on her other stocking. “You’re still crazy about her. I’m a magnet for guys in love with other women.” She admired the look of her newly stockinged leg. “It’s not so bad. Sad guys fuck like they have something to prove.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You were trying to prove something, weren’t you?”

  “Probably not what you think.”

  She adjusted
her breasts, settling them more cozily in the brassiere. “Oh, I know exactly what you were trying to prove.” She turned to the mirror, went to touching up her lipstick, her speech becoming halting as she wielded the applicator. “I am…expert in these matters…like all…ladies of the evening.”

  “Is that how you see yourself?”

  She made a kissy mouth at her reflection. “There’s something else in me, I think, but I haven’t found the man who can bring it out.” She adopted a thoughtful expression. “I could be very domestic with the right person. Very nurturing. Once the new wing’s finished…I’m sure I’ll find him then.”

  “There’ll be real women living in the new wing. Lots of competition.”

  “We’re the real women,” she said with more than a hint of irritation. “We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there. Some of us are there already. You should know. Bianca’s living proof.”

  Unwilling to explore this or any facet of this consensus fantasy, I changed the subject. “So, what’s your story?” I asked.

  “You mean my life story? Do you care?”

  “I’m just making conversation.”

  “We had our conversation, sweetie. We just didn’t talk all that much.”

  “I wasn’t finished.”

  She looked at me over her shoulder, arching an eyebrow. “My, my. You must really have something to prove.” She rested an elbow on the back of the chair. “Maybe you should go hunt up Bianca.”

  It was a thought, but one I had grown accustomed to rejecting. I reached down beside the bed, groping for my bottle. The liquor seemed to have an immediate effect, increasing my level of drunkenness, and with it my capacity for rejection. The colors of the room were smeary, as if made from different shades of lipstick. Joy looked slug-white and bloated, a sickly exuberance of flesh strangled by black lace, the monstrous ikon of a German Expressionist wet dream.

  She gave what I took for a deprecating laugh. “Sure, we can converse some more if you want.” She started to unhook her brassiere.

  “Leave that shit on,” I said. “I’ll work around it.”

  Not long after my night with Joy, a rumor began to circulate that one of the plumes had become pregnant, and when I discovered that the plume in question was Bianca, I tried to find her. I gave the rumor little credit. Yet she had claimed she could prove something to me, and thus I could not completely discredit it. I was unsure how I would react if the rumor reflected the truth, but what chance was there of that? My intention was to debunk the rumor. I would be doing her a favor by forcing her to face reality. That, at any rate, is what I told myself. When I was unable to track her down, informed that she was sequestered, I decided the rumor must be a ploy designed to win me back, abandoned my search, and once again focused my energy upon the mural. Though a third of the walls remained unfinished, I now had a more coherent idea of the figures that would occupy the dome, and I was eager to finalize the conception. Despite this vitality of purpose, I felt bereft, dismally alone, and when Richard Causey came to visit, I greeted him effusively, offering him refreshment from my store of junk food. Unlike my other visitors, he had almost nothing to say about the mural, and as we ate on the lowest platform of the scaffolding, it became obvious that he was preoccupied. His eyes darted about; he cracked his knuckles and gave indifferent responses to everything I said. I asked what was on his mind and he told me he had stumbled upon an old tunnel beneath the lowest of the sub-basements. The door leading to it was wedged shut and would take two people to pry open. He believed there might be something significant at the end of the tunnel.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “I ran across some papers in the archives. Letters, documents. They suggested the tunnel led to the heart of the law.” He appeared to expect me to speak, but I was chewing. “I figured you might want to have a look,” he went on. “Seeing that’s what you’re painting about.”

  I worried that Causey might want to get me alone and finish what he had started years before; but my interest was piqued, and after listening for several minutes more, I grew convinced that his interest in the tunnel was purely academic. To be on the safe side, I brought along a couple of the chisels I used to scrape the walls—they would prove useful in unwedging the door as well. Though it was nearly three in the morning, we headed down into the sub-basements, joined briefly by Colangelo, who had been sleeping in the corridor outside the anteroom. I brandished a chisel and he retreated out of sight.

  The door was ancient, its darkened boards strapped with iron bands, a barred grille set at eye level. It was not merely stuck, but sealed with concrete. I shined Causey’s flashlight through the grille and was able to make out moisture gleaming on brick walls. With both of us wielding chisels, it required the better part of an hour to chip away the concrete and another fifteen minutes to force the door open wide enough to allow us to pass. The tunnel angled sharply downward in a series of switchbacks, and by the time we reached the fifth switchback, with no end in view, I realized that the walk back up was going to be no fun whatsoever. The bricks were slimy to the touch, rats skittered and squeaked, and the air…dank, foul, noisome. None of these words or any combination thereof serve to convey the vileness of the stench it carried. Molecules of corruption seemed to cling to my tongue, to the insides of my nostrils, coating my skin, and I thought that if the tunnel did, indeed, lead to the heart of the law, then that heart must be rotten to the core. I tied my shirt across the lower half of my face and succeeded in filtering the reek, yet was not able to block it completely.

  I lost track of the passage of time and lost track, too, of how many switchbacks we encountered, but we traveled far beneath the hill, of that much I am certain, descending to a level lower than that of the river flowing past the gate of the prison annex before we spotted a glimmer of light. Seeing it, we slowed our pace, wary of attracting the notice of whatever might occupy the depths of Diamond Bar, but the space into which we at length emerged contained nothing that would harm us—a vast egglike chamber that gave out into diffuse golden light a hundred feet above and opened below into a black pit whose bottom was not visible. Though the ovoid shape of the chamber implied artificiality, the walls were of natural greenish-white limestone, configured by rippled convexities and volutes, and filigreed with fungal growths, these arranged in roughly horizontal rows that resembled lines of text in an unknown script; the hundreds of small holes perforating the walls looked to have been placed there to simulate punctuation. A considerable ledge rimmed the pit, populated by colonies of rats, all gone still and silent at the sight of us, and as we moved out onto it, we discovered that the acoustics of the place rivaled that of a concert hall. Our footsteps resounded like the scraping of an enormous rasp, and our breath was amplified into the sighing of beasts. The terror I felt did not derive from anything I have described so much as from the figure at the center of the chamber. Dwarfed by its dimensions, suspended from hooks that pierced his flesh at nine separate points and were themselves affixed to chains that stretched to the walls, was the relic of a man. His begrimed skin had the dark granite color of the prison’s outer walls, and his long white hair was matted down along his back like a moldering cape; his limbs and torso were emaciated, his ribs and hipbones protruding and his ligature ridged like cables. Dead, I presumed. Mummified by some peculiar process.

  “Quires!” Causey’s whisper reverberated through the chamber. “Jesus Christ! It’s Quires.”

  The man’s head drooped, his features further hidden by clots of hair. I had no evidence with which to argue Causey’s claim and, indeed, not much inclination to do so. Who else, according to the history of the prison, merited the torment the man must have experienced? It did not seem possible. Quires had been in his eighties when he stepped down as warden more than eighty years before. But the existence of the chamber undermined my conception of the possible. Its silence was so liquid thick and chilling, it might have been the reservoir from which the quiet of the prison flowed. A brighter fear flickere
d up in me.

  “Let’s go back,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  At the sound of my voice, the rats offered up an uneasy chittering chorus that swirled around us like the rushing of water in a toilet. Causey was about to respond to my urging when Quires—if it was he—lifted his head and gave forth with a cry, feeble at first, but swelling in volume, a release of breath that went on and on as if issuing not from his lungs but from an opening inside him that admitted to another chamber, another voice more capable of such a prolonged expression, or perhaps to a succession of openings and voices and chambers, the infinitely modulated utterance of a scream proceeding from an unguessable source. The chittering of the rats, too, swelled in volume. Half-deafened, hands pressed to my ears, I sank to my knees, recognizing that the cry and its accompanying chorus was pouring up through the holes that perforated the walls and into every corner of the prison, a shout torn from the heart of the law to announce the advent of a bloody dawn. Quires’ body spasmed in his chains, acquiring the shape of a dark thorn against the pale limestone, and his face…Even at a distance I could see how years of torment had compressed his features into a knot of gristle picked out by two staring white eyes. I felt those eyes on me, felt the majestic insistence of his pain and his blissful acknowledgment that this state was his by right. He was the criminal at the heart of the law, the one in whom the arcs of evil and the redemptive met, the lightning rod through which coursed the twin electricities of punishment and sacrifice, the synchronicity of choice and fate, and I understood that as such he was the embodiment of the purpose of Diamond Bar, that only from evil can true redemption spring, only from true redemption can hope be made flesh. Joyful and reluctant, willing servant and fearful slave, he was thaumaturge and penitent, the violent psychotic saint who had been condemned to this harsh durance and simultaneously sought by that service to transfigure us. Thus illuminated, in that instant I could have translated and read to you the fungal inscriptions on the walls. I knew the meaning of every projection and declivity of stone, and knew as well that the heart of the law was empty except for the exaltation of the damned and the luminous peace of the corrupted. Then Quires’ cry guttered, his head drooped. The rats fell silent again, returned to their petty scuttling, and all but a residue of my understanding fled.