Still

by Charlee Jacob

  Why own up to it now? Zane’s death portrait was in it. (Death Portrait! What a misnomer. Like he’d dressed up and posed, said cheese just before he was turned into cheese.) Why compound Clay’s sense of desecration?

  “What do you do for a living?” Pete asked.

  “I just retired, so nothin’ much anymore,” Clay answered cheerfully. “But before, I was a salesman.”

  “Yeah? What’d you sell?”

  “Medical supplies. I was the company’s rolling poster child. Sold wheelchairs and appliance limbs from Carolina to Cambodia.”

  One day, maybe a month after Peter was attacked, Clay arrived but wasn’t smiling as usual.

  “What’s the matter?” Pete wanted to know.

  “I saw something on the Internet. There’s a buzz among the peculiars about a shroud of skin covered in little movies of murdered people. Seems to be the rage, if you’ll please excuse the expression.” Clay shifted in his chair self-consciously, clearly not wanting to upset Peter. “I just thought you should know.”

  Pete blinked, getting a picture in his head (so much going on these days in that chemically-altered noggin of his) of the skin hanging like a freaky suit of clothes. People lined up and paid a fee just to touch it. A little more money and they were permitted to lick it.

  “Cure what ails ya!” some carnie talker announced. “Yes, ma’m, that shriveled jerky is the penis. Why ain’t the head here? Well, there weren’t no pictures onnit. Guy weren’t that good-lookin’ anyhows.”

  The crowd laughed. Touched. Licked.

  Then fell upon each other like wild animals.

  ««—»»

  Falling asleep replicated the experience of licking the pictures. He had an alkaline taste assault his mouth and throat, its stench filling his nostrils—turning into the smells associated with death: blood, fear-sweat, shit blown out a shockatonic sphincter, stomach acid and churned contents, the cheap peach or apricot brandy of rot, putrid methane not begging to be lit with a match.

  The breath of maggots, their odor like a gangrene storm.

  Visions of personal apocalypse. Each individual with a capacity to inhabit by Fate a gruesome Golgotha. Feeling their agony in nuance and lightning. Carrying their sins and their desperate desire for release.

  A kind of sineater.

  One who consumed a banquet from the chest of the deceased and took on everything which might bar it from heaven.

  Peter didn’t get a feast. He only licked a photo. Still an oral genuflection, a swallowing of both iniquity and innocence. Proof of it hung upon him like a body on a cross.

  Would it inspire condemnation, revulsion, or prayer?

  Always seeing the group, led by Zane, coming toward him. Tendrils of an alkaline mist, of a poisonous decomposition, snaking up to partially obscure some of their damage but not all. Zane always held out those empty arms, where Rosaluna’s baby had been tenderly cradled.

  Interesting, the vics no longer chanted, “Only you can heal us.”

  They were hushed, still, silent as the grave.

  ««—»»

  Nika was tired. She worked days at her clinic but spent the nights with Peter. All the food in her home refrigerator had gone fuzzy. She could send skirts and blouses to the cleaners but she didn’t find time to do regular laundry. She stopped and bought new panties, bras, stockings. Took the items to the hospital with her.

  She entertained Peter with sexy stories, or laid her hand on his cheek to give him human contact. The most they shared were kisses.

  She met Clay and they played cards while Pete watched. She did some of the nurses’ duties: attending to his medications, changing his dressings, brushing his teeth.

  That’s when you found out how much you cared about someone—when you actually took on the responsibility to care for them.

  She brought in her laptop. Together she and Pete plunged into the seamiest Internet sites. Where was the Beta shroud this week?

  “Paris?” Peter half-shouted.

  Nika giggled. “Shsh! You want to bring someone next door out of a coma?”

  He pouted. “Last week it was in Rome. I never get to go anywhere.”

  She tsked. “Not fair is it? It’s like an annoying big brother getting to have all the fun.”

  He wheedled in a childish voice, “Mommie, when can I go to the Cirque du Monstruosité and parade nekkid for the flipper ladies?”

  Nika’s shoulders shook with laughter even as she replied in mock severity, “Not until a long time yet. Just because you’ve got hair where you didn’t used to…”

  Peter grinned impishly. “No, I don’t have hair there. You wanna see?”

  “Well, young man. I have it on the best authority that the lovely and gracious flipper ladies like hair on their nekkid Believe-It-Or-Nots.”

  They noticed a further website update. The photos from Zane McFadden’s scrapbook were shown paired with whatever part of the skin the particular crime was depicted on. Pete knew it so intimately, more than personal birthmarks or scars. These were like family.

  ««—»»

  Seven layers of skin.

  Seven deadly sins.

  Seven veils and Salome, how she danced.

  Pete didn’t know how many layers of him had been peeled away. Dr. Bhombal explained but when the surgeon got technical, Pete tended to phase out. Words had never been his strong suit. Besides, he couldn’t be that analytical about his tragedy. He didn’t fully understand and didn’t want to. He kept it basic: his life had been completely fucked up since Dunk Friedhof gave him that picture from Rosaluna’s snuff film.

  He’d already had three operations. His body rejected each of the grafts within an average of two weeks. They were meshed, placed upon the open wound which was his torso and extremities, demonstrated epithelialization in about a fortnight. But they needed healthy epidermal cells, and his were deteriorating despite the team’s best efforts. It had been less than three weeks since the last allografting procedure. They were considering scheduling him for another replacement.

  Dr. Bhombal explained about exogenous immunosuppression and adherence to wounds as a collagen and elastin prosthesis. And, you see, Mr. Beta, blah blah irradiated or freezedried nonliving grafts…less antigenic…prone to enzymatic degradation by collagenase…

  Biobrane. Collagen. Nylon copolymer.

  Artificial skin, Integra. Collagen-glycosaminoglycan copolymer dermal matrix, you see.

  Cultured keratinocytes, replacement of outer or skin’s epidermal component, Mr. Beta.

  Re-epithelialization.

  Pete got the impression the doctor knew he was talking way over his patient’s head. Could it be an attempt to appear to be keeping Peter informed of his situation, while actually sparing him the grisliest details? Because if Peter wanted to know, he could just insist on having it in terms he did understand. Yet he knew that the doctor knew that Peter did want to be spared those details.

  Seven days of the week, every one a bummer.

  “I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads.”

  Seven plagues of Egypt.

  Seven thunders.

  Seven stars, angels, trumpets.

  What did these revelations mean?

  Same as any that arose from visions taken in death vapors. Bad shit going down.

  ««—»»

  Naturally, Pete and Nika talked to the police on a regular basis about what they found on the computer. But the cops were watching it, too.

  “The F.B.I.’s involved. Interpol. Everybody’s looking for this Friedhof. He’s got himself a network of protection. The U.C.U.,” an investigator told the couple.

  “U.C.U.?” Peter queried.

  “Underground Creeps Union. Not what they call themselves. That’s Videre. A word passed down from ancient Latin. Apparently this group has its roots in Imperial Rome. It means to see, to perceive through the senses. Rome covered most of the known world then, now the ‘Videre’ really are everywhere. We’ve tried se
nding in deep undercover agents but the stress is too much for ‘em. We’re talking guys who go beyond kiddie porn and into kiddie snuff. Guys who throw lavish parties for it as it goes down. We’re talking folks who wear baby part fetishes in their scanties. It’s damn near impossible to find officers who can withstand the horror—fine detectives who thought they’d seen it all. And if their covers get blown? These freaks make ’em suffer for weeks before they finally let ’em die. I mean, they do stuff not even Amnesty International ever heard of.”

  The inspector paused, realizing he’d been venting. “Hey, I apologize.”

  “It’s okay. Videre. Good to know,” Nika assured him.

  The cop snapped his fingers and shot Nika a piercing look. “Hey, Dr. Noll, did I tell you those videos you took of Mr. Beta’s—uhm… Before the attack… We found one of those perps still alive, old as sin. Don’t know what we can do to nail him in court, but I feel like the man who nabbed Klaus Barbi.”

  Peter gasped. “Really? That’s great. You don’t know how much this means to me. I don’t suppose you could tell me which one of the victims, or who the killer was?”

  The detective gave him a thumbs up. “Sure. It was a 1954 case, a fourteen-year-old girl by the name of Rosaluna Pasolini. She and her baby were strangled in the back seat of a car. A mob soldier by the name of Larry Gauzy, trigger man for Tony Zarembo Senior of way back when. He’s a creaker, eighty if he’s a day, but sly as ever. There’s one piece of evidence we’re hoping’ll help. Girl had this little gold charm bracelet with a crucifix on it. Apparently she lashed out and left a cross-shaped scar on his face. We found that bracelet in an evidence room, after fifty goddam years! Took three weeks of snorkeling through dust but we got it.”

  Peter grinned. He didn’t know if this made everything he’d gone through worth it. He believed maybe it did.

  Would the ghosts stop coming at him? Only his next dream would tell him for sure.

  Hot damn. Shake, rattle and roll.

  The cop left. A few minutes later Clay came in. He smiled sheepishly. “I stayed in the waiting room until he left. Figured you deserved privacy when speaking to the law.”

  He noticed both Nika and Peter had been crying. It concerned him. “You all right?”

  Nika affectionately ruffled Peter’s hair as she replied, “Thanks to Pete, one of the murderers in your father’s unsolved cases has been located, alive.”

  “That’s super!”

  Peter added, “He used to be a paid assassin. What name did the detective give us, darling?”

  “Larry Gauzy,” Nika answered.

  Clay twitched, momentarily out of breath. He pulled himself together. “It makes me wonder how Dad would feel if he could only know.”

  He noticed the laptop and the display on its screen.

  “That’s my father’s scrapbook. How’d they get that?” Clay cast a questioning glance at Peter.

  Pete squirmed. This was how lies and deliberate omissions of truth bounced back on you.

  He sighed and told the older man, “My so-called friend, Dunkel Friedhof—the man who did this to me—was the guy who bought the book at the estate sale. I bought it from him the same day. I just couldn’t tell you. I’m sorry. He took the book when he took my skin.”

  Was that the slightest flash of betrayal in Clay’s eyes? But he said, “Guess I don’t blame you. I mean, you probably thought—what with those pictures on your skin—that if I knew you also had the book, I’d think you were a weirdo. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. But, come on, my dad collected these pictures first. The scenes appearing on your body…who’s to say that isn’t my father trying to work through you? A cop when alive, still a cop when dead.”

  ««—»»

  Next dream.

  They no longer approached but were there. They bent down. In the black and white mist they were celluloid subjects, captured between a sickly compelling form of entertainment and the unabridgably desolate.

  When Pete closed his eyes in the nightmare, he perceived them as they’d been in the first dream, just starting forward in their long trek. Only now they sped up, more frames per second, atrocities hurrying to be captured with the dying light. Lives rewound through time, unraveled by a disembodying thousand steel thrusts. Yet really only just accomplishing the direct opposite of coming together.

  Something inside him broke, grew hysterical with terror even as it surrendered blissfully to a great helpless backward slip. As much like falling in love as dying.

  No wonder they haunted. How intense, this rush so raw it invented a perfect blend of pure scraped-nerve ending awareness and hallucinatory rapture. He’d once read, somewhere or other, that the most common memory of a past existence concerned the death of that previous life. Traumatic and hypermemorable, if the atmosphere didn’t soak it up to replay it as an emotion of location, then it was surely because the camera’s flash had possessed it all.

  He opened his dream eyes. The victims bent down, so near he smelled their alkaline ghosts. A menacing taste on the tongue? An imprint of grief, astrally punitive.

  “You’re here, I’m here. Get it over with,” Pete said to them.

  ««—»»

  The nurse woke him up before contact. He reached consciousness like a drowning man, gasping for air, lungs uncooperative, chest about to explode, the roar at the center of the earth in his ears.

  They do that in hospitals, wake you up to give you a sleeping pill.

  Dr. Bhombal came in about two minutes later. He looked subdued, not about to launch into one of his imcomprehensible lectures about the present state of Mr. Beta’s condition and what lay in store for him next.

  Pete understood the word ‘sepsis’. It probably had quite a lot to do with why he felt raunchier than usual.

  He was blunt. “I’m dying, is that it?”

  The doctor was frank. “Yes, sir. We had never encountered a case quite like yours. Minor degloving injuries—by comparison, you see—yes. Patients who had their hair caught within a mechanism which resulted in the stripping of scalps, sometimes even pulling away the eyelids and nearly popping out the eyes. This sort of thing. We thought we could treat you as if it were a major burn. Yet several grafting attempts have proved us wrong, sorry to say. There was too much of the dermis lost…”

  “I got it, doc,” Pete said firmly, not intending to dismiss the man, just get him to shut up about it.

  He wished Nika was there but she’d been called away to the police station. About midnight, one of her regular necros got himself caught doing a fuck-amuck in a morgue. He’d done four bodies and was on his fifth when his enthusiastic thrusts caused the refrigerated, occupied drawer he’d pulled out to suddenly roll back in, locking him inside with the cadaver. The graveyard shift attendent returned from his dinner break to hear the man trying frantically to kick his way out.

  Pete wanted just one more kiss. He needed Nika to lay her cool, goodnight hand against his cheek as he fell back to sleep, knowing he wouldn’t wake up again. Not because the infection was going to kill him that swiftly but because he knew what waited for him, finally close enough for revenge, in the next dream.

  He didn’t even bother to ask Dr. Bhombal how long he had. He knew better than this guy, didn’t he? He felt no rancor against Bhombal, who’d done everything possible.

  (Wish I could’ve seen Ellis and Melody. To tell them I wasn’t such a bad guy. When they grow up, I hope they’ll be able to still love their mother and, at the same time, not take to heart her bullshit about me. Like Clay does about his parents, holds each in his heart for their worth to him.)

  One soul down, here goes the other.

  He almost laughed. Sure as shit sounded maudlin.

  Worse.

  Self-pitying.

  After the victims wreaked their vengeance, would he discover a place on his lost skin for himself?

  He was a murder victim. Dunk Friedhof had killed him.

  (Dude, everyone knows that. You’re not one of the Wi
thout Resolutions.)

  As the pictures on the skin were now, none of the others were either. Their killers were front and center.

  So, would Peter be shown on the Beta shroud, strung up in some contraption as the man named Darkness skinned him?

  And he’d done it well. Smoothly. One piece. How did somebody acquire such a skill?

  The Nazis were known to have used human skin taken from concentration camp victims to make lamp shades, books, furniture.

  The Family Business?

  Peter remembered that only those who had crime scene photos in Zane’s book appeared on flesh. Pete wasn’t in that book. The fact the crucified ‘dermis’ belonged to him was only a matter of location. (How the movie people loved to scream Location! Location! Location!) Pete was the set—not the script, not a player, not even listed in the credits unless you counted at the end.

  This film was shot entirely on location upon Peter Beta’s bod.

  No, couldn’t say Peter was in Zane’s scrapbook, unless you counted previous incarnations. And that theory could be a crock.

  The pill the nurse gave him to swallow began to hit. Items in the room shifted into a surreal second gear. The faces of the nurse and Bhombal faded as if shot through a camera, its lens covered with a single layer of fine gauze. Pete found himself on the other side of the hypothetical veil.

  ««—»»

  The dead bent over him, all or in part, basically a piecemeal assault. Agnes Mathewkitty leaned over his face on the right. On the left was Rosaluna Pasolini. At the crown of his head was Zane McFadden, gazing at him upside-down.

  “It’s almost Christmas Day. Did you know I died on Christmas Eve?” Zane said hoarsely, blood and bubbles emerging from his slashed throat.