Godson returned to his car and got behind the wheel. He called Compound West and was told a cleaning crew was near. The cameraman was on his hands and knees now, hissing in pain and cursing breathlessly. As Godson was brought up to speed by Compound West, a sound like tearing wet canvas came from behind the Taurus.
Brian felt his guts contract again as he voided himself. Leaning back against the Taurus in an uncomfortable squat with his pants around his ankles, he was afraid to look down, sure that he’d see a lung lying in the puddle of waste that had just spewed out of him. Where the hell was all this shit coming from? Brian had been too busy to eat properly yesterday. He’d had soup for lunch and a salad for dinner. A toasted muffin and a glass of grapefruit juice were all he’d had so far today. Feeling as if a big hand had reached up inside him and was pulling him inside out, he clenched his fists and wished the churning in his guts would stop. He looked at the big turquoise ring. Too bad there aren’t talismans against exploding colons, he thought. Another spasm rippled through him. Enough! This is enough!
The pain in his insides was gone as fast as it had come and he looked at the ring in wonder.
“I’m on my way,” Godson said, and put away the phone. He was surprised Compound West had the woman they’d been looking for, and even more surprised the man she had been with was dead. He thought it would have taken a great deal to put Mr. Hill down.
He remembered his frustration after a recent encounter in Manhattan. The order to bring Hill in had been issued, and when Godson found the man, Hill had ignored Godson’s advances and he had not been able to get close enough to Billy-boy to complete the kill, a frustration multiplied by the fact that Hill seemed to be able to shrug off Godson’s suggestions, leaving Godson no choice but to try and finish the job manually. And that had ended badly. After some reflection, Godson had accepted the weirdness within Hill. After all, the only killer on the Compound’s payroll surrounded in as much mystery as Godson was this William Hill character. Ah well. He could still get a look at Eicher’s girl and see what all the fuss was about.
Ravi was sure he was going to lose his mind. The pain grew and subsided with each heartbeat, burning in the center of his eye like a red-hot cinder. If he closed his eye the pain faded. When he opened it again, even a little, the pain flared up. Son of a bitch, he thought, this could be serious! He was on his knees, sniveling and feeling helpless when he realized Brian was hunkered down beside him.
“Easy, let me take a look,” Brian said. He raised his right hand and delicately opened Ravi’s eye. The sclera was bright red, the pupil contracted to a pinpoint. As Brian watched, the pupil began to expand.
Brian didn’t want to tell his cameraman that he was touching Ravi with his silver ring. Ravi hated all that nicely packaged New Age shit, especially the stuff pedaled by Indian gurus, paths to enlightenment based on the latest ancient discipline in vogue. If Brian said anything about the ring being a talisman Ravi would blow him off and quite possibly spoil whatever was working in their favor.
Yet the ring had seemed to stop his torrential bowel movement, so he held it beside Ravi’s eye until Ravi blinked and said the pain was beginning to fade. It works! Brian’s face was grim, but inside he was laughing. The damn thing works! The more enthused he became, the faster Ravi’s eye returned to normal.
Godson saw the reporter and the cameraman shake off their afflictions. Impossible. The tall man should have been able to look down between his knees and see his anus dangling in the dust by now and the cameraman should have ripped his eye out only to discover that the pain was still there, har-har. He watched the reporter pat the cameraman on the back and begin help him to his feet.
“You’ve just hit the glass ceiling, gentlemen,” Godson said, getting out of the car.
Brian grunted. He was bent at the waist and trying to stand but it felt like he had hit the top of an invisible box. Ravi rose and rapped his head against nothing, falling back on his butt.
They watched the man in the white suit walk over to the van and raise his arms. Then he turned and passed them, getting into the convertible and starting the engine.
“You gentlemen have no idea who I am,” Godson said. He’d leave these two for the clean-up crew. “You’re forgetting my face as we speak. This scene,” he gestured to the wrecked Taurus and the bodies, “does not exist.”
Brian and Ravi watched the car pull onto the road. Brian clenched his fist around the gaudy ring and put a hand on Ravi’s shoulder. After a minute they realized they could stand up.
“That was some guy,” Brian said.
Ravi raised his eyebrows. “Huh?”
“The guy in the white suit. He was really something.”
“What guy?” Ravi looked perplexed.
Jesus, Brian thought, Ravi believed what that guy said. Must be some kind of hypnosis or something. He had a thought. “Hold my hand.”
Ravi gave him a look.
Brian said, “Come on. I’m serious. The guy that was just here, you don’t remember him at all. I think it was my talisman.” He raised his hand, showing off the gaudy ring.
“You’re an idiot,” Ravi said. “And why did we pull over? I don’t see anything worth stopping for.”
Ravi was staring directly at the wrecked Taurus and looking through it. Brian grabbed Ravi’s hand, letting the ring touch the cameraman’s his skin. Ravi jerked, now seeing the Taurus and the bodies. “Where’d that come from?”
“Think,” Brian said. “Remember.”
Ravi frowned, and then looked up, eyes wide. “That guy in the white suit. I remember now. Jeez, it’s like he said. I forgot all about him. And I didn’t even see these dead people.”
“Yeah,” Brian said, shaking a fist. “But I wasn’t affected because of this.”
Ravi thought that was stretching things. “Yeah, you believe what you want to believe, Bri. I’ll tell you though, that guy sure knows how to use the power of suggestion. When he mentioned that glass ceiling, that’s exactly what it felt like.”
Brian nodded. “It was like being imprisoned by a mime.”
Ravi went to the van and started searching through his cameras again, this time coming up with a Polaroid. “Mr. White Suit fucked up all my cameras. Unless they’re okay and he only suggested they’re fucked-up. I’m gonna see what I get with this.”
Brian stepped back as Ravi hopped out of the van. “Yeah,” he agreed, “That guy could’ve charmed the panties off a nun.”
Ravi took three shots and grabbed each as it came out of the camera. “This film pack is screwed, man. Nothing but gray.” He showed Brian three shots of gray-white fog.
Brian got behind the wheel of the van and closed his door. Ravi waited for him to start the engine and then plugged a cable into his battery pack. Shouldering the camera, he tried to shoot the scene using the van’s power.
“Shit Bri, did we drive into a nuclear testing site without knowing it?”
Brian looked over his shoulder with raised eyebrows as Ravi switched on a monitor. “This is what I’m shooting now,” Ravi said, panning from the Taurus to the two dead people. The picture rolled, then filled with snow, lost focus, then rolled again.
“Let’s try something,” Brian said. “Keep shooting.”
He put the van in gear and pulled onto the road, moving at a crawl. Ravi leaned out the side door and kept the car and the bodies in the frame. At twenty feet there was distortion. The picture also broke up at fifty feet. At fifty yards, the picture cleared up, but they couldn’t really see much on the monitor, just an overturned car, which could have been there for a year. When Ravi zoomed in on the scene the picture broke up again. Brian pulled over on the shoulder. Ravi lowered the camera because Brian had put a big boulder between him and the shot.
They sat for a moment, the engine idling.
“Eye okay?” Brian asked.
Ravi nodded. Then he chuckled. “Hey. What happened to you back there?”
“I felt like my asshole was disintegrating,�
� Brian said reluctantly.
They both froze when they heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.
A Page from the Past
Inglewood, Los Angeles, California, June 4 to mid-July 1979
Peeping through the hole in the wall, Lionel Eicher felt like he was strangling on his own tumescence. God in heaven, he thought, my prick is going to explode!
Earlier in the day he had been in an especially generous mood and in celebration of Jeannie’s sixteenth birthday he had driven her down to the San Diego Zoo. They had spent hours walking the grounds, Eicher almost paralyzed by boredom and sips of Jägermeister from a silver flask. Jeannie had run from one habitat to the next cooing and sighing over the cute animals. Eicher couldn’t really understand her love for creatures. When he looked at them he saw unprepared food or fodder for the laboratory, but it made her happy, and when she was happy and occupied she was not obsessing over her past and pestering him with personal questions.
He’d passed by her room late on Saturday night, seeing her sitting on her bed and watching a Marilyn Monroe film on her small black and white television. Jeannie called those Hollywood studio productions old movies, something that made Eicher feel old; he had been in his prime when those old movies were released, and the films of those by-gone days had some modicum of class, unlike the so-called cinema of today that featured sex and violence and car chases and far too many Negroes and Jews.
The movie Jeannie was watching was almost as bad. The blonde slut on TV pranced around in a garish costume as Jeannie sat in the dark, mesmerized. Eicher had seen this behavior before. He was always with her, studying her, and he had seen her in turn studying Monroe’s image many times on movie posters, postcards, everywhere in fact, since that harlot’s visage, which Jeannie’s beautiful face was coming to resemble more and more, was inescapable in Los Angeles.
As Eicher had peeked through her door Jeannie had surprised him by standing and slipping out of her robe. She was wearing a cotton nightgown that covered her from chin to ankles. When she had moved in front of the full-length mirror fixed to the back of her closet door and began posing like the platinum cocksucker on the small screen, the flickering light from the television shone through her nightgown, rendering it a gauzy veil over the stark silhouette of her body.
Eicher had felt his throat go dry at the sight before him. A woman on a TV screen was one thing, but this was real. He understood in a flash why so many men had lusted after this so-called goddess of sex. Looking at Jeannie’s body, her shapely legs, wide hips, slender waist and jutting schoolgirl’s breasts all topped off by that shining platinum hair, Aryan hair, he was stupefied. My eyes may be old, Eicher had thought, but they can still see those plump young nipples. They reminded him of the ripe and luscious raspberries his Oma used to grow in her back yard garden before the war ruined Berlin. A board had creaked under him and Eicher had quickly shuffled away.
In an attempt to ignore his base urges Eicher had gotten plastered that night, sleeping until late in the day Sunday.
On Monday morning he had called the Mannheim school and told them Jeannie would be away for the day. They drove down to San Diego, visited the zoo, and when they returned to Los Angeles late in the afternoon Eicher somehow found himself talked into stopping at the animal shelter nearest their home.
Jeannie spent an hour looking at cats and dogs that stared out of the metal cages with eyes almost empty of hope. Eicher couldn’t understand why the miserable creatures weren’t exterminated the moment they came through the door. After all, his taxes were used by the city to fund the feeding and care of these miserable things. Better yet, to save the city euthanasia costs, why not sell the animals to local pharmaceutical companies or universities for research purposes and actually make a profit for the municipality?
Pets, Eicher thought. What foolishness.
Jeannie eventually chose a small gray kitten with foul yellow eyes. To Eicher it looked like a ball of detritus fetched out from under a bed or bureau. She christened it Fuzzy. Eicher stifled a groan when he received this news. Having given permission for Jeannie to adopt the kitten, Eicher then found himself buying a carload of accessories for the damnable thing; a litter tray, a bag of litter that exhaled fine gray dust when he lifted it, making him sneeze, a basket for the thing to sleep in, an assortment of toys, and a little collar with an identification tag.
This last item reminded him of Jeannie’s own 333X2 tracking module, still buried under her forearm where he had placed it so many years before. He reminded himself yet again to try and find a tactful and devious way to remove the module from Jeannie’s arm. Telling her about it would alienate her even more.
Years ago he had transmitted signals to the module and received no response. It was dormant, but not dead. With the advances they were making in computers, it was only a matter of time before some, what was the term, whiz kid at the Compound figured out how to locate the device. Then they would find her, and him, and take her away from him. That simply would not do. Until now he had wanted her only as a daughter. After Saturday night he was beginning to think he could have her as something more. Yet, if she ever got away from him, he would need to track her, so he could not decide if the module should stay or go.
When they arrived home it was evening. He ordered a pizza for Jeannie and sealed himself in his den, where he swallowed glass after glass of port while nibbling on the American excuse for bread and some imported cheese. He knew that once the kitten was attended to, Jeannie would undress and take a shower; she always showered at the beginning and end of every day, and then she would watch television until very late. Eicher considered this, and as he did, he thought of the peepholes and smiled.
When he heard Jeannie go down the hall to her room and turn on her radio he waited, then went to his own bedroom with a glass of port. Half-pissed and reeling a little, he closed his door and went to his walk-in closet.
After changing into his pajamas and robe, he opened a hidden plywood door at the back of the closet and slipped through it, spilling some port and cursing softly. He entered a three-foot-wide crawlspace that ran along the length of Jeannie’s bedroom and private bathroom. Every four feet was a peephole, three in the bedroom and two in the bath. On the other side of the wall the holes were cleverly hidden by wallpaper. One was behind the mirror fixed to the bathroom wall. Over each peephole on Eicher’s side of the wall were video and still image cameras mounted on metal frames. Eicher had no trouble setting up this equipment. He had used earlier generations of similar devices in the old residence he and Jeannie shared in the Compound. There was a reason Jeannie had grown up in bright light, and in her current room the light level was more than enough for the cameras.
Eicher checked that the video cameras had tapes in them and then started recording. He hadn’t been in here to watch Jeannie in a long time, but every few weeks he dusted off the equipment and installed fresh film and videotapes. Now the watching would take on an entirely new dimension. Eicher had no idea his scientific observation of Jeannie had escalated into full-blown perversion.
For years, as she was growing up, he observed Jeannie’s every private movement. He had countless file boxes full of pictures and videotape of the maturing child, yet until now Eicher had never become sexually aroused by that body. Until now his obsession had been that of the owner of a fabulous gem or a rare painting. He admired the way she was attaining the perfection of her design with each passing year. He was proud of the way the machinery of her parts performed their jobs exactly as he had programmed them to do. And he had congratulated himself as he watched the fruits of his labors blossom before his eyes.
Tonight there was a new element to his watching as he realized he had created an incredibly desirable woman. Even though his goal had been to create a clone of the überwhore Monroe with which to influence the long-dead Kennedy, he had always been certain that, under his tutelage, the girl would be a modern, intelligent woman and not a primped and practiced cocktease. Now he knew for c
ertain that the unquantifiable power the blonde walking orifice had held over men had been real and not the media’s imaginings. He felt it and embraced it.
With the last of his scientific detachment gone, Eicher stared agog as Jeannie played on the floor of her room with the kitten, watching the way her breasts shifted under her blouse. He looked down at himself with equal wonder, opened the fly on his pajama bottoms and watched his penis slide into view. It twitched with each heavy beat of his heart and he was sure Jeannie would have heard that rapid thudding had it not been for a group of schwarzens on the radio keening like cats in heat.
He slurped his port and waited. After setting the kitten in its basket and tuning her radio to a different station, Jeannie began to undress.
She kicked off her shoes and twisted her hair into a rope, pinning it up for her shower. She wore her hair long and straight, letting it hang down to her shoulder blades in natural, shining waves. Eicher had forbidden any fancy hairstyles such as those displayed by the slatternly triad known as Charlie’s Angels. Jeannie unbuttoned her blouse and tossed it by the bed.
Eicher only gave Jeannie money if she told him exactly what it was for and he approved of the expenditure. Later he would want to see receipts or ticket stubs or merchandise to prove she had spent the money as agreed. He wasn’t a totalitarian Arschloch. He knew that once in a while she spent a few dollars on junk food or other wastes such as pop music and make-up, and let her do so. Make-up! Why did she wear make-up? Did he not make her perfect? Now he could see that she would be soon asking for money to buy new underclothes. Her powder-blue brassiere was too small, the cups struggling to contain their twin burdens of flesh, the straps digging into her back in a way that made Eicher’s breath quicken.
He touched his penis again, squeezed it. “Mein Gott, like fucking oak,” he whispered.
The music ended and an announcer started blathering about the Billboard hit list, whatever that might be. A new song began, assaulting Eicher with a disco beat as Jeannie undid her jeans and struggled to free them from her hips. Why did the youngsters wear their clothes so tight that they cannot get free of them? Eicher shook his head. Jeannie hopped about and laughed when she saw the kitten watching her. Finally the jeans dropped and she stepped out of them, kicking them across the floor beside her shirt.
Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition Page 18