by Larry Doyle
j!m roamed the halls, not looking for Marie and with no idea what he was going to say to her when he found her.
Something stupid, he guessed.
Around the corner, next to the girl’s lavatory, smoking a Chesterfield, the vice president’s brand, was a middle-aged man who had been major-market, Cleveland to New York, a friend to the Silvers and Bobby Zee and the Presley Brothers, until, through no fault of his own, a law nobody obeyed, he was banished to this godforsaken small town teeming with freaks, reduced to a gimmick act, which wasn’t working.
“Neep neep,” Marshall said to J!m, exhaling smoke.
“Yeah,” J!m said.
Close up, the Martian was unconvincing, the makeup gloppy and smeared on his collar, the tentacles cracked and rotting, the silver cape made of tinfoil. He had an explanation.
“Somebody’s gotta play the clown, right?”
“Right.”
J!m kept walking. The Martian took a puff.
“Screw you, mutant.”
johnny got going, had forgotten he was in high school, was in a basement in the city or a shack along the highway, three a.m., where they didn’t care what you were, as long as you weren’t a white boy and could sing.
He sang:
The Beast in Me
The Beast in Me
You bring out
The Beast in Me
Dancers did the circumscribed contortions, unacquainted with the tune but moved by it, the beat pumping like the fornication girls dreamt of and boys aspired to. Rusty gyrated with her eyes closed, all the better to not see her dance partner, who was duplicating every dance move he’d ever seen, simultaneously.
The Beast in Me
The Beast in Me
Please release
The Beast in Me
toad had mil or hel pressed against the lockers, next to Ice with the other one. A few feet down, Tubesteak was the one with his back to the lockers, Sandra Jane pressed against him, most of his ear in her mouth, to no discernable effect. Tubesteak’s mind was clearly elsewhere. When her dependable conchal whirl failed to elicit a response, Sandra Jane sucked hard, popping his eardrum. He was unmoved. Sandra Jane undocked and looked to see what he found more fun than her tongue.
Across the hallway, Russ had Marie against the wall, under her own campaign poster, GO 4 RAND. He was wetting her face in a manner she did not find intoxicating, the drying saliva smelling like sour milk and making her forehead itch, and yet she allowed it, the behavior of an insecure teenage girl, not herself.
Tubesteak was enjoying it a great deal more than she was, evidently.
“You wanna watch,” Sandra Jane said, her hand spanning his pelvic region, “or you wanna do?”
“Watch,” Tubesteak answered, nudging her aside for a better view.
Russ cupped Marie’s breast outside her dress, squeezing and twisting to assess what sort of brassiere he was dealing with. Marie might have allowed even this, had she not seen Tubesteak envying her, Sandra Jane working his torso.
Marie pinched Russ’s pinkie and leveraged it to detach his hand, holding it away from her like a dead Manos.
“This yours?”
Russ, however, had two hands.
“C’mon, baby,” going in with the left. “I’m gonna explode.”
She pushed him away.
“I’d better stand back.”
Russ became instantly and irretrievably furious, something Marie hadn’t seen coming but which didn’t faze anybody else in the group.
“I thought,” he swept a hand across his apostles, “you wanted to be a part of this!”
J!m stepped out of the shadows.
“I guess she doesn’t.”
the second verse kicked harder, faster and more to the groin than the first.
Baby, I swear this is love
Honey, I ain’t just in lust
After a sweaty start in which he’d tried to do the Monkey, Hully Gully and Charleston all at once, ending up with four arms, six legs and no head, Jelly stopped trying to show off and became quite impressive. He was a resonant mass, and when he let the beat pulse through him, jiggling to the rhythm, he certainly could dance, for a fat boy.
I ain’t actin’ funny
This ain’t tactics, honey
That’s just the Beast
The Beast in Me
j!m stood his ground.
“Walk away. Nobody gets hurt.”
The first punch came across his left cheek.
“I don’t like that plan,” Russ said.
Toad had J!m’s arms pinned, keeping him upright. The others were rivetted; they had never seen Russ hit J!m before. There had been countless promises of violence, but none kept; this marked a milestone in Russ’s psychopathic development, and everybody was excited, Tubesteak visibly, to Sarah Jane’s great irritation.
“Ah, violence,” J!m said. “Clever.”
“Then you’ll find this”—Russ searched for the trump word—“cleverer.”
“Russell, please,” Marie implored, with no better result than the first eleven times.
“One sec.” Russ rabbit-punched J!m’s brain. His hyperelastic cranium swung back and forth. This amused a majority of the humans there.
Russ raised his fists for more cleverness. Marie grabbed his arms and tried to drag him away.
“C’mon, Russ. Don’t . . .” She lowered her voice in a go at sultry. “Come over here. I’ll—”
Russ swung Marie into the lockers. She dropped to the floor, next to Bennie, gratified for the company.
“You fell down.”
Wobba wobba wobba. Russ pummeled J!m’s head like a speed bag. Wobba wobba wobba wobba.
“Look at me,” Russ said, “I’m Cassius Clay!”
Wobba wobba wobba wobba wobba.
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!” shouted Tubesteak in a plantation dialect. This galled Russ, who was about to say it, and could at least do a respectable impression of the champ.
Wobba wobba wobba wobba wobba wobba.
J!m’s brain began sparking, not from the exterior input, which was harmless and somewhat stimulating, but from a torrid inner storm of speculative fiction, little bangs of universe creation, including ones in which:
through a newly discovered ability, J!m hit Russ with a mega-mindblast that propelled him backward at fantastic speed, impaling Tubesteak;
the authorities arrived and carted Russ off to an internment camp for creeps;
after J!m’s heat vision roasted Russ, J!m broke off an arm, took a big juicy bite, remarked “tastes like chicken,” and Marie gently admonished him with a pat on the rear;
an escaped Gorgon snipped Russ’s head off;
a small atomic device lodged in Russ’s colon went boom.
So fevered was J!m’s revengineering that the ugly thoughts spilled out of his head, frenzied current scurrying atop his skull, weaving an electric toupee that did not flatter him.
Wobba wob—
Russ pulled back his fist, crawling with fibrils of light. “Tickles.”
He sensed someone behind him.
“Marie,” he said, according her a cordiality she no longer deserved, “don’t make me—”
A bristly black claw grabbed him from behind. Russ was in the grips of a hideous Man-Fly!
johnny wailed:
The Beast in Me
The Beast in Me
You bring out
The Beast in Me.
Jelly tossed Rusty around: a Swingout into a Shoulder Throw, Piggy Back Flip into Double Sugar, Frog Jump and one of his own invention, the Jelly Roll, a modified spin in which the female spins all the way inside her partner. Rusty looked disconcerted at first to be enveloped in Jelly, but caught the spirit and performed a few moves, wearing him like a suit, before he spun her out and into a Princess Dip.
The Beast in Me
The Beast in Me
Here it comes
The Beast in Me.
Johnny hooted, and the crowd ho
wled in return.
his enormous maxillary palps clacked fiercely, his labella gushing and spluttering, making very little sense.
“You’re drooling on me, Al,” Russ said, swatting at the Man-Fly, who flitted away in his blue jumpsuit, a victim of his instincts. “Buzz off.” Russ raised his hand again and the mutant janitor buzzed off.
“Now,” Russ said, returning to his victim. “Where were we?”
“You were making an aggressive display to assert your alpha status, which you are driven to maintain because of a crippling lack of self-esteem, stemming from your early abandonment by a mother who never loved you,” J!m said, tired of being wry.
Russ looked around for something sharp with which to express his displeasure.
“What are we having here?”
Miss Mantis buttoned her blouse as she entered the light, Al Delambre a safe distance behind her.
“Nothing, ma’am,” said Russ. “I was just punching Jim.”
“Do not lie to me!” her antennae vibrant. “I can smell your sex!” She lectured Marie and Sandra Jane. “And are you silly and stupid? These boys will never earn good livings! They will give you worthless babies!”
“Come!” She clicked at Hel and Mil, though she had long ago dismissed them as subprime.
On her way out, Marie presented to J!m the same brutal smile he had attacked her with earlier.
“If I need your help,” she said, “I’ll scream.”
Russ yelled after her.
“Nice knowing you, Marie!”
Miss Mantis’s head ratcheted around without her body moving. “Don’t make me bite your head off!” She licked her chitinous lips.
Russ scoffed, going in the opposite direction. He pointed at J!m, fixing him with a look that said, I’m pointing at you.
“Later, masturbator.”
johnny was soaked, his face and chest trickling with transuranic perspiration, grinding to a hot and slow climax.
Honey, I know what you want
Baby, I got what you need
Come a little closer
Give a little whisper . . .
Rusty leaned in, drenched in Jelly, and sang, sotto con fuoco:
I wanna feel
The Beast in Me
She lapped the sweat off Johnny’s cheek. Johnny laughed. Jelly licked the other side, his tongue the size of a flapjack. Johnny liked that less.
Chapter 18
Charged with Million-Volt Excitement!
robby took his floor-waxing as seriously as he took protecting eccentric scientists and befriending underparented boys, which was very seriously. He was a robot.
The rotary brushes retrofitted to his foot pads whirred gravely, so that on Monday the boys and girls who attended gym would never know fun had been had there; every trace of diversion would be waxed away, and the athletics program could operate unimpeded. It was not as glamorous as appearing on Gilligan’s Planet and The Addams Phylum after returning from Altair IV, but it was what he had been reprogrammed to do, and would do, unless it conflicted with his prime directive.
J!m picked up a cob of Indian corn and heaved it. It went wide of the mark, but the Hypersan gravity can drew it in, whisking it into another dimension, thereby dumping it on Old Man Mxyzptlk’s lawn, who was damned tired of this and might accelerate entropy for a couple of days to see how we liked it.
Everybody had gone to Googie’s. J!m begged off, knowing Russ would be there, and his imagination was sore. He had stayed to help Al, figuring he would one day need a recommendation for a sanitation job. He liked Al. J!m had never gotten his story; Al had told it to him several times, but he had never gotten it. He’d heard that Al was from Canada, but that didn’t fully explain it.
“I’m gonna zoom, Mr. Delambre,” J!m called to Al, who was high on the wall, retching digestives on some stubborn tape residue.
The Man-Fly spluttered pleasantly, making the “in peace” salute with his human hand.
“Yeah,” J!m said.
the billboard twinkled, zippered, etc.,
DRIVE SAFE!
DON’T MATE!
PLEXURE™ YOURSELF INSTEAD!
IT’S CLEAN AND EFFICIENT!
as J!m walked past, pulling his tweed jacket tight around him. The nights were getting colder, and darker.
He activated his domes.
“We’re deep into the night,” a smoky female voice whispered in his head, “and from this point on, all sense of time will cease to exist, only space, and the sensory, that which we feel and experience becomes the manifestation of all of the cosmic waves of the universe. The sound pours in the brain and pushes all barriers to the outer limits of perception, and we are in space and we are above, and beyond.”
J!m swooned from the beautiful idiocy of it, this cosmic nonsense lost souls embraced upon the death of their god, the notion that the universe, a math equation, would embrace them more warmly than a deity they had built for that very purpose.
“Come, fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird,” in her soothing mesmer. “We begin this night with an early Halloween treat; from White Trash, here’s Edgar and Johnny Winter’s ‘Frankenstein.’ ”
J!m had never heard the instrumental but immediately liked it, the heavy, lumbering beat suiting his mood, the frenetic synthesizer lead mirroring his mental state.
There were no streetlamps along this stretch of road, next to the cornfield. The light from the waning moon filtered through the towering stalks, the silhouettes forming black bars, a prison extending into the night, if one were inclined to think that way, which J!m was.
Halloween in three days. That was a lively night at the Anderson house, though wasteful, since they didn’t eat eggs or use toilet paper. And only 194 more nights before he graduated. If they were all like the last two, and in all probability would be much wor—
It hit him first in the left lobe, buckling his right leg. He fell onto his side and a second blast erupted on the right, causing the opposite limbs to spasm. His entire head lit up, and everything was moving, his right leg and arm scrabbling in the dirt, spinning his body around, his left limbs out and shaking all about. The music in his domes, a muscular fugue of evil insanity, was an ideal accompaniment. The seizure seemed to be taking orders from the drum line, crescendoing with the percussion solo and trailing off thereafter.
J!m managed to stand. A night breeze almost knocked him down again, setting off a paroxysm of chills. He shivered uncontrollably; he felt wet, and wrong.
A harsh light struck him from above.
He shrank away, shielding himself from the incoming lumens.
Two bluish beams, a series of small red lights flashing between them, began to descend, and approach.
J!m tapped off his domes.
The low crunch of gravel told him this was not his father’s spacecraft, come to take him home to assume his rightful place on the Regulese throne, with his pick of queens from throughout the galaxy.
It was an Earth vehicle rolling down the hill.
The car stopped fifteen feet from J!m, idling with a cold, slow thrum. A chorus of spectral voices ended in the only words J!m could make out, shut up, dipshit, and then it was quiet, and dark.
Russ Ford’s head appeared, floating several feet in the air, lit from below.
“It’s later.”
they had not gone to Googie’s. Halfway there, an idea had fallen into Russ’s head, much like it had occurred to him a few days earlier to start dating Marie, after not noticing her for seventeen years. This evening’s plan had arrived fully formed, a vision of such brilliance that Russ assumed it must be his own.
For two hours he and his gang had been parked on that hill, with no music or conversation. The only excitement had come when Bennie said there was a disembodied hand crawling on the floor, prompting the others to toss out the Zoomers he had distributed.
Russ wanted everything to be perfect, and it had been, up until he turned off the Ballistic and Tubesteak found it necessary to comment
on how perfectly it was all going. Yet the light trick, placing his wristplex under his chin and turning on the torch function, had been superbly effective, and Russ was still relishing the look on J!m’s face, frozen in terror, when J!m disappeared into the cornfield.
“After him?” Tubesteak asked, stepping on Russ’s next line.
“Sure,” Russ grumbled.
j!m hurtled through the corn, which, stiffened with human bone genome and emboldened by anabolics, was unyielding, the truculent crop batting J!m to and fro down the rows. Disoriented, he tumbled and spun, away, he hoped, from Russ and his thugs.
Shafts of light stabbed at him from all directions, combining with binaural cues, woops and giggles, to tell J!m he was surrounded.
Humans were an inferior species in numerous respects—playing well with others, cleaning up after themselves—but they were unparallelled at hunting down other animals.
J!m ran into a solid object, its alabaster face and rat eyes underlined with ghoulish illumination.
“Boo,” Ice said.
J!m staggered back, cracking the spines of a couple of corn stalks, which cursed him, and fell at the feet of Toad, also holding a wristplex under his chin, his facial craters taking on lunar scale.
A glance to either side confirmed Russ and Tubesteak, lit from underneath as agreed, Tubesteak grinning against orders.
“I apologize,” J!m said, getting up. “I am truly sorry.”
J!m had never apologized before. This made Russ uneasy about what was going to happen next. It contravened the Uniform Code of Bully Conduct:
XVII B. Spontaneous Contrition
(1) Should it apologize or cry “uncle” or otherwise express regret for whatever it did to enrage you, whether during a beating or prior to one, you are to:
(a) Consider the sincerity of the admission, taking into account shrillness of voice and copiousness of tears, and
(b) If the apology is deemed sincere, offer it an opportunity to save itself, either through
(i) financial restitution.
(ii) continued grovelling.
(iii) fulfillment of other conditions, determined at your sole discretion but not to include felonious acts or sexual favors. (cf. Appendix O, Prison Exceptions)