Make Something Up

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The beast moves the way it’s always moved. Without muscles. Without bones. The way a paramecium moves by expanding itself in one direction across the bed. The beast moves with a peristaltic pushing out of trembling nodes, a hydraulic flooding and alternate drainage of cellular walls. It needs no skeleton to give it shape. And doing so, it tumbles closer to her.

  By this far along, Ethan is almost asleep. Neither alive nor dead. He can hardly speak because the beast has co-opted most of his blood. In a tiny voice, he says, “The worst thing you can do is panic.” He reasons with her, wanting to explain sanely and logically about aesthetics. The cutting edge of culture and evolution.

  Whispering, he says, “You ladies aren’t the only ones who can bring new life into the world.” He’s proof of that. At first, he was just a kid trying to grow his dick and get rich, and the next thing he knows is he’s the gateway to a new dominant species.

  The problem is: He can’t accomplish this alone.

  He begs. If only Mona would reach out and touch it. Pet it. Maybe even kiss it like the ugly toad in a fairy tale. Popular culture is chock-full of monstrous things that grow out of ordinary, normal young men. To Ethan’s way of thinking, this wasn’t so different from what had happened to Spider-Man. Mona Gleason could be his co-inventor. She could befriend it and make the swelling go down. Between the two of them, they could tame it.

  With just one…one kiss and he’ll turn back into her Prince Charming.

  The little bit that’s left of Ethan is sucked dry, scrunched down to a pimple on the monster’s ass, but he continues to listen for Mona’s scream.

  After the scream, he knows she’ll try to escape. The same way Amber and Wendy tried. And after he recovers, he’ll wake up to find Mona like Amber: suffocated and bruised and everything else, and he’ll have to stash her body in his closet before his folks get home. Then he’ll have to go to school the next day and sit next to her empty desk. In the afternoon, he’ll have to rush home and bury her. He’s almost certain the police and his parents would never understand. Once the hookers he’s swabbed catch wind, they’ll raise a ruckus and no one will get exclusive patent rights.

  Then, to make matters worse, he’ll have to start all over with a new girlfriend.

  It’s then Ethan feels something. A tickle. A tickling.

  In that moment he feels something warm. It’s the warm touch of fingers, as Mona reaches deep into the shuddering mess of tangled hairs and dangling flesh and her lovely, soft lips close around the small, wet part of what’s left of him.

  SMOKE

  None of his words just came out anymore. Every syllable had to be weighed and measured. Each was calibrated to trigger laughter or to dominate or to earn him a dollar. He sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee while his wife looked at a magazine. She lowered it a smidgen and asked, “A penny for your thoughts?” He could see only her blue eyes above the binding. She said, “Cat got your tongue?” Anything he might say in response felt chewed over. To talk about…to create more words, would just worsen an already dismal situation. For too long, language had used him as its brood mare, and he resolved not to say anything until he had something important to say. He set aside the newspaper crossword puzzle he did every morning. The book he’d been reading, he used as a coaster for his coffee mug. Already, he could feel the words pent up inside him, the pressure building, expanding toward an explosion. He worried that language had come to the Earth and invented people in order to perpetuate itself. The Bible said as much: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Language had arrived from outer space and mated together lizards and monkeys or whatever until it had customized a host which could sustain it. That first person had been introduced to the complicated DNA sequence of proper nouns and compound verbs. Outside of language he didn’t exist. There was no method to escape. To feel anything, anymore, required ever-increasing amounts of words. Great landfills and airlifts of words. It took a mountain of talk to achieve even the tiniest insight. Conversation was like one of those Rube Goldberg machines wherein a bird pecked a kernel of corn glued to a button, pressing the button which activated a diesel locomotive and sent it speeding down a hundred miles of polished track until it slammed into an atom bomb the explosion of which startled a mouse in New Zealand so that it dropped a crumb of blue cheese onto a scale and tipped the pans so that the empty pan rose and flipped a switch which jiggled a trip wire, unleashing a tiny hammer so that it swung down with just-sufficient force to crack the shell of a pistachio nut. His wife drew her breath as if about to say something. He looked back at her, expectantly, hoping for the nut. The large, yellow words on her magazine said “Elle Decor.” She coughed. She went back to reading, lifting her coffee cup, tipping the brim against her mouth to make a white mask of it while telling him, “The French have a phrase for what you’re thinking.” Everyone, he knew for a fact, was populated by billions of microbes, and not simply the flora in their digestive tracts. People played host to mites and viruses that all wanted to reproduce and continue life elsewhere. They jumped ship with every handshake. It was folly to imagine we were anything more than vessels, carting around our bossy passengers. We were nothing. He sipped his coffee, sending everyone aboard more sugar and caffeine. To relieve the pressure, he pictured himself shoveling words into a furnace where they burned to power a colossal ocean liner wherein every stateroom was the size of a football field, and every ballroom ballooned too large to see the far walls. That ship was steaming across an ocean where it was always night. Every light on every deck blazed bright as surgery while a waltz played, the smokestacks spewing out the trailing cinders of incinerated dialogue. He stood in the bunkers, sweating, with his feet planted wide apart for stability and stoked “Hello’s” and “Happy birthday’s” and “Have a nice day’s” into the roaring flames. He shoved in a pile of “I love you’s” and a heap of “Does that include sales tax?’s.” He pictured a planet, blue and perfect, without words until this ship would someday arrive. Or, not even the ocean liner. Just a lifeboat would suffice. Just a dying sailor with a few viable words still incubating inside his mouth. With his last breath, the sailor would ask, “Who is he?” and that’s all it would take to wreck a paradise.

  TORCHER

  The sandstorm didn’t come in on little cat feet. It wasn’t like a Dashiell Hammett fog creeping over San Francisco or a Raymond Chandler fog setting the stage in Los Angeles. This desert storm descended on the tent city like a scorching, brown blizzard. Overnight, campers hunkered down inside their billowing tents. They tied wet bandanas over nose and mouth. In lieu of hoop dancing and fire-eating, they torched bong hits and told muffled tales by flashlight. In hushed respect for the dead, they recalled burners who’d left the safety of their tribes. Fools had ventured out in a storm, like tonight’s storm, trusting some drunken sense of direction. Their destination might be only a few feet away, but blinded, their eyes shut against the scouring grit, the travelers had sidestepped. Lashed by sand, they’d compounded the error. Stumbling forward on sheer faith, they’d been certain they’d grasp hold of something solid. Salvation always seemed to be within their reach…

  At dawn, a walkie-talkie squawked. Static at first, followed by a voice. A female voice. Half buried, clotted with dirt, the walkie-talkie asked, “Rainbow Bright, do you read?” Another cough of static hung in the dusty air. “This is Strawberry Shortcake,” the voice said. “I have a Code Spearmint. Do you copy?”

  With sunrise, the dust had settled. Near the walkie-talkie, a long zipper descended. A hand reached from inside a damp sleeping bag. Each finger lined with curlicue henna designs. Black-painted fingernails. A mood ring, its stone turned onyx: anxious. The lowest state. It wasn’t a young hand, it had been younger. It felt around on the dirt floor of the tent, rejecting dead light sticks and filth-coated candy necklaces and gummy, used condoms until it found the walkie-talkie and dragged it back inside the sleeping bag. Muffled, a man coughed. He answered, “Rainbow Brigh
t, here.”

  “Thank the goddess,” replied the female voice. Strawberry Shortcake.

  Groggily, the man poked a finger deep into his navel. That was one perk of hitting middle age: He’d grown a gut. Life had given him the kind of hard, round belly that bore down and forced a girl to arch her back when he took her from behind. The bigger a guy’s gut, the deeper his belly button; Rainbow Bright’s was like a kangaroo’s pouch. His fingertip felt a five-milligram Stelazine. A South African Mandrax. A fifteen-milligram Mellaril, stashed for just such emergencies. He pinched out a green, ten-milligram Mellaril and popped it between his chapped lips. He asked, “Are you for sure this is a Code Spearmint?” The sleeping bag folded back to reveal its occupant: a bearded, sunburned man. A tangle of beaded necklaces threatened to strangle him. They snagged in the hair on his bare chest. One beaded strand was looped through a silver ring that pierced his lower lip. Holding the walkie-talkie to his ear, he asked, “Where?” He could smell cat piss. With his free hand, he gathered a fistful of his dreadlocked hair and brought it to his nose.

  Strawberry Shortcake’s voice said, “I’m at the Mud People campsite.”

  The sleeping bag felt wet with more than sweat. Lying next to Rainbow Bright was an empty bong, spilled. Its water had soaked into his braids. It wasn’t even water. The previous night, he’d filled the bong with Jägermeister. Between the ’meister and skunkweed tar and THC, his head stunk.

  Curled up even closer was some naked somebody. Some young, feminine seeker lay fast asleep. The comatose brand of asleep. Asleep like somebody under a fairy-tale curse. An unknown person had pasted stars all over her face and bare tits. Nipples as dark purple and big around as plums, or bigger. The foil stars teachers used to grade homework, red and gold and silver. Someone had used black laundry marker to write something across her forehead. Rainbow read the words and winced. In all caps, they said “Daddy’s Grrrrrl.” He looked at the penmanship, hard. It didn’t look like his handwriting.

  The kid slept so sound that even the gang of flies working over her tits didn’t wake her. Rainbow waved them away. An empty gesture of gallantry. They’d buzz in the air; the moment he left, they’d descend on her like vultures.

  Strawberry asked if she should call the cops.

  This brought him back to reality. Almost reality. Near enough. The Mellaril was performing its magic. “Negatory,” he said. “We never bring in the heat.” He waited for emphasis. “Do you copy?”

  The voice over the walkie-talkie started to cry, she was begging. “Please come quick.”

  He waited for her to catch her breath. “Strawberry, do you copy?” He picked a crab lice the size of a lentil out of the sleeping kid’s pubes and flicked it toward his dozing tent mates. “Don’t call any outsiders. Got it?”

  The Mud People Camp. It wasn’t Rainbow Bright’s favorite hangout. Not by a long shot. He’d rather spend a full-moon night watching fire-eaters and hoop dancers at the Sad Clown encampment, and he really despised those Sad Clown freaks. For now he crawled out of his purple Barney the Dinosaur sleep sack and found his phone in the dirt. He wiped a layer of fine desert dust off the screen. It wasn’t eight, yet. Most of the tent city would still be asleep. The screen said it was already ninety-four degrees. He stretched his arms. Sunshine predicted all day. After he found his flip-flops and adjusted his loincloth, he set off for a cup of coffee at the Hospitality Pavilion. It was on the way to Mud Camp. He wasn’t in any hurry. A corpse could wait.

  As he skirted around an art installation, an erect penis sculpted of papier-mâché, Rainbow Bright texted a couple of potential deputies. The penis has been trucked here on a flatbed by some freaks all the way from East Lansing. It was the size of a church steeple, filled with illegal fireworks, ready to be set ablaze on this very night of the festival.

  Build it. Burn it. Build it. Burn it. Worship and destroy. The festival was civilization on Fast-Forward. They embraced and celebrated the pointless lunacy of human endeavors.

  His thumbs dancing over the keyboard, Rainbow reiterated that this was a Code Spearmint. He texted, “This is not a drill.”

  He paused between tents to take a leak. At most, maybe half his piss actually hit the ground. The morning air was already that scorching hot.

  His phone rang. Someone calling from a blocked number. Either his wife or a redhead he’d seen broadcasting for some cable network. He took a gamble.

  “Ludlow Roberts?” It was his wife. “Where are you?” For being a six-hundred-and-fourteen-dollar airplane ride away, excluding tax and baggage fees, she sounded amazingly clear.

  Rainbow Bright considered hanging up.

  “I called the hotel,” she continued. “There’s no Allied Freelance Artists convention in Orlando.”

  He held his tongue. The tip of one index finger went fishing in his belly button, seeking the Luminal in case he’d need it.

  His wife had her own demons. Working a state agency job, pushing paper for twenty-plus years. Computing accounts payable. Interest accrued. This is after attending high school with Bill Gates. Double pinkie swear. William Henry Gates III. Not in the same class, she was three years behind him, but she used to catch him watching her in a meaningful way. Significant long stares she did nothing about. Fate, everybody knew, didn’t offer you that big a brass ring twice in one lifetime. She worked her job, these days, like it was the penance she deserved. Over the phone, she continued, “You’re there, aren’t you? You broke your promise.” She sounded crushed. “With all those flower children.”

  Rainbow Bright hung up. He found the Mandrax and chewed it for faster results.

  The crew at the Hospitality Pavilion knew how he liked his coffee. No soy anything. No LSD. No mescaline. Especially no decaf. Best of all, no coffee. They filled a hand-thrown stoneware mug and gave him a whole-grain bagel to go with it. He put the mug to his lips and drank deep: rum, sugary banana-flavored rum. Such were the perks of being a Fellowship Facilitator. Rainbow Bright watched the crew members for any signs they might know about the dead man. Every square inch of their skin that wasn’t carpeted with hair, it was busy with tattoos. Nobody seemed agitated. Nobody wore the requisite hairnet. It seemed like business as usual.

  Being a Fellowship Facilitator wasn’t the worst position. It beat Sanitary Crew. His first three years at the arts festival, he’d pumped scalding crap water out of baking-hot fiberglass shit sheds. Nobody on that crew ever got laid, but a newbie had to start at the bottom. He’d been so young. A crew-cut high school graduate. By the time his hair had grown to shoulder length, he’d worked his way up to Hospitality. The festival lasted only three weeks, but it was the only three weeks of the year that counted. When his hair hung to his elbows, he’d made the Water Brigade. Following that, Yoga Crew. After a few more seasons, Fellowship Facilitation. These days he was the lead facilitator with the wristband and headaches to prove it. He was John Law, around these parts. That was a sight more than he was in the outside world.

  For forty-eight weeks of the year, he designed video special effects for the medical industry. There was more to it than that. Rainbow Bright was a medical illustrator; at least that’s what he listed on his tax returns. His accountant didn’t need to know the finer details.

  These days his dreads hung to his waist, but they were going gray and beginning to split and break off at the roots.

  When he got to Mud Camp, his deputies were waiting for him. Tinky-Wink and Sun Baby. They were good kids. Not college material, but not total burners. Not yet. Without three chest hairs between them. Both looked shaken, pale under their layers of peeling skin and Nevada suntan. Both were naked except for various lanyards and feathers, those and their Fellowship Facilitator wristbands.

  As if Rainbow Bright could feel any more ancient, both young men had foreskins. When had the whole world woken up to the fact that male circumcision was genital mutilation? Even the crew in Jew Camp had foreskins. Nothing made Rainbow Bright feel more like a dinosaur than his old-fashioned penis.
The last girl he’d been with, she was a sprite from Fairy Tale Camp. Naked except for a pair of pink gauze wings strapped to her shoulders with elastic. She was so young, she’d asked if he’d been in an accident. Before going down, she’d marveled over his junk and said, “You’re just like that guy in The Sun Also Rises.”

  That’s why he always wore a loincloth. Plus it seemed in keeping with his position of authority to cover his private junk.

  Tinky-Wink had a pink pacifier hanging from a cord around his neck. Sun Baby wore giant-sized sunglasses with rose-colored lenses, the frames paved with rhinestones that hurt to look at in strong daylight. Rainbow took both deputies to be surf bums. Trustafarians. Globetrotting in their restless quest for better waves and raves.

  Rainbow asked if they’d seen Strawberry Shortcake. Tinky-Wink jerked his braids toward the rear of the Mud Camp tent. Most of the occupants were still unconscious, snoring away in the growing heat. The walls of the huge tent flapped in the dry breeze.

  Out back, Strawberry Shortcake was standing with a Mud Person. It was their tribe’s custom to spend the entire three weeks naked, coated in a dried crust of gray mud. They went barefoot and wore round helmets that enclosed their heads in gray spheres with only three holes. A mouth and two eyes. All of them looked identical, like gray bowling balls. And they danced around the tent city like aliens or aborigines. The one standing with Strawberry had taken off her head. She was crying so hard she’d washed most of the mud off her rack. Cleaned up, they were nice tits. College girl tits. Despite his role as John Law, Rainbow hoped she’d keep crying until she washed off some real estate below her waist. The girl was kneeling over a mud-smeared body. Her mud, cracked and flaking off.

  It worried him, how, anymore, his only reaction to beauty, beauty and vulnerability, was to grow himself a boner.