“You can steer it with those handles.”
Where the probe became a solid haft there were two steel loops like the rings on an old-fashioned syringe. By pulling back on one or the other of these, Steven found he could twist the head of the probe enough to guide it around the curve and into the next section of bowel. Here the gut lining was more corrugated and the folds were crusted with hard deposits of shit.
Lucy made a noise. “Jesus, that’s disgusting. Even dumping doesn’t get you clean.” She shook her head sadly. “My parents used to tell me to be happy. What a fucking joke. How can there be any happiness with filth like that rotting away inside? You’ve got to be clean to be happy. Go on, push it further.”
“Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”
Steven was more interested in watching the probe disappear into her hole than in the image on the screen.
“Fuck no, that stuff just comes from food. The real poison comes out of your head. All your fuck-ups and sadnesses and fears drop down like some sort of brainshit into your guts and build up there. That’s what really fucks you up. I told you before.”
Lucy had over a foot and a half of the probe in her now and her teeth were clenching against pain. Steven bent the endoscope through a particularly tricky twist of colon and slid it forward another few inches. The blunt head of a turd blocked the way, like an animal in its lair.
“Jesus fuck, not more already.”
“Do you want me to push it through?”
“Can’t. It’ll smear the lens and you won’t see anything. Leave it there, I want to look at it.”
Steven let go of the probe carefully and leaned back to get a better view of the rod sticking out of her. He stroked the skin around her cunt, she didn’t turn.
“We can look in you after, if you want.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll have poison inside you too. The only way to get normal is to find it and cut it out.”
He slid his middle finger into her cunt, she was wet and she pushed against him.
“It’s too late for normal.”
He got his cock out and stuck it in her. He had to bend the probe out of the way and the picture shifted slightly.
“Keep it where it was.”
She sounded urgent so he twisted the thing until the shit was center screen again, snouting blindly into the glare of the endoscope.
The picture vibrated as Steven pumped, but Lucy was locked in on it too tightly to complain. He watched his dick plough between red flaps of skin and thought he could feel the hard line of the probe pressing against him through a layer of internal meat. Near the end Lucy started to moan.
When it was over he pulled the probe out of her ass and she cleaned the streaks of shit and intestinal mucus off it with a handful of tissue. She held the stained paper to her nose.
“Fuck, it stinks.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Steven thought it might happen straightaway, that the fucking might magically bring into existence around him the world of his TV dreaming. But Lucy lay down on the floor, in a cold draft from an open window, and fell asleep without speaking to him. So he went back to his room and the TV and Dog in the corner with a dog smile so happy to see him, and lay naked under his torn blanket, lifting and lowering it, puffing out the fish stink of his recent sex in warm gusts of memory.
He was not worried at the delay. She would be what he wanted, Lucy upstairs. He knew it. There might be more steps to take, but she would be the mother, the lover, the hook on which to hang his plagiarized blueprint for living.
There had been no love there, upstairs tonight, but it would come—Lucy would force it into being. She had no choice. She would never find her black lumps of poison or cut them out, and like Steven she would never be part of the world. In time, when she realized this, she would need someone to cling to, someone to absorb and deaden the impacting horror of her sentence. And to justify this dependence she would have to call it love.
The Hagbeast would permit no such joining, of course. She would move swiftly to destroy any source of affection, any avenue of hope, that threatened her tyranny.
And so she must not find out.
But that was impossible. How could he hide from her a growing involvement with Lucy when she tracked the slightest of his movements with every sense she possessed? He was transparent to her and sooner or later she would know, despite any camouflage he might erect, that he was directing himself to more than his daily struggle against her.
She would know. She would home in and ruin his dream before he had a chance to use Lucy to make it real. She would expel him from the flat or she would kill him. There could be no middle ground.
Here, now, with Lucy’s cunt scum crusty on his dick, with the raw materials of his envisioned satellite world at last close enough to reach, the inference was obvious. And it did not surprise Steven that he found little horror in its contemplation—he had suffered too long.
Steven did not sleep.
How could it be done?
What would it feel like to kill, to actually extinguish the pile of meat that had shitted him into existence? If she had been a mother like mothers were meant to be, then he supposed it would be impossible. Or if possible, that it would trail such jellyfish tentacles of remorse his eyes would be forever clouded with the final stinging vision of thick white foam boiling past her swollen tongue and out over his wrists.
But she had never worn a blue-checked apron or baked sweet pies in a kitchen where the warm air made her cheeks rosy, never reached down with floured hands to lift him up onto the table and kiss his face and laugh at his giggles with her eyes so bright he thought he would never see anything else again, or want to, never shown him things or let him press the dough before she wrapped him up in herself and carried him off to bed. And because this was so, he knew the act would not bleed forward in time to harry him in small-hour awakenings. It would stop when she stopped.
The killing would bring him relief, but its doing would not be easy. He could imagine himself, head back and howling, in a suffusing glory of murder, gouting semen across her naked shoulders as he hauled back on her head and snapped her neck. But reality would be different. Reality would be a frightened rush to the finish with no time to linger over details, a headlong plunge to get it over with before his courage gave out, before a lifetime of conditioning reared up and robbed his arms of strength.
Steven squirmed in his bed. He had to do it, there was no other way. But in twenty-five years he had not lifted a hand against her, and thoughts of starting now with the ultimate hand-raising made him frightened enough to puke. His body felt boned and unequal to the task.
Much better to find some way less direct. Killing without the necessity of active throttling, stabbing, beating participation. She was old and immensely overweight, the systems of her body degenerating under an onslaught of filth and the mordant of age. There had to be a way to place a final, terminal strain on them. An iceberg method that kept the bulk of its guilt and purpose hidden from sight.
Steven watched the shifting reflections of streetlight on his ceiling until dawn.
CHAPTER TWELVE
You were out last night and you didn’t tell me.” The Hagbeast ladled an oily sludge into his breakfast bowl. Her eyes flicked blankly across the table and into the corners of the room, a false front running interference for her words.
“You know Mama needs to know where you are all the time.”
“Why?”
“So I can be sure you’re eating right.”
“You shouldn’t have pissed on Dog.”
“I should have pissed down its throat and drowned it. Where did you go?”
“The roof.”
She chuckled. It made her neck shake. “You moron. Staring at the people out there won’t change anything. You can’t be like them, don’t you know that? You’re part of me, you little fuck, part of this place, and you’ll die here.”
Steven tipped whatever it was she had served him out onto the tab
le and threw the bowl across the room. He didn’t bother to stand.
“And when I do, it’ll be a long time after you and I’ll have someone to love me when I go.”
The Hagbeast snorted into the greasy early-morning air.
“Who’s going to love you, Steven? I used to live out there before you infected my cunt. I know what they like and what they love. And it isn’t you. Hear me, you piece of shit? It isn’t you.” She spat on the floor and caught her breath. “Clean up that mess, you fucker, and eat.”
Steven didn’t move. He looked into those empty eyes and decided it was time to test himself.
“I know what you’re doing with this food.”
The Hagbeast’s face went dark with blood and she shouted each word distinctly. “I am not trying to poison you!”
“Yes you are.”
“I’ve told you before, Steven, I eat what you eat. How can it be poison?”
“Because it is. I can feel it in me.”
“For the last time, cunt, it’s only food. Now eat it.”
“It’s shit.”
“If I eat it, you will as well.”
“Not anymore. From now on I’m going to make the food.”
“What?”
The Beast lurched upright, slavering and working her mouth incredulously. Fat slewed about her frame under the sudden acceleration. She planted her fists on the table and roared: “No!”
The stink from her throat wrapped itself around Steven’s head. He stood up, breathed it in, drew back his arm … and hit her. A single short hook to the side of the head. He felt the impact travel through his bones, the sandpaper crunch of his knuckles against the coarse skin of her face. For one wild moment he wanted to keep on hitting until she was a bleeding sack of shit, draped shapeless over the back of her chair. But he couldn’t do it. Instead he watched a white smear of disbelief shade out from the red mark on the side of her head.
She looked at him through eyes veiled with the calculation of shifting power balances. Her features held no trace of pain, only a drenching hate that boiled with the reassessment of options.
Steven held her gaze, but it was a war. The hard seconds thudded into him, working on his knees and stomach, searching, weakening, all the time getting closer to finding a path to that soft interior where reassertion of the dominances scattered by his blow might be possible.
It was time to go. Her scrutiny threatened the glory he felt burning about him like the cold fire in some picture of God. This first small act of defiance was too valuable to be risked here in the flat light of the kitchen. It must be gathered in, protected, allowed to grow and to extend into time, raising structures in its slipstream that would shelter him in the future.
He put his head close to hers and said into her face, “I make the food and you eat it.”
He left the room as she started to shriek.
“Fuck you, you fucking moron! I know what you’re doing. Anything you can make, I can eat. My guts held you for nine months, you can’t get worse than that. You think you can beat your mother? We’ll see. We’ll see about that, you dogshit.”
Her ranting followed Steven down the stairs like garbage tipped from a pail.
CHAPTER THIRTEN
On the line that morning a cow got loose, somehow slipped from a grabber before the slaughtermen put the bolt in its head, and came clattering into the process hall, half slipping on blood, scattering men, ramming the inverted dead bodies of its brothers. Looking for an escape from cow hell. But its terror must have made it blind and it ended by slamming its soft nose against a ventilation grille until Cripps came over and blew its brains out with a shotgun.
The ruthless efficiency of the killing took Steven’s breath away. Cripps moved without doubt or hesitation. He did not consider the phases of his attack, he simply saw a problem and removed it in a flawless, perfectly economic stream of action.
If Steven possessed such clarity, such sureness of purpose, ridding himself of the Hagbeast would pose no greater problem than crushing an insect. At breakfast he had decided to poison her as she was poisoning him, but now considerations of practicality had begun to cool the fire that had earlier singed his veins with the ecstasy of confrontation.
Could he force himself through it?
Would she really eat whatever he gave her?
And if it killed her, would his own body be strong enough to survive?
The resolve of just a few hours ago was becoming infested with the worms of doubt.
Cripps had spoken of mastering the self, of releasing a potential for action that benefited no one but the individual concerned. Of selfish epiphanies in blood. And Steven wondered, as he watched him carry his shotgun back to the slaughter room, if there might not be some crutch beyond those plastic strips that could support him through the killing of the Hagbeast.
The afternoon shift was half through when Cripps appeared at his side and took him away from the grinder.
“You look ready, boy. I’ve seen you watching the slaughter room and I know what you’ve been thinking—‘Is he right? Is there something in there for me?’ Well, I am right, boy. The slaughter room gives up its secrets to any man with the cock to ask. Are you asking? Have you got the cock for it, boy? Have you?”
Inside the slaughter room death was in full swing.
The place was a storm of bawling cows and goading, muscular men working with fierce precision. These men moved as Cripps had during the shotgun execution—without weakness, without even the thought that they might position a hand or a foot unsurely as they punched and kicked and prodded the animals with stubby electric lances along the alleys that led to a final bondage of pneumatic presses. Some were stripped to the waist, all were streaked with blood and wet cow shit. They sweated and wrestled cows into position, faces creased in tight grins of effort, taking pleasure in their own strength, calling to each other over the din, directing, pointing, clapping hands like it was all a play in some bloody contact sport.
Some of the cows in the alleys bucked against the rails, trying to turn and plough back into the reassuring brown and white and black cowmass, rearing up and scrabbling at steel and brick with slippery hooves, eyes white all the way around, nostrils wide, snorting in as much air as they could hold, knowing that its taste would soon be lost forever and trying to imprint it on some soul memory so it could be remembered after death, shaken out like a tablecloth and searched for meaning. Others trotted madly in a straight line, refusing to see the swinging V of the grabber in their path, running only for the blur of white light from the process hall that maybe looked like freedom. Like moths.
On the platforms by the grabbers slaughtermen worked the boltguns on their counterweighted chains … Swing smoothly forward over the rails, nudge the muzzle into the soft hollow behind the ear, look at the cow and wait to make sure it knows what you’re going to do, then pull back on the trigger and send a four-inch hardened-steel bolt through skull and into brain, swing the gun away with the bolt already retracted by recoil and watch shit squirt out of one end and blood out of the other.
Where the room had been empty and awkward that other lunchtime, it was now hot and bent to its purpose, seamlessly fusing the action it housed into an organic whole where airborne blood and shit and beasts and brick walls and steel girders became one in a designed and streamlined operation.
Steven watched it all and wondered what he was supposed to feel. It was obvious that these men moved within the flow of some connecting and energizing force. They shared a motive confidence that made them even more intensely alive than the others out here in the world. The sight of them roused him to envy, but the staggering deaths of the cattle as they collapsed against the grabbers did nothing to stir a corresponding sternness of self-direction in his own breast.
“Majesty, boy. The death of animals and the rebirth of men. You can feel it, can’t you? There is glory in this room. Look at them. Many were like you before they learned the secret that killing holds. Timid. Yes, boy, timid, b
ut with the cock to push themselves beyond what they thought they could endure. They didn’t know what they would find, but they went looking anyway. And when they confronted their own uncertainty, when they crossed to the place weaker men had forbidden them to enter, they found a strength greater than they ever dreamed existed. Come close and watch.”
Cripps led Steven on to the low platform beside one of the grabbers and held him tightly about the waist while they watched the slaughterman work. A cow was driven between the iron jaws of the grabber and Cripps whispered harshly into Steven’s ear.
“See how it comes, so full of life—eyes seeing, mind thinking. Life! Prized above all other things. Touch it, feel it breathe.”
Steven leaned over the guardrail and put his hand on the cow’s back. The slaughterman watched, ready with the boltgun but waiting. The cow felt solid and warm.
“Keep your hand there.”
Cripps nodded and the slaughterman put his gun close against the straining bovine head. Steven felt no particular affection for the cow, but the fly-shooing tremors that jerked in waves across the animal’s hide shook his arm and jarred loose within him broken-glass splinters of panic. He was about to feel something die.
When the gun went off the cow threw itself forward and collapsed like an enormous rubber toy, pumping steaming liquid shit down the inside of its thighs … Off into cow darkness.
Steven snatched his hand away and looked quickly to see if it had absorbed the mark of death, some dark contagion that might multiply beneath the skin and come searching for him.
There was no mark, but the shock of the killing sent small blurts of bile into his throat. Cripps was laughing and pressing a hardon against the side of his leg.
“Did you feel it, boy? Did you feel it just … stop? It’s like a switch, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You must be aching to try it yourself.”
How far did he have to go for this magical awakening, this unleashing of strength that Cripps talked about? He was already flecked with blood and shit. He had seen the bolt punch into cow head, rip away a circle of hide and bone, and slam deep into cow brain. He had smelled the fear and the last rush of breath and the emptying bowels and the wet-newspaper mustiness of the inside of the cow’s skull. And there had only been horror at the ease of it all, the sickening backward flip of approaching fugue—not the sunrise of a new way to live. But might the secret be waiting a little further on, standing elegant and incurious beyond a bleeding threshold of flayed beef, needing only a little extra letting-go to be caught?
Cows Page 4