Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Yes, that’s it exactly.” Drew wagged his head, then. “You read too much into my stuff,” he told Sol. “These aren’t me. They aren’t meant to represent my emotional or psychological state. They’re all an Everyman; they aren’t a personal expression. Hey, I just like the way I make them look. It’s a matter of aesthetics, that’s all.”

  He dried his hand, smiling at his reflected face in the liquid of the tank. Speaking of aesthetics: this one was going to be a big hit, that was for certain. She looked so pretty, he doubted that they would treat this one as a pinata. If it were me, he thought, I’d fix her up a room and keep her around as a pet for lonely nights.

  He still felt a crawling arousal. He would have to go relieve it himself. Drew and his last girlfriend had broken up three years ago. She had appreciated his art less even than Sol. Lack of understanding was something he had learned to deal with.

  But lack of companionship was harder.

  * * *

  The rains had stopped today, and the streets were dry. Of course, the corpse in the gutter was still there, and its decomposition had been effectively sealed up and suffocated. But in his zeal to affix the thing to the pavement, he had gone too far with the sealant, and it had turned a discolored yellow in drying, it was so thick, like a layer of dirty wax painted over his creation. But there was something far worse than that. Some kid, some punk, had spray-painted a witty remark on the body. An obscenity. It was a desecration of his art. Here he himself hadn’t autographed it, and some worthless insect had sprayed a joke on the thing as if to sign his own name to it. Furious, Drew glanced around as if he expected to find the kid lurking in an alley, snickering. He saw no one. Could he remove the paint with a solvent? He must try. If that didn’t work he’d spray the whole cadaver another color to mask the vandalism. Or maybe he’d have to chisel up the thing and dispose of it, rather than leave it here like this—its lonely beauty, its statement, muddied.

  Its lonely statement. Yes, all right, Drew thought. He did seek emotional expression through his work. But it was a universal palette of emotion he worked from, not a personal one, he thought. He painted in broad, archetypal strokes of color and meaning. Every clone of himself was merely another Everyman—body debased, mind burnt away and spirit enucleated.

  * * *

  Drew sighed, pushed himself back from the monitors before him. Against one section of his work area’s wall was his computer center, its screens glowing like aquariums of exotic knowledge, bundled cables trailing across the floor or up the wall. Drew had excelled in college. He could have been a doctor, according to every family member, friend and girlfriend he had ever been criticized by. But medicine was for mechanics. He was an artist. The same knowledge could he turned on its ear. The same ear could be turned inside-out to make a new flower of flesh; ugly or lovely, it would be a miracle of one man’s imagination, not a miracle of nature’s mindless engineering.

  She was ready to be born from her artificial womb.

  He rose from his chair, took one more sip of coffee, and went to her.

  First, he drained the violet liquid into a recycling system, where it would be purified for the next creation. When the tank was sufficiently dry, he raised the platform on which his clone lay. Her face was serene, her arms at her sides and her feet pale as those of a corpse on a morgue slab. But Drew inserted a tube into her mouth, down her throat, as if to undo her embalming. There were discs adhered to her chest, and he tapped the keys of a device on a rolling tray beside the tank. A jolt went though the woman’s wet, glistening flesh, and her back arched violently. Again. Again. She was like a fish drowning in air. Like a sleeper gripped by a terrible dream.

  But at last, a beeping came from the portable unit on the tray, and Drew smiled. It was the sound of her heart stumbling to life.

  A few minutes later, her eyes opened. She looked up into Drew’s face with a dull, fish-like expression. But her eyes followed him as he moved across the room to pour himself a fresh coffee. He noted this with satisfaction. He had wanted to keep her an animal. But not the usual starfish. For this creature, a product of his highest artistic refinement, a little more seemed called for than the usual shuffling zombie.

  When she began to sit up, he set down his mug and rushed to her, took her arm to help her. He swung her legs over the side of the platform, eased her to her feet with one of her arms slung over his shoulders. She was heavy, awkward, but he walked her to a stained love seat. Along the way, she turned her face to gape at him. He grinned back at her. “Hello, my beauty,” he whispered. He was as proud as a father, or a groom carrying his wife across the threshold.

  * * *

  As he went through his bureau to find her some clothes she could wear, just some sweat pants and a tee shirt maybe, he watched her crawl on hands and knees across the room. She stopped at the foot of the sofa, and gazed up mutely at the flayed, crucified creature on the wall. As if it sensed her, the blind thing moaned.

  Drew frowned, wondered if perhaps he had left too much intelligence in the female clone after all. He couldn’t have her crawling all over his apartment, learning to walk, perhaps. Getting into things. Maybe he could sedate her, but anyway, Sol would be picking her up in a little over a week, so it wouldn’t be a problem long.

  Her rear was to him, bare, the dark cleft inviting, her drying hair spread across her back. Jesus God, what was he waiting for? He knew it was inevitable. He couldn’t be embarrassed about his desire, could he? After all, it would be no more than his usual masturbation, would it?

  Drew set aside her clothes, moved across the room, knelt down behind the clone. He began to rub her back; so smooth. He cooed to her, soothing baby-talk, as if to a kitten. She looked around at him, perhaps at the sound of his zipper. He pressed against her, and something like a drugged, foggy wariness—not quite alarm—came into her eyes, but he was slow, easy, did not want to harm her, had no intention of raping her. If she found it pleasurable, too, he would be ecstatic. It would prove him all the more successful.

  He could not determine how she felt about it. She did not resist as he pressed her into the sofa cushion, wrapping his arms around her, with her bottom spread against his belly. Their pallid skin tones matched precisely, and though she was so different from him, he saw something on her face that unnerved him, interfered in his pleasure so that he had to look at her back instead. Her head lay on the sofa, on its side, her eyes staring without apparent emotion. And on her temple was a small mole, just a dot, really, exactly like the one on his own temple. Something so tiny, so unimportant, that all of his clones must have had and yet it had never consciously called attention to itself before. But now...now...it seemed to glare, like another eye, staring back at him.

  * * *

  He kept her in bed with him in the nights that followed, as much to be aware of her movements as to enjoy her flesh. He didn’t leave the apartment much, afraid that she’d get into his equipment like a curious toddler, but that was okay, too. Sol called. Drew told him that the clone had come out well, and that was all he said. He did not tell Sol that yesterday he had dressed the thing and found a perverse delight in taking her out for a hot dog sold by an automatonic street vendor.

  He did not tell Sol that last night, he had awakened in the dark to feel the clone’s face nuzzled in his neck as she slept, her arm draped over his chest.

  As much as he enjoyed the sensation, he had pushed the thing off him gently.

  Tonight, he would sleep on the couch. She could have the bed. After all, she was only to be a guest for a few nights longer.

  But later that evening, he called Sol back.

  “This client, Sol...what’s he have in mind for this clone? Is it for a party?”

  “I don’t think so; just a wealthy couple buying some artwork for themselves.”

  They had requested a female—that had been their idea. At first, they had wanted a clone of a woman they knew, but Sol had informed them that Drew only did clones of himself. But Drew had been inspire
d, rose to the occasion. The work of art they sought would be all the more special, valuable, for having been made a woman in this manner.

  He pressed Sol. “Don’t you know anything about these people? Are they going to exhibit her in a showcase? Bring her out at parties? Take her to bed—what?”

  “Drew-man, I don’t know. That’s not unlikely. Even some of your most grotesque pieces have been used for that. Why, isn’t she capable? Drew? Is there a problem with that?”

  Drew glanced over his shoulder at the clone as she knelt on the floor staring at a movie on his old 2-D VT. “They aren’t going to...hunt her or anything, are they?” he asked. “Tie her up...burn her with cigarettes? Strangle her while they rape her? That kind of thing? Can you find out?”

  “Look, I can’t do that. What’s the matter?”

  “Can they wait a few weeks? For another clone? This one...I’ve become too attached to. It’s my finest work of art. I can come up with another one, just as nice.” Just a little more like a starfish, though, he thought.

  “Look,” said Sol, “make another clone for yourself, then, but we have a deal, and I have a deal with them, and it’s too late. Sorry. Don’t make me disappoint them, Drew—they’re looking forward to this. And you need their money a lot more than I do, remember.”

  Drew glanced again at the clone. Yes, it was true, he could make another one. And he could make that one more intelligent, not less intelligent. Intelligent enough not just to snuggle, an adoring dog, but to love him as a true woman.

  But then wouldn’t she also leave him, as other women had? Criticize his art first, and then leave him?

  Whether he made another clone for himself or not, he had yet to decide, but he must give this one up. And maybe it was for the best. She made him too confused. She made him feel more alive than he cared to. It was all right for his clones to starve, freeze, die in the street. But for him to feel the ache of his own solitude...that was more of a burden than he cared to carry. Better to keep his suffering in those extensions of himself, safely distanced.

  As he shut off the vidphone, Drew saw that the woman had twisted around from the VT and been watching him finish with Sol. “Hi, there,” he said, smiling uneasily like a guilty teen caught making plans by an eavesdropping mother. The woman only stared back at him, her dark eyes narrowed slightly and blinking. She looked like a person trying to remember a dream.

  * * *

  A heavy thump awakened him.

  Over the top of the partition, the monitors and tanks of his work area cast a blue and violet glow on the ceiling. But that was the only light. The artist felt as though he floated in a dark void, a black womb, listening to the burbling of his coffee and his chemicals. A computer chirped like some night insect. Rain pattered on his balcony outside.

  That was all normal enough, but something was amiss.

  A sound of movement, from the living room section. As of something—crawling. Dragging itself across the cold bare floor in the deep gloom.

  Drew realized then what was amiss; the woman was gone. No warm body against his, as there had been these past nights, her skin sticky from the sweat of her exertions. The previous night she had kissed him on the mouth before he could begin to make his advances. Had she become programmed? Or had her adoration evolved from the dog-like? She had begun to moan when they were entwined, these past couple of nights, and responded more enthusiastically to their love-making; writhing, clutching him, even riding atop him last night.

  With only two days remaining before he had to give her up, Drew had again begun to doubt that he could part with her. Even if he had the ability to create a dozen more like her. They would be a dozen women like her. But they would not be her.

  He sat up in bed, stared into the darkness. He wanted to call her name but hadn’t given her one. She seemed to be crawling toward the bed. Yes, he decided, she was. Had she fallen in the dark, hurt herself? Without waiting any further, he reached out blindly for his beside lamp...

  But as he did so, he felt her fall against the mattress. He reached instead to her, took hold of her arms, pulled her up. “Are you all right?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

  She gave a deep groan.

  Her arms seemed thinner, like those of a starving child, atrophied. And her breath was sickly. And her chest, as she fell upon him. It was hard and bony...

  Drew cried out, tried to push the thing off him, but its wide flaps of skin covered him like a blanket, lent weight to the pathetic creature as it lay atop him. Its face pressed into his neck in a terrible mockery of the woman, but Drew knew that it wasn’t her. Instead, it was the crucified thing, somehow. Somehow it had fallen, its spikes torn free.

  He pushed it off the bed with one panicked surge, terrified suddenly that it would suffocate him with its manta-like body. It thudded to the floor, and he thrust his arm out for the lamp.

  It came on and he leapt from the bed, backed across the room. He saw the abomination trying to push itself up. The eyeless head lifted as if to sniff him out, its twisted mouth working, drooling. It trailed the cords of its life support.

  He looked around to the wall where it had been suspended, and saw the woman there, standing before him.

  She was naked. As lovely as ever, her thick hair half obscuring her face like a primal thing, a savage innocent. His beast. His pet.

  But under one arm, she held his decapitated head.

  And across the sofa cushions lay every one of his embryos, his future clones. All were dead already but for one, wriggling its tiny limbs like flippers.

  Under her arm, Robespierre had rolled its eyes up, lips quivering as it died, disconnected from its tank.

  Drew felt fury rising up in him. But along with that, a vertigo of horror and revulsion, disorienting him. Paralyzing him. His eyes dropped to the spike in the woman’s other hand. One of the spikes that had affixed the crucified being to the wall.

  She came forward then, the head under one arm and the spike rising up like a dagger.

  Drew raised his arms and cried out, “No!”

  The woman lunged past him and fell atop the back of the blind, half-flayed thing as it sought to rise, plunging the spike into the base of its neck.

  The three collapsed as one; the woman, the head, the sightless creature. Only the woman rose, but she lifted the head in her arms again. Now it was entirely motionless, as were all of the embryos reverently lined up on the sofa.

  “What are you doing ?” Drew asked the woman, lowering his arms slowly. “What have you done?”

  For a moment, she gazed at him. Her face was nearly blank. And yet, he knew his own face well enough to interpret sadness there. Despair. And self-loathing. He had seen those things often enough in the mirror to recognize them now.

  She turned, and moved to the door. Tapped the keys to open it, as she must have seen him do. From the inside, it did not require a code, and the door ground painfully open most of the way. Where was she going, nude, with a human head cradled like an infant? She had no weapon now, yet Drew was still almost afraid to follow. But he did.

  “Wait!” he called after her.

  As he slipped out through the door, into the mounting rain, he saw the woman standing at the balcony railing, gazing out at the city lights. Maybe searching for the ghosts he had seen.

  “Hey,” he said to her, holding out his hands. “Come back inside. Please. I won’t send you away. I promise you.”

  She half turned to look back at him, rain water streaming down her face. He saw her lips move slightly, as if she were trying to mold words.

  “Please stay with me,” he told her.

  The woman turned back to face the night. With a solemn kind of grace, she stepped over the low railing.

  “Hey!” Drew said, lunging forward. And he saw the woman leap out into the dark, wet air, his own disembodied head still clutched in her arms.

  Drew yelled for her to stop, even as he watched her white form plummet. He fell against the railing, looked down. Saw her p
ass through the yellow light of a lower window as she fell. Then she passed out of the light, and he lost sight of her altogether. He heard a heavy thump, and it was like he had heard his heart drop, severed, to the floor of his chest.

  He pounded down the stairs, some outside the warehouse, some inside, until he reached the street. It was cold as the surface of an iced lake beneath his bare feet. He welcomed the punishment of the sensation.

  He moved to her side, knelt there.

  “Oh, God,” he murmured. “Why...why did you do that?”

  He moved the wet hair which obscured her face, afraid at what death might have done to alter it, evil sculptor that it was. The drop had not been so great as to disfigure her. With her head turned on its side, she merely appeared asleep. She was beautiful, even in death. A beautiful work of art, bleeding in the gutter.

  Tenderly, he shifted the hair at her temple. Though it was too dark to see it, he lightly touched the tiny mole there. A birthmark that united them.

  Drew did not leave her in the gutter. Gently, he scooped her slack form into his arms, and began the long climb back up the stairs.

  He went to the bed, rested her there. Again, he cleared wet strands of hair from her face.

  He had taken the head with him, and now he gathered the embryos, the heavy grotesque corpse of the crucified being. In addition to these, he went into his laboratory of a work shop and collected organic cultures and growths which the woman had missed in the darkness.

  He deposited the woman and all the rest of his brood into the tank in which she had been grown. But instead of pumping in the violet amniotic solution, he took down two jugs of chemical from his metal shelves.

  With a mask over his face, he poured the contents of one jug and then the other over the figures in the tank. He quickly stepped back from the billowing fumes. Inside these clouds, the bodies in the tank were indistinct shadows. They appeared to have all become one tangled, deformed being. But the limbs shortened, the shadows began to fade away, leaving only the vapor...which the vent fans sucked out into the night air to be dispersed like the ashes of a pyre.