Glitter & Mayhem

by John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas

“It’s Hunger City,” she said, as if he would recognize the name. As if it would explain everything. “Do you like it?” Jeanie was not being sarcastic, but proud.

  Mr. Jones thought, How could anyone like this? It was some hell version of Manhattan. A ghost town. He got a sudden flash of the real New York: the densely packed streets, young people in bright clothes, and the cars, so many shining cars. He knew by the feel of it that this was an old memory, imprinted on the brain of a very young man.

  “This is awful,” he said.

  Jeanie seemed disappointed. “We thought it would trigger something for you.”

  The teenager led him down the block. Mr. Jones heard things moving behind them, paws tapping across the rubble. But Jeanie, whose ears must have been better than his own, said nothing, and so he said nothing.

  Jeanie led him across expanse of cracked concrete, toward a glass and steel monolith rising up behind it. As they entered its deeper shadow, Mr. Jones glimpsed red eyes in his peripheral vision. He turned, but there was nothing there.

  “Watch out.” Jeanie put a hand on his chest, pushing him back, and something heavy slapped the ground a few feet in front of them. A coil of rope, dropped from above.

  He looked up. The rope trailed down the side of the building, twitching like something alive. Another shape dropped toward the street.

  “Here he comes,” Jeanie said. “A regular Tarzie.”

  It was a man, his body twisting around the rope as he slid down it. He hit the ground in a crouch. His face was painted with a white grinning skull.

  “This is Jack,” Jeanie said.

  Jack rose, extended a hand.

  “Your hands are smoking,” Mr. Jones said.

  “So they are,” the man said, grinning. He clapped his palms and ashes puffed the air. “I just want to say, I’m dead honored. Your work means so much to me. Obviously.” Despite the Halloween paint, he managed to look sheepish.

  “Were you followed?” Jack asked Jeanie.

  “Yes,” Mr. Jones said.

  “The Moon boys are back in the Temperance Building,” Jeanie said.

  “They’ll figure out he’s missing soon enough,” Jack said. “Better hurry.” He whistled, and figures began to move out of the shadows of the building. A skeletally thin man in a 19th century bathing suit; a limbless woman, wriggling across the ground; a dwarf, less than three feet tall, in an immaculate tuxedo. A larger figure loomed out of the dark — a man, almost eight feet tall, naked except for the brass tubes that wrapped his body. The bell of a sousaphone sat on his left shoulder like a second head.

  Mr. Jones backed away from them. “What do you want? I don’t have anything.”

  He felt a tug on his jacket and turned. A pair of bald–headed school girls, joined at hip and shoulder, grinned shyly at him. They had two outside arms, and in each they held a single drum stick.

  Jack smiled. “Isn’t it obvious? We want to be your band.”

  “No,” Mr. Jones said. “Never again.”

  “Oh, we think you’ll change your mind,” Jack said, and the freaks — Mr. Jones could only think of them as such — burst into laughter.

  Jeanie gripped his hand. “Let me show you the body.”

  §

  Jeanie led him into the building, a vast space hollowed out by destruction. She guided him over tumbled heaps of cement, under drooping ceiling tiles and loops of electrical cables, around the black mouths of unguarded elevator shafts. Most of the band stayed outside, but Jack and a few others followed them inside, keeping to a discreet distance. The school girls giggled in anticipation.

  The body lay on a metal slab, surrounded by candles. It was a man, naked and pale, with red–orange hair streaked with black. The body sparkled in the light as if it were dusted with diamonds.

  “It’s for you,” Jeanie said. “A birthday gift.”

  Mr. Jones stepped foward. The face of the naked man was beautiful and alien. Red, glittering paint divided the face in a lightning jag. Mr. Jones touched an index finger to the face, ran a finger along that red stripe. He rubbed finger to thumb, feeling the grit.

  Jack appeared on the other side of the table. “Let me show you how to get in.” He touched the head of the body, where the bright hair met the pale skin, and pressed down. The skull parted, then opened like a flower. There was nothing inside.

  “Now you,” Jack said.

  “Get away from me,” Mr. Jones said.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Jeanie said to him in a soft, reassuring voice. She touched his forehead, directly above his nose. He felt himself tipping back.

  Someone had placed a chair beneath him; he thumped into it. The dwarf in the tuxedo stepped back, nodding as if to say, You’re welcome.

  “Open your hands,” Jeanie said, and he did as he was told. She reached up, above his line of sight, and then brought down a glowing, pulsing object. It was shaped like a brain, but it seemed made of neon. A ribbon of light was connected to the base of the brain and ran past his cheek to, he supposed, his own skull.

  “This is your noetic module,” Jeanie said.

  It was so beautiful. He touched the top of it, between two glowing folds, and it seemed to expand in his vision, like a microscope zooming in. (But it did not feel like a microscope, it felt like a telescope, bringing distant stars into focus.) Lights flashed, but there were vast sections that lay in shadow.

  “It’s only a representation,” Jeanie said. “But also an interface. Do you understand? You can go all the way down to the bottom —”

  “Atomic even,” Jack said.

  “— of the acquired substrate.”

  Jack squatted beside him. “Just slip it into the new body. The metaphor will actualize the transfer, as well as perform other updates to the module. We built it to fix some of your current, uh, difficulties.”

  Mr. Jones frowned, trying to remember what Dr. Benway had said. “But the new body won’t be me,” he said.

  “That’s not a bad thing,” Jack said. “You’re a mess.”

  “It will be mostly you,” Jeanie said. “The rest we’ve modeled with everything we know about you, your true nature.”

  “Sure, there were disagreements,” Jack said. “Some of us insisted on looking to your later work.”

  “The dance albums,” Jeanie said. “Regrettable.”

  “But in the end we all agreed — this is the you you’re meant to be.”

  Jack held out his hand, and the small man in the tuxedo handed him a gleaming pair of scissors. “Once you’ve inserted the module, you’ve got to cut the connection. We can’t do you it for you.”

  “Permissions,” Mr. Jones said.

  “That’s right!” Jack said. “Exactly right.”

  “And what happens to… me?” He touched his sternum.

  “You are in the module. But this old body will just… poof.”

  But Mr. Jones was no longer listening to them.

  He was gazing deeply now, so that he seemed to be inside the module, the light surrounding him. His thoughts flashed by, delighting him. Then he became aware of the thought about his own thoughts, and laughed. He was himself watching himself… and this thought, too, came under his scrutiny… and this thought…

  He felt himself lurch, spinning into free–fall. The beams of lights coursing past him slowed, became dollops of mercury. So beautiful, he thought (and saw this thought, too, slipping past him like a spangled parade float)… but so constrained. The more he looked, the more he noticed the frayed connections, like bridges that had been sundered, and sections as dead as the ruins of Hunger City. He reached out toward a seam of black, pricked at its edge…

  §

  He lay on his side, the cement floor rough against his ribs. What had happened? He’d been inside the noetic module, learning it. But now it lay glowing beside him, still tethered by a thread of light to the unseen socket in his head.

  Someone was screaming. Bodies all around the room were in motion. He couldn’t understand what was happening
. Then he realized: the Moon boys had found them.

  The smiling brother held a length of pipe that he might have picked up in the debris. He swung it in the direction of the giant, forcing him to step back. The big man moved awkwardly in his suit of brass tubes.

  “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” the orderly said, and laughed. He jumped forward and swung again, striking one of the tubes with a clonk. “I revoke your privileges,” the orderly said calmly, and the giant disappeared in a flash of light. The tubes clanged to the floor.

  A dozen feet away, the silent orderly held Jack by his throat. The great kitchen knife, the weapon he’d shown him back in the Temperance Building, was in the brother’s hand. He thrust it into Jack’s gut, and Jack made a sound like a door creaking open. The orderly grimaced — it was the first change of expression Mr. Jones had seen cross the man’s face — and twisted the knife a quarter turn.

  Jack… shattered. A thousand pieces clattered into the dark.

  Mr. Jones sat up in horror. The members of the band were charging toward them. And in the dark, skulking outside the perimeter, were the wolf–shapes that had been following him. They were not engaged in the fight, but circled around it, waiting.

  “Damn it,” a voice said. It was the tiny man in the tuxedo. He was staring at the spot where Jack had disappeared. “This is all going to hell.”

  The silent orderly turned toward the dwarf. He nodded deeply, as if inviting him to dance.

  The man in the tuxedo smoothed down his oil–black hair, straightened his cuffs. “Well then,” he said.

  He took two quick steps and threw himself at the orderly, yelling with with surprising savagery. He tackled the man at his thighs, sending him stumbling backward.

  Mr. Jones heard a moan. On the other side of the metal slab, out of sight of the orderlies, Jeanie lay on his back. She was still alive, but there was something wrong with his skin. It fizzed with light, like lasers turned back on themselves. She’d been wounded.

  A voice behind him said, “Making love to your ego, Jonesy?”

  The smiling orderly, done with the giant, strode toward him, twirling the pipe in one hand like a batsman warming up. “These peoploids must have taught you that trick. But you can’t just be waving yer old N.M. around where it might get hurt.”

  There was a double shriek. The bald girls lurched on too many legs to throw themselves in the orderly’s path. They raised their drum sticks like knives and stabbed at his face.

  They are heroes, Mr. Jones thought. Risking everything for me.

  He tucked the module under one arm, then pulled himself up. The pale, lovely body waited for him on the slab, the skull open like a cradle.

  Just slip it in, Jack had said. Actualize the metaphor.

  He could become someone else. This was a world in which all forms were malleable. These freaks had fashioned themselves into shapes that would please him. They’d built an entire city for him. And this shell they’d designed for him, this beautiful diamond–flecked man, was exactly what they dreamed him to be. It would make him into their dream. He wouldn’t be who he was now, but he could escape. He could beat them.

  The girls screamed in harmony, the tones a third apart. Mr. Jones looked back just as the orderly drove his pipe between the twins, tearing them in half. “Revoked!” he shouted. The bodies fell in opposite directions like a split tree. They hit the floor and each vanished in a spray of sparks.

  Mr. Jones stifled a shout of fear. The orderly winked at him. “Come here, Jonesy. Time to get back home. Yer missing all the good shows.”

  Mr. Jones lunged for the new body. But the silent orderly was already there, squatting obscenely over it. The kitchen knife was in his hands. He swiveled his head to regard Mr. Jones.

  The old man realized he wanted nothing to do with the body. It was just another type of trap. Designed by those who loved him, but a trap none the less.

  “Go ahead,” Mr. Jones said. “I don’t want it.”

  The orderly shrugged, then plunged the knife into the body’s chest. It did not twitch or react. There was no blood.

  “No unauthorized transfers,” the smiling orderly said. “Them’s the rules.”

  Mr. Jones had already backed away. He held the module in one hand, and the fingers of his other hand were pressed into one of the creases.

  “Careful now,” the orderly said. “You don’t want to be fiddling with that.”

  Mr. Jones plunged his hand wrist–deep into the module. Yet in another way, he was deeper than that. All the way in, submerged and surrounded, where thoughts became languorous as dripping mercury. He’d already learned a great deal about the flaws and dead zones in his mind. Now he was eager to make repairs.

  §

  The silent orderly jumped onto Mr. Jones’ back. They went down together, and Mr. Jones’ hand came free of the module with a cartoon pop!

  Mr. Jones laughed. The sound was low and came from far back in his throat. “Wham bam,” he said.

  The smiling orderly hesitated. “Okay now, Jonesie” he said. “Time to put that brain back where you found it.”

  Mr. Jones nodded. He reached above his head, then set the noetic module into the cavity, as if crowning himself. His skull accepted the module and enfolded around it. The orderlies bent to lift the old man, but he raised a hand to stop them. He got to his feet by himself. His smile was one they had not seen before.

  “What have you done, Mr. Jones?” the orderly asked.

  “That’s not my name,” the old man said. He slipped off the smoking jacket, let it fall to the ground. Mist rose like smoke from the neck of his pajamas.

  The skin of his face began to crackle and fall away like buckling ice, exposing a new surface the color of indigo. His eyes shifted color: one to green, the other to blue. His body assumed a new shape, and the pajamas slipped from him.

  He’d lost memories, he was almost sure of it, but other, older memories that had been irretrievable for the old man were now accessible to him. He remembered some of the things that belonged to him. He remembered the dogs.

  “Mr. Jones —” the orderly said, but his smile was faltering. Wolf shapes padded out of the dark, more than a dozen animals, their red eyes fixed on the Moon boys. As they stepped into the circle of candles, the light glittered on their diamond collars.

  “Revoked,” the indigo man asked. The dogs leaped.

  §

  Jeanie gazed up at him through light–splintered eyes, still trying to maintain cohesion.

  “You changed,” Jeanie said in wonder. “All on your own.”

  “Is there anything you want me to do for you?” he asked.

  She smiled shyly. The indigo man kneeled beside the boy and placed his lips against hers. He allowed a bit of deep purple to smear against the child’s own lipstick.

  Jeanie sighed. “This body you’re wearing — I don’t recognize it. Is it from ’72? ’74? Something in the 80s I missed?”

  “Oh little Jeanie,” he said, and rested her head gently against the rocks. “When have I ever repeated myself?”

  The Electric Spanking of the War Babies

  Maurice Broaddus & Kyle S. Johnson

  EVERYTHING WAS INEXTRICABLY TETHERED TO THE box in George’s closet. He stood on his tiptoes and let his fingers find the familiar edge of the old shoe box on the top shelf in his closet. He pulled it down carefully and carried it over to the bed where he laid it with quiet reverence. Though it had become a weekly routine, George never lost sight of how important the ceremony of dressing was to him. Clothes made the man.

  After a moment of silence, he popped open the lid and withdrew his most prized possessions: his well–worn–yet–still–fresh pair of robin’s egg blue quad skates adorned with rhinestones in geomantic formations. They were his talisman. His key.

  A Dr. J poster hung next to one of his namesake, George “The Iceman” Gervin, behind him. They were his childhood heroes. He had grown up wanting to ball just like them. The ritual, however, felt every bit a
s if he was turning his back on childish things. He was ready. His two–toned blue bell bottoms hugged him tight in all the right places. His sideburns trailed down to his chin. He tucked a pick into his sculpted Afro, leaving only the raised fist that was its handle visible. All that remained were his shoes. He slid the first one on, the familiar wave swept down over him. Before he lost himself, he paused and shouted toward the crack in his bedroom door.

  “Going out for a while, Momma.”

  From behind a curtain of beads which separated the rooms down the hall came a muffled cough and then her voice, weak and half–asleep. “Oh, is it Thursday already? Where has this week gone?”

  “Yeah, it’s that time again.”

  “Be careful, baby. The war is almost here,” she whispered.

  “What you say, Momma?”

  “You have fun now, okay? Don’t be out too late.”

  “Sure thing, Momma.” George tried to ignore how tired she sounded. She’d been hustling all day to feed his brother and sisters. He couldn’t help but think they’d be better off with one less mouth around. George returned his attention to the second skate, sliding it on easily. Pulling the laces tight, he rose to his feet. The energy coursed through him. He felt blue electricity. He felt alive. He felt free. Looking himself over in the mirror, George tugged the wide collar of his polyester shirt and watched himself disappear into the person he became every Thursday night. He was no longer George Collins. The transformation was complete. He was Shakes Humphries, the baddest mofo on eight wheels.

  §

  The Sugar Shack was an oasis in the riot–torn city. No matter how angry folks got, burning buildings and tearing up their own stuff, they left the Sugar Shack alone. It was sacred ground, but it wasn’t a place for heroes. Everything was so dark and gritty in those days, one long shadow drifting into an endless night.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, a broken world filled with broken people who reveled in their brokenness. A world populated by anti–heroes, misunderstood villains, and heroes with feet, legs, and torsos of clay, where those who stood tallest fell first. Part of him remembered an echo of how things used to be, of a time where men and women were proud and bold, which confused him because this was all he ever knew. He put it down to a childhood dream, to something he’d read in a comic or seen on the television in his youth. Something he’d lost himself in, laying on his belly in the living room, while Momma was at a revival meeting.