By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  “Would that do it?”

  “I told you this was the center of the world. Look! The people running things here, they’re the best in the business. They know all the names, they know who done what. And where and when too. And if they don’t know, they just pick up the phone. Once a girl works here she can go anywhere. Anywhere! She’ll get a job just like that. She’s made, you know? That’s why everybody wants to work here. That’s why you need juice. Or else maybe the biggest tickets in the world.”

  “What’s tickets?”

  “What’s tickets! Say, where you from anyway?”

  “Pittsburgh,” he said quickly but she didn’t hear him.

  “Tickets are, you know, fits. A girl needs a big set of tickets to work here.”

  “You don’t have tickets?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my tickets.” She straightened her shoulders. “They’ll do till something better comes along.”

  “But if you had big tickets you wouldn’t need any juice.”

  “Listen! To work this town without juice you’d need a pair of tickets bigger than the Goodyear blimp.”

  She ordered a bottle of Chablis, for which he paid. He liked the bitter taste.

  “You in for a good time?” the girl asked, wondering how much she could take him for.

  “Actually I’m here visiting a sick aunt,” he answered, knowing she had no money.

  “I’ll show you everything you need.”

  “She’s got cancer,”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “By the time I get there she’ll be dead.”

  “For fifty I’ll take you round the world.”

  “What’s round the world?”

  “Say, you sure you’re from Chicago?”

  “You’re from Chicago.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “What is?”

  Eyes locked together.

  “You buying or selling?”

  “You don’t have big tickets.”

  “You don’t have any juice.”

  The electric smiles were turned off, but in the neon night no one noticed.

  The following evening he returned to the Strip, this time going to the Sands Hotel where he went into the casino. He had no intention of gambling but he wanted to watch the action for a while to see if what he was seeking might be found there. A half hour taught him it was hopeless. The women were either tourists with men in tow or locals looking for men with money. The sight of all those women with mouths agape and bodies intact pained the sensitive young man and he longed to be about his father’s work. But he resolved to stick to his plan; this one time he would search out the money first.

  That many of the women were prostitutes or traders of one persuasion or another didn’t bother him at all. Sex was a weapon that women used against men, and so it seemed perfectly reasonable to him that some regarded it as a profession while others used it as a means of exchange. He harbored no specific ill feeling toward such women. If he sought them out it was merely because they were the most accessible to a stranger and therefore the least dangerous. Their craft required privacy. And so did his.

  He left the Sands but the story was the same wherever he went. Moneyed excitement and sexual promise, he now began to see, traveled hand in hand. Men traded money and women traded sex. The winners got what they wanted, the losers got nothing. It all seemed reasonable enough. Except for the fact that women, he reminded himself bitterly, in their total demonic rage sought to destroy men by whatever means they could. They were evil and therefore had to be themselves destroyed.

  As he looked around at the players he suddenly realized that the whole concept of Las Vegas—the money-sex trade-off, the idea of winners and losers—was nothing more than another bit of insanity in an already crazed world; paper people who once upon a time had sealed themselves in a cardboard castle, hoping to escape their pursuers. They were doomed of course. There was no possibility of true exchange between men and women, nor was anyone really a winner. “Only losers,” said the bright young man as he threw a coin into a slot machine and walked away.

  In the car again Bishop knew that he would shortly be leaving Las Vegas, just as soon as he finished what he was destined to do.

  Sitting now in the small restaurant on Fremont Street in the fourth day of his stay, the child of destiny turned his attention to the newspaper. He ordered another cup of coffee as he glanced over the headlines in the Las Vegas Sun. On page 2 he found it, a three-column story from Los Angeles through UPI. He looked at the picture of Vincent Mungo—dark, menacing, scowling. He mentally checked his own face—light, bland, smiling. He pushed the smile wider.

  The article told of the brutal murder of a twenty-one-year-old woman in her apartment in downtown Los Angeles. She had been a dancer. The body had been “savagely mutilated” but no details were given. The killer was the escaped maniac Vincent Mungo, who had left clues to his identity at the scene of the crime. Again no details were given out. The rest was all about Mungo. Physical description, background, and expert psychiatric opinion. The conclusion was inescapable. He was dangerously homicidal and would probably kill again unless quickly caught.

  Bishop, his smile gone for the moment, wished people, the men at least, could understand what he was doing. But he expected no such miracle, and he instinctively realized that he would have to live out his life and deeds hopelessly alone. Just like his father.

  He walked out, leaving the paper on the table. It was yesterday’s news.

  For the next week he rode around Vegas and the surrounding countryside, always with an eye open for his prey. One afternoon he drove out to Lathrop Wells and visited the brothel at the crossroads of US 95 and Nevada 29. Someone had told him brothels were legal in Nevada except for Vegas and Reno, where there were so many prostitutes that no building could hold them all. It seemed a sensible idea to him.

  All the action in Lathrop Wells was on the roadway: two bars, a restaurant, a few general stores and gas stations. And a flashing neon arrow set by the road, pointing to a white frame house with trees in front and a wide parking area running around the back. He pulled in along the side. Walking up to the house, he wondered if the two big red lights above the door were meant for those who had somehow missed the flashing arrow.

  Inside he quickly picked, or was picked by, a young dark-haired girl dressed in ribbons of diaphanous material that floated around her as she led him into the room. Bishop had never been with a real prostitute and he looked at the girl with great interest. When she took him over to the small sink and began washing his penis with warm soapy water he noticed that she frowned. “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  “You’re not circumcised.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Just makes it harder for me is all.”

  “Does that way cost more?”

  She shrugged. “Depends what you want.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “You want a straight lay?”

  “What’s that?”

  She glanced at him. “You know, you get inside me.”

  “No. I don’t want that.”

  “What then?”

  He told her.

  “That’s the hardest.”

  “Why?”

  “When you’re not circumcised, there’s all that extra skin I gotta take in my mouth.” She looked him over. “Cost you … ten dollars more.”

  “Really?”

  “I wouldn’t kid you, handsome.” She gave his penis a squeeze, wiped it with a paper towel. “You got the money?”

  “I have money.”

  “So get your clothes off.” She steered him to the bed. “You want mine off too?”

  “Will it cost me more?”

  “No charge.”

  “I’d like to see your body.”

  “This your first time?”

  “Yes.”

  “First time,” she said. “Son of a bitch.”

  There was a pause as she undressed. “You sure you don
’t want nothing else?”

  “Nothing else,” he said.

  “It’s your money.”

  Lying back on the bed he watched the girl hunched over him, her breasts hanging down loosely. She had a soft fleshy body, the belly skin drawn tight over a layer of baby fat. Kneeling there, she looked like a snow-white vulture swooping down on his groin. He could almost feel the claws ripping into him, tearing into his flesh, the monstrous beak eating his vital organs, teeth crunching crushing bone, pulling the life from his open wounds. He wanted to kill the hideous demon. Squinting, he watched the breasts, hanging globs of fat that could be cut off so easily with his knife. He fought to keep the breasts in focus, visualizing what he would do if only he wasn’t so small and helpless. Sudden stabs of pain wracked his body. Laughing now, he gave up the struggle as the life force gushed from him and his eyes closed in total surrender.

  When the girl returned from the sink she began to dress. “Time’s up,” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “You okay?”

  “What’s okay?”

  “You sure come hard.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Maybe you got problems. Know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “You kept saying ‘Don’t hit me. Please don’t hit me.’”

  “Yes?”

  “Only I sure wasn’t hitting you, baby.”

  “I’m not a baby.”

  “Sure, I know that.”

  On the way out he gave her a fivedollar tip. She asked him for it. “You take care of yourself,” she said.

  He wished her good luck.

  The girl smiled at him. “Who needs it? What I’m selling you gonna be buying for a long time.”

  Upon his return to the hotel Bishop lay down and cried in frustration for a long time until he drifted into troubled sleep.

  Several days of that week were spent in the desert around Las Vegas. Here, just a little way off the road, were the quiet and solitude missing from the crowded city. Here too could be seen the constant life-and-death struggle for survival as each animal, each insect, killed or was killed.

  For Bishop it was reaffirmation of his life’s course. All living things, from the smallest bug to man himself, destroyed life in order to preserve life. Destruction was a form of creation. Death was a form of life. To kill was to live, to not kill was to die. It was all simply a matter of who did the killing and who did the dying. He had no intention of being among the dead.

  His last visit of the week was to an oasis in the Amargosa Desert, seven miles from Death Valley Junction. He arrived on August io and stayed overnight. Though Ash Meadows boasted a dining room and bar, swimming pool, game room, and seventeen guest rooms set motel-style along a wood porch, its prime function was as a brothel, with the girls housed in a separate building away from the main lodge. Bishop’s taste for seclusion had prompted him to make the hundredmile journey. As he sat on the porch gazing into infinity, something he had heard the previous day came to mind. Ash Meadows, it had been said, was so remote that you could lose yourself and not even be missed.

  Something about the immensity of the landscape, with its unbroken horizon and sun-splashed whiteness, caused an uneasiness in him. Slowly he turned his head 90 degrees and saw—absolutely nothing. He hurriedly looked backward, to the guest rooms and main lodge, for confirmation. He had a sudden feeling that out there ahead of him, stretching across thousands of square miles without a living human being, devoid of all animal and plant life, lay the meaning of death. This, then, perhaps was what death was like. Emptiness. Solitude. Nothing.

  He sat like that for a long time. In his mind’s eye the young man saw a boy, the frail body bruised and bleeding, being struck again and again. He watched the torturous descent of the great whip, heard the boy’s desperate pleas.

  “I’m sorry, mother. I’m sorry. Don’t hit me.”

  Crack!

  “I’m sorry,” he screamed. “I didn’t mean it.”

  Her eyes bulged, foam caught the corners of her mouth. Her hand raised and lowered the whip again and again across his head, his neck and shoulders. There was no escape for him.

  “Please don’t hit me,” he shrieked. “Don’t hit me. Please! Please!”

  Bang!

  Crouched in absolute terror, he tried to cover his face with his skinny arms. A blow seared his wrists. He lowered his hands and another slashed open his cheek. A scream of pain rushed out of the dying young man. Blood filled his mouth.

  Again the dreaded whip landed.

  Crack!

  Slowly, slowly, the young man returned to the living. His eyelids fluttered open. Closed, opened again. He tried to focus his eyes. Everything was blurry. Faces. Faces were above him. Far away, as though through the wrong end of a telescope. They seemed to be looking at him.

  He heard noises, strange sounds. Then voices.

  “Easy does it now.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Sure. Just fainted.”

  He saw them now. Three men standing over him. No—one was kneeling next to him. Two fingers gently raised his right eyelid.

  “He’s fine. Just let him rest a minute.”

  A face, friendly, interested, beamed down at him.

  “You must’ve fainted, Mr. Jones. Happens once in a while out here. The desert, you know.” The face continued to smile. “Nothing to worry about.”

  He felt his senses returning. Eyes, ears, touch. He lifted his right hand, looked at his fingers, long slim fingers that he put to his face. They seemed cool on his skin.

  He wanted to raise his head. Someone’s hand carefully pushed it up from underneath. It made him woozy and he let it be placed back on the ground. He rested a bit longer.

  After a while they helped him over to the porch steps. Somebody got him a glass of water. Two of the men stayed with him, telling him how the heat can sometimes affect a man’s senses. They told him he should go to his room and lie down a spell. That’s all it took when the heat got you. Just a little rest.

  He told them he felt much better now. It was like they said, just the heat. He thanked them and they left. They would see him later in the main lodge. Meanwhile he really should lie down a spell.

  The porch steps were comfortable; he finished the water, staring at the endless emptiness ahead of him, He remained like that, motionless, for two hours. Later he lunched at the lodge on cold meat and beer. After a nap he wandered aimlessly around the oasis, always with an eye on the buildings. They never left his line of sight.

  In the evening he played pooi in the game room with several other guests and some of the management. He knew nothing of the game, and they kindly taught him how to hit the balls into the pockets. The ivory ball was the one that did all the hitting. He told them it seemed a lot like life. “How’s that?” someone asked, and Bishop said that it was always the individual, the loner in any group who does everything, who gets everything done. “Always the loner,” he repeated.

  “The strong-leader theory,” someone suggested.

  “Sure, some men are just natural-born leaders.”

  “Gotta be strong to get things done.”

  “Not strong, Phil. Smart. Smart up here.” The speaker pointed to his head.

  “Got nothing to do with smart. It’s drive is what it is. You got to have that damn drive.”

  “You need a vision too,” someone else said. “You gotta be able to see what ain’t there and then make it happen.”

  “Or something that is there,” said the young man, “and make it unhappen. Make it … disappear.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Yeah, it’s like Mr. Jones here says. You got to make a thing disappear.” He slammed the nine ball into a corner pocket. The ball whirled around the cushioned corner for a moment before disappearing from view.

  “Damn!”

  “Nice shot, Gus.”

  Gus laughed. “Ain’t me. It’s the cue ball done all the work.”

  “T
hat’s right. Just what the man says, one does it all. And you notice it’s always white.”

  “Least it ain’t black or Mex.”

  “What color’s Mex?”

  “Ain’t white.”

  “Damn right!”

  “It’s like my sex life,” someone said.

  “How’s that, Harry?”

  “You running round again?”

  Harry took the unlit cigar out of his mouth. “One ball,” he announced smugly, “does it all.”

  “Did he say one ball does it all?”

  “That’s what he said, Andy. He said that.”

  “Now I know why you always remind me of a pool table with half the stuff missing.”

  “Tell him, Lee.”

  Lee pointed at Harry. “What this boy needs is more balls.”

  Everybody laughed, including the young man.

  Later in the evening he walked past the small swimming pool to the house where the girls stayed. He selected a dyed blonde with a heart-shaped mouth. But this time he didn’t make the mistake of lying on the bed with her crouched over him. Instead he spread himself on the edge of the bed with the girl kneeling on a pillow on the floor.

  Afterward he gave her a fivedollar tip without her asking for it. As he was leaving he said he hoped they met again. Anyway, here’s wishing things get better for you.

  The girl laughed. Though very young, she already had the hardness that came with the life. And who the hell was he to talk about things getting better for her? What did he know about anything, the dumb Son of a bitch? She looked him straight up the eye. “On this job, mister, there’s nowhere to go but down.”

  Outside he sat again on the porch steps and looked up at the starinfested sky. It seemed to be blazing out of control. He lowered his head. Darkness was everywhere—total, absolute blackness surrounded him, was closing in on him, enveloping him, smothering him. He glanced around fearfully. Nothing. He gazed upward again. Nothing, except a hundred billion pinpoints of light shining, existing, performing just for his pleasure. He grinned nervously. Another Las Vegas in the sky. Just another fantasy land, with make-believe diamonds and flashing promise. A lot like a brothel.

  He began to feel better. Darkness was not the enemy, nor was the unknown. The enemy had form and shape and breasts. The enemy had blood and bone and belly. The enemy was all around him.