by Poppy Brite
Then Sammy’s hands spasmed and his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed face first on the table. The hypo fell out of his arm and rolled off the edge of the table, the inside of the barrel still coated with a thin film of blood. Sammy’s right hand hit the glass of whiskey and sent it spinning to the floor. Its harsh reek filled the bar.
Trevor grabbed a handful of Sammy’s hair and lifted his head off the table. It felt as light as a hollow gourd. The junkie’s face had gone a sick blue beneath the already-gray cast of his skin. His eyes were closed, his chin slicked with spit.
Then the handful of hair separated from Sammy’s scalp like dead grass ripping out of dry dirt, and Sammy’s head smacked against the tabletop and split open as easily as an overripe melon.
Shards of his fragile skull went skittering away. Much of it simply sifted to dust. His brain looked like burnt hamburger meat, desiccated and crumbling, Trevor saw a thing like a cloudy marble trailing a length of red string roll to the edge of the table. One of Sammy’s eyeballs. It teetered for a long moment, then plopped moistly to the floor. There was very little blood. The tabletop quickly became littered with teeth the color of old ivory, drifts of hair gone ashen gray, dust that smelled like a freshly opened mummy case: faintly spicy, faintly rotten.
Trevor stared dumbly at the wreckage he had made of his father’s cartoon character. The running joke about Skeletal Sammy had been that he could shoot anything. Morphine, Dilaudid, straight H, you name it. Junk peddlers had tried to poison him with battery acid and strychnine when he got too deep into them for credit, but Sammy just pumped these noxious substances into the old vein and came back for more.
It had taken the son of his creator—his brother, in a way—to give Sammy the kick he couldn’t get twice. And if Sammy had ever known where to find Bobby, he wasn’t telling now.
Trevor squeezed Sammy’s thin wrist. The skin flaked away beneath his fingers until he found himself clutching little more than bone. Once more he was alone in this place that felt as empty as a junkie’s promise. Trevor rolled down his sleeve, put his jacket back on, and walked out of the bar.
The street was still deserted. He chose a side street that ran alongside the factories but didn’t seem to lead directly into them. He had no tears left for Sammy. He kept walking.
Zach managed to drop the empty coffee mug and curl up next to Trevor before the pain slammed into his chest. For several seconds it rendered him quite unable to breathe, and he thought that was it: he’d killed himself quick and neat with a single dose of a socially acceptable drug used by billions of people without a second thought every day of their lives.
Then his lungs hitched and he was able to suck in a shallow, agonizing little breath, then another. His heart was beating so hard it made his limbs tremble and his vision throb. He rolled closer to Trevor, hooked an arm across Trevor’s chest, made sure their heads were close together on the pillow.
Every muscle in Zach’s body felt pulled in too many directions, stretched too thin. He imagined the fibers pinging and snapping one by one. The pain was exquisite, electric. It burned and jittered and screamed. The mushrooms in his system only upped the ante.
A red curtain began to draw across his vision. Zach let his eyes unfocus, felt himself slipping. It occurred to him that if he blacked out and had frightening dreams, the stress on his heart might kill him before he could wake up. I don’t care, he thought. If I can’t find Trevor, I don’t have a hell of a lot of reason to come back.
The pain lessened, then disappeared. He felt as if his weak flesh and his confining brain were dissolving, releasing him. All at once Zach found himself hovering somewhere near the center of the room, staring down at the two bodies on the bed. Their limbs were intertwined, anchoring each other. They looked defenseless, as fragile as the cast-off husks of locusts that would shatter at a touch.
This is real! thought Zach. I’m having an actual out-of-body experience! He tried to quash the thought, afraid it might jolt him back into his flesh. Instead he suddenly felt himself skimming along the ceiling, on the verge of being pulled through the wall. Zach dug in his psychic nails and fought to stay in the bedroom. He was afraid to lose sight of their bodies. And on the other side of that wall was the bathroom.
But he was already through, circling madly near the ceiling, so close he could count the cracks in the yellowed paint and the cobwebs that clogged the light fixture. The room whirled faster, faster. Now there was no ceiling, no floor, nothing but a nauseating blur of toilet and tub and sink that looked stained again with rotten blood, though it might have been the shadows. Zach felt dizzy with centrifugal force and terror.
He was in a vortex, being sucked toward the tub. For a moment he thought he would go spinning straight down the black orifice of the drain. But then he saw the glittering shards of mirror and felt himself swirling into them, fragmenting. It was like being forced through a screen, like falling into a kaleidoscope edged with razor blades.
Zach recognized the next place he saw. It was a place he knew well. It was his cradle, his home, his most addictive drug.
It was cyberspace.
The writer Bruce Sterling defined cyberspace as the place where a telephone conversation seems to occur. This could be extrapolated to include the place where computer data was stored, and the place a hacker had to travel through to get the data. It had no physical reality, yet Zach had an image of it as vivid and sensibly laid out as the streets of the French Quarter. Cyberspace was part cosmos, part grid, part roller coaster.
Right after leaving his body in the bedroom, Zach had felt very light and slightly damp, like a breath of water vapor or a spare scrap of ectoplasm. Now he was utterly weightless, without physical properties. He was composed of energy, not matter. He was a creature made of information. He was traveling through cyberspace at a very high speed.
Then suddenly he wasn’t, and it knocked the wind out of him.
Zach sat up with a deep burning sensation in his solar plexus, pressed his hand to his chest and touched crisp cloth. He seemed to be wearing some kind of suit. He was reclining in a padded chair, hard sticky floor under his feet, lurid light assaulting his eyeballs. As he became accustomed to it, he was able to make out rows of seats around him, slumped bodies and nodding heads, bloody images flickering across a wide screen. A movie theater.
The film appeared to be a composite of any number of works by Italian splatter film directors, but with an all-male, homosexual cast, set to a screeching saxophone soundtrack. A boy carefully rolled a condom onto another’s erect penis, raised a pair of huge gleaming scissors and snipped the whole thing off, then pressed his mouth to the raw hole and drank the fountaining blood. A white man masturbated over a prostrate black man, ejaculated a pearly stream of maggots into the straining, glistening ebony back.
Zach saw that most of the other filmgoers were seated in pairs. Here and there a head bobbed gently in a lap, half-concealed by a dirty overcoat. Zach watched the movie for a few more minutes. Just as he was starting to get interested, someone slid into the aisle seat next to him and put a warm hand on his leg.
He turned with a well-rehearsed fuck off on his lips. This was a situation he’d encountered at the movies ever since he could remember, and he wasn’t enough of a slut to let some anonymous pervert jack him off, hardly ever.
But instead of letting the words fly, Zach just stared. The person sitting beside him was Calvin.
The guitarist wore a charcoal suit with a black turtle-neck sweater underneath. His gaunt grinning face seemed to float on the gloom of the theater. His blond hair was slicked back, giving him a vulpine look. The pressure of his fingers increased. He leaned over to whisper, and his lips brushed Zach’s ear. “Do you want this as bad as I do?”
No, I just want Trevor, thought Zach. He opened his mouth to say so, and what came out was “Hell, yes.” Then Calvin’s mouth was attacking Zach’s, Calvin’s hand was sliding up to his crotch, tugging at his zipper, freeing his eager, treachero
us dick. Calvin’s fingers squeezed and stroked him expertly. Zach wrapped his arms around Calvin’s neck and kissed back hard. Their tongues exchanged molten secrets.
This was all we ever wanted from each other anyway, Zach thought, a down-and-dirty, no-strings-attached fuck. What was so wrong with that? He couldn’t remember why they had stopped the first time.
The skin of his balls was tightening, his dick aching and throbbing. Zach broke the kiss and gasped for breath. Over Calvin’s shoulder he caught a glimpse of the movie screen. A hand was sliding up and down the shaft of a penis he recognized as his own. The camera panned back until he could see a tangle of naked limbs, including an arm whose biceps was tattooed with a little cartoon character Zach could just make out as Krazy Kat. He guessed Mr. Natural hadn’t been invented yet in this universe. Well, he thought incoherently, Krazy Kat was a fag.
The camera zoomed back in on the hand. Its quickening rhythm matched Calvin’s. Zach felt himself getting ready to let go hard. The screen filled with glistening purple flesh, huge slippery fingers. Then come was pulsing from the enormous lips of the movie penis, and from his own aching dick as well.
But Zach saw only what was happening onscreen. The come made a deadly rainbow arc in the air, landed on the hand, and began to dissolve the skin. Tiny holes appeared where it hit, sizzling and spreading, reducing the layers of flesh and muscle to blackened lace. The matter dripped off the framework of the bones, oozed down the shaft of the penis. Still the huge skeletal fingers stroked. And still Calvin’s hand moved in his lap.
Calvin leaned in for another kiss and Zach saw his face, no longer just gaunt but emaciated. Zach shrank back against the seat as Calvin’s skin blossomed with purple lesions like the ones he had seen on his own face in the bathroom mirror. Calvin’s tongue was a dead dry sponge thrusting between his lips, questing toward Zach’s mouth, seeking moisture.
Then it wasn’t Calvin at all; it was the clerk from the convenience store in Mississippi. Leaf. Those elegant cheekbones were hideously exaggerated now; those honey-colored eyes were like chips of topaz set in a ruined mosaic. His lips twitched as he leaned toward Zach. He stroked Zach’s thigh with a disintegrating hand.
“Oh,” he whispered, “just come over here and let’s fuck …”
Then he was the person before that. And then he was the person before that. And then she was the person before that. And they just kept changing, and they just got worse …
Zach shoved himself out of his seat and stumbled backward down the row. He tripped over a tangle of feet and turned to apologize, but the pair of faces that tilted up to him were blotched with purple, horribly withered. He saw his lover pushing itself up, supporting itself on the seat backs, making its way slowly toward him. Above the blaring soundtrack Zach heard labored breathing, dry, painful coughing. All over the theater other figures were beginning to stir, to rise.
Zach turned and ran. He vaulted over the tangled legs, sprinted up the aisle, and burst out into the lobby. A set of glass doors led out onto the street. At the last second before he grasped the handle, Zach knew they would be locked. He would be trapped here in the lobby with the zombies coming for him, and when they got him they would smear him across the glass like a crushed strawberry. He had seen enough movies to know what happened when the zombies got you.
But the doors weren’t locked, and Zach slammed through them at high speed. On the far side of the street, pausing to push his glasses up and catch his breath, he glanced across at the theater. Its facade was lavishly decorated in art deco tiles and marble, deep crimson, jade green, jet black. The marquee was wrought of fluted, gleaming chrome like a 1930s dream of the future. On its sign was spelled out—in red block letters a foot high—THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS.
“Cute,” he snarled, and started walking fast, looking behind him every half block or so. The street remained empty. He guessed the zombies were quarantined in the theater.
Zach held his hands up in front of his face and stared at the palms. The lines in them were dark pink, healthy-looking enough though slightly damp with sweat. He had always heard that if you were really sick, the lines in your palms turned gray.
But he felt fine. Was the place trying to scare him with its rotting mirror images and its wank-house zombies? Or was it trying to warn him of something?
If he ever got out of here, Zach decided, he was going straight to the nearest health clinic and getting a blood test. He didn’t want one, but he thought maybe it was time to start considering things other than what he wanted.
Soon he was far from the theater. The deserted streets felt half-familiar. This place wasn’t New Orleans, but Zach thought New Orleans had been used to flavor it like a spice. He could see it in the gas lamps on the corners, the high curbs, even a cast-iron balcony or a gate leading into a shadowy courtyard here and there. The night air was cool on his face, though it smelled nothing like the alcoholic haze of the French Quarter. The odor here was more like Toxic Alley, the poisonous stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, a faint ghost of chemicals and burning oil.
He saw a fountain bubbling fitfully in a tiny concrete park and stopped to rest. The fountain struck him as odd, and after a moment Zach realized why: there were no coins on the bottom, not even pennies. He had never seen a public fountain without pennies on the bottom. Instead there seemed to be a few small faceted jewels, so translucent in the clear water that Zach could hardly be sure they were there at all.
Well, you’re in a hallucination now, he thought. And it isn’t even your own. Better get used to seeing some weird shit.
He stared at his feet and suddenly registered that they were clad in shoes he’d never seen before, two-toned wingtip loafers polished within an inch of their lives. For the first time he thought to check out the rest of his outfit.
Some kind of suit, he’d thought in the theater. But what a suit! It was woven from nubbly-textured cloth of the palest shell pink, cut loose and baggy, with vast lapels. Underneath he had on a cream-colored shirt and an extravagant red silk tie with a tiny paisley figure. Zach felt something on his head, reached up to investigate. A beret. Wouldn’t you just know it. Even the lenses of his glasses seemed to have taken on a smoky hipster tint.
Birdland might try to fuck with you at every turn, Zach thought, but at least you got to dress cool.
He heard a ripple of music nearby. The clear voice of a saxophone, leisurely rising, then descending. The sound was getting closer. By this time Zach would not have been surprised to see Charlie Parker (or his zombie) come swaying round the corner, eyes shut tight and forehead wrinkled, blowing the horn as he walked. Bird used to come onstage like that, Trevor had told him, after the rest of the band had already been playing for an hour or so. He would start somewhere way off in the bowels of the club, and the other musicians would gradually fall in with him as they heard his approach, until by the time he walked onstage Bird was leading the band.
But what rounded the corner instead was, in the most literal sense of the term, a solo instrument. Walking on four multijointed, chitinous-looking legs, depressing its own keys with two equally insectile three-fingered hands, brass gleaming through a web of scuffs and scratches, came an unaccompanied alto saxophone.
“Oh now,” Zach muttered, “this is just silly.”
The music stopped, and a low fluting voice spoke out of the instrument’s bell. “Hey, cat—you in a cartoon, dig? Cartoons is s’posed to be silly. Here, have a stick of tea and you be gettin’ silly too.”
Zach could see no speaking apparatus anywhere on the thing, nothing that vaguely resembled lips or vocal cords, yet the voice did not sound synthesized. The alto reached one of those spiny claws deep into the curve of its bell and pulled out a fat twisted cigarette. This it tossed to Zach, who caught it eagerly.
“Pick up on that tea,” the sax advised him. “Don’t be lettin’ zombies bring you down. They ain’t cool or viperish neither. Not like us.”
“Hey, t
hanks.”
“De nada,” said the instrument suavely. “Any descendant of Hieronymus is a friend o’ mine.” It began to noodle off down the street, playing a few bars of “Ornithology.”
“Wait!” Zach stuck the joint in his pocket and hurried after it. “Do you know where any of the McGees are? Trevor? Bobby?”
The alto switched to “Lullaby of Birdland” but did not otherwise reply. It had a half-block start on Zach, and it always seemed to stay just a little too far ahead of him, dropping to all fours and scuttling like a roach on those barbed legs, still playing itself with its spiky little hands, the gay tune spiraling behind. Zach’s fancy new shoes pinched his feet when he tried to hurry. He could not catch up. Eventually the thing disappeared down an alley and lost him altogether.
Now Zach was in a narrow street lined on both sides with dark buildings that seemed to lean forward over the sidewalk, swaying slightly. Many of the buildings had old-fashioned stoops and stairs leading up to recessed entryways that might have once been elegant, but all were in a state of advanced decay. He saw fanlights with the stained glass broken out, only a few shards remaining like jagged multicolored teeth in the frames. Overhead he could barely make out a purple slice of sky. The place was deserted. Zach reached into his jacket, knowing somehow that there would be a streamlined silver lighter tucked in a pocket. There was.
He leaned against a stoop, stuck the joint in his mouth, and lit up. An acrid, bitter taste filled his mouth, nothing remotely like marijuana. He burst out coughing. “A stick of tea,” the alto had said, and Zach assumed it was talking beatnik slang. Now he remembered a panel from Birdland of cat-headed smugglers at a river dock, unloading bales of Darjeeling and Earl Grey under cover of darkest night. It really was tea.
Well, fuck it. Caffeine had started him on this journey; maybe it would preserve him. Zach took another hit off the stick of tea and found himself getting a delicious dizzy high, as good as that from the sticky green bud Dougal used to sell in the French Market. He felt a sudden wave of homesickness, wondered if he would ever see New Orleans again.