Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh

by Jay Lake

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF METAL AND FLESH

  JAY LAKE

  Copyright © 2013 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

  Cover photography by Becky van Ommen.

  Cover art and design by Sherin Nicole.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-415-7 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-340-2 (hardcover)

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  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

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  Id: Precursor

  I am become machine. Tiny springs click broken-backed and slack-spiraled deep within my lungs as my bellows-breath rattles in the iron cage of my ribs. My blood is the sour oil of regret. My bile is the musty taste of lost wisdom and found sorrow. When I try to move my fingers, they clack with the rust of years and the straining of gears, my touch reaching for something which I cannot quite see.

  There is nothing to see. Oily dark marks the black I can reach with what remains to me. This transformation, it has become my life, my art, myself. This transformation has become me.

  α: Love in the Time of Metal

  Distant doctors chatter and chaffer, their words a susurrus caressing his ears as the ocean caresses the shore. Machines whisper as well, their quiet clicking and gentle beeping a womb for the dying, ushering the man who was toward the soul who will be. Or won’t.

  There is honest confusion and dishonest amusement on that subject. To be possessed of a soul implies an obligation towards ethics, morality, behavior to which one can live up in the face of ultimate judgment. He wonders—his mind floating free on an ocean of pharmaceuticals, dancing freely within the chemical pathways of his neurophysiology—wonders on the link between cause and action, between thought and deed, between the weak and palsied vibrato of the human heart and whatever might pass for the vessel of the human body.

  “Love is a fountain,” he says. No words pass the space where his lips once were.

  The machine-beeps change tone, acquiring a plaintive tone in pursuit of his eventual health and healing. Doctor voices change.

  “Love,” he says again, “is a fountain. Can you hear me?”

  Noise degrades to fractured fractal silence, punctuated by the rubber screech of nurses’ shoes and the whispers of the dying.

  Has time passed, he wonders?

  “Can you hear me?”

  The silence bounces, echoing down metal shafts and through long hallways of cartilage to impinge on the slow syrup of his thoughts.

  “Can you hear me? I’m talking about love.”

  “Love,” says a woman with her final breath.

  “Is,” cries an infant in a distant ward.

  “The most human,” coughs a tubercular with the last bloody bit of his lungs.

  “Mistake of all,” the machines echoes.

  i: Love in the Time of Flesh

  Markus spent years planning the first cut. Danni had been helpful, bringing him books, taking him to torture room parties. Sometimes even more special field trips.

  One day she came by his apartment. Markus was carving Celtic knots into the skin side of a slab of pork. Practicing. It was his day off from the bookstore job, when he could think even less than usual.

  “Hey, hon,” Danni said, slipping through the door and walking across the room to plant a kiss on his forehead. She clanked when she walked, as she always did—six metal bars set into the inside of each thigh. Not that she had a lot of extra flesh for such work, but somehow Danni managed. “Got a surprise for you.”

  “Mmm . . . ” Markus was trying to work out how to cut a loop and keep the center skin in place. “How’s things?”

  “Oh, you know. Metal. Surprise, Markus. You listening?”

  He looked up. Her hair was orange this month, about the color of shrimp on a low-end sushi bar, and she’d been inking her face with laundry marker camouflage patterns in sympathy with the current war. “Listening now,” he said, though he kept the scalpel steady in his hand.

  “Daddy Nekko set you up with something special.”

  Markus didn’t like Daddy Nekko. Daddy Nekko had far too much of a hold on Danni’s time and imagination for his comfort—he’d thought that before they’d started sleeping together, and he’d keep thinking that long after she was done with him. Daddy Nekko had put the bars into Danni’s thighs. The damned things hurt Markus’ temples every time he went down on her.

  “What kind of special?” he asked, his voice slow and low.

  “Your kind of special, hon.” She kissed him again, took the scalpel away, and curled up on his lap, sitting half on his pork skin.

  Danni drove, her little gold Honda Civic plastered with Goth girl stickers—Born to Cry, It’s All About the Pain: The Metal’s Just a Souvenir, My Other Girlfriend Lives in a Box. Markus hated folding himself in and out of the car. He was several inches too tall not to bang something on the body every God damned time.

  Danni only laughed, same as she ever did. “You’re a big lunk who deserves to go thunk.”

  “Fuck you,” he said amiably.

  “Later.”

  Then they were off through the intestinal avenues of San Francisco, Danni throwing the gear shift around with a mad abandon which promised to make some mechanic’s house payment soon. Markus sank into his seat, covered with some weird Hawaiian shirt fabric, and closed his eyes, letting the swaying and banging of the little car take him wherever Danni wanted to go.

  When she slammed to a halt, he opened his eyes and looked around. They hadn’t crossed a bridge or headed along a highway, so they had to be somewhere in San Francisco proper. Down by Army Street maybe? Chavez, whatever it was now. The Civic idled along on a quiet avenue of crumbling warehouses, two- and three-storey facades from a time when even the utilitarian was a subject of pride. Art deco capitals topped fake columns now eroded to lines on plaster, while pigeons nested among the iron ruins of once-proud signs long gone to glass powder and stubbed, rusted wires.

  The only other vehicle in sight was an aging eighteen-wheeler, cab the color of a junkyard, trailer covered with peeling, leprous paint in the remains of what had once been a hippie mural celebrating organic produce, or perhaps the victory of the People’s Vegetable Army. The truck was backed up the loading dock of one of the warehouses, a tarp dropped down to cover whatever was being transferred.

  “You owe Daddy Nekko,” she said quietly.

  For what? Markus wanted to say, but he knew better than to ever argue with Danni. Especially not when she was like this. Previous sudden excursions had resulted rather memorably in a group sex session with a lesbian biker gang consisting of an astonishingly high percentage of East Asian midgets, a trip to a ’shroom farm in Mendocino where he’d gotten higher than he’d believed possible, and a night in an abandoned jail talking to a man who believed he was Jesus and had performed some convincing sleight-of-hand with cheap red wine.

  In short, Danni had conditioned Markus to expect anything, despite his native cynicism.

  “Wait ’til they’re done,” she whispered. She then dug into her minimal cleavage for a spliff about the size of a fat-point sharpie which she proceeded to light off and share with Markus.

  He descended into a pleasant haze of green tobacco and watched while the leprous trailer rocked as if giants were having sex within.

  Sail Selvage: A Portrait

  Selvage, Sail; Senior, 1979

  Drama club, home economics club, recreational band

  “She can slice and dice with the best of ’em, dude.”
/>   —Spanky Fuentes

  “Best dancer in the senior class.”

  —Mindy Carstairs

  The photo is of a beautiful girl, brunette hair falling over one side of her face in the classic yearbook twist. Her eyes are half-lidded, with a sultry look that any thirty-year-old chicken hawk knows all too well. She’s thin, rail-thin, the kind of girl a man could almost put both hands around. There’s a lot of miss-you-babes written in her yearbook, notes from boys who had it good with her and are wondering if the college girls will be any better than a home girl with spreading legs and a smile nicer than Mom’s.

  Superego: Judgment

  Oh, God, what have I done? This isn’t what I meant.

  I can barely breathe. When they ask me to blink, it doesn’t quite work. I can see Dr. Thompson’s files, while he talks to that nurse with the garlic breath. There is a scan clipped to the top. MRI or something. I don’t know, but it is . . . like seeing a demon of me. What the hell are they scanning me with? I don’t remember any tests that would make me look like . . . that.

  My eyes are drawn, and turn away at once. Like a kid playing with magnets that spring together or apart again depending on the poles. It is me, part of me, inside me, a piece of me.

  And I cannot look at it.

  I feel sick, sick as I had the first time I’d cut away a part of my body. My toe. Pinkie. Small enough to be lopped with a pair of bull dykes with blue electrical tape on the handle and an old Sears price tag still clinging to one red plastic-sheathed handle. It fell away, no bigger than the nub of a peanut, and my blood poured like an orgasm from my foot, me laughing and giggling into the tub until I was faint with heat from the shower steam and blood loss and wrapped duct tape around my foot, the entire roll until it was a big silver-gray ball, and I couldn’t walk for days and God damn me, I cannot look at that scan the color of the dark side of duct tape, black as old blood, my face shriveled as the toe which yet sits in a sugar bowl on my desk, my eyes starting from inside, rippled spread of skull like the ocean’s whipped waves frozen to dark plastic and something that might have crept from inside the freshest of wounds, a guilty grin upon its face.

  My face.

  There is a guilty grin upon my face.

  Oh, God, what I have done?

  I love her.

  Loved.

  Love.

  It is all my doing.

  Liver and Lights

  Surging dark surf, roiling through channels like Noah’s flood sent down a thousand miles of concrete ductwork. All the world’s filth passes here, the East River of the human body, the place where everything comes to die, or migrates to in the time after death, ever seeking repatriation with the great unknown.

  Markus sails the standing wave of heme, wallowing in his own oxygenation, dodging killer t-cells and the mighty whites that sound and thrash amid the depths of the vessels and vesicles which writhe within him. He is not sure if this is a voyage of the mind or a voyage of the body. While he has handled several livers in his life, he is fairly certain that he has never seen his own, not from the inside.

  A voice echoes in his head, long ago preaching from a high lectern, a distant, fearsome man with a slap-leather Bible in one hand and a metal belt-end in the other. “And so the Bible does tell us, in the book of Lamentations: Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people!”

  My liver is poured upon the earth, Markus thinks, and me with it. Then he is within, passing ever smaller into the network of channels and canales which interpenetrate the lobes more tightly than ever any two lovers found a way to be one.

  “What?” grumbles the liver. The voice is a rumbling mix of thunder and fear, toxic echoes in the undertones of a busy someone—something?—turning reluctant attention to a necessary if regrettable gadfly.

  “I’m sorry,” Markus says. He doesn’t mean it, and his liver knows. The mind can lie to itself, but not to the body.

  There is a whiff, sewers and hospitals mixed together in an unholy duo of sepsis. The liver does protest.

  “So . . . ?” The voice now like gravel sliding down a cliff, pushing boulders onto a stalled school bus.

  “I need to know . . . ” He cannot remember now what it is he means to ask. “I need to know why . . . how . . . what . . . ”

  “Why?” The liver is ponderous, nearly angry now, enfolding him like the wrath of Mother. “Why? Why have you visited the filth and poisons of the world upon me? Why have you driven yourself past breaking me? Why have you swallowed so much cum, so much spew, so much woman sweat?”

  “No.” Markus struggles for clarity. Distant machines whicker, complaining of ill health, stress, the onset of Cheyne-Stokes respiration and ketone breath, and other premortem breakdowns. “I want something else,” Markus says.

  Even the angry liver can hear the external threats. It squeezes him tight, purpling meat enfolding him until the breath leaves his lungs and his heart skips beats, economizing the last jolts of energy in the face of this most bizarre autoimmune suicide. “What do you want?”

  He is weeping now, fear and regret mixed in a stone soup of the soul. “Love is a fountain. What became of my love? What became of my love?”

  “Ah . . . ” The liver releases him to the flow of his blood, the pounding of his pulse. Markus is swept away, borne beyond consciousness and sense into some other territory that means less and less with each washing beat, cleansed of his toxins and baptized in bile, a new man, whole—in a sense—made into something else, his own fears temporarily taken up in the twinned lobes of the great filter of his body.

  β: Love in the Time of Metal

  He has become aware of linoleum. It is a nineteenth-century miracle of materials science borne forth into the twenty-first century on a wave of legacy flooring and ruptured maintenance budgets. There is linoleum beneath him, its ancient linseed oil surging slowly upward through layers of vinyl and hypoallergenic underlayment.

  His veins are linoleum, too, or possibly Teflon. He is unsure now. There had been a project once, replacing some of his venous routing with external tubing. Surgical staples clung to his body, crisscrossed with tape in pleasing colors and patterns, bearing the dark and viscous blood home to the heart. The engineering of the human circulatory system had confounded him, then, but later, there had been more cleverness.

  Now he is aware of linoleum, even as he sinks further and faster into the floor. He is spreading thin, his blood spilling out to a barely visible slick, the cells dissolving into tiny, purposeless machines that will wander the cracks and interstices of the hospital forever, each carrying a whispered fragment of his soul until he is attenuated into the very fabric of the ancient building and each brick whispers and whimpers his name.

  Her name.

  His lost, lovely, luscious love.

  “Love is a fountain,” he whispers.

  The floor above and around him has no answer, only the echo of a million footsteps and a thousand squeaking gurneys, the passing of lives in the rhythm of the badly greased wheels and the shuffling attendants with their cigarette breath and sad assignations in the staff locker room after hours.

  “Love is a fountain.”

  Even the air ducts are silent for once.

  “What became of her?”

  In the endless noise of his dissolution he remembers there is something he cannot face, some face he cannot look at, some look his eyes will not meet. Remembering, he forgets, his scream quiet as ever his passion had been.

  “It was a mistake,” echoes a voice he might once have recognized, but he is spread too thin to understand what it is he might be hearing.

  ii: Love in the Time of Flesh

  Pleasantly stoned, Markus followed Danni down the cracked sidewalk. The warehouses seemed larger than they had before, older, more ragged. The walls might have been breathing, he wasn’t sure.

  She walked close in front of him, her hips swaying in the tight leather pa
nts she favored. Danni was a little woman, lithe, he thought—that was her word, “lithe.”

  The hippie truck growled to life with a sudden kicking of the starter that startled him. Markus flattened back against the wall, even as Danni laughed without turning around.

  It wasn’t the noise. No one had climbed into the cab, come or gone from the vehicle.

  The truck ground its way into gear with a racket that put Danni’s abuse of her Civic to shame, them rumbled away, dragging the concealing tarp the better part of a block before it dropped off. The rear door of the trailer was spray-painted with a slogan in some Cyrillic language—Russian, probably, in San Francisco; like KGB gang tagging.

  Then she pulled him into a narrow walkway between two warehouses, along a path through shattered glass, cigarette butts and the corpses of ancient bicycles.

  “Visitors’ entrance,” Danni said. Her voice was almost normal.

  “Yeah.” Markus wasn’t afraid, not exactly, but there was something wrong here. She was daring him to ask, entrance to what, but he knew better.

  Then they were at a door, plywood boarding up what had once been glass or mesh, painted over in a dozen layers of old color now flecked like a shattered, drab rainbow. Danni shoved her shoulder against the door, bouncing her weight twice, before it sprang open with a screech of strained plywood and protesting nails.

  Markus followed her through, his leather jacket snagging on something.

  Inside reeked of rot and bandages and things left wet in the shadows far too long. They were in a little office, old furniture crusted with rat droppings and the fluff of asbestos insulation pulled down for nests. The path from outside led into the jumbled sea of water-logged cardboard on the floor and out through a gaping door into the wider warehouse.

  As they walked in the mucky shadows, Markus heard a cow lowing.

  “What?” he blurted, before stopping himself.

  “Daddy Nekko knows what every good boy wants,” Danni said.

  He could hear her grinning, even in the dark.

  They followed the reek of blood and the echo of meaty thumps through the shadowed gloom of the warehouse. There were low, heavy noises ahead, and a whuffling like the breath of dozens of bodies. Danni pulled aside a curtain of heavy-gauge plastic and they stepped into light.