Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh

by Jay Lake

  (Images of a small orange-headed woman laughing through fear.)

  Did the knives flash, loving her too much?

  Did he make too much of himself?

  Did he make too much of her?

  Deep inside his metal-self, he is not proud of who he is and what he has done. Not the pain—he takes great pride in the arts he has learned—but the use and misuse of love, until she was driven away, taken away, gone away from him, leaving him with nothing more but rattling breath and blindness.

  Except his ears have returned, and his eyes.

  Maybe his skin-blindness will lift soon, and he will know true pain.

  Daddy Nekko died hard. He smiles at that, for what the fat man did to her, to his love.

  Everyone who hurt his love, hurt in the way that counts, not the way that pleasures, will die hard.

  That is why he is here, in this place, the tiny gears and motors of him grinding to empty dust amid the chaos and pleasure of a hospital ward where the nurses’ shoes squeak and the children sob endless agony and the very electricity in the walls knows the names of the dead.

  He surrenders, then, to his machine destiny, and loves himself, knives and gears and all, finds what he will in the wires within, leaving behind his fear on the garlic breath of the nurse and in the whimpering fellowship of his ward.

  And the machines go beep, beep, beep, beep, counting out the measures and rhythms of his life in slow quatrains.

  He wonders what his mother would say of her little man now.

  The Lung March

  He wafts on a column of air, a fairy feather floating on a spring wind to spin high above a blanket-pink landscape of tiny tendrils and distant forests.

  Pink?

  There is a shudder, a sort of seizure of the world, and the wind shifts with a suddenness that seems like it should have been expected. The air blowing back toward him is dank, warm, smelling of tight places with organic heat, slightly stale. Markus feels stretched, spare in that new wind, wrapped around himself like old blankets on a vagrant’s dog.

  Then the wind shifts again, cool, the spring returned, and he knows he is moving inward to the lungs, carrying his question and his quest to the great bellows which drive the air into his blood and breeze into his voice.

  This is a dark cathedral, thousands of naves and narthexes branching outward and downward and wide and narrow, as if God had grown a million fingers and wriggled them all inside a meat-sponge at once in the process of crafting His creation.

  Alveoli.

  The word comes to him, unbidden, from some distant memory.

  He has never cut lungs. Like cutting guts, the risks seemed close to suicidal. Muscle tissue is one thing, parting sweet skin like the zipper on a child’s jacket, but organs.

  “Yes,” whispers someone, but the word is lost in the gale of noise which follow almost instantly. “We have been expecting you.”

  If the north wind had a voice, it would be this, raging and clawing at him with empty fingers that scrub his scalp, echoing in his ears like a woman shouting from the bottom of a well.

  “I am here,” Markus announces.

  “We are the bellows that move the engines of life.”

  “The fountain of love?”

  “No.” The lungs seem regretful. As if the fact that even their great, slow powers are not enough should be a subject of mourning.

  “Danni is here somewhere. I lost her, lost my love.” Cut her away, he thinks, but he will not say that here, not say that now.

  “Nothing is ever lost forever.” A certain air of spongy, pink satisfaction creeps back into the lungs. “The air brings all things back to us in time.”

  “You live in cycles,” Markus protests. “Like the heart. For you the entire world has a rhythm of departure and return. A sameness.”

  “Of course. How else should it be?”

  Sitting now on the rounded edge of a bronchiole, Markus reflects on life’s patterns. Love is always easier to lose than to find. Pain for love is pleasure, pain of loss is . . . pain of a different sort. And the loss of love is unbearable.

  He remembers his mother, sitting there in the inconstant breeze. She had been warm and pink, too, in her ways, and somehow she had loved him, though Markus is not now sure how that was.

  “She will come back to you,” the lungs say with a sigh the size of horizons.

  “No. I have lost her.” Markus knows this now, that Danni is gone, this thing his body is trying to tell him.

  “She is not lost to you. She is close, closer than you know.”

  Even the lungs hear, he realizes, the resonance of the chest granting them powers denied to the fatty organs jostling within his abdomen.

  “Your wisdom is not mine,” Markus announces, realizing he must seek elsewhere for his lost love.

  There is a spasm then, another quake of the world, a cough to expel his foreign self at speed into the wider expanses of squeaking nurses’ shoes and pilfering orderlies and the cold echoes of machines that are not pink, that are not soft, that do not round themselves to his contours and blades and the bright spiked corners of his love.

  History 103

  When Markus was thirteen, he went on his first date.

  Momma was so proud. She bathed him herself in a big galvanized tub in the middle of the kitchen, while Anna and Tildy ran in and out of the room with different combinations of clothing and accessories, giggling at his nudity until Sail sent them outside to feed the chickens for a while.

  He stood, staring up at the pressed tin ceiling which sagged like one of those square-sectioned chocolate bars left too long in the sun—if chocolate was the color of old cream mixed with rust and, somehow, bird crap. Sail’s familiar hands ran up and down his body, brushing over the scars on his chest and back and butt, gently scrubbing his penis with a rough rag that made him stiff in spite of his embarrassment.

  “My little man isn’t going to do anything to get himself in trouble, is he?” she asked, still touching him.

  “No, Momma.”

  “What do you say if she asks about any of your little accidents?”

  I say I’m thirteen and I don’t have to have accidents anymore. But he didn’t open his mouth.

  And besides, those accidents could feel so nice.

  “Exactly,” Sail whispered. “You gonna be good, Markus?”

  “I’ll be good, Momma.”

  “Then let’s make sure you’ve got the right clothes. Where the hell are them girls?”

  Later she dropped him off at the Dairy Queen in Lockhart, then took the girls to a movie. Markus wondered where Sail had gotten enough money to take three people to the movies, but with his mother, anything was possible.

  He had twelve dollars and forty-two cents of his own, saved from odd jobs and sheer begging from his grandparents on the rare occasions he saw them.

  Enough money to buy him and Suzie Elle Petty burger baskets, and maybe Dilly® Bars. Markus hadn’t had a Dilly® Bar in years, hadn’t even had a restaurant meal in months and months. He was really looking forward to it.

  The Dairy Queen was all red and white and chrome, like something from when cars had fins and everybody’s hair was oiled back. He stood near the jukebox, waiting, watching, not wanting to get in line and order anything by himself. The smell of frying oil and ice cream tugged at his gut, making his mouth water at the same time as his stomach almost turned.

  Nerves, Markus told himself.

  Suzie Elle would be a normal girl.

  That thought made his knees turn to jelly.

  Markus’ date arrived forty minutes late with two other girls and three boys. They tumbled out of a dualie pickup driven by one of the boys, Billy Hardegree—who’d got a hardship license the day he turned fifteen.

  “Oh,” Suzie Elle said when she pushed in the door of the Dairy Queen.

  “He’s still here!” giggled one of the other girls. Sandy McMann, eighth grade, Markus noted.

  “I was . . . just leaving.” He spit the
words out like teeth knocked loose in a fight.

  “Come on,” Suzie Elle said, grabbing his elbow and tugging him outside. There was a breeze carrying the scent of distant cattle and fields of milo. “Look, Billy called . . . you know how it is. And you don’t have a phone, Markie.”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry.” He wanted to slide beneath the gravel of the parking lot, scuttle away with the rest of the insects.

  “Oh, stop it,” she said. “Wait for me, a little while.” She glanced around. “Down the street by the library. The porch at the side door. Where they won’t see you. I’ll be back.”

  An hour passed. Markus watched his mother drive by looking for him, watched Anna run into the Dairy Queen twice, before they gave up and the rusted old Mercury headed back out into the county. He kept his back against the bricks and his face in shadow.

  No one noticed him, not even his family. It was a long walk home, to County Road 61, but he really, really wanted to meet up with Suzie Elle again.

  Billy’s dualie truck finally roared to life, then departed bearing blonde hair and laughter and tight sweaters. A minute or so later Suzie Elle walked across the gravel, up the library lawn, and joined him in the shadows. She put her arms around his neck.

  “Listen,” she said. “A kid like you with someone like me. You know how that works. I couldn’t show my face at school. Except I heard you got . . . um . . . experience?”

  Who would know that? he wondered.

  His sisters, of course. A grade behind, sixth and fifth to his seventh.

  “Uh . . . ” Markus couldn’t think what to say. “Yeah.” Some. His groin was warm, his dick pushing against his pants.

  “Billy and me been . . . fooling.” She put her head into his neck, her breath hot against him. “He’s an idiot. Don’t know what he’s doing. You show me, I can show him.”

  Despite himself, Markus’ hands strayed to her back, sliding down to her hips.

  Just like Momma liked to be touched.

  “Where?” he whispered.

  “Blankets in the ditch over at that stand of trees behind Main and Bee,” she said, slipping her fingers into the front of his pants.

  A bit later, when he pressed her hard, she just whimpered. When he hit her, she moaned. He wished he had scissors, or needles, but her teeth were enough.

  A deputy sheriff drove up to their house a week following. The brown and gold Crown Victoria idled in the driveway behind Sail’s old Mercury as a very fat man in a tan uniform got out. He carried a nightstick in one hand.

  Markus walked outside, ready to throw up. “Momma’s sick.” Stoned out of her mind, actually, naked on the living room floor. “Can I help you?”

  “Mark Selvage?” the deputy said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I need to speak to your mother. And you’re going to have to come with me.”

  “Why?”

  The deputy’s eyes got narrow, piggy, angry. “You whupped the shit out of that girl when you raped her, son. And now she’s pregnant.”

  The nightstick swung fast and hard, catching Markus on the elbow. He collapsed, sucking in his breath with the pain.

  “You resisting arrest, boy?” the deputy asked, leaning close, beer and beef on his breath. “Answer me right now.”

  Markus tried to find his voice, but the pain had flattened his lungs.

  Another blow, to the ribs, so hard something cracked inside.

  “Don’t try to run away from me, boy. Shouldn’t ought to do what you did to that poor girl.”

  A kick this time, in his hip.

  “We’ll take good care of you down at the lockup. Couple of days to get you to juvenile, I’m sure.” He leaned close, jowls flapping. “Next time, don’t fuck with the county judge’s niece.” A tap on the forehead, almost gentle. “So where’s that pretty little mother of yours, boy?”

  Anna screaming from the porch interrupted them. After that, Markus just stared at the sky for a while, until he was dragged in the back of the Crown Victoria, his head slammed in the door twice, then driven off over bumps larger than he was, the way they made his mind bounce off skin and blood and memory.

  iv: Love in the Time of Flesh

  “It’s time for you to meet Daddy Nekko,” Danni said. She was licking the scabbed-over stump of his left pinkie, the two of them spread out on the plastic sheeting he hadn’t bothered to pull up in the weeks since taking his finger.

  Markus whimpered with the intensity of the feeling. Like rock salt being grated into skin, or vinegar and whiskey on an abrasion. “I don’t know,” he whispered.

  “You owe him.” Danni’s teeth closed over the corner of his hand, as if she’d swallowed his finger. He almost came with the sensation.

  “Yeah.” Without Daddy Nekko, he wouldn’t have gone to the slaughterhouse. Without the slaughterhouse, he wouldn’t have found his way to . . . wherever he was now. With Danni. With the pain.

  The bars in her thighs clattered together as she twitched. “You’ll love him.”

  Maybe, Markus thought. Love was an elastic concept.

  Then her teeth clamped on the bones inside his hand and new pain blossomed, within the healing wound and inside the flesh of his palm, and he felt closer, tighter, more bound to her.

  Another gear-grinding, head-banging ride through San Francisco. This time they were somewhere up near Golden Gate Park, a neighborhood that reeked of mortgage bankers and low-end venture analysts. Old ornamented houses overhung tiny garage doors, and Markus couldn’t have parked a Vespa on this street.

  Danni simply slid the Civic into a driveway, nudging it sideways up to an overhead door to completely block the sidewalk. “Come on,” she said brightly. “He’s waiting.”

  “I was expecting something like the slaughterhouse.”

  “Daddy Nekko is different.”

  They hopped out of the car, scuttled across the street and up a stone stair to a front door paneled in beveled, frosted glass, as ornate as anything Markus had ever seen. Danni pushed the door open without knocking. Markus followed her in to a front hall that was classically San Francisco. A Tiffany lamp dangled from a chain, patterned silk lined the walls, and a collection of unusably delicate furniture was scattered around, crystal bowls filled with candy and a tall vase overflowing with rusted razorblades.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Downstairs.”

  “Do they know . . . ?”

  “Of course.”

  She led him through a parlor done in the same style as the entryway, then down a flight of stairs into another world.

  The basement was tiled like a morgue out of the 1950s, all linoleum and stainless steel wall panels, with rubber mats underfoot. Massive surgical lamps nodded like hugely distended heads over a pair of slab tables complete with blood gutters. There were instrument trays standing by, covered with shrink-wrap. Stainless shelving on the walls featured an astonishing array of blades, metal objects, prostheses and electrical devices.

  No one was in the room.

  Danni stopped with a sigh that sounded like the smallest of orgasms. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  This antiseptic splendor was almost exactly the opposite of the slaughterhouse, Markus realized, a post-modern empire of blood and pain conquered with surgical precision and obsessive cleanliness.

  The bald man with London on his head stepped backward through a swinging door, still naked save his thong. He was pulling the largest wheelchair Markus had ever seen, and swiveled it around without a word or a glance of recognition to reveal the largest man Markus had ever seen. An enormous Asian.

  Daddy Nekko. Four hundred pounds if he was an ounce, the pale color of an antacid tab, like a Samoan with jaundice, naked as an Oregon pole dancer, skin blank as any ink virgin. His eyes were tiny in the folds of his face, fleshy and piggy as a deputy sheriff, and his teeth were stained scarlet as he smiled.

  “Da’i,” he said, with a voice like a mouth full of oatmeal. Even from across the room, Markus could see there was so
mething wrong with Daddy Nekko’s tongue. “We’co’.”

  “Daddy Nekko.” Danni bowed her head, twitched as if she wanted to kneel. “Thank you for seeing us.”

  “Thi’ i’ Ma’kuth.”

  It was a statement. Markus was pretty sure Daddy Nekko didn’t ask a lot of questions. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you for seeing us.”

  The chair ground across the floor toward them. “Le’ me th’ee your ’and.”

  Markus held out his left hand. The scab where his finger had been glistened, kept loose and damp by Danni’s ministrations.

  Daddy Nekko took Markus by the wrist, turning the hand over, back and forth. Then he snapped his fingers and held up his own free hand. London handed him a dental pick. Daddy Nekko began probing the skin around the scab as Markus winced, trying not to twitch. Then the fat man stabbed straight into the scab.

  Markus couldn’t hold his pain behind his teeth. “Ha . . . ”

  “Goo’ nerve denthi’y.” Daddy Nekko glanced up, his tiny eyes catching Markus’ gaze in a vise. The fat man’s whites were as red as his teeth. “You cu’ goo’.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Nekko glanced at Danni. “I can ’o i’.”

  “Markus,” Danni said slowly. “I want you to trust me now. Really trust me. Daddy Nekko can take you beyond . . . anything. Even what we already share. But you have to follow him. Without questioning. For the love of me, will you let him do what needs to be done next?”

  Sail flashed in Markus’ head, his week face-down in the Caldwell County jail, those summer nights with his sisters—all the years and blood and pain of his life. Was he waiting for this?

  What was he waiting for?

  Everything with Danni was a plunge, from one unknown to the next, following the pain.

  “All right.”

  London led Markus to one of the tables, pulled out leather straps, and fastened down his entire body. The nodding-head lamp was brought low over him, light at the height for someone in a wheelchair, but blinding to Markus even through closed eyes. Daddy Nekko rolled up beside him.

  He heard metal clink, a drill whine twice as it was tested, then soft giggling and sound of kissing.

  Danni and London, making out on the other operating table, as probes began to dig into his hand. When Markus began to scream, every pressure he’d ever felt erupted like steam from an overfired boiler, until his voice eventually fell raw.