Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh

by Jay Lake

  The Death of Sail Selvage

  Lockhart Post-Register, Thursday, December 9th

  Page One (above the fold)

  HEADLINE: Caldwell County Woman Brutally Murdered

  COPY: Sail Selvage, residing on County Road 61 in the Chamberlain Tract, was found dead Monday morning by her grown daughter, Anna Forksmith of Red Rock. Ms. Forksmith called 911 at approximately seven a.m. in a hysterical state, reporting that her mother had been murdered. Caldwell Sheriff’s Office spokesman Kathy Clarke says that investigations are still ongoing and they currently have no suspects.

  Ms. Selvage’s son Markus was in trouble with law repeatedly during his school years here in Caldwell County, but he is believed to now be residing in California. The Sheriff’s Office reports that California authorities are cooperating with the investigation.

  “Ms. Selvage kept to herself as far as we can tell,” Clarke stated, “and didn’t have any enemies or grudges. There are some unusual characteristics to this crime that I’m not at liberty to discuss that should aid in identifying the perpetrator.”

  Persons with information pertaining to Ms. Selvage or her son, especially his whereabouts, are urged to contact the Sheriff’s Office as soon as possible.

  “Son always was a bad little motherfucker,” said Deputy Morrison, remembering a fall day more than ten years earlier when he’d taken the shit-ass punk in. He began laughing at his own joke, in a sort of snickering cough.

  “Yeah.” Clarke took a deep drag on her Natural American Spirit cigarette. They weren’t as good as quitting, but they beat Marlboro.

  The two of them sat on a red picnic table outside the old folks’ Dairy Queen near the library.

  The deputy laughed once more. “Cut her up bad.”

  Clarke felt queasy. Jesus Christ, was she pregnant again? “Yeah.”

  “Never seen nothing quite like it.”

  “No shit, Bert.” She blew smoke at him. “Why don’t you go whack off over it, then come back and tell me again?” More smoke. “No, wait! You already did!”

  Morrison shifted his weight, turning his hips away. “Whole family was bad. Old man Selvage was right to cut them off after what she did to his Freddie.”

  “Freddie was the worst asshole in town.”

  “Hey!”

  Clarke shrugged. “Don’t care if you two ran together in high school. You never did like it that Freddie banged Sail and you didn’t.”

  “Don’t matter now.” Morrison exuded a sort of smug, churchy satisfaction. “She’s dead and that boy’s gonna be.”

  “Yeah.”

  Another cigarette drag, then she was down to the butt burning her fingers. “Look, Bert, just fuck off.”

  Morrison shrugged and went inside for another milkshake. Clark stared at the pale sky and wondered what would draw such a fucked-up kid back after all these years. Considering the stories, if any of it was true, and she was Markus Selvage, she’d have stayed as far away from Caldwell County as humanly possible for the rest of her life.

  But somebody had done Sail Selvage real bad, both before and after killing her. Knife, chainsaw, the works. And a lot of needlework, before she died. They were keeping that quiet for now. Let the fucking public defender find out on his own when the time came.

  Ego: Regret

  I am starting to remember Danni now. She is pretty, smiling with a mysterious air—as if she knows secrets the rest of us cannot even guess at. She is petite, with the kind of build that men and women both turn to watch as she walks down the street in tight leather with just a little too much skin showing. She has metal in her thighs, and metal in her labia, and metal in her nasal septum, and a dozen other places.

  She is very much about metal, the Danni I remember, though as she says the metal’s just a souvenir, the pain’s the thing.

  She loved me. Once, for a while, maybe longer. I can’t remember yet when that ended, but I regret it. I am not proud of what I have done. Whatever I have done. But she loved me, and I loved her.

  I wanted to be close. She led me into countries of pain and love which I had never thought existed. I craved the intensity, the wells of experience she drew me so far into.

  What did I do? Why did I do it? Where has she gone?

  Some of my blindness is gone. I am no longer eye-blind, though shadows dog my vision like hounds on a dying raccoon. My ears never did stop, or the lying, whispering nurses would have vanished. My head twitches now when I wish to turn it. Soon I will see.

  But I am still skin-blind. I think I am still heart-blind, though this slow seep of regret like tar in California sands would seem to be the same as dawn creeping through a drawn shade into the last day of a junkie’s life.

  There is so much I cannot feel now. Danni’s presence, like a spark in the corner of my vision, is dark. My own hands and feet. Even the rattling gears and springs in my lungs seem soft, dying, rotting into old cartilage and from there to a sort of nothing-mucus, a phlegm that is the basic block of my being.

  I will find it here before I die, before my lungs rot out of my chest, before my eyes collapse into pools of surprised color. I will face whatever it is that scares me in Dr. Thompson’s medical scans, whatever it is my own body denies me in my inward voyages.

  I will count the love and the blood and the deaths, and the sum of my life shall be greater than zero, greater than the mark of the razor on the eyeball, greater than the regrets for those things which should have been.

  “Where is Sail?” I ask, surprised at my voice, and around me, the air stirs, dying oldsters answering in slow breaths.

  “Love . . . ”

  “ . . . is a . . . ”

  “ . . . fountain.”

  Danni. I meant Danni. Where are you, Danni? I remember you, but you are gone from me.

  “Love,” the ancient lungs creak, until I lose myself in time and the metronome of uncaring machines that watch over whatever is left of me.

  I am sorry, I think, for whatever I have done.

  History 104

  When Markus was seventeen, his sisters came to him.

  “Look,” said Anna, just fifteen and bursting out of her t-shirt. Tildy would probably be shaped like Sail—thin and leggy—but Anna had somehow gotten the opposite gene.

  “Yeah?” Markus had his feet out the passenger side window of the old Mercury. It didn’t run any more, they had a pickup now, but the car continued to sit in front of the house on tires mashed flat by summer heat and relentless time. It was spring and the three of them still needed blankets. His head was on Tildy’s lap, and Anna leaned over from the front seat.

  “Billy Hardegree’s been fucking with me.” Anna’s eyes flickered toward Tildy. “Us, really, but someone doesn’t want to bitch.”

  Markus listened to a cowbird squawk outside, watched the ragged top edge of a post oak barely visible from where he was lying, while Tildy smoothed his hair without saying anything.

  Anna spoke for both sisters a lot. In his experience, Anna did a lot of things for both sisters.

  “And . . . ?” Markus didn’t go around Lockhart High. He hadn’t been in school, not really, since the whole rape thing. There had been tutoring in juvie, but somehow the idiot defender on his rap had gotten DNA testing on the tissue samples from Suzie Elle’s abortion—and of course there had been no match to him at all.

  Nobody had bothered to test Billy Hardegree. They’d just let Markus out of juvie with a buttload of threats and his signature extracted on a bunch of disclaimers and quitclaims.

  “Everybody over at the school thinks you eat babies for breakfast and kill spics to keep in practice.”

  “Mexicans,” said Markus heavily. “They’re fucking Mexicanos. Not fucking spics.” He drank at a migrant bar out on the county line.

  “So . . . if you come round and make nasty to Billy Hardegree, he’ll quit fucking with me.” She glanced at Tildy again. “Us.”

  “Last time I had anything to do with Billy Hardegree, I got gang-raped by four drunk
s in a holding cell while the cops went out for coffee. Then I spent a year in juvie. What the fuck makes you think I want to ever see his sorry ass again?”

  Anna pulled her shirt up. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her tits rested on the top of the front seat. He could see a big red mark on her right breast—teeth. Someone had bitten her good. “Fucker got me down behind the bleachers and did this through my t-shirt. Promised me more. You going to let him?”

  He reached up and touched the red mark. “Tildy?”

  “Grabs my ass in the hall,” she said shortly, still stroking his hair. “Thinks he owns us.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to him.”

  Sail was drunk again, so Markus didn’t have any problem taking the truck the next morning to drive the girls to school. His mother wasn’t awake enough to remember that the girls took the bus. He’d wrapped an axe handle in duct tape, tucking it behind the seat, and had his jackknife in his pocket. Tildy sat between him and Anna, her hand on his thigh as he drove.

  “Listen,” Markus said. His hands hurt where he’d spent a lot of the evening passing a straight razor back and forth over them, stressing the skin and veins without ever quite cutting. “When we get there, I’m staying in the truck. You guys stand around in front of the school ’til he turns up. If he don’t, well, go to class and I’ll think of something else.”

  Tildy kissed him on the ear.

  The gravel roads hissed them toward town until they hit blacktop, then they cruised faster, pushing seventy, Markus topping the hills like he thought the old Chevy would take flight.

  The parking lot of Lockhart High was crammed with Austin-bound SUVs, country pickups and the scattered economy cars of students and teachers everywhere. The school itself was a forgettable collection of pebble-finish slab buildings surrounded by tan trailers with window unit air conditioners. Markus drove through the bus loop and stopped right in front of the school, ignoring dirty looks from the drivers. Anna and Tildy got out and made a show of standing by a planter full of dried dirt, chatting.

  Like clockwork, Billy showed up. He walked between the girls without ever glancing at Markus in his truck, draped an arm across each shoulder, and began talking.

  Markus got out with his axe handle, walked over to Billy. Three paces back he braced the handle low, and stepping into the blow, swung it up hard between Hardegree’s legs from behind.

  Billy dropped like an ox as other students began to shriek. Markus leaned the handle into the seat of Billy’s jeans and pressed, twisting it, threatening to tear the denim and jam it in the other boy’s ass.

  Then he leaned down low.

  “Last time you fucked with me, I took it up the butt from four mean drunks for a whole evening. Fuck with my sisters any more and you’re gonna fucking wish it was only four drunks.” He tossed the axe handle away, pulled his knife, slit both of Billy’s nostrils and notched the ear he could reach, while Hardegree cried and pissed himself.

  Tildy leaned over and spit on Hardegree’s face, then the girls went to class.

  Markus closed his knife, pocketed it, and walked away before anyone could work up the nerve to tackle him. He left his sisters and his momma’s truck behind, and eventually, left Texas behind with them.

  v: Love in the Time of Flesh

  Markus had never quite passed out, but the pain had pounded him like surf against the shore until he had moved into some other state entirely. So when he finally came to himself, sitting in Danni’s car, he was surprised.

  “How are you?” Her voice was low, silky, smooth—loving.

  “Oh, God . . . ” All the cutting he’d ever done, on himself or anyone else, was nothing compared to going under Daddy Nekko’s scalpels.

  “Do you like it?”

  It what? He looked at his left hand, where the pain had been. Was.

  A stubby hypodermic protruded from the stump of his knuckle. Sutures and clamps bound it to a ring of skin that Daddy Nekko had constructed, to hold it on.

  “What?”

  “Wiggle that finger,” Danni said.

  Markus tried to visualize wiggling the missing finger. Something popped, and there was a feeling of pressure. Three drops of blood oozed from the exposed needle tip.

  “Neural interface. Now you can stick me, and we can share.” She grinned like sunrise over the Sierras. “Welcome to the world of metal, Markus. Real metal.”

  Real metal. He couldn’t feel it—the syringe wasn’t really a part of him that way, but there was a valve or something inside he could control.

  He couldn’t feel it, and it couldn’t feel for him. Pain for pleasure. And nothing to hurt inside.

  “Oh, God,” Markus whispered again. He could only begin to visualize what this would mean. “I can be anything.”

  “We can be anything.”

  Woozy and hurt as he was, he turned to kiss her as she drove, jabbing the needle deep into the flesh above her collar bone, flexing his vanished finger until their blood mingled and they were really, truly, forever united, at least in that moment.

  After the first operation, there was time of delightful variation. They experimented with external routing of venous tubing. Danni implanted a neural interface below his right elbow, which they trained to trigger drills, pumps, even a food processor just for the hell of it.

  He felt more human than he’d ever been, more in charge of who and what he was and what he might become. Danni was with him on the voyage of discovery, making big plans for his hands, his feet, his face.

  Together they would remake Markus Selvage as someone greater than he’d ever been, someone whole and loved and loving, with the aid of metal where the only pain was to the good and the heart never bled.

  The fountain of their love, the spray at the heart of their world, was the blood streaming from the tip of the finger-needle Daddy Nekko had given him.

  One day Markus turned to Danni over stewed rabbit with Chianti at his stained Formica table. “When do we take from you?”

  “Me?”

  “You’ve got metal in you, but . . . this . . . ” He waved his finger, the hypodermic under a leather safety glove, sort of like a little red condom. “You were right. You asked me to do this. I’m asking you to join me.”

  “I . . . ” She stared at her bowl of stew for a moment. “I’m happy where I am.”

  “So you push me, but you won’t follow?” He wasn’t angry, just feeling a sort of cold confusion in his chest.

  “It’s not that simple for me.” She looked up at him. “You live in this little apartment, you work in a weirdo bookstore with a bunch of Gothy science fiction types. They don’t care about your red fingerglove. I live in the world, sometimes. Front for Daddy Nekko. Can’t be missing big pieces of me.”

  “I see.” Though he didn’t. When had the risks become all his? Where had they parted ways? Had she wanted only to watch him be sliced away?

  Just like Momma, he thought. Just like Momma, push all the pain on someone else.

  “Come close,” he whispered, slipping his fingerglove free, “and kiss me tight.”

  She glanced at the needle. “Later . . . ?”

  “Later?”

  Later.

  Life was full of laters. He wanted now.

  Markus pushed himself away from the table. Thinking of his mother, he went to his room, locked the door, and masturbated, letting the needle poke his dick and his groin over and over until he passed out from blood loss without ever cumming, wondering—until his thoughts grew too dim—what had ever happened to Sail Selvage.

  ζ: Love in the Time of Metal

  “Love is a fountain,” he says. His voice has returned. “It pumps and pumps and gives and gives, without limit, without end.”

  The machines do not answer him. A gurney squeals in the hallway, bearings clogged with pubic hair shavings or the threads from old bandages. The others on his ward breathe their ragged chorus.

  “Love is not a mistake,” he tells his fellow breathers. They are still human, he presu
mes, sole and solitary within their flesh, excepted from his heart-armor of invulnerability.

  He is more.

  The blade that is his left hand moves, twitching with a life seemingly of its own. A column of flesh and bone is bound to it like the wrapping on a hilt, ending in a syringe, his first and somehow best change into what he has become.

  The window frames rattle, air pressure moving outside, the breath of the world matching his breath. He sees the acoustic tile in the ceiling, wiring conduit stapled back and forth like the tubing which might carry blood from one body to another. He sees the flickering of overhead lights, turned down for the night, just bright enough to keep the nurses from tripping as they pass the bulking machines which envelop the dying. He sees the pale glow of the machines around him, green and red constellations, traffic lights for the departing souls.

  Markus has watched enough souls depart, though not yet his own. Now, filled with gears and circuits and comforting shafts of cold, hard metal, surgical bolts in his joints and wires in his musculature, he has armored his soul against damage, against injury, against departure.

  He is ready to face what has become of Danni’s soul.

  At that thought, at that moment, he begins to retch, coughing and choking until vomit comes forth, tiny fragments of metal rattling to the floor with his bile and his mucus, the coils in his head unwinding until the nurses come running, followed by orderlies and technicians and eventually a doctor, the mass of white-coated wisdom picking through the pan and marveling at the bright sharpnesses he seems to be producing endlessly from within until he threatens to flood the room and drown them all in razor cuts and slowly, slowly, with each cough and muscle tearing, he remembers what he has done.

  What has become of Danni.

  “Love is a fountain,” he tries to tell them, but his mouth is filled with metal shavings and servomotors. “Love is not a mistake.”

  “Mistake,” whisper the pale-eyed nurses. “Mistake,” shout the greedy-mouthed orderlies. “Mistake,” intones the sepulchral doctor. “Human,” shout the machines in their shrieking, beeping voices as he retches forth yards and yards of cabling.