American Monster

by J. S. Breukelaar

  She tried to focus on Una’s greasy wall of fame. Blanket’s bloated gaze. She raised her glass. Me and you, Blanket. We’re the same. Here but not here. She felt it. Something about this place, Spill City, acting on her. Obliterating her.

  Monstrous.

  Norma stiffened, looked behind her but there was no one there. Mommy, she thought. That voice not just in her head but in her Whole. The voice becoming more insistent over time. Sometimes telling her to do... things. The voice, the blood on her hands. They were related somehow, part of the Configuration—the Whole—an enmeshed totality of interrelated perceptions shared between her and Mommy. But Norma was finding it harder to tell whether the voices came from outside or inside, from her or Mommy... or someone else. They seemed to be all three, making her fiddle with the bioswitch, look to see if anyone was there. And at the same time listen to that cramping of the dentata deep within her as if it were trying to tell her something that she had yet to understand. Mommy wanted in. It always wanted in, so what it amounted to was not knowing when Mommy was there and when it wasn’t. Not knowing when the voices would speak and what they’d say. Norma was exhausted just thinking about it.

  – Donkey meat? she said, blinking the men back into focus. One of their names was Augustine. She remembered now. His lantern jaw caught the white light from the Karaoke machine.

  – ‘Donkey meat?’ mimicked Augustine. What planet are you from?

  – Uranus, said a reedy voice behind her. Your head says hi.

  Norma froze, looked sideways down the bar. The owner of the voice swung herself up onto a stool halfway along. Norma recognized the blue parka from the street urchin over whom she’d stumbled outside the payphone the morning after the night with Bunny. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  – Schnitzel el gato, said a reedy voice behind her. Better than no pussy at all, right boys?

  Una’s furious face reappeared in the pass window, glared at Augustine, softened when she saw the urchin, and said something in German to Little Barry, who ignored her. He ferried two Sisyphus-sized plates of battered meat to the men.

  Little Barry said, So go to Miguel’s. Spill-kill so fresh, it glows.

  It was all true and it didn’t matter. Bobcat or donkey or seafood a la nuke. The men tucked in, tightfisted and methodical. Elbows cocked and cheeks bulging, grease running down their chins and knuckles. Along their hairless arms and around their pylon necks crawled a tangle of elaborate tattoos, the unfinished scrawl erased and rewritten in the flickering light. Every movement unveiling a new manifestation of the interchangeable motif—bird, snake, deity, demon. Any and all signs against the night.

  The street kid watched the men eat, her face locked in a look of stagey revulsion. But for Norma the scene was both tender and obscene and almost arousing. Augustine had once been a Cartel lieutenant and liked to tell how he’d earned big bucks ‘negotiating’ with Texas kickers for access through their land. Hog wire and a tire iron his tools of the trade. Now cooling his heels in Spill City as an enforcer for a steroid syndicate. Just regular old beta males in feeding mode. Yet high above them in some towering edifice in another place, behind rice paper screens or Mahogany paneling, the alpha chewed at the wall—drooled and howled for more souls in this world.

  Little Barry banged Norma’s meal down in front of her, spilling grease. A mountain of dead mule sliding like the Sierra Nevada into a valley of rehydrated potatoes. Peaks and troughs, she thought, channeling Mommy, but Norma had lost her appetite. Even Augustine’s lackey, a hook-nosed sentinel, had pushed away his plate. The third man with them looked ill and did not eat but sat hunched over his console, a flayed quality to him. Deluded bottom feeder, she thought, far from home and doomed to flounder and fail.

  Norma caught the urchin eyeing the men’s heaped plates from the depths of her tunneled hood. Her skin was pale, lucent eyes ringed in red. She held her beer in both hands. Her slim fingers misshapen from cold and godless commerce. She lifted the mug shakily to her lips like a chalice, took a swallow and spat it out across the bar.

  – Jesus wept, LB, you been pulling horses’ dicks again, yeah? This piss is the worst yet.

  Norma’s face began to crease and go peculiar. A giggle leapt from her lips and Little Barry’s eye shot sideways which made her laugh even more.

  – What you laughing at? said the midget with one hand on the bar, the other wielding a filthy rag.

  And Norma, a little drunk, giggled below her breath, If I told you, would you know?

  – Crazy Frau, said Barry, sloshing the rag over the counter where the kid had spat her beer. You wanna eat, kid? Una’ll fix you something to take home.

  The Karaoke surged. In the mirror behind the bar, Norma watched a lipless grocer sing, ‘I would sell my soul for something true, someone like you.’

  A woman got up to dance. She bent her knees, pumped her arms back and forth like she was running in place. From the ceiling beams high overhead swung long cords dangling dim yellow bulbs. Their powers of illumination compromised by dirt and distance. The smoke and the din in the bar grew heady. Norma ordered another beer for her and for the urchin. Loops of speech and song wound around her like silk. She felt languorous in the false scents and the false light of the bio-candles. In her dream last night there had been dead wolves in the storm. Icicles clinging to a ragged tail. Around the carnage were footprints in concentric circles. Hehe, she’d laughed into the vicious wind, wringing from her hands vermillion drops that fell and froze.

  The men—ratass rebels reduced to bare-knuckle vengeance, cast unsated glares in her direction. Augustine cracked his knuckles and called out to Little Barry, These eggs taste like your old lady laid ’em. I eat another bite, I’ll bark.

  – You mean barf, Tine, said his lackey.

  The pink-eyed runt on the phone laughed but it turned into a wet cough and the lackey rounded pumpkin-sized biceps over his plate to shield it from the spray.

  – What I said, said Augustine.

  The lackey inserted a finger into his surgically enhanced nose while he thought about that.

  – You all done? said the urchin to Augustine, pointing at his plate.

  Augustine looked at her, unblinking. The lackey wiped his finger under the bar and his glazed eyes floated from Augustine to the urchin and back again.

  – What’s it to you? said Augustine.

  – Give me your leftovers is what’s it to me.

  Augustine made a show of fiddling with his steak knife while he looked at the urchin in mock disbelief. His eyes, meeting those of the lackey’s, left the urchin for less than a blink but it was long enough for Norma to register his intent.

  – No, she said, getting to her feet at the exact moment that Augustine, with a sweet smile at Norma, flicked back his rawboned wrist and sent the knife arcing overhead, where, with a faint but distant thwang, it found purchase high in the dusty shadows. Norma lifted her face to the ceiling, aware that everyone was doing the same. Like spectators at a fireworks display, she thought, we wait for the flames to fall. Una too, her head twisted out from the pass window like a turtle from its shell, unleashing a torrent of Teutonic outrage.

  – Jeez Louise, Augustine, said Little Barry, waving his old lady down. Them knives are the only ones we got.

  – I give a shit, said Augustine, you’d be the first one I’d give it to.

  Norma’s shoulders burned. She flexed her shoulder blades, registered the crack of brittle bone beneath her jacket.

  Augustine pushed his plate across to his lackey and smiled wolfishly at the urchin.

  – If you bring back the knife, he said brightly to the urchin, like a nursery school teacher talking to a difficult child, you can have my slop. I’ll even throw in a beer.

  He stood in silhouette, a swelling at his groin. The urchin pulled her hood down over hair the color of dunes from a world Norma now saw only in her dreams. She took out her console, played the light over the vaulted ceiling laced with rows of rusted struts and smashed sk
ylights.

  – There, said the urchin. The synthetic rustle of her parka unleashed gooseflesh across the back of Norma’s neck.

  The knife, a dim speck in the beam of the console, hung from the frame of a skylight forty feet up.

  – Show’s over, said Little Barry. The wife’ll give you something, kid. Go home. You too, Augustine.

  Barely able to mask his relief, the lackey rose to leave. At a glance from Augustine he sat down again. The third man long gone.

  – Show’s not over, is it, said Augustine, pulling a billfold from his pocket. Show’s never over, right kid?

  – She’ll never make it, said the lackey. Dude, let’s go find us some whores.

  – Make it twenty, said the kid, staring dreamily at the ceiling. And two beers.

  – It’s a deal. And if you, said Augustine, not even turning to look at the lackey he addressed, ever call me dude again, I’ll strangle you in your sleep.

  – No, said Norma, rummaging in her jacket. She found two tens, shoved them across to the kid with her plate of uneaten meatballs. Forget it. Here’s your money.

  The room lurched under her stool, a spinning blur of karaograms and white faces and dead candles. Norma shut her eyes to stop the spinning and when she opened them, the urchin had turned to her with a pinched and focused fury.

  – The fuck is it to you? she said before a confused recognition surfaced on her baby face. Oh. Right. The crazy bitch talks to Mommy.

  The urchin twiddled two fingers in the air. A hiss of laughter from Augustine, his eyes glittering. The lackey giggled like an echo, food caught in his teeth.

  – The beams won’t hold, said Norma. Dry rot and quake damage.

  – Eat shit and die, said the urchin.

  – Never thought I’d say it but Norma’s right, said Little Barry. Those windows got blown out in the 2020 Burn, three Shakes since then—whole building is pulp.

  – Norma? said the urchin. Her teeth were white and her eyes flashed like a summer storm. What the fuck kind of name is Norma?

  – Call it off. Or you ain’t welcome here no more, said Little Barry. It was an empty threat and they all knew it. Anyone with cash was welcome anywhere. This was America. Or had been.

  Augustine ignored him, but there was now, in his chemically-augmented baritone, a creeping hint of retreat. You want to climb forty feet of Swiss cheese for my leftovers, bitch? You that hungry?

  Una started to say something and Little Barry turned to her, made a throat-slitting motion with his hand.

  – I haven’t eaten in three days, said the urchin. For Neimen Van Aldren’s leftovers I’d suck his dick if I could find it.

  Van Aldren was the wheelchair-bound leader of Purple Rain, gone to ground. The men roared their appreciation. They bumped fists and grabbed their crotches and the ritual was complete. Bets were made and covered. Una crossed herself and slammed the pass window shut with a clatter. Norma put her head in her hands. So much hurt and harm and no one to explain it to her. Through a parting in the crowd she thought she saw a flash of pale hair, the sweep of a brim, but it was just a trick of the light. She lifted her head, narrowed her eyes at Augustine, and shook her head. He poked out his tongue and mouthed, Booh!

  Norma drained her beer and stood up. She had a job to do, a horn to implant before the dentata tore a hole in her soul to match the one in her womb. Leave existentialist rubbernecking to the Slashes. Hell, the street urchin probably had some terminal illness anyway, or at least a major intestinal infection, bone disease or whatnot, and this was her last chance for a story to leave behind in Spill City, where stories, at least the kind you wanted to tell yourself, were in short supply.

  An Avon lady’s rendition of “Heart-Shaped Box” floated across the room. So now the urchin was doing something weird with her bitten index finger. She was tracing an aerial path, her midnight gaze turned inward so that she looked momentarily daft. Norma froze with her mug of beer halfway to the bar. She looked up to where the urchin’s finger was pointing, an imaginary trajectory that ran from the bar, up the wall eight feet and across a series of vertical (y axis) and horizontal (x axis) bars and beams through a third dimension (z axis) that would theoretically, if not factually, move her toward the knife. The final dimension, (t) was time. Timing was everything. A beam that could hold for a second might not hold for two. A ledge that held because it was supported by an old gas pipe might be rendered unstable because of a customer coughing thirty seconds into the future, or the urchin’s own progress might loosen a strut that would otherwise last another century. So there had to be a Plan B. And Norma could see exactly what the urchin was doing. It was taking a little while because the configuration had to include that contingency. If Una’s bar was a three-dimensional box and every route mapped out in the urchin’s head was a thread going from the bar (a1) to the knife (b) and back again (a2), the total shape—the Whole—would look like a small mountain range. A mountain range as shaky and vulnerable as the Sierras had become. Because the whole of anything was always unequal to its parts. There were, by definition, limits on the accuracy with which the coordinates could be traced from an irretrievable beginning toward an unpredictable end. Just as you thought you knew your position on one axis, your position on the other became uncertain. The urchin had taken this into account—timing, speed, position, momentum. Yes. Norma knew that from an entirety of possible routes from a1 to b to a2, the urchin had seen and selected a number she could work with.

  – A hundred says she makes it, said Norma. The bioswitch at her breast issued a warning. Even if Mommy couldn’t see her, it registered that she wasn’t where she should be. Norma yanked the jacket zipper up. Mommy could wait. She tossed more bills onto the pile. The men wiped spittle from their lips and the lackey stared sadly at Augustine staring at Norma. Something rippled across Augustine’s lanterned jaw and receded. He reached into his pocket and took out a hundred, nudged the lackey. The lackey added his money to the pile.

  The urchin drained her glass, banged it on the bar and pulled herself out pupa-like from the parka. As Norma suspected, she was ropy in the arms and strong across the chest, but her vertebrae poked beneath her T-shirt and her legs were long sticks in unflattering jeans. Norma kept her hands on her lap or as far from the bioswitch as possible, concentrating on keeping Mommy out.

  The urchin clambered confidently off the stool and hoisted herself onto the bar. She swaggered past Norma, taking her time. Unleashing an unwashed funk, trampling Coasters and sending ashtrays flying. Some customers clapped. At the end of the bar, the urchin gestured for someone to pass her a stool. She placed it carefully on the bar top squared with the wall, mounted it, spat on her palms, and shimmied up some old pipes. Norma heard the Karaoke grow silent. The urchin stepped onto a triangulating strut and along a steel beam about thirty feet up. Halfway across she froze.

  Knelt there on all fours for so long that Norma thought she’d changed her mind, but what she knew was that even if the urchin hadn’t looked down, she’d thought about it and it had got to her. Long cold claw of night. The Silence. Pulling aside the membrane to give you a glimpse into the other side. What you saw there immobilized you at best, made you crazy at worst. And the only thing to beat it was pain which was why, in Norma, the VIPr had been programmed to generate pain under stress. Mommy could hit Norma’s binary matrix with a sudden snap of it, that breath-stopping heart-starting bite of the dentata. Codename VIPr, Mommy said, just in case Norma missed the point: the disease was the cure. Point being that there was no such way Norma could reach the urchin from here, no way she could snap the kid out of it, get her moving again. So they waited. The men sniggered. Don’t look down, thought Norma. Just don’t.

  For some inexplicable reason the karaoke started up again, this time with a song so ancient that even the barflies sucking on their teeth in the shadows looked confused. Norma saw on the screen that it was a song by Michael Jackson called “Billie Jean,” the song jockey scratching his head and scrolling down his c
onsole trying to figure out how it got onto the set. Norma sniffed at a sudden change in the air currents, a ferrous chill as if a door had momentarily opened onto the night, but it was like a switch had been pressed in the urchin. The song, waveringly rendered by a chubby clerk, pulled the urchin to her feet and Norma took a step back, her stool crashing to the floor as she stretched her arms out like wings and watched the urchin do the same. Augustine burped. Little Barry crossed himself. The lackey said, Shit a brick.

  The urchin shuffled along the beam a few more yards and toward the end grasped the lower ridge of a skylight that ran above it. She crossed onto a bisecting beam, feeling ahead with her leading sneaker before she placed it. Norma’s mouth felt dry, her scalp tingled and her heart hammered in her throat. The urchin was lost in a swirling darkness, punctuated by sporadic flashes like lightning, from the console she carried in her teeth.

  – Any of you dickasses want to help out with some light up here? she called out from between her teeth.

  And as she spoke, the console fell from her mouth and dropped thirty feet to the ground. Everyone watched it float and sink through the darkness like a tropical fish and land with a clatter at Norma’s feet.

  – Gott in Himmel, came a sob from behind the pass door.

  – Hellooooo... The reedy voice came down to them from the dark hole of night.

  – Jeez Louise, said Little Barry. Una, where do we keep the flashlight?

  But Augustine had already whipped a military issue LED torch from his backpack, its lens at right angles to the olive drab casing. Nimble as a ferret he hopped onto the bar and, holding the torch like a Handycam, pinned the tiny figure crawling along the beam in a hard tube of light.

  And Norma knew then. The urchin was a climber. An artist. This was something previously attempted, who she was. She would have done it for nothing.

  Norma’s neck hurt from craning. Her eyes sidled across to Augustine. His wet lips hung in a loose grin and a forked vein pulsed at his brow. The urchin crawled along the rusted beam and cut back up to a supporting strut. Scraps of sacking and rope and plastic fluttering in the trembling white beam of light. Norma’s hands felt clammy but when she looked down it was only perspiration and she wiped them on her jacket, felt Mommy’s furious heat in the bioswitch at her breast. She ignored it because Mommy didn’t know what it was like to walk amongst the Slashes, to actually walk amongst them, instead of just theorizing. Mommy didn’t know, could not imagine the wolf prints in the snow.