American Monster

by J. S. Breukelaar

  – Pepsi? said the girl, the corners of her mouth quivering in disappointment. I like Coke.

  Norma felt her shadow fall across the girl’s form and how the girl did not cringe or pull back. The window looking over the street had gone dark, almost opaque as if there was nothing there, nothing outside this room. The urchin’s eyes scanned from the top of Norma’s head to her feet.

  Norma said, They only had Pepsi.

  – The Subway on the corner, the urchin said. Or the 7-Eleven down at Birmingham?

  – The Subway.

  – Well, Birmingham has Coke.

  Norma wiped the sweat off her forehead with her wrist. She sat down on the opposite bunk so as to free the girl from the shadow she made over her.

  – How’d you get past the guard? the girl said, still not taking her eyes off Norma.

  – Lester let me in, Norma shrugged. By the way, Una said to say ‘get well soon’ except that she said it in German.

  The urchin grinned and she shook her head as if shaking off a daze. She squared her bony shoulders.

  – Gott im Himmel!

  – Una? Right. They afraid I’ll sue or something. Forty feet. I had falls before but I think that was my biggest.

  – Maybe you should quit while you’re ahead.

  – Thanks for getting me out of there, said the girl. And also, I’m Raye.

  – Norma.

  – Nice boots. Norma. You get them here?

  Norma said, Barstow.

  – That where you’re from? When you were a Baked Bean Bomber?

  Norma said, Bombshell. Bakersfield.

  The girl said, Me, I’m from Portland. You ever been out of the Zone?

  Norma shook her head. What’s it like?

  The girl gave a sideways pull to her mouth and frowned, her eyes looking somewhere behind Norma.

  – I can’t really remember. Not anymore. I used to, but—. She numbly shrugged.

  To fill the silence, Norma said, This place is okay. Short term.

  The urchin waved her arm extravagantly across the room.

  – It’s okay. I haven’t had a chance to do it up yet. My decorator’s been busy with other projects.

  Slowly, her heart banging against her ribs, Norma said, It has a rustic charm.

  The girl said, I summer in Belize.

  Her eyes flicked to the food, and back to Norma.

  – Well, said Norma. She got slowly to her feet, awkwardly stooped so as not to scare Raye off. She felt knock-kneed and coarse-skinned. The girl’s skin looked lit from within, so filled with light that no more light could get through. Norma stood back so as not to be the shadow that passed over so much light.

  – You okay? said Raye. She pulled two beers out from under the bed, held one out to Norma.

  Norma’s ears rang with the sound, or the possibility of the sound of metal heels in the hallway. She waited until it passed because it was only the Silence, deafening. Then she said, You shouldn’t drink.

  – Here’s to Augustine and the crew, said Raye, drinking.

  Norma pulled open the tab and let the warm beer run down her throat.

  – Beats Pepsi, anyway, Raye said.

  – I’d lay low for a while, said Norma, regretting it instantly.

  – You were the one took his money and his manhood, snapped Raye. You’re the one should be worried. I’m just a Grimey. No one cares about me.

  His manhood, said the voice in Norma’s head. The girl’s eyes were glassy. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a week, hadn’t wanted to.

  Norma said, Should you see a doctor?

  – I don’t know. Should I?

  They locked eyes, creature and creator, and Norma could not say who was who. So instead she said, What’s that smell?

  Raye sniffed, Leeks, she said. From the Crock—hey! You didn’t finish your beer.

  But Norma was already halfway to the door and didn’t trust herself to look back.

  Telefraxis: (n) A process of splitting and then catapulting one aspect of a psyche or sentience (Viewpoint) into a separate physical presence (the host) in an entirely different space/time. This separate being is generally controlled by a remote communication system involving presequencing protocol (PSP) i.e. sonic ‘wiring’ enabled by excess cosmic microwave radiation leaked from obsolete, broken and dirty comtrash (see below) and CogShare Protocol (CSP—see below: The Whole). (n) the creation of a sub program or network operation requiring minimal access (NORMA), the physical or psychic embodiment of which is achieved through advanced sequencing methods. (v), Slang—to ‘frax.’ (See above, Alaxenoesis).

  (Saurum Nilea, AQt., trans. L.Shay 2656)

  22//: mommy

  Mommy was waiting for her when she got back to the trailer. Norma could tell because the inside of the trailer, the walls and the ceiling and the bathroom mirror, were covered in a foul scrawl. The same three words over and over written in a filthy ooze that was less on the surface of the sweaty laminate than excreted by it.

  Ratreevels are fourbidden. Ritreivalls our furbiddnine. Rutreevles r fearbittened.

  Norma stared and her gorge rose. It wasn’t just the bad spelling. It was the way some words were rubbed out as if with an angry sleeve and then overwritten. Black blobs beneath which wiggled squashed serifs like the legs of dying spiders. Lines of crud thumbed through the text and letters squashed between corrections. Superscript and caret marks. Snatching up a towel, Norma began to smash at the goo, trying to clean it up but she only succeeded in spreading the filth.

  – She wasn’t dead, said Norma.

  – Shshs, said the voice inside her head. Those retrievals are nothing but trouble.

  – Trouble? said Norma. For who?

  – For the mission, said the voice. Only one way to fix it.

  – No, said Norma. The girl is not your lookout. She’s mine. I made her.

  – Where’s my horn?

  – I’ll find it, Norma yelled. Or die trying.

  – You wish, said Mommy, the voice inside her head, inside her cramping womb.

  The ooze had begun to run down the wall in places. How had Mommy done this? That was the real abomination. Mommy, the our in your, the trusted Whole. Had it squatted beneath the faraway towering flames? Or had it commissioned some other? Someone whose eyes she’d looked upon, whose form she’d sought, longed for. Look. half a heel-shaped crescent, a blunt arrow that might have been the toe of a boot. Even the floor fouled in its passing. Norma swung around as if to catch a retreating hat rim, a grimy cuff—who had squatted here, right here in the trailer, and with a grunt of satisfaction squeezed this filth out of themselves, fouled their own hand with it? Norma clearly saw the hand with its putrid load moving across the wall, forming the letters, the words, and understood that was set out here now was both an insult and a warning. And what else?

  She stared at the hieroglyphs tracked on the linoleum—that blood-black crescent, an arrow-shaped toe print ineptly rubbed out with a filthy sole. Was it him? After longing for him, filling her nights with the sound of his footfall, thinking of him when she touched herself, it horrified her that she might find herself face to face with a Guy whose stench she now had on her hands. So personal, so internal, that surely he would recognize it on her, his own smell. Was that part of the Plan? Should she understand herself now as marked? A part of her sought another explanation.

  – Mommy? she whispered.

  She turned off the light and moved to the window. The ocean outside the trailer had turned the same color as the goo, like black blood, and the sky was smeared with it too, the earth. The darkness now taking form from the words and their stink, never to be eradicated.

  – What am I? Norma said.

  – You’re mine, said Mommy. I made you.

  – I’m a woman, said Norma. Self-made.

  Mommy chortled wetly from deep in Norma’s whole, A woman? You sprout wings under duress, you wear a chunk of plasma around your neck and sometimes, if I’m not mistaken you dream of having y
our cock sucked. So you tell me—what kind of woman?

  – Only women bleed, Norma said but half to herself.

  She looked down at the dark matter dripping from her hands and pooling on the floor between her legs. Her whole body swayed. A shadow fell across her vision, a darkness that burned like the sun. Norma had to squint one eye against the shadow’s searing heat.

  – You’re nothing, said the shadow. Nothing.

  – I hate you, said Norma between ragged breaths, half-choked by her lying heart. I wish you weren’t my Mommy!

  At which the shadow then rose to a great height, immeasurable, and with one timeless and unnatural motion, leapt across the void and brought the creature to her knees.

  23//: remains

  – Hey you. Big Lady.

  The sharp rap at the trailer door seemed to begin before the light footsteps ended. There was a scuffling of rubber soles on the threshold. The smell of donuts. Norma froze over the final bucket of bleach. She felt feverish and her muscles screamed.

  The door opened; light poured in and the wet hiss of the surf.

  – Anyone home?

  – No, said Norma.

  – I brought breakfast.

  Norma’s stomach roared in response. She looked around the trailer. There was a crack in the laminate from where Mommy had thrown her against it, but no sign that Norma could see of the filth. After she regained consciousness, it had taken her the night and most of the next day to clean up the trailer, a dozen or more gallons of water that she boiled on the one-ring stove in a borrowed pot from Noe and an entire bottle of Clorox that she found in the old amenities building.

  She went to the door, leaned against it for a moment with her eyes squeezed shut against the storm of black flakes—like char or ash—that floated across her vision, and opened it. The clean wet hiss of the surf poured in. The girl, Raye, stood there silhouetted in the white light. The old parka hung open over a soiled T-shirt. Her tawny hair stuck up in waxed tufts around her head, a grin across her young-old face. Yoinking earphones.

  – I’m not hungry, Norma said.

  – Big night? said Raye. Her dark blue eyes appraised Norma with a child’s shy disapproval. Can I come in?

  – No, said Norma. I—

  Raye nodded lewdly. You got company.

  – Right.

  – Well. I was just in the neighborhood, so.

  She rooted around in her crusty backpack and extended a greasy bag of donuts toward Norma. They’re from VGs. That’s where you go, right?

  The donuts filled the air between them with their burnt-sugar smell. Norma felt her mouth water without meaning to. She could reach into the girl’s bony chest and rip out her heart without meaning to. Maybe it would be for the best and it would be swift. Better Norma should do it than Mommy. Mommy would take all the time in the world.

  Nothing but trouble, said the voice inside her head, but it was just an echo. Norma zipped up her jacket.

  – Okay. Let’s sit out here.

  Raye didn’t move. She looked out past Norma across the camping grounds.

  – What? said Norma.

  Raye said without looking, Clothes. Some clothes would be good.

  Norma looked down at her bare legs. She was wearing nothing but the jacket over her panties.

  She turned around and went back into the trailer, bent down to pick up her crumpled jeans. Her lower back throbbed. Her head knifed behind both eyes. She groped across the bedside table for a blister pack, washed down some pills with a bottle of pink-tinged water.

  – You want a Coke? she called out to the girl.

  – If you got one.

  Norma’s pulse skipped. Sometime between being beaten up by Mommy and scrubbing away the filth, she had gone across to the 7-Eleven and bought every bottle and can of Coke in the place should Raye come back, willing her to do so. Norma raked her hands through her hair, forgetting her swollen ear, and almost crying out with the pain. She wobbled to the kitchen, brought two Cokes out of the fridge and went back outside.

  – You’re bleeding, said Raye.

  Norma touched her eyebrow. It had split from impact with the corner of some piece of the trailer. She blotted the blood with the back of her wrist and wiped it on her jacket. She pulled a lawn chair out from under the trailer for the girl and sunk down on the trailer steps.

  – Thanks, she said through a mouthful of donut.

  – VGs across the road, yeah. That the place?. The baker there, Noe, was like ‘Norma this’ and ‘Norma that.’ I think he’s crushing on you. He said to bring back the pot when you can.

  Raye gave a mock shiver.

  – Right, mumbled Norma. Noe. Ooof.

  – You okay? You want me to leave?

  – No.

  The jacket’s special weave circulated cool air across her damp skin. She zipped it up so that that it covered the bioswitch. The itinerants who lived in the camp grounds had dispersed for the day. The surf rolled up the dark sand leaving lacy trails of foam. Rocking on the lawn chair, Raye looked exhausted, a little speedy. Rediem, maybe? Another slow way to die. She’d broken out in small pimples. Norma busied her hands with the donut, breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces so she wouldn’t reach across and brush Raye’s hair off her spotty forehead.

  Raye stopped rocking and said, I was climbing before I could walk. It was just something I did. I could see it. Like in my head I could build some invisible tightrope to get me from here to there and back again. Up in Portland once, before I could walk, no one could find me and I was just up in an old walnut tree. Crawled up and couldn’t get down.

  – That’s the thing, said Norma, washing the donut down with the Coke. Getting down.

  – But not falling down, said Raye, moving her finger in a downward spiral. Not that.

  – No. Well. That was a big fall.

  The girl lazily picked at a pimple on her chin. The surf crashed and she watched it a while.

  – I went to circus class once. In LA. My dad put me there because a friend of his ran it and it was cheaper than child care. It was pretty lame though. Mainly tumbling. What’s with that? Who wants to tumble? There’s this circus I heard about in Australia where climbing’s the thing. Walls and ceilings, special boots and gloves for added grip. I could do that. I could go to Australia. There’s that.

  – You never know, said Norma.

  But they did.

  – If there were still tourists around here I could busk, said Raye. I did some busking in LA. Backflips and cartwheels. I tried a stilt act up at Swami’s. But the spill killed the tourist industry, all those heavy metals. See that spill? Nitrates are what make it red. Who wants to swim in red? Phosphates spread it out, blow out the biomass and take all the oxygen out of the water. It’s called Eutrophication. Which I learned in middle-school. Whole southern coastline’s a dead zone.

  – A red zone.

  – Bingo.

  Raye said, I used to stand at the tideline. thought I could hear the fish screaming. Every morning the tide dumped them by the hundreds on the shore. It still does.

  Raye turned to Norma, pinned her in a teary stare.

  – Thing is, I should be dead too. I shouldn’t have survived. What, forty-fifty feet?

  The size of the fall getting bigger every time she told it, Raye dropped her gaze as if she could no longer contain it in her mind. She started drawing shapes in the condensation on the Coke can.

  – A beam caught your fall. It happens, said Norma.

  Raye’s fingers kept drawing lazy, hypnotic scrawls on the outside of the can.

  – I feel different now. Like I’ve been through something.

  – You have, said Norma. No arguments there.

  The girl shook her head. What did you do to me?

  Her hands had begun to shake around the can. She tried to keep drawing but the can slipped through her fingers fell onto the ground, the brown soda trickling onto the sand and pine needles.

  – I’ll get you another, said Norma, s
tanding.

  When she came back she said, Look. All I did was bring you back here. Give you some painkillers and let you sleep it off.

  – I heard of some new techniques they’re trialling at the Chinese Front, antibody transfusions. Is that what you did to me, being excom. You are military, right? What, some kind of medic?

  – Sure. I keep my stash of hot T-cells and a box of syringes under the bed for emergencies.

  The girl’s eyelids fluttered a little queasily. A gull cawed. And then another, bursting off a pile of kelp.

  – Thing is I feel weird. But whatever. Raye shrugged dramatically. I’m alive. So, thanks. I think.

  – Nothing to thank me for, said Norma. Then she got that whiff of ferrous sickly-sweet char, the burnt shit smell of the goo written across the trailer. It was under her nails now, in her nostrils, never to be erased. She narrowed her eyes at the stunted scrub around the trailer, looking for a jutting shadow or glimpse of yellow eye.

  – You saved me, said Raye.

  – No! Norma, leaning forward in her chair with her face inches from the girl’s, who would not flinch. You saved yourself. You’re strong and you’re tough and you’re a climber. Said so yourself. Remember that.

  – Well, getting me away from Augustine. You did that. Man’s a vampire. What you did to his balls, there’s that.

  Raye shook her head and laughed, her eyes lighting up as quickly as they darkened, laughter following tears like a whirlwind that caught Norma in its dizzying spiral. It was catching. She leaned back in her chair and felt the corners of her own mouth twitch.

  – Well. I’ll take that.

  Raye, grinning wildly, shakily. Augustine didn’t bet on that, now. Did he?

  Norma shook her head, That part was on the house.

  – So, I’m going to be okay? In your expert medical military opinion. No brain damage or anything.

  – Nothing to speak of, said Norma. Just keep both feet on the ground for a while. Okay?

  They sat in silence for a while and it was a good silence.

  – I could eat a horse, said Raye.