American Monster

by J. S. Breukelaar

  – Hides? You mean, he disappears?

  – You know the Michael Jackson song, the Man in the Mirror? That’s how he talks to him. To Daddy. Through the mirror.

  Norma’s eye sockets felt hollow. The CCTV screens? she said. That’s his mirror?

  Raye nodded, her gaze fixed on her plate. Don’t you want to know what he says? Her voice was barely audible above the din in the diner, the rushing in Norma’s ears.

  – No.

  – Michael tells Daddy to find the one he lost, the one that was taken from him.

  – Himself. Norma’s shoulders burned and the dentata knifed and she felt Mommy roar inside her, clawing to get out, craving, always so hungry for what it had lost. Lost somewhere in the mirror, in its own image, the same but different. Pass it on.

  Raye said, He wasn’t always so wacko. Like he was never normal but it was okay for a while. He was always an impersonator. A really good one. He did Elvis, Hendrix, but Michael Jackson mainly. Always too much Michael.

  – When did the mirror thing start? said Norma.

  Raye turned to face her own reflection in the dirty diner window. Too much Michael, she said to herself.

  The waitress came over. Her brown hands gripping the coffee pot, her face framed in a short white afro. She looked down at Raye and clucked. Went away and came back with a piece of pie buried under ice cream and cream, a puckered cherry on top.

  – Happy Birthday, hun.

  Norma nodded her thanks. Raye talked between mouthfuls of pie.

  – He did some shows in Vegas. I was still with him then but just a baby and he had some trouble up there—got evicted or some such—then he came down to Spill City and opened the store. He had boxes of shit he collected, plus his own stuff from when he was a kid, dug in dumpsters for the rest, traded and quake-trash meets. Had dreams of going on the road again. Blamed it on the fact he didn’t look enough like Michael Jackson. Every cent he earned at the store went on another nose or chin or whatever.

  The coffee was hot and bitter going down but it was the way Raye swept her arms out in a gesture so falsely indifferent that made Norma wince.

  – Everything he did to make him look more like Michael Jackson only seemed to remind him of how far he had to go. I called up once from New York, yeah. Times Square boogie all night. He told me how he finally got a letter back from the Michael Jackson people after all the hundreds he’d written. And it said, come on up to Neverland. Really. He read it to me. It was from Blanket Jackson III, signed, sealed and delivered. Saying come up and help with the Neverland Revival. They were going to move it to Vegas, reopen it to the public. They invited Daddy to perform. Make Michael live again.

  – So? Norma was trying to pay attention but exhaustion had made her mind wander, and her eyes too. She just wanted to be alone to think about the puppet, how Gene had left it there—for her—and Mac had made sure she’d seen it—had passed it on—so pretty. Like a wolf.

  – Soooooo... Raye stared down at her pie with her fork poised in the air. Before Norma could stop her she started banging her head against the back of the booth. Bang bang bang. People staring.

  – He lost it, Raye said between bangs. He lost the letter.

  – How? said Norma. How do you lose something like that? He never goes anywhere.

  The windows of the diner were steamy and it was dark outside. Norma rubbed some of the steam away and watched some Cruids doing figure eights on their boards in front of a sheet metal fence scrawled with biofluorescent slogans. Raye thumped against the back of the seat again. Norma turned back reluctantly.

  – Some guy came through.

  – Some guy? What guy? Norma dragged her voice up from the pit of her stomach. She waved the waitress over for more coffee.

  – He was from LA, that’s all he said. He stopped by to show Daddy some merch, top notch. A rare train set or some such. Daddy was feeling okay that day—the woman at the Laundromat told me afterward that he looked good too—he made the guy lattes with the machine he looted from a Sunset cafe in the arson attacks of ’29. Guy had a fifth of Wild Turkey in his sack, started splashing it around; Daddy got out his favorite Ozzy Osbourne shot glasses. He shouldn’t drink, you know. He’s not meant to drink with the meds and all. The two of them swapping lies, the guy’s all, did you know you’re the spitting image of Michael? Turned Daddy’s head. Guy even said the magic words, Moonwalk for me, Michael.

  Raye had started again, banging her back against the vinyl booth.

  – Hey. Stop that. You’ll break something.

  – Turned out the guy had been a stuntman in LA, did the stunts in X-Box Mariachi. Got Daddy drunk (bang bang) and he passed out. When he woke up, guy’d ripped him off.

  Norma’s hands were shaking so badly she had to set her coffee down. She’d lost feeling in her fingers. Breathed through the pain in her shoulders.

  – Guy was gone (bang), letter from Neverland was gone. Bam (bang bang). A bunch of other random stuff gone too. But nothing that mattered like the letter. That was Mac’s ticket to ride. His red shoes—

  – Slow down.

  – When Daddy called me, he’d lost it. I mean not just the letter but his total shit. it was like he was talking a different language then. Like the voices were talking through him. He started to act crazy, not just the usual eccentric and weird and selfish and addicted, but cracked. (bang) The chick at the Laundromat next door called me, I came as quick as I could. I mean he’s no angel, Daddy. You don’t have to tell me. But he’s Daddy, yeah (bang). Only one I got. So I said I’d look for the letter but he said he already looked. I could see that. The place was trashed. I asked him to tell me what the guy who ripped him off looked liked, you know, people I ride with can fix that shit, but he couldn’t remember. I said try but it was like the sickness, the schizo thing, brought in new memories, stuff that never even happened to him that took over what he thought. Like he started talking about stuff, bad stuff, that never happened to him—not that I knew of.

  – What sort of stuff?

  Raye jabbed viciously in the air with a fork dripping cherry pie.

  – Devil puppets, wolves, fortune tellers, barns. Like all the memories attached to all the shit in that store were talking to him all at once. Like they wanted him now instead of the other way around.

  She had stopped banging against the booth. Had started silently crying again, the tears rolling down her blotched, snotty face, framed in the stiff tufts of her dune-colored hair.

  Norma said slowly, Why didn’t he tell me this? Why didn’t he tell me about the Guy?

  – Michael wouldn’t let him, said Raye. You’re not getting it. The voices start, yeah, and it’s always Michael. And the headaches like, I don’t know, terminal brain cancer or something, and he says the darkness never comes. He prays for dark and for silence but’s always bright and the bright lights bring nose, and he can hear the pain. So he closes his eyes—bang—and it’s bright, always light, so much pain—bang—and the darkness never fucking comes.

  The cherry pie gutted and split like road kill on the plate and Raye’s soft cheeks splattered with cherry goo and other diners staring, the Jamaican cook’s eyes narrowing from over the stove, Norma standing and throwing bloody bills on the table and shepherding the girl out before the waitress called security.

  27//:pull

  A woman and a child moving through the mean streets, nothing that hadn’t been seen before. It would be light soon. A Consortium guard’s knuckles tightened over the butt of his rifle—Norma’s shadow loomed at the mouth of an alleyway, but he relaxed when he saw the child. Norma had managed to get her cleaned up—in her cruddy parka she blended in, her pallor, the hunger in her eyes reflected in a thousand other faces, untold other eyes. All around them, the persistent swoosh of skateboard wheels, the clack of cowboy boots, black hat brims, and Norma wheeled wildly to and fro but there was no one there. Around them nothing but the space of darkness, the space of fear.

  Raye was talked out. But as t
hey neared the Sanctuary, she said, expressionless, Leeks.

  The sour, overcooked reek of whatever seethed in the Crock-Pot had drifted down to the street and Raye picked it up a block before Norma did. At the door to the Sanctuary Norma gave the girl a couple of Valiums and left her there without making eye contact. Without saying goodbye.

  Norma jumped a GMC recombo with Tijuana plates and flew off at the trailer park. She landed badly and splashed in some standing water at the edge of the road. Her arms flailed as she regained her balance. By the time she got to the trailer, numb with exhaustion, all she could do was kick off her boots and fall face-down on the bed. Her eyes burned yet she couldn’t sleep. She dry-swallowed some off-market triazolam but it didn’t help. She went outside, wondered if she should go down to the beach. And then what? Take a dip?

  Mommy said, A daemon cannot die.

  If that is what she was once, what was she now? She’s adopted a street kid, longed for a man she couldn’t have and suffered from killer PMS. What was that? There was no way of knowing.

  The wind was bitter and the ocean was a roiling hole. And also a whole. Mirror of the world, source of all its pain, all its life and time. She saw it in its entirety. All the way down, two-three-four miles. The trick was getting back up. A daemon couldn’t die but how far could a woman fall? How many miles to mortality, Mommy? Are we there yet?

  Dawn touched the fleshy cliffs. Their tufted vegetation rippled like living pelt. Eroded monsters, doomed gorillas with slumped and leathery bodies swathed in mist. The path beneath her feet was lined with wrappers, cans and burger boxes in various states of decay. An odor of petals, pine and corrosives. She put her hands on the wooden rail at the edge overlooking the beach. The countless hands and unending seasons that had touched this rail, felt the call of the unfathomed sea—find out what you truly are.

  Norma could see beneath its surface, see it in its entirety. The whole. Float through it in her mind—the sand bars and buried reefs, the shipwrecks and underwater crevasses. She could see the other side. Not just San Diego Bay but beyond. To where the Pacific grew warm, where warships lay buried along with the odd asteroid, ancient fuselage, and then grew cold again. And the life it sustained—would it take her? Would it want her? Mommy said no. So what had changed? Norma could feel it. She needed to know. What was she now?

  She needed to know if she could die.

  The way Mac’s eyes had darkened at the end, just before they’d brightened. Like it had gotten crowded in there. Is death what they’d seen in her, those crowded eyes? Or not. Had they seen the Silence?

  Because that’s who she was. Mommy had made her that way, a conduit. A hole. She could only hope that something had broken through the silence.

  Bring bring.

  Norma released her clawed hold on the wooden rail. She brushed off the sand and splinters and went back in the trailer and lay on the bed with the curtains open to the numberless stars. She carried the inevitability of her fall—there was blood on her hands and she didn’t know why—within her, sharpening its teeth. The longer she waited before implantation, the worse the pain.

  – Look, she said, Here I am.

  The sun had gotten too big for Mommy, gave it a swollen head, or was it the other way around? Who had killed who? What had killed the First Beings? The fissioning death star, or the hostile, doomed Brainworld determined to take its beautiful horned children down with it? If Mommy couldn’t have the beautiful First Beings, nothing could. It made sure of that, but to learn its power, had it summoned them or created them?

  It was impossible to know, impossible not to know.

  There were footsteps outside the trailer, a faint whiff of straw and manure as if stuck to the soles of a shoe. She, the hunted now, haunted by some Guy with shit on his shoes. What was he? Her skin prickled and the darkness nailed her to the bed. The shuffling footsteps receded. What was its name? She went to a barn in her dreams and came back with blood on her hands, more fallout? Or psychosomatic guilt over Slash sins unnumbered and truths debowelled—was this guilt another side effect of the mission? Because however it had originally been conceived the mission had changed. Elvis has left the building Mommy and the truth is dead even as it is created. Brrring brrring.

  – I am never going home.

  Sleep. Slipping over the lip of a waking dream, she felt, more than heard, a song at the horizon, so beautiful it made her smile. A stranger singing—the Guy?—calling to her, pulling her toward the song, his image on the rise, a gelid moon that became the face of Michael Jackson and Mac Daddy and then the guy on the train with the fulvous eyes. Gloria, the song went. GEE-EL-OH-AR-I-AY. A phone rang. And rang. Irretrievable beginnings, unpredictable ends, her curse was to have been made in the image of no other. Was it a puppy? Or a child? Did the daughter pass on? Or live to rip out the heart of its parent? To write a letter from Neverland, miles between us, Michael. Time against us. Call home, hun. Chewy yeah, and crusty too. Looks like gum. Or was that cum? One two I’m coming for you. Make Mommy talk. This is God, said the wolf man, reaching into Norma’s hole and pulling out a plum. I’m your boyfriend now.

  PART III

  META 4

  Kali I8 saw the Slash as a self-authored being. To penetrate the secrets of the Slash, I8 studied its symbols. It collected, collated and translated. Letters, numbers, pictograms, cuneiform. Japanese, German, Arabic, Israeli, Swahili, Sanskrit, Urdu, Yandrruwandha, Yugoslavian, Handspeak. Metaphor, metonym, semaphore, sign. Ebonics, Hebronics, Chingrish, Hinglish, platitude, aporia, glossolalia, clichés and platitudes, pidgin, rhetoric aporia, and rhyme. And so on and so forth. Assonance and synonym, lyric and lies. Zingers and clangers and curse and verse, heresy, prophesy, Strine and slang. I8 kept the symbols in the lab (a sentience has many rooms), dissected, dismembered, stacked on shelves beneath the great precipice. It tried to master the code, practiced unendingly, but language—words for things—eluded it. So Kali’s brain destroyed the symbols and signs and sunk again into the only world that it knew and could therefore rule, a world of silence and solitude. Kali I8’s mind could not conceive of another.

  (Fascicle 437 Nilea AQn., trans. L.Shay 2656)

  28//: unheimlich maneuver

  The drugs kept her unconscious and finally dreamless most of the day and when she woke the dentata was screaming for a name. What hunted her? The Factory, when she got there around midnight, was deserted. It wasn’t just the Dianabol scare that Bunny and Raye had told her about. There had been rumors of a raid—not seen in a decade or more—and of Consortium informants and moles and a return to order. Zygote labs had dismantled overnight; spiders swung in the windows of the hot ware outlets, and Cash Attack had closed its Factory store. Up at Una’s, the Karaoke was winding down and Norma slumped beneath the screen running Dancing with the Chefs, followed by a news report about a new school opening in the Zone.

  Little Barry hefted brontosaurus schnitzels and kept his one good eye on Norma, answered her questions about Raye with wary nonchalance. Norma saw something skitter at the edge of her eye, but why turn around when there was nothing there?

  Little Barry told her that Raye didn’t do Rediem, not yet, even though she was technically a Grimey, rode with them and called herself one. And Grimeys did Rediem.

  – Raye rides in once or twice a year with the Grimey, but she’s all right. Got guts, that kid. Something innocent about her. She brings her old man food and meds.

  – How does she afford it? said Norma.

  He shrugged, wouldn’t meet her eye and this time she knew it was deliberate.

  – Daredevil stunts, he said. You saw her. Survival sex.

  – Great.

  – You can talk, said Little Barry.

  Bring, bring.

  – That was some fall, he continued, looking up to the vaulted ceiling and pointing to the broken skylight. Norma kept her eyes straight ahead.

  – Verstehen si jetz, scolded Una from the kitchen. The bad man pushed her.

  Little Barry
waved her quiet, drying beer mugs while his wonky eye wandered Norma knew not where.

  – Haven’t seen Augustine and the others for a while, he shrugged. Can’t say I miss them.

  – They’ll be back, said Norma.

  – You don’t want to be here then, said Little Barry. Augustine bears a deadly grudge.

  Norma tried to think how best to approach the topic of Mac’s visitor, the stunt man from LA.

  – So, what’s with Mac? Is he just selfish or is something really wrong?

  – Mac’s bent, said Little Barry. He’s never been all there. Loved his little girl but couldn’t raise her.

  Norma said, She told me he knew everyone, saw them as they came into Spill City. Got paid for his eyes and his ears.

  Little Barry shrugged. She told you he’d be able to pass on some intel about this guy you’re looking for?

  Norma said, She didn’t lie.

  – Good, because, thing is she says that to everyone, just to help her Daddy out. Brings them to the store so maybe they buy some piece of junk they don’t need, maybe pass on some piece of junk info gets someone laid, killed, cured. Whatever. And maybe once it was true. Was a time Mac saw himself as a double-agent type. Covered it up with his eccentric ways, so no one would know what he was. Told himself he was doing it for the kid, for Raye. Another weirdo—same difference.

  – What is the difference?

  Barry looked up at the TV, checked the score. The state, he said. When it was a state, used to be full of them.

  – Weirdos?

  – Big time moonwalkers, baby, Yeti-Divas, Unicorn-hunters. No one was what they said they were.

  – Unicorns? Norma said more to herself than to Barry.

  He rolled his good eye and moved off to take an order.

  When he came back he said, where have all the unicorn hunters gone? All I see is Consortium goons and Cartel sissies.