American Monster

by J. S. Breukelaar

  Norma said nothing.

  – It’s all the same weird now. Soul’s gone from the place.

  She heard a combo bleating in reverse down in the dock. A reek wafted in from the catwalk as a customer pushed out the door, and Norma turned around, half-expected to see a retreating hat brim, but the room was deserted and the door banged shut in the rank updraft from the Factory floor.

  Bang bang bang.

  – Mac took everything, said Little Barry. Quake-trash and baggage no one wanted to lug around. Trash or treasure, he didn’t care which was which. Vulcan dolls worth fifty bucks a pop and dime-a-dozen Stephen King hardcovers from the Eighties. Folks’d open up to him and he’d listen to their crap, take it all in. Believed it or said he did, and they believed him, the passersby. How the real founder of Er was no less than Niemen Van Aldren himself. How they’d dug themselves out of the rubble with an Emory board, how demon slugs had crawled aboard USS Nimitz. Lies, truth, it was all the same to him. He’d pass it on and it would become something different again. A circle of lies until it strangled him.

  Little Barry shook his head and his jowls flapped in sorrow. Some customers waved him over and he disappeared behind the bar, popped up on the cinderblock step at the other end with two giant mugs of ale. When he came back he shrugged in the direction of the customers, a little happier.

  – Haven’t seen their kind here for a while. Coders. Upscale techies. Good for business, I got no complaints. Where was I?

  He banged a stubby thumb against the oversized dome of his forehead.

  – Mac. Yeah. So being a cute and cuddly collector was one thing but then the thing with Michael Jackson just got too weird. You may have noticed.

  Norma was on her feet.

  – Sit down. Una’ll fix you something. So a little bit of Michael goes a long way, you know what I’m saying. Folks don’t want that. They want cute and cuddly, not deranged, chopped up Thriller-fuckers. You seen him, right? Man’s a freak. Best left alone. Pass on by, do not pass Go. But then, so he gets this letter from one of the Michael Jackson people saying they want to see his act, maybe use it for the reopening of Neverland in Vegas, you know that big—

  – Neverland, said Norma. Look. Raye told me. So what?

  It was coming. Bring bring. She felt it. Felt it in the tight lick of anticipation in her belly, her mouth dry with Mommy’s hungers and some new ones, ones that had no name.

  – Okay, so he gets this letter, brags about it to who’d ever listen, which wasn’t much more than the Korean laundry family and the waitress at the diner who looks in on him now and again. And then he gets a visit from this Guy Whatsit who rips him off—you heard about that, right?

  – Guy who? said Norma, trying to keep her voice even. Her legs grew cold. She hadn’t eaten all day. Hadn’t slept for two nights. Masturbated till she bled.

  – Guy, guy? It’ll come to me, said Barry. Guy Thingie, Una, what’s his name?

  – Who? said Una.

  – Macho man who took that letter—Barry turned to Norma—was going to make him a star. Whoa! Hey!

  Norma reached over the bar and with both hands seized Little Barry by the scruff of the neck and was dangling him above the bar without knowing what she was doing. It wasn’t her. She shook him like a doll and he was surprisingly heavy. His little legs twitching and his fat fingers clawing her hands at his throat. His little feet in their heavy boots kicked the cash drawer and something flipped out and in his hands was the Saturday Night Special he kept there, and the muzzle was cold against her ear.

  She dropped him.

  – Sorry Barry. I don’t know what that was. I swear.

  The midget’s hand steady on the piece pointed at her head. Steady as hell.

  – Get out, he said.

  – Guy Manly, said Una in a shaky voice. The name of the guy who goes to see Mac is Guy Manly. Go home now, Big Lady.

  – Barry. Honest. I’ll make it up to you.

  – Manly, said Barry, lowering the gun and rubbing his throat. That’s it. Guy Manly. Happy?

  The red was draining from his face but the fear and hurt were still in his eyes and Norma thought bitterly of the rage that had been coded into her program, and into Little Barry’s too and how it was different but the same. They both had different Mommies to blame. Speak of which, the bitch wasn’t returning her calls.

  – I’m sorry, she said again.

  Little Barry just shook his head and moved off to the other end of the bar. Norma listened to the flat sounds of a sales assistant murdering ‘Nothing Compares to You.’

  – Psst, said Una from the pass window. A porn star is your Guy Manly.

  – Raye told me he was a stuntman, Norma said. From LA.

  – Stuntman, porn star, politician, no difference in Spill City. Guy Manly not his real name, verstehen?

  One of the coders at the end of the bar, who was very drunk, called out flirtatiously, Remember that actor, Duane the Vein?

  – Buck Naked, said Little Barry. Is the one I remember, and Rod Long. You look good when you cry, kid. Makes you look young. But if you ever lay a hand on me again.

  – I’m not crying, said Norma. And I am young. What does he look like?

  – Rod Long? said Little Barry. He’s a dwarf. Started as an understudy, but he fluffed like nobody’s business, so—

  – No, said Norma. I mean this Guy Whatsit who stole Mac’s letter.

  She couldn’t bring herself to say his name.

  – Guy Manly, said Little Barry. Mac says. Schizos are like that. Maybe he was real or maybe not. Maybe there was a letter and maybe not. Maybe Mac just wished there was, know what I mean?

  Una’s face flashed into the pass window, damp with labor and rage.

  – Unheimlich, said Una from the kitchen. You never know what you have until it goes.

  – Anyone know, said Norma very slowly. Where this Guy is now?

  Little Barry shrugged again, suddenly finding a spot on a glass he was cleaning that wouldn’t come out.

  – That reminds me, he said. You hear Bunny’s boy died?

  The bar swam and blurred, all the colors running into each other, all the songs. Una heaved a sob from the kitchen and slammed shut the pass window.

  Little Barry said, Funeral’s day after tomorrow up at Canyon Memorial. You coming?

  Norma lifted her head and howled, which seemed for once like the right thing to do. Beneath it the sound of Una’s sobs and the Karaoke and clink of glasses and coders’ jokes, the swoosh swoosh of Little Barry’s towel and silence of his tears. A chorus of the fallen.

  29//: swami’s

  Gene first got to Spill City a few days after Independence Day. He went to have his palms read at Swami’s, the famous cliff-side temple he’d heard about, but found it in ruins. He strolled the ramparts in a secondhand shirt that he’d bought at the 101 markets with his dwindling cash. He’d lost weight coming back from Bakersfield, had walked most of the way, arrived in Spill City wondering if she was still here. The freaky Thriller guy hadn’t seen her, but he could have been lying—there were human portals like that all over the Zone, broken down visionaries whose function as mnemonic receptor in the damaged brain of Spill City was limited to those missing in action or about to be. Gene threw the devil puppet into the mix—Norma would bite or she wouldn’t. He was sick of dragging the old thing around the country anyway. Time to let it go.

  He clambered around Swami’s—the crumbled stucco and mossy pagodas overlooking the Pacific, the weed-choked grounds reclaimed by shanty-dwellers and cardboard cities. Music blared. At every turn someone selling batteries, homemade consoles. Laundry flapped. Trash fires burned in canisters. He asked after the one he sought, a tall woman—like me, he said, pointing to his heart—yeah, white, I guess. Dark hair, eyes the color of rain. Folks said, see the Doctor. There.

  Hunched over a brazier, an old guy, skinny as hell, warming his black-nailed fingers. Gene grinned. He knew the type, half-starved psychic, reader of cards and tea
leaves, fire-eater and sister-fucker. Gene approached, feeling right at home.

  – Stop the alliance with a virgin’s blood, the Doctor yelled, chugging from a bottle of Old Crow and wiping the dribble off his chin. Feed their lust and all their fury. Feed the fury, cause of all our grief.

  – Amen, slurred a chorus of addled Grimeys sprawled beneath a broken fountain.

  Gene’s shadow fell over the man. He watched him poke at the fire for a while.

  – Five bucks, the Doctor said, not looking up. Show me your palm.

  – Now you’re talking, said Gene.

  He grinned, pulled up a wooden crate and held out his huge hand.

  – Five bucks, said the Doctor.

  Gene lay three on the ground between them. The man inched a dusty boot forward, held the bills down fast with a metal heel. Took Gene’s hand in his own gnarled fist and traced the joke lifeline with a cursor that glowed pale blue, the color of a star at its hottest.

  You should be dead, said the Doctor. Pass it on.

  Gene’s grin widened. That’s what Auntie always said. Look at that lifeline, how it cuts out just—

  – There, said the Doctor. It picks up there. With the cursor he touched a hairsbreadth crease on Gene’s meaty palm almost at the point where it met his wrist. Gene shuddered involuntarily. He felt his gorge rise at the Doctor’s touch. He breathed through it, nudged aside the leather cord bracelet dangling Gloria’s teeth, and peered down at his open palm.

  – That’s nothing. Just a wrinkle, you crazy fake. I’ve had better readings from One-Eyed Alice back at the rez.

  Without warning the Doctor made a fist with his right hand and punched himself in the face. His hand disappeared into his mouth.

  Gene recoiled.

  – Hey.

  The Doctor’s hand kept rummaging around his grizzled maw right up to the snake tattoo on his arm. Pulled out his hand finally and opened his spit-slick fist. Yellowed dentures dangled off the end of a clawed finger, drool unspooling. He stared at Gene with gunky eyes. He poked the cursor behind his ear and ratcheted his left arm out, took Gene’s wrist in a rusty grip and dropped the gooey dentures in Gene’s open palm.

  Gene said, Fuck.

  – Is it a man or a woman you seek?

  – A woman, said Gene.

  The Doctor shook his head. There is another, he said. His puckered face hole gumming the words. Between the hunted and the hunter there is another.

  Gene tried to pull his hand away, tried to twist his wrist to lose the false teeth. But the Doctor’s hand held like a rat trap.

  – Another? he said. How will I know?

  Gene was unable to take his eyes off the dentures that lay in a pool of saliva in his open palm. Later he would try to remember if the old man’s lips had moved, and realized that even if they had he wouldn’t have seen them because when the dentures started to talk that was all he saw.

  – You will know, the false teeth said. You will know the other by its step.

  Aporafek/x: (n) i. A being caught between temporal, spacial, or ontological categories. e.g. a g(host) or alien. ii. A (non)species of meaning impossible to penetrate, put aside or pass on. iii. The expression of doubt, real or simulated, about where to begin or what to do or say. iv. A conceptual transparency so complete as to form a barrier rather than a window to meaning.

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

  30//:re:mission

  At Miguel’s, on the day of Bunny’s son’s funeral, Norma worked her way through a late breakfast of four eggs, bacon, beans and pancakes. She ate a bowl of gluey pink yoghurt and drank two cups of coffee and a glass of pineapple juice from a tin that Miguel opened behind the counter. She slowly wiped her mouth. She dialed Mommy on a smashed ’droid she’d found under a dumpster but transmission was blocked. It was not uncommon. Psychic interference was often a factor in failed configuration protocol, especially across species. In other words, she and Mommy were no longer seeing eye-to-eye.

  She paid her bill and set out for the cemetery. Was it still February? An ashy rain fell and a chill settled over this Sunday afternoon. She pulled the sleeves of her jacket down over her wrists, zipped it up over the tank top. After a long wait in the shade of the ramp among the interchangeable lumps of sleeping bags, dogs and comatose itinerants, she finally jumped a Humvee recombo and rode inland. They passed under the Interstate on what remained of the 805 and turned left onto Canyon Road, Norma peering out from under the tarp at the blurred canyons running with mud. A castellated millionaire’s lair on a hillside lay split in two halves, like a grapefruit.

  The rattle of the tarp was deafening. The recombo rumbled past evacuated housing developments as vast as Mayan ruins, heavy with graffiti and scuttling with squatters. Rags flapped. Rain glinted off looted satellite dishes. Sprayed hologlyphics and Secessionist Liberation Army slogans fading on basketball courts. Hooded and huddled, the forgotten and passed-over disappeared behind sheet metal fencing as quickly as they came, along invisible paths and twisting trenches. Between the slick on one side and the fallen mountains on the other, the tech-dream had left its mark on Spill City before passing on: Calgene, Biofuturix, Illumidata. All gone. In the wake of catastrophe there were those who fled, but also those who stayed and dug out a city beneath the city. They tunneled into cellars and garrets and clung to the walls of virtual wells, hidden behind avatars and SIGs, jacked into the cosmic highway from where they might, or might not, re-enter the world on whole new footing.

  Norma braced herself and then flew off at Canyon Road. It was an hour’s muddy trudge through more deserted biotech country and the rain fell in big oily drops on her face and hung off the ends of her hair. She stayed dry beneath the arachnoweave lining of the jacket Gene had given her and she thought of him in Bakersfield with its weed-blown sidewalks and sad ruined franchises. She thought of how he’d left with nothing but his wolf’s teeth around his neck and a bunch of diamonds up his ass. She wondered that she did not feel him here in Spill City, did not feel him near.

  Three squat white arches marked the entrance to the cemetery. These were echoed and amplified farther in by the ruins of three conjoined bell towers. Norma recognized the vaguely Mexican architectural style from other parts of the Zone—it was called RE/mission, sad monument to a fusionist age. Norma scanned the grounds looking for Raye or Bunny. Looking for anyone.

  Because that’s why she was really here. She felt it now. Created—not chosen—for her appetites and for her stamina but also for something else. For the ability of her program to adapt, to self-correct on a continuing basis. Just like a human. That had been Mommy’s mistake of course, to program within Norma an almost endless capacity for self-transformation, for adaptation, but as each resequencing moved the mission, AKA Norma, further and further from its original conceptions, it became less and less possible to predict the results, to be able to say, with any certainty, what had been unleashed in the protocol and what had been hidden, to emerge at some later time and insist on a life of their own.

  She headed toward the towers. The bells were long gone, fallen in the quake and melted down on site by Cartel contractors to be hauled away as briquettes. Norma wondered how many bodies the alloy had propelled its way into, how many shallow graves around the one-time state contained a piece of the cemetery bells nestled in worm-ridden flesh or shattered bone.

  Her guerrilla boots padded silently along the ruptured blacktop past knolls still scorched from the fires and embedded with markers, uneven slabs of stone glassy in the rain. Some had inlaid bronze stars and glyphs of the dead, speakers from which their recorded utterances once flowed. Hebrew, Arabic, Cantonese, Kanji. Dear departed. Beloved sister. Passed on this date. Subterranean events had popped many of the gravestones out like teeth, some lay where they had been flung, inches, yards or more from the human whose passing they had marked.

  She got to a hill where a clump of folding chairs were arranged in loose rows beneath a canopy. The chairs faced a pile of black eart
h beside a small rectangular grave. Norma continued up the hill past the trees only stopping when she was a safe height above the funeral canopy. She found a wide elm and stood beside a stone bench to wait. She wasn’t sure if this was where she was meant to be. Bunny had said to text when she got here, but Norma had reminded him that she didn’t text.

  Below her, the canopy on the hill sagged under the rain. Water streamed off its edge. Norma looked to her right across the park, her whole body turning from the effort because she was still stiff from the beating Mommy had given her. A vast bunker contained drawers for the remains of the numberless dead. An old couple materialized across the front of the bunker. A man and a woman. Norma blinked to make them go away. Their images slivered then reformed with some distortion, the man’s feet missing, the woman’s eyes gelid. They were both middle height, the woman on the heavy side. They moved toward her, the weeds and chipped gravestones visible through their translucent forms. The man walked stooped, stopped to point out a name here and there. His voice drifted across the cemetery. Someone’s nephew, adopted. A cousin from Hungary. Whatsisname. He was tremulous, with oversized ears beneath a skullcap. His wife wore horn-rimmed glasses and a scarf over an enormous beehive the color of pearls. She was heavy in the bosom, but with delicate wrists, her hands her pride. On one arm swung a black purse with a gold clasp that caught the light. Norma forgot to breathe. The woman clasped her husband’s sleeve with white fingers and he led her along the avenues of the dead. Norma, her flesh crawling, watched them pass. They disappeared from view and their voices came and went, at one point drowned out by the roar overhead of three F-17s from the base at Tucson. They reappeared, fading, the man pointing to a headstone through the trees, turning to his wife and her eyes, Norma saw, were spilling from their sockets. Her fine fingers tugging at his sleeve, so pale, so surely out of reach, never to return, never to find what had been taken from them. They grew incandescent in the rain and Norma watched them sputter and fade, but not entirely.