American Monster

by J. S. Breukelaar

  – Who? she said. The pain got in the way of her thinking. Raye?

  Gene pushed away his uneaten pie. He carefully wiped his mouth with a napkin he carefully folded in half. Then in quarters.

  – You called out Gloria. My wolf. The one killed up north. Did you see her? Or something? You pointed at—nothing.

  – You were the one who pointed, she said. Weren’t you?

  The sticky finger of the Silence tickled her ear. Pulled at strands of her hair. The Night. Breathing wetly down her neck.

  He shook his head. Did you see a dog or something?

  I don’t know, she said. There was this dog. From before. This other dog called Jose. I called his name?

  Gene shook his head grimly. His beautiful big hands were shaking. She reached out to take them in her own but he pulled away and covered it up by waving the waiter over.

  – You haven’t finished, she said, pointing at his half-empty glass.

  He turned to her, his face taut with terror.

  – You didn’t say Jose, he said. You said Gloria. Gee-EL-Oh-Are-I-A.

  It was the last week in March. Spring refused or forgot to come, yet there was in the chill coastal breeze a scent of reprieve, a feeling of space opening up between the stink of the spill and the charred hills. Norma went for a long walk on the beach, hoping she’d figure out what to do by the time she got back to the hut. She thought of what Gene said about the future passing on, about how it had not forgotten California because the future has seen the Silence. It has been to the other side.

  She noticed some of the shutters being repaired in the big homes along the highway. Earlier that morning while waiting fruitlessly for Raye at the trailer park, she saw a couple of surfers back at the rail at sunup, not going in yet or any time soon, but talking about it. Pointing at the red tide, the plankton changing color maybe. Greener now. Maybe the dolphins would come back soon. Yeah. Maybe.

  She had two hundred dollars and change left. When she got back to the cottage Gene was already awake and was making eggs. She poured herself a cup of coffee. He had changed since the vision she had of his wolf at the lagoon. It was like he knew something that he couldn’t tell or wouldn’t. He said with a grim smile that she was looking thin. That if she thought he hadn’t noticed her eating less, giving him her share, she was dead wrong. Not looking at her while he banged around.

  – There might be some work at the Wang after all, he said. I’m going down there later in the week.

  – So you’re not going to SJ?

  He turned off the little battery stove slowly but kept staring at the eggs in the pan. His strong chin sagged a little with exhaustion.

  – No, he said. I’m not going anywhere. I won’t forget and I won’t leave. I’ll stay. We’ll figure something out. Pass it on.

  Her coffee-cup wobbled in her hand. What did you say?

  He turned to her, pan in hand. Pass it on. Tell them, whoever wants to know. I’m not going anywhere.

  They locked eyes, man and monster.

  – I know Morse code, too, he said. My cousin Ty taught me. Only good thing he ever did.

  39//: V

  Who the hell lives here? Raye banged around the trailer, lifting up a map of the Zone (a wavery inverted V traced from Bakersfield up to San Miguel then down the coast to Spill City) to find some cash stuffed in a used but clean duffle coat. She’d found a shitload of comtrash too, food wrappers, a laundry hamper filled with bloodstained clothes and nothing much else. Raye had finished the three beers in the fridge, slept on the bed, tried on Norma’s shoes (one pair) and sampled her lipstick (too red). After that, really, there wasn’t much else to do except slip out to check up on Mac, if she could find him—she thought maybe fishing in trash cans at the edge of the markets, or up at Swami’s having his fortune read, but he was nowhere—and then come back to the trailer and wait for Norma to leave before Raye snuck back in. She never stayed for long, but she liked coming here to this little trailer beside the beach, where a part of her was born, she knew, and a part of her had gone forever. Raye didn’t want Norma to find her because she didn’t like what was happening to her, how she was changing and she knew Norma wouldn’t like it either. Raye was a little scared of Norma, truth be told, but mostly she wanted to give Norma time with that big old chief of hers. Gaaah! Raye could go and hang out with them at their little love nest, and she even tried to follow them once. Followed the sound of their laughter and the splash of their boots through the puddles, but then, go figure, she lost them. It was like a shadow came between her and their twinned silhouettes just ahead and then they were gone. But that was okay. They needed their time together, yeah. Norma had to be the loneliest damn woman Raye had ever met and she’d met lonely on the road, yeah and on the rails too. Lonely as hell. Except Norma was the loneliest. Eyes the color of a rainy Sunday. Raye lay on the saggy bed tracing inverted Vs on the window that looked out over the ocean. She had never had a boyfriend. Not unless you count the select group of Spill City johns who hadn’t beaten her up.

  For her sins.

  40//: charity

  They needed money. Gene didn’t want to spend their last diamond, which was safely shoved up where the sun didn’t shine, not unless he had to. He got to know some day-laborers near Bunny’s place at Pacific Beach. Norma said that he could get killed moving in on established turf like that, but the workers accepted him and shared what little work there was with the big man. It didn’t last though—Gene wasn’t good with his hands, not in that way. He looked for a driving job, hung around Una’s and the Wang, but all that happened was that Bunny felt sorry for him and threw him a couple of shifts in the thukker, pleading a hot date. They both knew the tranny was lying but as far as Gene was concerned, driving a tranny’s tuk-tuk did beat trying to squeeze into red tights and hoof it to twentieth century show tunes.

  Norma told Gene about how Bunny lost his little boy and when Gene asked Bunny about it, the transvestite said that he didn’t expect it would ever get any better. That the grief would outlive him, not the other way around. They were sitting at the bar waiting for Bunny to go on. He was wearing his Wonder Whoa-Man suit, baggy with the weight he’d lost, and as usual, had the wig beside him like a patient pet. Gene took one of Gloria’s baby teeth off its cord and gave it to Bunny. For luck. Bunny looked at the little butter-colored tooth and his face collapsed in on itself, slick tears gouging troughs in his make-up. Unable to go on with the show for the first time in his life, Bunny just shook his head when Superman approached with his cue. At a nod from Gene, he turned around, got back onstage and nailed it.

  Duonoesis 1. (n) Seeing through the eyes of another being (an aporifek) who is usually a byproduct of one’s own alaxeneasis. 2. (v) Being in two places (geographical or temporal) at once, a strategy deployed by the Hipproque Guerillas of 2060, and adopted after the war as a form of adolescent interactive entertainment that went out of favor, but which came back into vogue by Quint 206, due to the development of the new Frax Protocol.

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

  41//: barn

  Norma looked for her own game and finally found one near the checkpoints. Poker, a little left-handed snooker. It was like riding a bike, she’d forgotten how much she remembered. She played with Consortium guards, Cartel goons, it didn’t matter. Word had got out about the big crazy bitch with a wicked-witch mojo and no one gave her any trouble. On some unexpected level, Norma felt vaguely disappointed.

  Then one night down in TJ, on La Coahuila, a fat Swedish assassin with a tattoo sleeve—fangs and eagles, demons and dragons—shot her after she won two thousand dollars and his gold tooth, which she wrenched out with her bare hands, winning another five hundred dollars from an Armenian construct artist. The bullet went in mid-body, missed every vital organ and came out cleanly leaving a tiny hole she could stick her finger into. After recovering for a day and a night in the upstairs bedroom of a whore named Fonda Cox, Norma went after the Swede who shot her, a couple of hours
before dawn. Lightning flashed on the dark horizon. Stars shrank from the arcing lasers and the throbbing roar of the hoppers. Norma tracked the Swede to a silent alleyway east of the cordon. The alley was unlit and it was impossible to tell how narrow it was in parts, Norma’s shoulders brushed sheet metal and cinderblock either side, ducking beneath fire escapes, walking past blacked-out windows and over soundproof cellars. She watched the Swede stop at a door invisible against the night until the door opened a crack and vomited out an orange flicker that it swallowed back up again when the Swede disappeared within. Norma was at the door at once. She peered through a crack in the sheet metal of the shack at a small circle of men and boys wearing headsets and viewing a Reely projected from the center of the room. It starred an unbilled Randy Mears as a Consortium puppet eaten alive by vermin who’d survived the brush fires and brought their hungers with them. Soundlessly gnawing. Norma’s vision tunneled and she was aware of a presence at her elbow and then a Taser-like wave of nausea, and then she blacked out.

  And then she was on a dark road above which the Milky Way wheeled. She was both herself and able to watch herself as someone else. Her boots slipped in the starlit mud and her esophagus spasmed, emitting a deep-throated growl. Ahead of her, down a narrow length of earth that was not quite a road and not quite a path, was the barn. It was not the same barn, but they were all the same barn. Her knees buckled beneath the weight of the fat Swede over her shoulder. She couldn’t remember how he got there, but she knew why.

  The Swede’s arms swung down so that his hands smacked against her ass and his hairy belly was soft against her cheek and not in a good way. Beneath her righteous wrath, she felt wrong in her body, stiff in the joints and weak-willed. At the barn door she let the Swede drop onto the mud and dragged the body the rest of the way by one leg, beneath the raccoon skull and into the dark, sweet-smelling space. She let his leg drop and caught her breath. Fumbled for the lantern on the shelf and froze. She struggled to breathe, drew in ragged gulps of air and began to back away, the Swede staring up at her with his blood-webbed eyes and throat slit and vulvate. But it was not from this horror alone that Norma, eyes burning with smoke and claws a-drip, recoiled. No. Beside the dead man she could see another and in the stalls before her, more bodies, countless, flayed and flyblown in the pinking sawdust and among them not a soul that didn’t seek it.

  42//: stanislavsky rag

  He would not run away again. He would bring in some money. He would dress in tights. Whatever it took. He would finish building his game and send it to that friend of Jesse’s in Albuquerque. He would find a driving job. Driving was his thing. He could drive anything on wheels. Two, four, or eighteen. He liked the road, felt most like himself behind a wheel. Something about watching life through a dirty window. Made him feel clean.

  Norma looked for and found a play for herself down at the checkpoints. Gene and Jesus went down ahead to clear the ground—a seven foot Six Nations warrior who looked like he could kill three wolves with his bare hands (look, the teeth) and a three hundred pound Sonoran bouncer, praise Jesus, whose wife and three children, mother and step-dad and two uncles and grandmother were murdered by three SLA activists one afternoon between telenovelas and Funyuns.

  Gene ordered another drink. On the stage, the androgens were finishing up their synchronized snorkeling. Their cocks in the giant tank waved like eels. Bunny would be up next. Gene liked Bunny’s Wonder Whoa-Man act. Bunny was a skilled dancer, Gene gave him that. Gene liked Norma’s friends. He liked that she had friends down here—Jesus and Bunny and Little Barry and the missing Raye, who’d maybe turn up one of these months the way kids sometimes but not always did. It wasn’t like in LA where Norma’s only friends were an Elvis Bop Bag and a lost guy she’d met on a train (or something). She was so lonely in LA and there had been nothing Gene could do about it. Not that Gene could talk. Up in LA, his only friends were a dead dog and a continent full of strangers. America was a lonely place. But Spill City was not exactly America anymore and so it was different. Her friends had become his and he’d made some of his own. Spill City was no longer a place of strangers.

  The bartender came over, all fake spurs and shit, and splashed some whisky in Gene’s glass. Gene heard the click of boots and turned around thinking it would be Bunny in the new heels Norma had bought him. Break a leg, Gene was about to say, but it was just a cordon guard in the usual crazy drag and so Gene turned around again. The guard was wearing Mariachi boots and a Cartel bandana over his brassy yellow hair. From the edge of his eye Gene watched the guard check his weapon, pull up a stool and order a Miduri Bomb. There was something vaguely familiar about the guy. He had tiny baroque scarification scrawls (or old acne scars) on one sunken cheek. The Wonder Woman remix started up, all throbbing bass and digitized brass. Gene let the music take him, he closed his eyes for a moment and let the air rush out of his lungs. It blew his mind the way Bunny fell from the ceiling like that. Such skills. The perfect splits. Bunny hung Gloria’s tooth from the rearview mirror of his tuk-tuk. A piece of her to guide him on his way. Bunny planned to go to LA to check on his family, there was more work up there anyway—Gene could come too. But Gene wasn’t sure about leaving Norma. Gene could relate to the need for a grown straight man to dress in women’s clothes. It was less the swish of cheap material against shaved thighs or the grip of a gusset, than the expansion of consciousness. One thing in the place of another. And it was also bare thighs and the grip of a gusset. A part of you waiting in the wings to return, a necessary but not sufficient condition of becoming. Peaks and troughs. Highs and lows. Men and women until Norma came along who was everything in one. The one out of the many.

  He rubbed a hard palm over his burning eyes, then drained his glass.

  Norma.

  She’d changed so much since he’d first fallen for the haunted drifter who shed bits of herself all the way down the California coast. And then after LA she’d changed again. She’d grown into consciousness herself, learned which bits were necessary, and which were just sufficient. Gene would go with her wherever she took him. That didn’t stop him worrying. Like how Gloria used to worry about him, her beautiful velvet brow knit with anxiety watching him fall where she couldn’t catch him.

  – I’ve become my dog! he said out loud.

  – Good for you, said the barman.

  Gene watched the barman crabwalk warily down the bar to serve the scarred stranger. The stranger ordered another bomb and swiveled, lurching a little to his right and then to the left. He barely seemed to register Gene nestling a luminous shot glass in the darkness. Gene heard the click of steel heels as the stranger leaned across and said in a loud and gravelly alto:

  – Anyone around this joint know of a good driver?

  43//: body mod

  The ride to New Mexico had been bumpy, he said. He regarded her from where he was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, his huge shoulders sagging a little, his long hair lank with steam. Explained to her how the new wireless hybrid technology was not as smooth as it was cut out to be and there had been bandits. Hungry kickers who lurked at truck stops, peeled off the new fibre-wrap fuselage of the rig like candy while you waited for your vending machine coffee. He only got as far as Lordsburg before the battery died and the rest of the cargo had to be picked up by Cartel runners in lithium-recharged Humvees.

  – How did you get back? Norma mumbled with her eyes half-closed. The edge of the tub hard against her head.

  – Hitched, he said. No one attracted the kindness of strangers like Gene. The Cartel flunky who took over in Lordsburg even paid him for his pains, five hundred dollars he slapped into Gene’s shirt pocket and offered to buy him a beer. Gene wisely declined, as savvy in his assessment of intent and character as he was warily withholding of judgement.

  The tepid water lapped at her breasts and Gene smiled at her. He told her how he got the driving job from that cordon stranger who said he needed to move some goods—quote unquote—between TJ and NM. Gene had been
all excited to drive one of the new wireless rigs and see this hacker friend of his brother’s in Albuquerque, maybe tweak the new game they’d been working on. Norma asked about the stranger and Gene shrugged. Just some guy, he’d said. Bunny lent him his tuk-tuk once he got into Spill City. He used it to track her down.

  It was after midnight. He’d driven first to the hut and then to the trailer (empty) and finally to the Factory where he found her tied to a chair in the back of Tweety’s forge, naked from the waist up. She’d given Tweety the last of her poker winnings to try to melt the cord off her neck thinking it would lose strength if Tweety could get it hot enough. When the blow torch didn’t work, she asked him to try cutting it. That’s when she’d bled and couldn’t stop. The cord bled. The actual cord, like some umbilicus from hell. And her screams had reverberated around the vast building until she passed out on the chair, blood from her neck to her new boots.

  Tweety backing off, saying. It ain’t metal. I don’t know what it is but it ain’t any kind of metal I know.

  Gene barged in all B.O. and fear, pushed Tweety aside and untied her, covered her with his coat and carried his fallen angel in his arms all the way back to the cottage, folks next day still talking about the fierce giant with his hair around his shoulders and the tall crumpled woman in his arms. She came to in the bath. Gene’s eyes never leaving her, picking his cuticles.

  – I had to change the water three times, he said.

  He put her to bed. Lay beside her on top of the sheets grimly waiting for her to tell him what was going on. Waiting for the truth. When it was not forthcoming, he asked what body-mod in hell would agree to solder the cord to her spine.