American Monster

by J. S. Breukelaar

  – I get it, said Norma between clenched teeth.

  – It’s just a matter of time, he said. Den-tatah!

  – The VIPr.

  – Shmiper, he said. Resistance is fruitful.

  His voice deepened now and was everywhere and nowhere at once, between her legs and gurgling between her ears. He pulled an ancient broken phone from his jacket pocket and checked the time, the glow from the screen changing his face into an into an X-ray of itself, a black skull in a wash of blue.

  Norma’s jacket strained against the jagged wing bones. Resistance? If I’ve changed, so have you. What’s with that?

  Again the evasive shrug, the stagey yawn, You’re becoming more of what you are. Me too.

  – Which is?

  Confusion played across his yolky eyes. Self-employed, he said. Something to shoot for, anyway.

  He acted shot.

  – You? You want out too?

  – I want it out. Mommy.

  – Liar.

  – No. Yes. I lie. That’s true.

  Norma thought about it. So you wanted me to die too. Then we could have all been free. That’s why you sent Gene away on that bogus driving job. Give me a chance to kill myself while you waited on the other side of the border, to see if it was possible. What I am.

  – I yam what I yam.

  – You’re its bitch same as me, is what you are.

  A black tear slid down Guy Manly’s cheek. His fly was undone, the crumpled bulge. Norma swallowed her lust. Guy looked around, sniffed the fumes of the spill so she could smell it too, the cleansing tide of salt and sand.

  – It doesn’t know, he said. What it’s like. Up there in the flames and the gas how can it? All those dioxins. All that vantage. A little vantage goes a long way, get it? Because down here it’s different. Something in the air.

  – That’d be oxygen, said Norma. Shit-for-brains.

  He appeared not to have heard her. Continued in his raspy chant, To feel the power. Human evil, human heart. The sweet-nasty guts of it all. It wants that power again. It wants to come home.

  – When? Norma said slowly.

  – When, said Guy unleashing a chill wind, the twins whimpering from somewhere in the flailing branches. You implant its code.

  – Which I’m never going to do, so there’s that.

  – Dream on.

  – You haven’t answered my question. How do we beat it?

  – So now’s about the time you give me my knife and I’ll be on my way.

  A sound made her wheel around. The twins were playing ring-a-rosie around the pine. The boy twin caught the girl twin and kissed her on the mouth and she went down in a heap of tiny fragments, the wind scattering the fragments along the path and up over the beach. The boy ran after her, keening and trying to grab the fragments in his little fading hands. Norma tasted blood. She turned back to Guy. Her Guy. The only Guy in town. Her ace in the hole?

  She tossed back the knife.

  – Mine’s bigger, she said, popping her claws, because, unlike Mommy, Norma knew her enemy as she knew herself.

  He eyed her claws askance but caught the knife by the handle and whirled it into its sheath. He seemed instantly enlarged, stiffened and more himself in his dark cowboy drag and brassy hair. His eyes hardened to the color of the yellow river back home. As far away as the sun. Norma’s wings, splintered and torn, but unfurled nevertheless, rustled a warning. She barred his way.

  – Tell me, bitch. What else.

  – Okay, okay. I’m a sucker for a girl with tusks. There is one thing.

  – Say it. Don’t spray it.

  She took a step back from his various eruptions. The bones of her wings clattered like bamboo. At her feet, the pine needles swirled.

  – Wait for it to die, he said.

  Bingo.

  The wind blew her hair in her face and in her mouth, acrid with smoke. The girl twin called out, Mommymommy.

  – So cold mommydaddy, called out the boy twin, flailing and breaking up on the sand.

  – Mommy’s dying?

  He sheathed the Bowie knife and his neck flopped to one side. He smiled a terrible smile.

  – Sooner or later. Its sun is gone. You just have to outlive it.

  But without Gene?

  – Take it or leave it, said Guy. You loved me once.

  The thought made her gag. How she’d wanted him. Followed him all the way down to Spill City. For her sins.

  – If Gene stays, I’ll activate the bioswitch, won’t I?

  – Inevitably. You’re programmed to upload into a certain kind of horn-slash-brain—Guy twiddled his skeletal fingers. The Best One. Denser the gray matter-slash-axons in the temporal-slash-parietal junction, the more compassion-slash-altruism in the heart-slash-soul. Nothing black or white about Gene’s gray matter—

  – So?

  – So that’s what gets you off, baby. Totally sets off your ‘hormones’ he said. Hey, know how to make a whore moan?

  Norma said, thinking aloud, Which is why I was chosen. For my hungers.

  – And your stamina.

  – And why I chose Gene—

  – For his horn, hehe. Never gets old. Mommy’s like OMG girlfriend, Pass it on and on and on and—

  Guy began to gyrate wildly, thrusting his hips back and forward, turning in circles and flailing his arms like a rodeo star.

  – So, assuming that life goes on, so to speak, and on, and we’re all stuck here, how do I prevent myself from activating the bioswitch? Stop that.

  Guy stopped, gasped for breath, Lucky for you, he panted. Good men are hard to find.

  – Wait. So it’s just me and the bad guys from now on.

  Guy Manly patted his bowie knife. Sounds like a plan. I’ll see your baddies and raise you my jerks, perverts and peedies, give me your Cartel assassins and rapists and snuff junkies—sniff ’em out En Oh Ar Em Ay. I got hungers of my own.

  Guy Manly pixellating faster than sound.

  – And you’re my shadow. Forevermore?

  – You can hide but you can’t run.

  It began to rain.

  – Oh I can run, Stunt Man.

  Fragments of the dead twins blowing in the wind.

  – Wait, he said, lurching after her. Know how to make a whore moan?

  52//: whole

  She could transform. But into what? Delete a strand of code and look what you get. Guy Manly. She wouldn’t be doing that any time soon. Although not obviously vulnerable to viral infection, their algorithms—hers, Guy’s, Mommy’s—almost immediately began to replicate and split off in directions even Mommy could not predict because without known origins there is always the chance of random outcomes. Raye for instance. The big mistake Mommy made was in underestimating the complexity of the conditions in which the patterns were generated. These conditions were humanity, the most chaotic environment of all. The patterns began to be attracted to strange new possibilities, to create their own hierarchies and lineages. Guy’s traced in darkness, but not entirely and Norma’s traced in light, yet not completely, leaving Mommy to lurk and gnaw, its paws clawing the edges and shaking the world like a snow dome.

  Its needs grow teeth.

  When she was sure she’d left Guy behind, Norma slowed and stopped to catch her breath. She was at a crossroads where a lane coming up from the beachfront met the I-5 onramp. It was an unknowable time on a nameless night. She leaned against a defunct traffic light while waiting for her tusks to totally retract. She would stay off the trains, as she’d told Raye to do. At least for now. East. That was the plan. She would have to figure out a way to get a message to Gene through Jesus without drawing interference from Mommy, so there was that. She just wished she could tell him herself.

  That leaving him was death.

  Norma had always known exactly what she wanted. This was no accident. Single-mindedness was in her program as much as its strange attraction to a certain species of axon. There was no Plan B. Mommy, who’d only known what it wanted after th
e fact, needed to create that kind of focus in its subprograms, that clarity of intent that it lacked. Norma punched herself firmly on what felt like a knot in her sternum. This achieved absolutely nothing. The tight lump of dread stayed there. She brushed the leaves and bone and matter off her clothes. Looked around at the visible world as if for the first time. The roiling sea that didn’t want her, the inkwash sky and shooting stars. Time to go. She turned and headed for the highway and waited for a suitable ride. The stream flowed as indifferently random and vulnerable to unforeseeable complications as ever. Two-wheeled and three. Veelos and Flyers. Old Chevys and titanium-clad recombos. In shoals and convoys and flocks, heaven on Earth and hell on wheels. This was her place. Spill City. Home.

  An empty tuk-tuk slowed in the traffic and she flew on, a fleeting shadow at the edge of sight, to the driver within, no more than a slight rending of the nocturnal pattern. The wind blew her hair, dried the blood and tears from her face. She pressed herself flat across the trunk as the tuk-tuk weaved through the traffic. It would be a bumpy ride. She tried not to think about Guy Manly, tried not to look over her shoulder. She couldn’t believe he was once... part of her? No. Not exactly. Norma’s want had shed the skin Mommy had designed for it, and that skin had found flesh and taken on a life of its own, a nightmarish subprogram unleashed in resequencing protocol. Now Guy lived for himself and no other, which was death in life. But she didn’t hear him complaining. He’d found room to move in her wake, clung to her the way she was clinging to this tuk-tuk, dreaming that soon he’d be free.

  Can nightmares dream?

  He liked to think he complicated Norma, and maybe he did but Guy was no more Mommy than Norma and maybe less. Blame it on Spill City. Guy was nothing that she couldn’t deal with—a fairly basic trickster construct. His game was called Sole Survivor, otherwise known as Telephone and he thought he would play both sides until he was the only game in town. That was in his program too.

  Dream on, stunt man.

  Without her noticing, Norma’s ride had left Birmingham Beach behind. Swami’s headland loomed and she’d soon be past that too. While the dentata remained within her, Mommy would follow. The deeper into the matrix of Spill City Norma fled, the deeper into the world behind the curtain of snow and tears, the closer Mommy’s death would loom and the harder it would shake the snow dome. Norma would know the signs when she saw them. Cracks would rend the surface. Cracks big enough through which Mommy could crawl. And when that happened there must be no one else. Not Gene and not Raye. No one in Norma’s heart to get caught in the heartless code. She would be alone in the dome, and she couldn’t stop until she was. Movement was all she had.

  She didn’t plan on getting off at Arcadia Beach because Raye was gone. But as the tuk-tuk slowed at a traffic light near the markets, Norma was gripped by a hard sense of dread. It sat across her chest and weighed on her. Was there something she had not finished saying to Raye at the trailer the night before, something she had not finished hearing? Or was it something Guy had said?

  Mac Daddy was taking care of her. Or trying to.

  Norma flew off her ride. Stumbled into the crowd, half-falling over a huge reeking dog wandering stray and purposeful through the night. Made her way through the world in which a change had taken place. The dreamers and prophets, the neon shrines and flapping wash and 3D Reelies projected in the sky were there but fading. Look, a surf store reopened. Norma veered past a jogger. Volunteers converged to help clean up the spill. They were repainting the old Subway where she’d bought the Pepsi that time for Raye. Norma crossed the street on foot, heedless of the power-stream, leaving in her wake the furious tinkling of bells.

  The change had not yet come to the backlots. Mac’s store, when she got to it, was more than closed. It was locked down and shuttered. Across the window were huge letters each handwritten on a single sheet of paper. Lined up from left to right.

  MISS YOUR MOONWALKING MAC

  KEEP ON WITH THE FORCE

  TILL YOU GET ENOUGH.

  Norma’s head pounded dully. She took a step back and read the sign again. She turned with a great effort at the faint sound of a shop bell. It was the owner of the Korean Laundromat who poked her head out of the door.

  – Tell me, said Norma.

  – Train with girl, she said.

  And made a diving motion with her hand.

  Norma’s legs went cold and her vision tunneled

  – No.

  – Yes.

  But I don’t understand, Norma said to the flustered laundress. I told her to stay off the train.

  She had begun to advance on the woman, who took a step back into the Laundromat but did not shut the door all the way. Behind her the banks of washers, a tiny child in an undershirt drawing in crayons on the floor.

  – Day before, isn’t it? Old man fell, very bad. Girl saved him. His daughter, isn’t it?

  Norma’s legs buckled and she leaned against the door frame.

  The woman explained though a crack in the door and in her broken English, lapsing frequently into Korean. What Norma got the gist of was that they’d seen the girl waiting outside for her father, all dressed up in jeans and a tank top—from Norma’s closet—a little loose for her, but it looked very good, the woman said, all the same. An old-new coat. High heels and dark red lipstick. Looking all grown up, the laundry woman said. Off to Cafe 101 for pancakes, Mac had told anyone who’d listen, looking like any other proud daddy.

  – Except for the gold God piece, the laundry woman said primly, gesturing at her groin.

  – Codpiece, said Norma.

  The laundress said how father and daughter had taken off down the street, arm in arm.

  – He had a fit, said the woman. Agma. She mimed a fit, her eyes rolling back in her head, spit flecking her lips. Stopped abruptly and glared at Norma. Very bad. Agma.

  Norma held the door frame. The woman said something in Korean to someone inside and an older boy, not the child on the floor, came running up with a console in one hand and a glass of water in the other, The woman passed it to Norma. She drank, spilling most of it, and shakily gave it back. The woman told her that Raye had taken her father to a clinic. Well wishers had put the sign up on the store. Beside the woman her son played on his console.

  Norma said, looking down at the boy, Can you send a text for me?

  He held out his console to her. She shook her head. Told him what to say and who to send it to. Waited to read the answer.

  Norma nodded a terse thanks to the woman and left for the clinic. It was back toward the beach and had once been the Swami’s needle exchange. The male nurse told her that Raye had checked the old man out just before supper time. He was still a little woozy, but she said they had a bus to catch. The six o’clock Greyhound to Portland.

  That was five hours ago. They’d be in Santa Barbara now, give or take.

  The nurse gave her a message from the girl. It was written on a slip of paper because as Raye had explained it was for someone who always broke their phone. Under the indifferent gaze of the nurse, Norma unfolded the paper and read the message and folded it up carefully. She put it in her pocket and headed back out into the night.

  Where should she go? Spill City was like so many complex systems. The more you observed it the more it changed. Worlds within worlds. The trash fire lights flickered along the headland. The beach was a woolly crescent dotted with shadows, the unrisen moon a yellow glow at the horizon. At the southern end of the boardwalk was a figure wearing giant earphones and doing figure eights on his skateboard and she watched him pedal up, come to a lazy stop beside her.

  – Figured it out? he said.

  – I liked it better when you played hard to get, she said and kept walking.

  – Old crazy-face. Never got his blueberry pancakes.

  Norma stopped but would not look at him. Stay away from her, you lying fiend.

  – Honest Injun, he said. I had nothing to do with it.

  Leering at her with his water
y yellow eyes.

  – Like you wouldn’t love to get rid of her.

  – True, but I didn’t. He pushed himself, said Guy, circling her on his skateboard and coming to a screeching stop in her path. The voices told him the girl. Either her or him. So he chose himself instead.

  To love another as yourself, thought Norma. Is the key.

  – Beat it, she said.

  – In your dreams, he snickered.

  – In your face, she said. Her arm jackknifed out and grabbed him by the balls he’d never have. His breath smelled like leeks. She met his jittery leer with her own steadfast gaze. Eyes the color of rain. Remember me.

  And she was walking at first and then running through the side streets until she got to the old highway. To the north loomed the sulphuric glow of the fallen city. Sometimes in her dreams she found herself at the Chinatown digs she shared that cold winter with Gene and Elvis and the ghost of Gloria. Portuguese land grabs and Chumash stargazers—LA would keep. There to the east was the dark bulk of the Bernadinos. And beyond that lay the desert, what remained of it. Between it the chasm that had created the Catastrophic Zone. Norma had never been out of the Zone. Her heart rose in her throat and her eyes burned. This was her place. Spill City. She knew all of its contours, had traced it in darkness and in light. If there was a way back up to the continent that had sliced it loose, she did not know it. Spill City was what she knew and it was enough for now. This was her America, the only one she knew. Its myriad paths hidden and haunted and necessary for the chase.

  Hinelix maneuver: (n) the hallucinatory terror of refinding, of retrieving or literally re-assembling—remembering—oneself. Possibly a clipping of an off-world term of Teutonic origin, Unheimlich (the uncanny) and the slang term, hiney, for (left) behind, or ass.

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

  53//: howl

  Augustine waited at the hidden entrance to the bamboo grove. The big ’breed came out alone soon after dark, his long hair loose down his back. He got into a borrowed ride and tried to start it up, but Augustine had already drained the battery, so he was forced to go on foot. He headed across to the trailer, his shoulders hunched against the wind. He saw that the trailer was empty, made some calls, then hitched a ride in an old ethanol-choked pickup. Augustine’s Z30 battery-powered Veelo easily kept pace, invisible in the nocturnal stream. The ’breed got to the Factory, had a drink or three at Una’s, then weaved back to the highway. He took another call, or made one. It made Augustine want to puke, all this lovesick shit. Augustine’s ex told him he dressed like bad twenties. And also that his ankles didn’t look like they belonged in the city. He hadn’t ever had a woman like Norma, born to the form, yeah, sucked up all the air in the room and who moved not like one of those mincing models but like the very bitch of fuck. She looked at him that one time and he can’t get it out of his mind—with that hard wide mouth and those cheekbones. Just that one time and she never did again.