Nothing to Lose

by Vernon, Steve

  “I’m here to see Dr. Carter.”

  The receptionist is nice-looking, if you go for that polished mannequin look. A good figure. Nice complexion. She probably spends a lot of time at the gymnasium and the day spa.

  “Are you her receptionist?” I ask.

  “I’m her agenda supervisor.”

  That’s a new one. Folks are inventing masks all the time.

  “Well, Madame Supervisor, I’m here to see Dr. Carter.”

  I use Sharon’s title, because people usually listen a little harder if you squeeze in those little notches of respect. She looks at me like you might look at a stray dog, wet from a rainstorm. I throw her my best disarming grin, but I might as well have been throwing soap bubbles.

  “She’s with a patient right now.”

  Sure she is. I look at her closed office door. I think about all of the guts that have been spilled behind that proper-looking slab of highly polished mahogany veneer.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  She knows I don’t. She’s just being officiously polite.

  “Sure I do. Just look under the hard Cs for Captain Nothing.”

  She gives me a pretty good look, like she might have a chuckle buried beneath that polyester façade.

  Nothing.

  There’s a big yellow sheet on her desk, gridded out like you might keep sports statistics on it. It must be an agenda. It’s good to see people are still killing trees instead of relying strictly upon computers.

  “I don’t see your name,” she begins to say.

  While she’s looking down at her officious yellow roster, I vault her desk. It would have been easier to step around it, but not nearly as impressive.

  Mesmerize them with gusto is my motto.

  It works for nearly two-and-a-half seconds. Then she stops being mesmerized and grabs for the phone. But by then I’ve already yanked the phone from the wall. It’s old fashioned, one of those receiver style phones. I didn’t think they made them anymore.

  What now?

  Tie her up?

  Gag her with a scarf?

  I’m still debating this when she catches me with a thumb in my throat. They must offer classes in street brawling and self-defense at her day spa.

  I grab my throat, hacking up a wet and lousy-tasting loogie, while doing my best to show her she hasn’t hurt me. She’s goes for my eyes next, her hands held out like one of those little rakes you use on weeds. I catch her by the shoulder and shove her as gently as I can against the door.

  Twice.

  Hey, she hit me hard.

  She makes a nice banging sound against the back of the door.

  That’ll do for a knock.

  Before she can make me look any worse, I reach around her back and turn the doorknob. The door swings in, and she and I go spilling onto the floor. She breaks my fall with a kindly knee to the groin. Thank god, I’m wearing my standard issue super-cup. I pull myself free, and Madam Supervisor stops trying to maim me. She’s too busy screaming at the thing she thought was her employer.

  What used to be Sharon Carter. It’s kneeling there by a stylish green couch, attending to her patient. The eyes are the mirrors of the soul, and whatever used to be Sharon Carter is busy eating her patient’s mirrors. It’s funny how chewy she makes them look.

  Like big, tough-skinned grapes.

  The red of the woman’s blood is blending nicely with the green of the couch. Combined they make a lovely shade of copper brown. She’s talking while she’s eating. I guess her mother never guilted her too hard about proper table manners.

  “You’ve got to forgive yourself,” she says, then she takes another munch. “Just let the hatred go.”

  I can’t believe it. She’s making like Oprah and Hannibal Lector, rolled up into a completely unviable combination.

  Only, the woman seems to be listening. I can’t believe it, through all the pain she must be feeling. All she can see is a sheet of sticky red agony, and she’s nodding and listening like the good doctor is pumping her full of high-test Valium.

  Then I get it.

  Sharon Carter didn’t die in that alley. She was reborn. All the latent anger and frustration piled up behind the vinyl siding and her Maybelline façade broke free and broke down, turning her into something made of sheer hate and glass that can break and break and never stop breaking.

  And cutting.

  She’s very good at cutting.

  Every super-nightmare’s supposed to have a name, so in my mind I think of her as Shatter/Sharon. She’s cracked up, broken down. She’s shattered every mask and metaphor that civilization hides behind. There’s nothing left here but raw undeniable hunger. Only it’s not the eyes that she’s eating, but whatever hateful thing the woman’s seen. She’s eating the rage, the frustration, the anger.

  Hell, look at it one way and she’s practically performing a public service.

  Only she’s killing the patient with the cure.

  The receptionist is still screaming. She’s got a lot of lung power. She must do cardio in between the self-defense classes.

  “Get out of here,” I yell.

  I give her a push towards the door. It’s kind of like trying to push a sock drawer full of electrocuting snakes. She keeps yelling, as if somehow creating the proper decibel level is going to make some kind sense out of this gentle massacre.

  I keep pushing her towards the door.

  “Go yell for the police,” I suggest.

  That last word seems to get through to her. She scuttles for the door like a crab heading for high water.

  That’s one down.

  Now for the main course.

  I turn around. Shatter/Sharon’s still talking to her patient, only the lady is probably having a hard time hearing much of anything. Shatter/Sharon’s worked her way through the eyes and down into the brain. She takes the ears in like they were made of corn. My guess, from the looks of it, is that Shatter/Sharon’s teeth have raped their way somewhere down past her patient’s left sinus cavity for a little postnasal therapy.

  “Can we talk about this?” I ask.

  Okay, she might be listening. She’s walking towards me like she might want to communicate, or at least open her mouth. I’m hearing that laughter again, like a pair of barber’s scissors, working right behind my left ear.

  “Come on. Let’s have a little dialogue,” I suggest.

  I figure I’ve got two options. One of them is spelled right and the other reads left, only you should never lead with the right. So I take a swing at her with my left; backhanded, because I don’t want to hurt her too much.

  She’s still a woman, I think.

  Only I ought not to think so hard.

  I had better luck duking it out with the receptionist. My backhand hits something that gives way like sharp water. Like hitting a stucco wall made out jellyfish and MoonPies. It is hot and sharp and burning all at the same time. I look at what’s left of the hand. I see lots of blood and lots of skinned meat. That white thing that looks like a knucklebone? That’s just an over-boiled eggshell left over from the receptionist’s brown bag lunch, I hope.

  Shatter/Sharon is coming closer; sounding like a rain of no deposit pop bottles, the words are crashing out of her mouth and shattering my every hope and dream. She’s speaking, only it’s like watching a ventriloquist act. The words don’t seem to be coming out of her mouth. Her lips are moving, sure. They’re articulating. They’re chattering and chomping like a runaway guillotine, not even bothering to try and form themselves around the words that leak out of her skin.

  “Just let it out,” she says. “Let’s get down to the bones of it.”

  Oh-oh.

  She wants to chew the fat.

  My fat.

  “The root of your problem, the heart of your guilt,” the words spilling out like so many Smarties from a fat man’s lips. “Your rage, your anger, your frustration, let me taste it.”

  So I hit her again. It’s stupid, I know, but I can’t think
of anything better to do. I bring it in low, aiming for something that I hope is soft. My arm passes right through, it feels like it’s sticking elbow-deep in a screaming hornet’s nest.

  Did you ever try to fight depression? Did you ever try to lash out at a temper?

  It’s like trying to drown a river.

  All of her rage, her fear, her self-loathing, it shatters out around my right arm, cutting it down to muscle tissue, and reforming itself just as quick as that. I’m down on my knees in front of her, only not in a nice kind of way. She’s standing over me, her mouth and teeth working like a double-time trip hammer, and all of those thousand mouths of brittle glass are laughing down at me, the laughter cutting my ears like a scorpion flail.

  That does it.

  Nobody laughs at Captain Nothing.

  I look around her office. The diploma hiding behind glass, the leather-covered, blood-spattered couch. The wallpaper stained with pain and unleashed memories. And I ask myself what Dr. Phil would do.

  I stand up. I’m not sure how I do that but I manage. Her laughter is like burning piss, shrieking napalm, eating away at my soul.

  What the hell can I do?

  I don’t have an answer. I’m beat and I know it.

  I’ve got about a half of a half second to think like the psychiatrist Shatter/Sharon used to be.

  So I open my arms wide, like I want to kiss and make up.

  “Come here and give me a hug.”

  And she comes, unable to stop herself. I have half a heartbeat to think to myself that this is probably the worst idea I’ve had since crossing the womb, and then she’s in my arms.

  It’s a pain worse than napalm.

  It’s a pain worse than castration.

  It’s a pain worse than self-inflicted guilt.

  I’m hanging on to her, feeling her eating at me, all of her broken dreams and fractured reality, her shattered perceptions and breached walls. The incisive comments, casually dealt. The slices of life that separate each of us from what we want to be. The blind dividing cleaver of love, striking at random. Her fragmented family, torn and uprooted since birth. The dysfunctional disjunction of society and the casual vivisection of an impartial society grown blind to communal agony.

  “Come on,” I coax her. “Let it all out.”

  Now she is cutting and tearing at me, and I’m taking it all in like I was just one big sponge of self-mutilation.

  Cut me baby, I like it.

  I feel my clothes giving way, the cape and the denim and my favorite Coors t-shirt. I feel the patchwork of my skin lacerating and letting go; her screams, my screams, bleeding about my ears, and I’m hanging on and letting it flow.

  Finally she lets go of it all. That hatred that’s been topping her tank, that has been keeping the juices flowing long after she let poppa despair have his way. Now she’s just a woman, kneeling on a bloodstained carpet and the only thing that’s hitting the ground are her tears.

  “God damn them, those dirty bastards, god damn them all.”

  I feel her frustration breaking free. Letting go of all the hatred, all of that polite anger that she’d kept walled up behind that high society smile.

  Only it’s a good kind of hurt.

  She lets it all out into the night and the anonymous acceptance of the city. That’s the one gift of concrete and civilization.

  Listen.

  There’s a secret hiding behind every window in this goddamn city. Every voice, every whisper, they’re all out there hiding behind a million sheets of glass. It’s the light that keeps them hidden. In the darkness you can see right through their masquerade. Every detail, shining through in raw crystal sheets of pain.

  And Sharon Carter is feeling it all.

  Now I hear the police coming through the door. Dozens of them, like big blue army ants scrabbling in, and all they see is this big, naked, bloodstained guy in a mask standing over a weeping PhD and a woman with a half a skull.

  I feel the cold cuffs about my wrist bones and it kind of takes some of the sting out of it. I’m looking down at Sharon Carter, hoping she hasn’t broken down too much to remember to tell these officers of the law that I’m one of the good guys.

  Then one of them reaches for my mask.

  “Jesus!” He swears.

  I’ve got to grin at that.

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  I mean it’s so goddamn funny.

  “The fucking thing is stitched to his face.”

  Just wait until they get down to the tattoo.

  LAMPREY FELLATIO

  Drowning would be all right, if it wasn’t for the severed head.

  Drowning isn’t that bad of a way to go.

  There’s usually not much pain involved.

  Usually.

  Of course pain doesn’t mean much to a guy like me. I’m inured to injury. Beat beyond agony, a long time ago in a galaxy far beyond this realm of existence.

  There are degrees of pain, you understand. Like degrees of burns. The Lone Ranger mask I tattooed across my eyes hurt like a bastard. There are so many nerve endings up there. It hurt worse than you can imagine.

  That’s one degree of pain.

  Then there’s the leather mask I stitched over the tattoo. That’s a whole other degree. An advanced degree. A degree of commitment and insanity that the average person just doesn’t want to touch - except commitment was something I could never learn to stick to.

  Remember that undeniable truth, would you?

  No matter whatever else I tell you - I fell into this life.

  I was sucked into it.

  Eagerly.

  Super powers? I had that covered. I was Captain Nothing. Faster than a speeding pullet. Able to leap to tall conclusions in a single bound. More powerful than a speeding Vida Loco.

  And now I even had my very own uniform; which would be all right except for the severed head.

  ~ * ~

  It started out as a swimming accident.

  Of course, you can’t really call it swimming when there’s a twenty-five-pound anchor manacled to your ankle. It’s more like a liquidation sale. All Captain Nothings must go. Still, I’ve got no one to blame but myself.

  I’ve always been a sucker for a blow job.

  Let me tell you how it all started.

  It started out good. Me in a shady hotel room, getting lip service from a woman whose mouth should have been in the Guinness Book of Records. Come to think of it, I might as well send it to them. She sure doesn’t need it anymore.

  I met her at an after-hours club called The Sloppy Second. It opened precisely at one second past midnight, and closed when the sun came up to swap spit with the morning dew.

  I was busy trying to suck the last few drops of beer out of my third glass of tepid draught, while working a fork through the plate of nuked and renuked spaghetti and meatballs that passed as an entrée there, when she slid up beside me and socked her crotch hard against my hip. I mean I felt the lips of her labia close in on me – just like a barnacle – right through the fabric.

  “I been watching you,” she said. “All night long.”

  She caught me by surprise. I didn’t get that many direct propositions, and rarely from someone this sober; especially when I was in costume, which is always. That’s the point of stitching a leather mask onto your face – always on duty, always on call.

  Always hiding.

  I kept my cool, neatly managing to swallow half a lungful of sudsy barley soup without drowning myself. The Fonz would have been so proud of my restraint.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  Repartee is my strong suit.

  Ask my dry cleaner.

  “Yeah,” she said, leaning over and sticking her tongue into my left ear, sponging out six months worth of earwax and a legion or two of well-fed dust mites. I stood there, listening to the roar of the ocean in my ears, making fish-out-of-water-lip-flap-sounds, while barnacling my mouth over the rim of the beer glass.

  She crawled one long, slow hand over the hog
back of my belly, touching my belt line then straight on down to glory.

  I bit the rim off the beer glass.

  She unzipped my fly.

  I spat the glass shards onto the floorboards. They hit with a rusty, wet, thucking sound imbedding into a six-year accumulation of scuff marks, loogies, chewing tobacco wet bombs, assorted crud and the bones of a John Doe drunkard who had fallen there three years past and had never bothered picking himself back up.

  “Do you have a name?” I asked through a mouthful of broken glass, blood and beer suds. Infection was the least of my worries. The beer at the Sloppy Second is brewed strong enough to kill cancer.

  “Do I need one?” she asked.

  I kept stabbing the fork into the plate of warmed-over spaghetti, but nothing seemed to stick.

  “No,” I said.

  I am a fountain of toes-to-molars eloquence.

  Letterman could have taken footnotes.

  She took the fork from my hand and the spaghetti from my plate, sucking it up with a soft, wet, slooping sound.

  “Why don’t you just call me Hoover?”

  “Damn,” I said.

  She slurped up a second forkful of spaghetti, slooshed it around in her mouth, then spat out a perfectly tied hangman’s noose.

  “Boy Scout?” I asked.

  She draped the noodle noose over my head, like a necktie at an anti-Atkins pasta party. Then she tightened the noose, which at this point might as well have been a choke leash, because I would have followed her downstream through a herd of suicidal piranha-lemmings.

  ~ * ~

  We wound up in a hotel that rented broom closets by the hour. I can’t remember who paid the desk clerk. I was too busy letting Hoover-girl pluck and strum my vocal cords with the tip of her tongue.

  And what a tongue. It bent in places it ought not to have been able to fold. I swear it was part tapeworm, filling every socket and gully in my dentally unplanned molars. A one-woman cavity search; tonguing my mouth, eyeballs, and cleaning the puss out of each skin pore way better than an endless tube of Clearasil. Hook, line and suckered. She spoke in tongues and I was nothing but ears.

  The girl showed no mercy.

  She worked her way down my face like Sherman marching through Georgia. Down the meat gullet of my neck, tonguing my nipples like they were molasses-covered lemon drops; slithering down my sternum like a fresh, wet, stripper down the pole, following the happy trail of man-fur; dipping her tongue into my navel and gently braiding a French-styled lint lace doily.