“Mary Shelley, man,” Marcus said, taking a bite out of a large wing. “You know, the broad that made Frankenstein.”
“You mean Frankenstein’s monster,” the kid tried to correct him.
“No, I’m talking about the book Frankenstein. She made the book. It’s perfectly fine to just say Frankenstein when you’re talking about the title of the fucking book and not the monster itself.” He shook his head and swallowed his bite. “People need to quit with this Frankenstein’s monster semantics shit.”
“Sorry,” the kid said. “I didn’t even know it was based on a book.”
Marcus tilted his head. “Really? What do they teach you in school?”
“I’m graduated.” The kid looked at Rikki.
“You’re graduated? Don’t tell me that, how old are you, son?”
“Look it doesn’t matter, I was homeschooled so I finished early.”
“Homeschooled.” Marcus nodded. “There it is. I’ve been wondering what was wrong with you, my man, and now I got it.”
I laughed. The kid wasn’t sure how to react. “What do you mean what’s wrong with me?”
“No, no. Don’t worry,” I told him. “I think he’s just taking the piss.”
“What the fuck, dude? You’re making fun of me?”
“More like having fun with you,” Marcus told him. “But your reaction proves my point: homeschooled kids are weird birds.”
Rikki was being strangely quiet on the topic so I gave her a stare. Finally she spoke, almost reluctantly, “I don’t know… I mean I was homeschooled.”
Marcus and I erupted in laughter. “Well, there you go.”
Rikki sighed, shook her head and tried not to smile.
“What’s the fucking deal? Why am I weird?” the kid asked.
“You’re fine, son. You’re fine. You all just haven’t developed the social skills that everyone else has.”
“What, because I don’t know that Frankenstein was a book before it was a movie and a song?”
“No, because you’re freaking the fuck out about it,” Rikki said. “You’ll be fine. I ended up just fine. And I think being homeschooled was rather quite nice for a lot of things. Though I did run away from home when I was thirteen.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? I was homeschooled and bored out of my goddamn mind. Any time I met another kid I had no idea how to interact. I either acted like I was a little adult who didn’t know how to play or have fun at all or I was so inexperienced compared to the other kids that I was treated like I was retarded or a little sister who wanted to tag along.” She laughed. “And on top of that I was Somali so automatically most of the kids I met were white and treated me like an exotic fish and stared at me when they thought I wasn’t looking. I was always looking! How could I not look? Or they just fucking hated me outright. And on top of that my father raised me Muslim so there was another thing to make me different. And then there was some of the other Somali kids who treated me like a half-breed and didn’t want a thing to do with me either.” She looked at the kid. “Look, you’re awkward because you’re earnest. Earnest is just another way to say you say what you mean. Nothing wrong with that, in fact I think the whole world could use a bit more of that. All you’re missing is the ability to bullshit, that’s the ability that all the other kids pick up on and get good and practiced at in school. And you know, it is important, because this world runs on that bullshit. So you’ll learn, like I did, eventually, to do it too. Even if just a little bit. But…” She flashed a smile at me and Marcus. “Don’t ever feel less than for being real. Because the world may run on bullshit but it’s honesty, cold, hard, fucked up honesty that is going to change it. So, don’t lose all your awkward, mate.”
Marcus had a profound look on his face. “Oh… Somali, you’re half Somali? This whole time I was like, is this sister Egyptian? She got a little Indian in her? But Somali, that makes sense.”
“Motherfucker.” She threw a chicken bone at Marcus. And me and the kid laughed along. I took out a smoke, walked over and offered the pack to Rikki who shook her head and grabbed the last piece of chicken. I offered it to the kid next who took one with a grin. The smell of the chicken was getting to me. So I put my smoke back in my pack and walked toward the fridge, hoping to get myself either something savory or maybe even some ice cream if they had a freezer. “Hey, if you want something I can get it for you,” the kid said while trying to look cool for Rikki with the cigarette in his mouth.
“No need, I’m fully capable of looking for myself.” I opened the fridge door and the cold hit me. I started thinking about the storm outside, how cold it would feel if we ever got out. It wouldn’t be that bad for long. We were in the heart of downtown Boston, even with the streets clear we’d find a place to stay. We’d smash windows if we had to. If the police came then great, we could tell them to get their monster gear and go back to the Alucinari Hotel. The door slammed behind me and then I was swallowed up by the dark. I took out my Zippo. Even with the power off the room was still cold enough I could see my breath. I crept in at a slow pace. Everything on the shelves was covered in plastic wrap or still in a cardboard box; maybe I should have had the kid fetch my food for me. But the thought of him bringing me my food bothered me. Infection, Rikki had called it. Whatever had happened to Frankie. What if there was truth to that? What if the kid was already infected and now passing off the bug in our food? What about before, the cigarette Rikki had given me from her pack? The one I took like a fool even though I had my own. Hers weren’t even my brand. The paranoia was bottomless, it was making me lose my appetite. But at the back of the room I saw another door for the freezer. For some reason I’ve always fancied ice cream when it’s cold outside, don’t know why. So I went in there.
The room was terribly cold and I almost turned back but then I saw something that didn’t belong. On the ground, sticking out from behind the right shelf, down near the condiment tubs—feet. Two feet and legs laying on the ground, sticking out from around the corner. I walked around the shelf and found a dead man covered in frost. He was brown-skinned with short hair, wearing only his underwear and an undershirt, on the floor with his eyes open. An ice patch of dark brown, a waterfall of frozen blood erupted out of his neck and down his belly. Next to him there was a pile of clothes. I crouched down and rifled through them; black jeans, a denim jacket, and a pack of smokes. Cherry Valleys too. Admittedly, I felt like a dirty fucking bastard when I pocketed them, I did, but seeing him dead like that was just further proof that this might be my last pack of smokes so I might as well take ’em. Besides, it was my brand. If there was a god in charge of this miserable series of events, this was one of the few bones he had thrown me as of late.
I looked at the corpse closely, trying to determine if he looked changed, the way Frankie had been changed. He looked human. Then again, I hadn’t cracked open his sternum to find a secret stash of extra limbs and vital organs, so who knew? The clothes didn’t seem to have any blood on them so someone must have stripped him or made him strip and slit his throat after. Or maybe he slit it himself after getting down to his skivvies in the fridge. His underwear, by the way, were those white atrocities men who never get fucked wear. They even had this bloke’s name written in magic marker on them, like he was seven years old and his mother separated his wash from the rest of her lot for him. I bent down some more to try and read the name. It read: John.
I heard the freezer door open behind me and felt a hand around my throat before I saw the blade gleaming right next to my eye in the firelight. “Now you know,” the kid said from behind me. “Don’t try and fight. Just start walking backwards with me.”
I did what he said, surprised he didn’t just kill me. I should have kept quiet but I was too tired and beaten down from lack of dope and too many monsters. “So if that’s the actual John Lopez who’s a bellhop dogsbody at the hotel here, who might I have the pleasure?”
“Dude, what?”
I still like
d this kid. “If you’re not John Lopez, who the fuck are you? What’s your real name?”
We got to the walk-in fridge door then stopped. “John, actually. Just one of those coincidences. Trippy, right?”
“Are you even Mexican then?”
“Mexican? Dude, I was never Mexican. I’m fucking Puerto Rican.” He used one of his feet to kick the door open behind us. Light washed in.
“Anus, Ah-nus, what’s the fucking difference?”
Tetrahex
The kid spun me around and herded me out into the kitchen in front of the others. Rikki was still too busy enjoying her first bit of meat in years to look up, but Marcus, still impressively in control of his facilities, assessed the situation right away and got up out of his chair holding his hands up. “Whoa, son, what’s going on here?”
The kid’s arm around my throat was tight, little shit was stronger than I would have thought. But his grip wasn’t so tight that I couldn’t bark, “Kid’s not even a bellhop, the dead bellhop’s in the icebox naked with his throat slit—” The kid pulled back and cut me off.
“Why was he naked?” At some point Rikki looked up from her meal.
“Fuck is wrong with you, woman?” Marcus said. “It’s so the kid could wear his bellhop uniform and impersonate staff of the hotel.”
“His name, however, actually is John,” I blurted out. The kid tried to choke any more out of me. “…But not Lopez.” For some reason I found this important information to share. “Also, not Mexican, did anyone else think that he was or was it just me?”
“Everyone quiet,” the kid tried his best to sound menacing. Admittedly it was working even if you could hear him trying. “Look, no one here understands what’s actually going on right now.” Marcus opened his mouth to speak but the kid cut him off. “You think you do but trust me, you don’t. You think you’re going to get outside? That someone out there is going to help you? There’s no one else who can save you. No one but this man.” He shook me as punctuation. “I need to take him to the top of the hotel.”
“Top of the hotel, sure. That makes sense,” Rikki told him.
“Do not placate me, punk rocker,” the kid said. Even Rikki didn’t know how to respond to that. “Listen: the Alucinari Hotel was designed by Pedrik Navarj, a Darjmainian aristocrat and architect who was inspired by Robert Fludd, an English occult philosopher and astrologer and mathematician and cosmologist who died in the 1600s.”
“Did you memorize all that from a book in school or something?” Rikki asked.
“Church actually,” the kid answered.
“And he was homeschooled, remember?” I said.
“Oh right,” Rikki said.
“Shut up,” the kid told us. “My point about Fludd was that he was into a lot of different shit. Including this book about musical theory he wrote called De Musica Mundan. In that book, Fludd devised a mundane monochord and a celestial monochord and a divine monochord that linked up the Ptolemaic universe to musical intervals.”
“…Well, everybody knows that,” Rikki said.
“You’re talking a music of the spheres type of thing, aren’t you?” I said.
“Everything in the universe has a certain vibration, a frequency,” the kid said. “You, me, the earth itself, everything. This building was built by Pedrik Navarj as one giant musical instrument to match and play along with the vibration of our world. At the top of the building there is a chamber where Codger can play this instrument which will reverberate through the body of the entire building.”
So there it was. I was right all along. He was a nutter. Another Helter Skelter fucking loony. Another one like the Yank fucker who shot Lennon. He wasn’t in league with the beasts outside. Just another loony hearing shit in the songs that wasn’t there. It made me feel so hollow all of a sudden; that we spent so much time on our music and they either didn’t pay attention at all to what we were trying to say or they got the message so turned around and twisted that needn’t have bothered with it in the first place. He had killed already; if I didn’t get away I’d either be dead by his hand or by whatever was waiting for us outside the door or in the lobby.
So I told him, “I’ll do whatever you say, kid. I’ll tell you all about what actually happened on the night that inspired the song, ‘Frivolous Black.’ I’ll tell you all about the big black shape that loomed over me while I slept in bed.” I eyed Marcus who lowered his brow to me ever so slightly. I returned the gesture as best I could. God, I hoped he was actually as sobered up as he appeared. “But you have to know that if we go out that door neither of us is going to be making it up to the chamber at the top floor, man.” I couldn’t see his face, of course, but I felt for a moment like I had got through to him. I don’t know why I thought that, because the next thing I knew I caught the look on Rikki’s face. She looked braced for something. And then Marcus lunged forward and the kid pulled back and he ran his blade against my left cheek. There was a sting as it cut the top layer of my skin and then I felt something unhinge itself inside my head.
Like a door split open inside my brain. That sudden relief of a tremendous pressure previously unknown to me but now obvious in its absence, that relief had returned. There was that sound again, like with Frankie, a buzz. A hiss. My last thought was simply, Oh, it’s me. And then in a breath I was no longer myself.
No longer just I…
We…
We were so much more.
So many more.
No longer just human.
We were infinite.
And We didn’t take kindly to knives cutting any of our faces.
Even if We had countless other faces.
The people in the kitchen, however, all shared one face, one of rapt horror at the beautiful new thing We had become.
Schizoid
We walked on many worlds. We wandered through stars and were lost in oceans of thought and galaxies of dreams. In one instant We were everywhere all at once. It was agony. It was madness. It was sublime. It was too much. It was also without beginning or end. We, not I anymore, We… We were a countless array of Codger Burtons. And We were much more than that too. Other versions of a similar mold, variations on a theme. Some not even human. Weird-limbed homesick nightmares as disgusted or enthralled by the human shape as the humans were by their natural forms. All of us lost in a howling wilderness of this vast, listless oblivion. Screams on a wind, unable to even tether ourselves on the ears of a merciless god. Less than ghosts, lower than demons, more like abandoned gods buried beneath the rubble of our children’s fresh empire. We saw the worlds through our new countless eyes. We thought the same way. All at once, a complex cobweb, a circuit board gossamer, a snarl of information that weighed us down into incompetence or insanity. We enjoyed such pain because of this. But We also suffered such delight. For now We no longer felt the indignity, the vulgarity of the self. Of I. Solitude, privacy all myth now. Instead We basked in the hive. Countless beings connected by a vibration. A shared sound. A marker that chained them to one another across universes. And in many of these universes there were witnesses indigenous to each realm who cried out in terror at the sight of our birth. At the death of the form they had known to be who and what We were.
But back in the universe where Codger Burton was in the kitchen of the Alucinari Hotel with the kid, Rikki, and Marcus, Codger Burton had become something almost unspeakable. With a pair of our new eyes We could observe from behind our skull that the kid had dropped the knife he once held at our fragile singular cheek and was now recoiling and shrieking. In his eyes We registered his bland terror as our back became a rolling, ever shifting composite featuring our new litany of shapes. We cycled through limbs and organs, sinew and shell, fang, wing, carapace and feather, always becoming, never satisfied, never still. We were an open wound that never stopped bleeding. A mouthful of shipwrecked teeth gnashing ourselves to sinking splinters. A living kaleidoscope of stretching flesh, misshapen, swelling bone, and blossoming viscera. Naturally, the kid screamed.
He fell to his knees, either in worship or abject horror. From our vantage point above there was no difference.
There was also no clear desire either. Nothing that one would recognize as a desire.
There was a hunger. Not for sustenance, not for knowledge. Something darker and older than that. It was the same thing that made babies cry out when being torn from the womb. Beyond fear, pain, or confusion. We were suffering and We wanted to share it. From the cluster of heads and wreath of eyes that were still to our front We saw Marcus at the barricade, trying to drag away the tables they’d placed there earlier. Tables We had helped drag in place back when We were still I. Marcus called out to Rikki to help him. But Rikki was busy. She had a plastic bottle of cooking oil in one hand and a butane lighter in the other. She came towards us, ignored Marcus who continued to bleat at her, and she threw the oil on one of our faces. A nest of curled horns unpacked itself from where that face once occupied. It flowered out rapidly and then this latest head of ours thrashed forward, knocking the lighter from Rikki’s grip and cutting and slashing her face and arms. She didn’t fall, she stood her ground, with tears in her eyes she reached for her axe which she had placed on a nearby table. We thrashed again and caught her arm before she could use the axe. Her arm twisted beneath one of our spiraled horns and We threw her over the table with a quick twist of our neck. Marcus chased after her, abandoning his fruitless effort to move the barricade by himself.
As he helped her off the ground We spied from behind the boy, the kid still on his knees but now with hands raised towards us. Pleading or attempting to claw at us like some beast himself. We met this with more beasts of our own. Our back collapsed and out sprang another of our selves. This self flashed fluorescent and had hoofed heavy limbs which landed like hammers on the floor to the sides of the boy. Beneath him there was a small pool of urine and it felt warm against our new legs. But still he reached towards us. His eyes brimmed with tears. What could he want? More importantly, what did We want? The only thing We could want… Above him our gleaming beast face hung down to look at the boy’s tears more closely. Still he reached up.
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