The Great Dark Mouth was a jealous god, demanding that you have no other gods—or goddesses—ahead of Him. But you weren’t worshiping her, you were only admiring her. Making a little conversation. Killing time during the long bus ride.
“I’m heading back to my mom’s house,” you announced. “There’s something… well… something for me to pick up there. I moved out the other day. Didn’t pack everything I needed, though.” You were telling her the truth… from a certain point of view.
You tried to make eye contact with her, but now she was staring at your leg. Or, more specifically, the T-shirt tourniquet around your leg. Little specks of blood started to leak through your jeans and onto the white cotton.
“A little young to be out on your own, aren’t you?”
You bit your lip. “Naw, I’m eighteen now.”
“I’m twenty-five,” she said. “And I only got out on my own last year.”
That surprised you. You knew she was a little bit older than you, but you didn’t know she was that much older. You wracked your brain for a clever follow-up line, but nothing emerged. So you looked out the window and felt yourself tugged toward the side of the bus as it turned right onto Baxter Avenue.
“I waited until I’d saved up some money,” she said. “And I waited until I was in a good place in life.” She looked at you with glassy blue eyes. “Are you in a good place in life?”
A couple of flies buzzed around your backpack, sensing the gore slathered across your old clothes but unable to get to it. You shooed them away. “I’m sittin’ in air conditioning on a hot day,” you said. “And sittin’ next to a pretty girl. So I suppose you could say that’s about as good a place as any.” You didn’t grin when you said this, because you didn’t want her to think you were being sarcastic. But all your efforts at being a smooth operator were derailed by the unexpected nonsense that came out of her mouth next, like so much verbal diarrhea.
“When I asked you whether you were in a good place in life, I meant: do you know Jesus? Because the very best place of all is in His arms. That’s what my pastor tells me, whenever I get to feeling sorry for myself for being in this chair. He says it makes no difference that I can’t walk, because if I let Jesus carry me in His arms, I can go anywhere. Do you believe in Jesus?”
You tried, but couldn’t keep from scowling. To say you felt disappointed would be an understatement. You felt as though you’d been sold a fraudulent set of goods. Those legs and those tits had “fuck me” written all over them, but you weren’t two minutes into making your move before she dropped “Jesus” into the conversation. Beliefs that conventional had no business coexisting with a body so scantily clad and deliciously deformed. You didn’t say anything. You were taken aback. You didn’t want to offend her, so you paused. And when you paused, you considered fibbing and telling her that, hell yeah, you believed in Jesus. You believed in him so much, you wanted to hear her call out his name while she was on her back, legs spread for you. But you didn’t say that. You just sat there, looking dumb.
“That’s a no,” she said. Then she grinned. She started wriggling around in her chair. Lowered her head to start searching through her purse. With her glance directed there, you were able to get a nice glimpse of cleavage. You wanted to bite off her breasts and fuck the wounds. You chastened yourself for veering into squishy-gushy thoughts. Flesh-thing, you told yourself. Flesh-thing. You felt disappointed (once more) when she raised her head up and her eyes met yours again. She thrust a little piece of paper toward you.
“My church asked me to write a gospel tract, with my testimony. It talks about how Jesus keeps me going. I’d like for you to have it.”
You didn’t want to take it, but you didn’t want to stop the conversation. And you had enough experience with these kinds of people to know that if you didn’t take her tract, the conversation would be over. So you took it. In the end, you were glad you took it, because it had a black and white picture of her on the front page. She was all dolled up like she was on her way to church. Wore a pretty skirt and top. More modest than what she was wearing now. More formal, too. But it would still be sufficient to jerk off to.
Squishy-gushy, you reminded yourself. None of that. Transcend it all. You forced your eyes away from the picture. “Thanks. I’ll be reading it, I really will, because I think you’re a fascinating person and I want to know more about you.”
When you said that, some redness crept into her ivory face. She giggled. Oh, how you almost lost control and raped her right then and there, when you heard that giggle! It was the sort of giggle more appropriate for a girl-on-girl porno flick than evangelism aboard a TARC bus. No squishy-gushy, you reminded yourself. But she was too damned perfect. The perfect temptress, at least, for you.
Maybe the Great Dark Mouth had placed her in your path, on purpose. There were shadows there, on the bus. Sun crept in through the windows, fell on passengers’ noses, and formed shadows underneath them. So, the Mouth could be there, watching. Watching, literally right under your own nose! He must have given you this wheelchair-cutie as a temptation; as a way to test your devotion.
The one, true god—the Mouth—had placed a tool of the false god Christ in your midst as bait. You felt yourself getting hard. You told yourself it was just the motion of the bus. You’d heard that before, once. That certain kinds of transportation—buses and trains, primarily—could trigger an involuntary hard-on. You looked out the window and took a deep breath. Down boy, you thought. And it seemed to obey.
When she was finally through with her temptress-giggling, she asked you a question. “What is it about things that are so bad, right now, that you had to leave home? I mean, maybe I can help. Well, what I mean is, maybe I can’t help—on my own. But maybe Jesus can help, through me. You mentioned you were going back to your mom’s house. Is it your parents? Is that the problem? A lot of teens find it hard to submit to their parents’ authority. But God’s word says to honor your father and your mother, so what other choice is there? I mean, you have a choice. We’re given free will. But what other godly choice is there?”
Talking to this girl made you miss Cressida more than you had in awhile. She might have been a little too fragile and a back-stabber, to boot. But at least she was under no delusion that her mother and father deserved anyone’s fucking honor. “I see your point,” you fibbed.
She saw through that, though. “I mean, it’s not always easy. But that’s kind of the point. Advancing in holiness isn’t easy. If it was easy, then it wouldn’t be so precious.”
The bus stopped in front of Mid-City Mall and let on a few passengers. A black hippy chick, a white hippy chick, and one of the hairy, Bosnian immigrant dudes who’d been shipped to Louisville back in the ’90s (you could tell because he was yammering away on his cell phone in some vaguely Eastern European language). The girl in the wheelchair kept on talking, but the Bosnian guy distracted you from what she had to say. He was fucking ugly, in a way that was fucking beautiful. All big, broad forehead and long, bony jaw. Decadent cheekbones that looked like tumors jutting from his emaciated frame. He squeezed in next to you, to your right, and kept on talking. He was wearing some shitty cologne that didn’t cover up a heavy smell of cigarette smoke. That scent wafted alongside the lingering smell of the disabled girl’s suntan lotion and now you could no longer restrain yourself. The boner happened.
You felt embarrassed that it happened. Felt relieved that your bigass backpack was on your lap and hid it. But then your remembered your gore-stained clothes were tucked away in that backpack, and that just made your boner all the fiercer. The old man’s gore… so close to your cock.
“So, do you want to say it with me?”
The Bosnian guy kept talking on his cell phone, laughing every now and then.
“I’m sorry,” you said, “I didn’t hear everything you had to say there.” You jerked your head in the direction of the chattering Bosnian.
“Do you want to say the Sinner’s Prayer with me. Right
here and now? What I guess I’m asking is, do you want to be saved?”
Salvation. What did that really mean? The Great Dark Mouth was offering you the closest thing to salvation you could imagine… salvation through annihilation. It required no prayer. And rather than insisting that you honor your mother and father, He told you to take some of your mother’s bones or flesh or blood away from her as a passport. And yet, you suspected there was a thread of commonality between the two paths: both embraced self-denial. Maybe there was something you could learn from her.
“Before I answer that,” you said, “I have a question for you.”
“God’s word says ‘ask and it shall be given’. Better you ask Him the questions, than me. In prayer.”
You gave her your hurt-little-boy look. It worked.
“Oh, I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to be rude… What I meant was…”
“My question had to do with… well… how you do it?”
She squinted and cocked her head to the side, a gesture of confusion. It showed off that swan-neck again. You bit your lip. “How do I do what?” she asked.
“I mean, you said it isn’t easy, being holy. What helps you with it? I guess you could say I’m looking for advice for fighting temptations.”
“That’s a good question to ask,” she said. “I wished I’d asked that when I first got saved, because it would have prevented a lot of struggling. I was foolish then, you know. Thought that once I was saved I never had to worry about holiness ever again. What helps me is to remember that even though I have free will, I lovingly offer that free will up to the Lord. In that way, I become like unto a living sacrifice. And that’s what He wants us to be. He wants us to willingly give up our will to His will. And if I’m living in God’s will, then I know there’s no way to fall to temptation, because the Lord is above and beyond all temptation. He proved that when Satan offered Him temptations in the desert. God’s word talks all about that. That’s what you should really do. Open up your Bible to… ” She got out her smart phone and began typing. While her eyes were distracted, you gazed at her legs again. Smelled the lotion-cigarette-cologne scent again. Bit your lip. Felt your erection throbbing. “The Book of Matthew, chapter four, verses one through eleven. That’s a good passage about temptation.”
“I don’t have a Bible.”
She grinned and reached into her backpack. “You do now!” She handed you a slim New Testament. You went through the motions of looking up Matthew, chapter four. You put her gospel tract inside as a book marker.
“I know all about temptation,” she said. “I have a cousin who tried to get me to drink alcohol once. But I told her I gave my will and my life up to the Lord, and that when that can of Budweiser was pushed my way, I didn’t see a good time, I saw sin and I saw Satan. That’s the real trick,” she said. “You have to start to see the world as your Lord and savior would have you see it. If you see the world that way, then all those temptations will be rendered so unappealing that you won’t have to worry.”
And those words were like a magick spell. She spoke them and they slithered out of the air, into your ear, toward your brain then down into your optic nerves. For you realized, now, that she wasn’t sent by the Great Dark Mouth to tempt you. Or, at least, not just to tempt you. You realized, now, that despite being caught up in a web of conventional delusions, she nonetheless was the inadvertent carrier of a certain wisdom.
A very important wisdom.
You knew it was dangerous to be stuck in Step One of the Three-Fold Path, and you were in danger of getting stuck there. The world was teeming with temptation, because the world was teeming with ugliness. An ugly river coursed through ugly towns, littered with ugly businesses and inhabited by ugly people who were hosts for ugly diseases and vehicles for ugly behavior. For you, the commonplace cancer patient was like a supermodel. X-rays of tumors were like centerfolds. Amputations were like orifices. Disease was an aphrodisiac. Advanced age was an aphrodisiac. Decay? An aphrodisiac.
So you began muttering under your breath. You said a prayer to the Great Dark Mouth. Asked Him to give you the strength to push away from Step One and proceed to Step Two, where all temptation would be removed from you as you moved on to a state of total (not merely incidental) Derealization.
And so your Lord and savior, the Mouth, heard this prayer. And He answered it. He was good—oh so good—to you. For, one moment you saw the most tempting piece of disabled ass ever sitting in front of you, crinkled-up accordion legs and all. The very next moment you saw an array of crudely-fashioned plastic limbs covered in a denim miniskirt. They were connected by squeaking pulleys and frayed rope to a plastic torso that wore a white tank top and a plastic head adorned with molded plastic hair and blue plastic eyes. There were two plastic mounds where breasts should have been, and they looked like the unmoving tits on a department store mannequin. The wheelchair was plastic, too. It looked like an oversize Fisher-Price toy.
You heard a cartoony voice next to you, and turned toward the Bosnian man. His ugly, broken features had been smoothed out—the extremes removed from them—as he, too, was revealed to be nothing more or less than a mannequin. A plastic man holding a plastic device, now revealed to be a toy cell phone. You could hear a voice coming out of it. It sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown.
All the riders on the bus were now plastic.
You told the girl in the wheelchair that you were finished listening to her, and that she should go bother someone else. You pointed at the Bosnian guy and told her that he was a Muslim. She didn’t even wait until the guy was off the phone before her little plastic hand shoved a gospel tract in his face. He waved it off and she stifled herself until a new passenger would ascend the stairs up into the bus, on wobbly plastic limbs. Then she would make eye contact with them, try to get a conversation going. But all the new plastic people who got on waved her off, too.
“No thanks,” they told her, “I’m already saved.”
XV
You got off the bus in Hikes Point and started walking back to your subdivision. A rattling noise followed your every step. You looked behind you, expecting to find a snake or someone playing maracas. But there was, apparently, no explanation for the noise. It was a nagging mystery, but one you were able to shove out of your head as your neighborhood appeared to you as it never had before.
The Gift of Plastic-Vision didn’t depart from you when you left the bus. All the cars looked like a toddler’s toy cars. All the pedestrians looked like marionettes or mannequins or action figures. They clomped down the street with clumsy, exaggerated steps, as if being poorly manipulated by invisible strings. They spoke to each other in cartoony voices.
You looked up into the sky and noted that the sun, itself, was actually the headlight from a car (you could spot a hint of chrome around the edges). Birds were plastic. Alley cats, too.
This was Step Two.
The plasticness erased the ugliness (or, at the very least, minimized it; took its bite away). You supposed it could have been possible for the plastic features to appear to you as ugly features. Halloween masks were plastic, and they could boast facial features that were hideous or grotesque. But when you saw the plastic faces around you, you didn’t see Halloween masks. You saw a sort of generically non-offensive array of facial features repeated over and over on various heads. Pleasant action figures. Pleasant dolls. Pleasant mannequins.
Many people would have experienced this new world as a hostile intrusion into their reality. But you’d been given enough information by the Mouth to be able to properly contextualize things. Seeing things as unreal didn’t alarm you. It was a necessity; a step along the path to nonexistence. In a way—at least, at first—it comforted you. It relieved you from the burden of ugliness and verified that the magick of the Path worked.
But how to grab your passport? As you trudged along the sidewalk, you considered various ways you might be able to gather your mother’s flesh or blood without resorting to squishy-gushy. You could put
broken glass at the foot of her bed, so that when she woke up she’d cut herself. Then you’d collect a shard of glass with your mother’s blood and… voila… instant passport. Or maybe you’d sneak a pair of scissors with you into her room and quickly snip off a tiny piece of earlobe. She’d wake of course. But by the time she knew what was happening, you’d already be out the door. That wouldn’t count as squishy-gushy, would it?
Of course there was always the possibility that when you arrived at your house your parents and your brother would be plastic and fake, like everyone else.
You supposed that a plastic mother would make the passport collection process easier. But you also worried about what such a passport would look like, when presented to the bouncer at The Border Crossing. If you presented a plastic-looking finger to him would he declare it invalid because it was “fake, fake, fake”?
But the Mouth had told you to trust Him. (You’ll know when you get there, bucko. You’ll see a sign outside the house that will give you a tip for how things will go down.)
And the Mouth knew what the fuck He was talking about. When you were across the street from your house—no not your house, your parents’ house, your parents’ house—you saw it festooned with yellow police tape.
CRIME SCENE DO NOT ENTER.
The shit had hit the fan. Your stomach hit the street. Police don’t put crime scene tape up if they’re investigating something mundane, like truancy. No, something much, much more significant must’ve occurred. Something violent.
Your brother had warned you about this sort of thing, hadn’t he? The night before you’d left, he’d spelled it out for you: “Haven’t you considered how… well… extreme her reaction might be?”
And you hadn’t. Not really. Your planning had been entirely selfish. You didn’t care who ended up getting the lion’s share of her wrath after you were gone. You figured that would be their problem. You had your own problems to attend to.
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