The Secret of Ventriloquism

by Jon Padgett

  Can’t remember much more. I was sobbing. Pipes were hissing, sputtering dark fluid above me. A great squealing static roared in the darkness around me. Or maybe it was just the sound of my chainsaw cutting.

  When I came to myself again, I was still separating appendages—some fingers, some toes, some claws and some less defined things—from hands, hands from forearms and sub-forearms from segmented insect legs and deformed claws... tossing them all to the mill fire. And then I dumped that shrieking skull itself into the digester’s inferno.

  At some point I was incapacitated by a few of my fellow police, members of the Brotherhood who came a little late to the party but soon enough to stop me from completing my good work. I never had time to finish annihilating all the squirming bones of my partner. I never had a chance to burn the factory to the ground.

  Afterwards, as I’m sure you know, I confessed to the murder of my partner. You can add Kroth and whoever else might’ve died in his neighborhood’s gas line explosion to the list now.

  I took their psychiatric tests, and they told me I was competent to stand trial. Officially, I knew what I was doing when I shot Guidry’s body and started dissecting and immolating it. And I did know what I was doing.

  There was some deception on my part, I admit, through silence if nothing else. I never denied the bullshit story that Guidry and I were involved in a long term affair and that he had finally broken it off. Made them think I was taking psychotic revenge on him by saying I wanted to erase his body from the earth, but that part was true. They also suggested I was to blame for abducting and murdering the other skeletonized victims and for distorting their bodies in the most grotesque ways. There wasn’t any believable proof, of course. But I never denied any of it.

  You know the rest of the story as it played out in front of the media. Scorned sociopathic lady cop offs her partner-lover. Just like Kroth said at the end—all those things I obsessed over for so long finally came to light. The abuse I endured as a child, “my unsociable nature, a notable instance of brutality,” blah blah blah. And, of course, the simple fact of being a lady policeman killer. A scorned lady policeman killer to boot.

  But now you’ve come to interview me here in the clink, and I’m curious. First, I assumed you wanted to know why I really killed Guidry. Then I figured maybe you wanted to hear about the skeletons. Maybe you had found out what they’re like—how they shriek and thrash around and grow. I assumed you wanted to know about the toxic garbage that poured out of those corpses and maybe about the Brotherhood of the Black Fog itself. Most of all, I was hoping you'd whisk me to some federal lockup far away from foggy, farty Dunnstown.

  But I can tell by that blank expression—by those eyes of a doll and a fucking shark—that you already know everything you need to know.

  Organ Void

  “What is missing at this moment?”

  Rose snorts as she drives her Bug home from work. The gentle voice of a self-help guru drones over her car speakers.

  “What is missing at this moment?”

  The question buzzes through her consciousness as Rose navigates down the sooty Interstate exit. Beyond that—the whining roar of the mammoth overpasses loom above her like ruined cathedrals.

  “What is missing at this moment?”

  “ORGAN -VOID”

  Both words are emphatic. Underlined in deep black, the letters slanted to the right on the wrinkled face of the cardboard.

  (“...there is nothing else, and at that moment when you fully realize...”)

  The fingers that hold the sign are long but look as wide as Rose’s big toes, the lengthy nails oddly well-manicured. The man or woman (it’s impossible to tell which) holding the sign has a ragged face browned from years of unprotected sun exposure. The eyes entirely covered by a tumorous mass of wrinkles, giving the impression of visionary blindness. (“...dead to the aliveness in others. And so we can no longer have...”) The mouth a tight line in a face that retains a fine—almost aristocratic—bone structure, ample chin, broad, high cheekbones and square jaw framed by wild, chest-long, dingy hair spilling in every direction.

  Man or woman, Rose thinks, You were beautiful once.

  The tramp is one of the skinniest human beings Rose has ever seen in spite of hands and a face that retain the illusion of weight. (“...pain body has two ways of feeding...”) Only hard junk use coupled with starvation could achieve such a skeletal frame. The clothes the vagrant wears—dingy gray, hole-ridden wife-beater, stained cargo shorts and flip-flops—only highlight the form’s emaciation.

  “ORGAN -VOID”

  What does it mean? A medical condition? An expression of loss?

  Rose rolls down the window, expecting the traditional whiff of urine, excrement and/or strong alcohol. (“...ultimate thing is the realization of the formless essence...”) But only the pungent smell of vehicle exhaust meets her. The vagrant shuffles towards the Bug—those thick, manicured fingers still grasping the cardboard sign on either side, pushing it through the open window.

  “Uh, hi there,” says Rose, pulling her face back from the cardboard just inches away. “I’d like to buy your sign for... will twenty dollars do it?” This has long been Rose’s practice, thus simultaneously appeasing her distaste at giving the homeless something for nothing and her guilt at not helping them in any way. She has boxes full of such signs—but never one like this.

  There’s no response from the tramp, who continues holding the sign uncomfortably close to Rose’s face. (“...the mind made image ‘little me’...”) The cardboard smells moist, like rubbing alcohol masking pus.

  “ORGAN -VOID”

  The traffic light turns green, and immediate, fierce honking commences behind Rose’s old VW.

  “Oh damn,” Rose says, her hands shaking as she digs deep into her purse for bills. “I’ve got, um, forty. Will forty do?”

  “Come on, goddamnit! Move - your - ass!” (“...useless when we talk about this. That’s why...”) A chorus of beeping and engine gunning echoes across the cyclopean overpass-wasteland, the single eyes of the daddy longlegs street lights glaring down.

  Sagging cardboard falls into Rose’s lap, and she cringes. Pushes her proffered bills toward the bum. But the figure withdraws with surprising speed—long, skeletal arms and large, thick hands hanging limp now, head tilted back, mouth agape in an attitude of surrender—a junk-ravaged scarecrow at the end of the Interstate ramp. (“...that deepest Self, not the mind made self. It’s so precious...”)

  The light turns red while Rose stares at the vagrant, and the drivers behind her scream and honk and rumble in vehicular berserker rage. A man exits the truck behind her—a short, stocky shark of a brute. Rose balls up the two twenties and throws them towards the sign-bearer. She doesn’t wait to see if they find their mark or are blown away by the hot highway winds. (“...the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. Who am I then?”) Rose guns her puttering car to life, punches the power button on her stereo to silence the droning self-help guru and runs the light, almost broadsiding a fast-moving motorcycle. She races home the rest of the way to outpace the wrathful drivers in the wake of her Bug.

  She is taking in huge gulps of air all the way home. Adrenaline like too potent junk jacking her heart rate. Rose doesn’t look down at the bum’s sign until she parks on the street in front of her ramshackle, duplex apartment.

  “ORGAN -VOID”

  ~

  “My name is Dr. Onavi. You’ve had an episode.”

  A roaring vibration grows and subsides. A chill. The smell of dirt or dust that makes her nose twitch. A floating sensation and the slow awareness of her body on an unyielding, rough surface. Rose feels a kind of wonder. No running commentary peels off rapid-fire auctioneer-style in her head. There are no words that come to mind. There are no words.

  “Gord Onavi.”

  Rose opens her eyes, sees the dark shapes above her. All concrete and metal framed in the bright LED and sodium lights of the city, grooved, mammoth steel, concrete
crossbeams. It is cold. The crossbeams bleed dark mold. With effort, Rose rises to a sitting position, and looks around her. She peers up at the underbelly of the Interstate, each track of road at various levels in a pattern that seems altogether random, senseless. She notices her bare legs for the first time, grimy, scratched up and thin. Rose braces herself for support to keep from collapsing back to the littered concrete as it reels around her. She is wearing only her long t-shirt (the blue “Captain Hook’s Seafood” tee with the eye-patched pirate head emblazoned in white). Her underwear is gone.

  “Can you hear me, Rose?”

  How did she get here? Downtown by the looks of it, just off Poydras Street in the long strip of city properties. Makeshift parking lots, impoundment yards, RV parks. And the homeless, of course. Blocks and blocks of them, spread out. One woman at the Interstate onramp on one knee, eyes closed and head held up to the smog-sick sky. Filthy, gloved hands crossed and twitching. Bowlegged and hooded figures with overflowing bags full of mysterious odds and ends.

  “You may call me Dr. Gord. Am I reaching you, Rose?”

  Rose rises to her bare feet, walking on the cold, sometimes muddy concrete, puddles shining in the sodium glare. The roadway above her is quiet—only the intermittent sound of vehicle dopplering. The drainage pipes under the Interstate shattered from some nameless deluge. The cityscape breathes.

  “You may experience some pain now, Rose, or feel some pressure.”

  Cold. Barren. Desolate. Rose hears and feels the repetition of the words like a mantra inside her otherwise quiet mind. If she feels pain or pressure it is only from her hungry guts, her scraped and battered legs and the aching pain in the side of her neck. Cold. Barren. Desolate. These words don’t touch the quiescence within her. She staggers on as if purposeful, absorbed in every throb of discomfort and every nerve-thrill within her extremities. And there is a shape ahead—a tall and hunched human shape.

  “A dithered wino youth vow?” the husky voice asks her.

  “Are you down with the void?”

  “Can you hear me, Rose?”

  ~

  Rose wakes up late, alarm clock insect droning. Echoes of a recurring nightmare—something about titanic steel and concrete curtains above her. Her throat is raw with stinging phlegm. Did she piss herself in the night? Rose checks the dingy black futon sheets but finds no sign of moisture. She farts and sniffs—and smells something like rubbing alcohol and pus. It clings to the flesh-colored bedroom and stained, gray-salted wall to wall.

  What is missing?

  She calls in sick to work, her voice satisfactorily croaking on her boss’s voicemail. Rose’s stomach produces internal shitting and dribbling sounds... oozing or spitting out of the mouths that appear on the organs in response to that awful pressure... Her head hurts, a deep bone pain, throbbing as if in concert with the gastric ensemble within her abdomen. She totters into a shabby bathroom, hunched and holding her stomach as if gutshot. Squats on the toilet and immediately has waterrhea, which she examines for signs of blood, black bile or other damning viscera. Nothing—just the typical, medium flecks floating in light brown liquid. No sharp diarrhea stench, though, which Rose thinks odd. And she remembers the run-in with the street bum yesterday and that sign of his.

  “ORGAN -VOID”

  ...organ almost certainly meaning vital organs either literally or figuratively that’s the crux of the matter yes but either way in any event something is missing or else filled with empty space yes void or perhaps it means an end of sorts or a denial or correction...

  An image from her nightmare comes to mind and more liquid hits the already hot toilet water and splashes back on her ass and upper thighs. Something about an overpass, a pock-marked gray series of rectangles and crossbeams curving down at the ends of her sight and contracting and expanding as if the lungs of some vile behemoth, the large, broken pipes carrying sewer water leaking black liquid like shit or jizz out of the cracks that appear from the shifting metal and cement.

  ...like writing VOID on a check that has been incorrectly filled out and then of course there’s the implication of darkness yes the void of space and emptiness and all that comes of that but isn’t there also the possibility of voiding like evacuation yes pissing or shitting and if an internal organ did that it would be squeezed out imagine like a sponge-kidney or dirt-liver grabbed and clenched and twisted like an old wet snot or cum rag the pus or bile oozing or splitting out of the mouths that appear on the organs in response to that fantastic pressure...

  “Organ Void,” Rose says aloud, shivering and groaning with nausea, coughing up greenish-yellow discharge. Yes, she’s ill and likely with a fever to boot. She flushes the toilet again but there is no sucking spiral of liquid. Too much toilet paper and shit. Rose groans again, gambles on one last flush and squeals as the light brown liquid tops then overtops the toilet’s rim.

  ...and where would all that organ piss that organ shit go why in the rest of the body always in the body and if all your organs start convulsively squeezing spitting out their vital juices into the rest of the organism what would that do what would that feel like painful no doubt but after empty meaningless as in having no force all the life escaping from one container into a larger container...

  The sharp gas pains come in waves, leaving a gap of about thirty seconds between them (Rose counts). In the interludes she is able to move, bare feet shit-tracking the bedroom then living room floors with steadily lighter shit-prints as she makes her way to the kitchen. She strains and fumbles for the medicine cupboard. Bottles of antidepressants and tranquilizers, vitamins and pain pills rattle and spill like slot machine coins onto the kitchen floor. She dry-pops three Imodiums and a couple of Vicodins, and the next gut-wave hits.

  ...never meant for the life-spillage that oozes or drips or rushes out of the organs the organs have voided themselves have created a void for themselves have made their existence invalid useless uninhabitable and imagine if such a creature such a life form kept on existing spreading their disease of unmentionable unnatural compression moving on like a balloon like a baboon bobbing along...

  Rose slips on diarrhea and falls hard on the linoleum onto her hip, but she doesn’t feel it. Her naked ass dribbles shit as she crawls through the carpeted living room, trying to beat the next gut-punch. Rose makes it to her bedroom and pops open her box, one of her boxes of signs. She can’t even smell the old mildew or pungent cologne or vomit or piss—not even rubbing alcohol and pus. She pulls out the sign she’s looking for, the one that’s pushing and pushing her frenzied, sick mind. The gastric walloping begins again as she grabs the thing in both hands, clutches it close and fills her vision with those words:

  “ORGAN -VOID”

  ...organ sap stored in extremities fermenting bile-wine beyond feeling maybe but maybe not maybe just thoughts the brain a large organ itself thought-nectar internally bleeding emptying the head but filling the body with mind nonsense that might feel like sewage blending with other sewage filling up the whorls and the body like a toilet overflowing the rim with sepsis-diarrhea like a body vomiting not outside but inside of itself...

  ~

  “Am I reaching you?”

  Rose awakens by degrees. She hears a steady roar of traffic above. She sweats. Hears groans and unintelligible muttering nearby. She opens her eyes and sees an interstate overpass above, mid-morning. People, prone on thin, foam mattresses, dot the concrete pavement around her. The bodies—some with slim pillows under their heads, some not—are of varying ages. An elderly, bearded black man lies nearest to her, back arched as if in pain but unconscious, mouth agape, fixed in position. He wears the typical patient’s wardrobe—a thin, dingy blue, diamond-patterned robe. A bored looking, middle-aged nurse in scrubs, hand on one hip, fans him with a piece of cardboard. On the other side of Rose a bald woman lies, shirtless and legless, upon her chest and face and outstretched arms. She appears to be in a posture of worship.

  A small, bespectacled man with white, wiry hair, a
round face and a prodigious belly ambles from one patient to another. His long white coat shines in the makeshift hospital. As Rose looks towards the physician, he returns her gaze. He smiles and his eyes crinkle shut.

  “I’m glad to see you conscious, Rose. Onavi. Dr. Gord Onavi, but you may call me Dr. Gord.”

  “What... what happened, doctor?” Rose asks.

  “You’ve had an episode, Rose,” the doctor replies, squatting down to check her pulse, and his hands feel cool and dry. “Forgive the mobile unit. Cuts cuts cuts coming down. Though paradoxically this is where we’re supposed to be, yes—with the street people, the suffering non-killed who can’t or won’t come to us.”

  “An episode? What kind of episode?”

  “A reaction.”

  “To a drug?”

  “Indeed.”

  “But I don’t remember taking anything.”

  “In your case, that makes perfect sense.”

  “I don’t understand. What happened, doctor?”

  “Organ Void,” Dr. Onavi whispers.

  “Wait, that... that was a sign.”

  “Oh yes, quite a bit of fluid entered your extremities last night. You certainly have all the signs.”

  “No, it was a sign, like from a homeless person. ‘Organ Void.’”

  “That’s exactly how it’s contracted, my dear. But—”

  “I thought you said it was a drug. Wait. How are you treating me?”

  “I’m not here to treat you. I am only observing. After all, we can’t avoid the unavoidable, now can we?”

  The bald, legless woman turns her face towards Rose and smiles toothlessly. She asks, “Is she down with the void?”

  “Indeed she is, Mrs. Smoot,” the doctor replies, eyes crinkling, patting Rose’s shoulder. “But not to worry. Her ill-directed mind is being righted by degrees.”

  Rose listens to the traffic above. A deep peace moves within her.