He talked big talk and went on about every single person who he thought had wronged him in the most fucking inconsequential way.
Nina felt her brain dry up. A dead seed, like for real.
They walked the whole city, rode the trains without paying, Nina found a tattoo guy who worked from a basement, while Shane bashed out rhymes for his album, designed the cover art, and they’d buy vodka coolers and smokes and sit in the park until sundown and buy more coolers or whatever else and go back to that little room by the bus station.
The mouths of the bus garage would open and close, and the busses would come out and peel off or they wouldn’t come out at all but some dude in overalls would come out of the mouth and smoke in the parking lot, and Nina would watch it from the window while Shane talked and paced around.
And there was something about those days she thinks of, even now, with Brit—that connection between those days with Shane and Brit being the, like, daughter of a bus mechanic. Some mornings, before this renegade shit, she’d put her face in Brit’s hair and would swear she could smell the diesel from the garage.
But anyway, Shane, like, he was a total animal in a cage back then.
First time, there was a flash of light and her cheek bone felt hot.
He cried and groveled, made her an ice pack.
She thought it looked hot when she looked in the mirror—totally smoking.
Like, totally.
She came right out from the mirror and popped him one—a left hook to his temple.
She had watched him practice throwing punches so much, she knew what to do.
What’s love—accepting everything? Or not having to accept a thing?
It became a game.
Nina called it Painting.
The Painting Game.
Their colours were blue and brown and purple and red and yellow and black black black.
His face, and hers—like legit canvasses, man.
And let me tell you, it’s better than anything Shane ever drew or painted before.
When you see that shit on a city wall it’s like you’re looking at a corpse. Or even worse, like in some gallery where it’s like a funeral home or a wax museum.
Some dumb shit with an aerosol or camel-hair brushes.
Concrete or canvas, like whatever.
Because painting is alive, man, and it’s written right here on our faces.
And when they introduced Brit to the game, she took to it like crack.
That’s how you find true love—you fuck them up, and then it’s their turn.
When she told her sister, Nina received a post-card in response, saying:
FUCKED UP. BUT CONSENTING ADULTS.
They went with it.
Like, full on.
The dead seed sprouted.
Maybe they were actually really exciting people, but she didn’t really think so—she thought they were even more boring than before.
She held a knife edge to Shane’s face one night—That’s us, baby, she said.
I still feel that way, motherfucker, Nina says. Like, the front of this car like the edge of that knife. Like, leading the way, know what I mean? Like, we’re avant garde as shit.
The curve of that front bumper cuts through space.
For a time, her knuckles so swollen, she couldn’t grip a cup or Shane’s cock and made Brit do all the work.
So what happened was I was just like totally sick of looking that way?
I started making good money as a cam-girl and one of the other girls told me that I should reinvest my money in my career and in my future and that’s when I booked my appointment for the consultation and they said I had a lot of potential—good cheekbones and lips and nice wide eyes even though I thought I looked ugly—like a total meth-faced bitch—but I had a lot of fanboys.
One of my regulars always signed off, Thanks Cumbucket, and that’s how I felt about myself?
And also my pussy was like a piece of raw meat, you know?
I put in a lot of hours on that thing.
I’ve spent more time working that thing than anything else in my life.
I’d always had that innocent-girl vibe going for me, but I was done with that.
When I hit fifteen I was like, girl, you are done being a delicate flower.
They made me look more like Rita Hayworth, right? Like old-timey and sad and like a vamp, too, but I went around town for weeks and weeks with my head completely wrapped in bandages, you know?
And anyway, my nose is smaller than hers, and that’s natural?
But I looked like some kinda burn victim or some shit.
And you have to be careful these days because those studios are everywhere and it’s so cheap now they’ll give any cab driver from Sri Lanka a license and a scalpel, you know?
And it wasn’t just my face and my body they fucked with, it was even my nipples: they have this simple procedure thingy where they turn them from ovals into heart shapes, and it hardly cost anything extra, but now, even though I can’t ever breast-feed some little monster of my own, my nipples are in the shape of hearts?
And, like, Shane loves it—and so have others? So whatever or whatever.
I have become the picture of love and the picture of love is monstrous—and I love what I’ve become, you know?
So beforehand, me and Nola, that was the other girl’s name who hooked me up with this idea, went to this place where she’d gotten some mods done—she’s ancient, man, like, twenty-seven years old—and we worked together at her place sometimes and it went well so I trusted her.
Nola was kinda like my mom or whatever—that was a thing we liked to do on camera, but it was also the truth, right?
Or we both agreed she was my mom without ever having to talk about it, but it didn’t feel weird when we performed together or anything, it was just a thing, know what I mean?
But it was Nola who had the idea for me to invest in my career and in my future because she was like, You don’t wanna end up like me where the mods at a certain age make you look weird, right? The clinic gets their lasers into you and that bio-chemical shit into you, you start to look a bit reanimated or some shit.
It’s true—you see it so much—dead girls on the screen—they’re everywhere.
Dead girls with a magic wand or whatever, working the raw meat for you.
Dead girls populating the invisible cloud above our heads—data, man, you know?
Dead girls in the netherworld.
In the real world too.
In the waiting room they had these screens on the walls with an animation of some, like, fire-bird or whatever flying out of the sun—the name of the company was Phoenix Modification—and Nola held my hand the whole time before I went in for the chop-job like my dad would say.
And when I came back out, swaddled in rags, man, did I ever feel excited about things.
I felt just like Jesus Christ.
Like, it was a new morning, you know?
And my sun was rising.
Dear CFP,
So anyway I wrote you all those letters previous because I am a fan of yours, but also because I felt you needed it. I care for you and for what happens to you and what was happening to you was that you had lost someone, so I thought I should write.
You’ve made it through okay.
Just like I advised, you haven’t died yet.
You’re still alive, and so are we. We’re still here and so are you.
Maybe you’ll die when we reach the big end, and so maybe this is a book you won’t finish until you’re ninety years old—but then, through our magic, I know this book will be finished and available in the spring of 2017, like, years ago—so maybe you’ll be dead by then—maybe everything will finally kill you, all this shit—and by that time, given what happens at the end, how that’s already written and the future already defined and clear and bright as a flash of light—the present still just totally opaque and fucked up—I can be there with you.
Like dead or wha
tever, or maybe not, but either way, we’ll see won’t we, CFP?
Because you may be killing us, but we’re killing you too, huh?
It’s just the way the Painting Game goes, right?
It goes this way, but it goes the other way too.
I guess we’ll see how everything goes eventually.
<3 Brit
First they saw the immense radio towers in the distance aflame and stark against the dark sky.
Where the rocky hills give way to the valley, and beyond that the sea, radio towers as bright as crosses—hundreds of feet up—lining the highway leading down to what? Man, who the fuck knows?
Booms, echoes, the smell of electrical sparks, diesel, ash, grilled meat: a slight warm wind bringing to them through the open windows of the car the scent of something else—marshland, humidity, the air thick, heavy, and somewhere else between the thunderous roars from afar—birds screech and are silent out there in the near wilderness.
Gotta be napalm, Shane says, or some shit like that because whatever it is sticks to shit.
Look—these towers are made of steel, and they’re burning, and here roadside, the greenery burns black.
Shit’s fucked, yo, like, the world’s ending, G.
Through smoke, big birds fly.
They pull up to a roadside gas station—the blinking blue- and-red neon OPEN sign a miracle in the grey—where the mustachioed elderly scarecrow takes cash from Shane’s hand—gasoline, and an eight pack of canned Wild Cat for dad—saying something about an uprising, workers, cults, the government—the man’s dentures chattering in his head—through the window Shane sees those radio towers burning straight down the line into the distance, and on a shelf behind the man, the television showing scenes of urban and not so urban revolt—troops in the streets of T Dot—Shane would swear he saw their old apartment building in the background of one shot—blood and smoke, homey, like fire everywhere—and in the once green towns—the police have rounded up the malcontents and beaten them to death with boots and batons and fists and have set fire to everything the jets haven’t yet destroyed—the reporter saying most rural areas are secure, gesturing to a trench behind her.
The jets and the armor of the soldiers emblazoned with the emblems of their corporate sponsors, the Stars and Stripes.
Craters in the rich soil of the heartlands.
He stares at the screen for a long while wondering what may be waiting for them on the Island.
Like, did anyone even think of that place as part of the world?
Did Tariqu(e) or the CEO ever hear of it?
A freezer in his dad’s workshop filled with bodies waiting for chemicals.
He leans there in a studied pose of extreme nonchalance but doesn’t feel like he’s pulled it off—the scarecrow giggles at him, crazy as fuck.
At the counter, the old man’s hands at rest on a pane of plastic under which lie all those unscratched lotto tickets—Your Dreams Come True—and Shane’s like, guess the market for that evaporated some time ago, right? Went up in smoke.
Why do we do the things we do?
Shane steps out the door and looks east where the sounds of a war and the beams of the sun are coming from.
He doesn’t like to think too much so he thinks of how he’d gotten into this anime porn shit a long while ago—like bigtitted cartoon girls hung like horses—and it totally ruined his sex drive for regular pussy. Aw dawg, these bitches—to say they are cartoons is like an insult to the animators, cause these girls are real, like for real—like they’re real looking—nearly as real looking as Brit and Nina are except better because they’re also not real—they’re like these fucking perversions of reality and what’s hotter than that? But they’re virtual, yo—like they ain’t messy the way Brit is, know what I mean? Like all the mods in the world and you’re still a person. Unless you’re a clone. Or like, Satan.
And what’s not real about them is that they’ve got these giant cocks they fuck each other with, and they’ve got these sweet little pussies too and they’re, like, down for whatever, know what I’m saying?
Aside from this uprising or whatever, it ruined his life.
Anyway, the scarecrow behind the counter is like that, yo.
You just keep doing the things you’ve always done, right?
Shane guesses he’s been here at this gas station every day for the last fifty years, and ain’t no way shit’s gonna stop him.
You get a taste of something and you like it at first and you keep doing it, and then it comes to define who in the fuck you are, know what I mean by that?
But there’s no, like, true self or whatever.
There’s no initial state.
There’s no human nature, G, grow the fuck up.
Shane’s like, it’s fucking Pavlov. It’s Skinner. Or maybe he’s just feeling cynical given that the world’s ending, and he’s actually like, Naw, G, it’s Chomsky and we’re all terribly creative and maybe everything’s gonna be alright.
So Shane’s back in the car and we just creep along this highway. Cars abandoned left and right.
A sign outside the town says Welcome and someone has flattened the place.
The car bumps over the train tracks that run beside the town.
Rubble, building foundations like sets of blackened teeth.
Right in the center of town there’s this waterfowl park shit—like it’s a swamp and in the middle of all this—wooden boardwalks that go right out into the middle of it, right—there’s this like still water and this like swampy as fuck area? Like, I don’t go in for plants, but these cattails are, like, the shit, know what I mean? They tower above the roof of the car and Nina and Carter look up at them.
It’s kinda like the most peaceful place in the world?
Fucking bugs big as your thumb whiz by?
The car rolls right to the edge of the water, and, except for the bodies, you wouldn’t know that, a hundred feet away, the town’s been drone fucked.
Here in the dim light of dawn, bats are still whirling.
Blindness, right—motherfuckers just know—they feel it, they don’t just see.
They know, you know?
The body.
The body knows what it knows in its own blind way.
And then, you know, there’s all these dead bodies surrounding them, right?
Charred skulls and ribcages, right—like they’re everywhere.
I may or may not lose my mind, but I’m not gonna even try to describe it to you—the scene or losing one’s mind—words may or may not do the experience justice, you know what I mean by that? Words are just shorthand for experience, but unfortunately they are also material, and that’s what fucks with you I guess. Material gets in the way of meaning but is also just like total meaning at the same time?
But anyway, needless to say—bodies everywhere—this little town stinking of so much shit.
Like horrible things everywhere, that’s what we’re seeing.
Burned bodies with gaping mouths holding smaller bodies with smaller gaping mouths.
It’s like, real, right—women and children burned where they lay.
Prolly raped. Prolly raped before they were murdered and then burned alive.
So, that’s what I’m seeing now.
Once people asked what is God?
And they asked what is truth and beauty?
They asked what is love?
What’s real?
What’s meaning?
What’s anything?
Brit’s like, When shit gets real like right now, who cares?
Dear Craig,
We’re almost home now, and so are you. You’re doing well, okay? I just wanted to tell you that. Maybe you think you’re at the absolute bottom now, but things could be worse, couldn’t they? At least you’re not on the run, and at least the world isn’t ending for you way over there where you are, right?
I see you, okay? I see you. And I’m there with you, even on those nights when you’re sitting al
one in the spare room of your mom’s apartment, wondering how it all went wrong—I’m there with you.
Don’t drink too much, and don’t whore around too much.
Don’t give up, okay? Not yet, at least.
And don’t believe yourself when you tell yourself what a fucking loser you are, okay?
Don’t do that to us, baby—it’s not true.
You’re bringing us all to the point we need to be at for things to feel right—and you’re bringing yourself there too, honey, okay—I promise.
You are making me, but I’m making you too so don’t forget that.
And last night, I dreamt about you, but it wasn’t really you, it was a really super-hot black girl in leopard-print bra and panties—you were rocking this 70s afro thing and you looked so good, C, you were my dream girl.
And we were walking hand in hand through the Christmas Village thing they had at the base of the TV Tower in Berlin and we skated on the little skating rink next to the Ferris wheel and your daughter was there with us too.
I was so sad, Craig. The three of us were so beautiful together.
And that was the whole dream, baby.
It was just us going around and around and around—the moon coming up and going down—around and around forever.
When they tested the first A-bombs way down south, they didn’t really know what would happen, you know? Like, the first detonation was the trickiest—there was a chance the explosion wouldn’t actually come to an end—like, anything could have happened. They could have opened a door into another world—like into your world or to my world and then who knows—we may have met somehow, you know?
That’s what I like to think about.
I want you to think about that too.
Let’s know each other a long time, okay?
I love you, baby.
I miss you.
Bisoux Brit
The four of us get out of the car, leaving the doors open, because, like, who knows, right? The interior lights letting out this sickly little glow into the night.
And we walk out onto one of those boardwalks that lead out into the middle of this swamp where the brown water laps at the planks—we’re at the very heart of the place—dead center in the water, and the four of us just kind of stand there looking around, right?
Skeet Love Page 8