by Dino Parenti
“Love,” I repeat.
He bobble-heads a nod. “Yeah. Yeah, like . . . love. Like, I’m doing it like with love. Her to me . . . me to her. I know it sounds . . . weirdo as fuck . . . but yeah. Thing is, damn if I . . . remember her face.”
He swallows the rest of his drink and joggles the glass at the barkeep for a second.
“So how does a simple gal like myself get a ticket?” I ask.
For a moment Cedrick turns jittery, eyes panning the room and head shrinking into his own shoulders before shrugging it all off just as fast. From his wallet he pulls out a business card and places it on my coaster.
“I like you, PI, so I’m gonna help you. That there’s . . . my finance guy. Just ask him . . . for a loan. If you qualify, he just might . . . hook you up. But hey, tell him . . . Tell him I sent you.” He leans into my ear. I smell booze, day-old cologne, and the citrus waft of whatever drug is leaching from his system. “I get a little extra . . . for referrals. And Maxine? You . . . would be a hit . . . on that boat.”
He leans back, shuts his eyes and hugs himself before slow-singing my name on his stool.
I’m out the door before the bartender returns with his second drink.
***
It takes less wheedling and misdirection than I’d expected, but a couple of weeks after meeting Cedric, I manage at last to finagle passage aboard the Petrichor under dummy startup auspices and accrued charm, plus a hundred-thousand dollar loan I don’t need and won’t live long enough to make the first payment on.
Cedric’s finance guy was a prototypical bro-dude, steeped in resentments small and large. I got the fast vibe that while he was allowed to parse out invites, he was not allowed aboard the Petrichor himself.
Despite being ten years his senior, he still asked for my number. I laughed, and he laughed too after a long beat. He kept laughing as I walked out.
Always a bridesmaid. It takes most men a lifetime to realize that as their lot.
***
I don’t see Brook board—don’t spot her in the fluffery of costumed affluence—and I worry that my shooting her husband has mired her in questioning and surveillance. But I know she’s here. I feel her presence, and maybe it’s just my growing hunger to see her up close, to hear her side, that’s feeding it. For someone like me, addicted to the almosts of life, it’s more excitement than I feel I deserve.
My natural brown hair trimmed and coiffed, breasts bandaged tight under my tuxedo, I make certain to be the last man to board, and soon the ferry is underway.
2004
They assumed Leah’s injuries were the results of her fall into the well, but her mother eventually confessed to her husband’s abuse. Years of beatings and torture.
I will never forget the crime-scene photos. The bite marks on her neck and shoulders. The peeled, bloomed flesh of her fingertips—the result of trying to climb her way out.
The hyacinths snagged in her hair, their blue exploding from the bloated soot of her flesh.
2018
I linger on the top deck with the smokers until a few miles out, armed guards under black stocking masks and night-vision goggles usher everyone below deck.
Only after closing the doors behind us do I realize all the stragglers are men, and all the guards are women.
Inside, and we’re all handed pills by a masked usher. From behind a leopard-print veil, she pauses to size me up. I think I’m blown—that I missed a crucial detail, failed to dab off a spot of makeup—but she drops a pill into my palm and waits for me to swallow it before pointing to the stairs. I try to smuggle it under my tongue, but it’s pre-coated with some manner of saliva-activated lubricant, and no sooner does it hit my tongue that it rifles down my throat.
We descend a winding staircase, and I learn at once that the Petrichor is only a common ferry from the outside. That down below, a yacht of the grandest opulence thrives. Ribbed and Baroque. Echoes of Gaudi and Giger.
Sweet, spicy smoke curlicues past like ghosts in flight, and my head reels and my joints swim. I lose count of how many costumes pass me. Get-ups adorned in boar and magpie. Masks of snake skin and fleece.
Me with nothing on but a clash of purpose and disorientation.
Through an arched tunnel we file towards the sound of moans. Of keens and sighs. It smells of meat and damp earth, and as we emerge into the boat’s belly, I realize that the entire bottom is made of glass.
As if on cue, the same seawater glow as before swells awake, and the twining of flesh, young and old, quavers in jade.
The bacchanal only throws me for a moment. I’d suspected as much from the start, but not the mutilation. While the men are their varying degrees of normal—if not outright spaced-out on hallucinogens—the women are, to varying degrees of severity, all disfigured. Stripped of costume, the scars rise and the pits fill by whim of the spectral light. The welts and healed burns seem to glow as if black-lit.
Some are missing eyes. Some, entire limbs.
I realize, again on a delay and despite the rarified air of the place, that I’m still very aware of all the detail, and that the drugs Cedric described are slow to take.
A deep whistling soon coats the air, harmonious with the sex, and when I glance down it’s to the sight of a dozen orcas and porpoises and other vague sea creatures approaching from below. Noses and bellies and sourceless tentacles nuzzle the glass, mimicking the undulant flesh above.
I’m either fully hallucinating like the men, or they gave me a placebo, and I only remember Brook again when she hooks my arm around hers.
“I’m glad you came,” she whispers into my ear.
The ocean in her voice. The cold of her. I can’t utter a sound.
I start to point at the marred women, only to have her gently lower my hand with hers.
“I suspected you understood,” she says.
I remain mute. She continues.
“Despite what you’re thinking, this is a good place. A place of second chances. Of rebirth.”
She guides me to the other end of the boat. Towards batwing doors.
“Women of great imagination created this. To keep them safe. Indemnified. All you’ll uncover here is freedom and appetite, from the earthworm to the stars. I’ve studied you. Know that my deceased husband hired you to find me. Will you help nonetheless?”
Whale song keeps thrumming against the hull as questions, and despite my coat, I can feel the judder of Brook’s flesh through the stitching.
Ferry personnel and ushers carrying trays of steaming appetizers or shimmering beverages give us a wide berth as we pass. They’re all women. All scarred and hardened of bearing. Like soldiers retreating from the front.
Those that look upon me soften, as if I were a medic hauling a cart of morphine.
2004
Not long after the ME’s initial examination, Leah Ross’s official cause of death was determined as drowning.
Most blamed the flash-flood waters filling the well from the sudden rain that broke the drought the morning after I drained the pond, but I knew better. I’d studied the courses the pond water would take, and they easily could’ve branched into the trails and hyacinth fields that had already been mostly investigated.
Search parties camping near her ultimate location reported hearing the water rush that morning, but attributed it to the storm, along with the black mud found in her lungs, which the M.E. determined as “sewage runoff.”
But there wasn’t enough rain for flash-floods, and Leah was still alive when I breached the pond, three days after her father beat her and dumped her into that well to starve.
Unlike my mother’s funeral, hundreds came to Leah’s, including her mother. From behind dark sunglasses, the flesh around her eyes swelled in brown-green eddies.
Just like my mother’s the morning she left to scuba-dive for the last time.
Earlier that morning, I bought my first leather gloves at a Louisville haberdashery. My palms sweated profusely in the afternoon heat, and the salt accrue
d into the tips and chewed loudly at the fresh wounds of my fingers. Even with four Excedrin, I felt their throb in my toes. Two weeks of agony later finally got me staggering into an ER. By then, half my fingertips were as black as pond mud.
As they lowered Leah’s tiny coffin into the earth, I thought of the last sight of my mother. Her skipping towards the shore, tossing aside the gloves my father bought for her the week before.
2018
Almost forty years removed from my mother’s final plunge, and almost fifteen removed from Louisville and that final autopsy report, and I start to hitch, then finally break. Sobs so wracking that Brook has to hold me to keep me from falling.
“Help . . . how?” I blubber against her neck. Stiff and corded, as if set to deadlift all her lost years.
“Here all inherit new names, all necessary alterations, new places to begin again, away from those who’ve harmed and crippled. To defeat the unenduring. But first, a chance to feel truly wanted, as you can see. Truly loved. If you are willing to provide, you too can contribute to the cause.”
She starts to pull off my gloves, and I don’t resist. She examines my mutilated fingers, then brings each palm to her lips. I don’t feel the flesh of her kisses so much as her cool breath, and we’re walking again.
Verging upon the batwing doors, she begins to shed clothes. Except that parts of her come away with the Gossamer and filigree. Curves molt, seemingly grafted to her costume, and scarred, skeletal arms and concaved chest, where sutures ghost the glands that once jutted proud, sponge the green light.
Wig hisses from scalp. Drags and catches on stringy moors of patchy, ashen hair from scalp pockmarked by tooth and cigar burn.
Dentures are spat, and ragged, broken teeth flare.
Passing the batwing doors and into the galley, I catch sight of chefs and line-cooks. All women and all maimed to some degree. Bruised and acid-burned. Their food smells exquisite though, and for a moment I forget where I am and pause to watch their plating.
“They cook for the women, and for the women only,” says Brook. Without her dentures, her voice tumbles past jagged teeth in a crackle, as if spoken into a whirring fan. “As for the men, they eat what they’ve all secretly yearned to. This way.”
Again she takes my arm and leads me to new doors, these located at the end of an adjoining corridor without light.
At the darkened threshold, she pushes a button at the jamb, and an older woman in chef’s whites and night-vision goggles opens the door and steps aside.
I can barely see inside. Spots of vague light here and there. A door outline in one corner. The skeletal frame of spiral stairs at another.
The sound of a meat-grinder choking on bone.
Brook’s hands move up. Her fingers unbutton my jacket and shirt underneath. Gently unwrap the gauze from my torso until my saline breasts peal from my sweaty ribs. My trousers come down next, then my shoes and socks, and finally my briefs.
My shriveled manhood and flat scrotum, testicles removed for three years now.
Her probing, spidery fingers on my shoulders then as she twists me gently back to face the chef.
“The men believe they’re about to dine on the most extravagant, most endangered of animals, and they never question it. But we’re not so reckless with the Earth. They’re indeed provided something exotic, albeit far more abundant. And it typically seeks us voluntarily. The last one was quite corpulent and aggressive.”
It all slots in perfectly then. I always though Billy Wentz’s goodbye letter on his desk sounded way too extravagant for his gorilla brain.
The sharpening of knives in the dark. Another female chef materializes from the darkness to join the first, and behind their goggles they confab over cuts. New York prime, one says, and I think of Neil West’s twitching, balling hands.
At least two exits at my disposal that I can barely see. Only three shattered women to best. I can get out the back and swim to shore if need be.
Or, I can . . .
Down in the boat’s belly, all is dark and dank. How the bottom of Kettle Cove would’ve looked to my mother during her final breaths. How Leah’s well must’ve seemed to her, murky and wafting of damp concrete. And before all turns black, a thank you is whispered into my ear, and I feel the comfort of the water that surrounds us.
MOJITO
DAY CAME THAT I caught my wife trying to hawk my mother’s Tiffany urn on Ebay—ashes included—the only thing she seemed troubled by after being confronted about it was how paltry the offers had been.
I’m not reveling in some caustic flashback here. Not really. There happens to be a comparably shaped vessel overflowing with matchbooks behind the bar that I first noticed upon walking into this humble watering hole, and being a pattern-recognition mammal and all . . .
Alright, so I am feeling a certain little something. Right this instant, as I’m finger-walking through a wad of hundreds, this kneejerk trait that I used to enjoy now leaves me ill at ease for the first time since the wifey’s experience with necrotic fire sales. An encouraging thing to feel embarrassment again after so long. After your wife’s been a junkie long enough, shame is the first emotion that deserts you.
“Sorry, I don’t have anything smaller,” I tell the barkeep, kicking myself for not taking the extra ten minutes to have the bank teller break a couple of the c-notes. But I needed to blow that town and not look back. Even pondering it now has me second-guessing if stopping at some bar while attempting an exodus—or anywhere else for that matter—was a good idea.
If just continuing west until the car died under me was the better option.
The barkeep waves me off with a facial scrunch that adds ten years to a mug already rutted by hard miles.
“I can break it, guy,” he says. “If you don’t mind an extra stack of ones bulging your pants.”
I flick back concession with a finger. Yeah, I should’ve kept driving, but fuck it, I need this too.
To counterpunch my self-disgust, I stare out the narrow window cut in the cinderblock. The amber puddles from street-lights are all that break up the black outside. Now and again a lightning strike at the horizon cuts a scrim of sagebrush and scurrying jackrabbits to remind me of just how much nothing lies between Jacksonville and Santa Monica.
I swear, this storm’s been following me since Juarez. It scouts ahead in the air, musky and hell-bent, alive with agenda.
“Oscar vouched up and down for you,” I say, blinking away the hot after-images. “Says you make a killer mojito.”
The barkeep’s shrug is a line in a play remembered a beat too late and hastily delivered.
I’m no stranger to the waft of tension at this point, the way it ferries certain unmistakable metallic tangs not unlike organ meat. And this guy’s all kidneys and bladders. A newbie to peddling, no doubt, anxious over the nuances of payment acceptance and product relinquishing, and so on. And like most of his type, the virginity gets masked in ostensible ways. Hair on the face and head worn in unkempt, ovine eddies. Wrinkled, plaid button-down open at the chest, the summits of indeterminate ink peeking unsure from under the frayed collar of the obligatory ribbed tank-top beneath.
He even mutters in droll, film-noir bites, just as Oscar said he would.
“C-note, huh? In this gin-joint? Been a while . . . ”
Oscar Wolinski. For being the one who exposed just how deep my own dependencies run, a few words. Oscar and I met in therapy some years back. He told me about this place in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico, among others, but before that he introduced me to this Belgian quack with a new aversion therapy that required no medication. His method consisted of rattling off systematic laundry lists of ingredients or instructions, the idea being that engaging the analytical left of the brain will help quell our urges.
Oh, and afterwards, you’re supposed to snap the large binder rubber band around your neck as a kind of punctuation. A little pain period, if you will.
We ended up choosing drink recipes for our lists. Surp
risingly, this proved somewhat counter-productive, however avant-garde it sounded in the moment. But hey, at the extremes of life, whether high or low, you see the world through needle heads.
Another lightning strike. White-hot shivs shanking the earth around Las Cruces, though until the boom arrives four seconds later I’m convinced it’s actually the lights in the ceiling. These dusty, droning old fluorescents flickering with organic syncopation are classic headache makers.
Out the window again. “It’s dead out there,” I say.
The barkeep glances about as if this is news. “Deader in here.”
“Huh. I suppose you don’t get much mother’s day traffic, place like this. No offense.”
He shrug-nods. “No worries, guy. Sign of the times. You can tell by the traffic. The freight never lies. It’s like it all got called away to some national emergency we’ll finally hear about in a week. You know, after the oligarchy’s been safely sheltered away. Last customer left over an hour ago. Paid for three shots of whiskey with quarters. Was about to close early before you pulled in.” He squints a quick double-take at me as if from an attempt to reconstitute the world post-camera-flash. “Can’t say the last time a business type walked through those doors.”
Yeah, the white collar remnants of a once profitable, sixty-hour-a-week toil. All I own are pricy Burberry button-downs which I step groggily into each morning as if they were bathrobes. I guess that’s not so bad for a poor, withdrawn kid from Appalachia with a revolving-door felon father and a cuckoo for a mother. When I called her this time last year to wish her what would turn out to be her last happy mother’s day, all she did was gripe about the drought in LA, and how her new oven didn’t keep accurate temperature, and how the house kept smelling of burnt apples.
The barkeep’s sun-cracked lips clench as he loses his place counting singles and fives. The hand he rakes across his thinning, ponytailed head comes away damp. To this he grimaces mild concern, though no sooner does thunder circuit through the floors and begrimed window again that he’s counting anew.
