Broken Monsters

by Lauren Beukes

  Layla pulls up short. ‘Oh shit, Cas. I dreamed this.’

  ‘What? Waiting in line to see some crappy art as the worst ever cover for trying to get laid?’

  ‘No, idiot. The fish.’ She points out the paste-up on the side of the house, two storeys high. It’s of a fish with fluttery translucent fins, striated with rainbow colors, covered in spikes and with a deep tube mouth of circular fangs like a lamprey or the pit monster in Star Wars. ‘This is so weird, Cas. It’s exactly the same.’

  Cas is unimpressed. ‘Maybe you dreamed it because you saw it.’

  ‘I’ve never seen this before.’

  ‘Slut, please. It’s on the invite.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Give it to me, I’ll show you.’ Layla digs the flyer out of her handbag. The image shows the place in front of them with its cheery sign: ‘Dream House: An MCity Projects Party.’ And Cas is right. It’s not taken dead-on, so you can see some of the side of the house, the wall slanting away at an oblique angle and the fish mural half-cast in shadow.

  ‘Lodged in your subconscious like a splinter, along with sweet, sweet dreams of Dorian going down on you.’

  ‘Cas!’

  She laughs and flicks Layla on the forehead. ‘Jesus. You are in love. Hopeless. So where are we going to find your boy?’

  ‘He said he’d meet us here.’ Layla looks around. ‘He’s not outside, so I guess we go in.’

  ‘One at a time,’ the man at the door says. One of the artists, Layla guesses, going by his paint-spattered overalls and the screwdriver sticking out of his pocket. His hair is plastered with sweat, as if he just finished working. The sign outside the house reads ‘Can’t See the Would’.

  ‘We’re together.’

  ‘Okay, then. It’s all on the ground floor. Please go straight through, so other people can have the same experience. Don’t go upstairs because the stairs are rotten and we’re all about having a good time, not falling through the floor. The live performance kicks off at eight. Enjoy.’

  He ushers them in and closes the door behind them. It’s gloomy in the entrance hall, although they can hear the murmur of voices deeper in.

  ‘Like a ghost house,’ Layla whispers because the muted acoustics seem to demand it.

  ‘Or a tunnel of lo-ooove.’ Cas steps forward and a thrum of bass judders under their feet. ‘Shit!’ She grabs Layla’s arm in fright.

  ‘I think that’s the “experience”.’

  ‘Cute.’

  ‘It’s rigged to different floorboards.’ Layla walks forward, setting off another deep vibration under them, like the whole house is purring. She is pleased with herself for working it out. ‘Pressure plates.’

  ‘Scared the fucking crap out of me.’

  ‘It’s pretty cool. You know haunted houses seem that way because of subsonics.’

  ‘For once I wish we could just go somewhere without you turning it into a big fat lecture.’

  ‘Same with church organs. The way they make the hair on your neck stand up. It’s the frequency. Too low to register on our aural spectrum. But you can feel it on some level, in your bones, and it gives you the heebie-jeebies. Or a case of the holy-moleys.’

  ‘I always thought oral sex was aural sex. Sticking it in your ear.’

  ‘Are you even listening to me?’

  ‘Unless you’re saying, “Cas, can I get you a drink, my dear friend”, then no.’

  ‘You don’t drink.’

  ‘They have Chinese bubble tea. I saw a cart.’

  The door opens behind them and the artist pokes his head in: ‘Can you move all the way in, please? There are other people waiting.’

  They walk deeper into the house, through a room wallpapered in monochromatic symbols – an alien’s idea of Arabic, perhaps, where musicians are setting up a keyboard and a saxophone and a big glossy double bass, and into a huge section with a stylized black-and-white forest of trees painted on the walls.

  ‘Yargh. Makes my eyes go funny,’ Cas says. The effect is amplified by thin black and white branches planted in the floor. People are milling between the sticks with glasses of spiced wine and beer and chatting, apart from one white-haired old guy who is edging round the room, staring into the forest. Their voices bounce around the space, which draws Lay’s eyes up to the ceiling. The floor above has been ripped out to make the space double volume. ‘That’s why it sounds so echoey,’ she says, nudging Cas.

  ‘I don’t think he’s in here. We should go look for him outside.’ Cas tries to turn her round, but it’s too late, Layla has already seen Dorian – her heart does a fish-flop – and the girl he’s with. She’s changed her hair, but it’s the one from Facebook. Dorian keeps touching her – her wrist, her arm, her shoulder, as if he’s compelled to check that it’s all in place.

  His hair is mussed up in that effortless way that takes hours, and she’s not the only one who’s been raiding thrift stores. He’s wearing a tuxedo jacket with the sleeves rolled up over a seventies T-shirt featuring orange and green stripes and a windsurfer. The girl’s white-blonde hair has been cut short and styled into spiky tufts. Her only makeup is a cat flick of eye-liner, and her cream dress is made of hard linen folds, like origami. She’s the coolest girl Layla has ever seen.

  ‘Hey,’ Layla says weakly. ‘We made it.’

  Dorian gives her a lazy grin and, in spite of the evidence, her heart flip-flops once more.

  ‘This is my friend, TimTam.’ He touches her again. ‘She does projections.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ Layla says. Meaning, die, bitch.

  ‘We have names too,’ Cas says cheerfully. ‘I’m Cas. This is Layla.’

  ‘Awesome,’ the girl says vaguely. ‘Listen, I’m going to have a smoke before the show starts.’ She kisses Dorian on the cheek, pressing her lips against his skin. Marking him, Layla thinks with an acid splash of jealousy. He watches her go.

  ‘She seems cool,’ Layla says, trying to pull him back. Lost cause.

  ‘What the fuck is projection art?’ Cas asks.

  ‘What it sounds like,’ Dorian explains. ‘You set up laser projectors and you can map an animation onto 3D objects, like a hologram. She’s into transformational art. Her piece runs the lifespan of a house in a really organic way, building it up from the cellular level.’ It sounds like something he’s repeating without understanding what it means, like a toddler using cuss words.

  ‘Okay,’ Layla says. She doesn’t point out that houses aren’t made of cells.

  ‘Part of the visiting artists’ residency. She’s from LA.’ He says it as one word, Ellay, like it’s the magical golden land of the gods. Maybe it is.

  ‘I love what they’ve done with the subsonics,’ Layla says, knowing he’ll know what she’s talking about. ‘I was trying to tell Cas about it.’

  ‘I got it,’ Cas rolls her eyes. ‘Haunted houses and churches and shit.’

  ‘That’s one of the theories of Zug Island,’ Dorian says, his attention finally recaptured.

  ‘Que?’ Cas chirps.

  ‘That industrial place downriver, with all the factories that smell so bad. The machinery apparently creates subsonics. That’s why there are so many conspiracy theories about it. Secret military operation or aliens or whatever.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why the whole city feels haunted.’

  His face brightens with delight. ‘That’s good, Lay. That’s really good.’ See, Layla thinks, fiercely. This is why you belong with me, not some Ellay art bitch who sees you as a bit of local color. His attention shifts, and he frowns at the wall behind her. ‘Did you see something move in the trees?’

  Layla turns round and stares into the monochromatic forest. ‘It’s the contrast. Optical illusion. Unless your girlfriend is doing projections in here, too.’ He doesn’t correct her on the ‘girlfriend’ score. Goddammitdammitdammit.

  Cas steps in. ‘Are we going to check out some motherfucking art or what?’

  ‘I swear I saw something move,’ Dorian sa
ys.

  ‘Whatevs. Ciao-ciao, Dorkian.’

  ‘Bye, Dorian. I’ll—’ but she can’t think how to finish.

  They walk back over the vibrating floor, but now it just seems dumb. Cheap shock tactics. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she warns Cas.

  ‘Don’t know what you mean, bitch. I’m just here to take in some culture and have a good time.’

  Chicken Coop

  The dream parks the white truck in the street behind the house and waits patiently for The Coast To Be Clear – more words hauled from Clayton’s head.

  The man knows this neighborhood, this house in particular, with its disused chicken coop and the back gate that doesn’t latch properly. It is a simple thing to carry the boy from the truck into the garden, light and sagging in Clayton’s arms, unnoticed.

  Everyone else is busy on the other side of the fence. The music starts and stops again. There is a clamor of voices, a bustling rush of activity, all the last-minute preparations. There are already people streaming through between the houses when the sound system screeches, a sonic whine, and the curator laughs nervously, and announces the Dream House project open for visitors!

  The air is full of excitement, an expectant buzzing in people’s heads. The dream knows what they are waiting for, even if they don’t themselves.

  The end of everything.

  The moment when it reveals its miracle boy and all the eyes will look and their seeing will be horror and glory and wonder and it will pierce the skin of the world, collapse dimensions, and open the doors and the work will breathe and dance in his shoes and the dream will be able to escape.

  Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.

  The shadows are deepening, the fall dusk bringing the cold with it. It paces round the garden, impatient, until a young man waves at it from an upstairs window in the house. It raises a hand in acknowledgement, pulling Clayton’s face into a smile that is all teeth. It waits until the figure behind the glass moves on, attention caught by something more intriguing.

  It can’t be seen. Not yet. It needs critical mass.

  Big Bang, Clayton thinks.

  It hunches in the chicken coop, crouched on its haunches above the calcified bird shit, relying on the shape of the shed to disguise its own, listening to the music and the voices getting louder and louder, competing for space.

  But Clayton’s wretched body gets restless. His feet start to tingle and burn and all the things the dream can sense, past the gate, inside the house … they’re attractive.

  It can feel the tug of the art, the currents of imagination. Maybe all the art will stir to life in the moment of reckoning. Wouldn’t that be something, in Clayton’s words.

  It can’t wait any more. It has to see for itself. It has to make things happen.

  It stands up, shaking out the man’s legs. It drives him up the porch stairs through a room full of frozen silver women who long to move.

  Maybe it can help them.

  Party People

  Jonno works the crowds, getting vox pops. He makes straight for the weirdos and the hotties. He cajoles good answers from them. The artists all want to blab about their work.

  ‘It’s an improv-jam based on the hieroglyphs,’ a man in overalls tells him. ‘We’re going to try and read them as if they were a musical score.’

  He gives more airtime to the camera-friendly ones, like the gorgeous young blonde in a dress that looks like it’s made out of paper, who is also eminently quotable. ‘I think there’s more artistic freedom in Detroit. You can do what you like here, and no-one cares. My work is intercontextual because it’s about regeneration on a cellular level, using light to remake our idea of what these buildings could be. I think that’s what we bring here. Light.’

  They film her work, which looks like a high-school biology project projected onto the side of the building. Jonno can’t resist making shadow puppets until Jen grabs his hand and pulls it away from the beam.

  ‘That’s mean,’ she says, kissing his fingers in gentle reprimand.

  ‘It’s art, baby.’ But he’s annoyed, even though he’s not the only one who can’t resist interfering with the projection. He goes prowling off for other people to interview.

  They run into Simon, who seems intimidated talking directly into the lens, a very different thing to hamming it up as a fake mugger, and Jonno wonders why he was ever worried about this jerk with his dumb tattoos, who can’t say anything remotely intelligent for the camera.

  It gets better as the crowds get thicker and the beer flows. One young woman, clinging to her friend, ponders his question. ‘I think my favorite thing about Detroit is … the party stores! Whoooo!’

  ‘Whoooo!’ her friend says and they clink plastic cups, sloshing beer onto their shoes.

  Sometimes they have nothing to give, so he throws in one-liners to spruce things up.

  ‘Is that wax in your mustache, or are you happy to see me?’ he says to a hipster with annoying facial hair. ‘No, don’t go. I have a serious question for you. Please. You ready? Are you personally responsible for the die-off of the bees?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because you must have plundered whole colonies of hives to keep you in mustache wax.’

  ‘Fuck you, man.’

  They’re running low on good commentators when he spots his weird friend from the gallery, still in the same rumpled brown jacket, wandering dazed among the hip young people. Jonno knows how he feels. He swoops down on him, hoping he’ll diss the art, say something critical and edgy. ‘Hey, remember me? From the gallery? Mickey Mouse?’

  The man focuses his attention on them with the unnerving zeal of a monk about to immolate himself live on TV. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I need a camera. I need people to see. It’s ready. You have to come with me.’ He turns, gesticulating for them to follow, and starts weaving his way through the crowds.

  ‘Well, this is going to be good,’ Jonno says and moves to go after him, but his camerawoman has lowered the phone and is messing around with one of her test strips.

  ‘Now, Jen? Seriously?’

  ‘We’ve been running around a lot. I have to check my levels,’ she says, popping the lancet against the edge of her finger, so that a bright bead of blood wells up. Jonno shifts impatiently, trying to keep the man in sight.

  ‘Ninety-five,’ Jen says, reading off her meter. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Well, thank fuck for that.’ The nutty old guy has vanished. Jonno sighs and segues into his brightest smile as Jen raises the camera phone once again. ‘How about you, baby?’ he says to a sandy-haired teenager sipping a bubble tea. ‘What’s your favorite thing you’ve seen tonight?’

  ‘My reflection,’ she says and gives him the finger, walking off.

  ‘Let’s take a break for a bit,’ Jonno says, suddenly weary of all this. The scene. ‘I need a drink.’

  ‘I have to get ready for my set anyway. You’ll film it, right?’

  ‘Of course, baby.’ He kisses her on the forehead, which leads him down to her mouth, which is hot and sweet. He feels a rush of tenderness for her, constantly at war with the sugar in her blood.

  Unspeakable Things

  Each of the six houses is curated to a theme, announced on the real-estate sign outside. They move through the buildings, peering in all the rooms: Would House, Lust House, House of Amerikana, House of Money, Luminous/Limnal, _Blank_.

  Some of the art is lame, Heidelberg Project-lite. Plush toys stuck up all over exterior walls in ‘Soft’ and a bonfire pile of sneakers, like Tyree Guyton’s high heels.

  ‘Yawn,’ Cas says. She likes the banal wall-size pop-art remixes in the Amerikana house where Marilyn Monroe has been given Kiss makeup and Osama Bin-Laden has been mashed-up with Einstein with his tongue sticking out. ‘I’d wear this on a T-shirt. See, I’m an arts connoisseur.’

  Layla lingers at the storm cloud of gray balloons that fills a room, set up with shifting lights that create a sense of expectancy, dawn or dusk constantly breaking in Luminous/Limnal.
It’s a lot more interesting than the boring porno stuff in the Lust House.

  And she likes the interactive piece upstairs at _Blank_ (where presumably the floors have been reinforced), luggage tags hanging from the ceiling on red strings, where viewers have to complete the sentence prompt, ‘I’ve lost …’ The range of answers is lovely. ‘My mind!’ ‘My grandmother.’ ‘My virginity.’ ‘All the feeling in my right leg.’ ‘My place in the world.’ ‘My dog. Reward offered!’ ‘My wifi password.’ ‘My dignity.’ ‘$200 at the casino.’ ‘My sense of wonder.’

  ‘Are you going to read every single one?’ Cas complains.

  ‘I haven’t thought about what I’m going to write yet.’

  ‘I’ve lost … my patience with art. I’ll see you outside.’

  Layla finally writes down ‘my one true love’ and then thinks better of it. What if Dorian recognizes her handwriting? She plucks it from its ribbon mooring and crumples it up in her fist. Then recants. When would he ever have seen her handwriting? And so what if he has? She hopes he does see it. She flattens it out and reties it among the others twirling gently.

  In the meantime, the house has filled up. The crowd has become a salmon migration of shoving bodies. She fights her way down the stairs only to be faced with an even worse melee. It’s going to take her half an hour to get to the exit. Someone barges into her and someone else steps backwards onto her toe.

  ‘Ow!’ she pushes back, but the crowd is oblivious. Screw this. She goes the other way into the kitchen, which is full of mannequins, spray-painted silver. She tries the latch on the back door and, mercifully, it opens onto a wooden porch that leads down into a dark overgrown garden. The music has become denser. She can feel it in the back of her teeth. Bass must generate its own subsonics.

  She makes her way gingerly down the steps into the darkness and the long grass, hoping for a gate or an access alley down the side of the house. The grass gives way under her boots with a soft cellulose scrunch of protest. Blackjacks prick through her tights, clutching at her legs. Everything needs to propagate. She’s just the vector of transmission.