"Can't I get another job?"
"No, this is your job."
Tree sneers.
"If you don't do the job you won't be able to pay rent and I'll be forced to absorb you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CLOTTA takes Tree to a party. She doesn't bother asking him if he wants to go. Two of her enormous arms wrap around his neck and pull him through town like a child on a leash.
"These are the people you will want to get to know," she tells him. "They are the upper class."
She leads him into one of the old blackened buildings, up spongy-wood stairs that his feet sink into with each step.
It smells like blind cats in here. The lighting is dark brown. The flowery wallpaper is black and scratchy.
"Only speak when spoken to," CLOTTA whispers.
Inside of a small room at the top of the stairs, there are five portly women and a man sitting in a circle. Like many of the other townspeople, they are dressed up like old porcelain dolls. Covered in thick layers of makeup. Fluffy pink and yellow dresses.
All of them sit there, on the floor or on top of old decaying mattresses, just staring at each other. Their faces painted into a permanent smile between plump rosy cheeks.
Tree wonders if they actually are adult-sized dolls until he sees their eyes moving within the makeup.
CLOTTA sits Tree down next to the male. He is twice the size of Tree, dressed as a fat German boy with a curly mustache painted onto his lip.
The man twists his head mechanically until it faces Tree. He stares at him for several minutes with bloodshot eyes. Then twists back to face the ladies. There are cracks in his makeup. Tree can see his greasy gray skin beneath, pulsating and emitting a strong coppery odor.
CLOTTA doesn't sit. She stands in the doorway, crouched over with her arms spread out like a spider.
Nobody speaks.
For hours, Tree sits there with them, watching them stare at each other. They occasionally move their heads, cracking their make-up, to stare at Tree. But the yellow man ignores them.
The situation is cutting deep into his nerves. Tree pretends he is not in the room with them. He lowers his head and closes his eyes, but he can still feel their eyeballs pressed against his skin whenever they turn to stare.
Tree wakes to CLOTTA pushing on his back with her heavy raptor foot. He opens his eyes. All of the doll people are gone. He is lying on one of the old crusty mattresses. Cobwebs cover his face like he has been asleep here for decades. For some reason, he's still tired.
"It's time to go," CLOTTA says. "You can't stay here." She pulls him out of the bed and leads his staggering body downstairs into the street.
Rowak is in the center of the town with stacks of popping fuzz-balls in his arms. He is collecting them from a vinegar barrel and sucking the vinegar-like fluid out of the fur. The fuzz-balls pop and flip at him like puppies.
"Did you drop him?" CLOTTA asks Rowak.
Rowak backs away and cowers, as if he's doing something wrong with the fuzz-balls. "Yes, yes. He has joined the lower depths. How is the yellow working out?"
"We'll see," says the azure woman.
"Where will he stay? With the Carrols?"
"Not this time," she says. "He'll stay at the Topo House."
Rowak goes limp and the fuzz-balls roll out of his hands.
"The... Topo House?" he says. "You can't let him stay there. He's too new.”
"I want him to understand our ways. That won't happen if he's sheltered like a baby."
"But the Topo House..."
"And I want you to take him there."
"But I..."
"Take him to the most suitable room and then go back to your dolls."
CLOTTA bows her massive torso at them and walks away. Long blue arms liquid-swaying as she returns to the gatehouse.
Rowak straightens his back and smooths the tightness in his face. He becomes the pseudo-wiseman that he was outside of town. Tree, wondering which character is the real Rowak, asks him if CLOTTA makes him nervous. Rowak just answers the question with a question, another useless rhetorical question that makes him feel superior.
The Topo House doesn't look very different from the other rotten houses in the village—Rowak approaches slowly, again losing his grip on the wiseman persona—but it feels different.
Tree is beginning to experience another sense coming through. Not sight or smell. It is very slight, but what Tree is sensing from the Topo House is something like boiling baby fat mixed with a wig of razor-hair slicing up the back of his neck. It is the sixth sense. Not a psychic sense, as the sixth sense was defined on Earth. Something much more tangible. Like sound. But Tree is having difficulty processing it.
"Good luck," Rowak tells Tree, locking his legs.
"Aren't you taking me in?" Tree asks.
Rowak shakes his head. "There will be a room to the right of the nail paintings. Just go in the room. Get into bed and go to sleep. Ignore anything you see."
They stare at each other for a moment.
"Don't move until somebody comes to get you in the morning," Rowak says.
Pecan vomit emotions as Tree enters the Topo House. Rowak slams the door between them with click-scurries and a whimper. The room is dark gray chaos. A war zone. It overwhelms Tree, too much for his virgin mind to process. He sees spiked vibrating balls and greasy swollen penis-tubes clogging the open space. Spicy lard sounds in the air.
Tree takes the only open path through the warm meat-machinery, looking down at his feet. He needs to find the nail paintings but does not know what nail paintings are or how he'll be able to tell them apart from this mess.
Getting dizzy and covered in a film of plastic fluid, Tree pushes forward. His path is lit by several metal buckets containing small blobs of breathing warm meat. The meat glows and jitters at Tree as he passes. No nail paintings anywhere or even anything remotely resembling a painting, so Tree takes the first right-hand door he can find. The doors here open like dresser drawers. Tree has to climb in and pull it shut. His new flesh rubbery against the aluminum.
Inside: it is more like a closet than a room. With piles of ropes and mops and strange webby devices. Lit by only a few random blobs of meat.
Half the room is occupied by a giant bed. Or at least Tree thinks it is a bed. It is shaped like a bed but instead of a mattress there is a tub filled with an odd substance that can only be described as a cross between heart burn and dying elephant cries.
"Sick," Tree mumbles.
He examines the pile of junk and digs out a plastic tarp and some netting. He lays it in the small open space of floor between the tub/bed and the cluttered junk. And attempts to do as Rowak suggested—go right to sleep.
But first: he stands in the middle of the room frozen like a statue for a few hours...
His flesh becomes powdery as he gets into the netting/ tarp bed and the hard metal floor makes him feel like sandy feathers. But eventually he falls asleep.
Drifting in and out of sleep...
He's not really sure how to sleep anymore. He has no idea what being comfortable or uncomfortable is supposed to feel like. There are noises all around him. Gurgles and pepper-poppings. Sometimes he can taste ripped up pieces of paper in the air.
A deep sleep.
Then wide awake again as a spiral creature opens the drawer to his room and stretch-dances up the walls around him.
Tree can feel it examining his body. He feels like his soul is being flipped through like a filing cabinet. The drawer/door closes but Tree no longer feels alone/safe here.
He keeps his eyes closed and blanks his mind out as hard as he can until he is again asleep.
A twitching in his nostrils chokes Tree awake, looking around the room like somebody did something to him. He sneezes into his palm. A chunk of black and gray. Tree pokes at it and it moves. It grows legs and crawls up his finger. A squid spider. Tree flicks it away.
A pain attacks Tree's
belly. A pain that he actually recognizes. Gas pains. He has to go to the bathroom.
"Not now," he says, holding his belly and scanning the area for one of those toilet contraptions that Rowak introduced him to. Nothing like it in the junk pile.
"There must be something I can use."
He digs through the odd tools and scraps until he finds a tin can similar to a coffee can. No, exactly like a coffee can. He empties it of glitter dust and sets it on the floor. Without realizing what he's doing, he whips the ornate blade out of his arm and cuts open his crotch.
Tree squats and a ball of gook splats into the coffee can, not too worried about missing the sides. It oozes out of him and the gas pains slowly disappear.
Just as he sighs in relief, he feels the ooze of waste dripping up his thighs and sliding up his back. It wraps around his sides and warms his belly.
Tree looks down and grabs a handful of the waste from his belly. Squid spiders. Dozens of them, squirming in his hand. He realizes that it's all squid spiders coming out of him. The coffee can is filled with them, the ground is swarming with them. They are crawling all over him.
He freezes. Eyes tearing. A tornado of snot in the back of his throat.
He calmly decides to go insane.
Racing out of the Topo House screaming at the top of his crackling white wine lungs, thrashing at the puddles of squid spiders on the back of his thighs. They are still coming out of him.
He just runs. Aimlessly out of the village and into the blue-black night. He doesn't want to be in Heaven anymore. He doesn't want to live in the Topo House or try to entertain the people of CLOTTA's town.
Tree circles behind silent buildings and squeezes between brick walls until he finds himself in the old dead section of the city, behind the scrapheap tavern, facing the small village on the hill in the distance.
That's where Tree wants to be. It looks more civilized and friendly. The lights of the town brighten the landscape like a beacon. And CLOTTA acting like it doesn't exist only makes Tree want to see it even more.
It's got to be a better town than this one, he thinks.
He wipes at the spiders on his back one last time and then follows the thin trail through the ruins.
There is a memory of a man touching Tree's penis. It flashes in and out of his head without his permission. Tree is a child or maybe a teenager, he can't tell. But he knows the man is very large. His hands like hairy bricks. Again, Tree isn't really sure if this ever happened to him during his life, but he can feel it clearly. He is suffocated by the man's musky flavor. His mass of sweaty heat and gray chest hair. His face is blurred but Tree can remember a bald head with freckles and peeling flakes of scalp. Tree doesn't know why he's with the man but he knows he doesn't want to be there anymore. The memory makes Tree sick. It is something he shouldn't be remembering. Something he doesn't want to remember. He hopes it was just a bad dream he had a long time ago.
The town is much farther than Tree realized. He has been walking for hours now and doesn't feel any closer than when he began.
His legs are feeling like twisted ladders and his eyes droop sore. There are still squid spiders dripping out of the gash in his crotch.
The black graveyard of city ends and Tree enters a cool plain of lime-green. The ground is oddly flat and smooth here, like he's walking on a glass tabletop. There is no longer any vegetation around him. It still looks like ground but it is flat. Two-dimensional. Tree continues towards the hill on the natland. It's too late to turn back. He's got to get to the new city. But after a few dozen feet, Tree realizes that the horizon is also flat. He comes to the end of the landscape and realizes he's at a wall. The distance is painted on. It's not real. The village on the hill doesn't really exist. It's just part of an enormous painting that reaches to the top of the sky.
Tree presses against the picture and it expands to the length of his arm. It's flexible. Like canvas paper but rubbery like a balloon. He releases his hand and the landscape bounces back at him. The lights from the village are really flickering. There is movement in the bushes on the hills, movement of carriages in the town, but it's all part of a picture. It's all some kind of illusion, some kind of movie to trick people from far away. Tree looks back to CLOTTA's town. It is very far. He just now realizes how far he's gone. Has he gone to the edge of Heaven? He is in a corner. Perhaps Heaven is within a giant box. The inner walls of the box just moving pictures.
Tree realizes his blade has been in his hand this whole time. He is beginning to feel an unusual connection between him and the knife. He wonders if CLOTTA is right. He thinks maybe it is an extension of his body, his soul. Though it also seems to have a life of its own as it stabs into the landscape screen and cuts a slit all the way down to the floor. Tree widens the hole and slips his head through, like peeking out from under the covers.
What Tree sees he does not at all understand. Whatever it is, it is vast. His brain processes it as an ocean of computer networks but he knows that it is something far more complex than that. There are waterfalls of electrical fluids. Millions of miles of circuits and wires. It stretches farther than his eyes can see in every direction. Perhaps it is the machinery that powers Heaven. Perhaps the world he is within isn't Heaven at all.
It takes Tree the rest of the night and some of the morning to walk back to town. As he arrives, CLOTTA and many of the townspeople are standing in a mob waiting for him. Like they knew what he had done. CLOTTA stands like a blue demon among a mob of doll-faced people.
"You are not to wander," CLOTTA says.
Tree is unable to speak.
"We will have to start locking you up at—"
CLOTTA freezes, her pinhole eyes examining Tree's feet. She approaches him. Shakes her head at him.
"You stupid man," she says, staring at his feet and shaking her head. "You stupid, stupid man."
"What?" Tree says.
She points at his feet. "You've picked up an extra shadow."
Tree looks down. There is only his normal shadow.
"No, I didn't. This is the shadow I've always had."
"There is a small one hiding within your shadow," she says.
Tree looks down again and for a moment sees a shadow of a little girl with pigtails peeking out from behind his shadow.
"Look what you've done," CLOTTA says. "You've ruined everything. Why couldn't you stay put and do what you're told?"
"I couldn't stay in that place another second," Tree says. "You never should have made me stay there."
"Don't speak to me," CLOTTA says. "You're dead to this town. We're sending you underground."
"But I don't feel any different," Tree says. "I don't feel more evil than I did."
"If you have more than one shadow you must go underground. Those are the rules."
"But I haven't changed."
"Those are the rules."
Rowak escorts Tree away from the mob. There is a look of compassion on his face, but Tree isn't sure if the look is forged or genuine.
"You really upset her," Rowak says. "It was a horrible thing you did."
"I was scared," Tree says.
"There was nothing to be scared of. There are no dangers within town. You just didn't understand your environment. But now you have reason to be afraid. The underground is a cruel and ugly place. As soon as you go down there it will be a constant fight for survival. You'll be lucky to last longer than five minutes.”
Rowak leads Tree to a gated courtyard. Vines with 5-inch razor thorns grow up the walls and gates, organic razorwire. In the center of the courtyard is a manhole. Rowak untwists the heavy iron lid and opens it. A rising of warm vapors from within and a smell like orange pavement. Tree peers down into the dark. He can't see the bottom. There is no ladder or rope leading down.
"How am I supposed to get down there?" Tree asks.
"How do you think you're supposed to get down there?" Rowak says, sadly.
"It won't hurt will it?" Tree
asks.
Rowak looks down and pretends to measure the distance to the bottom, but doesn't give a reply. He pats Tree's shoulder a good luck and half-smiles at him, then pushes him over the edge. Ass first down the hole.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tree wakes in soft warm black. Crab-moisture in the air burns his lungs. His vision clears and he's able to see in the dark. Cat-eyes glowing.
He's in an enormous cavern. The ceiling is like the inside of a whale. The floor like wet meaty tongue-tissue. The walls are too far away for him to see.
His yellow flesh is covered in tiny multi-colored mounds. Ticks. Digging into his skin and sucking his fluids. They grow plumper by the second. More of them are crawling out of the tongue-flesh carpet and crawling onto his limbs and waist. He brushes at them but they are in deep. He has to pick them out one by one.
The last of them crawls out of his fingers and attempts to reenter his skin on the back of his hand. It wiggles a plump blue butt at him. Tree's eyes widen at the little creature. It's not a tick. None of them are ticks. They are tiny people, hungry for soul-flesh.
The little blue one is female, with four breasts and porcupine hair. She catches Tree's glare and freezes, stares back with hollow wooden eyes. Her face becomes soggy, drooping at him. A wooden moan screeches out of her black tar mouth.
Before Tree gets a chance to flick her away, his flesh absorbs her. Yellow veins climb her limbs and pull her down into his knuckles. Her face becomes a yellow molten blob gurgling bubbles out of stretchy lips as he involuntarily takes her inside of him. He tries to pull her out but she is already just blue and green paint swirling deep into the back of his hand.
Deep rumbling growls steal his attention.
He whips the blade out of his skin and poses, ready to attack, as he examines the area. He is expecting dozens of multishadowed evil men to jump out at him and try to rob him of his soul-flesh.
Examining his surroundings:
The entire cave is made of meat. Moist bladder walls, bubbled mounds of tongue. A texture like rotten death flesh.
Ugly Heaven Page 4
