by Brian Hodge
Help. He needed help. Medical help.
Near the far edge of the roof, Gary collapsed, spent and shaking. He rolled onto his back, beginning to shed tears at the night sky while distant thunder rolled. The desultory rains were moving on, leaving gray and violet clouds in their wake, boiling past the face of the moon.
Gabriel knelt beside him, rested a comforting hand upon his traitorous chest. Beneath the hand, Gary’s skin throbbed. It wasn’t unpleasant, this rebellion, and part of him yet remained intrigued.
“Poor Gary.” Whispered, soft.
“What’s wrong with me?” Choking on tears.
Gabriel shook his head. “Megan — I’m sorry you had to see that. I was afraid she’d hurt herself someday. Things could never move fast enough for her.”
Gary shuddered.
“I never got to answer my own question. What the worst part of being us is. Can you guess?”
Again, that nudge of familiarity. Further this time, all the way to recollection. Lana had put to him the same question the night they’d met, before he had known the truth about her. The riddle had gone unanswered, soon forgotten.
“No,” he said, “I can’t.”
Gabriel looked fondly down at him, that androgynous face at once strong and tender. But calculating. “We can’t go all the way across, you know. We never will make it one hundred percent.”
His hand stroked Gary’s lap, popping the button of his slacks and drawing the zipper down. Massaged him, bared him, and, heaven help him, against all expectations he was growing erect.
“If you’re going man-to-woman the surgery’s pretty successful but the hormonal changes are lacking. If you’re moving the other way, like me? The hormone change is better, but not the surgery. They can build me something that looks like a cock … but it won’t much act like one.” Gabriel gave him a squeeze. “This spontaneous hard-on? It’s something I’ll never know. At least, their way.”
Gabriel began to peel away his own clothing and reveal his hybrid body. Still on his back, Gary saw moonlight glint off the shiny healing scars of a double mastectomy, amid sprouting hair. Lower, Gabriel’s last remaining femininity hid within a triangle of hair.
“You’ve known Lana’s half, now try my point of view,” Gabriel murmured, then straddled him, mounting firm.
Raped. The thought was murky, surreal. Am I being raped? His hips surged upward all the same. Tomorrow had always been soon enough for self-reproach.
“So the very worst part of being us?” Gabriel stared down, sheened in sweat. “We’re made, not born. We can’t procreate. But … I think maybe you can change that.”
This was more than coitus, Gary knew when he saw the others gather round to watch. This was tranquilizer. This was anesthesia. Bribery and reward and homage.
“A friend once told me that the South is a land of ghosts.” Gabriel’s breath was deepening with the rhythm, voice growing huskier. “I believe that. And I believe that New Orleans is a magic place. There are people here, they know things that others feel they have no business knowing at all. Maybe they’re right. But I don’t think so.”
When Gabriel stripped Gary’s shirt away, he saw the twin rows of nipples aligned down his torso. Erect and straining, like those of a sow lying before her farrow of piglets.
Gabriel bent low, placed his lips to one, and sucked.
Gary gasped, shaking his head yet unable to deny the river of warmth flowing inside, a glow he could label only as maternity.
“Lana looked for someone like you for a long time. I never saw her any happier than after she met you. Someone open-minded … eager for new experiences … who wanted to break with his past.” Gabriel touched a quieting finger to Gary’s lips when he started to speak. “But let your conscience off the hook. She didn’t kill herself over you. She did it for us.”
Once content to observe, the others now started forward.
“It was the one sacrifice she wanted to make, to thank the rest of us for making her feel like she belonged somewhere. It didn’t take long to make up her mind once she decided you were the one. Your leaving just … accelerated the schedule.”
Gabriel kissed him on the lips, then eased his weight back onto Gary’s hips again as the others closed in. Half-men, half-women, walking wonders of endocrines, scalpels, and implants, taking positions at the nipples, joining to him with suckling mouths. They were very gentle, did not bite.
“Lana was carnal … and she was spiritual … and maternal. Like any goddess should be.” Again, Gabriel shushed him, still grinding with muscled hips. “Making children is more than functioning body parts. It’s a thing of the spirit, too. Lana understood that more than anyone I know. And now she’s closer to you than she could ever have gotten with her body. Can’t you feel her inside yet?”
He searched hesitantly, tentatively. Thinking perhaps there was another light, another warmth, pulsing within.
“No matter what, though,” whispered Gabriel, “don’t ever think she didn’t love you. She did. She does.”
Of course she would. How could she ever have done this to someone she hated? What is love? Two souls and one flesh.
Gary writhed, caught in a hurricane of tears and love, revulsion and desire. Fighting would accomplish nothing. And he was so needed.
So he lay back in this roof-bound Eden, beneath the roiling sky, and let them nurse. Soon, more found their way to the roof to take their place in line. And within, and from within, the juices flowed — testosterone and estrogen, progesterone and androgen — a mother’s milk to nurture and nourish wonders greater still.
Gabriel cupped his cheek. “You are truly honored. You’ll be the madonna of an entirely new gender.”
Gary surrendered fully, pleasure and contentment swamping his last efforts at denial. He stretched his arms wide, satisfied that he and Lana would forever be as one, and reached to embrace their children.
In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town
He stood back, grinning with arms crossed, to watch those hips of hers sway while she threw. Had a wind-up that drove him truly and deliciously insane. This, after she’d kissed the tip of each dart for luck. Oh, she was overflowing with promises of finer things to come later in the night.
Sad about her aim, though. Darts all over the damn place.
“I don’t think this is your game.”
She turned chin over shoulder to stick out her tongue at him. “I got games you never even played.” She danced away to retrieve the darts, came dancing back with all six and handed him his three. Green ones, his lucky color.
“The trick,” he said, “is breath control. You breathe out on the throw, nice smooth exhale. And never, ever, take your eyes off the spot you want to hit. Not even long enough to blink.”
Down and dirty blues thumped from the jukebox while he sank all three darts in a tight cluster. He raised both arms to receive worldwide acclaim.
“Am I the master, or am I the master?”
“Careful you don’t stick yourself with one of those, or that shit you’re so full of is gonna run right out in the floor.”
He pretended to bristle. “Sure is a lot of sass coming from someone hasn’t even hit herself a bull’s-eye yet.”
“Keep making a big deal out of it” — she licked her finger and pretended to clean the zipper of her jeans — “and I know something you won’t be hitting again anytime soon.” A huff. “Anyway, I know what the problem is. I’m distracted.”
“By what, that music? Sweety-pie, the way you’re shaking your moneymaker, I dare say you’re making it work for you.”
“No, no, it’s not the music. It’s that goddamn barmaid! Never have I heard a voice that inspires more natural annoyance in me.”
She had a point. That voice did tend to carry. The gameroom was separate from the main bar, but still, they’d been listening to the barmaid going on nonstop about one thing and then another for the past hour. He sighed with the truth of it all.
“Sugar, go take care
of it.” Turning kiddish on him, trying to wrap him around that sweet little finger of hers. “For me? Pleeease?”
“Where do you think we are, high school or something? Your problem, you take care of it.”
She pouted until it was clear he wouldn’t give in. Then her face went hard and she made for the pool table. Rolled the dead shitkicker slumped half across it off onto the floor and snatched that monster ten-millimeter she favored, next to his shotgun, and went stomping behind the bar. Through the doorway he watched her point the pistol down, out of sight.
Two shots. Then, after a long pause, another. Joker. Trying to throw off his aim. She danced back all smiles.
“You know, good thing you’re better with that than you are these darts.” He inspected her three, then set them aside. “Here, why don’t you try mine?”
“Look, green may be your lucky color, but it was never mine. I’ve always been more of a fuchsia girl, myself.”
“Forget color, look at the tips of those things.” He pointed at the rejects. “Look how bent they are. You been smacking fat boy in the forehead too long. Can’t keep hitting bone and expect these to stay pristine. Now, no sass — try mine.”
She gave in. Turned back to the guy lashed to the post near the dartboard, long past caring. Her first two throws went high, while the third drilled home with a sureness she found thrilling.
“Hah! Doesn’t get more bull’s-eye than that!”
He inspected more closely. “I do believe you nailed pupil that time.”
“Can we go now? I was getting bored with this anyway.”
He was about to agree when he stepped over another shotgunned redneck for a peek at the hogtied mess behind the bar. “Can’t say as I’m thrilled with what you done to our plans for later.” A sigh. “Your problem, your solution.”
She cleared his Mossberg twelve-gauge from the pool table. “Then start racking. Stick and balls, that’s more my game anyway.”
He chunked in quarters while she danced to the front window, glanced out at the night. Turned the sign from CLOSED back around to OPEN.
The crack of the break shot beckoned to all comers.
Naked Lunchmeat
The trains don’t run on time anymore. It gives us a sense of gambling, we stand on the platform at the 14th Street Station and play the odds whether the train will come before any meatfolk catch wind of us on the stale ozone breeze in the tunnels of the underbelly, and come shambling out to investigate.
The train is late again, and here we are sharing the platform with the usual suspects, and we all look at each other like we don’t really trust our eyes to tell between the living and the dead. Only the old Hasidic stands there with a sense of peace in his rheumy eyes. I figure it’s because his faith forbids a belief in an afterlife and so he doesn’t believe this shit is actually happening. Evidently we must be his idea of hallucinations. In black he already looks like an undertaker.
Today we lose, and people start to scatter with the practiced panic of retreats that leave their dignity intact after the first of them notices the meatboy lurching out of the mouth of the tunnel. When winos and bag ladies still slept down here, meatfolk bred like blue rats. He shows his saggy ashen face and the warmbloods run for the stairs and the streets, forgetting about their spent tokens. No thought to economic sacrifice. The solitary meatboy crawls from track level up onto the emptying platform, and I can hear his slobbering grunts and it still makes me wonder what all the fuss is about. The meatfolk all sound like asthmatics to me.
“Time for toasties,” says Frazzle, and he takes the meatboy by one shoulder while I take the other and before he can snap at us we pitch him down below again. He lands on the third rail and starts to smoke and pop and flop like somebody’s gray steak and a gas buildup blows out the back of the meatboy’s pants and shoots him off the rail, between regular tracks. Everything’s quiet and we’re looking at each other through the charbroiled haze. The old Hasidic views it all without judgment, turns away.
Frazzle’s got the works in his hand even before he jumps down off the platform. Clears the rails like a kid playing hopscotch, and I think I start to sweat when he kneels by the moaning meatboy who’s sluggishly waving a pair of burnt matchstick arms in the air. Frazzle sinks the heavy bore needle into the meatboy’s skull, better than a doctor. He hits the pituitary every time, like an old junkie finding final life in a bruised and flaccid vein. The syringe fills and he leaves the cripped-up meatboy for the next train, whenever it decides to show, and I can already hear the squeal of brakes and the shear of meat from bone and bone from socket.
“It’s already cooked for us, even,” says Frazzle.
“Fuck the tokens, we bail,” then I turn to the old Hasidic’s back. “Shalom.”
We hide the works like couriers like spies like jesters of greed and take the stairs three at a time and the afternoon sun slams us bright in the face. We almost can’t wait until we get back to the hotel room before tying off and nailing up. After transfer, we slide the smaller needle home, staring at that beautiful plumage of bloody backwash in the syringe, its second of blown-crystal perfection before it thins out, dilutes, drains back into the arm. Always the last aesthetic we appreciate.
Death’s a bitch, and then you live.
*
The H dealers are out of business now, most of them, because dealers sell a product they don’t make. Dealers are smart but not particularly creative, so they can’t figure out how to make any profit off selling a fix that anyone can go out and find for free, or if not, and they have no moral objection to murder, manufacture for themselves. Meatfolk everywhere, for the taking or the making. Dealers have to shut down in an economy like this, but the way I see it, they just don’t try hard enough to find the really stupid, lazy, rich junkies, if there are such things, the kind can be convinced of anything, my meatboy is better than your meatboy and it’ll cost you, you know what I’m saying?
Some new kind of kick: pituitary extract drawn from recently reanimated corpses, then treated with heat; cooled fluid medium bears attenuated form of virus known among scientific quarters as Quayle-Beta Syndrome, otherwise known informally as Pitchback Fever, the Resurrection Rag, Cancelled Ticket, Highway to Limbo, God’s Little Joke, the Indiscretion of a Lifetime, Rotten Johnny, etc etc etc. Attenuation renders virus incapable of cannibalizing host cells. Intravenous injection results in purgatorial death trance, is metabolized out after six to ten hours.
“The times, they be a-changing,” said the East Village’s Twitching Kalvin Khrist before he shot himself through the eye with a nail gun. Here was a man who truly lived for his work. He was still sitting on a half-kilo of junk at the time. When we find him we have a shooting match and it just like the old days, all the old familiar addictions in all the old familiar veins.
The city’s now filling with meatfolk and we suppose it really is possible to have too much of a good thing because they don’t surrender their pituitaries without a fight, then there’s their own habit to support. More of the slow groaning stinkers every day. In a sense I figure there’s a karmic balance at work here, we two species each feeding off the other, the last cannibal couple each trying to sink the teeth while slow-dancing in the gray hungover morning.
So we hot-wire a Lexus, stock the trunk with fresh meatfolk heads, and start west.
*
We come out of the northeast looking for the last free town in Amerika, because it’s the way we feel ourselves. For the first time in our memories uneaten by the fluid charcoal reclamation, we’re not tethered to our connections. We score in cornfields as easy as Bleecker Street now. You know what it’s like when God pukes manna, you don’t ask questions, just stoop for the harvest.
Eight hundred miles and then Frazzle gets weird on me, tells me how every Christmas he took down his decorations and threw out the tree, and listened to Christmas records backwards and heard Satanic messages oozing from the speakers. These spells of his, never the same twice. Tomorrow he’ll be singing
the last stock reports to Gregorian chants or blinking Morse code haiku in a broken mirror. We get cold in the car as the Lexus’ heater broke down in Indiana so we slice up the back seat and start to burn the pieces in the hubcaps set in the floorboards until the smoke forms a cataract over the windshield. I draw maps in the soot, Byzantine aortas from some other peeled body under the gloom, never mine.
The trunk of heads runs out west of Kansas City and it’s desolate country, fields of nothing waiting to grow. Not even the meatfolk stayed around here. Sun goes down and we shiver. Sun comes up and we cry. Sun goes higher and jonesing we face hard facts, remember a time when they said junkies shared their last fix. A time we never lived through, never wanted to live through until now. A time we never even believed in.
“Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Frazzle say. “But so does everyone else now. And we give it a shot, you and me, Hallucinogenius One and Hallucinogenius Two.”
“I regret I had but twelve veins to give for my sickness.”
“Explorers are never so honest as to explain what they’re really looking for, so history invents it for them.”
“How will we go down, you think?”
“In flames, most likely.” Frazzle dries day-old tears. “Make it quick, if you’re going to.”
So I stab him in throat with gnawed bone. Frazzle tries to hold in his life for a minute then gives up and watches it puddle in his lap, pool of old secrets where avatars lie submerged and suffocating. Ten minutes and he’s back again, so I bust out his teeth with the Lexus’ tire iron, Frazzle looking out at me with a toothless frown and handfuls of desiccated ivory, sad in his way. It’s not fun when they’re strangers, even less if you know them. I’m not as good with the heavy bore needle as Frazzle was, but it’s a learning experience, and for a moment he almost seems to turn his head to give me a better shot at the pituitary, something of the old Frazzle remaining to help me along.
