by Gemma Files
When I woke up I had a tube down my throat, and I was in too much pain to even cry about my failure. Dehydration had shrunk my brain to a screaming point, a shaken bag of poison jellyfish. I knew I’d missed my chance, my precious window of opportunity, and that it would never come again. I felt like I’d been lied to. Like I’d lied to myself.
So, with a heavy heart, I resigned myself once more—reluctantly—to the dirty business of living. I walked out the hospital’s front doors, slipped back into my little slot, served out my time. Until last week, when I keeled over while reaching for my notebook at yet one more Professional Development Retreat lecture on stress management in the post-Millennial workplace: Hit the floor like a sack of salt with a needle in my chest, throat narrowing—everything there, then gone, irised inward like some silent movie’s Vaseline-smeared final dissolve. Dead at 29 of irreparable heart failure, without even enough warning to be afraid of what—
—or who, in my case—
—came next.
Am I the injured party here? I hover, watching, inside and out; I can hear people’s thoughts, but that doesn’t mean I can judge their motives. My only real option, at this point, is just what the angels keep telling me it is: Move on, move on, move on. But I’m not ready to do that, yet.
There were five of us in the morgue, after all, but the body snatchers only took two for her to choose from. And of those two . . .
. . . Pat chose me.
* * *
Lyle turns up at one, punctual as ever, while Pat’s still dripping. She opens the door for him, then drops towel and stalks nearly naked back to her room, rooting through her bed’s topmost layers in search of some clean underwear; though he’s obviously seen it all before, neither of them show any interest in extending this bodily intimacy beyond the realm of the purely familial.
Which only makes sense, now I think about it. In Pat’s mind—the only place I’ve ever encountered Lyle, up ’till now—their relationship rarely goes any further than strictly business. He’s her prime “artistic” pimp, shopping the act she and Ray have been working so hard to perfect to a truly high-class clientele: One time only, supposedly. Though by Lyle’s general demeanor, I get the feeling he may already be developing his own ideas about that part.
Pat discards a Pixies concert T with what looks like mold-stains all over the back in favour of her Reg Hartt’s Sex And Violence Cartoon Festival one, and returns to find Lyle grimacing over a cup of coffee that’s been simmering since at least eight.
“Jesus Corpse, Pats. You could clean cars with this shit.”
“Machine’s on a timer, I’m not.” Then, grabbing a comb, bending over, worrying through those last few knots: “Tonight all set up, or what?”
He shrugs. “Or what.” She shoots him a glance, drawing a grin. “Look, I told you it was gonna be one of two places, right? So on we go to Plan B, ‘sall. The rest’s still pretty much as wrote.”
“’Pretty much.’”
“Pretty, baby. Just like you.”
And: Is she? I suppose so. Black hair and deep, dark eyes—a certain eccentric symmetry of line and feature, a clever mind, a blind and ruthless will. Any and all of which would’ve certainly been enough to pull me in, back when I was still alive enough to want pulling.
The angels tell me I’m bound for something better now, though. Some form of love precious far beyond the bodily, indescribable to anyone who hasn’t tasted it at least once before. Which means there’s no earthly way I can possibly know if I want to ’till I’m already there and drinking my fill, already immersed soul-deep in restorative, White Light-infused glory . . .
Convenient, that. As Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady so often used to say.
Oh—and “earthly,” ha; didn’t even catch that one, first time ‘round. Look, angels! The corpse just made a funny.
(I said, look.)
But they don’t.
Pat tops her shirt with a sweater, and starts in filling the many pockets of army pants with all the various Bone Machine performance necessities: Duct tape, soldering wire, extra batteries. Lyle, meanwhile, drifts away to the video rack, where he amuses himself scanning spines.
“This that first tape he sent you?” he demands suddenly, yanking one.
“Who?”
He waggles it, grinning. “Your boyfriend. Ray-mond.”
A shrug. “Pop it and see.”
“Pass.” Which seems to remind him: “So, Patty—realize you two are sorta tight and this comes sorta late, but exactly how much research you actually do on this freak-o before you signed him up for the program?”
Pat’s bent over now, hauling her semi-expensive boots up with both mittened hands. “Enough to know he’ll fuck dead bodies if I ask him to,” she says, shortly.
“’Cause he wants to.”
A short, sharp smile, orthodontic-straight except for that one canine her wisdom teeth pushed out of line, coming in. “Best way to get anyone to do anything, baby. As you should know.”
Of course, Pat’s hardly objective. Seeing how she’s in lust with Ray . . . love, maybe, albeit of a perversely limited sort. Much the same way he is, truth be told—
—with “me.”
But Lyle, obviously, doesn’t feel he can argue the point. So he just returns her smile, talk show bland and throat-slitting bright, as she reaches for the door-handle: Lets them both out, side by side, into a world of gathering cold. All bundled up like Donner Party refugees, and twice as hungry.
And: Don’t follow, the angels advise me, uselessly. Don’t watch. Don’t care.
But the fact is, I . . . don’t. I really don’t. Don’t feel, or know what I don’t feel. Let alone what I do.
D-E-A-D, but way too much still left of me. I’m dead, so let me lie. Let me lie.
Please.
Pat and Lyle, struggling up the alley and down to the nearest curb. Ray, his obtrusively unobtrusive car—the Rich Pervertmobile itself, far too clean and anonymous to be used for anything but life’s dirtiest little detours—already there to meet them, pluming steam.
And somewhere, awaiting its cue, the reluctant third party in this little triangle cum foursome: My body, a water-clock full of blood and other fluids, forever counting down to an explosion that’s already happened. A psychic plague-bomb oozing excess pain, a hive for flies, all slick, lily-waxen and faintly bruised in the wake of rigor mortis’ ebb, even before Ray’s hot mouthings gave birth to that starburst of pale lavender hickeys around what used to be my trachea.
It’s not me, not in any way that counts—but it’s not not me, either. And I just, I just . . .
. . . don’t . . .
. . . want . . .
. . . them touching it anymore.
Either of them.
* * *
Going back—as far back as he can, at least—Ray tells Pat that he thinks the first time he really began to understand the true nature of his personal . . . distinction . . . must have been when his parents insisted he visit his beloved grandfather’s freshly-dead body at the local hospital: Washed, laid out, neatly johnny-clad. His parents had already forewarned him it would look like a mannequin, like something made of plaster, an empty husk. But it wasn’t like that, not even vaguely. It looked oddly magnetic, oddly tactile; nothing rotten, or gross, or potentially contagious—soothing, like an old friend. And its only smell was the familiar odor of shed human skin.
He wanted to lie down with his head on its sternum, breathe deep and let it cool his fever, this constant ceaseless hammering in his head and heart. To free him, for once and for all, of the febrile hum and spark of his own life.
Since then, Ray’s never been able to decide what arouses him more: The concept itself, or the sheer impossibility of its execution. Because anyone can fuck the dead, if they only try hard enough—but the dead, by their very nature, can never fuck
back. Which is why it has to be guys, though he himself is—in every other way than this—”straight.” If that term even applies, under these circumstances.
Their superiority. Their otherness. To him, it’s only natural: The dead know more, and knowledge is power. And power, as that old politician once boasted . . . is sexy.
So: Fucked in slaughterhouses, under the hanging racks of meat. Fucked with decay smeared all over them both, in graveyards, animal cemeteries; sure, buddy—just gimme my cut, you freak, and bend on over. Fucked in mortuaries, the “other” corpses watching impassively. Corpses taking part in his own taking, silent voyeurs, sad puppets in countless sweaty menages a mort. Fucked by guys wearing corpses’ skins—and wow, was that expensive, mainly because it went against so many kinds of weird sanitation strictures; public health, and all that. Same reason you can’t just drop your Grandad in the garden if he happens to croak at your house—or die at home at all, these days, for that matter.
Fucked by the dying—guys so far gone, so far in the financial hole, they’d do anything to make their next medical bill. A charge, but not quite the same; not the same, and never enough. And finally, back to the morgue alone with condoms and trocar in hand—here’s an extra hundred to leave the door ajar, I’ll lock up as I leave. No worries.
Money’s no problem; Ray has money. Too much, some might say—too much free time, and a bit too little to do with except obsess, jerk off, plan. The idle rich are hard to entertain, Vinnie . . .
Things do keep on escalating, though, often and always. And escalation can bring a bad reputation, especially in some quarters.
Which made it all the more lucky Ray and Pat happened to find each other, I suppose—for them both.
And for Lyle, of course, albeit from a very different point of view . . . Lyle, to whom falls the onerous yet lucrative task of facilitating this gender switched post-Millennial Death And The Maiden tableau they’ve played out every day this week, given or take; same one that would surely re-run itself constantly behind my eyelids if only I still had either eyes to see with, or lids to close on what I didn’t want to see. Same one you might well already have seen already, if you’re just hip and sick enough to have paid Lyle’s “finder’s fee” up front—or bought the bootleg DV8 tapes he peddles over the Internet, thus far unbeknownst to either of his silent partners.
Like Lyle, I never saw that original “audition” tape on Pat’s shelf, either. But as the run-down above should prove, I’ve certainly heard its precis often enough: Why I Like To Get Screwed By Dead Bodies For The Amusement Of Total Strangers Even When The Money Involved’s My Own, In Fifty Thousand Words Or More. Ray’s confession/manifesto, re-spilled at intervals—after various post-post-mortem Bone Machine-aided orgies, usually—over binges of beer and weed which sometimes culminate in fumbling, gratitude- and guilt-ridden, mutually unsatisfying attempts at “normal” sex. Pat lying slack beneath a sweating, huffing Ray, trying to will her internal temperature down far enough to maintain his shamed half-erection even as her own orgasm builds, inexorably. Cursing the demeaning depths this idiot hunger for him can make her sink to, while simultaneously feeling her fingers literally itch to seize the Machine’s controls again and do the whole damn thing over right.
Part of me wonders exactly how much detail I need—or care—to go into here, vis a vis Pat’s “art” and my rather uncomfortable place in its embrace. But then again, close as “I” may get to it in flesh, most of the Bone Machine’s complex structural workings will probably always remain a mystery to me. Bolts screwed directly into bones, wires strung like tendons, electrical impulses jumping from brain to finger to keypad to central animatronic switchboard . . .
Pat pulls the strings here, as in all else. When my dead body’s making “love” to him, it’s her moves, her ideas, her smoothing, gentle touch translated through my flesh, which keeps Ray coming back time and time again; I’m just the medium for her message, a clammy six-foot dildo powered by rods and pistons. A deadweight sex-aid soaked in scented lube to hide the growing spoiled-meat smell, the inevitable wear and tear of Ray’s increasingly desperate affections.
But Ray, like any true fetishist, ignores whatever doesn’t contribute directly to the fulfillment of his motivating fantasy. He knows our time together’s on a (necessarily) tight schedule, so he tries to wring every extra ounce of pleasure he can out of the experience while Pat watches and fumes, trapped behind her rows of switches. He loves the mask, not the face; the made, not the maker. Decay’s his groom, and he doesn’t want even the shadow of anything else getting in the way of this so-devoutly desired consummation, this last great graveyard gasp.
It’d be sort of tragic, if it wasn’t so—mordantly—funny. Together, Pat and Ray have all the requisite common interests and obsessions, plus a heaping helping of that brain-to-groin combustive spark which so many other relationships are made from; if she was dead (or had the right equipment required to rock his world), they’d be perfect for each other. But her hole just doesn’t fit his socket, or vice versa. So the only way she can touch him . . . and make him want her to, at least . . . . . . is with my hands.
And more and more, that very fact is already making her dream happy dreams of someday taking a bone-saw to “my” wrists. Of burning them in some Haz-Mat crematorium’s fire, like plague-infected monster grasshoppers.
Ray told Pat he was literally up for her ultimate piece of performance art, to bravely go where none of her other co-conspirators were ever willing to, not even with three condoms’ worth of protection. She told Lyle, who instantly cheered her on, visions of Ben Franklin dancing in his money-colored eyes; he paged his pals down at the M.E.’s office, and the deal was struck—cash for flesh, tickets at the door and a fresh new co-star every week, after the old one finally started to rot.
And so it went, a neat little cycle, a perverse new rhythm method. Pat called the shots, Ray did the dance, Lyle racked up the take; they soon got into the habit of partying later, while Lyle was on his way to the bank. Pat, using Ray’s addiction to feed her own, like any pusher trading “free” product for not-so-free favours, while Ray replays his own earlier performance for both their benefits.
It was, and is, a match made in Gomorrah, or maybe Gehenna: Pimp meets girl meets boy meets corpse(s.) And everybody’s happy.
Everybody alive enough to count, that is.
All that changed once Pat and Lyle fixed Ray up with my mortal coil, though, and he “fell for” it . . . telling her, feverishly and repeatedly, how this hunk of otherwise nondescript white male meat which just happened to come with my restless spirit attached was the end of his search, the literal embodiment of all his most cadaver-centric daydreams. Suddenly, his fetish had narrowed and shifted to allow for only this one particular corpse or nothing at all.
And: “You know tomorrow night’s gonna have to be curtains for Mr. Stinky, right?” She asked him, briskly, after yesterday’s post-show pas-de-deux.
Ray, frowning: “How so?”
Pat reclipped her bra, sponged sweat from her cleavage; I saw the angels’ halos reflected in her throat’s shiny hollow, a wet white crackle of phantom jewelry. “’Cause he’s starting to fall apart, same as the others. Already had to re-wire his joints twice just to get him limber enough to limbo—and his scalp’s starting to peel, too. Now it’s just a matter of time.”
“But if you’re keeping him refrigerated . . . ”
“Yeah, sure. But there’s only so far that goes, Ray. No freezer in the world’s totally fly-tight; nature of the beast, man.”
A pause. Ray stood silent as Pat wriggled back into her jeans, then shot him the raised eyebrow: You comin’, or what? Shook his head. And replied, finally—
“Then I guess we’re looking at goodbye for me too, Pat.”
At that, Pat turned fully, both eyebrows up. “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
Because . . . this i
s the one. Remember? The one and only. No substitutes need apply, not even—
(well, you, sweetheart)
Ahhhh, true love.
He feels like he’s having a dialogue with it, that’s what he’s always told her. Like he’s finally being privileged, through this nightly series of gag-makingly contortionate sex show antics, to vicariously experience the ecstatic transformation my corpse is already undergoing—the transition from flesh to fleshlessness, an all-expenses-paid tour through time’s metaphorical flensing chamber. To share in the experience as it sloughs the residue of its own mortality off like a scab, revealing some clean, invisible new form lurking beneath.
My body, my husk. My shucked, slimy former skin.
It’s not pure, though, for fuck’s sweet sake. It’s not perfected. It has no “secret wisdom” to impart. And as for powerful, well . . .
If it really was powerful—if I was—then we wouldn’t be here, would we?
Any of us.
The argument went on for some time, back and forth: Pat’s voice soaring snappishly while Ray stayed quiet but firm, unshakable. There was an element of betrayal to her mounting disbelief, as both of them well knew. Suffice to say, Lyle probably wouldn’t have been too happy to find out his star attraction had decided to retire either. Not that Pat even seemed to be thinking of things from that particular angle.
“It’s just a fucking corpse, Ray. You’ve done fifty of ’em already, most of ’em long before you ever met me—”
Ray nodded. “Because I was looking for the right one.”
“And this is it?”
“In my opinion.”
She stared, snorted.
“Lyle won’t like it.”
“Fuck Lyle.”
A sigh: “Been there.”
The unsaid implication—goodbye to it, to this, the nightly grind. To Lyle’s meal-ticket. And, by extension, goodbye . . .
(to me?)
