by Gemma Files
Me meaning her. As well as me meaning “me.”
Before, whenever Ray’s beaux got too pooped to preserve, the routine took over. Lyle got on the pager again, handing out more of Ray’s money; the bodies made their exit, stage wherever. Parts in a dump, an acid-soaked tub-ring, concrete at the bottom of a lake, with all trace of Ray’s touch, or Pat’s—or Lyle’s, for that matter, not that Lyle ever touches the Bone Machine’s prey—salved away in disposal.
Which should be enough, surely: Enough to wash this lingering wisp of me clean and let me rise. Sponge the fingerprints from my soul, and all that good, metaphorical stuff. But—
(but)
At first I just hovered above, horrified, longing for the angels to cover my see-through face with their equally see-through wings. So grotesquely helpless to do anything but watch, and wait, and watch some more. Wait some more. watch some more. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
But then, slowly . . . through sheer, profane will alone, one assumes, while my constant companions loomed ever closer in (literally) holier-than-thou disapproval . . .
Don’t look.
But I have to.
Move on.
But—I can’t.
(Not yet.)
. . . I found myself starting to be able to feel it once more, from the inside out. The ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a sensation. Ray’s mouth on “mine,” sucking at my cold tongue like a formaldehyde-flavored lollipop. “My” muscles on his, bunching like poisoned tapeworms.
Taking shaky repossession part by part; hacking back into my own former nervous system synapse by painful synapse, my shot neural net fizzing at cross-purposes like that eviscerated eight-track we used to have in the student lounge back at my old high school—the one you could only make change tapes by reaching inside and touching two stripped wires together, teeth gritted against the inevitable shock.
Pat sends her commands and I . . . resist, just a fraction of a micro-inch; she’s off put, suspects that her calibrations aren’t quite as exact as she’d thought. But even as she reworks them, Ray strains towards me and I . . . strain back. Rise to meet him, halfway. I know he sees what I’m doing, if only on a subconscious level. Her too.
Because: It’s like cheating, isn’t it? Always is, when love’s involved. And lovers always know.
“I want to do it,” he told her in the car, on the way home. “I want to be the one, this time.”
“The one to do what?”
“You know. Finish it.”
Pat narrowed her dark, dark eyes. “Finish it,” she repeated. “Like—get rid of it? Destroy it yourself?”
Rip it apart, tear it limb from limb, eat it (un)alive. If he couldn’t have it . . .
Dark eyes, with green sliding to meet them: Money-colored too, in a far more vivid way. Because it’s not that Ray’s unattractive, that he couldn’t possibly indulge himself any other way. In fact, if you look at it too closely—closer than he probably wants you to, or wants to himself—you’d have to conclude that the indulgence is doing things the way he’s chosen to.
“You’re worried about what Lyle’d think?”
She shrugged. “His customers, maybe.”
“Should be a hell of a show, though.”
. . . should be.
Another cool look, another pause—silence between them, smooth as a stone. All that frustrated longing, that self-bemused ache; enough to power a city, to set both their carefully-constructed internal worlds on fire.
The angels ruffle their pinions, disapprovingly. But I was human once, just flawed and impermanent enough to understand.
I mean, we just want what we want, don’t we? Even when it’s impossible, perverse, ridiculous, we want just what WE want. And nothing else will do.
Move ON.
Be at PEACE.
But: I can’t, can’t. Won’t. Because I want . . . what I want. Nothing else.
(Nothing.)
“You’re the last of the red-hot Romantics, Ray,” Pat told him, eventually, knowing what she was agreeing to, but not caring. Or thinking she knew, at least. But knowing only the half of it.
She’s had her dance, after all, like Ray’s had his: Now I’ll have mine, and be done with it. Change partners mid-song; no harm in that. And if there is . . .
. . . if there is, well—it’s not like anyone’ll be complaining.
* * *
And now it’s past midnight, the zero hour. Showtime. Lyle’s customers file in as he sets up the cameras, trance-silent with anticipation: Stoned suburbanites, jaded superfan ultra-scenesters, unsocialized Western otaku with bad B.O. and worse fashion sense. Teens who followed the wrong set of memes and ended up somewhere way too cool for school, let alone anywhere else. Many seem breathless, barely able to sit still. Some—few, thankfully—have actually brought dates, rummaging absently between each other’s thighs as they lick their lips, eyes firmly on the prize: The Bone Machine itself, a slumped mantis of hooks and cords; Pat, strapping “my” body in for its final run around Ray’s block, suturing it fast with duct tape. Slipping the requisite genital prosthetic mini-bladder tube up the corpse’s urethral tract and pumping it erect before condoming the whole package shut once more . . .
The Machine—model number five, re-built on site by Pat herself, due to be broken down to component parts and blueprints when the spectacle’s dollar-value finally wears itself thin—occupies a discontinued butchering lab somewhere in the Hospitality area of a shut-down community college campus: Ray’s coin bought a deal with security guards who let them in at night after the campus manager goes home, as well as access to a walk-in fridge/freezer just big enough to keep their mutual “carrionette” pliant. It’s a vast, slick cave of a place whose dark-toned walls are hung with 1960’s charts of cartoon pigs and cows tattooed with dotted “cut here” lines, whose sloping concrete floor still sports drains and runnels to catch blood already congealed into forty years’ worth of collective grease-stink. Under the heat of Lyle’s lights the air is hot and close, smell thick enough to cut: Meat, sweat, anticipation.
Transgression a-comin’. That all-purpose po/mo word poseurs of every description love so well. But there are all kinds of transgressions, aren’t there? Transgression against society’s standards, the laws of God and man, against others, against yourself . . .
Here’s Pat, gearing up—eyes intent, face studiously deadpan. Here’s Lyle, all sleaze and charm, spinning his strip-club barker’s spiel. Here’s “me,” slug-pale and seeping slightly, yet already beginning to stir as the connections flare, the cables pull, the hip-pistons give a tentative little preliminary thrust and grind. And—
—here’s Ray, nude, gleaming with antibacterial gel. Right on cue.
See the man, see the corpse. See the man see the corpse. See the man? See the corpse?
Okay, then.
. . . let’s get this party started, shall we?
Jolt forward, pixilate, zoom in—not much foreplay, at this stage of the game. Just wind and wipe into Ray bent l-shaped and hooking his heels in the small of my jouncing avatar’s back, clawing passion-sharp down its slack sides. Pat puppets the Machine’s load forward, digging deep, straining for that magic buried trigger; Ray scissors himself and “me” together even harder, so hard I hear something crack. And blood comes welling: Fluid, anyway, tinged darker with decay. Blood already starbursting the cilia of “my” upturned eyes, broken vessels knit in a pinky-red wash of old petechial hemorrhaging—
Ray groaning, teeth bared. Lyle leaning in for the all-important E.C.U. Pat, bent to the board, her hair lank and damp across her frowning forehead.
Ray, grabbing at “my” hair, feeling its mooring slip and slide like rotten chicken-skin. Taking a big, biting tug at “my” bile-soaked lower lip, swapping far more than spit, before rearing back again for a genuine chomp. Starting to—chew.
Pat gags
: Ewwww, rubbery. You kiss your girlfriend with that mouth?
(Not any more, I guess.)
First the bottom lip, then the upper. A bit of “my” cheek. Sticky cuspids and canines like stars in a gum-pink evening sky. Ray’s tearing at “my” sides, “my” chest, “my” throat, as the audience coos and gasps; Lyle’s still filming. And Pat’s twisting knobs like a maniac, trying to match Ray’s growing frenzy, fighting with all her might to keep the show’s regularly scheduled action on track: Destruction, ingestion, transgression with a capital “T.” Fighting Ray, really, as he guides “my” exposed jaws to his own neck again and again, like he’s daring “me” to—somehow—bite in, bite down, pop his jugular and give all his fans the ultimate perverted thrill of their collective lives.
Because: Ray feels himself going now, in the Japanese sense. Knows just how late it’s getting, how soon the high from this last wrench and spurt will fade. Knows that no possible climax to this drama will ever seem good enough, climactic enough, no matter what he does to “me.” I can see it in his eyes. I can—
(see it)
See it. “I” can. And “I,” I, I . . .
I feel myself. Feel myself. Coming, too.
Feel myself there. At last.
Feel Ray hug me to him and hug him back, arms contracting floppily—feel that pin Pat put in my shoulder last time snap as the joint finally pulls free, and tighten my grip with the other before Ray can start to slip. Feel my clotty lashes bat, a wet cough in my dry throat; the sudden gasp of breath comes out like a sneeze, spraying his face with reddish-brown gunk. See Ray goggle up at me, as Lyle gives a girly little scream: Cry to God and Pat’s full name, reduced to panicked consonants. HolyshitPahtriSHAFUCK!
Pat’s head comes up fast, hair flipping. Eyes so wide they seem square.
My tongue creaks and Ray hasn’t left me much lip to shape words with, but I know we understand each other. Like I said, I can see it.
Gotta go, Ray. You want to come with me?
Well, do you?
And Ray . . . nods.
And I . . .
. . . I give him. What he wants.
And oh, but the angels are screaming at me now like a Balkan choir massacre, all at once—glorious, polyphonic, chanting chains of scream: Sing No, sing stop, sing thou shalt thou shalt thou shalt NOT. Their halos flare like sunspots, making the whole room pulse—hiss and pop, paparazzi flashbulb storm, a million-sparkler overdrip curtain of angry white light.
(Sorry, guys. Looks like revenge comes before redemption, this time ‘round.)
Ray pulls me close, spasming, as my front teeth find his Adam’s apple. Blood jets up. The audience shrieks, almost in unison.
I look over Ray’s shoulder at Pat, frozen, her board so hot it’s starting to smoke. And I smile, with Ray’s blood all over my mouth.
So hook him up to the Bone Machine now, Pats—make a movie, while you’re at it. Take a picture, it’ll last longer. Take your turn. Take your time.
But this is how it breaks down: He’s gone, long gone, like I’m gone, too. Like we’re gone, together. Gone.
Gone to lie down.
Gone to forgive, to forget.
Gone, gone, finally—
—to sleep.
* * *
Aaaaaah, yes.
The sheep look up, the angels down. And I’m done, at long, long last—blown far, far away, the last of my shredded self trailing behind like skin, like wings, a plastic bag blowing.
Done, and I’m out: Forgiven, forgotten, sleeping. Loving nothing. Being nothing. Feeling none of your pain, fearing none of your anger, craving none of your—anything. Anymore.
Down here where things settle, down below the bridge, the weighing-room, the House of Dust itself—down here, where our faces fall away, where we lose our names, where we no longer care what brought us here, or why . . . I don’t care, finally, because (finally) I don’t have to. And in this way, I’m just the same as every other dead person—thank that God I’ve never met, and probably never will: No longer mere trembling meaty prey for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; no longer cursed to live with death breathing down my neck, metaphoric or literal.
Which only makes the predicament of people like Ray—or like Pat, for that matter—seem all the crueller, in context. Since the weakness of the living is their enduring need to still love us, and to feel we still love them in return; to believe that we are still the same people who were once capable of loving them back. Even though we’re, simply . . .
. . . not.
Down here, down here: The psychic sponge-bed, the hole at the world’s heart, that well of poison loneliness every cemetery elm knows with its great tap-root. Here’s where we float, my fellow dead and I—one of whom might be Ray, not that he or I would recognize each other now.
The keenest irony of all being that I suppose Ray killed himself for me, in a way—killed himself, by letting me kill him. Even though . . . until that very last moment we shared together . . . we’d never really even met.
Come with me, I said. Not caring if he could, but suspecting—
(rightly, it turns out)
—I’d probably never know, in the final analysis, if he actually did.
Down here, where we float in a comforting soup of nondescription—charred and eyeless, Creation’s joke. Big Bang detritus bought with Jesus’ blood.
Ash, drifting free, from an eternally burning heaven.
Keepsake
There is no such thing as evil, just the gradual
removal of good until nothing is left.
—St. Augustine
IT’S FUNNY HOW the hardest moral questions only ever occur to you long after you’ve lost the power to answer them. Or to put it another way:
How many times have I asked myself what it is with some people, but not given much of a fuck either way? Because the plain fact is, nobody can cure themselves of someone else’s disease. The world’s full of dying parasites; you can’t hold them all, wipe their eyes and their asses, change the channel and tell them one more time how they’re going to a better place. Sure, we all talk a good game—but no one actually has the time for that kind of love, let alone the strength.
And I only ever really loved one other person on this whole rotten planet, anyways, aside from my own stupid self.
Now it’s long past five in the morning, and I’m still crouched out here in a nest of long grass, halfway into the junk-choked sump that passes for a yard between the Tar Baby dance club—heavy metal and formative rock cover bands all night, every night—and its nearest neighbor, Calypso Heaven. Sitting back on my heels with Jos’ second-best gun in my hands, last night’s frozen mud already seeping through the seat of my jeans. Sitting here listening to the distant cries of my little brother Loren, as they seep up through those six-plus feet of dirt I piled on top of him last night—after I dragged his limp, rug-wrapped body down all three flights of rusty fire escape from our former mutual home, and rolled him ass-up into a shallow grave.
Thinking about how he’s already been dead for a year and a half, and the only difference now is he’ll finally have to start acting like it.
* * *
Around twelve-fifteen last Thursday, I jerked abruptly awake at my usual table in the Caf Shack on the corner, and for a good minute and a half, I couldn’t remember what I’d come there for in the first place. There was a cup of half-price latte in front of me (Steamy Thursdays, Get It While It’s Hot) and a half-smoked cigarette in my right hand, burnt down almost to filter—a shaky column of ash, poised and ready to gild the tattoo winding across my Mound of Venus and up around my thumb with grey. A snake, a triangle, two moons and a line of star-pointed Coptic crosses, all based on some Moroccan wedding designs I found in this old issue of National Geographic Rennie stole from my last social worker’s office: The kind of shit they usual
ly do with henna on the big day, then leave on until you wear ’em off playing unpaid workhorse for your hubby’s family, long after the roast lamb’s all been eaten and the band’s gone home to sleep.
I remember how the tattoo artist laughed when I showed him the ripped-out page I wanted him to copy them from. Smirking:
“Guess you can kiss your day-job ambitions pretty much goodbye with this one, huh?”
And I just smiled back, ever so slightly. Thinking:
Yeah, that idea would probably scare me too, if I’d ever actually had a day job.
Outside the Caf Shack window, it was just another post- ozone-depletion February in Toronto—equal parts frigid and uncertain, pedestrians eddying to and fro outside like ghosts beneath a livid, parboiled sky. Streets slick with yesterday’s slush, already turned to ice.
Then I let my attention focus back inside the window frame, and realized the guy who’d been cruising me for the last few minutes—so overtly, he could’ve been wearing a big neon pink sign on his forehead—was actually somebody I knew, or used to. One of Jos’ regulars, back in the days; back when I was one glam, Iced-up little Goth girl and Jos was my main squeeze, Mr. Trent Reznor Superfly, all black eyeliner and free drugs to anybody who shared his musical tastes. Before Rennie finally followed my example, broke and ran from that pit we once both laughingly called “home,” turned up knocking at Jos’ and my apartment door, and we let him crash in that little room next to the iguana tank—the one with no shades on the window, no lock on the door, and nobody left unstoned enough to check who was going in and out, especially during one of our legendary three-day parties.
Before Rennie got sick. And Jos went to jail.
And I ended up in this limbo I’ve been living, every day-for-night since.
I nodded at the chair next to me, and took another leisurely gander out the window—more than long enough for the guy to take the hint, and slide his skinny junkie ass down in it.
“Hey, Ro,” he said, in a tone he probably thought passed for cheerful. “Long time, man.” Then, small talk over: “You holding?”
