The Teratologist

by Edward Lee

  “Maybe you’re right. If you died, right now, you’d go to hell. Be careful.”

  “But isn’t hell really just death?”

  “Yes,” the angel said. The distant clock ticked through a long pause. “And no, not at all. Be careful, Westmore.”

  “How ambiguous.”

  “We have to be. God works in fucked up ways. It’s the only way because you and your kind can’t understand. All of life is a mystery. We’re spirits, Westmore. We live forever.”

  Westmore stared up into dark. Whenever he tried to focus on this phantom—something surely born of his subconscious mind—a vertigo shifted in his vision. Then he was shuddering—the angel was touching his forehead—the gash. The touch felt hot, itchy.

  “Parlor tricks for a simpleton.” The voice flowed in the dark. The cigarette tip glowed. Westmore wasn’t impressed when he touched his forehead and found it healed. No gash, no cut, no blood. When I wake up tomorrow, it’ll be there. I know it’ll be there because I know I cut my head. This is just an hallucination, the D.T.’s or something.

  Now the voice sounded like wind blowing through leaves. “You want to see something, you want to see something?” The angel opened his hand over Westmore’s eyes. “Remember that girl you loved so much, the one you never told? Take a look.”

  Westmore saw her in the dark behind his eyes. She was passed out. Some scuzzy scumbag was fucking her. In the vision, Westmore could sense the man’s aura—the core of his being. He was just using her for a hole to fuck. He didn’t care the least about her; he’d gotten her drunk just so he could fuck her, and discarded her feelings.

  “You should’ve told her, Westmore,” the angel’s voice hissed.

  The photographer’s own voice sounded like something destroyed. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “Let me tell you something about truth…” Now the angel’s words seemed to issue from everywhere but his mouth. “The truth always matters…”

  Westmore ground his teeth; tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes.

  “And here’s the crippled kid’s digs now. Look, look…”

  An executive office, big desk, plaques and certificates of achievement on the paneled walls. On the desk, a framed picture of a happy family.

  “He’s what you aren’t. A success. A benevolent person. He’s what it’s all about. You aren’t.”

  Westmore was sinking.

  The angel stepped back hastily, as if annoyed. “This is chump change, man. Your life is chump change. I don’t know why I bother.”

  “Why do you bother?”

  More of the hiss-like whisper. “Because you’ve got to love everyone. You’ve got to love everyone the way Jesus did. Anything else makes no sense. You’re an asshole, but I love you. You’re all assholes. A lot of us were really pissed off about your race. A lot of us got thrown out.”

  “What about you? Did you get thrown out?”

  “No. I live to love and serve the Lord on High. I am His unworthy servant forever.”

  The words beat gently in the air, like small birds flying.

  “Because God was right.” Again, the angel pointed to his head. “It’s what’s in here—” and touched his chest—“and what’s in here—” then pointed to the windows, “and how you use it out there. Life’s a gift. Don’t fuck it up. You’re fucking it up.”

  Westmore listened to the ticking clock, staring at the shadow.

  The angel flicked the cigarette away, to the tile before the French doors. “It’s not possible for you to understand—your brains aren’t big enough.” He kept pointing to his own head, jabbing a finger. “You can’t…cogitate. You cannot…reckon. You do not have the capability of comprehending, man. So that’s why we whisper to you in time-held secrets. That’s why we unfold as myths and fables. That’s why Moses parted the Red Sea. That’s why when Jesus said ‘Lazarus, come out,’ Lazarus came out. It’s parlor tricks. You can’t understand the whole picture, none of your kind can. God gave you paradise, God gave you perfection and bliss, and you still turned your back on Him. You said ‘Fuck you,’ to God. You willingly chose error and sin over God’s perfect gift. ‘You closed the door in My face, so I’m gonna close ALL the doors in your face—all but one. I still love all you assholes, so I’m gonna leave you the option of salvation. I’ll tell you what you have to do to do get. But that’s it. From here on you’re on your own.’ You people all chose the wrong road, so now you gotta drive on it, and during the drive you’re gonna have to deal with all the things God wanted to protect you from: war, hatred, disease, poverty, failure—ALL that shit. It’s no cakewalk. Satan’s owned the title-deed to the world since Eve bit the apple and Adam put his fuckin’ fig leaf on in shame.”

  Westmore laughed.

  “Come on man. You don’t mean that all that biblical shit literally happened? I always thought they were just allegories, sort of like fables.”

  “Belief is a powerful thing. It shapes the past as well as the future. Once a thing is done and thousands of years have passed, who is to say the manner in which it came to pass? History is what we believe it to be just as God and heaven are what you believe them to be, well, to a point. God does have a definite nature. It’s his appearance that changes. Your faith shapes it. There are many different heavens just as there are many different hells and many different types of angels. If you were a Buddhist I may have appeared to you as a lotus blossom.”

  “Why not as Buddha himself?”

  “It’s within my power but beyond my authority. That would be akin to appearing to you as Jesus Christ. I’d wind up in Hell myself for that.”

  “So there are different gods as well?”

  “No, only one, but he can take many forms. It all depends on your belief.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Fortunately it’s not really necessary that you do. You’re not capable of getting it.”

  Westmore’s thoughts dripped like blood. He felt becloaked in darkness.

  Then the angel said, “Heavy shit’s going down in this house. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What kind of heavy shit?”

  “An aggrandized affront. Systematized evil. It’s a by-product of your fucked up society. The only true society is the society of God.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Westmore grated.

  “Of course you don’t, because you’re too stupid. We work in secrets. Someone has to know. That’s why I’m here. Farringworth is an adherent, a living symbol of the corrosion of mankind. He wants to argue with God. He thinks that if he pisses God off so completely and precisely, then God’ll show Himself.” A chuckle like crumbling rocks. “Let me tell you something, Westmore. God’s already pissed off. He has been for five thousand years, and He’s sick to the nucleus of His soul. He’s not going to show Himself—you’re not worth His time. God’s gone. He’s fuckin’ busy, man. He gave you a chance. Take it.”

  Farringworth, the photographer thought. What did he say? Systematized evil? Was the angel deliberately being obscure?

  “Some things you just gotta find out for yourself,” the angel said.

  “What about Farringworth?” Westmore nearly pleaded. “You’re confusing me. I don’t know what you mean.”

  Did the shadowed outline look more grainy?

  “Check it out.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Westmore asked next.

  A floating laugh. “I’m just the messenger. Mine is not to wonder why. God wants me to come to you so I come to you. Yeah, God works in fucked up ways—He sure as shit does ’cos that’s the only way you have even the most irreducible chance of getting the big picture.”

  Westmore’s eyes felt propped open by hooks.

  The angel was dissolving. “I have to go now, but before I do, I’m going to tell you something. Do you want to hear it?”

  Westmore gulped, nodded.

  “It’s a secret.”

  “Tell me.”

  The angel was d
iscomposing in the dark. “If you take the impetus behind the desire to be good, and the impetus behind the desire to be evil—if you put them both together and look at them very closely…you’ll see.”

  “See what?” Westmore croaked.

  “They’re the same.”

  The angel was gone.

  (VI)

  Two men in a room. Night. Quiet.

  “The hydrocephalic died,” Michaels said. “And the priest had a heart attack.”

  “Take care of it.”

  “I already have.”

  Farringworth sat in a robe of scarlet satin, sipping with little interest from a glass filled with Montrachet 1918. His gaze alternated from the computer monitor to the great bow window, which framed the darkness, tinged in moonlight. Another of his speculative moods, pondering. Michaels knew it was his master’s way of dealing with his despair.

  “Further appropriations shouldn’t be difficult.”

  “No, they won’t be. They’re being pursued as we speak,” Michaels assured.

  Farringworth had the volume turned down on the monitor; he was gloomily watching a variety of clips. First, Betty, stumps reeling in orgasmic jubilation as a Unitarian minister fastidiously fucked her. Next clip: the program director for the United Way, slavering as he performed cunnilingus on an eighteen-year-old girl with Downs’ Syndrome, prognathism and cutaneous facial horns. Next clip: two deacons from the Baton Rogue Church of Christ, masturbating rabidly into the face of a woman with a congenital sternal and a genetic defect known as coalition of the bowel. She’d been born with no exterior rectal vent; instead the bowel emptied into the vaginal canal. The camera zoomed closer to her splayed legs as if on cue, as she, in less technical terminology, took a giant spectacular shit from her cunt.

  “You’re definitely getting your investment’s worth from the Metopronil. They want to do it. Anything, with anyone, for sexual release,” Michaels observed.

  But Farrington seemed bored, or forlorn.

  He switched to the next scenario, the live camera in the Angels’ room. Both monsters slept serenely, entwined in each other’s arms amid shining white sheets.

  So that’s it, Michaels thought. He should’ve known.

  “I’ll have them one day,” Michaels,” the billionaire said very softly. “They’ll love me one day.”

  “I’m sure they will,” the attendant replied for lack of anything else, but he was thinking, Yeah, and I’m sure God will be stopping in any time now.

  He’s insane.

  Michaels was startled by his employer’s next sudden gesture. Just as the attendant had finished the sarcastic thought, Farringworth looked up at him with something like a reproving glare. But a moment later, his eyes went sad again and returned to the monitor.

  “And what about our two guests?”

  Michaels hated to be the bringer of bad news, but he still wasn’t worried. “We’ve already contained Bryant. And, well, don’t be alarmed, but—”

  Farringworth snapped up another sharp glare.

  “—The photographer isn’t in his room.”

  “What?”

  “You needn’t worry. He’s probably stumbling around here drunk. My men aren’t back yet from disposing of the priest and the child.”

  It was Michaels’ good fortune that looks couldn’t kill.

  “We’ll find the photographer,” the Englander assured. “It’s impossible for him to get out of the house.”

  Farringworth’s reply sounded like the worst omen. “It better be.”

  (VII)

  Westmore regained consciousness, oblivious. He lay beneath the table, cloaked in darkness, and at first he could remember nothing. His thoughts ticked along with the clock.

  An angel, huh?

  Surely, he’d passed out from too much scotch, and dreamed the whole thing, but even in the dim moonlight streaming in through the French doors, he could see the bloodstains on his shirt. He’d hit his head against the edge of the armoire, but his head didn’t hurt at all. He felt at the wound and there was no wound.

  He dragged himself up, pressed the stem of his watch to light the dial. 4:12 a.m. He fingered his top pocket for a cigarette yet found the pack empty. Maybe the angel ripped off all my cigarettes, he thought as a joke. But he wasn’t laughing. On the immaculate tile flooring before the door, a cigarette butt lay, as if flicked there.

  What could he tell Bryant? Nothing. I had a hallucination, I had a hallucination. I was drunk. I hit my head but the cut must be on my scalp; that’s where the blood came from. And it was me who flicked the cigarette butt on the floor. It was not a foul-mouthed, wingless angel in a black t-shirt. It was not.

  He felt sick now but not from drinking. It was his heart that felt sick. It was the vibes. He was not acting on cryptic messages from a hallucination of an angel, but he felt he had to do something.

  Check it out, the mirage had said.

  Westmore took a deep breath, took a few steps to see if he could walk, then felt his way out of the room toward the stairs. Words like leaves blowing through gutters haunted him up to the second floor landing: An aggrandized affront. Systematized evil. And: Heavy shit’s going down in this house.

  “Forget it, forget it,” he mumbled to himself. “Just…find Bryant.”

  He didn’t even know exactly why he needed to find Bryant. It was just an inclination, perhaps one rooted in uselessness. Westmore felt perplexed and useless. And scared. He didn’t really trust anybody on the face of the earth—he’d spent his entire life trusting the untrustworthy, a fool—and he didn’t even now at this point if he trusted himself, especially shit-faced.

  But he trusted his inclinations. He trusted the vibes.

  “Bryant?” he kept his voice down when he opened his partner’s bedroom door and looked in.

  The room was a shambles. Bryant wasn’t there.

  (VIII)

  “You weren’t easy to subdue.”

  The accent rang: British. Bryant’s head rang, too. Felt like somebody hit him in the head with a hammer. Damn… Acidic splotches of memory—like bile in someone’s throat—kept slipping up. Several men, he recalled. They’d come into his room when he was asleep.

  “You put up quite a fight,” Michaels said, looking down.

  Bryant remembered more. Thrashing. After the fight, the room was wrecked and Bryant was straitjacketed.

  And here he sat, unable to move against the canvas constraints, in another room. Not the bedroom he’d been shown.

  It was a horror show. It was a room of freaks. Bryant was speechless, at first not even believing his own eyes.

  A bright room, with bright overhead lights. Were multiple cameras mounted in the ceiling? He thought so. And there were…things. Pale, quivering things…

  “This is where we do it,” Michaels said. “It is from this room that Mr. Farringworth puts forth his challenge to God.”

  Bryant thought he might throw up when he took his first look. There were several beds arranged about the room, and on each one lay some twisted, naked form—some biological accident. It took him a moment to actually realize that the forms were human.

  “We house monsters here, and this is our work room, so to speak. But we care for them quite well— Mr. Farringworth actually loves them, in his own way. He’s fascinated by the imperfect, and the derivatives of that imperfection.”

  One contorted, slobbering woman was being wheeled out now in a wheelchair. Did she have horns or spikes coming out of her face? Her head looked squashed. On another bed a deathly thin man twitched. He suffered from muscular and adipose atrophy—a living skeleton. A raging erection bobbed as he twitched. Eventually, men in suits gently put the tragedy in a chair and wheeled him out.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” Bryant finally got it out.

  “In God’s name—yes. How ironic. You’ll understand in due time. Oh, and I hate to tell you this, but…” Michaels smiled, then held up a piece of paper that Bryant recognized at once as a blueline, an editor
’s proof. “Can you read this? Is your vision blurred from the skirmish?”

  “What is it?

  “Your obituary.”

  Bryant’s heart thudded as he read.

  —The editors and staff are saddened to report the deaths of finance journalist James Bryant and photographer Richard Westmore, both well known in the field. Bryant and Westmore worked together often, interviewing some of the most successful financiers in the world. They were both killed Wednesday in a taxicab accident near Metro Detroit airport. They will be sorely missed. Services will be held at—

  This is crazy, Bryant thought. “My boss knows we’re here, you idiot. I talked to him yesterday on my cell phone—from this house.”

  “Mr. Bryant—” Michaels wagged the sheet of paper. “This is a blueline for the next issue of Blue Chip, the magazine you and Westmore work for. This was all planned well in advance, and I’m happy to say that your boss was all too cooperative.”

  Bryant struggled against the restraints, swamped in confusion. “He’s agreed to run an obituary when he knows we’re alive?”

  “Oh, yes. In the past, wisdom has been power, but today it’s money. And Mr. Farringworth paid of a lot of that to your boss to go along with this ruse. The bodies, of course, were burned beyond recognition, and further palms were greased, so to speak, to insure the proper placement of falsified DNA reports. To the rest of the world, Mr. Bryant, you’re dead.”

  “So…what? Now you’re gonna kill me? That’s ridiculous. You don’t know me, I’m no threat to you, and neither is Westmore!”

  Michaels didn’t move, just kept looking down, hands behind his back. “No, no, we’re not going to kill you. We want you. You will be the chronicler, Westmore the photographer.”

  “Chronicler for what! Photographer for what!”

  “For Mr. Farringworth’s life, of course. And his work—or I should say, not his financial pursuits—that’s just his hobby. His real work, the work he does here. You and Westmore will never leave this house again. You will write Farringworth’s biography and philosophical study, and your colleague will compile the photographic archive.”