by Edward Lee
The redhead doodled indifferently on a napkin. “But I don’t want to be loved,” she said. Then she grinned as intensely as an indian devil mask. “I just want to be fucked.”
“Jeeeeeeesus Chriiiiiiiiiiiiist!”
“You gotta tune ’em out,” advised the fat blonde, now halfway done with the pizza and starting her third dark beer. Grease glossed her lips and chin.
“The seeker,” said the keep. “I like that.”
“But what exactly do you write about?” asked the blonde.
“What I write about isn’t the point, it’s how I write about it.” And then, with no warning, the thought returned: How powerful is the power of truth? The writer smoked his cigarette deep. “Honesty is the vehicle of my aesthete. The truth of fiction can only exist in its bare words. Pardon my obtuseness, but it’s the mode, the application of the vision which must transcend the overall tangibilities. Prose mechanics, I mean—the structural manipulation of syntactical nomenclatures in order to affect particularized transpositions of imagery.”
“Oh,” said the fat blonde. “I thought you meant, like, fucking’n shit like that.”
The writer frowned.
He swigged another Piss Shooter, another tin roof. The fat blonde’s pizza lay thick with extra cheese, anchovies, and big chunks of sausage beneath a sheen of grease. Her stomach made fish tank noises as she voraciously ate and drank.
“Why, why, why?” White Shirt looked close to tears, or a schizoaffective episode, staring at the redhead. “At least tell me why I’m not good enough anymore?”
“You don’t want to know,” she nonchalantly replied.
White Shirt hopped off his stool to stalk around her. Anger made his face appear corrugated. “Go ahead! Tell me! Spit it out! I WANT TO KNOW!”
The redhead shrugged. “Your dick’s not big enough.”
Oh, dear, thought the writer.
White Shirt’s low moan issued out like that of a just-gelded walrus. He stumbled away crosseyed, and staggered out of the bar.
The keep and fat blonde ignored the outburst. The redhead looked at the writer, smiled, and said, “Hey, he wanted the truth, so I gave it to him.”
Truth, thought the writer. Suddenly, he felt empty, desolate.
“But if you’re a seeker,” posed the keep, “What’cha seekin’?”
“Ah, the universal question.” The writer raised a finger, as if to preamble a scintillating wisdom. “And the answer is this. The true seeker never knows what he’s seeking until he finds it.”
The fat blonde’s wet eating noises ceased; she’d finished the entire pizza. “Here’s something for you to write about,” she said. She leaned over and kissed the writer on the mouth.
Her lips tasted of grease and cheese. But actually the kiss inspired him. Her mouth opened and closed over his, tongue probing unabashed. The writer found himself growing aroused. Truth, he thought frivolously. Ephemeral reality. This was it, wasn’t it? Spontaneous human interface, inexplicably complex yet baldly simple. Synaptic and chemical impulses of the brain meshed with someone’s lifetime of learned behavior. It was these simple truths that he lived for. They nourished him. Human truth is my sustenance, he thought, and remembered the voice he’d heard. Yes, sustenance.
The fat blonde’s kiss grew ravenous. Then—
urrrrrrp
She threw up directly into the writer’s mouth.
It had come in a single, heaving gust. He tasted everything: warm beer, lumps of half digested sausage and pizza dough, and bile—lots of bile. Utter disgust bulged his eyes and seized his joints. Then came a second, and larger, gust, which she projected right into his lap.
The writer fell off his stool.
“There,” said the blonde. “Write about that.”
“Ooooo-eee!” remarked the keep. “That one was a doozy, huh?”
The writer, flat on his back and in shock, could only groan, staring up. The heavy, hot blanket of vomit lay thick from chin to crotch; it oozed down his legs slow as lava when he got up. He spat immediately, of course, and incessantly, and out flew several chunks of sausage and strings of flecked slime. Almost blind, he staggered for the door.
“Come again… seeker,” laughed the keep.
“Hope you liked the pizza,” bid the fat blonde.
The writer grabbed his suitcase and stumbled out. The dusk in the sky had bled to full dark, and it was hot outside. He reeked, drenched. He was mortified. Human truth is my sustenance? he thought. Jesus. The awful tinge in his mouth seemed to buzz, and he could still taste the sausage.
Then he heard the voice again, not in his ears, in his head.
What was it?
He stood stock-still in the empty street, sopped in vomit.
««—»»
The power of truth? He’d come here seeking truth and all he’d gotten was puked on. And he was hearing voices, too. Great, he thought. Fantastic. But he had to find a motel, get showered and changed.
He strayed up the main drag, aimless. Shops were closed, houses were dark. The bus station was closed too, and in his wandering he found not one motel.
Then he saw the church.
It sat back quaintly behind some trees, its clean white walls lambent in the night. What relieved him was that it looked normal. The front doors stood open and, within, candles could be seen.
He entered and crossed the nave. The pews were empty. Ahead, past the chancel, a shadow lingered, mumbling low words like an incantation.
It was a priest, reading rites before an open coffin.
“Excuse me, father,” the writer said. “I need to know—”
The priest turned, chubby in black raiments. He was glaring. In the coffin lay the corpse of an old woman.
“What!”
“I’m new in town. Are there any motels?”
“Motels? Here?” the priest snapped. “Of course not!”
The writer’s eyes flicked to the open coffin. “Do you by chance know when the next bus arrives?”
“How dare you come in here now!” the priest outraged. He pointed abruptly to the coffin. “Can’t you see my mother’s died?”
“Sorry, father,” the writer groped but thought, God! He hurried back out. In the street he felt strange, not desolate as before, but woozy, disconnected. Is it the town, or is it me? A sudden and profuse flash of sweat made his vomit-drenched shirt feel like a coat of mucus.
The sweat was a herald, like a trumpet—
Oh, no.
—for the voice:
SEEKER. SEEK!
A block down, the sign glowed over the transom: POLICE
His footsteps echoed round his head like a halo as he trotted up. Surely the police would know about the next bus. He pushed through the door, was about to speak, but froze.
A big cop with chopburns glared at him. “What’cha want, buddy? I’m busy.”
“I…” the writer attempted. The cop was busy, all right. He stood behind a long-haired kid who’d been handcuffed to a chair. A tourniquet had been fashioned about the kid’s neck via a cord and nightstick.
“Okay, punk,” warned the cop. “No more bullshit. Where’s them drugs?”
The kid, of course, couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to. He was being choked. The mouth moved in panic within the strained, ballooning face.
“Still not talkin’, huh?” The cop gave the tourniquet another twist.
“What the hell are you doing?” shouted the writer.
“Police business. This kid’s got drugger written all over him. Sells the shit to kindergarten kids probably. All that crack and PCP, you now? We gotta rough ’em up a little; it’s the only way to get anything out of ’em.”
Rough them up a little? The writer stared, flabbergasted. The cop twisted the tourniquet all the way down, until the cord creaked. The kid’s body stiffened up in the chair, his face turning blue.
“Talk, punk. Where’s your stash? Who’s your bagman?”
“How can he talk!” the writer shouted
the logical question. “You’ve got a tourniquet around his fucking neck!”
“Scram, buddy. This is a police matter.” The cop paused and looked down. “Aw, shit, there he went.” The kid twitched a few times, then fell limp, swollen-faced in death.
Madness, the writer thought.
The cop was unwinding the tourniquet, taking off the cuffs. “Just a drugger, no loss. No point in wastin’ it, either.” The cop gave the writer a comradely look. “Girl pussy, boy pussy, s’all pink on the inside, right, buddy? Help me get his pants off so’s we can poke him ’fore he’s cold.”
A sign on the wall read To Protect and Serve. The writer, brain thumping, teetered out of the station.
Phone, he thought dumbly. He abandoned his suitcase in the street and staggered on. Something’s happened here. Got to call someone, get some help. The houses set back off the street looked harmless. He knocked on the first door. A middle-aged man answered it—
“Yes? Can I help you, young man?”
“I…” the writer attempted. The man wore eyeshadow and cherry-red lipstick. He also wore panties, garters, and stockings. Stainless-steel clamps were screwed down on his nipples, distending the fleshy ends.
“Sporty, wouldn’t you say?”
“Huh?”
The man lowered his frilled panties, revealing a penis and scrotum glittery with safety pins. One pin pinched closed the end of the foreskin.
“Uh…sporty, yes,” the writer said.
“Would you care to touch it?”
“Uh, well, no–”
The writer jogged off. At the second house he peered through the storm door and saw a beautiful nude woman chasing a giant St. Bernard, and a man at the third house stood grinning on his porch rail, a noose around his neck. “Fly, Fleance! Fly!” he quoted Shakespeare, and stepped off the rail. Heavy, tonerous thuds greeted the writer at the fourth house. WHACK-WHACK-WHACK! WHACK-WHACK-WHACK! In the kitchen window, he saw a man very contentedly cracking open a baby’s head with a large meat tenderizer while an aproned woman prepared a fry pan in the background. The man pried the cranium apart and began to spoon the tender brains into a bowl. “Olive oil or canola?” the man asked the wife.
The writer foundered away, gagging, and tripped back into the street. The impact of vision made him feel sledgehammered in the face. He’d seen enough; he didn’t want to be a seeker anymore—he just wanted to go home. Then the sweat rushed again, and the voice, like a raddled chord, fell back into his head:
BUT THERE’S SO MUCH, SO MUCH FOR US TO SEEK.
Whatever did that mean? Without reservation, the writer bent over and threw up. This seemed the logical thing to do, an obligation, in fact, after all he’d seen. Madness, he repeated, urping it up spasm after spasm like a human sludge-pump. Ropes of saliva dangled off his lips as his stomach rocketed out its contents. The wet splattering crackled down the street.
Oh, what a day.
Done, he felt worse, he felt decamped. The particulate mush of his last meal glittered nearly jewel-like in the frosty glow of streetlamps. He felt empty, not just in the belly, but in the heart. Had he thrown up his spirit as well?
Do I even have a spirit? he thought.
Too many things cruxed him. The town’s madness, of course; and the voice—most certainly. Hearing voices in one’s head was not generally an indication of well being. What cruxed him most of all, though, was simply his own being here. Why had he come? For the truth, for shards of human realities to nourish his writing, but now he wondered. It made no sense, yet somehow he felt the opposite: that actually a lack of truth had evoked him. Vacuities, not realities. Wastelands.
Lies.
Absurdly, he sat beside the puddle of vomit, to reflect. Was throwing up catalytic to subjective conjecture? He felt rejected, but by what? By the mainstream? By society? In a sense he was—all writers were, and perhaps it was the backwash of his rejection that had instigated the summons, chosen him somehow. Human truth is my sustenance. How powerful is the power of truth? But the more he plied the speculation, the harder he laughed. The quest had backfired, leaving him to sit gutterside as his vomit spread into strange shapes between his feet. Seeker, my ass, he concluded. Bugger truth. All he cared about now was the next bus.
“Mother!” he heard.
The plea had sounded impoverished, a desperate whine like a lost child’s.
Then: I SHOW YOU TRUTHS, SEEKER. SEEK. SEEK OUT THE SUSTENANCE OF TRUTH. SHOW ME YOUR WORTH.
The writer smirked. What else have I got to do? He could feel the churchfront as he approached, as one might sense a particular face in a crowd. Candlelight caused the nave’s darkness to fitfully shift, populating the pews with a congregation of shadows, worshipers bereft of substance.
“Mother! I’m here!”
Aw, God, the writer thought, and it was the palest of thoughts, the bleakest and least sapient. What he saw numbed everything that he was. He stared toward the chancel as if encased in cement.
The coffin stood empty. Its previous tenant—the dead old woman—had been stripped of her last garments and lay stiff across the carpet, all gray-white dried skin and wrinkles, and a face like a dried fruit. Between the corpse’s legs lay the priest, black trousers at his ankles, copulating furiously.
“I’ll bring you back!” he promised, panting. His eyes squeezed shut in the most devout concentration. Sagging bags for breasts jiggled at the corpse’s armpits.
“You’re having sex with a corpse, for God’s sake!” shouted the writer.
The fornication ceased. The rage of this ultimate coitus interruptus focused in the priest’s eyes as sharply as cracked glass. “What?” he shouted.
“You’re fucking your mother’s corpse!”
“So?”
The writer shivered. “Correct me if I’m wrong—I’m not an expert on modern clergical protocol—but it’s my understanding that priests aren’t supposed to have sex, especially with their mothers, and more especially when their mothers are DEAD!”
The priest faltered, not at the writer’s objection, but at some inner query. A sad recognition touched his face as he withdrew and straddled the embalmed cadaver. “I can’t bring her back,” he lamented. “No, not like this.” His erection pulsed upward, a parodical stiff root. Forlornly, he picked something up.
The writer’s guts shimmied. What the priest had picked up was a pair of heavy-duty roofing shears.
“There’s only one way, I’m afraid,” mourned the priest. The writer shouted “No no no! Holy shit! Don’t do th—”
—as the priest unhesitantly clipped off his glans with the shears.
The obligatory scream shot about the nave; the glans fell to the carpet like a gumdrop.
The writer was backing away, his ears ringing. I do not need to see this, he thought. But something forced him to look, and by now he had a pretty good idea what that something was.
Blood jetted freely from the priest’s clipped member—yes, freely as water out of a garden hose. “Mother, oh, Mother,” he muttered, shuddering as the blood poured forth.
TRUTH, banged the voice in the writer’s head as he plodded in shock back out onto the street. Something’s made everyone in this town crazy, he realized.
NOT CRAZY. BLOOMED IN TRUTH, THE REAL TRUTH.
He ignored this; he had to. So how come I’m not crazy?
YOU’RE THE SEEKER, came his answer.
He gazed emptily down the street. He didn’t feel crazy, he felt fine. So why was he hearing voices?
AH, YES, he heard. SUSTENANCE!
Was it really madness, or was it susceptibility, as the voice seemed to infer? All his deliberating over truth, and what truth really was, had skirted one very important consideration. Perhaps truth was mutable. Like philosophy, art, technology— like life itself—perhaps old truths died and were replaced by new ones.
So the truth had changed? Was that it?
The writer banged through the swinging doors of the Crossroads.
“Look, he�
��s back!” said the fat blonde. “It’s the writer!”
“The seeker,” corrected the keep. “Ready for a shooter?”
“Cram your shooters, rube, and you,” he pointed violently at the fat blonde, “Stay the hell away from me.” She burped in reply, halfway done with her next pizza. The redhead was still at the rail too; on a bar napkin she absently doodled stick figures with inordinately large genitals.
“What brings ya back?” asked the keep.
The fat blonde ripped off another belch, which sounded like a tree cracking. “Maybe he wants more pizza.”
“You haven’t seen my hopelessly inadequate boyfriend wandering around, have you?” the redhead asked.
Jesus, thought the writer. “All I want to know is when the next goddamn bus comes into this goddamn town.”
“Call Trailways,” invited the keep. “Pay phone’s by the john.”
Finally, a phone!
“But hold up a sec.” The keep slapped a yellow shooter down. “Drink up, seeker. And don’t worry, it’s a—”
“I know, a tin roof.” Can’t hurt, can it? The writer shot the shooter back, froze mid-swallow, then spat it out. “What the fuck was that!”
“A Piss Shooter, partner.” The keep’s fly was open. “The house special. Bit more tasty than the last one, huh?”
“You’re all a bunch of psychopaths!” screamed the writer.
“Crank up one of them Snot Shooters,” suggested the fat blonde.
“Good thing I’ve had a cold all week. Makes ’em thicker, meatier.” The keep applied an index finger to his left nostril, then loudly emptied his right one into a shooter glass. “Yeah, there’s a beaut. Go for it, seeker.”
The writer’s head was reeling. “No, thanks. I’m trying to cut down.”
“Cheers,” said the fat blonde. She tossed it back neat, swallowing it more or less as a single lump. “Nice and thick!”
It just never ends, does it? The writer wobbled back to the pay phone, dropped in some change, and waited.
No dialtone.
“Goddamn this fuckin’ shit-house piece of shit crazy-ass motherfuckin’ town!” the writer articulated to the very best of his refined and erudite vocabulary. “Suckin’ fuckin’ redneck shitpile town ain’t even got a fuckin’ phone that works!”
