by Edward Lee
“Phones haven’t worked since last night,” he was informed. It was the guy in the white shirt, who’d just come in the back way. He was hefting a shiny 44-oz aluminum softball bat. “Shh,” he said next. “I want to surprise her.” He snuck up behind the redhead, assumed a formidable batter’s stance, and swung—
Ka-CRACK!
The impact of the bat to the redhead’s right ear sent a big spurt of blood from her left. She flew off the stool like a golf ball off a tee and landed on the floor.
“How about that?” White Shirt softly inquired. “I’ll bet that was big enough for you.” The keep and fat blonde applauded. The writer just stared. White Shirt dragged the redhead out the back door by the throat.
“Still ain’t found what’cha seek, huh, seeker?” commented the keep. “Still ain’t found the truth. Well lemme tell ya somethin’…truth can change.”
The writer peered at him.
“I know what the truth is,” claimed the fat blonde.
“Yeah?” the writer challenged. “Tell me then, you fat hunk of shit redneck walking trailer-park puke-machine. What is the truth?”
“It’s black!”
Great. The truth is black. Wonderful. The writer started for the back door, but the keep implored, “Don’t go yet. You’ll miss my next one.” He was lowering his trousers.
“Jizz Shooters!” cried the fat blonde.
Laughter followed the writer out the door. It made him feel rooked. Perhaps in their madness they knew something he didn’t. Perhaps madness, in this case, was knowledge.
In the alley, White Shirt was eviscerating the redhead with a large hunting knife. Less than patiently, he rummaged through wet organs like someone looking for something, cufflinks maybe. “Give it back!” he shouted at the cooling gore. “I want it back!”
The writer leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “Buddy,” he asked quietly. “Could you please tell me when the next bus comes through town?”
“There aren’t any busses anymore. Things have changed.”
Changed, the writer thought.
THE TRUTH HAS CHANGED, elaborated the voice. YOU WERE RIGHT. IT HAS BEEN REBORN, THROUGH ME. I LIVE ON IT.
The writer gave this some thought.
“I’m looking for my love,” White Shirt remarked and gestured the redhead’s opened belly. “I gave her my love, and I want it back.” He scratched his head. “It’s got to be in there somewhere.”
“Love is in the heart,” the writer pointed out.
“Yeah, but this girl was heartless.”
“Well, the patriarchal Japanese used to believe that love was in the belly, the intestines. They believed that the belly was the temple of the soul on earth. That’s why they practiced ritual suicide by disembowelment—to release the soul and free the spiritual substantate of their love.”
“Intestines,” White Shirt contemplated. “So…if I gave my love to her…” He stared into the tilled gut, fingering its wares. “To get it back, I have to bring it into me?”
The writer shrugged. “I can’t advise you. The decision is yours.”
White Shirt began to eat the girl’s intestines.
The writer’s sweat surged. The redhead was as dead as dead could be, if not deader. Nevertheless, as her ex-lover steadily consumed the loops of her innards, her eyes snapped open and her head turned.
She looked directly at the writer.
“He’s taking his love back,” she giggled.
“I know,” said the writer.
“It…tickles.”
“I would imagine so.”
The moon shone in each of her eyes as a perfect white dot. “Real truth sustains us, just in different ways.”
Sustains, considered the writer. Sustenance.
“The end of your quest is waiting for you.”
The writer gulped. “Tell me,” he pleaded. “It’s very important to me. Please.”
“Look for something black,” she said, and died again.
The writer leapt the alley fence. The fat blonde had said the same thing. Black. But it was nighttime. How could he hope to find something black at night?
Then he heard something—a stout, distant chugging.
A motor, he realized.
The he saw…what?
A glow?
A patch of light that was somehow, impossibly, black.
He was standing in a schoolyard–ironically a place of learning. The light shimmered in a rough trench-like bomb crater. It’s black, he thought. In the distance sat the source of the motor noise: a squat U.S. Army armored personnel carrier.
The writer looked into the dropped back hatch.
“Don’t go out there,” warned a crisp yet muffled voice.
Murky red light bathed the inner compartment like blood in a lighted pool. A sergeant in a gas mask and full decontamination gear slouched at a console of radio equipment. Very promptly, he pointed a 9mm pistol at the writer’s face.
The writer urinated in his pants, just as promptly. “Don’t shoot me. I’m only a novelist.”
The masked sergeant seemed very sad. “Bock and Jones. I had to send them out. It’s a DECON field order. The lowest ranking men go into the final exclusion perimeter first.”
Final exclusion perimeter?
“I think it got them,” the sergeant said
It, the writer reckoned.
In the mask’s portals, the sergeant’s eyes looked insane. “When my daughter was an infant, I’d rock her in my lap every night.”
“That’s, uh, that’s nice, sergeant.”
“It gave me a hard on…. She’s fourteen now. I drilled a hole in the bathroom wall so I can watch her take showers.”
“They have counselors for things like that, I think.”
A dark suboctave suffused into the words. “At midnight, the wolf howls.”
The writer winced. “What?”
“I never knew my father.”
Then the sergeant shot himself in the head.
Sound and concussion hit the writer like a physical weight. BANG! It shoved him off the top of the vehicle as the sergeant’s mask quickly filled up with blood.
I HUNGER FOR TRUTH TOO, loomed the voice. BUT TO SEE IT, IT MUST BE REVEALED. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? YOU MUST UNDERSTAND.
The writer strayed into the yard. Yes, he thought he did understand now. Here was what his whole life had been leading him to. All that he’d sought, in his absurd pretensions as a seeker, had brought him to this final test. There could be no going back. His preceptor awaited, the ultimate seeker.
A second decon soldier lay dead in the grass. There were no hands at the ends of his arms, and the stumps appeared burned. Some colossal inner pressure had forced his brains out his ears.
“Get out of here, you civvie fucker!” someone commanded. A third soldier strode through shadows, a kid no more than twenty. “The light! It’s mine!”
“Are you quite sure about that?”
“It’s…God. I’m taking it!”
A TEST? WATCH.
“Watch!” the boy cried. “I’ll prove it’s mine!” He ran manic to the trench, his young face in awe above the radiant black blur. “Hard-fucking-core, man! I’m taking God!” He put his hands into the light, eyes wide as moons, and picked it up. But in only a second the light fell back to its resting place, melting through the boy’s hands. He stood up stiff and convulsed, a silent scream in his lips.
The voice trumpeted. ALAS. FAILURE.
This disconcerted the writer, for he knew he was next. For the last time in his life, then, he asked himself the ever important query. How powerful is the power of truth?
I’LL SHOW YOU.
The boy’s innards prolapsed through his mouth in a few slow, even pulses; the writer thought of a fat snake squeezing from its hole. Lungs, liver, heart, g.i. tract—everything that was inside now hung heavily outside, glimmering. Then the red heart, amid it all, stopped beating, and the boy fell dead.
ONLY FAITH CAN SAVE YOU NOW.
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“I kind of figured that,” the writer admitted.
THE TRUTH IS MY SUSTENANCE. I EXIST TO EXPOSE IT, TO GIVE IT FLESH. I DRAW IT OUT SO THAT IT CAN BE REAL AND, HENCE, SUSTAINING. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? TOO OFTEN THE TRUTH HIDES UNDERNEATH. WITHOUT REVELATION, WHAT PURPOSE CAN THERE BE IN TRUTH?
Good point, the writer mused.
WE’RE BOTH SEEKERS, WE BOTH HAVE QUESTS. LET OUR QUESTS JOIN HANDS NOW IN THE REAL LIGHT OF WHAT WE SEEK.
“Yes,” said the writer.
WILL YOU MINISTER TO ME?
“Yes.”
THEN THERE IS BUT ONE DOOR LEFT FOR YOU TO ENTER. GLORY OR FAILURE. TRUTH OR LIES. THE TEST OF YOUR FAITH IS UPON YOU.
The writer looked into the shimmering trench. This would either be the end or the beginning; it was providence. To turn away now would reduce his entire life to a lie. He began to reach down, softly smiling.
I am the seeker, he thought.
He put his hands into the light.
YES!
He picked it up. He looked at it, cradled it. The glory on his face felt brighter than a thousand suns. The test was done, and he had passed.
Was the black light weeping?
CARRY ME AWAY, it said.
He took it into the Army vehicle and closed the back hatch.
THERE’S SO MUCH, SO MUCH FOR US TO SEEK.
In the driver’s compartment, the writer lit a cigarette. Looks simple enough, he observed. A t-bar, an accelerator, and a brake. Automatic transaxle, low and second. The fuel gauge read well over half.
He thought of sustenance, the first pronouncement of the light. This town had been too small; that was the problem: tiny, dry. There weren’t enough people here to provide the truth its proper flesh. But that was all right. He knew it wouldn’t take long to get to a really big city.
SUSTENANCE, SEEKER, whispered the light like a lover.
The seeker put the vehicle into gear and began to drive.
— | — | —
Afterword
In 1989, I was in love with a girl named Mary. Things didn’t really work out, to say the least. It was a violent relationship: she punched the crap out of me many a time, and the relationship ended abruptly as a car crash. It was a wonderful disaster, however, a fabulous catastrophe. I loved her—too oblivious to realize the incompatibility. I was blind. Much like the protagonist of this story, I felt I was searching for something, and when I found it, it was already a heap of ashes. It had changed. Something I felt was a certain truth had changed into something else. Nevertheless, my involvement with her provided a tremendous creative impetus for which I will always be grateful. She was a “formalist”; she was a ballerina—she manipulated the strictures of art with her body. Then one day she simply gave it up. She stopped searching for whatever it was she sought.
There should be some obvious symbolism in this piece. Too often the things we think are most important to us are supplanted by something altogether opposite, often something outrageous. A philosophical writer seeking “truth” finds out that the real truth is little more than a gross-out B-movie.
Pay Me
(For Betsey)
I’m trying to think what this is.
Providence? A confession? No, not even close. Words like that ring too thinly, don’t you think? Nor could it be anything so stale as a rite of passage. My God, a passage to what?
These are excuses—lies. Like touching a lover’s thigh and feeling shadow instead of flesh.
Sometimes it’s hard to write honestly. Without truth, without the revelation of what things really are, it’s just more lies. More shadows in want of flesh.
It says—in Ezekiel, I think: I make blood your destiny. That’s God talking, not me. And if God can’t reveal the truth, who can?
So I guess that’s what this really is. I guess this is my blood.
««—»»
Smith wasn’t sure what to make of it; he approached the way dared children might edge toward a house said to be haunted. LIVE SEX! boasted the sign in blue neon. D.C.’S BEST! ALL YOUNG PRETTY GIRLS! LIVE SEX LIVE SEX LIVE SEX!
The place was called The Anvil; Smith smiled at an obvious symbology. He remembered it as one of the many bottomless bars wedged into the city’s porno district. Now, though, it seemed The Anvil had graduated to more definitive designs. Smith felt confused. What, after so many years, had brought him back? He was a writer; he wanted things to write about, real things, real truths in a real world. He wanted substance, not tales; he wanted people and lives and honest experience, not cardboard cut-outs and soap opera dialogue. He figured his professional insights had posted a challenge. So here he was. Couldn’t better judgment, in a sense, also be called cowardice?
Music rocked into the street when he opened the door. He shouldered through a standing crowd in a brick-arched entrance, craning his neck to sense The Anvil’s depth. The $25 cover didn’t seem to thwart business—people were jammed in attendance. Smith had come here a few times during college, with friends. It seemed larger now, a cavernous expansion of the layout he remembered. The main stage existed in a stagnant haze of glare, accentuated by multicolored spotlights set to throb with the music. Around all this, dozens of tables and chairs were arranged in uneven concentric circles. The stage was empty, save for an armless chair and a loop harness suspended from the ceiling. The loop cast a shadow like a hangman’s noose.
Two stone-faced city cops eyed for minors near the bar, but no one seemed to care. Smith thought, temporal excommunication. They were invisible here, shunned. Outsiders in the chasm’s jubal.
A large video screen rounded one corner—entertainment between the acts. Smith winced. This was “homegrown” fare; you could always tell by the trackmarks on the girls’ arms, and forced smiles full of broken teeth. The grainy shot zoomed in from behind for the eloquent close-up of frenetic copulation. Then a cut to the girl’s head rocking on the desk. Was she asleep? Eventually the penis withdrew and offered its obligatory ejaculus externus. High class stuff, Smith thought.
Consciously he wanted to leave—this was not his territory. Places like this were dangerous, and not of his ilk. Drug deals took place here; prostitution was solicited. Fights broke out on a regular basis. There’d even been police raids. But down deep Smith wanted to see—he needed to—as if seeing would verify the reality he pursued, whatever that might be. He was an outsider, too, goodie two shoes in the den of iniquity. His discomfort excited him; it made him feel, somehow, more like a writer. Cowards die a thousand times, he reflected and almost laughed. But when he began to search for a table, his arm was grabbed, spinning him around. Suddenly a girl was shouting in his face. “Hey—hey! It is you! My God, I haven’t seen you in ages!”
The moment warped, mental feelers searching for a bearing. Then: recognition. He knew this girl.
“Lisa?” he queried. He’d had a crush on her as a kid, but the crush had never progressed past distanced longing. Her odd haircut and glossy blue-vinyl overcoat made her look like some kind of pop baroness. It dizzied him to see her in such contrast—in school she’d always dressed like a minister’s daughter.
“Lisa,” he finally managed. “The last time I saw you was in—”
“High school,” she finished. “I know, I know. Ten years.”
Smith groped for some cordiality, but before he could speak she was yanking him through the throng by the arm. The meeting had transpired so quickly Smith was flabbergasted. He couldn’t stop wondering what Lisa, of all people, was doing in this seamy place.
She led him to a table marked RESERVED, then ordered two beers from a mohawked blonde with glittered nipples and an orange g-string. When Lisa looked at him she seemed to smile through a wan aura. Smith felt hit in the face by a flying stone; it was the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen.
“Surprised to see me?” she asked.
“I, uh,” he replied. He shook his head. “You look as good as you did in ’83.”
“Do I really?”
“Well, no. A
ctually you look better.”
She leaned forward, coyly, as if to tell a secret. A subtle scent drifted up, clean hair and a hint of perfume that Smith found intensely arousing. “You know, this is really freaky,” she enthused. “But I was poking around my basement today, and I found one of my old yearbooks. I opened it up and the first face I saw was yours. And here you are, a couple of hours later, sitting right in front of me.”
“A classic example of the power of the feminine mystique,” Smith joked. It might make a good social allegory. “Come to think of it, I did trudge here in zombie-like state, beckoned by your psychic call.” He grinned stupidly, lit a cigarette. “I still can’t believe it’s you.”
Her big brown eyes beseeched him over a beautiful smile. She paused dreamily. “There’s so much I remember all of a sudden…”
“Like what?”
“Like how you used to look at me. Follow me around. Think of the silliest questions just for an excuse to talk to me…”
Smith turned red.
She touched his hand, laughing. “I’m sorry. I’m embarrassing you.”
You’re goddamned right you are, Smith thought. But then, weirdest of all, he replied, “I remember, too.”
The waitress brought the beers, and stooped to converse with Lisa. Smith used the distraction to take a good look. A black velvet choker with a tiny silver penis at its center girded her throat. Her hair hung perfectly cropped in a straight line, cut at the same level as the choker; it was lank and shiny as black silk. Barlight and shadows diced her face into a puzzle of hard, pretty angles. Her eyes were so big and bright they dominated her face almost surrealistically.
Smith’ hands tremored. He drained half his beer in one hit. Perhaps here was some of the very truth he felt bereft of. This was more than a girl—this was his past coming back to him, a reclamation. But what had his past been? Innocence? Smith frowned. Not innocence as much as intimidation and failure. He couldn’t see between the lines. Was this his past coming back? Or his weakness?
The waitress ignored him and sauntered away when he pulled out his wallet. “These are on the house,” Lisa told him. “In case you haven’t guessed, I work here.”
